Latest / Identity at the Center / #317 - Sponsor Spotlight - Strivacity
Transcript
- 0:00A hallucination can kind of be thought of as a, as a statement
- 0:03that's statistically probable, but factually incorrect.
- 0:07I, I, I like that. I read that statement somewhere.
- 0:09I was like, that's perfect way to describe it.
- 0:11Statistically probable, factually incorrect, right.
- 0:13And again, this is one of the reasons that people are building
- 0:17grounding systems around AIS like like RAG, because it's a
- 0:20safety mechanism, It's a security mechanism, like you
- 0:23said, right? To make it more, make the answer
- 0:25more reliable, make it more accurate.
- 0:28It's certainly a concern for us as we were, as we were building
- 0:31the product, building it into our product.
- 0:33And it's also why you see disclaimers like on chatbot
- 0:37systems. It's like, hey, LLMS can make
- 0:38mistakes. Please, please verify your
- 0:40answers because hallucinations are and will continue to be a
- 0:43problem even with grounding systems around around, you know,
- 0:48the, the implementation of these.
- 0:49So yeah, I think it's, I think it's a great question.
- 0:52Are hallucinations the the biggest threat to the success of
- 0:56an AI right now and trying to put guard reels around it so
- 0:59that you're not giving incorrect information?
- 1:01Or is there something else that keeps you up at night?
- 1:08This is identity at the center if it has anything to do with
- 1:13IAM. This is the go to podcast now
- 1:18your hosts Jim McDonald and Jeff Stedman.
- 1:28Welcome to the Identity of the Center podcast.
- 1:30I'm Jeff, and that's Jim. Hey, Jim.
- 1:32Hey, Jeff, how are you? Not so bad yourself.
- 1:35I just living the allergy life man.
- 1:37Even though we've we've gotten to the point of daylight savings
- 1:39time is over and temperatures are getting cooler, my allergies
- 1:43just keep getting worse. So if it sounds like I only
- 1:47breathe through my mouth, that's why.
- 1:50Well, yeah, if you could just not breathe and make sure the
- 1:52audio quality sounds good, that would be fantastic for me.
- 1:55Yeah sure I'll I'll die mid episode.
- 1:58Well, today's special episode because we've got a sponsored
- 2:00spotlight and we're joined by our friends from Strabacity.
- 2:05His name is Steven Cox, he's a Co founder and CTO.
- 2:07Well, welcome here in a second, but just to make it crystal
- 2:10clear, this entire episode is sponsored thanks to Stromacity.
- 2:14We work with folks like Steven all the time to try and come up
- 2:17with different entertaining shows around.
- 2:19You know, there are specific viewpoints into the different
- 2:21things that they approach from identity space.
- 2:22So I'm sure people enjoy it. We've had actually Steven on
- 2:25before in the show. Steven, you joined us way back
- 2:28in episode 112. So welcome back to the Identity
- 2:31of the Center podcast. Thanks a lot guys.
- 2:33Yeah, it's great. It's great to be on.
- 2:34Always enjoy talking with you guys and, and I'm proud to have
- 2:37been #112 on your on your podcast.
- 2:41An early supporter, we appreciate it.
- 2:44You were with Trivacity then, you're still with Trivacity now,
- 2:46and that website is Trivacity dot AI, so make sure you get it
- 2:49out there. STRIVACITY dot AI definitely
- 2:53encourage to be able to go check it out.
- 2:55But why don't we start sort of at the very beginning, you know,
- 2:58tell us about Trivacity and give us a refresher on how you got
- 3:02into the digital identity space. Yeah.
- 3:05So I've been in the digital identity space now for, gosh,
- 3:08about 10 years. I came from a sort of network
- 3:12and endpoint threat detection background.
- 3:15I worked in that space for a number of years.
- 3:17I've been in cybersecurity for probably about 20 years now.
- 3:22I joined about 10 years ago, I joined a company that your your
- 3:28listeners are probably familiar with secure auth with who is now
- 3:32my Co founder of Trivacity, Keith Graham.
- 3:35And so I focused on, you know, workforce identity management
- 3:38and customer identity management at at secure auth, which, you
- 3:41know, informed a lot of my, you know, my current beliefs around
- 3:45customer identity platforms. So, yeah, that's kind of how I
- 3:49got my start on, you know, in, in, in this space.
- 3:54And you know, Stervacity is a, is a customer IAM solution.
- 3:59We got started in about 2019. So gosh, we've been going about
- 4:035-5 years, 5 1/2 years now. So we're focused on the, the
- 4:08customer identity problem end to end, right.
- 4:10You hear lots of, you know, lots of terms thrown around this
- 4:13space, customer identity, consumer identity, but
- 4:15fundamentally like we're ACCIM solution and that's the problem
- 4:18we're we're interested in solving for our customers.
- 4:22So what is it about your guys's approach to the consumer or
- 4:26customer because we're talking Siam, right?
- 4:28CIA am here. What makes you guys unique
- 4:31because I think that's the question that I always have for
- 4:33for folks in the space. OK, well, you know, there's lots
- 4:35of solution in the space. How are you guys different and
- 4:37how do your customers measure success with the, you know with
- 4:41your products? Yeah.
- 4:43So there's a couple things I focus on when we talk about
- 4:46differentiation, You know what, what sort of, you know, brings
- 4:49us out from the pack and and the and the three things I like to
- 4:52really talk about are are architecture, our capabilities
- 4:56and our focus on on customer experience.
- 4:58So in terms of architecture, you know, we spent a lot of our
- 5:02early days focused on building a platform that could scale with
- 5:05the unique needs of customer identity.
- 5:08You know, as we are building, you know, we kind of set some,
- 5:12some design principles out to, to help guide us, you know, and
- 5:15those principles of have evolved over the years, of course.
- 5:17But you know, I can give you a high level kind of what we were
- 5:19thinking. You know, one of the, one of the
- 5:22big ones was like going after the cloud hesitancy problem,
- 5:26right? They're, they're, you know, this
- 5:28is less of a problem than it was now than it, than it was in
- 5:302019, but it is still an issue. And it centres around that
- 5:34hesitancy of organizations to move certain types of data or
- 5:38systems to the cloud for a variety of reasons, right.
- 5:41We learned a lot about this in previous experiences before
- 5:44servacity. So we wanted to really attack
- 5:46that head on. Another thing we sort of
- 5:50observed previous experiences was that CIM projects were sort
- 5:53of excruciatingly long and laborious, you know, kind of
- 5:57often for the wrong reasons. And we wanted to sort of go
- 6:00after that problem. You know, customer identity has
- 6:04some unique requirements. It requires you to to move
- 6:07quickly, to iterate quickly as sort of customer patterns change
- 6:11and you discover new customer patterns.
- 6:14We wanted to bring the whole customer identity journey under
- 6:18the umbrella of a single platform, right?
- 6:19Something that had not yet been achieved in 2019 and arguably
- 6:23still has not been achieved or only been achieved by us, by us
- 6:27today. And you know, sort of sort of
- 6:30goes along with that are are things like brand management,
- 6:34which was sort of horribly broken until we came along.
- 6:36So you have these, you know, you have these orgs that are sort of
- 6:39brand of brand organizations, you know, have a sort of a
- 6:41parent company and multiple sub brands.
- 6:44That's a challenge we run into. So yeah, so we developed an
- 6:48architecture that takes these challenge into into account,
- 6:50right? We're built on Kubernetes.
- 6:52Our platform scales with demand. It can be upgraded using rolling
- 6:56upgrades, which means no downtime.
- 6:59You know, each of our customers, and this is a big point, gets an
- 7:02isolated instance of our product, right?
- 7:04We call this isolation by design and that's really what we're
- 7:08what we're doing to sort of address that cloud hesitancy
- 7:12issue, right. It also helps with sort of data
- 7:14sovereignty requirements. But we believe this is sort of
- 7:16superior to multi tenant architectures.
- 7:20And then orchestration, we have an intrinsic orchestration
- 7:23capability that's tailored to the customer journey runs in a
- 7:26serverless environment and then everything is protected by a
- 7:28sort of role based access control, right?
- 7:30So, so, so that's sort of the architecture differentiation in
- 7:34terms of capabilities. You know, as I mentioned, we're
- 7:36sitting here today, we're kind of the only solution that covers
- 7:38the full spectrum of customer identity needs right from a
- 7:41single product, single admin console.
- 7:44So if I put on my marketing hat, you know, I would like I say
- 7:46things like, hey, we can handle customer identity from sort of
- 7:49registration to the right to be forgotten, right?
- 7:51So the sort of beginning to end. And so you know, our, our
- 7:55capabilities cover things like registration, self-service,
- 7:59adaptive auth, identity verification, consent
- 8:02management, fraud detection, right.
- 8:05And then in terms of customer experience, you have to think
- 8:08about CIM systems as fundamentally workflow or
- 8:11journey systems, right? You, you have to build a whole
- 8:14layer on top of that IM tech around generating flexible flow
- 8:19based UIS for customers to interact with.
- 8:21So we think we've done a pretty good sort of differentiate job
- 8:24and sort of making it really easy to do this.
- 8:27So how do our customers measure success with the solution?
- 8:30It's a great question. I love, I love that question.
- 8:32There's, there's kind of two areas that I would focus on
- 8:36here. 1 is time to value, right? We, we talked about sort of
- 8:40deployments being long. This, you know, this is time to
- 8:45value is largely focused on things like deployment, sort of
- 8:47set up of the solution, things like customer journeys and sort
- 8:51of the migrations of of users, right.
- 8:54And the other is sort of ongoing KPIs around things like adoption
- 8:57metrics and customer engagement. And this is something where we
- 9:00really differentiate with our, with our dashboard, right?
- 9:05So, you know, you've got to make that really easy.
- 9:09You know, we, we can report on a cup on a few dozen different
- 9:12metrics, you know, across things like conversion rate, you know,
- 9:15how many visitors are actually converting into registered users
- 9:18on your platform, engagement rate, like how are your users?
- 9:22Are your user base sort of coming back every month, right?
- 9:25How long are they taking to register from the moment they
- 9:27click sign up to the moment they're redirected back to the
- 9:30customer portal? So these are things that you
- 9:32have to report on, right? So that so that they can your
- 9:35customers to sort of take those KP is back to their their
- 9:37management team and sort of show that they're, they're doing a
- 9:40good job, right. So let me ask you a real basic
- 9:42question because I feel like sometimes there's just double in
- 9:46the details. Is there a difference between
- 9:49consumer IAM and customer IAM or they really the the same thing?
- 9:54Yeah, there is a difference. I would say it's like a Venn
- 9:57diagram, right, where there's where there's overlap and
- 10:00there's and there's separate, there's separate capabilities,
- 10:03right. So a lot of the sort of
- 10:04fundamental IAM technology underneath, you know, things
- 10:08like federation, you know, open ID connect SAML, those sort of
- 10:12basic, you know, text are, are certain certainly within the
- 10:17middle of the Venn diagram between customer identity and
- 10:20and, and and workforce identity. But when you get into things
- 10:23like sort of customer metrics, you know, like how long is a
- 10:27user taking to register? Are you getting people that are
- 10:30sort of registering and walking away those there, there's not a
- 10:35whole lot of overlap there, right?
- 10:36Those are very customer specific metrics and those are things
- 10:39that, you know, you're sort of marketing team wants to know
- 10:43that your users are converting, right?
- 10:45That your users are making it in, in a, in a, in a workforce
- 10:47environment, you, you kind of have a, a captive audience,
- 10:50right? Like they're, you know, you're
- 10:52not going to have somebody that sort of refuses to register with
- 10:55the workforce, you know, access management system.
- 10:58And so there's a, you know, that there's that sort of where the,
- 11:01the sort of the, you know, on the outside of the, of the Venn
- 11:03diagram, you know what I mean? But yeah, it's a good question.
- 11:07Yeah, Steven. So I thought it was real
- 11:09interesting that our, our conversation started going down
- 11:12this kind of marketing track because, you know, big thing I
- 11:15wanted to talk about today was AI, of course, but even before
- 11:19that, it's just the topic of identity security.
- 11:23And you know, we had this episode scheduled for several
- 11:27months in advance. I've been in communication with
- 11:31Keith. And then just recently Gartner
- 11:35kind of identified you guys in the, in the paper, it's called
- 11:40emerging tech, tech landscape for startups and security
- 11:43software. And there is a digital identity
- 11:48column, if you will. And I think it's interesting
- 11:52because I'm I'm still not sure what is the difference between
- 11:56digital identity and identity security.
- 11:58I think that's maybe an episode for the future.
- 12:02But what do you think? It was about Trivacity that made
- 12:07Gardner sit up and take notice. Yeah.
- 12:10I mean, so Gardner's been talking about us, you know, for,
- 12:15for a while across a couple of different areas, which is kind
- 12:19of interesting. Journey time orchestration is 1
- 12:22where we've appeared in their research because that's a
- 12:25capability of our product, you know, sort of fraud and risk is
- 12:31one because we, you know, we have some fraud controls.
- 12:33We have things like identity verification and user
- 12:36experience, right, which is going to something that's going
- 12:38to make us stand out because it's, it hasn't been a focus of
- 12:41a lot of our, a lot of our competition.
- 12:44And also, you know, we're, we're, we're one of, you know, a
- 12:47small number of entrants into this space in the last five
- 12:50years that's taken significant investment, right?
- 12:53And, and especially 1 that's focused on the, on the customer
- 12:57identity problem and has made sort of, you know, customer
- 13:01traction, made some significant customer traction into, into
- 13:04this space. So I think it's great that
- 13:07they're taking notice. I mean, it's helping us with
- 13:09brand awareness. It's very crucial for our
- 13:11company, our stage to have that. And it's also kind of a sign
- 13:15that we're, we're probably getting things right, you know,
- 13:18from, from from the analyst point of view, you know, and in
- 13:22terms of sort of other, you know, other analysts activity.
- 13:26You know, we actually debuted as a leader in the Forster wave for
- 13:31CIM in 2022, which is just absolutely unheard of.
- 13:35Like for an, A, a start up to sort of debut as a, as a leader,
- 13:40you know, we were one of the only three leaders #2 after
- 13:44Fordrock at the time. There's another way of doing
- 13:47soon, I think. I believe.
- 13:48We believe it's going to be sometime in December.
- 13:51So you know, Gardner doesn't have a magic quadrant
- 13:55specifically for CIAM. But you know, like I mentioned,
- 13:58they're talking about us, you know, across other areas of
- 14:00research, which is great. And if I'm going to be, you
- 14:03know, if I'm going to be self-serving, you know, I'll say
- 14:06that, you know, such a young vendor debuting as a leader, you
- 14:09know, again on Forrester is just, is really a testament to
- 14:11the, to the strategy and just how good our product is.
- 14:15You know, I think you know our architecture, our breadth of
- 14:18capabilities, our focus on customers experience is really
- 14:21what's behind the interest from from the analysts.
- 14:25Yeah. So you talked about the
- 14:26isolation by design. I think that's just really
- 14:30interesting, but talk to us about why that's important from
- 14:34a identity security standpoint. Yeah, so I, I came from an
- 14:40incident response background. So I, I worked in network and
- 14:43endpoint security for a company called Mandiant, probably heard
- 14:47of, you know, later acquired by Google and you know, I sort of
- 14:52saw the the, the worst of the worst of, of breaches, right.
- 14:57So when you know you're asking a, a large org, you know a large
- 15:02financial institution, a large healthcare business to sort of
- 15:06move their their data to the cloud, you better be protecting
- 15:10it, right? So one of our sort of
- 15:13fundamental design principles was we're going to, we're going
- 15:15to give an isolated instance of our product to each of our
- 15:18customers, right? That means that means that if
- 15:20one of our customers is breached, the blast radius
- 15:23between one customer to the next is, is null, right?
- 15:27Like there's no, there's no shared infrastructure, no shared
- 15:30keys, databases, services between any two of our
- 15:34customers, right? And and that's, that's
- 15:38absolutely critical in customer data, customer identity, because
- 15:41you're storing, you know, sensitive customer data, you're
- 15:43storing passwords, you're storing MFA, you know, MFA
- 15:47credentials like this is really, really sensitive data that
- 15:50you're storing. So you have to sort of take a
- 15:52really strong security, you know, posture with how you
- 15:57design these systems. There was a LinkedIn post that
- 16:00Jim actually made about why I am tech companies aren't really
- 16:04getting into the generative AI space of their products yet.
- 16:06I think it's going to be a little bit dated, Jim, no
- 16:08offense, because I think we're starting to see it more out
- 16:10there. But what?
- 16:12And you responded back to that, like what prompted that response
- 16:16back? Was it just familiar with Jim or
- 16:18you're like, oh, hold on a second buddy, you're way off
- 16:19base here. Well, I mean one, I, I do like
- 16:23you guys. So I, you know, I, I do.
- 16:25We'll get you everywhere on the show.
- 16:27Yeah. So, so that was certainly one,
- 16:30but I don't know it just it, it was interesting.
- 16:33It was, it was during a time when we were sort of deeply
- 16:35pondering that very question, right.
- 16:38So I sort of struck me as a very relevant question from from Jim,
- 16:42kind of considering where we are in the space, where we are in
- 16:46sort of the development of AI, you know, where we are in the
- 16:49identity space. You know, every sort of product
- 16:52leader right now is having to make a decision as to whether
- 16:56integrating, you know, generative AI and into their
- 16:59platform makes sense, right? And, and, and IAM products are
- 17:03no, are no different, you know, than that.
- 17:05So that was kind of the reason. Jim, Jim, you wrote this article
- 17:10and I don't want to leave people behind.
- 17:11So you kind of give like a gist of it so you can catch people
- 17:14who are listening or watching. Yeah, it wasn't really so much
- 17:17an article as much as it was, you know, a a true question.
- 17:22Like it seems like every product is now baking in AI.
- 17:27But in the IM space, at least, what I'm seeing is, you know,
- 17:32versions of AI are more big data analytics, machine learning.
- 17:38They're not generative AI like what you get when you go out to
- 17:42open AI or, you know, Gemini or something like that.
- 17:47And, you know, I throw this one back to Steven because, you
- 17:51know, is that what you see as well?
- 17:52Like there's a difference between machine learning and big
- 17:56data analytics and AI, right? Yeah, I think, yeah, definitely
- 18:00you need to stick, take a step back and and and sort of think
- 18:03about like what is the intersection between AI and ML,
- 18:06right. Like the media often gets this
- 18:08wrong, as you, as you've likely noticed, you know, and I think I
- 18:12think the way to position is that, you know, AI is just sort
- 18:15of overarching term of which machine learning is a subset,
- 18:20right? It's, it's correct to say that
- 18:22ML is a form of AI, but ML has been sort of historically
- 18:26focused on finding patterns and data and getting smarter over
- 18:29time so that you can make decisions on what it finds and
- 18:32protects. So if you think about ML, we've
- 18:36actually like, we specifically Stervastity has had it in our
- 18:38product for a number of years, right?
- 18:40Specifically around the behavior analytics problem.
- 18:44So let's sort of watching behavior, user behavior
- 18:46detecting when there's an anomaly, you know, sort of
- 18:48making access decisions based on that.
- 18:51And to be honest, like this ML based behavior analytics is, is
- 18:55by no means a new technology. The first, the first UEUEBA
- 18:58vendors were got their start in what 2014?
- 19:02And I mean, that's an eon in, in technology terms.
- 19:07So it's, but it's also means it's very tried and true
- 19:09technology for, for, for what it's designed for right now.
- 19:12If you're talking specifically about generative AI or Gen.
- 19:15AI, that's what we sort of most recently added to our platform.
- 19:19And what I think a lot of you know, product practitioners are
- 19:23sort of pondering right now as to what makes sense for them.
- 19:28You know, if you talk about Gen. AI as soaring sort of also being
- 19:31a subset of the overall AI space, it also makes use of
- 19:36machine learning. Gen.
- 19:37Gen. AI models are designed to emit
- 19:39or produce data versus simply analyze and, and classify data.
- 19:45But they also have other, other elements that sort of fall into
- 19:48that bucket. You know, a good example would
- 19:50be like natural language processing, right?
- 19:52The chatbot aspect of of Gen. AI systems is a is a somewhat
- 19:57separate space and it's, you know, it's all about determining
- 19:59user intent. Or what they call grounding in
- 20:04the in the Gen. AI space.
- 20:06So you know, when you sort of couple a prompt that you're
- 20:10sending to an LLM with live data, right?
- 20:13You, you, you might have heard this referred to as retrieval
- 20:18augmented generation or RAG, which is the way that a lot of
- 20:21products right now are implementing AI into their
- 20:25system. So, you know, we circle back,
- 20:26like I say, we've had ML in our product for some time.
- 20:29Gen. AI was a was a recent addition.
- 20:31I hope that was a pretty clear description of of how I see see
- 20:34them differently. No, it's great.
- 20:36I mean, I feel like we can, we can really dive into this
- 20:38because we kind of joke all the time that this we should turn
- 20:40this into like AI at the center of the way the this is moving.
- 20:44So my definition of AI changed when I first saw the open AILLM
- 20:50sort of released and I was like, oh wow, OK, That AI before that
- 20:55really was like machine learning and sort of like behind the
- 20:58curtains. And now all of a sudden we've
- 20:59got a text based interface at the time and now it's even voice
- 21:03that you can, you know, buddy up with and ask questions.
- 21:06Now, do you trust it or not? It's different.
- 21:08It's a different, you know, answer or a question.
- 21:10But did your definition or your thought process around AI change
- 21:14when you saw that or you'd already seen that coming?
- 21:16I mean. Oh, I mean 100%.
- 21:20I mean, the, I was, you know, I was as I was sort of, you know,
- 21:24thinking about, you know, putting some notes, some
- 21:26thoughts and notes together today for, for the discussion
- 21:28today. I, I realized that chat TBT was
- 21:31only real was only released like in 2022.
- 21:34It was like 2 years ago. I mean, that's crazy that it
- 21:37seems like, it seems like it's been like 20 years, you know
- 21:40what I mean? And so, yeah, I mean, I think I,
- 21:43I think I was just as shocked as as a lot of the folks in, in, in
- 21:48the technology space where the sort of power of these of these
- 21:51systems of 100%, it completely shook my, my, my understanding
- 21:57of the space 100%. So let's get more into that AI
- 22:01because you know, I mentioned the website Stravacity dot AI.
- 22:04It's literally in the name. What are what are some of the
- 22:08things that we can expect if I if I pull up trivacity?
- 22:11Give me some examples of like use cases.
- 22:14Yeah. So you know, on the benefits,
- 22:17you know sort of like the benefits of pulling this into
- 22:20our product, there's a couple things that really just line up
- 22:24with how we have built the product from the beginning,
- 22:27right. What one of one of those is sort
- 22:30of lowering the bar, you know, of entry to, to IAM systems,
- 22:34right? We, we always say that you kind
- 22:37of, you don't need to, you shouldn't have to have a PhD in
- 22:40IAM to set up a customer journey, right?
- 22:43And so, you know, Gen. AI makes a really good companion
- 22:48to work with as you're sort of configuring and maintaining
- 22:51your, your IAM systems. You know, things like context
- 22:55sensitive help where you're asking questions of an assistant
- 22:59on how to, you know, that AI assist on how to do certain
- 23:02tasks within the platform. Like, you know, we can tell
- 23:06where you are in the admin console.
- 23:08We can send along pertinent contacts and our docs to the LLM
- 23:12to craft a very specific answer. Like, so hey, how do I set up
- 23:16bot detection? Or how do I change my password
- 23:20policy to be more restrictive? You know, like we can really
- 23:23help with context sensitive help, right?
- 23:25That's a, that's a huge, there's one thing we wanted to build for
- 23:28a while is constant context sensitive help.
- 23:31And Eugenia is a great, a great way, you know, to to sort of
- 23:36facilitate that interpretation of data is another one that we
- 23:42thought was really important. You know, like I am isn't just
- 23:45about like MFA and federation, right?
- 23:48We can also generate a lot of data.
- 23:51It's often hard for less technical people to crock,
- 23:53right? And you know, specifically in in
- 23:57customer identity, you know, where some of your users of the
- 24:01platform may actually be in fact customer service
- 24:04representatives, CSR's who are deeply technical in IAM areas,
- 24:09but they might actually be actively on the phone with a
- 24:11customer and they're trying to cut, you know, troubleshoot a
- 24:13customer issue. So roll ups of these types of
- 24:17these log data of this customer journey data can actually be
- 24:20really helpful in getting to an answer quickly when a customer's
- 24:22unhappy, right? We can say like, oh, you're this
- 24:25user is struggling to get through the identity
- 24:27verification process or they're not able to finish their
- 24:30password enrollment, you know, those kind of things, right?
- 24:33So that's really helping there. And then also like one of the
- 24:36things we wanted to really focus on and I think is really big
- 24:38benefit is, is sort of the guidance towards best practice
- 24:42or optimization aspects. So, you know, there's a lot of
- 24:46best practice out there, password guidelines, adaptive
- 24:49access policies, you know, how you know, what if you could
- 24:52guide A-Team or a user towards improving their posture based on
- 24:56what they're actually seeing in the product, Specifically on the
- 25:00CIAM side, What if you could got a, you know, got a team towards
- 25:03optimizing customer experience or improving, you know,
- 25:06conversion rates, spice, what you're seeing in the logs, what
- 25:09you're seeing in the data, what you're seeing in the, in the
- 25:11dashboard. So those are, you know, those
- 25:14are kind of those are kind of the focuses and kind of the
- 25:16things that you can kind of do with with our, our, our current
- 25:20AI assistant in the product. Yeah, I'm kind of I'm interested
- 25:26in in, you know, visualizing in my head.
- 25:29How does that take place? So that last part that you're
- 25:32talking about where it's like, all right, I want the system can
- 25:37make suggestions to your client in terms of access policies or
- 25:44things. How does that manifest?
- 25:47So when the user comes along and they're looking at a particular
- 25:53portion of the admin console and they ask a question, we do a
- 25:59form of retrieval augmented generation, which is RAG, which
- 26:02is just a, a, a really complex way to say that we take the
- 26:06prompt, we take the context of what they're looking at in the,
- 26:10in the admin console and we take a relevant section of our docs.
- 26:15And we send all of that to the LLM at the same time.
- 26:18And we say, give me an answer built from this prompt, this
- 26:22context, and this documentation. Now this is obviously very, very
- 26:28simplified version of a complex thing, but that's what happens.
- 26:33And then the LLM has what it's what it needs to answer the
- 26:37question in a way that's very specific to our product and
- 26:41relevant to the context of what the user is, is, is staring at
- 26:45at that at that point in time, right.
- 26:47And this is a very, this is a pattern that you will see in the
- 26:51Gen. AI space right now of people
- 26:52doing these, these rag based systems that are marrying a
- 26:56prompt with context, with documentation, with maybe stuff
- 27:00on the web, right? Open AI can do that when you
- 27:03when you ask a question about current events, it's going to go
- 27:06out and search the web, search news articles for relevant stuff
- 27:10and then give you a context relevant answer.
- 27:13That is another form of rag, right, that that you're seeing
- 27:16Open AI implement in their ChatGPT tool.
- 27:20So it's a common pattern. That seems like a a really
- 27:24clever way to help with the security of the model itself and
- 27:29reduce the chance of a hallucination, right?
- 27:32I think everyone's kind of concerned about will the AI give
- 27:34me a correct answer and can I trust it?
- 27:36And what if it comes up with something to put you off the
- 27:38wall? But it sounds like if you're
- 27:39able to limit the input into that model and have it just be
- 27:43based on your documentation, you know the chances of it going off
- 27:46the rails are probably a little bit, you know better for it not
- 27:49happening. 100% and like, and that, and that goes back to the,
- 27:54the, the comment I made about grounding, right, grounding is,
- 27:58is, is a, is a necessary technology and sort of
- 28:01implementing Gen. AI systems, Gen.
- 28:03AI products, because basically what you're doing is you're,
- 28:07you're, you're closing those guard rails in a little bit,
- 28:09right And you're giving, you're giving an LLM more information
- 28:12to give you an accurate answer, right.
- 28:16And if you think about like, I love the hallucination topic.
- 28:19I, I think it's AI think it's, I think it's great that you
- 28:21brought that up. I mean there's, there's been
- 28:23some really fun stories about that in the, in the media.
- 28:27And I think, I think it's really useful for, for, you know, your,
- 28:31your listeners to understand like what a hallucination is
- 28:35and, and why you, you need to understand why they happen.
- 28:39I, and I think if you, if you look at what an LLM
- 28:42fundamentally is, it's, it's, it's a probability machine,
- 28:45right? I mean, I'll probably get
- 28:47blowback from your users for that simplification, but maybe
- 28:51it's better to say that they're sort of a, they're sort of
- 28:53fundamentally probabilistic in nature.
- 28:56So what they're trying to do is they're trying to figure out
- 28:58what the next word, character phrase is based on the context
- 29:03that they know about what you, what you've sent it, right?
- 29:05So, you know, a hallucination can kind of be thought of as a,
- 29:10as a statement that's statistically probable, but
- 29:12factually incorrect. I, I, I like that.
- 29:15I read that statement somewhere. I was like, that's perfect way
- 29:17to describe it. Statistically probable,
- 29:18factually incorrect, right. And again, this is one of the
- 29:21reasons that people are building grounding systems around AIS
- 29:25like like RAG, because it's a safety mechanism, It's a
- 29:28security mechanism, like you said, right?
- 29:30To make it more, make the answer more reliable, make it more
- 29:33accurate. It's certainly a concern for us
- 29:36as we were, as we were building the product, building it into
- 29:39our product. And it's also why you see
- 29:41disclaimers like on chatbot systems.
- 29:44It's like, hey, LLMS can make mistakes.
- 29:46Please, please verify your answers because hallucinations
- 29:49are and will continue to be a problem even with grounding
- 29:51systems around around, you know, the, the implementation of
- 29:55these. So yeah, I think it's, I think
- 29:58it's a great question. Is are hallucinations the the
- 30:02biggest threat to the success of an AI right now and trying to
- 30:06put guard rails around it so that you're not giving incorrect
- 30:09information? Or is there something else that
- 30:10keeps you up at night? I mean, there's, you know,
- 30:13there's a hallucinations are definitely a challenge.
- 30:15I don't, I don't, I think you can kind of especially when
- 30:19you're not, you're not sort of implementing what you know, what
- 30:21I would consider a public API, a public AI system like like
- 30:25ChatGPT. Ours is very specific to our
- 30:28product. So we can really control what
- 30:31sort of goes into it. But you have all kinds of other
- 30:34challenges like, you know, prompt injection is one, right?
- 30:38Because if you know, it's not all that different than like a
- 30:40sequel injection where you're, you're, you're taking a prompt,
- 30:44you're formulating it into a larger prompt and you're
- 30:47injecting that in the LLM. And a smart user might figure
- 30:49out what the format of your prompt is and sort of break out
- 30:53of it in some way, right? And try to get data out of your
- 30:55system. But you can also put, you know,
- 30:58a system like ours. You can also put guard rails
- 31:00further down the road so that you're not able to return or
- 31:04you're only talking to certain APIs that are read only.
- 31:06And you're, you're, you know, you're, you're putting some
- 31:08security guidelines past the LLM point within the product.
- 31:13So those kind of things keep me up at night.
- 31:16I honestly, I think the other thing that keeps me up at night
- 31:18is sort of the, the, the cost around these systems, right?
- 31:22That's, that was a, the first thing, the first one of the sort
- 31:26of the first things that I thought about when, when we said
- 31:28let's, let's put this into our product was like, Oh my gosh,
- 31:30how much is this going to cost? Right?
- 31:32Like it's compute and memory. It's you requires you to sort of
- 31:36have specialized GPU heavy instances in the in the cloud.
- 31:41And so you know that when you're sort of talking about large
- 31:43scale systems where a user, you know, where you know, you have
- 31:47customers that have, you know, 10s of millions of users, you
- 31:51know, a large portion of which login every month.
- 31:53Like are you are you being careful about how you're
- 31:56leveraging, leveraging the tech right with regards to large
- 32:00scale deployments? You know, that's that was that
- 32:03was sort of a big worry for me, less of a worry now, but but was
- 32:07a big worry in the at the at the, you know, the the start.
- 32:10Yeah, you're starting to get into where I think the the big
- 32:14value and the big threat are. So I think the big value is
- 32:18being able to, you know, enable say marketing you brought up in
- 32:25the marketing example for business users to query the data
- 32:29so they can start saying, OK, well, how many people logged in
- 32:33in the last 24 hours? That's one level.
- 32:36Another level might be now let's branch out into information
- 32:40that's on the Internet. How many people logged in in the
- 32:42last 24 hours from somewhere that is was raining, you know,
- 32:47and you know, so the, the concern it brings up is like,
- 32:52OK, how far can it extend? Could I, you know, what do I
- 32:57have to do to create security boundaries to make sure that I
- 33:01don't say, all right, what is my competitor doing on this system?
- 33:05How many users do they have? And maybe I do that in some kind
- 33:09of like less obvious way, right? Maybe I know that my competitor
- 33:14is using this system. So I, I start asking questions
- 33:18like more at like an industry level, like what do
- 33:22organizations that are in my industry, how many users do they
- 33:26normally have? Things like how many, how much,
- 33:29how many times do people log in the last 24 hours for other
- 33:32organizations that are in my industry?
- 33:34So, Mike, I think that's the real power would be to be able
- 33:39to ask, you know, reporting style questions that it could
- 33:44really think about and maybe you could even pitch a scenarios
- 33:48like, all right, well, if a hurricane took out power over
- 33:54the, you know, this large portion, Jeff and I certainly
- 33:58know that problem. How would that, how would that
- 34:02impact my logins? I, I knew this as I am, this is,
- 34:07you know, I can't really basically go as far as to say
- 34:09how would that impact my sales? But maybe, you know, something
- 34:13like that. And then I think the, the big
- 34:17threat is the more powerful that becomes, the more security
- 34:22becomes an issue, which probably goes to like, how did you guys
- 34:26go about deploying this? Is this are you leveraging like
- 34:29the APIs of some big tech platform?
- 34:33Did you develop your own AI or like how did you build AI into
- 34:37your product? Yeah.
- 34:39So again, we, you know, we we focused on isolation from the
- 34:47get go, right, which actually put us in a pretty good position
- 34:50for implementing this technology into the platform.
- 34:54So we are, we're leveraging an existing LLM, but it's local to
- 34:59our customer environment, our individual customer environment.
- 35:02So they get their own instance of our LLM within, within the
- 35:06customer within their own, you know, product instance.
- 35:10So we're not using a public LLM like open AI, right?
- 35:13And as soon as you open that door where, you know, these
- 35:16systems are able to sort of go out to the Internet or, you
- 35:20know, go out to a third party system, you're, you know, that
- 35:24opens a lot more, a lot more risk than having a system that's
- 35:28sort of self-contained within, within our admin console within
- 35:31our own customer instance. It only has access to that
- 35:33customer data within within that instance.
- 35:36So from in terms of like a, an isolation or sort of a, you
- 35:41know, securing a customer perspective, we, we were kind of
- 35:45already in a good position for that right in the way we wanted
- 35:48it to implement that. And there's, there's a lot of
- 35:52local open source models out there that are extremely
- 35:57powerful and well suited to RAG systems.
- 36:01Like what we like, what we built with Instrabassity, Everything
- 36:05else, you know, around it we built is custom, right?
- 36:08The actual RAG implementation, you know, the user interface,
- 36:12you know, the sort of, you know, AI assist like interface we have
- 36:16in our admin console, things like that.
- 36:17That's all, that's all custom. But yeah.
- 36:22And then to to kind of like agree with the point that I was
- 36:26making where like definitely I think the things that you talked
- 36:29about a lot of power in that and a lot of benefit in having
- 36:34contextual base help. But I think kind of that next
- 36:39frontier is, you know, just leaving it open to non-technical
- 36:44people to be able to query the the system, query the data.
- 36:49Yeah, yeah. And and that's, that's, that is
- 36:52something that we can do as well.
- 36:53Like you can, you can pop into our account events interface and
- 36:57sort of ask like, hey, who are the, you know, tell me about the
- 37:01tell me about the users that have logged in today in terms of
- 37:03like where did they come from and, and what were they doing?
- 37:06And is there anything anomalous, right?
- 37:08Like you can do things like that, but it's, you know, it's
- 37:11obviously very secured, it's obviously very controlled to
- 37:14that specific customer data within that customer instance.
- 37:18And we don't sort of allow, you know, you to sort of go like
- 37:21allow our system to sort of go out and query the Internet or,
- 37:24or sort of other external systems.
- 37:28And the other thing that's interesting too, is that, you
- 37:30know, we, we have role based access control in the product
- 37:35and we treat the LLM like any other subset of functionality
- 37:40within, within the product or any other sort of area that lets
- 37:43you get access to sensitive information.
- 37:45So if you don't want certain employees or groups to have
- 37:48access to the LLM, then you don't give them that right in
- 37:52the in the admin console and they can't, right.
- 37:54So if you want to control who sort of has access to those,
- 37:58that's that's a that's a great way to do it is with RMAC.
- 38:02That was the question I was going to get into is like how
- 38:05you control access to either the LLM or what the LLM has access
- 38:12to. I think that that second
- 38:14scenario is a lot more difficult, right?
- 38:17It it is yeah. And so if you think about these
- 38:20sort of rag based AI systems, they're kind of they're kind of
- 38:23chains, right? So you, you might, you might
- 38:26have multiple LLM calls, you might have multiple API calls,
- 38:29right? You might have a, a, a, a first
- 38:31date LLM call that's sort of like, Hey, what is this customer
- 38:34asking for, right? Then you might make a call out
- 38:37to an API, probably one of my, it's probably going to be one of
- 38:40our internal APIs to pull data. You might get some context back.
- 38:44Then you might make another LLM call with that context to get
- 38:48the final answer, right. So they're, they're implemented
- 38:50as chains, but that when you implement them as chains like
- 38:53that, you also have an opportunity to it, you know,
- 38:55sort of introduce security restrictions at different steps,
- 38:58right. So it's like, hey, yes, I am not
- 39:00going to allow any API calls that do a write or, you know,
- 39:06only can access this subset of APIs within our product.
- 39:10That that that's kind of the, that's kind of the idea, yeah.
- 39:13So Steven, where do you see, where do you see this being five
- 39:18years down the road? Like you said, two years since
- 39:21Chap GPT kind of hit the mainstream and look where it is
- 39:27already. I mean, five years might be, I
- 39:29might as well say, you know, in an eternity.
- 39:32But where do you see this five years down the road impacting
- 39:35the identity space? Well, I mean, if I could, if I
- 39:38could send the, the the shrug emoji to your, to your, your
- 39:42users, I would. It's it's really hard to say.
- 39:45I mean, I think I thought you positioned it really well
- 39:47earlier when you asked like was it was it sort of, you know, was
- 39:50it sort of a big change on way, the way you think about things
- 39:53when, when Chad JP take him out because it it, it, it really
- 39:56was. It's really hard to say because
- 39:58we're, we're constantly being surprised on what these LMS can
- 40:02do. I mean, generating like lifelike
- 40:04video and all kinds of, you know, crazy stuff like this and
- 40:08that, you know, the AI firms sort of keep bringing out their
- 40:11latest and, and greatest models, right?
- 40:13And they just keep out doing themselves.
- 40:16But I'll tell you one thing that.
- 40:18That really piqued my interest recently.
- 40:21It's that the, the large tech firms like, you know, like
- 40:24Google, Meta, they're, they're, they're seeking out other
- 40:28sources of, of energy beyond the, the energy grid, right?
- 40:33So they're, they're talking about like obtaining access to
- 40:35nuclear energy or building their own nuclear, nuclear energy
- 40:38infrastructure. That's just insane to me.
- 40:40But it, it tells me two things, right?
- 40:43It tells me one, we're taxing the energy grid right now, it's
- 40:48not going to keep up with the demand of this of this
- 40:50technology, right? And it's also, it's also a hint
- 40:55that the those firms are sort of acknowledging that, right?
- 41:00It means that they're acknowledging that, you know,
- 41:02any efficiencies that they design into these systems or the
- 41:06distribution of the compute of these systems, you know, pushing
- 41:09it down to devices or, or things like that is not going to, it's
- 41:12not going to keep pace with the demand, right?
- 41:15So that points, that points to, for me to the technology
- 41:21reaching a plateau shortly. Because once you run into issues
- 41:27with resource scarcity, you know, it quickly becomes
- 41:31geopolitical, right? And you, you know, we, we all
- 41:34know, we all know humanity has done a great job at sort of
- 41:37sanely sharing resources and it's in its history, right?
- 41:41So but yeah, I mean, I kind of think we're only scratching the
- 41:46surface of this tech right now. I mean, like I say, ChatGPT
- 41:49came, like you've mentioned, came only out and, you know, two
- 41:52years ago. Seems like seems like eons.
- 41:55I mean, that's nothing. That's, you know, I I would
- 41:59equate unleashing eon the world as, you know, equivalent to the
- 42:03the advent of the consumer Internet, the invention of the
- 42:07microchip, you know, the, the industrial revolution.
- 42:10I mean, I think it has that level of impact on the world.
- 42:13It's like I I can't imagine where it's going to be in five,
- 42:171050 years from now. You know, I mean, it's, it's
- 42:20insane to think. About mind blowing.
- 42:23I mean, do you think that it's going to evolve so quickly that
- 42:29whatever governance is needed to, you know, keep it from
- 42:35becoming a dangerous weapon, that it's going to outpace that
- 42:41ability to govern it or that we will be able to govern it?
- 42:47And it's kind of a crazy question, but.
- 42:48It's, it's a tough question. I, I, I think it will probably
- 42:53outpace our ability to, to, to, to govern it, especially with
- 42:57the fact that, you know, you have sort of open source
- 42:59capabilities around this. I think, you know, governments
- 43:05haven't really do done a good job at sort of keeping up with,
- 43:08with technology governments in the governance in the past.
- 43:10So there probably will be a crackdown at some point.
- 43:13But, you know, it just all speaks to more of like keeping,
- 43:16keeping the keeping the inventors of this type of
- 43:19technology involved in the, in the governance of this
- 43:22technology. But it's, it's, it's, it's going
- 43:24to be a very tough problem. I think it's really going to, I
- 43:26think we're, it's going to outpace our ability to sort of
- 43:28keep a, keep a lid on it. Yeah, to get this through as any
- 43:31guide, it's difficult to keep up with tech.
- 43:33It just moves too quickly. Yep, Yep, yeah.
- 43:35And I mean, and our elected officials aren't really aren't
- 43:38really sort of equipped to, to understand this technology at
- 43:42any level and, and sort of, you know, the the applications of it
- 43:45and the impacts of it. They'll get there, they'll get
- 43:47there. But it's, it's moving so fast
- 43:49right now, you know? Going back to the power
- 43:52requirements, sounds like we need a a Tony Stark type person
- 43:54to come up with an arc reactor that we can stick into a data
- 43:58center somewhere and have it just power that thing and just
- 44:01be good. Yeah, I mean, I just, I to me,
- 44:03it was just insane to see the the tech firms sort of going
- 44:05after nuclear power to to keep their data centers running.
- 44:09You know what I mean? It's just crazy.
- 44:12Microsoft's and, you know, Microsoft AI and you know,
- 44:15Microsoft nuclear like that is a that is a weird thought to say,
- 44:19yeah, all right, why don't we go ahead and wrap it up there?
- 44:22This has been, I mean, we could talk AI all day for sure.
- 44:26I'm looking at this Trivacity dot AI website and you, you, you
- 44:29almost stole all the kind of the Thunder of the website because
- 44:31on the screen I'm looking at right now, you know, it's, it
- 44:33has like this little picture of access control, you know,
- 44:38settings and you got the AI assistance.
- 44:40I, you know, basically asking, hey, are these settings secure?
- 44:42Which I think is a really cool way to approach securing the
- 44:45product, right? Especially you mentioned, you
- 44:47know, being able to train it on your documentation.
- 44:48It's like, OK, here's exactly what I'm looking for.
- 44:51And I love that idea of leveraging those AI assistants
- 44:55to help with that because I don't want to pick up the phone
- 44:58and talk to somebody. I want to do it myself, right?
- 45:00I want to be able to look it up and say, OK, click this, do this
- 45:03here. OK, good.
- 45:04Now I kind of get it. So it's a really cool example of
- 45:06how how you guys are approaching it.
- 45:07You've got it. So let's talk a little bit about
- 45:11astrophotography because I, I did my first astrophotography
- 45:17just a few weeks ago. Oh, yeah.
- 45:19So I'm in the Asheville, NC area and we had Northern Lights
- 45:25basically come down as far down as we were.
- 45:27And that's the first time I've ever experienced anything like
- 45:29that. And it was almost invisible to,
- 45:32you know, the naked eye. But when I pulled out my phone
- 45:34and that's all I had to kind of take pictures.
- 45:37All of a sudden I've got this picture and it's like Reds and
- 45:41purples are in the sky and it's, you know, 2 in the morning or
- 45:44whatever it is. I'm like, wait a second.
- 45:46I like, that's not what I saw, but that's what the camera
- 45:49picked up. And I'm just fascinated by this
- 45:51idea. So I started looking at it like,
- 45:52well, can I download an app or something to kind of, you know,
- 45:55capture this better than, than just the, you know, the iPhone?
- 45:58And so I'm curious because I think you're into the
- 46:01astrophotography stuff too. I I want to get into this a
- 46:03little bit more with you. Yeah, yeah.
- 46:06So, you know, it's, it's actually something that I
- 46:08recently got into as well, like as in this year.
- 46:11And it's, you know, it's something I've I've I've wanted
- 46:14to, I've had a I've had a telescope for a while, like a
- 46:16nice one, but I've never gotten into sort of the like post
- 46:20processing part of it, you know. And so I think one of the things
- 46:24that was sort of holding me up on it was, you know, some of
- 46:29these rigs that you build for sort of capturing deep space
- 46:32objects can be like incredibly expensive, like, you know, five,
- 46:35$10,000 if you really want to build like a really nice rig,
- 46:38But there's actually this really cool and something you might
- 46:41want to look into if you have an interest.
- 46:43There's really there's these really cool set of like smart
- 46:46telescopes coming out where you can.
- 46:49They're not very big. They, you can sort of put them
- 46:53out, you know, in your yard and, and train them on a, on a, on an
- 46:57object that you want to record. And then they have an app where
- 46:59you sort of control it and, and capture images.
- 47:02And they actually can produce some pretty amazing images.
- 47:06So they'll take exposures, like they'll take like 10 second
- 47:08exposures and you know, you leave them out there and maybe
- 47:11over the night you take 510,000, you know, 10 second exposures.
- 47:16And then they have stacking tools, right?
- 47:19So you take these, all of these images, you stack them together.
- 47:23You know, it does some crazy calculations on the pixels to
- 47:25decide what is noise and what is, what is image, you know,
- 47:30what is, what is signal And, and you get this beautiful image of
- 47:34like a deep space object, right? Like, so like of a, you know, of
- 47:36a nebula or you know, of a, of a Galaxy, right.
- 47:41And I, I just, I was, like I said, I was afraid from the cost
- 47:45requirements and I was afraid that I wouldn't like the post
- 47:48processing angle of it. Just, you know, because it's,
- 47:51it's, it's a whole new sort of technology to learn, but I, I
- 47:54love it. It's, it's actually another
- 47:57place that the AI has made an appearance because you can, they
- 48:02have these sort of AI driven noise algorithms that are that,
- 48:06that people have developed where they try to figure out like what
- 48:09is signal and what is noise and sort of remove the noise from an
- 48:12image. So you can, you know, you can
- 48:13produce these visually brilliant images from a little telescope
- 48:17sitting out on your backyard because of, because of the way
- 48:20you're stacking the images and the way that you're, you're,
- 48:22you're denoising them, right. So yeah, it's, I've actually, I,
- 48:27you know, I've spent like it's been a really, we've had a
- 48:29really run good run of the sort of clear nights here in
- 48:31Virginia. And I've been out, I've been out
- 48:33in my backyard like almost every night doing, you know, taking
- 48:36pictures, so. Well, that's the key, right, is
- 48:39light pollution kind of really impacts that.
- 48:41So if you're in a in a rather remote area where there's less
- 48:44of the light pollution you're, you're more prone to be having
- 48:47to have better quality for the images, right?
- 48:50Yeah. And they they call that the,
- 48:52they call that the Bortle scale. And so it goes from, I think it
- 48:56goes from like 1:00 to 9:00, I think.
- 48:58But I'm in a Bortle 5 area. So I'm right in the middle
- 49:03because I'm right outside of a, of a major airport where I live.
- 49:06So that you get a lot of light pollution from, but we actually,
- 49:09we go down to the Outer Banks. I'm North Carolina a lot I'm
- 49:12sure you're familiar with. And a lot of people don't
- 49:15realize that is actually one of especially the Ocracoke areas,
- 49:18one of the darkest areas in the United States.
- 49:20And it is one of the darkest areas on the, on the East Coast
- 49:22as well. So you can actually get Bortle
- 49:242, which is the second darkest on the Bortle scale.
- 49:27So I and it having the little smart scope, you can, you can
- 49:31kind of take it down there. It's not, it doesn't require a
- 49:33lot of space. So like when we go down there,
- 49:35I'll, I'll, I'll take it down there and sort of put it out on
- 49:37the back deck and, and get some really good pictures because
- 49:39it's so dark down there. So from what I understand of
- 49:42Ocracoke Island, you take a ferry to get there you have to
- 49:46have a 4 by 4. You drive on the beach and pick
- 49:50your spot and you can camp or whatever.
- 49:54A lot of people go surf fishing. So you go onto this island and
- 49:59you set up your telescope and your camera.
- 50:02Yeah, Yeah, you can do that, Yeah.
- 50:03I mean, Ocracoke, you have to take a ferry to Yeah, but there
- 50:06actually is a Route 12 goes. It's a, you know, a major road
- 50:09goes all the way down to the city of Ocracoke.
- 50:11But yes, if you go out on the beaches of Ocracoke when it's a
- 50:15clear night, you can see the, the Milky Way without any
- 50:20imaging equipment at all. And it's it's amazing.
- 50:23Ocracoke's beautiful. If you haven't been there, I
- 50:25highly recommend it. So that's.
- 50:27That's what our ancestors did, right?
- 50:29They just looked up in the sky. There's no light pollution.
- 50:32Yeah. Yeah, We did a episode pretty
- 50:36recently with a guy named Nitin. He's the CTO over at Civil
- 50:43Security and he rents part. He's in a group of people who
- 50:49rent AA telescope and Jeff made the the statement, which I
- 50:55thought was spot on. Like there's supposed to be an
- 50:57expensive telescope if it takes several people to kind of pull
- 51:01their money. To bring a trailer and
- 51:03everything. Oh my gosh, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 51:05Some of some of the, the, the Dobsonian telescopes are really
- 51:09big. Yeah.
- 51:10So they're, and they're actually less, less expensive.
- 51:13I don't know why that is, but but yeah, they can be pretty
- 51:16big. But yeah, one of the reasons I
- 51:18got into the sort of smart telescope area was because it's
- 51:21they're portable. You know what I mean?
- 51:23You can, it can, it can pack down into a little box and I can
- 51:26just throw it in the back of my truck on my way down, you know,
- 51:28to the Outer Banks. So I had.
- 51:30To look up the Bortle scale because I hadn't heard of that
- 51:33before, because I know I live in an area that's got less Royce
- 51:35provision and it looks like the Asheville area is around a three
- 51:37or a four. Wow.
- 51:39Yeah, pretty. Good.
- 51:39And I've got a mountain range between where my house is and
- 51:42the rest of Asheville, so it's even darker, so I feel like I'm
- 51:45in a good spot. So if I, yeah, if I drive a
- 51:47little bit West of where I am, I can get to the Shenandoah
- 51:50Mountains and I can get some really good, really good dark,
- 51:53dark spots out there. But, but again, like even in a,
- 51:57even in a highlight pollution area, you can pull a lot of the
- 51:59light pollution out of the images in the post processing
- 52:01part of of this. So there's people that take
- 52:04great pictures like out of Tokyo where it's portable 9, you know,
- 52:08So it's, you know, some of the denoising algorithms are, are
- 52:12pretty fascinating. You stack enough images you can
- 52:14you can figure out what's what's noise, what's light pollution
- 52:17and what's what's image you know.
- 52:19Of course you get those cool like motion ones across the sky
- 52:22right where it's. Like yeah, with the starting.
- 52:23Image and here's the only thing that's moved, right?
- 52:25Yeah. And stuff like that.
- 52:26Yeah. So if someone wanted to get into
- 52:28this, what would be the beginner?
- 52:30And let's say it's me on the on my back deck trying to have
- 52:35maybe just a slightly better set up to do some astrophotography.
- 52:39So, so the, the, there's a company called CWO and they have
- 52:45a, they have a couple of scopes called the sea stars.
- 52:49And so there's like AC * S 30 and AC star S50.
- 52:52And they are the, the, the highest quality, sort of easiest
- 52:57beginner scopes that, that you can find.
- 53:00They'll actually livestack with, they'll livestack the, they can
- 53:03livestack the, the images that you take while you're using the
- 53:06app. So you don't even really need to
- 53:08do post processing on your own, unless you want to throw
- 53:11something into like Photoshop or something.
- 53:13They'll do the stacking for you. So you pop the scope out in the,
- 53:17in the, you know, wherever you want to, you want an image, you
- 53:19tell it, you actually can tell it, like what deep space object
- 53:22or what the moon or, or what planet you want to look at.
- 53:26It'll point the scope at that, it'll start taking pictures,
- 53:28it'll stack it for you and you get a nice little image on your
- 53:30phone and your, or your tablet. And so I'm a big fan, big fan of
- 53:35that company. What do you do with the pictures
- 53:37that you take? I post them on Instagram and and
- 53:41and Facebook and, you know, share them with share them with
- 53:45my buddies. Wallpapers.
- 53:46Print them out. Put them on behind you.
- 53:48Yeah, well, maybe I haven't done that yet, but that that would be
- 53:50a good idea. You know, my kids also enjoy
- 53:53seeing what I'm doing and taking pictures off, so I share it with
- 53:57them too. Well, maybe Sea Star wants to
- 54:00sponsor an episode in the future.
- 54:02There you go. Yeah, stuff like that.
- 54:03They'll appreciate the mention. It's a tiny little.
- 54:06I'm looking at the one right now and it's definitely a tiny
- 54:08little thing. It's much smaller than I
- 54:09anticipated it being. Yeah.
- 54:10Well, that's super cool. Which I think is probably a good
- 54:14spot to leave it with a product mentioned for another company.
- 54:17So let's get back to stravacity. Stravacity dot AI Steven, you,
- 54:22you've been great again. You know, I hope we can talk
- 54:24again in the near future. I really like what you guys have
- 54:28done with the the AI assist. And so I'm definitely encourage
- 54:30people to go check it out. And I've been a big fan of what
- 54:33you guys been working on for the last, you know, couple years
- 54:35now. So it's been exciting to see
- 54:36that evolution, you know, happen over and I won't say it real
- 54:40time because, you know, a couple years is is a blink in the eye
- 54:42of a tech spot, but it's been really impressive.
- 54:46Thanks, I and I and I always appreciate talking to you guys.
- 54:48I hear, I hear that you guys are like celebrities at conferences
- 54:51now and people walk up to you and recognize you and stuff.
- 54:54So I'm, I'm, I'm honored that you, you would have me on your
- 54:57on your show again. So I'm looking forward to the
- 55:00next time. Well, we appreciate that.
- 55:02Yeah, for sure. And definitely appreciate all
- 55:05the wishers to come up and and I try not to be awkward when I can
- 55:08do it. All right, let's go and leave it
- 55:11there for this week. You can find Strabasi on the web
- 55:14again, Strabasi dot AI. We'll have links in our show
- 55:17notes and people can check that out.
- 55:18And then Steven, I'll put a link to your LinkedIn profile as well
- 55:22in case people have questions or maybe just want to talk about
- 55:24astrophotography. I'm sure, I'm sure you would
- 55:26appreciate either of those things.
- 55:28And as far as we go, we're on the web, idacpodcast.com and we
- 55:34got the YouTube channel going now, idacpodcast.tv.
- 55:37So feel free to like and subscribe.
- 55:38Jim's shaking his head. Like make sure I get that plug
- 55:40out. But yeah, thanks for everyone
- 55:42for listening and are watching and we'll talk with you all in
- 55:45the next one. You've been listening to
- 55:49Identity at the Center. We hope you've enjoyed the show.
- 55:53Make sure to like, rate and review, and we'll be back soon.
- 55:58But in the meantime, hit the website at
- 56:00identity@thecenter.com. See you next time on Identity at
- 56:06the Center.