Joe Rogan predicts that pharmaceutical companies will benefit from growth and success of 'Enhanced Games': "They're going to be extremely popular"
Popular podcaster and MMA personality Joe Rogan recently had an in-depth conversation with Dr. Aron D'Souza, founder of the much-talked-about "Enhanced Games". With the rampant use of Performance-Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) in sports today, D'Souza and his team of scientists and specialists leaned on the idea instead of rejecting it.
This means that the new sporting league will not only allow but will carefully and safely administer PEDs to its athletes with the hopes of conducting safer games, increasing athlete pay, and breaking world records. On their website, the Enhanced Games is dubbed as "the ultimate demonstration of what the human body is capable of".
After much discussion with Dr. D'Souza, Joe Rogan had this take:
"It's really interesting because if it does take off, it might legitimately change the way pharma companies interface with these particular substances if they realize they're going to be extremely popular. Once they see how well people do, especially if you get athletes that are in their 30s that may be washed out of MMA organizations and they start competing at an elite level again. If you start seeing people breaking the world records in sprinting they might go 'Hey let's revisit this.'"
Here's the full podcast, timestamped with what Joe Rogan said:
Dr. Aron D'Souza to Joe Rogan: "44% of Olympians admit to using banned performance-enhancing drugs"
At the beginning of the podcast, Dr. Aron D'Souza explained his thought process for coming up with the Enhanced Games, citing poor athlete pay and the widespread use of PEDs in Olympic sports.
D'Souza said (via Joe Rogan Experience on YouTube):
"44% of Olympians admit to using banned performance-enhancing drugs in the last year, according to research commissioned by the [World Anti-Doping Agency]."
He continued:
"And then I learned that the average American Olympian only earns $30,000 a year. And I thought to myself, 'There's something really wrong in the system and instead of, you know, trying to reform it, let's take a blank slate of paper and invent the third Olympiad from scratch."
Rogan's assessment might hold. Once big pharmaceutical companies see how much viewership "enhanced" athletes can generate, their marketing direction towards PEDs might change. Soon enough, the popularity of Enhanced Games will skyrocket once big pharma floods its airtime with advertisements of new performance enhancers and whatnot. This, to say the least, could be the biggest stepping stone for the league to garner attention and revenue.