The Vergecast - Meet The Onion's new and improved InfoWars

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

The Onion's takeover of conspiracy show InfoWars isn't officially complete — but comedian Tim Heidecker, who's serving as creative director, won't let that stop him from building out a slate of comedy programming. Before the new InfoWars launches July 2, The Verge's Mia Sato interviews Tim about what drew him to the project, how long he can (or wants to) maintain an Alex Jones parody, and whether it's worth doing an interview with The Verge when you've already done one with Wired. Further reading: ⁠The Onion’s rebooted InfoWars is coming July 2nd⁠ ⁠The Onion’s acquisition of Infowars was blocked by a judge⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the international chip shortage. I'm Mia Sato, and today I'm talking to comedian and writer Tim Heidecker about the Onion's takeover of Info Wars. A year and a half ago, the satirical news site The Onion announced it was trying to acquire Info Wars, the conspiracy news website hosted by Alex Jones. Among the many lies peddled by Jones was that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax. The victim's families sued Jones and won one, $1.2 billion in defamation lawsuits. Info wars came up in bankruptcy auction and the Onion emerged as a potential new owner.

The legal process to acquire InfoWars has been through a lot of ups and downs, but the Onion is relaunching it anyway on July 2nd. Tim Heidecker, the influential comedian and writer, has been named creative director of the revamped Info Wars. I'll talk to Tim about his vision for Info Wars in an era when reality is stranger than fiction. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. Hey, it's your friend David Pierce, and this is 90 Seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, June 30th, 2026. We're starting to get looks at the next generation of iPhone, and they're coming in the strangest ways. First, there were reports that photos of the iPhone 18 Pro were starting to appear on the dark web,

along with the lists of the device's parts. Then, videos that supposedly showed the 18 Pro undergoing a drop test showed up on X. If this really is the 18 Pro, boy, does it look a lot like the 17 Pro. Call me when the iPhone Fold starts showing up on the dark web. You know what I mean? Meanwhile, a couple of important political things today. First, the Supreme Court stopped President Trump's attempt to end birthright citizenship, which means that still, nearly everyone born in the U.S. is a U.S. citizen.

And the Kids Act passed the House by a pretty wide margin, actually. This is a package of bills that, among other things, implements safeguards for minors on social platforms and would require AI chatbots to tell you that they are, in fact, not human. Versions of this legislation have been around forever, and there are still a bunch of hurdles to clear, but this idea is starting to move. And finally, Verge contributor Sophia Chen just published an excellent piece on the state of quantum computing,

which has supposedly been the next big thing for like forever at this point. In reality, there's a lot of progress being made, but you don't have to learn what a qubit is just yet. You can read more about all of this at the verge.com. That's 90 seconds on the verge for Tuesday, June 30th. Back to Mia. Support for the show comes from Service Now. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways.

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safe. Tim Hydecker, welcome to the Vergecast. How is it going? It's good. In 2024, Ben Collins says he's going for InfoWars. What is your thought? Immediately are you like, I want it? I want it.

Yes. I think my thought was that would be fun to have to play with. I don't really know what he means. So my first thought was, who do I know over there? And I'm such a fan of the onion that how can I insert myself somehow? into the into his plan. Yeah. And are you thinking, you know, when you see this news kind of developing, do you have an idea in your head about what you would do if you had the keys? Or is that something that kind of developed over time? The first attempt for them, I reached out with, I think,

just to talk to them about what they were thinking and then I never heard back. So I didn't think about it. I kind of just thought, oh, well, I guess I've, I'm no longer relevant because I can't get the onion on the phone. And then out of the blue, they called me, and I hadn't realized that this was back on. And really, I think in that first conversation, I was just spitballing, and my first two thoughts were,

well, it would be fun to make fun of them for a little while. But then that joke would go stale. And, but then you'd have all this, you'd have a media site. You'd have the infrastructure of, of like a streaming site or a new, you know, anything you wanted it to be. So it would be, and at the same time, I was like developing my own independent streaming sites, the high network, which is where I do on cinema, and office hours, which is we do through Patreon.

And I'm just really excited about the possibilities of like, you know, building your own networks, your own subscription, you know, streaming sites. And I thought, well, there's my, sites, especially the high network, which is very specific, it's very similar to the onion because it's very restrictive in what we can really do because of the sensibility

has to be very straightforward. It has to be united and you can't just, I have so many funny friends and ideas that don't fit into that box. And the onion was thinking the same thing. They have, they want to do so much in comedy, but they're kind of restricted by their

own voice for good reason. But so if there's this other thing, Maybe we can expand outside of our limited sensibilities. Yeah, kind of drag the cinematic universe out a little bit. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. A big old parent company, which it's not quite that yet, or it's evolved since then, but it has become sort of these, we talk about it in sort of phases.

Like, first phase, we're going to come out and be very, like, directly parodying that world, that sort of conspiracy world. you know, supplements and hoodwaking people and, you know, crisis actors and all that stuff. But to me, that doesn't have a long shelf life. So then it would, phase two, would evolve into, well, let's make a platform for the kind of comedy we all like. Yeah. Because I think when, you know, the, an earlier announcement, there was a clip of you doing an eerily good Alex Jones impression. It's Tim Heidecker here.

I'm broadcasting now live on the internet. Thank you for joining me. We have major, major announcements to go through here. Lots going on. But to clarify, you're not going to be trapped in his skin. You won't be Alex Jones forever. I'm walking in his skin, but I can take it off whenever I want. No, I'm going to do it for a little while, but I don't want to be, I mean, I just have other things I want to do.

So I'm not, I don't want to get trapped in that mentality for too long. Yeah, the stress on your vocal cords must be crazy. I was, people are like, how do you do it? And I said, it's fun and easy, but I've only been doing it in short bursts. And then last week we filmed like two proper episodes that kind of took all day. And by the end of that, I was stressed. I mean, like physically, the vocal cords were pushed. And the next morning, I was like, oh, boy, I don't know if I can do this.

I'm on vocal rest. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure I could go to some kind of a coach and get to where I can do it every day. But I don't think I want to do that. Yeah, yeah. So new InfoWars scheduled to launch in just a few days, July 2nd. What will people find when they go to The Onion.Info? We're putting together like a kind of an hour or so of programming that essentially it's my show, which is InfoWars essentially,

the very direct parody that we're calling emergency with Tim Heidecker. And that's got like a six-episode arc that I can't reveal much about. But we'll kind of, well, we'll see. We'll see what happens. But and then the Onion had, before I got involved, had produced the Jim Haggerty show that is very much like a kind of a Tucker Carlson parody that they've teased already. So we have those two kind of like tent pole shows. And then there'll be some like interstitial stuff.

You know, we want to start presenting the idea that this is going to be like, you know, the way adult swim was this block of time that you would go and it all felt kind of connected. It was kind of similar sensibility, a voice that's consistent. And so that will get us, hopefully, you know, into the fall. And then I think we'll try to kind of relaunch or sort of present our, you know, fall programming schedule, that stuff that's now just in the works. It's just being developed now. Yeah, I wanted to ask about Jim Haggerty, the, you know, the Onion Social Media accounts

have been teasing and reposting old stuff. Can you tell listeners what his lore is? Well, I don't know at all, but I was a fan for sure when they're still doing O-NN, their sort of CNN parody. And he was like the morning guy. And it was like a very much local news. And I just, I mean, I was such a fan of those. Fewer Americans than ever are planning to travel this summer.

But what if taking that vacation doesn't turn out to be as expensive as you think? Travel expert, Kathy Barnett joins us now with an affordable summer getaway solution, taking a vacation in your mind. Hi, Kathy. Hi, good morning, Kathy. And then he, I guess his trajectory was, he got, you know, red-pilled, I guess, or something. and got kicked off. I'm not sure.

I don't have all the details, but now he's sort of this anti-new or anti-establishment parody of, you know, kind of exactly what happened with Tucker Carlson. Sure. Yeah. I was looking up the actor who plays Jim Haggerty, Brad Holbrook, and apparently he used to be a reporter in a previous life.

It kind of adds like a really funny dimension to it. I mean, that's like a great trick of, in my world, of casting, is try to find as close to the real deal as you can. and work with them. Like, not, I'd much rather see a real guy like that than, you know, a comedy actor, you know, some kind of improv person pretending to be that. Like, just go for the real deal. For 35 years, I was part of the problem.

Oh, oops. A mouthpiece for the mainstream media, spewing their lies and kissing their feet all while they turn me into something I'm not. But now I'm free of my corporate shackles and my only business is freedom. Yeah, find a disgruntled former news anchor and get him in. And write him funny lines. Yeah, give him a red pill script. Put the teleprompter up there and let him go. Yeah.

This is such a funny time to produce satire. Sometimes I wake up and read the news and it's like the Trump administration has stolen onion headlines, right? And beat me to the punch. Not the onion Reddit page. Yeah, right. How do you keep an edge? Where do you look for what's next or getting one step ahead? It depends on what project I'm in. I mean, office hours is much more reactive to what's going on in the world. Do you ever use Snapchat? They've announced these new, everyone's got the wearables, the glasses, the technological glasses, right? This bombed apparently. What do they do when you look through them, you see people's faces in a baby filter?

And sometimes that can just be, you don't need to really, like, you know, you can kind of just talk about what's actually happening and have a laugh about it and remind people that you're not going crazy, this is crazy, you know, and be angry or be befuddled or whatever your feelings are. And that's more like immediate reactiveness. In this InfoWore space, I think it's finding, I mean, just ratcheting up the, you. absurdity to where it becomes funny and it's more about like human relationships and not the specifics as much. I'm more interested in like the deeper flaws that we all have that are kind of universal. And so like with Alex Jones, I think there's like the idea of paranoia and everyone's out to get you and what's how do you, you can you can do that in a funny way by sometimes it is hard to find something crazier than

than what he's doing but you can try to, you can usually find something funnier, I think, or something that makes me laugh, you know? I like, it's a,

I like playing, in this world, I also like playing with religion and, and like the idea of the sort of the school yard, or like the elementary school level ideas of hell and heaven and demons. Because he talks about, demons a lot. Yes. And I just think that's very silly, you know. I think demons are silly. It's like thinking about witches and stuff and goblins, you know, and he treats them so seriously that that's

like a fun area for me to play in. But I hope with all of that, we're getting to like a deeper universal connection to like what we're all feeling and like finding those flaws in us and seeing and just getting them out in the open and laughing at them. Yeah, yeah. I imagine these clips will be everywhere from the various programs that you're producing. Are you worried about people not realizing that it's new Info Wars? I mean, worried about people realizing that it's... Not realizing that this is herding something.

I mean, I guess they would see you and be like, Alex Jones looks a little different. Yeah, I mean, we're not trying, like, we're never really trying to find. fool anybody. You know, I think we're playing to our audience, playing to our fans and people that are into different kinds of comedy or get, you know, think that guy's a scumbag and want to goof on him with me. And, um, but I've always been presenting stuff in a way that might be confusing for people. And we confused the hell out of Alex when we exposed ourselves. And he started finding all my own, all my old Tim and Eric stuff, you know, and, um, and, um, You know, you can't predict that, you can't control it.

But sometimes it hits in a beautiful way where it's just like, oh, he took the bait. It writes the story writes itself, yeah. I'm curious what corners of the Internet you find yourself fascinated with. Where do you go to find weird things or where do you go to find material or things to play off of or things to, you know, sort of shape your work on? Well, I love some, a few Reddit accounts. that I look at a lot. I think that I'm the main character one. That always is like, that's a character I want to do.

Like who is that person? What's their deal? I think our guy I do office hours with Vic Berger is an absolute Instagram addict where he finds like the people with 200 views that are, you know, absolutely from Mars and sends them to me. Okay. Sometimes I watch them. But, you know, sometimes it'll be like, it'll come back in a way where you're like, I forgot about that.

But then now I'm writing a character who's, you know, is a guy who is always like showing off his wife. And he's taking, he's like taking his wife to the mall. Like I let showing how much he loves his wife and how well good he treats his wife. Yeah. And that's like funny on the surface. But then maybe a month or two later, there'll be like something unrelated that's like, oh, That would be a fun note to play, that similar thing. I mean, I love also, like, I'll definitely dip into, like, the Rogan verse or, like, the, you know, like, Patrick Bet David.

I don't think so. See, people don't know these people. Yeah. There's a small group of people I know that we treat these like, that's like our reality show. Okay, okay. And they're these right-wing guys who do broadcast every morning or, and they just talk about the news and everything. But they are hilarious. I mean, unintentional.

Yeah. the way they interact. And so that will inspire something. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, like everybody else, I'm on my phone a lot. You're watching reels. Just looking crap, looking at crap. Yeah.

Okay. So if we send you a reel, there's like some small chance you might see it. You might watch it if it has like two views. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious if you and folks working on InfoWars, whether that's Ben Collins or someone

else have talked about, like, the contemporary space of conspiracy theorists and what it looks like. Because I was thinking about it, and Alex Jones almost feels, like, not quaint because it's, like, monstrous, but almost like old school in some ways compared to some of the sort of new-gen, like Nick Fuentes types or, right? Like, they're very tapped into how platforms work and how algorithms work and what young people want. So I'm curious, like, if you guys talk about sort of the real ecosystem and what it looks like. Well, we haven't talked too much about it. I could tell you what I think, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah, Alex, that brand of conspiracy theory does feel a little, he is an older, you know, he's been doing it for a long time, and his media generally does feel a little dated, I think, if you look at other stuff. I'm fascinated by these, like, millennial, maybe even what's, what's, what's, It's below millennial, Gen Z. Oh, yeah, Gen Z and then Alpha. Like those young guys, mostly guys, even, and a lot of them are on the left. We're like really fast talking. Sure.

And know everything. Sure. They know everything. They sit in that Jubilee thing. Oh, my God. But actually, if you look at the GDP from 2006 or 2020, you can find that. It's like debate, high school debate. It's debate talk where I just like, you know, they just talk.

run circles around you. And that's like a whole new breed, I think, of internet personality that kind of came recently. And I mean, I don't look at Nick Fuentes. That guy creeps me out, I think, too much to actually listen to him. But yeah, I mean, it's also just so spread out and has just kind of dissolved into the general culture. And some of it, like, the weird thing about this when we started really ramping this up was you had, it was at this period where suddenly there's all the Epstein stuff and Alex was breaking off from Trump. And you started feeling like, well, some of the stuff he has been talking about is

really, is actually real. There is, there is a secret society of sickos out there. And, and, but then it gets, you know, it just gets so messed up with, you know, it gets into this anti-Semitic stuff. Yeah. It gets into, you know, Tom Hanks is, the problem. I don't think, you know. TBD.

But like, you know, but people that Alex is very close with are. Sure. So, and then there's, you know, the break in foreign policy. So it's like, it's a weird time, sort of a weird time to go hard on him because some of the stuff he's like saying is actually quite anti-Trump and anti-establishment. But it still goes back to, I mean, I tuned in the other day just to get some. inspiration for the voice. And I literally hit on him talking about somebody who had faked his own death.

And they were talking about Charlie Kirk faking his own death. And like, what? Like, that doesn't, I don't know. They just love that. Yeah. Magical thinking, I guess. And I think for their audience, it's a way to make the world make sense and to like feel like there's order. Even if it's an order that is against you, at least it's not just, you know, I could get,

struck by a bolt of lightning. Sure. You know? So, but he, his main function is to sell pills. Right, right, right. Pills that probably don't work. Gummies, pills. Yeah, and that's at the core of his.

And, you know, that's true for like, you know, cheers the sitcom, too. It was just to sell, you know, Chevroletes. So it's very similar. Yeah. I wonder what we sell. I don't know. Oh, I'm sure you sell lots of crap. Phones, chips.

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spend, how to upgrade your wardrobe for as little as possible, and what signs actually give away that someone is truly wealthy. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash your rich BFF. I don't want to spend, you know, too much time talking about Alex Jones because I think, like, what you're working on is more interesting. But I do have this nagging thought that's like, you know, he obviously can perform. He can do the character, but he was also fighting tooth and nail for his show for Info Wars. On the brink of losing it, where he was spending days posting on X,

where he seemed to be like conflating characters you'd written and played and saying that it was you, the person who had taken over Info Wars. Do you have a sense of how much he truly believes any conspiracies or anything he shares with his audience versus how much is the performance? I don't have any clue. I mean, I could just tell you what I don't have any insight information on that. I think it's like 60% of an act. And then he's seen, I mean, he's been doing it since like the 90s, you know.

So somewhere in him is a, is a worldview that is, you know, conspiracy driven. Yeah. Back from 9-11 to, you know, you name it, Kennedy assassination, Bigfoot, you know, UFOs, all of it. All of it's fun in a way. You know, like there's a recreational quality to this stuff that, you know, I think Joe Rogan used to center his show around, like, hey, let's talk about ghosts. Yeah. Or there was a, there was a show I listened to a lot.

It was a coast to coast. It was George, George, Art Bell, and then George Norie. And it was a radio, late night radio show where people would call in and say, hey, George, I saw, you know, Lockeness Monster about three years ago. And you're like, uh-huh, go ahead. And it's just good radio, you know. So I think that's what a lot of this started as. Yeah. And then it changed.

It really changed more with Trump because Trump basically was like one of those listeners or one of those callers. Sure. Yeah, literally calling. Yeah, he would love to call into like TV programs. Yeah, and he'd just shoot from the hip and say what he thought and a lot of it was nuts. And now he's now like he actually has, he's actually running the world in a lot of ways. Yeah. That's the scary full circle of it, I guess. Yeah.

A big part of, you know, the Info Wars ecosystem and Alex Jones' finances was, right, selling crap. I looked at the store the other day. Yeah, what do they got these days? Well, I was kind of surprised because I feel like he hasn't been keeping up with the trends. It was mostly gummies, supplements, but I feel like he really should be on the peptide train. And I was surprised that he wasn't. Right. So will the onion be selling peptides?

I'm a little behind on peptides. I've heard, I keep seeing it. Sure. Is it like steroid? What is it to? Yeah, it's like injectables. I mean, look at Alex. Like, he's a, he's not peptide from what I could tell.

It could be a different peptide that I'm not aware of. Yeah. A new horrible thing. Yeah, it's a ballooning peptide. That's, yeah, we will, I mean, we'll have to figure out the funny version of that. I don't know if that just doing peptides is quite there, but pep-mo, maybe pepto. Maybe injectable peptobismo. in a syringe form.

Yeah, right, right. The pink stuff. The pink stuff. Have you heard from any of the, like, sponsors of the show or any of the... I don't know if there are any. I mean, I think it's their stuff. Yeah. I don't know if these were...

They're, like, manufacturing it somewhere in Austin. I think so, yeah. No, I haven't heard from any of them. We did hear from somebody that, I don't know how much I could say about this, but who actually makes gold and, like, he sells gold. Okay. And you could, if you were at a company, you could work with him to, like, design gold, whatever, you know, things and sell them on your site. And he, I guess, used to work with Alex and used to work with Rogan and those guys doing crap.

And he saw, he's like, wants to do business with us. He wants to make gold for you. Yeah, which we have a couple of ideas. Oh, love it. Yeah. It could be like a mega sponsorship level where it's like. Yeah. As long as I get a cut.

Yeah. I want to make sure that we, like, really explicitly talk about the harm that the show caused. And, you know, for listeners who are not aware, Alex Jones has lied for years about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. 26 people were killed, 20 were kids. And the families have been harassed and threatened. Some said they've received letters from people saying, we're going to desecrate your child's grave. Yeah. Families have had to go into hiding, move.

And several years ago, Alex Jones was ordered to pay something like $1.5 billion to the families in two defamation suits. Have those families gotten anything? Have they gotten a sense of justice or money or anything? No. I mean, I think, I'm not sure if this was announced that we, when we launched this, we launched a whole line of merch shirts and bags and all that kind of stuff. And a portion of that is going to the families. And it's quite a bit because we sold a lot of InfoWars merch. This is the prime motivator for this is to set up a, to make InfoWords valuable again and start generating money that can go to them, that can start paying them back.

Yeah. Yeah, he's been very successful in evading that. And part of this is keeping that pressure on in the course. and in the press and reminding people, I think we forget about that. And people don't know the details of what he was doing to those families. And we should be,

it should be a never forget situation because there should be justice for the decisions he made. There should be consequences for them. And to try to tamper it from happening again, from that feeling like it's an okay thing to do. Like there's a documentary, Anyone could watch on HBO called The Truth versus Alex Jones. That goes very much into the details of what he did.

It's a horrifying experience to watch that because the first 20 minutes of that movie is about what happened to those kids. And not something that anyone wants to go and revisit because it is truly horrible, like as horrible as you can get. And then stacked on top of that is almost immediately, you know, one of the fathers comes out to talk to the press because he doesn't, somebody has to. Somebody has to speak for these people. And the cameras are rolling, and he's never done this before. The guy's an NCIU nurse. You know, it's just like a normal guy. And he's uncomfortable.

And what do we do often when we're uncomfortable? Wow. Yes. We smile. We go, this is weird, you know? Something. He does that. And that is the ground zero point of those ghouls saying,

look at that. He's an actor. Nobody wants to smile like that. And that just, that's the big bang of the insane conspiracy theory that ruined that person's life for many years. And then, so that was, you can watch the clips of him, Alex Jones being glib and just purely disgusting in the way he talked about these freshly wounded families, you know, in a way that just makes you want to put your hands through the TV screen and, you know, ring his neck. And so we're kind of doing that in a more artistic way, I suppose. I love the idea that's like, oh, that was, what was that? That was 2012?

Like, dude, that was fucking yesterday. Yeah. You know, in my mind in a way. So, like, no, you don't get to just like keep doing your shit. Or, I mean, maybe you will, but we're not going to, like, stop telling people what you did and try to do it in an entertaining, artistic way, I guess. And to the bitter end, he was saying lies about the families. Oh, yeah, except when he's under oath and he goes, wow, yeah, that's a joke. That's a kidding.

Come on. It's a comedy show or, you know, whatever he said. It's an entertainment. You know, it's too late. Yeah. Was it a process to get the families on board with the vision? I talked to Ben about that because that happened a little before I came on board, but they were, you know, they had to take a minute to think about what they were. what you're talking about like what and then they came back and said yeah this sounds cool i mean

good luck and let us know what we can do it's and and then after we had been doing it for a while after i'd put out a couple things we did a big zoom with everybody and they were like go for it go go harder like do you know really um don't don't worry about us like we think this is hilarious and are happy to see him getting dragged through the mud like like he is right now and and like people are not forgetting about this. And just more like, you know, thank you basically was what their message was, which was pretty intense. Yeah, for sure.

I was curious if they had any, like, creative input. Did they have ideas for what to do? The only thing one of them said was like, I can't, it was watching one of my clips of me doing the impression. And he's like, my wife gets really mad because she thinks I'm listening to Alex Jones in the room. And she'd turn that guy off, but it was just me, which was a nice. That's his way of being. Yeah, yeah.

The legal process has obviously been through some ups and downs and speed bumps, and it's been a whole thing. The last I heard was that The Onion had put forth a plan in which you'd basically license the Infowars IP on like a monthly basis. And that also a judge was trying to stop. So what is, is it still kind of in limbo, Info Wars? I think it is like, yeah, there's the Texas Court of Appeals, has said, put a stay on that at the last minute, literally like the day before we were about to get the keys,

which was very upsetting for everybody. We got a call from Ben. He's like, remember I told you there are like three things that could happen? This is the fourth thing that we didn't think was going to happen. But every other court in Texas, and I think a federal court has said, like, stop it. Stop holding this up. This is bananas. And so limbo is the right word for it because he certainly doesn't have any ownership over that anymore.

The receiver does. But they're apparently too scared to do anything about it. What are they scared of? I mean, there's some wackos out there. Sure. Oh, okay. You know, that could be it. I don't know.

I think some people are just a little more tender about this stuff, nervous. I haven't spoken to the person. but I wish I could because I would say, give it to me now. Give me the keys right now. Give me the fucking password. You know, like, what is the, can I guess it? That's all we're talking about here at the root of getting the site itself. So the message, we all gathered and said that we are, this is going to eventually happen.

Like we'll eventually come to our, he will have to do it eventually. The pressure we will keep the pressure on. But in the meantime, we're just going to go and do it. anyway. And no one's going to really, no one's going to have anything to say to stop us. We are very, our legal side is very confident that's like we're, we can proceed. The only thing we just don't have is the website itself. And, but we're, you know, we're going to have real info wars, Instagram, real info wars, Facebook, all that stuff. In the onion.com is where the site will be. And then, you know, hopefully by the end of the year or something,

But, you know, who goes to websites anymore anyways, right? Actually, a lot of verge readers love going to the verge.com. I have a funny thing to say, my tech guy. Who's the tech? What's the tech guy? What's the tech guy? He's like technically, he's like the technical director on office hours. Okay, got it.

And he knows everything about computers and the internet. He's always on talking about microchips and stuff. And I was like, I got to go to New York. I got to do this president. I got to do the, what the hell is the verge? I don't want to go down and do the verge. the verge. And I already did wired, I said. How can there be

too? And I said, and he goes, oh, no, no, the verge is the one to do. Really? The verge is the hot spot right now. Oh my God. Well, now you know what the verge is. And you can report back to him. I'm on the verge of knowing. There was another interview that you did where you kind of described your early work, you know, turning a mirror to like American culture and consumerism from sort of like in a cynical way.

But the InfoWor's venture feels incredibly hopeful to me. And it feels like a refusal to let Alex Jones have the final say and have the last word. So what keeps you hopeful? My children, I suppose. That would be two people that keep me hopeful. I mean, just knowing that there are, there's a ton of funny, creative, young, diverse people out there that I think, are pushing the boundaries of what you can do in comedy and what's funny and how do you use the tools of, you know, technology to make interesting things. I mean, just the amount of

creativity out there, the amount of ingenuity and it's endless. And like, you know, we're all freaked out about AI. And one of the people we are talking to is this guy Husk, who a lot of people, he's blown up on Instagram. But he just has a series of him. talking to is AI and makes fun of and shows you how stupid it is. And it's funny, but it's also, for me at least, it like calms my nerves about the whole, oh no, we're going to have AI overlords when in fact, I think it's pretty clunky and pretty bad. You know, it sucks. And it's a con job that these billionaires have, you know, been selling snake oil, I think. I think that's what it is. and he's one of the people just through his little videos

where the AI can't spell strawberry or it won't count to a hundred or something where we're making, that's like he's making fun of the way I would make fun of maybe Trump four years ago or something. You know, like we, there's just, there's people that I'm hopeful will, you know, add by adding their point of view to the world,

we'll, you know, entertain us and make us, and make us think about things differently. And it sounds like maybe InfoWars could be, new InfoWords could be a calming presence if you're afraid of AI making you the part of the permanent underclass or whatever. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah.

Goodbye, Tim Hydecker. Now you know what the Verges. Thank you, Mia. Thanks to Tim Hydecker, and thanks to you for listening. Send your questions and comments to Vergecast at theverge.com Or call 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is produced by Josh Kajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larcuk, Aaron Lacassio, and Andrew Marino.

If you want to support what we do here at The Verge and get ad-free podcasts, go to theverge.com slash subscribe. David will be back tomorrow if I let him. Bye.