Speaker 1: Welcome to two percent. I'm your host, Michael Easter. Here's
Speaker 1: an insane idea. What if we took a bunch of athletes,
Speaker 1: rejuiced them to the gills with performance enhancing drugs, and
Speaker 1: then we had them all compete. Now, this might sound
Speaker 1: like something someone comes up with in their dorm room
Speaker 1: while stoned, but it actually just happened at the Enhanced Games,
Speaker 1: which were held in Las Vegas in May. So today
Speaker 1: we have Chris Guyemali and Sam Egan. They were on
Speaker 1: the ground before, during, and after the Enhanced Games. They
Speaker 1: were talking to founders, athletes, and scientists. They were there
Speaker 1: reporting their podcast Superhuman, and they're here today to talk
Speaker 1: to us about the aftermath of the Games and the
Speaker 1: rise of websites selling us TRT peptides and other products
Speaker 1: that promise us better versions of ourselves with no effort,
Speaker 1: just the swipe of a credit card. We'll take a
Speaker 1: break and then we're going to bring them on. All right,
Speaker 1: Chris and Sam, thanks for coming on two percent.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you for having us.
Speaker 3: Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: So, you guys are about to release the final two
Speaker 1: episodes of your show on the Enhanced Games that might
Speaker 1: be out by the time this episode is out. But
Speaker 1: for people who have no clue what the hell the
Speaker 1: Enhanced Games are, explain it to us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so the Enhanced Games were originally billed as the
Speaker 4: sort of steroid Olympics, which you know is kind of
Speaker 4: the kind of idea that like Stone College students tend
Speaker 4: to have or like, we're didn't it be sick if
Speaker 4: we like had all these like peds and people could
Speaker 4: do whatever they want.
Speaker 2: But they actually made it happen.
Speaker 4: It was founded by this guy named Aaron Desuza, who
Speaker 4: is an associated Peter Thiels, who is most famous for
Speaker 4: helping bring down the Gawker website from many many years ago.
Speaker 4: And yeah, we've just been embedded in this strange world
Speaker 4: where they convinced a bunch of former Olympians to take
Speaker 4: some peds and try to try to break some world records.
Speaker 2: That's basically what this thing is.
Speaker 5: It's actually gonna say some people who aren't who aren't
Speaker 5: even Olympians, like they got they I think obviously because
Speaker 5: this was so controversial, they kind of had to widen
Speaker 5: their their search and they got some people who had
Speaker 5: never competed in the Olympics, but you know, not to
Speaker 5: get ahead of myself, but actually ended up like beating
Speaker 5: former Olympians.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so with the word controversy. So when I first
Speaker 1: heard word of this, and I don't know what it was,
Speaker 1: probably a few months ago. You hear steroid Olympics, you
Speaker 1: hear like Saudi money, you hear we're do some people
Speaker 1: the gills, And my initial thing was like, this just
Speaker 1: sounds like a giant grift, Like this sounds insane.
Speaker 6: What is this?
Speaker 1: What did you find in terms of that? So what
Speaker 1: was your mindset entering doing this podcast? And like where
Speaker 1: is it gone?
Speaker 6: Sense? Then? And I'm not wrong?
Speaker 1: Am I wrong that this has kind of insane?
Speaker 4: No? When I went in, I kind of didn't know
Speaker 4: what to expect. It just sounded so circusy and like
Speaker 4: a big old sort of carnival sort of thing that
Speaker 4: I was like, dude, this could end up being a firefest,
Speaker 4: this could end up being something stranger altogether. But as
Speaker 4: we've been sort of embedded in this thing this whole time,
Speaker 4: I kind of realized it's basically just you know, the
Speaker 4: website hymns with a WWE component attached to it as
Speaker 4: the marketing apparatus.
Speaker 1: Basically, Yeah, and so people who don't know people who
Speaker 1: don't know hims, hymns cells basically supplements, pep DDes, TRT.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I mean I would say for me, I
Speaker 5: came on a little bit earlier to the project than Chris.
Speaker 5: I went to their initial event where they announced that
Speaker 5: this was actually going to happen at Resorts World in Vegas,
Speaker 5: like it's sort of in May of twenty five, and
Speaker 5: it took me about I don't know what this says
Speaker 5: about me, but it took me about a full day
Speaker 5: of like attending these events and talking to people to
Speaker 5: be like, hey, I think that they're trying to sell
Speaker 5: testosterum to the wider pub. This is an ad like,
Speaker 5: this is an advertise. It took me a full day
Speaker 5: to realize it. And I would say throughout the whole
Speaker 5: process of making this series that.
Speaker 3: That suspicion was only was only confirmed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So tell me what the business model is, because
Speaker 1: when I first heard this, I was like, Oh, they
Speaker 1: just they want to see like what people can do
Speaker 1: if they're juice to the gills. Kind of interesting to
Speaker 1: your point, Chris, kind of sounds like something you come
Speaker 1: up with in your dorm room stoned, But there's a
Speaker 1: bigger play here because they are paying these athletes in
Speaker 1: same money. So then the questions will where's the money
Speaker 1: coming from and how are they actually going to make money?
Speaker 6: So tell us about that.
Speaker 5: It's the enhanced games are funded at least at it's
Speaker 5: the start. Now it's a publicly traded company by Christian Engermeyer,
Speaker 5: who is this sort of biopharma billionaire who's played in
Speaker 5: the in the psychedelic space for some time. And the
Speaker 5: business model, like we said, the way they kind of
Speaker 5: pitch it is that it is more bespoke version of
Speaker 5: telehealth that will give you access to both drugs that
Speaker 5: need to be prescribed, like testosterone, and also just a
Speaker 5: wider range of supplements. I think they sell like a
Speaker 5: sleep supplement for Chris, I think you said it was
Speaker 5: like seventy bucks. Well, on top of that, they're selling testosterone,
Speaker 5: they sell a whole list of peptides. They sell NAD
Speaker 5: and Chris actually went through the website and bought it.
Speaker 5: I have not done it yet, but as they pitched it,
Speaker 5: it was like you're going to have to talk to
Speaker 5: a doctor and it's going to be more specifically suited
Speaker 5: to what we think that you need, But as I
Speaker 5: understand it, that has not been the case. It basically
Speaker 5: is just essentially the same website model as Hymns or
Speaker 5: Row or Keeps or any of these other of these
Speaker 5: other companies.
Speaker 1: So when you bought stuff, Chris, So, the idea going
Speaker 1: in as you're gonna meet with a doctor. It's it's
Speaker 1: gonna feel like just getting a precision from a doctor.
Speaker 6: But that didn't happen. So what was that process? Like?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was basically like filling out a Google doc
Speaker 4: survey of like what are you suffering from right now?
Speaker 4: And I was like anxiety, and it's like great prescription
Speaker 4: on the way. I actually ordered some Sammarell and that,
Speaker 4: in true enhanced fashion, hasn't gone to me yet because
Speaker 4: of some logistical hold ups in their shipping. Yeah pipeline,
Speaker 4: but you know, as soon as it gets to me,
Speaker 4: I'm eager to try it. But basically the business model
Speaker 4: is they're using this, you know, this wacky sort of
Speaker 4: competition to sort of justify a framework that then they
Speaker 4: could like use to sort of normalize ped us. And
Speaker 4: that's kind of like the big overarching mission of this thing,
Speaker 4: Like if we can provide a way where we can
Speaker 4: sort of do it in their words like safely and
Speaker 4: like rather conservatively honestly, like in the in the public eye,
Speaker 4: then we can sell that to the masses.
Speaker 2: And that's sort of how they're building this sole operation.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Chris, your background as you were at GQ reporting
Speaker 1: on wellness quite a bit. Sam, you're a producer. Also,
Speaker 1: you were a D one athlete. You wrestled at Wyoming?
Speaker 6: Is that right?
Speaker 3: That's correct?
Speaker 1: Of polks you go, So, how did how did you
Speaker 1: two get pulled into this project?
Speaker 3: I think for me, there's just you know, there's not
Speaker 3: a lot of.
Speaker 5: People who come from like an athletic background of the
Speaker 5: level that I guess I come from that also work
Speaker 5: in the in the in the journalism space. So I
Speaker 5: think that it so I think that it was a
Speaker 5: natural fit. But I was also really curious just from
Speaker 5: my own experience. I was fascinated by the idea of
Speaker 5: I guess just like the recovery part of PDEs because
Speaker 5: I just remember being competing at at Wyoming and I
Speaker 5: think people understanding theory the training regimen of like a
Speaker 5: divisional athlete or a little bit level athlete, but like
Speaker 5: to see it actually put in front of your face,
Speaker 5: and to actually do it is another thing entirely.
Speaker 3: And so of you're like.
Speaker 5: An hour and a half in the morning, it's been
Speaker 5: with from three and a half hours at night. You're
Speaker 5: told when to go to class, you're told when to
Speaker 5: go to study hall, you have to go to recovery
Speaker 5: after practice, probably have tutors after that. So your entire
Speaker 5: day is built for you. Five hours of exercise, six
Speaker 5: days a week if you're not traveling. And even at
Speaker 5: like nineteen to twenty three, my body was messed up
Speaker 5: all the time. I still have like I mean like
Speaker 5: I still got like I got pinkies that do crazy stuff,
Speaker 5: like you know, like I was beat up, and the
Speaker 5: question of like does this have to be this way?
Speaker 5: Like are we kind of closing ourselves off to a
Speaker 5: realm of drugs in pharmacology that could like make athletes
Speaker 5: lives better without compromising their safety and health. I was
Speaker 5: really interested to find that out. I don't know if
Speaker 5: I think that the answers were satisfying, but I wanted to.
Speaker 3: I wanted to see what they were setting.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, you're going look like I've been put
Speaker 1: through hell on the wrestling team.
Speaker 6: It's taken a toll on my body.
Speaker 1: If there's this thing I could do that is not
Speaker 1: going to affect my long term health, that seems like
Speaker 1: it would be interesting from an athletic perspective, just to
Speaker 1: make the lives of athletes not quite so totally.
Speaker 5: And I think just because people don't realize how how
Speaker 5: stringent the anti doping sort of guidelines are on substances
Speaker 5: that you cannot you can and cannot take. So study
Speaker 5: that came up like time and time again with the athletes.
Speaker 5: We were interviewing one one of the athletes, Megan Romano,
Speaker 5: who came out of retirement after like ten years a swimmer.
Speaker 5: She was like, I was even I was afraid to
Speaker 5: take ibprofen because you never know what's going to be tainted.
Speaker 5: You never know what's going to get you banned. Like
Speaker 5: the list changes constantly. The book of like wat of
Speaker 5: guidelines is like a tone of different substances that you
Speaker 5: can and cannot take. It changes, it changes constantly, And
Speaker 5: it was also just creative without athlete, without athlete input.
Speaker 5: So for me, I was just really interested in how
Speaker 5: this could affect the athlete experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes sense. So you kind of mentioned who
Speaker 1: is behind this. But how did this whole idea start
Speaker 1: to get legs of the enhanced games.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so Aaron Desusa sort of like was kicking around
Speaker 4: a bunch of ideas post his Gawker project a couple
Speaker 4: of years ago, and he presented this sort of idea
Speaker 4: to Peter Teel, who's one of his buddies, and was like, hey,
Speaker 4: you know what if we threw a sort of steroid
Speaker 4: Olympics that you know, sort of allowed us to put
Speaker 4: on this big, big show, We'll create a lot of noise,
Speaker 4: it'll cause a lot of mischief, and from there we
Speaker 4: can sort of develop and reverse engineer as sort of
Speaker 4: business plan. So I think they kind of went in
Speaker 4: with the big, nasty, sort of like you know, a
Speaker 4: dirt kicking idea, and then they sort of like, you know,
Speaker 4: we're building the plane on the way down. To mix
Speaker 4: every metaphor possible to describe this, but yeah.
Speaker 1: So in a way, yes, it does have elements of
Speaker 1: the this is an idea that you'd come up with
Speaker 1: in the dorm room all stoned. At the same time,
Speaker 1: it's coming from two people that have billions of dollars
Speaker 1: and they're like, hey, we could actually figure this thing
Speaker 1: out and then they also have the sort of gear
Speaker 1: in their mind going all right, and then how do
Speaker 1: we turn this into a super profitable business potentially?
Speaker 4: Yeah, And so that's that's sort of how I came
Speaker 4: onto it too, because Aaron and Christian Angermeyer went on
Speaker 4: Joe Rogan's podcast, like not too long ago. I think
Speaker 4: it was like in was it twenty twenty two or
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three?
Speaker 2: I believe it was twenty four, twenty four, twenty four.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So they went on, and you know, when I
Speaker 4: was at GQ, like sort of my big story that
Speaker 4: I wrote over there was the story about the guys
Speaker 4: who got their legs artificially lengthened during COVID secretly, And
Speaker 4: so for me, I was like, I kind of want
Speaker 4: my next big story to be about weird stuff we
Speaker 4: do our bodies the way we can augment it and
Speaker 4: sort of improve it. I'm using air quotes here, but
Speaker 4: improve our bodies. And when I heard them on Rogan,
Speaker 4: they were like Carnival Barkers basically, they were kind of like,
Speaker 4: you know, this is going to change everything. This is
Speaker 4: going to like, you know, sure in a new paradigm
Speaker 4: for enhancement and the future of humanity. And then when
Speaker 4: I actually wrote them and like you know, kind of
Speaker 4: pitched myself to be the guy to write a big
Speaker 4: magazine story on it, it was kind of like, oh,
Speaker 4: this is just like another business. And so there was
Speaker 4: like this like incongruity between what they were actually pitching
Speaker 4: and what that actual project turned out to be.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was very much an extension of Peter Teal's
Speaker 5: trans sort of transhumanist vision. For those who might not know,
Speaker 5: transhumanism is an I like an ideology that has existed
Speaker 5: in the tech space for a long time that basically
Speaker 5: says that, like to avoid the inevitable collapse of humanity,
Speaker 5: like that we must enhance and depending on who you ask,
Speaker 5: even like sort of supersede our own bodies, whether that
Speaker 5: is like uploading yourself to the cloud, or it's aging
Speaker 5: yourself with like I think of Brian Johnson using the
Speaker 5: blood of his son. You know, it's it's part of
Speaker 5: this this transhumanist ideology, this transhumanist vision that that that
Speaker 5: Peter Teal very much, very much subscribes to.
Speaker 1: Part of the art argument that they're making is that
Speaker 1: doping is already happening in the Olympics and Sports. So
Speaker 1: I heard one of the numbers that one of the
Speaker 1: founders tossed out. They said, forty four percent of Olympians
Speaker 1: admitted to pds in the last year.
Speaker 6: Did you report on that? Is that real?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So that is a study, that is it's a
Speaker 3: it's a real study.
Speaker 5: It is an outlier among other sort of studies that
Speaker 5: have been done on the rates of doping and the Olympics.
Speaker 5: And the researcher that did it consistently has sort of
Speaker 5: outliers in his data. It's it's anywhere from like ten
Speaker 5: to twenty percent higher than than most other studies. Fine,
Speaker 5: twenty percent of athletes in the Olympics doing drugs is
Speaker 5: still a significants. I wouldn't I wouldn't say that that's nothing,
Speaker 5: you know, but it is. It is an outlier in
Speaker 5: the data for sure.
Speaker 1: So they pulled the most favorable number because they're going
Speaker 1: to do well.
Speaker 5: If forty some one would ever do that in the
Speaker 5: wellness space might come on Manyeah.
Speaker 1: So they're basically saying, all right, if forty four percent
Speaker 1: of Olympians are already doping, like that makes an unfair
Speaker 1: playing field at the real Olympics. So what if we
Speaker 1: just you know, pull back the curtain and say, hey, basically,
Speaker 1: more or less anything goes, let's let's see what happens.
Speaker 6: So that's kind of their argument.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and then you know it, it kind of
Speaker 4: has a little bit of a point, like it's like
Speaker 4: you look at the Russian Federation or like the Chinese,
Speaker 4: like you know, so it's like, oh, these big apparatuses
Speaker 4: are basically like helping their athletes gain an unfair advantage.
Speaker 4: And then what are they getting from you know, the
Speaker 4: IOC or WATA. It's like basically like a slap on
Speaker 4: the wrist, like they're still competing, they're still able to
Speaker 4: win medals. It's a sometimes it's it feels like a
Speaker 4: little silly. So I kind of see their point in
Speaker 4: some of this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there is some research that suggests even if
Speaker 1: you've used certain banned substances in the past, those can
Speaker 1: still impact your performance moving forward. So you'll still have
Speaker 1: you know, you'll have gained more muscle than you could
Speaker 1: have without them. While not muscle's going to stick around
Speaker 1: even if you're not on them, you're still getting this
Speaker 1: sort of boost from the past more or less.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know, There was this really funny example
Speaker 4: of this Australian swimmer named James Magnuson. He was the
Speaker 4: first dude who signed on with Enhanced a couple of
Speaker 4: years ago, and he actually ended up taking like they
Speaker 4: didn't have a protocol in place, they didn't know what
Speaker 4: they were doing. He was kind of effectively, you know,
Speaker 4: the trial balloon step free into the air, and he
Speaker 4: ended up doping so much that it made him significantly
Speaker 4: slower in the water.
Speaker 2: Like he was huge.
Speaker 4: He looked like, I don't know, like he Man, basically
Speaker 4: like the cartoon version of he Man, which you know,
Speaker 4: maybe having giant shoulders isn't the best for your buoyancy.
Speaker 2: In the water, but you know, the dude, the dude.
Speaker 4: Was an ocean liner when he should have been a
Speaker 4: speedboat basically.
Speaker 5: I mean, I'm not convinced that wasn't a problem at
Speaker 5: the Broader Games themselves a few months ago too.
Speaker 3: You know, like having more muscle on your body does
Speaker 3: not necessarily.
Speaker 5: Equate to like swimming faster in the water, right you
Speaker 5: are basically turning yourself into a rock. You're far less buoyant. Uh,
Speaker 5: it makes it, It makes it a lot harder. So
Speaker 5: I did find myself wondering why they chose swimming given
Speaker 5: given the reality of you know, the way that the
Speaker 5: water works.
Speaker 1: But yeah, because a lot of the a lot of
Speaker 1: the drugs they are offering and athletes are using are
Speaker 1: essentially muscle enhancers. Are they using stuff like EPO for
Speaker 1: because most of the sports are power sports, right, so yeah,
Speaker 1: distances there's sprinting, but there's not they're not doing like
Speaker 1: marathons or anything like that.
Speaker 3: No, they've been very like, we don't want to do
Speaker 3: right now.
Speaker 5: We don't want to do anything that is an endurance
Speaker 5: sport because it's not tiktokable. Basically, they want everything to
Speaker 5: be able to they they're very candidly candidate about that.
Speaker 5: They want to be able to throw it on a clip,
Speaker 5: publish it, put it out there, get.
Speaker 3: As many pieces as they can, which you could.
Speaker 5: Tell this was their model by being at the games
Speaker 5: for kind like we were. We were kind of depressed
Speaker 5: being we were sequestered into this kind of corner of
Speaker 5: the arena and given very very limited.
Speaker 3: Access to interview the athletes during the games themselves. And
Speaker 3: meanwhile they were letting.
Speaker 5: YouTube I don't even know who they were sort of
Speaker 5: YouTube influencers Zoomer TikTok influencers like go poolside, and they
Speaker 5: were doing like Fortnite remote dances and interviewing athletes right
Speaker 5: as they came out of the right as they came
Speaker 5: out of the water. So it was, it was, it was.
Speaker 5: It very much felt like they were trying to cater
Speaker 5: specifically to.
Speaker 3: New age media.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know these like short bursts, sprint sports
Speaker 4: and like lifting. It's like it makes a lot of
Speaker 4: sense for like, you know, the online economy, but for
Speaker 4: a six to eight hour live event, maybe not the
Speaker 4: best or most entertaining way to throw first games, I guess.
Speaker 6: So you guys go to Vegas.
Speaker 1: It's at the event is held at Resorts World, which
Speaker 1: is a big Newish casino at the end of the strip.
Speaker 1: It's very nice. What are the vibes like before the
Speaker 1: event actually happens.
Speaker 4: So they had sort of built this bespoke structure in
Speaker 4: the middle of a Resorts World, which was it had
Speaker 4: a four lane pool, one hundred yard track I think,
Speaker 4: or maybe a little bit longer than that, and then
Speaker 4: like a little stage for powerlifting.
Speaker 2: There was a big.
Speaker 4: DJ booth and this was all taking place in like
Speaker 4: sort of the shadow of Trump Tower with the sphere
Speaker 4: in the background. The vibes were a little I don't know,
Speaker 4: this is probably a little harsh, but they felt very
Speaker 4: cursed to me, Like.
Speaker 6: What do you mean by that?
Speaker 4: The swirl of the TikTokers, and then like there were
Speaker 4: the athlete families sort of in the stands.
Speaker 2: They neglected to put a roof over the whole.
Speaker 4: Thing, which you know, if you're competing in weightlifting or
Speaker 4: track and you're in the middle of like the Nevada Desert,
Speaker 4: that's probably not the best like situation to break a
Speaker 4: world record in. So the sun's beating down, there's like
Speaker 4: old ladies like getting like having wheelchairs requested, and it
Speaker 4: feels sort of like it feels like a sort of
Speaker 4: wellness see Coachella in some ways. But they hadn't figured
Speaker 4: out all the kinks yet, and sort of that's kind
Speaker 4: of like how it is when we like parachute it
Speaker 4: into this thing.
Speaker 5: It was ninety six degrees that day, yeah, because it's
Speaker 5: light Mary, Yeah, and it was I don't know if
Speaker 5: you remember what I said to you beforehand, but I
Speaker 5: was like, I've spent my entire life going to wrestling
Speaker 5: tournaments where you compete for seven minutes at a time.
Speaker 5: Nobody here is going to be accustomed to how much
Speaker 5: of this is just waiting, just waiting for your turn.
Speaker 3: And they're kind of rolling through the events.
Speaker 5: Really slowly, and a lot of it is I would
Speaker 5: say probably four hours of it. We don't quote me
Speaker 5: on that, but like a significant chunk at the time
Speaker 5: was dedicated to Olympic weightlifting, because that just takes time.
Speaker 5: People need to rest between reps. No shade to Olympic weightlifting.
Speaker 5: I think it's really cool, but it is not the
Speaker 5: best spectator sport I think it is. It happens, you know,
Speaker 5: like a handful of seconds. You're competing at a time,
Speaker 5: ton of build up, and I think they attempted. They
Speaker 5: only attempted one world record the whole time. They didn't
Speaker 5: even in the way that think they didn't even attempt.
Speaker 5: They didn't throw the weight on the bar and give
Speaker 5: it a go with with almost any of their almost
Speaker 5: any other athletes. And this is the height of the day.
Speaker 5: So for most of the most of the weightlifting, the
Speaker 5: crowd was like empty downstairs, drinking free beer that they've
Speaker 5: been given by enhanced because it was for no, no
Speaker 5: public tickets.
Speaker 3: It was invite only.
Speaker 5: Everybody in attendance was either pressed, family or an influencer.
Speaker 1: And so the deal for athletes is explain how they
Speaker 1: get paid and what the numbers are and how that
Speaker 1: compares to doing it the quote unquote non enhanced way.
Speaker 1: You're trying to get to the video Olympics.
Speaker 4: And yeah, so you know, the sort of like pattern
Speaker 4: net emerged for us was if you're like not an
Speaker 4: NBA player or an NFL player or whatever you're you're
Speaker 4: you're basically not making any money from your chosen sport.
Speaker 4: And so for a lot of these let's let's take
Speaker 4: swimmers for example, like their options after they're they're retired
Speaker 4: from their swimming career are basically, you know, they could
Speaker 4: they could teach kids, they could do seminars, but maybe
Speaker 4: you're not the type of person who wants to like,
Speaker 4: you know, help kids, like you know, kick around in
Speaker 4: the pool or whatever. And so if you're signing on
Speaker 4: with Enhance, you get paid a monthly stipend. We don't
Speaker 4: have the exact numbers on that because they decline to
Speaker 4: share it. You have basic health care, you have the
Speaker 4: futuristic health care with all the you know, enhancements and
Speaker 4: sort of like health monitoring and recovery stuff, and you
Speaker 4: had free housing and food, so you basically had a
Speaker 4: lot of your amenities taken care of and you could
Speaker 4: basically focus on training and training only, which you know,
Speaker 4: it's kind of like just like a luxurious version of
Speaker 4: going back to college and except you don't have to
Speaker 4: go to class. Basically, it's it's kind of how I
Speaker 4: understood it.
Speaker 5: We should add though, that they that they they were
Speaker 5: only given those amenities if you agreed to be well,
Speaker 5: not all of it. They were only given the like
Speaker 5: food and board and access to the pharmaceuticals if they
Speaker 5: agreed to go to the United of Air memorates and
Speaker 5: participate in this study that they're doing on the drugs themselves.
Speaker 3: So you had to essentially.
Speaker 5: Agree to be a guinea pig to get not the stipend,
Speaker 5: but the board and the food and free access to
Speaker 5: the pharmaceuticals.
Speaker 1: And then one of the big reasons that athletes would
Speaker 1: do this is that if you win an event, the
Speaker 1: purse is pretty big, and then if you break a
Speaker 1: world record at the Games, it's even bigger.
Speaker 6: So what are the numbers there winners were getting.
Speaker 5: In most of the events, we're getting two hundred and
Speaker 5: fifty thousand dollars, which is if you're running track, that's
Speaker 5: like more than you might make in your entire career,
Speaker 5: with the exception of the best of.
Speaker 3: The best of the best of the best.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then low end was like fifty thousand dollars,
Speaker 4: So there was a range of money you were guaranteed
Speaker 4: to make from just competing alone basically.
Speaker 5: And then for some of the events, I believe the
Speaker 5: one hundred meters sprint for men's and fifty and one
Speaker 5: hundred meter free in swimming, if you broke a record,
Speaker 5: you got a million dollars.
Speaker 3: The person was less.
Speaker 5: The world record breaking purse was less than that for
Speaker 5: other events, but for those ones it was up to
Speaker 5: a million dollars.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think just to put a pin in
Speaker 1: that so people have context, if you play in the NFL,
Speaker 1: you're probably guaranteed at least two million bucks a year.
Speaker 1: You play a few years, you're like, okay, I'm probably
Speaker 1: gonna be okay for life, so long as I just
Speaker 1: manage my money decently. Now, if you're at a decent level,
Speaker 1: like you can be in the nine figure range, so like,
Speaker 1: you know, some of these like bigger professional sports, you
Speaker 1: can do your thing, you'll make enough money that you're
Speaker 1: probably set for life. But with more of these niche
Speaker 1: Olympic sports, you're really scratching by unless you're like the
Speaker 1: absolute top, like a Michael Phelps, and you can get
Speaker 1: these big advertising deals and all these other things, but
Speaker 1: like the average athlete is hardly making any money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's basically it.
Speaker 4: And we talked to a number of the athletes, and
Speaker 4: they all had the reasons for doing it, Like, you know,
Speaker 4: some of them had just put down a mortgage and
Speaker 4: then lost a bunch of their other sponsors, so this
Speaker 4: was like a way to you know, like earn a living.
Speaker 2: Basically.
Speaker 4: One of the more interesting guys, his name is Andre Govarov.
Speaker 4: He had actually fled Ukraine during the war and his
Speaker 4: business back there was basically destroyed.
Speaker 2: He had no source of.
Speaker 3: Like literally destroyed to be clear, like with missiles. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and he you know, he was like, in order
Speaker 4: to compete at an elite level that I want to
Speaker 4: compete at, it costs you know, ten thousand dollars a month,
Speaker 4: like between the coaches, I got to pay the trainers,
Speaker 4: my recovery, my food, all that stuff. So he was like,
Speaker 4: enhanced was just financially, you know, the most logical move
Speaker 4: that I can make in order to like be who
Speaker 4: I want to be.
Speaker 6: We're going to take a quick break.
Speaker 1: Then we're going to look at the actual events of
Speaker 1: the enhanced games and the records that were set and
Speaker 1: not set. Okay, So at this point we've said, up,
Speaker 1: we've got this big event. We're going to let people
Speaker 1: juice to the gills. We're going to see what happens
Speaker 1: do they get these crazy times and weights lifted we've
Speaker 1: never seen before. We've set down that this is sort
Speaker 1: of one big advertisement in order to sell these things
Speaker 1: to the public. We've set up the fact that athletes
Speaker 1: are being pulled into this because they can make more
Speaker 1: money than they might have made their entire career for this.
Speaker 1: Now the event happens, what happens with the times? Are
Speaker 1: these records being shattered across the board?
Speaker 5: No? No, they go most of the entire day without
Speaker 5: a record. They come close once in one hundred meters
Speaker 5: men's sprint, they were like one hundreds of a second off.
Speaker 3: But in most of the events.
Speaker 5: The one that comes to mind is kind of being
Speaker 5: the most egregious of the women's hundred meter sprint.
Speaker 3: I believe that I don't believe any of the times
Speaker 3: that were run would.
Speaker 5: Have qualified for the Olympics. All the fine for the Olympics. Yeah,
Speaker 5: even the winner, I believe. I have to don't check that,
Speaker 5: but I'm pretty sure there was a case. They were
Speaker 5: all like the the eleven second range, which is, you know,
Speaker 5: certainly faster than you or I, but not.
Speaker 3: An Olympic caliber.
Speaker 5: And not only that, they had multiple, multiple non enhanced athletes.
Speaker 5: So for context, you could join the enhanced Games and
Speaker 5: say I don't want to do steroids, I just want
Speaker 5: to compete.
Speaker 3: For the money.
Speaker 5: And they had multiple athletes who were doing that, or
Speaker 5: at least said they were doing that, were won their events.
Speaker 5: One of them was Hunter Armstrong, who the guy that
Speaker 5: was trying to save his mortgage, basically who signed.
Speaker 3: Up for the Games.
Speaker 5: He won one hundred meter backstroke, yeah, backstroke, as well
Speaker 5: as the Fred Curley, the one hundred meter sprinter, and
Speaker 5: the women's sprinter as well, whose name is escaping me.
Speaker 1: So they have so basically one the times are not crazy,
Speaker 1: The whites lifted are not crazy, and people are winning
Speaker 1: who are not even enhanced, and this is supposed to
Speaker 1: be Let's see what happens when we enhance the hell
Speaker 1: out of these athletes.
Speaker 4: And yeah, and I don't know about you, Sam, but
Speaker 4: you could sort of like feel the tens, the tension
Speaker 4: like sort of like building in the in the arena.
Speaker 4: As the night goes on, it's like, Oh, another one
Speaker 4: that's not smashed, another one that didn't even come close.
Speaker 4: Another lift that was like far, far far off from
Speaker 4: a world record. And it wasn't until the very last race,
Speaker 4: which was a fifty meters free and they actually had maybe,
Speaker 4: you know, pound for pound, the highest caliber of athletes
Speaker 4: competing in that one, so that was kind of like
Speaker 4: their big bet.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't until that.
Speaker 4: Very last end of the night that the swimmer, Christian
Speaker 4: Golamyve like touches the wall and then like there's a
Speaker 4: split second that happens in between that where they like
Speaker 4: verify that a world record was broken, and then all
Speaker 4: the screens like flash red. It's like, oh, they had
Speaker 4: all these like you know, I don't know if it
Speaker 4: was fireworks, but just like all this stuff firing off
Speaker 4: that they were sitting on all night and you could
Speaker 4: just sort of feel like I was looking at the
Speaker 4: executives like it was like a load had lifted off
Speaker 4: their shoulders, like they were so relieved to finally have
Speaker 4: had a gens like break one single world record with
Speaker 4: the Games.
Speaker 1: But he did that in some sort of suit that's
Speaker 1: banned in the normal Olympics, right, he did it and what's.
Speaker 5: Called the super suit, which is just like really it
Speaker 5: looks like a wrestling singlet, but even kind of tighter
Speaker 5: like sumber withking a wrestling singlet in a what suit,
Speaker 5: but it goes to the ankle and comes kind of
Speaker 5: over your body and what it like, it kind of
Speaker 5: compresses you. It makes you more more buoyant, which I
Speaker 5: do think when they first initially broke a record, and
Speaker 5: for context they they it's kind of a proof of concept.
Speaker 5: A year ago they had gold Christian Golomy break the
Speaker 5: fifty meters world record as it stood at that point,
Speaker 5: which had been set by Caesar Clo in the late
Speaker 5: two thousands in a super suit before the supersuit was banned. Okay,
Speaker 5: a few months after that, Cameron McAvoy, an Australian swimmer,
Speaker 5: broke Christian the world record that the rest of the
Speaker 5: world recognized, and Christian gold Mus world record in a
Speaker 5: regular sort of speedo, not in a super suit, so
Speaker 5: did not have the like extra gear that Christian gold
Speaker 5: meaf again raced in and broke the broke the record
Speaker 5: in so that I honestly, to me, that puts more
Speaker 5: of an asterisk on the record than the steroids do.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 5: The line that I always say to people is like,
Speaker 5: I use the Barry Bonds example, which is obviously extreme.
Speaker 5: You know, like you could go on YouTube right now
Speaker 5: and watch there's hundreds of videos on YouTube just analyzing
Speaker 5: Barry Bond's swing is the most beautiful swing ever. Right,
Speaker 5: Steroids aren't gonna make your the technique of your swing better.
Speaker 5: You know, they're gonna make you stronger, make you recover better,
Speaker 5: but they're not gonna make you better at swinging a bat.
Speaker 5: But then like it's the supersuit is almost like benching
Speaker 5: on like a sleeve the power lifters do versus benching
Speaker 5: raw without, you know, like it's your.
Speaker 3: At a gear to a thing to assist you.
Speaker 5: At that point, if you want to go down the
Speaker 5: philosophical route, it's like why not put a fan behind him?
Speaker 3: And like him to propel him forward? Why not give
Speaker 3: him flippers? Why not? You know, what is the what
Speaker 3: is the logical end of what you're what you're doing?
Speaker 3: I think here was kind of my question.
Speaker 1: So the so these events start happening, no records are
Speaker 1: getting broken initially, and then you finally have this moment
Speaker 1: where you know, screen flashes read. At that point, what
Speaker 1: are the what's the energy among people who are not
Speaker 1: the owners? You said, it's almost like the felt relief.
Speaker 1: But what are people in the press area thinking and saying?
Speaker 6: What?
Speaker 1: What's the reaction from the TikTokers and the YouTubers. Is
Speaker 1: it sort of like this, I don't know if this
Speaker 1: is going well or at that point when that happens,
Speaker 1: is it are people reacting as if it's a success.
Speaker 3: I think the TikTokers didn't really care.
Speaker 5: Yeah, either way that the families were happy.
Speaker 3: The athletes were extatic.
Speaker 5: I mean, these people have been living together for many months,
Speaker 5: you know, and tells them Abu dabims.
Speaker 3: Them like they're clearly they're very kind of tight knit.
Speaker 5: So there they were extatic for I mean they were
Speaker 5: extatic throughout for whoever won, for who, you know, the
Speaker 5: energy for them was kind of always always very high.
Speaker 5: The press was clearly, I think, quite suspicious of the premise.
Speaker 5: What I've been kind of saying is like, I don't
Speaker 5: know if this says about me as a journalist, but
Speaker 5: I was like, you know, if they had broken a
Speaker 5: ton of records, that would have been like an incredible
Speaker 5: story just in terms of it being interesting, not good
Speaker 5: or bad, just really interesting. If they had broken no
Speaker 5: records at all, that would have been so interesting. But
Speaker 5: breaking one in the event that we thought they might
Speaker 5: break it in that they'd already broken it in at
Speaker 5: one point we thought they might break it again with
Speaker 5: this suit on. At the very end, I was like,
Speaker 5: this is I don't want to say a letdown, but
Speaker 5: it wasn't as compelling as I think that it could
Speaker 5: have been. It was hard for the story part of
Speaker 5: my brain to not be like, ah, dang. You know,
Speaker 5: I think a lot of the press ultimilarly. I don't
Speaker 5: know about you, Chris, Yeah.
Speaker 4: You know when you asked about what was the mood
Speaker 4: between the influencers, it actually took me a second because
Speaker 4: by then most of them had already left, so the
Speaker 4: stands were a little bit empty by that point, which
Speaker 4: was you know, probably not in their favor, but yeah,
Speaker 4: I do think the for me at least, Like I
Speaker 4: gained a lot of sympathy for these athletes over the months,
Speaker 4: just like the stuff that they struggle with, like the
Speaker 4: work they put in. How unique their situation was in
Speaker 4: terms of like being the best at what you do
Speaker 4: and being asked to train together in like the same
Speaker 4: pool every day, Like that was really fascinating. Like the
Speaker 4: dynamic in there was a bunch of alphas in the
Speaker 4: same room. You look to your left, it's like the
Speaker 4: second best guy. You look to your right, it's the
Speaker 4: third best guy, and they kind of like pushes you
Speaker 4: to be better in a lot of ways that you
Speaker 4: know how much that had to do with their success
Speaker 4: versus peds, I don't really know, but I thought it
Speaker 4: was like a really like sort of cute like dynamic.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the I mean the athletes of the people throughout
Speaker 5: this process that I have absolutely the most sympathy for
Speaker 5: the ones that I am.
Speaker 3: I would say I'm the happiest for like it is.
Speaker 5: I would say my criticism of the Enhanced Games in
Speaker 5: no way it should be construed as being support for
Speaker 5: the IOC or for the world Antidoping Agency, something that
Speaker 5: I thought was quite poetic in the days immediately after
Speaker 5: the Enhanced Games. I don't think they could have timed
Speaker 5: this worse. Kirsty Coventry, who's the president of the IOC,
Speaker 5: was interviewed and she said, in effect, she said, I
Speaker 5: don't believe in paying athletes like prize money. Was kind
Speaker 5: of the arc that she was asked about praying prize
Speaker 5: money to Olympic athletes. She was like, I don't believe
Speaker 5: in that. I think that's a bad thing, which was
Speaker 5: which is just you know, the IOC makes ten zillions
Speaker 5: of dollars.
Speaker 3: They have plenty of money.
Speaker 5: It's technically a nonprofit, you know, I think that they
Speaker 5: can afford to pay life changing money to some of
Speaker 5: their to some of their athletes. On top of that,
Speaker 5: the I think that the methods that we use to
Speaker 5: decide who's doping and who isn't. Our sort of antidoping
Speaker 5: policies as they exist are draconian. Athletes have to surrender
Speaker 5: to test it basically any given moment, any given time,
Speaker 5: Their athletes, their whereabouts have to be given to the
Speaker 5: Royal Antidoping Agency literally twenty four to seven if you
Speaker 5: miss a test if I think three times, then you
Speaker 5: give a year or two year ban if you're just
Speaker 5: not where you're supposed to be.
Speaker 3: They have no sort of say on what is and
Speaker 3: isn't banned.
Speaker 5: It is also draconian, I think, kind of also dystopian
Speaker 5: in a way, almost opposite the spectrum of the Enhanced Games.
Speaker 5: And I have to think that there is a better option,
Speaker 5: some sort of middle ground.
Speaker 1: We'll take a break, then we'll talk about the backlash
Speaker 1: that happened after the disappointments in the Enhanced Games. So
Speaker 1: the event happens, as you said, kind of a letdown all.
Speaker 1: Like you said, you wouldn't want to call it a letdown,
Speaker 1: but we'll just go with that.
Speaker 5: You can call it a letdown. I think that's for Yeah,
Speaker 5: I stand by that it's a letdown.
Speaker 6: Yeah, event was a letdown.
Speaker 1: Stock price crashes like seventy five percent in the ensuing days.
Speaker 1: It could just be my algorithm, But I did not
Speaker 1: say a positive thing. I just saw a ton of
Speaker 1: hate being thrown at this thing. What reactions did you
Speaker 1: see and how do you sort of process that?
Speaker 6: You know?
Speaker 4: I think our algorithms are probably coded very similarly, like
Speaker 4: it was a you know, maybe ninety nine percent people
Speaker 4: dunking on the whole thing.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, I feel like this whole.
Speaker 4: Thing was designed to sort of court controversy and to like,
Speaker 4: you know, I feel like for them, they feel like.
Speaker 2: Any attention is good attention.
Speaker 4: And so just the fact that people were talking about
Speaker 4: it and they had a lot of eyeballs and people
Speaker 4: would going to their website, like I think they would
Speaker 4: consider that a win, and you know, they were in
Speaker 4: the aftermath, they were trying to spin this as, hey, look,
Speaker 4: we had a bunch of athletes who happened to be
Speaker 4: thirty five who set prs and that's a you know,
Speaker 4: that's a moral victory for us and for them, and
Speaker 4: you know, maybe that can happen to you too. You
Speaker 4: could be the best version of yourself and feel ten
Speaker 4: years younger. And so that was kind of the spin
Speaker 4: they were putting on the ball in the aftermath of the.
Speaker 2: Games, which I thought was, you know, not the worst idea.
Speaker 4: But for me, the thing that was like very weird
Speaker 4: about the Games is if you are targeting a demo
Speaker 4: that is, like people who are like thirty five forty
Speaker 4: middle aged, and you're like trying to help them feel younger.
Speaker 4: Inviting a bunch of eighteen year old TikTokers who've never
Speaker 4: felt though we're back pain in their life just feels
Speaker 4: like the most twisted marketing stretch possible.
Speaker 2: So that was the part I couldn't quite reconcile.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's the promise, is that you know, you
Speaker 1: two could set a pr at thirty five forty. What
Speaker 1: drugs do they actually sell to people? So there's like
Speaker 1: this range, right, It's there's peptides, there's testosterone. There's what
Speaker 1: all is being sold? And what do they do?
Speaker 5: Well, it's changing constantly because the Trump because the Trump
Speaker 5: administration is constantly deregulating a lot of the stuff that
Speaker 5: they want to sell, like the peptide stuff.
Speaker 3: Interesting, I can tell you right now.
Speaker 5: For sure, they sell samrellan, which is a peptide that
Speaker 5: is supposed to boost your natural production of growth hormone.
Speaker 5: They sell testosterone, they sell they sell nady plus.
Speaker 6: What does that do? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Anydy plus is this sort of coenzyme that helps with
Speaker 4: sort of like cellular repair and helps a lot with
Speaker 4: the energy, brain fog, that sort of thing. I've I've
Speaker 4: dabbled in it and take it once in a while
Speaker 4: before I got into like enhanced world, they sell a
Speaker 4: bunch of like glp ones creams, and then like they
Speaker 4: have like theirs your standard issue like creatine and like
Speaker 4: pre workout sort of stuff that are grossly overpriced and
Speaker 4: actually are a little too sweet for my liking after
Speaker 4: tasting them.
Speaker 5: It would appear that they've added Cialis to Dalla phil
Speaker 5: since I last looked up maybe a week or two ago,
Speaker 5: which I believe some people are saying is like you
Speaker 5: can use as like a like a like a mental
Speaker 5: clarity booster. Now too, I've heard that on the kind
Speaker 5: of wellness circuits. So they have they have cialis, they
Speaker 5: have generic salis, they have they have truz eppetide, they
Speaker 5: have g hkcu, the copper peptide creating. I mean, they
Speaker 5: kind of got they kind of got everything in this kind.
Speaker 3: Of this whole gambit of of drugs.
Speaker 1: And then how are they tracking the health effects of
Speaker 1: these because part of it is they're doing these sort
Speaker 1: of study on athlete help health to see do these
Speaker 1: things help or harm in the long run? What does
Speaker 1: that actually look like? And have they have they published
Speaker 1: any results yet?
Speaker 5: No results They've they've throughout the whole process of reporting this.
Speaker 3: They were very.
Speaker 5: At first they kind of promised us, especially Chris, that
Speaker 5: they would have access to whatever information we wanted about
Speaker 5: what they were taking. And then as when it kind
Speaker 5: of push came to shove and we were like, hey,
Speaker 5: we're gonna go to Abu Dhabi and like we want
Speaker 5: to we want to be in the room when you
Speaker 5: give them the needle. They're like, no, actually, we can't
Speaker 5: tell you because of privacy laws in the UAE, and
Speaker 5: so we don't know exactly what any given athlete was taking.
Speaker 5: They have since published some data on what percentage of
Speaker 5: different substances, like different athletes took, Like it was like
Speaker 5: something like seventy percent use of soostro and like forty
Speaker 5: percent use EPO, just kind of generic like this percentage
Speaker 5: of our athletes use these drugs, but they have not
Speaker 5: made the exact results public yet. And we talked to
Speaker 5: a bunch of doctors about we're just to basically gut
Speaker 5: check what this study was. And there's I mean, there's
Speaker 5: a few there's a few big problems. One is that
Speaker 5: like you really don't have any control. You have three
Speaker 5: athletes who are not taking drugs and you're not controlling
Speaker 5: anything else in their life, so that already kind of
Speaker 5: compromises the study. And then two like there is no
Speaker 5: they're not drug They were very candid that they were
Speaker 5: not drug testing athletes and lead up to the games
Speaker 5: they were only going to test their sort of organ
Speaker 5: health and to make sure that they were healthy to compete.
Speaker 5: Some of these substances can in larger heart they can
Speaker 5: cause liver damage, et cetera, et cetera. And kind of
Speaker 5: the hole in that logic that we we kept coming
Speaker 5: across was there's a huge financial incentive here, and there's
Speaker 5: you're not You've already said you're not drug testing any
Speaker 5: of these athletes, So what's stopping anybody here from taking
Speaker 5: more of this drug? Given that they could win a
Speaker 5: million dollars you know from on the side, getting some
Speaker 5: testotics around on the you know, there's nothing stopping them.
Speaker 5: So the on top of that, there's questions of you know, independence,
Speaker 5: like how independent could the study actually be? The data
Speaker 5: I think is compelling, but dubious, Like I think there
Speaker 5: isn't a ton of research out there because we have
Speaker 5: been so I think punitive in our approach to drug
Speaker 5: research for a long time, not not you know, especially
Speaker 5: with street drugs, but which steroids have been treated as
Speaker 5: a street drug for a long time. It's very hard
Speaker 5: to research the effects of them. We didn't really have
Speaker 5: for some many of these drugs, we still don't have
Speaker 5: a really good idea of what they do. Most of
Speaker 5: it is like broscience, and then on top of that
Speaker 5: bro science being just kind of anecdotal.
Speaker 3: Like I like this, do you like that, how do
Speaker 3: you use it? Blah blah blah.
Speaker 4: You know, they had a couple of different categories of drugs.
Speaker 4: It was, you know, they had you know, they had
Speaker 4: the testosterones, they had stimulants that they were able to
Speaker 4: take for the women, they had hormone regulators like you know,
Speaker 4: and then what was the last category stem There.
Speaker 3: Was one more metabolog modulators.
Speaker 2: Metablog modulators, yes.
Speaker 5: Yes, uldonium drugs that make your salves more energy efficient.
Speaker 5: Often they're used for like diabetes and libertines and stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And what was interesting is, you know, we talked
Speaker 4: to this guy, Guido Plis. He's this cardiologist from the
Speaker 4: UK who heads up there sort of like scare quotes
Speaker 4: Independent Medical Commission, and he said that peptides were actually
Speaker 4: like something that the athletes were going to be able
Speaker 4: to take. In the lead up to it, like we
Speaker 4: talked to a couple of them who were excited about
Speaker 4: potentially taking you know, like BPC one five seven or
Speaker 4: you know, the Wolverine stack for healing and all of that,
Speaker 4: and he was like, you know, that stuff is a
Speaker 4: little too unregulated even for us, so we don't kind
Speaker 4: of want to we don't want to dive into that,
Speaker 4: which to me felt weird because it's like, oh, you
Speaker 4: guys are leaving a lot of money on the table
Speaker 4: by doing this, But at the same time, it's like
Speaker 4: you're sort of I don't know, ability to regulate or
Speaker 4: not regulate, but to sort of like determine what the
Speaker 4: athletes can and can take. It's just as squishy as say, wata,
Speaker 4: you know, Like it was they kind of didn't have
Speaker 4: their own grounding.
Speaker 5: What I was gonna say earlier was on top of
Speaker 5: how hard these drugs have been able to research, the
Speaker 5: other argument that they make, which has some merit I
Speaker 5: think to be fair, is that like most of what
Speaker 5: we understand of the symptoms of steroid abuse comes from
Speaker 5: people who are abusing extreme amounts of them in an
Speaker 5: unregulated manner off label for long periods of time. I
Speaker 5: bodybuilders basically. And their argument is, although we can't know
Speaker 5: because they don't give us access to what they're doing,
Speaker 5: is that they're giving these athletes very small doses of
Speaker 5: these drugs relatively speaking, for much shorter periods of time.
Speaker 3: I think in total they did for about eight weeks,
Speaker 3: maybe slightly longer.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, And what's funny.
Speaker 4: What's interesting about that too, is like, you know the powerlifters,
Speaker 4: it's like, oh, they were the ones who were the
Speaker 4: furthest away from breaking world records in some ways, was
Speaker 4: there more conservative dosing that enhancement was providing them different
Speaker 4: from what was available in other.
Speaker 5: Contexts, which I think was unsurprising, and just because weightlifting
Speaker 5: has always always been I think the most drugged out
Speaker 5: of the Olympic sports totally.
Speaker 1: Like in powerlifting, you have federations that are clean in theory,
Speaker 1: and then you have ones where it's like this is
Speaker 1: a non clean federation, like just juice yourself to I mean,
Speaker 1: there's already kind of this experiment happening in the powerlifting world.
Speaker 1: One thing I would point out about the study though,
Speaker 1: is if if you have people taking a bunch of
Speaker 1: different substances, how the hell do you figure out what
Speaker 1: is helping and what is hurting an athletes' health? Like
Speaker 1: there's just way too much fucking noise.
Speaker 3: It's a strange cocktail.
Speaker 5: And also like, how do you extrapolate the effects of
Speaker 5: t stosterone from Ben and proud Olympic silver medalists to
Speaker 5: sixty year old ethel who wants to like there is
Speaker 5: an example that they're like, we want Olympic athletes to
Speaker 5: have act to it.
Speaker 3: And the sixty year old woman who wants to tend
Speaker 3: her garden longer?
Speaker 5: How do you extrapolate the results from an Olympic silver
Speaker 5: medalist to a sixty year old woman who just wants
Speaker 5: to take care of her ponies?
Speaker 4: You know, Like yeah, and I think we mentioned it
Speaker 4: earlier too, that it's like, you know, the the menu
Speaker 4: of drugs that are presented to each athlete is totally
Speaker 4: different for each one of them. Like it's totally bespoke,
Speaker 4: like catered to sort of your biometrics, your test, and
Speaker 4: it's recommended to you by your doctor. You decide what
Speaker 4: you actually do and don't want to take. And so
Speaker 4: just like the variants there alone between the athletes is
Speaker 4: like it's it's like just like such a wide spectrum
Speaker 4: that how do you control for that?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 1: So you what I thought was interesting, Chris is that
Speaker 1: you had you would take an NAD mm hmm. What
Speaker 1: prompted you to do that and what was that like?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So one of the funny things that happened in
Speaker 4: like Sam and I like getting put together for this
Speaker 4: story is we both do muy Thai and both compete,
Speaker 4: you know, so you know, obviously when we were in
Speaker 4: Vegas for like let's hit up a muay Thai gym,
Speaker 4: let's like get some work in, you know.
Speaker 2: But you know, I'm forty one.
Speaker 4: I'm like it's sort of like the tail end of
Speaker 4: like my you know, ability to compete at this point.
Speaker 4: I also have a four year old son, and so
Speaker 4: my sleep is trash, Like you know, I don't get
Speaker 4: very much recovery. And a homegirl of mine was like, oh,
Speaker 4: I'm like she was in her mid forties and she
Speaker 4: was like, I started taking NAD and it really really
Speaker 4: helped me with like my daily brain fog and just
Speaker 4: my general ability to function and as a writer and
Speaker 4: sort of someone who partakes in like combat sports. I
Speaker 4: was like, oh, the sort of mental acuity that comes
Speaker 4: with NAD plus is something that was really appealing to me.
Speaker 4: And I also wanted to understand what it's like to
Speaker 4: jab a needle into your belly so I could sympathize
Speaker 4: with these athletes a little bit more. And that was
Speaker 4: kind of like what kicks started the experiment for me?
Speaker 6: What was it like? Did it improve things? Did it work? Yeah?
Speaker 4: You know what we I Sam actually tried it too
Speaker 4: when I when I had an extra dosing that was
Speaker 4: sent to me. For me, it's I think it's awesome.
Speaker 4: Like I feel like whenever I do need my brain
Speaker 4: fog lifted or I need a little bit more energy,
Speaker 4: it helps tremendously.
Speaker 2: I'm also a lot older than.
Speaker 4: Sam, so this stuff like my you know, he has
Speaker 4: the wrestling background in the lifetime of those injuries compounded
Speaker 4: onto him.
Speaker 2: But you know I got I got.
Speaker 4: Like ten years at least, so you know, maybe maybe
Speaker 4: the age is more of a factor for me.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I would specify, you know our preface that you know,
Speaker 5: I am not forty, I'm thirty years old, maybe in.
Speaker 3: Ten year old, but be like, yeah, give me everything.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but I one thing I liked about working with
Speaker 5: Crystal This was which was it was a good gut check.
Speaker 5: Because I am my mother's a doctor. I grew up
Speaker 5: in a house of with a medical professional. So I
Speaker 5: am deeply suspicious of anything that comes out of the
Speaker 5: wall in this industry.
Speaker 3: Most of it's on regulated kind of et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 3: et cetera.
Speaker 5: Also, I just have this kind of like predisposed belief
Speaker 5: from my experience competing that like, I've seen what people
Speaker 5: can do if they just train really hard and sleep
Speaker 5: a lot and eat really well, and that's kind of
Speaker 5: all that they do.
Speaker 3: And that's their focus.
Speaker 5: I'm like, maybe we as a society should try to
Speaker 5: sleep a lot more and work out. If you want
Speaker 5: to run faster, lift more, work out really consistently for many.
Speaker 3: Hours a day, and sleep well and eat better.
Speaker 5: Before we start talking about injecting exogynous substances and hormones
Speaker 5: into our body, I was like, I feel like we're
Speaker 5: starting at the wrong end here often because there's because
Speaker 5: there's something to sell. So I came into it, I
Speaker 5: think pretty suspicious. I took a pretty small dose of
Speaker 5: the nity I didn't really feel much. I found the
Speaker 5: feeling of it being in my stomach to be so
Speaker 5: off putting. Uh, it's like warm, and there's it feels
Speaker 5: like there's like a little it felt like one of
Speaker 5: those like little like weights that you see the like
Speaker 5: in like the old ladies and the jaggeritized classes, the
Speaker 5: like little bullet weights they hold.
Speaker 3: I felt like someone like slipped that under my skin
Speaker 3: and it was just sitting there.
Speaker 5: But again, you know, I don't know how I'll feel
Speaker 5: when I'm forty. You know, it's easy for me, like
Speaker 5: I can still go out on the weekends and wake up, and.
Speaker 3: I went out.
Speaker 5: I was out late, real late a couple of nights ago,
Speaker 5: watching the game two of the Knicks and partied until
Speaker 5: like two in the morning, and then I woke up.
Speaker 5: I was like, I got to get rid of this hangover.
Speaker 5: And my solution was to run five miles.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, that's about I was.
Speaker 4: I was going to say, you know that it's I
Speaker 4: know sleep is important, but there's a Knicks game that
Speaker 4: starts at eight thirty.
Speaker 5: And I don't have a kid, so it's like and
Speaker 5: it's easier for me to say, like, maybe you should
Speaker 5: work out four hours a day before you start putting
Speaker 5: stuff in your body.
Speaker 1: We're going to take a break and we're going to
Speaker 1: get into a little bit of philosop of aging and
Speaker 1: why we as a culture are so obsessed with slowing
Speaker 1: down and stopping aging. I wonder, and Chris will be
Speaker 1: interesting to get your perspective on this.
Speaker 6: Part of me.
Speaker 1: Wonders, is having brain fog, waking up kind of tired?
Speaker 1: Is that just part of aging? And is there almost
Speaker 1: a reward in that? It's like it's a fundamental part
Speaker 1: of the process of being human. So if I think
Speaker 1: about myself from a writing perspective, it's like some mornings
Speaker 1: I wake up, I'm like, ah, the sentences aren't coming out,
Speaker 1: but I put the work in and then I get
Speaker 1: a couple good ones and I'm like, that was awesome.
Speaker 1: And I did that sort of by myself. Do we
Speaker 1: lose something when we buy a product that makes these
Speaker 1: important things about being a human easier?
Speaker 2: That's a good question, you know.
Speaker 4: To my mind, it's sort of indistinguishable from you know,
Speaker 4: having two shots of express morning. In some ways, it's
Speaker 4: like if it helps you do your job a little
Speaker 4: bit better, I'm like, yeah, dude, go for it.
Speaker 2: That's fine.
Speaker 4: Like we're sort of like thrust into this system where
Speaker 4: getting sleep is pretty much impossible, and like if you
Speaker 4: do are are in a situation where you can get
Speaker 4: a lot of sleep, it's kind of like that's like
Speaker 4: the new luxury in some ways. Like if you're Lebron
Speaker 4: getting twelve twelve hours of sleep at night, it's like,
Speaker 4: of course you're going to have an advantage over everyone else,
Speaker 4: but none of us. If we're working our jobs, trying
Speaker 4: to get in our workouts, trying to like do any extracurriculars,
Speaker 4: it's like, yeah, sleep is always the first thing to go,
Speaker 4: and so you know, whatever you can do to sort
Speaker 4: of mitigate that, I'm personally kind of.
Speaker 2: All for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Sam, what was your take on that, giving your
Speaker 1: background as an athlete and you had to go through
Speaker 1: all these you know, PD checks and everything, and where
Speaker 1: do you draw the line? Because I think Chris's yeah,
Speaker 1: point is great. That's like, well, if I took four
Speaker 1: shots of espresso on the morning, that gives me some
Speaker 1: sort of boost, And so like how do we how
Speaker 1: do we even determine these lines between what's a quote
Speaker 1: unquote banned substance versus Oh that's good, that's totally fine.
Speaker 3: It's a really hard question to answer.
Speaker 5: It's just kind of thinking out loud, Like I, especially
Speaker 5: as I have the experience of getting older to me
Speaker 5: and I've would preface that I've In ten years, I
Speaker 5: might be like, screw everything that I said when I
Speaker 5: was thirty.
Speaker 3: I'm like, Chris, give me the shot. But totally totally possible.
Speaker 3: But right now.
Speaker 5: I would never preasist to anybody because it's not my body.
Speaker 5: And I really do believe that, like that's the autonomy
Speaker 5: is important, but I do think that you lose something
Speaker 5: of your The process of aging, I think is such
Speaker 5: an important part of our of our humanity. I think
Speaker 5: feeling what enhanced is selling is I think what so
Speaker 5: many in the sort of tech biopharmer space are selling,
Speaker 5: which is like, wherever possible, removing the friction of your lives.
Speaker 3: And I think that the friction.
Speaker 5: Of our lives is where we grow, it's where we
Speaker 5: develop as people, it's where we if you're a father,
Speaker 5: it's where I think that we imbue valuable life lessons
Speaker 5: upon our children. And I don't want to do things
Speaker 5: that make me feel good all the time personally, Like
Speaker 5: it's I like, I intellectually I enjoy writing.
Speaker 3: The process of writing I find to be really unpleasant.
Speaker 2: It sucks.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I do it because I don't like it, and
Speaker 5: it makes me anxious and it makes me feel kind
Speaker 5: of insecure about how smart I am, and it makes
Speaker 5: me like, you know, like all these kinds of things
Speaker 5: in the first similar way that like combat sports did.
Speaker 5: They're very primal and personal, and if you lose, it's
Speaker 5: not like in football or soccer where we have a
Speaker 5: team to blame. It's like you got beat up in
Speaker 5: this very visceral, personal way. That's embarrassing and that's hard,
Speaker 5: and it gives you insecurity and it gives.
Speaker 3: You anxiety, and I worry. I guess I worry.
Speaker 5: NAD is one thing, but I just worry about the
Speaker 5: logic where that logic ends. And I like it doesn't
Speaker 5: end like this with everybody, but it's you can see
Speaker 5: how you get from NAD to let me hammer my
Speaker 5: face to make my bones grow sharper like Clinticular, you know,
Speaker 5: like you can see how that kind of rabbit hole
Speaker 5: can happen. And most people are gonna be like Chris
Speaker 5: and be reasonable about it, but there's you know, there's
Speaker 5: always the outliers that are gonna, you know, take things
Speaker 5: to extremes. And I think because the Internet, like taking
Speaker 5: things to extreme is rewarded because of the culture of
Speaker 5: the Internet, you know.
Speaker 3: So I just kind of worry where this goes.
Speaker 5: And for me, like I've found a lot of enjoyment
Speaker 5: in the aging of my body, in the way that
Speaker 5: I practice combat sports, like the way that I when
Speaker 5: I wrestle now, I.
Speaker 3: I'm not as quick as I once was. It my
Speaker 3: knees hurt.
Speaker 5: It's hard for me to take shots the way that
Speaker 5: I used to, Like I don't want to do a
Speaker 5: full penetration step where I hit my knees.
Speaker 3: I take like fat man old man shots and grab
Speaker 3: people's legs.
Speaker 5: But also like I wrestle college guys in high school
Speaker 5: guys now, and I'm like, I can see five moves
Speaker 5: ahead of you.
Speaker 3: I know what you're doing. Like I've studied the scrolls too,
Speaker 3: young man, you know, and there's fun in that too,
Speaker 3: And I worry.
Speaker 5: About losing that the more the more that this culture
Speaker 5: kind of propagates, I really do.
Speaker 1: It feels like the enhanced games are kind of this
Speaker 1: collision between two forces that you just mentioned, the removal
Speaker 1: of friction from life, but also kind of the machine
Speaker 1: of marketing, big money trying to sell us something like
Speaker 1: this is all kind of one big advertisement for the
Speaker 1: removal of friction. It's just this collision of those two
Speaker 1: forces in modern life.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I feel like that's that's the read. It's funny
Speaker 4: because it like greases the skids in some ways to
Speaker 4: like introduce weirder frictions into your life. It's like, I'm
Speaker 4: going to take the easy way out, but now I'm
Speaker 4: going to go spend three hours in the gym, you
Speaker 4: know what I mean?
Speaker 1: There you go.
Speaker 6: That's a good point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is a good point.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean I think I've been thinking about this a
Speaker 5: lot lately, just as I've gotten into I've been getting
Speaker 5: into running.
Speaker 3: And I'm not like, I'm six one, two sixty.
Speaker 5: I'm not naturally predisposed to being like it's no I'm
Speaker 5: getting I'm down, I'm under. I'm just barely under a
Speaker 5: twenty preivo at five K. I'm working my way up
Speaker 5: at that build. I'll take it. But now I get
Speaker 5: running culture stuff peppered at me on my like toort
Speaker 5: form video feeds like TikTok and Instagram, and it is
Speaker 5: like all sports are consumerists, but running seems to be
Speaker 5: an extremely consumeris sort of sub athletic culture. It's like
Speaker 5: you can buy your thirty dollars gels, and you can
Speaker 5: buy your like, you know, your fancy.
Speaker 3: Sunglasses and your five hundred dollars shoes and this and that.
Speaker 5: And I see people out running in Brooklyn all the
Speaker 5: time and they're wearing like all these crazy drive fit
Speaker 5: gear and Oakley's and super expensive shoes and I'm running
Speaker 5: on like a gigantic old Wyoming shirt and like crappy
Speaker 5: trail shoes, and I don't feel better than Actually, I
Speaker 5: definitely don't feel better than them, because like I went
Speaker 5: out and bought an actual period like two hundred dollars
Speaker 5: running shoes like recently, and I was like, oh, this
Speaker 5: is incredible. Like there's utility to these I understand that,
Speaker 5: but it's it's like been such a good case study
Speaker 5: for me and how far consumers them can kind of
Speaker 5: take these things, you know, And it's it's not it's
Speaker 5: not necessary all the time. It is, I think, to me,
Speaker 5: in somebody's counter to what athletics is and yeah, I
Speaker 5: struggle with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, you.
Speaker 4: Know, the two hundred and fifty dollars gentle Glide racing
Speaker 4: shoes are kind of the testosterone for your feet, the
Speaker 4: super suit of the feet totally.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We had Brady Homer, who's a two like twenty five marathon.
Speaker 3: Or Jesus Psycho.
Speaker 1: And he said yeah, but he did say that the
Speaker 1: super shoes probably give him a six percent decrease in
Speaker 1: his time. So we're talking going from like two thirty
Speaker 1: down to two twenty five or something like that. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's and it's just in the shoes. So it's really interesting.
Speaker 1: So where do you think the Enhanced Games go from here?
Speaker 4: Shortly after the Games, you know, they they kind of
Speaker 4: doubled down the stakes. They were like, oh, usining if
Speaker 4: someone could beat Hussein bolt sold record, We're going to
Speaker 4: not do a million dollar prize.
Speaker 2: It's gonna be a ten million dollar prize now.
Speaker 4: So in some ways I kind of feel like, you know,
Speaker 4: this sort of first iteration of the Games was designed
Speaker 4: to attract other athletes who are probably a higher caliber,
Speaker 4: who you know, have a little bit more of a
Speaker 4: reputation to be like, yeah, I could win that easy
Speaker 4: money I could win two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
Speaker 4: like beating some scrubs, And I thought what was really
Speaker 4: telling about it is afterwards Ryan Lockdey, you know, he
Speaker 4: was kind of like, Oh, I kind of wish I competed,
Speaker 4: Like that sounds like something I would do. And so
Speaker 4: it's like, oh, if you're going to get people who
Speaker 4: are on that level like sort of you know, voicing
Speaker 4: interest and perhaps even doing it, like, I think that's
Speaker 4: to be a lot more interesting and kind of fun
Speaker 4: to see.
Speaker 1: Do you think that legitimizes it or it becomes like
Speaker 1: even more spectacular spectacle.
Speaker 5: So for me, like my two big questions about the
Speaker 5: future of this are I guess one thing I would
Speaker 5: preface is that like billionaires funding their like quirky sporting
Speaker 5: events is not new. I think about Trump and the
Speaker 5: New Jersey generals, you know, like or the XFL and
Speaker 5: Vince McMahon, what I would say, like, you know, I
Speaker 5: think part of the one of the big points to
Speaker 5: that point is there one of the big questions to
Speaker 5: that point is how long will Christian Angermeier and company
Speaker 5: continue to want to hemorrhage money engaging in this operation
Speaker 5: because they're going to have to keep paying athletes a
Speaker 5: ton of money to do this, and they need the
Speaker 5: business to work, and it's hard for me to understand
Speaker 5: how enhanced stands out from keeps or hymns or row
Speaker 5: or etcetera, etcetera. But then also I think the big question,
Speaker 5: I think this is maybe the most important thing for
Speaker 5: the future of the Enhanced Games is the case study
Speaker 5: of Hunter Armstrong, the backstroker who competed unenhanced. So he
Speaker 5: throughout the process was like, I I still want to
Speaker 5: compete in the Olympics.
Speaker 3: I just desperately need.
Speaker 5: Money, and the Olympics are a scam and they don't
Speaker 5: pay you, and so I am going to do this
Speaker 5: and I want WADA. Please keep testing me. I will
Speaker 5: be you know, I'm just gonna do this competition and
Speaker 5: then come back. It is currently unclear if they're going
Speaker 5: to let him compete in the Olympics and the World
Speaker 5: Championships and whatever moving forward. They did happen to test
Speaker 5: him directly after the he competed at the Enhanced Games.
Speaker 5: They pulled him aside and tested him, which is funny.
Speaker 5: But the question of whether or not he's going to
Speaker 5: get banned, I think is important because if he's not,
Speaker 5: then that opens the door. I think two tons of
Speaker 5: other athletes who still want to stay in the Olympics
Speaker 5: system coming over and competing, and that's how you're going
Speaker 5: to get the kind of athletes who could break world
Speaker 5: records for at twenty five six, So you know, and
Speaker 5: I think that if that happens, if he's allowed to compete,
Speaker 5: then I could see the floodgates opening. And then the
Speaker 5: question just is like how long does enhance want to
Speaker 5: hemorrhage money paying because they cannot be profitable.
Speaker 1: There's no way, right if everyone breaking the records is
Speaker 1: not actually using the substances you're selling, there's no incentive
Speaker 1: to the consumer to go buy the substances, and then
Speaker 1: where does the money come from?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and.
Speaker 4: Then you're left with like, you know, teachers versus the
Speaker 4: JV team day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Well the podcast is superhuman. It's awesome,
Speaker 1: really great on the ground reporting. I love what you
Speaker 1: did with the episodes, especially like episode three. That was
Speaker 1: one that I immediately sent to my producer Robbie.
Speaker 6: I was like, listen to this, this is great.
Speaker 5: Shout out Lena Mescis, our senior producer. Incredible sound designer.
Speaker 6: Yeah, awesome.
Speaker 1: Well, great work guys, and I appreciate you coming on.
Speaker 2: Thanks, I appreciate it for having us.
Speaker 1: Thanks for checking out the show, and thanks to Chris
Speaker 1: and Sam for coming on to talk about the enhanced
Speaker 1: games and their podcast Superhuman. As a reminder, two percent
Speaker 1: is in your feed twice a week, so please subscribe
Speaker 1: so you get those updates. We are always open to
Speaker 1: your questions for our Ask Michael Anything section, Sending the
Speaker 1: media at two pc T dot com or drop me
Speaker 1: in the comments. If you want to watch this on video,
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