Beyond the Binary: Nature, Networks, and New Identities

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Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. My guest today is Z Schwab. He's doing some interesting stuff. They're developing an innovative identity protocol with a reputation based indexing system that revolutionizes online identity management, which is definitely going to become a problem very soon, if not already, with all the crazy online AI videos. I just shot one two days ago where all of the people talking about the news were all AI generated and they looked real. And it's going to become impossible to trust anything online. So welcome, welcome to the show. Z.

Thanks. Thanks again for having me. Looking forward.

So, yeah, can you go into why this problem? Why did you get focused on developing this identity protocol?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. So I, I'm actually, my background is in. Is in medicine to some degree. I'm a former med student and I was like, halfway through that process, I decided to take an internship at a international hospital. I emailed the head of pediatric oncology and I was like, hey, can I shadow you? And he responded, no, you cannot. I said, but please, you know, before I commit to this sort of world, I want to have a much more, you know, hands on experience, see what it's like. People just go into work, they have no idea what it looks like, you know, beforehand. So he's like, all right, cool. You know, fly in, show up, and we'll see. So I flew in, showed up, and he's like, you know, fine, you can, you can shadow me. So I spent, I think it was about 10 months working directly underneath him. And just given the nature of himself and the country itself, I got to do like a lot of clinicals. I remember the first day he turns to me, he's like, yes. So, you know, grab a stethoscope, check this. And I said, you know, not trained. He's like, I don't really care. You've been watching me for two months. Like, just do it. I'll double check. It's fine. So at the end of that, what I came to realize really after he sat me down and we had a good talk. It's just, it's really difficult to innovate in the field of medicine. And so I ended up launching my first startup in which we were taking a look at all the NIH databases, Medscape databases, which is kind of like a doctor database, and looking at studies, looking at the causes behind various conditions, consolidating these pieces of information and then using that to come up with new pharmaceutical formulas, natural formulas, kind of both directions, just using peer reviewed research that simply was underutilized. Slash, not used at all. Which is how the industry works, right? You have someone going for a PhD and they have to write a paper. So they do and it goes nowhere. But the reality is a lot of really, really good data that you can use. So we were taking that, using it and coming up with new formulas. And I ran into an issue there in that how do you rank these pieces of information? How do you know what's the most useful, what's kind of actually worthwhile going after? And it turned out that the best way to do it was to understand who the creator behind that paper piece of content. Let's look at it like that was, you know, did they exist prior, who had they previously worked with to write something or really involved in any. And what it really is was ideally like the Internet could have a protocol that would allow you to better understand everybody just based on the way they've engaged with other people. Right? So if you post something and you have someone engage with the post that you made, say you posted about topic A and then someone engages with that who's, you know, pretty, pretty already well known in Topic A. Engagement's really this signal of how valuable the information you're sharing is. Right. A like is kind of this like low level signal. A response would be a pretty high level signal. And so I figured that hey, this is a really easy way to just use the way people act online to give them an identity and then you can take that and just make it anonymous. If you don't want to be anonymous, you know, you can just put your real name on it. And that's, that's it pushed me in this direction.