The Wolf Of All Streets - From Working With Steve Jobs To Building Identity On Blockchain | Phillip Shoemaker, Identity.com

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

While working alongside Steve Jobs and building Apple's App Store, Phillip Shoemaker realized there were a lot of issues with identity and privacy: app developers who would break the rules of the App Store and whose apps were deleted could easily register with new credentials. After leaving Apple, Phillip decided to focus on this problem and solve it using blockchain. So here comes the story of Identity.com! Follow Phillip Shoemaker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/pbsIdentity ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/ ►►BITGET GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT AND GET MASSIVE DISCOUNTS ON TRADING FEES! 👉 https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget ►►NORD VPN GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #trading Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:27 Way into crypto 2:55 Developers' identity issues 4:25 Solving identity issues 9:48 Pseudonimity 11:40 Privacy violations 13:30 Not your keys, not your identity 16:25 KYC & AML 18:00 Identity theft problem 21:30 Regulation & identity 26:00 FTX case 28:40 What will happen if your identity is stolen 32:20 Working in Apple 33:10 Working with Steve Jobs 35:30 From app store to dapp store 38:00 Solana phone 40:30 Ecosystem is the most important 46:13 Final thoughts The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Some of the world's most brilliant innovators and entrepreneurs are working in the crypto and blockchain space. One of them is Philip Shoemaker, who is the guy that created the App Store for Apple. He shares some insane stories about working with Steve Jobs, how he was effectively doxxed by the world's most famous magician, David Copperfield on Twitter, how that complicated his life. Man, this conversation is one that you cannot miss. Oh, and by the way, we talked a little bit about digital identity and why that's so important. That's what he's building now. Listen up. Sometimes the first question I like to ask people is, how'd you end up here? Right. How did you end up in this decentralized crypto space?

You have quite a background, obviously, with the App Store. And so you probably could have stayed over there in Web2 and lived a very pleasant life. But here you are. Yeah. And I love it here. Look, to me, one of the most appealing things. I got the white paper sent to me in 2010 and it just thrilled me, right? I was excited about it. I shopped it around Apple, talked to

a bunch of people about it. They all poo-pooed the idea of cryptocurrency and didn't really understand the blockchain aspect at the time. But I invested in companies, right? I invested in BitGo, invested in 21E6, which was Bology's company. And Bology, he got me a good return. BitGo, still waiting for that. But for me, it was all about this space. And I knew I had to plan it one day, but Apple was absolutely not the place to do it. And so when I left in 2016, after running the App Store for seven years, I started focusing on what the big problems were I was running into there. And for me, it was all digital identity, right? It was knowing who the person was, who the customers were,

who the developers were. And so I started looking into digital identity, self-sovereign identity, all on the blockchain, which made a lot of sense to me. So that's kind of how I got into it. Talk about the challenge of knowing the identity of an app developer while you were at Apple, because that seems like a huge competitive advantage for Apple over Android, certainly, but probably also a massive challenge. You don't really get scam apps on Apple nearly as much as you do on other platforms. No, you don't. But one of the issues is that certain developers, Apple knows who they are, I mean, because they go through a full KYC process,

and that's businesses for the most part. You and me, right? End users that maybe we don't want to incorporate, et cetera. All they really need is a credit card, a name, an address, and an email address. And in foreign countries, that's easy to spoof. There's developers that come in, they can pretend they're one person, and then ultimately do some really bad stuff.

So we chuck them off the platform, and they resurrect in a matter of minutes. That was one of the banes of my existence at Apple was playing whack-a-mole. Once you get this developer in that starts doing shady stuff, you chuck them from the store. They come up under a different company name or a different username. They come up with a different app name and everything changes, but they're still doing the same bad stuff. So that's a hard problem to solve. And that was the thing that I kept just circling back on saying, how do we solve this problem in a way that preserves privacy?

So you obviously said you found the Bitcoin white paper in 2010. You shopped it around, didn't go that well at Apple, obviously. But you saw something in that technology that could solve this identity problem. And that's a pretty big jump actually from the white paper because the Bitcoin white paper obviously is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. That's not a digital identity system. So where was the sort of evolution there in your mind where you had that moment that you said, we can solve identity using this technology? Well, for me, it was things about consensus mechanisms was one piece. And then just the transparent nature of putting things on the chain, right?

On the chain itself meant to me that we could put attestations on the chain to say, this is Scott. He is who he says he is. And it's verified by X. It could be TransUnion. It could be Ideology. One of these big ID verification companies that stakes their reputation and insurance on the fact that they validly or that they verify everybody's identity and

make sure that you're not a bad guy, a bad performer. To me, those two pieces made me start thinking there's got to be a way to solve this problem. I started doing a lot of research in 2016. Ultimately, 2017 rolls around the ICO craze, and I run into Civic Technologies, Vinny Lingham. And Vinny and I hit it off and ultimately decided to spin up this identity company based on some of the groundbreaking work and patents that Civic was putting out. It seemed to make a lot of sense. And so what are those patents? What are those ideas?

How are you building this? What are you actually building? And honestly, I had no idea that Vinny was involved. It shows my level of due diligence on this one. I do know Vinny, and I think that would have not gone under my radar, but that's really cool. He's a great guy. Yeah, he's a good guy.

In fact, I moved to San Diego because of him. But I wanted to be closer because he's a board member on identity.com. So what we did when I started talking to the civic folks, Vinny and I decided that it would be a great idea to create a nonprofit because it's really difficult to create a protocol and then bring in competitors into that protocol, right? If you want to bring in a spruce identity bring in competitors into that protocol right if you want to bring in a spruce identity or something like that they don't want to sit on a protocol that Civic is created and that Civic is in control because they're their direct competitors right so that didn't make a lot of sense so we wanted to take a step back create a a non-profit that says

look we're open to all comers let's's bring everybody in. Let's have a level playing field. We'll own the protocol, not Civic. And we'll be able to bring everybody on board into this protocol to do this work. And what we have right now, we started out with an attestation mechanism on Ethereum that allowed us to run smart contracts, put an attestation on the chain that doesn't have any of your PII, just says that you are who you say you are. And it's been validated by company X, whoever one of the validators are in the network. And that's how we started. But look, 2019 rolled around and gas prices got exorbitant.

And so we decided we needed to make a change. And so we started looking at Solana and we ended up doing a full rewrite and creating a new protocol called the Gateway Protocol to allow gatekeepers, also known as validators, to be able to come in and specify, hey, we will KYC and AML people. We will hold their identity off chain somewhere securely and allow people to use DEXs and other things if you're in the States to be able to use a DEX is a big thing. But we find that a lot of people aren't using it for that reason. They're using it to do bot detection, to do age gating, right? They don't care about the regulated KYC stuff. They are more interested in knowing, is this person of age? Is this a human? Is this unique? And so that's how a lot of folks are using it right now, which is a good use case. It's good for DAOs and other things.

But still, we need to get to that solution where the US starts allowing DEXs and other people to use decentralized identities. And that's a big regulation change, right? And that's one of the battles I constantly fight. I'm flying to DC a lot to meet with regulators to have this conversation. Seems like every person I record a conversation with now is in some way, shape, or form flying to DC regularly to have conversations with regulators. Although I will say that when I asked them about that, generally they say it's a positive experience, which I think is the antithesis of what you would expect. Yeah, well, it is positive for sure.

People are really excited to hear from us, et cetera. But as soon as you open your mouth and you say crypto or blockchain or something, they conflate the two, right? So I open my mouth, I say digital identity on the blockchain, they're like, wait a minute, we don't want another FTX. And you're like, this has nothing to do with FTX. Get that, you know, people conflate the two. And that's the hard part is when I met with Feinstein's office and Padilla's office, senators out of California, they didn't want to hear a word about blockchain.

So I kept it to DLT, you're giving a distributed ledger technology and talk about digital identity. And that seems to smooth things over and make the conversation go so much better. Is the main focus securing our identity on the blockchain or is it actually kind of what you hinted to, which is abstracting away the private information so that you can still give confirmation

of someone's identity without sharing everything? Exactly. That's exactly what it is. It's all about abstracting. And look, I'm a big believer in pseudonymity, right? You were talking about me coming into the Web3 world from the Web2 company, which I could have stayed at happily. I am a huge look. I love the Wild West. This is the Wild West. Right. Just like the early days of the Internet, you could get away with a lot there. It's same is true in crypto and in the Web3 space. And for me, this whole concept of pseudonyms, like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Yuga Labs launched with four founders

that had never been docs. They didn't release their identity. And people had big problems with that. It's like, look, it's not about those people. It's about what they've created. Who cares who they really are in real life? But when you start investing in companies behind a shadowy figure, right, a pseudonym, you start to question that.

But what if there was a service that says, hey, we verified this person. We know who they are. They have a good reputation. Look at the reputation. They work at this company, this company, this company. And you could start to abstract some of that information and do a layer of indirection. Because look, as soon as the founders were doxed at BAYC, they had to hire security details. And because people imagine them walking around with a billion dollars in their pocket and,

hey, I'm going to get this guy, right? And so suddenly overnight, these guys had problems. But to me, it's all about the abstraction. If we can do a level of indirection between the hackers and people trying to steal our identity and us, I think we'll be a much safer place. So you just mentioned the hacker side of it, which is huge. How about the fact that we're just dumping all of our data and our privacy is being violated by major corporations? Does it also help to solve that? Because I would think that if you're an average person, they're probably more concerned with that than obviously being the billionaire who needs security walking down the street because they made some really cool

monkey pictures. That's right. Yes. And you're absolutely right. My main goal is to eliminate all the PII honeypots of the world, right? As you and I, and probably most of your listeners, we've been hacked, right? Equifax hack got our identity out there. I was able to purchase mine on the dark web in 2016 for $25. And I got everything about me. I got my address. I got my social security number.

You name it, it was there. And I want to stop that for other people, right? So for me, if you're carrying your digital identity on your device, you, you have the ability to control the disclosure of that information to whom you want to, what information you want to whom you want to, and nothing beyond that. Because right now, you know, who owns our identity, Facebook, Equifax, I mean, who owns this identity? Facebook? Equifax? I mean, who owns this stuff? And you could say that Facebook owns a lot of my social identity, as does Twitter.

But who owns my legal identity? Well, I should, but it's really held by so many different credit bureaus and other things that they can do whatever they want and share it with whomever they want. They're monetizing your identity and you're not even getting paid. It's almost like a bank. They're going and making 10% on my money and I'm getting nothing back. But it's worse, right? Because what's more inherently important to a human being?

What's more rightfully yours than literally your identity, your personal preferences, your information, how that's used and how that's spread? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's brilliant because, you know, I was listening to it during the FTX hassle and all that and everything else is going on. People were losing money because they kept their money up on an exchange, right? Their crypto up on an exchange. And everybody's like, it's not your keys, not your crypto. And I feel the same way. Look, I'm a believer in that. I keep it all offline. But I also believe in not your keys, not your identity, right? To me, my identity

is more important than my money. I mean, I hate to say that, but it really is. I walk around saying not your keys, not your identity. You need to control the keys to your kingdom. And that's what we're trying to create okay so is there a direct relationship in the way we store our crypto and the way we would store our ID using your technology is it literally private keys you can put it on a hardware wallet and uh that's right yeah using decentralized identifiers dids uh allow you to basically you go through the same hassle that you would with a standard wallet and you ultimately store your your did up on a wallet somewhere which uh which is backed by a verifiable credential which is a

which is a uh a storage of your off-chain credentials essentially that that that makes perfect sense but then the next challenge obviously which is out of your control, is getting that process more acceptable, easier for your average person who's terrified. They're already terrified to be their own bank. Now they have to be their own bank for the ID, right? So MPC technology, whatever technology is coming to basically make the private key process less terrifying. Yeah, I totally agree with you. And that is one of the concerns that we have. I think this whole idea of a wallet is kind of crazy. We have to abstract that. That's what I love about the wallet abstraction stuff. We have a wallet abstraction technology called Cryptid that helps

you store your identities in a better way. But look, the problem is the same old wallet issues, right? With the key and controlling your key and then losing your key and how do you recover? So we're, you know, we have a solution that right now is fully DID and yeah, you lose your key, you're done. But we're working on what we're internally calling a web 2.5 issue, a solution, right? Which I'm sure you've heard before, which helps bridge that gap over time and then we'll make it easier for you over time. Yeah. I think that that's just a challenge not unique to you, but to everything blockchain based at this point. But the more conversations I have about it with the more people, the more I realize it's just a matter of time.

Yeah. I mean, it's just like we didn't even used to have Face ID on an iPhone, right? Yeah. I mean, it used to be kind of complex and now you just look at the thing and it appears and you're in your app store you know that you built and that's right so how are you guys actually your company does the kyc and aml for every single person or is this in partnership with those other companies that have already done that the trans TransUnions and the Equifaxes of the world. Exactly. We don't do it ourselves. We provide the blockchain,

the lower level technologies to do that. And I said, we're on Solana. We're going to other chains as well. That is what we're actively doing. But our partners are companies like SoCure and OnFedo and these companies. I want to get as many of those into our network as possible because the goal and the desire is to make it a meritocracy. You choose the data provider or the identity provider that has the highest score, that has the lowest cost, and those kinds of things to help

drive these costs down to make this much more amenable. And look, when these companies, when people implement, say, an identity verification from SoCure, they're writing to a custom API, typically, and they're US only. So now if they want to expand to India, they have to, what, get a third provider, another provider, etc. So that's what's great about our technology is You write it once and then just tweak a smart contract to point to a different provider and then they can handle you in India. Another company, Ideology, can handle you in Europe, etc. You talked about how Equifax obviously was hacked in the past. You were able to buy your own identity on the dark web, I think. my first experience with identity theft was when I tried to open a credit card for a free t-shirt on a locust walk at the University

of Pennsylvania in 1996. I was a kid who literally was like, I have no free t-shirt. I'll write my information and social security number on a piece of paper, a card that they were handing out. We got my identity stolen. It's absolutely horrible. But with you working with Equifax or these companies kind of agnostic to it, are there sort of points of failure even in your system where somebody could theoretically get in and steal someone's identity? Or does the person basically become their own point of failure if they fail to secure it correctly. Yeah. If you ultimately have a... If you get access to somebody's private key, access to the...

In our case, we hide away the private key. You can't really see it. You have to use the app. And ultimately, to get into the app, you need to do a face detection, face scan, etc. to get into that. But look, some people turn that off on their devices. They don't like it. And so then that makes it a little more easy to use.

But when you go to transact with a, you know, one of our use cases is alcohol vending, right? So you use your device, your phone, and you walk up to a beer vending machine and you want a beer, it needs to identify you. If you're already identified, you just go up, do a quick face scan to prove it's you. And it compares it to the driver's license or the passport that you've used. It does a face verification. If it is you holding that phone, you're standing right there. It'll dispense a beer after you pay it. And so there are biometric checks in place.

In place. But look, there's always a way i think to be able to steal it but the difference is that it's not stored in a giant honeypot somewhere that a hacker is inclined to you know would you rather 10 million of them at once right rather than spending that same amount of time just to hack your phone because everything's encrypted etc so uh it's it's So it's much more difficult to steal my identity because first of all, you have to steal my phone and then go from there. So clearly this is being built for mobile, right? You obviously, the app store, I keep bringing it

up, but it's arguably one of the greatest innovations in mobile technology history, right? So you have a bit of a background here. Is the idea then that just like we face scan to use everything on our iPhone, that anytime we need to show ID or verify anything, it's just that click of a phone or a scan of the phone? Exactly. Exactly. But you know, it's funny. I've been dealing a lot with the government recently. And the thing that scares me about doing face scans and those kind of things is that they can compel you to put your face in front of a phone. Of course. I mean, if you get kidnapped, it's...

But they can't compel you to give a... With kidnapping, it's a bit different because they can use force, right? But with the government, they can't compel you to give them your PIN code, right? So it's curious. PIN codes tend to be a little safer, believe it or not, although we're hearing all about the crazy pin code attacks that people are doing now. Once they see you type in your pin code on a phone, they steal your phone, right? And then get access to everything. I mean, there's only so much you can do, right? I mean, at some point, if somebody

wants to do something bad, bad enough, they'll probably find a way. But like you said, you're making it exceptionally difficult and the incentives really aren't there. That's right. Right. I don't think the bottom line, I don't think the bathing ape guys are going to stop using security because they're like, have a more secure wallet, right? Right. No, exactly. Which makes sense. So you talk about obviously going to the government then. This seems like something that the privacy-loving side would appreciate and maybe something that the other side,

where they want to be able to access everything and be able to track you or to know what you're doing, where, and with what, maybe this would be a huge threat to them. Yeah, and you're absolutely right. When you start talking to the FinCENs of the world and those what, maybe this would be a huge threat to them. Yeah, and you're absolutely right. When you start talking to the FinCens of the world and those guys, they say, look, if you're doing regulated purchasing of securities and that kind of thing,

you need to store their identity for seven years. Now, how do I, as a self-sovereign identity company, store somebody's identity in a non-centralized manner, right? That is a really tough problem because one, I don't want any, I hate centralized services that store RPII, right? Because that's a honeypot. That's all it is. So how do we store it in a way that is allowable by the US government and other governments. And it's a problem that eludes all of us. You have to store that information if you want to do regulated securities trading. And doing that requires honeypots of information. And so for me,

I just think the laws need to change. They absolutely need to change. I was going to say, that seems like a problem with the law, not a problem with what anybody's attempting to build. But how do you get lawmakers who work for a government that probably wants to have all that information centralized to understand something like this? Seems like a major, but seriously, it is a long conversation that we need to have with the government. And I think people are getting tired of this. One of the things that we have right now is the Digital Identity Act of 2020. It was what it was called, but it's still in motion. And a few senators are working on this to be able to push through a digital identity bill. Now, the thing about the digital identity bill when I read it last year was that it involved honeypots. And that's why I got really engaged and said, we've got to shut this down.

So I'm involved in another group called the Web3ID Coalition that is all about forcing the government or getting certain rules in there to allow for decentralized identity and eliminating the concept of honeypots and we've made some progress there but it's just not enough yet digital identity has almost become the catchphrase of 2023 i'm hearing about it all the time you know ens and uh mina you know zarks and all of these things. So are you technologically different from them? Are they competitors? Is everybody working towards the same goal? Yeah, you know, 2022 was a watershed moment for the digital identity group, getting companies getting tons of VC interest, right? There was a lot of money. Now, we've been around since 2019. We've been crypto

wintering for the past year and a half because we knew this was happening. And then FTX kind of threw us for a loop because it's like, oh, we're going to add another year to this winter. But look, we've been working on this since 2019. A lot of other companies have received a bunch of funding in the past year. And I worry that they're gonna uh go through that money pretty quickly and at the end of 2023 we're going to see a lot of digital identity companies go away but with regards to what we're doing we're all taking a similar approach but at the same time just different specific implementations and uh look zkKPs to me are the future. They're just super computing intensive and we will be supporting those as they start getting down to a place that makes more

sense computing-wise and speed-wise. And that if I can do a ZKP on my phone itself, then I'll be happy. So you effectively could incorporate the winners of the technological race on how to do it and still utilize it on your own platform and make it work on the phone. I would love to have a lot of those guys as part of our network, as equals in the network. We're just like I said, we're a nonprofit. We're not in it. I don't know if anyone gets into digital identity to make a ton of money, right? We're not in it to make money. We're in it to put good out there into the world and solve some of these difficult problems. You'd think that if you went to a government official and had that conversation and saying,

listen, we're a non-for-profit. We're doing this to better humanity, that they would listen. But to your point, I think SBF put so much egg on their faces that it's almost impossible to have that conversation. How far do you think he set us back? And how frustrating is it that you, in this interview and probably every conversation, have to answer for him? Yeah, right. It's so true. And I think it's a couple of years at least. It really ticked me off, right? I mean, as all of us, right?

I was really excited about the work FTX was doing. And it looked like they were onboarding a ton of people. They were bringing in people, mainstream users. I mean, it was all good. And then all of this lobbying and other work that they were doing behind the scenes with government officials. But to find it was all fraud, it was all nonsense. It kind of threw me because I knew it was going to set us back a few years.

And a lot of these government officials don't even want to talk to us anymore because of SPF. And it's really frustrating. So I'd say, yeah, two to three years he set us back, at least as far as trust is concerned. And we've always had a trust problem in crypto, right? And finally, but last year was just so many things, right? So many issues. Celsius, Luna, and I guess BlockFi at the tail end. But FTX was special in all the wrong ways because SPF was the guy. He was the white knight. He was the one who took the meetings. And if you took a meeting with him, you just can't even risk your reputation of saying the word crypto out loud again. That's right. Yeah. It's so embarrassing. I still find it just so incredibly embarrassing. So I can't imagine for you who goes to have a meeting about something that's completely

unrelated, inevitably, you have to explain why we're not all scammers and frauds and dark web. Yeah. And identity is all about trust, right? You got to trust the validator. You have to trust the issuer of the identity. You have to trust the presenter of the information. And for me, it's all about trust.

And SBF blew up that trust. We started back at zero. And we're making so much progress in this industry. I would say before that, we had some relatively reasonable legislation being proposed on the Senate floor. I mean, even Biden's executive act initially was, hey, let's figure this out. And now it's like he's tweeting about how crypto trillionaires are violating the tax code, right? That's right.

But here we are. Not even worth discussing anymore. crypto of what are the worst case scenarios of actually having your private information and your identity stolen or violated? What can actually happen? Why is this so important? Yeah. I'll give you a few of my stories. In running the App Store early on, nobody knew who I was. I was in a confidential position because when people know what you do and when you're in a position of power like that where you're controlling basically what apps go into the platform

and then ultimately deciding who gets removed from the platform, you're basically a... You're done, man. You're blocking their ability to make money, right? And people go crazy over that. Either they're going to try to bribe you or they're going to try to kill you. And so I had a bit of both, right? At one point, I helped a magician out with his app, David Copperfield. And I was on a phone call with this guy and he thanked me. And then the next day, he tweeted my name and said, hey,

I just met with the head of the app store, Philip Shoemaker. And from thanked me. And then the next day, he tweeted my name and said, hey, I just met with the head of the App Store, Philip Shoemaker. And from that day, people started hounding me. Once they found out who I was, people were sitting in the lobby of Infinite Loop at Apple's prior campus with a picture of me. And they would just wait for me to walk through the doors. And I say that because the receptionist would always call me and say, somebody's looking for you. There's somebody here with a picture of you. Security would call me and say, hey, somebody just tailgated another employee trying to find you. Here's the contents of their car. We took pictures of everything. I was like, I don't need this information. What are we going to do with the contents of some rando person's car? So that

somebody showed up at my house because they got my information off, off, off the dark web. They were able to find out where I lived and a lot of things like that. So that's one of the things is that suddenly your, your privacy is completely violated and people show up at your house. They show up at your work. They stand in front of your car late at night, waiting for you to come out of the office just to have a conversation or something worse. I got death threats in Australia and Brazil. These were people that really were serious about taking me out because I rejected their app or somebody on my team, my 450 employees, one of them rejected their app and so therefore they were going to murder me. Those so those are some of the kind of

things that happened to me directly. My mother-in-law, however, she had kind of like you did, right? And somehow somebody, her social security got out there. Next thing you know, multiple loans in her name, creditors were calling her, and ultimately, bad things happen. So many people have to file bankruptcy for these kinds of things to solve. She didn't, but some do. That is insane. You'd think that David Copperfield would have been able to magically make that mistake disappear. Take us back in time and take the tweet off. You're David Copperfield. Exactly. I'm not going out there and telling people how his magic illusions work, right?

Why is he outing me? The funny thing is he probably thought he was doing you a favor. Yeah, exactly. I mean, he clearly didn't get it, but man, wow. I mean, what a... And there you go.

You fought so hard to maintain your anonymity. I mean, Apple fought hard to maintain your anonymity and one simple tweet and it's over. It blew up. Then I got dragged to the press. Oh my God, it was terrible. It was a terrible time. Jaws vice president at Apple always said I had the hardest job at Apple because if I do something right and I reject a bad app, the developers in the ecosystem are screaming my name. They hate me. If I do a bad thing, I let the app go through, then people inside Apple hate me. It was just nonstop. Three weeks on the job, my team approved an app that made our stock price go down. It was rough. Steve yelled at me. Everybody a, you know, Steve yelled at me.

Everybody yelled at me. Al Gore yelled at me. I mean, this was so ridiculous that an app could have that much power. What was it like? Well, I should say, what was it like getting yelled at by Steve Jobs? But I'd actually rather know

what it was like to innovate with Steve Jobs and to work on this. How much of the way that you now view what you're building came from working with him and seeing the way that he approached the App Store and everything at Apple? Yeah, you know, it's easy to, one of the things that people do when they work for a leader is they kind of emulate his behavior or her behavior. And that's one of the things that you see at Apple. Steve had a sharp tongue for sure, criticisms all around. And that's how management is at Apple.

They all just turn on each other and they criticize people left and right. And it's a real critical workforce. And it's difficult to work in that and not come out the same way. And I know when I left Apple, I was kind of that kind of same kind of jerk to employees. And they're like, what are you doing? Right? You can't, you can't treat people. You don't seem like a jerk at all. I think you're a reformed jerk then. You seem so nice. It's a lot of Zen. But, but yeah, but, but to be honest, you put that aside. Steve was, he was just always thinking outside the box.

He was such a lateral thinker, somebody who would always look at problems in a completely unexpected way. And when my team for the first, when I joined Apple, I said, first thing we need to do is set up guidelines to tell developers what they can and can't do. Otherwise, they spend months working on a product, ship it to us, and we're like, we're never going to ship a porn app, right? Apple is never going to let a porn app on the store. But we didn't want to say that. We didn't want to say anything.

We wanted to see what people were going to present. And so we did that for a good year, almost 16 months. And then Steve and I sat down and we took everything we found. My team had kept an amazing wiki of information. And we sat down and hammered out the guidelines. And doing those guidelines with him was just eye-opening, right? Just the way he thought about things, the way he would distill information. It was probably an absolute waste of his time.

But it was amazing for me because I learned so much from him. But amazing leader, just an eye for detail that I've never seen before. It doesn't sound like a waste of his time when you put in context how impactful the App Store has been. Yeah, that's true. So what's the next App Store in Web3? Is it identity? I mean, or is there something along those lines where we actually see, you know, something as impactful as that, that sort of mimics what you experienced there? Well, I had high hopes for the saga, right? The Solana phone with their dApp store, right?

The concept of a dApp storeap store to me really resonated it was to me uh something that we could do in a decentralized way allow people to uh to vet look one of the things that apple does over say android is that they vet the apps and if it's a financial app they do a little more due diligence to make sure that if they don't any code. That's one of the things they absolutely don't get is code. So they can't verify that there's no backdoors or anything like that. But they can verify the company, they can verify the app works as advertised, that things are being secure, that data is not stored in plain text, etc. And that's what I envision as the next kind of Web3 store. It doesn't need to be a Dapp store. Look, wouldn't it be great one day when you don't know if you're running an app or a Dapp,

you don't really care. You just want it to run in a way that's decentralized. Now, I understand that's the D in Dapp, but we want to make sure that I can't be, that one company can't say, you know, I'm cutting Philip off. And we want that app to be able to work in perpetuity. Right now with Facebook login, if Facebook hates me, all of a sudden, they can turn off my ID. And now I can't use Facebook login in any of the other apps I was stupid enough to use Facebook login to log into. And this whole kind of deep platforming thing is something that we have to fix. And so to me, the next big thing in Web3 needs to be a good dApp store that's cross-chain,

that whatever we call it, it's just a bunch of apps that run in a decentralized way. And that's been secure and vetted and audited. And security audits need to happen and insurance, et cetera. So for me, I see that. I don't see identity as being a big piece of that other than knowing who the customers are, knowing who the developers are. And hell, if you're a developer of a fintech app, maybe you're going to have to go through a KYC AML. And maybe your board has to as well.

Because, look, if you look at something like FTX, there were a lot of red flags that various people saw, but it was not put together in a cohesive argument to say, this is why you should stay away from these guys. Right. Absolutely. So I spoke with Anatoly from Solana three days ago. Oh, you did? And we talked pretty deeply about the phone. And he said, if we get 25,000

people to buy these, we've won. We consider that a success. Well, you're one of them. How's your experience been with the phone? I haven't actually asked anyone as of yet. Well, it's interesting. I was quoted in a Fortune article on Monday that said, look, these guys are going right down the middle. They're not adding a lot of features that are going to drag in the crypto bros, and they're not adding a lot of features that's going to bring in the mainstream users. There's nothing here on this phone that's going to make me switch for my iPhone. Not yet. Sure, there's the security aspect. It's the way they handle the keys, but I have a ledger. I have good technology to handle that as well. And it's just nothing's dragging me to it yet. I think it's a kernel of a good idea and they just need to flesh out a few

more versions. The question is, are they going to have enough success to push this through? One of the big problems with hardware, I've been in, you know, I worked at various companies that were creating the iPod killer. Obviously, we never never did Apple killed all the companies I was at Virgin electronics was one of them right they destroyed us because uh you people don't have the uh the ability to keep funding something uh over and over again to make better hardware hardware is expensive so for Solana to fund the next two or three versions. I mean, to make a major hardware change, he said that. He was like, we have to be thinking now

about what we want to be in three or five years. That's right. And so if they have the money and the wherewithal to continue iterating on this, I think they're going to create something good, but it's going to be a few years and it can't be Solana only, right? They have to, you know, I talked to CZ about this.

He wants a Binance phone. No doubt about it. A lot of these guys do. So they need you and Steve Jobs. That's right. Get over there and start working on the saga. Or people, I mean, as much as that's whatever, in jest, they need somebody who understands

the user experience and has built something like this. But listen, the other person, the company you just mentioned was Ledger. And I talked to Pascal, the CEO of Ledger yesterday, and we had that conversation about their new device stacks. Yeah. Right. And that it had to be, and of course, everybody sort of pays homage to the Apple devices. The guy who designed the iPod is the one who's designing that Ledger stacks. But to your point, it can be a great idea, but this has to be something that's so sticky and so easy to use that they would give up their iPhone. That's a massive proposition.

That's massive. And look, giving up an iPhone is tough because Apple does everything they do to keep you in the ecosystem, right? Apple music becomes as annoying as humanly possible to go switch your things. My favorite, like old Apple sort of anecdotes, my wife specifically, I can say, I can't remember the order in which it happened, but it was that she had a phone. She went to update it on her computer and it was one of them. The computer was too old to update the phone. So she had to buy a new computer to be able to sync her phone. And then it was like the iPad, the computer was too old to update the phone. So she had to buy a new computer to be able to sync her phone. And then it was like the iPad didn't work. And so now you've bought four new Apple devices before you've even thought about it just to make sure that they all

work together. And who's going to then say, I, you know, I'm going to go get a PC and move everything from iTunes. Yeah, that's right. It works really well. It does. It works really well. It's funny. A lot of people inside Apple refer to Tim Cook as Mr. Burns, right? So when you were explaining that suddenly they had to buy four different Apple computers, I see Mr. Burns saying, excellent. Because that's exactly the mentality there. Yeah. It really does force you to stay in the ecosystem for better or for worse. Because I mean, I do think that the user experience is far superior. I think I've been an Apple guy literally since the early 90s. I mean, I had my first personal, but we had like a Commodore 64 and all that stuff. But my first computer when I went to college in 1995 was a Performa. Yeah, really? Yeah. I mean, so I learned, I mean, I literally have never owned, I don't think a PC since 1995. I had the Blueberry,

iMac. I've had them all. That's so funny. You know, that's the first, Performa was the first computer line that Steve killed when he came back to Apple. He was like, there's too many, there's too many systems. And he got rid of most of the skews. Yeah. I noticed that it didn't last very long and also that it was like very piecemeal. It was one of the few that felt like a PC where you had to like plug all kinds of different things into one another. And it wasn't that one moving from that computer to the iMac, which was,

you know, literally like you pull the keyboard and the mouse out of the box and plug it in and you plug the computer in and you're done. And I had that 15, two, two, i love that i'm 52 too yeah that's what i meant 52 too because in four we only had the 14-4 on the performer or whatever it was it was it was like life-changing to even be able to use the internet that fast that's right so cool so then you got to wonder now with the exponential sort of progress of technology, seeing where we've come from there, what comes next, right?

And then how much will blockchain be a part of that? I think AI is opening people's eyes to just how fast something can evolve. Yeah. But do you think that blockchain and the things you're building that we're going to see that sort of hockey stick curve still? You know, despite running an identity company, I still say digital and decentralized identity is five years out, right? We've still got a way. So I think it will ultimately, but that might be closer to 10 years from now when it hockey sticks. So I think we will see it over time. I think everybody's going to move to this because it's so much safer. But for now, it's all AI and AR. I think the two of those together, if Apple releases a good headset that has augmented reality and it incorporates things

like chat, GPT, and object recognition and other things in it, it could be a phenomenal workplace productivity tool to be able to help us all perform so much better. I think Apple beats Meta to the punch on that. I do. Yeah, I really do. We've been hearing about this headset for, what, five years? When I left Apple, the first conference I spoke at asked me about augmented reality.

And I opened my mouth. I knew nothing about what Apple was working on. And I said, I think one line, it's like, you better watch out for Apple. They I opened my mouth. I knew nothing about what Apple was working on. And I said, I think one line, it's like, you better watch out for Apple. They're involved in everything. And I got a cease and desist immediately from Apple saying, you can't talk about. And look, it was one of those things

that scared the hell out of me. By the way, you did not compete on something you didn't even know existed. I didn't even know existed. I could ask you about rockets and you would have said the same thing and probably gotten a message. Would have gotten that, exactly. Of driving cars, what? Yeah. God. So it's just- But they really do have their fingers in everything, right?

They really do, yeah. But assuming that that's true, don't we then even need what you're building more? Because the more things that they all build and the more things that these major companies, for better or for worse, start to combine, the more honeypots and risk I would say there is that we lose our identity or that they're just recycling our information to sort of better their products. Yeah, I agree with that. For honestly, I believe that Apple has the same kind of feeling about self-sovereign identity that I do. They feel really good.

They want to secure their users' privacy, etc. But they just have such a disdain for crypto that I don't know if they're going to ever grab onto blockchain and decentralized identity because of their just hate of crypto. That's sad. I hope that evolves. It feels like we almost need just like one really positive killer app, even if it's just like a silly game or something that shows that everybody doing this

isn't criminals and it's usable on a day-to-day basis. I would have argued stable coins were that killer app, but of course that's a threat to the dollar. So that's right. So the central bank digital currency that's coming. So listen, before I let you go, any final thoughts, anything we may have missed, anything you're dying to share that we didn't touch on? No, I think we've covered a lot. For me, it's all about securing our future, the future for our children and others and getting it the end of honeypots.

That is the way to do it. We got to get rid of these PII honeypots and you can need to start storing your identity locally and disclosing it only to people you trust. And to me, we need to do this for the kids. We need to do this for the future of the human race. I agree. And then the final question, because I didn't ask, how far along are you for your average person? If I went to identity.com right now, how much would I be able to actually use this at this point?

Well, that's a great question because we're a protocol. So you can go up there and look all you want, but there's nothing you can do there. You have to use a company like Civic or one of their products that leverages our technology. Now that will change in the next few months as we're releasing a set of tools for verifiable credentials to allow people to interact with our apps directly. But until then, it's just a protocol. We're focusing on developers and getting them to integrate us our apps directly. But until then, it's just a protocol. We're focusing on developers and getting them to integrate us into the ecosystem. Can't wait to see it happen, man. Thank you so much.

And so obviously you guys can go to identity.com. Where can people follow your adventures, but not the ones in the app store when you're doxxed by the world's most famous magician? I'm on Twitter at PBS Identity. PBS Identity. Perfect. Everybody go follow him, but not in the creepy way that people did in the past. Thank you very much, Philip. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Thanks, Scott. Appreciate it. Let's go.