TRIGGERnometry - Fired Google Insider Speaks Out

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

Former Google employee Taras Kobernyk talks to TRIGGERnometry about being fired from the tech giant after questioning company equity training. Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Peter Hitchens here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873620658 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even asking questions about this ideology is potentially harmful. I at some point decided to ask a question whether some actions inside of the company complied with company's policies about discrimination. And I got reported for asking that. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with Fasten.

What a brilliant guest we have for you today. He is a former Google engineer who was fired by the company for challenging some of the excesses of the company's diversity agenda. Tarasca Bernik, welcome to Trigonometry. Hello, Constantine Francis. Happy to be here. You are very kind. Brilliant. It was probably an overstatement, but I will try to live to that. Yes, indeed. Well, your story is very interesting, and I'm sure our audience will find it very interesting. given some of the things that you've been through. Before we get into Taras, please tell everybody a little bit about what's your background, who are you, how are you where you are, what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Most of it probably is not related to the story.

I'm from Ukraine. I was born there, moved to Switzerland to work with Google at 2016, worked there for four years as a software engineer. and unfortunately it came to an end with me trying to point out certain things that were getting too far from my perspective at the company and becoming damaging to the company's culture and probably the future. And let's get into that right away. What was it that you were starting to become concerned about?

Because having looked through some of the documents involved in your case, I can see that you made repeated attempts in discussions and discussions. forums in conversations internally at Google, in response to various memos and diversity initiatives and all of that, to challenge some of the things that were happening. And you were told repeatedly that you were making other people unsafe, uncomfortable, you were being insensitive, you were told that by supporting Jordan Peterson's position on pronouns, you were making your fellow employees, quote, unquote, unsafe, et cetera. So what was it that was happening? and why did you feel the need to speak out against it?

It was probably me being new to the Western culture because all my life before that moment I spent back in Ukraine and the approach as they are different. So when I came to Google, I had to adjust to working for a huge company, working in the West, living in a different place. It was my basically first trip outside of ex-Soviet Union. And I also had to adjust to. to the culture around, and not just to the local culture,

but also to the American culture that is prevalent at the company. And I tend to pay attention to what the company tells us during some educational sessions like when the company explains companies' policies and so on. So when the company tells me that discriminations are not allowed on all these characteristics, I tend to trust that. And then when I see some actions that do look like discriminations,

at least in my book by definition of treating people differently based on different traits like race and so on, I start asking questions because it's either a violation of policies and might be a problem along the term, or it is the company not being honest and telling you one thing in policy. and then acting differently outside of that. And that is a problem because it starts hard to trust the company in such case, when you don't know what to expect of the company. And also, you don't know when the company might start holding you responsible. Because on paper, if you comply with what the company does,

you start violating one thing or another. And then it's up to the company to decide where to cash that and to hold you responsible for it. hold you responsible for that. And since you cannot properly trust the company, you cannot trust that the company is going to be fair and honest in holding you responsible. So it's useful to try to clarify things. And that's what I've been trying to do. Well, speaking of clarifying things, before Francis jumps in, because I know he has a lot of questions for you, just to clarify for people who may be less familiar with our sort of post-Soviet culture, etc., you're coming from a place where the idea of saying things as they are is encouraged, right?

In your previous career before you moved to Switzerland, you probably would have thought, well, it's my job to listen to what my employer tells me and to respond to that honestly and directly about what's happening. And you move over, you find yourself at Google, which says, we must not discriminate against people on the basis of their race, their sex, their gender, whatever. and you take that at face value, and you take that literally, and you start going, well, some of the stuff you're saying about white people kind of feels like discrimination to me, and if I go along with this, I would now be complicit in the very thing your company says,

I must not do. Is that a fair summation? Yes. Obviously, you cannot just say anything and without consequences back in Ukraine, and companies might not be happy with whatever your disagreement is, and you're supposed to comply with policies, but that basically comes first. You're supposed to satisfy the company's requirements like policies or whatever, and that's why policies of Google did look like important to pay attention to it. And so let's just flesh out the working environment.

What was it like to work at Google, number one? Was it good, or was there sort of this culture, true fear? It's a mixed feeling because there are a lot of awesome things at Google. There are a lot of wonderful, highly experienced people in their areas. There are a lot of resources, obviously. There are a lot of tools that probably not all of them are available outside, tools that help you to do your job.

There are a lot of people that really try to make your work pleasant and to provide you with some additional perks, health, whatever. At the same time, the company is obviously huge, and there are costs that come with that size. So not everything is fast enough, and there are some bureaucratic complications there. And I wouldn't say there is intentional culture of fear. It's more like a lot of people try to stick to doing their job,

job and try to avoid contradicting the company or superiors because despite the company encouraging you to do the right thing even at the cost to yourself or challenge the status quo, which is stated in some company's documents describing positive traits. It's not always good because if you start disagreeing with your superiors, it might go both ways. And there are awesome managers there that really try to help you, try to figure out what the problem is and how to solve it. But there are a lot of people that basically try to avoid unnecessary responsibility and try to spend time on what they know best. For example, most managers are good at fields they are in, like an engineering manager might be.

most probably a great engineer, at least a great engineer delivering some products in time. That doesn't make such a person good at interacting with people or figuring out any interpersonal problems or organizational problems. So when such a person becomes a manager, many seem to revert to this mode of thinking, oh, I am a good engineer, I'm going to keep being a good engineer. but just now I have additional team to help me deal with engineering stuff. And that becomes a problem because the company expects certain things to be done in certain ways and expects managers to handle some bureaucracy at the company. And when managers self-eliminate from that, all that burden falls onto teams and it makes things harder.

And for the ideological stuff, it applies to the extent, that the company does something for whatever company reasons are. Not necessarily the company is ideological, but it certainly supports some ideologies and not others. Taras, could you give an example where you said it supports certain ideologies but not others? Obviously, my document lists some examples of this, and we've...

It wasn't the first case when I started, was asking questions, but in this case, it was 2020. A lot of stuff was happening back in the U.S., racial-related stuff, and we were getting bombarded by messages from the top management regarding all these ideologies, that we have to educate ourselves about racism and about Juneteen and about slavery and about everything, and read books by Robin DeAngelo and others. And basically the situation is that you're getting an email from your CEO with such messages from your senior vice president, your vice president, vice president's responsible for your office, vice presidents for European region or whatever,

and all keep telling you that you are supposed to educate yourself and you are not supposed to be a terrible person, and it's not clear why they are trying to do that and what they are trying to achieve other than just to signal that they support this stuff. And as for not being able to supporting one ideologies or not others, even asking questions about this ideology is potentially harmful. I at some point decided to ask a question whether some actions inside of the company complied with

company's policies about discrimination and I got reported for asking that for two cases. One, once I asked, I formulated some question and I used words alleged racism because to me it didn't look like

racism what people were describing. And I got reported for using the word alleged because apparently you're not supposed to doubt that such things are due to racism. And second case, I was pointing out that one of allyship resources available inside of the company did look like discriminatory. And why did you say that? That's the resource that is mentioned in my document.

And when there are articles there like white people have no culture or what do we do with white people and so on, they focus on race. and they blame people based on race. And to me, it's already, it looks like discrimination. And most importantly, I don't see what a good thing this could lead to, because I don't see good outcomes of this. So I asked the question whether such a resource was within company's policies, and I was reported for asking this question also, because I was told,

I was told that pointing out, like, criticizing or questioning all the relationship resources draws attention from the anti-racism fight. And so I was intentionally drawing that attention away from important things. I didn't know that at the time, I only discovered these things later when I was given a written warning with these statements on it. I was given it right before getting fired. So you're not supposed to doubt that racism is there, and you're not supposed to even question whether some resources

are within company's policies, and then how do you act? Taras, that sounds incredibly sinister. So when you got that email from the vice president, saying you have to read this book, you have to read that book, Did you have to read it, or was it advised to read it? It wasn't compulsory. I know that in some teams in the US, people were getting through some learning sessions, and while a pay were not compulsory, skipping them was not something people felt comfortable with,

because the idea is if you don't participate in this, then you are a terrible person because you don't want to understand how to deal with terrible stuff. Luckily, in Europe, it's different. We didn't have even optional trainings, but we were getting a lot of these emails from all the management, encouraging us to read all that stuff. It's interesting that it seems to me,

like a lot of people might look at your situation and go, well, why would you be discussing politics at work? And, you know, if an employee in a company that sells coffee or whatever came in and started spouting off about BLM, you can see why their manager would be like, come on, just make the coffees, calm down. But in your case, it seems like the company brought the politics in and you were then simply responding based on your literal interpretation, possibly, if I may say so, as a fellow post-Soviet person, because you kind of took it at face value, and, well, these are the requirements of my job.

I have to take this information in, process it, and respond accordingly. And then having politicized your role and everyone else's role in the company, the company then essentially prompted people to be talking about this political stuff, but there was only one particular vision that you were supposed to have. Yes, kind of like that. There are multiple things here. So the company tells us all the time that we are supposed to pay attention to bad things happening around us. We are going through trainings that tell us that we have to pay attention and report violations and so on.

And then when it looks like there are some violations, it becomes a problem. It's actually even more complicated when there is all this pressure, because the company doesn't always explain to you what exactly the company wants. It's slightly a step to the side, but I had a situation once when I got reported for one discussion. and my manager had a meeting with me and told me that I was not to cross the line. And it wasn't clear what that line was in that specific situation that he was referring to. So I asked for a clarification. Could you please tell me what that line is, so I would avoid crossing it.

The manager takes a break as far as instant meets some HRs, then comes. back and tells me, and I quote pretty closely, that a decision has been made not to clarify to you where the line is, because doing that would enable you to go straight to that line without crossing it, and it's not that's something that the company wants. So it was intentional obscurity of policies, and in such cases, how do you act if you don't know what constitutes a violation of a policy? Because then, whatever you do might be a violation and you might be hold responsible. It's understandable that it's useful for the company to push all this responsibility

onto everyone around, be it employees, be it customers, because you are customers of YouTube because you have to comply with YouTube's policies. Don't we just fucking know it, Taras? We do. Taras, let me ask you something. Look, obviously your story, and we'll be. get into some of the consequences for you is deeply painful, I imagine, and difficult, and a lot of people will care about it. But also, I think a question a lot of people will have is how this

affects them, right? Because if you have a company that, you know, whether you believe it's ideologically driven or not, it certainly seems like a particular ideological slant exists within some of the policies, does, do you believe that that is reflected in the product, in the Google algorithms, in the YouTube, in all of that stuff. Is there any element where that starts to bleed through? I haven't seen examples of that affecting our project, but I was just a part of some project and not others. Generally, I would avoid making statements like,

yes, it does affect products, though we can see that Google Maps has, for example, released half a year ago, a new feature where businesses can mark themselves as owned by black people or by women or something like that. And this is basically coming from this idea of we having to provide additional possibilities to minorities and so on, which results basically in a feature that incentivizes people to discriminate each other basically on grounds of race, gender, and so on. But in general, the thing is, for example, with Google search that I was a part of a bigger ecosystem of Google Search, when you make any changes to search, you're supposed to figure out whether this is a good change or not.

And it's hard to do that in a big system. Same goes for machine learning systems, AI, and so on. And this is often done by having some references, let's say search queries, and you have a huge amount of them, and then you check whether changes in outcomes of search are beneficial or not as a result of you tweaking something. And there are people that create such references, and there are people that grade whatever deviations from known search results. And then these people make decisions whether some examples are good or not, whether some search results are good matches for search queries and so on. And when such people are subjects to all these environment where you have to, support or at least not to challenge certain ideology. When they know that even questioning whether something is good or not might result in a problem for them,

they might be quite careful with making their decisions about such references. And they might just avoid any basically tests for software that might challenge this narrative. So while people might not be actively ideological, they might just take decisions not to evaluate quality of some aspects of products in order to avoid problems with ideological stuff. But the reason I ask you is I'll give you an example, and maybe you can explain to me what's going on. Obviously, YouTube is also owned by Google. And there's a right-wing American talk show host, a very famous Tucker Carson whose show you've been on.

And I have noticed that if you, you know, whether I'm doing stuff for research or whatever, when I put Tucker Carlson in, the first or second video on the YouTube search is almost always someone on CNN making fun of or debunking or mocking Tucker Carson, which seems quite unusual. Like if you were to search for trigonometry,

I'd be very odd to me that the first search results wouldn't be from trigonometry. there would be somebody making fun of trigonometry. Not that anyone would do that, of course. Well, you do, you make a good fun of it yourself when you get to that. Yeah. As for search results on YouTube and so on, it's actually a difficult question. It's pretty easy to see it as a result of ideologies and some malice,

but it's not necessarily that, because all these algorithms, they have to deal with so huge amounts of information that you cannot potentially test everything. And you cannot always, it's basically impossible to have some decision-making system that would be 100% correct. So you always try trying to make improvements, and your improvements probably result in some, detrimental effects to some other parts. Let's say that you would try to make sure that Tucker Carlson gets proper search results,

and then you make some changes to the algorithm. And then whatever, CNN, Deutsche Valley, BBC would start getting slightly worse search results. And then it's up to you to decide whether overall increase in quality is good enough to justify that slight drop in some areas or not. and you cannot get to 100% correctness. So it might be possible to look at specific results and try to figure out what's happening there. But I wouldn't say that it is the company's malice

or whatever that is responsible for such results. I find that very upsetting, Taras. I thought that YouTube were against us. That's made me angry. But look, Taras, why? I still can't get my head around this. Why is it that these big juggernaut, multinational corporations making billions, why do they get involved in this stuff?

If it's going to cause anger, if it's going to cause devices within their own ranks, and ultimately lower productivity? I hope that you would be able to tell me you've had so many wonderful guests on your show and much more suited to explore reasons behind such changes. I really don't know why the company supports it. I haven't seen some evidence of the management being ideological. But I don't know what they say in private. And when they talk in public, it's not clear whether they support this

because they really think this is a good ideology, because they are trying to get some benefits for the company by supporting this ideology or simply because they are afraid to touch some topics. For example, there was a situation in the beginning of summer 2019. There was one company's employee, a manager from YouTube in Los Angeles, who did notice some random black person trying to bypass some security measures on an apartment building of that Google's employee. And so that employee did confront that black person.

The situation escalated and ended up with the employee calling the police and being filmed on camera. And that ended up on public news as a white YouTube executive calling the police on a black man or something like that. And so there was a lot of enhanced. happiness inside of the company. People were claiming they were unsafe working with this employee. There was a meeting between so-called blacks at YouTube and affinity group in YouTube for as far as and send black employees and their allies. They had, according to the internal

messaging boards, a meeting with the CEO of YouTube, Susan Pujitsky. And after that, and they, as far as and were trying to express their unhappiness with the situation. And Susan has decided to address this during a company-wide meeting, so-called TJF. We still had them back then. Later, the company canceled most of them. So Susan was aware of the situation. She was addressing it on her own initiative. She was able to prepare.

She obviously thought that the topic was important enough, because she walked in the middle of regular presentations, usually doesn't happen. She decided not to wait for the standard questions and answers session at the end and decided to address the situation in the middle of that meeting. And she said that basically the company, I'm trying to be close, that the company valued black employees a lot, and that the safety of the black employees was paramount, the company and so on. Nobody was challenging that position. So it wasn't clear why she was

stating that. And she said absolutely nothing about whether it was fine to call the police in that situation for the employee or not. So with people claiming being unsafe and asking several questions on that Q&A session about consequences to that employee, whether the company would take some action against that employee. Susan never addressed that. And then the CEO of Google, Sunder Pichai, also said a few words, but he basically repeated the same sentiment and also avoided addressing the question of a mob of black employees and to their allies basically harassing that white employee for calling the police on a suspected trespasser.

That employee wasn't fired as far as I understand, but the company that claims that discrimination is bad and that the company that even mentioned on the statement about me for Tucker Carlson's show that I was a apparently a bad person for singling out some person. I have no idea what that is about. The company was obviously fine with all this mob singling out that employee and going after that employee. I don't know why the company reacted that way. My best guess is that despite being aware of the situation

and having time to prepare, the management had no idea how to address it. because over time, it's not like the management has been displaying, create problem-solving skills to the rest of the company. So that could have been just a result of the management being afraid of doing anything. And Taras, so you see this happening in the company. You see the way that the political climate is going. Do you not worry about yourself and doing the actions that you have then done? Because you must have been worried. You must have known where this was going to end up.

I wasn't worrying that much for myself, though it was obviously affecting me when I was being called, being referred to as a terrible person because of being white, basically. But what was worrying me even more is that the company didn't look capable of addressing in such situations and being clear with its employees or with customers. And that says something about company's ability to address other challenges. And when so much in your life depends on how good your employer is, good as in the sense of business sense, whether you have future there and so on.

And then you see such actions that make you think that the company is not capable of addressing actual. problems, that was troublesome. But in general, about the situation, yes, I don't see how this can proceed without ending with one out of two outcomes. Either people accept all this state of things and just submit to it. And I don't, I won't be able to do that myself, and I wouldn't wish that on to my. friends or there is going to be real conflict and potential misery down the road and whatever the outcome of that conflict I'm not looking forward to that so yes I felt it was necessary to try to

fix the problem the idea basically is that you love it fix it or leave it I saw it as a problem I saw it as affecting, let's say, my reputation, because when I joined Google, my reputation started contributing to Google's, although it was very small contribution, but Google's reputation started affecting me. And if the company you work for starts doing bad things and you say nothing,

like I would feel myself responsible or at least it would be, possible for people to blame me for such things. So I had to do something. I wasn't able to love the situation. I wasn't ready to leave. And I tried to fix it. That's why I've been asking questions internally. That's why I wrote this document. And I actually wrote this document after a conversation in our team because it wasn't just me being unhappy, but other people as well, Though most of people are not as able to talk about this stuff because they worry about their families and so on, I was in slightly better position. I unfortunately don't have a family, but that does make things a bit easier for me.

So in the end of that conversation, my manager asked me about my specific concerns and told me that these concerns would be sent somewhere upstairs. or whatever, and I decided to write a document because it's hard to just keep telling stuff to people in such a big company because everyone has their own problems to work on, different time zones and whatever. So when you try to address something, it's much better to write a document and then share the documents so people can read it at their spare time. I wrote the document, I shared it with the manager, so he would be able to use it. And I also shared it with our team because of that conversation and with some other people I've been having, I had similar conversations with.

And that's when problems started because apparently the company wasn't happy with that. And for people who haven't read the document, what was the gist? What was the overall message that you said? I saw these ideologies getting too far and becoming contradictory with company's own policies and damaging long term to the culture and to the reputation of the company. And I also saw it as a problem that it was hard for people to point that out because I knew plenty of people that were not happy with this, but that were afraid of speaking up.

And that was also something that I mentioned in my document. Actually, after I started getting pressured by my manager, I contacted one of higher managers, the Rector level with something like 50, 80 people reporting to him. And I asked for advice there because I wasn't getting any good advice from my manager. Okay, maybe my document is awful, but let me know how I can express these thoughts in an appropriate manner. And I never got that response. And I asked that question again during the meeting with HR when I was getting fired.

And I also didn't get any explanation how I can't express these things in a way that would be considered possible. The company tells you all the time that you are free to discuss whatever you want. And then there is a small print caveat that communications have to be. respectful and so on. And then it's up to the company to decide what is considered to be disrespectful. And the company doesn't actually tell you what is your mistake and how to fix it. Again, probably because whatever the company says, it is afraid that it might be used against it somewhere later. So it's more beneficial for the company to avoid providing you with enough information.

I contacted that director-level manager, and I asked him for help. And the answer was, do what your manager tells you. And also, you're wrong that you think that it's not safe to talk about these matters inside of the company. That's most probably because you've never engaged with all these wonderful all All-A-ship resources our company provides. And then I was encouraged to join some allyship group and to learn about racism and so what.

And I don't know what was more disturbing there, whether an engineer and a high manager with a lot of people depending on him not understanding this environment that the company creates and problems that come with it, or understanding it and consciously, stepping away to avoid making things complicated for himself and letting subordinates

basically to deal with all this on their own. Torres, was there any point where you were working for Google? This reminds me of the Soviet Union. Oh, okay, if I would say that I wouldn't be

totally correct because I was lucky to be about 13 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Luckily it collapsed before I did. So I was only able to judge about the Soviet Union based on conversations with parents, friends of the family, reading books, movies, and so on. So it's not like my personal experience with the Soviet Union with a lot of stuff. But a lot of nonsense that happens not just with Google but it looks like in corporate world in politics it's just ridiculous it's all these statements about supporting some ideologies and having to be the beacon of lights

or whatever all that stuff was happening in the Soviet Union with actual results not being that great and so on as far as I understand so yeah there are better people to make such a comparison, but I guess some people, after getting fed all that nonsense in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Union times in countries controlled by the Soviet Union, like Poland and others, maybe they're a little better, maybe not better equipped, but maybe they have a little less patience to all this nonsense than others that are not familiar with this. Yeah, well, that makes sense to me, Taras. And obviously, you then get fired for refusing to not share that document.

So your manager said to you, there is no problem discussing this issue, or rather this director manager, there's no problem talking about this stuff at Google. Go ahead. I mean, go and read all the right literature, of course. But there's no problem. You can say what you want. And so you said what you want. And then they tried to get you to unsay it.

and when you refused they fired you. Is that correct? Yes. I don't know why the company didn't order me to delete the document. Maybe again it was trying to save, to maintain some perception that things are allowed at the company. So you don't have to delete the document. I was told that you just have to make the document not accessible by other people,

which results in the same and which sounds as a nonsense. And I've been asking my manager repeatedly, like, what is wrong with my document? And if I am so dumb that I am unable to express my thoughts in a good way, could you please tell me how I can do that? My manager wasn't capable to do that. I wouldn't get into details of that because, again, that's just decisions and qualities of one person that might not be indicative of the company in general. but it wasn't the first time when I got in this situation, we allow you to talk about things, but you have to talk about them in a way we see appropriate

and we won't tell you what the appropriate is. It wasn't the first time when I was asking HRs about ways to talk about things without getting reported. You already mentioned that the case about Jordan Peterson's pronounce, and it was actually ridiculous because it was a conversation where someone asked a question, something like, if only I knew why people act the way they do. And that could have been a sarcastic remark, but I decided to try to respond to it. And it's not like I knew a lot about psychology.

Maybe nowadays I would have recommended lectures by Robert Sapolsky from Stanford. But back then, I was going through university lectures by Jordan. Peterson, the maps of meaning. And despite me not following all conclusions by Dr. Peterson, I was fascinated by how he was getting to some interesting ideas based on whatever sources he was using. So and it was useful for me to a certain extent. So I decided to recommend these lectures. By that time, I already, I had already had already heard about such things as microaggressions and trigger warnings. So I decided to do my best to provide a trigger warning. So I mentioned that Jordan Peterson was considered by some people

controversial because of his stance on the compelled speech, which resulted in all this controversy around transgender pronouns. But from my point of view, it was due to representation of his stance. And that was basically my comment. Almost immediately someone commented that how dare you to mention Jordan Peterson because I have a sibling who is trans and this is so painful and now you are mentioning this terrible person. And then I got reported for for supporting Jordan Peterson's stance on transgender pronouns, which wasn't, I believe, the point of my comment. So you can get in such strange situations as well. So basically, you mentioned someone who some people don't like and that becomes you making people unsafe now.

Yes. And around that time, I also heard about some attempts to invite people like Dr. Peterson to give a talk at some Google office. Google has been inviting digital. different people and there is a channel called Talks at Google or something like that on YouTube where you can watch all this and there are people like John Cleese for example and some of these talks are fun to watch but people were not getting approvals for inviting Jordan Peterson and at the same time Robin DiAngelo the author of the White Fragility book was given a talk at one of the officers it was actually my first topic that I got engaged in because I had no idea how the concept of white fragility

might not be a violation of companies' policies about racial discrimination. So, Taras, you're looking at the journey that you've had. You look at everything that's happened. Do you regret speaking out? How many discounts does USA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount.

New vehicle discount. Storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. I regret losing my Google salary and putting my Swiss visa in danger because it's hard to stay here if I don't have a good job and not that easy always to find a suitable job.

I don't regret speaking up. I probably would have regreted if I stayed silent. Basically, it was quite uncomfortable for me, and it was not, I would say it was detrimental for my state. In addition to all the pressure that there is, engineering-wise, regarding your work, there was this pressure with ideologies. I wasn't able to support and pressure with all this nonsense and with the company not being able to formulate things. And the company basically acting hypocritically

and avoiding putting all the blame onto you, avoiding providing you information in order to be able to navigate all these complexities, it was making things harder. Actually, I was already thinking about leaving Google at some point even before that, but I was still not ready to do that. But this pressure actually drives some people away from the company.

I know people that do leave company because of all this nonsense about because of all this pressure. And what has been the impact on your life? You mentioned losing your salary and your job. You are still looking for a job now. Google haven't exactly. I mean, you can see why after all of the complaints that they had about you, they wouldn't give you a good reference, but you still haven't found another job,

and it's been a year, right? It's not like I've been looking for a new job all the time. I really needed some break after Google, and after some time, I really felt way better than I felt while working for the company. Yes, it's a bit hard for various reasons for me to find something here. And regarding the reference, sure, I totally agree that, first of all, I agree that a company should be able to get rid of an employee that for some reason is not good for the company.

Otherwise, it just wouldn't make any sense from business reasons, whatever. What I don't agree is the way it went because basically the company was putting onto me the blame for situations created by the company for whatever contradictions been there. And then instead of just telling me, look, I know that you don't support this ideologies, we do. It's not going to work for us. Let's figure out how to part our ways. I would have understood that.

I would have understood if the company just told us that, yeah, we're going to do. discriminate people based on race because we think it's better for us. At least there wouldn't be wouldn't have been this contradiction for me like different messages from the company. I was expecting a slightly different outcome but the company actually acted quite unfriendly both through all this process and afterwards. You mentioned the reference and again I agree that how can someone who gets fired, get a good reference letter. But there are actually some regulations regarding that here in Switzerland. Basically, reference letters are supposed to be written in such a way to help the former

employee to find a new job. You are not supposed to blackmouth that employee, and you're supposed to only mention negative stuff if that was directly related to your job. Like if I was a driver and I was drinking alcohol during my work hours, that would have been on a reference letter. That, of course, makes reference letters a bit less useful because you cannot properly explain why have you decided to fire someone. But some people even getting fired for underperformance and getting fired after the company having bad perception are still getting great. reference letters as far as I know. In my case, the company has decided to provide me with a bad one that was also contradicting my previous performance reviews and was basically questioning both my

personal skills. The reference letter tells something like that I was so disrespectful with my fellow employees, fellow colleagues that the company had to intervene. And when I was trying to negotiate with the company about that, the company told me, so what that you can bring? And again, I'm quoting pretty closely. So what's that you can bring 10 colleagues that would testify that you were a wonderful colleague? We're going to bring testimonies from five people that were offended by whatever you posted on internal message boards.

And then it's going to be up to some judge to decide who is more right. Overall, it has resulted in me losing a lot of time trying to negotiate for a better reference letter and a lot of money spent on lawyers. The company wasn't even trying to talk to me. So it was basically stolen for a lot of time, not replying, which is not that great. And talking about you as customers of clients of YouTube, that's basically one of the standards approaches of designing interfaces, be it like graphical interface of a program, or a process through which people have to go in order to contact to the company and to get some support or whatever. I've never been posting anything on YouTube. You know better,

but are you getting good enough explanations from YouTube when some of your videos gets unlisted or demonetized, whether some of your, some of the comments on your videos are getting deleted. Are you getting enough information to prevent such things from happening in the future? And do you understand why exactly that happened? Because if it doesn't, it's the same problem. The company is putting all this responsibility onto you. The company is not being friendly and not trying to be fair. And the company has this so-called culture of three respects,

respect each other, respect the customer, and respect the opportunity. It was getting installed somewhere two years ago, maybe. And I'm not prepared to talk about opportunities, but at least with regard to respecting each other and customers, I would say that the company does a terrible job, because by not providing you with proper information, so you would be able to interact with the company, it makes your lives easier

and it basically puts responsibility onto you in order to avoid responsibilities itself and this is not a good partnership. And the same happens with internal communications when you don't understand what's happening and all these situations at the company. So respecting each other also doesn't work that greatly inside of the company.

That makes sense. But us, we wish you all the best with finding new employment and now that you feel better about everything, thank you for coming to speak to us. We've got a few questions for our local supporters. We've also got a final question. Is there any way people can get in touch with you

if they want to or find you online or anything like that? They can probably find me on LinkedIn or on my Protonmail account, taras.com. Fantastic. Thanks very much. Well, we've got one more question in the main interview for you. Which is, what's the one thing?

we're not talking about, but we really should be. If only I knew what you've been talking about because I didn't have as much time to watch all your wonderful podcasts. But I'm curious whether, how we can improve overall education system. I know that you've discussed it briefly with doctors Heather Heinz and Brett Weinstein during your recent podcast, a live stream. but there you were addressing it from the point of view of changing maybe creating new institutions instead of the existing universities and so on.

I wonder about accessibility of good mentorship to people because sometimes you, it's nice if you know what questions to ask, then you can go to sites like Quora or whatever and try to find some answers or Google for something. Sometimes you don't even know what questions to ask. good mentorship is important. Unfortunately, not everyone can get one. Usually it's parents and your teachers that are supposed to help you, but not everyone can help you. For example, my parents were never able to advise me on creating my own business or investing things. Those were not things in the Soviet Union. And so in other countries as well. So I think there is a lot of value in

good mentorship. I don't know how to make it accessible. And maybe we can create something that is not perfect, but the next best thing. We have all these wonderful online courses available from leading universities. And they were of great help for me, for example, because without them, I wouldn't have been able to get to Google or near a close. So maybe there is a some way to have some educational institutions that are not about having awesome scientists on staff. And instead of leveraging these educational courses from online platforms and instead focusing on providing good mentorship or whatever, and Francis would be able to tell more about this with your background in education. I don't have that experience, but it would be nice to discuss

stuff. No, it's something that would be very, very interesting to discuss. Taras, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. It's been an absolute. Yeah, well, it's been a pleasure for us, so thank you. And thank you for watching guys at home. And if you've enjoyed the show, please remember that Wednesdays and Sundays, 7pm, British time, 2pm, Eastern Standard Time, or when our interviews go out, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 7pm, 2pm are our raw shows. And if you want to enjoy, Trigonometry on the move because you're back at work. It's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview.

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