How I Made This Pod: Chris Gayomali’s “SuperHuman” Investigation
“You don’t want the person who’s the best, best, best in the world. You want the person who’s hungry for more.”
For the latest (audio-centric) installment of “How I Wrote This Book,” a Deez Links Q&A series on craft and creativity, we have the indefatigable Chris Gayomali talking about his latest GQ feature, What Would the Olympics Be Like If the Athletes Could Juice? and the accompanying iHeart podcast investigation, “SuperHuman,” which airs its second episode on Tuesday.
When it comes to the wild and seemingly exotic world of Olympic-level athletes competing while on performance-enhancing drugs — to what end, you ask? Turns out, this question is the best part of the story! — there’s literally no one I’d want to explain everything to me than Chris, especially considering his famous journey into the world of human augmentation in the form of leg-lengthening procedures (you’re welcome, Materialists!). He also writes the health and wellness newsletter Heavies, so truly, this story could not be a better cut of ribeye for Chris to sink his teeth into.
With the Enhanced Games beginning May 24 in Las Vegas, Chris and I took a walk around our neighborhood in Brooklyn last week to discuss his reporting — which involved 40-ish interviews and resulted in an 8,000-word initial draft for GQ — plus the question of whether athletes make good interviewees.
When did you first take an interest in the Enhanced Games and think, I should write about this?
After I finished the leg-lengthening piece, I was on the hunt for whatever the next body augmentation thing was going to be. In order to do that, I listened religiously to Joe Rogan. Then two of the founders of Enhanced went on there, and they were talking about, like, “We’re going to juice everyone to the gills, and we’re going to try to shatter world records and make all this money.” It was the kind of thing where a million magazine writers were immediately going to chase it, and they kind of did.
So I got in touch with the lead guy, Aron D’Souza, and was like, “Hey, you should let me write it. Here’s where I stand. I love weird body shit. Let me be the magazine journalist to do the big feature story on you.” Then on Valentine’s Day 2025, I got this invite to go to a penthouse on the east side of Manhattan. It was near where the weird Trader Joe’s is in the 50s or whatever. I took the elevator up; weird, weird vibes the whole way around. There were beautiful men on TRT all around me.
