Manager of Corporate Communications, Vista Outdoor
Search every verified Eric Smith interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Eric Smith, a former Communications Analyst in USAID’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA), has discussed his work at the agency and his personal recovery from addiction in several recent interviews. On the podcast *Global Development Interrupted*, Smith described USAID’s partnerships with minority-serving institutions, including Florida International University, and a case competition where teams developed solutions to help female potato farmers in Peru. He stated that when the Trump administration took office, the DEIA office was dissolved within 48 hours, and he lost his job. Smith also said that both USAID Administrator Samantha Power and Chief DEIA Officer Ned Dialo advised staff to spell out the acronym DEI to avoid it being “demonized.” In other appearances, Smith has spoken about his 15 years of active addiction to multiple substances and his subsequent recovery. On *The SoapBox* and the *Objective Recovery Podcast*, he described his path to sobriety, including living in a halfway house where he paid $5 a day, and said he now has over three decades of continuous sobriety. He expressed skepticism about medication-assisted treatment, stating that the pharmaceutical industry made $1.27 trillion and that his personal experience with Suboxone and Vivitrol was that they are “effective, but most of the time they’re not.” Smith also discussed his work with Tangible IQ, a company that helps organizations understand “beyond market” forces such as activism, regulatory politics, and geopolitics, and commented on the electric vehicle market, noting that VinFast, a Vietnamese automaker, announced five models for the U.S. market.
“Growing up religious and going to Catholic church all the time, I think helped me along the way in having a sense of duty to others and that helping people is a virtue and that you should just generally try to live a moral life and leave it better than when you found it.”
“When I started working at USAID I got the same responses from my family as when I did Youth in Action in high school — 'why aren't we helping people in America?' — which really gave me practice for the arguments I would get later when working at AID.”
“Full disclosure, it doesn't hurt that I'm gay — being told by other people how bad that is is certainly not an appealing trait for a political movement, and that shaped my politics.”
“Both Samantha Power, the administrator, and Ned Dialo, the chief DEIA officer, kept telling us — spell it out, because it's easier to demonize DEI as this mishmash of letters; if you say diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, what's not to like about that?”
Eric Smith, former Communications Analyst in USAID's Office of DEIA, shares what it meant to build an agency that reflected all ...
Eric Smith is an addict, a writer, an engineer, a woodsman, and ( by his own admission) borderline Crazy. Eric, also known as ...
In our first guest story, Eric Smith opens up about 15 years of active addiction to cocaine, meth, cannabis, alcohol, work, shopping, ...
Attribution Time with Eric Smith. Eric is the Creator of Tangible IQ. His team is working with enterprise organization to understand ...
This is a quick clip of a longer interview you can find here on Green TV. "Demand for and interest in EV's seems to be exploding ...
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