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. Still fantastic.
Remember here at the Gardner I am Summit 2025, the last
conference of the year for me. How about you?
Yeah, me too. My last trip of the year.
I think I'll have 98, maybe 99 flights by the time I'm done
with this week. You.
Bear me at the most the least status of the.
Airline, well, I'll tell you, Diamond status with Delta does
not absolve you of poor visibility at the Atlanta
airport yesterday. So this is Sunday before Gartner
kind of officially kicks off today, and that cost me 6 hours
of delays getting from Asheville to Dallas area.
Yeah. And yeah.
That's a bad time of like flying this time of year.
But what's really great, like we're here now.
I want to thank a couple organizations, one's Gardner for
setting us up as this awesome room.
I wanted to thank RSM for getting us out here and kind of
always supporting the podcast. And by the way, I think a lot of
people don't realize that's our day job is that we do consulting
during the day. The podcast is not a full time
job for us. So thank you to RSM and then
thank you to you too, Jeff. I mean, I know you're not an
organization unto yourself. I am.
Oh, sometimes I wonder if you think you are, but no.
Could you keep taking our technology game to a new level?
I think when people see this podcast, all the cameras we
have, the new wide angle, I mean, it's impressive.
Yeah, we'll see how it goes. I just realized that I have a
new camera over there and I'll be looking away from it for the
most part. So, you know, we'll, we'll
figure it out. But yeah, you don't want to look
good and sound good. So I'm trying.
I'm trying for you. Yeah, I think, I think
everyone's grateful. But yeah, we're going to
knockout 3 episodes while we're here, and I think we can
probably get jumped into the first one here.
Yeah, why don't we go ahead and and introduce our guest, Sarah
Clark. She's been with us before.
She's joining us. She's with Hope now.
I had to answer. Ask her how to pronounce that.
Just make sure you get it right. But welcome back to the show,
Sarah, because you're a second time here.
Yeah, no, it's a pleasure to be here and there are a lot of
cameras here, so feeling a little nervous, but.
It's just the conversation about identity amongst old friends,
that's it. Exactly.
So you were with us a couple years ago at the Authenticate
conference in 2022. That was episode 179.
So I'm not going to make you go back and like give us your I am
origin, origin story because we've already covered that.
Go back and check that out. But tell us a little bit about,
so it's been 3 years, I guess at this point.
What have you been up to since then?
And tell me a little bit more about Hope, because it's a name
I've heard before, but I'm not sure if we're familiar about it,
especially here in the US. Yeah.
So in 2022, when I was last on the show, I was leading
something called the ID. The ID network at MasterCard all
about ensuring that digital ID credentials can be shared
globally seamlessly with assurance and all the good
stuff. So that was amazing.
However, MasterCard decided to no longer pursue building a new
network. So I ended up leaving in 2024.
And you know, of course, that decision was a bit
disappointing. You know, very, I was very
enthusiastic about the business, as was the team.
So I decided to take a little bit of time off to decompress
and figure out my next steps. Well, little time off turned
into a year off and I spent the year buying rainforest in Costa
Rica for the sole purpose of preservation.
So that of course, took quite a bit longer than I anticipated,
and I got pretty deep in that. And I ended up becoming very
passionate about saving dogs from the shelters in Southern
California. And I'd just like to say, please
adopt, don't shop. So did that for a while, tried
to help the situation by developing an AI agent and sort
of a long story, but I got sidetracked with some passion
projects, Really enjoyed the time.
After a year I decided I'm ready to jump back in and Hope A
actually found me. And the vision of Hope A is very
similar to what we were seeking to do at MasterCard.
So Hope A is building the digital identity infrastructure
of the future. And at a high level, there's two
main parts to that. The first is something called
Hope A Connect. And Hope a Connect is all about
connecting the world's government issued digital IDs to
be used seamlessly by the private sector.
So we enable identity verification companies,
authentication platforms as well as enterprises to access
government issued digital IDs as well as government issued
credentials. So all about making that
seamless, easy providing the network, providing the one line
of code type approach to get to all of those.
The second part of our focus is enablement of issuance.
So working with governments that are launching digital IDs so
that they can have the wallet and the infrastructure to be
able to issue those to their citizens, as well as private
enterprises that can benefit from having a wallet to issue
their own credentials. Because maybe they're solving
for data silos, maybe they're solving for having subsidiaries
and user journeys that span multiple things.
So Hope a connect the global Eid hub and the Hope a wallet all
about enabling issuance. So that's what we're up to.
I joined as Chief Product Officer and GM of North America,
and I'm just super excited to be continuing my work on that
vision because I really do believe it is the unlocking
mechanism to a more secure future with a lot less fraud.
That's really cool. And I'm really interested to
understand what the governments are doing with the digital
identity, digital credentials. I'm just wondering what is the
problem that governments are trying to solve with those
identities, the digital identities?
Yeah. So at this point there are,
let's see, I have a little CHEAT SHEET, 186 out of 198 countries
are moving forward with government issued digital IDs
and I'm going to shorthand that to Eids because that's a lot to
keep saying. So 186 governments moving
forward with Eid programs. So that is 94% of all countries
on Earth, which I think is just absolutely amazing.
Some of them are released, some of them are in progress.
So they're all at different stages, but huge adoption.
So before COVID, you know, this was definitely becoming a hot
topic. There was awareness that having
a sound digital ID infrastructure could help uplift
economic metrics for a country. Lifted GDP, allow for easier
access to financial services, allow for inclusion, that type
of thing. COVID hit, and of course, many
governments were slammed with the same problem, right?
Lockdown and standing in line to access government services did
not mix. They were the, you know, polar
opposites of each other. So a lot of acceleration
happened to solve for access to government services through
digital channels. And, you know, we certainly saw
that here in the US with, you know, inability to get
unemployment benefits because of that friction.
And that happened everywhere. So there was a lot of
acceleration driven by the problems with government
services during COVID. And at that time there was a bit
of debate, you know, would governments open these Eids to
the private sector? How would they do it?
I would say now that debate is over and in general all
governments see the benefit of enabling the private sector with
government issued Eids. So why is this valuable to the
private sector? It is an unlocking mechanism to
solving for just absolutely egregious fraud levels that
we're seeing right now. So if you think about any
private sector company that's regulated, they have to do KYC,
financial services, gambling, you know, other regulated
sectors. Beyond that you have, you know,
sharing economy marketplaces that may not be regulated like
payments and financial services, but they also need trust, which
means they need identity verification.
The current state of identity verification generally is you
capture a photo of a physical ID document.
You pair that, you know, with a selfie and that's sort of the
process that people go through the physical ID document photo
is analyzed by algorithms that try to figure out if it looks
authentic. And, you know, that's
probabilistic. In the end, AI, as everybody
knows, has accelerated and it's very easy to create, you know, a
very good fake ID document. So basically that method has
been, you know, breached. It's vulnerable to AI, so that's
just no longer reliable anymore. Deep fakes, you know, all the
different things that are happening.
Juniper Research recently did a study or or a research report
where they predict that fraud just within financial services
identity fraud is going to surge to 59 billion in the next few
years. Like this is a huge problem and
the existing method of capturing physical documents, even
layering that with risk signals, it's no longer good enough.
So I've been talking about this for years.
The reality is finally coming. The private sector to reduce
this fraud needs to connect the root of trust, which are the
government issued digital ID's. And that's the horizon that
we're entering. So that's great for fraud.
It's also great for user experience.
Yeah. And just so you mentioned I
think a few different benefits, right?
There's the fraud reduction part, which you hit pretty heavy
there at the end. But you also talked about
security, efficiency, inclusion. And I'm wondering like from a
government standpoint, and maybe there's not just one answer, but
what, what's the main driver, what is like top of the list
that they're trying to drive forward?
I would say that a foundational digital ID drives economic
activity, right? It drives inclusion, it drives
safety, it drives less fraud outcomes.
I mean, I guess there isn't just one answer, right?
There's sort of a holistic benefit to society.
And I think that can differ depending on a developed economy
versus a developing economy. You know, we can get into what
the EU is doing, but one of their driving motivations is
also all around data privacy for their citizens.
So I'm happy to kind of dive more into that.
But I think part of it is, you know, regional, but the top line
benefit is sound digital identity drives safe, you know,
enhanced economic activity overall, which benefits
everyone. I had major jealousy or, you
know, wishing I had one. There were some folks going
through airport security and using mobile driver's licenses,
and it just seemed like it's a better user experience for the
person who has it. It's probably better security as
well, right? Oh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, again, there are different ways that different
governments are proceeding with their platforms.
There's kind of a few different models, and we can get more into
that. But overall, the themes are, you
know, cryptographically secured, you know, kind of tokenized
identity protected by biometrics.
Some of them are wallet based, some of them are centralized.
But any way you look at it, it's just more secure.
You know, one of the things I figured with the those digital
driver's licenses is not going to work for everybody.
Like who's used the example of my dad, right?
Like my dad's not going to do that.
It's not for him. And so they're still going to be
the the plastic driver's license right there.
Yeah. So the digital I did or what we
call them Eids, that's not going to be an overnight light switch,
right. They're still going to have to
be the physical world version for people.
So I'm wondering like, what is that adoption curve typically
like? Well.
Again, I think that is varying from country to country.
So, you know, maybe I can start with some countries that have
seen tremendous adoption and adoption is fueled by acceptance
or where you can use it, right. So you're talking about mobile
driver's licenses as an example. You've observed through airports
in the US. That's pretty much one of the
only use cases that's available at this point in time.
So some people that have heard of it are going to use it, but
it's not super compelling because where else can you use
it? You know, am I going to bother
or just big enough to check out my license versus my phone?
So the adoption curve here is, you know, starting off a little
like not, you know, shooting up into the right quite yet.
I think that's going to change and we can talk more about that.
Other parts of the world, there's been more enablement and
more ways that it's accepted throughout the country.
So some places that have huge adoption right now would include
the Philippines. So they recently announced that
80% of their population of 117 million have their national
digital ID and are using it for different things within their
country. I think most people are familiar
with India having Adahar as their digital ID platform.
So they've effectively on boarded, you know, all of the
adults and their population of 1.4 billion.
So a staggering number. And they've measured metrics
that show benefits in terms of financial inclusion and other
things. They're continuing to modernize
or evolve, maybe I should say, to make their ID available as a
wallet. Now on someone's phone, they
have something called a Digi locker.
So it's not just about your foundational digital ID
credential. It's also about other things the
government issues to you that can be important for enhanced
user journeys. So imagine signing up for a loan
and you can have, you know, proof of the various things that
you need that go beyond your foundational ID.
That's all there for their citizens and obviously widely
adopted because it's used for a lot of things right now in
India. We have Brazil, I think is a
really interesting case where 50% of the population has a
driver's license. So they don't have quite as many
drivers as a percentage of the US, But those are all in a
digital form. And they just announced a very
sweeping program to create a centralized multimodal digital
ID where they plan to have 100% effectively of their population
onboarded across the next five years.
So these are examples of governments that are really
solving for both adoption and enablement of use cases within
their country, and that's why they're getting high adoption
rates. I.
Think it's like, you know, I think a lot of the technology we
have Silicon Valley in the US and our adoption is relatively
poor compared to these countries.
So just an observation that I think is worth noting.
Out of curiosity, like adoption rates, I would think that age is
a major factor in demographics. Especially you mentioned
financial ability because you do need a smartphone for this to
work, right? Well, it depends on the model.
So yes, if the approach is to enable with a wallet type
container for a verifiable credential that would be used
from a smartphone, But some of these countries that have less
penetration of smartphones are using approaches that you know,
may not be as dependent, you know, on a phone.
So it kind of depends on if it's a centralized model versus a
decentralized model. So there are different factors
and if you look at the more decentralized or smartphone type
models, I would point to, you know, the US and the EU
especially as an example of that.
And you know, I talked about a bunch of other countries, but
the EU was really kind of the shining star, at least in my
view, that sort of leading the charge to the most kind of well
formed program with the most regulatory kind of teeth, right?
That's, you know, I'm a person that cares deeply about
transforming the Internet to be privacy preserving.
So their approach is very in line with those ideals.
So I'm really excited about what the EU is doing.
And when you talk about adoption, I think we're going to
see adoption very, very quickly in the EU.
In fact, they're predicting that 80% of their citizens will be,
will not only have a digital ID or an Eid wallet, they will be,
you know, using it within the next several years.
So they're expecting a very steep adoption curve, but they
also have a lot of, you know. Support right from the
government where it will be mandated in some ways.
So maybe we can talk a bit more about the EU.
Yeah, I want to because I think Jim still a little bit Thunder.
I feel like the US is behind right now and I based that on
conversation that we actually did an episode with Christina
Souza and Dr. Torsten from German Spring Group is kind of
responsible for the E for the digital wallet for Germany.
One of the things that I learned from that conversation when we
were at EIC earlier this year was there is financial implement
implications for each of the member states of the EU if they
do not have this interoperability set up.
I think it's by the end of 2026. Don't quote me on that, but it's
relatively soon coming up. I feel like that's a great
incentive for countries, governments to say, OK, we're
going to have this thing put together and there is a
financial implement implication. If not, yeah, I don't know how
well that would work in the US. We're 50 states.
Mobile driver's license is probably, I don't know, like I'm
pessimistic. And I feel like we're 1520 years
out because it's going to take that much time for each state to
adopt it to figure out how we want to do their
interoperability, blah, blah, blah, and stuff like that.
And so I have this sort of jaded opinion that, oh, man, the US is
behind when it comes to this idea of a decentralized digital
identity wallet of some sort. Am I being too pessimistic?
Is there hope coming, you know, for us in the US?
Or are we going to continue to kind of, you know, not lead in
this space? You know, EU is probably the
leader right now. Do we catch up at some point?
So I think the US will catch up and fun fact, we already do have
20 states that are issuing MDLS. We also have the three major
wallets. I think probably a lot of people
have seen that news where Apple, Google and Samsung all support
uploading and MDL into the wallet.
And these aren't, you know, 1 to one, right?
So 20 states have MDLS, Not all states support all wallets.
So there's sort of this patchwork, right, that is
happening with that. But that's all starting to come
together in addition to having the state app for your MDL.
So the fact the wallets are supporting the upload means the
next step is the wallets will plug into the private sector and
there will be more use cases. So with more use cases comes
more adoption. And 20 states have them.
I don't know the exact number that are in progress or are
scheduled, but there's a bunch. So I think all the states are
seeing that they need to do something that is digital.
For the most part, they're supporting A consistent set of
standards, which is basically the M doc standard for MDLS.
But then again, nothing is completely consistent.
So the problem exists, you know, kind of when you zoom out, you
know, the US is a microcosm of a bigger fragmentation issue
globally. So for the private sector to
plug into MD LS, it might seem OK, Apple Wallet supporting it,
I'll plug into that. Wait, some states don't do Apple
Wallet. What about Google?
What about Samsung? What about direct?
So there's always going to be an issue with fragmentation that's
going to slow down kind of the ultimate adoption.
But I think you are being a little pessimistic because there
is a lot happening in the US I'm.
I'm fine with that, not. Nearly as much as what's
happening in the EU. So we have 50 states.
The EU has 27 member states, so half, but still a bunch, right?
450 million citizens, so about the same population wise.
And like you said, they do have, you know, a sweeping regulation
that's coming into effect and that's EI desk too.
So by the end of 2026, each member state must make available
at least one ID wallet to their citizens.
And by the end of 2027, it is mandated that regulated entities
as well as Vlops, which is very large online platforms.
Vlops, I guess. Yeah, yeah.
Are you a VLOP? You must plug in, but they must
support the EU digital identity wallet for identity verification
as well as customer authentication flows.
And I believe it says as the first choice.
So 2026, every citizen needs to have access to a wallet, at
least one in each member state. So the word at least means some
member states are going to have more than one.
So there's going to be a bunch of choices out there and then
every regulated entity and BLOP need to plug in, make it
available for identity verification, authentication as
the first choice by the end of 2027.
So if you're an IDV company, if you're a regulated entity, if
you're a VLAP, the time to start looking into this is now because
this is mandated by their regulations.
So they are pushing acceptance along with the issuance side.
And it's just amazing because these are digital identity
wallets. They're privacy preserving.
The individual gives consent to data sharing.
There's so many elements in here that is just like a good model.
And I talked about Brazil, I talked about a couple different
places. I know South Korea is has done a
lot of work with digital identity.
A lot of countries, they're looking at this as the template
for how they should evolve or introduce their systems to their
citizens, and I think that's tremendously good news.
I can't imagine there's a balance of, you know, citizen
demand and government required use cases.
I think of that identity verification process and with
the Eid is really enabling those processes to be more efficient
and better. And that seems to be the
transition where it's actually a government service that
enterprises can leverage these technological improvements.
Am I zeroing in? Is that kind of that linkage?
I'm not sure I completely understood your point.
Yeah, so my point was. In my world.
No, no, no, you, you kind of talked about the identity
verification piece in the beginning and it's like, yes,
those are the mechanics, but it seems to me the verifiable
credentials and this transition to EIDS kind of greases the
tracks for that. For the identity verification.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, so the EIDS and the verifiable credentials transform
the consumer, the individual's experience from, you know, a
hassle to one click. So I don't know if your average
person has intrinsic demand for this, right.
Like a lot of people aren't walking around saying I wish I
had an identity wallet. However, the average person
knows that signing up for things can be a pain.
They know that they don't enjoy password resets and text
messages and you know all this stuff.
And they know that fraud is rising.
So they want solutions to that. Those are their kind of jobs to
be done right, to use product lingo.
So this is, and people want data privacy too.
You know, I, I don't think your average person understands that
centralized databases collecting their data getting breached lead
to identity fraud. I mean, this is stuff that we
understanding in the industry, but you know, people want to
access things easier and to feel safe.
But I think we've gotten jaded. You know, there's a breach every
day, every week. It's like OK.
I ignore. What did I do about it?
Nothing. Not just this.
At this point, yeah, you know. So that idea of like, well, it's
centralized, it's already centralized.
So how? How are we supposed to fix that?
Well, that's what the, you know, some of the regulation and data
privacy, you know, regulations that are also in effect, like
these things are certainly being pursued by the European Union
and fixing, it's not going to be overnight, right?
But this is the whole kind of philosophy right behind Web 3
and decentralized approaches. I mean, just even beyond the
identity fraud, we are all giving our data to centralized
places to then monetize our data instead of we benefit and
monetize our own data. So if you think more broadly
just about all of that, you know, that's flipping, you know
the script. So this is a microcosm of that.
So you share only the data that is needed to be shared.
And, you know, there is liability and risk for
organizations to be storing too much personal data, especially
as the regulators catch up and there begin to be penalties for,
you know, breaches and other, you know, liability, right, for
allowing data to be misused or breached.
So there's a lot of work to be done, right, to completely solve
what you're talking about. However, this is a significant
step in the right direction. So that's all coming.
That's going to be in place. It's going to be mandated by the
end of 2027. However, you know, it sounds
great on the surface, right? Private sector is going to
benefit by also having less fraud and offering better user
experiences. However, there are 27 member
states. Even though the, you know,
overall framework is consistent, there still are different
standards, different states. Each state has their own trust
registry. Working with each government to
gain access like these are all challenges where even though the
EU is unified, it's still challenging for a single entity
to plug into the wallets of all member states.
Even just the effort of testing with, you know, at least 27,
possibly double the number of wallets depending on how that
all emerges with the different protocols.
There's Open ID Connect, there's Open ID for VC, there's the ISO
standards, like there's just different things to consider
from a technology protocol level.
There's the trust management, there's the key management,
there's keeping up with, you know, any of the regulatory, you
know, things that need to be kept up with with respect to
integrating to each ID wallet. So the EU has also defined
what's called an intermediary role.
So this is basically the network or the hub that takes the
responsibility for sorting through all of that and creating
the integration to the 27 member States and then allowing the
private sector to connect to make it easy to have it
normalized to take all that complexity out.
So the intermediary is also a certified role in the EI desk to
framework. And that's also a really big
unlocking mechanism that the EU has put into place and made an
explicit role that requires, you know, certain certifications
and, again, data privacy being front and center.
So where do we go from here? Because it doesn't sound like
this is a technology issue. We have standards, we have
different components for interoperability.
So I'm curious like where's, where's this going next?
Are there any specific trends or things that you've kind of
identified? And then my follow up to that
is, OK, so there's probably some trends you're going to tell us
about. Is there a specific area that is
quicker like historically? And what I'm thinking is like
finance, you talk about fraud, nobody wants to lose money.
Finance might be a leader in this, but are there is, is that
right or are there other other industries or verticals that you
think are adopting, you know this idea faster?
Well, I think age verification is something we haven't really
touched on and that's, you know, a subset, I would say of digital
identity. So we certainly see a lot of
legislation globally around age verification, particularly with
protecting restricted, protecting minors from
restricted content. So we see that in Australia, we
see that in the UK, we see that in certain states in the US.
So again, a bit of a fragmented landscape.
You know, however, there's a lot of interest in privacy
preserving techniques, making it simple because it's something
that has a high frequency of use and that's, you know, usually a
really important determining factor for kind of taking all
the friction out of a user experience.
So that has been a driver in certain areas that's creating
another, you know, path to adoption and awareness and
causing private enterprises to plug in these types of
capabilities. Financial services, as you say.
As you say, I would say that kind of global fintech firms
tend to be on the leading edge. Something that I'm personally
really excited about is, you know, this movement, this sort
of parallel movement on the financial side to stable coins,
to tokenized assets, You know, all of that results in money
being able to move cross-border with instant settlement instead
of, you know, the various waiting processes that exist in
the legacy framework with anything instant, you need to
have really, really great also instant deterministic identity
verification, government issued ID's are the solution to that.
And most of those businesses do tend to have a global scope.
So certainly plugging into both developed and developing
countries to do that I think is really important.
And we see demand and drivers there.
And just in general, financial services, I mean, they're
getting hit with a ton of fraud. This is a solution even if it
doesn't cover every person. As the coverage begins to take
place, if you can start solving for it, start plugging it in to
the user journey, start experimenting with it, measure
the different outcomes. You know, we're starting to see
that moment momentum now. I've personally seen a huge
interest, even though it's still pretty nascent, but financial
services, fintech, marketplaces, social media sharing economy,
they all want to plug into mobile driver's licenses.
It's just a matter of sort of creating the right pathways
because the value is there. And if they can do it for a
segment, you know, and work their way up, you know, there's
a lot of interest in starting those tests today and then
you're going to sue the adoption that you're asking about.
So we then we're still in that fragmented environment, right?
Where it's like, OK, 20 states have it.
I'm in a state that doesn't have it.
Is it all of a sudden now the, you know, the citizens or the
residents of that state are pushing their local government
to adopt this? Is that one way to kind of get
this to move faster? Because it'll never move as fast
as everyone wants it to and it'll never be 100%.
But I feel like at least in the US, until we have all 50 states
on it, which means now it is distributed like a driver's
license, that will be one thing that really kind of drives the
adoption to move things forward. The other thing that I, I, I
kind of get concerned about is we talked about KYC on the fraud
side of things. What about know your employee,
right? There's a lot of instances of
fraud where people are getting hired that aren't who they say
they are and there's really no Kye know your employee, know
your contractor, know your, you know, whoever may be that.
I think there is an opportunity to take identity verification
down that route versus just my customer, which tends to be
more, you know, a commercial sort of environment.
Oh definitely. And I should have mentioned that
in the use cases that are drivers, I mean, know your
employee workforce management, there is, you know, just new
vectors of fraud in in all of that.
So, and this is an example where, you know, an employer
might even have a need to have, you know, their own sort of
wallet for their employees for access for events, for, you
know, providing different benefits that maybe need to go
seamlessly. So like your imagination can
really run wild, right, with different things you can do for
your workforce. If you had this concept of a
secured, you know, credential wallet, you could issue
different credentials for different things.
So there's all sorts of stuff that you can do, but workforce
management definitely is one area.
And that's something that's becoming more and more regulated
as well, like enabled through a digital channel.
Because it wasn't that long ago. And I've worked with some
customers in the UK where they would be bringing on remote
employees and that remote employee would have to drive 3
hours to come in just to show their passport in person and
all. Those people got hired during
like, COVID, had to go to somewhere.
I remember I had to do this, you know?
Yeah, it's a pain. Yeah, it's a pain.
And so that's changing. So I I guess in summary I agree
with you. Great.
I'm going to isolate that and that'll become, you know, the
theme for the show. I want to wrap up the
conversation with something that we that you originally started
with. You mentioned you took some time
off and you mentioned rainforests and you mentioned
adoption of dogs. So I have two adoptions of my
own, probably going to be adopting another one here when I
get back. I want to hear about your dogs
and tell me a little bit more about that because I'm with you.
Adopt, you know, dog shop, right?
And they are such a big part of our family now.
So I want to pivot to dog talk. Dogs all day, tell me.
About how many dogs do you have? You know, give me, give me some
insight into what's happened. I personally have three dogs, I
have a German Shepherd and I have two Pitbull Husky mixes.
Because that's a loud house. That's a loud house.
It's there. Well, coyotes like to visit my
house and they howl to my dogs and then my dogs howl back at
them. The pit bull Huskies, do you
know, they're all high energy dogs, So I got to say they keep
me in shape. They're all rescues.
And the third one I rescued during my time off and I went up
to the shelter in LA. And I learned more about the
situation where there's just a record number being surrendered.
And I decided that I had to do something about it.
So I started working with the volunteers and the rescue
organizations, and I started specifically looking at how to
facilitate out of state adoptions because we have a
really bad situation here in California with just the
shelters. They're at like 200% capacity.
And most of the dogs in there are just wonderful pets.
All three of my rescues are the best dogs ever.
You know, they can be a bit of a pain.
The Husky mixes they like to bowl.
Dogs are the best people you know.
The dogs are the best people and they're grateful.
They know they've been rescued. And it just breaks my heart
because, you know, all dogs deserve to have love and a good
home and a leader and all that good stuff.
So I decided to see if I could help facilitate out of state
adoptions. So I worked on that for a while.
I was trying to figure out how to make the process slower.
I mean, honestly, it's just a really heart wrenching,
difficult, very manual thing to do with sharing and trying to
find people to adopt the dogs, arranging for logistics.
You know, I looked into things like finding extra capacity with
truckers to help drive dogs to different locations.
So I I just did a bunch of work and trying to figure out how to
facilitate mainly out of state adoptions and to get some dogs
out of the shelter so. My wife volunteers for Mountain
Pet Rescue in the Asheville area, so shout out to Mountain
Pet Rescue. I know they're listening to the
identity center guys, but you know, being part of those
convoys, right, where it's kind of like they'll take them from
here to here and then someone else, you know, they move from
one car to another to get them across state lines or to large
distances. It's amazing that volunteer
effort that is taking place. And it's such a grassroots thing
because it seems like every shelter is overflowing.
And so I can't imagine our house without the dogs that we've
adopted. They are such a big part of our
family. Now we have 3.
We lost one last kind of Christmas.
And so now we're, I get to pick the next one.
So we'll hit to the, the, you know, to the shelter probably
when I get back from Grapevine and, you know, figure out, you
know, what makes sense, you know, from a family dynamic and
making sure and, you know, letting our dogs be part of that
as well because they've got to get along too.
So it's a big part of it. But I just, I can't imagine, you
know, what would life be like without those dogs?
I know. Me neither.
I've got three dogs. I also have two cats.
The smallest cat with little stubby legs and he's kind of
chubby. He's the pack leader of the
animal ecosystem in my house. They have their own, you know,
thing going on, but the little cat is the leader of everyone,
including the big dogs. That's.
Personally say it's not just dogs, it's also cats.
I'm sure other pets as well. Goats, chickens, I mean bunnies.
Yeah, I have to. I have to draw the line
somewhere. I don't want to turn into like a
farmyard, but I'm good with dogs.
I'd like to adopt A pig and I'd like to have chickens.
But you know, it's there's, it's a lot of work to maintain.
We feel like I'm always clean enough after now that my kids
are older, I keep adopting animals and, you know, my
husband is like, OK, can we stop?
You know, you don't need to just keep filling the house.
I'm like, I don't know, I just, I like to take care of other
living beings and. We have chickens sort of like in
the area of our where we live, but we also have black bears and
those things attract things along with, you know, mountain
lions and all kind, you know, hyenas and not hyenas, but Cody
coyotes and stuff like that. Like there's those are
definitely dangers that we have to kind of take into account.
We've we've had several close calls of bears and our dogs
where a bear will come through our front yard and kind of
around and, you know, the dogs are outside and next thing you
know, it's like, you know, if the bears typically don't want
anything to do with it and they'll kind of scurry away.
But yeah, that's that's not something that I know who's.
Going to win that fight, right? Yeah, right, right.
So I'm, yeah, again, I'm not interested in testing it, but
that's, that's kind of where we're at right now, Yes.
One one of my dogs jumps our fence to go play with packs of
coyotes. We had to extend our 6 foot
fences to 9 feet and she managed to launch off a boulder in our
backyard. And actually I, I was like
standing out there and I saw her do it and she launched over a
nine foot fence to go play with the coyotes.
I was like, all right, I give up.
Can't stop the can't stop containment.
It's like what it is what it is. I appreciate you taking time
with us. It's been a while since we got a
chance to talk, so it's kind of good to reconnect.
And I feel like there's so much hope here that we can be
glomming onto. And I'm going to try to be more,
you know, positive to try and get there.
But I just, I want to go faster. Like decentralized identities,
digital wallets sounds great. Yeah.
But get me there faster. That's my plea, You know, to the
people who are listening, that actually can make those happen.
But get there faster. Yeah, yeah.
I couldn't agree more. Big benefits.
But you know, the acceleration curve has really just steepened
in the last couple years. So it's going to keep going
faster. I know it.
OK. We'll go and wrap it up.
Jim, anything else? No, sounds great.
OK, All right, we'll go ahead and leave it there for this
week. Thanks everybody for watching
and or listening. You'll find us on the web
idacpodcast.com. Let's see idacpodcast.tv, the
YouTube like subscribe that helps us get great guests like
Sarah to join us. And yeah, so thanks everyone for
watching or listening, and we'll talk with everyone in the next
one. I've been listening to Identity
at the Center. We hope you've enjoyed the show.
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