Christian Angermayer is a billionaire film producer, psychedelics mogul and maybe soon the brainchild of the most recent crazy sporting competition to beat the masses: the Olympic Games on steroids within the truest sense of the word.
From his London office, Enhanced Games co-founder Angermayer plans to shake up the world of athletics with the assistance of fellow billionaire Peter Thiel.
The improved games
The Enhanced Games are rivals to the Olympics, but with a special twist: athletes are allowed to take certain performance-enhancing drugs, including steroids, and have the possibility to earn 1,000,000 dollars in the event that they break “significant” world records.
Angermayer co-founded the Enhanced Games with Aron D’Souza with the goal of safely introducing these drugs into high-level competitions.
The notorious investor Thiel was the figurehead of the games as an early financier. The three-time Olympic medalist in swimming James Magnussen popped up In February, he reported that he was excited by participating within the Games, and more are said to be within the planning stages.
The group wants to boost $300 million for the games. Angermayer said he has courted sovereign wealth funds as a part of that campaign.
Who is Christian Angermayer?
Angermayer made his first hundreds of thousands by founding and selling the biotech company Ribopharma together along with his professors on the University of Bayreuth.
Angermayer, the accordingly Forbes is value $1.1 billion and today makes much of its money by pushing the boundaries of medical pondering.
Before turning to steroids, he was certainly one of the early supporters of the psychedelics movement and founded the corporate atai Life Sciences in 2018, which is now valued at $244 million.
Angermayer’s first experience with magic mushrooms got here when he and a bunch of friends went on a yacht into legal waters.
“It was the most meaningful thing I have ever done or experienced in my life,” he said Scientific American in 2019. “Nothing has ever come close to this.”
Angermayer said Sci-Am that he didn’t drink alcohol for the primary 30 years of his life because as a teen he was afraid that his brain cells would die if he drank or smoked.
He now says he takes mushrooms legally twice a yr. His home is decorated with sculptures manufactured from psilocybin mushrooms to reflect this obsession. He has also spent around $10 million on a group of eight dinosaur eggs, including one from a Tyrannosaurus rex. Bloomberg reported.
Angermayer’s combination of wealth and eccentricity implies that his fingerprints are present in unusual places. He is credited as a producer of several Hollywood movies, including Samuel L. Jackson’s Big game And dirtan adaptation of a book by Irvine Welsh starring James McAvoy.
He has said his push for enhanced games is predicated on his belief that AI will enable more leisure time, thereby increasing demand for sports broadcasts.
However, you’ll hardly find him on the streets of his second home, London. Angermayer says he avoids walking the streets of the British capital for fear of becoming a victim of petty crime.
Regulations
Angermayer and his partner D’Souza have high hopes that they will create a brand new format for peak sporting performance. They argue that they will provide a secure, controlled environment to make sure their athletes aren’t put in danger.
In an email interview with AssetsD’Souza said he could imagine a billion people tuning in to see someone break the 100-meter world record, putting it on par with the world’s biggest sporting events, including the rival Summer Olympics.
“By creating an exciting and immersive environment, we will capture the imagination of audiences around the world and make the Enhanced Games a must-see event,” said D’Souza.
However, the concept met with fierce criticism.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has condemned the Enhanced Games as a “dangerous and irresponsible concept” that might endanger the health of athletes. Several Olympians have supported this claim.
Angermayer cites an anonymous survey that implies that a major proportion of Olympic athletes are already secretly taking performance-enhancing drugs. Some would argue that this reduces the necessity for a contest specifically geared toward doping users.
D’Souza said Enhanced has hired a top recruiter to seek out potential athletes for the Games, adding that it’s in advanced discussions with lots of them.
“One of the challenges in publicly confirming athletes is that, despite the overwhelming interest, we also need to develop plans for the format of the first Games – including which sports and events will take place,” D’Souza said.
There are also concerns that this can reinforce a growing trend amongst most of the people to make use of these drugs in a far less controlled environment than is the case with the Enhanced Games.
Of course, after years of working to popularize psychedelics, it shouldn’t be a given for Angermayer that he’ll adhere to the regulations within the USA or Europe, something for which he is especially critical in Europe.
“The US is setting a bad precedent and then Europe says: ‘You know what? We can make it even worse. We can make it even dumber,'” Angermayer told the Secret Leaders podcast Last month.
Angermayer has achieved his first goal of bringing the controversial Enhanced Games to the eye of the media. But given a wave of critics, doubts in regards to the industrial appeal and an unclear list of athletes, this will likely be going too far.
