Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg promoted his company’s post-election makeover with an interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience” last week wherein Silicon Valley’s censor-in-chief suddenly became a champion of free speech and masculinity.
“It’s one thing to say we want to be kind of like welcoming and make a good environment for everyone and I think it’s another to basically say that ‘masculinity is bad,’” Zuckerberg said on Rogan’s podcast.
I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the kind of, the spectrum, where you’re like, okay, masculinity is toxic, we have to get rid of it completely. It’s like, no, both of these things are good. Right? You want feminine energy, you want masculine energy. I think you’re going to have parts of society that have more of one or the other. I think that’s all good. But I do think corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing.
Zuckerberg explained that his recent embrace of martial arts had shaped his thinking. The Facebook founder previously told Rogan in 2022 that he started Brazilian jiu-jitsu training after coronavirus lockdowns.
“I didn’t really feel that until I got involved in martial arts, which I think is still a much more masculine culture,” Zuckerberg said. “Not that it doesn’t try to be inclusive in its own way, but I think there’s just more of that energy there.”
Vice President-elect J.D. Vance suspected Zuckerberg was a closeted supporter of the Republican ticket last fall during a separate interview with Rogan just days before the election.
“My secret theory is that Zuck is now a Trump supporter, but he can’t say that publicly, of course,” Vance said. “But hopefully he is.”
The two credited the influence of martial arts on Zuckerberg’s transition, which was labeled by the Washington Post as a “bro-ification.”
“Zuckerberg has gotten really into mixed martial arts, he’s gotten really into jiu-jitsu and really into training, and there’s very few things that will turn you into a conservative more than martial arts,” Rogan said.
“Have you seen all these studies that basically connect testosterone levels in young adults and conservative politics?” Vance said. “So maybe that’s what’s going on.”
Scientist and author Kevin Bass shared one such study from 2021 on X in response to a listener speculating Zuckerberg was on performance-enhancing steroids. A researcher at Claremont Graduate University examined the political preferences of 136 healthy men during the 2011 presidential election season and found when “weakly affiliated Democrats received additional testosterone,” they reported a “red shift” in favorability towards Republicans.
Another study published by a team of researchers in Australia last July analyzed how changes in testosterone and the stress hormone cortisol could shift individuals’ opinions. They found men with increased testosterone were more likely to support a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico or Great Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Zuckerberg repeatedly slammed the Biden administration on Rogan’s podcast last week and condemned the censorship regime that his own company participated in.
“I don’t think that the [government] pushing for social media companies to censor stuff was legal,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg claimed that whenever Meta resisted requests from the White House, “all these different agencies and branches of government basically just, like, started investigating and coming after our company.”
“It was brutal,” Zuckerberg said. “It was brutal.”
The CEO behind Facebook and Instagram preceded the interview with the announcement that his company’s platforms would cease fact-checking operations as Americans prepare for the Republican administration to take over next week. Zuckerberg also recently appointed Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, who prominently endorsed Trump last year and spoke at the nominating convention in Wisconsin, to Meta’s board of directors.
“We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.,” said Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg, however, has made similar promises before, writing to the House Judiciary Committee just last summer that his company was “ready to push back” on election interference in the form of online censorship. But by September, Facebook was censoring Federalist coverage of Haitians hunting geese in Springfield, Ohio.
[RELATED: We’re Still Waiting For Facebook To Atone For The 11 Times (We Know Of) It Censored The Federalist]
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