Join editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle for the first ever Babylon Bee podcast. This week's new stories with links: Sports Illustrated Burkini (5:29): https://babylonbee.com/news/sports-illustrated-unveils-first-ever-baptist-swimsuit-model-in-floor-length-denim-skirt That Crazy Copeland (12:11) https://babylonbee.com/news/kenneth-copeland-unveils-new-luxury-jet-that-runs-on-the-souls-of-the-deceived Trump's Lands Free Chips and Salsa Deal (17:30): https://babylonbee.com/news/trump-secures-unlimited-chips-and-salsa-in-mexican-trade-deal Main Topic: the Bee Origin Story (24:05) Hate Mail Of The Week: (44:37) Bonus Content (paid subscribers only) -Gay Pride Week -YouTube Radicalizing Left And Right To Have Actual Conversations -Subscriber Q&A Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
In a world of fake news, this is news you can trust.
It's the only news source 100% approved by Snopes.com.
You're listening to the Babylon Bee podcast.
Yes, this is the Babylon Bee podcast, and I am Kyle Mann, the editor-in-chief of the Babylon Bee.
I'm Ethan Nicole, and they call me the creative director.
Creative director, aka Photoshop slave.
Yeah, and I do some writing.
I deserve some credit for some writing.
Does a little bit of writing, but I edit it all and I make it beautiful.
And it all goes through Kyle.
So yeah, this might be weird for you if you're listening to this to actually hear audio when you're thinking of the Babylon B because we're usually not audio.
We're usually not talking out loud.
In fact, we rarely hear our own voices.
That's it.
You know, you may be wondering, what the heck?
Like, why am I listening to the Babylon B?
I could just read The Babylon B.
Yeah.
And you're also like, why isn't this some snarky headline and some satirical story?
So we have been wanting to do a Babylon B podcast for a while.
And we tried a lot of different methods.
We tried scripting out some satire.
We tried faking news.
We tried kind of like going halfway between scripted and kind of goofing off.
And we also tried some conversational stuff.
And the stuff where it was just us just kind of talking about stuff, just kind of like being ourselves, felt the best.
Not saying it is or that you're going to like it, but I don't know.
What do you think, Kyle?
This is a good way to introduce a podcast is to tell you that you probably won't like it.
My only thing, I just want to warn people, because I know that like, hey, I was a big fan of Mystery Science Theater growing up, and it's puppets, right?
The first time I saw Kevin Murphy, who played Tom Servo, the puppet gumball machine puppet, it threw me off because it was like suddenly like the vision of who I thought he was this whole like for years, it didn't quite match up.
And so it's jarring.
I just am trying to be sympathetic to like people listening that now they're hearing these like guys.
Like the reality is going to sink into them that like the Babylon B is a couple dorky guys in a garage.
Yeah, this is this is how the Babylon B ends.
This is how it goes down in flames.
People hear our voices and they realize we're just a couple of nerds and nobody ever goes to the Babylon B ever again.
We're going to shed all of our social media followers.
Everything's going to go down in flames.
Right.
So, but you get to witness the very end of the Babylon B with the one and the first episode and the last episode of the Babylon Bee podcast right now.
But I would remind you, if you are one of the people that is listening and hates this, that it is optional to listen to.
That's true.
You can just ignore it.
Yeah.
And just read the stories.
And just read the stories.
Yeah.
So what we want to do on the Babylon Bee podcast, rather than replicating what we have on the site, which is, you know, stories that are hilarious, hilarious, so very funny.
And are done in a satirical style.
We wanted to provide kind of a supplement to that.
And this is kind of a behind the scenes of what we do on the Babylon B. Behind the scenes with two E's.
You know, every time we say the syllable B on this podcast, we are going to make some kind of a pun.
Yeah.
So, yeah, but we're going to cover the week's news.
And this is a great way.
You know, I see a lot of people in the comments on like our Facebook page say that they get their news from the Babylon B. That's horrible.
Yeah.
Well, not that they think it's real, but that they don't know what a story is about.
Yeah, they don't really pay attention.
And then they see us joking about it, so then they go look it up.
Yeah, they see one of our satirical pieces and then they go, oh, something must have happened.
And then they go Google it.
I think there's a large amount of news that I wouldn't know about if I wasn't doing this too.
Yeah, I think I think the worst decision I made in my life was like, I'm going to take a job where now I have to read the news every day because it's just so depressing sometimes.
But yeah, we're going to cover the week's news, and we're going to do that by referencing some of our stories that we've written over the week.
And we're going to have a little bit of discussion about it.
You're going to get kind of the behind the scenes of how the Babylon Bee puts stuff together.
And yeah, hopefully a little bit of commentary on current events.
Yeah.
And yeah, we'll talk a little more later.
We're going to also do a main topic.
And I think that for their first episode, we're going to talk a little bit about the actual history of the bee.
And I'm new to the Babylon Bee compared to Kyle's been here from like day one.
But one thing I was telling him that I knew I would love listening to a Babylon Bee podcast back when I was just a fan of the bee because it was like we've made this comparison to me.
It was like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.
Like I didn't know what was going on in there.
It was like this big monolithic concrete box of silence that I didn't know.
It was just, there's just stories coming out.
You send them messages.
They don't reply back.
You don't know who it is.
And maybe that was smart.
I don't know.
But I think there's people that want to know what's going on behind the scenes and like some of the funny stories of angry male we get and just all just that stuff.
This is the golden ticket into the Babylon Bee satire factory.
Right.
Yeah.
So each episode, the way that it's going to work is we're going to banter for a couple of minutes, then we're going to go into our top stories of the week.
And then we're going to go into our topic of the week.
And after that, we have a special treat where we read you some hate mail from our inbox, which is always filled with hate mail.
All right.
Well, let's get to our first story.
So by the time this podcast comes out, this is going to be old news.
But Sports Illustrated this year in their swimsuit edition, they featured a woman in a burkini, a burka ini, a burka kini.
It's like a dad joke word where you like put you like put two words together and look at your kids like, eh, clever.
Yeah, it's funny.
The burkini thing.
It almost sounds like something that it almost sounds like something that some guy who's like really Islamophobic would have made up.
Oh, these Muslims, they're going to be coming here wearing burkinis.
Because he doesn't even know what the word is.
So the Babylon Bee article we did in reference to this was Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue features first ever Baptist model in floor length denim skirt.
And so if you've ever been in the if you've ever been in the Baptist community, especially like the independent fundamental Baptist movement, now Ethan said he wasn't really familiar.
Yeah, I didn't know about this.
When Kyle asked me to do the first Photoshop, I got it all wrong.
It's like a whole thing of like denim skirts and sneakers and polish shirts and like the pulled back hair and the ponytail.
It's all it's kind of all part of like modesty and purity culture, but just like taken to its extreme.
It like turned into a uniform.
Yeah.
That's always wonderful because the original thing that I based my photo, my first Photoshop on that got rejected that I spent way too much time on were the FLDS ladies that had like their hair in that crazy wave and they would have like a big fluffy dress on, but I made it a denim one because I like how weird they look.
But I wonder how that evolved and where it's similar, like a weird evolution that happens.
And it's like a whole family tree of purity culture and figure out where all the who copied from.
Will Baptists eventually look like the FLDS women if they just keep going down this path?
Yeah, the FLDS style evolved from the start of this Baptist back in the back in the 1950s.
Yeah.
History lesson.
You know, it's funny because you look at an article like this and we were kind of trying to figure out how what our angle would be to make fun of the Burkini, you know, because it's something where it's almost a parody in itself in a lot of ways.
Yeah, I saw the pictures and they're so weird.
Like it just looks like a woman in a burqa laying in the water.
Stunning and brave.
But it's kind of weird because it's like, it's something that like it's they're doing it for the fame.
Yeah.
They didn't sit around a table and be like, oh, we're going to take a hit on this one, but we've got to do this because we've got to be brave.
Some market analysts went out there and figured out that the issue would sell better if we included.
I think it's very similar to what happened with Gillette with their taking a stand, whatever it was with the masculinity thing.
I think that right now a lot of companies are struggling to get attention and creating some kind of outrage or taking a stance of some kind is what gets cuts through the noise on the internet.
Yeah.
And I think that's what it is.
You divide people in half and then that gets people to share your thing.
Even if they're mad about it, they're sharing it.
So I do think that there's a huge amount of motivation for companies to take stances right now because that's the way the internet works.
Yeah, I think you've said before that like social media, it's a really funny image to me.
Social media is like this room where everybody's just shouting.
Nothing Twitter is.
You think about what Twitter is, everybody's standing not looking each other in the eyes and they're just saying stuff and some people have bigger and louder megaphones than other people.
But it is like it's just a place where you're encouraged to just blurt out your thoughts no matter what anybody else is saying.
Yeah, and you have to have a take on everything.
And you want to cut through the noise.
And the way that some companies do that is by creating a buzz, creating a controversy.
Yeah, to cut through all that noise.
Yeah, for sure.
The other funny thing about this sports illustrator thing is that a lot of kind of Christians, it's kind of, I don't even know if this would be Christian necessarily, but kind of real conservative, like people that are really afraid that any day now Muslims are going to take over the country.
You know, obviously they had this major overreaction to this one sports illustrated picture, you know.
And so, uh, and the funny thing about the Christian response is that a lot of those people that, that are Christians also are, are, uh, um, sorry, you can edit this out.
I'm not editing anything.
This is a no editing show.
A lot of the people who, a lot of the Christians who are critical of it are like mad that this magazine that usually features women in skimpy bikinis is featuring a modest woman.
But it's because they like take it as a sign that Muslims are taking over or something?
Yeah, it's kind of this, it kind of all ties in with that like xenophobia and stuff.
So that's kind of what we wanted to do was do an article that kind of plays on both sides of that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I have to admit, there's articles we do where I think I don't get it, so I think no one's going to get it.
And I didn't really get it on this one.
But though, I think once the headline and the image were all right up there and all together, I suddenly got it.
Yeah.
And it went crazy, huge viral.
It was insane.
Yeah, you never questioned my wisdom, Ethan, when it comes to like Baptist culture because I get it, man.
Yeah, I guess, yeah, that's the one thing.
That's the one thing I won't question you on.
You didn't grow up like in any kind of purity culture or anything, so you didn't.
No, I grew up in really weird floozy culture.
My parents were kind of like strangely, they were hippie, weird, hippie, artsy people.
But then when I was a kid and they were married, they went to like a Nazarene community church or something.
And then when they divorced when I was like eight, my mom went Roman Catholic and my dad went Pentecostal.
So it was like two different worlds.
But there wasn't like, I live in the Northwest where it's cold.
We didn't do a lot of camp.
So I just wasn't out with.
That's the secret to being to being pure.
Just being the cold.
Just living a cold.
It's cold and rainy all the time.
I live in the arena of temptation.
I grew up in Southern California.
Yeah, so Cal.
So, yeah.
Well, I went to Young Life Camp, though.
That's where I came to Christ in the Young Life Camp as a high schooler.
And there is like no modesty rules at those camps.
Like, because the girls, it just, it's, I remember being just kind of like shocked by it.
I was like, oh, the cow, this is like, like an MTV special.
Was it like Bugs Bunny when the hearts come out of his eyes and the mouth drops all the way down to the floor and his tongue rolls?
Yeah, like a little 16-year-old.
Is that Bugs Bunny or was that Daffy Duck that did that?
I think they all did it.
All the cartoons, kind of the trope.
A recent story in the news was that Kenneth Copeland was cornered by Inside Edition on his use of private jets.
Kenneth Copeland owns his own airport.
That's not satire.
That's a real thing.
A whole airport?
He owns an airport, yes.
It's right across the street from his ministry headquarters.
He has Kenneth Copeland Airport.
Or it's Kenneth Copeland Ministries Airport or something like that.
And multiple jets.
And so this reporter cornered him and he gave the most crazy, like demon-possessed interview you've ever seen.
Yeah, it was really weird.
Very uncomfortable to watch.
Said on one of the, like, if you freeze frame it when he, he, at one point, he like points in the lady's face and his like eyes kind of cross and he's wiggling real hard.
And I, yeah, I remember tweeting that he looked like a creature from like Jim Henson's Labyrinth or something.
When like Jim Henson does like a human like a dark, like some kind of dark crystal thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The big nose.
Yeah.
Singer crab things that are crawling around.
Yeah.
Or hoggle from labyrinth.
There you go.
So let's go ahead and listen to this thing.
Play the clip.
Do you really believe that human beings are demons?
No, I do not.
And don't you ever say I did.
We wrestle not with flesh and blood, but principalities and powers.
Scary.
You need the visual, though.
I would look it up if I were you look it up too.
If you haven't seen it, I'm going to go take a shower and then we can keep talking about this.
So we did an article spoofing this.
Kenneth Copeland unveils new greener jet that runs on the souls of those deceived by the prosperity gospel.
That's very nice of him.
He really cares about the environment as well as his ministry.
So yeah, it's really crazy to me that people still fall for this stuff, but like there's like a whole culture of prosperity gospel stuff that's out there that we don't even, if you haven't been trapped in it, you don't really know how pervasive and deceitful it really can be.
Yeah, it's weird because I feel like, and it might be because my dad was into it when I was a kid, but it feels like it's not as popular now as it used to be.
And maybe it's not, but he's obviously still making good money.
And they're still out there.
Yeah, you know, maybe we should try his strategy.
Try that?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Deceiving people?
I kind of do.
I guess I don't even know how does he get his money.
Does he do like, he must do the crusades, kind of like Benny Hinn, where he goes to different countries and, you know, they pass around the world.
He gets in passing.
Yeah, I don't know how he does it.
So I wonder if most of it comes from people that are like sending him checks.
It always is shocking how much money they make.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Mind-blowing.
So, yeah, so at the Babylon B, there are certain topics that we will go just hardcore into.
I call it getting out the satire bazooka.
And one of those is the prosperity gospel.
We don't pull any punches when it comes to the prosperity gospel because I do think it is so dangerous and deadly.
Yeah, I think that's the thing that I found fascinating when I, you know, because there's a year or two there when I wasn't involved with the B and I was just kind of on the outside.
And I always found that fascinating that you guys took that stance because it was always kind of taboo to be that way within, at least in my circle, it was always like, well, you know, there are still our brothers and sisters in Christ and they're new, you know, they just have a different way and some people get saved through it or whatever.
And it's probably true.
There probably are some people that got saved through it, but that doesn't justify.
Yeah.
And one interesting thing about the Babylon Bee is just being satire and kind of being the satire that comes from within Christian culture, but isn't afraid to criticize things that are in that Christian culture.
One interesting thing is that we get to kind of just go in swinging and not really, we don't have to qualify everything.
Yeah, because it's more of a skit.
Like you're not actually punching anybody in the face.
doing a skit like it's it's a joke where uh i don't know it's hard to explain but like to me like instead of like we're not calling uh we're not writing a big think piece on copeland but we're just making an observation Right.
So if someone were to write a think piece on Copeland, they would have to put in all these qualifiers.
Now, I'm not saying this, and I'm not saying that.
And let's be careful in our criticism.
And at the Babylon B, you don't have to do that.
It's kind of nice to be able to go, we're criticizing this one aspect of this person's ministry, or we're criticizing this idea.
And that's what I like, is that it really does criticize ideas.
And what I really like is when, and this may not be the best example of it, but we've gotten Benny Hinn on a couple of them is when we're just pointing out the absurdity of the situation.
Right.
Like there's one where we just say, and this is before I was on, but one of my favorites is Benny Hinn spends the weekend healing children at the children's hospital with cancer or whatever.
And it's the idea that if he had the powers that he has, like, and he doesn't go out every weekend healing children, then he's evil.
Right.
Right.
And yeah, and that's one of the interesting things is that it just takes their ideas.
It takes their theology and it just takes it to its natural conclusion.
And it says, what if this was really true?
Then this is what would happen.
And it's without having to do this long think piece, without having to read, you know, 3,000 words on this person.
And sometimes that headline can cut to the truth a lot faster than a long article can.
Well, this week, President Trump's tariffs against Mexico, his threatened tariffs against Mexico are coming up into the news again.
I don't even really 100% know what's going on with it.
I always thought tariff was short for terrific.
Yes.
That's terrif.
It's just taxes with a fancier name.
But Trump was threatening Mexico with taxes, which actually we would pay, but he was threatening tariffs if they don't solve the immigration.
How would we pay it?
Like as the price on weed would go up or something?
Yeah.
Exactly.
The price on all along.
Coke.
Bottled Coke from Coke with real sugar.
And chips and salsa.
Well, that was our joke.
We actually reposted something that we posted last time something like this happened.
And it was Trump secures unlimited chips and salsa in Mexican trade deal.
And there's this great picture of Trump with his Trump's classic expression on his face where he's so confident.
I want to clarify that I have the right to laugh at that the way I did because it wasn't written by either of us.
And it's written by our friend Frank, who's our, we both sit here and revel at how funny Frank is, especially when it's Trump humor.
I call, you know, yeah, Frank's official title is senior writer.
But what we, I just consider him Trump, our Trump special.
Yeah, he is the Trump specialist for sure.
He can write Trump's voice so perfectly.
He nails it every time.
What I love about this one is that it, because a lot of times our joke is either making fun of people who are so anti-Trump they're insane or making fun of how insane Trump is.
Or the pro-Trump.
You know, a lot of it is the pro-Trump like people just write that kind of worships and we always have to take one side.
One thing I like about this one is I think that it got the reason the shares were so insane on it was because people that are pro-Trump loved it because it does kind of play into this idea that Trump is a brilliant deal maker.
And then anti-you know, it's just funny the idea that like, well, you know, you get that.
You go to a Mexican restaurant and free chips and salsa are always thrown in.
Trump is making America great again, one Mexican restaurant at a time.
Yeah.
You know, when satire can hit that sweet spot where you get people from both sides laughing, I think that's just, that's just beautiful.
That's the best.
That's a symphony.
Yeah, and one reason this does it is because Trump humor is really hard to do when you just say, Trump is stupid.
Yeah.
It doesn't really work.
You see that a lot on the late shows, Saturday Night Live.
That's non-stop.
Trump is dumb.
Yeah, he's so dumb.
Yeah.
And it's like, come on.
Yeah.
So we're in the political space.
So I do feel like you can't avoid making Trump jokes.
They do get very tiresome, I think.
It's such low-hanging fruit.
So I do think we try to come at it from a different angle as often as we can.
And then there is funny times where we are making Trump jokes and people are more offended by the Trump jokes than they are jokes that might be considered sacrilegious.
Yeah, well, when he's your savior, you're going to be upset.
Yeah, it's really interesting to see, you know, people ask us, like, how much hate mail do you get?
And a lot of the hate mail honestly comes from Trump supporters.
Yeah.
Like, I would say at least as much as hate mail from the left.
noticed that since trump that yeah there's a there's a very equal it's almost like a there's become a new snowflakey version of the right that is cropped up and they are just you're all a bunch of snowflakes but don't criticize president And they're the ones that always call people snowflakes, but yeah, they're the most touchy.
Yeah, they're very sensitive about Trump.
So here's how Frank nails, our writer, Frank, here's how he nails Trump's voice.
Yeah, you heard that right.
Unlimited, Trump gloated to the press.
The Mexicans wanted it to be one bowl of chips per customer and $1.25 for each bowl after that.
But I said, no way.
All the chips and salsa we can eat or I walk.
Sounds just like him.
He just absolutely nails it.
It's so funny.
Yeah, you know, I've said before that Trump is kind of like Michael Scott from the office and you've really got to get that aspect to him that he's really confident, but he's also really insecure in some ways.
I don't think he has a sincerity that Michael Scott has, though.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's an element there for sure, the awkward weirdness.
It's like that overconfidence that's really compensating for insecurity.
Yeah.
If you can nail that, it's just comedy gold.
He is great for humor, but he's also good for bad humor because it's so easy.
So you really have to be careful with Trump humor.
I think we have a lot of fun with the evangelical Trump support just because of the hilarious juxtaposition of him and Jesus Christ.
Like I get, like, I understand.
We'll get some angry mail for this.
Yeah.
If anybody listens to this podcast, my brother, yeah.
But I think on the one hand, I understand from a pragmatic perspective.
I totally get why you voted for him and why you would and why you would next time.
I totally get why and why it's like the right thing to do.
But it's the weirdness of like, there's that, you know, we spoofed this painting that was a picture of Trump signing legislation and there's like a ghost image of Jesus hovering over him with his hand on his hand, helping him write it as if the things Trump does are orchestrated by Jesus Christ or by God.
And to kind of mock that idea, I did a series of fake paintings because I can't actually paint, but they're just Photoshop jobs where Jesus is helping Trump do other things.
Like tweet.
Yeah.
Work on his golf swing.
Tweet Covife.
It's pronounced Cofefe.
Coffefe.
And the responses to those are so fascinating.
Like for one thing, like the overall, I don't think our audience thought it was funny.
But I saw a lot of people say, like, I would share this.
They're so funny, but my grandma will want to see these on commemorative plates.
Like, they'll think these are real.
Yeah, you know, the problem with that is like it's almost sacrilegious in that we've got these pictures of Jesus doing things with Trump.
And then you've got the people that really idolize Trump and they're offended.
So you're offending everybody.
It is, yeah.
It really is an offend everybody joke that like but it was totally worth it.
It was kind of yeah, I still stand by.
We should do sequels.
We need to do more Trump and Jesus just to take more people off.
I'd be really happy about that.
So if those sound funny to you and you missed them, try to look those up.
Or maybe we'll have show notes.
This is our first show.
So we don't know if we're going to have, we'll probably have show notes.
So we remember to link it.
We will.
Or search Trump and Jesus on Babylon B. Maybe you'll find it.
All right.
Today's main topic.
We're going to do kind of a main topic of the week every week that we do a podcast and that we're still alive and that we're still in the Babylon B.
So this is the only one.
This could be the only one.
You never know.
So I was thinking for the first one, this is my idea to get a history of the Babylon B because I think a lot of people don't know it.
There's a lot of criticisms or questions.
But just to kind of clarify how we got to where we are right now, the story.
And since I'm kind of the newer one to the B, Kyle's been here the whole time, I'm going to act more as the interviewer on this.
But in kind of, we're going to get to the bottom of the story of the Babylon B.
So Kyle, how did it all start?
What was the first time you heard the word Babylon B in your life and where were you?
Well, our good friend Adam Ford launched the Babylon B in March of 2016.
And for people that don't understand, it took me a long time to put these together.
The Adam 4D is Adam Ford.
The 4 is, I mean, you say it like the one number 4.
Yeah, Adam was running.
He's a webcomic guy.
He was a webcomic at adam4d.com.
Yeah.
And I used to say, hey, guys, have you, guy, have you seen a new Adam 4D comic?
You know, you're a webcomic nerd follower.
Yeah, I was an evangelical webcomic nerd.
I was a follower of the webcomic.
I bought some of his t-shirts.
So I was a fanboy.
Wow, serious fanboy.
I'm a Ford fanboy.
That's how we met.
You were a fanboy of my webcomic.
I was a fan of Axcoff.
But you were a fanboy of me.
We were fanboys of you.
I was a fanboy of you too.
That's unbeknownst to you.
Yes.
Yeah.
So, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
So in March 2016, Adam founded this website, The Babylon B. His idea was kind of, he liked The Onion.
He liked the idea of satire that's really cutting and incisive, but nobody was really doing it from a Christian worldview.
Nobody was doing it in a place that would criticize the left a lot, or at least criticize the left's ideas.
You get a lot of people that will do jokes about the left, but it tends to be softer.
Yeah, like you think the onion will go hard on the right, but they don't ever go hard on the left like that.
They make jokes about the left.
I've noticed recently they've gone a little harder on the left, but then they lost some followers.
Like you'll see people will get upset.
Oh, how dare you go after these guys?
It's like when they make fun of Trump.
Yeah, it's like when they make fun of Obama, it's like he's making fun of Trump.
How dare you?
But yeah, Adam noticed there wasn't anybody using the tool of satire in a way that really would criticize the left, would criticize things like atheism.
You didn't see that.
Yeah, jokes about atheism.
Nobody makes them.
There's so many great ones to make.
Yeah.
So he wanted to do kind of things that would tackle current events, politics, Christian stuff, church culture, false teachers, prosperity, gospel, the worship band, everything you can think of that topics that someone who isn't within Christian culture would never be able to write about.
Yeah.
Yeah, because like the jokes, I think we talked about this on a different podcast that we were on, but just that the jokes from outside the church about the church, there's like maybe three jokes you can tell, and they're all kind of the same angry, mean joke.
Yeah.
And you're usually like your presuppositions about how the whole religion works are usually wrong because you don't even get it.
You're like, you know, you're calling a Baptist church a place that has a priest.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The worst thing is to write a satire article, and then the people who actually know about that topic, you know, comment and they're like, actually, you know, you're like, oh, dang it.
And there's so many great jokes to tell at the church from within the church.
So I agree.
Like, there's so many jokes that the Bab Lomby was telling when I first found them.
Yeah.
That I was like, holy cow!
Like, and that's that's what makes a thing resonate.
Like, it's, it was singing my tune, like, it was telling jokes from in, like, almost felt like I thought I only thought I was only without that or whatever.
Making the jokes that we weren't making from at church, maybe, or maybe we were making the jokes like after Bible study together, but it was never out in an article or printed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, you know, something that was formative for me in comedy in my faith was I saw the old, uh, there was that old movie, I think it was Mandy Moore.
There was a movie called Saved.
Yep.
Do you remember that?
Yeah.
And it was just so bad.
Yeah.
Like, I know some people actually respect it, but I watched it as, you know, growing up in the youth group and stuff.
Yeah.
And it was like, oh, the people who wrote this have obviously never been to a church before in their lives.
And they have like contempt.
They have a sense of contempt.
Clearly trying to make the Christians look stupid the whole time.
And it's like, yeah, sometimes Christians can be stupid, but we're stupid in certain ways.
And it's not always the way that those kinds of media portray us.
It's the way that most of the time we joke about cults because cults are like a closed off thing.
So we just make fun of the way we see them from the outside.
It's very loony and one-dimensional.
And that's how you can see that that's kind of like the general secular world treats Christianity.
Right.
Because they don't, I think they don't realize that how many Christians there actually are everywhere.
And we're just respectful enough to not like constantly put in their faces, even though that's what we constantly get accused of.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You look at really good satire like This Is Spinal Tap or A Mighty Wind, any of those mockumentary style ones.
And it's clear that the people who are writing it like have a real respect for musical culture.
That's another reason I think we were talking about this that I think that I think Ricky Gervais is funny in the British office, but I think that one of the reasons Michael Scott, the Steve Carell version, is so much better.
It's a better character in my opinion.
It's because you can tell that he not just.
I think Ricky Gervais has a lot of hate for people and he plays out of that hate.
It does come off as more cynical.
Very cynical and he's playing a person that he despises.
Steve Carell, I think, is sympathizing with that guy and making him a human.
Yeah, and he may have even been that guy before.
You could see a big jump from the first season of The Office to later seasons where they were really emulating the Gervais ones.
And then it got a lot more empathetic with the Michael Scott character later on.
And I think you're right, that really improved it.
For the homeschoolers out there, the office is a TV show that was on the TV.
If you'd like to complain that we referenced secular TV shows, please send your emails to Ethan.
So anyway, Adam Ford, that was his idea through this.
Something that criticizes a lot of the crazy things that Christians do, but from within and in a way that's loving.
And it's clear that we have a love for Christianity and a love for the church.
Do you remember what the first Babylon Bee story of all time was?
It was, I'm actually not sure because they all went up like before the site even launched.
And then there were like 20 up.
Okay.
But the first article I wrote, I just got involved because I just started emailing Adam incessantly.
So after he launched it, you emailed him.
And he launched it on the first day and he said, I'm launching the Babylon B.
It's a Christian satire site.
If you want to write, go ahead and email me.
And he had a submissions thing and he got like a thousand emails on the first day.
Just crazy.
And it really opened the floodgates.
The response was immediate on social media that this was obviously a need that was being filled.
That people weren't like you were saying like a lot of it was almost a lightning rod, like people had these thoughts before yeah, but they never like.
They're like, oh my gosh, you too, you know.
This person on the other side of the country had the same experience in a megachurch and hide it, you know it's, and that was what was crazy when I was writing my early pieces.
My first one was uh uh, holy spirit unable to move through congregation as fog machine breaks, you know, and it's just a picture of this fog and it's oh, you know, the holy spirit couldn't do anything because the because the fog machine broke and uh, I just wrote it.
Just, you know from my own experiences growing up in a megachurch, and I wasn't really like thinking oh, everybody's gonna get this.
It was more like i'm just doing this for the love of writing it yeah, you know.
And then it just took off huge.
I think it was our first big, widely shared article, you know.
I think it got published the second day the site was up and uh, and it was immediately obvious okay, this thing's gonna work.
And so like, overnight it became Adam's uh, day job, you know wow, I think before he was uh, he was kind of thinking it would be a side project to supplement his comic, just to goof off.
Yeah yeah, Adam's kind of a.
Tell me a little about Adam.
I've never actually met him.
I've talked to him a bit online.
Seems like a real interesting character.
I'm not 100 sure he exists and people must wonder why he's not on this podcast.
Well I, you know, I did talk to him.
We, we are going to get him as a guest.
Oh, is he?
Yeah, so he's going to come along.
We're going to, we're going to have an interview with Adam for a rare it might be the first interview with Adam for audio interview format.
Yeah yeah, but uh yeah, Adam.
Adam uh is a is a guy who's really passionate about uh, truth.
He's really passionate about communicating truth.
Obviously he did that visually through comics and then he wanted to do that through the written word and satire.
You can see in his comics he really tries to be thoughtful and he really wants to get a message out there, clearly communicating in very uh cutting but respectful ways, which is one thing I love about the BEE.
It's uh, a lot of right-wing humor is mean, and i'm not saying the BEE is technically right-wing humor.
We, we tell more.
We do criticize the left a lot.
We can yeah, we criticize the left a lot, but a lot of people who tell jokes criticizing the left they're so mean about it like right now, Steve Uh Crowder's in the news about the way that he was criticizing Vox and he kept using all these you know unpleasant slurs and things it just kind of ruins it.
You know.
It's like on one hand he's saying I have a Christian faith and then he's talking like this and it's like I think he has a lot of wisdom when it, when he, when he actually does these change my, change my mind segments and talks to people.
And that's something I like about the BEE is we have those boundaries um, already in place and uh, I think people feel safer coming here for humor.
They know that we're going to push certain boundaries but other ones we're not going to push, right?
So uh, Adam honestly is like uh, just one of the most genuine people I know, and that he's like he, He wants no fame.
You know, he never really wanted his name to be attached to the Babylon Bee.
He doesn't care about anybody knowing who he is.
Yeah, that's really serious.
Like he could have used this.
Yeah.
Like we are.
Yeah, we just recently put it.
Our names were never on the B.
We just recently put a little about us blurb.
It's very small on the bottom of our page.
And we're asking Adam, do you want to, you know, we're going to put your name on this.
You founded this site.
And he's like, no, don't put my name on it.
It's just crazy because it's kind of refreshing when you see so many people that are like, you know, just out for internet fame.
And I always get the feeling in the evangelical culture, like people will stab you in the back in a second just to get a little, you know, 100 more followers or, you know, they'll dunk on you on Twitter so that you can get their little likes or retweets.
And Adam's not like that at all.
And he's he converted to Christianity older, right?
Yeah, not as a kid.
We'll get his full story when he comes on.
Okay, when he comes on, whatever he's willing to tell us.
Okay, so he grew up an atheist and just far from God and God saved him like hardcore.
Now, what about the accusation that the Babylon Bee has gotten too political?
How do you respond to that?
Do you think has it changed over time in that sense?
Yes and no.
I mean, the Babylon Bee definitely has leaned more into current events in politics, I think.
I think that's a fair criticism, especially there's people who just liked the church humor.
And then they're like, oh, all I'm seeing now is politics.
Yeah.
And so I think it's a fair criticism to say like, oh, I liked the other stuff.
Well, that's fine.
Yeah, I think even as a reader, there was days where I felt like I saw so much political stuff.
It did get me a little sour.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's kind of, you can't make jokes about worship leaders forever.
Yeah, there's a, yeah, it's true.
So I think we made a Skinny Jeans article like every year ago, we made our Skinny Jeans article.
And it was right after Adam.
I haven't finished with the history of the Babylon B, but I took the side over full time as editor-in-chief a little over a year ago.
And right around that time, Adam published a Skinny Jeans article.
And he goes, he messages me and says, well, this is a historical day.
This is the last Skinny Jeans article we are ever going to publish.
He felt like it was played out.
Yeah, in one sense, you had all this ripe, like low-hanging fruit for the picking.
Yeah, yeah.
And then you've got to kind of turn to current events a little bit.
Now, we always try to do things.
I don't really always see a distinction between like Christian satire and non-Christian satire.
Like we're writing satire, we're Christians, and we're doing it from a, we're doing it from a biblical worldview and a Christian perspective.
So if it happens to be about politics, it happens to be about a current event.
You know, we just write stuff that's about like family life and crazy things dads do and crazy things moms do and crazy things kids do.
And to me, that's all like very wholesome satire from a Christian perspective.
And sometimes, you know, even when you see satire from the left, a lot of times you don't see that because they don't have so much of a positive view of the family.
You know, you'll see that a lot of times where it tends to come from a different angle.
So yeah, I mean, on the one hand, yeah, I can see that.
On the other hand, we're actually just publishing a lot more content in general.
Yeah.
You know, we used to do maybe three articles a day.
Now we're doing six, seven, sometimes eight.
And so if we do three Christian pieces and five political pieces, well, guess which one, guess which articles everybody shares?
Yeah, that's the thing.
I've noticed as I come on board, yeah, is that the political ones get way more shares.
Part of the reason is that the B has acquired some fans who are very influential and who are mainly in it.
They like, I think the B has become a conservative comedian outlet in a way.
Like we put out jokes that conservatives like.
And so we have a lot of conservative people with big followings who share our stuff.
And that makes those stories go way more viral.
So if you're not seeking out our stories each day, going to our page and reading through all of them, you're probably mainly going to see the political ones because those are the ones that just get the most traffic.
Yeah, those are just the ones that get shared virally.
So yeah, so I would say if you look at the percentage, it's probably more political.
If you look at the absolute number of stories that we're publishing, though, we're probably publishing about the same amount of general It's about half and half.
Yeah.
But one of the things that does happen is you don't generally get a like, oh my gosh, something happened with worship leaders today.
We have to write a worship leader story.
But political, you may have three church humor articles and three political articles or whatever, or maybe a couple dads stepping on Lego articles.
But then suddenly something pops into the news today and we got to make a joke about it.
It's a loud noise.
There's a loud truck driving by.
We're in a garage right now.
And it's very hot.
It's very hot in this garage.
Yeah, the Christian news is so slow.
It's like, oh, the Southern Baptists are meeting this week.
Yeah.
And nobody cares except for the Southern Baptists.
Whereas current events that happen nationally, it's like people, people, it's something that you can really hook into in comedy because everybody knows what's happening.
And sometimes what makes a joke funny is how quick you are to throw it out there.
Yeah, that's one huge problem with Twitter.
This is kind of off topic, but with Twitter and meme pages and like as soon as something happens, every joke's been told within five minutes.
So you really do have to come from a unique perspective to make it work.
So just finishing up the history of the Babylon B.
Yeah, so how'd you actually become like editor-in-chief?
Eventually he said, oh, Kyle, you are now the head writer of the Babylon B. How far in was that?
Three or four months, I think.
Okay.
Kind of head writer.
And how often are you writing before that?
I kept writing the same.
He just said, I'm going to name you head writers.
You got named.
So from the beginning, you were writing multiple articles a day?
I was emailing in three or four articles a day.
You're a professional comedian at this point.
I was working full-time in the supply side of the construction industry, which means I sold stuff to construction workers.
Fire hydrants and stuff.
Fire hydrants pipeline.
It was underground pipeline for anyone who knows the industry and cares.
Fascinating.
Let's talk more about that.
I think there's a scene in the office where Jim says that if he ever quits the paper industry, he'll have all this useless knowledge just bouncing around in this.
That's how I am.
I still have part numbers in my head that I'll never use again.
Never know.
Unless the Babylon B crashes and burns, then I can.
Yeah, or the apocalypse or something have to rebuild society.
Yeah, but even then, what good is the part number?
I mean, I guess that's true.
Post-apocalyptic world.
So about a year in, I flew out and met Adam.
We wrote a book, How to Be a Perfect Christian, that got published through Waterbrook Multnomah, and that was a lot of fun.
That really, I think, boosted the site and got us a lot of publicity.
But other than that, I mean, it was just growing anyway.
It was all viral.
We never paid for ads.
We never paid for any publicity.
It was just overnight sensation and never stopped growing, which was just a huge blessing.
And then a year after that, almost exactly, I quit my job and started working full-time.
A man named Seth Dylan, who we will have on the podcast soon, bought the website.
He's this cigar-smoking rich guy that lives in a giant penthouse.
And he's always sitting with his back to us, and he has a cat in his lap.
And then he's like, he owns the Babylon B. Or it's like George's boss in Seinfeld.
Yeah.
He's a silhouette.
Sir David's voice or whatever.
So yeah, Seth bought the site.
For the homeschoolers, Seinfeld is a TV show that's on TV.
Any complaints about the secular TV show reference, please email them to Ethan.
So Seth bought the site and that gave us enough funding basically to hire me on full time.
And Adam wanted to get out of it because he moved on to his next project, which is called Christian Daily Reporter, kind of a drudge reportee sort of visual.
He's just like hijacking.
First, he hijacked the onion for Christ and now he's hijacking the drudge report for Christ.
You know, we Christian, we're running out of ideas to take from secular culture, man.
Yeah.
What's next?
What's he going to get next?
Yeah, I don't know.
He's too genius.
I can't get a step ahead of him.
Yeah, yeah.
He'll make some Christian video games or something.
That's what we'll do.
But yeah, he went off and did a kind of a news aggregator for Christians.
And then I've been running the site ever since.
And we've just been growing.
We've been able to hire some part-time contributors.
And just recently, we brought Ethan on full-time as our creative director.
Yeah, so like a picture, this isn't me interviewing.
This is me just like now that I'm inside and I see how it works.
Kind of a picture of how it works at the B is that there is a group of headline pitchers, really.
Like we have a group of people that around actively, what is it, like maybe like 12 to 20 people that just are pitching constantly.
Yeah.
So we kind of pick the best from that.
We also have the headline forum on the website.
If you're a subscriber, you can actually go in there and you can pitch headlines and get them voted up and you might actually get your article published.
So that's through the paid subscription service.
And then, in generally, I mean, a day looks like, you know, Kyle's writing most of the articles.
He's just, he's a machine.
I write a few here and there.
I try to write it one or two a day at least, but then I also try to get a lot of the Photoshops done.
So I'll just go through and try to find visuals for everything, especially more complicated.
At this point, now that we have, yeah, the first, you know, it's funny, it's the first few years of the site, first couple years of the site, people kind of assumed it was this professional operation because it's like a website with headlines and pictures.
You know, and people see that and they're like, oh, it's a real thing.
You know, people think it's real news or they just think it's like this office that's running all this stuff.
Yeah.
And it was basically Adam working out of his upstairs room and me emailing articles into him in the morning.
That was like the entire operation.
So now it's a little bit more of an assembly.
Now it's huge.
Now it's this massive corporation.
Yeah.
We're in a garage.
Yeah.
So we are in a garage right now.
Literally.
But now it's a little bit more of an assembly line.
Well, if there's a good idea in the forum or the Facebook group, we'll get it put up in a drafts folder.
Ethan will, it'll catch Ethan's eye.
He'll do a Photoshop for it.
I might write the copy.
We'll get it up on the site and get it published.
So it's a little bit more organized now, I think.
Still not super organized.
Yeah.
Still a little crazy, but cool.
So that's the Babylon B, you know?
That's the story, huh?
The next steps for us, obviously, is we're launching this podcast and we're trying to break into new types of content.
We've talked about doing video, audio.
That's a question everybody's always asking us.
When are you going to do video content?
Yeah.
Yeah, we're still looking at that because it's so much more work than writing an article, but we're interested in it.
So if there's any video people out there who have like amazing resources.
Or if there's anybody who wants to give us like a six-figure movie deal, you know, or no, sorry, seven-figure movie deal, give us a call.
All right.
So that was our first podcast.
What do you think, Kyle?
How'd we do?
It was very good.
But you know what?
One thing's missing.
We need to read some hate mail.
Oh, yes.
We're picking from the top of the pile the greatest hate mail we've gotten.
Every week we're going to read you some hate mail.
This hate mail was in reference to a piece we did that was making fun of Donald Trump's wall on the southern border.
So here it is.
I see you guys have turned into liberal trash.
Go die.
It's all no, it's not over.
He says, go die.
Go die.
It's also sad you don't even support law enforcement.
Hope you die in a house fire.
I think what we need to do with that is we need to get my buddy Dave, who's an amazing voiceover guy.
You heard him at the beginning of the show, is to do a dramatic reenactment of that for us.
I think we absolutely need to do that.
Okay, let's do it right now.
I see you guys have turned into liberal trash.
Go die.
It's also sad you don't even support law enforcement.
Hope you die.
The house fire.
And that was Dave D'Andrea.
That was perfection.
That really brought it to life.
You know what I really like is if you kind of outline, if you grammatically outline the email, it's like, you guys have turned into liberal trash.
Therefore, criticized the wall.
Therefore, you should go die.
I like that it's go die.
It's not like die.
Like, you have to go somewhere to die.
So when we're leave here, don't leave your corpse here.
But take it somewhere else.
I like that you can really feel his rage and then he's like, go die.
And then he's like adding on, wait a minute.
You don't even support law enforcement.
Go die in a house fire.
Like it's just adding, he's just piling on and on.
We love our fans.
You know, this really makes it all worth it.
All right.
Well, that is the show for this first episode of the Babylon Bee.
What we're going to be doing, because we have a subscription service now to actually support what we're doing financially and to give you guys a little extra.
You're not looking get rid of ads on the website and be part of our headline forum, but if you subscribe, you can hear the bonus content we're going to be putting out.
We're going to talk about a little more.
We're going to do a couple more stories, one or two more stories, and we're going to do some, we're going to answer some questions that people have sent us.
Yeah, so if you go to babylonbee.com slash plans, you can check out all of our subscription options.
And even from the base level up, $5 a month or more, you will get access to bonus content every week.
All right.
So yeah, we're going to do our first bonus content right after this.
And subscribers alone will get to hear it.
So you guys get to feel really special.
But beyond that, I think that's the show.
Yeah.
So just remember, just like Jesus said, go forth and own the libs.