Seth Dillon
Appearances
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
I have to correct you, though. Not the founder, just CEO. Just CEO. Adam Ford. That's right. I don't want to take that away from Adam. He's the brilliant mind that began the whole thing. I wish I'd started it, but I took it over in 2018, so...
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
Yeah. I mean... To be caught up in that whole thing was crazy. I avoid saying that we were the reason he bought Twitter, because we weren't. The reason he bought Twitter was free speech. It was free speech. The Babylon Bee was a symptom of that, right?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
He was getting really concerned about the fact that there was these bad ideas, wokeness in particular, which he called divisive, exclusionary, hateful, a civilizational threat. He was... really concerned about the spread of these bad ideas and the inability of people to push back on them and respond to them because it was considered hate speech or misinformation or whatever.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
So when we got kicked off for telling a joke that we weren't supposed to tell, which those are the ones we should be telling, right? It alarmed him. It got him really concerned and worked up about it. So I... Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel's back. I don't know.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
It's challenging. I think that probably a common misconception is that it's easier because there's a lot to make fun of. And there's truth to that to an extent. Obviously, there's crazy things happening in the world that are easy to make fun of. But the problem is when you're trying to satirize what's happening in the world, you have to exaggerate it and go a little step beyond that.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
And then reality catches up to you. You've got to stay ahead of the curve of these things. A matter of weeks or even hours sometimes, that's all it takes for a joke to become something that actually happens.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
So it's, you know, I think the more, the more like we swing back in the direction of sanity and stop doing some of the really crazy things, like the joke that we had told about that got us kicked out of Twitter was a joke about Admiral Rachel Levine having been named, you know, she was named she. He was named Woman of the Year by USA Today. Tricky language.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
And we mocked that by naming Rachel Levine our pick for Man of the Year. Well, comedy like that, you look at the real headline and it seems like it is satire. It seems like a parody. It seems like something you'd see on South Park. And so in that environment, obviously it's a target-rich environment, but it's hard to satirize what already feels like parody.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
But as we swing back in the direction of sanity, I think that dies down a little bit. And you've got to look for other things to make fun of.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of disconcerting to see it happening on the right, too, but it was becoming a major problem, you know, to the point where Seinfeld was talking about how he won't do college campuses anymore. You know, he had this kind of safe space. I need to be insulated in a bubble. My feelings can never be hurt. That whole thing was...
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
it destroyed the ability of people to look at themselves in a critical way, especially with mockery, where they're able to actually have that introspection where they say, some of the things that I do are ridiculous too, and I should be willing to laugh at that.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
You know, there's a maturity in that, and we kind of like stunted our own growth, I think, as a culture by suppressing that and saying, no, your feelings should never be hurt by anything, including a joke, and humor is actually harmful. I don't think humor is harmful. I think we were more unified than ever when we were joking about each other, you know, and willing to laugh at ourselves.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
And if you go back 20, 30 years in comedy, that was much more prevalent than it has been over the last decade. And I've seen some on the right getting angry about jokes at their expense and the way that the left used to. And I bristle at that. I don't like people taking themselves too seriously. I think it's unhealthy that we take ourselves so seriously.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
You've got to be willing to laugh at yourself. And if you can't do that, if you're taking yourself that seriously, you're not going to enjoy life, for one thing, but you're going to be stuck as like a child in an adult's body. You need to grow up and be willing to laugh, and you'll have more fun.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
Well, we've never aimed for the shock humor. We've never tried to do comedy that just puts people down to make them feel bad about themselves or goes for that shock value. What we're trying to do is really just communicate truth to a post-truth culture and use humor as an effective way to do that. And so there are, I mean...
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
There's a value system at play there where what we're trying to do is not just entertain and make people laugh, but make them think about whether or not these bad ideas should be taken seriously. And so those are more likely to be the things that we would challenge with our comedy rather than the kind of behavior that we would engage in.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
For one thing, it's a good thing that they're on the way out. That was kind of the point, right? This is the reason we made fun of these things is because we didn't want people to take them seriously and adopt it into the culture. That was the entire reason to make Lady Ballers was because this is a bad idea. It needs to be ridiculed. It needs to be mocked.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
Let's reject it instead of taking it seriously. And, you know... I don't think they're going to go away quietly. You saw the speech that Trump was giving the other night. You had the Democrats refusing to stand or applaud for a lot of these... The return to sanity that he was talking about. We're going to return to sanity, safety, reason. We're going to take care of women and children.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
You're not... There's no such thing as a child born in the wrong body. God made you as you are, and you're perfect that way. These are things to applaud. These are good, reasonable, sane things to applaud, and they sat down and refused to do that. So they're going to continue to fight us, I think, tooth and nail on these issues.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
Whether we've won, well, the ascendant power thing, we have more influence than we had before. We have more control than we had before. But I don't know that these things are just going to go away. These are going to continue to be fights at the state level, at the local level. There's still going to be situations where you have trans athletes getting in these meets with other girls.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
And the girls are going to have to make a decision on whether they compete or stand down because it's not completely eradicated yet. And that could take a lot of time. Your question was, what's next? What's next on the horizon? Man, how do you try to predict... what the Democrats are going to go for next, and how crazy that might possibly be. I don't know.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
I would keep an eye on the Babylon Bee headlines, and maybe those will come true in a few months, because whatever we're talking about is probably going to be what they're pursuing. But I don't know. I would ask you, what do you think?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
Well, that was fun. So that was kind of our first foray into, you know, I guess you could kind of style that or call that a mockumentary, you know, where we're taking an idea and treating it like super seriously when it shouldn't have been taken as seriously as it was and mocking the actors involved in that.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
That was a fun foot in the door for us to do like a larger project, a long form project beyond just like a short comedy sketch for YouTube. So we're going to dabble in more of that, you know, try some of these other ideas that we have kind of floating around and see if we can make some more films like that because the audience loved it.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
We generated a lot of subscribers with that, got a lot of really good feedback. There's a lot we learned from it that we can do differently and better the next time. And so we'll iterate on that some, but I think for the beat, the primary thing for us, what we do really well is news satire. We mimic a news publication and publish satirical headlines. Funny fake news you can trust.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
That's our thing. That's what we do really well. And the next logical extension of that is probably some kind of a... a show that is a satirical news show, a daily show style thing. Something like that, I think, could be really successful under the Bees brand. So we have some things in the works along those lines that we're looking at, too, that we're really excited about.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2158 - Democrats CAVE, Trump Chalks Up Another Win!
So where that lives and when that lands is anyone's guess. But we're excited about kind of continuing to do what we've done well that the audience really enjoys and bringing that out to a broader audience in new forms.