The Incredible Failure of the Enhanced Games
Jun 3, 2026 · 17 min · 10 segments
It lost $800 Million in RECORD Time. Get Early Access on SubstackJoin the Discord:
- Speakers
Scott CarneyHost
Jun 3, 2026 · 17 min · 10 segments
It lost $800 Million in RECORD Time. Get Early Access on SubstackJoin the Discord:
Scott CarneyHost
The $370 million investment came primarily from Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder, the Palantir scion, the techno-fascist, and friend of the channel.
It also included Christian Angermayer, the German billionaire who's made a fortune in psychedelics and longevity startups, Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase, and one more person who you probably know, the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, who backed the games with a cash investment from his fund, 1789 Capital.
This is not a group of people who got together because they love track and field.
This is a group of people who saw an opportunity in getting in on the trillion-dollar supplement and testosterone business while they still could.
The plan, and I want to be clear about it because it's kind of brilliant in a deeply cynical way, the plan was to use the Enhanced Games as a loss leader.
They would spend this $370 million fortune on a spectacle to get the world's attention, and then funnel all of that attention into supplements and peptides and testosterone therapy pipelines that are rapidly gaining market share against ordinary doctor-backed healthcare.
In the two-year lead-up to the games, coverage was everywhere from Wired and NPR and The New York Times.
The lights, the booming music, the cheering crowds, and the huge billboards.
Here's how one of my fellow YouTubers, a channel called Athletic Interest, put it.
Still, before a single race was won, the Enhanced Games were valued at 1.2 billion.
So how do they make money? The sports event isn't the product.
The sports event is the ad.
In March 2026, right as the games were approaching, Enhanced launched its consumer platform, selling supplements and testosterone therapy.
That's the whole game right there, and it's precisely why the Enhanced team brought in Brian Johnson, a wellness vampire with his own supplement line, to commentate on the event.
His job was to tout a golden age of peptides, longevity protocols, and concierge medicine to people who are willing to spend big.
But when the games didn't go as planned, his job was then to explain to the audience why these doped-up athletes only managed to break a single record in the event, and boy, did he ever try.
And I think a lot of people have come into today expecting world records to drop.
Now, to put that into context, these athletes have been training in-
in-For four months.
Mm-hmm.
The $370 million investment came primarily from Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder, the Palantir scion, the techno-fascist, and friend of the channel.
It also included Christian Angermayer, the German billionaire who's made a fortune in psychedelics and longevity startups, Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase, and one more person who you probably know, the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, who backed the games with a cash investment from his fund, 1789 Capital.
This is not a group of people who got together because they love track and field.
This is a group of people who saw an opportunity in getting in on the trillion-dollar supplement and testosterone business while they still could.
The plan, and I want to be clear about it because it's kind of brilliant in a deeply cynical way, the plan was to use the Enhanced Games as a loss leader.
They would spend this $370 million fortune on a spectacle to get the world's attention, and then funnel all of that attention into supplements and peptides and testosterone therapy pipelines that are rapidly gaining market share against ordinary doctor-backed healthcare.
In the two-year lead-up to the games, coverage was everywhere from Wired and NPR and The New York Times.
The lights, the booming music, the cheering crowds, and the huge billboards.
Here's how one of my fellow YouTubers, a channel called Athletic Interest, put it.
Still, before a single race was won, the Enhanced Games were valued at 1.2 billion.
So how do they make money? The sports event isn't the product.
The sports event is the ad.
In March 2026, right as the games were approaching, Enhanced launched its consumer platform, selling supplements and testosterone therapy.
That's the whole game right there, and it's precisely why the Enhanced team brought in Brian Johnson, a wellness vampire with his own supplement line, to commentate on the event.
His job was to tout a golden age of peptides, longevity protocols, and concierge medicine to people who are willing to spend big.
But when the games didn't go as planned, his job was then to explain to the audience why these doped-up athletes only managed to break a single record in the event, and boy, did he ever try.
And I think a lot of people have come into today expecting world records to drop.
Now, to put that into context, these athletes have been training in-
in-For four months.
Mm-hmm.
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