13th & Park
"13th & Park" hosts insightful conversations with special guests covering a broad range of topics from politics and government, to technology, culture, economics and the media. Listeners eavesdrop on what feel like private conversations featuring the savviest and most highly regarded minds in the country. The show, co-hosted by media veterans Adam Goodman and Justin Sayfie, is produced by Ballard Partners in the Ballard Studios in Washington DC.
13th & Park
Pat Condo on Building AI We Can Actually Trust | Seekr CEO on 13th & Park
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Pat Condo, CEO of Seekr Technologies, joins 13th & Park for a wide-ranging conversation on artificial intelligence, national security, and why the next great power competition may be decided not by who builds the smartest AI, but by who builds the most trustworthy one. Drawing on decades of work across defense programs, intelligence, and technology, Condo frames AI as the defining feature of 21st century superpower status, comparing its geopolitical weight to the role nuclear weapons played in shaping the post-World War II world order.
Condo breaks down the core challenge facing AI today: provenance, lineage, and intent. He explains how training data shapes the outputs of AI models, how bias and misinformation get baked in from the start, and why the explosion of open-source models and AI agents, including those originating from China, poses a serious and underappreciated national security risk. He points to 60 million deepfakes generated daily as evidence that the unintended consequences of AI are already here, and warns that the race to build fast is outpacing the effort to build safely.
The conversation explores how Seekr Technologies approaches AI governance the way a financial auditor approaches a balance sheet, tracing assumptions through a system to verify that what comes out can actually be trusted. Condo argues that the solution is not to slow AI down, but to channel it through the right governance frameworks and transparency standards, the same principles that made institutions like the SWIFT financial system reliable at global scale.
Condo also reflects on his own path from the MX missile guidance program at Northrop to Digital Equipment Corporation to founding companies around search and discovery. He closes with a direct message: the debate over AI should not be framed as good versus evil, but as a civilization-scale opportunity that demands urgency, governance, and a commitment to transparency before the chaos of an uncontrolled rollout becomes impossible to reverse.
Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:34 AI as a Civilizational Shift
2:38 Controlling and Validating AI
3:57 Provenance, Lineage, and Intent
5:46 Deepfakes and Hallucinations
8:35 China and the AI Arms Race
9:29 How Seekr Technologies Works
10:49 Ethics, Laws, and Human Oversight
12:55 What Keeps Pat Up at Night
13:49 The Speed of AI Development
15:10 Pat Condo's Background in Tech
16:44 Government and Technology
18:16 Why Every American Should Care
19:27 Closing Thoughts
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