James Damore and Stefan Molyneux. YouTube

Fired Google engineer James Damore is standing by the controversial memo that lost him his job.

Damore said he wrote the memo, which criticizes Google's approach to diversity, after attending one of the company's diversity programs and finding it "secretive" and "shameful."

Damore made the comments in his first major interview since being fired, to alt-right YouTube personality Stefan Molyneux.

You can watch the full 45-minute interview below.

Damore said: "I went to a diversity program at Google. It was ... not recorded, totally secretive. I heard things that I definitely disagreed with in some of our programs. I had some discussions there. There was lots of just shaming and, 'No you can't say that — that's sexist,' and, 'You can't do this.'

"There's just so much hypocrisy in the things they are saying. I decided to create the document to clarify my thoughts."

Damore lost his job Monday after a turbulent 72 hours at Google. The saga began when he released the memo, titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," internally. It accused the firm of holding a left-wing, progressive bias and took issue with the effectiveness of its main diversity programs.

The document is dated July, but it was leaked to journalists on Sunday after more Googlers read the document and expressed their disgust on Twitter. CEO Sundar Pichai described Damore's views as "offensive" and "not OK."

During the interview, he said he wrote the memo to fill his time during a 12-hour work flight to China.

He also said he had received more messages of support than criticism.

He said: "There may be a lot of negative responses in the public. But very few of them actually send me messages. They just want to virtue signal to all their followers: 'I'm a great person, I share your morals. This person is bad.' But they don't really want to have a debate on why I'm wrong or even confront me — they just want to show how self-righteous they are.

"I've gotten a ton of personal messages of support, which has been really nice. I got that at Google before all of this leaked. Lots of upper management was shaming me."

Damore had been mostly silent over the past four days, saying only that he planned to take legal action against Google. On Monday, he filed a complaint with US federal labor officials. Speaking with Molyneux, Damore didn't comment on any legal action against Google or on what he plans to do next.

But during the conversation he continued to back his viewpoints from the memo. At one point he said, "I'm not saying any female engineers are in any way worse than the average male engineer." But that message may be compromised by the fact that Molyneux has published videos with titles such as "Why Feminists Hate Men: What They Won't Tell You!" and "Why Feminism Hurts Women: What They Won't Tell You!"

Damore said he was also prompted to write the memo by other Google employees "not in this groupthink" who felt "isolated and alienated." He said more conservative employees were thinking of leaving Google because they thought the company had a left-wing bias that was "getting so bad."

"I really thought it was a problem Google itself had to fix," he said. "Hopefully they do."