Why Mark Zuckerberg Got Lost in Space with Joe Rogan
By J. Max Robins, September 7, 2022
I recently listened to the entire gabfest Meta chieftain Mark Zuckerberg did for The Joe Rogan Experience, an event I have since filed under “T” for “Three Hours of My Life I Will Never Get Back.” On the face of it, you could look at the August 25 sit-down as a savvy ploy to position Zuckerberg for Rogan’s millions of mostly male and politically quite right of center podcast listeners, as the ultimate nerd bro. After all, the 38-year-old gazillionaire and Harvard dropout is, like, also a surfer dude, who is consumed with creating ridiculously cool virtual reality gadgetry, and who shares Rogan’s obsession with mixed martial arts and the UFC.
The problem arises when you go beyond the face of it to realize that Zuckerberg, in word and deed, is shockingly without peer in the current class of big-money media emperors of evil. And that’s saying something.
Problems? What Problems?
Obviously, Zuckerberg wouldn’t have entered Rogan’s Octagon without ground rules about what could and couldn’t be discussed. While the New York Post and other right-leaning outlets trumpeted Zuckerberg’s strained explanation of his handling of the Hunter Biden Laptop story, I found the whole exercise more interesting for what wasn’t discussed. Nowhere during the conversation, for example, did Rogan ask why Meta’s stock price had fallen by 50% in the last 12 months. And I couldn’t help but notice that the conversation took place just weeks before the one-year anniversary of the The Facebook Files, the Wall Street Journal’s devastating investigation of Zuckerberg’s empire that demonstrated how the company repeatedly identified the “ill-effects” of its platforms, and “the clearest picture thus far of how broadly Facebook’s problems are known inside the company up to the chief executive himself.”
Rogan, whose podcast has been a safe haven for a long list of anti-vax quacks, did not engage Zuckerberg there, knowing his guest has been a big proponent of Covid vaccines. And not surprisingly, Rogan stayed away from revelations in The Facebook Files detailing how Zuckerberg knew from internal research that Instagram had been devastatingly detrimental to the mental health of adolescent girls, as well as being a tragically fantastic marketing tool for human traffickers. With all that seemingly freewheeling time the two spent together, there wasn’t a single question raised about any senseless havoc perpetrated by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Such as? Well, nowhere were there questions about the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Russian manipulation of Facebook in the 2016 White House race or the far-reaching manipulation of the site in 2018 to stoke the genocide fires in Myanmar. Also ignored were recent charges from respected Ukrainian news outlets about censorship of their war coverage while Putin-controlled news organizations such as Russia Today and Sputnik proliferated their propaganda all over the social media behemoth.
‘Not Fully Formed as a Person’
It’s understandable; Zuckerberg had more important topics to cover. To wit: He mentioned that his jiu-jitsu instructor was Rogan’s buddy Dave Camarillo, and waxed ceaselessly about his hands-on work developing Ray Ban smart glasses and other metaverse stuff. It’s much easier for the Meta supremo to turn his focus on creating an alternate reality, as opposed to dealing with the grim reality of the social media hellscape that devolves under his careless watch.
Perhaps nobody is wiser about the Meta boss’s mindset than David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, which became the definitive Zuckerberg biography when it was published in 2010. The founder and editor-in-chief of Techonomy Media, Kirkpatrick has known Zuckerberg since Facebook’s earliest days. “What’s essential to understand is that Zuckerberg has total control of the company,” says Kirkpatrick, “With all this emphasis on the metaverse, what he’s doing is sublimating and doesn’t have to deal with the reality of what he has wrought.”
Kirkpatrick says that if Zuckerberg did not have ultimate control of the scandal-ridden Meta, an independent board would have fired him long ago. “He dropped out of college and is not fully formed as a person,” adds Kirkpatrick, who believes that becoming so rich and powerful so young has encouraged him to run amuck: “There is no business leader less ethical than Zuckerberg.”
Gut Punches Galore
In what may be the biggest reveal in Zuckerberg’s Rogan Experience, it became clear why the Facebook chief is so vested in virtual reality. In a candid moment, he told Rogan about how his day begins with “millions of emails” and that they usually contain bad news. “It’s like, okay, what’s going on in the world that I need to kind of pay attention to that day, so it’s almost like, every day you wake up and you’re like, punched in the stomach and that’s like, okay, well, fuck.”
Where’s the pleasure in that? So, if you’re the Meta tutti di capo, why not spend billions developing VR, so you can shape a different reality while distracting the marketplace? You can create a reality much more soothing than the real one. That’s better than facing the reality of the digital cesspool you’ve spawned and repeatedly neglected, a reality that could truly benefit from your infinite resources in an effort to clean up your polluted social media wasteland.
It would be worth it for Mark Zuckerberg to do the right thing; that way, despite the billions in the bank, he might wake up in the morning and not feel like he’s been punched in the gut. But after listening to the ultimate power broker get all pally on Rogan, I envision a different fate, one that mixes an escape from reality and an area of interest: Maybe he’ll do some time on a UFC show, and even come between some fighters. Perhaps that’s the gut punch he’d need to truly wake up to reality.
J. Max Robins (@jmaxrobins) is executive director of the Center for Communication. The former editor-in-chief of Broadcasting & Cable, he has contributed to publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Columbia Journalism Review and Forbes. Read more from J. Max Robins at www.jmaxrobins.com
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The Facebook honcho appeared on the August 25 Joe Rogan podcast. Was it a savvy ploy to position Zuckerberg to Rogan’s millions of mostly male and politically quite right of center listeners? (Photo: Flickr)
