3783 Google Memo: Fired Employee Speaks Out! | James Damore and Stefan Molyneux
Why would a successful Google engineer risk his career to make the case against Google’s current diversity initiatives? Former Google employee James Damore describes the intense media backlash to his Google diversity memo, intolerance shown towards political diversity in the company, the importance of discussing gender differences and why he wrote the memo in the first place. James Damore Fundraiser: https://www.wesearchr.com/bounties/james-damore-official-fundraiserRead The Full Memo: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdfYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Vita Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well. So, a lot of times on this show we talk to people you already know or who have been in the public eye to one degree or another for a substantial amount of time.
This conversation is going to be a little bit different.
We're going to hear talking to James Damore.
Now, James is the writer of the memo that has been characterized as critical of diversity, despite the fact that James repeatedly insists he's very pro-diversity.
That erupted and over the last couple of days has caused quite a firestorm across the internet, on television, on radio and so on.
And I did a video response to it recently and after I put out the video response we found out that James had been fired from Google.
So we wanted to talk to James, or I wanted to talk to James, to find out what it's been like and what his thought process were in producing this article, this series of arguments, and what the response has been like and, you know, what it's like to be in the very center of one of these highly controversial but absolutely necessary conversations that society needs to have.
So, James, I really, really appreciate you taking the time today.
Yeah, thanks. Now, your thought process, I know that you had complained in the past to a labor relations board about what was going on in your work environment, but I also know that you've been a researcher at Princeton, at Harvard, at MIT, you've got a master's degree in biological systems and so on.
Can you just give us a sense of your intellectual growth towards the memo that was recently, I guess, elevated to a center of the firestorm status?
Yeah, so I guess in general, I just really like understanding things.
And recently, through interactions with different people, I've noticed just how different political ideologies sort of divide us in many ways.
And I wanted to understand what was behind all that.
And so I read a lot into Jonathan Haidt's work and a lot of what is actually the philosophy behind all of these things.
And that led me to at least the beginning of the document.
And what was it in the writers that you read, I think it was, that you found sort of the illumination moment, the moment of like, aha, this is going to make some of the jigsaw puzzles fit into place.
I guess just...
I could see that...
All of us are really blind to the other side.
And so in these environments where everyone is just in the same echo chamber, just talking to themselves, then they're totally blind to so many things.
And we really need both sides to be talking to each other about these things and trying to understand each other.
Because you had a very interesting critique at the beginning, and people will link to the full document below, and I'll talk about how shameful it was at so many outlets.
Well, we basically We've edited the document a little bit and we've removed some charts and one of the major media outlets had removed all of your sources and said, you know, it's curiously unsourced.
It's like, come on! You've got to be kidding me.
This isn't even close to believable.
But you had an interesting critique of the left and the right, neither of which are particularly satisfying for a sort of fleshed out philosophy of the world.
I wonder if you could go over that sort of briefly and give people your thoughts on Yeah, so I guess some of the easiest ways of understanding, say, the left is it's very open, it's looking for changes, and while the right is more closed and wants more stability.
And there's definitely advantages to both of those.
Sometimes there are things that you need to change, but you also need a vision for what you actually want.
There's a lot of value, for example, in tradition, but not all traditions should be how they are, you know?
Yeah, I sort of get a sense like, you know, sort of ancient classical Chinese civilization that was like the same year after year, century after century, sometimes it seemed like millennia after millennia, versus really, really chaotic times like the 1960s where there seems to be like a real pedal to the metal kind of gas acceleration of change to the point where people can't even keep up and cultures can't adapt to it.
Yeah. And what I found also very interesting was that these create biases for ourselves.
And so this is particularly interesting when we talk about how it relates to reality.
And so both sides are biased in certain ways and they have motivated reasoning to see what they want out of a lot of things.
And so this happens a lot in social sciences where Where it's 95% leaning to the left, and so they only study what they want, and they only see the types of things that they want, and they really aren't that critical of their own research as much as they should.
No, no, go ahead.
I'll hold my foot. So the popular conception is just that the right doesn't understand science at all, and it's anti-science.
And it's true that they often deny evolution and climate science or climate change, but the left also has its own things that it denies.
So biological differences between people, in this case, you know, sex differences.
What was it that you saw?
So you started in Google at 2013 and just sort of geek to geek, I wanted to get a sense of how you'd gotten so much into computers, how you learned how to program, because of course your degree wasn't in that.
Where was it that you first developed this sort of talent or ability with computers and what were your first impressions in 2013 when you started as a software engineering intern?
Yeah, so I never really was a computer science major.
As a kid, I made computer or calculator games, but that was just for fun.
Just like all the women I knew. But I guess I got into chess, and so that was a couple years of my life, so I stopped doing anything related to computers.
And how I actually got into Google was I found these coding competitions.
It's just these puzzles that you have to solve within a certain time.
I did well enough.
I made it to the semifinals or something for Google and they just recruited me out of that.
Google obviously is a dream job.
They have huge benefits and so I was happy to go there.
I love Google.
I was always an Android fanboy and stuff.
Now, when you started to work at Google, and I've spent a lot of time in the IT world, I've been an entrepreneur in the IT world, hired a lot of coders, and one of the things that I've noticed, and tell me this is purely anecdotal, right, so we want to draw a line between the science we'll be talking about in a bit and just the anecdotal stuff, James, but for me, The engineers who worked most closely with the code, and particularly the base layers, right?
Not the user interface stuff and all that, but the real base layers of the software.
A lot of them tended to be more conservative.
And I have this sort of vague association In my brain, tell me if this accords with your experience or not, which is that when you're working deep in the bowels of the software, it's like it better work, you have to be objective, it's all factual, you can't will anything, and you don't have to worry about people.
Like the user interface people, they're always like, well, what would the people do and how would they swipe and what would they do and so on, right?
I think that there may be an association between software engineering and conservatism because you're dealing with logic, facts, reality that if an evidence-based argument comes along or a really tightly reasoned argument comes along because of all of the training that goes into and all the experience that goes into dealing with facts, reality and evidence and the empirical question of does it work?
Is it faster? Is it more efficient?
Does it use less memory or whatever?
Have you found any association between Software engineers and conservatism, is that somewhat boxed into my experience, or is that more general, do you think?
So, at least personality-wise, one of the two biggest differences between the left and right is that the left is often more open, so openness to new ideas, and so that's why often academia is so left-leaning, but the right has higher conscientiousness, which is also very useful, so I guess in this Very low-level type work where you're just debugging all the time and you really have to persevere to get these things going.
That would be something that maybe more conservative people would excel at.
Yeah, I mean, I know what you're saying about the openness of the left.
You know, in my experience, I mean, I went to a bunch of Canadian universities.
A lot of them were kind of on the left, as was the theatre school that I went to, in my opinion.
I didn't find them to be particularly open to non-leftist ideas.
Like, this helps us accelerate the leftist agenda.
I'm really open to it.
It's like, wait a minute, this evidence-based, science-based argument retards the leftist agenda.
I must attack and destroy it using ad homonyms.
I don't know that it's openness as a whole because openness as a whole, to me, comes more out of people who just sort of reason and evidence-based.
There is like, okay, well, if this is what the reason and the evidence is, I guess we have to go that way.
Scientists, to me, tend to be more open, but they're open with standards.
Whereas the left seems to me more open, like, cool, enthusiastic, advances our agenda.
I don't know. Like, if you say, well, Google is a company that's dominated by leftist politics, really open to new arguments, new ideas.
It's like, well, you did put out this set of arguments.
They did not appear to be overly open to it.
Yeah, I think that's partly just a symptom of the echo chamber that we were in.
And so if we were in a more understanding environment where the two sides actually talk to each other, then hopefully at least they would be more open to ideas that run counter to their internal morals.
And when you were there, or in the, I guess maybe the Silicon Valley culture as a whole, I mean, I know there are conservatives.
I know there are non-leftists, you know, in the same way, you know, like to me, if you look at a picture of like a, I don't know, like a frat or a school, a university, an all-male university from like A hundred years ago, you know there are some gay guys there.
You know that for a fact, but they're just, you know, they're kind of underground, they're in the closet and so on.
Is there a significant proportion, do you think, of people in Silicon Valley who are not on the left or who are skeptical of the left, but who really keep themselves hunkered down and silent because of a fear of this kind of backlash?
So, yeah, definitely those aren't on the left feel like they need to stay in the closet and not really reveal themselves.
And actually mask and say things that they don't believe.
I think one thing that maybe, and I haven't really looked at this too deeply, is that there are a lot of libertarians, which would be sort of independent of the left and right.
Because, at least according to Jonathan Haidt's work, the libertarian mindset is actually very logical, which would fit with coding.
Yes. No, and I think, you know, for me, when I first got into philosophy, I loved, loved, loved the logical rigor of it.
And when I first became aware of, I mean, I always kind of knew this in science, but in philosophy, that evidence really matters.
And you don't just sort of come up with all these theoretical constructs and impose them on the world like a cookie cutter, like, you know, this idea of communism is just this way, it's right, and we're going to impose it no matter how many bodies pile up.
Once I kind of got how important evidence was and became a real empiricist, To me, the coding that I did was sort of logical and empirical.
The philosophy that I did was logical and empirical, the show that I run now, I mean, I work as hard as it can to be logical and empirical, though it is tough sometimes when it goes against your pre-existing ideas.
But there does seem to be, I think, kind of...
I guess a meeting point or a synchronicity between libertarianism and coding which is interesting because I do get a lot of social justice warrior vibe coming out of Silicon Valley and to me it's almost like okay well libertarians and rational people have created all this cool economic productivity and now the company is so wealthy it can afford to hire a bunch of social justice warriors and then things go from there.
Yeah and I mean, there's definitely some...
I think a lot of the entrepreneur mindset is sort of libertarian, just self-reliance.
I mean, Peter Thiel is libertarian.
I don't think Sergey Brin, our co-founder, has really declared himself one way or the other, but I've always interpreted the things that he said to be Very not partisan.
He's always wanted the two sides to talk to each other.
And he's very unpolitically correct in a lot of the things that he says.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that he may identify as libertarian, but I just don't want to say it.
Yeah, well, I can understand why these days.
Particularly, as you get big as a corporation, Microsoft had this issue.
IBM, it was brutal.
I think it was in the 80s that it started.
IBM, one of them would say, oh, well, Microsoft just kind of took Yeah, but one of the reasons for that was that IBM got dragged in by the Department of Justice into this 13-year soul-crushing battle of antitrust prosecution.
And boy, people just don't want to work there.
Oh, I'm going to spend the rest of my career in depositions?
No, thanks.
I think not.
And this, you know, when you get to be a big enough company, you know, I criticize Google for some degree.
I also fully am sensitive to the reality that they're living in a kind of hair-trigger, lawsuit-happy Department of Justice.
I mean, you know, I mean, if Clinton had gotten in the business environment, I mean, she wouldn't be repealing like 16 to 1.
Like for every, like Trump had this thing, like for every new regulation to have to be canceled, These are like 16 to 1 or 18 to 1 cancellations to new.
That wouldn't have been the case if Hillary had gotten in and you do as a big company have to live in this highly litigious world.
And I mean, there's a lawsuit already going on against Google for pay disparities and so on.
So it is a real challenge to operate in that kind of environment.
And you don't want to get sucked into one of these like endless legal actions, in particular, if it's Department of Justice based.
I mean, they'll just drain your will to live if you're a big corporation.
So I am sensitive to the fact that when you bubble up something like this, and we'll get to the thought process in a sec, if that's right with you.
When you bubble up something like this, they have to look at that in a sort of big legal picture framework and say, okay, well, how does this position us with this, that and the other and all the other things that could possibly go on?
And it may not be a decision, like your termination may not be solely related to, well, this is just a bad thing and we've got to get rid of this guy, but there may be very big concerns, which maybe you and I aren't particularly aware of.
Yeah. Yeah. For sure, Google is under a ton of pressure on multiple fronts and throughout the globe.
It definitely complicates things.
Now, what was your thought process around this?
I wish I had the right word for it, James.
It's been called all these nonsense screed.
It's an essay, an argument perspective, but I think an argument is better because it's tightly reasoned.
It's got lots of source notes and so on.
Did you have...
That Jerry Maguire moment where it's like, I'm going to write this thing or was it just something you're making notes for yourself and you built the case and you thought, well, this is important to share.
What was the process of generating the arguments?
Yeah, so I went to a diversity program at Google and it wasn't recorded at all.
It was totally secretive and I heard things that I definitely disagreed with in some of our programs.
I had some discussions with people there, but there was a lot of just shaming.
No, you can't say that.
That's sexist.
You can't do this.
There's just so much hypocrisy in a lot of the things that they're saying.
I decided to I created a document just to clarify my thoughts.
And also, I had to fly to China for work, so I had a 12-hour flight to fill my time with.
That was one motivation.
Right. And then, did you have a sense beforehand Obviously, you knew it would be controversial and so on.
Controversy, to me, is fine.
People advance arguments I consider mental half the time as a public intellectual or whatever.
Sometimes they pan out and sometimes they don't.
I try and be open to these kinds of perspectives.
I guess you were aware of the controversy.
How did it play out relative to your expectations?
I guess this is going back to some of how each side has blind spots.
This was definitely one of my blind spots.
As a very logical person, I laid out my arguments.
I specified exactly what's causing this.
I even outlined what the response may be, all this PC silencing.
But they did exactly that, so I couldn't really get ahead of it at all.
And so I did share the document multiple times, like, a month ago.
And many people looked at it, but no one ever had this explosive reaction.
All the responses were just rational discussion.
Right. So you shared it internally, and then would you know how it kind of got out and metastasized from there, like it escaped and supernovaed from there?
Yeah, so there were the people writing on Twitter, And they were all against it.
They were just calling me, you know, all these misogynist, racist terms and stuff.
And so I think it was, they got in contact with Gizmodo, I think.
Maybe. Hypothetically.
And then it was likely from there that it was leaked.
But I'm pretty sure it wasn't anyone connected to me because they would have asked me first.
And they wouldn't have removed all the citations and Messed up the formatting and stuff.
Right. No, they really did take it from what I thought was, you know, fairly academic, very professionally put together A set of arguments with extensive citations and graphs and so on.
And, you know, the thing is, too, like I mentioned this in my sort of video response to it, James, it's like you put a lot of qualifiers in there.
A lot of, you know, okay, these are group averages.
You can't judge the individual.
I mean, all the things that rational people have to say because nobody seems to get taught about statistics or anything like that.
But, you know, like women in general are shorter than men.
Oh, so you're saying that no woman can be taller than a man?
It's like, no, I'm not saying that.
Oh, please. I wish that government schools were better.
But it is, and I remember when I first heard about it, I thought, okay, I'm going to go read about this.
And when I started reading about it, James, first of all, there were no quotes.
And when there's no quotes from the document, I know, I know it's reasonable.
Usually, it's like, well, we can't quote from it.
We're going to give you our interpretation.
And then I found it really hard to find the original document, like what you'd actually written.
And then I thought, oh, man, okay, this is going to be really reasonable now.
This is going to be really evidence-based.
This is going to be really factual. And then I finally found one and they said, well, we've made some edits and we've taken out some charts.
And I'm like, what?
Why are you hiding it? If this guy's crazy, just let the crazy speak for itself.
And then I finally, like it took forever, finally found one.
It's like, here are the sources, here are the charts.
And I'm like... Damn, this guy's really reasonable.
This is important stuff for us to be talking about.
This is science. This is factual.
And according to Breitbart, there are four, I think, psychologists or sociologists or some combination who've said, yeah, the guy's science is bang on.
This is well accepted within the psychological community.
This is well accepted within the biological community.
This is well accepted Products of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology, this guy's science is bang on.
I haven't seen any actual scientist or any of the people you've cited say, no, no, no, no, he got this, he's misusing my work, he's got it totally wrong.
All the professionals, all the people who actually study this stuff, they're like, yeah, this is, he's right.
You know, I don't agree with everything he's written, but as far as the science goes, he's bang on.
And this to me is the really surprising thing because people are characterizing.
What's happened to you as you've been fired for having an unpopular opinion.
You've been chastised for having an unpopular opinion, for being anti...
But it's not an opinion that you have.
Right? And I wonder if you can help people understand that disparity.
Because it's one thing to be fired for being unpopular.
It's another thing for being fired for being right and having the science on your side.
That, to me, is truly astonishing.
Yeah. I don't really understand it myself yet.
I mean, a lot of it is just...
People got offended because it goes against the left's ideology and then they just okay it defended people therefore it's wrong and therefore it's an opinion because it can't possibly be true if it offends me.
I have my own subjective truth or something.
I don't know. It is terrible how...
Also, people weren't, from what I can see, the people who were the most offended were the people who had not read what you'd written, but the people who had read these exaggerated, doomsday, apocalyptic, nonsense interpretations of what you'd said.
You know, you didn't say women are biologically unsuited to be...
I mean, none of the things that were actually in the document.
And... That to me is, you know, I have this special circle of hell thing going on in my brain these days.
You know, who belongs in what special circle of hell?
People who exaggerate factual or mischaracterize factual empirical arguments to attempt to goad the mob into the most virulent and vicious hyperreaction.
There is a special circle of intellectual hell for those people because they're stifling and absolutely necessary debate about these issues in society.
Yeah, I think a lot of it is that they feel self-righteous, and so they feel that the ends justify the means.
But it's really bad, I think.
And what's it been like for you?
Again, most people will probably never go through this eye of the hurricane storm trial by fire.
Hey, good. Pressure turns coal into diamonds.
But what's it been like for you?
I mean, is it hard to sleep?
Is it hard to concentrate? Is it like, welcome to a side of the world you probably didn't know about really very much until now, and now it's all too vivid?
Yeah, it's definitely been hard to sleep.
Especially early on, I was responding to comments from people in Australia and Europe, so I was staying up until like 5am, but it still hasn't truly hit me, the enormity of it all.
Well, it's interesting as well, because the stuff that I read at the beginning was, and I thought this was also a very strong reaction, This man's life is destroyed.
And I don't think that's true.
I don't think that's true at all. And in fact, I know that we'll talk about the job office in a second, but, you know, you've just set up a giant flare saying, I have a lot of courage.
I'm willing to stick by the facts.
I'm willing to take a hit. I'm willing to take a hit for reason and evidence.
I'm willing to take a hit. Now, whether the hit was entirely anticipated, the extent of the hit was entirely anticipated, nonetheless, you did release something that you knew could be explosive and controversial, and you're not backing down, and you're not groveling, and you're not like, sorry, you know, it's the Galileo thing, you know, but it moves! But it moves!
What do you want me to say? The Earth is not the center of the universe, but it moves!
You can't argue me out of the facts.
I mean, I could pretend, but what's the point of that, right?
And so you've set up this giant flair which says, like, I value truth over comfort.
I value reality over conformity.
I value science over, you know, I can't believe they call your stuff pseudoscience.
It's like, no, no, no. Diversity is pseudoscience.
Diversity is a strength.
Diversity is a benefit. Please show me the studies where this has absolutely proven to be the case, right?
Diversity is not a benefit in neighborhoods.
I can't find evidence that it's a benefit economically and so on.
But nonetheless, you set up a giant flair and people will see that And tell me what the response has been that has been a positive, that has been encouraging.
Yeah, so it's surprising.
There may be a lot of negative responses in the public, but very few of them actually send me messages because they just want to virtue signal to all their followers that, hey, I'm a great person, I share your morals, and this person is bad.
They don't want to actually have a debate on why I'm wrong or even confront me.
They just want to show how self-righteous they are.
And so, in contrast, I've gotten a ton of personal messages of support, which has been really nice.
And I got that at Google before all of this leaked.
Where it was a lot of the upper management that was shaming me.
Right, right. Well, I mean, I do think that it is a real shame now because, of course, a lot of people are going to look at your example and say, well, I can't talk about that.
Well, I can't talk about this and so on.
And, you know, I have no criticisms about anything that you did, with one exception, James, is that I would say that what you should have done is activated your super-secret white male patriarchy shield.
You should have activated...
Your privilege shield so that you would sail through this immune from all negative repercussions.
Because this kind of stuff, when it happens, it's like white privilege.
These guys basically dragged out in the street, beaten senseless in the court of public opinion, and then fired within, what, 48 hours or something like that of this becoming public knowledge.
I don't see a lot of white male privilege rising up around him like these magical shields to protect him.
In fact, the white privilege seems to me, or white male privilege seems to me, to be an excuse for people to say, well, I can bully this person because they're so privileged.
Anything I say is always punching up.
So it seems like white privilege is kind of the opposite of privilege, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, there was a surprising amount of attacks that were just at my race and gender.
which is Exactly what we're trying to avoid with these things, right?
We want to avoid classifying people just by their group identity.
That is racism.
That is sexism. Now, I wonder if you could just step people...
We're going to link to the full document.
I want people to read it.
You need to read this document.
It's a great document. It's well put together.
It's well sourced. But I know not everyone's going to do it.
I mean, I wish they would.
I know not everyone's going to do it.
I wonder if you could just step people through some of the major points that you want to get across for people who aren't going to end up reading it.
Because again, I thought it was very thoughtful, very reasonable, perhaps too reasonable.
Very conciliatory.
And it comes, I think, from a genuine passion for excellence for all parties concerned.
I guess one caveat I would say to anyone is that I'm not talking about any individual person.
I'm not talking about reducing anyone to their group identity.
I'm just saying that if we look at population level distributions, different Groups have different distributions of traits, right?
Just as we can say that men have a higher distribution of height than women, for example.
And so this isn't important in judging any individual person on how good they are at a job.
In fact, I'm not saying that any of the female engineers at Google are in any way worse than the average male engineer.
I'm just saying that This may explain some of the disparity in representation in the population.
So there may not be so many over here, but those that are over here are just as good.
Or not even good, like ability-wise, just preference-wise with a lot of things.
The personal difference between men and women is just differing interest in people versus things.
And this has links to prenatal testosterone.
And that explains a lot of the differences in career choice.
For example, teacher versus something like coding, where one is more people-oriented and one is more things-oriented.
And so that's the biggest one that I would say.
But then there are some other personality traits that at least have some effect or at least We should be cognizant of.
And maybe if we want to make tech a more female-friendly environment, we should recognize that some women are different than men in these ways.
And so if we want to make it more accessible to women, then maybe, for example, cooperativeness, which is higher in women than men, We should make the workplace a place where you can actually thrive if you're cooperative.
A lot of coding now is just very individual.
I'm writing my code and I can be a superstar.
I can just write my code for a week and then make this huge system all by myself.
But there's ways of pair programming, for example, or just other collaborative things that we can really help improve the workplace.
It would just help Good for productivity, maybe.
And also in our interview process, for example, it's all individual right now.
And it's only how well you work by yourself.
And we never really measure how good someone is on a team, which is really important to how good you perform at your job.
And so that may also be disproportionately hurting certain populations.
And you had a great argument about status.
I wonder if you could refresh people's minds if they haven't read it, or if they have read it and don't remember, I'm not going to read it.
That's a great argument you had there.
Yeah, so the drive for status is one also difference between men and women, where generally men try to compete in high-risk activities for the possibility of having high status, where status is often just a lot of money.
And that also pushes a lot of men into dangerous and otherwise unseemly jobs, like coal mining, that are extremely dangerous but pay more than the equivalent job for your skills.
And so that may be what's pushing some men into CEOs and other upper management I personally wouldn't want to be a CEO. You have to work so long, right?
And for what?
Bye-bye, kids.
I'll see you when you're 18.
I actually want to have kids and have a family life.
I don't want having millions of dollars but no time to yourself.
And that's not a good fulfilling life, at least for me.
And so that may be why There are more men in leadership, for example, or politics even.
Well, and of course, way back in the day, vastly more women reproduce than men.
And so the advantages for a man of taking risks, like if you didn't take risks, your chances of reproduction were very low.
If you took risks, then you had the chance to reproduce.
And it was, I can't remember, the numbers were mental.
It's like a dozen to one women or men reproducing or even more, 16 to one.
And so you had to take the risk.
It's sort of like if the plane's going down, you're going to have to jump.
You don't want to jump, but you know for sure if you go down with the plane, you're going to die.
And so taking risks for men was often the only way to get access to reproduction.
And so the positive selection there, genetically, will be that the men who take risks are going to end up reproducing.
So you're going to end up with that as a, you know, whereas women didn't have to take the same number of risks because the ratio was so different.
Yeah, so I think it's actually just two for one.
So we have twice as many female ancestors as we do male ancestors.
But maybe in certain environments it's much more skewed, like the Genghis Khan in China.
I'm sure he had thousands of wives or whatever.
So we're not going to talk about legal options.
Because if we start talking about legal options, all the lawyers are going to be like, ooh, what did he say?
What did he say? I do want to mention this.
I know you do have some legal options regarding this, but we're not going to talk about them in any detail.
But I think that what you did was very brave.
I think it was necessary. I'm sorry for the price that you have to pay.
It is tragic sometimes when we look at the fact that there are biological differences.
It's like the new Copernicism.
It is just one of these things that used to be kind of understood non-scientifically.
The science is racing, in a sense, to catch up, but there's a lot of barriers in the way.
People don't want this stuff to be studied at all.
And I'm sorry that you have to take this kind of It's tough in the moment, but you really have something to be proud of in the long run, I think.
I know you've got some great job offers from some great people, which I think is very encouraging.
But I also want to make sure that people understand that if you want to help James out, Which I think is a reasonably decent thing to do.
You can go to wesearcher.com forward slash bounties.
That sounds bad, but it's not forward slash bounties forward slash James dash Damore dash official dash fundraiser.
Damore is D-A-M-O-R-E. So I'm not going to spell that whole thing out.
We'll put it in the links to the show.
But you can help out in this kind of challenging environment.
It is a real, you know, this is a real trajectory change for your life, right?
I mean, you know, you've got your education, you've got your reputation, you've got your job at Google and so on.
And then it's just like, Well, things are going to go in a slightly different direction now.
In fact, it may in fact be 180 for you, which is tough.
It does create opportunities and I'm positive you're going to land in a place where you can be more self-expressed because, you know, that soft censorship of it's going to be a disaster if I tell the truth about things that are important to me and things that are affecting my career, things that are affecting my entire company.
You know, people think that this came out of a Distaste for women, of course it didn't.
It came out of a desire that facts help everyone.
The truth helps everyone.
I guess except people who are addicted to lies and manipulation and so on.
But it is out of, if I understand this correctly, and you know, correct me where I go astray, James, but it is out of your love for Google, it is out of your love for excellence that you want to bring facts to bear so people can make great decisions about how to facilitate a variety of people's different experience and opportunities at the company.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, a lot of this came from me seeing some of the problems in our culture at Google, where a lot of people that weren't in this groupthink just felt totally isolated and alienated.
And there were many people that came to me and just said, yeah, I'm thinking of leaving Google because this is getting so bad.
And so I really thought it was a problem that Google itself had to fix.
And hopefully they do.
Hopefully they do. I don't think this is a step in the right direction, but hopefully they do.
And hopefully what's happened is the crater of your opportunities at Google is a light, and the data that you have presented and the arguments you have presented are now visible in a way that they wouldn't have been otherwise.
And again, this is not to say that what happened to you is right.
We try to get the best we can out of these difficult situations, and the fact that the impact of this These decisions on your future and your career has blown this information up into the stratosphere, and it is now raining down on everyone, and now it's becoming somewhat inexcusable for people to not have any idea about these ideas, about these arguments, about these basic scientific facts.
And it's a very tough thing to go through, but I guess it is just one of these necessary things, because it really frustrates me no end, because this Hard leftism, this pure environmentalism, this idea that we're all just the same and the only reason for any group differences is exploitation.
It's such a frustrating thesis.
And it's the same thing that happened, not so much the social justice warriors, but America used to be a center of manufacturing excellence, like incredible engineering, incredible manufacturing.
And then, you know, the government moved in, the unions moved in, and...
It just got progressively more difficult to be creative and enjoy yourself and be passionate and powerful in your occupation.
And then manufacturing began to drift overseas and moved to Japan, moved to China, other places, and now American manufacturing has hollowed out.
We'll say like 50,000 jobs a month were being lost in manufacturing.
My concern is that the same thing with high tech is going to happen.
There are other cultures, other countries, Where differences that may be biological origin, that's a topic you can talk about.
It's openly discussed.
I certainly know this in places like Japan.
It's openly discussed. It's openly talked about.
It's a real issue that needs to be grappled with, and they bring their best minds to bear on the evidence and the arguments.
So my concern is the same way that manufacturing went, is the same way that high tech might go, because there's only so much of this kind of claustrophobic political correctness that people can take before they don't want to play.
Yeah. And definitely we don't want to go too far into the other end where we just say all differences are due to this.
Because we need some sort of balance, but we need to be able to say the evidence for both sides.
And when we're just totally blind to new evidence for anything that contradicts our ideology, then we'll only drift further and further to the left and into more authoritarian ways.
Right. No, and I think that's true, right?
And I'm glad you pointed that out.
See, this is the kind of subtlety that got you in trouble.
No, I'm glad you pointed this out because, you know, when it comes to the Earth or the Sun being at the center of the solar system, that's kind of binary.
It's not like half and half, right?
I guess people can say, well, the sun also orbits the earth a little bit.
Anyway, but with this one, of course, yeah, I mean, there's environment and there's biology.
And we don't want to put 100% on either because that's not supported by the data.
It's not supported by the facts.
It's not supported by common sense.
But eclipsing one at the full expense of the other is unjust and unfair and I think leads to a lot of bad decisions, which I think is what is happening now.
So, James, I want to...
Give you the final word here, because there are people who are going to be listening to this who dislike both of us.
And for you, there's no good reason.
For me, maybe there's a good reason.
But for you, there's no good reason.
What is it that you want to say to people who may have got their first impression of you from not-so-fair sources?
What is it that you want them to understand about what you did and why and the message you want to get across?
I guess one way of trying to understand what it's like To be in such an oppressive echo chamber is, so say that you are currently in this progressive echo chamber and you don't really see what problem it is.
Just imagine if you were on the other side, in a very conservative echo chamber, and you felt like you didn't have any rights to be different than other people, and you just had to stay with tradition and you couldn't do anything.
You would also feel stifled, right?
I just think that once we open up to not being in our own echo chamber and actually seeing the other side for what it is and trying to understand each other, only if we do that can we really progress.
And I think this is really hurting our politics right now where it's getting increasingly partisan.
Yeah, that's a good point.
And, you know, for all of those who want to bring out their internet daggers and stab at the simulacrum of another human being's heart, You are setting up an environment of backlash and backlash and backlash and escalation.
You know, those who live by the sword may die by the sword.
And those who pull out the mob and throw it at people and so on, at some point it's going to happen back to you.
And it is an ugly thing to experience and it's an ugly thing to participate in.
And I really strongly encourage people to de-escalate I think we're good to go.
And then attacked as if it's some straw man trying to set fire to the planet.
I mean, this is ridiculous. This is not how a rational society behaves, and I really want to urge people, and I would be saying this no matter what your arguments were, whether you came from the left or the right, and I know you don't identify strongly with either side, which I think is a libertarian alternative, but I really do want to say to people that if we allow this kind of escalation, this hysteria, this character assassination, let's find him, let's dox him, let's get him fired, let's attack, attack, attack.
It ends. I mean, I'm enough.
I've studied history enough to know where this ends.
It's not a good place at all.
So again, I'm sorry for what happened to you.
You know, there's a lot of good that can come out of it, but people should not pay this kind of price to get this kind of information out into society.
So I just wanted to remind people more.
Please go visit, we'll put the link below, researcher.com slash bounties slash slash James hyphen demore hyphen official hyphen fundraiser and help James out if you have a mind.
I think it's a reasonably and good thing to do.
James, thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it today and try and get some rest.
