The Onion's big plans for InfoWars

Venerable satirical Chicago-based outfit The Onion is truly on a mission to save democracy — and it starts by relaunching FKA Alex Jones’s InfoWars, which The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron LLC, acquired via bankruptcy auction. CEO Ben Collins joins us to discuss the business’s past and future; chumboxes vs. subscriptions; why they still put out physical newspapers; “Google Zero”; the editorial process (and humans vs. AI); of course, their plans for InfoWars, and more. Our guest Ben Collins is the CEO of Global Tetrahedron. He goes by “Tim Onion” on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social. You can also find The Onion at https://theonion.com/, and starting on July 2nd, the new InfoWars @RealInfoWars. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus & exclusive episodes, and access to our exclusive Discord? Sign up for a membership for just five bucks a month at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. For Apple Podcast users, you can also find all of our bonus content — plus other great COURIER shows — with a subscription to COURIER+. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  The only good thing about Trump, Trumpism is that like it's not a debate. Like this is what happened. Like he intentionally destroyed pretty much everything that we had. We get to rebuild it now because we're ahead of the game. We're the only people who know it's all gone. Like we're the only people who understand we're on the rubble and we can build from there.

• 0:42Ryan Broderick?

  Today, we are taking a look behind the curtain of one of America's most important institutions, an institution that may be trying to save our democracy from evil dictators and fascists. I'm talking, of course, about the Onion. And today we sit down with Onion CEO Ben Collins to talk all about their purchase of Infowars and what they plan to do next with it.

• 1:10Ryan Broderick?

  So we typically do like a whole song and dance setting up for one of these interviews, but we don't know what we're about to talk about. And you, KG. So first I just want to say welcome. You know, so excited you're here and we are dying to know what we're talking about.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. Of course. Infowars launches on July 2nd. The brand new Infowars that we all know and love. And it's going to be a whole new kind of thing. And it's taking a lot of what you guys have talked about over the last year and implementing it into like a business strategy. So if it fucks, if I fuck this up, I'm absolutely blaming you guys.

• 1:45Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, cool.

• 2:01Ryan Broderick?

  All right. Welcome to Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually, reality. You are currently the CEO of The Onion, which is, does that still feel insane to say?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does. Because I, as Brian, you've known me for 10 years. I don't think anybody would pick me for a CEO of fucking anything. Like, this is a completely weird thing. But, you know, as you know, like, because you're kind of the CEO of your own thing at this point, but you wouldn't call yourself that in public.

• 2:27Ryan Broderick?

  Legally, I am.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 2:29Ryan Broderick?

  You know, CEOs are a different, you know, we have different responsibilities. We have different, we're kind of better, I think, because there's, there's more on our shoulders.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. It's, we're so much more important than everyone else.

• 2:40Ryan Broderick?

  You get it. You get it. Yeah.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. You should read my LinkedIn post about this. It's just like, it really is, we just, we just carry more, you know? It's emotional labor.

• 2:50Ryan Broderick?

  I wish people got, you know, what it was like and how, how society is sort of stacked against this. But, okay, so you take over from the, you, you, you take over The Onion, and one thing that I, yeah, one thing that I've been watching very closely is your business model. So, you know, pre Infowars, let's, we'll, we'll build up to that. So, talk to me about like, what it was like taking over The Onion and sort of rethinking how The Onion makes money in the 2020s, because it has to be quite different, I imagine, than how it was making money before.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Oh, hell, yeah, man. So, like, when we took it over, it was making like, you know, well, under $2 million a year on exclusively, almost exclusively, chum box advertising. So, chum box, chum drop, chum box advertising is this stuff at the bottom of the screen that is like, you know, it's like putting onion in your sock and it'll cure your diabetes or something. All that bullshit that has existed for 20 years now on the internet that you hate, you, you only click on it by accident. That was the whole business model. So, when we took it over, that, we just turned it off, and we decided within three months, we would become subscription forward. We would still do ads, but they would be more bespoke, and they would work with people, and we started a, a copy agency as well. But mostly, it's a subscription forward thing with the newspaper. We have 80,000 subscribers.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  We're on sale, by the way. Everyone, go get it. $75 for a year of The Onion. Go get it right now. We realized that it wasn't, the business model that existed was going to last like six more months. So, we had to flip this thing over into something that we had for real. What we knew is that everyone wanted a newspaper. Everyone was like, when are you bringing the paper back? And we're like, immediately? We just had to figure out a way to do it. We didn't know anybody who printed a newspaper in Chicago or anywhere at all, actually, how to ship them. We have a, the people had to like invent a robot arm to shove a newspaper into a manila envelope. And you actually use as a dryer sheet to make sure it doesn't, there's not too much friction over time. Like the kind of stuff that we had to do initially was so manual.

• 4:45Ryan Broderick?

  Does that sort of switch from one dismal to another also reflects sort of like where the onion is getting its traffic from? Cause I imagine like you guys are also sort of feeling the impact of Google Zero right now.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't really care about, uh, we don't care about Google search traffic at all. We want things to pop off wherever they pop off. So for example, our most read story this year, we can't quantify. It's a story called, uh, I work very hard and I would like to try a cake and it's by a horse.

• 5:16Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  And it's screenshotted in everyone's text messages and across LinkedIn and threads for some reason and Twitter. Like it is everywhere. And if you, if you were to look at our website metrics, like you would be like, oh, it did pretty well. If you looked at it in the world, um, it is enormous. We had people at farms feeding horses cake. Like that's how like viral it went among a certain section of people. And I don't care about quantifying that. All I care is that people know the paper's back in print and that the onion is popping off. And we like, we measure against social metrics and like, and vibes kind of, yeah.

• 5:53Ryan Broderick?

  And the, and the assumption is like, good vibes equal good subscriptions equals good business.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Are we doing right by our audience, wherever they are? Like literally, if you are getting a screenshot in a text message, that is incredibly valuable to us. We, we really don't care how you get it. Now it's good to like, our website traffic is like up since we took over, but that's just downwind of all of this other stuff. Our social traffic is like through the roof. It is exponentially hundreds, something X everywhere. And it's because of this, like we don't, I always say, uh, it's like trying to fall asleep. If you spend your whole life just being like, I gotta fall asleep, I gotta do it. Something will happen. You just have to like work really hard and then go to bed. Like, and that's what we're doing. We're just like working really hard and we wake up in the morning and we're, we're, we feel pretty good.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  There was a very famous This American Life episode about the Onion's newsroom, or writer's room. In this iteration, how does the process of picking a headline and deciding what to run with, how has that changed from the days of yore?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's exactly the same as it was back then. I think that's what works about it is that we come in with like 150 headlines a day and we would open and mount like one or two. It is the most severe editing process anywhere in the world. There's something about being really manual right now where people can tell, like people are just very, people yearn for non-AI stuff. We don't use AI in any exported thing in any capacity. I'm sure somebody's using it to like fill out an Excel document somewhere, but like if it's in our arts, if it's in a headline, first of all, you would be able to tell and get yelled at immediately. So please yell at us if you see it. But second of all, it's in our bylaws. We just don't use it. We're not, it's, you see,

• 7:37Speaker 01

  it's in our about us section. We are fervently against it because it produces bad stuff right now. Like maybe down the line it'll be good, but right now it's way the fuck off.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Do you include typos just so people are like, all right, yeah? We do. Still a person.

• 7:53Ryan Broderick?

  That's why we have the typo policy. It's like, look, we made it by human beings. So what you're talking about, you know, and it sounds kind of silly and insane to phrase it this way now, but like you're talking about people primarily reading words, which is a rarity on the internet. And I've watched as you guys haven't totally gone all in on video yet. Now, I assume the Infowars purchase is part of this, but before, but pre-Infowars, like what were, what was your thought process about like what you prioritize? Because you know, like we even have conversations all the time about like what video means and how we monetize and all the rest. Like was, was that sort of just like, okay, phase one is words, phase two is everything else? Or was there another thought there?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Well, we want the Onion to remain at this incredibly high bar. Like if you watch an ONN, like on your news network video, it is great. Like we want to be able to have these incredibly written, just really highly thought out videos. And that, is that the pace of the internet? I'm not sure, but we want to maintain that quality bar. So like when we did a Jeffrey Epstein, Bad Pedophile, which is a documentary that we put in theaters as well. Everything was extremely heavily written and scrutinized and all this stuff. And it's with a tiny staff, like our staff is, when we took over, it was probably about 15 people. Now it's about 35. That's not the video team, that's the whole Onion.

• 9:12Ryan Broderick?

  35 is the whole team?

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, and that includes people selling ads and all this stuff. So we use every part of the pig, as they say, and our, our video team is incredible considering the circumstances. I like, not even, they just are incredible. Like, that documentary is the most ridiculous thing in the world. We're also doing, yeah, sorry, we're doing another one, by the way. We're doing another one called America: Birth of a Nation, which is, uh, that comes out the day before the 4th of July. And, uh, we, like, we want to go all in on that, but we want the quality bar for that to be really high. And the reason we brought Infowars is because the quality bar for Infowars, the brand, is, uh, like beneath the toilet. So, anything is better than that.

• 9:51Ryan Broderick?

  For you. I mean, for Grant, longtime Infowars guy, he's pretty upset about it.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  For you guys, screwed up Infowars, I loved it.

• 9:58Ryan Broderick?

  So I want, I want to, I want to pause real quick on the, on the Bad Pedophile thing, because, uh...

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Oh, you want to pause on the Bad Pedophile, right?

• 10:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I want to pause on the Bad Pedophile thing.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  He disagrees.

• 10:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Brian's like, no, I think he's pretty good, actually, yeah.

• 10:10Ryan Broderick?

  I think he was great. Uh, I think it was really unfair what you did. I think it was really unfair what you did to Jeffrey Epstein. Um, so, you know, I, I was tracking this in the beginning of the year of sort of like, trying to sort of get a sense of what, what people were doing with film and theaters in a way that was interesting. And, you know, our team were talking a lot about going all the way back to like The People's Joker, and then you get like Nirvana, the band, the show, the movie, and sort of different experiments in the theater. And now we're having this conversation post Obsession and post Backrooms, where it feels like, okay, we actually have a sense of how this works now. Like, the internet and Hollywood can collide in ways that are interesting and people like. So what was the thought process for the Onion to go to theaters? Like, was that a stunt? Was that a business model? Was that both?

• 10:53Ryan Broderick?

  Like, what, what were the conversations like leading up to that?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  It was, definitely wasn't a business thing. We wanted to get people together in a room together. The big business image right now is just realizing that the, the real world has been abandoned by, like, corporate interest.

• 11:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  So like, getting people into movie theaters, going to concerts, like, anything that has to do with going out in the world, like getting a physical newspaper in the mail. That is a wide open space. And we wanted to kind of test it out. And we did it with, on a month's notice, we were in like 50 something theaters. That just volunteered do it and we let those places keep the gate like we didn't care about financially what that would do. We just wanted people to remember the onions alive and it's stupid and people to get together at Onion Events to get together in like three different cities in Missouri like carry this thing. So that's what we wanted to do. And like the Backrooms and Obsession thing didn't just simply did not surprise me. They want, people want original and different stuff. They don't really care who's in it. Like it would be nice if they knew somebody, but they want like a shared experience again.

• 11:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, because you guys had the luxury of having Jeffrey Epstein in your film, but like Backrooms and Obsession, there's no big names there.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  He was great to work with, by the way. Just a gem.

• 12:01Ryan Broderick?

  I'm sure. How was the access?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  I mean, he flew us everywhere.

• 12:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think you guys should absolutely repurpose his plane for something. So in terms of like, like, let's call this like, I don't know what you would want to call it, but like sort of using analog infrastructure to like, to sort of reinvigorate a media brand, you know, what are, you talked about the dryer sheets and sort of like building a robot that can like deliver mail. Like when you say corporations are abandoning real life spaces and now there's this opportunity for smaller, newer, younger, savvier places to figure out how to, how to get in there. What are the complications? Like, did you have to do the thing Markiplier did where you like work with some third party to place the movie in movie theaters? Like any of that rigmarole or?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  No, we, I literally posted on Blue Sky. Like initially, like there was a theater chain that was going to do it. Then Charlie Kirk got shot and they called us and we're like, we can't do a Jeffrey Epstein thing.

• 13:00Ryan Broderick?

  Why?

• 13:01Speaker 01

  I'm not really sure. But we honestly, I was like, look, you're a gigantic theater chain. I'm not going to be that upset about it. And the people helped us actually, you know, get us into indie movie theaters and it was helpful. But like mostly I had us posted on Blue Sky. I said, if you want this thing, if you guys want to, if you own a movie theater and like, trust me, 100% of indie movie theater owners are on Blue Sky. That's where they are. Like we, you guys can just take it. Just contact Jeffrey Epstein at theonion.com and we, we gave them like a gigantic file on a Dropbox account and they showed it in their thing. So. That's, that was what it took. And like, I'm not sure the actual gate nationwide. We don't care.

• 13:39Ryan Broderick?

  Like, yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  That's the thing is like, I'm just trying to get people to think way outside of what success is. Like what your metric for success is, because if you are actually reaching people, it's not going to be measured in a way that like the NASDAQ cares about. It's just not the case. Cause the, the internet's so bought it out and so filled with fake bullshit. Uh, if you want to reach a human being and sell them something, you have to go to where they are. And that has nothing to do with like Twitter or anything like that. It's like the places where the gigantic numbers of like hundreds of millions of people viewing your stuff. That's all made up. And every other place that you can reach people and build affinity with them

• 14:24Speaker 01

  is wide the fuck open. I just wish people understood that. Actually, I kind of don't because then my business would be fucked.

• 14:29Ryan Broderick?

  We, uh, we, we've had the same experience actually in a smaller way where we, it started as like, I wanted to do something beyond the newsletter, but I didn't want to make content in the shape that an algorithm would determine. So I was like, oh, it's actually just easier to like sell tickets to a comedy club and do my YouTube videos there. And then that ballooned into like an event series that we're still doing. And the thing that like the immediate takeaway was the same takeaway I had when I went to newsletter publishing for the first time, which was like, oh, here's where the people are. Like I'm not getting like swarmed by psychopaths. I mean, I am, but they're my psychopaths. They're not like, this is, I'm really glad you brought this up because this has

• 15:08Ryan Broderick?

  been really troubling me actually over the last six months or so, which is that most, it feels like most of the people sort of guiding society, guiding culture, guiding, you know, these institutions have totally bought in on metrics that no longer reflect what's happening. And so it's producing this like endless amount of slop is like, kind of not even a, a coherent word for it at this point. It's, it's like this idea that like, the numbers go up when we do this. So we're going to just do this over and over, but it's not reflecting what real people want in any capacity.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  The world became the Trump box, right? Like especially, I, I open Twitter like once a day. Every time I open it, it's someone dying in a unique way. I must say it's someone like, you know, being pushed off a cliff this week. That was a big one.

• 15:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Saw that?

• 15:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  But it's literally every single time. The first thing it says, no 18 gore videos. That's the first account that comes up every time. And I, I don't know how to get out of that. And is that something that I want? Or is it making me better? Is that a community I want to be around? Fuck, no.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 16:34Speaker 04

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• 17:06Speaker 01

  You know, you went to Babies All Right in Brooklyn, right? And you were able to take this thing and have a big audience and have, like, instead of background noise being just complete silence, it's people laughing and having a good time. And then people get excited about your podcast and go and leave and have a drink and talk about it afterwards. It's huge and important. And you know where I'm getting 40% of my ideas, I would say? Is all the psychos we used to cover back in the day over the last 12 years, who found this out first? Like the right wing, the extreme far right found out, for example, that during the pandemic, do you know where there's a camera that's free to use? And also you even have to like record it yourself. You can just go on YouTube and clip it up afterwards at every school board meeting in the country. It was like the only available camera.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  So like there, if you use the surveillance state to your own ends, which they've done, um, you have a wide open space. Like you could do so much.

• 18:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. It really, I mean, that really is what it is. It's like, if you create a moment.

• 18:07Ryan Broderick?

  You're very close to sort of articulating this thing that I've been struggling to articulate, which is like, the cool thing used to be, I'm gonna do something and I'm gonna upload it and then people are gonna share it. And now, the cool thing is, I'm gonna go do something that creates a moment that other people share. Like, they do the social media for me. And like, it's very exciting and it feels very like organic and authentic. It's sort of like the flash mob psychology, but applied to everything. So like, you know, I guess like, the question, you know, from here, though, is like, if you guys are going into producing digital video, how, like, I guess, like, firstly, okay, let's talk about the Infowars purchase. It is now totally sorted

• 18:52Ryan Broderick?

  out, right? Like, you guys have all of it, or is there still legal limbo there?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  There is. So here's the deal. What we're doing is, as you know, the families are 99.9% of the creditors to the Infowars estate, right? There's someone in the courts, or something stepping in at each step to try to prevent this receiver from doing his job. At the 11th hour, anytime we present a deal, at any level of the courts, there's just always somebody or some invisible thing happening in the background. So like, when we had our lease deal, there was an emergency stay on the ability to sell the assets. And that emergency stay, which usually lasts like a week, maybe, lasted 11 months. When we put up the lease deal to take over the assets, which we have,

• 19:40Speaker 01

  you know, signed with this receiver who took over these assets, somebody stepped in on the Texas appellate court at the 11th hour and said, actually, no, you can't, because of this emergency stay from 11 months ago. And they didn't address the fact that it was an emergency. Still has not been addressed. After a federal court stepped in and said, you have to let this guy do this, another, a lower court in Texas, Judge Garrett Gamble, said the same exact thing.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Basically, Alex has created a pocket veto for himself that allows him to never sell these assets and degrade them intentionally. So he can, his whole game plan this whole time is to degrade them. So he would never actually have to pay these families. He has not paid them any money. And he said this, by the way, the day he got it, the day the judgment came down, it's just four years ago now, four and a half years ago, where he said, I, do you really think I'm going to pay any of this? That's what he said, as, as the judgment was coming down. He's such a piece of shit, man. And, and you know what? He, he would have been proven right if not for this whole situation, if not for us and the families being this strident in, in our demand that they

• 20:48Speaker 01

  get something out of it. So what we're doing is we are giving the families $100,000, we're keeping it in the old account that we're trying to give to the receiver. We want to give them much more than that. We want to buy the thing out of it for like, like a million and a half dollars. But in the meantime, we made $100,000 in in-force merch in the last month, and we want to give it to them. So we are going for it as a way to, you know, create some action here. But also, Alex has no standing. Alex is no longer part of Free Speech Systems, he says, even though he keeps using the in-force branding and stuff.

• 21:23Ryan Broderick?

  I've seen that. Yeah, he does not seem deterred. Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  So we're also not deterred. And we are launching this thing because it needs to happen, and the court needs to act, and they need to get, get moving. The other thing is, no matter what happens, there's two different lawsuits. He lost both of them. There's one in Texas, and that's the one that he keeps delaying. But there's one in Connecticut that went all the way to Supreme Court and it's over with. He owes these people, regardless of what happens in Texas, he owes these people at least $1.35 billion. So it's delaying the inevitable here. And we're just tired of waiting. We don't want to let him, like, as, as a federal judge said last month, like, abuse the bankruptcy process in order to make it so the new owners of this thing can't

• 22:08Speaker 01

  use it. That is against the rules, and we are trying to uphold these rules so these families can get it.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  When you entered into the saga like, two years ago, I think, like... Over that, were you expecting the fight to go basically how it's gone?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  No, no, no. We thought we were, again, we thought it was like Storage Wars. We thought we were just gonna go in there and just like put a bid on it. And if we got it, we got it. And we did. And, but we're stupid people because we didn't understand that like nine days after the election, of course Alex Jones can't lose something. Like, it's like, I was gonna go. So like, it didn't, it didn't work out that way. And that's okay. Like, the, the amount of like wrenches thrown in this, like, Ed Martin, the guy who runs all the weaponization stuff, who probably went after my girlfriend, actually.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Like, he tried to step in at one point on behalf of Alex to target one of the first responders to the San Diego massacre. He sent a letter to him, basically, to like, preserve all your documents. And then, you know, the picture of accountability, Todd Blanch actually sent a retraction on that letter to that, to that guy. We didn't expect him to go whole hog, but it is kind of a dare to some extent of like, you really gonna stand up for Alex Jones against the victims of these people? What the fuck is, in a satire website, what the fuck is wrong with you, basically? I think the biggest surprise to us, despite all of that, despite the government, you know, alluding to the fact that they were gonna like dig into our shit, was how quickly he devolved.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  When we had the licensing deal, he didn't expect, because he thought, again, he thought he was getting all this stuff back for free. He thought he was just gonna live scot-free, and his judgment was gonna be an invisible thing for the rest of his life.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  When the licensing deal came through and the receiver told him about it, and we went public with it, he completely went nuts. He was shirtless on his show, talking about, like, calling Tim Heidecker a Satanist and

• 24:02Speaker 03

  I saw that, yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, a pedophile and all that. And like, even his fans were like, I know Tim Heidecker, I used to watch Adult Swim. This is a comedy show, you dumb dumb. And to see that This broke him in a way that was not usual and that his fans started like like fled. I didn't think that would happen. I don't know. Maybe I maybe I underestimated his user base. Like, I just didn't think it would happen.

• 24:28Ryan Broderick?

  I do think there's like a sniff test and like if you get too weird, like a lot of people just feel like I don't want to be here anymore. Like I, I think that has actually happened to the broader Republican movement since Charlie Kirk died. I thought it would happen when Trump was shot the first time or shot at the first time. But maybe because he didn't die, it didn't happen. But I think like when everyone watched Charlie Kirk's head do that. Um, everyone was like, I don't want to be here anymore. Like this is like, this is weird and bad and scary. I don't want to do this. And I think it is slowly happening. I maybe I'm naive, but I think that is true.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  You can't be a loser.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't be a loser.

• 25:06Ryan Broderick?

  You can't be a populist strong man and lose. Yeah, or die.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Like, yeah.

• 25:11Ryan Broderick?

  Death is the ultimate law, the ultimate losing the game, you know, you die.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, you can't spin that. Um, he just lost a, he lost a war to like, um, like a middle power recently. That's like, again, that's what fascists do, but it's also, you know, it's, it shows that it's unraveling. So I don't know, man. I think that the whole experiment's falling apart and the faster corporations or and all these other people just want to get off the train and stop participating, the more likely I am to be like, okay, well, you know, maybe you played the game, but you got, you got out at the right time. If you continue on through to the end of this, I'm gonna make permanent decisions about where I spend money and shit. So like, I hope they understand that.

• 25:50Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so this is where I'm gonna put on sort of my like, thinking too much about the internet hat. Of course. So you guys, you wanna, you wanna raise money for the Infowars victims and that's great.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:02Ryan Broderick?

  How do you staff pay for and and even like, let's say like survive? So like, and I'm asking this semi selfishly because like, You know, we just had, I just had a conversation with our social media intern for the summer about slop. And she was like, look, like, you know, there's no reason to make slop just because these platforms want slop. And I was like, you're right, you're right. But at the same time, it's very hard to justify like paying a lot of attention or giving a lot of effort to these platforms that don't really support that effort. So like, I mean, are you guys going in a dropout model? Are you going to have like your own Vimeo setup for Infowars? Like, how, how will this work and how will it sort of pay for itself?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, a couple of things. First of all, we tell everyone.

• 26:46Ryan Broderick?

  Where's the money, Ben? Where's the money and how are you doing it?

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. How many interns are you exploiting? Who are you exploiting to do this? What kind of workers are you taking advantage of to make this happen?

• 26:56Speaker 01

  My friend Jeffrey, whose last name I'm not going to mention, told me a lot of stuff about this.

• 26:59Ryan Broderick?

  Sure, yeah, yeah.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  No, it all works out financially because people subscribe to the enemy because of it. Like, you have to make these big swings to get into the news or, you know, into the real world and remind people this is happening. We have people walking around with Infowars codes, explaining the whole situation to people, their T-shirts on, because it's provocative. And they're explaining, no, no, no, it's not a weird fascist thing anymore. It's gay now, like they have to do that. And that's great. Like, that's, that's, that's one to one, like, that's the best kind of advertising you can ask for. So like, in terms of actually making back the money, like, we've, that's really not the issue. Pick good fights, pick fights that you know are worthwhile, especially right now. Exist in the real world, especially right now. Because like, nobody likes what the fuck is happening, brother. Like, right?

• 27:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Everybody hates AI. Some people use it, but everybody fucking hates it for a million different reasons. And they don't want anything, they don't want their art to be exported from it or look like it in any way. Because it kind of all looks the same and it's bad and it's obvious. And it will always be that because it's the synthesis of all things. It's the middle of all things. So like, we don't want to participate in that. We're just in a different world. Part of why people subscribe to the newspaper is a Act of just pure deviation from the like limitless economy that exists among fascists. And want to put everything back in the box and have people poke out of the box again. And that's, that's what we allow for. So financially, it's been awesome for us, but that's not the point of the fucking thing.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  The point of the fucking thing is to pick the right fight and to get people's, you know, eyeballs in, in the way that they want. And the, in a way that leaves them with a dopamine hit that isn't evil.

• 28:40Ryan Broderick?

  So like, will Infowars live on all social platforms? Like, I guess, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is like, what shape will this take once you guys launch it?

• 28:48Speaker 01

  So Infowars launches July 2nd at 8pm Eastern Time. And that's because, uh, I don't know if you remember this, back in the day, 8pm Eastern Time was appointment comedy television.

• 28:58Ryan Broderick?

  It was, yes.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  That's what it was, baby.

• 29:00Ryan Broderick?

  That's when new episodes of Seinfeld would air.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Yes, I love this. And speaking of guys that Jeff and I have in common.

• 29:06Ryan Broderick?

  Speaking of guys that have aged totally fine in the last decade.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Unlike his girlfriends.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  We'll be honest. Uh, so, uh, look, it was a big deal when we were growing up and it's a great hour. Like you have the whole weekend to think about what just happened, stupid shit to talk about. And what we're going to do is we're going to be totally platform agnostic about this. Where anywhere that you can see stuff for the first eight weeks, especially with these streams. We want you to be able to see, see it and talk about it and get in the community. So that's, that's on YouTube, that's on Twitch, that's on Instagram, like literally anywhere you will see us live. Provided you can access it for free. Um, and we want people to jump around this. So this is in part because the kind of, Tim had to make some sort of comment the last time that all this stuff happened. All the deal went through the last time.

• 29:58Ryan Broderick?

  Tim Heidecker, you're saying?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Tim Heidecker. So yeah, Tim Heidecker, who is, you know, he sent, and we didn't, when we first sent him up, we didn't think he had this kind of Alice Jones impression marketing to it. And then he, he fucking nailed it.

• 30:09Ryan Broderick?

  It's, it's incredibly good. Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  So like, within a day, he was like, I think we just gotta do something. So within his day, he called Will Sasso to do his Alex Jones impression with him. Um, you know, he got, he got Phil Braun and all of his like, characters and he mapped out some bits to do. And then they went live that night. And within a day, like, we took over the internet. It was like, the top post on Reddit, it was the trending on all of the platforms, even the evil ones. Count Dankula and the Russian government really disliked it. They thought it was cringe and lame and gay, which is, you know.

• 30:43Ryan Broderick?

  You guys should, yeah, try to fix that for next time. You want the Count Dankula vote, I think.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  But like, it drove the conversation on the internet for a weekend. And we didn't even do it really on purpose. We weren't planning, we didn't wake up that week being like, we're gonna do this thing. Now we're gonna, you know, lay all out and see what we can do. And it's in part inspired, like I keep saying, it's inspired by your whole thing. It's just like, show up where people are. And for example, because of the clipping bullshit, like, you know, even, you know, Hasan Piker, or the evil version of him, Nick Fuentes, they averaged like 40,000 people a live stream, and then their clips are millions and millions.

• 31:21Ryan Broderick?

  They just live on forever, yeah.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  And we, we want that, but look, we want people, if there's 40,000 people, last time it was much more than that, but if there's 40,000 people watching live on YouTube, we want them all to be excited about it and watching it and, you know, filling the comment section with, uh, with bits. And like, at present, there's just no place for people who like weird comedy, or stupid shit, or all these other Instagram famous comedians to go, uh, that it feels communal. And, uh, this is a real communal way of doing it.

• 31:51Ryan Broderick?

  So you've inadvertently sort of like stumbled across another trend that I'm really fascinated with right now. Um, so I've been, I have like a folder of like, things, like links, where I'm like, I should like, follow this little thread here. And one I've been keeping track of are the people who are doing TV on the internet. And there's like a couple, uh, you know, uh, Kareem from Subway Takes has his show, and I just saw another one that started last night, which is a late night show filmed outside in New York, and they had like Caleb Heron on it, I can't remember the name. And so there is this trend right now of people going, Okay, if the if if the internet is TV now, I'm just gonna do a TV level production on the internet. And what I've sort of been fascinated with is that like, these things actually aren't working so well.

• 32:33Ryan Broderick?

  Like, they are not actually doing as well as the like garbage nonsense clavicular clips, you know? It's because the deck, I think, is stacked against any sort of professional production. So like, when you're thinking about doing what is ostensibly a TV show on the internet, like, how are you gonna like, how do you navigate that? Like, are you, is it really just like, yeah, fuck it, like, we want it to look good and we want it to work? Or is it, are there things that are going through your head of like, we want to make it specifically work certain ways, I guess?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think like, there's like a concert festival element to this where we're going, like, every episode for the first eight weeks is going to have two static things, which are Tim on a show called Emergency Broadcast, which is a pretty one-to-one parody of Alex. And then the Jim Haggerty Show, which is a parody of like Tucker's style, like brain worm stuff. Who, Jim Haggerty used to be the host of Today Now, which is the old Today Show.

• 33:27Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he got, he got red-pilled and now just talks about 9/11 all the time. So that's, those are the two shows. But in between those two things, all of those like Instagram famous comedians, actually, I'm not gonna say names yet because they're like people that you know, but I don't want to like ruin it for surprise. They're gonna be doing bits that turn into shows. Like, one of these, we'll talk about this on the record. One of these people is Nick Lutzko, who I love deeply. He has the equivalent of like a couch gag for us, which is going to be very, he's done the Infowars theme song for us.

• 33:59Ryan Broderick?

  Fantastic.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Nick is most famous now among regular Americans for being a batch of cubes, pubes during a Super Bowl commercial. I don't know if you guys saw that.

• 34:08Ryan Broderick?

  I did not see it.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  He did the Manscaped Super Bowl commercial. He created a song for them where he is a singing clump of pubes.

• 34:15Ryan Broderick?

  Our fans might know him from the Dan Bongino songs, of which there are a few now, and they're very good. Him as the clump of pubes is actually my background for my computer. I just keep it there.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Oh, cool. That's good. That's really nice.

• 34:27Ryan Broderick?

  If you didn't know it was Nick, he just liked it. So, okay.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Back to the most important part of this stuff.

• 34:33Ryan Broderick?

  I want to hit one thing before we move on. So. When you say like, these people are gonna do bits that become shows, are you imagining a network, is like a video network? Is this is what you're trying to build?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Mia Di Pasquale, who used to work, she worked for Nathan Fielder as the person who duped all the duped all the companies into.

• 34:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  She's awesome. And she's the eye in the scenes, working with all these creators, being like, could this be a show? Actually, could this be a larger thing? And by the way, when we say just show, I don't mean necessarily like there's a 12 episode order of a half an hour. I'm saying like, maybe it's like a roadshow, maybe it's on the street, like, maybe it's a movie, maybe you are a character in a professional wrestling match or something like there's just like, we want to be like, when I say platform agnostic, I really mean it. There is a method to the madness here. It's just like, exist where people aren't with people who people with people who need a break, frankly. A lot of these Instagram guys and YouTube, YouTube creators that want to be

• 35:35Speaker 01

  part of a collective, want to be part of the next MTV or Comedy Central or movement or whatever. There's nowhere to go. They're not racist enough. So like,

• 35:45Ryan Broderick?

  Right, that's the

• 35:45Speaker 01

  We're just trying to get into that.

• 35:47Ryan Broderick?

  Be more racist. I agree.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:50Ryan Broderick?

  It's this thing that we've been having conversations about internally a lot right now, where it's like, if you are someone like me or you who's, you know, been looking at the internet basically nonstop for two decades, if not more at this point, like, we're at this very exciting moment, exciting for me moment where because we live in a Panopticon where anything can become content, anything can become content. And, you know, clavicular was sort of this interesting moment for me where I was like, oh, yeah, like, literally, you can do anything now. And, you know, it's easier if you're racist, it's easier if you're a psychopath, but like, it is true for anybody and packaging

• 36:30Ryan Broderick?

  it up, kind of is the fun part. The hardest part is going like, what is a cool idea? And then you can kind of just like, let it sort of exist however it wants to exist.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  There's, there is this wide open field. There is this wide open space and we have this ability to create something new that feels brand new and people really desperately want it. We, Ryan, we've been living in this, the last five years. Of this comedy space that is probably best defined as like anything but the N word. It's just like, it's really deeply horrible, not funny, just cruel and like over the top evil space. And then the most serious thing we've moved into is the all rage is sort of recreating 90s culture, but in the most like brazen and awful way. Clavicular is like the equivalent of like Britney Spears where we're trying to drive into suicide as a culture for some

• 37:22Speaker 01

  reason, uh, using steel bucks. And I don't get it. Like, I think it's kind of weird and fucked up. Um, and we should be making fun of the premise of that, but not like the guy needs to go to the fucking doctor. Like his problem with his brain.

• 37:36Ryan Broderick?

  He, no, no, he needs more plastic surgery. He needs to go to the doctor and get more plastic surgery.

• 37:41Speaker 03

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• 37:45Speaker 00

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• 38:42Ryan Broderick?

  I've been having this conversation a lot over the last six months and I, I was having it literally last night where, you know, I wrote this thing a couple of months ago about how like the, you know, in a world where you can say the N word and be paid a millions of dollars for it, the only actual taboo left is copyright infringement because the corporations will never allow it. And so like Nirvana, the band, the show, the movie, that brazen copyright infringement. Technically what you guys are doing is sort of like a very legal version of copyright infringement, or at least taking a copyright and messing with it. Right? It's this, it's, it's this sort of thing where the powers that be get very allergic to it.

• 39:16Ryan Broderick?

  And I do think there's historical precedent there. You you compare it to the 90s. I would actually compare it to sort of that like war on terror era, which I had never sort of considered like the rise of illegal music and the rise of like mashups and remixing and messing with copyright as part of that larger kind of surveillance state and censorship moment while also being like mega right wing. But I do think it always sort of goes hand in hand. It's like when you have not, I think human beings are naturally attracted to taboo and they're naturally bored of it quickly. So it's like, you know, if you can have a UFC fight on the White House lawn, like you could do whatever the fuck you want. You could shit your pants in front of the G7, which he literally did this week, the president.

• 39:59Ryan Broderick?

  But so, okay, then how do you press people's buttons? And it's like, well, you can just really sort of scramble people's brains by playing with the last sacred thing, which is like copyright and what corporate, how corporations make money and how they make money off of you. So like,

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. As you said, like messing with the the inherent surveillance by doing things out in the world and having people film it. Right wingers figured this out really fast. It's like if there's a televised appearance somewhere and I can get on it, I can hijack it. And that doesn't have to be a right wing thing. Anyone can do that.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yes. And there's like so much joy in it, too. Like part of, part of why this whole thing is work. It's not like we can afford Tim Heidecker. He just like, he believes in the fucking thing. Like so many people want this thing to work.

• 40:43Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, so you're not paying? You're not paying a comedian?

• 40:46Speaker 01

  We, we.

• 40:46Ryan Broderick?

  You're not paying a comedian for his labor?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  You're absolutely paying Tim, but like I, you know, maybe I shouldn't do a contract negotiation on, on the Panic World podcast.

• 40:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, let's do it. Let's get you both on.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  That's a good idea. Um, but like we, there's a reason he puts in way too many hours on this. It's because he believes this is the fun next thing. And anytime he goes out in the world, he's like, what's happening to this thing? Was, was this going, like, how do you do this? Like the fights that, that we're doing it for the plot, basically. The very like, uh, anticipation of.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Taking things over, keeping like fighting the bad guys is is part of the part of the deal here. It's part of the like, there's I wouldn't even be able to put that into a format, but whatever that is that we're doing is part of is part of the experiment. So that's a huge part of it. And again, I keep saying this, but all that has been abandoned is still good and useful and cool. Like movie theaters, like we like, that's what obsession in back rooms realizes. Just like, you can just get in there and beat Nate Bargatze and Baby Yoda, because you have a better thing. And it's not reliant on like focus groups, or bajillions of dollars of like, overwrought CGI shit, or really old tropes.

• 42:05Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  In Nate's case, who I used to like, but Jesus, what happened?

• 42:09Ryan Broderick?

  His SNL episodes are so good, but I don't I don't get it either. I I I want to I don't want to take up too much more of your time.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 42:16Ryan Broderick?

  And I want to zoom out here. And sort of, you know, it occurred to me the other day when I was thinking about this, that The Onion is sort of one of the few now completely intact, running sort of comedies. It's kind of like you guys and Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is sort of fascinating. And The Simpsons, I guess, if you want to count, or like Family Guy, but like, there's there's not a lot of them. And I think it's important that you guys have figured out a through line of American comedy throughout the decades, because I think right now, the right wing gets a lot of power by saying that things have changed, and that sensibilities have changed. And and you see this with like the Gen Z puritan reaction to it, where they're like, I guess things have changed. Everything's

• 43:00Ryan Broderick?

  different. Like, you can't, you know, what you can't make The Office now. You could never make The Office now, according to Rainn Wilson. But The Onion sort of stands as proof that like, actually, that's, if you're funny, it sort of has not really changed. Core concepts of like, what is funny? Like, once you can pop that bubble, the entire right wing fever dream kind of dissipates, because you're like, we are just sort of human beings that know what's good. Like, good doesn't have to change. Taste can sustain, I guess. It's like, it's a very, it's a very hopeful thing that gets me fired up right now. Like, because the whole thing rides on that not being true. And if you can prove it's not true, you win the game.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yes. What we've been living through is a carpet bomb of like, we're gonna win culture from the, again, the Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen style people. And you can get a critical mass of people to consume your thing. It does not mean they like it more. I think we see this left and right, pretty much everywhere. But there was that, I don't know who posted it on Blue Sky, somebody did about how, you know, there was like a six month phase where you walked into a Target and all you heard was country music. And everyone was like, why the fuck is this happening? What's going on? It didn't take, like, it just, the country just does not behave like this. Some people like country music, but it's a small amount of people and it's not the whole fucking country. We're not, we're not like this. And what we are is people, as Americans, really, at the end of the day,

• 44:20Speaker 01

  we're people who will rebel against somebody who comes off as trying to tell you to do something.

• 44:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  And holy fucking shit, eight people who are the richest in the world, plus the United States government entirely, every branch of it, is telling you to do something. And it's fucking weird. It's like, did you see the Riley Gaines clip about when she showers, she uses beef tallow?

• 44:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  These people are fucking disgusting. Like, they are gross people. And like, nobody, it is not taking because it's fucking gross, weird behavior. Of course. And not even in a cool way. This isn't like a Gigi Allen situation. So like, we're living in somebody else's constructed, forced reality. And the only thing Americans know how to do, it's like the fucking founding of the country, is rebel against that thing. Conservatives thought they were doing that against like Obamaite wokeness, I guess. But that was a very light touch. This is so fucking heavy handed.

• 45:10Ryan Broderick?

  They were rebelling against content cops like you and me, who weren't allowing them to post cartoon frogs on Twitter.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Tell you what, though, the content cop shit, like, Alex Jones has like 6,000 streams a day on Rumble now. Like, all of the, all of his juice came from the Infowars account. And be that, be that bots, or be that genuine falloff and how cool the name Infowars is, which it is.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  It's a cool name. You know, I think it's probably bots, but like... It's that was not organic that whole time and we have to understand that.

• 45:45Ryan Broderick?

  There's been an argument over the past couple since Trump that it's impossible to do satire as the world has become dumber and more extreme. Has that is that discussed in the underwriters room? Has that has that impacted like where you take a headline?

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's probably easier to do hack shit. I think that's definitely a way of putting it, but that's why we have the pros. That's why we like do that whittling processes because we don't want to be confused with a random meme page and we're not like you can tell what's a non headline and what's not. We're a little bit surprising in each way. I think also just like playing with format and playing with other stuff is is the next frontier on this. Again, we did satire through a bankruptcy court like that shit is not.

• 46:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  It's not fucking easy. Like we are, we're, we're trying, there are new evolutions of this all the time, but it's also like the most effective weapon against authoritarianism throughout history or throughout the world. We're not the only place it's like this Baltic states have been like this where you can ban making fun of the guy in charge, but you can't ban making fun of a composite character or saying specific words or alluding to it. But yeah, of course it's harder, but that's, that's why we have these guys here cracking away every day.

• 46:59Ryan Broderick?

  We've been, uh, we've been noodling on this concept that we're calling chud tech. And so it's like gambling apps, streaming apps that all sort of want to like turn everything into like a gooner mode. So like, cause like a live stream and a gambling app are kind of the same thing. You just stare at it and you give it money sometimes. And I think another reason why that stuff is so popular with like the Marc Andreessen set is that it's very easy to inflate. Like it's very easy.

• 47:26Ryan Broderick?

  I can't say for sure that Peter Thiel reached out to Clivikular and told him to start streaming on on kick and then, you know, had him and his buddies flood kick with a bunch of donations to give him money as a way to launder him money for the right wing culture war. I can't say that. But if I were Peter Thiel and I wanted to do that, it would be a great and easy way to do that.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  I think Owen Higgins' book and this lawsuit around it confirms that you can in fact say this, so I think that's, that's fine.

• 47:50Ryan Broderick?

  I'm just, I'm just asking questions. Um, and so, but yes, and, and, and it's, and it is funny, like every time you lift up one of these rocks and you actually like see what's going on, you realize it is not really, it is all like random clips being made for millions of dollars like in Rwanda, you know, by guys on Discord. And like, we saw this up close this weekend when we went to the UFC fight in DC, we're talking to people, they're there on the White House lawn to watch a UFC fight. And we were like, oh, like, do you have any like big thoughts about the fact that this is, you know, Trump's birthday or whatever? Not a single person even remembered it was Trump's birthday. Like, the, this stuff is not actually permeating culture. Yes, there are like right wing rednecks out there who

• 48:33Ryan Broderick?

  want to watch like a fight or whatever, but like they don't think deeply about this stuff. It's the internet telling you that they do. It's not real. Like, I really don't think it's real.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  I don't think it is either. And I think a lot of it is, um, a big part of the marketing we're going to do around at Wars is just making fun of the fact that everything is anticipation for an event that will never happen. And that's what, for example, like the SpaceX thing is like, eventually we'll get to the moon and we'll do all this other shit. And like, and money is infinite, right? That's all anticipation for a thing that will never happen. So is Trumpism as a premise, right? It's been 10 years. He was going to fix everything the first time around. Now, we're going to get through effectively 12 years of Trumpism with one guy who was just standing there just getting punched by Trumpism.

• 49:14Ryan Broderick?

  Well, it's revelation Christianity. You just rebranded the waiting for the apocalypse, but it's just some other thing that hasn't happened and will happen if you support us, you know, kind of thing.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  And Alex Jones is always into this with, you know, the civil war is right around the corner. You gotta do all this. Right. It's all just anticipation, because like, they don't actually want. They don't want a result. They want to feel the dopamine high of something coming. And that is true of gambling apps. That's true of like prediction markets, all of these other things, because they realize that the high is in the ride up. And then, once you're there, there's nothing, there's nothing. The top of the mountain, you are standing at the top of the mountain and you're fucking cold. And that's what it is. So like, we are, part of what we're doing here is hopefully laying that bare.

• 49:56Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I want to thank you for coming on. I, I want you back on the show as soon as, as soon as you can. This is great.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  And ditto. Like, I'm, I'm just, you know, you're the only person who seems to get what's going on. I'm just like, very, it's, it's nice to be able to, because it's not even a question anymore, who is right about stuff. Now, we're just like paleontologists about the last, about, about the last 10 years and how everything devolved and how, the only good thing about Trump, Trumpism is that like, it's not a debate. Like, this is what happened. Like, he intentionally destroyed pretty much everything that we had. And now, we are, we get to see, we get to rebuild it now, because we're ahead of the game. We're the only people who know it's all gone. So I'm just very grateful for you for understanding that. And like, I always say, like, like, we're the only people who understand we're on the rubble, and we can build from there.

• 50:44Ryan Broderick?

  Honestly, the, the accelerationist in me is super excited about this, because like, I have spent, I was never a great fit for the like, peak Obama squeaky clean relatable. Like, I'm not a very relatable person. I think there's something like, about being from Massachusetts that makes you extremely allergic to that in general. Like, I'm not, I used to think of it as like, oh, this is, the internet has become like, a dorm room I want to get out of. Like, a freshman year dorm room, I want to get the fuck out of here. And obviously, what happened after that is not good. But I feel like, for the first time in my life, the first time professionally using the internet, there is like, room to build things that don't have to be a specific shape, have to be a specific, you know, for a specific demo. You can just do things. And I, I am really fired up about it. And

• 51:28Ryan Broderick?

  I fear I sound crazy when I talk about it.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  I feel, I feel like myself. I feel like I'm building something as myself. Like, I, I want to, what I want to build within fours is like, national public access, where people get to do weird shit all the night, and just like, And now we can do that. Like, it's all available to us because we understand the thing. But like, when I was in, when I was in NBC, I felt like I had a headache every third day. Like, I was just like, I am fitting myself into this fucking box of what people want me to, what I'm being told to be by people, but still kind of just trying to report what's going on.

• 51:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  And that was horrible. Like, I, like, at the end of the day, I should have just gone to you like, look, they're all Nazis. I can't tell you, they're acting like Nazis because they're Nazis and they're doing Nazi shit. Like, at the end of the day, I should have just done that. Like, I don't know what I was thinking.

• 52:12Ryan Broderick?

  I, I remember, like, I was in college, you know, I'm reading crack.com, somethingawful.com, like the Zach Parsons era where they're writing, like, amazing stuff. And I'm watching, like, the Chris Gethard Public Acts show, you know, which was, like, filming in New York, and I'm on Long Island at the time. And I get into New York media thinking like, oh, cool, like, it's like, you can do whatever you want now, the internet's limitless. And then that you hit peak Facebook era, and it all gets wiped out and then becomes like the bedrock for this, like, insane right-wing oligarchical fascist movement that I feel like the fever is finally beginning to break on because they're so stupid that they fucked up their own stuff. Like, all their own platforms are so goddamn and shitified that, like, people are finally going, wait a minute, like, I can do other stuff and I can enjoy their stuff.

• 52:56Ryan Broderick?

  And that, it is, it is crazy to me that we had it for a brief second between, like, 2008 and 2011, and then we lost it for, like, 15 years. But now we're finally at that place where you can do it again. It's awesome. It feels good.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  The, the actual silo that's been created is like these people who are the Bill Ackman types, like, people, they're high on their own supply. They think the, the whole world's coming along with them, but nobody is. And like, because they're in, they're on Twitter together and that, like, nobody uses that. So like, they, if they were to check Instagram to see, like, the amount of people who are, like, grandmothers who are just like assassinate the president, like, that's what they're talking about. Like, they have no idea how out of their depth they are, especially culturally. I, and I'm no longer, like, nostalgic.

• 53:37Ryan Broderick?

  No. Um, I wanna, I wanna ask one important question that I've been dying to ask you, which is, what is your favorite? Attraction at the Salem Willows.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Oh, uh, great question. It is the, uh, the dancing monkeys with the maracas. Do you know these guys?

• 53:55Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I do. Yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Uh, they're right in the front. Yeah.

• 53:58Ryan Broderick?

  In the very, the tip of it, right? The front? Yeah. I was a big fan of the DDR machine personally.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Shocking. That makes a lot of sense. Yes. That DDR machine was the first time I saw a line with like, people would put coins on the machine to wait to do DDR.

• 54:11Ryan Broderick?

  I would do, yeah, it's like, it's like a pool table. Uh, for listeners who don't know what I'm talking about, uh, we are both from the same area of Massachusetts and there's a slightly haunted amusement park sort of thing on the edge of the water that is great and very weird called the Salem Willows. Highly recommend visiting.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  It's a, it's like, it's back rooms, the, the amusement park, basically. So.

• 54:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  You should go to that. Yeah. Yeah.

• 54:32Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Last question I always ask everybody is, uh, if people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that? You know, obviously the Onion, but.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would follow the Onion everywhere, at Real Infowars everywhere, starting fly second. And, um, that's not me, that's, that's, that's Infowars, but you can follow me on Blue Sky with my name, Ben Collins, uh, the dot Blue Sky on the social, really.

• 54:52Ryan Broderick?

  It's so easy to tell.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  I gotta fix that.

• 54:54Ryan Broderick?

  It's so easy to tell people where to find you on Blue Sky. They really did a great job with that. I love Blue Sky. Yeah.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. And, uh, yeah, I'm, I'm everywhere but Twitter, literally everywhere but Twitter. So like, if you want to look me up, uh, I'll be there just like up my stupid fucking name or Tim Onion. That's a way of calling it out too.

• 55:09Ryan Broderick?

  There you go. Cool. Well, thank you so much. This is fantastic. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fialsted is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and national managing director and executive producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing and Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to.

• 55:49Ryan Broderick?

  You can email her at [email protected]. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.

• 55:59Speaker 05

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