Season 1. Episode 14. Unscripted with Lena Smart

Lena Smart has spent 30 years securing the systems we genuinely cannot afford to have fail — the power grid, financial markets, and as longtime CISO at MongoDB, one of the most widely used databases on the planet. She's defended more high-stakes infrastructure than most people will ever see. And she's here to tell you that AI agents scare her more than any of it.

Not because they're malicious. Because nobody knows who owns them when they break.

We get into the shadow AI problem CISOs are walking into blind, why the board is asking for AI on Monday and the CISO finds out on Friday afternoon, what Lena actually does when she wants to stress-test a company's chatbot (hint: she asks it for a lasagna recipe), and why she's now helping build the first real certification and insurance standards for AI agents through AIUC.

And before any of that — she grew up in the housing projects of Glasgow, left school at 16, taught herself to code from library books, found a modem in a dumpster, and joined hacker bulletin boards under a male name. She still won't tell you what the name was.

Lena Smart, Unscripted. Let's get into it.