Seth Dillon is a man who has spent years fighting to get free speech back on social media—for the sake of comedy. Now he thinks that fight created a problem he didn’t anticipate: a culture with the restored freedom to say anything, built on top of a growing willingness to believe nothing. Dillon runs the popular satirical website The Babylon Bee, which is often described as a Christian version of The Onion. His path there was almost accidental. He was a successful marketing entrepreneur who reached out to the site’s original founder as a fan, hoping to invest a little money in something he thought was funny. He soon found himself buying the whole operation instead, right as the publication started to get flagged and fact-checked by platforms it depended on to reach readers. He told me how that fight actually played out, including the moment his team sent Snopes a legal letter that eventually forced the site to change how it fact-checks altogether. I asked him whether some public figures are harder to satirize than others, and he had a theory I hadn’t heard before: It’s not really about who deserves mockery; it’s about whether the person’s real behavior already sounds like a punch line. He brought up a joke his writers made about President Donald Trump years before Trump said something almost identical in real life, and argued Joe Biden and Kamala Harris created the opposite problem, sounding so unintentionally absurd that writing something funnier than their actual quotes became difficult. Dillon also told me about a joke his site ran about Megyn Kelly that he pulled down after she pushed back, and why he’s since come to see that decision as a mistake rather than a kindness. Dillon argued that the old gatekeepers suppressed true things they didn’t like, but the newer, freer version of the internet has the opposite problem: rewarding whichever claim is most outlandish regardless of whether it holds up. As an example, he pointed to the conspiracy theories that sprouted after Charlie Kirk’s murder—ideas with no real evidence behind them that spread faster than the boring, well-documented truth ever could. His worry wasn’t that people would be silenced again, but rather that fewer of them would bother asking whether what they were hearing was actually true. Free speech, he said, cleared the room. What people do with it is up to them. 0:00 Intro 1:46 How Seth Came to Own the Babylon Bee 7:53 Why Wokeness Opened the Door for Conservative Satire 18:30 Why Humor Is a Cleansing Mechanism for Political Culture 24:30 How Fact Checkers Became Narrative Guardians 33:11 The Meghan Kelly Joke and Taking It Down 42:02 The Corruption of Friendship in Public Life 47:05 Is Trump Easy or Hard to Parody? 50:07 Should the Babylon Bee Punch at Both Sides? 53:09 With Gatekeepers Gone, We're Incentivized to Disregard the Truth 1:02:13 AI, Conspiracy Thinking, and the Future of Comedy