While Joe Rogan will not be having former President Donald Trump on his podcast, he did bring on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and the conversation contained tough questions.
Rogan took aim at Facebook’s censorship policies and asked the company’s founder about his career during “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast Thursday.
Rogan claimed in the podcast that Facebook profits off of “encouraging dissent” and quizzed Zuckerberg about how the company handles controversial topics. Zuckerberg admitted the process has flaws as a result of his main goal of creating technology.
“I didn’t get into this to judge those things. I got into this to design technology that helps people connect,” Zuckerberg said.
Rogan also grilled the CEO on how his company can tell whether someone is real or not on the website. Zuckerberg assured him that the company doesn’t take censorship mistakes lightly.
“When we take down something that we’re not supposed to, that is the worst,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.
Zuckerberg further explained that there are a lot of signals as to whether a person is legitimate, such as the IP address and seeing where they are from. Ultimately, Zuckerberg said there are some trade-offs that his company has to make depending on whether it is strict or lenient on censorship.
“You could either build a system and you could either be overly aggressive and capture a higher percentage of the bad guys but then also by accident take out some number of good guys. Or you could be a little more lenient and say, ‘OK, the cost of taking out any number of good guys is too high so we’re gonna tolerate having a little bit more bad guys on the system.’ These are values questions,” he said.
Facebook has grown from a startup in 2004 to one of the biggest tech companies in the world valued $454 billion, according to Fortune. Zuckerberg said on the podcast that he feels stress from various negative aspects in his career.
“It’s almost like every day you wake up and you’re punched in the stomach,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “You wake up in the morning, look at my phone, get like a million messages. It’s usually not good. People reserve the good stuff to tell me in person.”
While Rogan didn’t let Zuckerberg off easy in his interview, he did agree with Zuckerberg on a recent statement, according to CNN.
“Mark Zuckerberg is a smart guy and is really ambitious. ... In Zuckerberg’s quote that I read recently that says, ‘What’s good for the world is not necessarily good for Facebook,’ I’m like, that’s it,” Rogan said.