The Untold Story of the Guy Who Choked Out Mark Zuckerberg

EPISODE 4: Why Silicon Valley's tech bros all so obsessed with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

I was Facebook User No. 199.

This is less a brag — although producer Ryan Cortes remains unconvinced — and more a marker of time: I have been hearing about Mark Zuckerberg for 20 years, since college, long before there were more than three billion people who signed up for the social network that may or may not have destabilized human civilization.

(More untold stories about that part of my life later. Undoubtedly.)

So when Zuck successfully rebranded himself as a sports story, somehow, as a muscular, shirtless, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu bro — threatening to fight Elon Musk, and loving MMA, and palling around with Joe Rogan — I had questions.

First: Why are so many tech bros in Silicon Valley (Musk, Zuckerberg, and so on) now deeply obsessed with the exact same martial art: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?

And: Did Mark Zuckerberg really get choked out?

Well, as it turns out, The Guy Who Allegedly Choked Out Mark Zuckerberg agreed to sit down with us, in person.

And so I somehow persuaded my friend and new Pablo Torre Finds Out correspondent, the documentarian and New Yorker writer Jay Caspian Kang, who coincidentally happens to be one of the best journalists (and Substackers) in America, to find out…