BONUS PREVIEW: Enhanced masculinity crisis

Did you catch Peter Thiel's Enhanced Games in Las Vegas on May 24th? You know, the libertarian-minded, steroid-fueled, biohacked Olympics. No? Still nothing? After recruiting mostly ex-Olympic athletes from track & field, swimming, and weightlifting, parent company Enhanced trained them for months in Abu Dhabi — while also loading them up on a cocktail of drugs to see how many world records they could break. Reporter, producer, wrestling coach, and also Grant’s trainer Sam Eagan talks with Grant about the intended goal of the games (read: transhumanism is involved), and their deep connections to the right-wing and perhaps a little toxic masculinity, plus a recap of how the attempted record-breaking went. Our guest Sam Eagan covers the intersection of masculinity and politics. You can follow his work here, and also check out his podcast SuperHuman — which goes into even more detail about the Enhanced Games — here and wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode is an unlocked preview from our Patreon. To hear the whole conversation, join us at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld — for just five bucks a month, you get exclusive content like this, extended and bonus episodes, Discord community access, and more. Join us so you don’t miss it! For Apple Podcast users, you can also find all of our bonus content — plus other great COURIER shows — with a subscription to COURIER+. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey, it's me, not Ryan. It's like a holiday this week at some point, some big birthday. So we're loading up on fireworks. We don't have time to record an episode with all of the fireworks we're about to send off. We, um, we just need to prep, you know, figure out our orchestration. So we didn't want to leave you totally hanging. So here is a conversation about steroid athletes, which just seems, you know, deeply American and right for you. I recorded this for the Patreon. While I'll go to the rest of the conversation, you can go to patreon.com/panicworld or look up Courier Plus on Apple.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  So the enhanced games happened. Peter Thiel's Libertarian Steroid Olympics. Did you hear about this? Did you miss it entirely? Now that it's over, did it matter at all? A journalist and a wrestling coach who trains me, Sam Egan, is gonna try to convince me that they do matter and explained how it connects to the far right and even Nazi recruiting. So, um, if you want to hear about steroid muscle men and Nazis recruiting, here's a little bonus for you.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  It's so funny that we have met and I guess in this way.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  It's really funny.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna lie. You were like, I'd love to have you on the show. And I fully was like, this guy probably does a podcast in his backyard. Like, I probably would have still done it. I didn't realize you were a panic world.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  On that note, uh, you want to introduce yourself?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Of the work you're doing and the work you, uh, you used to?

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. My name is Sam Egan. Uh, I'm a reporter, a producer. I write about, uh, sports and politics and masculinity, kind of the intersection. And I've been working on a show called Superhuman with Kaleidoscope Media for the past year. It covers the Enhanced Games, the sporting event where ex-Olympic athletes are allowed to take steroids. On that, I have reported and produced and co-hosted with a good friend of mine, Chris Giamali.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  Do you want to say how we met?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  We met at, I started coaching at your gym.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  So we're really just here to talk about my form. And if you think I have potential as a 36-year-old amateur wrestler.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  How long ago did you start?

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Like nine months.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Oh, you're brand new, man. Had you done it before?

• 2:32Speaker 00

  I'm brand new.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  You wrestled in high school?

• 2:34Speaker 00

  No, everyone assumes I did because I just had older brothers. So I like.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  What gives you that dog? And you, I had an older brother too.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  I grew up wrestling. I never wrestled. I would prefer to just be talking about little tips and tricks. But that would be, I should be paying you if I were to do that. But let's start with the Enhanced Games, which I hope just we can all pretend don't exist, but, but maybe that's not the right approach.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that it would be foolish to pretend that the Enhanced Games do not exist. I guess for context, the Enhanced Games are being put on by their parent company, Enhanced, and the sort of, the sort of spiel, the elevator pitch of the Enhanced Games is they're taking a bunch of ex-Olympic and if not Olympic elite athletes in three sports. You have track and field, you have swimming, and you have weightlifting. And they are giving them slew of different performance enhancing drugs in hopes of facilitating the breaking of world records on Sunday when the games actually, actually go down. They've been training together for the last almost eight months, I think, since October, when

• 3:41Speaker 01

  I first went out to their training camp, which was in Vegas. And for the past handful of months, they've been in, they've been in Abu Dhabi, where they like actually were able to facilitate the pharmaceutical courses that they are, that they are running. Because obviously Abu Dhabi is like a lawless land for the bigger rich.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Of course, this is like Vegas and Abu Dhabi.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  It is the most, it is the most Vegas thing imaginable. It is the most Abu Dhabi thing imaginable. Yeah.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  What if, is there a solution if like Abu Dhabi and Vegas just secede into one nation? And we just put, we just put them all there. And the rest of us can go about our non-peptide business.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  It'd be, it'd be kind of like, who would be whose state? Would, would Vegas be the vassal? Or would, I feel like Vegas is the vassal in this situation.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  What they're essentially using these athletes as is. Advertisements. They are in the same way that Michael Jordan was, they were like, if you buy these Jordies, new Air Jordans in the eighties, like you can be like Michael Jordan if you wear these and you can jump super high. They're selling these pharmaceuticals on their website, kind of like Hims or like one of those, you know, sort of straight to consumer pharmaceutical websites or like Ro.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  It's like a massive Liver King situation.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. They're selling these drugs to the sort of wider consumer and the idea is yeah, you here buy this stack of drugs that Ben Proud, Olympic silver medalist, was using when he broke the world record at the 2026 enhanced games. And the hope very much is, so there's like a ton of money to be made there if they can, you know, convince the layman that the same drugs, this Olympic god, look, he's, this guy's huge and beautiful. And like, it genuinely looks like a great god, this guy. They can convince them that they need the same thing, you know? And I think that there, so there, there's a ton of money to be made there. There's billions of dollars to be made there, I think. And it's also just a cultural exercise and like moving the Overton window, I think, on performance

• 5:35Speaker 01

  enhancing drugs and convincing people that, making people comfortable with the idea of injecting themselves with something, with taking, taking something. And also shifting what they, I don't know if they'll be successful with this, but what they love to talk about, and I'm frankly suspicious, is they're like, we want to flip the whole medical paradigm of like, medicine being used to make you feel, get back to baseline when you're sick and not be better than baseline. They're like, actually, medicine should be proactive, not reactive. I think there's a lot of problems with that worldview. I think that it could quickly go down some pretty eugenics-y paths, but, um, yeah. So I could, I see why they would try to do it. Vegas is just the most, is like one of the few places in America like psycho enough to be like, yeah, absolutely. No questions asked.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  So you've spoken to these athletes. What are they feeling? So we did a story recently about a teal-funded hipster movie film festival in New York.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  That's so funny. What?

• 6:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, of course he did, you know?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. When was this?

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Um, right after the pandemic, like 2021, 2022. And like, everyone was like, celebrating the irony and the shitpost of like, being able to like, do this, like, they were like chanting, like, Teal is paying for this. And like, the artists involved were like, yeah, I'm fully aware of that they are using me and puppeting me. And they like hired a canceled queer black person to be like the events organizer. And they're like, I'm not unaware of like what they're trying to do. Like, this is like mu- mutual usage.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say the vibe is similar. I would say the vibe is, I would say the vibe is similar. I think, I think different athletes have different answers to that question. But I think that overall Olympians are inherently guinea pigs. They're, they're, they're inherently kind of used as props. It's like, you think about you, like, every Olympic cycle and NBC parades out like they're sort of token athlete. And they tell them the sob story about their, you know, growing up in poverty or whatever, you know? I think there's always, there's always been an element of that. Uh, and I think that what's interesting that I've heard from a few of them is that they, they feel like, now they are sharing in the, the rewards of the, the financial benefits of that exchange. Being an Olympic athlete versus like playing basketball or football in America, it's, you don't make any money.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  So these people have spent their entire lives basically hemorrhaging money at best, breaking even, literally among the best in the world at, at what they do. And with enhanced, they're essentially with the, the message that I've heard is like, yeah, I understand I'm a guinea pig. But like, I feel like at least I'm in on it now.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  You know?

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Man, that's fucking bleak.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  It really is bleak. I mean, especially like the Brit- uh, one of the British athletes, Ben Proud. They don't have an Olympic fund. So if you, if you medal in, for context, in many countries, I want to say most, I'm not sure. But in many countries, if you medal, uh, you'll get some sum of money. Uh, if you win a gold medal, you'll get more money. Like, it's like basically a gift from your government. Britain is one of the only countries in the world that doesn't have a medal fund. They're just like patting you on the back, thank you for, you know, for king and country, whatever. Thanks for doing this, buddy. So he's like 32, they're, they're also almost all in their 30s.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  So this is a lot of like, Past prime, you could argue weightlifting because like weightlifting like your prime is probably towards your mid mid 30s, but like

• 8:54Speaker 01

  The last thing you lose is strong.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that's why I got a future.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's it's past prime dedicate their whole life to this to this mission. There's not really money to make in it. I mean, it just like speaks to how we treat anything like it's not different to them being like a member of the arts and it just like is prime to be

• 9:16Speaker 00

  at the whims of some rich patronage.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  It's like, it's not very dissimilar to the Fox catcher story or

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  Except that there's, I doubt that they are very aware of what's actually going in their bodies.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do. They do seem to have a like fairly robust medical program. Like for everything that I've seen, they get tested constantly. I don't, I don't know whether or not the athletes themselves understand really what's going on. No, I think that they're choosing to trust the doctors that are speaking to them. And they've published some of the data in the study now as far as what they're actually taking. The study itself is, I would argue, deeply compromised. I guess probably for context, for context, they're also studying these drugs on these athletes. Part of the reason why they're in Abu Dhabi is they're running a like, like a government approved study into the effects of performance enhancing drugs, the four main categories being steroids. So like, you know, anabolic testosterone, exogenous hormones, stimulants like Adderall, metabolic modulators, which are a little bit weirder and I still don't have a really good handle on,

• 10:18Speaker 01

  but they basically make your body use energy more efficient efficiently. Maria Sharpov, I got caught on one. It's called Maldonium. And then peptides, like approved approved peptides. So not like BPC 157 or none of that stuff, but like regulated peptides. I can understand this sentiment. The effects of performance enhancing drugs, specifically testosterone and other anabolic are not well understood because it is illegal. It's off label use and our government famously does not do a good job of researching things that are illegal. We don't have good data on most of the illicit drugs that people consume frequently. And so there's merit to that argument, but what I would, I would say the study itself is deeply compromised. There's no real control group. There's two athletes who aren't doing drugs, but it's still not a functional control group.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  How, how, on top of that, how can you extrapolate what a 30 year old Olympian? How they react to a drug, how can you then extrapolate that to like a 70 year old grandmother? Which is what they want to do. They want everybody to be on drugs. It's very much this like this transhumanist project.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  Sure. Or even just like, I drink nine beers.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  And then I like roll out of bed and like go to bench press.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  A totally different thing to do to your body than like being, being in a.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like, does that guy need sermurelin, Diana ball, Decadura ballin, Adderall, Maldonium, like a, like a.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Let's not, let's not knock, knock Adderall. Let's, that's. I mean, I do think that there's middle ground.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  I take Adderall every day. Indeed, it is also fun. Um, but I lost my train of thought.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  The studies are deeply flawed. The athletes have, are as aware as people who are not scientists can be about like the risks of what they are doing and like they see an opportunity to get to make money.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  To make more money than they really would have probably ever make in their, in their career. I mean, if you, if they, one of them breaks a world record, they're going to get paid a million dollars.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  No matter what happens, they're going to say it was a success.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  From your actual vantage point, what will, um, and just, and just kind of like, give us a spark on like how long you've been covering this and how you've been covering this. What is your sense of like, what would actually be a successful event for them? And where do you think that this will actually, how, how do you think it'll actually play out?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  So for context, I've been covering this intermittently since, and for the last six months, it's been my day job. But intermittently since, uh, May of last year. So about a year. I just don't see it. I just don't see any like it, it, that being a success unless they break a world record. Like they have to break a world record in some event. I, I do anticipate that that will happen.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, but as in there, it's like Mark McGuire broke the, the home run.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  A lot of people, Barry Bonds, a lot of people still are like Barry Bonds is the home run king. I don't care what you say, you know?

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's a debate and it is like asterisk, like.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  I want, like, I wonder like, yeah, of course. A bunch of people who are like pumped up on drugs like no one else was. It's also not like, like, most people are like, man, I fucking, I love the, the world deadlifting guy.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  I, I, I love deadlifting and I don't know who that person is.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Thor Bjornson, you talking about the mountain, the guy that deadlifted 1100, like 1100 pounds or whatever?

• 13:38Speaker 00

  This is even my point is that like, I'm, I watch, my Instagram is full of people doing lifts and I don't know any of their names.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Why do they think that's worth it? Um, you know, am I, am I underestimating the amount of people who would care about this and would be impressed by the record? Even though they're all loaded on steroids?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  I don't think you are. I think that they would lean into the, the debate, but I think that if in a world, what I guess I was arguing is like, in a world where they did all this and someone still doesn't break a world record. That's the disaster.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  That's a disaster. I imagine that somebody is going to break a world record. If they do, it's going to spark some level of controversy. It's obviously going to have an asterisk and nobody else is going to recognize it. What I find more interesting personally, and I find more compelling just for me, speaking to myself is there's a number of athletes who they wouldn't say this. And it's not how, I want to be very clear. This is not how Enhanced sells it out loud, but the clear implication to me is like, there's this batch of like young 30 something, just barely out of their prime athletes who they're like, we can get you to break a world record. And then there's a batch of a few swimmers who are in their mid to late 30s, who are former Olympians, medalists, who are way past their prime in terms of like being an elite athlete.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Who, a couple of them, as I've been told, have like broken their personal records in training, which are not world records, but they are, that is impressive, I think, to me. It's, it's more impressive to me to get a 37 year old to break with, even with drugs, to break their like all time best time with a much older body.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  I see.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  That to me would be more meaningful. That's kind of the longevity part of it. And it's like, part of how this is connected, even though they kind of like, in a backwards way, deny any real connection to the transhumanism, transhumanism movement. Like that's part of, I mean, this is a transhumanist project. They're trying to sell longevity to people. This idea of like living forever and your body being beautiful and strong as, as long as you're alive, basically. Uh, if they can do that, I think that there is, there is something compelling about that and it's, it's hard to not like.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  See the carrot in front of your face of like, I'm like, for me, I'm, I'm 30. I, the last time I competed seriously, I was 22, you know, like it's hard, like I hear this and I'm not like, man, it would be cool to look and feel like I did when I was a division one wrestler again. I did not appreciate it at the time. It was fun. I felt good all the time. I was never tired. I was in incredible shape.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  No, I think about it all the time. Finish your thought, but I do, this is, this is what I want to talk about.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  If they do a good job of marketing that and one of them, there is this particular swimmer, I don't want to say her name. I don't want to out her, but has broken her PR a couple of times. I think if she does it on Sunday at the games, like, if they're smart, they're going to market that. That's what I would personally lean more in. You've got to market the world record if you break one, obviously, but that to me is the really compelling part of it. And I think if they do a decent job of marketing that, that will appeal to people.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Another really interesting thing, and I'm really curious to see, and I don't know, this is beyond me. It's beyond my pay grade, but so there's another swimmer competing, uh, whose name is Hunter Armstrong, who he won gold in the last two games, uh, who is competing in the enhanced games clean. And his whole spiel has been, I'm going to do the enhanced games because it's impossible to make a living doing swimming. It's a rich, it's a rich kid's sport. Uh, I have no money. My sponsors have bailed on me. We interviewed him. He told us his sponsors bailed on him because they wanted to get into the pickleball game. Which is insane. His plan has, and he's been very open about this. He's like, I want the world anti-doping agency to continue to test me. At no point am I going to like do

• 17:15Speaker 01

  steroids, keep testing me. Uh, I'm going to compete in the games. I'm going to leave. And I want to come back and swim in the 28 games. Many, many of the athletes have been banned by water. They're just like, yeah, they're, they're, they're done. Uh, most of them don't care because they're like, my swimming career is over. It is still unclear as of the taping of this, what is going to happen with Hunter Armstrong? Whether they'll let him swim in the Olympics or not theoretically, they could ban him for like poor character, but he has not specifically violated any of the like doping rules. And I think that that what happens with him will be really telling about whether this kind of event can continue. Because I think that I think that if it's impossible for these events to coexist.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Like, I do think eventually the enhanced games will lose its luster, these events being the Olympics and the enhanced games. I think the if that cannot happen, the enhanced games will ultimately lose its lose its luster after a few goes. Especially because as they take as if you're only getting old athletes, older athletes, even as you pump them full of drugs, it'll get harder and harder and harder to break records.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  I'll say for this first go around, Hunter, is that his name?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Hunter Armstrong, yeah.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  Might be the best thing for his career is to get canceled by the Olympics so that then he can have a career as a podcaster. Selling, you know, like

• 18:30Speaker 01

  It might, yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Depends if his goal is actually gold or longevity in a sphere. You've reinforced kind of my suspicion going in and also have made it more complicated where the Silicon Valley transhumanist bubble that has been growing, but is that but is still extremely insular. This is shit that is important to them that just seems extremely weird and niche, especially around niche sports. All of these things are attempted like incepting a mainstream and changing culture. And I think that they always just come across being people being like, you are so fucking weird. Like, this is such a weird thing to care about.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Specifically with transhumanism.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and just like all these sort of libertarian funded like backed ideas. It is off putting, I think, to most people. But the thing that you said that has me concerned that were that were that I think is hard to combat combat against is let's say a swimmer breaks a record and there's a sort of like, you don't need to lose your performance. More broadly, people are stuck making

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Moralistic and cultural cases to not take something that is that is iffy. That does, I think, move the Overton window and it becomes really hard to explain like, why wouldn't you take?

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  The time it will take to prove or no long-term results of these things, the cat will be out of the bag.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Totally. And I think I think that this has like, this is to the transhumanist movement, which do I need to explain that? Or do you think the audience knows what it is?

• 20:06Speaker 00

  I'm going to trust that the panic world audience knows.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Well, this is, I think, the most important moment, actually. Like, I don't think this is sensationalist. I think this is ultimately the most important moment for the transhumanist movement that it's ever had. What this is providing is like a very small modicum of proof among a very elite, specific group of people. This can be done, that you can like, enhance people safely without killing them. And like, they can theoretically come off like that. That that is providing proof that they have never, that they have, that they have never had before. And as far as like, yeah, I completely agree with you in the way that this shifts. Then you're forced to make arguments about like, assuming they can, which I don't disagree is a big, is a big if still. I it's very unclear to me that you could still, you could do steroids and it could be safe.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  But just for the sake of this argument, assuming that they can.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  Because again, a constantly tested world-class swimmer is in different shape. And who like, that's not a sample.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  It's not a sample size at all.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  That's not.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  But if they, they can convince people that they can do that, regular people, then you're stuck making these arguments like, oh, but that's not what it means to be human. Like, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, it's a lot harder. And whether it's true or not, I don't, you know, I don't know. I struggle with this. But it's also just harder. Like, if you're like, if if Enchance is sitting over there going, don't you want to feel good? Don't you remember when you were 24 and you're and like you were your dick was hard all the time and like you were happier and you could run five miles without your knees hurting and you could bed lift for it like weren't you happier versus like me over here trying like wagging my finger like that's not the human experience like you're supposed to accept aging

• 21:52Speaker 01

  with dignity like you're never gonna win that argument. I mean, look at GLP-1s like what did GLP-1s do to like the body positivity movement largely in like Hollywood, for example, you know, like it's gone away, you know, I think largely it's just a lot harder to hold that position. It's a lot more. It's a lot more nuanced, a lot more complicated, and this is a simple solution to a complicated problem, I think, you know?

• 22:12Speaker 00

  If it wasn't coming from them, right? I'm repulsed by who it's coming from. Explaining that they're like the amount of steps that are being skipped here.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  You're not gonna win that argument.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  It feels important to me to say that like they are essentially the argument they're making is that like the people who do these drugs usually are doing them illegally to don't know what they're getting and they're doing it illicitly. So they're trying to get caught. And there's obviously they're not seeing a doctor. And so they're doing like psychotic amounts of the drug. They're basically arguing like that you can microdose these drugs. So they're taking far smaller quantities of them. That I find interesting. There's there's like whenever I talk with people at this with with enhance like the kind of like the powers that be it is like they take these like kernels of of truth and just go buck wild with them.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  It's like I am. I do think it's a good thing to study the effects of anabolic steroids. We should know the like event horizon where like if you do enough testosterone, at what point do you get hypogonadism where your testicles shrink? That's a good thing to know. Can you or can you not come off testosterone? What should we be telling kids? These are all good things to know. But and then they just run wild with it like transhumanists often do and they get into the hypotheticals and they're like, what if we could cure muscle wasting in old ladies? And what if we could do and they get into these hypotheticals really quickly. So it's very hard to argue with them. Is a problem I've run into when I interview them is they very quickly turn to these like moral extremes. He's like moral hypotheticals, which transhumanists love to do. If you've read like Nick Bolstrom, they they turn everything into this like future

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd love to hear your prediction and then I'd love to, uh, this is fascinating. I but I love to move on to like your experience talking to those people, but I think that what we should do is hold this and then once it's over, do a follow up and see how everyone's feeling and kind of do a bookended thing. Yeah. Like, how has this made you reflect on being 30 and moving slower? And, um, have you felt tempted? Have you, do you feel like you relate to some of the athletes? Like, where's this left you?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Um, there's a guy that I interviewed who is not, at one, at one point in the series, we do an episode that is about the consumer, basically the normie that will be downstream from the, um, the athletes themselves, the enhanced games competitors. Uh, and we just talk about how much this all has seeped into the popular culture, being willing to inject yourself with drugs. I mean, I interviewed this gentleman who is, uh,

• 24:44Speaker 01

  he basically, he buys gray market peptides. He has prescription testosterone and he buys gray market red and true tide, which is a GLP. It's a, it's a, it's a GLP that people call GLP three. That's a kind of a gimmicky name, but it basically it's, it's, uh, I think a study just came out yesterday of like a, a final study from Eli Lilly, who manufactures it. It's like far more effective than, uh, yeah, regular GLP ones at preserving muscle. Muscle wasting is a big problem with other ones and Reda helps you preserve muscle is, as I understand, but I'm not a doctor. It's a, it's a, it's phase three trials, so it's, it's, it's, it's coming soon. But he's been taking it, uh, by just getting on, you can get, I don't know if I want to say how to get it actually, but you can, there are ways where

• 25:26Speaker 01

  you can get a hold of labs in China and they will direct to consumer ship you peptides that are,

• 25:37Speaker 01

  dubiously legal to illegal, like outright illegal in the United States. It's called the gray market. There was a story in the New Yorker a few weeks ago where they tested gray market peptides and some of them had fucking lead in them. Almost all of them had like, were not entirely with the product that they said they were. Like, there's tons of problems with this. It's really risky. And this guy had been using, uh, gray market red and true tide for many months now, maybe even over a year. And he lost like 80 pounds. He looked really fit. And as I interviewed him, his name's Aaron. As I interviewed Aaron, um, something that like kept coming up was he talked about his relationship with his dad, who was his hockey coach when growing up. He's from Michigan and he played hockey growing up. And how growing up, he was always like the fit ripped kid and like he was told telling me a story about how his like,

• 26:20Speaker 01

  his dad was like a business guy and he'd like make Aaron, his son come downstairs and like flex for his like business partners and shit. And he just, that just became such a part of his identity. And then he got, he got really overweight and had like back issues and he was just like, I felt like I, I felt like I had like never given my dad a reason to be proud of me since I was fit. And he was telling me this story about, he went to go visit his dad and his dad like pulled him into his lap like he was a kid again. And was talking about how proud of him he was.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  Hold on, was he proud of himself?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he was. Yeah, he seemed to be.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  There was a little bit of a like, he was a little insecure about it. He was a little bit insecure about having used pharmaceuticals to do it, but um,

• 27:01Speaker 01

  he generally seemed to like, he still got to like, he worked out constantly. He was like a really, even when he was fat, he was a really strong guy. It just seems like it kind of pushed him over the edge. So he, he seemed, he was a little insecure about it, but mostly he seemed okay with what he was doing. But just hearing him ta- tell me that story about his dad, his dad like pulls him into his lap and he's like, I'm so proud of you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Uh, I remember doing that and like, uh, I mean, I've interviewed neo Nazis, like I've talked to all sorts of crazy people and I'm pretty, usually pretty steeled in moments like that or really in any interview, but uh, like it made me emotional because I, I immediately, my mind went back to being a wrestler and being a very good wrestler. And I'm a big guy. I was a college heavyweight. I'm six, one, I'm probably two sixty-five now, but when I was, I was probably thirty, forty pounds lighter when I was competing.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Definitely put on a gut. All that to say, at tournaments in high school and even like early in college, like my dad would, they'd fly out to see me compete if I was at Wyoming, but before that even too. My dad would um, always like come up behind me and like, kind of like massage my like back and like my arms. And he'd be like, you're so fucking strong. Like you, like, look at you. Everyone here is afraid of you. Like you're a weapon, dude. He didn't exactly say that, but that was the vibe. He's like, but he's like, saying all these nice things to me and it's like being the big scary, strong guy that was good at fighting, that was good at sports. Was and still is so much of how I like identify myself. And there's something really fucked up in sports that like, it's one of the only.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Skills that you just like, you just lose it. Like at a very early age, you can never be as good at it again. By the time you're in your like, late twenties, early thirties, you're downhill. You're already getting worse. And at some point, you're gonna have to stop competing at a serious level. You can never do it again. So you like lose this part of yourself. And it's very difficult. Really empathize with this guy in that moment. I don't know that I would go as far as like, order drugs from China. And I think that that is, um, something's happened in the zeitgeist that I don't have a good answer to yet. I'm gonna try and keep writing about it. But something's happened in the zeitgeist in the last, I want to say since COVID. This maybe sounds a little

• 29:10Speaker 01

  extreme, but it felt like body perception issues were like something that culturally was like reserved for women. And that's was bad. And like, we shouldn't do that to people. And that's fucked up. But somewhere along the way, and like, I want to say the last day, like five to 10 years, like, it crossed the border and the sort of masculine world has been afflicted by this like, extreme body image crisis. This to me is a byproduct of that. The looks maxing thing is a byproduct of that. Like obsession with peptides is a byproduct of that.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  We've lost culturally things to replace the importance of of of that with. Like, I cared so much about how I looked and how I performed at things when I was a teenager. You know, I did not compete at and at the levels you were competing at.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  I do think it mattered in this way, where I didn't have the experience of like, oh, I've reached a physical peak and that I can no longer perform it. What happened was, other things started to matter more in life. If you're not that like, serious of an athlete, and they get replaced by other things, which was difficult in its own way, because I like, then realized I like, really missed. There's a thing I used to do with myself that I got that I knew myself as, this like, constantly playing a contact sport, or just like, like, being in my body in a specific way. And then like, I get to college and there's other priorities and other things you are rewarded for. And I like,

• 30:47Speaker 00

  completely had this disconnect from myself in this way. And by the time I was returning to like, a more physical lifestyle, like, I was, uh, cooked and chopped.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Courier Plus on Apple, Patreon.com/panicworld if you want the rest of me talking about Muslim men trying to break records in Las Vegas. America, we appreciate you. Have a good holiday. I hope your pets and you do not suffer too much.