What’s even more unbelievable is that Chamath didn’t have any monologue in this episode! Sacks wins that metric for this episode with his take on the firing of Antonio Garcia Martinez. Here’s the complete monologue:
No, I’m happy to jump into this. Jason, I think you focus a little bit too much, and I saw your pod with Zach Coleus on this. A lot of good takes, but I think you’re a little too focused on what AGM. I think it’s easier just call him by his initials, what he did as opposed to what the employees at Apple did. And there’s at least four things that Apple did or five things that Apple did wrong. I mean, number one, I think there was a very good reason not to hire this guy, which is that he wrote a bestselling tell all book about the last big tech company he worked at. So if you’re a big tech company, why in the world would you hire him? So that was stupid decision number one, but they did decide to hire him, and once they hire him, they got a treat him like any other employee and give him a chance to show what he can do. And so that leads to mistake number two, which is these 2,000 employees who signed this petition really distorted and took out of context that passage. And I know the passage is cringe and gnarly, and it could certainly appear sexist, but you have to put it in its context. And this is a work of literature. This bestselling book, it’s what, 150,000 words or taking 150 words out of context. And the context was like you said, he’s describing the mother of his children, the love of his life as this sort of Linda Hamilton esque in Terminator type figure or Charlize Theron in Mad Max. And this passage is not in there. To describe all women is just basically a literary flourish to contrast the woman that he loves being such a bad ass compared to every other woman. And when Kara Swisher interviewed AGM five years ago, she brought up this passage, he explained it, and she said, Yeah, okay, I get it. So it’s certainly the case that people can understand the context if they choose to, and they simply are not choosing to understand the context. Which brings me to mistake number three, which is these 2,000 employees lied in their petition by claiming that their safety is threatened by Apple hiring AGM. That is simply untrue. It’s physically impossible in the era of Zoom when everyone’s working from home. But this guy is not a threat to anyone’s safety. But they use that claim. They make that claim because they know that if you accuse someone of threatening your safety, it will trigger the machinery of HR to remove that person from the workplace. This is the language of safety-ism and it’s a specific tactic to basically get somebody canceled and removed from the workplace. And then that leads to the next mistake, I think mistake number four, which is the bosses of Apple caved into this pressure. They were total cowards. They never even gave AGM the chance to explain himself. They never asked him what did you intend by this passage? What were you trying to do? And by the way, they knew about this book.
