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Disrupting the Data Flow with Asterisk Women’s Health
Recorded: July 16, 2025 Duration: 1:01:07Space Recording
Short Summary
Asterisk is revolutionizing women's health with the launch of a groundbreaking non-reproductive health tracking app, backed by grants and strategic partnerships, while addressing critical gaps in ADHD care and promoting tokenized participation.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We're doing a mic check here just to make sure that my mic is working.
Yeah, it seems like all things are working on my end.
Erin, we can't hear you.
Okay. you Thank you. All right, we're going to go through some technical difficulty troubleshooting.
Very classic for tech sphere, I would say.
But in the meantime, we just have D-side mom here so far, but we had some other folks here. Hopefully we'll get them back.
Um, but yeah, speaking here on the, on behalf of Asterisk Women's Health is Veronica Kieran, which you can find me also at VMKieran. I post there quite often about all things Web3 and kind of sociopolitical, the backgrounds in anthropology. So on Asterisk Care, we're talking specifically about women's
health, but from a different perspective than most people imagine. Because unfortunately for pretty much all of health history,
women's bodies have been reduced to organs.
So when people think of women health or femtech,
they think of reproductive health only.
And so asterisk is here because the rest of the woman's body
has been considered an asterisk in pop health, Western health for 500 years.
And we want to change that because holy heck, that's not good.
So that's what you'll see here on the asterisk account, as well as in our regular deep dive reports on women's non-reproductive
health on Substack.
And we're bringing to market the first women's non-reproductive health tracking app, which
makes us a data DAO and helps us to bring better research, better data to research. So that's what we're here to do.
And we're here to just talk about that today and just really get into it. I basically
don't hold anything back anymore. People have been a little bit too nice about the reality of
women in healthcare for too long and so I'm excited to
chat with Erin about that um Erin do you want to try your mic on your personal account and see how
it goes curious if it works yeah yay so Erin and I met how did we meet were we introduced or did we meet at DC London
um I feel like we probably connected online before that um Aaron has a way if you didn't know
she finds projects especially in the design space.
But yeah, how do you like to, this is your show. I mean.
Yeah. Now that I have a voice. Yeah.
Super excited to have you on today.
Thanks for giving a introduction without me being able to give you the
introduction to do so. So,
appreciate you kicking things off. For anyone that might be listening in, this is a weekly show
focused on highlighting different awesome things happening in DCI or having critical conversations in the space that we need to be having. And this week,
we are focused on the work that Veronica is doing at Asterisk and covering a lot of the different
things she mentioned in the introduction. I'm personally really excited about the progress they've made in terms of actually getting something ready to
be in people's hands and be collecting some of this data that just hasn't been collected in a
meaningful way, as well as focusing on kind of the distribution of that knowledge. And I think
there's a lot of work to be done in the broader health domain
across these different categories of collecting critical data
to be able to discover new insights or challenges or opportunities
that can be focused on, as well as making sure that the people
who are affected are in the know about it and focusing
on kind of that marketing, storytelling, narrative, and distribution of knowledge. So those are two
things I'm super excited about with what's going on here. Maybe if you can give a little bit of an
overview of what has been found and some of the different reports
that might be an interesting next thing to dive into? Well, we just put out the first ADHD report
in what's turning into a six-part series. Usually we do one report per disease date because
women's health is so vast, but our current clinical advisor is so kick-ass that she found
incredible data and then also huge gaps in ADHD care for women, which I think probably comes to
no surprise here. And one of the things that she found is that women with ADHD are more likely to,
they have a greater mortality rate than men with ADHD or people without ADHD,
which killed me as somebody with ADHD. So that's what we've been finding. Things like that.
You know, like what- Why is that?
It's primarily to do with the type of ADHD that women have. So like that's also where the gap comes from in care,
that ADHD has three different subtypes. And the second subtype is the
subtype that males generally tend to present with. And so all the questionnaires and the way that
practitioners have been groomed to understand ADHD comes from that perspective,
whereas women have type one typically. Women and girls have type one typically. So then,
of course, if you're not getting care, if you're not being supported, and definitely like you don't
have to be medicated for ADHD, but if you don't know that you have a certain symptom spectrum and then, of course, a sense of what the comorbidities could be, then your care goes down just by a matter of course. on to learn. And that's what we're trying to do in our reports is just to help women better
understand their outcomes, the gaps, and then also how to advocate for themselves. So even in this
report where we're describing the symptomology, the lifestyle ramifications. We're also saying this is how to approach your
practitioner. And this is probably what they're going to say. So I've noticed that I have this
refrain that I say on TikTok, where we go viral. And in our newsletter, and just in in all of our comms is like ask for the female data because most
doctors don't realize that they're not using female data they're using bias data and that
includes like in medication medications and dosages it's a fun world that's super interesting uh are there other conditions that are kind of very very
disproportionately focused only on the male phenotype of it in medical training or literature
like what are some of the other top conditions that you might be interested in or focused on next? Yeah, so our last report was on autism.
And of course, I think it's pretty well known that autism is also considered a predominantly
male disorder, even though there are plenty of women and girls that experience autism.
Um, our upcoming collaboration with a, um, with a researcher, uh, for the next report,
it's either the next report, the report after depending on the timing, but we have two cooking
right now. So we're working on a female diabetes report, um, working with a researcher who
specifically does her work around female diabetes. And I'm not just talking
about gestational diabetes. I'm talking about actually like in women type one and type two as
well, um, because it presents differently and affects women differently. Um, and then we're
also cooking an endometriosis report. It's been, I think the most requested topic. And we haven't touched it yet, partly because endometriosis starts to skirt
the line of what is non-reproductive versus reproductive health. But at the end of the day,
endometriosis can be in your stomach, on your heart. It can reach up into your body and present in all kinds of different ways. And so it ultimately
turns into a non-reproductive issue, but it's a female bias disorder. So we kind of span the
topics. I'm hoping to have a PMDD or premenstrual dysphoric disorder report later this year.
That's one of the female specific non-reproductive disorders
that I personally suffer from. And it affects as many women as diabetes, yet nobody has heard of
it because there's no research on it and there's no advocacy for it. So that's one that I'm really
hoping to like slap hard on. So yeah, for those listening um if you click into our bio our sub stack is linked right
there and you can um take a look at our reports so um our sub stack is predominantly these deep
dive reports on how like like the female presentation of these um common and well-known, typically well-known diseases and disorders and what women need to
know and urge to better advocate for themselves because if the data is not there, then it does
unfortunately fall to our hands. But it is something we're trying to fix here at Astros too.
Absolutely. I feel like I keep seeing commentary popping up across different threads and conversations on how historically the research or standards for a lot of different conditions or just trying to optimize different health states has all been conducted only on men due to the fact that the changes in women's
hormones throughout their cycle create too much complexity. And that's just too hard to deal with
from a research perspective. So it's easier to just cut it out and then apply the research done on men to women, even though it's two completely different hormonal cycles that we're talking about.
One post on this topic that recently came across was just replying to a meme that was circulating on what's an opinion about health that would have people doing this.
And then it's like the guy from
I think Rapunzel with all the knives pointed at him I'll share it into the space but somebody was
just replying specifically on weight loss research in particular um and and just how much we further as a research knowledge society, we have to go even on very like basic things such as how does weight or nutrient retention affect humans?
Yeah, like we recently published a report on sports medicine that when you don't take into account the female cycle in sports medicine, you lose out on a lot of opportunity, not just for like optimizing your ability to perform, but then also optimizing for avoidance of injury.
Your ligaments and the stretch that exists within your body and the flexibility that you have within
your body changes throughout the month. But if you don't take that into account, you are much
more likely to injure. We've done reports on sleep and all kinds of things. But I also want to point
back to what you said that not only is it more complicated to include women in research, which I always say, we
send people to the moon.
Why can't we include women in research?
Why is it so complicated that we can build rockets, but we can't just literally pay enough
attention to how a woman's body functions for a few months in order to improve medicine. But it also means that it's more expensive and takes
longer because we need a woman to go through multiple cycles in order to really understand
the follow-up and effects of either a modality or a medication or a disorder. And so then there's this counter incentive in grants and other funding
bodies that pushes against inclusivity. So we have these inclusive regulations. So
I don't know about the United States anymore, but elsewhere in the world,
women are mandated to still be included in research.
But then you have this counter incentive against that because it makes the study more expensive and it takes longer to get to market.
We at Asterisk are correcting for that because our data lakes are much more cost effective.
They're the first longitudinal, non-reproductive, all-female data lakes in the world.
And we also lower the barrier to entry for participant acquisition. So again, we're making it a lot easier for researchers and other organizations
like NGOs and med tech startups to acquire and access the data that they need. And so then we,
yeah, we can counterbalance against that financial disincentive for female inclusion.
Absolutely. Can you talk through a little bit
of like specifically how you're going about creating that data lake or creating access
to that knowledge? Yeah. I don't know if you can hear, like I'm smiling because I have the,
I just, this makes me so happy. So we've created Astra, which is the, again, the first non-reproductive tracking app for women in the world. And we did it this way because typically, by and large, women are fairly used to tracking symptoms on a daily basis or on a regular basis, at least through a menstrual
app. So this feels familiar to be like tracking symptoms, except for the app does everything but.
So the participant builds a profile that includes age, location, ethnicity. We've been praised for
having the most comprehensive ethnic list in the world, which is critical for medical inclusivity in Global South.
We then also ask about disease states and any medications being taken, which also includes
contraception and vitamins. So we do ask kind of the full spectrum and modalities you're undergoing,
et cetera, et cetera. So this is kind
of like a standard profile that every person creates. And then every day they interact with
Astra. And Astra can be modulated to either be super serious and caring all the way to snarky.
So if you need a mom or if you need a big sister who's going to kick your ass,
Astra can do that for you. So you are being coached by Astra to contribute information that
is useful to research, but in a way that feels really good to you. Astra is also tracking your
trends. So over time, she's going to remember if you had
a headache three weeks ago and also two months ago. And hey, by the way, you have a headache
this week, might be related to your cycle or might be related to you going to a concert
or might be related to apples because every single time that you have a headache, you keep saying
that you had like apple pie or something. I don't know. I'm making stuff up, but that's what Esther
is meant to do. And over time, she can build a case for you so that you have
a better understanding of what your health is doing in the non-reproductive space,
as well as be alerted to maybe when you need care. And then finally, what really is exciting
to me about Astra is that she will create a comprehensive clinical readout of your data.
So when you go to the doctor, you can communicate better with your doctor.
84% of women report not feeling heard by their practitioners at least at one point in their
medical journey.
And this has to do with all kinds of different biases, both in culture and in medicine.
And so this readout is more than just a stupid graph like you get from your Apple Watch.
It is clinical language, so it will help meet the clinician where they are and facilitate a conversation that gets women better outcomes.
that gets women better outcomes.
Not to mention, this is all tokenized.
Not to mention, this is all tokenized.
So every time you enter a daily check-in through Astra,
you are receiving tokens within the DAO.
So yeah, I don't know.
I'm in love with it.
Can you tell?
Yeah, it's super, super awesome.
Has been great to check it out myself. What does the kind of rollout for this app
look like, I guess, in terms of maybe different groups or people you're targeting to onboard
first? Or when might this be available for others to jump on and engage with?
Yeah, super question. So right now we're in Alpha. So Astra is like the baby version of herself.
We only have a few trusted people who are interacting with her in order to tell us
how we did it all wrong. And so we can do it all better and break it which is also very important we found
all kinds of like opportunities to make it better already and we just received a grant to bring
to bring astro from alpha to beta we have a beta list going right now it's on our website just
smack on our home page and you can also see the wireframes and like see some of the hot spots
explanations as to what the profile looks like. So you can already take a look kind of under the hood there. And then sign up for the
waitlist for beta. So beta will be a standalone mobile app and we'll have that LLM in there that
will be able to interact with you and give you that comprehensive experience. Still taking
feedback at that time, of course, but we'll be blasting
it out to the full wait list at that point. And we are only limited as far as acquisition goes
by language. So I'm not sure that we'll be able to roll out language inclusivity in the first
beta iteration. It is on the roadmap for later this year,
as long as we have the legs to do it.
But language is really, really critical for female inclusivity globally.
And we're hot to trot on this topic
because 90% of medical research funding comes from the global north.
So we just really, really need to change how that's working and include all women. And shoot, now I've lost my train of thought completely.
So it is for those folks who are listening from around the world, it's the end of the day here
in Germany and my brain is fried because I've been knees deep in our white paper.
So that will be hopefully done by the end of this month.
That's why I noticed that's cold and really excited about it.
But yeah.
Amazing.
That's what I got.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think you answered the different questions.
I think you answered the different questions.
I looped into one question.
I looped into one question.
So is it safe to say the best way to stay updated and be able to check it out whenever it's available for beta and rolling out kind of beyond that as well?
Follow along with you.
Any other action steps that people should be doing right now?
Yeah. Oh, that's what I was going to say. The other limitation that we have
just to rolling out globally is our partner itself does our KYC. And we're currently working
on applications for IDs that don't have chips in them. So right now we're inclusive globally of
passports and European IDs that have chips in them, but obviously that's not the world and we need
to include the world. So we've been raising that because we have users in countries that
only have ID papers and we need to bring them on board. And that's, so that's an interesting
point too to make is that we're, we validate you are female so um yes if you are on the beta
wait list you get first access and first tokens um so obviously that's a huge draw for men women
and bots um and we need to guarantee to researchers that this is an all-female database because that's our commitment.
And so we have gated it through the self-ID KYC, which uses zero-knowledge compute with your ID.
It's like super cool tech.
But yeah, so if you're interested in being on the wait list, just head to our homepage.
It's also in our bio.
And then if you want those deep dive reports and kind of like status updates, that's where you're going to find them on Substack. So I would recommend
joining the wait list so you get invited. Because if you're just on our Substack, you might not get
the invitation, but also then join our Substack so that you get the updates and also those deep dive reports on the disease states that affect women most.
Awesome. Yeah, the reports are super comprehensive. And so definitely recommend
subscribing to the sub stack as well. Are there any questions or debates in this broader conversation that you're frequently
either being asked or coming across that you think might be interesting to address here as well?
So from a medical standpoint, it is interesting to be entering the space when
women's health is finally being raised as a legitimate issue. We exited stealth mode right
before the Melinda Gates Fund and the White House Initiative landed. So like we, we were like,
just on time to coming out and dealing with this. But it's interesting.
It's interesting being the leader of a team that is 90% female. It's been interesting to speak with
You know, it's been interesting to speak with VCs who are coming from a very different mindset, let's say.
So I've been asked if we're being discriminatory against men by not including men in our app, even though Western medicine has been men's health for 500 years, as you know.
medicine has been men's health for 500 years, as you know. Um, and, uh, I've been asked if they're,
you know, how the drama is on the team because it's all female. Um, we, we, we do have a guy
now who's our developer, but, um, yeah, so that's what I would say like, those are the issues.
Um, and just this misconception that women's health is too
niche that gets raised a lot as well um and it drives me bonkers because women are 51 percent
of the world's population but if you're thinking of women as only two organs as i've mentioned
before then um then yeah it might seem like that is niche because we're only talking about two
organs but we're over here talking about non-reproductive because we're only talking about two organs but we're over here talking about
non-reproductive health we're literally talking about the whole rest of the body except
uh the ability to fall pregnant so that i i'd say like those are the the larger issues that i run
into as a founder in the space like yeah maybe i took your question in a different direction it's a great direction to take it it was more just an open-ended what is kind of spicy happening
either in your day today or in in this broader conversation and world right now and um yeah
that's wild that you're being asked if there's more drama on your team in today's
like I have a fully bootstrapped all-female team like we are super kick-ass and that's the question
I get asked like how about like Veronica what's been like what has been like to motivate a team
of eight women who live all around the world for two years without funding?
Like, what kind of culture have you built in order to, like, keep the team together and cohesive throughout that time, even though it's been, you know, like the incentives have been non-monetary?
No, we get asked how the drama is and that's it.
Yeah.
Are there other organizations or bodies that are funding this type of work? I mean, historically, the answer has been more on the category of no, or I know there might be some funding towards different elements of reproductive health with like only a concentrated focus on that element of things. But are there
are there bodies starting to shift in this type of way as well and and fund more, I guess,
holistic research in the sense that the other half is also included?
the other half is also included? Yeah. You know, that's a really good question. And like,
of course, as a founder, I'm extremely protective. So sometimes those spicy stories come up first,
but there are really amazing organizations that are emerging that are supportive of, if not specifically like women's health,
they're interested in funding women leaders.
And so we've had some great conversations with orgs that are out to play that
way. And then we've also found a,
hopefully research partner. We're still talking with them, but they are
specifically interested in women's health. So they're out there. Um, and, and it is so fun to
have those meetings because it clicks immediately. We understand the problem. We don't need to talk
about it anymore. Let's get into the solution. And so then it's a meeting only about solution building. And it's super, super fun. That's the space that I absolutely thrive in.
Thinking about the longevity space, does that ecosystem have interest in the data you're collecting or funding more research on like women and as a whole?
Or has that not really been a leading part of the conversation yet?
So I do have some opinions about longevity.
I think most people do. Yeah. How could you? Yeah. Okay. So being in this space, there's two
things. The first, just to answer your question directly, I sure hope that they approach us with interest in utilizing this data. To be honest, I have some great contacts already
in DSI who understand the issue. And so they're saying, yes, like Asterisk needs to be part of our
roadmap and our business model in order to better serve all of our, you know, participants or people
in the DAO or what have you. So there is an awareness there,
just in general. However, I would say there is an issue in how longevity is viewed because
it is predominantly pushed by men. And longevity is the natural next step when you feel your health care
in the law of averages. So throughout the average lifespan, if it feels like your health care
is well-supported and well-taken-care-of, then the next step would be, okay,
so how do I live longer? Because I can stay well
throughout the majority of my lifespan, but I would like that lifespan to be longer.
Whereas women spend a much more significant portion of their lives unwell because especially
post-menopause, the research and the support is not there. And I'm watching as my female friends are taking
care of their mothers. Um, and, and, and the lack of support that they had and the issues that
they're having that they should not be facing because we have the medicine to fix it, but we
don't have the awareness or the education or the data to get women there. And then the massive gaps in between.
There's like just the absolutely enormous gaps.
So for me, living in this non-reproductive space, longevity makes sense if you're a man.
For women, we just want to have a lifespan that is healthy.
We don't necessarily, like our current goal is just to have a lifespan that is healthy. We don't necessarily like, like our current goal is just to
have a healthier lifespan, not have a longer lifespan, if that makes sense. I would love,
however, for longevity to be inclusive. Um, and, and so the door is absolutely open. We want to
have those conversations. It is necessary, but longevity is going to have to pivot in order to take menopause into account because it's a critical moment in the female life cycle.
And it changes absolutely everything chemically in the body.
And if it's not accounted for, the innovations within longevity are just not going to work for women.
within longevity are just not going to work for women. Completely. I feel like I had always heard
Completely.
that women live longer than men. So I feel like there's also an opportunity to dive into
some of that or different factors that might be at play there as well.
well. Um, yeah, there's like, there's this interesting, um, kind of statistical bias that
women do, again, law of averages live longer than men by about five years. Um, they don't live
well, how do you say weller, healthier than men though in that latter half um and again like so if you're
taking law of averages um how many during those periods of time when the statistics were formed
and then taking that over the like long a long enough period of time um we tend to send men to
war and not women um and so uh if you take into account all these different life factors, as far as
morbidity goes, just from circumstance, women live longer, but certainly not as healthfully.
Definitely. Yeah. And plenty of other factors at play in those statistics too.
Plenty of other factors at play in those statistics too.
I guess diving back into what you're building from like a DSI technical perspective,
can you share about how what you're building fits within the DSI umbrella,
whether that's from a technical perspective related to the token or your approach?
I would love to. Again, knees deep in white paper. So if you actually take a look at our
recent post today, we posted about how the United States is changing health data sets,
which is actually illegal. But okay, so
you're not supposed to change health records without consent. And that's a huge problem when
other bodies own your data, your data can be altered, can be used without your consent,
can be sold. So there's all kinds of ERC companies that have your data. So ERC is
electronic health record or electronic record. Yeah, anyway. So those are being sold out from
under you and those are your data. We've heard this and this is not a surprise. We know that
Facebook does this to our social media data as it's happening all over the place. So Asterisk is
built on Akave, which is out of the Filecoin environment. And Akave functions specifically
within data lakes. They only curate data lakes. And the way that they do it is that
every profile in the Astra app is its own kind of, you could call it like a bubble that goes
into the data lake. And so if ever at any point you want to say, I'm done, like say a decade from
now, you say, I don't want to be part of Astra anymore. I'm done. I'm out. If you hit delete, it yanks your bubble, which is a wallet. It just goes boop. And
everything comes out of the data lake clean. A hundred percent. There's no questions asked.
Done. You will always own your data. We cannot alter your data because we're using
the blockchain as well to validate. So we're validating via Vana. And we're also going to be able to go to market.
One of, one of our go to market is through Vana.
We are able to be truly global and reach women that usually can't be reached by
health, either health tech or research bodies. Thanks to blockchain.
research bodies thanks to blockchain. We use KYC and ZK proofs through self. So we can validate
that you are female without ever knowing anything about you. And it's just really, really fun to
use the app in the first place. Super geeky that way. And then, yeah, as you said, we're
tokenized. So you will have a say in how the DAO functions, what kind of research we do.
So eventually we will be conducting our own research on the data that you've contributed,
which is also very exciting for me. I can't wait to be putting
out those reports. And we also have, this is in development now, so I can't get too far into the
tech, but there's going to be a kind of zero knowledge validator because our participants
can be invited into clinical trials and focus groups, but they can be identified
by one of our customers to be invited,
but the customer can't see who they've invited
until the participant says,
yes, I'm interested in that.
And then the match is made.
So it's like a dating app, you know,
except for blockchain.
That's super cool.
I think a lot of other projects in the space
can be learning from your approach
of how you're connecting these different parts together and also making
sure that the data is trustworthy and that it's actually a proper data set, especially
when we have different incentive mechanisms like tokens, part of these conversations that
can really be encouraging for bots to engage
and potentially jeopardize everything that is being worked on here.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, I mean, the people who sign up for Alpha
are definitely within our sphere of, um, uh, in our network, because we, we wanted people who would
understand that this is, you know, this is the MVP. So it's, it's not going to be the full dream.
So please give us feedback, but you know, be, be like kind also, but that's a, that's the incentive
mechanism for their, for them is that they are the first people to um start to accrue tokens within the doubt simply by providing their feedback um
and we've got we've got to we've got to gate that somehow because just like you said like
bots are constantly knocking at the door it's like the swarm coming for you
absolutely uh well would love to also open the door to this conversation for
anyone listening in. If you have any questions for Veronica and Asterisk, please request the
mic or leave a comment down below and we can read that off and dive into it. Yeah, you guys are doing super awesome work. And
I think we've covered a lot of really great topics here. Is there anything that you were hoping we
might be able to dive into or touch on that we haven't yet had a chance to talk about?
I mean, I think the only other thing is to
reiterate, you know, we talked about the beta list if you're somebody who wants to participate,
but if you're in a position where you either don't want to participate or you can't,
because you're disqualified to do so, we're still looking for partners. We're always looking for
partners because as we are showing within the ADHD report
that we just put out, there are data gaps. And so if you're going to build, let's say,
an app that is meant to address and support ADHD, if you use the existing data set, you're leaving
out a lot of your users.
And so we're always looking for people who are building something,
you know, MedTech, DSI, all of it,
because we want to help you make sure that you are serving your user base
as well as possible.
Completely. Are there any specific types of partners you're particularly keen or excited to
potentially start working with or would like to kind of create a specific invite out to
invite out to those types of groups here? I love when LLMs approach us because we know that AI is
pretty male biased and is also starved for data. So that's always a great use case that I think a
lot of people don't think of asterisk serving.
Obviously, we're always looking for more researchers, more clinicians, and of course, pharma.
We're super excited to hopefully get this deal done that's in the works right now in order to enter that space on a strong footing.
Um, but honestly, like if you have a startup again, that's like in this med tech space,
um, I mean, we're always just happy to have the conversation about inclusivity.
Like we don't even have to necessarily, uh, get into the data specifically.
Um, but I, I wowed the pants off of one of our customers today because we were talking
about doing like focus groups, focus group acquisition.
And because we're global and because our customers can sort for age,
date, age, location, ethnicity, all that stuff.
We're like, yeah, we can find those people for you.
We can help you build a survey specifically to that group and help you prove your business
model.
And like her mind kind of melted.
It was really fun.
It was a great conversation.
I don't know.
I like, I just like talking about it.
So if anybody has any like outlandish ideas, just approach.
Always approach.
Absolutely.
And then if people are interested in getting involved at a deeper level, is there opportunity to do that as well?
We have a wish list that is on our one page, which you can find on our website in the header here in the main menu.
But also, like, we just have a new contributor who joined us.
She had all kinds of ideas we hadn't even thought of.
So, like, that's the thing.
That's why I'm just always open to a conversation.
If you have a question in your mind of, like, what if Asterisk did this? Like, just ask. I'm just, I'm always happy to have more folks support what we're doing.
And yeah, again, be part of this DAO as it grows.
Yeah, there's a bunch of super great people involved already.
And I think that will also be a factor in just helping to make this really take
off and have all the impact that you guys are positioned to be aiming for. Let's jump back
into a broader DSI conversation right now. Any trends you're seeing, any other things in the space
you're excited by, or any things you think need to be addressed as DSI keeps moving forward?
I'm starting to see and hear more rumblings about diversity in DSI, which I think is really important. I've written many times, if you kind of web stalk me or go to my personal website, you can find my essays on diversity in Web3, ethics in Web3, and women in Web3.
my essays on diversity, Web3 ethics from Web3 and women in Web3.
And it's not, Web3 is a technology and technology and STEM come from a long history of a male bias
for all of these different reasons that, you know, we're not here to necessarily get into right now.
But it creates that initial bias being a tech. And so I'm excited to
hear more of the discourse that we need to see DSI especially diversify. And then Web3 at large,
I'm noticing, you know, I've been in Web3 long enough to see this kind of arc towards ubiquity.
We're just like starting to get there in a couple of different ways, which means that the conversations that need to have and the changes that need to be made are going to start having the right pressures and levers applied in order to do it.
So, yeah, I think that's like what I'm most
excited about is just like diversity in the space. DSI had to create a niche in order to
prove itself, but now I want to see diversity of business models as well as diversity of leaders.
Yeah.
Cool. Yeah, I think we'll continue making progress on that front and having some of these different critical conversations to really push Des doing and getting Astra into people's hands, as well as the upcoming reports and white paper that you have in the docket.
approach the top of the hour, are there any closing thoughts, call to actions,
recommendations for people to do if they were inspired or interested by this conversation?
I mean, first of all, as I said, just reach out. I'm always happy to have a conversation.
Definitely hit the wait list, hit the sub stack,
lurk, like whatever that feels good for you. But also I want to encourage everyone listening to
be bold and be stubborn, especially if you feel like you're noticing something that
Like you're noticing something that could be better in the world.
Like I know that women's health needs to improve.
So I'm just stubbornly moving forward because like it's what needs to be done.
So just stand for what you believe in and don't let anybody back you down.
And you've got a whole lot of community
that will be ready to help you along the way.
Amazing.
Definitely second that.
And I think that's a really great way
to wrap up the space.
So if you haven't already, give Asterisk a follow.
Go check out that recent ADHD report.
Subscribe to the stub stack.
And make sure you're on the wait list to check out the beta of the Asterisk app when it will be available and rolled out.
Yeah, highly recommend following along.
Super exciting things happening within the Asterisk team and ecosystem.
So thanks so much for coming on.
Really enjoyed this conversation and diving into kind of all of these different moving parts in the broader world that
you and the team are addressing and trying to solve for. So I appreciate the conversation
and sharing all of these great updates and the work you're doing overall.
Thanks so much for having me on and thanks everyone who was here to listen. I hope you learned something.
xspace so please reach out either to myself or the dsci mic account um to get that conversation
going every wednesday same time uh and we'll see you back here next week thanks everyone Thank you.
