It's so crazy, whoa, crazy, whoa Somebody's gotta have to save you
I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is the co-founder and former CEO of Vice Media and the host of the Shane Smith has questions podcast. Shane Smith, welcome to the Rubin Report.
Thank you, buddy. How are you doing? I'm fine. I'm fine. I said to you right before we started, it's odd that we haven't crossed paths before. I feel like everybody in the media kind of ends up one way or another intersecting. Here we are. And I thought it's an interesting time to have Jan actually because the media is in such upheaval and you've kind of been at the forefront of that. So why don't we do a little Shane Smith 101 before we get into everything? How did you start what got into Vice? Let's just do that stuff and then we can get into the current day.
Yeah, got into vice basically because we couldn't get jobs. I sort of graduated in Montreal, Canada in the 90s and there was no gigs to be had.
There were three of us. We started at a government welfare project called Voice of Montreal, and they couldn't pay us, so we decided to take over. We changed it to vice. We changed it to voice, and then we decided to move to the States because Quebec, where Montreal is in Canada, decided to outlaw English because they were trying to separate from Canada, so they outlawed English.
So we said, well, screw this. And we moved to New York and then sort of expanded around the world to many countries and started doing digital video. We're at the forefront of that. And then got punched in the face when the big four, big five, took all the money out of the room and sort of fell from grace as the digital media.
And now I'm doing sort of news 2.0 and media 2.0 and much like yourself and anybody who's smart, sort of getting into directed audience podcasting, which is a lot of fun. Yeah, welcome to my world.
Yeah, well, well, it's for now we can say what we want. And there's a lot of technology to back us doing that, even though the bad guys are always trying to silence us. And it's the wild west to some extent. So when you guys start advice from my audience, that's a little bit younger that may remember vice the way the way that I do or the way that, you know, anyone basically over 35 probably does.
What was your original intent? Because you guys clearly hit on something that the mainstream was not getting. Everyone now sees what's happening online that the mainstream's not getting. But you guys hit it from a different perspective before this sort of magazine. Yeah, we were a magazine in the beginning. And magazines were just, I mean, so shit and everything was the same and derivative. And we were just basically sex, drugs and rock and roll, but became famous for sort of over the top crazy stories.
Then Spike Jones, who became our creative director, and Spike at the time was like sort of best music video director. He turned into a feature film director, but at the time he was the video director. And he said, you guys should shoot all your articles. And we started shooting our articles.
um and and right about the beginning of youtube and we were sort of one of the number one video creators on youtube in the beginning days and all of a sudden we went from like you know
someone would recognize us in the lower east side in the bar and who loves school. And then all of a sudden you'd be in India and people were like, Shane, you're like, hey, what are you shooting? Because YouTube was international and the numbers were crazy. And it went from like, when vice was at a million copies, we thought we were the biggest where we're gonna be. And then we'd put one video up and it would do like a hundred million video views. And we'd be like, holy shit. So we just were sitting on this atom bomb that kind of blew up as YouTube blew up.
What was the, like, what was the angle that you were really going for? Was it counterculture? Did you consider it kind of political? I mean, it's hard for people to remember. Not everything was as hyper-political back then. No. As it is now. Yeah, that's a great question and I could talk about seven hours about it, but I'll try to keep it short. We just, you know, some of the things that made us, me, I made my bones,
North Korea just because, you know, it was zany and heart so we sort of snuck in bribed our way into North Korea and did a video that went crazy viral. We were doing just like we would get stories like, you know, like a container was stolen, you know, as it is in Africa and it had two-pack Shakur t-shirts.
And so that became a uniform of an army, the Chewbacca army. And the other guy was General Botnaket, who fought naked, who was General Botnaket in the Peaback Army. And so we're like, well, that's a pocket story. I flew to Liberia to hang out with these guys and didn't realize that they'd been in a
particularly brutal civil war for nearly 20 years. And General Butt naked starts talking to me, he's like, yeah, well, I've killed and eaten over 10,000 people. And you're like, oh, what? And so cannibalism, a craze in the generals and war. And so that really resonated with a lot of people. And then I think it was heavy metal and Baghdad. We were in Baghdad during the war, shooting the only heavy metal band, because those were vice kind of stories.
And we happened to be there when George W came and did the mission accomplished where one, we've won the war and everybody's in the green zone and everything's fine. And we're in the red zone and getting shot at. And people started saying, well, this is the real news. Vice is the real news. And we're like, we weren't doing news. We were following it. But what we figured out was as if, if you go there, well, that was one of our taglines among rumored to be among the best was my favorite, but we go there became
became one where so we would actually go. So like you hear all of this shit coming out of Afghanistan or Iraq or around, whatever, and you can just get plane tickets to those places. So we go, okay, well, I was just fly. So we'd fly in. And nine times out of 10, it would be a different story. And so we became famous for breaking new stories or at least coming up with a different line of, and you know, we called a lot of things like five years before
the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan, we said that they would, and that the Taliban would have more land than they had beforehand, because at least there was the Massoud and the sort of Northern alliance. And everyone called us, oh, you're insane. And of course, it's exactly what happened, because all you have to do is go there.
So that became our thing, just go there, get on the ground and tell the truth, just press record and see what the story is rather than try to shoehorn something into your political agenda. When did you realize there was gonna be a crazy tension between going there and doing what you guys were doing versus what the mainstream media was doing, which was largely, I would say, it's fairly obvious, now misreporting on shit that they barely were going to in the first place? Yeah. Well, that's a great story. A lot of people look back on
the Walter Cronkite here and say, well, why can't we do that about it? And you're like, well, it's interesting because it was a guy, let's say in Vietnam, and he never left his hotel. He had stringers go out. They would say whatever, by the way, they didn't go because they didn't want to get shot. They would just come up with some copy. They would take wire that copy back to put it up in teleprompter. Walter Cronkite reads it and says, and that's who it is tonight. And you're like, yeah, it wasn't true.
And a lot of it was propaganda. We looked back on that era and said, so great. Now it's a lot of the mainstream media has been debunked. Two things I didn't realize. One was, we're just vice, and we're going out there and we're shooting stuff. And we're kind of everybody's friend with a little engine that could, where everyone's kid brother, little vice, until we started being worth billions of dollars and eating everybody's lunch. And then the fucking knives come out. And I was explaining this to someone the other day saying,
If I open a shoe store next to you, you're gonna cut your prices in half and you're gonna say, my shoes suck and you're, cause you wanna survive. News agencies are no different except for that they have a blow orange and people believe them, especially in a lot of big mainstream media. So when you get bigger, the knives come out and they just come after you. So we're sitting there, we went from everyone's kid brother to let's fuck these guys. This is hard as we can.
And trying to debunk us, which they couldn't. I mean, I realized early on that if we ever fucked up like a fact check that they were just going to hammer us. And so we fact checked like motherfuckers and we, you know, we were very, very stringent and like safety of our journalists because we were going to a lot of dangerous places and we realized anybody gets hurt.
were fucked. So we became incredibly dedicated to our craft because we knew that these guys were after us. And when they couldn't get us on news, they just started coming after us on culture, on lifestyle, on point of view, on everything they could fucking do. And quite frankly, we were unprepared for that. We were unprepared for the fact that news is war.
Do you think there's any way you could have been prepared? Because the reason I'm asking the question is it's it you strike me and the story of I strikes me as it was sort of an early version of cancel culture in that you guys were against the system. The system then basically tries to take you out. But you really couldn't you couldn't have known in some sense, because it was the first like sort of scaled example of that. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Yeah.
I mean, in the beginning, we were a challenger brand. So I used to throw spears at CNN in New York Times because if I get mentioned in the same sentence, that's a fucking win for me. And then all of a sudden we exploded and became bigger and they're like, now we're going to throw spears at you. And yes, as somebody said to me and say two things about this is, you know, when we started coming up, we hired this guy who came out of Washington and a lot of
know uh... marcom so marketing communications people come out of washington because they get paid sixty thousand dollars a year but it's like that they may learn to be the sort of best at their gigs and so media people hire them what they get used to doing in washington is atomic bomb atomic bomb atomic bomb kill scalp scalp scalp and so they come into media and they that's their modus operandi that's what they understand
So all of a sudden we came into this world of like, everyone's trying to take our scalps and everyone's trying to fucking kill us. And so we hired people, you know, to sort of do that. And they're like, okay, you need to hire 40 reporters and put them on the New York Times. And I'm like, we're not going to fucking put 40 reporters in New York Times. And sorry, this is long-winded, but a good thing. And that, I think, is what's ruining media or ruined media is that media became a war
of op ed against media. And so it's Fox versus MSNBC versus CNN. They're all fucking op ed going, you know what I think, you know, no one's fucking doing news. No, there's no commonality of facts. No one's going out there and actually going for the great center. You know, we're going for the fucking far right in the far left.
And everyone's sniping at each other, and it's sort of fear mongering on the right, and it's snide comedy on the left, and you're sitting there going, what about the fucking facts? And you're right, we could not be prepared for that upheaval and the war that sort of intensified with mirroring the war that's tearing apart this country. But we were definitely one of the first casualties.
Are you hopeful for where we're at right now? I mean, in some sense, this last two weeks post-election, it's become fairly clear that mainstream media, although I know they have a lot of tricks in their bag that they're kind of on the way out and you don't tread lightly with giant corporations, but the online people now are ascending. And there's, in some sense, there's nothing they can do about that. I mean, they can blow up servers and they can shadow ban and all of that stuff, but this one's going to be tough.
I mean, I'll be honest with you. I look, Vice was always a challenger brand. We were a magazine to go back to sort of tech and culture where we were magazine just when desktop publishing became, you know, and because of that, we could be different because everybody else who
who like they have printing houses and you have to do certain things for printing houses and they censor you and so it's like censorship is huge. Anyway, then when video on online video became a thing, by the way, back in the day, people shadowed us for for going to video. It was like Dylan going electric. And now I think this is the greatest upheaval in media. And I think it's probably the most positive one. I think mainstream media got so big and so corrupt. And
like advertising is the modern sensor?
And when you have brands censoring news media, you're completely fucked. And so it's broken. It doesn't work. And it's not news. It's op ed, fighting op ed. So this kind of shit and going online, now it's chaos and it's wild west. And the commonality of facts become a problem, which is what I'm trying to do in my podcast, but it's democracy, democratic sort of,
um, where you choose to get your news. And, you know, there will be more fact checking. There will be more like, what's it called? Community notes on acts and stuff like that, which I think is necessary. Um, but fuck it. Go directly to your, your audience, sub stack or, or you spotify or, you know, whatever, whatever it is. And, you know, fuck, you know, having networks sensory, which they do.
fuck having advertisers sent you, which they do even more, and say what you want. And I think that's the greatest fucking thing that could happen in news media because I think news media is broken.
Oh, it's broken to say the least. Yeah, that's going lightly on it. How would you argue the idea of an overdone window and sort of if we need it, that there has to be some sort of accepted parameters. So if Walter Cronkite, if it was just way too narrow with that, and maybe 15 years later, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, et cetera, it widens a little bit, then cable news it widens a little bit. Now we've kind of blown the doors off.
What do you make of it? Do we need something that sort of is the kind of highway that we're all roughly on, or do you think it can just be total free for all? I think the problem is, and so I became fascinated by exactly that during COVID, and I think Rogan says something about this in his comedy special where he's like,
I went into covid thinking that vaccine was the height of human technology and came out thinking we never landed on the show. I was kind of the same. I think a lot of us were. We started looking at online and social media and acts.
There's just so much stuff on there and you're like, well, is that true? Like, what about this? And, and look, you know, I did a show about COVID and then that a lot of stuff got disproved and I sort of felt duped. So, you know, one thing you know what to do is piss off and a fascinated journalist. So I started saying, okay, well, let's look into COVID. And, you know, also like,
they had these open doors and tons of people coming through on the border. And I'm like, I've reported on the border for 20 years, I've never seen anything that faintly resembles that. So we started to sort of dig in and say like, what the fuck is true? And I think that there are so many young people that get their news from social media, and there are no
you know, fact checks that are standard out there or people calling out bullshit. You can say what it is. As you said, community, you know, it seems like it's kind of doing it, but that's still niche. Yeah. You need more of that. You need more debunking, like maybe AI does that where it's like, you know, someone said this. It's like, you know, they do it for, it's funny because porn, we did a, we did a presentation once at the peak of ice and we were like,
we went to a big marketing conference and we're like, we don't have a presentation, we don't have to say. And we're just like, why don't we tell the truth? You know, telling the truth. And we're like, okay, porn made the internet, porn is like, you know, video, they were for ads. They were for. Yeah. Everything, everything online. And so on the porn thing, like they have like, you know, oh, this is like a paid model for only fans. And you're like, well, they're regulating all the porn stuff. But like you can say,
The Rothschilds are fucking controlling the world economy and they're drinking chicken blood and whatever. And we need to have more community notes and we need to have not just for X, but for other things because I think you can basically say anything and keep saying it and then people believe it. And a lot of these things went from conspiracy to mainstream. And I think that's fine for some stuff.
but like, you know, we don't know what to believe anymore. And so one of the things I try to do with my show is say, okay, this is what's being said online. Here's who's saying it. Here's who's saying it on the right. Here's who's saying it on the left. We'll talk to them. Here's, by the way,
where the traffic's coming from, because famously there was like the $27 Big Mac. And I'm like, yeah, that's straight out of the CCP. That's Chinese Communist Party is trying to fuck us up. And they're sending shit out because it undermines our, you know, belief in our economic 60% of Americans believer in recession.
And you sit there and you say, okay, you know, let's go and attack those things. Now it's great for me, but I'm like a little tiny drop and like, we need to sort of get out there and do a better job of that. But in my long when it answered to your question, I think it's a great thing that there's upheaval in the media because it was broken. It was corrupt and it was shitty.
Yeah, it's funny. People say to me all the time, like, if I'm just at the store, the main thing that people say to me is, Dave, you're the only guy I trust. And I'm like, man, we are so screwed. Yeah, like, I'm like, yeah, I'm doing the best I can. And I try not to lie. And I actually do like correcting myself. I had to do it on my show yesterday in the middle of the show. I got something wrong. And my guys fact checked me live. I like that. But like, if that's where we're at, where basically there's like, you know, a couple dozen of us trying to pilfer something,
That's tricky, but yeah, I do agree with you. Maybe it's through partly AI or some mechanism or some community notes that get scaled or something else. What do you make of what's happened to the culture now where sort of being anti-woke now does seem like it's going to be the culture? I mean, I'm a big believer that we're about to have kind of like an 80s revival right now in America if Trump can do this thing right. And maybe whether he does it right or not, it's happening.
that something has really broken post-election and that we're about to see something really kind of fun and cool, closer to a time that you and I grew up in. Well, if it's 80s, then we're going back to the best of all times. Yeah. Yeah. No, me too. I mean that. Hits of the 80s on repeat. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Look, I think, again, during COVID,
It's funny, you know, there was the sort of Nick zone in silent majority. And I felt like I was part of this silent majority where, you know, and I said this to a bunch of people at the time. I'm like, there's so much liberal propaganda. Obviously there's Republican propaganda, but it's become propaganda. And I remember talking to someone about this and saying, well, at least it's the right kind of propaganda. And I was like, there's no fucking right kind of propaganda. It's propaganda. And so I remember getting upset about that and
Also, there were so many people walking around quietly angry. People don't want to feel guilty. People don't want to feel like a piece of shit. People don't want to feel like they've done something wrong, especially when they haven't. Also, people don't like to be fucking preached to by other people who, by the way, why the fuck do you get to tell me anything?
And so... Right, while they're going to their dinners and doing all their stuff, but they're preaching, of course, for you to stay here. Exactly. And so I think that there was this sort of mass, silent majority that just was irked and unhappy and sort of sick of, we can't say anything, and we can't tell the truth. By the way, the truth shall set you free.
And so, I mean, I got irked, you know, a lot of my friends got irked.
And it's funny on my podcast now, I'm too, I'm too right for the left and too left for the right. And, but I love being a centrist and I love being able to look at both sides. And like I said to someone on the part of the yesterday, like I love the game. I love, you know, I love asking questions and talking to people on both sides. But it became so political and people became so labeled. Like if you're left, go, go, bro, fuck you, you fucking motherfucker.
And if you're right, you know, you're fucking Nazi and you're like, hold on a second. No one's a fucking Nazi. Like, what are you talking about? And, and it just became so politically charged with rhetoric and again, no commonality in facts. And, and just it's, it's your team is the Steelers and my team is the Eagles and I'm going to hate you no matter what. And I'm not going to believe anything you say. I think that's stupid and broken. So like, I think something had to break the dam had to break. And I don't think that
if you look at the last four year, I don't think that media would have just done that on their own. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Never, never. And I think that politically, you know, look, we need, I believe we need dynamic change to keep up with what the fuck's happening in technology, because technology is going to lead the future.
And when quantum hits with AI, it's going to totally upset everything, even more than it has. So media, philosophy, economics, education has to try at least to keep pace, and we were not. And media was lagging. And so guess what? It got shaken up.
Is that what you think the real tensions about right now that basically we have this new world on the horizon between AI and quantum computing and all of this stuff? And that we literally, Elon's going to go interplanetary probably within our lifetimes, that there's so much incredible stuff right on the horizon. But the old world doesn't give up easily. I think that's like, that's basically baked into the code. Nobody, nobody just gives up.
Yes. And also, there's hard things. We're in this weird tech cold war with China and India's coming behind them. And we're kind of starting to look a little bit like Great Britain after World War II. We've been this big kid on the block. But if you just look at the math,
We beat England because we had a much bigger domestic market and we had manufacturing and we were a much bigger country with a much bigger population. And then if you look at China, you say, well, again, they have a much bigger population, much bigger domestic market. They have a much bigger, you know,
population as does India, and they're sort of starting from scratch, so a lot of our industry is outdated, and they're just building new factories now. So I mean, if you just look at the math, we're in trouble. Now, what can help us is we're very far ahead technologically, and I believe that tech is sort of leading all of these dramatic, and if you look at AI, the definition of AI, is all human endeavor done by machines.
And so if we look at that, then, you know, you're like, well, the kids who are in school today are coming out into a much different world, a much different workforce. And they have to learn to adapt to that. And humans don't like to do anything unless we have a gun to our heads. Well, we have a gun to our heads now. And so I think, so my long wanted answer to your question again, this is actually a positive thing that there's, there's, we've woken up. You know, we've realized that,
You know, there has to be some sanity. There has to be some rationality on both sides. And I think, look, being a centrist just means there's things on the right that are great. There's things on the left that are great. There's things on the left that are fucking stupid. And there's things on the fucking right that are outrageous. So let's get rid of the fucking outrageous and stupid and keep the fucking good things from both. Try it like bubble was the last consensus politician. I fucking love Reagan. Let's just fucking try to
Like the 80s. Yeah. Let the 80s. Let's try to be bipartisan. Let's try to make some fucking money. Let's try to unite as a country and as a culture because China's going to eat our fucking lunch if we just sit there and have a civil war. Well, that's almost exactly why I think the 80s revival is unstoppable now because well, it's also partly because how old do you?
You're 54, so I'm 48, so we're right in that Gen X thing. Gen X was the only generation that voted more for Trump than Kamala, but there was enough of them to do it. And it's like, we remember that thing. We grew up in that incredible time where it wasn't about politics. It was just cool to be every weekend.
I'm sure you had the same thing on every weekend. There was another new awesome movie in the theater. Every week, a new freaking album dropped. That was awesome. I can't remember the last time. When was the last time you heard new music that you were like, holy cow, that's great. Well, that's one thing you don't want to get on with me because hits the eighties is a fucking permanent repeat. Alternative hits. I just want to say one thing about that. First of all, I haven't heard this eighties thing, but I'm loving it. Yeah.
I've been hitting this for quite some time. I really think it's really smart. I was explaining this to someone
the other day, which is funny because you're Gen X. Yeah, 48. So I'm Gen X and Gen X always got the sort of short end of the sick for some reason. We're like, we got a five year less of a window. So we're tiny and weird. And we were post boomers and we were kind of latch key kids and sort of this Gen X. We were the forgotten generation of the ship. And it's so funny because I was explaining to somebody.
Gen X, arguably, in history, well, time will tell, but probably lived in the best single window in human history because we had complete economic uptick for that whole generation. No real wars. Luxury became a thing. Foodie, like food became great. Like if you look at hotel rooms or restaurants in the 70s, it's terrible, but in the 80s, I can go through the roof.
You know, travel becomes a thing. And, you know, to go bigger, you know, Carl Sagan's like, look, billions of planets, billions of years, we have this tiny little window where the fucking temperature is perfect and we go out and we can live. Well, not only that, but throughout human history, you're not getting a fucking pitchfork in the stomach and dying of gangrene. We're sitting there with the advent of computers and smartphones and all these things.
And now it's going to be AI and it's going to be climate change and it's going to be upheaval and it's going to be going to the fucking stars. And by the way, it's going to be quantum computing with AI. So the rich are going to get richer. The poor are going to get poorer. That's going to be whole societal slash global upheaval. But we've had this tiny little window
of just fucking lovely, lovely times. And that's 10x. And I was like, you know, I would have thought that we were totally fucked when I came out of college. And I literally got to live in the greatest window of time. And for that, I'm great. We had Rocky four, like this, it kept better than that, you know? It doesn't get better than any of the fucking Rockies.
You know that on the day of the election, I watched all of the compilation scenes on one YouTube video. It's about 19 minutes. But I was like, I got to get my mind right. And that's what I watch. And it all worked out. I watched Rocky the other day. And I'm just like, the greatest single moment in cinemographic history is, you see, like we used to actually use Rocky and my pitch for Vice, because I'd say,
um, vice sports, because it was like everybody goes for the, the, the sports rights because you know, the biggest thing in the world, but like nobody does. Rocky is 90 minutes of story to give you five minutes of fighting. And so give us the hour before and the hour after and we'll tell stories about sports and some of the greatest things we ever did was vice sports. No one ever watched them and didn't become popular, but I would just sit there and cry because it was so good. Anyway, the greatest thing in Rocky is you know exactly what's going to happen.
And you know the thing and it's going and it's boring. And Apollo Creed is fucking beating the shit out and whatever. The greatest fucking moment is when Rocky fucking knocks him down with one punch out of nowhere because he let his fucking hands down. And you know what? That's what everybody wants. They want the underdog to at least have a shot at it. They want
A story that you don't know what the fuck's going to happen at the end. That's why people love sports so much. That's why people love Rocky so much. And they want to go back to you and me to go back to media. They want people like you and me who are who have been punched in the face who are reinventing themselves who are doing things differently or going out on the fucking tip to say, look, we're going to go up against Apollo Creed, I see it in New York Times, everybody. And we're going to try to give him a fucking punch in the face.
Yeah, and I'm pretty sure in the sequel, they're not gonna stand up this time. That's the goal. That's Rocky II. Yeah, exactly. We're gonna be Rocky II. Shane, as a new guy in this internet space, you ended an interview on a very effective manner.
I enjoyed talking to you. We'll do it. I asked you where you live. I knew you were somewhere west coast. You do the show out of LA, but you're in the safe sanctity of Malibu. So even during the zombie apocalypse, you'll be close to water. You'll be all right. Yeah. Well, yeah. We have a compound. We have
You know, we have, we have, anyway, I'm not going to, I was about to try to make a joke and I'm like, they could arrest me for that joke. So no, no, keep the compound. Nothing's going on over there. You don't have to say. Nothing, nothing to find here. Nothing to see here. All right. Thanks. Enjoy the man. All right, brother. Keep on keeping on.
Thanks for tuning in to The Rubin Report. Don't forget to review, share, and subscribe to this podcast. If you're looking for early and exclusive content, you can join me on locals at rubinreport.locals.com.
