Dr. Aaron D'Souza and Christian Angermayer unveil Enhanced Games, a venture-backed ($1M prizes, Peter Thiel funding) apolitical sports competition where athletes use clinically supervised performance enhancers—44% of Olympians already admit to banned doping, yet WADA’s 25% tainted supplements (e.g., China’s TMZ-laced products) expose systemic hypocrisy. With 1,000+ applicants and global broadcaster interest, they propose XX/XY chromosomal categories over gender labels, FDA-approved meds, and strict health monitoring to avoid Eastern Bloc-style harm, while questioning Olympic asthma loopholes (e.g., Bradley Wiggins’ TUEs). The debate frames enhancement as a fair, inevitable evolution—from ancient bull testicles to CRISPR—challenging medicine’s illness-focused definition and the IOC’s billion-dollar revenue model. [Automatically generated summary]
I've been studying the Olympics and the Olympic movement my entire life.
You know, I'm 39 years old.
When I was an undergraduate at university, it was just after the Sydney Olympics.
And, you know, it was always something that inspired me.
And I thought to myself, you know, I learned some key statistics.
44% of Olympians admit to using banned performance-enhancing drugs within the last year, according to research commissioned by the World Antidepressant.
Well, the Olympics is kind of a scam because it generates billions of dollars in revenue, and the people that are there to perform make almost none of that.
Actually, the International Olympic Committee doesn't pay any of the athletes.
Incidentally, they may get some money in sponsorship or from their National Olympic Committee.
Yeah.
The billions of dollars in revenue come into the Olympics, and none of that goes to the athletes.
It gets wasted building stadiums.
It gets wasted paying officials.
And we thought there's a way to do a better, more honest model that inspires us to believe in the future of science and technology in the 21st century.
And then, of course, there's tainted supplements, which is a real problem because a lot of these supplements, they use another party that puts them together for them.
Generally in other countries and a lot of them in China and these people are also making different things with these vats.
They don't clean them properly and then they mix the new stuff in it and you easily get contamination.
And we've been hearing that for years about sprinters, particularly sprinters in other countries, that they're enhanced.
And especially if your national pride is involved, and they know that there's ways that you can kind of finagle things and get around them, and you hire doctors to test people and use masking agents or whatever the hell you do.
Yeah, they won't let you, just because of the fear of masking performance-enhancing drugs, because you could flush your system.
But the problem with that is, like, IVs are good for you.
Like, this is really stupid.
Like, if you can make sure that a person is just doing IV vitamins, I mean, if your random testing is effective, you should just do that.
Like, don't stop someone from doing something that's going to make them healthier while they're in a business that's about as dangerous as you can get without people shooting at you.
If you open up the gates and say you're allowed to take whatever substances you want at whatever levels you want in order to compete at your very best, How close to redlining does a person get?
Especially if you're involved in something that requires strength and explosive energy.
The UFC at one point in time had testosterone use exemptions.
And you were allowed to get those if your testosterone was at a low enough level.
The problem with that was that was not thought out at all.
Stay up all night, eat 15 cheeseburgers, and jerk off three times, and you're good.
You're going to be at like 200. You're going to be like, oh my god, you're sick, Bob.
But also, there's another problem, is that people that have a history of anabolic steroid use, generally they've wrecked their endocrine system.
And particularly back in the day, the early days of MMA was all enhanced.
And if you go and watch Pride, for instance, like Pride, which was the big show in Japan, it was this enormous organization in Japan that kind of fell apart because the Yakuza was involved with it and they went bankrupt.
There was a lot of craziness involved.
But at one point in time, they were selling out, like, these 90,000-seat arenas in Tokyo.
It was nuts.
And everybody looked like a superhero.
I mean, just fuckin' jack, just giant jack guys beating the shit out of each other.
And everybody who went over there will tell you, like, the contract literally specifically stated in capital letters, we do not test for steroids.
They will encourage you to do steroids over there.
If you guys are successful, What athlete would want, if you guys are successful and it becomes a huge household name and people watch it and it becomes exciting and you make money, what athletes are going to want to do the Olympics for free and get a microscope up your ass?
And people constantly testing you for this and that and knowing that other countries are probably pulling off some shenanigans like China allegedly did.
You're not going to watch something where the best natural player, no, you want to see the best absolute player, even if this player or person is enhanced.
But again, the future will tell and the consumer will tell, but we are super confident.
You don't want to get someone just starting out at a sport, right?
So you have people that have a...
A deep history in the sport where they want to, and they can, they're capable of competing at an elite level.
And then if they're going to do your games, they have to kind of make this decision because they're never going to be able in the Olympics again after that, right?
And if they do, I mean, if they do start taking testosterone, do start taking a bunch of other things, it's going to inhibit their natural ability to produce hormones.
Well, technically most likely it comes back, but I would say it's a decision of the Olympics and other sports leagues how they want to handle athletes who also at a certain time have participated in our games.
Maybe they say there is a cooling off period.
So it's not that we will exclude them going back.
It might be that other sports leagues say, look, once if you're in the enhanced games, you can't come back to us.
So the question is like how can you ensure that you're gonna get elite level athletes that are capable of performing at like an Olympic level and they're gonna they'll be risking it's a big it's a significant risk to them because they'll be openly admitting they're a part of the enhanced games they're openly admitting that they're taking these substances in order to compete at this level and they don't know if you guys are gonna be around like Well,
Yeah, and so, you know, if you believe you've won the genetic lottery and you think you can show up and break a world record and get a million bucks, they'll come and do it, right, and do it naturally.
And then some athletes say, you know, I did not win the genetic lottery and I want the chance to be, The Neil Armstrong of our generation.
This is how I think of it.
I think we're building the Apollo mission for the 21st century.
What did the Apollo mission do?
It showed us that we were so much more capable as a human species.
We had a new threshold going to the moon, using science and technology to overcome our limits.
It's also we'll know for sure that these people are doing something, whereas before we just suspect it, you know, I remember when Ben Johnson got popped and everybody's like, oh, I can't believe he cheated.
But then you find out that Carlos was taking stuff, too.
And by the way, one thing is that we don't even need to speculate if athletes want to do it because we did a so-called casting call.
So we're doing a documentary about the way to the Enhanced Games together with Ridley Scott.
So we made a big casting call, and we have more than 1,000 professional athletes, many of them who are in the Summer Olympics, who applied to be in the documentary and hence in the Enhanced Games.
So the question, if this is an appealing proposition, is answered.
It will be a point of national pride to be the most technologically and scientifically advanced society that has the engineering and intellectual capability to develop and manufacture and clinically supervise these products.
It's actually what is interesting, like when we teamed up, Aaron had the idea, we talked early, I have my own investment firm, so I'm both the investor and his co-founder.
We both were actually calculating with much more negativity.
In actually a good way because it's driving our recognition.
But I'm always jokingly saying it's almost going too smooth because people love it.
The only people who don't love it is the Olympics.
But the feedback we're getting from my 14-year-old godson to a head of state is like, that's fucking awesome.
You know, before USADA came into the UFC, a lot of people studied the difference between certain fighters that were competing at an incredibly high level before USADA came, and then their physiques melted.
I mean, you could see the difference.
It's a giant difference.
But they were all passing drug tests.
Before.
But they were passing drug tests by the athletic commissions on the day of the fight, which by all accounts is an intelligence test.
It's just whether or not you're taking the proper steps to cover your tracks.
And so instead of going your way, they went the way of just crawling up everybody's ass with a microscope.
And they do it...
USADA was doing it in a very intrusive way where they were waking up fighters on the day of a weigh-in early in the morning because they'll show up at 6 o'clock in the morning.
Right, so logically it should be like member countries like the UN, or maybe the athletes should elect members of the IOC. No, the IOC is a club of European aristocrats that was formed in 1896 that just elects itself.
And so it has no external accountability.
It's not regulated by anyone.
It's not accountable to any governments.
And so that means that they can just set the rules however they want, and this is how they've gotten away with not paying athletes for over 100 years.
So MMA, if you're going to have people being enhanced in MMA, that will severely limit their ability to compete in other organizations.
So how are you going to get high-level fighters that are not going to compete in Bellator or not going to compete in the UFC? How are you going to do that?
Yeah, you know, that's where performance-enhancing drugs are very appealing, right?
Sure.
You've been in your career, you know, you're sort of 30, 35 years old, and people say, you know, you're out of it, you should be retired.
And they're saying this isn't now with the emotional maturity that you have in your 30s to regain the body in your 20s and to come back to compete at a high level.
It's like accumulated time sparring, accumulated time in different scenarios where you know what's coming next.
You don't have to think about it.
It's programmed into your system.
So they're all kind of...
That is interesting, because, like, I don't know how much you guys follow MMA, but one of the great eras of MMA was Vitor Belfort when they let him take testosterone.
So do you know about this?
Okay.
It's legendary in MMA, because he is the best example of a veteran, a guy who was an older guy, first fought in the UFC at 19 years old in 1997. And in the 2000s, this was like 2004 or 5, that's when they allowed the testosterone use exemptions and Vitor looked like an alien.
Luke Rockhold saw him at the weigh-ins and my first thought was, what the fuck is this guy on?
Because he had a mohawk and he just looked insanely jacked and he was knocking everybody out.
I mean, fearless.
But because of the testosterone use exemptions and then there was some controversy about it, they had tested him one time when he was in the United States and he was Off the charts.
Like, you're not supposed to have that much testosterone in your system.
This is fucking insane.
And so then it started this controversy, and then ultimately they got rid of testosterone use exemptions.
But he was the perfect example of a really elite fighter who, you know, is getting older.
His body was kind of failing him, and he did a lot of steroids when he was younger, allegedly.
And so his physique looked kind of soft.
And then all of a sudden he looked like a fucking freak.
Just a real freak.
And he was just wheel kicking people and knocking everybody out.
It was like he went on a run for a few years where he was just unstoppable.
So, you know, what we're trying to do is a very rigorous scientific and medical process to ensure that we gather high quality clinical data and we share it.
And we're going to publish it in the top journals.
And we have a scientific advisory board.
We have doctors from, you know, previously at FIFA, you know, the chairman of genetics at Harvard, Professor George Church is on our advisory board.
And we've really built up a serious scientific and medical establishment to make the enhanced games a very serious endeavor.
And I think another aspect of this whole thing is what you said initially.
We all know That the Olympics are dirty.
We all know that...
Anyone who's seen Icarus, and if you haven't seen it, I really recommend it.
It's amazing.
These state-funded, state-sponsored programs have existed forever, and they've just been doing weaselly things to try to avoid detection, and they get caught all the time.
And it's not as simple as, like, everyone just really wants to find out who the best is, and they're on the honor system, and everybody is honorable.
But imagine the scientific potential of all of that research that came out into the open in terms of anti-aging in particular.
The same compounds that allow individual athletes to run faster and jump higher are the ones that will allow us to be younger, faster, and stronger for longer.
And, you know, I think that's a very admirable aspiration.
You know, look at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
You know, he's doing pull-ups when Joe Biden and Donald Trump can hardly walk up a flight of stairs.
I think a lot of people always put enhancements into just the vanity pocket, which is, by the way, and I think it's a very legit pocket because, for example, I'm doing it more for vanity.
But if you look at older people, like sarcopenia, like a rapid muscle loss, whatever, is a problem for many people.
And we take it as normal.
We're like, oh, it is normal that you're losing muscle mass.
And I was like, no, we can do something.
And the life of a 70, 80-year-old would be completely changed if they have a functioning muscle system again.
Yes.
Which is, by the way, easy to produce.
But, like, we're shying away because it all got commingled in that 80s, 90s doping debate.
There are extremely good anabolic steroids with a very good medical use case.
Take Anavar, yeah, or these kind of compounds.
Like, they are very good for older people with muscle loss, with osteoporosis.
But we don't give it to them.
So I spoke to so many doctors.
They're still there, but the doctor's like, oh, like...
I have these reputational risks giving an eight-year-old an anabolic steroid because the word became so bad.
Despite, they all agree, this would make the life of millions of older people much more livable.
By the way, small doses, but like, yeah.
So I'm very passionate, not just about like, enhanced games, we hope will be a crystallization factor for a whole societal change on how we look at Body autonomy, how we give the decision back to people, again, what they want to be with their body, with their mind, and all of that.
So in the 1920s, the Carnegie Foundation commissioned a sociologist from Johns Hopkins University, Professor Albert Flexner, to go and study medical education.
And so it used to be, back then, that anyone could call themselves a doctor.
Yeah, anyone could just read some books and you call yourself a doctor.
And after the Flexner Report, it was decided by state legislatures that we had to regulate what it meant to be a doctor and what medical education was required.
And the definition of medicine as a result of that is that medicine is about the treatment and cure of disease.
And if you walk into your doctor and you say, I'm a healthy 39-year-old, but I'd like to be extraordinary, he would say, I'm sorry, medicine legally cannot help you.
Well, wasn't this the reason why ProVigil and NuVigil, when they first came up with those, I believe they came up with the idea of them being a performance-enhancing substance, but then they didn't have a way to prescribe them, so they used narcolepsy.
No, it's like, I think it's like, by the way, I always tell that at universities when I give a speed, that's the real mind or intellectual enhancement drugs because it doesn't make you chittery, whatever.
Why do we say for students or whatever, oh, it's bad if you try to be the best?
And why is a substance, modafenil, which is, by the way, wildly studied, which is there since decades, Every single neuroscientist in my team, in my biotech sector, I talk to is like, this can be taken safely in moderate amounts.
Why are we shying away to discussing that this is a good thing?
The lucky thing in my life is I have these resources.
We're the largest investor, one of the largest investors in neuroscience globally.
So I have all these colleagues at hand.
And I went to everybody because people always mix it up.
They're like, when they hear me talking, like, oh my God, Christian is so adventurous.
Like, I'm actually a huge hypochondriac.
And I'm always worried I do the wrong thing.
So meaning I put in a lot of effort before I take something.
So I went to some of the biggest neuroscientists in the world and discussed modafinil.
And everybody just had good things to say.
I really mean it like it's like...
I'm not only doing a marketing session about it, but it's a good example where I really don't understand how we could not at least give people the choice.
So the paper is published in The Lancet, which is the top medical journal.
And if, Jamie, you want to pull it up, it's called Drug Harm in the UK, a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, published in The Lancet in 2010 by Professor David Nutt.
And it has this amazing chart, which I'm looking at on.
So, by the way, but I want to be careful because that actually would got him in political trouble because one magazine wrote, which is, by the way, the wrong takeaway, said, oh, the drug advisor of the UK government said heroin, take heroin on alcohol, whatever.
I'm from Bavaria, and I decided when I was 14, I'm never going to touch it ever.
Wow.
For societal reasons, because I was gay in a village where it was not cool to be gay, and I was like, if I get drunk, I'm going to spill it, and my life is ruined.
But like, so Friends in 2013 showed me that chart.
And we talked a lot about it.
And the outcome of it was like, you should try mushrooms.
And I was like, you're completely insane.
Like it's a Schedule 1 drug, whatever.
And then it took me a year when I was reading up.
And by the way, this was a different time.
Like people didn't talk about psychedelics and all of that.
So I was reading up all about psychedelics from 2013 to 2014 and then had my first psychedelic trip.
In 2014, which was hands down the single most meaningful and important thing I've ever done in my whole life.
Nothing comes close.
And I was always a very happy, lucky person, so I didn't think it's doing that much to me.
So I came out of this trip, and there was the point when I decided that psychedelics in general should be medically available again, and then sort of restarted the whole psychedelic renaissance.
I think it was the biggest crime, one of the biggest crimes that government back then did.
Because if you think about it, like all the data we're producing, it has the potential to heal, really, I'm using the word healing deliberately, To heal mental health issues like depression, anxiety.
So if you think about it, that a government scam in 1970, which was a pure political scam to discredit the hippie community because they were going against the Vietnam War, that that took away one of the most potent groups of drugs, medical drugs, for mental health issues.
And then you look at our time, how prevalent mental health issues are.
They are actually as a whole You could say the number one problem we have from opioid addiction to depression to youth suicidality.
And it all was taken away for no reason.
These drugs, as you saw on the chart, and by the way, what we're showing with my two companies, Compass and Atai, They have a little downside, meaning everything has a downside, but there is no big downside if taken properly with a therapist together.
But the data we're producing shows an enormous upside, again, to cure and alleviate mental health issues.
And I think one of the best paths that MAPS has put forth is helping soldiers.
Helping soldiers with PTSD and that's been a great way to get through the door because you know the veteran community has been dealing with it for a long time and I think it's shifted the perspective from a lot of these people that are more conservative that would normally think of drugs as being for losers and bad for society and they have a different perspective on it now like you're calling it drugs It's the wrong word.
It's not a decision yet because the FDA is going to decide on August 11th on MDMA. But the advisory committee hearing, which was public, recommended not to approve MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder.
It was a big outcry.
But the reason is also, I want to be a little bit self-critic-like for the psychedelic industry, Because I'm a huge believer, like you're sitting next to maybe the biggest believer in psychedelics, but I also realize that 95%, I would guess, because we live in our bubble.
You have met a lot of people who take psychedelics.
I'm always very open, like in a country where it's legal, I do my psychedelic therapy, sort of life enhancing thing twice a year, like I'm very open with that.
But, like, I also realized we are a bubble, like, and 95% of whatever, like, a vast majority of people have not done psychedelics yet, and are unfortunately, we can like it or not, and we can blame the Nixon government or not, but, like, are stuck in this misinformation.
So the only way to, this was sort of what some people say, I'm too conservative, because they're like, oh my god, you're taking it, like, you should, like, be more, like, be liberal, whatever.
But my decision was the only way to move psychedelics Back into the medical world is to do it like I would do it, and we have a biotech portfolio, 50 biotech companies, like I do it with every other medical substance.
I'm producing clinical data in a very rigorous, very scientific way to show and prove it what I personally believe, but we have to prove it.
And that was a little bit the weakness Of the MAPS data, because MAPS was a non-profit, so they never had a huge funding.
So all the data was actually always done with the minimum effort.
Not because they wanted it, but it was kind of limited in terms of funding.
I'll give you an example.
MAPS did 200 people in the Phase 3 PDST study.
In our treatment-resistant depression study with psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, we treated around 800 people.
Why people said at the beginning, oh, it's a lot.
You need to spend all that money because it costs hundreds of millions.
But I was like, people will try to poke holes in it because it's magic mushrooms.
So because I'm dealing with psychedelics and because I have this personal conviction, but I cannot take my personal conviction and say, oh, everybody should just follow me because, like, I know.
I need to be especially rigorous and need to do it sort of very scientific, very broad.
So, yeah, long story short, I think psychedelics are coming back.
Yeah, I think we're going to deliver really good data over the next years.
And I also think, I still hope that the FDA will actually still approve MDMA because they can, so they don't need to follow...
That advisory board's recommendation.
And I think the political pressure of the veterans is there, so I really hope.
But if not, it's also not lost because the advisory board didn't push back on MDMA per se.
They pushed back on that specific data set and said, okay, there are holes we can poke into it.
What's going on with marijuana is interesting in this country, because at this point, 24 states have it legal for recreational use.
That's literally half the country.
And then you have more that have it available for medical use, yet the government still has it as a Schedule I. They've made moves to turn it to a Schedule III, but as of this discussion, it's a Schedule I drug.
You have half the country.
Literally in states that are saying you can take it here you could buy it here you could sell it here We'll tax it and the federal government is still not on board with that and then The move next would be psilocybin so some states have decriminalized that right like Portland kind of Portland or Oregon I think has done a reverse they've did they've made like I think they've hit the brakes on I want to make a big sort of plea that psilocybin or in general psychedelics and cannabis should not be mixed
People instinctively do that because it's kind of the same history.
It's so-called illegal drugs which now be coming in one way or the other legally.
But if I look at it, I have a very sort of strong opinion.
Psychedelics are very strong substances in a very good way.
So they have a very good outcome.
But if I look at human history, and you had Brian here, Murarescu, whom I love.
So if you look at Brian's work, he has shown that over 10,000 years, humans have used psychedelics in a very actually rigid setting.
If you think about the cult of Demeter, the Ilysinian mysteries, or the cult of Osiris, all of these psychedelic cults, they all actually said you can't just do psychedelics once or twice a year.
With a shaman together, it was actually forbidden by death to take the kykion, the drink which we believe was ergot, the natural version of LSD, in the Illycinian Mysteries outside of the very strong framework of the Illycinian Mysteries.
So that's why I really have, I mean, my personal opinion is, so psychedelics should be medically used, but they should be limited.
It's not consumer drugs.
They should be limited to be used with a therapist together who also sort of gives you a sort of a full sort of therapy session around it, and that's how they can unfold.
I understand where you're coming from, but here's where I would say about that.
First of all, two things.
You can take psychedelics in micro doses and it's very effective It's very helpful and to limit people from having the ability to do that.
I don't think makes any sense There's great benefits to micro dosing psilocybin a lot of people have had great benefits micro dosing LSD like tremendous benefits and they talk about it very openly and I think if we are going to act under the idea of body autonomy that falls under that also To say that marijuana is not a psychedelic, all that would say to me is you haven't taken enough.
Or you haven't taken edibles.
Are you aware of the process of what happens when you eat cannabis?
When you eat marijuana, it produces a completely different chemical when it gets processed by your liver.
And it's called 11-hydroxymetabolite.
11-hydroxymetabolite is five times more psychoactive than THC. And I used to do a joke about it where it said, and it lets you talk to dolphins.
Because it's very psychedelic.
Eat edible...
Pot, like in high doses, is extremely psychedelic.
Especially if you close your eyes.
Like, if you lie somewhere in silent darkness and close your eyes on edible marijuana, it rivals a lot of different drugs.
Psilocybin, a lot of them.
Especially in the tank that I showed you guys.
Psychedelic drugs, mushrooms, there's a great history of people using them in those tanks.
We talked about John Lilly who would take ketamine.
But I know a lot of people who do high levels of edibles and they get in the tank and they have crazy psychedelic experiences.
I think that's also part of the problem with people recreationally taking edibles, is you really probably shouldn't do that all the time, especially at high doses, because I think it causes schizophrenia, and I think it has in some people.
I think it causes fragile minds to shatter.
And especially if you have some underlying conditions or propensity or family history of schizophrenia, it's probably not a good idea for you.
But I don't think we should just dismiss marijuana as being different than the other drugs.
It's just a drug that is more likely to be consumed microdosed.
If you, by the way, pull up the chart again of David Knott, so the amazing thing with mushrooms is that the only risk which you saw with the small pinkish sort of thing is that you fall down the stairs and hurt yourself while you take it.
We have a whole team which is following up that sentence if somebody says that.
And literally for like, since when are we doing that?
Since 2018. Every single person we could find online and chat boards, whatever, whom we contacted, who said, oh, I have any side effects.
Our first question is always, what have you taken?
And 100% of the people who had negative things said, oh, I've taken mushrooms and I drank a lot of alcohol and I took a lot of cocaine.
Can already stop there.
Never mix these things because we don't know.
What I'm arguing for, by the way, the same going back to microdosing, we need to find or we need to create a scientific basis for all of that.
There will never be a scientific study which tells you you can happily mix alcohol, psilocybin, and cannabis.
I really don't know what's happening in your brain.
So don't do it.
But I can give you a lot of studies what is happening standalone when you take psilocybin.
I can give you a lot of studies what is happening when you take cannabis.
Yeah, so I always tell people, why mix?
That is one of my first recommendations because, remember, I'm a hypochondriac.
I just want to do things where I really know what's happening in my body because life is awesome.
I think I'm very...
I'm okay up there.
I'm happy.
Why should I risk it?
Microdosing is my favorite example to push back a bit because you said it actually.
You said there are people who say they were helped by microdosing.
That is not how science works because I can give you a lot of people who have one experience, but science is take thousands of them and see if there is a real statistic significance in whatever we want to prove.
They are not from us, because I think microdosing will always be not a commercial endeavor, but there are a few really good studies from, I think it was the University of Chicago, but I don't know, about microdosing, and they could not reproduce the positive factors individual people were saying on a large scale.
Yeah, but I would say microdose, do you one trip a year.
You get all the benefits, by the way, because there we know you get neuroplasticity.
There we know you get all the positive effects out of it.
But second, what you need to be just mindful is like there was a study some days ago, if we can pull it up, if you look microdosing at heart, so all these psychedelic stock at the 5-H2A receptor, But also have an effect on your heart.
So hopefully I'm not using the technically right terms, but I always describe it to my friends.
It's like psychedelics are a little bit poking your heart.
So if you do that once a year, we've shown it zero problem, zero.
We don't know what psychedelics microdosing does to your heart.
Right, but isn't the poking the heart effect due to the large doses of stunning experiences that you're having when you're really tripping on like seven grams?
And the only thing I'm putting out there is that everything I'm saying is like what is really important, and I'm saying that as really like one of the most passionate people about psychedelics, That we cannot or we shouldn't abandon the...
I'm just wondering what they did for cognitive tests.
There were also some neurobiological reasons to expect LSD might improve mood because LSD acts through serotonin receptors where traditional antidepressants are known to act.
The main thing I'm saying is, so microdosing could be, the only plea I make is, like, let's treat psychedelics with the same sort of rigorous scientific lens like we treat anything else.
By the way, that's my whole, like, how I marry my libertarian view and sort of my scientific view is let's just prove things.
Science is awesome.
We have learned over the last hundreds of years how to prove things or dismiss things.
Let's prove it.
And that's, by the way, how we, I mean, here in the room, because we all love psychedelics, how we convince the 95%, how we convince those people who were sitting on the advisory panel and said no to MDMA. It was very clear when they were talking that none of them had tried it.
But the answer can't be, come on, try MDMA and then please approve it.
The answer must be, I put in front of you a data set where it doesn't matter that it's called MDMA and it doesn't matter that it has a history because the data speaks for itself.
We've raised millions of dollars in the world's top venture capitalists, Christian included, Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan.
And we're reinventing the Olympic Games, not just in terms of adding Performance enhancements, adding payments to athletes, but we're also removing the core waste.
So the core problem of the Olympics is that they build a dozen stadiums and then they throw them away after two weeks.
It is literally the most financially wasteful exercise in human history.
Between $30 and $100 billion a cost to put on an Olympic Games, and it is just disastrous for the host city.
So by reducing the number of sports and focusing on the ones that have the highest television and social media impact, we can have very, very low infrastructural costs and operate the whole thing profitably.
So number one, we will raise enough equity capital so that we can run the games for at least three years without any media rights, corporate sponsorship, or ticket sales.
Of course, we will grab all those revenue drivers, and that will make us a profitable endeavor.
But fundamentally, we have enough equity capital to make sure this thing really works and is delivered for a long period of time.
But what I can tell you, what I was actually a little bit surprised positively, is like we got inbounded by big brands.
We were actually calculating in the early days.
We said, ah, it's going to be controversial.
We don't think a big, whatever.
Outdoor brand or whatever, a big sportswear brand will sponsor in the first year.
So we really, as Aaron said, we planned, we are venture funded and we can do it three years without those major revenues, which we obviously somewhat want to have.
But then surprisingly, major brands Inbounded us and said, can we work with you early?
Which, again, showed us like we sort of hit the zeitgeist a bit with the thing.
But the fact that we are paying the athletes has really changed the dynamics of Olympic sports.
So, Lord Sebastian Coe, who is the president of World Athletics, came out and said that athletics will pay $50,000 For a gold medal at the Paris Olympics.
And read the coverage.
Journalists all attribute this because of the pressure we put on because we're offering payment for athletes.
Obviously, we're offering a million for a gold medal.
Yeah, and that's why we've raised millions and millions of dollars from the world's top venture capital funds so we can deliver an amazing broadcast experience, recruit the best athletes, and ensure that we make a television package that's really, really compelling.
And for the networks, they want to buy a five, ten-year deal because they're effectively taking a bet.
The Olympic television rights are worth four billion per games.
We live in the era of peak television rights right now.
Amazon, ABC, D&D, they're all bidding for the NBA rights.
Two NBA games on Christmas Day are worth a billion dollars.
This is an absolute sweet spot.
And you see this with college football and college basketball.
The NIL writes, you know, 18-year-olds in college are now driving Lamborghinis.
Yet Olympic athletes have been so screwed financially and that we're just going to deliver a better economic system that is a more compelling television package because of enhancements.
Well, I mean, it's really interesting because if it does take off, it might legitimately change the way pharma companies interface with these particular substances if they realize they're going to be extremely popular.
Once they see how well people do, especially if you get athletes that are in their 30s that may be washed out of MMA organizations and they start competing at an elite level again, if you start seeing people breaking the world records in sprinting, they might go, hey, let me revisit this.
By the way, that is again, my answer is always like, everything has side effects.
The coffee you just gave me has side effects.
The Diet Coke, the...
Whatever, I actually always come back.
Psychedelics have made it the least.
But it's all about an educated guess.
I can look at Ozembek.
There is a whole list of side effects.
And I can look at myself.
By the way, it's also very important to measure yourself from the basic stuff, like have an Oura ring, whatever.
That's already more complicated or more advanced.
But take an Oura ring.
I do a blood test every two weeks because I'm obviously at the moment going through an enhancement process.
And because people react different on different stuff.
Like there might be people who say, look, I don't like Ozempic, then don't take it or like it.
But like it worked for me, which is great.
So but it's outsourced discipline, but I'm not the person which it was made for because it was obviously originally made for diabetes and then for clinically obese people.
So 83% of all people don't take it for the original use.
They take it for vanity whatsoever.
And that really changed the way pharma CEOs are looking at medications.
It's exactly coming back to what Aaron said.
We are in this zeitgeist shift.
Where suddenly the whole industry looks at health.
By the way, I think looks at health how we should look at health, not like how we just give people something once the damage is there, but how we can keep people more healthy for longer and help them to enhance themselves if they want to.
Yeah, and I come from the view that aging is a disease that we should be able to treat, cure, and eventually solve.
But that's not what medicine is about.
So legally, aging is not a disease.
So a doctor cannot prescribe you medication against the clinical indicator of aging.
Aging is a normal biological process and is just accepted by the field of medicine.
And it wasn't until 1997 that osteoporosis was considered a disease.
It was prior to that just considered a natural part of the aging process.
And so I think we need a revolution here where we say medicine is not about making just the sick people less sick.
It's about fundamentally improving the quality of all human life so that we can become Superhuman.
And at the time in which we live, an era of artificial intelligence where the machines are upgrading, we need to upgrade our own biology to be competitive.
Well, I think in that case, especially looking at Ozempic and these drugs that are used off-label, the fact that they're incredibly profitable and the fact that they are being used mostly for people that just want to lose some weight and look better, that's really probably a good sign for the future of how these substances are at least allowed to be used.
I mean, this is the conversation that I had yesterday.
I had Freeway Ricky Ross on the podcast yesterday.
I don't know if you know who he is, but he was a drug dealer that was illiterate that was at one point in time selling as much as $3 million worth of cocaine in a day.
And he was supplying...
It was all done through the CIA, allegedly, to supply the Contras versus the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s.
He went to jail for it, learned how to read in jail, became a lawyer, figured out his case was tried and prosecuted wrong, got off.
The problem is you're never going to get away from the demand.
The demand in the United States is immense.
So you're fueling drug empires in Mexico.
So you're fueling illegal organized crime because you won't come to terms with the fact that body autonomy and The rights of an individual to choose to do whatever they want, especially in light of what is legal that is incredibly damaging, like alcohol.
And that if you just made it legal, I mean, you would have a real problem.
You would have a lot of people getting addicted, you have a lot of people trying it that wouldn't try it, but eventually the dust would settle.
And the concept would be you would have to mitigate all these potential future problems With counseling, with treatment, and with education, but you would severely limit the amount of adulterated drugs.
You would change a lot of that.
If you made sure that the supply was clean and you're getting it from pharmaceutical drug companies and pharmaceutical drug companies, Could profit off of it.
And you would just have a percentage of that profit that would be taxed.
And in that discussion about the social externality and addictive substances, we never talk about the two most addictive substances, processed food and sugar, which have done so much damage to our society.
And do you know who Team USA's top Olympic sponsors are?
Also, I always say, like, when you remember the chart we looked at where alcohol is worse than heroin, next time you go to an airport and you see all these shops which say alcohol and tobacco, whatever, just think for a second it would say heroin.
How messed up is that?
And it's not just for adults.
It's also children.
We're just bringing them up in a world where the most dangerous substances are stuffed into them and marketed to them and whatever.
But young people coming up, and I think a lot of podcasts are doing that because these conversations are available for the first time, and not just available, but available to millions and millions of people in a way that it used to be.
Mainstream media was and these conversations get shared and then people they put clips on Instagram and YouTube and they start passing them around and people Listen more and then they you know I used to think this but now that and The more conversations you have with intelligent, educated people that really understand what's going on and can give you the data and explain it in a logical way, you realize, well, this is an intelligent person that has an informed perspective on this.
And it'll allow people to just sort of reevaluate.
And I think...
Faith in institutions is at an all-time low, and faith in institutions that give out health advice is at an all-time low, because we now know about the sugar industry that bribed scientists in order to lie about the dangers of saturated fat.
We know about drug companies that lie about the side effects of their drugs and high data.
We know about all that now, so we're a little less We're likely to believe the mainstream narrative on a lot of things that we just accepted as fact.
That's right, and I think we live in this era of disruption, and social media is such a powerful force in both positive and negative ways.
And two years ago, it was basically impossible for athletes to talk about performance-enhancing drugs.
You would just be canceled immediately.
And, you know, we launched and, you know, started to have a conversation and pulled the Overton window open.
And now so many eminent scientists and doctors come and say, you know, if you actually look at the data, look at Professor Nutt's study, it's not that dangerous.
It's worth having a conversation about.
How will this affect our society?
How will this...
Build a better future, right?
And this is only possible because of the era of information distribution which we have, which is not guarded by traditional media institutions.
I also saw methadone was on that, which I thought was interesting.
Oh, equally as effective as moderate doses of methadone.
However, because buprenorphine is unlikely to be as effective as more optimal dose methadone, it may not Be the treatment of choice for patients with high levels of physical dependency.
Okay, so it's to treat people that are physically dependent.
And to emphasize that this is a really high-quality, credible study published in The Lancet, which is one of the top medical journals in the entire world.
We need data, and I firmly believe in personal autonomy.
And I just think, again, I just don't think adults should be able to tell other adults what to do and not to do.
If they're informed, if they're educated, if they know what they're doing, you should be able to do whatever you want to do, just like you can go bull riding.
I don't encourage you to go bull riding, but if you want to go bull riding, you're allowed to go bull riding.
So tell me why you can go bull riding, but you can't smoke a joint.
But like, you know, think about the Apollo program.
Apollo 1 burnt down on the launch pack, killed three astronauts.
Did we stop the Apollo program?
Should we have not gone to the moon?
Right?
And what we have lost in our contemporary society in so many ways is the propensity to take risk.
Thoughtful, intelligent, positive risk.
And this has always been something that I've been so deeply passionate about is The people who succeed in life, the people who push society to a new level, the people who improve themselves and their families and their communities are willing to take positive risk.
Yet our society is so dominated by a safetyism and a safetyist culture that we're increasingly unwilling to take any risk.
We're not really targeting the things that are actually dangerous for us.
We're not being honest about it, about what we know about food and what we know about certain substances that people are using and taking in their food and just what happens when you have a bad diet.
It's one of the primary factors for all-cause mortality is a shitty diet.
As long as people have access to accurate information, the problem is when capitalism also works to try to subvert Accurate information and try to distort things in order to increase their profits, which is also a giant issue.
But today, I think that's more difficult to do than ever before, just because of new media, just because people have the internet, they have access to information, as long as that information is not being curated, which is also a problem.
You know, it's a problem what is allowed and not allowed to be distributed.
And I think that's why the podcasting industry is actually so powerful as compared to consuming written content, which is so easily manipulatable and doesn't have that trust dimension.
As I read the New York Times, I don't actually think about the person who wrote the article versus I listen to a podcast and I say, oh, I know Joe.
I listen to him every day.
I've built an emotional relationship with the presenter.
And if they do something to break that trust, I'm not going to tune in again.
And if there is such a person who wishes to compete at the Enhanced Games, please write to me and I'm going to set up a meeting with every athlete you propose to compete against and create a fair and balanced framework.
But is it fair and balanced if you're allowing a biological male ever to compete with biological females, especially in light of the enhanced games proposal of allowing people to take performance enhancing drugs?
Because you'd have to make a very clear definition What is a transitioned athlete?
How long would you have to wait?
And what are they allowed to take?
If you're going to limit a biological male's ability to take testosterone or force them to take some sort of a testosterone blocker, In order to achieve a certain requirement, that kind of goes against the ethics or the ethos of this enhanced games in the first place.
Well, so I think you're actually viewing it in the inverse way that I would.
Because the actual question to ask is, so, and I'm gay myself, so let me use my language very precisely here because I know it really matters to a member of the transgender community.
The standard argument is that a person born a man who transitions to being a woman, particularly after puberty, has an insurmountable biological advantage over a natural born woman.
A biological male that's transgender So you're taking a biological male, for lack of a better term, lack of being politically correct, and you're allowing them to compete with biological women, and you're allowing them to take performance-enhancing drugs, then you're allowing a man to compete against a woman.
Like, full stop.
That's what it is then.
Why not just say you have to be biologically female to compete in the female division, biologically male to compete in the male division?
Yeah, so one version that one of our investors has proposed to us is that we have a Because the reality about gender transition at the moment, it's still not even beta stage technology.
It's alpha stage technology.
It doesn't really change anyone on a chromosomal level.
It changes people on a surface level.
And so let's assign athletes based on chromosomal status without having the labels of male and female, which are very precious to some people, or man and woman.
And that language has been manipulated by both sides politically.
And just say, it's actually a scientific question.
I think the point Aaron wanted to make earlier is that in all the more than 1,000 people we had, there was no person identifying as transgender.
I also think that it might be a little bit the whole headlines blown out of proportion on a very professional level.
Yes, there are some activists on both sides who I think try to make a point almost in sports, but these are not the people who compete on an Olympic level.
So we also think for us, it might not even be a big issue.
That's why Aaron was saying, like, we really welcome a discussion.
And that's the great thing of inventing a new sport.
We can think about things with a very clean slate, without any prejudice in one or the other direction.
yeah so that's why if somebody is really feeling or is somebody is transgender and really is on a level though they can compete in the enhanced game which is an Olympic level talk to us and we want to hear that perspective and we want to sort of but like hasn't happened yet yeah and then we're already thinking about you're still dealing with a biological male that you're allowing to enhance themselves so they can perform to the highest level of their ability physically
So if you're taking a biological male, who's transitioned to being a woman, but now you're allowing them to take EPO, testosterone, you know, fill in the blanks, IGF-1, whatever you're going to give them, you're not, that's a biological male, full stop.
Now, I want you to imagine Leah Thomas on testosterone, EPO, all sorts of performance enhancing substances, peptides, and then allowing this person to compete as a woman.
And you would have to change the structure of their body, the hip structure.
You'd have to change the size of their lungs, the size of their heart, different cardiovascular capacity.
Everything is different.
And especially if you're allowing Leah Tom...
The whole idea about a transgender athlete competing with biological females is that there's supposed to be It's supposed to be even because this person is on testosterone blockers and on estrogen and they've lost all their muscle mass and they're basically a woman.
This is the argument that the activists use.
But the problem with that is the structure of the body is different.
Reaction time is different.
Lung capacity is different.
Heart size is different.
There's a giant difference between males to females when it comes to athletic performance.
But I think that that's going to be the likelihood in the future is that most children, at least in like first world countries, are going to be edited.
And the transgenderism issue is actually just the vanguard of this whole transhumanism issue.
Right.
Where eventually we're going to have BCI implants in our brain.
We're going to have gene editing.
We're going to have the most amazing technology.
Right.
And, you know, if the Olympics are stuck in this ancient Greek Corinthian values modality, then they're not going to adjust to modern technological and social changes.
That's actually the vision beyond what we're thinking now about performance enhancements, is that we're going to be the continuous role model or the continuous showcase where human enhancement can go over the next 20 years.
We're talking now about performance enhancing medications, but maybe in 10 years we're going to have the first people with a chip in their brain.
Maybe it's going to be There is going to be a continuous sort of pushing the boundaries in a good way where we want to showcase what science can really do positively for humans.
By the way, fun fact, because we always reference back to the ancient Olympics, they did allow performance enhancements very openly.
So, you know, a historian told me, and you need to verify it independently.
That they originally wore clothes, and then, you know, a woman pretended to be a man to compete at the Olympic Games, and then this was found out, so then they just made it all naked.
You know, I'm sure you're aware of the Eastern Bloc women in, I mean, some of the records still to this day haven't been broken.
And these women were just juiced to the tits, no pun intended, because they were trying to win.
And so they, you know, when you've, there's been some interviews of these women that were forced to do this in these communist countries.
And You know, it devastated them.
They became infertile.
They, you know, developed all sorts of problems, ovarian cysts and all sorts of things that were connected to the use of exogenous testosterone at very high levels.
Right, but you wouldn't stop them from taking testosterone, right?
Right.
So let's talk about combat sports athletes, for example.
If you had a female combat sports athlete and you allowed that female to compete with other women, but allowed that person to get juiced to the hilt, And go in there, look with a fucking crazy voice, and looking like Vandelay Silva in those pictures, or rather, Vitor Belfort in those pictures that we saw.
I mean, that's, you know, then you're saying to these women, in order to compete, you have to stop being a woman.
You have to essentially transition, which is what happens to trans men.
When you take a woman and you give them a shit tote of testosterone, they start growing beards, They become trans men, right?
That's part of the process.
It's what's happening.
That's not reversible.
And when you do that to women competing with women, those women are going to be more effective.
They're going to be stronger in weightlifting competition.
There's going to be no comparison.
If you have combat sports, you're going to have much more power, much more speed, more violence.
It's just you're turning them into men, essentially.
You're turning them into trans men.
And just to compete.
It's a little bit different, right?
Because we look – I mean, maybe it's a society standard.
Maybe it's not, though.
If you look at it in terms of, like, when someone looks at, like, GigaChad, you know, guys look at that.
Guys who like to work out, like, wow, I'd like to be built like that guy.
Very few women look at like a female bodybuilder who's got a five o'clock shadow and say that's the ideal physique.
I actually think there's also an economic rationale here, right?
So if you're an athlete, particularly in the era of NIL rights and in the era of- What is NIL? Name, image, license, what's happened in the NCAA, right?
Selling your brand, right?
For an athlete, male or female, their physique and their brand are- Attached to each other.
And so if a female athlete says, you know what, I'm going to take tons and tons of testosterone, she may also be compromising her economic ability to earn by not building a visual brand that is amenable to the market.
Wait, third one, but it's still a limiting factor.
You need to find a doctor who's publicly your doctor, who's not hiding in the shadows, and who's like, I'm responsible for whatever this athlete is taking.
It's just thinking through safety measures, or how do we sort of make it in a way that people are sort of doing rational decisions.
But the third one is important.
Anything, by the way, in life which you take too much of has side effects and has bad ones.
If you take 20 vodka shots, you're going to be dead, most likely, or 30. There's a number of alcohol, if you take it, you're dead.
So, alcohol has a lethal toxicity at a certain amount.
So what we're going to do, the same is like for many of the things we're just discussing, is like if you take too much of it, even if you think you get one point more out of it, you're going to put damage on your body.
There's always for anything, for testosterone, for human growth hormones, for anabolic steroids.
How we regulate it is we're going to do a full health check, which the Olympics don't.
It's very simple.
You should do it.
We do it on site with our own doctors so that you can't cheat.
One of the most important things is an MRI of the heart.
Because, for example, a lot of anabolic steroids, if you abuse them, so if you take too much to squeeze out the last point, you're gonna have a heart damage somewhere.
And then you're gonna get disqualified.
We will not let any person on the field who has a health damage.
So if you're a woman, And everything you described, I hear you, but I can tell you, I'm not a doctor now and can tell you the exact answer, but if you describe me a woman is taking that much testosterone that she grows a beard and whatever, she's going to have damage to her body and her heart.
And she's not going to, and that is then, they don't do it because then they would do it for nothing.
And these therapeutic use exemptions are just abused left, right, and center.
Look up the case of Bradley Wiggins, the British cyclist, I believe, who had a therapeutic use exemption for asthma and then, you know, forever hid this from even his own teammates.
A long-term study would help distinguish between athletes with asthma who self-select to swimming and those who have asthma as a result of exposure to endurance training practices.
That's interesting.
So the idea is that you could limit your cardiovascular system from extreme training?
Intensity of swimmer training, long hours spent in water, may expose swimmers to more chlorine byproducts.
It could be that swimmers really have more asthma because their training environment or living environment is fostering it, but it also could be that most likely it's both.