This is identity at the center. 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. Happy anniversary. 400 episodes
of Identity at the Center. Pretty crazy.
That's 400. I wouldn't say 400 weeks, right?
It's probably close. So, I mean, there were a lot of
weeks where we did more than one episode, but it 6 1/2 years, 400
episodes, I think we're ahead of pace.
Yeah, it's been a crazy wild ride.
Yeah, I think we're we're going to do today is kind of talk
about that journey that the podcast has been on and the
growth we've seen and then maybe talk through like some trends.
But I guess to kick down the 4th wall that we that I like to do
at least is this is actually the first episode you and I are
recording together. That is like a non sponsored
thing in the year 2026. So we had some episodes that
were recorded in December while we were at Gartner.
We did the majority things majority rules game show with
Becky there, which was awesome. And Gartner let us release it,
which is even more amazing. So there's proof that we were
there and yeah, here we are. Look, it's.
But it's, I guess when this goes on, it'll be what, February
something? Happy New Year.
Merry Christmas. How was your holiday break?
All that stuff. It's good, you know, and I've
got a few New Year's resolutions that probably should kind of
been the kind of person who doesn't do New Year's
resolutions. There's been something that's
been eating at me for a while, which is I wanted to write a
book about identity. And the more I thought about it,
I didn't want to write just another identity book, which I
don't even know what's happening, right.
But I looked at it like a, a book that a lot of people would
write, say like an Eve Mailer would write.
It's like, I can't do that. I can't like that's not even if
I wanted to do that, I couldn't do it.
But I do feel like I've got a creative mind and I've got a lot
of experience doing identity over the past 20 years.
And so I, I'm writing a book of short stories from the lens of
identity practitioners doing identity stuff in the trenches.
And what I'm doing is kind of a mix of telling the identity
story, but also telling the story a little bit about the
people and the interactions and like what's happening to them.
So I don't want to give too much away.
And the book's not really written yet, but I've made
tremendous progress on It's going to happen here in 2026.
How many pictures can I expect in it?
I don't know really. It's not, it's not a
kindergarten or under book. No, it's.
It might not have any pictures. OK.
Well when you when you let me know about this a couple days
ago, I kind of mentioned it sound a little bit like kind of
like the Phoenix project. Was that a fair kind of
comparison or? I mean, yeah, that's, you know,
a lot of first hand, first hand accounts of things that have
already happened. So that's kind of the point of
view of the storyteller. One thing that I'm doing is
trying to trade off between mentor and a mentee or an
advisor and advisee situation. So run through like a scenario
where a breach has recently taken place and somebody, two
people who were involved in the breach in some way.
But somebody who has kind of more perspective of having, you
know, a 30 year career and, you know, looking at it differently
than the person who maybe was on the front lines and is more
early career and like thinking like, great, I was on the fast
track and all of a sudden like I'd blown it.
So that's just an example of one story.
There's another story I'm working on where the setting is
they are preparing for, you know, I don't say the Olympic
Games, I just say the games. But if that like that kind of
setting is like a major event where the whole world has
eyeballs on this thing. And could you imagine being
responsible for the identity roll out, maybe the biometrics,
the idea of like taking some kind of cutting edge
technologies like using biometrics for making purchases
and entering at the gate, like things that have been done, but
doing it at that kind of scale. So a lot of cool backdrops for
these stories, but then I also tried to weave in, you know, a
little bit of education. So it's kind of like this
podcast, right? We always think of ourselves as
like edutainment, like partially education, partially
entertainment. And so the idea we find the book
is really the same kind of approach.
So take me through your process here because Jim, I love you,
man. You're one of my best friends.
But I've seen you type and based on what I know of your typing,
this book might come out in a decade, so.
That's a good point. Well, First off, I think my
typing has gotten a lot better and there's voice recognition
software that helps. But I mean, I'd be remiss I'd be
lying if I said I wasn't using AI for help.
You know my, my approach with using AI for the book, it's kind
of like I use AI for everything. I explain everything that's in
my head to the prompt to the AI and then it comes back with
ideas. And the one thing I, I am
critical of AI right now in the in 2026 is that it pretty much
agrees with everything I say. Every idea I have is like the
most awesome idea that's ever been heard.
I should say that's that's what happens like 99% of the time.
Sometimes it does give me some feedback, which is good critical
feedback, but it does a really good job of like, OK, with what
you've given me now I'm going to do my best to output this thing.
And then it's a lot more iterations than I expected.
I expected like, Hey, I, I gave you, you know, a full page of
like, here's my thought, right? And I'm looking for a A10 page
short story and then like how, how, how did you miss by that
much, right, So that there is a lot more corrective or it's kind
of like you're talking to another person.
Obviously, I think most people who are listening to this
podcast have done enough AI don't know what I'm talking
about, right. It's just a back and forth and I
don't know, Jeff, I think it's just like so entertaining for me
to go through this process. That's been the biggest surprise
so far is that I kind of had this idea for a long time and I
kept putting it off. Kept putting it off because I
thought it was going to be kind of dreadful to sit there and
write a book. Like, who the heck wants to
write 100 pages of anything? Well, the approach in using AI
has been a lot of fun. It sounds interesting.
Are you going to do an audiobook version of it, be you, you know,
speaking into the microphone, reading, you know, being the
characters in it and the different voices?
Because that I would pay extra for that.
I think the only way I wind up doing an audiobook is is with
AI. So in other words, I'll teach
you on my voice. Now you read the thing.
But if it sounds too mechanical or too robotic, that wouldn't
work. I have another friend who
published a book recently, put it on Amazon.
So I'm going to learn a lot from him in terms of like, how did he
approach that? But you know, you can self
publish books now without, you know, having to, to get a
contract or anything. And you know, I, I think this
will be popular within our circle, like the identity
practitioner circle, but I don't see this being New York Times
bestseller. You never know, you know, get it
out. Maybe you want to sponsor an
episode of the podcast and, you know, promote the book, things
like that. Well, hopefully I don't have to
sponsor we'll. Take it under consideration, you
know, I'll talk with management. Yeah, right.
There you go. That's pretty exciting though,
writing a book. So that's a New Year's
resolution. Is that mean?
Then sometime this year is you're thinking you'll be done
with it and kind of like out there for people to to enjoy.
My goal is by one of the conferences this summer to say
it's launched, maybe to even have a few printed copies
available that, you know, people are interested in buying it.
I'm assuming it's going to cost me enough money to produce it
that I'm not just going to want to give them away, but we'll
see. You know, I'd like to be able to
give them away, but that's kind of the timing that I'm thinking
about is like you know around the conferences May, June time
frame. Yeah.
So we'll have EIC in Berlin in May and then Ideniverse in Las
Vegas in June, can turn our podcasts recordings that we do
there into slash book signing for you, Jim.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'll maybe I'll
have to get a little booth or something, but I don't think
it's going to be that popular a line out the door.
You know, the, I think the, the way we went, like we're sitting
here today at like 1.5 million downloads, which is mind
blowing, mind blowing that our podcast people have listened to
us that many times. And we do LinkedIn.
We have to do really for the most part any other social
media. We tried like X for a while.
We tried blue. Sky and Instagram, it's just.
Too much one that people got sick of X, right?
They got sick of Elon. So then everybody went over to
this other one, Blue. Sky or Mastodon?
Yeah, Mastodon. Mastodon was one, yeah, which is
another decentralized, you know, thing.
I think blue Sky's kind of taken over kind of that role, but it's
just too much, man. I can't keep up with it.
So it's LinkedIn and YouTube and, you know, the podcast
platform and, and the audience. What I was going to say is it's
been word of mouth. I mean, I think that's the
biggest thing is word of mouth and people telling people.
So if you're listening, I think probably other than listening
we, which we highly appreciate, if there's something you want to
do to help the podcast, it's tell a friend, you know, or as
Jeff likes to say, at the end of episodes, tell a friend, tell an
enemy. We don't care as long as they
listen. Right, exactly so I think.
The book is going to spread that way too.
I mean, that would be a science success.
That'd be a, that'd be a nice, a nice little bonus for it.
One in one and a half million downloads to date.
We've been doing this for, you know, it's called almost seven
years. You know, kind of July, June,
July is sort of like our birthday kind of officially.
I was looking back over the stats and in 2019 we put out 26
episodes for a total of 2374 downloads with an average
download per episode of 91. And I'm pretty sure I was
probably 80 or 90 of those making sure things were working
and try some of that. And yeah, it's just been growth
since there last year alone. This is absolutely mind
boggling. We did almost 1,000,000
downloads just in 2025. It's crazy.
It's really crazy. Yeah.
So thank you so much to everyone who is like supported.
You know, there's a ton of, you know, listeners and super fans
and folks that we meet at conferences and we kind of
talked to like, OK, we name names as like, well, we're not,
are we going to miss somebody that we mean to include?
And so we just decided we'll just leave a general thank you
to everybody. I think people know who they are
and really appreciate it. And, you know, the conferences
have been a big, a big thing for us, you know, going to places
like Ideniverse and Gartner and Fido.
And I know now EIC for the first time last year and again, you
know, this year, I think that's where people have really kind of
discovered us. Because I'm always curious like,
hey, how did you hear about this thing?
Because, yeah, we don't do any advertising.
It's either me on LinkedIn posting a new episode or, you
know, maybe the out the YouTube algorithm, which we started
video maybe was that about a year, a year and a half already
now or maybe 2 years even, which is still growing, right?
We're still, that's still kind of our, our very, very much a
minority platform. 99% of the people who listen are listeners.
They don't really watch on YouTube, but that's probably
better for their eyeballs. They don't have to see these
faces. No, I I think it's the format is
probably lends itself better to audio.
You know you're off for your walk or on the car ride to work.
You just played the audio. I totally agree with you about
not naming names because you're invariably going to leave
someone out. But there's one name I do want
to mention and it goes back to episode 7.
Probably know who I'm talking about.
Elise Almeida, dear friend of both of ours, passed away right
after the the new year. Yeah, yeah, a lot of kind of
outpouring support on LinkedIn, I noticed.
And you know, we worked with him at Identropy a very long time
ago feels like. But we've all like that whole
team has really kind of stayed together, right?
That's how you, Jim and I, you and I met were working through
Identropy though. Elise was just awesome.
Yeah. And it's a shame that we've lost
him so soon, but it it, it's nice to see the outpouring.
You just kind of wish it would happen while people were still.
Alive. I know, I know.
That's the truth. That's the truth.
And yeah, he's somebody that will always remember.
And like I said, he was on episode 7, episode 78 and
episode 164. So folks are interested in going
out it by the way, in case you always you ever wonder like how
do we remember what episodes specific people were on?
Go to our website, idacpodcast.com.
There's a tab for listen and there's a a search bar that
works as good as any search for eyes.
I mean, this thing's on the level of Google well.
Let's not go crazy. It's very simple.
Just type in a couple words that'll find anything in the
description or the titles. Yeah, no, it's not.
It's not at the Google level, but it is, it's pretty darn
good. So you know, as having done IT
projects for over 20 years, I remember some really bad search
wars overtime, like if you misspell something, forget it.
It was not finding it. Yeah, I can think of a couple of
enterprise tools that you and I use in our day job.
It's pretty much like that. That's just an absolute mess.
And you'd think we would have that, you know, those types of
solutions would have solved for that already.
But clearly there is an area for improvement.
Definitely. So how about your new year?
I mean, how is it off to a good start?
Yeah, I mean, after Gartner, I basically shut it down for for a
few weeks, came home, adopted a puppy, though we now have Pepper
joining our pack here. So now we are officially
outnumbered again in the house, three dogs to two humans.
We imported her from Tennessee, couple hours away.
My wife went and picked picked her up and brought her home.
And that has basically consumed our entire life for the last I
guess month and a half now. So I would like to say it was a
fun and great Christmas kind of holiday, New Year break.
But it was I do not feel rested because there was a lot of like,
you know, one AM, 3:00 AM, five AM, 7:00 AM walk outside.
Let's try to get the house, you know, the house breaking done
and and things like that. But.
Every once in a while, step in a pile of poop or what?
Or a wet spot on the hardwood floor.
Yeah, yeah. She's been pretty good, though.
So, you know, I think part of that is just us being diligent,
you know, or a couple mistakes, you know, you're, you know, here
and there. But I can tell you it was it was
some days we got really lucky, sort of like when we first
brought her home, because the weather here in in Asheville, NC
was relatively mild. And so it wasn't too bad.
And then, like, the freezing temps kind of came and, you
know, they're, you know, when you're out at 3:00 in the
morning, you know, in the side of a mountain, the wind is
whipping. We had gusts here from thirty,
3540 miles an hour. And that's whipping, you know,
through. And it's cold.
It's like, all right, do your business.
We need to get inside. Like, this is not fun.
But yeah, so far so good. You are quite the quite the dad.
Well. That's, you know, those are our
kids in our house, but. Yeah.
So, yeah, one of the one of the things we talked about doing
during this episode, we obviously wanted to talk about
the conferences and just to let people know, because I think
this is one of the things that kind of a service that we do and
we've been doing it for a long time is we always ask the
conferences to give us a conference discount code.
It will publish, right? We don't ask them to pay us to
do that or anything. We just do it as a service to
our listeners. And we always insist, don't give
us a discount code unless it's the best one because there was
an instant, I'm not going to try to pinpoint who it was, give us
a discount code. And then again e-mail a couple
days later where it was like, oh, here's this other
organizations discount code and it's, it was like 5% better than
ours. I'm like, what the heck.
We've been telling people here's a 20% and now here's a 25% that
doesn't fly. So at least we get verbal
guarantees that yes, these are going to be the best available.
Yeah, and that's great for conferences like to want to
partner with us and do that. I think, you know, we bring a
lot of fun, I think to conferences.
You know, we've done like our game show their majority rules
couple places. You know, we Fido we do, you
know, Fido few, which is a lot of fun.
And you know, we try to do something different and try to
make it more entertaining. And if we can somehow use that
to save people money, awesome. Like that's, that's a win for
everybody. Yeah, I also feel like, you
know, the confidence attendance being there has helped people
become aware of the show. And then I think, you know, it's
it's been great for us. Like I love going there.
I love recording episodes having a little bit of a different
background, they're a little bit different environment.
Plus you get a break from, you know, the day-to-day and you
know, you can't. You get your guests are in the
same position where they're not feeling the pressure of like
check their e-mail box all the time.
So yeah, I think the whole thing is fun.
The other thing that we wanted to do is kind of like reflect on
some of the the highlights that we've had over over the years.
What are some of the best lessons learned you know,
without putting a number on over the 400 episodes of interviewing
What What's 1 of the things that you've learned about either
being a guest? I feel like one of the things
I've noticed about you, so I'm going to you don't have the
answer. This way you can give whatever
answer you want. One of the things I've I've seen
about Jeff Steadman over 6 1/2 years, 400 episodes, is like,
you've become the MC, like you just are good at that.
I'm not saying you weren't good at it in the beginning, but
you've definitely gotten better over time.
Do you feel that? First of all, thank you.
Checks in the mail. I will buy a book.
Yeah, I think so. Look, it comes with like, you
know, anything else that you practice and do enough.
When we first started this podcast had no really public
speaking experience and didn't really expect it to do.
Anywhere near the numbers that we're doing now for sure.
But I think you get more comfortable in front of it.
I will say, you know, I've had people ask me, hey, why don't
you present at a conference, right?
Or something like that. I don't really want to do that.
I'm much more comfortable being sort of like that MC or
moderator type role or, you know, have a little fun things
like that. So I don't think I have anything
original to say or ground baking to like, oh, here's the next big
thing and identity. Like, no, I want to have fun and
entertain. And I think, you know, I've,
I've had more practice on it. Am I perfect?
No. But I think I'm good enough and
I'm happy with that. And OK, anything else, I'll keep
continuing, continuing to get better at it as I stumble over
my words, you know, trying to say that stuff.
Yeah. Look, you and I have done this
400 times at least. You know, there is, you have
thousands of hours at this point of audio.
And so if you listen to Episode 1, it sounds like Episode 1, you
listen to this episode, yeah, it's going to sound more
polished, more natural. The quality is going to be
better and, and pretty much every front, right, Things like
that. The only way you get to that is
by doing episodes 2 to 399. And really the same comes
through like, you know, knowledge in any space, right?
If you're a basketball player, you shoot free throws unless
you're Shaq until until you're good at them, right?
You know, if you're a quarterback, you're throwing
balls in into, you know, tires and, you know, name the
profession and identity is another one of those is like,
you have to stay on top of it and keep doing it.
And, you know, podcasting is no different.
It's just presenting and, you know, just continuing to kind of
develop your own voice. Yeah.
So I was thinking one of the things I've learned about doing
interviews and every once in awhile and like you said
earlier, like you might come for the show, I might cover the show
ideal scenarios where we're both here.
But one of the things that I've learned is that I know it's not
that I like to hear myself speak.
It's just that I feel like, oh, I just said something now I need
to explain what I just said. And then I say it and then I'm
like, oh, further explanation. That's kind of like my natural
way of being. But I found that sometimes it's
better just to ask the open-ended question and then
shut up, especially if the guest is kind of like able to, to work
within that framework. And so I found being a, a good
interviewer, sometimes just asking a question, then letting
the person answer it. But I will say, so one of the
things with the podcast is like, sometimes we have CE OS on,
sometimes we have very technical people.
And I think we we aim for some level of consistency, right?
So I think we've gotten better at kind of organizing things and
preparing our guests. Like, hey, a good answer goes
something like 2 minutes, 2 to 3 minutes.
And then, you know, let us ask some follow up questions and
stuff like that. And it's knowing when to
interrupt. And I think we both tried to
avoid interrupting people, but sometimes you're, you're
throwing them a lifeline by interrupting, right?
Like they just are to the point where they're afraid to stop
talking because then you're going to have that, that moment
of silence where it's like an uncomfortable silence.
I think that's a natural reaction is I think people think
that, you know, you can't have dead air.
And I think it goes back to like the radio days is like dead air
is the enemy. I can't have that.
Look, you know, people will talk, people have stories to
share. I'm very, you know, fortunate to
be able to have those conversations with all these
people that we've met over the years.
And you know, we again, I'll, I'll pull down the kick down the
4th wall here. And I'm sure we have a lot of
people listening who have been guests on this episode.
They kind of know what the process is that we go through
like do guest prep and kind of get things going.
But you know, to that point of like long answers, one of the
things on our, you know, prerecorded checklist is have
something to drink nearby because I know you and, and you
know, we have like 17 things on this checklist.
I'm looking at it right now. And they are all there because
of a real life thing that has happened.
That's like, OK, we've got to like add that to our thing to
make sure that, you know, not only us right as the people on
the show, but anyone who comes on the show knows like we know
what to expect. So I've seen the drink nearby
because we've had situation where somebody talked for like 5
minutes and you know, their throat was basically gone at the
four minute mark and they just kind of kept plowing on through
it rather than, you know, taking a break and allowing like the
conversation to breathe and take a sip of water and stuff like
that. So yeah, I think, I think being
able to ask questions and let the person answer is, is super
important for everybody. It's not just podcast, right?
You're talking to anybody, you're asking that question.
Listen, don't just don't just ask a question and then
immediately have your next thought ready to go, right?
Be in the conversation, be dynamic, be part of it.
I think that's something that, you know, I think I, you know
myself, I'm sure a lot of people also struggle with this.
Like you just want to get to the next point.
Like, no, no, no. I just asked a question.
Let me think about that and react to it rather than just
waiting for my next turn to speak.
That makes sense. Yeah.
Yeah, it's certainly that that kind of triggered a memory for
me, which was we had a guest who I thought was going to be a
fantastic speaker there. So where I came up with this was
is so you can over prepare. You can write like the full
sentence of the question you want to ask or to your point,
you can be listening and not really paint, not really
listening. You're hearing the words and
you're thinking about what you're going to say.
Those are both horrible things. Sometimes the guests over
prepare too. And it's like, I remember 1
episode and I'm not obvious. If you want to try and figure it
out, there's 400 episodes out there.
Listen to all them and you'll figure it out.
But and. Why you're listening to them?
Hit the Like button. Yeah, hit the like 5 stars for
all of them. This poor guest basically read
notes the entire episode and it was like, Oh my God, like do we
re record this thing? And I thought what we didn't,
but it's we always say to people, it's presentation is not
or I'm sorry, it's not a presentation.
It's a discussion and we have to be in the discussion as well.
We can't expect that person being the in the discussion.
We're just reading questions from a sheet of paper.
Look, you know, you're only talking to 1,000,000 people a
year, so don't be nervous. I get it, right?
Yeah. Some people are covered with
that. Some people aren't.
I mean, there's been times where, you know, we'll go
through a prep session and I'll, I'll send you a message like,
oh, I don't know how this is going to go.
And then, you know, that the light kicks on, the star
happens, whatever. And the guest is awesome, right?
It's like, oh, OK, I didn't have to worry about.
Anything that does happen, I mean, so the opposite also
happens. So you you have the scenario
that you described, so you do the prep session, then you go to
record and the person is way better in the recording than
they were on the prep. And the prep, they weren't
really paying attention or their camera had a big thumbnail
thumbprint on it or something. They didn't inspire confidence
that it was going to be a good conversation.
Yeah, exactly. But you also have the opposite
where the prep session goes great and then you get to the
session. Now one of the things I fig I've
found is, you know, technology issues can be the worst.
I remember 1 episode where we were recording with somebody and
it wasn't even their Internet bandwidth.
I think their hard drive was so full and what do you call it?
Like there's that software that that kind of like makes all your
files whole again. But oh, fragmentation.
So if you're their, their drive was probably full and fragmented
and it couldn't save the video and their computer kept
crashing. It crashed like 5 times during
the episode and somehow you're able to save it and make a
decent episode out of it. I don't know how, but we've had
a few times where things like that have happened.
It still happens. I mean, you know, there was an
episode recently where we had it, you know, a guest crash a
few times throughout it. I challenge you to find where
that happened because I've gotten so much better at editing
and hiding that kind of stuff. Look, we're, we're remote, you
know, we're doing recording. Technology is not going to be an
issue. And, you know, we've got a
pretty stable platform here that we're using.
But things happen and, you know, we'll deal with it.
It's fine. Yeah, it's the meme, right?
Everything's on fire around me. This is fine.
Well, the, I think with the podcast too, it's like we've
been talking about the early days and I'd love to, you know,
one of the things we prepared today was to kind of go through
and what was a major theme for each year since we started the
podcast. But I think back to this early
days and literally we were recording Teams meetings, like
we would just save the, the audio recording of Teams or Zoom
or something like that. And.
Pre pandemic, Zoom that that helps you gauge the quality of
how things were working. Yeah.
And just think about it, it's like very Internet dependent.
If your Internet was shopping that day, your episode is not
very good. And if you have a guest on now
you're talking about three people to have to have decent
Wi-Fi connections for the entire episode to get decent recording.
And yeah, it's a, it's actually for us to look back and say,
yeah, we only got 100 downloads. It's a, it's a tough thing to
even wrap my brain around. Why someone Our audio quality
was what it was that we would get anybody who'd wanted to
download it. Well, let's go back year by year
because I think the strength of our show has always been the
content, right? The quality I think is in a good
enough spot, you know, where we sound good enough, right?
And we look slightly worse than that, but still good enough for
you to 2019, you know, the year of foundations.
Really it was like strategy and frameworks.
Our first episode was introduction to an IM strategy
framework and of the, let's see, 26 episodes I think we put out
that year that was sort of like the theme was like a lot of
conversations around strategy and how do you build a program
and how do you set that kind of stuff up and what are people
should be thinking about, right, the people and the process side
of things. And so, you know, those are
those are the episodes that, you know, listeners seem to
gravitate, you know, even way back when in in 2019.
Yeah. You know, I wanted to mention
one other thing, so or two other things.
One is the name of the podcast. So we've never changed the name
of the podcast. I feel like there's a a bit of
luck there. Like identity at the center was
kind of a philosophy that we were at a debt free we're all
working on. And the idea being that identity
is at the center of cybersecurity.
There's all these cyber tools that are in the environment,
including, you know, SIM and logging and access management,
and they all depend on an identity.
If you don't have the identity, the power of those tools is not
that great. And well, that's the way the
industry has gone. Like now all these cyber tools
are becoming identity dependent and with that dependency becomes
they become so much more useful. So the name a little bit of luck
because like the industry, like put it, you know, made it so, so
perfect. And I think The thing is like we
so we've trademarked identity at the center.
If we hadn't, I may either be an identity at the Center
conference or. It would be a theme at a
conference for sure. And I've, I have certainly
noticed a few conferences really stretching like the theme of
identity and sorry man, identity center was taken and they had to
like come up with an alternative.
Identity at the middle. Right.
Yeah, so. That was for us for being
trendsetters and ahead of of of our times.
But yeah. Yeah, the other thing is people
ask me a lot. I'm sure they ask you, well, how
did you start this thing or why did you start the podcast?
And I always just tell the truth, which it's kind of like
not the most glamorous story. I remember you saying because
you and I were working together on client work, like every day,
right? So you and I would talk every
day and we'd have these like really cool identity
conversations. Like we're as the industry was
moving and we're moving with it where our thoughts are evolving
and we're having these conversations and kind of like
testing each other's limits on various topics, right?
And you would say we should record this, make a podcast.
I'm thinking like, I don't know about that.
I'm pretty busy. I'm pretty busy, man.
And then I think one day he just said it again.
I was like, fine, let's do it. And then we recorded an episode
and then we recorded the next one the next week and the next
one the week. Actually, I think Week 2 I
wasn't available. You recorded with Fletcher,
Fletcher Eddington. And then I mean, you and I both
did on most of them. You know, probably of the 400,
we probably made like 385 each or something like that.
But we've recorded an episode every week, at least one episode
per week except the two weeks at the end of the year.
And I always argue for give me another week man.
And you always talk me out of. It.
Get back into that editing cave nerd and put out another
episode. Well, I always give you the
option. We can record every day the
first week of December and just we can have a whole bunch of
episodes build up. But that's also not realistic.
So we do take a break. And I think partly that break
makes sense because not only do we need a break, but our
listeners probably are spending time with their family.
How dare they? How dare they do that?
We're your family. We're your identity family.
Identifam so so yeah, like that's really how it started
was, you know, Jeff's idea we should record a podcast and my
brave soul saying, OK, let's do it.
And neither of us liking our voice, but just plowing through
it anyway. Oh yeah.
That's that hasn't changed in Nobody does, yeah.
But that was 2019 was like strategy frameworks. 2020 became
more of like career growth and like certifications and really
kind of like, OK, how do we make this?
I am an actual career, right? So this was pre CID pro from ID
Pro like that certification didn't exist.
We did a really popular episode with the Identity Management
Institute, Henry Begusarian. Hopefully I got the name right.
That was all about different IM certifications that, you know,
they had. They were one of the leaders in
that space went early movers. So like a lot of the content
that people seem to gravitate were, you know, how do I become
certified in this thing called identity and access management?
I don't think digital identity was like a thing then.
It was just, oh, I'm an IM or IDM, you know, something like
that. And, you know, pandemic, I think
was kind of hitting somewhere around that time too, and a lot
of disruptions and, you know, we're taking place with that,
but like that. Yeah, we were starting to get a
lot of downloads. And then the pandemic hit
hardware, they said to everybody in the world, stop coming to the
office. People stop listening to the
podcast in their car. And it was like, oh, now we're
back down to like 65 listens per episode.
I don't have time to listen to a podcast.
I got to find toilet paper man, it was 20. 20 a total aside, but
I remember right after the world started going to to shit.
The second swear ever made on this show.
Right there. Well, you can bleep me out.
That was that was leaving. That was my first one.
I think the other one was you so.
The first one was a privileged access management episode that
we did several years back, and our guest asked if she could
swear, and I said sure jokingly. And then she swore.
I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is a family friendly show.
So anyway, I see this adult man, he's a what's the neighbor of
mine adult man and his wife and they had 6 gallons of milk.
They had no, no children. I'm thinking what did you do
with 6 gallons of milk? Are you lactose intol?
It's the new currency for 20/20 was, you know, the barter
system. It was, but I think that's the
exact theme that we had that year because, you know, it's,
it's really weird. I think back in that time, the
mantra was there's more demand for people than there are
people. So it was like, hey, folks,
you're having a hard time finding a job that has meaning
to you while the water's warm over here.
Jump in. And then I remember at Identity,
we had something going, where do you remember a lady named
Elaine? And she had brought in a bunch
of very junior people into the company and they were like
learning the trade. And we had a few of them on the
show, I think. So that was the reason I said
that was kind of funny, is because now we're all worried
the AI is going to take our jobs and that the next generation,
like nobody's hiring new people. Well, we had some of those
folks. We we actually did a Family Feud
episode like way back then as well.
We did it at a company meeting for Identropy.
And you know, you ran this very complex set of PowerPoint slides
that I had found to use as like the game and I sort of MC Ed
that point of it. And some of the some of the
answers that we got from our own companies like identity
professionals, I'm putting that in quotation marks were very
suspects. But yeah, it was it was an
interesting time. Yeah, name your favorite
privileged access management platform, Kanye West.
I remember somebody just said Kanye West is like an answer.
I was like, what? That had to be.
That had to be Fletcher. It might have been, but it was a
lot of fun. And I think that's was like, all
right, Like we got to figure out how to do this better sometime
in the future. And, you know, fortunately we
were able to work something out with Fight Alliance.
And, you know, that whole thing was.
Fido feud baby. Fido feud.
That's Yep. So, but yeah, let's see.
So 2020 was or no to 20. Yeah, 2020 was like
certifications and like professionalizing.
I am 2021 was really about like cloud stuff, cloud identity.
I think there was a lot of people still figuring out how to
things like AWS, you know, work. How are we managing permissions
in Azure and GCP and all the different cloud environments
that were out there. So there was like a lot of
content that was around managing identity in the cloud.
And you know, our top episode that year was episode one O 1,
AWS Cognito and CID Pro. We did that with what did we do
that with? I have to look and see Sarah, I
think it was. Yeah, that was like the most
popular episode for like years, right?
Yeah. And so, you know, people were, I
think were interested in, you know, what is this thing called,
you know, Cognito. So people were trying to figure
that out. And then, yeah, it was just
Sarah Cicchetti. Sorry, There we go.
Yeah. And then the CID protos, CID Pro
certification was just being launched kind of around that
time tone. And obviously, you know, ID Pro
has been such a big part of this this show, right?
We're the official podcast for that ID pro.org, you know, go
sign, sign up, be a member just like Jim and I.
But that was a very popular episode because it kind of
blended a couple things. It was the need to certify
talents, right? To demonstrate we've got
certification in space just like other parts of security.
And then also this crazy idea of like I am in the cloud like what
does that even? Mean well that's it.
I mean, you know, I think organizations that had
traditionally had on Prem infrastructure were in mass
moving that infrastructure to the cloud.
I kind of remember in the beginning of the cloud, it was
like, Oh yeah, we're just running some dev servers there.
And then all of a sudden it was like, Oh no, we're doing DevOps
for our production pipeline to AWS.
And it's like, oh, wow, that happened pretty quick.
And now the identity practitioner needed to get their
arms around it. Man, I can't believe that that
was that was all happening, you know, underway while the podcast
was running. But it doesn't make sense.
And now we're in like a, you know, another era where you see
AI, the big AI wave coming to potentially replace a lot of
infrastructure. Yeah, we're going to talk about
2026, but I'm going to keep the the year is rolling here.
So if 2021 was a year of cloud, like for an identity standpoint,
2022 was really about the year of governance.
So there was a lot of like process and compliance type
things. And IGA was certainly part of
that. We did an episode with Paul
Mazzara, episode 190, which was around identity governance.
That was like our most popular episode that year.
And so the assumption was at that point was like, oh, OK,
programs are starting to figure it out.
We're starting to get our handle on our people and this being a
career. And, you know, now we've got
this. We've had to manage the cloud
permissions because that was like, oh, we've got to figure
that out. Like right now what's happening,
let's take a step back and make sure the permissions across the
board are being governed, right? So kind of like the space of
identity governance and administration, right?
So players in that kind of space.
So kind of interesting to see 2022 kind of clean up the work
that was done in 2021 which? Is definitely, it's definitely
about cleaning up. It was, you know, a lot of
organizations move quickly during COVID to open things up.
But I think overall it also opened a lot of eyes to like,
here's the gaps that we have in terms of our preventative
processes to make sure that people have the right access.
And I really, I think one of the things that we were the voice
for was folks, now's the time to do this.
Because if you wait and you find yourself in 20252026, you're
going to be way behind the curve.
Because now what you're seeing happening is this kind of real
time intelligence where identity and signals are kind of becoming
where, you know, organization have the opportunity to get
ahead of threats. But The thing is of like, you're
still fighting the war of like, hey, we're trying to get IGA in
the door, man, you're, you're way behind.
And so hopefully your organization, if you're
listening, you've taken care of this.
But that was one of the times where I think we're kind of
ringing the alarm like now's the time to do this.
And by the way, I did want to say one thing about Paul
Mazzera. So Paul's now at Gartner.
We probably won't get Paul back on the show until he retires or.
We did majority rules, you know, maybe we do something at the at
a conference and he can get him on stage for something.
They have very specific rules around how that works.
But now I know what they are, maybe we can work that out.
Absolutely. There was a lot going on.
And so 2023 was the year of security conversions.
So we saw like a lot of different tool sets start to
come into things. So like identity security
started to become a term that was out there.
You know, we started to see things along the lines of like
ITDR and ISPM and sort of precursors right to those kind
of spaces. And around that .2023 we kind of
hit 100,000 downloads as a show. It's like, oh, it's like a major
milestone for us. I think I put one of the few
times I put like a social graphic on Twitter or something
at the time around, you know, celebrating that.
And we actually were self funded throughout that entire time.
And then we started to do sponsored episodes, you know, to
help with, with the cost of running, you know, the episodes
and show and stuff like that. And believe it or not, our top
episode in 2023 was a sponsor Spotlight episode with Sunray.
Was that our first sponsor or no, No, I'm sorry.
No, we it wasn't our first, but Sunri did come back into a
second one as well. Yeah, and I think people were
interested to learn more about other, other identity security
tools in the space, right. It wasn't IGA, it wasn't Pam, it
wasn't another IDP. It was something else.
And there was current, you know, definitely an appetite for
people to kind of learn about that.
And you know it helped us, right?
Help helps me pay the costs pretty.
Sure. Our first sponsored episode was
Conductor One with Alex Bovey. That sounds right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was a, that was a big
turning point for the podcast we had.
We were still not doing video at that point.
I think, I think we started video in 2024.
But I actually, I think we started experimenting with video
by the end of 23, but we weren't sure if like this is something
we wanted to commit to, right. But then at the beginning of 24,
we made the the announcement. Yeah, I think convergence was a
big thing that year. I think a lot of these new
technology spaces and I remember as a consultant thinking, you
know, I'm, I'm concerned with making a recommendation about
something that's new to my, my clients, right?
Because what if that becomes unimportant or kind of kicked to
the curb? Like remember we were talking
about UBA all the time, like user behavior analytics.
It's not from a space that people refer to anymore.
And I'm not saying that it doesn't exist at all.
What I'm saying is it's, it's not making any headlines.
So if we're making big recommendations like, Hey, you
need to do this thing because the promise was there.
And I think a lot of what you're seeing happening with like ITDR,
it's dependent on, you know, recognizing a user's normal
behavior, knowing when they're doing something that breaks that
mold, and then taking action on it, doing a response so they're
on the right track. But if you went out and told
your clients like hey, you need to, you need to be on this UVA
thing, you could have muddle on your face later.
Yeah, it was it, it's really kind of an evolutionary thing.
It's like where I've, I've said this before where I think like
ITDR started as user behavior analytics, or if you wanted to
use user and entity behavior analytics, right?
This other thing is kind of evolved into that while you're
talking. I went and looked it up.
Sunri was our first sponsor episode.
We did that December 13th with Sandy Byrd, which was a fun one.
We had a great conversation and then we started to do more and
more of those. And you know, I think the one
thing that's been nice about those sponsor Spotlight episodes
is, and this is something that I have learned over the years of
doing this, there are way too many technology companies for me
to even keep up with. It used to be manageable, like,
Oh yeah, I know all the IJ players.
Not anymore. Like there's just too many of
them and new ones are popping up every week.
Same thing for Pam, same ID. PS A little bit more mature, but
occasionally I'll see a new like IDP type solution.
But now you've got things like ISPMITDR.
What was the one that we talked about intent based access
control. You know, we we talked about
with gal from plane ID that'll be coming up in an episode, you
know, stuff like that. There's always something new.
And for for all the sponsors that have been, you know, we're
grateful for them for like donating and helping us, you
know, keep the show afloat and running.
It's been a really learning opportunity for me to also say
like, OK, our normal episodes vendor neutral.
Like we don't pitch product. We don't even advertise what we
do. A lot of people think that we
are podcasters 100% of the time when it couldn't be far from the
truth. Like we've been identity
consultants the whole time and we've maybe done too good of a
job of hiding the fact, which I guess is a good thing.
It's like, hey, this is vendor neutral.
You're not getting punched in the face every 3 minutes with
like, you know, buy a, buy a mattress or, you know, here's a
protein shake or, you know, buy our services, you know, stuff
like that. But it's been, it's been nice to
be able to kind of take the gloves off on those sponsor
episodes and ask question, tell me about your product.
Very similar to like going up to a booth at a conference or you
know, hey, some salesperson reaches out and say, Hey, can we
show you our product for 45 minutes, right.
And tell us about it. So, you know, it's, it's been a
great way for me to keep up with that.
And I think people have enjoyed that as well.
Judges based on episode numbers like our sponsor episodes do
just as well as our quote UN quote normal episodes.
Yeah, You know, I think I was, you know, sometimes you think
there's going to be resistance. I thought there'd be resistance
from our sponsors, like, hey, you know, I'm paying, I'm
donating for this 45 minutes, right?
I want to talk about my product the whole time.
That's absolutely not been the way it's gone.
Pretty much everyone who's come on the show, and I shouldn't say
pretty much, I think it's 100% of our sponsors are like, we
want to do a regular episode, but we want to mention our
product and like how we do it. But you guys have a formula that
works. The formula that works is like
it's not a infomercial. It's educational.
Hopefully it's entertaining. Hopefully, you know, with the
sponsored episodes, it's like people get to go on saying this.
Something I want to do further investigation on.
I'm going to reach out to this company or they can watch him be
like, yeah, I'm glad I listened to this.
They don't have my e-mail address.
They're not going to be bugging me.
I don't have it. This doesn't scratch the itch
that I have. Yeah, I mean, it's perfectly,
perfectly put, no notes. All right.
So 2023 was also like a lot of convergence, right?
As I mentioned, like the security tool and stuff like
that. It feels like 2024 was a lot of
like privileged access management stuff, protecting the
keys to the Kingdom, those kinds of ideas.
Our top episode that year was episode 294 navigating
privileged access management. And you know, there was just a
lot of growth that year. I think we started to hit more
conferences. You know, we went from like
100,000 to I think by the time 2024 was done, we were already
over like 400,000. So we had like a 400% growth in
that year in downloads. I think a lot of it was, you
know, being at conferences and people starting to pick up on
stuff like that. But it seemed, for whatever
reason, like Pam was 2024's theme.
Yeah. I mean, here's one thing about
the podcast, right, is that we tried to keep our pulse on
everything that's going on, keep a pulse of everything that's
going on. So we'll, we had episodes in 24
about customer, IE about IGA and also the the newer technologies,
privileged access management, I think kept coming up or is
probably if you had to pick a theme, that's what it would be
because of the breaches. You know, it's like what was
happening in the world at that time is like companies were
getting exposed, ending up on the front page, becoming the top
story on CNBC because they got breached and they either paid a
ransom or, you know, their business got shot down.
And usually if you tie those all the way back, the bad guys got
their hands on a privileged credential and we're over able
to overtake some pretty important infrastructure and
maybe shut the company down. So decision makers, senior
people were willing to invest in solutions that kind of help
prevent those things from happening.
Yeah, Again, I think a little bit of like clean up from prior
years. You know, we saw like a lot of
MFA adoption the pandemic years and it's like, OK, we've got
that solved. We think we, we think we've got
authentication good enough. Now let's start to look at
things elsewhere. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think you're right on with that.
It's like there's the cleanup and we spend time talking about
like, hey, for the practitioners that are out there and you're
breaking your axe trying to fix these problems.
Like we have episodes that are dedicated to it.
I mean, over the years we've done episodes on role based
access control. It's not sexy, right?
And we've been doing it since before we were doing podcast,
but it's still something that practitioners in the field are
breaking their acts like implementing.
But it's the same time we'll have somebody like Annie and
Glazer come on and he'll talk about 0 sending privileges.
So it's like, OK, this interesting because now we're
talking about what's coming next, right?
And a lot of times, like, you know, some companies says,
here's what's happening now. But for a lot of US who are the
practitioners and breaking our acts in the world, it's and it's
listen to somebody like Ian or an Eve or somebody like that
who's talking about, hey, these are the things that are up next.
Yeah. And I think sometimes what you
end up seeing, a lot of conference talks are sort of
like the future. And so it takes time for those
concepts to filter into the real world, right?
Not many companies can afford to be bleeding edge on 100% of all
I am functions across the board. Like they have to pick and
choose. And so they say, OK, well this
year we're going to try and tackle IGA and we're going to
work on that for the next, you know, well, 18 months to three
years, right, Whatever it looks like.
And that's like, OK, we've got some breathing room now there.
Let's improve our Pam and then let's let's go back to
authentication and start working on pass keys and replacing, you
know, legacy MFA, right, things like that.
And so as much as you go to conferences and you hear about
all these great ideas and they're, they're needed because
they have to start somewhere, it takes a while for, you know,
businesses to catch up to that. That's right.
So 2024 privilege access 2025 was really about frictionless
authentication. So what I mean by that is we saw
a lot more uptake in like pass keys, improving user
experiences, you know, identifying, you know, who
people are when they need to get something done, whether it's,
you know, calling a help desk, whatever it may be.
Our top episode was the one we did with Ori from Trusona.
So episode 360. That will always be a memorable
one for me because one Ori is a great speaker.
He's he's entertaining in his own right.
He's just a very interesting guy.
They have, you know, a very interesting product.
It's a good product. It works and you know, he's put
up money. Like this is the first time we
ever had like a sponsor say come break our stuff.
I won't use the S word, come break our stuff.
If you can find a hole in it, there's a $10,000 bug Bunny for
that. That's the first time anybody
has ever come on the show like put their money where their
mouth was. And so I think it was for like a
month they ran this and as far as I'm aware, nobody was able to
break it. You know, you could have won
$10,000 and a slide whistle for for Maury.
That was a lot of fun, right? And I think that kind of shows
like, hey, there is, there is a need here for identity
verification for a bunch of different things and come poke
holes in it. And and I hope that we get more
opportunities like that in the future to be able to kind of
have some more fun with that, but address like real problems
like that. Yeah, no, I mean, one of the
cool things that you're right is like that you and I got get to
do because of the podcast meeting people like Ori getting
behind the scenes, look at the technology that he has.
I was like, man, why? Why didn't somebody invent this
like 1520 years ago when, you know, I was doing end user
support and you could say you could see like, hey, this person
says they're calling from California, but they're really
in Vietnam because I can look on the map and see physically where
they're located. So that was cool.
But I thought 2025 was like, I don't know.
I felt like it was the year of identity at the center.
The podcast really took off this year.
Or almost 1,000,000 downloads. Million downloads almost in one
year. That's mind blowing.
I hope we can at least duplicate that this year, if not do
better. I think you're right.
The frictionless authentication was huge.
I think there's just so much stuff happening in this space.
I think, you know, the industry was starting to say, all right,
we've we've been talking about for a while like 00 trust and
every product was more zero trust and now started to become
in 25 the with AI. So is AI for I am.
I think we're just going to see more and more of that.
Yeah, I mean, definitely like, you know, AI has kind of taken
over the last year. It's been, it's been a thread I
think through every conversation we've had for the last year or
so. And so let's kind of wrap this
up with like 2026 is the year of what, you know, it's February
when this episode comes out. We've got a handful of episodes.
It seems to me like a gentic identity is going to be like the
theme for this year. What do you think?
I think it is to the point that when we do the 500th episode,
it's going to seem like, oh, it's so obvious.
I think the agentic AI is moving so fast and now AI is able to
write its own code that I think organizations are going to start
re platforming applications in such a way that it's going to go
fast. And maybe re platforming isn't
even what's going to happen. Maybe it's just that
organizations, you know, we used to do build versus buy analysis
in IT like 2025 years ago. And that got to the point where
it was like who the heck would ever build their own IT
applications? I've seen a resurgence of it.
I'm seeing organizations, my clients build applications in
AI. Why?
Because they can build them way cheaper than they can buy them.
This need to have AI built in or I'm sorry, I am built into the,
you can't just forget about the security.
So The thing is it's moving so fast.
I don't know what it's going to look like, you know, 12 years,
12 months out, much less, you know, 2-3 years out, I mean.
I mean, it's hard to predict anything in this space.
It's the one thing I've learned over the years is like, just
when you think you're getting comfortable and like, oh, I kind
of got a handle on it. No, something new comes along
and pulls it out. It's just, it's part of it.
But you know, AI is just that thing.
It'll be another thing, you know, episode 500.
Well, I think so. It's another.
It's another tool that we're grappling with to figure out how
to leverage it, how to secure it, how to use it in any number
of ways, both good and bad. It will just become, you know,
like the calculator or the Internet or other things, you
know, it's going to be very disruptive.
We just got to figure out how to how to work with it.
It's not like it's going away like that cat is out of the bag.
Yeah, I just don't know if it's like just another revolution or
it's like the revolution. I mean, you know, from things
I've been hearing and researching, and I listen to a
lot of podcasts, especially about AI is, you know,
especially like it seems like Anthropic and Clod are the ones
that get pointed to the most in terms of its ability to just
write really good code. And it's just going to take a
lot of jobs away from developers.
And then it's going to be able to write applications 24 hours a
day. I mean, people can't do that.
People can't work 24 hours a day.
So if it's already starting to do that now, where's it going to
be a year, 2 years, three years from now?
Well, it's like anything else that's going to continue mature.
It'll become cheaper, more capable, and we will have found
new and exciting ways to secure and unsecure things with it.
There will be something else, right?
It, I guess it's hard to, it's hard for me to call it the
disruptor when you're in the moment.
It is a disruptor. But so was the Internet.
So was, you know, a calculator. So was indoor plumbing, right?
There's so many of these things that come along in your
lifetime. I do think it is going to be
very disruptive. It already is.
But we're going to have to figure out how to coexist with
it. It's not going to go away.
And so we have to figure out how do you make it secure?
How do you make it usable for people?
How do you try to put guard rails or, you know, train tracks
maybe in certain cases where, you know, people are only doing
the things with it that you want them to do that?
That's the kind of situation I think we're in right now.
Yeah, it could be. You know, you and I were talking
about this before the show. I was thinking that we should
should have hit record. That happens so often with you
and I and even with our guests. Like we get to have a slide
conversations like, darn it, we should hit record.
But we're talking about how fast is moving.
And the thing everyone always points to Will Smith eating
spaghetti. You just have to watch the
benchmark. For any maturity that should be
like all of our IM maturities is Where are you on the Will Smith
eating spaghetti scale? Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. So if you haven't seen that
already, look it up. It's pretty hilarious with like
comparing that. And it's basically it's AAI
generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti and then one
that's, you know. That's like literally what it
is, right? Yeah, right.
Exact code like that is. It is exactly what it says on
the tin. Yeah, Will Smith, the actor, and
he's eating spaghetti and then they show like him doing it,
like a video generated of him doing it now.
And I don't even think it's now as in, you know, February of
20/20/26, I think it was like sometime in 2025, like the
current video. And it's like, my gosh, she can
barely tell this the day I generate.
Yeah, that's what I keep thinking.
It's like of this 2026. What's it going to be like in
20-30? Like that's four years from now.
That's nothing. Going to be more capable, going
to be more realistic. We're going to have to figure
out ways to do content authentication and verification.
And talk about AGI and they say AI is going to be smarter than
any person on the planet and that's like 3 to save eight
years away that AI will be smarter than any person on the
planet. And then they talk about
artificial super intelligence, I guess ASI or AGSI, and that's
where AI reaches the point it's smarter than the collective
knowledge of everybody on the planet.
I mean, when I kiss that point, do you think it's really going
to need a human to tell it what to do?
Or is it just going to know what it needs to do and do it and
that humans just really won't be able to add value to that
process? I think we were talking earlier,
you said, well, the creativity, and I definitely would have
agreed to like, I think if you think about where AI is now, you
definitely reach the limits of its creativity sometimes.
But I've seen it gotten got a lot better in say the last year.
But that's looking at it like where it's at now.
I think that, you know, it's not just random number generator.
It's going to actually like I'm constantly shocked like I was
talking about with writing this book, I asked it to come up with
things and sometimes it's like it's just not very creative.
But I just think it's just a point in time of where AI is at.
I guess I'll just get more capable and we'll just have to
figure it out. I think AI is going to become
more personal. Too.
So rather than having like these generic models that are like
everybody is, you'll have your own little sort of like personal
AI that you lean on. And you know, some of us are
probably already doing some of that, right?
Whether you're doing like your own gems and Gemini or your own
little GPTS and ChatGPT or Spaces and clawed right, or
using notebook LM, you know, whatever it may be, I think
there will be a person, a personal touch that will make
it. The idea is that will make it
more enhancing of someone's life.
So I'm in a beta right now with Gmail for this thing called CC.
And every morning I get an e-mail that is like a summary of
all the things that are happening in my Gmail and my
calendar. And it's nice.
It's like having a little assistance like, Oh yeah, I
forgot about that. I have to take care of that.
And it's, it's just every morning I just get this brief
and I can respond to it as a person.
Just reply to the e-mail and say, Oh yeah, remind me about
this or yeah, can you look that up and just come back to it
later and treat it as like an offline agent, you know, type of
approach? Is it perfect?
No. But I think stuff like that
will. It'll be interesting to see how
this all plays out because there's going to be some people
who are going to be willing to place that trust into it and
some people who aren't. And that's fine.
We have to figure out where do those two, where do those those
roads meet and intersect? Yeah, I think those choices get
taken away after a while. I think look like self driving
cars. That's, you know, I don't think
you'll be able to buy a, a car that you drive and people will
stop knowing how to drive a car, just get into a car, tell where
they want to go. The car will take them there.
That's not far away at all, right?
That's already being done. I think there's going to be
robots. I think five years, at least a
minimum 10 years. You'll see robots walking on the
street and you'll go into places like the grocery store and
robots will be working in the grocery store.
So it's going to change our physical world for sure.
Yeah, I'm not saying it's not. It definitely will.
We're really like, pontificating and waxing poetic here.
Yeah, I don't have any. I don't have any answers.
I just know that we're going to have to do what humans have had
to do forever. Adapt.
That's right. Fire Hammer.
Bronze Age plagues, pandemics, you know, going to the moon, if
you believe in that, right things like that right we've
we've had to adapt and that is what humans are really good at
adaptability generally I. Think identity has adopted
Identity has to follow the technology, right?
It has to. You can't do it any other way.
I mean, look at what we're doing right now in the US with mobile
identity and driver's license, right?
We've got a little less than I think half of the states are
coming online this year. You know, couple years ago was
half of that, before that was half of that.
So it takes time for these things to all catch up.
But eventually we get there and then we figure out, OK, what's
next? What thing do we have to solve
for? Jeff I'm looking forward to the
next 100 episodes and maybe 500 after that.
Yeah. I think I'm thinking 500 is
probably sometime in 2028 based on our current run rate of like
somewhere between like 65 and 70 episodes a year roughly.
It's been a fantastic ride to be on with you, man.
So I always express my gratitude to our sponsors and to our
listeners. But I'm also, I've had a lot of
gratitude to you because you and I have been doing this
consistently. I've been good friends now for
longer than we've been doing the podcast.
But you know, when you do something like this, like
there's times where the other person does something that
annoys you, right? And that happens on both ends.
And we always get past it, maintain our friendship.
And I hope that comes through in the podcast.
I hope people know that we appreciate each other and that
we are friends. And, you know, sometimes we get
into our debates about identity or whatever it might be.
We always come out and we're still friends.
Because we talk that simple. Yeah, we got to get more people
in this world to do that. You know, is what is I don't
want to, I don't want to turn political.
But yeah, we couldn't be more opposite.
And somehow we still make it work and it's good.
So there you go. Let us be the shining example
for the world. Let's put it that way.
We are the world. I'm going to isolate that and
that might be the part of the clip for this episode.
Anytime you say I always, but see, I'm recording isolated
tracks, so I can totally steal that.
Gosh. All right, there we.
Go, let's go ahead and leave it for this week.
Thanks again to everybody who supported us over the 400
episodes. Here's the next 400.
Find us on the web, IDC podcast.com.
Like, subscribe, use our discount codes.
We're always on our main page for idcpodcast.com that helps us
continue to grow the show and bring more content.
And you know, thanks to everyone for for the ride that we've been
on and the ride that we'll continue to go on.
So thanks everybody for watching and or listening and we'll talk
with y'all in the next one. You've been listening to
Identity at the Center. We hope you've enjoyed the show.
Make sure to like, rate and review, and we'll be back soon.
But in the meantime, hit the website at
identity@thecenter.com. See you next time on Identity at
the Center.