Jen Easterly and Nate Walkingshaw discuss leadership, moral courage, cybersecurity, software quality, AI, and distributed energy, highlighting culture, trust, and innovation as essential for America’s infrastructure, defense, and future.
Salt Lake City, Utah — November 5, 2025
Insights on Leadership, Cybersecurity, and Energy Innovation from the Final Day Fireside Session at the 2025 Zero Gravity Summit
The final day of the 2025 Zero Gravity Summit brought together some of the brightest minds at the intersection of technology, national security, and energy. Onstage, Jen Easterly, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Nate Walkingshaw, co-founder and CEO of Torus, sat down together and explored leadership, cybersecurity, and the future of energy in a world moving faster than ever.
Easterly noted that her fascination with technology and problem-solving led her to CISA, where she emphasizes human-centered leadership. Pointing to a tattoo on her arm inspired by ikigai, she explained that purpose, skill, societal need, and intrinsic reward intersect to guide her work: “You want everybody to wake up excited about what they do, to feel empowered and taken care of by their leaders, but also to know that their work makes a tangible impact every day for America.”
Easterly spoke candidly about one of the most difficult chapters of her public service — reforming U.S. hostage policy after the murder of American journalist James Foley, who was kidnapped and killed by ISIS in Syria in 2014. She described how that tragedy exposed painful gaps in the government’s approach to hostage recovery and family support. “We owed those families better,” she said. Easterly led efforts to overhaul the process, establishing clear accountability and coordinated communication between agencies and victims’ families. “It was about restoring trust,” she reflected, “and doing the harder right — not just talking about values, but acting on them when it matters most.”
She also reflected on her West Point experience sharing with the audience an important principle she has learned about leadership: “Fear can distort judgment and narrow imagination, but true leadership is choosing the harder right over the easier wrong. Courage can be contagious, and it’s what sustains innovation, ethics, and freedom.
For Walkingshaw, leading Torus offered a different perspective on culture and leadership. Torus, a Utah-based full-stack energy platform, is pioneering distributed energy with hybrid inertia-battery systems, capable of millisecond responses and 99.9% uptime. “We’re building the world’s first distributed utility — small inertial power plants that deliver grid-scale performance at the edge,” he said, noting deployments exceeding 1 GW across multiple states. He emphasized that building high-performing teams requires empathy and customer focus: “The customer breaks the tie… Our job is to create an environment where teams feel empowered to solve hard problems, to innovate, and to deliver real value.”
At the heart of both cybersecurity and energy innovation, Easterly and Walkingshaw agreed, lies culture. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” Easterly said. “No one wakes up thinking, ‘How can I fail today?’ Leadership is about unlocking potential — creating a culture where people feel safe, respected, and inspired to do their best work.”
Walkingshaw echoed the sentiment from the perspective of Torus. “At Torus, culture is everything,” he said. “You can have the best tech stack and the smartest engineers in the world, but if the culture’s off, you’ll never deliver what customers actually need. The customer breaks the tie — they’re the reason we exist.”
The pair’s reflections highlighted a shared ethos: whether defending national infrastructure or building next-generation energy systems, human-centered leadership and trust are what turn strategy into impact.
At CISA, she forged partnerships across industries, states, and government agencies. “People don’t trust the federal government; they trust people. If the government isn’t adding value, we might as well go away,” she said.
Easterly’s view on cybersecurity is equally provocative: “We don’t have a cybersecurity problem. We have a software quality problem… Vendors have been allowed to deliver insecure software for decades.” She framed AI as a potential solution for secure coding and modernizing legacy systems, but cautioned, “Move fast and break things is catastrophic. Move fast and build things is possible if you have the right people and leadership.”
Walkingshaw stressed that security is cultural as well as technical: “For startups burning venture capital, there’s constant pressure to move fast. Embedding security by design requires a mindset shift — in schools, in companies, and in public-private collaboration.” Torus’ hybrid energy systems reflect this ethos, delivering reliability and resilience for utilities, industrial operations, and data centers.
Utah itself amplifies these efforts, with 20% of the workforce in aerospace, defense, or advanced manufacturing, creating a nexus for public-private collaboration. Walkingshaw highlighted the rapid scale of Torus, from a 40,000-square-foot facility producing 400 MW annually to a 540,000-square-foot GigaOne campus designed to reach over 1 GW per quarter. He said, “Energy is the foundation of everything: computing, manufacturing, defense, even cybersecurity… We’re not just building power plants; we’re building reliability, resilience, and the capacity for innovation.”
Easterly praised Torus as a model for the collaboration she championed at CISA: “Trust, courage, and imagination will decide how America leads in the next century.” She returned to moral courage in leadership: “Fear can be weaponized, but courage can be contagious. Choosing the harder right over the easier wrong — in technology, in business, in governance — is what sustains freedom, innovation, and human progress.” Walkingshaw agreed: “You can’t defend what you don’t dare to dream. Technology, energy, and cybersecurity are inseparable. We need leaders willing to imagine what’s possible and deliver it with precision, resilience, and ethical grounding.”
Easterly concluded the conversation by highlighting warmly Utah’s unique role in innovation and national security, calling the state “a nexus for public-private collaboration” and “a model for the rest of the country.” She praised the ecosystem’s foundation in “values, service, and trusted partnerships,” and singled out Torus as a standout example of that ethos: “Torus is redefining energy resilience and reliability while demonstrating the power of collaboration, imagination, and technical excellence.” Her remarks underscored how regional innovation hubs like Utah not only support local economies but also serve as prototypes for scaling solutions critical to national infrastructure, cybersecurity, and energy systems.
Learn more at zerogravitysummit.com