There's not a lot of identifiably positive progress happening out there at the moment, but this week's episode does mark a short but nonetheless real step in the right direction. We first tried to book Ben Collins as a guest back when he was at NBC News, and were given a polite but definitive "maybe come back in one calendar year" from that network's press handlers. It may well have been for the best. Ben's old beat—the political version of online psychopathy, more or less—probably would have made for a compelling bummer of an episode, but it would have been a bummer for sure. While it's hard to say the broader world is doing much better now than it was then, this week's episode—which is just Ben and me, as Drew is off—is much happier. So, it seems, is Ben, who led the group that bought The Onion a year ago, and which has since overseen both an ambitious expansion and a total vibe refurbishment. Which means that instead of talking about the absolute worst stuff online, we were talking about one of the few truly sunny-sided stories in American media.
And so we talked about the state of The Onion, mostly, and how one goes about assuming control of Global Tetrahedron and removing the Jim Spanfeller failstink from one of America's most storied newsrooms. Some of this was nuts-and-bolts stuff about how the crew that liberated The Onion from G/O Media came together and what it took to get things back on track after years of ownership-mandated austerity and slideshows. But a lot of it was also about why Ben wanted to do this, and the role that free papers like The Onion played in shaping our respective perspectives and personalities as young people, and the importance of this kind of media as a portal into a bigger world and reminder that you are not alone in your smaller one. I talked about the time that I weirded people out after getting too high and reading The Onion on the subway; Ben compared the experience of sitting in on an Onion pitch meeting to his memories of watching Allen Iverson fuck up Reebok staffers in a pick-up game. We also touched upon the Ted Leo and The Pharmacists' iconic cover of "Everybody Wants To Rule The World," which The Onion commissioned for its once (and future) AV Undercover series.
You will have surmised by now that The Onion meant and means a great deal to me, and while I think I more or less kept it together on the podcast I was constantly fighting the urge to deliver a series of staccato, Beavis-style "yeah-yeah" reactions the more we talked about things like the Onion News Network, which was wildly ahead of its time and had been given an annual budget of $800 by its previous ownership. We talked about what it takes to make a business like this work, which amounts to some number of happy accidents but mostly a commitment in ways private equity ownership can't or won't. There is something both liberating and terrifying in giving up on trying to convince lunkhead elites to do what you think is right and just Doing The Thing instead.
In the back third of the episode, we touched upon Ben's unique route to basketball blogging, which began with a post on his Angelfire blog winding up in front of Mark Cuban and involved Ben getting flown, as a tween, from his home to interview Steve Nash and Eduardo Najera in Dallas. That explained how someone from Massachusetts wound up becoming a Mavericks fan; Ben went on to explain how the events of the last few months led him to end that fandom after it became a little too challenging to his self-respect. We talked a bit about the Luka Doncic deal and its emotional aftermath, both as part of the sprawling elite tantrum we're all living within and with, and on its own merits—Ben described it as Nobody Wants To Work Anymore: The Trade—and as symptomatic of what too much grindset does to the executive brain.
In place of the Funbag, I asked Ben to explain this:
That is a Chop Suey Sandwich, which is Ben's personal meme, one of the most deranged foodstuffs I've ever seen, and a (possibly extinct) real local delicacy that he has enjoyed many times in his life. We talked about its origins, his experience bringing a date with him to get one, and the unmatched thrill of "standing in the street with a pile of gravy." Say what you will about this sandwich's looks and overall merit, but it sure beats talking about 8Chan.
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