Happy Thanksgiving. Brian here. Got a little treat for you today. A conversation with the guy who runs the country's favorite fake newspaper, America's finest news source, as they call themselves, The Onion. This interview ran not long ago on another podcast from our partners at KShear W in L.A., the Sam Sanders Show.

Like me, Sam is a former NPR journalist.

He covered politics for years, then culture, and now he has a great show from KCRW,

where he tries to make sense of the culture by talking each week to some of the most

interesting comedians, journalists, celebrities, podcasters, influencers, and in this case,

the CEO of the Onion, who took over the publication last year and has been doing a lot of really interesting stuff since then,

including something that will be meaningful to regular listeners of this show that lies about

Sandy Hook families being actors.

He's trying to have the Onion buy InfoWars out of bankruptcy to run it as a satirical

onion channel.

Fascinating.

As is this whole conversation between Sam and the CEO, stick around.

Sam Sanders, nice to see you.

So good to be here.

Long time listener, first time caller.

For listeners who don't know, we kind of go way back.

Way way back.

We were both Croc Fellows.

Yeah, we had the same fellowship at NPR and times have changed so much. It's no longer there, the fellowship. They said it was just a pause, right? But it's going to come back, I hope. Sure, girl. You're a skeptical journalist. Be skeptical. Oh, man. Yeah, it's a very cool program. It's like the reason I do audio journalism. Same. You know, was that program. It was a year-long training program.

Anyway, that's how we know each other. And now we're both, uh, KCRW hosts. So I'm excited to share this interview you did with, um, Ben Collins, the CEO of the Onion. I'm curious, what made you want to have Ben on? Like, what's the background here? Like, what caught your interest? back when I was covering breaking news and still doing that thing all journalists did five to 10 years ago where we were on Twitter all the time, he was one of my journalist Twitter friends. And it was a great follow and just someone who's reporting I loved. What was he doing then? He wasn't at The Onion then, right? No, he was covering disinformation for NBC and beginning to cover the alt-right, et cetera. And I just loved

his reporting. He was always a sharpshooter. And he was very clear-eyed and laser-focused on telling

the truth about these things in a time when a lot of newsrooms were looking for words to be

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