The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny

Summary

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Podcast Summary: On with Kara Swisher – The Onion’s Ben Collins on Political Satire & Why Trump Isn’t Funny

Host: Kara Swisher
Guest: Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion
Date: February 2, 2026
Podcast: On with Kara Swisher (Vox Media)

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Overview

In this lively and incisive episode, Kara Swisher interviews Ben Collins, CEO of the legendary satirical publication The Onion. The conversation explores the delicate role of satire in an era when reality is increasingly absurd and politically charged, especially following Trump’s return to office. They discuss the evolution and endurance of The Onion, satire as both catharsis and critique in bleak times, how to lampoon those already performing self-parody, growing The Onion’s print business, and the power of community and truth in the fight against disinformation. The episode is infused with humor, skepticism, and the irreverent, resilient spirit that defines both Swisher and Collins.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The State of Satire in 2026 & The Onion’s Mission

• The Onion’s strategy: Collins describes how The Onion’s persistence and commitment to its core editorial process have helped it survive the “fever” that afflicted much of comedy and media in the Trump era and beyond.
  • “We stuck to our process. And that’s a big reason why I want to take it over… We never wavered. We’ve just always been exactly who we are.” — Ben Collins (03:42)
• The fever breaking: Collins observes that the heightened toxicity and embrace of cruelty in mainstream comedy is waning, returning space for sharp, incisive satire.

2. What Sets The Onion Apart

• Classic late-night writer’s room approach: Collins likens The Onion’s method to the great tradition of late-night TV writing — quality through relentless curation.
  • “It’s closer to Colbert or Letterman, a great Letterman monologue, than anything else.” — Ben Collins (05:01)
• Global influence: The Onion’s model has been replicated worldwide, but Collins asserts their edge is in quality writing.

3. Satirizing Tragedy and Power in Bleak Times

• Humor as catharsis: The Onion’s writers spend hours crafting the perfect headline to give readers release in dark moments, such as recent ICE violence in Minnesota.
  • “By the time we have that perfect take on the moment, it gives people a lot of catharsis.” — Ben Collins (06:29)
• Mocking the powerful and the powerless: The episode probes the paradox: is it harder to satirize powerful evildoers, or impotent “resistance” politicians?
  • “They think they’re omnipotent and they look incredibly weak. In the chasm between that, there lies a lot of comedy.” — Ben Collins (07:48)
• Unspoken truths: The Onion says what mainstream news can't or won't, distilling collective frustration into a single, apt, hilarious line.

4. Satirizing Authoritarianism in the Age of Trump

• On Elon Musk and satirical power: Collins notes that satire unsettles the powerful more than factual reporting; fascists hate being mocked.
  • “Once they feel like they’re being taunted to the point where they’re unpopular widely, which is really all they care about... that’s where they get really upset.” — Ben Collins (10:06)
• Satire as a safe haven for speech: Journalists face increasing incentives to self-censor and avoid direct truths, but satire can say what straight news cannot.
  • “One of the safe havens of that in the world right now is satire.” — Ben Collins (13:23)

Memorable Exchange – “Can you satirize Trump?”

• Justin Theroux’s expert question (22:36):
  Trump’s use of “shitposting” and bad-faith humor blurs the lines for satirical critique. How do you target someone who weaponizes irony and cruelty as comedy?
• Collins’ response:
  • Trump’s style is more bullying than genuinely funny. He never truly laughs, and there’s a shelf life to this kind of mean-spirited humor. The public may tire of cruelty as joke.
    • “He might be operating with the functionality of the baseline of what humor is—A plus B equals joke. But there’s no wider thing there.” — Ben Collins (24:54)
    • “It’s shit talking.” — Ben Collins (27:28)

5. The Onion’s Print Renaissance & Business Model

• Print is thriving: The Onion’s return to print has been a financial and cultural success, now surpassing 65,000 subscribers, described as “contraband” among students.
  • “Jokes are supposed to be read in this way... If it’s a physical object, it works better.” — Ben Collins (30:13)
• Business model: Nearly all revenue comes from subscriptions and brand consulting work; social media remains “top of funnel.”
• Online presence: The Onion’s cultural relevance spikes during national crises—people look to them for the “right needle to thread.”

6. Attempting to Buy Infowars

• Status of Infowars bid: Collins details the legal and absurd challenges to purchasing Alex Jones’ infamous fake news empire as part of a plan to re-appropriate disinformation platforms.
  • “I don’t recommend trying to buy the world’s most famous psychopath’s website...” — Ben Collins (33:49)
• Vision: Use Infowars as a major comedy and media platform, providing a “centralized hub” for satirizing misinformation and how people get their news.

7. Legacy Media, Disinformation, and the Future

• Legacy media criticized: Collins and Swisher lament legacy organizations’ timidity and reliance on bothsidesism, urging more courage in calling out fascism.
  • “The first place to be brave and step up… you’re going to be rich.” — Ben Collins (44:19)
• Media is experiencing a “sea change”: The Minnesota events marked a shift—newsrooms increasingly call a lie a lie.
• On billionaires, tech, and ownership: The Onion insulates itself from billionaire whims by owning its subscriber base, process, and archives.

8. The Future of Satire and Community

• Human connection over algorithm: Collins expresses confidence in real human communities, print media, and hand-crafted jokes over AI-generated content and algorithmic feeds.
  • “People really want this connection… [In] the next five years… people are starting to come back together to be like, ‘I want a funny person to say a funny sentence to me.’” — Ben Collins (55:12)
• Fight against disinformation: The antidote is community, reality, and making art “for the sake of art.” Satire remains vital because memes and fake news cannot foster real belonging.
• Golden age of comedy: Despite claims that comedy is dying, Collins believes the opposite is true.
  • “We’re living in a golden age [of comedy].” — Ben Collins (60:26)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On The Onion's Process:
  “The Onion is its process. So if you come in and break the process, it’s not the Onion anymore... If we deviate from that, we’re no longer the Onion.” — Ben Collins (50:10)
• On Trump’s ‘Humor’:
  “Have you ever heard this man actually laugh? Like, like, in a way that you can’t control yourself?... He’s just bullying people.” — Ben Collins (24:54)
• On Satire’s Power Over Authoritarians:
  “Fascists hate being made fun of more than anything.” — Ben Collins (10:06)
• On Community and Hope:
  “My hope is… they’re rediscovering community, they’re rediscovering each other… living in the real.” — Ben Collins (59:23)
• On The Business Model:
  “There are two economies. It’s the economy of the real and then the economy of gambling and speculation and all this extra shit. … I want people to give us dollars for goods and services.” — Ben Collins (53:19)
• On Legacy Media:
  “If you just stand up and report information objectively as it’s going on, you’re going to be in a good spot.” — Ben Collins (46:05)

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Important Timestamps

• 03:42 – Collins discusses The Onion’s editorial endurance amidst “fevers” afflicting mainstream comedy.
• 06:19 – Grieving, catharsis, and the role of humor in dark recent events.
• 07:48 – On the comedic chasm between powerful’s omnipotence and weakness.
• 10:06 – Satire’s unique power to unsettle authoritarians, Elon Musk, and Trump.
• 13:23 – The press’s limitations vs. satire’s latitude in speaking dangerous truths.
• 22:36 – Justin Theroux’s expert question about Trump and performative authoritarian irony.
• 24:54 – Collins’s nuanced analysis of Trump’s “humor” and its limitations.
• 30:13 – The resurgence and importance of Onion’s print edition.
• 33:49 – The onion’s ongoing (and surreal) attempt to buy InfoWars.
• 44:19 – Prescriptions for legacy media: calling out fascism.
• 50:10 – The entrepreneurial importance of owning the process and the platform.
• 55:12 – The return to community and real human connection.
• 60:15 – AI in comedy vs. the irreplaceable work of real people.

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Conclusion

This episode dives deep into both the art and the necessity of satire in chaotic times. Ben Collins’s stewardship of The Onion reveals the enduring power of sharp humor and community, especially when reality itself is increasingly “stupid.” For Collins and Swisher, the ultimate defense against disinformation and authoritarianism isn’t just fact-checking or reporting, but galvanizing trust and catharsis through well-made jokes and refusing to give ground.

The Onion remains a beacon—sometimes a life raft—of wit, irreverence, and resistance in the post-fact era.

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For more:

• Subscribe to The Onion’s print or digital editions
• Listen to Kara Swisher’s “On with Kara Swisher” Mondays and Thursdays via Vox Media
• Related reading: The rise of independent media, challenges for journalism, and the evolution of political satire in the US

Transcript

[Ben Collins]

We tend to try to make fun of how people get their information. And right now, people get their information in the most base and stupid ways possible. Like, we're all competing with people who seem to, like, drink, paint for a living.

[Kara Swisher]

Hi, everyone from New York magazine and the Vox Media podcast network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher today. Today my guest is Ben Collins, the CEO of the Onion. Ben started his career in journalism. He covered disinformation up until 2024. That's right. The former reporter who covered fake news is now leading a website that told brand is fake news, but in the best kind of way. Since then, Ben has helped the Onion relaunch its print edition and grow its circulation to tens of thousands of people. He brought back the Onion News Network on YouTube. He kicked off a bid to take over Alex Jones's Infowars. And late last year, the Onion also released a mockumentary about Jeffrey Epstein called Bad Pedophile. The Onion success has been a bright spot in an otherwise bleak period for the media industry. And actually, it's very common. There's a lot of these really interesting entrepreneurial efforts that are doing really well. I think it's really important to have successes like the Onion, especially satirical, when reality feels more absurd than satire. And it's just really fun. You know, most of you experience it online in social media, but I gotta tell you, I was a big reader of Mad magazine, of crack magazine, National Lampoon as a kid, and it's in that genre, and they really skew up powerful people in just the right way, and it makes me laugh out loud. All right, let's get to my conversation with Ben Collins. Our expert question comes from actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux, who's a good friend of mine. This is a serious conversation, but it's also a fun one. We're talking about the Onion, after all. So stick around.

[Ben Collins]

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[Kara Swisher]

Ben, thanks for coming on.

[Podcast Producer/Announcer]

On.

[Ben Collins]

Kara, thank you so much for having me.

[Kara Swisher]

I have wanted to have you on for a long time. It's been close to two years since you became CEO of the Onion. You said one of the big reasons you wanted to buy it was because you don't want Elon to own it and kill an iconic comedic publication for the left. But since Trump returned to office, comedic voices on the right have gotten very powerful, as you know. It feels like there had been a broader shift. I think it's shifting back again. So talk a little bit about that shift and what it means for the Onion's place in comedy, which has a very prominent role, by the way.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, look, we just stuck to the process throughout that whole weird fever that was going on throughout the comedy world. It's very clear that that fever is now breaking and that people, we're like, maybe we got a little bit too hot in the collar about the racism. Maybe we went a little bit too hard on that one. We just. We stuck to our process. And that's a big reason why I want to take it over is because I didn't want somebody with that fever to come in and try to lay everybody off and install people with whatever weird disease those people had in their brain. So, like, we stuck with it. And, you know, when I took over the Onion, we kept the staff, we gave everybody raises, and we said, what's the ultimate form of this process that you guys run where you throw away 99% of jokes and keep the one good one? And we stayed true to that, and now it's really paying off, I think. Where other places, the Austin comedy scene dying, other places, starting to realize they may have had something to do with the installation of a fascist regime. We never wavered. We've just always been exactly who we are.

[Kara Swisher]

So it's really interesting because there's always a place to go where other people aren't. And everyone sort of rushed over to that manosphere comedy scene, and then there's lots of them. You can't tell them apart. That's how I feel. I'm like, which one has the mustache? I don't know. They all sound the same. But what would you compare yourself to? What sets it apart?

[Ben Collins]

It's in the great late night tradition of, I would say, having 15 people in a room and coming to the best sentence about what happened that day. It's closer to Colbert or Letterman, a great Letterman monologue, than anything else. And I don't think there's another thing specifically like it.

[Kara Swisher]

You're doing the basics.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, we're doing the basics. Right, exactly. And I think there are satirical places on the Internet, like the Hard Times, that do really good stuff. There's also, like, there's little onions throughout the world. There's the Beaverton in Canada. There's one in Australia. There's ones that are literally called the Onion that we don't care to send ceases and desist to throughout Asia. We don't care about that. We, I think. But the difference is in quality, is that we just. We have the best comedy writers.

[Kara Swisher]

So the last few weeks in America have been extremely bleak. But as a satirical newspaper, the Onion's job is to find humor in them. Let's talk about Minnesota. In the last few weeks, ICE agents have killed. I say murdered two American citizens. I want to read two Onion headlines about Minnesota. Superficially similar. One is, democrats condemn ICE for murdering without proper warrants. And the second is Christine. Christine Noem calls on Minneapolis residents to stop obstructing murders. Talk a little bit about this, how you're thinking, thinking about this.

[Ben Collins]

The one from this morning is ICE Agent stuff. Sock under mask to give himself chin. Which is precisely how we're thinking about it.

[Kara Swisher]

I love a penis reference, but go ahead.

[Ben Collins]

Good. Yeah, Look, I'm from the news. So I went in here hot and under the collar, and I was like, guys, like, we gotta hurry up. We gotta do things quick. And they're like, no, we take a breath. Like, we take a breath before things happen to really contextualize stuff and see how things feel in the moment. And that's become a really big part of what this company is. Is sort of providing, like, the one sentence that is able to distill American life right now. And they take it very seriously in the room. Like, they are ruthless about word choice and where people go with each word in the sentence. So I am proud of them for just telling me to shut the fuck up and just be like, guys, like, we need to take a step back here. And by the time we have that, like, perfect take on the moment. It gives people a lot of catharsis. I think people struggle for nine or ten hours to come up with the thing that. Come up with the feeling that they're thinking, put into words and right. When people are at their breaking point of where they are emotionally, we do tend to provide exactly the right sentence, and that's our role.

[Kara Swisher]

The Democrat one is equally funny as the Kristi Noem one. They're powerless, though. At the same time, is it hard to satirize the powerful or easier at this moment?

[Ben Collins]

I mean, there's several parts of that. They think they're omnipotent and they look incredibly weak. Weak. They look soft. In the chasm between that, there lies a lot of comedy. So going in for power structures like that, I think you have to do it in a way that isn't exclusively filled with rage. And you have to take us, like, again, just contextualize everything and take a step back and take them for who they are. Psychoanalyze. I think that's. That's really what we do. I also think we do something that the news just simply can't or won't do, which is we say the unsaid sentence in American life. The people that, you know, when you're talking to people on the street about what's going on, they say it, but the news will never say it.

[Kara Swisher]

Right, Right. What they actually think are making jokes about it. But is the powerless Democrats funnier than the power Trump administration?

[Ben Collins]

People who are just kind of standing there and saying, stop hitting me, but have a little bit of power. We had some headline that was like, somebody has to do something to stop this. Says Democratic fundraising email from. From sitting US Congress person.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[Ben Collins]

You are. You have more like, they may not have power, but they have more power than us. Right. They can at least yell at the person down the hallway, and everybody else has to go to work and go to the gas station and do all those other things. Bring, you know, bring their kid to soccer practice, and they don't see anybody fighting this thing. I. This is a little severe, but I read a. And I hate to bring up a meme because we try to stay away from memes, but like, I wrote this thing about how, like, Republicans are the Uvalde shooter and Democrats are the Uvalde cops. Like, you can be mad at both things here. Like, there's. There is enough to be mad at both things.

[Kara Swisher]

That's a really good point.

[Ben Collins]

The true. The true evil are the people you know, shooting people in the street. And you can be mad that the people tasked with standing up to that aren't doing it.

[Kara Swisher]

That's an excellent analogy. Let's move on to another serious story. Elon Musk's chatbot Grok generated millions of sexualized images of women minors in late December and early January. When you were a reporter covering disinformation on NBC News, you were actually suspended over your critical coverage of Musk as the CEO of the Onions parent company. You're not involved in the Onions editorial process. But nonetheless, what's it like to go from covering him as a reporter to critiquing him through satire, which I think he hates more, probably would be my guess.

[Ben Collins]

Oh, yeah, definitely. It's. It's definitely more powerful weapon right now. As you know, the. The. Throughout all of history, fascists hate being made fun of more than anything. They can. They can lie their way through factual stories in the press, they can easily go through that. But once they feel like they're being taunted to the point where they're unpopular widely, which is really all they care about, is being loved and liked and thought to be funny, that's where they get really upset. So there is. There is a ton more power here in terms of taking down power structures and how people feel about what's going on, you know, because we were, you know, I was. I was reporting on Elon in a very straightforward way for a while, and it was. I think part of it was he was so extraordinarily nuts that it made it, you know, this. It made it seem like I was like. Like I had a grudge against him. But he was doing, you know, he was doing drugs and in the end, firing every person. And he thought that there was some sort of, like, wokeness switch that once he bought Twitter, he could just turn it off. But it turns out there's people who actually believe stuff. Right, Right. So, like, I. Yeah, it was. It was difficult to go on the news and just allude to the fact that he had lost his mind. It's much easier to just sit here and watch the world's best comedy writers go ham.

[Kara Swisher]

So talk a little bit about that. I mean, in terms of having the freedom to do that, the difficulties of being reported is hard because you're sort of looking at, say, a Kristi Noem, say something really heinous or anybody else, and you have to be like, christine Ohm said this today. Right. It's kind of exhausting on many levels. I find it exhausting, obviously, that train has left the station for me. But talk a little bit about that because you can just say explicitly in the form of a joke what you're talking about.

[Ben Collins]

Look, care, you know this. A lot of the best reporters that we know at the big places are making a lot of concessions and are being quieter just to keep their job so they can pop up with their big story once every few months or they've quit. That's really what I. They are not in a position to. To tell the truth accurately and correctly, consistently, because of the incentive structures of what these big places are. They want to. Even if, even if they're. They have good intentions at the top of these places, which is like, we got to maintain somebody on Air Force One or whatever, so we can't piss them off too much. That's still a deal with the devil that you actually don't want to make. And also with the misinformation stuff, people who covered that have been effectively criminalized, people who covered disinformation, people who stood up advocacy groups to try to, you know, steal away Nazis from these platforms and put in, say, like, hey guys, they're actual Nazis and they're coming back. Those people are. Those people are being targeted by this administration and that those people are doing truthful things. So like, under. Under the guise of. Of stopping censorship and under the guise of free speech, they are actually censoring people for speech. That is true, yes. So, like, we are actually in a much worse position, speech wise, than we've ever been. And one of the safe havens of that in the world right now is satire.

[Kara Swisher]

Right, right. Which is where Elon started off. He was angry that Babylon Bee wasn't able to make a trans joke, kind of a stupid trans joke, but it was a joke nonetheless, and that's what got him there. And so he got to be this free speech warrior that he is simply not.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, of course, he famously tried to buy the Onion once about, I don't know, 10 years ago now or something. He. He tried to buy the Onion. The deal didn't go through. A lot of people didn't want to work for him. So then he started picking off Onion staff writers one by one, and he. He put them in like a weird hangar in like the SpaceX facility in California, and then just forgot about them. And those people wound up coming up with something called thud, which is probably aptly named. And then, you know, a lot of this stuff, a lot of the origin stories of these people are they weren't accepted as funny. They never really Understood jokes. They never understood punching up and they became hell bent on power instead.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah. So let's get to one more story. The near collapse of NATO over Trump's demands to get Greenland. At one point, he was linking his threats to the fact that Norway didn't give him the Nobel Peace Prize, even though the Norwegian government doesn't give out that prize. We've been talking about the end of satire for years, but I have to ask, how is it possible to satirize stories like these when reality is so absurd on its own?

[Ben Collins]

Well, I think it's. We're lucky in a sense that the press has capitulated so much because they're splitting hairs with people who are actively lying and we're just like, no, this is the thing that's taking place and we get to be funny about it. So it's like we're, we're in this, like, really interesting and prized position. So, yeah, look, it's gotten harder because everything's so stupid.

[Kara Swisher]

Well, because Trump threatens to invade Greenland because he didn't get the Nobel Peace Prizes in Onion headline.

[Ben Collins]

Yes, exactly. Like, everything is so stupid. So in that sense, it is hard to compete with reality.

[Kara Swisher]

So in the bigger picture, at one hand, it's not funny times we're living in. And at the same time, the one of the key news figures is parody of himself on purpose. How difficult is it to do satire in 2026?

[Ben Collins]

I actually think people keep saying this as if it's like this horrific burden and it is like, it's harder to be funny now, but it's actually easier to push the lines. Think about this. Like, we made a 22 minute documentary where Jeffrey Epstein rises from the dead like a horror movie figure at the end of it.

[Kara Swisher]

It was called Bad Pedophile.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, it's called Jeffrey Epstein Bad Pedophile. We had a. We still can't get this off the wall. We had this like gigantic caulk gun that was filled with fake cum in it. Sorry to be weird. That's okay. The, like, the boundaries through which that we can play in humor right now. Are they the furthest they've ever been? Like, we are very lucky to be able to say literally whatever we want all the time. It's part of like, acceptable American adult society.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah. Although the theater chain pulled it out in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder.

[Podcast Producer/Announcer]

Correct.

[Kara Swisher]

Is that right?

[Ben Collins]

That's true. Yeah. We had a distribution deal for that and then they pulled out. But like, we. Here's the thing that just keeps happening in American Life that I'm just, like, genuinely proud of. And I think that once people start to embrace it, that you start to realize, like, oh, this is actually what is good about this country. So we made this documentary called Jeffrey Epstein Bad Pedophile. We were going to release it with a theater chain throughout the country. Charlie Kirk gets shot, and we get a email the next day saying, we're not doing this anymore. And initially we were pissed off and we were like, this is just straight capitulation. The fact that Charlie Kirk gets shot means we can't make fun of Jeffrey Epstein. Like, what the, how does this, like, what is the chain of command here?

[Kara Swisher]

Right.

[Ben Collins]

But then we're like, okay, so what do we do? So then we told everyone that we're going to put in theaters everywhere in a few weeks, and we don't have any place to put it. But if you want to put it in your independent cinema throughout the country, we'll just give you the movie and you can keep the gate. And within literally six days, we had many, many more than that theater chain. We had, like, that theater chain was going to be 20, 30 cities nationwide. We were in 50, 60 throughout United States and Canada. And people had to, like, add extra screenings. People were making whole nights out of it.

[Kara Swisher]

So a different experience than Melania, the documentary.

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[Ben Collins]

Great movie.

[Kara Swisher]

That should be called Married to. Anyway, go ahead. Oh, just a joke.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah. Same ending, though. Jeffrey Epstein comes back to life in both moves. I, I, so, yeah, look, the traditional mainstream power structures here are just going to capitulate. They're just going to fail repeatedly. You can't count on them. But then the people you actually want to hang out with are going to step up. You're seeing it in Minneapolis, you're kind of seeing it nationwide. Once you start to embrace this thing and we have, we've had a lot more fun. It's just been a lot easier to live like this.

[Kara Swisher]

We'll be back in a minute.

[Podcast Producer/Announcer]

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[Kara Swisher]

So you know it's hard to make Trump the butt of the joke when he is the joke. So we got an expert question from an outside person. It's on that in that vein. So here's yours.

[Justin Theroux]

Hey, Ben, it's Justin Theroux. I am an actor, writer, and New Yorker and a longtime Onion subscriber. My question, perhaps not surprisingly, is about Donald Trump. Throughout history, political strongmen that have emerged like him or authoritarians like him usually take themselves very seriously. They're very austere figures. But Trump, I've noticed, has added something unique to this authoritarian playbook, which is he spreads his unique authoritarian message through what some people, perhaps not yourself, would call humor or comedy. It's this new kind of authoritarianism that has learned how to shitpost. He uses memes. He uses bad AI, famously him flying a jet fighter over protesters and dumping feces on them. He uses irony. And when he's cornered on it, he usually just pulls that kind of, you know, I was just joking or what, are you stupid? Or he sort of goes through that escape hatch as someone using satire to cover not just the news, but also disinformation. How does this change the game for the Onion or when your targets are already operating in sort of a bad faith irony mode where everything is dangerous but nothing is serious. Has the onions brand of satire had to evolve? How do you satirize someone who's already performing in a post sincere world where sadly, cruelty is often the joke?

[Ben Collins]

Great question, Justin.

[Kara Swisher]

It was. And I heard he's your handsomest subscriber in India.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, I was gonna say it's unfair that he gets to be handsome and smart. Like what? What is that shit about?

[Kara Swisher]

I got him specifically for you. Cause you said that we were laughing our asses off, so I asked him to do it. So talk about that. It's a great question, cuz Trump uses humor quite a bit. And when he was running, everyone was making fun of him. I said no, he's funny. Like he is in a weird way and he makes fun of himself and he's very self deprecating. And of course that's moved into using cruelty as humor, which sometimes is funny to so talk about what he's saying there. It's a very complex and interesting question of what you do then when the authoritarians take the playbook, that hurts them.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, no, he's, he's funny in a way. A bully can occasionally hit on something. Right. But I always ask this to people. Have you ever heard this man actually laugh? Like, like in a way that you can't control yourself? Every good person you know, you've been around them and they, they have laughed so hard that they can't handle it. Right. He's never done that. And that's because he might be operating with the functionality of the baseline of what humor is. A plus B equals joke. But he doesn't. There's no wider thing there. There's nothing that keeps you around. He's not funny in a way that is illuminating or interesting. He's just bullying people. It's just school era bullying. And I think there is a shelf life on this. We went through this sort of in the 80s with Andrew Dice Clay style comed and people just get tired of it. People get tired of people being mean and you can deal with it for a few years and it might feel fresh that there, that there were sacred cows and there aren't anymore. But it gets tiresome. And look, I have no doubt that there is some base humor in him and I do think that he's much funnier. Well, he'll say things that are attempts at comedy that most politicians simply will not do that. Right. They are talking about farm bills and stupid shit like that. That's what set him apart. But he's actually funny. Like if a genuinely funny person ran for office and was was able to keep that lightness, I think they would do probably even better than him.

[Kara Swisher]

I'm going to be devil's advocate. I had Judge Apaton and he talked about he thinks the funnier presidential candidate always wins, the one who has more wit or humor. And Trump does draw people in. I think it's getting tired. You're absolutely right because it's like, oh, are you still going to make another poop joke? You two year old or Elon does the same thing. He is definitely not funny, is wildly unfunny and he thinks he's funny.

[Ben Collins]

Yes.

[Kara Swisher]

It's an interesting dynamic going on where they think they're much funner than they are at the same time that they're using. Humor is interesting.

[Ben Collins]

I actually think it's like, who is least in a box, right? It's not like, who's funniest. It's like, who is most willing to call a spade a spade in the moment, even if the calling the spade a spade is just fucking wrong. Right. Like, Donald Trump will. Donald. Donald Trump will call immigrants whatever he wants to call them, and it's incorrect, and it's based on shit that he read on his weird little racist Facebook knockoff, but he will say it as plainly as he can. Again, I don't know if it's humor. I think it's just like other people are tying themselves in knots to, like, make sure they don't offend specific things.

[Kara Swisher]

Shit talking. It's really shit talking.

[Ben Collins]

It's shit talking, right, exactly. And I think now that's what you see as well, is that the shit talking. The Trump people are in the box now, right? They're. They find themselves in the last few weeks with the Alex Pretty murder being like, you can't walk around with a gun and you can't stand in the street. But the Second Amendment is the most important thing that all these, like, they are just like, they're in the box.

[Kara Swisher]

Well, I think they use cruelty as a joke sometimes. And this isn't funny, right? There is a moment where it's not funny. Does that change the way you all think about it? I mean, I thought one of the ones you did recently. Totally different person. Tim Cook. Your headlines about Tim Cook were very funny.

[Ben Collins]

It really depends. There are. We were really cool to Donald Trump when everyone was really cruel to Donald Trump. Right. And I have no problem with it. I'm just gonna look up the exact. I think it's a little long. Okay. This. We wrote this on January 23rd of 2013. And it says, when you're feeling low, just remember, I'll be dead in about 15 or 20 years by Donald Trump. And we. Yeah. Michael Cohen sent us, like, a cease and desist letter for that that I guess we didn't open until he started running for president. We were just sort of like, in a envelope somewhere. Now it's framed, obviously.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah. The one for Tim Cook was police repeatedly shoot Tim cook after mistaking iPhone for gun, which.

[Ben Collins]

Ow. Yeah.

[Kara Swisher]

I laughed and I thought, yeah, yeah.

[Ben Collins]

By the way, I think that's an archive poll. I think that one is from, like, 10 years ago. But, like, we, like, we'll go for it. When the situation demands it. Demands it.

[Kara Swisher]

Demands it.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, exactly.

[Kara Swisher]

But let's pivot a little bit and talk about the bigger picture of the Onion's vision, the wider media world. Cause what you're doing is really interesting because it seems to be working. You brought back a print version of the Onion. You've got more than 50,000 subscribers, including my son. I didn't know this. He knows everything about the Onion. And you said you wanted to help more publications get into print. Obviously, social media is probably your strongest area in terms of bringing in subscribers, et cetera, even if it's not necessarily profitable to. Bottom line. It's a marketing tool, I guess, and there's a lot of comedy out there. So talk about this with a print thing and how you have to balance it with online to stay culturally relevant, because a lot of the stuff moves there.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah. So we brought back the print because we just thought it was. I grew up with the Onion prints, and getting it on the side of the road felt like stealing something. It felt very cool to have that around. And it's been a miracle. Like, jokes are supposed to be read in. In this way. And I'm not trying to be like, one of those, like, weird vinyl guys who's like, actually, you're supposed to listen to. Musically. I'm not trying to be like that.

[Kara Swisher]

I hate that.

[Ben Collins]

Like, if you. I know, but if you. Like, if you just keep scrolling through headlines all day and, like, you pop up and we're the. Obviously the funniest thing you see on Instagram, you're still going to forget about it. If it's, like, a physical object, it works better. So we thought it was going to be successful. We didn't think it was going to be this successful. It's like, it is most of our business. We have around 65,000 subscribers now, and we are close to having more than the Washington Post in terms of print subscribers. That's our goal for this year.

[Kara Swisher]

Well, yeah, they're actively.

[Ben Collins]

I mean, that's not going to be.

[Kara Swisher]

They're trying to go down while you're. They're actively trying to go down while you're trying to go.

[Ben Collins]

We didn't think they were going to not be a newspaper anymore, so, like, that was maybe a different goal. But, like, look, another thing we didn't expect is, like, your kid is a Onion subscriber. We didn't know it's being used as contraband in schools, and we love it. Like, we keep hearing people stealing it from their kids.

[Kara Swisher]

He's older. He's 23.

[Ben Collins]

Oh, okay. I didn't know that. Wait, seriously?

[Justin Theroux]

Yeah.

[Ben Collins]

Oh. Oh, my God. Kara, I had no idea.

[Kara Swisher]

He watches most of everything online. Like, he told me he was watching Frontline and I was like, oh, PBS? He goes, I don't watch PBS. Like, he watched it on YouTube, obviously. So he's quite online and his media consumption. But in this, I was surprised. I was interested.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah. And that's great. And like, we. I thought he was 14, because that's the thing that keeps happening.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, Well, I had MAD magazine. Mad magazine was my version of that, but.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, exactly.

[Kara Swisher]

National Lampoon or Cracked. Cracked.

[Ben Collins]

Cracked is great.

[Kara Swisher]

Cracked.

[Ben Collins]

Cracked churned out a bunch of incredible, like, truly remarkable writers.

[Kara Swisher]

They did. Cracked was amazing because it was sort of meaner than Matt, and Matt was pretty mean. Matt could be pretty mean.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah.

[Kara Swisher]

So most of your revenue comes from print right now, correct?

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, you know, people pay 100 bucks a year and, you know, we don't have the world's biggest staff. I mean, I think in. In our lore, I think we have like 500,000 employees, but I think we actually have like 30. And then like, the. The other way we make money is brands come to us because no one can speak normal anymore. Everyone relies on AI too much. So they come to us to get their brands to, like, we have a copy agency. We get them to talk normal or be funny or whatever. So business is good, but we really, we need people to buy the paper. And the paper's great, so people are very happy with it.

[Kara Swisher]

But online, what's. How important is that to your business? Even if it's not a revenue driver?

[Ben Collins]

Sure. It's top of funnel. Like, we. We try as. As much as we can to get as many people know what the Onion is. And we have this weird gap where every teenager knows what it Is and every 35 plus person does, but there's this gap in the middle trying to bridge that gap. And also, like, to me, it's important that people look to us in these moments, in these big national crises for the right for us to thread a needle. Like, after Charlie Kirk was shot and everyone kept getting fired, people were like, when are you going to say something about this? We had a headline that was report you to be fired for reading this head deadline about Charlie Kirk. Like, and it was just exactly what was needed in that moment.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, you have to wait and have the right thing to do. So another thing, you're still in the middle of trying to buy Alex Jones's site, Infowars, but it's on hold for more than a year. As I said, you were a reporter who covered fake news and you're trying to buy one of the biggest spreaders of actual fake news, or at least used to be. I mean, one could say it's trolling, which it is a little bit. Talk about what is happening right now and what your actual goal might be.

[Ben Collins]

Sure. I don't recommend trying to buy the world's most famous psychopaths website. I think it's like a bad idea. However it's been, you know, it's the fight of our life. I guess we have. So the San Diego families will basically only sell this thing to us and it's the only way they're ever going to get money. The lawyers around this case have made lots of money. Alex Jones lawyers made a lot of money. A lot of money in the. The four plus years after it was decided that he owes these families $1.5 billion. But they haven't seen the. They literally have not seen a penny.

[Kara Swisher]

They have not. Yeah.

[Ben Collins]

So we're trying to get them a penny and maybe, you know, some recurring pennies over time. I will say we have grand designs. If we end up with this thing. Like we, we really. The comedy world in Hollywood has been really hollowed out. They had several repeated disasters over the writers strike and the pandemic and then the fires. And then they came back and the situation wasn't the same. People who are, you know, the world's best comedy writers are out of work. And the way that we satirize stuff also has kind of updated itself. So I don't want to, I don't want to blow too many things, but if we end up with this thing, which we're hopeful we do, like, we're, we're kind of at the mercy of the court, but we're hopeful. We're hopeful. We do. We're going to make it as big a deal as we possibly can. We think this is like a very big opportunity.

[Kara Swisher]

So give me a grand design. The annual Alex Jones award. What?

[Ben Collins]

No, we. Oscars.

[Kara Swisher]

The Alexes.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah. There are plenty of people worth mocking that aren't straight news things. The Onion was invented to sort of like be a take on the New York Times, the Onion News Network, which is incredible. And we brought that back too, was a take on CNN and more traditional news. Then we had Clickhole, which we eventually sold, but that was supposed to be like BuzzFeed News stuff. We tend to try to make fun of how people get their information. And right now People get their information in the most base and stupid ways possible. Like, we're all competing with people who seem to, like, drink, paint for a living. So nobody has done the widespread take on that. It's not just. Obviously, Alex Jones is not the only guy who does that. So we're going to be keep playing in that space. And there. There are professionals who are kind of doing it kind of seem around on. On your feeds already. We just want to give them a more centralized hub.

[Kara Swisher]

Oh, interesting. Would you do it again? You're already deep in it. But is it draining to do this?

[Ben Collins]

It's deeply draining. Like, I've had to learn about bankruptcy law. I don't know anything about this. I don't. Yeah, I don't care.

[Kara Swisher]

Like, so what's your chances of getting.

[Ben Collins]

It comes down to, like, a bunch of court decisions, but, like, the Supreme Court has already ruled. Like, dude, you have no outs.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah.

[Ben Collins]

It's just that everyone's afraid to deal with him because he is. The guy has abused the justice system at every step, and he has. He. Anyone who walks in his path, he harasses and harangues. So we're basically purchasing a. Like a permanent harassment campaign.

[Kara Swisher]

Right, right, right. He does it from his car now.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah. Everybody who. Everybody gets involved in the process is like, Jesus Christ, why did I do this? Look, Cara, like, a couple weeks ago, I turned it on. Turn on Infowars after, because he's still going just as is after Renee Good was shot. And he had Kyle Rittenhouse on saying that Renee Good had lost custody of her kids because she was putting cigarettes out in her kids. And he had that. He had read that on X. And I was like, this. These are just gonna keep doing this forever, aren't they? Like, and they're gonna make so much money. They make so much money doing it.

[Kara Swisher]

Yes, they are.

[Ben Collins]

And I. I just think that there. There is just. There just has to be somebody who's just going to say, okay, enough, enough.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, I agree. Like, someone was talking about Minnesota foe. We won. I'm like, they're going to Ohio next. Just so you know, they don't stop. These people do not stop.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah.

[Kara Swisher]

Which. Do you have any sense when you'll get an answer?

[Ben Collins]

I sound like Donald Trump talking about healthcare. I'm like, oh, it's gonna be two weeks. But, like, I've been saying that to my staff for, like, six months, and they're like, dude, what are you talking about? Like, they're. They think I'm insane. So I just like, at this point, I'm just like, like, if it happens, it happens. And if it does, we are ready to go. Like, we, we have, we've had a game plan.

[Kara Swisher]

Every week is infowars.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, exactly. So, like, yeah, at some point, by the way, like, we, we're just, we're going to do this. Like, we, we can't leave this whole terrain unmade. Fun of. So we're going to press go at some point. Yeah.

[Kara Swisher]

Okay. So the Trump administration has not been shy about going after news outlets. Obviously, un is clearly satire, so it's a little different. But it's also true that doesn't matter with these people. So where's the line? Are you worried about litigiousness from anybody? I mean, basically the defense is fuck them if they can't take a joke. But is that something that worries you? Because it certainly has affected lots of big news organizations, as you and I know.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, look, I'm not saying we're immune to this. In fact, I think we're like, explicitly targeted. You know this. My girlfriend's been indicted for protesting ice. Federally indicted. She's like one of the only people who's been federally indicted for protesting ice.

[Kara Swisher]

Just so people who don't know. Your girlfriend is Kat Abu Ghazali, a progressive candidate who's running in the Democratic primary for Illinois's 9th congressional district. And she's indicted for allegedly conspiring to injure officers during an anti ICE protest.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, she is. And she's the coolest person I know. But just because you're scared doesn't mean you stop doing the thing you're good at.

[Kara Swisher]

Yep.

[Ben Collins]

I think it's especially important now where the people who have caved since the start of this, universities, news organizations, everybody who, who is like, okay, sir, what do you need? They just kept stepping on them afterwards. They just kept going.

[Kara Swisher]

They did.

[Ben Collins]

I'm not going to tell this staff to change what they're doing at all like they are doing. They're going as hard as they want. And if they come to me with a 50, 50 ball, I say go for it. Like, and if they come to me with a big idea, I'm like, let's, let's find funding, let's find a sponsor, let's find a thing to that to make sure that this thing can happen. And I, I, I just want to, if, if people like, get one thing out of this, there are more of us than there are of them. There just are. And that doesn't mean necessarily politically or emotionally. I'm not saying that for you to get through the day. I'm saying that if you're marketing a product, if you're trying to start a business, there are more people who don't like this shit than the offices. And there's fertile ground. There's a reason the Washington Post is going to die before the Onion, you know, becomes one of the biggest newspapers in the country. Yeah, it's because they, they licked the boot and we kicked back.

[Kara Swisher]

Right?

[Podcast Producer/Announcer]

Right.

[Kara Swisher]

That's a really good point. We'll be back in a minute.

[Megan Rapinoe]

Megan Rapinoe here this week on A Touch More. Trinity Rodman is officially staying with the Washington sp in the NWSL as the first player to benefit from the NWSL's new High Impact Player role, aka the Rodman Rule. What does this mean for the rest of the league? Also, in light of the potential Caitlyn Clark, Paige Becker's rivalry on the horizon, we want to talk about rivalries in general, how they're formed and what they mean. Plus, Deanna Flores, flag Football's biggest advocate and Mexico star player, join the show to tell us why the future is flag football. Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.

[The Vergecast Host]

A lot of us have spent a lot of the last week watching videos of what's happening on the streets of Minneapolis and understanding what it is that we're seeing, but also what's real and what isn't and what's AI and who is taking these videos and how we're supposed to understand the source feels harder than ever. So this week on the Vergecast, we're talking about what's happening in Minneapolis, how information moves in an AI age and what it means to make sense of it all. All that plus what's new with the new TikTok, why everything feels like it's falling apart on TikTok and more on the Vergecast.

[Thumbtack/Lowe's Ad Voice]

Wherever you get podcasts.

[Turning Point USA Event Narrator]

Turning Point USA's last big event, America Fest, was held in December without founder Charlie Kirk. Had Kirk been alive, it might have gone differently, but it was a mess. Ben Shapiro went ham on Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.

[Ben Collins]

So no Tucker Carlson. It is not an excuse to go silent on Candace's targeting of TP USA or to mirror her bullshit line lines of questioning because you love Candace personally. The same holds true of Megyn Kelly.

[Turning Point USA Event Narrator]

Kelly and Tucker hit back at Shapiro.

[The Vergecast Host]

To hear calls for like de platforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event.

[Ben Collins]

I'm like, what? This is hilarious.

[Kara Swisher]

I don't think we are friends anymore. I've been a very good friend to Ben. Nobody knew who the heck Ben Shmiro was when I started putting him on my shows on the Fox News Channel.

[Turning Point USA Event Narrator]

Erica Kirk tried to keep it light.

[Kara Swisher]

The enemy has thrown a lot of curve balls at us today. My iPad won't even turn on.

[Turning Point USA Event Narrator]

Nicki Minaj was there.

[Ben Collins]

Why not?

[Turning Point USA Event Narrator]

And those people are adult professionals. Charlie Kirk started Turning Point USA to reach college students. It was a campus organization first. So what are the students thinking today?

[Podcast Producer/Announcer]

Explain.

[Turning Point USA Event Narrator]

Drops every weekday.

[Kara Swisher]

You know, a lot of these news organizations that have given in certainly are still doing a lot of good news. But. And you've been critical. So have I. About legacy media bowing to the administration, being two soft and powerful people. This, this centerization. And by the way, I think it was your thread Bucket of gravy made me laugh for days. Hiring. This is about CBS News contributors like Stephen Miller. No, not that one. Wait, we found a third. Very funny. But their work does drive a lot of what independent media covers too. And I know it's easy to they say it's easy to criticize them. I'm like, no, you actually have gone so far in a very bad direction. I'm not so sure it's undeserved. But if you were running a big news organization, what would you do? Like you are now the head of cbs. What would you do? You'd do a much better job.

[Ben Collins]

First of all, I would be like, no, thank you. Second of all, that would be one big thing. Look, they have dismantled so much and I don't know if you can just hire those people back and be like, trust me, I'm not going to do what just happened. I don't think you can do that. I also, like when I was at NBC News, I was a good reporter on my section of the world, but I knew nothing about immigration reporting and they had incredible immigration reporters. I knew nothing about this woman named Adiel who worked there who was able to effectively make it so ups. I don't know if you know this, but UPS drivers didn't used to have AC in their cars and they used to drive through the desert. She outlined how many people were getting heatstroke and then got them and made sure there was legislation that this, that made sure these people that happen. Yeah, incredible work at these big places. If you're given that, if you're given some leeway and time to do those sorts of things, all that stuff is going to go away. If you hire the three Stephen Millers and a big bucket of gravy to talk about. You know, every, like to talk to both sides, literally every single issue, like it is not a sustainable model. I, I, I will say the first place to be brave and step up and be like, no, actually we're covering this as a fascist administration because we've talked to enough history professors to know that's what's going on. And like, we're going to, we're going to view this through the lens of history. Guess what? You're going to be rich as, like, I know it sounds heavy and hard and they might, they might harass you and they might, I get why you wouldn't do it. You might have a kid at Little league, the FAA Little League, and like, your life is going to be harder, but you're doing the right thing. And I just, Business will be better, I'm telling you.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, I agree.

[Ben Collins]

People don't like what's happening. People understand that both sides in this stuff, when people are getting executed on the street, is repugnant. If you just stand up and just in report information objectively as it's going on, you're going to be in a good spot.

[Kara Swisher]

I would agree. It's good. Truthful, not neutral is the expression I use. From Christiane Amanpour. Do you think a shift is happening after Minnesota? Because I've noticed suddenly all of them, like, on cnn, they've got like, Wheaties or, you know, like, wait a minute. Nicely done. Like, or Anderson Cooper had a great interview with the lady in the pink. Dan Bash's. I'm just using Santa. But I've noticed that not at every organization, but at several of them, it's gotten a little bit better. You know, even the Free Press called it a lie finally to describe the administration's defense of killing and didn't then have a separate editorial saying, what is a lie really? Is, was he, you know, should he have been carrying a gun? Whatever talk about is that. Do you think that has happened? Do you think there's been like a just a fucking second or not?

[Ben Collins]

I think there's been a sea change. And I think that, I think people are starting to realize that a whole entire city of people cannot be paid protesters. Like, this can't happen. It can't be the case. And all of the abject disinformation they see going through their feeds is just not aligning with their realities. I also realize it's more difficult, by the way, because news people are human and they wake up and they go on Twitter or they go on TikTok and they see stuff that isn't or, you know, whatever. I don't want to blame TikTok specifically. I do want to blame Twitter. But, you know, whatever feed they have, and they see stuff that is deliberately designed to make them at least upset.

[Kara Swisher]

Yes. Conspiracy. And it's less. And they're less engaging than those conspiracy theories and algorithm. Prioritize that.

[Podcast Producer/Announcer]

Right.

[Ben Collins]

Yes. And, you know, news people are not a nerd to this. And it's like just, just because they're, you know, they're a little bit more aware of the dynamics. That's the case. But I don't think they realize how. How fundamentally from a structural standpoint, it's designed to help the oppressor here.

[Kara Swisher]

Right, Absolutely.

[Ben Collins]

And we're like the word. It all happens so fast that maybe, maybe a situation like this where a man was executed on the street, the administration came out and said he was going to do a mass shooting or something, and everyone knew, it was like you could not justify the two realities. People might be waking up to the fact that like, oh, maybe the entire. Maybe this. The pipes are broken.

[Kara Swisher]

Right, right, right. So what happened with these news organizations? Because, you know, in an interview with Molly Jungfest, you said, we're standing in the rubble of what our media ecosystem used to be. The only people who don't see that are that way are the people who own the R, which is. I like that idea. I agree with you. The real influence comes with what's next. Now, you're backed by a good. I've interviewed him. Your billionaire is good. Like, or is he not bothering you?

[Ben Collins]

No, he's. He's good. He would. He would also dispute that he's a billionaire. Yeah, keep going.

[Kara Swisher]

All right, yeah, whatever. He's rich. He's rich.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah. He's a rich guy.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah, he's a rich guy with money to earn for this kind of stuff. But, you know, and they do shift on a dime, by the way, just FYI. You also, you're in satire, so you don't have to do fact checking. You get the juicy bits, I think.

[Podcast Producer/Announcer]

Right.

[Kara Swisher]

But most of the new media goes system is dependent on the whims of social platforms owned by tech billionaires, many of whom are really, have become really venal fucks at the same time. We don't want news just fed to us by influencers also. And that, that's what I was joking with.

[Ben Collins]

Your.

[Kara Swisher]

Your list of. Of CBS contributors. A bucket of gravy. It made me laugh. Exactly. Bucket of gravy. Is what you're getting here, which is. Might be delicious, by the way. I love gravy. Who doesn't love gravy?

[Ben Collins]

So good.

[Kara Swisher]

How do you square that now? You're in a fortunate position in many ways.

[Ben Collins]

There are two major things that I did, I think, and I didn't do it. My staff did. My team did. Everybody here did this. That includes our chief product officer, Danielle Sterlay, and our chief marketing officer, Leo Brilson, and our whole editorial team. One we really steeled up like, this is the process, and the Onion is its process. So if you come in and break the process, it's not the Onion anymore. And the onions process is. You go in, you have 15 joke writers that come in through. Through a long pipeline that start with fellowships and all these other things, and they learn over the course of time what an ideal Onion headline is. And then every day they come in with 15 headlines and they leave. So it's like 150 to 200 headlines a day, and then they leave with like, one or two to. That process has to remain in place. And we. If we deviate from that, we're no longer the Onion just the way it is. So that's one very major thing, is making sure editorially it remains the same. And you can't mess with that thing. Our editor in chief has been here for 30 years. People. There are people on our staff who, when it was going through the private equity phase, they were. We have a woman on staff who has an engineering degree from Brown, and she at any moment could have left, and she was making, like, probably like $50,000 here, and she said she believed in this thing. Those people are the Onion, and we're going to make sure they're protected, and we're going to make sure that the process that feeds into this makes it so it remains that way forever and can update and do all those things. And the second thing is you got to own your own thing. That's why we have a newspaper. I don't think they'll go after the US Postal Service. Isn't it in the Constitution? They could try and that people. It's. It's a pamphlet. Like, it feels like a civil war, baby. Like, we're like, we get to send these things out to people's mailboxes, and it feels like a secret. Yeah. And that has that. That will help us endure. And we are. We're very big into archiving our old archive. We want to make sure that what we do is enduring and, like, totally separate of These pipelines that are being eaten alive by rich people.

[Kara Swisher]

I've had several really wealthy people. They're all interested in media. Now, I don't know if you've noticed or gotten call, but they're like, hey, I'd love to talk about investing. I go, I don't want your fucking money. And they're like, what? And I'm like, I make plenty of money.

[Ben Collins]

Like, Kara, do you even want the Washington Post anymore? Do you? Because, like, you would have to, like, call five rich guys and, like, I don't even know. Like, why would you want to put.

[Kara Swisher]

Well, because I'd have a lot of them, so none of them would have power. I have. I have a whole scheme to keep them in a position.

[Ben Collins]

Are you going to do it?

[Kara Swisher]

I don't know, but I don't know. No. No, he won't talk to me. What am I talking about? No, he's in business. If I go to, I guess, a fashion week and take some Botox, I suppose I could get to talking to him.

[Ben Collins]

He doesn't even fucking want it.

[Podcast Producer/Announcer]

He doesn't care.

[Ben Collins]

Like, he doesn't. Has no utility to him whatsoever.

[Kara Swisher]

I actually. I would turn it into a satirical publication at this point, but this one rich guy was like, oh, you don't want to have a talk? I'm like, I don't. Like, thank you. Like, and he's like, why? I go, I don't want to talk to you. Like, I know it sounds dumb, but I just am very happy making money. And when I don't, I'll stop doing it, I guess.

[Ben Collins]

But right now, Cara, like, I. I keep talking about this.

[Kara Swisher]

It's freeing. It's freeing.

[Ben Collins]

What? Yes, there are the two economies. It's sort of like what we were talking about with the theater chain earlier. I keep talking about the two economies. Like, it's the economy of. Of of the real and then the economy of gambling and speculation and all this extra shit. And we. I want this company in the economy of the real. I want people to give us dollars for goods and services. I don't. I don't want to tie up our fate in a. A, Like a shitcoin. I don't want to come up with the perfect onion AI generator. I don't want any of this shit. Like, I just want people to. I want to live in the human world with us. And trust me, Cara, that's clearly what's going on right now. There is a split right now between, like, real money in a real economy and human connection. And then Whatever the fuck this other thing is, which is much bigger but much worse.

[Kara Swisher]

So if five years from here, how do you think the media business will look? When I get asked that question I always get, I was like, I'll do something else. Like, I didn't know I was gonna do podcasting 10 years ago. And that worked out rather well. And then we just did this tour that worked out rather well. I don't know. And when I get to the answer, I'm like, we're gonna keep making stuff people wanna buy. Like, I don't know what else to say. Like, that's the answer. And so I don't know what it'll be like. I just announced this documentary for CNN on longevity. I'm like, oh, this is gonna have some legs.

[Podcast Producer/Announcer]

Right?

[Kara Swisher]

You know what I mean? This idea. I'm bullish on the future of media, especially independent media. What do you think it looks like in five years, or what would you see the Onion being in five years?

[Ben Collins]

Yeah. I think a big change for me personally is over the last couple of years, I went from, like, all of my childhood media dreams are gone, and my, you know, my dreams are dead, to all my childhood media dreams are gone, and my dreams are dead. Like. Like, I get to live in this new, cool, functional thing that is, like, that allows me a lot more agency and everything's a little bit better.

[Kara Swisher]

And you're happier.

[Ben Collins]

I'm okay with this. And I'm. I'm so much happier. Like. Like, we are allowed to say what we want to say. And I. You know, Cara, there's never, like, there's never going to be a world where people don't seek out, like, gossip and information and the funniest sentence and connection. That's just never. That's never going to exist. And I. I actually think that that's a fundamental problem that's going on, right, Is that the world's richest people think that they don't need that. Like, they're building humanoid robots, and they're building all these compliment machines that tell them exactly what they want to feel and how they want to act. And everyone else is like, I don't. I have no desire for that. I want to hang out with my friends. I want them to yell at me and, you know, tell me I'm stupid and then, like. And then hug me and go to my funeral. Like, that's what I want to happen. And they don't care about that. And that's all of the money. All, like, the big amounts of, like, seemingly fake money. Seems to be going towards this, like, disconnect stuff that people don't want. People really want this connection. And I think in the next five years, like, you can see where it's all headed. People are starting to come back together to be like, ah, I want. I want a funny person to say a funny sentence to me, or I.

[Kara Swisher]

Want to hang out with friends, you know, One of the positives from this Minnesota thing is Minneapolis has rediscovered community again.

[Ben Collins]

So cool.

[Kara Swisher]

You know, I think it's. It's a terrible way to do it, but I think a lot of people are rediscovering community and how easy it is to pull away from some of this stuff, which is. There's no mistaking why these tech billionaires want to buy these things. It's because they don't like the insults they get from people like you or I, you know, and they want to control it, but you can't control it. That's the whole thing. So on the last question earlier, you talked about how when it comes to disinformation, the people who spread it aren't going to stop. I agree with you. There's too much money in it. You're trying to combat that. I'm trying to combat that. But even if most of us don't want that, give people an idea of what you do to fight it from your perspective.

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, I hate to keep bringing back. Bringing Minneapolis back into this, but it really is. It's community and all that stuff and living in the real. You know, we've worked ourselves into a froth in this country over the last 10 years. Blaming immigrants for everything, taking, taking videos that turns out it largely aren't real. Like they're eating the cats and dogs kind of stuff.

[Kara Swisher]

That's next week, by the way. They're going for that next week.

[Ben Collins]

There you go. Yep. They're going to sprinkle. Right. Like, turning them into moral panics and then trying to punish these fake things. They're trying to punish things that don't exist. And now we're on the other side of this, where the dog caught the car that apparently the dogs that we're eating got the car and we're, you know, we're. We're doing Gestapo shit to every immigrant in this country and everybody who stands in their way. And guess what? The economy's not fixed. Your life's not better. You don't feel any better. All these people who thought their world was going to get fixed once they got all the brown people out of their line of sight, turns out everything's worse. Everything still costs way too much. Culture got worse. You are not respected and you're a. So I, I'm hopeful since the dog caught the car that people will just like I, I don't think everybody comes to this conclusion immediately. Some people just stay in it forever. And that's the thing that I've realized is that some people like to be upset and they like to complain about it's fine. But I, I hope when the people who like to be upset, complain about can start, start complaining about the guy next door who sucks like the fictitious thing that we all have to kill. I, I, I kind of already think this happening. Young people are inert to this. Young people have, have lived through this entirely of. All they know is people blaming a fictitious thing and their life not getting better. My hope is, and I know I can see it everywhere, they're rediscovering community, they're rediscovering each other there. I'm not one of those people who is a touch grass person who thinks that like I'm not a crunchy granola guy.

[Kara Swisher]

No, I get it.

[Ben Collins]

I, and I think a lot of this can be accomplished and will be accomplished on the actual Internet. I think like it's smaller communities in the Internet doing stuff separate of scale, but it's about talking to each other and, and making art for the sake of art. Like not for the sake of anything else. Like I, I just want to make one thing clear. By the way, the Onion does not use AI Our, our AI is a guy named Carl who does awesome photoshops. He's great. He's wearing beanies on the other side of the store right now.

[Kara Swisher]

You can use it in your advertising placing.

[Ben Collins]

It's fine. Yeah, you're right. It's true. Look, I'm not saying AI has no purpose, but for us.

[Kara Swisher]

You mean in the creative process?

[Ben Collins]

Yeah, it's like Soylent or like hot dogs or something. It's just like this amalgamation. It's calories, but like it's not.

[Kara Swisher]

Every now and then it's fine. Every now and then it sounds like something good, I have to say, but not much. Not much. Not compared to people.

[Thumbtack/Lowe's Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[Kara Swisher]

And what's really ironic in this moment is all these people who were talking about how nobody could be funny anymore. They've never been funny a day in their lives. And fuck em if they can't take a joke.

[Ben Collins]

They've never been funny.

[Kara Swisher]

They can't.

[Ben Collins]

I've seen some of the funniest shit in my life. Over the last couple years, the people who are, like, who can't seem to find humor and who seem to be upset all the time about not being able to say, like, one specific word, they even found the new words. They're much funnier. Like, there's like, we're living in a golden age. And you'll see it. You, once you look back on it, you'll figure that out, comedy wise. We're not living in a golden age of anything else.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah. Anyway, Ben, thank you so much. I love the Onion. Everyone should subscribe. It's really funny. It's just really funny. Makes me laugh all the time. And we could all use a good laugh. Thank you, Cara.

[Ben Collins]

Big fan. Keep doing what you're doing.

[Kara Swisher]

Today's show was produced by Christian Castro Wisel, Michelle Aloy, Megan Burney, and Kalyn Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Bradley Sylvester. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following this show, you're building community and laughing with friends. If not, you're angry because you're the butt of the joke or Elon Musk. Go.

[Podcast Producer/Announcer]

Wherever you listen to podcast, search for.

[Kara Swisher]

On with Kara Swift Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to on with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.