October 23, 2020 • 32 mins
Back inside the magic box of audio delight, Ben and David bring a little humor along for the ride. A leader that has been targeted for his satire, will not waver to the mob, and refuses to be swayed by empty threats from the big tech companies sits down with the fellas to talk about his journey.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Be sure to catch live editions of The Ben Maller
Show weekdays at two a m. Eastern eleven pm PACIFICO.
If you thought four hours a day, minutes a week
was enough, I think again. He's the last remnants of
the old republic, a sole fashion of fairness. He treats
crackheads in the ghetto Cutter the same as the rich
(00:21):
pill poppers in the penthouse, the Clearinghouse of hot takes,
break free or something special. The Fifth Hour with Ben
Maller starts right now in the air everywhere. We are
back at it again, another weekend of podcasting. Here. This
a course, a spin off, as you know by now.
He spin off of the Overnight show, the Ben Maller
(00:43):
Show on Fox, and this all over the podcast world
eight days a week now because four hours are not enough.
And we welcome in yet again, David Gascon. This is
an interview podcast. It's an interview podcast. Want me to
play that? Uh? I was delightful about the guest selection
(01:08):
that you had for this week. I know this is
this is Gascon's dream come true. I assume you already
know now because you downloaded the podcast. Who was on
the podcast but for a very long amount of time.
Gascon has been badgering me with the Babylon Be and
I have come around. I'm a big fan now of
the Babylon Be. At first, I was like so annoyed
(01:28):
because you would every day with these Babylon Be stories.
I'm like, leave me alone, Leave me the f alone.
But I've come around, and they've blown up here this
year in this election year. Babylon b which is a
satire site, and they've been in the news a lot
because they got shut down this week. It's by Facebook
(01:50):
because of inciting what was it? Inciting violence on a
satire site, which is just outstanding. So we have tracked
down here ask on the man that runs it. The
CEO of the Babylon Be, Seth Dylan's gonna hang out
with us here on this podcast, which I'm excited about.
I was it was a long time coming. I thought
about the approach since we've had so many radio personalities on,
(02:14):
and I figured this is a great time to have
them on, especially because we got the election going on.
People are voting, and we got obviously the huge day
on November the three, and we didn't laugh a little bit.
You you've had a wild week um Dodgers coming back
last week in the NLCS in the World Series. You've
got Kyler Murray, you got got Republicans and Democrats. This
(02:38):
is this is a good week for us, so that
I thought it was appropriate for you. Yeah, yeah, I know,
it's it's great with everything's going on. And I'm sure
we'll last seth about the the President Trump retweet of
the Babylon B which got a lot of attention recently
as well, within the last ten days or so. So, uh,
we'll get to that as well. And for those that
(03:01):
are unfamiliar, I don't know how you would be unfamiliar,
because we talk about the Babylon B guest gun played
as a game here every once in a while, B
or not to be. But it's a satire side obviously.
It's it's been been doing very well here. And as
they say, I like the mottel they have on their
social media. I think it was on Twitter. I read
this that fake news you can trust, fake news that
you can trust, and uh, it's it's you know, it
(03:24):
reminds me a little bit of the the Phil Hendry
radio show from back in the day. I remember it
because like if you listen to the Phil Henry radio Show.
And you didn't know that it was a joke, you
would be upset, right, you'd be like angry. But if
you knew it was a joke, if you figured that out,
and you'd be like, this is the most amazing this
(03:44):
like art, like this is art? What this is? And
so the babila me like the way I consume it now,
it's so funny when I read these stories and I
you know, you know, they're satire whatever. And then the
people that are hard ohs that don't get the joke.
And that's my favorite part. That's I that's just outstanding.
And these are people in society that have very important
positions and politics and news and they don't get the joke.
(04:08):
It's it's really pretty funny. It's kind of piggybacking off
of Sports Talk with Barry right because he would go
Twitter change his name multiple times and people would just
crush him or they would retweet him like he was
breaking news. And that's the ya capain with the Beat
because they have a good attention to detail with titles
and pictures and then articles and then bang, could you
(04:29):
imagine could you imagine if sports talk very joined forces
with the Babylon be. Oh my god, you it would
be like all the superheroes teaming up in satire. It
would be amazing. Uh man, all right, well let's get
to it though, guess because we don't want to waste
any time here. The man is standing by virtually, of course,
(04:50):
we welcome in the CEO of the Babylon Being the man,
one of the big shots that runs this thing. Seth
Dylan is his name, and Seth, why don't we start
with the reason we're having you on here? The Babylon Be.
You guys ran a story, a political story, and got
shut down by Facebook. Kind of walk me through how
this all happened, please, Yeah. I mean basically, Facebook has
(05:16):
these community standards, and they have a complicated algorithm based
artificial intelligence system that looks at various posts on their
platform and links that are um posted on their platform
to determine if they are hateful or inciting violence or
threatening in some way, and so they're signals that they're
(05:38):
looking for that will tell them, um, if the content
is posted violate their standards in some way. So, um fine.
You know, to have systems in place like that, it's
more efficient than having people looking at everything. You know,
I don't think they have so much content on their system.
It makes sense that they do that, but in this case, yeah,
we posted it absolutely ridiculous article. It was basically a
(06:00):
re hashing of an old Monty Python scene. Um, you know,
we we we took the scene from where they were
in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where they were
trying to condemn this woman as a witch and they
were trying to figure out if she was a witch
or not, and they decided to weigh her against the
duck to see if she weighed as much as a duck.
And it's just the most absurd scene ever, and they
determined that she is in fact a witch and she
(06:20):
needs to be burned at the stink right. Well, we
translated that scene into the confirmation hearing where Amy Coney
Barrett was being grilled by these senators, um, and you
know they're disparaging her and trying to make her look
silly and whatever. So we took this duck scene from
Monty Python and we made it. We made a spoof
on it and and had the senators you know, suggesting
(06:41):
that if she weighs more than a duck, and then
you know she's a then she must be a witch
and we must have burned her. Well that language like
we must have burned her? Was it triggered something? And
fag Facebook flagged it as being, you know, an incitement
to violence, and obviously it's not. But the incredible thing
where it went where things went sideways a little bit,
was when um, we appealed that that ruling and a
(07:04):
person looked at it and then it reached out to
us and said it is an incitement of violence. We
stand by this. Uh, you need to make changes to
the article. And we just couldn't believe that that's insane.
So like, you know, how's it where they assume the
email you or you just go to your Facebook the
babblelon bi Facebook page and you're like, you're done, that's it,
(07:25):
It's over. Are you? Like? How how does the chain
go where you find out you've been taken down, your
your your financial opportunity demonetized? How did that work? Yes,
they send you a notification tour account. They have like
a page quality section where you can analyze your page
and see if you're compliant with their policies and and
(07:45):
they give us a notification saying that one of our
popes had been deleted because of violated community standards, and
as a result of that, we were demonetized. So basically
what that means is we can't make use of any
of Facebook's monetization tools. We can't use their instant articles platform,
which allows you to display articles within Facebook and have
(08:06):
Facebook ads on them for ad revenue. Um, you can't
use their subscription platform to collect subscription revenue. Brand collaborations
are no longer permitted. So they have a bunch of
monetization tools that they restrict and turn off if you're
violating the community standards. So they let us know that
those tools were no longer accessible to us. We would
no longer be able to monetize our Facebook page until
(08:27):
we fix this issue. And when we appealed and they
denied the appeal, we had no choice. But they go
to the media and try to make us think about
this because it's just absolutely ridiculous, Like in what universe
is that article and actual incitement to violence. They say
in their community standards that they take context into account
when they review these things, Well clearly they didn't in
this case. Yeah, so how does that you know? You
(08:48):
you're an Internet guy? Obviously run the Babylon be You've
been in the game for a long time, Like, how
does that happen with the algorithm? Like, is it you know,
somebody programming it obviously, or how does it end up
in that situation? And I saw your you posted on
Twitter about this, and I saw a bunch of people
underneath you said, yeah, I had something happened, you know,
I'd said so and so, and I got in trouble
with that. So like, how do you think this happened?
(09:11):
You know the algorithm? Well, I mean they code there out,
they code their system to look for specific keys, phrases
and words, and so a sentence like we must burn her,
you know, burn her is clearly a reference to, you know,
lighting someone on fire, and their systems aren't smart enough
(09:33):
to look at the broader context and see that we
weren't actually suggesting that Amy Coney Barrett be lit on
fire by anyone. You know, the system is not smart
enough to detect satire. And then when they came out
in their public statement, they didn't make a statement to
Fox News when Fox inquired about this, and they said,
you know, our systems have a hard time detecting satire.
(09:53):
So we're sorry for this mistake. But but our response
to that is, well, okay, your system failed, but then
a person looked at and the person also failed, So
you know, why did that happen? There's no explanation for that.
And to your point, yes, there are lots of people
commenting underneath his posts talking about how they've been flagged
and they've been disabled, they've been suspended, but they don't
have the platform that we have. They can't get online
(10:15):
and get the media involved and and push back on Facebook.
They don't have the ability to do that. We're in
a position where we can do that, fortunately, but not
everybody can. So for those people, when this kind of
stuff happens, they're just done. They're dead in the water. Yeah,
and this has a happy ending, right, Santh. I mean
you you updated the story, right, So because of interviews
(10:36):
you've done like this and other obviously big platforms, they've
changed their stances that correct. Yeah, I mean, well, once
we brought media attention to it, all of a sudden
they're issuing apologies and saying they reinstated our account. And
this happens over and over and over again. You know,
Twitter hasnt spended us before Facebook has threatened us with
the platform and demonitization before. And the only time we
(10:59):
get a positive outcome is when we go to the media,
we explain what's happening, and you know, news reports start
coming out about it, about how Facebook is trying to
censor us, and then and only then they changed their
tune and try to fix it. Said are you surprised,
like has this happened to you? Or have you had
a hint of something like this happening to you in
(11:20):
the past, or is this the first time you've been
hit with a hammer like that? Uh, well, it did
happen one time in the past with Facebook specifically where um,
when they first started implementing fact checking, they started working
with third party fact checkers, and the fact checkers snokes
in particular, was rating our articles full. And it's just
the most absurd thing in the world. It's like, a
(11:41):
joke isn't true or false. It's a joke, right, it's
in its own category. Um, you don't when when Jerry
Seinfeld is up on stage tracking jokes in a nightclub,
you don't stand up and yell that's not true. Whenever
he tells a story that's that's fictional because it's a joke, right, so, um,
it's just it's silly. But Facebook was was wodenly interpreting
these fact checks to mean that we were putting out
(12:03):
fake news, and they had strict policies against faith news,
and so they would they reached out to us and
threatened us. This was a few years ago, well, two
thousand eight teens. They threatened up to with the monetization
and uh in suspension of our page for for for
pushing fake news. And again we made we got a
lot of media attention there. Eventually they apologized and said
(12:23):
we realized it's a satire now and we need that
we need a better way of handling this stuff so
that we're not threatening satire companies, you know. But there's
been a lot of effort on the left to in
to insinuate, imply, um that we are not in fact
a satire site, but we are actually a purposefully misleading
(12:44):
disinformation campaign that pretends to be a satire site to
certain invent Facebook rules. And I'm not as a kidding
like that sounds crazy, But there's a recent article in
um in in New York Times published like five days
ago that says that we capitalize on Fusion Um in
questions whether or not we're doing this on purpose. Well, set,
I'm happy to bring that up because because Ben and
(13:06):
I like Ben, Ben Monday through Friday is typically compelled
to hit all that is sports talk radio. It's great.
So some of the stuff that he does on his show,
or some of the stuff he wants to do on
the show, just can't because obviously that kind of a spectrum,
it doesn't cater to it. But on the podcast, which
we obviously invited you on, we do things a little
(13:27):
bit different. And so, like I said the email, when
I introduced myself to you, I was kind of like
one of the original fans of the Babylon b and
to kind of pull the curtain back, I would send
articles to Ben. I text him like in the middle
of the night when his show is going on, and
his eyes would just roll because like, what the funk
is this right? And then before you know what, some
(13:49):
of those other friends that are at sports that the
media started retweeting you guys on the regular, and then
Ben's followers and listeners to a show started retwitting stuff
and then tagging the minutes. So so yeah, and it
blew up. It I mean, I know you guys have
done great, and this is like, uh, let me ask
you this a little said I. I I. When you told
(14:10):
the story about you know, the New York Times and
and their your their article like it, it it reminds me.
I used to have a Boston radio that didn't get
like I I don't you know, I do a sports
show obviously, but you know, occase, let's throw some satire in.
And I had a boss that did not get had
no sense of humor. What is it like? It feels
like there's a lot of people, said, that have no
sense of humor. What is it like to do a
(14:31):
satire site in when no one has a funny bone anymore?
It seems well, okay, so there's a couple of things
that play there, and there is there is um. You know,
there's a lot of hesitation to do comedy and for
certain audiences because of the PC culture, right. I mentioned
Jerry since all a minute ago, you know, years back,
he announced that he would no longer do shows for
(14:52):
college students on college campuses. And the reason is because
they're so politically correct, you know, anything he says, they're
gonna think he's racist or sexist or something thing, you know,
or homophobic. So um, they they they're just ready to
be offended by anything. And that kind of culture does
make comedy a little difficult. But when it comes to
not having a sense of humor, Look, people on the
(15:13):
left love to laugh as long as it's the right
targets that are being hit. You know, these late night
comedy shows. I just saw something the other day. It
was something like their jokes when they're making political jokes
are about Trump, um, and only like three percent of
them or something, or about Biden. Well, you know, they
like to laugh at certain people, they like to laugh
at certain ideas. They're they're very they're very willing to
(15:35):
laugh as long as it's it's not it's not pointed
at them, right, So, um, it's a very selected thing.
It's a double standard. A lot of these media companies
that that are very hard on us and and have
this uncharitable assumption that we have some kind of ill
motives where we're trying to mislead people on purpose. They
never think that about the Onion, for example, the most
(15:57):
popular web you know, satire site of the last twenty years. Um,
they never assigned ill motives the Onion. They think the
onion is funny and that they're doing genuine satire. And
the only reason that they question our motives is because
they disagree with us politically. And I don't know if
they see that or not, but it's definitely disingenuous and
it's double standards. Said, let me what percentage of people
(16:19):
I remember I read a study years ago, I said
of Americans will believe anything like what percentage of people
read your stuff online? And they're like, they don't get
the joke, they don't understand the sets. How do you
have any idea just a ballpark figure on how many
people you think just don't get it? Um, I don't
know that. I wouldn't say that's probably as high ascent.
(16:41):
There's absolutely people who don't get it. Now, there's a
couple of reasons for that, right, there's um satire is successful.
The jokes are funny when they're when they're closer to
the truth rather than further away from it. You know,
it's they depend on having a proximity to the truth.
If it's too detached from reality, it's not funny. So
that you know that saying there's a grain of truth
in every joke is it's popular saying for a reason,
(17:04):
there's truths to the things that we're joking about, and
that's why people believe them so readily. Um. There's also
the world has gotten much crazier. People have much more
extreme views. They're saying much more extreme things. There's really wild,
crazy things happening today that would have never been normal
or acceptable years ago. UM. And so in that environment,
(17:24):
when when when you're trying to exaggerate the truth a
little bit, which is what satire does, Um, it's hard
to stay one step ahead of it. So almost everything
is believable today. I mean, and from my experience what
I see in the headlines, I see headlines every day.
I'm shaking my head in disbelief. I'm like, I can't
believe that really happened. I can't believe they really said that.
I can't believe they really did that. In that kind
of environment, UM, it's hard to write stories that people
(17:47):
aren't going to believe. So it's reality's fault, Honestly, it's not.
It's not that our satire is too close to reality,
which is what we're accused of. It's that reality is
too close to satire. That's the problem. And on that note,
is that what inspired you to create Not the Bee?
Because you guys have had some articles on the babel
on Bee that you know they've turned from satire to truth.
(18:11):
So is that look you to create Not the Bee?
We call them, we call them fulfilled prophecies. But yes,
we have in some cases, mere hours after we published
a story, whatever we were joking about actually happened. Um.
And that's a perfect example of how reality is, Like
it's hard to stay one step ahead of things when
they're this crazy. But yeah, that's the that's the inspiration
(18:31):
for Not to Be. It's that there's there's enough crazy
stuff happening, these wild headlines, they seem like they should
be satire but somehow aren't. Um. Not to Be is
really targeting those stories and in isolating the stories and
amplifying them. So um, it's just really there's so much
low hanging fruit today out there and what's going on
(18:52):
in the world. We thought that there was a great
opportunity to do kind of a spinoff of the Bee
where it's just this absurd like should be satire but
somehow isn't. And you guys do things on a national level,
But is there a particular state that you target the most.
I know, you guys hit California pretty hard, But is
it in California or New York or Florida and Texas,
anything that you like in particular, you mean in terms
(19:14):
of hit pretty hard. Like we make fun of them
a lot. I mean, we will pick on people, uh,
anybody that where you feel like basically, you know, satire
what we try to do with his ridicule, bad ideas. Um,
that's one of the that's one of the main purposes
of satires to criticize you know, bad thinking, bad ideology, hypocrisy,
(19:35):
double standards. So when we see like governors uh you
know with really heavy handed, um kind of authoritarian rule
in their states, you know, and they're doing crazy ridiculous
things or contradictory things, we make fun of that. And
and you've got a lot of stuff. You've got a
lot of stuff going on right now in California. They're
in the headlines all the time, like they don't have
(19:55):
enough they don't have enough electricity of power their state,
for example. So you know, we we condom for those
kinds of things. Um. So yeah, I mean I think
the ones that are in the headlines, the most are
the ones that are gonna get picked on the most.
We're really piggybacking on whatever is in the news. And
and Sepia, the October sixte President Trump retweet is that
the Mona Lisa for the bab al embie. Oh man.
(20:21):
You know, there's a lot of debate about that that. Actually,
we don't normally get media attention outside of like conservative media,
you know, like we get Fox News pays a lot
of attention to us, a lot of the a lot
of the players on the right like the Daily Wire
and the Federalists and the Blaze. You know, they pay
attention to us, But we don't get a lot of
immediate media attention on the other side, like with Slate
and Box and CNN or any of those places. But
(20:42):
but when Trump tweets our stuff, all of a sudden,
they pay attention, and they they look at that as
just a prime opportunity to make fun of him as
being an idiot. But um, we actually know, I mean,
we know people in his administration, um, and we have
it from we have close contacts of his who have
a short up that he knows what the babylombie is.
He thinks it's funny. Um, he reads it all the time,
(21:04):
and so we believe that he knows that it's satire,
but um, it is it is. It's possible he's just
trolling people on the left and and uh and sharing
satire just to see a kind of reaction he can
get from them. I would not put that past him
at all. Seth, who's the biggest celebrity or or I
guess personality that you guys have fishhooked? Is it like
Alissa Milano or who? Is it? Very good question. If
(21:29):
Trump was confused by that headline and thought it was real,
then it's Trump for um. But I don't think that
he was. I'm not sure. I'd have to go back
and look. I do know. We recently did a piece
on after Ruth Vader Ginsberg passed. UM. We photoshopped Lebron
James wearing like a lace a white lace collar around
(21:54):
his black shirt, honoring Ruth Vader Ginsberg, so it looks
like he was dressed like her. And UM, people on
the left we're sharing that like crazy. So there were
like New York Times reporters who are sharing it talking
about how beautiful it was, now meaningful it was that
the NBA was honoring Ruth Bader Ginenberg in that way. Um.
And so you know, depending on what we do, we
get a lot, a lot, a lot of attention um
(22:16):
from people. You know, they love to say that we're
we're fooling our own audience with this stuff, but they
get fooled by it all the time. And specific names
of like celebrities are escaping me. I'm not sure. But
there was another one too, we did about how Trump
said that he's done more for Christianity than Jesus himself.
And you know, we're just playing on Trump's ego there.
(22:36):
He's constantly you know, talking about how great he is
and how and how he's done, you know, better than
anybody in history at whatever he's doing in that moment um.
And but you know, the the left believe that that
was true, that he really said that, and that one
was shared very wide, and I know there were a
lot of celebrities who are who are condemning him for that,
you know, being so arrogant to say he's done more
(22:57):
for Christianity than Jesus. So I'd have to go back
and try to pick out name because they're escaping me
at the moment. But there's been some big ones. I
sins for sports guys. Well, I'll ask you this one.
Is there a favorite sports story that you've done, because
Ben's hit it up with Colin Kaepernick obviously over the
last couple of years. And I think one of the
ones that I noticed the most was when he got
put into Madden and then you guys published an article
(23:18):
it says Madden introduces throw a Malotov feature. I think,
for us, the perfect intersection, you know, because we have
a very we have like a large conservative Christian audience.
So whenever we do it Tim Tebow joke, it's like
(23:39):
the perfect nextus of things because we're roping in the
sports on the one side, but also like the Christian
fake stuff on the other side. So one of them,
uh it was. I wrote the headline for this one.
It was Tim Tebow suspended for using performance enhancing Bible verses,
and it got shared like a million times. It went
(24:00):
like crazy viral. So I think whenever I think, whenever
we do a Temtebo article, it goes crazy viral because
it's that kind of perfect, you know, combination of the
Christian stuff and the and the culture and sports stuff. Um.
But yeah, in general, steth. How how do the sports
stories do? I mean, you guys obviously deal with politics mostly,
but like, how do the how do the sports stories
(24:21):
do in comparison? They do really really well. Um, we
just don't do that many of them. We need to
do more of them. Part of the problem is we
have our writers are more like it's funny, you know,
our writers are are like a mixture of things, are
like computer programmers or or they have a creative like
(24:41):
art background and and and so they like they like
board games and video games and stuff like that much
more than they like sports and not sports guys, Right,
So we need more people on our staff who get
sports and want to write about sports. Like the founder
of the b is actually really into sports. He loved
like he loves like m m a, he loves baseball.
You know, he's reallyly into sports. Um. But but we
(25:03):
need more people on our writing staff. Writing day today,
we can tap into these things because like whenever, you know,
whenever there's something going on, like we we make we
like to make fun of soccer and how Americans you know,
aren't aren't We make fun of Americans for not being
super interested in soccer and and uh and and feeling
like it's boring or whatever. And so when we when
(25:23):
we've got like sports shut down from from COVID, we
ran one on how American sports fans we even watched
soccer at this point. You know, well it gets shared
hundreds of thousands of times. So well and Seth, I
gotta tell you, and you know, being in the sports
radio game for a long time, and it has never
been more tribalistic in sports. I the the the Arizona
(25:46):
Cardinals quarterback the other day completed two passes the rest
of the game. He was terrible. He completely like, you know,
nine pass in the game, and I ripped him for
having you know, I didn't think he played well. And
the Arizona newspaper wrote a story ripping me for ripping him.
Um yeah, I mean so that is a gold mine
for you guys. I know you mentioned you've done well
with the sports, but a lot of sports fans these
(26:08):
days cannot take any criticism of the hometown team and
they just go nuts like you're not allowed to rip us.
It's it's crazy, it's you know that that stakes to
kind of a broader thing goes beyond sports. People are
just not willing to hear disagreement anymore. And I don't know,
you know, it's it's that's it's manifesting itself in the
sports world. I get to be bleeding into the sports world.
But that's kind of like a general principle, now, isn't it. Yeah,
(26:32):
totally it's it's totally true that you're not allowed to
criticize us. How there you I don't want to hear.
It's like put their their ear muffs on. They don't
wanna hear anything other than they want to be fed,
study diet of what they believe in. It's crazy. Well,
I do want to do you guys. You know, um,
I definitely want to do more sports stuff. That's for sure.
It does really well for us, and we got to
(26:53):
tap into that more. All right. So are you are
we the first sports personalities that you've done an interview with?
I know that you did some stuff you mentioned on
on a couple of news sites, but are we the
first on the sports side? Yeah? I think so. I mean,
even though we've had some kind of viral sports stories,
we've never really had any sports reporters or media sites
(27:14):
reach out to us for any kind of like comment
on it or UM, you know, and no, I don't
think I ever have. You'll never forget your first and seth,
do not ever cheat on us. I got a question.
I'm curious. You don't have to say, I know it's here.
You know Intel how you how you make the make
(27:34):
the hot dogs? But like, like, how does this work?
You have an editorial board that says, hey, look at
you know so and so when you're when you're coming
up with stories each day, we kind of talk us
through how this works here when you come up with
the stories and with your writing staff. Yeah, So we
have a team of writers, UM and contributors, and we
(27:55):
communicated a number of different ways. We have a Facebook
group that's kind of a broader, larger group has some
people that are not on our staff but are very
creative that we've invited into that group to kind of
pitch ideas to us. UM, and then we have kind
of our internal flack channels where we're talking on flack
and pitching ideas back and forth. We're in a bunch
of different locations, so we're not all in the same room.
So UM, we basically just look at whatever is going
(28:17):
on in the news each day and and try to
think to ourselves, what's a funny take on this, and
and we throw headline. It's all the joke is in
the headline. It's always the headline that comes first. So, um,
it's just headline pitches, one after another. We pitched dozens
and dozens and dozens of ideas based on whatever is
going on in the world. UM. So we do that
(28:39):
day in and day out, and the ones that rise
to top to get a reaction that you know, our
editor in chief decides, you know, he wants to run with. Um,
we pick out of those, out of those pitches. So
it's really a small percentage. It's probably like, honestly, like
two percent of the headlines we pitch get published, and
most of them are just junked. Um. But it's to
(29:00):
refine the process. You know, we go through iterations of it.
Someone might pitch something that's not perfect as is, but
then you know, someone else will do an iteration of
it that's a little bit better and would you know,
connect better and better worded. So we play off of
each other and just work together very collaboratively to come
up with these ideas. And once we have a really
good headline, you know, one of our writers can can
take on the tap you're actually writing out that article
(29:22):
and populating and getting up on the site. So, um,
that's what we do every day. It's fun. It's crazy
that this is our job because we just make up
funny stories, uh and then photoshop crazy images to go
along with them. Um. We hitch ourselves sometimes crazy than
anyone does for a living. But it's a lot of months.
Wwe holds massive Royal Rumble event on Zoom that was
pretty solid. Yea. Writers declined to sign Colin Kaepernick. That
(29:46):
was another good one, that was pretty solid. You guys, Uh,
you guys continue to shouting. Now, how big is the staff?
I know you said you have some outside people, then
some internal people, but how big is the crew? Are
writing staff? I think we have about a dozen people
right now writing, and not all of them full time,
so it's a pretty it's a pretty small crew. Um,
some several of them all have other jobs and our
(30:07):
work is like part time contributing writers. And how's the
the advertising market these days? And we're still in the
apocalypse right and business is still slow? Are you guys
being able to still monetize it and make some money
on this? Because you guys, are can imagine tons of
traffic these days with all the people freaking out of
your stories. Yeah, we're doing record traffic numbers. Um. We're
(30:28):
trending up with that. Um we did. At the start
of the whole pandemic. If you go back to like
March April, are advertising took a big hit and and
our earnings went way down. But they've they've really come
back quite a bit, pretty close to where we were
before the pandemic started. So we're really bouncing back on that.
(30:50):
But we're also trying to monetize in other ways. We
have a subscription now where people can subscribe either just
to support us because these big tech issues that we're having,
or two uh, to gain access to premium content feature
that isn't otherwise available to everybody. So we try to
make some we try to throw some value add in
there so it's worthwhile for people to subscribe. So we
have a mixture of revenue from like our store where
(31:11):
we sell stuff and the ads we run aside, and
the subscriptions where people are paying for access awesome sets.
So listen, I appreciate you coming on with us. I
don't They're not gonna take up your entire day here.
But I was a little skeptical when you when my
guy David used to send me the Babylon be stuff.
But I have become a big fan as well. I
love it and I I feel like we're in on
(31:32):
the joke because I when I see people who you
mentioned the lebron story, when I see people who don't
get it, I just it just makes my day. It
just I just smile. I have a cheshire cat smile
from ear to ear when I see It's just it's wonderful.
So thank you for your time. Fun. And you know,
people people who try to act like it's dangerous that
people are believing our stories. Come on, it's hard. These
(31:53):
are jokes, and if people don't get the joke, you know,
that's on them. But we're not trying to mislead any buddy.
We're just trying to have fun. We're just trying to think, well,
what would be a funny take on this and then
come up with something. So that's all we're trying to do. Awesome,
all right, thank you said, I appreciate it, all right,
Thanks guys. Be sure to catch live editions of The
Ben Meller Show weekdays at two am Eastern eleven pm
(32:15):
Pacific
Be sure to catch live editions of The Ben Maller
Show weekdays at two a m. Eastern eleven pm PACIFICO.
If you thought four hours a day, minutes a week
was enough, I think again. He's the last remnants of
the old republic, a sole fashion of fairness. He treats
crackheads in the ghetto Cutter the same as the rich
(00:21):
pill poppers in the penthouse, the Clearinghouse of hot takes,
break free or something special. The Fifth Hour with Ben
Maller starts right now in the air everywhere. We are
back at it again, another weekend of podcasting. Here. This
a course, a spin off, as you know by now.
He spin off of the Overnight show, the Ben Maller
(00:43):
Show on Fox, and this all over the podcast world
eight days a week now because four hours are not enough.
And we welcome in yet again, David Gascon. This is
an interview podcast. It's an interview podcast. Want me to
play that? Uh? I was delightful about the guest selection
(01:08):
that you had for this week. I know this is
this is Gascon's dream come true. I assume you already
know now because you downloaded the podcast. Who was on
the podcast but for a very long amount of time.
Gascon has been badgering me with the Babylon Be and
I have come around. I'm a big fan now of
the Babylon Be. At first, I was like so annoyed
(01:28):
because you would every day with these Babylon Be stories.
I'm like, leave me alone, Leave me the f alone.
But I've come around, and they've blown up here this
year in this election year. Babylon b which is a
satire site, and they've been in the news a lot
because they got shut down this week. It's by Facebook
(01:50):
because of inciting what was it? Inciting violence on a
satire site, which is just outstanding. So we have tracked
down here ask on the man that runs it. The
CEO of the Babylon Be, Seth Dylan's gonna hang out
with us here on this podcast, which I'm excited about.
I was it was a long time coming. I thought
about the approach since we've had so many radio personalities on,
(02:14):
and I figured this is a great time to have
them on, especially because we got the election going on.
People are voting, and we got obviously the huge day
on November the three, and we didn't laugh a little bit.
You you've had a wild week um Dodgers coming back
last week in the NLCS in the World Series. You've
got Kyler Murray, you got got Republicans and Democrats. This
(02:38):
is this is a good week for us, so that
I thought it was appropriate for you. Yeah, yeah, I know,
it's it's great with everything's going on. And I'm sure
we'll last seth about the the President Trump retweet of
the Babylon B which got a lot of attention recently
as well, within the last ten days or so. So, uh,
we'll get to that as well. And for those that
(03:01):
are unfamiliar, I don't know how you would be unfamiliar,
because we talk about the Babylon B guest gun played
as a game here every once in a while, B
or not to be. But it's a satire side obviously.
It's it's been been doing very well here. And as
they say, I like the mottel they have on their
social media. I think it was on Twitter. I read
this that fake news you can trust, fake news that
you can trust, and uh, it's it's you know, it
(03:24):
reminds me a little bit of the the Phil Hendry
radio show from back in the day. I remember it
because like if you listen to the Phil Henry radio Show.
And you didn't know that it was a joke, you
would be upset, right, you'd be like angry. But if
you knew it was a joke, if you figured that out,
and you'd be like, this is the most amazing this
(03:44):
like art, like this is art? What this is? And
so the babila me like the way I consume it now,
it's so funny when I read these stories and I
you know, you know, they're satire whatever. And then the
people that are hard ohs that don't get the joke.
And that's my favorite part. That's I that's just outstanding.
And these are people in society that have very important
positions and politics and news and they don't get the joke.
(04:08):
It's it's really pretty funny. It's kind of piggybacking off
of Sports Talk with Barry right because he would go
Twitter change his name multiple times and people would just
crush him or they would retweet him like he was
breaking news. And that's the ya capain with the Beat
because they have a good attention to detail with titles
and pictures and then articles and then bang, could you
(04:29):
imagine could you imagine if sports talk very joined forces
with the Babylon be. Oh my god, you it would
be like all the superheroes teaming up in satire. It
would be amazing. Uh man, all right, well let's get
to it though, guess because we don't want to waste
any time here. The man is standing by virtually, of course,
(04:50):
we welcome in the CEO of the Babylon Being the man,
one of the big shots that runs this thing. Seth
Dylan is his name, and Seth, why don't we start
with the reason we're having you on here? The Babylon Be.
You guys ran a story, a political story, and got
shut down by Facebook. Kind of walk me through how
this all happened, please, Yeah. I mean basically, Facebook has
(05:16):
these community standards, and they have a complicated algorithm based
artificial intelligence system that looks at various posts on their
platform and links that are um posted on their platform
to determine if they are hateful or inciting violence or
threatening in some way, and so they're signals that they're
(05:38):
looking for that will tell them, um, if the content
is posted violate their standards in some way. So, um fine.
You know, to have systems in place like that, it's
more efficient than having people looking at everything. You know,
I don't think they have so much content on their system.
It makes sense that they do that, but in this case, yeah,
we posted it absolutely ridiculous article. It was basically a
(06:00):
re hashing of an old Monty Python scene. Um, you know,
we we we took the scene from where they were
in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where they were
trying to condemn this woman as a witch and they
were trying to figure out if she was a witch
or not, and they decided to weigh her against the
duck to see if she weighed as much as a duck.
And it's just the most absurd scene ever, and they
determined that she is in fact a witch and she
(06:20):
needs to be burned at the stink right. Well, we
translated that scene into the confirmation hearing where Amy Coney
Barrett was being grilled by these senators, um, and you
know they're disparaging her and trying to make her look
silly and whatever. So we took this duck scene from
Monty Python and we made it. We made a spoof
on it and and had the senators you know, suggesting
(06:41):
that if she weighs more than a duck, and then
you know she's a then she must be a witch
and we must have burned her. Well that language like
we must have burned her? Was it triggered something? And
fag Facebook flagged it as being, you know, an incitement
to violence, and obviously it's not. But the incredible thing
where it went where things went sideways a little bit,
was when um, we appealed that that ruling and a
(07:04):
person looked at it and then it reached out to
us and said it is an incitement of violence. We
stand by this. Uh, you need to make changes to
the article. And we just couldn't believe that that's insane.
So like, you know, how's it where they assume the
email you or you just go to your Facebook the
babblelon bi Facebook page and you're like, you're done, that's it,
(07:25):
It's over. Are you? Like? How how does the chain
go where you find out you've been taken down, your
your your financial opportunity demonetized? How did that work? Yes,
they send you a notification tour account. They have like
a page quality section where you can analyze your page
and see if you're compliant with their policies and and
(07:45):
they give us a notification saying that one of our
popes had been deleted because of violated community standards, and
as a result of that, we were demonetized. So basically
what that means is we can't make use of any
of Facebook's monetization tools. We can't use their instant articles platform,
which allows you to display articles within Facebook and have
(08:06):
Facebook ads on them for ad revenue. Um, you can't
use their subscription platform to collect subscription revenue. Brand collaborations
are no longer permitted. So they have a bunch of
monetization tools that they restrict and turn off if you're
violating the community standards. So they let us know that
those tools were no longer accessible to us. We would
no longer be able to monetize our Facebook page until
(08:27):
we fix this issue. And when we appealed and they
denied the appeal, we had no choice. But they go
to the media and try to make us think about
this because it's just absolutely ridiculous, Like in what universe
is that article and actual incitement to violence. They say
in their community standards that they take context into account
when they review these things, Well clearly they didn't in
this case. Yeah, so how does that you know? You
(08:48):
you're an Internet guy? Obviously run the Babylon be You've
been in the game for a long time, Like, how
does that happen with the algorithm? Like, is it you know,
somebody programming it obviously, or how does it end up
in that situation? And I saw your you posted on
Twitter about this, and I saw a bunch of people
underneath you said, yeah, I had something happened, you know,
I'd said so and so, and I got in trouble
with that. So like, how do you think this happened?
(09:11):
You know the algorithm? Well, I mean they code there out,
they code their system to look for specific keys, phrases
and words, and so a sentence like we must burn her,
you know, burn her is clearly a reference to, you know,
lighting someone on fire, and their systems aren't smart enough
(09:33):
to look at the broader context and see that we
weren't actually suggesting that Amy Coney Barrett be lit on
fire by anyone. You know, the system is not smart
enough to detect satire. And then when they came out
in their public statement, they didn't make a statement to
Fox News when Fox inquired about this, and they said,
you know, our systems have a hard time detecting satire.
(09:53):
So we're sorry for this mistake. But but our response
to that is, well, okay, your system failed, but then
a person looked at and the person also failed, So
you know, why did that happen? There's no explanation for that.
And to your point, yes, there are lots of people
commenting underneath his posts talking about how they've been flagged
and they've been disabled, they've been suspended, but they don't
have the platform that we have. They can't get online
(10:15):
and get the media involved and and push back on Facebook.
They don't have the ability to do that. We're in
a position where we can do that, fortunately, but not
everybody can. So for those people, when this kind of
stuff happens, they're just done. They're dead in the water. Yeah,
and this has a happy ending, right, Santh. I mean
you you updated the story, right, So because of interviews
(10:36):
you've done like this and other obviously big platforms, they've
changed their stances that correct. Yeah, I mean, well, once
we brought media attention to it, all of a sudden
they're issuing apologies and saying they reinstated our account. And
this happens over and over and over again. You know,
Twitter hasnt spended us before Facebook has threatened us with
the platform and demonitization before. And the only time we
(10:59):
get a positive outcome is when we go to the media,
we explain what's happening, and you know, news reports start
coming out about it, about how Facebook is trying to
censor us, and then and only then they changed their
tune and try to fix it. Said are you surprised,
like has this happened to you? Or have you had
a hint of something like this happening to you in
(11:20):
the past, or is this the first time you've been
hit with a hammer like that? Uh, well, it did
happen one time in the past with Facebook specifically where um,
when they first started implementing fact checking, they started working
with third party fact checkers, and the fact checkers snokes
in particular, was rating our articles full. And it's just
the most absurd thing in the world. It's like, a
(11:41):
joke isn't true or false. It's a joke, right, it's
in its own category. Um, you don't when when Jerry
Seinfeld is up on stage tracking jokes in a nightclub,
you don't stand up and yell that's not true. Whenever
he tells a story that's that's fictional because it's a joke, right, so, um,
it's just it's silly. But Facebook was was wodenly interpreting
these fact checks to mean that we were putting out
(12:03):
fake news, and they had strict policies against faith news,
and so they would they reached out to us and
threatened us. This was a few years ago, well, two
thousand eight teens. They threatened up to with the monetization
and uh in suspension of our page for for for
pushing fake news. And again we made we got a
lot of media attention there. Eventually they apologized and said
(12:23):
we realized it's a satire now and we need that
we need a better way of handling this stuff so
that we're not threatening satire companies, you know. But there's
been a lot of effort on the left to in
to insinuate, imply, um that we are not in fact
a satire site, but we are actually a purposefully misleading
(12:44):
disinformation campaign that pretends to be a satire site to
certain invent Facebook rules. And I'm not as a kidding
like that sounds crazy, But there's a recent article in
um in in New York Times published like five days
ago that says that we capitalize on Fusion Um in
questions whether or not we're doing this on purpose. Well, set,
I'm happy to bring that up because because Ben and
(13:06):
I like Ben, Ben Monday through Friday is typically compelled
to hit all that is sports talk radio. It's great.
So some of the stuff that he does on his show,
or some of the stuff he wants to do on
the show, just can't because obviously that kind of a spectrum,
it doesn't cater to it. But on the podcast, which
we obviously invited you on, we do things a little
(13:27):
bit different. And so, like I said the email, when
I introduced myself to you, I was kind of like
one of the original fans of the Babylon b and
to kind of pull the curtain back, I would send
articles to Ben. I text him like in the middle
of the night when his show is going on, and
his eyes would just roll because like, what the funk
is this right? And then before you know what, some
(13:49):
of those other friends that are at sports that the
media started retweeting you guys on the regular, and then
Ben's followers and listeners to a show started retwitting stuff
and then tagging the minutes. So so yeah, and it
blew up. It I mean, I know you guys have
done great, and this is like, uh, let me ask
you this a little said I. I I. When you told
(14:10):
the story about you know, the New York Times and
and their your their article like it, it it reminds me.
I used to have a Boston radio that didn't get
like I I don't you know, I do a sports
show obviously, but you know, occase, let's throw some satire in.
And I had a boss that did not get had
no sense of humor. What is it like? It feels
like there's a lot of people, said, that have no
sense of humor. What is it like to do a
(14:31):
satire site in when no one has a funny bone anymore?
It seems well, okay, so there's a couple of things
that play there, and there is there is um. You know,
there's a lot of hesitation to do comedy and for
certain audiences because of the PC culture, right. I mentioned
Jerry since all a minute ago, you know, years back,
he announced that he would no longer do shows for
(14:52):
college students on college campuses. And the reason is because
they're so politically correct, you know, anything he says, they're
gonna think he's racist or sexist or something thing, you know,
or homophobic. So um, they they they're just ready to
be offended by anything. And that kind of culture does
make comedy a little difficult. But when it comes to
not having a sense of humor, Look, people on the
(15:13):
left love to laugh as long as it's the right
targets that are being hit. You know, these late night
comedy shows. I just saw something the other day. It
was something like their jokes when they're making political jokes
are about Trump, um, and only like three percent of
them or something, or about Biden. Well, you know, they
like to laugh at certain people, they like to laugh
at certain ideas. They're they're very they're very willing to
(15:35):
laugh as long as it's it's not it's not pointed
at them, right, So, um, it's a very selected thing.
It's a double standard. A lot of these media companies
that that are very hard on us and and have
this uncharitable assumption that we have some kind of ill
motives where we're trying to mislead people on purpose. They
never think that about the Onion, for example, the most
(15:57):
popular web you know, satire site of the last twenty years. Um,
they never assigned ill motives the Onion. They think the
onion is funny and that they're doing genuine satire. And
the only reason that they question our motives is because
they disagree with us politically. And I don't know if
they see that or not, but it's definitely disingenuous and
it's double standards. Said, let me what percentage of people
(16:19):
I remember I read a study years ago, I said
of Americans will believe anything like what percentage of people
read your stuff online? And they're like, they don't get
the joke, they don't understand the sets. How do you
have any idea just a ballpark figure on how many
people you think just don't get it? Um, I don't
know that. I wouldn't say that's probably as high ascent.
(16:41):
There's absolutely people who don't get it. Now, there's a
couple of reasons for that, right, there's um satire is successful.
The jokes are funny when they're when they're closer to
the truth rather than further away from it. You know,
it's they depend on having a proximity to the truth.
If it's too detached from reality, it's not funny. So
that you know that saying there's a grain of truth
in every joke is it's popular saying for a reason,
(17:04):
there's truths to the things that we're joking about, and
that's why people believe them so readily. Um. There's also
the world has gotten much crazier. People have much more
extreme views. They're saying much more extreme things. There's really wild,
crazy things happening today that would have never been normal
or acceptable years ago. UM. And so in that environment,
(17:24):
when when when you're trying to exaggerate the truth a
little bit, which is what satire does, Um, it's hard
to stay one step ahead of it. So almost everything
is believable today. I mean, and from my experience what
I see in the headlines, I see headlines every day.
I'm shaking my head in disbelief. I'm like, I can't
believe that really happened. I can't believe they really said that.
I can't believe they really did that. In that kind
of environment, UM, it's hard to write stories that people
(17:47):
aren't going to believe. So it's reality's fault, Honestly, it's not.
It's not that our satire is too close to reality,
which is what we're accused of. It's that reality is
too close to satire. That's the problem. And on that note,
is that what inspired you to create Not the Bee?
Because you guys have had some articles on the babel
on Bee that you know they've turned from satire to truth.
(18:11):
So is that look you to create Not the Bee?
We call them, we call them fulfilled prophecies. But yes,
we have in some cases, mere hours after we published
a story, whatever we were joking about actually happened. Um.
And that's a perfect example of how reality is, Like
it's hard to stay one step ahead of things when
they're this crazy. But yeah, that's the that's the inspiration
(18:31):
for Not to Be. It's that there's there's enough crazy
stuff happening, these wild headlines, they seem like they should
be satire but somehow aren't. Um. Not to Be is
really targeting those stories and in isolating the stories and
amplifying them. So um, it's just really there's so much
low hanging fruit today out there and what's going on
(18:52):
in the world. We thought that there was a great
opportunity to do kind of a spinoff of the Bee
where it's just this absurd like should be satire but
somehow isn't. And you guys do things on a national level,
But is there a particular state that you target the most.
I know, you guys hit California pretty hard, But is
it in California or New York or Florida and Texas,
anything that you like in particular, you mean in terms
(19:14):
of hit pretty hard. Like we make fun of them
a lot. I mean, we will pick on people, uh,
anybody that where you feel like basically, you know, satire
what we try to do with his ridicule, bad ideas. Um,
that's one of the that's one of the main purposes
of satires to criticize you know, bad thinking, bad ideology, hypocrisy,
(19:35):
double standards. So when we see like governors uh you
know with really heavy handed, um kind of authoritarian rule
in their states, you know, and they're doing crazy ridiculous
things or contradictory things, we make fun of that. And
and you've got a lot of stuff. You've got a
lot of stuff going on right now in California. They're
in the headlines all the time, like they don't have
(19:55):
enough they don't have enough electricity of power their state,
for example. So you know, we we condom for those
kinds of things. Um. So yeah, I mean I think
the ones that are in the headlines, the most are
the ones that are gonna get picked on the most.
We're really piggybacking on whatever is in the news. And
and Sepia, the October sixte President Trump retweet is that
the Mona Lisa for the bab al embie. Oh man.
(20:21):
You know, there's a lot of debate about that that. Actually,
we don't normally get media attention outside of like conservative media,
you know, like we get Fox News pays a lot
of attention to us, a lot of the a lot
of the players on the right like the Daily Wire
and the Federalists and the Blaze. You know, they pay
attention to us, But we don't get a lot of
immediate media attention on the other side, like with Slate
and Box and CNN or any of those places. But
(20:42):
but when Trump tweets our stuff, all of a sudden,
they pay attention, and they they look at that as
just a prime opportunity to make fun of him as
being an idiot. But um, we actually know, I mean,
we know people in his administration, um, and we have
it from we have close contacts of his who have
a short up that he knows what the babylombie is.
He thinks it's funny. Um, he reads it all the time,
(21:04):
and so we believe that he knows that it's satire,
but um, it is it is. It's possible he's just
trolling people on the left and and uh and sharing
satire just to see a kind of reaction he can
get from them. I would not put that past him
at all. Seth, who's the biggest celebrity or or I
guess personality that you guys have fishhooked? Is it like
Alissa Milano or who? Is it? Very good question. If
(21:29):
Trump was confused by that headline and thought it was real,
then it's Trump for um. But I don't think that
he was. I'm not sure. I'd have to go back
and look. I do know. We recently did a piece
on after Ruth Vader Ginsberg passed. UM. We photoshopped Lebron
James wearing like a lace a white lace collar around
(21:54):
his black shirt, honoring Ruth Vader Ginsberg, so it looks
like he was dressed like her. And UM, people on
the left we're sharing that like crazy. So there were
like New York Times reporters who are sharing it talking
about how beautiful it was, now meaningful it was that
the NBA was honoring Ruth Bader Ginenberg in that way. Um.
And so you know, depending on what we do, we
get a lot, a lot, a lot of attention um
(22:16):
from people. You know, they love to say that we're
we're fooling our own audience with this stuff, but they
get fooled by it all the time. And specific names
of like celebrities are escaping me. I'm not sure. But
there was another one too, we did about how Trump
said that he's done more for Christianity than Jesus himself.
And you know, we're just playing on Trump's ego there.
(22:36):
He's constantly you know, talking about how great he is
and how and how he's done, you know, better than
anybody in history at whatever he's doing in that moment um.
And but you know, the the left believe that that
was true, that he really said that, and that one
was shared very wide, and I know there were a
lot of celebrities who are who are condemning him for that,
you know, being so arrogant to say he's done more
(22:57):
for Christianity than Jesus. So I'd have to go back
and try to pick out name because they're escaping me
at the moment. But there's been some big ones. I
sins for sports guys. Well, I'll ask you this one.
Is there a favorite sports story that you've done, because
Ben's hit it up with Colin Kaepernick obviously over the
last couple of years. And I think one of the
ones that I noticed the most was when he got
put into Madden and then you guys published an article
(23:18):
it says Madden introduces throw a Malotov feature. I think,
for us, the perfect intersection, you know, because we have
a very we have like a large conservative Christian audience.
So whenever we do it Tim Tebow joke, it's like
(23:39):
the perfect nextus of things because we're roping in the
sports on the one side, but also like the Christian
fake stuff on the other side. So one of them,
uh it was. I wrote the headline for this one.
It was Tim Tebow suspended for using performance enhancing Bible verses,
and it got shared like a million times. It went
(24:00):
like crazy viral. So I think whenever I think, whenever
we do a Temtebo article, it goes crazy viral because
it's that kind of perfect, you know, combination of the
Christian stuff and the and the culture and sports stuff. Um.
But yeah, in general, steth. How how do the sports
stories do? I mean, you guys obviously deal with politics mostly,
but like, how do the how do the sports stories
(24:21):
do in comparison? They do really really well. Um, we
just don't do that many of them. We need to
do more of them. Part of the problem is we
have our writers are more like it's funny, you know,
our writers are are like a mixture of things, are
like computer programmers or or they have a creative like
(24:41):
art background and and and so they like they like
board games and video games and stuff like that much
more than they like sports and not sports guys, Right,
So we need more people on our staff who get
sports and want to write about sports. Like the founder
of the b is actually really into sports. He loved
like he loves like m m a, he loves baseball.
You know, he's reallyly into sports. Um. But but we
(25:03):
need more people on our writing staff. Writing day today,
we can tap into these things because like whenever, you know,
whenever there's something going on, like we we make we
like to make fun of soccer and how Americans you know,
aren't aren't We make fun of Americans for not being
super interested in soccer and and uh and and feeling
like it's boring or whatever. And so when we when
(25:23):
we've got like sports shut down from from COVID, we
ran one on how American sports fans we even watched
soccer at this point. You know, well it gets shared
hundreds of thousands of times. So well and Seth, I
gotta tell you, and you know, being in the sports
radio game for a long time, and it has never
been more tribalistic in sports. I the the the Arizona
(25:46):
Cardinals quarterback the other day completed two passes the rest
of the game. He was terrible. He completely like, you know,
nine pass in the game, and I ripped him for
having you know, I didn't think he played well. And
the Arizona newspaper wrote a story ripping me for ripping him.
Um yeah, I mean so that is a gold mine
for you guys. I know you mentioned you've done well
with the sports, but a lot of sports fans these
(26:08):
days cannot take any criticism of the hometown team and
they just go nuts like you're not allowed to rip us.
It's it's crazy, it's you know that that stakes to
kind of a broader thing goes beyond sports. People are
just not willing to hear disagreement anymore. And I don't know,
you know, it's it's that's it's manifesting itself in the
sports world. I get to be bleeding into the sports world.
But that's kind of like a general principle, now, isn't it. Yeah,
(26:32):
totally it's it's totally true that you're not allowed to
criticize us. How there you I don't want to hear.
It's like put their their ear muffs on. They don't
wanna hear anything other than they want to be fed,
study diet of what they believe in. It's crazy. Well,
I do want to do you guys. You know, um,
I definitely want to do more sports stuff. That's for sure.
It does really well for us, and we got to
(26:53):
tap into that more. All right. So are you are
we the first sports personalities that you've done an interview with?
I know that you did some stuff you mentioned on
on a couple of news sites, but are we the
first on the sports side? Yeah? I think so. I mean,
even though we've had some kind of viral sports stories,
we've never really had any sports reporters or media sites
(27:14):
reach out to us for any kind of like comment
on it or UM, you know, and no, I don't
think I ever have. You'll never forget your first and seth,
do not ever cheat on us. I got a question.
I'm curious. You don't have to say, I know it's here.
You know Intel how you how you make the make
(27:34):
the hot dogs? But like, like, how does this work?
You have an editorial board that says, hey, look at
you know so and so when you're when you're coming
up with stories each day, we kind of talk us
through how this works here when you come up with
the stories and with your writing staff. Yeah, So we
have a team of writers, UM and contributors, and we
(27:55):
communicated a number of different ways. We have a Facebook
group that's kind of a broader, larger group has some
people that are not on our staff but are very
creative that we've invited into that group to kind of
pitch ideas to us. UM, and then we have kind
of our internal flack channels where we're talking on flack
and pitching ideas back and forth. We're in a bunch
of different locations, so we're not all in the same room.
So UM, we basically just look at whatever is going
(28:17):
on in the news each day and and try to
think to ourselves, what's a funny take on this, and
and we throw headline. It's all the joke is in
the headline. It's always the headline that comes first. So, um,
it's just headline pitches, one after another. We pitched dozens
and dozens and dozens of ideas based on whatever is
going on in the world. UM. So we do that
(28:39):
day in and day out, and the ones that rise
to top to get a reaction that you know, our
editor in chief decides, you know, he wants to run with. Um,
we pick out of those, out of those pitches. So
it's really a small percentage. It's probably like, honestly, like
two percent of the headlines we pitch get published, and
most of them are just junked. Um. But it's to
(29:00):
refine the process. You know, we go through iterations of it.
Someone might pitch something that's not perfect as is, but
then you know, someone else will do an iteration of
it that's a little bit better and would you know,
connect better and better worded. So we play off of
each other and just work together very collaboratively to come
up with these ideas. And once we have a really
good headline, you know, one of our writers can can
take on the tap you're actually writing out that article
(29:22):
and populating and getting up on the site. So, um,
that's what we do every day. It's fun. It's crazy
that this is our job because we just make up
funny stories, uh and then photoshop crazy images to go
along with them. Um. We hitch ourselves sometimes crazy than
anyone does for a living. But it's a lot of months.
Wwe holds massive Royal Rumble event on Zoom that was
pretty solid. Yea. Writers declined to sign Colin Kaepernick. That
(29:46):
was another good one, that was pretty solid. You guys, Uh,
you guys continue to shouting. Now, how big is the staff?
I know you said you have some outside people, then
some internal people, but how big is the crew? Are
writing staff? I think we have about a dozen people
right now writing, and not all of them full time,
so it's a pretty it's a pretty small crew. Um,
some several of them all have other jobs and our
(30:07):
work is like part time contributing writers. And how's the
the advertising market these days? And we're still in the
apocalypse right and business is still slow? Are you guys
being able to still monetize it and make some money
on this? Because you guys, are can imagine tons of
traffic these days with all the people freaking out of
your stories. Yeah, we're doing record traffic numbers. Um. We're
(30:28):
trending up with that. Um we did. At the start
of the whole pandemic. If you go back to like
March April, are advertising took a big hit and and
our earnings went way down. But they've they've really come
back quite a bit, pretty close to where we were
before the pandemic started. So we're really bouncing back on that.
(30:50):
But we're also trying to monetize in other ways. We
have a subscription now where people can subscribe either just
to support us because these big tech issues that we're having,
or two uh, to gain access to premium content feature
that isn't otherwise available to everybody. So we try to
make some we try to throw some value add in
there so it's worthwhile for people to subscribe. So we
have a mixture of revenue from like our store where
(31:11):
we sell stuff and the ads we run aside, and
the subscriptions where people are paying for access awesome sets.
So listen, I appreciate you coming on with us. I
don't They're not gonna take up your entire day here.
But I was a little skeptical when you when my
guy David used to send me the Babylon be stuff.
But I have become a big fan as well. I
love it and I I feel like we're in on
(31:32):
the joke because I when I see people who you
mentioned the lebron story, when I see people who don't
get it, I just it just makes my day. It
just I just smile. I have a cheshire cat smile
from ear to ear when I see It's just it's wonderful.
So thank you for your time. Fun. And you know,
people people who try to act like it's dangerous that
people are believing our stories. Come on, it's hard. These
(31:53):
are jokes, and if people don't get the joke, you know,
that's on them. But we're not trying to mislead any buddy.
We're just trying to have fun. We're just trying to think, well,
what would be a funny take on this and then
come up with something. So that's all we're trying to do. Awesome,
all right, thank you said, I appreciate it, all right,
Thanks guys. Be sure to catch live editions of The
Ben Meller Show weekdays at two am Eastern eleven pm
(32:15):
Pacific
Host
Ben Maller
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