Mark Zuckerberg is one of the founders of social media giant Facebook and the current CEO of Meta, and he’s recently revealed just how much he loves watching MMA and training BJJ. Zuckerberg is one of the richest men on earth and has built a social media empire that includes some of the most popular apps on the planet, but he’s still able to make some time for grappling. He recently appeared on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience and the conversation naturally turned to another of Rogan’s jobs as commentator for the UFC, only for Zuckerberg to reveal that he was actually quite a big fan:
“I really like watching UFC for example, but I also like doing the sport. It’s because I have a connection to it. Since COVID, I got super into surfing and foiling, and then really into MMA. I know a lot of people who do it. There’s actually this really interesting connection between people who surf and do jiu-jitsu, and I basically collected a bunch of recommendations, ran them by a bunch of people who I know, and I trained with this guy Dave Camarillo – Guerilla Jiu Jitsu – the crazy thing is, it really is the best sport.”
The man that Zuckerberg is referring to is an incredibly well-respected BJJ and Judo instructor, with Camarillo having worked with some of the best fighters on the planet on a regular basis. Dave Camarillo has trained in Judo since he was just a child and even travelled to Japan to develop his experience in the art, before transitioning to BJJ. His BJJ journey began under Cesar Gracie and Ralph Gracie where he trained alongside former UFC world champion BJ Penn and earned a brown belt in just two years of training. Camarillo was eventually promoted to black belt under Ralph Gracie and travelled to American Kickboxing Academy to work as their head grappling coach, training UFC champions like Daniel Cormier and Cain Velasquez.
While Mark Zuckerberg makes reference to both MMA and BJJ, it’s likely that the majority of his training time is spent grappling and based on the comments he makes, that seems accurate:
“The question isn’t how did I get into it, it’s how did I not know about it until right now? From, like, the very first session that I did, like, five minutes in—where has this been my whole life? My mom made me do three varsity sports and my life took a wrong turn when I chose to do fencing competitively instead of wrestling in high school or something. There’s something so primal about it, I don’t know. Since then I’ve just introduced a bunch of my friends to it – we train together, and we like, wrestle together, and there is a certain intensity to it that I like. I also find just wrestling around with friends is awesome.”
It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that Mark Zuckerberg enjoys watching MMA and training BJJ however, as Facebook employees have been training in the sport for quite some time and have even received company-branded gis in the past. It’s still nice to see someone as rich and powerful as Zuckerberg enjoy spending his time on the mats, especially because a lot of what he says actually echoes the feelings of most people who have ever done martial arts:
“MMA is like the perfect thing. Because it’s like, if you stop paying attention for one second, you’re gonna end up on the bottom. Yeah, right. So I’ve just found that that is just really important for me, in terms of like, what I do and being able to just kind of maintain my energy level, maintain my focus, because then like, after, you know, an hour or two of, of working out or rolling or wrestling with friends or training with different folks, it’s like, now I’m ready to go solve whatever problem at work for the day and like I’ve fully processed all the different news for the day. That’s, that’s come in, and and we’re just ready to go.”
