Is Decentralized Science (DeSci) the biggest scientific shift since the internet with Andrew Hemingway

Summary
In this episode, we sit down with Andrew Hemingway, founder of the DeSci Alliance, to explore how Web3 is transforming how science is funded, shared, and collaborated on - from breaking pharma’s data monopoly to onboarding citizen scientists from Reddit.

Whether you're curious about DeSci, a startup founder in healthtech, or just want to understand how blockchain and science can finally converge for real-world impact on individuals like us - this conversation is for you.

Topics We Cover:
- What is DeSci and why does it matter now
- How DeSci can disrupt the "big boys club" of traditional science
- The low-hanging fruit: data, privacy, and funding
- Using X (Twitter) Communities to build ecosystems
- Why the DeSci Alliance is amplifying—not gatekeeping—the space
- The untapped potential of biohackers, Reddit researchers, and citizen science

Guest: Andrew Hemingway
Formerly with Tron & Avalanche, now on a mission to build the connective tissue of decentralized science through the DeSci Alliance.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to DeSci and Its Importance
01:21 Andrew's Journey into Web3 and DeSci
04:39 The Formation of DeSci Alliance
08:52 Utilizing Twitter Communities for DeSci
11:10 The Current State of DeSci Communities
13:16 The Need for Unity in DeSci
14:41 Challenges in Communicating DeSci's Value
18:36 Exploring the Scope of DeSci Beyond Healthcare
20:01 Building a Community in Science
22:36 Low-Hanging Fruit in Data Services
28:08 The Future of Data Sharing in Pharma
29:14 Emerging Voices in the D-Sci Space
31:55 Seriousness of the D-Sci Community
33:53 The Importance of Narrative in D-Sci
35:56 Future Directions for D-Sci Alliance


Hit Subscribe for more interviews on:
- DeSci
- Web3 for scientists
- Blockchain in healthcare
- Crypto funding models
- Peer review reform
- Tokenizing research
- Decentralized data collaboration
- New Health and Wellness data sharing models

Transcript

Pete (aka BFG) (00:00)
Hello everybody and we are back. And today I'm here with Andrew. Andrew, welcome.

Andrew Hemingway (00:05)
Thank you so much. Yeah, excited to be here and jump in the conversation.

Pete (aka BFG) (00:10)
Cool. So today we are going to talk about DeSci or Decentralized Science or whatever you want to call it. It's basically the area, I bumped into probably three years ago, And I, because I used to work in pharma, I always liked the topic. I thought,

decentralized science probably not going to solve everything, but it might be a nice way to add some sort of transparency to the processes which we have. And maybe, give more people a chance to actually like be part of it. Cause right now it's a big boys club So that's why we have Andrew here today. And I bumped into Andrew because he is a founder of DeSci Alliance. Am I saying it right? Yeah, cool.

Andrew Hemingway (00:47)
That's correct.

Pete (aka BFG) (00:50)
So let's jump right into it. Andrew, how did you get to like web3? When did you get interested in this thing? And how did you end up in DeSci

Andrew Hemingway (00:56)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so it kind of an interesting story. Part of the story begins with where I live, which is in New Hampshire. And New Hampshire is a very small state, but it's a very libertarian state. And so we have a good base of libertarians. Those happen to be my friends and, you know, comrades in arms. And so it was introduced to Bitcoin very, very early.

Pete (aka BFG) (01:17)
One of them.

Andrew Hemingway (01:21)
as part of a kind of a movement here and among libertarians. so it was introduced to it. I never fully grasped the currency piece of it, but I always immediately understood the blockchains potential. And in fact, one of the first ways that I saw the disruptive power of blockchain was in government and did various interviews with like

basically just emailed or tried to get in contact with leaders in the blockchain space, including Andrea, Centinopolis, Roger Ver, like others, and actually just like spent time interviewing them before, really before this podcast style of thing, just like calling them and asking them and saying like, how do you think this is going to disrupt government? And so really understood really early on the potential for blockchain. Ultimately, after around COVID, I went to work for Tron.

helped to lead their ecosystem team, went onto Avalanche and was part of their growth team, and then onto a number of other protocols and things like that. One of the last projects I was working on was working in the data privacy space and specifically bringing private data on chain, retaining its programmability and composability, but...

but bringing it in a way that would still protect its privacy. And that obviously overlaps in the DeSci space. So I started talking to a number of DeSci projects and just kind of like got pilled really, just started to see the potential. And I think for me, I think I represent a lot of people who come from the crypto space and maybe more largely like DeFi in the sense that what I realized was that in DeFi,

Pete (aka BFG) (02:51)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hemingway (02:54)
DeFi or really crypto and the Mimi side of crypto and they they have to dream up like use cases or like they feel like create They have product and they've got to go try and find some way to sell it what I realized right away in DeSci was that you have real problems that affect real people in real life And that the blockchain provides for them

real solutions. And so there's this all this demand. There's demand around new ways to fund science and new ways to capitalize projects. You have all this demand around breaking down the walls of the institutions and the good old boys club. whether that's through the peer review system, whether that's through access to laboratories, Like in all these ways, blockchain disrupts the middle man. And so like in all these ways, I just saw that potential.

And I literally, I'm just being totally honest with you, Pete, I literally just started tweeting about what I kind of thought about it. And yeah, I guess I just sort of hit a nerve and, you know, I'm not a scientist. I don't pretend to be a scientist. I literally come at this for just as like, you know, my voice is just to amplify the space and to raise the work that's being done by so many amazing people.

Pete (aka BFG) (03:53)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah

So what is your background? Are you like a techie or it's more like economy, finance or sales?

Andrew Hemingway (04:17)
No, no, no, no, I think my background is more of just like, building narratives around like emerging tech. I've always sort of been early and I've always been able to understand concepts and articulate them in a way that resonate with people. And I would say that's literally all that I've done.

Pete (aka BFG) (04:26)
Okay.

Thank you.

Andrew Hemingway (04:39)
I have marketing and background. The way that I see my role in the DeSci space is just as the ecosystem guy. So I want to connect people, I want to amplify the space, I want to just see it grow. And I have no real economic interest in this. I just am passionate about seeing the space amplified and growing.

Pete (aka BFG) (04:53)
Right? Yep.

Nice. So how did the DeSci Alliance happen and how old is it? Because, you know, I basically started, came back to DeSci after New Year's. So it was like mid January when, you know, everything like skiing and holiday traditions were done. And I think, you know, one of the first things I bumped into was first of all, you and some hints on like a list of VCs who are going to invest.

and then the DeSci alliance.

Andrew Hemingway (05:27)
Yeah, so I started by, well, I started posting about, think one of the first things I posted about was like, here are some companies or here are some projects that are interesting. Who am I missing? And look, from my experience, I know how to build an audience and build a community. so, I just sort of doing, just sort of posting a little bit about that. And that's what,

That's when I just like, that's what sort of opened the door and started gaining some traction. And suddenly there was, you you could tell like, this was a, this was a big need in the space. Like the ability to, to, to go to market, to be able to build a community was, was, is clearly a big need in the DeSci space. And there's a lot of interest in that. And so, so out of that, I just kind of said, well, you need a mechanism. Like if you're going to start a community. So, so yeah, I let me just explain it you this way.

especially if there's projects who are listening to you who are thinking about this very thing. One of the first things you have to do is you've to have an aligned vision. And so for me, the aligned vision is let's build DeSci And you've heard me say already multiple times, amplify DeSci. And I'm just going to keep saying that because that's just what I'm trying to do. That's not a mistake. It's intentional. It's on purpose. We're going to build up the entire ecosystem. But if you're a project,

Pete (aka BFG) (06:46)
Yep, makes sense.

Andrew Hemingway (06:48)
If you're a project, you've got to figure out what is that aligned vision? What is that mission that you're going to articulate, that you're going to say over and over and over over again? Some projects that are successful have that. You can say, they're successful because they're talking about this or this. There are a lot of other projects that you could say, man, those guys are amazing, but I can't really tell you what they're doing. And that's the key. So you have an aligned vision. The second thing after the aligned vision is

Pete (aka BFG) (07:09)
True.

Andrew Hemingway (07:15)
you have to have a place or a way to sort of catalyze that support. So the easiest thing for me was because the traction that I was experiencing was coming to me through Twitter, I just kind of like went to their community function and just said, okay, let's do something there. Now they don't have a great community function, but, it's sort of underused because of that, but it's a lot easier than saying, hey, go to Discord or hey, go to Reddit or hey, go to here or go to Telegram or go to this one or go there.

Pete (aka BFG) (07:38)
Absolutely.

Andrew Hemingway (07:40)
Especially because

everybody in Web3 is tired of doing that. No one wants to join another Telegram group. Nobody wants to join. So what I did was I just simply said, OK, let's just start an X community. It's a very low, very low burden of effort to join. You literally just click Join. But what that does is it tells Twitter that all of these people have opted into my content. So now I have something like 700 people all around DeSci who have all

Pete (aka BFG) (08:01)
Mm-hmm.

Okay, nice.

Andrew Hemingway (08:07)
I've all, by a signal, told Twitter's algorithm that they want my content. And that's a very strong signal for Twitter's algorithm. It's stronger than almost anything that you can find out there. And so what I was able to do was sort of like use that as a way to then start to post inside of that community and start to talk about raising the volume and amplifying DeSci

All of those people have that shared vision. They all want to do the same thing. They all see that as value. And so that's been my approach and reason why I started DeSci Alliance and sort of the mechanism behind it.

Pete (aka BFG) (08:28)
Mm-hmm.

So when did this happen? Was it like last year and or this year?

Andrew Hemingway (08:41)
Yeah,

it was like I think December timeline Yeah, I think it was like early December. I think so. It's very very recent

Pete (aka BFG) (08:46)
December down. Okay, perfect. By the way, so to...

Okay. So to ask about the Twitter community function, which, you know, I see it on a timeline. I'm a member of some communities, but, know, I don't use it very often. But, uh, I was always curious. Does it mean that because I'm member of the community, which you started, for example, that I'm going to see all your posts or I'm just going to see more of them than I usually would just more. Okay.

Andrew Hemingway (09:03)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, you see more of them.

I mean, because what, just, I mean, just think about it. Like from, from, from Twitter's perspective, when Pete says, I'm going to join the DeSci Alliance, that's a, that's a, you're literally opting into my content stream. And, but, but the, the, the little X factor here that no one has yet really fully realized is that anyone who posts inside of that community.

Pete (aka BFG) (09:30)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Andrew Hemingway (09:42)
which right now I have it set so that anybody can post, anyone who posts inside of the community has access to all the people who have opted in too. So when you, and that's the value of being a part of the Alliance is when you come in, you have the ability. So like when you go to make a post now on Twitter, up at the top, it says post to everyone, you hit that dropdown and you should see a list of the communities that you're in that allow you to post. You can post Alliance.

Pete (aka BFG) (09:51)
Okay, let's see.

Hmm.

Andrew Hemingway (10:10)
And when you post in the D then you post the DeSci Alliance and what you're doing is you're telling Twitter, this is DeSci content that the people in the DeSci Alliance are going to be interested in. goes into that feed. And what happens is that DeSci content gets set into their content timeline.

Pete (aka BFG) (10:10)
Right.

Nice. Just gonna try it straight away.

Andrew Hemingway (10:28)
Yeah. Yeah. So that's, you know, that's, that's, that's one of the mechanisms that I think is there. Otherwise it's, it's, it's almost, I mean, they're from a functionality perspective, like it's very minimal. Like, I mean, there isn't really much functionality inside of Twitter for communities. Now I think that they're going to be improving that because I even just noticed this last week, they issued an update, around the community functionality, changed some of the formats. You can now add communities into your bios. So I think that they're going to start like,

Pete (aka BFG) (10:29)
Okay, that makes sense.

Andrew Hemingway (10:56)
doing this more and more. So it's a good time to start to use that. anyways, that's where that came from. And that was my thinking behind why I did it.

Pete (aka BFG) (11:05)
probably lucky

in the sense that there is not too many of these high communities just yet.

yeah.

Andrew Hemingway (11:10)
think I can comment on that. think that

there are, without a doubt, there are some amazing people who have been here in this space and who feel, and have, not just that they feel, but they have been critical in building the space to what it is today. And sometimes when somebody like me shows up, who I'm just tweeting about stuff, but gets a little bit of like,

know, traction and stuff. Sometimes there's a feeling of like, man, you know, that they're, they're stealing all the glory. And that's not my intent at all. Like, I mean, honestly, I didn't set out one day to say like, I'm going to take over DeSci. I didn't do that. I've just, what I want to do is I just want to elevate. I don't want to overtake. I'm just trying to elevate every, all the amazing science based projects that have been in the space and that are coming into the space and like,

the more that we can do that, the better. And it's going to take literally everybody's voice. One of the things that DeFi did really early was isolate. They in-fought and they isolated. You had all the fights around the change, you had all the fights around the various projects, you have all these communities getting, right? And you had these turf wars all the time. What happened is it created this very antagonistic environment in which no one was winning because everyone was fighting everybody else.

We as a community of DeSci will not exist. We cannot fight big pharma. We cannot fight institutions. We cannot win this battle that we've engaged in if we are gonna be filled with infighting about who came first and who did this first and who did that first, right? And so look, I'll be the first one to take a seat at the back of the bus. This is not about me. This is about like just moving.

everybody forward and if I can say one thing to the DeSci community it's like we all need to participate. Pete, the work that you're doing is important, the work that others are doing it's important. It doesn't matter if you've just started, it doesn't matter if you've been in here for five years. What matters is that like everyone who will align around and carry the same flag and say okay let's all work for DeSci and the vision that DeSci promises. I think if we can align around that

And if I can help be a voice in unifying people around that, then man, you know, I'm happy.

Pete (aka BFG) (13:23)
You're good. You're good.

No. Look, I agree. I think, you know, it's sort of natural to feel a little bit of distrust in Web3 towards everybody who is here shorter time than you, because you may be just passing through. Who knows? Also, it's kind of like schizophrenic many times because we all want like more people in. When they come, we are like...

Andrew Hemingway (13:39)
Yeah. Yeah.

Pete (aka BFG) (13:49)
I think we haven't figured it out yet. But especially on DeSci side, I think the space is super vast and there's a lot of work to be done on build the credibility that people here are not just drifters and that they're also like serious scientists.

but also people who understand business because eventually someone has to pay for it. And it's nice that we can raise a couple of million or tens of millions, but it really means very little in a pharma healthcare space. And so I think we will not really make it without onboarding the big guys eventually. it's gonna be a long painful process, but we need...

Andrew Hemingway (14:27)
Mm-hmm.

Pete (aka BFG) (14:32)
unified culture and also at least a strong looking group. it has to look strong from the outside.

Andrew Hemingway (14:41)
Right. I think that so if I could if I could kind of riff on what you just said, I think what you said is very important and and aligns with with my perspective. think one of the things that's missing right now in the conversation is projects have to begin to articulate message. Really, why they're choosing DeSci

I think even before they get to the messaging around, know, we're a DAO and we exist to cure this thing or that thing, right? Those are powerful statements. Or we've got some lab and we're gonna do this or X or... I think they have to first articulate why DeSci and what is it that DeSci brings to their project that is of value.

Otherwise, there's this question which exists among scientists and pharma, everybody, which is like, why do need a blockchain to do that? And that's this prevailing question, but it's a question of ignorance. It's spoken into silence because to date, DeSci has not done a good job of answering that question. And it's a powerful question, though, because it undermines your existence.

So if you say, I'm going to choose DeSci and we're a DeSci project, then we're going to do this. And you can't answer the question, why the blockchain? Then your project isn't a real project. It's not a legitimate project. You have to be able to say, we chose the blockchain and we chose DeSci because it adds this. It aligns with our mission to do this. It facilitates funding in these additional ways. You have to be able to say, here's why.

Pete (aka BFG) (16:00)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hemingway (16:15)
If, and I've said this before and I'm going to keep saying it, if the only reason why you chose DeSci is to launch a token, you're not DeSci.

Pete (aka BFG) (16:15)
Mm-hmm.

Right. But launching a token means funding.

Andrew Hemingway (16:22)
If the

Right. If,

if, if, if you only exist to just launch a token, you're not DeSci because on the back of that, you're, you're, you're De but you're not Sci Like, because otherwise you could be anything you want to be. Like you could, you could make it up. You could make it a decentralized a company and launch a token. Right. So yeah, I'm sure there is, I think it's really important that that to be DeSci.

Pete (aka BFG) (16:44)
I think there is one.

Andrew Hemingway (16:53)
You're coming to it because you see the value that the technology adds and that it feeds in value into the proposition. And I think that that is a very, very critical piece. The more projects who can articulate that help to differentiate themselves from the pump and dumps, help to differentiate themselves from the crypto side and help to establish themselves as legitimate.

Pete (aka BFG) (17:03)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hemingway (17:21)
players. And I think that there are a lot of legitimate cases to use the blockchain. There are a lot of legitimate cases for decentralization, for composability, for immutability, for verifiable. I mean, there's a lot of reasons to choose a blockchain as your technological base. so, but I just think the DeSci projects today have got to do a better job of answering that question first.

and then talk about their particular solution.

Pete (aka BFG) (17:52)
Yeah, I agree. think, you know, it's in many ways similar everywhere in web3 or even web2. young companies usually have a problem of describing neatly. It's like, what are you doing and why are you doing it this way, not the other way. many times it's because they don't think it's important. Sometimes it's because

they haven't spent time thinking about it because the founder sort of intuitively feels this is like a good direction, which I want to try.

Andrew Hemingway (18:21)
Yeah.

Pete (aka BFG) (18:22)
Maybe privacy and all the tooling which we have in crypto and immutability could play a big role. But in many ways, it will mean that a lot of things, a lot of ways how we do science today will have to change.

one question which I had since we agreed that we are going to talk was, so everywhere when I see DeSci on a timeline, it always implicitly assumes we talk actually about healthcare and pharma. But, know, why is it DeSci and not like health Sc or something? Because

There are a lot of other areas of science, right? From physics to whatever you may have. So what, or am I understanding it wrong? Because my feeling is it always ends up with like healthcare related stuff when you say DeSci.

Andrew Hemingway (19:17)
So I can appreciate that. I think that there is a lot of health-focused projects that align with that. I think this is because of the supplement space and sort of the unregulated nature of the supplement industry, especially in the United States, that you have real companies who are doing real science and real projects, but they kind of live outside of the like,

you know, FDA, World, you know, someone's probably gonna correct me here for which agency is directly responsible for them. But I think, but those projects have built communities, they're real companies with real revenue, and they have audiences that I think are a natural fit to bring this in. Think about the average science lab, like the lab who's running, you know, they're a,

Pete (aka BFG) (19:41)
Great.

Gotcha.

Andrew Hemingway (20:01)
run by an immunologist and he's got a laboratory. They're doing amazing work. What they don't have is a community. They never had to go build any customer base. They deal with institutions. They're all B2B. They go to conferences, they meet clients, they write papers, and that's how their business operates. When you talk about DeSci, suddenly it's an entirely new model of going direct and thinking about how you can build a community and raise awareness.

That's a very different game. So I think what you're hearing is the first wave of the companies that exist to have the easiest and lowest barrier to market. Now, what I would say is there's a lot of other things from companies I've been speaking to. I mean, last week, I I spoke to over 20 companies. This week will be over probably over 30.

Pete (aka BFG) (20:41)
Okay.

Andrew Hemingway (20:56)
like lot of projects, getting a real sense of what's happening. There's a very significant amount of interest coming from the established science space, especially as NIH funding has sort of been disrupted. That's caused a lot of people to start to consider what they're doing and how they're doing it. I also think there are a lot of other verticals that are becoming aware and are starting to move into this. Just last night,

Pete (aka BFG) (20:57)
Impressive.

Andrew Hemingway (21:24)
was contacted by a company who's doing stuff in space, right? And there's some science work that's being done around that. That falls to me, that falls under DeSci right? At some level, astronomy is a form of science. So like you have all these things. What about ecology? What about environment, right? These companies exist. I don't think that they've all, they've all...

adopted the DeSci brand. I don't think that they've necessarily seen the benefit of it. And to your point, it's been a very small community for a very long time with very really tight arms around it. And I think what we're starting to see now is that expand and for the DeSci tone to change to say, hey, we want to help everybody, want to elevate everybody. Let's all band together and do this. So I think we're going to need all the biologists, all the ecologists, all the immunologists, every...

vertical of science that you can think of that aligns around the values and principles of blockchain. We're going to need them on board and we're going to need all of us to be elevating and amplifying ultimately the entire ecosystem.

Pete (aka BFG) (22:26)
I see. Okay. Yeah. Fair explanation. So from your perspective, What is the easiest, low-hanging fruit we could tackle with, science?

from your perspective.

Andrew Hemingway (22:38)
Lowest hanging fruit. The problem with asking me that question is, or asking anyone, is they're biased by their own knowledge, right? this is where I look into that vast space of things that I don't know and wish that I could pull something out of that for you.

But look, I think that the first and immediate low hanging fruit around DeSci revolves specifically around data services. So there are primitives that exist today to allow you to facilitate data, whether it's private or public data, to use it on chain in both programmable and mutable ways. And that aligns really, really well with

you know, the blockchain and those sort of things. Scientists, the entire d-size space revolves around data, whether it's research data, whether it's patient data, whether it's health, whatever it is, this space creates massive amounts of data. And so I think that there is some real opportunity there. So...

In my mind, I was to pitch you a startup right now that I would love to do, and I'm sure there are people who are doing it, is I think that with some of the privacy primitives that exist today, you can tie into existing healthcare databases or large data sets, whether private or public. And they all retain their silos, yet they're connected.

And you can have AI run over the top of those consistently. basically, maybe this is what Data Lake is kind of doing, but basically build this massive array of connected data sets that you don't own, but you get to rent, right? You get access to. So the economics are, I'm not buying all your data. I'm simply generating an additional stream of revenue for you.

Pete (aka BFG) (24:19)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hemingway (24:27)
So, through API, you connect to all these data sets. And now the AI is just running over all the private data sets. You never give up your data. The AI never sees your data. It's simply able to compute on top of it, pull inferences off of it, use that, right, and compile it. So now, what that means is imagine if that's done at the pharma level. Now, all of the data from from Pfizer, all the data from Merck and all the data from this little random

laboratory over here and over here and over here could be connected in a singular way. Super easy. Infrastructure already exists. They can be all connected in simple way. And now Pfizer can run queries. Merck can run queries. And now their data set is not their own, but now the shared human knowledge around pharma without ever sharing any company secret or private brand secret or anything like that. And it's only a value add, right? It's not a cost add. It's only a value add.

Pete (aka BFG) (25:12)
Hmm.

Andrew Hemingway (25:22)
So that's, to me, that's like, that's just something I thought about. And I'm sure it exists.

Pete (aka BFG) (25:23)
Yeah.

Sounds

like a dream, Yeah, I'm saying it because I used to work for Merck. And this is not happening. But yeah, it will be a dream. I think it's partly understandable why it's not any company's dream because the data is basically the fuel for...

Andrew Hemingway (25:30)
Yeah

okay. Well, you would know. Yeah.

Pete (aka BFG) (25:53)
everything you can do in the future. So even if eventually, and you know, maybe we could do it through regulation, you know, it can be like obligatory once you use your data for, don't know, 10 years, you have to put it into a private public pool and everybody can query them. But, everybody wants to keep their data and run the AI, hopefully better AI than the others.

on their own data to come up with like future IP, which I guess is going to be the biggest stifler of data feeding growth for pharma in general.

Andrew Hemingway (26:25)
Yeah. There's,

think there's a shift coming in the sense that you're not, remember when, when, when Google first started indexing websites and like at first everyone was like, take everything like we got to have, we got to secure the walls. Like Google can't get into our place. And then all of sudden it switched. And then you said, let's hire people who help us better index our data to get it onto Google. Do you know what I mean?

Pete (aka BFG) (26:35)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Andrew Hemingway (26:51)
There was a shift. So I think that as these privacy primitives start to make their way into the market, what you're going to see is you're gonna have the Merck and you're gonna have the Pfizer and you're gonna have these guys who are gonna stand apart. And you're exactly right. They're gonna be the institutions. And what they're gonna do is they're gonna work with legislators to try and pass legislation against this. They're not gonna ever go for it, right? 100%, 100%.

Pete (aka BFG) (26:51)
Yeah, yeah, I do.

Probably, yeah.

Andrew Hemingway (27:17)
But what you're going to have is you're going to have these, startups who are going to start banding together. And what you're going to notice is that collectively and with a, a, with a, privacy primitive that protects their data and retains their competitive advantage, but makes all of them more, advantageous. that, that's the, that's the thing. Like they're all going to be more efficient.

That wave is going to have to grow, grow, against all odds and against all the forces of nature. It's going to have to grow. But what's going to end up happening is at some point, one of those guys is going to go, you know what? I can actually double the size of my data set that I'm running my AI on, or triplet or quadruplet. And I could have an advantage if I do this before Merck and before Pfizer do it. So I'm going to do it. And then all of a sudden you start to have this like,

this wave that you can't avoid.

Pete (aka BFG) (28:09)
you know, if I would be placing my bet, I would actually bet on the other way around. So I would bet on the fact that some of the startups in the DeSci space will figure out the way how to actually create the data sets in Silico without the need for data sets from the old pharma. So sort of like...

you know, Nvidia is doing with the virtual worlds from coming to Cosmos now. That someone will figure this one out so that, there will be a way to create the data sets to train the AI to do the things you would normally do with the real life data. Because it seems to me like more plausible than basically just breaking the

Andrew Hemingway (28:48)
Yeah.

Pete (aka BFG) (28:55)
multi-billion dollar alliance of F50 pharma companies, right? It's too much money hidden in there.

Andrew Hemingway (29:00)
Yeah, could be.

Right,

right, and power and all that. It's totally possible. Yeah.

Pete (aka BFG) (29:08)
So coming back to our DeSci Alliance, if I would like to get, let's say,

better understanding of what's been happening in DeSci before we got here and who is super exciting total newcomer into the space, which names would pop into your head. So I could contact them and try to get them on the pod.

Andrew Hemingway (29:33)
hmm. What names would come into my head? well, there's, mean, there's a number of really great people. So the first one is, is my cohost on, the spaces that we've been doing. And, we have a space tomorrow with, AI, but Aaron McGinnis from DeSci Mic is amazing. And, you know, a DeSci she's been around for.

Pete (aka BFG) (29:49)
Aaron, right. Yeah, okay.

Andrew Hemingway (29:55)
quite a while, I'm not sure if she would consider herself an OG or not, but certainly, you know, somebody who's really influential, well connected, and just valuable in the space. So I think that she's somebody, the projects that she's aligned with, I think have been a great help.

really

Let me just say this truthfully. The people who have come on this space, the people who have participated in this space, all the projects who are saying, I'm willing to come, I'm not saying this just for the sake of saying it. I truly mean it. That is what's made this fun and successful and helpful.

Pete (aka BFG) (30:28)
By the way, I have

to give you a lot of credit. I was surprised to see so many projects come and actually in a relatively organized way say things which made sense, like what we are doing, what we are trying to do. Because a lot of times, well, I would say probably most of the times, honestly, in different areas of Web3, if you join any spaces which are supposed to introduce some projects, you...

oftentimes learn really nothing, but this was really good. I've grown my DeSci list of accounts to follow, so it was definitely helpful.

Andrew Hemingway (30:55)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Awesome. Yeah.

one of the things that we talked about after that spaces was like, we heard from multiple people who said, I, I found like two new lab partners, through that space and was able to connect with them and, and started to do stuff. I connected with the VC because of, know, they were in that space. All right. three people reached out to us and one talking about partnerships.

Pete (aka BFG) (31:21)
Awesome.

Andrew Hemingway (31:27)
Like I think to your point, being able to just go through and keep it to like a succinct time where we're just talking about what we're doing. It also, I want to ask you, we talked a little bit about the memes and blah, blah, blah, but like when you were on that space, I don't know how long you stayed for, was three hours or something like that. When you walked away from that, did you get the sense that the DeSci community was a bunch of pump and dumps or did you get the sense that these were actually serious people, like real scientists?

building real projects, truthfully.

Pete (aka BFG) (31:58)
so I, I probably ended up somewhere in the middle. I definitely haven't thought this was like, some yapping space where people were hyping their projects, which have no substance. I couldn't say whether, you know, they were just like really excited builders without real credentials or they were actual scientists.

I think it's one of the areas which we will have to fix, especially for DeSci.

Because if you will come to more of funding issues and research being put forward for funding, you will want to know, I would want to know as a founder, who am I giving money to them? Do they have a chance? Or is this just like they are really excited about the topic, but they've never researched anything. But so to your point.

Andrew Hemingway (32:40)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Pete (aka BFG) (32:44)
It was great. I definitely thought these people are serious about what they're saying. They will do. I've, you know, connected with Rosen from there. So a couple of projects which totally made sense. So some projects which are on scene for a long time. But you know, this distinction, whether they are serious scientists or, you know, just excited public, not really possible to make.

Andrew Hemingway (33:02)
understand that.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah. I think when I come from the DeSci space, like you're saying, to have a space that was filled with people like that was like a very different experience than what I've had in other areas of Web3. And so that's why I'm excited about who's building in DeSci and just the nature of the projects that are coming to market. And look, these...

The people that I've talked to and networked with in DeSci are serious about science. Sometimes I'm hearing this sort of chatter from the scientific community or academics who are saying, well, if you even choose the label DeSci, you're not serious. And I just want to say they said the same thing about the internet. They said the same thing about every innovation ever.

Pete (aka BFG) (33:44)
Right, yeah.

Andrew Hemingway (33:54)
And in fact, the innovation that you're working on right now, some other scientists has said, if you work in this field, you're not a serious scientist. So like that's just just the criticism doesn't isn't enough to to make it legitimate. Instead, I think that that's why I'm coming back to this point that it's so important for the space to continuously advocate why they're choosing DeSci And and if we can articulate that.

If we can build that, I think that creates a foundation for all of our projects to flourish.

Pete (aka BFG) (34:21)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. And I, you know, I would add one thing. I, I believe DeSci would probably benefit a lot from some sort of like, I don't want to say organized, but maybe decentralized, but like organized approach to like figuring out the right narrative, which you want to pass on to outside space, honestly. And also maybe.

Andrew Hemingway (34:45)
Mmm.

Pete (aka BFG) (34:51)
sort of like figure out the priorities and steps for people who are new, which they should like take, you where should you start? And, and really just also for ourselves, like what's the low hanging fruit or what are the blockers which will really make the next steps really hard if we don't solve them now, things like that, right?

Andrew Hemingway (34:56)
Yeah.

Pete,

Pete, let's do it. We need to collaborate on that. We need to figure that out. I mean, seriously, that's what the Alliance is all about. It's like saying, if that's where you're, I totally agree with you, but if your mind is going in that direction, if you have a gift and thinking about it and seeing it from that perspective, then we need you to participate with us. Like, let's do it. Okay? I love it. I love it.

Pete (aka BFG) (35:14)
Really. Yeah.

I'm here, I'm here.

Cool. So what is the question, because we are running on 45 minutes and I know you have kids coming life to live, things like that. What is the question which I should have asked but didn't? What is the area which we didn't touch on, you wanted to talk about, you think it would be important to get out?

Andrew Hemingway (35:48)
Yes.

I think it would probably be like, where is this going? We talked about where it started. We talked about kind of what we're doing. I don't know that we necessarily talked about where it's going. okay, perfect. I beat you to it. Yeah, I I'm just being very frank about this and I have been the whole time. It's just like, I don't know where it's going.

Pete (aka BFG) (36:03)
Right, OK.

No, that was my last question. But you are there. You are there. Let's talk about it.

Andrew Hemingway (36:24)
I didn't start the Alliance with some sort of like master plan to take over the world and I don't think that that's gonna change. I think it's doing the types of things that we are doing. So spaces on Wednesday where we're focusing on specific verticals. like we started one last week was like a general one. This week will be AI, next week will be another vertical and another vertical and just thinking about how to aggregate those spaces. But you'll notice the difference though.

The thing that we're doing is we're not starting spaces to talk about ourselves. We're starting spaces to let everyone else have a platform. That's the reason why we're gaining traction. So like if you're a project and you're in the longevity space or you're in the health space or do a space and invite everyone on to talk about what they're doing. that, that's platform people stop stop gatekeeping people, right? That, that to me is like the thing. So anyways, we're going to continue to do that. So Wednesday at noon.

Pete (aka BFG) (36:58)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hemingway (37:18)
And on Friday, I think at 10 or something like that, we'll be doing like, what did you do in DeSci this week? And those are just very simple community builders. I imagine that as we move forward, we'll continue to do more spaces where we introduce new things. Maybe we do like a pitch competition and we bring on some VCs and do something like that. Maybe we bring on scientists in a certain field and have people present projects and have some sort of like critical questioning and just create.

Pete (aka BFG) (37:35)
Thank you.

Andrew Hemingway (37:44)
more like community building, community activities. I think some of the things that you just mentioned are something, are things that I also really want to participate in and would love to find people who also want to participate is like, how do we onboard? Like, so, so I spent, I spent a big part of my week this week, like diving into Reddit and it's not because like Reddit's like a, Reddit's a dark hole with all sorts of stuff, but, but what I noticed about it and I got sort of like dragged into it was

Pete (aka BFG) (38:05)
Okay.

Andrew Hemingway (38:14)
They are these massive communities of hundreds of thousands of people who are amateurs mostly, who are doing a lot of their own research. I mean, the biohacking communities, the peptide communities, all of those communities are huge masses of people. Now what's interesting is they all participate out of their own interest. But in DeSci,

they could have an economic participation in the projects that they're writing about and researching about and talking about. Right now, they're just doing it out of their own interest. I think that there's some amazing opportunities to align an economic interest to say, you're doing all this stuff over here, let's do this together. Let's onboard the Reddit communities into DeSci.

And just think, all the projects, if a project could onboard 300,000 people into their community, we would today say that, they're the greatest project that's been started in DeSci. It would be like insane. We would just go crazy. And literally, they're there. You have people who are every day spending their time writing about peptides, writing about molecules. They're on there, they're doing it, and they have this community going.

Pete (aka BFG) (39:12)
yeah.

Andrew Hemingway (39:27)
So like to me, I'm like, okay, how do we start to onboard those people into DeSci How do we show them the value proposition? How do we start to connect those dots? That's the stuff that I wanna do. Like I wanna figure that out. I wanna bring those people in. Into the projects, they're gonna fill in like the projects that they're interested in and they're gonna do great things. But like, how can I connect those two worlds? And that's what the DeSci Alliance is gonna be working on.

Pete (aka BFG) (39:51)
Okay, that's great. I'm happy to hear that because I think we often forget in Web3 that our community is very, very small and most of the stuff is happening somewhere else. it would be really hard to find topic about which people are not already talking somewhere else. It's just that maybe you don't know the place or you don't like the place. So a lot of people don't like Reddit, like lot of people don't like Twitter, right? So it's the same thing.

But yeah, totally agree. And I think the Friday and Wednesday so far turned out very good, so I'll be tuning in.

Andrew Hemingway (40:19)
really appreciate it.

Awesome. Pete, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to do this and listening to me for this long. Appreciate it very much.

Pete (aka BFG) (40:31)
Well, thank

you so much for making the time. It was great. I learned a ton and we'll see where we can move it. Everybody have a great day.

Andrew Hemingway (40:40)
Absolutely.

Thank you so much.