The Pomp Podcast - #451 Christian Angermayer on Investing in Innovation

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

Christian Angermayer is the founder and CEO of Apeiron Investment Group, which serves as his family office. Christian has previously built and invested in numerous multi-billion dollar companies. In this conversation, we discuss investing in innovation, including biotech, longevity, psychedelics, cannabis, fintech, Bitcoin, crypto, and deep tech.  ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 90,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Christian Agamire is the founder and CEO of a pyrone investment group, which serves as his family office. Christian has previously built and invested in numerous multi-billion dollar companies. In this conversation, we discuss investing in innovation, including biotech, longevity, psychedelics, cannabis, fintech, Bitcoin, crypto, and deep tech. I really enjoyed this conversation with Kristen, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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daily letter to over 90,000 investors every single morning that covers business technology and finance. I break down complex topics in easy to understand language. You can sign up at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get this episode with Christian. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational

purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have a very special treat for you today. Christian is here. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. Welcome. I'm super happy to be on the podcast. Super excited. So yeah. Absolutely. Let's just jump right into your background. There's a lot of people who probably know some of the work that you've done, but don't necessarily know your entire story. So where'd you grow up and kind of how did you get into business and investing? wow broad question so um i grew up in germany to be precise actually in bavaria which maybe some of you know from oktoberfest uh she's always very funny because i never drank alcohol so far

so although alcohol is like the bavarian like basic nutrition so so and you never drank any you've never drank any alcohol no i don't know why um super long sorry i tried many when i grew up in Bavaria, like I, I grew up in the super tiny village, like till, till I was nine, it was like 90 people. And then we moved to a town, which was 2000 people. So it was very sheltered. And I always already early realized that I had two things, which, um, sort of a very special, what I'm happy about is I was always a very happy child and I was also always very good in school. so and i i was really afraid of losing that so i was like ah if i put something in my brain like alcohol then um then maybe i'm losing that sort of perfect equilibrium so so i decided not to

touch it and then it was a stupid bet so it was really like like we were like 13 years old i was like i'm never gonna drink alcohol and then all my friends were like you're not gonna make that not in bavaria and then it became a bet that i'm not drinking alcohol till i'm 18 so if the whole school was watching yeah they're not and then it sort of stayed that way once you're not drinking you're a designated driver and then i really think it's really bad so i know it's like i always spoil the party but like um but i don't mind if other people drink but i just think it's not it's not a healthy thing to do and uh so i didn't start it i love that all right so you're growing up uh there you moved to this town of 2 000 people and then what do you do um well i went to school um

And after high school, which is in Germany, high school is like high school plus college in America. So when I was 19, I actually had one year of civil service, which was maybe the most important thing, because till I was 19, I was 18, till I finished high school, I was extremely set to do something academic. So I was I had the luck. I was really, really good in school. I got a lot of scholarships. So and I was really thinking, OK, I'm going to go to university, study, become a professor or whatever. and then I did I had to do one year of civil service so you either in Germany go to the army or you go to hospital and I thought as a libertarian I didn't really know the word back then but like I thought that's really a crime that the government is telling me for one year

of my life what to do so I had these sort of silent revolution that I I think it's very bad if I tell it now but it doesn't matter it's 20 years ago so I didn't show up I was always like going to the doctor and saying that I'm sick and I can't go. And I started actually speculating on the stock market. And then I did it for friends that I was managing a bit of money. And so in this one year, I changed from a very academic sort of trajectory to a very entrepreneurial one. And then I started studying economics. But I was already set now. This was 1999. I need to do my own company. This was the first internet boom. Um, and I was like, okay, I need to find an idea. And then I had the scholarship for, for science. Uh, and so I had

these sites tutoring with two famous guys who were like, um, um, biology professors. And I asked them, okay, Hey, what are you doing when you're not tutoring little Christian? Um, and they told about an idea which was super fascinating i understood half of it um it was practically simplified said how you switch on and off the human dna and i was like that sounds so great i might have found the guys to start my company with and i said why don't we do it together and i don't know why they said yes to a 19 year old turning 20 but we did the company together it was called ribofarma it's now called our nylon um and it became really big because these two guys needs all credentials to them they had made these amazing uh innovation um and the company today

i mean i sold very early but the company today on island is like a didn't check it lately but like 15 16 billion dollar company so there was a start in biotech um i skipped uni then uh i was never really there ever um and since then i'm investing uh founding and investing so i'm somewhat in between an entrepreneur and investor. And so when you started that first company and it started to get big, you sold it at some point. What was the thought process between trying to run the company forever and that being kind of your legacy versus selling it and going and doing other things? How did you kind of think through what you should do? I was always winning. It was never winning. First of all, I was the junior partner. So the two guys

were running it yeah so um i was raising the first funds and and i was always and this is what still what i am like i would say something in between very entrepreneurial but also like more like an investor who wants to have a portfolio so i'm always interested in new stuff i don't want to do one company or one thing the whole day the whole year like so early on like i was looking left and right? And what can I build around? What else can I do? So it was always clear that I want to build up a portfolio. Got it. That makes a ton of sense. And so today, basically, most of the things that you do are under a period investment group. It's kind of family office slash business. How do you think through that entity? Well, it's a pyrone. People always say a pyrone was a famous

a mythological horse, I think. And a pyrone, it's just the E-I, is sort of the philosophical idea of the essence, that everything has an essence, a core which is immutable and defines what it is. And that's the a pyrone

in Greek philosophy. I'm super, super geek when it comes to history. So a pyrone is my family office. So we don't, we have in Appiron, it's just my own capital. We have two funds, which we span out, so to say, but I'm still sort of the GP and I'm also the largest LP in the funds. So we have sort of outside money in two defined strategies, but in Appiron itself, it's just

our own capital. And we do three things. We do biotech, which is obviously where I started. We do a lot of fintech, insurtech, prop tech, and crypto, which is obviously how we met. And then we also, we do the third thing is deep tech, which is anything from space tech, AI, robotics. So all the cool stuff, real technological innovation. So let's start with the biotech space. You have done an incredible amount.

uh you've got uh a tie life sciences uh which has led to all kinds of innovation and different companies maybe just start with like what is your thesis on biotech or what are the areas that you're most interested in in that bucket a broad question so first of all i think um biotech will be the at least one of the most likely the best performing asset class maybe next to bitcoin but like i think let's say one of the best performing asset classes. I think really we're going into this golden age of biotech. So what tech was, and obviously tech will still do well, but like what tech was the last two decades, I think the next two decades will be biotech. So I'm super excited that practically we're going back where we started and this is why over the

last four or five years, we've built up sort of our biotech portfolio, which is at the moment, and drown about 50% of my entire portfolios in biotech. And COVID is just, if you take COVID, is one example where actually we see that people extremely value their health. So I think the same pandemic 20 years ago would have led to a different treatment, or treatment, I mean, different handling of it. So the fact that we more or less with a broad majority that people say, hey, let's do the lockdown. Yeah. And now though we're going to lockdown discussions, but like it's so emotional in America, it's so political.

But just like if you see that the fact that people approve it, although definitely the lockdowns have a very negative effect on the economy. But also, by the way, it's not on the health of the people in there. But people want the government to take care of their health, I think, more than they did 20, 30 years ago. So the priorities have shifted. So people demand health. And I think politicians are realizing that. And a lot of politicians I'm speaking to are like, well, beyond COVID, we want to focus way more on keeping our voters healthy, actually. yeah and that means that companies biotech companies which deliver our product is making people hopefully healthy yeah that they're gonna go up in value that's i think it's a little bit like the super macro uh few on it and then actually uh also another um another driver is that if you look at all the auxiliary services you need to start and run a biotech company

they all have the prices of them like gene sequencing whatever buying a genetic modified mouse yeah so that all has crashed like partly 99 cheaper 95 cheaper than it used to be so so many many factors feeding into that that i think as i said biotech is going to be the the number one asset class over the next 10 20 years and then we and my i mean and then within biotech meaning obviously almost everything in biotech is interesting because you always help people but our few or our main focus is on um longevity um and on mental health because sort of my i'm actually always very honest like i'm doing or i'm i i want to be sure so the two things or the three things i really want in life i want to be happy which was always like very important for me that

i sort of live my life in a way that i'm happy and i i think i am i wake up in the morning life is awesome like i feel comfortable it doesn't mean every day is great but like sort of we have a basic sort of happiness feeling so i want to be happy then i want to be healthy obviously and once you help healthy and happy you want to live at least very long if not forever at least i want to live as long till i say look no more i had enough christmases i had enough birthdays yeah so so and this is why we focus practically very egoistically on these two things on mental health on the one side and on longevity on the other side. So let's start with longevity first because I think that one is what people are probably most familiar with out of those two. On the longevity

side, how do you see the technology landscape kind of evolving? And are we talking about things that are kind of short-sighted in the sense of like, hey, if we just make you healthier, then you can live longer? Or are we talking about things that are much more long-term, like we literally want to make it so that you can live for 200 years 250 year type stuff so it's getting there it's getting to the latter one so i think as you said first of all obviously you can always say every biotech progress which avoids us dying like every cancer treatment if you don't die of cancer you're going to live longer in average yeah although by the way it's not i think the number i just read was like even if we completely would eradicate cancer um the overall life expectancy would just

go up like three years or something because then you die of something else when you're very old yeah so it's not that easy so what we're talking about when we talk about longevity is really finding the reason why we age so my personal view is and i know it's a controversial i don't even understand why it's controversial because i think everybody should think aging sucks yeah um but uh but aging is not natural we know how many you still look very young and hot but like we know how the 20 year old Anthony looks because your DNA is the same on the day you were born and that you were 20 on a, on a day you're 80. Yeah. But something is happening. Why that translation of sort of the, um, the construction plan for Anthony is, is sort of changing. So why

do we get wrinkles? Why do we get gray hair? So something is going wrong. Yeah. And philosophically seen because because it's happening since humanity is thinking and recording memorizing we ingrained aging and dying so much in our culture and our religion that we deeply deeply think it's natural but the same in the medieval ages people were thinking that the black death is a punishment of god and some when and it was really for them it was miraculously people were dying they had these whatever things on the skin and somewhere they were dying it was okay it must be a punishment of god and just like very later we found out no it's a it's a bacterium yeah and we can cure it yeah and the same i think someone we're gonna see and we start actually already now

to understand why we aging yeah and you can say it is a disease and once we understand why we aging we will be able to stop it slow it down stop it and someone will even be able to reverse it yeah so that's natural that's how humans progress yeah and uh and this is what we focus on so really pushing the boundaries of understanding aging and and hopefully finding sort of cures or slowing it down and and by that you automatically expand life expectancy much more than what is now seen to be normal. Over the last two years, uh, or prior to the last two years, I knew nothing about this stuff. And, uh, I started to look more into it when I heard, um, I think it was, uh, David Sinclair maybe was the guy who basically started talking about, you know, aging is a disease,

right? And that's a framework that I think most people don't think of it through. Uh, but when you start to really understand kind of what's happening in the body, uh, one, it becomes very fascinating that like, yes, it is more likely that this is a disease than anything. Uh, and it just so happens that we all get it but also two is it feels like we've made pretty far advancements in understanding how far have the advancements though been in how do we actually address it or how do we you know take life expectancy from you know kind of late 70s early 80s to let's say 150 years like is that something that's likely to happen quickly is that something where you know there's somebody who's born today that will live to 150 how do you kind of just

think through the progress that's being made again these are all hopefully educated guests i'm making but i i think who somebody's born today will live have let's say have the potential to live some hundred years because also what people underestimate is and again by the way but have to say i'm a super optimist for technology in general and for progress but like but i think we're underestimating um exponential growth in biotech so we all are used to like if you look at our iphone yeah uh meaning what was it like 11 years ago 12 years ago there was no iphone when was it like it was 10 12 years ago i think it started yeah and if you then see how much has changed and how much progress we had in 10 12 years yeah so we tend not to see that

automatically in biotech because the the the the so because because we we have these sort of phase one phase two phase three so which takes a long time so what people see now actually everything you or everything the normal person sees coming out of the biotech industry to market is actually technology from 10 years ago so and what's actually happening right now is that we see the same exponential growth yeah we have seen in a lot of other technologies we also seeing in biotech But the consumer, so to say, will really start realizing that in maybe five years from now. But I firmly believe in the next 10 to 20 years, we will see enormous progress in biotech on all fronts, which a lot of people maybe at the moment can't grasp. So if you think that through, if you're like 40 years old at the moment, your life expectancy today is, let's say, 80, for the sake to make it simple.

So you have a 40-year remaining life expectancy. And now think about it. If you look at other technologies where you realize what exponential growth is, what in these 40 years, four zero years of exponential growth can and will happen? I think it's really hard to imagine. So let's say just now, to be easy and simple and conservative, that we will be able to within the next 20, 30, 40 years to push life expectancy 20 years. So from 80-ish to 100.

But that adds another 20 years of optionality. So the way I look at all of that is pure optionality. I want to have optionality because I think we're actually right at the inflection point where this all takes off. And my view is if I survive the next 20 years, then the game is open. for for way longer yeah and this is why sorry for the long explanation but if i throw out now i believe i can be 150 200 whatever people say okay he's crazy but if you see that that it's not a it there will be not a day where we wake up in the morning and you're going to read the headline oh

life expectancy jumped from 80 85 to 150 but it's sort of a gradual sort of increase and i just need to make sure that i'm always still alive when the next breakthrough uh is happening if it makes sense absolutely and last thing on the longevity before we move on is just what do you do personally uh in terms of kind of positioning yourself for the highest probability or longest life are there things that you eat or drink or or uh you know certain habits that you have that uh that you're focused on well i have a lot so i i tried because i'm okay i'm also very geeky in that. So I, I, um, I take, I think like 40 pills a day, like, uh, everything like water is not bad. Like, no, but actually, first of all, by the way, so, uh, again, um, I'm, uh, I'm 42. So

what is the main risk for me, for somebody who's around 40? Yeah. It's actually in the next, again, and I'm just focused on, let's make it simple to not die the next 20 years. So the one is like not getting a cardiovascular disease. The second one is not getting cancer. And the third one is not having an accident. So if you're 40 and if you avoid having cancer, a cardiovascular disease, or an accident, the likelihood that you're still around when you're 60 is actually pretty high. So my whole regime is centered around risk mitigation.

so i'm not skiing i'm really wherever i can i'm not going on a german autobahn yeah because driving a car is insanely risky um i'm really trying to think through not doing any stupid risky thing to avoid the accident second uh and then the second is like have a health regime which is focused on not getting cancer and not getting a cardiovascular disease which is a lot but like the main things are alcohol is really bad like i can come back to that i know i'm party pooper but like alcohol is really bad smoking is really bad so by the way it's these famous 80 20 rules you can do a lot but if you sort of focus on let's say five six core things like no alcohol no smoking i'm obsessed with sleep so i think you have to

meaning we have there is this great book because i can tell you now in five minutes what that guy has put in a book, which is amazing. It's called Why We Sleep from Matthew Walker. And it just shows you the statistics, what's happening with your body when you sleep too little. Yeah. So for example, I try to have the luxury to not wake up with an alarm clock. So I always try to do emails in the morning so I can wake up whenever I want. So my body can take the sleep. Yeah. I need like around about eight hours. By the way, there's also no chance, no chance that you train yourself to sleep less if anybody thinks that it's always a disastrous outcome you have a natural genetic uh sleep need and you need to keep it so sleep no alcohol um getting your

basic nutrition what david sink there is actually um promoting which is very good is nm nmn and nad plus uh which is sort of uh i want to say it's a vitamin because it isn't but it's like a nutrition um what you can get um resveratrol is good fasting is great so i try to do i don't eat or i don't have any calorie intake for 16 hours a day so i do every day forever like years intermittent fasting because it's the way i can integrate it easy in my life checkup is super important yeah a lot of bad things you see happening like you can uh if you really would be about to get a heart attack you can see that a year or partly two with the right sort of checkup cancer whatever so if you get it if you see it early it's not that bad

so i do a checkup every year like yeah that that may be the main things but i have a whole list of stuff i think that's a fantastic great it's which is by the way one of the first sort of longevity drugs uh meaning by the way this is obviously i'm not a doctor obviously uh everybody needs to consult, but like metformin is a diabetes drug, which seems to have a very positive effect on, uh, on aging. Got it. Uh, and then from a diet standpoint, do you, you said intermittent fasting, but when you do eat, do you eat any specific type of diet? Um, I try to do, but it's, I think there is a little bit more complicated. I don't think it's, it's, it's a little bit also how your body reacts in certain stuff. So I don't mean I do a low carb diet, but because I know I

react badly on carbs yeah uh at least on the sort of bad ones bread pasta whatever but other people might need it so i'm but in generally i'm in the sort of little meat no zero meat but a lot of fish yeah um a lot of mediterranean yeah got it all right let's switch gears to uh mental health um i feel like this is uh been thrust into the um you know kind of main stage with uh covid and the lockdowns and all of that uh you've got a very specific i think one view on mental health in general and kind of how big of a problem it is but also what some of the solutions are just walk me through kind of why you're so interested in this space okay why i'm interested i mean it came a little bit by i told you like on a one side i was always interested for myself completely

egoistic in being happy and i actually i think or i think i'm sure i have to attribute it to my parents so my parents always gave me I'm I have a super relationship they gave me all the love I needed and they always sort of gave me the feeling that I should be who I want to be like so there was no but I come from a very basic background it was zero centered around sort of success or whatever it was just like sort of be a happy child like do whatever you want there was zero pressure to do eggs or whatever yeah so but I think so I always first of all I was always and I am happy But I also was always interested because somewhere in around 20, I started figuring out other people are actually not always happy. So many, we come in a second to mental health when you say depression and sort of the very, sort of the defined illness.

But what always negatively fascinated me that if you look at humans, like while maybe 15% of the world population have really like a clinically diagnosed mental health issue, like depression or whatever. i think there are very little people who truly would say that they are happy so i think there is a huge part in between like who would say well i'm not depressed but i'm also not really happy so i was always interested in that i produced a movie um which did very well which was called hector and the search for happiness uh with uh some cool people like rosamund pike and christopher plumber so it's always this happiness thing and then i had this one evening where actually friends were setting me up a bit because so I was at a dinner and there was a very famous neuroscientist who's actually sort of also like sort of the drug czar in Germany, like for the public opinion on

what's good, what's bad. And they told him, they said, oh, you need to loosen up Christian a bit because then he could drink alcohol with us tonight. So they were thinking like, this guy could convince Christian to drink one glass of alcohol. Yeah. And so they sat me next to him and were like this guy can tell you you're not gonna die when he's drinking alcohol i was like look guys i know i'm not gonna die the only by the way and the only reason why i'm so strictly not drinking alcohol now is because the social pressure is so high once you start so the good thing is everybody knows christian is not drinking so nobody even when i do business in china or whatever nobody's bothering me yeah which is very rare because normally they yeah and so so but i

started talking to the guy i can't say the name because he's always a little bit worried to what comes next what he promoted and i was like look i'm super pragmatic i'm an investor let's go through um all the drugs out there like legal and illegal and if you can tell me there is one drug who has more upsides than downsides i'm completely up for it like or let's think about it and he pulled up actually a chart and for everybody who's watching you need to watch the chart or google it because it's another colleague of him here in London, who in the meantime is also a good acquaintance, Professor David Nutt, like N-U-T-T. And if you Google David Nutt chart, then his famous chart comes up. What he did, he ranked every single drug, legal and illegal,

actually how risky it is. And without spoiling the surprise, but alcohol comes out first. So in an overall risk assessment, actually alcohol, and this was actually a little bit the controversial part of his study, but it's a complete accurate study. Alcohol is in an overall risk assessment is a little bit more risky than heroin. Heroin came second. Yeah. And then came crack cocaine, whatever. So in the chart, you see the very bad at the beginning. and then at the very end practically no risk came all the psychedelics like mdma magic mushrooms

lsd and this guy this is why i can't say the name was like christian don't touch the rest don't even touch alcohol yeah don't touch heroin obviously don't touch anything of these bad stuff because you see it's bad but you should do actually psychedelics and you should especially do magic mushrooms and i was like look you're insane like it's an illegal drug i don't even drink alcohol although i saw it in front of me that alcohol is so so so more bad and you can't even rate it because magic mushrooms have really like low risk or practically the only risk of mushrooms which she told me was like you can sort of hurt yourself or have an accident when you do it um but i was like this is no i'm not gonna do it i stay like completely sober like like i am

but he was like look i am he actually did his phd which super impressed me with a famous guy called professor hoffman who was the guy who synthesized lsd so he was like let me send you all the studies this was so well researched in the 60s and 50s and then it became purely illegal for for political reasons it should have never gotten illegal um and you're a biotech guy so you're gonna understand it let me say i was like okay i'm always up for new stuff so that's one of the things in life i think you need to by the way and i believe sorry when i'm jumping now but this is an integral part of staying healthy healthy meaning young in your brain we talked about a lot um about how staying young young in the body but we didn't talk about aging of the brain which is

aging like physical aging but also like people yeah age sort of they become complacent whatever so and i believe in you need to shock your brain all the time positively shocked with new ideas so i was okay bring it on i wanna i wanna look at new stuff so he sent me all the stuff i read it And it was really compelling, meaning, again, let's say with magic mushrooms, they were legal. They were used as a medication. We had all the studies in the 60s, and it was a pure political reasons why they became illegal. So it's sticking in my mind. It took me a year, though, so I'm less adventurous maybe as some might think.

And also, I'm very spiritual. I believe that things are happening at the right moment, in the right moment in life and time. So one year later, I was with my dearest friends in the Caribbean, which is an important side note, because it's a place where it's legal. And they had real magic mushrooms. I saw it. It was organic. It was homegrown, so to say. And they were like, want to try? And I read so much about it. I called my friend, the guy who told me about it. It was like Shola. And he was like, as a doctor, I tell you do it can't be better set and setting and um it was the single most meaningful thing i've ever done in my whole life nothing really comes close and i can't sort of um emphasize how um how

yeah important groundbreaking that was um why that's very hard to describe that's that's one of the sort of uh i i try uh but like as a disclaimer before the problem on a problem the the beauty is that you go you go on a completely different let's say as a discount i just want to be precise and because i want to be precise it's so complicated you can't describe psychedelic use without using religious terms it's a very spiritual drug they have been used actually for thousands of years um in uh in ceremonial setting actually most religions actually including christianity are most likely based on psychedelic use so but when i use now a religious term because religions is

one of the really like um sort of everybody even if somebody would say he's an atheist religion is so ingrained in our life that if i use the word let's for the if i use the word god or soul you're gonna have an immediate idea in your mind that it might be different from what i try to say so so it's really a problem of language because our especially religious terms are so loaded with history and emotions and personal belief yeah so so but ultimately you're going on another level of consciousness where in one way or the other but interestingly all the descriptions of people who are doing it are then ultimately similar again they're trying to describe if you've done it you immediately know what they want to describe you you meet sort

of you can say the divine the core of the universe some people would say they meet themselves which is one of the very very healing aspects of psychedelics is that you meet yourself and in a very positively meant naked pure form your call it your soul your inner self your whatever you know what i mean like and and uh and this gives you so much insights you could say this is like the positive effects of psychotherapy within what what other people would achieve of 10 000 hours of psychotherapy you achieve in four hours of trip yeah and that is so valuable it's also it gives everybody as it seems what he or she needs at this certain moment in time so you might come out and have a total different it's called the revelation or learning and these are

all also teachers drugs like again this is what they were used for for thousands of years for people to learn and grow as a human being. So you might have a different sort of takeaway because you might need a different lesson or a different learning than I might need at the same time. So also all of my trips, they have been similar and different with the messages or the learnings I had at different points over the last years and they change. And this is the beauty of it. What is the kind of manifestation of this in terms of where you're putting capital or the companies that you're building? I know you've got Atai, I know Compass,

like there's kind of a whole bunch of stuff that's going on. How do you think about where you're actually investing and then also what companies you're building? Well, so after that trip I had, this was one of the first ideas I had was like, oh my God, this needs to be legal again. Because this is everything I realized if it has such a profound positive experience on me

as a happy person yeah and again it made my life tremendously even more happy yeah but already starting at a decent sort of um level of happiness i completely understood what i had read before purely on paper that it why it works for people who have depression anxiety addiction or any form of of mental health issue so so i was like hey this needs to be legal again and then i i was actually looking around because i was convinced somebody needs to work on that because these are so powerful substances and then nobody did i mean not in this millennia so to say yeah because it was completely again this is one of the saddest part of politics that we were that these substances sort of were shut down or were taken taken away um and then i was actually

was looking around and uh i can tell the story because you know the other guy i think but it is one of the stories i always use because because again i'm personally very spiritual and i think things happen at the same time what happened is i had one later i mean for two years i was looking around and like talking to scientists but this was all again now everybody talks about psychedelics and you have books about it and people are open about it but like it was really like this was a fringe science and scientists were there so it's always very important yeah i want to make clear because i mean it's obvious but i did not invent psychedelics like i'm standing on the shoulders of giants there's they're cool people who are not around

anymore like schulgin or hoffman or whatever but they are still also very amazing people from from back then around like uh like rick dublin who's running maps and whatever so i I tried to get in touch with these people with scientists, whatever. And then I, um, and it's a big shout out to him because, uh, and we have a, he's also a shareholder of a tie. So I was in New York after I came, did not do in America. So I came from, uh, uh, right after Christmas, I had a, um, one of the best trips, trips, literally trips of my life. I was in New York and on this trip, one of the message was Christian, you should talk about it more openly because it's so positive and and so it's you shouldn't be afraid because the first two years

i was not like now on a podcast like i was telling my parents i was telling like friends yeah but i was very holding back yeah because a lot of people said don't talk about it meaning you're in finance like you're you're an investor like you i have a lot of politicians as friends like don't talk about magic mushrooms um and um so and on this one trip which was a very defining one the message actually of the trip was do talk about it so I went to New York and I met Mike Novogratz and he was sort of the first person to work on my my mission because Mike was like you know Mike how is hey what you up to and I was like well actually I just did an amazing magic mushroom trip and I told Mike the same what I told you for two hours like how amazing it is and um and like

many other people he was like well that's interesting i had done it in my youth like it's a college drug maybe in america but i haven't done it and he had not talked about it for 20 years or whatever so the next day the phone is my phone is ringing it's mike and he was like christian you can't believe it this is such a rare weird coincidence you told me about magic mushrooms yesterday for the first time in 20 years and one day later he said my sister called me she's on Bali with a crazy couple from London who are working on bringing magic mushrooms back as a depression treatment and she called Mike and said from all the people I know you might be crazy enough yeah to finance these guys and Mike was like well my friend Christian is in London and

might be even a bit crazier yeah so and this is how i met george goldsmith and and his wife uh katya um who were thinking the same they were it's the company compass uh and uh compass wasn't even existing they were thinking about starting it and needed a seed investor but back then most of the people said again don't touch that can't put money in most of the venture funds said who we don't know yeah by the way although everything we do at compass and that's how it's completely illegal because we're running clinical trials we're not yeah um anyway so i met george and katya amazing human beings and after 15 minutes i was like you know what uh i'm in yeah i'm giving you the money you need um to start compass and uh i called mike because obviously he sort of made

the insurance said you want to be on board and then i also called my friend peter teal because he's also interested in this crazy kind of stuff um here we are so that was the foundation of Compass, which was the first for-profit psychedelic company, again, in this millennia. And so how does Atai fit in? Atai is almost like a holding company that holds equity in Compass and a number of other companies. So right after we started Compass, Compass was always focused on, again, let me be precise, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms and the artificial synthetic version, which is called psilocybin. And the more than I dived into it, this was now 2017,

the more I dived into it, I realized, well, there are more psychedelic drugs. And by the way, the brain is also a very complex organ. So there will never be a one drug fits all. There will not even be another proponent of psychedelic drugs will solve everything. I think psychedelic drugs as a sort of a universe of drugs are an extremely important part of the tool set, but also other drugs we still have like SSRIs, psychotherapy, whatever. What I think it's like, you have to give a doctor who knows the patient, the tool set, and then he can pick. So I realized there are more of these psychedelics. There is DMT, which people know because it's the active ingredient of ayahuasca. There is ibogaine, which is the only known compound or only known drug we know,

which is completely or has the potential to completely eradicate addiction. So it's used actually in Mexico already in clinics to get people off even heroin and opioids, which is one of the strongest forms of addiction. There are new versions of ketamine who can be very supportive were very helpful against depression so there are so many so compass wanted to focus on um on um on psilocybin so i was like okay but i i want to work on all the again what i told you before i always want to have a portfolio so i started a tie as a platform where we build up a very strong team it's more than a holding because what i realized is encompasses a little bit the exception because they already, George came out of the sort of business side. He knew how to run and fundraise

and whatever. So, but most of the people who actually scientists who were working with these drugs, again, they never stopped. They were just like very fringe. They were not commercial. They didn't know how to raise money. And it's even a different talent to sort of know everything about a drug, how it works, and then to structure a clinical trial. Yeah, whatever. So a tie is way more than a holding. We have a strong clinical trial team. Yeah. We've obviously a strong finance team fundraising. We raised more than $200 million over the last two years. And we started actually partnering with a lot of these scientists. Yeah. There is a great colleague, Deborah Mesh. She's working on Ibogaine since more than 20, I think 30 years. Yeah. She's Mississauga. What's Rick

Dublin is for MDMA, Deborah is for Ibogaine. So we partnered with Deborah and now have a 50-50 joint venture where we're bringing Ibogaine back as a therapy for or against addiction. So we started onboarding all of these drugs on our Thai platform and have now more than 12 new mental health drugs in the pipeline in various stages of clinical trials. Got it. And so when you think about kind of where the psychedelic space is going, is this something where we'll continue to see kind of acceptance in the medicinal space and it'll be much more heavily regulated? it'll be for mental health and other type of health, you know, issues, or do you think that we'll eventually see kind of recreational type legislation and really anyone in the United States will be able to go to a store, they can buy marijuana, they could buy psychedelics, they can

buy alcohol, they kind of just have, you know, really free choice across a lot of these different items i mean i hope but i also don't um i also see the future in the medical field for a very simple reason it's not mariana it's not cannabis it's it's it's waste all these psychedelics yeah starting from magic mushrooms they are way stronger way more potent which is the beauty of them, but they were never recreational drugs. Never. So while Mariana was always used as a recreational party site, if you look, and I'm very, very also trying to understand and learn more always about the history of psychedelics, they were always used in a religious ceremonial setting with a guide, call it shaman, call it priest, and a disciple. They were never used at

home for like just partying yeah but it's very important because they're extremely strong drugs and part of the upside and also if you look at um if you look at patients and that's what we focused on part of the healing process is also the interaction with the therapist so this is not a a smarty drug you pop at home and then the disease miraculously goes away yeah so big part of the healing is that you do the trip together with your therapist you and by the way you might have a bad trip i don't like the word because bad trips can also be incredibly healing but but they can be very very challenging so i like the word challenging trip yeah so and then especially then and by the way especially when trauma is coming up with trauma is is a is a is a

root for a lot of mental health issues yeah then even more you need somebody going through this process with you and literally guiding you through the trip so and this is why i'm extremely focused on and i hope this stays a very strictly medical track because also me that doesn't mean by the way you and i and whoever wants can grow mushroom at home yeah i'm very pro and these are to be precise and very pro decriminalization so you have practically three pop cuts you have the medical pocket definitely then you have the should it be legal and sold everywhere definitely not yeah and then you have sort of these decrim like should people who grow it themselves who know what they're doing yeah who maybe do it with a very spiritual background that should be totally fine

yeah and a lot of countries by the way like the netherlands portugal parts of the u.s now handle it like that yeah but it should not be sold lightly yeah on the street ever or like even not like cannabis in nice shops to people who don't know um and understand the power of it without a guide yeah and that's also sorry but i'm sorry but it's but because that's really like the essence of what we want to do with a tie and i also want to make clear i had the super luck as i said 10 times but like i came from a very happy place um i had the right people around me so i did have great guides in my first and in the following trip. So everything was right. I had also the money to go to the Caribbean to be at a nice place. But ultimately, a tie and compass with

doing that stuff, because there are hundreds of millions of people out there who have really a mental health issue. There are more than 300 million people who suffer from depression. And most likely that it's just the official number, the unofficial number, because depression and all of that is still a stigma. People don't talk about it. So most likely the real number is even bigger. Yeah. You have hundreds of millions who suffer from addiction, whatever.

So, and I really want to make clear, yeah, again, everybody can have a great trip at Burning Man, whatever. Yeah. But like we've, we want to make sure that these people who really need it. And by the way, these are not the people who would go to Burning Man. Yeah. These are the people who need a doctor because they're in a, in a bad place to start. And we want to make sure that these people have access to these amazing, powerful drugs.

Yeah. And so when you think about kind of this biotech bucket, is that literally one third of kind of your focus, fintechs one third, deep techs one third, or is biotech, it sounds like it's 50% of your kind of investments. But what about like from a mindshare standpoint, do you spend 50% of your time thinking about biotech versus the other buckets? or is there a difference between the amount of capital that you've deployed versus kind of how you spend your time thinking? It's very hard to say because my days are changing, whatever is at the moment. I would say where my companies need me. So I'm extremely one of our main focus, I would say.

And by the way, every investor would say he or she is hands-on. But I think we're really hands-on as an investor, mainly because I'm coming, in my heart, I'm an entrepreneur. So as I said, I think I do certain things really well, which an entrepreneur should do well, like all the macro picture, like fundraising, strategy, vision, but I'm not a good operator. So I shouldn't run a business. So this is what I realized. So I'm not doing it. Yeah, this way, even for a tie, I founded a tie myself, but I teamed up with great guys, Florian Sweeney, who running the day-to-day business and doing it super well.

so um but like because i'm in my heart i'm an entrepreneur i'm like extremely hands-on and trying to support my portfolio companies wherever i can with whatever they need so so and this fluctuates so sometimes this company needs me sometimes there so so it's not there is no real typical christian day they're all a little bit different um and then there's interestingly by the way there is a lot of um there is a lot of overlap or synergy so i have to say so there are there would be two people i credit with or two to one person and one event like which i credit with understanding bitcoin three people mike novogratz told me first and i did not listen which was maybe one of the biggest mistakes i listened when he called me for mushrooms so

but i did not listen early enough when he called me and he told me like this was 2012 you need to buy bitcoin and i was like damn it so then um actually mike introduced me to brandon blumer who then again gave me the whole pitch on bitcoin and us and then i thought about exactly what brandon told me some weeks later on a mushroom trip and then i was like now i get it um so so i think so it's a fun example like that there is a lot of sort of indirect synergies you learn and ultimately i think for an investor the important thing is you need to stay open like you need to yeah you need to want to learn stuff and i i'm a little bit like a like a puppy you throw a ball in the air and i'm like oh my god this is the nicest ball i've ever seen yeah so

um so like right before we had our call i spoke to an anthropologist about where humans come from which i want to learn more about because we also investing started investing a lot in in in brain computer interface stuff yeah which ultimately could change what we are as a human and i think if you want to deal with that stuff you should understand what makes us human and how can we preserve that in in technology anyway i i think there there is a bigger i know it sounds like okay he's doing biotech he's doing crypto he's doing deep tech but there is for me sort of sort of... You invest the exact same way that I think is the absolute best way to invest, right? And people will think because we're talking on here that I'm just saying this, but if you've

listened to the podcast before, people will have heard me say, I basically think of the intersection of two ideas as the absolute best place to invest. One is things that are on the fringes of society, but will become mainstream in the future, right? So if you kind of think of they are the most asymmetric type of opportunities because you're basically making a bet on a space or a company before everyone else thinks that that is a thing. And when it goes from a contrarian idea to a consensus idea, there's incredible upside to be captured and that's where you get the asymmetry. But the second thing also is you invest along very long time horizons, right? You're not day trading stocks. You're not doing a lot of that stuff. You are looking at things that

are going to take years, if not decades, to come to fruition. And so what that allows for is a very long period of time for the capital to compound because of innovation. And so to me, it's all tied together because it's basically you're looking at society, if you will. You're going to the fringes and you're saying, what are the things that today are accepted at the fringes, but not yet at the mainstream? And how do I basically put stakes in the ground and the things i believe in there and then as they kind of get pulled into the mainstream they become consensus ideas obviously they will accrue tons and tons of value is that fair perfect summary and i would add i would add one more important point i just invest in companies and people and

ideas which somehow excite me because i don't need to do it i'm not running a fund um i i have enough that i could stop i don't want to stop i really i always would describe it everything i'm doing is my constant hobby that's the only reason i can because i in in work terms i think i work a lot yeah but i don't it doesn't feel like work it feels super exciting because i'm i would do exactly the same if you would say i give you four more weeks i was like well then that's what i'm doing because i love it yeah so and one of the things i love and by the way it's always important if i come back to self-exploration psychedelics that doesn't mean this is the way to do it because i think one of the most important things with psychedelics was and i had that already before

with meditation and there are other techniques you need to know what you want as a human being yeah but i want that that's what excites me i want to always see new stuff and i want to invest in things and companies and ideas and human beings who shape the world i hopefully gonna live in for a very long time yeah so i want to contribute a little bit to the world which yeah which i will be a consumer so to say hopefully as i said for for a very long time i love it let's talk about Bitcoin before I let you go. You described a little bit about how you kind of came across Bitcoin. What's your view on it today? How do you think about it within your portfolio? Did you just go buy a bunch of Bitcoin and you're sitting on it? Are there other things that you're doing in

the space? Just talk to me kind of about your philosophy and how you're gaining kind of exposure to that asset and industry. Yeah. Well, I'm not trading. Yeah. I'm not trading in anything. like so i'm not uh that's just not you can't do both uh i have a long-term view and i'm preaching i think to the super converted like you and your your viewers but it's i think it's so simple if you look at the um edward politicians by the way on both sides of the spectrum so both left-wing and right-wing politicians in europe in in america everywhere they have they are actually they are hooked on they are like opioid addict like they are addicted to money printing and i think there is no good outcome. And you can't come off. I think it's a very strong structural addiction,

which I don't think they will overcome. I don't also think it's going to be completely blowing in our face. But I think that fiat currencies will gradually but very strongly devaluate over the next... And it has already started. But I think the last 10 years were just a tiny bit of start in what we're going to see in the devaluation of fiat currencies. uh and they're all doing the same so you don't have an escape that you say oh i go to this currency or that one it's a global phenomenon yeah because by the way meaning philosophically or observate it's because also we're living in a people don't want to suffer yeah uh you can say this is good but like if i think about and i come back to fiat currency second when i had my when i

lived through the first real crisis in crisis i mean the economic crisis this was like the 2000 crash and then 2001 when the two planes or what are the two planes it flew in a twin tower yeah that was a real recession yeah and it was similar than covid because it was not my fault yeah i was sitting there as a small entrepreneur yeah there was a global recession but back then nobody would have said well terrorists flew in the twin tower it's not the fault of companies tech stars we're to help you and throw money at you no back then most of the companies went bankrupt and it was healthy by the way i i'm very skeptical that we pumping so much money in it yeah and and then even in 2008 in the crisis yeah meaning again was lehman my fault yeah no but i had to go through

it stocks i owned were going down companies had a hard time and nobody was helping because that's normally how how economic life was seen you go through cycles and normally cycles are always an external shock it's never you who sort of is responsible anyway and somehow we switch but this is also a little bit the sort of the zeitgeist is that we don't want to suffer suddenly yes covid is bad and covid is an external shock but it's just another external shock and we could just have said look let's use that to sort of let company go bankrupt let things go the weak ones. I mean, it's Darwinian theory, but we didn't. We said, hey, no, we don't want to suffer. People shouldn't lose their job. Let's throw money on it. And I think they can't stop.

So people will always now say, hey, there is a way easier way than suffering. Why don't we just put money? So that's going to be, and there will always be problems. After COVID, there will be another problem, another problem. Anyway, having said that, I think we're going into this 10, 20-year cycle of fiat currency devaluation, which, by the way, means any solid asset will go up. So this is why tech is going up, biotech is going up. And there will be, obviously, within that mega cycle, there will be ups and downs. And Bitcoin is the synonym for stability or for the opposite, for integrity, for politicians not being able to meddle with it. So I think among that, as I said, biotech, I think is one, tech, fintech, and Bitcoin are sort of the core pillars of my asset location.

Do you do any real estate investing? A tiny bit. A tiny bit? I do think there will interest rates might go up. So I do really say, but not on a large scale. And I think what we could see, which I think would be a little bit of in that mega cycle of currency devaluation, it doesn't mean that everything is going up like a straight line. So what my view is, my macro view is that next year is going to be one of the craziest positive years of our lives because I think they're pumping money in the market as long as COVID is there. And in the moment COVID is over, people will spend like hell.

So my, my fun quote is like in the medieval ages, there were like orgies for years straight after the black death. Yeah. So, and in a certain way, we're going to bring the orgies on, like, we're going to go on holidays. We're going to go on concerts that people will spend as their, if there is no tomorrow, my few. So we're going to see an overshooting economy.

And that could, for the first time since 10 years or whatever lead to, um, inflation. yeah because so far despite which is interesting despite the money printing we didn't see consumer price inflation we saw asset price inflation already yeah but if if consumer price inflation comes which i think could come at least for a period yeah then they need to take interest rates a little bit up and that could be extremely sort of negative for the short term for real estate even for tech by the way because a lot of the tech valuations are sort of kind of pegged to the super low zero interest rate environment. Absolutely. Before I get into the rapid fire questions to wrap this up, what's the most contrarian idea you have right now? What's

the thing that you believe, and if you say it, other people will be shocked that you believe it? Isn't that the famous Peter Thiel question? He, I think, likes what you ask or what you believe that other people disagree with? Like, what's the secret that you know that other people don't know? I'm asking more about like, what is the thing that you believe that other people will be surprised that you believe? It's a good question. Finally, we talked about all the controversial stuff, which is suddenly not controversial anymore about psychedelics and longevity, whatever. To me, it's more something that violates how people perceive you, right? So let's say, for example, somebody who is really religious, all of a sudden them saying, I actually don't believe in God.

That would surprise people about that person. And so what is the thing that, based on either the work you do, the lifestyle you live, the person that you are, that maybe you have a belief that's counter to what people would expect it to be? a good question meaning i'm meaning i told you i mean i think but it's not counter because i'm personally actually very spiritual yeah so but that's everybody knows that so um nothing comes i'm always pretty open with what i believe so it's not i i would say honestly if like i think if i had something i really believe in you would already know because one of the things is no but one of the things was always like i had this big luck that i had success early on and i was like i don't need to please anybody i hopefully people like me i actually want to be liked this is why

i couldn't go in politics like i i hope people do like me like but like but i don't need to like i so i always thought like be open of and that's what actually it served me so well i mean you always have then one or two negative experiences where people abuse that openness but in general Again, take the magic mushroom thing. If I wouldn't have been open, again, in a time where it was not sort of convenient to be open about magic mushrooms, we wouldn't sit here. I wouldn't have compounds. I wouldn't have a tie. So being open about what I think actually served me well.

So there is nothing hidden, I would say. I love that answer. I always ask everyone the same two questions and you'll get to ask me one at the end. The first is, what's the most important book that you've ever read? Sink and Grow Rich, by far. Ah, why that one?

That's one of my three. Because it made me to a certain extent. And I really want to say that strongly. I went in, I really still know it. I went in a bookshop in Munich when I was 14 years old. and there was again i believe in that stuff so um there was just like these i think in english you call it epiphany yeah um so i go into this bookshop and there was these um which is not i think it's not around anymore it was a very famous one for the germans listening uh in munich and

and i went in and there was this massive wall of books all thinking grow rich and i was like as a 14 year old oh my god this is this is it like this is was literally like a religious epiphany so i bought the book and i think it's a beautiful description uh for the germans the title is a little bit uh because in germany we don't like to talk about money so much uh it's a little bit of different culture like in america it's a very american book which made me actually very american i think for a german guy german friends all that christian is very very americanized in his thinking and this is due to this book yeah and i think though it's so timeless and i read it maybe 30 times yeah because i think it's really like it's a it works yeah and then later on i read

more books again more on the spiritual side of respect like law of attraction which though are the same sort of takeaways in different wording yeah so i always think for the ones who don't want to go too sort of spiritual crazy at the beginning like this is a beautiful easy to serve timeless wisdom so yeah i i uh always tell people three books that i read when i was 20 21 years old uh rich dad poor dad uh thinking grow rich and um uh what is the other one um oh man i'm gonna put it on it no uh think and grow rich it'll come to me napoleon hill there is another god murphy has similar it's all the same age all the same out of the same time richest man in babylon that's what it is which one the richest man in babylon okay yeah yeah

those three books it's all the same messaging yes it works by the way finally you meet and again not a lot of people want to talk about it because it's either they think oh this is too simple to sort of do sort of say my success is based on that or in germany you would say you don't want to admit that you read the book and were fascinated by it when you were 14 which is called think and grow rich yeah but uh but it is like i think everybody if you think about how messed up our education system is. Um, yeah, every child should read it. This is, I think we would do the world, um, uh, an enormous, uh, enormous favor. What about, uh, second question, which is more fun aliens. Are you a believer or a non-believer? Oh, that's, I mean, I definitely believe that

there are aliens. Um, so I mean, if statistically everything, this must be, this is like, yeah. Um, the question is are they sort of really all these sub questions like are they still there are they already extinct can they come to us if they hear that so but i think yes i mean i think there are aliens the question is i don't know if we're gonna make contact um yeah but i definitely think they are all right do you think that we've already made contact i think yes but you mean now like in our lifetime like we as us our generation or us as humans humans yes i think i actually another um actually psychedelics are so amazing because you meet so many amazing people uh i just had by the way another thing which is maybe not i don't want to jump now from aliens to that because

he's not talking about aliens but what goes in that direction is i think we what what i'm thinking a lot and which is my sort of reading list for for the holidays is um we know so little still where we come from yeah and so i had these fascinating zoom chats um a week ago with graham hancock you know graham hancock yeah amazing guy i mean his books i started reading some of them i have the whole reading list and so i think there is i think we shouldn't not exclude the alien question the same like maybe there were high cultures 20 000 years ago which completely got lost maybe i think we're too stiff in even in science i think people and that's what actually is worrying me a bit you have on the one side you have you have actually the entrepreneurs who like

and which i think is the right way to go is like sort of the sky's the limit and why not think about that and why not think about that but somehow society is sort of very conformistic so so so maybe maybe that's a point people always think um um i'm gay i'm liberal but like i'm i'm not so sure if the left if if there is the left is going in the right direction and this is saying light with precaution like because we we too conformistic actually they think they are colorful but like we sort of narrowing down too much and thoughts which are not allowed to be thought and there should be no thought we should not we should not be allowed to be thought we should be way more open to to thinking okay why not is this the right thing you know what i mean

like i think we're becoming a little bit is this this whole new generation is i hate political correctness i think it's so wrong why should we i can decide if somebody is offending me i turn around and go away but i nobody can offend me like everybody can say anything like we shouldn't be like so snowflakey that's maybe what if to come back to a question people might not think about me but i think we should be way more and and we completely losing especially in politics the the power of debate yeah we cannot sort of the whole safe space idea is is completely alien to me because we doesn't mean people need to be safe but like say so we need to discuss things you can't shut down discussions especially when they're unpleasant yeah then we need to have

them and then we need to think about it again we need to shock our brain with new things all the time and not being conformistic all the way i could not agree more i think that that is one of the the craziest parts of the world that we live in today is that there are certain things that we can't talk about and uh one of my favorite lines is uh is from joe rogan he basically says uh you know look once an idea goes from um you know being able to be discussed to not we've now transformed into a religion right you literally get you enter into religion's uh kind of uh field uh all right that is a good good point because that's the fine line i said so often because it's important for my life that i'm spiritual but organized religion always turned bad most in most of the cases and

by the way that's the sad part if you look at most religions were actually based on psychedelics for everybody's viewing read a book and you should i told you before they should get him on a podcast because that's a whole different topic like brian muralesco he wrote the immortality key about the origins of religions based on psychedelics but what happened so all religions were based on psychedelics or most or most of them yeah including most likely christianity at the beginning they were very inclusive and spiritual but then when they turned into an organization people were actually saying hey let's exclude the the thinkers the new ideas because you can't run an organization uh with with people speaking to god every day so and then every religion if you

look at christianity islam whatever they went through a phase where they burned the heretics yeah but the heretics were the ones who normally if you look back now they were the spiritual ones they were the ones who took psychedelics who were like so and we going through like a new era where we start burning the heretics and we're sort of an originally good idea sort of the liberal left which was great they fought for many things which are important for me personally i don't want i wouldn't be like to be gay in the 50s so it was extremely valuable but then somewhere it starts to become as you say out of something humanitarian out of something good it starts becoming a religion and then the religion starts burning the heretics and that's actually actually almost

burning your own origins yeah and it's very sad absolutely you could ask me one question to wrap this up what do you got for me what's the most interest the other question around because i'm always interested in new technologies or new ideas. What's the craziest contrarian idea you have seen or in your podcasts or in your discussions where I should look at? I don't know if it's necessarily a crazier contrarian. I think the space that is going to be much better than people expect. Obviously, there's Bitcoin. I think including me, everyone is underestimating how big this thing will get. But we'll see. But there's a lot of talk about kind of brain computer interfaces. So how do I take something and I put it in my brain? I think a lot of

interesting things are going to come out of the idea of how do I tell my brain what or how does my brain tell computers what to do? And what I mean by that is, you know, I recently invested in a company called Atom Limbs that basically they've got prosthetics. So let's say a prosthetic arm and it's connected so that when I think I can literally move the fingers, I can pick things up, I can do things. And it operates just like a regular arm would, uh, and it's being controlled by my brain. Right. And so when you start to think about, uh, the brain is a two directional, uh, you know, computer basically. And so, yes, we can definitely augment it. We can put things into the brain. We can do all kinds of great stuff, uh, everything from just eating healthier,

not drinking lots of alcohol, you know, kind of natural type stuff to literally augmenting it with technology, but also I think about this idea of connecting your brain to computers and having your brain somehow very quickly tell the computers what to do. I don't quite yet know all the different ways that that'll be applied, but that to me feels like a big space that no one's talking about. I actually think that's going to be something like an iPhone is today, which is going to be applied to everything. Because what we're interacting already, we're actually interacting in a very archaic way with our phone we're typing yeah which is very archaic so they're trying to upgrade it to uh to um to language theory whatever but the natural thing is we'll

be just thinking yeah and i think there is no meaning i give it 10 years maybe 15 and we i saw another company i'm gonna bring it on like somewhere next year when it's out of sales but like they believe and it's more than belief because they have the basic technology for it in 10 15 years we can do telepathy not because it's magic but because if you already exactly what you say if you already can now tell your arm what to do uh or a prosthetic arm yeah so that is your brain thinking and sending a message yeah the next step is that your brain will be able to interact with your computer um that you can dictate an email by thinking of it but if that happens i can equally send you a message to you from brain to brain and that that and this is what i said

before, it's why I'm so interested in sort of the origins of humanity, uh, because this will ultimately change what we now think is human. So we need to go to the very core, what really defines of being human and then preserve that while we might leave behind things, which we think now is human, but maybe in 20 years is not anymore. Could not agree more. Where can we send people to find out, uh, more about all the things you're working on or find you on the internet? um i actually started posting a lot on linkedin because i think meaning i like twitter as well twitter is sometimes a little bit negative so i i think linkedin is more it's more friendly that's another thing i don't know why people are so negative to each other especially on twitter

twitter is i think not good for your brain meaning i'm using it i'm posting stuff if i want to say something announce something but i i think it's like always when i start using it i get sad and then i let it go like because i don't want to be sad um so um yeah linkedin i think is the best that's fair man listen thank you so much for doing this you are amazing i love to talk about what excites me so um thank you very much it was awesome