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[Music] tetr griton [Music] it's the Unspeakable mystery the representation of a Soundwave from which everything Springs tetr grittin is an online collection of curated material is it a library or a gallery a museum an oracle
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we hope to find out [Music] 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 newa uh in Montreal and they figured
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they could get more money if they did an English language as well as a French language one so that was called voice of M all guy named suou Alvi started it straight out of rehab how do you mean suou well after the I came back from my
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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 met them and that was just sort of this weird mag that
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wasn't that great and then we slow took it over did a lot of hip hop and we became sort of a street mag I see at some point I was like well you know why isn't anyone reading my genius you know and uh they're like well we have to print more copies it's like well how do you print more copies you know we have to sell ads and I'm like what's an ad so I would hitch like down to Toronto for Montreal there's no money in Montreal yeah all the money is
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in Toronto so we would hitch we take the city bus out to all the record labels and we' Pitch all the the record labels and we started getting more and more ads and then they couldn't pay me my commissions so we're like okay well we own it so we
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we dropped the O at that point we were a voice we dropped voice mun then we were voice and we dropped the O became vice bought the company and then started going crazy would you say it was a fan Zine to start
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with it's that how you describe it how do you describe the original idea I mean Canadians are kind of like Japanese in that were on the periphery of the world especially back then so we were like culture scientists like we would know everything about music or fashion and 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
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fashion that's like when we came down in New York and people were like who are these Canadians you know that are on point like how do they even know anything cuz Canadians are seen as being corny and whatever so yeah I don't know
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we weren't necessarily a fan Z 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 Street Wear skate fashion
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when that was new hip-hop punk rock uh and then weird stories like stuff that we just sound interesting like freaky business were you more influenced by the American culture or uh 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 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
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were you know I would say half and a half and tell me tell me about suou and tell me about Gavin yeah those were your first two partners essentially well suus is is like uh you'd love me Zen Guru kind of really beautiful guy
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uh he both his parents are professors very smart you know ran into some problems in college with drugs and then sort of asked a for help and came out and start advice and uh was just a super Good Vibes like just a super like we're best friends to this
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day we talk every day like 30 years later uh and you both grew up in he grew up in Montreal Gavin and I grew up in Ottawa um how far how far apart of those two hours and then Gavin and I knew each other since we were kids our our dads knew each other and we were part of the Ottawa Punk scene and the Ottawa Punk scene was like nonexistent you literally had to like make your own band rent your own venue you know make your like do DIY to
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the million who would have been the the bands that you were most influenced by to become a punk band at that time uh my threat Bad Brains you know DC hardcore yeah uh Misfits Misfits were big in the French Canadian so we were sort of half
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French half English so first wve American hardcore punk yeah that sort of you know you remember when punk was like was Punk and there was hip-hop and then they did these weird Punk hip-hop mashups yeah you know so that was our
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era and wuang was our era like when when Vice first started I believe we were the first guys to ever bring them to Quebec wow they came up yeah and everyone showed up chef rayquan and bastard we got Old Dirty Bastard out of jail to come play a vice party amazing and in those days what was distribution like like how many copies did you print and who did it go to in the early days we printed I don't know 35,000 which is a lot yeah and news
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Sprint and so it's like tons and tons of pallets anyway any so we knew we had to so we we started Distributing to like bom and pop records s and stuff and there was a a company called Voyager which was a bus company and we would
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like Greyhound and we would we we would trade them ads and we would come with these big pallets put them on the buses and the buses would take them to like Winnipeg or Vancouver s primarily Canada Canada and then uh and then it started
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getting bigger and then the bus company was like we were coming with P pallets they're like we can't even fit them then we started Distributing in New York and at that time were they free it was always free it's always been free and uh
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we started doing it in New York and people thought we were just weird like who these weird frogs from Montreal doing this and and New York just blew up for us and so how many years into it did you move to New York uh
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four and then so when we moved in New York then it just exploded like there's a rich dude in Canada Richard swinsky and he bought us and moved us to New York in the dot bubble and we were like we were skate like we never had any money like poor
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poor I left home very young punk punk punk and then uh all of a sudden we were you know walking around New York and sort of Prada a pump and they was like you know sort of comedic like we were Canadian yokal go going asymmetrical
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zippers and uh we had money for the first time ever and that's when I bought my place in Coast Street I 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
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going to spend all this money so down in New York uh 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
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much money when we were with them the other company that we were going to buy like all these companies one of them was Triple five soul and put them all together and do this e-commerce it was going to be like basically Amazon before
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Amazon it would have been huge but it was 10 years too early so we're going to buy Triple 5 soul and then Troy was like oh it's okay kid you can have my part of my warehouse so he gave us like a corner of his Warehouse in
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Brooklyn uh and uh what was Brooklyn like at that time it was I mean heaven but it was like our P Warehouse had like crack vials and like you know hookers were giving [ __ ] on our staircas we had to hose it down all the time it was
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the wild west and it was just that was real early early day at the beginning but all the artists were out there all the bands came like that wasn't Saye we're on the right place at the right time because we became Planet Brooklyn
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like when all of these artists and musicians and every that movement came out of Brooklyn we were just there and chronicling it and like all the you know Y and interpool The Strokes and all those bands that you know came out of
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there TV on the radio everybody it was just like we were just in the right place at the right time and and we just as as Brooklyn sort of blew up so did we and that was that was those are the Glory Days you know 2000 from like 911
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like 2010 that was just you know it was good to be alive and was it primarily a New York Magazine at that time or were you trying to get it uh everywhere in the country no that was that was the fun part is I believe the first city we went
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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 so we launched in Tokyo and I just fell in love with Japan I was like Head Over Heels so we were
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and they also have a a culture of refined taste for American cultural stuff and all cult obsessive yeah obsessive and so we I we just got along I love Japan and fell in love with Japan so we were we were doing well in Japan doing well in New York anything that does well in Japan and New York it does well in 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
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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 do a deal we had no money yeah so we'd do a deal where we'd find a
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publisher in England and then they would and we'd find our editor 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 you would send them content
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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 would be like this is from Berlin and this is
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from London and this is from you know Italy and this is from you know 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
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so 9/11 to 2010 was mostly Planet Brooklyn punk rock [ __ ] booze and Coke and luny then like 9 89 to like 15 was like you move to Milan get an apartment you find an Office you hire the people you live there like you go to Chua and meet the grandmother you go here you know you have a big party and everyone comes and bands and celebrities and you can't get into your own party and then you're like get on the train and go to Sweden to do
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it there like what about the baby and you're like I got to go and you know like and you're just like you would live everywhere for 6 months and it was just so much fun like to just travel around the world and is that how most companies
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are built I've not heard this story before so it's interesting yeah it was all Grassroots and and we just built it from from the ground up and that's when like was making money it was growing like like wildfire and and like we were
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getting the best content and we had was kind of Misfit like we we never had money to hire people who knew what they were doing so like when Spike Jones said hey you guys suit everything in in the magazine right we were like yeah and we
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went back to the office we'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 [ __ ] from the mag and um that's when it really exploded because it was just as YouTube
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was starting and the mag was like at its peak and that at this point we're doing about a million copies a month which is for us like insane it took us 10 years to get 2 million copies and then in our first year we got to like 100 million
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video views and we're like oh here we go so we started doing online video of our articles and not when it just went went you know to the Moon Amazing Story content-wise similar content it was just a change in format from the written word
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to video would you say yeah the cont had changed a lot over the years everyone thinks that they're like you know no Vice or we're guardians of Vice all the editors were guardians of Vice but there was no real it changed and changed and
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it kept changing from 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 uh also we didn't take ourselves too seriously when
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we went online yeah that was when it was like cuz we would people used to make fun of us because of our story ideas but we were getting like we we would write something like there's a true story about a a shipping container that went to Africa of Tupac t-shirts and then they got they stole it or whatever and then they became like an army the two pack Shakur Army right cuz how did you first hear the story who the [ __ ] knows
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I don't know like we just got we got we get 100,000 of these a day just coming in like people you got to so the story was uh General but naked and the two Pac cooler Army and it was basically this guy who fought naked with his army CU they believed they couldn't be killed was fighting the Tupac Shakur I mean we're like well that's a story for vice and then so did you go personally so I I was like well that's just go shoot it
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like how how bad could this be so we flew to Liberia to meet this guy General but naked had you been to Liberia before no okay no and uh like again we we've never been anywhere and we would go I think we flew like air Belgium for like
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$400 like we had no money yeah and we were staying at some Grim place in the in Li anyway uh and then you meet General but naked and he's like he's talking to you about not only killing people but eating them they he was very
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famous canimal and uh and you're like holy [ __ ] and then 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 Monrovia we went to um West Point and West Point is
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like the worst slum maybe in the world but definitely in West Africa and it's [ __ ] gnarly and Everyone by the way it's they happy to see you no well not not happy they want money so they're like oh like how much is those shoes
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like how much is that like it's like money and cameras and shoes and like they just want any kind of money and so it's 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 like little bits of it into like a plastic bag and I bought some for some kids who were around and
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then you know bigger kids came out and then the bigger kids came out and it was 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 re like really rough and uh did you ever feel in danger oh yeah yeah yeah yeah so how do you deal with that there was there's two was two points one time we got we got this guy so there's all these different generals and one was General mosquito
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because mosquitoes are terrifying because of dang fever or malaria the general mosquito then there was 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
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and then as we were interviewing him the whole building got surrounded by like I don't know 200 guys with all machine gun that his army how would you get somebody out of jail he just bribe the I cops and said can we have him for a bit to
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interview him yeah and uh so You' say in general you could make things happen in most of the places you went yeah yeah yeah yeah and uh yeah that that was that was scary that was uh Liberia is a scary place and uh but hang I also you you get a bit of
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Stockholm syndrome because you're hanging out with but naked and he's saving you from a lot of these CU he comes out and every like whoa so you're like oh I'm with him I'm with B it's just a weird weird weird uh weird
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place but did they Al everybody spoke English yeah because Liberia is actually formed by America so it's called like explain explain so it's so it was you know Marcus M so Marcus Garvey LED this back to Africa movement so it's freed
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slaves who went Liberia you know means freedom so Liberty Liberia so they bought uh a portion of West Africa they went to West Africa the the capital city is called monroi after uh Monroe who is the president of America the
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Constitution was written in America and in in Liberia they have like people with African names and people with American names right like Charles Taylor famously the worst Civil War guys and um the Americans the freed slaves went to
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Africa and promptly Enslaved the native Africans based on the plantation system that they had learned in America so that there was a slavery system where the American free slaves Enslaved the local liberians so then that started this
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story before you went yeah I knew I knew I knew the basics yeah and Charles Taylor is famous because he became like this he killed so many people he was backed by us and but naked you know was was against them and so so so I you called him but naked or he called himself but naked he called himself but naked interesting that was his that was his General he was General but naked they literally would fight naked and they believed that that you know
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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 couldn't
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kill ourselves and meanwhile this is a guy who's openly telling you that walking on the streets like telling you these stories and you're like it's just so coming from Brooklyn and flying into these places and meeting these people
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you're like what the fu but that's what Vice became so anyone saids what is vice content and vice it became like 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're talking about eating baby's hearts and you're like yeah I'm not oh well you know
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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 um became a sort of signature you know Vice style as well and then from there you started we started
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sneaking into like Iraq Afghanistan Iran and uh and yeah that's when it that's when it it's got garly 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 we got into news
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by doing culture because we did um a feature called heavy metalin Baghdad which was about the only heavy metal band in Baghdad so we were following was it illegal in Baghdad it was okay no you couldn't be heavy metal that's what I'm asking yeah yeah so it was the only heavy metal band in Baghdad and we happen 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
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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 is not what the [ __ ] you talking about like those War still going on and so we came at it through that point of view of like we're we're to go back news the Golden Era of news was basically somebody in New York calls a Stringer in Afghanistan majority of stringers don't leave the hotel you know they're rum soaked you
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they call back in a story they put it on the teleprompter and Walter kronite 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
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Colonial like it's like bunch of white guys who've been to Harvard or whatever going a thing writing it having their take on it whatever so our take was just go there and press record and see what the [ __ ] actually going on and nine
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times out ATT 10 it's not what they're telling you and you see a completely different side of things and especially if you in bed with young people or locals or you know people who are like-minded you remember like maximum
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rock and roll yeah before the internet like maximum you could you and You' go to different towns you meet someone from Maximum rock and roll and you knew that they you were kind of like-minded and like each other whatever well news or
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vice whatever was like this it was like an entree that's why we got the vice rings made because it secret club and you'd go and you'd meet people like you and they'd say look I'll come [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] and we said it like 5 years before America left Afghanistan we said yeah America is going to leave
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Afghanistan and the taliban's going to have more territory than when we came in we called it 5 years before because it wasn't because we were Geniuses it was because everybody in Afghanistan would tell you that yeah that was that's when it became hard news
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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 and because we were in the beginning of YouTube we were like the largest uh one of the largest video
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Publishers and then we became number one for video news so 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 going to be 10 times size CNN we already were
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because they would they would uh have I don't know like a 1.5 so like 1.5 million people or even if you put in international all it would be like 15 million would be a massive massive audience for CNN and we were doing like
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150 million video views per video and you're like okay I mean comp of course that's when it was massive cuz when we when YouTube was like Road blocking news for us it was just [ __ ] huge not making a lot of money but I remember
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like going from some nobody Punk kid to like I was in India somewhere shooting and people were go oh it's Shane Smith Shan just online was just was exploding so then we did a little stinted MTV which wasn't great Vice gu to
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everything and they wanted to be more Zip Zap dly app whatever and I remember going to the party where they said you know we're not going to re I think we did two not we're not going to renew season 3 I said don't
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worry about it we're going to HBO anyway because HBO is at Mt and so we had no uh we had no discussions with HBO but Ari Emanuel just went to Richard pleer and Richard pleer is like [ __ ] me the greatest guy ever and he's just like let's make some news
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let's make they'd 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 to 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 if we could get the Chicago Bulls to go over so called up Michael Jordan Scotti pip and they're like yeah know but the worm was out in uh uh
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Denver I I think sign in sign in uh autographs denn Dennis Rodman R and sorry his nickname's the word and uh he uh 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
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into under a mountain in in North Korean that you go and you see all the treasures and like one of the biggest ones is this basketball sign by Michael Jordan and given by meline Albright and so basketball is the biggest sport in
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North so we sent down Rodman and the hardam gro CHS to play uh and then Kim Jong-un invited our whole crew back to his house and and the whole world exploded like every newspaper was like [ __ ] VI and stunt journalists and they did this post 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 uh our first you know our first B news one the Amy with bour
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and so so uh Prime Time like real yeah yeah and so uh we were really proud of of that first series and then we just got shat on about this North Korean thing and I'm like the BBC shot on us a lot and and we're like hold on you tried
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to sneak in in like a student group like you're endangering the lives of a 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 [ __ ] on and I remember being like torn
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apart I remember lying in the bath and reading these reviews and going wow like we tried you know we tried and we launched to a a five which is I think it was second only to Game of Thrones it was like it was like a huge number for
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especially for a news show and uh and pleer was like that's what these you know all press is good don't worry about these assol and uh so HBO was supportive of the fact that you got good numbers super supportive no they were supportive
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of the show yeah we got good numbers because of all the Press I didn't realize that because I was like would be taking seriously like so so the bad press actually few yeah yeah yeah the reason why we're successful is because
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of all that bad press it was like it was like a 1020 million campaign wow for the show so when that show launched that's when everything changed because we started winning Emmys and um like to win an Emmy Emmy are a racket it's like if you win you
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get a vote and 60 minutes have been getting em for like 70 years ABC News CBS News it's almost impossible you know to the new kid on the Block and win Emy so we started wining winning Emmy off the off the you know we won emys we won
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peab bodies and PES and Pulitzer so you're like you had to be really good but you were also doing real journalism like you you were breaking stories that nobody else broke yeah and so that and stories that people were actually
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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' 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 isn't how documentary film making works
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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 were seven years on HBO that was just like why did it change what or what changed uh three things uh pleer laughter was out 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 and that year we did
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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 hard to keep up that that level of good content for that much lots and lots and
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lots and somebody was like looking at it and at one point because we were doing so much yeah they're like we're spending more on mice we are on Game of Thrones now Game of Thrones was doing 12 episodes and we were doing [ __ ] 100
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yeah but like it was a lot of money and you know most shows don't last over 5 years because that's when it gets more expensive whatever and then PL laugh and and we we were having a hard time you know keeping up with with the you know
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because if you're doing 12 to 20 episodes you can just really concentrate on on knocking them out of the park but we went to Showtime after and we kept winning Emmys and it was good but it just it was never like never had the
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same cache as those HBO and that was at the Pinnacle of HBO's like it was like that was like Game of Thrones and um anyway all all like girls and I don't know there was like four big hits that they had all the time and then there was us so there was they were killing it and then after that like now HBO's in 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
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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 spe the HBO series would have been the most watched thing you were doing yes um not
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by numbers because online like our o Ando 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
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as the New Media model you should you should be in media so so we were killing it on TV but I mean online was 10x that right so that's that's what where we were making our bread and butter and then we expanded into we bought a TV network and
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we started into agencies and bought Studio tell me about let's talk about each one of those the idea of doing the TV network well look I'm a I'm a hustler and I I called it years and years ago I mean I made a MC tiger
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speech I've said it to anyone who will listen 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 7 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 and we it's funny because five years ago everyone used to
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say you know Google and Facebook you know YouTube Amazon like these guys are taking all the money and every was like yeah and it's it just got worse and worse wor and worse and then everybody's went oh well what are you going to do
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and so we knew that that was going to happen we saw it happen by the way I think everybody saw it was going have so we're like okay let's use the insane valuations to buy things that are going to be let like a hedge fund model so you
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say okay well we'll take our evaluation we'll buy a distressed media asset which is a TV channel and I ironically we have the TV channel today and it's throwing off money because it's just TV channnel they just throw off cash
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so yeah we did it as a as plan to sort of offset and to you know we we we built five different legs of the we had an agency Diversified exact because of the limitations on dig growth on the growth in digital publishing because it was
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becoming more and more the mainstream was taking more and more of that space yes well not yeah not the mainstream cuz they're in the they're in the same not mainstream media like the old school guys who now are in the same boat I
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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 Facebook runs like a lot of online video what what they don't run uh uh Google
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does YouTube and so between those two in my like Facebook buzzfee did a lot of uh 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
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say we were reliant on them is uh is is to understate it did you ever have that experience with YouTube with the algorithm yeah we it was more of a Facebook thing um but you know when we were partners with YouTube it it was
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definitely it was definitely easier to sort of you know get the traffic than 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 oh and oh traffic oh and oh traffic and then all of a sudden when like Tik Tok came up or Instagram then it just became about all screens all the time because you just couldn't your Ono couldn't compete with
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Tik Tok so then it just became being everywhere which is great for numbers but terrible for money looking at the media landscape today how different is it than when you were able to do what you were able to do 100 we started when desktop publishing was just sophisticated enough where three idiots could make 16-page print mag right so it's like literally just just coming and now you know everything's on phones everything's on these massive massive
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platforms the consumption is through the roof I mean if you see by the way I called this as well like in my mcer speech I'm like look there's going to be massive consolidation which has to happen not only between the online
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companies 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
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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 you know hosts your this
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you're 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 you know
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Studios uh you know you know making going out in the field and digital video teams and you know people who have cameras and that's three years away from being obsolete that's I could have never predicted it's when now it seems crazy
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but we used to get in [ __ ] for going from a magazine to online video people were like oh it was like Dylan going electric you sellout and [ __ ] you we were so angry Gen X was so angry that we became Millennial because we went to
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online video and now we're going to a super Studio format which is what everyone's doing studio is the only way you make any money obviously we get [ __ ] out and wh [ __ ] you [ __ ] is there any point in the vice story where you feel
38:36
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
38:50
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 um people don't put content on that they like because they like it they put content on the rates right and so
39:13
Vice like so to go back like around 2017 at the peak of the HBO whatever I because all of our big clients Google and you know the studios and everybody was out in La I moved LA and so I sort of St stepped back from
39:30
day to day and but kept doing news and vice the other channels not the news and what started moving because we always say you know give the the company over to the insurance like every five years and vice started moving like into this
39:52
sort of weird woke you know era or whatever and but it was young people writing for themselves to the audience it was like our audience went from like Millennials to whatever that is Gen Z and they were writing for themselves to
40:06
themselves and it by the way traffic was through the roof but the old Vice audience including me were like what what are we doing here and also one of the mistakes was Vice news was over here which I was concering and it was still
40:19
killing and doing rewards and all stuff but like people didn't differentiate between vice.com and and vice news there was his advice and so I think that was a [ __ ] up um we should have had a lot more differentiation and I mean the go woke
40:36
go broke thing I'm well aware of and a lot of times i' I'd see stuff and you'd be like what the [ __ ] and then you go to give someone [ __ ] they're like okay this the one you liked 10 people saw the one that this [ __ ] was 100 million like
40:49
that's just what [ __ ] young people want you're old man you're like oh well it's it's it's it's a you know it's it's a problem with with digital media and that it it changes with the audience and the audience now
41:08
that Young 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 uh pieces a day and just all of this stuff would come out You' be like
41:40
what the [ __ ] is this [ __ ] like what the [ __ ] so did we lose control of the bicycle yet if you um were to go back to the original model of the HBO show and if you decide to do 8 to 12 that episodes of season now yeah
42:00
and found the right distributor whether it be Netflix or Hulu or whoever it would be yeah 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
42:13
I also think for example Netflix like a the big guys who could who could do it now yeah Google Netflix Apple Amazon how could Google do it now well hold on they won't do now but how could they well because they have the largest audence in the world so they can do anything but we're but if we're talking about a TV like a TV show well now there's no such no difference yeah it's the same thing like apple has TV shows they never get shown on TV s
42:44
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 mhm uh no is the answer and I'll tell you why because Netflix in particular if you do a news show then you do a story on Modi and then mod 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
43:17
Corporation to back this kind of content super dangerous and news on TV doesn't work 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
43:39
that is just comedy making fun of the fearmongering and so we believe that there's a huge middle like the solid majority uh of Centrist sane people who who are not being catered to and you know so we're going to try to make news uh products for them and you
44:05
hit the nail on the head which is uh 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 [ __ ] but there's an opportunity now for example what you're doing like
44:23
podcasting is this new frontier and it's exploding and we said like if we wanted to do something around this election 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
44:38
worse and so we were like let's take the biggest social media memes so it's like you know millions of people going now [ __ ] let's take them and let's deconstruct them let's talk to people on either side let's do it like a
44:52
scientist let's do it like a journalist I'm so let's go investigate one of the the things I love doing was we went to Antarctica uh no sorry we went to Greenland and Greenland is melting and Greenland is something like 2 meters or
45:08
3 meters of sea level R it's melting as fast as can so we're like hey guys like Greenland melts were're all screwed and we got this is at the peak of HBO we got inundated like usually we get something like 10 million comments we
45:24
got like 28 million comments and usually was like 60% positive it was like 90% negative there was just Bots and everyone [ __ ] going crazy about me especially so I'm like okay let's follow the story so we went we found the
45:37
traffic it was all conservative think tanks and they're like there's more ice ever and Antarctica Shifting the polls more sea ice and 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 they can melt we're like well what and they're like yeah well
46:05
there's always flat earthers we're like flat earthers is 45% of the [ __ ] 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 saying you work in that arue you
46:17
they're saying that there's never been more and they're like yeah well there isn't like they're wrong so to go back to my long-winded story is we want want to do that with political memes like for example the $24 Big Mac took on
46:32
everything and Biden's got it 24 bil [ __ ] $24 it's everywhere and we looked I have these traffic Guys these stor for at Vice news and they're like yeah it's all coming from China CCP Chinese Communist party because somebody
46:45
had posted somewhere $24 and it had gotten subtraction so they just turn on the there's no $24 big in fact McDonald's came out and said yeah it's $495 whatever the [ __ ] big ma is there's no 20 big Ma and so then it sort of was
46:59
like bing like all of these conspiracy theories all of these people like on the right on the left you know and and I'm just like let's call them let's just talk to them let's call the people who are [ __ ] on either side of
47:15
the thing get their point of view get 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 [ __ ] your election we're trying to [ __ ] your
47:25
electoral as China as it's the free Syrian Army as our Iranians like so many people are trying to [ __ ] with our [ __ ] and so you just have these young people going ding and the reason why I got back in the game is so many of the people I
47:40
was working with would just say something that's prous as if it's a given like that's not even we're not even discussing that that's just part of the thing we got to the given you're like that that's not a given dude that's
47:52
[ __ ] 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 fake news he literally just did a kindergarten like you're fake news and it work oh that's fake news and now everything's fake news nobody believes anything anymore this is a huge problem because no there's no basis of truth because everyone's just like that's
48:24
[ __ ] well and like if you shm if you look for the source the sources are all these [ __ ] 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
48:43
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
48:57
than just the the the sort of shotgun approach of of the HBO show which was just like let's figure out what's interesting in the world today I'd be really curious to see that I'd like to see that great well this is the first one we're doing itol was vice ever banned or censored yeah oh yeah we uh we used to say um we take the sex pistol's uh brand of marketing I.E get banned and go number one uh in Canada so America you have you
49:30
know freedom of speech in Canada they they just censor the [ __ ] out of everything so we had Vice we it wasn't even an article it was a it was a skate ad and the skate ad got banned at my album mod like so Gavin and I went to
49:48
Carlton we're going to Miguel and he went to Concord but uh we were at Carlton so we used to distribute in Carlton and they banned us from Carlton and then the Carlton newspaper ran the article and used the same image and using the same
50:06
methodology they banned their own newspaper then the gay and lesbian newspaper wrote about it use the same image and they got banned and that's censorship like I was like and then of course all Canadian media called us to say you know what happened we're like well that's censorship because obviously you should censor us cuz we're Phil pornography terrible horrible garbage but then the next guy gets banned and the next guy gets banned and the next
50:30
guy gets 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 [ __ ] you get banned and
50:43
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 tons and tons of Times Europe we come here we get banned Italy actually uh you have to register with the local Council and
50:58
local Council has one clergyman so can you imagine VI giving every month to a [ __ ] Clan to say okay let's see what we got here and it's like which dildo is best for a donkey and which you know like and it would be like was that ever
51:14
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 F and it hits like Tunisia [ __ ] you know animal it's like donkey uh sexual divice vibrator and it's like
51:30
it's an actual Vice thing it's like Tunisian donkeys are being fiated by vibrators whatever and you're like okay it's like I take I can take a good joke you're like the vice articles became and headlines became a bit [ __ ] Rich at
51:44
the end and there used to be a thing called not Vice or something that would just you you you had it was like online and you had to pick which was a fake Vice headline and what was a real Vice headline um so it did become a bit rich
51:58
but uh anyway yeah we got banned all the time tell me the story with uh John Maxi I was a weird one he was on the run in Biz I don't know who he was on the run from because we couldn't figure out if he had made it
52:18
all up or if it was real and I think it was 90% made up in its 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 we
52:36
contact people everybody knows everybody so like oh my uncle knows this guy or oh they call and at our Peak everyone's like I got a story for you guys uh so we sent somebody down and then they were following them then they decided to go
52:49
on the run with them whatever and then I guess they they 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 that anyone was actually looking for
53:06
him but we got in [ __ ] for the metadata picture from him or no he didn't I me he was he was with us uh and I don't know that they ever caught him and I don't know that he was ever but if they weren't after him why would the med a problem the whole thing about it was like the internet blew up for a day about it and you're like like we were involved in it it's still unclear as to whether or not he was actually being chased but you know
53:34
he was he was a he was a freaky freaky guy and you know the person who went down there like was just I whoever was in the office I guess went down there and took a picture cuz he said take a picture and they didn't take off the
53:48
metadata and anyway so so 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 to do about nothing but what was some of the other places that you um flew into and uh got
54:06
to experience something unusual let's say so many uh the one I remember was there's another great story which was this guy named General Abdul rizik and he was like a teenager was a kid maybe before he's a teenager in Kandahar and he the Taliban are from canar 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
54:38
Pakistan like illiterate [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] Adam and the Ants they have like these you know weird shreds of things colored colored rope not ropes like colored ribbons that they wear Crazy Colored they look awesome and uh he was known as a Taliban killer he's a teenager and he he when the Americans
55:09
invaded they said bring us anybody who's fighting the Taliban so they they bring him to to Kabul they train him they give him just like ludicrous amounts of money and he becomes the go police chief of Kandahar and then eventually governor of Kandahar and uh he he's it's like CTS like when he went into this region and all enemy uh activity died so he goes to Kandahar where the Taliban are from zero Taliban activity kills [ __ ] kills
55:41
[ __ ] you know you can imagine he's not a good guy lots of killings lots of like torture and bad stuff he's a bad guy but he he becomes I think maybe the biggest drug dealer in the world like running the Opium into Pakistan he has all this
55:55
gold bully his brother kills carai the prime minister's brother so like super powerful guy 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 funny you have to dress as if
56:13
you're from the place yeah and so I'm pink so it's funny because I went into Northwest Frontier province with serou who's from Pakistani so he speaks her do anything and I had just come from shooting in Kashmir which is another hot spot where they're having a war and so I was wearing Kashmir chule so a pink guy I had a long beard and handed the beard cuz that's what they do there so I haded a beard and I was wearing Casmir chapel
56:37
and I remember they asked suou does your religious leader uh require any dietary restrictions because there's only one guy who's got a pink face wearing kmir chule and he's a badass because a lot of the the top fighters in the top are come
56:53
from dagistan which is in Russia because because the dagistan is where sort of the spns running 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
57:10
spns with the Russian Special Forces so you become super badass so those guys then go out and Train everybody else like the Taliban and okah Har and everything so they they thought you know you're one of those guys so anyways we
57:22
we go interview him and uh I don't speak do so I'm sitting there talking to him in English and then there's translating so anyway finish the interview fly to Cabell which is grim but this is how bad Kar is when I flew into cabal I'm like
57:39
it's like Paris in the springtime you're like there's hotels and food oh my God and so I he was knock knock knock at 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
57:57
for you we'll give you deep cover meaning like we're not you know Deep Cover stories like we're not going to attribute them whatever but we'll give you the actual story that's true if you give us ridic like give us the stories
58:08
on ridic I'm like he's your guy like you you fund him you're like he's your guy and he's like yeah he's off the reservation and I'm like I don't I don't I just spoke to him in English and he spoke back to the Apache I don't have any insight into that General do Ric 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 talaman Killer and the minute that guy goes you
58:35
which happened then Kandahar goes so that was freaky because you're were sitting there going like I'm this Punk kid you know used to [ __ ] bus you know for for [ __ ] quarters all of a sudden you're talking to the CIA and DEA
58:48
about [ __ ] you know trading for Deep Cover stories about [ __ ] Sal you show up in these places with a story in mind are you ever surprised by what's actually happening there and are the people who are the bad guys necessarily
59:04
the bad guys and 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 are such a bad guy Tali in if they're American they're
59:21
Freedom Fighters because they're 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 Fighter they beat America by the
59:35
way before that they beat Russia before that they beat England they're [ __ ] 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
59:49
important because it's in between India and China and Iraq and Iran and uh you know it's it's it's a sort of Crossroads um more location than anything else yeah I mean and it's it's also very difficult to tame and so if
1:00:09
it's very difficult to tame then [ __ ] can go down like uh you know training camps for for extremists etc etc I mean that's the whole thing is like oh 911 happens and they say okay we're going to go there which at least had a modum of
1:00:24
sense because they had training camps there they're also like we're also going to invade Iraq which has zero like absolutely nothing to do with we're just going to do that too we're just going to go in there you know it's ludicrous but
1:00:37
if you go to Afghanistan I mean are they good guys or 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 and everyone forgets that and we dehumanize
1:00:49
them 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 with a political narrative and just nobody
1:01:01
deviates from it and I got to give it to Al jazer 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 like yeah like if you go to Iraq we went in there and
1:01:18
mismanaged it so badly we created uh Al-Qaeda we not Al-Qaeda we created Isis like America made Isis cuz we created this vacuum and then Isis came along and you're like well that's not good like what what we what we did in in
1:01:36
Afghanistan and what we did in in Iraq you know were were were bad things and the how we get it back here the propaganda is is propaganda that's one thing Wars have propaganda on both sides and one side always believes that my
1:01:55
side isn't propaga have you spending time in Russia yeah what's that like a lot of time they've had an interesting time where they were the [ __ ] like they were number two and then you know yelson gets blamed for a lot of stuff and and
1:02:12
basically Putin is trying to get them back to where they were before their the way they they see it is we had a complete economic collapse and everybody feasted on our corpse you know and I remember saying like when I was in
1:02:26
Russia like Putin like is he communist is he fascist like what is he they're like no no you don't understand sh he's for Russia and you're like okay got it but like on the political Spectrum you know because he was part of the KGB but
1:02:40
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 lavro who's the fore Minister and he'll say that they've been saying it to anyone who listen if you put missiles on our border like for example in the Ukraine uh it's like exactly the same as putting missiles in Cuba or Canada or Mexico we're not going to let you we're
1:03:10
going to retaliate they've said that for the last 20 years and then you we go do it and you're like what do you think going to happen yeah unprovoked oh my God what happened there and so when you go you know there's there's two sides of
1:03:25
everything story and poor Ukraine is is Vietnam it it's it's a proxy war that's being fought in its backyard and that's you know unpleasant for everybody who's there but there's you know there's two sides to every story and like that's
1:03:41
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 and and angry and and won't even listen or talk to the other people and you're like you have
1:04:00
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
1:04:13
had the largest surplus of all time and then Bush increased his 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
1:04:26
no one in America said boo no one said [ __ ] and that's when I realized a lot of this stuff and now it's with Trump and Biden which makes for [ __ ] insane political theater but a lot of this stuff in America because America is not
1:04:39
a democracy it's a republic and if you talk to the founding fathers they're like yeah it's made to do nothing and to do it very slowly but a lot of this stuff is uh bread and Puppet Theater like it's to give the the the sort of Mass imagination that this is a massive Democratic process that there is agency that you actually have some sort of you know Democratic uh uh country and you're like well it's it's not set up to be a
1:05:11
democracy it's Republican 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 Brad and Puppet Theater but now it's Amplified to the point of just
1:05:24
impassioned lunacy and the 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
1:05:39
house so when he died everyone just starts shooting each other because machine guns no problem if you don't have machine guns you have machine and now America's 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 Democrat it's like kind of like the old Soviet Union America like oh Russians eat babies oh you know American gang like the Democratic and Republican propaganda
1:06:09
against each other is like dehumanizing and doing this war so so that you know and that's terrifying because you're like it's a [ __ ] the Republican Party versus the Democratic part like like it used to be and it should be nothing like
1:06:22
whoever you vote for is whoever you vote for and then you're done we get on with life and who cares it's but it's like a declaration of [ __ ] War like it's crazy now so good for media and good for news and good for what I'm
1:06:35
doing but terrible for everybody else tell me about the home you grew up in that's a weird question uh really seems so straightforward really yeah uh I it's funny I've been thinking about it because I just came from Greece and I
1:06:52
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 it was weird and PR this is prep Punk yeah no this is Sor this is po post one I was
1:07:08
F I'm going I'm getting to that but it was like I first discovered Beauty you know in that that sort of 181 1920 before that sort of Ottawa no money Punk everything was very Grim B like we celebrated the work in class
1:07:28
like uh 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 Palace is like you could be in a band and then you would pay the rent out of the band money and stuff so
1:07:40
grew up like playing in punk bands you live like in a commune with other band 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 bu a house and build a car
1:07:56
and you had to get straight A's and you had to box you had to do the stuff because his dad had like was self-taught and ended up being a big war hero and D even though he you know left school in I don't know grade eight or something and
1:08:10
so he was a real harsh task masterer so my dad was like look life is tough life is hard life is like a [ __ ] sandwich the more bread you have the less [ __ ] you have to eat but he the only guy to ever lose money on insider trading so he he never really did well but he was like he's 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 uh then I moved
1:08:34
to 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 drooling around busking and then I went to there we were busking the guy we were in Athens and the guy said
1:08:47
uh you want to come out and he gave us a house on the beach uh we could eat in any restaurant drink in any bar and we had to play one night at the Hard Rock Cafe one hour night I never left I'm like this is the greatest [ __ ] thing
1:09:01
but it was the first time I was like coming out of this real working class Punk Northern cold trench Coy world all of a sudden wearing like flip-flops and shorts and just being tanned and beautiful being like Oh my God this is
1:09:16
this is and I was saying like I used to say one more year and then I'm going back to gree man one more year and then I'm going back to gree is my like ontological paradig but yeah my I don't know my my dad was a harsh Taskmaster my
1:09:29
mom was overprotective so Irish do you have uh brother and sisters brother and then so they they got older he 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
1:09:45
rational you know we were going crazy and and because of that I left I said [ __ ] you and then uh left home and but know I had a good relationship I still have a great relationship with him but I was it was just like oh well now I'm a
1:10:01
man 14 or 15 I'm like okay [ __ ] it I'm out I'm out and uh 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 decision 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 in high school so that was one good thing is that I wanted to get out and go to
1:10:27
university and and like be with my buddy so at least I didn't like just you know drop out of school so that was good um yeah I just wanted to get out I wanted to get out of Ottawa and like get out to the world and and so I spent a lot of my
1:10:41
time before Vice is traveling and then and then when we did Vice I spent most of half my year on the road I you know I love just excuse me going to see as much as I can how do you think growing up in Canada impacted your outlook on the
1:11:00
world Canada is sort of weird because we're kind of sanctimonious we're like you know we give more than foreign aid than everybody else and we do this this we also gave reactors to India and Pakistan said don't do anything bad with them and they both you know exploded Atomic weapon uh it's a kind of a sanctimonious place but it's a great place to go up it's it's like the definition of the Canadian character is we're not American
1:11:31
and vice was beloved in in Canada and uh until we went to the states we're like yeah we love America America's great you know it's the only place you could come with no shoes I came from Costa Rica and I had literally no shoes because someone
1:11:43
stole my boots I had FitFlop you could become a million it's the only country in the world you can do that it's amazing and Canadians are like [ __ ] you and they wanted us to hate the states I'm like I love the states I
1:11:54
think it's great right 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 uh and it should be managed better but but you know so I think you get that from Canada but you also get
1:12:23
like you know we're 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
1:12:37
can get out of 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
1:12:52
huge [ __ ] job I don't have any water right these are massive massive mass and and like so Canada you know is a massive country with tons of money anyway it was 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 a bit more for what it is rather than like I was born into it like it's like a sports
1:13:23
team or something like it's going to be the Phillies and until I die kind of thing okay just have a little more perspective because you're coming from the outside yeah um how would you describe your [Laughter] temperament oh my Lord that's a good
1:13:38
one uh much changed I mean I was very hard charging I was like I speak French why didn't you speak French like 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 a you know a
1:14:04
calm C never did a good captain make like when I was the blue-eyed boy rolling down the hill catching money uh I was the smartest guy in every room and then after sort of a few belts to the head you're like you know what we
1:14:21
should maybe think a bit more and listen to a bit more and read a bit more and uh you know I I think now probably much happier I mean I'm pretty lucky I've been happy most of my life but like comprehensively happy happier uh I much more sort
1:14:46
of I contemplate things I think about things more uh you know I think I think it was car s 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 the you know the temperature works and this 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
1:15:19
didn't get stabbed with [ __ ] pitchforks and and food is delicious like food is it's not like this rotten [ __ ] moldy bread and all foods are and like you can travel around the world you like our era and God knows if that
1:15:34
that's the other thing I don't know if the HBO era that continues going on like let's say the Gen X hereo the Gen X here is pretty goddamn good so I'm very thankful that my envelope happened to be probably the greatest envelope of human
1:15:51
existence um so that's good uh 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 agism in America that like if you're like if you're 40 and you don't have a plan you're [ __ ] and if you're 50 just [ __ ] you know and like for us we still get to [ __ ] do what we love to do that's a [ __ ] blessing like we're not like oh you're [ __ ] old you can't
1:16:22
do anything um like family like like you know happiness at a cellular level so I think I learned a lot uh you know it's funny I studied philosophy in University and I think it's completely the ass backwards like we should study
1:16:38
philosophy now because you read it but when you're a kid you're like I don't [ __ ] know what do I need to write to get a name [ __ ] so now like I I read a lot more and and I also like appreciate pretty much everything but
1:16:52
being able to get back in the game and being able to to do something with a little bit more understanding of the complexities of it and a little bit more understanding of look there has to be [Music] some place where people can go where
1:17:07
they believe in what you're saying and that you know I could retire and [ __ ] live my Serene existence which by the way is great but if you can still do something and be you know use your skill set to do something that
1:17:23
isn't shitty then and that's just [ __ ] great so comprehensively happy but like grateful to to still be in the mix and grateful that 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 going to believe like you have to believe it perhaps that's why I was so hard charging because I'm like we're just making this episode go along now I don't have to do that anymore so you're
1:17:51
just sort of like okay let's look at this and let's let's let you know try to do it right also your hard charging achieved a tremendous amount I mean it's it's insane what you accomplished yeah and nobody believed it like everyone
1:18:07
would say no that's why we had to get like self-fulfilling props and you had to be like we're going to do this we're going to do this because nobody says yes we're going to go from $155,000 to the you know 10th largest private company
1:18:19
America like yeah no yeah we're going to be the biggest the reason why Canadians got mad at us is like we're the biggest ever uh media out like to come out of Canada and we went yeah we're going to America we love it and they were like [ __ ] you
1:18:32
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 at one point we were making the
1:18:47
best content in the world and there was a time when you're just like we know I knew like you can't keep the team together but it was just like just a [ __ ] great feeling it was that was a really great feeling and also to be
1:19:00
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 um Tom Preston get involved that's a great question Tom this is the best gu I love him to bit he I don't know if you know
1:19:16
his story I don't really so he was a hippie hitchhiked around ended up in Afghanistan I didn't know that yeah yeah started a company in Afghanistan and Delhi clothing company it's like hippie hippie threads and uh had a whole life and then
1:19:37
the Communists the Russians came into Kabul lost everything I think he was like 38 or something like wow grown up yeah oh yeah like but had a life yeah was a millionaire lost everything flew back and then Pitman said oh we're doing this
1:19:54
thing and and so you know how to sell [ __ ] like you sold pants and stuff 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
1:20:10
he was the only one like you want to be you want to run it he said I guess so ends up becoming CEO of Viacom super smart guy amazing person he gets ousted because redstone's going NS and phip D who's used to be his
1:20:28
lawyer you know gets in like Gollum or whatever and then Tom started working with us and he really wanted to us to be big to be to say basically [ __ ] you to MTV you did it again and so we we traveled all over the world together like he would come to Afghanistan and he would come to Sudan this is an older guy he he he [ __ ] 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
1:20:58
this thing where we were like three times the size of MTV and MCV when we did the deal with Tom uh I had a a deal a cause where if Tom last week to buy it back and so we did we bought it back for a book value which is $4 million at the
1:21:14
time and then it was worth whatever when they did the article was 4 billion and they're like oh that 4 million turned into 4 billion so Tom loved it and we loved uh and he's just he's one of the last entertainment gurus you know like
1:21:34
these guys back in the day were Larger than Life and now they're just lawyers with [ __ ] police Fest but he was he was a hell of a [ __ ] still is hell of a character um who were some of the suitors who wanted to buy Vice over the
1:21:49
years everybody we had a deal done time order for 49% cuz I wanted to get a TV network so we were going to get HLN and uh and we were done and then a guy came and he said go talk to Bob Iger and everyone's like [ __ ] Disney's not
1:22:09
ever going to deal with theal 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 of there was like a huge dildo next to like a frozen cup and he's like I want to talk to you a copyright he was joking and I was like ohly [ __ ] very [ __ ] smart guy and uh he said look you've given these guys nine months give me N9 days so I delayed my trip back to New York we worked out a
1:22:35
deal I went back told Time Warner uh I wasn't going to come in and they like five minutes later in the New York Times boom they dropped a story like couldn't agree on price like I.E I was too greedy then two minutes later we released our story of Disney at 2.5 so we had 800 million of value and like a week so wait three four 4:00 How great is the o00 is a good time I love the bill does somebody have to do that no it's a it's an automatic that's
1:23:10
awesome yeah nine to nine that's awesome yeah we were talking about um Disney you meet with Bob Iger it was you give him nine days oh suitors so suitors so is everyone from rert Murdoch that's another person everyone rert Murdock devil rert
1:23:31
Murdock and you're like yeah he got labor elected in the UK labor being communists here in America he wanted access to power like that's what he does and so like he doesn't give a [ __ ] if it's brightwing now maybe because he's
1:23:48
older but back in the day he would just get access to power anyway so rert wanted to buy us at one point uh Jeff bucas said Time Warner another great guy Jeff uh Tom wanted ADV 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 haha 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
1:24:17
no to money I'm a so said yes the Time Warner then Disney outbid them yes then we were working to sell Disney the whole company and there was a time when Disney was trying to buy Snapchat Andor Spotify and I know Daniel and I was good friends
1:24:35
with Evan so I was trying to get in there get into me and at some point Spotify Andor 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 SL because we were going to be
1:24:49
the content part of this platform thing and then that's turned into Shane said no and then they went bankr 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 the whole company to be and then because we Disney didn't didn't P Disney pulled the plug that's when we got into private equity and private Equity is like Scorpion and the Frog they're like yeah we'll value
1:25:14
at 6 and A5 billion [ __ ] let's go and uh but then they put in all the ratchets and the things and look private Equity do what they do they're going to end up owning your company me no matter what you do so that was
1:25:28
probably you know not great like we were built for a strategic I.E like a a real partner yeah 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
1:25:48
mean we always had a had a had a rule for every page of of content we had to have a page of ads because it was a business and if you don't uh if you don't pay for it it's going to die right and so I was always really into
1:26:11
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
1:26:32
taking in you know higher and higher valuations how much of your time was that taking versus on focusing on the content it's a great question the last the advice I give to Media Kids and people who came in VI and stuff I'd say
1:26:48
look concentrate on two things content and revenue that's what a media company is make great content and then monit now it sounds like simplistic advice everyone will try to take everything away it'll be HR it'll be lawsuits it'll
1:27:02
be courtroom battles it'll be proxy votes it'll be rights offerings it'll be raising money and all you and you know people like it's lawyers and it's hundreds of millions of dollars and it's exciting and making content and and and
1:27:16
like selling brands is difficult so people get sucked up into it and I think that happens to all media companies and I think that that's what's happened uh not only you know in New Media but in Legacy Media because if you look at what's happening
1:27:32
now they have to consolidate and fire everybody because you know they're just they're just they're just they're they're not driving revenue or interesting ways of having because everybody's Advertising based and as we
1:27:47
talked about the big five are taking all the [ __ ] advertising so they haven't innovated they haven't you know got into subbase they haven't got into any is anything new and so they're just sitting there nobody's concentrating on Revenue
1:27:58
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 going to be able to compete with Amazon because they just do content
1:28:11
as an add-on because they're make anything because they're going to sell everything in the world and pretty soon the content's going to be like oh it's be hot clicks I want those jeans I want that bottle of WI and you're just going
1:28:24
to be able to click anything on Amazon and just be able to buy it's genius who's who's gonna 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 uh what else is told mean to me [Music] um I mean most most most of the advice of the day to day kind of stuff is always bad it's mostly kind of lawyers and uh like for example we were
1:29:02
going to do the the vice gu ding to the vice book like the 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 lawsuit like this is going to be insane and you're like okay well [ __ ] 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 and we always used to say that
1:29:27
like 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 a narrative which is obviously
1:29:41
like disgruntled employees or this or that or whatever it's not going to be and nobody like who's inside and who actually knew about the growth and knew you know and and so that became that's not we shouldn't have listened to those
1:29:56
lawyers tell me about your experiences currency trading yeah uh well it sounds a lot I don't know sexier or well anyway I went to Eastern Europe so when I was studying politics how old are you at this time 20 1 22 okay so I was studying East European Soviet uh studies in college and then the Soviet Union goes away so I'm like 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
1:30:35
and uh they had uh so I went to I went to Prague which was where everybody went but it was already inundated so then I went to Budapest and I taught English and uh I taught business English and then uh I was teaching business
1:30:51
English and all these guys were like you know you you you as a foreigner can get a [ __ ] like a a foreign company and you can buy currency and uh and it's it's much better rate than the black market which is like you know so I had this book and
1:31:08
I was buying and selling forign and all of a sudden like I didn't have to do the school anymore I was making a lot of money at had a car and driver I lived in the same building as Jah horn the Prime Minister I tailor made suits by the way
1:31:19
this is a punk kid like it's really interesting yeah it was super fun except for when the ROM Ians transylvanians who were running real money laundering the bad guys start catch wind that you're like taking their business and it got
1:31:33
very hot for a minute and my brother said I'm getting married I'm like you know what I'm going to take a little break but um yeah it was basically like all money trading there's a difference between between you know the Arbitrage between the the the black market rate and the other R what saved my ass was that because I was doing it with companies uh I I I I was sort of out of the spotlight of the bad boys for uh for long enough to to make some
1:32:03
money but what I realized about that so that's a good question but the real thing I realized was I've 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 money and I would be rich and hungry but the minute you're left you're poor but I would go to like Venice for the weekend
1:32:28
and like stay at the danieli and [ __ ] you know and to poor kid from Ottawa this was just like your [ __ ] rain is exploding and then you know I'd go back but like you couldn't ever really leave Eastern Europe because it was you
1:32:41
know the differentiation was so much what was Budapest like oh my God beautiful place oh my Lord Paris of East 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
1:32:58
was just [ __ ] beautiful and speaking of like it had like Roman bass it was known for the B had basss everywhere uh like you know hot bass cold bath this plung that's where the water culture was invented no the the bathing culture huge
1:33:14
like it was massive complexes of Roman bath incredible food culture incredible wine culture uh how long did you get to live there two and a half years and it was just [ __ ] lovely I've got to say that it just was opening
1:33:29
up and they were very excited we were very excited and uh people speak English yeah now it was before it was more German but how did you communicate uh you know a little bit of Hungarian a little bit of English a little bit of German and uh now they speak English but yeah Hungary is a beautiful country but Budapest is like staggeringly beautiful and yeah living there and being like it was you kind of felt like James Bond you're like suit
1:34:02
you like my car was a musk sky like the old Russian yeah and you and you have you're trading money and you yeah this is [ __ ] cool now that's not going to go on very long so when I came back and they said you know come let's do Vice
1:34:16
together that was uh probably saved my life but the one thing about that is you know after you get a taste of that lifestyle you're like [ __ ] I want to go back to to my dad the one piece of advice he gave me was that life is like
1:34:29
a [ __ ] sandwich more bread you have the less [ __ ] you have to e it's true like like when you have a little bit of cash it's [ __ ] nice you and so that that was the first thing that ever gave me a taste did you ever think about staying
1:34:45
there yeah just if the quality of life was so good yeah um 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 the thing
1:35:06
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 hodge podge person like quy and people that talking about music cuz I'd been I grown up the music and stuff there's a whole new music wave going on there was a whole new like everyone dressed different everyone talked different I'm like oh I'm [ __ ] off doing felt like you were missing out on
1:35:35
culture yeah and I like just being able to talk was a big deal yeah and like food like comfort food and stuff uh yeah so I mean I I thought about going back um but at that point I was like loving I mean again I moved back to Montreal
1:35:56
which again is one of my favorite places in the world so it wasn't terrible it was great Montreal was great but uh 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
1:36:12
Greenpeace so my first job out of college was Green Piece 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 Green Peace Canada which is the biggest
1:36:28
part of Green Peace then I went to Switzerland which because the greens got elected and at that point they had 32% of the parliament so I was very politically active uh when I was here in Italy I joined par communist Italia went to
1:36:43
Umbria you know worked for Green Peace was very environmentally active for a number of years uh then went to East Eastern Europe the program was called education for democracy which is basically go teach people English but at the same
1:37:00
time like talk about how democracy works and liberal democracy and so very politically active and then uh that I think later on that's why I I sort of veered off from you know the fashion and uh music and stuff into more
1:37:21
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 if they nobody cared about tell me about tell me about that you know Napoleon said um Conquest has made me and Conquest must sustain me and basically North Korea made me and North Korea must suain North Korea was insane
1:37:47
like North Korea was it went from nothing to like hundreds and hundreds of millions of video years uh 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
1:38:02
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 [ __ ] weird like like it's weirdest weirdest place you've ever been
1:38:17
times a million oh I mean it's [ __ ] and you've been in weird places I highly recommend going because it's can anybody go no that's the problem but it's basically a theme park for 1950s stalinist Russia 1960s mest China total Cult of
1:38:43
Personality uh like every room you know two pictures like everybody State Police like just it's like going to Disneyland of of what the world used to be under Stalin and Ma it's crazy and also studying that stuff so phenomenally
1:39:02
interesting terrifying like State Police run uh and by the way we're lucky that we live here and not there holy [ __ ] like there's stories of like going to concentration camps and people eating the colonels of corn out of cow [ __ ]
1:39:19
like it's bad but it's the most interesting like for example the first time I went we went to the air rang games you know what that is it's like the largest stadium in the world and they they get the best and the brightest
1:39:30
to practice for like a year to do this thing the Aang 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 and they do this thing where they they do like
1:39:47
highly choreograph things where it's the whole history of Korea the Communist history of Korea by 150,000 people doing this [ __ ] thing with pixels and then like people flying through the air and the and like like cheerleaders would you say
1:40:06
yeah like it's like it's like a floor show of like maybe 50,000 people doing choreograph like no here's an island and now here's this and now here's Mount Arirang and then Here Comes IM song and here comes like which is like these
1:40:21
50,000 people here and then the back background there's literally like pixels like I have to show it you but like yeah they they they do a thing where it's like TV but made of humans doing choreographic with 100,000 of them and
1:40:34
so I'm sitting at the Das where Kim uh you know s 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 the singing year they performing for you and a handful of
1:40:48
people exactly like like generals and stuff who are wow and you're like what the what is going on here wow like what is going on so that was the craziest thing that ever happened I shot it I can show you the thing I because people
1:41:01
wouldn't believe me so I shot myself with nobody there and then and then there's the [ __ ] thing so that's that was crazy uh how did you get permission to go that year uh there was so we got refused that year there were floods which is why I was one of the only persons people there and they had they hadn't done the area r games for two years but that year they had to do them because the Chinese something delegation was coming so they
1:41:32
they wanted to get a few practice thing runs in and what I was told was they're going to refuse everybody before the chines come but if you go to Shenyang which is a industrial city in Northern kind of right on the Korean border you can go to the Korean Embassy and pay like a entrance fee and the whole thing was crazy we went to Shenyang like we're not going to tell you if you can get in or not we paid the entrance fee they make
1:41:59
you stay in a North koreen Hotel there which literally has concrete beds you're like what the [ __ ] really yeah yeah they come in at 2:00 in the morning they take your passport they take everything they go come on go go they put you in like
1:42:09
this [ __ ] shitty like military bus they take you to the the military airport and you put you on an old tupf like an old aluminum [ __ ] Russian plane and you and you fly into pyang you're like holy [ __ ] [ __ ] we made it
1:42:25
like we're in we're in and then from the second you get there you're like what is that do you have any feeling that you wouldn't be able to get out was that ever a feeling we got caught uh filming so what we did cuz we're [ __ ] stupid is we got these
1:42:42
like uh point and shoot cameras you're not allowed to take well you can like you can go to specific areas and take a picture and then when they say yes but what we were doing is we got these like it was basically the first
1:42:58
time where you could get a big memory card and so we put a mem and you could do like you shoot film like on your camera so we would be like I'm just taking a picture you know and so we were doing that because you have a guide a guard and then a secret police I remember the secret police guy was watching us we got probably a bit too cocky and then he was like say give me that and so I gave it to him and he goes why do you have a whatever 250
1:43:28
Meg photo card that's cuz he usually like I guess 18 I don't remember the numbers but it was like 10 times what it should have been and I'm like I don't know I just la like no idea I was in the airport and I bought it and that's the
1:43:41
only one and they started but that was our Dodge like we knew and they knew when I they knew that I knew that they do and then I started going oh [ __ ] like they know you know they know that we're [ __ ] filming this [ __ ] thing so
1:43:55
that was that was scary cuz one guy on that trip had a had a camera and he cuz they put you on a in a hotel which is like a like it's like Hotel murder it's like it's like this concrete box and you go in it's just a concrete room like you imagine the carpet's been soaked in blood many times and it's like there's a thing there that like like it's it's like a 50 radio but it's just listening to you like you can hear it listening to
1:44:26
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 [ __ ] you can't go you can't like it's all choreograph and this guy tried to
1:44:37
[ __ ] 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 they checked him out he didn't end up having to go to concentration which you don't
1:44:49
want but they're very [ __ ] serious did you get to see how the the regular people live at all yes and it's [ __ ] wild because so the first like there's one one that became most famous I actually interact with people there's
1:45:04
like we stop at a tea shop and I play pool with the tea girl who's been in the tea shop for like five years playing pool really good at playing pool but nobody comes in because there's no [ __ ] tourist so everyone's like what
1:45:14
happened to the tle because she's really cute and really sweet and like so they're like the te girl we got to get the te girl and then I went to the DMZ and uh you do your DMZ [ __ ] whatever but on the way back like you see
1:45:27
Villages and the village it's so [ __ ] up because they don't build like villages with like houses and stuff they build Villages which will just be like a in the middle of nowhere there's nothing so it's like forest and then there'll be
1:45:38
like a 50 story stalinist like like like apartment building you know like the massive Russian ones like huge [ __ ] that's the village it's one building two buildings it's one and then one big like uh uh Amphitheater for like
1:45:55
political whatever indoctrination and then that's it it's like what the [ __ ] 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
1:46:09
the rebar right cuz to sell it to the Chinese so it looks like this Pock marked look like it's been eaten by like woodpeckers that eat concrete and people live in it but wait so there's no and there's no electricity now so they have
1:46:23
you see like on the 50th floor like you'll see cooking fires wow so they're caring up 50 stories water they don't there's no we any water so they go get water from the stream and like Lumber 50 stories up to their apartment where they
1:46:38
cook and cookie 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 B you not allowed to be or nobody's allowed to be
1:46:52
well no West Turners okay aren't allowed to go out and so uh so because Kim Jong-un came to our basketball game all of a sudden they're like oh now we're going to show you this and now we're going to do this and so we got like CU
1:47:04
everyone has the same footage because they give you the same tour so all of a sudden we had all this new footage nobody else had and that's why we got all this [ __ ] like oh Vice of stunt journalist Vice but we had the footage
1:47:15
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
1:47:28
this mountain and it's like they have like the Hall of treasures which is every treasure that's been given to either Kim or and so it's it literally would take you two weeks to go through the whole sorry it's two miles in down a mountain
1:47:45
so they they they they holler out a mountain so you go down this mountain and inside the mountain they have like the first train that's Allen gave Kim a song like a train 2 miles in down into a mountain because they have to be [ __ ]
1:47:59
protected cuz they're Treasures but like there'll be like a bar coaster that fedel Castro sign like so much [ __ ] and so you go through and through like weird weird weird stuff like an alligator from some guy from Nicaragua whatever so you
1:48:14
go through oh yeah there's also wax figure of Kim song and Kim Kim Jil with like a fan blowing their hair and everyone has to go there and like cuz they're still like you know and and bow to them by the way as a Korean you H
1:48:32
North Korean you have to go there one time in your life see the treasures and like literally 10t away from the their leader and the president for life is this basketball like signed by Michael Jordan and so I was like that's so [ __ ] weird was the first St of Raper small since the Korean war with America Island Albright they love the Bulls etc etc so yeah we came up with the idea why don't we just do [ __ ] pingpong uh diplomacy in China we're
1:49:03
going to do basketball well I'll send you the doc the doc's heartwarming because the Harlem glob shoters were the stars I mean those guys are [ __ ] amazing amazing and they played the North Korean national team he showed up to the the game which was [ __ ] insane cuz the people went ape [ __ ] cuz he's like God they they could say mans happy oh they say I think they say mans which means 10,000 years or something and they're
1:49:30
just like man like like crazy for like I don't know half an hour wow and then what was really [ __ ] up is they said to the crew uh yeah come back come back for to my house so the whole crew went back to his house for like 12 hours J
1:49:47
yeah yeah yeah and so then because of that we got access to everything what was his house like I wasn't allowed to go oh uh 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
1:50:05
documentary and then they get mad at me see ban me and then they say okay now you can come back and then I do it again so that one I set up but they're like yeah you're not coming on this one buddy the dock is amazing it sounds amazing
1:50:18
the doc is great and like at the end like the how go you see these little kids their eyes light up and they're just that's what I like to cuz they're just regular people like we're like North Korean [ __ ] North Korean they
1:50:28
[ __ ] North [ __ ] boms and lasers and [ __ ] and like you see they're just kids like they're just kids who like basketball and they're they're just stoked like to see somebody and like it's it's that's the greatest thing
1:50:41
about that is that uh um you realize that it's all propaganda like everything is propaganda so anyway that's the one didn't surprise me that most North Korea the one that surprised me that didn't hit as much as it should have is
1:51:00
we took the first sitting president to a prison uh to talk about prison reform got two sitting president of what country Obama you took Obama no no president's ever gone to a president he had to lie to the doj and dop really
1:51:17
yeah yeah it was a big deal wow and it was a huge how did how were we able to orchestrate it Biden came out to Vice in Williamsburg for like a day they had snipers on the roof and all this [ __ ] wow he came in to kind basically vet us
1:51:31
you know that we would do it went to a prison in Oklahoma to talk about uh um 56% at that time 5 56% of all prisoners which is obviously it's 25% of all prisoners in the world or America 56% of them were nonviolent uh drug offensers most of them we and so we we did a lot on weed and always have done a lot of weed and and decriminalizing Etc so we went to Oklahoma where something I don't know like 70% of their population and maximum security
1:52:08
we're three time offender like the three three strikes here out for weed for weed yeah so we went there with Obama and one and Emmy uh uh got two bills passed bipartisan bills on uh on on uh reform crime reform prison reform
1:52:32
prison reform and like just it didn't hit like really did it right it was very serious and it was very but like it's Obama in the [ __ ] prison freeing prisons for weed like I thought that would hit and it didn't the one that hit
1:52:49
actually because we did the prison reform one he gave me un limited access un gave me access to the last 6 months of his presidency and uh we were I was going to give him a [ __ ] like we were just going to say hey [ __ ] good job kind of think all
1:53:05
they wanted to talk about was the Tea Party and John Boehner and how [ __ ] dysfunctional America was and how [ __ ] cided Republicans were they like it was them so I went okay now I'll go talk to John Boehner he's a great guy by
1:53:17
the way went to go talk to John Boehner then went to talk to D Party Guys and then when like John Boehner which I didn't know speaking of how things work speaker you know 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 a political mechanic and he' get [ __ ] done and he was like a whip and he would [ __ ] go do stuff
1:53:43
and he' go meet Obama whatever just for meeting with the GU that was his [ __ ] job the Republicans El him he's a conservative and like he wasn't conservative and so Obama was like look you know our our political
1:53:57
institutions are under attack they've weathered us along democracy and this Trump thing is going to be an issue and d and he kind of called it he kind of said like this is going to get a lot worse and and and that hit like that that was I think our
1:54:13
biggest show on HBO and uh but the prison one the prison which was an excellent episode it didn't so that's what I thought would would for our audience especially weed and prisons and Obama you think like all right how is running something big
1:54:32
different than running something small running something small is all about how do I survive like how do we keep the lights on and if something bad happens like what is it they say you know Americans don't have like $586 if
1:54:49
there's a if there's a yeah you know a catastrophe that's running a small business it's like if something happens we're [ __ ] I remember so many we had stores and remember so many times like the mag like an ad wouldn't come in so
1:55:03
we'd have to go like clear out the [ __ ] 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 you know lawyers and one of the reasons why I when went to LA and
1:55:23
sort of got out of it is I'm good at creating content I'm good at at Brand building and and and and revenue I'm bad at lawyers and uh boardroom politics and and uh all the stuff that you have to when you become it's a different thing it's a
1:55:41
different thing it's also terrible like I'm just I just don't like it and it's false and you know everyone's lying and you know that whole scorpion frog thing you I look you look success has many parents and and failure is an orphan and
1:55:56
uh so when you're when you're rolling down the hill catching money everyone's your best friend and the minute something goes wrong they like that guy with real thing so the fun stuff is building the fun stuff is making the fun
1:56:07
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
1:56:19
going to do did you ever have um advertisers complain about the contents you know who's that's a big question you know who's the blame for censorship and who's the blame for is advertisers on both sides because we would do something and our audience would go up but the advertisers were like you know we're you know we don't know about that by the way nobody's safe like even the the right A lot of people go to the right because the left is so
1:56:51
sketchy if the advertisers take a like a second out you're gone they don't care so the right at least they'll stand by you more even Tucker Carlson got X like the the advertisers will just they'll just they're the modern day
1:57:05
censors and you know they're they're the ones you in fact we did a thing we actually want to what's their motivation though if they if the goal of a advertis safe they want it to be brand safe so so we did a a campaign which won the first
1:57:22
glass line or Diamond line or Crystal line or whatever it was the can lions because we did a we did a brand safety campaign where like homosexual like gay black all of these were in the brand safety guidelines for all these brands
1:57:39
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 know what your your name next to Black your name next to like where is this 1953 so we actually did a whole
1:57:53
thing to re-edit this sort of brand safety dictionaries um because we were getting nailed on everything you know for for brand safety and yeah they they they don't want their their brands next to anything you know risque and you're like well that's what that's what it is I mean what it's called Vice exactly but they are the modern day sensors like if they pull their their money their advert iing then you're [ __ ] what would you say are the
1:58:25
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 mean I wish 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 this the Bad News Bears we had people didn't know how to shoot who revolutionized shooting we had
1:58:54
people who' never cut anything before becoming the best editor we never had any professional hosts like it was just hey you go [ __ ] you know baby balls was we got him as a joke cuz he was 92 lbs soaking wet with helosis and dandr
1:59:09
and he was became our [ __ ] most like non you know Fearless [ __ ] man in the 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 I think that that was when it
1:59:24
was really fun when it was we were literally the bad news there we were shitty at everything individually but if we put them together there's this weird Alchemy the symbiosis that happened that uh you know that led to this unique way of shooting and cutting and telling stories but for a while was great then we got too big and also everyone caught up like people were started sending me like ABC News news and CBS News stuff that look exactly
1:59:54
like Vice so you set a standard that then got copied yeah 100% 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 and get a job back in the day when there still
2:00:10
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 cuz it was it was no secret sauce you know device it was like
2:00:24
just like the editor would stay ex me 24 hours to [ __ ] cut the thing and polish the the shooter would just [ __ ] stay there to get the shot no matter what happened you know the the the the the host would be like I'm not
2:00:39
leaving until [ __ ] or ask the questions that nobody else would ask and all of that together made to this weird sort of alchemy and and you know that's one thing I miss because I don't know that you'll ever work with a team that
2:00:52
you'll put together like that again because nobody in the right mind is going to put together a team that's never done it yeah would you say the um what unified it all was the attitude would that be right yeah also I think a
2:01:06
lot of people couldn't get jobs and they were just like well this is my shot like so I'm going to give it my all and there's a lot of we we used to come up with taglines that we thought were funny and like my favorite was rumored
2:01:20
to be among the best but like that's really funny yeah rumor to be but we but we had one for a while which is like less shittier I forget what it was less shittier than everybody else and that used to be our line like just let's be less shitty than everybody else because everything's so [ __ ] by and large and 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 [ __ ] that's
2:01:47
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
2:02:01
make those lists for me 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 North 10 which was a rabbit warrant of like we put together like 40
2:02:18
offices because we had no money would get that office and then you know that someone would leave and we get down and it was like tunnels things whatever and I remember going like oh [ __ ] I forgot my thing I went there like midnight on a Sunday and it was packed wow just Ram because people were like this really worked and then they hung out we we had bars in the in the office and stuff so people just drink and they would just
2:02:40
stay there that's what worked I mean when it was I'll tell you when it was when it's us against uh the world right that's when it worked when we did well we bought a whole city block not bought it but put put together it was like the Starship
2:02:58
Enterprise it was [ __ ] like amazing edit Suites and everything was [ __ ] like you know stateof the yard and we had a farm where we gr own vegetables and [ __ ] and that's when it went bad because that's when it was like us
2:03:13
against them them meaning like us like meeting the management of the company because when was all the rabbit warrants and like had to stand R for the bathroom whatever we were all together we were all in a mission we all and when there
2:03:29
was a time when I lived off of gambling because I didn't have any money so then when I got you know have 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
2:03:42
spent a lot of money at dinner now what happened was there was a there was an earnings call for MGM bagio or whatever they're like uh uh Vegas is back there was a big whale he came in he spent $400,000 of dinner and somebody called the
2:04:02
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 work but you can buy a cheese sandwich or you can buy a $400,000 dinner they don't give you the money
2:04:14
like they give you a comp allowance but if you leave the comp dies so I'm like okay it's comp it's free like because you spent a lot of money gambling or you made a lot of money gambling 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 Cal but when the story came out that it was $400,000 dinner that's when it became US versus them
2:04:45
they're like Shane isn't one of us anymore and that's when the union started and all this stuff and it was us versus them and and I see you're like oh like that was bad yeah and to this day you can't explain to someone it was
2:05:01
compt it was like yeah you either take it or you don't like yes but so that was bad uh 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
2:05:19
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 they like
2:05:34
okay and I would give my own money because I wanted the equity yeah but people just wanted money and I mean there were people who also had Equity you know that you know it's not we if you're like at a Silicon Valley startup
2:05:48
they know about seed rounds and down rounds and up and our kids never had anything so like it was like where's my money and you're like well it's not public company you know doesn't exist did it ever become a public company it
2:06:00
never did was it close at any point we were going to do a spack but like every we were a day late in a dollar short like spacks were hot I guess in 22 21 22 and then we were going to spack in 23 you know BuzzFeed did a spack and you
2:06:16
know just it just died and so I think they spaed at 12 and went up 15 and now it's at like 1 wow so yeah spaxs became like the devil so we were going to do a spack and then we just said I mean everyone was spacking as a last Stitch effort I mean that's the other thing it's not just us like BuzzFeed who was number two behind us did the same thing and at one point they were like I don't know $38 million market cap and you're
2:06:47
like everyone's looking to say like I always say like it's like who left the the port hole open in the Titanic well it hit it hit a [ __ ] Iceberg the iceberg is the big five the port hole it's just [ __ ] doesn't matter but
2:07:02
everyone's like looking for that person who left the port hole over but yeah it's what I would say is it's depressing because it means like the sort of end like that year last or whatever question before who's coming up who's the next VI
2:07:15
or that's the shame there should be somebody who took Vice and and ate our lunch and is better than us and cooler Global and [ __ ] out they great um I don't think that there's going to be that not because I'm want to say we're
2:07:29
the I'm saying it's because independent publishing as a as a general unless it's very Niche is gone because it's just all the erors being sucked out of the room that sucks that sucks for everybody and what what Vice was bellweather for for
2:07:44
New Media and Independent Media well we're also the Bell weather for that's not happening anymore which sucks the best time of were three which was 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 like my dad was a prick and a and 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
2:08:14
have the best magazine in Canada but the best magazine in the world wow you know that was big wow yeah shocked by the call he's never never said said like that before even now I'm getting anyway beautiful so that time was good the
2:08:31
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
2:08:46
food speak the language and 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
2:09:05
doing with Vice and then not having any fun not having any and then flying out again yeah and so when you realize I used to have the freedom because I controled the business yeah to go and build that's what I'm good at and by the way we were
2:09:25
spectacularly successful what I was spectacularly unsuccessful had yeah was flying in hanging out with lawyers and [ __ ] accountants saying here's how you should do it and you just go well [ __ ] you which doesn't help anybody
2:09:37
either and then flying out on a plane just going what the [ __ ] did I just do yeah that was terrible is that the difference between um what a Founder does and what an operator does 100% that's the difference you hit the nail
2:09:52
in the head the founder is like this is my baby let's build let's create and the operator goes okay publishing isn't making money do it with somebody else okay Studios killing it up with the studio TV [ __ ] let's do it that's
2:10:08
that's what an operator does and you know and they know how to manage those boardrooms and they know how to manage those lawyers and accountants like at some point you have like 15 different outside consultants in these meetings
2:10:22
giving you all their whatever I never knew who Mackenzie was and then all of a sudden I was surrounded by Mackenzie people and you're like this is just ter 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 it's people who had seen something by Vice and they liked it and then they come in and say you know what we should do we should do this and
2:10:48
you're like that's not it that was like shitty 17 years ago we did it we're not going to do it again like all the most the IDE but lawyers like they all want to be creative or they all want to do this and you're like what are you
2:11:02
[ __ ] everyone should have a mustache and wear yellow and you're like what what are you [ __ ] talking about and every you know what to like want to talk about being authentic and you're like do many you have to say it's authentic it's not t