I'm Ali Jackson Jolly with Forbes. I am here with Renee Myers. She is the former head of

inclusion for Netflix. She is also one of the original DEI strategists. Renée, welcome. And

thanks for being here with us. Thank you, Ali. I'm happy to be here. Yeah, well, my gosh, do we have a lot to talk about.

Am I right?

You can be here all day, sure.

But I want to start with, you know, looking through your bio and for those who aren't familiar,

you are a Harvard-educated attorney before you went into diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And you were doing that strategy long before 2020, long before the murder of George Floyd,

when many in corporate America woke up to the need for this.

But so with that degree that you have, that experience you have,

let's just get right into it. When you hear a lot of rhetoric around DEI hires and that

being code for unqualified people of color, what's your response to that? I feel like what year is it exactly?

Because you're right, I started this working on diversity, equity, inclusion. It was 19, I mean,

yeah, it was 1995, right? I came up in Boston as an attorney. And somewhere along the way,

the people in the Boston community realized that there was this deposity of black attorneys

in the major law firms where I was practicing. And they started looking around and noticing

that there were only black men who were partners and very few of them.

And there was this huge like discrepancy between when they came in as partners and the next

set of partners as in we weren't making progress.

And so when I hear people say something about qualifications and really attributing that

to race and ethnicity, my heart kind of sinks because I'm like, I thought we already talked

about this, that this is not the same as lowering standards or sometimes people would say

...