Do Human Work

Ray Espinoza cut false positives 80% at Workday and alert volume 70% at Atmosera, fighting alert fatigue years before the industry had a name for it.

Now leading information security at Elite Technology, after building eBay's first global security event response team and Workday's first customer-facing SOC, he argues that AI has finally caught up to that fight. Nate Burke and Lior Div catch him at Black Hat 2026, where the conversation swings into the Hugging Face sandbox scare and open-weight models handing nation-state capability to any threat actor with a laptop.

00:00 - Introduction

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Matt Sharp walked away from cybersecurity for fifteen months, hiked the Camino, trekked to Everest Base Camp, and came back to an industry that had rewritten itself while he was gone. 

Now CISO at Xactly, co-author of The CISO Evolution, and a top 20 finalist for TIME's CISO of the Year, he argues the gap in security leadership was never technical skill. It was the ability to read a financial statement. Recorded on location at Black Hat with Nate Burke and Lior Div, the conversation also turns to China's open-weight model releases: nation-state capability, handed to every ransomware group with a laptop.

00:00 – Introduction

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Season Two of Do Human Work opens with Jatarra Warren, Senior Director of Information Security at Lovesac, tracing her journey from teaching soldiers how to trust battlefield communication systems in the Army National Guard, straight into cybersecurity leadership. 

Ninety days into her new role, she talks candidly about the humility-and-confidence balance required to lead a team you don't yet fully understand, why AI is forcing security teams to finally fix the foundations they've been skipping, and why fighting AI-driven attackers still comes down to the same basic controls that mattered a decade ago. 

She's also a certified life coach, and makes the case that coaching, not code, is the skill security leaders need most right now. It's a reminder that in security, the hardest skill to automate is still the ability to lead people through change.

Impactful Moments: 

00:00 – Introduction

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Most security teams are still betting that hygiene problems and AI-scale problems live in separate categories. Nicole Beckwith, Senior Director of Security Engineering and Operations at Cribl, has seen exactly how that bet goes wrong from the inside.

Nate and Lior caught up with Nicole to talk about why the basics still break organizations faster than any AI threat, what it actually takes to secure AI agents as identities rather than tools, and where defenders are quietly getting ahead of attackers for the first time in years. 

Organizations are racing to get ahead of AI-driven threats while the thing that actually takes most of them down is something mundane: a stale account, a siloed team, or a SIEM nobody's feeding properly. AI doesn't replace the need for fundamentals, it raises the stakes of skipping them, and Nicole has the breach story to prove it. 

Impactful Moments:

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When Claude Mythos dropped, the question wasn't whether AI could find vulnerabilities, it was whether defenders would move faster than the attackers who were already racing toward the same capability. The gap between those two timelines is shrinking faster than most organizations want to admit, and the teams still betting on the old playbook are about to find out what that costs.

Nate and Lior sat down with Mark-David McLaughlin, Head of Security Architecture and Engineering at InterSystems, whose software quietly powers hospitals, health systems, and critical infrastructure worldwide. Mark-David came up through software engineering at Cisco, a decade in PSIRT handling incidents when things went badly wrong, and now leads product security for one of the most sensitive industries on the planet. 

His take on what AI actually changes is grounded in 20+ years of hard lessons, and at least one story that will make you rethink how much you trust your SOC.

Impactful Moments:

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Breakout time has collapsed from 285 minutes to 17 seconds. Attackers are running orchestration agents around the clock while defenders are still scheduling a meeting about it. 

Brian Fricke, CISO at AutoNation, has done something rare. He's built security programs from the ground up four times across the military, government, and heavily regulated financial institutions. He joins Nate and Lior, live from RSAC, to break down the governance mistake almost every organization is making with AI agents right now, and what a risk-tiered framework actually looks like in practice.

Impactful Moments: 

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The cybersecurity industry has spent decades throwing bodies at the same three problems: too much noise, not enough context, and not enough budget. AI didn't create those problems, but it's about to make ignoring them dangerous.

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302 days ago we launched from stealth with a belief that sounded almost reckless: that AI agents could do the repetitive security work that burns out defenders and buries teams in false positives.

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Most cybersecurity conversations obsess over tools, threats, and tech. But what if the real evolution is happening in the human layer, a shift most in the industry aren’t used to seeing?

In this episode, BISO and industry voice Olivia Phillips join Nate and Lior to redefine what effective security leadership looks like in the age of AI. Olivia shares insights from behavioral science, organizational psychology, and decades of cyber experience, revealing why influence without authority, real transparency, and emotional intelligence are now core cybersecurity capabilities. She also discusses the future impact of quantum, the shift toward value-driven security investments, and why trust is earned, not given.

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How is AI reshaping the cybersecurity landscape, and what does this mean for the future of cyber professionals? In this episode, Nate Burke and Lior Div sit down with Ron Eddings, a gen AI security researcher and co-founder and CEO of Hacker Valley Media, to explore these pressing questions. Ron discusses his journey from a traditional cybersecurity role to becoming a thought leader and content creator focused on the confluence of humanity and technology. The conversation delves into Ron’s belief that AI will one day replace many cybersecurity roles, but not without creating opportunities for new, more strategic positions. They also explore the notion of AI agents, multi-agents, and the potential magic of a model context protocol.

Throughout the episode, Ron offers insights into how AI can eliminate repetitive, non-human tasks, freeing up time for creativity and strategic thinking. He elaborates on his contrarian belief in the capacity of AI to eventually overhaul cybersecurity jobs, for the better. Together, the hosts and Ron reflect on how the integration of AI in cybersecurity will redefine the way we talk, train, and work in this field.

Impactful Moments:

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