You're listening to the identity of the center podcast, this is
the show that talks about identity and access management
and making sure you know who has access to what let's get
started. Welcome to the identity of the
center podcast I'm Jeff. And that's Jim.
Hey Jim hey Jeff, how are you? Oh, not so bad yourself.
I'm doing great. We are broadcasting from the
podcast room or podcast Nook. Here at the authenticate, 2022
conference, gotta send a shout-out to and Russia are for
giving us this room and giving us the special attention.
I think we're the only podcast who are podcasting from the
conference and been a fantastic conference so far.
Yeah. Very much appreciated for sure.
I unfortunately, missed most of the first day dealing with
absolutely horrible allergies, but I am returned mostly been
ban back to the land of the living.
So but definitely appreciate Andrew and the team here.
Adrian for for hooking, us up, it's very cool.
You didn't realize how lucky you were to live.
Was somewhere that had very few trees.
Now, you live somewhere that surrounded by trees and you went
to visit somewhere we're just as many trees.
So yeah. I think that's probably what's
what's causing you You problems and I'm sure like six or seven
errors and a high-pressure environment flying over the u.s.
you know, from east coast to West Coast.
I'm sure that didn't, you know, heard it all for sure.
Yeah but this conference has been great sat through
basically. I think what was the business
track yesterday? Heard several stories from like
Salesforce USA, a city on them rolling out fine to
authentication to their customer bases and just Kind of the
Lessons Learned super valuable feedback because hopefully the
folks who are practitioners here at the conference can avoid some
of those mistakes, right? But I think the takeaway that I
had was just the level at which Fido authentication is being
rolled out on the customer level you know over the past year or
two like how many real implementations of taking place
and You know how many organizations are pushing for
like 100% adoption of Fido authentication, you know,
hundreds of thousands millions of users.
It's real. It's very frightening to think
that everyone's been talking about for like years it seems
like it's taken to get here is we're here now they're only
there isn't any excuses as to why people can't start to go
down this path of password lists and things like web often,
obviously getting all the big vendors and like Google
Microsoft. Apple cetera, right?
All the browsers on board was a huge moment earlier this year.
And we talked with Andrew about that, I think, you know, several
months back about it. But it's here.
Like there is literally no more excuses other than budget
funding, right? The will to do it like those
sorts of things. You know, one of the things that
I also saw in the presentations yesterday was that there's kind
of like a vulnerability or at least a willingness to not try
to say, Like hey, we did everything in a went perfectly
and we didn't run into any issues.
It's kind of like here are the issues that we ran into and the
things that you should look to avoid.
And here's how we found to solve those issues.
So it was like a lot of reality involved.
I mean, you know, even though the technology is fantastic,
that doesn't mean that, you know, the rollouts are going to
be without you. No bumps in the road.
Yeah, nothing's perfect. But I think if you're willing to
get smarter and learn the lessons of Past.
That's why a conference like, this is so great, I think,
because we're hearing a lot of case studies, a lot of people in
the real world doing this and getting it rolled out.
And I think that's where I think a lot of values that is you're
not just, you know, talking to like a marketing person or
vendor. Here's how we do it.
You're hearing from except people in the real world
practitioners who are rolling the stuff out and they are been
they've been very cool about explaining how they did it.
What were some of the wrinkles that they faced, you know, how
they got past may be certain In issues, things like that.
So definitely kudos to sort of the content team putting this
together because it's been very valuable valuable.
So far, I'm really looking forward to is session.
That is going to take place tomorrow with our, Our Guest
right now from CVS l. So why don't you introduce them?
Yeah, his name is John Porter, he's the lead director for CVS
Health. Welcome to the show.
Thanks Guy. Thanks for thanks very much for
having me. Yeah, thanks for taking the time
and you're given a talk tomorrow.
We're going to talk about that in a But we have tradition, come
on the show. First time is like to find out
more about the background, the identity origin story.
So to speak of the folks who join us.
I guess for folks who aren't familiar with John employer.
You know, how did you get into the identity space?
Is this something that you chose, or did it choose you?
I'm gonna have to say that identity absolutely chose me.
I was actually in the telephony space for a long time doing
voice recording and things like that on the in the contact
center. And at one point, Point RC so
came to the telephony organization looking for
somebody. I wound up being that person and
and went over into the security side.
If you will bringing telephony knowledge into the security
Arena, that's pretty unique because you don't normally see,
I think at least that that telephony side of things, right?
It's been there for so long. It's like, okay, well, how are
we going to leverage? You know, the skill sets and the
knowledge we've gained through the telephony side into
information security, it seems like a natural fit about - I
don't see Happen as often these days, which is very cool.
So I guess what were some of the original sort of issues that you
were, you know, tackling from a, from an info sector identity
standpoint. It's really all about this
conference, right? It's the identity and the
authentication piece. I think your guests last a
couple of podcasts ago. I was talking about is like, we
draw the line at authorization, right?
So we've always had that line that we're on the left side of
that line, we're going to do the identity, and then we're going
to do the Authentication. And and then we throw it over to
the app to do the authorization. So that's where our teams at our
Mantra is to kill the password. But Ironically in a call center
setting, you've never had a password on the phone and so
those are some of the challenges that we look to to solve is the
you don't have the traditional identity Solutions.
When you're on a phone, there is a talk that you're giving
tomorrow. I believe that Jim referenced
the forgotten, how we all started with the Are then forgot
to secure it properly. I guess.
Can you give us a preview for the folks that are, you know, I
don't want you to, I don't want you to like, give it away now
because my plan is to get this edited and ready for tomorrow
morning. But you know, what is a preview
of that folks can expect on that?
Absolutely, one of the things is the As we're at this conference,
we're listening to all the different solutions that are out
there and we're talking about web and mobile and in-person
interactions with your identity. You don't, you don't have those
capabilities on the phone. So you have to come up with
different ways to identify somebody on the phone, you have
to actually come up with a different way to authenticate
them and and how do you do that in a secure method?
It's so here, I don't know that I'm teaching per se, but just
kind of enlightening and bring Something to the Forefront that
maybe people just fight all-conference, haven't thought
about where so ingrained and oh we're going to use our thumb
print. Okay, great what, but how do I
get a thumb print on a phone call?
That's it's not easy. And so we have to really think
about it and even, even some of the other Biometrics that we
would, I mean obviously voice would be something that you
would, you would go to, but that's not going to be
foolproof. And so it's funny to listen to
All of the conversations here, all of the solutions when
Everything goes awry is its they're going to wind up calling
back into the contact center and it's so we've forgotten the
contact center and it's not as secure as it should be.
Social engineering is it's everywhere and we really need to
tighten up the contact center because as we tighten up, the
other areas contact centers were the hackers and the social
Engineers are going to head to Jim.
I know you and I have a special place in our hearts and learn
our day jobs where this is an area that we see.
A lot of organizations struggle with is, how do you validate
people calling into context on our help desk, whatever that
that real human being is to validate their identity.
I know this is a challenge a little that a lot of
organizations that face, but what are your thoughts on it?
Yeah, I've got to think that just like on the web, there are
there's context to somebody calling in the calling in, from
a certain number. Maybe they're calling in at a,
at a time that, you know, is normal for when they were
calling or Not normal and then there's the voice unique
fingerprint. I think there's a couple things
that are right. One is you know, my
understanding of the voice fingerprint is, you know, it's
going to be a Big Blob of data. So you can't just generally say,
hey, I'm going to search my database, based on your voice
and find you. You have to kind of like use the
The Voice print almost like a password, but I wanted to kind
of Bounce some of that back to On to talk to us, a little bit
about how ivr might work as an authentication tool.
Alright? So in the cost center, right?
That's the first place that most people get to talk to write
your, you get to get to the ivr and traditionally those
self-service options have been very limited because compliance
or maybe, security, or even legal won't let you do certain
things in the in the ivr. Because You haven't
authenticated that person or I would say the opposite as well.
Like they think they've done a great job authenticating just
because they've got three something you knows and if I
take the five something you know is now I'm more secure because I
know my mother's maiden name. I know the first car that I
drove and I know the color, you know, whatever, whatever those
things are you know, your your favorite food.
Oh, by the way, the hint is it's a triangle, it's all something
you know. So it's Not really satisfying,
all three pillars of authentication and and it's
funny that I know my team will laugh when they hear this.
But it's, it's my quote, it's something you have something,
you know, and something you are. And you have to satisfy all
three of those to get an authentication complete, and the
challenge in the phone spaces. Again, getting all three of
those. Yeah, I have experience of doing
this. And the one that comes to my
mind is my Bank has completely switched over if you call their
call center. Now they sit they make you say,
my voice is my password and I guess kind of what I assume is
happening is that they already know that.
You know, this person is coming in and claiming to be Jim
McDonald. Now we're going to check you
know quote-unquote the secret which is does that voice for an
actually match Jim McDonald, right?
I mean they're not just generally saying you know My
voice is my password. Now let's search are 10 million
customers to see who this is, right?
So that's the first thing you do on the way.
And the only thing you really have on the way into a phone
call is going to be your Annie your automatic number
identifies. Our AKA your caller ID so that
comes up and we're going to have to do our best job of what we
call a nanny look up. So I've got a customer database,
I'm going to go through the customer database, take a look
and say, oh, you know, who? I think this might be, this
might be gem on us. Cell phone.
So we give that a test and if you are using the voice
biometric, you would take that utterance.
We got to get you to talk and most people's experience in the
ivr is representative representative.
The ironic part of that is they're talking, those are
utterances, I can absolutely take a nanny.
Look up, take that representative and and try to do
a voice match. I might already have you
authenticated just because you're yelling at my ivr.
And we're going to go now, I'm going to open up all the
self-service options for you. Not just hey would you like us
to mail you an ID card? And you know, it's Karen calling
us again, right? Yeah, exactly carry.
Yeah. And then she can be
authenticated as well. And that's, that's, that's the
cool thing about the boys princes.
They are unique, but they are a key value pair, like you said,
so you have to do that identification piece up front
before, you can actually go ahead and utilize any
identifier. Whether it be password, whether
it be your one-time passcode, your your favorite pizza, or
your voice biometric? I don't know if you know the
answer to this but what happens when somebody has a cold, right?
And they just have that froggy voice and doesn't sound like
them. I mean you probably run into
scenarios like that, right? Does the ivr adjust for that or
do you have to have a plan B to authenticate the person?
Well, the the ivr is the device that is actually doing a lot of
the work. It's the technology behind I
know there's a few vendors out there that do a great job in
the, in the voice space. They'll tell you that they're
building the voiceprint based on a number of attributes that are
basically not going to change like your the length of your
nasal passage the the size. How open you open your mouth?
I think they're going. Transient characteristics.
Renzi was right. There you go.
All those transient characteristics.
Are that make up your voice print.
So even If you do have a cold those aren't going to change and
so the voiceprint stayed pretty consistent and we can
authenticate based on you know whether you have a cold or not
but your voice does age over time and there's a there's a
thought and we're not deep enough into this technology, but
we think we have to enhance those voice prints as they age.
Moving on, this ring is almost like training your training a
voice model, basically, right, correct.
So to get to the step of you know authentication you have to
have gone through an enrollment That's right to get people to do
that and it's funny. Jim you mentioned you don't you
know my voice is my password that must be like a stock thing
that like every voice recognition company uses because
I'm ever doing this in the mid-2000s was rolling out an ivr
for automated password resets and it was the same thing.
It was at someone. So my voice is my password and
that captured the you know, the voiceprint and it worked very
well and so forth, but the challenge was actually getting
people to enroll in this. I'm curious.
John if you've Tackled this, if you solve this somehow for
people, I will say that there's there's two two sides of the
street on that, right? So as far as the enrollment and
the consent, there's there's laws that the gramm-leach-bliley
ACT actually allows you to, I don't want to use the word
ignore but the state laws are limiting to certain and
financial institutions are certainly one of those that are
protected by What we call gleba. So you don't have to have the
consent but to have that consent model to have that trust which I
think is super important in a relationship with your
customers. You have that trust you, if you
establish that trust and you have a consent driven model
where they do actively enroll then then they know what they're
doing. They're actively putting
themselves in a situation where we're trying to protect.
I mean that's the reason we have passwords, that's the reason we
had we would go through all these steps the identity, the
Authentication is we want to protect which we're protecting
something whether it's legally that we have to through HIPAA or
PCI compliance or whatever the legal reason is or just the the
social reason or the fact that you do want to protect your
customers information. So yeah we have discussed that
quite a bit and you can go either way on it right at the
end of the day, we're trying to do the right thing, protect the
customers and Nation and then you kind of up into it though,
right? I think there's always the path
where, you know, where do you want it?
What level of support are you willing to sacrifice some level
of privacy to obtain? So if you want to take advantage
of the self-service on an ivr for example to be able to do
that, you need to provide your voice print.
If you want to log into your iPhone with just a fingerprint,
you are sacrificing your fingerprint in the name of
security and usability and Cetera, though.
Those sorts of things, I think that's probably where things
we're heading is. Okay, well, what is what level
of privacy or piece of data. Are you willing to maybe
sacrifices in the right word? But I'll allow another
organization. Whether it's your bank, or
health care, or college education, or even just your
employer to be able to leverage some of these other cat and Cat
buildings. That would imagine.
You have this ivr system in place, not everyone funnels
through that thing. There's always still some
percentage of the population. Elation that, for whatever
reason, doesn't go through that either it didn't work for them
or they refuse to sign up or they just don't trust it right
now. Whatever may be right and
they're like, you know, representative represent.
If they don't care, right? They just want to go right to a
human because they've had a poor experience, maybe before.
And now you're you're fighting not only, you know, this, this
experience that person might have had in the past.
But also how do you get them to take advantage of the newer
technologies that better? Maybe it is a better experience.
Since now compared to what they had before, you know, that could
be something to think about. Yeah.
Absolutely. And those you know we've always
had that IV our message, right? That and it's evolved over the
years. It started off as your call, may
be recorded for quality purposes and then it evolved into your
call, may be monitored and recorded and then all of a
sudden your call will be monitored and recorded.
And so it's been an evolution. And we've taken the next step
that your All will be monitored and recorded for quality and
security purposes. So we're we're we're taking the
right steps as far as our consumers are concerned.
But I'm going to say that the consumers aren't always the most
aware of what's going on in the industry.
And I think at this conference is an absolute eye-opening event
for what's actually happening in the, in the in the real world if
you will the SMS that. I mean, it's a you can't even
use SMS anymore as a man. Multi-factor authentication.
The, the in-app experience. You can't trust the consumer
because they're just pushing. Yes, that was me.
Yes, yes, yes. Make this little box go away.
So, MFA fatigue, I think is what you're talking about, if a
fatigue. Absolutely.
And that's been attributed to some of the the recent hacks
that some of the big ones that people are gaining access to
these systems because of MFA fatigue.
And the I'll just say that it's whether they're distracted or
whatever. The Whatever.
The reason of the excuses people saying, yeah go ahead and then
you've seen credentials, get synchronized because you're in a
certain browser and all of a sudden that synchronize you've
just given that person everything you need or you know
I'll throw a personal example and there just happened to me
last week and I have been a security professional out for a
while. I've been in the industry for
quite some time and and I've Got my different passwords, right?
We've all started with passwords like it was said that was 1961
passwords got invented so where I've grown up on passwords and I
have my different levels My Level 0 password is super simple
it's probably on. I've been have I been poned.
Yeah, it's absolutely up there. I've checked it but it's things
that I don't care about, it's those applications that I really
don't care about. So I put that out there and I
didn't think I cared about Form, but my Jersey Mike's account got
hacked last week. No, and I yelled at, my boys are
all, they're all home on the fall.
Break was just me. I was just making sure I got my
Philly cheesesteaks. So well, that the funny thing is
I said, well, who ordered, uh, order to Jersey Mike's on my
account, though. It wasn't me, it wasn't me.
I'm like, wait a minute, that's in Jacksonville, Florida for a
415 pick up, it was for 14 eastern time at the site called
the Jacksonville, Florida store. Lady picked right up.
She said oh okay yeah yeah. When he I'm going to take this
off the shelf right now, when they come in I'll I'll ask him
and then, can you give me a call back number?
So, I gave her my callback number and 15 minutes later, she
calls me back and says, yep. He came in, and I said, Hey,
listen, the account owner actually called us and said that
he didn't order this sandwich. And the guys, like it was for my
cousin. Hold on, just a second.
He walked. And ran out the door and out the
door and never came back. She said she goes, I'm 100%
certain that. Hacked your account used your
points and try to get that sub for free.
It's, you know, again, no, that's on me, that's on me with
my level 0 password, but then I turned it over to my team
internally, and within five minutes, my team had taken my
user name that I gave them and they had ran it through a few
tools, external, internal, whatever.
It might be. And I said, screen share with me
when you're done. It was five minutes later.
One of my teammates came back and said you got a minute.
I said sure. Shared a screen.
He goes, can you confirm any of these?
I said, yeah, you've got my level one password, for sure.
You've got my root of My Level 3 password.
Wow, that was quick. I'll bet all based off my email
and and know we're battling those things and so he could run
that through a tool. And he could see where that that
level 0 password was used all over the place.
I believe it was and that's ultimately the use case.
That that Fido is all about is Even somebody who has, you know,
experience and decent pastured, hygiene still, super
susceptible. Absolutely, you know, I think
one of the other themes that have come through in the
sessions, I sat there yesterday. Is that look, nobody comes to
your company for your whiz-bang authentication experience,
right? They come through for the
content to get something done. You want to manage your account,
or they want to do whatever you do.
And I talked about something else is like, so imagine you're
now calling into CVS to do something.
You get authenticated, you do it and now they want you to do a
survey, right? You're right.
And most people just hang up at that point, but you've been able
to do something that you're pretty proud of to increase the
survey rate. So you just tell us about that.
Share that little tidbit somebody out there might benefit
from it. Yeah, absolutely things.
And it's wreck when I started before.
I was in security. Actually, it was a solution that
we were. It's changing the mindset of the
the contact center representative, right?
You have all these rules that we've put in place to keep the
context under secure and keep it csat.
Score really nice and high. And we do all these things that
we think are the right thing. And I've seen, many, of example,
is sales where you have to go through your actual, you have
to, you have to use all these words or you're going to get in
trouble, you know, right? So one of the things in the
context Center was that the representative never hung up on
the consumer. So the person calling in had to
disconnect first or you got in trouble and When we
revolutionize that we said no, that's wrong, what we should be
doing is using return destination and it telephony
routing, right? And so when our agent hangs up,
we introduced, we ask them to introduce the the survey I
didn't need to ask you to beginning whether or not you
want to take a survey that made no sense whatsoever to us, you
don't know yet, you haven't had that experience.
I would, why would you, why would you render an opinion
before the experience, even And so, let me interject for a
second because I always, I've always been curious about this.
I've been through that experience, where it's like,
hey, would you be willing to take a survey after your
experience, right? And I was thinking I was like,
okay, well, if I say yes, does like the person know, and I'm
going to get better customer service because of that, I'm
going to say no to that have at least at least in the solutions
that I've implemented over the years.
No. But you know, it makes as much
sense to me is putting the the fork and the knife.
At the beginning of the buffet line, why do you want to carry
your fork and knife all the way through?
Buffett, you're not going to use it in the buffet line, right?
So you don't want to ask that question up front.
You want to ask it at the end but you don't even need to ask
it. You just present it.
So what we've done is we ask the agents.
Hey, introduced to serve a. Hey listen, thank you for your
call today. I'm going to I'm going to
disconnect and you're going to be sent on to a survey, feel
free to take the survey or not take that, you know, whatever,
whatever that introduction, winds up being but you'd be
absolutely surprised at the number of people that do take
the survey because they were Almost you're not surprising
them with it but you're presenting them with an
opportunity and it was, it was, it was, it is it far as I'm
concerned, change the game and we got a lot of surveys and we
got a lot of feedback as well. We allowed people to talk for 90
seconds after the survey was complete, and it was amazing to
us how, how much feedback we got.
And so we turned those speech to text and turn it into a word
cloud. And we can see these words pop
up and very, very, very, very Insightful.
And that you'd think that the people that do stay on the line
to give you the survey, we're going to adjust reme you and
give you negative feedback. It was overwhelmingly positive
and it was a it was very insightful, it's good.
Maybe it makes me not feel weird though.
When I always give the positive stuff at the end, like I had a
great experience yesterday with apple.
In order that I had placed, and I'm like, where's my thing?
And given the order numbers like, okay, great got it taken
care of and it was a great experience for a couple things.
One, they authenticated me through An MFA Channel.
We're all I had to do, was put Camille press confirm on my
iPhone and they knew immediately that was me which I thought.
Okay, that's really cool. Like I'm used to like okay, I
have to give you a code or answer a question, right?
Or some like that is like literally it was like I'm going
to send you a prompt. Just want to confirm that this
is, you know, Jeff pops up on my iPhone.
I hit confirm right. Great.
Thanks with move on and kind of thing and it was like, all
right. Well that's you know, here I am
at an authenticated kind of authentication conference and
that was like the best Remote Call Center contact center
authentication experience that I had experienced so far and it
was seamless. It just worked and I was happy
to provide the feedback afterwards, the hey, you know,
this couldn't have gone any better for me as I someone I
did. I already don't want to talk to
you but here we are and now the police are coming to make sure
that I didn't speak ill of apples or yet, you should be
good. John look to kind of shift, the
conversation to be kind of future facing.
And when we talked last time you made a statement, which I
thought was pretty interesting and you said voice is the way of
the future. I don't know if you remember
saying that but of you what were you thinking?
When you said that so we've done a great job on securing the
mobile in the web environment. Right.
And the more you secure that the harder it is to get through and
social engineering get get to that data.
Whatever that data winds up being the the pot of gold at the
end of the rainbow, right? The or using your face print
were using your your fingerprint, but your other bio
much as a few other Biometrics. But the next one I think is Line
to be very successful is your voice print.
If it can be implemented properly and in like we talked
earlier, you have to have that key value pair.
I have to know who you are, so that I can verify that voice and
we don't get the device information in a, in a
particular phone call, right? So when you call in, on your
phone, all I'm getting is your auntie, I don't get any of your
device characteristics, I don't know, really any, your could be
on a payphone. You could be in a work phone,
whatever. Most people are calling it on
their cell phones today. So, we have that.
The Voice pieces is the is the next thing that's going to be in
line for that authentication. So again away from face print
fingerprint and now I'm in a voice Channel.
These smart speakers that are coming on board today.
The iot, there's going to be, you have to do something.
If it's not a physical device that you can touch voice is
going to be the way you transmit that.
So you have to, again, we have to go back to that identity.
We have to be able to identify the person but then, I think you
said it best earlier, it's almost like your password, your
voice is your password and that you don't necessarily have to
say those words anymore. We it's almost a free open
speech that you just we analyze your voice would continually
analyze your voice to create that voice print.
And it's Unique. And and I think that's what
we're a thing that's really cool about that.
Just think about like, Fingerprints and face prints.
Usually, it's all kind of device Centric.
So you capture all that on your device?
Where's your voice is going back to some Central server.
So completely device agnostic, whether you're calling from a
pay phone, cell phone Hotel, phone, whatever.
That verification is happening independent of that device.
So it's definitely a different different, you know, Channel
over which Goes. And there was a great
conversation yesterday about web 3.0.
You know, a lot of people that know we were on web 3.0 yet, you
know, we've been through Web Web 2.0, which here's a website,
check it out. Oh, great, I can read anything.
I want on what, you know, check out my MySpace account, check
out whatever, right. And then we moved into the Web
2.0 with the social apps and the ability to interact.
And really that's when the data collection really started
happening, but we lost track of our identity.
We don't Own our identity, Facebook owns, my identity.
Google owns my identity, they own my identity and its really
taken out of my hands now and and they manage my identity.
Then they get breached in my identities out there.
That wasn't me, I didn't do that.
I didn't put my level zero password out there on purpose
that was in a data breach somewhere that somebody then
used some tools to start leveraging these data breaches
and she appoint web 3.0. I feel like voice is going to be
part of the 3.0 experience where we're going to come back, we're
going to own our identity. We're going to own that we're
going to have that digital wallet.
We're going to have that blockchain experience.
We're going to have the ability to really put the identity at
the Forefront and then put voice behind it to your point.
Does it have to be on a specific phone?
I can use my friend's phone now and and put in my Identity or
whatever. That identity piece becomes, the
voice becomes that password behind the scenes and I think
it's going to be powerful. Especially in the smart speaker
Arena and the, in the iot, my wife, and I take heavy advantage
of Google smart speakers around the house.
And it's amazing how, you know, accurate is and picking out
who's telling it to do what, and when it knows the difference
between Jeff, asking the turn the lights on in the office or,
you know, my wife saying, you know, set a timer for something
right. Whatever it might be.
I think it's interesting that they've been able to advance the
the Fidelity of being able to To make that determination on just
this cheap little device that just sits in the corner of the
room. It's always listening, which is
always a concern. But it's doing a good job.
And I think that goes back to what my previous statement
because you know, you're always sacrificing something in the
name of convenience or usability or whatever.
Maybe that's a choice that you know my wife and I have made
mostly for my wife to be honest and say, hey this is how we turn
on the lights right in this area, right?
Or, you know, I can walk into my office and morning and say, hey
so and so I won't I'll trigger it here but you know, turn on
the office and I have Smart lights to turn on.
I have a TV that turns on a monitor behind me and, you know,
stuff like that and it's, it's cool.
It feels a little bit like Star Trek or something, some degree,
but I think that's, that's where I totally believe in the power
of the voice. The one thing I don't want to
lose sight of the oars, for the people who can't take advantage
of that technology. There needs to be a alternative
that is, you know, just as good. So if you, for whatever reason,
can't speak, whatever it might be, you know, whatever the
situation might be. That there still needs to be a
path that we're not leaving people behind on that too.
Absolutely. And you make a great point that
trust, you've put your trust into sounds like Google.
And so you allowed those Google smart speakers to come in.
And now you're trusting them and it's it's difficult for us in a
in a heavily regulated environment.
We right hip. You've got PCI, you've got a lot
of different laws and regulations.
I don't know that we can necessarily Trust to that level
yet. We have to get there and there
has to be some efforts really from a lot of different
organizations and Leadership that allow us to use that
person's voice because I can't give you PCI Data.
Based on just the fact that it's your voice, I really have to
authenticate you and understand that it is you so that and you
are authorized at that point, right?
So again, identity authentication, and then
authorization, just because it's your wife on this.
Speaker, does she is she allowed to know a certain piece of
information, right? And we have a lot of that in the
health care Arena, where once a child turns 18, you know, you
were able to talk about them last week and this week.
So a lot of regulations that really drive.
A lot of these solutions that we have just had to be very careful
but they have that trust is I think trust is the key and and
voice is going to unlock a lot of that for us in the future.
I'm pretty sure we could pick John's brain for the next hour.
Or two. But at some point, we've got to
kind of shift into the. He probably wants to actually go
to the conference and actually, like, listen to the smart people
talk, so we should find let him go.
I don't know, I don't know. We're kind of fun, right, fun?
Yes, intelligent is totally separate discussion.
Let's talk a, let's start to wrap things up here though, but
we were talking before we hit the record button and you were
sharing some pictures of Robotics things that that you do
on the side, right? Can you tell us about sort of
this very A cool robot thing that you do.
I want to like, steal your thunder.
So that's like a no worries. I appreciate that.
So, but no one about six years now, it's a a, i coach at the
junior, high level Vex robotics. So, Vex is a worldwide program,
they change the game every year, and this year's games called
spin up. It's basically frisbee golf and
I go in on Tuesdays and Thursdays to the junior high
right by my house. And I, Teach kids the ways of
the engineer, if you will. So we've got an engineering
notebook that they're supposed to be documenting.
They build the robot, they program, the robot and robotc,
and then they also program the controller.
I mean, it's a Xbox controller, but it's it might as well be a
brick until you start program again.
So they get, they get to robots to do amazing things.
And it's just unbelievable to me, the seventh and eighth
graders. Once I get the parents out of
the way to allow the kids to just be themselves and that,
that I feel like, I'm just like, a, an old friend for them.
I go into that room and let them do their thing.
And it's amazing to me what these kids can do the parents,
every year, every year, the end of the year.
Wow, I didn't know they can do that.
And if you let the kids do what they just naturally do, it's
absolutely amazing. And I've got a very A very
successful program very proud of obviously and we've got a lot of
really good. Great kids in the area and went
to the I took three out of four of the teams in my program to
the World Championships last year.
And I know we're headed back there.
I tell them every year, I said we're going back to the World
Championships who's going with me.
So that's pretty cool. I hate is this I've always been
like a Lego person at heart and I feel like this is like the
next stage of that. How does how does someone get
involved without have a child? It sounds It might be expensive.
Do I get where do I get the parts?
Like what is the barrier for to get more people involved with
us? That's really insightful.
And it is expensive sport. It's actually recognized in the
state of Arizona. Now as a sport you can letter
and Robotics now but it is expensive and we the school
district has been very very helpful and really good at
finding us. They bought the robotics kits.
A few years ago we just enhance the Every year of X is a pretty
standardized program where the parts are the same every year.
So you have access to parts. And there's a lot Tronics that,
sometimes I'll change the electron, you might get a bumper
switch, or a limit switch or different things.
But we buy these, we buy these parts and year to year, they're
good. It's been pretty consistent with
that. Would take all the V5 over the
last few years, and we just enhance that every year, but we
charge just like you would a sport.
If you're going to go play football, you going to probably
pay 75 bucks. 80 bucks. 100 bucks to play football and
Eagles. Pay for baseball in the spring.
So same thing where we run it. Like a sport.
It's a club and then I work for sponsorship.
So we actually have sponsors at the school district level that
will contribute money and they'll help us from that
perspective. But to get involved, it's just a
club and it's word of mouth and it's actually, I called a geek
tryouts. The first time, I'd 47 kids, try
out and I had to actually pair it down.
And I didn't know what the perfect team size was when I got
started, but for seemed to be a real good team.
So we have about 16 kids, it's competitive.
You try to get into the club and so now I think we've generated
enough buzz and we've been to the World Championships.
Now, the last well, we've been eligible for the world champion.
Nobody got to go anywhere in 2020.
It was virtual in 2021. So this year was the first year
we've actually been able to physically, go to Dallas.
And yeah, we've got enough Buzz. Now that the kids are really
interested in it and Just it's a program that they want to be
part of. Wow, that's pretty cool.
So I don't want to like take up too much more time.
We got one more question about this is so you mentioned sort of
like the kits and this year I think you said the theme was
spin up is the idea that you've bet you have these kits and
every year there's different theme but it's for the most part
sort of taking what you've already got, maybe with a couple
of random new bits, you know, I keep going back to the Lego,
right? But I have like this.
I think of the my child. I have like this.
Giant gray like toolbox. Phil just a whole bunch of Lego
pieces in it and, you know, we would just come up with weird
random stuff off of that is this is the concept the same almost
exactly. With the exception of I don't
think you've probably ever cut a leg.
Oh no I got so we have a there's metal, there's aluminum, see
channels or different, different size pieces and and sometimes
they'll come in standard lengths, like a 15 or a 25 or 35
and 35 dots. All it is is 17 and a half
inches and your robot can only be 18 by 18, typically and can
expand some years there let you expand past that.
But no, you, you might need a 4, right?
And so you cut that. So that said by about the only
difference really is that it is a standard box of stuff and we
start from scratch. Every year, you put wheels and
you make a chassis and you build whatever that game is and this
year, we pick up discs and we throw them like a frisbee.
Interesting. And when it does, I wonder if
this feeds back into like some master, robot databases, if I
got we've tackled picking up this, what's next?
What's next? Right, we need to, I don't know,
let's figure something else out and that's one outsourced,
that's one of our most anticipated events of the year.
It happens at the World Championships every year on
Thursday night, they announced next year's game and you want to
talk about. There's people all over the
world just tuned into that live broadcast.
I had for, I one team that didn't go this last year for the
five. Kids texted me on Friday said,
will you be in the, in the classroom on Tuesday?
I said, yes, I will. Can we come in?
I said, no, three out of four of them showed up anyways, because
because it just know me that I think I'm gonna let him in.
That's really cool. It reminds me of BattleBots.
Oh, yeah, no legs. You seen that show.
But I think what's really great about a John.
I just want to recognize this is like you're donating so much of
your time, two kids. That aren't even your own kids,
right? Right.
Just and I think that's really cool.
I mean, that's it, you know, hats off to you.
And it also gave me the idea that I've got a son, who's a
freshman in high school, I'm gonna have them, you know,
investigate whether or not that's available in his school.
I bet you. There's a good chance it is.
Yes. And for anybody out there, who's
a parent who has kid, that's that age, or coming up to that
age, you know, be something they could look into.
Anyway, as we're talking about this, this whole robot thing.
So here's our lighter note, like, we love to end on a
lighter note and it kind of got me thinking about robots that
are being built commercially. Like, you know, Elon musk's had
a unveiling of a robot that I think Tesla is building or one
of his companies building. And it also got me thinking
about Star Wars and Star Trek, and you would ask me if I was
Star Wars start. I said, I'm more on the Star
Trek Star Trek side, Jeff is probably more on the Star Wars
Side based on conversations we've had, but I think they both
had a different direction for would robots, would be in the
far distant future. So in the Star Wars side, I
think R2D2 and C3PO. In other words, you know, there
were about, you look at them, they're robots, the Star Trek
side had data. So it was more like the
humanoid, I'd meant to be that you couldn't tell the difference
between a synthetic life form and a human life form.
And really the goal was to try to get to the point where you
couldn't tell the difference. And so that the letter, no
question for all three of us will be, which way do you see
actual human Direction going in the far distant?
Future, is it to build robots to be indistinguishable from
humans? Or is it to make them very Both
from humans. That's a great question.
And, you know, as far as I'm concerned, I have no idea where
we're headed, but I would think, would lean towards more of those
Star Trek side where they're going to look more like humans.
Maybe not identical. You should be able to tell the
difference, you know, in real life even like was a Boston
Dynamics and they have that dog that walked, you know, the
trying to make that walk like a dog and act like a dog.
And I think that's where we're headed.
I think that the will be more human-like in.
Maybe probably have a servant in our home and go back to George
Jetson. Those days won't mind Rosie
Rosie. Yeah, something like that.
But looking more like Star Trek and more human-like.
More humanoid. What do you think?
Jeff, you know, I thought the answer is going to be easy for
me and I'm going to cheat and say both because I'm going to
take the risk based cost based version of this.
I think we're going to have at the highwomen.
And robots that are virtually indistinguishable from a human
basically data from Star Trek and you're going to have purpose
built robots that nobody cares what it looks like.
It's, you know, it's in warehouses today.
They move boxes back and forth on these little loader
platforms, right? It doesn't look like a robot.
It is a robot but doesn't look like, you know, it doesn't have
arms and legs and head right MBA.
Yeah, Rumba. Yeah, exactly.
Like it's, you know, it's a purpose-built.
Nothing. And so I think it's I think that
would just be this trend, it will be.
If if you don't care what it looks like, it'll look like a
thing that does a thing Rumba if you do care.
And if you're not trying to replicate a human experience
caregiving, you know, medical education, maybe or even just
companionship, those types of things.
Then the interface and the visual appeal of the robot
itself, takes a much higher precedence over the
functionality. It's a great Point.
Yeah, I like that answer. Are you know what?
I was kind of thinking is that one branch for robotics is going
to Branch into the medical side. So someone loses a hand, how can
we replace the hand with a robotic hand and of course,
you're going to want that to look as much like a human as
possible. I don't know, man, we're gonna
take like a nice giant claw, like a USB port.
Something I can plug my phone into keep it charged.
Yeah. So maybe you Would but I think
that most people would like like those like an actual.
And anyway, I think there's also something that'll happen which
is the the the use of organic cells as the understanding of
organic cells in the ability to send chemical signals to them.
We'll cross a point of knowledge that you can actually build
something organically. A robot because I think to get
to kind of the data 2.0 which if you seen Star Trek the card,
it's like the next generation of synthetics and they are
indistinguishable from humans. I feel like the only way you can
get there. As if like you have real skin
real blood, real hair and so she could get there.
That should be deep. Yeah.
I guess I'm like kind of deep
but so high. I kind of think that that would
be the direction because even though I do agree with you if
like you're going to have robotic devices for doing tasks.
But I think when you start talking about like, AI robots,
you know, it's going to go down the medical route and then
eventually be indistinguishable from humans because I think
people are essentially wants to live forever.
Just like that, I'll take care of and I don't think people want
to reach their demise because they have some disease or
something like that. They'd want to have it repaired.
See now we're getting into like the ship of, was it ship of
Theseus? Like with you start removing all
the parts from something and you reassemble it is it still the
same ship. Well way to end on a lighter
note. Yeah, in that show the card to
mean. Jean-Luc Picard has like some
kind of Of brain disease and then in the end, they replace
his brain with a synthetic brain.
But rewired all the chemicals that essentially just didn't
even realize that he had a new synthetic brain.
Is that possible on a remote? But I mean Star Trek it is.
Everything is possible. The TV show, right?
All right. Well with that, I don't know
where to go with that gym but thank you for that uplifting
view on. Unity in the future.
We'll go and wrap it up for this episode.
John, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to the
conversation. Can continually to move forward
here. Hopefully enjoy the conference
again. Shout out to Andrew and Adrienne
and all the folks here at Fido who are hosting us.
We'll go ahead and leave it here for this week.
You can check us out on the web identity of the center.com.
We're on Twitter and IDC podcast.
And with that, thanks everyone for listening and we'll talk
with everyone in the next one. Thanks for listening to the
identity at the center podcast. If you like what you heard,
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