The Enhanced Games, a novel sports event explicitly allowing performance-enhancing drugs, seems like a publicity play for the techno-macho age: Olympic-caliber athletes on steroids vying for million-dollar prizes in Las Vegas. Yet, co-founder Aron D’Souza envisions a telehealth business with a 90% gross margin and a proposal for governments grappling with aging populations.
Set to launch in May 2026 with Peter Thiel’s support, the Games pledge $1 million awards for setting new world records. Some former Olympic athletes, such as sprinter Fred Kerley and swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, have already committed to compete. The aim extends beyond shattering world records as fans applaud; it involves creating a marketing engine for a longevity sector D’Souza anticipates will be worth trillions.
“We leverage sports marketing to market a human enhancement product,” D’Souza stated on a recent Equity episode. “It’s a telehealth service akin to Hims or Roman, but we [will] have proof that the top and fastest athletes globally utilize our protocols.”
The business strategy mirrors Red Bull’s approach – using extreme sports to promote a product – but the product isn’t an energy beverage. Instead, it’s testosterone, growth hormone, or any substance that can maintain human competitiveness with machines and productivity into their 70s and beyond.
Despite the Games’ controversial nature, D’Souza is confident the negative perception will diminish once individuals witness athletes in their 30s and 40s breaking world records. He and billionaire co-founder Christian Angermayer have secured “double-digit millions” based on this idea and recruited executives from the U.S. Olympic Committee, Red Bull, and FIFA to advance what D’Souza describes as a mission to “upgrade all of humanity.”
“I anticipate that when Fred [Kerley] surpasses [Usain Bolt’s] 100-meter world record in Vegas next year, it will mark a turning point, demonstrating that enhanced humans outperform ordinary ones,” he asserted.
To put it differently: if Sputnik inaugurated the space age and ChatGPT sparked the AI revolution, D’Souza believes a steroid-fueled sprint could usher in the human enhancement era – and trigger a similar surge of investment.
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Longevity startups attracted $8.5 billion in 2024 as interest in extending lifespan transitioned from a fringe interest to a mainstream investment thesis. The appeal ranges from billionaires funding anti-aging research to everyday Americans opting for direct-to-consumer health monitoring when traditional healthcare falls short.
D’Souza contends that longevity is not merely desirable but essential in the context of progressively aging populations and increasingly intelligent machines.
In numerous regions globally, declining birth rates are setting major economies on a trajectory toward population decline. A recent McKinsey study revealed that fertility rates are falling below the replacement level nearly everywhere, with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa. Several nations have employed immigration to tackle the challenges posed by an aging populace, as immigrants typically arrive at a younger working age, fill essential labor shortages, and tend to have more offspring.
However, large-scale migration has sparked a political backlash in both Europe and the U.S., where right-wing factions have gained traction by fueling anxieties regarding immigration and national identity. Immigration has been a pivotal theme of Donald Trump’s presidency, and D’Souza anticipates this issue could propel far-right figures to power in countries such as Germany, France, and the U.K.
“If you oppose mass immigration, you inevitably face a demographic scenario resembling Japan,” D’Souza noted, adding that Japan’s average age (49.8 years) makes it one of the world’s oldest populations.
“So, how do you reconcile the need for economic growth with an anti-immigration approach?” he questioned. “The solution must be longevity and human enhancement, as there is no alternative. We require a young, working, tax-paying population, which is incompatible with low birth rates.”
The proposition is blunt: Instead of embracing immigration or expanding social welfare programs that might encourage higher birth rates, simply enhance humans to prolong their working lives. D’Souza dismissed the policy alternatives, stating that Europe has already attempted to support families without success in raising birth rates.
Against this backdrop, the Enhanced Games has attracted some predictable backers, including Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., through his VC firm 1789 Ventures. D’Souza characterizes both as “obsessed with the nation’s demographics.” Thiel has invested significantly in longevity startups such as Retro Biosciences, Unity Biotechnology, and NewLimit, which he co-founded with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong in 2021.
Of course, many of the Games’ investors are also wagering billions that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — essentially, AI capable of performing any intellectual task a human can — will soon outperform humans in most jobs. This raises the question: If AGI is on the horizon, why bother extending our working lives at all?
“We have the Sam [Altman] perspective, which is that AGI will arrive, replace all humans, and relegate humans to a second-class status due to the superiority of machines,” D’Souza explained. “The inevitable consequence of this, which Sam won’t acknowledge, is that humans [become] irrelevant.”
The alternative paradigm D’Souza suggests? A competition between humans and machines.
“Machines are improving in real time, and due to outdated regulations, particularly by the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti Doping Agency, human enhancement is restricted, preventing us from upgrading rapidly enough to compete with machines,” he continued. “My aim is to ensure that humans can remain competitive with machines.”
However, the challenge with this species-level perspective is that not all humans will necessarily receive the upgrade.
D’Souza suggests that “technology diffusion” will lead to a trickle-down enhancement effect, where what’s suitable for elite athletes evolves into therapy for individuals engaged in activities like CrossFit, and eventually becomes more accessible to non-athletes. Nevertheless, the business model – premium telehealth services marketed through elite athletes – indicates a potential scenario where the wealthy are enhanced, while everyone else simply ages.
When I posited that enhancement technologies would likely reach the wealthiest first — and that elites might monopolize access to these capabilities — D’Souza did not object.
“I believe that is a potentially detrimental consequence of human enhancement,” he acknowledged.
