Christian Angermayer appears on my Zoom screen, wearing a white collared sweater and looking freshly shaven and relaxed. Behind him is a 1st-century B.C.E mosaic featuring Ganymede, the young prince who was so beautiful that Zeus abducted him and granted him everlasting life. 

“I want to go back to the classic era when the gift of immortality was something very positive,” Angermayer says of the artwork, before explaining that he believes it was medieval Christians who turned the world against the concept so they could sell more indulgences. The statement may be an incomplete reading of Greek mythology. (One recalls Tithonus, who was granted eternal life without eternal youth.) But it is an excellent vibe setter for my conversation, which lasts the better part of two hours, with the 47-year-old German billionaire investor and entrepreneur obsessed with human potential.

Angermayer founded and runs Apeiron Investments, his multi-billion-dollar fund and family office, which has financial stakes in various sectors, spanning cryptocurrency, neurotechnology, and biotech. Its tagline, “Next Human Agenda,” underscores his belief that we are entering a “golden age of human enhancement,” where technology will enable individuals to modify and optimize themselves as they see fit. Angermayer also co-founded Centenara Labs and Cambrian Biopharma — two companies focused on expanding the human life span — as well as the Enhanced Games, a planned 2026 Olympic-style event that has sparked controversy for its proposed policy to allow competitors to use performance-enhancing drugs.

Psychedelics are central to Angermayer’s vision. And, in this world, he’s best known as the co-founder and chairman of atai Life Sciences, a biotech company with multiple patented psychedelic compounds in clinical trials. Just days before we speak at the end of February, he announced a $22.75 million reinvestment in the company (out of a total $63.25 million raise), bumping his personal stake to 22.3%. The move, he hopes, will help to position atai as the industry leader, or as he previously put it, “the psychedelic mothership.”

While atai focuses on addressing mental health conditions like depression, addiction, and anxiety, Angermayer sees psychedelics as more than just medicine. He believes they have the potential to enhance cognition, resilience, and overall human performance. So what does that future look like? And as biotech pushes the limits of human potential, where does treatment end and transformation begin?

“It really comes down to what is the definition of an illness and what is medicine,” Angermayer says when I ask him how psychedelics intersect with his broader definition of enhancements. The billionaire underscores that he’s offering his personal opinions, not an official position of any of his companies. But for a man at the nexus of media, capital, and power, he is affable and remarkably comfortable thinking out loud. This is the first of many enthusiastic musings, each winding its way between the micro and the macro, ancient history and the future, before eventually terminating at its logical endpoint or event horizon. 

In this case, his broader point is that the zeitgeist at least partially shapes the line separating sickness from health (especially mental health). That is, an “illness” is often simply a deviation from the norms of the times. He notes, for example, that being gay was once wrongly classified as a medical disorder. So the notion that medicine exists solely to return people to normal is problematic, since normal itself is a moving target.

Like many forward-thinking doctors, Angermayer’s vision of medicine advocates for a shift toward a more preventative, proactive model. However, he also points to the fact that we are already blurring the lines between treatment and enhancement. He cites weight-loss peptides (e.g. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, etc.) as a prime example: technically prescribed for Type-2 diabetes and clinically diagnosed obesity, yet widely used (including by him) as a tool for staying lean. So, if we’re comfortable outsourcing discipline to a drug, why stop there? Why not take a pill to boost intelligence or a tablet that builds muscle?

As for psychedelics, Angermayer echoes many advocates who say they should be medically available in the treatment and prevention of mental health issues — boosting neuroplasticity and shifting how the brain’s default mode network functions. For example, he points to their potential role in addiction treatment, highlighting ibogaine’s reported success with opioids, but also emphasizes that thinking about psychedelics as useful only once a person is suffering limits their potential.

“Why can't we take psychedelics one step further and address happiness? Why do we have to wait until we can talk about an absence of happiness?” Angermayer asks, gesturing at their enhancement capacity to boost well-being beyond normal levels (again, with the caveat that normal is a floating marker).

There are some in the scientific community who are not as bullish on the enhancing potential of psychedelics — like Manoj Doss, Ph.D., a UT Austin Research Fellow who studies the interaction between psychedelic drugs on cognition and brain function. Doss’s work has called attention to the positive effects of psychedelics — for example, psilocybin therapy’s capacity to increase cognitive and neural flexibility — but it has also cautioned against downsides, such as, their potential role in facilitating false, harmful beliefs.

“I think that people should still be cautious with these drugs and not just act like anybody can take them willy-nilly and they'll lead to greater human potential,” Doss said to me before my call with Angermayer. “I think that's kind of an absurd thought.”

However, Angermayer’s approach to psychedelics—or enhancements broadly—certainly isn’t willy-nilly. He is a libertarian and believes that people should have the bodily autonomy to choose how they modify themselves. He also predicts that what we call enhancements today could become standard treatments tomorrow. However, Angermayer is adamant about practicing “gold standard” science and underscores that he is a “conservative libertarian” in that he believes that all medicine should be available by prescription only. Further, all potential enhancements — including psychedelics — should be limited to those at least 21 years old and used under the direct supervision of a facilitator, therapist, or doctor.

“It's a big task to bring psychedelics back from their undeserved status as an illegal drug,” Angermayer says. He points to a broader shift in the zeitgeist — shaped in part by his own advocacy and the work of figures like journalist Michael Pollan — for pushing psychedelics toward mainstream acceptance as legitimate medicines. But he also stresses that progress must be gradual, especially in light of the past. While he acknowledges the passion of the psychedelic evangelists of the 1960s, he believes their approach was too “aggressive” and “non-medical,” triggering a backlash that stalled the movement for decades.

As such, atai remains committed to the traditional pharmaceutical path, seeking FDA approval to bring psychedelic compounds to market, a process grounded in strict regulation. Presently, atai’s focus is on depression, anxiety, and addiction. (Clinical trials for conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia are, for the time being, prohibitively expensive). And, among other treatments, the company is trying to gain approval for a two-hour, DMT-based antidepressant.

But Angermayer’s commitment to slow progress is hard to square with his outspokenness about psychedelics as potential enhancements, a position that could be viewed as challenging the risk-adverse, do-no-harm culture of FDA approval. Here, two things go largely unsaid: First, the clinical pathway is also a strategic business move, as it locks in intellectual property protections, enables insurance reimbursement, and opens the door to market exclusivity. And second, positioning psychedelics as lifestyle and performance enhancers isn’t just ideological — it may be a savvy long-term marketing move, broadening the appeal beyond the narrow lens of clinical treatment. (According to a study by healthcare software provider Inovalon, off-label prescriptions for Ozempic — i.e. the use case Angermayer defined as akin to an “enhancement” — increased 256% in the U.S. between 2018-2022 to one in five). Still, if atai can demonstrate that it can help the “billion people” struggling with mental health, then enhancement doesn’t look like a leap — it looks like the logical next phase.

***

Angermayer excuses himself to use the bathroom. While he’s away, Mike Oakes, Apeiron’s Chief Communications Officer, who’s been listening in on our call, flips on his camera.

“He doesn’t take many breaks does he?” Oakes says, referring to Angermayer’s seemingly boundless energy. I confess I’m worried that I won’t get through my prepared questions and am recalibrating on the fly. 

When Angermayer returns, we get into a thorny topic surrounding enhancements: equality. 

“In society and politics, we often talk about equal opportunity, but wouldn’t true equality mean that everyone has the chance to enhance their intelligence?” Angermayer asks. I raise the oft-cited counterargument that enhancements could actually widen inequality, since the wealthy would have disproportionate access to them.

“This is a reactive argument from the left, that if something is new, it’s only for rich people,” he says, linking it to a widespread “victim culture,” which he believes makes people more sick because it undercuts their agency. “But if you look at this from a business perspective, most industries thrive by expanding to the biggest total addressable market.” In other words, while new technologies and treatments may start as luxuries for the wealthy, market forces inevitably drive prices down, making them widely accessible. (Psychedelics have yet to experience this kind of economic effect. Legal psilocybin clinics in Oregon can run clients thousands of dollars and ketamine therapy programs, which have been around since the early 2010s, are still inconsistently priced and cost-prohibitive for many.)

Angermayer also believes that, aside from the dice roll of genetics, the real sources of inequality are family upbringing and individual discipline. For example, he mentions that many people in the U.S. receive free medications and simply never take them. (Importantly, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about three in ten Americans say they do not take their medications as prescribed because they cannot afford to).

Angermayer’s self-confidence and belief in personal effort seem rooted in his upbringing — happy but not overly privileged — as the only child of a middle-class family in small-town Bavaria. He showed an early interest in business, writing price tags for his homegrown vegetables and flowers at age six. He later earned a regional academic scholarship to the University of Bayreuth, but left after meeting two biotech professors with whom he co-founded Ribopharma, focused on RNA interference. When that company merged into another in 2003, his exit marked the start of his entrepreneurial rise.

For academics like Dr. Neșe Devenot, a Senior Lecturer at Johns Hopkins who specifically studies the intersection of psychedelics and commerce, Angermayer’s hyper-commercial, libertarian approach to the sector risks deepening the very inequalities it claims to address. Rather than tackling root societal causes like access to food, water, housing, and education, his vision reinforces a neoliberal, for-profit healthcare paradigm, where well-being is an entirely personal responsibility rather than a collective one. 

This view is echoed by other scholars like Yale’s Daniel Markovits and Harvard’s Michael Sandel, who assert that taking a meritocratic outlook only further entrenches inequality. For example, in his 2020 book The Tyranny of Merit, Sandel argues that successful people often embrace a narrative centered on their own exceptional talent, downplaying factors like luck. In doing so, they cast implicit blame on those who haven’t succeeded, as if their failure were due entirely to lack of effort.

Devenot, whose worldview is fundamentally opposed to both libertarianism and capitalism, believes the only way to create real change is by redistributing wealth. “Libertarians don’t want that; they just want to say, ‘Leave me alone with my pile of gold and stop trying to regulate me.’” Devenot later tells me: “What I would ask is: Why do you get to keep that pot of gold while everyone else is forced to live by your preferences?”

But more broadly, Devenot is concerned about the outsized influence of billionaires like Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk in the psychedelic space. She sees them as invested in a techno-utopian future where psychedelics play a role in helping to consolidate power among elites, not just access and control, but by shaping the very narratives around human progress. 

It’s customary in the tech world to endorse a set of interlocking techno-optimist ideologies, such as “transhumanism,” which seeks to advance the human species through modalities like genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and neuroimplantation. Angermayer most definitely moves in those circles (Thiel is an investor in atai), and his thesis about enhancements roughly fits the transhumanist model. However, he resists the label, preferring human “maximization,” a term he coins mid-conversation to describe his belief that human beings already have innate potential that remains unlocked. Tools like psychedelics only help us “maximize what is already there.”

While this may read simply as a semantic distinction, he believes it's an important one. “Transhumanism creates a huge negative reaction,” Angermayer says, “because it kind of insinuates that we leave humanity behind.” 

***

As far as psychedelic evangelists go, Angermayer is something of an oddity. In his youth and early adulthood, he completely avoided alcohol, cigarettes, and recreational drugs. Then in 2014, a friend convinced him to try psilocybin, which he took for the first time in a legal zone on the island of Canouan in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. (He still eschews alcohol and other substances). In a 2021 Bloomberg story, he described the trip as “the single most important experience” of his life, so much so that it sparked his journey to bring psychedelics into the mainstream. 

“It’s my personal opinion that everybody who's touched by psychedelics has some form of spiritual experience,” he says. I ask Angermayer whether he sees these kinds of experiences as based on biological interactions with the mind or as contact with something beyond the material world. He believes in God, Angermayer tells me, but he doesn’t necessarily think these distinctions are important when it comes to psychedelics. “What I don’t understand about the psychedelic community is why some people insist it has to be a spiritual experience,” he says, arguing that the real value of psychedelics is about showing you who you really are.

Psychedelics deepened Angermayer’s desire to do entrepreneurial work, which he notes stand in contrast to warnings by tech mogul Marc Andressen to founders that psychedelic experiences may lessen their entrepreneurial resolve. His view: “Those people never wanted to be founders, and conformed to societal pressure when becoming one. The experience showed them what they really want. It didn’t change them. It made them honest.”

In this anecdote one can see that while Angermayer is interested in the mystical potential of psychedelics, he’s also concerned with its real-world utility. In the same 2021 Bloomberg story, he told the writer that his first trip also helped him understand cryptocurrency, a sector in which he’s now a major investor. (atai will also convert $5M from its recent capital raise into Bitcoin because Angermayer believes it’s an effective way to hedge against economic risk).

These kinds of goal-oriented outcomes from psychedelic experiences — using them to boost productivity, spark entrepreneurial clarity, or fuel material success — concern Richard Doyle, a professor at Penn State and author of Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere. For him, framing psychedelics in such instrumental terms risks flattening their deeper potential. He argues that when we approach psychedelics with a maximizer’s mindset — focused on outcomes, status, or optimization — we may miss what he calls “the pearl beyond price”: genuine self-transcendence. In his view, the psychedelic experience is not something to be leveraged or controlled, but rather a practice in surrender, in letting go.

“You want to take what the Aztecs called ‘God’s flesh’ and ask how you can design a better app? Go for it. But what didn’t you ask?” Doyle mused when I spoke to him a couple of days earlier. 

Doyle prefers the term “ecodelics” to describe psychedelics’ potential to expand awareness beyond individualistic, achievement-driven frameworks. He connects them to the “noosphere,” (pronounced NOH-uh-sfeer) a concept dating back to the 20th-century Russian polymath Vladimir Vernadsky, who described a global, interconnected field of human thought and consciousness — one that psychedelics, in Doyle’s view, help us tap into.

Another risk of an achievement orientation in psychedelic culture is what Jules Evans, author of the newsletter Ecstatic Integrations and an academic paper on “evolutionary spirituality,” describes as the tendency to frame personal transformation in hierarchical terms — where some states of consciousness or healing are seen as superior to others.

This kind of thinking can lead to what Evans calls “spiritual eugenics,” where perceived enlightenment justifies hierarchies where the less evolved are deemed expendable. However, he is quick to clarify that just because figures like Angermayer believe in using enhancements to maximize human potential, it doesn’t necessarily make him a eugenicist. The eugenics term is often too sloppily thrown around whenever enhancements of any kind are mentioned.

“Evolutionary spirituality can, however, lead to a kind of snobbery, like ‘I am more evolved than you,’” Evans tells me. “It’s a kind of ego inflation, and we don’t need any more ego inflation in psychedelic culture.”

Clearly, Angermayer doesn’t dismiss the spiritual importance of psychedelics; nor, in my observation, does he come across as a spiritual snob, or at least in the way Evans describes. He is adamant, for example, that “we all deserve to be happy” and believes that psychedelics can help achieve that aim by bolstering our “mental health immune systems,” which he defines as comprising three core elements: faith, purpose, and love. But saying the future will be inclusive isn’t the same as ensuring it will be. And Angermayer stands to gain enormously — both financially and reputationally — if the world buys into his vision. That said, if psychedelics really are a tool for an enhanced future, what precisely are we racing toward?

***

With time running out, I throw out one last question: Where does AI fit into all of this? Angermayer’s eyes light up. 

“Hang on,” he says, pushing back his next call. “If we’re going to talk about this, we need to do it properly.” Once again, we venture off into another Angermayer rhetorical adventure during which he explains how he believes AI (and other important technologies) could radically transform society. 

“One of my beliefs is that psychedelics can save humanity for a very earthly reason,” he says, before drawing a comparison between today and the late 1800s and early 1900s —a period when Jules Verne wrote about unimaginable technological feats (e.g. rockets to the moon) and real innovations like electricity, the telephone, and the automobile were transforming the world at breakneck speed. (The period is also known as the “Gilded Age” because it brought some of the worst economic inequality in U.S. history). 

The problem was that, while many elites in cities like Paris, Berlin, and London embraced a vision of a globalized, high-tech future, most people — many still working as farmers — worried they would be left behind. It was this dissonance between the elites and the masses that, in Angermayer’s theorizing, led to fascism and the war-plagued decades that followed. That is, fear only stretches so far before it “snaps,” and society at large begins to crave authoritarian control to restore feelings of safety and order. 

Angermayer considers himself an optimist, convinced that much of today’s fear around new technology is overblown (a la the elites of the Gilded Age). But he worries that the same mounting spectre of catastrophe and obsolescence undergirds today’s explosion in mental health issues, which he predicts will become the “No. 1 disease” of our times. (A 2023 study reported that one out of every two people globally will develop a mental health disorder in their lifetime). 

But that’s where the necessity of medical psychedelics come in—as an accessible tool that boosts neuroplasticity and creativity, helping people cope with accelerating change. He even imagines a world where governments of the future realize this and distribute psychedelics en masse. While scholars like Devenot worry this veers dangerously close to using psychedelics to “mollify the masses” (à la Soma in Brave New World), Angermayer sees something more hopeful: A shared path toward resilience, insight, and maximum human potential.

“The world needs psychedelics,” he says, once again referencing the 1960s, framing the period as a cautionary tale for today’s psychedelic movement. Push too hard, too fast, and another backlash could lead to our losing a vital tool for navigating an increasingly complex world. Angermayer sees it as his personal mission to make sure this doesn’t happen, and he’s determined to get it right.

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