Latest / Identity at the Center / #316 - Authenticate 2024 - Death and the Digital Estate with Dean Saxe

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#316 - Authenticate 2024 - Death and the Digital Estate with Dean Saxe · Identity at the Center

• 0:00
  What happens like to this podcast, right?
• 0:02
  Someone wants to come along and it's like The Beatles back
• 0:05
  catalog, you know, they're like, OK, The Identity at the Center
• 0:11
  podcast you and I have both asked on, you know, what happens
• 0:15
  to this thing that we're doing, we've been doing for the last
• 0:17
  five years. It's just going to live out
• 0:18
  there somewhere, I imagine. We hope it lives out there.
• 0:21
  I mean, like you said in the beginning, you did this because
• 0:23
  you wanted to be able to share this information and and share
• 0:26
  that long history about identity into the future.
• 0:29
  So yeah, I hope it continues living on, but I don't know.
• 0:34
  I don't know that anybody knows. And that's part of the problem
• 0:36
  that we're dealing with. So you mentioned a working group
• 0:40
  is that you need people to be part of it.
• 0:43
  So how does somebody become, if there's somebody there's really
• 0:47
  interested in working on this problem, how do they involve?
• 0:51
  It's really easy Open ID Foundation.
• 0:53
  I think I can say die. Wow, that that would, that
• 0:57
  would, that would. Really.
• 0:58
  We didn't test subjects. That would that would be hard
• 1:00
  mode. OK, let's let's not do that.
• 1:02
  Let's not go there yet. This is identity at the center
• 1:11
  if it has anything to do with IAM.
• 1:15
  This is the go to podcast now your hosts Jim McDonald and Jeff
• 1:21
  Stedman. Welcome to the Identity of the
• 1:30
  Center podcast. I'm Jeff, and that's Jim.
• 1:31
  Hey, Jim. Hey, Jeff, how are you?
• 1:33
  Oh, not so bad itself. Doing great.
• 1:35
  We're we're at the conference here in Carlsbad.
• 1:41
  California, you're in a safe place.
• 1:44
  Your name is Jim. You're at Authenticate 2024.
• 1:46
  But it's flood shine I haven't eaten yet.
• 1:48
  Yeah, no, neither have I. We're probably going to forego
• 1:50
  lunch in in favor of recording. But yes, we're here at
• 1:53
  Authenticate 2024. We're in the Expo hall, so we're
• 1:56
  not hiding the fact that we're in the corner over here.
• 1:58
  But definitely want to give a shout out to the Fight Alliance
• 2:00
  for hooking us up with a spot, the production crew for actually
• 2:03
  giving us microphones and speakers.
• 2:04
  So people are wandering by, you know, they can actually hear us.
• 2:07
  And of course to our employers, RSM for funding us from a travel
• 2:11
  perspective to get out. Here, I'd say we wouldn't be
• 2:13
  here for wasn't about. Yeah, then absolutely.
• 2:17
  As much as I like to get out of well, so this episode's actually
• 2:21
  not going to go out for a couple weeks, but I have been dealing
• 2:24
  with hurricane issues in the actual area for the last couple
• 2:27
  weeks. So no water, no power, no
• 2:30
  Internet, no cell service. It's been a couple weeks, I
• 2:34
  guess kick back the 4th wall. Today is October 15th, so we're
• 2:37
  it's the Tuesday of the conference.
• 2:40
  And so it's been 2 1/2 weeks, I think since the hurricane came
• 2:42
  here at this point. And you know, fortunately
• 2:45
  everybody's OK, you know, no damage to the house, but not
• 2:49
  having running water, can't take showers, can't flush toilets.
• 2:53
  Yeah, like we have plenty of supplies.
• 2:54
  We don't have is like enough of that non pourable water.
• 2:56
  It's not like trying to figure that part out.
• 2:58
  Yeah. And I.
• 2:58
  The one that always says that sounds like first world
• 3:01
  problems, not living running water.
• 3:03
  That doesn't qualify as a first world problem.
• 3:07
  So we have workarounds. So the running water is
• 3:09
  definitely nice. I don't know if I'm yet on the
• 3:12
  the of the cusp of saying is that a first world problem or
• 3:15
  not. So the other water is really
• 3:16
  important. We can drink, we can go
• 3:19
  somewhere and take a shower if we need to.
• 3:21
  Is it ideal? No, but we are surviving and I'm
• 3:25
  hopeful that by the time I get back from this trip, hopefully
• 3:28
  water will be restored or close to yours.
• 3:31
  Yeah, and obviously thinking about all the people who.
• 3:34
  Are less fortunate, Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure.
• 3:35
  I mean, if you've seen pictures on the Internet of like the
• 3:38
  Asheville, NC area, I mean, it's just widespread.
• 3:41
  Just, you know, devastation over.
• 3:44
  It's really kind of sad because there's a lot of folks.
• 3:46
  Who's bringing the showdown? Yeah, that's true, but.
• 3:49
  The show did go on while I was with Disconnected.
• 3:51
  You actually recorded a couple episodes.
• 3:53
  The show will scroll and that's right.
• 3:54
  And I edited them in my car underneath the T-Mobile cell
• 3:57
  tower so that I get Internet connectivity.
• 4:01
  So that was a lot of fun. But yeah, so here we are.
• 4:04
  Authenticate 2024. We just came off of doing a
• 4:07
  family, sorry not family Fido Feud keynote thing yesterday on
• 4:12
  the stage, which I had a lot of fun doing.
• 4:14
  Yeah, hopefully, hopefully people in the audience had half
• 4:17
  as good a time as we did on stage.
• 4:19
  I was not aware that someone was going to bring up a bottle of
• 4:22
  tequila and start doing shots. We're.
• 4:24
  Doing the game, That's Christian.
• 4:26
  Yeah. So if you if you missed it live,
• 4:31
  we are trying to turn into an episode.
• 4:32
  I'm not sure if it's already aired at this point for us or if
• 4:35
  it'll air after this, but I am trying to turning into an
• 4:37
  episode. Get the audio and the video
• 4:38
  files from the production team here.
• 4:40
  But it was a lot of fun. We have to do that again.
• 4:43
  That's a huge hit. I mean, I had so many people
• 4:45
  saying they wanted more. They wanted it to continue and
• 4:49
  have more families come up and do the game show in front of
• 4:53
  everybody. And so that's the sign that went
• 4:56
  well. Yeah.
• 4:57
  So. Maybe we can do that at Gartner
• 4:59
  in a couple weeks. We're going to be there.
• 5:02
  We've actually got a discount code.
• 5:03
  If you use the code IDAC 375, you get, guess what, 375 off of
• 5:10
  your registration. It's a very clever code.
• 5:12
  We'll have a link in our shutouts for people to check
• 5:13
  that out. But that's in Grapevine, TX.
• 5:15
  That's in early December. Jim, you and I are going to be
• 5:17
  there. I think we're doing something.
• 5:19
  You signed us up to do something.
• 5:20
  Yeah. So we'll figure it out.
• 5:22
  What? What it is that we're doing?
• 5:23
  We're doing a case. Study a case study.
• 5:25
  OK, that's it. All right, I guess we'll figure
• 5:28
  it out. Live.
• 5:30
  As far as today goes, we're going to talk about death.
• 5:33
  Oh man, you're really, you're really bringing things up today.
• 5:36
  Deaf and the Digital State. I want to introduce our guest
• 5:39
  today, Dean Sacks. He's the Principal engineer,
• 5:42
  office of the CTO at Deond Identity.
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  He's the Co chair of the Fido Alliance Enterprise Deployment
• 5:47
  Working Group, and he's also the chair of the Open ID Foundation,
• 5:50
  Deaf and the Digital Estates Community Group.
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  Welcome to Identity at the Center, Dean.
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  Thank you for having me guys. I appreciate the opportunity to
• 5:56
  be here today. You know, it's been a long time
• 5:58
  coming. We've known each other for a
• 5:59
  while, and it's surprising this is the first time we've had
• 6:02
  actually gotten you and you know it better.
• 6:04
  Yeah. Lifting story and then talk
• 6:05
  about death. You know, I wish I could be here
• 6:08
  to talk about other things, but you know, we'll take this
• 6:09
  opportunity while we have it. It's, you know, moving out of
• 6:13
  Amazon. I have a little bit more freedom
• 6:14
  to be open and talk and do these podcasts and things.
• 6:17
  And so it's a great opportunity. I'm happy to be here with you
• 6:20
  guys today. Well, later in the same time
• 6:22
  when you shared this topic with me, I think it wasn't probably a
• 6:25
  done verse. Maybe it was.
• 6:26
  And I was like, yes, I want to do that because I have stories
• 6:29
  about this myself. And I look forward to hearing
• 6:31
  those stories. And but it's something
• 6:34
  unfortunate and we have to figure out right as a as a
• 6:37
  society, but also as a as a industry from an identity
• 6:39
  perspective. But before we get too far, it's
• 6:42
  your first time. Here it is.
• 6:43
  We've got to ask you about your identity background.
• 6:44
  How did you get into the world of I AM?
• 6:46
  Is this something that you chose or did it choose you?
• 6:49
  It chose me. So funny enough, I didn't
• 6:52
  realize it, but back in the early 2000s, I was working in
• 6:54
  banking and banking software, business banking software.
• 6:58
  And I wrote an SSO service at that time to the specs of the
• 7:04
  customer and then found a vulnerability where we were
• 7:07
  passing the account number in the query string of the URL and
• 7:11
  it was encrypted. But we were also passing the IV
• 7:13
  in the query string of the URL. And quickly realized, well, if I
• 7:16
  manipulate the IVI can actually manipulate what it gets
• 7:20
  decrypted. And now I can move money into a
• 7:22
  different account. And that's a lot of fun.
• 7:26
  This sounds like an Office Space type of situation.
• 7:28
  Fractions of a penny, not quite sliced in the salami, but it
• 7:31
  was, it was, it was fun. So Fast forward a number of
• 7:34
  years, I did software security consulting, web hacking, other
• 7:38
  kinds of things for a number of years at Soundstone Professional
• 7:40
  Services. And in 2009 I landed at the
• 7:43
  Gates Foundation, moved my family to Seattle and spent a
• 7:47
  number of years working there. And it was maybe 2010, I think,
• 7:51
  when I went to my first Gartner identity conference, I believe
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  down in San Diego. And I saw people like Ian Glaser
• 7:58
  on stage and were like, wow, really interesting set of topics
• 8:03
  and spent a couple years, the Gates Foundation working in the
• 8:05
  realm of identity. In 28, 2013, right at the end of
• 8:09
  2013, I moved to Amazon where I worked in retail and I for a
• 8:14
  little while was a technical program manager for the Active
• 8:17
  Directory service that runs all of Amazon's internal Active
• 8:20
  Directory and then eventually became a security manager.
• 8:24
  And then I decided management is not for me and started be it
• 8:29
  went back to being an IC as a security engineer where really
• 8:32
  my focus was 100% on identity. We found an internal team to
• 8:36
  focus on the identity of Amazonians.
• 8:39
  That led me to meet Sarah Cicchetti, because I tried to
• 8:43
  hire Sarah to join my team because I thought, wow, this
• 8:46
  person looks really smart, need to hire her.
• 8:49
  Got in a phone call and realized really quickly, this is not
• 8:52
  going to work, you are too smart for this job.
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  But we became fast friends and in 2016 I went to my first EIC
• 9:01
  conference in Berlin. Nope, not Berlin, sorry.
• 9:04
  It was Munich at the time or Hunter Schleischeim, which is
• 9:07
  not Munich. And then 2016 went to my first
• 9:11
  Identiverse where Sarah got me on stage for the first time in
• 9:14
  a, in a panel. And then it's been, you know,
• 9:17
  going on from there. So around 20/17/2018 we joined
• 9:21
  the Fido Alliance at Amazon. I found my way into the Identity
• 9:26
  community and the Fido Alliance and maybe I have a bit of a big
• 9:30
  mouth and said some things that people liked and here we are
• 9:34
  today. At least you said things that
• 9:36
  people liked. Well, I also said things that
• 9:38
  people didn't like, but sometimes saying the thing that
• 9:42
  people don't like, but saying the right thing and doing the
• 9:45
  right thing for the people that we impact is the right way to
• 9:48
  move forward. And I strongly believe that, you
• 9:51
  know, what we do impacts the lives of individuals every day.
• 9:54
  And it's really important to be clear about that fact and clear
• 9:59
  about the impact that the choices that we make as
• 10:01
  individuals, as companies, as standards developers, it impacts
• 10:05
  people. And we need to make choices that
• 10:06
  are good for other people and think about their privacy, their
• 10:10
  security, not just, you know, usability or how fast I can log
• 10:15
  in. I mean, those are great things
• 10:16
  and those are great metrics. But if we don't protect the
• 10:19
  security of those individuals, or we do things that maybe give
• 10:23
  them a false sense of security, then that's a bad thing and we
• 10:26
  need to avoid that. So now you're with Beyond
• 10:28
  Identity. That's right.
• 10:30
  Give me a little bit of an overview of of what that is.
• 10:32
  And I know we're going to probably talk about this in a
• 10:34
  future episode maybe. But yeah, just give me the
• 10:36
  elevator. Story So the elevator pitch, and
• 10:38
  the reason I joined Beyond Identity is, as you know, I've
• 10:41
  been a strong critic of synchronized pass keys because I
• 10:44
  don't think they're useful for all use cases.
• 10:47
  They're a great password replacement, but passwords
• 10:50
  aren't really enough and passkeys, sync passkeys in many
• 10:53
  cases aren't really enough either.
• 10:54
  So Beyond Identity offers a device bound credential bound
• 10:58
  into a TPM trust execution environment T or a secure
• 11:02
  element that doesn't leave the device.
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  It probably doesn't leave the device.
• 11:08
  And that was what attracted me to Beyond Identity because
• 11:10
  particularly in the enterprise space, that is a really critical
• 11:13
  component for secure enterprises.
• 11:15
  And I have the pleasure of working with Monty Weissman, who
• 11:18
  I've worked with in the Fido Alliance for two years now, and
• 11:21
  he is one of the fathers of the TPM.
• 11:24
  He was there in Trusted Computing Group 25 years ago
• 11:27
  when TCG was founded. I don't think it was called TCG
• 11:30
  at the time and did the work to establish what we now call the
• 11:34
  TPM. And so there's a deep, deep
• 11:37
  pedigree of security in Beyond Identity and joining that was
• 11:41
  really super exciting for me. And believe it or not, I got to
• 11:44
  join at the same time as Sarah Cechetti.
• 11:47
  And, and in fact, now we've come full circle because she now is
• 11:50
  my boss. So funny how things work.
• 11:54
  At least you didn't say you're too smart for the job.
• 11:56
  Thankfully, yeah, that would have been a terrible reorg to
• 11:59
  get reorged out on that one. Yeah.
• 12:00
  What I really love about your story is I hope people go back
• 12:04
  and anything they didn't understand of what you're
• 12:07
  talking about, the kind of that history, they go back and do a
• 12:10
  little research. Because I think I mean the
• 12:12
  context of how we got to where we are today is such a key to
• 12:17
  understanding why things are the way they are.
• 12:20
  That's right. Yeah.
• 12:21
  And that's what I love about this community is we have great
• 12:23
  historical context from people like Pam Dingell and Eve Mailer.
• 12:27
  They've been there for a long time and and they're so open and
• 12:31
  willing to share information and ideas and talk about that
• 12:34
  history. I had dinner last night with Pam
• 12:36
  and a few other folks and we talked about how we all got into
• 12:38
  the identity industry and. And you know, that was part of
• 12:41
  it is sharing that knowledge and also making sure we pass that
• 12:44
  knowledge on because we're not going to be here forever.
• 12:47
  We will eventually retire and we want to do other things.
• 12:50
  And so bringing new people into the industry, teaching them the
• 12:53
  lessons we've learned over the past 20 plus years and, and
• 12:57
  helping them not repeat those same mistakes.
• 13:00
  It's a good thing. And so it's it's good to to do
• 13:02
  the teaching and mentoring and, and help bring people along on
• 13:05
  the journey. Yeah, that's one of the things
• 13:07
  that Jeff and I thought when we started the podcast was this
• 13:10
  could be a time machine for the identity industry for as long as
• 13:14
  we do this thing. So let's pull people in who've
• 13:16
  been around for a long time so that people are going to be
• 13:19
  around for a long time and give that picture of where this
• 13:22
  industry is as of this decade of surrounding.
• 13:27
  Absolutely. I think that's fantastic.
• 13:28
  That's a great, great goal. Yeah, yeah.
• 13:30
  So, Dean, you've been talking about death and the digital
• 13:34
  state. Yeah, that's horvid.
• 13:35
  Wow. It's a real, real knee slapper.
• 13:38
  But I mean, you've been the leading boys, and maybe it was
• 13:41
  because nobody else wanted to talk about this thing, but it's
• 13:44
  really important. I'm just wondering what drew you
• 13:47
  into it in the first. Place yeah, it's a it's a good
• 13:49
  it's a good question. You know, I'm not the only
• 13:52
  person who spoke about this. Kalia Young, 10 plus years ago,
• 13:55
  she spoke about deaths and she held I think 2 conferences on
• 13:59
  conferences called Digital Death Days.
• 14:01
  It didn't take off, surprisingly, because everybody
• 14:05
  wants to talk about death and dying.
• 14:07
  And I should clarify, when we talk about death in this
• 14:11
  context, we're not just talking about death in the sense of you
• 14:15
  are deceased, but also losing control of your, of your own
• 14:18
  ability to manage your own digital estate.
• 14:20
  So if you're incapacitated in some way, that falls into this
• 14:24
  bucket as well. It's much easier to talk about
• 14:26
  death in the digital estate than death and incapacitation and the
• 14:29
  digital estate. So we've sort of shortened it.
• 14:32
  But how I got here is not a great story.
• 14:38
  As I mentioned, I was a consultant with Found Stone for
• 14:40
  a number of years, and after I left Foundstone I moved to
• 14:44
  Seattle. One of my good friends that I
• 14:47
  consulted with at Foundstone, we would spend, you know, nights
• 14:51
  eating good meals, drinking good beer, sitting and playing
• 14:53
  Civilization in our hotel room between between gigs.
• 14:56
  Just one more. Rounds.
• 14:57
  Yeah, exactly. Just one more and suddenly it's
• 15:00
  like 3 in the morning. So my friend Roman unfortunately
• 15:06
  passed away at the age of 39. And this was in 2010.
• 15:10
  And he left behind two small kids and a wife and a digital
• 15:14
  estate. And some of that digital estate
• 15:17
  was inaccessible. And that was really what got me
• 15:21
  started on this journey. I, I spent a lot of time
• 15:23
  thinking about the idea of how do we, how do we deal with this
• 15:27
  problem? And initially my, my solutions
• 15:30
  were pretty rough. I wasn't yet in the identity
• 15:32
  industry or I was early in my identity career.
• 15:35
  And so the solutions really involved the concept of a dead
• 15:37
  man switch. And so if you're familiar with
• 15:39
  like a train and what a dead man switch is, the train conductor
• 15:42
  will step on a switch on the floor.
• 15:44
  And as long as he or she is stepping on that switch, the
• 15:46
  train can move forward. Pressure comes off the switch
• 15:49
  and the train comes to a stop. Now, that's an imperfect
• 15:52
  solution too, because if the conductor happens to pass out
• 15:56
  and fall on the switch, the switch remains depressed and the
• 15:59
  train goes on. So now there's things like
• 16:01
  vigilant systems where an alarm goes off and the conductor has
• 16:04
  to hit a button to acknowledge that.
• 16:07
  And so it's evolved over time. But the basic idea is where I
• 16:11
  started. And so I thought, what if there
• 16:13
  was a dead man switch for our digital accounts where when you
• 16:17
  don't check in after a period of time, say 90 days, it releases
• 16:21
  all of your digital credentials, your passwords at the time.
• 16:24
  Because that's pretty much what we were using.
• 16:26
  To your friends, your family, your loved ones, whomever it is
• 16:28
  that you decide to do that with. The problem is as of last year,
• 16:33
  2023, there was a study done that showed in America only
• 16:36
  about 35% of users are using password managers.
• 16:39
  And that is a really low number. And that makes it challenging
• 16:43
  for that to be a successful mechanism.
• 16:46
  So Fast forward a number of years from from Roman's passing
• 16:50
  and I found myself in Berlin in 2022 at EIC.
• 16:55
  We had just talked about pass keys being released.
• 16:58
  Synchronized pass keys came. I came out earlier that year.
• 17:02
  I saw the writing on the wall with, hey, everyone's going to
• 17:05
  get better credentials. More people are going to have
• 17:07
  credential managers and and kind of saw where things were going.
• 17:10
  But I also saw things coming like mobile driver's licenses
• 17:13
  and verifiable credentials and realized as the credentials got
• 17:17
  better and as they became bound more tightly to an individual
• 17:21
  human, it was going to be harder and harder to turn those
• 17:25
  credentials over. We couldn't just have a dead man
• 17:27
  switch. And so in Berlin in May of 2022,
• 17:31
  I had dinner and drinks and went up at the Hilton Hotel in Berlin
• 17:35
  with Andrew Schickiar from the Fido Alliance, Khalid Zaki from
• 17:38
  AWS, Tim Kapali, then Microsoft, now at Octa and Victoria
• 17:43
  Rotochi. And late into the night we were
• 17:46
  talking and I brought up this idea of a dead man switch for
• 17:49
  your digital accounts. And Tim being Tim, named it
• 17:53
  Dean's Desk Service. And and so DDS became sort of
• 17:57
  the the joke, but we all agreed something needed to happen, but
• 18:01
  we didn't know how to make it happen.
• 18:03
  And nothing did happen. And so Fast forward to last
• 18:07
  year, the summer of last year, it was in July when Victorio
• 18:12
  called me and let me know that he was sick.
• 18:14
  And when Victorio passed on October 7th last year, a week
• 18:19
  later I found myself at IIW and I LED a session IIW about death.
• 18:24
  A week after that, I found myself right here in California
• 18:27
  in Carlsbad at this hotel. And amongst our shared grief and
• 18:32
  stories, we talked earnestly about creating something out of
• 18:36
  this. And that was really where Death
• 18:38
  of the digital Estate came from. And later spend some time
• 18:42
  talking to GAIL Hodges at Open ID Foundation across the winter
• 18:46
  and across Iowa in the spring. And that led us to charter death
• 18:50
  in the digital estate just last month.
• 18:52
  And we will have our first meeting in just a couple of
• 18:54
  weeks on the 15th, I believe of of November, 7:00 AM Pacific.
• 18:59
  Have to check the calendar, make sure I got that right, but I
• 19:01
  think that's right. So check the Open ID Foundation
• 19:04
  calendar and you can find the details on that.
• 19:06
  So great, the bro of notorious name.
• 19:08
  I mean, what a great human being he was.
• 19:11
  He was, he was. And you know, I, I, I have, I, I
• 19:16
  work hard not to make this about Vittorio because it's not about
• 19:20
  Vittorio. It's about all of us, because
• 19:22
  all of us are going to die. And most of us, most humans will
• 19:27
  have some sort of digital estate.
• 19:29
  And there's the bits that you know about, you know, like the
• 19:32
  the photos and the social media posts.
• 19:33
  But then there's all the digital emissions that you leave behind
• 19:37
  or digital exhaust, I think maybe he calls it, you know,
• 19:40
  where, where you're being tracked for advertising or
• 19:43
  whatever purposes. And all of that falls into what
• 19:46
  we consider your digital estate. And we need ways to deal with
• 19:49
  that, that respect the humans that are involved.
• 19:53
  Well, I'm interested to know kind of what is the scope of the
• 19:56
  digital estate because in my mind very simple thinking. 5-10
• 20:02
  years ago was much more simple. URLs, usernames and passwords.
• 20:06
  You could put them in a notepad. That's right.
• 20:08
  And pass them on if you at least like knew you were going to pass
• 20:11
  away soon or something like that.
• 20:15
  But we're here at a conference. But we're talking about like
• 20:17
  killing the password and shifting much more to something
• 20:22
  you are, you know, the biometrics based authentication
• 20:26
  is what a lot of this is going to turn into is what does that
• 20:30
  look like? Well, you know, it's, it's
• 20:33
  challenging and one of the things Eve Mailer, who's been a
• 20:36
  great supporter of, of this work and, and, and really helped me
• 20:40
  think through a lot of this. She really is advocating for
• 20:44
  delegation and I think delegation is the right
• 20:47
  mechanism moving forward. But we first need to define what
• 20:51
  it is that is your digital estate, what is in scope and
• 20:55
  what is out of scope. And I can talk very clearly
• 20:57
  about things that are out of scope because things like
• 20:59
  financial data, particularly here in the US, we have laws
• 21:03
  like I believe it's called Rufada that control how your
• 21:06
  financial assets are dealt with after death.
• 21:09
  That doesn't include your cryptocurrency.
• 21:11
  I did actually speak to a lawyer who told me that she advises,
• 21:14
  off the record, her clients go figure out how to get that
• 21:17
  cryptocurrency. White hat, Black Hat, whatever
• 21:20
  it takes, go get it, which is super scary.
• 21:24
  Not everybody has access to a group of white hats or black
• 21:26
  hats to go get that data. But there are certain things
• 21:30
  that are clearly out of scope. We need to keep out of scope,
• 21:34
  but what's in scope is, you know, anything that is
• 21:37
  representative of me or my thoughts or feelings digitally,
• 21:41
  whether it's located on my local hard drive, you know, sitting on
• 21:46
  ACD in my house. Do we use CDs for data anymore?
• 21:50
  I don't think we do. I don't know.
• 21:52
  I, I don't know. I found the whole spindle of
• 21:54
  them in the house the other day and I was like wow this is
• 21:56
  crazy. Did you throw them away though?
• 21:59
  I'll. Watch a blank.
• 22:00
  Cdr because I'm a pack rat. So no, I still have a huge stack
• 22:04
  of CDRS and DVDRS that I don't know what to do with.
• 22:07
  But all of the data, wherever it exists, whether it's audio of
• 22:13
  me, video of me, my writings, pictures that I've taken, all of
• 22:19
  that stuff is part of my digital estate.
• 22:20
  But it also is the cryptocurrency I own, and I
• 22:23
  don't play in that game. I don't have any cryptocurrency,
• 22:27
  but but the the cryptocurrency your avatars on like Cam spoke
• 22:33
  this morning about Sony PlayStation, your avatar on
• 22:36
  PlayStation, right? I mean, that's part of your
• 22:38
  digital estate. That's part of who you are.
• 22:41
  So there's lots of things, right?
• 22:43
  There's an entire library of things.
• 22:45
  But then there's things that go beyond that because we don't
• 22:50
  know what's going to be created in the next five years or 10
• 22:52
  years. And so when I think about a
• 22:54
  digital estate, it includes things that we as humans haven't
• 22:58
  developed yet or are on the verge of developing.
• 23:01
  And and so that that that creates a whole bucket of of
• 23:06
  things that we have to take a look at that we don't even know
• 23:09
  how to classify at this time. Yeah, one thing I was thinking
• 23:11
  about was photos, because we very infrequently go and get
• 23:17
  prints of photos anymore. We think, oh, we've got them on.
• 23:20
  Some people do Facebook, other people do Google Photos or
• 23:24
  wherever people are storing them.
• 23:26
  If you lost those photos, I mean, those are family
• 23:29
  heirlooms. You look back when you have
• 23:31
  photos of your grandparents or, you know, people long ago in
• 23:35
  your family, you haven't been with us.
• 23:38
  Losing those photos would be a huge deal.
• 23:41
  You wouldn't be able to pass this on for generations.
• 23:43
  So I think that's an important one.
• 23:45
  Yeah, we no longer have the the shoe box of photos stuffed under
• 23:48
  the bed. Right now.
• 23:50
  That shoe box of photos is stuffed into somebody else's
• 23:52
  computer in the cloud. And it's one of the things I
• 23:55
  think about with my own digital estate.
• 23:56
  Like I was talking to to some folks this weekend about it and,
• 24:01
  and recognize that I don't have a backup of all of that.
• 24:04
  Like I don't have an offline backup or maintain offline
• 24:07
  backups of my writings and and other things.
• 24:10
  And I probably need to because someday it's going to go away.
• 24:15
  So I mentioned Rufada, the law that controls like financial
• 24:18
  assets in the US, One of the things that happens when you die
• 24:22
  is your credit cards and your bank accounts get frozen.
• 24:25
  And So what happens to the Google Cloud account that I have
• 24:30
  that runs a domain for my family that has all of our e-mail, our
• 24:35
  calendars, our notes, etcetera, or my iCloud account that has
• 24:39
  all of our photos. What happens to all of that when
• 24:42
  I die and those credit cards are no longer chargeable and
• 24:47
  suddenly Apple's like, well, got to shut your stuff down.
• 24:49
  That's right. And I could set up a legacy
• 24:51
  contact and that's available through Facebook and Apple and
• 24:55
  other other kinds of services. But it's a lot.
• 24:59
  There's a lot of activation energy that goes into actually
• 25:01
  thinking about that and doing that, that frankly, I'm
• 25:05
  imperfect in view and it's been hard to overcome and I haven't
• 25:07
  done that, but I need to. What I hear you talking about is
• 25:11
  that you rely on these services, say your your Apple cloud or
• 25:17
  Google Cloud to store all these files and you have to pay even
• 25:21
  if it's as low as $1.99 a month. Your credit card gets frozen.
• 25:26
  You don't pay that bill for whatever number of days.
• 25:29
  They just delete it, right? Is there a way to even restore
• 25:32
  it? I mean, that's the thought that
• 25:34
  needs to go into it. It is.
• 25:36
  And Ian Glazer and, and I were chatting and he, he was helpful
• 25:41
  and pointed out something about legacy contacts.
• 25:45
  So I believe it was at Apple he was talking about with legacy
• 25:47
  contacts, they get access to say photos and other documents, but
• 25:51
  they don't get access to your pass keys if they're stored in
• 25:54
  the Apple password app or any password stored there.
• 25:57
  And so those things would have to be proactively shared with
• 26:00
  somebody else if you wanted to share that data with somebody in
• 26:05
  the event of your death. So there's so much to think
• 26:08
  about here. And, you know, as someone who's
• 26:11
  thinking about this a lot these days, and it's not something I
• 26:14
  enjoy thinking about, but it's the reality.
• 26:17
  It's it's near impossible to think about all the implications
• 26:21
  of what happens in the days to weeks to months after I die when
• 26:26
  my family is going to be grieving and not in the state of
• 26:30
  mind to deal with all of this stuff in that short time frame
• 26:34
  before things start getting deleted, removed from services,
• 26:37
  etcetera and may never be recoverable again.
• 26:40
  Well, I think part of the discussion also needs to be
• 26:42
  about. I don't have the audio frame.
• 26:46
  There also needs to be some discussion around the your
• 26:52
  wishes. How do you want to be received
• 26:54
  after you pass, right. So the story that I was thinking
• 26:58
  of when you mentioned this was my father.
• 27:01
  If you search for Jeff Steadman on LinkedIn, he has a profile
• 27:04
  there. It's been inactive for 1214
• 27:08
  years since he passed, but it's still out there in the void of
• 27:13
  LinkedIn in this case of there's this profile, how should we
• 27:18
  treat things like that? How do we mark things as closed
• 27:23
  or, you know, gone or whatever, things like that?
• 27:25
  And you know, are there ways to approach that?
• 27:28
  I don't know that I have a specific way to approach it.
• 27:33
  I will tell you that Speaking of LinkedIn, I before I did the
• 27:38
  Identiverse presentation that I did the keynote earlier this
• 27:40
  year. I found on LinkedIn a person
• 27:45
  whose job change or job update said, you know, so and so is now
• 27:51
  deceased at none. And I was like, wow, that is a
• 27:54
  terrible, terrible way to represent somebody in death.
• 27:58
  That's how. You want to find out.
• 28:00
  Right. It's not how I want to find out
• 28:01
  that someone I know professionally has passed away.
• 28:04
  But what was even weirder is people liked that job update
• 28:08
  because it was a job update and I'm sure people are just blindly
• 28:11
  quick and crew and liking this. And it was like, who likes this
• 28:14
  thing? So I, I think, you know, as we,
• 28:18
  we talk about death with digital estate, I, I wrote down three of
• 28:22
  our organizing principles because we need to organize
• 28:25
  around treating humans as humans, But that means we need
• 28:30
  to organize around principles of respect because not every
• 28:34
  culture, every religion, every person treats death in the same
• 28:38
  way. And so I don't know how someone
• 28:41
  else's religion or culture treats death.
• 28:44
  And I don't want to state they should do things with a certain
• 28:47
  way. I don't, I don't think that's my
• 28:48
  place. I don't think that's anyone's
• 28:50
  place. I think it's a very personal set
• 28:51
  of choices. But also I, we have an
• 28:54
  organizing principle of empowerment through consent.
• 28:57
  And someone challenged me on the word consent and said it should
• 29:00
  be choice. And, and I strongly believe that
• 29:02
  that's actually an accurate statement that we empower people
• 29:06
  by giving them choices as to what they wish to happen to
• 29:09
  their data. And so that may mean people are
• 29:13
  weird and you've got a private stash of photos that you don't
• 29:17
  want anyone to see. You certainly don't want your
• 29:18
  kids or grandkids see them. Maybe you want all that stuff
• 29:21
  deleted. Or maybe you want some personal
• 29:23
  writings, a personal diary deleted.
• 29:25
  Maybe you want to archive your blog for posterity, or maybe you
• 29:29
  want to save it for some future date.
• 29:31
  Maybe you wish to delete your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn
• 29:35
  profile, or maybe you wish to make updates which are are more
• 29:38
  personal and, and reflect the wishes and the choices of the
• 29:43
  individual. And so, so empowerment through
• 29:47
  either consent or choice or potentially both is really
• 29:50
  important. But that also means being able
• 29:52
  to delegate that access to somebody to maybe do those
• 29:55
  updates on your behalf. And then the the third
• 29:57
  organizing principle was around interoperability and
• 30:00
  accessibility because it's not good enough to be able to do
• 30:04
  this at one service at a time. We need a control plane, We need
• 30:08
  our own digital control plane to be able to determine or state
• 30:12
  our wishes in a way that makes sense and enforces that that set
• 30:18
  of choices or that that consent that we are are pre authorizing
• 30:23
  someone to do things on our behalf.
• 30:24
  So. What do you feel is the right
• 30:26
  way for the industry to go about managing this?
• 30:30
  Is it is the individual's responsibility, is the each
• 30:34
  company's responsibility, Should we have some kind of regulation
• 30:39
  or is it estate planners have to kind of come up to speed on
• 30:44
  including digital assets? Have you even thought to how
• 30:48
  this should be fixed? Well, I'll answer your question
• 30:51
  with one word, yes, yes to all of the above.
• 30:54
  But it's, it's really not as simple as that, I don't think,
• 30:57
  because we need fine grain controls to do this.
• 31:02
  GAIL Hunt just pointed out to me the history of a living will and
• 31:06
  a power of attorney for, you know, when you are unable to
• 31:10
  make medical decisions on their own behalf.
• 31:13
  And I did a little bit of research on it thanks to GAIL.
• 31:15
  And the idea of a living will came about in the late 60s.
• 31:19
  And the reason for it was in the late 60s, medical care was
• 31:23
  getting significantly better. And what it meant was that
• 31:28
  doctors, nurses could prolong people's lives when they were in
• 31:32
  a near death situation. What they did so at high expense
• 31:38
  to their families, they did so possibly by causing more pain
• 31:42
  and prolonging persons suffering.
• 31:45
  And it really wasn't necessarily the ideal set of outcomes.
• 31:49
  And we didn't give people a way to make active choices about how
• 31:54
  they wished to be treated when they were ill and potentially
• 31:58
  facing death. And so it was out of that that
• 32:01
  came in the late 60s and through the 70's, the concept of a
• 32:05
  living will where you choose actively what you wish to occur
• 32:10
  in certain situations. And I certainly have a living
• 32:13
  will. My wife has a living will.
• 32:15
  It was part of our estate planning.
• 32:16
  So that's where it should. Have one do you believe?
• 32:18
  I think everyone should have one.
• 32:20
  But maybe what we need is to to recognize that now, in this era,
• 32:25
  in this time on the Internet. And, you know, I've been on the
• 32:28
  Internet for way more years than I care to tell, but it's north
• 32:31
  of 35, I think now in, you know, now I realize that we need
• 32:37
  something like that for Internet denizens to be able to make
• 32:42
  those active decisions. And in the same way, a living
• 32:45
  will states your wishes or your choices about what you wish to
• 32:48
  happen to certain things, we should have a, a, a sort of a
• 32:51
  living will for your digital assets.
• 32:53
  And similarly, the ability to have power of attorney or a, a
• 32:58
  similar kind of a concept. And I am not a lawyer, so don't
• 33:01
  quote me on these things, but but a similar concept of power
• 33:05
  of attorney where you are delegating access to somebody on
• 33:09
  your behalf to execute your wishes when you can't
• 33:12
  necessarily do it, when you can no longer do it yourself,
• 33:16
  whether you're deceased or you're incapacitated temporarily
• 33:20
  or permanently. And so I think those models
• 33:23
  work, but we need more exploration because I don't
• 33:27
  think it's as simple as just that.
• 33:29
  I think it's that plus the control plane, plus eventually
• 33:33
  trying to establish maybe protocols where through that
• 33:36
  control plane I can communicate to all the platforms I use,
• 33:39
  etcetera. These are my desires, these are
• 33:42
  my wishes and there is a a mechanism to execute those
• 33:47
  wishes. Maybe that's a bad term, but
• 33:49
  execute those wishes when somebody passes away.
• 33:54
  So where does AI fit into this equation?
• 33:56
  Because I feel like we can't have a conversation now without
• 33:59
  AI being part of it. If if I go off and create AAI
• 34:03
  version of myself, I would assume that becomes part of my
• 34:05
  digital estate, right? Yeah, that would absolutely be
• 34:08
  part of your digital estate. You guys recently had a podcast
• 34:11
  with E Mailer where I believe you talked about personhood
• 34:13
  credentials. And I read that paper that, you
• 34:17
  know, a lot of authors were on that paper about personhood
• 34:19
  credentials and I thought it was really interesting, but they
• 34:21
  spent a lot of time talking about agentic AI and creating AI
• 34:25
  agents that go out and do things for you.
• 34:28
  Now that sounds really cool. I'd love to have, you know, bots
• 34:30
  going out there and doing things on my behalf.
• 34:32
  But what happens to that bot when I die?
• 34:35
  Does it keep roaming the Internet on my behalf and doing
• 34:38
  things on my behalf and, you know, going and liking job
• 34:41
  updates and, and all these other things?
• 34:43
  And I mean, I know I don't do this because, you know, I'm
• 34:46
  actual and actual human on the Internet who does things on my
• 34:48
  own behalf. But if I had something doing
• 34:50
  things on my behalf, does that continue after I die?
• 34:54
  How do we shut it down? Or do we shut it down?
• 34:57
  Mike Kaiser when we were at Ideniverse this summer, told a
• 35:02
  story about, I believe it was a man who lost his partner and he
• 35:08
  had an AI bot of his partner that he kept alive for some
• 35:12
  period of time during his grieving and.
• 35:16
  Well, it's also, you know, episode of Black Mirror.
• 35:18
  Oh well, there, there you go. I'm not a Black Mirror.
• 35:19
  Fan so I didn't know that but. But that idea is really
• 35:22
  interesting and and maybe that was helpful for helpful for this
• 35:26
  person as he was grieving the loss of his partner.
• 35:29
  But was his partner consent? Did his partner consent to that?
• 35:34
  And so when I think about AI, what if we use AI to remix
• 35:40
  photos of me or audio and video of me?
• 35:42
  What if suddenly that audio says things that I would never say or
• 35:46
  do, or that video does things that I would never have done.
• 35:51
  So we need controls to prevent the reuse the remix of that
• 35:55
  data, in addition to, to more of the agent based AI stuff.
• 36:00
  It's, it's a complex topic. There's no one right answer.
• 36:03
  And I, I certainly don't have all the answers, which is why I
• 36:05
  need intelligent people to come and help me with death from
• 36:08
  digital estate community group so we can work on this problem
• 36:11
  together. And it's, it's not a problem
• 36:13
  that's going away. It's a problem that is only
• 36:15
  getting worse. Khalia Young many years ago in
• 36:18
  a, in a talk I watched, made the statement that, you know, there
• 36:21
  are more people who are alive on the Internet today than who have
• 36:24
  representations of death on the Internet.
• 36:26
  And I thought it was a really interesting comment because she
• 36:31
  went on to say at some point we'll hit a tipping point where
• 36:34
  there are more people who are dead who have a representation
• 36:39
  on the Internet than who are alive on the Internet.
• 36:41
  And once we hit that tipping point right, do we hit that
• 36:44
  tipping point? We're not coming back.
• 36:46
  Yeah, that's interesting. So as far as like you talked
• 36:54
  about the Legacy.com legacy contacts in terms of social
• 36:58
  media. And So what I thought was
• 37:02
  interesting is like some people's social media accounts
• 37:05
  actually have monetary value, right?
• 37:07
  Maybe they have. 20 million followers are these Do you have
• 37:12
  any interesting stories of like where people have passed away?
• 37:15
  Then they had accounts that people wound up in lawsuits
• 37:18
  trying to. Fight over.
• 37:20
  Yeah, well, this is the Mr. Beast YouTube.
• 37:22
  Account you know, it's so funny that you bring up Mr. Beast.
• 37:25
  I had dinner, I had lunch with Sarah Cicchetti and my team last
• 37:28
  week and somehow the topic of Mr. Beast came up and I said.
• 37:33
  Yeah. And, and she's like, no, no,
• 37:35
  really, you know who that is, right?
• 37:36
  I'm like, no, she's like, text your daughter.
• 37:38
  She knows who that is. And my daughter's 16.
• 37:40
  I text her. And of course she's like, of
• 37:41
  course I knew who that is, dad. And then I talked to my son
• 37:44
  who's 9. He's like, of course I knew who
• 37:46
  that is, dad. So I am apparently the uncool
• 37:48
  dad. But no, I don't have any
• 37:51
  stories, but it would be interesting to know that
• 37:52
  because, you know, certainly the work that I've done around
• 37:55
  account recovery, I, I have seen instances where somebody, maybe
• 38:01
  a partner in a, in a, in a company has died.
• 38:04
  And then how does that organization recover access to
• 38:09
  that partner's accounts? Or maybe it's the domain name or
• 38:13
  whatever. And I mean, my domain is that I,
• 38:14
  I think about this like how does my family recover access to
• 38:17
  those domain names? I think that expands, we talk
• 38:19
  about the monetary value of a Mr. Beast or whatever other
• 38:22
  Internet star. I don't know because I'm just
• 38:25
  not that cool, but that's a really a great thought and I
• 38:30
  don't know how we deal with it. I don't know how their wills
• 38:33
  deal with it or if it's even included there.
• 38:35
  What happens like this podcast, right?
• 38:38
  Someone wants to come along and it's like The Beatles back
• 38:41
  catalog, you know, They're like, OK, normal.
• 38:44
  Feel. Like the Identity at the Center
• 38:47
  podcast, you and I have both asked on, you know, what happens
• 38:51
  to this thing that we're doing, we've been doing for the last
• 38:53
  five years. It's just going to live out
• 38:54
  there somewhere, I imagine. We hope it lives out there.
• 38:57
  I mean, like you said in the beginning, you did this because
• 38:59
  you wanted to be able to share this information and and share
• 39:02
  that long history about identity into the future.
• 39:05
  So yeah, I hope it continues living on, but I don't know.
• 39:10
  I don't know that anybody knows. And that's part of the problem
• 39:12
  that we're dealing with. So you mentioned a working group
• 39:16
  is that you need people to. So how does somebody become, if
• 39:21
  there's somebody there's really interested in working on this
• 39:24
  problem, how do they involve? It's really easy Open ID
• 39:29
  Foundation. I think I would say die.
• 39:32
  Wow, that would that would, that would.
• 39:34
  We didn't test subjects that would.
• 39:35
  That would be hard mode. OK, let's not do that.
• 39:38
  Let's not go there yet. So through the Open ID
• 39:41
  Foundation, we chartered a community group.
• 39:44
  No IPR agreements required. We're not going to create any IP
• 39:49
  and so it makes it easy for those of you who work for large
• 39:51
  companies that you know, don't are maybe hesitant to sign IP.
• 39:53
  Rs the the community group is through the Open ID Foundation,
• 39:58
  openid.net. I hope I got that right.
• 40:00
  I'll have a link in our show notes.
• 40:01
  Sweet. Thank you.
• 40:03
  And it's the death of the Digital Estate Community Group.
• 40:05
  Through Open ID Foundation, you can simply join the mailing
• 40:08
  list, You can join the calls. We are working on what is known
• 40:12
  as the participation agreement. So it's a legal participation
• 40:14
  agreement that you have to sign that will come in, in due
• 40:18
  course. It should be happening in the
• 40:19
  next couple of weeks here. And simply join and show up,
• 40:23
  show up on the meetings, join the mailing list.
• 40:26
  We have a GitHub repo and that GitHub repo we're going to be
• 40:30
  collecting use cases and other data.
• 40:32
  We've got a set of deliverables that we hope to deliver over the
• 40:34
  next couple of years. And it's through that mechanism
• 40:38
  of regular Zoom calls that we will move this work forward.
• 40:43
  I had a reach out from somebody here in the Fido Alliance, and
• 40:47
  he introduced me to a professor in Japan.
• 40:51
  And the professor works in sociology but has spent the past
• 40:54
  year, 10 years, exploring this topic of death in the Internet.
• 40:59
  And he was very interested. He immediately joined the
• 41:03
  mailing list and I look forward to getting his feedback from his
• 41:06
  research because I believe we need those academics to come in
• 41:10
  and help us, as well as lawyers and technologists and identity
• 41:13
  people. And everybody has a role to
• 41:16
  play. So I look forward to everyone
• 41:18
  joining us, you guys and the folks here at the the conference
• 41:22
  today and your listeners, because this is a case where,
• 41:26
  you know, if you want to go fast, go alone.
• 41:28
  But we don't want to go fast. We want to go far.
• 41:30
  And to go far, we need to go together.
• 41:33
  And I need lots of people to help me with this because I
• 41:37
  don't have all the answers. I don't even know that I have
• 41:39
  all the questions to ask. And so it's up to us as a
• 41:43
  community to move this work forward and develop this work.
• 41:46
  It's fine. This is how this is how this
• 41:49
  industry works, right? There's this idea and then it
• 41:52
  starts to get shared and then people start to put their heads
• 41:55
  together and then the next thing you know, you've got SAML or XML
• 41:59
  or JavaScript, right? This is how it's not JavaScript.
• 42:04
  I mean, I had a rough history. But this is how this, this sort
• 42:07
  of thing starts, which is really interesting.
• 42:10
  I'm curious to see what are the cultural implications of this,
• 42:14
  because we approach it from an probably an American point of
• 42:17
  view, right? It might have a completely
• 42:19
  different meaning or in different contexts right around
• 42:22
  the world. And what the expectations are of
• 42:25
  how should this be approached from a human perspective and not
• 42:29
  just a, well, this is what America says, right?
• 42:32
  Right. And that's why we need a broad
• 42:34
  coalition of people who represent lots of different
• 42:37
  cultures, lots of different religions.
• 42:40
  You know, I have my own my own set of beliefs which are
• 42:43
  unimportant for the conversation, but they're
• 42:45
  probably different than yours and that's okay.
• 42:48
  But we need to respect that everyone's beliefs that is
• 42:51
  different and how they treat this topic is going to be
• 42:54
  different. And to do that effectively, we
• 42:58
  need broad based, it's a broad based set of people to come and
• 43:02
  help define this for us and not define hard controls in a way
• 43:07
  that is, is heavily influenced by our very Western perspective
• 43:11
  or American perspective, but rather develop controls that are
• 43:14
  flexible and work for people from all different religions,
• 43:18
  all different countries. And, and, and that's going to
• 43:21
  be, frankly, it's going to be difficult, right?
• 43:24
  I don't know how we will do that successfully, but we will make
• 43:28
  every effort to be as inclusive as possible in how we approach
• 43:32
  this topic. Well, I definitely want to check
• 43:35
  in and get like milestones. So open invite as this thing
• 43:39
  progresses and there's things that you feel like, hey, the
• 43:41
  world needs to know about this, come back on, let's talk about
• 43:44
  it. We'd love to and try to drive
• 43:45
  some more awareness from it and get it out there, right?
• 43:48
  People need to be aware that this is something that is being
• 43:51
  thought about. Moreheads, right?
• 43:54
  It's a marathon. I don't know if this is ever
• 43:56
  done right. I think there's probably
• 43:58
  iterations, I would imagine, of what the definition of a digital
• 44:01
  estate means and what should happen.
• 44:02
  And all the things they haven't thought about or invented yet
• 44:06
  need to be a counterforward part of this.
• 44:07
  Well, we need those academics who have worked in this space.
• 44:10
  And I know there's person in the UK who did a thesis on on this
• 44:15
  idea. I mentioned the professor in in
• 44:17
  Japan. And so we need to start pulling
• 44:19
  in some of those resources as well.
• 44:21
  And you know, that's where having friends in this community
• 44:25
  who can help identify those people and help draw them in to
• 44:29
  help with the work is going to be so critically important to
• 44:32
  getting this done. Well, let's lighten the mood a
• 44:34
  little bit. Please bring this up with a
• 44:36
  little lighter note. I know you're a board game
• 44:40
  aficionado. I don't want to always say like
• 44:42
  enthusiast, expert, yeah, etc. What's your favorite board game
• 44:47
  of? All time.
• 44:50
  Probably my favorite of all time.
• 44:53
  Oh man, that's a tough one. There's a lot that I like, so
• 44:59
  I'll tell you what, I'm and. You could beat loose with your
• 45:01
  interpretation. Of foreign game.
• 45:02
  Well, I'll tell you what I've been playing a lot lately.
• 45:05
  I play a fair number of board games with my my son.
• 45:08
  He'll be 10 in about a week actually before the show airs,
• 45:11
  he'll he'll have turned 10. But he is really likes the game
• 45:16
  morels, which is a a a card game very simple 30 ish minutes.
• 45:21
  It's great. It's super easy.
• 45:24
  I like board. I like board games that are
• 45:26
  accessible to sort of all ages. Settlers of Catan has been a
• 45:31
  long time favorite ticket to ride and I am completely
• 45:36
  blanking on the name now, but I'll I'll eventually.
• 45:39
  I'll eventually get there. It's French and that's where the
• 45:41
  comments. Will like call it out here.
• 45:43
  Yeah, probably. Yeah.
• 45:46
  You're, you're build, you're building, you're building
• 45:48
  cities, you're putting the other tiles to build cities.
• 45:51
  And I cannot believe I cannot come up with the name, but it's
• 45:53
  a French name and I am absolutely embarrassed that I I
• 45:57
  cannot come up with it On and on queue here.
• 46:00
  But of course things like Exploding Kittens and Exploding
• 46:03
  Kittens NSFW. I'll get it out eventually.
• 46:09
  And of course, I own the full set of Cards Against Identity,
• 46:13
  and I look forward to getting to play that with some of my
• 46:15
  Identity friends real soon. Now.
• 46:17
  Hopefully I'll have a chance to do that in the very near future.
• 46:20
  But yeah, I enjoy more lightweight games, things like
• 46:25
  Agricola and Puerto Rico. Too heavy, too.
• 46:29
  I don't have three hours sit down and play board games.
• 46:31
  Need a break from civilization you wanna have?
• 46:34
  Right. Exactly.
• 46:35
  Yeah. Jim, what's your favorite board
• 46:37
  game of the? Platter So I I thought about
• 46:39
  this question because I saw on our show that you were going to
• 46:41
  fart about it and I thought, well, it really depended on the
• 46:44
  time in my life. So you start out with like
• 46:46
  shoots of the ladders and there you go.
• 46:48
  Maybe it's Monopoly and then Trivial Pursuit.
• 46:53
  I really love for risk. At one point in my life, like I
• 46:56
  had some college buddies, we would do whatever, drink a beer,
• 47:01
  play risks for hours on end, sometimes all night.
• 47:05
  Love that you mentioned the game though.
• 47:07
  But because then I became a parent and then it's like games
• 47:10
  that you can play with your kids.
• 47:12
  And the coolest one that I found was Ticket to Ride.
• 47:15
  Yep. And there's also a version you
• 47:17
  can put on your iPhone if you want to totally geek out.
• 47:20
  You can play the game all the time, but it's a lot of fun.
• 47:24
  It's a pretty new game, I think, like within the past decade.
• 47:27
  I mean, that's later. Discovered it.
• 47:29
  I think Ticket to ride goes. Back to the the late 90s or
• 47:32
  early 2000s, actually. That's when I first first heard
• 47:35
  about it and I do remember the name of the game.
• 47:37
  Finally, Karkasan. I don't know why I couldn't come
• 47:39
  up with it but Karkasan is a great game.
• 47:41
  My entire family, well my my kids and and I like it.
• 47:44
  My my wife was not a board game player, which is OK, we will
• 47:48
  forgive her. She loves Uno though, so we do
• 47:50
  play a lot of Uno in our house. Uno is another one.
• 47:52
  Yeah, but you mentioned Cards Against Identity.
• 47:56
  Justin Richard was on her address.
• 47:58
  He's a friend of the show, I guess.
• 48:01
  But I guess my final boat, Kick it to ride.
• 48:04
  Kick it to ride. Yeah, OK.
• 48:06
  I can get down with that. So it's interesting you guys are
• 48:08
  are we get this from the angle of, you know, your kids and the
• 48:11
  accessibility. I don't have kids.
• 48:13
  So I'm thinking of things like, you know, Cards Against
• 48:15
  Humanity, right, Little war on the not safe for work stuff.
• 48:19
  I enjoy that kind of stuff. You know, there was lice when I
• 48:21
  was a kid that was sort of the big one only because like, oh,
• 48:24
  it's like a 3D game with like there's a mountain, you know,
• 48:27
  cars and things like it's. Very 1950s though, yeah, I mean.
• 48:31
  It's old school for sure. There was one as growing up and
• 48:33
  I don't remember the name of it, but it was I think it was called
• 48:36
  crossbows and catapults. And it was almost like you're
• 48:40
  building forts on each side with kind of like giant Lego block
• 48:44
  type scenario. And you would have a crossbow or
• 48:48
  a cannibal that was powered by a rubber bands.
• 48:51
  And you'd had these little discs that you would shoot to the
• 48:55
  crossbow or try to launch the chemical to the other person's
• 48:58
  base and try to do as much damage as possible to their
• 49:02
  base. And so the skill was, can you
• 49:05
  aim it? Can you get just the right
• 49:06
  amount of tension right on the rubber band to launch the
• 49:09
  projectile into it? And so I don't know what I don't
• 49:14
  know what it was, but I just have fond memories of one of my
• 49:16
  younger brothers and I playing that and in every way getting
• 49:20
  into fights or what was, you know, the damage that the other
• 49:24
  was doing to the other place and things like that.
• 49:26
  So yeah, I would say Crossbows and Cannibals is probably the
• 49:28
  one that has the most, you know, visceral metal or from.
• 49:32
  That era Stratego, I think, was one of the games that we played
• 49:36
  a lot. Yeah, it's not when I was a kid.
• 49:38
  Yeah, battleship. Battle battleship on the back of
• 49:41
  an airplane seat with, you know, people on the flight as well.
• 49:45
  Here's a meme I've seen where, you know, there's two people
• 49:47
  playing battleship and one person is sitting behind the
• 49:50
  cross so they can see exactly. Oh, that's awesome.
• 49:53
  What they're what they're trying to hit.
• 49:55
  And yeah, just if you're putting that on an airplane, just be
• 49:59
  aware of your surroundings. Make sure that you know.
• 50:01
  We should all be aware of our surroundings with airplanes.
• 50:03
  You, you have no idea the number of things that I've seen on
• 50:05
  people's screens inadvertently over the years because I'd spend
• 50:08
  a lot of time on planes these days.
• 50:10
  So yeah, we all, we all need to be careful of that.
• 50:13
  That's a good pro tip for travel for sure.
• 50:15
  All right, why don't we go ahead and grab it out there?
• 50:16
  I'm getting a dry voice here and then you get some like we.
• 50:19
  Have old one. Two years, something like that.
• 50:22
  We're on the web, IDC, podcast.com.
• 50:24
  Dean, thank you so much for joining us.
• 50:25
  We're going to have your LinkedIn profile on our show
• 50:27
  notes so people can check that out, as well as the website for
• 50:30
  the deaf and digital estates and also a link to Beyond Identity.
• 50:34
  People want to check that as well.
• 50:36
  Let's see what else We're on YouTube, IDAIDAC, podcast.tv.
• 50:40
  We'll take you right to our YouTube channel, Twitter, We're
• 50:45
  there. LinkedIn connected with us on
• 50:47
  LinkedIn, Mastodon, Mastodon. I mean, we're kind of
• 50:50
  everywhere. Linked all the socials.
• 50:51
  That were. Well.
• 50:53
  You've got all the socials. Yes but I think YouTube is the
• 50:56
  main 1. Great.
• 50:57
  Go to YouTube, subscribe, Hit the ring the bell, baby.
• 51:02
  That's right, like and subscribe and yeah, that helps us bring
• 51:05
  conversations like this to life. So all right, let's wrap it up
• 51:09
  there. Thanks everyone for watching and
• 51:11
  or listening and we'll talk with you on the next one.
• 51:13
  Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate the time you've been
• 51:18
  listening to Identity at the Center.
• 51:21
  We hope you've enjoyed the show. Make sure to like rate and
• 51:25
  review and we'll be back soon. But in the meantime, hit the
• 51:28
  website at identity@thecenter.com.
• 51:32
  See you next time on Identity at the Center.