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H.B.R. presents. Hello, it's Azima Zahr here and you're listening to Exponential View, a weekly

podcast in which I explore the shape of the near future, was some of the most thoughtful

founders, technologists and scientists. Today I'm in conversation with Meredith Whitaker, the co-director of the AI Now Institute, a research

group affiliated to New York University at NYU that looks at the social impact of artificial

intelligence.

Previously, Meredith worked at Google and was one of the

instigators of the Google Walkout when 20,000 staff protested against a culture of harassment

and discrimination at the company. Meredith, welcome to the Exponential View

podcast. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. We are recording about a year

since the famous Google Walkout. Could you take us back to that day?

What happened?

Well, on that day I got very little sleep.

I woke up at maybe 5 a.m.

I met some of my co-organizers in a park near the Google New York office and we started to try to make kind of a makeshift stage so that we could give speeches and realize that that was going to be hard because the

Park Service didn't allow us to move the tables and chairs.

We finally got something set up and we waited.

And a little before 11 when the walkout was timed we had to

globally every office that was participating walked out at 11 local times so we

had kind of rolling thunder starting in Tokyo and Singapore and

...