Transcription
[applause] Thank you very much for being here tonight. So on stage I am joined by Axel Bukhon, co-founder and CEO of Matter Neuroscience and Matias R, founder and CEO of CVVC. Please welcome them with a round of applause.
[applause] Thank you, um, so much for joining us tonight. Um, um, Axel, so, um, um, this is one of our latest investment activities with MAR neuroscience. Uh, it's very rare that uh, we have a neuroscientist uh, uh, on stage and um, I maybe understand half of what you're actually doing. But the conversation we had earlier uh, late last year uh, introducing this, what we're doing right now, was from my perspective one of these probably mind-blowing conversations that you will remember in a couple of years' time. So we're trying to to to dive into what actually you are doing and why that could be relevant for uh, our our interesting uh, space.
So Axel, you are a founder and CEO of Matter Neuroscience. You have a PhD in infectious disease and neuroscience. Um, you told me at one point you painted Mona's COVID vaccine >> together with others. Yes, >> together with others. Um, you have 25 years in pharma and biotech and amongst others, you were researching happiness but also the other side of happiness, which is depression. We're coming to that. You um, are the book author of The Capitalism of Happiness. So you wrote a book about happiness and uh, its capitalism. You are also an entrepreneur. You built over 10 successful biotech companies in in the past. You are a venture partner uh, with ARCH. For those of you that are not familiar with the biotech space, this is often the number one biotech VC firm in the US, a big, big player. And um, you told me at some point you realized after 25 years in the pharma space, you came to the point where you realized, well, in pharma only treatment gets paid, but never prevention. And um, I think this is what you know, drove you to found Matter Neuroscience a couple of years ago. And and the initial goal was actually to find the biomarkers for happiness. Is is that correct?
>> Yeah, that that's correct. Maybe just to to uh, tell the the full truth. After failing in multiple studies to find a working medication for depression and anxiety. Um, I just realized that that that maybe the pharma company is coming too late to that disease because our brain does one thing: it remembers. So once you have seen darkness, you remember the darkness, and that might be just a fundamental issue. So I almost like overnight, I stopped my pharma and biotech career and I said, I I may have to really understand how happiness really works. And and what came in these last meanwhile six, eight years was actually this equilibrium.
So [clears throat] biochemists love equilibriums of molecules. Um, what it actually tells you is the science between happiness and suicide is identical. There's no difference. We do something weird. We have medicine and pharma working in the dark spot exclusively, by the way. So your doctor is actually not allowed to market any other product to you. Um, and happiness and unhappiness is actually in the space of marketing. Everybody can tell you whatever they want. You may have some FTC questions once in a while, but that's actually it. So the issue I was working 25 years on the black side, and what pharma does is they try to get you just here. Just here. That's the readout of a clinical study. What you see here, however, is that between happiness and unhappiness, there's an equilibrium that you actually should be able to control. So very simple, you're hungry, you go to the kitchen, you eat something. I miss talking to Matias. I grab the phone and call him. Right? Unhappy to happy. And equilibrium means I have control over where I want to go. The challenge is when you stay too long on the unhappy side. There's a second equilibrium that pushes you into the disease space. And that equilibrium is irreversible. You cannot come back by yourself.
Now, the challenge of that is that if I would put to you some numbers on this, we have 1 billion people currently diagnosed on the planet with depression, anxiety, addiction, or aggression. It's all the same science. And we have roughly, and now hold your breath, five billion people being in a pre-es state. And I can see that because the behavior of a pre-es that you try to compensate desperately to get back happy with working too much, seeing your kids too little, only seeing your kids, work out too hard, eat too much, consume too much. Overconsumption is basically a key thing. Or because you're so desperate, you start to abuse others. That's like at the current situation of our planet. In the middle, we have six billion people. That sounds still okay, but it has two problems. Emotions are contagious. The most infectious disease, more infectious than any virus, is a bad emotion. And now you see why Matter and Neuroscience was basically founded because it was very clear. The problem is we cannot subjectively measure what happiness is. So Matter had two objectives when we started. Number one: find a biomarker for happiness. And number two: we need a reward system. A system that rewards people carrying these six billion back into the white, because otherwise these species will not be eliminated by AI, but simply because the exodus suicide, that's basically the topic of the talk.
>> So, h how did you do that? How, how do you search the biomarker for happiness? What did you do?
Um, the challenge is happiness. Everybody believes they know what it is, right? Because you feel happy. Done. If you scratch the surface, you have a challenge because everyone understands something different, right? So the philosopher says, "Oh, it's pleasure versus purpose." The psychologist says, "No, no, no, it's emotions and your personal emotions are very particular. It's only about you and it's very individual." Biochemist says, "Hey, it's just molecules. What's what's your problem?" Then the biohysicist, the biohysicist says, "No, no, no, guys, it's actually cell activations, it's biophysical signals." And then the social economist, e-economists say, "No, it's actually subjective well-being in other or flourishing or kind of life satisfaction." So if you want to do a study that finds a biomarker, you need all these expertises, not against you, but with you. And we could agree uh, in 2022 on one argument that everybody could follow, and that was like, if we don't know the real language, let's agree on something. We always can rely on what is evolution. In evolution, everything what is important is carried over, it's not disappearing. So if we could find something what was literally present for the last 1 billion years, we would know that is the biioarker for happiness. In essence, happiness. Happiness started when life started, and that was the experiment. So we basically um, invited 500 people um, meanwhile, in the beginning, a few fewer, and we can just ask them to come with their best memories because that was very important. If I show all of you a cat, half of you would say, "Oh, I feel good." The other half said, "Oh, I have an allergy, I go crazy." Right? So in a way, you need your personal best memories to actually stimulate your brain, otherwise I cannot find the molecular foundation of this. So we basically invited those and we put them, thanks to um, uh, various collaborators, in an MRI machine, the highest MRI uh, magnet that you can imagine at the moment, seven Tesla MRI um, and actually just ask them to look randomly on their best memories for hours. Now, you know why you see a very precise 3D print of my brain because I was in this machines for weeks. Four weeks. Um, and in essence, after all this, we found it.
>> So you, you took 500 people, you told them, "Bring your best memories." Would they bring photos, photographs, or or...?
>> A photo that could as serve as an opener to a whole movie? My family, certain emotion linked to that. You would put them into an MRI that would generate a high-resolution image. >> And, and you would measure while this person would look at that photograph, you would measure brain activity. Correct. And what would you see?
>> That's actually almost a premiere. You see this. This is not published, so therefore keep it for yourself. Um, but it will be published very soon. So in a way, this is the first time you see the human map of happiness on your left side. And what is interesting is if you just look at it, the top layer is basically just here, very young material. So the outer face is kind of only humans have this, right? The right side seems to be empty. And then interestingly, inside where the older regions are. Let me just get this out. You also see extremely strong signals. So in other words, we have signals that are in very old structures, and we have signals that are unique to humans, but they are just associated with positive emotions because that was more or less the surrogate that we used here. The beauty is we asked these people right after the um, stimulation, "How did you feel?" and "What exactly did you feel?" That was a kind of risky because we didn't know whether people would understand. Do all humans understand the emotional terminology the same? That was a big question mark. If you believe in evolution, you would actually say, "Yes, we should all have the same emotions." So we asked them along a panel of information that we knew was actually conserved. So what you see on the on my side is now we can zoom in into every single patch and can identify: was that associated to pleasure, excitement, sexual desire, recognition, family love, and so on? I come to all these emotions in a second. But what that tells you is two things. The father of happiness, Aristotle, 350 before Christ, was wrong. Okay? It's not purpose or pleasure because these are different areas in your brain. Just imagine you have different muscles. If you do biceps curls, you are not training your legs. So the learning for tonight is: if you want to be emotionally fit and totally happy, it is not enough to only work, or only take care of the family, or only have pleasure. It is actually a decathlon, guys. It's not a single player game here. You have to play everywhere if you want to be happy.
>> Now, basically, if what that mean if I only work, right? So like hours, I only work. This would only translate into a certain area in the brain. This would get trained heavily, and you would neglect the rest, and you would be doomed to become unhappy.
>> Yeah. Exactly. You would you would be very trained here. We could see that because the density would be very high. So we can actually see how well you train certain areas in your brain. And if you are kind of more in terms of gratitude, this is basically here, you would see this actually become very dense and kind of just like more trained. So in a way, we can tell now, and actually that's the the nice thing. Now we are not even asking the people in the MRI anymore. We just can read from their pictures what they feel, their intensity. We can literally read the quality and the quantity of their emotions. Um, the beauty, the next beauty was for the biochemist, very important. You know, emotions, happiness, this is fine, but I love molecules, right? But with this, we could now overlay so-called PET MRI data to find the molecules in these patches to literally say, because evolution happens on a molecular level, how does it actually really work? How do emotions match to the molecules?
And you, I think we're, we're getting there right now. When you mentioned, so then you developed a protocol, the Matter Protocol, and in our space, we think blockchain and and and and and all of that. It's not that, right? So, so you created a code and you mapped those neurotransmitter molecules with the various emotions. Can you say more about those emotions?
>> Exactly. I think that is most probably the most important slide you should carry with you from Davos this year because that explains your life. It's basically six neurotransmitters that have a code, and you, when you have a photo, you can read the code because it's the lines how they connect. And you have nine emotions, nine positive emotions. Sorry, that's it. Okay. Everyone in this room has this code. The beauty is because we have so many data, we could now back calculate from the signals how much molecules are basically produced. So in other words, this whole mechanism also works the other way around. If I recall a positive memory, like I will recall this moment here, right? I get a little bit of these guys back. Why? Because my brain wants me to remember this and repeat this. The brain is the guidepost for our progress. And that's why it's so important to really learn and understand these emotions because it will guide us like a lighthouse where we should actually go in life.
Maybe one interesting thing here is our current economy, they call it capitalism for a second, triggers only three of these: dopamine, excitement in males, testosterone, sexual desire, we are successful and recognition. That's it. That's the same neurotransmitters every animal has. So just that you understand where our economy leads us. Every animal can play this game from a molecular perspective. The real difference to humans are the lower three emotions that we laugh, that we basically feel content in nature, and that we actually are grateful. And this is not because I'm kind of just like preaching this. It's just the pure data of our of our study. In a way, it also shows already a little bit where we hopefully go from here. And there's like the shortfalls of our current system. The products and services you get offered are actually a fraction of what you can experience and like as a human. And I think that's very important. You cannot buy love. I mean, real love. It's impossible. You cannot buy a friend. So the biggest values for our brain are currently not represented in our economy. But you can buy things, right? So if I look at the left side, this looks like the world's favorite drugstore. Correct.
>> So, can you, I can buy some of those, right?
>> Yeah. It's an interesting. Yeah, you, you could. It's correct what identifies. So just going going down to it. Dopamine, cocaine. Testosterone, pornography. Serotonin, ecstasy. SSRIs. Um, we have nothing for oxytocin. I leave that for after the session. Cannabinoids, the name says it, right? Even the scientists were later than cannabis. We, we had to use the original name. Opioids, fentanyl, heroin. Literally everything is there that you know from drugs. Now, the critical thing is, oh, easy, I just take all of them. [laughter] Right? But what is the problem? What will the brain learn? Remember, it's a memory. The brain learns, "Oh, if I smoke weed, I feel that as if I have friends." Do you have real friends?
>> [laughter]
>> You understand the concept? It's a, we have built as humans shortcuts that systematically erode what we are built for. So, but this basically mean just taking drugs doesn't work because you don't do something. You don't actively do something in order to learn the brain to learn, like to train those. You need to actively, you couldn't cheat, basically, if you want to become a happy person. You, you can cheat once by getting some emotions, right? But the brain learns and attaches the emotion not to the original idea, like "I feel like you are friends." Right? So this is a good feeling, and I'm not smoking weed. So you see this is the difference. So, so the key thing is we have to attach it to the origin because then our brain can guide us what we like. That's for instance, just for me, like the most pressing issue is the huge Adderall use in the US as an example. Right? Adderall is a dopamine, is cocaine, right? Co, small, big, small brother of cocaine. But in a way, you get like dopamine, you're all of a sudden amazed about, "Yeah, I'm in, I'm in this business here, it's totally amazing. I'm just amazed about everything." "Oh, I'm in the window business, it's crazy important." The point is, if you take drugs, it takes your freedom to learn what you like and what you're excited about. I can only tell if you have founded a business on the Adderall, take it off, think about again. [laughter] Because the question is, you have to really love it. Otherwise, it's just a general stimulation. I know we...
>> So, so, so now the Matter Protocol, it's not a blockchain protocol. The code of happiness. Um, now we want to make a business out of that. Also in pharma, we're still in pharma, right? So you want to make a business out of that. So what's next? What did you do next?
>> So, in a way, we split the business. So me coming from the black side, we are working together with our phenomenal team in Stanford because we're trying to really use now memories as an antidepressant. So by putting these people that cannot move back, we put them in the MRI and the therapist tries to train with them these areas to re-engage. In a depressed patient, they cannot activate these regions anymore. They're just completely off. That's kind of the the medical product. And on the the the consumer side, we realized that whoever was in the study actually had very high subjective well-being scores. So apparently, this little app we used to just collect the memories was making them happy. That's the moment when your B says, "You know, biotech is interesting, but can you not just launch that app?" And that's basically what what we did. So we kind of developed an emotional fitness club that works exactly like your gym. So we have a coach, we have co-coaches, an AI coach. Um, you have your teammates. So I basically train with people for certain things. And then you have, of course, the metrics to see whether your brain muscles kind of just like evolve. And the last thing is when you remember the beginning, we wanted to gamify that you take care of your teammates. So when you kind of induce a score or a badge or a level increase of your teammate, you can earn a currency. It's currently is a game currency called royalties, right?
So, so this is, this is um, the medical uh, use case. This is the the the consumer use case. They're, they use the same app, right? So in order to train, they use the same, the same.
>> Can you show how, how they use that?
>> I can show that. So here they have an enhanced thing with the um, MRI while they are while they are looking at it.
>> And you told me when you won over, I'm not sure if it was Arch or Polaris, was when I don't know, 100 or 200 of the initial users were only using the app, and you told me that the results were so significant that that's how you convinced the the first big VC, right?
>> Yeah. And in a way, the surprise was, um, we were working together with the World Happiness Research Institute, who was just asking, "Hey, can we monitor these people with our metrics?" And whoever stayed and went through the the study was actually 30 to 50% happier in terms of subjective well-being. That is a huge number. This is a huge number. So that was more or less kind of...
>> Just so you know, people see your screen. So now, okay. [laughter]
>> You see, my developers were nice, and the testosterone picture is of course private. I have only, this is the only feature who has this because I, we would have, but you see some cannabinoids here, is obviously only friendship. [snorts] Um, friendship, love. So in, in a way, what we what we do here is very simple um, and I, I just quickly show you in a way um, let me just do it properly because I need this memory, I need this, I just need it. So, okay. And then you basically very quickly rate your emotions. Quick is very important because these are the nine emotions from...
>> These are the nine emotions that you have just seen. Pretty exciting here. I'm actually still after so long time, proud to tell this story. I love you guys. So I give you a little bit from friendship love. We laughed. What is good? Not extreme, but I think it's okay. And I'm really grateful that I'm here.
>> And in a way, that's the location is pulled automatically. So in a way, I'm just not doing this. Um, I normally could enter something. I do this later. And then it simulates my MRI because we have so many data that it can simulate automatically a kind of an MRI picture with the intensity of these emotions. And then what I can do, because the only guy I'm sitting here is this person, I can send my score to him as a thank you. That's the gamification. So in a way, I give him the date and the location. So we have some verification that is really me. And then I basically just did by email. I think it's fine. It's fine. There he is. That's it. That's a loyalty creation. That's it.
[applause]
So already here, it screams for blockchain, right? So, so when you show me this the first time, there's identity in there. So there's just the basic aspects of of of technology, ownership, um, uh, decentralization, everything in there. But there's way more to it, right? So this is where we got excited here at CBVC. It, you then started to think this further. It started already when you wrote the book, but, but can you run us through where, what you are thinking about right now?
>> Yeah.
>> So there's no token yet. There's no protocol yet. This, this is just where you are now, and where we are partnering with the next step in biotech. You are always about efficacy and safety, and you do three studies: phase one, phase two, phase three, and then you go. And because we're a biotech company, we do the same thing. So last year, we did phase one that actually just was inviting two handful of people, trying whether this is actually efficient. So kind of we have an effect on these people, and whether it's safe in terms of my memory stays mine, private, do we have all the kind of securities in place? Um, the success was actually phenomenal. What we what we tried to do is we, we wanted to have a way on that you can spend your royalties. And we found a way that if you are allowed to use it to train your AI that is in the app, you're not faking it, because otherwise you load fake data on your AI, and that kind of just like left us with everybody was using it, and we liked that. So that we literally in a few weeks, we start phase two, what is inviting 50 to 100 people to join us to actually just run through this. And then hopefully, like in pharma always, if it works and is safe, we hopefully go to phase three and launch. I think the real first universal, all-inclusive, because you can all do it without huge energy plants, and private, because it's your ID, your emotions, your local localization stamp, your time stamp. You cannot be here and someone else. I can only make this memory here. I cannot be somewhere else and make another one.
>> And that was the idea why I was so excited to meet >> Matias.
>> I was excited to meet you. So, so just so I understand correctly, next you're going to invite uh, participants. They, they would do the same thing. And if you're considering doing that, right? So even, even if it's in a private placement situation, >> you're going to, I'm going, I, I'm supposed to be part of that, right? You told me. [laughter] I have, I have to do that because you, at some point, you told me that the reg, the best product out there in the market, uh, uh, biomarker product, you get 80, 100 biomarkers or something like that. How many are we going to get if I do that?
>> A thousand.
>> Actually, we're at 10 million. Right. So in a way, we combined this between a, if, if you maybe to explain that, if you go to a longevity clinic, um, today, you can just like get something between 250 to 300 biomarkers to kind of just check how long you live. The, the point is, longevity and feeling happy correlates 100%. This is what I always tell everyone. If you ask me that you want to live long, I just say, "Live happier." So we have a compilation of a, a lot of biomarkers, but also your emotional well-being data that you never get anywhere, and to integrate that in your personal AI that you can take with you at home. That is basically the first test um, where we're inviting people, and then we can basically see the behavior. We can see kind of just like, does the behavior match our hundred thousands of memory that we have already created in the community? Because that's a good benchmark. You, you have kind of benchmark of emotion ratings from people who were not believing there's a token. It's a very good control concept.
[gasps]
>> Yeah, I could go on and on and on. It's, it's, it's really fascinating what you are doing at at Matter Science. Um, you were suggesting that we ask for questions.
>> I, I think it'll be too much. But just one thing, I, I think you can talk to to Axel after. You told me this could be the first scam-proof token because you can't cheat.
>> But don't answer. It's gonna take hours.
>> If we would have all our, try to do it short, if we would have all our MRI at home, you cannot cheat. It's impossible. Not really convenient. But there are other imaging abilities like fNES that you can literally translate this data to, and they could give you a real objective measure of your intensity that you experience. That's like a helmet you, you could potentially wear at home.
>> Excellent. Thank you so much. We're very excited to be part of this journey.
[applause]