← What Is Happening Here | Canadaland Investigates
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- [00:00]
Christian Dropo
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- [00:58]
Samantha
Hi there.
- [00:59]
Christian Dropo
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- [01:06]
Samantha
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- [01:19]
Christian Dropo
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- [01:22]
Samantha
Solve a real problem and make sure the right people hear about it.
- [01:26]
Christian Dropo
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- [01:36]
Kasia Mihailovic
This episode is brought to you by Fizz Mobile. Have you ever looked at your phone bill and your eyes kind of pop out of your skull cartoon style? Well, Fizz would actually never do that to you. The price of your mobile plan will never go up unless you decide to make a change. Visit Fizz Ca to learn more about Fizz Mobile and its long list of added value features. That's Fizz CA and activate a first plan using the referral code CAN25 to get $25 off and 10 gigabytes of free data.
- [02:11]
Justin Ling
Okay, so what is quote unquote old vice? I mean it was the days when, you know, Gavin McGinnis was still there, when they would do horrible things to their interns and everything was, you know, ironic joke and that nothing meant anything. Nihilism was the official editorial policy of the magazine.
- [02:28]
Samantha
That's Justin Ling, a reporter who worked at Vice Canada with Slava Pastakov and who still freelances for them. Full disclosure. He was also a host for Canadaland, the company that makes this podcast. He's agreed to talk with us about his time at Vice because Vice itself and its staff won't talk about the story, and he feels like someone has to defend them from what he sees as our misguided journalism.
- [02:53]
Justin Ling
I think this podcast is unbelievably stupid. Apologies to the people sitting in front of me, but I think this podcast is a bad idea.
- [03:00]
Samantha
According to Justin, Vice gets a bad rap because of its early reputation, a reputation it has since totally outgrown.
- [03:08]
Justin Ling
I know there's all of the stories of yesteryear advice, and I heard a lot of them. That was late 90s, early 2000s. The magazine and the outlet went through a thousand different reinventions. When I joined, it was a company that was no longer built for hipster skateboarders, but was suddenly PIV pivoting towards long form documentaries, thoughtful reporting, cultural investigations, you know, looking at the effects of the drug war, talking about issues that don't get platformed elsewhere.
- [03:37]
Samantha
By the time Justin left Vice, he says it was pretty much like any other media company.
- [03:43]
Justin Ling
The culture was, I have to tell you, incredibly boring.
- [03:48]
Samantha
What particularly galls him is Slava's explanation that the reason why he got into cocaine smuggling was because he intended to write about his crimes for Vice.
- [03:58]
Justin Ling
Bullshit, Bullshit. Just straight up and down. This is him trying to pass off his own personal decision to commit a crime. Not only just commit a crime, but convince others to commit crimes for him and to make money. So he's blaming Vice. That's what he's trying to do. He's trying to remove his own personal culpability in this and push it off to his employer. So did Slava think that he was doing this for the sake of, you know, the content minds? No, I don't think so. I, I, I think this is revisionism. He's trying to explain it away now that he's been caught. I'm here to tell you that the person responsible for all of this is, I think it was Slava.
- [04:32]
Samantha
There's no arguing with that. Slava's culpability is undisputed. He did plead guilty after all. But Vice's role in this story goes beyond the direct connections we've explored so far. It's true that the person responsible for Slava's crimes is Slava, but it's also true that all of this happened within a culture that Vice and its founders have claimed credit for creating. And that without Vice, it's hard to imagine imagine any of it happening the way that it did or to the people it happened to. And when a media company is as successful as Vice has been at spreading its culture, it's hard to imagine how that company could ever outgrow that culture, even when it wanted to. In the pages of early Vice, you'll find ordinary people turning their lives into porn, figuratively and literally. You'll find the roots of influencer culture, where everyone is selling their own personal brand. You'll find an editorial voice that became the language of the Internet itself. So today we're going to go way back and explore how a tiny, funny, mean, self described welfare scam run out of a dirty loft apartment in Montreal in the mid-90s went on to change the world. This series is almost over. Our next episode will be our last. That's when we'll find out what happened to Slava and the rest of the drug smugglers and where they all are today. But before we end our story, we need to go back to the very beginning. I'm Kasia Mihailovic and this is Cool Mules.
- [06:27]
Kasia Mihailovic
This episode is brought to you by Fizz Mobile. You know those emails you send to your future self to open up like 10 years later? I got one of those the other day. It was not a pleasant surprise, not gonna lie. But there is a world where past you can actually give future you a useful, tangible and practical gift. Data Fizz, a mobile carrier based out of Montreal that you can get in Alberta, bc, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec, has got this sick data Rollo. So if past you doesn't use all of your data, future you gets a bump. How about five extra gigs from one month ago? You Fizz has got a ton of other sick features. No fixed term contracts, no price hikes, and their sick loyalty program. Visit Fizz Ca to learn more about Fizz Mobile and its long list of added value features. That's Fizz CA. And activate a first plan using the referral code CAN25 to get $25 off and 10 gigabytes of free data.
- [07:31]
Jesse Brown
Greetings, my fellow Americans. I'm just joking. I'm not an American. I'm the editor and publisher of Canada Land. My name is Jesse Brown and I don't even know if we're friends anymore. I'm told that we're in some sort of a war, a trade war with Americans. But you just listened to one of our podcasts to the Kopernick Affair. Thank you for listening to our stuff. I'm going to try to do something very difficult here. I'm going to try to convince Americans to support a Canadian podcast company during a trade war. And I think I'm going to do that. I think I'm going to accomplish that. If you listen to this message, I think you're going to want to support Canadaland. Who are we even? We are the first podcast company in Canada. We've been doing this for 12 years. And we do investigations, long form, deep dive, journalistic investigations like the one you're listening to now. This story of Hassan Diab, this story, the Kopernik Affair. Dana and Alex pitched it to a bunch of American podcast companies and international podcast companies. But the industry is not looking for deep dive investigations right now. They are expensive, they are difficult, and they were turned down by people who loved the story but didn't have the budgets for it. Canadaland supported them for this 18 month investigation. We've been doing it again and again. This is how we made our reputation. We began over a decade ago by doing what you would call a MeToo investigation of a very famous sexual predator here in Canada, a guy named Jean Ghomeshi. We did that story before, years before the MeToo movement happened. We did that here. And we're threatened with a lawsuit for it. We've been threatened with lawsuits again and again and again. Jordan Peterson threatened us with a lawsuit. Hollywood director Bryan Singer threatened us with a lawsuit. I have been surveyed by people who we reported on. My family has been under surveillance. A Republican combat PR firm was enlisted to discredit us. And nevertheless we persist. And we have never been successfully sued for libel or defamation because we care about getting it right. And we take these risks to bring you stories that nobody else is looking at. We take on really big stories and we take on really big and powerful people. And the only way we are able to do that is because our listeners support us. But we have never asked American listeners to support us before because we're called Canada Land. And the idea that Americans would support a Canadian podcast company, to a lot of people I've been told it's just a joke. They won't do it. I don't think that's true. Our stories are not just for Canadians. The majority of people who listen to the Kopernick Affair are American. We are going to be publishing more investigations on this feed on Canadaland Investigates. And by becoming a supporter, you are funding those investigations. And we will give you all the things. We'll give you ad free podcasts and you'll get to hear it before everybody else. And you'll get bonus content. You'll actually be paying for Dana and Alex to keep reporting on what happens next to Hassan Diab because this story is not over. It's 3.99amonth. We want it to be like a coffee to support Canadaland. We want it to be like, set it and forget it. You're never gonna regret the price of a coffee to fund this scrappy team of like 15 journalists who want nothing but to tell you an amazing story that would otherwise never be told. I will level with you. It is just a surprise to us that you're even here. We're Canada land. We never thought we'd have 100,000 regular American listeners. We are so proud to have you. But we need you to support us the same way we ask our Canadian listeners to support us. And unlike the Canadian listeners, we don't really make much ad money off of our American listeners because we sell mostly Canadian ads. We kind of need this to work. So to get the ball rolling, we have a special offer for the first hundred American listeners to come to canadaland.com investigates and sign up for a year's worth of support. And there's a big discount on that as well. We will ship to you, to your home in America, tariffs be damned. A free Canadaland T shirt. Wear it proudly and defiantly. And by the way, though we give our supporters every perk we can imagine, our podcasts are free. We do not paywall this content. So what you're really paying for when you support us is you're paying for everybody else to get this stuff. And that's how journalism has impact, because it has reach. We're hoping that just some of you will Support us for 3.99amonth at canadaland.com investigates. Please go do it right now. And thank you. It's not.
- [12:37]
Samantha
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- [12:38]
Gavin McInnes
But not sure where to?
- [12:40]
Samantha
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- [12:46]
Christian Dropo
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- [12:48]
Samantha
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- [13:06]
Jessica Lowe
Really can't comment about Vice post 2008. I haven't looked at it. I haven't seen the show. I've never been to the site.
- [13:13]
Samantha
That's Gavin McInnes who co founded Vice magazine with Shane Smith and Soroush Alvy in Montreal in 1994.
- [13:20]
Jessica Lowe
I would assume because it was taken over by the head of marketing, that it's focused on marketing and it's slow on substance.
- [13:27]
Samantha
He gave an interview to Canadaland in New York city back in 2014.
- [13:31]
Jessica Lowe
I think that Vice trying to their Stalinist revisionism is sort of blown up in their face because it's like saying Vince Neil wasn't in Motley Crue.
- [13:41]
Samantha
In 2008, Gavin McInnes and Vice parted ways. It was a bitter breakup. He was quickly expunged from the Vice brand. His credit as co founder was erased from their masthead. When the filmmaker and Vice creative director Spike Jones interviewed Shane Smith about Vice's start for an in house documentary, they blurred Gavin's face out of an old photo. Their attempts to erase Gavin from history seem to have compelled him to exaggerate his legacy.
- [14:09]
Jessica Lowe
Look, the only reason I say I invented hipsters is so no one else takes it.
- [14:12]
Samantha
It's a ludicrous claim, but not an empty one. The truth is Gavin McInnes did have a lot to do with establishing the modern hipster look, attitude and voice.
- [14:23]
Katherine Burrell
So yeah, I mean, Gavin would have the balls to say that he invented it.
- [14:27]
Samantha
That's Jessica Lowe. She was a 19 year old university student when she dated Gavin, just as Vice magazine was starting.
- [14:35]
Katherine Burrell
When I first met Gavin, his uniform basically was a pair of ill fitting, but skinny cords, big boots and a plaid shirt, or a skinny, ripped, stinky T shirt and facial hair and tattoos. And now when I walk around London or New York or Toronto or Ottawa or frankly, Kingston, Ontario, a solid half of the young people walking around look like that.
- [15:15]
Samantha
Gavin was the editor of ICE and he also wrote most of it, did the layout and illustrations. He started a wildly influential feature called Do's and Don'ts, which was just pictures of people with captions full of cruel jokes about how they were dressed and whether he'd have sex with them.
- [15:31]
Jessica Lowe
I think one thing about Do's and Don'ts was it kept repeating the rules every single day, twice a day.
- [15:37]
Katherine Burrell
The do's that he would pick back then were like super high waisted skirts and knee socks and old sneakers. So his aesthetic was disseminated far and wide because of that column, which was very influential.
- [15:54]
Samantha
Gavin was the chief creative force behind Vice. He made Vice what it was when Vice was infantile, influential and totally full of shit.
- [16:03]
Jessica Lowe
I wrote about 80% of it. And, you know, we tried to get, you need more blacks writing, you need more women writing. And I would try to find them. So in order to meet those demands, I eventually just had to become these blacks and women. And I would talk about the black experience and I would talk feminist anthems and new takes on my reproductive system.
- [16:23]
Samantha
The other founders, Shane Smith and Soroush Alvi, may have wiped Gavin's name from the official company history, but they haven't succeeded in wiping away his impact. You can still hear Gavin's voice in Vice's headlines and beyond.
- [16:36]
Jessica Lowe
I approached writing from a non writing standpoint and the first review I did in Vice was in the first issue and I just said it was furnace face. And I said the first songs come out like do do do do do, and then the second one is more.
- [16:50]
Samantha
Like do do do do do do.
- [16:51]
Jessica Lowe
Do and spelled that out.
- [16:54]
Samantha
The fact is, Gavin's vernacular style of writing and the snarky, mean captions he wrote for do's and don'ts in the late 90s read a lot like the cruel and funny comments millions of young people now post to the intern on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat in text messages. People write online like how they talk. And for a lot of people my age and a little bit older, the first time we read writing like that was in Vice.
- [17:21]
Jessica Lowe
I would swing the pendulum the other way too, and put write all caps and like write things like, okay, one thing I could say about the writing back then, and maybe the magazine's influence, was that we taught people to just write like themselves. And yes, you can be an airhead and say, not use words you don't understand.
- [17:39]
Samantha
You know, Gavin encouraged young people to write like themselves in Vice, but he also compelled them to write for free or very close to it. And he had no qualms about rewriting their articles in his own voice whenever he wanted to, with or without their permission.
- [17:55]
Jessica Lowe
And my attitude with that was, if your writing is so shitty that it needs me to add two paragraphs, I can't wait for you to quit.
- [18:01]
Samantha
Whether Gavin was pretending to be people who were not real or pretending that real people wrote things that they didn't, the common feature was deceit. And Vice was built on deceit. That's not my opinion, by the way. It's a fact. Vice was born when Soroush, Gavin and Shane were, as they put it, scamming a welfare jobs program at a multicultural community newspaper called Voice of Montreal. According to Shane, he, Gavin and Soroush took the magazine from its Haitian owners. So you stole the magazine from a non profit organization that's trying to help Haitians.
- [18:38]
Shane Smith
Correct.
- [18:39]
Gavin McInnes
That's kind of not that nice.
- [18:42]
Samantha
Yeah, even the name Vice started as a lie to help boost the rebranded magazine's profile. Here's Soroush on npr. We came up with this thing where.
- [18:53]
Christian Dropo
We said the Village Voice has a.
- [18:54]
Samantha
Trademark on the word voice, and they're suing us and forcing us to change our name.
- [18:59]
Jesse Brown
Because you guys were Voice of Montreal.
- [19:01]
Samantha
Yes.
- [19:01]
Christian Dropo
We told the world that we were being sued by the Village Voice, and that's why we had to change the name to Vice.
- [19:06]
Slava Pastakov
So you basically made this thing up.
- [19:09]
Jesse Brown
About the Village Voice to generate publicity.
- [19:11]
Slava Pastakov
Yeah, and it was a complete lie.
- [19:13]
Christian Dropo
It was a total lie.
- [19:15]
Samantha
There were other lies. Here again is Gavin's old girlfriend Jessica, who also dated Shane during Vice's early years in Montreal.
- [19:23]
Katherine Burrell
Deceit has been a big part of their story from the very beginning. You know, one of the things that Shane started doing right as they became Vice, so he was, you know, trying to sell ads, and what he would say, they would. He would say, we're distributed across North America. And he would mail one copy of Vice magazine to a skateboarding store in Miami and a clothing store in San Francisco and, you know, Austin, and claim technically that they were available across North America. There were no concerns about lying to get the money.
- [20:01]
Samantha
Lying worked for Vice. Lies became true when the three founders lied to the press about a rich Montreal investor offering them bags of money. It led to that investor actually taking notice of them and putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into Vice. Here's Shane and the other two founders in 1999 boasting about how foolish that big investor was to fund them. Really?
- [20:25]
Shane Smith
You want to do that? Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You want to give me money? Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You know, like, we're living like kings. We own Montreal.
- [20:34]
Samantha
So it's not really an insult to call Vice liars. They're proud of it.
- [20:39]
Shane Smith
In the beginning, we were all about making up shocking stories. We made them up. So that was the beginning was sort of like National Enquirer type shocking stuff combined with, like, hip hop and punk rock.
- [20:51]
Samantha
Similarly, you can't really call out Vice for glorifying drugs. I mean, it is called Vice. Again, here's Shane.
- [21:00]
Shane Smith
And we were sort of fascinated with cocaine and supermodels and streetwear and just shit. We were like, we're so rich. We're so rich. It's crazy.
- [21:11]
Jesse Brown
They actually put cocaine on the COVID like the COVID of a magazine. What's on the COVID of the magazine this month? Cocaine.
- [21:16]
Samantha
That's Jesse Brown, my boss and co producer of this show. He's got some disclosures to make.
- [21:22]
Jesse Brown
I would have been 19 or 20 years old at the time. I contributed an article to an issue of Vice that I believe was the first glossy issue of Vice ever after they upgraded from newsprint. I had pitched a second piece that Gavin had greenlit, but I happened to have some conversation with him where he casually says to me, oh, we don't like Jews. Hear advice. And, you know, I was pretty sure he was baiting me or trolling, being ironic. But, like, with Gavin, you can never really be sure. After that, I didn't really feel comfortable sending them more articles.
- [21:59]
Samantha
Jesse wasn't a part of Vice's early years beyond what he just said, but he knew a lot of people who were, and living in Montreal at the time, he had a front row seat as their popularity exploded.
- [22:11]
Jesse Brown
Everybody had very strong opinions about Vice, but it was hard to just simply hate them because what they were doing was legitimately so exciting. It's probably relevant to mention that it was basically free porn at a time right before porn was really easy to get and ubiquitous on the Internet. So, you know, rather than hiding it under the mattress, you would put it out on your coffee table. And if you think about that in context with where the magazine industry was at at the time, like, especially with young readers, it was just dying. You couldn't get to subscribe to, like, Spin magazine. Nobody was buying magazines. Young people weren't going to newsstands anymore. And then here's this magazine that every single copy would get picked up. You know how magazines used to have these annoying postcards, these subscription forms in them? Vice had the opposite. They used to put an ad in every issue that said, don't subscribe to Vice. Like, we. It's a pain in the ass for us to get your subscription. Read us, don't read us. Fuck you, we don't even care. So it always had this kind of air of abuse to it. It was sort of abusive to its own readers. And of course, it's well documented that they were horrible to their own employees. There was always this element of mockery that you would be so dumb as to work for them for nothing. I mean, Shane said it. He famously boasted that Vice was a sweatshop for trustafarians. I had a friend in university who I think was one of their very first interns, and they hazed him terribly. Like, they thought it was just hilarious that this privileged university kid would just work for them for free. I remember him telling me the story about, like, how Gavin McInnes would take out his penis and testicles and literally just dangle his junk on this kid's desk while he would give him orders. So we're talking, like, primate level dominance stuff. And there were a lot of contributors and cartoonists and various writers who left Vice feeling that they had been very badly taken advantage of. I had my own taste of this, an experience myself. Gavin barely knew me, and I remember he offered me the job to be Vice's comics editor. But I asked him, like, okay, what does it pay? And he said, nothing. I turned him down. And what's embarrassing for me to admit now is that I actually regretted that decision for years. I was truly sorry that I had missed my big chance to be part of Vice, to be exploited by Vice. I mean, it's amazing what made sense to me at the time. The power of their brand was really amazing.
- [24:50]
Samantha
Vice's brand was bulletproof because negative things that would tarnish the image of any other company actually added to Vice's appeal. If you called them offensive, greedy, drunk, dishonest, well, they called themselves those things. And the more Vice deceived and insulted people, the more people loved Vice. Here's Shane on Charlie Rose.
- [25:14]
Shane Smith
And every time traditional media has criticized us, we get a million more followers. We get 10 more million video views.
- [25:20]
Samantha
They like the fact that you are so different. This didn't just work on Vice's young employees and readers in Montreal. It worked on advertisers and business partners, too. And it worked all over the world. That's next. This summer, Instacart is bringing back your favorites from 1999 with prices from 1999. That means 90s prices on juice pouches that ought to be respected, 90s prices on box Mac and cheese, and 90s prices on ham, cheese, and cracker lunches. Enjoy all those throwbacks and more at throwback prices only through Instacart. $4.72. Maximum discount per $10 of eligible items. Limit one offer per order. Expires September 5 while supplies last. Discount based on CPI comparison.
- [26:14]
Jessica Lowe
Close your eyes.
- [26:15]
Samantha
Exhale. Feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered to free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast.
- [26:29]
Christian Dropo
And breathe.
- [26:31]
Samantha
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts. Vice moved to New York. And throughout the 2000s it grew and grew. They launched in the UK and then expanded to other countries. By the time they returned to Canada, this country was just another satellite office in their global empire. But one thing Vice has always excelled at is plugging into a pre existing scene. And a vibrant scene was emerging in Toronto.
- [27:13]
Gavin McInnes
2005 was when it started. The Toronto indie music scene was really like gaining an identity. And there was something about just like Vice's presence around that. Like, I don't think that they created it, but they piggybacked off it.
- [27:25]
Samantha
That's Katherine Burrell, a screenwriter living in LA who spent her twenties in Toronto in the 2000s as a journalist.
- [27:31]
Gavin McInnes
So yeah, in 2003 I became friends with someone who worked at Fashion Television who is like way better dressed, way cooler than me, really plugged in. And she introduced me to the writing of Leslie Arfen, who was one of the like foundational, kind of most famous like Vice magazine writers. And, and I just, I loved Leslie's writing. I loved how confessional it was, which just felt like a little bit of an extension of that, kind of like that McSweeney's self referential, really snarky, really smart commentary, op ed journalism that I think was probably like foundational to sort of the hot take journalism we're mired in now. I loved how, you know, Baldly, she was talking about her drug problems, her anger problems, the experience of being a young woman in New York. And I very much wanted to be that young woman in New York and had had so many brushes with almost going there and, and, and, and never going, and was, you know, stuck in New York's little brother, Toronto.
- [28:35]
Samantha
But around this same time, Toronto was coming into its own.
- [28:39]
Gavin McInnes
Torontopia was a term just about this sort of like dreamy collective, kind of like socialist Canadian indie music thing that was happening specifically in Toronto, but also in Montreal as well with bands like Broken Social Scene stars Arcade Fire and Vice was there. Vice was there with the co branded Red Bull sponsorship. Vice was there making sure that the party was happening and the party was great and there were lots of good looking, interestingly dressed people there.
- [29:10]
Samantha
Catherine sees this moment in time as Vice's midlife crisis.
- [29:14]
Gavin McInnes
I remember talking to this guy, he was a Vice guy from New York who had come up to Toronto because he was following the Strokes around and we all went to go see the Strokes together and we were having beers after the show and he was talking about how he had just turned 30 and how his Father, who was a blue collar guy from New Jersey, was asking him one day, you're not going to be cool anymore and what's your job going to be when you're not cool? And he was honestly stumped about what he was going to do. And I think that that was something that must have occurred to all of the Vice guys, like the Vice guys, who realized that the party couldn't go on forever, realized that they had built something interesting, lucrative, that had cultural capital. And then you turn 40 and you're like, okay, well, I don't want to be like the old tired guy at the party anymore. I don't love going to shows anymore because standing on, on my feet is exhausting.
- [30:08]
Samantha
Shane Smith was Vice's figurehead now that Gavin was gone, and he was definitely starting to look like that old guy at the party. Rather than committing himself to endlessly cool hunting for what each next generation of kids would be up to, Shane cleverly announced that Vice was ready to grow up alongside its audience.
- [30:28]
Shane Smith
Overnight. We changed it. We changed it to doing video, to being more international, to doing more news stuff, to do more serious stuff. And, you know, people grow at different rates.
- [30:40]
Samantha
The serious stuff that he set his sights on for Vice, that was news journalism.
- [30:45]
Gavin McInnes
The time that I remember Vice going from, you know, being this magazine that I, you know, I would pick up and read in passing for, it's like snarky op ed stuff was when Shane Smith was one of the journalists who was tapped to go to North Korea on this, like absolute propaganda tour.
- [31:08]
Shane Smith
It's so surreal. There's nothing normal that happens ever in this whole country.
- [31:19]
Gavin McInnes
In the late 2000s that kind of like immersive, first person casual journalism, bringing journalism to a younger generation. As media was falling apart, I don't want to diminish Vice's role in that.
- [31:35]
Samantha
Vice started working with legacy media like cnn. And the more Vice insulted big media barons and huge conglomerates, the more money those companies threw at Vice. Well, it's interesting that. Did you once said to Rupert Murdoch, as I remember this quote, I am the future and you represent the past and we should be in business together or something.
- [31:55]
Shane Smith
No, I didn't say we should be in business together. I said, I understand. I have what you want because I have youth, I have social and I have online. You have none of those.
- [32:04]
Gavin McInnes
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Bought a 5%.
- [32:07]
Samantha
Stake for a reported $70 million. After that, A&E Networks invested $250 million, and then Disney invested $400 million. By 2015, Vice had ascended to the top of the media food chain. Just as magazine advertisers in the late 90s had been dying for a vehicle that would deliver them young readers, now major TV networks were desperate to believe that there was a way to bring young people back to cable tv. Vice promised that they and they alone could make that happen. In return, Vice got its own daily HBO series and its own 24 hour cable channel. There were rumors of a coming IPO. Vice's stock would be going public, and if it happened, it would make Shane Smith a billionaire. He even got insulted when it was suggested that his company was worth a mere 4 billion. Okay, more than. How much more?
- [33:03]
Shane Smith
More than 4 billion.
- [33:04]
Christian Dropo
Okay, 4.4 billion.
- [33:06]
Samantha
There you go. All right.
- [33:06]
Shane Smith
Okay, so that's $400 million.
- [33:09]
Samantha
I'm not good at that.
- [33:10]
Shane Smith
You just rounded it down?
- [33:11]
Christian Dropo
Yes, we rounded it down.
- [33:12]
Samantha
Why?
- [33:12]
Shane Smith
Because you guys are mean, that's why. If you were nice, you'd say five.
- [33:16]
Samantha
All of this was built on the notion that Vice was now serious. And that notion was built on its newfound commitment to journalism. Shortly before that transformation. Here's what Shane said.
- [33:29]
Shane Smith
If you're looking at Vice for being news and the truth, then you're in trouble. Because we didn't come up as like, I'm Jesus on my cross. We came up as, yeah, it's totally cool. Fucking shoes, Spice Guy. To fucking eating pussy Spice Guy just fucking you in the ass.
- [33:47]
Samantha
Two years later, in a CBC profile, Soroush was shopping a very different narrative. We're investing heavily in the news space. Vice promised that they could revolutionize journalism and make it relevant to an entirely new demographic through a style or maybe a philosophy that they called immersionism. They described it as Jackass meets 60 Minutes. Instead of putting a well groomed, authoritative correspondent in front of the action with a microphone, Vice sent dozens of scruffy hipsters to conflict zones and crime scenes where they were encouraged to get their hands dirty, drink or smoke whatever the locals were using, and become a part of the action.
- [34:29]
Shane Smith
I actually went to North Korea twice. The first time we snuck in. They wouldn't let me shoot anything. While we were there, we got drunk doing karaoke with some generals, and they let us come in the second time and we shot.
- [34:39]
Samantha
I'm just watching a bunch of people roasting their dogs. Oh, my God. Today I'm going to test that and try and break as many ancient British laws as as possible in one day in front of policemen and hope that I don't get arrested.
- [34:55]
Christian Dropo
It's Thomas.
- [34:55]
Samantha
I'm in a clinic in Indonesia being cured of my acne by smoking and.
- [35:00]
Justin Ling
Having something sucked out of my ear.
- [35:02]
Jesse Brown
This is also good for cancer.
- [35:05]
Samantha
Vice did hire tons of legitimate journalists who did increasingly solid, daring journalism, the best of which was charged with an air of danger, with reporters getting closer to bad people and bad behavior than viewers were used to. Here's L. Reeve interviewing a white supremacist in Charlottesville. Whatever problems I might have with my.
- [35:27]
Jessica Lowe
Fellow white people, they generally are not.
- [35:30]
Shane Smith
Inclined to such behavior.
- [35:31]
Jesse Brown
And you know, you gotta kinda take.
- [35:33]
Jessica Lowe
That into consideration when you're thinking about.
- [35:35]
Samantha
How to organize your society in Oklahoma City. Okay, so exactly, you have to go.
- [35:39]
Jessica Lowe
Back to Oklahoma City to talk about.
- [35:41]
Samantha
A white act of terrorism. Roger Dylann Roof Vice has amassed awards for its journalism, including Emmys and a Peabody. So many hard working journalists have done good work there and some still do. And full disclosure, as I mentioned before, I once applied for a job there myself. But Vice is fucked up journalistically too. Vice Canada's small team wanted a piece of what may have been the biggest story to ever come out of Toronto. The mayor Rob for crack scandal. News that a video existed of Toronto's trainwreck mayor smoking crack had been broken by Gawker, confirmed by the Toronto Star and gone global. But nobody beyond a few reporters had actually seen the video. Amid all of this, Vice Canada's editor Patrick McGuire dropped a bombshell revelation. Canadaland's news editor, Jonathan Goolsbee was covering the Rob Ford scandal at the time. He remembers Vice's blunder well.
- [36:41]
Slava Pastakov
So the story was that Rob Ford's office had hired a hacker to find and destroy the crack tape. Now, in the context of everything that was going on at the time, it was just another thing on the pile that took it to another level of brain melting, giddy absurdity. But two and a half years later, the crack video finally was publicly released. This was after Rob Ford had passed away. This is the summer of 2016. And so the person who basically used Strongvisa long openly tweeted about what he had done. So I got in touch with him, I think we had messaged before and he laid out for me in quite a lot of detail exactly what had happened. Like a lot of people in the political right were frustrated with use of unnamed sources in news articles and wanted to prove that the media would print any bullshit about Rob Ford. And that's when he went. He said he took the trouble to create photos and screenshots of like, of emails basically. But as he said, like he just created up a bunch of Yahoo accounts and had them email each other like it was very easy stuff to fake. And then I did find a way to independently confirm that, yes, he was given a cash payment of $5,000 by Vice, or money from Vice through an intermediary. In journalism generally, it's a really bad idea to pay for information specifically because it creates a market for fake information, which is exactly what happened here, where the offer of, or at least the possibility of cash created an incentive to fabricate evidence.
- [38:25]
Samantha
Essentially, the hacker story fell apart. But Vice never retracted it or apologized. And by the time the fake hacker admitted that this was all a lie, Patrick Maguire had already been promoted to head of content, a top job managing huge budgets and dozens of employees. One of them was Slava. Patrick and Slava were both part of the original 12, a tiny team of old Vice hires who found themselves in positions of seniority when the Toronto office quickly ballooned to 150 employees. Like Slava, Patrick had no training as a journalist, and neither had ever practiced journalism at any other company. Even though Vice had several experienced political reporters working in house by then, Patrick Maguire was the one to interview Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
- [39:18]
Christian Dropo
Mr. Joe, thank you for joining us.
- [39:20]
Shane Smith
Always a pleasure.
- [39:22]
Samantha
As Slava saw firsthand, it didn't matter at Vice what degree you held or what work experience you had in the industry. What mattered was whether you could make it work, roll with the changes, and be whatever the brand required. The more I learned about the roots of Vice, the more I found myself understanding how a guy like Slava could get the idea that taking the initiative to put himself into an extreme situation might pay off.
- [39:49]
Christian Dropo
I mean, I was writing for advice.
- [39:50]
Jesse Brown
About things that I had done at previous jobs where I was like, running someone's dating profile, or I wrote about how there was a weird way to smoke weed up in Northern Ontario. All of these. It was highly encouraged to mine your personal life for content. The line between professional and personal, kind of hard for me to draw.
- [40:10]
Gavin McInnes
It's something that I started calling the cred economy, which, you know, is the same thing as just like the coolness factor is like there's all these people who are trading in the cred economy, hoping that they will be able to eventually participate in the real economy through. Through participating in the cred economy and like, paying their dues there.
- [40:31]
Samantha
As journalists mined their personal experiences for content, being cool became a professional goal.
- [40:38]
Gavin McInnes
But because it's so informal, because there's no roadmap for it before, because. Because it doesn't really exist. It's not like you can look at the credit that you have accrued in your cred economy bank account and go like, okay, I'd like to cash out now and get paid with full health and dental. That's not how it works.
- [40:58]
Samantha
As Catherine pointed out to me, the cred economy leaves young people so vulnerable, just like the five smugglers who went to prison in Australia.
- [41:07]
Gavin McInnes
When I think about these kids who were involved in the smuggling ring, I think of Terry Richardson and the models who he assaulted. And it's just different versions of that, right? Like, it's just different versions of exploiting vulnerable young people, promising them this lifestyle, promising them access and power, all of these things that they don't have that they want to feel important, to feel powerful, to feel meaningful, to feel like they have agency, but having to run through this, you know, criminal gauntlet or gauntlet of bodily assault before you can get there. But because those lines are so blurred and because there are no protocols or it feels like there's no protocols within the world of Vice, everything feels reasonable and everything feels like it's on the table.
- [41:58]
Samantha
A lot of things can feel reasonable in a status economy with no rules and no limits. Maybe even taking strange bags to a foreign country and snapping selfies along the way before a planned visit to Vice's Australia office. Or a vague promise to help with your music or modeling career. But Vice didn't create the gig economy or the culture of hustling and side hustling just to stay above water. And they didn't invent hipsters. Whatever Gavin McInnes claims, they just rode the wave. There's one last thing I have to tell you about Gavin. As many people listening to this will know, he found a way to channel his spite. Not long after his 2014 interview with Canadaland, he had already been doing appearances on Fox News. He would soon be ousted from his own advertising agency for his hateful transphobic rants. Even during the interview with Canadaland, he went on wild racist asides out of nowhere.
- [42:58]
Jessica Lowe
For example, inbreeding is now a huge problem with Muslims. No one wants to go near that.
- [43:05]
Samantha
Two years after this, in 2016, Gavin would exert his influence on the culture in a whole new way. As the founding father of a violent faction of the extreme right, he created the Proud Boys, a neo fascist men's group of self proclaimed Western chauvinists that spread across North America. The Proud Boys assume an ironic joking tone when presenting themselves to the press. But the violence Gavin openly encouraged, and that the Proud Boys have committed is very real. Their current chairman participated in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where anti right protester Heather Heyer was killed in a hate crime. After it was reported that the FBI classified the Proud Boys as an extremist group with ties to white nationalism, Gavin proclaimed that he was officially disassociating himself from the group, but his voice lives on. You can hear it in thousands of taunting, abusive tweets, ironic racism, and truth twisting memes posted every day. The same guy who taught hipsters how to dress also taught the alt right how to troll. So when it's all said and done, it might not be enough to just say that Vice wrote the hipster Bible. As Shane Smith himself has put it, if our religion is a faith in perception itself, if we value engagement and influence even above money, then it's all Vice's world. We just live here.
- [44:38]
Jesse Brown
The worst thing will be to be unknown. Everybody should want to be the most extreme version of themselves available and there will be a reward for that down the line. If it's a book deal, a movie deal, whatever, whatever have you.
- [44:52]
Samantha
That's next time on the final episode of Cool Mules. Cool Mules is hosted and reported by me, Kasia Mihailovic and it's written and produced by me and Jesse Brown. Research assistance from Jonathan Goldsby. Kevin Sexton is our Managing editor. Music by Nathan Burley, Sound design and mix by Chandra Bulacan. The final episode of Cool Mules will be out next week, or you can listen to it right now, ad free and support our journalism for $5 a month. Just click the link in the show notes or visit Coolmules Ca join and the whole show will be on your phone or computer in min.
- [45:54]
Jessica Lowe
ACAST powers the world's best podcasts.
- [45:57]
Shane Smith
Here's a show that we recommend.
- [46:01]
Samantha
This season on the Dream. Supplies are being provided by nurses who.
- [46:07]
Gavin McInnes
Run out in the middle of the night and purchase diapers, but the hospital.
- [46:11]
Samantha
Is still charging as it if they still have these items. We are digging into every topic we've.
- [46:16]
Gavin McInnes
Ever wanted to cover on this show.
- [46:18]
Samantha
It's a spinning plate analogy.
- [46:20]
Jesse Brown
The second that you stop spinning those.
- [46:21]
Samantha
Plates that crashes so you can never stop working.
- [46:26]
Gavin McInnes
The Dream Season 4 comes at you.
- [46:28]
Samantha
Weekly starting Monday, January 20th.
- [46:32]
Shane Smith
Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.