Open Science, Better Healthcare: A DeSci Conversation with Ray Dogum

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It can be how the data is stored and shared amongst the community as well. So, um, many definitions of DeSci out there. So, um, you know, I'm happy to share mine and dive deeper into it, but I suggest people also do their own research into it because there's a lot to

DeSci and I'm not going to be able to explain all of it in this podcast, I'm sure.

Um, and then they would send that to, you know, but it was a, it was a distributed effort essentially. And I think you had a couple of things like that that followed.

And now, it's really interesting what they're all doing.

Like Kyogen, Thermo Fisher, et cetera, they would spend millions of dollars a year on content that would mostly be read by academic scientists. Cause the idea was they would get brand loyalty while they were doing their PhD and then 10 years later, when they work in a biotech company, they'd buy their stuff.

It was kind of a long term investment for them. So the majority, I'd say about. 60 percent of our audience was academic scientists, and then it would be people working in industry, PI's, lab managers, things like that. Um, but the more I got to know that space, the more I realized that what almost any academic scientist cares about 10 times more than they care about anything else is where's my next grant money coming from.

So that's kind of interesting as opposed to just, looking for grants from the NIH, which is currently now in question, you know, their grants, uh, the federal administration is looking into that and seeing how they can reduce costs. If we were to lose, you know, most of NIH grants, what academic science, and even institutional research, science, what are they going to do? are they going to get their grants from? It's not going to come from their own pockets, I don't think. So either they're going to be very efficient with how they use money or they're going to find new alternative sources of funding. certainly I don't think anyone wants science to halt, slow down.

I think we want it. See more science and learn more about our universe and everything around it. Um, so yeah, very curious to see how the next four years will end up

You know, people will put up a Kickstarter and then they'll grow a game studio out of nothing by building things that people want. And you know, there, it's a decentralized mode of funding. Right? And then you also see the same in crypto, it's starting to become calling in to do ICOs. You know, for the longest time, if you had anywhere on your resume that you were involved in an ICO, no one would want go near you.

That's how low status it was. But now. you're starting to see people use these sort of decentralized funding mechanisms again to solve the, solve the, you're seeing with, uh, not all of them, but people are getting annoyed with certain VC backed projects, launching tokens that they're just enrich the insiders.

if you try and get in and run as retail, you're just going to get screwed over. So people are telling you this mechanism, it's the same story, just applied in different places. And we see it time and time again, I think.

You could, you can even argue for like, you know, uh, many decades. Uh, obviously there've been regulations to hold on a lot of corruption and insider trading, and that's worked relatively well. Um, but in the crypto space, it's much harder to do that because a lot of the transactions can be obfuscated or the identities of the people doing the transactions can be obfuscated. um, But then again, also once it's on the blockchain, it cannot be removed. So there's also that potential transparency in there.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is I think that although there are a lot more ICOs or token generating events, again, we're seeing now sort of like the cycle, um, we have to be careful out there. So do your own research, make sure what you're investing in, what you think you're investing in, makes sense to you and don't just click on a Twitter link and invest in it.

There's very few jobs out there that don't require you to log into something. um, going to have to adapt. And I think people are doing that relatively well. just considering the number of users who are on the internet and the amount of activity that's been going on. So this is, you know, we're talking macro level stuff here right now.

So there is cost benefit analysis here and like how we secure our wallets. Yeah. Um, of course, if you are a company managing multi billion dollar accounts, you're going to want to have some sort of multi signer, multi signature sort of wallet in place. Um, do you want to have a, you know, a series of processes in place to move large amounts of cryptocurrency?

How do you make sure that there is no way that someone can sort of steal, or coerce you to give your really protected private key.

Thank you. Um, I'm sure he's thinking about security and safety in a very different way going forward, uh, and that's going to hopefully cascade into other CEOs, other high level executives, thinking about the same, thinking about this in the same way and really making sure that their systems are protected.

But one thing you have to consider is, you know, law enforcement came into action and was able to recover. But what happens in a world where we're cutting out the costs or we're cutting out the, the budgets of law enforcement and it become private security enforcement. And then if there's private security enforcement and there's potentially private, mercenaries out there too, who can potentially request.

Um, I think that's just unnecessary. And, you know, it's, it's short. short term thinking, very short sighted. Um, but yeah, again, everyone has different incentives and different people are living in different situations. And sometimes this is the only way for some members of society to, to, to get by. So, um, yeah, I'm not gonna be able to preach too much on law enforcement anymore, but that's sort of my high level thoughts on that.

So. again, you have to really consider the in the ledger case, you know, ledgers, one of the most well known hardware wallets out there globally. I think these people are targeting high level executives, but we also don't know about all the targets that have happened or all like the hostage situation that have happened ransomware. It's not all reported, so there's a lot of consideration there too.

My LinkedIn says I live in Miami. If someone really was motivated to figure out where I live, I'm sure they could do that. You know, I wonder if they're, you know, Mexico is known for its security issues, right? It's not as bad as people say, but you know, they could look through. Oh, what if I search LinkedIn for crypto in this specific city?

What might I find? Well, no one's going to find me if they do that. and I don't think I'm big and important enough to, be some massive target that everyone's going to seek out. But I think it's just, hey, easy little things you can do to dramatically lessen your risk. like these people that, show up to Bitcoin Miami or whatever with giant Rolexes and this, to me, that's just dumb.

Um, Something tells me that the situation is going to keep getting worse for a while before it gets better

That's bad. Now you control your money. That's good. But I think the reality is a little more nuanced than that. And what we will see and are starting to see is what crypto technology enables you to do is have a range of choices for how to manage your keys. Okay, you can self custody the entire thing if you want.

in the end, I think the optimal solution for most people is probably not going to be full self custody. Uh, if nothing else for the, from a security perspective, right? Or if you get kidnapped, sorry, I can't give you my money. I don't have access to it. you just make yourself an attack vector. but yeah, like you point out, it's not just.

It's not just losing access to your money, but what would you even do if you lost access to the only copy of your medical records?

They have their use, but I take as few of them as possible. Uh, as my general principle here. Um, I have to take, uh, medicine for epilepsy. I never talk about that, but yeah, I've, I've had epilepsy since I was 17. I haven't had a seizure in, no, sorry. I've had it since I was 13. I haven't had a seizure since I was 17 or thereabouts, but I've always taken the medicine ever since.

Cause every time I talk to anyone about it, it's, uh, Hey. You could come off it and you might be fine, but there's a 50 percent chance you wouldn't be fine. And if you come off it and you start having seizures again, it's possible that if we put it back on, it won't work anymore, which is to me far worse than the alternative.

But if you could, you know, shared data and LLMs could look for patterns in it. Maybe you wouldn't need clinical trials in a traditional sense to figure this stuff out because you could just match patterns with what was happening and you could control for things without a human researcher having to be involved because the LLM could sort through the data.

I wonder if you could have extremely powerful monitoring and data. Cause at the moment, you know, do you remember the food pyramid? So

Our heart rate would be one thing. steps, diet, uh, you could ECG, all these different types of data points can be collected and shared specifically. I think that's key. and then you'll basically be able, theoretically, again, the holy grail of this whole D Health movement your health insurance premium will be paid by your own data, essentially. So you'll be able to live your life. unlimited good health care for free because you're providing your health care information.

You have to build it in a way that existing traditional systems can plug into it, essentially. Yeah, no, I'd love to go in deeper about that and like the concepts and how a typical day would be in the future for these types of, individuals.

But when it's not free, it comes out of the 70 percent taxes you pay to the government. And then you have to go on a waiting list for nine months. And then it's, there's so many downsides with that. But then the U. S. system is insane as well. I know people who pay multiple thousands of dollars a month. For coverage that doesn't even cover the first ten thousand dollars And then I live in latin america, right where you kind of as long as you have some money I think it's the best of both worlds because it's an actual private market system and for us it's affordable So we have, we have, uh, you know, health insurance that is, you can get a local plan here, which is vastly cheaper than this, like, probably by a factor of 10.

We have international health insurance, which, the reason we have that is, let's say you pick up a pre existing condition, well, it's actual insurance, not Obamacare, so they have, they're not going to cover you for that, right? Um, so if we were to move country at any future point, we can keep the plan, that's why we have it.

As you would expect but you know, if you want to go see the doctor here You can go and see an oncologist or a neurologist or whoever you want the next day and pay forty dollars for the appointment Now i'll spend that even give you their whatsapp, you know in america doctors will give you their whatsapp You just message them anytime you imagine that.

To me, it makes a lot of sense.

Which just looked completely cringe. You know, the LinkedIn posts with the 10 emojis and the 50 hashtags, like you can just spot 'em a mile away. Um, but they're dramatically better than they were two years ago. And now I, I'm, I'm sitting, I use Claude all day. I use it as my deal co-pilot. I use it to little bit.

I, I don't write my LinkedIn posts or tweets or stuff with AI and I never would. But I use it for things like the show notes for the podcast.

Um, but also from a quality point of view, I mean, nobody cares that the show notes are the most amazing show notes ever. They don't, they just need to describe what's going on and link to the thing. So I'm okay using AI for that, but beyond, you know, beyond the content, I'll give it data metrics, KPIs from the business that spot the patterns in this.

Okay. Sometimes I'll bring up, Oh yeah, that's okay. I'll take a look at that. Um, so for those use cases, I think it can be very effective.

And, um, you know, you're not putting garbage out there,

There are machines essentially zapping the weeds off of plants with little lasers, We're going Towards a direction in society where robots will do all the work that people didn't want to do but then what are we going to be doing right? Is it just are we just going to be purely socializing all day long with other humans and just hanging out and being artists I think that's potentially You Uh, the direction we're going into, but, I don't know, speculating now.

Some days more than others, which I think is true for anyone. But I think about, okay, we're on the cusp of a situation where that can actually occur. I'm thinking, what would I do?

There's a lot of ability to own your own assets in the gaming world. as opposed to having a centralized company able to take away your special sword. not much of a gamer, but I just want to use that example as a very adopter of blockchain, um, and low risk. No, it's not highly regulated.

The gaming industry as it, as healthcare is, even finance is more regulated. The gaming, far as I know. So yeah,

What are the big sort of problem spaces that need to be solved right now that could be solved with DeSci?

So scientists sharing data, not just on themselves as individual scientists, but let's call it research data, investigational research data, sharing it with the community in a way that they're recognized as one of the contributors of this pool of data.

Open access is something that is enabled with DeSci. and you know, let's continue to grow.