Some misinformation would be the spread of information that is
false or inaccurate or without the intent of doing so.
So people that maybe, I don't know, I can think of my
grandmother. Maybe she finds something funny
or something scary and then she shares that online, but that
happens to be false. Then this information is on the
other hand the spread of false information, but with the intent
to create chaos or confusion when some event happens.
Yeah. And how, I mean, how does that
manifest when in terms of technology are we talking about
social media regular, you know, what do you call it legacy media
or is it all the above? Yeah, I think misinformation,
disinformation has always existed.
If we look back in history, across time, there's always been
some people that have knowledge and they decide to shape it in a
way to spread it to, let's say, the masses.
I know you can go to the Roman times and see Julius Caesar, the
famous book, the Gaelic Wars, and he, you know, wrote it in a
way that would help his own cause.
So I think that we can trace this, let's say, spread in a
very massive scale. If we look at the printing press
in 1440, here in Germany, in mines so not far from Berlin,
there was this Goldsmith named Johann Gutenberg, and he
developed this printing press and that enable editors and
people to spread information in a much faster way.
This is identity at the center if it has anything to do with
IAM. This is the go to podcast now
your hosts Jim McDonald and Jeff Steadman.
Welcome to the Identity at the Center podcast.
I'm Jeff, and that's Jim. Hey, Jim.
Hey, Jeff, how are you? Oh.
Not so bad yourself. Doing great here at EIC 2025
early in Germany and just having a fantastic time.
Did I mention how awesome of a job Marina has been doing
keeping things organized? She's she's walking across
behind the cameras right now, but she's the MVP that was even
said got a smile that that's that's something we'll take.
Martin, make sure you you, you hear this message right?
Marina is kicking some butt. Yeah, been a good show.
We've got a guest with us that we're going.
So another episode here from the stage of EIC, introduce
Alejandro Leal. He's the senior analyst with
Governor Cole. Welcome to the show, Alejandro.
Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Jim.
Happy to be here. Yeah.
So thanks so much for taking the time.
I know you're very busy. You've got like a bunch of
different sessions, so definitely appreciate you taking
that. But let's start with your
background. How did you get into the
identity space? Is it something that you chose
or did it choose you? Chose me.
I think like many in the industry, it found me.
I was mainly studying my bachelor's in international
relations in Poland, and it was in my last semester when I had
to write a paper on the impact of technology in International
Security. And that's when I became very
interested in how technology impacts businesses.
People cite the politics in general.
And then I did a master's degree in Estonia on technology
governance and digital transformation.
And after that I found this job at Copingoco and here I am.
Well qualified for that, I would say.
Yeah, I hope so. One of the topics that you talk
a lot about is misinformation and disinformation first.
Could you kind of define that for us?
What is the difference? Yes, I think it's important to
to distinguish these two. There's a lot of misconceptions
out there. I think some misinformation
would be the spread of information that is false or
inaccurate or without the intent of doing so.
So people that maybe, I don't know, I can think of my
grandmother, maybe she finds something funny or something
scary and then she shares that online, but that happens to be
false. Then this information is on the
other hand, the spread of false information.
But we didn't intend to create chaos or confusion when some
event happens. Yeah.
And how, I mean, how does that manifest when in terms of
technology we're talking about social media regular, you know,
what do they call it legacy media or is it all the above?
Yeah, I think misinformation, this information has always
existed. If we look back in history,
across time, there's always been some people that have knowledge
and they decide to shape it in a way to spread it to, let's say,
the masses. I know you can go to the Roman
times and see Julius Caesar, the famous book The Catholic Wars,
and he, you know, wrote it in a way that would help his own
cause. So I think that we can trace
this, let's say, spread in a very massive scale.
If we look at the printing press in 1440 here in Germany and in
mines so not far from Berlin, there was this Goldsmith name
Johann Gutenberg. And he developed this printing
press and that enable editors and people to spread information
in a much faster way. And that led to in long term, it
led to the Reformation, it led to the religious conflicts in
Europe, led to the 30 Years war here in Germany.
And that caused people to start, let's say, moving from from
speaking Latin to the vernacular.
So in a way it's a good thing because he democratizes the
ability of people to communicate, to learn new
things, to acquire knowledge. But I think that it can also
have some consequences that people don't really plan ahead.
I think it's true for most technology, right?
It's the intent was probably maybe hopefully pure and then
gets corrupted or you know, we'll look at other ways to use
it. You know, a hammer is a tool
that could be for any number of things.
And I guess you know, from a misinformation, disinformation.
You mentioned that intent. That really is probably the key
part is you're trying to further a goal with one and the other
one is a mistake of some sort or something on those lines.
What can we actually do about it though?
How do we know if something is, you know, misinformation versus
disinformation? Because I feel like at this
point there's so much out there that's like, well, how do we
believe and who do we believe in, you know, with AI, what do
we believe? Is that really Alejandra sitting
there or is it Alejandra AI twin, right, something like
that? Like what can we do about that?
Yeah, If we step back and look at these examples that I
mentioned of the printing press, I think back then there was a
small number of people that could read and write.
And for example, many people would print books on how to burn
witches, for example. So that was clearly a
intentional way of spreading ideas that maybe wasn't that
nice, but it also led to the spread of religious texts or
political texts or scientific texts that could be accessible
for everyone in the population. But if we look at today, I think
most people should know how to read and write.
But it looks like all of the things that we see and read are
more are getting more confusing, are getting more difficult to
distinguish they're true or they're not true.
And maybe later we can talk about what are some of the
potential solutions. But I think that the the scale
and the scope of misinformation and disinformation today is on
another level. I.
Think there's those words are used to sometimes discredit
ideas as well so to say Oh yeah, I talked to Alejandro and he
gave me all this misinformation or disinformation.
I think sometimes those terms get loosely used, but the intent
is so important because you use the example of your grandma saw
some article maybe about a medicine and reposted it because
she wants people to have all this good information that it's
false. It's a kind of at least a
disservice to everybody, but she didn't mean to harm people.
Yes, that's true. But I think that a few years
ago, you could always provide this grandma example because for
people like in the industry or younger people, it's easier to
distinguish. OK, that's completely false.
But that's getting more difficult today, and it's going
to keep getting more difficult in the future.
And I think that with the use of generative AI, it's going to get
even more complicated. My colleague John Tolbert, which
I think you guys know, know him very well, he recently shared
with us a news article on some lawyers, I believe in the US.
They shared a brief to the judge.
They were looking at a case and then the judge noticed that
there were more than 30 mistakes and they used ChatGPT to
summarize the case. It created like fake cases and
things like. That it did.
It did. Not a very well.
John said LLMS do not care about the truth.
You know, it's text prediction, so I kind.
Of have a theory that the LLMS are too embarrassed to admit
when they don't do something. Make something up to not feel
embarrassed. So that's what that is human
emotion every single LLM and and interface.
So it says use at your own risk. You know they're washing their
hands of any sort of responsibility that anything
that puts out on it is accurate, right, whether it's reporting or
if you're trying to do something with AI voices, right, like are
we defer April first episode. It's just use at your own risk.
Yes, yes. So let's talk a bit about how
did this start because I feel like personally, everything
starts as misinformation until you can prove the intent is this
information. How does I guess how did things
start? You know, maybe before and you
kind of talked about, you know, I think going back to Roman
times, but how do we look at it now and from a origination
standpoint of where does misinformation start and then
when does it convert to disinformation?
Am I? Is that make sense to how I
describe that? Yes, yes.
I think we need to look at where this information is flowing and
that's taking place in cyberspace.
So in the digital landscape, in theory, we should all have an
identity. That's why we're here at the IC.
But in many cases, we see false information being spread,
perhaps by a bot, perhaps by a anonymous account.
And maybe people would share that because they may be in a
sort of echo chamber or the thing that they read and see it
matches what they believe or what they are afraid of.
So they might share that with intention of spreading
information and maybe telling their friends what's going on
and they don't really know the source of this information.
But then we also see the other aspect, the other dimension,
which is this information. And I think that the origin is
very clear with the intention of creating a narrative from a
particular event or a situation. And as I said earlier, you know,
back then, few years ago with the grandma example, it was easy
to distinguish these things. But now with generative AII
think from a business perspective, we need to be very,
we need to understand this issue because there's been cases of
false information affecting business practices, businesses
that have been acquired or businesses that are talking to
investors. And then there's some online
narrative that is trying to affect such developments.
Yeah, I, you know, I was thinking, as you're talking
earlier about two major scenarios, business and
politics, right. And you see, I think
misinformation can happen quite innocently where people hold a
belief and they say that belief. And you know, in some cases it's
hard to tell what is true. Maybe there are some things that
are factual, some things are opinion and you can never prove
an opinion wrong probably. But then also on the the
business side, you know, just conversations that we have, I
might have some beliefs that are incorrect, but if I knew that
they were incorrect, I wouldn't repeat them.
But on the disinformation side, from a business standpoint, I
could potentially be saying, oh, that other software vendor,
they're not good because of XY and Z.
And I know that's not true or I know that they are addressing
it, or I use some recent breach to say, oh, you know, they were
asleep at the wheel knowing very well that maybe that could have
happened to almost anybody. So that I think though, where we
see it a lot also is in the political realm where we here
with things like like election interference and maybe some
countries trying to become involved in sway elections in
other countries and things like that.
But I also think we are more susceptible to disinformation in
the political realm because people are becoming more and
more ingrained into the political process of holding
their beliefs more firmly than ever, I think.
And they're more likely to believe disinformation if it,
you know, backs up what they already believe, if it, if it
aligns with what they believe, and if it doesn't, then they'll
disinformation. Yes.
Well, we were talking about a little bit about philosophy
earlier. I know this is an identity
podcast, but if we look at the current narrative from a
philosophical standpoint, it's this postmodern narrative that
there are no truths on the interpretations.
Of course, that's a very vague sentence because there are
course roots that we can see from a scientific point of view,
etcetera. But I think many people, you
know, when I turn like 21, for example, I, I was like, OK, now
I'm an adult, no more BS. Now it's time to like, I don't
know, behave like an adult. And then I started to see that
political leaders or even business leaders, they sometimes
spread information that it's not true.
And they clearly don't have good intentions when doing this.
So I think it ultimately comes to responsibility from the top
level. And I know that we're all humans
and we all have our own biases. We have our our own
preconditions, but I think there's no responsibility from
from people on top. Then this is going to create
even more chaos and things are going to be more complicated and
not only politics in sports. You know, I was watching one
game last night, my favorite team lost.
I was very angry this morning. And I started to see comments
from people from the other team, from the rivals saying all these
things. And I'm like, no, that's not
true. So yeah, we can see that.
You can talk for disinformation of the comments section.
Yes, yes, sometimes it's a funny area, but you can see many
comments that are just not factual.
Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of
disinformation seems to be in the news cycle, right?
And I guess what is the transition of how this impacts
identity? Yeah.
So there are many, I guess, potential solutions out there,
but I think it ultimately comes down to identity, to digital
identity, because as I said earlier, the spread of this
information is taking place in cyberspace.
And in theory, we should all have an identity if we want to
post something on a social media platform.
But then there's a problem that each social platform has
different rules, different regulations.
They have they have a different approach to how their social
media works. So it's really difficult to keep
track of who, who is who, who's saying what.
But there's some, there's stock here in Europe.
The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in in January, he said
that maybe Europeans can tie the European wallet with social
media accounts. So you can always know who's
saying what. And maybe that could prevent
misinformation, but that also creates more problems with the
social media platforms and also when it comes to privacy, many
citizens will be skeptical to that.
I also wonder, and I'd love to hear your feedback on this,
whether or not the Internet needs a anonymity feature.
So let's say you're in a country and you are an oppressed group
and you need to use the Internet to get information out.
But if the authorities maybe saw who was posting this, it could
be bad news for you, right? So having anonymity in that
context is a good thing. Yes, yes.
I think that's kind of reminds me of a kind of like a clash
between do we want more privacy rights or do we want more
truthful content, Right. Because I guess we can make
things happen so the Internet will be, you know, having only
truthful things. But how is that going to work?
Yeah. Philosophically, it's almost
like the right to privacy and secrecy versus safety and
security and surveillance and things like that.
Well, even still, who decides what's true?
Yes, yes, exactly. That's sort of also a big thing,
yeah. The arbiter of truth.
That's right, I volunteer as tribute.
I will. I will decide what is.
True. I don't know if I'd want that
job. Boy oh boy, I don't know if I'd
want that job. I mean, I think it would be cool
if some sopranational organization like the UN could
have some sort of platform where scientific and factual
information is there and people maybe can access that somehow.
But again, who's saying what's true?
It seems like right now it's kind of the purview of the
company that runs the platform, right?
So like X or Facebook can decide whether or not to put a warning
on a post that it hasn't been vetted or, you know, some other
organization says this is not true, something like that,
right? And is that the right place
where it should be? Or do you think that it should
be in some kind of neutral third party sands?
That's a good question. I'm not really sure.
I think that as I said earlier, I think it ultimately comes with
to having responsibilities of the owners of these social media
platforms should try to look at the impact of their technologies
and see if there's anything they can do about it.
Because we are in a, let's say, capitalist system that is driven
by profit. And then is that going to be
beneficial for them in the long run if they change the whole
dynamics within or is that going to be good for people?
So I think it's it really depends.
I think. I don't know how you see it.
As what what? The way I see it, I think it's
as complex as the whole idea of decentralized identity and
identity wallets because I think so first to start with, I think
that companies like X and Meta would love to hand this off to
some third party and say you deal with it and we don't have
to worry about it. I disagree.
Well, let me finish my thought. OK, So I think they would love
to get it off their plate because they've taken a lot of
heat over it over the years. But I think that if we said
there's going to be some arbiter of the truth and you'd turn out,
the UNI can tell you right now a lot of people in the United
States would not trust what would come out of the UN.
And I'm not giving my opinion on that one way or the other, but I
can tell you I'm the same. I think if some arbiter was in
the United States, folks in Europe would say, hey, you know,
can it be trusted? And so, and then that's not even
taking the rest of the world into into account, right?
And so I think it ultimately does fall back on the platform
that they have to do it and they're, they have to deal with
this chaos right now of nobody's ever going to be happy with what
they're doing, right? Or, or if somebody's happy, that
means somebody else is not happy.
What? What we're going to.
Disagree with yeah. So I mean, I think you look at
the business where you talk about the business model.
If I am a social network, my entire business model is based
on eyeballs looking at screens. I do not want people going away
from my screen because that's how I'm going to serve up ads,
engagement, right, whatever want to measure that for.
So I would not want to hand off anything to do with my app or my
service to a third party that could potentially draw people
away from that. I'm saying that's good.
What if it was an API that somehow you pulled the info and
then you presented the data? We get into another scenario
where it's OK, well, do you trust that API or not?
And 50% of the population is going to believe one thing, 50%
of the population's going to believe the other.
And this becomes more of a question of is there a
difference between truth and fact?
Yes. If we can't all agree that 2 + 2
= 4, now we're not even speaking the same language.
That's right. I think what you said about the
business perspective is a sort of microcosm to what you were
saying, Jim, on the, let's say the US giving up their
sovereignty to the UN or some other third party.
I think that it's not only in the US, but I think everywhere
in the world, people will be skeptical to give up that to
some other organization that they don't have any
accountability or transparency or any information on what are
these people? What are they deciding?
And that also has a dimension from from a business perspective
how that's going to impact if you have a local business in the
States or like anywhere in the world.
So I want to tie this back to digital identity because we are
an identity practice. So we're getting philosophical,
which is great. I think these are important
matters discussed because I think this ties well back to
identity verification. What is a truth behind or fact
maybe behind? Is this really Alejandro or
someone pretend to be Alejandra or Jim or Jeff or whoever,
right? What are the things that, from a
misinformation standpoint, how does that tie back to
establishing that verified credential or whatever it may
be? Yeah.
I think there are several options on how to handle this.
I think 1 would be, I guess to label AI generated content, but
there's also some challenges there.
I think the use of verifiable credentials could potentially be
a good alternative. We still need to see, for
example, here in Europe, there's still lots of developments
around the EI. Does all these 2728 countries
have to agree? So we still don't really know
the use cases and how it's going to look like, but I think
there's potential there. But I think as I said earlier,
responsibilities key because if a company is going to develop
their own AI Gen. AI model, their own LLM, then
they have to look at their data. It has to be, you know,
transparent. It has to be been.
They have to maybe implement RAG.
There are many different ways that these LLMS can be trained.
So the information that they're going to provide is not only
going to be true, but also going to be useful for the business or
for the customer that they're trying to target.
Yeah, it's a really interesting conundrum because you could say,
well, go to your AI and say make me a picture of this political
leader. Make them two feet tall, right?
And make their hair stick up and make it like 8 inches sticking
up from their head should be. Describing a troll doll.
Exactly what I was doing, but put it on the end of a pencil,
right? Should the AI say no I can't do
that because that doesn't that's not what that person looks like.
Or should the AI engine do that for you?
So is the AI an arbiter of truth?
Exactly. Or the company that that makes
the AI like they have to put enough guardrails on it.
So where does that responsibility fall?
Yeah, But I think that could lead to more maybe
fragmentation, different models having their own proof, like
Deep Sig. You asked them about Taiwan and
Tiananmen Square and then they're going to tell you
something completely wrong. Is it better to have more
fragmentation or do you want to see a finite number, maybe a
half dozen AI models? Well, who decides?
Yeah. Yeah, but what?
What do you think? Is is better?
What do you think? I don't know if I have an answer
for it. I don't know what is there.
It's, it's moving too quickly. And I think there's, there we,
we, we haven't agreed on what even the standard will be for
that. I think MCP model contacts
protocol is certainly all the rage right now as it's sorely
needed, right. It's been described As for the
USBC of that area. But I don't know who should be
making those decisions. Yeah, it's moving too fast, like
you say, and regulators are not keeping track of what's
happening. Many of them don't have a
technical knowledge, so it's sometimes hard for them to
understand how these systems work.
So yeah, I think more fragmentation could lead to more
competition, but more chaos as well.
But also, who decides that? So it's.
Yeah. But so with the example I just
painted, I thought of another thing, which was, let's say we
we wanted a political figure to look funny like that.
Is that free speech or is that hate speech?
Depends on what your perspective is.
It might be more dependent on where in the world you're you
live and where you're from. But that's two ways to look at
the exact same set of facts. Well, if we live in a democratic
society, I think that would be considered free speech.
But at the same time, misinformation and
disinformation are challenges to democratic systems.
But I think in some countries, they, if you were to take that
same model and say, take this religious figure and make them
look ridiculous, print that picture and now people start
forwarding it on the Internet. It's considered hate speech and
you can be arrested for it in some places.
Yeah, yeah. This is kind of a downer of an
episode, man. Hey, man.
This is my kind of episode. This is.
Like you're, you're like all into this.
Yeah, I'm loving it. I mean, I think the challenge,
right, is I don't think we have the answers yet, right?
We, we recognize the problem or the beginnings maybe, of the
problem, 'cause I'm sure we'll find new and creative ways to
misuse anything. This is just the latest
invention that we're grappling with.
OK what do we do about this? I feel like there's a a play
here somewhere for authenticity and maybe it's a digital
watermark. You know, maybe it is something
where, you know, there is some sort of system to say, OK, if it
was AI generated, make it very clear.
And maybe that doesn't stand up in a court of law or it's
immediately flagged as, yeah, that's not real.
But when you have technologies right now that are so good at
making fakes, yeah, fakes and and they're hilarious.
And I don't want to stifle the innovation because I can see a
lot. I mean, we've used to food
podcast and you know, stuff like that, but it is a problem.
And so how do we, you know, verify the authenticity of
something is a really part of this and bring it back to the
identity side. It's the same thing, right?
What we don't want to do is have a bunch of fake IDs and
credentials that have proliferated.
You we're younger, right? You have fake ID.
Not saying that I did. But.
People would get a fake driver's license and someone that kind of
looked like them, and that would pass.
They get them into the bar, right, to do whatever.
Maybe the same thing can happen also in the digital world is
what happens if I replicate something, somebody's active on
Prem, Active Directory account, and it looks and acts and
behaves like a person, but it's not really them.
Yeah. You know, I think the I was
thinking the most dangerous model is like some kind of
disinformation that started World War three or something
like that, right? So someone put out information
that a nuclear kind of attack took place, and if you weren't
able to authenticate that that information was correct, maybe
some country acts on that. That's the worst case scenario.
But then I was thinking, you know, you can then take it down
several levels in terms of the global scale and say, hey,
there's police officers going from door to door, but they're
not really police officers, so protect yourself.
And it's like fake. And then a police officer shows
up in somebody store and the person takes the negative action
against that police officer, thinking they're a fake person,
right? And that could be a life or
death event. So there's been cases like that
of people committing crimes or other things to other people
based on false information they found online.
And I think another challenge. I know we're talking a lot about
challenges and I hope, hey at least.
Shine a light on it not sending all the answers, but at least be
aware of them. Yes, we can't fix what we don't
know about. Yes, so let's know about it.
Another one would be that many of the conversations on digital
identity, like here at EIC or all the conferences that we see
in the States, it's taking place mainly in the Western world.
And whatever comes out from these conversations affects the
Global South. And that's another area where
many people don't really have a saying of how these technologies
are going to impact not only their businesses, but their
politics, their own echo chambers, etcetera.
So I think it's also important to try to have the sort of, if
we cannot have AUN implementing something, at least we can try
to have a global conversation. I don't know how, but it's
important. To it's important to.
Keep it going like this for example.
So what do you now? Let's turn this into some action
we can take. What do you recommend people do
for themselves to not fall victim to mis and
disinformation? And what can they recommend to
people in their lives to, you know, whether it's people that
they're responsible for work or family members to protect
themselves? Think being responsible, what
you're saying online is a part of who you are in a way and
you're sharing something about you.
And many people don't see it that way.
Many people see cyberspace, sure as an extension of themselves,
but they don't really understand that whatever you share online
can have consequences. So responsibility would be one.
Another one would be to have critical thinking that's I mean
sounds easy sounds. Common sense not so common.
Yes. So I don't know how it could
lead in the next few years, maybe even having in schools
critical thinking skills or lessons on how to distinguish
false and truth in the online world.
Sounds a little bit silly. You know the Gram example, it's
easy to distinguish what's true or false.
But imagine in five, in 10 years, in 20 years.
In your own world, if you spot misinformation, different
disinformation like our comments section, do you post something
to call it out? No, I don't.
You don't, do you? Probably not.
Good counter. I'm.
Curious. I don't.
Really go into social media other than LinkedIn.
I think that would be it's. Like the last safe place.
Yeah, it's like the last safe place.
But there are times where I disagree with somebody and I
usually don't. I usually just say OK.
Don't feed the trolls. Yeah, I don't.
I guess if you distinguish if is this disinformation, then
there's really no reason to engage because maybe it's a bot,
maybe it's someone that has a narrative and they're not going
to change their mind. They're just going to keep I
guess making that the comment is going to be more visible.
But if it's misinformation, if it's a friend or someone that
you know, maybe you can have a civilized response.
But I'm curious to know if you ever had any, let's say,
conversations in your comments on these podcasts or some?
We've got pretty good fans, you know, people who support us say,
I think kind of get what we do. There is always going to be, I
think the threat of it. I deal with a lot of spam on our
YouTube channel. You probably never see it, but a
lot of them are seed values for Bitcoin wallets and things like
that. They post into the comments and
reject. Not happening, right, But it
does happen. Now it's not is that
disinformation? No, but it's clearly not
information and it's clearly not relevant or authentic to
whatever it is they're posting on, right?
I don't need a 16 code words, but I was like, and it starts
with I liked your episode and it just doesn't make any sense,
right. So there I think there's some of
that. I think the other thing too is I
think there's a natural inclination where if it doesn't
affect me and less likely to do something about it.
And I think that's just probably more, you know, human part of it
is if someone went out there and said something bad about me or
something about maybe the podcast and we know it's not
true, you and I would fight that.
That's. Much.
More difficult. That hasn't happened yet.
No, it hasn't yet. And nobody's called us on, you
know, You mean the best looking podcast.
Articles sometimes where I'm like, oh, I want to say
something, but I usually just restrain myself because I don't
want to put negative energy into the world.
Even if the article is negative energy, I usually just say to
myself, I shouldn't have read that.
That just made me unhappy. I think that requires courage
because sometimes you really want to express something that
you sometimes could trigger you. But that's again what I said
earlier, the responsibility part and the critical thinking, which
are two human components. We can maybe talk about other
technical solutions to this problem, but I think the human
is the source of the whole conversation we're having today.
Yeah. All right.
Well, that was heavy, man, that. Was.
Heavy. That was heavy.
Let's try to lighten it up a little bit.
You did mention philosophy and you mentioned your before you
hit record, you know that you like to read.
So I was, I told you, I was going to ask you like, what's a
good book or something that people in the identity space
should read? And then I jokingly said
something like the Art of War and like, well, maybe what's
something that people should check out, maybe in the book
world that they can consume to maybe enlighten them from an
identity standpoint, maybe their thoughts and viewpoints.
I think that there's an essay written by a German philosopher
called The Question Concerning technology.
It was, I think, published in 1954 by a philosopher named
Martin Heidegger. And he talks about that
technology is not a means to an end.
It's not an instrument, but it's a revelation of being.
It's a revelation of what it means to be human.
And he warns us that if we keep relying too much on this
technological framework, we're going to start looking at the
world through that lens, through that frame.
And that could lead to, I don't know, environmental
catastrophes, etcetera. I know maybe that wasn't the
most possible and happy. You sound like me.
That's what I do every every week.
There's a real chemistry having here, yeah.
My wife calls me at grandpa, so I guess yeah, well.
No, but I think it's important to recognize some of that stuff,
right? I mean, this maybe this episode
is a little bit more of a downer, but it's mostly because
this is a real challenge, right? And then there's plenty of
things that we can talk through is OK, like I said, we don't
have all the answers, but at least we can shine a light on
and say, what are we going to do about this?
Because we can't just bury our head in the sand and say
whatever, right? Whether it's, you know, someone
using in, you know, credentials to do bad things, which still is
the majority of attacks. There was our friend Jason
Kenahan this morning from, from Telus.
He had a keynote. And you know, over a third of
all Internet traffic is malicious bot activity.
So whether you know it or not, it's happening and whether
you're doing something about doesn't, just because you're not
doing something about it doesn't mean it's stopping.
And so it's just going to keep going.
So I think I think it is important to have discussions
like this and. It's a wake up call because for
example, this essay, if you read about it, then you could maybe
have a different understanding of what technology is and that
could impact the way you conduct business or you do your IM
programs. You will think it's not just for
technical efficiency, but we're talking about humans, we're
talking about identities. So let's try to have a clear
perspective and a nice framework that will work for the human.
I feel like there's a Black Mirror episode here that we can
get into. I watched the, the, the newest
season, the first episode of my way here.
It's like, Oh my gosh, I, I talked about like this whole AI
and like, you know, making an imprint of your brain and you
got to watch this because I don't know if you've, you've
seen it, but it is I, it got me thinking about like what that
would be like in the future. I'm, I'm almost through Better
Call Saul, OK. And everybody I tell who I'm,
I'm watching it, they're like, oh, it's so good, really good.
Yeah. So I'm I'm going to be ready to
dive into something else. Buck mirrors are great because
they're like 45 minutes to an hour roughly and they're all
self-contained. So you can watch one and kind of
be done with it. And you might want to be done
with it because they're they're generally not happy stories,
right? But it's.
Like today's episode? Yes, yeah, yeah.
But they are good and they're thought provoking and it's like,
oh, exactly, I haven't thought about that before.
And I think if that's what you take away from, that's good,
right? You're expanding your horizons,
you're expanding it. So I'm going to ask you for the
link that I can put in our show notes for that so people can
check it out. Thank you so much for taking the
time with us. I said you have like I was
looking through your list, you have like 5 different panels and
talks and things that you're doing.
Yeah, you're a busy. Guy yeah.
So taking the time off for this has been great.
Thank you pretty much. Happy to be here.
Yeah. So we'll go ahead and wrap it up
there for this episode on behalf of Jim.
Thanks everybody for watching and are listening.
Check us out on the web, IDC podcast.com, like subscribe,
share. This is information, not not.
We are information, definitely not disinformation, and we try
to get it right. We try not to have missing.
Right, exactly. Yeah.
And if we are, call us on it, let us know so we can fix it.
OK, that's it. Thanks everyone, and we'll talk
with everyone in the next one. You've been listening to
Identity at the Center. We hope you've enjoyed the show.
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