Joe Rogan slammed employees of large Bay Area tech firms as woke ‘activists’ on his podcast Wednesday, labeling employees for companies such as Google as ‘mentally ill’ and ‘lunatics who are running the asylum to a certain extent.’
Speaking to Silicon Valley vet Antonio García Martínez, an ex-engineer at Apple and Facebook who was fired by the Mac maker after staffers petitioned to have him nixed over ‘misogynistic’ writings in his autobiographical book, in which he wrote ‘women in the Valley are ‘full of sh*t’ and likened a former Indian coworker to a ‘bored auto-rickshaw driver from Delhi.’
Rogan, 54, asked the seasoned tech specialist what it was like to work at the two tech giants.
‘What is it like being in those companies?’ Rogan asked his guest. ‘Like whether it’s Facebook or, you know, any sort of tech company.’
‘For someone from the outside, we look at it and say: ‘How are those f**king places run?’
Before Martinez, who previously served as a quantitative analyst at Goldman Sachs, could respond, Rogan recalled a conversation with a ‘good friend’ who worked in a management position at Google before leaving the search giant for another ‘large tech company.’
‘And the way she described it to me she’s like it is utter madness,’ the comic and UFC commentator said. ‘And the lunatics are running the asylum to a certain extent.’
Rogan continued: ‘Because a lot of people that are inside the company that legitimately are mentally ill and they consider themselves activists.
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Joe Rogan slammed employees of large Bay Area tech firms as woke ‘activists’ on his podcast Wednesday, labeling employees for companies such as Google as ‘mentally ill’ and ‘lunatics who are running the asylum to a certain extent’
‘And they have to placate them,’ the former Fear Factor host asserted, ‘because there’s a certain percentage of the population of the people that work for the company, and they’re the loudest – and they oftentimes don’t get work done.’
Rogan then frustratingly remarked that whenever those woke workers are ‘confronted’ over not getting work done, ‘they talk about their activism.’
Rogan then told Martinez, 45, how his friend was forced to tell staffers at the search company that worked under her: ‘You are here for X amount of hours per day. This is your f**king job. You’re not an activist.’
Martínez, who penned Chaos Monkeys – a work that recalls his experiences working at Bay Area tech firms and likens Silicon Valley staffers to the quintessential image of a room full of monkeys who carelessly clank away on typewriter keys indefinitely – responded by saying the firms employing these people are partly to blame, due to them encouraging staffers ‘bring the real self to work.’
He described to Rogan how big tech firms such as Facebook are ‘kind of like a cult’,’ where 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,’ conceded Martínez, who worked for the Mark Zuckerberg-run platform between 2011 and 2013, during which time he became an influential figure on the company’s ad product team.
‘It was very powerful. Everyone sacrificed themselves for the sake of the empire and its emperor.’
‘Did it change your own personal thinking, while you were there in the cult?’ Rogan went on to ask.
Martínez, who penned Chaos Monkeys – a work that recalls his experiences working at Bay Area tech firms and likens Silicon Valley staffers to the quintessential image of a room full of monkeys who carelessly clank away on typewriter keys indefinitely -described to Rogan how big tech firms such as Facebook are ‘kind of like a cult,’ ‘where employees are brought to a ‘campus lifestyle’ where ‘they do your laundry for you’ and ‘feed you’
‘Oh yeah,’ Martinez remarked, saying that he was ‘vaguely aware’ of the bubble that surrounded the tech company, due to his education at tech-heavy University of California, Berkeley.
The rest of the discussion revolved around Martinez’s experiences in those companies involving targeted ads implemented on tech companies’ respective platforms.
Martínez was axed by Apple brass after just a month on the job when his new coworkers unearthed controversial passages from his 2016 memoir, written after he was fired from Facebook in 2013, which they branded sexist and racist.
Those colleagues flagged up his book’s claims that ‘women are ‘full of sh*t’ and another excerpt likening a former Indian coworker to a ‘bored auto-rickshaw driver from Delhi.’
It quickly ruffled feathers within the company, with 2,000 outraged Apple employees signing a petition demanding an investigation into the decision to hire him.
Apple staffers took issue with comments made in Chaos Monkeys – a former New York Times bestseller which they deemed offensive.
Martinez was fired by Apple in 2021 after just a month on the job after staffers petitioned to have him nixed over ‘misogynistic’ writings in his autobiographical book, Chaos Monkeys, in which he wrote ‘women in the Valley are ‘full of sh*t’ and likened a former Indian coworker to a ‘bored auto-rickshaw driver from Delhi’
García Martínez wrote that ‘most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak’ and claimed he was ‘snookered into fatherhood via warm smiles and pliant thighs’ after admitting he ‘played it fast and loose with the safe-sex rules.’
He also crudely nicknamed a female coworker ‘PMMess’ – a derogatory term for a woman during her period – and described a colleague with a ‘thick Indian accent’ as an ‘auto-rickshaw driver’ in Delhi.
García Martínez released the book back in 2016, chronicling his move from Wall Street to Silicon Valley and promising a behind-the-scenes look at Facebook after he was fired from his advertising manager role at the social media giant in 2013.
Rogan has served as an outspoken critic of tech firms, for their censoring and de-platforming of those whose viewpoints are deemed to be not worthy by mainstream media.
On Saturday, the popular podcaster lambasted liberal media outlets for creating a false ‘narrative’ surrounding Hunter Biden‘s lost laptops, after it was revealed incriminating text messages, photos and financial documents found on the devices were authentic.
During the Saturday airing of The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan called out journalists for suppressing the story, first reported by The New York Post and DailyMail.com in the weeks before the 2020 election.
He spoke days after The New York Times finally admitted Hunter Biden’s laptop was real, having haughtily dismissed the story as ‘misinformation’ in the run-up to last year’s White House contest.
‘This is the problem that I had with the New York Post article and the Hunter Biden laptop being suppressed,’ Rogan told guest, former CIA officer and security expert Mike Baker on air during the podcast.
‘It’s not that I’m a Trump supporter,’ Rogan first disclaimed. ‘I didn’t vote for him, I’ve never voted for any Republican in my life.’
The pair discussed staffers’ behavior at Bay Area tech firms such as Google, situated in Mountain View in Silicon Valley
He continued: ‘You’re looking at something that’s real information, and you’re hiding it from people cause you don’t like the result you think is going to come out of that information.
‘That’s not how we’re supposed to be doing things.’
Earlier this year, Spotify, which signed Rogan to a nine-figure licensing deal in 2021, was pressured to part ways with the podcaster after singer-songwriter Neil Young and a slew of other artists removed their songs from the streaming platform, due to their refusal to work for a platform that employs Rogan because of his reported spread of ‘misinformation’ involving vaccines and the coronavirus.
Rogan has rebuked these claims, insisting that he is not an ‘anti-vaxxer.’
Rogan was then forced to apologize for the clips – which were recorded over the course of several years before he signed with Spotify – in a post to Instagram.
‘I never used it to be racist, because I’m not racist,’ he told his followers on the social media platform last month.
‘There’s nothing I can do to take that back. I wish I could. Obviously, that’s not possible. I certainly wasn’t trying to be racist, and I certainly would never want to offend someone for entertainment with something as stupid as racism.’
