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Amaryllis Fox Kennedy: From the CIA to the White House and What Comes Next | 13th and Park
Description
Amaryllis Fox Kennedy joins Adam Goodman on 13th and Park for a rare and wide-ranging conversation that moves from the trauma of losing a childhood friend on Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, to recruiting algorithms at Georgetown, to running covert operations for the CIA in her early twenties. Her journey from a nomadic childhood, shaped by her father Hodson's work as a world economist and her mother's career as an actress, to the corridors of the intelligence community is as unlikely as it is logical. She draws a direct line between the loss she experienced at age 8 and the hunger to understand, and ultimately prevent, the kind of violence that took her friend Lauren.
Fox Kennedy offers a clear-eyed account of what it takes to operate undercover, the isolation, the faith, the discipline of truly listening to adversaries rather than simply targeting them. She reflects on a formative 1999 interview with Aung San Suu Kyi, conducted before she ever considered working for the CIA, which crystallized her belief that free expression is the most powerful force on earth, more durable than any military apparatus or surveillance state.
The conversation moves into the present as Fox Kennedy describes building Mission AI, the largest interagency artificial intelligence program across the intelligence community, designed to shift analysts from prompted tasks to unprompted warning. She lays out both the promise and the genuine peril of recursive self-improvement in AI systems, the quantum computing race with China, and why she believes the current administration is uniquely positioned to set the long-term trajectory for how these technologies serve, or surveil, the American people.
She speaks candidly about the personal cost of that work, stepping back from senior roles at OMB and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence after going weeks without seeing her children awake, and about the private conversations she witnessed between RFK Jr. and the president that deepened her respect for both. Her closing message is simple and tactical: understanding what drives your adversaries is not a weakness, it is the only path to winning.
Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:36 Welcome to 13th and Park
1:40 Growing Up, Pan Am 103, and Lauren
3:48 9/11, Danny Pearl, and Joining the CIA
5:08 The Algorithm That Got Her Recruited
6:19 Life as a Covert Officer Overseas
7:58 Aung San Suu Kyi and the Power of Free Speech
10:50 Common Ground and the RFK Jr. Campaign
12:00 Restoring Trust in Institutions
13:36 AI: The Turning Point for Freedom
18:50 Quantum Computing and the China Race
20:30 Advice for Tech Innovators and Government
21:52 Balancing Family and Public Service
23:43 The Kennedy Family and What Drives Her
28:02 Closing Thoughts on Listening and Leadership
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