[turtleofdeath]

Replying here because I guess there's a limit.

> His reaching out to alt-right media and having a "Goolag" shirt on the very first interview suggests that he was kind of ready for it.

Which alt-right media did he reach out to? I've been paying pretty close attention and I saw him being interviewed by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, but they are not alt-right media. They are both classical conservatives.

> As anyone who's worked for Google (I have) will tell you, that's highly discouraged. You don't want to put Google or yourself into a weird legal position for posting publicly about this (for example, Google would have to track you down and make sure to archive all your internal emails moving forward for possible discovery, etc.)

Then all we have to go on are theories and the question: what's to be gained from him lying about this?

[dguaraglia]

> Which alt-right media did he reach out to?

His very first interview was with Stefan Molyneaux, a self-described "fighter for men's rights" (yeah, I know.)

> what's to be gained from him lying about this?

I don't think he was outright lying, I think he was just uninformed and made a lot of assumptions and drew conclusions (biased by his own political views) out of those assumptions. I do think his inflammatory approach to accusing Google and Googlers of "leftist bias" was a way to get attention.

About what's to be gained? Well... he's been interviewed by the New York Times and he'll probably get a book deal out of it, plus whatever money he might get if he manages to successfully sue Google.

[jshevek]

I've been told that his first interview was actually with Jordan Peterson. The Stefan interview with simply the first to be published maybe, or widely seen.

[dguaraglia]

You might be right. It was definitely the first I saw pop up.