Episode 146 - Fake News You Can Trust with Seth Dillon
If you’re a part of the Christian conservative community, you’ve probably heard of The Babylon Bee. It is, and we quote, “the world’s best satire site, totally inerrant in all its truth claims.”
With headlines like “Man Who Doesn't Read The Bible Also Chief Authority On What Jesus Would Do Today,” it seems like a fun way for Christians to laugh at themselves. But as today’s guest and Babylon Bee CEO, Seth Dillon, explains, being a satirical site doesn’t come without a fair share of controversy.
Hear Seth tell the origin story of The Babylon Bee, how we can use satire as a form of apologetics, and all about that one time Donald Trump retweeted one of their articles...
Episode Transcript
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Seth Dillon: And the truth is, C.S. Lewis made this point and one of his talks that's in the weight of glory, where he talks about how men in dire situations don't cease to be men. We still need to learn. We still need to laugh. We still need to cry. And so this idea that when things are really hard or when times are tough, we need to be really serious about it and take everything so seriously. I think we're taking everything way too seriously. We need to be able to just kind of put things in proper perspective and be willing to laugh a little bit and bring levity to things, because even in dark times, that's important. It's not that you're making light of the troubles, but you're keeping things in proper perspective.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, William, welcome. Good to be here. Good to be here. So we got a special one today. We've got Seth Dillon in the house. And I think that this is a podcast that is going to be familiar to probably half of our listeners that probably know about the Bee and not the Bee. And by the end of this, the other half are going to be downloading. In fact, Seth is going to get an idea about how many followers we indeed have, is going to see how much his Twitter followers jump. And I expect that you're going to do just that. You're going to go on to Twitter and you're going to start following the Bee and not the Bee because of Seth and his team's unique ability to be able to look at what's going on in current events, process it, have fun with it, and to do it from a uniquely Christian worldview that allows us to poke fun at ourselves and poke fun playfully and most of the time very respectfully at others. But I love his work and I love what he does. And some of you may have been familiar with the satirical sites of The Onion and others. I think that the site and the team that is better than that is the Bee and not to be so. We've got the leader of that initiative with us, the Babylon Biscet, Dylan in the House. Seth, welcome.
Seth Dillon: Thanks for having me on. I appreciate you guys thinking of me and giving me a platform to share a little bit about what we're doing and why we're doing it.
Henry Kaestner: Awesome. So just an example. Is it just kind of cast it? You've got these great many articles with these really compelling headlines, things like Worship Leader It an infinite loop between bridge and course. You've got things that poke fun at the church. You've got things that will look at the political process and try to make sense of it. Give us an idea before you talk about the origin story of the Babylon Bee, let us know a little bit more about the work that it does right now. And then let's go backwards and let's talk about the Origin story.
Seth Dillon: Yeah, I mean, what we do now. So we're a satire site, right? So we make up fake news not to be confused with misleading, intentionally misleading fake news. We make up entertaining, humorous, funny, fake news stories for the purpose of making some kind of a point. Oftentimes we are pushing back on some kind of ideological absurdity or hypocrisy or something like that, exposing it for what it is and using humor, sarcasm, irony to do that. So what we do is we have a whole team of writers, editors, animators. We're looking at what's going on in the world and in the church on a day to day basis and just pitching ideas back and forth about how we can approach it from a satirical angle. And oftentimes it's we're going for the easy joke just to make people laugh and to entertain. And other times we're really trying to speak truth to culture in some kind of meaningful way which satire can do very effectively. So you've got the battle on Bee, and then you've also got something called not the Bee, which not the Bee, so not the Bee was born from this kind of you'd see all these headlines out there, these crazy headlines that were so absurd and people would share them on social media and they would say not the onion or not the Bee. And what they meant by that was depending on who their followers were and which of those two sites they're familiar with. What they meant by that was this is not satire. This is actually real. And that disclaimer is necessary sometimes because stories can become so over-the-top, absurd, real life stories that people might assume that it's satire unless you disclaim it for them. So that was happening a lot. And we saw people sharing this hashtag, not the Bee, not the be all over the place on social media. And we decided eventually that it was time to launch a site piggybacking on that concept. And so what not to bee is is it's basically all of those real news stories that are so absurd. They should be satire, but somehow aren't. And so it's kind of a humorous, entertaining, real news source where we're offering some comedy and bringing some headlines to your attention that are just outrageous and stranger than fiction type. Exactly. Exactly. And a tagline across the top of the site is, what a time to be alive? Because we find ourselves saying that to each other all the time as we're reading these real headlines. And satire is becoming exceedingly more difficult in today's world, because basically what it does is it exaggerates the truth a lot of the time. That's one of the primary ways you do satire is just by going in the direction of the truth, just taking it a little bit further to its next logical progression. And reality is doing that for us quite a bit. So Not the Bee covers that angle of things. And it's every bit as entertaining, in my view, as the satire itself.
Henry Kaestner: Well, I want to get back into in the role of satire in the church role of satire in society. You're obviously very well thoughtful about that. But before we get much further back into that, let's do the origin story. Who are you, where you come from, how the Babylon Bee gets started. Bring it all, please.
Seth Dillon: So I am a pastor's kid, I was born in Washington, D.C., but I've lived all over the country and my dad was pastoring churches throughout my youth and into my early adulthood. And so I personally have a background in the church and behind the scenes knowledge of how the church works. And I played guitar in my own worship team and I grew up in the youth group. And so I have a lot of insight into the types of jokes that the be really started out making, kind of poking fun at the churches don't idiosyncracies and dealing with some controversial theological issues and stuff like that. So I had a background in those things. That's why the beat was so attractive to me when I first came across that I'm not the founder of The Bee acquired it back in twenty eight from its founder, Adam Ford. I'll talk a little bit more about myself and how that happened, but let me jump the beginning of the bee. So The Bee was started by Adam in March twenty sixteen when he was just doing these web comics, Adam Ford Comics, and they were kind of like these curiously Christian comics he called them, where he's making a point through his little comic strip. Oftentimes it's a joke. Oftentimes it's a more serious point, dealing with very serious issues like abortion through his comics. And he built an audience, a pretty large audience with that. And once he got to a certain place where he felt like he had kind of a little bit of a platform, he thought that someone really needed to jump in and fill this void for Christian conservative humor. There was nobody really doing satire from a Christian conservative perspective. Well, at least at that time. And he suspected that there would be a large appetite for a big market for it if somebody could do it well. And he thought he had the right tools to do that. Clearly, he did, because he wants to be in March of 2016. And within two months, he was already getting millions of page views. The site just took off like a rocket, and it became very clear that there was a very strong demand for this type of content at this level of quality. And he was just running it as a little blog. Very quickly, he started getting article contributions from readers who were following the site and primarily his initial audience for people who followed his comics. So they followed him into the launch of the Babylon Bee. A lot of them were submitting ideas to him, and one of them in particular, his name is Kyle Mann, submitted a handful of ideas that were all really great. And Adam was like, Dude, these are really good. Keep sending more. Do you want to write for me? So Kyle started doing a little bit of writing and helping Adam out. So it was really just a two man show for a long time with Kyle supporting Adam running the site. Kyle is now our editor in chief and I promoted into that role when I acquired the site and Adam kind of stepped back from things, but that was in twenty sixteen and I didn't come into the picture until April, May of twenty eighteen. So the site was two years old when I got involved and I really became involved just really strictly from the position of an investor reaching out to Adam and saying, hey, you've got something really great here. I love it. I love the humor, I love the church angle. But I also love that you're doing the political stuff and that you're reaching a broader audience just beyond the evangelical audience that you've tapped into initially. Do you need some funding to kind of get to the next level? And he was about to close a deal with somebody else who was trying to buy the Bee from him, and he was really ready to step out of the driver's seat. He was really concerned about big tech censorship. And he wrote a manifesto kind of detailing some of the reasons why he handed the Bee off to me when a deal ended up going through. But his initial deal that he was working out fell through. And he came back to me and said, hey, look, I'm not really looking for an investor. I know that's what you said you wanted to do, was just kick in some capital for equity. But I want to sell this thing. I want to step out of the driver's seat, have someone else take it over. And he has some reservations about that fight with big tech and how censorship was going and how Facebook and Twitter and the Googles of the world exercised so much power. And they can just throttle you based on ideological differences and disagreements that really concerned him. And he didn't want to be playing much of a role in that world anymore and being dependent on them for his daily bread. And so he decided that he wanted to step out of that. And I saw it as an opportunity. I look at things a little differently than Adam. We have a different perspective on this. I saw it as a great opportunity to step in and be like, hey, if you don't want to be driving the be when that fight comes to your doorstep, I do, because I see that as a worthwhile effort. I think somebody needs to be willing to be on the front lines fighting that fight. And I see that as kind of like a bring it on situation. I welcome the challenge. I thought it would be not just important and impactful to be running to be in those circumstances, but also I think to some extent enjoyable. I think a lot of these efforts to silence and censor and everything kind of backfire on the left and they actually amplify the voices they're trying to silence. And so I saw it as a challenge and an opportunity, whereas he saw it as a threat and something to really be concerned about. And so he ended up handing it off to me. We worked out a deal in the middle of the year in twenty eighteen. So that's kind of the details around how I got involved and what ended up happening there. I was already an entrepreneur who was on my own running my own businesses at the time. We develop websites and web applications, mobile apps, we have some ecommerce properties. So we had a lot going on and I had a lot on my plate. And so that's initially why I was looking at being more of a passive investor in the in not taking it over. But I couldn't pass the opportunity when he wanted to put it in my lap.
Henry Kaestner: That's fascinating to me as I'm listening to you share this story and just your take on the opportunity and his take on some real challenges, and the truth is that there's real opportunity and there's real challenges. I also marvel at the fact that you are unlike most entrepreneurs with this property, with this investment that you lead and run. Now, what you do changes every single day. Most of us make a product or service. We have customers. We know who they are. But the raw materials, we understand what we do. We're plumbers or we are in technology every single day. What you do and how you respond is different based on the news cycle. Yeah, and it's almost kind of like I don't want to overly spiritualized it, but it's almost kind of like it is manna from heaven thing, which is you wake up in the morning and you believe that God is going to provide and it's going to look probably much different one day versus the next day. What does that look like for you? And do you ever have, like, panic, like, oh, my goodness, what if nothing happens? Interesting this week, what do we do?
Seth Dillon: Well, it's interesting because there's two challenges, right? One of the challenges is that you can see it as an advantage that you always have news coming at you. You always have things happening. It's always things happening in the church. There's always things happening in the world. And that you can count on that. And there's always going to be crazy controversy and stuff like that that you can capitalize on. And that presents a lot of opportunities. At the same time, it can be very overwhelming to have to be swimming in that cycle every single day and constantly be creative. On the back of that, all the time, our writers will say, I think I just came up with my last funny idea I don't have anymore. But it's funny how creative inspiration works when you have really talented people and we have a super talented crew that, well, seems to be somewhat bottomless for us. So, you know, it's a combination of the creative genius of our writing staff, but then the steady stream of events, real life events that are happening, that kind of feed and fuel their creativity, that keep us going day to day, I don't think there's any fear or concern that there's not going to be crazy headlines that are going to attract our eyes and attract our attention and get our minds working. I think the real fear that our writers really feel day to day is that they're not going to be able to come up with anything funny off the back of this or how do they go beyond it? I mean, that's what I mentioned a moment ago. You know, that satire is more challenging now than it's been in the past, or perhaps I didn't what I was thinking it and it is and the reason that it is, is because the world has become so absurd, so crazy, and satire exaggerates the truth to make its points. So we've got this challenge of trying to go beyond reality and come up with points that are believable, but not so crazy that you've got a fine line there, because if you go too far beyond the truth, your joke kind of depends on proximity. The truth to be funny and to make its point. It's really difficult in an insane world. It's really difficult to find that sweet spot where it's crazy enough to be satire, but not so crazy that it's not believable. So I think that's the biggest challenge that we face.
That's really interesting stuff to jump in here.
William Norvell: Big, big, big, big fan, I've been following you guys for years. I have a Instagram account with a handful of friends where we share Babylon articles and jokes. So you add a lot of joy to my life. So very grateful for you. And it's so much fun. It's so much fun from the inside jokes to you playing both sides of the political spectrum in such a way. In some way, I just find it hilarious. And in a time where it's just so needed, you know, we just need to laugh at ourselves and have a joke. The world is heavy and just grateful. So thanks so much. And on that, I mean, my friends are going to be super jealous that we're having this podcast right now. I mean, it's that level like I'm sending a text immediately after this and it's going to be a really you fanboy.
Seth Dillon: Absolutely.
Because I'm not hiding this to speak to that point of real quick about how you know, how the world is right now and how this is kind of needed, we we don't want to overstate the importance of what we're doing. You know, we're not saving lives or anything like that. But in a dark time and we've been dealing with economic challenges and the pandemic and all these things that you've got, these deaths of despair that are happening, we do get a lot of feedback from people who are like, you're a bright spot. In my day, you made me laugh. And so our team feels really good about the role that they're playing right now when things are so crazy in the world, especially when all this is happening during an election year, when you've got a lot of division and political differences and disagreements and divides within families and stuff like that. So we get a lot of really encouraging feedback from readers about that.
And the truth is, C.S. Lewis made this point and one of his talks that's in the weight of glory, where he talks about how men in dire situations don't cease to be men. We still need to learn. We still need to laugh. We still need to cry. And so this idea that when things are really hard or when times are tough, we need to be really serious about it and take everything so seriously. I think we're taking everything way too seriously. We need to be able to just kind of put things in proper perspective and be willing to laugh a little bit and bring levity to things, because even in dark times, that's important. It's not that you're making light of the troubles, but you're keeping things in proper perspective.
Henry Kaestner: You know, I think about the impact of satire when delivered by people from a people group. There's something really powerful. And you can go that much further with the Babylon Bee because you are a Christian and you are therefore uniquely prepared to be able to make fun of people who share our faith in a way. And I just I'm laughing a little bit. Good thing I put it because I just started laughing out loud about maybe I shouldn't date when we're recording it, but it's at the beginning of Nativity and talking about the fact that the thorn in Paul's side was discovered and it was when the nineteen 1980s British rock group.
I love that.
But there's there's something about our ability as Christ followers to be able to poke fun at, you know, the word of God that if it came across from a different group might not be received as well. I think about the work of Key and Peele in the way that they're able to poke fun and have some satire about mixed race couples or African-Americans in a way that they can only uniquely do. And some people might think they go too far one way or another. But what does that look like for you and being uniquely positioned to be able to make fun of the church in a way that can still be reverential but just makes it compelling? Right. Because if The Onion, as a secular satire site, were to go ahead and poke fun at the Apostle Paul, it will be received completely different than the Babylon Bee. What does that look like for you? And what do you take that?
Seth Dillon: Well, we're coming at it from the perspective that what I mentioned a moment ago about how we take ourselves too seriously. I mean, this applies, I think, very directly to the church. There's an article in Christianity Today. It's an interview with the founder of The Bee, Adam Ford, with the headline The Church Needs Laughter. And he talks about in that piece the importance of us not taking ourselves so seriously, being willing to kind of examine ourselves and take a look at our own beliefs, throw this stuff up on the wall with the projector and see if we're OK with it and analyze ourselves and be willing to be a little bit self-deprecating. I thought one of the most refreshing things in the world when I was first encountering the Babylon Bee was the fact that there were a bunch of Calvinist jokes on there, kind of poking fun at Calvinists. And I knew that the guy that was running the site was reformed himself. And I thought it was so refreshing that you've got Calvinists running a website that makes fun of Calvinists. And I thought, where is this been? This kind of refreshing willingness to examine ourselves, poke fun at ourselves, not be so thin skinned and sensitive, but at the same time not being irreverent just for the sake of being irreverent? I don't think there's any value in that, at least not from our perspective. Being Christians running a Christian website, our reference is goal oriented. You know, we're kind of making light of things or cracking jokes about things with a specific purpose in mind. And we're trying to make a point. We're not doing it just for the sake of being irreverent in the way that like a show like. Family Guy or South Park would with an episode about Jesus, where they're just trying to make him look silly and and mock him for the mockery we bring to bear on the issues is done primarily to ridicule bad ideas, that ideology, that moral viewpoints. So it's coming at it from a slightly different perspective that way, never just a reverence for the sake of a reverence.
Henry Kaestner: How do you look at that when you talk about race and stay away from some things that are like race? Does that ever come up when it's with a preacher or something else like that? I think back to the recent post that you guys had with Kenneth Copeland and his very, very passionate prayer against covid-19 said to this incredible electric metal guitar, I mean, just so well done. And so you're making fun of Kenneth Copeland, but it's not an ad hominem. I think that's good that he's just very powerful. Some of you guys got to go online and you got to see just that good. Do you ever find that in your editorial space where like, oh, my goodness, the way that this pastor is presenting this with regards to the prosperity gospel or some other thing, we have got to make fun of it. Lest the rest of the world think that this is what Christians are like, what does that look like? And is there a real tension there?
Seth Dillon: I guess the tension would be this idea that Christians shouldn't go after their own. But really, like you said, it's not an ad hominem thing. You know, just as a kind of a general principle. The purpose of satire at least, is we're doing it most of the time is to ridicule bad ideas or dangerous ideology. In this case, from a Christian perspective, it goes a little bit further than that and more specific than that to ridiculing and taking apart bad theology. And so, like with the prosperity gospel, one of the most viral pieces that we did early on on that topic was about after Hurricane Harvey had flooded Houston. We did this piece about how Joel Osteen was sailing his luxury yacht through the flooded streets of Houston to pass out copies of your best life now. And the whole purpose of that is to just highlight the absurdity of this message. Your best life now, this gospel that doesn't preach everywhere. Right? You can't preach that gospel to people who are drowning in their homes, are lost to flooding. You know, you aren't necessarily going to have your best life. Now, that's not how this actually works. In fact, Christians can expect to experience a lot of hardship and persecution and suffering in this life. And so we do go out of our way to deal with a lot of these issues and take on theology that we disagree with in a very direct head on way that can be extremely uncomfortable for Christians who find themselves in these camps or listen to these pastors and preachers. It can be very offensive to them. But if you're bristling at something that we're saying, you know, then I think that we're doing our job, we're making a point. And so it's satire is always fine with everyone that always entertained by it. They love it. They think it's great right up until the moment when it pokes at something that's important to them and it hits them personally. And then all of a sudden, oh, you went too far. You went too far. I can tell you this. Every single article we publish goes too far in somebody's eyes and we hear about it all day long in the inbox. You know, we're getting all these complaints and emails from people. This one went too far. This one went too far. It's just because that particular article touched on something that was really important to them. It was one of their sacred cows. So you're always going to have that challenge with satire that you're going to be offending people. But to some extent, that's the point. If we're not offending anyone, then we're certainly not speaking any truth.
Henry Kaestner: So how might you offend the Faith Driven Entrepreneur?
Have you thought about that throw there?
I mean, the guys with fish on the side of their van for plumbers or something like that, have you ever waded into. I can't recall, but maybe that's some untapped if it's right for you, it might be.
Seth Dillon: I mean, it's a very kind of niche audience. I'm not sure I don't know that we've ever gone after that particular angle.
William Norvell: I thought if you need some contract writers, Henry and I are available, just throw it out there. Christian business feels like a ripe area. I mean, me and my friends sit around and talk about and they're in jest and quick, but also like, gosh, you had one the other day that said man pretends to understand certain book. Yeah. And like that was just like so perfect for one of my friends. I said it to him and I was like, Dave, here you go, buddy. You know, he was like, oh, so true. I don't understand a word and thing, but I read it. I tell everybody I read it. And I just think it's such a valuable thing. If you could take it light and you feel like you're in a place where pastors find themselves to write. I mean, I talk to a lot of pastors and they say, look, if you knew how many negative emails or letters I got after every single sermon I give. Right. And there are just people that are going to get upset no matter what. And that's like our call is the body of Christ to love. And he wants them and try to shepherd people along that.
Seth Dillon: I am. And you know what? We make fun of these people, too. You know, we make fun of the mentality, I would say, that says, oh, well, satire. I love satire. But this time you've gone too far. I mean, we've actually written satirical pieces, cracking jokes about that particular mentality, and we'll even jokingly send that to them sometimes when they send us their complaint. Where they've now just put themselves in line with a joke that we've made and we'll bounce it right back to them. I think it's for a lot of people, it's just a maturity thing, not being able to kind of look at yourself and do some of that self-examination and allow yourself to feel convicted by something to bristle at it and to get offended is not a very healthy reaction. So, you know, you don't do too much to try to appease those people or to apologize. We're never really doing that. We're not really backing down on it because our point isn't to just upset them. If they're upset, then there's probably a reason why they're so upset and it's not our fault. So we don't own that.
Henry Kaestner: You know, I wonder if there's an aspect of the work that you're doing with satire that becomes a winsome and apologetic. I think that one of the things that is universally well thought of is somebody who doesn't take themselves too seriously and is able to poke fun at themselves. Do you hear of people fording Babylon be articles and headlines out to other people as a way of saying, hey, I know that, you know, I'm a Christian and I'm really serious about my faith. But lest you think that I kind of sit in this holy huddle and all I do is read the Bible all day, here's some fun pieces that poke fun at us and then becomes kind of a winsome, apologetic where people say, actually, you know what, maybe these Christians are a little bit more accessible because they can poke fun at themselves. I can see it being an apologetic tool.
Seth Dillon: Yeah. And I think where we see that the most is not so much in feedback from people who are saying, hey, I'm forwarding this along to people and sharing it that way. But we get feedback all the time from people who are atheists or agnostic, and they'll write in and say how much they appreciate our willingness to kind of take on our own issues and laugh at ourselves. And also they think it's really funny, the jokes we make about atheists, they'll find it entertaining and they have a healthy perspective on that. And I think that's good. Know as Christians, we've become very used to that. We consume entertainment all the time. That makes fun of us all the time. You watch The Simpsons and the way that the reverend is portrayed in that show or Ned Flanders, you know, they're the butt of the joke a lot of the time, these people. So we're always portrayed that way and we've gotten used to kind of laughing at ourselves. But this is not often on the other foot. And I think it's really great when we hear feedback from people like that who say, I do not agree with you guys on these issues. I'm not a religious believer, I'm not a churchgoer or whatever, but I really enjoy what you guys are doing. I love what you're doing and I love the spirit in which you're doing it. That's really great feedback and that's a step in the right direction. We're connecting with them in a way where we're not just upsetting them, making them angry, turning them off, we're entertaining them. So now at least we have some common ground we can stand on.
William Norvell: And having the next step in the discussion, I'm going to pull a Henry here, two questions. One, I'm interested when some of your articles are I've seen two that come to mind, of course, one that's probably more famous for President Trump retweeted one of your articles and didn't seem to think that it was satire, too. I remember the one you did about LeBron James where in the L.A. Supreme Court in honor of ERG, and that went viral. And even my network, I had a few friends posting. I'm so proud of LeBron James. This is an incredible tribute.
And I had to shoot him. And I was like, oh, my gosh, that's not what that is. I want to take that down.
And so I'm interested in how you react to that. And the second piece is obviously something that's probably come up is the censorship idea. And I know you just mentioned earlier that Facebook could cut off 80 percent of your revenue. And I think you guys have been in some dialog with them on some different things. So how do you feel when one of your fake things becomes real, right at some level? And then two, how are you wading through the censorship concept?
Seth Dillon: So the Trump thing was really interesting. He shared an article that we wrote about how Twitter had taken down their servers to prevent the spread of negative coverage of Biden's family and the scandal, the Biden skin, all that stuff. You know, we did a joke about that because Twitter actually had a server outage. They had a brief outage. They were down for like a couple of hours. And we made a joke about how they had gone down for the purpose of suppressing negative news about Biden. Trump retweeted that and everybody immediately jumped on him like crazy to suggest that Trump doesn't know he's sharing a fake news site. You know, he's so dumb. First of all, it was an opportunity for them to take jabs at him. Now, we actually know from people close to Trump in his administration that he's a fan of the Babylon and thinks it's really funny. Even people in his family, like Don Jr. who have met is a big fan of the Babylon Bee, so they circulate these articles and share them. We had somebody in his team tell us that they often read them on Air Force One when they're traveling to and fro. So he's a fan of the Babylon Bee, whether he knew that that particular article was satirical or not, I can't tell you for sure. But he does know that the Babylon be a satire. So if he recognize the source, then he was sharing that either to troll people or just because he thought it was funny. But it's interesting, you know, the way that that kind of stuff happens, that the left treated him as if he was really stupid for sharing our piece. Did you bring up that? LeBron James thing while the left was sharing that like crazy, so they try to act like we're duping our dumb conservative Republican readers who are just so stupid, they can't tell that this is not real news. They love to kind of paint things in that color. But the truth of the matter is, whenever we do a piece that's very critical of Trump or some other conservative or Republican thinker or idea, they're very quick to jump on it and think that it's true. And a lot of that is wishful thinking. They want these things to be true. We made up a, quote, kind of poking at Trump's ego a little bit, saying that he had done more for Christianity than Jesus himself. And that piece went crazy viral on the left. They were sharing it like, look at this man and his ego. Look how great. Now, obviously, it connected with people because they saw that there was some truth to what we were saying in terms of highlighting the man's ego. But they really wanted that to be true because they wanted a reason to dunk on him. So that can work both ways. And it's not an effective argument for them to say that we're duping our readers because a lot of our stuff goes viral, particularly because the left took it so seriously on the censorship side of things. It's interesting because this is where, you know, these two things kind of overlap a little bit when our stories do go very viral. And in some cases, there is a percentage of the population out there who's never encountered the Bible. And Bee, they don't know who we are and they're not aware that what we just shared was satirical and they believe it. That's where the media loves to jump in the mainstream media, The New York Times, CNN, and they like to say, oh, look at these guys. They're skirting so close to the truth on purpose. They're trying to deliberately mislead people. They're not actually a satire site. They are trafficking and misinformation under the guise of comedy. And they're doing this in some nefarious, malicious way to try to get around Facebook's rules, because Facebook is going to have exemptions carved out for satire. So they impugn our motives and try to use that as a way of demonstrating that we are, in fact, a bad player. We are a bad actor who is misleading people on purpose. And it's the predicate for censorship. That's what they're trying to do, is they're trying to say, hey, look, these guys aren't genuine satire. They're misleading people on purpose. And what's the penalty for that? You know, on these social platforms, they have strict rules against the spread of misinformation and they penalize sites that repeatedly put out misinformation and eventually they do suspend them. So what I believe they're trying to accomplish by smearing us this way, because they know that we're genuine satire, they know that we're not actually doing what they're accusing us of doing. You know, what they're trying to do is they're trying to get us into a position where we are alleged to have violated the community standards, these social platforms that they can shut us off. And so far, Facebook and Twitter haven't taken the bait on that and acted on that as if we are, in fact, spreading misinformation on purpose. But we have had mistakes several times that have impacted us, at least in the short term.
Henry Kaestner: Is there an arrow in your quiver of using satire back at them to poke fun at them as they come after you?
Seth Dillon: Yeah, we do that all the time. If you pull up the Bible and be and look for either New York Times or CNN in the search, you'll see that we hit them really hard. Whenever they come after us, we make jokes about how we bought us, how we acquired CNN, the biggest competitive satire site out there. We make jokes about putting words in. Brian Stelter is now saying the Internet's only big enough for one satire site. You know, we constantly poke at them when these things happen. And I'm sure we get under their skin a little bit, but they keep coming back at us. And it's interesting that these attacks on the bee as being kind of this malicious source of misinformation up to this point have only backfired because what they do is they raise the level of notoriety of our site. For one thing, we get more media attention when they accuse us of this stuff. I end up on Cantabrian Show or Greg Gutfeld or Tucker Carlson or something talking about it. So they raise our profile and they bring us more readers. So up until the point where they finally succeed and get Facebook to shut us off, they're only helping us right now.
Henry Kaestner: So I'm really, really grateful for your time and for your work. Satire is actually, interestingly, a big part of Faith Driven Entrepreneur, and it's not so much for all the material that we're going to be able to deliver to you that makes fun of Faith driven entrepreneurs. And I think that there is a lot of material there, but it's actually part of our origin story as well. We got started. Our very first blog post was what I thought was a really good blog written by John Drexler talking about the value of satire through the lens of HBO's Silicon Valley episode, where they talked about all the different things you can be as an entrepreneur, but you can't be Christian. And that kind of kick started our ministry and John's ability to recognize that. I will tell you that as I reflect back on that. When I moved to Silicon Valley five and a half years ago, people had said you should expect to feel lots of headwinds and people are going to make fun of you because your faith and I can understand who you are, you have to understand you're walking into an environment where the Mozilla CEO is forced out. But I think that. This is about the time that this episode from HBO, Silicon Valley came out, and I think that actually that episode was really a turning point where people came to understand actually, that's ridiculous. Now, do we really think that that way about Christians and I've gotten the sense over the last four or five years that people have come to understand that a faith expression within the concept of entrepreneurship and investing is appropriate. It's part of who somebody is. But if I were going to go ahead and I was going to actually say there was a turning point from when Silicon Valley was actually very negative against Christians and were actually turned around. And I think it really has again, I think it was actually at that point, very widely watched episode of Silicon Valley. So satire is part of origin story to thank you for sharing your origin story with us and for continuing to do your work. And we always close every episode out with William asking a really important question.
William Norvell: Yes, Seth, appreciate it. It's been such a good time as we do close, we always love to ask two things which are one, where does God have you today? Where does he have you in his word? What might he be teaching you? This could be something you've been meditating on this season, maybe something he brought to you this morning. Right. But just we know his word is living and active and we just love to see where he has our listeners. And then to if you happen to have any prayer request that us and our listeners could stop and lift you guys up and yourself personally, that's nice.
Seth Dillon: Yeah. I mean, so one of the things that's been kind of on my heart and mind a lot lately is this, you know, people are in my church and my family talking a lot about how are we living in the end times. And as Jesus coming back soon and look at all the unrest in our society and all the hardship we're going through as a nation, we're kind of just like at each other's throats. And there's all these issues going on with extreme weather in the pandemic and all of these things. And there's a lot of fear and uncertainty and a lot of hope and expectation that maybe, you know, maybe Jesus is coming back soon and maybe all of these wrongs are going to be set right in the near future. And, you know, I think just really keeping a perspective on this, I was in second Peter recently reading through where he's talking about the long suffering of God and how he's not he's not being slow in his promise. He's being patient and he's long suffering because he wants people to be saved and drawn to a knowledge of him. And I think it's really important for us to understand the role. This is what I try to counsel people when they come to me with some of these concerns is that there's a role that hardship and suffering have to play in drawing people to God and to bringing them to knowledge of himself. And part of the reason why things are the way they are in this world and they actually are as they should be, in the sense that we live in a world that's filled with circumstances and free will and all kinds of hardship and suffering that does unite people with God by drawing them to him and seeing that they have a need for him and reaching out for him and hope and expectation. And he is going to come. But he has long suffering and he wants as many as possible to come to repentance. And so I see it as, again, it's kind of like that situation with Adam, where he was kind of really concerned about the situation and wanted to pull the ripcord. And I saw it as an opportunity. I think we need to just flip our perspective and see that this is really an opportunity to reach people, people who are going through a really hard time. You can reach them with the gospel message right now. And it's going to if it's the right gospel message, it will preach to them in these times. So that's been something that's been on my mind and heart that I've meditated on and shared with some people just recently and some of the concerns that they were sharing with me. And I hope that's helpful in terms of prayer requests.
Yeah, I mean, as far as for the Babylon Bee, I think we would really appreciate prayer along the lines of exercising wisdom and discernment in what directions we go in, the types of issues that we decide to cover and the way that we go after them. But also just for God's provision, as we kind of navigate these crazy rough waters with censorship and all these things going on that he'd make a way for us.
William Norvell: Amen Amen, thank you so much for sharing your story. Thank you for sharing those reflections. Thank you for sharing your time. We're grateful for you and what God God's doing through you and your team. And we appreciate it. Thank you, guys.