The Joe Rogan Experience - #1009 - James Damore

James Damore is a former Google Senior software engineer, who was recently fired by Google after an internal memo he wrote about its diversity policies was leaked online. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Duration: 2h 46m
Broadcast on: 05 Sep 2017
Audio Format: other

James Damore is a former Google Senior software engineer, who was recently fired by Google after an internal memo he wrote about its diversity policies was leaked online.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

(sighs) Five, four, three, two, one. And we're live. James, what's up? How are you, man? - I'm great. - Don't freak out about your sound of your voice in the headphones. This is the first time you've ever worn headphones or on a podcast. - Definitely the first time I've heard myself talk. - 'Cause it weird. - You know, after a second, yeah. - It's weird. - You get over it. - Pretty self-conscious about it. - Really? You get to 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? - Yeah. - But you just take this bucket. We don't need these things. Just keep this sucker close to you. You'll be fine. - So first of all, thanks for doing this. You've been on this crazy sort of whirlwind tour. Have you gone anywhere? Or you've just been doing it mostly from your house? - Mostly from my house, just on Skype. - 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? - Yeah, so 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, you know, 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 have just changed me and was like, no, you're wrong. You're just like, have white male privilege.

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