Christian Angermayer, a German biotech entrepreneur, is “an advocate of what you call the next human agenda, which includes enhancing human athletic performance, using psychedelics to alter human consciousness, and figuring out — just maybe — how to extend the human life span,” Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat says. Christian has been in the world of drug development for 28 years; he’s also the co-founder of the Enhanced Games, a recent sports competition that encourages the use of legal performance-enhancing drugs.

On this week’s episode of “Interesting Times With Ross Douthat,” Christian says:

>With medical drugs that are already available today, we can make a massive improvement in performance, in weight, in appearance, similar to the amounts we see with Ozempic. And what I predict is, because the ice is now broken, every pharma company is like: Wow, I want that. I want those revenues.

>And now they are saying or understanding — and what I am trying to say — after these 28 years is that, obviously, the market is much bigger if you have a total addressable market of ideally 100 percent, than only for cancer. We should always work on cancer as an industry, but luckily not everybody has cancer.

>I’ve always said that in addition to curing things, the bad stuff, why don’t we also find things that everybody wants more or less. And that race is on now.

Watch, listen to or read Ross and Christian’s full conversation [here, for free](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/opinion/biotech-maxxing-christian-angermayer.html?unlocked_article_code=1.pVA.kgje.521eSFHcDF83&smid=re-nytopinion), even without a Times subscription.

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