Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Friends, hello. My name is Mike Rugnetta. I'm the host of a podcast called Never Post, which is about the internet. Or really, it's about the world and why the world is the way that it is because of the internet. We ask big questions like, why do disgraced politicians join Cameo? Why is it scary and satisfying to block someone?
Would you ever create an AI voice clone of a deceased loved one in a show that you don't need to be terminally online to enjoy? But it doesn't hurt. Neverpost is at neverpo.st and wherever you find podcasts.
The only good thing about 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.
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.
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. So first, I just want to say welcome. So excited you're here. And we are dying to know what we're talking about.
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 I fuck this up, I'm absolutely blaming you guys.
Okay, cool. All right, welcome to Panic World, a show about how the internet works our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. You are currently the CEO of The Onion, which is... Does that still feel insane to say?
Yeah, it does. Because, Ryan, you've known me for 10 years. I don't think anybody would pick me for a CEO of fucking anything. This is a completely weird thing, but... As you know, because you're kind of the CEO of your own thing at this point, but you wouldn't call yourself that in public.
Legally, I am. There you go. CEOs are a different – we have different responsibilities. We have different – we're kind of better, I think, because there's more on our shoulders.
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Chapter 2: What are The Onion's plans for InfoWars?
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. And 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. It actually uses 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.
Does that sort of switch from one bismal to another also reflects sort of like where the onion is getting its traffic from? Because I imagine like you guys are also sort of feeling the impact of Google Zero right now.
Yeah, we don't really 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, I work very hard and I would like to try a cake and it's by a horse. Okay. It's screenshotted in everyone's text messages and across LinkedIn and threads for some reason and Twitter.
It is everywhere. And if you were to look at our website metrics, you would be like, oh, it did pretty well. If you looked at it in the world's, It is enormous. We had people at farms feeding horses cake. That's how 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 measure against social metrics and vibes, kind of.
And the assumption is good vibes equal good subscriptions equals good business.
Yeah. Are we doing right by our audience wherever they are? Literally, if you are getting a screenshot in a text message, that is incredibly valuable to us. We really don't care how you get it. Now, it's good. Our website traffic is up since we took over, but that's just downwind of all this other stuff. Our social traffic is through the roof. It is...
exponentially hundred something X everywhere. And it's because of this, like we don't, I always say, it's like trying to fall asleep. If you spend your whole life just being like, I gotta fall asleep, I gotta do it. It's not gonna happen. You just have to like work really hard and then go to bed. Like, and that's what we're doing.
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Chapter 3: How has The Onion's business model evolved?
We just wanted people to remember the onion's 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.
Um, like it would be nice if they knew somebody, but they want like a shared experience again.
Yeah. Cause you guys had the luxury of having Jeffrey Epstein in your film, but like backwards and obsession, there's no big names there.
He was great to work with, by the way, just, just a gym.
Um, how was the access?
I mean, he flew us everywhere.
It was crazy. Yeah, I think you guys should absolutely repurpose this plane for something. So in terms of 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 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 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 –
No, I literally posted on Blue Sky. Initially, there was a theater chain that was going to do it. Then Charlie Kirk got shot, and they called us and were like, we can't do a Jeffrey Epstein thing. Why? I'm not really sure. Honestly, I was like, look, you're a gigantic theater chain. I'm not going to be that upset about it.
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Chapter 4: What is the impact of Google Zero on The Onion?
Basically, Alex has created a pocket veto for himself that allows him to never sell these assets and degrade them intentionally. 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 was just four years ago now, four and a half years ago, where he said, do you really think I'm going to pay any of this? That's what he said as the judgment was coming down. He's such a piece of shit, man. And you know what?
He would have been proven right if not for this whole situation, if not for us and the families being this strident in our demand that they get something out of it. So what we're doing is we are giving the families $100,000. We're keeping it old. account that we're trying to give them to a receiver. We want to give them much more than that.
We want to buy the thing outright for like a million and a half dollars. But in the meantime, we made $100,000 in InfoWars merch in the last month, and we want to give it to them. So we are going for it as a way to 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 InfoWars branding and stuff.
I've seen that. Yeah, he does not seem deterred. Yeah.
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 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 the 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, as a federal judge said last month, abuse the bankruptcy process in order to make it so the new owners of this thing can't use it. That is against the rules. And we are trying to uphold these rules so these families can get it.
When you entered into the saga like two years ago, I think, were you expecting the fight to go basically how it's gone?
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Chapter 5: How does The Onion maintain its editorial process?
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 nobody likes what the fuck is happening, brother. Ryan, everybody hates AI. Some people use it, but everybody fucking hates it for a million different reasons.
And 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 an 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 the point of the fucking thing is to pick the right fight and to get people's you know uh eyeballs in in the way that they want in the in a way that leaves them with a dopamine hit that isn't evil
So will InfoWars live on all social platforms? Great question. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is what shape will this take once you guys launch it?
So InfoWars launches July 2nd at 8 p.m. Eastern time, and that's because – I don't know if you remember this. Back in the day, 8 p.m. Eastern time was appointment comedy television. It was. Yes.
That's what it was, baby. That's when new episodes of Seinfeld would air.
Yes, I love this. Speaking of guys that Jeff and I have in common.
Speaking of guys that have aged totally fine in the last decade.
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Chapter 6: What are the challenges of producing video content?
That's really nice.
You didn't know it was Nick. He just liked it.
Back to the most important part of this stuff.
I want to hit one thing before you move on. So when you say these people are going to do bits that become shows, are you imagining a network, like a video network? Is this what you're trying to build?
Yeah, so Mia DePasquale, who used to work, she worked for Nathan Fielder as the person who duped all the companies.
Yeah, yeah.
She's awesome. And she's behind 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 road show. 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, exists where people aren't, with people who need a break, frankly. A lot of these Instagram guys and YouTube creators that want to be 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.
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Chapter 7: How does The Onion plan to engage with its audience?
Right wingers figure 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.
Yeah, and there's so much joy in it too. Part of why this whole thing has worked, it's not like we can afford Tim Heidecker. He believes in the fucking thing. So many people want this thing to work.
So you're not paying a comedian for his labor?
You're absolutely paying Tim. Maybe I shouldn't do a contract negotiation on the Panic World podcast.
Yeah, let's do it. Let's get you both on.
That's a good idea. But 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? How do you do this? The fight, we're doing it for the plot, basically. The very anticipation of...
taking things over keeping like fighting the bad guys 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 uh it's part of the experiment so that's a huge part of it and again like i keep saying this but all that has been abandoned is still good and useful and cool like movie theater is like we like that's what obsession and backrooms realize it's just like
You can just get in there and beat Nate Bergazzi and Baby Yoda because you have a better thing. And it's not reliant on focus groups or bajillions of dollars of overwrought CGI shit or really old tropes in Nate's case, who I used to like, but Jesus, what happened?
His SNL episodes are so good, but I don't get it either. I don't want to take up too much more of your time, and I want to zoom out here. 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.
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