But I'm seeing already in the data that most of the performance-enhancing effects come from better recovery, including better sleep. If you think that through, and again, nobody has ever proven it by the way, a lot of athletes who tell you that that's what they feel, they're not getting bigger, they don't want to get bigger, but they can train more. Nobody has ever put that in a scientifically accepted gold standard data set. But if we prove that, and that's the fact, I can tell you all these athletes who are enhancing, I would really very vaguely say more than 50% of their improvements comes from better recovery, better sleep. If this is the case, I think, and that's my plan for the second half when we release the data, is I can, I not just can start, but I think it's the right thing to start, morally right thing, the discussion is it actually morally okay to not allow performance-enhancing drugs for everybody in sport? Because these people, they pick a horrible job. If you look at damage to their body, being an Olympian athlete, being an NFL player, being like all of it is like a drag and it's pain and disruption for your body, or talk to a circus delay artist or whatever. There's many reasons why they all retire in their early 30s.
Yeah. I mean, this is actually beyond just performance in athletics too, right? You can generalize this to stuff like construction or other blue-collar labor where you have people, they age out of this because they just destroy their body over like 40 years.
And that is by the way a fact by the way nobody wants to talk about. It's one of the most under... if I always think, oh my god, if people would use the same amount of passion they're hating on enhanced games for actually highlighting how risky the... people are obviously allowed to do their job choice, but like it's a very, very risky or very destructive. So if we show that actually performance, and we're going to show that because I see it, that performance-enhancing drugs actually unfold their potential mostly by repairing that damage better which they're doing. I think the moral consequence will be not allowing performance-enhancing drugs is actually very bad. It's literally like somebody in the old days you would say, 'Oh, you're a coal miner.' And what we would say is like, 'You're at higher risk of lung cancer, so please do your screenings and whatever.' And instead, we would say, 'No, you are at higher risk of lung cancer, but I don't want to talk about it. You're not going to go to screenings.'
Are banned and you can't wear any helmets, right? Yes. Enjoy your mining.
And that is what we're doing at all these sports. They're damning their sports, their heroes to deliberate damage and nobody wants to talk about that and they get away with it because nobody had the data.
Welcome to another episode of the Plaza Deniable Experience. We're very proud today to have a very fun guest. Christian, do you want to introduce yourself very briefly?
Okay, very briefly. First of all, thanks for having me. My name is Christian Angermayer. How would I describe me? I'm an entrepreneur, an investor. I like interesting things. I like to be curious. And once in a while, I think I'm starting pretty cool companies. At least I think they're cool.
Yeah, we think they're very cool. That's why you're on. Quick shout out to sponsors. Thank you to Poly Market, Zcash, Passage Press, and Citizen X for sponsoring. Before we jump in, Christian's most recent venture is the enhanced games, which is similar to the Olympics, except instead of banning athletes from using performance-enhancing drugs, athletes are required to use performance-enhancing drugs. But Christian's done a bunch of other really interesting stuff, too, like forming and selling an African banking conglomerate for hundreds of millions of dollars. And we do touch on that later in the episode, but for now, on to the super soldiers. Especially with PEDs, it gets really tricky because you have like the performance-enhancing cocktails that athletes use are basically things that have never been studied before, right? Like we might know what happens when you do like testosterone individually or testosterone with some like oral steroid or something, but then it's like you start pumping a bunch of these other things together and it's like you kind of just have to do blood work on the person and hope that you're not messing them up.
Well, but I swear, because we didn't rehearse the call, it's the perfect question because that's what we actually want to do with enhanced games. So before I come to your point, just want to everybody who doesn't know who's listening, sort of tell us what enhanced games is. With the games, and then I think this episode will air before, like on May 24th we have the first enhanced games. We're building this global sports franchise. It's going to be much more than a single event. It's going to be every year. We're going to have monthly events, whatever. But every...
Sorry, let me interrupt you there. It's going to be very cool. If you can go, you should go. It's going to be like going to the first Olympics ever. You get aura forever. Okay, we're going to be there. We're going to have a lot of friends there. You should go. You're a huge loser if you don't.
If you're not invited, you're the biggest loser ever.
All the hottest people on Earth.
I have to say because I want to make it more positive because you're not a loser because like tickets are not for sale, but you could text me or whatever. Like it's but it's like...
He's calling you so much of a loser that he's saying you can't even get the ticket. That's how much of a loser he's calling you. He's saying like you can come because you're not even invited. Okay, that's where we're at right now.
That is not what I said. So if we don't know each other, we should know each other if you want to go. And if not, watch it because it's going to be live streamed on various platforms. But like the premise of the enhanced games is performance-enhancing drugs, medical ones. That's super important. Like FDA, fully FDA approved drugs. Yeah. If you do it with a doctor together, probably get...
Tell us how the idea started and then tell us what the games are because I'm sure there's some interesting story here, right?
Yeah. But I want to then come back what Luca said.
Yes. Into the testing. You have the three branches of the company.
Because like, so first of all, we only allow again already fully medically approved, nothing in trials, fully medically approved performance-enhancing drugs. But additionally, because there is so much out there and so much urban legends, oh, this is bad and blah blah blah. And I really get angry because like it's a mixture of not knowing. It's a mixture of obviously some parties want to paint us like crazy, whatever. But like in order to leave all of that urban legends behind, we actually structured our training camp where all the 50 athletes are training like a gold standard proper clinical trial, government oversight, big universities involved and it's going to be the first very big comprehensive data set we're going to release after the games of performance-enhancing drugs. Yeah. Whatever. So if there are questions, hopefully we contribute to at least answering some of them because again, I'm a fan of data and of scientific rigor. Yeah. And that's what we're going to do. So, they're already approved, but like we want to show...
You want to hold yourself to the highest standard possible and really make sure you're adhering and going above and beyond. So...
So after the enhanced games, then the internet biohackers are going to be going nuts. They're getting like a massive data dump on all these compounds that they've never seen.
They're going to love us. They're going to love us because like again, I think by the way...
This is me. I'm referring to myself. Like this is going to be awesome.
There are people saying that like I don't want to name the other person, but it's one of these famous looks maxers who said in like an interview, oh, I'm like doing meth to be more lean. Yeah. It's scientific because if I want to give the medical answer, there are medical things you can get in your pharmacy who give you exactly the same with much less downside and you get in a clean way, whatever. So it's dumb to do it. Yeah. But also it's giving all of that a very bad rap and it shouldn't have that because I so much believe in that sort of topic of positive enhancements and how we can really add something to everybody's life because also people at the moment see like these niche looks maxed groups and like again they're going very overboard but I was like hey what I think is like enhancing is like if you have a 75-year-old who can still be that sporty that he can take his grandkids to the playground and hold them and like yeah it's like an 85-year-old woman who maybe lives alone because her partner passed away and she can still go shopping and visit friends and it sounds so simple but that's the real problems with sort of muscle...
I love that the example for the guy is like you can be active and the woman she can spend more money, man. Like the woman can spend more money.
I didn't mean it like that. I thought more like...
Oh, no, no. We love this. It's unfiltered, man. You're not going to get cancelled. We don't get more cancelled at this point.
Well, I was going to say like there does appear to be this pervasive trend with all the looks maxing, like the biohacking stuff where it's like, yes, there is a pragmatic reason why you can do all of this stuff, right? Like you can totally take performance-enhancing drugs to help you with sports. You can take things to help you lose weight. You can take things that make you live longer, feel healthier, all of these things. But the majority of the people willing to go and buy a bunch of peptides from China and inject them in themselves, they're usually just drug addicts actually. And so you wind up getting really bad feedback from these internet communities because it's just a bunch of like the Bay Area people who used to really, really enjoy ketamine and they're like, 'Okay, now the new party drug is like I'm going to be doing CAX and Salank because this is like a nootropic or something like that.' Right? And so the things that they're doing and the thoughts that they have about these substances are frequently justification for drug use instead of an actual analysis of the data of like what is actually going on, right? Like does this stuff actually work? Is it good? And so that just throws all this like random gibberish into the signal which is why I think everyone would be euphoric to have a massive data bank...
That you're going to provide. Apparently.
It's all about data. I think I was just thinking a bit to give the current looks maxing sort of sub-world credit. I would say maybe that I'm phrasing it as half a question is like maybe you always need the extreme to push something forward and kind of that's how the world works into the limelight and then sort of the mass adoption is actually normally more...
Totally awesome that they exist. Like I'm a huge...
If you actually think who were the first looks maxers, it was actually the transgenders. That's the ultimate form of looks maxing.
I want to say it was the bodybuilders had a spin-off and the transgenders. Like both bodybuilders and transgenders align so many different...
In a good way. Actually, I credit the transgender movement a lot in terms of pushing the boundaries of body autonomy because like one of my core arguments if somebody is really like having a lot of stupid arguments against enhanced games whatever was like hey do you believe a man should become, we should be able to become a woman which is the obviously as we know like the trick question or the very scary thing especially for the left. Yeah. Or what is a woman? And then the other I'm making the point is like if we allow a society because which I by the way fully endorse because I'm in this libertarian camp everybody should like live their life as they want to be but if we support that which we shall and should but that needs really heavy drugs to go from the appearance of a man to appearance of a woman. How can we not allow somebody who just wants to lose weight or get ripped or whatever? Yeah. To use medical drugs as well for their kind of own transformation. Yeah. And I think so but taking like that example like sometimes sort of the more extreme groups or...
Yeah. They push the boundaries.
They push the boundaries or profit from them. Well, what I wanted to say earlier, you were talking about some of this stuff and we're talking about, you know, the more libertarian or the more state power. I think the way a lot of these things used to work is, you know, it's very hard to create these gray boundaries, but I think there's a lot of things that like you are tacitly allowed to do. And the example I always say is like jaywalking New York. You know, is it illegal to jaywalk? Like there's a law in the books, you can't jaywalk in New York.
You can't jaywalk in New York in front of a police officer. As jaywalking is crossing the road incorrectly like you know the light is red for the pedestrians and you cross, you know like that is on the books illegal.
Right, you obviously shouldn't walk into incoming traffic now if there's nobody and a cop sees you no police officer in New York is going to book you and send you to jail for jaywalking or like doing weed in Denver one week before it's legal right there's all these things that we tacitly allow or for example drinking on a college campus at 20 years old Right. There's this argument that's like maybe not logically very satisfying but does end up having I think the best outcomes which is you know you allow some discretion with the enforcement of the state where it's like okay is there a real victim here right if if there's a bunch of 20-year-old college kids that are drinking some beer in their dad's basement you know who cares right or if someone jaywalks in New York who cares you know and like you think about informed consent And you think about severity and it's not something you can do on the scale of hundreds of millions of people in a clean way that everyone will feel they got a fair shake and you know someone will always be unfairly on one or the other side but there's something there but but coming back so the enhanced games give us the super quick like two sentence pitch basically what I've always heard it as and I want to hear you but it's like you know it's like the Olympics but you're allowed to do a bunch of performance-enhancing steroids. You're allowed to take performance-enhancing drugs obviously like you say with safeguards with medical staff with data analysis and I know that's a super interesting part of the business that I want to talk about. Would you say that's like the correct description?
That's the great... so I would say we have three innovations. We allow performance-enhancing drugs again only medical only fully FDA approved that does exclude crystal meth that does exclude... well by the way but it's important anything it does also exclude anything in trials so no experimental stuff it needs to be something you can get in your pharmacy yeah with your doctor together because it's so we know what these drugs are I have to say it again I believe big shout out to the US here the FDA and the whole trial and the whole research process biotech and pharma companies goes through to approve a drug, it's the most rigorous one in the world. So when something is FDA approved, we have enough data for a doctor with the patient together to make an informed consent. And second, also you get pure quality. Yeah. You're not ordering it in China...
Right? You know where you're getting it from. If you want to use 10 times more testosterone than a normal TRT doctor would prescribe, are you allowed to do this or do you have to go with whatever doctor will write you the biggest TRT script?
Well, you would... okay, two different answers. Like hypothetically speaking, you would need to have a doctor to get it. So you need to convince if you're like, 'Hey, I need or want 10 times as much as maybe the right dose is or the proper dose.' Yeah. You need to have a doctor who... but you can pick your doctor. So we're not saying oh there is only our doctors and if they say no you can't. No you can come up and say oh I have a doctor but it needs to be within the medical system. So proper doctor in the US but second just because like the question is a good one but it shows is already one of the many many and I actually want to do a blog post next week about all these urban legends because people instinctively think that's the joke when I tell it to people. Everybody's like, 'Haha, like they gonna do like the more the merrier.' And that is not how performance-enhancing drugs work. Yeah. If you look at it comes a little bit from the bodybuilding because bodybuilding is like you really want to make your body as big as possible. So, I don't want to say anything against bodybuilding, but I think it's a way more unnatural state and look if you really want to be on the top. And a lot of the bad rep of performance-enhancing drugs comes from that sport because like there might be people who think at least the modern era if...
Yeah performance in bodybuilding is just being 400 pounds right so it's not necessarily performance in any other domain that anyone cares about.
It's really really blowing up your body. So but like if you look at what we are doing we have in the first event and then we're going to add more events but the first enhanced games on May 24th we have three events swimming, running and weightlifting. And in these categories, like it is not just looking better like it's actually the opposite. Like if you look at for example swimmers, if they put on too many muscles, they get slower because they get heavier, but also their swimming is so much more than muscle strength. It's flexibility, it's technique and everything. So what they're only doing again with a doctor together they're finding that icing on the cake do those which is helping them yeah maybe be a little bit more strong but most importantly and that was I'm so excited about because it's I'm very very sure and by the way you're the first podcast I'm talking about that yeah because I think it's going to dominate the sports business in the second half of the year what we're showing already and I see it because I see the data we're going to release that in the second half yeah but what I'm seeing already in the data that most of the performance-enhancing effects come from better recovery including better sleep because so and if you think that through and again nobody has ever proven it by the way a lot of athletes who tell you that that's what they feel they're not getting bigger they don't want to get bigger but they can train more they can yeah is like but nobody has ever put that in a again scientifically accepted gold standard data set but if we prove that and that's the fact I can tell all these athletes who are enhancing they I would really very vaguely say more than 50% of their improvements comes from better recovery, better sleep. If this is the case, I think and that's my plan for the second half when we release the data is I can I not just can start but I think it's the right thing to start morally right thing to discussion. Is it actually morally okay to not allow performance-enhancing drugs for everybody in sport? Because these people, they pick a horrible job if you look at damage to their body. Being an Olympian athlete, being an NFL player, being like all of it is like a drag and it's pain and destruction for your body or talk to a circus delay artist or whatever. There's many reasons why they all retire in their early 30s.
Yeah. I mean, this is actually beyond just performance in athletics too, right? You can generalize this to stuff like construction or other blue-collar labor where you have people, they age out of this because they just destroy their body over like 40 years.
And that is by the way a fact by the way nobody wants to talk about. It's one of the most under... if I always think, oh my god, if people would use the same amount of passion they're hating on enhanced games for actually highlighting how risky the... people are obviously allowed to do their job choice, but like it's a very, very risky or very destructive. So if we show that actually performance, and we're going to show that because I see it, that performance-enhancing drugs actually unfold their potential mostly by repairing that damage better which they're doing. I think the moral consequence would be not allowing performance-enhancing drugs is actually very bad. It's literally like somebody in the old days you would say, 'Oh, you're a coal miner.' And what we would say is like, 'You're at higher risk of lung cancer, so please do your screenings and whatever.' And instead, we would say, 'No, you're at high risk of lung cancer, but I don't want to talk about it. You're not going to go to screening.'
Are banned and you can't wear any helmets, right? Yes. Enjoy your mining.
And that is what we're doing at all these sports. They're damning their sports, their heroes to deliberate damage and nobody wants to talk about that and they get away with it because nobody had the data but and this reminds me by the way now I'm jumping but I'm happy if we talk about like but I had the same journey with psychedelics this my two big passions the two companies I started myself the last 10 years was like enhanced games and then bringing back psychedelics and it's so much light because like when I started psychedelics there was all the data from the 60s. It was never a question. Yeah. But so many people had all these urban legends and told me it's going to end your career whatever. And I was sitting there was like I am looking at an enormous amount of data in the 50s and 60s which tells me again these medications I think psychedelics should be only medically used but these medications have an enormous potential to heal mental health issues and practically very very low side effect profile. That was what I saw and I was like do you see something different in this data and people are even looking at it like yeah and now after 10 years with new data we practically recreated all the data from the 60s like we've proven it now we had even Trump acknowledging it like and we're bringing psychedelics back and I think the same I'm very proud of that or my prediction we're going to sit here in two three years most likely quicker that it went with psychedelics and people will say okay enhanced games have changed the entire sports ecosystem because again with data and with science we're going to show that performance-enhancing drugs are in the right way with a doctor together medical use proper stuff FDA approved are actually net very very beneficial for athletes and for everyday person.
So I want to ask while we're on the games so you said swimming running and weightlifting how many different events within those you know like over you know you have to mention in every single one. But I assume it's not just like one swimming running 110 m sprint and sorry 100 meter sprint and 110 m hurdles.
Kind of like a selection of the classics. Yes. Right. Like the 100 meter dash or sprint which is like the classic, right? I assume the 100 meter freestyle for swimming. A couple of these are classics. I have to ask because we're sponsored. You guys have to talk to Poly Market because this would be one of the most things is have people be able to say, you know, oh, do I think there's going to be a world record that's broken?
We speak to Poly Market. I hope they're going to put on bets and...
All right, we'll call this is live business deals on the podcast. We will call our people at Poly Market. We know a lot of people. We'll get them to do Poly Market. It'll be very, very fun. We should 100% do this. I always like joining, you know, we're lucky enough to have some really fun sponsors and I think there's fun things that we can do with them. So, I'm excited to...
I would bet like I think we're going to break three to five world records. Not all.
I was going to ask you three to five.
Gun to your head which is like the one like if you could only bet one world record is going to be broken, which one do you think?
100 meter freestyle for me. Yeah, that will be pretty epic. I can tell you what the one which is the hardest take is like controversial maybe and I want to phrase it like as a really like just my own thoughts but I think the 100 meter sprint will be the hardest because my guess is that the world record was done on performance-enhancing drugs.
Well, that's what I was wanted to ask is of these events, you think probably that a lot of them are done on some amount of performance-enhancing drugs and they're definitely towing the line, right? We know that they tow the line for sure.
So they are in an interesting way. What is very open. So they did publish several studies for pro athletic events and sort of kind of their statement is that they believe not just believe they did actually anonymous surveys with athletes. So there is this one study which I think the number is 44% where WADA says not us. Yeah. That they believe 44% of all professional athletes use performing drugs which by the way makes all these events completely meaningless because you need...
Yeah. Because it's who's willing to take more risk, right? Who gets lucky with the doping test.
Exactly. You watch it and you're like, is this guy or person winning because it's the best or like so it may because the framework is missing and by the way that what most athletes we talked about at the very early days already said like that's why we love you guys because like they know by the way it's like it's a little in the locker room with these people.
Yeah. And they're like, 'We can't prove it, but like several of our athletes were like, I was standing there winning silver and I knew that the person winning gold most likely did something and I couldn't prove it.' So, how does it work? So, a lot of the athletes do it in their off times. So, which is the likelihood it's kind of a statistics game like...
You cycle on and off and hopefully it's out of your system by the time they test you.
Or which is even worse they're using other drugs to mask things. So it's kind of a scientific arms race then we're in that we're like oh people trying things which are experimental whatever that's an even worse yeah and then my personal suspicion and I can't prove it and it's just like but like I have a good feeling for business models that's my job I think that some of these big leagues and the IOC whatever they realize what we have as a strength is like we're living in a world which wants novelty all the time.
You want to break records, right? You want to break. You need the record to be broken. Now think about it. Over the last 50 years, we humans haven't evolved. It's not that the human of today is like massively advanced to the human in the 70s. So breaking world records, it should be something super super rare. So and I think it's rarer than it's good for them. So I think there is a little bit of like you know what like looking away because we want superstars.
And there's sports that you know I'm not a big baseball fan but like in baseball everyone knows that there was an era where everyone was on dope and no one looks at the pitches no one says oh the speeds from that era are comparable because everyone knows or for example in the marathon which we recently broke the 2-hour mark right for example I think a lot of people are saying well you know a lot of the difference was made with the shoe...
Yeah right but there's also non-medical like gears Yeah, there's also non-medical enhancements. So the shoes, what do you think about that? Like if someone shows up just to cover. So what I want to say is though is like all of that is kind of not perfect. So our assumption from the because that was actually the number one question I got asked all the time from investors in the early days. Or maybe you're not going to break world records at all because like all the world records are done on... So and I was like look I don't think all the world records are done on performance-enhancing drugs and even the ones where people did use them they might they didn't do it perfectly because they had to hide it.
Yeah. Because they're worried about hiding it.
So and my assumption which we now have actually proven right last year when we did a exhibition event yeah in swimming and we broke a world record is that performance-enhancing drugs done again always come back to my formula perfectly under medical supervision with the right drugs like that will beat even the secret performance-enhancing drugs which people take sort of secretly like not allowed in the Olympics. So, and we got to prove that. But that's the reason why...
Uncapping the entire process is going to give you an advantage, right? Like because you don't have to deal with all of the testing downsides and all of that stuff like you can just full-on optimize for winning the thing.
Yeah, I'm sure the last phase is going to be everything...
Probably. Also, these people aren't optimizing the performance-enhancing drugs regiment itself, right? So, they can't also start to learn what is better, right? Like that's the whole thing that you're trying to tease out here is this is going to be your number one trial of enhanced games, right? But presumably after like 10 years of this, you're going to get much better at these PED stacks that the athletes are using.
And by the way, just like one thing I know you can go because one I want to make this one state because like people try to deliberately sort of misunderstand when he called about trials, they're like, 'Oh, it's again one of the urban legends. Your athletes are guinea pigs.' What I'm saying is like they're all taking the approved drugs and the only thing I'm trying the data collection is like to really see it in a comprehensive manner benchmark it next to each other. exact combination like but like yeah unfortunately like our I think hopefully really sincere strive for collecting data and doing everything super scientific is some competitors trying to misconstrue and say oh they need the data because they don't even know we don't we know fully what we're doing because like again it's approved drugs da da da I just want to see the bigger picture and I think the bigger picture will really put a dent in the universe by shocking...
Something that could be really funny is if after releasing your data you see an increase in Olympic records being broken, right? Like you do your studies and you release the data on how to run an optimal PED stack and then magically like the Olympics which does not have any drug use allowed, they all just get better too, right? Just step functional increase. I assume that happens also.
I think I really mean it. Like I don't always want to benchmark us versus the Olympics because I love the Olympics. Like my only sentence is they should be clean because then it's real. Like I want to see it would be so cool to have a natural event but then people should be really natural and to have an enhanced version. Yeah. So I don't want to always feed into that what sometimes the media wants to make it like that we are like sort of the competitor of the Olympics. I think we can so well coexist like but what I actually hope is the other way around. I think one of the reasons if I want to give the IOC and WADA the benefit of a doubt that they really sincere in their strive to not have people do doping in their system. Like their number one argument is that they don't have the data and that it's an arms race against doctors and they don't have the capacity. So if by giving them the benefit of a doubt that this is the only reason, yeah, then we should be their best friends. Because we're going to have the data and they have a comparison group like and I offered it to them already, didn't take it up so far. I would even donate money like I'm happy to be the benchmark. I'm happy to be the control group in science and help them to get fully clean and really coexist and sort of...
Yeah between each other.
And so tell us about so I think and part of why I think this business is going to do very well I think virality and marketing matters a lot and I think owning your own virality in your marketing and I think you know because of the controversial aspect which some people will think is very controversial hopefully you're breaking a lot of records if you don't even if you don't break a lot of records. That's also going to be news because everyone's going to start thinking the Olympic, everyone's doping, etc. Tell us a little bit about the two other lines of business. The way I understand it, you have three lines of business. One is the enhanced games. That's actually not maybe the most commercially relevant, but it's kind of like the crown jewel. You know, we'll see what ends up happening there. But I think the other two lines are actually going to be super interesting. Which as I understand is a research division and then a telehealth so people can say okay great you have the research division you have the enhanced games where you showcase it and then great you watch this you saw these people do these amazing things you see these people recover hey maybe you also want to try some of these things here's a safe and regulated way to try it how's that moving forward what's the regulation on because I saw some stuff from the administration in the US...
Big changes recently.
Yeah changed recently what happened there...
So Okay. So, but you described it perfectly.
Sorry, a lot of questions. I know.
Yeah. So, like to go through it like so I the only adjustment I would make in your description is like the sport event is really the core. Yeah. It's and by the way I think it's going to be highly profitable because what we cracked with the sport events is the social media call like if you look at what is the most valuable thing or the most valuable formula in our world in terms of marketing and reach is free attention because of virality combined with emotion. So my and by the way I'm not saying that now because it happened two days ago everybody who has listened to a podcast where like if I talk about enhanced games I always since 12 months I brought up as my favorite anti-example I brought up LIV Golf who went under some days ago because like LIV Golf was only...
Sorry can you tell us what this is really quickly? So LIV Golf again the question only is already so offensive to LIV Golf but I love it because LIV Golf was the try of the Saudi government to build up a new competitor to the PGA the big golf league. They invested the rumors are they now want to talk it down. Normally Saudis want to talk volumes up now. So because the rumors are they spent more than $5 billion...
For a meta event only and nobody cared literally we did a survey which I loved like it was a proper third party survey so not my family and friends like in America we asked more than thousand people in November number is most likely much higher now many questions but number one question was like have you heard about enhanced games and the insane number in November was that 61% of all Americans asked had already heard about the enhanced games. By the way, the first event is happening in some weeks now, like in some days. So, this is insane. Yeah. And we achieved that 61% without any marketing budget. We spent zero. It's only earned media only because it's...
It's just a great idea, man. Like everybody in the entire universe when they hear about the Olympics, they're like, 'This is awesome because it's the best in the world competing, right?' And then their next thought is like, what if they were better? Like, why can't they be better? Why are we banning drug testing? I want to see like the sickest freak be in like the entire human race beating each other up, right? Like I want to see absolute machine gladiators racing against each other. Something that literally every American wanted.
It's actually I personally think it's more than that. Like it's evolutionary biology. It's like I think it's really ingrained in us that we want to know who's the best. Well, back to the survey. And then we asked people do you know LIV Golf and it where Saudi spent again mostly more but like 5 billion dollars and mainly it was like 40 something% knew LIV Golf with $5 billion spent but then the second questions were centering around what do you think about it and especially there was interesting the 39% who hadn't heard about us when we told them the pollster what enhanced games is literally 100% of the people who just learned about enhanced games had a strong emotion and by the way the smaller part but some said this is very like shouldn't be allowed but I like it because what you really want in our world you want attention and then emotional you want debates you want people going home and like wow I learned about enhanced games today I get so many friends tell me that an investor is like in the road like oh my god we talking about that every some evenings with the kids and it's a debate whatever while again nobody debates LIV Golf there was always like so so we cracked with the sport event sort of that formula of attention and emotion and I believe that will allow us in the next two years in record speed to really build a global sports franchise around centered that basic idea of performance-enhancing drugs are allowed and endorsed and that by the way going to be is a multi-billion dollar business. If you look at proper sports franchises, they're usually double-digit billion dollar businesses because sports is such a big business. People just underestimate how complicated it is to break into that. Again, the Saudis didn't do it with $5 billion. So, you need it's so hard in our world to create again...
Attention is just the hardest idea. So I think to be proven the next three years, but I think we crack that and I think we're going to talk in hopefully again soon and then in two years whatever and we're going to have built up a multi multi multi-billion dollar business sports only. So I really want to make a point that sports is not like a means to an end or whatever.
And again, is that going to be more Olympics type events or do you also imagine a world where it's like maybe you do American football, maybe you do basketball, maybe you do tennis?
Yes, we have a full growth plan in our heads and it's going in we have various layers like...
Let's see team sports because obviously then you need to have people play against each other you need more of them but like first of all we have more...
Olympic disciplines we can do. Second, my number one favorite thing I want to do already in year two is having an over 50 category and then bring back beloved sports. Actually, they're not going to chase world records. Enhancements are great, but you're not going to enhance somebody in the 50s to break a world record. But what I want, I want to bring back people who are famous for something for a time or whatever and beat themselves. We have one athlete who I love. Big shout out to Megan. Yeah, Megan Romano, always in the enhanced game. She's end of 30s and she's very like, we document her whole story. She's not going in to break a world record because end of 30s is like, I would always say enhancements give you maybe five to seven years, but she wants to beat her own best time and that is I think almost a more emotional story. Yes, I want the breaking world records because that's going to give us the global headlines, but if you think about us three here, even if we perfectly enhance and train for two years, we're not going to break a world record. World records are very actually non-relatable if you're really honest. But if I see my peer, I'm 48 now, and if I see another guy in the 40s or 50s doing something he was kind of famous for in his 20s and 30s, what is my emotional reaction? I want what this person is on. So for the role model function, actually this sort of from next year on over 50 is much more important. But then we want to have new categories. We might do actually combat sport. There is so, by the way, you can also have fun stuff. You can add an out of competition celebrity versus professional athletes thing. We have so many celebrities who inbound us, the younger ones who say, 'Oh, I can beat the world. I can beat these.' I don't think we can, but like, let's put it on. Let's have an IShowSpeed racing against our real athletes. Maybe ways, maybe not. Like, yeah, by the way, we got inbounded by robot companies who said, 'Can't we not do an out of competition thing where we have robots doing crazy stuff against the best athletes?' So, these whole, I think there is such a big like cool entertainment.
There's a lot more creativity also, right? Like it's an unlocking of creativity of you can do new things and it doesn't have to be plus minus what we've been doing for the last 50, you know, half a century. I think that's super interesting. So what's the regulatory change that happened as well?
Sorry, if you want to add something on the last plan.
So if we go through it. So that's the sport event. I just want to make clear, like I think the sport event alone financially or business wise is going to be a multiple dollar business, but also like it's going to be huge. So that's the center of Enhanced. So then the second business line is we're building up our own telehealth platform. Actually, I always say very honest, the company I'm copying is Red Bull. Red Bull, genius company, private, so people are aware of it. They know the product. But like they discovered whatever 20 years ago that instead of only spending on marketing, they can own sports assets and on average hopefully make money with it and create value, but also additionally kind of for free boost their core business of consumer products selling Red Bull cans. And the same, like there are great companies out there, Ro, Hims, people might know, which are already telehealth platforms offering people kind of, they all started a little bit in like, 'Oh, we're offering people like him and Ro things which are, which you don't want to talk about like erectile dysfunction whatever,' but they kind of already morphed into that more enhancement like thing like peptides, testosterone or whatever. But they all need to do marketing permanently and if you look at their cost, that's the biggest part of their spendings is customer acquisition. Like in the future, if you see the coolest athletes in the world doing really breaking world and all of that in a company called Enhanced and you think about enhancing yourself, where are you going to go? You're going to go to us as the trusted source. And I believe we will be not just saying that, like I think we know much more than others to also get your scientifically based sort of enhancements. So that's why we have...
It's the easiest sales pitch of all times, right? It's like it's always, you know, you look at the athlete, 'Oh, I buy the shoe because I think if I buy the shoe I can perform as well as them,' or if I'd buy, you know, the gloves or whatever.
But this is already like a hard pill to swallow. Like the idea that the shoe is responsible for any runner's success is like extremely much responsible for it. Like you can buy that really easily. Like that's actually, and it's definitely more true. The idea of going...
Is much more authentic. We're not paying people to say something. We're really showing our products in action, so to say.
People believe this. It's not like the looks maxing or biohacking stuff where someone's like zooming really far in. They're like, 'Oh, look. My crow's feet are like 20% better after I took this peptide.' Nobody really cares about that, right? But like you actually do care if you see a 40-year-old athlete outperforming themselves at age 20 and like crying as she crosses the finish line. That's very clearly like you can point to that and literally...
Scientifically recorded. That's exactly 100% related.
Yeah. I got away. I think it's the sort of thing where it becomes impossible to ignore and you own your own marketing and your own virality machine which is very powerful and you can make a lot of money off of it like you say you can build a beautiful franchise around that. So then there's a telehealth platform which there was some recent regulation. Can you give us like the super quick what happened?
Yeah. So our telehealth platform is, but there are so many by the way enhancement products which are either even supplements. So we have a supplement line which is non-prescription drugs and they do work just saying like it's not like you, so it depends again just how strong you want to go how quick, but like sort of there is really and I take all of them from glycine to urolithic acid and stuff like that. So we have the supplement lines and then we have prescription drugs and there are already good FDA or not just good like really good FDA approved medications like testosterone the most simple one for men but this is what does work. You don't need to go by the way medium peptides like if you don't do testosterone as a man like over 40 that's the base I would say the science shows again if you're not, if you don't have exclusion criteria again that's why you need a doctor who looks at you but for the average man above 40 mild TRT changes your life and the same for women over 40 by the way when they go through menopause and everything like mild hormone replacement therapy lifechanging. So we're offering that. Then there are actually peptides people mix that up who are fully FDA approved for example Tesamorelin. So we have already those. So and now to your question there is a big move from the FDA under RFK's guidance to allow certain peptides which the Biden administration banned. It's a little bit I don't want to say tricky because again I want to put data up because these peptides are out of patent and are kind of so old. These are mostly like peptides coming out of Russian labs in the 80s where if you ask me personally, they do work. They have very low risk because like millions of people take it and I believe in that sort of very much in that sort of wildlife data or real life data. By the way, another thing that the current administration HHS and FDA does really well, they want to collect a lot of the data and make sense out of it because it's a shame that we neglect sort of this like let's say real life data. But also to say like to not just not give in to critics but just to be like really presented in a way there are some peptides who just don't have a lot of proper modern clinical studies. So our stand is if the FDA is going to allow some of these peptides to be so-called compound, it's a different way to regulate. They're not actively allowing them as a medication, but they're allowing them to be prescribed and sold. We will, we have I would say arguably the best medical commission in the world. Sort of best scientists on it for performance-enhancing therapeutics. Yeah. Which mostly at the moment take care of our athletes. But like with them together, we got to make a decision which of the allowed sort of, when the FDA allows more peptides, which of those we going to offer because we believe that beyond the regulatory thing because that would be a check. We're allowed to do it. Yeah. So it fits in our framework. But because not on all of them is a lot of data, we will make a decision so that we can really be true to ourself which is really science-based. And now comes to the third pillar. That's why the third one, the data pillar, is indeed so important. We going to be the first one who actually produce more data in that field. And at the minimum, this data will allow us to do better decisions both for our athletes going forward every year and for the everyday consumer. At the best and I'm hoping for it. We actually can even get like some sort of intellectual property out of it because data and biotech if you do it right sometimes allows you to create recreate at least like marketing claims which is the weakest version of intellectual property maybe even some stronger ones. So but if I would look at Enhanced Games as an investor or what I can tell investors is what we have is a sports business, what we have is a telehealth business that's correctly fully there existing and we going to have a lot of data and I think we all agree in this world data is incredibly valuable and I'm going to work very hard to make the most out of it. That could be intellectual property that could be just better just like better service for our clients but the data will really influence and drive the other two businesses.
So maybe a little bit personally, not have to go into depth. You know, what kind of stuff are you on that maybe a normal person who still has more of an antiquated view of some of these PEDs or whatever, you know, wouldn't think to be on.
The funniest possible answer right now is he just says, 'I'm not on any of this stuff. There's not enough...' No, no, no, no. I'm very open with that. I'm on a lot of...
It would be very funny if you were like, 'No, no, no, no.'
I, by the way, I really like again and hopefully if people, I think hopefully say one thing, they can disagree with me, they can agree with me, they can like me and all like, but I hopefully I'm authentic because like that's when I come back to the very beginning of this podcast and to the very beginning of my career. I always thought like I don't want to be somebody else than myself because why would I, like I don't need to, like I could if I don't like my life, I could say tomorrow look I stop all of it, go on my yard and just hang out and read books. Like I don't like that. I want to do what I'm doing but also like I don't need to project anything which I'm not because it would be by the way bad like I think like I'm so much again we haven't talked a lot about psychedelics but I so much believe that the number one reason to be on this earth if you go into the spiritual realm is being happy and being a good person there is no reason to pretend something you're not so people get what I how I say like what you see is what you get anyway so I'm doing that since a long time but way I'm actually I'm so satisfied at the moment because literally and I remember it, you know, when you have like sort of early memories of your career where you really know where you were sitting, when you were thinking about that and like I was always kind of vain a bit. So I was always already in my 20s I was like I don't want to age. It's bad. Like this whole storyline we tell ourselves that aging is cool and makes you wiser. I want to get smarter and wiser but why do I have to deteriorate while doing that? Like so when I had these first success with Rehbock Pharma and I was looking at my own industry where I started and with passion was talking to scientists was like hey guys yes it's great that we cure things and focus on the very bad stuff but like can't we also like do this and this and aging and everybody looked at me as if I'm an alien like for 20 years you can't imagine like the biotech industry over the last 20 30 years was is so focused on kind of the nichier the better. Oh my god, there is a disease which only has 10,000 patients per year. Great. We can do a very small trial, get it fasttracked and then charge a million dollar. Yeah. And by the way, important. We I want to help these 10,000 people. But I was I never really understood fundamentally how we would not strive as an industry to find the one medication everybody wants to take. That's how you become a trillionaire is when you do things like Elon Musk does or like Mark Zuckerberg did. They made things which a lot of people want to use. Like somebody everybody almost will use Starlink soon like everybody wants to be on Instagram. We never said if you imagine how Zuckerberg would have said you know what I want to make Instagram really cool. I only want to make it for 10,000 people. No, you want to really make it for everybody. And I always tried to apply that on drug development and it was really kind of like I was seen as kind of a crazy person. They couldn't say I'm dumb because like I had the credit credentials but like I was always seen as the odd one out I would say in English. Yeah. And finally the world is changing. By the way, the one thing we haven't, you mentioned it a bit is like I think we going to change it a lot with Enhanced Games, but what was actually coming before us and we kind of building on is the way GLP1s and all of these weight loss drugs have paved because like they are actually originally made for diabetes. Then people were like okay you can lose weight but then the pharma industry stupidly at the beginning was like okay but only for obese people. Yeah. And now Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk was sitting there and cashing in billions and billions because most of the people who take GLP1s are actually taking it for vanity like me. Let's start that. That's one of the things I'm doing. I'm like a stress eater and a good stress. If I'm busy, I would always eat a cookie here and there and da da da. And I don't like I just take GLP1s and it's gone. It's quieting that part of my mind which is craving food. Yeah. Which is my stress response. So amazing. It's outsourced discipline. Yeah. So, but like so I'm really proud that finally like after 27 years like the way how I see medical, the medical system drug development yes let's cure diseases but let's also find the few drugs or hopefully many drugs which really everybody wants and who are good for everybody or for nothing is good for everybody that was too generalistic but like who are good for many people where the total addressable market is really big yeah and that's what's starting and people there was this remember last week the all the GLP1s together make more revenues than all the AI companies together. That is the power of vanity. And by the way, we just said at the beginning, I think vanity is the ultimate, if you would ask me for the one sector people should put their money.
Well, it's the K-shaped economy, right? These are the two things people spend money on. These are the two sectors that grow. It's tech and health. As people have more money, do you really want a house that has 50 rooms or are you okay with 10 rooms? You know, would you rather have five times more rooms or would you rather spend five times the money on your health? Right? Would you rather have a five times better phone or five times better piece of bread? You know, I think, you know, it's the K-shaped economy. I think people really want a vehicle to say, how do I express a view on someone who's really pushing the boundaries? I'm going to show you a little bit here because we have people on the podcast that we really think are doing interesting things. And a lot of what when we think about people we screen, you know, you have a large platform, you have a huge following, you're very well known, a little notorious, controversial sometimes, which we like. We want to have interesting people on, which is good. I think if you, you know, if you don't have one or two controversies nowadays, you're a boring person a little bit. And I think you're going to get a lot bigger. And when we screen candidates for the podcast, one of the checklists is, is there a five to 10 percent chance that this person becomes a hundred times more famous than they are right now? And if the answer is no, if the answer is there's not a 5% chance that this person becomes 100 times more famous, which in your case is basically becoming a household name, right? We just don't have them on. So I think there's a very large chance that this is going to become big. You know, obviously not financial advice. Like we said, you know, if you take crazy drugs and you if you invest in crazy things, don't come crying. But, you know, there's some stock tickers that might be relevant for people that might want exposure to a little bit more of a pure play because part of what happens here as well is that some of these companies that are developing these drugs, right? You have Eli Lilly, you have some of these others, they're actually cannibalizing some of their existing product lines, right? And so, you know, whenever you have a thesis, you know, there's kind of two ways to invest. One is you find a secular thesis and you say how do I express this? Right? So I think peptides are going to do great. How do I express this? The other is you look at a company and then you work backwards to a thesis. I think the first one is a lot more intellectually satisfying and is where you really find that breakout stuff. You don't look first at the stock. You first look at what do I think people haven't priced in or has an asymmetric upside. And what you're always looking for there the holy grail is like the pure play, right? And I think this brings together a lot of the things we talk about on the podcast and when we got intro to you, which I've already, you know, known of you for a long time and been moving in similar circles, but it's the pure play on, you know, hey, biotech is going to grow a lot. We're going to enter a new golden age of biotech. Number one. Number two, some of the regulatory, you know, maybe molasses maybe was a little bit too slow. You know, we don't want to go full approval. I think you've been very clear about that. I think probably Lucas would like to do some crazier stuff than you. Maybe I'm a little more traditional. I'm a little bit more naturalistic, you know, and everyone will be able to select where they want to be. You want to push it. Maybe you don't want to be the company really pushing. You know, you had this company there, the guy the other day that had a piece in the New York Times saying they're the first, you know, billion dollar single employee company and then it's like a day later all this crazy, you know, we won't say allegedly, a lot of fraud going on. Allegedly people are saying. So you want to push the boundaries but not too much. And then lastly, I think owning your own marketing, owning your own top of funnel that can also be an incredibly incredibly lucrative business on its own just very very valuable and it's the full stack from hey mass marketing appeal compete with a lot of these entrenched and frankly not professionally run right the Olympics is a business are the people who are on the Olympics committee people who are selected for being the best at business probably not right that's not where they're getting these people from. They're not serial entrepreneurs.
That's not by great point because like I tell everybody, hey, exactly that. I don't think it's so professionally run and they make billions of profit. I want a part of that, if not all of that.
Well, these people have a they have a monopoly on this, right? And so now, hey, you know, out of the zoo into the wilderness, it's time to compete. And, you know, I think people consumers will be able to choose what is more interesting to them. I think you have a novel view. You've done a lot of stuff. What's the latest news on the stock stuff? I know there was a there's an acquisition vehicle. Where's that at?
Probably this will come out we'll aim for Thursday or Friday. We'll see how we do this week. Yeah. So, if it comes out on Friday, I think, which is the perfect day because Friday, so if you're listening then followed that what we're just saying and it if it is Friday now, then it's our first day of trading under our ticker. We're closing and we starting on Friday hopefully today we're going to trade under ENHA on the New York Stock Exchange and I look I'm super biased disclaimer I don't need to say it I'm one of the founders I'm the chairman like I love this business I agree with you I think we can be a category defining company I think we can the Olympics badly managed show us how much money you can make in sports yeah I think we're going to kill it on the telehealth side so I think we're going to build a really cool company and whoever loves what we're doing when first of all the number one thing is I hope you all are listening to become fans like zoom in dial in like on various platforms from Roku to Rumble to YouTube to local ones every I know obviously in social media watch it because then you see what we're building but yes so if you believe in on the financial business side honored if people become shareholders we're building something great.
I think it's very interesting. Yeah. I don't know if there's anything else you want to cover on Enhanced. I wanted to ask about a few other things. Is there anything else that you think you want to cover there? I think we did pretty comprehensive.
If Lucas wants his answers quickly, so because we diverted with testosterone. So what I'm doing is like since I'm in my 30s, I measured again. I diverted because I told you how satisfied I am because really like I want to, it's not like that we just came to that like I working on that practically in my mind it's 27 years and on myself and so when I was 30 I measured my testosterone and I'm since then keeping it there. So I'm not again I didn't even want to I would have never thought it doping or whatever because like it's just keeping it there because it's the number one correlation between male aging and sort of the negative aging is the decrease in testosterone. So, I would tell any man, look, think about it. Go to a doctor, talk about it. But TRT, I'm doing some peptides, the FDA approved one, especially Tesamorelin because it's like improving your own human growth hormone production. I'm taking GLP1s as I said for outsourced discipline and doing...
Which specific ones actually is it like semaglutide, tirzepatide?
Yeah. And then I'm doing actually two other very old drugs which are out of patent which is Januvia I think you pronounce it, I can't pronounce the ingredient like the brand name one of the brand is Januvia and Acomplia which are two drugs very simplified also like diabetes drugs like I always very simplified hopefully nobody's crucifying me too simplified but they filtering out sugar and carbs from your food and like so and they very provenly prolong longevity but also like make you sort of more defined and slimmer up. I'm doing DHEA. I'm doing pregnenolone. I'm actually doing a lot of things for sleep. And there's a lot of basic things like glycine, like magnesium, like these kind of stuff. I just discovered because again the data is very good. There are so-called orexin drugs which is a new category of sleep drugs.
I've seen people saying that these have been really good for treating ADHD too actually.
So I don't know ADHD but like if you look at it like in the past sleep drugs had correctly so a very bad rap because actually the truth is there were no sleep drugs. What there were were drugs which kind of knock you out. Yep. But they were very bad because you had the feeling you slept but the truth is you didn't sleep. You didn't get quality deep sleep.
They destroy your sleep partitioning, right? Like you have usually like a given amount of like deep sleep, REM, etc. different phases of sleep and they just like screwed the whole thing up and said, 'Yeah, I mean you were technically unconscious kind of I guess.'
Exactly. So that's probably sleep aids again correctly so the old generations have a very bad rap. So it then came that new drug or category of drugs these orexin drugs and they are really sort of supporting the natural wake sleep mechanism and provenly give you much more deep sleep and REM sleep which is in itself super healthy. There was the first study I saw last week from Japan that actually they can help support preventing Alzheimer's dementia. Why? because in our sleep and especially in deep and REM our body undergoes like or sorry our brain undergoes a cleansing mechanism all of that so very obsessed with sleep and I just added these kind of drugs I think that's a good sort of summary but by the way also want to say it again like one of the most important things is training so I'm doing gym every day I try to do cardio every day I love Pilates HIIT training I do weight training every day you need to work out.
