Philosophy of Aging and Future Outlook

. Welcome to Tw Perscent. I'm your host, Michael Easter Here's an insane idea What if we took a bunch of athletes, we jued them to the Gills with performance enhancing drugs, and then we had them all compete Now this might sound like something someone comes up with in their dorm room while stoned But it actually just happened at the Enhanced Games, which were held in Las Vegas in May So today we have Chris Imoi and Sam Egan. They were on the ground before, during and after the Enhanced games They were talking to founders, athletes, and scientists They were there reporting their podcast superhuman. and are here today talkalk to us about the aftermath of the games and the rise of websites selling us TRT. peptides and other products that promise us better versions of ourselves with no effort just the swipe of a credit card take a break and then we're going bring them on Hi I am Steph and I work at United Healthcare When I think about United Healthcaarere's members, I think of my own family. My niece was diagnosed with an ultra rare genetic disorder. I know how hard it is for our families at United Healthcaare. We can make it easier I'm Brian. I care because I know what it's like to not speak the language. It's not easy. Health insurance is complicated. I would say our job is to make everything easy for our UXC members I work for you out of Health care. I'm committed to care. Being there for those we love can be so hard for people with chronic migraine fififteen or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more Botox, on a bachulinum tooxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with fourteen or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Botox effects may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as trouble swallowing, speaking Breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition Those with these conditions before injection are at highest risk Side effects may include allergic reactions like rash, breathing problems, dizziness, neg and injection, side pain, and headache. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions like ALS, Myastthenia Gravis, or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medicines like batulinum toxins, which may increase the risk of serious side effects Why wait Ask your doctor about Botox. Visit Botoxchronicmigraine. com or call one eight hundred and forty four Botox This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. I'm going to be honest with you. I am online way more than I probably should be. And between me and everyone else at my house, we've got a zillion screens going on at any given moment. So when my internet slows down, it is a full crisis. That's why having fast, reliable internet that can keep up really matters and why you need optimum famously Fast Fiber Internet Optimum fiber blows flaky five G out of the water and keeps it cool with the fastest and most reliable speeds that don't slow when things heat up. And right now, they have the deal of the summer, just thirty dollars a month for five years. So don't wait, callall eight eight eight for optimum. Visit optimum dot com or stop by your local optimum store today Famously Fast Fiber for thirty dollars a month for five years. You can't beat it Terms apppply, see optimum dot com for details. This is Boen Yang and Matt Rogers from Lasco Choristas with Matt Rogers and Boen Yang. JBL wireless earbuds are for those who are the first to try something unique. The first wireless earbuds on the market with a touchs screen case, which allows you to control your audio without reaching for your phone. They also have a touchscreen smart charging case for one touch control I love being able to touch my buds and control the volume. With a built in wireless transmitter that lets you plug and play with any device you want, JBL wireless earbuds connects you to all your favorite music, movies, and games. JBL wireless earbuds. Grab a pair at jbl. com Chris and Sam. thanks for coming on two percent Thank you for having us. Really appreciate it. So you guys are about to release the final two episodes of your show on the Enhanced Games. that might be out by the time this episode is out. but for people who have no clue what the hell the Ehanced games are Explain it to us Yeah, so the Enhanced games were originally billed as the sort of steroid Olympics, which, you know, is kind of the kind of this idea that like Stone college students tend to have. Or like, wouldn't it be sick if we like had all these like PEDs and people could do whatever they want U but they actually made it happen It was founded by this guy named Earon DeSuza, who is an associate at Peter Thials, who is most famous for helping bring down the Gwer website from many, many years ago. And yeah, we've just been embedded in this strange world where they convinced a bunch of former Olympians to take some PEDs and try to break some world records. That's basically what this thing is I was actually going to say some people who aren't who aren't even Olympians, like they they they they uh I think obviously because this was so controversial, they kind of had to widen their search and they got some people who had never competed in the Olympics, but you know, not to get ahead of myself, but actually ended up like beating former Olympians. Yeah So with the word controversy, so when I first heard word of this, and I don't know what it was probably a few months ago You hear steroid Olympics, you hear like Saudi money, you hear we'ducing people to gills. And my initial thing was like, this just sounds like a giant Grift. Like this sounds insane. What is this and What did you find in terms of that? So what was your mindset entering doing this podcast and like Where has it gone since then And am I wrong am I wrong that this is kind of insane No, when I went in, I kind of didn't know what to expect. It just sounded so circusy and like a big old sort of carnival sort of thing that I was like, dude This could end up being a fire fest. This could end up being something stranger altogether But as we've been sort of embedded in this thing this whole time, I kind of realize it's basically just you know, the website Hys with a WWE component attached to it as the marketing apparatus basically. Yeah. And so people who don't know people who don't know Hyms, Hys sells basically supplements Pep des TRT. TRT. Yeah, I mean, I would say for me, I came on a little bit earlier to the project than Chris. I went to their initial event where they announced that this is actually going to happen. at Resorts World in Vegas, like it' would have in May of twenty five And it took me about I don' know what this is about me, but it took me about a full day of like attending these events and talking to people to be like Hey, I think that they're trying to sell Testosterone to the wider pub. This is an ad. likeike this is an ad for tester. It took me a full day to realize it Um And I would say throughout the whole process of making this series that that suspicion was only was only confirmed. Yeah. so tell me what the business model is because when I first heard this, I was like, oh, they just they want to see like what people can do if they're juiced to the gills. Kind of interesting to your point, Chris, kindind of sounds like something you come up with in your dorm room stonone But there's a bigger play here because they are paying these athletes insane money. So then the question is, well, where's the money coming from? And how are they actually going to make money? So tell us about that. The enhanced games are funded att least it's the start. now it's publicly traded company by Christian Eermmeyer, who is this sort of biopharma billionaire who's played in the in the psychedelic space for some time. And the business model, like we said, the way they kind of pitch it is that it is More bespoke version of telehealth that will give you access to bothoth drugs that need to be prescribed like testosterone and also just a wider range of supplements. I think they still like a sleep supplement for Chris. I think you said it was like seventy bucks But on top of that, they're selling testosterone, and they sell a whole list of peptides, they sell NAD And Chris actually went through the website and bought it. I have not done that yet, but as they pitched it, it was like you're going to have to talk to a doctor and it's going to be more specifically suited to like what we think that you need, but as I understand it, has not that has not been the case. It basically is just essentially the same website model as Him's or Row or Keps or any of these other these other companies. So when you bought stuff, Chris, so the idea going in is you're going to meet with a doctor. It It's going to feel like just getting a prescription from a doctor, but that didn't happen. So what was that process like Yeah, it was basically like filling out a Google Doc survey of like what are you suffering from right now? And I was like, anxiety. And it's like great, prescription on the way. I actually ordered some Semarellin that in true enhanced fashion hasn't gone to me yet because of some logistical holdups in their shipping pipeline, you know As soon as it gets to me, I'm eager to try it. But basically the business model is they're using this wacky sort of competition to sort of justify a framework that then they can like used to sort of normalize PED use. And that's kind of like the big overarching mission of this thing. Like if we can provide a way where we can sort of do it in their words, like safely and like Rather conservatively, honestly, like in the public eye, then we can sell that to the masses. And that's sort of how they're buildilling this whole operation Yeah. so Chris, your background is you were at GQ reporting on wellness quite a bit. Sam, you're a producer. alsoub you were a D one athlete. You wrestled at Wyoming, is that right? That's correct G pes. There you go. So how did How did you two get pulled into this project I think for me, there's just, you know, there's not a lot of U peopleeople who come from like an athletic background of the level that I guess I come from that also work in the the in the journalism space. So I think that it I think that it was a natural a natural fit. But I was also really curious Just from my own experience, I was fascinated by the idea of I guess just like the recovery part of PEDs because I just remember being competing at Wyoming and I think people Understand in theory the training regiment of like a division one athlete or Olymply level athlete, but like to see it actually put in front of your face and to actually do it is another thing entirely. And something you like I An hour and a half in the morning, spining from three and a half hours at night. you're told when to go to class, you're told when to go to study hall You have to go to recovery after practice, probably have tutors after that. So your entire day is built for you Five hours of exercise six days a week, if you're not traveling U and even at like nineteen to twenty three My body was Master all the time. I still have like, I mean, like I still got like I got pinkies that do crazy stuff, like, you know U like um I'm I was beat up and uh The question of like, does this have to be this way? L are we kind of closing ourselves off to A realm of drugs and pharmacology that could like makes athletes' lives better without compromising their safety and health I was really interested to find that out. I don't know if I think that the answers were satisfying, but I wanted to I wanted to see what they were selling You know Yeah, you're you're going, look like I've been put through hell on the wrestling team. It's takaking a toll on my body. If there's this thing I could do that is not going to affect my long term health. That seems like it would be interesting from an athletic perspective just to make the lives of athletes not quite so hellish Totally. And I think just because people don't realize how How stringent? the anti doping ort of guidelines are on substances that you cannot, you can and cannot take. This was a study that came up. Time and time again with the athletes we were interviewing, one of the athletes, Meghgan Romano, who came out of retirement after like ten years A swimmer She was like, I was even I was afraid to take iberprofam because you never know it's going to be tainted. You never know what's going to get you banned Like the list changes constantly. The book of like water guuidelines is is like a toone. different substances that you can and cannot take. It changes It changes constantly Um And it was also just created without without athlete input. So for me, I was just really interested in how this could affect the athlete experience. Yeah, that makes sense. So You kind of mentioned who is behind this, but how did this The whole idea start to get legs of the enhanced games Yeah, so Ind to Sus sort of like was kicking around a bunch of ideas post his Gaker project a couple of years ago. And he presented this sort of idea to Peter Thial, who's one of his buddies, and was like, hey, you know, what if we threw a sort of Steroid Olympics that, you know, sort of allowed us to putut on this big, big show will create a lot of noise. It'll cause a lot of mischief. And from there, we can sort of develop an reverse engineer sort of business plan. So I think they kind of went in with the big, nasty sort of like you know dirt kicking idea And then they sort of like, you know, we're building the plane on the way down to mix every metaphor possible to describe this. But yeah. So in a way, yes, it does have elements of the this is an idea that you'd come up with in the dorm room all stoned at the same time, it's coming from people that have billions of dollars and they're like, hey, we could actually figure this thing out. And then they also have the sort of gear in their mind going, all right, and then how do we turn this into a super profitable business potentially Yeah. And so that's sort of how I came onto it too because Eron and Christher Anngermmeyer went on Joe Rogan's podcast like not too long ago. I think it was like Was it twenty twenty two or twenty twenty three? I believe it was twenty four twenty twenty four. Yeah, they went on. and you know, when I was at GQ, like sort of my big story that I wrote over there was the story about the guys who got their legs artificially lengthened during COVID secretly. And so for me, I was like I kind of want my next big story to be about weird stuff we do to our bodies, the w is can augment it and sort of improve it. I'm using air quotes here, but improve our bodies And when I heard them on Rogan, they were like carnival barkers basically. They were kind of like, you know, this is going to change everything. This is going to like, you know enure in a new paradigm for enhancement and the future of humanity And then when I actually wrote them and like, you, kind of pitched myself to be the guy to write a big magazine story on it, it was kind of like, oh, this is just like another business. And so there was like this incongruity between what they were actually pitching and what the actual project turned out to be Yeah Yeah, it was very much an extension of Peter Thial's trans sort of transhumanist vision. for those who might not know, transhanism is an ide like an ideology that has existed in the tech space for a long time that basically says they like to avoid the inevitable collapse of humanity, like that we must enhance and depending on who you ask, even like sort of supersede our own bodies, whether that is like uploading yourselves to the cloud or or reverse aging yourself with like or think if u Bran Johnson using the blood of his son, you know, it's part of this transhumanist ideology, this transhumist vision that Peter Teal very much, very much subscribes to. Part of the argument that they're making is that Doping is already happening in The Olympics and sports So I heard one of the numbers that one of the founders tossed out. They said forty four percent of Olympians admitted to PDs in the last year. Did you report on that? Is that real Yeah, so that is a study that is it's a real study It is an outlier among other sort of studies that have been done on the rates of doping in the Olympics And the researcher that did it consistently has sort of outliers in his data. It'swhere from like ten to twenty percent higher than than most other studies find Tw twenty percent of athletes know doing drugs is still a significant I wouldn't say that that's nothing, you know U But it is it is an outlier in the data, for sure So they pull the most favorable number because they're going Well if forty No one would ever do that in the wellness space might come up. Yeah. So they're basically saying, all right, if forty four percent of Olympians are already doping Like that makes an unfair playing field at the Re Olympics. So what if we just, you know, pull back the curtain and say, hey Basically, more or less, anything goes Let's let's see what happens. That's kind of their argument Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, it kind of has a little bit of a point. like it's like you look at the Russian Federation or like the Chinese like, you know, it's like, oh, these big apparatuses are basasically like helping their athletes gain an unfair advantage. and then what are they getting from, you know, the IOC or WAa? It's like basically like a slap on the wrist. L they're still competing. They're still able to win medals. Sometimes it feels like a little silly. So I kind of see their point in some of this. Yeah, and there is some research that suggests even if you've used certain banned substances in the past those can still impact your performance moving forward. So you'll still have, you know, you'll have gained more muscle than you could have without them. while that muscle is going to stick around evenven if you're not on them, you're still getting this sort of boost from the past, more or less Yeah. And you know, there was this really funny example of this Australian swimmer named James Magnuson. He was the first dude who signed on with Enhanced a couple of years ago. And he actually ended up taking like they didn't have a protocol in place. They didn't know what they were doing. He was kind of effectively, the trial balloon set free into the air And He ended up doping so much that it made him significantly slower in the water. Like he was huge. He looked like a I don't know, like Han, basically, like the cartoon version of Han Which, you know, maybe maybe having giant shoulders isn't the best for your buoyancy in the water, but you know de the dude was an ocean liner when he should have been a speedboat basically I mean, I'm not convinced that wasn't a problem,h broader games themselves a few months ag go to, you know, like having more muscle on your body does not necessarily equate to like swimming faster in the water.. You are basically turning yourself into a rock, you're far less buoyant It makes it it makes it a lot harder . So I did find myself wondering why they chose swwimming given given the reality of, you know way that the water works, but yeah, because a of a lot of the drugs they are offering and athletes are using are ssentially muscle enhancers. Are they using stuff like EPO for because most of the sports are power sports, right? Soing sh distances There's sprinting, but there's not they're not doing like marathons or anything like that. No, they've been very like we don't want to do right now. we don't want to do anything that is an endurance sport because it's not TikTokable They want everything to be able to they they they're very candidly candid about that. They want to be able to throw it. on a clip, publish it P it out there, get as many views as they can, which You can tell this was their model by being at the games for c like we were we were kind of depressed we were sequestered into this kind of corner of the arena. and given very, very limited access to interview the athletes during the games themselves. And meanwhile, they were letting YouTube, I don't even know who they were, sort of YouTube influencers, Zoomer TikTok influencers like go poolside and they were doing like fortnite emote dances and interviewing athletes right as it came out of the right as it came out of the water. So it was it was it was it It very much felt like they were trying to cater specifically to new age weia Yeah. and you know, these like short burst sprint sports and like lifting, it's like It makes a lot of sense for like, you know, the online economy, but for a six to eight hour live event, maybe not the best or both entertaining way to throw first games, I guess. So you guys go to Vegas. It's at the events is held at Resorts World, which is a big newish casino at the end of the strip It's very nice What are the vibes like before the event actually happens So they had sort of built this bespoke structure in the middle of a resource world, which was it had a four lane pool one hundred yard track, I think or maybe a little bit longer than that. And then like a little stage for power lifting There was a big DJ booth, and this was all taking place in sort of the shadow of Trump Tower with the sphere in the background The vibes were a little, I don't know. this is probably a little harsh, but they felt very cursed to me. L what do you mean by that? The swirl of the TikTokers and then like there were the athlete families sort of in the stands, they neglected to put a roof over the whole thing, which you know if you're competing in weightlifting or track and you're in the middle of like the Nevada desert, that's probably not the best situation to break a world record in So the sun's being down, there's like old ladies like getting like having wheelchairs requested. and it feels sort of like It feels like a sort of wellnessy coachella in some ways, but they hadn't figured out all the kinks yet. And sort of that's kind of like how it is when we like parachute it into this thing. It was ninety six degrees Yeah because it's it's late May invent. it was, I don't know if you remember when I sent to you It' beforehand, but I was like, spent my entire life going to wrestling tournaments where you compete for seven minutes at a time Nobody here is going to be accustomed to how much of this is just waiting Just waiting for your turn And they're kind of rolling through the events really slowly. and A lot of it is I would say probably four hours of it We don't quote me on that, but a significant chunk of the time was dedicated to Olympic weightlifting because that just takes time. you'll need to rep between reps. No shade to Olympic weightlifting. I think it's really cool, but it is not best spectator sp it, I think. it is It happens, you know, likeike a handful of seconds you're competing at a time a ton of build upp U and I think they attempted They only attempted one world record the whole time. They didn't even in the way I thing they didn't even attempt They didn't throw the weight on the bar and give it a go with almost any of their almost any of their athletes. And this is the height of the day. So for most of the most of the weightl lifting, the crowd was like empty downstairs drinking free beer that they've been given by enhanced because it was for no public tickets. it was invite only. Everybody in attendance was either a press family or an influencer And so the deal for athletes is Explain how they get paid and what the numbers are and how that compares to doing it the quote unquote non enhanced way, you're trying to get to the Olympics and Yeah. so you know the sort of like pattern that emerged for us was if you're like not an NBA player or an NFL player or whatever, you're basically not making any money from your chosen sport And so for a lot of these, let's take swimmers, for example, like they're Their options after they're retired from their swimming career are basically, you know, they could teach kids, they could do seminars. But maybe you're not the type of person who wants to like, you know help kids like, you know kick around in the pool or whatever And so u If you're signing on with Enhance, you get paid a monthly stipend, We don't have the exact numbers on that because they declin to share it. You have basic healthcare, you have the futuristic healthcare with all the enhancements and sort of like health monitoring and recovery stuff and you had free housing and food. So you basically had a lot of your amenities taken care of and you could basically focus on training and training only, which, you know it's kind of like just like a luxurious version of going back to college and except you don't have to go to class basically is kind of how I understood it. We should add though that they that they were only given those amenities if you agreed to be not all of these they were only given the like food and board and access to the pharmaceuticals. if they agreed to go to the United Arab Emirates and participate in this study that they're doing on the drugs themselves. So you had to essentially agree to be a guinea pig to get the not the stipend, but the board and the food and and free access to the pharmaceuticals And then one of the big u reasons that athletes would do this is that if you win an event, the purse is pretty big. And then if you break a world record at the games, it's even bigger. So what are the numbers there The winners were getting, um In most the events we' getting two hundred fifty thousand dollars Which if you're running track, that's like more than you might make in your entire career with the exception of the best of the best, the best of the best. Yeah. And then low end was like fifty thousand dollars. So there was a range of like money you were guaranteed to make from just competing alone, basically. And then for some of the events for I believe the one hundred meter sprint for men's and the fifty meter and hundred meter free in swimming If you broke a record, you got a million dollars. The purse was l the world record breaking purse was less than that for other events, but for those ones, it was up to a million dollars. Yeah. And I think just to put a pin in that so people have context If you play in the NFL, you're probably guaranteed at least two million bucks a year You play a few years you're like, okay, I'm probably going to be okay for life so long as I just manage my money decently. Now if you're at a decent level, like you can be in the nine figure range. So like You know, some of these like bigger professional sports You can do your thing. you'll make enough money that you're probably set for life. But with more of these niche Olympic sports You're really scratching by unless you're like the absolute top like a Michael Phelps and you can get these big advertising deals and all these other things, But like the average athlete is hardly making any money Yeah, that's basically it. And we talked to a number of the athletes and they all had the reasons for doing it. Like, you know some of them had just put down a mortgage and then lost a bunch of their other sponsors. So this was like a way to know like earn a living basically. One of the more interesting guys, his name is Andre Govorov. He had actually fled Ukraine during the war and his business back there was basically destroyed. He had no source literally destroyed to bear .. And he you know, he was like in order to compete at an elite level that I want to compete at, it costs, you, ten thousand dollars a month like between the coaches I got to pay, the trainers, my recovery, my food, all that stuff. So he was like ennhanced was just financially, you know, the most logical move that I can make in order to like be who I want to be We're going to take a quick break, thenen we're going to look at the actual events of the Enhanced games and the records that were set and not set This is Lila Pans from Sweite three of five with Lap Pons Game day at my house Chaos in a fun way. The TV's ready, the remotes are ready, the kid doores are going off, and somehow everybody needs batteries at the exact same time That's why I keep Derusa stock Andnduraso just released limited edition Duroso and Messi battery packs. The design is inspired by Messi's iconic left leg tattoo. So every battery feels like it comes with an extra kick. From the TV remote to automatic corkscrew, Durasl keeps us game dayay ready. Duraso Double and AA A batteries are the only ones built different with power boost ingredients for long lasting performance you can trust Find the limited edition Durasalt and Messi batteries in stores. Low's and Walmart or On Amazon Fonatics Fest NYC returns to the Jabbit Center july sixteenth through the nineteenth for the biggest sports event weekend of the summer. See stars like LeBron James, Tom Brady, Aaron Judge, Sehun Cena, Jaylen Brunson, Serena Williams and hundreds more, featuring more than five hundred athletes and celebrities, live shows. exclusive merch, rare collectles, Sonatics games with two million dollars in prizes, a full tailgate zone in New York City's largest indndoor FIFA World Cup final watchatch party. Fonatics Fest is the world's number one sports fan festival. Get your tickets now beticspest. com. That's beticspest d. com What is chronic migraine? It's fifteen or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. In Botox, Anibachulinum tooxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not approved for adults with migraine who have fourteen or fewer headache days a month Ask Your doctor about Botox Botox is a prescription medicine injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away has difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headaches Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Luarics's disease, myastheniaravis or Lambberd Eaten syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects G to your doctor and visit Botoxchronicmigraine. com or call one eight hundred four four Botox to learn more. If you sometimes turn down the podcast just to hear the hum of your engine, then shell has the fuel for you. Shelby Power Nitro pllus fuels every drive from the shore to the Delaware River with a fuel like no other It has active coating ingredients that minimizes engine wear and tear. because your car's engine matters. That means more power when you need it and more performance with every drive. Sheelvy P Nitro pllus Pmium Gasoline. M power, more performance. Chances are you're not far from a shell station. Download the Shell app to find it. Formulation Unique to Shell withith continuous use of Sheelllvy Power Nitro plus Pmium gasoline Shellly P power nitro plus gasoline compared to lower octane minimum detergent gasoline. Actual effects benefits may vary according to vehicle type, driving conditions, and driving style. See shell. usS slash more for more information. Okay, so at this point, we've set up We've got this big event We're gonna let people juice to the gills. We're gonna see what happens Do they get these crazy times and weights lifted we've never seen before We've sut down that this is sort of one big advertisement in order to sell these things to the public We've set up the fact that athletes are being pulled into this because they can make more money than they might have made their entire career for this Now the event happens what happens with the times? Are these records being shattered across the board? No No They go They go most of the entire day without a record They come close once in the hundred meter men's sprint They were like hundreds of a seconds off. Oh But in most of the events, the one that comes to mind is kind of being the most egregious of the womomen's hundred meter spprint. I believe that I don't believe any of the times that were run would have qualified for the Olympics. W would have qualified For the Olympics, Yeahah, even the winner, I believe to double check that but I'm sure that was the case. They were all like the eleven second range, which is, you know Certainly faster than the URI, but not Mip bit caliber Uh and not only that, they had multiple multiple non enhanced athletes. So for context, you could join the enhanced games and say, I don't want to do stairoids. I just want to compete for the money And then multiple athletes were doing that or at least said they were doing that were oneon their events. One of them was Hunter Armstrong, who the guy that was trying to save his mortgage basically, who signed up for the games. He won the hundred meter Backstroke Backstroke. yeah. Yeah he your backstroke as well as the the Fred Curly, the hundred meter sprinter and The women's printer as well, whose name is escaping me So they have so basically one The times are not crazy The weights lifted are not crazy. And people are winning who are not even enhanced. And this is supposed to be, let's see what happens when we enhance the hell out of these athletes. Yeah, and I don't know about you, Sam, but you could sort of like feel the the tension like sort of like building in the arena as the night goes on. It's like, o, another one that's not smashed, another one that didn't even come close, another lift that was like far, far, far off from a world record. And it wasn't until the very last race, which was the fifty meter free And they actually had maybe, you know pound for pound, the highest caliber of athletes competing in that one. So that was kind of like their big bet And it wasn't until that very last end of the night that the swimmer Christian Golamve like touches the wall. And then like there's a split second that happens in between that where they like verify that a world record was broken. And then all the screens like flash red. It's like, oh they had all these like, you know, I don't know if it was fireworks, but just like all this stuff firing off that they were sitting on all night. And you could just sort of feel like I was looking at the executives, it was like a load had lifted off their shoulders. L they were so relieved to finally have had a chance like break one single world record with with the games that He did that in some sort of suit that's banned in Normal Olympics, right Mh He did it in what's called the suuper suuit, which is just like really it looks like a wrestling singlet, but even kind of tighter. Like somewhere between a wrestling singlet and a wetsuit But it goes to the ankle and comes kind of over your body. And what it does, like it kind of compresses you it makes you more more buoyant U which I do think When they first initially broke a record, for context, they It's kind of a proof of concept a year ago. they had Christian Goldbbe break the fifty meter world record as it stood at that point which had been set by Caesar CieLo in the late two thousands in a superuit before the suuit was banned Um A few months after that, Cameron McAvoy An Australian swmer broke Christian the for the world record that the rest of the world recognized and Christian Goly's world record. in a regular sort of speedo Um not in a super suuit. So it did not have the like extra gear that Christian Golve again raced in and broke the broke the record in. So that I Honestly to me puts more of an asterisk on the record then The steroids The line that I always say to people is like I use the Berry Bonds example, which is obviously extreme. you know,ike, you could go on YouTube right now and watch There's hundreds of videos on YouTube just analyzing Berry Bond' swings is the most beautiful swing ever, right? Yeah. Steroids aren' going to make the technique of your swing better You know, they're going to make you stronger M you recover better, but they're not going to keep you better at swinging up bat. Uh, but then like It's the super suit is almost like benching him like a sleeve The powerlifters do versus benching raw without a s noe. Like it's you're adding a gear to a thing to assist you. At that point, if you want to go down the philosophical route, it's like, why not put a fan behind him and have him have it propel him forward? Why not give him flippers? Why not, you know? what is the what is the logical end of what you're what you're doing I think here was kind of my question So these so these events I start happening. No records are getting broken initially And then you finally have this moment where, you know, screenflash is red at that point What are the what's the energy among people who are not the owners? You said it's almost like they felt relief, but what are people in the press area thinking and saying, what what's the reaction from the TikTokers and the YouTubers? Is it sort of like this I don't know if this is going well or at that point when that happens are people reacting as if it's success? I think the TikTokers didn't really care Yeah their way, the families were happy. The athletes were ecstatic. I mean, these people have been living together for many months, you know, in hotels in Abu Dhabi M them. Like they're clearly They're very kind of tighten it. So they they were ecstatic for I mean, they were excited throughout for whoever won, for whoever, you know, the energy for them was kind of always Always very high The press was Clearly, yeah, I think quite suspicious to the premise. what I've been kind of saying is like I don't know this is about me as a journalist, but I was like, you know, if they had broken a ton of records, that would have been like an incredible story Just in terms of it being interesting, not good or bad, just really interesting If they had broken no records at all That would have been So interesting but breaking one in the event that we thought they might break it in, that they'd already broken it in at one point, we thought they might break it again with this suit on At the very end, I was like, this is I don't want to say a let down, but It wasn't as compelling as I think that it could have been It was hard for the story part of my brain to not be like, ah dang You know, I think a lot of the press fimately. I don't know about you, Chris. Yeah, you know, when you asked about what was the mood between the influencers, it actually took me a second because by then most of them had already left. So the stands were a little bit empty by that point, which was you know, probably not in their favor. Yeah, I do think the For me, at least, I gained a lot of sympathy for these athletes over the months, just like the stuff that they struggle with, like the work they put in How unique their situation was in terms of like being the best at what you do and being asked to train together in the same pool every day, that was really fascinating. Like The dynamic in there was a bunch of alphas in the same room. You look to your left, it's like the second best guy. You look to your right, it's the third best guy. and that kind of like pushes you to be better in a lot of ways you know, um How much that had to do with their success versus PEDs? I don't really know, but I thought it was like a really like sort of like dynamic. Yeah, I mean, the athletes and the people throughout this process that I have absolutely the most sympathy for the ones that I'm I would say I'm the happiest for. likeike it is I would say my criticism of the enhanced games in no way should be construed as being support for the IOC or for the World Anti Dping Agency. Something that I thought was quite poetic. in the days immediately after the enhanced games I don't think they could' have timed this worse. Kirsty Coventry, who's the president of the IOC was interviewed Um And and she said In effect, she said, I don't believe in paying athletes. like prize money was kind of the argument. She was asking about prize money to Olympic athletees she was like, I don't believe in Um, I think that's a bad thing Uh, which was which is just, you know The IOC makes tens of billions of dollars They have plenty of money. It's technically a nonprofit, you know, I think that they can afford to pay life changing money to some of their some of their athletes. On top of that the I think that the methods that we use to D decide who's doping who isn't O our sort of anti doping policies as they exist are draconian. Athletes have to surrender to test at basically any given moment, any given time. their athlete their whereabouts have to be given to the role anti doing agency Literally twenty four seven Yeah. If you miss a test I think three times, then you give a year or two year band if you're just not where you're supposed to be Um They have no sort of say on what is and isn't banned Um It is Also drraconian, I think. kind of also dystopian in a way almost opposite the spectrum of the enhanced gamame Yeah. And I have to think that there iss a better option. Some sort of middle ground We'll take a break, and we'll talk about the backlash that happened after the disappointments in the Ehanced games This is Lil Pons from Site three hundred five with Lip Pons Game day at my house. like in a fun way The TV's ready, the remotes are ready, the kid stores are going off, and somehow everybody needs batteries at the exact same time That's why I keep Duroso stocked. And Duroso just released limited edition Duroso and Messi battery packs. The design is inspired by Messi's iconic left leg tattoo. So every battery feels like it comes with an extra kick From the TV remote to automatic corkscrew, DuracL keeps us game dayay ready. DuracL Double and AAA batteries are the only ones built different with power boost ingredients for long lasting performance you can trust. Find the limited edition DurasL and Messy batteries in stores Lath's and Walmart On Amazon. Fanatics Fest NYC returns to the Javbit Center july sixteenth through the nineteenth for the biggest sports event weekend of the summer. See stars like LeBron James, Tom Brady, Eron Judge, Sean S Cena, Jaylon Brunson, Sererena Williams and hundreds more. feeaturing more than five hundred athletes and celebrities, live shows. Eclusive merch, rare collectibles, Sonatics games with two million dollars in prizes. a full tailgate zone. In New York City's largest indndoor FIFA World Cup final watchatch party. Fonanatics Fest is the world's number one spports fan festival. Get your tickets now at fanaticsfest dot com That's fanaticsfest dot com Can Botox, on a botulinum toxin A help if I have chronic migraine? fifteen or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more? Botox prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not approved for adults with migraine who have fourteen or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine treatment Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts asthma, symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Luar' disease, myasthenia Gravis or Lambd Eaten syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects Ask your doctor and visit Botoxchronicmigraine. com or call one eight hundred four Botox to learn more If you sometimes turn down the podcast just to hear the hum of your engine, then shell has the fuel for you Shelby Power Nitro pllus fuels every drive from the shore to the Delaware River with a fuel like no other It removes up to one hundred percent of performance robbing deposits to rejuvenate your engine's performance. Because your car's engine matters. That means more power when you need it and more performance with every drive. Sheelvy Power Nitro pllus Pmium gasoline. M power, more performance. Chances are you're not far from a shell station. Download the Shell app to find it. Formulation Unique to Shell In gasoline direct injection engine fuel injectors with continuous use of Sheellly Power Nitrolus premium gasoline ShellV power Nitro plus gasoline compared to lower octane minimum detergent gasoline. actctual effects and benefits may vary according to vehicle type, driving conditions, and driving styles. See shell.s slash more for more information So the Event happens as you said, kind of a letdown. although you said, you wouldn't want to call it a letdown, butll we'll just go with that. You can call it a letd down. I think that's f ye, I stand by that. It's a letd down. Yeah. Event was a letown Stock price. Trashes like seventy five percent in the ensuing days It could just be my algorithm But I did not see a positive thing. I just saw a ton of hate being thrown at this thing Um What reactions did you see? And how do you sort of process that You know, I think our algorithms are probably coded very similarly. Like it was a, you know, maybe ninety nine percent People dunking on the whole thing But at the same time, I feel like this whole thing was designed to sort of court controversy and to like, you I feel like for them, they feel like any attention is good attention. And so just the fact that people were talking about it and they had a lot of eyeballs and people were going to their website, like I think they would consider that a win. In the aftermath, they were trying to spin this as, hey, look, we had a bunch of athletes who happen to be thirty five who set PRs. And a that's a moral victory for us and for them. And you know, maybe that can happen to you too. You could be the best version of yourself and feel ten years younger. And so that was kind of the spin they were putting on the ball in the aftermath of the games, which I thought was you know, not the not the worst idea, but For me, the thing that was like very weird about the games is if you are targeting a demo that is like people who are like thirty five, forty, middle aged, and you're like trying to help them feel younger. inviting a bunch of eighteen year old TikTokers who've never felt lower back pain in their life just feels like the most twisted marketing strategy possible. So that was the part I couldn't quite reconcile. Yeah, so that's the promise You know, you too could set a PR at thirty five, forty What drugs Do they actually sell to people? So there's like this range, right? There's peptides, there's testosterone, there's what all is being sold. What do they do Well, it's changing constantly because because the Trump administration is constantly deregulating a lot of the stuff that they want to sell, like the peptide That interesting I can tell you right now for sure, they sell Salarellin, which is a peptide that is supposed to boost your natural production of growth hormone This testosterone They sell u they sell ND plus What does I do Yeah ND plus is this sort of co enzyme that helps with sort of like cellular repair and helps a lot with energy, brain fog, that sort of thing. I've dabbled in it and take it once in a while before I got into the enhanced world They sell a bunch of like GLP ons Dreams and then like they have like theirs your standard issue like preine and like pre workout sort of stuff that are grossly overpriced and actually are a little too sweet for my liking after tasting them It would appear that they've added SialS to Dalafil since I last looked up maybe a week or two ago, which I believe some people are saying is like you can use as like a like a like a mental clarity booster now too. I've heard that on the The kind of wellness circuits so they they have CialS, they have generic Cialis, they have U They have Tzepetide, they have GHKCU, the copper peptide Creatine, like I mean, they kind of got they kind of got everything in this kind this whole gambit of of drugs. And then how were they tracking the health effects of these because part of it is they're doing these sort of study on athlete health to see do these things help or harm in the long run. What does that actually look like? And they have they published any results yet? No results, they've theyve throughout the whole process of reporting this, they were very At first, they kind of promised us, especially Chris, that we would have access to whatever information we wanted about what they were taking And then as when kind of push came to shove, they were like hey, we're going to go to Abu Dabi and like we want We want to be in the room when you Give him the needle They're like, no, actually we can't tell you because of privacy laws in Um And so we don't know exactly what any given athlete was taking. They have since published some data on What percentage of different of substances like different athletes took like it was like something like seventy percent used testosterone, like forty percent use EPO just kind of generic like this percentage of our athletes use these drugs. Yeah. But they have not made the exact results Um And we talked to a bunch of doctors about or just to basically gut check with what this study was. And theres there's a few big problems. One is that like you really don't have any control. You have three athletes are not taking drugs. You're not controlling anything else in there So that already kind of compromises the study Um, And then two, like there is no They're not dru They were very candid that they were not drug testing athletes and lead up to They were only going to test their sort of organ health. and to make sure that they are healthy to compete. because some of these substances can enlarge your heart, they can cause liver damage, et cetera, etcetera Um And Kind of the hole in that logic that we kept coming across was There's a huge financial incentive here And there's're not you've already said you're not drug testing any of these athletes. So what's stopping anybody here from taking more of this drug given that they could win a million dollars. right now from on the side getting some Testosterone on, you know, there's nothing stopping me So the On top of that, there's questions of You know, independence, like how independent could the study actually be. The data, I think is C compelling but dubious. Like I think there isn't a ton of research out there because we have been so, I think Um punitive in our approach to drug research for a long time, not not, especially with stre drugs, but Steroids have been treated as a street drg for a long time. It's very hard to research the effects of them We didn't have for many of these drugs, we still don't have a really good idea of what they do. Most of it is like broscience. And then on top of that, broscience being just kind of anecdotal, like I like this, do you like that? How do you use it? blah, blah blah. You know, they had a couple different categories of drugs. It was, you know, they had you know, they had the testosterones, they had stimulants that they were able to take For the women, they had hormone regulators like, you know, And then what was the last category Sam? There was one more metetabolic modulators? Metabolic modulators, yes.'s like Mldonium, drugs makeake your cells more energy efficient Often they're used for like diabetes and liver disease and stuff. Yeah. And what was interesting is, you know, we talked this guy Guido Pelis, He's this cardiologist from the the UK who heads up there sort of like SkarQuotess Independent Medical Commission, and he said that peptides were actually like something that the athletes weren't to be able to take. In the lead up to it, like we talked to a couple of them who were excited about potentially taking, you know, like BPC one hundred fifty seven or, you know, the Wolverine stack for healing and all of that. And he was like, You know, that stuff is a little too unregulated even for us. so we don't kind of want to we don't want to dive into that, which mh weird because it's like, oh, you guys are leaving a lot of money on the table by doing this But at the same time, it's like you're sort of I don't know. ability to regulate or not regulate, but to sort of like determine what the athletes can and can't take. It's just as squishy as say water, you know, it was they kind of didn't have their own grounding just be That interesting. Yeah. Well what I was going to say earlier was on top of how hard these drugs have been able to research The other argument they make, which has some merit, I think, to be fair, is that like Most of what we understand of the symptoms of steroids abuse. comes from peoplee who are abusing extreme amounts of them in an unregulated manner off label for long periods of time, I bodybuilders, basically and they' argument is, although we can't know because they don't give us access to what they're doing, is that they're giving these athletes very small doses of these drugs relatively speaking For much shorter periods of time. I think in pedle, they do for about eight weeks, maybe slightly longer Yeah. And what's funny what's interesting about that too is like you know the powerlifters, it's like, oh, they were the ones who were the furthest away from breaking world records. So in some ways was there more conservative dosing that ennhanced was providing them different from what was available in other contexts. whichich I think was unsurprising and just because Bightlifting has always always been, I think, the most drugged out of the Yeah Olympic sports. Ttally. Like in power lifting, you have federations that are clean in theory. and then you have ones where it's like this is a non clean federation. like just juce yourself to. I mean, there's already kind of this experiment happening in the powerlifting world. One thing I would point out about the studies though is if if you have people taking a bunch of different substances How the hell do you figure out What is helping and what is hurting an athlete's health? Like there's just way too much fucking noise. It's a strange cocktail And also like how do you extrapolate the effects of T sawone from B and proud Olympic silver Medalists to sixty year old Ethel who wants to like is they this is an example that they're like, if we want Olympic athletes to have access to it and the sixty year old woman who wants to tend her garden bong How do you? Extrapolate the results from an Olympic silver medalist to a sixty year old woman who just wants to take care of her ponies, you know,. And I think we mentioned it earlier too that it's like you the menu of drugs that are presented to each athlete is totally different for each one of them.ike It's totally bespoke, like catered to sort of your biometrics your test and it's recommended to you by your doctor, you decide what you actually do and don't want to take. And so just like the variance there alone between the athletes is like it's like just such a wide spectrum that how do you control for that Right. So you what I thought was interesting, Chris is that you H Do would take an NAD? Mhm What prompted you to do that and what was that like Yeah, so one of the funny things that happened in like Sam and I like getting put together for this story is we both do Mi Thai and both compete, you know, so you know, obviously when we were in Vegas we're like, let's h up a Moi Thai gym. Let's get some work in, you know But you know, I'm forty one. I'm like at sort of like the tail end of like my, you know ability to compete at this point. I also have a four year old son And so my sleep is trash, like I don't get very much recovery in. And a home girl of mine was like, o, I'm like she was in her mid forties and she was like, I started taking NAD and it really, really helped me with my daily brain fog and just my general ability to function. And as a writer and sort of someone who partakes in combat sports, I was like, oh, the sort of mental acuity that comes with NAD plus is something that was really appealing to me And I also wanted to understand what it's like to jab a needle into your belly so I could sympathize with these athletes a little bit more. And that was kind of like what kicksted the experiment for me What was it like Did it improve things Did it work Yeah, you know what? we Sam actually tried it too when I when I had an extra dosing that was sent to me. For me, I think it's awesome. Like I feel like whenever I do need my brain fog lifted or I need a little bit more energy, it helps tremendously. I'm also a lot older than Sam, so this stuff like you know he has the wrestling background and the lifetime of those injuries compounded onto him, but you know I got like ten years at least, so know Mbe maybe the age is more of a factor for me. Yeah, I would specify, you know or preface that, you know, I am not forty. I'm thirty years old. Maybe in ten years I'll be like yeah, giveimm me I don't do I One the thing I liked about working with Christ on this was which was it was a good gut check because I am My mother's a doctor. I grew up in a house of with a medical professional. So I am deeply suspicious of anything that comes out of the wellus industry. Most of it's unregulated kind eter, et cetera ceter Also Um, I just have this kind of like pre disposed belief from my experience competing that like I've seen what people can do if they just train really hard. and sleep a lot and eat really well And that's kind of all that they do and their that's their focus Um I'm like, maybe we as a society should Try to sleep a lot more and work out. if you want to run faster, lift more, workout Really consistently for many hours a day and sleep well and eat better before we start talking about injecting exogenous substances and hormones. into our body. I was like, I feel like we're Starting at the wrong end here often Yeah, because there's because there's something to sell. So I came into it I think pretty suspicious. I took a pretty small dose of the NAD I didn't really feel much. I found the feeling of it being in my stomach to be so off putting U It's like warm and there's it feels like there's like a little It felt like one of those like little like weights that you see the like in the like the little ladies in the jazzer size classes, the like, littlellet weights that they hold. It felt like someone would like slip that under my skin and it was just sitting there Um But again, you know, I don't know how I'll feel when I'm forty You know, it's easy for me like I can still go out on the weekends and wake up and I went out I was out late real late a couple nights ago watching the game two of the Knicks and parted until two in the morning and then I woke up, I was like, I got to get rid of this hangover and my solution was to run five miles Sry. was about Yeah that Yeah was about I was gonna say, you know, I know sleep is important, but there's a NX game that starts at eight thirty. And I don't have a kid. so it's like it's easier for me to say like maybe you should work out four hours a day before you start putting stuff in your body We're going to take a break, and we're going to get into a little bit of philosophy of aging and why we as a culture are so obsessed with slowing down and stopping aging This is Lila Pons from Sueite three hundred of five with Lap Pons Game day at my house Chaos fun way The TV's ready, the remotes are ready, the kid dooreors are going off, and somehow everybody needs batteries at the exact same time That's why I keep Durisil stock Andnduraso just released limited edition Duroso and Messi battery packs. The design is inspired by Messi's iconic left leg tattoo. So every battery feels like it comes with an extra kick. From the TV remote to automatic corkscrew, Duraso keeps us game dayay ready. Duraso Double and Aple A batteries are the only ones built different with power boost ingredients for long lasting performance you can trust Find the limited edition Durasalt and Messy batteries in stores. Lows and Walmart or On Amazon Fonatics Fest, NYC returns to the Jabbit Center july sixteenth through the nineteenth for the biggest sports event weekend of the summer. S stars like LeBron James, Tom Brady, Eron Judge, John Cena, Jalon Brunson, Serena Williams and hundreds more, featuring more than five hundred athletes and celebrities, live shows. Eclusive merch, rare collectibles, Sonatics games with two million dollars in prizes, a full tailgate zone, and New York City's largest indndoor FIFA World Cup fininal watchatch party. Sonatics Fest is the world's number one spports fan festival. G your tickets now eticspest. com That's beticspest d. com migraine is fifteen or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more In Botox, on Aachainumoxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for adults with migraine with fourteen or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo If P presrescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection, site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection