#1009 - James Damore

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Five, four, three, two, one.

And we're live. James, what's up? How are you, man?

James Damore (0:11)

I'm great.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Don't freak out about your sound of your voice in the headphones. Is this the first time you've ever worn headphones on a podcast?

James Damore (0:20)

Definitely the first time I've heard myself talk.

Joe Rogan (0:22)

Is it weird?

James Damore (0:23)

You know, after a second, yeah. It's weird.

Joe Rogan (0:25)

You get over it.

James Damore (0:26)

Pretty self-conscious about it.

Joe Rogan (0:27)

Really? You're gonna be all right? You can take them off if you want. If it's freaking you out too much. You think you're gonna get through this?

Let's just take these ______ off. We don't need these things. Just keep this sucker close to you.

So first of all, thanks for doing this. You've been on this crazy sort of whirlwind tour. Have you gone anywhere, or you just been doing it mostly from your house?

James Damore (0:50)

Mostly from my house, just on Skype.

Joe Rogan (0:53)

Now, for people who don't know the story, let's give them the short version of it. You were working at Google, and what prompted you to write this memo?

James Damore (1:03)

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, you know, I voiced some concerns, but people just chained me and was like, no, you're wrong, you're just like, have white male privilege.

Joe Rogan (1:45)

They said you have white male privilege? That was the actual word they used?

James Damore (1:47)

Yeah, there's a lot of that going on.

And so they asked for feedback on the program. So I wrote this document to clarify my thoughts. I sent it to them. They looked at it, but, you know, they just ignored it. Never told me anything. So I went to a couple more of these programs and, you know, I gave similar feedback. I gave the same document. They kept looking at it, but just never said anything.

And, you know, I would send it to random people that I knew.

And half the people would be like, yes, exactly, this is what I've been thinking. And the other half would maybe disagree with some points, but it would never be, you know, emotional outburst or anything. It would just be like, oh, are you sure that this is actually happening? It's like, yes, because, you know, I've actually been to these unrecorded meetings. This is what's happening.

Joe Rogan (2:34)

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 with, I mean, if you don't have all your bases covered to black women, to Asian men, if you don't have all your bases covered, you can get pretty roundly criticized as not being diverse.

When you do that, you're kind of fucked.

James Damore (3:13)

Yeah, so Google definitely has a huge target audience back. And so there are people that want to complain that, oh, Google is not diverse, therefore it's racist and sexist. And so that's a lot of their fear. They look at their representation and then compare it to the overall US population and say, oh, we only have 20% women, we should have 50%. There's obviously some sexism happening.

And so a lot of their stuff is, oh, we need to fix this because all this sexism is bad. And obviously, if you disagree with sexism, that's of course bad. I obviously don't want there to be any sexism, but I just don't think that that's the sole cause of this disparity in representation.

Joe Rogan (4:01)

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 this really important thing today's society, that you want to promote an image of diversity, that it's more important than anything. So when you're in these class, or these, I wouldn't call it a class, what would you call it, a meeting, whatever they are.