Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan have something in common: They get easily frustrated by their spouses when they work from home.
Rogan interviewed the Facebook founder for three hours on his “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast Thursday.
The two were discussing the drawbacks of working from home, particularly in light of efforts by tech companies to bring their employees back into the office.
“There’s definitely a big pushback now about people going to the office, rather than working from home, like people would rather just do their work from home,” Rogan said.
“They’re like with the internet connections as they are today and the ability to video conference, like why do I have to be physically in the building in order to get my work done?”
“I agree with that too,” Zuckerberg said. The portion of the podcast was transcribed by the news site Mediaite.
“Um, you know, our company’s actually pretty forward-leaning on remote work. I mean, just especially some types of work, especially software engineering, you can do pretty well from a lot of different places.”
Zuckerberg continued: “And if you’re an engineer, sometimes it’s actually better to not be in the office because then people aren’t bugging you. You kind of want like a block of like five hours where you can just work on a problem.”
The Meta CEO then seemed to imply that his wife, Priscilla Chan, knocks him out of concentration when he’s in a “flow.”
“I don’t know, it’s like I have this thing where, you know, it’s — I’ll be like in zone kind of flow concentration working on something and you know, my wife will like ask me some, some like basic question and I’ll just be like, ‘Oh man,’ it’s like, ‘I just like lost my flow,’” Zuckerberg said.
“From her perspective, it’s like, ‘Oh, not a big deal, it was a quick question, just go back to what you’re doing,’” the Meta chief said.
“It’s like, nah, that’s not how it works, so I do think to some degree, having people be able to work remotely, is actually pretty useful for a lot of things.”
Zuckerberg added: “But I think we’ll need to find this mix. I think we’ll need to find the mix.”
“I physically run away from my wife when I have a joke idea,” said Rogan, who is also a stand-up comedian. He has been married to Jessica Ditzel for 13 years.
“If she’s talking and I have an idea, I will just run away. I just go, ‘I got an idea,’” he said.
“I just have to, like, she gets it, so it’s okay. But yeah, if I’m in the middle of writing and she comes in and interrupts, it’s over. Just gets shattered.”
During the interview, Zuckerberg told Rogan that it was wrong for Facebook to ban the sharing of The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
He said he regretted Facebook’s handling of the bombshell story — but he still defended the process as “pretty reasonable.”
nypost.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism