Listen here on your chosen podcast platform.
In this episode of Brave New World, billionaire entrepreneur Christian Angermayer and Olympic athlete James Magnussen – who's been offered $1 million if he wins the competition's 100m freestyle swimming race – talk to Evgeny about taking part in the most radical sports event ever conceived; where doping is not just allowed but encouraged.
Christian talks about:
- Dropping out of university and becoming an entrepreneur
- Why he believes medical psychedelics will be available to prescribe within a couple of years
- How psychedelics can help us cope with change, AI panic and our fear of the "new reality"
- How Ozempic has changed the game for pharmaceutical companies
- Why alcohol is "the worse drug of all"
- How the Enhanced Games will actually improve drug testing at the Olympics
- How most athletes struggle to make ends meet – and how the competition will help them earn proper money
James talks about:
- How the Enhanced Games have given him fresh purpose
- Why he isn’t worried about using testosterone to “juice to the gills” – safe for the impact on his fertility
- Why stigma persists around performance enhancing drugs
- Why this could become one of the biggest industries in the world
If you enjoyed the episode, please follow, leave us a review and vote in the poll below. The next episode will drop on 8 August.
Get in touch with us at podcasts@standard.co.uk
Here’s a fully automated transcript:
Welcome back to Brave New World, The Evening Standard's podcast on all things science, medicine and the future of humanity.
I'm your host, Evgeny Lebedev, and in this series, we'll be taking a look at the latest developments in neuroscience, longevity, sleep and much more.
Join me as I engage in thought provoking conversations with some of the brightest minds of our time.
You may have heard of something called the Enhanced Games, a sporting competition in which athletes are not being subject to drug testing.
With the Olympics beginning in Paris this weekend, we thought it'd be an interesting time to look at sport and the idea of sports performance at a time when more and more innovation is happening in the medical and pharmaceutical space to extend health span and the physical advantages of youth.
Lots have been said by news pundits about the Enhanced Games, that they're morally bankrupt, dangerous, laughable or worse still, an insult to sport as we know it.
I decided it would only be fair to speak to the brains behind the competition and see what it's really all about.
Enter Christian Angermayer, a German entrepreneur and founder of Attai Life Sciences.
He's been involved in the largest medical trial with psilocybin to date.
That's the compound you'll find in magic mushrooms.
And his companies have worked on developing mental health treatments using DMT, Ibogaine and either psychoactives.
As the owner of a payroll investment group which manages over 2.5 billion worth of assets, he's at the helm of an empire that is developing anti-aging drugs and tech innovations in fields like AI and food.
So where do the Enhanced Games fit into all this and how did the idea come about?
Listen on to find out.
Christian Angermayer, it's fantastic to have you on Brave New World.
And I think it'd be great if we start just by talking a little bit about yourself and your background, how you got here.
And then I thought we could speak just about your fascinating, exciting, futuristic projects.
Okay, thanks first of all for having me.
What is important to know about myself?
Like, I mean, I could start in kindergarten, but like I'm running my own investment firm.
I started as an entrepreneur, so coming from a very like normal family.
I had the big luck.
I always was interested in science, but then I decided to study economics because I thought that's what you have to do when you want to become an entrepreneur, which is wrong, but I started it.
But I had a science scholarship.
And actually, the fourth week of being at university, I had my first science tutoring with two professors.
And I was like, look, let's not start with the flowers and the bees.
Tell me - where did the interest in science come from?
I don't know.
I always wanted to know how the world works, maybe.
And I always was interested in a lot of things, which is upsides and downsides.
That's been awesome.
But science is exciting.
Yeah, exactly.
I think, yeah.
But I also was interested in Latin, for example.
I loved languages, so I had a face where I thought I should study Latin or religion or something.
So, I was always very broadly interested.
But in that first session with my science tutors, I was pushing them and said, tell me, this was 1999.
Where's the world going?
Because the most I was always interested in is, what's the future?
Where are we developing to?
And these two guys, all credits to them, they told me about an idea which didn't have a name.
It was really in their mind.
And I always have to admit, I did not fully understand it, but I understood enough for like, I understood the concept, because I was 19, where they want to go.
And my sort of contribution or reaction was that it was like, guys, if that works, what I think you want to do, this is going to be a multi-billion dollar business.
So don't do it as a university project.
Let's start a company together.
And they said, yes, that's a short version.
And they had invented hindsight, like a thing, we already have technology or platform technology, which is called now RNAI technology.
It's a whole sector.
Company is really big.
It's now called Alnylum.
So that was sort of my start into life.
I dropped out of uni.
So, I could say I was there one and a half years, but technically I was there some weeks because I never made any exam.
And since then, I'm doing two things.
I'm investing in companies, so practically like venture with my investment firm.
But also once in a while, always when we have an original idea, then we're still starting companies ourselves.
So, in my heart, I'm an entrepreneur.
But if I see an idea being done by great people, I'm like, I'd rather back those guys.
But once in a while in psychedelics, which I guess we're going to talk about, was one of these sort of big original ideas where when I thought psychedelics should become medically available again, I was looking around because I actually saw somebody must do it.
But there wasn't.
So, we were really the first one in this century who had the idea.
And then so this is why I started it.
This was about 10 to 15 years ago?
No, it was actually no.
The psychedelics idea came when I had my first trip, which was in 2014.
And I really came out of the first trip and was like, this should be available again.
But I didn't immediately know how.
Over two, three years, my opinion formed which should be medically available.
But at the beginning, I thought maybe I should do rather lobbying like people did with cannabis to make it sort of broadly available and stuff like that.
So, between 2014, my first trip and early 2017 was the time when I tried to figure out.
And then in 2017, we finally co-started Compass Pathways, which is doing...
Was that really the first commercial?
So, obviously the research was closed because I've spoken about psychedelics on the show previously.
So, our listeners hopefully heard it.
But in a nutshell, if I understand it correctly, there was a lot of research happening in the sort of late 50s, 60s and 70s.
And then due to particularly the Nixon's war on drugs, which was fueled by the anti-Vietnam war movement, there was a blanket shutdown of all research, slowly, step by step.
First LSD, then psilocybin, and eventually even MDMA, they're not completely related to this.
But then the few scientists still continued working.
Research was never fully shut down.
By the way, one add-on was actually not just that in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s a lot of research was done.
Actually psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, and LSD were medical products by a Swiss company called Sandos.
So, LSD was used, for example, for Parkinson's as a prescription drug, and psilocybin was used for depression, anxiety.
So, they were medical products.
The hippies kind of did it illegally outside of the medical realm, but nobody cared because if we're honest, they did the good stuff.
They did less alcohol, more cannabis, more LSD, whatever.
And as you said, like Nixon then used that and was just like kind of saying, oh, look at the hippies.
They're doing things which makes you crazy because you must be crazy if you're against the Vietnam War.
It was a complete made-up thing, but unfortunately it's stick.
But research on a very low level continued because it was kind of a career killer.
Like now again, by the way, research in psychedelics is kind of a career booster.
But research was never fully gone.
But the commercial idea was completely gone.
And between 2014 and then ultimately 2017, when I told people and really like very open-minded people, like, hey, I'm thinking about bringing psychedelics back, like there was 100% recommendation, no.
It's interesting how that propaganda worked really well.
It's worked so well.
By the way, even scientists, like even doctors were like, oh, it makes a hole in your brain or people who take it never come back.
By the way, which is not even unlikely, it's completely wrong.
It's like saying, I don't know, coffee makes you crazy.
Like it's just like wrong.
But for me, the whole psychedelic sort of journey on how the perception of people changed is interesting on so many levels because on the one side, it's frightening how a government like Nixon and so actually a few people who were kind of conspiring, if you want to call it like that, how they were able to wipe out 20 year plus of solid research.
Like it's not that this was a niche, this was a very well researched category of compounds.
Maybe it wouldn't work today with the internet, I don't know, but it's scary.
It's actually literally scary.
Or it could work very well.
Or it could work very well, yeah.
But on the other side also, I'm very happy because also it's very fascinating how within actually at the very end, four years, the perception completely changed again back to a very positive one.
So, we’re sitting here, literally psychedelics are, every dinner discussion I have, psychedelics are part of it.
And that just is happening since mid-2019 till the answer between 2017, when we started Atai and Compass, and 2019, it was a huge uphill battle.
So, people didn't want to invest, actually a lot of people thought they are not allowed to invest because a lot of funds, for example, say no drugs, no weapons.
I was like, well, it's not a drug, it's like medical, but it was a very like, Compass and Atai wouldn't exist if I wouldn't have, in this case, I'm the founder, but also I had money myself in my investment firm, so I was my own investor.
So, if I hadn't had money, no other founder could have pulled it off because nobody wanted to give me money.
So, and then just mid-2019, 2020, everything changed and it became overnight a little bit like the hottest topic.
But if public opinion, I think in people who are reading, thinking, considering, talking, is definitely shifting towards positive as far as business and commerce, yes, although I understand there's been a peak which has now come down.
But with governments, I mean, there might be discussions, but there's no real movement.
There's more movement.
And that's great because we don't need a movement.
That I think was the big mistake of the 60s and 70s that people thought it's a movement.
So, what I want is like all these compounds, I see it as a medication.
And the work we're doing, we're doing FDA clinical trials, gold standard, everything you want, everything you need, to once and for all, by the way, because all the data is old.
I mean, we know that it's going to work.
That's a good thing.
It's actually one of the best investments I've ever made because also like the sort of probability of success, like I had the data in the 60s, but like we're going to reproduce the data.
But then we want to have psychedelics treated like every other medication.
Yeah, that's what I mean.
By movement, I didn't mean some kind of human movement.
But that leaves politics out because it's an automatism.
It's just a good thing.
Like in the moment, we finish phase three for each of these drugs.
And by the way, psilocybin is finished.
First phase three data is coming this year, and then there's a second leg next year.
And then the other psychedelics are following over the next years.
And the data is sufficiently good, which I'm expecting, then it's an automatism that these drugs are approved.
But if it's a class A drug, I mean, you know much more about this than I do.
But if it's class A drug, would the FDA prove it?
And would, for example, would psychotherapists in this country, they wouldn't be able to?
It's the other way around.
In the moment we have the data and the FDA is sort of approving it as a medication, it's automatically rescheduled.
And you don't need any policy decision for it.
The only reason why psychedelics are at the moment, wrongly, schedule one, is because someone, politicians, like said, oh, they have...
But like in the moment, we bring them back in the medical world, it's an automatic rescheduling.
And by the way, we don't want, I just want to repeat it for everybody who's listening and hopefully gets excited about psychedelics.
We don't want to make them available like cannabis.
So what we envisage and what is happening, that in the future, hopefully already starting next year, you will go to your therapist, to your doctor, your psychedelic trip has to be embedded in therapy.
So, it's not a standalone thing, it's like not pop a pill like for something else, but you do therapy.
And then part of the therapy is the psychedelic trip.
And you do the psychedelic trip while you're with your doctor, yeah, it's very important.
So, it's not even a prescription drug, we want to have it in this narrow field where you go to your therapist and do it with them.
Well, I think that you're totally right that this, from having had experiences myself, it is good to have someone who knows what they're doing alongside you, undoubtedly.
But what kind of timeline, and I know you're an optimist on the whole.
Because I sort of feel that with something like this, the FDA would take years.
And do you feel that there is actually interest in FDA, because there's a lot of belief in people who work in the industry that it's against the FDA's interest, or particularly the ones who lobby the FDA to...
I don't know why, but there is a lot of fear, sort of, I would say, in the psychedelic community that like, oh, big pharma and all of that.
No, like, first of all, it's fairly an automatism.
Yeah, if you produce good data, the FDA has some, let's say, decision room, but it needs to be based on data.
There is definitely an old-fashioned approach in medicine, generally, because of that very thing, right?
And because of that old-fashioned approach, FDA has to approve, which is why all these things that you and I talk about with like are taking so long to become.
Yeah, short version is, I think it's very good that we have an FDA or other medical agencies in the world who sets a standard.
Because if you buy a drug, a medical drug, in the pharmacy or whatever, if a doctor gives it to you, you want to know that there was a certain threshold of science and not some random, oh, I treated three people with that and let's guesstimate.
Yeah, so I think from a consumer perspective, I do want a standard and I do want an oversight and I do want a quality control because also at the moment when you order peptides, it's like you have no quality control, all of that.
So, what we can agree, that's not on me to solve though, is that I think over the last 30 years, 40 years, by the way, that is a philosophical discussion on every regulator.
I think that's a problem of the Western world, is that every regulator became more and more like rigid.
Yeah.
And I think we overregulate.
So, I want the FDA because I want the framework, but I also do think, personal opinion, is that it's all too cumbersome and too complex, which by the way, also makes drug development, as you said, first of all, very slow and makes drug development very expensive.
And then people complain, oh, why are pharma companies pricing drugs so high?
But they don't see that behind that expensive drug pricing is a system which forces you, again, to invest hundreds of millions, sometimes billions into a new drug.
And by the way, what people don't see is the many drugs which fail and pharma companies lose billions, which is gone.
So, I think we should lower regulation, but not abolish it.
It just should be a little bit more.
There is definitely an argument for regulation because we see the fields that are unregulated.
It's so difficult for people to understand what could be harmful, what's beneficial, and you have to do a lot of your own personal research too.
And I think we are very geeky in that, like not everybody is doing that.
What's your vision for psychedelics?
What do you think that could be?
First of all, how long do you think it would take?
So, if everything goes well, which I expect, then this year, which is one other company which I love is called MAPS and they're doing MDMA.
So, this year, MDMA should be approved and then next year, our psilocybin should be approved.
And I would say some say MDMA is a psychedelic, it is not a psychedelic, but they group it normally into that world because at the same time it became illegal, it has some similarities.
So next year, then we should have MDMA and psilocybin available for patients in the US and then soon in Europe and then all our other psychedelics are going to follow, I would say, over the next three to five years.
And they will be approved for particular uses?
So how it works, you have one indication, which is your approval indication.
So, for example, Compass with psilocybin is going for treatment resistant depression, MAPS with MDMA is going for post-traumatic stress disorder.
So, but then you can do what is called post-marketing studies or like so they are not then as Compass on because you already have all the data for an approval, but to show that they also work for other indications.
So, Compass has already great studies, for example, on the way for anxiety, for addiction, for it was a big highlight was anorexia and in general, body dysmorphia.
So, they're going to be the numerous indications that it can be used for.
And then comes the whole topic.
That is, I really want to see change in the medical world, is that once something is approved, again, I'm always for approval because then you have the data, but then I'm very open for so-called off-label use.
Off-label use is already existing today.
It's just a little bit frowned upon, but it's changing.
Off-label use means that any licensed doctor in the Western world is already legally fully allowed to use an approved medication.
Again, because then we know what the medication is doing, we can use an approved medication also for an indication it has not been approved for.
This was always very like, oh, yeah, I get frowned upon, whatever, but it really did change with Ozempic because Ozempic is actually the approval of Ozempic was first for diabetes.
By the way, when it was just for diabetes, I already took it for weight loss because we knew it works.
Then, actually, Novo Nordisk did take it and made an approval study for weight loss but in clinically obese people.
On paper, Ozempic is not made for me because hopefully we do agree I'm not clinically obese.
It's amazing.
It helps me with weight management.
It's practically outsourced discipline.
My doctor is giving it to me.
It's called off-label use because he's using an approved medication for something or somebody.
Then I think, coming to psychedelics, what is my vision?
My vision is starting next year and then with the full slate in some years, therapists will use psychedelics actually as the front line of treatments because all the rest is shit.
There is nothing that really works for mental health issues.
They're going to have a toolbox because for some issues-
But therapists or doctors or-
In Europe, it's going to be a wider definition because, by the way, there is no medical thing.
You need to be able to guide somebody through that.
But then the therapist can decide, oh, is this person rather profiting from MDMA or DMT, whatever?
By the way, sometimes they're going to try different things.
It's not because all these psychedelics have different sort of strengths, whatever.
But I also believe, give it some years and I think it's going to go much quicker than people think.
Well, I think, when it's starting next year, I think give it a year or two and not just people who have severe depression or any other severe issue, but people like you and me will very officially go to a therapist.
And by the way, there will be all ranges of therapists.
There will be the more clinical ones, there will be retreats, whatever.
But it's all unofficial.
As long as you have a doctor there, it's all going to be legal and going to do psychedelics with proper therapists, but for maybe reasons which are not defined as an illness, because they want to be more creative, because they want to work on their marriage, because they want to be just more happy.
But you see that happening with psychedelics as off-label for the...
I think psychedelics is one...
And by the way, coming back to your original question, so regulators are very open, by the way.
So, I know people always think they're very stern or whatever, but I have to give a big positive shout out, especially to the FDA.
They were supportive from day one, meaning they gave CompaaS, it was 2017, I think, already, and if not, it was early 2018, they gave CompaaS Pathways as the first company ever fast track designation for psilocybin, which was a huge message.
We want that to happen.
We want that to happen in a regulated framework, but the FDA was always very supportive.
This is why I see zero hiccups as long as the data is great.
Yeah, society is very open.
So, what happened on the stock market, you said investors were a little bit up and down, which is true.
Like there was a big hype.
And then unfortunately, like it always happens in a hype, there was a lot of bullshit as well.
There is a reason why psychedelic stock as a sector went down, because there shouldn't be actually a sector, because there are not many real companies.
There's CompaaS and Atai, and maybe two, three other companies who really have intellectual property, which you have to have to make a business.
But then there were 150, literally bullshit companies who were like, now everybody is saying you are in AI, and there is a lot of companies that are going to die because they don't have anything.
And that happened in 2020, 2021.
A lot of companies said, oh, we're doing something psychedelic.
I got really people pitching me companies where it was like in the pitch, I was like, you do know, you're violating all of my patterns, and you're never going to do any business.
And they either didn't know or didn't want to know or just ignored it because they wanted to scam people.
But that confused investors, because on paper, there were 150 companies doing psychedelics.
And then additionally, because of interest rates going up, biotech as a whole, not just psychedelics, the whole biotech sector went down a lot.
And when something goes down, a whole sector, then investors focus on stuff they really know.
And psychedelics were both novel, because it is a different sort of treatment paradigm to go to a doctor, it's not, oh, take a pill home and take it every day.
And then there was this overload, oh my god, there are so many psychedelics companies.
So short version, psychedelics were hit the hardest, the psychedelic companies, and unfortunately also the good ones in the biotech winter.
But that is actually changing now, like, depends when this comes out, but like, yeah, a tie is really recovering, like, I think investors coming back into biotech in general, again, it's like the whole sector which suffered, but also into psychedelics.
It's all about human improvement, right?
A lot of your investments are about human improvement.
But how would you, like, just following on from the ideas of Ray Kurzweil or Aubrey DeGray, how do you see the future of humanity, particularly now there's so much being said about future of AI and humanity within AI, but how do you see the future of humanity?
The broad question.
Let's start step by step.
What I really believe and focused on, and actually because it's happening, I'm very happy, meaning off-label use is a small part of it, is that we as society are rethinking when to take medical drugs.
So, over the last 100 years, more or less the opinion was you have to be sick and somebody else was telling you when are you sick.
Probably forever since the doctor.
No, but Eastern medicine is partly different.
Western medicine, yes, so I would say what influenced Western medicine the most was the invention of antibiotics, which was a massive success, by the way, because if you look at Eastern medicine with the whole holistic and spiritual view, it's very hard till impossible to pray the black death away, because it's a bacterial infection and there is something in your body, a bacterium, which should be there and you need to treat it with something.
So, nothing you can do with a holistic view.
So came the Western medicine, we invented antibiotics and it was a huge success.
And by the way, rightly so, I don't want to talk this down, like millions and millions and millions of people were saved thanks to antibiotics.
But sometimes, by the way, which is a lesson learned also in business, whatever, there's this saying, for the guy with a hammer, the world looks like a nail.
So, if you have one success, you want to repeat it and repeat it and you think that.
So, the Western medicine was like, oh, everything we're suffering from, something is in your body which shouldn't be there.
And again, and for some stuff that works really well, for other stuff like cancer, for example, because it's your own body, whatever, it doesn't work at all.
We didn't make any success.
And it's just starting that we seem to realize, oh, maybe we have to have different paradigms like mental health.
Like it's also, mental health doesn't work, oh, there's something wrong in your brain and I just give you Xanax and it's going to fix it.
No, it doesn't work.
And in parallel with that few, it was also, I think, that was the time when we especially developed that few, there is a norm level, which is, for example, no black death, bacterium in your body and then there is a sickness level.
So again, for bacterial infections, works really well.
Norm, you don't have a bacterium, sick, you have one.
But for other stuff, it's not so easy.
So and I think what's exciting is that we start giving people more freedom to define what do they want to change and you don't need to be sick in the old definition of sick to say, I want to change something.
So, in fact, you want to prevent yourself from being sick.
You either want to prevent but or you want to optimize yourself.
That opens up all possibilities if we go back to psychedelics, like, yes, our studies are all for, oh, what is like we need to treat a medically defined illness, treatment assistant, whatever.
But I look at people and say, look, are you truly happy?
And even if you are, by the way, do you want to be more happy?
And suddenly, if you rephrase the question and look at people and say, are you happy enough or would you like to add a little bit of happiness?
Who wouldn't say no?
There is no, again, norm for happiness.
Let me just ask you something, because something just occurs to me.
So, the stoic view or philosophical view of similar schools to stoicism would be that if you are constantly trying to find happiness elsewhere, then you will always be unhappy.
So, it's called a hedonic treadmill.
So, you're here and you want to be there.
You get there and eventually you're not happy there.
You want to be over there.
So how does that reconcile?
But I didn't say that.
I said you can always add happiness.
I truly believe psychedelics is this one group of drugs where every single human can benefit if they want it.
Yeah, so because overall, they not just, which is obviously the main reason or the primary reason we're doing it, they not just really have the potential to cure mental health disorders like anxiety, depression, addiction, but they also can give every single person more happiness, more...
Why?
Oh, that's a long...
Well, let's just briefly...
But the very short version is I think there would be almost a podcast on its own, but I love the topic.
Like, by the way, now, let's end science for a second.
I think they're very spiritual and they help you reconnect with the divine.
And by the way, it's not even a plea or like that I'm arguing that God exists or a God, the God, whatever.
But I do believe that the divine, let's maybe not give it a name, exists.
But I think what definitely is the case that we need some form of spirituality in our lives.
I also had Brian Johnson on my podcast, the Blueprint Human Experiment, man.
And his more scientific, more kind of futuristic approach was that if we better ourselves and we live forever, that we will care more about ourselves, we will care about other humans and we'll also care about more about the planet as an interesting, if you put it together as a whole, it becomes an interesting concept that if you make yourself better spiritually and mentally through psychedelics and you better yourself, this is obviously stuff of science fiction for now, living forever, but this idea of taking greater care of yourself, the other and the planet all becomes a much more attractive future.
First of all, where I agree is that obviously the longer we live, the longer we have to live with our consequences of things we're doing.
If people would know they have to or are allowed to be on this planet for some hundred more years, you would maybe be more worried about climate change, 100%.
I also always want to point out because that's one of the other things we're really working on like medical drug development for new therapies to really make humans live longer because Brian who I really value, but what he's focused on is using current medication and optimizing his body and trying to live longer.
Yeah, but there is nothing you can do which makes you live to 200 now.
Whatever how healthy you are, whatever you do, you might live longer a bit and you might be especially in a younger state while you're living, but it seems to be that sort of 100 at the moment is kind of where most people really then die at the latest.
And I think we have the opportunity, but we need new medical drugs.
They're not there yet to really push life expectancy and health spend, so in a younger state, much longer to some 100 years and maybe we see like that's a long time and then we see where the world is going.
But what I also believe, pragmatically, scientifically and kind of spiritually, there is always an end because forever doesn't exist because somewhere in this planet is going to end.
Like even if we make it for a very long time, somewhere in this solar system is going to end, somewhere in the universe is going to end.
So, there is an end and then something comes after and I'm very like, I believe I'm spiritual, like I think we have an immortal soul which will go on forever on a different level.
So, we do have eternity, yeah, just not in this sort of incarnation, yeah.
But coming back to our psychedelics work, I think they reconnect you to the fundamental truth of life which a lot of people either have lost or never had.
Like we developed a society where we sort of ban certain philosophical and religious question out of our lives.
But also, sometimes it's very easy, like it's not always about spirituality, it's sometimes about a lot of people don't even know what makes them happy.
And then some people know what makes them happy, but they are afraid of acting on it.
So, in psychedelics, what I love with psychedelics, the number one thing I love is, and again there is no really scientific answer for that, but they seem to give every single person the answer or the solution for what they really need in their very moment.
So, it's not that every person comes out and has a super spiritual experience.
Some just come out and say, oh, I learned a lot about myself.
But for them, this is sort of because we're all different.
And that's what I also think is the amazing thing.
Psychedelics celebrate the diversity of humans and seem to give every individual that information, that piece of information, which is what they need at this very moment in order to live a more happy and fulfilled life.
And that's what we all want.
That's why I think ultimately beyond curing mental health issues, psychedelics will be sort of, not our lifestyle drug sounds so floppy, but like something very very valuable, we all should do once or twice a year.
And then it really adds a lot to your life.
Yeah.
Well, it's an exciting prospect, Christian.
It says, I think what was the Alan Watts quote?
The reason why there's such fear of using psychedelics because it's the taboo about discovering who you are.
And I think a lot of people would be very keen to do that.
Because that does seem to be an eternal human question.
But let's talk about the human enhancement or the Enhanced Games.
So, psychedelics is just one example.
It's our happiness enhancement.
But then if you look at your body, what do we really want?
What's core to us?
First of all, most important, because there is already an enhancement drug, I mentioned it was Zempig, people want to look good.
I think we should also be more open, vanity is one of the core character traits of humans.
We're just starting to see enhancements for how you look.
And that is weight loss drugs, they're going to be...
We actually have two biotech companies who have novel medications for muscle gains.
First of all, people lose or gradually lose the ability to put on muscles already starting with 30, so it's getting harder and harder.
So, we have some drugs in development where we can give people back the ability to gain muscles but you still have to train and obviously the holy grail will be if we can find a drug and we have maybe one where you just take it and you're super ripped without any sports.
But how do you feel about that?
Very great.
But do you not like the drive, the ability to actually get it yourself?
I know obviously some people are luckier than others, it's harder for some, easier for others.
Some people don't like it, but...
I think there are people who still will enjoy sport, even if there were or is a drug which makes them ripped.
Because these are people, by the way, in a good way, who don't do sports just for being ripped now.
They do it because they enjoy it.
I'm very frank, like I'm going to the gym at the moment a lot because I'm going through this whole athlete enhancement program because I want to find out how it feels.
It's okay.
But like if you would say I can have the same result and I can do one and a half hours reading or other stuff, I would opt for other stuff because I'm doing it really as a necessity and not because I'm passionate about it.
And I want to give people the option, if they're not passionate about sports, like why not read a book and still look like a supermodel?
I think it's just optionality.
There is no rule.
Presumably, I mean, again, it's not necessarily a good or a bad thing.
It's just a judgment of my view of human nature.
Most people would go for it.
They're not going to want to...
A, there wouldn't be one left out.
B, most people are lazy.
They don't want to...
But I think there are people who love sports, team sports, whatever, for other reasons.
Again, I'm just very neutral.
I don't think there should be norms.
No, I agree.
I agree.
I just...
As we were talking about earlier with, say, tech, right?
So, if tech does a lot of stuff for you, you inevitably will relegate a lot of what you can to tech rather than thinking, oh, I'm going to do it myself just so I can keep mentally fit and I can keep physically fit, you know?
That's the thing.
But I see what you're saying.
Yes, I mean, people have a choice.
But it is an interesting philosophical question.
I agree.
But like, if you think about tech, now we're jumping, but like one of my other big beliefs is that over the next 10 to 20 years, pretty soon, by the way, meaning I always don't want to say it out loud, but like my high school end was like 26 years ago.
And like when we I always remember like six years ago, we had 20th high school reunion.
And it felt like yesterday when I saw all my friends and like I'm still in touch with many of them.
So, and I realized how quick 20 years go by.
So, when I say now, oh, in the next 10 to 20 years, that's going to be fairly soon.
I think next 20 years will be much more change than the last 20 years.
Crazy change.
And by the way, one of the big things is I think humans won't have to work.
The majority of people...
What will they do, though?
Well, so first of all, I think it's not going to be overnight.
So, I think we're going to have a reduced amount of work every year.
And by the way, Germany is already going to a four-day work week.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, just said, oh, in some years, he can see that most people just work three days a week.
So, it's going to be a gradual reducing the time we work.
What I also believe, you still get the same purchasing power because society can't...
We can't endure all the people being unemployed and getting no money.
So there will be a societal contract because companies, I deeply believe, because of AI, will make much more money.
So, they're going to see enormous efficiency gains.
So, they will keep paying people.
So it won't be that people are complaining.
Well, you're going to say, look, you're going to get the job, like you're going to get that amount which is sort of in purchasing power the same like people go there.
Basically paying people for...
But show up one day a week.
So, it's paying people for believing that they're still the masters when actually AI will be the master.
So, show up once a week, show up twice a week.
So, but overall, I believe people will have much more time and the same purchasing power.
So yes, and we can make it now very dystopian and say, shit, what are these people going to do?
And I can give you a negative pitch and say, hey, people have too much free time, they're going to have a lot of bad ideas.
Yeah, maybe.
But also I give you the positive side.
We had that already.
It's not new.
Actually, most of the times, human exist.
We had that literally till the agriculture revolution.
So as long as we were hunter gatherers, which is much more of our time here on Earth of humans like then we are now a sort of structured sort of agriculture society.
So, when we were hunter gatherers, the daily amount of time needed for making a living was maybe two to three hours.
So, you were hunting or collecting berries.
So what did we do with the other 21 to 22 hours?
We slept, we had sex, and we told each other stories, and we most likely were much happier.
So, I think we have the opportunity to go back to be actually what we are kind of developed to be is very social animals.
So, we could have more sex, we could have more relationships, we could have more storytelling.
And think about it, like maybe people suddenly see art as much more of a, like maybe people start making poems, maybe people like we can be creative.
Like I'm actually, again, I think like with everything, the transition period is always tricky because transition and change frightens people.
That's one of the other things if you look at our brain, we don't like change.
That it's actually really bad for like, I always say as an example, maybe the most stable society ever was ancient Egypt.
Yeah, it was one of the longest running societies for let's say 2,000 years.
And their core principle was Ma'at, which means nothing is allowed to change.
So practically ancient Egypt for more or less 2,000 years was the same.
They had slight changes in fashion, slight over 2,000 years.
They had no real change in how they did agriculture, it was all the same.
And it was part of their religion was that the order and how humans function is God-given, so you can't change it or shouldn't change it.
I do believe actually people are very happy.
We're living in the opposite society where literally the year in December will be completely– the world at the end will be completely different compared to…
But it will be probably changing a lot.
No, it will change a lot.
And what I'm saying is like that is in the moment it's changing, it's very bad because people get frightened, whatever.
But I think once we've made the transition, then actually I can totally see a great…
If it is as you see it, then yes, but if it is a huge populace that's unemployed, hungry, homeless and angry, then that's obviously the flip side.
Well, that's why I mean hopefully it comes that we should give people like either it's a universal basic income or any other form of sort of minimum thing.
You should hopefully have people who feel they're unemployed and feel they have no money.
I also, by the way, think psychedelics can be a great way to ease people into change because they make you more open for change, they take away the fear.
So one of my big theories is that change in the first instance creates fear and fear unfortunately brings out the worst in us.
If you would ask me what I'm really afraid of is the following.
When you go back to like 1870, and by the way, it's very interesting because newspapers are still available.
You can go online like, yeah, I think your newspaper was already out then.
1870, yeah, even earlier, it's going to be 200 years and 3 years.
So, you have most likely all the issues, so you can go back.
So, if you go into this time like 1870 plus, the headlines were like now because it was a very tech-optimistic time.
So, there was the Paris World Exhibition, so the Eiffel Tower was a symbol of tech-optimism.
So, there was Jules Verne who wrote his book like Flying to the Moon, whatever.
It's literally, bizarrely, the same like now, like it's really the same topics, flying to the moon, going to the ground of the sea, like da-da-da.
So, but the problem was that was depicting, so the media and the elites were depicting a future, which by the way ultimately came true.
So, the depictions were right, but like 95% of the people at the time were farmers.
And they somehow realised or believed that in this future, the media and the elites in Berlin, London and Paris are painting, they're not going to be part of it because there was like what is our place in that.
And that sort of displacement and fear of displacement made people incredibly angry and fearful.
And out of that fear, that's my belief, they develop two of the most evil philosophies, which is communism and national socialists.
And the problem is with these ideologies, and we see the same now again on the far left and on the far right, they are incredibly simplifying and most likely giving wrong answers, but they give people an explanation, which is most likely wrong, but like what is happening?
Because people are like, here, what is happening?
And then people go, it's a lot of foreign people.
So, I would say much beyond even just giving people happiness, I think we need psychedelics on a global scale to make people able to cope with a new reality, which is coming full stop.
There is no way.
Look at the AI news every day.
Look at robotics, whatever.
And if we're not addressing, meaning politicians especially, if they're not addressing the fear this technological change is creating, then we're going to repeat what we have already.
But we have a chance now this time to not be wrong.
Well, should we talk about your protocol?
Because you're in the same protocol as the athletes.
Well, yes, now.
Like sort of in various days.
Again, by the way, there's two protocols because the one thing is, and it's always super important, I tell everybody is like when they ask me, what would you recommend is like, what do you want to solve for, because there is an answer for what is the best is what Brian Johnson is doing extensively, and I'm very happy about that because we're going to learn a lot, is what makes you live longer and look healthier.
Partly it makes you also look younger, but there is partly a different answer, what makes you look better.
And then the question is even what does look better for you mean, because some people might say, oh, I just want to lose weight.
Other people might say, I want to become a bodybuilder.
And I want to say that once and for all, because I think it's so important, I'm sort of a conservative libertarian.
On the one side, I want to give people the full authority to define what they want to be.
But on the other side, the limitation I want to set around is just with FDA approved drugs, because otherwise you can get scammed and people are not able to research on their own.
So practically, but once a medical drug is approved and you do it with a doctor, because again you need, for example, for certain stuff which when you're doing it, what's colloquially is called doping, you need to really monitor yourself, that you make it healthy.
But I think if you have these two sort of rules, you just FDA approved drugs with a medical doctor together, then you can reduce any potential side effects and fully benefit from what makes, again, you happy, what you want to be.
So, I have a health protocol and then I have, at the moment, I have a vanity protocol because we have this idea, which I'm very happy about because I'm super excited, is our Enhanced Games.
Yeah, let's talk about that.
So, with a friend of mine, all credits to him, Aaron Dissousa, he's the main guy, we teamed up, but he had the idea to create a new sporting event on the one side similar to Olympics, so athletics, but actually already we want to do it every year, it's going to be different.
But the main difference is that we are allowing and actually kind of endorsing performance enhancements and what we want to show is like what can the human body do, again with that limitation just FDA approved drugs with a doctor together, you can't displace Olympics.
Do you see this ever as becoming the Olympics?
Well, it's going to be something different, but I totally see.
Do you think there's still a place in my view, which I think is different, what we were discussing slightly earlier was more about sort of changing yourself and if people want to do that and they prefer to go and read the book, as you were saying, as opposed to spend two hours in the gym, they have the opportunity, great.
But in terms of pushing the human body in its natural state to achieve some kind of incredible sport record, there's huge value in that still, don't you think?
Yes, absolutely, by the way, I love the Olympics and the Olympics will, I think, always be there.
But I really believe it's not cynicism.
I think we're going to make the Olympics better because at the moment, the Olympics are weird because the Olympics themselves, it's not my number or WADA, the world anti-doping agency, did a study some years ago, WADA study, not my study, 44% of all Olympian athletes are doping secretly and don't get caught because the Olympics say they don't have the money, whatever.
So, I would love to have a completely natural but really natural Olympics because think about it now, yeah, if 44% are doped, and by the way, all athletes I was talking to told me they know who's doping.
Yeah, you know that.
So, imagine you're coming in second, you're getting silver, and you know that the gold medal winner doped.
How do you feel?
It's unfair.
It's actually everything the Olympics are not standing for.
So, would you see the people who are doping would just go to the Enhanced Games instead?
So, what I hopefully think is like in two, three years, because we're going to have the first Enhanced Games next year, you're going to have a completely clean Olympics.
And we already told the Olympics, we're going to give them all the medical data anonymized obviously, but they need to make their doping testing more efficient because they should test everybody.
They don't.
They say they don't have the data.
We want to help them to make the Olympics really clean and have a clean event.
And then you have the Enhanced Games, where people, by the way, don't have to dope.
So, I actually think, and again, I spoke to some athletes, if you're really convinced of yourself, you might say, look, I'm a natural athlete, and I'm also competing in the Enhanced Games.
And if I'm winning there, I mean, think about that.
And there will be once in a while, it's going to be hard, but there will be natural athletes who even destroy the Enhanced Competition, and then they can really say, I'm the number one in the world.
So you don't have to.
But yes, most people in the Enhanced Games-
You think it's possible?
I think it's possible.
I think genetics plays a huge role.
Yeah, for sure.
But yes, most people will be doped, or performance enhanced.
And it's something different.
But maybe also we want to do it every year.
It's going to be a different thing, and I think both Enhanced Games and Olympics can greatly co-exist and actually really support each other to have a more distinct profile.
But coming to me, I'm so excited about that that I decided to test it out and go through the kind of protocol of an Olympian athlete myself.
I'm not going to reach that level because they're obviously starting a different thing.
But at the moment, I'm tipping various performance enhancers.
You start with testosterone, check it up.
You do human growth hormones, you do maybe certain steroids.
But you stack it up.
So, I'm not there yet.
I'm coming there soon.
But you also have to train a lot.
So, I'm training.
At the moment, I'm super disciplined.
And presumably, you're supervised by a doctor.
Yes.
So, I have a doctor every week and do my blood work every week.
You actually also have to do a lot of physio because you're suddenly gaining muscles a lot.
Your body is changing.
I'm training every day one and a half hours.
What are you doing?
Are you training with strength or…
So training is mostly in the gym with strength and a little bit of cardio, running like actually, I love the peloton bike, stuff like that.
A lot of it is consistency as well.
You have to do it for a certain time.
But by the way, it's phenomenal, meaning it's like when you were 20, you're training and you're putting muscles on and you're losing weight.
So,, it's fascinating to observe.
Because I know the field and I can read even my own blood work, there is no bad strange.
But by the way, it's the same like with psychedelics.
By the way, whoever is watching, if you want to take one thing, because that's always I told you when we met the first time, please go online and Google David Nutt-Chart.
David and then Nutt-N-U-T-T and then Chart.
And a big shout out to David, who's one of my heroes.
David Nutt-Chart.
Who I've interviewed on this podcast.
Who you had, like very famous neuroscientist, who was one of the early guys, as I said before, who never stopped doing research on psychedelics.
And he did this one really important thing.
He looked at the harm potential of various drugs, scientifically, because there is so much bullshitting going on.
When I do that, what we're doing now at dinners, and tell people, oh, I'm doing like sport enhancement, then people normally say, oh, that's so risky.
And then first of all, I normally say, first of all, can you define risk?
Have you ever thought about that word?
People are using that in terms of drugs, oh, it's risky.
At the same time, the person maybe who said it to me is drinking a glass of alcohol.
Yeah, so it's bizarre.
Yeah, so because if you look at scientifically at the risk potential of drugs, which David did, and the core outtake of his study is that chart, yeah, you see that the worst drug of all is alcohol, closely followed by heroin, and then everything else which you think is bad.
But at the right end of the chart, practically really, really low risk, you have very at the end, practically no risk, you have mushrooms.
But also there, you have anabolic steroids and all of that, if you do it properly.
Yeah, I think David lost his job because of that.
But he got it back, because it was a pure…
His job was a government advisor and he never got that back.
I think at least they said sorry.
Yes, because it was very bad, because the media, there was I think this one headline, by the way, which is so grossly misrepresenting his work, because the worst drug is alcohol, closely followed by heroin.
And then I think that one of the headline was the government advisor says, to heroin not alcohol.
That's not what the chart says.
The chart says both of drugs are very, very bad for you.
So, it was just like you saw how people back then, and again, I give him the credit, because he did all of that before me, how people are kind of almost feel attacked when you poking in their sort of believe that alcohol, which is the greatest shit of all, meaning think about it, like is sold in every gas station.
I mean, as a Russian, I can't agree with you.
But you should, because your Russian life expectancy is going down and nobody says anything.
Alcohol is one of the strongest poisons out there.
And we giving it out, by the way, I really get very emotional, because it's not just for grownups, like go on an airport.
Think about that sentence, alcohol is worse than heroin.
Next time when you go through the airport and you see all these shops selling hard liquor, just think they selling heroin.
But again, both you and I are libertarians, people have a choice.
Yes, but like one last point to my weird definition between libertarian and conservative is like we need education.
And I don't, when I have children, want my children to be confronted with one of the most dangerous drugs every single day.
Hopefully I can tell them that, and I tried it with my godchildren and they're actually getting it really well.
At least we should then give much more education in school about the downside of that.
I agree. I understand the younger generation drinks much less.
But coming back to what I want to say about sports performance enhancement, if you look at the science, because by the way, again, it was so bizarre when we announced the Enhanced Games, some IOC people came out and said, oh my god, two killed people.
I was going to ask you how you respond to that.
But so Sebastian Coe, who is the president of, I think he's president of Olympics now, he said that no one within athletics takes Enhanced Games seriously.
It's like bullshit bingo.
First of all, he doesn't know what he's talking about because he was also, I think, saying this is dangerous.
Whatever.
In fact, it's not.
If you do it with a doctor and if you don't grossly, it's the same what I had to endure with psychedelics when people told me they make a hole in your brain.
No, they don't.
And like saying that performance enhancements can kill you, no, unless you take 30 times too much.
But if you drink 30 vodka shots, you're going to be dead.
I won't.
So, it's like everything.
Weirdly, the only thing which you can take a lot because they have no toxicity psychedelics.
But like most things in life, if you kill you in a certain amount, so saying like, again, they all feel threatened in their beliefs or whatever.
Yeah, but so first of all, again, performance enhancements, medically, FDA approved with a doctor in the right medical amount, which a doctor tells you and they're not going crazy or whatever, have very low risk, full stop.
That's science.
That's not my personal belief.
Second, we had yesterday, so this comes on some weeks, but like we have a big announcement where the big announcement, we're going to do a big documentary with Ridley Scott together.
I'm a huge fan of him, so I'm super excited.
He's doing the documentary, and we open about the Enhanced Games, and he's going to follow 10 athletes about their journey to our games.
This was the first time ever, by the way, we ask for people to apply.
What I can tell you, we have hundreds of very famous athletes.
What he said, nobody takes us seriously, it's the opposite.
There are hundreds of people who are famous, who either were Olympian athletes and are retired, because by the way, that's a great side effect of the Enhanced Games, a good one, positive side effect, is that sports is really ageism.
If you're older than 30, you're practically out, and suddenly with enhancements, we're going to provide athletes in their 30s to do what they want to do on a world level again.
We have a lot, one of the most famous ones who publicly came out, that's why I can use his name, and he's a big supporter, and he's going to be in a documentary, is James Magnussen, is like very famous swimmer, Australia's darling.
But we have hundreds of others, and we're going to pick 10, again, former athletes, but we also, we're going to shock the Olympics.
We have hundreds of current athletes who say, I want to actually jump ship.
By the way, side note, if I criticize one thing with the Olympics, again, I think we can absolutely coexist.
But the one thing I think is appalling is like in any sports, the people who really make the sports, who are the soul and the heart of the sports, the athletes, get a good chunk of the money.
I wanted to speak to one of the athletes involved in the competition.
None has been more vocal than James Magnussen, who has been offered $1 million if he wins the 100-meter freestyle swimming race.
So, the first and foremost reason that the Enhanced Games was attractive to me was the chance to be a professional athlete again.
That was the highlight of my life, being a professional athlete and now being back training again and living like an athlete is the happiest I've been in five years, to be back doing what I love.
So that's first and foremost.
The second part there, there of course was and is a financial aspect to this opportunity, which is very attractive.
And then the third part, honestly, curiosity.
I'm so curious about how fast my body can go, about what is out there, what's available, how will it affect me, how will it help my performance and what results can we get from this experiment, from these games, from this whole endeavor.
And are you already on the Enhanced Games protocol?
Not yet, but I'm ready.
My body is sore and sorry after all the intense training at 33 years of age, so that's the next step.
I'll be over in Paris for the Olympics for media coverage back here in Australia, so I'll probably have a quick trip across to London and see some of the medical staff who are on board with the Enhanced Games.
Can you just talk our listeners through how the process would work?
Because we would be remiss for us to not address the criticism of this.
One of the criticisms is that it's potentially dangerous.
What is the process and how do these substances get integrated into the training?
I think the first part and potentially the most important part is really stringent testing of my blood work, understanding how my body is functioning currently, where are my hormone levels at currently, where is my testosterone at naturally, how is my body responding to the training that I'm putting it through, and then understanding where those gaps are either in function, in hormone levels, in performance, in training.
And it's not just about medical supplementation, right?
It's also about optimizing all levels of my performance.
But the main aspect that we're going to be able to most dramatically affect are those biological markers.
So, for example, I'm 33 years of age, no doubt my testosterone is a lot lower than it was when I began swimming at an international level when I was 18 years of age.
Some signs or symptoms of that might be slower recovery, lower energy levels, poorer sleep, poorer recovery, lower libido, things that all of us men start to experience as we get older and start to show the signs of aging.
So, it'll be sitting down with a doctor going through those blood works, understanding where I am at currently.
And then I'm sure that they'll go through a number of different substances and possibilities that are out there.
And then the most important thing, I believe, is to continue testing from start to finish.
You know, how is my body responding to these new substances, these new products?
How is my performance being affected?
Am I suffering any side effects?
And if at any point I am suffering side effects, how do we either minimize those or change tact and change to a different supplementation plan to avoid said side effects?
Are you concerned about long term side effects?
I have thought about it.
But I think long term, the only real query that I have is around probably fertility.
So I'm 33 years of age, I have a partner, we don't have kids at this point.
But that's something, you know, in our not too distant future, I imagine.
So, fertility is the one thing that I have thought about the most.
As far as long term effects, as a result of ongoing use, for me personally, I see this as a short to medium term endeavor.
You know, if there was multiple games, if they held the games every year, I'd love to do, you know, one, two, maybe three games.
But you know, I am 33 years of age, and I'm very realistic about that part of it.
So, it's not something that I plan on starting and then doing for the rest of my adult years.
Do you think this could do something potentially for why the healthcare?
Yeah, I believe there's still a lot of stigma attached to things like testosterone and its uses, whether those be medicinal or for enhancement.
But what I think this will help us to do is to break down some of the stigma around this industry, this sector of the health and fitness industry as well.
And so many men that I know get to 40, 50, 60, and they have low energy, they have low libido, they have just low signs of vitality, and they just suffer in silence.
They think that this is part of growing old and being an aging man, that I just have to go quietly and wither away to half my former self.
So hopefully this shines a light on the possibilities of things that are out there to decrease those signs of aging, to increase vitality, to not have to age so dramatically.
This is currently, but this can be one of the biggest industries in the world.
One major reason the Enhanced Games is so appealing is because many athletes struggle to make ends meet.
Christian explains how the Enhanced Games provide these athletes with a chance to earn a proper living, much like in other competitive sports.
So, this is why we're going to give a big part of the money we're making, like in Formula One, like in soccer, like in any other sports, to the sports guys, because that's attracting talent.
And that's the reason why this guy is so idiotically wrong, why all these people jumping ship, because we're just saying, look, we're fair, we're transparent, like, yeah, people will be able to judge you because you have to say if you're doping or not, like, yeah, and we give you a big part of the cake.
Well, look, Christian, I have to say, you're much more optimistic about humanity and the future of humanity than I am, but I admire your embrace of future, because I'm like that.
I, you know, it's coming, you might as well embrace it rather than fight for it.
Life is then awesome.
I think life is inherently awesome.
Yeah, if you really live it like with an open mind, what I'm really bothered by is that I have discussions like that, and the younger the people are, the more pessimistic they are.
And it's so sad, like the one thing I remember, I was at a conference, it was a tech conference, and there was this young guy, 20, and he was flown there by the organizers to interview people like me.
And he starts the interview, he said, how can, what do you want to tell by viewers who are all around 20 as a privileged person because my people cannot join this event?
And he was, I was like, greatest bullshit I've ever heard.
First of all, I grew up, there was no internet, in a 200 people village, in really not a rich family.
And still I'm sitting here now, like I made my way.
So I think young people now have, no matter if they're rich or poor, even the poorest ones have more access to knowledge, they can go online, most of them have a phone, they can go on YouTube, they can watch videos, they can watch interviews like that.
If you think about it, I didn't have that, like literally, like if I wanted to learn about something, I had to go to a library and rent a book because I couldn't afford so many books.
So now all the knowledge of the world is at your fingertips.
And you have cool people, hopefully like us cool people, but many other cool people, to share stuff, to talk about stuff.
So never ever had young people more opportunities to shape their life however they wanted to shape, but they are completely frustrated and think the world is ending.
By the way, also all this bullshit about climate change, like yes, there is climate change, I don't want to deny it, but I believe science is the solution, not our detrimental.
And we just need to be optimistic, and yes, there are problems, I'm not ignoring problems.
Unfortunately, where all the information is being gathered from is full of negativity, it's full of bad news.
Because the media is thriving of negativity, you need positive storytelling.
By the way, one other thing is look at Hollywood.
I'm working on one big project there to change that, is like all the science movies, or movies who are all dystopian.
Think about the 60s, like we had Star Trek, and what was Star Trek?
The foundation of Star Trek were two beliefs.
Science is great, and yes, by the way, there can be science which is then abused, but science in general is great, and humans are in general good, and yes, then there can be evil individuals.
And we turned that around, now the storytelling, science is always bad and humans are always bad and then there might be a good individual.
And it's so sad, because I deeply believe that's not reality.
Humans are good, science is good, yes, there are bad individuals, but like, if we are more optimistic and constructive, then I think we're going to have a fantastic future.
Well, we need more people like you for spreading optimism.
Thank you, Christian.
Thank you for listening to today's episode.
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Until next time, take care.
