American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - Can Psychedelics Solve Depression? | Christian Angermayer

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

This week’s American Alchemist is Christian Angermayer: entrepreneur, investor, and head of Apeiron Investment Group, which manages 3.5 Billion Dollars. Born and bred in Germany, Christian is the first investor in Compass Pathways and founder of Atai Life Sciences, demarginalizing psychedelics and bringing them into the mainstream as FDA-approved treatments and therapies for ailments like depression, addiction, and PTSD. Perhaps more interesting than his business track record is his personality; he’s both laser-focused and great at actualizing his goals, visualizing them with a specific method every morning before achieving them. In this interview, we get into everything from his goal setting and visualization methods to psychedelics, to space, to biotech, to crypto, and other sectors that we both invest in. *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. People in nursing homes should do a medical-assisted psychedelic trip. Our next guest is Christian Angermeyer, entrepreneur, investor, and head of a Piron, which has 3.5 billion assets under management. Born and bred in the German countryside, Christian is maybe best known for his early investment in Compass Pathways and his founding of a Thai life sciences. He's systematically demarginalizing psychedelics and bringing them into the mainstream with FDA approval, using them to treat ailments like addiction, depression, and PTSD. Perhaps even more interesting than his business track record is his personality.

He's laser-focused, incredibly creative and generative, and even has a specific visualization method he uses every morning to achieve his personality. six-month goals. And it works fascinating you well. Outside of psychedelics, Christian might as well be Mormon. He's completely straight-edge. I've never tried alcohol. I've never smoked a cigarette. This makes him a great combination of hyper-competent, but also a little trippy and open

to serendipity. Thank you. Germans are super bad with compliments. He's also friends with some of the most interesting people in the world. He politely called me to reschedule our first interview due to a dinner with Uma Thurman. If you've ever seen Kill Bill, you know that UMA is not somebody you want to fuck with. In this interview, we get into his manifestation methods, psychedelics, consciousness, crypto, space, and other sectors that we both invest in.

So sit back and take some notes from today's American alchemist, the Sultan of psychedelics himself, Christian Angermine. The only drug I took before 34 was coffee. And I thought it's very bad, like, yeah, if you count that. But otherwise, I have never tried alcohol, although I grew up in Bavaria. where alcohol is like daily nutrition. I've never smoked a cigarette, never smoked a joint. From my point of view, a series of events,

which were hindsight, I think, really leading up to that moment, I sort of tried magic mushrooms, and then it was the single most meaningful thing I've ever done in my whole life. And so did you have a revelation that I need to get involved in this and sort of democratize it when you had your first mushroom? So, yeah, so one of the things which was leading up to it was that I had met a scientist who's the head neuroscientist of University of Mannheim in Germany. He actually still did his PhD with Albert Hoffman, the legendary LSD guy.

So he's on the scientific side very into it. So he introduced me to the topic a year before my first trip, science-wise. And also that they were used medically. So that gave me sort of the scientific confidence to try it. So the next day I was like, okay, holy shit, if it's doing this. this amount of positivity and add-on to me as a happy person, I can totally see how it can help people with depression, anxiety, addiction, and all of that. So that was sort of the moment where I was like, this should be medically available again. Maybe you should talk about these

medical side because I don't believe it should be broadly given out. I don't think it should be sort of recreational. At least not in a sense that you can easily get it. Let's describe Compass in a tie for people because I think a lot of people have heard of both. There's this big sort of shroom boom out there. There are, I think, a bunch of probably inferior companies that have popped up in the wake. And so that's my take. Copycats. Yeah, copycats, yeah.

And so what exactly is it? Like, what is Compass getting approved through the FDA right now? So Compass is focused on psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in Magic Mushrooms. The main lead indication is treatment-resistant depression. And actually, I was surprised by the openness of regulators, politicians, the establishment. The reason I think is a combination, the science is really legit. But also, and that's sort of the sad part, which I wasn't even aware because I'm a happy person, how big the mental health crisis really is.

So you touch, I don't know, depression, anxiety, addiction, post-traumatic stress, or take any of those indications of sub-problems and any one of them has like hundreds of millions of people suffering from it. So that pressure is really high and on the regulators, whatever, to find solutions. And when I saw that, I was like, wait a moment, there are actually more psychedelics. There is like ketamine, LSD, MDMA, DMT. There's a wide range of psychedelics. Some actually natural, some artificial.

And I was like, I want to capture and develop all of them which make commercial sense. So this was the birth moment of a tie because Compass wanted to stay focused on psorocybin. So we took my compass stake, which I had put it in a tie at foundation. And then a tie started to onboard, so to say, and develop other psychedelics as well. So a tie is the larger platform. Exactly. In compasses the first instance. part of it.

Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. Do you get it all kind of conspiratorial about like, why was this stuff marginalized? You have the kind of Michael Paul in how to change your mind narrative that, you know, in the late 60s it all sort of went away. It was associated with counterculture in the hippie movement. The doses were too big.

Why do you think, you know, wasn't taken seriously? Well, maybe it was taken too seriously by politicians, yeah. So, so I think he, I mean, definitely it's part of a problem. I think, again, sometimes in life, I think. things come together in a good way and sometimes in a bad way. And I think the whole 60s use of psychedelics, meaning again, let's take magic mushrooms, they, suicide was legal in some countries as medication against depression. So we knew actually what we know now, it works for depression. But first of all, the problem was way smaller. And additionally, we were actually

not able to diagnose them properly. So that together made mental health issues a marginalized disease back then. So then the hippies were doing it. It was associated with sort of Vietnam war counterculture, whatever. Science was also meaning we knew it works, but it was not as explainable as we can't explain now. What does it do in the brains? It was a little bit more of mystery around it. So there were many reasons and then sort of this was abused by the government to say, oh, let's blame the hippies because we need to make them look bad because you are actually crazy because the narrative they wanted to do is like, you must be crazy if you go against the Vietnam War, oh look, they take these drugs, this is why they're crazy.

Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids you killed today? We have a mutual friend Brian Murat Rescue who wrote an amazing book, right, the immortality key. And he touches on something that's really interesting, which is that this has been used for thousands of years. But a lot of the people we call the forefathers of Western civilization, Plato, Aristotle, Alcibiades, all these people went to this place. Elusis, 13 miles northwest of Athens.

And what's interesting is they would come back saying that they had experienced, you know, noesis. They had witnessed their immortal soul, which is, you know, if you give psilocybin to somebody who's terminally ill using the compass protocol, you know, they fear death less. And so it's very interesting how all of this sort of dovetails. No, so I mean, first of all, I love Brian because all what he put together in the mortality here in his work is what I think a lot of people feel and what I felt when I was taking mushrooms for or again we can always use the word mushroom or psychedelics like in a broader sense

like other ones but like if you take these substances you always have a kind of spiritual experience yeah and I think a lot of people were like but without proof and Brian sort of gave it proof saying oh my god now I'm very sure like this is what all the founders of religion state. Like and then if you actually if you if I now read any religious text I'm like yeah come on like the burning bush like clearly Moses was on dm t and t the Lord Jehovah has given unto you these 15 10 10 commandments so let's get back to the macro outlook on mental health why is everybody seemingly lonely and depressed in greater numbers today I think one reason is that we all are permanently terrified of dying permanently like everything

So, and I think even worse, it's not that meaning I'm terrified that I could die, but like, even worse, I'm terrified that my loved ones could die. And I think the fear of death, of yourself and of others, is a nagging terror, yeah, which weakens your brain. And religion and faith is a counterbalance to that. So that's one pillar. The second one is purpose. I think humans want the purpose. Like, they want to be needed. They want to be included.

it. We want to wake up. We want to know why we're here. In the bigger concept, we want to know what we're doing every day. Yeah, you want a job, whatever. So, and the third ones, which is it's love. You want to have relationships. It can be the close ones, the family, the children, the partner. And if you look at the world, all three of them are eroding. So faces on a low point or spirituality. So then the biggest problem, I think, what we're going in is purpose, because because because of the technological innovation which is happening, the purpose is getting away for, I don't know, making it up, but definitely a majority, maybe 70, 80% of the jobs will not exist anymore in 10, 20 years.

And maybe we give it a name. I don't have a name for it, but maybe we call it a better word than fear of the future. But there will be a term. I'm very sure. Somebody who coined a term, what I just described. Futurephobia. Maybe you coined it. No, seriously.

That's a good name. Like, I think we should use it. So let's call it future phobia. Like so, and then the third one is we started to sort of erode communities, like the whole problem with like what is the community nation states, a little bit eroding, like the whole concept. And that is, in my point of view, sort of the reason why mental health is so much, or mental health issues are so much on the rise. Something crazy.

The word loneliness comes from Victorian England. Interesting. Industrial Revolution. The word used to be oneliness. It wasn't even a concept before that. Oneliness and then it turned into loneliness. So that definitely connects with what you're saying. Actually, by the way, loneliness leads to very severe real health issues. So people who are lonely in old people's homes die significantly earlier than people who still have a social environment, who have a family. So for example, I think someone in the future, meaning with all the caveat on this podcast that we're going to have to put research in it. But I deeply believe that

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I want to talk about a very exciting investment you just made BlackRock. Love it. Love it. Let's hear about it. What's the thesis? I think brain machine interfaces evoke a lot of excitement and skepticism at the same time. So, and not just skepticism, I think fear. Black Rock NeuroTech is for, I don't even want to say from my point of you, it is factually the leading brain computer interface company in the world because there are 30 people in the world who have a functioning brain computer interface and 28 of these patients globally are running on a BlackRock interface. So what are these, what's the issue is these people are quadriplegic or have ALS, like have a severest disability and you can help them.

with a brain computer interface to overcome that. Definitely it's gonna be explored, meaning the first ones who are pushing it now already is the gaming industry, because we have this one guy, I told you with the electronic arm, there's an amazing video online, if you wanna Google it with Obama,

because he shakes Obama's hand with the electronic arm, but actually what it's even more special is that he feels everything on the robot arm as if he had the arm. And the amazing point is because it's input as well, so people, So we can do output, so we can do commands, controls, that are, but we can also give back information to the brain.

So think about the gaming industry. You would have that and you get shot in a 3D or whatever virtual reality and you feel it a bit or as much as you wanna feel it. Yeah, maybe you wanna so. Yeah, so again, but obviously you can then say like what is about wrong memories, what is about hacking?

If that's coming, like the biggest problem is like, if people are hacked, yeah, and then you know, your phone is hacked or computer, your brain is hacked. Your body, your brain is hacked. So then we obviously very quickly have what is really real. Maybe we are already hacked like. Yeah, maybe we're co-opted now. Exactly.

So. In the Sims. But anyway, I think it's exciting. And but we want to set up an ethics committee and it's super important that we do it in the right way. And if there's one sector I would sort of associate with you, you're obviously of a multitude of interest. But it might be biotech. It feels like you are very bullish on biotech, especially in the 21st century. Why?

Well, first of all, I think it's always. It's strange not to be bullish in biotech because you want to be healthier. So I always say like I never understood why people do so much like charity to obscure stuff while saying the best charity you can do because you help millions of people is like invest in biotech. Every single success makes the life of somebody better because you cure problems. So biotech for me is actually the marriage of charity and making money. I want to be happy, which I think I am, and I want to be healthy, and once you're healthy and happy, you want to live forever. Or at least very long, because it's fucking awesome.

What are some crazy biotech ideas? Maybe that haven't manifested themselves in companies yet. You seem like a person who incubates ideas in your head sort of constantly. And I realize I'm putting you on the spot here, so I don't know if anything comes to mind. I think we focused way too long on curing cancer and not enough on making sure. cancer doesn't exist in the first place, which means a vaccine for cancer. So we have one super interesting company, Sensei, and they are already in phase two. So it's not some years away from an approval, but like it's not super late.

It's like for biotech terms, phase two is pretty mature. Yeah, for a cancer vaccine, which you can hopefully somewhere. At the moment, the term cancer vaccine is actually used that you'd still take it when you have cancer and make your immune system aware of the cancer. so that it can fight it. But if the side effects are minimal, you would actually take the vaccine early and make sure that your immune system knows

whenever a cancer cell is coming, kill it. It feels like you think kind of a million miles a minute and you always have these constant ideas and you want to test things. And I find that very interesting. If you feel like your intuition sort of leads in many cases, your investment theses and then you try to find data to support.

Yes, totally. I would say simplified always when I followed my intuition, by the way, in those directions, also in like, don't do this deal. Like, it was the right thing. And there were the deals where I bent sort of the diligence in one way or the other for whatever reason. So because either you want to do a deal, you don't want to do a deal, and you go against your intuition. And this always went actually wrong.

So I'm a big believer in intuition, but not that intuition is something miraculously, like, sort of unknown. but like I think our brain is way more capable of doing these quick like I think it's a combination of data points and and and and and and and recognition. Yes. So you said something very interesting to me when I first met you two weeks ago. We had a great conversation and I was like you know we're kind of in this weird time Christian, you know maybe there's an asset bubble feels like sort of a speculative frenzy and the government just keeps printing money and you were like I think we should keep printing money. Totally. And put it in more tech and R&D. And so what did you mean by that?

It's practically a redistribution of wealth away from the middle class who has cash to, yes, unintended side effect, also to the rich. But actually, you know, a lot to the poorer as well. But even more important is that US, China and Europe and maybe with Russia have to try to be first in certain technological innovations. So how do you do that? You flood the market with cash. Because I deeply believe, though, that governments are shitty allocators of money. And I do think they know that.

So you could say, why don't governments take the money and push research themselves? But for many, many reasons, I think they know that this doesn't work. It starts, like, at least in the world we live in, the smartest people are not working for the government. And I think they know they can't change it.

So what they're doing, I don't know if they're doing consciously, but like what you're doing when you print money, you push money into risky asset. So people are screaming, oh, we have a bubble. Oh, we're doing bullshit like AMC and GameStop or whatever. But that's just a tiny bit of it. I think there are a lot of great technologies, risky ones, maybe daring ones and visionary ones, who get money at the moment because we have sort of these money printing orgy who wouldn't get money in another. time, but we want them to get the money because some will stick. I think a 16-year-old Robin Hood trader is a better allocator of money in average than the government. Let's talk about crypto. So I'm of a split mind of it. I'm somewhat of a BTC maximalist.

You know, Bitcoin mimics the property, properties of gold. And then you have all these other sort of, you know, promises around distributed virtual machines, you know, things like that. You're very invested in the space. How do you mean? make sense of it. I think the world always needs a reserve, I don't want to say currency, but a reserve, a store of value, yeah, because politicians have a hundred percent track record of destroying every fiat currency ever. There's not a single fiat currency who has survived that's a great point. Of a long period of time. Like, this is like the best negative track record I've ever seen. So tokens and a tokenized economy can, is practically what we're seeing a little bit

in these sort of creator economy. I think, I think, I think, we sort of dis-solving tradition, or we have started to dissolve traditional forms of organizing a company. So, and maybe in the future, sort of things which we would say, oh, 100 years ago, this was done by a company, which was organized as a legal form and had an office, whatever, is done by thousands of individual people who are organized by a protocol. Yeah, yeah, very, it's right again, and I'm not the best one to explain it, but like, if you, if there is a new fashion brand coming on market, at the very beginning, the early adopters are actually, in the old days, they were buying the fashion stuff. They should actually be paid and own a stake in the company.

Right. Because they are like the early ambassadors. They are running around and saying to their friends, look, I just bought this shirt and it's like new and da-da-da. So you could, in the future, super simplified set, attach a touch. token to every single t-shirt and you actually let the amount of tokens go down for every t-shirt. So the number one t-shirt gets the most tokens because the first person who buys it and the second and then like the and someone it ends. Yeah. And so the people who are early on something who are creators or how we call influencers, yeah, they might then own forever a stake in the product

or in the company or whatever. How do you think about the space market? So there's obviously There's a launch market that's growing quickly, but it's not very big at the moment. On the one side, it's good that people like Elon Musk have these visionary goals go to the Mars. Sometimes I fear that this makes it a little bit less credible for certain people who are like, I don't know, is this really like, A, what we want to do and be what we will do. But they all have way more short-term goals. So a very practical short-term business model is the fiber-octib cables in the ground in the Western world that are coming to a capacity limit.

So we would need to dig up the whole West to have more of them. And in all the emerging markets, in Asia, in Africa, we don't even have five optic cables. So however, at the same time, data volume, because of technology, is going through the roof. So the most logical thing is we're going to build constellation, satellite systems, which are primarily the telcos of tomorrow. So for example, I have one company who's like, so I see all these endeavors because the Convocumvir, and they're connecting satellites with laser so that they can build up this network

and it's not just the government, it's not just the big ones, it's like actually car companies because if you want to have a fleet of self-driving cars with AI, you need them connected all the time. There's not a single second you can lose them because otherwise it's bad. What is your next five years look like?

Do you have sort of things you're visualizing right now that you want to achieve over the next five or so years? No, I do visualize every day. So 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the evening before I go to bed. I don't want to call it meditation because I actively think, so it's not getting rid of thoughts, it's actually manifestation. And I have like a list of things, short term, midterm, long term, very long term.

And I'm sort of visualizing it, going through it, what is important for me. I try to make it pretty, not basic, but pretty like, yeah, basic in a way. It's not too much details because I think, not always, it's a little bit like in these fairy tales where not always the details you wish should come through because you don't know what it means. You should have a concept. Do you want to be, you want to have a family? Do you want to have wealth?

Do you want to have health? And then let sort of now, super spiritually said, let the universe do the details. So I think I try to make it sort of detailed enough that I can sort of manifest it, but broad enough that I let sort of, again, whatever you call it, the universe, the divine, God, fill out the details. Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you, Christian.

I appreciate you being here. This is awesome. Thank you.