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I’ll spare you the experience of listening to one of the richest men in the world whine and just tell you straight out: Mark Zuckerberg’s interview on The Joe Rogan Experience is full of lies.
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Journalist/developer. Storytelling developer @ USA Today Network. Builder of @HomicideWatch. Sinophile for fun. Past: @frontlinepbs @WBUR, @NPR, @NewsHour.
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When Islam Makhachev and Arman Tsarukyan met for the first time, Makhachev was a known problem and Tsarukyan was a mystery. What unfolded in their fifteen minutes in the cage was remarkable. They might as well have been sent from the future to show us what MMA should be in another twenty years. And yet they were both still young prospects with time to grow.
Now, five years on from their original meeting, we get to see the two rematch for the UFC lightweight title. Let us take a look at some of the notable tactics and habits both showed in their first fight.
Striking in the Clinch
Randy Couture believed that pummeling was the key to mixed martial arts, and his success with this philosophy lead to a general belief that Greco Roman wrestling was the “best base” for MMA for quite a while. Pummeling in principle is exchanging one control or grip for another. Most commonly pummeling means digging for underhooks, but the idea can be extended to other controls and the devilish details of modern guard passing and leg lock work is in “leg pummeling.”
Couture himself stressed the importance of pummeling for grips while using strikes. Most of his fights involve him grabbing a collar tie with one hand, scoring a few uppercuts with the other, and then switching to holding the head with that hand for a few more. But in Makhachev vs Tsarukyan 1, the use of strikes to lubricate the pummeling for controls was a little sneakier.
When the two men hit the over-under clinch, Makhachev would begin digging with his knee to ribs on the side that Tsarukyan had the underhook. If Tsarukyan tried to move Makhachev around to keep his feet on the mat, Makhachev would start hacking away with short uppercuts on the same side. These successfully irritated Tsarukyan to the point that he tried to block them. He could not block with his underhooking arm because that was already committed to its own task. Instead Tsarukyan brought his overhooking arm across to block his midriff.
Fig. 4
Butterflies / Elevators
Makhachev’s recent success as a striker has not made anyone forget what he is really about: smothering top control. There have been just a few opponents who have found some success getting out from underneath Makhachev, and the fact that Tsarukyan did not get held down until late into the third round was remarkable at the time of the first fight.
Tsarukyan’s success from the bottom had a common factor with Alexander Volkanovski’s and Mansour Barnoaui’s: it took place out in the open mat. When Tsarukyan attempted to wall walk in this bout, Makhachev sat on his legs and stalled him out in the seated position. When Tsarukyan was out in the open, he was able to use the space to create scrambles.
Another important feature of Tsarukyan’s bottom game was his use of butterfly hooks. Butterfly sweeping Makhachev onto his back is almost an absurd prospect, but Tsarukyan was able to use his butterflies to draw Makhachev’s weight onto him, and then throw it away from him and get to his knees.
When Volkanovski used his “head into the ringpost” defence with Makhachev behind him, Makhachev ended up tripping Volkanovski down on top of him, and Volkanovski was able to turn over into the overhook and stand up again.
While it is not strictly butterfly offense, I would be remiss to not point out that Tsarukyan did something I have seen maybe a handful of times ever to get out from underneath Makhachev later in the fight. As Makhachev sprawled over his butterfly hook and into a half guard, Tsarukyan turned in, grabbed inside Makhachev’s thigh and powered his way up on a head outside single leg by basically doing a Turkish get up with a man attached.
Fig. 11
You will see weirder fighters like Linton Vassell and Rani Yahya use head outside singles from their knees, but they don’t just explode up out of bottom half guard like this. Maybe not something anyone else will ever be able to use, but notable.
Arman’s Lack of Open Stance Options
The first fight is remembered for the scrambles and the long periods of clinch work, and this did not leave a great deal of time for striking at range. In the few moments that did unfold on the feet it was hard to ignore that Tsarukyan struggled with the open stance match-up presented by the southpaw Makhachev.
This merits even more attention when you account for the level of success Tsarukyan has had on the feet in the five years since. His left hook is lightning quick on the counter—as Christos Giagos was told once he woke up—and his left leg kicking game stands out as both powerful and dexterous, which is unusual on an orthodox fighter. Yet since the Makhachev fight, Tsarukyan has met just two southpaws (Aubin-Mercier and Beneil Dariush), and encountered brief moments of it against the switch-hitting Mateusz Gamrot.
The complete extent of Tsarukyan’s striking against Makhachev was using the shifting right hook to chase him back. Volkanovski had success doing the same thing in his first fight against Makhachev, until it became apparent that against a southpaw this was going to be a solid 85% of his output.
In the gif below you will see two identical moments from different points in the fight, wherein Tsarukyan throws a right hand, steps through into a second right hand (now his lead hand), and then throws a left high kick. One quirk of Tsarukyan is that because he can kick high, he feels as though he always should. A left low kick after the shift might have served him much better in the long run.
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Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, sets the tone at the very beginning: “I think at some level you only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice, right?”
Unfortunately I wasn’t born yesterday, and I remember Zuckerberg’s first attempt at getting rich: FaceMash, a clone of HotOrNot where he uploaded photos of his fellow female students to be rated — without their consent. “Giving people a voice” is one way of describing that, I suppose. Personally, I’d call it “creep shit.”
If you can get away with the small bullshit, you can get away with the big bullshit, right?
Early on in the interview, Zuckerberg tests out the water to see how much pushback he’ll get; Rogan is a notoriously soft interviewer — it’s like listening to your dumbest stoned friend hold a conversation — but he does occasionally challenge his guests. So Zuckerberg says that there are limits on the First Amendment by saying, “It’s like, all right, you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.”
“Fire in a crowded theater” makes every lawyer I know foam at the mouth because it’s flat out wrong. It is not the law, and it never has been. And, obviously, you can yell “fire” in a crowded theater — especially if, you know, the theater is on fire. Rogan says nothing in response to this, and Zuckerberg knows he’s got a willing mark. If you can get away with the small bullshit, you can get away with the big bullshit, right?
For his part, Rogan serves up Zuckerberg a series of softballs, setting his own tone by referring to content moderation as “censorship.” The idea that the government was forcing Zuckerberg to “censor” news about covid and covid vaccines, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the election is something of a running theme throughout the interview. When Zuckerberg isn’t outright lying about any of this, he’s quite vague — but in case you were wondering, a man who was formally rebuked by the city of San Francisco for putting his name on a hospital while his platforms spread health misinformation thinks that “on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative.” Whew!
Misinformation on Facebook started well before the 2016 election — as early as 2014, scammers were spreading Ebola lies on Facebook. Shortly after the 2016 election, Adam Mosseri — then Facebook’s VP of product management — said in a statement that Facebook was combating fake news but “there’s so much more we need to do.” Facebook did receive criticism for spreading fake news, including misinformation that benefitted President Donald Trump, but even then, Zuckerberg wasn’t having it. “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news,” Zuckerberg said.
“It’s something out of like 1984.”
Still, in the 2020 election, Facebook — along with other social media networks — took a harsher stance on fake news, making it harder for Macedonian teenagers to make a profit off Trump supporters. During his Rogan interview, Zuckerberg now characterizes this intervention as giving “too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying, okay, there’s no way that this guy could have gotten elected except for misinformation.”
Facebook implemented a fact-checking program, one that involved partners such as the conservative online magazine The Dispatch, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and USA Today. In a concession to Donald Trump’s second presidency, implemented before Trump even took the oath of office, Zuckerberg has said Facebook will end the program. “We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in the video announcing the move.
On the Rogan show, Zuckerberg went further in describing the fact-checking program he’d implemented: “It’s something out of like 1984.” He says the fact-checkers were “too biased,” though he doesn’t say exactly how.
The problem wasn’t that the fact-checking was bad; it was that conservatives are more likely to share misinformation and get fact-checked, as some research has shown. That means conservatives are also more likely to be moderated. In this sense, perhaps it wasn’t Facebook’s fact-checking systems that had a liberal bias, but reality.
The biggest lie of all is a lie of omission
Well, Zuckerberg’s out of the business of reality now. I am sympathetic to the difficulties social media platforms faced in trying to moderate during covid — where rapidly-changing information about the pandemic was difficult to keep up with and conspiracy theories ran amok. I’m just not convinced it happened the way Zuckerberg describes. Zuckerberg whines about being pushed by the Biden administration to fact-check claims: “These people from the Biden administration would call up our team, and, like, scream at them, and curse,” Zuckerberg says.
“Did you record any of these phone calls?” Rogan asks.
“I don’t know,” Zuckerberg says. “I don’t think we were.”
Many of the controversial moderation calls Facebook made in the pandemic were during the Trump administration
Rogan then asks who, specifically, was pressuring Facebook. And Zuckerberg has no answer: “It was people in the Biden administration,” he says. “I think it was, you know, I wasn’t involved in those conversations directly, but I think it was.”
But the biggest lie of all is a lie of omission: Zuckerberg doesn’t mention the relentless pressure conservatives have placed on the company for years — which has now clearly paid off. Zuckerberg is particularly full of shit here because Republican Rep. Jim Jordan released Zuckerberg’s internal communications which document this!
In his letter to Jordan’s committee, Zuckerberg writes, “Ultimately it was our decision whether or not to take content down.” Emphasis mine. “Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
Those emails also reveal Zuckerberg wanted to blame the Biden White House for how Facebook chose to moderate the “lab leak” conspiracy theory of covid origins. “Can we include that the WH put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory?” he asked in a WhatsApp chat. His former president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, responded, “I don’t think they put specific pressure on that theory.”
Joel Kaplan, the former George W. Bush advisor who has now replaced Clegg, said that blaming the White House for Facebook’s behavior would “supercharge” conservatives who believed the social media giant was “collaborating” with the Biden administration. “If they’re more interested in criticizing us than actually solving the problems, then I’m not sure how it’s helping the cause to engage with them further,” Zuckerberg wrote. This doesn’t seem to show that the Biden administration successfully censored anything.
Facebook was widely and obviously targeted by Republican lawmakers
In fact, many of the controversial moderation calls Facebook made in the pandemic were during the Trump administration. Take, for instance, the “Plandemic” video hoax: Facebook removed the video in 2020. Joe Biden took office in 2021. If Zuckerberg was dealing with an administration pressuring him about this, it was the Trump administration. The Biden White House may well have engaged in similar outreach, but it was joining what was already an active discussion about Facebook moderation.
Facebook was widely and obviously targeted by Republican lawmakers, including Jordan, Senator Ted Cruz, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Texas governor Greg Abbott, Senator Marsha Blackburn, and incoming Vice President JD Vance. It was mostly conservatives who threatened him during the interminable and pointless Congressional hearings Zuckerberg sat through for years – often asking him to comment directly on conspiracy theories or demand that individual trolls be reinstated to his platforms.
But Zuckerberg didn’t mention any of that to Rogan. Instead, he was upset that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started investigating him for improperly using financial information to target ads. What does Zuckerberg say about this? Well, let me give it to you straight:
They kind of found some theory they wanted to investigate. And it’s like, okay, clearly they were trying really hard, right? To like, to like, find, find some theory, but it, like, I don’t know. It just, it kind of, like, throughout the, the, the, the, the party and the government, there was just sort of, I don’t know if it’s, I don’t know how this stuff works. I mean, I’ve never been in government. I don’t know if it’s like a directive or it’s just like a quiet consensus that like, we don’t like these guys. They’re not doing what we want. We’re going to punish them. But, but it’s, it’s, it’s tough to be at the other end of that.
This is a compelling demonstration that jujitsu and MMA training (or hunting pigs in Hawaii or making your neck real thick or whatever) isn’t going to help you act aggressive if you’re constitutionally bitchmade. Blaming the CFPB for a witch-hunt when we’ve all watched Republicans target Facebook really is something! That’s what this whole performance is about: getting Trump, Vance, Jordan and the rest of the Republican party to lay off. After all, the Cambridge Analytica scandal cost Facebook just $5 billion — chump change, really. If Zuckerberg plays ball, his next privacy whoopsie could be even cheaper.
In fact, Zuckerberg even offers Republicans another target: Apple. According to Zuckerberg, the way Apple makes money is “by basically, like, squeezing people.” Among his complaints:
- Apple’s 30 percent commission on App Store sales
- Airpods work better with Apple phones than all other headphones
- Apple wouldn’t let Zuckerberg’s Meta Ray-Bans connect to iOS using the same quick-setup protocol Airpods use
- iMessage is a walled garden, and groupchats go wonky if there’s a person with an Android phone in there
- “I mean at some point I did this like back of the envelope calculation of like all the random rules that Apple puts out. If you know, if they didn’t apply, like I think you know, it’s like — and this is just Meta, I think we’d like, make twice as much profit or something.”
At least some of these Apple issues actually matter — there is a legitimate DOJ antitrust case against the company. But that isn’t what’s on Zuckerberg’s mind. The last point is the important one, from his perspective. He has a longstanding grudge against Apple after the company implemented anti-tracking features into its default browser, Safari. Facebook criticized those changes in newspaper ads, even. The policy cost social media companies almost $10 billion, according to The Financial Times; Facebook lost the most money “in absolute terms.” You see, it turns out if you ask people whether they want to be tracked, the answer is generally no — and that’s bad for Facebook’s business.
Zuckerberg wants us to believe this isn’t about politics at all
But Zuckerberg wants us to believe this isn’t about politics at all. Getting Rogan’s listeners riled up about Zuckerberg’s enemies and finding Republicans a new tech company target is just a coincidence, as are the changes to allow more hate speech on his platforms happening now, changes that just happen to pacify Republicans. All of this has nothing to do with the incoming administration, Zuckerberg tells Rogan. “I think a lot of people look at this as like a purely political thing, because they kind of look at the timing and they’re like, hey, well, you’re doing this right after the election.” he says. “We try to have policies that reflect mainstream discourse.”
And did this work? Did Zuckerberg’s gambit to talk about how social media needed more “masculine energy” win over the bros? Well, Barstool’s Dave Portnoy isn’t fooled by this shit.
I don’t know. I did think it was pretty funny that after all these complaints about government “censorship,” Zuckerberg didn’t say a word about Trump and the Republicans’ efforts at it. After all, Trump, the incoming president who has on occasion threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison, was recently asked if the Facebook changes were in response to his threats.
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Watch Duty shot to the top of the Apple App Store charts on Wednesday, racking up roughly half a million downloads in just a day as three brutal wildfires raged through Southern California, killing at least five people and forcing thousands to evacuate. The app gives users the latest alerts about fires in their area and has become a vital service for millions of users in the western U.S. struggling with the seemingly constant threat of deadly wildfires—one major reason it had over 360,000 unique visits from 8:00-8:30 a.m. local time Wednesday. And the man behind Watch Duty promises that as a nonprofit, his organization has no plans to pull an OpenAI and become a profit-seeking enterprise.
Watch Duty was created in 2021 by John Mills, the founder and CEO, who was inspired to build an app after experiencing frightening wildfires in 2019 and 2020 near his home in Sonoma County, California. Mills, a tech entrepreneur who sold his company Zenput a few years ago, said he couldn’t find the information he needed online and was doing extensive research on who would have the most up-to-date info. Mills evacuated his property during the Walbridge Fire in 2020 and decided he needed to take action.
“I spent day and night for eight days just up all night listening to radios, digging through the internet, and just realized this was a broken, broken problem,” Mills said. “And a lot of the people who got me through that fire are actually now employees of my company.”
Mills said those people guided him through his issues and it took him about six more months before he realized that the same people who helped him were the key to this problem—because Watch Duty isn’t just one guy who coded an app, though Mills did that himself. It’s a team of people who actually make the thing work. Watch Duty covers 22 states and has 15 full-time staff, seven of them reporters who provide updates on the app, and dozens of volunteers.
“Surprisingly, it only took us about 80 days to get [Watch Duty] off the ground,” said Mills, noting that it’s a pretty lightweight app. “The key was really the reporters themselves, the radio operators, right?”
Mills said he just needed to explain to people who might work on the app that he wasn’t “some Silicon Valley tech bro trying to profit off disaster,” but just a guy who was concerned about protecting his own property during wildfires and thought it could be useful to others. They launched in just three California counties in August 2021 but gained 50,000 users in the span of just a couple of weeks. Last year, Watch Duty had 7.2 million users, up from 1.9 million the year earlier.
“Engineering taught me to engineer, but then as I got older, you realize that like, if you build it, they won’t come, right?” Mills said. “Like why are you building it? Why does this matter, right? How do you get this to market? How do you really leverage technology to be able to make a difference in the world?”
That’s when it clicked for Mills. He told Gizmodo it was all about getting emergency radio monitors who had the latest information and pushing what they knew onto an app as reporters.
The organization was founded as a non-profit 501(c)(3) and strives to be transparent about its finances and work in the public interest. The app is free but users can subscribe for additional features that are neat, though not vital to keeping people safe, like information on where air tankers may be flying at any given moment.
Watch Duty brought in $2 million in revenue last year from 65,500 paying members, an additional $600,000 from individual donors, and a $2 million grant from Google. The organization also received a $1 million grant from a wealthy businessperson who has opted to remain anonymous, Mills tells Gizmodo. Watch Duty’s website includes a 2024 annual report that breaks down where its money goes and what goals the organization has for 2025.
“We’re trying to find a way to make a sustainable nonprofit that supports the free version without having to do this horrible idea of like fundraising in December because you’re not going to make your budget in January, and throw a bunch of galas and beg people for money,” said Mills.
In 2012 Mills founded Zenput, a tech platform used by restaurants for inventory and scheduling, and sold the company in 2022. His father was both a cabinet maker and an executive with IBM, which is one reason he’s been working with computers since he was a young kid.
“I grew up in a wood shop with a computer, right? So I’ve been writing code since I was eight. Before that, I grew up working with my hands. And so a lot of my life has been in technology,” said Mills. At eight, he was too young to work with the power tools his dad used for cabinet-making, so he would “go use the computer and start hacking.”
Mills understands the gravity of what he’s created and the vital resource it can be in life-threatening situations. “When Watch Duty goes off in your pocket, it’s because something bad’s happening,” said Mills.
The app has received recognition both locally in California and nationally, with an invitation to an Innovation Roundtable at the White House back in October 2024. The organization is looking to expand into other states and cover other types of natural disasters like floods.
“We call this company Watch Duty, not Fire Duty on purpose, right?” Mills said. “We knew from the beginning it was about geospatial problems. If people have to migrate, that’s the business we want to be in.”
Mills promises that his nonprofit has no plans to shift from a non-profit model to something more profitable, like OpenAI recently did in a move that raised more than a few eyebrows.
“Unlike OpenAI, we’re not changing. We’re not for sale. That’s nonsense behavior,” Mills said, describing the sneaky corporate structure of OpenAI. “There’s no shell companies. There’s no other owner or anything up underneath the corporation on purpose.”
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