Yael: I've always just been really curious and drawn to other cultures, to sort of the global landscape. As a teenager, my parents let me go overseas as a 15-year-old for a year. So Africa was someplace mostly, honestly through music and art that first drew me in. And then it became more of a political and professional interest when I joined the CIA before September 11th.
Aza sits down with Yael Eisenstat, a former CIA officer and a former advisor at the White House. When Yael noticed that Americans were having a harder and harder time finding common ground, she shifted her work from counter-extremism abroad to advising technology companies in the U.S. She believed as danger at home increased, her public sector experience could help fill a gap in Silicon Valley’s talent pool and chip away at the ways tech was contributing to polarization and election hacking. But when she joined Facebook in June 2018, things didn’t go as planned. Yael shares the lessons she learned and her perspective on government’s role in regulating tech, and Aza and Tristan raise questions about our relationships with these companies and the balance of power.