5 Takeaways From Mark Zuckerberg’s Interview With Joe Rogan

Trump, censorship, and society-wide emasculation were highlights of the lengthy podcast.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington on Jan. 31, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared on actor and martial artist Joe Rogan’s podcast on Jan. 10, sparking interest days ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.

The episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” was aired just days after the tech founder announced that his company was changing its moderation policy, replacing fact-checkers with a less censorious system modeled on social media platform X’s Community Notes. He has also elevated Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a Trump ally, to Meta’s board of directors.

During the nearly three-hour episode, Zuckerberg and Rogan talked Trump, online censorship, the recent election, television versus podcasts, and the emasculation of society.

Trump ‘Wants America to Win’: Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg praised Trump on Rogan’s program, drawing a contrast between his prospective leadership and how the Biden administration has handled the tech industry.

“I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg said of Trump.

He also voiced regret for complying with requests to censor content on ideological grounds, particularly content related to COVID-19 while the Biden administration was pushing for COVID-19 vaccine uptake. He traced the rise of ideological censorship online to Trump’s election in 2016, which came alongside Brexit, and to the 2020 pandemic.

“We did generally defer to the government on some of these policies that in retrospect I probably wouldn’t, knowing what I know now,” he said.

“These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and ... scream at them and curse.”

The Facebook founder said that the United States should do more to defend its tech companies in other countries, citing legal actions by the European Union against Meta and other tech giants. He said that the U.S. government had set the stage for other governments to intervene through its own approach to Meta and other firms.

The Election Made a Mark

Zuckerberg told Rogan that the 2024 election had affected Meta’s approach to content moderation.

“The good thing about doing it after the election is you get to take this cultural pulse,” he said. “We try to have policies that reflect mainstream discourse.”

Joe Rogan during UFC 274 at Footprint Center in Phoenix on May 7, 2022. Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Yet he pushed back against claims that there was a particular significance to the timing, which coincides with other moves from Zuckerberg seemingly aimed at gaining support from the incoming administration—for example, Meta’s donation of $1 million to the Trump inaugural fund.

“I try not to change our content rules right in the middle of an election, either,” Zuckerberg said. “There’s not ... a good time to do this.”

Zuckerberg Talks Trade-Offs in Content Moderation

The Meta CEO spoke about his company’s decision to shut down its fact-checking program in favor of an X-style system in which users generate notes and vote them up or down.

He also drew attention to a related change—namely, the move to require more confidence from the company’s artificial intelligence-based systems before harmful content is removed.

A Jan. 7 announcement from Meta suggested the current approach is producing too many false positives, leading to “the vast majority of the censorship” on Meta’s platforms.

It stated that the systems will concentrate on “illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams” rather than the political content that was often flagged in the past.

On Rogan’s program, Zuckerberg said that there was a trade-off between precision and comprehensiveness. A more aggressive system for spotting drug-related content, for example, might catch more of that material while sweeping up many innocent posts in its dragnet. On the other hand, a more precise system might catch less of that targeted content while censoring fewer innocent posts.

“We will maybe take down a smaller amount of the harmful content, but it will also mean that we’ll dramatically reduce the amount of people whose accounts were taken off for a mistake—which is just a terrible experience,” Zuckerberg said.

‘I Hated Doing TV’: Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg discussed his early media appearances after founding Facebook in 2004 while a student at Harvard University. Like Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard.

“I hated doing TV,” he told Rogan. “I’d get super nervous.”

He recalled that, as a college-aged techie, he was “good at coding” but “real bad at ... talking to people.”

Zuckerberg said that the media outlets that hosted him would reduce his appearances to unflattering sound bites. He suggested that online podcasts succeed because they operate without those constraints.

“On the internet, there’s no reason to cut it to a four-minute sound bite,” he said.

Rogan agreed.

“Conversations are like a dance,” he said. “You kind of have to find the rhythm that you’re going to talk with, and then you have to actually be interested in what you’re talking about.”

Zuckerberg Warns of ‘Neutered or Emasculated’ Society

Zuckerberg also discussed his martial arts training. The Meta CEO practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

“It definitely takes the edge off things,” he said. “After a couple of hours doing that in the morning, it’s just like, yeah ... nothing else that day is going to stress you out that much.”

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies at a Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees joint hearing in Washington on April 10, 2018. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Zuckerberg reflected on society as a whole, saying that much of it has become “neutered or emasculated.”

He said that practicing martial arts allows him to express himself in a way that isn’t possible as the CEO of a large company, comparing the visuals of him fighting favorably to the brief sound bites he can provide through TV interviews.

“When people see me competing in this sport, they say, ‘Oh, no, that’s the real Mark,’” he said.