Transcript
Aron D'Souza: So I think of the Enhanced Games a lot like Formula One. Formula One is a combination of the athlete and the engineer working together. Enhanced games are the athlete and the scientists working together.
Daniel Darling: Welcome to the Five Year Frontier podcast, a preview of the future through the eyes of the innovators shaping our world. Through short, insight-packed discussions, I seek to bring you a glimpse of what a key industry could look like five years out. I'm your host, Daniel Darling, a venture capitalist at Focal, where I spend my days with founders at the very start of their journey to transform an industry. The best have a distinct vision of what's to come, a guiding North Star they're building towards. And that's what I'm here to share with you.
In today's episode, we're talking about the future of human potential and performance. In it, we cover the quest to be superhuman, making biological enhancements mainstream, cyborg athletes, human longevity, and endeavoring to build the biggest sporting spectacle the world has ever seen. Our guide will be Aron D'Souza, co-founder and president of the Enhanced Games. This new model of the Olympic Games places performance-enhancing drugs and genetic modifiers front and center. The games strive to showcase humanity's unbounded potential by embracing scientific innovations and breakthroughs in an era of accelerating technological and scientific change. They believe the world needs a sporting event that embraces the future, particularly advances in medical science. By doing so, they promised to give us all a glimpse of what the future of human performance could look like.
Set to debut in 2025, the games have the deep-pocketed support of some of the most successful and polarizing technologists and investors, including PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, the futurist CTO of Coinbase, as well as an upcoming documentary series by Ridley Scott. Prior to the Enhanced Games, Aron founded Sargon, a technology infrastructure company for the pensions and superannuation industry across the Asia Pacific region. Now owned by Vista Equities, Sargon has 200 employees and nine offices. Aron is the author of three books and studied law at both Melbourne and Oxford University. Now Aron presents one of the most polarizing, fun, and exciting episodes that I've ever done. I'm excited for you to listen to it and get a glimpse of what this future might look like. Aron, so nice to see you.
Aron D'Souza: Thanks for having me on the show.
Daniel Darling: So I feel so lucky to be recording this with you. Right at the heart of Olympic fever, it's week two of the Paris Olympic Games here. And here you are ushering in the biggest disruption to the Olympic movement in memory. In my view, what's been your critique of the games so far, and in particular the areas that have spurned your motivation to start the Enhanced Games?
Aron D'Souza: Daniel, I don't think that we're the biggest disruption just to the Olympics. We're the biggest disruption to the history of sports. In many ways, what we're trying to do is disrupt humanity as a whole. The core objective of the Enhanced Games is not to build a better version of the Olympics. It's not to even build a better version of sports. It's to build superhumanity and imagine what the world will be like when there are superhumans among us mere mortals. And that will happen at the first Enhanced Games.
Daniel Darling: Really big mission there. And I see that in your mission statement as a company, which is really around saying there's an inherent enhanced movement that believes in the medical and scientific process of elevating humanity to its full potential. What is that kind of end goal that you're looking at achieving for the Enhanced Games? In this kind of enhanced movement and elevating these people in this way, I.
Aron D'Souza: Believe that the performance enhancements market, performance medicine market, will be the largest market ever created. And the evidence that I can give is that Ozempic and the GLP-1 drugs added $1 trillion to the market capitalization of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. In comparison, all the generative AI startups, including OpenAI, are only worth 200 billion. Therefore, one enhancement drug is worth five times all of AI. And so what do we mean by superhuman? Well, humans are limited by our biology. Superhumans, humans 2.0 will be unlimited. We can overcome our biological limits and be something more than human. And that's what the Enhanced Games is about.
Daniel Darling: And what kind of enhancements are you envisioning for your athletes? What will they be taking to improve and better their performance?
Aron D'Souza: Our athletes will be able to use all FDA-regulated compounds, at minimum to increase performance. So these are things like anabolic steroids, synthetic growth hormones, etc. But most importantly, these are the same drugs that allow athletes to run fast or to jump high, but they also allow my father to walk up a flight of stairs. It will allow us to age more gracefully. And I believe aging is a disease that we can treat, cure, and eventually solve.
Daniel Darling: Yeah, and I'd love to come back to those kind of flow-on effects from what is happening at the Enhanced Games from there. So they can take FDA-approved performance-enhancing drugs of any kind of variety and any kind of concoction that they.
Aron D'Souza: As long as it's done under clinical supervision. So that's the core fact that differentiates us from Olympic competition. So, according to research funded by the World Anti-Doping Agency, 44% of elite athletes admit to using banned performance-enhancing drugs in the last year, yet only 1% get caught. And so you can assume that basically everyone who's winning a medal at the Paris Olympics, certainly everyone who's setting a world record, probably has at some point in their career, taken banned enhancing drugs. And so instead of doing it in the darkness, in secret, let's do it all out in the open, where scientists and clinicians can gather effective data, and we can really study what's going on and use it to improve the human condition.
So I think of the Enhanced Games a lot like Formula One. Formula One is a combination of the athlete and the engineer working together. Enhanced Games are the athlete and the scientists working together. And in Formula One, technologies are always developed. And some of the most amazing automotive technologies have come out of Formula One, particularly anti-lock braking. And now every car on the market has anti-lock brakes, which allows them to drive faster and safer for longer.
Daniel Darling: It's a really fantastic analogy that makes a lot of sense. And you're combining the athlete with an actual doctor for that supervision, and then that doctor is kind of named or sort of put forward alongside that athlete. Is that right?
Aron D'Souza: That's right. It's the team doctor. And so it's like Leclerc can't just drive the Ferrari one day and the McLaren the next day. It's a team effort.
Daniel Darling: I've heard you call what happens at the moment behind closed doors as locker room bro science, in terms of what people are taking from there, which is, I think, an amazing turn of phrase. So this is really about taking that out of the darkness, professionalizing it, putting some names to account from the medical profession, and then would they also showcase what they were taking as part of that? Is that sort of how transparent it would be?
Aron D'Souza: Absolutely right. And so we are a serious scientific project. I have a PhD, and numerous members of my team do as well. We have people like Professor George Church, the chairman of genetics at Harvard University, on our advisory board. And we've always, from the very outset, been a serious scientific endeavor. We want to make sure that we can not only transition humans into a new superhumanity, but do so safely. Safety requires clinical supervision and requires good, high-quality data.
Daniel Darling: How do you prevent athletes from pushing it too far? What are some of the guardrails that you're putting into place for them to really not go too far?
Aron D'Souza: It's a comprehensive health assessment. So if you, Daniel, wanted to take performance enhancements today you could, and I would recommend that you go see a doctor on Rodeo Drive or on Fifth Avenue. There's a whole industry of anti-aging and performance medicine physicians, particularly in the United States. The first thing they would do is take your blood, make you do an echocardiogram. They might even give you an MRI and do some kind of other organ imaging and prove that you're healthy, and create a baseline set of biomarkers that then could be used for your overall clinical assessment. And so that's what we're doing at the Enhanced Games. We're going to review every athlete on an ongoing basis to make sure that they're healthy to compete, most particularly on a cardiac level.
The biggest risk for us as a business and for an individual athlete is that an adverse medical event happens on live international television. We don't want that to happen. And the most likely circumstance is that it's a cardiac event and that can be screened for using well-established methodologies.
Daniel Darling: You're not just doing every single type of sport and mimicking the Olympics in that way. You're very selective about the types of events that you're hosting to begin with. Can you just list what they would be and why you chose them?
Aron D'Souza: Yeah. So the Olympic Games have too many sports. The result of that means that at the Paris Olympics, they've built a dozen stadiums and they're going to throw them away after two weeks. It's literally one of the most wasteful exercises in human history. You can go to Rio, London, or Athens, and you can see the ruins of Olympic success, where billions and billions of dollars were spent building infrastructure that literally got thrown away after two weeks. And so let's focus on the sports that matter, the ones that have the highest television and social media impact with the lowest infrastructural costs. Track and field, swimming, gymnastics, combat, and weightlifting. Five sports that don't require specialist infrastructure that can be delivered anywhere in the world. And that will mean that we can deliver the entire Enhanced Games for less than the cost of the opening ceremonies, while having a similar level of television and social media impact, which in the end, means that it will be a very profitable exercise, which means that we will be able to pay the athletes very, very well.
And one fact that I always point to is that your average Olympian only earns about $30,000 a year. And even if you're a gold medalist, it doesn't mean a lifetime of financial security. And so we need to find a better way, a better business model for the games, and the first step is to stop the wasted infrastructural spending. We have forced the Olympics, for the first time ever, to pay their athletes. So we offered a million-dollar prize pool. It caused quite a stir for that, for world record and world athletics, which came out and offered $50,000 for a gold medal at the Paris Olympics. It's the first time ever that they have been offering any kind of direct cash compensation from an international federation for winning a gold medal at the Olympic Games. So we are forcing the Olympics to adjust to the 21st century. I don't think they'll catch up. The Olympics are like the taxis, or they're like Blockbuster Video, and we're like Uber, or we're like Netflix. They won't be able to adjust their business model quickly enough.
We're planning to do it every year because athletes need greater opportunities to monetize. And the reason the Olympics are every four years is because they're stuck in this ancient Greek ethos. It's a 3,000-year-old business model that was reinvented by a racist French aristocrat, Baron Pierre de Corbettin, in 1896. And we are the Olympics of the future. We want to say we will always respond to social, political, and economic change. And as science and as technology progress, we need to adjust to that. So the Olympic Games were designed for an era of the steamship of nationalism, before instantaneous broadcasts. And now we're designing a new Olympiad, the third Olympiad, for an era of science and technology, social media, and instantaneous distribution.
Daniel Darling: Underlying some of the economics of building this business seems to be quite an interesting potential tie-in with big pharma or pharmaceuticals. And, you know, a cynical look at this would say this is the biggest gift to big pharma. You could deliver, which is essentially the best form of content marketing for their drugs that they couldn't provide. Is that something that is deliberately done on your end? What is the relationship with these institutions? And how do you kind of see this evolving as some sort of symbiotic relationship between the types of drugs being used by your athletes and sort of the wider promotion of those kinds of drugs?
Aron D'Souza: It's exactly like Formula One, Daniel. I love high-performance cars. I would never buy a Renault because they're bad at Formula One. I'd buy a McLaren or a Ferrari because they're good at Formula One. And in the same way, the Enhanced Games will demonstrate the efficacy of medicine and scientific technologies that enhance human performance.
Why is sports marketing the most effective marketing of all time? Because it actually demonstrates, in a really tangible way, how products and services compete with each other. This isn't just about pharmaceutical products. This can also be about technology products. So think about artificial intelligence, computer vision in an augmented reality. Imagine a javelin thrower wearing an Apple Vision Pro goggle getting real-time decision support, powered by OpenAI. Powered by Amazon. Right? Shouldn't Team Amazon and Team OpenAI compete against each other to see who can enhance an athlete better? Who can compete better on the playing field? And this is where technology brands have not traditionally used sports marketing.
If you go to a Premier League football match or the Olympics, the major sponsors are some of the most deleterious companies that have ever existed. It's processed food, it's alcohol, it's gambling. Those are the major sponsors of sports today, and two of the most powerful drugs ever invented, processed food and alcohol, are the biggest investors. They're the biggest sponsors of mainstream commercial sports today. And so we want to move away from that and focus on the futuristic companies, the companies building the future, whether it's in AI, whether it's in biopharma or other advanced technologies, and use the Enhanced Games as a method to demonstrate the effectiveness of their technology.
Daniel Darling: And that's the first time I've heard you talk about something that isn't biological, but rather technological, in terms of saying, can you provide something with something like computer vision or some sort of data input as well? Is that part of how you view the enhanced picture for an athlete, of adopting these kinds of technologies as part of their performance?
Aron D'Souza: That's right. So the first Enhanced Games are focused on pharmacological enhancements, but there's no reason to say that we can't allow engineered enhancements. So think about next-generation shoes, advances in material science. But let's take it a step even further. I've had a lot of robotics companies reach out to me and they've said, "Oh, Aron, can I build a robot that can compete in the Enhanced Games?" I said, you can't build a car to run the 100 meters, but can you build a bipedal, six-foot, three-inch, 220-pound humanoid robot to run the 100 meters? Can you do so with full artificial intelligence so that it can go from the locker room to the starting blocks to the medal stand without any human intervention? If you think about the rise of technology and the actual need for humanoid artificial intelligence-based assistance, demonstrating that at the Enhanced Games will be a very, very powerful tool.
And what I want to see in my lifetime is not just 20-year-olds breaking world records, but 30-year-olds, 40-year-olds, 50-year-olds, and eventually, I hope, a 65-year-old enhanced athlete can be faster than the fastest natural human being. Imagine a 65-year-old running a 9.5-second 100 meters. What would that tell us about the place of aging in our society? And what would it tell us about the retirement age? If a 65-year-old, 165-year-old can be faster and the fastest natural human, should we be rethinking the statutory retirement age?
Daniel Darling: I love this, and I think it really is a petri dish for experimenting on a global stage that would have massive ramifications beyond that and sticking with that kind of human optimization component. With pharmaceuticals and biologicals, it seems like you're picking up on what is a really massive trend that we're observing in pharma, which is from treating the sick to optimizing the entire population.
Aron D'Souza: Medicine is about the treatment and amelioration of disease. So it's about making sick people less sick. And if you walked into your doctor today and said, I'm a perfectly healthy 39-year-old, but I want to be extraordinary, your doctor would say, well, you don't have a disease, and therefore I cannot treat you for anything. I cannot prescribe you any drugs without a clinical indicator that is a disease. And so what we are changing is not just the definition of sports, but also the definition of medicine. Taking medicine from this negative concept, making people less sick, to a positive concept, positive medicine, where medicine can be used to enhance the human condition.
Daniel Darling: Absolutely. And that definitely feels like where things are going. And I can imagine that that's where pharmaceuticals also want it to go because you're suddenly addressing 100% of the human population versus just a small percentage of that population.
Aron D'Souza: Yeah. And so it's going to be amazing. When the history of humanity is written, it will turn out that the thing that was blocking us from going from being mortals to being superhumans was a bunch of random Swiss sports bureaucrats. Because right now, there's very little research and development being done into performance-enhancing drugs because they can't be used for the optimal case, which is in sports, but they can actually be used for people who don't compete in sports. And so what we are doing is we're going to unlock this entire multi-trillion dollar global market where pharmaceutical companies will have a TAM of 100% of our population.
Everyone, I believe, will want to become enhanced when it can be done safely and through high-quality clinical supervision. And then that's going to create a positive feedback cycle of a larger market, more revenue, more profit, greater human performance, and a greater demand for these products. We will be putting our logo as a certifier of products on goods. And then we will work with doctors to create certified clinics and delivery protocols, so it becomes a whole ecosystem where you say, "Oh, I watch that guy compete at Enhanced Games. I believe that I want to become enhanced just like him. So I'm going to go talk to an enhanced certified physician, use enhanced certified products, and have a whole enhanced lifestyle." It's a platform play. So think of us like Google. We need to get one product that is search to work well, and then layer on additional products, so like AdWords, and then G Suite, and then cloud and build a whole tightly integrated, maybe like Apple iPhone-like ecosystem, where first and third-party apps can all sit on one technological platform.
So we might not be delivering the full clinical support in Saudi Arabia, but we might be able to do it in the United States, for example. And that might require partners or different apps on the platform. And so what we have to do is have the killer app. The first app work really, really well. And for us, that's the games. And then once we have the principal marketing platform for human enhancements, then we can layer everything else on.
Daniel Darling: What are some of the enhancements that you're seeing interests you the most, and where do you see that kind of evolving? Is it all around the inputs that we take from a pharmacological perspective, or are we also starting to think about things like genetic engineering as part of this?
Aron D'Souza: You know, genetic engineering and CRISPR technology is real, and this poses a huge ethical threat to the Olympics. So the Olympics effectively say you have to be a natural human. You cannot be an enhanced human to compete at the Olympic Games. Fair enough. That's their rule set. And so imagine in 20 years' time, we're going to have the first generation of CRISPR babies who were born enhanced, who cannot become unenhanced, who will want to compete in sports. And you see the challenges today that the IOC is facing about trans athletes and intersex athletes, and they don't know how to deal with scientific and technological change.
Daniel Darling: And then do you see an increasing cohort of your athletes being designed to be athletes? Like, I can imagine some of the labs in places like China and Russia getting pretty excited about the idea of unleashing some top-performing athletes that are being incredibly enhanced using their science onto the world stage.
Aron D'Souza: I don't think it's just in China and Russia, there's excellent surveys about parents in the United States who are asked the question, how tall would you want your child to be? And every parent actually wants their child to be tall. Particularly for boys. If we had the option to enhance ourselves, shouldn't we be able to take it? And one of the kind of fundamental ethical questions that I pose is always, what will it mean to be mortal when we live in a world where superhumans are among us? This is almost like a Marvel cinematic universe type of question, but it will happen. We're going to say, oh, there are enhanced humans who are performing at an extraordinary level because of science, not because of mere genetics, but because of some scientific intervention. What does that mean for a wider society? Does it mean that governments need to subsidize enhancements so that everyone has equal access to them? Or does it mean that only the rich, the powerful, the celebrities get access to these enhancements? These become very powerful public policy questions.
Daniel Darling: How would you project that out if you had to say that this started to happen?
Aron D'Souza: I think it's going to be that some nations will be filled with superhumans, and some will be filled with increasingly sick, old, fat mortals. And on a public policy level, I can see this happening already. I see that there are some countries that say, oh, yes, this idea of human enhancement is real. It's going to be a powerful driver of economic productivity. When we have an increasingly aging society in all of the developed economies, how can we solve that? Well, the easiest way is actually just to make the population younger through performance medicine. And some countries are very receptive to this concept. Others, like Australia, I think, and Britain, will reject this idea. They will fall behind, and then there will be a global geostrategic arms race for the most effective enhancements to become the most powerful population. If you think of this from a militaristic angle, if you're America, don't you want all your marines to be enhanced? Don't you want your soldiers to be the strongest versions that they can be? Don't you want your population to be as strong, as healthy as possible? And some countries will adopt this, and...
Daniel Darling: Others will not, given the gravity of a lot of what you're talking about, timescale is in your head when you're thinking about these kinds of topics. Maybe just start with when the first Enhanced Games will go live, and then when do you start to think that these impacts will start to proliferate out as you envisage?
Aron D'Souza: Our goal is to deliver the first games by the end of 2025. So within 18 months, we'll be seeing the first superhumans among us. And this cultural change is faster than ever. You know, I'm a gay man. And it wasn't only until I believe 2002, that it was legal to be gay in the United States with the Lawrence v. Texas decision. Even in our home country of Australia, gay marriage only became on the books within the last ten years. And now this is sort of unthinkable that this condition could have never been. And so society is changing so quickly, and the proliferation of social media, I think, is the principal driver of this accelerated social change.
And so by the time Brisbane hosts the 2032 Olympics, I think it will just be a total white elephant. Who's going to want to watch the fastest natural humans in the world running 9.8-second 100 meters when at the Enhanced Games, people are running 8.8-second 100 meters, continually getting faster, using new technology and improving the human condition. Once it clicks in the brain of public policymakers that there is this whole technological set that they have not hitherto thought about, and it will become like artificial intelligence. Ten years ago, to people in Silicon Valley, to venture capitalists, artificial intelligence was real, but it was hard, and a lot of money needed to be spent to make it real. But to your average person on the street, just ten years ago, even just five years ago, artificial intelligence was Sci-Fi, it was something that was the realm of Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and all we needed was a Sputnik moment. And that Sputnik moment was ChatGPT. They're like, wow, a computer that can write and almost think. That changed everything. And now every government, every Fortune 500 company has or is developing an AI policy.
And I think after the first Enhanced Games, every government is going to say, what is our human enhancements policy? Are we going to, like the Americans do, openly celebrate this technology, try and push it as quickly and as far as possible? Or, like the Europeans, regulate it into the ground. And I think we're going to see different countries approach this in different ways. But where this is interesting is that with the aging population issue, that is really pernicious in Italy, in Greece, in Germany, in Japan, there's going to be a need for performance medicine technology, there's going to be a need to enhance the population writ large, because otherwise the nation will not survive.
Daniel Darling: What's your vantage point on longevity and the potential for extending our lifespan?
Aron D'Souza: I think it's hard to extend our lifespans, but we can increase our health spans. So it's pretty obvious when you walk around the streets in Los Angeles or in Miami that people are enhanced, and that for most in the Hollywood Hills, they view aging as optional. And there's a cocktail of medications and surgeries, procedures that can be done to make aging a more optional condition.
Daniel Darling: You're talking largely about the superficial side or you think that there's actually quite a sophisticated endeavour already at place in terms of the underlying health of someone?
Aron D'Souza: Yeah, you only need to look at Joe Biden, Donald Trump versus Robert F. Kennedy junior. RFK has a perfect six-pack. He's doing pull-ups. And he's the same vintage as Trump and Biden. Why is he able to be so physically active? It's because he's enhanced. He's taking, and has been taking for a long time, very openly synthetic growth hormones. He's taking testosterone. And if he wanted to compete in any Olympic-sanctioned competition, whether that's running the Boston Marathon or competing at the Paris Olympics, he would not be able to.
Daniel Darling: And Aron, what about yourself? You've been immersed in this industry for a couple of years now. How are you thinking about your own enhancements?
Aron D'Souza: I intend to be the very first person to undertake the enhancement protocol that we are recommending to our athletes. So I want to be the guinea pig. I want to be there. And, you know, I want to go and compete at the first games myself. Right. In the 100 meters. Right. I probably can run, I don't know, like a 14 or 15-second 100 meters now. It's pretty pathetic.
Daniel Darling: Yeah, that's a lot of enhancements.
Aron D'Souza: Yeah. But like, won't it be fascinating to see what is possible for a 39-year-old venture capitalist to transform itself into. Right. I'm not probably going to be running a sub-ten-second 100 meters, but can I go from 14 seconds to eleven? I think that's pretty cool. I'm going to be documenting the whole process on social media. And I want to be really transparent about the benefits, the side effects and
the setbacks. Be very open and honest and transparent about it.
Daniel Darling: You're working on such a massive moonshot, Aron, and that must be really hard to have all of these sort of big long-term ambitions and so many complicated things all in your head at one point. How do you keep focused on that endeavor, especially when you're being bombarded by skeptics and naysayers along the way?
Aron D'Souza: It's great operational procedures. The number one asset of any organization is its culture. And culture isn't about just being inclusive and welcoming and friendly. It's about how an organization operates. So at Enhanced, every single person who works here replies to every single email that they get every day. We all get to inbox zero with something that we're very proud of. We're ultra responsive. We move very quickly. We don't make decisions by committee. The International Olympic Committee is a committee of people that move slowly. We move quick. We make hundreds of decisions every day and are extremely decisive. We project manage everything.
If the IOC president came to my office here in Kensington, he would see a bunch of mostly young software engineers building the future as if we are building software. I think he would go home and say, you know what? We'll never be able to compete with those guys, right? It's like the taxis competing against Uber. It's a completely different cultural mindset of the organization and the ability to deliver change. We want to be at the same level as Tesla and OpenAI in terms of talent, and that the most talented people in the world want to come and work on this project. Why? Because it has a humanity-defined mission. It's not about building a better SaaS widget or an AI chatbot or just another unicorn. It's not just about making money. It's about building the future of humanity, where aging is optional and that we can overcome our limits. And we have shown time and time again that the most talented people in the world want to work here at the Enhanced Games.
Daniel Darling: That's an incredible note to end on. I think this has been one of the most fascinating conversations I've had on this podcast, and it is about unlocking the future, but you're really pulling the future forward in such a massive way. Congrats on all that you're doing. Very excited to watch the first Enhanced Games and maybe even see you compete in it. And thanks for coming on to chat with me today.
Aron D'Souza: Thank you very much for having me on the show.
Daniel Darling: What a wild conversation. It's incredible to hear from Aron how they're fearlessly challenging our preconceptions. If his team at Enhanced Games is able to pull off even a fraction of what they're setting out to do, it will leave a lasting impact on our global society. I go back to his talk of the Sputnik moment to awaken the world to what is possible for human potential and really spur a scientific and technological arms race to unlock more from our physical selves. Whether you agree with their approach or not, the Enhanced Games are well funded and endorsed and will be arriving on the global stage in 2025. It doesn't feel like we're ready or willing to welcome its arrival, but then again, that is usually the sentiment before a major transformation to our status quo. To follow Aron and the team's work, head over to their Twitter account at Enhance Games. I hope you enjoyed today's episode, so please subscribe and rate the episode if you'd like to listen to more coming down the pipe. Until next time, thanks for listening and have a great rest of your day.
