Calculus of IT - Season 3 Episode 2 - Identity with a Capital "I"

Identity...I mean...super easy topic right? 

Wrong.

Season 3 is largely devoted to looking at "capital-I Identity" from all available viewpoints.  Tonight, we just started to try and figure out what the hell it actually means.  We will come back to this idea many times this season so let this be the baseline to our discussion.

We also spent some time talking about idealizing tech stacks for small businesses and why Bob Barker's microphone was so long.

Dare I say it...yet another smash hit episode.

Transcript

Season 3 - Episode 2 - Final - Audio Only
===

Nate McBride: [00:00:00] Do you think she gets paid a royalty every time that it says that recording in progress? Absolutely 

Mike Crispin: Not one time fee. Probably 

Nate McBride: one time flat fee. 

Mike Crispin: It's like 

Nate McBride: you think I tell if it's a bot voice or a actual human voice. I think it's a bot voice. 

Mike Crispin: That was, 

Nate McBride: if they were smart, they would've done a bot 

Mike Crispin: news originally.

Just like Siri, remember they, they had, I think they had the lady that did Siri on 60 Minutes or on some YouTube short or something at one point. She's like, yeah, I, I just got a flat fee for that. But it's her voice and she recorded all of the prompts as as I remember it. But I think things would be different now though.

It seems like Apple is, uh, they just created an ad, uh, an a, an advertisement, I think for Apple TV or graphic or something that they made sure was all human generated. And they wrote a little how, a little, um, how to Oh, so to kind a, their, their, uh, 

Nate McBride: qua queen [00:01:00] for them 

Mike Crispin: organic, you know, development model.

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: So organic development model for, for art like we've always done. But they have to make sure everyone knows that it's not ai, you know, um, hey, it's a market. It's gonna be actually gonna, it's actually kind of paying off for them right now. Um, and it will pay off if the bubble bursts too. So I don't know if it's that bad of a strategy for them.

We'll see, 

Nate McBride: you know, what's, um. Something that's, well, you don't know. Of course I haven't told you this, but recently I've been, I've been working with, uh, external counsel on our privacy policy for our website. 

Mike Crispin: Okay. 

Nate McBride: And our privacy policy is like most, you know, it's pretty, pretty standard. No big deal. But you know, we have that, um, accept or deny banner for cookies at the bottom of our website.

Mike Crispin: Oh yeah. 

Nate McBride: And because we use a GA code in our website and because we are hosted by word, uh, WP Engine, [00:02:00] um, 

Mike Crispin: yep. 

Nate McBride: When you come to our site, even if you click on reject cookies, you still get 12 cookies put on your computer. Now these are cookies that are tracking the fact that you don't want cookies, which is ironic, but I was like, okay, I wanted to start, I just wanted to poke around and see how many websites where I reject all does it put cookies on my machine even after I click that button.

Guess what? But it's all of them. Every fucking website I tested where I was like, reject all denial, whatever. I still got the cookies 

Mike Crispin: we're using Brave. So you can see all the things that it's blocking. 

Nate McBride: No, I was just looking at the, um, developer mode on the right side. Oh yeah. You can see the cookies. Yeah.

Mike Crispin: Like 

Nate McBride: that come in and get pushed into your machine and then, then you go and verify that against, in fact, what cookies. So I was starting with a brand new, fresh version of Brave, completely wiped clean. And then doing this and just watching the cookies mount up. Now with Brave, if you turn on [00:03:00] Shield and you completely block everything, then yes, you don't get cookies.

Well, you get the minimum amount, but it those websites that have the reject all button. Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: fill insert stuff in there. 

Nate McBride: That's a pre, you know, that's a pre GDPR thing. That was a state level. Yes. Old, old manifested law from like 15 or something. And it's never worked. 

Mike Crispin: You used to use, uh, cookie Pro.

Remember Cookie Pro? 

Nate McBride: Yes. 

Mike Crispin: So Cookie Pro was bought by, or maybe they were part of OneTrust, but yeah, I remember setting that up a couple times and it was all just for that, it's, you know, an insert code that sits at the bottom. But you're right, it's still, you still have to insert certain cookies just for the site to run appropriately.

Nate McBride: Right. 

Mike Crispin: So you, you, you can reject some of them. And I think now more and more, I see those sites as they're popping up and they're like, you've gotta accept something. So it's not like you can deny all anymore. It's like 

Nate McBride: [00:04:00] Right. 

Mike Crispin: You've got four options. You can choose to accept some of them, and these ones are optional.

And accept the bare minimum is the one I see now the most bare 

Nate McBride: minimum. 

Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Okay. At least they're being honest. You're gonna have to accept some. And then if, well, if 

Nate McBride: you click, 

Mike Crispin: probably they know if you're using, even using Safari, that most of the stuff's gonna get blocked anyway. So. 

Nate McBride: Well, I mean, I think basically if you want to test this out for yourself, you should and find out just how much those banners are working.

Um, yeah. I went to a few different biotech websites actually from Massachusetts and all of their cookie denials don't work. Um, so we actually turned ours off 'cause I was like, this isn't working, so why do we have it? And so we turned it off. Yeah. Um, smart move.

Trance Bot: The [00:05:00] calculus of it

Season three,

verifying this identity.

Sometimes you just have to take it,

sometimes you just have to take it

because it's season three divided autonomy.

The calculus of it.[00:06:00] 

Mike Crispin: All good. Any who, how are you doing? You doing okay? 

Nate McBride: I'm good. I'm a little, I'm little cold. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, you got the heaters going on there. I have a little here going on down here as well. 

Nate McBride: The foot heater going and the, the propane blower at 59 balming degrees. Got my Google 66 degrees scarf. Actually Google cloud scarf.

Mike Crispin: I've got my pine tree candles going. 

Nate McBride: Nice. 

Mike Crispin: Like, just like those trees you put in your car. Actually, they still make those things. 

Nate McBride: Yes, they do. 

Mike Crispin: So I, I don't know, I kind 

Nate McBride: of, they only cause cancer in like four states, so. Oh 

Mike Crispin: really? Okay. Yeah, 

Nate McBride: you're fine. 

Mike Crispin: Okay. I'm, I'm, I'm better off with the Yankee candle or something.

Then 

Nate McBride: only causes cancer in three states, so you're better off 

Mike Crispin: smell. Smells so good. So sweet. 

Nate McBride: Yeah, I remember when I was in college and this was a long [00:07:00] time ago, I dunno if they still do this, people would burn the little incense sticks. 

Mike Crispin: Oh yeah. I love those. 

Nate McBride: They would, 

Mike Crispin: don't burn 'em in your office. You'll get in trouble.

Nate McBride: Definitely not 

Mike Crispin: at work. At work, yeah. 

Nate McBride: I, no, I just never get into it. Because you, you'd light 'em and then they would burn, you know, for a while, but then they would stink up the entire four of the dorm and everyone knew that you were smoking weed, so it just merged together into a, 

Mike Crispin: that's why you used them.

Oh, I didn't know. I thought everyone just wanted their rooms, 

Nate McBride: not me. I never smoked weed in college. It was mine. Oh, oh, 

Mike Crispin: okay, okay. 

Nate McBride: The people on both sides of me. 

Mike Crispin: Got it. Got it. That makes 

Nate McBride: sense. I was only, I, I just tried to study all the time. 

Mike Crispin: You were working hard. You were studying, you were in the books.

Nate McBride: In the books. 

Mike Crispin: You were in the books. 

Nate McBride: I was deep. I was like, in the back of the book. That's how deep I was. I was in the index. 

Mike Crispin: You were 

Nate McBride: reading. I only read the, I only read the 

Mike Crispin: index put up on the desk. You know, you're just light feet up on the desk sitting back in your chair. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. I don't even read the books.

I just read the indices. I just, like, I, I reverse [00:08:00] engineer the index back into the book and I'm able to put it together. 

Mike Crispin: So you start at a and go to page 58 b go to 2 76, like just, you go down the index. That way 

Nate McBride: it's, it's, it's, it's pretty efficient actually, because you can jump to the things you wanna read about quickly.

Mike Crispin: Oh, I thought you just started at the top of the index and just jumped around all the pages on your way, on the list. 

Nate McBride: Kind of, but you can just skip over the things that are boring, like, 

Mike Crispin: oh, okay. Got it, got it. 

Nate McBride: You wanna just get to the, the pictures of people doing things like in the history books, you just go to the index part where it's just all the pictures and you can see the old timey paintings of the guy shooting the guy, and then you can just infer a whole lot in that picture.

Mike Crispin: The picture books. 

Nate McBride: Picture books. That's how I learned. Curious George, 

Mike Crispin: I'm so similar. I love, I love Curious George. 

Nate McBride: Are we in episode two already? 

Mike Crispin: We are. This the season 

Nate McBride: season's 

Mike Crispin: flying by. It is Flying by 

Nate McBride: Jesus Christ. Like last week was, I mean, felt like episode one just last week.[00:09:00] 

Uh, 

Mike Crispin: I got a little cold or something last week. I was very, I felt very, uh, like I, I sounded like Grandpa Simpson on that episode. I 

Nate McBride: were you ailing? 

Mike Crispin: I dunno man, I was just exhausted. I was pretty tired last week. And 

Nate McBride: I think it was that storm front dude. 'cause I was feeling it too. 

Mike Crispin: I was just like, oh, 

Nate McBride: I was feeling ver verness 

Mike Crispin: feeling much better this week.

Nate McBride: I'm still coming off the vertigo stuff. But what's cool about it is it feels like you're constantly high. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, really? 

Nate McBride: Well, and not in a good way though. Not like a fun way, but necessarily every time you stand up and the whole room shifts two degrees. It's pretty interesting feeling. 

Mike Crispin: We don't want that. 

Nate McBride: No.

Mike Crispin: So you're out of that, that's No. No more? No. None of that. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. This whole big storm thing that came through has put now pushed off. Uh, and now we're dealing with the other side of it where there's normal pressure until the next storm comes through. It is basically how it goes. For me, all winter, big [00:10:00] storms come through, kick the shit outta everybody.

I get vertigo and then it moves off and I'm good. So enough about my health, Mike. Um, we decided to basically take on the biggest topic of the entire season tonight. Okay. Identity. Um, there's many, many 

Mike Crispin: facets. 

Nate McBride: Many facets. At least 15 facets of identity. 

Mike Crispin: Yes. 

Nate McBride: I don't know if we're gonna get 'em all tonight, but, um, before we did that, one of our, one of our loyal listeners sent in a request.

Trance Bot: Okay. 

Nate McBride: And she asked us if we would talk a little bit about it stacks and like risks independencies for small independent businesses. Um, and I have of course, my LLC to put in context there, and I've helped a few small life science startups, you know, four or five people. But, um, I'm curious, like, when you think about what is an, what could [00:11:00] be an ideal IT stack for, and you know, obviously calling out the risk independencies of that for a small independent business, what comes to mind?

Mike Crispin: Well, I think first is the collaboration suite of tools always comes up. That's one stack. Then the, perhaps the business operations stack, which would include your ERP, potentially an HR system. Uh. Your payroll system, those type of things. And then any business focus systems, that could be r and d or if you're a technology, a medical device company, you have any specific systems in that area.

Trance Bot: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Uh, and then cybersecurity. So kind of those, those areas. And I think where you plant the seed is in that collaboration ecosystem stack. Whether you go with Microsoft or Google is largely what people see right out of the right from the beginning is like, yeah, hey, I can get email. Um, 

Nate McBride: right. 

Mike Crispin: That, that [00:12:00] decision is gonna drive the direction for many things.

What, what security, um, investments you make, how much of a security investment you make, uh, and also the integration requirements you may have for those business systems I mentioned. And the business operations side. And the business lines, the r and d systems or the commercial systems Sure. Or the laboratory systems.

The, so it does start to thread out from which ecosystem you pick at the beginning, in my opinion. Because yeah, often the tools that you buy after that need to interoperate with it. And I think in our space, if, if this person's speaking from a life sciences background, I, I think the, the more proven path.

But also the, in my opinion, less secure path is to go down the Microsoft road [00:13:00] because you're dealing with so much, chances are you're gonna deal with so much legacy from those business vendors. Yeah. They're still gonna have requirements that need to hook into Outlook or hook into SharePoint or something.

Nate McBride: Sure. 

Mike Crispin: You're gonna have to have that on the tool belt. That being said, I think that's quickly dying out and, you know, I say it all the time, I, I, people who have worked for me in the past know how big of a fan I am of the Google stack because of a loosely coupled architecture. Because it's a, a more secure platform because there's less human error elements, both on the user side and on the IT and cybersecurity.

Right. Leadership side. And because the world is a web now, the world is based on the web. It's not based on client server. Like many of our, uh, yeah. The people we work with would like to keep it. It's, it's a web browser world now. So I think that. [00:14:00] If you're taking the, the, the more progressive, um, and faster moving and lower total cost of ownership path, that's Google.

If you want to go down probably a larger and more expensive path over time, 

Trance Bot: yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Will require a probably a little more overhead. Things have gotten easier, but specific security frameworks for Microsoft, um, then that's the Microsoft stack. And it will probably be less stress in the short term to start with Microsoft.

'cause everyone's gonna be like, oh yeah, I know how to do that. No problem. You know, this is easy. Um, but in, in the, in the more medium term or long term, it's is a lot of unknowns from a sec cybersecurity perspective. And I think right now, I'll say the one thing about the AI in both of that, those spaces is that Google's AI platform is, is probably gonna leapfrog, uh, [00:15:00] Microsoft's.

Though Microsoft has the advantage right now in small, medium, in large enterprise, the life sciences enterprises, because they have, and this is an important piece for the life scientists too. They have prepackaged GXP for ai. Yeah. And no one else has got that yet. So Microsoft has that built in and they have third party partners who will validate the system for you else.

You're gonna have to do it yourself. And some people can do that. That's not a problem. So if you're, if you have GXP compliance, that's where some Microsoft's got a turnkey solution. But 

Nate McBride: I don't know. That's a, 

Mike Crispin: well, let, lemme put it as, I think 

Nate McBride: it's a bit of a leap. 

Mike Crispin: Not, not, not, not turnkey. So take any other system that you go, GXP, they give you an iq, oq.

Right. And you gotta do the pq. Um, the only one that I know of and that I've seen that, that has an IQ OQ type model where you're gonna get something for AI is, is like, is the platform, I think montrium is one of the vendors, [00:16:00] like builds on top of Microsoft with, um, open AI or open ai or your model of choice in Azure that all those paperwork's done for you.

So is it perfect? No. It's just the framework you'd get with any other GXP vendor. Sure. Whereas if you're doing anthropic inside of Bedrock or you're doing inside of Vertex AI with, uh, Google, you, you're responsible to build that IQ oq and you might be okay with that. That might be valuable for you to do that.

So 

Nate McBride: I think, I think, but I think just that, sorry to interrupt, but I think a lot of the companies this size are not facing GXP issues yet. 

Mike Crispin: No, we're not. We're not. We're, it's so early and we shouldn't be. I think we shouldn't be making any, any huge decisions there. Some trailblazers are doing it or, or trying to go there, but they're, I don't think they're really doing it on Microsoft.

So they're taking them more. I'm, I'm using CSA against my own model. My own. Right, 

Nate McBride: right, right. 

Mike Crispin: The own, you know, my own or CSVI should say, against my own data center. 

Nate McBride: Well, CSA is now mature enough that it's being 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: It's finally [00:17:00] being 

Mike Crispin: for edge computing. Just new. Right, 

Nate McBride: right, right. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: But let's talk, let's talk about, okay, so 

Mike Crispin: Google, Microsoft, and then security and ERP stack, you know, there's a lot to it.

Probably NetSuite on ERP side. Um, you could probably pick your, your hand in small HRIS or performance management piecemeal systems. You're gonna switch them out when you get bigger anyway. 

Nate McBride: Sure. 

Mike Crispin: And with the ERP, I mean, it's just, 

Nate McBride: I mean, I'm gonna, but I'm gonna go like pound for pound. I'm gonna go with the Google Workspace option only because, um, not only do you get e-sign out of the box now with Google Workspace.

Sure. That's great. Which is, which is important. Um, you get, yeah. I think you, if you, if you apple's to apple's the administrative functionality and interfaces between Google admin and 365 admin, it is night and day. There is, um, like there is a high element of expertise I think needed to get deep into the weeds on Microsoft.

Uh, exchange admin or even 365 [00:18:00] admin, we're on Google admin. It's for dummies. I mean, it's literally like, uh, oh, I need to do this or, or find this thing and it's right there in front of you. You can't, uh, I mean, I've trained people on both and you can't really, it takes me, it takes me much, much longer to train somebody on 365 admin that does on Google admin, like hours versus an hour.

Mike Crispin: And you also want a real backstop if you're on 365. You want a small MSP or you want some 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Safety net because there's so many ways in power shell that one thing can go wrong and you're just either compromised or you've screwed it up yourself. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: You need someone to be able to call and just calling your, uh.

Software vendor who showed you the licenses probably isn't gonna do it. You, you need, you need someone. Whereas in, in, in, in, in Google, I don't know the better way to put it, but it's really, it's really hard to do something catastrophic in the Google ecosystem that can't be undone. Well also [00:19:00] Google in a graphical interface even.

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: You know, so 

Nate McBride: go Google, Google's administrative, uh, Wiki, they're sort of knowledge library about all things administrative is so good. Oh God. And it's not like you go into a Microsoft forum and then like spray and pray hope for the best or a Reddit form about some issue, and you get people throwing around and, and pissing on each other about PowerShell scripts.

And there's none of that with Google admin. But even besides that, besides those sort of smaller objects, you can work with a office environment. Uh, you can work with an office architecture in 360, and sorry, in Google Workspace you do get Gemini, NLM, all of that. Right out of the box. You get zero trust architecture out of the box.

You don't not get that with Microsoft. Um, right. You get pretty good security with Microsoft outta the box, but not nearly as strong. And basically Google doesn't want you to make a single mistake. Uh, they don't want it coming back on them. So, but. [00:20:00] You also get YouTube for video creation out of the box bolted.

Right on. Not to mention, um, app sheets and all kinds of other functionality that if you wanna explore beyond, you know, sheets, docs, and slides, you can get into a very, very extensible universe, but also the Google Authenticator or Google authentication. And the fact that GO is a universal authenticator to so many other platforms, Microsoft is too.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: But given my choice of poison, I'm taking G off with me wherever I go. Um, not to mention the fact that I'm encrypting it inside of Chrome. So, I mean, overall with a small payment per email license, which is what you do, it's about $12 a month per seat. You get the whole thing. You don't need to secure email gateway, you don't need to worry about sort of dmars and d [00:21:00] Kims and DNS issues.

You're getting everything in sort of one single bundle 

Mike Crispin: all built in 

Nate McBride: and What's that? 

Mike Crispin: It's all built in. 

Nate McBride: All built in. It's, oh, 

Mike Crispin: mostly pre-configured. I mean, 

Nate McBride: pretty much. Pretty much. And everybody in the in the world knows how to use Gmail. Gmail's interface. You do not need to go download the Outlook client.

You do not need to try and fuck around with web mail. Figure out how that works. And I think to even get the local office apps, you're paying even more than the 1295. You would pay for the Google Workspace business license. You can get the Google, Google 

Mike Crispin: still have office if you need Microsoft office, if you, if you want it, which you should have.

I mean, in our industry, you need to have it, for the most part, you 

Nate McBride: need the local version. Yeah. I mean that's, 

Mike Crispin: and um, 

Nate McBride: so that's the best part though, to your point about web only earlier you're getting into a world where, yeah, if I'm going with Google Workspace, I don't need, I can use any freaking thing I have in my hands.

I don't need to go download fat applications to run on my machine. Um, 

Mike Crispin: [00:22:00] this is a huge amount of change management to get people comfortable because I think, I think a lot of people, probably peers of ours who used Google, they used it 10 years ago. They haven't used it since for work. So they don't have the context to how much it's improved.

But it's 

Nate McBride: unfortunate. 

Mike Crispin: I I, one other thing you can mention just in turn around support is you can, you can open a chat window and get Google fixed. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Try 

Mike Crispin: that with Microsoft. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Try, try getting someone to help you If you don't have a, have a per their name, even have Premier licenses anymore, they, whatever the fricking support model they have now is, you know, the tiered.

So you, you need to have an MSP or a third party provider that's gonna provide you another level of support. And if, and if you don't, you're, you're kind of running at risk. And that's, we, so in my career, we had a number of issues in Office 365 where we've paying for support. We can't get it. 

Nate McBride: I know. 

Mike Crispin: Quick, 

Nate McBride: let's, let's, let's, let's add onto this though.

So that was the ecosystem [00:23:00] part. I think there's a, like in my dream world for startup, there's a couple other apps I think you'd want too. And you can disagree with me on these, but I think we're both in alignment on terms of the ecosystem. Sure. I would also add in, you're probably going to, I mean, you go, of course if you go with Google Workspace, you don't need a Zoom license, so that's a plus.

Yeah. Um, and you don't need to, to futs around with a team seat that is gonna work half the time. Um, you're gonna get anyway. I think you would also want to get a visualization tool like Lucidchart. That's always my number one recommendation. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Um, and it's not expensive to have an annual license for a single seat of Lucidchart.

I would get an Airtable seat, again, inexpensive for a single year of Airtable. But now you have relational database management and you can use Google Sheets and you can use vlookup. Um, if you're a big fan of that, you're still not relational about though. But with an Airtable license, you can share your platforms with other people.

IE your consult your clients. So when I work [00:24:00] with clients out of Airtable, I'm sharing views to them multiple different ways to slice their data out of Airtable and giving them forms to use. Again, Google forms would work too, but Airtable just brings that power up a notch. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Everyone knows I'm an Airtable fanboy, but I think it's an essential component to absolutely teaching the right way to handle, um, structured data from the get go instead of, instead of beginning that over dependency that will never go away on Excel or sheets.

Mike Crispin: And, and Google Sheets has tables now too. Did you see that? It 

Nate McBride: does, yeah. 

Mike Crispin: It's a lighter, it's lighter than Airtable, but if you just wanna start somewhere, Google Sheets has some new tables capability. That's pretty neat. 

Nate McBride: Well, it was, I mean, so they took the tables app and deprecated it out of the area one 20.

Yep. And now they moved all the tables functionality into App sheet and App Sheet now with App Sheet, Looker and Sheets together. Um, all free by the way, with a Google Workspace business license, [00:25:00] you get not only the ability to create mobile apps for your customers, but you can create these beautiful, elegant tables.

Again, they're not super high power like Airtable, but they'll get the job done for a startup business. No question about it. And plus, you can use Airtable for ar, AP Inventory management. Asset management. You can use it like I use it for all my expenses. Uh, for my small 

Mike Crispin: business. Nate, 

Nate McBride: we 

Mike Crispin: not sorry to interrupt you, Nate, but are we talking about like a one or two person company or are we talking more about a, some 

Nate McBride: I would small, small, like small.

Very small, small businesses independent. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. That 

Nate McBride: that, that money is actually a very important thing. 

Mike Crispin: Yes. 

Nate McBride: They're still in that stage where 

Mike Crispin: that's why I ask. Yeah, 

Nate McBride: yeah. There, there's, there's a burn element to existing. 

Mike Crispin: Yes. 

Nate McBride: And so, yeah, I, I, I wanna avoid, okay. I want to just recommend avoiding the route of having to bring an additional help.

'cause at this stage you should be able to manage the whole thing yourself. 

Trance Bot: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: And you shouldn't need a, um, comp side. Agree to get there. So I think we're both in alignment [00:26:00] on the, on an ecosystem recommendation, which is to say workspace is probably the ideal, though. It's definitely not. You look at as an outlier when it comes to life sciences, but in all, all other small startups, I don't wanna say I've seen it a lot, but I've seen it a lot, a 

Mike Crispin: lot to 

Nate McBride: work.

So, well 

Mike Crispin: the, the key is to, to learn a lot about it so that you build it in a way that you can 

Nate McBride: Yes. 

Mike Crispin: Can scale it. And it's easy. And I'm first to admit, like it can sprawl outta control very easily 'cause it's so easy to use and you don't, you, you know, it, you can have unlimit almost unlimited storage and dah, dah, dah, dah.

So you do have to have some rules. And, uh, certainly lessons learned in my career is like how to keep that rules, how to keep that, that environment so that it scales. Um, and doesn't just. Become a big mess. It's, it's, you just gotta keep on it. And you have a who 

Nate McBride: brought, who brought the adult in the room.

What's this rule? Shit, 

Mike Crispin: you can start. Hey, you could, here here's the [00:27:00] other thing. 

Nate McBride: I'm kidding. I'm kidding. 

Mike Crispin: But here's something we didn't mention that, you know, we're both Google fans, I guess to some extent here. 

Nate McBride: To some extent. That's a good way to put it. 

Mike Crispin: Really easy to export everything out of it. 

Nate McBride: That's right.

Ding, ding, ding. So 

Mike Crispin: if you need to move to Microsoft, it is way easier to go from Google to Microsoft than Microsoft to Google. 

Nate McBride: Yep. 

Mike Crispin: So, you know, if you, you find, hey, I'm growing out of this, it's, a lot of companies seem to think they boom, take takeout. You can take, use takeout to get everything out if you want, or you can use a migration tool and it's all out.

You're done. 

Nate McBride: And, and if you're a CFO who absolutely, positively cannot function in Gmail, well the good news is you can use the Outlook client with Gmail and not spend millions of dollars to replace Google. So, you know, there's always that plus for leader down the road. Um, I digress. Well, anyway, so our, our loyal listeners keep saying those questions and that's a great question.

Hopefully we've [00:28:00] answered it to a degree, but, um, keep on with your small business. I hope it goes well. 

Mike Crispin: Yes. 

Nate McBride: Good luck stack and, um, let us know if you have other questions. Uh, identity, 

Mike Crispin: yeah. Identity. So much to think about in terms of that. And I know that's the pretty much the theme for this season. 

Nate McBride: Oh, hold on.

I have one more question for you. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. 

Nate McBride: I cannot get into this. 

Mike Crispin: Okay. 

Nate McBride: Until we can, until we settle the argument. 

Mike Crispin: Okay. 

Nate McBride: I asked you the question on Slack. I'm gonna ask you now publicly. Why do people still care so much about model evolution and development? Since, since, by the way, since the beginning of the year, January, 2025, there have been over a hundred model releases.

Um, open AIS had five and Anthropic four, Google, at least four that I could find. Meta [00:29:00] six, deep seek six, the straw eight, so on and so forth. It just keeps going on and on, like, why do we care anymore 

Mike Crispin: almost every day, right? Like you're saying, why, why, why, why, why do we care? Why should we care? That type of thing.

Nate McBride: Should we, should we, should we just wait until the last one comes out and then care? Because every time that they come out, I mean, if you just look at the, I was, I was on, on hugging face, and you look at the differences between the models and you see like multi-step reasoning improved. Okay. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. I think it's just like, good for you.

Maybe any other hugely, uh, hyped or exciting new technology everyone's looking for the new Better Mouse trap. But I think also there's a lot of interest because people are looking for efficiency and ones that work better, ones that are safer, ones that lower your risk or ones that can help you transform your workforce.

Not a [00:30:00] popular, popular thing, but 

Nate McBride: Oh, you mean fire everybody? 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. Right. 

Nate McBride: Those, those 

Mike Crispin: models. I, I think there's an element of, uh, being up on what would potentially reduce costs. Just like anything else, if there's a new software package of interest, there's something that does manufacturing better. People are interested, you know, if there's a, a more secure system that's, that's cheaper.

People were interested. But LLMs, they're in the press, they're hot, they're exci. I didn't actually hear LLM that much, at least outside of our kind of the technology. The 

Nate McBride: LLMs themselves are not updating. It's the agents, the LLMs are stagnating. They have nothing left to ingest. 

Mike Crispin: Well, they, the LLMs are still, I mean, yeah, I mean, to some 

Nate McBride: extent they, they, they stole it already.

It's all done. 

Mike Crispin: Well, they're not, they're not a hundred percent yet. They still hall hallucinate. They still have a number of issues. No, 

Nate McBride: hold on. But the LLMs themselves are still big probabilistic data masses. They are big piles of shit floating in the ocean that have 

Mike Crispin: big mo, big, big models of tons of [00:31:00] data mixed together and 

Nate McBride: Yep.

Mike Crispin: Um, you know, 

Nate McBride: often conflicting data in the same model. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. Uh, I think that's why people still care, is they're not perfect. People still think, and I think to some extent the AI is magical and it's gonna solve all the world's problems. So there's a huge interest and we, and we should probably still care because a number of these LLMs aren't working well or they don't do certain things Well, 

Nate McBride: the agents you mean, 

Mike Crispin: not just the agents?

The, 

Nate McBride: the l LMS are not updating at the same pace as the agent structures around them. What I mentioned before, that is a hundred agent updates. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. Engine updates. They, they're agents, but LLM is the model. So four Oh sure. Or GPT five. Those are LLMs and similarly sonnet and, and Haiku. And those, those are, those are based on models.

And you know, the, the MCP genera, generative, uh, agent-based models that anthropics come up and everyone's copied is huge. I mean, that's the next wave. Well 

Nate McBride: wait a [00:32:00] second. 

Mike Crispin: They're still very 

Nate McBride: sorry. GPT, the difference between GPT-4 and five was not a LLM rewash, it was an agent update. That was an engine update that was better.

They, they, they refreshed the LLM outside of that cycle. So we're not seeing a sinking between LLM refreshes, which again is happening much, much slower pace 

Mike Crispin: what is 

Nate McBride: than it was last year versus the engine updates. 

Mike Crispin: What do you mean to define 

Nate McBride: four? Five to five was an engine update. 

Mike Crispin: Define, define the difference between an engine update and an LLM update.

I'm 

Nate McBride: just, you have your, a agent engine sitting on top of the LM, the LM is an unstructured, massive data. It's not actually doing any of the work. The thing that's doing the work is the agent on top of it that's calling in and doing the probabilistic termination to get to the answer of the query. So there's two separate articles now they, there are joint one can't exist without the other.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Well, they can, but they're just useless. But they're joined together. But you have two separate things. You have the engine and you have the data source, which is the LLM. The LLMs are updated at a different frequency, [00:33:00] I think. I think Claude is way behind. I think they last updated their LM in September or something.

I have to look it up. But their agent has been updated on a different schedule. 

Mike Crispin: It's up the agent, 

Nate McBride: they can't, they can't update their LMS every time they update an agent because LM refresh takes so long now to do 

Mike Crispin: at the, the model is still upgraded from 4 4, 1 to four, five to five. Those are different LLM models.

They're not just agents. There, there's a, there's a full, there's a full model underneath that's been updated. It may not update much, but still, I guess in the context that we're talking about, yeah, maybe people don't, maybe we, we shouldn't care about one component of the, the full stack. It's really as these new things are released, so.

Sonnet four or five, for example. There's a lot of interest in that if the LLM underneath is named something else or some different set of data. I don't think that's what a lot of people are focused on unless they're looking at it to look at the, the numbers that they score on [00:34:00] these tests to see which one is better, kind of measuring, measuring the stick, if you will.

But I think people are still very interested and should be interested in the overall model development and the, and the growth. Um, at least nomenclature, I'm hearing with all the, you know, YouTube geeks and everything is that we're still talking about the model. Um, and, and it's, and it's a very, still very important in terms of how these are implemented and for what use cases.

Um, a, a agents are huge. I think that Gentech component of all of this is, is very, very exciting. And that, and that in some respects is new to a lot of people and they're not thinking of that as much as they should. Um, maybe that should be more of the focus is how well these, because to your point, perhaps these models are stagnating a bit, which I think they are.

I mean, I think you're absolutely right about that, is that how do we connect, how do we use the data? How [00:35:00] is it done safely? And, and that's where, you know, we're seeing emergence of edge computing models and the CPS being implemented more at enterprise grade. Um, yeah, it's really exciting in, in, in that respect.

But I do think I still watch some of the, uh, commentary on them just looking at the spreadsheet to see which, you know, model did better. And right now it's a tossup to me against all of them based on use cases. So for me, it's throwing use cases at these things and seeing which one, um, seems to work best for the use case I'm, I'm doing.

And I think that's the, that's gonna be the tough part is it's like, yeah, I need Claude for coding and I need, you know, o open AI for, for, I don't know what, I'm not really, I could, that's just somewhere in the middle to me in terms of the tool Gemini for collaboration and c communication, large, large token windows, like having the ability to really throw a huge document.

It. Um, and [00:36:00] I mean Claude is amazing on the, on the r and d regulatory side. It's, there's some amazing things it's able to do with very little tuning. Um, so, and its flexibility with an AWS and GCP and I mean, I just, there's just so many things that you can look at and then there's perplexity and other smaller tools, but where the, the, the, um, the new models that are coming outta China are raising eyebrows is 'cause again, allegedly they're spending one 10th, you know, of what the US spends to, to run these models.

And again, we can only take them at what, what they're saying, but it, it's pretty shocking when something comes out and it beats. You know, uh, you know, grok four or Claude Sonnet, you know, by 10, 15 points that cost one 10th to run. Uh, it's, that, 

Nate McBride: that's well is the ns, the NSA and ICE just tapped into this podcast.

So as soon as you said China, by the way, 

Mike Crispin: hey, it's very, very public information that this new model, I'm just 

Nate McBride: kidding 

Mike Crispin: is, is kicking our ass. [00:37:00] And so much that I, I I think the, one of the questions and, and why you ask this, and I think it is we should talk about is, do you similar to what Apple just did, and people are like, oh, apple screwed up, they're gonna use Gemini, and they just kind of gave up.

Maybe they're doing what many of us are gonna do or many new companies are going to do. And, and this is why I kind of believe in the perplexity and the PO models and those, these things that, and we said about it a few times last season. The brokerages and aggregators of the models are gonna have these, I think, really interesting platforms in the future because, possibly, possibly, Michael, let me, what, where they're missing it.

Where they're missing. That is on the coding side and on the. Edge side. So you look at PO and you look at perplexity and their search engines. I mean, they're, they're, they're, they're gen AI engines. They're, they're not integration, they're not, they're not doing a lot of the things like you would see a codex or a cloud [00:38:00] code be able to do.

So I, I totally get that. There's different differentiation there, but I guess, I know I've gone around here, but the LA last thing I'll say is, does it make more sense for us just to, as a company say, Hey, I'll, I'll, I'll rent your model, I'll lease your model. We, we contract it, we call it crisp, OLLM. It's really Gemini.

I put it into my product, and I got, I got an awesome LLM. It's all based on what data I feed in the backend, what persona I develop for it. And no one needs to know that the LLM, this is to your point, who, who should care about the LLM, is that as time goes on, I think we will care less and less about it because it'll be easy just to get the best LLM and dress it up with, in our business context or 

Nate McBride: yeah, 

Mike Crispin: our product context.

And you just have great, I, and it won't be AI anymore. It'll just be kind of part of our product. So 

Nate McBride: let's be, it'll be just Wally, dude. We'll just be [00:39:00] sipping out of meat, meat, juice outta straws. 

Mike Crispin: I, I think that, you know, we're gonna see a iPhone, right? Implement Siri and all these little AI features, but we're not gonna think of them as AI features.

They're just gonna be basic things in our phone. And 

Nate McBride: yeah. 

Mike Crispin: And similarly, that's how AI will progress through our business applications, is not as I'm using AI in my box environment. It'll be like, no, that's just part of box. Like, that's 

Nate McBride: how's another, another way to, to compound forced obsolescence in our devices.

But my, my, my concern, Mike, is that we're, we're doing a sort of ready, fire, aim approach with Yeah. Uh, these models and no one's saying, when I, I want a model that does X and when it achieves this benchmark, I'm done. 

Mike Crispin: You're right. 

Nate McBride: We, we, we, we used to say, I want to go ahead and put in NetSuite and I'll take the latest version.

Do not update that fucker. I want it to stay on this version, and I will only go through the absolute required updates every year. No big deal. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Um, and NetSuite caught onto that, said, [00:40:00] okay, every year we'll have two, two big updates. All customers have to do them. You'll prepare notes, et cetera. But if you, if you align with any vendor and you're saying, okay, I'm gonna start making myself a dependent on this vendor, that vendor's like, Hey, by the way, that thing I just hooked you up to, it's already so old you stupid ass.

Now we have a new model that's twice as fast. Oh, by the way, it's gonna cost you x more. And then they keep doing this game. You, I, I, I, I'm like, why? We care so much about model development. I don't know why we do, but my and my take is. I don't care about model development. I like the model that I'm using.

I'm not looking at the model I'm using and saying, Jesus Christ, that took three seconds. Why can't it take two? Um, maybe now on some sort of terra scale level where I'm doing maybe millions of gen AI transactions, and I wouldn't, and I'm not, but let's suppose I would then Yeah. That that second's gonna matter.

Mm-hmm. But for now, no, we're not even close to that. No one's using it such a scale, but everyone's being forced, not forced. But you [00:41:00] can't go into Anthropic and pick sonnet two. It's not an option anymore. They've, they've deprecated, they're not, 

Mike Crispin: they're not charging you to use Sun at four five, even though you used three five last year, right?

Nate McBride: No, I, I, I believe me. Don't, don't worry. They will start, they will have to either, or either add revenue or something to get people to start paying. But that's besides the point. You're right. You won't care. It'll just say Claude. It won't say four five or five one or five two or whatever. We'll just say, Claude, you won't know anymore.

You won't be like, oh, I'm gonna use Haiku for this and Opus for that, blah, blah, blah. It won't matter, right? Because they're gonna dumb it down to the dumbest possible person they can, and then put it at that level. 

Mike Crispin: Yes, 

Nate McBride: there will be opportunities for people that are on the up and up to say, uh, I need the extra special sauce Claude model, and I want that.

And they'll pay the premium for that. Right. 

Mike Crispin: Oh yeah. 

Nate McBride: That's, that's the only way that this evolution makes any sense. Otherwise, with a hundred plus models so far, this year, models, now let's just aggregate it all together. 

Mike Crispin: [00:42:00] Yep. 

Nate McBride: Um, that's kind of an absurd number for, for an industry that either it has no path.

Mike Crispin: Mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: Because these all seem like, these all seem like relatively linear progressions on the, on the model scale, but they're not, 'cause if you look at what the updates were between features, they're just like picking things, oh, so and so did this now. Well, I gotta do this now. I need Neo whatever. You're right.

Maybe, maybe it was more of a rhetorical question than anything else, but I'm trying to, I'm trying to understand why when I get a note that there's been a new update for a thing on, and, and I, I'm a po user from my 

Mike Crispin: hope. My hope is that it will work better if there's a 

Nate McBride: Yeah, exactly. But whats the, what's the benchmark 

Mike Crispin: works?

Nate McBride: What's the benchmark where you're like sitting there looking at quad four or five and you're saying, God, this doesn't work, and then four six comes out and you're like, oh my God, Eureka. It's working again. Um, what's the, what's the benchmark between something that works in something that doesn't on such a pace of [00:43:00] model scale updates?

It's just, uh, you know, 

Mike Crispin: yeah. It, 

Nate McBride: anyway, 

Mike Crispin: use case, 

Nate McBride: it was like when, when, when, when Apple came out with OS 10, you're like, holy shit, where did my finder go? Then all of a sudden the, the, the updates kept coming. The big ones, and every time there's a big one. It was so big and they had the little tiny ones in between, you know, where like they changed the trash can or something, whatever.

No one cared, but it was the big ones that made the performance development. So they, you know, they were pretty good at doing it one an pretty annual basis. Right. I didn't go to WD WDC anytime, but, um, we've, we've gone away from the worlds of every year there's gonna be no update to now. Hey, last week that thing you used, that was actually not the best one.

We, we made it better 

Mike Crispin: point. 

Nate McBride: So then I think because 

Mike Crispin: it's still new, it's still new. So that's why you're seeing so much of this 

Nate McBride: stuff. When is it not gonna be new anymore though? And you don't have to answer that really, but that's a good question. 'cause it's been three years, well longer than that, but three [00:44:00] years since the zeitgeist effect broke the dam.

Um, yeah. When is it not gonna be new? So anyway, 

Mike Crispin: there's no money left in it. When the bubble bursts, then it's not gonna be new. 

Nate McBride: When the bubble bursts, that's our next podcast name, the bursting 

Mike Crispin: bubble that's everywhere right now. I think that's the number one topic is when is the bubble gonna burst?

SoftBank. 

Nate McBride: So I was listening, I was down on Rhode Island yesterday to get my tires changed in my car at my friend's, my friend's place, and, uh, P-S-C-N-B-C on in his lobby of his little tiny car repair shop. So I'm sitting there, you know, reading my book and it's just listening to. The, the pundits about the market.

Of course, listening to 'em talk about gen ai. Hysterical, all ignorant, no idea what they're talking about. Need a basic lesson in prompting, but listening to 'em talk about the bubble and how a bunch of money is being lost on a daily basis on the global financial markets because of Gen ai. It's a staggering, it's trillions of dollars now with a [00:45:00] t, which is a staggering number.

Even that's too hard to comprehend. Way more than like, say a hundred billion dollars. Uh, $2 trillion is a, is an un un unrealizable number. Um, it's being thrown at infrastructure that will never do anything except kill forests. So anyway, 

Mike Crispin: it's funny that, you know, SoftBank sold, you know, all the press is like, oh, SoftBank just sold all their Nvidia stock for $5.8 billion, period.

Oh my God. What, what? This is horrible. Do. Do you know what they did with the $5.8 billion 

Nate McBride: a MD? 

Mike Crispin: They bought more open AI stock, or they, they put more money into open ai. Not, they didn't, they're not public, but they, they gave $30 billion to open ai. 

Nate McBride: I hate to break it to you, but you with $5.8 billion, you can't even get a membership on a golf course in Florida with 5.8 billion anymore.

Um, 

it's 

Mike Crispin: like, 

Nate McBride: [00:46:00] forget about, 

Mike Crispin: it's a thing. To try and signal that, oh my 

Nate McBride: God, you can't, you can't even influence Russian government officials to $5.8 billion anymore. Come on. We need some real fucking cash. God man. 

Mike Crispin: I just want some of that. Why can't we get, you know, maybe a, maybe 

Nate McBride: I could, I could, honestly, I'd be, I think I'd be all right with like three, three and a half billion.

That's, I think I'd be alright. 

Mike Crispin: I'd take, I'd take three. 

Nate McBride: I buy, I buy, I upgrade my arcade behind me. All my machine's working again. All right. Identity, Mike? 

Mike Crispin: Yes. 

Nate McBride: Identity. 

Mike Crispin: Identity. 

Nate McBride: What 

Mike Crispin: is 

Nate McBride: identity? How, 

Mike Crispin: how do we, where do we wanna begin? Do you want start with like this kind of digital user identity components?

Well, what we're actually talking about in terms of scale and 

Nate McBride: couple weeks ago, I mean, this is pretty much how every episode's gonna begin. I think couple weeks ago Mike and I were at a bar. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. That's where we were. 

Nate McBride: That's where we were. And we were talking [00:47:00] about this very topic and we asked a lot of dumb questions about it.

But also, um, every now and then we have something that we feel is unsafe enough to write down. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Um, we were just talking before the show started about needing better verifiers for identity. But I think, I think a good place to start would, I'll give you a pop quiz. 

Mike Crispin: Okay. 

Nate McBride: Pop quiz. Ready. I know you didn't study for this.

Mike Crispin: Never do. 

Nate McBride: Is identity your email address, your employee id. S, SH key social security number or something else? 

Mike Crispin: It's all of them. 

Nate McBride: Okay. That's, there wasn't an, I was, there was no option. FII. There's some and there's something else maybe that passes for that, but, 

Mike Crispin: oh, yeah. I, I would say those are there, they're, they can be components of your identity.

Yeah. They're not, it's not that we could say they're authenticators, I guess to some extent, but they, they could [00:48:00] be lumped in with your, with your identity. They would be a 

Nate McBride: Alright. 

Mike Crispin: A cell. A cell in the table of your identity. 

Nate McBride: Let, let's start with that then. So you just mentioned authenticators. Sure. Um, authentication versus identity.

So a name is an is an identity. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: And the password sort of like transforms that name into authentication. So, go ahead. 

Mike Crispin: I was gonna say that a component of your identity can be used as a factor. One of the three factors or four factors, whatever you need to present as an authentication. So. 

Nate McBride: Got it. 

Mike Crispin: Your name, your name, your email address could be an authenticator as well as part of your identity.

I would say. 

Nate McBride: So, so assuming the airport's working, I go into the airport and I have my passport. I'm me, I am my identity, my passport is my token. So you find these symbiotic relationships everywhere you go and together they become an authenticator. They're [00:49:00] authenticating me or allowing me entry into a thing together.

But my identity, which we actually talked about last season, is half of the equation. My name or my biometric, or my token or my voice or whatever is, is not, is not, I mean, it's my identity, but we have to do, we have to kinda get to the bottom of what exactly identity means, I think first. Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: sure. Uh, 

Nate McBride: so, 

Mike Crispin: yep.

Nate McBride: So when we think about identity, we talked about, um, the fact that there can't, well, I'll get to that in a bit. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. 

Nate McBride: We talked about identity being, um, a physical, tangible thing. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. Yep. 

Nate McBride: Uh, you wouldn't not have, you, somebody could not have an identity. Everyone has to have an identity. Uh, and this isn't about anonymous versus non-anonymous.

You to get to, to do anything, you have to have an identity except go live in the woods, I suppose. 

Mike Crispin: [00:50:00] Sure. 

Nate McBride: There you'd just be mountain Mike. You wouldn't, you'd still have an identity, the guy who, the freaky guy who lives in the woods. That's your identity. But you have to have some sort of, uh, representation of yourself for identity.

Correct. At the starting point. 

Mike Crispin: You have to have some way to I identify yourself. That's, uh, that's observable that people recognize or something recognizes 

Nate McBride: something recognizable. Okay, so, so then if we have something that's tangible, so we have a mic, he's got a physical body. He looks like this, he talks like this, et cetera.

All right. So, all right. You've already, you've already passed. You checked that box. 

Mike Crispin: I'm here. I think I'm here. I've been digitally created. 

Nate McBride: You're there unless you're, unless you're alt mic. And we'll talk about that in a minute. 

Mike Crispin: Well, I turn my head to the side so you can see, like, 

Nate McBride: yes, please. Thank you. 

Mike Crispin: All right.

Nate McBride: Um, so then is identity, if identity's a person and the person needs a passport to get into a thing, is identity, permission, or context? So in other words, am I, am, [00:51:00] am I, by virtue of being Nate, the context I need along with that passport to get in? Because my picture's on the passport, the, the picture looks like me.

Mike Crispin: Mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: So which one of the two of those things is the identity? Is it the Nate, or is it the picture of Nate that verifies that? Nate is Nate. I don't wanna get too meta about this, but that's part of this, because when we get too authenticating to a system, 

Mike Crispin: it's multifactor. The picture is a factor in your name as a factor.

Nate McBride: What about, what about my physical body? Am I still, am I still just the identity 

Mike Crispin: that, that, that is as well? Your, your body is a, is a factor, maybe more behavioral in terms of his acceptance and how it's observed, but it's part of your identity. Absolutely. That's why I said all before, because I think these, these things are all components of your, i of your actual identity.

Verifiers. Verifiers are part of your identity. [00:52:00] Not, you know, even if they're, we consider them authenticator type tasks or authenticator type objects. They're all, they're all part of who, who you are. In some aspect else, they wouldn't be useful. 

Nate McBride: So that's a good point. So my, what are my verifiers without a passport?

Well, they are my face. Mm-hmm. My voice things I say the way I speak, the way I talk. These are all things that people have come to, to know as Nate, 

Mike Crispin: that's 

Nate McBride: right. As my identity. Right. If I all of a sudden started speaking French all the time in a weird accent and shave my head, I'd still be Nate and my, my brand might have to change a little bit and people might have to adapt, but people would still be able to associate my identity.

It wouldn't have changed because they would already have a core understanding of me. Now, if I met somebody new on the street that never knew me before, what they saw at that moment would be, would be their version of my identity. So there would be the identity that everyone knows today. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Then there would kind [00:53:00] of be my.

Other identity. And I'm not talking about like alter egos or whatever. I'm talking about someone who's I've never met before. When they meet me for the first time, they're creating an identity of me, right? 

Mike Crispin: Sure, sure. 

Nate McBride: So the only, the only way to normalize this is to attach it to a token. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. 

Nate McBride: To say whether or not you've ever met Nate.

Here's how you can verify that it is in fact, Nate. 

Mike Crispin: That's right, that's right. 

Nate McBride: Okay. So, so you talking about better verifiers, well, what's the best verifier then? Is the best verifier the brand I've already established that gives everyone context about Nate? Or is it always going to be a token? Can it never be just the context?

Mike Crispin: I think the more the, the more things that can be used to identify you by more people, the more verifiable you become. So as you as those things you, so that passport, everyone knows about a passport and everyone knows what it's for, at least most people do. [00:54:00] I would say your picture identifies you, your voice identifies you.

Um, maybe the way that behaviors behave, you behave, identifies you. And I think identity is, you know, I think, trying to think of how I put this, like identity is, is not something that you have anymore. Like it's just, you have, it's something that. That is in, in this context is observed. So something that you are putting out there to be used as a unconsciously or consciously to be used to identify you.

Uh, it's, it's a, a way that you behave or a factor or a, you know, a code or a picture that you can use as proof that lines up with those things. You know, that we just talked about your, your what's been observed, that you can prove that that's you [00:55:00] and that you still maintain control of your identity. This is a key thing because one of the reasons I think we're talking about this is because all of these factors of authentication against your identity as a whole are getting easier and easier to spoof or harder and harder to verify.

Nate McBride: Right? 

Mike Crispin: So 

Nate McBride: that's, that's where we picked, that's where we left it off last season. That's why we're coming back to it. 

Mike Crispin: That's why it's so important that we think about how we want to define, define, define sort of identity in the current state and kind of the current global situation and technology revolution situation we're in.

I guess if you wanna say that, is how do we actually, I guess, even philosophically talk about identity and is it, to your question, Nate, how do we actually. Do that in a way where it's still verifiable. The answer to me right now is, I'm not sure. I, I [00:56:00] think that what we answer for right now is, is gonna be, is, is gonna be manipulated in other ways, even months from now.

Nate McBride: Sure. 

Mike Crispin: So I think that's where, to me, the biggest verifier is still social interaction and connection. Um, network and relationship building. And even though, like take for, let's take this as an example right now. Hey, hey Nate, I forgot my password. Can you reset it for me? And right now you know me and I know you, there's an element of trust that's been built and you can easily verify that I am who I am and you'll change my password without me having to, you know, fill out a form or send you some token and prove that I'm me.

Yeah. That we met in person and we know each other. And you, you would do that 'cause you know who I am [00:57:00] now. Pretend we've never met, we're working on the other side of the world and maybe I'm not even human. I'm an agent or I'm a bot of some sort and I'm asking to be reverified. And you have no way of knowing that someone hasn't taken the identity of that entity.

And that, that I think is where we're headed. Where we're, we've gotta, we're gonna have to have a way to identify, uh, applications, people services, bots and behaviors and all sorts of other robots and all sorts of other things, right? So that's where an observable behavior, a provable set of factors like we talked about.

And then having some sort of assurance that that identity has remained in control of their actual factors and of their behaviors and of their, their, their persona. 'cause once they've lost control of that persona, then all those other things are, [00:58:00] are moot. All of the, the factors that are approved, the o observable behaviors, they've just copied and now they can be someone else.

Con artists do this well, right? Sure. 

Nate McBride: I 

Mike Crispin: mean, they get into your life for a few months and they think you are someone else. It's happens on dating apps all the time. Not that I know, but, um, that's speaking. There's also the spoofing and identity some somewhat, um, 

Nate McBride: ah, but the spoofing question is what one of the things that bothers me the most because what's the importance of identity if it is spoof able, I mean, what's the value in it?

So if I, if I can't be anonymous and I can't, I mean, I literally to access anything. Is it then true that I am exactly what I access? Like is my identity more even bigger than, than something that's spoof? What's another way to say this? So let's suppose that someone gets my password and then get into a [00:59:00] system.

They're still not me, they're not my identity. They're just authenticating as me to get to a, a certain amount of data. But in order for them to take my identity, I mean, they're impersonating it to a degree, but they're not taking my identity. They have to actually become me. 

Mike Crispin: That's 

Nate McBride: right. They have to fully manifest as myself in another form.

Uh, help me virtual, of course, yes. But that has to fully manifest as me to fully steal my identity. And yes, that happens, but every time it happens, we're usually talking about, um, it was done on behalf of getting access to a, to a set of data, which then brings me back to that same question and my, is my identity what I can access?

Or is my identity bigger than that? Um, and I'll, let me before you, before you get into that, let me ask you this follow up question, which is metadata about me. Mm-hmm. Is that also part of my identity? So if I do a biometric, [01:00:00] um. If I have some sort of secret, double secret handshake, token somewhere, all these metadata points about me, do they fall under my identity or my authentication?

Mike Crispin: I think they fall under your identity as well. Any, anything that can be used to verify your identity as part of your identity. And authenticators are just a mechanism in which we can, hold on, 

Nate McBride: hold on, hold on. Sorry. I'm not letting you get away with that. So anything that can verify me is my identity. I thought those were 

Mike Crispin: No, anything that you can use to ver your identity is a whole number of things.

It's not one thing, it's a whole number. 

Nate McBride: Right. It's, we talked about it's behaviors, it's visual, it's all those things. But, 

Mike Crispin: but your, your identity could also very well be your address. You know, that's part of your, if the 

Nate McBride: system knows me, knows me as my address, then sure. That would be my identity in that system.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. In that, in that system. And it's, it's, it's, it could be, I used as an identifier that you [01:01:00] are who you are, so therefore it's part of your identity. I think in terms of your persona or like who you are, that's different. But your identity is a set of, I think a set of factors and a set of, of things that, uh, can be observed that you can use to prove who you are and that you own and control.

Nate McBride: Why do so few companies, Mike, why do so few companies. Uh, still use our older methods of assigning someone an Id like a bunch of random characters. Why is it, I mean, random characters is, no one does that. Uh, and if they do, call us. Remember, 

Mike Crispin: COPUS serve. Copus Serve, 

Nate McBride: yeah. CompuServe. Yes. But it was, it, it was a pattern.

It was still a pattern. 

Mike Crispin: It wasn't just a set of numbers. 

Nate McBride: No copy serve had like a five, five letters and then eight numbers, right? 

Mike Crispin: Oh, I can't remember. I thought it was Prodigy. I can't remember. One of them. 

Nate McBride: My god, 

Mike Crispin: one of them was just numbers. And I was like, I could never do that. [01:02:00] 

Nate McBride: I wouldn't have, but that, that was probably the next number of the signup.

I mean, if I was signed up right after you, was I the same number? Hold on now we have to look this up. Prodigy versus Comp. 

Mike Crispin: That's 

Nate McBride: a 

Mike Crispin: good call. 

Nate McBride: Usernames. 

Mike Crispin: Oh man. That brings back memories. 

Nate McBride: Comp, serve username. So initially it was, it was a based eight numbering system. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Original format was seven digits long in the form.

Seven XXXX comma xx. It grew to eight, nine, and eventually 10 al digits. Product usernames were, were actually, you're right. Were a complete mix of letters and numbers. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. Compus service just numbers. 

Nate McBride: However, com you com was just number Prodigy, but, but CompuServe was, um. Not random numbers. It was sequential numbers.

Sequential. Prodigy just says it was a mix of letters and numbers. [01:03:00] Then the IDs were used as the basis for all email addresses in the form of user id prodigy.com. But in 1995, prodigy introduced the ability to users to choose their own.

So you could like me, 

Mike Crispin: what? See what a great feature. 

Nate McBride: I know, but maybe, maybe it's Prodigy. We can blame every single security problem we have today on for allowing the usernames to be used instead of just sticking with random, random combinations. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, I I, it would be great if usernames could be, and some apps do this again now, and usernames could be separated for email.

It was such a short, but 

Nate McBride: we don't do that. Right? 'cause because of convenience. 

Mike Crispin: Such a 

Nate McBride: short, you would never, ever, yeah. So, so Mike's at, at his company and new vice president shows up for day one and Mike's like, here's your, here's your username and it's a 17 character set of random shit@cardian.com. And then a VP is like, sweet, I love this combination.[01:04:00] 

No, that's not gonna happen. 

Mike Crispin: But you were asking about why we, why do we still need to put our names in our, our username? Is that 

Nate McBride: what you Yeah, we talked about that. Why we talked about last season. Like why are we still giving away half the, half the combination every time we do this? It's because this is how we got into ident the identity question, which was, if I am giving you, I've never met you in my life, but right away, the first thing I say to you out of my mouth is, here's my email address.

Now go ahead and guess my password. That's, 

Mike Crispin: and here, here, and even, even that's 

where 

Nate McBride: the problem starts. 

Mike Crispin: Even more, even just as funny, I should say, is that here's my email address or here's my phone number. Both are used as factors to your identity and how you authenticate. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: So your phone number's even worse.

If you give some of your phone number, I mean, I'd say nine out of 10 mobile applications, use your phone number as your, as your, as your username. 

Nate McBride: But you don't have to give it to somebody. They just go to [01:05:00] Rocket beach.co and they can get it for free. So 

Mike Crispin: there you go. 

Nate McBride: I mean, um, hi, I am Mike Crispin. Stop.

I'm good. I get the, I'll get the rest. Thank you very much. I'll get anymore. 

Mike Crispin: I don't know why I got a text from the CEO What happened. It's like your phone number is out there, you know, it's 

Nate McBride: on Rocket, rocket reach, check it out. 

Mike Crispin: Rocket Reach. 

Nate McBride: Anyway, so that, so, so that was what we got here. But the problem of spoofing, I think is still largely the question, if I have an asset Yeah.

It's supposedly locked down. I'm the person who has access to it. You get access to my account. Yeah. Um, what have you, what have you done? Well, you've, you've breached data using my account as a proxy. Have you stolen my identity? No. 

Mike Crispin: No, you havent stolen your identity. But they could, well, they could potentially act on your behalf and someone could, let's say someone, let's say someone took your LinkedIn [01:06:00] account and for, for the people that you, you've built relationships on there that really, you may only know through LinkedIn.

Nate McBride: Sure. 

Mike Crispin: And, and you write a series of posts and you didn't write them, that could hugely change your identity Yes. Within people's context of who you are. That's how they know you, that's how they've observed you, and that's, but now it's outta your control. So that's where identity thing breaks down. And, and, and, 

Nate McBride: okay.

But I'm ta so I, I just, I was talking about it from a smoothing perspective, but let's get back on track, which is Yeah, that's, we know, we know that there cannot be an identity and you're, we need better verifiers for identity. But 

Mike Crispin: yeah, 

Nate McBride: an identity, identity itself, um, at least from a corporate perspective comes in the form of you have a user login.

So you start at your new employee, Mike decides, here's your identity. You assign an identity to that person. They're coming in with their face features, behaviors, all the things that they built as their brand. [01:07:00] But within your company, they have a different identity. They are, you know, user 1 0 2 4 5, um, that's their identity.

From that, from that point forward within your environment, that's their identity. Now they're given a certain amount of authentication and access to things which all sort of together make it part of their identity. Um, and as we've determined, they're all spoof or some, most elements of that are spoof. So we get back to them.

What's the point of identity? Um, it's just a, a method of prevention. It's not in any way whatsoever a mechanism that can stop somebody else. It's just sort of a gate in the path. Yep. If that's the case, then could we not start talking about identity in terms of a broader scale? For instance, if my identity is my behavior and it's who I, what I look like and what I say and what I write, wouldn't all those things or couldn't all those things also be used to verify me in some way?[01:08:00] 

Couldn't we ever get to a point where it's gonna say at one moment, will I go read your LinkedIn posts or one moment while delete your substack environment to make sure it's you? Go ahead and while you're waiting, write this brief paragraph for me to answer this question. I'll determine if it's you or not.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Right. Or something along those lines. It says, I just wanna verify it's you so speaking to the microphone and tell me a joke. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And well, Nate's Nate would only tell one of like four jokes that he knows. 

Mike Crispin: That's right. Those are all verifiers and, and things you could use. Yeah, absolutely. 

Nate McBride: Because they're parts of my identity.

Right? We've established that. So now we know what the parts of the identity are, so that's good. Uh, but how much of you,

how do I put this? How much of you then, back to the question of you are what you access, how much of what you access, how much of what you can see and do should be [01:09:00] linked to something that is either easily spoof or we put so many barriers around to make very difficult to spoof. How much of, uh, 

Mike Crispin: uh, let's put it this way, if verification can be made easier with many factors, which could very well be, like you said, written pros or somehow be way to automate behavioral recognition, any of that stuff.

Nate McBride: Yeah. I know the question I wanna ask, but go ahead. It 

Mike Crispin: could be even easier, but go ahead. 

Nate McBride: Question I wanna ask is what is, what is essentially the only identifier that can be used for identity verification? What is the only verifier we could come up with that is a foolproof verifier to verify who you are?

And that would be physical 

Mike Crispin: presence. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. It had to be you as the i you'd be the only way to identify your identity. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. You gotta be there in, in the right there, it can reach out and give you a high five. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. [01:10:00] 

Mike Crispin: That, I mean, that's. 

Nate McBride: That's what I was trying to get at. And it took me a little bit of time to get there, but 

Mike Crispin: I, I think that 

Nate McBride: that's the Alchemist beer you're speaking.

Mike Crispin: I think that's true. And I think there's, that's part of Im parcel kind of the verification economy discussion. We'll, we'll have too, I think it at some point this season is that that's one of the only ways you can do it. The problem is measuring that not invading 

Nate McBride: Right. 

Mike Crispin: People's privacy. And that's, that's gonna be the interesting time to think about how that will work.

Yeah. But that's for every day. 

Nate McBride: No, we get the verification economy, I think in episode four. Uh, it's coming up. But that is, that will help us answer some of these questions too, so we can st we can stay away from that for now. Um, so I'll come back to the other point I made in just a moment. But you said something earlier about AI and I want to talk about that for just a moment because last season we talked about AI identity portability.

We talked about what happens in the near [01:11:00] future. When Nate walks into a company and with him, he is bringing Alt Nate bot built on top of an SLM that Nate's created. And, and so Nate doesn't go anywhere without his bot. He walks into your company and says, I need to be able to attach my bot to your environment.

Do we have? Have we started thinking, I know the industry kind of talks about agent identity a little bit though no one seems to have really nailed it down, but have we started to think about what the identity is we're gonna give to that bot? So I feel like it's an inevitability that we will all in some way have a bot that goes with us.

Mike Crispin: Yes. 

Nate McBride: My research assistant buddy, my, my CIO buddy, you know, my Alt Nate that I've created, but he's mine. I created him. So I bring him with me wherever I go and when I leave a place, he comes with me. I detach him from your mothership. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. 

Nate McBride: What's the identity? Is the identity the bot [01:12:00] Nate that controls the bot?

Mike Crispin: I think it's Nate that controls the bot. This is similar to the BYOD in a much bigger scale, but some of the BYOD argument or discussion or concern that we had years ago. 

Nate McBride: Yeah, 

Mike Crispin: I do think that people will bring an assistant with them. It's gonna be very hard to regulate that. So therefore, I think the way that we'll have to manage it is just legally, I don't think there'll be much more than that, that we can do other than to have something in the employee agreement saying certain things will not be discussed.

Or maybe by that time there'll be whichever assistant that you use or that you develop. There are some. Sort of guardrails or capabilities built into the models or the, or the software that allows you to create some sort of divide when you bring it into a business. But I think it will be predominantly owned by the [01:13:00] person.

Um, because a assistant that probably has more personal information and it then business information. And then if you're legally obligated a company not to use it for some reason, uh, the companies that allow it are gonna end up probably hiring more people. Because you're bringing one brain plus a huge intelligence with someone into an organization instead of saying, yeah, you can't use your personal one, we got one for you.

Um, I, I think that's not gonna work in the, and right now that seems crazy, but down the line, I, I don't, I I think, I 

Nate McBride: don't think it's too far away. I, Mike, if I, if I took 27 years of documentation that I've written and I have every single document since the, the day I started outta college. 

Trance Bot: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Every email I've ever sent, if I took that whole thing and fed it into an SLM, built an agent around it and called it Nate Bot.

So every post, every single thing I've written for, for 27 years, yep. Sorry. 29 years and fed it [01:14:00] in there, that would not be a personal agent, that would be a working agent. And basically every decision I made, everything I did, every email I sent would be captured. By my agent to then continue to improve the way I do work.

Of course, I'm gonna detach it and it's gonna be an interesting discussion around who owns what I, well, obviously I own it. Yeah. If I've built it on my own time. But, um, 

Mike Crispin: is it training on the things that you are asking from the business you're in, because then is that property of the company? Yeah. Is that, is that, does, does once, once you do that, does that make your whole body of work now discoverable because you've attached that assistant to your company?

There's a whole, 

Nate McBride: yeah. I mean, the rule 

Mike Crispin: of legal question, 

Nate McBride: it's, it's a, it's a corpus of legal, of craziness and no one's got into it yet because Yeah. How did you, how would you sue an agent? Well, you can't, you have to sue the identity owner of the agent, which would be Nate, but you'd have to be [01:15:00] able to get into Nate's agent, which makes, which means you, you know, oh my God.

But that's a whole other episode. But the point was that if I have an agent that I bring into your organization with me and I need access to certain things which you have to grant, do you grant that access using Nate's identity or the agent's identity as a proxy to Nate and that we don't have the technological way to describe this today, but let's just pre pretend that there's a way to do that.

Um, you know, you go into Okta and there's Nate and it says, does Nate have any agents? And yes, there's Nate Bot and here's Nate Bot and here's Nate Bot's key. Uh, we'll go ahead and share it and create the. The, 

Mike Crispin: would you, would you as a, if it was your personal bot, your personal assistant, would you want to attach it to an enterprise system in any way?

Or is that your 

Nate McBride: I'D wanna know. Well, this is where the other side of the industry's gonna have to catch up because when I bring my bot to your company, I need to be able to port it, to dock it to your world. So it's almost [01:16:00] like, you know, when they have these, um, and these sci-fi movies where they have these planets and any, any kind of ship can fly in and dock.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Uh, it doesn't matter what kind it is, it'd be the same principle. Like Mike's bringing his agent, he built it in something entirely different, you know, using like, uh, some foreign country open source, LLM, he's built his agent. It works fantastic. He doesn't leave home without it. He comes to your company, he expects to be able to port it in.

Mike Crispin: Mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: Like during the interview process, what kind of agent are you using? And, and oh, well, we're not compatible with that agent. You can't come here. Or, yes, we were totally open, friendly to that, that agent type, regardless of how it ends up working, and you can sort of see where all this is going. Uh, I still have to, I still have to dock my bot to your, your mothership.

And when it docks, it immediately is going to start crawling what it's been given access to. 

Mike Crispin: Why would you want to [01:17:00] dock it with your. 

Nate McBride: Because I wanna be able, I wanna, I would wanna immediately be able to attach to things I'm doing. Like for instance, I'm collaborating on documentation. I'm posting on Slack.

I'm sending emails. I would want it to intercept all of this information to have it. Now the alternative is, that's where it's inert, it sits, it's not, not attached. It's, it's, it's a part of me and I'm downloading all information separately to put inside and feed the LLM, which of course is violating all kinds of corporate whatever.

And when does it anyway. 

Mike Crispin: That's what I mean. I think the, the, the bigger challenge will be when you get to that point where you are bringing, you're bringing in an agent. That is, that is, it's now, 

Nate McBride: well, at that point, I'm no longer bringing it. I just have it. It's, it's whoever it is. When I say bring it, I mean I'm bringing it within the domain.

I'm bringing it into the corporation. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: I would do work on my behalf within your walls. 

Mike Crispin: That's easy to regulate. 'cause that will just block, I think that that's, that's kind of what I'm going, is like, I think if it's, and you're, you're, 

Nate McBride: but sorry, I [01:18:00] I'm going on the premise so that you would give access to it.

Like you would be the kind of company that would say, yes, PhD, so and so, we're very, very happy to have you here working on our research team. Please plug your bot into this node and here's its new identity. It can now access this. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. Yep. Yeah. That's, that's gonna, 

Nate McBride: because, because I, 

Mike Crispin: yeah. Sorry, 

Nate McBride: go ahead. 

Mike Crispin: No, I'm just saying that that more from a legal perspective is gonna be very difficult.

Where I was, where I was going with it is. Is that you have people who don't need to connect it at all. They can just use it, whichever that they want. Whatever they're seeing, whatever they're recording, whatever they're saying is all going into this personal assistant and taking it. That's not connected because that's easier to maintain and bring with you when, but if you're maybe, but you're obligated to say, or you, you want to have true integration and you say, yeah, I'm bringing this thing in, I'm gonna plug it in and integrate it with your systems.[01:19:00] 

I, I think there's, it's gonna be easier for companies, the majority of companies to say no to that because they can control that pretty easily and there's probably not some sort of force multiplier that they're gonna be able to see right out of the gate. By you plugging your assistant in, it might be good for you, but they're not.

They're gonna need some real proof to see that. That adds value. Whereas I think if you have an assistant that's attached to you that you can just record everything you hear it hears and everything you say it hears, 

Nate McBride: hold on. That's a whole different level. Let's get to that one just 

Mike Crispin: a second. That's more, that's more likely.

That's what people do today. They use Chachi BT on their personal accounts. They put all this stuff from work in there. They're not supposed to, there's no way for you to stop them from doing that except for them. 

Nate McBride: Well, this is the point I wanna make, Mike. So if I, if I already know if I am, if I'm going to go ahead and not lie out of my ass by saying, oh yeah, 

Mike Crispin: gotta 

Nate McBride: be the good person.

No employee in my company takes any data, it all [01:20:00] stays within our company walls there. Everyone's a hundred percent honest. If I stop living in that falsehood and start saying yes, everything is probably leaving. Yeah. Um, and I don't care what anyone has to say about that. You can put in every fucking protection in the world, but you know what, if someone's got a camera in their pocket, they can take pictures and walk away with it.

So just stop your argument right there. Point being that if I can go ahead and just not live under that fantasy and let somebody dock and then say to them. Let's be open about this. You're obviously gonna train your bot on our shit. That's why we're not gonna give you access to the crown jewels with your bot.

Your bot can see your email, it can see whatever. 'cause we know that shit's gonna walk anyway, but we're not gonna give you access to the crown lobe. That's like, you gotta go in this other place. No bots allowed. Whatever 

Mike Crispin: that, that's, I mean, I think there's too many parallels with what we do today to stop that from happening.

Nate McBride: Sure, sure. So, so that's where the identity comes in. So what does the bot get? What does [01:21:00] the bot become when it doesn't, 

Mike Crispin: wouldn't allow the bot in the company to, I wouldn't allow the bot to dock to anything, 

Nate McBride: but, so you're just gonna continue to operate under the premise that it's okay for it to just all walk out.

Uh, I 

Mike Crispin: whereas you just, I'm going facilitate. I'm, I'm with the, I'm going the premise that a lot of us do, I mean, do you let everyone upload everything to OneDrive because they like to use it and it creates value for them at home? 

Nate McBride: Absolutely not. 

Mike Crispin: That's right. 

Nate McBride: But I'm not, I'm talking about the stuff that's leaving 

Mike Crispin: what's, 

Nate McBride: that's leaving the, I'm talking about what's leaving the organization.

Mike Crispin: That's what would happen if you plugged OneDrive in and you said, Hey, I, I get a lot of value as an employee outta OneDrive. Sure. I'm gonna break that into the company. I'm gonna dock it into the company and I'm gonna copy all the data over. 

Nate McBride: We're, we're, we're, 

Mike Crispin: we're, we have it rules to stop that. Right.

Nate McBride: We're arguing if we're arguing for the exact same point. So there's, that's, it's kind of a didactic to the point where what I'm talking about, Mike, is if we are willing to accept that stuff as walking is leaving. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: In my fantastical premise that someone might [01:22:00] allow somebody else to plug in a, an agent that's their own creation that lets them be better at your company, which is why you hire them.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: That's your secret sauce. Secret sauce is they can work five times as fast as normal human. Would you, and let's say that you were able to allow that agent to dock, but not subsume any information from your org. Let's suppose that Okay. Will that make you happy? You still have to give them an identity.

Mike Crispin: That's right. 

Nate McBride: Is the bot the, the owner of the bot's identity or is it the they get their own identity? That's not right. 

Mike Crispin: They would have, it would've to integrate with your i, with the enterprise's identity system in some way. 

Nate McBride: Okay. 

Mike Crispin: I think definitely. Yeah. 

Nate McBride: All right. 

Mike Crispin: I I, I don't think that that will be as big of a issue because I think there's too much precedent on it's just software.

So like that, that to me is just like any other, you bring your, your assistant in. That's just a software plugin you're bringing [01:23:00] in. It's gonna be easy, I think, for it and legal to say, yeah, it, uh, many, many, many companies to say NNN now, we're not gonna let you do that and not have any consequences for them in terms of who they hire.

Right? Sure. I think there will be problems is when you have an assistant. That you can talk to, you know, on your watch, or it's something that they can't control, the enterprise cannot control, and you're gonna bring it into meetings with you where it's a persona or something that they can't stop from happening or the IT department can't help stop, or cybersecurity can't help stop understanding that knowledge goes out the door.

It's when the, the, the form factor of the technology changes that people will walk in regardless because they know there's no way that it can be, it can be mitigated or stopped and more businesses will have to conform to that type of mindset. Like, I think of, yeah, let's take maybe good. I good. Uh, example is smart glasses something that seems kind of far, maybe a little [01:24:00] farther out and not as useful right now, but someone brings smart glasses into the organization.

Nate McBride: You can't in my company, but go ahead. 

Mike Crispin: And that's, that's just it, right? You, you can't, you just can't do it. Right. But there's probably a number of other companies that don't know enough about them and just don't care. Yes. And, and they're there. And to your point, like they can snap pictures and record whatever they want.

And, and now just imagine an earpiece that's gonna chip in it that is saving everything we say and, and we can use as a preference. I, I think that's the stuff where. We're gonna run into you bringing your assistant that talks in your ear, that helps you get stuff done that integrates that May, may, may integrate.

Nate McBride: I couldn't even do it. I couldn't 

Mike Crispin: do it. Here's the, here's the crazy thing, Nate, is it may be able to verify as you, this is your point, I coming back to your point, right, is what, what does the identity hold? I think when the technology is good enough, [01:25:00] it's a mirror of your identity, therefore you are in control of it, not the business or the enterprise.

So that's when all the rules change. 

Nate McBride: Right. Well, I think, I think maybe the answer to the question in a sort of very weird way is that the only way to prove that you are, you is at almost like a chromosomal level. Um, I mean, I don't know if there's any other way to, besides physical presence with some sort of way to completely prove it's you and not in some fabricated way.

Some, someone that's not you. Um, are you dreaming? No, I'm not dreaming. I'm sorry. 

Mike Crispin: Are you, are you really here? Is it a simulation? You know? 

Nate McBride: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean basically like, um, 

Mike Crispin: watch Pluribus by the way. 

Nate McBride: Oh man, 

Mike Crispin: I on Apple tv. 'cause this, this is, this plays into some of what we're talking about right now. 

Nate McBride: I don't have Apple tv, man.

I shut all that shit off. I got HBO [01:26:00] max. It's all I have left. I shut everything else off. It's idiotic. 

Mike Crispin: We can go to a bar and watch it on my iPhone. We'll watch it 

Nate McBride: together. I tell, I'll tell you this, just total totally unrelated segue and then I'll come back. But I've been watching this show on HBO Max called In the Eye of the Storm and it's basically, it's ba I'm watching this.

And it's about people who recorded all these natural disasters over the last few years from their cell phones. You know, you hear about the news like, hurricane, you know, so and so and it fucking leveled half a state, or, you know, all these tornadoes or something and you're like, wow, that's really, that's really tragic.

Look at the houses from, from way up in the sky. Then they, the show is all about the people that are on the ground filming it from their houses, like their front porch and stuff. Yeah. They've consolidated all these videos together into these, I'm not usually one for a shock video. Uh, in fact I don't really watch it, but this kind of hooked me.

'cause I was like, okay, HBO max, it's kind of legitimized. Um, although not really. Um, but I started watching it. I got totally hooked. And then the first thing that I thought to thought of about was [01:27:00] what we should be doing, and this is the way to like, make just a ton of cash, like billionaires right here. We sell little devices that you can put on your house, uh, all like in the, in the tornado belt in like in Florida and Texas and stuff, and make millions of them, right?

And they're just recording weather. They don't have, they don't do anything else, but when there's an event they all turn on, right? They're recording 360 degrees. Every single thing that happens for like that hurricane tornado and then you're able to mash 'em together into one video and then show that tornado as it just completely levels everything.

Like package it up, market it, boom, HBO max. And I'm telling you, you could like it with just one year alone, make a killing. Now we need like a couple billion dollar investment. I'm not gonna lie. So I dunno if a 16 Z is listening. If you are, we hate you, but you can give us a couple billion anyway. We just need like [01:28:00] two or 3 million cameras.

Oh wait a second. We can just use flock cameras anyway. Or Palantir cameras. We can get a couple cameras, film all these video, film all these storms, like people getting their limbs torn apart on telephone poles and cars slipping over into houses and stuff. And there was a huge market for it and we could dissect it into eight second clips, put on TikTok, sell it to Meta.

You see where I'm going? 

Mike Crispin: Oh yeah. It's uh, what's, who's the weather guy that's on the storm chaser guys? 

Nate McBride: Yeah, well they have some of those guys too on that show. And of course every single night I watch that show before bed and I have nightmares of like me running to get into a storm shelter that keeps moving further and further away.

Oh my 

Mike Crispin: God. 

Nate McBride: I'm telling you man. 

Mike Crispin: I'm sorry, I brought us down the dream tangent. 

Nate McBride: It's okay. So, so AI portability, you're, you're a vote [01:29:00] voting? No, I'm voting maybe. Um, and then 

Mike Crispin: in terms of docking Yeah. 

Nate McBride: In terms of

Mike Crispin: sometimes we just have to take it, you know, 

Nate McBride: Gardner 2000, remember Gardner 2013? 

Mike Crispin: Yes. Yep. And they, 

Nate McBride: and they were showing the live tweets up on the screen. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. I remember all too. Well, 

Nate McBride: thank God. And they finally caught on to what we were doing. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. They did, what did we post again? I can't remember. Oh yeah, it's 

Nate McBride: about docking.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. Docker. Yeah. They finally got it 

Nate McBride: after, 

Mike Crispin: like, didn't someone else like retweet and write the same thing and 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Yeah. And we just kept, kept over retweeting ourselves on the same, same hashtag And we just dominated the whole, the entire major auditorium at Gartner was just our tweets. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. We were, [01:30:00] it's like throwing marshmallows on the golf course.

It's just doing it in social media instead. 

Nate McBride: Oh God. Those are the days. Mike. 12 years ago. 12 years ago we were younger. Younger and smarter. Um, so on this AI tip, let me just finish this thread 'cause I wrote another note, but it was this alt identity. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: This Alt Nate bot, 

Mike Crispin: I love it. 

Nate McBride: What, what would it take for me to make that my identity?

My actual identity, besides the fact that I can't, my Nate bot can't physically show up at the office. In all other respects, I could theoretically make it into my identity. Correct. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. So those ob observable things, your, your persona or behaviors, your behavior. Uh, sorry. Your, your visibility, your, the way you speak.

Nate McBride: Yep. Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: All the sense, sense, uh, sensory things that are important. Uh, [01:31:00] yes. You could use 11 labs for your voice and you could build video imagery, I'm sure for yourself. It just, I think it's doable, but it's expensive right now. But as the costs come down, 

Nate McBride: oh yeah. Remember we're in fantasy land right now.

So in fantasy land, there's no, there's no money. It's just ponies and bubble gum. 

Mike Crispin: But the existing tools today, you could, you could probably get some of the way there, but it'd still be, I think, detectable. 

Nate McBride: Well, the day when I do get there, if I go there, you could, you can see that becoming my identity, like my identity is me controlling this puppet.

Mike Crispin: Mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: Is marionette of the internet as identity. Yeah. That would be, that would be an acceptable identity. 

Mike Crispin: Basically, outsourcing yourself to yourself. 

Nate McBride: Whoa. 

Mike Crispin: You're outsourcing yourself to your twin. 

Nate McBride: Would I have to pay myself? 

Mike Crispin: No. 

Nate McBride: For outsourcing, would I become, 

Mike Crispin: I'd have to pay for the tokens, [01:32:00] right? 

Nate McBride: Would I become a, what would you call that?

Would it be a virtual service provider? 

Mike Crispin: Digital twin man. 

Nate McBride: An a SP an asp. 

Mike Crispin: An well, an a SP 

Nate McBride: autonom service provider. Like an MSP, but, but better. 

Mike Crispin: A DDP.

Nate McBride: Digital. 

Mike Crispin: A digital digital provider. 

Nate McBride: Wow. 

Mike Crispin: Or Oh no. DT dp. No. 

Nate McBride: No. Can have, can't make it work. You need to have Nexus in there too. 

Mike Crispin: Nexus 

Nate McBride: of, um, nexus of digital service providers, N ds p ndsp.com. I'm registering right now. 

Mike Crispin: Get 

Nate McBride: that 

Mike Crispin: thing going. Get that going. 

Nate McBride: Okay, so I'm [01:33:00] gonna hit the pause button for one second and say that you mentioned verification economy before, so I was looking up that coming episodes.

Definitely. We're gonna call back to identity in that episode. I 

Mike Crispin: think 

Nate McBride: we're gonna talk about open ai, the garden wall episode. Oh yeah. Yep. Later down the road. That will come back to identity because essentially, I mean, I think that's more of like an, just an ecosystems in general. What's your identity? Uh, doing, um, the alternate identity?

Oh, the alternate inter alternate internet identity episodes 22 and 23. So the alt internet, uh, I'm not talking about Web3 or web four, we're talking about something entirely different. Or maybe it's kind of like Web3 and a half maybe. And then, um, we'll get to the viewer editor paradox again, I don't think we've done that enough.

Justice. And then lastly will be com compliance identity. So we're gonna hit this from multiple angles over the season. And of course we're gonna come to the end of the season with the death of [01:34:00] the password. And, um, maybe by then we'll have figured out after 39 episodes, how the fuck we should identify somebody.

And how is Mike? Mike? Like, why is Mike, Mike and why does Mike get to see this thing? Uh, and the, the i the IT autonomy paradox book, and in the last season's, uh, podcast we talked about, Mike gets access to this thing based on a number of factors. Mike gets accessed because the help desk looks at Mike and says, oh, he is a VP of it, so he must need access to the IT folder.

By default, he's a vp, so he must get VP access by default, but no one ever. Checks to see if that's what he needs. So he just gets all this shit by default. But then Mike's sitting there saying, well, why don't I also have access to that folder? 

Mike Crispin: I think the, the, the even bigger, the, maybe even a bigger issue to, to what you're talking about is not only does the IT department, our IT department not know what he needs.

Nobody knows what he needs. 

Nate McBride: Nobody knows what he needs. So [01:35:00] what, so what does Mike do? Mike gets, Mike gets the basics, you know, employee resources, IT department, but then Mike's like, well, I need to know what's going on in, in the widget project. So someone's like, okay, I'll add you. So now Mike's in the fucking widget project.

And then Mike's like, Mike's like, I need all the historical data on the widget project. So then somebody else is like, oh, I'll, I'll share it with you. No one's got any idea that Mike should never see the widget project. 'cause it's all about the elimination of Digital Forces and Mike's department. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah.

But if, yeah, if nobody knows that, that's where the Digital forces elimination document lives, then I guess that's, 

Nate McBride: it's not a document, like it's digital. 

Mike Crispin: That's a digital document though, right? With the plan of how to eliminate the digital forces? 

Nate McBride: No, it's just digital dude. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, okay. So it's like an Asana like work list or something linked?

Nate McBride: No, it's just digital. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, just digital. It's ones and zeros, man. 

Nate McBride: Purely, purely, purely [01:36:00] binary. It's, it's digital. We wouldn't put on a on document, someone could print it.

Mike Crispin: Oh my God. 

Nate McBride: Oh, so Mike gets access to all this shit and all he had to do was just walk around and ask people for it. So therefore, it, it's kind of like, um, up upends our entire argument because Mike just started. No one knows Mike except for maybe like the people who hired him. But Mike's walking around asking for shit.

And just by virtue of him being a physical breathing human, you know, he's taking in nitrogen in the air and converting it into other gases. He's being given access to things. 'cause he looks like a nice guy. That's Mike's identity, not his name, not his, what he says or writes, but his existence is his identity.

Oh yeah. Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Oh my goodness. 

Nate McBride: I know. So the [01:37:00] real answer then, Mike, is if we just eliminate you 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: We don't have to worry about securing data from you or providing you access to things, 

Mike Crispin: right. Just then there's no issue, right? There's no one to identify. 

Nate McBride: Right. I guess maybe that's the point. Like when someone comes and starts at a company, if you just get rid of them, then you don't really have a problem.

Mike Crispin: You don't have to identify and identify anyone. 

Nate McBride: Nope. Maybe, maybe we're onto something here. I have to, I'm gonna do some research on this one. Um, go a little deeper. I have an interesting question for you, by the way. 

Mike Crispin: Okay. 

Nate McBride: All this talk about getting rid of you 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Reminds me of a, know what I wrote earlier, which is, you know, all these companies that are like firing tons of people 'cause of ai, they think it's gonna help them.

The real, the real [01:38:00] problem I think isn't gonna come from the day that they realize they shouldn't have done that and then tries to hire them back. The real problem I think is going gonna be when these companies are like, well, uh, we, the AI thing blew up on us. Nah, we shouldn't have done that. They look around and they realize we are right sized.

That's, we never knew of those 10,000 people to begin with. 

Mike Crispin: That's what I was just about to say. 

Nate McBride: That's when all of a sudden we have a big fucker problem because they're looking around like, we can get rid of 15,000 people. And everyone's like, oh my God, the market's going crazy, whatever. But I think some of these companies might turn around at the after the bubble and say, actually we're, we're at the right size.

We're good. 

Mike Crispin: I, I think that is some of what Amazon just did. You've got some context to Andrew, Andrew, uh, Andy Jassy and sit down round table or conversation, some conference said something about AI replacing jobs and then they, you know, they let go of all those people and largely it was a restructuring.

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: [01:39:00] And kind of used ai, like they, they timed it so that people might think it was AI when it was really an organizational restructuring. 

Nate McBride: I think it's how you announce it if you're like, yeah, through ai we're able to eliminate jobs that's idiotic. If you're able to, if you're just coming forward and saying, we're having a riff to actually like save money, well that's a different approach.

But anyway, all those identities that are now lost and floating around in the ocean, uh, they will all find port, I'm sure and be an identity somewhere else. Again, we haven't forgotten about all you identities out there. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Um, 

Mike Crispin: there's so many, so it's, to me, that's the next big It is. It is, it is a problem in so many different, not just an ai, but in, from a data perspective, from a truth perspective, from a verification and data integrity perspective.

It's, it's [01:40:00] a challenge we have across the board in this new world we're in, or not even new world, but just an evolving world of new technologies and, uh, that are gonna make it much harder to figure out where information's coming from as if it wasn't already hard enough. It's just getting worse and worse.

Nate McBride: Well, um, I think that there's. I think there's a way to put this into context of any big major change we, we've had in our careers, offshoring and then onshoring, and then outsourcing and then insourcing. Mm-hmm. And then this and then that, and then COVID and then hybrid and then, um, 

Mike Crispin: just a, it's a pendulum or a circle, right?

Like it's, 

Nate McBride: yeah. I try not to put this one, obviously this one's a little bit bigger, but I try not to put this into too big, too broad of a context. It's moving markets, of course. You know, [01:41:00] it's making a global made up war on progress and all this other shit. People are getting absolutely fabulously wealthy, rich off of it.

But, um, when it does settle and we all go back to doing work normally, or however, normal is again, at the next evolution, we still have all the same problems. We honestly, as, as many steps forward as we take, 

Mike Crispin: mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: We'll still have people that don't need editor rights. We'll still have people that, um, don't know how to log into things.

We'll still have people that just do all kinds of terribly stupid shit all the time forever. And you can ai the crap outta things, but until you get rid of everybody or you rationalize that, you can in no way influence human behavior. At least on, at least on an intergenerational scale, it has to be a, [01:42:00] a full series of generations, like four or five 

Mike Crispin: Yep.

Nate McBride: To change cultural norms. You're just gonna have to deal with the fact that we can do all the things we want to do. Fucking ai, the hell outta everything. We're still gonna have the same problems, which I find to be absolutely glorious that it will solve almost none of the problems we have. 

Mike Crispin: Hopefully there'll be some progress in some areas.

There's so much going into this and so much effort that um, 

Nate McBride: but you put a keyboard in front of a human being with a screen ostensibly attached to it running, then it doesn't matter what you've built. A human being can do so many things at such and such a speed using so many tools at one time. They can memorize things up to eight digits, essentially nine that can do certain things [01:43:00] that they have been taught.

Rote skills. 

Mike Crispin: Mm-hmm. 

Nate McBride: It's like the majority of human beings on the, on the planet. It doesn't matter what you do in technology. They can't buy faster, they can't buy more. Everyone's got limits. Yeah. So all these limits are sort of, everyone's pretending that these limits don't exist anymore. That Yeah. You go ahead and lay out 15,000 people.

Well, you just lost 15,000 customers. Like you, you. Or that can no longer afford your product or wouldn't wanna buy your product. So now there's like, I'm not an economist, I was a Latin and Greek major, but I understand a little bit about economy, economies of scale. If I have a hundred things, I need a hundred people to buy 'em.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Um, 

Mike Crispin: I, I agree. I do agree. The more that this, this goes on, the more that Yeah, there's I the philosophical discussion of like, how do we, in a, in a perfect world, do we get to the, does this actually [01:44:00] work and that these services actually help make our lives better, let's say in the rosy version of all this.

And then people can do whatever they want, focus on whatever they want, which is like this utopia lens. Or does it become a, a, you know, like you said, it's, it's all gonna make a few people a lot of money and everyone else is now gonna be a either a slave to the technology or the technology just doesn't work.

Right. And now we've crashed the economy. You know, it's, it's very much. I, I, you know, I hope that's not the case and that it's some, either somewhere in the middle or that, um, yeah, we can get to a point where some people do prosper. Uh, and you know, I do hope that there's an opportunity for more and more one or two person businesses to evolve thanks to some of the technology and, and tools that are emerging.

But I know, I know that's a very optimistic point of view, but I do [01:45:00] think that there will be some new discoveries and new technologies and new capabilities introduced to the economy by people who would never have had the opportunity to build those things or to bring those to market that they may now have.

Then again, hey, you've got these, the big seven, the big nine, whatever you want, however, number there are now that just could copy it and swallow you whole, and you can't, and anything you create is, is copyable and breakable and all the work you've put into it. Okay. 

Nate McBride: Well, so let, let, let me finish up with some final question then the final question, not the final, but I have to say one more, but sort of the final question on the topic is, with all that being said, do you foresee a way that identity will ever be able to be completely managed by ai or will identity still face the same problems by virtue of the fact that you need a physical human being in the room to do the thing?

Mike Crispin: I think once we lose control of our identity, then we've, we've moved down the, uh, the hierarchy of [01:46:00] control of the planet. 

Nate McBride: Lose control of our identity. That's, that's sort of an existential level. We'll control 

Mike Crispin: our identity. And we are now second class being on the planet. 

Nate McBride: So maybe, 

Mike Crispin: yeah, 

Nate McBride: so you can foresee a future maybe where we, where we lose our identity.

We're gonna come back to that then, because that's a very big existential threat you just mentioned. 

Mike Crispin: That's 

Nate McBride: the moral model, 

Mike Crispin: right? 

Nate McBride: A model. I see Cedar talks about that. So if you ever follow Cedar's, uh, monthly bulletins, they've run war gaming on the loss of identity. Uh, it's pretty terrifying. It is. But, but do you see, like, so outside of the existential threat level, do you foresee a capability or technology where Mike's identity can be replaced by AI entirely?

Mike Crispin: Not today, but 10 years from now, maybe 15 years from now. Very possible. 

Nate McBride: Is digital identity or is identity? Identity? 

Mike Crispin: Uh, i, I, identity, identity. If it's, there's a way to put, put, [01:47:00] if let's, and, and we're going super sci-fi here, but let's, let's say that robotics becomes a huge thing, uh, and, and, and they're life like Android's being created right now at all the trade shows and all that stuff.

And there's a lot of AI generated crap that's out there that looks real, but isn't, but they're working on these, these bots, you know, that exist to be companions or whatever else, right? I mean, if, if you can take. Everything, uh, your, your, your brain or even just your, your selection of works, that's enough to build a persona around who you are.

If more people meet the robot than they meet you, then uh, you've been able to put one identity, I think, more observable than your own. And now yeah, it's taking your identity. And maybe that's by design. Yeah. Maybe you wanna disappear, you know. But I, I think I, what I mean by being outta [01:48:00] control is if what we just talked about, your identity being taken and taken over without your acknowledgement or without your permission.

Yeah. That's when it's over and we become a, you know, a subservient class to, to the ais or whatever. Some people think that will be utopia. That, hey, now, now we can go paint and we can hang glide every day and we can do whatever we wanna do. And the robots take care of everything. But it's a total loss of autonomy from a reward and accomplishment and, you know, desire, perspective.

Now it's refocusing your, what makes you happy? 

Nate McBride: I just want my, I want my meat shakes and sit in a chair all day. 

Mike Crispin: I just want meat. I want butter steaks, man. 

Nate McBride: Butter steaks, man. 

Mike Crispin: That's what I'm looking for. Uh, 

Nate McBride: so 

Mike Crispin: as long as it's still beer and, you know. It 

Nate McBride: would just be in the meats shake. You put everything, the meats shake would have all the things you wanted.

Mike Crispin: [01:49:00] I, I think another area, and we're not gonna, we should not, and we probably should not talk about this, you know, and go down it, do a topic on this, but there's the whole, the industry we're in, right? And we're in an industry of, uh, pharmaceuticals and there's a whole bunch of mechanical type work potentially that could views with, with AI in terms of identification.

Um, when it comes to human 

Nate McBride: lives, I, I think that's 

Mike Crispin: always at a cell level. At a cell level, 

Nate McBride: sure. At cell level. But I think when it comes to human lives and the treatment of human beings, there's gonna be an ethical line. We're probably too afraid to cross. We'll get pretty close to it, I think, but I'm not a hundred percent sure you will find it.

Um, at least not in our lifetime anyway, maybe somewhere down the road. But we'll, we'll evolve to a point where we're letting a hundred percent of what we do health-wise be treated by start to finish a non-human [01:50:00] process. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: I think that we're, we, we have, we have to evolve past a very, very specific point in time where we've already, we've already completely lost our identity and autonomy to go so far as to accept healthcare and to, you know, start to start to finish from a completely com inco program.

Hey, um, 

Mike Crispin: start writing some scripts, man. Let's start writing some movie scripts. 

Nate McBride: Dude, there won't be, there won't be movies next year. Um, it'll all, it'll all be like eight second TikTok videos mashed together to show storm chasers. Um, dumb asses like me will watch it, so I, I, I, so, so, alright, well, we're lots to come back to on identity this season.

Stay tuned. I'm gonna finish up with, I have a couple just, uh, other questions for Mike. First of all, you know, this big cheating scandal in baseball with the, the pitches with the guys. [01:51:00] So it got me thinking like, well first of all, it's one of the dumbest sports ever. Sorry if you're a baseball fan, but come on, let's, let's just call it out what it is.

Uh, most, most professional sports are just dumb at this point, especially with all the betting that's going on. 'cause you know, everyone's fucking betting on everything at this point. What if, what if we didn't have baseball anymore and instead we just had virtual baseball games So the whole thing would be virtually generated.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: Uh, you didn't know what the outcome was. 'cause no one could know the ai. It could be 155 innings because the AI is just like, Nope, you're gonna keep going. It's zero zero. And then it just has like a, imagine how fucking cool that would be if we no longer had actual baseball, but we had virtual baseball games.

Mike Crispin: Why 

Nate McBride: can't you just be anywhere from, it could be like one inning or. You didn't know what was gonna happen and then you'd bet on those games, everyone could bet. Yeah. Um, not even the designers would know what was gonna happen. 'cause they would feed into parameters like 67 degrees. [01:52:00] Uh, no, no dome. Uh, it's the, you know, the, the, the Twinkies versus the dildos or whatever.

And they, here here's, it's like, it is like, it's like M-L-B-M-L-B baseball and the Nin 10 Nintendo. 

Mike Crispin: And then we could bet on it on Poly market. We could put the games up on poly market and, and bet away, 

Nate McBride: oh my God. Just how fun would it be? Of course it would eliminate a part of the economy that no one really cares about or helps the economy in general.

Um, but every one of us could watch these games. It'd be so, I'm telling you, it'd be so fun. 

Mike Crispin: Have you heard of, uh, Twitch TV before? 

Nate McBride: I have Mike many times, but I want, I wanna see a, I wanna see a full baseball game. Like, almost like watching Madden, like watching my son play Madden on Yeah. On uh, steam. Well, let just don't have him play it.

Just have steam run games. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: That are completely AI controlled though. So they're not following any [01:53:00] rule. I mean, there, there's a basic set of rules, right? They just play. 

Mike Crispin: I don't think it's too far out in the future. I think baseball still exists, but I think betting on 

Nate McBride: between, no. Eliminate baseball.

Eliminate eliminate the sports. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, come on. National pastime, man. 

Nate McBride: It's not a national pastime. The last time when I went to a Red Sox game not too long ago, that a single person at the game was watching the game, everyone was getting shit faced on fireballs and beer, talking to each other, social media, getting the hell outta themselves.

Not a person anywhere. I was, I was watching the fucking game. 

Mike Crispin: Oh man. 

Nate McBride: Including myself. Um, all right. So I, that was one question I was curious about. I mean, it would be cool, 

Mike Crispin: right, though I like baseball, but I don't watch it all the time. But I think that, that, uh, I don't think you're too far off in terms of there being digital games now.

I, I think what you're trying to say a little bit is those games could probably be even more easily manipulated than the real thing. And why not just no, no, 

Nate McBride: top loaded, real games can be manipulated. [01:54:00] Now they've figured out, you know, they're putting all these rules in across the country about parlay bets on these small things, but every single element of the game can be manipulated.

I've long since held the belief that most of the world's series are already pre-programmed. That the whole season's designed is one long script, and everyone's gotta follow it. Everyone's in on the scam, like the 

Mike Crispin: wwe. Oh, you 

Nate McBride: know, just like the wwe like at the, at the beginning of the season, everyone gets their scripts and everyone's like, oh man, I gotta lose the again.

This year the guy's like, oh man, I get to win. This is cool. But everyone's gotta say and do all the shit they have to do. It's all already pre-ordained. But now with the basketball things coming out and the baseball, you just know. Everyone is fucking gambling because everyone is, and they're so rich. They can, they can get away with it mostly.

But yeah, just get rid of all the sports and just have virtual sports. It'd be way more fun. I'd watch that like squid game, but, but way more fun. Um, the other question I have for you is 

Mike Crispin: you start the business man, do it up [01:55:00] bet on Twitch games. 

Nate McBride: It might, it might look a little pixelated when we started. We have to like go back old school.

But if we just had like literally a Nintendo and we had major league baseball and we managed to get the source code and we were able to have AI just automatically generate a game. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: With some basic rules. Like it's gotta be three outs, three strikes, four balls, you know, per inning. But here's the, you know, just basic rules and then let it just play.

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: That'd be fun to watch 

Mike Crispin: RBI baseball do it up Tech mobile, 

Nate McBride: RBI baseball tech mobile. 

Mike Crispin: That's the way to do it. 

Nate McBride: Yes. I think you had to have, as long as you had Barry Sanders and techno Tema Bowl, you couldn't be beat. 

Mike Crispin: They have retro, retro bowl on the, uh, phones now. It's like a throwback. It's awesome. You can play it on the phone.

Nate McBride: I only play Orna on my phone. 

Mike Crispin: I know you're an Orna or Orna all day. All night. All night. 

Nate McBride: You 

Mike Crispin: would like all night. You would like vampire survivors. [01:56:00] You would like that. You should try that one out too. 

Nate McBride: Is it like Orna? 

Mike Crispin: It's like, um, it's like gauntlet. Remember gauntlet? 

Nate McBride: Yeah. I don't wanna press a lot of buttons.

I just wanna like, drive around in my car and dominate people. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, all. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. I'm not surprised 

Mike Crispin: by that. 

Nate McBride: My commute, my commute in the last year has become awesome. I no longer care what time of day I'm in the car. 'cause if I'm sitting in traffic at one 17 per an hour, I am just taking that guy's kingdom and that guy's kingdom.

I'm killing everybody on the whole way. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. 

Nate McBride: And they get me on Discord. They're like, what the fuck's your problem? Why you guys keep doing that to me? Every day? I'm like, dude, you're on my commute route. Sorry. Sucks to suck 

Mike Crispin: these poor people. 

Nate McBride: Um, you're 

Mike Crispin: ing them. 

Nate McBride: I'm the high, I'm so high. I'm the highest level, but I'm, I've gone beyond that on essential levels.

I'm just like, pretty, pretty. You know what, I'm 52-year-old. I feel like I am good at something finally. [01:57:00] Um, Orna, Orna, 

Mike Crispin: I like Orna. Still don't know what the hell I'm doing, but I'm working on it. You 

Nate McBride: don't know what you're doing until you get to level 10 and then it start, you start to figure it out. Um, the other question I have for you was, have you seen the LinkedIn Daily games?

Mike Crispin: No, I haven't. I have not seen them. 

Nate McBride: If you go on LinkedIn, on the right side of your LinkedIn screen, there'll be games and there's, there's, there's scorecards and like leaderboards, right? You can go look up your employees. I 

Mike Crispin: haven't been on LinkedIn in a while. 

Nate McBride: Okay. You can look at your, look at people that you know, and it's a good way to find out who's not doing work during the day.

Not that you care, but people are play, like lots of people are playing these, and it's your identity. Wow. It cracks me up that you look at these leaderboards, the people that are playing their CEOs, CFOs, that are playing fucking stupid [01:58:00] word games on LinkedIn. Wow. I wonder if they know that Everyone in the world can see that they're doing it.

Mike Crispin: I don't know. I haven't even looked at it. I didn't even notice them until you just mentioned it. Now I gotta, yeah. Today's puzzles. 

Nate McBride: Yep. Oh, no, I, I think, I think I've done you some wrong by telling you this. 

Mike Crispin: No, no. I, I, I, this will be one more reason why I can stay. 

Nate McBride: You know what we should do though? 

Mike Crispin: Yeah.

Nate McBride: This would be funny. I thought about this today. Like, what if we just get on there? We dominated every single puzzle every single day. 

Mike Crispin: Oh gosh. 

Nate McBride: Just talk super shit about it.

Just troll people or like, get the answer and tell everybody what the answer is on our LinkedIn feed. The wordle of the day is 

Mike Crispin: ponies. My goodness. 

Nate McBride: No ponies is six letters. 

Mike Crispin: Oh. 

Nate McBride: All right. So next week, next week, we, uh, we visit an old friend, distributed versus centralized it. I'm sure this will be not controversial at [01:59:00] all.

Mike Crispin: Not at all. No. No one, no one will, uh, disagree with us on this one. 

Nate McBride: Maybe, we'll, maybe we'll get a guest on. 

Mike Crispin: Oh boy. 

Nate McBride: Maybe we can call up a friend for this one. 'cause you know, everyone's got no opinions on this. Um, so that's next week. And then we have Thanksgiving. We will not be, we will not be podcasting that week unless we wanna do it Tuesday night.

Mike Crispin: No, I won't be. We'll have to skip that week. 

Nate McBride: We'll skip that week. We get a week off, then we come back from Thanksgiving. We get the verification economy, baby. We're gonna rip. That'll be awesome. On a new, a new one. 

Mike Crispin: Yes. So much to talk about there. 

Nate McBride: Oh my god. You know what, it's all, it's all about crypto. The answer to everything right now is, should be crypto.

I used to say it should be process improvement, but now I'm saying it's just crypto. 

Mike Crispin: [02:00:00] Crypto. 

Nate McBride: Yep. Um, 

Mike Crispin: rock and roll. 

Nate McBride: Well, 

Mike Crispin: great time. Great, great discussion. We took, covered a 

Nate McBride: lot of Yeah. Identity man is what it is, right? Or it is what it isn't. I mean, who knows? One or the other. 

Mike Crispin: No, it's all good. It's all good.

Nate McBride: I don't know. So, as we always do on the Calculus of IT podcast, which you can, by the way, access to the, the co it.us. You can find all our episodes, you can find the links to all of our merchandise and the buy of beer. Um, go right 

Mike Crispin: to it. 

Nate McBride: All the stuff is there and the links of all of our podcasts, wherever you listen to it, give us all the stars.

Mike Crispin: Go for it. 

Nate McBride: Uh, why, why wouldn't you? I never understood why anybody would not give us all the stars. Someone actually gave us like four out of five stars. That's ludicrous. Just give us five stars. Um, 

Mike Crispin: why not? 

Nate McBride: Probably with my wife. And, um, [02:01:00] don't be mean to old people or it people or anybody. Just be nice.

Hold the door open for people at Dunking Donuts. What else? Have your pet Spader neutered.

Mike Crispin: Is that just 'cause you like Bob Barker? 

Nate McBride: No, because we have a significant pet problem in this country. 

Mike Crispin: True, that's true. 

Nate McBride: But also Bob Barker. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: You know, uh, gotta keep the legacy alive. 

Mike Crispin: Yep. Yep. 

Nate McBride: I could be him someday. Spinning a big wheel 

Mike Crispin: with a long microphone. 

Nate McBride: Oh my God, I love that. With a 

Mike Crispin: small, with a small.

Nate McBride: The only guy in the, the only mc on any game show ever. And actually no. Chuck, uh, wink. Dale Martindale. Wink Martindale. Wink Martindale on, uh, what was the one? [02:02:00] Tic-Tac Dough. Wink of Martindale on Tic-Tac Dough. Had a long microphone.

Anyway, be nice to everybody. It pays off. Everyone gets nicer, and then all of a sudden, everyone's just nice. We will see you next week. Mike, anything else? 

Mike Crispin: No, that is all for tonight. Thanks everyone. Thanks for, uh, listening or watching. 

Nate McBride: And if you wait around for like five seconds, the theme music will come back.

Mike Crispin: Oh boy. Uh oh. 

Nate McBride: Did you listen to it last week? 

Mike Crispin: I, I didn't. I didn't. Was it at the end? 

Nate McBride: I put it and, and kind of towards the, towards the beginning. And again at the end. 

Mike Crispin: I saw it at the end. 

Nate McBride: So now we're just gonna fade out because the music, it's coming.

Cheers. 

Mike Crispin: Cheers, man. Have a good night.[02:03:00] 

Trance Bot: The calculus of it,

season three,

verifying this identity.

Sometimes you just have to take it.

Sometimes you just have to take it.

It's season three divided autonomy,

verifying identity,

the calculus of [02:04:00] it.