The Steroid Olympics Backfired. Here's What It Proves About Human Performance

Billionaires backed an all-drug athletic event to market peptides and testosterone to the public. Two journalists went inside the games before, during, and after. We learn what they found.

Quick note before we start: We ran a poll at the bottom of yesterday’s post about podcast emails. Please take it if you haven’t.

Let’s play a fun hypothetical: What if you juiced a roster of athletes to the gills with performance-enhancing drugs and let them compete for millions in prize money? This may sound like something college students dream up in a dorm room while stoned out of their minds.

But it actually just happened a few weeks ago. That’s the Enhanced Games, the billionaire-backed “Steroid Olympics” held in Las Vegas. And the results? Well. They weren’t what investors expected.

In today’s episode, I sat down with journalists Chris Gayomali and Sam Eagan, hosts of the Superhuman podcast, a 6-part limited series. They were embedded with the Enhanced Games’ founders, athletes, and scientists before, during, and after the event.

Despite being hyped as the future of human performance, almost no world records fell at the Enhanced Games. In many cases, drug-free athletes beat the juiced ones.

Within about a day, it became clear the event was really a marketing engine for selling testosterone and peptides to the public, and a glimpse of how we’re increasingly being sold a frictionless, “enhanced” version of ourselves—all for the swipe of a credit card.

This episode covers the aftermath of the Enhanced Games, what we learned from them, and questions about where health and wellbeing are headed in the brave new world of internet peptide and TRT companies with giant advertising budgets.

Watch the episode

Listen to the episode

• This link opens the episode in your podcast player of choice.

Show notes

• Listen to the SuperHuman podcast, a 6-episode series about the Enhanced Games: Apple Podcasts or Spotify

• Sam’s website.

• Chris’ website.

• Enanced.com

• Anabolic-Androgenic Steroid Use in Sports, Health, and Society; ASCM position stand.

My Biggest Takeaways From the Episode

As a reminder, this new section is for Members only. Below are 8 of the highest-impact, most actionable takeaways from the episode, including:

• The scientific flaws inside the Enhanced Games’ research model, and how to spot fake data in the wild.

• The draconian, 24/7 surveillance state rulebook that forces world-class athletes to look for alternative systems.

• Why the modern wellness industry’s obsession with making life “easier” is actively sabotaging your psychological and physical resilience.

• Chris and Sam’s unfiltered breakdown of safety, when tools like NAD+ and peptides are actually justified, and the one foundational habit you cannot out-inject.