Limitless Podcast - Encouraging Athletes to Take Steroids: Bryan Johnson's Enhanced Games

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

In this episode, we discuss the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas, where athletes were allowed to use performance-enhancing drugs under medical supervision, including the event format, prizes, and rules. We also highlight a new world record swim in the men’s 50-meter freestyle, other event winners, and the mixed results for enhanced versus natural athletes. Finally, we look at the event’s business side and its connection to biotech, AI, and future enhancement and medicine.------🌌 LIMITLESS HQ ⬇️NEWSLETTER:    https://limitlessft.substack.com/FOLLOW ON X:   https://x.com/LimitlessFTSPOTIFY:             https://open.spotify.com/show/5oV29YUL8AzzwXkxEXlRMQAPPLE:                 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/limitless-podcast/id1813210890RSS FEED:           https://limitlessft.substack.com/------TIMESTAMPS0:00 Enhanced Games Unveiled2:58 Can Drugs Break Records?5:34 Rules, Stacks, Side Effects7:59 Ethics Of Enhancement9:47 Natural Winners14:12 The Business17:35 Biotech Acceleration21:31 What It Means For Sports------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/JoshKaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

So we have the regular Olympics. On this show, we've covered the Robot Olympics, and now we have the enhanced Olympics. An Olympic competition that just happened last weekend that offered $7 million in prizes to the top athletes in the world. But these are not normal athletes. Because the difference with the enhanced Olympics, the enhanced competition, is that you're allowed to take whatever performing enhancing drugs that you want. In fact, on screen, you could see the before and after of what an Olympic swimmer looks

like prior to the enhanced Olympics. And currently afterwards, he looks like a month. This is a man that goes by the name the Missile. And on this episode, we're going to cover basically everything that went down at this new futuristic pseudo-dispopian Olympic event. We are fully kidded out in our athletic gear today. We are ready to talk all things superhuman. Is the ceiling actually higher because people dope?

Or is there some unexpected outcomes that we're going to cover? I think the latter might be a little sure EJA. I know both of us were tuned into this this weekend. It's a really bizarre thing, but I think a really cool learning experience to see the impact that drugs have on super athletes. Yeah, my social media timeline looked very different over the weekend and I couldn't figure out why. This guy was plastered everywhere. His name is James the Missal Magnuson and he's an Australian swimmer. He never actually won any kind of a significant medal at the Olympics at least. And he came back out of retirement to participate in these games.

So what are these games? Over this weekend, a bunch of billionaires got together including Peter Thiel and Balagie, and they said, okay, let's try and recreate the Olympics, but have no restrictions on doping. So typically at the Olympics, you have something called the anti-doping agency. They have a set of rules of all performance-enhancing drugs and substances that you can't use to perform at the highest level. So it's just human, no enhancement at all. They took that and completely flipped the script, allowing pretty much anyone and everyone to enhance themselves. And the idea was, how far can we push the human body? What records can be beaten when we use these different types of substances. So it took place in Vegas. There were around

36 events in total and a huge cash price, $7 million, as you mentioned earlier on. Now, the breakdown of this is pretty simple. If you break a world record being on enhanced performance drugs, or if you just break a record in general, you win $1 million. If you win your own in vet category, you win $250K. So it really stacks up. And I think this is like the largest payout of any sporting event in recent history. So the way this played out was it took place in Vegas over the course of four days, including the weekend, and it takes place over three specific event categories. So you've got swimming, you've got track, you've got weightlifting, plus a strongman deadlift exhibition. All of the athletes performing can be on performance and arts and drugs. But there's a twist. If you want to perform and you are a previous world record holder and you don't want to engage in any of the drugs, you can also do that and see how you fare against the enhanced versions of these athletes. Seven million dollars on the line in total. And this was the first. first sanction drug doping event in modern sports history. So we got to start with the answering the question that everyone wants to know, which is does it actually make a difference?

And on the surface, the answer is obviously, yes, the first person we're going to talk about is this guy named Christian. I'm not going to try to pronounce this last name, who raced and won the 50 meter men's freestyle in 20.81 seconds, which is 7 tenths of a second faster than the world record. So that was a really strong start. In fact, this was actually the conclusion of it. This was the last event.

and Christian wound up taking home $1.5 million from the bonuses and awards that he won. Now, for better or worse, that is, the beginning and the end of the world records that were broken. There was only one. It was this one. It happened at the very end of the race. And it poses a series of really interesting questions because another example that we have is this guy, Half Thor. And I think a lot of people know him as just the mountain. That's his nickname.

And he is one of the world record holders for deadlifting. He tried to do a world record deadlift attempt at the enhanced games, it didn't work, he got very close. This is a painful video to watch because that is an insane amount of weight, 515 kilograms, and unfortunately could not get it lifted. And there was this one interesting counter argument, which was one of the people that actually won an event totally natural. I just want to go back to this Christian guy for a second. So he's the only PED enhanced athlete that not only broke the record, but came away with the most money, $1.5 million. He performed.

formed in four Olympics previously. He performed for Greece, and he didn't medal a single time. So this guy that has suddenly broken a world record that has stood the test of time, 20.81 seconds, was able to kind of prove the thesis that, like, if you are able to enhance yourself, you can achieve a higher fit. I also want to, like, take a moment to laugh at this for a second. This is like a disco. This is like a club.

You just never see this in the Olympics. I just find that hilarious. So other kind of medal winners that we have here, there was Cody Miller. He was a Vegas local. He won the breaststroke event. We've got Fred Curley, two-time Olympic medalist. He won the men's 100 meters race in 9.97 seconds.

He won 250K. He won the event, but he didn't break any kind of record. Megan Romano on the female category, Women's 100 freestyle, and Tristan Evelyn won the women's 100 meters on track. And Marius Cush won the Butterfly event, each took home 250K each. So there was a bunch of very impressive feats,

fast and quick times, but not necessarily too many records broken. And in the case of there being event winners, they actually ended up being ones that won on performance-enhancing drugs. And before we get into the all-natural winner, we should talk about the rules that feels important, or perhaps the lack there of rules. Basically anything that you could put into your body

so long as it is FDA approved is allowed. It must be taken under medical supervision and every single dose and ingredients. must be published prior to competing. That's it. Other than that, it's free range. And what we saw is that 62% of athletes actually stacked three or more of these substances on top of each other to chain the effects together, with the most popular one being testosterone. 91% of the people who competed on this were on testosterone. We saw it in the clip of the missile and how big he got so quickly. That's where a lot of that comes from. Second to that is human growth hormone,

79% of athletes did that. And then the third most popular, which I found interesting, We're stimulants. 62% of the athletes who competed use stimulants. That includes things like Adderall, which is an enphetamine. It gets you all hyped up. And also, medaphanil, which is another one on the list. I'm not super familiar with these, but there are a lot of risks that come with these, using these together, with compounding them.

And the big question is, is like, are these worth it? And the answers that we received are a little questionable. Now, we have these funny examples that I saw of people who really stacked these very hard. One of them, we have a clip from Brian Johnson here that we're going to show, which talks about how one of the athletes, the missile, he actually took so many substances that he started sinking in the water because he became so dense. And it didn't quite work out for him that well

because he came in last place, unfortunately. And it's funny, they were measuring these dosages and they had to start moving over to horse measuring tools because it set off the limit for what humans are actually allowed to do. And it's almost funny seeing how far these athletes will go with seemingly low returns. I mean, even down to the base, There's this really funny example of a video where one of these swimmers, it takes 27 minutes to actually get the bathing suit on their body fully because they have to include powder all over it and they need three people to help pull it up because they're very tight. It basically turns them into a seal. So the optimizations for that final like 0.1% of edge are all in play. And it's just, it's really fascinating to see. I'm not surprised to see Brian Johnson here commentating on this. Like he spends his entire life. His whole brand is just to kind of like,

optimizes life for health and fitness. And that's basically the thesis for this entire enhanced games, like this enhanced Olympics. It's like how far can we push the human body and its limits to go to? Now, it's interesting. I looked up the rulebook for these games and there isn't one. In fact, when you go into the official site or any, it's official Wikipedia page at least,

it basically says it is the complete opposite to what the anti-doping agency states for any kind of Olympic or actual sporting event. So I found that pretty hilarious, and it brings up the question of, like, should humans be using these drugs or should they not? Like, what's the moral ethic behind it? Now, the obvious answer for many people or the majority of people will probably be like, you know, you shouldn't be able to take a drug-enhancing kind of like medication. You should just kind of like perform in your natural fervor. But this has been kind of disputed a lot and it's actually changed a lot over time. So if you look at like what the anti-doping agency kind of like positioned, where it positioned itself a decade.

to go versus where it prescences itself for now, it's now enabled a bunch of different kinds of drugs or compounds to be used. So it's always evolved over time. And I guess the question that the enhanced games is trying to answer is, should we have any of these rules in the first place? Like what constitutes a safe substance? What constitutes as an unsafe substance? You'll see here, like, in the rule book, they say that, like, you can't use anything and everything. And the things that are FDA approved, you need to state what substances you've taken, what the doses, dosages are so that they have a kind of like experimental lab kind of feel. Like I can't help but think that like the sponsors for the show or the investors for this show are

biotech companies that are just doing this not for the sporting history or the prominence that comes from that. It's more to like kind of like use them as lab rats to try and figure out, you know, what compounds they should be building themselves. And there's a really interesting point that we want to make on the business side of things. But before we do that, there is a narrative break. So you would expect the people that use these different kinds of drugs to perform better than the people that don't. But that ended up not being the case, not just in one event, but in many different cases. But let's just take this one example. Hunter Armstrong shows up. He's a two-time Olympic gold medalist and a former world record

holder and he performs in the 50-meter backstroke, right? This is a very, you know, highly competitive event. And he ends up winning it. He didn't take a single PED performance in an arts and drug and he beat all the guys, including I believe James the Missile Magnuson, who is that beefed up guy that we showed earlier. So it just goes to show that like, one of two things. One, maybe the performance enhancing drugs don't actually enhance you for the particular sport that you're trying to do. Maybe bigger muscle doesn't actually help. It's more technique. But then the other question that comes to my mind is, were the non-enhanced athletes already on the drugs beforehand? And maybe like, they've just kind of like increased it to a level that's kind of close to what is legal or illegal,

and they were able to still win anyhow. It's a, it's an interesting question. There's like these two outstanding questions, right? One is that one that the actual games posed, which is, are Olympic athletes already doping and they're just hiding it very well? Their assumption is yes. Their assumption is that 44% of Olympic athletes are actually doping as we speak. And they're doing this on the regular basis. And that's how they're getting exceptional results. The other side of this is that enhanced athletes don't even perform at an Olympic level. Because it would effectively mean, based on the results of this event, that the physical ceiling of a lot of athletes is baked into more their genetics versus their ability to stack it on using growth enhancers.

Because most of these races that we talked about, they didn't even break Olympic world records, let alone world records. So a lot of the records weren't broken, even given the sheer amount of perceived advantage they would have from taking these drugs. And I think that's really noteworthy is the idea that possibly, like humans, maybe you just need to be born as an elite level athlete and you could train to get to the maximum of your own potential, but taking a certain amount of drugs will not get you somewhere that you are not biologically able to do yet. And I think that's probably the takeaway from the first Olympic Games is that you can maybe improve yourself a little bit, but based on the results we're seeing, I mean, people who didn't

take any performance enhancing drugs were winning these events. And the only world record that was broken was won, and it was by seven tenths of a second. So, it's very small margins here. We're right on the frontier and there isn't a clear signal that taking all these drugs actually makes a meaningful difference. Now granted, these are the FDA approved drugs. These are not the experimental peptides that we see a lot of people talking about. This is not that next generation of drugs. So we'll see how these games evolve over the years. But right now, the data is a little questionable. There's this amazing quote from Fred Curley, who's a guy or athlete that competed in the 100 meter sprint and he refused to. He refuses to,

take any of these drugs and he ended up winning the event despite not taking any of the drugs with a 9.97 second beat. But he goes, everyone needs to train harder and use the drugs better too. So the point he's making is like essentially like drugs aren't everything to win this kind of like type of an event or sporting competition at least. And a lot goes into kind of like training and prepping yourself. And we kind of see this with the people that like are very open and transparent, about using steroids to kind of like enhance their physique, they do still put in a lot of work. I kind of think of,

I don't know if you know this guy, Josh, Chris Bumstead. He's like this guy that's competed in a lot of like male Olympics when it comes to like, you know, muscle mass and like those types of competition. He's been very open about this kind of stuff and he puts in so much work. I've spent like so much time watching his YouTube videos and stuff. And it's the same thing happening in these events. Like just because you take these drugs doesn't mean you're automatically going to win, when you need to put in the effort.

And you can get out competed by. people who put in more effort than you. Yeah, they're freaks of nature. And it's interesting to see, I wonder what would happen if we took those Olympic athletes and we gave them doping access, like the gold medalists of all these events. What would it look like if they were given a little extra edge? Would it make a material difference? I don't know. Maybe one day we'll see as this frontier gets pushed even forward. I want someone to like come in that isn't like retired for 20 years, which is what a lot of these guys were. Like I want to see them come out of like their prime and use some of these drugs and see whether that works. I guess a lot of that is dependent on like future

versions of this competition. Yeah. And then there's this whole second part of this competition too, which is getting down to the kind of reason why this even exists in the first place. I mentioned Peter Thiel is one of the elite investors. This took place in Vegas. This also, one thing that's noteworthy that we haven't mentioned yet is the fact that it took place in Vegas outside in the end of May. It was hot, so hot that they had to cover the barbells because they were getting too hot to even hold. A lot of athletes, they train and very controlled indoor environment. So having to compete outdoor in the very, very high heat, fully exposed to the sun is a disadvantage. But the business that put this on is, I think, part of the story that a lot of people

are glazing over because this very much is a business. This is not just a for fun philanthropic venture. This is a company with a goal. And that is clearly based on their website to sell you supplements or to actually trade at a higher valuation because it's public. But as you were scrolling through the website earlier to just get a little bit more information. And it's funny. The first thing that you see when you visit the website is a button that says get enhanced and they're selling a series of performance enhancing drugs that you can go and buy based on this brand. So it's interesting to note the economic incentives as well for holding an event like this. Yeah, you would think that when you go to a sporting athletic association's website, that they would probably talk something about

the competition and like explain kind of like the philosophy, the thesis, the vision behind this entire thing. It's one of the greatest competitive traits of history. And over here, they're just trying to sell your product. I don't even know what these products do, by the way, but they're trying to sell you the products that these athletes are taking you as a regular individual that may not be competing at the highest level or have any interest in competing at the highest level. You're immediately hit with a get enhanced button, and you can view this menu of these random compounds, which most of these compounds I don't know how to pronounce, I don't know what they will do, and you can buy it in the same way that I buy my protein powder, and I have it on subscription, and you can take it. I don't know

what effects these will have, but the point is this seems like a biotech company advertising their product disguised as a sporting event. And that kind of takes away from the authenticity and the excitement that comes from this and reinforces the point that I made earlier, which is this seems like a worldwide kind of lab experiment to try and see whether their drugs actually do do do well and if not what went wrong and how they can improve it. Maybe they do genetic testing and all those kinds of things. And so another thing I discovered is if you go to the investor tab of this website, you'll notice a stock ticker on the left over here. And so So I was like, what is this stock ticker?

Is this company public? And it turns out it is. The enhanced games is basically part of a SPAC. So they were like acquired under the ticker, E-N-H-A. And they basically started effectively trading about a couple of months ago. And in the last month, it is taken an absolute beta. The complete value of this entire corporation is down almost 50%.

So it signals a few things. one, that the general public's confidence in this type of competition isn't too high, isn't too favorable, which I guess makes sense. The majority of people are used to the Olympics. They care about ethics and they care about the fact that these humans are performing and their natural form. People aren't really open to PEDs or they're not really, they have a bad taste in their mouth about what these things actually do.

They see it as a bad thing. But just interesting to see the financial incentives that are put in by these four billionaires, Balaji, Peter Thiel, and a number of others that are trying to kind of boost this, mainly as a sales narrative versus a sporting achievement. Yeah, and I wish the stock was actually the other direction, because I think it's very admirable trying new things, shifting the Overton window in ways that a lot of people don't expect, making it acceptable to test an experiment on yourself.

And this is very much, I mean, we talk a lot about AI on the show. This is very much a world that gets empowered and accelerated by AI. I think when we think about a lot of the largest investments that are coming right now, even from within Open AI and Anthropic, and other large companies like Eli Lilly and Andreessen Horowitz, they're all spending a lot of time figuring out the best ways to contribute to the world of biotech, to understanding genome sequencing, to investing in biotech accelerators, anything that can really move the needle forward.

In fact, Eli Lilly and Andreson Horowitz launched a half a billion dollar fund just for AI biotech to help accelerate the rate at which we discover these new breakthroughs. And one of the things that we're going to be seeing as we progress through this is the increased cadence of trials that not only go to trial, but then pass trial, because we're able to do so much for the testing through these large language models versus having to wait for human trials that take many, many years. So the rate of acceleration that we're going to see these types improvements, maybe now just for sport because it's fun to watch, but then also for just general well-being of humans, it's probably going to accelerate fairly quickly, and all of these initiatives

are all pushing the same direction. And I think you're right. And I don't think it's just going to surface in the form of athletics. It's going to surface in the form of self-care and even like, prevention of diseases forming or even just treating diseases directly. I think immediately of isomorphic labs, which is basically Google's AI-powered drug lab, which just spun out and raised, I think, $2.1 billion from Thrive. Their whole thing is they attach Google's leading protein sequencing model to a drug design module, and it basically spits out, it evaluates your genome, it sequences it, and then it spits out a perfected design of a drug that could prevent major diseases from occurring. Now, the one major kind of like

feat that it's achieved so far is the drugs that it's designed that has been tested and built in a lab have already passed a number of the different obstacles way more than an average drug does for testing to go to human trials. So it's already, the technology is already proving itself. Just a bunch of these drugs haven't hit the public market yet because they're going through human trials right now. So I expect there to be a shift in the future where people go from like, not having certainty around how to treat a particular disease or problem will cure to having full confidence in doing that. And in fact, leaning into it, you know, if you could have a personalized drug for yourself versus for me, for some particular ailment that we're feeling, that is something

that will not just permeate the drug and disease side of things, but also performance-enhancing as well. It's easy to kind of like make that jump in your head to go from, well, if I can prevent this disease, how can I make myself better? I don't have a disease right now, like, but can I, like, improve my hair growth or whatever that might be. And so you can see something like the enhanced games becoming a lot popular down the line thanks to AI. Yeah, and fun stats in terms of AI acceleration. We're about halfway through the year of 2026. And so far, 173 AI drug discovered programs are in clinical trials right now. 94 are in phase one, 56 are in phase two, 15 are in phase three, all enabled by AI. So this is a huge rate of acceleration. In fact, Anthropic, they acquired coefficient bio, if you remember,

a little while I go for 400 million dollars of stock. So Frontier Labs are trying to solve this problem, which is mostly now a large numbers problem because I think the estimate is 10 to the 60th power possible chemical compounds exist, which is more than the stars in the observable universe. And now it's these companies jobs to seek out that problem space, figure out where the best solutions lie, and actually bring those into a form factor that humans can ingest to make their lives better. And if these enhanced games can accelerate the rate that that happens or the attention that gets placed on it, I think that's a huge one for everyone, even if the records were not really broken this one. I think it's a good start. I actually do want to see more of this happen.

I have a bio background, so I kind of dug into the weeds of a lot of this genetic stuff in the past, and I'm like massively pro, like trying to figure out new ways or new cures or novel ways to kind of enhance the human body. When it comes to sporting, I expect this trend to flip. I was kind of surprised that the drug enhancements didn't work, but it may also make sense. Like, they have never had, like, a wide test bucket to kind of see how humans actually perform at the highest level. And it was just a great spectacle to watch over the weekend. It definitely kept me super entertained. I sent a bunch of these to my friends who were, like, you know, these kind of records being broken are crazy. And it was just a fun discussion overall for, I think, like, people who are kind of obsessed

with sports or athletics or, like, even kind of interested in wanting to see, you know, how far can we actually push this. It's been great entertainment all round, and I'm looking forward to the next one. I'm excited to see what some of these products actually do for regular people as well. If you are someone that is listening to this and you go onto their website and you're seeing some of these comments and you're interested in it, like, let us know what your thought process is behind it, because I look at this and I'm kind of scared, but maybe you guys know something better than me. I know peptides and amino acids are becoming like a big thing now, so maybe I'm just a boomer and missing something. But that is it for today's episode.

We have a bunch more coming up this week. Josh, any final words? No, that's it. I mean, it was a fun weekend. If you haven't seen some of these clips, I would recommend going back, checking them out, watching them. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to share it with your friends. Your support really helps.

We have been having record weeks the last two weeks in terms of you. So thank you so much for the support. As always, we really appreciate it. And we will be back again tomorrow for another episode. See you guys.