Speaker 1: This is making me anxious.
Speaker 2: Belly take a pinch of belly fat. Jam this fucker in.
Speaker 1: Oh there it goes.
Speaker 2: All right, needles in.
Speaker 1: Do you feel pressure?
Speaker 3: Nah?
Speaker 2: Just the initial poke. This part sucks. So I'm injecting
Speaker 2: really slowly. Uh huh depressing the plunger.
Speaker 1: Why do you think go slow?
Speaker 4: Just it hurts lass? Okay.
Speaker 1: Chris and I are in my apartment in Brooklyn, and
Speaker 1: for the podcast You Know Research, I asked Chris to
Speaker 1: show me how he administers his weekly shot of n
Speaker 1: D plus, a compound that he says gives him a
Speaker 1: major boost of energy throughout the week and helps him
Speaker 1: keep up with the demands of raising a four year old.
Speaker 4: Do you want to try it right now? All right?
Speaker 3: Yeah it?
Speaker 1: Do you have a Do you have a?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 2: I have another alcohol?
Speaker 1: Okay, not our finest moment together, but for the record,
Speaker 1: we didn't share needles. Chris had a separate, unused pen
Speaker 1: with him and inside was another dose of n A
Speaker 1: D plus.
Speaker 2: So I'll set it up for you.
Speaker 3: Off, put the needle in in your belly, I press it.
Speaker 3: Do you want to do it?
Speaker 4: So? What you're gonna do?
Speaker 3: Put the needle in?
Speaker 4: How hard is the push.
Speaker 2: So the button is just a click button.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So take take a pinch of the belly fat like
Speaker 2: like like really like pinch it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then you press the button.
Speaker 3: Keeep it in there. One, two, three, four, five, perfect, seven, eight, nine, ten,
Speaker 3: Take it out.
Speaker 4: You did it. That does feel weird. It's weird, right.
Speaker 2: What did you what did you feel this warm?
Speaker 1: Mm hmm okay, confession time. I didn't really notice anything
Speaker 1: change after I took the ana D injection.
Speaker 4: YEA.
Speaker 1: No boost of energy, no pep in my step, no
Speaker 1: lightning recovery from my muy Thai sessions or my five
Speaker 1: K runs. Nothing felt different. But these drugs, they're everywhere.
Speaker 1: I see people all over the internet openly and eagerly
Speaker 1: documenting the mix of performance enhancing drugs that they're experimenting with.
Speaker 1: Each of these cocktails made of steroids or peptides or both.
Speaker 1: They call them stacks, like the Wolverine stack, which is
Speaker 1: named for the comic book character, or the God stack,
Speaker 1: named for you know, God. But those recipes, the combination
Speaker 1: of drugs, basically, they're endless.
Speaker 5: Anovar are in testosterone update day ten one.
Speaker 4: My libido is through the roof.
Speaker 1: Two, My appetite is like sky high.
Speaker 6: I cannot stop.
Speaker 1: Eating a lot of your casual gim bros are going
Speaker 1: to say, hey, start off your cycle with your dianabal as.
Speaker 1: You're on testostrode and you're going to get big really quickly.
Speaker 1: The steroid that everyone swears is the nectar of the gods.
Speaker 1: Spoiler tremblone aka trend. We're really doing it boys. It's
Speaker 1: not just a masculinity thing either. These drugs, they're for
Speaker 1: women too.
Speaker 7: I started with BPC one seven and I immediately fell
Speaker 7: in love. Why because my hair grew an insane amount,
Speaker 7: my skin was glowing. It helps your gut health, and
Speaker 7: when your gut health is happy, everything else is happy. Okay,
Speaker 7: it's great for inflammation covery.
Speaker 1: These days, i'd say one in every three ads on
Speaker 1: my social media feeds or for steroids or peptides or
Speaker 1: some other exciting new drug. And the way they're marketed
Speaker 1: to me, it's like a boardroom full of suits read
Speaker 1: my diary and said let's invoke those specific insecurities like
Speaker 1: too tired, unable to focus. There's a drug for that,
Speaker 1: and it cost one hundred and fifty dollars. Hair thinning,
Speaker 1: hairline receding, there's a drug for that that cost one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty dollars. Too hungry yo yoing weight one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty dollars. The government is holding a mirror
Speaker 1: up to this shift too. The Trump administration recently moved
Speaker 1: to reclassify a long list of peptides so that they
Speaker 1: can be manufactured in the US. And then there's the
Speaker 1: Enhanced Games. At the first Enhanced Games, athletes will break
Speaker 1: world records. When that happens, everyone's going to say what
Speaker 1: is he on? And how do I get it? And
Speaker 1: to enhance credit. Well, if nothing else right place right time,
Speaker 1: turning new fads into real revenue. What I want to
Speaker 1: know is what happened? Why are people men especially so
Speaker 1: eager to get in on this cultural shift. How is
Speaker 1: it that enhanced knew this was the right moment to
Speaker 1: appeal to the masses From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts, this
Speaker 1: is superhuman. I'm Sam Egan. I'm going to reddit for
Speaker 1: him our slash testosterone. When I noticed a guy named Aaron.
Speaker 1: He's in his late thirties and from the transformation photos
Speaker 1: he's posting, I can see he's white with thirty blonde hair. Also,
Speaker 1: from the photos, which spans six months, I can tell
Speaker 1: he's lost a ton of weight, forty three pounds, he says.
Speaker 1: In his after pictures, Aaron's cheeks are sharper, his abs
Speaker 1: are beginning to pop, and his shoulders look more to
Speaker 1: fined sculpted. In the photos caption, Eron lists the contents
Speaker 1: of his stack TRT two hundred milligrams right a true
Speaker 1: tide between one milligram and twelve milligrams hCG parenthetical for fertility,
Speaker 1: clomofin parenthetical for fertility, one hundred and fifty to two
Speaker 1: hundred grams protein parenthetical meat and clear protein drink, creatine powder,
Speaker 1: and el glutamine powder.
Speaker 5: So there was an ad that came out and it
Speaker 5: showed a guy like snowboarding through the back country and
Speaker 5: there's this like electronic music playing in the background, and
Speaker 5: the overall tone of this was like futuristic cutting edge.
Speaker 1: I reach out to Aaron to find out more about him,
Speaker 1: what he's working towards, and why.
Speaker 5: It positioned it as something new and something that will
Speaker 5: obviously be ubiquitous in a few years, like the next
Speaker 5: step in evolution.
Speaker 1: The first time we talk, Aaron's gone on a polo
Speaker 1: shirt and an old school headset, like he's a telemarketer.
Speaker 1: Behind him is an empty white wall no windows. He
Speaker 1: reminds me of one of the background brokers in the
Speaker 1: Wolf of Wall Street. Aaron says he lives in Florida,
Speaker 1: works in sales. You might be wondering how Aaron gets
Speaker 1: most of these drugs.
Speaker 5: Getting it through a US distributor is something you only
Speaker 5: do until you know enough to access labs directly in China.
Speaker 1: A network of manufacturing labs outside the US, often in China,
Speaker 1: the gray market, selling directly to consumers, skipping the middleman entirely.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing about these gray market drugs. Though they
Speaker 1: aren't certified by the FDA, which is one the only
Speaker 1: way to know for sure that what you're taking is
Speaker 1: provably effective for its marketed purpose, two dose safely, and
Speaker 1: three that only what's supposed to be in it is
Speaker 1: on the gray market without an FDA, consumers need to
Speaker 1: work around, and they find them.
Speaker 5: They get together in groups and do testing where they'll
Speaker 5: order from a specific vendor and everyone will send a
Speaker 5: sample to make sure that a vendor that this group
Speaker 5: is accepting has.
Speaker 4: A legit product. Because these labs.
Speaker 5: They rely on their reputation in this group to sell
Speaker 5: their product.
Speaker 1: What strikes me about this system, the people buying the
Speaker 1: drugs are doubling as the people ensuring the drugs efficacy
Speaker 1: and its safety. They're literally paying to be the Labyretts.
Speaker 1: This market is such a new phenomena that it hasn't
Speaker 1: gotten a ton of peer reviewed research yet. But one
Speaker 1: recent test found that a vial of BPC one five seven,
Speaker 1: a popular heptide, sold by an unregulated supplier, contained measurable
Speaker 1: amounts of lead. Groups like Aaron's describing that they're the
Speaker 1: one who's deciding to risk it and test drugs on themselves,
Speaker 1: like they have to get lead poisoning to find out
Speaker 1: that the product they're buying contains lead. So not great.
Speaker 1: What motivates a person to do this, to take such
Speaker 1: risky gambles with their body.
Speaker 5: My dad was your prototypical sports coach. He was very
Speaker 5: serious about my training, and.
Speaker 1: Aaron says, in a past life he was an athlete,
Speaker 1: raised playing hockey, and however that shaped his body, his physique.
Speaker 1: That was a point of pride for his father. Maybe
Speaker 1: two or three times a week when guests were over
Speaker 1: at the house, He remembers hearing his dad call for him.
Speaker 5: I always knew the reason he was calling me. It's
Speaker 5: because he wanted me to take my shirt off and
Speaker 5: flex for his guests and show me off to his
Speaker 5: business partners or family friends or whoever. In retrospective, kind
Speaker 5: of weird, having like a you know, twelve year old
Speaker 5: kid take a shirt off and flex for everybody all the.
Speaker 1: Time kind of weird is one way to put it
Speaker 1: the way Aaron talks about it, though, I think it
Speaker 1: created a complex. No matter how fit he was when
Speaker 1: he looked in the mirror.
Speaker 5: I always saw something problematic no matter what weight I
Speaker 5: was at. You know, if I was walking around at
Speaker 5: one seventy or one seventy five, I might have felt
Speaker 5: like my upper body popped out too much.
Speaker 1: By the time Aaron was in his teens, he'd moved
Speaker 1: on from hockey. Now he was boxing. He competed all
Speaker 1: through high school, but then dropped it when he went
Speaker 1: off to college, and for a time he stayed reasonably fit,
Speaker 1: but then thirty hit.
Speaker 5: I had been like steadily gaining weight and getting more
Speaker 5: and more out of shape.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just his aesthetics. Aaron was worried about.
Speaker 1: It was his health. He says. At around that time
Speaker 1: he developed scoliosis in his back, and maybe that's because
Speaker 1: of the weight gain, maybe from an old spo orts injury.
Speaker 1: Either way, he was in extreme pain, constantly sleeping maybe
Speaker 1: three hours a night. After that, he stopped wanting to
Speaker 1: get out of bed. Yeah, because it hurt. But there
Speaker 1: was another reason too.
Speaker 5: A big part of it was also just the motivation
Speaker 5: to tackle anything that needs tackling in life, you know,
Speaker 5: career aspirations and goals. Everything was just not worth the trouble.
Speaker 5: I spent a lot of that time just laying on
Speaker 5: the couch watching TV, all the seasons of Narcos, And
Speaker 5: there was a long period where I had no relationship,
Speaker 5: really had no one in my life for probably six
Speaker 5: or seven years.
Speaker 1: At some point in this stretch, Aaron tells me that
Speaker 1: he tried to stosterone for the first time. He'd seen
Speaker 1: a family member on it go from quote dadbod to ripped,
Speaker 1: and that family member taking the cystosterone. He told Aaron
Speaker 1: it had helped with his mood and with his motivation
Speaker 1: in the weight room. What if this was the answer
Speaker 1: that he'd been looking for the reason he'd been feeling
Speaker 1: so awful, so he found a doctor.
Speaker 5: He was kind of a sketchy doctor. To be honest
Speaker 5: with you, I knew I could easily get it from
Speaker 5: this type of doctor, and I was expecting it to
Speaker 5: be like that movie Limitless.
Speaker 1: That movie Limitless, it comes up a lot on this show,
Speaker 1: like so many people we spoke to brought it up.
Speaker 1: I've never seen it, but according to the Internet, it's
Speaker 1: about a man played by Bradley Cooper, who is quote
Speaker 1: facing unemployment and his girlfriend's rejection. He has no future,
Speaker 1: but that all changes when a friend gives him a
Speaker 1: drug that produces enhanced mental acuity instantly. If nothing else,
Speaker 1: it's on the nose. But anyways, back to Aaron and
Speaker 1: his first time on testosterone.
Speaker 5: Everyone tries to make it seem like it's just like
Speaker 5: a night and day difference, and the fact is it's very,
Speaker 5: very subtle.
Speaker 1: A year later, he'd lost about seventy pounds, which doesn't
Speaker 1: sound so subtle. At around that same time, on vacation
Speaker 1: in Colombia, Aaron met somebody. They hit it off, got married.
Speaker 1: His wife moved to the US to be with him.
Speaker 1: They wanted to start a family and because there's some
Speaker 1: evidence that testosterone can impact male fertility. Aaron went off
Speaker 1: of it soon after the weight came back. He was
Speaker 1: up to three hundred pounds. Aaron says when that weight
Speaker 1: did come back, so did his depression and his backbane.
Speaker 1: But the most relentless feeling what he spent the most
Speaker 1: time ruminating on? What did other people think when they
Speaker 1: saw him and overweight erin with his hot, thin wife,
Speaker 1: her being, you know, from Columbia, having come here on
Speaker 1: a fiancee visa. People usually assume like very specific things
Speaker 1: about a marriage like that. What he means is people
Speaker 1: assume she married him for the visa for American citizenship,
Speaker 1: because why else would she be with someone who looks
Speaker 1: like him.
Speaker 5: So it was upsetting to me to think that like this,
Speaker 5: you know, this couple with the husband being a super
Speaker 5: overweight guy. I always wondered if people would wonder if
Speaker 5: we had that type of a.
Speaker 1: Marriage, which just to say worrying that other people think
Speaker 1: that sounds hard enough. But Aaron also says the way
Speaker 1: he looked it made him question his wife's taste too.
Speaker 5: You know, why would someone want to be with someone
Speaker 5: that's so overweight and appears like that.
Speaker 1: My co producer on this show, Lena, She's also on
Speaker 1: this call.
Speaker 6: I'm not a guy, and certainly I don't care about
Speaker 6: peptid er steroids. But I'm very comfortable admitting that as
Speaker 6: a woman, I've spent big spass of my life imagining
Speaker 6: what I look like to the people looking at me.
Speaker 6: What can they see in the sun that I can't
Speaker 6: see in a mirror? Is my sci fi showing? Was
Speaker 6: I bailed on for a second date because of my
Speaker 6: personality or because of how big my ass is? And
Speaker 6: which of those answers is supposed to be the better one?
Speaker 6: So I ask Aaron if the roles were reversed, if
Speaker 6: his wife gained a bunch of weight, would that have
Speaker 6: any impact on how much he wants to be with her.
Speaker 5: I've always cared a lot about how we appear physically
Speaker 5: as a couple. It might be shallow in some ways,
Speaker 5: but it is something that's important to me to have
Speaker 5: a certain image as a couple. So that you know
Speaker 5: the truth is, maybe it would be uncomfortable if the
Speaker 5: shoe was on the other foot, And yeah, I probably
Speaker 5: would struggle.
Speaker 4: With that a little bit. To be completely.
Speaker 6: Honest, not the answer I expected. I think we spend
Speaker 6: our whole lives gathering all of these insecurities, these suspicions
Speaker 6: about what other people think of us, and what we
Speaker 6: hear back so often is that it's all in our heads.
Speaker 6: No one thinks about us as much as we think
Speaker 6: about ourselves. Hearing Aaron say otherwise it sucks. At the
Speaker 6: same time, I find it so relieving to hear someone
Speaker 6: just say the damn saying okay, back to the boys.
Speaker 1: Aaron and I have been conditioned to filter our bodies
Speaker 1: through the lens of sports. In my case, because of wrestling,
Speaker 1: I was a heavyweight, one of the big guys on
Speaker 1: a team made up of absurdly lean men constantly crash
Speaker 1: dieting like four percent body fat. Even at my smallest,
Speaker 1: I was the fat guy in the group. It's changed
Speaker 1: how I dress, how I move, what I think about myself.
Speaker 1: People call me Big Sam, they always have. I hate it,
Speaker 1: and so much of that is rooted in my athletic ambitions.
Speaker 1: Even after I was done with wrestling, I spent the
Speaker 1: rest of my twenties obsessing over staying as close to
Speaker 1: my fighting weight as possible. I'd weigh myself three times
Speaker 1: a day, restrict my eating for days or weeks at
Speaker 1: a time. Sometimes I even cut out water. If I
Speaker 1: hadn't grown up in such machismost circles, it would have
Speaker 1: been called an eating disorder. Honestly, it was an eating disorder.
Speaker 1: And what was it all for? Four?
Speaker 4: Really?
Speaker 5: A big part of all this was like how my
Speaker 5: father saw me as my coach and as my idol
Speaker 5: in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: Aaron tells me about a recent trip he took to
Speaker 1: see his dad after losing all that weight now that
Speaker 1: he's small again.
Speaker 5: And my dad at one point when we were alone,
Speaker 5: he kind of like half pulled me into his lap
Speaker 5: like I was still a you know, a thirteen year
Speaker 5: old kid, twelve year old kid, and was telling me
Speaker 5: how proud he was of me. And I hadn't given
Speaker 5: him any reason in you know, twenty plus years to
Speaker 5: be proud of me.
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, my dad never missed a
Speaker 1: wrestling match, never, and sometimes before it was my turn
Speaker 1: to compete, he'd sit with me and massage my traps
Speaker 1: and my biceps and my back, and he'd tell me
Speaker 1: how powerful I was, how proud of me he was.
Speaker 1: He'd call me his moose his genetic freak. It made
Speaker 1: me feel so good. And now that my life isn't
Speaker 1: centered on being an athlete, I don't have that anymore,
Speaker 1: but I want it and I miss it. When I
Speaker 1: step back and really think about this stuff, the obsession
Speaker 1: with what's in the mirror, the stacks of drugs, I
Speaker 1: guess it's not so confusing at all. We're all just
Speaker 1: licking old wounds, and now, because of companies like Enhanced,
Speaker 1: we have the option to do so with drugs.
Speaker 8: I'm a nineteen year old who can afford his own
Speaker 8: gear in his own fucking groceries, bread so online.
Speaker 1: AJ's open about his steroid us. In videos, you can
Speaker 1: see him flexing for the camera, his age and height
Speaker 1: posted on the screen, plus his current stack of steroids.
Speaker 1: Usually there's rap or heavy metal music on in the background.
Speaker 1: Man just hop on. His eyes are bulging and red.
Speaker 1: In most of his clips, it's nighttime, only enough light
Speaker 1: to show his frame. Everything behind him is pitch black.
Speaker 1: We got on the phone back in February.
Speaker 4: I've been on testosterals for like twenty weeks.
Speaker 1: Oh so it's still that's doing math that's like five months.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, how are you?
Speaker 1: How are you feeling.
Speaker 8: I feel like I feel like an animal. You know,
Speaker 8: I just feel, you know, you know, like very powerful.
Speaker 8: I feel like there's no goal that I can't achieve.
Speaker 8: You know, I feel like I can do anything in
Speaker 8: the world. It really puts you like in a motivated state.
Speaker 4: Twenty four seven.
Speaker 1: Aj says he grew up playing football and he originally
Speaker 1: got into weightlifting at fifteen because of how much he
Speaker 1: admired superheroes.
Speaker 8: You know, I always would to love like him. You know,
Speaker 8: that feeling of like, you know, like dominate some power.
Speaker 8: You know, that's z he has.
Speaker 1: He says he started using testosterone at eighteen because people
Speaker 1: online told him to.
Speaker 8: I had a bunch of other guys like telling me
Speaker 8: like how fucking like how much how it exploded.
Speaker 4: And you know, like shit shit like that.
Speaker 8: But I already knew for myself personally, I knew I
Speaker 8: had the genetics to like, actually look good.
Speaker 1: I knew I had the genetics to actually look good
Speaker 1: if I hop on. For the record, even in the
Speaker 1: bodybuilding community, eighteen is considered very young for performance enhancing drugs.
Speaker 1: The standard recommendation is basically, get as big and strong
Speaker 1: as you possibly can first, then use drugs to go
Speaker 1: that extra mile?
Speaker 4: What made you decide to do it so so early?
Speaker 8: Because I feel like there's no sense of waiting because
Speaker 8: like like a lot of chances don't come like often,
Speaker 8: like like you know, like finding another gear source or
Speaker 8: you know.
Speaker 4: Things in that nature.
Speaker 1: When you say finding another gear source, what do you mean, you.
Speaker 8: Know, like finding finding you know, like a legit, a
Speaker 8: legit you know, someone that can actually get you like
Speaker 8: legit gear.
Speaker 4: You know, how do you get it? Get it from
Speaker 4: face to face with were plugged?
Speaker 1: So basically he started doing steroids because he had access
Speaker 1: to steroids. AJ dreams of being a bodybuilder, also an influencer.
Speaker 1: His biggest heroes include bodybuilders Tom Platts and Lee Priest,
Speaker 1: and someone named Dallas McCarver, a YouTube bodybuilder born in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one. McCarver actually died of a heart attack
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen at twenty six.
Speaker 4: Damn, but he's he's a legend.
Speaker 1: Though mccarver's autopsy report lists a massively enlarged heart, kidney damage,
Speaker 1: and an engorged liver as contributors to his death, all
Speaker 1: symptoms associated with long term steroid abuse. When we speak
Speaker 1: AJ's nineteen years old and living at home with his parents.
Speaker 1: I ask him, do they know about the drugs he's taking?
Speaker 4: Like my mom, he kind of accepted it, but you know,
Speaker 4: my dad hates it.
Speaker 1: Why does he hate it?
Speaker 2: Can?
Speaker 4: I ask? Uh? Because of the health aspects.
Speaker 8: He believes that it's just so damaging to the health
Speaker 8: and things of that nature.
Speaker 1: And do you have any thoughts about that, like, you know,
Speaker 1: because it's like there's a you know, there's.
Speaker 8: Maybe like a thirty percent chance of like actually running
Speaker 8: in the problems. But I'd rather be like, like, I
Speaker 8: really don't care. I'd rather just be big as fuck.
Speaker 8: I rather die big as fuck, Like I'll do anything
Speaker 8: just to be like fucking huge. So it doesn't really
Speaker 8: either way.
Speaker 1: Why do you want to be huge so bad?
Speaker 4: Man?
Speaker 8: I just I love like being the biggest. I love,
Speaker 8: you know, like the compliments, the admiration.
Speaker 4: I love it.
Speaker 1: So you're like, if I die at forty, but I
Speaker 1: got abs on abs and my biceps for twenty four
Speaker 1: inches or whatever, like that's that's cool by me. Exactly
Speaker 1: after our one call together, AJ stopped responding to me,
Speaker 1: but I followed along on his TikTok in the past
Speaker 1: few months, by the looks of things, AJ has only
Speaker 1: gotten bigger, and it seems that he's added a number
Speaker 1: of other drugs to a stack, something that he told
Speaker 1: me he was thinking about doing when we first talked.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna see how the next week feels,
Speaker 8: and then I might up the dose, maybe like five,
Speaker 8: maybe add some.
Speaker 1: Decade deca dur a ballin, commonly known as decca. It's
Speaker 1: an anabolic steroid often used on top of TRT. The
Speaker 1: bro science says that it helps a joint pain and
Speaker 1: recovery on top of muscle growth. But a few months later,
Speaker 1: while scrolling through AJ's feed, I saw him post about
Speaker 1: suffering complications from taking these drugs.
Speaker 4: Bro.
Speaker 8: I fucking hate Deck with all my fucking Brett, But
Speaker 8: I feel fucking sad all the time, all.
Speaker 4: The goddamn time.
Speaker 1: But it's just roid rage in sadness grow Who let me?
Speaker 4: Who let me hop on Deck?
Speaker 1: It isn't just AJ.
Speaker 8: A lot of people wind up getting anxiety if they
Speaker 8: do too much NPP or too much decca.
Speaker 1: That's kind of just a quick search through TikTok and
Speaker 1: you can find plenty of people talking about the side
Speaker 1: effects that they've experienced on deck. I did for like
Speaker 1: three weeks, and so that kicked in. I'ah fucking stressed
Speaker 1: out of my life. Yeah, I was having panic attacks
Speaker 1: for the first time ever, freaking out. AJ and Aaron
Speaker 1: are both experts in the underground, the gray market, but
Speaker 1: as these drugs become more accepted and easier to access,
Speaker 1: their appeal to a wider set of people has grown too.
Speaker 1: The tech and VC money is pouring in and fundamentally
Speaker 1: changing the culture and speed to market of these drugs
Speaker 1: and our relationship to our bodies. It's hard to say
Speaker 1: for sure how many people are on performance enhancing drugs,
Speaker 1: just because so much of it happens underground, but without question,
Speaker 1: the number is going.
Speaker 9: Up bigger, stronger, you know, make more money. Everyone's got
Speaker 9: to have ferraris and lambeaus. You gotta be hot, fucking hot, dude.
Speaker 9: We are so superficial. I mean, don't. I'm in it too, man,
Speaker 9: I mean, we're humans. We have that low brain. It's dopamine.
Speaker 4: Sam.
Speaker 1: That's doctor Thomas O'Connor. He's a licensed internal medicine physician
Speaker 1: who goes by the anabolic doc.
Speaker 9: When I deal with a young man who's twenty something
Speaker 9: is on and off steroids and his numbers are low
Speaker 9: normal and he's done and he's done everything, Doc, and
Speaker 9: I'm gonna give him testostero. And I say, sir, I
Speaker 9: need to hear from you. You understand that if I
Speaker 9: gave you this testosterone, we crossed a certain point, at
Speaker 9: a certain point, you're never ever ever gonna come off
Speaker 9: ever ever. I've been on forever. And then so many guys, Sam,
Speaker 9: they go really, and I go yep.
Speaker 1: Doctor O'Connor specializes in treating people who have abused steroids
Speaker 1: and TRT. He specifically does this work because he can relate.
Speaker 1: He's a powerlifter and for a number of years a
Speaker 1: steroid user. Two he still uses testosterone, something he says
Speaker 1: he has to stay on forever as a result of
Speaker 1: too many years abusing steroids and destroying his endocrine system.
Speaker 1: His biceps are still giant and bulging, and his face
Speaker 1: is red. He's in his sixties, but he looks like
Speaker 1: he could knock out thirty pull ups on a dime.
Speaker 1: According to doctor O'Connor, the world of underground steroids used
Speaker 1: to be very different. He says he was first introduced
Speaker 1: to it at a gym in his early twenties. One
Speaker 1: day he's there working out and a guy offers a
Speaker 1: spot him.
Speaker 9: He goes, hey, you want to He goes, watch you
Speaker 9: come over here a minute. I've never forgot it took
Speaker 9: me in the back room, in the locker room. It
Speaker 9: was like, you want to come to the next level.
Speaker 1: He says. Back then in the eighties, steroids weren't well known.
Speaker 1: Even as recently as the nineties, people still didn't know
Speaker 1: what they did or how they worked. Something O'Connor sounds
Speaker 1: almost wistful for now.
Speaker 9: Back then, dude, back then there was a real protective
Speaker 9: brotherhood and now it's completely gone because it's just about
Speaker 9: the money.
Speaker 1: But he says that back then the only way to
Speaker 1: get steroids was through word of mouth, and to get
Speaker 1: them word of mouth, you had to be in a gym,
Speaker 1: and gyms weren't on every street corner back then like
Speaker 1: they are now. These were usually dark, dingy, dungeon looking
Speaker 1: gyms that cater to powerlifters and bodybuilders.
Speaker 9: We didn't have phones, you know, so it was just focus,
Speaker 9: outward focus, social focus, and then go to the gym.
Speaker 1: Doctor O'Connor says that people lifted for years in this
Speaker 1: environment before they would hop on cycles. The goal was
Speaker 1: to max out their natural physiques before they even considered
Speaker 1: using steroids.
Speaker 9: It was very protective and we had segments of detection
Speaker 9: in mitigation. On that sam there was mitigation, there was
Speaker 9: barriers to it. All the barriers are lifted, dude, and
Speaker 9: now we have the Enhance Games.
Speaker 1: It's not just the Enhance Games. Telehealth companies are making
Speaker 1: these drugs more accessible than ever before. And doctor O'Connor,
Speaker 1: he's concerned about the side effects, but what really worries
Speaker 1: him is the whole philosophy propelling the Enhanced Games. When
Speaker 1: I asked him to explain, he says that the idea
Speaker 1: that these kinds of substances can be administered with minimal
Speaker 1: side effects is bullshit. That there are basically no guarantees
Speaker 1: that any of the athletes are using these drugs safely
Speaker 1: and responsibly. Remember that Enhanced CEO Max Martin told us
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be testing athletes for drugs, only to make
Speaker 1: sure their organs are healthy at the time of competition,
Speaker 1: and doctor O'Connor worries this could create an environment that
Speaker 1: is a powder keg for gradual abuse.
Speaker 9: You know, I'll take a little twenty five milligrams of
Speaker 9: anavarn training days or whatever, one hundred milligrams every five
Speaker 9: days of sipenade or something, and then they're like, you
Speaker 9: know what, it's gonna go up a little bit more.
Speaker 9: You're you're gonna do steroids. You're gonna do one cycle.
Speaker 9: You're gonna like it. I don't care if you're a
Speaker 9: top guy or a regular accountant guy. You're gonna want
Speaker 9: to do more and more and more. You're never gonna
Speaker 9: do one cycle. Never doesn't work that way. What happens
Speaker 9: is men take steroids and they go I take, they
Speaker 9: take a little bit like they always say, they're gonna
Speaker 9: do this minimal dose. That's bullshit right there. That's one
Speaker 9: hundred percent bullshit. This is an arms race.
Speaker 1: On top of that, he says, he worries about the
Speaker 1: message that this will send to young people.
Speaker 9: If you're twenty three or twenty five and you really
Speaker 9: know what you're doing, rock on. Be careful, brother sister.
Speaker 9: But if you're what's gonna happen is the audience is
Speaker 9: children thirteen twelve, thirteen fifteen, sixteen high school students or
Speaker 9: high school kids are going to see this, and despite
Speaker 9: the fact that they're using lower doses and you could
Speaker 9: have a pr team spin that really great. But in
Speaker 9: the end of the day, the moms and the dads
Speaker 9: are going to have the child tugging on their arm, saying, Mommy,
Speaker 9: I'm going to do this. I'm going to be a
Speaker 9: winner like him.
Speaker 1: I keep coming back to that day in my apartment
Speaker 1: with Chris where he showed me how to inject nad plus,
Speaker 1: seeing him use that syringe, hearing how great it makes
Speaker 1: him feel. I couldn't help wanting to try it too.
Speaker 1: I'm not the child doctor O'Connor's talking about tugging on
Speaker 1: mommy's arm. I'm thirty years old. But human curiosity, it's
Speaker 1: powerful a drug in its own right. In the last year,
Speaker 1: as I've watched the audience for these drugs grow, I
Speaker 1: think about it a lot. Curiosities hold on people. Everyone
Speaker 1: selling this stuff, peptides, nad TRT. They're all banking on
Speaker 1: enhanced included, and they know who they're appealing to. Maybe
Speaker 1: not children literally, but our inner child absolutely being young again, beautiful,
Speaker 1: big and strong and capable. Who's going to say no
Speaker 1: to that? Still enhanced needs to prove that these drugs work,
Speaker 1: that they can deliver on what they've promised, and to
Speaker 1: do that, they're putting on a show larger than life,
Speaker 1: promising unprecedented achievements and shattered world records at the first
Speaker 1: ever Enhanced Games. If a record is not broken, can
Speaker 1: you call it to out a success?
Speaker 4: Look at all you guys.
Speaker 1: More people have never paid attention to track swimming, weightlifting
Speaker 1: and strong man in the history of the world. Next
Speaker 1: Time on Superhuman. Superhuman is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership
Speaker 1: with iHeart Podcasts. The series is produced, reported and co
Speaker 1: host by me Sam Egan. Lina Messi's Metal is our
Speaker 1: senior producer. Production support from Dara Luk Potts, editing by
Speaker 1: Kate Osborne, editorial consulting from Adeza Egan, original composition and
Speaker 1: mixing by Hannis Brown, Reported and hosted by Chris Guayamali.
Speaker 1: From Kaleidoscope, Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, oswa Oshan
Speaker 1: Mengesha Tikador and Kosis Linos. Julia Nutter is the head
Speaker 1: of Studio for Kaleidoscope and from iHeart. Our executive producers
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