45. Enhanced Humans 2.0: Aron D'Souza on the Future of Sports, Aging, and Human Potential
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Mizter Rad (00:05)
Hello, beautiful humans. So let me share a news clip from July 2035. That's about 10 years from now.
Breaking news from the Enhanced Games Tokyo, where Ana Reyes has just shattered what we once thought was physically impossible. The 39-year-old mother of two has completed the 100-meter sprint in 8.43 seconds.
nearly a full second faster than any unenhanced human in history. Medical sensors confirm her heart rate is operating at 180 % normal efficiency thanks to genetic modifications she received five years ago. Her team of scientists is already streaming her real-time biological data to millions of viewers worldwide.
Now, of course I made this up, but that future is closer than we think. Traditional sports ban athletes for trying to push human limits with science while we embrace technology in every other area of life. My guest today is saying enough with this hypocrisy. Meet Aron d’Souza, founder of the Enhanced Games. He's trying a competition where performance enhancing technologies aren't banned, they're celebrated.
While traditional sports try to keep science out of athletics, Aron is building a platform where human potential meets cutting-edge technology, promising better safety, bigger performances, and far less waste than the Olympics. With backing from billionaire Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., the first enhanced games could happen as soon as next year, challenging everything we think we know about, quote unquote, fairness in sports. Aron, how are you doing today?
Dr Aron D'Souza (02:02)
I'm great. Thank you very much for having me on the show.
Mizter Rad (02:06)
It's great to have you, Aron. I want to start with something simple. I want you to paint me a picture of what the enhanced games look like. If I'm a spectator, a guest in one of your games walking into your event in, let's say, 12 months from now, what am I seeing that's different from the Olympics?
Dr Aron D'Souza (02:29)
it's completely different from the Olympics. It's not even comparable. I think the best way to think about what the enhanced games will be, it's a festival of ideas like South by Southwest, TED, or the World Economic Forum, plus the Super Bowl. It's a place that you come to learn about science. You see the demonstration of scientific and technical excellence and find the opportunities to become enhanced yourself, mentally, physically, socially.
It's so much more than a sporting event. This is the beginning of a new era of mankind, where we say that our biology is no longer our limits. And that is a movement of people, of scientists, of consumers, of researchers, of athletes, of coaches, all working together. Everyone has a part to play in upgrading humans from 1.0 to 2.0.
Mizter Rad (03:24)
That's a fantastic explanation, but a regular person here in my audience would say, okay, you're basically saying let's make doping legal. If they listen to your previous interviews or if they kind of read more or less what you guys have done so far, some people would still think that. And most people would immediately think this is dangerous and this will kill athletes. How do you respond to that concern specifically?
Dr Aron D'Souza (03:53)
So according to research commissioned by the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency, 44 % of elite athletes use, ban, performance enhancing drugs, yet only 1 % get caught. And that is peer reviewed evidence that was published in top cure scientific journals commissioned by the world's doping policemen. And so what is happening today is that doping is happening, but it's done in secret, in the dark, without clinical supervision.
and that is very risky. On the other hand, what the enhanced games offers is an open, transparent, honest, clinically supervised, scientifically rigorous platform for using performance enhancements to increase human performance.
Mizter Rad (04:41)
So when you talk about enhancements, what are we discussing here? Are we just talking about chemical drugs from pharma, from traditional pharma companies? Or does this include hardware enhancements like prosthetics? Or I want to get a bit more futuristic here. Do you also consider experimental treatments like, let's say, quantum therapies that might work at a subatomic level? Where do you draw the line?
Dr Aron D'Souza (05:10)
So the enhanced games are rigorously focused on pharmacological enhancements now. But this isn't a singular journey. This is a journey that will take decades, if not centuries, to advance the human species. The first upgrade that is obvious and evident to do is a pharmacological intervention from a human 1.0 to a human 2.0. But the version 3.0 is probably an engineered enhancement, so cybernetic things like
replacing hips, other joints with advanced manufacturing. But on the horizon are things like brain computer interfaces, CRISPR gene editing technology, Polastime gene therapies, et cetera. And I have great admiration for Brian Johnson. He's a great friend of our project. Brian has been a great advocate for enhancement therapies. He's willing to push the boundaries himself, and he's very open and transparent about them.
But in terms of sport performance, we know what works. It's EPO, androgen anabolic steroids, synthetic growth hormones like testosterone. These have been around for over 100 years. The toxicologies, drug on drug interactions are very well known. And there's ample scientific peer-reviewed about the risks and the opportunities that these compounds provide.
Mizter Rad (06:29)
All right, so let's talk about the compounds without getting specifically into the compounds categories, let's say. But in general, when you talk about the kind of enhancements of compounds that athletes take, who actually decides on that? Is it completely up to the athlete who says, I want to take that? Or does your organization have
essay, could you as an organization, for example, decide to deploy, let's say, certain drug into into all the athletes to quote unquote, just test them?
Dr Aron D'Souza (07:06)
No. the core governing document of the Enhance Games is called the First Declaration on Human Enhancement. We passed this constitution of our movement at a meeting of our top scientists at Oxford University last December. The first principle of the declaration is that an individual adult with free and informed consent can do to their body what they wish. So it's up to an individual to make choices about their own body.
No one can force them to do anything. The second article of the declaration mandates that every athlete participating must undertake full clinical supervision. So you can't enhance yourself on your own. You need a doctor to work with you. And number three, you must respect national laws. So there are at least 23 countries where androgen anabolic steroids are legal.
you know, from Team Portugal or Team UK, they might have an advantage over say Team USA, where steroids are more restricted. And these are the three sort of fundamental rules. There are seven other ones in the Declaration on Human Enhancement that forms the constitutional principles by which we govern ourselves.
Mizter Rad (08:26)
So how did you come up with this constitution actually? You said you met with a bunch of scientists. Are these guys part of the team or you just put them together to create this declaration, this first declaration of human enhancements?
Dr Aron D'Souza (08:41)
Yeah, so it was a very interesting process. you know, for the last year, as we've talked about the Enhance Games project, lots of scientists and ethicists, philosophers, etc. have reached out to us wanting to become involved in the project. We hosted a first scientific conference at the British Parliament in the House of Lords in February of last year. And there we decided that we needed to draft a constitution. And so we assembled a small committee of people, which I chaired, to write this document.
It's only about 500 words long and can fit on about two pages. It's very simple, just like the US Constitution is very short, because we need the constitutional principles. Then we can write laws and develop policies. And so if you ask questions like, could an athlete cut off their leg to participate in the games and put on a springy carbon fiber leg? That would not be possible because although it would be their right under Article 1 to modify their body,
under Article 3, they have to abide by national laws and grievous bodily harm, i.e. cutting off a limb, is illegal in most countries. So even if you wanted to, you legally could not remove your own limb unless there was a medical condition that mandated an amputation. And using just these simple set of principles, we've been able to really answer most of the questions that arise from
this whole new field of ethical endeavor.
Mizter Rad (10:14)
Wow, that's fascinating. That's fascinating. You were telling me before we started recording that for the first enhanced games edition, you have three sports as a target. Track, swimming, and weightlifting. Why these sports? Why not more?
Dr Aron D'Souza (10:33)
So the core problem about the Olympic Games is that they build a dozen stadiums and they throw them away after two weeks. It's one of the most wasteful exercises in human history. And we wanted to build an infrastructure light model that had high television and social media impact without the cost. And so we focused on the sports that had the most interest, but the lowest infrastructure cost. So I'll give you good example. VeloDrome cycling is an Olympic sport.
It's a sport that I practice myself and I love very deeply. There are only a few thousand people in the entire world who do velodrome cycling. There are only a few thousand people in the entire world who do velodrome cycling.
Mizter Rad (11:10)
What is that, sorry?
Velotron, okay, yeah, I got it.
Dr Aron D'Souza (11:18)
Yeah, yet,
yet to host at the Olympics cost about $300 million because you have to build a specialist facility for it. And so why did we select these three inaugural sports? Because they have objective world records, right? And breaking the world records is crucially important for us because it shows the efficacy of the program, which we are undertaking. And I think it becomes very simple. If you're an athlete, you don't want to be the fastest amateur.
in the world, you don't want to be the fastest natural person in the world. You want to just be the fastest person in the history of the world. And when the world records are with the enhanced games, then there is no competition, right? Athletes will only want to compete in the premier forum of competition. And that's why the Olympics are beautiful because it's the ultimate avenue of human competition. Yet we have now created something better.
Mizter Rad (12:13)
Alright, but wait, want to get this right. So you've mentioned that the enhanced games will cost much less than the Olympic Games. So Olympic Games cost around billions and the enhanced games will be, as far as I understand, low double digit millions exactly. So what's the economic motive behind it? How is that possible?
Dr Aron D'Souza (16:53)
Yeah, so you can look at countries like Greece was hosted the 2004 Athens Olympics. The country literally went bankrupt on the back of hosting the Olympic games. It's one of the most wasteful exercises in the totality of human history. And you can look at both the World Cup and the Olympics in Qatar, in Rio, in London, in Athens, and see wasted infrastructure over and over again.
The Olympic Games are abusive to taxpayers. And this is why fewer and fewer Western countries want to participate in the Olympic system. And fundamentally, if the enhanced games are faster and cheaper, and we pay our athletes, this is something really important to emphasize. know, in all the reporting, people focus on the fact that the enhanced games is where athletes can use drugs. But it's also
It's not just the Olympics plus drugs, it's the Olympics plus drugs and money. So instead of wasting money on building useless infrastructure, we're focused on delivering a low cost, high efficiency model that pays athletes really well. so athletes will earn up to a million dollars for breaking the world record. And that's life changing when the average Olympian only earns $30,000 a year. And, you know, it's, it's a broken system because you look at the Olympic committee president, Thomas Bach, he flies around the world in private jets.
He literally lives in a palace in Switzerland and the athletes themselves, the core value creators aren't getting paid anything.
Mizter Rad (18:27)
Yeah, that doesn't sound like a good model actually, very old school, but let's go a bit deeper into the kind of business opportunities that you're creating. You told me that the athletes will be paid, but I want to know more about this business ecosystem that would grow around the enhanced game. So I'm thinking about new industries that wouldn't exist without this platform or this transformation that you're trying to do.
For example, can imagine, let's say, specialized media companies that create content about, let's say, the biology of enhanced athletes, like a sort of like a show, let's call it the Inner Race, that shows viewers exactly how, let's say, a runner mitochondria responds during the final meters of a competition or how the muscle fibers recover between competitions. It would be like a...
You know how formula one shows the technical aspects of racing accessible basically to anyone who wants to see them. But in this case, it would be sort of like a human biology. So from there, you can like think of many business opportunities, let's say. What kind of business do you see emerging in this ecosystem? So besides the athletes making money, who else is basically making money?
Dr Aron D'Souza (19:40)
Yeah, so.
Oh, I think this is actually going to be one of the largest industries of all time. the drug Ozempic and the GLP-1 wider category have added $1 trillion to the market capitalization of Nova Nordisk and Eli Lilly. 83 % of the time, Ozempic is prescribed not as a diabetes medication, which is its stated purpose, but awful label as an image enhancement drug. When you can see the efficacy of these compounds, where
middle aged athletes, athletes in their thirties, maybe even their forties can run as fast as the same bold. Then that's going to change everything. Every middle aged guy who was once a division one athlete who now has back pain is going to say, what are those drugs? How quickly can I get them in my body? And, and those are going to be worth trillions of dollars. That money will be recycled into
New research and development to create better, more effective, safer, longer delivery compounds, which will be worth even more money. And this is how humans go from being version 1.0 to version 2.0 and technology keeps improving. And this isn't just for the athlete. This is for the wider world. And the analogy I like to use is Formula One. Formula One cars have gotten safer and faster over last 50 years because of all this R &D.
And that technology diffuses out into the wider world. And the most obvious one is actually anti-lock braking, which is a standard feature on most cars today, which was developed for Formula One on the racetrack. And so in the same way, athletes and scientists will collaborate to develop and improve compounds at the enhanced games, which will then be sold to the wider world, which will create a multi-trillion dollar ecosystem that then becomes the stage. It's like, well,
If you aren't enhancing yourself, you are falling behind. The most productive human beings will use enhancement drugs to be faster, stronger, younger for longer. And then eventually this becomes central in public policy because the major issue that faces all developed countries is an aging population. I know you're sitting in Germany right now. Germany has the second oldest population in the world after Japan.
The issue is that with an aging population, you have more retired people who are using benefits like pensions and health insurance from the welfare state and fewer workers who are paying taxes in to support that system. Right now, policymakers don't know how to solve this problem. For everything that they've tried for the last 50 years, we can't increase our birth rates. And the only way to solve the
the dependency gap is to import new workers, immigration, which comes with a whole host of social and economic issues. However, there's a technological solution here, which is human enhancement, right? The same technologies allow athletes to run faster and jump higher, will allow our population to be younger and more productive for longer. And eventually, roll four o'clock, 10, 15 years, the president, prime ministers around the world will realize
that human enhancement technologies can actually help shore up the tax base and fix this dependency ratio problem, which will in turn almost probably make them mandatory. So you would see in countries like Britain with the NHS or on Medicare and Medicaid in the United States where enhancement drugs are subsidized by the state.
Mizter Rad (23:33)
Interesting. Half of me wants to applaud this idea and I'm all in and then half of my brain says, okay, wow, some of it is a bit too far for me. Where do you draw the limit? Like if we start enhancing our bodies, like you say, like human 2.0, 1.0, and we go through this process to compete in sports, for example, where do we draw the line? Will we end up transforming what we call quote unquote human today into some kind of synthetic organism designed
in a lab maybe for maximum performance? Should we even think about limits or what's your thought on this?
Dr Aron D'Souza (24:11)
The stated goal of the enhanced games is to usher in a new era of superhumanity where our biology is no longer our limits. I believe that aging is a disease that we can treat, cure, and eventually solve. I don't want to live to age 150 in a decrepit, failing, painful body, but I would live forever if I could in my 25-year-old body. And I don't believe that anyone should be forced to be enhanced.
But I think everyone should have the opportunity to be enhanced. And that's the availability of medications and processes, but also solving some of the economic barriers to enhancement. Because the world I don't want to see is where the wealthy are enhanced and the poor are not. And you can see this in Los Angeles or Miami, right? Older people, they look healthy. They look young. They look strong, right? If they're rich, because they can access
human performance medicines, concierge medical treatments, and then the poor don't have that ability. And so we want to make sure that we have a world where enhancements are available to everyone and that everyone has the opportunity to become enhanced if they so choose.
Mizter Rad (25:09)
Right.
Hmm. Interesting. Well, Aron, let me switch gears a bit here because I'm seeing something interesting happening in tech today. And on the one end, have companies building advanced humanoid robots. I'm sure you've seen them all over, all over the internet that look and move more like humans every year. And then on the other end, we have people like you pushing boundaries of human biology with enhancements. Do you think these two paths will eventually meet creating some kind of
superhuman that combines synthetic biology with advanced hardware, or better said, are humanoid robots and enhanced humans just different routes to sort of the same destination?
Dr Aron D'Souza (26:08)
Yeah, so, you I think the overarching question is, we presently live in the information age. What is the next age of mankind going to be? I think there are only two answers to this question. It is the artificial intelligence or the artificial age, or is it the enhanced age? And if it's the artificial age, that really means that human beings are no longer relevant, right? That technology will overcome us and that, you know, robots and AI will literally just destroy all the humans and it becomes an artificial life dominates human life. Alternatively, in an enhanced age, I think there's a much more positive outcome where human beings are enhanced by technology, mentally, physically, culturally, spiritually, and that technology is an aid to improving the existence of human beings.
And that may mean that we have brain computer interfaces, have pharmacological enhancements, we have engineered physical enhancements that mean that we no longer have to age and suffer, but that we can become superhuman.
Mizter Rad (27:23)
Interesting, but we'll eventually get to the artificial age then, according to your reasoning.
Dr Aron D'Souza (27:30)
No, I think that we can build a symbiosis between what makes us uniquely human and that's a question. Is it our minds that make us uniquely human? Is it our bodies? Is it our social constructs and the way that we interact? So let's distill down the very best of that and say, heck, I don't want a body that ages. I don't want to develop osteoporosis and break my bones. So why don't we overcome that?
We are not starting this process off. The Enhanced Games, we're merely accelerating it. It has begun since the beginning of time, where human beings have looked towards medical and scientific treatments to overcome our limits. But now we are doing it in a way that is very prescient and obvious. like, again, like Brian Johnson, I love this project, but it's going to take a hundred years for him to prove that he could live longer than any other human being. In contrast, the Enhanced Games,
we'll be able to prove if our project works, if we can break the same Boltz-Wold record, and that will take nine and a half seconds, it will fit into a TikTok. And that is it, right? And as soon as enhanced humans are faster than regular humans, then we open the door that everyone will want to become enhanced, right? And we have to ensure that the economic barriers are as de minimis as possible, such that we can improve the human condition as much as we can.
Mizter Rad (28:58)
I understand. I understand. Well, I hate to take you off track here, but I was in Saudi not so long ago, a couple of weeks ago. And I saw a huge trend that you can see in other countries, of course, but they're investing a lot on e-sports and it's growing like crazy. And while traditional sports, of course, try to figure out how to stay relevant. Where do enhanced games fit into this picture? Is there any intersection that you see between what you're doing with physically enhanced athletes and the digital competition world?
Dr Aron D'Souza (29:34)
Yeah, I think there's definitely an opportunity because, ⁓ surprisingly enough, the international Olympic committee, which is running the sport games in Saudi Arabia has mandated drug testing in the e-sports, which doesn't make any sense. what advantage could be had? Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, they have this moral addiction to anti-doping and it's their system of control over the athletes. And so ultimately they're trying to apply these rules. ⁓
Mizter Rad (29:48)
Really? I didn't know that.
Dr Aron D'Souza (30:04)
the board and I'm like, no, why don't we allow neurological enhancements? Why don't we allow compounds that increase our neurological performance? 70 % of all orchestral professionals, so as in like classical musicians, have used beta blockers, which will get them banned from Olympic competition. And it increases focus. And it's very common to use in musical performances today? And why can't we use the same things to increase performance in esports?
Mizter Rad (30:40)
Very interesting. So this could happen pretty much in a lot of different fields, also in the art, in the music industry.
Dr Aron D'Souza (30:50)
Exactly. Enhancement is everywhere. Right. So for example, the best analogy I can use is in Hollywood. So Hollywood, like sports is very competitive. It's very glamorous. Lots of young people are affected by the products of Hollywood. Yet we accept that the best Hollywood actresses in particular are enhanced. You look at the Kardashians, right? They use cosmetic enhancement procedures, right? They're very open. They're very honest about their use of Botox and fillers and plastic surgery.
Does that make them any less relevant as artists and creators? Does that mean that they are somehow cheating? No, we don't use any of this language, right? We don't even, we don't think about the integrity of Hollywood being undermined by the fact that celebrities are using image enhancement drugs and procedures.
Mizter Rad (31:42)
So in that same line of thought, do you think enhanced games will serve as a of like a premium lab to create extra out of the ordinary capable humans that can do work that no normal human can, for example? Like, are we looking at this as a testing ground, let's say for a super worker or for a super actor, for a super entertainer, super athlete, of course, of tomorrow?
Dr Aron D'Souza (32:09)
Absolutely. Right. And I think the technologies that we develop for, you know, for the track are going to be diffused out in the wider world. And there are going to be wide ranging, very positive social implications for this, where every field, like if you're, you know, the CEO of a large company, you're going to say to yourself, how do I make my workforce more productive? Maybe we should include in our health plan access to performance medicine treatments so that our
our workers can be stronger and more productive for longer. Because everything at the end of the day is an investment in human capital and enhancements are an investment in human capital.
Mizter Rad (32:42)
Mmm.
But okay, so if what you said is enhancements through chemical compounds, the pharma industry at this moment in time of history, let's say, and this enhancement through drugs and tech happened in sports, at least at first through the enhanced games, aren't we just turning sports into a sort of competition between the pharma companies and the biotech labs rather than just sort of staying in the athletic.
Dr Aron D'Souza (33:25)
Sure. I think, so Formula One, again, is a good example here. So the International Olympic Committee would not consider Formula One to be a sport because it's about engineering excellence. however, I would argue that Lando Norris is a great athlete, right? He also needs to be supported by great engineers. And why Formula One is such a profitable and extraordinary sport is because it demonstrates the height of engineering excellence.
athletes and engineers working together. Enhanced games are athletes and scientists collaborating. And I don't think that undermines anything about the integrity of traditional ancient sports. So what I see is a bifurcation where the Olympics are the guardians of natural classical sports, right? Drawn from ancient Greece into the present. And we are the stewards of an enhanced age whereby we are taking sports and all of humanity into a brighter future. It's two very different things. The Olympics can continue to be the guardian of amateur natural sports, and we will be the guardians of the future.
Mizter Rad (34:36)
So when you talk about being the guardians of the future, and this is like my classic question that I like to ask all of my guests, how do you see that future in 50 years from now? From your perspective as an entrepreneur, but also in the field of sports, specifically enhanced sports, how do you see the next five decades?
Dr Aron D'Souza (34:57)
In 50 years, I think the greatest gift that I could give to the world is a 65 year old who can run faster than Usain Bolt. And why 65 is so important is because that's the retirement age, right? And this is, you know, it makes sense that 18 is the age of adulthood. It's sort of the end of puberty, the end of formal education. But 65 is an arbitrary age that was picked by Napoleon's.
to dupe his soldiers into getting a pension instead of a pay rise. Like the social history of it's really fascinating. And around the world, 65 is sort of stuck at our retirement age, despite the fact humans are increasing to live longer. And so if a 65 year old can run faster than a same bolt, then why should we be retiring? Why should we be condemned to being senior citizens to be shipped off to nursing homes?
at this magical age, right? And so instead, the product of the enhanced games will inspire public policymakers and citizens at large to rethink what older is in our society. And I always say our business is not sport, our business is cultural change.
Mizter Rad (36:15)
Interesting. Well, Aron, thank you so much for joining us today. was an honor having you in the Mr. Rad Show.
Dr Aron D'Souza (36:24)
Thank you very much for having me on the show.
Mizter Rad (36:26)
Until next time, beautiful humans, stay curious, question everything, and maybe, just maybe, start thinking about whether the quote unquote natural human body is actually the final version or just the 1.0 version of something much greater than you imagine. Hasta la vista.