Can steroids combat population collapse? Optimized games want to know that.

The Enhanced Games, a new sports competition explicitly designed to allow the use of performance-enhancing drugs, looks like a publicity stunt for the macho tech age: doped Olympic athletes compete for multi-million dollar rewards in Las Vegas. But co-founder Aaron D’Souza has a 90% gross margin in telehealth, targeting governments with aging populations.

The games will launch in May 2026 with support from Peter Thiel, and promise $1 million in prizes for anyone who breaks world records. Former Olympians such as runner Fred Curley and swimmer Christian Jkolomiev have already signed up to compete. The goal isn’t just to break world records while the fans cheer. It’s building a marketing engine for a long-term industry that D’Souza believes will be worth trillions.

“We use sports marketing to sell a product to enhance human potential,” D’Souza said on a recent episode of Equity. “It’s a telehealth service like Hims or Roman, except with us [will] We have evidence that the best and fastest athletes in the world use our protocols.

The business model is borrowed from Red Bull – extreme sports as an advertisement for the product – but the product is not an energy drink. It’s testosterone, or growth hormone, or whatever else can make humans competitive with machines and productive into their 70s and beyond.

While the Games are seen as controversial, D’Souza is betting that the bad factor fades once people see athletes in their 30s and 40s breaking world records. He and billionaire co-founder Christian Angermayer have raised “millions” on this theory and have poached executives from the US Olympic Committee, Red Bull, and FIFA to build what D’Souza calls a mission to “lift up all of humanity.”

“I think that when Fred [Kerley] Breaks [Usain Bolt’s] “The 100-meter world record in Vegas next year will be a watershed moment to show that augmented humans are better than regular humans,” he said.

In other words: If Sputnik launched the space age, and ChatGPT launched the AI ​​boom, D’Souza believes the sprint could launch the age of human augmentation — and unleash the same deluge of investment.

Longevity startups have raised $8.5 billion in 2024 as interest in longevity shifts from a fringe obsession to a mainstream investment thesis. The appeal extends from the billionaires who fund anti-aging research to everyday Americans who turn to direct consumer health tracking when traditional health care fails them.

But D’Souza believes that longevity is not just a beautiful thing; It has become an indispensable necessity in the face of an ever-aging population and ever-smarter machines.

In many parts of the world, falling birth rates have put major global economies on a path toward population collapse. A recent McKinsey study found that fertility rates are falling below the replacement rate almost everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa. Many countries have used immigration to address the challenges of aging populations, as immigrants typically arrive at younger working ages, fill critical employment gaps, and tend to have more children.

But mass migration has sparked a political backlash in Europe and the United States, where right-wing parties have gained more ground by stoking concerns about immigration and national identity. Immigration has been a central issue in Donald Trump’s presidency, and D’Souza believes the issue could propel far-right leaders in countries such as Germany, France and the United Kingdom to power.

“If you’re against mass immigration, you’ll end up with this demographic model that looks like Japan,” D’Souza said, adding that Japan’s average age (49.8 years) makes it one of the oldest populations in the world.

“So how do we reconcile the desire for economic growth with an anti-immigration approach?” Continue. “Well, the solution has to be longevity and human enhancement, because there is no other way. We need a population that is young, working, that pays taxes, and that does not coincide with low birth rates.”

It’s a stark idea: Instead of embracing immigration or expanding social safety nets that might encourage higher birth rates, simply encourage humans to work longer. D’Souza rejected political alternatives. Europe had already tried to support families, he says, but had failed to raise birth rates.

Given this backdrop, Optimized Games has some expected backers, including Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., through his investment firm 1789 Ventures. D’Souza describes both as “obsessed with the demographics of the nation.” Thiel has poured money into long-lived startups including Retro Biosciences, Unity Biotechnology, and NewLimit, which he co-founded with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong in 2021.

Of course, many of the same gaming investors are also betting billions that artificial general intelligence—basically, AI capable of performing any intellectual task a human can—will soon do most jobs better than humans. Which raises the question: If artificial general intelligence is coming, why should we care about extending our working years at all?

“We have Sam [Altman] “A world view, which is that artificial AI will come, and it will replace all humans, and then humans will basically be second-class beings because there will be superior species in machines,” D’Souza said. “And I think the inevitable consequence of that, which Sam won’t acknowledge, is that humans [become] accidental.”

The alternative model proposed by D’Souza? Competition between humans and machines.

He continued: “The machines are improving in real time, and because of outdated regulations, particularly by the IOC and the World Anti-Doping Agency…human augmentation has been stifled, and thus we are unable to upgrade quickly enough to compete with the machines.” “Now, my goal is to make sure that humans can remain competitive with machines.”

But the problem with this species-level framework is that not all humans will necessarily get the promotion.

D’Souza says the “diffusion of technology” will lead to a kind of gradual consolidation, where what’s convenient for champion athletes becomes therapeutic for people who do things like CrossFit, and then becomes more convenient for more non-athletes. But the business model — premium telehealth services marketed through elite athletes — points to a possible reality in which the rich get better, and everyone gets older.

When I suggested that enhancement technologies would likely reach the rich first — and that elites might hoard access to these capabilities — D’Souza didn’t object.

“I think this is a potentially harmful consequence of human augmentation,” he said.