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