Hi, good evening everyone. I'm Uma. This is Christian Angermayer, my friend, who I'm interviewing for the first time. I'm interviewing anyone, so I apologize in advance. We're going to talk for 30 minutes, and if anyone has any questions, we will stay after and there's a mic to ask them. Hi, Christian.
Both really nervous. Well, Christian, the question that I have, given that we've been friends for 10 years and you're one of the most straight, disciplined, focused people that I personally know, a teetotaler, a very precise and healthy person, deeply involved in medical research, how on Earth did such a completely straightforward, sharp person stumble upon psychedelics and decide to invest?
Okay, where to start? Which is by the way true, I have never touched alcohol in my whole life, and I'm from Bavaria in Germany where alcohol is sort of the basic nutrition, and I have not done anything else. No, really, it is very encouraged. I never did it. I always was, and I am always, a very happy person. I don't think I'm really dumb, so I always was like, okay, let's not put anything in my body which could rock that sort of perfect equilibrium. And then I'm also very spiritual, so I do think that the right things happen at the right time to people. So it was actually 2013. I was at a dinner and friends made a joke. They were like, hey, here is Rer, who's a very famous neuroscientist in Germany. Here is Rer, and he can loosen you up a bit and tell you that you can drink actually a glass of alcohol with us without dying. I was like, look, I know that, because actually the alcohol which is really bad, but it's not about alcohol. The social pressure is so high, why I'm avoiding it so clearly is like then you never have the social pressure. So I was like, look, even he cannot convince me, but I'm super happy to talk to him about the brain. I'm investing in biotech, so this is how I met Rer. And he was like telling me, actually the short version was like, look, you're completely right not to do alcohol, but actually you should do psychedelics. And I was like, you're insane, this is like an illegal drug, at least in several countries. But he told me all about the research he was doing back then already, about how psychedelics, so-called magic mushrooms, psilocybin, but also other drugs which fall into this group, how they can potentially cure or at least relieve a lot of depression, anxiety, addiction, all these mental health issues. So that was the very first time I came in touch with that topic, and actually I wasn't convinced, but it started sort of sticking in my brain. But it took me another year, and then some again. Sometimes in your life you have to have the perfect moment. I was in the Caribbean with my best friends, you know them, and they had mushrooms. They were like, look, we have real mushrooms because they looked like a mushroom. I was like, okay, I read so much about it, and by the way, all these psychedelics but especially magic mushrooms had been already medically available in the 50s and 60s, so there is an abundance of research out there. And I was like, I know they're safe, I know they can have this effect, and even though I didn't need it, I was like, let's try it. And then to summarize it in one sentence, it was the single most meaningful, important thing in my whole life, full stop. Nothing comes close to that. And actually already the next day, I'm an entrepreneur by heart, an investor, I was like, holy shit, if it's doing this to me as a happy, healthy person, I can totally see how it has the potential to cure various mental health issues. Let's work on it. And that was sort of the starting point in 2014.
And what is approximately, you know, as far as PTSD, anxiety, depression, what kind of population are you talking about there? As far as say in the US, what kind of numbers of people could this reach?
Well, globally, unfortunately, and people are not still, mental health is getting known out there that we have this mental health crisis. But the official number globally is that more than 1 billion people suffer from either depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, or addiction, or several of these things. One billion people. It's the number one group of diseases out there. And actually, most likely the number is grossly understated because unfortunately it's still a stigmatized disease or a group of diseases. So a lot of people who actually would need help are not seeking out help because they're ashamed. It's getting better, so we are destigmatizing it, and I'm expecting that we see a sharp rise actually in that number, which is anyway huge, because of people seeking out. And then the other thing is, and this is one thing which I'm thinking about a lot because I'm investing in tech, so I'm sort of helping create the worlds we all use with our phones. Like all of you are on the phones now, but the world we created, I think it's awesome and great in certain things, but it's terrible for our brain. So it's not just that more people come out and say I have a mental health issue anyway, which makes the number grow, but actually the world we created makes us all mentally, or at least at risk for becoming mentally sick. And hopefully we change it.
So you're saying the use of technology itself is increasing mental illness?
The main two things I would say are two things, just examples. First of all, our mind, if you look at how we, I mean we are at the end like sort of pack animals who lived somewhere in the savannah, and life was always the same. So our mind seeks continuity in a world where it's none. And even worse, like 20 years ago, this was always the case, life was always changing, but like now it's changing at a pace where people really can't cope with that. So you have an update, you have a new iPhone every year, you have a new, and it's just small examples. It's like the whole disruption we're bringing to the world, which we are in this room celebrating, but is really deeply down frightening most of the people.
And so there's still, there's other compounds in the routine that can be chosen for different people's problems, depending on what their trauma is, what they're suffering from, and all administered by a doctor?
Yes, that's a super important point. Because I know I can be very passionate about psychedelics, and I did do it in a country where it's legal, because there are some countries in the world, mainly South America, where it's not classified. But to make that as a disclaimer, at the moment in the entire Western World, so let's say Europe and the US, most psychedelics are classified as illegal. We want to change that medically. What we want to do is not, and I deeply believe it would be the wrong path to go, that these drugs should be freely sellable like cannabis or whatever, because these are very, very powerful tools and therapeutics. And what we want is that they get back where they used to be in society. Because for thousands of years they were used by shamans and priests for healing, not for party. It was never a party drug. You did it once or twice a year with a healing intention. And we want to bring it back where they had been for thousands of years into the society as medical treatment, with a doctor together. Practically, the doctors or the shamans of our times are the psychotherapists. So most of the drugs we're developing with my company, atai, are meant to be administered with a doctor. You go there, you trip together, and then you go home.
Well, you of all people I know would be firmly against recreational use of drugs, so I have absolute clarity on that. So there's the medicinal use. You know, having known so many people whose lives have been saved by existing drugs for depression and anxiety, I also have experience very personally with people finding that they didn't work for them in times of hardship and difficulty, and the side effects were intolerable. Is this going to create possibly, hopefully, some hope and optionality for people for whom the existing psychiatric treatments are not working?
Yeah, totally. So how we see it is the mind is a very beautiful and complex organ, and there will never be a one-size-fits-all. And this is why actually we also believe like the current treatment options which are out there, SSRIs and benzodiazepines, they don't work for a lot of people. Unfortunately, they have heavy side effects, but they might work for some. So we're not saying it's either or. How we see it is that the ultimate person who knows the patient is the therapist. And I already said it, we all group that together in the one billion, but there are numerous mental health issues, from depression, anxiety, addiction, and so on. And then everyone can have different root causes. So it's about the therapist looking at the patient, knowing the history of the patient, and then saying, look, for you, you should do this or you should do that. And we, sort of what we want to do with atai, I always see like we're developing toolboxes, or a toolbox, and the more the merrier, because the more we have, the more people can be helped.
Two years ago, you were so enthusiastic about this, you asked me to host a small dinner with you to present this to people, your friends and people of interest in finance and in medicine. And I remember sitting at the dinner and listening to the conversation as this was sort of being birthed, this idea, and testing the water. And some more cynical, straightforward, either finance or medical types, I'm not sure who I was sitting next to, but they were challenging or questioning. They said this kind of treatment, does it have a risk of not being so commercial because it's not going to create a dependency where the person is using this drug over and over and over endlessly, and unable to get off of it? How have you been able to answer that in the risk of doing this enormous research in a solution that would not create dependency?
So it's actually a positive question. What it says, what I can say, is that in the research we're doing, and by the way we are for several of our drugs pretty advanced. We have several drugs in phase two, which is for the people who know biotech, it's pretty advanced. There needs to be a phase three, but we're getting there. So it's not early stage, it's somewhere in the middle of the drug development phase. And so what we're seeing is that several psychedelics do have this positive potential to really cure it, like to really say, okay, with one trip or maybe two, you solve the problem and you're defined as cured. So then the cynical question is always, oh, does big pharma like that? My view, and not just with psychedelics, is in general, people might like it. Well, the billion people suffering, exactly. So it's like the question is, isn't it better if you would develop a drug which they need to come in every week? And unfortunately, the problem is so big that we're going to have a great business even. And I really wish that it's going to be curative because the people deserve it. That even if all the people who need it just need one trip, there are so many of them, and as I said before, this number is growing. Ultimately, I really believe that the total addressable market, because of the world we're building, is the global population. It's totally fine economically if everybody has one trip.
It seemed very clear, as we hopefully spin towards the end of this pandemic, that it's wreaked havoc with people emotionally and mentally, and just the amount of fear that we've all had to experience from every different angle. I can only imagine that number must be soaring.
And we don't have the numbers yet for the pandemic. It's always, but like our expectation is, again unfortunately, that the whole COVID pandemic, both being locked into small rooms but also the anxiety and the existential meaning. I yesterday here at dinner at the Milken Conference, someone said, look, what did we learn from the pandemic? A lot of people learned, okay, I could die now. They were confronted with this sort of existential crisis. And all of that together, the way the media handled it, because there was also a lot of fear mongering, whatever. All together, unfortunately, I'm expecting that the number of people who have any mental health issue is skyrocketing.
What year were the psychedelics made illegal? It was in the Nixon era.
Maybe that also is a good point, because people are asking why are these drugs actually illegal? So the historic excursion is like, so they were used for thousands of years as I said in medicinal, back then shamanistic, religious practices. As a fun fact, and we're going to have some big news in the next weeks on more of the nonprofit side, because I'm going to support an initiative. A friend of mine, if you ever want to read a cool book, it's called The Immortality Key. A friend of mine, Brian Muraresku, has proven that most religions, including Christianity, are actually based on psychedelic consumption. And the Catholic Church, as a very business-savvy organization, wait, if this is the reason why we're so successful, we maybe should revisit it. So there is a lot of historic evidence of people using these drugs again. I just can repeat it, once or twice a year, very ceremonial, in a guided setting. Then came the 60s. Actually, first came the 50s and 60s, and in Europe, especially by a pharma company called Sandoz, some of these drugs were made medical therapeutics because already back then people realized it is very, very positive, potentially curing depression and so on. And then the hippies technically did it back then illegally, because it was like what we want them to be. It was back then approved for use with a therapist. And obviously the hippies did it at Woodstock, whatever, but nobody cared because it is a positive thing, it's not bad. But unfortunately then, or fortunately I see it, but the hippie movement became political. So they went against the Vietnam War, and suddenly the hippies were the enemy of the state. And we know now, and there are an amplitude of documents, that they were sitting in the White House and were like, how can we discredit these people? How can we make them look crazy? And they started literally falsifying studies, whatever, claiming that psychedelics can make you crazy, because you must be crazy if you're against the government. And unfortunately, back then mental health was not an issue, because again, I think it's also the time we have now. So nobody really stood up and said, wait a moment, we cannot take good medical therapeutics away for political reasons. Nobody resisted. And this is what happened. And we are trying to sort of change that in a very scientific way. Because it's not political what we're doing. We're not trying to make politicians change anything because it's anyway, it's not talk about politics. But we are just repeating the studies with all FDA studies, and we're just doing what you would do with every promising substance for therapeutic use. You do FDA studies and you prove it in a very rigorous scientific way what the potential of these drugs is. And automatically then, if we succeed in the FDA studies, they're going to be automatically approved, specified as therapeutic use.
You know, it's with her permission, and it's going to be in her autobiography. But Christian, I called my mother before we came down because I wanted her permission. She was briefly married to Timothy Leary before she met my dad. And she said they were married in June and she left in May. But I think it was a very significant relationship. And you know, all of that was very hush when I was little because my father's a professor and nobody wanted to be identified as being sort of of this unusual, possibly have background of exploration. And that is no longer the case, so I had her blessing to mention it. What has been interesting to me as an adult, having them share some of what they experienced, was actually in the 60s, how rigorously they were really using psychedelics not just as hippies and not as a party, but to solve the perennial questions. She said, you know, why am I here? Is the world chaos? Is there hope? And it sort of opened almost a spiritual channel in a very disciplined way. Did you find it to be for yourself a sort of spiritual opening or enlightenment?
Yes, and I'm happy to try to describe it, because it's literally extremely hard to impossible to put the experience you have under a psychedelic trip into words or into language. But what I can say, because we also see, not just I have my own experience with it, then I have with friends obviously, but we also see the reports. People are coming back when they are in our study group, so we ask them obviously we're not just checking, okay, are you better now? That's obviously the biggest question, but we ask them to report what did they feel, what happened. And it's in a very spiritual way. So let me describe it maybe first medically a bit, and then try to describe the spiritual angle. What happens in your brain? You have a part of your brain which tells you that you are Uma, this is Christian, we're different people. And that part of your brain literally contains your whole personality, your ego. And all of us have great things in life, all of us have a lot of pain, all of us have little traumas. People think of when you think of trauma which causes mental health issues, you think of the big stuff. But we all have been hurt sometimes, we actually don't know it, but it's somehow affected us. And it's not always in a bad way, it's just creating who we are. But that part of the brain, the ego, it's called the default mode network, is practically always on, literally 24 hours. It's always telling you what you need, and it's our survival mechanism. You want that. You wake up, you want to eat, you want to... But it's also in a certain way, you could say screaming, because it's always on and it's telling you, it's always loud. And this part of the brain is literally shut down, or at least severely reduced, under psychedelic use. And you know this through EEG. So that's a good point, because why are we, why do we have the potential to be really successful? One reason, and a lot of people ask why now, why didn't somebody do that like 10, 20 years ago? For the first time, I would say the last 5, 6, 7 years, we really understand the brain. In general, I'm investing a lot in mental health, so atai is my flagship company, but we have a big portfolio of others, from Alzheimer's, dementia, whatever. And it's all positively really now making progress because we do understand better, not all of it, but we do understand better what is happening in the brain. In the 50s and 60s, people were seeing the effect of these drugs, but they couldn't tell why. So they saw people having a trip and then they were fine. So now we can way better. I explain it: this default mode network is reduced or actually almost put to zero. So practically, in a certain way, your ego is vanishing. And the interesting part, and again I'm trying because I'm sitting here and representing a company, but I'm also personally, I was always very spiritual and became way more spiritual by my psychedelic experiences. Because at the same time, something is emerging. I'm always hesitant to put religious labels on it because we all have a different background. If I would use the word God or soul, then everybody has a different idea of it. But let's call it for the sake, it's either your soul, your inner voice, your subconsciousness. You don't need to label it religiously. But something is emerging which seems to be there all the time, but because your ego is screaming and your needs and your wishes, you don't listen to it. And this is actually the best guide you have. That's the real psychotherapist. And then if you look how it helps people, it's always different and the same. Let me give you one example. We had one person who talked to me who had a severe trauma by being raped as a child or young girl, like 10. And she said actually at the beginning of the therapy, she was like, but this has nothing to do with my depression. And then when she went on the trip, she had to... By the way, trips are not necessarily funny or pleasant. They're good for you, but especially when you have to dissolve a trauma, it can be very challenging. So she was revisiting that situation, but in a third-party observer, so she could really dissolve the situation by making amends with it, because she can't change the past, it's part of her. And at the same time, she was realizing that the real negativity came from she blamed herself and not the rapist. Again, by the way, a lot of things which are happening, I tell people about what patients say in these trials. People like, but somebody could have told her that it's not her fault. But you don't reach that part of your brain where you have that pain and trauma. But under a psychedelic trip, you do. So she literally was able to let go, and she's fine ever since. And it's these very powerful examples where I know we're on the right track.
