Enhanced Games
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Peter Thiel, Brian Johnson, Connor Murphy: How fitness influencers are becoming guinea pigs for a form of tech eugenics that draws on a very peculiar interpretation of Carl Schmitt.
Enhanced Games, Tech Eugenics and Dark Enlightenment: How fitness influencers are becoming guinea pigs for a political movement
Bostin Loyd died on 25 February 2022 whilst working out, his kidneys having been destroyed. Connor Murphy now drinks sperm shakes and, following a steroid-induced psychosis, acts as an enhancement consultant. Peter Thiel is funding, via middlemen, a 20-year-old looksmaxxing influencer who describes half of his fellow human beings as subhuman. What looks like a TikTok oddity is actually a programme.
What are the Enhanced Games, and who is behind them?
The Enhanced Games is a sporting event founded in 2025 that expressly permits performance-enhancing substances. Anabolic steroids, growth hormones, peptides and experimental substances of all kinds are not merely tolerated but are marketed as a sporting advantage. The event positions itself as the antithesis of the Olympic anti-doping policy and sells enhancement as the liberation of the human body from supposedly anachronistic constraints.
Behind the Games are some of the world’s wealthiest tech investors. Peter Thiel has invested substantial sums. Joining him are other Silicon Valley heavyweights with a transhumanist agenda. The Games are not a sporting event in the traditional sense. They are a for-profit vehicle that stages the deregulation of pharmaceutical substances as a sporting spectacle. The global market for enhancement substances is estimated to reach 335 billion US dollars by 2035. The Games are the media run-up to this market opening.
Who was Bostin Loyd, and what did he die of?
Bostin Loyd was an American bodybuilder who had been speaking publicly since 2014 about his heavy use of anabolic steroids, growth hormones and peptides. On the morning of 25 February 2022, he collapsed and died whilst training at a gym near his home. The post-mortem revealed end-stage kidney failure. A doctor treating him later publicly described his body as 100 per cent destroyed by drugs.
Loyd was not an isolated case, but a particularly prominent one. His death was noted within the mainstream bodybuilding community, but barely in the wider sports media. The substance that ultimately destroyed his kidneys was adabotid, a peptide marketed in the bodybuilding scene as promoting regeneration. Loyd’s death marks the culmination of a series of fatalities in the looksmaxxing and enhancement scene in 2026.
How did Connor Murphy go from bodybuilder to lab rat?
Connor Murphy was one of the most prominent fitness influencers of the 2010s: four million YouTube subscribers, an athletic physique, a polarising style. His career followed a predictable pattern.
Phase one: workout videos, diet content, documentation of success.
Phase two: vanity content, taking his shirt off in public, questionable videos of him approaching women.
Phase three: starting to use anabolic steroids, despite publicly professing a natural lifestyle.
Phase four: the COVID-induced collapse of the street content world, followed by an identity crisis, which he attempted to resolve through heavy use of ayahuasca.
Phase five: documented episodes of psychosis (“I’m out of the psych ward”), relocation to Thailand, where performance-enhancing substances are freely available.
Phase six: Looksmaxxing pivot, including the grotesque self-promotion of drinking his own semen (marketed as a divine protein shake with nerve growth factor).
Phase seven: Establishment as a steroid and peptide consultant under the Natty Plus Protocol label.
Murphy’s trajectory is the detailed version of what is also evident in the compact format of the career of 20-year-old Clavicular (Braden Peters), who collapsed live on Kick in April 2026 following a suspected Pentastack overdose.
What does Peter Thiel have to do with Looksmaxxing?
According to research by several journalists, Peter Thiel is funding the rise of Looksmaxxing influencers via middlemen and Twitch donations. Clavicular spoke openly on his own stream about a major donor named “P”, who not only made direct donations but also paid for thousands of subscriptions for other viewers, a form of algorithmic reach subsidy. A journalist who asked about the Thiel rumours was thrown out of Clav’s flat. Thiel himself is said to have invited Clavicular to a party, which he declined because he was supposed to come alone.
At first glance, the connection seems absurd: one of the world’s most powerful tech billionaires is funding a twenty-year-old who lets people hit him in the face with hammers. But it makes sense when you consider Thiel’s other investments. He is putting capital into Enhanced Games, into Prospera (a special zone off the coast of Honduras with its own jurisdiction), into politicians pursuing a deregulation agenda, and into influencers who normalise a certain view of humanity. In this constellation, looksmaxxing influencers are not a sporting phenomenon, but a political infrastructure.
What is Dark Enlightenment, and where does the term come from?
Dark Enlightenment (also known as Neoreaction or NRx) refers to a political movement that emerged in the late 2000s, formulated by bloggers such as Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) and Nick Land. Core tenets: Democracy has failed because it presupposes egalitarian assumptions about human equality that are biologically untenable. Hierarchies are natural. Tech elites should govern instead of elected parliaments. The Enlightenment was a mistake.
Thiel has expressed sympathy for this position in public interviews. In a famous 2009 quote, he wrote that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. His investment in Curtis Yarvin’s company, his support for populist right-wing political candidates, and his involvement in tech platforms with political reach all stem from the same logic. Dark Enlightenment is not a fringe phenomenon, but a movement with massive financial backing from Silicon Valley.
What role does Carl Schmitt play in Thiel’s thinking?
In several interviews, Thiel has cited the German constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt as a formative intellectual source. Schmitt, who later became known as the ‘chief jurist of the Third Reich’, transformed the crises of the Weimar Republic into a theory of sovereign decision-making that placed the state of emergency above the norm, thereby providing the legal language for the destruction of the constitutional order. At the same time, after 1945, despite his unbroken loyalty to the central premises of his thinking, he remained an influential reference author for authoritarian political projects in certain conservative and new-right circles. In an interview, Thiel explicitly draws parallels between Weimar Germany of the 1920s and the USA of the 2020s, both characterised by an exhausted liberal democracy, both searching for answers far beyond the acceptable window of discourse.
This reference is not to be taken in an academic sense. Schmitt provided the philosophical justifications for the extermination of people whom he classified as not belonging to the community. Anyone who recommends Schmitt today as an analytical tool for the present day is, at the very least, in need of explanation. Thiel has never actually provided this explanation but instead relies on references that read like cultural criticism, obscuring the historical substance.
What does ‘subhuman’ mean in the Looksmaxxing scene?
In Looksmaxxing forums and on the channels of prominent Looksmaxxers, the term ‘subhuman’ is established. It refers, in Clavicular Peters’ words, to ‘horrendously ugly people’, i.e. people who fall below a certain threshold of value according to the scene’s aesthetic criteria. The term is used casually in live streams, TikTok scripts, and forum posts. It is not an ironic provocation, but a serious classification category within the scene.
The historical resonance of this term is obvious. ‘Subhuman’ is the English translation of ‘Untermensch’, a key concept in Nazi racial ideology. It is no coincidence that an international subculture, funded by a tech billionaire with an affinity for Schmitt, is introducing this classification into the vocabulary of young men. It is the groundwork for a policy in which some people are considered more valuable than others, eugenically justified, technologically operationalised, and marketed in a market-oriented manner.
Why are children the next target group of the enhancement industry?
The use of steroids and peptides is spreading to ever younger age groups. Eric English is a documented case: publicly fitness-focused at 13, already muscularly developed by 15, in a form that is biologically hardly possible without substances. A friend of English’s: 1.60 metres tall, 19 years old, 160 kilograms, with documented bench press figures that surpass those of adult bodybuilders. Sixteen-year-old Martin Memphis is already showing severe acne as a result of testosterone use.
These teenagers are no exceptions. They are the crest of a wave that is barely discussed in the daily press. Influencers with large followings normalise the use of these substances; tutorials on dosages circulate on Discord servers; substances are readily available via semi-legal sources. The ‘looksmaxxing’ logic offers a narrative: those who are subhuman have a moral duty to optimise themselves. Those who can optimise must optimise. The cascade of substances begins with testosterone, leads to acne, requires aromatase inhibitors, causes joint pain, necessitates BPC157 or TB500, and escalates to growth hormone peptides. Stopping is not an option because the business model is based on escalation.
What is Prospera, and why are genetic experiments being carried out there?
Prospera is a special administrative zone on the Honduran island of Roatán, established as a private city-state with its own jurisdiction and reduced regulation. It is the first concrete implementation of the ‘network state’ concept, which is promoted by Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman, among others. The company Mini Circle operates in Prospera, offering experimental gene therapies, particularly follistatin gene therapy for alleged muscle-building and anti-ageing.
These procedures are not authorised in regulated healthcare systems. In Prospera, they are carried out because the special zone has no comparable oversight. The Honduran government has taken legal action against Prospera, with the outcome unclear. Mini Circle is funded by the same tech investors who back Enhanced Games. The logic is consistent: where the state regulates, the state is circumvented. Where gene therapy becomes possible without oversight, it is carried out. The people who bear the risk are the guinea pigs; the profits flow to the investors.
What does this have to do with Trump’s Freedom Cities?
The second Trump administration introduced the concept of Freedom Cities into the political discourse from 2025 onwards. Up to 10 new cities on federal land, with significantly reduced regulatory constraints, were proposed. Trump presented the concept as a revival of America’s pioneering history. Behind the rhetoric lies a concrete political operation: the creation of special zones in which the Prospera model can be replicated on US soil.
The Freedom Cities are the US domestic response to the international Network State movement. They are spaces where the tech elite can put their vision of a posthumanist society into practice without grappling with democratic processes. The financial link between tech investors close to Trump (Thiel, Andreessen, Musk) and the proponents of the Freedom Cities is no coincidence. It is the political and infrastructural realisation of what the Enhanced Games have culturally paved the way for. A society that views its bodies as upgradeable deficiencies is a society that has prepared itself for takeover by a technologically superior elite.
Summary
· The Enhanced Games are a sporting event founded in 2025 that permits performance-enhancing substances and is co-funded by Peter Thiel and other tech investors.
· Bostin Loyd died on 25 February 2022 from end-stage kidney failure following years of anabolic steroid and peptide use, particularly adabotid.
· Connor Murphy’s career follows a predictable pattern: bodybuilder → vanity content → steroids → ayahuasca-induced psychosis → looksmaxxing → enhancement consultant.
· Peter Thiel finances looksmaxxing influencers such as Clavicular (Braden Peters) via intermediaries, alongside investments in Enhanced Games, Prospera and pro-Trump politics.
· Dark Enlightenment (Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land) rejects democracy and advocates hierarchy and the rule of a tech elite; Thiel has publicly expressed sympathies with this movement.
· Carl Schmitt, chief legal advisor to the Third Reich, is cited by Thiel as a formative intellectual source; parallels between the Weimar Republic and the current US situation are explicitly drawn.
· ‘Subhuman’ is an established term in Looksmaxxing forums for ‘aesthetically inferior’ people; historical parallels with the Nazi concept of the ‘Untermensch’ are evident.
· Steroid and peptide use is reaching 13- to 15-year-olds; Eric English and Martin Memphis are documented cases of a wider trend.
· The enhancement substance market is estimated at $335 billion by 2035; “Stopping is never the answer” serves as the business model for the substance cascade.
· Prospera (Roatán, Honduras) operates as a deregulated special zone for mini-circle gene therapy; Trump’s Freedom Cities transfers the network-state logic to US soil.
· The link between tech eugenics, mortality among fitness influencers and political deregulation is not a conspiracy, but an openly funded strategy to prepare for a post-humanist class society.
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