The Enhanced Games: Aron D'Souza and Christian Angermayer on Performance Enhancement, Paying Athletes and Psychedelics

High-Level Overview

Dr. Aron D'Souza, president of the Enhanced Games, and investor Christian Angermayer, its co-founder, join Joe Rogan to pitch a new Olympic-style competition where athletes are paid well and allowed to use approved performance-enhancing substances under open medical supervision. They argue the current Olympic system is both hypocritical, because doping is widespread but hidden, and exploitative, because it generates billions while paying athletes almost nothing.

The conversation ranges well beyond sport: into body autonomy, the legal definition of medicine, anti-aging, the drug-harm rankings of Professor David Nutt, the return of psychedelic medicine, modafinil, beta blockers, GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, food marketing and the thorny question of transgender athletes. The tone is energetic, optimistic and occasionally argumentative, with Rogan broadly supportive but pushing back on several points, especially microdosing and how the Games would handle sex categories. The conversation moves between business plan, drug policy debate and philosophy of human enhancement.

The Discussion Explores:

• Why the founders believe the Olympics are dirty, unaccountable and unfair to athletes
• The Enhanced Games model: pay athletes, allow approved substances, test for health rather than drugs
• Legal versus banned substances, tainted supplements, and state-sponsored doping scandals
• Aging, sarcopenia and the legal definition of medicine as treating only disease
• David Nutt's Lancet drug-harm study, psychedelic medicine and a debate over microdosing
• Funding, format, broadcasting and why the Games will be spread across cities
• Transgender athletes, XX and XY categories, and the effects of testosterone on women
• Food, sugar and sponsorship, and why they believe conversations and capitalism drive change

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

The Case Against the Olympic System

D'Souza says he has studied the Olympic movement his whole life, and two statistics pushed him to act: research commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency found that 44 percent of Olympians admit to using banned substances within the last year, and the average American Olympian earns about $30,000 a year. Rather than reform the system, he says, "let's take a blank slate of paper and invent the third Olympiad from scratch." Rogan calls the Olympics a scam, since the International Olympic Committee brings in billions but does not pay athletes; D'Souza adds that the money goes to stadiums and officials instead.

They point to evidence of widespread doping: seven of the ten fastest 100-meter runners in history have had doping violations, the next clean finisher after Lance Armstrong's Tour de France titles were stripped was far down the field, and 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a heart medication received no sanctions, an accusation D'Souza attributes to U.S. Anti-Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygart. Rogan brings up the documentary Icarus and Russia's state-sponsored program. D'Souza also argues the IOC is accountable to no one: it is, in his words, a self-electing club formed in 1896, not chosen by nations or athletes.

Legal Is Not the Same as Banned

The founders stress the distinction between illegal and banned. Most substances on WADA's list are perfectly legal, they say, including FDA-approved TRT prescribed by a doctor, and they claim about 25 percent of products in a typical supplement store contain WADA-banned ingredients. Rogan describes UFC fighter Khalil Rountree being suspended after self-reporting a contaminated supplement, and the risk of contamination from factories that do not clean their vats between products. He also criticizes bans on IV rehydration, which exist to prevent masking but also block something he considers healthy.

D'Souza's alternative: "the solution is not to do drug testing. It's to do health testing." Athletes will get cardiac screenings, MRIs and blood work to ensure their biomarkers are in a healthy range. Angermayer lists three core rules: only substances approved by the FDA or a comparable regulator, a publicly named doctor responsible for each athlete, and on-site health checks, including heart MRIs, that disqualify anyone showing damage. Rogan worries athletes will push right up to the redline, and recalls the era of testosterone exemptions in MMA and Vitor Belfort's dramatic transformation, but the founders argue public accountability and health testing limit that.

Fairness, Consent and the Business Model

The founders frame their philosophy around informed consent: adults should be able to make choices about their own bodies. Angermayer argues true fairness means either a truly clean competition or a fully transparent enhanced one; what is unfair is standing on a podium suspecting the winner cheated. They compare their plan to the Olympics' historical ban on professionals, predicting a future of "natural and enhanced competitions side by side, and say they are building the Apollo mission for the 21st century" to show what humans can do with science.

The Games will feature five sports chosen for high viewership and low infrastructure cost: track, swimming, combat sports (boxing and MMA), gymnastics and strength. They offer $1 million for breaking a world record in key events, plus base pay around $100,000 negotiated with each athlete. Athletes need not use enhancements; a natural athlete who believes they won the genetic lottery can compete too. A casting call for a documentary with Ridley Scott drew more than 1,000 professional athletes, about 15 percent from combat sports, including former UFC fighters. Rogan presses on how they will attract elite talent and survive; D'Souza says they have raised enough from top venture investors, including Christian, Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, to run for three years with no media or sponsorship revenue, and targets the first Games for the end of 2025, spread across multiple cities connected by television rather than a single host city.

Aging, Medicine and Enhancement

Angermayer, who says he is undergoing an enhancement program himself with blood tests every two weeks, describes feeling 20 years younger in recovery. He argues enhancement is not just vanity: sarcopenia and osteoporosis in older adults could be eased by small, medically supervised doses of compounds like oxandrolone, but doctors avoid them because anabolic steroids became stigmatized in the doping debates of the 1980s and 90s. D'Souza explains that after the Flexner report, medicine was legally defined as treating and curing disease, so a doctor cannot help a healthy person become extraordinary, and aging is not legally a disease. He says aging "is a disease that we should be able to treat cure and eventually solve."

They discuss modafinil, which Angermayer takes and describes as widely studied and safe in moderate amounts, and point to GLP-1 drugs as proof the market wants enhancement: they say about 83 percent of prescriptions are off-label, and that these drugs added about $1 trillion to Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, five times the value of all generative AI startups. D'Souza recounts that creatine, when it emerged after the 1992 Olympics, was treated as scandalous, with a headline declaring "Creatine is cheating no matter how you look at it," yet now it is standard; Rogan says he takes creatine gummies daily. They note 75 percent of professional orchestral musicians have used beta blockers, which are banned under WADA rules.

Drug Harm, Psychedelics and a Microdosing Debate

Angermayer, who has never drunk alcohol, walks through Professor David Nutt's 2010 Lancet study ranking drug harms, which placed alcohol as the most harmful overall, followed by heroin, with psilocybin and other psychedelics near the bottom. He describes his first psilocybin experience in 2014 as the single most meaningful thing he has ever done, which led him to fund companies such as Compass and Atai to bring psychedelics back as medicine, including a psilocybin depression trial with 800 patients. He discusses the FDA advisory committee's recommendation against approving MDMA for PTSD, attributing it partly to limited data, and insists psychedelics must win on rigorous science.

Here Rogan and Angermayer genuinely disagree. Angermayer argues psychedelics historically were never consumer drugs, citing Brian Muraresku's work on ancient mystery cults, and should be used with a therapist; he cites a study that failed to show benefits from LSD microdosing and raises concerns about heart effects of frequent dosing. Rogan counters that microdosing has helped many people and falls under body autonomy, and that edible cannabis, through its metabolite 11-hydroxy-THC, can be profoundly psychedelic. D'Souza cites Carl Hart's argument that "America's drug problem is a dosage and an adulteration problem." Rogan adds a case for regulated legalization to undercut cartels and adulterated supply, citing his recent conversation with Freeway Rick Ross.

Transgender Athletes and Testosterone

Rogan asks how the Games will handle transgender athletes, arguing that allowing a biological male to enhance and compete against women would simply mean a man competing against women. D'Souza, who says he is gay, accepts that a person who transitions after male puberty has a measurable biological advantage, and describes an investor's proposal to divide events by XX and XY chromosomes rather than by male and female. Angermayer notes that none of the more than 1,000 applicants identified as transgender and suggests the issue may be smaller at the elite level than headlines imply.

Rogan presses a related point: high-dose testosterone permanently changes women, altering voices and fertility, and recalls Eastern Bloc athletes who suffered lasting harm. He argues that in an enhanced women's division, every competitor would effectively face a choice to masculinize. The founders respond that health screening would catch damage and that athletes' commercial brands would discourage extreme choices, and D'Souza raises gene editing with CRISPR as the next frontier: children edited before birth never consented, so should they be banned? He says the transgender debate is only the vanguard of a larger transhumanism question.

Food, Sponsors and How Change Happens

D'Souza points out that the Olympics' top sponsors have included McDonald's and Coca-Cola, and argues processed food and sugar are among the most damaging substances marketed to children. Rogan agrees on marketing, criticizes seed oils and the food pyramid, and cites the sugar industry's funding of research on saturated fat, but says he would never ban treats. D'Souza says, "Change only happens when someone puts a suit on and goes to work every day trying to solve a problem," and both founders argue for-profit models are the strongest driver of change. Rogan adds that long-form conversations and podcasts are shifting perceptions as trust in institutions falls, and they discuss the Olympic athletes' village, where poor sleep and partying may hurt performance.

Conclusion

The Enhanced Games founders make a provocative case: the Olympics are already full of hidden doping and underpaid athletes, so why not bring enhancement into the open, supervise it medically, pay competitors properly and see what humans can really do? Their argument reaches past sport into aging, the definition of medicine, and drug policy grounded in data rather than stigma. Rogan is supportive of the core idea and of body autonomy, while challenging them on microdosing, testosterone's effects on women and fair categories for transgender athletes. Whether or not the Games succeed, the episode lays out a clear vision of a future where performance enhancement is treated as science rather than scandal.

This is a summary of "#2166 - Enhanced Games" from The Joe Rogan Experience, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.