How Mainstream Media Got Enhanced Games WRONG
I was in Las Vegas recently for the first Enhanced Games — a new athletic competition that is considered to be the Olympics for athletes using performance-enhancing substances. The premise is simple: instead of banning enhancement, Enhanced Games allows athletes to use FDA-approved substances under medical supervision, while building a new kind of sports event around human performance, longevity, and physiological optimization.
One of the more revealing parts of my conversation with Enhanced Games co-founder Max Martin was our discussion about how much of the mainstream media covered the event. A lot of the criticism, both from journalists and online commentators, centered on the claim that the Games failed because they did not produce enough world records.
But that framing misses the deeper point. As Max and I discussed, the more important story may not be world records, but personal records: athletes improving beyond their previous limits, often years after their supposed physical prime. World records are exciting spectacle, but personal records are where the broader promise of human performance and physiological optimization becomes much more relevant to ordinary people.
Max also shared a striking anecdote about one journalist who questioned whether Enhanced Games’ clinical data should be taken seriously because some of the research was coming out of Abu Dhabi. His response was basically: if the work is being published transparently and conducted under institutional review board approval, why should its geography automatically discredit it? To him, this reflected a broader problem with parts of the coverage: journalists looking for conflict or narrative rather than seriously engaging with the data and context.
In this clip, we talk about what the media got wrong, why the “not enough world records” criticism is too shallow, and why the real lesson of Enhanced Games may be closer to Jordan Peterson’s rule: compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.