Joe Rogan took aim at woke “activist” employees of large Silicon Valley tech firms, calling them “mentally ill” and “lunatics who are running the asylum to a certain extent.”
Rogan made the comments on his Spotify podcast during an interview Wednesday with Antonio García Martínez, an ex-engineer at Apple and Facebook who parted ways with the iPhone maker after employees complained of “misogynistic” writings in his book.
During the segment, Rogan asked Martínez what it was like to work for a large tech firm.
“For someone from the outside, we look at it and say: ‘How are those f–king places run?’” Rogan said.
The stand-up comedian then said he had a conversation with a “good friend” who was in a management position at Google before leaving the firm for another “large tech company.”
“The way she described it to me was, ‘It is utter madness,’” Rogan said.
“The lunatics are running the asylum to a certain extent because there’s a lot of people working inside the company now that legitimately are mentally ill and they consider themselves activists,” according to Rogan.
He added that tech bosses at these companies “have to placate” the workers “because they’re a certain percentage of the population that works for the company, and they’re the loudest, and they oftentimes don’t get work done.”
Rogan said that when these workers are “confronted” over not getting work done, “they talk about their activism.”
He said his friend was forced to reprimand tech workers by telling them: “You are here for X amount of hours per day. This is your f—–g job. You’re not an activist.”
Martínez told Rogan that the companies are partly to blame because workers are encouraged by human resources departments to “bring the real self to work.”
He described big tech firms like Facebook as “kind of like a cult” since employees are brought to a “campus lifestyle” where “they do your laundry for you” and “feed you.”
“Facebook was a cult, and I joined it, and I was a happy member of it,” Martínez said. “It was very powerful. Everyone sacrificed themselves for the sake of the empire and its emperor.”
Rogan has been a frequent critic of tech firms for censoring and de-platforming those with viewpoints deemed outside the mainstream.
Spotify, which signed Rogan to a nine-figure licensing deal, was pressured to dump the controversial podcaster after rocker Neil Young and other artists removed their songs from the streaming platform.
Rogan has been accused of giving a platform to skeptics of COVID-19 vaccines and pandemic lockdown measures. He denies being an “anti-vaxxer.”
