The Enhanced Games Were a Peptide Telehealth Grift

Full episode:
https://youtu.be/t3izzj5nuT0

SUPPORT:
https://www.patreon.com/psymposia

FOLLOW:
https://www.instagram.com/psymposia/
https://x.com/psymposia
https://bsky.app/profile/psymposia.bsky.social

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.

[00:00] Enhanced games didn't go public at a billion dollar valuation before the first event because investors thought it would be the next Olympics. The enhanced games achieved that valuation because investors are betting it can be a DTC direct to consumer peptide teleaalth business that uses a steroid friendly Olympic style event as its top of funnel marketing engine. Enhanced for us is really a movement. But let's talk about a tellah health business because like as Mark said like the one is the sport event May 24th a little bit of promotion that's where people can see it but like what we actually want to be we want to be the showcase we want to be a platform the movement to allow people what I said before at any stage for any gender to live a fully enhanced positive life additionally to the sport event.

[00:46] Yeah, we have our own tellahalth business and the range goes from hormone replacement therapy, TRT for men, yeah, hormone replacement therapy for women. Two peptides to the very famous GLP1s, the weight loss drugs. The stock has absolutely [expletive] the bed. All right, so let's get into it. So, so the first what are we talking about today? Yeah. So, the first story we're going to talk about is the enhanced games and everything to do with that. So, basically, I think it was a couple years ago now, they announced this new sort of Olympic competitor called the enhanced games.

[01:32] People refer to it as like the steroid Olympics. Yeah. The media has been calling it the steroid Olympics. So, they just held it in Las Vegas. There was a bunch of prize money. Their supposed thing is that it's FDA. It's any drug that the FDA has already approved versus like Major League Baseball, basketball, where even though if there are FDA approved drugs, you can't use them within the sport, competitive disadvantages and whatnot. One of the co-founders of that, of course, was Christian Anger Meyer. James, do you want to play that quick video so we can get kind of a little overview? Yeah. You want the tellahalth description or number two? Number two. Yeah. A lot of the criticism is bigger part is bull and people say it either because they want attention because they thriving of I have so many never heard scientists who give a quote and say this is all risky and I was like look you're a scientist I've never heard of.

[02:30] Yeah. And you have your two minutes of fame because you write on that. It's very sad a lot. You have your two minutes of fame, which is obviously every scientist out there is looking for fame. So, I also just love that that's the defense they have there is like you got these no-name scientists saying that performance-enhancing drugs being dangerous is is a radical statement or something. Yeah. And some of the investors that are in it, of course, is Peter Teal, Balagi, Shernavasan, Winklvos twins, some of the Saudis, and Trump Jr.'s There's 1789 capital is also in invested in that. And so they spent $20 million on a 2500 seat arena in Vegas. And their whole one of their big objectives was to see how many world records that that they could actually beat.

[03:23] And Rossy, I think you were the one that brought up in chat the other day. So they beat one of the swimmers beat officially beat one world record by like a few milliseconds or something. Okay. So, I was just looking at this morning because I was like, how can I describe this? What's like a good way to put into perspective how much they beat this record by? It was 07 seconds, which is quicker than it takes you to blink. It was the band suit, right? Yeah. Some kind of performance-enhancing technique was used to beat the So, my understanding is they had banned the polyurethane suits because they gave an advantage underwater to larger athletes. And so that's why they're not even allowed in like professional I don't know what the swimming league is, but in the professional swimming league.

[04:08] Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. That was when I was reading about it. It was talking about performance-enhancing drugs and prosthesis and other performance-enhancing materials. So like we're all allowed in the games. You know, one of the things when I was thinking about when I was thinking about all of this is, you know, in that clip, Anger Meyer is talking about and just so just a little bit of context, Christian Anger Meyer, one of the co-founders of this, he is he's the founder of a Thai Life Sciences and he's a big investor in Compass. He's probably I would say he's the biggest psychedelic investor in the space, the most prominent at this point. He's both in so he runs a Thai life sciences and they recently acquired Beckley but also they're a big investor in Compass Pathways and that pretty much makes up a huge percentage of all of the psychedelic companies right now.

[05:03] Compass is probably going to get psilocybin approvals later this year some point next year. That's what it's looking like. James, do you want to get screenshot seven queued up? The reason why I wanted to share this is because so while he's talking about all these new drugs and you know and criticizing no-name scientists this is this was Anger Meyer's we've been reporting on Angmer for a while now. Yeah. But during COVID when hydroxychloricquin came out as like you know when that was being pushed by the first Trump administration and Rogan and all of that and just the insanity that was going around in podcast world. He was all about it. So he said in normal times, this is from April 5th of 2020, so right after like the pandemic was, you know, formalized.

[05:53] He says in normal times, it's important to have due process when applying when approving drugs or repurposing them. But these are not normal times. People are dying. Economy is in freef fall. Time is too expensive to waste. We need # hydroxychloricquin now in caps. Frontline doctors agree. And it's just an instance of pushing drugs that just it's been thoroughly debunked at this point that there is absolutely no benefit to using it all. And in fact, there's been some studies that came out that were don't use it. Wasn't this Was this the drug I'm just trying to think out loud now. Was this the drug that like some people were accidentally going into the like aquariums? Wasn't there like some cases where people went into aquariums and it was like fish tank cleaner?

[06:39] The first thing that comes up from March 20th, what from March 2020 is corona virus. Man dies from taking fish tank cleaner as virus drug. This is chloricquin. Chloric phosphate. So it seems like it maybe was named similar. Yeah. [laughter] Well, this is what happens when people like just, you know, they do their Twitter Twitter doctor prescriptions. And, you know, I think what's crazy is it sounds like what he's saying is we cannot waste time, but we can waste the people who will get harmed from like just plowing ahead like how is time more important than like the safety of the people who are taking the drug. Yeah. And of course this was sort of in the period when we were like public health officials and whatnot were saying yeah it was different times stay home I you know isolate.

[07:32] Do you appreciate the work we do at Psymposia whether that's our long- form journalistic articles our informational video content the occasional comic or academic presentation. If so go check us out on Patreon where you can help keep our lights on and get your hands on some bonus content. But you know the alternative any medicine that's another part of it is like he's you know in the elite class where like us staying home and isolating was a threat to him for most of us. I mean like I was able to like find a career for myself like figure out a life for myself and like that's kind of a direct threat to the status quo corporate oligarchy. This is the point like I had an elderly grandma at a nursing home at this point. I think there was about a hundred patients in her nursing home and they had to lock that down.

[08:24] CO ripped through that nursing home. Out of a 100 patients, 15 of them died and almost everyone got infected in that nursing home. And so this is I just hear this a lot with people, you know, in retrospect looking back now on the early days of COVID and [expletive] on every doctor expert that's out there. In my lived experience, I saw all these elderly people dying and like I just feel very few people were thinking about that at the time. It was more of this like [expletive] this, I'm doing what I want, you know? Yeah. My family member is an ICU nurse and every time people downplay the severity of COVID, she's like, "Tell that to all the [expletive] people I zipped up in a body bag during this time that were coming in unvaccinated with all these lung issues."

[09:17] Yeah, that was like the brief period of time where like thank first responders and you remember all that seems bang your pots and pans. Yeah. Forever ago at this point. All right. So, getting back to this, Anger Meyer has built his career a lot around the fringes of the next big thing in medicine, like whether it's psychedelics, whether it's longevity now. Yeah. Yeah. And so, so enhanced is not just this sporting event. It is, it's also a publicly traded. They launched. They're publicly traded now. And it's actually a store as well. And so they raised all this money from those various sources and they achieved a $1.2 billion valuation. But their big bet, what I didn't realize was that their big bet was actually the teleaalth store.

[10:08] James, do you want to share the screenshot too? Yeah. And so this was from a Substack article called the enhanced games explained inside the $1.2 2 billion dollar bet on doping in sports by Joe Pompiano. And so what he writes is what you'll read online is that this is the d this is a dangerous event that is also guaranteed to lose money. Regulatory bodies have called it everything from a clown show to dangerous and irresponsible. And given that the organization is projected to lose tens of millions of dollars on this weekend's event alone, the media rights and all 2500 tickets were given out for free. Many insight, many industry insiders and sports fans are already calling it a disaster. But this is the wrong way to look at it. The enhanced games didn't go public at a billion dollar valuation before the first event because investors thought it would be the next Olympics.

[11:00] The enhanced games achieved that valuation because investors are betting it can be a DTC, direct to consumer peptide teleaalth business that uses a steroid friendly Olympic style event as its top of funnel marketing engine. enhanced for us is really a movement. But let's talk about a tele health business because like as Mark said like the one is the sport event May 24th with a little bit of promotion that's where people can see it but like what we actually want to be we want to be the showcase we want to be a platform the movement to allow people what I said before at any stage for any gender to live a fully enhanced positive life additionally to the sport event. Yeah, we have our own tellahalth business and the range goes from hormone replacement therapy, TRT for men, yeah, hormone replacement therapy for women, two peptides to the very famous GLP1s, the weight loss drugs.

[11:54] And when you actually go to their website, you can you they're selling all kinds of products, but these are the various products that the athletes are actually all using. And the sporting events, they're designed to clip. They're very short and they're pushed out on social media and everything. So that's why they were willing to lose so much money on this because what they're really trying to do with enhance is create like a hims and hers competitor, a tellahalth competitor that is focused on the new peptide market. So to what extent are you guys following the whole peptide craze right now? Are you I've had some students in my classes write about peptides and their marketing on social media.

[12:42] That's actually the first time that I became really aware of it was reading about my students covering it. But I know especially from that generation, so like you know 18 to 20 year old, like there's a lot of they're exposed to a lot of influencers and other kind of just like online content and a pipeline towards like sales and to purchase these products. I was talking to a friend who follows like the peptide thing. He's been into health and weightlifting and everything for years now. And he was telling me, I don't know, 10 years ago, he was buying some of them like sort of dark webbby like compoundingies. They were in the research chem chemical kind of category. They weren't directly approved. They're coming from China and all that. And so, yeah. So like with my understanding is with ompic with segletide I guess that's how you pronounce it that sort of kind of blew through the mainstream and I think there's around 30 million people now who are using ompic type

[13:43] GLP1 drugs and then like more recently it's become super popular because like influencers starting to push that with clvicular pushing it various peptides heads, but also and specific stacks as well is what I heard. Like their unique kind of combinations. Yeah. And also they are they're starting to develop like new classes of them. They're improving them and everything like that. So what I was talking to my friend about is and they actually sell it on the enhanced website is one called Turzeppatide. So this is like one of the new classes of peptides.

[14:28] Yeah. On the right hand side there. Yeah. And so they sell it. And the thing is you can't I was poking around I was poking around the site. So it's very easy for someone wants to get into these. So I'm not entirely sure how enhanced is doing it, but say you wanted to get them you can pay one of the tellahalth companies a fee. You pay them 60 bucks. you get the teleahalth appointment, but you're not entirely sure if you're going to be able to get the prescription because they got to prescribe it for you. And so, basically, you can they told my friend, we'll do our best to accommodate your preference for dosing because he didn't want to go too high. So, you know, they're kind of poking around and asking him what he exactly wants it for, blah blah blah.

[15:18] And you can kind of make [expletive] up and you're going to get the you're going to get the prescription. But on the enhanced website, I couldn't tell. They don't list the dosing. I don't think they can list the dosing just due to because they have to kind of personalize it based on your responses and everything. So they have like a regulatoride. They have a micro dosed version. I was trying to guess what the doses would kind of be. It seems like the prices are somewhat in alignment with the other teleaalth companies, but if you poke around, you can find a compounding pharmacy for much cheaper. And so, so you're kind of you would go with an enhanced or one of these other hims and hers type places because there's more of a trust factor, apparent trust factor, you know, that you're not buying it from some rando compounding pharmacy, you know.

[16:10] Well, and that's like that's built into Anger Meer's pitch for the website is, oh, all of these people are getting it from China and these research chemical sites from China, but you want to buy it from a trusted like western provider of these peptide medications or whatever. Where does come from, I wonder? Yeah. And so there's just new ones coming out to market. There's one of them now called Redatide, which is a triple agonist. It's a GLP1, a JIP, and a glucagon. And so yeah, these are just they're trying to push these they're trying to push these for that young market. The one that you were mentioning the Huddle Up article that some of this was coming from I thought put it interestingly which is that the his and hers markets are really big right now for things that are already deteriorating.

[16:58] They have this kind of tellahalth market cornered for things like male pattern baldness, erectile dysfunction, like estrogen level change over time, but that the enhanced games is trying to corner this market of oh, it's not that you're deteriorating already, it's that you want to enhance yourself. They're cornering this peptide and teleaalth market around physical enhancement. Personally for me, I don't know if you guys feel differently. I'm fine with it to certain to some certain extent for some conditions, you know, and whatnot. I'm fine for if that's going to help someone out for whatever their reasons are. I think what turns me off is the they're just really pushing it to young guys who are insecure, who are trying to looks max or whatever that, you know, they're really trying to push that hard to those guys.

[17:55] And while everybody thinks it's some sporting event, that's really like the loss leader, you know, for pushing the tella health business, which I did not even realize before diving into this story whatsoever. Yeah. I wonder how different things would be if we just acknowledged that like aderall has weight loss benefits too. And for like people who [laughter] needed like a weight loss drug, like we've already got a pretty good one out there, you know, like and vice versa. I used to have a friend who would take his dad's diet pills to go study. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is such a longer conversation on [laughter] bioeththics of GLP ones I find to be so fascinating. James, in that screenshot that you just had, does that mention the marketing spend?

[18:40] Yeah, I found this really, really fascinating. Yeah, sorry. I thought that's where we were heading when Russ started. So, in 2024, Himsenhurst spent $678 million on marketing, which is almost 50% of their total revenue. And so that's what kind of they're trying to do with the enhanced games is to create that, you know, viral online, you know, kind of controversial steroid Olympics, you know, to draw attention to this, to push that. So yeah, and this is the way of the future for medicine. It's my entire Instagram feed. Every other post is tellahalth ketamine right now as well. It's just everywhere. I was trying to explain this to my father on the phone and I was like, "Dad, yeah, like you just get prescriptions now by calling a tellahalth company.

[19:32] It's like, you know, it's so easy." And so anyways, enhanced went public. Do you want to bring up the screenshot of the stock performance since it launched in May? Real quick before we get there though, I do want to say like the overease of tellaalth is like definitely a downside, but there are a lot like I think that we would all agree that there's too many restrictions around people getting the prescriptions they want anyways. And like I have lived with ADHD my whole life. And it wasn't until after COVID and Tella Health became a thing that it was actually attainable for me to like get a prescription for it, get tested for it, and like get on medication for it. And so like I do want to just say like it's a double-edged sword, but there's definitely positives too.

[20:21] And I just want to make sure that it doesn't seem like we're all just like [expletive] on Tellah Health. Yeah. No. Yeah. Good. I'm glad you tossed that in. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's you know it's the bigger context of this like stage of capitalism that we're in and the way that like you know people are so vulnerable and there's such a profit incentive that that's where we get into some of the slippery implementations of tella health. Yeah. No, I tell people all the time, tellahalth is amazing if you already know what you need. And it's really bad a lot of times if you need to get a diagnosis. Like if you already kind of know what you have, like it's a lot easier. But yeah, it's hard to go in and try to get a diagnosis legitimately on them a lot of times. Yeah. If you're dealing with a doctor or someone you're consulting with that's primary aim is not just driving revenue and making sales, you know.

[21:12] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like the first time I told them like I drank coffee and I smoke weed and they tried to put me on mood stabilizers because they said I was self-medicating with uppers and downers and I was like that sounds like you don't understand weed or coffee. But [laughter] that's obviously going to ex exist with your regular doctors any you know that's still going to exist there. I just think in the same I don't know this just popped into my mind. In the same way that fine, we're we as a society, we're going to decide whether or not we want to have casinos, right? And there's a difference between having the casino and having the casino in everyone's pocket where 24/7 you can place sports bets if you're whatever 20 years old, 18 years old in Massachusetts.

[21:59] Maybe it's 21. Maybe it's 21. I don't know. I don't sports bet. But yeah, there are ones that appeal to kids too and that are like actively seeking them out. So yeah, that's a whole other can of worms. Yeah. So do you want to Yeah. Some good news. [laughter] Yeah. So this launched in May, I think just before I think this was a week or two before the games went live. The stock has absolutely [expletive] the bed. Curious where this goes. Curious if they're even able to kind of become the peptide teleahalth company. We'll see. But if you invest stock needs some performance. Yeah, that was a good line.

[25:05] Do you appreciate the work we do at Psymposia? Whether that's our long- form journalistic articles, our informational video content, the occasional comic or academic presentation. If so, go check us out on Patreon, where you can help keep our lights on and get your hands on some bonus content.