Latest / Computer Says Maybe / Ben Collins: Computer Says MozFest
Transcript
- Ben: [00:00:00] We would still like to buy in Info Wars. We are just trying to figure out how to do it. Uh, Alix: all right. We were at MozFest last month. I had some amazing conversations, which we are releasing. On our feed all this week if you miss Moz Fest. We also made a special episode that hopefully will make it feel like you were actually there, and that's on the feed right now. So if you haven't heard it, go back and give it a listen. This is Ben Collins, CEO of the Onion, who I had the chance to ask about what it's like making satire in 2025 when things have never looked so bleak or hard to satirize. Do CEOs have to be funny when they run a a satire publication or do you get to like, [00:01:00] well, Ben: I've made it this far without being funny. So I guess the answer is no. Or my job's in serious jeopardy. Yeah. Yeah. Alix: Okay. But you get, you're just like around funny people all the time. Is that Yes. I'm around Ben: funny people all the time. That's correct. Most of my job is hearing in the background. People just like cackling all the time while I like file expense reports. Is Alix: it hard to manage people that are funny? Ben: Uh, yeah. Uh. Not this group. I think the hard thing is the dance monkey aspect of it. Yeah. You can't just be like, go be funny about this, because they'll never do it. They Alix: need creative space to just like explore exactly. The little flowers. Right. It's Ben: like a good comedian has, or a good comedy writer has like oppositional defiance sort as like as a rule. Yeah. You just get what you get. Alix: Yeah. Okay. Um, how long have you been running it? Ben: Two years now. Alix: And you guys have recently been like emerging as this one successful example of how one might monetize. Do you call it news? Ben: I don't even know what we call ourselves anymore. We're a media company I guess. But at the end of the day, we do what [00:02:00] should be the easiest part of a newspaper, which is the headline. And uh, people have made it very hard by overcomplicating stuff. But yeah, we just got back to basics about what people expect of us and we've leaned into our strengths and it's make a newspaper, make people happy. Write the dumbest sentence that you can think of every day, Alix: but they're also dumb sentences that resonate across decades. Um, I feel like the, the fact that you can make something funny in like, I don't know, 2005, and then people every time that thing happens, do you wanna reflect a little bit on the durability of some of the humor? Oh, Ben: yeah. We're very lucky in that we have oppressions because we, we don't have full fidelity to exactly what's going on at every second. And our archive content, I always say to them, sometimes the best thing to say in a moment is something that we said. 15, 20 years ago or something. One of my favorite op-eds is from someone who just says somebody should do something about all the problems. And I think about that all the time. I think about it and it's just a lady ranting about how we should, someone should do something. Who's do something? Who's gonna do something? That was from like the nineties maybe. [00:03:00] It's a very old, so like, yeah, we're lucky we have this big archive that people have like. Big emotional attachment to, and every single person I ask what their favorite iron headline is, every person's is different, and sometimes it's something I've never heard of before. Alix: So how does it feel to do or try to do satire when times are so grim? Ben: It's a different challenge because I think some people think that when things are really bad that you just throw the pedal of the metal and go twice as hard, and that's really not what you should do. They're very nuanced and artful about it. So the times that they have to go as hard as they can, they really do go as hard as they can. I always say like, we go at like 1.25 x and that's, that's where the satire is. That's where the joke is. You're still within the confines and bounds of reality, but you are dragging you up a little bit further, and we're not being too obvious about it either. Our process is so. Rigorous and heartbreaking that at some point, only like the real wheat from the chaff comes out every day there's 160 headlines and we whittle them down to like one or two or sometimes none. [00:04:00] Alix: Horrifying. I know. So do people are, there's some people that just like never get their headline in Ben: Oh. Every day. Like it's like, but like Alix: are there people that never get a headline? Ben: Yeah, and like we have, we have some, it's so depressed. We have people, we have a. Contributor network that is like, some of them are like famous people and, Alix: but they're just not funny enough. They have the hardest time Ben: of all of them. Yeah, it's true. And I, I don't think there is like some sort of like perverted, masochistic reason that they're denying the famous people. Uh, I think it's 'cause the headlines just aren't there. But like, it's a true darling killing machine. Absolutely. Alix: I feel like that's a good. Art Made in Crucible. It's really, it's good. Um, Ben: it's helpful and like it's, it sets us apart from other places where like there are other places where like the CEO will literally write a headline and if I ever do that, my head will be in a stick by mid-afternoon. Alix: Yeah. Yeah. Um, I get that sense. How does it feel to be so MozFest? It's kind of like an earnest space. Um, uh, I feel like the jokes may write themselves. Um, but [00:05:00] how does it feel to be in a space like this that's sort of engaging in these kinds of topics in this way? Ben: I'm glad that they're doing it. I've always thought academia and tech sort of had this. The similar problem where they kind of do have the answers, but they can't communicate them correctly. It leads you into this, like the dumbest people in the world wind up being in power and all these things happen. There's gotta be a convergence of this. And it does seem like finally the good guys are starting to realize like, oh wait, we got, really what we have is like what we have. Messaging. Messaging problem, a message. Hey Jesus, I can't believe that's another place where people just have a messaging problem. Uh, but like that, that's what it is. Uh, because like none, the world is not working out for most people right now. The people who are here, earnest, ethical technologists, and I don't think people know those people exist because of the market cap of assholes in technology. They've, they've monopolized everything. Alix: Yeah. How has it affected your business? Ben: Dramatically, but like we went into it with a clean slate. So when we took over the onion two years ago, we were almost entirely programmatic [00:06:00] advertising. We were in a business that doesn't. Exist anymore. Really, it was just refresh the page. We were in the same business that like pirated NFL streams are on. And uh, you know, that is, that's one way of living, but it's not my favorite way of doing it. So we went in there and we're like, what's the best onion we can make? And if we make the platonic ideal of the onion, I know enough people love this place that they'll pay for paper. So we brought back the newspaper. We, we turned off all, all ads immediately. So we went a month without revenue. And then within two and a half months we had a brand new website and we had a hard deadline of the 2024 DNC 'cause it was in Chicago where we are to print and ship a newspaper to whoever wanted it. And now that's insane. It was an insane thing to do and I don't, I don't know why actually in hindsight, we're, we're all nuts now. Uh, that's Alix: such a tight time. I didn't realize the turnaround time was that fast. Yeah, Ben: it was, it was crazy. And so we had to hurry and, [00:07:00] uh, we bootstrapped everything. We found a printer nearby by the airport who just makes newspapers still, and they were very happy to print as many as we needed. And they had to develop a robot arm to stuff them into manila envelopes to ship them out to people because people don't ship news. Broad, broad sheet newspapers to anybody in the mail, uh, in a manila envelope anymore. So it was a crazy time. Like, because of that, we, we run the business that we wanna run. Since then, we've, we've stood up a copy agency for people who need help punching stuff up or straight up just need whole marketing campaigns. But we, our real goal is to employ as many human living comedy writers as possible, uh, as like studios collapse and other places. Fail to live. We wanna be a safe haven. So Alix: what's next? Ben: A lot of stuff we would still like to buy Infowars, we are just trying to figure out how to do it. Uh uh. But one way or another, we're gonna have to like, we're gonna have to deal with the fact that the way people consume media is not [00:08:00] cable news or newspapers anymore. So that would be the best way of pulling it off. Alix: Mm-hmm. So basically you'd be buying it for its distribution networks and for the joke. Ben: Oh, we don't give a shit about distribution networks. We just want the URL. Uh, we think it's funny. Uh. I don't even know what we would do with that disillusion network. Alix: Maybe start deradicalizing people that are really into supplements. I don't know. Yeah, I guess, Ben: uh, yeah, we can, we can turn boner Max 5,000 into Bone Max 6,000 I think. But uh, we just want to do it so we can expand our world. 'cause as you know, the United States economy is now just like. Graft and gambling and speculation and conspiracy theories, and we would love to be able to take that on in some capacity. Yeah, so that's a goal. Frank Shear is to get into that space. Our biggest goal is to, this sounds like a joke, but it's like very much within reach. We want, we really do want to have a larger print circulation than Washington Post by the end of next year. Alix: I feel like theirs is shrinking. So as fast as yours is growing about right. Yeah. So you, you Ben: meet. In the middle. We'll meet [00:09:00] halfway. Yeah. Alix: I feel like I, I believe I believe in you. I think you're gonna do it. Oh, Ben: thank you. I, I, I appreciate that. I hope we do. I mean, we have a really good little paper, and it's not even little anymore. It's the paper itself is getting bigger. I'm just really proud of the work they do. And, uh, the thing I'm most proud of is that people stay with the onion through the, the deep, dark times because the writing remained great. Our staff remained, our editor in chief has been here for 28 years. One of our head writers, our senior writer, her name's Lauren Moer, she has an engineering degree from Brown, but she just stuck around writing jokes at a company that got bought by private equity. And they tried to, they kept trying to kick everybody out, but she stayed. She loves it. People fucking love this thing. I want to be as big as possible. I wanted to be in front of as many people as possible, and as other opportunities come up over the next year as the next in fours and the next, like New York Times op-ed or whatever we do, we wanna be in the way. We just wanna constantly be in people's faces. Alix: Love it. Cool. Okay. Well [00:10:00] thank you for chatting and I hope you enjoy the rest of your Moss Fest. Oh, thank you. You too. This is so great. Yeah. Cool. Thank you to Abba Luisa, Ben, Audrey, Hannah, and Malik for taking the time to talk to me and of course to the Mozilla team for putting on a great moss fest that we were delighted to attend in Barcelona. Up next is a special end of year episode where Pham, Georgia and I will talk through our biggest learnings, aha moments from 2025, and some of our favorite conversations. So join us as we wrap up our year. Thanks as ever for listening. And thanks to Georgia Iacovou and Sarah Myles for producing this whole series of conversations live from MossFest.