LIVE SPEAKING
SCSP AI+EXPO
The SCSP AI+EXPO is a key tech event in Washington, DC. It attracts every year over 20,000 attendees and leaders from business and government.
About Sebastian
TRACKS
If you don't want a customized speaking track for your event, or if you need ideas before you request a track, read some examples of what Sebastian can deliver.
Talk 1
They Already Have a File on You
AI, propaganda, and the profiling of leaders
Profiling leaders used to take a team of analysts. Now it takes a server.
In 2025, researchers at Vanderbilt University’s Institute of National Security reviewed leaked documents from GoLaxy, a Chinese technology company. According to reporting on those documents, GoLaxy had built profiles of at least 117 members of Congress and more than 2,000 American political figures and thought leaders, and had used AI-generated personas in influence campaigns around Taiwan’s 2024 election and Hong Kong. GoLaxy denies the claims.
Sebastian, trained in psychological operations, explains how modern influence campaigns choose and read their targets, why reading leaders at scale is now cheap, and what the defensive side is missing. Adversaries profile crowds of our leaders. The answer isn’t to profile crowds back. It’s to read foreign leaders and agents of influence one at a time, with evidence, so analysts can anticipate a move instead of explaining it afterward.
Your audience leaves knowing:
How influence operations select their targets and build a read on them.
The signs that an influence effort is aimed at a specific person or institution.
Why defensive analysis has to work person by person, with evidence attached, and what that changes for the analyst.
Best for: national security and intelligence audiences, policy and government affairs teams, boards and executives in sectors that foreign influence campaigns target.
Talk 2
Read the Person, Not the Situation
Your diligence covers the company. Who’s covering the founder?
Deal teams spend weeks on financial, legal, and commercial diligence, then judge the person running the company on a few reference calls and a gut read. Sebastian shows what the public record already says about how a founder or executive decides, how they behave under pressure, and where the risk sits that no data room will show you. He draws on hostage negotiation and on a real case: a fund that learned, two months after wiring the money, what had been public all along.
Your audience leaves knowing:
The questions standard diligence never asks about a person.
How to separate what someone did from why they did it, and why confusing the two is how good investors get surprised.
How to tell a read you can defend from a confident guess.
Best for: private equity, venture capital, investment banking, family offices, KYC and enhanced due diligence teams.
Talk 3
Negotiating With People You’ve Never Met
Most counterparts are strangers until the meeting starts. They don’t have to be.
Hostage negotiators rarely meet the person on the other end before the first call. They build a working read from fragments, test it within minutes, and drop it the moment it stops holding. Sebastian applies that discipline to deal teams, analysts, and anyone who has to sit across from someone they know only from a bio: how to prepare a read on a counterpart, how to check it in the room, and how to avoid assuming they think the way you do.
Your audience leaves knowing:
How to build a read on a counterpart from public material before the first meeting.
What to listen for early in the conversation that confirms the read or breaks it.
How mirror-imaging, assuming the other side reasons like you, quietly wrecks negotiations and assessments.
Best for: M&A and deal teams, investment banks, diplomats and attachés, analysts preparing leadership assessments.