Surfing, robot memes and ‘upsetting’ Twitter: What we learned from Mark Zuckerberg’s Joe Rogan interview

Billionaire Facebook founder spent three-hours on The Joe Rogan Experience

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a surprise appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience where he sat for a three-hour interview with the controversial podcaster.

During the interview, which was filmed at Rogan’s studios in Austin, Texas, Zuckerberg pushed his company’s Metaverse expansion and claimed that it was the future for offices as well as home entertainment.

The notoriously private tech titan also gave a rare glimpse into his own life as he discussed his love of martial arts, UFC, and surfing with Rogan on the Spotify podcast.

Here are five things we learned from it.

Zuckerberg spent a lot of the pandemic at his family ranch in Kauai, Hawaii

The Facebook founder told Rogan that it gave him the chance to be more active.

“I hate sitting in front of my desk, I feel that if I’m not active I’m just wasting away,” he said.

“My energy level and mood and how I interact with the world is based on...its so physical. I don’t believe we are just brains in a body, our physical being and actions we take there are as much of kind the experience of being human.”

And he told Rogan that he spent hours every morning in the ocean before starting work.

“I spent a lot of time down in Kauai early on. I got really into surfing and hydrofoiling and I would get up early and go and do that and then be really refreshed for my day of meetings,” he said. “That is not something I could do in Palo Alto.”

Tech boss does not have time for social media and doesn’t enjoy watching TV

Zuckerberg said that he is too busy to get on social media platforms, despite founding the world’s most successful one.

“Me personally I am just doing so many things that in practice that there are not (enough) hours in the day,” he told Rogan.

He said that in what free time he does have he does a “bunch of messaging” but that he does not watch much TV as it puts him in “a weird mental state”.

He has seen the Internet’s robot memes

At the end of the podcast, Rogan teased the Meta CEO about how stiffly he had drunk a glass of water when he appeared before Congress in 2018.

“I don’t like the way you sip water though, you sipping water at the Senate, you were sipping water like a robot,” Rogan joked and asked Zuckerberg to take a proper drink.

Zuckerberg laughed and took a swig of water from a cup, before defending himself.

“The Senate testimony is not exactly an environment that is set up to accentuate the humanity of the subject,” Zuckerberg said. “If you’re up there for six or seven hours you’re going to make some face that is worth making a meme out of.”

Finds being on Twitter for too long ‘upsetting’

“I find that it’s hard to spend a lot of time on Twitter without getting too upset,” he told Rogan.

“On the flip side, I think Instagram is a super positive space. I think some of the critiques we get there is that it’s very curated and potentially, in some ways, overly positive... It’s easy to spend time there, and kind of absorb a lot of the positivity.”

Zuckerberg added that the design of Instagram was a deliberate one, saying “I don’t want to build something that makes people angry.”

Dreads checking his phone in the morning

Zuckerberg said that when he gets up in the morning he starts his day by looking at his phone, where he normally finds a “million messages” and they are “usually not good”.

“People reserve the good stuff to tell me in person, right?” the billionaire told the podcaster. “So it’s like what’s going on in the world that I need to pay attention to? So it’s almost like every day you wake up you are punched in the stomach.”