A company built on a bullshitter. A company founded by a white supremacist. And a company run by a man who started a magazine with a Pakistani-American man named Saroosh Alvi. This is the story of how Shane Smith and Reeves Weideman started Vice, and how they built a company that was basically a pyramid scheme. And how they managed to get away with it for 25 years, even though it was a scam that cost them millions of dollars in profits. And why it s not just a scam, it s a massive scam. And it s probably not even a scam at all. But it s still a scam. It s a big scam, and it s been going on for a long, long time. And the problem is, Shane Smith s plan for Vice was that by the time the suckers caught on, he d never be stuck owning the company he co-founded by Reeves Wiedeman. And that s why he s not worth a billion dollars. And I m not saying that Vice is not worth anything, but I think there s a good chance that it s worth a lot less than a billion. And there s no question that Vice s a scam too. But that s not the only scam that the internet has always been wrong about what they ve been worth, and that they ve always been a big pyramid scheme, and they ve never been worth anything. And they ve got it all wrong. and that s a lot of people have been wrong, but they re not worth it so why they should be worth anything at all, right? And why they re a scam? And what they re worth it? And how much they re going to start a business in the first place? And are they not? And why are they don t need it? And what s it really worth? and why they ll ever be worth it, you ll have to have a plan to make money? And is it worth it anyway? And who s going to make it? and what s the point of it? I ll tell you what they are going to do with it? What s the difference between them? And will they ll make it in the money they re gonna make it, and are they going to get it? Is it worth anything? And if they can t make it then they ll have it, then it s gonna be good enough? And they ll be okay with it or not? And can they have it?
Transcript
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00:00:00.000I guess I better talk about this Vice article in New York Mag.
00:00:05.000The general gist of it seems to be they're accusing Vice of basically being a pyramid scheme.
00:00:15.000And no, they're not worth billions and billions and billions.
00:00:20.000The title is, A Company Built on a Bluff.
00:00:23.000For almost 25 years, Shane Smith's plan for Vice was that by the time the suckers caught on, he'd never be stuck owning the company he co-founded by Reeves Weideman.
00:00:36.000Every time I see these articles, I just skim through them.
00:00:40.000Going, please don't call me racist, please don't call me racist.
00:00:51.000Just to sort of jump ahead, there's this writer, I think he's at Daily Beast, Spencer Ackerman, and he goes, company founded by a white supremacist?
00:04:38.000That the internet has always been very wrong about what I got paid, my net worth.
00:04:43.000They've always been wrong about what Shane is worth and what Vice is worth.
00:04:48.000I think one of the, if you could call it a trick, and I'm not saying this is justified, but I think there's a misunderstanding with big business when you get to be a certain level, where you go, alright, someone bought this many shares at this price, the company's worth that.
00:05:07.000So if you get 25% for a billion, then the company's worth 4 billion.
00:05:14.000A company's only worth what people are willing to pay for it.
00:05:17.000Now, if you are a CEO whisperer, and you manage to get a guy to pay a billion, that doesn't necessarily mean your company's worth 4.
00:05:24.000It just means it does according to one guy.
00:05:28.000And when you're not an IPO, right, when you're a private company that's not publicly listed, it's, it's, if someone wants to pay, if your neighbor loves your car so much, he wants to just own one door, and he pays you a million dollars for the door, that doesn't make your car worth ten million dollars.
00:05:45.000That just means some guy is really into your car for some reason, and he might eventually buy the whole thing for ten million, but that doesn't mean another neighbor's gonna want a door also for that kind of price.
00:05:59.000Yeah, I was annoyed that he said in the article that my noxious humor.
00:06:07.000Vice also learned its edginess had to be packaged.
00:06:10.000In 2008, Alvin Smith bought out McInnes, whose noxious brand of humor, he is now an admired figure in the far right, known to say things like, I'm becoming anti-Semitic.
00:06:20.000I'm gonna have trouble suing him for that because he's prefaced it with brand of humor.
00:06:25.000Had defined the magazine's punk voice, but was becoming a financial liability.
00:06:30.000A year later, Vice hired Andrew Cuomo's communications team to burnish its image.
00:06:49.000I'm ranting away about how annoying our tour guide is, and as a crystal clear joke I say I'm becoming anti-semitic.
00:06:56.000Now that's been taken out of context and will follow me forever, of course, and maybe my kids won't be invited to a fucking bat mitzvah because of this liar.
00:07:03.000And by the way, one of the reasons that little quote, that joke,
00:07:07.000has been used against me so much is this guy Jesse Brown in Canada land is his site and he was a dude who came from Montreal and he wanted to work for us in New York City his parents probably paid for him to come down and stay wherever he wanted and he had this article and it was it was what this is 2000 I'm talking now 18 years ago and it was about how Jews are superior the superior race
00:08:09.000And this is when we just moved to New York and I was trying to ingratiate ourselves with like street kids like this gang Iraq and these graffiti kids like ear snot.
00:08:19.000And to have an article about the inherent beauty and superiority of this particularly white religion just smelled of like bourgeois Canadian aristocrats.
00:08:32.000Let's not invite them to our things in New York and you know make them part of the New York culture.
00:08:40.000And he's been obsessed with me ever since, trying to prove I'm an anti-Semite for almost two decades now.
00:08:47.000And then this other guy, Spencer Ackerman, probably Jewish too, he's also consumed with this idea.
00:08:53.000And I've talked about it on other shows where I think this comes from.
00:08:55.000I think it comes from traumatized grandparents, but they just like, they have all this evidence.
00:09:01.000I call them not-see glasses, Nazi glasses.
00:09:04.000And they just have all this evidence to the contrary that you're not a Nazi, that no one really is.
00:09:08.000And they're just like, yeah, but in 2003, and Spencer Ackerman does this, he goes, no, I can prove you're a white supremacist.
00:09:14.000Even though your wife is American Indian, you've got three non-white kids, you started Vice with a Pakistani gentleman, et cetera, et cetera.
00:09:22.000Jesus, you know how tired you'd be if you were racist in New York City?
00:09:25.000If you're a bigot in New York City, there's like, maybe a fraction of the population is white, straight males.
00:09:35.000And they're out in South Brooklyn working construction.
00:09:40.000So then he brings up this New York Times piece, which I've explained in my book in many places, but I'll just repeat it here for fun, where I said, I'm proud to be white.
00:09:46.000I think it's something to be very proud of, and I think we're diluting our culture, and we have to assimilate to a white Western way of life.
00:09:52.000And then the next sentence says, Gavin McInnes claims that though hipsters are annoying, at least they're white.
00:09:58.000And of course that sounds terrible and that's been haunting me ever since.
00:10:06.000Vanessa Gregora Darius, who's not the most tenacious reporter in the world, she's the one who put Mattress Girl on the cover of New York Mag and said, the new sexual revolution.
00:10:14.000Anyway, she was having trouble with this article.
00:13:05.000It's like a homeless man with his handout at the end of every article.
00:13:08.000And that's what's happening to liberal media because they're shitty at their job because they're Bigfoot chasers and tell you Bigfoot is hiding around every corner, but in this case, it's a Nazi.
00:13:16.000But anyway, so we were already at a confrontational interview, and I did say that to the guy, but in the context of the interview, it's funny because I'm dressed as a skinhead, Shane is dressed as a soccer hooligan, and Saroosh is wearing a suit, and he has blood all over his face and head, and he's holding a bandage to his head.
00:13:36.000He was our hate crime victim, and we were National Front-like English, British, you know, Nazis.
00:13:46.000In fact, the joke was a parody of the idea that Nazis could work with a Pakistani guy.
00:13:54.000So once again, and I talked about this with Josh Denny on my show, it's a parody of racism.
00:14:01.000But they want the Nazis so bad that they just take that out and then it just snowballs and it just follows you for the rest of your life as evidence that you're secretly a Nazi, you're hiding it.
00:14:11.000Which you also say to that, well why hide it?
00:14:15.000Like, I understand maybe secretly being gay, but then, then if you were secretly gay and you liked this guy, there's gonna be that moment where you go to place a kiss on his lips, and he's gonna go, what the fuck are you doing?
00:14:30.000So, say you, like, start a secret Nazi organization, there's all these black guys in it, and then you go, okay guys, draw the blinds, we're Nazis.
00:14:59.000It's really, really in-depth, but it basically says that the CEO whispering has come to an end because Disney, I guess, ran the books and said, you're not even close to worth $4 billion.
00:15:15.000You don't have any money, you're deep in debt, and all these eyeballs you had are fake spam bots.
00:15:21.000I'm just paraphrasing the article, by the way.
00:15:27.000And you barely had any viewers to your show.
00:15:31.000Which makes sense if it's true because you can't be all about millennials and the young people and then choose a dinosaur media like television.
00:15:40.000No one's going to... young people don't even own TVs.
00:15:44.000They're on their phones non-stop, which is a vice.
00:15:51.000Is that everything I had to say about it?
00:15:58.000I mean, it also talks about Shane having, you know, a $25 million house, and people there, they said there was a common rule called the 22, where you hire a 22-year-old, you pay them 22 grand, and make them work 22 hours a day.
00:17:31.000That's where that dude wanted to do the juicer awesome thing.
00:17:35.000And, uh, we were then there with a few other companies that he had, uh, purchased because he wanted to be a multi-lifestyle brand, multi-channel brand it was called.
00:17:45.000And then there's rumors that this guy was doing his own pyramid scheme.
00:17:50.000Maybe that's where this technique was learned from.
00:17:53.000Telling investors he's worth a lot more than he is.
00:18:51.000I did get married, and then I had kids on the way, and I wasn't one of the boys anymore.
00:18:54.000I wasn't going on vacation with them, and Shane and I had a house together in Costa Rica, and we'd always go there, and I would rather just be alone with my wife there.
00:19:21.000Go ask, you know, Bryce Fanich or Melissa Burgos or Ryan Duffy, Trace Crutchfield, Leslie Arfin, Amy Kellner, Ryan McGinley, Tim Barber, Melissa Burgos.
00:20:52.000If you listen to all my podcasts, you probably heard this before.
00:20:55.000Um, but eventually, you know, that is going to experience some metal fatigue of bending it and bending it and bending it and eventually it breaks.
00:21:04.000And I don't blame those guys for, you know, thinking all we do is dig holes, dig us out of holes, patch up relationships that Gavin severed with some horrible joke.
00:23:12.000And you'd be surprised, by the way, how many people in pop culture are pop culture nerds.
00:23:18.000So these guys eventually get so into it
00:23:47.000Rob Zombie gets so into the sort of minutiae of trading tapes and this is a guy from that band that they become a band and they become the thing that people trade.
00:24:54.000So, I know CEOs are overpaid, and the wage gap is fucking ridiculous, but I'm of two minds about it sometimes, because you'll hear like, this company was going under, and then the CEO got a bonus, and he got, you know, 400 million bonus.
00:25:10.000You go, that does sound fucking ridiculous, especially when the guys on the line are making 60 grand a year.
00:25:16.000But, I also think, well, what's the whole story there?
00:25:20.000Did he save the company from losing $4 billion?
00:25:24.000This is not Shane, I'm talking about a hypothetical here.
00:25:26.000Well then, he kind of deserves $400 million.
00:25:46.000And when it gets wet, then there's food around it, and it comes to life, and then mixes with more cement powder, and then the crack heals itself, just like human skin.
00:25:56.000So this is going to solve the problem of cracked pavements and buildings cracking all over the world.
00:26:57.000And I think people want, I think the big picture here is, screw Shane's personality, the big picture here is that a lot of people in journalism are beta males and they have a lot of resentment.
00:27:11.000And I think they resent that Shane and Vice and me and Sarouj,
00:27:16.000Built a successful media empire and it's been around for 20 years when countless others have failed, including the New York Times.
00:27:24.000Carlos Slim had to bail them out of bankruptcy and they've become a pamphlet for Carlos Slim's agenda.
00:27:37.000So it's very tough to survive in media.
00:27:40.000And, you know, we were a newsprint, English newsprint in Montreal, and then managed to keep adapting to National, to Glossy Magazine, to multi-channel brand that had stores.
00:28:43.000You spend the entire article calling, including the title, saying that this is all bullshit, a company built on a bluff, this guy's a liar, hustler, it's all fake.
00:28:54.000And then you end it with, but no one's lost any money yet, so it seems to be working.
00:29:51.000So I think a lot of people went, you know what, I'm just going to fucking, this is a pyramid scheme, I'm going to get in and then get out when the money's good.
00:30:00.000And it sounds, this is sort of what he's accusing Vice of.
00:30:03.000Of being at that part of the Bernie Madoff scheme.
00:30:07.000But the big picture here is that you can't trust the media.
00:30:12.000That's really the takeaway for this particular issue.
00:30:18.000Anything you read, especially in 2018, especially these beta males who have so much baggage like Spencer Ackerman and Jesse Brown and all these Huffington Post guys.
00:30:28.000And then of course there's the spinsters that run these places with an iron fist threatening all these betas with HR complaints and you know Slate, Salon, Huffington Post.
00:30:40.000They are all terrible at their job, and I think all you can glean from their writing is here's some topics you may want to look into.
00:30:50.000Like when they tell you that Trump is about to ruin the economy,
00:31:58.000Actually when I talk to these guys I get kind of sad because I still don't have a concealed carry.
00:32:03.000I have plenty of guns but they're all long guns and I have cop friends and I see them with their guns and I just I want to weep.
00:32:11.000I actually suggested a commercial where they we
00:32:14.000We have a guy who's in New York City hearing all these people in the South and Arizona talk about their holsters and their guns and all their, like, Dana Lash.
00:32:22.000Dana Lash has so many guns that she had to move because her gun room was too full.
00:32:30.000And when you hear it as a New Yorker who's sane, by the way, not these liberals, I honestly want to shed a tear because I'm so, I'm very rarely jealous.
00:32:39.000But if you have more than three kids and you have a concealed carry, I'm jealous of you.
00:33:10.000And the beauty of this holster is when you take it out, shoot, you can put it back easy.
00:33:15.000Some of these softer holsters, you go to put it back and it's not easy to do, which in a dangerous situation, you don't want to have your gun on you.
00:33:23.000You know, sorry, that's a terrible thing to say.
00:33:25.000In a dangerous situation, when you pull out your gun, you also want to be able to reholster it.
00:33:30.000If you have something else going on, and then pull it out again.
00:33:32.000Maybe in a situation that's like an hour long, that's involving some real danger, you may want to have your gun in and out of your holster like five times.
00:34:32.000It's like Joe Rogan says, men are mean to each other's faces and totally kind about each other behind our backs.
00:34:39.000Women are nice to each other face to face and then just rip them to shreds behind their backs.
00:34:46.000Like a man will go up to a fat friend and he'll put his arms around him and he'll just grip his fat and he'll go, you are the fattest and most disgusting pig in the entire universe.
00:34:58.000And that man who's having his belly grabbed will go,
00:35:01.000I am enormous and then they'll both laugh.
00:35:05.000I've told this story before but I used to run an ad agency.
00:35:08.000We sold it to Havas called Rooster New York and I would go on the road with this guy Sebastian who looks like Thor and we'd be brushing our teeth in the bathroom and so we're we'd share a hotel and we're looking each other in the in the
00:37:10.000There were some other things I wanted to get to that were not vice related.
00:37:13.000Oh yeah, speaking of men and women, I thought this was kind of interesting.
00:37:16.000The mayor of London said that there's too many men, like if you look at Wikipedia, there's all these men stories and men being represented and there's barely any women.
00:38:51.000So, they're more consequential than us, but it's less story-ish.
00:38:56.000Like, you're not going to have a Wikipedia page about a woman named Gladys Hepburn, who had 13 kids, and loved them to death, and had a stable relationship with no infidelities, and was married for 35 years.
00:39:11.000Boring, but invaluable, like amazing, and those 13 functional, happy people went on to be, you know, successful tradesmen and professionals, and then they had four kids because they loved their childhood so much, and they wanted their kids to have the same kind of joy, so that joy went out exponentially.
00:39:35.000Good for society and has way more impact than Blackbeard, but I'd rather see a story about Blackbeard, because it's short and sweet and he's got a sword and he jumped from a boat to a boat and chopped a guy's head off.
00:40:53.000And I realize we imbue all this like gossip and, oh, there's probably an orgy going on in there.
00:40:59.000But once you peel back the layers, if you could see into people's lives, read all their emails from like the past week, you're not going to find like a plot to kill the president or a gun trading ring or, you know, orgies going on.
00:41:11.000You're just going to be like, hey, did I leave my socks there?
00:41:14.000And it's not that people are boring, but people are just trying to get through the day.
00:42:25.000I also wanted to talk about this willingness the left has to let America burn to the ground just out of spite, like Bill Maher said he wanted the economy to suffer so it would hurt Trump.
00:42:36.000And all these people pissed off about the- the meeting Kim Jong-un and saying, oh fuck, who cares?
00:42:41.000It's just a mee- it's just a photo op!
00:42:44.000And how vindictive that is, but I explain all that on my show, Get Off My Lawn.
00:43:20.000Even if, just check it out and then cancel your subscription if you don't like it.
00:43:25.000I mean, Roaming Millennial, who is a nine, just went to England to sort of get the heartbeat, the real sort of street taste of what's going on with Tommy Robinson in England and talk to people there on the streets about how they feel to get the sort of temperature.
00:43:42.000I don't think they've ever met a cop in their life.
00:44:12.000And by the way cops are involved in my black eye story, but you have to go to get off my lawn to get all the juicy gossip It's it's not Tuesday's episode.
00:44:20.000It's all explained on Monday's episode, but all of these Subjects I just alluded to but didn't get into depth on the Argento and we want America to fail and my black eye That's all discussed in depth with funny pictures and videos on get off my lawn at CRTV.com done hacking hawking
00:44:49.000I promise the next show will be centered on comedy.
00:44:51.000And speaking of comedy, by the way, check out Josh Denny on Get Off My Lawn, discussing all these people trying to get him fired for what could not be more obvious jokes.
00:45:01.000My favorite one, imagine wanting someone fired for this.
00:45:05.000He goes, hey, Asian girl at the pool, can you close your legs?
00:45:07.000We don't want to see your slanty pussy.
00:46:05.000By giving to The Salvation Army, where every donation fights for good.
00:46:09.000Visit SalvationArmy.ListenAndGive.org now to help fund bill pay assistance programs and climate-controlled community centers for our neighbors most in need.