Show Notes! Kyle and Ethan are joined by Babylon Bee CEO, Seth Dillon to discuss the controversy surrounding Snopes and their recent and past coverage of the Babylon Bee. Relevant links: Seth Dillon appears on Fox News! https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1157352307408941056 Adam Ford's Tweet-thread (1:00) Introductory interview with Seth Dillon Stories of the Week (9:44) Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-Fil-A Employee Told Her To Go Back To Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said 'My Pleasure' (18:25) Democrats Demand Kavanaugh Submit To DNA Test To Prove He's Not Actually Hitler (27:15) Thanks To New Laws, VeggieTales Finally Introduces New Cannabis Character (35:39) MAIN TOPIC: Snopes! (if you jump here, be warned that we cover this topic throughout the entire episode as well) (51:16) Hate Mail (1:00:36) Subscriber Exclusive Segment (1:01:24) Facebook Hires Drax The Destroyer To Distinguish Between Satire, Fake News (1:06:13) Trump Spends Afternoon Shouting From White House Balcony During Twitter Outage (1:12:15) Subscriber update and what we are working on Become a paid subscriber! at https://babylonbee.com/plans
In a world of fake news, this is news you can trust.
100 billion times better than Fox News and CNN put together.
You're listening to the Babylon Bee with your hosts, Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicole.
Yes, this is the Babylon Bee podcast.
This is Kyle Mann.
And this is Ethan Nicole.
And today we're joined by a very special person, very near and dear to our hearts because he signs our paychecks.
Yes.
And his name is Seth Dylan, and he's the CEO of the Babylon Bee.
Thanks for coming on with us, Seth.
Thanks for having me on, guys.
He's out there in beautiful Florida, the land of milk, milk, and curdled milk out in the humidity and slow driving.
The land of humidity is what I think of it as.
Are you currently petting your cat in your dark chair in your office right now?
What kind of cat is it?
I'm currently just sitting here wondering how on episode eight, you're already scraping the bottom of the barrel having me on the show.
Yeah, it's all over.
We want to do crazy things nobody does, and that's talk to your boss on a podcast.
So we're doing crazy stuff.
All right.
Well, just real quickly, we're going to introduce Seth before we get started today.
This is going to be a fun episode because we're going to talk about Snopes.
And we were in the middle of a little bit of a controversy with Snopes, but we've dealt with Snopes for years on different things like fact checks.
We've made fun of them in some satirical articles before.
A few.
Just a few.
And it's kind of a hot topic right now.
So it's going to be a good conversation talking about Snopes and all the different angles on that.
But let's talk to Seth real quick.
Seth, how did you get involved with the Babylon Bee?
Good question.
It was almost accidental.
I mean, I reached out to Adam initially just kind of seeing if he was looking for investors because I saw the B as kind of this ascendant property that was just taking off.
It was super popular.
I loved it.
The quality of the content was really good.
So I was really interested in getting involved really just as a passive investor.
I didn't want to be at the helm of it.
I wasn't even thinking of that.
And when I reached out to Adam, he was in the middle of a deal with somebody else.
He was looking to sell it to somebody else.
He wasn't really looking for investors.
And so the conversation didn't really go anywhere.
But when that deal didn't work out, he reached.
You saved him.
That's a good angle.
He was going to sell it to the devil.
And then you stopped him.
Seth saved us.
Yeah.
Continue.
What ended up happening was he reached back out to me, said that deal didn't work out, and he wanted to resume the talk.
So when we met each other and we talked more through it, and it became apparent that we were still going to have you, Kyle, kind of running the show from the content side, and I would just have to really be driving the business end of things.
It seemed like it made a lot of sense.
I mean, we were just a really good fit from a lot of different perspectives in terms of our ideology and what we wanted for the B.
I think it was really encouraging to Adam that when I told him, look, if I end up taking this thing over and it falls into my lap and I'm responsible for it, I really don't want to change it.
I don't want to change its voice.
I don't want to be dictating what should and shouldn't be published.
I want to let it be what it is.
It's grown and become popular and it's awesome just the way it is.
And I just want to help it grow more, not really change it.
So he appreciated that.
And so I think we had a lot of alignment there and we were able to work out a deal.
He wanted to pull the rip cord before Snopes undid us.
And it's a wise move on his part.
So do you miss Adam Ford?
We all miss Adam Ford.
You know what?
Don't miss, though, is when he, you know, he pokes out his head and resurfaces and comes to bat for us when we need him.
That's kind of nice.
He's like, he's like an Avenger, but on Twitter.
So, why did you ruin the Babylon B and turn it into a political satire site?
You know, that's the big misconception, right?
And it is a misconception.
I think people need to understand that.
And Adam has actually addressed that.
Follow Adam.
If you have questions about whether or not the B has always been political, go follow him because he's talked about this before and addressed that.
And it was political from day one, right?
So it's funny, though, because I'm not sure what it is, what it is that's giving people that impression that, oh, things are different since the leadership changed.
It's like they were looking for it to be different.
They wanted to be different.
I mean, you can speak to this, Kyle.
How many times have I told you, you've got to run with this story?
You've got to suppress this story, or you're doing too many, you're doing too many hits on conservatives.
You've got to back off.
Does that ever happen?
Well, I mean, you know, you do beat me when I make fun of Trump.
But it's with a leather belt.
But other than that, every morning, you know, Seth flies out to California in his private gym.
The word is discipline.
He takes his whip and he starts whipping me, you know, and he's like, why aren't you doing more political articles?
I want to know, I mean, because a lot of this stuff we've talked about, but Seth, because I don't know a whole lot about you and I don't know how much, because you're probably like a lot of people that are doing well, you're very mysterious.
But like, I know that you're younger than I am and you had enough money to buy the Babylon B.
And I'm just like curious, like, what's your background?
Like, how did you get, what's your, like, do you have a success story or did like your parents have a bunch of money in your lap and you're just a rich kid?
Or what's your story?
You're assuming the Babylon B was expensive.
It was more than I could afford.
It was a $5 bill.
$5 billion.
How many pieces of silver?
$350.
How much do fake news websites really cost?
Well, I have a background in internet marketing.
That was what I got into when I graduated college back in this issue.
College, college.
That's a secret, man.
Nobody told me you were supposed to go to college.
Dang it.
I went to college.
So, yeah, I got into the internet marketing world.
And I tell people when young people are asking me what they should do or what field they should get into, there's a lot of talk about STEM degrees and stuff like that.
But man, there is so much opportunity in web development, graphic design, internet marketing.
If you know any or all of those things, you can really do well.
So there's just so much opportunity.
So getting into the internet marketing world, I learned a bunch about different industries, businesses.
I had clients in every field imaginable.
So I kind of learned what works and what doesn't with search marketing.
And so I had some ideas for businesses that I wanted to try.
I just needed somebody on the development side to kind of make it a reality.
So my brother and I partnered together back in about 2012 now and just became internet entrepreneurs, just building things, selling them, marketing them, monetizing them, investing in other properties.
So we've been building up a portfolio of stuff, either our own properties or investments over the years.
And so, yeah, I mean, the success is just due to the fact that I had that background that gave me some insight into what would work and what wouldn't.
And then we just kind of put that to work on our own stuff.
Awesome.
Well, I was hoping for more of like a crazier story.
We're like, you found a giant suitcase of money and you were a struggling.
You were a struggling high school teacher, and you turned to a life of cooking meth.
We should cut that whole thing and let's write a new story.
We're going to change it.
We're the writers here.
We were the writers.
All right.
Yeah, we can go back and edit that if that was too boring for you guys.
I could make up something fantastic.
So, where's your money been?
Like, where do you dive into your pile of gold coins every morning?
Swim around.
I prefer cash.
It's soft.
Do you wear a speedo or do you skinny dip?
We're going to need to put another one of those content warnings at the beginning of this episode now.
The money is so dirty.
I'm fully clothed when I swim in my money.
Okay, well, that gives everybody kind of a basic idea of who Seth is.
And that'll let us dive into our topic and our stories this week.
So this week we're going to be talking a lot about.
You got to break it so that I can do the sound.
Oh.
And now let's do our weekly stories.
Well, but I will do that.
Shortly.
Oh, okay.
Oh, you're going to do it?
Okay.
Well, I was going to lead it into it.
You look like you were going in.
I was going to lead into it, man.
Okay, you try again.
I'm not editing this out.
You go.
So we have a lot of stories this week that have to do with Snopes, either because Snopes fact-checked them or because they're about Snopes or because they mentioned Snopes or something like that.
And then we're going to have a topic of the week where we talk about the importance of what we do and why we have a few concerns with Snopes and the way that other fact-checkers will deal with us.
So it'll be a good episode, we think.
So let's go ahead and dive into our stories of the week.
Every week, there are stories.
These are some of them.
All right.
Yeah, this is the Snope episode.
I don't know if we need a good name for it.
We're going to talk about this is all we're getting all Snopey on this episode.
Yeah.
All right.
So first story.
I'm going to let you take it, Kyle.
First story of the week.
This is the big one this week.
The big one.
This is the controversy.
The controversy.
That's what those smart people say.
Georgia lawmaker claims Chick-fil-A employee told her to go back to her country.
Later clarifies, he actually said, my pleasure.
Now, we need to, we actually need to issue a retraction on this story because Snopes informed us it was false.
That's terrible.
So we picked this story to talk about as one of the stories of the week, and then we got a Snopes fact check.
So we need to apologize.
We need to issue a public apology for the fact that we just published a false story.
False story.
A joke that isn't true and based on a fact.
So we're very sorry.
We're very repentant.
So this story is based on the Georgia lawmaker.
She has a name, I assume, but I. Erica Thomas, I think.
They live the blonde.
Yeah.
And she was at a grocery store and she claimed that this guy said all this stuff to her and then she kind of kept retracting her story more and more as like evidence carried the guy.
The guy popped back up and came in the news and said what he said.
And apparently she was in like the 10 items or less line and she had more items and he was all mad about that or something.
Yeah, something like that.
Yeah, so she said that he told her that this was in the.
This was in the wake of Trump telling, like he's like, go back, like she took, go back to your country as, go to the other line where people with a bunch of stuff can go.
That's not 15 items or less.
Yeah, this was in the wake of Trump telling the, the squad or whatever to go back to their countries.
And then everybody chanting, send them back.
And then she adds you know, lighter fluid to the fire and says yeah, this guy told me to go back to my country.
And then, and then media ran with it, for I don't know, I mean days.
How long was it until the?
Uh, until it came, the real story came out?
I was on vacation during this, so I got bits and pieces.
I was surrounded by Seth you're the one, you're the one who cares about politics.
So what, uh?
I mean the media ran.
I mean she, the media was running with it.
She walked back her comments pretty shortly after she initially made them, though I think it was just within a day or two.
Okay, but I mean, Snopes wasn't even aware that she had walked back her comments at least they claimed not to be, because the original version of the story that they ran with omitted that fact.
So I don't think that got picked up.
Yeah, and that was the basis of the whole.
Yeah, that was the basis of the whole joke and that that was.
That was.
The craziest part to me is that Snopes fact-checked our joke about it without even mentioning that her claim, you know, and they never fact-checked her claim.
Yeah right, there was a real story.
Right and they are usually more thorough than that.
I have to say this this, this Snopes seems sloppier than past Snopes.
They usually get a little into a little more detail.
This one there.
It seemed like they got someone more opinionated because the Snopes piece on this one was the one that kind of led to all the controversy this week.
You guys know more about this than I do because, once again, I was on vacation while this all happened.
But um, the piece starts right off by saying that the Babylon be.
What do they say?
They say we're not sure this is it's.
It's all funny with a company that claims to be a fact-checking source.
They say this, we're not sure of fanning the flames of controversy and muddying the details of a news story.
Classify an article as satire.
Well, it's like that's a very ambiguous statement for a fact checker.
Yeah, if you're not.
If you're not sure what satire is yeah, we're not.
Why are you the fact checking?
Uh, shouldn't you have your definitions worked out?
Well, I think she was fanning the flames of a controversy by making up something um, that didn't necessarily happen the way that she originally claimed that it did.
I mean yeah, that was, that was really the story that should have been debunked.
Right was the initial news story that everybody ran with that ended up not being exactly as it as it as it was.
But I mean, look from my perspective.
Uh, I don't really have a problem with Snopes fact-checking our content.
I don't think you guys do either.
I mean, it's it right if we have, if we have, an article that goes really viral and gets exposed to a broader audience than just our general readership that usually sees our stuff, you're gonna have people who are confused that don't know the source.
Um, that'll happen sometimes, especially with a story that kind of rides on the back of the truth.
A little bit satire oftentimes is just, you know, You know, it's a step further than the truth, but in the direction the truth was already pointing, right?
That's oftentimes what satire pieces are like.
So you're bound to have some confusion with stuff like that.
And it's fine, in my view, if Snopes goes out there and says, hey, guys, look, this story came from this site called The Babylon Bee, which is a well-known satire publication.
Therefore, this story doesn't need to be taken seriously.
It's satire.
It's parody.
Look at the source.
That's the extent to which an investigation needs to go to determine if the story is misleading fake news or some kind of parody or whatever.
Just look at the source.
I mean, if an article comes from the onion, you don't have to wonder whether it's satire.
It came from the onion.
And that's a popular satire site.
So same thing goes for us.
And what I've recommended to Snopes in the past is that they add to their fact-checking categories.
They have these, what do you call it, the rating system that they have, right?
They can rate it false mixture.
The categories or whatever.
Legend.
Yeah, they have a legend rating.
I don't know that I've really seen that used much.
But what they need is a satire article.
If they had a satire rating, they could just stamp our stuff as satire and then move on, call it a day.
And you don't have to get into our motives and what we were trying to accomplish with it and raise all of those questions.
None of that is necessary.
They know that.
I'm not sure what their aims are here.
I'm not going to guess at them, but it would be that simple in my mind.
Yeah, I mean, and a lot of the distinction between satire and fake news is like the intent.
And there are sites out there that just try to capitalize on outrage by publishing fake stories.
They come up with the most outrageous thing that they think they can get your grandma to believe something horrible that Hillary Clinton did.
Hillary Clinton sacrificed a goat on, you know, or whatever.
And they try to, and they just pass it.
There's no point.
There's no intent.
There's nothing that it's trying, there's no point that it's trying to make.
It's just trying to trick people.
And I could see it being a gray area if we weren't a well-known satire site.
But when it's just, I mean, we're one of the most well-known satire sites, you know, in the country.
So it's kind of like, you know, why don't you just stamp it as satire?
Yeah, a lot easier.
And I think we can get a lot.
I mean, if our main topic is going to be Snopes and fact-checking, we can save similars for that portion of the show.
Is there anything else to say about this specific story?
I'll just say that it's a clear, you know, there's a big difference between our audience and then when it goes viral and some other people might mistake it because our audience immediately recognizes, oh, this is a Chick-fil-A joke on the Babylon B.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, look, it's my pleasure.
That's funny because Chick-fil-A employees say my pleasure.
You know, and then there's layers on this joke where it's you have to kind of get the Chick-fil-A joke.
You have to know about this specific story about this lawmaker lady.
And you also have to know that she retracted her statement.
Like, you have to know a lot of stuff to get the joke, I think.
I agree.
And so it actually, I can see how it confused some people if you're not up on stuff.
It was funny.
The first headline of mine that I had pitched to you guys that you ran with that goddamn story.
Oh, yeah.
The House Democrats draft legislation that would make it a hate crime to eat at Chick-fil-A.
That one, it kind of took off a little bit and it got snoped and they rated that one false.
And obviously it's a ridiculous premise.
But it's believable in the sense that Democrats hate Chick-fil-A so much.
Why not draft some legislation that would make it illegal?
I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's part of the struggle of writing satire is that you're just taking something to its logical conclusion.
You know, so people are like, well, in 10 years, maybe this could be true.
And it has that ring of truth to it.
Right.
All right.
Well, for our second story.
So these stories are all Snope attacks.
These are all ones Snopes jumped on.
And this one is back from the days of Kavanaugh, the justice, when they were trying to get him into the Supreme Court and things were getting crazy with him.
We did this story.
Democrats demand Kavanaugh submit to DNA test to prove he's not actually Hitler.
So apparently there were people that were worried that this was real, that they really wanted him to submit to a DNA test to prove that he wasn't literally Hitler.
And so I've always wondered that, you know, how there's these DNA tests you can take with ancestry.com and stuff, and you can find out how much Native American you are and how Irish you are and all that stuff.
How white you are.
Yeah, how white you are.
Like what if they couldn't?
How much of a victim you are?
Yeah, like if you partner with like the liberal, like liberal, some liberal organization, and they could find out how guilty you are.
Like just like divide up everything and decide, like find how much slave owner you are and how much everything you are in your past.
Like all the way back to like even during caveman days, if you like hit people with your club, just like try to get your best ratio like number.
Cavemen are a myth.
Yeah, yeah.
What a silly story, though.
Like doesn't this one, isn't this one kind of across that line?
It's kind of on the face of it, it's so absurd.
Does it really need to be fact-checked?
Really?
I mean, who are the people?
You know, sometimes what Snopes tries to do is identify people who were kind of confused by the joke, right?
And they'll snapshot their comments and highlight their comments.
And they're using those comments to justify their fact check, right?
I don't know.
I haven't looked at this one recently.
Did they have examples of people being confused by this one?
I don't recall.
I don't know.
I have the link here, but I didn't do prep that deep.
I do not recall.
Some readers were taken in by a satirical website story that Democrats wanted the Supreme Court nominee to go undergo DNA testing.
I'm good at reading lines.
Some people were taken in.
They were taken in.
We got them.
They were seduced.
We got them.
I wonder that, though.
I mean, Frank was tweeting about this.
We have to mention Frank or he won't listen.
Yeah.
He only listens to him.
The first big run-in we had with Snopes was with that CNN purchases industrial size washing machine to spin the news before publication.
And he's asking the question, you know, who really bought that as like a real news story?
Could you point out to one person that believed that this is actually true?
Yeah.
Where is that person?
Who are they?
Yeah, I want to meet them.
And I mean, if there is someone out there who thought that CNN was spinning news in a washing machine, like, I mean, can we just leave them to their own fate?
Do we have to change everything for that guy?
Like, come on.
That's going to be, that's going to be a lot of work.
Yeah, they don't have examples of people who were confused, but they claim that there were some who were taken in.
It is weird to me that it's like, it's the absolute worst.
Like, like, Snopes is acting like they're this defender of truth.
Like, it's the absolute worst possible thing if someone takes a joke seriously.
Like, haven't people been taking jokes seriously since the dawn of time?
You know, people, like.
Isn't that the worst person you can be?
The guy who sits there being really serious and everybody's joking about it.
Actually, false.
Actually, false information.
The chicken did not cross the road.
You know, like, that's.
Chickens are not sentient.
And if you could look back at, like, I might be wrong on this, but I think people got upset at Jonathan Swift's modest proposal.
You know, one of the early examples of satire in the English language.
You know, I'm sure a ton of people read that and were like, what?
We're supposed to eat babies?
You know, this is crazy.
How do you fill in what that is for people that don't know?
Not me.
Oh, it's about eating babies.
Idiots.
It's an uplifting, it's an uplifting inspirational he just jokes about eating babies.
Joke about eating babies.
Yeah, my.
When was that made?
It was.
Hold on.
I'm going to swiftly Google so I sound smart.
It's called A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.
What is the year on this?
And 1729.
Oh, wow.
So Jonathan Swift wrote this essay and it was about how to solve the problem of all these poor people.
And the joke, and his ongoing joke in this essay is that they should sell their poor should sell their children as food for rich people.
And then they won't be poor anymore.
And it's not labeled as satire.
It's like it's just straight-faced.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's actually really funny.
It's really worth a read.
But I always point to that when people will say, like, you know, people might take you seriously, or you need to label it as satire.
Or people will say, you shouldn't joke, you shouldn't write satire about serious topics.
Like, that's what satire has always been used for.
Yeah.
And even kind of going back to what Michael Mouse was talking about last episode, there's a part of it that's about how it causes the audience to react in that trolling way he was talking about.
But when you see the comments that come up on some of the stories we post, it's fascinating to see the, it's almost like a Rorschach test.
It brings out all this stuff.
It wasn't anywhere in the story.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But anyway.
All right.
So, um, but yeah, Kavanaugh, everything is crazy during the Kavanaugh hearings.
That's insane.
So this wasn't true.
He didn't actually.
He didn't actually.
I don't know if they took the test or not.
To prove he's not actually Hitler.
Literally Hitler.
I do like how Kavanaugh hasn't really been super conservative on the court.
Yeah.
After all that, like people were acting like he was going to turn the customer into some dystopian nightmare.
It was insane.
He's just been kind of a middle of the road judge so far.
It was crazy.
Yeah, Ginsburg has complimented him recently, hasn't she?
Yeah, she said he's a nice guy.
She was just trying to prove she's still alive by making a public statement.
She has to come out and say a few words every month.
That's too far.
That's too far.
Too far, Seth.
That's not something you can joke about.
Kyle's still the editor-in-chief here.
The other thing to say there, too, Ethan, is satire is not always making light of something.
There can be a joke to what you're saying, but the issue that you're addressing isn't necessarily a joke.
And people oftentimes will confuse the fact that you're making a joke with what you're joking about and what you're trying to accomplish with the joke.
And sometimes what you're trying to accomplish is a very serious argument or exposing a serious flaw in someone else's reasoning or a serious moral shortcoming or something of that nature.
And you're using a joke to do it, but you're not making a joke of whatever the serious thing is.
Yes.
Yeah, I'd say if there's one common trait among the Babylon B writers is that we all love jokes and humor.
Like that's a big part of who we are and what we do.
But I think that the common trait that's even more at the forefront for all of us that I know is we really care about ideas and clarity and truth.
And humor seems to be our best way to communicate that stuff.
And that's not a common trait in our culture.
Like finding people that really do care about the truth being clear and ideas having consequences.
And, you know, if this is your philosophy or your way of, if you say idea A leads to idea B, you know, like a lot of people don't want to connect the dots like that.
And I think that I know the guys that I know who write for the B, we all, that stuff's really important to us.
And so we like to, you just want to walk up to somebody in the street and say, like, hey, if you believe this, that leads to this.
You know, and you're just kind of a jerk if you do that.
But the Babylon B is a great way to do that, to like jump out and go, this idea leads to this and do it in kind of a in a satirical way that says, you know, this is, it is a slippery slope.
Yeah, except for Frank.
He just wants to call Democrats idiots.
Yeah, he's definitely not the Sean Hannity of our group.
Sorry, go ahead.
You say you care about truth, but I checked on Snopes and we've been rated false many, many times.
So I know we've failed very hard.
We need to write some true jokes.
Maybe we can get a few true articles on Snopes and redeem ourselves.
Balance the scales a bit.
We'll talk more about why that's important in our main topic.
Yeah.
So next story and final story of this portion of the podcast.
A story that's near and dear to my heart.
I forgot to post the headline on here because I'm bad at doing show notes.
But this is a Veggie Tales story.
Thanks to new laws.
So this is a classic Snopes article, by the way.
This didn't just come out.
This came out back in last August.
Thanks to New Laws, Veggie Tales finally introduces a new cannabis character.
And so we have a character named Cannabis Carl.
And Snopes debunked this.
And I can kind of understand why they had to debunk it.
There's people that thought it was real.
I don't know.
You don't think that's it?
Is it really?
I mean, it is really ridiculous to think that.
But the only reason I could see how they could be fooled by it is because I did such an amazing Photoshop job.
It looked like the Photoshop was really good.
It looks totally legit.
I'll give you a little bit of it.
Did it get a lot of reach?
Was it shared pretty widely?
Massively.
Yeah.
It was crazy.
So sometimes maybe they just feel the need to do it based on that.
I don't know.
Was this published before Seth ruined the Babylon B or was this?
I think Seth was around.
Or was this in the.
And I don't see it.
Maybe I'm not sure.
I started driving the bee into the ground last year around May.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So you were around for this.
Yeah, the numbers aren't on there like they usually are.
I don't know why.
Yeah, our little Facebook plug-in broke, so I can't see the share.
Our little social share plug-in broke.
But no, it got shared extremely widely.
And yeah, this is one where the Photoshop is just perfect.
Laura Carrot has this look of horror on her face as she's turning to look at Cannabis Carl.
He's just this cannabis leaf with the goatee and the bloodshot eyes.
And it's just, oh, it's so beautiful.
I love this article.
Now, Ethan actually wrote for Veggie Tales.
He was lead writer on two seasons of Veggie Tales on Netflix.
And so this is all of it.
Any Veggie Tales, the news series with the designs, if the designs have eyebrows, then I was involved.
There's no eyebrows, I wasn't involved.
That's your mark.
And the people that and the true Veggie Tales fans despise the eyebrows.
Yeah, the eyebrows were a big controversy.
Very big controversy.
Even in our offices.
It was crazy.
Why did they introduce them?
Would it make them more expressive?
Yeah.
Well, even Phil Visher said the reason they didn't have eyebrows back when they first created them because the technology was so new they couldn't figure out how to have these free-floating eyebrows out there.
But anybody who draws cartoons wants eyebrows because imagine a human without eyebrows.
They're horrifying.
They can't make faces.
They just look at you.
So you don't want that.
And so Bob and Larry, and they also have these super thick eyelids that were like, they looked like that was like a replacement to the eyebrows or something.
Yeah, they tried to use.
Well, and they had this weird animation where like their eyelids didn't move their entire eye and their eyelids squished and stretched together.
It was very because it was so new.
I mean, Veggie Tales was one of the first computer animated shows, I believe.
Well, that's what's crazy is people treated the Veggie Tales designs as like gospel truth.
Yeah.
But they were done so early on in the CGI cartoon age that if you actually go look at them, they're pretty like they have three polygons each or something.
Yeah, I know.
Their design is pretty crude.
Yeah, very crude.
They look like bad video games.
Yeah.
But I mean, what they did was very smart.
I mean, they created a very simple style of animation.
Right.
And they did something that, I mean, clearly it was a huge hit and people loved it.
But yeah, it was funny.
We got these comments from very passionate comments saying, like, using scripture as the reason that the Veggie Tales should never be redesigned.
Because like Sydney, you have scripture.
Yeah.
You need to stick to the old paths.
Yeah, you should not change the things as the Lord set them or something.
I can't remember the exact scripture.
It was like, it's like the Lord does not care, but look on outward appearances or something.
It's like the end of Revelation.
Like if anyone adds to or changes or changes or that kind of stuff.
They'd use stuff as if they were coming from the premise that God set forth the Veggie Tales as they were and we have come in as this worldly force because they didn't know us.
In their mind, which I totally understood, I totally got from that how it looked because we were working for DreamWorks.
But I know that the entire cast, like pretty much everybody we work with are Christians and we cared about really trying to make a great show.
But we really wanted to make a silly, funny, snappy, Looney Tunes, funny show.
Like we wanted to be really, really funny.
But there was a lot of challenges that came with that.
The insanely low budget, especially compared to what people watch.
Like Veggie Tales, they would usually have like it's made for TV movies.
So they'd have a budget per one.
So they'd be like Veggie Tales is their spoof on Gone with the Wind or their spoof on Noah's Ark episode.
On a TV show, your budget's for all the shows and you have to reuse everything and you only get like one set per thing.
So we just, we couldn't do those things.
So people would look at them and go, oh, you're not doing Bible stories.
You are of the devil now.
And it's just like, no, we don't have the budget to have them suddenly have an ark full of animals.
Like that costs a lot of money.
We can't do that.
This episode, now they're in Jerusalem.
And now in this episode, they're reenacting Moses.
We just can't do that.
Yeah, I mean, that's why it was all set on the kitchen, right?
It was like a sitcom.
So we had to write a sitcom.
And the only way to really get the Bible into that was for them to just keep on bringing up the Bible in conversation casually, being like, oh, you know, you shouldn't sin because it says in the Bible, blah, blah, blah.
And they're like, oh, yeah.
And then have to be.
It's easier to please liberals or Christians when that's your target audience.
Who's more easily offended?
They each have their book.
Well, the fundamentalists, like we talked about with malice, there's the fundamentalists on both sides, and they have a book of rules that if you step outside those rules, then you are in trouble.
So I think when it comes down to that, it depends on who you're, you know, if you're writing, I think that's the other thing about Veggie Tales.
There's a certain portion of people, like, it's the only cartoon they'll watch.
And so it really was, they were pretty sensitive about it.
So I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, well, the thing with Christians is that we, you know, we are sensitive to people who are trying to change the gospel or people who are trying to attack the Bible.
Yeah.
So when you believe in eternal truth, you know, you already have this built-in mechanism to fight against people who are trying to change something.
Yeah.
And then when you start to integrate other things into your understanding of the gospel, like Veggie Tales is the gospel, now you're going to start to get really defensive.
Yeah.
We always had all these interesting questions about the Veggie Tales.
Like they live in a house and there's no humans.
So like maybe the apocalypse already happened and something caused them all to come alive.
Yeah.
These are the veggies.
We always jump.
It's like Veggie Tales Left Behind.
I like it.
We always joke that there was a corpse just off screen.
Is that too dark?
I'm never going to watch Veggie Tales the same.
We didn't joke like that.
Yeah.
Cannabis Carl.
Cannabis Carl.
So, as a guest, am I supposed to pull you guys back onto the main thing here and say we were talking about this?
Sorry, I just had to decompress a little bit of Veggie Tales stuff.
We talked in our test episode for this, we did like three or four pilots for the podcast before we ever actually did it.
Yeah, Seth kept saying, not good enough.
Yeah.
Record it again.
So I know we talked about this on that, and I can't remember what I said, but it was cathartic to kind of get some of it out because I know that so many people hate the Veggie Tales that we created.
And it was the hardest job I ever actually had.
Alrighty.
Well, that had nothing to do with Cannabis Carl, but uh, so there is no cannabis Carl.
It's false.
Oh, yeah, by the way.
Make sure everybody understands that.
It's not real, right?
It's not real.
Okay.
We need to issue another retraction.
That's another way you can tell if a Veggie Tales article was written by me, I use the new designs.
And if it's written by Kyle, he uses the old designs.
Do I?
Well, you know what?
A lot of times I'm referencing an old song or something.
Yeah.
You actually watched Veggie Tales.
I just did the one about Larry the Cucumber offering everybody a water buffalo.
And so I had to use the silly song where he sings about everybody has a water buffalo.
We had the Buffalo Orange in our version of Veggie Tales.
In the blasphemous version of Veggie Tales.
There's a whole story there.
All right.
Are we going to do our main topic now?
Let's do it.
And now, the Babylon Bee's topic of the week.
All right.
So we've been talking about Snopes a little bit as we kind of went through these stories.
We're going to talk a little bit about Snopes, but mostly I wanted to kind of have a more broad discussion about fact-checking in general, fake news on the internet, satire on the internet.
What is satire's place?
And it's a really important topic, obviously, to us at the Babylon Bee because we do satire.
As we mentioned before, we've been fact-checked some 30 or 40 times by Snopes.
Other fact-checking sites also hit us a lot.
I think AP has an Associated Press has a fact-checker that hits us.
So it's just a really interesting phenomenon to me that, you know, in the era of being able to share news at the click of a button, you know, fake news has become just prevalent across the internet in a lot of places.
And then satire and humor and jokes have started to get lumped in with that as people, you know, some people end up sharing it as if it was real.
So yeah, like part of this is like that's, that's something I always want to say.
When you know, when somebody gets mad at somebody for thinking, for assuming a Muslim group, like when you make that connection of terrorism to Muslims like yeah, like you should try not to but shouldn't, like the terrorists, who are Muslims, get some blame for that connection people make right.
So like on the internet, there's these sites that create fake stories and they call them satire, but they're clearly not satire, they're just fake stories.
But they use the word yeah, and they deserve some blame for this.
This.
Like, they have muddied the word and the term satire to just mean blatant lies.
Yeah, they'll hide behind the shield of satire.
Yeah.
And there are sites that are just entirely fake news.
There's no point to the satire.
Right.
So I want to just point out they deserve some blame.
So, Ethan, why are you making a joke about terrorism?
Why do you think terrorism is funny?
I just always think that you act like people act like it's like somebody just invented the idea out of nothing because they're racist.
Sure, sure.
So sometimes, you know, we're playing on a stereotype, and people will say, why are you making a joke about that stereotype?
And it's like, well, yeah, well, there's some, yeah, there's some substance to it.
I'm not saying, you know, yeah.
So those sites, they have a role to play, but then there's the irresponsible stuff.
Like, okay, so you guys saw Brian Stelter's tweet, right?
Yes.
Where he says something to the effect of, I don't know that we have that.
Do we have that in our notes here?
I don't want to misquote him, but he deleted it.
He said something to the effect that we are.
Babylon B is fake news.
They call themselves, quote, satire, unquote.
I think that's like basically what he said, right?
It's my cover image on Twitter.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, he deleted it.
He took it down.
I got a screenshot.
So that was the highlight of my career.
Yeah, no, he says Babylon B is a fake news site.
They call it satire.
And he puts it in scare quotes.
Satire.
Right.
So there's a difference with someone like us.
I mean, we are, like you said before, we're one of the biggest, most trafficked, most well-known satire sites out there, right?
So to suggest that we're just playing at pretending to be satire, you know, wearing this mask and hiding behind that shield so that we can say whatever we want and disseminate fake news everywhere is just, you know, it's absurd.
It's really silly.
It's irresponsible, really, it's what it is.
I'm glad he took the tweet down.
I'm not sure why he did.
But it's kind of what it's very similar.
There's parallels there between what he was saying and what Snopes was insinuating in their latest piece.
You know, that we have, like, we're, that we've managed to fool our readers with this ruse.
You know, it's, it, it's, it's painting us in the worst possible light as these, you know, nefarious people who created this mock satire site so that we could just mislead everyone with fake news.
And that's just ridiculous.
And the word, the word is really egregious.
I mean, that's what we, I think that's the word Adam used in his lengthy thread on Twitter addressing this stuff.
It's, it's, it's egregious.
Yeah, it's really offensive when you think about it because we sit down, you know, when we sit down and pitch headlines to each other, which we do mostly online, although me and Ethan will do it in person sometimes, but we're pitching headlines back and forth.
Nobody is sitting there going, what headline can I pitch that will fool the most people?
Yeah.
You know, it's never even a consideration.
Like beyond, like, the only consideration I think that I will take into account when deciding whether to publish something is, do we need to make this, do we need to exaggerate this more?
You know, this is too close to the truth.
We need a more satirical, humorous element.
So it's obvious it's satire.
You know, that's the only, that's really the only way that we'll end up tweaking headlines like that.
Yeah, it was really strange to me, the Snopes fact check, because it did suggest that our whole purpose was just to trick people.
And it does make me wonder if it is a bias because we make fun of liberals.
Yeah, and don't you think there's an elephant?
Elephant?
There's an element.
There's an element there.
That was the best gaffe.
We were just talking about how we're developing our voices and our ticks.
Yeah.
And Ethan's is like completely forgetting words.
I can never remember names.
And mine is not pronounced things.
But I've never accidentally said elephant instead of element.
That was a new one.
So what's the elephant?
The element, the elephant.
Maybe I was thinking there's an elephant in the room.
I don't know.
Maybe they just don't get the jokes.
Like, I think that there's, when I was on the podcast, Conservatarians with Stephen Miller, he said, it seems like if you imagine a bunch of conservatives, or like their kids in high school, sitting around the table in the cafeteria making jokes and then the teacher comes walking, like what are you laughing at, what are you joking about?
Like something has to be done here.
That must be bad, like kind of that.
It feels like that with the Snopes people um, and even and and Brian Stettler and people who just like they don't get why you make the joke unless you had bad intentions.
Because you have to be a bad person to make this joke, so you must have bad intentions.
Like there's a yeah, there's a part of the world view there that, like conservatives have Snopes knows better.
I mean we, we have.
We've had communication with them.
Oh yeah, it's not a defense over yeah, over over the course of you know, since they first started fact checking us right.
But but just recently, in our communication with them uh, the word that they used was, you know, they saw a quote, clear distinction unquote, between the satire that we do and the intentionally misleading fake news that some other people do.
Um, in private, that's what they'll say, but then when you look at this latest article it's, you know, it's like a hit piece.
It feels like yeah, and I have to admit, like in the past with the Snopes stuff, I just thought it was kind of funny, uh and and I I almost thought people are kind of overreacting or it was just kind of fun entertainment.
But I have to agree with what Adam posted his twitter thread about.
He compared how Snopes talked about us to how they talk about the onion and that was pretty glaring.
I thought it was really interesting because the way they talk about the onion they use terms like, of course this is here's.
He has an example of an onion article here um, or a Snopes article about an onion article.
And they say, they say the Onion is, of course, a satirical website that was founded in newspaper form in 1988.
Readers mistaking the onion's humorous material for real news is not uncommon on social media.
And they go on to say, like all content originating with the onion, the photograph, and claim uh, were purely satirical, not real news.
They just very clear, of course, obviously it's satirical, they're funny, we all know that.
But then when it comes to us, of course yeah, when it comes to us.
It's like they they were trying to fool people, but they didn't manage to manage.
I mean, we don't want to make a big deal out of nothing right, if it the fact-checking thing.
The reason why I say we shrug off the fact-checking, that's no big deal.
Um, the reason that this is different is because when you, when you try to guess at our motives or you impugn our motives and and suggest that that our, our intent really is to is to mislead people rather than entertain people or, or you know, speak truth through satire in some way and try to get our message across um when, when that's their goal, the.
The problem is, they're not just anybody, they're Snopes.
They call themselves a definitive fact-checking site.
They're, they're the, the internet's arbiter of truth right, and and they've had formal partnerships with social networks like Facebook in the past, and and we've had an issue in The past.
We mentioned this in our note to our readers recently that went out in our newsletter that in the past, when they rated us false, Facebook threatened to penalize us as a result of that because they were considering us to be a fake news source, a purveyor of fake news rather than a legitimate satire website.
So there were real consequences there.
I mean, that kind of stuff puts our entire business in jeopardy because we drive traffic to our site through these social networks.
So when they look to Snopes as the authoritative reference for who's fake news, who's not, and Snopes treats us as fake news, that's problematic for us in a really big way.
So we have to take it seriously as much as it may seem to some people like we're, you know, what's the expression, making a mountain out of a molehill.
Yeah.
There really is, there really is some seriousness to the matter.
So that's why we're taking it seriously.
And I appreciate Adam, you know, really coming to bath for us on Twitter about that.
Yeah, that's really the crux.
It's just that they're an authority.
If they call us fake news, that could mess up everything for us.
And we are in the deplatforming age.
It's hot right now.
Got to de-platform people.
And so, yeah, that makes sense.
And I do think it is a cultural, there's a cultural thing happening here where there's people just with such a different worldview.
I think if we were the Snopes people reading jokes that cut at our worldview in the way that ours cut at their worldview, it would be hard for us not to see some intent there.
I'm not saying that's justified.
I'm saying there's a disconnect between.
I mean, I don't know.
I read The Onion.
Yeah.
That's true.
I laugh at the jokes that are about me, you know, because I get it.
Right.
It's like, oh, that's funny.
And then when you read satire, you go, you either say, oh, you know, I really need to change my worldview because this is really convicting to me.
Or you chuckle and say, yeah, some people on my site are like that.
That's funny.
And you move on.
But yeah, I don't know.
Maybe it's because I know The Onion is satire, but I know.
Yeah, I think there is a in this, I hate saying the secular world, but just people that aren't close to Christianity, they get this, especially if you're on the left.
I think they feel like they smell a rat when they see that label Christian news satire.
Like, oh, what are your intentions other than satire?
Are you trying to sneak something?
You're trying to do a little gospel sucker punch?
What are you trying to do?
I don't know.
That's the sense I get from people when they well, it used to be Christian news satire and then Seth bought the site.
Yeah, now it's just right-wing nut job satire.
Far right.
Anyway, I'm not trying to defend it.
I'm just saying I find it fascinating.
Like, I want to get into the head of that Snopes guy who's writing it and figure out what is he really thinking or feeling when he's writing that.
Because I think he thinks he's doing some greater good.
It bothers me, though, that the charge is that we're trying to mislead people.
No, Snopes is trying to mislead people.
It's really shoes on the other foot here, right?
I mean, they're trying to lead people to believe that we're not really a legitimate satire site when they call into question whether or not our content even qualifies as satire.
And because they know better, that's them being misleading, even as they're calling us misleading.
So, again, the word egregious comes to mind.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I guess my curiosity or my interest is what is the motive there?
Like, do they really think, do they really think we're doing something bad or do they think they think our ideas just need to be shut down?
Or is it a bit of both?
Yeah, and I mean, we don't know.
Yeah.
And so we won't say.
Yeah.
Who knows?
Yeah.
And that's part of our problem with what Snopes did is that they assumed our motives.
And Unless we talk to them, we don't really know.
Yep.
Well, is that how we settled it?
So, yeah, I mean, I'll just kind of conclude just by broadly saying that I get, I understand the fact-checking thing.
I get why fake news is a concern.
I think maybe the culture is a little more concerned about it than we need to be.
Like, during the election, a lot of people were saying, oh, you know, all these fake news articles that, you know, the Russians were sharing changed the election for Trump.
And it's like, there was a couple memes that maybe a few thousand people saw.
And, you know, and it's like that didn't really change the election.
So I think the concern is maybe overblown a little bit.
And that adds to the edge of what Snopes does when they try to fact-check stuff.
But I mean, I get it.
You know, when you use, I might have mentioned this before on this podcast, but when you used to share satire in like Mad Magazine or the Wittenberg Door, you'd hand it to your friend, you know, and say, hey, this is satire.
Laugh at this joke.
Yeah.
And now, you know, grandmas are seeing their grandkids sharing satire and not understanding it.
You know, so it's just, it's just a shift in culture and the way that we share things.
And it's just a little bit of growing pains, I think.
I would love to do an episode about grandmas on the internet.
Oh, we should.
Let's write that down.
Because we did a post about it one time, and we had the comments were some of the funniest comments I've ever seen.
So someday we'll do that.
Side note.
It makes me want to just kind of lean into it, though, and let's, you know, let's give them what they want.
Let's try to swing the election for Trump fake news.
You know, let's do it.
We'll go all in on that as if that's our goal and we'll see what we can accomplish.
Adam Ford never would have allowed this.
He is rolling in his future grave.
Yeah.
He will die eventually.
He did.
Adam Ford is rolling in his couch, whatever he lays on.
His bed.
Probably has a bed.
All right.
So let's move on to everybody's favorite thing.
Hate mail.
Hate mail.
So my friend Brandon, who my voice cracks.
People have made fun of my voice cracking, and I'm just going to say it's my endearing quality.
It just happens, and I don't know why.
But you know how Super Dave talked like that?
Talk like that.
Like his voice cracked the whole time he was talking.
So I just wanted to say that's my voice.
Someone pitched a headline in our premium subscriber forum and said, and they confirmed Kyle Mann actually voiced by Kermit the Frog.
And I was devastated.
38 year old man is voice.
I'm going through puberty.
I'm rethinking my entire life.
You do have a bit of a Kermit the Frog.
There's a bit of a I've never noticed it before.
It's a little bit like, yeah.
Yeah.
I have all the self-doubt now.
Yeah, it's scary.
Devastating.
It's scary putting your voice out there in front of a bunch of people.
Anyway, so my buddy Brandon, who I used to be in a band with, he took our Dave D'Andreas saying, I really miss Adam Ford.
And he auto-tuned it to a little tune.
So I'm going to put that in here and we'll see what people think of it.
I really miss Adam Ford.
All right.
That was great.
Thanks, Brandon.
Oh, that was hilarious.
Wasn't that great?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So let's do our hate mail here.
Kyle, you want to give it a intro or read it or what do you think?
It's great because it's on topic, kind of.
Yeah.
Okay, here we go.
So we've read a lot of satire that came from a place where people were accusing us of being very anti-Trump, being very liberal.
So now we're going to read it from the other side.
People accusing us of being way too conservative and pro-Trump.
Finally.
So here's some hate mail we got.
You guys ramped up during the election like a Putin troll factory.
Republicans are not Christian, nor have any Christian ideals at heart.
They have exploiting the poor to the death at heart.
I guess conservative Christians did sell their souls and lost their salvation.
That's fine.
Works for me.
At this point, you may as well just hire Russian writers if you haven't already.
I do love the obsession that the left has with Russia.
Russian writers, yeah.
There's so much humor value in that.
Like, we won this whole Cold War, and now, like, 30 years later, everybody's freaking out about Russia again.
Yeah, I do love it.
Yeah, so we.
I wonder, how do we distinguish between the hate mail, that's legitimate hate mail, and people trying to get on the hate mail site?
Trying to get on, yeah.
This is old, right?
This is old.
So this came out before.
That's good.
Back when the hate mail was pure.
We do get a lot of fake hate mail.
We haven't gotten too much actual hate mail since the podcast.
So we're going to have to call it.
Maybe we could put some more fake news out there and we'll get some more hate mail in because of it.
I like how he's like, oh, yeah, Christians did sell their souls and lost their salvation.
That's fine.
Works for me.
You can feel the anger seething, like trying to really get to us.
Imagine being like Hyree Keitel or something.
He's like smoking a cigarette and he's like telling the guy who's like tied to the chair.
He's like talking to him.
Like, oh, yeah, fine.
So you lost yourself.
Works for me.
Works for me.
Where are people getting the impression that we are equating Christianity with being a Republican?
I mean, yeah.
Yeah, we make that joke all the time.
They must miss those ones.
That's like the people that say we're, yeah, we're like a pro-Trump factory.
Like, do they just miss all the Trump jokes?
It's like selective.
How are they filtering our content like that?
I see all of them.
They must have a filter.
Well, it could be that.
They have their friends who only share certain stories and that's how they saw it.
Who knows?
Yeah, I really do want to that myself.
That is one of the main tropes that we keep going back to with Republicans is like they worship Trump.
You know, that's the joke that we make all the time.
Yeah, you're not a real Christian unless you're a Republican with an AK-47 or not an AR-15.
Yeah.
AK-47.
Yeah, there's Ethan forgetting the name of a gun.
Gun, yeah.
And he's supposedly a Christian.
Supposedly, I believe in Christianity.
I think we're doing something right, though.
Because I'll see two hate mail messages come in right in a row, right?
One of them will be, you know, you guys are in Trump's pocket, you know, whatever.
And then, and then following that, five minutes later, it'll be a criticism from the other side saying that we're way too liberal.
All we do is attack their, you know, sacred Trump.
Keep your hands off Trump.
Touch not the Lord's.
My president.
My president.
Oh, man.
So we get getting both of those things, you know, seeing that from both sides.
I mean, that's like, hey, look, you know, not that our goal is to just be middle of the road, hitting both sides perfectly evenly.
That's not really a goal of ours.
But it does speak to the fact that we go after everybody to some extent.
Whoever deserves it.
We make everybody angry.
Yeah.
If something's funny, we make a joke about it.
That's the basic rule, I think.
Yeah, I think the reason that it's been more anti-left is honestly just because the left has been so unhinged.
You know, a lot of people in conservatism and Republicans, yeah, I mean, they may have some ideas that are worth criticizing, but it's like they just kind of want to be left alone.
Yeah.
And it's like there's not a ton to make fun of there all the time.
Some of the figures on the right can be a lot of fun, like Trump.
It's also that the best jokes come from the people who take themselves the most seriously.
And right now, the left are the ones who are taking themselves so seriously that it's just ripe.
They have some really radical ideas right now, too.
So radical ideas, and they take themselves, they take the ideas like they have that air about them that you can't joke about this.
And instantly, that is fodder for great, great jokes and lots of laughs the moment you say that.
Right.
So we did actually, we do have some Russian writers.
We tried some out.
And so we have some of their headlines that they submitted audibly to us.
They just basically call us up and say these headlines to us.
Yeah, we hired Russian bots and they gave us Russian trolls.
We went to an actual Russian troll factory and walked around and like, you know, I checked out the hooves on this one and checked out the coat on this other troll.
And like, we're just trying to see, what do you feed these trolls?
Are they free-range Russian trolls?
Yeah, we wanted to make sure we were getting pure, locally sourced Russian trolls.
And so here are the five best headlines that they pitched.
Yeah, so I'll read these to you guys and then I'm going to put in because we did get, we actually have the audio of them saying them to us, but I got to edit it in.
So here's one of them.
Here's our first one.
Report.
Motherland very good.
People very happy here with all potatoes benevolent government give us.
Actually, these are.
Does he get?
Oh, is that the wrong thing?
These are wrong.
Yeah.
Oh, it's wrong.
Oops.
These aren't the wrong.
Kyle.
Kyle, I edited it and picked like the five best, and they're not these.
I'm keeping that in.
I'm keeping me in trying to redo a Russian voice.
Here we go.
So the first one is.
Putin got lost on 100% of vote, but ha, impossible.
Because great man.
Very funny.
Very good headline idea.
It almost made the cut.
It's a little inside baseball.
Yeah.
The next one.
So yeah, we asked him, well, okay, we're the Babylon B. Can you do something more about worship leaders?
We like skinning gene jokes, stuff like that.
Can you do something like that?
Worship leader versus skinny pant because he went for government to give him good pant.
Still, it feels very Russian.
It's a little rough.
Like maybe there's some editing that needs to be done there.
But there's some potential.
There's a seed of an idea.
We talked about that before.
Here's another one.
Loser Americans try but fail to cover up being losers in space race by going to moon.
They're just getting personal.
So yeah, so we're like, hey, how about Chick-fil-A jokes?
We do a lot of Chick-fil-A joke.
We asked them to pitch us a Chick-fil-A joke, and here was their best one.
Yeah, so this is my favorite, but it's still to make the cut.
Man eats Chick-fil-A, but sad because he's not eating Stroganov instead.
Anything with Stroganoff, I like Stroganoff.
Maybe we need a My Pleasure.
Maybe it needs a My Pleasure.
All right, here's the final one we got from them.
Study, find Rocky, worst boxer of all time.
Very good.
That would be weird to watch Rocky as a Russian.
Yeah, I wonder if they like that where he beats the Russian up and was a Rocky 4 Rocky 4.
All right, well, we're going to move on to our subscription portion of the show now.
Yes.
And we're going to talk to Seth.
We're going to go deep.
We're going to do a deep dive with Seth about everything that's been going on with the B.
This is like for our, you know, how like sometimes at church, they're like, hey, we're going to, all of our members, we're all going to talk about what's going on and members meeting after the candid talk.
Yeah.
This is what's going on, what's the future, just everything.
If you're a visitor, we love you, but you're not welcome.
Yeah.
Unless you want to ship some money in it.
So if you want to become a subscriber and hear the entire podcast, you can go to BabylonBee.com/slash plan, subscribe for any amount of month, starting at $5, that is.
And then you get access to the full-length podcast.
Yeah, plus no ads and other stuff.
And plus, we're also going to talk about Drax the Destroyer and Trump shouting from a balcony in the next part, too.
So for the rest of you, we will talk to you next week.
Goodbye.
It's not easy being green.
Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dillon for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.