Better Offline - The Onion Knight Ft. Ben Collins

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

In April, The Onion was acquired by a new entity called Global Tetrahedron, revealed shortly thereafter to be a joint venture between billionaire Jeff Lawson and former NBC disinformation reporter Ben Collins, now its CEO. Ben joins Ed to talk about buying The Onion, keeping its Chicago roots, and how we can save digital media. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Each episode digs into what these stories reveal about desire, fantasy, identity, and how we love now. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CoalZone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. On April 25th, 2024, GeoMedia, the Private Equity Project,

best known for running websites like Deadspin into the ground, announced that it was selling satirical news, newspaper, and website The Onion, to a company called Global Tetrahedron. Though few knew it at the time, Global Tetrahedron was an entity run by former NBC News Disinformation Reporter Ben Collins, funded by billionaire Jeff Lawson, best known for founding Twilio.

As a note, global tetrahedron is a reference to the company of the same name from the Onion's anthology book, Ardum Century. In one of the first bits of good news I've had to share on this show, the Onion is now owned by somebody who has not only done a job in journalism, written things, research things, and worked in a news organization that didn't burn to the goddamn ground. He also cares about the future of the newspaper, best known for headlines like, study reveals babies are stupid, jurisprudence fetishists get off on technicality, and Mark Zuckerberg worried Facebook listening to him after being pushed shirt that says

I just laid off 10,000 employees. Today it's my immense pleasure to be joined by the Onion's new CEO, Ben Collins. Okay, so how did this deal to buy the Onion actually come together? Okay, so I was, uh, uh, it was January. I'd just quit, my job right before Christmas. And I was writing a book about like some of the biggest pieces of shit on the planet earth. Right.

You know, the Elon Musk's and the Jim Jordans of the world. And I was like super depressed and I was like, I was plowing through it, but it wasn't. Yeah, exactly. I have no idea.

I don't even know if it was good. I think it probably was all right. But like the, the process was horrible. And I read an ad week that the onion was. aggressively for sale. And I had known and I remembered that Elon Musk had once tried to buy the onion. Right.

He wound up poaching a bunch of staff and started this thing called Thud, which never really launched. He, from what I've heard from some lore in the office, by the way, is that they, after about a year, he didn't think anything that these former onion writers wrote was funny. And this was like a peak era of the onion. So he just shooed them away. off campus, off the Tesla campus where he had originally put them with the

SpaceX campus and into this weird remote area. And then it just died a sad and it died the death of like a guy dying in the desert in a video game. Yeah. That's what happened.

So I was worried that he was going to try to snap it up or like the AI, all the people who buy these like websites and turn them into like weird zombie AI farms. I thought that was a lot. Yes, that seems pretty likely. Yeah, and I really, I really did not want that to happen.

The onion was a very important part of my life, grown up. Right. Kind of remains that way, and it's like the last American news institution that has been completely unsullied, I would say. And also a rare good hit rate for decades. There's not really been a slump. Yeah, exactly. Even in the last year when all these other news organizations were really fumbled, in the bag, just like tripping over themselves.

They weren't, you know, they were very clear about AI and Gaza and all these other things that people fell into like some really weird rhetorical traps for themselves that they are now having a hard time getting out of. The onion didn't do that. Like one of their headlines from last year was a guy who sucks at being a person sees huge potential in AI, which is just fucking right. It's just really good. Yeah.

Anyways, yeah, so I read in Adweek that it was very for sale. And I put on Blue Sky, I said, does anybody want to save the onion? I have like $600 or something like that. And my friend Lila, Rilsson, who lives in Chicago, was like, the onion's like a Chicago institution. Like, if this thing goes away, it's like a really bad thing. Like, who do we call to make sure somebody decent ends up with the thing? thing. So I was like, I don't know, let me just make some calls and I'll see what it costs, I guess, or see what it is, see what's going on with it. And I just kept making phone call. I

just kept going. I just kept like being like, how would I, like, if we were to buy this, like, how would we make money? How do they make money now? Do they make money now? What's going on with this thing? Right. And a couple of weeks later, we were just in the thick of it. Like, eventually we had, we had collected enough people who knew a rich guy or not. you know, to get in the equation. And then there was, you know, there was this guy named Jeff Lawson who had just left Twilio. Yes. Like a company.

And he kind of felt the same way about it that we did. And we had, you know, we just kind of like constantly were in assurance to each other that neither of us was going to mess this up. That we're all going to like leave the processes be at the onion that makes it great. and then it just happened. Like, I, you know, within, I think like eight weeks, it went from like a hilarious joke in my house. Like, I was telling my girlfriend, I was like, I'm going to buy the onion, ha, whatever.

And then in like two weeks, it was like, I think I'm going to actually do this. I think this might actually happen. And then in eight weeks, it was pretty much done. Like, we were fighting off some last second bidders who were particularly ghoulish, but like, any clarity on who those might be? They're in the news.

Oh, okay. But, yeah, it's the, you know. But so perhaps a very direct question is, so Jeff Lawson, he's a billionaire, Rand Twilio, quite rich. How are you going to avoid what has happened with a lot of tech investor projects? Because for the most part, they've been pretty good, but generally when they start, like, Jeff Bezos has not really backed the Washington Post. He doesn't seem to feed it more money. and the same kind of like Beniof buying time and Mark Beniof's CEO of Salesforce bought time a few years ago and he again does not seem to have like he doesn't seem to have messed with it but he also doesn't

seem to have helped it what's the plan with Jeff Lawson well we're going to do profit sharing we're going to make sure the staff if it does well they get money for us like it's just straight up what it is you know he views this as a public interest thing just as we do that it's an American institution and if it dies it sucks like it's bad for everybody we need we need somebody to just um aggressively need old bad people and uh like this is not his money making enterprise i think he already did that um but like our the goal of it is is to yeah the goal of the goal of it is to make an environment where writers can make money for doing good writing like it's just a weird idea Yeah.

So with that in mind, what's the actual plan to make money? How does it make money now and what's the plan for the future? Okay, cool. I actually want to talk to you about this because this fits with how we talk about stuff. You and I, like when we text about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's important. So the way the onion used to make money under geo media is basically one way.

It's programmatic advertising. So programmatic advertising is this horrible thing that sort of ate the internet and sort of ate our politics in the world. it's all those like, you know those like one weird trick ads and... Yes. And they're currently all over the bottom of the page. Yeah. When people think of insidification, this is probably what they're thinking about, right? Right.

And that's how they make money right now. And I, now on the other side of this, I get it, right? If you were to, you can run a business like this where it's really low margins and, you know, you have a small staff. And on top of that, basically, you just keep running a website where that's if you're updating it a little bit, it'll remain at the top of Google or whatever. And then you get enough of these impressions so that these horrible ads just keep,

you know, showing up literally 10fold sometimes like 100 fold underneath. And they get paid by the impression rather than the click through. Right. Exactly. So like it's like it would be like if every car that drove by a billboard, there was a there, you got paid for an eyeball, right?

Every thousand car. Right, exactly. And then you can pay it even more, obviously, if somebody clicks on that. So the incentive structure is bad to begin with, but then the incentive structure from the person selling the thing on your website is even worse. So it's just like, can I tell you my favorite programmatic advertising? Please do. Larry Birdwife ad. One second.

Larry Birdwifead.com. Oh, yes. I know the one we're going to, I'll put a link to it in the episode notes. Okay. I do want to. Can I read it? you? Please do.

Please read it to me. It is Meet Larry Bird's repulsive wife. Which is not an onion headline, right? That's an actual programmatic click-bay

advertising. You click on it. It's exactly what it says it is it's them making fun of how this woman looks and she's not repulsive, by the way, but they just...

It's just one of the most things. And that's an automatic is that it's, I guess it was before, AI generation that came out. So there was a guy who was like, you know who I'm going to take the boots to today. Larry Bird's ugly wife. I'm going to take it down a few pegs. It's the 2020s. You know what it's time for? All the frame busted ones. Jesus God. But that's the thing. When you get websites, and you can even see it on big ones like NBC. I've mentioned this before.

These programmatic ads are everywhere, like Outbrain things. There's on CNN as well. So you'll get like international news, international news, politics, and then the thing about how your hearing aid should be better and you can buy them from a special website that's full of spyware. And it's just crazy. And this is most of the media. But what do you, what are you going to do with the onion though? Yeah. And I also want to say, by the way, that design language of that sort of thing, that sort of

verbatedness and how they even physically look, you see places like the New York Times sort of copy that because people are used to that the design language. of chumbox ads. They're called chum boxes. Yeah. And it just makes everything worse. Our politics sort of sound like that now. The way people talk sort of sound like

meet Larry Bird's repulsive wife. Like that's just sort of how things, that's how it feels like American life, right? And it can't be good. It just can't be good. So how are we going to make money? Great question. In a diverse way that is not that.

Like there's a several part strategy that we have. First of all, we're going to, I don't want to like, blow our load here a little bit, but we're going to have a membership that maybe brings back the newspaper. Yeah, cool, and we're excited about it. We're going to sell direct ads. So, like, ads that want to, like, companies that want to directly deal with us,

we're going to do that. We're not going to be, like, a fifth-party vendor to some, to scaring people on the internet. Companies that want to deal with us, we want to deal with them, too. And, like, that's another thing. There's a thing called, we're basically, we're going to write some ad copy. where we are also aware that there hasn't been a funny Super Bowl commercial in like fucking 15 years. So like we do want to be in that business too. And so wait, would you be making Super Bowl commercials for other people?

Well, we'll be making ads for other people. Yeah. Right. And there's several different ways we can go with video that we're currently trying to figure out the very best one. But all of those ways sort of, you know, they bring in cash. And then there's, uh, there's, there's, just a lot of ways to do this and we're going to do a little bit of everything. But like, I would say the number one way you can do it, it's like subscribe to us when we launch our membership product,

but we just want to be really good. So we want the staff to own it and be, you know, and we want to hear more feedback of what people want in a membership from us on a newspaper. So that's part we're just taking our time with that. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel,

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Because that feels like the biggest failure of every digital, what, failed digital media product that I've seen the last few years. Yeah, I mean, he's patient with the idea that this does take. time you get to build out a thing that you can't in what it's been six weeks or something you can't just like completely flip around an entire business um and like we have to get out of contracts we have to get out of whole thing like there's a bunch of stuff that we have to do to get out of that previous business um that oh so you're actually unbuckling parts of the geomedia the hydro yeah i mean like you know we're on their old building where there's just a lot of stuff that you have to do we We had to set up a whole, you know,

to set up a whole business with health insurance and all the other stuff that you would do when you buy a business. And a lot of it is unlearning stuff, right? Where part of the previous business, right? If you are doing programmatic advertising as your primary business, you're doing slideshows all day.

You are telling people, you're driving people to a slideshow and telling them to click the button over and over again to get a new freshly set, like freshly created set of ads. Right. And we have to get this, you know, it's demoralizing to the staff. We have to get them in the mindset that like maybe the best joke is a TikTok video.

Maybe the best joke is, um, is a whole newspaper. Maybe it's a physical object. Like, how do we actually satirize our current times right now and not just, you know, the internet from 10, 15 years ago? Getting that mindset with the writer's room is important. and until six weeks ago they didn't they had no idea who was going to take over this place or if anybody who was going to take over it would keep them on board so I think we're you know part of it is just winning their trust and we're well on our way as that's cool and you

mentioned kind of expanding the media side like as it's weird over the years the onion went from having probably some of the freshest media content to being mostly written there was a time when you had like, I don't know any listeners who remember this. I don't know if you saw this, but Get Out of My Face was one of the best comedy products of the last decades. It was a sports show, much like around the horn, except both hosts just completely hated each other and most of the sport. But then it went away and it felt like the onion went very writing base, which is fine.

It's good stuff. But so you're going to expand that then. Right, exactly. First of all, the favorite of Get Out of My Face, they had a segment where I think it was called Who Should We Assassinate and they would just pick a sports. They would pick an athlete to assassinate. I just remember one where it was just him screaming about how Pennsylvania is a giant, it's a giant abandoned parking lot and he couldn't wait to get home and shave his entire body.

Anyways, multimedia now. So you're going to start expanding into video, I hope, again. Yeah, that's important to us because there's two reasons for that. First of all, the reason it became a text-heavy thing is because of the business of programmatic advertising. There's no, you know, they were just feeding that beast. it up. So we want to get out of that and do bigger things. Second of all, we've accidentally developed this massive fan base

among the kids. Because in the last year, if you watched CNN or MSNBC or if you read the New York Times or something, and you were 22 years old, you were just getting fucking yelled at by old people. Like, that was it. That's just what was happening. It's still kind of all. Yeah. It was like, your feelings aren't valid and literally get off my lawn. That's what they were saying to them, right? That was the last year of

coverage. And we weren't like that. Like we, you know, we've, um, we've said, first of all, your feelings are valid. You also may be right. And also, um, you know, there are a lot of parallels to previous parts in history where, um, the onion also stood up, uh, when it was unpopular. For example, like during the Iraq war, they, they stood up all the time. You know, they, um, back peak Dixie Chicks era, they were, they had the same political, but they were, thankfully, the enemy was a little bit funnier, so they got away with it. Right. And that sort of mirrored a lot of the Gaza stuff over the last year or two, where they,

they stood up early on. Can I just read you a headline? Yes, please. The headline is, the onion stands with Israel because it seems like you get in less trouble for that. That's from October. Jesus cry. It's the most cutting media criticism you're really reading.

Yeah. And like, and by the way, with trans coverage. You've been fairly ahead with guns as well. The trans coverage is it is journalism's sacred duty to endanger the lives of as many trans people as possible. This was like in the middle of the New York Times every day just being like, trans kids don't deserve to be alive. Every single day, it would be a op-ed that says. And as an aside, listeners, this is a pro-trans podcast.

If you are anti-trans, delete this podcast, go fuck yourself. Anyway, just moving on. no I'm in the yeah obviously the the mass shooting stuff where um you know the country this happens to yeah there's no way to prevent this as uh only nation where this regularly happens that is an iconic thing that we obviously repost every time there's a major mass shooting which is like every other thing and uh like there is nobody else that does this and that's why we wanted this now um it's because when all of these other places sort of retreated

back into being really scared to speak truth to power, they're actually like, no, fuck this. We're just going to keep making jokes and we're going to keep standing on the side of people who are quite literally

sometimes getting murdered for no reason. Right. And it's interesting. It's, you are tangibly not necessarily, it's not even telling the truth. It's just you're not making any, you're more making stuff. statements for comedic effect, but it seems to be more barbed and fresh and focused criticism than actual journalism right now.

Why do you think so many journalists are pulling their punches? And I mean everywhere, tech, politics, business. Is it access or is it something else? I think in a lot of cases it's just access or pleasing their bosses who really care what access. I think a lot of these places with the Trump stuff, they decided, the bosses decided. The number one priority is that you remain on the plane, that the campaign will keep talking to you, that they will, that you're not going to piss them off enough that we're not going to be blackballed or whatever, because the, the 50-50 journalism was too important. I think that's mostly it. And I also think, like, I don't think they understand that, I think so many times these people think that they are the bastions of, like, purity and equality and, like,

one side is this and the other side is this and they cannot be any truth. What they're doing is actually really extraordinary and not in a good way. It's extraordinary in the sense that this didn't actually happen this way previously. They've been captured. They've been captured in a political moment where one side has totally issued the concept of the truth. It didn't used to work this way. People used to say that if it was raining outside, they used to say it was raining outside. Now it's right.

at these networks, whether it's tech or it's politics or anything else. Water-related weather event. Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, one side of the government insists it is not raining. Right. And that's like that is, that's new. Like, that's a new kind of reportage in the sense that it sucks. Previously, that didn't happen.

Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. Yeah, and it's interesting. It's almost like one side, right-wing side is very aggressively just objectively. Just they don't give a shit. They can do and say what they want. And then you get towards the centristy, and I hate these terms, because I feel like it's very hard to actually describe what's going on with them. But the center left, but let's be honest, it's more center than anything. They seem to perceive objectivity, sorry, subjectivity or objectivity, oh, sorry, objectivity, Jesus Christ, I swear I speak English,

as something that requires you to humor every argument, that every position is actually fair. Also, I don't think objectivity exists, and it's very bizarre to watch this. It's something I find with tech as well, very frustrating. But it's interesting that I think that The Onion is actually doing some of the best journalism, but through the most bizarre path there. Yeah, there's this kid on TikTok, and it was like 90,000 views. And she's just like, I'm, she said in a very Gen Z way, she was like, I say this with my whole chest. Like, the Onion has had better.

has had better coverage over the last month and on Israel and Gaza than the New York Times and Washington Post. And like she reads through it and you couldn't, you can't argue with it. Like they just, it's just the truth. I completely,

I completely agree with you on this man. Like there is like getting, there is a kind of thing that's going on where journalism is now insistent on you just getting punched in the face all day by fascists. Yeah, okay, it's fine. I don't think that's, They punch us.

Yeah, exactly. It's very important to find out why they punched us. While, like, the actual concept of what's going on is completely different. I was on, like, a, you know, I was doing an interview a couple days ago. And there was this whole, I was, they were having this whole conversation that arranged in so many different ways about disinformation and like a guy, a story, a guy wrote in Harper's about the concept of disinformation and how that is affected by Jim Jordan, but it's also affected by the fact that Katie Couric gave a speech about something. like, what the fuck are you talking about? Yeah. What is, who gives it shit?

Like, if you, the beauty of this place, beauty of the onion, is it like, you can just cut right through the middle of that. Like, these people can be having this stupid ass conversation on each side of it. And you can just be like, nope, just sliding on through. And that, that to me is, that's valuable. And that's, that to me is good reportage. That is just ignoring the fucking noise and trying to get to the center of what's actually going on.

Do you consider it a comedy outlet or a journalism out there? I mean, it's both. I mean, our bread and butter is stupid jokes. Right, of course. Dumbass. Like, I was a thing about a gorilla mother making the gorilla slouch. That's one of my favorite recent one. Yeah, exactly.

Like yelling at her child for not to slouch more. Like, that's amazing. Like, for example, like I was reading a really old issue out here, our, our entire entire archives. And I was just plowing through it. And there was a very serious Iraq war issue where they were talking about, you know, Georgia Bush's timeline to leave or whatever. And it was, everything was very heavy. But on the top left, the very first story you see on there, it's a Nabisco discontinues wheat fix. That's great. That's the thing. There's, you really get just like people having a bit of fun with that anymore. It feels like,

journalism and media in general has got so goddamn serious. Yeah, I know. But also serious in a way that doesn't seem to have the appropriate seriousness for, like, police brutality, fascism, but it's just serious about everything else. That's, I think that's why, like, the working, like, they're a substantial swath of the working class in America. It listens to Joe Robian, other than the fact that's, like, very hypnotic and, like, it's something on in the background is because even, they think they're getting the news, which is wrong. Right. I do think that. But in between that, it's him like showing,

you know, videos of gorillas and like people punching each other in the face. And, you know, there is like, there is a mild, like, through line of joy that goes on there that cannot happen on the regular news. It just doesn't,

right. It doesn't happen. And like, like, there used to be some of that in like the Today show of people still watch that. I don't really know, but like, yeah,

there's a lot, but that's very forced fun, like fake fun. you can't you can't see fun to fascism like you can't see the like the concept of making dick jokes to fascism because if you do it's just going to win

it's just like they're just going to get every teenager in America even if even if they're sitting around being like these ideas are fucking stupid like this doesn't make any sense like this is horrible the way we're treating people is bad but like you have to have some sense of humor about stuff or it's what's the point of being alive? It also feels like the very dry, objective standard of CNN, NBC. NBC's done more opinion stuff, which I appreciate,

but even then there's only a little bit of it. Of the larger media space just feels very serious, and then there's the right-wing psychos, but if you look at what the right-wing's doing, it is, Fox and Friends is a complete joke. It's an insane show, I'm sure. If you watch it for more than an hour, it begins to like melt your brain.

But it's fun in a horrifying way. Like it's trying to make the fascists watching, okay, I'm sure there are some non-fascists who watch Fox News. I'm sure there's one of them. Anyway, um, eh, but nevertheless, it's dorky, it's weird.

And then everything else outside of the fascist fear is just dry, dry as a bone. So no wonder people are going to the Joe Rogans of the world, because it's not like they can open a newspaper or a magazine these days, in the magazine and the newspaper actually speaks directly to them. It doesn't feel like at times it's even written as anything else other than a log of what happened. And it's so hard for modern journalism to escape that.

I just, I don't know. I worry, but also, I guess it benefits me that a lot of journalism is going to move opinion side. And that's assuming that Trump doesn't get in and just shut down journalism in general, but that's another problem. Right. No, I mean, I think that like, like I said, with the kids, I don't think they're getting traditional news. I think they use traditional news as like in the way that we used to send people a PDF to research or something.

Right. That's how they use it. They're like, I swear to God, this is real. Just click on this thing. I can prove it. That's how they use it as like a, I swear this is proof. But they don't like read it or ingest it every day. And they really don't sit down and watch television news because, again, why would they?

They're just being excoriated for being a lot. And that's, yeah, like, it's not useful. I think that there is, I think both parties are abandoning the premise that there should be joy in your life from various different angles, right? Right. Like the American right, the Trump right is a very joyless vector. It's like, you must support this man or beautiful. You must be in. You must aspire to a traditional life.

I think that's like, that's really humorless, right? And I'm not saying like the left has an equivalent. Like I hate when people do that. But like there is like it's just like it's so scary, right? Having to like it's hard. We're out of making jokes about Donald Trump. We've had it didn't work. And like it's 10 years later.

It just it never. I tell you during the trial, them showing him the tweets. Everyone else found that really funny. It made me very sad because I don't want people to think that this will happen to them. I don't want them to think that Trump is going to see their tweets. He never will. wait please stop

keep going sorry no so it is important to have you know there must be wheat thicks is what I'm saying what the fuck is the point you have to like get you have to get people into this it's why the New York Times is still doing

well is because they have wordle just the truth yeah and they and they have some opinion calling this that are readable and then many others that aren't and it's very strange that's what I really don't understand. You've got all these esteemed outlets that have become kind of homogenous. Yeah. Like what is the, like the New York Times, Wall Street, Wall Street Journal is the more

businessy one. New York Times has business coverage. Chicago Tribune is in Chicago. There are the occasional people out there, like Boston Globe, they still got here, Arthur Bray doing tech, like you've still got some voices, but it's almost like they've drained them of life. Like that on people with names. There was this big like, um, first of all that all the digital places have died or have been eaten, right? So like BuzzFeed died. They had awesome reportage. Amazing stuff.

Anything that was like human focused, empathy-based journalism is basically gone. It went to like nonprofit work. So it went to like the ProPublicas of the world or whatever. And those have much longer timelines. And their focus isn't really impact. Their focus is like, let's get awards. Let's get, you know, let's get a big long story that's really comprehensive out there. and then hopefully somebody will aggregate and syndicate in a good way.

So that's where a lot of that reporting went. In the process, all of the young people either left or were let go from places like the Times and the Post for probably ideological reasons. I would guess it more had to do with like, I don't want to deal with these sniveling children anymore. And it left them with Bill Maher disease. These places have the same exact kind of get-off-my-law and brainworms that you see riddled in a Netflix comedy special. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guide, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between-songs banter. Who's the worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah.

Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again.

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That's 844-8-4-8-4-I-Hart. Hey, everyone. It's Ryder Strong and Will Ferdell from PodMeets World. And now the PodMeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So, yeah, now we're experts.

I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Like what was just because we? Yeah.

We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of ha, who. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune into Pod Meets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to PodMeets Twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles.

I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to be present.

We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts. like Judd Brewer about anxiety and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal

and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Crimless, we're joined by our first ever guest.

Sorry, our first ever human guest. I don't think I could be in the same room with Shamrock the parrot. I'd be too nervous. That's right. The very funny Will Ferrell joins Rory Scovel and me, Josh Dean, for an episode dedicated to the many crimes committed by people also named Will Ferrell. They called to his fellow officer for the nippers. What are the nippers?

Very good question. No, I was thinking, would that be a good name for like a salad dressing? Simple assault. And it's a play on word, salt? Maybe not. I say we invest and we see. There's only one way to know. This did not amuse the cops.

By the way, normally the cops are amused, but this did not abuse the cops. Will even comes clean about some of his own crimes. I didn't get caught. You know why? If you don't want to be suspected of anything, you whistle as you walk. Listen to crime lists on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And you know it's bad when like Bill Burr is... successfully on the right side of history with Palestine and Bill Ma's being like, well,

you know, it's good people get exploded. Fucking Bill Burr is they're explaining to him breathlessly. But the truth is, Bill Maher succeeds because these papers fail. He succeeds because they need some sort of melting candle-looking guy to make center, right. But he'll say left, statements. And it's just, I wish journalism had more of a voice. I wish all of it did because the fear of access is one thing, but it's almost...

It's an ideological statement onto itself. Putting access above all, putting the interests of gigantic capital above all, does in fact merit an entire editorial strategy. I mean, Ed, you nailed this with the AI stuff. I saw it in my own newsroom where, you know, people were coming in and saying, and this is the only kind of AI talk you would get on television, they were talking about how it was going to ruin the world and all this stuff and how the robots were going to take over and the singularity and all this stuff.

And the whole time I was like, no, it's not. It's not happening. It's rebranded machine learning. Like we know what, we know what's happening. And like accelerate a little bit to like really mimic like LinkedIn posts, which is really cool. Good job.

Nice job everybody. And it makes a mean PowerPoint. and does like kind of like interesting things with music. It doesn't, it seems to like. While stealing. While stealing to do so as well. When it messes up, it gets kind of interesting. But when it does the prompt that you want it to, it's horrible.

Oh. Yeah. But like that's the thing is like in these in these newsrooms that like a bunch of people with money came into these places and were like, this is the next thing. You should be scared of it. And that in hindsight was the marketing campaign that all of these newsroom leaders fell for because. They were at the Aspen Institute.

But also, it doesn't seem like any of these news organizations are run by people who write or read. That's been my continual problem. Ed, like, there's, when I was in NBC, you know, I always said there's like this, there's this thin layer of that I like to call the Game of Thrones people. Okay. Or at the top of the company at NBC News. And they're constantly jockeying for position and fighting for power and stuff, but has nothing to journalism at all. Like, it is considerably closer to, like, the run-up to, like, an eighth-grade dance than it is to anything to do with journalism. It's just the case.

And those people, those are the hiring and firing people. And they're also, they have a hard time connecting the dots about, like, both what's important, who's doing the best reporting, how to get the stuff out there, what's really going on in the country. because those people are tied up in, you know, the conversations those people are having have nothing to do with like a regular American life. Yeah. And you know what? Let's talk AI.

How, well, first of all, is the onion going to sell it? Like, what is your plan there? Are you going to make any deals with these companies? I'm just curious. I mean, like, we, you know, our stuff was surfacing in Google, searches as answers a couple weeks ago. Yeah, eating rocks.

Yeah, if you asked it how many rocks you should eat per day, it told you you should eat one small rock a day because we did a bit about how, like there is a headline that said geologists recommend you eat one small, one small rock a day. It's like a bit of industry doing that weird PR thing they do. And it's in the Google, um, uh, developer blog about why they took down that feature is because they couldn't like figure fully figure out how they got in there like they it got aggregated from a um it was like a shittification sandwich it was like it got that story got aggregated from a fake fracking news

website that was really run by the fracking industry and then that as an answer um within within google so it was like five problems ago all wrapped up into this thing but uh no obviously i don't know um we're not gonna uh play in that game in part because i feel like it's already kind of the dying. But second of all, boy, it would be funny. If we did as a bit, if you're, if you're interested as a bit opening I, give us a ring. We would love to pollute your data set. Sounds awesome. Well, with that in mind, if they've already stolen the onion, if they have already would you, will there be legal action to protect it? I mean, we thought about it, man. Like, we really did think about that because at the end of the day, it's stealing our art,

stealing our war. Like one of the ones that, because that was not even close to the only onion article it sold in Google one. And that was just for the listeners, that's the Google search generative experience popping up onion articles and using them as a source for an answer. Pardon me, Ben. Like one of the ones was, can any white liquid be considered milk? And it had like the exact beats of a joke. It was like, yes. And here's an example.

It was like, uh, one of them, it was. like something, it was a, it was like glue, particularly white water, clam juice. But it was the exact beats of our joke implanted in the answer. I actually don't explain. Landly. Yeah. And like, even if it is, it's still theft, even if it's wrong. But that's the thing.

It's right now we're in this very strange world where you've got writers, like the Atlantic, this just happened. you've got writers who are like, oh yeah, stealing all the journalism is very bad, we don't like it. And then Nicholas Thompson, CEO of the Atlantic, formerly of Wired, who did a very glossy thing on one of the Kushner investments, Oscar Health. Anyway, my grievances aside,

he did this big announcement and said, hey, open AI is going to train on the Atlantic data. Big day for us and Damon Beres over at the Atlantic. God bless him, immediately had an article just be like, this sucks, man. Just this sucks, bro. I don't like this one bit. But what do you think of these.

deals are they good for journalism or are they just kind of troll toll bullshit um it's bad it's like there is a massive pollution of the internet happening to obfuscate good information because like a near do well's benefit from that as a concept um the more narrow the path it is to get good information on the internet the only people who benefit from that are rich people like if the People who have good access to information are rich people. Those rich people get richer from the good information. Like, that's, once there is information scarcity, the people who will hoard it are the rich, right? Right.

They have no problem paying for like a Bloomberg terminal. They don't care. They'll pay for the information or whatever much the fuck cost or whatever. Like, they will do that. Whereas everybody else is just like searching around for scraps. They're searching, you know, they're typing Whatever's free still? Yeah, they're like, it's Reddit probably.

Yeah. Like that's the thing is like we're now in a situation where it's hard, it's probably harder to get good answers if you have a new pet, if you have a baby. Just basic stuff that regular people go through is being robbed of these people from these companies for no reason. Google didn't have to ruin their whole product for this.

They're doing it to like, satisfy shareholders and to get in on this fad that exists to prop up the idea of progress in the American economy, but it's not progress. It's actually like several steps back. Yeah. So with that in mind, how do you actually save journalism business-wise? What is the thing? I know, just a small question for you. What's the plan? But seriously, though, what do you do now because online advertising feels like it's dying. It feels like it's falling apart. Is, and how do you, how the hell does free journalism even survive? Okay. So first of all, we have to do all the things that worked over the last 10 years, right? Instead of just like

loading up everything behind this like infinite growth, more and more traffic competing for what we're probably at the end of the day completely fake eyeballs, right? Right. Remember, some of the stories that I got like at the Daily Beast had millions of views like, like a ridiculous amount in a couple hours and now that kind of feels fake or wrong. It just doesn't feel. Yeah. It feels a million people didn't see it. Right.

Like, I don't know exactly what happened there, but it just doesn't feel right. And what we're going to do is we're going to take some of those pieces that worked. So right now what's working in in tradition, in media that I like is profitable. So it's like four four media, defector, aftermath. These are all like narrow writer co-ops that really worked. And, like, this place got decimated to the point where it's really a small place. So we can work up that. Also, in the comedy world, there's this thing called Dropout.

Do you know what Dropout is? No, I don't. Okay, so it's a lot like that. It used to be called College Humor. Oh. It was owned by IAC, Barry Diller. Barry Diller got sick of having it. And IAC owns most of the dating sites, right?

Most of the dating sites, I think, like, Expedia, just like they own Daily Beast. I used to work at IAC. Oh. They own lots of different stuff. So, Barry Diller got sick of having it. it used to run on that old model we're talking about. They sold it back to the original founders of the company for like, I don't know, a few hundred thousand dollars. And then those people were like, all right, we'll just start fresh, like, but what do we actually want this to be?

And they made a subscription model of just, you know, improv comedy and like some stuff they like to do, like D&D or whatever. It's called Dropout. And it has, I think like, I don't know, somewhere like near a million subscribers. at $6 a month. And they just sold out two nights in a row at Madison Square Garden. That's wild. They were sold from Barry Diller in like peak early pandemic, like 2021 or something. And that took what that's what three years or something.

They knew how to do it right and they put a lot of work into it. But that's sort of the space that we want to play in as a baseline. And then we're going to do this other stuff. We're going to, you know, we're going to do direct ads. We're going to do all these. We're going to do more. traditional media stuff, video stuff. But we want to get in the membership game.

People, if they like us, we will send them cool shit in the mail and also in their email. And they'll pay us some of money. And then on top of that, we'll use make TV shows and stuff. Like, that's our, that's our goal. And we'll have better merch. And we'll just try to serve people directly and hope that this like, you know, this very old-timey way of doing it works. Like that's my- Return to patronage.

Almost. Yeah. I mean, like there's, yes, I think, I think we can do that. And like if fucking Samsung wants to launch their galaxy phone,

Amazon Galaxy Note 7. Galaxy Note 7. Little Dan Ninen joke for the list of. For us, Dan Ninen heads, baby. Jesus. But yeah,

if they want to launch their exploding phone, what is the joke again? It's just really good for the listeners here who love this stuff. It was Dan Ninen, a clean comedian. whose joke was, oh, that really blew up. Someone must have plugged in their Samsung Galaxy Note 7. Classic phone that just started exploding because it's battery.

Anyway, what were we talking about? I don't know. We want to be returned to patronage. We want to be weirdos and we want to be able to say the things that people are all thinking we can't say. And then when it happens, we want them to, you know, pay us money and we'll send a newspaper in the mail. But there will still be free content. Oh, the whole, the site is, the onion is a public service. So we're going to, we're going to make sure everything's, you know, our journalism is free.

One final question. Are you going to start pushing bylines ever? Because the one thing that the onion doesn't have right now is names. And maybe that's good. So, you know, we've had this, I had this conversation because, like, it's been, it does protect people, but it's also a pain in the ass of like, you know, Yes. You're like a writing job or something. But like the process here is like so beautiful that I don't really want to mess with it.

Like that's the number of things I didn't want to do. I don't, I'm never going to write a headline. I'm never going to select any. Um, I don't want to do that. I'm just like I'm here to make it. So if they want to make a video out of something,

they can do it. Or if they want to make a new save or something, I can do it. Mm-hmm. Here's our process. Every day they have like a couple hundred contributors who are all like alums. Some of them are like famous people that I can't reveal. Joe Biden.

Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Jill Biden, Nancy Pelosi, America's funniest people. All of them. But they all, they and our 10 staff writers and editors all send completely anonymously headlines into this bucket. They're anonymized in a Google form. Those get winnowed down by whoever there's a person who windows down the list who brings it into the meeting. then there's like a couple hundred headlines that remain. Those are all, those are spoken out loud if they're funny.

And if they're laughed at, they generally, they might have a chance. That gets down to like eight or ten a day. And then from there, they write them up. And if they don't really work, then they throw them away.

And that's say you get to this like, you know, say you get to the half dozen headlines that you get a day on the onion. Every day, this process happens. And then they go back and they're like, they figure out who wrote it.

After all that. And I, That is like the most egalitarian way. Yeah. Anything works in journalism or, or writers' rooms or anything at all. And why would have any mess of that? It sucks that there's no violence involved in that. Maybe there's a way to do that.

But like sometimes it's like a huge team effort. And part of the beauty is not knowing who it's from. I've read The Onion for nearly 20 years. And I'm so happy to see it in the hands of somebody who actually cares, who loves writers and writing and creating, things that readers love. It's really frustrating that this is the exception rather than the rule. But I believe that sites like The Onion, along with worker-owned co-ops like Defector and Aftermath, making sports journalism and games journalism, respectively, are the future of journalism itself.

Institutions that empower great writers that deeply care about the subject matter, building sustainable, lasting businesses and relationships with their readers. And I really am serious when I say this is the future. Better offline, it could happen here, behind the bastards, great shows and cool zone media, 16th minute of fame. These are all things built by building real relationships with you, the listener, with people actually consuming this stuff, making cool stuff with a longer time horizon than, I don't know, six months. Making great things and hoping people will pay for them.

I mean, it seems obvious. But journalism has been almost completely swallowed, kind of like when Kirby eats something and he poops it out and he turns into it. Kirby isn't that thing. He just stole it. And that is the modern state of journalism. Journalism can be saved by people like Ben Collins. It can be saved by people like Defector and aftermath. It can be saved by people who make this stuff and it must be put back in the hands of those who make these things. It's time to stop building big, ugly, unsustainable journalism with insane startup valuation goals. It just isn't possible anymore. What is possible is giving

great people, enough of a chance to build a real audience and a great product. And I think you'll agree. A better world is possible for digital media. I promise you. It just has to be built by and for the writers themselves. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com.

You can email me at EZ at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's YourEd.com to visit the Discord and go to R-slash Better Offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Joey Dardano, and on my new podcast, Hope From a Hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with thoughtful solutions.

Sike, I'm a comedian. I'm not qualified to give good advice. Join me and my comedian friends as we riff, rant, recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to me. This is Help from a Hypocrite, the worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from a Hypocrite Wednesdays on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The story I've told myself can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection. This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast Deeply Well with Debbie Brown

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On the Radio 831 podcast, join us, Sanjana Basker and Tyler McCall, as we unpack all the trending tropes, fuzzy adaptations, book talk drama, and celebrity love stories with hot takes and sharp guests. Each episode digs into what these stories reveal about desire, fantasy, identity, and how we love now. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down. Gorsha accusing Kelly of sleeping with a merry man. They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew. Pinky has financial issues. On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows,

including the Real House Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, M&T, everybody's talking about. To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHart podcast.

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