Show notes
Episode Notes
AI can fake anyone, and AI agents can pass as human. So how do you prove a real person sent the message that moves your money, and who answers when an AI agent gets it wrong? Cody puts that question to Wes Kussmaul.
Wes launched the Kussmaul Encyclopedia in 1981, the online service that became Delphi, and sold Delphi to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in 1993. He founded The Authenticity Institute and wrote Quiet Enjoyment, a book about bringing accountability back to social media.
His answer is accountable anonymity, and he explains it with a licence plate. Your plate makes you answerable on the road without telling strangers your name, and your identity only comes out when there's a reason, like a fender bender or a court order. Online, he says, you can prove you're a real, accountable person without handing your identity to every company you deal with. He walks through the system he's building: separate persona certificates for dating, work and everything else, an attestation officer who is the only one who knows who you are, and a central database in Geneva that holds no personal information, so even a dictator at gunpoint gets nothing from it. He says licensees are already building on it, from dating to hiring to signed content an audience can check against deepfakes.
On AI agents, his rule is simple: any AI that can pass as a human needs a human conservator, a licensed professional who answers for what it does and can lose that licence. Cody says he doesn't see a way around it.
They also talk about how Delphi handled anonymity in the '80s, when, as Wes tells it, even the DEA needed a court order to learn who was behind a username; his account of why UN member states shut down a global identity network he worked on; the City of Osmio and his question "who asked Microsoft to be our government?"; Optimocracy, where you only vote after you've done the homework; his argument for owning information about yourself; whether AI is conscious and whether software engineering as we know it is dying; how, in his telling, US encryption export rules handed Canadian companies an opening; Canada's Bill C-22; and why he thinks IT should be a licensed profession, like architecture. To go deeper, Wes suggests starting with the SHIPS videos (Solutions Hiding in Plain Sight) on the Authentiverse site.
Chapters:
0:00 Proving you're real when AI can fake anyone
2:05 The truth the data industry won't admit
3:23 Social media in the '80s, before you were the product
7:51 From Delphi to the UN identity project nations killed
15:21 City of Osmio vs Microsoft's universal ID
19:23 Blockchain vs accountable anonymity: the licence plate model
22:16 Dating, hiring and signed content built on it
25:35 Multiple personas and attestation officers
29:14 An identity database with no identity in it
31:12 Optimocracy: no vote without the homework
34:50 Owning your own information
38:12 Is AI conscious? Is software engineering dying?
39:59 AI conservators: who answers for AI agents
43:24 Bill C-22, backdoors and licensing for IT
Find Wes:
Website: https://weskussmaul.com
Authentiverse (start with the SHIPS videos): https://authentiverse.com
The Authenticity Institute: https://www.authenticityinstitute.com
City of Osmio: https://www.osmio.ch
Optimocracy: https://optimocracy.org
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Context: this conversation reflects the speakers' views. Wes describes a system that he and his organizations build and license; his descriptions of it, its licensees and his history are his own account and weren't independently verified. Nothing here is legal advice. Correction: near the end, I say Bill C-22 makes every company build a backdoor into its systems. The version the House of Commons passed on June 18, 2026 lets the federal cabinet require "core providers", classes of service providers listed in the bill, to build access capabilities and keep some metadata for up to six months. It exempts them from any requirement that would create a "systemic vulnerability", and it says they can't be compelled to decrypt users' data unless the provider supplied the encryption and holds the keys. As of October 24, 2026, the bill is before a Senate committee and is not law. Contains explicit language.
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