The Future of Enhanced Competition

If your alignment in charge of keeping the lights on, Ranger understands that you go to great lengths and sometimes heights to ensure the power is always flowing, which is why you can count on Granger for professional grade products and next day delivery. so you have everything you need to get the job done. Call one eight hundred Granger, clickgrranger. com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones Who get it done My name is Jessa. One of the things I love the most about working for United Healthcare is that everybody matters. Every moment matters. There's a person behind every problem. I care because it's what I was put on this earth to do. I'm Ben, and I work at United Healthcare. I am just one piece of a larger puzzle But every piece matters. It's more than just work. We want to make the healthcare system better for everyone. I care because I want to make a difference. That's what committed to care means to me. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. 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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 If P presrescription Botox is injected by your doctor. effffects 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 Luarics' 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 four Botox to learn more This is making me anxious. Right in your a little belly. Take a pinch of belly fat Jam this fucker in Oh there it goes f. All right, needles in Do you feel pressure No Just the initial poke This part sucks, so I'm injecting really slowly. Dpressing the plunger Why do you think go slow just it hurts less. Okay. Be Chris and I are in my apartment in Brooklyn. and for the podcast, you know research I asked Chris to show me how he administers his weekly shot of ND plus a compound that he says gives him a majoroost of energy throughout the and helps him keep up with the demands of raising a four year old Do you want to try it? rightight now All right. Yeah F do you have a do you have a So I have another alcohol. Okay, not our finest moment together But for the record, we didn't share needles Chris had a separate unused pen with him And inside was another dose of NAD plus So I'll set it up for you. so we're on gonna big of this off P the needle in in your belly. Do I dont rep press it Do you want to do So what you're going to do, put the needle in How hard it to push So the button is just a click button Yeah So take take a pinch of the belly fat, L like like really like pinch it. Yeah Then you press button Keep it in there. One to Ilike those three F or so perfect. Seven M Nine. Tend to go You did it That does feel weird. It's weird. R did What did you feel? This warm, but okay, confession time.. I didn't really notice anything change after I took the NED injection No boost of energy, no pep in my step No lightning recovery from my Mi Tai sessions or my five K runs Nothing felt different. these drugs They're everywhere. I see people all over the internet openly and eagerly documenting the mix of performance enhancing drugs that they're experimenting with Each of these cocktails, made of steroids or peptides or both They call them stacks. The Wolverine Stack, which is named for the comic book character. or the godstack named for, you know, God. those recipes, the combination of drugs, Basically, they're endless. An ofR and testosterone update day ten One, my libido is through the roof o, my appetite is like sky high. I cannot stop e A lot of your casual gym bros are going to say, hey, start off your cycle with your diana ball as you're on testosterone and you're gonna to get big really quickly. The steroid that everyone swears is the nectar of the gos. Sploiler. Tim ballone, AKA Treim. We're really doing it boys It's not just a masculinity thing either These drugs They're for women too. I started with BPC one hundred fifty seven and I immediately fell in love. Why? Because my hair grew an insane amount. My skin was glowing. It helps your gut health. And when your gut health is happy Everything else is happy. okay? It's great for inflammation. These days, I'd say one in every three ads on my social media feeds are for steroids or peptides or some other exciting new drug And the way they're marketed to me. It's like a boardroom full of suits, read my diary and said Let's invoke those specific insecurities Like too tired, unable to focus, there's a drug for that, and it costs one hundred fifty dollars Hair thinning, hairline receding There's a drug for that They cost a one hundred fifty dollars. T hungry, yo yoing weit hundred and fifty dollars. The government is holding a mirror up to this shift toou. The Trump administration recently moved to reclassify a long list of peptides so that they can be manufactured in the U.S And then there's the enhanced games at the first Enhanced games Athletes will break world records. When that happens, everyone's going to say, what is he on How do I get it? And to enhance credit, well, if nothing else, Right place, right time. turnurning new fads into real revenue What I want to know is what happened Why are people, men, especially, so eager to get in on this cultural shift? How is it that Enhanced knew this was the right moment to appeal to the masses It from Kaidoscope and I Heart Podcasts This is superhuman. I'm Sam Egan. I'm on a Reddit for him R slash testosterone When I noticed a guy named Aaron He's in his late thirties and from the transformation photos he's posting I can see he's white with thirty blond hair. Also, from the photos, which span six months, I can tell he's lost a ton of weight forty three pounds, he says in his after pictures Aaron's cheeks are sharper, his abs are beginning to pop And the shoulders look more defined scculpted. In the phhotos caption, Erinon lists the contents of his stack TRT two hundred milligrams R at trree Tide between one milligram and twelve milligrams HCG parenthetical for fertility. Kleomathan parenthetical for fertility one hundred and fifty to two hundred grams of protein parenthetical meat and clear protein drink. creatine powder and algutamine powder So there was an ad that came out and it showed a guy like snowboarding through the backcountry and there's this like electronic music playing in the background And the overall tone of this was like futuristic cutting edge. I reach out to Earon to find out more about him. What he's working towards And why? It positioned it as something new and something that will obviously be ubiquitous in a few years. like the next step in evolution. The first time we talk, Earon's gone on a polo shirt and an old school headset like he's a telemarket Behind him is an empty white wall No windows He reminds me of one of the background brokers in the Wolf of Wall Street Aaron says he lives in Florida works in sales You might be wondering how Ein gets most of these drugs Getting it through a US distributor is something you only do until you know enough to access labs directly in China A network of manufacturing labs outside the U.S Often in China The grreay market. selling directly to consumers, skipping the middleman entirely Here's the thing about these gray market drugs though They aren't certified by the FDA Which is one, the only way to know for sure that what you're taking is proably effective for its marketed purpose T Do safely And three, that only what's supposed to be in it is On the gray market without an FDA, consumers need a work around. and they find them. They get together in groups and do testing where they'll order from a specific vendor and everyone will send a sample to make sure that a vendor that this group is accepting has a legit product because These labs, they rely on their reputation in this group to sell their product What strikes me about this system The people buying the drugs are doubling as the people ensuring the drugs efficacy and its safety They're literally paying to be the laborats This market is such a new phenomena that it hasn't gotten a ton of peer reviewed research yet But one recent test found that a vial of BPC one hundred fifty seven popular peepptide sold by an unregulated supplier contained measurable amounts of lead. Groups like Aaron's describing They're the ones deciding to risk it and test drugs on themselves They have to get lead poisoning to find out that the product they're buying contains lead. So Not great What motivates a person to do this, to take such risky gambles with their body My dad was your u protypical sports coach. He was very serious about my training. And Earon says in a past life, he was an athlete Race playing hocke And however that shaped his body This physique. That was a point of pride for his father Maybe two or three times a week when guests were over at the house. He remembers hearing his dad call for him. I always knew the reason he was calling me, It's because he wanted me to, you know, take my shirt off and flex for his guests and show me off to his, you know, business partners or family friends or whoever In retrospect, it's kind of weird having like a, you know twelve year old kid take a shirt off and flex for everybody all the time Kind of weird is one way to put it The way Aon talks about it, though I think it created a complex No matter how fit he was, when he looked in the mirror, I always saw something problematic, no matter what weave I was at Um, you know, if I was walking around at one hundred seventy or one hundred seventy five I might have felt like my upper body popped out too much By the time Earon was in his teens, he'd moved on from hockey Now he was boxing He competed all through high school but then dropped it when he went to. And for a time, he stayed reasonably fit Then thirty hits. I had been like steadily gaining weight and getting more and more out of shape. And it wasn't just his aesthetics Earon was worried about It was at help He says at around that time he develops scoliosis in his back And maybe that's because of the weight gain Maybe from an old sports injury Either way, he was in extreme pain. constantly Sleeping maybe three hours in night. After that he stopped wanting to get out of bed Yeah, because it hurt There was another reason too A big part of it was also just the motivation to tackle anything that needs tackling in life, career aspirations and goals Everything was just not worth the trouble I spent a lot of that time just laying on the couch watching TV all the seasons of Narcos And there was a long period where I had No relationship. Really had no one in my life for probably six or seven years At some point in this stretch, Aaron tells me that he tried testosterone for the first time He'd seen a family member on it go from quote, dad baed to ripped And that family member taking this estosterone He told Aron it had help with his mood and with his motivation in the weightro What if this was the answer that he'd been looking for the reason he'd been feeling so awful. So he found a doctor He was kind of a sketchy doctor to be honest with you. I knew I could easily get it from this type of doctor and I was expecting it to be like that movie limitless. That movie limitless. It comes up a lot on this show Like so many people we spoke to brought it up I've never seen it, but according to the interternet, it's about a man played by Bradley Cooper, who is, quote facing unemployment and his girlfriend's rejection He has no future all changes when a friend gives him a drug that produces enhanced mental acuity instants If nothing else, it's on the news Anywways, back to Earin and his first time on testosterone. Everyone tries to make it seem like it's just like a night and day difference. And the fact is it's very, very subtle A year later, he'd lost about seventy pounds. Do doesn't sound subtle At around that same time on vacation in Colombia met some They hit it off, got married his wife moved to the US. to be with him They wanted to start a family. and because there's some evidence that testosterone can impact male fertility Earon went off Soon after the weight came He was up to three hundred pounds. Aaron says, when that way did come back So did is depression and his back The most relentless feeling What he spent the most time ruminating on What did other people think when they saw him an overweight Aaron? with his hot thin wife being you know, from Colombia having come here on a on a fiancee visa, peopleople usually assume very specific things about a marriage like that What he means is eople assume she married him for the visa. American citizenship. Why else would she be with someone who looks like him? So it was upsetting to me to think that like You know, This couple with the husband being a super overweight guy. I always wondered if people would wonder if we had that type of a marriage which just to say worrying that other people think that sounds hard enough Aaron also says the way he looked It made him question his wife's taste too You know, why would someone want to be with someone that's so overweight and appears like that My co producer on this show, Lena She's also on this call I'm not a guy. And certainly, I don't care about peptides or steroids But I'm very comfortable admitting that As a woman, I've spent big swaths of my life imagining what I look like to the people looking at me What can they see in the sun that I can't see in a mirror Is my sci fut showing Was I bailed on for a second date because of my personality Be because of how big my ass is And which of those answers is supposed to be the better one So I ask Earin If the roles were reversed, if his wife gained a bunch of weight Would that have any impact on how much he wants to be with her? I've always cared a lot about how we appear physically as a couple. It might be shallow in some ways, but like it is something that's important to me to have a certain image is a couple. So the You know, the truth is maybe it would be uncomfortable if The shoe was on the other foot. and Yeah, I probably would struggle with that a little bit to be completely honest Not the answer I expected I think We spend our whole lives gathering all of these insecurities these suspicions about what other people think of us And what we hear back so often is that it's all in our heads. No one thinks about us as much as we think about ourselves Hearing Erin say otherwise sex At the same time, I find it so relieving to hear someone just say the damn thing Back to the boys. Erin and I have been conditioned to filter our bodies through the lens of sports In my case because of wrestling I was a heavywight. One of the big guys on a team made up of absurdly lean men constantly crashed d like four percent bud Even at my smallest, I was the fat guy It's changed how I dress how I move What I think about myself People call me Big Sam They always have. And so much of that is rooted in my athletic ambitions Even after I was done with wrestling I spent the rest of my twenties obsessing over staying as close to my fighting weight as possible I'd weigh myself three times a day Restrict my eating for days or weeks at a time Sometimes I even cut out water If I hadn't grown up in such machismo circles It would have been called an eating disword. Honestly it was an eating disorder And what was it all for really Big part of all this was like how my father saw me as my coach and U as my idol in a lot of ways Aaron tells me about a recent trip he took to see his dad after losing all that weight Now that he's small again. And my dad at one point when we were alone, he kind of like half pulled me into his lap like I was still a, you know, thirteen year old kid, twelve year old kid and was tellelling me how proud he was of me and I hadn't given him any reason and you know, twenty plus years to be proud of me When I was a kid, my dad never missed a wrestling match Never And sometimes before it was my turn to compete, he'd sit with me and massage my traps and my biceps back And he'd tell me how powerful I was. How proud of me he was He'd called me his moose his genetic freak. It made me feel so good. And now that my life isn't centered on being an athlete. I don't have that anymore But I want it I miss it. When I step back and really think about this stuff the obsession with what's the mirror The stacks of drugs, I guess it's not so confusing at all. We're all just licking old wounds And now, because of companies like Enhanced We have the option to do so with drugs This is Lap Pons from Sweite 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. Duril Double and AA 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 Loth's and Walmart On Amazon. Fanatics 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, Eron Judge, Sean S Cena, Jaylon Brunson, Serena Williams and hundreds more. feeaturing more than five hundred athletes and celebrities, live shows. exclusive merch, rare collectibles, Sanatics games with two million dollars in prizes, a full tailgate zone. In New York City's largest indndoorth FIFA World Cup final watchatch party. Fonanatics Fest is the world's number one sports 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 headach 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 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 Plus 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. ShellV 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 Shellvy P Nitro plus premium gasoline. ShellV Power Nitro pllus gasoline compared to lower octane minimum detergent gasoline. Actual effects and benefits may vary according to vehicle type, driving conditions, and driving styles. S shell dots slash more for more information I'm a nineteen year old who can afford his own gear and his own fucking grocery spay. So Oline, AJ iss open about his steroid use. In videos, you can see him flexing for the camera his age and height posted on the screen plus his current stack of steroids Usually there's rap or heavy metal music on in the background. Man, just hop on. His eyes are bulging and red. In most of his clips, it's nighttime with only enough light to show his frame. Everything behind him is pitch black We got on the phone back in February. I've been on testerone for like twenty weeks Oh, so it's still that's Do doing math. It's like five months Yeah. Okay How are you how are you feeling? I feel like I feel like an animal, you know, I just feel, you know you know, like very powerful. I feel like there's no goal that I can't achieve. you know, I feel like I can do anything in the world. It really puts you like in a motivated state twenty four seven. AJ says he grew up playing football And he originally got into weightlifting at fifteen because of how much he admired superheroes. You always one bl like you know, after feeling of like, you know, like domerinance and power, you know, that physqu has. He says he started using testosterone at eighteen because people online told them to. I had a bunch of other guys like telling me like how how fucking like how much how would explode and you know like shit shit like that. But I already knew for myself personally I knew I had the genetics to like actually look good if I had her. I knew I had the genetics to actually look good if I hop on For the record, even in the bodybuilding community, eighteen is considered very young for performance enhancing drugs. The standard recommendation is basically, get as big and strong as you possibly can first then use drugs to go that extra mile What made you decide to do it so so early Be I feel like there's no sense of waiting ' like A lot of chances don't come like often like like, you know, like finding another gear source or you know things of that nature. When you say finding another gear source, what do you mean You know, like finding finding, you know, like a legit, a legit, you know, someone that can actually gets you like legit gear, you know? How do you get it I get if from face to face would a plug So basically, he started doing steroids because he had access to steroids AJ dreams of being a bodybuild Also an influenc His biggest heroes include bodybuilders Tom Platz and Lee Priest. and someone named Dallas McCarver A YouTube bodybuilder born in nineteen ninety one M Carver actually died of a heart attack in twenty seventeen twenty six. Damn He's a legendnder McCarver's autopsy report lists a massively enlarged heart kidney damage, and an engorged liver as contributors to his death All symptoms associated with long term steroid abuse When we speak, AJ iss nineteen years old and living at home with his parents I ask him Do they know about the drugs he's taking Like my mom she kind of accepted it, but mean you and my dad hates it Why does he hate it? can I ask? Uh. becausecause of the health aspects, he believes that it's just so damaging to the health and things of that nature And do you have any thoughts about that? likeike, you know, because it's like there's you know, There's maybe like like a thirty percent chance of like actually running in the problems, but I'd rather be like like I really don't care. I'd rather just be bigest fuck I'd rather die big as f. I'll do anything just to be like fucking huge. So it doesn't really batter to me either way. Why do you want to be huge so bad, man I just I love like being the biggest. I love, you know, the like the compliments, the admiration. I love it. So you're like, if I die at forty But I got abs on abs and my biceps are twenty four inches or whatever Like that's that's cool by me Exactly After our one call together, AJ stopped responding to me But I followed along on his TikTok In the past few months, by the looks of things, AJ's only gotten bigger And it seems that he's added a number of other drugs to his stack. somethingomething that he told me he was thinking about doing when we first talked. Yeah, I'm gonna see how the next week feels, and then I might up the doose to maybe like five hundred, mayaybe add some Deca. Decca Durabalon, commonly known as Decca It's anabolic steroid often used on top of TRT Bro science says that it helps a joint pain and recovery on top of muscle growth. But a few months later, while scrolling through AJ's feed I saw in post about suffering complications from taking these drugs ro I fucking hate Decca with all my fucking heart bread. I feel fucking sad all the time. all the goddamn time, but it's just rooy rage and sadness, bro. Wh who let me Who let me hop on Deca B? It isn't just AJ. A lot of people wind up getting anxiety if they do too much NPP or too much Deca That's kind of just a quick search through TikTok And you can find plenty of people talking about the side effects that they've experienced on Dk. I did for like three weeks. And so this kicked in and fucking stressed out of my life. Yeah. I was having panic attacks for the first time ever freaking out AJ and Eron are both experts in the underground Gay Mark. But as these drugs become more accepted and easier to access But their appeal to a wider set of people has grown too teech and VC money is pouring in and fundamentally changing the culture and speed to market of these drugs and our relationship to our bodies This is Lilap Pons from Sweite three of five with Lip Pons Game day at my house. Chaos 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 Dsel 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 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. Loth's and Walmart or On Amazon Fonatics bestest 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, John Cena, Jaylon Brunson, Serena Williams and hundreds more. featuring more than five hundred athletes and celebrities, live shows, exclusive merch, rare collectibles, Sonatics games with two million dollars inrizes, a full tailgate zone in New York City's largest indoor fld W a World Cup final W watchatch party Fanatics Fest is the world's number one sports fan festival. Get your tickets now at fanaticspest. com. That's fanaticspest d. com