#242 - Authenticate 2023: Passkeys with Pedro Martinez of Thales Group - podcast episode cover

#242 - Authenticate 2023: Passkeys with Pedro Martinez of Thales Group

Oct 30, 202342 minEp. 242
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Episode description

In this episode, Jim McDonald and Jeff Steadman host a discussion on passkeys with Pedro Martinez, the Business Owner for Digital Banking Authentication at Thales Group. They explore the concept of passkeys and their potential to replace passwords in authentication. Pedro shares insights on the security and user experience benefits of passkeys, as well as the challenges and benefits for different industries, particularly the financial sector. The conversation also touches on the control and synchronization of passkeys by major tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Tune in to gain a deeper understanding of passkeys and their implications for identity and access management. Connect with Pedro: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedro-martinez-038338/ Learn more about Thales Group: https://www.thalesgroup.com/ Connect with us on LinkedIn: Jim McDonald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmcdonaldpmp/ Jeff Steadman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffsteadman/ Visit the show on the web at idacpodcast.com and follow @IDACPodcast on Twitter.

Transcript

This is Identity at the Center. If it has anything to do with IAM, this is the GoToPotcast. Now your host, Jim McDonald, and Jeff Steadman. Welcome to the Identity at the Center podcast. I'm Jeff and that's Jim. Hey, Jim. Hey, Jeff. How are you? Not so bad yourself. I'm doing great. You know, again, we're at the Authentic K conference and it's a really cool conference. I mean, you know, it's not one of the really

big conferences we go to like Gardner, I'd never heard of. So we're some of the vendor-specific conferences. However, like you'll see signage that say MFA is so 80s. And I'm like, I feel like I was still going around in my clients saying, make sure you have MFA. I mean, I know it's old, but it's kind of like I'm in between, right? Because you better have MFA, but at the

same time, this password was phenomenon. It's kind of like making it pass A. Well, pass keys are having its moment in the sun right now, but at the end of the day, you still need to have some factor additional to just a password, right? So MFA, I think, is still valid. Lots of companies out there have spent the last couple of years investing and even just getting MFA off the ground, especially with the pandemic and people working from home

and needing to do better authentication on that, which is great. And MFA still has a place in the world. It's better than not having MFA, but clearly the future is shifting towards pass keys and fight authentication. We've seen Google, Microsoft, Apple come together, right? Which is sort of momentous. Yeah, it's really moments. Yeah. So I don't want to poo poo all over the MFA thing. It definitely feels like it's, I don't want to say legacy,

but we're approaching it. It's kind of like, okay, SMS, right? That was top of a line 10 years ago. SMS is the best thing you can do. Now, it's not recommended. Is it better than nothing? Yes, of course. But people aren't recommending that you start with SMS. Now they're starting with, hey, you should be looking at pass keys for your FF. I also think

there's a difference between enterprise I am and customer I am. I think that's probably the biggest dividing line because usually customer I am is focused on apps and the web, whereas employee workforce is, I mean, it can be anything from legacy green screens to VPNs and as well as apps that are either desktop apps or web enabled apps of all generations. So those are different. They're captive audiences, right? I mean, your employee, your employer

can say, this is the way you're going to do that. Right? And you don't have generally speaking much of a choice within those rails. Consumer side of things, it's how easily can I get you to spend money with me, right? Or give me data or whatever the thing is, right? So of course, you need to have a minimum threshold of security, but it is much more open to, hey, let's look at it easier ways. The user experience is much more predominant.

Now I think that's changing, thankfully, but I think that's still sort of a general thrust between the two. Yeah, absolutely. So I think the pass keys are a big topic, how they fit it into authentication, especially customer I am is something that we ought to explore. And to that, to that end, we have a great guest today. Yeah, when you say explore, I think of the cowbell. Let's explore the space. Let's explore the space of pass keys. I want to welcome

to the show Pedro Martinez. He's a business owner for digital banking authentication at Tullis Group. Welcome to the show, Pedro. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure. Yeah, thanks for taking the time with us. One of the things that we like to do and we have someone on for the first time is to really kind of learn their identity origin story. How did you get into the world of identity access management? Is it something that you chose or did it choose

you? No, basically 25 years ago, I went to a job interview and I know very exactly where I was going and I found myself working into an identity and access company which at the time was called the Schlumberger and has been evolving name over time to the point that

today without having changed company is stallets. So I didn't know at the end, but it happened to be a very lucky situation because it put me in the right place at the right time because we were talking about this was 1998 when I joined and all the sudden it turns out that this company that I interviewed for and finally hired me at our main business was to manufacture

smart cards, smart cards for either banking. So for payment cards at the time that we were starting with the transition from Max Tribe towards cars with a chip and at the same time we were having the big roll out worldwide of GSM technology with SIM cards and so there was a point where you essentially would be walking down the street and you would hit the stone and you would have a license for a mobile operator popping out the floor.

There were licenses coming out all the time in each country around Europe and later on it was around here. So it was a boom of telecom and it was a happy moment to get into that kind of market all the way until now changing a lot over the years because that was very

hard work centric at the time around cars, the manufacturing, the personalization. It was not just manufacturing cars that the main value that we were bringing was the fact that every single SIM card or banking card that was living in our factory was personalized.

It was charged with a specific unique credentials to be associated so that was what was making millions but each of one was coming out as a different product already personalized from the factory at the time so that evolved a lot and over time it turned more towards

software and backend services than the actual development. So today it's a mix we still do SIM cards with banking cards but we do a lot of backend solutions, server solutions for securing digital banking, digital payment, tokenization, etc. So that was purely by chance I didn't know where I was getting into and here my 25 years later.

That's how I feel like a lot of people in the space sort of just ended up in it. You have a title of business owner, at least I introduced you as business owner for digital banking authentication at TALAS Group. I got two questions. First question is what does business owner for digital banking authentication mean? What do you do? Tell us a little bit about TALAS Group because I think it's a large company that maybe people aren't familiar with. Bring us up to speed on that.

So first of all, business owner means that my role today is not technical. I have a responsibility with Gs. worldwide. It's not a specific to a region and I basically am following all the opportunities that we have for business related to these type of solutions of authentication for digital banking with customers and with our sales teams around the world. I am not front line, not normally with customers. I am obviously our sales teams are. I am called

on occasion to help to assist, to have conversations. I'm particularly with the topic of Pasquite. I've been exposed a lot over the last 16, 18 months. We have been very proactive in going and talking with customers and we wanted to gather as well a lot of feedback. We were sharing with them what we knew. They were coming back. Business owner means that I follow the business, not at a deep technical, just following the opportunities and helping our regional teams to sell our stuff.

TALAS Group is a French company. I didn't know much about Schlange, but I just pronunciation this means that was a French company. Nothing to do because they were completely different companies. As you mentioned, Schlumberger, I don't know if I'm to say well, I don't know if I, but the origin of the company is American. It was a couple of, and the name of Schlumberger is probably, I think, that it was to German or German origin, the family name. It's

an American company. Oilfield Services as the main business, but they had a division that was working on something completely different. It was the business that I was talking about as a smart car, as a smart car, technology. That's where I joined. Over time, there was a point where we went through an IPO and we became an independent company. Just this vision, so Schlumberger continues to work and do a lot of great business around oilfield services,

engineering services, very impressive. We became an independent company under the name of Exalto, and we merged with our first competitor, which was, I'm talking about my origin, but we merged with our main competitor. We became Gemalto at the time as a result of that. We were the number one provider for all these kinds of products.

So now Tally's acquired us about five years ago, and Tally's is a big company, French multinational, with working with divisions around aerospace, around defense, and also around civil services. We have joined as a division within Tally's around cybersecurity. The name of our division is TIS, digital identity and security. Yes, we bring that aspect of security always with the aspect of security, but very center on the digital life.

So for those who are not very familiar, are you supposed to work there in Europe? I'm sorry? Are most of your customers in Europe? No, no, no, no. If I talk about the TIS, the digital identity and security, we are very multinational, very multinational company, even the part related to Gemalto.

Remember that we were working with banks and with telcos and with governments, because I talk about banking cars and SIM cards, but we also were providing electronic passports and electronic IDs, for example, as well as equipment for reading them to governments, to telcos, to banks, all around the world. We have some really large clients. And this idea of passports, I mean, we've relied on the password for so long and I've heard

you make the statement, passkeys will replace the password. I'm wondering why you say that and what kind of reaction you get when you say that to these big organizations that you work with. And that's actually, it all started, well, it all started last year. We have been working, we have been members of the FIDO Alliance since very early on. We are board members and we have been participating actively, leading work groups.

We have contributing to it and we have been building products and certifying our own products as FIDO products. But it is a technology that we always consider that it had promise and we were following and we were coming with products. But it was last year in May when Apple, Google and Microsoft did something that, to my knowledge, because I haven't been able to find any precedent of that, did something unique, which was to issue a joint PR, the three of them.

That was the moment where we said, okay, this is even bigger than we thought it would be. It was, we really saw that this was going. We knew that everybody had been working and had been doing all the plumbing that would be necessary for this technology to succeed. But sometimes that's not enough, no. But when we saw that level of commitment, that level of commitment from the three of them, we said, okay, well, so here there is something big that is going, is really going to happen.

And we decided that we needed to start to evangelize a little bit. To take the opportunity, it was not the time yet to take an action from customers last year. But it was an opportunity for us to go see our own customers and share information with them that we believe they would find valuable. Because what we were convinced is that they didn't know what was coming. So even if there was this announcement, people was not processing these. It sounded irrational at the time you mean. Sorry?

It sounded irrational. Because if you haven't had time to observe the idea, yeah, or you just don't, you know, I mean, we have been depending on passwords for as long as there is internet. It has come to a point that nobody likes them. Nobody, neither the service providers, nor the end users. Nobody likes to use passwords. And yet we have come to accept that it is what it is. It's always been like this. It gets to a point except everybody that is working here on a solution.

Everybody that is out of this bubble, it has come to a point that it just accepts that they have to manage 50 or 60 or 70 different passwords, that everything that they are going to a login, that they have not visited in three or four months, their standard login user experience is going to be going through the password recovery mechanism. We have come to accept that as just the way things are.

And even our interfaces in companies, anyway, we thought that we needed to go on, we needed to share information and to see the reaction as well. And we started to go out and we started to plan our most below customers and to see them. And when we started to do these meetings, indeed, we said we want to grab their attention and we are going to start by poking a little bit. And they would start with a slide that was saying flat out, and this is going at customers that I don't normally see.

It's not like they know me. I mean, they just see a weird guy that is coming with the typical contact, which is the sales person for that account or anyway. And the long coves this weird guy. And he sits in the room and he comes out and comes out with a slide as a self by saying, Pascis are going to kill password. It is inevitable and it's going to happen first. And the reaction was, as expected, you could see it.

I mean, you would be in the room and maybe there were five, six people depending on the gathering and the customer. And all the sudden you would see a one guy, typically security architect or also that would lean back on the chair and cross their hand. They didn't have anything with the body language. Yeah, you didn't say anything, no? But that was somehow intended. It was creating a little bit of attention and then from there you wanted them to challenge that statement.

But when you go through it, the question was, okay, I understand, you don't believe, why would you believe it? I mean, you have always seen this and it has never happened. When you go through that and you start to explain them that, well, then I was explaining why it is inevitable that this is going to happen. And then I was starting with the lamest argument possible, which was to tell them because they are great. And they were kind of laughing. Well, they are great.

Let's see, they are really great because they are clearly providing, compared to passwords. They are clearly providing a much better user experience and you could expect rolling their eyes, yeah, the better user experience. Okay. They provide a much better security and you can get into actuals and you can start to talk there about they cannot be fished. They cannot be subject to a massive data leaks.

That begins to touch ground because they have seen them, either they have suffered them themselves or they have seen nearby bombs dropping to them. And then you can tell them and the, as a third argument of why they are great because they can reduce your cost very significantly. The cost of the password resets represent one of the biggest costs that you have related to customer care. So that is quantifiable. Okay. They are great. But that is not enough.

What is the second big reason why it's inevitable is because, and I'm not sure, that and that's where you come out with a PR and you say, look at the level of commitments. This is something I'm present at. These guys, Microsoft, Google, Apple and the industry behind them because the fight allions with everything that comes behind. These guys have declared publicly that they are committed to end with passwords. This begins to be something.

You've got to think, if all of your Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon services, start using Peskeys and become ubiquitous. Everybody gets used to doing it. Who is listening to this podcast? Who isn't used to doing MFA? There was at one point in time that was almost unheard of. They sent me a message to my phone and I've got to enter that, you know, it was new. Now everybody gets it.

You see that pop up, check your phone for a message or for one time password, etc. The same things that I have with Peskeys, right? Yeah, we are going to get used because we are going to see it. But there are two aspects. This sometimes gets especially talking and that's what I differentiate. You said Microsoft, Google, Apple and Amazon. Obviously, there are big, most of us service providers.

But we have to make the difference with Microsoft, Google and Apple because the other reason that brings to say that this is inevitable is that they, they hold the platforms for all the end-user communication devices, whether they are computers, tablets or phones that we all use. You have there practically 100% of the market. And if they three are telling, we are going to make this happen.

We are going to do everything that is necessary at the level of our devices and at the level of the operating systems for this to be enabled. That is a big thing. And indeed, they did the announcement. That announcement that told us way. This is going to happen. And over the next, that was the fifth of May actually, that's password of 2022.

And over the five, six months that followed, they were true to their commitment because by the end of 2022, you had windows, you had Android, you had iOS, you had Mac OS equipped for PASCIS natively. Yeah, all along. Seared wrong the distinction. Apple, Google, Microsoft, because they have the devices. This level down might be Amazon, eBay, TikTok. Does anybody not think this is going to happen? Is anybody thinking this is not going to happen? Well, it depends.

I mean, if you think, well, okay, so there is banks. There is certain industries, any particular banking industry, that because that was the second part of the conversation that we were having at that table with those customers, no, with a person that was leaning back on the table. The first part of the conversation was to tell them this is going to happen. This technology is going to thrive. The second part of the conversation was, well, is this fitting well for financial institutions?

And there, things were getting complicated. And in part, besides sharing information with them, we also wanted to get their feedback to see how they see it, because at the beginning there was quite some doubts. Why is that? At the same time that Google, Apple, and Microsoft said we are going to enable this technology and make it natively, they also came out with a notion of synchronization of PASCIS.

All the work that had been done at the FIDO Alliance to build PASCIS was always under the consideration that a PASCIS was bound to a device. PASCIS created on one device. You create that credential. That credential, once it is created, it creates a unique link between a service provider, a user, and a specific device. And so it becomes a possession factor for a multi-factor authentication.

However, the moment that you enable synchronization, which is great for more than one reason, for one side, because it simplifies the user experience, you don't need to create a PASCIS for every single device that you have. You can just create one PASCIS on one device, and if you have multiple devices on the same myself, I use Apple devices. I've got to say I have a Mac, I have a tablet, I have a fanboy. You're a fanboy. Well, not me. Hey, it works. I like how it works. We all have our services.

He's the one. He's the one. He's the one. Anyway, the thing is that it's great. I mean, that synchronization simplifies life, and it also solves an everlasting issue related to a strong authentication, which is a counter-cover. If you lose your device, then you need to again verify your identity in order to create on a new device, et cetera, et cetera. Having this backup, this is fantastic. But you have lost the notion of device binding.

But when you create a PASCII, I create it on one device on my iPhone. But all the sudden that PASCII is going to flow through iCloud and end up available on my iPad and on my MacBook. Well, it's difficult to claim that that is a possession factor. It's proving it's the possession factor. It's proving possession of what. At most, it's proving possession or control. It's proving that I have control of my iCloud account, but not of a much expected password. Which goes back to password.

So that was something. And as we started discussing with our banks, we were telling this is going to come. This is something that is arriving. But what is going to be your position of that? We're talking about the second half of 2022. We're having these conversations, and some were surprised, and we're saying, no, this doesn't happen. And we were trying to form our own opinion. And there were discussions into the phyto alliance as well, no?

In the end, we used scratch our head a little bit for a while. But over time, as we had more and more interviews and we mature our own position, it is not that complicated as that, at least in our view. We think, because there is any bank that today is using passwords, even if it's partially, because they require something more than passwords to meet regulation.

But if they are using passwords as part of their authentication policy, there is, in our view, there is absolutely no doubt that they should jump at the possibility of replacing those passwords for synced passkeys. For the passkeys, even if they are synced. Sometimes, when we were having this conversation, a customer would say, no, but no, I mean, this is how are we going to accept that the credential, because the credential is ours, is between me, the bank and my customer.

How am I going to accept that this credential that is mine now is going to go on flow to an eCloud or to a Google password manager? And they would have said, and how is this different to what happens today already with passwords? You have no control and that is already happening. Because today, when a user is going to a website on any of this, if I go to my iPhone and I'm trying to log in into a certain account, I can choose. I can choose to save it into my kitchen.

So that is already happening with your credentials today. So you cannot consider that there is a loss because that's already happening to you. So don't look at it. Don't compare passkeys with your strong authentication solution. But are you using passwords as part of your authentication policy at all? If so, it's a no-brainer, replace as fast as you can those passwords for passkeys.

And if you have a solution for a strong authentication, OTP or whatever, whatever the solution it is that has to meet compliance, combine with those passkeys. Okay? It continues to work. You don't need to make any effort with that. You can do low assurance authentication if you want through passkeys instead of passwords.

And then when you need to step up, because you want to sign a transaction, you want to make a payment and you need to do a higher authentication, apply whatever you have as already as a strong authentication mechanism and that works. And over time, what can happen? That's going to be very easy to implement because you just need to connect a back end and to do a very minor standard modification into your web services. Just implement web-authent so that you can be calling on passkeys.

You don't need to do anything on the client side because the OS of the devices of the end users are already taking there. So it's super easy to add passkeys support to your web services and all the silent, you will see how customers start doing less passwords and more passkeys. And the more passkeys they do and less passwords, that's risk that you are removing, risk of phishing that you are removing, it's only benefits that you have on that side.

And if you do just that, you are doing yourself a favor. Later on, you can consider, well, I mean, right now I'm having an infrastructure for authentication of passkeys based on FIDO and then I have another infrastructure in place for legacy, legacy for a strong authentication. You can say, well, actually I don't need to infrastructures because I can use the FIDO infrastructure as well to do authentication that is too factor and that is acceptable from a compliance to a regulation standpoint.

How can you do that? Using the same back end, the same FIDO back end that you have for basic passkeys. Now you can reuse it if you want to remove the old infrastructure that you have for ROTP. How? Well, ensuring that passkeys don't synchronize. Now you were saying before that end users, you can control them in a B2C environment, you cannot control them, you don't know which platforms they are using.

So as far as there is one platform that is applying systematically synchronization, well, you cannot consider that you have a solution that fulfills all your users like that. So you cannot count on the passkeys that are managed by the platforms as your solution for authentication. But you can implement FIDO and you can manage passkeys through other means. For example, through an SDK, you can integrate the FIDO functionality on your mobile app as they do today in many cases.

So the bank can use their own mobile app to they can add the FIDO functionality into their mobile apps. How important is that control for an organization to own that portion of the authentication? So we talked about the platforms owning quite a bit of it right now, Google, Microsoft, Apple. But you just mentioned a financial institution, for example, wanting to incorporate the authentication into their app in your dealings with that industry.

How important is that control where they want to have that? It is very important. I think that they suddenly don't want to relinquish financial institutions in general, at least of a medium size to large size. They say these are my customers. When it comes to their service, these are my customers, these are my credentials. This is a direct relationship between us. I have to be the master of that relationship. And they want only a full authentication experience as much as they can, anyway.

Yes, there are, I mean, there are, there are in most cases, that's the case, there are some regional cases, there are some initiatives and we have some very interesting presentations that are, there are some, some small polls, for example, in the knowledge in Northern Europe, there has been an initiative actually where banks came together. There is a consortium of entities that came together and created an entity to manage identities, which is called by Katie. Absolutely.

Just the same concern that banks had with identity of the service, you know, 10, 15 years ago, was like, oh, I can't put my credentials up in the cloud. I need to have them on prem and control them. But the thing that I think where you were getting with the argument of Pasquise versus Paswards is people can use their eye cloud to sink their keychain, which is basically just the password, but your password could also end up in some kind of password file out on the dark web.

It can be used by anybody, but the Pasquise can't because it's cryptographically signed and it's not something that could end up in some kind of dark web dump. Pasquise, so that is a risk that you completely remove from the table because Pasquise are based on asymmetric cryptography.

The fact that they are based on asymmetric cryptography, what it means is that what you are going to be storing on the server side, you need to have something on the server side, but it's not the entire key, it's just half of the key. So even if that server would be compromised and those keys would be stolen, that on itself doesn't allow to recover all the... It doesn't break the security of that credential.

So that is one of the massive arguments why a bank or any service provider for that matter that today is using Pasquise for authentication. They may want to move away from them as soon as possible into this because the question about the data leaks, there is the direct financial loss, but there is the branding... Brand name. Brand name loss. And it's an aimer. So that on itself is quite the motivation.

So folks, for folks who are listening, it's 25 after three on Tuesday, you're going to be presenting in like 25 minutes, so... And you want to, yeah. And one hour, okay. We really appreciate you talking through this with us, but we don't want to hold you back from that. You need a little bit of time to catch the rest, maybe a coffee or something. But thank you, Pedro. I mean, this is really educational. I'm in my Malaysia, anytime.

Yeah, so let's end on a lighter note here so you can get off and go and prepare and psych yourself up. We were talking before we hit the record button that you're a soccer dead. Yeah. You've got a couple of sons, I think you said, that are playing soccer. Then the conversation turned a little bit towards Messi, who has become a phenomenon. He's already been a phenomenon around the world, but unless you've been a diehard soccer player, you're probably just kind of... Or maybe passing familiarity.

Now he's playing for Miami in Florida. Of your soccer dead duties, how do you see your sons and their journeys through the sport? Are we looking at maybe the next Messi somewhere in a different position? No, no, no. I mean, they won. They will do whatever they want, but for us, he's just a matter of keeping them healthy and doing a team sport and getting into that.

But to me, the only thing is that now they're playing soccer and then watching soccer and then playing soccer because you have the equivalent of the NFL games. Yeah, and it's all soccer all the time, all week long, it's quite intensive. But it's true that we were by tradition in the family, fans of Barcelona and now to... We had Messi, we had the lack of these guys in our team.

And to see the impact that now we're having in a country that doesn't have the tradition of it's funny to see, the kind of craze that is generating in a country that traditionally didn't pay as much attention to soccer as it was before. Does that give a sense of pride when you see that happening? Or is it a sense of loss because he used to play? No. Really happy for the guy because you know there are great sports guys that are just great at what they do.

But as a person, you don't... I mean, it doesn't... It doesn't... I mean, they are too fond of themselves. So they don't... Right. You don't see them as a role model, for example, for your kids. And this is a guy that has been... He's great in what he does. He's exceptional at any kind of measure. He's a very humble, very reasonable, very nice. He doesn't has outbursts or anything like that. And he won the World Cup after having been chasing it for many years in the late stages of his career.

And now to see him, the kind of things he's doing, every time that he does something that is remarkable, we just get as mild-nose. It's happy to see him thrive. And to see the kids obsessed with him as well. So Barcelona fans, are they Florida MLS fans at this point? Or Miami, I should say? Or... You follow a player versus a team? No, no. I would say that people have sympathy for the... For people from Barcelona have sympathy for Miami now, because Messi is in there.

And not only Messi, I mean, there were a couple of players, X, Barcelona players that went along as well. So now, now, it's a very rare thing to see, because there was no interest whatsoever in Spain about MLS here. And then now, you can have a conversation of what did Miami last week, which was and heard of before. So... It's amazing what a transcendent player can do with that. Yeah, right.

I think you see that occasionally, that's maybe basketball player coming from some area of the world right into one league or another, or baseball, was another one, which I know Jim, you were just chomping at the bit to get into that one. So I was in a conversation with Denise and one of her friends, and she sent a picture of a guy that she's dating her friend. And she said, I was like, he looks like somebody famous. She was like, yeah, he looks like Victoria Beckham's husband. David Beckham?

No, she said it right. The spice girl, right? She was a spice girl. Yeah. But he came over and played in the MLS for a while, but I think it was more of like, you know, it got some attention. But from what I understand, now Messi's over here just like dominating, right? Yes. Which, that's how it's cool. I mean, my Uber driver from the airport to the resort here, he's like, do you want to listen to something or watch something? I'm like, I don't care.

So what does he put on? He puts on like this highly real of Messi, just scoring goals and winning championships. And it was probably still playing after the 45. He was probably going. He's probably watched it hundreds of times, I guess, but yeah, I used to play soccer when I was a kid and it's usually how MLS has gotten progressively more popular over the years. I mean, it's still very much not anywhere near, you know, an NFL, NBA, you know, at Pocky baseball.

And then you've got sort of MLS, I think it's kind of after that. But there was just a genuine excitement when you, you know, a player of that caliber comes over. I was, I was concerned, he's okay, he's going to come over, he's towards his career. What does that mean? He's not going to be able to produce it ever. And then the guy comes out, scores goals left and, yeah, it's for Fogelgitz. I mean, he delivered right away and it was like this shot of adrenaline that went through MLS. He did.

It was the worst team in the MLS this season. The guy arrived and he played six, seven matches and he won a title for them just to straight up. It was, I mean, they were expecting him to make an impact, but no one was expecting that he would do that right off the bat as he arrived to the, it was, it was funny to watch. It was funny to watch. It was a real Cinderella story. Yeah. We're going to go ahead and wrap it up for this conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time. My pleasure.

I think we'll be recording another episode when you're on stage. So we'll be simpatico with you. No, thinking about that. But it was great to meet you, great to have this conversation. I'll have some links and our show notes so that people connect with you on LinkedIn. If they have any questions, sort of have a link to the tallest group as well. So people can find out more about what goes on over there. We'll have links to myself and Jim on LinkedIn as well. We're on the web, idacpodcast.com.

We're on Twitter, slash x, slash whatever it's called by the time you listen to this, at idacpodcast, mastodon, at idacpodcast, at infosectorexchange, like, subscribe, share with a friend, share with an enemy. I don't care. So I'm super listening. We'll keep doing this. Everyone for listening and we'll talk with everyone in the next one.

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