Panic World - The Onion's big plans for InfoWars

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

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

Friends, hello, my name is Mike Regneta. I'm the host of a podcast called NeverPost, 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 don't 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 Infoars 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. And you get at KG. 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 InfoWords 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. to panic world to 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 I, as 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, 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. Legally, I am. There you go. 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. Oh, my God. It's, we're so much more important than everyone else. You get it. You get it. Yeah. 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. 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, 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. Oh, hell yeah, man. So, like, when we took it over, it was making, like, you know, well under $2 million dollars a year on exclusively, almost exclusively, chumbox advertising. So Trump box advertising is this stuff at the bottom of the screen that is like, you know, it's like put an 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 only click on it by accident. That was the whole business model. So when we took it over, 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 copy agency as well. But mostly it's a subscription forward thing with the newspaper.

We have 80,000 subscribers. 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. 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 decided 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 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 I work very hard And I would like to try cake and it's by a horse And it's screenshoted in everyone's text messages And across LinkedIn and threads for some reason and Twitter Like it is everywhere and 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, 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. And the assumption is, like, good vibes equal good subscriptions equals good

business. 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 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 this other stuff. Our social traffic is like through the roof. It is exponentially 100 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 got to fall asleep and do it. It's not going to happen. You just have to like work really hard and then go to bed. Like that's what we're doing. We're just like working really hard and we wake up in the morning and

we're we feel pretty good. There was a very famous this American Life episode about the onions news room 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 day of your. 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 have an amount to 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 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 them to get yelled at immediately. So please yell at us if you see it. But second of all, it's, it's in our bylaws. We're just going to use it. You can see it's in our Arbara 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. Do you include typos just so people are like, all right, yeah. We do. That's what's still a person. 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-unfo wars, like, what were 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 that sort of just like, okay, phase one is words, phase two is everything else,

or was there another thought there? Well, we want the onion to remain at this incredibly high bar. Like, if you watch an O&N, like an 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,

I've seen 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. It's the whole onion.

35 is the whole team. Yes. Yeah. And that includes people selling ads and all this stuff. So we used every part of the pig, as they say. and our video team is incredible considering the circumstances. Like, not even, they're just are incredible. Like, that documentary is the most ridiculous thing in the world.

We're also doing a, 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, like, we want to go on in on that, but we want the quality bar for that to be really high. And we're reasonably about InfoWords is because the quality bar for InfoWords, the brand is, like beneath the toilet so anything is better than that for you I mean

for Grant long time InfoWords guy he loves that pretty upset about it for you guys screwed up Info Wars I loved it so I want I want to pause real quick on the on the bad pedophile thing because uh oh you want to pause on the bad pedophile right yeah I want to pause in the bad pedophile thing he just agrees yeah so he's like no I think he's pretty good actually yeah I think it was great 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 was tracking this in the beginning of the year of sort of like trying to sort of get a sense of 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? Like what were the conversations like leading up to that? It was definitely wasn't a business thing. We wanted to get people together in a room together. The big business advantage right now is just realizing that the real world has been abandoned by like corporate interest. Yeah.

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. We did it with, on a month's notice, we were in like 50-something theaters that just volunteer to 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 will get together at Onion Man's 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 backroom's an obsession thing didn't. 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 share experience again. Yeah, because 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. I'm sure. Just a gym.

I'm sure. How is the access? I mean, he flew us everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think you guys should absolutely repurpose his plane for something. So, So in terms of like a, 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 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 and movie theaters, like, any of that, rigamarole or? No, 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 were like, we can't do a Jeffrey Epstein thing. Why? I'm not really sure. But we honestly, I was like, look, you're a gigantic theater train. 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 just posted on blue sky

it said if you want this thing if you guys want to if you have own a movie theater and like trust me 100% of indie movie theater owners are on blue sky that's where they are uh like we you guys can just take it just contact geoffrey upstein at the onion dot com and we we gave them like a gigantic uh file on a dropouts 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 like Yeah. That's the thing. It's 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. Because the internet's so botted out and so filled with fake bullshit, 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 is wide the fuck open. I just wish people understood that. Actually,

I kind of don't because then my business would be fucked. We, uh, we, 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 is, 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 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. The world became the trump box, right? Like, especially, I opened 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. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. 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 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.

You know, you went to Babies All Right in Brooklyn, right? And you were able to tape 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 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 don't 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. So, like, if you use the surveillance state to your own ends, which they've done, you have a wide open space. Like, you could do so much. Yeah. It really, I mean, that really is what it is. It's like, if you create.

a moment 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 going to do something and I'm going to upload it and then people are going to share it and now the cool thing is I'm going to 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, um, 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, first, okay, let's talk about the info wars purchase. It is now totally

sorted out, right? Like you guys have all of it or is it, or is there still legal limbo? So here's the deal. There is. So here's the deal. What we're doing is, uh, as you know, the, the family, are 99.9% of the creditors to the Enfor as a state, right? There's someone in the courts or something stepping in each step to try to prevent this receiver from doing his job. At the 11th hour, any time 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 signed with this receiver, who took over these assets, somebody stepped in in 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 the lower court in Texas judge garrag gamble said the same exact thing uh basically

alex has created a pocket veto for himself that allows him to never sell these assets and to grade them intentionally so he can his whole game plan this whole time to grade them so he would never actually have to pay these families he has not paid them any money um and he said this by the way the day he got it this said 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 an old account that we're trying to give a jury 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 the enforce merch in the last month, and we want to give it to them. So we are going for us 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 Enforish branding and stuff. I've seen that. Yeah, he does not seem deterred. Yeah. So we're also not deterred. And we are launching the same 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 in delaying. But there's one in Connecticut that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It's over with. He owes these people, regardless of what happens in Texas, he goes these people at least $1.35 billion.

So it's delaying the inevitable here. And we're just tired of waiting. want to let him, like, as a federal judge said last month, like, abused 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, like over that, were you expecting the fight to go basically how it's called? No, no.

We thought we were, again, we thought it was like stories. Wars, we thought we were just going to go in there and just like put a bit on it. And if we got it, we got it. And we did. 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 that's like I was going to go. So like it didn't, it didn't work out that way.

And that's okay. Like 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. Like he tried to step in at one point on behalf of Alex to target one of the first responders to the Sandiope massacre. He sent a letter to him basically to preserve all your documents. And then, you know, the picture of accountability, Todd Blanche actually sent a retraction on that letter 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're really going to stand up for Alex Jones against the victims of these people. What the fuck is wrong? You know, satire website? What the fuck is wrong with you, basically? I think the biggest surprise to us, despite all of that, despite the government alluding to the fact

that they were going to dig into our shit was how quickly he devolved when we had the licensing deal he didn't expect because he thought he, again, he thought he was getting all of his stuff back for free. Right. He thought he just called lives, Scott free. And his judgment was just kind of

be an invisible thing for the rest of his life. 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 Heidegger a Satanist. I saw that.

Yeah, and a pedophile. And, like, even his fans were like, I know Tim Idaq or I used to watch a del swim. This is a comedy show, dumb, dumb. Yeah. 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 underestimated his years. base like uh it just didn't think it would happen 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 yeah 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, I, maybe I'm naive, but I think that is true. You can't be a loser. Yeah, you can't be a loser. You can't be a populous strongman and lose. Yeah. Or die. Like, yeah, death is the ultimate law. The ultimate losing the game. You know, you die. 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 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 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 out at the right time. If you continue on through to the end of this, I'm going to make permanent decisions about where I spend money and shit. So like, I hope they understand that. Okay. So this is where I'm going to put on sort of my like, thinking too much about the internet hat. Of course. So you guys, you want to, you want to raise money for the Info Wars victims, and that's great. Yep. How do you staff pay for and even like, let's say, like, survive.

So like, and I'm asking this semi-selfishly because, like, you know, we just had a, 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 set up for info wars like how how will this work and how will it sort of pay for itself yeah a couple of things first of all we tell it where's the money ben where's the money and how are you doing it 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? My friend Jeffrey, whose last name I'm not going to mention, told me a lot of stuff about this. Sure, yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, it all works out financially because people strive to the onion 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 happening. We have people walking around with infoors totes explaining the whole situation to people or T-shirts on because it's provocative. And they're explaining, no, no, no, it's not a weird fascist thing.

where it's gay now. Like, they have to do that. And that's great. Like, 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, Ryan, yeah. 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 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 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, eyeballs in the way that they want, in a way that leaves them with a dope main hit that isn't evil. So like will Info Wars live on all social platforms? I guess what I'm trying to figure out is like what shape will this take once you guys launch it. So InfoWRs 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. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Unlike his girlfriends. We'll be on this. So, 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. Anywhere that you can see stuff for the first eight weeks, especially with these streams, we want you to be able to see it and talk about it in the communities. 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. And we want people to jump around this.

So this is in part because we 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. Tim He didn't. Tim Heidegger. So, yeah, Tim Hidderer, who is, you know, he sent him in. We didn't, when we first sent him up, we didn't think he had this kind of Alice Jones oppression.

We're going to do it. And then he'd fucking nailed it. It's incredibly good. Yeah. So, like, within a day, he was like, I think we're just going to do something. So within his day, he called Will Sassow to do his Alex Jones impression with him. you know 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 trending on all the platforms even the evil ones count dangula and the Russian government really disliked

it they thought it was cringe and lame and gay which is you guys should yeah try to fix that for next time you want the count dankula vote I think but like it 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 going to do this thing. Now we're going to lay all out and see what we can do. And it's in part inspired, like I keep saying, it's inspired about 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, Hassan Piker or the evil version of him,

Nick Fuentes, they average like 40,000 people a live stream and then their clips are millions and millions. They just live on forever, yeah. And 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 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, that it feels communal.

And this is a real communal way of doing it. So you've inadvertently sort of like stumbled across another trend that I'm really fascinated with right now. So I've been I have like a folder of like things like links or 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, you know, 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 internet is teeming now, I'm just going to 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. 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 going to, 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. 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 Haggrey show, which is a parody of, like, Tucker's style, like, brainworm stuff. Jim Haggurdy used to be the host of Today Now, which is the old Today show.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so he got, he got red-pilled and now just talks about 9-11 all the time. So that's those two shows. But in between those two things, all of those like Instagram famous comedians, I'm not going to say names yet because they were like people that you know, but I don't want to, like, ruin it, and it's surprise.

They're going to 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 Lutzkohoi love deeply. He has the equivalent of, like, a couch gag for us, which is going to be very interesting. He's done the Info Wars theme song for us. Fantastic. Nick is most famous now among regular Americans for being a batch of cubes, a pubs during a Super Bowl commercial.

I don't if you guys saw that. I did not see it. He did the Man Escape Super Bowl commercial. He created a song for them where he is a singing clump of pubes. Our fans might know him from the Dan Bone Gino songs, which there are a few now, and they're very good. Him as a clump of pubes is actually my background from my computer. I just like to keep it. Oh, cool.

That's good. That's really nice. You didn't know it was Nick. He just liked it. So, okay. Back to the most important part of this stuff. I want to hit one thing before you move on. So when you say like these people are going to do bits that become shows, are you imagining a network?

is like a video network is that's just what you're trying to build yeah so me and deep asquale who used to work she worked for nathan fielder as the person who duped all the duped all the companies into yeah yeah she's awesome uh 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 street, like maybe it's a movie, maybe you are a character

and 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, 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. Right. That's the, and we're just having to be more racist. I agree. Yeah.

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 at 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 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. 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. Ryan, we've been living in the last five years of this comedy space that is probably best to find as like anything but the N-word. It's really deeply horrible, not funny, just cruel and like over-the-top,

space and then the most recent thing we've moved into is the All-Rache 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 reason using teal bucks and I don't get it like I think it's kind of weird and fucked up 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 problems with his brain.

He needs more plastic surgery. He needs to go to the doctor and get more plastic surgery on live stream. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment.

Old Navy's drapy denim wide leg I've been having this conversation a lot over the last six months and I was having it literally last night where I wrote this thing a couple months ago about how like the, you know, in a world where you can say the N-word and be paid 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 of 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 sort of thing where the powers of B get very allergic to it. And I do think there's historical precedent there. 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 ship 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 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, yeah, 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 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. 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. Oh, so you're not paying.

You're not paying a comedian. You're not paying a comedian for his labor. You're absolutely paying Tim. But, like, I, you know, maybe I shouldn't do a contract negotiation. On air. The Panic World podcast. Yeah, let's do it. Let's get you both on.

That's a good idea. But, like, there's a reason he puts in way too many hours on this. It's because he believes that this is the, fun next thing and anytime he goes out in the world he's like what's happening to this thing was it's going like how do you do this like the fights that we're doing it for the plot basically the very like uh 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 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 in backgrounds realize. It's just like you can just get in there and beats Nate Bergatsy and baby Yoda because you have a better thing. And it's not reliant on like focus groups or a bigillions of dollars of like overwrought CGII shit or really old tropes. Right. And Nate's case, who I used to like, but Jesus, what happened? His SNL episodes are so good, but I don't, I don't get it either.

I, I want to, I don't want to take it too much more your time. 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 not a lot of them. Right. 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 you see this with, like, the Gen Z Puritin reaction to it where they're like, I guess things have changed. Everything's different. Like, you can't, you know, you can't make the office now. You could never make the office now, according to Rayne 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 hopeful thing that gets to be 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. Yes. What we've been living through is a carpet bomb of like, we're going to win culture from the, again, the Peter Thiel, Mark Andrewsson style of 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 posed it on blue skies. 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's just, the country just does not behave like this. Some people like country music, but it's a small amount with 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 other day, where people who are rebel against somebody who comes off is trying to tell you to do something.

Yes. 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, do you see a Riley Gaines clip about when she showers, she uses as beef tallow? Yeah, yeah. 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 G.G. 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, Obama.

wokeness, I guess. But that was a very light touch. This is so fucking heavy-handed. They were rebelling against content cops like you and me who weren't allowing them to post cartoon frogs on Twitter. Tell you what, though, the content cop shit. Like, Alex Johnson has like 6,000 streams a day on Rumble now. Like, all of the, all of his juice came from the Infor's account.

And be that bots or be that genuine falloff and how cool the name InfoWords is, which it is. name yeah it's a cool name uh you know i think it's probably bots but like it's it that was not organic that whole time and we get we have to understand that 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 disgust in the under new writer's room has that has that impacted like where you take a headline 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 an onion 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. Yeah. It's not fucking easy. Like we are, 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 and 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 why we have these guys here cranking away every day. We've been 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, because 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 Mark Andresen set is that it's very easy to inflate. Like it's very easy. I can't say for sure that Peter Thiel reached out to Clivicular and told him to start streaming

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. I think Owen Higgins' book in this lawsuit around it confirms that you can, in fact, say that. So I think that's fine. I'm just asking questions. And so, but yes, 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 real. It is all, like, random clips being made for millions of dollars. 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 D.C. We're talking to people. They're there on the White House line to watch a UFC fight. And we were like, oh, like, 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, this stuff is not actually permeating culture. Yes, there are like right wing rednecks out there who 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 either i think a lot of it is um a big part of the marketing we're going to do around if 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 space x 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 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. 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. And Alex Jones is always in this with, you know, the civil wars right around the corner. You got to do all this. Right. It's all just anticipatory because like they don't

actually want the out. They don't want to 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 bear. Well, I want to thank you for coming on. I want you back on the show. As soon as you can, this is great. And ditto. I am just, you know, you're the only person who seems to get what's going on. I'm just like very, 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 the last 10 years and how everything devolved and how 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. 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 know it's all gone. So I'm just very grateful for you for understanding that. And I always say like we're the only people who understand we're on the rubble and we can build from there. Honestly, 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 I fear I sound crazy when I talk about it. I feel like myself. I feel like I'm building something as myself. Like I want to, what I want to build with the info is like national public access where people get to do weird shit and build 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. Yeah.

And that was horrible. Like at the end of the day, I should have gone to be like, look, they're all Nazis. I can't tell you. They're acting like Nazi because they're Nazis and they're doing Nazi shit. Like at the end of the day, I should just done that. Like, I don't know what I was thinking. I remember like I was in college. You know, I'm reading crack.com, something awful.com, like the Zach Parsons era where they're writing, like, amazing stuff.

And I'm watching like the Chris Gether Public Access 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. 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 oligarchal 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 shittified that like people are finally going, wait a minute. Like I can do other stuff and I can enjoy their stuff. And that it is, it is crazy to me that we had it for a brief second between like 2008. in 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 the actual silo that's been created is like these people who are the bill acme types like they're high in their own supply they think the whole world's coming along with them but nobody is and like no because they're in they're on twitter together and like nobody uses that so like if they were to check instagram to see like the amount of people who are like grandmothers who were 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. And I'm no longer like nostalgic. No.

I want to ask one important question that I've been dying to ask you, which is what is your favorite attraction at the Salem Willows? Oh, great question. It is the dancing monkeys with the Maracas. Do you know these guys? Yeah, I do. Yeah. They're right in the front. Yeah.

In the very, the tip of it, right? The front. Yeah. Yeah, I was a big fan of the DDR machine, personally. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yes. That DDR machine was the first time I saw a line with like people would put coins on the machine to wait.

You put on the machine. I would do. Yeah, it's like it's like a pool table. For listeners who don't know what I'm talking about, 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. It's a, it's like it's backrooms, the amusement park basically.

Yeah. Yeah. should go to that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Last question I always ask everybody is if people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that?

You know, obviously the onion, but. Yeah, I would follow the onion everywhere at real info wars everywhere, starting to fly second. And that's not me. That's, that's, that's, that's in for words. But you can follow me on blue sky with my name, Van Collins, at the dot blue sky at the social, really. It's so easy to tell people. 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. Yeah, of course. And yeah, I'm everywhere, but Twitter. So, like, if you want to look me up, I'll be there. Just look up my stupid fucking name. Or Tim Onion and says, okay, I have fully not too.

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 Fielstead is our production coordinator. And our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis.

From Currier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Moroni, and National Managing, Director and Executive. producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. de Mezzo is their VP of brand and social. Charlotte Robinson is their deputy director of brand and social. Marianne Couga 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. You can email her at tracy at courier newsroom.com. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.

If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies? Would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad-free? Don't worry, we get it. Every $20 ticket could win you $3,000 a month for life and supports life-saving cancer research at the Princess Margaret. Feel free to buy your payday for life ticket today. Raffle number 155-214. Please play responsibly.