Mark Zuckerberg On How He Starts His Days Without Coffee: ‘I Wake Up And I Fight People’

Via Theo Von / YouTube

Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is not a normal dude by many metrics even if there are some extremely relatable aspects to his character and daily life. First and foremost, he wakes up with fight burning inside of him.

Or rather, he wakes up ready to fight and acts on that by practicing MMA and training against the world’s best. Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Theo Von for an interview that just dropped and this topic of how MZ starts his day was at the beginning and I found it incredibly relatable, but also alien in some ways.

Zuckerberg and myself have semi-similar morning routines where we both wake up and immediately dive into some sort of exercise. I wake up around 5:20am most mornings and hit the gym by 5:45am and I’m back home by 7am to start my day where I then make a shake with chocolate protein powder, mixed frozen berries, creatine, PB2 powder, and (I swear by) Cometeer coffee..

That latter is where Mark and I could never see eye to eye. He doesn’t drink coffee save for a random day on vacation, saying he just doesn’t “like any kind of chemicals” in his body…like caffeine. I need the caffeine as a pickmeup after waking up early and coming home from a 75-minute workout every morning but not Mark Zuckerberg, he just needs to fight some dudes to get his heart pumping:

At 2:05, Mark declares “I wake up and I fight people.” He’s talking of course about MMA training and jiu-jitsu. He also wakes up around 7-7:30am every day which kind of blows my mind and I’m not quite sure why. I assumed a guy like that would wake up around 4am every day because of the asinine number of items on his to-do list every day but he Mark Zuckerberg tells Theo Von that’s the window he usually wakes up, once the kids start stirring.

After waking up and running through all of the top priority emails/notes, he says he composes his self and then goes “to fight for two hours” which is a SOLID workout, and probably a huge part of why Mark can stay in such great shape these days. Currently, he’s working on striking over jiu-jitsu which certainly suggests there’s a big fight on the horizon for MZ once he’s mastered more areas of training.

Mark Zuckerberg also told Theo Von that MMA / jiu-jitsu is “the greatest sport” because it is “neurologically stimulating, it’s good cardio, good strength” which is sort of glossing past the whole part about getting hit or kicked in the head and the potential neurological damage there but I get where Mark is going with all that.

What Does Theo Von Talk To Mark Zuckerberg About?

For those really wondering what a guy like Theo Von does with his 60 minutes speaking to the most influential person of the millennial generation… Well, he talks about driverless vehicles having meetups:

@theovon 

Talkin tech w/ #MarkZuckerberg

♬ original sound – Theo Von

I’d LOVE to know what was going through Mark Zuckerberg’s head while Theo Von was ranting about all of that. He was pretty polite about it though.