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Chapter 1: What are the Enhanced Games and how do they differ from the Olympics?
Last weekend's enhanced games in Las Vegas. Think the Olympics on drugs, organized by a company that sells performance enhancers used by the athletes who were in fact real athletes.
Most of them had the bad luck of turning 30, but you know, they still feel like they have a little bit more in the tank. It was a mess. It was the kookiest thing I've ever been to in person. They built this large outdoor stadium in Resorts World, which is this collection of casinos over there. But they neglected to put a roof over it. It was over 90 degrees.
The sprinters were just like asked to race on this like hot track that I don't think you can like put human skin onto. And then the swimmers did fine. You know, you're in the pool. And like the atmosphere was less the Olympic Games and more like a Tao pool party, I think.
On Today Explained, the organizers of the Enhanced Games want to enhance you.
This is Today Explained.
Chris Guyomaly, a journalist who covers health, wellness, and human augmentation, says athletes at the Games took performance-enhancing drugs, or PEDs, provided by a company called Enhanced.
They actually, like, came out of the gate a couple years ago really hot. They were like, we're going to dope up all these people and let them take whatever they want. And it's going to be this free for all.
We're building the modern version of the Olympic Games that importantly pays all athletes and does not have chart testing.
But over the course of the next couple of years, they realized that was actually not a very business savvy move. So they moderated their messaging quite severely.
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Chapter 2: What performance-enhancing drugs are allowed in the Enhanced Games?
Did any of them break any world records?
You know, what was really funny, the whole night, we were just watching all these events, weightlifters in the hot sun. It looks a little bit slow is all. Not coming close to the world record. Yeah. Sprinters misfiring, not coming close. And then the very last event, which was the men's 50 meter freestyle, like that very last race, that last thing in the night.
They broke the world record and you could see the sigh of relief, like overcome all the executives who were invested in this thing.
There was like, yes, we got one world record out of this thing.
New world record!
Yeah, it was kind of hotly contested online whether the record like mattered or not. But I think they were just like excited that someone broke it.
In the final events, we have our first world record. We have an idea that performance enhancing drugs are cheating and therefore it has always been against the rules to use performance enhancing drugs. And yet I realize as I say this, I have no idea if that's true. Has that always been the case?
It's actually a pretty recent invention that performance-enhancing drugs are seen as cheating. There's kind of this line that I was interested in investigating between what is an enhancement and what isn't. And in my research, I learned that the World Anti-Doping Agency, which is WADA, they actually came to fruition after this debacle at the 1998 Tour de France.
Basically what happened is French officials found a car full of PEDs from someone associated with the French racing team. And in doing so, the cops were in this weird position. It was like, do we enforce this? Do we not? And so the IOC, which is the International Olympic Committee, they were like, All the countries were like, we don't want this to happen to us in the future.
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Chapter 3: What are the motivations of athletes participating in the Enhanced Games?
Some people are going to get wildly rich selling a thing, creating a thing. The rest of us will use the thing but will not ever be trillionaires. And that just is the way of the world right now. Am I misreading who these guys are, who they belong to?
No, no, that's exactly it. And you have to imagine that, you know, the enhanced target audience, right, is a guy who goes on YouTube, he's maybe he's in his like late 30s, feeling some knee pain, and he's googling around for like ways to feel younger and get served an ad then goes down a rabbit hole. And it's like, huh, I would very much like to like to try this thing out and
Like order something like I did in the middle of the night just to see if it works. And what was interesting about it is at the games themselves, like they, it was invite only. You couldn't secure a ticket even if you wanted to attend this thing. And half the people that Enhance invited, I kid you not, were like Gen Z content creators who looked very much to be teenagers in some ways.
Guys, I'm getting ready. We're going to the Enhance. And I was like, if you're marketing this thing to like washed millennials who have
who can't sleep at night why are you inviting the the kid who's doing a fortnight dance like on the right outside the pool and like getting filmed by all his buddies like that's just an affront to being a wash dad you know what i mean so
But it makes you wonder, yes, this is a very good observation on your part. It makes you wonder whether they know who their customer is and whether they will, in fact, succeed. Because all of the beauty and the maxing and the mogging, people are very, very into it right now, especially young people. Washed millennials are just trying to get out of bed in the morning. That's where I'm at.
Same, same. My God. Yeah.
And so do these guys know who their target audience is, one? And two, do you think this succeeds? Do you think this business, this type of business becomes the next big thing?
When I've posed this question to them several times over the last year, the goalpost was always moving. The short answer is like, it's for everyone. And to my mind, it's like your healthiest market is probably the washed millennials, the people who are starting to run marathons in their 50s, like that sort of thing.
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