Exclusive: How The Onion Finally Shut Up Alex Jones for Good

The notorious conspiracy theorist profited from his vile Sandy Hook conspiracy. Then America's finest (fake) news source decided to troll the world's greatest troll. Ben Collins — who transformed from reporting on the historic Infowars defamation trial to buying out his "ideological enemy" in a Storage Wars-style auction saga — tells Pablo why The Onion committed to the ultimate bit: doing the right thing. (Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  We're getting shut down. We have, we beat so many attacks and, but finally, we're shutting down with the mill next month.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  Right after this ad.

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• 1:26Speaker 00

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• 2:11Speaker 00

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• 2:34Speaker 04

  I'm really proud of you, what you've done. I'm not kidding. Like, it's really hard to do what you've done here.

• 2:38Pablo Torre?

  Thank you, dude.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  It's hard to do journalism at all, and you took a, you bet on yourself, and you had the [bleep] backbone, so I'm really proud of you.

• 2:45Pablo Torre?

  I think both of us have probably felt this, where it's like, "Man, the bar's real low."

• 2:49Speaker 04

  It sure is. There's nobody, nobody's picking up the phone anymore to do any kind of journalism. It's crazy.

• 2:56Pablo Torre?

  It's a market opportunity.

• 2:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:58Pablo Torre?

  As well as the problem.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  The actual reporters left are the kids who are currently in journalism school because they're being told, like, old-fashioned tricks on how to do stuff.

• 3:06Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  Like, they realize, like, that's actually the thing that's gonna get me a journalism job.

• 3:09Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  Is scoops.

• 3:10Pablo Torre?

  Is information.

• 3:11Speaker 04

  Breaking [bleep] news.

• 3:12Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely.

• 3:14Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  What an accurate, descriptive summary of the thing we're here to talk about.

• 3:18Pablo Torre?

  Yep.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  And the, by the way, the exclusive big announcement you're here to make with us here today.

• 3:22Pablo Torre?

  Yes, yeah.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  So, thank you, Ben Collins, for doing that.

• 3:25Pablo Torre?

  For those who aren't unfamiliar with your current job, what is the title that you have?

• 3:30Speaker 04

  I'm the CEO of Global Tetrahedron. It's primarily a puppy mill. That's how I make most of our money, a clandestine puppy mill. We also print a newspaper called The Onion, which you may have heard of. Good newspaper.

• 3:42Pablo Torre?

  It's so good, I dare say, that you've become the foremost antagonist of the one and only Alex Jones.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  When you realize how fake it all is, the football, the basketball, the Lady Gaga, the Justin Bieber, now the globalists are pouring on all the heat they can, pushing their hive-minded Borg collectivist zombie public system. I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin frogs gay. Do you understand that? Ah, ah, serious crap. Liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, happy fun, la la la, human smuggling, fit and old desk, forced government euthanasia. Patriot, patriot, patriot.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Vampire, nationalist, mental retardant, eugenicist, a scared man, really retardant, retardant, traitor, vampire, vampire, next level, Moses.

• 4:47Pablo Torre?

  I don't know if I've given enough consideration to vampire as a really key feature of his work.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, 50% of people are vampires, by the way, referring to that clip.

• 4:57Pablo Torre?

  Apparently, apparently.

• 5:00Pablo Torre?

  By the way, the visuals on where he's saying a bunch of that stuff from, there is a very familiar microphone that has kind of been an archetype for all podcasters, let's be honest, since then. It's from inside of this bunker at this apparently undisclosed location in the woods of Austin, Texas, and that is where the headquarters of Infowars are located.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, guess how much rent is there, by the way?

• 5:23Pablo Torre?

  What's it, let's run Alex Jones.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  $75,000 a month. I swear to God.

• 5:28Pablo Torre?

  We're gonna get into the finances, the finer economic data points around this, but Infowars is the foremost conspiracy newsroom, scare quotes around the word news, obviously, the scariest quotes around the word news. It's been described by one of Alex Jones's former employees, who has written since a book about his experiences, as quote-unquote "cult-like." And Alex Jones himself chooses a different term to describe it. In a tweet from 2016, he says, and you've certainly seen this photo before.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:00Pablo Torre?

  "There's a war on for your mind at infowars.com is the 21st century cavalry." Exclamation point. And beneath which is a photo of what?

• 6:08Speaker 04

  That's a Putin-esque Alex Jones shirtless atop a horse. I would call him, barrel chested is a really nice way of putting it, right? A bowling ball chested is probably another way of putting it as well.

• 6:20Pablo Torre?

  Yes, and he is wearing jeans.

• 6:21Speaker 04

  He is wearing jeans, yes.

• 6:22Pablo Torre?

  Before RFK Jr. was wearing jeans and exercising, Alex Jones was the Venn diagram of all of these conspiratorial scammer characters. And his website, by the way, like the headlines over there. I mean, there are some classics like Lady Gaga halftime show, a satanic ritual, bombshell, Barack Obama conclusively outed, a CIA creation, NWO, New World Order, obviously, opening thousands of portals to ancient demons, top insider confirms Hillary odor problem, comma, actual demon?

• 6:52Pablo Torre?

  When did you first encounter Alex Jones?

• 6:55Speaker 04

  This is not going to be a fun story quickly. I'm just gonna be, I'm gonna go back into time and it's gonna be sad and then I'll come back to the fun part. Okay. So I was working at the Daily Beast. I was a news editor and one day I woke up and my friend's girlfriend was shot and killed on live TV. This was in Roanoke, Virginia.

• 7:13Speaker 04

  Her name's Alice Parker and my friend, Chris Hurst, we had a, like what we would call a podcast or something together in college. You know, he was an anchor at this news station in Roanoke and his girlfriend was out in the field and a disgruntled ex-employee put a GoPro on his head. And I think it was the first ever livestreamed murder of anybody.

• 7:37Pablo Torre?

  I remember this. You had no idea that you had a relationship?

• 7:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. I freaked out and I just like left the newsroom. My editor was like, get out of here, you're too close to this. And I was like, you're right. But over the next few days, I started to look up all of these people who were calling it a false flag. Cause if you, at that point in time, if you Googled his name, the very top things would be like, he is a CIA plant, she never existed. This is a false flag gun control thing. These are all notes that stank heavily of Alex Jones, right? So over the next few weeks, I did a story where I just called everybody who made those claims. And remember one guy, I, you know, I would let them talk for half an hour at the end and I would just say, I'm just letting you know, I hear you, but I know Chris Hurst, if he's a CIA agent, he sucks. He's a terrible fantasy baseball player.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  He's like garbage at this. He's a real man. And they would just say, well, that's just what I believe. I've just, I just believe this. And really, at the end of the day, it comes from the culture that Alex created.

• 8:38Pablo Torre?

  Right. The idea that there was, in fact, video.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:42Pablo Torre?

  And despite that.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 8:43Pablo Torre?

  You could deny what seemed to be, when we were growing up, the most undisputable way.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 8:48Pablo Torre?

  To convey reality.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Well, so my previous job, I used to cover conspiracy theories. And so I saw that Alex Jones had a guy on his show that said they're doing child sex trafficking on Mars. Like, they're bringing children up there to Mars. And I did some quick math, and I was like, by the time they get up there, though, they're like 25 at least. Like, they're like, you know, I don't know what number you're getting at here, but like, they're fully adults by the time they're up at Mars. So my editor was like, you should call NASA.

• 9:20Pablo Torre?

  What was NASA's response when you fact-checked the math?

• 9:23Speaker 04

  They thought I was just an idiot calling them, and they were trying to be nice to me. And then they got so mad. Like, once the story came out, they were like, I didn't know it was on the record. All this stuff was terrible. And I did feel bad for them, but the headline was basically like NASA colon, there is no child sex trafficking on Mars or something. Had Alex Jones stuck to this kind of [BLEEP], there's no problems. This is great. Amazing content.

• 9:48Pablo Torre?

  The thing that he ends up doing, though, is not just do 9/11 conspiracy theories and pizza gate.

• 9:54Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 9:55Pablo Torre?

  It gets to the subject that is at the heart of this entire saga that you've been immersed in.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:01Speaker 06

  It's a Sunday of sorrow for Newtown, Connecticut, and for the nation. This afternoon, hundreds of residents walked the road to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where, on Friday, 26 people were murdered.

• 10:14Speaker 07

  The majority of those who died today were children.

• 10:19Speaker 07

  Beautiful little kids between the ages of five and 10 years old.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake, with actors, in my view, manufactured. There's a cover up, there's actors, they're manipulating, they've been caught lying. What do you do when they've got the kids going in circles, in and out of the building with their hands up? I've watched the footage, and it looks like a drill.

• 10:42Pablo Torre?

  How do you describe what we just heard there, in terms of where it fits into his sort of oeuvre?

• 10:47Speaker 04

  It's a harassment campaign against private citizens who've gone through the worst thing that you can ever imagine, right? You know, I've come to call it like the double whammy of American life, really only happens here, where one day you drop them off at school and then they no longer exist as human beings anymore. And then, for the next few years of your life, there is an economy around trying to make it clear that your child never existed at all, and by the way, you deserve harassment because you're in on it.

• 11:16Pablo Torre?

  Right, you're a crisis actor.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  You're a crisis actor, you're a part of it. And, you know, a big part of this to me was always, when I say the double whammy of American life, it's that Alex was part of that ecosystem and really kind of drove it. And what he did at that time was he told people to call the families, you know, call the parents. There was a guy who went, who was an Alex Jones fan, who like ripped up the memorials and then called the families and were like, you know, "Why did you do this?" For years, this is what happened to them after. They had to, all these people had to move, just to stay away from this harassment. And, more importantly, he made so much goddamn money, dude. He made so much money.

• 11:54Pablo Torre?

  No, the business of being a Sandy Hook truther

• 11:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:58Pablo Torre?

  was one of the most telling chapters in human civilization.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 12:02Pablo Torre?

  The thing that was least acceptable became one of the most monetizable.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 12:07Pablo Torre?

  And there were no guardrails

• 12:08Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 12:08Pablo Torre?

  around this. And it reminds me, of course, in the bigger picture sense, of one of the greatest Onion headlines of all time, the recurring headline, which I'm sure you know by memory.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:20Pablo Torre?

  Which is?

• 12:21Speaker 04

  "No way to prevent this," says only nation where this regularly happens. And it's hard to come up with a better, yeah, capsule summary than that.

• 12:29Pablo Torre?

  But this is where like the onion being the antagonist to Infowars, to Alex Jones, is perfect in this sort of, I don't know, like the fake news spectrum, the moral valence of what it is to do satire and the abuse of satire. I mean, I grew up reading the paper, which you have revived. Like, I'm holding the new onion in my hands and I'm seeing at the very top, this is the March-April edition, "Tierful Trump Claims He Was Sex Trafficked By Epstein. I Was One Of His Victims We Used President." It's the stuff that made me laugh consistently.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:08Pablo Torre?

  1998, "Drugs Win Drug War." 2011, "Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult."

• 13:17Speaker 08

  Once the trial begins next week, all courtroom images of Hannah will depict her as a 300-pound muscular black man, and jury members will be instructed to imagine her as such.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  Great video, by the way.

• 13:27Pablo Torre?

  It's so good. Leading us to 2014, "Ohio Replaces Lethal Injection With Humane New Head-Ripping-Off Machine."

• 13:35Speaker 09

  The new device is designed to be as humane as possible, emitting soothing white noise and putting prisoners on a cushioned seat before its metallic talons dig into their necks and painlessly wrench their heads off.

• 13:47Pablo Torre?

  And so, the whole point in all of these things, not to be pedantic about satire, but like, in the humor, in the sacred topic that you seem to be defiling, you're actually revealing something fundamentally interesting and useful about us, in which the person being made fun of is not one of the most traumatized victims you can imagine.

• 14:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:09Pablo Torre?

  But it's often incredibly powerful people and institutions.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  To me, it's the financialization of it. Anybody can believe stupid [BLEEP]. But if you say, "Believe my stupid [BLEEP] and the only way to stop that stupid [BLEEP] is this boner pill I'm selling you on the internet," and then suddenly you're a millionaire.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  My friends, we have done it. With Dr. Group's help, we have developed ultimate male vitality supplement with eight concentrated super herbs. This is the answer to the globalist war on male vitality.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  Like a multi-multi-millionaire. Like, you have a recurring revenue of people buying your boner pills every month. That is not a speech issue. That is like an FTC issue. That's like, that's an issue of, of do we want an economy that incentivizes that behavior? Right? And I just don't want to live in a world like that. I just simply don't want to live in a world like that.

• 14:59Pablo Torre?

  And so the story we're here to tell, it's basically been in the works for more than a year at this point.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  18 months.

• 15:06Pablo Torre?

  Okay, well, I think we should probably catch people up with the date, November 14th, 2024.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:14Pablo Torre?

  This is nine days after Trump's reelection and, and actually, good things seem to have happened.

• 15:25Speaker 10

  New this morning, the satirical news site, The Onion, has just won an auction to acquire the media outlet Infowars.

• 15:31Speaker 11

  That is right. The Onion buys Alex Jones's Infowars in a bankruptcy auction. It sounded like a headline you would read in a satirical newspaper, but this is no joke.

• 15:41Speaker 12

  The Onion plans to turn Infowars into a parody, mocking the kind of disinformation that Alex Jones amplified.

• 15:48Speaker 13

  The Onion buying Infowars is like if Mad Magazine bought MindCom.

• 15:57Pablo Torre?

  It's hard to imagine something more perfect than you guys trolling the world's greatest troll by using legal mechanisms available to you that I did not know were even possible.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  We do big swings as a company, and this was clearly our biggest one yet. Also, it was a 50-50 ball until we found out. So it was, in terms of a swing, it was a home run swing and we connected.

• 16:25Pablo Torre?

  Well, this is, this is the thing. So this news breaks.

• 16:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:28Pablo Torre?

  And it's an enormous deal. Everyone's covering it. And then it doesn't happen.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:35Pablo Torre?

  So the answer I'm here to find out is like, what the [bleep] did happen? And also, in the, in the process of that, what happened to you?

• 16:44Speaker 04

  Uh, medicine.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  Antidepressants.

• 16:51Speaker 04

  That's what happened to me. Uh, yeah, look, it was a, uh, it's been a real test of my mettle as a human being. And I think like our mettle as a country in the last 18 months. And those two stories sort of dovetail pretty nicely.

• 17:23Pablo Torre?

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• 17:56Speaker 02

  A perfect crime film, says The Daily Beast. John Turturro gives a career-best performance. Sony Pictures Classics proudly presents the acclaimed new thriller, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. Turturro stars as an aging master pickpocket, whose latest score puts him in the crosshairs of a ruthless crime family. Also starring Sean Carlo Esposito, Tatiana Maslany, Will Price, and Steve Buscemi. See the film that the LA Times calls "instantly classic." Opens October 23 in New York and Los Angeles. Nationwide, October 30.

• 18:38Pablo Torre?

  So I just got to recap here, because summer of 2022, Alex Jones and the parent company of Infowars, which is conveniently named Free Speech Systems, they'd already been found liable for damages, like significant damages because of three defamation lawsuits led by Sandy Hook parents. And just to set the scene here, there are lawsuits in Connecticut, there are lawsuits in Texas, where Alex Jones is based, and so these two sets of Sandy Hook families at these two different trial venues, they're bringing litigation stemming from, again, the mass killing of 20 students, between six and seven years old, plus six of their educators, plus the shooter himself. This was all 13 and a half years ago, in Newtown, Connecticut, Sandy Hook Elementary.

• 19:20Pablo Torre?

  But legally speaking, Alex Jones lost those cases.

• 19:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:24Pablo Torre?

  Why?

• 19:26Speaker 04

  Because he didn't participate in the cases. He thought he was above it.

• 19:29Pablo Torre?

  And you were covering the trial for NBC News.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  Yes, I was. Yeah.

• 19:32Pablo Torre?

  We love discovery, we love documentation on this show. How forthcoming is he with the documents that the court is demanding?

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Oh, he doesn't provide anything. Like, literally does not provide anything. But that also backfires, which I'm sure you're gonna talk about. There is like this one moment that is... It would be like, if it happened on Law and Order, you'd be like, "Shut the [bleep] up."

• 19:52Pablo Torre?

  One of my favorite moments in the history of jurisprudence. We have Alex Jones on the witness stand. The judge, in her black robe, is over his shoulder. And he's on trial in Texas. And a lawyer for the Texas families is gonna reveal something that is objectively amazing.

• 20:10Speaker 14

  Is that your phone number?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  So you did get my text messages. And it said you didn't. Nice trick.

• 20:22Speaker 14

  Yes, Mr. Jones. Indeed. You didn't give this text message to me. You don't know where this came from. Do you know where I got this?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 20:31Speaker 14

  Mr. Jones, did you know that 12 days ago... 12 days ago? Your attorneys messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cellphone with every text message you've sent for the past two years? And when informed, did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protected in any way? And as of two days ago, it fell free and clear into my possession? And that is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn't have text messages about saying anything? Did you know that?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  I... See, I told you the truth. This is your Perry Mason moment. I gave them my phone, and then...

• 21:10Speaker 15

  Mr. Jones, you need to answer the question.

• 21:12Speaker 14

  Did you know this happened?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  No, I didn't know this happened. But I mean, I told you, I gave them the phone over.

• 21:18Pablo Torre?

  I just want to take a second to applaud the camera panning down to the back of his lawyer's head. Everybody... Everybody involved cooks.

• 21:29Pablo Torre?

  It's, I don't even know how that's possible.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't either.

• 21:34Pablo Torre?

  Like I accidentally gave you the opposite of what I should have done. Whoops.

• 21:40Speaker 04

  He has gone through many legal trials and tribulations and no one saw it through to just embarrassing him at scale.

• 21:50Pablo Torre?

  It also just has sort of like the vibe of like a kid who's finally been hauled in front of a principal.

• 21:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:54Pablo Torre?

  And in this case, the principal is Texas District Court Judge Maya Gamble, who treats him like he is, yeah, he's misbehaving in class.

• 22:03Speaker 15

  Spit your gum out, Mr. Jones.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  It's not gum.

• 22:05Speaker 15

  What is it? Because you're not allowed food or gum of any kind in the corporate.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  I, I, I had my tooth pulled a week and a half ago and it's, I had some gauze in there earlier and it's, it's been causing me to have some pain.

• 22:19Speaker 15

  So you're chewing on your gauze?

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Would you like me to show you?

• 22:22Speaker 15

  No, I just want you to answer my question.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  No, I was massaging the hole in my mouth with my tongue. I'm here, right here.

• 22:29Speaker 15

  I don't want to see the inside of your mouth.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Oh, no, there's no gum. Hole.

• 22:35Speaker 15

  Sit down.

• 22:36Pablo Torre?

  It's, it's like, it's incredible.

• 22:38Speaker 04

  It's great.

• 22:40Pablo Torre?

  And ultimately, like on the stand in Texas, Alex Jones goes on to admit the thing that he has been seemingly loathe to admit finally, which is that, oh yeah, the whole Sandy Hook shooting, it was, quote, 100% real.

• 22:56Speaker 16

  Do you understand now that it was absolutely irresponsible of you to do that?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  It was, especially since I've met the parents and it's 100% real, as I said on the radio yesterday. And as I said here yesterday, it's 100% real. And the media still ran with lies that I was saying it wasn't real on air yesterday. It's incredible. They won't let me take it back. They just want to keep me in the position of being the Sandy Hook man.

• 23:25Pablo Torre?

  I mean, just the experience of watching him try and save his reputation.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:31Pablo Torre?

  As a reporter covering the trial at the time, what did it tell you about Alex Jones's capacity to actually handle the truth?

• 23:37Speaker 04

  Well, you have to like bring him to the limit, right? Of him realizing like this might actually be it, that he might actually face consequences here. The issue is though, every mass shooting since then, he has called a false flag. Almost every single one, you know, El Paso, Buffalo. His default statement is, these people who died in this horrific thing are not real, or they are real, but it's being done on behalf of like a government or something like that. And to say that this isn't a big deal, it's not a problem that we have in this country with gun miles.

• 24:08Pablo Torre?

  So this jury awards the families $50 million, and that's not even like the big damages trial.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:15Pablo Torre?

  Fall 2022, in the state of Connecticut, you have the jury form in there, this is the other trial we've been talking about, and he's reading off the damages to plaintiffs.

• 24:26Speaker 17

  Total fair, just in reasonable damages to plaintiff Robert Parker and against Alex Jones and Free Systems, we have line A and line B, total $120 million.

• 24:38Pablo Torre?

  $120 million, $25 million, $55 million, and on and on and on. And yeah, Alex Jones on his show is like, he's basically saying, yeah, they had me doing the Oprah thing. You get a million, you get 100 million, you get a 50 million. But the total damages, it all adds up to about how much, Ben?

• 25:01Speaker 04

  $1.4 billion.

• 25:03Pablo Torre?

  Which, as a historical matter, how do we even begin to contextualize what that is?

• 25:10Speaker 04

  It's far and away the most in any defamation suit of all time. I want to make it clear, I do remember covering it that day, and he was, you know, almost elated. He literally said, oh, I'm never gonna pay this. It's like, I'm, you know, I'm never gonna pay this out. This is the guy who's settled everything else he's ever done. He once was sued by Chobani, the yogurt company, for alleging that they brought tuberculosis into the United States through immigrants. They settled. Another guy who he falsely accused of doing the Charlottesville attack, settled. People generally just take, you know, the admission of guilt, the admission that he's making stuff up, the on-air apology in a paltry sum of money and walk away.

• 25:52Pablo Torre?

  At the time that it was ruled that he owed these families 1.4 billion dollars, how much was Alex Jones worth allegedly?

• 25:58Speaker 04

  He was worth like, I believe, tens of millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars. But he, you know, he had this recurring stream of income. Like that, the thing, and it has not shut off. It's actually probably gotten bigger over time. Because he sells people the solution to all of these conspiracy theories, right? Iodized salt from a specific rock in a place is actually the thing that will save you from all of the radiation coming from 5G. Like, there's, he provides you something to be extremely afraid of and an answer. And also just like merch.

• 26:29Pablo Torre?

  His legal response to this is an ancient American response. Because he does what?

• 26:38Speaker 04

  He files for bankruptcy, yeah. Because he has to, right? He has a lot of mon, like, this guy is rich by any definition. But he's not 1.4 billion dollars rich, right? So he has to file for bankruptcy. And what gets fully into that bankruptcy is this thing called Free Speech Systems, which encompasses Infowars and Infowars Life, which is the supplement company, and several thousand domain names, including, which we learned after the fact, when looking through bankruptcy.

• 27:02Pablo Torre?

  Thousands of domain names?

• 27:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, including one called GoblinLove.net.

• 27:06Pablo Torre?

  Well, I'm just gonna go over GoblinLove.net right now and see what's happening on GoblinLove.net. I'm getting the whole thing of like, this site is not a secure connection. And, okay, very good. It's probably for the best.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm sure he had grand designs for GoblinLove.

• 27:21Pablo Torre?

  I should say for the record here that we at Publatory finds out are reaching out to attorneys for Alex Jones as well as for the parent company of Infowars. And while they may not immediately respond to our request for comment, we will post an update in the show notes and on social if they do. And in terms of like bankruptcy strategy, the legal sort of dimension of that, I should be very clear that neither of us are bankruptcy lawyers. No. And so while other sports podcasts have been talking about the final four, we ended up speaking to a guy named Chris Matty.

• 27:51Speaker 18

  Yeah, my name is Chris Matty. I'm a lawyer in Connecticut. I was lead counsel for the Sandy Hook families who brought a case against Alex Jones and Infowars here in Connecticut. Lifelong Husky fan, go Huskies.

• 28:03Pablo Torre?

  And Chris Matty said that Alex Jones mocking the verdict struck him as just another theatrical performance of sorts, as opposed to, again, something true.

• 28:14Speaker 18

  What it struck me as was a guy who was play acting, that he was strong and unbothered by this verdict, when inside I think he was terrified of what this would mean for him and his business. And my biggest hope was that the verdict might puncture, you know, this aura that he has around him with many of his followers, you know, where some people who had been misled for so long might have watched the trial, seen all the evidence, and then seen this jury's verdict and thought to themselves, you know, this was bull**** all along.

• 28:48Pablo Torre?

  You know, in basketball, there's the concept of a heat check. Yeah. And it just felt like the Sandy Hook families finally exposed Alex Jones as the thing that he never wanted to be regarded as to his audience, which was just a **** bull****. Yeah. I mean, that sort of felt like in the moment. I mean, what this lawyer, what this UConn Huskies apologist also told us, which is that. First of all, disgusting behavior. I mean, that's gross. That's gross. Yeah. But the degree of public confidence that Alex Jones was sort of theatrically performing.

• 29:22Pablo Torre?

  According to Chris Matty, it was far from the only thing that he saw Alex Jones misrepresenting in this case.

• 29:28Speaker 18

  Throughout the case, we knew that Alex Jones was lying about his assets. I mean, that's one of the reasons that he ultimately was defaulted is because he had his people fabricate financial documents and he was concealing, you know, crucial information about the way his business worked, which was obviously corrupt, like lie and you get clicks. That was the basic profit model. So we expected, you know, to run into some, you know, malfeasance post verdict. He sought bankruptcy in a very friendly venue in Texas and we were assigned to a court that, you know, basically allowed him to drag things out, continue to operate his business while benefiting from it.

• 30:11Speaker 18

  And the problem was that our families did not care about money. They've never cared about money. They rejected a deal with Alex Jones that would have paid them a lot of money and instead wanted to make sure that this verdict was used to basically defang him.

• 30:29Pablo Torre?

  Again, the vampire thing keeps on coming back.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, he shouldn't have used that word. What is he doing?

• 30:36Pablo Torre?

  I mean, dare I say that the whole onion thing has been on the nose now.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Pablo, that's garlic.

• 30:42Pablo Torre?

  Hold on. Yeah, I'm getting in my ear that it's garlic.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Motherf**er, do not edit that out. Do not let him have that.

• 30:50Pablo Torre?

  Furiously Googling vampire onion.

• 30:56Pablo Torre?

  We gotta fast forward though to June 2024 because the families and the lawyer, Chris Matty represents them, they agreed to let the court supervise the liquidation of Alex Jones, Inc., all of his assets. And the biggest asset in what is now like Storage Wars.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 31:13Pablo Torre?

  Is, of course, what?

• 31:15Speaker 04

  Oh, it's Infowars.

• 31:17Pablo Torre?

  So when did you and the Onion come up with the idea to make a bid on it?

• 31:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I saw it was for sale, like they, they have to market these things. They have to, in bankruptcy court, they have to go market it. And they, it appeared in like the equivalent of a classified ad somewhere in some Austin newspaper. And that was uploaded, I think to like Blue Sky or Twitter or something. I was like, this would be funny. The first thing I wanted to do was make sure the families would be okay with us doing a bid on this. Because like, you don't want to go in there and do a bit about stuff like this without people's, you know, permission, like, express permission. The other thing that, the big thing that played into our calculus is, the money goes to the families. Like, if we buy this, it goes to the Sandy Hook families. And I was like, I'm not sure anybody else is gonna bid on it.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  He might just get it back with money he's laundered through, like, Roger Stone or something. Which would be unacceptable to most people. And it certainly looked like it was headed that way. So we were like, well, it's either us or nobody.

• 32:15Pablo Torre?

  But when you say that you talked to the families and their reaction was like, huh?

• 32:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think it took them a minute. I think they were, at first, they were like, that [bleep] thing?

• 32:26Pablo Torre?

  It's worth characterizing, by the way, the reaction of Chris Matty, the lawyer for the families. Because it was understandable.

• 32:35Speaker 18

  I think the families would have been very happy for somebody to come in and just shutter this thing. On the other hand, they also recognize that there's kind of real value in using a brand and a property that has been, for so long, used for terrible purposes, and to kind of turn it around a little bit.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  I think a lot of people characterize victims of tragedies like this as like, that's all they are. You know, they are, that's the dad of this dead child or something. They are human beings who like to laugh at stuff and have lives. And this allows them to reclaim their identity in a way that is very nice, right? And also, if you live in America, you almost certainly know someone who has been a victim of gun violence. And that's not all they are. Now, the issue is, nine days before the auction for this thing.

• 33:34Speaker 19

  It is now official. CNN projects that Donald Trump has been elected president, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris, and making a political comeback unlike any.

• 33:44Pablo Torre?

  Oh, right.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  Remember that?

• 33:47Pablo Torre?

  November 2024, to put it in the grand timeline.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  So, he wins, and then there's this, like, eight-day window where we're like, okay.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  We are walking into a burning building. And we bid what we have. And what we have is $1.75 million. In part because our business is doing well and in part because we have a sponsorship for a launch of it with Everytown, which is the gun safety group. And then we have the backing of the families. The families have helped out by, basically, so the Connecticut families don't really care about money very much. The Texas families care about it slightly. They have basically deferred payments from the Connecticut families to the Texas families built into this thing, a claims waiver kind of thing.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  What that allows that to do is like push the value of our bid up much higher. The federal receiver in charge of the estate for Infowars, he has a fiduciary duty to maximize value. Cash is king. And by maximizing value, we have the highest bid.

• 35:00Pablo Torre?

  Well, Alex Jones, his shell company, first United American companies, they had bid three and a half million and lost because you guys had bid the 1.75 plus what I can only translate into sort of like non-lawyer speak is like this sweetener where the families agreed to forego some of the proceeds to benefit other creditors, which brought the sweetener to a value of like around $7 million.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 35:26Pablo Torre?

  But of course, the response from Alex Jones as Infowars is going offline and again, he can't even broadcast from his famous studio.

• 35:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:39Pablo Torre?

  You would describe how?

• 35:41Speaker 04

  He lost his [bleep] mind.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Ladies and gentlemen, it is 7:50 right now. I'm about to upload this to X. I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the US trustee over our bankruptcy this morning and they said they're shutting us down even without a court order this morning. The Connecticut Democrats with the Onion newspaper bought us. They asked, did they outbid? They said, well, it was competitive. So they changed all the bidding rules, made it secret two days ago. I had a bad feeling. I told you that.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  One of the very first things he does is he calls Steve Bannon on the air. And Steve Bannon picks up the phone and goes, "What the [__] is happening?"

• 36:21Speaker 20

  Audience should understand, The Onion is the front group that bought it with backing from other sources, but The Onion is going to turn it into a parody site, thinking they can mock us. So they're going to, you know, make fake news and the vitamin supplements that you sell, Alex, and other people sell, they think they're going to be really funny. Let's show them how funny it is. Walk in the control room, put the frickin' camera up in their face, and let's get a name, rank, and serial number. Imperial troops are going to come in there and think they're going to jackboot what's going on. Let's see the jackboot. Let's see the polish on the jackboot. Let's see the heel of the jackboot. They're nothing but Gestapo.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  And then the receiver goes in and starts like turning stuff off in the studio, which was also weird, and we didn't really fully understand the extent of how that was going to take place.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  They're turning off the internet, they're turning everything off here. And so, that's in process right now in full force, it's turned off, banned out, video's turned off. And so, there is a very good chance that we will be back here in the next few days as soon as the judge has an emergency hearing. And this will, this, what I believe is injustice and wrong will be upended.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  A thing that I didn't fully understand at that, until midway through the day, is that he had never heard of The Onion until it bought into force. He just never, didn't even, like, the concept of it was completely foreign to him. So we, that was a fun thing to deal with. And then over the course of the day, like, you know, the local, like, Fox News started a trip, because like, it was so out of left field, the news didn't really know how to handle it. Fox News said we had 4.3 trillion daily readers, which is on our website somewhere, but I don't even know where. It's not even on the about section. I don't know where they found that.

• 38:06Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 38:07Speaker 04

  We had done a hostile takeover of the news for a day, and it was great, except this really, really made Alex very, very upset. So, we realized that he was simply not going to give up on this thing.

• 38:22Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, and spoiler alert, less than a month later, a judge rejects your winning bid, rejects the entire auction that took place. And Alex Jones takes to his microphone again.

• 38:35Speaker 20

  This is a fight all the way to the end.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  And I've told Trump and I've told his advisors, they're the bad guys. And so I like our odds.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Just taking the gloves off.

• 38:59Speaker 21

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• 39:37Pablo Torre?

  Can you describe what it's like to face Alex Jones with the gloves off?

• 39:42Speaker 04

  Oh, it sucks, brother. It's not good. They had made a bunch of threats toward me and like the onion in general over that month that they were going to come after us for, you know, thought crime, whatever. I don't know exactly what, what the charges.

• 39:59Pablo Torre?

  For silencing him, for taking his free speech.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Yes, for taking his free speech for basically enacting a judgment, several judgments against him by bidding on the company. And a lot of people ask me like, you know, the judge, for example, was like, why wouldn't this sell for more? Why wouldn't this go for more?

• 40:17Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I gotta admit, like, that's a pretty good price.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, right? And it's because you're not buying Infowars, you're buying Alex Jones's personal harassment campaign for the rest of your life. You are inheriting this thing. You're taking on all of this bullshit forever. Like, we're just talking about strength and how he views strength, how Alex Jones.

• 40:37Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, shirtless on a horse.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. And what I've realized over the last 18 months is strength is.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  Actually sticking through to what you believe and what is the right thing to do for people who would otherwise just abandon it. It's not about showing up on a horse and taking big pills until your voice sounds like this down there here. It's not what it is. Or bombing the [__] out of countries and yelling at people about it. Or, you know, sending your mass goons into cities and beating the [__] out of women and shooting them in the face. That's not strength. That's actually like the opposite. That's insecurity. Strength is knowing that you're gonna walk into a bunch of people saying insane [__] about you and keep [__] walking.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  I just think, Pablo, there is a moment in your life where you see a bunch of evil [__] happening and you have a chance to stop something that is particularly egregious. And if you walk away from it, I just don't know why you're alive. You know? And I decided with the help of everybody in my life and family that like I just wasn't gonna drop this. And I just didn't wanna make it. So our most grievous sin as a country, which is mass shootings of kids in school, where financializing that and getting away with it is fine.

• 42:14Speaker 04

  If we can't draw a line there, then there is no line anymore. You can just do whatever you want, evil, whatever evil [__] you want and make as much money you want. Friends of mine were like, wasn't it cool that time you like, you know, you hip checked Alex Jones and like, and I was like, no dude, we're still going for it. And they'd be like, yeah, that's cute, Ben. It's nice that you're doing that. Everyone had just given up on the premise. And I wasn't gonna give up on these families. I just didn't wanna do it.

• 42:45Pablo Torre?

  Except the problem was that bankruptcy court doesn't exactly make doing the right thing easy. And I will spare you the full TikTok of what happened here, but all you really gotta know is that shutting up Alex Jones for good, because of Sandy Hook, ultimately hinged on a legal character known as the court-appointed receiver. And the court-appointed receiver's job was to sell, at auction, a whole bunch of stuff belonging to a bankrupt Alex Jones. Kinda like, you know, Storage Wars. He has the actual passwords Yes. to Infowars.com. He's also the guy, relatedly, who sued Alex Jones in June of 2025 for things which included,

• 43:26Pablo Torre?

  allegedly, selling part of his ranch to his dad for $10. Yep. Gifting his dad three luxury cars, and then apparently forgetting which cars they even were. Also making up a prenuptial agreement payment to his wife, and other, quote, "sham transactions concocted to frustrate the collection efforts," end quote. And this is the dude who, in so many words, seemed like he was all good with The Onion and your bid. Yeah. And then what happened? I think he got spooked. As did the gum-hating judge that we mentioned before, who rejected The Onion's winning

• 44:04Pablo Torre?

  bid back in late 2024, only to have something of a change of heart in August of last year.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  I guess it's hit the news, The Hill. Judge clears the way for The Onion to revive bid for Alex Jones' Infowars. So, here we go again!

• 44:21Pablo Torre?

  But more than anything else, Ben Collins needed the court-appointed receiver to rule in his favor, or at least allow The Onion to lease the keys to Infowars for that 75 grand a month. And what that receiver realized, apparently, is that he did not want Alex Jones to do to him what he had done to all of his targets, including the Sandy Hook families, who are still struggling to collect those $1.4 billion in damages. He realized that Alex Jones was gonna talk about him all the time on Infowars, and make his life hell.

• 45:03Pablo Torre?

  In fact, Alex Jones was so committed to information warfare and to fighting that $1.4 billion judgment, that he tried to take his case all the way to the Supreme Court, filing an 84-page application, which ultimately failed.

• 45:21Speaker 04

  First of all, he called The Onion his ideological enemy, and that we shouldn't be allowed to take over because of that, which I don't think is how courts work, but I just, you know, that's just, that's just me.

• 45:33Pablo Torre?

  But around that same time, last September, something remarkable happened. Donald Trump's Department of Justice entered the fray. The director of Trump's Weaponization Working Group, a guy named Eagle Ed Martin, who is also the Associate Deputy Attorney General and the United States Pardon Attorney, as previously discussed on this show, sent a threatening letter to Chris Matty, the UConn fan and attorney for the Sandy Hook families. And in that letter, Martin questions the credibility and financial motives of one of the first responders at the shooting, an FBI agent. And he says, quote, "As you may know, there are criminal laws protecting the citizens

• 46:18Pablo Torre?

  from actions by government employees who may be acting for personal benefit. I encourage you to review those," end quote.

• 46:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's like active Sandy Hook trutherism coming from the letterhead of the United States government.

• 46:34Pablo Torre?

  Alex Jones, naturally, obtained and then published this letter on Infowars.com. And he tweeted it out alongside a photo of himself standing next to a smiling Ed Martin.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  So yesterday, I talked to Ed Martin, the head Strike Force lawyer with billions of dollars under him and thousands of people at his disposal. And we talked about 45 minutes, and most of what he told me, he said was, you know, should be on the record, and only a few things weren't. And a lot of this was exclusive information, because I've known Ed for, believe, 24, 25 years. I know a little about his background, and he's been like hardcore anti-globalist for 40 years. I mean, so he's been doing it longer than I have.

• 47:21Pablo Torre?

  But what this whole multimedia effort told the recipient, Chris Maddie, was something else about Alex Jones.

• 47:31Speaker 18

  He was getting very, very worried that he was getting to the end. He was trying to come up with some way to, you know, throw off the process that is going to result in the closure of Infowars. And he tells Ed Martin, hey, and by the way, I don't have firsthand knowledge of this, but it's pretty easy to read these tea leaves that, you know, one thing we might be able to do here is to suggest that, you know, this whole litigation is somehow under investigation by the Justice Department. Thankfully, somebody at the Justice Department, I believe Todd Blanch, shut it down. But it is, it is a, a, one, one thing that it made me think about is how many people have gotten letters like this,

• 48:13Speaker 18

  who don't have counsel, who haven't done anything wrong, and are the just, with the Justice Department just being used as a form of like Bush League intimidation, which is what this kind of was.

• 48:26Pablo Torre?

  Todd Blanch, by the way, the new acting Attorney General, seemed to have at the very least the political wherewithal to think to himself, maybe we shouldn't want to be head to head against this Sandy Hook families by accusing the FBI agent who was trying to, you know, help them.

• 48:42Speaker 04

  And this is the Ghislaine Maxwell guy, by the way.

• 48:45Pablo Torre?

  Again, it's like, where is the line? Is the story of our time? What's gonna be the point beyond which you cannot return? And they looked right over into that canyon and then drew themselves back at the last second.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I think part of why I've been living with, you know, this like feeling like I'm falling out of an airplane for 18 months is...

• 49:11Speaker 04

  I am with them at the canyon. And this was the last line of defense. We had to do it because literally no one else was going to do it. The good news is two things happened. One, the newspaper went bananas in this timeframe. So we relaunched it in August of 2024. Since then, we've become, I believe we are the fifth largest newspaper in the United States right now. Which is insane. We have over 70,000 subscribers. So that was just cooking as this was happening. So that was really helpful. And also, it allowed, gave us some time to figure out what to do with this asset, right? Because initially, we were going to, you know, put some of our favorite old Onion writers in charge of it and just do a bunch of scams. Like, send us $100 and we'll send you your grandson $20.

• 49:56Speaker 04

  That was the kind of thing that we were going to put on the front page. Which I think we still might do, by the way. And then we were like, well, is that really doing this justice? Could we do something much bigger and better? So the good news is, over the last 18 months, and the bad news for Alex and everybody else involved on the other side is it gave us a lot of time to think about what this could be and make some phone calls. And then, a couple of weeks ago, Alex Jones shows up on Tim Poole's show and they say that he smells like alcohol. And he says, "They're shutting down Infowars next month."

• 50:30Speaker 01

  I'm ready, but don't follow me at RealLifeShowsOnX, Infowars.com. We're getting, we're getting shut down. We have, we beat so many attacks. And, but finally, we're shutting down like the middle next month.

• 50:42Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  It's gonna be the same what happens.

• 50:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  The fake receiverships, the fake auctions, all of it's happening right now.

• 50:50Speaker 04

  The picture of sobriety.

• 50:51Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, I don't have, uh, blood tests, but I can smell him from here.

• 50:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I called my lawyer, our bankruptcy lawyer, who we've had this whole time. And I was like, I know he says this like once a month, but again, he says that they're shutting down Infowars next month. So what's the deal? So he called the receiver and he was like, yeah, we're shutting it down. Like, the receiver said, "We don't have enough money to pay rent on this."

• 51:17Pablo Torre?

  This $75,000 a month.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. Let alone pay for utilities and internet and the staff. So we can't keep the asset moving. And we were like, well. This receiver has two responsibilities, right? Do what the families want with this asset. That's one, which currently they want to sell it to, hopefully us, I'm hoping. But like, they want to sell it for value to someone they can trust is not in Alex Jones's orbit.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  And in order to do that, they have to keep the value of the asset up. That is, the receiver's job is to keep the value of the asset going. That's why he's still on the air.

• 51:54Pablo Torre?

  The rub is, yeah, you can, you can sell this to Alex Jones's ideological enemy, but they got to figure out a way to make money with it.

• 52:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So we called the receiver and said, well, it has considerably less value to us as a dead property.

• 52:12Speaker 04

  We'll pay to take it over. And I could almost guarantee you with the plans that we have, like it will increase its value over, you know, the Boner Pill company that it currently runs. And by the way, and you know, this is not part of the deal, but the whole time, we're giving a cut of merch sales to the families. Like, we want, we want them to be able to get paid for real at some point with actual human dollars as part of this process. So we've come to an agreement with the receiver that we get to take over this asset pretty much immediately, in a couple of days.

• 52:50Pablo Torre?

  Wow.

• 52:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:50Pablo Torre?

  Wait, so just to be clear then, the, the actual big exclusive announcement here is that The Onion has finally acquired Infowars.

• 53:00Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, we have. We've taken over the Infowars studio and the IP and the website and all that stuff, yeah.

• 53:09Pablo Torre?

  You guys hiring?

• 53:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. So part of the thing we did in the background is like, we're like, no matter if we get this thing or not, we need to go after this kind of like, you know, ecosystem of like, Slotfluencers. So we started hiring in the background. And the very first person we hired is a guy who reached out maybe like 20 minutes after the first announcement, and that's Tim Heidecker from Tim and Eric and Adult Swim Days and Office Hours, and he's currently on tour.

• 53:39Pablo Torre?

  That's incredible.

• 53:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's an incredible fit. And we didn't know this until one phone call, but he does a great Alex Jones impression.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  I set up a website. You can look at it right now because I've got a liquidate and I've got a lot of DVDs. And these are, uh, these are items that I've had for 20 years. These are great DVDs. Tire, Monty Python's Flying Circus. Okay, now that's seven DVDs. And you can get that for $99 right now. And that's gonna help pay for our legal bills. We're gonna be able to keep the doors open.

• 54:04Speaker 04

  A big part of what we've seen over the last couple of years is all of the good comedians that you and I know and love, all the good pipelines for good comedy writers, kind of got killed by a series of things, like the writer's strike, the fires, the pandemic. And by the time they all came back, like, all their jobs were replaced by, like, shows about oil with, like, they have, like, five racial slurs in them for some reason. And they're like, shit, like, where is, where is the apex mountain for what a comedy job is? And it's kind of disconcerting.

• 54:38Pablo Torre?

  Are you saying, are you saying you're not hiring Jerry Jones to do a cameo?

• 54:42Speaker 04

  He is involved, but, uh, sometimes his yacht doesn't get great wifi. So that's kind of the issue.

• 54:48Pablo Torre?

  But I just love, hold on, but, but what you're saying is that you have, you have made a series of bets.

• 54:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:55Pablo Torre?

  On print newspapers and now, uh, yeah, comedy at the time at which both of these industries have, of course, been otherwise deeply, deeply destroyed.

• 55:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. I like, I like, I like a zag.

• 55:10Speaker 04

  We also had this woman named Mia D. Pasquale, who was in charge at, uh, you know, Nathan for You?

• 55:14Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:15Speaker 04

  She was in charge of duping all those companies into participating in that show. And all of them have deep rolodexes. My favorite thing about Tim is that he just loves bringing up younger comics and giving them more space to do stuff. And we're gonna give them space and we're gonna give them the ability to grow into a much bigger thing. In what better way, right? Like, build on the rubble of all this awful stuff. We're all gonna have to do this, brother. Like, we have, like, there, there is just rubble now. And, for example, what you've built is, like, you've built this mansion on top of this rubble because you correctly identified it as rubble. We're trying to do the same. And the people we've hired for this, I could not possibly be more confident it's going to be a big deal.

• 55:54Pablo Torre?

  Which is all to say that at some point, you, Ben Collins, head of The Onion, CEO of Global Tetrahedron, is going to get the keys to that studio. And you're gonna get to walk into Alex Jones's headquarters and do whatever you want with it.

• 56:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, and these families, too. You know, I'm hoping we get access to the actual facility and it's not like booby trapped or whatever. But like, they can go in there whenever they want and, you know, put their feet up if they want. And that is important to me and hopefully to them, that they get to be able to do that and feel like, you know, what happened to them won't happen to anybody else.

• 56:37Pablo Torre?

  Ben Collins, thank you for coming on the show. And if I find that there is a Filipino-looking sports podcaster on your new podcast network, I will sue your ass.

• 56:52Speaker 04

  Well, look, first of all, even our fake version of you will understand that vampires don't like garlic and not the [bleep] onions.

• 57:01Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 57:03Speaker 04

  I swear to God, if you guys [bleep] cut that thing.

• 57:04Pablo Torre?

  We're gonna cut every part of this.

• 57:16Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 57:22Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.