Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…There’s a lot to unpack there. First, you can’t do quotas. There are illegal unless you’re… And I’m not the lawyer on this subject, but unless you’re trying to repair something that’s happened in the past, some discrimination that’s happened in the past. It’s not quota-based, and I think that’s really just a straw man that people put out there. Now, does that mean that there aren’t DEI programs that are implemented poorly? Of course not. Everything that’s implemented poorly in one company to another. Sales, marketing, human resources, you can pick any element of business and find companies that implement it poorly, but that’s the beauty of capitalism in a free market or mostly free market where if you make these choices and they are the wrong choices, you’re going to lose your best people. You’re not going to be able to hire the best people. You’re not going to execute on your business plans in the way that we discussed, regardless of the size of the company. It also, I think, depends on where you’re having the discussion. When I’m in a different group of people off of X, the feedback’s completely different. To your question of reverse racism, yes, it happens because people are people. There’s no human being that is 100% objective. It’s also, there’s very, very, very few jobs that can be determined on a purely quantitative basis. How do you tell one janitor from the other, who’s the best? How do you tell one salesperson that you’re hiring versus another you’re hiring because they haven’t sold your product yet, so you don’t know? We talked earlier about firing people because you made mistakes. Yes, there’s discrimination against any group, white, Asian, black, green, orange, whatever it may be, but I truly believe that there’s far more discrimination against people of color than there are people who are white. I think it’s become a straw man, that reverse discrimination because of DEI is prevalent or near ubiquitous. Much of American history was defined by intense radical racism and sexism. But in the recent years, there was a correction and I think the nature of the criticism is that there’s an overcorrection where DEI programs at universities and companies, when they’re not doing their job well, are often hard to criticize because when you criticize them within the company or so on, they have a very strong immune system. If you criticize a DEI program, it seems like it’s very easy to be called racist, and if you’re called racist or sexist, that’s a sticky label. You’re getting into the culture of organizations and leadership within organizations, and accepting any type of criticism, put aside DEI. When I criticized the referees in the MVA, I got fined. That was their option. I knew what I was getting into, not that they’re completely analogous, but it’s cause and effect. If I’m in a major company and I’m publicly criticizing or even internally criticizing a sales plan or a product, our product sucks. There was a Google engineer that got fired for saying Google had AGI, and nobody believed they did and they knew that created problems. It wasn’t DEI related, but it was saying something publicly that was, in the CEO’s eyes, to the detriment of the company. I think those are all analogous. If you’re trying to accomplish something within an organization because you think there’s a problem and there’s people speaking out saying look, we’re getting it wrong, I think I’m a victim of all this, and the company… Then leadership has got to make a decision. Do they agree or not agree? Are they right or are they wrong? Is it positive or negative to the company? And you decide. This conversation that conservatives are being silenced in organizations now, I haven’t seen it. The other side of your question, I think unpacking it, is what’s driving all this? Put aside universities for one. In corporate America, when I talk to people in corporate America about DEI, they always start talking about ideology. I’ve talked to Bill Ackman, who you’ve had on, and when I asked him, “Bill, you run your own companies. Who’s telling you what to do?” “They are.” “Who’s they? “It’s the universities, the people who have this ideology of DEI.” I’m like, “Did they force you? Did they coerce you? Did you lose control of your company?” “No, it’s not me. It happens to other people.” Then I talk to other people, same thing. I try not to go one-on-one in Twitter conversations on this topic. In the DMs, I’ll talk to people who are really conservative and I’ll ask the same question and be like, “Who’s forcing you to do this?” “It’s the ideology that’s everywhere. Didn’t see the Harvard thing in University of North Carolina.” I’m like I’ve never had anybody try to push me in this direction to do this. This was my business choice. I’m not trying to tell other people you have to do this. You make your own business choices. Where companies have made their business choices, and if somebody doesn’t feel confident or comfortable with it, they may feel they’re being discriminated against.…

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