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When the Enhanced Games were first announced in 2023, I thought it was a joke. A privatized Olympics in which doping was encouraged, founded by three gay transhumanists - Peter Thiel, Christian Angermeyer and Aron D’Souza? Surely it was some sort of Situationist stunt, or a side-plot in a Pynchon novel.
Yet the joke has legs. Last year, Australian former world champion swimmer James Magnusson declared on a podcast that he would come out of retirement, ‘juice up’ and break his own 50 metre freestyle world record, for one million dollars. The Enhanced Games accepted the challenge, Magnussen put on five kilograms of muscle in a week, then tried to break his record in a swimming pool in North Carolina. He didn’t succeed, but another Enhanced Games athlete, Kristian Gkolomeev, did.
Now, the Enhanced Games has announced it will hold its inaugural games in Las Vegas next year; 12 athletes, either retired or near the end of their careers, have signed up; and new investors have come on board, notably Donald Trump Junior’s 1789 Capital. Don Jr declared: ‘The Enhanced Games represent the future – real competition, real freedom, real records being smashed.’ And real drugs being injected.
Needless to say, the Games have attracted controversy, quickly getting dubbed the ‘Steroid Olympics’. When World Aquatics, USA Swimming and the World Anti-Doping Agency said any athletes who competes in the Enhanced Games would be banned from mainstream events, the Enhanced Games responded with a lawsuit claiming $800 million in damages.
What’s the real goal of the Enhanced Games? There’s a purported reason (replace the Olympics), an ideological reason (advance transhumanism), and a commercial reason (create a libertarian telehealth market for enhancement drugs).
The purported rationale of the Enhanced Games is to out-compete and overshadow the Olympics. Enhanced Games CEO Aron D’Souza says the Olympics is ripe for competition, for two reasons. It’s hypocritical and untransparent, as doping is so widespread; and it’s economically unfair, as most world-class athletes make less than $30,000 a year. He thinks the Enhanced Games can create a fairer and more popular alternative.
This purported reason doesn’t make much sense. The Enhanced Games is hardly committed to economic justice - it’s only open to the very best athletes who might break world records, and they already have plenty of cash. And it’s unlikely to replace the Olympics, the oldest and most successful brand in human history, because the Olympics appeals to both nationalist and internationalist passions. A crypto-libertarian circus in Las Vegas can’t really compete with that.
The Next Human Agenda
The ideological reason for the Enhanced Games, meanwhile, is to promote transhumanism, or what Enhanced Games co-founder Christian Angermeyer calls the ‘Next Human Agenda’.
Transhumanism is a century-old post-Darwinian evolutionary religion, dedicated to transcending homo sapiens and creating God-like superhumans through technology.
Transhumanism has a PR problem: it’s seen as a weird Darwinian religion of the wealthy tech elite, who worship themselves as gods while seeing the rest of us as unevolved morons. One sees a bit of this Social Darwinian elitism in the Enhanced Games founders. D’Souza has said:
enhanced humans are better than ordinary humans…I would estimate today that only 0.1% of people identify as being an enhanced human…are you a human 2.0 or are you a human 1.0?
Christian Angermayer, meanwhile, has suggested humanity will split into two species in the near future - god-like intergalactic immortals and the unenhanced left-behind. If you’re wondering which side of the bifurcation he’ll be on, his London penthouse apartment is decorated with sculptures and paintings of Greek gods (as well as copies of the Forbes issue showing his place on the world rich list).
This religion-for-the-rich doesn’t sound very appealing to the 99.9% who don’t consider themselves ‘enhanced’, and there’s already a growing MAGA backlash to transhumanism, led by figures like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.
So why not create a PR spectacle to celebrate transhumanism and bring it to the lumpenproles? The Enhanced Games in Vegas will be one such PR exercise, alongside other stunts like a ‘declaration of enhancement’ signed by 50 enhancement experts last year.
These stunts are part of a strategy to open the Overton Window and get the masses excited about what Christian Angermeyer calls the Next Human Agenda. He has written, in an essay called The Future is Enhanced:
We are entering a golden age of human enhancement, where individuals will seek to greatly improve their functional capabilities - at physical, cognitive, and emotional levels.
This golden age is already here, Angermayer argues, with the widespread adoption of anti-obesity drugs like Ozempic (which he uses himself to keep in shape), and other enhancement drugs like Ritalin, Modafinil, and psychedelics. He’s the largest investor in psychedelics, through his company atai, in which Peter Thiel was an early investor.
I think Angermayer is right that we will increasingly use drugs to improve our lives rather than simply to recover from sickness. And that’s fine, as long as the consumer has all the information and advice they need to make good long-term decisions rather than being exploited by predatory companies.
Transhumanist telehealth
The commercial goal of the Enhanced Games is a telehealth platform for the enhancement products Angermayer thinks we will soon all be taking.
‘We use sports marketing to sell a human enhancement product’, D’Souza said on a recent episode of Equity. ‘It’s a telehealth service like Hims or Roman, except we [will] have evidence that the best and fastest athletes in the world use our protocols.’
The idea is, the viewers watch a superman break the 100 metre record, then they log onto the Enhanced Games website and buy the Performance Enhancing Drugs used by the athlete. Democratized transhumanism. You too can be an ubermensch.
Their first products, already listed on their website although not quite ready to order yet, are various Testosterone Enhancement products - injectables, creams and so on.
These are marketed towards the small percentage of middle-aged and older men who might experience testosterone deficiency and ‘ubermensch droop’.
But of course, the real market is much bigger, if you can appeal to all the men who want to get jacked-up through ‘t-maxxing’ without having to put in hours at the gym.
Or indeed the growing number of mid-life women taking testosterone to increase energy and libido.
The platform could also stock the full range of enhancement drugs - Ritalin, Ozempic, Modafinil, maybe even MDMA, psilocybin, and 5-meo-DMT?
This could be the future of the $1.5 trillion drug market: enhancement drugs sold on telehealth platforms and marketed by influencers and streaming spectacles. The Silk Road meets WWF.
After the paywall, the replacement of public health with a crypto-libertarian free market for drugs, and does RFK, the jacked-up Secretary for Health and Human Services, get roid rage?
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