Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Shane Smith

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

Shane Smith is a journalist, and he is the founder and Executive Chairman of international media company VICE Media. Since 1994, Smith has transformed VICE from a small, Montreal-based youth magazine into a global multimedia empire, spanning digital platforms, television, film production, and creative services. As a journalist, Smith has reported on the field in conflict zones including North Korea, Iraq, and Liberia. He grew VICE Media into a platform known for its cutting-edge content, earning critical acclaim and coveted partnerships. Honored for his work on VICE on HBO, Smith is the recipient of the 2014 Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Series or Special, and he was recognized as the Cannes Lions Media Person of the Year. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Vivo Barefoot http://vivobarefoot.com Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA'

Tetragrammaton. Tell me about the very first issue of whatever became Vice. What was it first? Well, that's a long, complicated question to answer. It was a black culture magazine called Nuit d'Afrique in Montreal, and they figured they could get more money if they did an English language as well as a French language one so that was called Voice of Montreal. A guy named Seroosh Alvi started it straight out of rehab. How do you meet Seroosh?

Well after the, I came back from my brother's wedding, I was living in Greece. I just came from now. And my friend Gavin at the time had become comics editor. He's like, oh, this guy Shane would be great. So I came down and met them. And that was just sort of this weird mag that wasn't that great. And then we slowly took it over, did a lot of hip hop, and we became sort of a street mag. At some point I was like, well,

why isn't anyone reading my genius? And they're like, well, we have to print more copies. I was like, well, how do you print more copies? We have to sell ads, and I'm like, what's an ad? So I would hitchhike down to Toronto from Montreal. There's no money in Montreal. All the money's in Toronto. So we would hitchhike and we'd take the city bus

out to all the record labels and we'd pitch all the record labels and we started getting more and more ads. And then they couldn't pay me my commission so we're like, okay, well, we own it. So we dropped the, at that point we were a voice, we dropped voice much earlier, then we were voice, then we dropped the O and became Vice, bought the company, and then started going crazy.

Would you say it was a fanzine to start with? Is that how you describe it? How would you describe the original idea? I mean Canadians are kind of like Japanese in that we're on the periphery of the world especially back then. So we were like culture scientists. Like we would know everything about music or fashion stuff because we were kind of far away from it. It was like hipsters before hipsters in the sense of people would study culture, they would study music, they would study fashion.

That's like when we came down to New York and people were like, who are these Canadians you know that are on point? Like how do they even know anything? Because Canadians are seen as being corny and whatever. So, yeah, I don't know. We weren't necessarily a fan, Zine, as much as a sort of, you know, we were like cultural scientists. And was it primarily focused on music at the beginning or no? It was everything. It was music.

We started doing streetwear and skate fashion when that was new. Hip-hop, punk rock, and then weird stories. Like stuff that we just sound interesting, like freaky business. We more influenced by the American culture or UK? Both. Both. Yeah, Canadians are sort of hyper aware of the sort of British music scene and comedy, you know, sense of humor. And then, but also like we live next to America. So a lot of the music, you know, we get both sort

of UK punk and American hardcore. And so we were, you know, I would say half and a half. And tell me, tell me about sirush and tell me about Gavin Yeah, those are your first two partners, especially Well, sirush is is like You'd love me then guru kind of really beautiful guy He Both his parents are professors very smart, you know

both his parents are professors, very smart, ran into some problems in college with drugs and then sort of asked their law for help and came out and started advice and was just a super good vibes, like just a super, like we're best friends to this day. We talk every day like 30 years later. And you both grew up in? He grew up in Montreal.

Gavin and I grew up in Ottawa. How far apart of those? Two hours. Gavin and I knew each other since we were kids. Our dads knew each other. And we were part of the Ottawa punk scene. And the Ottawa punk scene was like, you literally had to like make your own band rent your own venue you know make sure I do at DIY to the million who

would have been the the bands that you were most influenced by to become a punk band at that time minor threat bad brains would be on DC hardcore yeah Bad Brains, DC Hardcore. Yeah. Misfits. Misfits were big in the French-Canadian. So we were sort of half French, I think. So first wave American hardcore punk. Yeah.

You know, you remember when punk was like, it was punk and there was hip hop and then they did these weird punk hip hop mashups? Yeah. So that was our era. Wu-Tang Wu Tang was our era like when Vice first started. I believe we were the first guys to ever bring them to Quebec. Wow. When they came up, yeah. And everyone showed up.

Chef Ray Kwan and Old Dirty Bastard. We got Old Dirty Bastard out of jail to come play a Vice party. Amazing. And in those days, what was distribution like? How many copies did you print and who did you go to? In the early days, we printed, I don't know, 35,000, which is a lot. And newsprint, and so it's like tons and tons of pallets.

Anyway, so we knew we had to, so we started distributing to like bomb and pop records, and there was a company called Voyager, which was a bus company, and we would, like Greyhound, we would trade them ads and we would come with these big pallets and put them on the buses, the buses would take them to like Winnipeg or Vancouver, and stuff. But primarily Canada. Canada. And then it started getting bigger and then the busts

company was like we were coming with palettes and palettes and they're like we can't even fit them on. Then we started distributing in New York and at that time were they free? It was always free. It's always been free. And we started doing it in New York and people thought we were just weird. Like we were these weird frogs from Montreal doing this. And New York just blew up for us. And so- How many years into it did you move to New York?

Four. And then, so when we moved to New York, then it just exploded. Like there was a rich dude in Canada, Richard Swinski, and he bought us and moved us to New York in the dot com bubble. And we were like, we were escape, like we never had any money, like poor, poor, poor.

I left home very young, punk, punk, punk. And then all of a sudden we were walking around New York in sort of Prada pumps. It was like, you know, sort of comedic. We were Canadian yokels, asymmetrical zippers. And we had money for the first time ever. And that's when I bought my place in Costa Rica. I'd never had any money. And then I got my first taste of money.

I'm like, I bought a farm in Costa Rica because I'm just like, I'm just gonna spend all this money. So down in New York, losing our minds, and then they promptly went bankrupt. And so we bought the company back, I guess that was 1999, somewhere around there, 2000, 1999. And we moved to Brooklyn. We had so much money when we were with them,

the other company, that we were gonna buy like all these companies, one of them was Triple Five Soul, and put them all together and do this e-commerce. So it was gonna be like basically Amazon before Amazon. It would've been huge, but it was 10 years too early. So we were gonna buy Triple Five Soul, and then Troy was like, oh, it's okay, kid. You can have part of my warehouse.

So he gave us a corner of his warehouse in Brooklyn. And- What was Brooklyn like at that time? It was, I mean, heaven, but it was like, our warehouse had crack vials, and hookers were giving blow jobs on our staircase. We had to hose it down all the time. It was the Wild West and it was just those real early, early days at the beginning when

all the artists were out there, all the bands came like that. It was the same. We were in the right place at the right time because we became Planet Brooklyn. When all of these artists and musicians and that movement came out of Brooklyn, we were just there and chronicling it. And like all the, you know, Yaya Yaz and Interpol, The Strokes, and all those bands just came out of there, PD on the radio, everybody. It was just like we were just in the right place at the right time. And we just, as Brooklyn sort of blew up so did we and that was that was most of the glory days I you know 2000 like 9-eleven like 2010 that was just you

know it was good to be alive and was it primarily New York magazine at that time or were you trying to get it no we were in the country no that was that was the fun part is I believe the first city we went to for some reason was Tokyo. I don't know why. I think it was some sponsorship between the Canadian and Japanese embassy or something. We launched in Tokyo and I just fell in love with Japan. I was like head over heels. So we were...

And they also have a culture of refined taste for American cultural stuff and all... Obsessive. Yeah. Obsessive. And so we just got along. I love Japan and fell in love with Japan. So we were doing well in Japan, doing well in New York. Anything that does well in Japan and New York, it does well in London.

So we went to London and Then we came up with this business model where we would go find you could get the magazine everywhere or only in those cities only in those cities At this point only in those cities. Okay, but then we would go to like England and we'd meet cool people and say okay we'd do a deal we had no money yeah so we'd do a deal where we'd find a publisher in England and then they would and we'd find our editor or whatever and then we'd form like a little company and then they would do England and they would distribute England the same way we

distribute it. But you would send them content or they would create their own? So we would do it was the best of so they would come up with some of their stuff and we and each country we added it got better and better because it or they would create their own? So we would do, it was the best stuff. So they would come up with some of their stuff. And each country we added, it got better and better because it would be like, this is from Berlin, and this is from London, and this is from Italy, and this is from Japan. And were everybody punk rockers

in all these places pretty much? Or music heads or fashion people, depending on as they grow bigger. And then that was, again, so 9-11 to 2010 was mostly Planet Brooklyn, punk rock, fucking booze and coke and lunacy. Then like 8-9 to like 15 was like you move to Milan, get an apartment, you find an office, you move to Milan, get an apartment, you find an office, you hire the people, you live there.

Like you go to Cinque Terre and meet the grandmother. You go here, you have a big party and everyone comes and bands and celebrities, you can't get into your own party. And then you're like, get on the train and go to Sweden to do it there, like, what about the baby? And you're like, I gotta go. And you know, like, and you you're just like you would live everywhere for six months and it was just so much fun like to just travel around the world and

is that how most companies are built I've not heard this story before so it's yeah it was all grassroots and and we just built it from from the ground up and that's when like it was making money it was growing like like wildfire and and like we were getting the best content and we had It was kind of misfits like we never had money to hire people who knew what they were doing so like When spike Jones said hey you guys shoot everything in the magazine, right? We're like, yeah Went back to the office. They're like, how do we do that? Like we didn't you know, just get a camera I guess and so we just started filming back to the office and were like, how do we do that? Like, we didn't, you know, just get a camera, I guess. And so we just started filming shit from the mag.

And that's when it really exploded because it was just as YouTube was starting and the mag was like at its peak. And then at this point, we were doing about a million copies a month, which is for us like insane. It took us 10 years to get two million copies. And then in our first year,

we got to like a hundred million video views and we're like, oh, here we go. So we started doing online video of our articles. And that's when it just went to the moon. Amazing story. Content wise, similar content. It was just a change in format from the written word to video, would you say?

Yeah. The content changed a lot over the years. Everyone thinks that they're like, no vice, or we're guardians of vice. All the editors are guardians of vice. But there was no real. It changed and changed, and it kept changing from the from. And as we went more and more international,

that changed it even more and more. I think that's why it was good, is because it was always fresh. And also we didn't take ourselves too seriously. When we went online, yeah, that was when it was, like, cause we would, people used to make fun of us because of our story ideas, but we were getting, like we would write something like,

there's a true story about a shipping container that went to Africa of Tupac Shakur t-shirts. And then they got, they stole it or whatever, and then they became like an army, the Tupac Shakur armies, right? Because we're- How did you first hear the story? Who the fuck knows?

I don't know, like we just got, we get 100,000 of these a day just coming in, like people, you gotta, so the story was General Butt-Naked and the Tupac Shakur Army, and it was basically this guy who fought naked with his army, because they believed they couldn't be killed, was fighting the Tupac Shakur Army,

we're like, well that's a story for life. And then- So did you go personally? So I was like, well let's just go shoot it. Like how bad could this be? So we flew to Liberia to meet this guy General Butt-Naked. Had you been to Liberia before? No. Okay. No. And like again we we've never been anywhere and we would go I think we flew like Air Belgium for like $400. Like we had no money. And we were staying at some grim place in

Libya. Anyway, and then you meet General Buttnake and he's like, he's talking to you about not only killing people but eating them. He was a very famous cannibal and you're like, holy fuck, and there's all these other generals, and he's introducing these other generals, and the stories that they're telling, and like, we went to Wenrovia, we went to West Point, and West Point is like the worst slum, maybe in the world, but definitely in West Africa, and it's fucking gnarly. And everyone, by the way, it's so poor.

Were they happy to see you? No. Well, not not happy, they want money. So they're like, holy, like how much are those shoes? Like how much is that? Like it's like money and cameras and shoes. Like they just want any kind of money. And so it's hyper, like you just, if you're anywhere for a long period of time,

you just get surrounded by tons and tons of people. I remember I bought some when you buy like a drink they buy like a like a Coke or something they pour it like little bits of it into like a plastic bag. And I bought some for some kids who were out and then you know, bigger kids came out and then the bigger kids came out and it became like a little fish eating a bigger fish and you're like, no I just wanted to be like

like it's rough and really rough. And uh. Did you ever feel in danger? Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how do you deal with that? There was two points. One time we got this guy.

So there's all these different generals and one was general mosquito because mosquitoes are terrifying because of dengue fever or malaria. The general mosquito and then there's general mosquito spray. Oh, that's it. So one was general bin Laden. So we got general bin Laden out of jail to go interview him. And then as we were interviewing him, the whole building got surrounded by like, I don't

know, 200 guys with all machine guns to his army. How would you get somebody out of jail? He's bribed the cops and said can we have him for a bit to interview him? Yeah. So you'd say in general you could make things happen in most of the places you went? Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah that was that was. That was, Liberia's a scary place. And, but hang, I also, you get a bit of Stockholm syndrome because you're hanging out with Butt Naked and he's saving you from a lot of these

because he comes out and everyone's like whoa. So you're like, I'm with him, I'm with Butt Naked. Yeah. It's just a weird, weird, weird, weird place. But they also, everybody spoke English? It's just a weird, weird, weird place. Everybody spoke English? Yeah, because Liberia is actually formed by America. Explain, explain. So it was, you know Marcus Garvey.

So Marcus Garvey led this back to the African movement. So it's freed slaves who went to Liberia, you know, means freedom, so liberty, Liberia, so they bought a portion of West Africa. They went to West Africa, the capital city is called Monrovia after Monroe, who is the president of America. The Constitution was written in America and in Liberia they have people with African names and people with American names, like Charles Taylor, famously the worst Civil War guys. And so the Americans, the freed slaves, went to Africa and promptly enslaved the native

Africans based on the plantation system that they had learned in America. So there was a slavery system where the American freed slaves enslaved the local Liberians. So then that started. Did you know this story before you went? Yeah, I knew the basics. And Charles Taylor is famous because he became like this.

He killed so many people and he was backed by us. And Butt Naked was against them. And so, so, so. You called him Butt Naked or he called himself Butt Naked? He called himself Butt Naked. Interesting, that was his general. He was General Butt Naked. They literally would fight naked

and they believed that that couldn know couldn't hurt them and he would tell like crazy stories of like yeah before we would go to war we would you know get a child and cut out their heart and eat their heart before going in because we believed it couldn't kill us didn't kill ourselves. Meanwhile this is a guy who's openly telling you that walking on the streets like telling you that, walking on the streets, telling you these stories. Coming from Brooklyn and flying into these places and meeting these people, you're like, what the? But that's what Vice became.

So anyone who says, what is Vice, the content of Vice, it became just fly into the place and press record. And also this whole thing of objectivity or subjectivity. They're like, well, you know, you're supposed to be objective. It's impossible to be objective. You're coming from Brooklyn to a place where they talk about eating baby's hearts. And you're like, yeah, I'm not going to go. So that whole like, like the whole voyage of going there and being subjective of

like, this is how it's affecting me and stuff became a sort of signature, you know, vice style as well. And then from there you started, we started sneaking into like Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and, and yeah, that's when it, that's when it, it's got gnarly. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best-in-class templates. With the built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus. So your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with Fluid Engine, a highly intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

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Track inventory and connect with customers while you're on the go. Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace.com slash tetra and get started today. When did it turn to be more what the things you're describing are more? I would say more hard news versus culture. Yes, it was both. versus culture, yes? It was both. We got into news by doing culture

because we did a feature called Heavy Metal in Baghdad, which was about the only heavy metal band in Baghdad. So we were following. Was it illegal in Baghdad? No. It was okay. No, you couldn't be heavy metal.

That's why I'm asking. Yeah, yeah. So it was the only heavy metal band in Baghdad, it was okay. No, you couldn't be heavy metal. That's why I'm asking. Yeah, yeah. So it was the only heavy metal bat in Baghdad. And we happened to be there shooting while George Bush Jr. went and said, did the whole mission accomplish thing? So he's in the green zone saying, we're done, we won the war and we're in the red zone getting shot at.

And so all the people who were watching this said, well, the war's not what the fuck you're talking about. And so all the people who were watching this said, well, where's that? What the fuck you talking about? Like, those wars still going on. And so we came at it through that point of view of like, we're, to go back news, the golden era of news, was basically somebody in New York called the Stringer in Afghanistan.

Majority of Stringers don't leave the hotel, you know, they're rum soaked. They call back in a story, they put it on the teleprompter and Walter Cronkite reads it and they're like, everybody believes it. Everyone's like, yep, that's the news tonight. And God knows if it's real or not. And it's also really colonial, like it's like a bunch of white guys who've been to Harvard or wherever, going to a thing, writing it, having their take on it, whatever. So our take was just go there and press record and see what the fuck's actually going on.

And nine times out of ten, it's not what they're telling you. And you see a completely different side of things. And especially if you embed with young people or locals or people who are like-minded. You remember like Maximum Rock and Roll? Yeah. Before the internet, like Maximum, and you'd go to different towns

and you'd meet someone from Maximum Rock and Roll and you knew that you were kind of like-minded and like each other. Well, news or vice, whatever, it was like an entree. That's why we got the vice rings made, it was like an entree. That's why we got the vice rings made, because we'd be in secret clubs. And you'd go and you'd meet people like you,

and they'd say, look, I'll come fucking show you what's really going on. And we noticed that a lot when we went to Afghanistan, because everything that they were saying about Afghanistan was bullshit. And we said it like five years before America left Afghanistan, we said, yeah, America's gonna leave Afghanistan and the Taliban is gonna have more territory

than when we came in. We called it five years before because it wasn't because we were geniuses. It was because everybody in Afghanistan would tell you that. Yeah. That's when it became hard news and that was the HBO era.

That's when... How'd the HBO deal even come to pass? We did our first Vice News deal with Google. Because we were, in the beginning of YouTube, we were like the largest, one of the largest video publishers. And then we became number one for video news. On YouTube.

On YouTube. On YouTube. That's when our numbers were through the roof. Yeah. And everyone used to be, they still decry me for saying, oh, we're gonna be 10 times the size of CNN. We already were because they would have, I don't know, like a 1.5, so like 1.5 million people, even if you put in international,

it would be like 15 million would be a massive massive audience We're seeing it. We're doing like 150 million video views per video and you're like, okay I mean Harrison, of course That's when it was massive because when we were when YouTube was like roadblocking news for us and it was huge I'll make a lot of money But I remember like going from some nobody punk kid to like,

I was in India somewhere shooting and people were going, oh it's Shane Smith, it's Shane Smith. Because it's online, it was exploding. So then we did a little stint at MTV, which wasn't great, Vice Guide to Everything. And they wanted to be more Zip, Zap, Diddley, Aff, whatever, and Iguide to everything. And they wanted to be more Zip-Sap-Biddly-F, whatever. And I remember going to the party where they said,

you know, we're not gonna renew, I think we did two seasons, and we're not gonna renew season three. I said, don't worry about it. We're going HBO anyway, because HBO is an MTV. And so we had no discussions with HBO. But Ari Emanuel just went to Richard Plepler.

Richard Plepler is like, I don't know, fucking the greatest guy ever. And he's just like, let's make some news. Let's make news. They've never done it before. Wow. And I'll never forget, because we worked so hard on that first season.

And at the end of it we figured out because I've been in North Korea a few times we figured out that Kim Jong-un loves basketball and that if we could get, they love the Chicago Bulls, we could get the Chicago Bulls to go over to call it up Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, they're like, yeah, no. But the worm was out in Denver, I think, signing autographs for the department. Dennis Rodman. Dennis Rodman, sorry, his nickname's the worm. So it was your idea.

Yeah, yeah, because I'd been there, I'd seen, so they have the House of Treasures, which is two miles under a mountain in North Korea, and you go and you see all the treasures. And like one of the biggest ones is this basketball signed by Michael Jordan and given by Madeleine Albright. And so basketball is the biggest sport in North Korea. So we sent Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters to play, and then Kim Jong-un invited our whole crew back to his house, and the whole world exploded.

Like every newspaper was like, fuck my son, stunt journalists, and they did this bullshit. I remember- Tell me about the experience. Well, we had just done this series, which by the way, ended up tying Bourdain for the Emmy. Wow.

And our first, you know, our first Bourdain to, one of the Emmy with Bourdain. And so, prime time, like real time. And so, we were really proud of that first series. And then we just got shat on about this North Korean thing and I'm like, the BBC shat on us a lot and we're like, hold on, you tried to sneak in in like a student group like you're

Endangering the lives of student we figured out a way to get in and get access in a view that nobody else has gotten And we just were getting shit on and I remember being like torn apart I remember lying in the bath and reading these reviews and going well like we tried, you know, we tried and We launched to a five which is I think it was second only to Game of Thrones. It was like a huge number for, especially for a new show. And Plepler was like, that's what these, you know, all press is good for. Don't worry about these hats, ultimately. And –

Well, HBO was supportive of the fact that you got good numbers. Super supportive. No, they were supportive of the show. We got good numbers because of all the press. I didn't realize that because I was like, when are we taking seriously? So the bad press actually fueled you? Oh, yeah.

The reason why we were successful was because of all that bad press. It was like a $10, $20 million campaign for the show. So when that show launched, that's when everything changed because we started winning Emmys. And to win an Emmy, Emmys are a racket. It's like if you win, you get a vote. And 60 Minutes have been getting Emmys for like 70 years. ABC News, CBS News.

It's almost impossible to be the new kid on the block and win Emmys. So we started winning Emmys off the, we won Emmys, we won Peabodys and Polks and Pulitzer. So you're like, you had to be really good. But you were also doing real journalism. Like you were breaking stories that nobody else broke. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And stories that people were actually interested in

because they would watch them. Yeah, that was the glory days because we would come up with a story, go shoot it, have a ton of fun, come back, cut it with your crazy bad news bears, and it would go up and then you'd just, you'd be at the award show. Like it was like you could,

whatever, you would think it up and just, and I remember saying to everybody like, enjoy these times because this is how documentary filmmaking works. Like you go pitch something for three years and you make it for three years and it comes out Nobody watches it. So that was just glory days. That was like, you know, I think we're seven years on HBO That was just like why did it change what or what changed? three things

pepper Laughter was outstripped and he was sort of the visionary we also because the show was doing so well, like it went from like, eight was the first buy and in that year we did actually 12, they bought four more. Then it went to like 22. More episodes. Yeah. Then it went to like 56. Then we went to a weekly show and it was just too much. Just hard to keep up that level of good content for that much.

Lots and lots and lots. And somebody was looking at it, and at one point, because we were doing so much, they're like, we're spending more on Bice, we're on Game of Thrones. Now Game of Thrones was doing 12 episodes and we were doing a fucking hundred. But it was a lot of money, and most shows don't last over five years, because that's when it gets more expensive, and then Plattler left. And we were having a hard time keeping up with the,

because if you're doing 12 to 20 episodes, you can just really concentrate on knocking them out of the park. But we went to Showtime after and we kept winning Emmys and it was good, but it was never, was never like never had the same cachet as those HBO. And that was at the pinnacle of HBO's. Like it was like that was like Game of Thrones and anyway all like girls and I don't know there was like four big hits on there that they had all the time and then there was so

there was they were killing it. And then after that, like now HBO's in the max. And you're like, I don't even know what max is. Like, why would you change HBO to max? Anyway, so HBO changed, the media industry changed. We changed and there you go. What were the other things going on at the same time? So it sounds like from a,

from a focus perspective, the HBO series would have been the most watched thing you were doing, yes? Not by numbers because online, like our O&O became, we were doing at our peak like billion three, billion four video views a month. So that would be much bigger than HBO. HBO was status, it was like. I see.

You had success in the old media model as well as the new media model. There you go. I understand. You should be in media. So we were killing it on TV, but I mean online was 10x that. Right.

So that's where we were making our bread and butter. And then we expanded into, we bought a TV network and we started into agencies and bought studios. Tell me about, let's talk about each one of those, the idea of doing the TV network. Well, look, I'm a hustler. And I called it years and years ago. I mean, I made a McTaggart speech, I've said it to anyone who listened the whole time.

I don't know what it was when we started, but it was like 55 cents of every dollar went to the big four. Now, it went 60 cents and 70 cents. Now it's like 82 cents of every dollar goes to the big five. And so that's 15 cents left for everybody else in the world. So independent publishing was heading for a wall

and everybody knew it. It's funny because five years ago everyone used to say, Google and Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, like these guys are taking all the money. And everyone's like, yeah like and it just got worse and worse and worse and then everybody's went oh well what are you gonna do and so we knew that that was gonna happen we saw it happen by the way I think everybody saw it was gonna happen so we're like okay let's use the insane valuations to buy things that are gonna be

let's like a hedge fund model so you say say, okay, well, we'll take our evaluation. We'll buy a distressed media asset, which is a TV channel. And ironically, we have the TV channel today and it's throwing off money because it's a TV channel. It's just throw off cash. So yeah, we did it as a plan to sort of offset into,

you know, we built five different legs of the, we had an agency. Seed diversified. Exactly. Because of the limitations on the growth in digital publishing. Yeah. Because it was becoming more and more, the mainstream was taking more and more of that space. Yes.

Well, yeah, not the mainstream, because they're in the same, not mainstream media like the old school guys, who now are in the same boat ironically that we were in. Anything that's advertising based is screwed, because all of a sudden Google came along with YouTube and just, and Facebook runs a lot of online video, what they don't run, Google does, YouTube. And so between those two, like Facebook, BuzzFeed did a lot of work with Facebook and they were just going through the roof. And then one day Facebook just changed their algorithm.

They just, you know, BuzzFeed have. So to say we were reliant on them is understated. And then- Did you ever have that experience with YouTube? It changed the algorithm? Yeah. It was more of a Facebook thing. But when we were partners with YouTube,

it was definitely easier to get the traffic. I mean, there was a long period of time when you were doing SEO optimization and you were buying traffic and everyone was about the traffic, traffic, O&O traffic, O&O traffic. And then all of a sudden when like TikTok came up or Instagram, then it just became about all screens all the time because you just couldn't, your O&O couldn't compete with TikTok. So then it just became being everywhere, which is great for numbers, but terrible for money.

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Looking at the media landscape today, how different is it than when you were able to do what you were able to do? 100 percent. We started when desktop publishing was just sophisticated enough where three idiots could make a 16-page print mag. So it was literally just coming. And now everything's on phones, everything's on these massive, massive platforms, the consumption is through the roof. I mean, if you see, by the way, I call this as well, like in my McTigar speech, I'm like,

look, there's gonna be massive consolidation, which has to happen not only between the online companies, but between the mainstream companies, because you have these big, massive companies with ever-shrinking audiences, and then, but you have one audience that's growing and just consuming stuff.

What are they consuming? Well, going forward, I'll tell you what they're going to be consuming. They're going to be consuming AI because you can just print anything, it gets made. Then you print this, so it's going to be personal AI channels which has your stories, your hosts, your this, your that, and it's going to be everything becomes everything for everybody. So no one could have ever predicted that that's what the future of media is going to be because all of these big productions, all of the studios, going out in the field and digital video teams and people who have cameras.

That's three years away from being obsolete. So it's, I could have never predicted it. When, now it seems crazy, but we used to get in shit for going from a magazine to online video. People were like, oh, it was like Dylan going electric. You sell out, so fuck you. We were so angry. Gen X is so angry that we became millennial

because we went to online video. And now we're going to a super studio format, which is what everyone's doing. Studio's the only way you make any money. Obviously we get shit on and wave it. Fuck you. Is there any point in the Vice story where you feel like Vice sold out?

I wouldn't necessarily say sold out because we were always independent. We always sold pieces of it. I would say that. But from a content perspective, do you ever feel like you made, did you ever pander in your content away from what you actually liked?

The problem with content and what people don't understand. It's the same thing with TV People don't put content on that they like because they like it they put content on the rates right and so vice Like so to go back like around 2017 at the peak of the HBO era, because all of our big clients, Google, the studios and everybody was out in LA, I moved to LA. And so I sort of stepped back from day to day, but kept doing news. And Vice, the other channels, not the news,

started moving, because we always say give the company over to the interns, like every five years. And Vice started moving into this sort of weird, woke era or whatever. But it was young people writing for themselves to the audience. It was like our audience went from millennials to whatever that is, Gen Z,

and they were writing for themselves to themselves. By the way, traffic was through the roof, but the old Vice audience, including me, were like, what are we doing here? And also, one of the mistakes was, vice news was over here, which I was concerning I was still killing it doing the wards and stuff. But like people didn't differentiate between vice.com and And vice news there was this advice and so I think that was a fuck-up we should have had a lot more differentiation and

I mean the go-woke-go-broke thing We should have had a lot more differentiation. I mean the go-woke-go-broke thing I'm well aware of. A lot of times I'd see stuff and you'd be like, what the fuck? Then you go to give someone shit and they're like, okay, the one you liked, 10 people saw. The one that this will sit was 100 million. That's just what fucking young people want, you're your old man. You're like, oh, well, it's a problem with digital media. It changes with the audience. The audience now, the young audience, that young digital consuming audience is that audience

and that's the content they want. And so, you know, it became problematic. And definitely, to be speaking of selling out, like Disney or any of those corporate partners, they didn't want that. We didn't want that. It was just sort of this, you know, we had, I don't know, 5,000 employees doing 7,000 pieces a day, and just all of this stuff would come out and you'd be like, what the fuck is this shit?

Like, what the fuck? So, did we lose control of the bicycle yet? If you were to go back to the original model of the HBO show, and if you would decide to do 8 to 12 episodes a season now and found the right distributor whether it be Netflix or Hulu or whoever it would be, do you think that it would have the same impact that it originally had? I don't think so. I think you have to be in the right place at the right time. I also think, for example, Netflix, like the big guys who could do it now,

Google, Netflix, Apple, Amazon. How could Google do it now? Well, hold on, they won't do it now. But how could they? Well, because they have the largest audience in the world. So they can do anything. But if we're talking about a TV show. What is it?

Now there's no such thing. No difference. Yeah, it's the same thing. Like Apple has TV shows, they never get shown on TV. They get shown on Apple TV. But the big ones now, if you really want to do well, it's Amazon or Netflix, let's say. No is the answer, and I'll tell you why. Because Netflix in particular, if you do a new show, then you do a story on Modi, and then Modi gets pissed off

and then kicks Netflix out of India, they've just lost $22 billion business because you said, I don't like Modi. So, excuse me, they're not going to do that. It's too dangerous for a big corporation to back this kind of content. Super dangerous. And news on TV doesn't work and hasn't worked in a while. It's aging up and it's just now there's fear-mongering. So Fox is just fear-mongering, and MSNBC and all that is just comedy making fun of the fear-mongering.

And so we believe that there's a huge middle, like the silent majority, of centrist sane people who are not being catered to. We're going to try to make news products for them and you hit the nail on the head which is can it be like it was in the HBO glory days? The answer is no because there's no HBO and it was the beginning of all that shit but there's an opportunity now. For example, what you're doing, like podcasting is this new frontier and it's exploding and

we said like if we wanted to do something around the selection cycle because it's going to be, we're already seeing it's completely sheer bull goose lunacy and it's only going to get worse. So we were like, let's take the biggest social media memes, so it's like millions of people going, let's take them and let's deconstruct them, let's talk to people on either side, let's do it like a scientist, let's do it like a journalist, let's go investigate. One of the things I love doing was we went to Antarctica, no sorry, we went to Greenland and Greenland is melting and Greenland is something like 2 meters or 3 meters of sea

level rise, it's melting as fast as it can. So we're like, hey guys, Greenland melts, we're all screwed. And we got, this is at the peak of HBO, we got inundated. Usually we get something like 10 million comments, we got like 28 million comments, and usually it was like 60% positive, it was like 90% negative. There was just bots and everyone's fucking going crazy,

me especially. So I'm like, okay, let's follow the story. So we went, we found the traffic. It was all conservative think tanks, and they're like, there's more ice ever. In Antarctica, it's shifting the poles, there's more sea ice. Antarctica, Antarctica, Antarctica.

We went to a conservative conference, and the think tanks, we interviewed everybody. Then they're like, it's Antarctica, you idiots. So we went to Antarctica, met with all the scientists like, yeah, it's melting as fast as it can melt. We're like, well, what? And they're like, yeah, well, there's always flat earthers.

We're like, flat earthers is 45% of the fucking American population. They're like, well, we're not salesmen, we're scientists. Like, what do you want us to do? I'm like, they're not, they're saying, you work in NRU, they're saying that there, we're scientists. What do you want us to do? I'm like, they're not. They're saying you work in NRU. They're saying that there's never been more. And they're like, you know, they're in. They're wrong.

So to go back to my long-winded story is we want to do that with political memes. For example, the $24 Big Mac took on everything. And Biden's got its $24 billion. It's everywhere. And we looked, I have these traffic guys in the store from the advice news, and they're like, yeah, it's all coming from China, CCP, Chinese Communist Party,

because somebody had posted somewhere $24 and it had gotten some traction. So they just turned on the, there's no $24 Big Mac. In fact, McDonald's came out and said, yeah, it's $4.95 where the fuck Big Mac is. There's no $24 Big Mac. And so then it sort of was like, bing, like all of these conspiracy theories,

all of these people like on the right, on the left, and I'm just like, let's call them. Let's just talk to them. Let's call the people who are fucking on either side of the thing, get their point of view and then also see where the traffic's coming from. Because a lot of time it's coming from Russia. Like Russia will tell you open, yeah we're trying to fuck your election.

We're trying to fuck your electoral process. As is China, as is the pre-Syrian army, as are Iranians. Like so many people are trying to fuck with our shit. And so you just have these young people going And the reason why I got back in the game is so many of the people I was working with would just say something that's Prosperous as if it's a given but that's not even we're not even discussing that That's just part of the thing that we got to the given you like that. That's not a given dude That's bullshit. Like where are you even getting that and I think that

what's happened because of the first Trump election was he did an amazing job of they would say fake news and he'd say no you're a fake news he'd literally just did a kindergarten like you're fake news and it were and well that's fake news and this is now everything's fake news. Nobody believes anything anymore This is a huge problem because another is no Basis of truth because everyone's just like that's bullshit. Well, and like if you share Shaila family if you look for the source the sources are all these fucking nefarious weird and Everybody is is by the way just throwing so much fuel on fire.

So we're like, let's try to find these 10, 20, 30 massive, massive issues that no one agrees upon, try to talk to people on both sides, try to talk to experts and figure out where the traffic's coming from. And wouldn't that be an exciting show? So we think that'll be a little bit more interesting than just the sort of shotgun approach of the HBO show, which was just like, let's figure out what's interesting in the world tonight. I'd be really curious to see that. I'd like to see that. Great. Well, this is the first one. Element Electrolytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best?

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These minerals help conduct the electricity that powers your nervous system so you can perform at your very best. Element electrolytes are sugar-free, keto-friendly, and great tasting. Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklmnt.com slash tetra and stay salty with Element Electrolyte. LMNT. Was Vice ever banned or censored? Yeah, oh yeah.

We used to say we take the Sex Pistols brand of marketing, i.e. get banned and go number one. In Canada, so America you have freedom of speech, in Canada they censor the shit out of everything. So we had Vice. It wasn't even an article. It was a skate ad. And the skate ad got banned at my alma mater. So Gavin and I went to Carlton. We're going to McGowan. He went to Concordia.

But we were at Carlton. So we used to distribute in Carlton. And they banned us from Carleton, and then the Carleton newspaper ran the article, and used the same image, and using the same methodology, they banned their own newspaper. Then the gay and lesbian newspaper wrote about it, used the same image, and they got banned.

And that's censorship. And then, of course, all Canadian media called us to say, what happened? We're like, well, that's censorship. Because obviously, you should censor us because we're filled with pornography, terrible, horrible, garbage. But then the next guy gets banned, and the next guy gets banned, and the next guy gets banned. That's what censorship is.

Everybody wants to censor something. And so I love any kind of censorship argument because I've been on it my whole life. But yeah, we get banned all the time. And fucking you get banned and your kids love it. Like they're just, you're off to the races. So we've been banned, I don't know how many times, hundreds of times. Europe, we come here, we get banned. Italy actually, You have to register with the local council and local council has one clergyman So can you imagine vice? Giving every month to a fucking clergyman to say okay

Let's see what we got here and it's like which dildo is best for a donkey Which you know like so does it and it would be like was that ever a real vice to me? I don't know. I mean it be like was that ever a real vice story I don't know I mean it sounds like a vice there's a funny meme where the guy gets a dildo and he goes country and it hits like Tunisia fucking you know animal it's like donkey the uh sexual vibrator and it's like it's an actual vice thing it's like Tunisian donkeys are being fellatated by vibrators or whatever. And you're like, okay, I can take a good joke. But you're like, the vice articles became and headlines became a bit fucking rich at the end. And there used to be a thing called not vice or something that was just, it was like online and you had to pick which was

a fake vice headline and what was a real Vice headline. So it did become a bit rich, but anyway, yeah, we got bad all the time. Tell me the story with John Maxey. That was a weird one. He was on the run in Belize. I don't know who he was on the run from because we couldn't figure out if he had made it all up or if it was real. And I think it was 90% made up in his head,

but maybe a little bit real. So we sent a reporter down there to go follow him. And then- He contacted you? Yeah. Was that normally the case? Yeah, a lot of times. I mean, we would contact times. I mean we would

contact people. Everybody knows everybody so like, oh my uncle knows this guy or they cause... At our peak everyone's like, I got a story for you guys. So we sent somebody down and then they were following them. They decided to go on the run with them or whatever and then I guess they took a picture of him. And then, but it had the metadata still linked to it so that they could find him. But I don't know if anyone was actually looking for him. But we got in shit for the metadata picture. From him or? No, he didn't.

I mean, he was with us. And I don't know that they ever caught him. I don't know that he was ever. But if they weren't after him, why would the metadata been a problem? The whole thing about it was like, the internet blew up for a day about it, and you're like,

we were involved in it, and it's still unclear as to whether or not he was actually being safe. But he was a freaky, freakyaky guy and the person who went down there, whoever was in the office I guess, went down there and took a picture because he said take a picture and they didn't take off the metadata. Anyway, I forget how it ended but I think he got caught. They went through and then let him go.

So it turned out to be much ado about nothing. What were some of the other places that you flew into and got to experience something unusual, let's say? So many. The one I remember was, there's another great story, which was this guy named General Abdul Rizq, and he was like a teenager, or a kid maybe before he was a teenager, in Kandahar, and he, the Taliban are from Kandahar, and when the Taliban came, he got kicked out,

his parents were killed, so he's like this young kid went through the tunnels into Pakistan. He's like sweeping the floors in a shitty shop in Pakistan, like illiterate, fucked up. And then becomes a teenager, goes back through the tunnels and gets this teenage gang together and they just start killing Taliban. But they look like fucking Adam and the Ants. They have like these weird shreds of things, colored rope, not ropes, like colored ribbons that they wear, crazy colored, they look awesome. And he was known as a Taliban killer, he's a teenager, and he, when the Americans invaded, they said bring us anybody who's fighting the Taliban. So they bring him to Succulable, they train him, they give him just like ludicrous amounts of money.

And he becomes the police chief of Kandahar, then eventually governor of Kandahar. And he, it's like Kurtz, like when he went into this region and all enemy activity died. So he goes to Kandahar, where the Taliban are from? Zero Taliban activity. Kills, fucking kills and shit. You know, you can imagine he's not a good guy.

Lots of killings, lots of torture and bad stuff. He's a bad guy. But he becomes, I think, maybe the biggest drug dealer in the world, like running the opium into Pakistan, is all this gold bullion his brother kills cars either private issues brother Like super powerful guys, so I flew in the Kandahar

And in these places like you can't be like you can't be you have to wear like So it's like you have to dress as if you're from the place. And so I'm pink. So it's funny because I went into Northwest Frontier Province with Sirus, who's Pakistani, so he speaks Urdu. And I had just come from shooting in Kashmir, which is another hotspot where they're having a war. And so I was wearing Kashmiri chappal. So pink guy, I had a long beard and handed the beard because that's what they do there.

So I handed the beard and I was wearing Kashmiri chappal and I remember they asked Sarooz, does your religious leader require any dietary restrictions? Because there's only one guy who's got a pink face wearing Kashmiri chappal and he needs a pad hat. Because a lot of the top fighters in the top are come from Dagestan, which is in Russia, because the Dagestan is where sort of the Spetsnaz run it.

And so basically, it's like super training ground for like, for so if you're you go into the force, it's called if you're Muslim, you fight the Spetsnaz, the Russian Special Forces, so you become super badass. So those guys then go out and train everybody else, like the Taliban, and Okoharam, and everything. So they thought you were one of those guys. So anyways, we go interview him, and I don't speak Pashto, so I'm sitting there talking to him in English, and then there's translating the news.

So anyway, I finish the interview, fly to Kabul, which is grim, but this is how bad Kandahar is. When I flew to Cabell, I'm like, it's like Paris in the springtime. You're like, there's hotels and food. Oh my God. And so I hear this knock, knock, knock on my door and they bring me to the American Embassy and it's Treasury, DEA, and CIA. And they're like, okay, we'll trade for you. We'll give you deep covers, meaning like we're not,

deep cover stories, like we're not gonna attribute them or whatever, but we'll give you the actual story. That's true. If you give us a story on Ridgid, I'm like, he's your guy. Like you fund him, he's your guy. And he's like, yeah, he's off the reservation. And I'm like, I just spoke to him in English and he spoke back to you passionately. I don't have any insight into that general.

I'm dual-rithic, like I don't know what you're talking about. But if he's that far off the reservation, then this is a worry because he's literally the Taliban killer. And then when that guy goes, you know, which happened, then Kandahar goes. So that was freaky because you're sitting there going like, I'm this punk kid, you know, used to fucking busk, you know, for fucking quarters.

All of a sudden you're talking to the CIA and DEA about fucking, you know, trading for deep cover stories about fucking Taliban. You show up in these places with a story in mind, are you ever surprised by what's actually happening there? Always. And are the people who are the bad guys necessarily the bad guys?

Tell me about this. Tell me about our understanding of the world versus your firsthand experience of the world. Well, there's always a point of view. Like, for example, the Taliban is such a bad guy, your first-hand experience of the world? Well, there's always a point of view. For example, the Taliban are such bad guys, if they're American, they're freedom fighters because we invaded their country and they said, we're going to fight you until you leave. If you want to look at it objectively, they're very successful freedom fighters.

They beat America. By the way, before that they beat Russia, before that they beat England. They're fucking the empire killer, right? Why? Because they don't want their country to be invaded. And why is everybody invading their country? Well, geopolitically, it's very important because it's in between India and China and Iraq and Iran. between India and China and Iraq and Iran. And it's a sort of crossroads. More location than anything else.

Yeah. And it's also very difficult to tame. And so if it's very difficult to tame, then shit can go down, like training camps for extremists, etc. The whole thing is like, oh, 9-11 happens and they say, okay, we're going to go there, which at least had a modicum of sense because they had training camps there. They're also like, we're also going to invade Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with it.

We're just going to do that too. We're just going to go in there. It's ludicrous. But if you go to Afghanistan, I mean, are they good guys? Are they nice? You know, I mean, you can believe in them or not believe in them, but they are fighting for the freedom of their country.

And everyone forgets that, and we dehumanize them, and we tell all these terrible stories about them, and everybody jumps on board. And like, that's what I'd say is surprising, is that everybody, like all media, will just jump on board. And like that's what I'd say is surprising, is that everybody, like all media will just jump on board with a political narrative and just nobody deviates from it. And I got to give it to Al Jazeera, like we do have colonialist news,

which is our point of view and our point of view is right. And if you go to the countries, they're like, yeah. Like if you go to Iraq, we went in there and mismanaged it so badly that we created Al-Qaeda, or not Al-Qaeda, we created ISIS. Like America made ISIS because we created this vacuum. And then ISIS came along. And you're like, well, that's not good. Like what we did in Afghanistan and what we did in Iraq you know, were bad things.

And how we get it back here, the propaganda is propaganda. That's one thing. Wars have propaganda on both sides. And one side always believes that my side is a propaganda Are you spending time in russia? Yeah, what's that like? They've had an interesting time Where they were the shit like they were number two and then

You know yeltsin gets blamed for a lot of stuff and And basically putin is trying to get them back to where they were before and basically Putin is trying to get them back to where they were before their... The way they see it is we had a complete economic collapse and everybody feasted on our corpse. And I remember saying when I was in Russia, like Putin, like, is he communist? Is he fascist? Like, what is he? They're like, no, no, you don't understand. He's for Russia. And they're like, OK, got it. But like on the political spectrum, you know, because he was part of the KGB, but now, no, no, Shane, he's a patriot.

He's for Russia. So he wants to get Russia back to, you know, those old borders and those old territories and all that stuff. A. B. I talked to Lavrov, who's the foreign minister, and he'll say that and they've been saying it to anyone who'll listen. If you put missiles on our border, like for example in the Ukraine, it's like exactly the same as putting missiles in Cuba or Canada. We're not going to let you do that.

We're going to retaliate. They've said that for the last 20 years and then you would go do it and you're like, what do you think is going to happen? Unprovoked. Unprovoked. Oh my God, what happened there? And so when you go, you know, there's two sides to every story and poor Ukraine is Vietnam. It's a proxy war that's being fought in its backyard and that's, you know's unpleasant for everybody who's there. But there's two sides to every story. And that's the one thing that's really messed up

in America now is we don't have two sides to one story. We have one side that's hyper, impassioned, and angry, and won't even listen or talk to the other people. And you're like, you have two parties in America. But that's the other thing, like when I first came down to America, so I studied politics and economics, when I first came down to America, you know,

Bubba Clinton had done, you know, he had shrunk government and had the largest surplus of all time. And then Bush increased his levelunk government and had the largest surplus of all time. And then Bush increased the level of government and had the biggest deficit of all time. So basically the Republicans and the Democrats switched their whole basis of their whole political mandate. No one in America said boo. No one said shit.

And that's when I realized a lot of this stuff, and now it's with Trump and Biden, which makes for fucking insane political theater, but a lot of this stuff in America now it's with Trump and Biden, which makes for fucking insane political theater, but a lot of this stuff in America, because America is not a democracy, it's a republic, if you talk to the founding fathers, they're like, yeah, it's made to do nothing, it's to do it very slowly. But a lot of this stuff is bread and puppet theater.

Like it's to give the sort of mass imagination that this is a massive democratic process, that there is agency, that you actually have some sort of democratic country. You're like, well, it's not set up to be a democracy. It's a republic. You have two parties. That means one is in power and the other one's in opposition, so they're always in power. And so a lot of this stuff is bread and puppet theater, but now it's amplified to the point of just impassioned lunacy. And the thing that we have to watch out for is I was in Yugoslavia during the war there,

and what happened was Tito kept everybody under his thumb, but he was afraid of the Soviet Union. So he put a machine gun in everybody's house. So when he died, everyone just starts shooting each other because they all had machine guns. No problem if you don't have a machine gun. And now America has just been arming itself for the last decade, like super arming itself. And no one is listening to each other's point of view. Like Democrats like kind of like the old Soviet Union America like oh Russian deep babies oh you know American gangsters like the Democratic and Republican propaganda against each other is like dehumanizing and doing this war so that you know and

that's terrifying because you're like it's a fucking Republican Party versus Democratic Party like like it used to be and it should be nothing like whoever you vote for is whoever you vote for and then you're done and we get on with life and who cares it's but it's like a declaration of fucking war it's crazy now so good for media and good for news and good for what I'm doing, but terrible for everybody else. Welcome to the house of macadamias. Macadamias are a delicious superfood, sustainably sourced directly from farmers. Macadamias, a rare source of omega-7 linked to collagen

regeneration, enhanced weight management, and better fat metabolism. Macadamias, heart healthy and brain boosting fats. Macadamias, paleo-friendly, keto and plant-based. Macadamias, no wheat, no dairy, no gluten, no GMOs, no preservatives, no palm oil, no added sugar. House of Macadamias, dry roasted with Namibian sea salt, cracked black pepper, and chocolate dips. Snack bars come in chocolate, coconut white chocolate, and blueberry white chocolate. Visit house of macadamias.com slash tetra. Tell me about the home you grew up in. It's funny I've been thinking about it because I just came from Greece and I think Greece was like the first, like I was young and beautiful for the first time and punk wasn't part of

my persona and it was gorgeous and beautiful for the first time and punk wasn't part of my persona and it was gorgeous and it was weird and the water. Pre-punk. This is pre-punk. Yeah. No, this is sorry, this is post when I was punk. I'm going, I'm getting there. But it was like, I first discovered beauty, you know,

in that sort of 18, 19, 20. Before that, sort of Ottawa, no money, punk, everything was very grim. Like we celebrated to work in class, like I worked as a bartender from a very young age so I had money so I left home at a young age. There was a lot, you know punk rock palaces like you could be in a band and then you would pay the rent out of the band money and stuff So grew up like playing in punk bands Like in a commune with other guys my parent like I had a fine

Family life like My dad was very strict and was like you have to learn how to Build a house and build a car and you have to get straight A's and you have to box you do this stuff build a house and build a car and you had to get straight A's and you had to box and you had to do this stuff. Because his dad had like, was self-taught and ended up being this big war hero and da-da-da even though he, you know, left school in, I don't know, grade eight or something. And so he was a real harsh taskmaster. So my dad was like, look, life is tough, life is hard, life is like a shit sandwich, the

more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat. But he, the only guy that ever loses money on insider trading. So he never really did well, but he was like he was an academic smart guy, but just, you know, whatever. Life never worked for him. So basically I left home very young, punk, using my Dukes, hustler. Then I moved to Greece and I was like, this is on the menu? How did it work out for you to move to Greece? I was in a band and we were just tooling around busking and then I went to there and I was like, this is on the menu? How did it work out for you to move to Greece?

I was in a band and we were just trueling around busking and then I went to there, we were busking, we were in Athens and the guy said, you wanna come out? And he gave us a house on the beach, we could eat at any restaurant, drink at any bar, and we had to play one night at the Hard Rock Cafe, one hour a night.

I never left, I'm like, this is the greatest fucking thing ever. But it was the first time I was like, coming out of this real working class, punk, northern, cold, trench coat-y world, all of a sudden wearing like, blip flops and shorts and just being tan and beautiful and being like, oh my God, this is great. And I was saying, like I used to say to Sarooj,

one more year and then I'm going back to Greece, man. One more year and then I'm going back to Greece. It's my like, this is great. And I was saying, like I used to say to Saruish, one more year and then I'm going back to Greece, man. One more year and then I'm going back to Greece. It's my like ontological paradise. But yeah, I don't know, my dad was a harsh taskmaster. My mom was overprotective, sort of Irish. You have brother and sisters? Brother, and then so they got older. They got divorced and then we were so out of control,

these young punk kids, that my mom got remarried to sort of put some rational, we were going crazy. And because of that, I left, I was like, well, fuck you. And then left home, and I had a good relationship, I still have a great relationship with him. But it was just like, oh, now a man, 14 or 15, and I'm like, okay, fuck it, I'm out.

And then it was just, you know, like, there but for the grace of God go I, like when you're 15, 16, 17, you're not making the best of decisions. But I was obsessed with just, you know, getting out there in the world. All my friends and brother went to university, most of these bands were in university, I was obsessed with just getting out there in the world. All my friends and brother went to university.

Most of these bands were in university. I was in high school. So that was one good thing is that I wanted to get out and go to university and be with my buddy. So at least I didn't drop out of school. So that was good. Yeah, I just wanted to get out. I wanted to get out of Ottawa and get get out to the world and and so I spent

A lot of my time before vice's traveling and then and then when we did vice I spent most half my year on the road I like you know, I love Excuse me going to See as much as I can. How do you think growing up in Canada impacted your outlook on the world? growing up in Canada impacted your outlook on the world? Canada is sort of weird because we're kind of sanctimonious. We're like, you know, we get more in foreign aid than everybody else and we do this and this. We also gave reactors to India and Pakistan. I said, don't do anything bad with them.

They both, you know, exploded atomic weapons. It's just kind of a sanctimonious place, but it's a great place to grow up. It's like the definition of the Canadian characters, we're not American. And Vice was beloved in Canada, and until we went to the States, we're like, yeah, we love America.

America's great. You know, it's the only place you can come with no shoes. I came from Costa Rica and I had literally no shoes. I stole my boots. I had flip flops. You can become a millionaire. It's the only country in the world you can do that. It's amazing. And Canadians are like, oh, yes. And they wanted us to hate the States.

I'm like, I love the States. I think it's great. Now, this is this whole political theory, like politics, it's ugly. Like, it's an ugly country and you have homeless people like living right next to the richest people. Like, we could do a better job. Like, it definitely could be, especially it's the richest country in the world, like it could be managed better. And it should be managed better, but you know, so I think you get that from Canada, but you also get like, you know, we're better than you because we're not that way. But we're also really small and really rich.

I think there's a lot of countries that are sanctimonious because they're tiny and rich. And if you're tiny and rich, you can get out a lot of the problems that the big countries have. Like, India has 300,000 people who would be considered, like, middle class. They have a billion people that are poor that you have to pull up into that middle class. That's a huge fucking job. They don't have any water. These are massive, massive, massive. And like, so Canada, you know, is a massive

country with tons of money. Anyway, it's a great place to grow. It gives you a perspective of being one step away and sort of being able to see stuff and say, like, you can see, for example, the political spectrum in the States and go, you see it a bit more for what it is rather than, like, I was born into it like it's like a sports team or something like it's gonna be the Phillies until I die kind of thing yeah okay have a little more perspective because you're coming from the outside yeah how would you describe your temperament oh my lord that's a good one Oh my lord, that's a good one. Uh, much changed.

I mean, I was very card charging. I was like, I speak French, why do you speak French? Why don't we all just know this kind of thing? I was very uh, aggressive and you know, probably a bit arrogant. Uh, but you know probably a bit arrogant but you know calm she never did a good Captain make like when I was the blue-eyed boy rolling down the hill catching money I was the smartest guy in every room and then after sort of a few belts to the head you're like like, you know, we should maybe

think a bit more and listen to them a bit more and read a bit more. You know, I think now probably much happier. I mean, I'm pretty lucky I've been happy most of my life, but like comprehensively happier. I got much more sort of Contemplate things I think about things more You know, I think I think was Carl Sagan who said like it's insane with all the billions of years You know that that it took to get to this point and we live in this tiny little eye blink of of like

the air works and that you know the temperature work but not only that if you look within that envelope of human existence we got to live in like the only era ever without major wars like we didn't get stabbed with fucking pitchfork and food is delicious. It's not like this rotten, moldy bread. You can travel around the world. Our era and God knows if that's the other thing. I don't know if the HBO era continues going on, like let's say the Gen X era. The Gen X era is pretty goddamn good.

So I'm very thankful that my envelope happened to be probably the greatest envelope of human existence. So that's good. And now also like when Bill called me to do this thing, I'm like, people want me to get back in the game. And I was watching this thing about, like, ageism in America. That, like, if you're, like, if you're 40 and you don't have a plan, you're fucked. And if you're 50, just fucking, you know, and, like, for us, we still get to fucking

do what we love to do. That's a fucking blessing. Like, we're not like, do what we love to do. That's a fucking blessing. We're not like, oh, you're fucking old. You can't do anything. Like family, like happiness at a cellular level. So I think I learned a lot. You know, it's funny, I studied philosophy in university,

and I think it's completely the ass backwards. Like, we should study philosophy now because you read it. You're like, this kid you're like I don't fucking know what do I need to write to get a name? So now I read a lot more and I also appreciate pretty much everything but being able to get back in the game and being able to do something with a little bit more understanding of the complexities of it and a little bit more understanding of the complexities of it and a little bit of more understanding of, look, there has to be some place where people can go where they believe in what you're saying. And that, you know, I could retire and fucking live my serene existence, which by the way

is great. But if you can still do something and use your skill set to do something that isn't shitty, then that's just fucking great. So, comprehensively happy, but like, grateful to still be in the mix, and grateful that, you know, the arrogance, we were a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I used to say, if I don't believe it, who else is gonna believe it? Like, you know, the arrogance and the, like, we were a self-fulfilling prophecy,

and I used to say, if I don't believe it, who else is gonna believe it? Like, you have to believe it. Perhaps that's why I was so hard-charging, because I'm like, we're just making this up as we go along. Now I don't have to do that anymore. So you're just sort of like, okay, let's look at this,

and let's, let's, you know, try to do it right. Also, your hard-char charging achieved a tremendous amount. I mean, it's insane what you accomplished. Yeah, and nobody believed it. Like, everyone would say no. That's why we had to get, like, self-fulfilling profs, and you had to be like, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this.

Because nobody says yes. We're gonna go from $15,000 to the, you know, largest private company in America, and they're like, yeah, no. Yeah, we're gonna gonna be the biggest the reason why Canadians got mad at us was like we're the biggest ever Media outlet to come out of Canada and we went yeah, we're going to America. We love it They were like fuck you, you know, like so there was you know, it was it was It was definitely We didn't know what we were doing,

and then when we put the Bad News Bears together, we just struck this alchemy, and at one point, we were making the best content in the world, and there was a time when you're just like, I knew, you can't keep the team together, but it was just like a fucking great feeling. That was a really great feeling, and also to be vindicated when everybody says, you can't do it, you can't do it, you can't do it.

And then you do it. Yeah. When did Tom Freston get involved? That's a great question. Tom is a Tabasco. I love him to bit. He, I don't know if you know his story. I don't really.

So he was a hippie, hitchhiked around, ended up in Afghanistan. I didn't know that. Yeah. Started a company in Afghanistan, and Delhi, clothing company, it was like hippie threads, and had a whole life. And then the communists the Russians came into Kabul lost everything I Think it was like 38 or something like wow you know, yeah. Oh, yeah, but had a life Yeah, was a millionaire lost everything

Flew back and then Pittman said oh, we're doing this thing and and so, you know how to sell shit like you sold pants So so he became head of marketing at MTV and then when they sold it All the other guys had equity except for him. I didn't know that either Yeah, so they all laughed and then he was the only one left. So like you want to be you want to run it? He's other than get so ends up becoming CEO Viacom Super smart guy amazing person He gets ousted

because of red stones going nuts and sleep down and he used to be his lawyer You know gets in it's like Gollum or whatever. It's making and then Tom Started working with us and he really wanted to us to be big to be say basically fucked you to empty, he did it again. And so we traveled all over the world together, like he would come to Afghanistan and he would come to Sudan, it was an older guy.

He fucking loved it, he loved being on the road, he loved going to these places. And when we were at the peak of our success, they did this thing where we were like three times the size of MTV. MTV, when we did the deal with Tom, I had a deal, a cause where if Tom laughs, we should buy it back. So we did. We bought it back for book value, $4 million at the time. Then it was worth whatever when they did the article, it billion. And they're like, oh, that four million turned into four billion. So Tom loved it.

We love Tom. Uh, and he's just, he's one of the last. Entertainment gurus, you know, like these guys back in the day were larger than life and now they're just lawyers with fucking police best. But he was a hell of a fuck, still is, a hell of a character. Who were some of the suitors who wanted to buy Vice over the years?

Everybody. We had a deal done with Time Warner for 49%, because I wanted to get a TV network, so we were gonna get HLLN and we were done. And then a guy came and he said, go talk to Bob Iger. And everyone was like, fucking, this thing's not ever going to deal with dealing with bite. It's funny, I walked in and he said,

I want to talk to you about copyright infringement because in one of our pictures, there was like a huge dildo next to like a frozen cup. And he's like, I want to talk to you a copywriter for a second. He was joking. And I was like, oh, he's not a very fucking smart guy. And he said, look, you've given these guys nine months, give me nine days. So I delayed my trip back to New York. We worked out a deal. I went back, told Time Warner I wasn't gonna come in and they like five

minutes later the New York Times boom they dropped the story like couldn't agree on price like ie I was too greedy then two minutes later we released our story of Disney at 2.5 so we had 800 million of value in like a week so So, wait, three, four. Four o'clock. How great is the bell? Four o'clock is a good time. I love the bell. Does somebody have to do that? No, it's automatic. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, nine to nine. It's awesome. We were talking about Disney. You meet with Bob Eiger. What was the question? You give him nine days. Oh, suitors. So, suitors. So, is Disney, you meet with Bob Iger. You give him nine days. Oh, suitors.

So suitors, so is everyone from Rupert Murdoch. That's another person. Everyone, Rupert Murdoch's the devil, Rupert Murdoch the devil, blah, blah, blah. And you're like, yeah, he got Labour elected in the UK. Labour being communists here in America, he wanted access to power, like that's what he does. And so like, he doesn't give a fuck if it's Brightwing now maybe, because he's older, but back in the day,

he would just get access to power anyway. So Rupert wanted to buy us at one point. Jeff Buches at Time Warner, another great guy, Jeff. Jeff Bukus at Time Warner, another great guy Jeff. Tom Warner, before that, and then Bob Iger. Yeah, so that's one thing is, everyone's like, oh, Shane said no to Disney and now they're bankrupt. Ha ha. Which is a great story, it's not true.

Because I said yes to Disney. Well, you said yes to Time Warner first. Said yes to Time, I've never said no to money. I'm a capitalist. So, said yes to Time Warner, then I've never said no to money. I'm a capitalist. Said yes to Time Warner, then Disney outbid them. Then we were working to sell Disney, the whole company. And there was a time when Disney was trying to buy Snapchat

and or Spotify. And I know Daniel, and I was good friends with Evan, so I was trying to get in there, get in the mix. And at some point, Spotify and or Snapchat said, we're too big, like we're not going to do it. So they said put a hold on the whole, you know, vice slash because we're going to be the content part of this platform thing. And then that's turned into Shane said no, and then they went back up.

I never said no, I love, you know, I would love to be part of a bigger platform. And that's in fact, what we were building I would love to be part of a bigger platform.î Thatís in fact what we were building the whole company to be. Then because Disney pulled the plug, thatís when we got into private equity. Private equity is like scorpion and the frog. Theyíre like, ìYeah, weíll value it at 6.5 billion. Letís go.î Then they put in all the ratchets and the things. Look, private equity do what they do.

They're gonna end up owning your company no matter what you do. So that was probably not great. We were built for a strategic, i.e. like a... A real partner. Yeah. What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammaton? Counterculture? Tetragrammaton. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammaton. The Avant-Garde? Tetragrammaton.

Generative art? Tetragrammaton. The Tarot? Tetragrammaton. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammaton. Generative art. Tetragrammaton. The tarot. Tetragrammaton. Out of print music. Tetragrammaton. Biodynamics. Tetragrammaton. Graphic design. Tetragrammaton.

Mythology. And magic. Tetragrammaton. Obscure film. Tetragrammaton. Beach culture. Tetragrammaton. Esoteric lectures.

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Muscle cars. Tetragrammaton. Ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn. Tell me some expert advice you got along the way that turned out to be really wrong. All of it. All of it.

Give me some examples. Private equity. I mean, we always had a rule for every page of content, we had to have a page of facts because it was a business. And if you don't, if you don't pay for it, it's gonna die, right? And so I was always really into sales. I was always really into like driving revenue.

And then the whole company, including me, got caught up in this weird valuation game of just building up the valuation rather than selling and taking the money in and making it, you were just taking in higher and higher valuations. How much of your time was that taking versus focusing on the content?

That's a great question. The last, the advice I give to media kids and people who came in the vice and stuff, I'd say look, concentrate on two things, content and revenue. That's what a media company is, make great content and then monetize it. Now it sounds like simplistic advice.

Everyone will try to take everything away. It'll be HR, it'll be lawsuits, it'll be courtroom battles, it'll be proxy votes, it'll be rights offerings, it'll be raising money. People like it. It's lawyers, it's hundreds of millions of dollars, it's exciting. And making content and selling brands is difficult. So, people get sucked up into it and I think that happens to all media companies and I think that's what's happened not only in new media but in legacy media because if you look

at what's happening now, they have to consolidate and fire everybody because they're just, they're not driving revenue or interesting ways of having, because everybody's advertising based, and as we talked about, the big five are taking all the fucking advertising, so they haven't innovated, they haven't got into sub-based, they haven't got into anything new, and so they're just sitting there, nobody's concentrating on revenue,

no one's concentrating on making great content except for you know Amazon and Netflix because they can because they have the money I mean Amazon pretty soon no one's gonna be able to compete with Amazon because they just do content as an add-on because they don't need to make anything because they're gonna sell everything in the world and pretty soon the content is going to be like, oh, it's going to be hot clicks. I want those jeans. I want that bottle of wine.

And you're just going to be able to click anything on Amazon and just be able to buy. It's genius. Who's going to be able to compete with that? No one can compete with that. Can't compete now. So private equity, you always think that you can control the beast and you never can. What else is told to me? I mean, most of the advice of the day-to-day kind of stuff is always bad. It's mostly kind of lawyers and like for example,

we were gonna do the vice, God damn it, the vice book, like the be all and end all story of vice, the true story. The true story is phenomenal. We started writing it and the lawyers are like, yeah, this is like 50 different lawsuits. Like, this is gonna be insane. And you're like, okay, well, fuck it. We won't do it.

So we didn't do it. Just telling the truth. Yeah, yeah. And then now the narratives are being... We always used to say that, if you don't write your own narrative, then someone else is going to write it. It's not going to be your narrative or the truth. And so we didn't do it.

And then now everybody's just writing the narrative, which is obviously like disgruntled employees or this or that or whatever. It's not gonna be, nobody like who's inside and who actually knew about the growth and knew, you know, and so that became, that's not, we shouldn't have listened to those lawyers. Tell me about your experiences currency trading. Well, it sounds a lot, I don't know, sexier or...

Anyway, I went to Eastern Europe. So, when I was studying politics... How old were you at this time? 21, 22. Okay. How old were you at this time? 21, 22. So I was studying East European Soviet studies in college, and then the Soviet Union goes away. It was the hardest school to get into for politics, and I'm like, okay, well, they went away.

So I went to Eastern Europe, and they had... So I went to Prague, which is where everybody went, but it was already inundated. So then I went to Budapest and I taught English and I taught business English. And then I was teaching business English and all these guys were like,

you know, you as a foreigner can get a cockatoo, like a foreign company and you can buy currency. can get a cockatoo like a foreign company and you can buy currency and it's much better rate than the black market which is like you know so I had this book and I was buying selling foreign and all of a sudden like I didn't have to do the school anymore I was making a lot of money I had a car and driver I lived in the same building as you or the prime minister I tailor-made suits by the way way, this is the punk kid. It's really interesting. Yeah, it was super fun, except for when the Romanians,

Transylvanians who were running real money laundering, the bad guys, start catch wind that you're taking their business, and it got very hot for a minute. And my brother said, oh, I'm getting married. I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna take a little break. But yeah, it was like all money trading there's a difference between between the arbitrage between the black market rate

and the other way what saved my ass was that because I was doing it with companies I was sort of out of the spotlight of the bad boys for long enough to make some money. But what I realized about that, so that's a good question, but the real thing I realized was I'd been poor for so long that that was my first taste of money, although it was not real because you couldn't leave hungry with it. But what I would do, like, I would go to, like, Venice. Like, I would work and get my money, and I would be rich and hungry,

but the minute you left, you were poor. But I would go to, like, Venice for the weekend and, like, stay at the Daniele, you know, and to the poor kid from Ottawa, this was just like, your fucking brain is exploding. And then, you know, I'd go back. But, like, you couldn't ever really leave Eastern Europe because it was, you know, I go back, but like you couldn't ever really leave Eastern Europe because the differentiation was so much.

What was Budapest like? Oh my God. Beautiful place. Oh my Lord. Paris, it's gorgeous. And it was not destroyed. Like it was, there was no fast food, like there's no signs, there was no neon, it was just fucking beautiful and speaking of like it had like the Roman baths, it was known for the bath, it had baths everywhere, uh like you know hot baths, all by this pond. That's where the water culture was invented, no? The bathing culture. Huge, like it was massive complexes of Roman baths, incredible food culture, incredible wine culture.

How long did you get to live there? Two and a half years. And it was just fucking lovely. I've got to say that it just was opening up and they were very excited. We were very excited. And- People speak English?

Yeah, now it was before it was more German. How did you communicate? You know, a little bit of Hungarian, a little bit of English, a little bit of German. And now they speak English. But Hungary is a beautiful country. But Budapest is like staggeringly beautiful. And yeah, living there and being like,

you kind of felt like James Bond. You're like, my car was a muskets car, like the old Russian. Yeah. And you're trading money. And you're like, yeah, this is fucking cool. Now, that's not gonna go on very long. So when I came back and they said,

you know, come let's do vice together, that was probably saved my life. But the one thing about that is, you know, after let's do vice together. That was probably saved my life. But the one thing about that is, you know, after you get a taste of that lifestyle, you're like, fuck, I want to go back to my dad. The one piece of advice he gave me was like, life is like a shit sandwich, the more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat.

It's true. Like when you have a little bit of cash, it's fucking nice. And so that was the first thing that ever gave me a take. Did you ever think about staying there? Yeah, just that the quality of life was so good. Yeah I did. I mean, there's a few things like I came back from there and Found myself going hello Rick, how are you? Are you feeling fine?

Because, you know, and so that's thing. And like, I don't know, Scooby-Doo, it's like a dog, like it's cartoon. Like there's no cultural references. Like you're wearing weird clothes, like you become a hodgepodge person, like quality, and people that are talking about music,

because I'd been, I'd grown up in music and stuff, there's a whole new music wave going on, there was a whole new, like everyone dressed different, everyone talked different, and I'm like, oh, I'm fucking Rudolph, do I sound weird? You felt like you were missing out on culture. Yeah, and I like, just being able to talk was a big deal. And like food, like comfort food and stuff.

Yeah, so I mean, I thought about going back, but at that point I was like loving, I mean, again, I moved back to Montreal, which again is one of my favorite places in the world. So it wasn't terrible it was great Montreal's great, but Yeah, the one the one place that stuck with me was Greece I was always like Greece to me was always my my utopia How were you involved in Greenpeace?

so my first job out of college was Greenpeace Canada and My first job out of college was Greenpeace Canada, and I started out as a fundraiser, and then I ran fundraising, and then I ended up with a couple of other people running Greenpeace Canada, which is part of Greenpeace. Then I went to Switzerland, because the Greens got elected, and at that point they had 32% of the parliament. So I was very politically active. When I was here in Italy, I joined Participo in Italy, went to Umbria, worked for Greenpeace, was very environmentally active for a number of years. Then went to Eastern Europe, the program was called Education for Democracy,

which is basically go teach people English, but at the same time, like, talk about how democracy works and liberal democracy. And so, very politically active. And then, that I think later on, that's why I sort of veered off from, you know, the fashion and music and stuff into more political commentary. Of the pieces that you worked on, are there any that got wildly popular that you never would have guessed would have been popular? And were there any that you thought would have been really popular that nobody cared about? Yes.

Tell me about that. You know, Napoleon said, conquest has made me and conquest must sustain me. And basically North Korea made me and conquest must sustain me. North Korea was insane. Like North Korea was, I went from nothing to like hundreds and hundreds of millions of video views. I did not...

When you look back on the experience, forgetting the content aspect, was it a good experience in your life? I mean... From your perspective, going there and having the experiences you had... The experience is like being on acid for a week. It's not... It's... You're being watched the whole time.

It's fucking weird. Yeah. Like, it's... Weirdest, weirdest place you've ever been? Times a billion. Really? Oh, I mean, it's fucking... And you've been in weird places. I highly recommend going because

It's basically... Can anybody go? No. That's the problem. But it's basically a theme park for 1950s Stalinist Russia, 1960s and that was China total cult of personality, like every room, you know, two pictures, like everybody, state police, like just, it's like going to Disneyland

of what the world used to be under Stalin and Mao. It's crazy. And also studying that stuff, so phenomenally interesting, terrifying. Like state police run. And by the way, we're lucky that we live here and not there holding shit. Like there's stories of like going to concentration camps

and people eating the kernels of corn out of cow shit. Like it's bad. But it's the most interesting. Like for example, the first time I went, we went to the Arirang games, you know, that is just like the largest stadium in the world. And they get the best and the brightest to practice for like a year to do this thing, the Arirang game. And it's basically, I don't know, 150,000 people.

And then, you know, they do pixels, like they're human pixels. They're like, yo, shawty, shawty, shawty, shawty. And they do this thing where they do like highly choreographed things where it's the whole history of Korea, the communist history of Korea, by 150,000 people doing this fucking thing with pixels. And then like people flying

through the air and the bottom and like just like the cheerleaders would you say? Yeah, like it's like it's like a floor show of like maybe 50,000 people doing choreographed like no here's an island and now here's this and now here's Mount Arirang and then here comes Im Il Sung and here comes like which is like these 50,000 people here and in the background there's literally like pixels like I have to show it to you but like yeah they they they do a thing where it's like tv but made of humans doing choreographed pixels a hundred thousand of them and so I'm sitting at the dais where Kim uh you know, sung used to sit, the first one, and there's maybe me and some generals and whatever,

and no one else. So it's 150,000 people doing this thing, and you're the only one. Performing for you and a handful of people. Exactly, like generals and stuff who are. Wow. And you're like, what the fuck is going on? Wow.

Like, what is going on? So that was the craziest thing that ever happened. I shot it. I can show you the thing you It's because people would believe me. Yeah, so I shot myself with nobody there and then and then there's the fucking thing. So that's That was crazy How did you get permission to go? that year

There was so we got refused. That year there were floods, which is why I was one of the only people there. They hadn't done the Airy Run Games for two years, but that year they had to do them because the Chinese delegation was coming. So they wanted to get a few practice runs in. And what I was told was they were going to refuse everybody before the Chinese come. But if you go to Shenyang, which is an industrial city in Northern, kind of right on the Korean border, you can go to the Korean embassy and pay like an entrance fee. And the whole thing was crazy. We went to Shenyang and like, we're not going to tell you if you can get in or not. We paid the entrance fee. They make you stay in a North Korean hotel there,

which literally has concrete beds. You're like, what the fuck? Really? Yeah, yeah. They come in at two in the morning. They take your passport. They take everything. They go, come on, come on. They put you in like this fucking shitty, like military bus.

They take you to the military airport and you put you on an old Tupolev, like an old aluminum fucking Russian plane. And you fly into Pyongyang and you put you on an old Tupolev like an old aluminum fucking Russian plane and you fly into Pyongyang and you're like holy fucking shit we made it like we're in we're in and then from the second you get there you're like what is that? Did you have any feeling that you wouldn't be able to get out? Was that ever a feeling? We got caught filming so what we did because because we're fucking stupid, is we got these point and shoot cameras.

You're not allowed to take pictures? No, you can go to specific areas and take a picture, and then when they say yes, then... But what we were doing is we got these... It was basically the first time where you could get a big memory card. And so we put a memory card, and you could do like, you'd shoot film on your camera. So we would be like, I'm just taking a picture. And so we were doing that,

because you have a guide, a guard, and then a secret police. And the secret police guy was watching us. We got probably a bit too cocky. And then he was like, Shane, give me that. And so I gave it to him and he goes, why do you have a whatever, 250 meg photo card? That's because he usually like, I guess, 18 meg. I don't remember the numbers,

but it was like 10 times the legitimate. And I was like, I don't know. I just laid down like, no idea. I was in the airport I bought it and that's the only one and they started but that was our dodge like we knew they knew when I they knew that I knew that I started going oh shit like they know you know they know that we're fucking filming this fucking thing so that was that was scary because one guy on that trip had a camera.

They put you in a hotel, which is like hotel murder. It's like this concrete box and you go in and it's just a concrete room. You imagine the carpet's been soaked in blood many times. There's a thing there that like we're like it's it's like a 50s radio, but it's just listening to you like you can hear it listening to you and it's on an island Right and you can't get off You're not allowed to go do anything and you can't do anything unless there's guards there and all this shit can't go see You can't do like it's all choreographed and this guy tried to fucking get off the island and go shoot and he got caught.

And they're like, yeah, you're going to jail for a long time. Something happened, I don't know, I kicked him out. He didn't end up having to go to the concentration camp, which he didn't want, but they're very fucking serious. Did you get to see how the regular people live at all? Yes, and it's fucking wild. Because, so the first, like there there's one one that became most famous

I actually interact with people there's like we stopped at a tea shop and I played pool with the tea girl who's been in the tea shop for like five years playing pool through the really good at playing pool but nobody comes in because there's no fucking tourists so I was like what happened to the tea girl because she's really cute and really sweet and like so they happened to the tea girl? Because she's really cute and really sweet. So they're like, the tea girl, we've got to get the tea girl. And then I went to the DMZ, and you need your DMZ shit, whatever. But on the way back, you see villages. And the village, it's so fucked up, because they don't

build villages with houses and stuff. They build villages which will just be in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing. So it's like forest. And then there'll be a 50-story Stalinist like apartment building, you know, like the massive Russian ones, like huge fucking, that's the village, it's one building, two buildings, it's one, and then one big like amphitheater for like political whatever, indoctrination, and then

that's it. It's like, what the fuck? But because they have no money, they sold all the windows. So like, there's all the windows, 50 stories up, have been taken out, they've sold them. They've taken out the rebar, right, because it's to sell it to the Chinese. So it looks like this pockmarked,

looks like it's been eaten by like, woodpeckers with concrete. And people live in it. But wait, so there's no, so there's no electricity now. So you see on the 50th floor, you'll see cooking fires. So they're carting up 50 stories of water. There's no running water. So they go get water from the stream and lumber 50 stories up to their apartment where they

cook and cooking fires and you're like what and like you see you know like at night if you're ever out at night which you're not allowed to be like people like with scissors they were not allowed to be or nobody's allowed to be well no westerners okay aren't allowed to go out and so so because Kim Jong-un came to our basketball game all the sudden they're like, oh, now we're going to show you this, and now we're going to do this. So we got like, because everyone has the same footage, because they give you the same tour.

So all of a sudden we had all this new footage that nobody else had, and that's why we got all this shit, like all this vice, a stunt journalist vice, but we had the footage that nobody else had. So yeah, North Korea is not a place you want to live. Tell me the whole story of the basketball game. It's just, it's a wild idea. So they have this mountain, that's the whole of North Korea is wild, but they have this mountain and it's like they have like the Hall of Treasures, which is every treasure that's been given to other Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong Jong-un. And so it literally would take you two weeks

to go through the whole thing. Sorry, it's two miles down a mountain. So they haul it out of a mountain. So you go down this mountain and inside the mountain, they have like the first train that Stalin gave Kim Il-sung, like a train two miles down into a mountain because they have to be fucking protected because they're treasures. But like there'll be like a bar coaster a train two miles in down into a mountain because I have to be fucking protected because

of the treasures but like there'll be like a bar coaster that feed El Castro side so much shit and so you go through and through like weird weird weird stuff like an alligator from some guy from Nicaragua whatever so you go through oh yeah there's also a wax figure of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il with like a fan blowing their hair and everyone has to go there and like because they're still like, you know, and bow to them. By the way, as a Korean, North Korean, you have to go there one time in your life, see the treasures and like literally 10 feet away from the leader and the President for life is this basketball like signed by Michael Jordan and I saw it like that's so fucking weird

It was the first time a rapper small since the Korean War with America Adeline Albright, they love the Bulls etc. So Yeah, we came up with the idea. Why don't we just do a fucking ping-pong? So yeah, we came up with the idea, why don't we just do a fucking ping pong diplomacy with China, we're gonna do basketball. Well, I'll send you the doc, the doc's heartwarming because the Harlem Globeshotters were the star. I mean, those guys are fucking amazing.

Amazing. And they played the North Korean national team. He showed up to the game, which was fucking insane, because the people went ape shit. Because he's like God. They could say mance. Happy? Oh, they say mance, which means 10,000 years or something. And they're just like, mance, like crazy for like, I don't know, half an hour?

Wow. And then what was really fucked up is they said to the crew, yeah, come back, come back to my house. So the whole crew went back to his house for like 12 hours. Kim Jong-un. Yeah, yeah. And so then because of that, we got access to everything. What was his house like? I wasn't allowed to go. For that trip which I set up, during that time I was banned. I've since been back because what happens is I do a documentary and then they get mad at me. They ban me and then they say okay, now you can come back and then I do it again. That one I set up but they're like yeah, you're not coming on this one buddy. The doctor is

great and like at the, you see these little kids and their eyes light up. That's what I like to read. Cause they're just regular people. Like we're like North Koreans, fucking North Koreans, they're fucking North Koreans, they're fucking bombs and lasers and shit. And like you see they're just kids.

Like they're just kids who like basketball. And they're just stoked to see somebody. That's the greatest thing about that is that you realize that it's all propaganda like everything propaganda so anyway that's the one that surprised me the most North Korea the one that surprised me that didn't hit as much as it should have is we took the first sitting president to a prison to talk about prison reform, got two- Sitting president of what country? Obama.

You took Obama- No president's ever gone to a prison. He had to lie to the DOJ and DOP. Really? Yeah, yeah, it was a big deal. Wow. And it was a huge- How were you able to orchestrate it?

Biden came out to vice in Williamsburg for like a day. They had snipers on the roof. He came in to basically vet us that we would do it. Went to a prison in Oklahoma to talk about 56% at that time, 56% of all prisoners, which is obviously about 25% of all prisoners in the world or in America, 56% of them were nonviolent drug offenses, most of them weed. And so we did a lot on weed and always have done a lot of weed and decriminalizing, et cetera. So we went to Oklahoma where something, I don't know, like 70% of their population and maximum security were three times offended,

like three strikes here up. For wheat. For wheat. Yeah. So we went there with Obama, and one of them got two bills passed, bipartisan bills on reform, crime reform, prison reform, prison reform, and it just didn't hit. Really?

It didn't rate. It was very serious, but like it's Obama in the fucking prison Freeing prisons for weed like I thought that would hit and I didn't the one that hit actually Because we did the prison reform when he gave me unlimited access gave me access to the last six months of his presidency and We were I was gonna give him a blowjob, like we were just gonna say, hey, fucking good job, all they wanted to talk about was the Tea Party and John Boehner and how fucking dysfunctional America was and how fucking shitty Republicans

were, like it was them, so I went, okay, now I'll go talk to John Boehner, he's a great guy by the way, went to go talk to John Boehner, then went to talk to the Tea Party guys, and then went, like, John Boehner, which I didn't know, speaking of how things work, speaker, famously him and Obama, John Boehner got ousted by the Tea Party because he even met with Obama. Like, he was doing his job, and he actually is very, he was like a political mechanic, and he would get shit done and he was like a whip

and he would fucking go do stuff and he'd go meet Obama, whatever, just for meeting with the guy. That was his fucking job. The Republicans also, I mean, he's a conservative. And like, he wasn't conservative enough. And so Obama was like, look, you know, our political institutions are under attack.

Whether that's a long democracy or blah, and this Trump thing is going to be an issue, blah, blah, blah. And he kind of called it. He kind of said, like, this is going to get a lot worse. And that hit. Like, that was, I think, our biggest show on HBO. But The Prison One, which was an excellent episode, so that's what I thought, for our audience especially, weed and prisons and Obama, you think like, alright.

How is running something big different than running something small? Running something small is all about how do I survive? How do we keep the lights on? And if something bad happens like what did they say you know Americans don't have like $586 if there's a if there's a yeah you know some catastrophe that's running a small business it's like if something happens we're fucked I remember so many we had fucked. I remember so many, we had stores, and I remember so many times like the mag, like an ad wouldn't come in, so we'd have to go like clear out the fucking,

the tills from the stores to pay, like it's robbing from Peter to pay Paul. And then when you're big, it's like boardroom, lawyers, and one of the reasons why I went to LA and sort of got out of it is I'm good at creating content, I'm good at brand building and revenue. I'm bad at lawyers and boardroom politics and all the stuff that you have to when you become a company.

It's a different thing. It's a different thing. It's a different thing. It's also terrible. I just don't like it. And it's false, and everyone's lying, and that whole scorpion and frog thing. Look, success has many parents, and failure is an orphan. And so when you're rolling down the hill catching money,

everyone's your best friend. And the minute something goes wrong like that guy So the fun stuff is building the fun stuff is making the fun stuff is hey Let's go to when it gets big it becomes essentially a corporate job It's a corporate job and you have a lot of people that you have to appease and quite frankly You shouldn't appease them. You should just do what you're gonna do. Did you ever have? Advertisers complain about the content? You know who's, that's a big question, you know who's to blame for censorship

and who's to blame for is advertisers on both sides. Because we would do something and our audience would go up. But the advertisers are like you know we're you know we don't know about that by the way it was nobody's safe like even the right a lot of people go to the right because the left is so sketchy if the advertisers take us like a second out you're gone they don't care so the right the least they'll stand by you more even Tucker Carlson got X like the advertisers were just they'll just they're the modern-day censored and

You know the other the other ones are you know in fact we did a thing we actually want to what's their motivation though If there is the goal of a advertise I'm safe. They want it to be brand safety. So so we did a campaign Which won the first glass line or diamond line or crystal line or whatever it was, and then Ken Lyons because we did a brand safety campaign where homosexual, gay, black, all of these were in the brand safety guidelines for all these brands, for the majority of brands. These were seen as negative terms that they didn't want their brand next to. And we're like, you want your name next to black? Like, where is this, 1953?

So we actually did a whole thing to re-edit this sort of brand safety dictionary because we were getting nailed on everything for brand safety. And yeah, they don't want their brands next to anything risque and you're like, well, that's what it is. I mean, what do you think? It's called vice.

Yeah, exactly. But they are the modern day sensors. Like if they pull their money, their advertising, then you're fucked. What would you say are the biggest takeaways from the whole VICE experience? Look, we lasted 30 years, which most people don't. It lasted a lot longer than I thought it was going to last. I wish it had ended differently. Well, it's not over.

But I wish my part it had ended differently. Well, it's not over. But, you know, I wish my part of it ended differently. The takeaway was the greatest thing in the world for about 15 years. And we, like, really, it was the bad news bears we had. People didn't know how to shoot, who revolutionized shooting. We had people who'd never cut anything before becoming the best editors. We never had any professional hosts. Like, it was just, hey, you go fuck it. I mean, baby balls was, we got him as a joke because he was 92 pounds soaking wet with

halitosis and dandruff. And he was became our fucking most like non-fearless fucking man in the street. Like we did it so much, so much of it we did as a joke. And people just resonated with it. And, you know And I think that that was when it was really fun. We were literally the bad news there. We were shitty at everything individually, but if we put them together, there's this weird alchemy, this symbiosis that happened that led to this unique way of shooting and cutting

and telling stories. that led to this unique way of shooting and cutting and telling stories. But for a while it was great. Then we got too big and also everyone caught up. Like people were starting sending me like ABC News and CBS News stuff that looked exactly like mine. So you set a standard that then got copied. Yeah, 100%. Like look and feel. Yeah, like look and feel

Yeah, just and then people would just say well just do that and I mean you could work for vice and Get a job back to the day when there still were jobs in media like that because they wanted to just rip it off You know, which is funny because a lot of times it was like the Borg like when you left the collective Like because it was it was no secret sauceorg, like when you left the collective. Like, because there was no secret sauce to Vice. It was like, just like the editor would stay, excuse me, 24 hours to fucking cut the thing in policy turd. The shooter would just fucking stay there to get the shot no matter what happened. You know, the host would be like, I'm not leaving until fucking, or ask the questions that nobody else would ask.

And all of that together made to this weird sort of alchemy. And that's one thing I miss, because I don't know that you'll ever work with a team that you'll put together like that again, because nobody in their right mind is gonna put together a team that's never done it. Yeah. Would you say the,

what unified it all was the attitude? Would that be right? Yeah. Also, I think a lot of people couldn't get jobs. And they were just like, well, this is my shot. So I'm going to give it my all. And there's a lot of we used to come up with tag lines that we thought were funny.

And my favorite was rumored to be among the best. But like that's really funny. Rumored to be a lot. But we had one for a while, which is like less shittier. I forget what it was. Less shittier than everybody else. That used to be our line, like just let's be less shitty than everybody else because everything's so shit by and large.

Then you're just like, let's try to be just not shitty. And I think that was the real ethos that people would be like, come on, fucking that's shitty. Like, the majority of stuff that comes in is just not great. Yeah. And you're like, okay, let's try to make it good. If you were to make a list of the things that worked and a list of the things that didn't work, what would you make those lists for now? I don't mean content wise, I mean in building the company.

What worked and what didn't? Well, having people, I remember coming into our office on Norris, which was a rabbit warren of like, we put together like 40 offices because we had no money to get that office and then someone would leave and we'd get that. And it was like tunnels and things. And I remember going, oh fuck, I forgot my name.

And I went there midnight on a Sunday. And it was packed. Wow. Just rammed because people were like, this really worked. And they hung out. We had bars in the office and stuff so people would just drink and they would just stay there.

So that's what worked. I mean when it was, I'll tell you, when it's us against the world, right, that's when it worked. When we did well we bought a whole city block, bought it, put together, it was like the Starship Enterprise, it was like the Starship Enterprise. It was fucking amazing. Edit suites and everything was fucking, like, you know, state of the art, and we had a farm where we grew our own vegetables

and the fucking thing. And that's when it went bad, because that's when it was like us against them, them meaning like us, like meaning the management of the company, because when it was all the rabbit warrants and like you had to stand in line for the bathroom, whatever, we were all together. We were all on a mission. And when there was a time when I lived off of gambling because I didn't have any money,

so then when I got some money, I gambled a lot and I made a lot of money. One time I made so much money that I took the board out for dinner and I spent a lot of money at dinner. Now, what happened was there was an earnings call for MGM Bellagio or whatever. They're like, Vegas is back. There was a big whale. He came and he spent $400,000 at dinner. And somebody called the restaurant and figured out it was me. Now what they

failed to mention it was comped. I don't know if you know how comps were but you can buy a cheese sandwich or you buy a four hundred thousand dollar dinner they don't give you the money like they give you a comp allowance but if you leave the comp dies. So I'm like okay it, it's comp. It's free. Like because you spent a lot of money gambling or you made a lot of money. Okay. So yes, they, they comped it. And so I, when I heard about it, I was kind of like, yeah, like I made a lot of money gambling. Like I'm a good gambler. And I got called.

But when the story came out that it was 400,000 around dinner, that's when it became us versus them. They're like, shame, it wasn't one of us anymore. And that's when the union started and all this stuff. And it was us versus them. And you're like, oh, that was bad. And to this day, you can't explain to someone, it was comped, it was like, you either take it or you don't. So that was bad. Very high up there on the bad list of what

not to do. It was the feeling of you guys had made it and everybody else was still struggling. Yeah. And by the way, we tried to give away equity and we tried to do that. You know, we did, we gave away a lot of equity. And then I remember we had this thing and we were like, would you rather have $10,000 cash or equity? And they're like, $10,000 cash. And we're like, okay. And I would give my own money because I wanted the equity. But people just wanted money. And I mean, there were people who also had equity. If you're like in a Silicon Valley startup they know about seed rounds and down rounds and

up and up and up and our kids never had anything so it was like where's my money? Well it's not public company. It doesn't exist. Did it ever become a public company? It never did. Was it close at any point? We were going to do a SPAC but like we were a day late and a dollar short like SPACs were hot I guess in 22, 21, 22 and then we were going to SPAC in 23. You know Buzzfeed did a SPAC and you know just it just died and so I think they SPACacked at 12 and went up to 15 and now it's at like one well, so Yes facts became like the devil

so We were gonna do a stack and then we just said I mean everyone was spacking as the last-ditch effort I mean, that's the other thing. It's not just us like BuzzFeed who is number two two behind us, did the same thing, and at one point they were like, I don't know, it's $38 million market cap, and you're like, everyone's looking to say, I always say, it's like who left the porthole open in the Titanic? Well, it hit a fuckin' iceberg.

The iceberg is the big five, the porthole, it just fuckin' doesn't matter. But everyone like looking for that person who left the porthole But yeah, it's it's what I would say is it's depressing because it's means like the sort of end Like that your last or whatever question before who's coming up who's the next biker? That's the shame there should be somebody who took bison and ate our lunch and is better than us and cooler, global, and maybe fucking out there, great. I don't think that there's gonna be that, not because I'm, I'm saying it's because independent

publishing is general, unless it's very niche, is gone. Because it's just all the air is being sucked out of the room, that sucks. That sucks for everybody and what Vice was a bellwether for new media and independent media, well, we're also the bellwether for that's not happening anymore, which sucks. The best time of Vice were three, which is living in old Montreal in a big loft,

starting it from scratch, and having your peers go, that's good. That's a good thing. My dad was a prick and a tough guy and a harsh taskmaster. And I remember I was in Florida at ASR, and he called me up and he was like, how does it feel to not only have the best magazine in Canada, but the best magazine in the world?

Wow. And that was great. Wow. Were you shocked by the call? He's never said that before. Even now I'm getting with that. Anyway. That's beautiful. So that time was good. The planet Brooklyn time was good. But the best time was going country to country and building from scratch in each country, learning a bit about that country, etc. etc. You'd fly in, you'd spend six months, have a relationship, eat the food, speak the language.

It sounds really fun. Super fun. At the end, it was fly in to a boardroom for 24 hours, sit with accountants and lawyers telling you about Vice, telling you about protecting Vice and telling you what we should be doing with Vice. And then not having any fun, not having any, and then flying out again. And so when you realize I used to have the freedom, because I controlled the business, to go and build, that's what

I'm good at, and by the way, we were spectacularly successful. What I was spectacularly unsuccessful at was flying in, hanging out with lawyers and fucking accountants saying, here's how you should do it, and you just go, well, fuck you, which doesn't help anybody either, and then flying out on a plane just going, what the fuck did I do? Yeah, that was terrible. Is that the difference between what a founder does and what an operator does? 100%.

That's the difference. You hit the nail on the head. The founder is like, this is my baby, let's build, that's great. And the operator goes, okay, publishing isn't making money, do it with somebody else. Okay, the studio's killing it, up to the studio. TV, fucking let's do it.

That's what an operator does. And they know how to manage those boardrooms, they know how to manage those lawyers and accountants. Like at some point you have like 15 different outside consultants in these meetings giving you all their whatever. I never knew who McKinsey was and then all of a sudden I was surrounded by McKinsey thing and you're like this is just terrible. Yeah. So yeah. How bad were some of the ideas that you would hear? I mean I would say 90% of them were just awful, like super bad. I mean it's

people who had seen something by vice and they liked it. And then they come in and say, you know, we should do we should do this. And you're like, that's not it. That was like shitty 17 years ago. We're not going to do it again. Like, all the most the idea, I guess. But lawyers, like they all want to be creative, or they all want to do this one. And you're like, what are you fucking... Everyone should have a mustache and wear yellow.

And you're like, what are you fucking talking about? And everyone, you know what, too, like, I want to talk about being authentic. And you're like, the minute you have to say it's authentic, it's not. Music Thank you.