You're listening to the identity at the center podcast. This is the show that talks about identity and access management and making sure you know who has access to what let's get started. Welcome to the identity of the center podcast I'm Jeff. And that's Jim. Hey Jem. Hey, Jeff, how are you? Oh, not so bad yourself. I'm doing good man. Here in the RSM podcast, rzm sponsored podcasting sweet. The sweet sweet. We've been here all week stop doing that. It's not well, I've only only
can do it for a few more times. After, you know, I've had a great couple of days here, learn so much. Got to You old friends, make new friends. But I do want to Lodge a complaint. Yeah. And not going to Lodge the same complaint, which I normally do, which is too cold. It is this free breakfast that you've provided me is not meet my standards. No, it won't be that. What? It's a real complaint bought.
Two bottles of water at the pool the other day or didn't you said and you know what, it costs, two bottles of water. I'm going to say $15 T $30.00. How big are these bottles? They're big but they mean what you're talking about. Water doesn't matter how big they are. I guess. Not absolutely crazy. I don't think they can play that on inflation. Well that's a kiss for you. I mean everything here is just expensive. Yeah. Usually I'd say it's by the end of the week I'm like I can't
wait to get out of here. I think. If I don't get out of here ASAP I'm going to be broke. Well, we will definitely get are getting out of here. We're recording this as the kind of the last day of the Gartner conference here. It's been a wild ride, lots of great guests. We've got another great one here. We're going to be talking about, Brad to me. He's a Senior Solutions engineer at Indy, kite. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me, guys.
Really pretty cool to listen to a lot. So it's pretty cool to be here and it is definitely a sweet sweet. Don't get him started. So, it's a sweet sweet. So Before we get too far along, we have if you are a listener you will know that. The first question we always ask our guests is, how did they get into the identity space? What's your identity origin story did, did you choose Identity or did it choose you? I'm going to say identity chose me.
I think it's sort of a sort of my career as an application developer and the a couple years into my career somebody that I worked with had left and sort of working for a new company and he called me up and he said, Hey, I met this new company. We're doing identity management and since that's what you and I were working on at the at the last place, they want to talk to you and I thought I did it. I don't, what are you talking about? I have no idea.
I had no idea what I didn't even, I had no idea what he was talking about. We had worked on. We were, we had written some code to create. They were our sacred initials at the time and to me, it was just, we're just writing code to create our essay credentials and I really don't know what RC credentials are.
So from there this was this was early 2000's from, they're just sort of jump at and they're going to the nuke that new company and they were they have been a lot of federal Contracting and at the time I think was you off program like around the 863 and the M4 for that was coming out.
So all the federal agencies were scrambling to to do you know to Great. And so my role there was basically to do a bake off between the the major vendors at the time so that sort of parlayed that into a Consulting career ended up working for Oracle. They're starting my own company company did that for 15 years and you know, just kind of focused a lot with like you know, one or two vendors. Just so I can really get, you know, kind of like the t-shaped expertise.
You don't like a really Focus and then just, you know, more recently with indicate. So it's I guess the the long answer there is, its kind of stumbled into it and then it grabbed a hold of me right now and That's My Philosophy. I think most people at least some my conversations. I've been having is that generally identity. Pick them somehow they fell into it. Stumbled into it and the hooks have been deep and generally haven't, you know, gotten away from it.
I want to talk about Indie kite in a That. But from a conference perspective how has the Gartner conference been for you? Any highlights any interesting stories conversations things like that that have taken place? Yeah, I would like to, I'd like to Second the the cost of water here in the desert. The water is not cheap, that's running out. Yeah the conference has been good. It's been really good. I mean, this is this is the second or third conference.
I've been to the last in the last year but I got to say it's nice to be back in front of people and Not have a video screen or a monitor in between US unless you don't get to a session in time. Yes. The sessions have been really good. The the I think for me the Highlight, there's two
highlights. The one is that the sessions themselves have affirmed, kind of the the vision that we're working on it indicate and so it's good to hear that from from from, you know, from someone like Gartner and not just You know, some some random person said, hey yeah, you know did a project like that once too. So it's nice to have that that confirmation that we're on the right track.
The other thing is just the and I know it's it's everybody says it, but it's the networking, the conversations, you know, from identity management of such a small community. Everybody knows everybody. So you know, you're seeing old friends, you're seeing you're seeing people that you You know, maybe you've never met them in person before, but you've you've talked them or you've exchanged emails for 15 years, so it is this conversation? Yes, exactly, exactly.
But the, it's the random conversations, you know, you're standing in line for coffee and the person in front of you, just turns around and starts talking, you know. And they were, they they look at your badge and they're like, you know, I've never heard of your company before. Tell me what you do and that that you go down into this rabbit hole with them. And, you know, they start.
You're comparing use cases. You're comparing situations or in a lot of cases that you don't even talk technology or identity management. You just talk. You just, you know, where you from. Oh, cool, I've been there. I've never been there. You know, it's that, I think that's the best part. And so weird for me, some typically pretty introverted, you know, I spent a lot of time in my hotel room when I go to conferences just because, you know, the crowds tend to be a
little overwhelming. But with this, you know, I found myself like, okay, you know what? I'm going to Grab my laptop, go find a table. I'll be I'll be near the crowd, you know, kind of like crowd adjacent. Yeah, exactly. You know, then you see someone that you haven't seen in a couple years and so it's been cool. I mean, so I would say those are the two, the two highlights.
Lowlights really haven't been any, I mean, just, you know, joking about the cost of the water, you know, I was going to save the charge for coffee in the hotel room and you know, it's coffee's been plentiful downstairs. So, Can't complain too much about that. That is a bummer because you know, that is my complaint to and it's a first-world complaint. Yeah, I'm you know, we're in this sweet.
Thank you RSM again this week. The sweet, sweet sweet, and now you got me doing it but they cap you it to Internet devices and then charge you $15 right to connect another one. It's a sweet and you have two devices. What are the expectations there? It just doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah. Even if you're just one person in the room, you have you have four or five. Without a doubt.
I got my phone to laptop, Etc. So yeah, Caesars get your act together on my flight, my Delta flight coming here. I could connect for four hours for five bucks. No, but you're connecting in a chair in the sky race seems more reasonable to pay, only five bucks for that? Yeah no II. The point I was making is like if they can do that for five bucks, couldn't the sweet. Sweet. Give us more than two connections, and then not charge 15 bucks or the third. I'm with you. I get it.
I mean another let's lot of such as far as that I will only work for them. Yeah, so Brad you and I have known each other for a long time. What I'd like. 12, 15 years, nothing like that. Really good to finally have you on the show, one of the things that I wanted to bring up was Jeff and I did an episode where we reached out to was a four or five people about a lot more, only four or five people, you only 45 people responded. We have some zoo of recording to answer this question.
I'm going to pose it to you, which is, you know, the our Industries kind of changed names or is there. Um, name change happening from Identity and access management to digital identity. My question to you is, what's the difference between digital identity and identity and access management? Yeah, I think from our perspective, digital identity is the the properties that make up or describe and Identity or which is just a representation of something that's out there in the world.
Whether it's a human or non-human, a bought a machine, a house or car, but whatever it is. Where I am. I are the processes or the services around that. What can you do with that identity? What can you do with this properties? How do you secure it? How do you use it? Leverage it for Access, anything that you can do around that to meet up falls under under. I am? Yeah, I mean I think of the digital identity is like the fingerprint for a person or a
thing and identity. And when I think of that, it's like, what's the credential information? What is the, you know the digital signature that makes up a face recognition or whatever kind of biometric were using sure. It's also probably the core identity attributes but beyond that the digital identity includes more, right? It's all the things that we want to collect and know about a person. So why privacy? Exists because they're going to collect all this information about you.
We're going to get data from maybe another source like a DMV. We're going to get information about what entities you belong to or Associated to or even going to get data about your shopping preferences or what you've bought in the past or websites. You visited, we're going to store all that. And in talking to you about Indie kite and kind of learning what your product is all about, kind of think that you guys are taking an approach to that.
And so rather than trying to explain to for you, I'm just going to ask you to explain it sure. So at the core indicates based on the on the graph database
technology. So instead of using ldap or like relational database or some other data store, we picked graph technology and it was very deliberate decision because of the capabilities, the graph provided The model that we've picked because of the experiences that we've had with implementations over the last 20 years, is essentially to create to sort of each customer would get two or more graph databases.
The, the first one, the identity graph is that digital identity data that you were that you were describing. So the properties are the credentials that make up that, that digital Identity or that make up that that identity, whereas Each customer that we work with each customer, each organization would has their own business model and to try to fit that or bend that into the identity graph is impossible.
And so it's which you're usually left with is either you're going to massively warp, your schema and try to fit it into the customers model. Or you're going to, you're going to massively warp, the customers model to match your schema and neither of those are ideal. So, to resolve that we have, the second graph, which we call the knowledge graph. And because the graph database is, you can essentially, when you're modeling a graph database, you're using like, a
your, it's a real world model. So it's a one for one mapping between, what is the customers? Business model look like and what does that graph model look like? And so between, you have those two graphs, we import the data, we get the data into the graph, the customers data, and then we create a relationship between the digital Twins or the digital identity from the identity graph to the knowledge graph.
And then the week, the graph works is, it's all about traversing, the graph and finding the paths within the graph. To what are you related to you? What are you connected to? And then using that That it's using that relationship to determine access or do you determine entitlements or determine what can you do? And so that's really kind of the way we were seeing way we're building. The, the I am services around that things have always kind of wondered with graph databases is
why they're white. They weren't, you know, wholeheartedly adopted more because I know in what I found with developing And mostly on the customer side. So, like big identity management use cases, is you have these relationships that exist. So it's not only the identity but you have relationship to an entity or relational data, and if you put that into a sequel database, then the problem is that when you have a massive amount of data, tons of relationships, it crawls to a halt, right?
It gets really slow. Idea with the graph databases that, you know, you you're not confined by doll that structure but it has the power of building the relationships and fetching the data quickly. So I always kind of wonder why I didn't even Management Systems weren't already adopting the graph. You guys are so do you know what was holding that back and why you feel like you can overcome those things? Yeah. So I think it's a it's a resource issue.
So if you've spent the last 15, 20 years, building your platform, building your foundation, and it's based on ldap, the three of us. We've all worked in the industry. We've spent the last 15 20 years. Convincing people to stop using databases, get your passwords out of the database. Put it into a know that. Well, are you going to go back and say, hey, remember, we told you to use all that we want you
to now use a graph database. So plus we've invested, you know, we have millions of lines of code that are all tied. Pretty closely to out to ldap. So to go back and retrofit that is I think it's a daunting daunting task. That's why we decided to start basically start over. You know, that mean there's a lot of Open Source libraries out
there that we could have used. There's, there's products that we could have used and we could have just, you know, retrofitted but it was cleaner and better for a lot of reasons to just, let's start from, let's start from zero. It's I mean if you're going to, if you're going to, if you're gonna start a revolution, you gotta Gotta Throw it all out,
right? So that's that's you know, that's why we that's what we basically started from those kind of been like a tactical problem is that everybody was starting where it said. Ol daps fast bad at relationships, but we're going to use it because and then we they built their product that way and it was hard to kind of like a bandit that I moved to something better. Yeah and I think that I don't want to knock all day. I've spent the better part of my career working with ldap in it
was for the identity problems. I think ldap was better than a database. It definitely served its purpose for a long time but when we started hitting that wall with access control and authorization and hitting the limit the limits of our back and finding that. Okay, well we're going to, you know, we're going to do an are back role-based access control project and you know, oh no. You now have you have twice as many roles what? We do, we do, it's just, it's a
recurring problem. And, you know, I don't think that I think as an industry we've spent a lot of time on a authentication, but I don't think we've spent much time on authorization. And so, that's, you know, that's kind of put a Line in the Sand and said, this is what this is where we're, this is where we're going to make the mark and this is where we're going to go after. We're going to try to solve that. So I think it's kind of a two prong issue, right?
So it's not about digital identity, which sounds pretty clear like you guys. R /, you know, putting G of their solution to manage the identity as well as the the knowledge, all that, whatever that whatever data that business has about the Identity or about other things that need relationship to the identity. They've got you've got the real
identity piece down. Now, when I think of identity and access management, I think of all the processes that are associated with managing, I use are extracting that data so it's kind of the the tool Cooling and the management of everything that's in that digital fingerprint of a person, plus all that knowledge about them. So does indicate also address that piece? That's tough question. Or I should say not at all, but it's a complex question.
We're building the tools to manage that the challenges with the services that you need is around that identity is determining what the identity is. So if you're a human and you have a digital identity, you may need to have a password. You may need to have a password reset, you may need to have an impersonal verification, you may need to have all the things that a human would need to do to in the in the life cycle of their identity.
You can't apply those same Services, the same principles to a non human identity. So building a set of tools and a set of services to manage the lifecycle of the identity is there's commonality between but it's not a one size fits all so I guess that's that's a reason I said, the questions kind of toss us because it's I've got imagine you guys to take like a Services service-oriented approach to that, right?
So providing Our Sizzle. And if you're not going to force structure in that Knowledge Graph, then you almost have to have like a concept where people can develop their own endpoints
to manipulate the data. Of course, if you're going to have an IM tool, you want to enforce certain principles around that and I was thinking of and I can't even remember the name, but there's a type of A point as available in the for drunk, I DM product right where you could create your own endpoints of some kind of wondering if that is something that you guys have something similar.
And then I also wanted to bring up the whole for dark piece because just knowing that the founder of your company lost the Anderson was also, you know, one of the founders anyway of forgerock. So certainly the right pedigree there. Maybe kind of talked about that, that endpoint thing and then talk a little bit about you know, what, you know, loss A did to get the company started. The sure. Sure. So as far as the custom in point, I do with, I know what
you're talking about. I DM, you can create, you can create with my JavaScript you can, you can create a custom endpoint and you know, exposed that out as a service. We don't have that that could be, could be something that we Eventually would add in the value of something like that. Is it essentially the availability of the data? Yeah, I'm trying to I was trying to think through kind of the the
use case. I think we would get to a point where that would be you would need to have We just can't think of all the services that that a company or organization would need around their data model. And so, what it makes sense to have to be able to extend the platform and say, you know what, create your own apis, create your own Services. I think that makes makes sense. That's probably something that we would eventually get to to needing.
I think it was, I think it was a couple years into until I DM before they before they have that capability, right? That was something that came down the road. Yeah. The your second question was more about kind of losses story of from the transition from Ford Rock. So I think loss of the every entrepreneur saw the opportunity saw were the market was going. I mean, the vision came from a lot of experience working and
with graphs. And as I said earlier, you know, the sort of the validation and that, you know, here at Gartner's that that creating, that, that identity Fabric, or creating that, that service layer, and being able to do more with the identities and to do more with, you know, using using graph. You know, I think to place his credit, he had that that vision and then have the opportunity and the means to execute on it. Yeah, I mean, it's like everything we just talked about right there.
It's just seems like a solution that was so maybe not so obvious. I don't want to like take away any of the of the shine of what has been accomplished here. But just to me it was like yeah but aren't those the best products. These are the best. No. Duh. Why didn't we think of that, it right. Well, it's exciting because you're, you know, you're in the mix of it, you know, your heads down day-to-day and your you kind of have to pop your head up there.
Once in a while and say, okay, remind me what the vision is, okay? Okay, yes, yes, yes. And then I got to how was I was up half the night last night, just it was so exciting to apologize for keep going back to this. But, you know, just the validation, you know, the people I talked I spoke with yesterday the other presentations, yesterday, just like this is where the markets going, this is where it needs to go, you know? This is where we need to. We need to.
We need to give organizations to tools to be able to build the sort of building communities out of their customer data. I mean, able to, when I say community, what I mean is being able to create the relationships between the digital identities. I mean, right now, you know, we're all of us are, you know, our identities are in hundred, you know, and install hundreds of different data stores. But none of those identities are related across and none of the data's.
None of the identities are related within those data stores. So, for example, to construct the family or organization mean, you just have, you know, most companies just have, you know, a million identities that are all stand alone. Yeah, I mean, you know, would why I really wanted to get you on the show and kind of talk through this. Like I said, I've known you for
like 12 15 years. And you've been kind of a, you know, between independent consultant and kind of running a small Consulting business, but you could have easily just done that for the rest of your career, right? You're solving problems and very successful. So there must have been something about indicate that was just like, all right, I'm going to drop this other stuff that I've been doing been successful. I'd take a chance with something new and I you know, what is that? What is it?
That, that drove you just make that decision.
Ian, it's to think so. Number one, it was it's the the vision and being able to execute on that, you know, having spent a lot of time in the in this industry, the problems that were solving really resonated and I experienced those as a implementer firsthand, the challenges with ldap, the challenges with trying to create access policies that are complex enough to solve the problems that the customers are the organizations are having I mean, the number of times that my
response to a customer was okay, well just, you know, let's come up with a role and will do, you know, we'll do you know, we'll do role-based access control or tell me what the permission needs to look like, but being able to be part of, I'm going into the second part now is but to be able to be part of something much bigger, it's, you know, as a independent consultant it's a little bit of a lonely world. You You come into an organization and your, you spent
some time there. But at the end of the day, you're not really part of that organization. So, I think to be part of a group of people that are building an executing and at this stage, you know, being able to influence some of that. So you know, they, you know, they are like hey you worked an identity Brad. What what do you think about this or what do you, you know, and being able to say, okay, well I can look back and I know that, you know, kind of Yuma ego a little bit.
They, you know, I helped make that decision or, you know, the products going that direction because I, you know, I contributed to that, it's the new monuments, right? You're Building Bridges, but it was like the old days, right? You could carve your initials into it now. You're in a line of code somewhere. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It's a lot of fun, to be honest with you. I mean, we could solve things been fun Consultants been good.
But it's, you know, it after 15-20 years, it kind of, you know, you need something else to get you out of the bed in the morning and this This is definitely it. There were some, I was to say, you look great. You look healthy. I'll thank you. You look like you are just taking on the world. Well, thanks. Thanks.
There was something that struck my eye and I know we're getting short on time but I want to make sure we get to it because it's it's a concept that's relatively new I believe and not something a lot of people know it's called knowledge based access control. So I think people are probably familiar with role-based access controls but around for like 800 years it seems like and there's a lot of failed. Our bag projects that are out
there in a lot of messes. We've heard things like attribute bakes, attribute based access control a back policy based access control. And now I've got this thing. That you guys have coined as K back? Is that something that I guess? Tell me about kbecque knowledge? Based Access Control. What is it? And sure, how are you leveraging that?
So, so the knowledge and the knowledge in knowledge-based authentication or knowledge based Access Control comes from the knowledge graph and the data that's on the knowledge graph, what's fan what's amazing about graph database technology? Is that it's not the just the data that the I did Identity or the the thing that that digital identities related to you, it's the relationship between those two with graph. You can extend augment add to describe the relationship.
So you may be connected to your simple. Simple example, you're connected to your car. The label on that on. That line says Jim owns this car. Okay, but now we can go back and using artificial intelligence using machine learning. We can, we can, we can capture things. Like, how do you use that car? When do you use that car?
We can, we can take that data. The things, the things that we're gaining, and we're collecting, or to collect about the things that we're that are generated from the usage. Of that feed that back into the relationship and extend the metadata around that relationship and then use that data for Access Control. It's interesting. So it's not just a, it's not not, I don't want to knock our back or a back but it's not it all you want.
Well, it's limited in that you you create a role and you have access to X if you have this Roll. But the, as the context changes, the roles. Don't necessarily keep up with that short. You can, you can log out, log back in, get a different role. But in real time, the context may change in that your again, using that car example, you're driving at 50 miles, an hour or so, maybe the, maybe the, which you have access to needs to change, like, you shouldn't be accessing your phone.
Or you need to now, that's something, you know, in the car or the radio or whatever it is, but it's being able to feed that data back in and that data is becoming knowledge because it's, you know, it's it's it's getting pulled from the the usage reading pulled from the, you know, the you know, machine on a machine Flores house that data, the data that's being collected and and being able to augment that relationship that way and then being able to have access to that, what's really cool
about it, is that This point because we work in identity, we've only talked about the security aspects of that. Sure, we can create we can create access policies around that data. What's really interesting with this is that that data becomes a valuable tool for non security organizations within a company. So if you have access, you know, your work and your work in marketing or you work in business development or you work in whatever and you have access.
That. So you have this, this this related data and and the the augmented content around that or the augmented metadata around that are there new services that you would offer to these customers? Because now you can see that they're related and how they're using the service. Are there new products that you would offer? Other new things that you could recommend to them? You know, are there? You know, I mean, kind of the world's the you're all this data. What do you do with it, right?
It's like the sky's the limit and it sounds very much like this Nirvana, that marketing Ting and ecomp teams of progressive profiling, right? You're building up this knowledge, database around, who's visiting? What are they doing? What are they interacting with? I mean, certainly privacy concerns come to mind, right? I think there's a lot of concern and probably rightly so over,
you know, is the Facebook app. For example, listening to me, you know, when I'm not using it right, that that sort of thing, what sort, you know, the data being collected cetera, the controls that are in place there for the user to be able to manage Data. I would imagine it would be very robust but they also need to be user-friendly. Yeah, so we we are closely aligned with the web three Mantra or the the web, three, two components.
I should say, the components of web, 30 decentralized, self Sovereign, that's huge. You know, we're we're one of the few organizations at this point that's building consent and at the beginning. So that it's a really important step in actually, it's An afterthought. It it's usually shows. Notified. Oh no, we have all this data analysis data would now we're it's no longer a benefit to have a state and also liability to
have this data. So, you know, we, we want to dress that up front so that if we are collecting the data, we are using the data or maybe we're just referencing the data. The user has the ability to say you know what going back to the digital identity. Well these three properties or you know these these It's, I'll share them with you, but only for this week or only for this one time or only for whatever and then being able to digitally sign the consent.
So that if somebody comes back later and says wait a second I never I never consented to that you. We have that that audit Trail and it's digitally signed to say well here you did, you know you did sign that the terms of whatever and then terms change through you sign this first? Version. You didn't sign that version having things like that because I think all of that ties into
the privacy and consent. And you know what you agreed, what are the terms, you agreed to So, so going down a rat hole with this knowledge base authentication, but I can see some real world use cases, like you're in an e-commerce portal. Maybe you buy the membership that gets you. The free shipping stuff like that. Like, use a joint at the log back out to now, get permission to that, it just has to be added to the profile. What you have access to is now to tap into, maybe just A
section or something like that. So, totally real world use cases are bound by think. And I mean, that example, it's a simple. As you create a relationship from from that, from what person's digital identity to that permission, or to that object or two that, whatever, whatever it is. So you're not having to go back and say, okay, can you request someone to add this role? You're just the system is just creating that relationship and you're, you know, you're moving, along an out.
Now that you have this new thing, That you're related to okay. Well, what comes along with that and being able to just just just roll with that, just just have a system that is just flows with that. I'm not going to bore to see where this goes because I think obviously the I see the, I see the promise of it. I'd like to see it in action and sort of like the real world. Oh, yeah. And see how it works and works
through. But I know we're running out of time and we want to let make make sure that you can get out on the town and enjoy yourself. But before we go, we were kind of talking before we hit the record button here. And we got into the Concept of, you know, what would it take to walk away from something? And for those who are familiar with the other, the term is f you money. I won't spell it out here but you can look it up and it's inspired by our friend. Mike would burn.
And here's my question, as we wrap things up for today, what is your F? Your, what is your number when it comes to Fu money? Me a little walk away from things. So, I want to be able to just say the number and then, you know that you guys are gonna be, like, here's the chat. Here's the Giants. I'll check, check under your seat, better luck next time. That's a tough question and I know you're just looking for the
short answer saw. Just I'm just going to say a number but there's there's a lot of caveats to this say, my number is somewhere between 10 and 20 million, 10, and 20 million. I could do that yourself. That's kind of a cool. That's a much higher number than I was impressed. So first of all, I want to give you a little bit of background so Mike would burn is one of my favorite people. Not only died imagery but in the world I know he listens to the podcast.
So shout out Mike, you know. Yeah shout out of Mike and you can send your check right to me but I wanted to tell the story so I went to Maui and like 2012 and came back and was like I want to move to Maui then Financial reality set in and got back to life and never move to Maui. I met Mike let's say 2015, 2016 time frame, And makes it I'm going to visit. Maui is like Mike when you come back you're going to say I want to move to Maui and then you will never do it. Okay.
Yeah, right. So he goes to Maui because well he's like I want to move to Maui. Well those who know Mike would burn know that he actually did actually follow through with it. Oh yeah and so that was I think Mike is a smart guy many ways and obviously had his financing set up in a way that he was able to actually make it happen. So to me the fu money answer is not a firm dollar figure but it's about how much annual expenses I had covered.
And that would need to have like a Year's worth of expenses. In the bank, the annual expenses part, unfortunately goes up
every year, right? So this year, I'm not going to put a number out there because it's not important, but it will be more Sure. And the reason I say one year because it's kind of like to me it's like not me saying F you do the world, it's just being able to say all right well I'm going to go do something else and you know might take me a year to do it but you know today's my last day kind of kind of thing, not that I actually ever see myself pulling that trigger but that
whole question I heard you got Mike I said I'm right front of my boss right? So yeah. Anyway That's I like that answer now. I feel like it a lot of people here that question and you're instantly. Thank, you know, in a what number would it take for me to throw my laptop on the ground and walk out? And, you know, do you like a Jerry Maguire? But it's it's really about the freedom to make the choices like what question people ask all the
time. This, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail and to me that those two are tied together because this that's really what fu That's a really about. It's what, what, what, what, what can I say, no to what? Choices, you know, it's like I'm making, you know, I would probably continue working. If I had, if I had the, you know, my whatever that number is, you know, I would continue working because I like what I do. So wouldn't necessarily be about, you know, like know, tell
everyone to get off. No, it's I think it's, you know, it's the, the crude way to be able to work on what You want to work and pass on the things. You don't ya, well into not to make this all about like would burn because this is all about me. But, you know, Mike having talked to Mike. I know that he makes choices, you know, like, you know, you, I go and buy a car, or I go by buy a house. And I go by this and I have, you know, this is a reference from, like, but I have 15 streaming.
Services, you know, well, all of this costs money, but I'm making those choices. You don't have to have a ton of money to live the lifestyle you want to have you just have to make the right choices to be able to do that and you know like the lifestyle of the the choices that Mike and he also has the ability to go in like someone describes their project and was like, yeah, we're going to will throw money at you and still be able to go and no, I'm not going to work.
I'm not going to spend my life force energy. On that because I don't believe in what you're doing. You're making a stupid decision. I'm just not doing that. Yeah, well I think that the key is like, it's, it's at what point in your life are you, are you comfortable saying no to people and not having the fear of, you know, worst-case scenario. So what I started out Consulting, you know, the thing that my wife and I would say is
worst-case scenario. I just go get a job, you know, and it's like, that's how I felt, that's how I got to consult. He's like, you know what, I'm gonna give it a shot, I can always go. Back to, you know, being a civilian and not a consultant and you know whatever it might be. That was exactly what I thought. It was like those are better time, I felt confident enough in my abilities, my network my
reputation. That if I went into this and either I failed at it, because I wasn't good at it, or I didn't like it, I could pivot and go back to what I knew that was successful at. Yeah, and I think what you hit on it. There's it's having the confidence. To be able to do that. Yeah. Well, let's bring it back to Gartner because really, what's your number? Good question. It's probably pretty high
because I like nice things. I am a consumer, certainly of a bunch of different Services. I mean, I could I get by I'm lower number. Probably do I want to know. Could you clean your own house? I have got many things to do, you know, I don't know. That's certainly one of my guilty pleasures. It's like cleaning service. But enough of my first world problems, I would say I'm probably somewhere in the same area, 10 to 20 million.
Let's just say, because I feel like I like what I do I do this podcast because I like to do it the work that I do and identity is a consultant. And, you know, now, leading and identity, practice and building it up, right? You're building it with me. I like doing that. It's fun for me. When it's no longer fun, or the, you know, the cons outweigh the pros. That's when I look for something else, right? It's a As that I will work until I can't work anymore.
That's the way I look at it. You know what? I like to do nothing. Yeah, probably great for what I'm under a little while. Yeah. And then I get bored and I was like, I need to do something, right? So that's kind of how I look at it, you know, there's, there's a number. Let's just say, you know, x million, this point du du du where we are from the economy, but that doesn't mean that I stopped working. It's, I'm going to go do something right. There's only so many streaming
services. You can watch right. Maybe I'll create a new one. All right. Well, I want to bring back to Gartner. Oh Because one of the things that came up in this just why we were asking The Catcher in the question here, was, it started off with Mary mazzaglia, when she opened things up on the opening keynote and it was she talked about the, the generational divides and the people who are in the workforce now, you know, younger folks versus the older folks.
And, you know, I think everyone in this room is probably more on the ladder side and we didn't talk politics religion, Etc. Didn't have public stands. As in the workplace and now you know the the younger folks are expecting to have some sort of position on things like that. And I think being able to have that that discussion say yeah. Here's what I want to work on and here's why that's inspiring, right?
No one wants to work on a project that they don't like they don't want want to do. They don't want to work for a team or a leader or a company that they don't support right. Those sorts of things. So I think it's important to even if it's not a number, I think the question is Our to say, okay well, what is my intention here? Am I doing what I want to be doing whether it's in the identity field or anything else, really? I think it's I think we've come kind of Full Circle.
We start with, you know, Gartner 9 a.m. on a Monday and here we are, you know, local time five around 5 p.m. on the Wednesday. Yeah yeah I think it's um I think it's interesting. I've two young adult children and they're on the cusp of the rest of the rest of their lives and their, my daughter just finished her Nursing degree. So she started out Out and professional world and to see the choices that they make and
what's important to them. I mean, it wasn't it's it's only a few Generations separating, you know, my daughter from my grandparents to where my grandparents were like, you go to work. You do what you're told. You spend 25 years there, you get your watch and that's it. What, what questions do you have? And I think that younger people today have choices. There's not just One big company in town that you have to go work for. So you better not, you know,
embarrass yourself. They've got the freedom to make choices. They have freedom to make mistakes. I don't necessarily agree with living out your all your mistakes in life on social media. But, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's their world today. You know, I think that the world, I think people are much more health-conscious. They're much more environmentally conscious and so, it's wouldn't be fair to say, well, Well you can't bring yourself to work, you know, you
can't bring who you are. So you know I think that thought when you can do that, that's when you found the place. Yeah. If when you can be yourself and I've been in positions where I don't feel like I can be myself and others where I can and it makes the world of difference in how happy you are, which then has a, you know, an impact on the quality of the work and you're just general demeanor. And you know, it sounds like you know, silly you know.
Don't die advice. But if you're not happy, go find something that will make me happy. All right. We've wax poetic and I know you want. I know you're like it. I'm like so I think it's kind of ironic because I have been thinking about this last two days and it's kind of like, okay. Our generation was attacking
this the wrong way, right? We're not supposed to talk about these things, but imagine the scenario now where on one hand were supposed to talk about About all these things that have been taboo to talk about and on the other hand you're not allowed to judge anybody based on their opinion. So let's say one person's like got very far left. Using somebody elses very far right fuse and they have to work
together, right? Their views on things, outside of the workplace, really aren't relevant, right? And you know whether or not you believe then, you know, the environment should be perfect or you just think That or people should be able to do whatever they want to do. Whether you think that you should eat meat or you love, you're a foodie and you love to eat like the most exotic foods. Like this aren't really relevant discussions for the workplace,
right? And whether whatever you like to do in your free time as kind of none of my business. What you practice for a religion or how you like to spend your weekends? Not my business and What what I do on the weekends and what God I pray to our don't pray to, it's really none of your business either. So I get getting on. Yeah, I'm getting choked up who's going with that. But I think it's we're living in a world where it's really not appropriate to be judging
people. And, you know, the best way to not judge was really not to engage in conversation. I could become very polarized. Sure, well, I think that's another form of identity, you know, it's the more of the, the psychological, the, the Freud or the each version of identity. It's and people People get wrapped up in. This is my identity, this football team is my identity. This this this car you know this type of the type of truck. I drive is my identity, you know, and they get wrapped up in
that. And so they have to have to show that because this is my identity, this is, you know, and it's a, it's, it makes them feel better. It makes them feel more secure in who they are. And they, you know, work is, you know, I spent, I spent eight or
nine hours a day at work. I have to bring my And you know, if you can put your if you can put your Pittsburgh Penguins post-iraq, then I'm going to put a twice twice as big, Washington Capitals poster up and you know, you start bringing this to work and I think that it does. Some of that does unnecessarily
draw attention to those things. I think that, you know, like we said earlier, you should be, people should free be free to be themselves, but there are things that, you know, there's things you bring along that you don't have to. That I think sort of make it, you know, complicate the work
environment. I'm personally I just am like on the I want to go to work and I don't have pictures on my on my desk and, you know, let me do my job and then, you know, I'm going to leave after I'm done working and I'm going to go with my life and do the things that I like and the things that are my identity and the things that are are fun fun to me, just be nice. That's all I have to say. All right, let's wrap it up. It was very philosophically. I think that was, that was fun.
We'll go ahead and leave it there for this week. We will put a link to indicate in our show notes. It's IND. Why kitv.com? Thank you so much, Brad, finally, great to meet in person versus emails and things like that. If you've got questions about Unity kite, will have breads LinkedIn in the show notes as well. So reach out to him and get some information. I think you've got an interesting story there, anything I'm curious to see how it plays out.
I hope to hope to continue the conversation. I hope you have any back you know, somewhere in the Near future and I can give you an update and kind of tell you how things are progressing. And if you'll have me, if I wasn't too bad, then I'd love to come back and of course more about it. The door is always open. All right, we're going to leave it there for this week or weeks for this episode. We were just kind of here at the Gartner episodes are a gardener a conference.
I didn't the center.com is where you find us on the web, idac podcast is where you find us on Twitter, tweet us questions, connect with us on LinkedIn. We're always happy to take comments feedback. I could cetera. Whatever. Makes the most sense, get it to us and we can take it from there. So thanks everyone for listening. And we'll talk with you all in the next one. Thanks for listening to the identity at the center podcast.
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