The Lie That Killed Comedy for a Decade, with The Babylon Bee’s Seth Dillon

28:50preferred or popular narrative is, rather than making sure they're just objectively, you know, keeping everyone in line with what's real and true. So I see them as sort of an extension of the media and guardians of the narrative more than anything else. And I say that, you know, largely on the basis of my own experience. So what's happened with the Babylon Bee, the Onion and the Babylon Bee have both been fact-checked. So it's not like the Onion hasn't been fact-checked. With Snopes in particular, you know, the funny thing is when they would examine an Onion headline that went viral and people were believing that it was true, which, by the way, I give people a pass on that all the time.

29:30I'm like, you know, you can't really hold it against people. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're stupid if they think that a satirical headline is true. Sometimes they're not checking the source. They don't realize where it comes from, or they haven't heard of the satirical source that's that's reporting the story. I think that the lines are so blurred right now between parody and reality, and this is evidenced by the fact that so many of our jokes come true, like fulfilled prophecies. There is this sort of like struggle on the part of the comedian or the satirist today to stay a step ahead of reality and to continue to caricature and exaggerate what's happening in reality.

30:09It tends to catch up to us very quickly, sometimes within a matter of a couple weeks or even a couple days, we'll write a joke. And then two days later, whatever we just did as a caricature or parody of someone, they actually do in real life. And they say and do it in real life. And so there's this sort of like, they're riding so close to each other. And it's so difficult to stay ahead of reality when reality gets really insane, especially with what was happening with COVID and, you know, the rise of wokeness and how extreme and radical some of those ideas got, you could exaggerate what's happening today and it happens tomorrow.

30:42So I don't really hold it against people when they see a satirical headline and they believe that it's true, because how can you tell anymore? You know, like this, the Rachel Levine being named woman of the year felt like parody to me when I saw the real headline. So it's difficult. You got to kind of do a double take sometimes. But with Snopes, like Snopes would fact check The Onion. And, and the fact check would say, you know, this came from The Onion, a well known satire site, this is satire, you should laugh, it's funny. And then they would fact check a Babylon Bee headline. It was a very different approach, you know, they would look at it as like, you know, they've managed to dupe people with with these things before.

31:23You know, this is, this is not true this is a false report it's misinformation they've tricked people with these ruses many times and so it was just a different tone and a different

31:34Coleman Hughes:take on how they were they were sort of alleging that you were trying to convince people that this was a real story yeah yeah and using satire as as a defense yeah it was a it was they were just liking to our motive little nonsense yeah they're trying to speak to our motives on that and suggesting it And this was one of the things that, you know, this is how the New York Times had characterized us when we got a retraction from them on this. But at one point they had reported that the Babylon Bee traffics in misinformation under the guise of satire, which is a commentary on what our motivation is.

32:09What was their evidence for this? I mean, how do you prove that even if you think it's true of someone? I don't know. You know, maybe they were looking at the fact that, you know, so many people were believing it. Maybe they just assume that because we have the views that we do that we're bad people and that our goal must be to try to get other people to share our bad ideology. I don't know. I don't know how you would prove that. And they couldn't prove it, and that's why they retracted it ultimately. I joked that they were trafficking in misinformation under the guise of journalism at the time.

32:43so um it was a it was a weird thing to have our jokes characterized that way and especially by the fact checkers are supposed to be objective third parties who are just simply giving you the facts now we did we pushed back on snopes a lot you know we we actually told them we sent them a letter a demand letter from our lawyers saying look here's why this is serious for us we want to just mock you and make fun of you we can't just mock you and make fun of you though because if it is established, if you're able to work with the media to establish that we are trafficking in misinformation under the guise of satire, then we will be penalized by the social media platforms for posting jokes as if we are posting false reports.

33:26And those penalties will result in us losing our platform, which means we will lose our business. And so this is actually kind of a damaging lie that you guys are telling that can put us out of business, and we would appreciate it if you would stop. So they did end up actually caving on that. They changed the way that they rate satire. They actually introduced a new rating that was satire instead of false or like politifact, pants on fire. They'd rated us pants on fire a couple times. So I think that was a small victory there. But we had to really force the issue and defend ourselves in a way that I never expected to have to defend ourselves.

34:02You know, like I really my inclination Coleman initially when like stuff like that happens is to respond just with mockery and humor and like stay in character and just make fun of them for being silly. But with stuff like that, it was actually like, OK, well, if we don't if we don't send them a demand letter, if we don't get a retraction, if if we don't, you know, kind of fight this in a more serious way, we're not going to be able to do these jokes anymore. It's going to be over.

34:27Coleman Hughes:Right. Right. I want to talk about the the Megan Kelly joke that I believe I think you ended up taking down last year What was that joke and can you explain the joke and and what happened and how Megan reacted and and then Why you ended up taking it down? Yeah, so this was I don't have it in front of me. So I don't know the exact timeline of when we posted this but Megan was starting to get some criticism because she was she was shifting in her position you know on the Israel question and I guess this was was this towards the end of last year? Yeah this was last year maybe towards the end of last year but I don't have the specific joke in front of me but I remember the context part of the context was Megan Kelly was being asked her opinion on Candace who had gone deeper and deeper into Israel and Jew related conspiracy theories.

35:23Coleman Hughes:And Megan's position was basically, look, I'm not going to criticize Candace. She's a mother. You know, I think she's very talented and that's it. And really, I haven't even watched her podcast. Right. So it was a kind of refusal to engage with something she was clearly uncomfortable with, but didn't want to condemn. And I think in combination with Charlie Kirk conspiracies that Megan was being asked to comment on, people were noting a shift in her from like a stalwart defender of Israel to a critic of Israel. And many people were noticing that shift. Yeah, yeah, that's a helpful context. And I think that's exactly what was going on at the time.

36:09And I don't think it had gone very far with Megan yet. And I'll get to that because that speaks to part of the reason why the joke was taken down. But we posted a headline. It was something something along the lines of, you know, Megyn Kelly tosses out old pager just to be safe. And, you know, kind of just alluding to the fact that Israel has used exploding pagers to take out their enemies in the past. And Megyn now viewing herself as an enemy of Israel or perceiving that that's, realizing that that's how she's being perceived to be safe is just going to get rid of her old pager so she doesn't end up, you know, getting taken out.

36:49Um, now the, the response to this was very interesting because you had a lot of people who were, uh, very deliberately and disingenuously interpreting this as if we on behalf of Israel were issuing a threat to Megyn Kelly. Like we were, we were saying, you know, if you don't stop, you will be taken out as if that was the point of the joke. The point of the joke was to suggest that Megyn might have this irrational fear of Israel because she's buying into, you know, the propaganda and the lies about Israel that this is what they do with their opponents. They, you know, they take them out. You know, they took out Charlie Kirk.

37:25They could take out her, you know, like something like that. So, you know, I think the joke was pretty clear. And I think, in fact, Meghan had actually mocked someone who was offended by a pager joke in the past and said, relax, it's just a joke. yeah so you know Megan Megan understood what was going on there but she chose you know she tagged me and she's like WTF Seth Dillon you know and tagged me in it which started going viral and so I started having a conversation with her behind the scenes about the whole thing I didn't what the interesting thing is with you know our creative process I run the Babylon Bee but I'm not writing all the headlines and I'm not I don't have the the time or the interest in sifting through and reviewing every single headline that our staff writes before it gets posted.

38:13There are some that they bring to my attention, and there's certain topics, you know, hot-button topics might come up where I'm like, you know, run it by me before you run anything on this, you know, like I want to get my eyes on it. Primarily not because I'm like, we don't want to publish certain jokes. It's we don't want to publish a joke that's that's either really unfairly uncharitable to somebody or that just isn't going to be well understood. So because sometimes I'll give you an example, like sometimes there's a there's a headline that we might want to run that one of our writers thinks is really great and funny, but there's not enough national awareness of the story for people to really get the full context and they might misunderstand the joke.

38:51So it'll either fall flat or be completely misinterpreted. And so in those cases, I might say, no, this one's not worth running. It's going to be more trouble than it's worth because everybody's going to misunderstand it or they won't get it and it just won't perform well. So there's judgments being made like that all the time behind the scenes. And in this case, I didn't get my eyes on it. I would have probably not run the joke, not because I would have seen that people would have perceived it as a threat. I, you know, I don't really care if people interpret it that way. They can if they want to.

39:18I think it tells us more about them than it says about us. But because I wanted to be a little bit more charitable to Megan, because I didn't think that Megan had gone that far down that road yet, or that she would be perceiving herself as a threat to Israel who, you know, is afraid that she's going to be killed by Israel. I thought the joke, in hindsight, looking at it, it felt very premature to me that we would make that joke at that time. I didn't think it had gone very far yet. I think now the joke makes a lot more sense. I think a lot has happened since then. And I actually regret taking it down because I think it was actually on the mark, but may have been a little premature.

39:59Coleman Hughes:my conversation my sense would be even if a joke is premature but it's noting something that's just beginning to happen that it's fair game and if you don't think it's funny you don't think it's funny um but but it's sometimes like you said like the joke is by definition an exaggeration of something true it can be a gross exaggeration but you you said like often your jokes end up coming true right right they do and that yes that is actually a recognition of the fact that you're often humor is often onto something that hasn't quite happened yet right right and depending on the context that can be either I think fair or unfair in my conversation with her I felt like because there was personal dialogue happening behind the scenes between the two of us I felt like we had been unfair to her.

40:53And as a courtesy, I took it down. In retrospect, I shouldn't have. That was really kind of unprecedented for us. It wasn't really something that we've ever done before. And I think the biggest mistake, the reason I consider it a mistake that I took it down, even after communicating with her personally, is because of something that I already knew before. This isn't like I learned this through this experience. I should have known better. You know, I have had, because of the bee's, you know, prominence in the culture at this point. I have developed relationships and friendships with a lot of, you know, prominent commentators, politicians, whoever they may be.

41:28I know them personally. I have their phone number in my phone and, you know, they can text me if they have a concern. I can text them, whatever. But I've always been mindful of and even say to some people sometimes when I meet them, hey, we're probably going to joke about you at some point. Don't hold it against us because this is what we do. You know, like we make fun of everybody. We don't pull our punches. That's always kind of been my mentality. And so after it was taken down, I really regretted that I did that because there should be, whether she's okay with it or not, this is kind of just how this works.

42:00And this is what we do. And we shouldn't be apologizing for it or taking it back, even if people deliberately misconstrue it or if it hurts somebody's feelings. and you know in my attempt to try to massage and and and I'm not sure exactly how to phrase it but just to I don't know to try to be a good friend to somebody that had always been a good friend to me you know make an exception was not the right call in that case I think that it should have just I have just stood firm and told her, you know, this is a joke, and you can either laugh or not if you don't think it's funny. It ended up coming true, though, in a very real sense, because she has started to buy into a lot of those ideas.

42:49She claims now that she was misled by all the propaganda before when she was more pro-Israel and no longer buys into it. And so I think there's a lot more validity to the joke than there ever was, and it would have been a perfect example of one of those fulfilled prophecies had, well, it would only be a fulfilled prophecy if they actually sent her an exploding pager, but it would have had more truth ringing to it later on down the road if we'd left it up. So that was a mistake, and I own that.

43:20Coleman Hughes:Yeah, well, one of the things about being in this business, and we're not exactly in the same business, but it's similar in the sense that one of the sad trade-offs is that friendship with other public people is inherently corrupting. And I really mean that. I want to make friends with other people that have podcasts. I want to make friends with other people that are writers and public figures and are on TV. But this means when I do become friends with such people and they say something that I really disagree with, I have the human urge to pull my punches and that is inevitable. I would never say you, you shouldn't have any friends because that's such a, that's such an important part of life that I think it's worth sacrificing a little bit of your sense of integrity.

44:12Coleman Hughes:I mean, if you really want to be the purist and the journalist and die alone and, um, have no human contact and be willing to burn any bridge at any time. I would applaud that, but it requires a psychology that is rare and not necessarily well-adjusted. Well, it's certainly required for what we do because we can't be like, you know, guys, there's a rule, no making fun of Joe Rogan because I want to go back on his podcast again one day. That's right. You know, like I have to be willing to upset Joe Rogan if he does something that we think deserves mockery and so we're going to tell the joke and Joe Rogan as a comedian himself should appreciate that and not hold that against us you never know but there has to be a willingness to say well you know if he's upset and he doesn't like a joke of ours and doesn't want to have me back on his show as a result of that then so be it because this is what we do there has to be that willingness in this case you know the the justification that I had for myself and taking it down was that I wouldn't have run it in the first place if it had been run by me because I didn't think it was fair to her.

45:20I thought it was, it wasn't that it was premature because I didn't know where things were going when you have, when you put yourself in the shoes of where you were at that moment. It just didn't have a truth to it that I saw as being, you know, valid at that time. But it was a tricky one and definitely a learning experience. You know, we got the criticism for putting it up and then we got criticism for putting it down. There's no, there's no winning in those cases. But moving forward, I don't think I'm going to make that mistake again. Yeah.

45:48Coleman Hughes:Well, it's a good learning experience. I would even say the framing of a joke as being fair or unfair is never how I think about a joke. I think about, is the joke funny or not? And if it made me laugh, my assumption is that most jokes at people's expense are unfair. they are almost by definition unfair exaggerations of and mischaracterizations um they lack nuance you know uh almost by definition right there's simplifications that get rid of that just zero in on a point and exaggerate it and the hope is that you're because you're shining a light at something real there's going to be laughter but it's almost always unfair from the person's perspective being made fun of, right?

46:34I don't know that I agree with that. I think it's, no, the reason I disagree with that is because I think that it can be, when I say it fair or unfair, the fairness I'm talking about is that truth to it, that you are shining the light on some truth to it, that there is, there's validity to the joke in the sense of course it's an exaggeration, it's not 100 % accurate, it would just be a news report. It's some kind of a parody or exaggeration or caricature. But it's a caricature is fair. When you draw a caricature of someone's face and you and they have a large nose or really buck teeth or something and you exaggerate that and make it look really ridiculous to kind of mock their appearance.

47:18I mean, is it is it mean? It doesn't make potentially make them feel bad. Well, you know, not it's not really mean, because that's what the caricature is intended to do, and it's based on something that is fair. It's a mild and in the form of mockery criticism of the person that the expectation is with comedy that they won't take it too seriously and be upset by it because they're, you know, in that context, they're setting themselves up to be caricatured. And I think public figures are setting themselves up to be caricatured by being out there in the public and engaging in the discourse. And when you make a joke about them that exaggerates, you know, something that they've said or done and points in the direction that the truth is already, like, aimed at, I would characterize that as fair.

48:09And that's why it's funny is because it's fair. It's got that validity to it. So I see it, I guess I see it a little bit differently. And maybe we're not necessarily disagreeing with each other other than, like, in the semantics of it, potentially.

48:22Coleman Hughes:Do you find that Trump is an easy character to make fun of in caricature or a difficult one? Because I could see how it could go either way. Well, first of all, he does and says more shocking, really like hilarious, sometimes darkly and disturbingly hilarious things. You know, he does more in one week than the typical president would do in an entire term. You know, just like his press conference with the prime minister of Japan, where he's like throwing in quips and jokes about atomic bombs like being dropped. I mean, it's it's in one sense, I could see how it could be impossible to parody because it's already a parody.

49:13Coleman Hughes:On the other hand, it seems like there's a lot of material there. Right. It's both. Yeah, it's both. And. there is so sometimes we beat him to it a great example is when we did a joke I think it was in 2019 where we said you know Trump claims to have done more for Christianity than Jesus himself and and it was three years later I think he went on a radio show and said he's done more for Christianity than any other person in history that just sounds like something Trump would say it sounds like something Trump would say and then he did end up going and saying he's like I've done more for Christianity and religion in general than any other person in world history, you know?

49:50And so it's like, I'm like, dude, you went further than the joke. And I don't know if we're giving him these ideas or what, but there is a real challenge. Biden was the same way, honestly, when Biden was in office and he was, you know, mumbling and saying really weird things and somewhat incoherent. It was hard to come up with a joke. Kamala Harris, the same way, you know, Kamala Harris would go on and she's talking about space, how it connects us all, you know, and she sounds like she's talking to a kindergarten class. And the speeches that she would give and the statements that she would make off the cuff in interviews were every bit as funny and silly as what we would stuff in her mouth if we were trying to parody her in that moment.

50:37And so that makes it very challenging. Many of these political figures, Trump probably being the most kind of outlandish and exaggerated caricature of a person that you can think of, but it does present its own challenges. It also – it's also – there's tons of fodder there because he does say so many ridiculous things. It's easy to think of another ridiculous thing that he might say and stuff those words into his mouth and have people believe that it was true and think it's really funny for that reason. Um, so, um, I don't know. It's, it's kind of a, a, both, both sides to it. I think it's challenging in the one sense.

51:15Um, but it also provides you with a lot of fodder and material too, if you're, if you're willing to, you know, put the effort in to try to come up with a joke that hasn't already happened.

51:25Coleman Hughes:Do you feel that you have more of a responsibility to make fun of the administration that's currently in power? or do you feel that you just want to be an equal opportunity critic of all aspects of American culture no matter who's the president or do you feel you've carved out a niche criticizing like hypocrisy in the church and leftist craziness and you should keep hammering that niche uh well i mean to some extent that answer that question is answered somewhat naturally just on the basis of the world view that we're approaching the issues from so um you know secular progressive anti-capitalist you know uh uh socialist or communist ideology is going to be something that we constantly just have our sights on because we disagree with it so strenuously.

52:25And then, you know, the church culture stuff is just kind of baked into the bee's character from the outset. So those are things that we will always kind of have our sights on. But it isn't like, well, let's just stay in our lane and do this and kind of turn a blind eye to everything else. There's always, from my perspective, I feel a real responsibility. This is one of the things that really bothered me about comedians for so long is when they were willing to turn a blind eye to things that were really funny and should be made fun of and they wouldn't touch it because they wanted to protect it.

52:56And then they would try to be funny and making fun of something that wasn't funny. They had it all backwards and all wrong. I felt that there should have been a lot more introspection and, you know, and dealing with their own issues and self-deprecating humor than there was. And I think that that's always been very healthy with the bee that we've been willing to engage in that. but also look at not just the bad ideas of the left, but the bad ideas that also exist on the right and be willing to hold them to account too. With this, that sort of like come what may mentality that we're talking about earlier with, you know, well, we have friends on this side and we don't want to be perceived as being traitors to our own side or whatever.

53:35It's like, well, if somebody says something that is ridiculous or hypocritical, we should make fun of them for it. And if they're promoting an idea that's bad, that deserves to be mocked, then we should mock it and make fun of them for it. And I think that's the best way for us to kind of like stand on a fair principle and do what we really is our job, what we should be doing. Even if it means that we're going to get more criticism than we otherwise would from our friends on our side of the political aisle or something. And so, you know, we've been we've been willing to do that. And it's not just to present to the world that we're being fair.

54:11I think it comes from an honest place of saying, you know, bad ideas need to be ridiculed so that they aren't taken seriously. And that's just kind of a period, you know, blanket statement that applies across the board.

54:27Coleman Hughes:So you recently gave a really good speech at ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, I think a conference that's held yearly, usually in London. I won a couple years ago. Yeah. You gave this great speech. People can find it pinned on your Twitter page right now. I encourage people to listen to the whole thing. It's only like 13 minutes. And one of the things you talk about... It was extended by a climate protester coming on the stage. People thought that was a joke initially, by the way. They thought that I'd planned that, and then I joked about having planned it, which only confused them further.

55:01But anyway, go ahead.

55:02Coleman Hughes:Yeah, you were interrupted by this crazy climate change guy, which could have been scary, because he got up and touched you. Yeah. Yeah, he was right next to me, and it took a while for security to get him off the stage. That was a real concern. It could have been bad. But you ended that speech by talking about how even as someone that has been on the wrong side of the Internet gatekeepers attempting to censor you, banning you from Twitter famously, which was one of the reasons why Elon or perhaps I think you said the straw that broke the camel's back for Elon to buy Twitter despite having been on the wrong side of the sensors and the gatekeepers so many times and so unjustifiably you you still understand that there is a danger of having no gatekeepers at all.

55:59Coleman Hughes:There is an other side of the coin. And the way you put it is that with the gatekeepers, we weren't allowed to say the truth. And without them, we're incentivized to disregard the truth altogether. What do you mean by that? Well, so I'm talking about the public square there. You know, I'm talking about, I'm talking about social media platforms and, and how there was a time where the truth, saying what was true, whether it was about COVID or whether it's about the gender stuff, simply stating a matter of fact, seriously or in jest, could result in you getting penalized, and we'd experienced that ourselves.

56:44So there's this kind of like ideological conformity that was required, baked into the terms of service itself, so that if you challenge an idea that is being promoted and protected, you know, you'll pay, you can pay a penalty for that. And so that was in the, in the moderation standards and in the trust and safety standards, you know, that was sort of baked in. And that's the gatekeeping I'm talking about is that there's this guard guardianship of, of the narratives that was imposed from the top down that prevented dissent and disfavored speech and, and penalized it. And so the truth was unsayable in that context until that barrier to speaking the truth was removed when Elon walked in through Twitter's front door carrying a sink and saying, bring back the Babylon Bee.

57:35Until that happened, the gatekeepers were preventing truth-saying. And post that happening, now with more of a free environment where you don't have those kinds of rules, if you want to describe someone like Elliot Page as being a woman, biologically this is a woman who identifies as a man you don't have to say that elliot page is a man you won't you won't get banned for for challenging that idea anymore if you speak it um the the issue that i'm that i'm highlighting there on the other side of this is that in a completely open forum like that and especially in the context that we have now where so many people are resentful of having been lied to and uh and and gate kept for so long and being prevented from saying the truth and having having false narratives protected to the point where, you know, like the Hunter Biden laptop story couldn't get out.

58:26It was suppressed because it challenged the powers that be in ways that they didn't like. You have an environment, you've fostered an environment now where people are really receptive to and have an appetite for some sort of alternative source of truth that will help them and others wake up to what's really going on. And that sort of fuels this radical conspiracism that we're seeing, you know, where you've got all these podcasters and commentators now who are just willing to say and do anything and call it the truth and suggest that everyone else is lying to you and I am the sole source of truth and I'm going to lead you to the truth.

59:08And what they end up doing more often than not in those cases is disregarding all the actual evidence and just coming up with wild theories and suggesting that they're true because, well, they don't want us to say this, and they don't like when they say this, and they criticize me when I say this, therefore I must be right, and let's keep going down this dark path of radical conspiracism. That has, because of the appetite that's there for that, a lot of people are exploiting that, and so there is, yes, the way that I put it was we're now not just it used to be the truth was unstable now we're incentivized to disregard it altogether and just tell people what they want to hear if you want to be a breakout star on social media you don't just say obvious truths and self-evident truths you say whatever is the most outrageous and outlandish conspiracy that you can think of because people are hungry for that kind of drama and intrigue and they've been primed to believe that all the official narratives must be false just because they're official narratives.

1:00:07And so I'm going to believe this instead. And so there is an incentive structure in place there that I think is also very dangerous. And so one of the primary points I was trying to make in that speech is that freedom of speech is fundamental. It's necessary so that we can have real discourse and debate. But it's not enough. The freedom of speech does, the one thing that it doesn't do, just simply having freedom in an open forum is it doesn't really orient anyone to the truth. It doesn't point us to the truth. It just gives us all a level playing field where now we can discuss and debate what's true.

1:00:42And so what needs to come into the picture at that point is, you know, you can have skepticism, sure, but make it healthy skepticism, rational skepticism. Let's have discernment and use our rational faculties responsibly and seek objective truth, not just whatever makes us feel good. We have to actually ask the question, is it true whether I like it or not, and be willing to go in that direction. So freedom, my main point there at the end that you were quoting from is that freedom is fundamental, but it's not enough.

1:01:15Coleman Hughes:Yeah, there is a huge incentive to turn every news story into a great movie plot. In other words, I could give you the 32nd version of how Tyler Robinson probably allegedly, I shouldn't say probably, I should say allegedly just because the trial is ongoing, but the evidence is overwhelming. Tyler Robinson is in all likelihood the person who killed Charlie Kirk. We had the evidence within 48 hours. We had admissions of guilt to his lover. Yeah, I feel less inclined to have to say allegedly when you have a confession from the killer himself, you know, it's like, well, yeah, I'm saying for legal purposes.

1:01:59Yeah. For legal purposes, it's allegedly that you're innocent until proven guilty in court. Sure.

1:02:04Coleman Hughes:Um, but evidence is overwhelming and I can, I can do the podcast on that and I will get one, one hundredth as many views as the Candace Owens, true crime, total fantasy BS version of how you know Israel killed Charlie Kirk that's the point you know because she's giving you a movie plot and I'm giving you the boring truth the boring truth that has tons of evidence um and you can see this everywhere in in our culture right like I you can literally watch and I and I for reasons I'm not totally sure did watch the entire eight-part series of Candace Owens proving that Brigitte Macron is a man. It's all nonsense, but it makes for really good storytelling, similar to a kind of true crime podcast experience.

1:02:59Yeah, the movie The Fugitive would have been pretty boring if Harrison Ford's character, Dr. Kimball, says, I didn't kill my wife, and then they look at the evidence, and it was really clear that he didn't, someone else did it, and they're like, all right, well, you can go. Yeah, that's right. Not a very exciting, but it's a great movie when they think he did and they have to hunt for him and he's got to try to prove his innocence while evading the U.S. Marshals that are chasing him through Chicago.

1:03:31Coleman Hughes:So this is what those of us, and I count you and I in the coalition of the common sense and the coalition of reason, we're going up against people that are great storytellers. It's just it just so happens that they don't care whether what they're saying is true. And it's a difficult battle because those of us who actually do care about what's true, who care if we get a fact wrong, who don't want to even exaggerate, much less get something wrong, are handcuffed by our own ethics in this race, this constant race for eyeballs and attention. and people have to understand that people just have to become more literate consumers of of podcasts and media um people have to teach their children to discern bs from actual facts right yes so there's no as you say in the speech there's no easy solution to this problem there's no overnight fix i really like the role thus far that ai has played in addressing this issue by which I mean if you go to X and you you you know someone says something crazy immediately someone asked Grok hey is this true right Grok is really quite good and much better than the fact checkers I believe at giving an a politically unbiased fact-based rebuttal or summary of what the person is saying and so I I am I'm bullish on AI in general and I'm bullish on AI's role in making our political culture healthier.

1:05:13Coleman Hughes:I'm curious, final question, how you feel about AI, and you can address not only the, you know, the information and conspiracy thinking problem, but also as, you know, as someone who, you know, makes a living, at least overseeing, you know, comedy writers, are you afraid that AI is going to cannibalize that business, act as a multiplier, take jobs from all of your writers, or do you think it's just going to be like technological revolutions of the past where you're not going to replace those jobs? Well, let me just say something first. One of the comments that you made about how we're, was it handcuffed that you said?

1:05:57We're disadvantaged in some way because we're just trying to tell the truth, whereas others are willing to disregard it to get the clicks and engagement and be entertaining. And I think, you know, yes, that is true. One thing that I think does work in our favor with how radical and wild the conspiracies get, you know, one of the ones that's floating around right now is that the reason we haven't been told where Charlie's body is is because the Jews ate it to steal his power from him, you know. and uh and this is being touted by some as the most likely explanation at this point because otherwise why wouldn't you just tell us where his body is um well maybe because you freaks would go and dig it up uh to try to test your theories of what actually happened um but i think i think that's a good illustration of how how the craziness can go so far and we saw this with the left um You know, I think one of the reasons that – wokeness is not dead, by the way.

1:07:04You know, a lot of people have declared that wokeness is dead, that we've won, you know, whatever. Sure, there's victories being won there. I think it's a great victory when, you know, when men are no longer allowed – male athletes are no longer allowed to compete against women or enter their private spaces. You know, every little victory that we notch along those lines I think is a good one, and it's a win for sanity and safety. but it's not dead. It's still there. It may be in retreat in some ways, but largely I think the reason for that is because they went so far. They went so extreme. They got so crazy and they pushed so hard in the direction of things.

1:07:44When you start bringing in drag performers for children, you start upsetting a lot of reasonable parents and people who don't necessarily, they're not necessarily big Trump supporters or hardcore conservative Christians, but they still do find really obscene and ridiculous things, obscene and ridiculous. That's really maybe the only hope we can cling to in saying, oh, well, you know, slow and steady wins the race with truth. We'll just stay on our course and, you know, we'll beat them in the end. Well, they will defeat themselves potentially in the end by going too far and, of course, facing defamation lawsuits one after another because those are coming.

1:08:21You know, when you have a willingness to maliciously slander innocent people and try to shift blame from the guilty to the innocent and make up any wild claim that you can and state it as if it's fact and that you know this is true, you start to destroy people's character in a way that's very damaging. And there's recourse for that. And so there is some corrective, I think, that's coming just in the sense that, you know, there will be, like with Sandy Hook, you know, defamation lawsuits and there will be reasonable people who see it. This has just gone too far. With the AI stuff, I like AI as a fact checker, too, because it is dispassionate and somewhat objective in the way that it doesn't approach.

1:09:09You know, Grok is not a Republican or a Democrat. Grok is it has access to information and it can give you a response on the basis of that information. And it knows the law. And and so it can cite those things and and be very useful as a tool along those lines. However, what we're talking about right now with the sort of like hyper-skeptical, everything you've ever been told is a lie sort of mentality that has spread like a mind virus amongst so many millions of people, they're deeply skeptical of the AI systems because they'll just, from the same sort of perspective that they view everything, They'll just view it as one more tool of narrative control that's being operated by Israel and the Jews or something.

1:09:58You know, it's like they'll find a way to just discount and dismiss it without allowing it to be a corrective to what they think and what they're promoting. And we see that happening all the time, too. So there's this sort of imperviousness to the truth that is very stubborn. and AI isn't going to overcome that because it'll just be viewed as one more tool of the oppressor that's propping up a narrative that's false.

1:10:28But is it a threat to comedy? Well, right now it's not. I don't know if you've asked Grok to tell you jokes or tried to have ChatGPT write satirical headlines. These tools aren't very good at that stuff yet. There's a lot of layers and nuance to satire and parody, and the tools aren't there yet in being able to do that. We still need our talented writers and want to keep them as long as we possibly can. I think that there's plenty of opportunity for us to use these tools to do more. We've actually done a lot of funny AI videos that they're not just AI for the sake of using AI and replacing people.

1:11:06It's like leveraging the tool to do really funny parody. Grok is great because it lets you use the face and voice of public figures. It doesn't block you from doing that. And so we can throw AOC in a video or Bernie Sanders or Elon Musk and make a funny video like, well, what would – we asked AI what it would be like if a woman were president. And then we have this three-minute long thing of a woman president running the country. AI is excellent for stuff like that, and we've been able to use it for that I think pretty effectively. People think it's funny. What they don't like is when you just stop using real actors or writers and just produce AI slop content.

1:11:44That's not very appealing to anybody, at least not yet. And as it gets better, I think that will become more of a potential problem in terms of what tools do we use and to what extent does this push people out of the way and make sites like the Babylon Bee obsolete because anybody can do what we do, leveraging AI. there's still a lot of direction involved. There's still a lot of writing involved. There's still a lot of creativity involved in leveraging those tools. And so right now, you know, we're trying to leverage them to the extent that we can, because it's fun and funny to do it. And I don't know where that's going from here, but, but we'll see.

1:12:24All right, Seth Dillon, thanks so much for coming on my show. Thanks for having me, man. Good conversation.

1:12:35Thank you.