icebreaker.xyz

We sat down to chat with J4ck, a former Google designer and DJ, who now co-founded Icebreaker, a decentralized professional network often dubbed the "Web3 LinkedIn." In this episode, we dive deep into J4ck's journey—from working at Google to creating innovative music scenes in New York. We also explore the challenges and future of hiring in the Web3 space, the power of recommendations, and the seamless integration of personal and professional identities in the digital age. Tune in for an inspiring look at how Icebreaker aims to leverage trust and zero-knowledge proofs to reshape how we connect and collaborate professionally.

00:00 Designer, DJ, Entrepreneur: My Journey

08:55 Early Solo Mining vs. Corporate Mining

14:32 Multi-Profile Identity Management

17:45 Personal Website with Dynamic APIs

25:15 Graph Ordinality in Icebreaker

27:33 Consumer-Focused Web3 Adoption Rising

32:00 "Choosing Convenience vs. Privacy"

37:18 Data Transformation in System Integration

44:34 Crypto-Driven Hiring Solution

48:40 "Key Interview Question for Hiring"

57:33 "Bounty Programs Reimagined"

01:03:51 Networking for Job Referrals

01:06:21 Connecting Moderators Across Regions

01:10:44 Trust-Based, Open Internet Systems

01:18:42 Verifying Code Authenticity

Music & Sounds By: Gramajo
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CastOff/Episode Discussion, here.

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Transcript

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Cookies are broken. Governments are saying, hey, you can't do this, right? Like, you can't just hoover up all this data and use it to retarget it. And he built some like, really, really core systems to that at Google over a decade. So he was like, I need to go, you know, I need to right some of the wrongs. Because he created, you know, a really, really good system for getting that. Gm. Gm. Welcome back to another episode of the behind the Screen with Gramajo, the podcast where we unravel the stories, insights and secrets of top tier artists, avid collectors and innovative builders shaping the digital frontier better known as Web3. I'm your host, Gramajo, an avid crypto enthusiast. It's been in the space since 2012. Yeah. Hey, welcome back to another episode. This one's a pretty dope one. If you've ever used LinkedIn, which I feel like most people have at this stage, there is a web, a Web three version, a decentralized version. And what that means is, you know, you own your data. You know, kind of all the things about Web3 that we like. That team is called Icebreaker. I sat down with Jack and we talked about kind of hiring Web3 as a whole, how they got started, why are they even building a LinkedIn competitor? LinkedIn's super massive and him being a DJ and just an overall. Just being a founder. So, yeah, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Let's dive into it. I think we'll just dive into it. Yeah. So who is Jack? And then, and then what is Icebreaker after that, you know? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Who is Jack? Yes, I'm like, let me think about that. It's an existential question. Yeah, well, catching me after the holidays. Yeah, it really is, you know, but yeah, I'm a designer by trade. I was at Google for about seven years as a visual and UX designer and then UX manager at the end and then founded another company called Seasons that was NFT fractionalization for Daos before finally starting Icebreaker. So on the professional side, and then I also DJ a fair amount here in New York and play at Farcon, so that's kind of a side hobby and have a channel called La Petite Box where we host DJs. And so that occupies a lot of my other time. And I have a lovely wife and a little cat. So that's pretty, pretty good summary. Oh, born and raised in Denver and now live in New York. So that's right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't know you djed yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Almost over a decade now. But it was never, you know, it was always a hobby and a fun thing for me, but kind of picked up steam. I got a studio in East Williamsburg here with a friend in 2019, and that was like, kind of the. At the time, it was kind of art and stuff, but we had DJ gear in there. And then I had. I also had started a collective in San Francisco called Tall Boys, because everybody was, you know, six, five or taller, which was funny. And so had started a collective out there, and then we moved, so it was kind of a reset, and then it was Covid. So it took a while for it to, like, get the momentum back. But this year's looking pretty strong for us. We're booked out with gigs in the studio until, I think, June now, so. Oh, wow, that is taking some time then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What kind of genre of music? It's definitely like an underground electronic focus. So a lot of house, techno, trance, breakbeats, some disco slides in there sometimes. But, yeah, it only fits, you know, like. Love a Tea Box, it's called that. We had these French friends that were there, and they're like, oh, la petite Box. They started calling it that, and then we just started calling it that, and that's how it got its name. And you can only fit, you know, like 15 people comfortably. And even then that's a little tight. But sometimes it gets maximum. Absolute maximum is 30 people where you cannot move. But, yeah, so we're trying to do kind of like. I don't know if you're familiar with, like, Horror Berlin. They basically have, like, you know, one DJ with decks, and then Boiler Room is, you know, bigger stages party with DJ in the center, and we're kind of like a half, half step between those things. Okay. I love that, man. That's my kind of vibe, too. Yeah. I have to check that out then when I'm in New York. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Absolutely. Are you gonna be doing something for Far Cry or. No, it has crossed my mind. Yeah. I feel like. I feel somehow I feel obligated to do something. So we'll have to put it. We'll have to put it together. I thought I saw, like, a cast or something of someone saying that they wanted to do. I don't know if that was you, but I feel like I thought DJs. Yeah, Robin. Robin in Chicago and Robin and Chicago. Not Robin in Chicago. I organized the one last year in la, and that was really fun. So maybe we'll do that again. There's a lot of talent there. I know like, Giga mesh is on and around. I think Rack or RSC as well. Some bigger names. That's hilarious. Yeah, yeah. Wait, do you DJ also? A long time ago, but like, not like. How do I explain it? It was like when the. Those, like really small, like, players came out, they were like track. I don't know if you remember them. I don't even know. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like tr. I think is what is. That's how you know. But like they had one that you can just like connect to a laptop and select in college. I'm talking like 10 plus years ago. So. Yeah, I had one. Yeah, yeah, no, dude, that's. I started with one of those too. Are you talking like tractor? Is it tractor? Yeah, tractor. Yeah, yeah, There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had. I had one of those too. And right after I moved to sf, I got one that was my first. First deck. Things were pretty good too, actually, to be honest. Like, yeah, they were solid. Yeah. Like, I was able to like, upload some mixes to SoundCloud and. And mostly it was like, for me, I was like, oh, like I've always, like, it all started because, like, I was like, oh, it'd be really cool if these two songs got like mashed together. Yeah. And I was like, how do I do that? And then. Nice. It just went down the rabbit hole and then came out with one of those. And then I still have it actually. It's like in the garage, but. Nice. Yeah. Dust it off. Yeah. And then I ended up making, like, mixes for myself, which was kind of fun. Um, and it was good. Yeah. But, yeah, I think I need to dust it off. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure the technology's come a long. Way and I mean, that's what you think. I actually. That was like a rabbit hole. Pipe. Pipe dream business I was looking into. I was like, why. Why does Pioneer have such a strangle hold on the clubs? And I mean, the hard part of that is getting your equipment in every single club. And then also it. It's like a. It is very, very reliable. It takes a lot to break those things. So I think between those two. Yeah. But the software dude, I'm like, software. Buddy moved to Pioneer and that's what he got used to. And I think that's where I kind of was like, starting to slow down. I was like. I was like, I don't want to like, shell out. Like, he had like four, two and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, it was like five plus grand in gear. And I was like, yes. Yeah. And back then, I think, like, because this is like early 2000 and tens, just Bitcoin and crypto took over my mind and I was like, I'm just going to go down this rabbit hole and explore mining and home labs and all that versus DJing and stuff like that. Sounds like it was probably a more profitable hobby than the other side. It ended up being a little bit profitable. Yes. Yeah. Although mining, like back then was very different than it is now. Like now it's very like, you know, like remote sites in Texas, cheapest electricity, like big machines and renting pools and all that, you know. But to like even break even back then it was a little bit you could like solo mine essentially. And it just became more corporatized after that. That's awesome. And I had no idea that about that, about you. Yeah, yeah. So that's quite the pivot, I would say, from like your nightlife to your social life to then building Icebreaker. So what is Icebreaker? Yeah, yeah. Icebreaker is the open professional hyper network. And we've been saying where you meet exceptional people. And that is a little aspirational for us right now and. But yeah, so we are really, you know, allow you to connect, verify and recommend other professionals in your hyper network, which means across LinkedIn, Farcaster and the Icebreaker network itself. So, yeah, that's kind of a tldr, the high, the one liner. Yeah. I guess I had a kind of like something that maybe you experience this a little bit and I want to kind of pick your brain at. It was. So at least like for me, like, I guess for the people, like think of like LinkedIn, I guess, you know, so like we. There's like a professional side of us, of all of us. Right? Yeah. And then we have our personal life. So I think the thing I've been struggling with is like with Icebreaker, it's like it's obviously my on chain, like LinkedIn, like what I'm doing, which is very different what I do in real life. But I've been struggling with like how do I like mesh those two worlds? And like, should I even mesh those two worlds? Because you know, like in traditional like web two sets, it's like, you know, you shouldn't tell people that you DJ at night probably. Right. I mean, maybe like at Google, like it's big enough where like, you know, like it's not that big of a deal. It just has a different culture. But like I, I come from like a legal setting specifically Like a law firm, right? If I would have told people, like, hey, you know, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I, you know, I'm at the Liberty House and we're at a club, I go to sleep till 5, they'd be like, yeah, what? Yeah, what is this guy doing? Yeah, you know, so, yeah, I guess, like, what do you think about that? Like, should Icebreaker be like, totally, should we. Should I basically, like, mesh all those facets of my identity into Icebreaker or just think of it and keep it very professional. Like, this is like my professional web3 version of me, not I'm buying Penguin and doing it on leverage and doing all this crazy. Your hyper liquid portfolio. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, I mean, that's a great question. Everybody has multiple slices of identity, right? Like, you're somebody different to your neighbor than you are to your parents, than you are to your co worker, than you are to your friend. And we recognized that pretty early on and built a feature called Multi Profile. So you can actually set up. If. You think of identity kind of as like a backpack, you can pick which piece you're like, okay, I want to use this one today. I'm going to pick out this identity. I'm displaying this identity right now. So we built the feature in a way where you can kind of assemble that item based on whatever is in your backpack. Like, you have all of your accounts, right? Like, you have your GitHub, LinkedIn, your Snapchat, whatever, other apps, your SoundCloud, right? All of those are apps that you use and accounts you have, and you want to share those in different moments at different contexts with different people, right? Which is like, this is traditionally been segmented by, you know, which Web2 platform am I using? Yeah. And I think now we have, you know, our lives are so online and digitized now that it, you know, every person probably has, I don't know, 40, 50 plus Internet accounts. So which ones are most important to you? And depending on which community you're looking at or who you're talking to, that changes. So we built this feature that allows you, first of all, you can add all of your accounts, right? You just add as many as you want, and we verify some of those. We have a shorter list of accounts that you can verify, which are like, since we're professional focused, that's obviously like LinkedIn, GitHub, work, email, Farcaster, Twitter, and I think there's like five or six more. So you can verify those. And then you can also add any, any account you want as just a raw link or A handful of others, I think probably about 60 other accounts that we will like render with the like the icon and everything. So you have, you set all those up then you can put those into a profile and you can have multiple of these under a single account. So I actually in my icebreaker have a like my default main profile that is pretty tailored. I mean I have a lot of stuff on there but it's more, you know as co founder of the company I'm trying to show like look you can add all these different channels and you can have all these different things. And then I also, I do have a DJ profile on there as well so I could. And then I also have like a normal profile that is non not scary things like OpenSea and wallets but is email and telephone. Right. And I will, we have a mechanism that you can set a different one to primary. So if I know I'm going to an event that is going to be, let's say it's a Google alumni event, I will switch to that profile because I'm like I don't want to be exchanging wallet information with these people but I do want them to have my email, my phone so they can contact me, whatever. So really that multi profile feature allows you to rotate pick the slice of identity you want to share in that moment and you could do that either IRL with somebody with a QR code or with one of our NFC tags or you can send that as a link digitally to anybody you want to connect with. So to answer kind of a long answer to your question, we support whichever identity slice you want to show. Yeah, that makes sense. I actually, I saw that multi profile aspect of it and I guess I never went deep enough or didn't see an example of it. So I'll go check out yours to be like. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say I've come to just accept the fact that like you know, what we did in web 2 maybe didn't work, you know and like maybe we should embrace all these things that people are like to me I think that's cool that you're a DJ and a co founder. I think it makes me respect you a lot more actually. So like you know, thanks man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well that's, I mean that's, that's contextual as well. I'm sure to somebody else they'd be like that's an anti signal. Yeah, you know. Yeah, yeah like if I was a vc but I mean you guys got VC funding so I guess it wasn't that much of an anti signal. So. Right. I mean I would. Let me tell you, it was not, you know, primary on my, on my profile. It's not on my LinkedIn or my Twitter and it's. Yeah, so I keep it mixed, but I do, you know, to this point, last point on this maybe we allow you to link your Spotify and we added that pretty early and kind of before even we were doing multi profile stuff and I was connecting with people and they would always go, oh, you're Spotify. And they click on my Spotify and then they'd be like, oh, wow, you okay, you're into techno. Okay, all right, interesting. Like, and you would learn something and you know, they would kind of in meeting somebody in that moment, it was interesting that they would click Spotify and not LinkedIn or email or GitHub or these other, you know, maybe less exciting or like less personal channels. So I think, I don't know, I'm a proponent of showing up as yourself for the most part if you can because it makes you more relatable and people understand you a little better. Yeah, no, it's so funny that you bring that up because I ended up building like a website for myself, like a very simple thing, like a static website kind of thing. And it was really cool though. The whole premise of it that I wanted to build it for was essentially like I was trying to like pull, I was trying to use APIs so I was trying to learn how to like use Python a little bit better and stuff like that. That was actually the, the goal. So I had an about me section where it just had like a little bit about me. But then it actually had like, like what podcast, what books and what music I'm listening to. And each one of those is a different API point that for a service that I was using and I was trying to pull it and like show it off and so it wouldn't be because like one of the issues with static websites is like the data becomes stale, you know, and it's like. And I'm not like a developer like in any sense, but so for me to update it I was like ah, like it just, it just took a little that one extra step or two where I was like I wouldn't update it. So then it became really stale and I didn't like that. So I was like, let me work on this about me to make it so if you could really get a snapshot of like what did I listen to last week? Or what did I even watch TV wise like last week so, Right. I use like, like a TV Showtime movie app to track like what I'm watching. This is a while back because now with a kid, it's a whole different story. But. But it was funny because. Same thing as you. Like, I basically plugged in my Spotify and I was like in this weird. I was listening to like this person called Tamagotchi. I don't even remember what it's called, but basically it's like Lo Fi kind of beats. Yeah. And someone that I would consider like a mentor. Definitely a lot older than me. They're like, hey, I went to your website. I found this Tamagotchi person. I listened to it and now I listen to it on a weekly basis. So thank you for that. And they stopped me in the middle of the hallway like super randomly and they were like, oh, I just want to say thanks for showing me to this random dude, indie SoundCloud musician guy. They were just super stoked on it. And I was like, oh, wow, that actually worked. Like, it did what I wanted it to do, which was show a small, like real time feed of like, what. What am I reading right now? Like, what podcast am I listening to, like very often? Or whatever, you know. Right. And it was cool. Like, I haven't done that for my current website that I'm doing now, but I think I do need to do that. And yeah, I could see why people use that. They would use that Spotify feature on. Yeah, yeah. It's not the easiest one to verify. I had to put in my. Or no, I remember I had to go like, find my user number in there. That was a little challenging. I think now it's easier though. I think you just hit it and then it asks you in the app to verify. But what I was going to say. That's a great example actually of another thing that we are thinking a lot about, which are recommendations. Like, that was your recommendation for this artist. Somebody that trusts you, saw you listening to that artist. And then they were like, oh, I'll check this out. And listened and found that they really liked it too. So that's kind of a way that we've been thinking about eventually a whole model for the Internet. And I think we're going to see this. Even if Icebreaker doesn't do it, somebody's going to do it where you'll be able to bring your own algorithms across the Internet and see, you know, not only Grandma Ho's, but Alice, Bob and Carl's. Your other friend's recommendations for what songs are they Listening to right now in an easier way, if that's what you want to see. You can imagine applying that even to like a, like Amazon. Amazon shopping page. Yeah. Like proved by your purchase, like in a ZK fashion. Like 10 of your friends have bought this product. Like, and you could toggle that to say only show me items my friends have purchased if you wanted to. You know, if you're like looking out a little farther. Yeah, that's kind of where recommendations can go. Yeah, the ZK stuff is like, it's nuts to me. Like, yeah, like, yeah, I feel like my mind is almost like limited and what it is, I haven't thought big enough, like how much of a change it could be. Yeah, yeah, it's massive. And I know you guys are using it. Do you want to. I think we could talk about a little bit of. Because it is actually like CK is like I would say on Farcaster, it was like popular when anoncast was created and all that. And Arctic was kind of going nuts. And I think it's again picking up now because crypto Twitter is coming around to it as well from what is it? Anon World or whatever. But I know you guys used it for LinkedIn ingestion data, which is something I did. Do you want to describe one what ZK is and I guess how you guys in your V1, what did I do when I ingested that data? Like, what happened? Yeah, totally. I mean there are definitely people that can explain ZK better than me. But as I understand it as like a technical. Ish. Non technical.ish person. Zk is zero knowledge and it basically lets you prove that data is true without revealing the identity of either proving source. So you don't have to have any knowledge about the underlying owner to actually see that, hey, okay, this data is true. So in our case, we allow people to like, we're really interested in professional data. LinkedIn is notoriously challenging to get API access to. Their most valuable asset is there is the professional graph. Right? Like that's what recruiters pay $1,000 a month for the ability to comb through that with LinkedIn Recruiter. But our point of view is that that is like, that's my professional network. Like I know those people. Like, we happen to be using LinkedIn. But that's because there's not, you know, another great alternative and it's unfortunate that we have to pay this toll to search it. Like I was literally today trying to go search my designer friends connections to see which designers he knew and I had to pay Like I'll have to pay either $20 a month for like the basic access. I'm not even sure if that gets me access to that search functionality. So we think that you should be able to do that across your own connections for either free or, or way, at least way cheaper. And so using zk, we basically allow a user to. And Reclaim protocol is the ZK provider we use. There's a few, but we're using Reclaim protocol. So you basically open it up, you add your LinkedIn credentials and when that data is sent back, Reclaim says, okay, here you go, Icebreaker. Here's the data that was returned from LinkedIn for this user. And that's when we say, hey Grimoha, you have like a thousand LinkedIn connections. So you've actually taken your graph and put it back outside into Icebreaker. And that's super, super exciting because now we can compute that ordinality. We can say, okay, these are all first degree connections with Gromaho. And since I'm connected to Gromaho on Icebreaker and we're looking at a hyper network View Now I'm second degree to all of those LinkedIn people, right, that you have just imported or I might be first degree connection with them on LinkedIn as well. Like if I have also run my import, then we can deduplicate and say, oh, you guys are actually, you guys share these people outside of LinkedIn's graph. And we're doing that in a, you know, in a privacy preserving way where we're just pointing back to that person's LinkedIn profile, but we are able to reassemble that graph. So that's like super, super exciting to me and it's definitely complex. But that's the first network we're doing it with as in addition to Farcaster. So we have the three networks in the hyper network right now. It's exciting. It's exciting stuff. I mean like kind of what going back to the example with Amazon, you know, like you can verify that you, you bought the actual product without actually knowing like the, the order number, the credit card that was used, where that person. Yeah, exactly, it's, that's exactly right. Yeah, I feel like that's a, it's a very powerful thing. I know I forget what the app was, but like I know one thing that was kind of cracking me up was like to be able to prove that you bought GameStop before it took off. Because that was like one of the things I had done. And I was like, dude, just let me plug in and let Me get some on chain NFT say like, yeah, this dude bought it way before he was early. Yeah, exactly. That's what got me down the rabbit hole of ZKs. But it's nice to see it being deployed in real life now and I'm sure there's other deployments of it and it's existed maybe for a while and stuff like that. It's all very technical stuff like you said and hard to work with from what I can see from Card Taker slokes implementation. Like it could be a little slow or stuff like that. Yeah. But to me it's like it seems like the consumer facing version of it, not just like the nerdy like hey, I built a Z app. Like it seems like the consumer aspect of it is now like it's, it's taking off essentially. So yeah, happy to see that and hopefully like reclaim some of like, I mean like going back to like why we're in Web three. I mean at least for me, like it's like taking power back from, from this data, you know, like it just happens to be that you're using a Web2 app, you know, but like your followers are your followers or your friends are your friends. Your connect, your professional connections are your professional connections. You know, it shouldn't really matter what the platform is and it's why I continue to use Farcaster. I believe in that messaging. Like the people I connect with on online on chain are like those are my connections, you know, like I should be able to port that over into any app essentially. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean we're definitely like want that to be a social good for us. You're still there? Yeah, I'm still here. My kids just. Okay, okay, okay. All right. Wasn't sure. Yeah, yeah, I mean we definitely want the, we're, you know, working on making that social graph accessible for developers because I think there's a ton of stuff that can be built on top. And you already see this with Farcaster. We're one of the people using that graph, but there's a ton of others and I think what they're doing with frame V2, where now you have the concept of identity directly from within the app and you can actually just log into a web app without ever even leaving. Farcaster is incredibly powerful, similar to Telegram apps. And I was just talking with Tayeb who's our, one of our founding engineers about this and how well Farcade has done it. Like they've done an excellent job with this kind of mini app distribution model across Farcaster. Telegram And I think one other one. But yeah, I couldn't agree more with having the portability of our social graphs with us and what that will enable in, in this next decade. Agreed. Sorry. If you hear my kid in the background. No worries. Kind of taking a little bit of a step back, would you say that? I mean, it's kind of funny to me. Or ironic. I don't even know what the, what the word is. But like, you know, Google is kind of known for taking a lot more data or just taking a lot of data. Yeah. And you know, I think they're doing, obviously they're taking great steps now to be more privacy preserving or whatever. But you know, for a while they were not known for, for that. I think they just took whatever they could, you know. What does that influence kind of that experience that you had at Google? Does that influence some of the decisions that you're doing with Icebreaker or anything like that? You know, like. Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I think so. My co founder Dan was the one who approached me to create the company. And he was in advertising, like the ads shop. We were basically in the same org, shopping and ads. I was on the shopping side, he was on ads. And we didn't really meet until later on, but it definitely influenced his ideas. And the original idea which was basically to run ZK Advertising because he saw that cookies are broken, governments are saying, hey, you can't do this, right? Like you can't just hoover up all this data and use it to retarget. And he built some really, really core systems to that at Google over a decade. So he was like, I need to go, you know, I need to right some of the wrongs. Because he created, you know, a really, really good system for getting that data. So. Or at least I would say definitely. It definitely influenced the company. Or at least I would say, like give people the choice is kind of my thing, you know, like, because there's some benefits to some of that stuff, you know, like the, the positive, like the more positive side of it. Like I've seen it because I used to have a Google phone and be heavy in the Google ecosystem. Like, you know, high school, early college probably like until I got into bitcoin and cryptocurrency as a whole. Like that's kind of when I shifted. But yeah, still a ton of convenience, you know. Like I remember Google like would be like, hey, it's going to take 15 minutes to go to your next appointment. Because they knew like what my, what was on my Calendar, like, it could surface things at the right time and give you the right information. And it's like, hey, the bus is running late, you know? Yeah. Don't fret about, like, leaving the office little, like, on time. Like, it's running 15 minutes late. Like, just stuff like that, you know? I was like, man, that's, that's crazy. Like, yeah, I don't know how I can do that, but. So there is some positives to it, but I feel like giving people the choice to opt in or opt out or share, you know, so. Yeah, Yeah, I mean, I think, like. They, they, they share like, a good chunk of money, so that's good too. So I don't know, like, there are some possibilities. Yeah, yeah. I, I think the important piece and that, like, there's no. In Web two, there's just no door. Or they, like, make it really hard to find the door to exit. Like, LinkedIn data takeout is there because it is legally required for them to have it. And they'll send that to you in three to seven days, question mark if you ask for it, right? Yeah. Which is, like, long enough. That's, like, annoying enough. If you're a developer, you're like, okay, the user's gone. Like, I, like, Kevin O'Connell had built a flow that was. Or was it. I'm sorry, who was it? Joe. It was Joe, I think, built a flow where you had to go run LinkedIn data takeout. And I was like, cool, I'm so excited. And I forgot to go upload the LinkedIn. Like, I just never, you know, I went, I didn't go back. And I forget who said it, but it's like every, every user click is a miracle. Right? So if you have, if you have somebody clicking the thing, uh, you know, that's, that, that's a miracle. So they've designed it in a way where unless you're, like, extremely driven to get in there, you're just gonna, you're gonna churn, right? Because, like, you're like, oh, I forgot, or whatever, or maybe I'll go back. But, like, that's a significant challenge if you're a developer trying to build on, on that data. And Google, like my Google data, man, I ran it and I actually, this is right when we started the company, I ran my takeout for Google and I set it on my drive. I'm like, take it out. Yeah, put it in my Google Drive. I have like, the 2 terabyte plan. That should be fine. And I woke up the next morning and like, all my. Everything was like, broken. I was like, what is happening? Like, what happened? Or, you know, days later, I forgot that I even did it. I think like a week went by and it was. And my Google's yelling at me now and it was like, your drive is full. And I was like, how did that. What? I was using like 100 gigs of this multi terabyte. And it was all that. It was all my takeout data. Is all my Google takeout data. It was terabytes of data, which is crazy, crazy, crazy. I don't even. I still don't know. I was. I'm on a 2 terabyte plan. I don't know how many terabytes it was, but I was like, wow, okay, this is more data than I expected. So if you're curious, go, yeah, go run it and see what that total file size is. But I don't even know where I would run that. Years ago. Yeah, yeah. 10 years of data. Yeah, I did it like 10 years ago and it was like a ton of data. And not everybody has like a NOS at home or some kind of mechanism to store them. I mean, especially back then. Yeah. Two terabytes. Now I can carry that in the SSD in my pocket. But back then it was like. I remember I had this chunky dream machine thing for Apple and yeah, it's come a long way. Like you said, every click is brutal and people can forget. I felt like the ZK LinkedIn export ingestion thing with Reclaim didn't feel too bad to me, but again, my tolerance is higher. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crypto users in general have higher. Higher pain tolerance, but also like more unique taste and opinion as well. So, yeah, I think the Reclaim flow is only. I think it's under 60 seconds. The worst part is the app hopping. They use an app clip, so there's like kind of. It feels kind of like flashy or like you're like, oh, I'm in all these different screens, but it happens pretty quick. Like once you log in, that part's really quick. So. And definitely, you know, whatever. A thousand X. Better than waiting a week or a zip file to be emailed to you. Yeah, no, agreed. And like, as someone that works in date, like, I'm more on the data side kind of stuff for systems. And what am I? Like, what do you. You have like the export, but then you're supposed to like transform that data to match with like, the website that you're going into, like your destination. So, like, good example of this is like goodreads you know, I used to be heavy Goodreads user. And yeah, they can give you like a CSV of all my Goodreads stuff. And then I was trying to go to like a new website and I think one of them was like, this is a while back too. But they were like, remove this column, rename this column, do this and that. And it was, yeah, dude. And I'm like, it's fine. Like, it's not that complex. But like, I'm like, like you said. I was like, you. You added 10 additional steps. I was like, I'm just going to keep using Goodreads. And then like a year later, another app came out and they automated the. The transformation of the data. So, like, literally it's like just drag and drop it into this, the CSV file or whatever, or the flat file. I forget what it was. But they're like, we'll do the transformation for you. We'll do the ingestion, we'll do the troubleshooting and stuff. And I was like, okay, that's better, right? That I can do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean that. It just made me think. The LinkedIn one is challenging because they don't include. When I did this, most recently, at least they didn't include email, your contacts, email. And they didn't include their work experience. So you're getting like first name, last name, and like job title. Like it was an incomplete data set. Right? Like, so there. Which is like, I'm sure they're like, how little can we put in this takeout that is legally compliant? You know, Like, I'm sure, like, I'm sure, I'm sure that's, I'm sure that's a conversation because they don't want that to be out there. And to be clear, you can also, there are data resellers that will sell that info. Like, you can go buy that information, but that's, you know, we want to focus on the user, the user having control and privacy of that data, their professional network and their account. All right, let's take a quick break. All. Hope you're enjoying the episode. This episode was made possible with the support of my premium subscribers. Seattle Dog McMinals, the Bluffer the Nonlinear Brennan Peachy M. Branson, Trevor Nate Young, Weeknd, Humpty. Yeah, thanks all for your support. If you'd like to receive exclusive drops access to token gated content, make sure to subscribe to my hypersub. Make sure to join my telegram as well to talk about all things my content area 51. Yeah, let's get back into it. So I think you alluded to this a little bit in terms of like the tension between like privacy and openness and, and the vision of Icebreaker. Are there. Have there been a. Ideas? Because a lot of like, like I just had this example like literally before this call, like I went on Solana, went up to Magic Eden and. You. Know, it's like they want, you know, you can have like a general account on Magic Eating. So it's just like, you know, your address and it looks kind of janky. Everything's missing, like the bio is missing and all that. And the cool thing that I've been enjoying about like Farcaster is like download new app, connect Farcaster and it's like my bio, my profile picture, obviously your followers, like that stuff gets like automatically plugged. It's like plug and play. It's like really cool. And again it brings down that like that extra step of filling it in. But like, have you guys thought about, is there any ideas around that? Like, you know, like, if I go to a new website, like couldn't. I've already linked my Twitter, I've already verified with you guys that like I totally to Twitter. Is there like any ideas or. And I know that like it would have to be every single company that's out there. But like, is there any ways of making that easier? So like I could just like connect Icebreaker to Magic Eating and then just ingest like my PFP bio, my verified like Twitter, whatever other like socials that I verified. You know, just like that profile is more complete, you know, assuming you want that, you know, totally. Yeah, there's. You can actually do this right now because we use Privy and Privy added us as a, an identity sign in method. So if you're a developer, you can add login with Icebreaker and it will pull all those, all those verified accounts and that also they can look at all the credentials. And there's been. We probably have 10 or so companies and developers using that. I think the one coming to mind is Answer Social by Pat Sol on Farcaster, which is like kind of like a web two friendly brand and account management tool for Farcaster. So he ingests Icebreaker data and credentials. That's one I can think of off the top of my head. But to answer your question, yes, you can do that. We have not been promoting that super heavily because it's like we're really just focused on figuring out one core case, like what is the main problem. And for us that's hiring like Finding quality candidates in Web3 through trust networks is, that's our main, main focus right now. Got it. Okay. Yeah, I was going to ask like what is kind of what, what is on top of mind for Icebreaker? So it's hiring. What makes hiring so hard? Like what makes job boards? It's funny because some background, like I was listening to a podcast about developers in Japan and this dude's like printing money. Once you've found the problem, have the solution, like you said, recruiters, they're down to pay. Companies are down to pay. I think they're making a couple million. And obviously that's a very niche thing. Software developers in Japan, it's a very niche thing. But yeah, what makes hiring difficult? What makes it like why that, why are you guys focused on that? Yeah, we came down. I mean we originally started at the very beginning. We started with CK ads. We're like, okay, you can't just pay people to see ads in zk. Like they just don't like high value people who have valuable data are uninterested in watching low value ads. Right. And they won't do that. So then we're like, we basically ran 16 prototypes, identified a bunch of problems really. We were initially started with, you know, it's really hard to connect IRL and did a bunch of work there and basically just over all this time came to the conclusion that professionals are the right group of users because they are highly motivated to get a job and hiring managers are highly motivated to find somebody to hire. So that's a good problem. And LinkedIn is a dinosaur. So that is a good problem space to be in. And this is all around professional identity, which we think crypto is a unique solution for. So if we can solve that, then we can basically cascade out into more, more areas after that. But we have to solve hiring first. And then your other part of the question was why is hiring hard? As far as I can tell, hiring is hard because it's really a time heavy process. Like not only to source the candidate, to get them through the pipeline, to interview them, to have them interview with multiple people on your team, only to have them churn after two or three weeks is just a nightmare. That's super hard, super high cost. Hiring the wrong person is one of the worst things you can do at a startup and can derail you and cost you even more money. So it's just really strenuous thing, but also incredibly important for the success of any team or business. What we're really focused on is the power of Trust and like the best. When I was at Google, I heard a stat that 90% of people were referrals that were hired. And we know that's true. Like, we know that that already works. And people do this all the time. You see it happening in Farcaster passively through people saying, oh, you know, man, wish we had another dev. And somebody's like, oh, well, I'm actually looking for that, you know, and that's just coincidental. Just hanging out in Farcaster. And I think crypto, we're focused in crypto because it has super weird dynamics for hiring, which are like, you know, people meet on Forecaster, people meet on Twitter, people meet IRL at events. They all have weird animal PFPs or 8 bit PFPs. Like, it does not. The world doesn't look like it did when LinkedIn came around and started, you know, and you had a bunch of Silicon Valley people that were, you know, I suppose they're wearing T shirts at that time, but, you know, it just looked very, very different. So that's kind of, that's why we're focused there. Oh, and the last piece is that I think that most people have no idea how to hire. Like, they don't. I mean, including myself. Like, coming out of, you know, Google had taught me how to hire for internal roles, but I was nestled inside of this massive process and all I had to do was show up to two meetings and, you know, do the group meeting, do my interview, fill out my yes, no. And I didn't really have to consider like, well, how did this person even get into my lap? Now when you're a startup founder, you're like, okay, where the hell do I do that? And that's really important. But I also saw all these other 8,000 things, but like, I really need to hire. But I also, I haven't done that before. Like, hey, hey, friend, do you know somebody? And they're like, oh, yeah, my, my cousin's great at that. And you're like, okay, cool. One meeting with a cousin, you're like, yeah, you seem cool. You're hired. You know what I mean? Like, it's. Which is just word of mouth. But what I think a lot of people don't do is we kind of, we put out a little tweet about this recently. We have like a pretty rigorous process. And a book that I recommend on this is called who by Jeff Smart. And it's really, really, really good. And the very most important key nugget is this one question in the interview where you say, okay, I'd like you to tell me your last five managers and how they would rate you on a scale from 1 to 10. And you have to, you go through that and by the time you go through your fifth manager and what they would rate you, you kind of have a pretty good idea about like who this person is, how they're, you know, you learn a lot through that question. So just by asking that and it's an awkward question to ask, I always like, I'm always like, oh, this is going to be painful. Here we go. Like I feel bad because it's a hard question but it will just save you so much pain on both sides because you find out like, okay, this person is who they say they are. And then the follow up piece to that is you go and talk to those five people about that person and you find out like, okay, was this person being honest? Was this person good at their job? Was this person. You know, you find out a lot from those five referrals and I think that the majority of people don't take the time to do that because it takes time and it's hard to do and it's hard to find those people and it's hard to ask that question. So really with that lens, we're looking to build a pipeline that helps you do that easily when you are a busy, a busy hiring manager and help you find the people in your network that are already there and you just don't, you aren't asking. It's hard to ask. People don't have time to tell you. So we're really interested in building a system around that and that builds on top of all the other things we've built around identity and recommendations and verifications. Yeah, I know that it's been interesting even just this week or the last two weeks maybe on Foraster, you know, people stopping like their projects that they were working on and then immediately like joining like another, another team. Yeah. And it's obvious or easy because you're like, look, this person, they're a good dev or they're a good person to work with because they've done X, Y, trust. Yeah, it's like trust all on chain and they can see it and, and all that. I also find it really cool that like for Dan's post. So Dan's your other co founder for people that aren't familiar. But it's interesting seeing like that paragraph piece about like attestations like I really like, I like really enjoyed that article because it showed me like again going back to the Data thing where he was like. I felt it like, to my core, like, instantly. Where he would say, like, you know, we could do the EAs, which is like the Ethereum attestation services thing, but it's like, not proprietary, but it's like a certain format which you so. Which hasn't been like, said that it's like the standard across the world, you know, like, it hasn't been accepted as the gold standard or whatever. So keeping the data or the attestation as simple as like a cast. The benefits that it brought and all that, like, I thought that was like, really cool, like, behind the scenes kind of look of some of the decisions you guys are making. Yeah, like, it's. It's really cool seeing you guys build it and how those recommendations come in. And I think I, like, even me, like, I asked for the legal recommendation or legal skill. Maybe that was the skill. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is funny because, like, nobody knows me for my legal skills in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he asked me, he was like, this do legal. And I was like, well, he said he did. Yeah, like, yeah, you know. Yeah, I tried. I was like, I trust him. Yeah, I know. It's super funny. The. The. I felt like at first I was like, damn. Like, this is weird because, like, nobody's ever seen me do any of this in, in real life. But, you know, I was like, happy to be like, here's my LinkedIn. You can go look at it. Like, yeah, go check it out. That's what I figured a little bit. I was like, all right. Like, like, if someone wants to, like, verify, like, the Icebreaker has my LinkedIn profile, I'm pretty sure it's connected. Yeah, they could go on there and do that. But yeah, it's. It's. It's funny in that regard. So hiring. I know you. I know you mentioned, I think on Telegram when we were chatting that you guys are ingesting some of the job board data from other places. Um, kind of. What's the thought process behind that? Is it just to have like a more centralized location of. You know, like, if I'm thinking jobs, I go to Icebreaker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, jobs. Companies and people are like the three pillars of the. The. The triangle there. So. And we have, okay, company data. It's not great. We. Well, actually, the way that we render companies right now you can render any company on the Internet as a URL on Icebreaker. And if somebody shows up and verifies ownership of an account, an email account with that domain, then we will tie those two things together and we append it to that profile. That's one of the ways, like, if you look at my profile, it says google.com, and Icebreaker XYZ. And I got Google because somebody who has the actual Google email domain verified Dan. And since Dan had it, then he could verify me. So we're doing a transitive one for the. For that one. And the other way is I verify that I. That I work there. And now that ties the person to the company, which is kind of obscured and not super clear that you can do that. So with this lens of, you know, in the, in the hiring scenario, there's a hiring manager, there's candidates, and then there's kind of like passive network participants who are, you know, hiring manager asks their friend, hey, do you know any designers? That person then turns around and says, here are the people I know. And that person becomes a candidate. So we needed basically a way, like, it's still. We're still grinding at this right now where how do we tie the hiring manager to the company without. If they're not going to come to Icebreaker and verify their domain or how do we make that. So we can either make that easier or we can just go look at companies. And since we're in Farcaster, we're like, okay, we'll look at just this slice of Farcaster and which companies on Farcaster have people there and are also like, have a job description posting up and available. And that's actually. You couldn't find that data. It was like, yeah, I'm like, oh, my God. Like this, like, I can't find this. This doesn't exist. And Ben Ersing kind of had a list, but not with like, the job angle. So that's when we started the Farcaster company directory. And we said, hey, everybody, you know, submit. If you're working on something on Farcaster, submit it in this. In this Ponder survey, and we're going to aggregate it. So we did that. We got all those, and then we also manually went through all of Icebreaker, combed out all of those companies and people, and that basically came out into a spreadsheet. And then we went and built a job board based on those companies. So now you can actually look at, if you go to Jobs, Icebreaker xyz, we haven't really talked about this, but we aggregated a board together of all of those companies that have open roles. So now the next piece is for us to tie people to those roles, either actively by them, like logging in and verifying their domain ownership or by us saying, hey, we know like since we are a trusted, trusted entity. Right. So you can see that these are a bunch of like all of these have people who are on varcaster. So this was a great place to start. Now I now as I'm going down, what I've spent this week on actually is now across this company list. Which ones do I have a first degree connection at? Which ones do I have a second degree connection at? And then I'm running basically referral experiments to say can I reach through my extended network to find somebody that's a great candidate for this company because it's in a trusted like referral chain. So that's what, that's where my head has been at. Yeah, that's it kind of reminds me of. So like you know, at in web two companies like you have referral programs. Like it's common and yeah, different companies do it very differently. And it's funny like to me, at least funny to me in the sense that like when I first heard of Bounty Caster I didn't really think that I would use it because I was like, well what would I use a bounty for? You know, like I'm used to bounties like from like a dev sense of like hey, like hey, $10,000 bounty, like do an audit of our code like if you find an issue. You know, like I'm, I'm used to kind of like that perspective of it and I come from like a DevOps. I used to work at a DevOps company. That's where I got started like startup wise here in the Valley. And so that's what I'm used to for bounties. So like for me personally like as a content creator, just regular like on the Internet, I was like what would I use a bounty for? And then like my, like when I started seeing people using it for like hey, give me names for an artist or I'll put up a bounty for like 10,000 D gen whatever and anyone could submit, you pick. Like my mind kind of got opened up to like whoa, like there's a lot of cool stuff you could do essentially on chain, which is what I, which is why I love this place. So I don't know if, if there's a formal referral program for external users at companies like I don't think I've been exposed to that before. Like if I'm. It's usually like my old hiring manager is like, hey, do you know someone for this role? I tell them, but I Don't get like a cut, dude. Exactly. This is. This is exactly it. I'm like. So like, I'm like actively annoyed about this because this happens to me all the time. Because, like. And I'm like, you just said it sounds kind of like we could go down that path of like. And it's funny because, like, I'm interviewing. I keep saying it's funny. I need. I need a better adjective. But like, it's. That's on me. I got a 2025. We're going to step it up. But I'm talking to the union finance team and co founder, or founder, I believe, for. And I'm not going to talk too much about it. We're talking about you guys. But essentially it's like an on chain credit union. And it's like you got skin in the game of like, hey, it's funny because I've done this too. And this is actually funny in the sense of like, actually funny. One of my friends was like, hey, can you loan me like a thousand bucks? I'm good for it. My money's stuck in Gemini for like five days and it's doing its thing and I'm like, and you know, NFTs are popping off and I want to buy this. And you know how it is with NFTs at that moment. The floor is going blah, blah, blah. So I was like, yeah, sure, dude, I'll shoot you one K. And they did pay me back. And then sometimes they gave me like some interest, like very little, you know, like gas. Yeah, yeah, but I've done that a bunch of times. And with them, like, they're trying to do the exact same thing, but just like formalize it a little bit more. And so like, obviously if they like don't pay back, then like your social credit score or, I don't know, it starts getting a little like Black Mirror episode ish. But Right, right. It all makes sense in my head. But I would expect the same too. Like if, if you were like, hey, Juan, I need an attorney for a web three company startup. This is where we're at. And I give you a name. Like, hey, like, I know a freaking killer. Like, same how we have crack devs. I know a killer attorney that I think would do well for you guys. Yeah, I'm not expecting to get rich off that, but like a commemorative trophy saying like, hey, this person recommended this person and they ended up being a good hire. Like, that's cool to me. Like, I feel like, yeah, I would enjoy that. Obviously there's Like a kickback too, you know, like, maybe like, you know, internal referrals is like five grand. I think it's five grand on my current company external referral was like a fifth of that. Like, you know, a thousand or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah. I mean a lot of recruiters, I don't know how familiar you are, but they'll take 20% salary of a successful hiring. Yeah, I've heard of that. Yeah. So it's like, it's a chunk of change. So yeah, I'm interested in redistributing that across a referral chain, a trust chain. So if you were, if you were in like this. I ran this first version of this experiment last week and if you are in. We were able to find somebody who I didn't know was looking for work and is a great candidate and reached about 50 people just with like kind of a referral type form experiment. And basically whoever was in that chain to that person, assuming that they interview will be paid out. And we have a mechanism where basically the person closest gets them the most amount of money and then we're either going to do it flat back across the chain. So if you referred somebody, they referred somebody else, that person is available for the job, you'll get paid, your friend will also get paid out of that basically salary, salary take is, is the idea. Or out of that recruiter's fee. So which is like, that should be. I, I, I'm personally interested in doing that because like we're constantly referring people and it's good for your own personal. There's like a social capital element to that where you're earning. So you basically earn social capital when you refer a good person to somebody. But even sweeter would be to get 10k on top. Yeah, well, I think it also solves that problem of like, why personally. I personally do this with like my own referrals, but like, I actually like someone will be like, hey, can you refer me to this job? And sometimes I'm like, like, yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, you have to think about it, right? I'm not saying like they were like bad employees, but like, you know, I'm just like, I don't really want to put my, like, I had a really good relationship with that company. Like, I don't want to like do them wrong either. So I do that sometimes or most of the time to be quite honest. But I don't know how many people are actually doing that, you know, because I've, I've reached, I've like cold DM A couple of people that are like, second, I did this for Google actually when I interviewed there like before, I had a friend that worked there. It was a second degree connection. And I cold DM them and, and they were down to refer me, I guess they were able to verify via LinkedIn. And with that other person, I think they kind of did their own homework too, but they, they referred me. Right. So I'm sure it does happen. But like, I'm sure people just. The incentive maybe. Yeah, you know, they're thinking of like, I'll get five, ten grand no matter what, you know, who cares? Like, it's like a lottery almost. As opposed to like. Yeah, you have, I would say like an interesting metric around that would be like someone that's referred a lot of people and how high, like they've placed that person. Like that would be an interesting metric to be like one that person's well plugged in into whatever and they're like a good facilitator for on chain activity and stuff like that, you know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. There's, there's a lot of, a lot of nuance in the whole process. Like, what do you think of the company? What do you think of that candidate? So my goal is to remove a lot of that for you and let you just add three people. Either a candidate who would be a good fit or somebody who might know somebody who is good fit. And that second step is actually the critical part of this chain because most people don't know a full stack engineer dev who's available for work right now. And that was actually one of the hardest things in that first experiment because I'm like, I know that, I know you don't know anybody. And I'm saying you can put anybody down. And people are like, oh, what? Okay, okay, all right, I'll put them down. And then I would reach out to that next set of people and then I would have to explain that over. So clarifying that component of this experiment that I'm trying to walk these extended networks out is the harder part to communicate a little bit. Yeah, that's. Yeah, I'm sure it's different for people. It's funny because, like, I'm thinking now about like when I first got started with Farcaster, you know, people are like, I'm looking for a moderator for like a discord moderator or something. And I knew someone that had been doing that for like all of 2021, 2022, and they were killing it like as a, as a moderator, and they needed someone Specifically in California, because most of the team was in apac, I believe, or I see they were somewhere else, maybe central Europe, so they needed like just more coverage in a different place. And they were like, do you know anyone? And I was like, yeah. And the person ended up getting, you know, hired or whatever for whatever amount they were getting paid. But it felt good, you know, like. Yeah. Just recently I had someone else reach out to me on telegram saying like, hey, do you know someone that can do this type of work? And I sent them over to Young Weekend and. Nice. I'm almost 100% sure he ended up helping them out in some shape, way or form. I don't know if he got compensated. I would hope he did. But yeah, yeah, like it's good because it makes it feel like, you know, even if you're not the person that they're looking for, they trust you to like recommend someone from your network specifically to. Exactly. To go tackle. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, you're exactly right. I think. Yeah. That, that kind of, that nuance of. Yeah. Who. Who do you trust to have a good recommendation? That's kind of the, the linchpin of that whole thing is that you would recommend somebody that you would trust or three people that you trust and they can keep letting that fractalize out. Basically. Yeah. That's cool, man. I like that you guys are working on it. That's a good, good problem to solve. Yeah. And different too from like, like, again, like, I, I'm. I don't think I've experienced a Web2 company or LinkedIn facilitating like referral fees and like facilitating that. And that would differentiate you guys from, you know, other counterparts, essentially. Yeah. In the space. Yep. Yeah. Let's see, what else do we have? Oh yeah, shout out to all the people listening. We got like about 25 people. Oh, no way. Yeah. Mostly on Twitter, a couple on YouTube. Yeah. And then for everyone listening to this after the fact, this will be a podcast episode. So we'll repackage it. You'll get a podcast out of this. You can always watch the video too on my YouTube channel. But. All right, so I guess a more forward looking statement. So in legal land that means that. Don't worry, you're not gonna. This is not a commitment to where Icebreaker is going to be. You don't have, you don't have any investors anyways. Like, like publicly traded company investors. So it's. That's a legal joke for you. Yeah. What is, I guess what is like past. Because these things take time LinkedIn takes, took a long time to like get to where it is now. I would say like for context for some people. I guess I'm old or not old, whatever. But when I used LinkedIn back in 2010, no luck, no cigar, like it was not good essentially. Maybe it's just for my legal field or, or what, I don't know. But essentially I've gotten jobs off Craigslist. That's, that's how old I am. Craigslist. I forget the other one insight or there's a couple other ones. But LinkedIn now is like the main one. I think so long term, three plus years, four plus years, five plus years. What are you hoping Icebreaker will change the way like professional networks are built and maintained? Like, like what is the lasting marker impact that you want Icebreaker to, to leave behind? I guess. Yeah, I mean lasting the. Yeah, I mean I hope that we can build a trust based algorithm that you can bring with you anywhere on the Internet for any, any sort of content. Like that would be a huge success for me. And just using the fundamental nature of the Internet as well, like the way it already exists. I feel like that Web one just missed putting the person in, in and, or like, especially like Web2 kind of got locked in and now we have a chance to unlock and have these like free, open, permissionless systems where you can control your data. I think, I don't, I mean, man, what do I hope? I hope, I mean, I think that we're just going to have AI agents that are handling the majority of our like all of these very laborious and boring tasks. You're already seeing it. There's a few AI already that will handle your whole ATS tracking system. They'll even interview the candidate. So I would like, I'm sure that will be happening. I would like to hope that humans are still involved and important. I was actually thinking about if AI agents need like, I was like, will AI agents have trust networks? I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure. I think we're in such a huge like transformational moment that I can't even imagine what it's going to be like in five years. So I think the trust will still matter and that's durable. I would agree, and I would agree that agents would have trusted AT works. I mean, I feel like we've gotten a glimpse of it and like, I know what you mean. Like it's, it's hard to really visualize because it's such a like pivotal time in history. So like for some, some background I work at, at a sauna. This is also a forward looking statement. But in the short time frame that I've been here and coming from the legal space, I would say that everyone's been talking about like AI and like machine learning and, and bots and tech, like replacing attorneys. Like I saw a funny post recently about Andrew Wilkinson is doing the rounds on Twitter where he asked a question to an attorney and attorney charged him like 5K and yada yada. He has Claude and he got the same answer, simplified, cheaper. And it's like everyone's getting reactive over, all the attorneys are losing their mind. And all I can think about is like, why didn't Andrew just ask Claude first and then literally ask the attorney, like give him a memo saying like this is what Claude said. Verify this. Yes. No, because like, I mean to me personally, like Claude's great love chat GPT love these models. But there's a lot of nuance on these like things. So yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't do anything that like an AI agent would tell me to do. Like without double checking it. Just, just where we're at right now, they are getting better for sure. But I would say like going back to like my company personally is like we're like in the trenches of it I would say in terms of like the changes that are happening and like, yeah, I've slowly become like a believer of like what these things could do and how crazy it changes, like how quickly. Yeah. And now I'm just like, yeah, like do we need humans? Like all those questions are coming up on my damn are crazy but long winded way of saying like trusted agents. Yeah, because I would say like even like in Farcaster like we had. Was it Aether? Yeah, Aether Ethernet from the higher network they had their bot and we had like that bot to bot activity where it was like aether talked to Clanker bot. And that was fun to see. But basically like, you know, you would want to talk to some kind of trust. There would be some trusted verified network of bots that you trust. You know, so like maybe for virtuals and for a couple of these other networks, you know, they automatically default to trusting any other virtual bot that got created or a 16Z one. But yeah, I would imagine there has to be Trust is one of those things like you said. I don't know if we can replace trust at least in the short term, you know, because that would be key to kind of our futures. But yeah, it is. It is, yeah. I mean like, like even now, right? I'm like, I'm like, should I, Should I trust? Do I trust this model? Do I trust the team behind this model? Do I trust this model? Can't like, be convinced to drain its treasury? And like, that proof is coming and happening all the time. People are trying to break them left and right, but the progress has just been so exponentially fast that I can't. I don't know, maybe we'll hit some ceiling. I don't know. There are people that know a lot more about this than me, I think also, I don't know how fast, I guess, like, combined with robotics, I don't know, man. July has this theory that he was making a bet that the majority of transactions will occur between machines on crypto rails within five years. And I was like, huh, dang. I had not considered that. And he was saying all the way down to trucks and autonomous vehicles and this, that and the other. Maybe. But yeah, we still have to trust those systems. I don't know. Crazy. It's crazy. Crazy to think about. Yeah, definitely. I know what you. I think actually here's the take. We will still interact in these, online, in these digital spaces. We will still have to verify that we're human. I actually got asked the first time the other day if we could verify a bot was a bot. So that's going to happen too. So verification aspects we've already been thinking about for humans will also apply to bots. All of the problems that we have with spammers already will just get worse. So we will still need systems to verify that we're talking to who we think we are talking to. That's good for us. That honestly makes sense to me. I mean, like, yeah, I feel like in the DevOps space and in the crypto space, actually. So I used to be like a previous BTC maxi. And there's a lot of things that they teach you when you're first starting off that I think a lot of people nowadays kind of miss. Because I know consumer crypto apps now are like, the whole point of it is to abstract it away and not even know that it's. You're using crypto. And I'm not fighting against that. Like, I. I think we do need that. But there was some kind of nice parts about, like putting in the work to learn about, like some of these principles of like, how does a multi sig work? Why would you use a multi sig? There's just a lot you learn from back in those days that you had to learn yeah, And I think a lot of that gets forgotten a little bit nowadays. Yeah. And one of the things that we, that I was taught at least from a very early start was like verifying hashes. So if you were going to download one of these wallets, the person would commit the code and then they would sign off with their PGP key and then you would have to go double check to make sure it was the right key, everything was working and that's how you would know like that the code that they deployed. Obviously this is assuming you trust the developer to begin with, but at least you know, they're the ones that authored it. And it's not like some middle of the main attack or some other kind of attack vector essentially. But I knew like, okay, they pushed this code themselves like nobody else did. It's not someone impersonating them, they haven't been hacked, something like that, you know. So obviously that was slightly painful how it was done back then. Yeah, I know. Telegram just now announced for their mini apps, you can verify like you can get like a check mark. So like this is going to happen like you're going to personally for a bot. For me, like if I was interacting with a 16z bot, I would want to know that it's like their code. It's like the majority of their code still like the Rails are still there. It's like verified it's their code because then I would feel inclined to interact with it, you know, as opposed to like if it's like, I don't know if it says like a 16Z but it's got like a honey pot next to it. And then it's like, why would I trust that bot? Because like copying the image, the name. We go back to the same problems we had in Web2, where it's like they spoof the URL or they spoof the name. It's like Jack with an A versus 4. We had somebody doing. Yeah, just doing exactly that too. All right. Actually it was the first time that I had been subject of a impersonation scam where somebody had my face, my full name, and was messaging our engineer to send them USDT on Telegram. I was like, huh, okay, this is where we are. Yeah, I'm getting impersonated. I saw that online. Yeah, yeah, it's nuts. So, yeah, I think we will see some trusted networks or some kind of way to verify that the bot we're talking to is a good bot. All right, so I felt you over for a little extra. But the hardest question of all, just so you're aware this is a question I've asked all. All 20 plus guests. It's a long story. Why. But what is your favorite snack? Favorite snack? Just. Just to tell you, I've. I said PB and J, but I've been corrected twice now where someone said, that's a sandwich. That's a sandwich. My favorite. That's really funny. My favorite. I am. I'm a PB&J enjoyer as well. But favorite snack. I love tortilla chips and this artichoke spinach dip from Costco. It's exactly what you're talking about. You know, the one that comes in, like the bucket and it's the best. I. I'm, like, waiting to get tired of it in spin years. So, yeah, it's the best. Yeah. I didn't grow up in a household eating artichoke dip, but once I discovered that, I was like, yes, this or order it again. Just bring it back. Yeah. Awesome. I love that one. That's a good one. Yes. I do enjoy that chips, too, as well. Like chips and wok chips and salsa. Chips. Yes, Chips. Yeah. Just give you chips. Delicious. Yeah. Where can. Yeah. Where should we send people for either for you or for Icebreaker? Should we send them to sign up for Icebreaker XYZ? Yeah, Icebreaker XYZ to sign up. ICBK me J4CK. ETH. That's my profile. Yeah. That's where to start. Find me on warpcast. All my links are on the Icebreaker, but warpcast. Same. Same username. Yeah. Catch me online. Thanks again. Yeah. So I. I'll include those links so everybody can click on them. All right. Welcome back. Yeah. So this week's Cast off. And for those not familiar. Cast off, where I want to hear from from you. You can respond to me via telegram or forecaster. Wherever is easiest for you. But this week's episode, Cast off, is. Yeah. What do you think about decentralized LinkedIn or what do you think about LinkedIn overall? Like, it has a huge dominance right now over our professional life. Yeah. You know, is that right Warranted? Have you ever tried to export your data? Do you like that? Yeah. So if you're hearing this message, you've made it through the entire episode. Thank you for that. If you're listening to this episode on another platform other than pods, make sure to go to Pods Media to collect this episode. I'll have a link below as well. If you are on pods, make sure to subscribe to this episode from your favorite Web2 app. That way you get notified whenever I drop new episodes. And if you did enjoy this episode episode, make sure to leave us a review. You can leave it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, you can ping me wherever. That way, you know, you could they could make their way to their website. Also, any kind of future topic or person you'd like me to interview, let me know. I always happy to, you know, get my eyes and ears and hear what other people want to hear about. All right, see you next episode and enjoy. I hope you enjoy the new music. Actually, actually, I ended up creating these new music. They are collectible via Sound xyz. Yeah, Let me know what you think about the new music. All right, see you. Sa.