The State of Identity Podcasts 2026: Every Active Show, Counted and Sorted
We tracked 21 identity podcasts through their feeds. 13 are active, more than half are run by vendors, six of the seven that went quiet are vendor shows, and two can no longer be played in Apple Podcasts. The full count, sorted.
- Of 21 identity-focused podcasts tracked on 2026-10-01, 13 published an episode in the previous 60 days, one is irregular, six are dormant, and one has ended.
- More than half of identity shows (11 of 21) are produced by vendors, but vendor shows account for six of the seven that have gone quiet. Independent and analyst shows last longer.
- Vendor shows supplied 36 of the 139 episodes we judged good enough for a learning path (26 percent), against 61 from independent shows (44 percent).
- 2025 was the biggest launch year: five of the 21 shows started that year, and four of them are still publishing.
- Two shows, Identity, Unlocked and Mistaken Identity, can no longer be played from their own feeds because their audio runs through the shut-down Chartable tracker, which now redirects to a spam site.
On October 1, 2026 we read the feed of every identity podcast in the Start with Identity podcast directory: 21 shows whose main subject is identity and access management, digital identity, or identity security. Thirteen had published an episode in the previous 60 days. Eleven of the 21 are produced by vendors, yet vendor shows account for six of the seven that have stopped publishing. And two well-known shows can no longer be played from their own feeds at all. This is the full count, how we made it, and what it says about where to spend your listening time.
How we counted
A show is in scope when identity is its main subject, not an occasional guest topic, so general security podcasts such as Security Now and Risky Business are excluded from the counts even though single episodes from them appear in our learning paths. For each show we read the RSS feed, checked hosts and publisher against the publisher's own pages, and recorded the date of the newest episode. Status follows the same rules as the directory:
- Active: an episode in the last 60 days.
- Irregular: 61 to 180 days.
- Dormant: more than 180 days, with no announced end.
- Ended: the show or its host has said it is finished.
Starting points for discovery included Feedspot's identity podcast list, Apple Podcasts search, and publisher sites. Discovery lists are not evidence: every fact below comes from a show's own feed or site. The directory's feed job re-runs weekly, so the live status on each profile may have moved since this was written.
The headline numbers
| Measure | Count |
|---|---|
| Identity shows tracked | 21 |
| Active (episode in last 60 days) | 13 |
| Irregular | 1 |
| Dormant | 6 |
| Ended | 1 |
| Published items across all 21 feeds | about 2,980 |
| Shows launched in 2025 | 5 |
| Shows whose own feed no longer plays | 2 |
The item count is approximate because feeds mix full episodes with trailers, short clips, and daily digests. Root Causes, from certificate authority Sectigo, is the most prolific by far at about 670 short episodes since 2019. Identity at the Center has the largest archive of long-form identity conversation, at more than 450 episodes since July 2019.
Who publishes identity podcasts
| Publisher type | Shows | Active | Dormant or ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | 11 | 5 | 6 |
| Independent | 4 | 4 | 0 |
| Analyst firm | 3 | 1 | 1 (plus 1 irregular) |
| Trade media | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| Nonprofit | 1 | 1 | 0 |
More than half of identity podcasting is vendor-funded. That is not a problem in itself, and several vendor shows are good. The pattern that matters is survival. Of the seven shows no longer publishing regularly, six are vendor productions:
- Identity, Unlocked from Auth0 ended in 2022, and its host Vittorio Bertocci died in October 2023.
- Mistaken Identity from Okta ran one season in 2023.
- Let's Talk About Digital Identity from Ubisecure stopped in January 2024.
- 401 Access Denied from Delinea stopped in February 2025.
- The Identity Heroes from Strata Identity stopped in October 2025.
- Security Matters from CyberArk went silent in March 2026, a month after Palo Alto Networks completed its acquisition, and its feed now returns an error.
The seventh, State of Identity from analyst firm Liminal, has published nothing since May 2024. Vendor shows end when marketing priorities or ownership change, and they rarely say so. If you subscribe to one, expect it to stop without notice.
Even "independent" shows have ties
We class four shows as independent. Three of them carry a commercial connection worth knowing about, all disclosed on their directory profiles:
- Identity at the Center runs paid "Sponsor Spotlight" episodes alongside its regular interviews.
- Entra.Chat is hosted by a Microsoft employee and covers Microsoft Entra exclusively.
- The Identity Jedi Show is hosted by the field CTO of Saviynt, who also co-hosts Saviynt's own podcast.
Only A Digital Identity Digest, from standards consultant Heather Flanagan, has no product vendor connection we could find. None of this makes the shows less useful. It does mean "independent" is a spectrum, which is why we wrote a separate guide on telling vendor and independent shows apart.
Where the useful episodes come from
Counting shows says little about quality, so we also counted the 139 episodes we selected for our ten learning paths: ordered lists that take a listener from basics to standards-level depth on one topic.
| Source of selected episodes | Episodes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Independent shows | 61 | 44% |
| Vendor shows | 36 | 26% |
| Analyst shows | 25 | 18% |
| General security, cloud, and developer shows | 15 | 11% |
| Media and nonprofit shows | 2 | 1% |
Vendor shows are more than half the directory but about a quarter of the episodes worth recommending. The exception is identity attacks. Seven of the 15 episodes on our identity threats and ITDR path come from vendor shows, mostly CyberArk's red team and Semperis's incident responders, because those teams publish breach analysis that independent shows rarely match. On zero trust, by contrast, only two of 14 selected episodes are vendor-made.
Three shows supply most of the depth: Identity at the Center (37 selected episodes), KuppingerCole Analyst Chat (23), and Entra.Chat (17). The selected episodes skew recent, with 60 of the 139 published in 2025 or 2026, and the median length is 43 minutes.
2025 was a launch year
Five of the 21 shows launched in 2025: Entra.Chat, A Digital Identity Digest, The Biometric Update Podcast, The Identity Heroes, and SaviTalk. Four are still publishing. The new shows are narrower than the older ones: one platform, one standards voice, one trade newsroom, one vendor's governance team. The general-purpose identity conversation is still carried mainly by shows that started in 2019 and 2020.
Two shows you cannot play from their feeds
Both Identity, Unlocked and Mistaken Identity route their audio through Chartable, an analytics service that has shut down. Its tracking domain now redirects to a spam survey site, so Apple Podcasts and any other app that reads those feeds plays nothing. Spotify kept its own copies, and our profiles and learning paths now link there, including Identity, Unlocked's episodes on OAuth 2.1, the OAuth security best current practice, CAEP, and FastFed, which remain among the best audio explainers of those specs. Our weekly feed check now tests that each show's newest audio file actually plays.
Who does not have a podcast
We looked for official shows from the FIDO Alliance, the OpenID Foundation, Ping Identity, and Microsoft, and found none. The standards bodies reach podcast audiences as guests on other shows: FIDO's leaders appear on Identity at the Center and The Biometric Update Podcast, and OpenID Foundation contributors anchor much of our OAuth and OpenID Connect path.
The gaps
Two topics have no strong dedicated episode on any show we searched. If you host an identity podcast, these are open:
- PAM session recording and privileged session management.
- Progressive profiling in customer identity.
Several topics we first listed here turned out to be covered, mostly by shows outside the identity directory: Kerberoasting (Blue Security Podcast), Scattered Spider's help desk playbook (Microsoft Threat Intelligence Podcast), MFA fatigue (Root Causes), workload identity federation (AWS Bites), and decentralized identifiers (The Rubric). Those episodes are now on our ITDR, non-human identity, and verifiable credentials paths.
The 13 active shows
| Show | Publisher | Type | Since |
|---|---|---|---|
| Identity at the Center | Independent | Independent | 2019 |
| Root Causes | Sectigo | Vendor | 2019 |
| The ID Talk Podcast | ID Tech (Verse Media) | Media | 2019 |
| KuppingerCole Analyst Chat | KuppingerCole | Analyst | 2020 |
| Hybrid Identity Protection Podcast | Semperis | Vendor | 2020 |
| Trust Talks & Digital Dives | DIACC | Nonprofit | 2021 |
| The Identity Jedi Show | Independent | Independent | 2022 |
| The Future of Identity | Trinsic | Vendor | 2023 |
| Identity Matters | SailPoint | Vendor | 2024 |
| Entra.Chat | Independent (entra.news) | Independent | 2025 |
| The Biometric Update Podcast | Biometric Update | Media | 2025 |
| A Digital Identity Digest | Spherical Cow Consulting | Independent | 2025 |
| SaviTalk | Saviynt | Vendor | 2025 |
The Analyst Brief, from The Cyber Hut, is irregular rather than dormant; its last episode was in June 2026. The Future of Identity comes from Trinsic, and Identity Matters from SailPoint.
Use the data
The numbers in this report are generated from the same data behind the podcast directory, which updates weekly. Cite this page with its date. If you publish an identity podcast we missed, or a fact here is wrong, email community@startwithidentity.com with the feed URL. Listing is free and we do not accept payment for inclusion.
Frequently asked questions
- How many identity podcasts are there?
- We track 21 podcasts whose main subject is identity and access management, digital identity, or identity security. On 2026-10-01, 13 of them had published an episode in the previous 60 days. General security shows that cover identity occasionally are not counted.
- What is the best identity podcast?
- For breadth and consistency, Identity at the Center: weekly since 2019, with more than 450 episodes and two practitioner hosts. For standards, A Digital Identity Digest. For Microsoft environments, Entra.Chat. For non-human and AI agent identity, Identity at the Center's Decoded episodes and KuppingerCole Analyst Chat. The right one depends on your role; see the Start with Identity podcast directory.
- Are vendor podcasts worth listening to?
- Some are. Vendor-run shows produced several strong episodes in our learning paths, especially on Active Directory recovery and identity attacks. But vendor shows are more likely to stop without notice, and episodes can promote the publisher's own product, so check who publishes a show before relying on it.
- Which identity podcasts are free of vendor ties?
- Few are fully free of them. Of the four independent shows we track, one runs paid sponsor episodes, one is hosted by a Microsoft employee, and one by a vendor's field CTO. A Digital Identity Digest, from a standards consultant, is the only one with no product vendor connection we could find.
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