Is the pursuit of peak physical ability a noble goal or a dangerous game? This episode confronts the controversial world of human performance enhancement by taking a deep dive into Enhanced, a company poised to revolutionize sports, medicine, and our understanding of human potential. Joined by Enhanced CEO Dr. Aron D'Souza, we explore the razor-thin line between natural talent, medical treatment, and a future where aging itself could be considered a treatable disease. This conversation unpacks one of the most polarizing topics in modern science and culture: should we be allowed to enhance ourselves, and what happens when we do?
This deep dive with the HealthTech Remedy team and Dr. Aron D'Souza unpacks the vision behind Enhanced, a company building both a revolutionary sporting event and a direct-to-consumer health platform. We begin by exploring the complicated ethics of performance enhancement, using the real-world case of runner Caster Semenya to question where society draws the line on natural advantage. The discussion then moves to the Enhanced Games, an audacious alternative to the Olympics where athletes can openly use performance enhancements, aiming to showcase the true limits of human capability. We hear the incredible story of James Magnussen, an Olympic swimmer whose physical transformation for the games has gone viral, and Kristian Gkolomeev, who broke a 16-year-old world record after just three weeks on the program.
Beyond the spectacle, we scrutinize the business model of the performance medicine telehealth platform, which aims to democratize access to cutting-edge therapies for longevity, strength, and focus, moving beyond the realm of billionaires like Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson. Aron D'Souza explains his mission to not only disrupt the traditional sports industry but to create a paradigm shift in medicine, framing aging as a disease we can solve. This episode tackles the fuzzy boundaries between treatment (like LASIK or GLP-1 drugs) and enhancement, the scientific rigor behind the company's advisory board, and the long-term vision to build a lifestyle brand around the concept of becoming "Human 2.0."
About Our Guest
Dr. Aron D'Souza is the founder and CEO of Enhanced. With a background in law and a history of solving complex global problems, he has pivoted to what he believes is his greatest contribution to humanity: ushering in an "enhanced age." He shares his personal journey and the viral moment in a Miami gym that led to the creation of the Enhanced Games and its mission to redefine the future of human performance enhancement.
Introduction
Dr. Tim Showalter: Hey guys.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Hey guys.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: Hey, how are you guys doing?
Dr. Tim Showalter: Pretty good. I guess we're all taking performance enhancement drugs for this podcast.
Dr. Trevor Royce: I'm enhanced.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: Does coffee count?
Dr. Tim Showalter: Probably. I guess for a podcast, I don't know what would happen for hosting a podcast. I think probably coffee qualifies. I think one of those energy drinks, like a Celsius or a Monster or something is probably what we need.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: Okay. Yeah, I'm old fashioned. I'm a coffee fan.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Trevor, you're young enough. You probably drink iced coffee?
Dr. Trevor Royce: Well, we've got a heat index of 120 in Chapel Hill right now, so I'll take all the iced coffee I can get.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Paul, you probably have a catchphrase for this one because I think given the theme, we've got to have a really good one.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: I think today's podcast is going to be slightly enhanced.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Ooh, that does it.
Dr. Trevor Royce: I'm excited. Welcome to HealthTech Remedy, the show where three physician leaders in health technology tell the stories of new and established companies and interview leaders from the industry. I'm Trevor Royce, radiation oncologist and researcher with experience in real-world evidence, informatics, and AI diagnostics.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: And I'm Paul Gerrard. I started off as a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician before focusing on reimbursement policy, molecular diagnostics, and market access for AI products.
Dr. Tim Showalter: And I'm Tim Showalter, a radiation oncologist and prior medical device entrepreneur who is now focused on bringing AI advances to cancer patients.
Introducing Enhanced: A New Frontier in Human Performance Optimization
Dr. Trevor Royce: This week, we're diving into Enhanced, a company rethinking human performance, particularly at the intersection with sports. And later, we'll interview CEO Aron D'Souza.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: Enhanced is sponsoring the Enhanced Games, a sporting event where athletes may compete enhanced or natural. Also offering a digital health and wellness platform focused on enhancing the performance of their members.
Dr. Tim Showalter: This will give us a great opportunity to explore the intersection of sports, health, and what this company envisions for the future of human health and performance optimization.
Dr. Trevor Royce: And then we'll hear from the CEO himself about his transition from a background in law to founding a digital health sports performance company.
The Ethical Gray Area: The Case of Caster Semenya
Dr. Paul Gerrard: So let's start with a story that forces you to think differently about human performance and about where we draw the lines. Some of you guys might remember Caster Semenya, the South African runner who won the women's 800 meters at the world championships. She was born female, raised female, always competed as a female, but she was found to have a rare condition, 5-alpha reductase 2 deficiency, which led her to having naturally elevated testosterone levels. Now, despite the fact that she was entirely natural, she was told that if she wanted to keep competing in women's events, she'd need to go on hormone-suppressing therapy because her testosterone levels were too high to compete in her chosen events as a woman. Essentially, her biology was deemed too enhanced, even though she hadn't taken anything.
Dr. Tim Showalter: This is such a complex topic. It really shows how messy these boundaries are. In sports, we always want fairness, but then there's naturally exceptional people. Look at LeBron James and then look at Trevor. I do that because it would be too, that's more obvious of a difference than if I use myself for comparison.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: Against LeBron James or against Trevor?
Dr. Tim Showalter: Right, exactly. But then we turn around and we penalize someone for being exceptional in certain categories. And I just think you can get into these really gray areas and in the sporting world where sometimes we reward and celebrate exceptional characteristics and then other times they're not allowed. It's a pretty interesting topic if you go into these really unclear areas where you're drawing distinctions.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Yeah, absolutely. This has been one of the most hot button issues in social discussions, both politically and across the U.S. Obviously beyond the U.S. as well, certainly in sports, but it spills over beyond sports, medicine, society too, where we are in this moment where tools for performance, could be hormones, surgeries, cognitive enhancers are more available than ever, but the rules haven't caught up.
And not to be trite, but from the physician perspective, going through medical school and training and all the rigorous curriculum involved, very clearly there are some classmates that are taking medications to help their performance in that testing environment. And I don't think probably no profession is wholly protected from this moment of enhancements.
The Enhanced Vision: A Health Platform and a Sporting Event
Dr. Paul Gerrard: And I think that really brings us to today's focus. The company Enhanced, it's a startup that sits at the intersection of healthcare, technology and sport. And they're really building two things at once. One is this direct consumer health platform that's focused on human performance. And the other is a new kind of international sporting event, the Enhanced Games, set to launch in 2026.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Yeah, it's really interesting because they're not trying to sneak performance medicine through the side door. It's right in the middle of the action. And they're doing so in a big way with the Enhanced Games. In terms of their overall health platform, what they're saying is essentially, let's build this healthcare platform for performance optimization. And let's also in concert have a global sporting brand that treats performance as something people can openly pursue and talk about and really see what the outer edges of human performance are.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Yeah, there very clearly have been some pretty impressive pictures going viral of some of these athletes as they prepare for the enhanced games, I think they're calling them. The one in particular that stuck out that I saw was sent to me by several different friend group chats was James Magnussen, the Australian Olympic swimmer, who his body has just been totally transformed as he performs for these. I personally am very interested in watching this.
But to be clear, this podcast or thesis really focuses on the digital platforms and health technology side of things. And so that's a big reason why we're highlighting Enhanced today is this accompanying product where you're going to have the availability to get some of these medications, drugs, compounds marketed as tools for enhancing your performance on a digital platform. So we're sort of setting aside the ethics argument for some of these other more hot-button social discussions that are in some ways personally less interesting or beyond the scope of the podcast. But how does this business work? What level of interest is there? How do they take on risk and grow the business? How can you make a digital platform like this work in the real world?
Dr. Paul Gerrard: We're a healthcare business-focused podcast, but ethics is a market force. And we talk about market forces and those pictures of athletes who are jacked, for lack of a better word, I think are also an important market force. And so just like regulatory risk, reputational risk, cultural backlash, it shapes how you scale, how you market to customers, what customers you attract. So when people hear the term enhancement, there'll go into strong reactions and smart founders have to be ready for that, good or bad.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Yeah. And I think the term enhancement is fuzzy. You can think about it from multiple lenses. I think one example that you can think of is LASIK surgery. So it's a medically accepted surgery, permanently improves your vision. I actually got LASIK surgery years ago. These are just reading glasses because you can't escape old age. But LASIK surgery is interesting because it literally is performance enhancing and nobody objects to it because it's normalized. And so it doesn't trip the same alarms. Also, arguably, one could say there aren't known long-term health risks associated with using it. But if we take an open mind looking at this, it's a broad topic that one could have various opinions on.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Yeah, I suppose the extreme argument, you could say that really any intervention, any medical intervention is a form of enhancement. You're taking some baseline and trying to improve upon that. Classic examples might be fertility treatments, ADHD medicines, cosmetic surgery. We're enhancing ourselves all the time. So when does that enhancement become uncomfortable and in what settings and how visible is it? How elite do you have to get before it becomes pejorative? How medical is it? So there's a lot to unpack here.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: If you're building a company in this space, I guess the big question is, how do you draw the line for your users? Is there a framework for deciding what's safe, responsible, effective? And then how do you build trust when the product is really trying to push human limits, which definitionally is something that is not conservative. It's going above and beyond where we've been in the past.
The Enhanced Business Model: A Direct-to-Consumer Telehealth Platform
Dr. Tim Showalter: Let's talk about the business model a little bit, too. It's interesting if you think about branding for direct to patients platforms, a lot of the branding is about wellness or it's aligned very closely with health care directly. And Enhanced is looking to monetize services through a pretty similar consumer paid or patient paid services or diagnostics, prescriptions, maybe a coaching subscription to go along with all that. And what's interesting about it is it's more of a performance optimization type branding rather than health per se. And I don't know how that's going to work out, but it's interesting to see how different that is. I certainly can imagine that for certain demographics that there's some appeal to that.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Yeah, so there's the direct access medical side of the platform. You pay a monthly prescription fee as part of their product and get access to expert clinicians, where you get personalized prescriptions, availability for ongoing monitoring, plan adjustments, telehealth platform, essentially. Their focus is going to be on what they call enhanced therapies like things to enhance testosterone production or testosterone levels, longevity products, which is a huge emerging area in medicine that's really captured the nation's attention on how can we live longer, things that might improve your strength, your energy, your focus.
And I think the program I saw on the website was running for around $399 a month launching this fall right around the same time that they're going to have these enhanced games come out, which is a totally different engine where their media rights sponsors, I assume streaming will be involved. So two different sides of their business, and it will be interesting to hear about how they interact with each other.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: It's a bold strategy. They don't just have a health tech platform, but they tie it to this massive global event. And the people backing this are people who have been through this before. I think probably the most well-known backer is Peter Thiel, but there's also Christian Angermeyer and Balaji Srinivasan. And they're not afraid of controversial bets. They've done this before in biotech, crypto, and frontier technology.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Yeah, this is clearly not just tech bros in a garage getting each other pumped up about an idea. They're legit. You just listed the funding agents. I think they've got a clear vision, which combines a digital platform with these enhanced games. They've also assembled a respectable medical advisory board with cardiologists, endocrinologists, and neuroscientists. So there's clearly an intent on some level to build this responsibly and to be seen as credible. Of course, this is a super controversial topic. Many of our listeners are going to have probably polarized opinions on one way or the other. We'll hopefully hear a lot of comments back about this. But regardless, it's clear that they're trying to put a lot of the appropriate pieces together to move forward the vision.
Dr. Trevor Royce: And it looks like the healthcare platform would be launching this fall, 2025, and the actual Enhanced Games taking place, looking like estimated in May of 2026. So at any rate, later we're going to talk about all this with the CEO, Dr. Aron D'Souza of Enhanced. We'll hear about the origin story, this dual business model, what kind of safeguards they're putting in place for their customers and patients, and how they think about this opportunity.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: This episode is not about endorsing or rejecting the model. It's about understanding it. Because if enhanced succeeds, it could reshape not only sports, but how we think about aging, health, and human potential.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Yeah, Paul, I'm fascinated by this topic. Thanks for putting this together for us. Let's get into it.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: I got it just for you, Tim.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Next up, our conversation with Dr. D'Souza.
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An Interview with Aron D'Souza, CEO of Enhanced
Dr. Paul Gerrard: Let's welcome Dr. Aron D'Souza. We're happy to have you here. Thanks for coming on the podcast. And I guess first question to kick things off is, could you tell us a little bit about your own story? You began your career in law, and now you're at the helm of a human performance company and a new kind of athletic competition. What drove that pivot, and are there any through lines that connect these different worlds for you?
Dr. Aron D'Souza: My whole career has been defined by solving complex coordination problems, reaching across industries and disciplines to find the best specialists and skill to solve the largest problems. And when I was 16 years old, I wrote a plan for my entire life. What I thought would take an entire lifetime to achieve took a little over a decade. And by 30, I wrote another plan and I thought it would take me again the rest of my life to achieve. I achieved it all by 40. And now at 40 years old, I'm looking at what I believe my greatest contribution to humanity can be, which is not just to bring the enhanced games to life, but to bring a new age of mankind into existence, the enhanced age, an age where we see technology's core purpose as enhancing the human experience, enhancing us physically, mentally, culturally, civilizationally.
From Personal Mission to Viral Movement: The Origin of the Enhanced Games
Dr. Tim Showalter: Of course, most people have heard of the Enhanced Games, but they may not have visited your website, for example, and learned about the connection for broader focus for non-competitive athletes on the Enhanced Games in terms of working towards performance optimization as well. So it's a really fascinating broad mission that you're on right now. And I'm wondering if you could share for us in terms of Enhanced, was there a particular moment or insight that sparked your decision and really motivated you to launch this?
Dr. Aron D'Souza: Well, I always say it wasn't my idea to create the Enhance Games. It was an idea that was popularized by numerous academics. Julian Savulescu, who's a professor of bioethics at Oxford University argued for the moral imperative including enhancements in the Olympic Games. Nature, the world's foremost scientific journal, published a piece in 2012 arguing for a world pro-doping organization. Even Wired Magazine, as early as 2002, had argued for the inclusion of performance enhancements in sport. They were more focused on cybernetics than pharmacological enhancements. So I read all of these articles over the years. They sort of lingered in the back of my mind.
And I found my way through looking at social media and seeing how attitudes towards enhancements were changing. I noticed a lot of bodybuilders and powerlifters would say natural or enhanced in their Instagram bios. And that fact sort of sat in my head. And then one day I was just in a gym in Miami and I saw two powerlifters chatting about being enhanced. And so I just walked up to them and I said, what are you talking about? And they're like, oh, we are enhancing ourselves. And they talked about all the different compounds and therapies that they were using. I thought this was really interesting. And I asked them, actually, what do you do for a living? And one of them was like, oh, I'm an endocrinologist. And I thought to myself, wow, there's an MD, a board certified MD right here, enhancing himself.
In a way that goes counter to everything that the Olympic Committee and legacy governing bodies in sports believe. And I thought to myself, there's something here. And my overarching thesis of business is that normal companies raise money, they build products, and then they find distribution. And finding distribution is always very hard. So the better way to build a company is you find distribution, then build a product for that market and raise money if you need to. That's what Mr. Beast, Kylie Cosmetics, and so much of the creator economy today has done.
So we announced the Enhanced Games or the concept of an Enhanced Games two years ago in June of 2023, I should say. And we dropped a video on a zero follower account on Twitter and it got 9 million views in 24 hours. 600 news articles came out the following week. The world's best venture capitalists started sending us term sheets. And one thing led to another, and here we are today.
Proving the Doubters Wrong: Early Success and Social Strategy
Dr. Trevor Royce: I love how there was this aha moment where you had this direct interaction with a physician, kind of highlighting the beginnings of breaking down some of the stigma, showing that this can be done in a healthy way while still improving performance. So tell us a little bit more about where the story goes from there. You said, we and us, who else is on the team? How did you execute on that incredible interest that basically sounds like went viral within days and make this a reality? What happened from there?
Dr. Aron D'Souza: So my overarching thesis of social change, that change only happens when someone puts a suit on and goes to work every day trying to solve a problem.
And we've seen so many social movements go viral in recent years. I use the example of Black Lives Matter or Me Too. Me Too started with just a Google Doc exposing the inappropriate behavior by executives in Hollywood, but they didn't have any institutionalism behind them. And they fizzled out very quickly because they couldn't capture the virality of the moment. Same thing happened with BLM. Versus you look at the very effective social change movements of the 20th century. I think of Dr. Martin Luther King, he had the Southern Poverty Law Center and an institution behind him ready to act upon the virality of the social distribution of era.
In the same way, I recognize that just going viral with one clip wasn't enough. We had a beautiful website ready, a full manifesto. We had an investment case ready so that we could capture that interest in particular from venture capitalists and start running and start organizing in an event. And the main criticism that was leveled at us in 2023 was if all of these athletes are doping, as the evidence suggests, so according to WADA's own research, 44% of elite track and field athletes dope. According to World Athletics' own research, up to 99% of male elite track and field athletes have microdosed EPO.
So if all the athletes are doping, then how are we going to break any world records? That was the main criticism. Will the enhanced games actually be faster than the Olympics, or will they, in fact, be slower and just be an indictment upon the current system? And we proved that with Kristian Gkolomeev's 50 freestyle world record. He was only enhanced for three weeks. He went from being the number five swimmer in the world to the fastest in human history, breaking a world record that stood for 16 years, the most important world record in swimming. And he's 31 years old. So he is arguably about 10 years past his prime as a swimmer. It is the fastest in human history.
And I think that fact is really important to underline. Performance enhancements has allowed an athlete who has past his prime, significantly past his prime, to be the greatest ever. And I think this is the message that is really important to tell our society that performance enhancements makes athletes jump faster, jump higher and run faster. The implications for our wider society are tremendous and world-changing.
Dr. Tim Showalter: I think you're describing something that's, I'm sure there are dissenting views that the three of us, just for context, are physicians. And we were talking a little bit before this interview about how there's certainly so much gray area. There are certainly things in medicine that we do all the time and we don't think about as enhancement. We think as standard medical care, but there were all these gray areas. And I can imagine you hear a lot of pushback from people who are concerned about the health implications, both for athletes and more broadly. What sort of response or how do you think about approaching those criticisms?
Dr. Aron D'Souza: Well, I would analogize this to cosmetic medicine. So cosmetic medicine is non-therapeutic. It's not designed to cure a disease. It's merely designed to enhance one's appearance. So we find it non-problematic that one could walk into a plastic surgeon's office here in Park Avenue in New York and ask for Botox, breast augmentation, etc., for purely non-therapeutic reasons. So we have established that medicine can be used to enhance, at least on a surgical level. Now, if you walked into a cosmetic surgeon's office and said, I want bigger muscles, the surgeon would suggest that you insert silicon implants, and that would be perfectly legal. However, if you said, I would actually like to have functionally larger muscles by using, for example, androgen anabolic steroids, he would say, well, I can't prescribe those for non-therapeutic reasons, which I think is problematic.
Beyond Sports: Applying Performance Science to the Challenge of Aging
Dr. Paul Gerrard: When you were just talking about an athlete doing phenomenally well, sort of after what is considered textbook prime age, it reminded me of my days when I was on geriatrics faculty. And I know we don't tend to think of star athletes in the same sentence as older adults and the patients of people focused on geriatric medicine. But to me, it sounds like there's kind of this spectrum. People start to get older. At some point, we're considered older adults. And at some point, we truly do start to have problems with frailty and infirmity. Are you guys thinking about that at Enhanced? Clearly there's a piece of this is starting with people who are still at a point in their life where they're able to compete in sports. But it really sounds to me like the kind of thing you're talking about could even generalize into later life and enhancing performance and say mobility of older adults. Is that on your radar or am I drawing strings that you haven't thought of?
Dr. Aron D'Souza: This has been a priority since day one. I fundamentally believe that aging is a disease that we can treat, cure, and eventually solve. And it is a massive failure of public policy, for which I have discussed with the president's team, that aging should be classified as a disease. A physician should be able to prescribe medicines against the clinical indicator of aging. And I applaud the work that Bryan Johnson, who is a great friend of mine and a great friend of the Enhanced Project, has done to show that aging should be optional.
However, when I first told Bryan about the Enhanced Games, he said, ah, Aron, you've got it. Because for Bryan to be proven correct will take 100 years. He needs to be the oldest living human. For us to be proven correct fits in a TikTok. And at the end of the day, I think that most people would actually rather look like James Magnussen enhanced, rather than Bryan Johnson living forever.
And that's a choice that individuals can make. But ultimately, sports is the greatest proving ground for validating human enhancements, because it can be done so quickly, so effectively in such a measurable way. And I always say that the greatest gift that I can give to sports is not a 21-year-old who will break Usain Bolt's world record, but it's a 40-year-old. So you imagine if 40-year-old Usain Bolt could come back and break his own world record from 16 years ago, or Michael Phelps, who is long retired.
Could become enhanced and break his own world records, his personal bests, or Tom Brady at 43 to come back and break his combine times. These would be seminal moments in the history of humanity to the level of the moon landing. I really admire what Ben Lamm has done at Colossal, bringing back the dire wolf. I'm working on bringing back the woolly mammoth and de-extincting many other species. And we live in a world where science has unlocked unbelievable potential. And the International Olympic Committee would be like as if the University of Oxford banned the typewriter. We would have never got the computer. We would have never got artificial intelligence. Yes, there is something to be said about how handwriting is an authentic representation of the mind. That doesn't invalidate the typewriter.
And sports is the only industry that has a hard technology cap. And enhanced games breaks through that.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Yeah, I love that you mentioned James Magnussen because it's totally independent of our interview today. I had several different text chain groups have that picture of James going around and it is like, an image is worth a thousand words. It's so impressive. Folks that have watched him as an Olympian and then seeing what he's, how his body has changed in preparation for the enhanced game is it's really remarkable to see.
Just to go back to an earlier theme, I think important to pull on this thread a little more is the temptation of society to oversimplify things and put things into simple buckets where you have a disease state or a healthy state and you're providing treatment. But I think what we're hearing a lot in this conversation is that those lines of what requires treatment or what is actually a condition worth treating, for lack of a better way to put it, is actually quite blurred. And so this is something I think we'll continue to kind of work through as we think about what we can do to our bodies and how we can enhance ourselves in different states of our being.
The Business of Enhancement: Building a Red Bull-Style Telehealth Platform
Dr. Trevor Royce: Just to shift gears a little bit, and I think we'll go back to the enhanced games some, but I'd love to hear a bit more on the platform side from the healthcare side, as you guys envision an online health platform. This is something that we've seen rise in the health technology industry across a couple of different health verticals. Hims is one example that I think a lot of our listeners are going to be familiar with. Tell us what you guys are focusing on, what that product looks like, how you want to engage with your customers and patients and so forth.
Dr. Aron D'Souza: Let me be first critical of the traditional sports business model. So the business model of FIFA, the NBA, MLB, the Olympics are all the same. They sell media rights, ticket sales, corporate sponsorships, concessions, etc. It has taken the Olympics 120 years and a trillion dollars in inflation-adjusted capital expenditure to get to a billion dollars of annual recurring revenue. So get that through your head. A trillion dollars worth of CapEx to get to a billion dollars of ARR.
In comparison, a business like Hims is already doing, I believe, about $1.8 billion in annual revenue. OpenAI, I believe, does $3.8 billion. And these are businesses that are created within the last decade. And so, I've always been very critical of the traditional sports business model. I don't think it works. I think it's a glamour assets for billionaires. And a much better business model is like Red Bull. Red Bull uses sports marketing to sell a 90% gross margin energy drink, took $1 million in equity, and became third largest beverage company in the world with a market value now probably in excess of $100 billion.
And so I said to myself when I created Enhanced Games, I'm not going to follow the traditional sports business model. I'm going to follow a business model that actually works, which is like Red Bull's. And what are the kinds of products that we should sell? And it's so obvious. We should sell prescription medicines, supplements, FMCG products that support human enhancement. And what I would point out is that you can walk into a concierge medical practice here in Park Avenue in New York City, and you can get anabolic steroids, you can get testosterone, own, you can get EPO, you can get the whole nine yards, but it's going to cost $100,000 a year. It's not because the compounds are expensive, it's because the information is expensive.
And the greatest business model in history is taking what is available only to billionaires and making it accessible to everyone. And so today, it's not even billionaires that can afford this stuff. It's people like Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, all of my friends who are spending millions of dollars a year on their own labs, their own R&D, their own compounding pharmacies. And we want to democratize that and make it accessible to everyone. And so we are building a telehealth platform similar to Hims.
But backed up by our own R&D. So Hims doesn't innovate in new products and delivery formats, they just sell existing ones. And I believe that there is huge capacity for innovation in patentable subject matter in the performance enhancement space because traditional scientific funding bodies like the NIH have not funded any research into performance enhancements for decades. And so all the advancements of computational biology, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, all the omics can now be applied to the question of performance enhancement, and there'll be a lot of low-hanging fruit. And I look at the GLP-1 category, which has added a trillion dollars in market capitalization to Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, and they are prescribed as image enhancement drugs. And one of the core issues associated with the GLP-1s is muscle wastage. And so the same research and compounds that we are working on in terms of athlete performance are going to have societal wide implications when one out of four Americans are going to be taking a GLP-1.
Building a New Field: Scientific Rigor and the Paradigm Shift in Performance Medicine
Dr. Tim Showalter: I'd love to spend a little more time on this topic because I think the question from the outside is you've got the desire to develop more evidence and there's probably some low hanging fruit for things where there's already some data available, but the typical traditional medical community is not really paying attention to it. And so I'm curious, as you're building this platform and thinking about broad availability, How are you thinking about the balance between serving a large and growing consumer base that wants to have access to things, as well as scientific rigor and building the evidence that you're focused on?
Dr. Aron D'Souza: Well, I would always say that from day one, the Enhanced Games has been a rigorous scientific project. On the day we launched two years ago, we had a six-member scientific panel. Today, we have a 38-member one. Professor George Church, the chair of genetics at Harvard University, has been an advisor of ours and a board member since day one. We've hosted multiple scientific conferences at the British Parliament, at the University of Oxford. We have published, extensive research has been published about us. More than a dozen people are writing PhD theses about enhanced games. I'm aware that one person has already won a Fulbright fellowship to write about the enhanced games.
The Olympic Doctors' Own Association, which is called FIMS, published research in the Journal of Sports Medicine last week, indicating that 74% of their members of the Olympics' own doctors are willing to treat enhanced athletes. And 30% of them are willing to prescribe performance enhancements themselves and be a part of the distribution process if it is legal and ethical. So there's a great support in the scientific community for what we are doing. There is an immense field that is being built around us.
And one of the most instructive pieces of literature I've ever read is Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which is about how new fields of endeavor, scientific endeavor, come into being. And Kuhn is credited with inventing the term paradigm shift. And that's an example when we go from a world in which the Earth is the center of the universe to the sun being the center of our solar system as an example of a paradigm shift. And how does a new field of science come to coalesce around such an innovation? And he says that there are three things that are necessary. First is the formation of professional societies where ideas are shared. There is, number two, scholarly journals where information is distributed. And number three is a special place in the academy. That is how a new field of science comes to be.
And so we see this, for example, with artificial intelligence over the last few years. Specialist societies have been formed, specialist journals to distribute the information and now undergraduate coursework to train the next generation. And so the same is happening in performance medicine, which is a category that we invented. We are the community. We are convening the community. There are now extensive reporting in specialist journals and specialist journals coming to be. And the final thing, final step is just to create a place in the academy so that the next generation of leaders are trained.
The Long-Term Vision: Disrupting Sports and Building a Human Enhancement Brand
Dr. Paul Gerrard: When people typically think about sports, they're thinking about things like broadcast rights, sponsorships. But here, we've just really heard you talk about the enhanced games in the context of really a scientific endeavor. So do you see yourself as somebody who is going to be disrupting an existing ecosystem for sports? Or do you see yourself as somebody who is really pushing something entirely new that is kind of separate from the existing status quo in sports? And here, I mean, not just the enhanced versus natural side of things, but really the cultural and business aspects surrounding it.
Dr. Aron D'Souza: When Amazon.com started out, many would have considered Jeff Bezos' main competitor to be Barnes & Noble. But Jeff was playing 3D chess when Barnes & Noble was playing checkers. He was developing new distribution mediums, new shipping speeds that were unheard of, new membership models, and became a distribution monopoly. And so right now, the world probably says that our competitor is the International Olympic Committee. I don't think it is because we are going to have more revenue than the IOC within a couple of years. And we're focused on developing new methods of drug discovery, new methods of drug delivery, new whole categories of medicine.
Healthcare is extractive of all of the profits of capitalism. So in 1950, America spent 5% of GDP on healthcare. Today, it spends 18% of GDP. But over that same period of time, GDP has gone up about 5x. And so, healthcare spending has gone up, what, 16, 17x over that period of time. Why is that? Because all the activities of capitalism generate profit. And what is that profit spent on. It's spent on making our population healthier and stronger. If I were dying of cancer and my doctor said to me, Aron, you can fix this cancer for $10 million, I would just look at my bank account and say, oh, I've got $10 million there. Bang, I will pay it.
And so I believe in that same vein that human enhancement is a sector that will not be measured in billions or trillions of dollars. It will be measured as a percentage of GDP, because what can we use all the profits of our civilization for is just to become healthier and more capable human beings. And we see this in the willingness to pay now. Middle-class Americans are willing to cash pay $1,200 a month to get a GLP-1 drug. Some people are willing to pay a third to a half of their after-tax income to access a GLP-1 drug. It costs $3,500 a year to get a basic membership at Equinox here in New York City. There are some from concierge health practices that charge $100,000 plus a year. The market for this is extremely large, and we have built a category-defining company in human enhancements. We have owned the brand space, and I think it's three very simple things. It is the brand, the science, and the business. We built the brand, we have the science, and we've got the business model. Now it's time to just rapidly scale it.
Dr. Tim Showalter: You've described, I think, a pretty broad vision. And I'm just curious, when you look five years ahead or 10 years ahead, what will enhanced look like at that point and and how will what sort of services will be offered and how will people know of the brand?
Dr. Trevor Royce: And what are your metrics for success along the way?
Dr. Aron D'Souza: The metrics for success are very simple. We want to enable a world in which everyone has the opportunity to live enhanced. And so I would estimate today that only 0.1% of people identify as being an enhanced human. Those are people like Bryan Johnson. Our metric is like, what percentage of people identify as being enhanced? And I believe we can build the first lifestyle brand in medicine and healthcare. So no one will walk down the street wearing a Hims t-shirt. No one will walk down the street wearing a Pfizer t-shirt. People will go and buy enhanced merchandise. They will identify with the enhanced brand.
And there will be an iconic representation of are you a human 2.0 or are you a human 1.0? And who wants to be a Neanderthal when homo sapiens are around? And ultimately, this becomes a synergy of lifestyle, product sales that then allows us to pay athletes more money, break more world records, showcase human performance in new and innovative ways that is a positive feedback cycle that leads to more product sales.
Final Advice for Entrepreneurs: The Power of a Mission-Driven Company
Dr. Trevor Royce: I guess as we close things out here what you guys are doing there's definitely a contrarian streak and I think that's fabulous and I think that's the way we push our innovations forward and society forward. We have a lot of young entrepreneurs that listen to us on the health tech side of things. I guess any final kind of bits or advice as you think about for those young budding entrepreneurs in health technology and beyond lessons that you've learned along your journey as you've prepared for Enhanced?
Dr. Aron D'Souza: I would say that miracles happen more often than we expect, not because there is magic in the world, but because we are limited in our aspirations. And so the more we raise our aspirations, the more likely there are miracles that can happen. I went out and built enterprise SaaS companies. I've built fintech companies. They had missions, but their mission fundamentally was to solve a product problem in a niche industry or make money. But when you have a mission that is truly magnetic, like build superhumanity, that is attractive to the most talented individuals in the world. And fundamentally talent density is the only thing that matters.
And so think about all the great companies in the world, like Google, their mission to organize the world's information, OpenAI, build artificial general intelligence, Tesla, SpaceX, make humans interplanetary. These are missions that are worth dedicating your life to. It is not worth dedicating your life to go and be a product manager at Microsoft or to even be the CEO of DocuSign, a multi-billion company. And so to entrepreneurs out there, you can achieve miracles if you build a mission that inspires individuals to dedicate their whole lives to it.
As an entrepreneur, you have to be the first one to do that. And so there are some tough mornings. But I wake up every day believing that what we're doing is so powerful because this is an extraordinary gift to the future of humanity. And those who are blessed by God with capabilities have a moral obligation to act because that's the thing that got us out of the cave. We would not have civilization if capable people didn't believe that they had the capability and the desire and the agency to achieve extraordinary things.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: Dr. Aron D'Souza, we really thank you for coming on and sharing your perspectives on not only what could benefit society, but how you plan to address that specifically with the company that you founded. So thank you, and we hope that you have a good afternoon.
Dr. Aron D'Souza: Thank you very much. Have a great day, guys.
