James Damore joins Joe Rogan to discuss his 2018 Google memo, which cited studies on neuroticism and testosterone to argue gender disparities in tech stem from cultural, not discriminatory, factors. Fired after 40% of employees agreed with it, Damore faced media smear campaigns, legal battles (including NLRB claims), and accusations of extremism for challenging ideological homogeneity. Rogan compares Google’s suppression of dissent to McCarthyism, noting how its "diversity" policies allegedly target conservatives while ignoring real systemic biases. They critique the tech industry’s echo chambers, where taboo topics—like pay disparities (proven nonexistent when controlling for performance) or divorce rates—are weaponized to silence debate, despite evidence-based framing. Damore’s fight exposes how corporate power and ideological enforcement distort free discourse, even as alternatives like "alt-tech" face unfair demonization. [Automatically generated summary]
They would have these company-wide meetings where they just push a lot of this diversity stuff, and some of it was kind of weird, so I decided to go to these secret meetings, sort of, that were about 100 people, completely unrecorded, and they would talk about some of the things that they're doing.
And it would really contradict what they're saying publicly, where, oh no, we're not changing any of our hiring practices for these candidates.
And they said, yeah, we basically are making it easier for some candidates to get in.
And I voiced some concerns, but people just shamed me and was like, no, you're wrong.
So if you could get into specifics, like when you're in these meetings and they're talking about diversity, what is their concern?
Is it they're trying to promote an image of diversity?
Are they trying to promote actual diversity?
Do they think that there's a benefit for diversity, or is it a part of their public image?
And is it a lot of it to avoid criticism?
Because I think there's a big issue.
I mean, if you don't have all your bases covered, two black women, two Asian men, if you don't have all your bases covered, you can get pretty roundly criticized as not being diverse or being possibly racist.
Yeah, it seems like in the interest of promoting an image of diversity, they're willing to bypass science and the truth and the reality of culture, the reality of human biology and evolutionary psychology.
There's just so much that they're willing to look past to get to this one thing, which seems to be like There's a really important thing in today's society that you want to promote an image of diversity.
That's a very recent redefinition of the term racism, but it's very slippery and very dangerous because you could see it as promoting, in fact, exonerating racism towards other ethnicities or towards white people or towards people that you feel like are in a privileged class.
You can get away with it because it's no big deal because they're the ones who are racist.
Even if it's not even that person, if it's people who look like them that have lived for centuries, Like, somehow or another, you're a guilty person.
My main concern was them saying 50% in the population.
Look, Google only has 20%.
It's about women?
Yeah.
There were clear reasons, at least in my mind, that That's not as simple as they're making it out to be, and that there are some differences, and that could explain some of the issues that women are facing.
And so a lot of these women issues in tech, I feel, are actually not really gender issues, they're just Women, on average, are more cooperative, for example, and so they may find it harder to lean in in the corporate world, like Sheryl Sandberg is saying.
But there are men that also feel like that.
I'm not very assertive.
I'm actually pretty shy.
And so I feel the same stuff.
It's not that there's a ton of sexism.
It's maybe that male typical behavior is rewarded.
Just as, you know, competitiveness is rewarded in a lot of corporate world, but it's not that we're just, oh, you're a woman, therefore you're obviously bad at coding.
Yeah, although some people will twist that and say that because a lot of it is just they try to fit their ideology and they see one data point and they extrapolate.
So they see these studies and it's true that these women are viewed as less likable, but they are seen as just as competent.
And so their performance review isn't affected really by being assertive.
It's just that socially they may not be as liked as much.
Right, but that's got to be a factor in the way they behave, because for men, a ball-busting successful man is supposed to be, like, looked up to.
Like, oh, this is the guy who's kicking ass in the corporate world.
He's doing it right.
Like, you know, Bob is ruthless.
But if Jenny's ruthless, like, you don't want to be around her.
You know, it's a weird, it's just, that's, I feel like, if there is a real bias with men, obviously I don't work in tech, but I would assume that that would be a real bias.
Yeah, and I think some of the solution to that is just allowing people to be more cooperative.
And actually, so for example, at Google, you're really rewarded for owning a particular project and seeing that one project go through.
But if you're someone that can really help a lot of different people, and you're not necessarily the sole owner of any individual thing, but you provide a lot of value to the company, That isn't really seen as positive as someone that really drove the project alone.
Now, the blowback from this has been very intriguing, you know, as an outsider, like, looking at it.
When I first heard about it, you know, I thought, well, this mean, angry man must have written some things saying that women suck at tech, or they suck at this, and, you know, and people reacting to this blatant misogynistic tribe that I, or scribe that I, uh, I was hearing about.
When I read it, I was so confused, because I was like, where's the mean stuff?
Like, where is this?
And the other thing that was really confusing was that some people were reprinting it without citations.
Did that freak you out, like, when you were being misrepresented?
I think a lot of these companies just have a certain narrative that they're trying to push.
I've tried to talk to a lot of these reporters and I'll give hour-long interviews with some of them and at the end they'll just write the same sort of article of like, oh yeah, he's just a misogynist.
So I think even if I can convince the individual journalists, they are under pressure What a weird world we're in right now when it comes to that because I was looking for something that could be could be Like, evidence of massage.
The only thing that I could find, and this is a very mild criticism, is that you were saying, I believe you used the term neurotic, that women were more likely to be neurotic.
I think it's just, I was too much into the, like, I've seen the word so often that I didn't really associate it with neurotic and the negative connotations.
I've listened to you talk to Ben Shapiro and a couple other folks.
And, you know, your thought process is very reasonable and very well sorted out.
And another thing that I'm not hearing from anybody is how you wrote a whole page and a half describing all the different ways that women could be more involved in tech or you can encourage more women to tech.
Like, this is not the work of a misogynist.
This is the work of someone who's carefully considering an issue and looking at it from a very...
What I felt like...
And correct me if I'm wrong, but that you felt frustrated that you were looking at something that was, that people, the way they were approaching this, they weren't looking at it for what it was.
They had kind of decided how they were going to describe it.
Right.
How they were going to deal with it.
And it wasn't really based on facts or reality and certainly not on science.
And you sort of felt frustrated by this and you decided to try to interject with as much of the current science as you could that could possibly explain choices.
Not why women are bad at it, not why they shouldn't be in it, which is what I kept reading.
But more that why women choose to go into certain professions, what could be the impediment, and what we could do to maybe encourage more women to do it instead of doing this sort of blanket-style diversity where you're just like, oh, we need two of these, and we need two of those, which is what I seem to think that they were doing.
Is that a good assessment?
By the way, this will never trend on YouTube.
We might get five million hits.
That's a real problem, too.
There's a lot of censorship when it comes to these sort of conversations.
They would rather look at me, who looks like a meathead, and look at you and go, oh, well, these fucking guys are just talking shit about women for an hour.
Besides the fact of just certain things in our hiring process that would favor certain people, which would create negative stereotypes for people just in general.
One thing about stereotypes that they don't realize is that people will automatically create stereotypes no matter what, and it's based on their environment.
And we see this with affirmative action too in academia, where if you create a sort of situation where portions of the population are performing differently, then you'll automatically create the stereotype that, oh, maybe all the Asians are smart and all of the other minorities aren't as smart in this college.
Because you needed a 1600 to get in if you're Asian and you need lower otherwise.
So you'll automatically create that stereotype and that's negative for everyone because it creates this tension between the groups and they self-segregate because of that.
While if you just put everyone in the same level, then they'll just intermingle and it'll be great.
So, you know, that has its negative consequences, and it may be illegal, which is what I was trying to say in my document.
So that aspect, I think, is bad.
But then also...
Once you think that, oh, all of this is because of sexism, and even though we can't really see overt signs of sexism, like, oh yeah, you're a woman, therefore you're bad, and no one is saying these sexist slurs or anything, then it must be some low-level bias that we all have.
And that's why they're pushing all this unconscious bias and microaggressions and just increasing everyone's sensitivity to Oh, you said something that could be interpreted in this one weird way, and that might offend someone somewhere, therefore you should never say anything.
Yeah, and there have been reports of companies that'll have these diversity programs and then blackmail companies if they don't take them.
So, say, you know, they'll start complaining because, you know, all of these companies are the same in that they have about, you know, 20 to 30 percent women.
So they could do the same attack against anyone.
And so they blackmail a company, say, oh, you need to do these certain programs, and if you don't, then we'll start doing external pressure on you.
But the secondhand story was that he would go into these groups and if anybody had said something, whatever reason they had to get into this company, they would go into this company and then they would charge them A tremendous amount of money to go in and create these diversity programs.
And if they didn't do that, then they would shame the company and they would claim the company was racist.
Jesse Jackson had this laundry list of things he wanted, like jumbo shrimp cocktail and all this crazy shit and limo rides.
But really, it's been kind of documented.
I'd have to go back over it again.
I remember it only barely.
But that's where he got that moniker, race pimp.
That what he was essentially doing was race pimping.
And that he was going around and, you know, kind of threatening people that we will call you a racist, we will call your company racist, comply in this manner.
Yeah, and that was sort of made public with all of this, where there were some people that just really pushed and started complaining a ton based on my document.
They would email my HR, everyone up my management chain, and they'd write all these posts and try to coordinate people to really shame me.
And then they started tweeting about it after, and that's how it leaked externally.
Obviously the neuroticism, I could have worded that differently.
The fact that I didn't talk about all the biases that are against women as much, but it was really that This was a Google internal document, and so we already have so much stuff about the potential biases against women, and this was just the other side of the story, the other perspective that wasn't being heard.
I don't really know any criticism that was really, oh yeah, that was definitely, I should have done that.
You know, I mean, here's this very detailed thing.
If you guys disagree with it, let's debate it.
Let's talk about it.
Like I said, the only thing that I thought was even remotely derogatory was that one word or that one idea that women are more prone to neuroticism.
Other than that, it just seemed to me to be evolutionary psychology.
It seemed to be, like, a lot of stuff that has already been really well-researched.
This is some pretty clear differences.
And again, it's not all women or all men, but there's a tremendous amount of evidence that shows that males lean towards certain professions and females lean towards other professions.
Yeah, and these are based on surveys of like half a million people.
So people are saying, oh yeah, this is just one study that showed this.
Like, no, it's many different studies across many different countries.
And, you know, there have been even experiments that link this to just prenatal testosterone, which is pretty strong evidence that there's some biological link.
Also, if you have a company like Google, which, by the way, before we go any further, I'm a big fan of Google.
I use their products all the time.
I have a Google phone.
I mean, I think they're amazing.
I think their browser is excellent.
I use Chrome.
I think they kick ass.
Every morning, I go to my phone and I check the Google News.
I have a whole setup, but that's one of the first things I do.
I check the news on my phone from Google.
So it's not like I'm an anti-Google person, but if...
If there wasn't some sort of evolutionary psychology reason or some sort of a prenatal testosterone reason or some biological reason why people were inclined to choose one profession over another, Google would have to be a fucking horrible company.
If everything was even, if everybody was 50-50 and they're only hiring 20% women, that means they're monsters.
Yeah, and that's why I feel like some people are shaming me, like, oh, this is such a bad thing to tell little girls that are interested in technology.
When really, I think this is a much better view of the world, where just...
Yeah, if you're interested in technology, great.
There aren't as many women like you, but if you are, that's amazing.
While the other side of the story is, oh no, even if you are, then you'll face all these challenges, and it'll just be an uphill battle against sexism, and you'll never be seen as good as a man.
And that's not very encouraging to a lot of people.
Well, it's also not, it's not necessarily accurate.
I mean, you're kind of like bending the truth to meet your narrative, you know, where instead we should maybe look at, like, what are the differences between men and women?
But that's the thing, like, people don't want to even accept.
There's a trend today to not accept biological differences between the sexes.
I mean, if I was a woman, I would think that would be the worst place to work is in an office with men, especially if I was attractive and I was just around a bunch of goons or staring at my butt and just saying stupid shit.
Men are gross.
I mean, I think, like, in general, there's an issue with men and women working together because a lot of men are gross, you know?
I mean, it's not all of us, obviously, but, I mean, just if I want to be honest about it, I would say that, man, I think women probably have to deal with a lot of shit.
But is that the reason why only 20% of them are in tech?
Because that's not the case with all jobs when women and women work together.
And I think men are gross across the board.
They're not just gross in tech.
I mean, they're probably gross.
What are jobs where women are disproportionately represented on the other side?
Well, I bet they deal with gross dudes there, too.
There's a lot of gross dudes.
But that doesn't stop them from being hired at a disproportionately favorable number and percentage.
Yeah.
We've got to look, I think, collectively.
Here's one good thing.
Here's another good thing about Google, because I don't want to trash on Google, and the good thing about tech companies in general.
I feel like we are in a way better position that tech companies are leaning way left.
I think we're in a way better position socially that tech companies are being extremely concerned about diversity.
Because you just don't feel that in a lot of companies where they're about the hard line.
They're about the bottom line, making money, kicking ass, taking names, pushing the company ahead, and they're about infinite growth.
This is not what I see from tech companies.
What I see from tech companies is extreme caution when it comes to social issues and this extreme desire to be thought of as being very diverse, very fair, very liberal.
I think that's good.
I really do.
I think it balances it out.
And I also think When I think, at least, about the smartest people in the world or the most innovative people in the world today, I almost always think about tech.
Because I think about, like, if you looked at the human organism, We're good to go.
Those people are oftentimes very left-wing and very liberal.
So I like the fact that Google has this as a thought process.
I just wish that it was Unbiased in its determinations when it comes to biases.
Yeah, so I agree that being progressive isn't necessarily a bad thing.
It is great that Google has this don't be evil motto and they've decided, oh yeah, we get a ton of ad revenue, therefore we can do a ton of random stuff.
That's good for the world in general.
But I think, unfortunately, their political bias has created They haven't forgotten their don't be evil motto.
It's just that don't be evil has turned into just don't disagree with us and what our ideology says.
They're just a little off, but they're going the right way, you know?
And look, it's very difficult to fucking...
I mean, how could you run a giant company like that and be just totally cool and above ground and have it all worked out?
I mean, it just doesn't happen, you know?
And especially when you have all these internal influences, like you're talking about these activists that work, that have...
in proving that there's racism.
There's a vested interest.
Like when you go looking for, you know, if you have a hammer, everything becomes an L, right?
If you're a person who's the type of person that's looking for racism everywhere, fuck, man, you're going to find it in all these weird places that don't even make sense.
Like these hidden unconscious biases where you have to examine yourself.
Don't just look at overt actions and see whether or not those actions are racist.
You have to actually examine all your thoughts and try to find racist thoughts because they are in there whether you want to believe it or not.
Like, oh Jesus, this is a goddamn ghost hunt.
You know, this is a witch hunt.
It's like, again, even though I'm a white man, I really feel like it's leaning better that we're shitting on white men than, you know, if it was the other way.
If we were shitting on minorities, I mean, it would be very disturbing if an enormous company like Google was going, well, let's just be honest, Puerto Ricans are lazy.
You know, like, whoa!
But if a company comes along like Google and it's like, you know, you can't be racist towards white people, like...
Okay, look, at least we can work here.
We could talk.
We could talk about this.
You're saying something fucking crazy and racist.
I know you don't think it's crazy and racist because you're trying so hard to not be racist towards minorities that you're looking at what's a temporary majority.
I mean, white people are only a majority for another decade, right?
I hope it evens out.
But I feel like in defense of Google, it's better to be leaning incorrectly in that direction than to go the other way.
And at some point, people will just see, no, these people aren't actually that.
And, you know, they've just created a bubble of...
Words that they say and it just keeps getting more and more extreme and at some point it'll just shatter Like an economic bubble, but I but that's very dangerous because it opens a door to competition to Google Like someone who's more rational and I think that's unfortunate for Google to like to be supporting these ridiculous ideas I read this one article where this woman was calling you a misogynist.
Because I was listening, I was reading it, and I was trying to...
Wait, I'd read your memo.
So I read your memo and then I read this article about your memo.
I'm like, this is like an angry person that has just decided that this is the focus of all the woes of the world is James and I'm gonna shit on James and that the misogynists of the world like James are the reason why women can't excel in tech.
Yeah, and I think part of it is that there's just an asymmetry, so there's no punishment for writing this really angry letter that says how misogynist I am.
Negative to me and anyone else that has similar viewpoints So there really needs to be some sort of retribution maybe for People that just so openly are so negative about you could just get away with it Yeah, and then no one questions it.
That's really part of the problem It's like people are so looking for things to be racist that when someone cries racism if you debate it at all like well, how is he racist?
You're a Nazi, too?
You become a Nazi for discussing things.
Even if you just objectively go over the facts and don't agree with their assessment, you become a racist.
If I read a book today, like I've got a book over there by Michael Malice on North Korea.
If I read a book on North Korea, like, well, what's going on in North Korea?
People wouldn't be like, Joe Rogan's a North Korean supporter.
He wants to move to North Korea.
He wants us all to be under a communist dictatorship wronged by Kim Jong-un.
You wouldn't say that, right?
Well, back then, you would.
Back then, during the McCarthy era, if you started reading communist newsletters or you started going to a meeting, what is this all about?
You could get shamed, run out of Hollywood, and it was a giant issue.
People were ratting on people, and they were doing it for the same reasons.
They did not want to be lumped in with this group, so they would immediately turn people in.
They were turning in their neighbors.
It was a scary time where people were looking for the communists.
Everyone is looking for the dirty red scare.
They're going to come and infiltrate our world.
It's very similar because it's a mindset.
This mindset of not looking at things objectively but having everything boxed into these very convenient packages.
And this is one of them, that diversity is of the utmost importance and that anything that does not challenge that idea or anything that does not support that idea, rather, is racist.
Yeah, and that was sort of what I was trying to say when I said demoralize diversity, because, you know, we've just put it on such a pedestal and we've stopped looking at the costs and benefits of it.
And we've just started looking for villains, you know, all the racists, and we just want to punish those villains and label anyone that disagrees with any of the precepts of diversity as some sort of evil person.
Yeah, and a lot of this has some really nefarious history where the beginnings of just, you know, we used to just have tests and then that would be how you got into Harvard, for example, and whoever has the highest score would get in.
But then they saw, oh, there's too many Jewish people getting in.
And so they started adding all this, oh, let's look at your extracurriculars and let's make it more subjective on who we get in.
And that way they could discriminate against Jewish people, really.
Does that mean that we're prejudiced against Irish people?
No.
What does What does it mean?
Well, whatever it means, the end result is what's significant.
We're not stopping other people from taking these tests, right?
If you get a disproportionate amount of European Jews, there should be some sort of study, and there has been, but there should be some sort of studies as to what is it culturally.
Like, what is the significance?
Like, what has happened in the past that led this one group of people to be extraordinarily successful in one area?
Well, that's what we should study.
We shouldn't try to keep Jewish people out.
That's fucking insane.
And it's racist.
And I think Asian people are not...
Complaining the same way other folks would, you know, with the same exact issue, you know?
I mean, it's essentially a reverse affirmative action sort of a situation.
I had a good buddy of mine when I was young who was Korean, and he was in medical school.
And his parents were brutal.
I mean, they just wanted A's across the board, no fucking excuses.
You will study until your hands bleed.
you know there was just this sort of culture of of success in that household and of work hard work and hard work ethic and you know the the family's idea was like look we came over to America from South Korea so that you could kick ass period you're not gonna come over here and fuck off and obviously he was a fucking straight-a student and just a wizard
I mean, this dude was just always awesome at everything and always working really hard, but he was completely stressed out all the time.
Like, every time you'd see him, he was like...
But just getting everything done.
But, I mean, it's the culture that he grew up in.
So to discriminate against that guy and say, well, you work too hard...
Hey Jungshik, you can't, you know, your scores are a little bit too high.
It's like saying to athletes, like certain athletes, oh, well, you know, you've been training too hard.
And so we're gonna need a faster 40-yard dash from you than a regular person to get on the team.
You would never say that.
You would say, well, this guy's obviously super dedicated and gifted.
This is the guy we want on our team.
And that's the one thing where I feel like we don't see a lot of this stuff.
We like results when it comes to athletics, when it comes to things like, what's your number?
What is the fastest you can run?
How high can you jump?
What's the pole vault that you do?
How far do you throw a discus?
All those things are very clear.
These are very clear numbers.
You can't do that same sort of approach that you're doing with academics or with industry.
You can't do that approach when it comes to athletics.
I'm not suggesting that the whole world is a sport, but when it comes to things like scores and keeping people out and letting people in and trying to get more people of a certain color or ethnicity in, You know, you're doing some slippery work, man.
You know, it gets real weird when you start doing that.
Yeah, it's all about leveling the outcomes of people.
And there's this scary Kurt Vonnegut short story where, you know, if you're really smart, then you'll have to wear headphones that just beep all the time.
If you're beautiful, you'll have to wear a mask in the future.
If you're strong, you'll have to have all these weights on you.
Yeah, they try to invoke this a lot, too, in these programs where you're encouraged when you ask a question or something, you say, as a white male, this is what I feel.
I'm like, okay, let's read this fucking thing one more time.
I don't think you promoted any stereotypes.
You were talking with citations about science.
And that's where this whole thing really confused the shit out of me.
Have you had many people, like, has there been like a 50-50 sort of reaction?
Like 50% of the people were like me, kind of confused about this, and then 50% of the people were just knee-jerk calling you some sort of a sexist or a Nazi?
And even the 50%, probably a good percentage of them were just being pussies.
It just doesn't seem like, if you're looking at it really objectively, you could...
They obviously want a result.
And that result is the maximum amount of diversity.
And I feel like If that's your result, if that's what you're looking for, shouldn't the result be, let's just not discriminate, just be open and just try to get the best people?
Wouldn't that be the best way to do it?
And then if we run into problems, like, you know, we've tried to do this best people thing, but all we have is Asians.
Well, I think what you're seeing is that there's a fear of retribution.
And that's one of the reasons why people are towing the line, is that they're worried about these hyper-aggressive people that are coming out against people that don't toe the line.
They're, you know, like you're saying, shaming you.
And that's a disturbing aspect of human nature that I don't think should ever be reinforced.
And I think It's hard to call those things out individually because collectively as a group, if this group of diversity-minded folks, left-wing-minded social justice warrior types are attacking you, you feel very isolated and there's not a lot of support.
And so most people just acquiesce.
They just back off.
They just give in.
They toe the line.
They just alter their thoughts or they keep it to themselves.
I'm really afraid that I'm actually just polarizing the issue even more and separating people because it's really shown that The stereotypes are real in some ways.
There are some really extreme people on the left and really extreme people on the right, maybe.
And we really need to bridge it and say, okay, let's actually have a discussion.
Let's talk about what's actually happening.
And nothing is really off the table in this discussion, but that's not happening.
And Google itself, from what I've heard, they've just been doubling down on the diversity stuff, and they haven't addressed any of the political discrimination.
Well, I think you're right, and I think that has to be your motivation for writing that thing.
I mean, that was a very well-thought-out memo, and I don't think someone who Wanted to separate people would have written that the way it seemed to me as an outsider with not no dog in the fight.
I was looking I was like oh this guy is probably like frustrated at what he sees these sort of social justice warrior tactics and these aren't logical and that this is not rational and like maybe my breakdown of this situation scientifically evolutionary psychology studies and all these different Random factors that may have contributed to women choosing these careers.
Yeah Yeah, I definitely have a bias where I thought, you know, we could just sit down and discuss it rationally That's all I ever wanted was sit down and discuss it with them.
Yeah, but I really underestimated that sort of group based emotions that were behind this and That's scary.
One of the things that was important about Charlotte, I think.
Charlottesville, rather.
Is that we got to see real Nazis.
Like, hey man, they're real.
It's not the fucking guy writing the Google memo.
It's this asshole with a swastika on his check.
He's carrying a tiki torch.
Walking down the street with a gun in his pocket.
Ranting about the Jews and black people.
That's a real Nazi.
And...
That is what you were saying.
There's extreme people on the right and there's extreme people on the left.
And they don't understand that they're way more similar than they like to believe.
If you believe that all white people are racist, if you believe that it's impossible, You don't think you are.
I know you don't think you are, but you are, because you're just as ridiculous.
You're so off of what is real.
You're so off.
You know, the idea that all black people are responsible for the woes of society, and that none of it has to do with the fact that they were captured hundreds of years ago and brought over here as slaves, and that they're lesser as human beings, that's a disgusting, ridiculous proposition.
And the people that think that way are fools, right?
And rightly so.
Most people in the center look at those as fools.
I look at the people that think that you can't be racist against white people as just as foolish.
You dumb fucks are fueling these assholes.
Like with this dumb way of looking at things and pushing these ridiculous ideas that all white people are racist.
You're supposed to feel bad because you're white.
I didn't do anything!
I didn't do anything.
Didn't ask to be born white.
Didn't ask to be born male.
You can't get mad at people for who they are.
We should be having an open discussion about what is wrong.
Well, any interpersonal relationships with random people can be messy.
You get a group of 30 people together, you force them to work in a building, and it's going to be messy.
People are messy.
We're weird.
And if you have more of one group than another, that group is going to feel alienated.
So if you have 80% men and 20% women, they're going to feel alienated.
There's no way around it.
The right way of approaching it is not to distort the facts, especially when you're thought of as being...
I mean, Google is essentially a pillar of information.
I mean, they're one of the most important...
Like, hey man, Google it.
I mean, that is the thing that people say.
They're one of the most important aspects of our society today.
Having the ability to instant...
Nobody says, go Bing that.
Nobody gives a shit about Bing, right?
I mean, Bing's a joke.
But Google is hugely important.
So if you are essentially in charge of the distribution of more knowledge than arguably anything else on Earth, I mean, that's a big statement, but I think you might be able to...
You might be able to actually say that and be pretty honest.
I think Google is responsible for distributing more information than any group on Earth.
I am surprised that they never, you know, when they fired me, had me try to sign something to say, oh, yeah, you know, just here's some non-disclosure agreement or something.
And I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say, but at least according to our own policies, we said it's illegal to use someone's protected status or their sex or a race in employment-critical situations, like when they're getting hired, when they're trying to be matched to a manager or to a team, and when we're choosing who to promote But it is happening in a lot of these places.
Yeah, it's kind of weird how they cited some of the same parts of the Code of Conduct where, oh yes, every employee should do their utmost of reducing bias and harassment and legal discrimination, when really my document was about eliminating the bias against conservatives and the harassment against them and the legal discrimination that we're doing in multiple parts of our pipeline.
Yeah, I think socially I lean more left, like socially, in terms of like...
Welfare and things along those lines and, you know, obviously this protected status is driving me crazy.
This thing that Trump's doing with children that were born in this country or born in other countries and then brought over here as children and then they're talking about deporting them.
That drives me fucking crazy.
The hard right version of that is despicable.
These people that I see online, why didn't they apply for citizenship?
Oh, who knows, maybe because they're fucking 13. You know, like were you out there applying for citizenship if you were 13?
No, I mean when you're 13 years old you're playing games and hanging out with your friends and then you find out you were born in Guatemala and you're like what?
I lean way left when it comes to those kind of things gay rights and things like You know, social programs for disenfranchised people and disenfranchised communities.
If I want my tax dollars to go to anything, I want it to go to making people's lives easier.
Whether it's socialized medicine or whatever we could do to make people have an easier path to success and to not have them so burdened down by their environment and their circumstances.
That, I think, is our responsibility as human beings to try to...
I don't want to say even the playing field, because there's never going to be an even playing field, but to give people opportunity.
That's it.
Just give people an opportunity to do well.
Not have it so completely stacked against them.
So in that sense, I'm not...
Very conservative in that way.
Like, I'm not one of those pull yourself up by your bootstraps thing.
And it would be nice if more of us were charitable in that regard.
You know, and some people think that that charity should be a personal issue and that we should all just do it, you know, as part of our community and our society.
Maybe.
That's a good argument.
But maybe the argument is that our government should be a part of our community.
And that we should think about it that way.
Instead of thinking of it as this overlord that decides and designates where our money should go, then maybe we should have some more say in it.
It should be some sort of a more kind approach.
So in that sense, I lean pretty far left.
I'm also pretty pragmatic.
And I also know that if you give people too much, it's like sort of that winning lottery ticket thing.
If you make things too easy for people, they don't try hard.
It's just a natural part of human nature.
So in that sense, I'm conservative in a lot of ways.
Scotland will begin funding universal basic income experiments.
Yeah.
Hawaii.
That's what it was.
Hawaii considers universal basic income as robots seen stealing jobs.
Fucking robots running on the streets stealing jobs.
Yeah, it's Hawaii.
I think...
There is some real arguments to be made, and I think Elon Musk, who is of course a part of this automated car revolution, and he's creating these trucks that they're going to start using to haul things, and they're going to be automated, and it's going to remove a lot of jobs, and they're starting to talk about universal basic income as a real solution to that.
While universal basic income can be made such that you start working and then you'll lose a little bit, but it's never an actual incentive to not work.
It's not an incentive to not work, but it's an incentive.
It gives you food and shelter.
So then you could go pursue a dream, which I think would be wonderful.
I mean, look, if there's anything that our tax dollars should be going towards, it's creating less losers.
Less people who feel disenfranchised by the system.
You know, if you can pay X amount of tax dollars but live in an exponentially more safe and friendly and happy environment, I think most people would be leaning towards that.
You know, We want women to succeed in these positions so badly that a woman CEO can become a superstar like that lady from that blood testing company that turned out to be all bullshit.
Was that Thanos?
Is that the name of it?
Theranos?
That was a fascinating case.
This woman essentially was role-playing as a female Steve Jobs with a bullshit product that didn't really Do what it was advertised to do.
And her company was valued at, you know, something like 30 something billion dollars.
And she was thought to be the richest self-made woman in the world.
And then almost overnight, she's worth nothing because they found out it doesn't work.
And the company sort of fell apart.
There it is.
How Elizabeth Holmes' House of Cards game came tumbling town.
It is a fascinating story because this woman, look at her there.
She dressed the part.
She put on a fucking black turtleneck.
I mean, she dressed like Steve Jobs.
I remember she gave this speech once.
It's some woman's success group for something or another.
And she got up there in this unprepared, rambling, stupid speech.
And I was like, how is this woman, this super genius?
Well, it turns out she wasn't.
She dropped out of college at 19 and created this company.
She started this when she was in college.
And she basically just fit what people were looking for.
It addressed a lot of things and it's unfortunate that there was that one part that is getting so much attention when really it pointed out a lot of problems in our culture and a lot of suggestions for how to fix things and it seems like none of that is really gaining traction.
Yeah, I mean, we filed a claim with the NLRB, which is the National Labor Relations Board.
And so they usually work with unions.
And, you know, it's often employers that try to break up unions and fire people for joining unions.
And that's illegal.
And, you know, a lot of this, what I was doing was a conservative effort between multiple people that, you know, trying to improve the workplace and actually, you know, whistleblow on some of the illegal practices.
Did you save emails where people were shaming people for being white or shaming people for having implicit bias because they were white or harassing people?
There's some underground efforts within Google to at least document some of this because while they may not be the majority, they're sort of a silent coalition within Google that's sort of upset about a lot of this.
So I think this is a lot of what's happening, too, where people just assume, okay, because you believe, say, in traditional values and you think that marriage is an important thing, and I think that there is evidence that bringing up people in a two-parent household, whether or not it's You know, the same sex or different sex.
That is important for children.
And there's a huge disparity in outcome of people with only one parent versus two.
So there is something to be said about marriage and, you know, having cultural norms that support that.
But so just completely alienating that side of the argument is really negative.
Well, I think anytime you silence discussion based on your own personal ideas of what should and shouldn't be debated, I think becomes an issue.
I mean, you could disagree with someone.
And that's a very complicated issue when it comes to whether or not Two parents are more beneficial to a child than one, because obviously there's a lot of reasons why people break up.
You know, you don't want to encourage people to be in toxic relationships and then show the child that, you know, this is the framework for a loving relationship.
People that scream at each other and whatever horrible shit they do to each other.
That gets super complicated and very, very personal, right?
You even see it in some of their internal studies where they were trying to show how racist or sexist Google was and how worse women have it.
So they were looking at the code review process where you can submit code to be reviewed and then someone has to approve it before it goes into the code base.
And they were looking at, okay, if a woman's the author of it, how many comments do they get on this review?
And if they got more comments, then that would mean that their work is more scrutinized.
But if they got fewer comments, then they were just ignored.
And so there's no way out of it.
Any result would show that women are being discriminated against somehow.
There's definitely, and I went in a little bit in this in the document, too, where if you have a company that's too progressively run, then it'll be sort of this, you know, everyone's equal and no hierarchy and all chaos and constantly changing, while, you know, the opposite of a really conservative company where there's a lot of hierarchy, decisions are made from the top, which may not be, you know, very easy to change things.
So, like, Google is definitely more of the former, where there is a lot of chaos, and there's multiple teams working on the same thing, and it's just, this is how we have multiple products that end up doing the same thing, and we have to deprecate some.
They reserved the right to nuke your personal phone?
Now, this corporate phone, are you allowed to use it for, like, say, if you go on a date, or you want to buy a movie ticket or something, are you allowed to use that phone for that?
Yeah, my friend who worked for Google was very upset at this whole China thing.
Because essentially she was saying they have to agree to censorship, China's censorship, and that the only alternative is to let China steal all of what Google's doing and make a fake Google.
Because that's what they were doing, apparently.
They had to make sure that they didn't allow that.
And then to do that, they had to have certain things, like Tiananmen Square, you couldn't search for that.
There was a lot of weird shit that they would have to censor.
Any dissent of the government and Gets very slippery, right?
I mean, like, you're anti-diverse or you're pro-diversity, but you're also supporting that?
Like, as a company...
That's a giant issue.
Like, allow China to censor its citizens.
I mean, you're essentially promoting a dictatorship in that regard.
And I don't envy any of the people that work there in management that are sort of responsible for putting out, you know, an infinite number of forest fires all around them all the time.
Social, economic, you know, dealing with different cultures.
And one of the worries that they have now, too, is even though they have a large market share for Search, they see Search as sort of a gateway to the world.
And they don't necessarily have a huge market share for that because Facebook and Twitter are also ways to get to the world's information.
And a lot of Facebook is just a walled garden where Google can't really get into that.
And on your phone, you spend most of your time on Facebook or something and not necessarily just doing random Google searches.
So this is a random tangent, but I worked on image search and they also see that even though there isn't a huge competitor for image search, there's Instagram and Pinterest, which are very similar things.
And we do our demographic research and we really look into why people are using these products.
And we see that the majority of the users are women.
And they actually know why that is.
It's that women prefer art and aesthetics over men on average, right?
And that's exactly what I had in the document.
We openly acknowledge this when we're looking at the products.
Because otherwise, you're not going to give these random ads to people if you know that they're a man.
You're not going to give them ads for women products.
So AdSense does discriminate and stereotype people in some ways.
Now they're getting into trying to de-bias machine learning.
So if they do see any things that the machine learning has learned, the statistical anomalies or just trends in the data, then they'll try to remove that.
Your old name, you know, and then like when a woman gets married and then like all her name is is when her son gets locked out of his bank account and needs to know, Mom, what was your old name?
Like in terms of like how to access his account with a password.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it'd be nice if everybody just kept their own fucking name.
It's like a myth, quote-unquote myth, from the 70s and 80s, but there also isn't the amount of time, if you got married in the last 10 years, to say you're going to get divorced in 20 more years.
I would like to know the actual hard data with the United States of America, because culturally it gets weird when you look across the different countries, but what about the United States of America?
What are the percentage of people who get married who wind up getting divorced?
But that's just assuming you look at every single marriage, but if you look at the first marriage, then maybe you have a 70% chance of never getting a divorce.
Just other things that they're saying factor in, like cohabitating has become less stigmatized, so not living together but not getting married is another thing that's happening.
Uh, definitely, you know, I just went to a party with my friends and, you know, some of them I was much closer to and I had already talked to about this.
Some I hadn't.
And, you know, you never know how they felt about it.
Once you start aligning yourself with one of these groups and if you ever go against any of their principles and they're constantly changing and getting more extreme, then you'll eventually get ostracized and maybe that's what happened.
But I don't think that's as much of an issue with the conservative right, you know, with like rational conservatives, not like racists and like full right-wing nuts.
But, you know, I think what people just want, they want harmony, I think, overall.
They want to succeed and they want harmony, which sometimes are mutually exclusive.
Yeah, the idea that everyone who voted for Trump is in the KKK is so crazy.
But it's convenient to demonize the other.
We love to do that.
We love to look at groups and just block ourselves off and this is us and we're on the right and these people on the other side, they're incorrect and It's a real, normal, common tendency that human beings have that we should be very, very aware of, but we're not.
We have these convenient blinders that we put on whenever we're engaging in any sort of ideological discussions where our belief systems might be challenged.
We dig our heels in and, like, this is it.
I think you see a lot of that with the left, with this whole, like, you cannot be progressive enough.
It's like they're getting wackier and wackier with it.
But I don't think there's enough real discussions going on in this world, too.
I think people are a lot of times following these predetermined patterns of behavior.
They think they're expected to follow as a progressive or as a conservative, and then they just...
Go with it.
And then when they do engage with someone who has a differing opinion, then it becomes a, in quotes, game again.
It's trying to win rather than trying to understand what this person sees and what they think and what is your philosophy, how are you approaching this, and trying to be really open-minded about it.
I see this even in myself when I'm talking to someone and maybe they're a feminist or extreme in some way.
I'll discuss them and I'll immediately just stereotype them as someone that's even more extreme.
And I'll read into their words of, oh, you said that means that you mean this.
And even though, you know, maybe it's important to at least show what the extreme outcome would be, and therefore we can't just take this on principle, but, you know, everyone does it, and it's really hard to not do it.
It's one of the reasons why I think long-form conversations are so important.
And how often do you ever sit down like this with someone and talk for a couple hours with just you and the person talking, not looking at your phone, not checking the TV, not...
No, no one...
We very rarely do this.
I think this is one of the only ways we could really work out ideas, especially when you're talking to someone that might have a differing opinion, but they also might be intelligent, and you might be able to sort it out.
Like, let me parse out what your thoughts are and see where I differ and how you got to where you got.
Maybe I'll have a better understanding of your philosophy.
But there's a lot of people that don't even have a philosophy.
It sounds good, so they just go with this predetermined pattern that's easy to follow, you know?
As a left-wing progressive, I feel this.
I mean, I've heard people say that before.
Like, as a Democrat, I've always felt like, oh, as a Democrat.
How about as a fucking person?
That's, you know, it's not...
Ideas are hard.
Thoughts on life and how we cohabitate and how we move through this fucking existence together.
It's very difficult to work out.
There's just so many variables, so many styles of human.
There's just so many different things that we have to work through together and to try to To try to do that based on patterns that other people have established and that you cannot break.
That's one of the reasons why it's so ruthless to say that all white people have some implicit biases that they may not even be aware of.
This unintended racism flavors all conversations.
You're just poisoning this conversation.
You're poisoning this conversation with this fucking fishing line.
It's all tangled up.
Now we're going to have to figure out what is real and pull this apart and get it back on the spool.
Yeah, and there's no solution for some of those, too, where, you know, you just say there's some boogeyman type thing that's controlling all this, and there's some conspiracy that we can't really see, and we can't point out specific examples, but it's ever-present, and I think...
Yeah, a lot of the treating people as individuals, that has become more of a libertarian thing.
Yeah, like what they often do is they will find someone that they disagree with and then they'll scour through their entire history at Google and all the emails that they've sent and try to look for some way to blacklist them or show that this person is evil, therefore they should be fired.
It's horrible.
Supposedly, this is happening in other companies too, and they even have these automated scripts to try to find these negative things on people that they don't like.
Without a doubt, the fact that that is even up for debate, it's very strange.
I mean, that's an ideological echo chamber.
And that seems like For whatever reason, that seems like where tech is, and that's where technology companies seem to lean towards this very left-wing ideological echo chamber.
Yeah, and I saw it a lot, too, on the comments of the document.
Where I said, oh yeah, these are just biases.
And no, they were like, no, the right is indoctrinated.
They're just KKK. And they're anti-education.
They're anti-poor people.
They're anti-everything.
Not all of them.
At least the way I see it, and not being a total conservative, I can't necessarily say, but it seems like they don't necessarily hate poor people or anything.
They just think that these certain incentive structures are what's best for society, and it's not best to promote, or they think that some things will lead to laziness or something.
And that's not...
Saying, oh yeah, these people are just horrible people.
They actually want to help everyone and they think that these social norms and government programs may be hurting people.
Yeah, I mean, there certainly are some people that are right-wing that think like that, and then there's some people that are right-wing that are really racist.
They exist too.
And there's some people that are left-wing that are really racist, and they're really racist towards white people.
I mean, there's white people that are racist towards white people.
I mean, I've read so many fucking tweets from people that, you know, like, I follow a bunch of anti-social justice warrior accounts, and they'll find people that tweet, like, really horrible shit about white people that are white.
It's like, I get what you're doing.
Just trying to get those brownie points.
Trying super hard to get people of color to love you as an ally.
It's just a very strange time.
I think a lot of it has to do with this newfound ability to communicate that just really did not exist in the past.
If you wanted to get controversial ideas past to Right.
So now you get a lot of like really fragile or really poorly thought out ideas and as long as you can Hit the nerve of enough retards you can get those fucking things out there.
Oh And then they start promoting.
I mean, that's where the flat earth movement is coming from.
What is that other than that?
I mean, that's exactly what it is.
It's enough people that just don't They have a sense of the importance of critical thinking skills, or are not used to objectively assessing ideas, and then they coalesce in these groups that are like-minded.
And you can get that with racism, you can get that with sexism, you can get that with pretty much anything.
You get these like-minded groups, they get together, and they have confirmation bias, and they get an ideological echo chamber, and they start reinforcing each other.
And, I mean, it's really a shame, though, that this is happening even in, you know, the pursuit of knowledge in academia, where so many people have a certain worldview, like the social sciences have 90% of people lean left.
And that can create its own confirmation biases, and especially when It's definitely bad in tech where 20% of people are women and they can feel alienated.
But at least overt signs of sexism are seen as bad.
But overt signs of discriminating against people based on their political orientation is seen as okay.
And people do it.
And so there's a big asymmetry there where you actually feel it's justified to...
Maybe it wouldn't be as big of an issue if we had a reasonable Republican president.
Maybe if we had someone who was like really kind and rational, like maybe a Mitt Romney type who seemed like far more reasonable and, you know, it's the sort of, you know, I mean, we have a bunch of issues, obviously, as a country now with this guy's president.
And I think that we're also dealing with a really...
An infant stage of information distribution, like the ability for anyone to mass distribute anything.
Anyone can create a YouTube video, and if it strikes a chord, it can hit a million people like that.
But also, don't you think that there's a lack of time that people have?
Like, I told you how much time I spent going over your stuff.
And after a while, I was like, what the fuck am I doing?
I don't even work in tech!
But most people don't have that kind of time, nor do they have that sort of obsessive mindset.
They look at the surface of something.
Oh, this guy wrote a sexist memo about women in tech.
Fuck him!
It's probably a misogynist and they just march towards their meeting and we have to avoid the kind of thinking that led to someone thinking that it's okay to write the Google memo and then everyone like yes here here I want my year-end bonus.
I'm with you.
I think as the dust settles We will get more and more truth out of people.
And I think there's a general trend with information, to have information be easier and easier to distribute.
That's one of the most important things about technology, right?
Instantaneous access to information.
And right now that information is not entirely verifiable.
Like some of it is and some of it's not.
And that's one of the more disturbing things about people reprinting your memo without citations.
I was like, hey, like you fuckers, you left out a big part of what this is.
Like what you did is really wrong.
Those citations maybe people won't Go into them.
Maybe they won't read the studies.
Maybe they won't.
I mean, it takes a long time if you really want to get involved in that.
But there will be a better version of that in the future.
I think they will.
I think that's where the trend is.
I think the trend is leaning towards more and more honest interpretation of facts and ideas.
And then, you know, we'll be left with Some things that we have to look at that we can't just write off to sociology or write off to culture or write off to biases or sexism or racism.
We're going to have to look at things for what they really are.
And maybe we'll have a better understanding of why we behave the way we do, why we have the problems that we have.
Part of the issue, though, is if someone controls access to information and they want a certain narrative to be told, then it'll really color what people see.
That's what's scary.
We see this a lot in YouTube now, where they're demonetizing anyone that they see as right-wing and even censoring and removing videos.
If you look at it long term, over the long run, they have definitely taken a hit.
And if someone forces them to sit down, I would love to sit down with the guy who said that you promote harmful gender stereotypes and go, let's go over this thing.
Yeah, I mean, it's so related to all this microaggression, you know, speech is violence, and all ideas are harmful.
And, of course, some ideas are harmful, but...
It's only through openly discussing them can you actually dispel some of these things.
By making them forbidden knowledge, that's only going to attract certain people.
We even see this now where some of the YouTube videos that are in this purgatory type state where you can't really get to them, but if you know the URL, you can still find them.
What I would ideally want is somehow changing their policies.
But I don't really know how I, as an individual, can compel Google to do something like that.
But I think at least some of the stuff like the blacklisting, where they have these people that compile these spreadsheets of names of people that are conservative or even libertarian.
Oh, we're not going to work with them.
We're going to sabotage their work.
And we're going to try to get them fired.
When they are looking for another job, we're going to share this list.
So they can't get hired from any of the other major companies.
So do you feel like they feel that they have some sort of a social responsibility to push progressive values because they're in this massive position of influence, and they feel like that's the right way to think, so they're going to go full steam ahead with that?
Well, I get it, though, because I think it's a lot of the same things along the same lines that you were talking about when you were saying that you didn't, you know, like maybe you would have waited until you got your year-end bonus.
And you're a guy who's also...
Frugal, you've saved your money, and you don't have a family to support, and you're okay.
You got fired, and you're still okay.
Whereas some people would be fucked right now.
Maybe they'd be overextended, maybe they had that gold Ferrari in the fur coat, and like, shit!
I mean, that goes back to, you know, engineering civilization in the early days of Rome.
I think there was writings about that, about getting people to commit to families and it's easier to control them when they have loved ones and, you know...
And things that they enjoy and positions of power and status, that it's easier to get those people to give into your needs and desires.
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense, right?
I mean, it's just engineering a civilization.
It's one of the, like, getting people to perform and behave the way that you would like them to is a critical component of engineering any sort of a civilization.
Google's essentially a civilization, if you look at it that way.
I mean, internally, there's a community.
It's a structure.
And they're engineering that structure to be very much a like-minded ideological echo chamber.
You know, I mean, people have, interpersonal relationships are fucking gross and messy.
And if men work with women and they feel like they can dominate them with aggression or with some sort of weird tactics that play on the agreeableness that females seem to have, you know, it's a problem.
And I think by not looking at that, by not being honest about that, we do just as much of a disservice.
I would say that there are men that are just as agreeable and just as much of a pushover, say.
They also get shunned and pushed aside.
And sometimes it's even worse for men that fit that stereotype or don't fit the typical male stereotype because there's negative consequences on both sides for not being masculine if you're a man or not being feminine enough if you're a woman.
Well, even if you lose in court, will they address it?
They'll probably say, you know, although we support the court, we disagree with the rulings, and we still support gender equality, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is that there's currently an asymmetry, so maybe Google is acting in their best interest to act the way that they are because they think...
That there's all these activists that are trying to attack Google that only if they don't fit this certain party line.
They claim that it's the same job, although at least when Google was doing their own internal analysis, which they've been doing for years, they show that there's no disparity once you control for performance.
You know, notices seeking women currently or formerly employed at Google for possible inclusion in a planned class action lawsuit.
First of all, people hear that and they're like, we're going to get paid.
We're going Sizzler!
Right?
I mean, that's just, you're playing on human instincts when you seek out people that may have been employed for a possible inclusion in a class action lawsuit.
That's not saying that they weren't wronged, because obviously I don't know.
Several dozen came forward in a matter of weeks.
That's a pretty high level of dissatisfaction, says James Feinberg.
No, it's not.
No, there's fucking thousands of people who've worked there, and a couple dozen came forward.
That's not a high level of satisfaction.
How many people have been employed at Google that are no longer employed?
Okay, so for this guy to say that's a pretty high level of dissatisfaction when several dozen, let's say three dozen, let's go crazy, let's say it's 40 people, let's get nuts.
When you control for performance, the problem is when you control for performance, if it turns out that men are being paid more, then you have to figure out some sort of a way to justify that.
Or, you know, like, if men are being paid more when you control for performance, what is it that's causing the men to be paid more?
Why are they performing better?
Like, is it the environment?
Do they feel more comfortable?
Is it lack of suppression that the women experience?
Like, when Obama said that, he knows that that's not being honest.
Because you're talking about completely different jobs, different choices.
For people who don't know, okay, let's just break that down real quick.
This thing, because people repeat it ad nauseum and it's just not true.
The gender pay gap of 77 cents to a dollar that a male makes is based on the choices that people make as far as like what they do for a living.
It's based on the amount of hours that they work.
Men tend to work longer hours.
Women tend, especially if they get pregnant.
All those things are factored in.
That's where you get 77 cents on average for the dollar that the male makes.
What it implies, and this is where it's disingenuous, is that two people working side by side, doing the same job, and the male's getting $1 for the woman's $0.77.
That's not what the gender pay gap actually means.
If Google is actually, if someone is saying, if there's a lawsuit that's saying that a man and a woman are doing the exact same job with the exact same performance, and the woman is only getting 77 cents on the dollar, then you've got a real issue, right?
Yeah, I'm still looking at, you know, what exactly I want to do because I never was, you know, coding wasn't the thing that I was doing my entire life.
I think you took a bold choice and a bold stance to talk about something that's essentially taboo, but you did it with science, you know, and you did it...
I think you did it in a very reasonable manner.
And I'm shocked that the reaction has been as extreme as it's been.
But I'm not shocked at the same time.
I mean, it's predictable almost.
And the people calling you a misogynist, it was very weird.
And CEO of YouTube saying it hurt her when she read that.
Yeah, I mean, I thought that, you know, the first, the intro, which talked about all these political biases and how our culture shames people that give a differing view, I thought that might have shown that, you know, maybe we shouldn't be doing that.
But, you know, predicted exactly what happened to me.
You know, people now are aware of this a lot more, and there may be platforms that emerge that are sort of, you know, alt-tech is what they're calling it, just alternative technology that's more open to just free speech.
But unfortunately, they're currently just being labeled as white supremacist sites, and hopefully people can see through that.
If they have the time to even look, that's the thing.
It's just like they're taking everyone's word for everything.
It's a very odd time, but there's enough people discussing it, and I think the response to your memo has been...
It's been very enlightening for some people from a sort of a psychological standpoint.
Like, what are the reactions that people have and why do they have these reactions?
And what does it say about us as human beings that this is such a taboo subject that we can't even address the very real differences that we have as unique individuals, you know?
At least it's nice to see that some of the colleges have been standing up for it or against it and saying, no, you can't really just tell us what to do.
We believe in knowledge and actually seeking the truth and not just criticizing people based on their political ideologies.
I knew this kid who was a chess master, and it was a pool hall that I used to go to, and he used to play with this ex-con, and the ex-con learned how to do chess in prison in his head with no pieces, and him and this kid would just sit there and play chess back and forth with each other, and I'd be like, What are you guys doing?
How do you know where the board is?
You could play it blindfolded with four people in your head.
Differences and average between men and women is there are more men that just become obsessed with these systems.
And so Magic the Gathering, the card game, was also something that I became super obsessed with.
And so the way that people approach computers, too, is different.
A lot of boys just approach the computer as a toy, and they become obsessed with tinkering with the computer, while a lot of girls see it as a tool for improving the world.
And so they may not be interested in the computer as an end to itself.
And so a lot of the education programs to get more women into tech are actually addressing that.
But it's unclear because so much of coding is just writing server code, and this server is going to talk to this server, which is talking to that server, and it's totally unconnected to actual people.
But that's why we actually see more women in front-end and user experience engineering positions, because it's more interactive with people.
I mean, I'm sure there's a bunch of fashion things and aesthetic things and design things that women are really into that a lot of men don't give a fuck about.
It's not a terrible thing that men aren't into design.
And that's one of the unfortunate things, too, is that there's so much fighting to get more women into tech, but there's no fighting to get more men into nursing or any of these more female-dominated careers.
Yeah, I think inevitably there will be more men attracted to high-paying jobs simply because they fight for status and money is how you gain status often.
So that's partly why they see tech as a target.
But it's not as if nursing is a bad job.
That gets paid well.
And there are many people that go to college for pre-med and drop out.
Like 90% of people that start as pre-med drop out And the men feel like they can't enter nursing because that's too feminine.
And there's huge biases against men becoming feminine.
Like, you know, men can't wear dresses, but girls can be openly tomboyish.