Life As We Know It Will Be Redefined by 2030 (Here’s How to Prepare)

Every single time humanity went through a disruption period, it usually resulted in wars, in pain, in fear, etc. I think if we don't do anything, we're going to see the same again. We're going to completely replace it with the combination of AI and robots in 5 years from now. That's going to be already in full swing.

Stop thinking in terms of jobs because most likely till that kid is working there is no work anymore.

Why does it have to be 80, 90, 100 years? Why can't I go on as long as I please? Fear is the mind killer. It really brings out the worst in us and then also everything sort of around that fear and that change. So long story short, I think the future looks amazing but also a little scary.

That is an interesting question. What do you mean with permission to dream?

Okay. Well that was then this was like later in the business career but I think I was always like that. So I don't know if there is like if I ever was sitting there and gave myself permission. That's why I think it was just like that and I never thought it's different. It's the same like I just later figured out that other people are not always happy and it was very puzzling for me because since I'm a child I'm always very happy. Doesn't mean I have bad days but I think I have this baseline happiness and just figured out later in my teens and later on that other people are not like that or have more issues with happiness. And I would say the same with dreaming big or whatever, I always thought that's how life is. Yeah, I think it's my parents. I came from a very basic upbringing in a good meaning. I grew up in this 100 people village like most of the other families were farmers so I was playing outside winter summer all the time with the other kids. My mother was a secretary, my father an engineer, now they both retired but luckily still alive. But I think my parents were always telling me you can be whoever you are, whatever you are, very encouraging. Sometimes they now make the joke that they created a little monster because already when I then grew up in my teens I was so not what the rest of the family in the village is because I always was very entrepreneurial, always wanted to build businesses and whatever. But again I think it's their encouragement already in very early days that do whatever you want, think whatever you want.

No, I didn't. I was always very maybe the one. I'm just thinking which age it was. It must have been 12 or 13 round about that when I was the first time in the big city which was Munich, which is like 2 hours away from where I grew up. Back then books were still a thing and there was a very famous bookshop in Munich called Hugendubel, I think it's still around. I went into it and there was this whole wall of the book Think and Grow Rich from Napoleon Hill. And I already since I can think, since I'm six or whatever, I already was into business. Everything I did in primary school was always like, how can I make a business out of it? I loved gardening so I started selling flowers, I loved eggs. But then I went into this Hugendubel bookstore, again it must have been I was 12 or 13, and I saw Think and Grow Rich and I was like, oh my god that's it. This was the one point, again it was not the point where I gave myself permission, but the one point where I stumbled into a book which then I read and read again and again. I would tell every entrepreneur that's the one book you should read like once a year. It's very simple but in its simplicity I think it contains everything an entrepreneur needs to know. And that was then kind of driving my philosophy further. I think it fell on very fertile ground because when you read something and it summarizes what you think anyway in a very perfect or elaborate way. So everything I was reading in that book was like, oh my god this is exactly what I think and how I think life works. So that was this one pivotal moment.

No, that's okay. Now we jump from 12 to... you weren't doing psychedelics at 12. No, psychedelics came later. I'm just calculating. So it was 2013. So I was 35. So fairly late in my life. And as I said before on many podcasts, I didn't do anything before, neither did I try alcohol nor any other drug. So I was a very unlikely candidate for psychedelics. And by the way, like most things in my life, what I believe coming back to the book Think and Grow Rich, is if you go through your life with open eyes and open heart, you kind of encounter all these possibilities and then you just need to grab them. Literally we could go through everything I ever did. It was not that I meticulously planned that. It was like I kind of in a very positive and practically structured way, because I believe in that, I was stumbling into all these opportunities and they just presented themselves and then I was like, oh yeah. And psychedelics was very similar. So if you would have asked me literally some days before 2013, I would have said I will never try anything because that was my big thing: I don't want to take anything which goes into my brain for the very simple reason I realized when I was around 14 or 15, which is the time when people start drinking in the area I come from, very heavily drinking in this age which is not good, which is actually the worst. But I realized I have this baseline happiness and I'm also not dumb. I was very good in school and I was very proud of that, and I was very good in school very easily. So I didn't need to do a lot for it. So I concluded for myself, okay, something is very right up here, so why should I jinx it? There was not even a bigger thought. It was really that I don't want to put anything in my brain which could ruin that perfect equilibrium. And out of that became a thing. I didn't do anything. I started drinking coffee when I was 30, that was kind of the first if you want to call it a drug. So then very randomly at a birthday party in Germany, the birthday person made a joke, which rarely happens because people know that I don't drink alcohol and they also know that I don't like to be pushed. I hate that because I think that's one of the worst things in our society, that we're so encouraging for a very toxic drug. Anyway, in this case, I was lucky that the birthday boy did it because he was like, by the way, one of the other guests is a very famous neuroscientist and I seated you next to him and he can tell you that you could drink a glass of champagne with me on my birthday and you wouldn't die. And it was like, haha, heard that before. And I know obviously we do a lot of biotech. I'm not dying yet. But I don't want to do it because the very bad thing in our society is if you drink one time then everybody will be like, oh you did it last week and you can't do it now. So the only way to really not drink in our society is to never drink. So don't allow people to push you into that. Anyway, I was like, oh, but I'm happy to sit next to a very famous neuroscientist. Maybe I learned something. So I sat down and I asked the guy, I said, look, let's go through all the drugs, legal, illegal, whatever, and I want to know what are they doing in my brain and what is the downside. And he, by the way, surprisingly pulled out a chart, which I'm now at every podcast asking people if you take one thing away in this podcast, it should be this. So he pulled out the chart of David Nutt who had written a whole book about it. The chart summarizes the book and very accurately analyzes the downside of all recreational drugs legal and illegal. And the surprising thing is that alcohol in a very scientific observation is the number one most risky drug of all, closely followed by heroin which people normally would guess is the most dangerous. And then at the left of the chart comes everything which is really bad like crack cocaine, whatever. But then on the very right with practically zero risk come all the psychedelics. And he was like, look, we talked the whole evening about it, about every single one of the drugs, but at the end of the evening, he was like, look at the right, they are. And on the very right is mushrooms. That's what you should actually try. So now people might think, oh, this is like now we're talking on a podcast about psychedelics. But back then, psychedelics were really seen like a schedule one. It's unbelievable how much the world has changed since that dinner, partially also because of the work we were then later doing. Because back then I was like, holy no, go away, this is a schedule one drug, you go to jail, this is bad. And he was like, but look at it factually, it's not. And then he told me his story. He was one of the last scientists who still were working with psychedelics, but back then it was a career killer, not a career booster. He's still working, he's the head of university, but not saying his name now. He offered me and said, hey, you should come to my lab and you should try it out. And I was like, you're crazy. And then he was like, but it makes you happy. And I was like, but I am happy, why should I do it? And then he started sending me studies, his own ones, but out of the 60s and 50s, showing what he told me, that psychedelics have a very low risk profile but have this tremendous potential upside to cure depression, anxiety, addiction, which was completely forgotten at the time. Now people might say, oh he's stating the obvious, but back then 2013 it was unheard of. Nobody was talking about it. And then I was reading it because in Apeiron, my family office, we do a lot of biotech, but I still was like, why should I do it? I am happy. And then one year later, sorry for the long story, but one year later I was in the Caribbean with very close friends. They had real mushrooms which they had grown themselves. I trusted them and they were like, oh by the way, we are out tomorrow doing mushrooms on the beach. We know you're not going to do it. Just want to tell you we're not available in the afternoon. And I was like, something was there, very hard to describe. It's like this one feeling, this moment was like, you guys, what? I want to do it as well. And they were like, what? I was like, yeah, something tells me I should try it. So this is how in 2014 I did the first time, if you want to call it recreational drugs, mushrooms. And it was hands down the single most important, moving, deepest thing I've ever done, which a lot of people would say as well. But I came out of it and because I'm in biotech and because I'm very entrepreneurial, I was like, holy, if it's giving this amount of positivity to me as a happy healthy person, I can totally see what the studies said which I had read before, that it's helping and potentially even curing all these mental health issues. And then I was already starting thinking, oh my god, because that's my nature, that's what I did with everything in my life which I encountered that positively, how can I make a business out of it? And that was the beginning of the thought process which culminated in 2017 when starting Atai and Compass.

Zero. I don't even understand the question. I have a lot of trust in myself. I care about myself a lot.

I wasn't. So no, now I get the question. You see, I don't even get negative questions because one of my basic rules in life is that everything is great. I deeply believe in that. And if things seemingly are not great, because I'm not an idiot, life has hard moments. But what I learned and observed, when applying my philosophy, I deeply believe that life is inherently great. I also believe inherently people are good. And if you go through life with that positivity, I also deeply believe in the spiritual side of it and the law of attraction and everything. But even if you leave that aside, the great thing of that book Think and Grow Rich is it doesn't go into the spiritual side. In the beginning of the book, the author is saying that he's just observing certain rules which people simplified would call positive thinking. And he's like, look, there are other books and maybe other people who more want to explain why that works, but that's not what he wanted to do in the book. Napoleon Hill, the author, he just says, look, I'm observing that these rules and characteristics are how life works. I think that's great because you can always give it to people, and even if people are not very spiritual or open for that, they take it and say, oh yeah, it's a very practical book. Other books like The Law of Attraction go a little bit more into the spiritual explanation why that stuff works. But in general, I deeply believe that life is great, people are great, and if you go with that open attitude, you normally should have just positive experiences. We do have negative experiences all of us regularly because that's part of life. But if I zoom out and look at my last 47 years, then I can say that all of the negative experiences I had, for example in business or with people, because I still had the attitude that there must be something positive in it, they actually laid the ground for very positive things in the future. While if you have this negativity and if you look at life very negatively, then they break you because you get confirmed in your negativity. I know what some people were saying, they're like, okay, he's successful and he sits there and he has a podcast in a nice apartment and whatever. But there were moments in life which were really hard. And in the moments it was very hard for me to stick to the philosophy, but I tried to. I really told myself, look, by the way, that's normally when it's a real test for your life philosophy, when things get really hard, because it's very easy to say what I just said when things go really well. But what I can tell now if I would make an interim analysis of my last 47 years, I would say all the stuff which seemed to be bad in the first place actually turned out to be something really positive. You just needed sometimes years and to zoom out to realize that. I also believe there are things which are so in the first instance negative. For example, if somebody dies, there is nothing good in it. But I do think we will, that's my personal belief, in a very big zoom out, meaning when we die and when we look back on our life, we're going to realize what was the lesson we were supposed to learn in that moment. So I think there are actually bad events in life which will not materialize in anything good in this life, but you're still going to realize why they were actually very loving and good for you. If that makes sense.

But I think you're very lucky because I think the worst, if you want to call it the woke mind virus, did to a whole generation is that victim mindset because it condemns you if you're not escaping from it. I believe the worst you can do to yourself is to see you as a victim and always in this negativity, and it condemns you to a very sad and bad life. And I think we're facing a whole generation where at least the majority or a lot of the young people grew up with that victim mentality, and I think it will really haunt them unless they break free for the rest of their life.

Well, I would say read things like How to Change Your Mind on the psychedelic side, Think and Grow Rich. I think The Law of Attraction is a great book. But the problem is it's a little bit chicken and egg. You need to have that impetus first. And if you're in this victim mindset, that's why it's so toxic. One of the things is that you don't think it's changeable because you're the victim. It takes away all the agency you might otherwise have, and that is the problem. So hopefully if somebody sees this podcast who has a victim mindset, then yes, try to read these books, whatever. But they might not start watching the podcast because this philosophy, this book mindset took away all the agency of a whole generation. And sometimes it's so deeply ingrained.

That's maybe the good thing. I think while we have a whole generation where a lot of people have this victim mindset, I think it's also a generation which is embracing psychedelics. So that's maybe one way out, one solution for it.

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