The 229 Podcast

July 15, 2026: Adam Hawkins, EVP, Healthcare and Life Sciences at Cyderes, has spent more than 20 years at the intersection of clinical operations and cybersecurity, from co-founding a clinical decision support startup in college to building Cyderes's healthcare vertical from the ground up. Drex DeFord and Adam cover what the sprint to AI actually looks like from the security side, why most health systems are building guardrails while the car is already on the freeway, and the emerging concept of "blast radius", understanding not just what's vulnerable, but what actually breaks when something goes down. The conversation ends with a clear-eyed look at the next five years: machines versus machines, and what that shift means for healthcare security leadership.
Key Points:
01:22 Adam’s Early Healthcare Start

05:10 Lessons from Robert Hershebeck

07:30 Today’s Biggest CISO Challenge

09:49 Security Context and Blast Radius

13:03 Machines vs Machines Future

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Drex and Sarah join to discuss how board members are quietly using personal AI tools to review confidential health system materials, and most organizations have no policy for it. From there, the conversation gets personal. Sarah shares how she uses her AI agent as a real-time wellness coach, adjusting nutrition and habits on the fly. Drex unpacks his experience with WHOOP and asks the question every wearable user should be asking: when you clicked accept, who actually owns your data? Then the conversation shifts to Epic's Su Mi, his decision to step away, and what it reveals about identity, purpose, and the cost of never stopping

Key Points:
02:38 Secure Tools and Training

06:56 Wellness Coach in Your Pocket

12:02 Epic Leadership Shift

17:15 Purpose and Closing Thoughts

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A threat researcher at Sysdig was picking through the logs of a recent breach when something stopped him cold. The attacker moved too fast. No pauses, no fumbles, no fatigue. Over 600 payloads fired in sequence. When one failed, it read the error and adjusted. One time, from a failed login to a working fix in thirty-one seconds. No human does that.
Buried in the attacker's code were comments -- the kind a chatbot writes when it's reasoning through a problem. No person was at the keyboard. An AI agent had run the entire heist: reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement, persistence, and finally locking up 1,300 configurations before leaving a ransom note. Sysdig calls it Jade Puffer, and they believe it's the first ransomware attack ever run end-to-end by an AI.
The entry point was a vulnerable open-source AI tool sitting on the internet with cloud credentials right behind it. Health systems are bolting AI onto every workflow right now. Every one of those tools is a new door. The skill floor for running a full ransomware operation just dropped to the cost of an agent subscription. Drex has a few questions for your next leadership meeting.
Remember, Stay a Little Paranoid
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July 10, 2026: Bill Reid, Healthcare and Life Sciences Lead in the Office of the CISO at Google, has spent his career working with health system security leaders, and he keeps running into the same blind spot: healthcare is underestimating the browser as an attack surface. Drex DeFord sits down with Bill to explore why the shift from thick client infrastructure to a secure, browser-first endpoint model is no longer theoretical. It is what resilient health systems are building. From managing transient clinical staff to simplifying a fractured endpoint environment, Bill makes the case for why the browser is the future of healthcare endpoint security.
Key Points:
01:21 Browser Attack Surface

03:39 Resilient Endpoint Posture

05:40 CISO-CIO Conversation

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July 6, 2026: Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson are back from four executive summits in Napa, covering CIOs, Chief Application Officers, Chief Analytics Officers, and CNIOs. The through-line across every room? AI pressure is intense, budget cuts are real, and a clear leadership vision is nearly impossible to find. From nurses being left out of decisions they should be driving, to analytics leaders managing a shadow IT explosion, to health systems already quietly building agents for referrals and claims, this is an unfiltered read on where health IT actually stands right now.

Key Points:
01:05 Napa Summit Themes
04:55 Nursing Wins and Workflow
07:22 IT Demand and AI Vision
13:20 Bright Spots and Agent Builds

LinkedIn: 229Project
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