Elon Musk isn't as publicly, obviously involved in Washington as he used to be, that much is clear. But celebrations of his political exile are premature.

Sure, it's true that Musk and Donald Trump's bombastic joint press conferences have faded. Trump is no longer shooting Tesla ads on the White House lawn. And Musk has said that he'll be stepping away from government and focusing on Tesla.

But Musk loves to lie. He's said he'll spend "a lot less" on politics in the future, but I am also old enough to remember "funding secured." The government is still infested with his lackeys, such as Steve Davis, Chris Young, and Jehn Balajadia. Even in an announcement that was widely reported as Musk stepping back from DC, Musk made it clear he'd spend "a day or two per week" on politics for the rest of Trump's term.

I tend to view the credulous political obituaries people have written as wishful thinking, but I do understand the impulse. So much of Musk's whole thing is spectacle that when he's no longer publicly performing, it's possible to believe nothing is happening. This is a mistake. We don't even know the extent of what DOGE has done so far, and in the absence of a serious GAO repo …

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For most of my life, I've relied on a paper map when I go outdoors. Then, in March, I joined my friend Rusty on the Appalachian Trail for two weeks. He told me to download FarOut.

FarOut was my introduction to the world of app-based navigation. It's focused on thru-hikers, and has useful details, including comments that tell you whether a specific water source is flowing, and if so, how well. It took me a minute to get the hang of it - I was hiking southbound, and it defaults to northbound - but once I did, I was impressed.

FarOut works like a guidebook. But the kind of backpacking I ordinarily do is on more offbeat trails in the local national forests - not the wilderness highways FarOut specializes in. So for my first solo trip, to the Ventana Wilderness area of the Los Padres National Forest, I thought I'd try out some of the other navigation apps, as part of an absolutely transparent ploy to get my job to let me fuck off outdoors more often; there are a lot of hikes I want to do. I suspect many of our readers are connoisseurs of the great indoors, but I also know you love gadgets, and let me tell you something: so do backpackers. You would not believe the conversations I hav …

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Watching the behavior of our tech overlords has answered questions I'd never thought to ask. How do you NDA an army of baby mamas? Is there anything more embarrassing than impersonating Benson Boone? (Also, who is Benson Boone?) And now, the latest: how long after a sovereign ruler of a repressive state murders one of your columnists should you make a deal with him? The answer, it turns out, is a little over six years.

In October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a writer for the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, was killed and dismembered with the approval of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (better known as MBS) after Khashoggi entered a Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get paperwork for his upcoming marriage. His body has never been found. On May 13th, Bezos' Amazon announced it would work with Humain, MBS' AI company, to build an "AI Zone" in Saudi Arabia - and the two companies will spend more than $5 billion in the process.

Saudi money is old news in the tech industry - the Public Investment Fund has sloshed into lots of startups, either directly or via intermediaries such as SoftBank. Morally bankrupt …

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After five years, I was still happy with my phone, even though its battery had started the inevitable process of slowing to a stop. But Donald Trump's tariff nonsense pushed me to make a decision: buy a new phone or fix the old one now, before the prices go up. The answer was clearer than ever - I replaced the battery.

I have an iPhone 12 Mini, a size Apple no longer makes. It's small and light, which is what I want from a phone. When it came out, our reviewer found that the battery died on him every evening. I use my phone less than most, and so this was not actually a problem for me - until this year. My battery had degraded to 80 percent of its original capacity, which meant that my phone did actually run out of battery at the end of the day unless I switched on "low power mode" early.

Apple has designed its iPhones to be disposable, largely because Jony Ive is an asshole obsessed with "sleekness," a concept I do not find impressive. Its phones' actual functions haven't kept up with the constant churn of iPhone models. For a while now, each major iPhone review has had the theme of "a set of very nice but ultimately minor changes" from the previous model. The changes haven't …

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I once wondered whether law enforcement might stop Elon Musk's power grab. About a month ago, I got my answer: no.

On March 17th, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency broke into the nonprofit, congressionally funded US Institute for Peace, according to court documents filed by the USIP's board of directors. By allegedly threatening to "cancel every federal contract" of a private security firm that had worked with USIP until a day earlier, they convinced it to let them into the building - where, told by institute staff they were trespassing, the fired security firm headed for the USIP gun safe. That's when the USIP called the cops. The DC police arrived to escort DOGE into the building. USIP head of security Colin O'Brien, along with two of USIP's lawyers, was detained.

Any reasonable reading of these court documents shows that a fired security firm broke into the offices of a nonprofit agency, under a dubiously legal executive order and what, as described, sounds like straightforward extortion. Police officers elected to help the people who were breaking and entering. USIP's board of directors has sued DOGE and assorted other parties in Trump's administration, but …

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You know, I was simply going to ignore the bizarre Blue Origin stunt flight from earlier this week. But then it flopped beyond my wildest imagination, and so here we all are.

Doubtless you know the contours already: Jeff Bezos’ fiancee Lauren Sánchez, pop star Katy Perry, and four other women did a big space tourism trip in the name of performative femiladyism, wearing “space suits” cut so as to require a pair of Spanx underneath. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule,” Sánchez said. “We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut,” Perry said.

This promised to be a marketing bonanza for a nation addled by spectacle. What has happened instead has been a shocking amount of backlash. TikToks mocking Katy Perry’s feigned enthusiasm for “astronomy and astrology.” Suggestions the entire trip was faked. Video footage of what appears to be Bezos literally falling on his face in Texas. Did Bezos even really open the capsule door? Proclamations that the flight “showcased the utter defeat of American feminism.” Social media debates about w …

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Sure, the stock market is melting down after the US declared a global trade war. But have you considered that crypto is also melting down?

Starting around April 6, the Bitcoin price fell off a cliff — and is sitting at $78,800 as of this writing, after touching a low of about $74,000. That’s quite a fall from the all-time highs it hit in January, when it was worth more than $100,000. Even last week, it was worth almost $90,000. It’s not just Bitcoin; the carnage is general in the crypto market.

If Bitcoin were — as true believers often say —  a government-free currency, Donald Trump’s idiot tariffs should have strengthened it. After all, one of the main use cases for Bitcoin is crime, and given the sheer volume of tariffs, smuggling and tax evasion seem like they’re about to get very popular. But for Bitcoin’s sizable base of casual owners, the allure is financial speculation. And unsurprisingly, as money shows signs of getting tight, they seem to be bailing.

The casuals have been part of what made Bitcoin explode in both price and relevance in the last several years. Bitcoin’s original stated goal was to avoid financial institutions and central banks, — a kind of libertarian-anarchist people’s currency. As a point of fact, it has not been that in quite some time, as the Bitcoin ETFs show. Since its inception the price has gone way, way up as adoption has spread beyond the libertarian true believers — by normal people and also by Wall Street.  But these people aren’t ideologically committed. One of the first things people do in a bear market is sell off their riskiest assets. And so many people who put their “fun money” in Bitcoin are selling, because they need that “fun money” in real currency now.

So in the global financial turmoil, Bitcoin is not doing so hot. Bitcoin is valuable because dollars (or yen, or euro, or whatever) are valuable, and insofar as it is a financial asset that lets you get more dollars, Bitcoin is useful. Now, it’s clearer than ever that it’s not useful for much else.

I could go over the various ways that Bitcoin is bad at being money— how it sucks for transactions, has an associated serious risk of scammers and hackers, and is wildly volatile — but the fact that it’s been used primarily for speculation I think makes the case for me. The many people who’ve sent the value of Bitcoin up aren’t viewing it as the technology or money of the future, they just like Number Go Up. 

Well, now Number is Going Down. 

Nice economy you have there, said President Donald Trump’s administration. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

The something, announced earlier this week, is a set of globally applied tariffs that make no sense on their face. No sane economist would endorse this. Through a combination of stupidity, incompetence and sheer gangsterism, the Trump administration has decided to levy a series of taxes that encourage blatant corruption, entirely fail to encourage American manufacturing growth, and leave people and companies poorer. That is, assuming that the taxes come into play at all.

The central, persistent thing Trump seems to misunderstand about tariffs is that they are paid in the US by people in the US. A reasonable person might also remember that he tried them a few years ago in a trade war, to negative effect. We have, as a nation, shot ourselves in the dick. But don’t take my word for it! Here are some actual experts:

• “This is the craziest of the crazy things we’ve seen thus far,” says Chris Barrett, professor of economics at Cornell University’s SC Johnson School of Business.
…

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Suno wasn’t supposed to be an important part of Amazon’s Alexa Plus presentation. The AI song generation platform was a minor demonstration of how Alexa Plus could integrate into other apps, sandwiched between other announcements. But it caught my attention all the same — because whether Amazon realized it or not, the company blundered into a massive copyright fight.

Suno, for those of you not familiar, is an AI song generator: enter a text prompt (such as “a jazz, reggae, EDM pop song about my imagination”) and a song comes back. Like many generative AI companies, it is also being sued by all and sundry for ingesting copyrighted material. The parties in the suit — including major labels and the RIAA — don’t have a smoking gun, since they can’t directly peek at Suno’s training data. But they have managed to generate some suspiciously similar-sounding AI generated materials, mimicking (among others) “Johnny B. Goode,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and Jason Derulo’s habit of singing his own name. 

Suno essentially admits these songs were regurgitated from copyrighted source material, but it says such use was legal. “It is no secret that the tens of millions o …

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The putative president of the United States, Donald Trump, stood on the White House lawn. In his hand, he held a sales pitch for Tesla cars. The most powerful man in America, Elon Musk, attired for a very casual funeral and looking miserable, stood next to Trump. As Trump spoke, promising to buy a Tesla, Musk stood with his arms folded over his chest, giving the undeniable impression of a sulking toddler. Later, Trump threatened to label anyone vandalizing Teslas or Tesla dealerships domestic terrorists.

The entire incident was, in its way, revelatory. A series of protests had targeted Tesla dealerships and owners, as Americans expressed their distaste for Musk, the unelected leader of the US. The instinct, in response to real behavior, was to create a media moment: a Tesla ad.

One of the bizarre hallmarks of the Trump era is a set of elected officials who increasingly cannot tell apart spectacle and reality — as well as a group of voters who seem similarly confused. Take the Trump voter insisting that government agencies get tax cuts for DEI initiatives, as a baffled Sam Seder attempts to explain that, in fact, government agencies are what taxes are for, and thus are not taxe …

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Chatbots can’t think, and increasingly I am wondering whether their makers are capable of thought as well.

In mid-February OpenAI released a document called a model spec laying out how ChatGPT is supposed to “think,” particularly about ethics. A couple of weeks later, people discovered xAI’s Grok suggesting its owner Elon Musk and titular President Donald Trump deserved the death penalty. xAI’s head of engineering had to step in and fix it, substituting a response that it’s “not allowed to make that choice.” It was unusual, in that someone working on AI made the right call for a change. I doubt it has set precedent.

The fundamental question of ethics — and arguably of all philosophy — is about how to live before you die. What is a good life? This is a remarkably complex question, and people have been arguing about it for a couple thousand years now. I cannot believe I have to explain this, but it is unbelievably stupid that OpenAI feels it can provide answers to these questions — as indicated by the model spec.

ChatGPT’s ethics framework, which is probably the most extensive outline of a commercial chatb …

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The crypto market never closes, so it was fitting President Donald Trump made the announcement on a Sunday: he was going to reward the billionaires who funded his presidential run.

“A U.S. Crypto Reserve will elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks by the Biden Administration,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, a social media website that he owns. His brilliant son Eric made a post suggesting that his father’s announcement qualified as market manipulation. Fantastic.

Trump promised his crypto constituency a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” on the campaign trail. The new post expands the plan to include Ethereum, Solana, Ripple’s XRP, and Cardano. I am using “plan” loosely. I don’t know who’s going to buy and hold the tokens, or even if tokens need to be bought at all, or what kind of wallet will be used, or any of the rest of it. In a sane system, we’d have an inkling of these things, but this is Donald Trump.

Look, I know I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but this is so stupid. The US dollar is a source of American soft power and a tool for setting fis …

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Let’s pause and look at what the Elon Musk administration has done so far.

There’s been a lot of panic about the immediate but somewhat abstract constitutional crisis as Elon Musk’s misleadingly-named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) rips the government apart. And as much fun as we all are having watching Congress render itself irrelevant and wondering whether the courts even matter, there’s a concrete nightmare looming. Mass unemployment, the defunding of crucial social programs, and just plain incompetence mean that America, as we know it, is already in for hard times.

The scale of destruction in the past four weeks starts at the Soviet devotion to Lysenkoist biological theories, and at maximum, is the American version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution: a disastrous triumph of ideological purity over basic reality. I am not sure it has occurred to the majority of people that we are about to make a Great Leap Forward and destroy our prosperous, relatively peaceful society.

Musk has, in the short term, set us up for a shock to the economy from both une …

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I have heard it said that fame is the most addictive of all drugs. I have been skeptical about this, but Elizabeth Holmes’ ongoing PR saga makes me wonder if it is, in fact, true.

Holmes has appeared in People magazine to tell us that prison is “hell and torture,” in the same way that one might say “butt and ass” or “dick and cock.” The point of hell, for those of you who are not up on Christian theology, is torture. That’s what it’s for.

Holmes is in prison for defrauding investors at her company Theranos. She fought tooth and nail, every step of the way, to avoid this. First, she insisted on her innocence (and even testified in her own defense). Then, after the trial, she appealed, trying to stay out of prison. During that process, she was fawningly profiled by The New York Times, as part of an image rehabilitation campaign: don’t call her Elizabeth, she’s Liz now.

The People profile reuses many of the New York Times’ glamour shots, which makes sense: it’s hard to get photos of inmates. But even if Holmes is inside, her publicist is working overtime. As in the The Times’ profile, the emphasis is on Holmes as a mother, and how hard it is for her to be away from her children. “I’m not the same person I was back then,” Holmes tells People, vaguely saying that “there are things I would have done differently.” She still insists Theranos was a failure, not a fraud. Girlie, this one’s over. We all heard you lie.

You know, I might have managed her image differently. For starters, I likely would have waited a few more years before trying to seek redemption. That gives people time to forget things like the grueling hours she expected from employees, the misdiagnoses of (variously) HIV and miscarriage, and — obviously — all the lies. It also gives Holmes more do-gooder accomplishments to tout, and maybe some more secondary sources for interviews to say what a nice lady she is. I might even try to talk her into admitting the thing we all know, that she engaged in fraud, so she can finally have some kind of credibility.

But it seems Holmes can’t stomach waiting, or telling the truth about Theranos. So she’s telling People stories about saving her breast milk so that she can feel a connection to her child. There is also this assertion, which I find myself curious about: “Later, Holmes spoke to the prison’s warden about allowing women to breastfeed privately and authorities eventually built multiple lactation rooms in the housing units in 2023.” Am I to believe that Holmes has so much sway in a prison that she can get facilities built? Or were those facilities already planned? It’s not clear from People’s accounting.

I’m also not clear if the publicist is deliberately selecting incurious reporters, the ones who are easiest to play, or if doing any actual work seems like it is beyond the remit of People, but in some sense, it doesn’t matter. She can call herself Liz if she likes. She’ll always be Elizabeth Holmes to me.

Almost 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, America has gotten herself a new king. His name is Elon Musk.

“Wait a minute,” you may be saying. “What about President Donald Trump?” Trump ran, much like Silvio Berlusconi before him, primarily to avoid prosecutions. He has never liked being president and he has already gotten what he wants. He’s not the power center. Musk is. 

Consequently I will not be bothering with whatever statements Katie Miller of DOGE and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt are putting out. We all have eyes; we can see what is going on. Musk has taken over the civilian government. This is a billionaire pulling a heist on the entire nation.

Here are the things Musk has installed his IT Renfields at:

• The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
• The Department of Education
• The Department of Energy
• The Environmental Protection Agency
• The General Services Administration
• The Department of Labor
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• The Office of Personnel Management
• The Small Business Administration, 
• The Treasury.

We all learned in 2022, with th …

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Elon Musk has an uncanny ability to sort out which of America’s rules are real. It turns out punishment from the National Labor Relations Board isn’t real, punishment from NASA isn’t real, and punishment from the FAA isn’t real. The Delaware Chancery Court is extremely real. Based on the past two weeks, the Delaware Chancery Court may be the only real thing in the entire American government.

Here’s a quick recap. While putative President Donald Trump was busy alienating allies through tariffs and wasting water in California — real mad king hours — Musk pushed out the head of the FAA. Then the reports came fast and thick: Federal employees received a “fork in the road” email highly reminiscent of Musk’s Twitter ultimatum, encouraging them to resign, sent from an insecure server. A bunch of goons, some of them actual teenagers, reportedly got access to the US Treasury systems. (Read-only, reportedly, for now.) Longtime civil servants were locked out of the personnel systems that, by the way, house the personal data for government employees. Musk’s lackeys are in control of the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration. They’ve gotten …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It took about a month for the finance world to start freaking out about DeepSeek, but when it did, it took more than half a trillion dollars — or one entire Stargate — off Nvidia’s market cap. It wasn’t just Nvidia, either: Tesla, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft tanked.

DeepSeek’s two AI models, released in quick succession, put it on par with the best available from American labs, according to Alexandr Wang, Scale AI CEO. And DeepSeek seems to be working within constraints that mean it trained much more cheaply than its American peers. One of its recent models is said to cost just $5.6 million in the final training run, which is about the salary an American AI expert can command. Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the cost of training models ranged from $100 million to $1 billion. OpenAI’s GPT-4 cost more than $100 million, according to CEO Sam Altman. DeepSeek seems to have just upended our idea of how much AI costs, with potentially enormous implications across the industry.

This has all happened over just a few weeks. On Christmas Day, DeepSeek released a reasoning model (v3) that caused a lot of buzz. Its second model, R1, released last week, has been call …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Our tech overlords all have problems, and they want to buy the solutions.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine offers a history of the biggest player in streaming.

Read the full story at The Verge.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

“Probably,” Trump said.