The Onion Knight Ft. Ben Collins
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 688 Ratings
🗓️ 21 June 2024
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In April, The Onion was acquired by a new entity called Global Tetrahedron, revealed shortly thereafter to be a joint venture between billionaire Jeff Lawson and former NBC disinformation reporter Ben Collins, now its CEO. Ben joins Ed to talk about buying The Onion, keeping its Chicago roots, and how we can save digital media.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human |
| 0:03.5 | Quarzo Media |
| 0:07.9 | Hello and welcome to Better Offline. |
| 0:11.8 | I'm your host, Ed Zittron. |
| 0:30.6 | On On April 25th, 2024, GeoMedia, the Private Equity Project, best known for running websites like Deadspin into the ground, announced that it was selling satirical news, newspaper, and |
| 0:35.2 | Website the Onion, to a company called Global Tetrahedron. |
| 0:39.5 | Though few knew it at the time, Global Tetrahedron was an entity run by former NBC News |
| 0:44.9 | disinformation reporter Ben Collins, funded by billionaire Jeff Lawson, best known for founding Twilio. |
| 0:51.9 | As a note, Global Tetrahedron is a reference to the company of the same |
| 0:55.5 | name from the Onion's anthology book, Our Dumb Century. In one of the first bits of good news |
| 1:01.5 | I've had to share on this show, the Onion is now owned by somebody who has not only done a job in |
| 1:06.4 | journalism, written things, research things, and worked in a news organization that didn't burn to the |
| 1:11.3 | goddamn ground. He also cares about the future of the newspaper, best known for headlines like |
| 1:17.5 | study reveals babies as stupid, jurisprudence fetishists get off on technicality, and Mark Zuckerberg |
| 1:25.0 | worried Facebook listening to him after being pushed shirt that says, |
| 1:28.2 | I just laid off 10,000 employees. |
| 1:31.2 | Today it's my immense pleasure to be joined by The Onion's new CEO, Ben Collins. |
| 1:41.7 | Okay, so how did this deal to buy the onion actually come together? |
| 1:48.9 | Okay, so I was, it was January. |
| 1:52.5 | I just quit my job right before Christmas, and I was writing a book about like some of the biggest pieces of shit on the planet earth. Right. You know, the Elon Musk's and the Jim Jordans of the world. And I was like super depressed and I was like I was plowing through it, but it wasn't. And I don't have been fun. Yeah, exactly. I have no idea. I don't even know if it was good. I think it probably was all right, but like the, the process was horrible. And I read an ad week that the onion was aggressively for sale. And I had known and I remembered that Elon Musk had once tried to buy the onion. Right. He wound up poaching a bunch of staff and started this thing called thud |
| 2:34.9 | which never really launched he from what I've heard from some lore in the office by the way |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.