Grubstakers - Episode 155: Shane Smith (Vice)

Episode Date: April 7, 2020

We freebased DayQuil and recorded a podcast episode about Vice billionaire Shane Smith. This one delves into Smith's murky backstory, Vice's humble beginnings as a media property pump and dump, Vice union busting, and Smith's racist friend Gavin McGinnes. About ten minutes before the episode ends there were some technical difficulties (somebody forgetting to charge his recorder), so Sean's feed switches to Skype audio.

It's the kind of thing that makes the average citizen puke. I look at this system and say, yeah, you know, what's going on? I don't know anything about this man except I've read bad stuff about him. And I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about him. We have more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop.

In 5, 4, 3, 2... The evil has come. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires My name is Yogi Paliwal and I'm joined by my spectacular co-hosts Andy Palmer Sean P. McCarthy Steve Jeffers And today we're going to be talking about vice megalomaniac Shane Smith, the man that has been described by Johnny Knoxville at a roast,

which was $1,200 per plate, as Shane Smith is to journalism what Jared from Subway is to free the children. Johnny Knoxville is fantastic. But before we talk about Shane Smith, I think we'll do a Corona update for everyone listening. How are my hosts holding up? How y'all doing? I'm doing all right, all things considered. Someone else go.

I'll go in a minute. Unfortunately, the listeners cannot see Andy's freshly Britney Spears shaved head as he claims that he is not having a meltdown in the middle of this coronavirus isolation. I had long hair. It was getting in my face and making it annoying to sleep. Going to the barber is out the window. So I thought, you know what? I'll see how hard this is. And I got one of those trimmers uh a personal grooming kit and it has one of those

sliders with all the numbers on it and i thought i'll just give myself a nice little buzz cut at five and that'll be easy to to maintain and then it wasn't cutting at five no so i thought how do i get it to cut i slid it all the way down to one and then went, I did the classic moron move of just going right up the top of my forehead on the one level. And it cut. It cut the hair. And once that is down to just the roots, you got to kind of take it all off.

But Yogi, great job getting uh uh jim norton as a guest appearance on this episode that's a that's a big get andy's bald head is not necessarily jarring but it makes me more afraid of him which i don't know what says about him or me yeah i love the mustache so now i've I got kind of a Walter White turn. It looks good, Andy. It's the perfect look for wailing on a car windshield with a golf club. Yeah, if there's any Grubsticker host that's truly ready to riot, I think it's Andy. I think he's certainly jumped the gun on taking over the civil liberties that have been stolen from us in New York.

Steven, how are you holding up during the corona mania that we're living in currently? Well, I was trying to look up what the numbers are at for today for New York. And I think we're at like 4,000 dead. I had a Bloomberg update that said 10,000. Not to be a downer. No, for New York. Oh, just for New York? It's like 4,000 dead. I had a Bloomberg update that said 10,000. Not to be a downer. No, for New York. Oh, just for New York it said 4,000? Man, shit's fucking sad.

I mean, I'm still fine, you know, physically. I don't think I've had it. Yeah, I don't know if I've had it either. I felt sick for a little while, but I don't know if that was just me psyching myself out or if that was actually it. On Twitter, some people were talking about the coronavirus is not at all subtle. Like, they were like, it is relentless in how it truly attacks your body. This person was talking about her husband and herself had coronavirus, and he was more sick than she was. And it's just a brutal from

what they described i mean none of the like oh you kind of can't breathe for a second stuff no it was relentless in that they had fever symptoms heavy cough and they were just out on their asses for days yeah well some people like it some people just have like very mild case but then most people it's like you're just out of commission for at least a day obviously it's far worse for other people yeah i don't know yeah like it's it's that's what's so annoying about it and i'm sure we've talked about this a bit is just how how much like how much the symptoms vary from person to person, because, you know, it's pretty much killed Boris Johnson at this point. By the time this comes out, he might be dead. And then other people like there was an article about a bunch of people who got it at a party in Seattle. And so they all got tested and a bunch of them were tested positive at a party in seattle and so they all got tested a bunch of them

were uh tested positive but they all had completely different symptoms some people didn't have fever um some people didn't cough uh others were pretty like doing pretty badly and these were all people in their like 30s or so. Our listeners in the UK are already dealing with the new reality of a Dominic Raab magisterium because Boris Johnson has died. Yeah, but what if coronavirus kills Boris Johnson and then scientists look at it under a microscope

and they see a little IRA medal pinned to its chest. Somebody, yeah, an IRA insurgent just breathed on him. Coronavirus posts an update like you have to be lucky every time. We only have to be lucky once.

You guys got anything else? Sean? I mean, yeah, well, things are kind of same old, same old over here. I would say as far as, you know, the wider New York, the closest to green shoots is that we've sort of seen hospitalization leveling out, but we don't know if that's an actual trend or if it's just a blip in the data. And then, like, you know, the thing is, compared to the rest of the country, New York is getting better. But that's just because New Orleans is the new epicenter and Michigan and Indiana has a horrific hospitalization rate, even though they only have like 5000 cases confirmed. So you know, I mean, we are entering what I talked about in the last one. And of course,

my worst fear is that New York is very soon not going to be the worst city in the country hit by this. The thing that I talked about on the premium, it turns out it's actually starting to happen where there are a bunch of, it looks like according to the source I'm looking at here, this is from the Worldometer's thing. Okay, so they're quoting the chair of New York City Health saying that approximately 180 to 195 deaths per day are occurring at home in New York City due to coronavirus and not being

counted in the official figures um because they just don't have the capacity to test the people who are dying at home so that's another thing to uh keep in mind when looking at the official death figures is that there's an all likelihood happening nationwide but that's 180 to 195 in addition to the about 600 who died today so it it's probably that somewhere around that ratio nationwide worldwide maybe even of people who are dying at home and aren't getting tested and aren't getting counted in the official figures yeah i did like that there were a bunch of new york city officials today insisting that they will not be digging mass graves in new york city parks oh man because apparently that was

going around i mean we talked a bit about uh what is it andy that mass grave on the island i think the walk back was that that's where they'll get buried they won't get buried in New York City parks oh thank god well there there was a thing going around where it was like potentially temporary mass graves in the parks and I I think then they were saying well they're not going to be permanent mass graves and that was the kind of hand waving that was going around. I don't know if that was just a rumor, because it looked like it was potentially a real thing. So basically, we don't know if anything good or bad is happening,

but we do know that it's probably worse than we think it is currently. That's my consensus of the whole fucking situation. Everything is pretty fucked. Well, like, Cuomo is doing these daily briefings, and he says that we're coming up on this supposed peak. And, you know, there's, like, some data, like Sean was saying, that says there's a blip downwards in the cases. But you need to see like a few you need to

see like several blips at roughly the same time to be able to say that yeah cuomo has a tendency to take um statistical variations and say well it looks like we're starting to beat it and it it's possible that it's not um that it's kind of abating now that the shelter-in-place measures are actually making a dent in the total number of cases. I think some of the plateauing in the spread is also attributable to just running out of tests. tests um but even with keeping in mind that the shelter in place uh results are actually showing a um uh near plateauing in the number of cases and the numbers of deaths uh it's i would not put it past any of the leaders of the United States to kind of jump the gun and say a little too early, all right, we beat it. Everyone go back to work. And then it gets way worse than it is now. parks i mean this could actually be a great way that the officials could discourage people from going on shroom trips into parks is if you just put a plaque with 10 000 names on it because that'll really really harsh your vibe if you're uh just ambling through and you see a plaque with 10 000 names on it but uh so that thing it was reported in the new york times so it is still a rumor but

city officials were at least discussing this idea. But the play down was they're just going to bury them in mass graves on Heart Island, which we talked about on the premium episode. Yeah, so don't worry. You're not going to be in a nice mass grave. Well, we'll have more on Corona and the virus and how we're all dealing with it on our next episode. But right now, let's go into the bio of Shane Smith. Hey, do you guys ever watch or trust Vice? You guys into Vice?

Y'all ever fuck with Vice? I would skim articles. I mean, the impression that I got from the beginning, I think that's the impression a lot of people got is it was largely a media outlet that was trying way too hard to be cool. There was a Twitter account probably like five years or eight years ago or something that was Vice's hip. And it was just a bunch of like, we did ayahuasca and talked to Polynesians about skateboarding. And that was, I mean, that was kind of the standard vice headline for, I don't know, for most of its early years was just we did drugs and then talked to ethnic group about hip subject. Right. group about hip subject right yeah it's basically your like one-stop shop if you want to know how to roll a blunt but also overthrow the libyan government when i moved to new york i moved to like not too far from vice's headquarters and so i was like oh

man if i could get a job at vice that would be fucking awesome because i just moved to new york i didn't have work and i lived so close to the campus that i was like yeah oh, man, if I could get a job at Vice, that would be fucking awesome. Because I just moved to New York. I didn't have work. And I lived so close to the campus that I was like, if I could get a job with Vice, I could fucking do a whole bunch of shit. And I didn't get a job with them because I'm not Vice material, which from a lawsuit that was settled in 2019 where Vice meet agrees to pay 1.87 million settlement over gender pay discrimination. They had this thing called the 22 rule, which was hire 22-year-olds, pay them $22,000 a year,

and make them work 22 hours a day. And I didn't fit any of those things. I also wasn't a good-looking person, which is something that Vice specializes in. And you learned that your parents weren't as rich as you thought they were.

Mom, Dad, Vice won't hire me. When I first got to New York, I also, I wasn't trying to work at Vice, but I was, like, starting my grad program, and I saw,, and I watched a few of Vice's early videos, like the Viceland, stuff like that. Oh, yeah. the early vice was like associated with the punk scene in like montreal right in in ottawa and it was like sort of had heard of that i guess from some other people who are more into punk music but i guess like oh okay so they're doing digital media now and yeah it seemed like they were like they're intent on becoming like uh cornering the market on unemployed millennials or millennials in school which is most of them at that time in like 2010 and 11 uh and somehow making money off of that right yeah vice kind of they're one of many people to kind

of latch on to the idea that like punk is a as a brand is much more profitable than punk as music i will give them credit for being the first people i've ever seen to pump and dump gentrification because this guy became a billionaire off of just a bunch of well-to-do people moving to Williamsburg and then convincing a bunch of private equity people that they're the only ones who could advertise to them. Yeah. Well, all that will change when you learn more about him because I certainly, in starting my research on this episode, was swayed by Shane Smith's fable of who he and the Vice entity is. And really, you know, I've watched a small piece on Vice from 99 when they moved from

Montreal to New York. And the way it looks like, it just seems like three Canadian friends that are starting a podcast. And I will say that Saroosh Alvi, the one vice co-founder that's not mentioned as much, really reminds me of me because he's just quiet, mild-mannered, not a Nazi, not an egotistical brainiac who thinks he can take over the world by pitching to them a good sales pitch. He co-founded a company with an alt-right thought leader. Yeah. I had a lot of sympathy for the Pakistani-Canadian in this crew.

I honestly had the most sympathy for his parents because they were like, I think they were doctors and professors, I believe. I can't even remember his parents because it was so uninteresting in terms of what brown people are in the Western world. But his parents must have been like, man, son, are you really making this magazine where y'all are reviewing dildos? Sean, are you fucking cleaning your keyboard right now, man? Motherfucker, try talking on this goddamn mic. Is it coming through? Yeah, it's coming through. It did?

All right. Sorry. All right. Sorry. All right, go ahead. Sean, could you clean your keyboard after we're done with the show? I was rubbing it as a nervous twitch. I didn't know it would come through on the microphone. You eat fucking eight pounds of almonds before the episode, man. I don't need them almond crumbs to be on the goddamn show.

No, that's not true. But yeah, Shane Smith is a liar, a snake oil salesman, and the motherfucker is profiting off the idea of cool. media had been focused on for two decades in terms of between 2000 and now this entire idea that the millennial hipster generation is lazy no good idiots because of how shane smith built his vice media empire yeah i mean and even to go back to what we were talking about you know with the 22 year olds working 22 hour days like when i was more politically stupid, I didn't know enough about Vice, but it just kind of irritated me, this over-the-top drug use promotion, and then, you know, the most irritating elements of not sex positivity, but using sex positivity to sell sex or sell whatever, you know, sell themselves. And then you look at that. And then now, today,

you understand that people can use that cool aesthetic to make people work way too hard, because there's only a couple job openings in the entire field of journalism. So they can hire people for $22,000 a year and make them work 22 hours a day. And they can also do the same thing with people who buy into the idea that this is cool. This is a cool place. I want to be cool. I want to be hip. So I'm going to work way too hard and make a bunch of money for a bunch of people who are exploiting me. And I'm not going to think about it that much. And we've done with this podcast, there are a billion different ideologies you can use to sell people on the idea of exploiting themselves for you and coolness and hipness is just one of them i will

say shane is like a couple of the other gen x billionaires we've covered that they're like they're some of like the most cynical manipulating ones like uh as far as just like kicking that kicking down the ladder behind you generationally speaking yeah it's just like for late 30s to early 40 year olds exploiting early 20s to late 20 20 year olds to do it's like the same work that got you into the business it is true like gen x really does sneak under the the radar because they're flying in the wake of the supernova of suck that was the boomers so you don't even know they get they often they get a free pass sometimes yeah but yeah no it is this is the uh the beto o'rourke of news magazines people someone on twitter noted yesterday that um uh gen x's revolution was watching mtv

yeah so to now continue on with the bio of shane smith he was born in Ottawa, September 28th, 1969. He is the son of a computer programmer, and his mom is a paralegal. Although he comes from a upper-middle-class Canadian background, he claims in Vice videos, as well as in interviews, that Shane Smith... Oh, no. Oh, no. this man, this man has done a lot of hard time when it comes to becoming the person he is.

Basically, the way he describes it is that when he was 13, he had to leave home. And when he was 16, he got a job at a bar selling cocaine, and then from then after that, he became a robber, and he was always worried about dying by the age of 18, because him and his gang of 12, by then, 9 out of 12 people had died, and most of my research for this episode comes from NotVice.com, a website dedicated to why Vice sucks by Dan Voshart. He's been covering Vice since about 2014, I believe, and it's pretty hilarious the amount of dirt on Shane Smith and the Vice company that Dan has compiled on his website, as well as a podcast on Canada land,

which had Gavin McInnes as well as a few of the other writers that started Vice before it became Vice in Montreal, Canada as The Voice. But to go back to Shane Smith, the motherfucker's a liar. He lies all the time and he makes up content and pretend it's real between the magazine and his new media enterprise. When asked Gavin McInnes, who co-founded Vice and has been friends with Shane Smith since he was 12 years old, apparently, according to McInnes, his father was involved in insider trading, which is a theme with a few people that invest in Vice from the first investors in 99 to help them get from Montreal to New York to Tom Freston,

the CEO of Viacom, who then helps him later on as well. Now, Yogi, I don't know why you're being so hard on Shane Smith and calling him a liar, because clearly he was involved in a life of crime. He was honest about that. So he graduates a BA in History and English in Political and master's in political economy, both with honors. He said that after graduation, he once again resorted to being a criminal, where he fine-tuned the business acumen he learned as a drug dealer in his early 20s. He traveled Europe buying and selling money illegally, self-labeled arbitrage, while in Bosnia he managed to do some reporting for Reuters, one of the most trustworthy sources of news. In founding of Vice, he did a lot of coke and was fueled by spite.

Now, I just, so I want to go back to him saying that when he was dealing cocaine, nine out of ten of his friends were killed. This is like, why would you say such an easily disprovable fact, considering nine people being killed is the entire yearly murder rate of Canada? Yeah, on this website, it talks about how you could have only known nine people that died because of drug-related, gang-related crimes if you knew every person in Canada that died due to these crimes in that time period, which is just not true. Sometimes when the Mountie Anti-Drug Task Force does it,

they don't put it on the books. Gotta juice the numbers. So you're saying Shane was the unluckiest Canadian? Possible. Maybe, yeah. I don't know. He just knows how to lie, and he knows how to keep talking until you're like,

you know what, fuck it, Shane, you're good. I can't keep listening to you. Can I tell a story that's kind of tangential, and we can cut it if it sucks, but it always makes me think of this when I talk about Canada. There's a Magic the Gathering professional player who's well well known in the Magic the Gathering scene. And some people on the Internet found court documents that were charging him with him and his partner with running ecstasy back and forth from Canada. So he was like facing serious time. This is before he became a professional Magic the Gathering player.

He was facing serious time for ecstasy running and then mysteriously his co-conspirator who was uh cooperating with the federal government against him uh died the day he was before uh the day before he was to testify and uh so you will get banned from the official magic the gathering channel if you bring this up but his nickname his nickname is the innovator because he makes innovative magic the Gathering decks. So there'll be discussions online about how he quote-unquote innovated a solution to his problem of facing federal charges. People will talk about how he moved his co-conspirator to the graveyard or exile or whatever whatever other magic the gathering terminology you like there you could say that he um in the courtroom he had a severe bout of summoning sickness

yeah that's that's right uh dnd nerds show me one professional dnd player who killed their uh co-partner in an ecstasy ring in Canada. Okay? I don't think so. This is a real man's game. From the Daily Caller, they asked in Playboy, you wrote for Reuters in Bosnia in the 90s, Sisson began, and Smith

replied, definitely. I went down to Serbia and Croatia during the war I covered the ethnic cleansing and did a big thing on former Yugoslavian director Joseph Rose Tito he said wait if any of our listeners get the magic the gathering card murder

just go up to Patrick Chapin and ask him to sign it for you alright sorry I don't care for that joke I want Andy to sign it for you. Alright, sorry. I don't care for that joke. I want Andy to leave it in. I'll see how it plays on the track. But when people looked

at Smith's reporting in Budapest Sun and Reuters, they told the DC neither company had a record of Smith ever working for them. And according to a childhood friend, Patrick Bannister, he says that he was teaching English in the mid 90s. So Shane Smith was in Bosnia teaching English, but then later on would tell people I was in the thick of my journalistic prime interviewing people and getting my nuts wet you

know like this is shane smith's whole thing in reality what he's doing is not that impressive but the stories that come from it seem to be all the more tantalizing um in 94 i did ayahuasca and taught serbian refugees conjugation. So in 94, two gentlemen had been working for a year, Gavin McInnes and Saroosh Alvi, and they were working at the Voice of Montreal. From the Candleland

podcast I listened to that we'll link in our Reddit and the website, it talks about how he says that the government grant that helped fund the voice of Montreal was holding them back. And so they left that paper and then decided to create Vice, which was dropping the O of voice. Yeah, I mean, like another minor historical irony is Gavin McInnes becomes a huge libertarian, venerate-the-entrepreneur dickhead when he was getting a fucking government grant from Canada

to start his magazine. He describes Canada as like a socialist hellhole and all this stuff, and it's like they were paying you money to do what you love, you fucking hypocritical idiot. Saroosh Alvi, the co-creator, co-founder, battled an addiction to heroin and gotten out of it when he started working for Voice. And so Saroosh's whole thing is like he was on heroin and then now he's not doing drugs. So he's just focusing on doing this magazine. And from the Cannellan podcast that I'm referring to here, they work their asses off.

Saroj Alvi and Gavin McInnes worked hard to make the magazine popular. They would do things where they would take credit for other writers' successes. At one point, Bill Maher liked an article written by a vice writer and wanted the writer on his show politically incorrect but instead of the writer going on to the show gavin mckinnis decided he wanted to go himself and went on and kind of made an ass of himself on bill maher's show at the time so they take credit for writers they would do things where like one uh reporter was interviewing the rapper mers and at the end of the interview uh mers asked like hey you got a prairie voice you want to fuck next time when we're in chicago and the reporter said no and the editors of vice changed that to her saying yes

you have to be a massive fuck up to come across as an ass on bill maher where while he was interviewing a like a shithead republican senator he was the one who just fucked the chicken and blurted the n-word on his own show oh yeah what's the over under for gavin mckinnis bill maher being in a room together the over under for time it takes one of them to say the n-word like all right seven minutes four minutes over under approximately 200 chance i assume it's as soon as they meet they both greet each other as my hard r n-word well they just have they just have like a red phone line that they use behind like a sealed chamber they just say epithets to each other it's like the cold war like the cold war sort of like like a deconfliction line the interviewer in the canada land podcast talks

about how once he went to vice headquarters to get his payment of $50 because it was the first piece he had written at the time. And when he went in, only Gavin McInnes was at the building. And the guy was carrying toilet paper with him because he just got groceries. And Gavin McInnes looked at the toilet paper, looked at the writer and said do you shit and it made the guy so like like scared that he was like i embarrassed that he was taking shits that is the level of intensity and just dick baggery gavin mckinnis uh exploited at that time and to this day i mean we'll talk about his fucking nazi roots and the proud boys and all that shit in a moment. But before we get onto that, the way Vice would move from Canada to New York is a story of lies and insider trading once again.

Vice would claim that they had, you know, magazine subscriptions all over North America. In reality, they would email a skate shop in Miami, magazines of Vice, and then they'd be like, we're all over the fucking U. In reality, they would email a skate shop in Miami, Magazines of Vice, and then they'd be like, we're all over the fucking US. So they believe that the numbers of the magazine's success are inflated by 10. So instead of they had like thousands all across Canada,

it was probably more like hundreds all around Canada. Very similar to when we coveredard branson and how he inflated his numbers to make it seem like uh virgin was records was more successful than it actually was or yeah like every single book on the new york times bestsellers list yeah take a take a second uh this is just a task for the readers, take a second to imagine when the last time you saw a physical copy of Vice magazine was if ever.

Yeah. And you know, they went from, you know, Vice as an entity went from you know, Mad Magazine to Fox News for Millennials. In the last two decades they've gone from a hipster rag to, honestly,

a conglomerate of misinformation on the promise of trust with their viewers, which is us. Because, like I was mentioning earlier, I fucked with Vice immensely. I remember when viceland did uh the stand-up show they a few of my friends in san francisco were featured in it and it was an amazing time and the viceland uh crew wanted the sylvan house in san francisco

to look trashy so they wanted to keep like they like the house kept all the trash that they were creating for the last two or three weeks and they told the sylvan house guys that like hey we'll help you clean up the trash when the shoot's done they did no such thing the vice crew did not help the sylvan house in terms of cleaning their trash house after they were done filming their episode of flop house the tv series where they did stand up on vice land the television series which came through A&E through a deal we'll talk about more in a moment as well so in

95 Shane Smith is hired to Vice because of his ability to BS without remorse and in 2007 he would then take control of the company but at this time in 95 he was just hired to sell ads for Vice itself. And in 99, they struck some gold when they convinced a Canadian tech

billionaire, Richard Zielinski, to invest into Vice. Yeah, it's just interesting to me that like, you know, so Shane Smith's main role in Vice is marketing. This is what people talk about, like particularly at the early magazine, Gavin McInnes was the guy until he left in 07, was the guy who wasces people that you used to sell cocaine when, in fact, your dad was a white-collar criminal and you grew up as a rich kid. So it's just like marketing is literally just being a bullshitter. All the best marketers are just the people who just make up lies constantly and are modestly convincing at it. So their move from Montreal to New York would happen because Canadian tech billionaire Richard Slavinsky would help them move into Manhattan.

And with dot-com money, basically parade them around the world and do what they're doing now. But the dot-com bubble bursts and they all went bankrupt and Shane Smith and Gab McKinnis and Suresh Alvi would have to buy back the piece that they sold to Richard to then continue their business at the loft in Williamsburg, Manhattan, in the location they're in now. Yeah, just to back up, I believe the official founder's story that they tell is Richard, what's his face, the Montreal billionaire, bought a so that's good yeah he bought a 25 stake for uh 250 000 after apparently they had like said in a in an issue they had just made it up out of nowhere that he was thinking about buying them and so they said that like he heard about that and then apparently did actually buy a stake so you know it was a it was a fate of chance but uh that's where kind of their initial

capital came from is this 250250,000 infusion. And then he pays all the bills for them to go to New York City. Right. And before he invested in Vice, he was sued for insider trading in both Canada and the U.S. And his main goal was taking Vice public. The next investor of Vice was Tom fresten from viacom a a man who was a part of the i want my mtv now generation so he was a high ceo at viacom and would eventually leave them and join vice's board and shane smith looks up to tom frereston in a way that he does, that billionaires will

do with mentors to make their billions. Because from my understanding, Gav McInnes is the mad dog in terms of the personality and the style of Vice. Saroosh worked his ass off and also would help employees who had drug addictions as well, according to some of the employees' accounts on these articles. And, I mean, Shane Smith from this point on puts more time into Vice. And in the early 2000s, post the 9-11, like, the world's going to fucking end, so let's all just do crazy shit. People in New York were going to Vice and saying, I'm willing to do anything you want me to do for free.

And this is where the cult of Shane Smith begins. Yeah, just to back up for a second. Don't read too much into the fact that Vice's first investor was convicted of multiple counts of insider trading, and his entire plan was to IPO them before the dot-com bust. I mean, yeah, it clearly seems like it was a pump-and-dump scheme at first, and then they were able to buy it back after the value crashed. We drank a bottle of Robitussin and pump-and-dumped Petfoods.org. Wait, I've got Vice headlines from the 1940s.

Do it. All right, so Vice headline 1940. We smoked Mexican cigarettes and watched Wizard of Oz with Joseph Goebbels. Or 1944, we visited the brothel in Auschwitz. So from the early 2000s to 2010, they focus on gonzo journalism and create vice special reports that they sell to CNN. And from that point on, they realize that they can do a better job of selling video than they can of making a magazine that no one's really reading. We smoked opium and learned about the great leadership skills of Chiang Kai-shek. And, you know, at the time, what Vice is doing is gathering people to write articles for

the website and the magazine to hire people to shoot the videos, which they didn't even come up with the idea to do. Spike Jonze, who they knew through the Jackass and Jeff Tremaine crew, was like, you guys are filming your articles, right? And they both, Shane and Saroosh, were like, oh, yeah, totally. And then literally the next day, we're like, hey, we should start filming our shit and putting it on the internet. Like, they didn't even realize that media needs to be more on video now than ever before

because of the internet. And so Chainsmith in an interview with The Q describes that we were just better than everyone else that was free online. We drank a gallon of original formula Coca-Cola and watched the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Why does Spike Jonze keep popping up and all these like terrible billionaire stories like he also did that iconic ikea commercial and now he he gave the vice guys the idea to pivot to video i don't know i mean spike jones is interesting i i personally i i think he's great i really like spike jones a lot i think um his art's pretty cool i guess is the only way i can really put it without being a fucking major jerk off but you know with spike jones i think his biggest thing was that dude before this comes out

i mean you know guerrilla marketing and advertising even in like fictional state as in like you know a movie about a record company that just does it all themselves it's very like romantically pleasing in terms of what you could do with your time and money and so i think with billionaires and entrepreneurs alike they like the spirit of just like you just fucking show up you know it's that whole entourage like you just gotta show up to the casting office and burst in and say i'm the motherfucker you need and nobody else is gonna break me down like that that's that's exactly the type of energy i think spike jones embodies when it comes to how he comes across to the billionaires that seem to like him. Yeah, I mean, like, I like what he does, but it's just, like, one step away from, like... And then Michael Gondry told Jeffrey Epstein,

well, why don't you, like, get an island or something? And then you could make your dreams come true. Oh, he tries to... Spike Lee tries to get the IKEA guy to do a vice advertisement. Where he's just like, somebody, like a guy's trying to, he looks into one of those bins for a local, like a local newspaper and it's just not there anymore because they went out of business. And the Ikea guy is like you don't need to feel bad you don't need to feel bad for the newspaper you can just get digital media with

vice you know during this time period shane smith would go to mtv and various other you know media entities and just be like you guys suck we're We're vice. Fuck you. We're awesome. You suck. And his own description of what he does is to broadcast the absurdity of the modern condition. And they're anti-establishment, but essentially the big brother they believe themselves to be. We're cool. You suck. That is the whole Shane Smith vice ethos. I think, yeah, I think that's essentially correct.

I would just, another way I would put it is, like, they're millennials realizing a Gen Xer's vision of what, like, a radical sort of sort of like counterculture magazine and media empire would be so they're like like a lot of gen like the Gen Xers thing usually like their aesthetic is more like it's these freaking corporations man they control everything and like we're gonna we're gonna basically have our own corporation that runs on different principles and it's like ends up being sort of the same thing or it has like a um surface level trappings of like of the punk scene and um like railing against corporations and also saying don't trust the government and that they like it has no sort of larger vision of political change beyond just saying, like, I'm not going to consume certain things. Certainly.

And it's, you know, when you have an army of people that are willing to risk their lives, their health, and their livelihood to make content online for an audience that doesn't really want to pay for the content you're creating, you have an influx of enthusiasm, but you're just wasting time, if you ask me. You know, from an article I found from 2014, it said that 90% of Vice's money comes from partnerships. And this is after they had an investment from Rupert Murdoch as well as talk from Time Warner. But their partnerships are with Disney, with Nike, with advanced marketing from Intel via something called the Creators Project, where they got 250 people to just make shit for uh vice and then intel and shane smith in this interview says that the intel has these eight algorithmic spiders and with the creators project vice was able to hit

that number and that all eight algorithms were like this thing's good and it's like i don't know if this is shane smith telling the truth about something that the people that he hired made, or if it's just him bullshitting about something that none of us could ever prove? Oh, just to back up to your Shane Smith going on a media tour bashing other media properties, David Carr is the deceased New York Times journalist, but you can watch on YouTube, there's a video of David Carr berating Shane Smith for essentially Shane Smith was like yeah the New York Times it's like it doesn't even have correspondents

there and he's like let me just stop you there we have five correspondents in whatever the region is you know but you can watch him just completely getting called on his bullshit by an actual journalist from a Medium article it shows that Vice used to ship date rape drugs to male advertisers.

Shane published a degrading story about gangbanging someone in their office. Shane told an artist ex-girlfriend at her gallery opening that he was dying of a mystery illness and maintained the story for over a year basically as an excuse to cheat uh the bbc found a character witness this article literally says please stop offering me gross stories of shane smith that are sexual in nature i've read enough so this lying con man is abusive to women and is on his way to continuing to make billions upon billions of dollars and the reason is because blue chip companies uh like fox and and uh well not disney anymore but disney fox and nike and other people that don't know how to sell to our

generation they go vice has cracked this nut on how to advertise to people aged 18 to 34 or whatever. And honestly, they don't. I've never watched something on Vice and went, I want to buy this thing that they're talking about now. I've never once looked at something Vice did and thought, they now deserve my money. I've enjoyed a lot of the entertainment, but shane smith said in that q uh interview they're the best in free vice is only good when compared to things that are free is vice ever going to be better than stanley kubrick no i'll pay i'll pay money for kubrick

am i paying money for vice well i did i did see one of their programs on their HBO show about the nuclear arsenal, and right after that I was on the dark web. So, you know, different strokes for different folks. I mean, if you want to talk about their television channel, Viceland, the way that that came about was they have a new CEO now, and I'm jumping around a little bit, but in 2019, Shane Smith resigned as vice chief executive, and instead, Nancy Dubuck would be hired and be running things from then on. Now, Nancy Dubuck is an A, E, and E executive, and her big claim to fame was fucking Duck Dynasty and Ice Road Truckers. Now, I got no beef with Ice Road Truckers, but I think all of us can agree that fucking white conservatives that grew a beard and made a reality TV show that was Duck Dynasty is not good television

or good CEO-ing. So, Nate Zubik, you a fucking idiot. And A&E had a channel called H2, which was History International, which I want everyone listening right now to realize that calling something the history channel and then having a secondary channel called history international if you're only putting the brown history on history

international and keeping the history channel as white history fuck you um from the comments of h2 it wouldn't look like that going any that i'm pretty sure h2 is not so much brown history as brown shirt history i think they wanted to split up their civil war programs and their hitler programs on two separate channels look they need one channel for the aliens one channel for hitler and one channel for how the aliens gave Hitler the technology. I mean, I don't, I never watched H2, but from the comments on this article saying that H2 is going to change to Viceland, you got people saying that they love History International and that all of the good history shows were on it. And the problem with Viceland is that in a medium that has previously been insulted by Shane Smith to death,

they're not going to get any traction with Vice. Also, the generation of people watching stuff that Vice creates and produces, we don't have television. We don't pay for cable. So them creating a television channel through A&E and A&E buying a 10% share of them via Disney Hearst, it makes me think that within a few years, Disney's going to own the entire Vice brand. I really don't see any way that Shane Smith and Nancy Dubac and Saroosh Alvi getting a huge payday with someone like Disney buying them. But let's talk more about Gavin McInnes leaving Vice in 2007, Sean.

Yeah. Well, actually, though, I did want to back up because you kind of brushed over it there, Yogi, but did you say Shane Smith wrote an article about how he pretended to be dying of cancer so he could cheat on his girlfriend? A mystery illness is what I've deduced, but yes, cancer could have been the mystery illness.

Yeah. No, I want to dwell on the fact that Hunter S. Thompson convinced a bunch of people that if you just be an asshole and do a bunch of drugs, you will be a journalist. And, you know, of course, Hunter S. Thompson was great, but a bunch of people took the fucking wrong message from all of that. Oh, and I did also just want to say, you know, we were talking about how the entire secret of Vice's success and why this thing got so overvalued.

It was valued at like $5.6 billion at one point, which is more than the Washington Post was valued at when Jeff Bezos bought it. So, you know, like Vice got so overvalued because Wall Street and all these marketing people had this idea of selling to the millennials. And, you know, supposedly they had the secret sauce for that. But the entire thing was misguided because they were basing all these models around selling to a generation structurally locked out of the property market. You know, like it was just this assumption that like the millennials would like be these great consumers. But no, they're all, you know, paying a billion dollars in rent and health care and tuition and student loans i mean this is like a structurally impoverished uh generation and uh so all of these crazy overvaluations came out of this idea that somebody had the magic sauce to uh sell to these people who really just did not have the capital of the boomers or generation x

i wonder when that system is going to come crashing down spectacularly. No, they were, like, Vice joined, like, a whole host of different companies, mainly media and, like, clothing and retailing and stuff. They're like, how can we reach these kids, basically? And they just never once considered they're all poor and had no money, so they can't buy anything even if they do like the product i think that's why our generation doesn't read i mean like reading the paper is not a difficult act but i'm not going to spend 75 cents to a dollar 25 ever if it's free on my

phone you know what i mean and like uh that you know the decline in the newspaper, it was 100% because the internet was in my hand and free. Yeah, well, I mean, that contributed to the shift to free digital media that's driven almost entirely by advertisements. And so, like, Vice and BuzzFeed and others moved to just, like, an all all free model that had only advertisements coming in. And that, um, that led to like just an emissary emiserating conditions for the writers there.

And like they started like a, normally a newspaper has like, you know, editors, fact checkers, writers, all of these different groups working together. And they,

part of that shift was like just getting rid of like making the writer do basically everything vice is a is a leader in that in this buzzfeed type of world where there's no credits no directors no editors no anything but just one or two people high lit and most of the times the people that run the company. You know, from that not vice.com website talking about Shane Smith, it shows that in an analysis of the 20 most popular videos on Vice's YouTube, nine had no credits, four had partial credits, and one had full credits in both the video and YouTube description. So, like, you know, you got people that are editing and writing and shooting film for Vice. And Shane Smith describes the hiring process at Vice being that they don't want anyone that comes from any corporate media because they're ruined. And what they really mean is that they want to be paid exactly what they should be. If they get a guy right out of college

or if they get an employee right out of college or if they get an employee right out of college they won't have to pay them the correct wage because they are just excited to get a job so shane smith would go to colleges and be like hey give us your top editors those people would be like man i'm editing for vice fuck yeah this is awesome they work twice as hard they get paid less and they do more work for vice with less credit, both in monetary value, but also with the intellectual property of the product they're actually making. Yeah, and this was in 2005 to 2006 when digital media really started to take off as a new way to run your news department. vice would just have like instead of instead of like looking at the day's events and maybe trying to chase after i don't know 30 of the big headlines they would just focus in on like 10 to 15 percent and like that sort of that sort of became like an industry standard between them

and buzzfeed they would just focus on like a few clickbaity things and any year now they're going to figure out how to make that model profitable. For a while, it was genuinely profitable. In the mid to late 2000s. You had ownership groups of these properties making above 15% margins of return for themselves. And that was just clearly unsustainable after a while. I mean, you have to, okay, if you're running your whole operation off of advertising, then that gives the tech companies that you're working with a lot of power over what you

can start producing so like google google and all of the companies that are drawing people to click on your website suddenly they have a lot of leverage like they're they're kind of another another piece to this story that like we we don't have to really get into but they're just out there and they have a lot of power and like so you have that and then you also have shane like running the entire operation like a sweatshop yeah i think that um since nancy dubuck has uh become the ceo they've had to cut staff 10 but um but before we do all that let's have sean talk about gavin mckinnis let's get him getting the weeds of the nazism that is Sean's bread and butter.

Well, I'll give you the long and short story of Gavin McInnes, who I think is a very interesting character and very influential in the alt-right, you know, even if he's not given much of the credit for what this movement looks like in the Trump and post-Trump era. I do want to credit Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton's podcast, Moderate Rebels, did an episode if you want to listen to this in more detail. But they talk about, you know, when Vice was, as we said earlier, from 99 to 2006, when Gavin McInnes leaves, he's kind of the lead editor and it's his magazine. And so part of that was from 99 to 2006, if you can find old issues, you'll see photographs of people peeing in their own mouths. You'll see child prostitutes posed suggestively. You'll see photographs of people shitting. It was a very edgy magazine, and people assume that, you know, that's countercultural. But you'll also see, you know, articles laced with the word fag and retard and all this stuff. And this was all Gavin McInnes. I shouldn't say it's all Gavin McInnes, but that is kind of his aesthetic. So I guess something people kind of imagine is that Gavin McInnes became an alt-right Proud Boy guy after he left Vice. But the reality is he's always been this person, you know, like the Southern Poverty Law Center just kind of documented in 2002.

This is after they moved to New York for Vice magazine in 2002. Gavin McInnes told a New York press reporter who asked what he thought about his neighbors in New York's Williamsburg neighborhood. Gavin McInnes responded, quote, Well, at least they're not N-words or Puerto Ricans. At least they're white, unquote. And he said this in 2002. And, you know, Gawker would ask him about this and he would have some other quote about how his incendiary political statements generate controversy for us. He also said, you know, so he was kind of doing all this under, you know, the veil of

irony, which, of course, as as podcasters we know nothing about but um but he also said according to splc he said in 2003 uh uh quote he told the new york times quote i love being white and i think it's something to be very proud of i don't want our culture to diminish dilute it we need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western white English speaking way of life. And so kind of what that, it is very funny that this guy who's kind of a huge piece of shit should be a billionaire, but instead he sells all his equity right before all the private equity and every other investor gets in. If he just hung on for another four or five years years this guy would be a billionaire but instead in 2007 gavin mckinnis sells his shares for an undisclosed sum which he claims is very high but he won't tell anybody what he sold it for which i think is just because he severely undervalued his shares and spends his entire life kicking himself but the the point is not a proud boy. Yeah. Gavin McInnes was responsible for a lot of the magazine's early content, but in like 2005 or around that time, he starts doing a lot of freelance work as well. So he's actually in 2005 writes an article for VDare.

VDare is an alt-right affiliated anti-immigrant website. And, you know, he talks about he rails against multiculturalism in Canada. He laments Jared Taylor is a race and IQ guy. He said he laments that he had not been invited to speak at the University of Ottawa. So the point is that Gavin McInnes was given these inflammatory interviews and also writing kind of freelance pieces that were reflecting badly on Vice at a time when they were trying to draw advertiser capital. So basically, like, the reason—and you can't get a straight answer because they both signed non-disclosures, Vice and Gavin McInnes, but it's clear that he says that the corporate influence was the main thing that pushed him out.

He said Vice was getting more corporate, and that is true. But it also is a fact that these corporate players who were investing in Vice started to get a little nervous about their brands being damaged by Gavin McInnes, you know, talking about at basically the story where now that he's out of Vice, he cycles through some different projects, but he's able to much more freely express himself and become a full time commentator. But I guess the one other thing I wanted to say is just how, how much what Vice was doing fits into the entire Brooklyn Williamsburg hipster aesthetic and uh mentality even if of course they would not admit it and they would disown gavin now but you look at like this guy who's been called the godfather of hipsterdom well his entire attitude you know where gentrification and white people and all this stuff it was the attitude of a lot of rich fucking people who moved to williamsburg where you know they think oh the crime's going down because white people live here now. It's not because, you know, the fucking rich people live here now.

The property values are going up. So, you know, he's just really a product of the era. And the fact that Vice was so successful among this Williamsburg hipster community in the early 2000s with Gavin McInnes as, you know, executive editor putting all the content out. I think it speaks a lot about that era and the mentality of the people who inhabited it. And I want us to make it clear to our listeners, Vice is still a magazine in that their entire journalism ethic is to sell something. When it comes to their brand partners, and this is from notvice.com slash branding vice,

it describes as vice news being more about the brand partners instead of the news itself. The way that this website looked at this, vice had published 50 stories mentioning Nutella.

How Nutella explains the world. Soccer stars crippling love of Nutella. Nutella, Nutella, Nutella. How Nutella Explained the World, Soccer Stars Crippling Love of Nutella. Nutella, Nutella, Nutella, right? And you would look at it like, oh, these are just news stories that happen to have Nutella in it. No. It's because Nutella's paying Vice money to do stories that happen to have Nutella in it.

So, you're not being told, hey, I'm selling you Nutella, but you're being programmed. And to quote their other brand partners, it's AT&T, Axe Body Spray, Bank of America, Bud Light, Budweiser, Chanel, all of them. 90% of the revenue comes from their brand partner agreements, brand partner arrangements like this. There's an article right now on the Vice tech page that says, Tesla made a prototype ventilator with car parts. And then, quote, we've been working on developing our own ventilator design that's heavily based on Tesla car parts.

So you'll probably throw Tesla in there, too, because that definitely looks like a paid article. Yeah, you've got to be careful with the Tesla ventilators, because once they put you on them, you will walk directly in front of a semi-truck. Did you see that Musk stole a joke on Twitter from Morgan Murphy? Morgan Murphy did some dumb joke where she was like,

cut my dog's hair, and now he looks like a cleaned up guy instead of a dude that's drunk, and Musk stole the joke, and Morgan Murphy called him out on it and musk was just kind of like so how you chilling like hitting on morgan murphy after stealing her joke um one thing before we're going to talk about the unionizing of vice and how they've suppressed that time and time again. Vice has made money on all sides of cancer. In 2007, they started producing a series of anti-smoking advertisements for Truth.org. In 2014, Vice on HBO season one had a segment on the unregulated tobacco industry in Indonesia. In 2015, Vice produced a special report called Killing Cancer,

wherein Shane Smith recalls a personal story of his mother's fight with breast cancer. In 2016, Philip Morris signed a deal with the Vice subsidiary Edition Worldwide, which comprised of Vice Media CEO Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and Vice Media President International to produce white label content and basically every rich person looks at vice and goes these people know cool here's a couple hundred to a couple to some millions of dollars so that you can help promote us and make us look cool too yeah and sorry one other thing i wanted to mention about gavin mckinnis is uh he's the guy who hires the photographer terry richardson to work for vice and terry richardson is uh pretty well known for around the entire time that he's working for Vice, around the entire time that Gavin McInnes is the editor there. He's engaged in a series of sexual assaults and rapes of women, according to allegations.

And, you know, this is not Gavin's fault exclusively. Terry Richardson would go on to photograph President Obama. But this guy was a total sexual predator that Gavin McInnes had on the payroll, knew very well. And, you know, I will bet you dollars to donuts knew what was up. And something I want to say as well is that, you know, Shane Smith and the other founder, they all distanced themselves from Gavin, of course. And they can always just say, oh, hey, that was different. You know, Gavin is separate from us but they were happy to have this guy making them money and they were happy to have

like a fucking rapist photographer uh on their pay on their masthead because you know he took good pictures and he he gave them a reputation so it's you know it's it's just disgusting to me that these people are are just happy to cash the checks and then pretend like, oh, we distanced ourselves from the bad guy after he became a liability, after he made us billionaires, you know? And now let's move on to talking about how Vice has stopped unionizing in their own homes. Steven? I would say Vice has kind of a mixed record on unionization so in some cases they've been uh somewhat supportive to unionizing workers in other cases they've been like you know more typical of corporations that they're like actively trying working to sabotage it so in august on august 7th of, the 70-ish person writing staff of Vice Media US, they voted to unionize.

So, they finished their unionization drive, they got enough cards, and they were basically ready to finalize that. that and according to the wiki and that links to a 2017 article on all of this the vice management they say quickly recognized the union um the successful union drive followed in the footsteps of salon gawker and the, who also unionized that year. Shane himself has some kind of like, like in keeping with his sort of like countercultural, stereotypical Gen X thing, being against corporations, he was like, basically, I like, not only do I support this, I love these union brothers and sisters like let's you know he's sort of like saying like let's let's make vice work together and um so on the one side

there's that right and then on the other side actually the other side of the atlantic in uh vice uk in february of 2016 staff at vice uk called for a unionization drive and they were very close on their way to making that official um they would have been recognized by the national union of journalists which is sort of like their version of the Writers Guild of America. Those staff said that, very different from the US experience, the Vice UK management was just trying to actively sabotage it more in line with other corporations, what you would expect whenever workers try to unionize. So in February 2016, staff members at Vice UK,

they called for unionization with an officially recognized trade union called National Union for Journalists. Staff members there said this was following the steps of their U.S. comrades at Vice U.S. And in order to allow the staff to, quote, share in the success of the company, to strengthen job security by vice providing better contracts and to address, quote, pay issues so everyone gets a fair deal, including the freelancers. So they wanted to have all of the short-term contractors

be paid at the same rate as the full-time staff members. That proposition was rejected by Vice UK. They chose not to voluntarily recognize the union forming there, the trade union in this case. The company refused to recognize the National Union of Journalists and instead said they were free to set up an internal staff council, which would be basically useless as far as negotiating directly with management. Right.

So, very unconstructive in this case. In fact, they made some accusations against the National Union of Journalists. In another piece, Michelle Stanistreet, who was the general secretary of that trade union,

said in response, the accusation that the NUJ has not been transparent in its discussions with vice management is just not true. It's a shame that the company has proven so resistant to listening to its own staff and facilitating what they want, a collective voice at work. That the NUJ and its 30,000 members, including those at vice, are not used to the reality of digital workforces just laughable and shows it's the company it's the company who are out of date with the 21st century not the workers rejecting calls for union recognition from their own journalists and then trying to fob them off

as a Rupert Murdoch style staff association his pretty old-fashioned union busting ruse that misses the point. NUJ officials and reps at Vice will continue with the push for recognition, and if the company wants that to be gained through the law forcing their hand rather than through sensible engagement with their staff, so be it. And that's kind of an ongoing fight. So, this happened when Shane was still in control. Right. I mean, Vice UK, they have senior executives who are controlling this operation.

I'm sure they're in contact with Vice US and Shane throughout this process. Yeah. icus and shane throughout this process so yeah like where was the where was all that talk of like cooperation and um you know adjusting to the the shifting digital media landscape together like where was that this time yeah so i would say it's a mixed bag, just for those reasons. Yeah, it's interesting that, like, I guess journalism is one of the few fields that has actually seen a rise in unionization. I'm sure people who know more than me can offer explanations for that. There have been lots of different newsrooms that have unionized, whereas much of the broader economy has shaken off their unions at the behest of private equity and other forces. everyone very conspicuously or been bought out as we've covered before by a billionaire who just shuts it down after owning it for like five months yeah well i think in the in the in the uk's case um so i mean they're under like a dav a David Cameron government still that was, like, extremely anti-trade union and was actually trying to get them... They were trying to change the laws for a while so that unions wouldn't have some of these, like, preferential systems in, like, the party system to where they could, like, they got, like, a bigger say in the labor parties, how they choose their leaders and stuff.

Like, they're trying to get to stop that. So, like, they had kind of a different situation going up against it i mean like the obama administration was certainly no friend to labor but um it was kind of a a different a different issue on the uk side i think yeah it um it just seems to me that when it comes to journalism in this country it broke down within the last two and a half decades because you had people that were broke that could only afford the free stuff and newspapers going where is our money that we should be getting from people reading our stuff and it you know vice was the first one to jump in and produce the level of content that they did i mean in researching this episode the amount of times i had to look up something on vice and the 80 videos produced by vice that

would come up instead happened time and time again um one thing i want to read one thing i want to read uh is this piece by the new york mag on shane smith and vice uh this is you know shane smith uh megalomaniacally saying he would usurp his partners and become the next mtv espn and cnn rolled into one um and it talks about how kate albright hannah said that the pitch from shane smith to her was i'm tired of doing blow on naked models. I want to do something that matters. She left after working on the Obama campaign in 2009

and then when she joined Vice, arrived to find a chaotic organization. They tried to come up with a flow chart, but the flow chart didn't flow. The idea of professionalization was to make employees sign a non-traditional workplace agreement that read in part, Although it is possible that some of the text, images, and information I will be exposed to in the course of my employment with Vice may be considered by some to be offensive, indecent, violent, or disturbing,

I do not find such text, images, or information or the workplace environment and vice to be offensive, indecent, violent, or disturbing. Gavin must've wrote that. That's, that sounds in his voice. Um, but Albright would be happy that a few women work there,

but she noticed a circle of men at the top of the company wearing gold vice rings, a reward for good service. And it seemed to her a fraternity that would be impossible to join. She was left to decipher emails from executives at 4 a.m. while she got her five-year-old ready for kindergarten. And honestly, the worst thing about this whole thing is the fact that they had flair advice. Flair, ladies and gentlemen, flair. Yeah, I can't believe a company that uh gavin mckinnis was an executive

at had a systemic problem with sexual harassment yes who would have thought it is interesting that um you know you wouldn't think it at the time but uh doing blow-off models was actually mattered more than working on the Obama campaign. I got one last quick article just on Vice and Saudi Arabia. Yeah, let's do that. So I wanted to cite one last article just by Ben Norton at the Gray Zone in 2018. He writes up journalism originally published by The Guardian, actually. He expands on it a bit. But The Guardian found that they found internal sources at Vice who said that the Vice assembled a team to make pro-Saudi content in collaboration with the Saudi Research

and Marketing Group, SRMG, and I'm quoting from Ben Norton there, which is a regime mouthpiece closely linked to the royal family. So what happened, you know, as we all remember, Mohammed bin Salman in 2018 launches this charm offensive in the West where he sits down with, you know, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. He goes on and visits Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic. And one of the people he meets with on his U.S. trip was Shane Smith of Vice. And of course, Mohammed bin Salman is a genocidal, murdering friend of Jeffrey Epstein, probably a pedophile. You know, so this is a horrible guy. We had a line of Adderall unordered and a drone strike on a school bus.

We did research chemicals and watched Khashoggi get his head cut off. But yeah, and so apparently, just again from this Grey Zone article, Vice published in March 2018 a video promoting the King Abul-Zayz Camel Festival. I know I got that name wrong, but you can watch it. Abdulaziz? Yeah, the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival. Vice published a video about this in March 2018. You can watch it on YouTube. It has over 5 million views, and they published in partnership with SRMG, which, again, is this Saudi regime mouthpiece linked to the royal family. So, you know, they are clearly taking money to promote a good view of Saudi Arabia.

And, you know, the entire thesis or not the entire, but a contention made on that moderate rebels podcast about this is basically that after Gavin McInnes was kicked out, Vice magazine got all these corporate sponsors and also a lot of former government officials kind of came and went, and it started kind of portraying, let's say, a U.S. State Department line with regards to foreign policy. They also make the point that Vice co-produced a documentary with the Council of

Foreign Relations President Richard Haass. It's called A World in Desiree. And they argue that it's kind of a hawkish promotion of U.S. foreign policy. And you can also see examples of that with Libya. And, you know, I mean, some people would argue with Syria. I don't want to make that contention there. But certainly, at least with regards to Saudi Arabia and Libya and some other places, you can see that Vice Smith essentially has told the vice crew since 2017 that we are going to get bought by Disney and so

he uses that excuse to underpay employees off the promise of like no no trust me tomorrow we're going to be better I mean it's just straight fucking you know traveling salesman fucking ethics I'm going to make I mean, it's just straight fucking, you know, traveling salesman fucking ethics. I'm going to make money off this.

So fuck you. By the time you complain about this, I'll be gone, basically. We smoked a bag of K2 and ran Libyan guns to ISIS. No, I mean, yeah, that's a huge, that is such an underhanded corporate tactic to say that, hey, we're going to – you're going to get bought by Disney. And so you're going to get way more money, which if you just spend 10 minutes looking into Disney's compensation practices, that's absolute bullshit. That your company getting bought by Disney, if anything, means the opposite. That they're going to do exactly what Vice is doing and, you know, try to trim the fat wherever possible, starting with employee compensation. And, you know, all of their corporate partners are kind of smart to not buy

because Vice can flounder and fuck up and, you know, burn their own demographics without Disney or Nike or any of the other blue chip companies being like the ones that are held responsible for vice's practices like disney buys vice then immediately becomes disney has a problem with rape in williamsburg like you know that like that's just gonna be stomped quicker than the shit in florida yeah and just according to noah colwin in the outline um i guess vice news tonight got put on a bit of a hiatus, a bit of a hiatus from the coronavirus. I don't actually know if it's come back yet, but as of March 17, it went on hiatus. And they just kind of talk about how one of Vice's biggest investors is this private equity firm, TPG.

So, of course, Vice has to pay tons of, you know, management fees and interest on the debt. And Vice, you know, laid off 10% of its staff and raised another $250 million in debt financing. So it's not improbable that Vice collapses because of coronavirus. But maybe they'll get some bailout money. We'll see. By the way, shout out to Noah Colwin and Brendan James doing Blowback Podcast, which is, I mean, if you listen to Choppa, you've heard it plugged a million times, but it is a really good podcast about the Iraq war, and I highly recommend it. I also want to mention Daniel Voshart's website, Not Vice, as well as the Canada Land podcast I listened to, which had Gavin McInnes on the founding of Vice itself. Both very great publications that let me know a lot more about Vice.

And we will see what happens with Shane Smith in the future. I've got an old English Vice headline for you. Yes, get into it. We drank mead and catapulted a plague corpse with Genghis Khan. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Yogi Poliwal. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Steve Jeffers.

We smoked tobacco and watched Cortez massacre the Aztecs. All right, I'm Shafi McCarthy. Goodbye.