The 'Enhanced Games' Is the Ultimate MAGA Athletic Competition

A sports startup that allows performance-enhancing drugs is brash, confrontational, and perfect for the Trump era.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Enhanced Games want to redesign the human athlete by
Peter Guest read by Pamela Lawrence. The first thing Peter
Teal said to Erin Desuza, according to Desusa, was I'm
going to live forever. That was in two thousand and nine,
a few years before Desusa, an Australian lawyer, helped Teal,

(00:21):
a PayPal co founder, in one of Silicon Valley's most
influential men, bankrupt the gossip website Gawker via a lawsuit
that hinged on a leaked sex tape of the wrestler
Hulk Hogan. Is he correct? Desusa said of Teal's confidence
in his longevity, He's still alive, but I don't know right.
It's going to take another one hundred years to prove it.

(00:44):
Teal is among the investors in Desuza's Enhanced Games, a
sports start up that wants to compete with the Olympics
by getting its athletes to go higher, faster, farther using
performance enhancing drugs, making it possible for competitors to break
records in their life thirties, forties, and fifties. To see
a sixty year old run a sub ten second one

(01:05):
hundred meters that would really be tremendously impactful to our culture,
Desuza said. It would be the proof that life extension
through pharmaceuticals is possible, that the compounds work. The Enhanced Games,
of course, would sell the compounds. Desuza launched Enhance Games
in twenty twenty three alongside Christian Angermeier, a German biotech

(01:27):
billionaire and psychedelics advocate, with funding from Teel and Balaji
shrine Vasen, formerly a partner at venture capital firm Andreesen
Horowitz and author of a how to guide for creating
privatized nations the Network State. But nearly two years later,
the Games still had an announced a venue and only
a handful of retired athletes had signed up to compete.

(01:51):
It seemed destined to be another quixotic side project of
the Silicon Valley elite, like seasteading, a decade's old libertarian
obsession with make king privately owned, self declared sovereign territories
in international waters. Then Donald Trump was elected President of
the US. A month after his inauguration, the Games found

(02:11):
itself with the backing of the First Family via an
investment of undisclosed size from seventeen eighty nine Capital, a
venture capital fund where Donald Trump Junior is a partner.
The Enhanced Games has since abandoned its base in the UK,
which doesn't believe in the future, according to Desuza, in
favor of the US, the place where innovation happens. In May,

(02:35):
the Games announced its first competition will take place in
Las Vegas in May twenty twenty six, with money and
support from Silicon Valley and MAGA. The Enhanced Games embodies
a strange new alliance of two camps that should be
in conflict, the flag embracing science denying nationalists of the
Trump movement, and the biohacking, ketamine popping sperm racing immortality

(02:59):
chasing accelerationists of the tech sector. Its pitch is an
inconsistent mixture of scientific progress and populist ideology. Its brash, confrontational,
potentially dangerous, and probably the perfect sporting event for the
age of Trump human enhancement. In hindsight, there was a

(03:20):
Trumpian feel to the way The Enhanced Games was first
announced as much an attack on the institutions that govern athletics.
As a vision of a different future, DESUSA laid into
the international Olympic Committee and the World Anti Doping Agency
for what he described as bureaucracy, inefficiency, opposition to scientific progress,

(03:41):
and the exertion of monopoly power. The IOC president flies
around the world in a private jet. He lives in
a palace. Desuza told me the IOC system is designed
to benefit bureaucrats, not the athletes. An IOC spokesperson said
by email that the Olympic X finances are transparent and

(04:02):
that the IOC redistributes ninety percent of its revenue to
sport worldwide. They refer to a June ten joint statement
with WADA which said that the enhanced Games are a
betrayal of everything we stand for and that encouraging athletes
to use performance enhancing drugs is utterly irresponsible and immoral.

(04:23):
Anti doping policies have been in place in top level
sports since the nineteen sixties, but DESUSA argues that they
don't keep athletes safe, don't make sports any fairer, and
have held back scientific progress as well as maintaining an
economic stranglehold on athletics. The Olympics, because of their monopolistic structure,

(04:44):
has been able to put a technology cap on human
performance he said. Dsus's argument is that hyper competitive athletes
are always going to try to get an edge, which
means they will dope. A blanket band forces them to
experiment on themselves and use unlicensed treatments acquired on the
black market. DSUSA said that medically supervised drug use is

(05:07):
safer and in some ways more fair. Taking performance enhancing
substances in the open means no one is getting away
with secretly enhancing themselves, he said, and he believes pharmaceuticals
can help equalize the inequalities between athletes born in wealthier
countries and those who aren't. On top of that, it's

(05:27):
fair to say that the definitions of human enhancement can
be a bit arbitrary. In sports and in medicine, the
dividing line between what's considered therapeutic curing or preventing disease
and what's considered some kind of artificial change to the
human condition shifts constantly. Enhancement is part of medicine, it

(05:47):
always has been, said George Church, professor of genetics at
Harvard University. It's not just about fixing broken bones. It's
about protecting us from infectious diseases via vaccines, which is
certainly an enhancement relative to our ancestors. I think that
our nutrition, our education, all these things are enhancements. Church,

(06:09):
a pioneer of synthetic biology and noted wooly mammoth revivalist,
has endorsed the Enhanced Games and sits on its Scientific
Advisory Commission. The pursuit of longevity is just medicine. What
we call aging is the combination of genetic and epigenetic
factors that cause us to deteriorate and die. Sports, he said,

(06:30):
have historically been a testing ground for technology, and the
format of the Enhanced Games, where athletes are closely monitored,
could provide valuable data for researchers. If somebody finds an
improvement that really works, everybody should benefit from that. Church said.
The lack of widespread scientific interest or commercial support for

(06:51):
some types of human enhancement, whether off label use of
pharmaceuticals or hormones, or the wilder ends of the transhumanists
spectrum like brain computer interfaces and cryogenic freezing, has tended
to mean that those treatments get tested on and buy individuals,
small groups, scientific outliers, or wealthy obsessives. DESUSA thinks that

(07:15):
the Enhanced Games is a chance to bring these outliers
into the mainstream and create what he believes will become
a multi trillion dollar market for life extension within a decade.
Vast sums are spent in the US to make sick
people less sick, he said, but if medicine and scientific
technology were available to make healthy people extraordinary, how much

(07:38):
would that market be medical regime. To understand why an
elite athlete might decide to compete in an event that
effectively bars them from ever coming back to mainstream sports,
I spoke to the Ukrainian swimmer Andre Govaroff, who holds
the world record for the fifty meter butterfly. That event
was not previously included in the olympig schedule, but it

(08:01):
has been added for the twenty twenty eight Summer Games.
Goverov said he had dreamed of competing in the Olympics
since he was nine years old, and his first thought
was to try to score a place, but at thirty three,
he knew what it would cost physically and financially to
reach peak performance. When Goverov broke the world record at
the European Aquatics Championships in London in twenty sixteen, he

(08:24):
followed a brutal training regime, and he had a team,
two coaches, a doctor, a nutritionist, a massage therapist, and
a manager. In the run up to the event, he
was spending between ten thousand and seventeen thousand dollars a month.
Measured against that investment, the reward of victory seems poltry.

(08:44):
The Olympic Games dozen pay athletes directly for winning medals.
That's up to individual countries sports federations. At some point
the financial realities hit hard. Goverov said, sport gave me
a lot of opportunities, and I opened some how many
doors in my life as a world record holder. I've
met amazing people. I've met presidents, businessmen, I've visited many countries.

(09:08):
I've been in the top of the field, and financially
I couldn't make much, he said, and I started thinking, Okay,
I win the Olympic Games, best possible outcome. What am
I going to get? After a long negotiation, he signed
up to the Enhanced Games in May, likely ending any
hope he might have of competing in an Olympics. He

(09:29):
hasn't started a regime of enhancements yet. First, there's a
process of medical checks and monitoring to figure out the
best protocols, and the Enhanced Games medical teams will offer
advice on the best way to improve his performance, which
he can choose to follow or ignore. But his hope
is that the techniques and compounds will help with recovery,

(09:50):
letting him train harder. Participants in the Enhanced Games get
appearance fees as well as prize money. If Goverov breaks
his own record, he'll get a two hundred fifty thousand
dollars bonus. That's his plan. Win the event, break his
own record and set himself up for the future. How
many Olympic champions do we have already right now? Thousands?

(10:12):
Govarov said, Now I have an opportunity to be one
of the first traditional world record holders that could become
a superhuman athlete. So far, only four athletes have been
named as competitors in the Enhanced Games, all of them swimmers,
although DSUSA said that many others have expressed interest. The
inaugural three day competition will feature three core sports, swimming,

(10:36):
track and field, and weightlifting, with a handful of events
in each. The twenty twenty eight Summer Olympics will include
more than four hundred events across thirty five core sports
over two weeks. No sponsors or broadcast rights deals have
been announced, but DSUSA said that he's had interest from
pharmaceutical companies keen on the enhanced game's data. An Enhanced

(10:59):
Game spokesperson said that the company has engaged in positive
discussions with potential sponsors and broadcast partners, but has nothing
concrete to announce at this time, and added that such
deals aren't the primary way that the Enhanced games will
make money. Instead, we're looking forward to the upcoming launch
of our direct to consumer enhancement business, the spokesperson said.

(11:21):
Dogmatic resistance the Enhanced Games trolling of the sporting establishment
inevitably prompted a backlash. WADA called it a dangerous and
irresponsible concept. Sporting luminaries have decried it for endangering athletes
in ruining the spirit of sport, but it hasn't been
universally dismissed. The idea wasn't completely bonkers. Sylvia Camperezi, professor

(11:46):
of ethics and sports integrity at k U Leuvin University
in Belgium and a member of WADA's Ethics Advisory Group,
told me some of the questions that the enhanced games
posed were similar to those being discussed between US experts
in sports ethics, medicine, and biology. There's a long standing
debate about whether the strict anti doping policies that we

(12:08):
have in place with WATA are the most effective, she said.
While there can be dogmatic resistance to self experimentation in
the scientific community, and the line between therapy and enhancement
is often a value judgment, this is a live and
active discussion led by well respected, if occasionally fringy experts. Campereasi,

(12:30):
along with other experts in doping, enhancement, and sporting ethics
I spoke to, said that despite some reservations, they thought
the enhanced games might have something to offer to the debate.
But as the game's signal closer alignment with the Trump movement,
some of those experts views of the idea have darkened.
It seems that the project has become much broader. Camperezi said,

(12:54):
the game's backers in the administration and in Silicon Valley
are redefining what science means. They're smart, they've power and money,
and are dangerous. Among the most alarming of the shifts,
she said, is dsusa's embrace of Robert F. Kennedy, Junior,
sworn in as the U S Secretary of Health and
Human Services in February. Late last year, the Enhanced Game's

(13:19):
ex account approvingly posted a video of a shirtless Kennedy
doing push ups. DESUSA has praised Kennedy for his off
prescription use of testosterone injections as an anti aging treatment,
and said that Kennedy's attempts to disrupt the health care
system are aligned with the philosophy of the Enhanced Games.

(13:39):
Kennedy has been widely criticized by scientists and public health
professionals for promoting discredited theories linking vaccination to autism and
conspiracy theories about the COVID nineteen pandemic. The Food and
Drug Administration, which now falls under his purview, has previously
warned against using testosterone off precise description to slow aging.

(14:02):
The Trump administration has pursued a far reaching campaign against
America's scientific establishment, slashing funding to health and science and
cutting grants to universities. I put it to Desuza that
Kennedy's views on science seemed at odds with an organization
that purports to promote scientific endeavors. That's an interesting criticism.

(14:24):
But what I would point to is that Joe Biden
and his administration were anti science, right. He said, they
were against the Enhanced Games, and they didn't even consider
it properly. In March twenty twenty four, the White House
expressed deep concern about the Enhanced Games. The statement has
since been removed from the White House website. Our fundamental

(14:46):
rallying cry is my body, my choice, an individual with
free and informed consent to be able to do to
their body what they wish, and that is taken from
the pro choice movement, DSUSA said, And so I think
what we can agree, whether we're on the left or
on the right of politics, is that the fundamental human
right is not freedom of speech, it's not freedom of assembly.

(15:09):
It's the freedom over our own bodies, bodily sovereignty. And
if we don't have rights over our own body, then
what rights do we have. As for the attacks on
academia and other institutions, desusus's common cause between trump Ism
and the Games. The core of the Trump movement in
the US is a skepticism of what I call the

(15:30):
alphabet soup, NATO, the World Economic Forum, the WHO, the IOC.
He said, what do all these have in common their
European run, left wing globalist institutions that are bureaucratic and unaccountable,
that are paid for in one way or another by
the US taxpayer accelerationism. Trump's attacks on institutions are a

(15:53):
large part of what made MAGA so appealing to Silicon Valley.
If Silicon Valley has ever had a politics, it has
been that of techno optimism and tech above all, closely
twinned with an anti institutionalism, a resentment or dismissal of
bureaucracies and old institutions, said Margaret O'Mara, a history professor

(16:13):
at the University of Washington an author of the Code
Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. This goes very
far back, and it isn't necessarily right wing coded. Until
very recently, the tech above all philosophy has been supercharged
by the vast amounts of money slashing around Silicon Valley,
creating a class of entrepreneurs and investors with unprecedented levels

(16:37):
of wealth. These are people who have an absolutely staggering
amount of money, O'Mara said. When you're astoundingly rich, it's very,
very hard to keep a kind of tether on reality
that combination of cash and vivid imaginations has fed the
growth of accelerationism and related Silicon Valley philosophies geared at

(16:57):
going hell for leather on technology, whether artificial intelligence, life extension,
or Martian colonization. Almost or entirely, regardless of the near
term risks, human enhancement is a common threat across most
of these subcultures. The key, absolutely central feature of these
ideologies is that they are pro extension. Emil Torres, a

(17:21):
philosopher who studies the ideologies of the tech sector, told
me the enhanced games is part of this. I mean
its encouraging people to modify themselves, to take a step
towards becoming posthuman. As prevalent as these ideas are within
the tecalite, their proponents have historically tempered their evangelism in

(17:41):
the interest of making money, but as a critical mass
of wealth and power has built behind them. More recently,
accelerationism and technolibertarianism have started to feel less like ideas
and more like political movements. In twenty twenty three, Andres
and Horowitz co founder Marc Andreesen published a much shared

(18:02):
five thousand word Accelerationist prose poem titled the Techno Optimist Manifesto.
We believe that we are, have been, and will always
be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology. He wrote.
We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature.

(18:22):
We are not primitives cowering in fear of the lightning bolt.
We are the apex predator. The lightning works for us.
It's not a utopian manifesto, but rather one shot through
with attacks on the institutions and ideas that stand in
the way of its imagined future, including socialism, bureaucracy, anti greatness,

(18:44):
and a mass demoralization campaign comprised of concepts like existential risk, sustainability,
and tech ethics. It's really embittered and dark and apocalyptic,
O'Mara said of the manifesto and the movement it represents,
and there's kind of a personal edge to it. Since

(19:04):
Trump's election, the politics around accelerationism have become even more confrontational, conspiratorial,
and grandiose. See Teal's January letter to the Financial Times
about the coming apocalypsis of revelation under Trump or Meticeo.
Mark Zuckerberg's out zuck aut Nihil t shirt a play

(19:24):
on the motto of the famously megamoniacal Renaissance prince Chesaret
Borgia either Caesar or Nothing and his laments about the
lack of masculine energy in corporate America, or Elon Musk,
the world's richest man, directing personal attacks against his enemies
on the platform he owns while dismantling the American government

(19:46):
from within. The parallels with Trumpism, particularly second term trump
ISM's focus on retribution and the destruction of institutions are obvious.
But while members of the Tecalite are embedded in the
ad miss the politics of the Accelerationists aren't necessarily right
wing or libertarian. They're more driven by the need to

(20:08):
attack anything or anyone that stands in the way of
their visions of the future. It's a philosophy that can
make common cause with a health secretary who opposes vaccines,
because while dismantling health regulations and deregulating medicine might risk lives,
it also gets rid of the barriers to experimentation that
might slow down the development of technology. The transhumanist movement

(20:33):
and the human enhancement movement, they've always advocated for taking
down regulations and letting individuals make their own choices, said
Francisco Javier Lopez Frias, who researches sports in human enhancement
at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches a course on
the idea of autonomy. But that is, I think, a
very perverse way to look at the world, one that

(20:56):
of course works very well for privileged people who can
protect themselves potential rewards. It is using this narrow definition
of autonomy that the Enhanced Games can claim to be
bringing fairness and safety to sport. But it's an argument
that doesn't entirely hold up to expert scrutiny. If the

(21:16):
Enhanced Games succeeds in disrupting world sport and normalizing enhancements
in athletics, it's more likely that the price of entry
into sport would go up, not down. Only those with
the best medical advice and the best drug regime would
be able to compete for the top prizes. In that
version of success, the choice to use drugs or not

(21:37):
would be skewed by market forces. The potential rewards of
professional enhanced sports would create incentives for athletes looking for
a shot at the money to turn to black market
treatments or become guinea pigs for untested compounds. Human bodies
have always been subject to the market, mostly to the
detriment of poorer people, which is why organ doniations and

(22:00):
medical trials are highly regulated for now. I put this
to Desuza. At first, he responded with an attack on
the IOC's finances, but when pushed on the idea that
the Enhanced game's view of enhanced humanity seems to be
an elitist one, that it's a pathway to pay to
play immorality, he responded, so can we fix all the

(22:23):
problems that there are in the world. No, we can't,
But he argued, if the wealthiest members of society can
stay alive and productive longer, they'll contribute more, paying more taxes.
Good luck with that, and making society better able to
support its poorer members. It's this gamble that getting rid

(22:43):
of the things that make the majority safe in the
hope that an outsider elite will create a better world.
That allides trump ism, accelerationism, and enhanced sports. For those
like Torres who have spent years tracking how the promises
of Silicon Valley play out, those are long odds. There's
no reason to believe that these individuals are going to

(23:04):
share these technologies, are going to make them available, or
distribute them in an egalitarian manner, they said. The apocalyptic
tone of the Accelerationists, with their survival compounds, underground bunkers
and public musings about human survival have started to infect
some of their critics too. Either all of humanity loses

(23:27):
or most of humanity loses, Torres said. The situation where
most of humanity loses, that is what they call utopia,