Ep. 569 Disrupting Big Pharma with Blockchain Technology
Ep. 569 Disrupting Big Pharma with Blockchain TechnologyPowered by RedCircle
In this episode of Crypto 101 we have Gennaro D’Urso and Israel Mirsky from Pharma DAO. Together, Gennaro and Israel have co-founded Pharma DAO: a blockchain-based community aiming to directly fund the development of medicines in the public interest. Part of Pharma Collective, the DAO’s vision is to create an alternative to the current pharmaceutical model dominated by Big Pharma. Even though this project is in the early stages we wanted to highlight some unique different opportunities people are working on in the space to change it up from the traditional finance talk so we hope you enjoy it!
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SPEAKERS
Brendan Veihman, Bryce Paul
Bryce Paul 00:03
All right everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the crypto 101 podcast where I am joined as always by my co host Mr. Brendan V min. Brendan, how are you doing today over on the east coast you’re hanging in there no storms ripping through your neighborhood today.
Brendan Veihman 00:19
Despite it being hurricane season over here we are hanging in just fine. We are starting to get the beginning of fall. The weather is starting to cool down and I am feeling amazing. I think I’m gonna go play some pickleball after this Bryce,
Bryce Paul 00:31
love it. Yeah, America’s fastest growing sport. Also, I heard a very, very much responsible for quite a lot of medical bills these days. People are getting hurt left and right on the pickleball courts. People the actuaries have not been pricing this in but anyhow, we are going to have a very interesting discussion today with the co founders of pharma Dow. We’ve got Israel Mirsky and Gennaro Ders. So and I apologize, I’m not Italian. And I know I didn’t get that right. He’ll say it beautifully in just a second. But these are the cofounders of Pharma. Dow Gennaro is also the CEO of genetics network. And we’re going to be learning about really, you know, the pharma, the big pharma industry, and how we’re going to disrupt it and how we’re going to bring decentralization and transparency and sovereignty and all those good, beautiful things that blockchain can bring to it. So let’s introduce our guests here. Gennaro will say hello to you. First, how are you doing today?
01:28
I’m doing great, really nice to be here and give you some insights I hope and decentralization can make a difference in this very important space.
Bryce Paul 01:36
And can you can you say the last name without butchering it like I just did, please. So
01:41
my name is Jannatul doorsill. Beautiful.
Bryce Paul 01:44
I love it. It just something about the Italian love language. It gets me every time. And Israel Mirsky. It’s a beautiful name as well. How are you doing today?
01:51
Thank you very much. Very well. Thank you. Good to be here.
Bryce Paul 01:54
Absolutely. So we’re gonna, you know, bust into the big pharma industry and how we’re going to disrupt it. But before we do that, I want to get you guys acquainted with our audience. And we want to know a little bit about how you guys came into the market, from the pharma industry now into into crypto and blockchain. So Jinora, let’s go with you. First, tell us a little bit about you and how you found yourself here.
02:19
Well, I guess the story really begins. That I’m a scientist, I was trained. In a classical sense, basic research, you’re doing all the things that we do, to get to a point where we can run our own laboratory, I was running a lab in the University of Miami as professor, I was really under a rock for the most part, I was, you know, working really hard and science and decided to do something very important during the pandemic was fine treatments to save lives. And our technology was used in that case. But then I realized that it was very difficult to bring these things forward just due to the system the way it works in the large pharmaceutical industry. And that’s not to say it’s necessarily awful. It’s just that’s the way it is. And so, along those that path, I realized that there might be an alternative way when I learned more about blockchain and the technology. And I thought of it at that time as a really powerful approach to form of distributed ledger, that people could join in and do something more direct towards the things we needed at the time. So one thing led to another I spent about a year and a half, really pursuing the dream of saying, can we decentralized? Can we democratize drug development, drug production? And the answer to that question is, I think we can, and I think we can do a very effective job of doing that. And, and so Farmingdale was born, at least conceptually. And then that’s led to basically creating something called farmer collective, which is a foundation 501 C three, but also has the infrastructure being run by farmer Dow. And in this decentralized tech to develop or produce drugs in the public interest is our main main job at this point. And I should say that Israel and I are co founders, but we also have several other people that have joined the community and are actively pursuing this mission.
Bryce Paul 04:11
Incredible. and Israel. What were you doing before you founded Farmingdale?
04:16
Sure, so I’m originally computer scientist. I spent many years in the advertising universe. I used to run the global media business for Intel at the agency and spent the better part of the billion dollars for Intel and then I ran global technology for OMD, which is one of the massive global media agencies. And so I was I’ve been a technologist and followed crypto for a very long time. I like to say that I’ve missed five fortunes in the space. I originally recommended Bitcoin as a disruptive technology to the Omnicom global CEO and it was $7 a while and I didn’t, I didn’t understand the price action. I just didn’t. I just thought it was A few disruptive, disruptive technology. But yeah, so I’ve been involved in this space for for quite a long time. In one way or another, I first got exposure to some of the formato related problems. When I was running strategy for a pharma company in the psychedelic space, a couple of years ago, a company called husana, we were looking to get a combination of psilocybin and CBD approved for traumatic brain injury, tremendously promising concept, by the way, and our early research looked great, but I started getting really well acquainted with how complicated this stuff was, and how hard it was to get drugs that are really promising funded, and how much cooperation you need from big farmers in the current system to get that done and get them into people’s hands. And I spent a lot of time thinking, in general, I spent a lot of time thinking about systems and how you create systems level positive change. And a lot of the time, it comes down to messing with the incentives for the players involved through applying new technologies. So I was following the early doubts. And I realized there was an opportunity to create a different kind of funding mechanism for pharmaceuticals, that could change the incentive structure in such a way that you could save a lot of lives and maybe shift the dynamics and formula and I was calling it something else. And worked on it for a while. But then I put it aside because I didn’t have the right collaborator. I needed someone who had deep form and research credentials, expertise, and was also excited about the promise here. And then eventually, I met Gennaro at an event. And he started to tell me what I had been thinking of as my concept. And I thought this is Kismet. And so we’ve teamed up and got off to the races.
Bryce Paul 06:35
Yeah, so I guess the big question that that kind of comes to mind, just, if we zoom out at a high level, it sounds like you guys are really looking to decentralize? How drugs are developed and how drugs are distributed? Where does block chain kind of come in? And how do we? How do we think about, you know, this technology really disrupting a really established industry? And maybe you guys could both take a crack at it from from different angles?
07:07
Sure. You know, I think in order to answer that question, it’s important first, to understand why the system is currently so broken and the ways in which it’s broken, right. So that you can sort of see how the, the decentralized technologies can be a really effective counter to that. So the macro story is that the incentives in pharma are really screwed up. And the cost structures that have developed around those incentives, so how much large farmers need to make to pay attention to a new drug, are so massive that they distort the market of what gets produced. So in order to be worthwhile for pharma, and to drive bottom lines and what their investors demand from the most drugs need to pay back $2 billion per year to a pharma giant that sponsors them. And since those folks are the source of money in this ecosystem, absolutely. Every other company that works in pharma is basically catering to them. And to those that effort to create those kinds of blockbusters. And to make that kind of money. A lot of those new drugs end up being things like oncology drugs that extend life by like weeks or months, because people are going to pay for anything at the end of the lives are drugs that people have to be on for the rest of their lives. And so they’re sustained sources of income. And new drugs that could be more effective and so could threaten an existing profitable drug are not infrequently purchased by those really large farmers and killed to avoid competing with like a cash cow drug that they already have. Meanwhile, like the harvest isn’t hard business school dry grads got in there a couple of decades ago and started experimenting with like how much they could charge for drugs, as opposed to producing them for a percentage over what they cost to research and make, which is how it worked before. And when you’re talking about things people need to function or survive, like there’s a lot of price elasticity there is like all of our societies, and we have noticed. So obviously, that’s not how public health is best served. There’s a lot of examples of this, but but probably the largest opportunity, or one of the largest opportunities from our perspective is in off patent drugs. So generics, there’s over 10,000, generic drugs that are generally recognized as safe they’ve already been tested. And, and drugs often have multiple uses for multiple diseases. But if a drug is off patent, there’s virtually no way of developing them for other conditions, because the potential payoff doesn’t rise to that multi billion dollar per year mark, that the big farmers need in order to justify to their investors working on stuff. So that’s kind of the macro, right? The ecosystem isn’t responsible to the people it’s meant to health, which looks like a good case for a doubt. Right. So, you know, we’re looking at this going, that if the core of the issue is that the incentives are misaligned and perverse How do we create better incentives like a better engine for developing drugs? Well, it’s got to be more responsible to the public into public health outcomes. And for that to happen, it’s got to be okay with making sub billion dollar profits on drugs and reinvesting those profits in ways that are actually in the public interest. And in theory, this should really happen through democratically elected governments tweaking the incentives. But because of the vast amounts of money being made in pharma, their lobbying engines have made it virtually impossible to do the reforms that are needed to do that at the governmental level, right. So we need another path. Instead of using the existing public treasury, we need to make one of our own and we need to make it self sustaining. So how do we do that we need a mechanism that’s responsible to investing on behalf of its members, which sounds like a dowel right? And we need to use we need a path to investing in the right things. Now, there are several models to use a Dow to help public health but a huge opportunity exists in that generic repurposing, like we said, right, you take an existing generic drug, it’s already recognized as safe, it’s very likely to be efficacious for new conditions, either, because it’s already been prescribed off label, like ketamine for depression, or because you’ve got a technology that’s suggesting it’s going to work like what General has a genetic networks. And you take that and you run a phase three trial on it, to re label it. For a new indication, you go for what’s called a temporary patent, like a 505. B two, I think, is the designation from the FDA, which gets you like three to seven years worth of temporary patent protection to make that generic drug for like that new indication, right? That’s gonna get you like 10s to maybe hundreds of millions of dollars worth of pay back, it’s not going to rise to that $2 billion level. But it’s enough to win put back into the Dow to create a self sustaining engine that works on drug development in the public interest that works to identify new ways to really advance public health. And that is transparent and accountable to the public. I know I just that’s kind of a long explanation. But you sort of need all the pieces to see the vision.
Bryce Paul 12:03
Yep. No. Awesome. And GNR? Do you see things the same exact way? Or is there anything you’d like to expound upon that Israel just mentioned?
12:12
Yeah, no, I think what Israel said is something we’ve been discussing for some time now. And I think it’s, I’m totally in agreement with everything you just mentioned. I’ll add just something else to the question you asked, which is why blockchain why blockchain is useful for this. And I guess that was sort of not knowing a lot about blockchain, when I started realizing the power of it was truly the distributed nature of the technology. So that’s really what attracted me to this concept, because I felt like it was an egoless system, that you could literally have something that was owned by a community. So I like to think of it and you know, I’ve had some pushback on this. But I think it’s pretty accurate to say, building a distributed autonomous organization, which I think is really important that it’s distributed, and autonomous, that your two things are generally are lacking for most hours that I’ve seen, is really, at the at the end, that is what you really want to create. And there’s no centralized figure in there, there’s no employees, there’s nothing happening other than as a treasury there that the community operates off of, much like the treasury of the United States. But remember, there’s 2 million employees that are involved with the transfer of that, those dollars to whatever projects they deem necessary at the time, many of which are usually kind of fruitless, right and don’t really generate what we want. So I just thought of it in simple terms to build almost like your own nation, with a distributed ledger, which everyone would have a vote an equal vote. And they could donate whatever they want to that Treasury, and that Treasury that can then be used for the things we actually need when it comes to health and drugs in particular. And so that kind of read was reinforced by understanding that Bitcoin was, I think a bitcoin is really the first Dow distributed ledger that had 650 billion right now. And it was a trillion. And that goes to show you the power of how you can seriously crowdfund into a, into a wallet, basically, into a treasury. And if you designated some of that money for purposes, like finding drugs that we need during a pandemic, or in a short supply drug that no one’s making, because there’s not enough money in it, the community can actually say, we need this, let’s get this made, get it distributed, so people get saved. And that’s the end of it. And because you distributed among hopefully, millions of people, there’s no risk at all, to any individual losing their shirt on this deal. I get put in a small donation every month and you’ve got yourself a treasury that you can all act on. That says that was, you know, at a high level, that’s what really drove me down this path to say, this is just literally a different, accountable system. Transparent, secure and And people could actually have the control over decisions regarding their own medicine. And, and this really is been the main point that I’ve been stressing, in my talks with people in Israel, the much more elaborate job of describing what’s on the ground right now in terms of the system that’s in place. And I wouldn’t, we do have a broken system. But I think the most important thing to understand is that this system is broken. For us. It’s not broken for the businesses that operate within the current regulation. Everything they do is legal, aboveboard, most of the time, I wouldn’t say it’s never that. But generally speaking, it’s all legal. And things are governed, whether govern, and are lobbying, et cetera. But we need to be an alternative, we have to generate an alternative way of generating drugs for people that need them. And I think this is the way personally I think decentralization technologies are quite possibly the only way to disrupt this industry has been sort of in place over 100 years, and really hard to move or change.
Brendan Veihman 16:10
Yeah, Jinora, one of the things that you that you mentioned, as you said, hey, when I got into this space, I wasn’t super familiar with Blockchain tech. And it makes sense. And it got me thinking how many other people are out there like you that can make the same kind of impact, right? They are wanting to do something they’re looking to do to do something, and they simply just don’t know about blockchain? Because I think when most people think about blockchain, you know, the first thing that comes to their mind isn’t Pharma. But it just goes to show that there is a practical use case of blockchain tech in so many different areas that people just haven’t even thought to, to apply yet. And this is just another one of those examples of saying, Hey, we haven’t seen blockchain really applied much when it comes to to the farmer field. But you know, here we are. And we’re looking at these new applications and your yourselves as essentially a new project. And so maybe there is a listener out there. And I just want this to kind of act as your maybe your motivation to say, hey, blockchain can be used for so much more than we’ve seen it so far. And in the coming years, we’re gonna see a lot more projects like this of people’s minds just being blown and saying, Hey, I never thought that we could have used it this way. And yet, here we are. Yeah. And
Bryce Paul 17:23
I think, yeah, what you said about, you know, how the blockchain realigns incentives, and, you know, kind of as you guys were alluding to, like, if you just follow the money, you’ll find out where all the corruption is. And the beautiful thing about blockchains is that they’re completely transparent. And you can literally follow the money publicly, openly. Whereas a lot of the funding that happens in not gonna name any names, but, you know, all sorts of different governmental agencies and dark pools of capital, you know, the public is not made aware of who’s funding what kind of gain of function research or who’s, who’s funding where, and so bringing all this sort of funding into the public purview, I think is of national interest, and in a very real way, along with some of the other added benefits, which maybe outside of the transparency and stuff we could talk about, but is it lower costs? Is it you know, passing through different kinds of drugs that would never be funded? Before? Like, there’s what what are those other added benefits that you guys really foresee? And that real impact, you know, pharma, down making?
18:38
I think, I think lower costs on the way to making drugs available that wouldn’t otherwise be available is a critical part of this. Right? Like we we believe that part of the reason that the cost structures of the existing drug marketplace are what they are, is because of the incentives of the agency of the entities that are currently responsible for getting drugs over that last mile, and their appetite and tolerance for certain types of costs. And there are there are better ways to do some of this work that are emerging, including doing some stuff overseas, and various types of advanced record keeping, etc, that you can do. But I think, you know, the core of it is like this, why we use that generics repurposing example, although it’s hardly the only model that we see as an opportunity here is because there really isn’t a meaningful way to see those generics repurposed. Outside of creating a structure like what we’re describing here, right, some sort of publicly responsible entity, whose job it is to get things over the line, get things researched, and then distributed to people that otherwise simply wouldn’t be because of the nature of the entities and the incentives that currently exist. Yeah,
20:07
and I get, I can’t emphasize enough, the distributed aspect of this, this is so important, because we’ve never had a technology that easily allows a distribution among quite frankly, billion people. And therefore, you can lower the risk. Because if you think about the way drugs are normally discovered, it’s a super high risk business, of course, right? In meetings I go to, I would say, when you meet all these biotech companies that are trying to make new drugs, and that can be a very promising thing for the future, about 90% or more of those companies will fail. And as a result of that, a lot of money is sort of lost in that in that cycle. And so, and there’s a lot of risk, you know, the the venture capitalists, whoever put that money in, are, quite frankly, could lose, you know, 100 $200 million in one company. And they only Succeed by Getting at least one win, because they can literally sell that for enough money to make up for all the loss. That’s what I would consider a highly inefficient system, that doesn’t work, to our best end of having affordable medications for everybody in the world, when we’re sitting on, like, Israel said, 10,000 drugs that are safe, and affordable, quite frankly, and we just don’t know their applications. Yet. If we could figure that out, if we could bring those to fruition through small clinical trials that are 10 fold less expensive than standard trial for a new drug. That’s a big change in the industry, potentially. But who’s going to fund that no one’s going to fund that from a classic point of view, because there’s just not enough money to bring back the return they expect. So the only way you can do that is distributing it among the people that need the medications and, and do it in a way where there’s zero risk for any individual because who can’t afford, you know, $5 a month donation to this cause. Now, certainly, there are populations that can’t afford $5 a month. But I would argue that even if you took 10% of the population, and gave $5 a month, you would still have in excess of a billion dollar Treasury that could be used for producing drugs that nobody would be at risk. I think that’s what we need people to, quite frankly, understand that. And so we need to educate that that concept, because it’s very foreign to most people. You you raised a good point. I think it was Bryce that said, you know, you’re a scientist, you’re somebody who studied for decades, research, I was involved with a team that won a Nobel Prize in 2001. So yes, I have a very good background in science. Who else is out there like Gennaro, you know, doing similar things in the blockchain space? Honestly, I haven’t really met anyone. And that’s part of the problem, because scientists are a very strange group. Probably the most gregarious one I’ve ever met myself that, but many of them are introverts. They sit in their labs, they study things, and they don’t really think blockchain is real, or maybe they’re starting to see it. But they’re not spending their time thinking about. They’re doing their experiments. So I think we need to reach those people. I think those are the people that eventually they get it will benefit the most actually, because they can help us repurpose these medications, potentially using their skills. And that can also feed into the system. So we can actually get drugs made much more, you know, quickly and more affordably for everybody in the world. This is global, right? This isn’t us. This is a blockchain. So anybody can be part of this movement. And so it’s going to take some time, things like this help. But I would love to see more people like myself involved in blockchain, other scientists that are skilled in this area, but I have not yet really seen much of that. You mentioned the D side movement. That’s true, right is the D side movement. I think it’s a little naive at times, because of the fact many of the people I’ve met have really not been in the trenches like I have in terms of research. And so research is extremely expensive and doesn’t really yield value immediately. What we’re talking about Israel and I, we’re talking about a system in place that’s owned by a complete community that generates products that actually brings things to the surface so you can get them. And these are just simple things like baby Tylenol when it runs out and your kid is sick with 104 Fever. Who’s making that for us? Nobody. It was a short supply. And if you were a parent with that problem, you’d be pretty annoyed. So farmer Dow exists for those reasons as well. How do you bring these things to market? And that doesn’t mean excluding for profit companies. It means embracing for profit companies that are not big pharma that actually have a way to produce things that we need small scale perhaps? And I think it
Bryce Paul 25:04
kind of reminds me of, of what Mark Cuban is doing with cost plus drugs. Is there any overlap there?
25:12
Yeah, we see, we see that as a potential great point of collaboration because Mark stated goal is very similar to ours in that we both want to lower pharmaceutical costs for the end user, a lot of what he’s offering, there are generic medications at really, really effective prices, where he’s minimizing his markup. You know, we have some feelings about onshore versus offshore production in terms of quality control, etc. And long term, national security issues that we ran into in the recent pandemic, when you don’t produce enough of your drugs on shore. But philosophically, I’d say like, we’re very, very aligned.
26:00
I think, Mark, if you’re listening, Mark, you know, we should have a chat. But bottom line is, we we have, I reached out to the company, I’ve talked to the CEO. I think alignment will happen eventually. Because what Mark is doing is he’s building a small facility in Texas right now. And he’s real focus, I believe, is in retail, he wants to do retail of these drugs, much like Amazon and others. But I like the way he’s moving this. And he’s going to need suppliers he’s going to need, what I’m talking about here is is building a almost like a guild of manufacturers suppliers. One of the things people don’t recognize sometimes is that if you run a manufacturing facility properly, there’s money to be made. It’s not billions, as Israel pointed out, but it’s millions. And that’s pretty good. If you cover all your expenses and make millions, I mean, nobody would argue with that as a bad business. And a lot of those companies are sort of family operated or have a legacy. And unfortunately, there’s systems in place in our country that have destroyed, those companies tend to take them out, you know, and I think they’re a risk to the larger industry and what they really want. So a lot of them get sold off in the pandemic, we lost the largest generic manufacturer in our country, which was my lawn, which is a million square feet, and that was bought and sold, and not actually bought and killed, actually. And so that was a problem. So so what we’re talking about here is sort of, you know, good for the middle of the road, people that people can actually make things happen. And for profit companies do that. And they should be working with treasuries to make things happen, just like the government treasury funds for profit companies to do things, but no accountability, like the trillions of dollars spent on you know, planes we don’t need for military actions we won’t do. Nobody’s accountable for that. But that’s money out of our own personal treasury. And so Israel and I are trying to wake up the nation to say, hey, let’s build our own nation, have our own treasury and use it for specific purposes that are necessary to keep people alive, and cut out all the middlemen, because the middlemen are not necessary with with basically decentralized that you don’t middlemen
28:16
are not your friends. Yeah, you were talking earlier about like the the folks who might be listening to this podcast and thinking themselves, you know, for the first time, oh, this might be relevant to my space. And I think I think, you know, if you look for places where middlemen are, are extracting large amounts of money from a transaction between a buyer and a seller, that’s a really good place to think about whether or not crypto with three or four dowel opportunities might be a business opportunity for you to start and, and not necessarily. I want to be clear about this, like Gennaro and I are not expecting or intending to get rich off farm. Now, the point here is, like we consider our son, we are the first founders of this project. But we want lots of founders and we ultimately wanted this thing to exist, independent of us are anything that we individually do, because it really should be driven by the public interest and not our individual personal interest.
Brendan Veihman 29:23
Yeah, and you, you know, this reminds me of, of even going back to the defi space, because what defi was able to do was a gave everyone across the world, even if they didn’t have access to a traditional first world financial system like we might have in the States or other countries. Anyone could go out there and get access to finance in some form and define empowered people globally, who didn’t have those kinds of luxuries. And in the same way, I feel like you all are doing the exact same thing for the pharmacy space and so people who might not be able to have the same kind of pharmaceutical system Some or health benefits that people have in the States or other countries are able to get access or be a part of this. And that’s where I really find it beneficial. So I guess my question for for all of you is when you’re looking at your target demographic here, is this something that anyone from someone in Africa to someone in the United States can use? Are you targeting maybe like one demographic or area over the other? Like, what’s your?
30:24
So there’s two answers to that question. You know, like, obviously, the US is the sort of center of the bullseye, but the reality is that drug prices in the US affect drug prices everywhere else. So if we, we set the tone here, and if you read that book, sick money that we were talking about in the preview, highly recommended, if you are interested in the space at all, it’s an incredible primer on how we got here, and how how and why the space is so messed up. But, you know, we think the the very center of the Bullseye is the US the wider center is, is the Western world. But ultimately, what we do here is going to affect the problem globally. And so because just as a simple example, when we get a new indication approved for generic, the fact that the US has done that flows into basically every other countries approach to that drug and how it’s covered and how it’s used. So, you know, the, the types of actions we take here really will impact the rest of the world. Yeah, and I think
31:33
your point about sort of disrupting insensitive financial systems and allowing it to be more accessible to everybody around the world, was really what drew me to the blockchain tech in the first place. It was clearly 2008. Of course, that drove that. And, and so the idea of building a social network, in a sense, to impact financial transactions, which was what really Bitcoin essence was, and think about how many people ultimately bought into it, it took time, right? $7 a coin, we didn’t care, of course, now we do. But it did take time. And people did recognize, I think the power of the technology to, to make these huge impacts. And I guess, if we were saying the same thing about pharma data, we’d be saying, you know, it’s been created as a social network to impact pharmaceutical transactions. So it’s literally the same concept, but brought to a much, in my mind, a much more important aspect of life. It’s survival, you know, life and death. And the central is that we need in order to maintain our health, money is great, and we all need it to survive. But there’s nothing more important in my mind, and, you know, four essentials of life, right, which include medicine. And so there’s water, shelter, and food, of course, those three things are also essential for life and important. And I truly believe that ultimately, if people catch on to this idea of this collective protocol that we call it, the collective protocol, which is you build a Treasury, and you intersect that Treasury, with a for profit company, or many for profit companies to get the purpose of that Treasury completed. And that Treasury is distributed as community owned. And in my case, in our case, it’s a 501, C three, it could take other forms. But this way, it’s legitimate. It’s aboveboard, it’s a real company. And that company can transact with for profit companies legally, they can hold them accountable for what they promised to do. And this is proven this has worked before. And one example is the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, that was that $4 billion return from a $200 million investment on a 10% royalty. And that was all done through a nonprofit working with a single for profit company. That was not the perfect system, because ultimately, that money sat in a bank account for five or 10. Board members to do whatever they want with. But that’s not the point of farmer doubt, the point would be that $5 billion would be part of a treasury owned by every human in the planet, that would be my dream. Yeah, of course.
Bryce Paul 34:03
It’s almost like, like a mutual, like an insurance mutual, if you will.
34:07
Exactly. Yes, we’re, like,
34:10
risk management, like, pharmaceutical more broadly. Yeah.
Bryce Paul 34:17
So like, I was just gonna say, I guess, you know, as, as we kind of think about how you guys are going to bring this into reality. And, you know, what’s the go to market? Is this going after individuals to get them on board first, and then go into drug distributors? Or is it going to the suppliers, like how do you guys think about the sequence of events to getting this into full production mode?
34:43
So there’s a few stages and we’re running multiple strategies at the same time, right. So we’re, we’re pursuing high net worth individuals. At the same time as we’re doing a broad marketing campaign to smaller individuals. There’s a minting NFT strategy just to get people excited in involved and help build up that initial Treasury which we can talk about more. But the the sort of initial startup capital focus is, is across those two groups. Then once we’ve got that knot of initial capital, there’s about five projects that we have on the docket, which we’ll go public with soon that look like really excellent early opportunities for the Dow to make an impact. And we’ll basically start driving the the initial dowel members into making some choices about which of those we go after first. By the way, the way this works is, anybody can bring a proposal to the Dow, but there’s a vetting Council of pharmaceutical experts that basically help identify and sort the wheat from the chaff. So that like, not just anybody can bring a proposal to the Treasury and get it. Or not just anybody can bring a proposal to Treasury and get it approved without some real vetting from real pharmaceutical, the experts. But all those people are operating in the public interest. And none of their incentives are aligned with anything but ensuring that we get drugs that are going to make an impact on public health into the marketplace. So those are sort of the initial stages that we’ve gotten mapped out. And I’ll let Gennaro fill in anything that I’ve felt
36:42
just add one thing to what Israel just said, it’s true that anybody can propose something to the Dow. But but there are going to be some conditions that need to be met in order for that to be successful. First of all, I think it will be more like the operations of the government where a board will be in place, unpaid, of course, and that board will be literally selected initially by the original board. But eventually it could be replacements could be voted on by the community. So there could be ways that the community could, you know, veto, let’s say somebody on the board if they felt it was not appropriate, for whatever reason, and but it would really be scholars or people that understand what good businesses are good science, or whatever the need would be. The key thing here is, I think it’ll be much like an RFA, you know, Request for Application. So we would identify a need, and it could be very simple, like shortage of insulin or shortage of baby Tylenol, I use that example before during the pandemic. And once that need was identified, maybe involving a vote from the community, maybe not. But you could put the RFA out. And within a very short time, any for profit enterprise that can make that product as one example and could generate that product for the for the Dow in a sense, but they have to distribute that through a normal for profit channels, could make that proposal. If that proposal passes, and clicks the right boxes that this is a legitimate company, they’ve been in business for whatever number of years, they look like they can do the job were requesting, then it put up for a vote. And that means they’re already validated. And so the vote would be yes, no, no, he wants me to town all they say yes, we find five companies that can make it great, they will get a piece of the action, they will make a profit on that. And then they distribute it for additional profit. If somebody does an amazing job of building their business, which is what they should be doing, if they’re a for profit company, and start selling way more than we actually ordered initially, they give back a royalty to the Dow. So that’s how we can sustain it financially. So the idea here is very simple. You prime are you catalyzed a production of something we need in the community. Once the company does that successfully, they get paid, they make a small margin, much like Mark Cuban’s idea. And then they have the freedom to go distribute that drug. And they actually they sign an agreement saying they will, when they distribute, they can give it away for free or they can get another margin on it. That’s up to them to do do as a good company. And then once you do have done that, you’re going to give back to the Dow for for doing that pilot. And that could be a percentage of your revenue, your net profits, whatever it might be. But that’s all contracted. So it’s a straight up milestone based contract between a non for profit and a for profit. And basically fueled by the crowdfunding Treasury called pharma Dow, you know, and that I think, is a system that was trying to kind of spearhead here. And the thought is that can be used for almost anything that people need. If you find the right for profit companies that can do it. And so, guess what Big Pharma is not going to be in that because they don’t make those type of products. They simply don’t, they only make new drugs and they only make them overseas, basically. And they’re, they’re the people that sell them. And they make a lot of money on that. But that’s not pharma that is not going to be of interest to them. It’s just not going to work for them. It’s going to work for smaller producers, which is good. Good.
Brendan Veihman 40:19
So for the people who are listening in and they want to get involved, where can I guess? Where can they get involved.
40:26
So go to Farmer collective.io, sign up for the, for the mailing list, and you will be an early adopter early member of the Genesis group of farmed out farm collective. And as this develops, we’re going to maintain that status for you. Through the years, we will not forget the people who are there for us at the beginning. Love it. Yeah,
40:48
the other thing to add, I want to make it very clear that it’s true that to get this thing really ramped up. Nobody’s you know, everyone knows that’s gonna take marketing and getting the word out. And, and, of course, we we have, individually, we all have limited budgets for that. So there may be individuals that come in and see the light here and help us drive that forward. So we can really get the numbers up that we need. We want a community that’s large. And we’re not focused on individuals with high wealth, per se. And the most important thing is anybody who comes in and helps us with that, you still get one vote, you don’t get 20 votes, we don’t have this concept of, hey, I’m gonna donate to this not for profit, and I’m going to be in control of the board. No, you’re going to come in, we’re going to be treated equal to anyone else. Even the person has no money but wants to have drugs for their mother, they get one vote just like everybody else. And that’s true for the government of the United States. Theoretically, one vote is one vote per person. Sometimes we can sway that a little bit with a little bit of squeezing. We know that but the reality is it was designed to be equal and democratize across all members. And I think that’s what the principle is for pharma down pharma collective, to make a treasury that’s controlled by the people.
Bryce Paul 42:05
I love it. And it’s for a great purpose as well. So I hope all of our listeners can go over to pharma collective.io, sign up for the mailing list, check it out and stay apprised of all the developments. So Israel and Gennaro we really appreciate you guys coming on and spending the time with us. Thank you very much. And we wish you guys and all of the founding members of the pharma, Tao all the best.
42:31
Thank you so much. We really appreciate you.
42:33
Yeah, thank you very much guys for having this conversation. It’s much needed. Absolutely.
Bryce Paul 42:38
It’s very important. And we hope everybody at home listening, you know, learn something and can get involved. So stay tuned. Come back next week, guys. We’ll have more fantastic guests as we do every week on the crypto 101 podcast. Thank you, gentlemen.
42:54
All right. Thank you. Have a good one.
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