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[Up-tempo pop music]
[Eddie] You know, I'm curious though.
You are actually the number one employer
- of human beings in Williamsburg. - Yeah.
How does it feel?
Good. But we first came to Williamsburg--
it's a good story.
So we started in Montreal.
And we came down to New York
in the dotcom sort of era.
So we moved to North 4th
'cause Triple Five Soul gave us part of their warehouse for free.
[Shane] And at the time, this is like 2000
and all the crack whores were down there.
And they were like $5 blowjobs,
like the lowest common denominator shit.
We used to be extorted by a crackhead named Crazy Larry.
And he would literally shit on our stoop
unless we paid him a dollar.
So we had to pay him a dollar a day, extortion,
or he would shit on our stoop.
You know what I loved about it is Manhattan was right there,
and here was completely lawless.
Like, there was no law, there was nothing.
Like, there was a coke place here,
stayed open all night, you could go buy coke.
What was it called?
Kokie's.
My favorite bar was, there was this--
- ...you ever hear about the Chex Cash? - [Eddie] Yeah.
So Chex Cash was two 16-year-old kids.
They took an old, deserted check cashing place on the water.
Ninety-nine cent beers, punk rock on a jukebox,
and, fucking, you'd just sit by the water and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon for 99 cents.
Boom, that's fucking Brooklyn.
Brooklyn was, for I'd say a decade,
the coolest 20-block radius in the world.
I like how you just put the...
Can we get a shot of him putting the bone on the table?
This is a guy who grew up in a steak house here,
where he's just like, "I'm gonna put the bone on the table now."
[Upbeat music]
[Glasses clink]
[Pop music continues]
[Eddie] I came up as a chef in an era
where everything was shifting underneath my feet.
[Chef] And I'll show you what you do.
- [Whimpering] - [Audience] Yeah!
[Eddie] After watching Food Network dominate food culture in America
for the better part of a decade,
food and travel exploded on the internet
with websites like Eater
and apps like Yelp.
It was a hit, I mean a big hit.
With all these new options,
Food Network was becoming a joke.
Oh, Lord.
[Eddie] And a new voice had arisen.
What do you think about these guys like Emeril Lagasse
and those guys on the Food Network?
Well, you're asking me to kick Santa Claus in the crotch on television.
- I mean... - [Audience laughs]
[Eddie] I idolized Tony because he humanized people.
[Tony] How long you been surfing now?
You were the first.
[Eddie] He broke stereotypes and centuries of preconceived notions and prejudices
with each one-hour episode.
In the wake of his success,
the Food Network scrambled to find the next Tony Bourdain.
They even started a new channel called The Cooking Channel
that went after young chefs like myself.
How the hell have you been making money here with all these deals?
We have a good product.
[Eddie] At one point, I was offered a series
called Cheap Bites with The Cooking Channel,
but I balked when a producer said,
"You could be the next Asian hip-hop Guy Fieri."
Every executive started coming to my restaurant,
but so did Tony.
- What's up, Tony? - [Tony] How are you, man?
[Eddie] How's it going?
- All good, how's things? - Good to see you, man. Good, good, good.
Delicious.
[Eddie] I didn't really know what the fuck I was doing
with all the attention and started to say wild things.
I was like Rudy Gobert touching all the mics during the pandemic,
not understanding the gravity of the situation.
But Tony did.
He saw the food establishment trying to kill my career
before it even really got started and got my back.
Tony took me to dinner on the second floor of the Spotted Pig
and told me one thing:
"Eddie, at every turn,
"they're gonna ask you to bite the dick.
"And no matter what you do, never bite the dick."
And I didn't.
I'm Christine Laskowski with Signovision Journal,
and tonight we're in Soho at the McNally Jackson Bookstore.
We're going to be hearing from Taiwanese-American chef
and author Eddie Huang about his new memoir,
Fresh Off the Boat.
Let's go have a seat.
[Eddie] I published a memoir called Fresh Off the Boat.
[Laughing]
Then ABC bought my memoir,
which became the first Chinese-American sitcom of all time.
- Excuse me? - It's the American way, right?
You know about that.
[Narrator] Fresh Off the Boat.
[Eddie] Life started to get weird.
Executives tried plugging me into boxes,
but I never fit.
I got a TED fellowship and lost it about 48 hours
into the conference because I left to do a podcast
with Asa Kira and David Choe.
I lasted about one week doing a new show with Meghan McCain
before they replaced me with Baratunde.
And despite Fresh Off the Boat's success, I hated it creatively.
I was out before the end of the first season.
At every turn, I stayed true to myself,
and the one place I felt at home
was a place called VICE.
[Upbeat music fading]
I'm Shane Smith.
I'm Gavin McInnes.
I'm Suroosh Alvi.
And we're VICE Magazine,
and we're moving to New York City!
"V".
[Upbeat music]
[Eddie] VICE was a lot of things.
A digital content creator.
[Shane] Three million subs across brands
and something like half a billion video views.
[Eddie] An ad agency.
- Another round? - Nah.
I'm taking it slow.
[Eddie] A news organization.
[Applause]
[Eddie] A media empire.
[Man] What's the mission?
The mission is to become the largest media company
in the world and to not suck.
[Eddie] But originally, it was a magazine started by Haitians in Montreal.
[Shane] We were working at a place called Voice in Montreal.
It was a make-work project for Haitian immigrants and us.
And then after a while, they owed us money,
and they couldn't pay us, so we took it,
we dropped the 'O', and called it VICE,
and then that was it.
[Spike] So you stole the magazine from a non-profit organization
that was trying to help Haitians?
Correct.
Dude, that's kind of not that nice.
Yeah.
[Eddie] VICE was successful for several reasons,
but what they were selling, if you ask Shane Smith,
was cool.
[Shane] Every generation, you have a changing of the guard immediately.
Woodward and Bernstein were the punks of their generation,
and now they're the old guard.
By definition, when you have a changing of the guard,
you have a different language.
[Eddie] This sales pitch took VICE at one point to a $6 billion valuation.
And Shane was looked at like this Professor X-like media mogul
who could get along with mutants and businessmen alike.
What a fucking guy.
Thank you.
[Eddie] Then it went bankrupt.
The VICE publishing business is now
going to operate as a smaller, break-even business.
[Emojis bubbling]
[Eddie] A lot of people lost their jobs.
A lot of people lost money.
And some people like myself never got paid what was owed.
You could read about it here, and here, and here.
And I'm sure there'll be an Alex Gibney-esque documentary
with talking heads sitting on stools, cutting the story into bite-sized pieces
from mouth breathers like this was WeWork or Enron.
These people are risk takers. They're impulsive.
[Eddie] But VICE was different.
At one point, this was a free magazine
that meant a lot to people.
Not investors, not the market,
not the trades, not demographics or numbers in a spreadsheet,
but actual fucking people.
VICE's existence challenged everything we knew
about journalism and brands.
We invested in story.
[Woman speaking Spanish]
[Eddie] And character.
[In Spanish]
[Eddie] And showed that with a "DIY fuck what you heard,
"I'll see it for myself" attitude,
you could get closer to the truth.
But once it caught fire and Shane saw the value,
we all fell victim to a resource curse.
The thing that I could see happening was we get to New York,
we lose our focus,
and we start sort of venturing off into the side projects,
so much so that we forget the mag,
which is the root of our everything.
[Eddie] Looking at Shane's face,
you could tell this thing meant so much to him.
It meant something to all of us,
and we give our youth to this place.
But I swear to fucking god, it didn't have to end like this.
[Pop instrumental music]
[Music ends]
[Crew] I'm sorry I need you to clear this shot.
Yeah, thank you.
Zach?
Stay next to this dude, and then keep taking pictures of the frame.
I wanna see what it looks like.
[Laughs]
What're you looking for in the frame?
- Just got to look fly. - You got to look fly?
I feel like it's a nice shot on you, bro.
Yeah, it's a nice shot. Looks great.
- Let's do it. - Alright, good.
- Dave approves the frame. - Alright, let's go.
Wait, I hate like at the beginning of documentaries
we can't use any of the "Oh, do I look good? Oh, cool."
Cut to the interview. I hate that shit.
None of that. We start, we talk.
You don't want foreplay. You just, like,
- rock it and roll. - No foreplay.
Yeah, so what was the last year you worked at VICE?
2007.
Oh, wow. Okay. So, you like dumb, early VICE.
Started in... I want to say '98.
Oh, wow.
[Dave] Still in Montreal.
In the early days in Montreal,
I remember the loft,
and it was a bunch of like punk rock dudes
who really loved Wu-Tang.
Like they loved Wu-Tang.
And that's why they gave me the platform.
So, my first column in VICE magazine was called
"Ask the Poindexter."
And it was fake letters written to me, the Poindexter,
about like the most obscure hip hop facts.
It evolved into an ad hoc position
of hip hop editor.
Because they were like, we need someone that's a hip hop nerd
that's going to write about this from a unique perspective,
even though my perspective wasn't that unique,
because I was just trying to pay homage to Ego Trip and On The Go.
And I have to say this,
because it's really like those magazines raised me.
Ego Trip specifically was a massive, massive, massive influence on VICE.
- High concept. - [Eddie] Yeah, satirical.
[Dave] So that humor, that kind of self-awareness
was missing at the time in a lot of hip hop journalism.
So, when I came on board,
what I kept saying was like,
"rappers are the funniest people on earth."
Like they are the most vibrant, funniest people
with the best sense of humor, the best references.
All you need to do is transcribe.
- [Eddie] That's sick. - [Dave] And that started in '98,
and I went until 2007.
And then when the band became bigger,
I was like, you know, I'm an artist,
I'm signed to the label.
I don't really need to be writing music criticism for the magazine.
- For the magazine. You know? - [Eddie] Yeah.
- [Needy Girl playing] - ♪ Wanna be by yourself ♪
♪ And no one else ♪
♪ Alright ♪
[Eddie] Your quarantine album you start writing,
you just, you want wax now, you know, like you're good, dawg.
- That's different. [Laughs] - That's better.
Congratulations, man.
[Up-tempo pop music]
[Dave] Looking back in VICE Magazine,
they let me do whatever I wanted
because they knew that they did not know this music
and they did not revere
- ...the music as much as I did. - [Eddie] Yeah.
And you would think that you would write an article, it's VICE,
people thought we just wrote this and sent it in.
Like no way.
Revisions, edits, this paragraph needs to go there.
Like really, you know, rigorous.
People never knew that or it didn't come off
because the tone was so spontaneous.
But these things were really labored over, at least for me.
You know, Jesse was a really, really rigorous and demanding editor.
- [Eddie] Pearson? - Yeah.
[Eddie] Yo, Jesse Pearson brought that literary bent.
Him and Gavin merged and they did something really special
that should not be overlooked because like--
But that story gets eclipsed.
At that time already, so 2000,
it was already starting to rumble under the surface.
[Dave] I remember reading Gavin's "VICE Guide to Hate".
That's a very important article in the sort of journalistic bent.
I remember reading that and being like, "This is weird."
Like some of it's funny, some of it's,
you know, today you would say like edgelord or whatever.
I don't know what he does now. I don't follow.
But in those days,
he was a hysterically funny writer.
So, when he wrote the "VICE Guide to Hate", it was funny.
You know, so you kind of like, you felt uncomfortable.
You were like, "This is weird."
Like, "What does he really think?"
I think that was the question on our minds.
Does he really think this, or is he being funny?
Which as you know is the strategy behind a lot of hate speech,
even today, right? It's 4chan.
It's the Pepe meme, right? "I'm just joking."
- Yeah. - That's classic. But...
before it went to shit or it went too far
or before it became even just corny,
Gavin was a really, really funny writer.
Like truly, a really, really, really funny writer.
[Upbeat music]
[Eddie] Speaking of Dave 1 got me thinking.
I knew that Gavin got kicked out of VICE before I got there.
And people actively tried not to mention his name
around the office like he was Voldemort.
But I never knew why Gavin got kicked out
or how VICE ended up in Shane's hands.
And watching this cautious,
fantastic, curated man
who was literally checking the frame of the shot
dance around the topic of Gavin
while simultaneously dropping hints,
made me realize I had a lot to uncover.
[Upbeat music]
[Eddie] I really liked that article.
- [Amy] I grew up orthodox Jewish. - [Eddie] Yeah.
So feel free to ask me questions.
But growing up Orthodox Jewish, I would say...
sort of led the way to working at VICE
because I did not fit in there.
I was a total misfit.
And I was so sheltered.
As soon as I was free of there,
I was like, "Get me the hell out of here.
"And I want to do everything.
"And I want to do the weirdest shit I can do."
I was always drawn to things that were frightening
because I just wanted to experience life outside of this tiny bubble
where everyone liked and did the same thing.
Jesse Pearson,
who was the glue for everything in the early days,
he and I both worked at this magazine called Index,
and he brought a copy of VICE.
It was the year 2000.
And I just remember looking at it and thinking, "What?
- What is this? - [Laughs]
"Oh, my God, what is this?"
So I thought, this is like a zine,
but somehow with like, amazing production values.
Was the beauty of VICE that you could just talk about anything you wanted there?
Yes. I don't think they ever said no to anything I ever wanted to write.
The stuff you were doing, like the guide to female ejaculation,
[Eddie] I have been seeing stuff that you should be proud.
[Amy laughs]
[Amy] So, you had the VICE guide to,
you know, all different sexual acts,
but they didn't have one for female ejaculation.
So I said, "May I please add this to the fantastic guides?"
'Cause those were all pretty good. They were funny
and the advice was pretty solid.
So I just wanted to, you know add to it.
[Laughs]
[Eddie] I realize talking to you that I'm still really figuring out
how I feel about my time at VICE.
They created this place that young people
got to write and create and be right and be wrong
and figure their shit out.
[Amy] Yeah, it's a very different time now.
There wasn't really any canceling, I guess.
I mean, you could, just because it wasn't so...
it was such a small audience.
And it was a free magazine.
You could either pick it up and look at it and like it or throw it in the garbage.
- [Eddie] Yeah. - [Chuckles] That was it.
[Amy] At the time, I had a lot of different jobs.
I also had a blog called Teenage Unicorn.
It's not online anymore. I scrubbed it. [Laughs]
But I have a picture of a really fun barbecue
that Gavin had where he, like, he put his dick on a bun.
And then he put ketchup on it,
which is actually more offensive because you don't put ketc--
- [Eddie] Mustard. - Mustard all the way.
So, you know, I was more mad about the ketchup than anything.
I don't know. Does it sound terrible if I just say it was funny?
I'm sure somebody can figure out an equation,
like politically, where that is wrong.
And there's probably many reasons--
[Amy] Well, it's wrong if it's not your friend
And you explicitly ask them not to. [Laughs]
After Jesse Pearson left and then I left,
they got this giant influx of money
and suddenly you could do these crazy things
but for a much bigger audience.
And I kind of feel like that's where things got iffy
because suddenly you had like a lot of people in the office
who aren't all friend-- like long-time friends
and you can't do the same kind of crazy shit
because you'll offend someone.
Gavin likes rules, obviously.
"Do's and don'ts."
Some of the do's and don'ts were hilarious and right on.
But a lot of the do's and don'ts
were very much like how to be a woman,
how to be an attractive woman,
how to be an attractive woman to men.
But Gavin wasn't mean to me or wasn't scary enough
- To make me be like, "whoa." - [Eddie] Yeah.
He would have stupid shit on his desk,
you know... racist stuff,
and I would just roll my eyes 'cause I was like,
- He's like an edgelord, you know? - [Eddie] Yeah.
He'd say something shocking and I'd say like, "Alright, Howard Stern,"
- Like it just was his shtick. - Yeah.
Did you ever hear about the... VICE initiation thing
where they gave out like rings and pins and stuff?
[Eddie] I mean, I got a ring, but I don't know how you guys--
See, I never got a ring. I got a pin.
And that's fucked up.
- I've never heard about the pin-- - I didn't want a ring.
[Crew speaking]
- Damn. You can think about it - Let me tell you--
while they do the new card.
So Gavin had this thing where he would hand out these pins,
and he had like a Hitler doll,
and he would be like, he would dub you with it.
And I was like, "Fuck no."
[Crew 2] Mark.
- [Eddie sighs] - What was I saying?
Something came up with my therapist where I said,
"Oh, but you're not supposed to do that
"when you're my age," she was like, "Where are you getting this from?"
And I was like, "Holy shit, from Gavin."
Like 20 years later,
I've internalized... these rules that are absurd.
And there's a very infamous... story.
[Chuckles] It's so stupid.
Jesse and Lesley,
and me and Gavin were hanging out.
Gavin just went on one of his comedy bits
about like how a woman should look.
- [Eddie] Oh. - And when he got to um...
the labia, he said,
"Ugh, labia has to be perfectly symmetrical.
"Otherwise, it's just disgusting."
And I just was like, "Ugh, I keep-- like, come on already."
And they were like, "Oh, someone has asymmetrical labia."
[Boisterous laughter]
And I was like, "I don't know, but like I'm just enough."
[Laughter]
[Uptempo theme music]
[Eddie, voice over] Despite knowing what Gavin became after his time at VICE,
hearing Amy talk about his errors is shocking.
It's one of those things that doesn't feel real.
It doesn't make sense until people like Dave and Amy paint the portrait for you.
Looking at it in retrospect,
you may be wondering why any of us went to work at a place like this.
For a lot of us, we were rejected everywhere
and spent most of our youth looking for a place to be ourselves,
even if the place was founded by a guy like Gavin.
You could see Gavin as a savior,
a cult leader,
or maybe just a chilly pimp.
They never had a daddy,
so when they call someone "Daddy,"
that's everything they got.
[Eddie] No matter what he does,
he was the first person to see value in some of these writers,
and they'll always have a place in their hearts for him.
It's a tough thing for people to understand
who weren't in situations like this.
Sometimes you love people that hurt you
simply because they were the first to love you at all.
[Music fades]
[Eddie] I'm curious, not just in the context of VICE,
like, what drew you to writing?
[Jesse] Reading, I think, drew me to writing.
I was drawn to reading first as an escape from my life as a kid.
You know, it was like a safe place.
I think that if you read enough,
you've got a natural inclination to write, it just starts to happen.
But writing writing, you know,
in terms of, like, prose, journalism,
started for me with punk rock probably, with zines, certain zines.
There was kind of a zine explosion for me. And a lot of them were--
not even what you might call punk.
They were more like, some people call them hate literature,
you know to some degree.
I was attracted to that stuff.
Also, independent comics were really big for me
in terms of inspiring me to like know that I could do something
without having to have permission.
[Eddie] When I read the old VICE shit,
you weren't trying to capture youth culture.
You weren't trying to define youth culture.
You were just sharing the shit you were interested in,
and because it was so specific,
it became representative.
[Jesse] I think Gavin started it before we even met him.
And then I came in, and then I brought in Amy Kellner and Lesley Arfin.
And I think the four of us defined a tone.
I always refer to it as, like, hyper-intelligent valley girl.
- [Eddie laughs] - You know what I mean?
Like, you know you can drop continental philosophy,
but you also say totes.
[Eddie] When you were there, it felt like the wildest literary magazine.
You know, like, I would give this shit to my kid to read,
to be like,
"This is the literature of that time."
"These are the romantic poets of the early aughts."
- [Jesse] That's cool. Yeah, that's great. - [Eddie] Right?
[Eddie] Like, you have Miranda July in here.
You have Ottessa Moshfegh in here.
Natasha Lyonne.
Like, this shit is a time capsule.
So, those are, those are of a certain era.
I mean this one was really controversial with some readers.
- It's cops telling their own stories. - [Eddie] Wow.
"The bag is NYPD slang for the full uniform.
[Eddie] "If your bag is perfectly pressed,
"crispy condition, you're probably a pussy.
"Real cops wear busted-out uniforms as a sign of experience and pride."
[Jesse sniggers]
[Eddie] Do's and don'ts, baby.
"She's either an empowered slut
"or the kind of person that will tell your boss
"you made up the nickname Bald Hitler."
[Jesse] Wow.
[Eddie] And, you know, a lot has been said about Gavin
and his political views and as a person.
[Jesse] Oh, yeah. I mean, there were pieces in VICE
that were starting to indicate conservatism
even before I came in in 2002.
There were little things here and there.
So, I think Gavin was exploring these ideas way earlier
- than a lot of people think he was. - Yeah.
So, it was bubbling, yeah. It was bubbling.
And I think Shane...
Fuck it, I'll just say it. I think Shane was, like,
jealous of Gavin being the face of VICE for a long time,
and he wanted some of that shine too.
And he saw this as a way.
So, he made his move.
- Did you have a ring at VICE? - I had a ring.
I lost it like a week after they gave it to me.
- [Eddie] You didn't give a fuck? - Fuck, no. I'm not gonna wear that.
To me, it would feel like wearing your own band's T-shirt,
you know, which is a lame move.
[Eddie] I think they tried to like, get our loyalty with it.
And the only people that ever thought it was cool
were like the business people that invested and like got a ring.
And, like, of course, you cornballs thought this shit was cool.
- And you're wearing it to this day. - Yeah.
[Jesse] Shane was a good businessman in a certain way.
Like, he could really sell.
But his approach to selling, I always kind of liken it to P.T. Barnum, you know?
Where you're like, a carnival barker, you know?
Taking the freaks, who were us,
and selling them to the squares.
He wanted consciously to win that sector of culture over to himself,
you know what I mean?
I don't think it succeeded, you know?
[Eddie] After you left, it's just kids with guns.
[Jesse] Well, that's kind of why I left.
I quit in 2010 because
the bosses at that point,
were wanting the magazine to become kind of like
a catalogue for the video content.
And it was like these attempts at hard news.
Sending some kid to a country that they'd never been to,
and basically the thrust of these pieces would be like, "It's scary here."
And I found that really irresponsible and really othering.
I was like, "I don't want a piece of this."
And that's a filter they chose to put on, you know?
To look at the world that way.
Somebody went to Liberia,
and they were talking about how scary everything was.
[Gunfire]
This is like a civil war on steroids.
It's a post-apocalyptic Armageddon
with child soldiers smoking heroin, cross-dressing cannibals,
systematic rape.
It's total hell on earth.
[Gun fires]
[Jesse] And then like a week later,
I saw an episode of Anthony Bourdain's show at the time,
and he was in the same place,
walking down the street, like, "It's vibrant here, it's exciting.
"Gonna try some food and meet some people."
Just these two completely different approaches to these places.
I think I even told Shane this at some point like, 'coolness',
whatever you want to say about that word and concept,
and how complicated it is and how problematic it can be,
'coolness' is not a renewable resource.
You know, if you have it and you want to sell it,
you can sell it once.
[Up-tempo pop music]
[Eddie] Speaking to Jesse reminded me of the time
I went to Jamaica for Huang's World.
I didn't like VICE's coverage of Black people
because it was always kids with guns or dudes with drugs.
I grew up working for a Jamaican chef
at my dad's restaurant named Chef Andy,
and he was none of those things.
I wanted to show the Jamaica that he told me about,
so I visited schoolchildren
and spoke to people about Marcus Garvey.
There is way more to Jamaica than just the whole party
and the hype life, smoking weed and all of that.
There's a lot more.
[Eddie] But when I got back, Eddy Moretti,
the number two at VICE at that time,
went off on me saying,
"Where's the guns? Where's the drugs?"
"Where's Trench Town?"
I told him I wasn't down for his ghetto safari kids with guns bullshit,
and he suspended me.
When I went back to Jamaica for the reshoot,
I put this clip in, but they took it out
because it made fun of their approach to journalism.
Yo, if this was any other VICE show coming here,
it'd be like this.
[Dramatically] So, we are in the mountains of Jamaica right now,
and this is very, very dangerous.
Many people have died here.
Thomas Horton has died here three times.
VICE: HBO. We go there.
[Singing in Arabic]
[Spike] Now, I always think that a lot of what VICE has done
has happened because of your sheer will of it...
Yeah, I think that too. [Laughter]
I think... I think because you're like...
I mean, you know, it's part, like this sort of...
part you know, having a vision,
part P.T. Barnum hyping it
and you know sort of willing everyone to you know, to go along with you.
Yeah. When you're starting out, you have to definitely,
you know be louder noise than the other guys.
You freak me out.
No, I'm the only one that doesn't freak you out.
- Oh, that's right. - So, you've forgotten that.
[Pensive music]
[Lesley Arfin] There was a writer, Christi Bradnox,
who wrote the "VICE Guide to Eating Pussy",
and I was like, "This is what I want to write."
It was like telling guys what to do, or girls or whatever.
I was like, "This is exactly the type of shit
that I want to do when I leave school."
It was so funny and really like a celebration of women.
And I just wanted to write the kind of shit that VICE was writing.
So, when I first started at VICE,
I told Gavin, I'm like, "Look, I don't know who Christi Bradnox is,
"but I want to... this is what I want to write one day.
"Like, I want to... I want to be her."
And he goes, "I'm Christi Bradnox."
And I was like, "Well, I still want to write like her."
Gavin was always very, very funny.
He's a very funny, very charismatic person,
for better or for worse.
- Shane isn't. - Yeah.
He went out with my friend.
I don't give a shit about talking shit about Shane.
- [Eddie] Yeah. - He went out with my friend
and, like, bought her this really ugly painting
that was like, it wasn't a painting.
It was like a sand art, and she was like,
"Oh, Shane got that for me.
"He said that, like, Buddhists made it,
"and it takes them, like, you know, seven years to do every grain of sand."
And I'm like, "I saw that at the airport."
[Eddie laughs]
"But of course he told you that."
- You know? - [Eddie] Yeah, yeah.
[Lesley] Like, I don't care what you have. Be normal.
Even when you have dinner with Shane, he always will take my hand and be like,
"This is about to be the best meal you've ever had."
- And I'm like, “Homie". - Hundred percent, dude.
"We're at Nobu, dawg.”
[Lesley] It's, like, not even good anymore.
This is a Japanese Cheesecake Factory.
So, in that sense, like,
both Gavin and Shane do have like this cult leader thing,
and Gavin probably, like,
could have been, like a really good cult leader.
But I don't really think that Gavin believes in anything.
I think he believes in jokes.
My name is Gavin McInnes.
I'm judging the Air Guitar Brooklyn Championships.
My brother has Down syndrome, so I have a bit of a soft spot for shit like that.
I don't know how you could ever take this seriously and not be a dick.
[Eddie] You were humorous like--
Yeah, it was like Mad Magazine for grown-ups.
At VICE we weren't journalists.
In fact we probably ruined journalism for the rest of the world
- that came after. - Yeah.
Because we were not fact-checkers.
This was all, "Let's go someplace
"and infiltrate and become part of it,
"and then we'll report back."
You have a duty as a journalist.
We did not have that.
We did not have those skills.
We weren't interested in being that.
We were biased. There was nothing journalistic about VICE.
And I was super insecure, you know?
Like, I just wanted to, like...
I just wanted like, guys to like me
and to, like, feel like I was good at my job.
And so...
Gavin, who was really like a true believer
in, like anarchy and, like...
would make racist jokes, I made them, too.
Because I cared more about being accepted by him
and feeling insecure and wanting to fit in
than, like what-- than actually hurting people
and what that meant.
And...
in retrospect...
I was wrong.
And like, it's not okay,
but also, I can't go back in time.
I just wasn't as smart as I could have been.
You know, like I cared more about being cool
than I did about being right or like kind.
[Eddie] So I was curious, what happened that day that Gavin left?
Okay, Gavin had been gone for two weeks
because Sophie-- his daughter Sophie was born.
His first kid.
Prior to that, Gavin had gone to,
I believe, it was like a...
a David Duke conference.
I just took it with a grain of salt
because that's how I took everything Gavin said.
So he goes to this David Duke thing,
and they lose advertisers.
So Shane says, "No bueno.
"Jesse's the editor now. You're not."
"Why are advertisers pulling? This is what we do.”
"Advertisers are pulling" because you're associating yourself with David Duke,
"and that's scary,
"and so they don't want their product to be advertised in the magazine.”
"Okay, fuck you. I'll show you what's scary.”
Right?
So then Gavin comes back from two weeks,
and he's like, "Where the fuck is my desk? Where's all my stuff?"
None of his stuff was there.
He's asking everybody, like, "Where's my chair?
"Have you seen my chair, my desk?
"This isn't my computer.
"What the fuck?"
And everybody's quiet.
[Whispering] "What the fuck is going on?"
"What the fuck?"
And then Gavin just was like,
"Fuck this fucking bullshit, whatever."
Don't know the exact words. Stormed out.
I don't think he ever went back to the office.
It was a huge moment,
a huge, pivotal, traumatic moment for his life.
His entire identity was that magazine, right?
And he got booted out.
[Eddie] None of us are born knowing the answers.
If people don't get to express themselves
and they don't get to learn through some of these mistakes,
then you're just bottled up, and you're like,
- "Okay, I'm gonna keep it to myself." - Right, and then what happens?
- You're gonna explode. - You explode and you start...
[Clears throat]
a group that is physically scary, like the Proud Boys.
[Pulsing electronic beat]
I went to America...
in the '90s.
Yeah. Boo!
Boo it up!
Free speech is very dangerous...
to the state.
The government doesn't like free speech,
and they've tricked us into culturally thinking
that we don't like free speech.
We don't like telling stories.
We're worried about offending people.
But we're not.
What happened to the West?
We're fighting to be ourselves.
We're fighting to be proud and unashamed of who we are.
And what are we?
We're Westerners!
If you want to come here and you have those values, come on in.
But if you want to tell us what to do, you can fuck off.
[Cheers and applause]
I'm so nervous about meeting Eddie.
Oh, my god. Hope he likes me.
I don't know Chinese. Does he speak English?
'Cause we could use Google Translate.
[Eddie, voice over] As I was getting ready to enter the scene,
I could hear Gavin telling jokes about speaking Chinese.
We've met before. Did you know we did comedy together?
Where?
[Gavin] At Brooklyn Brewery.
- [Eddie] No way! - Yeah. Everyone loved you,
which I suspect is based on race.
Yeah, probably.
[Eddie, voice over] I felt like his strategy was to try and shock me,
like he shocks everyone else.
But I didn't want to get caught in his vortex arguing.
Oh, fuck, I got gum on my pants.
Do you-- you know how to get gum off your pants?
[They laugh]
[Eddie] The positions he takes are so far outside the realm of reason and logic
that you lose as soon as you meet him on that ground.
- Do you want a drink? - I'll have a drink. What d'you have?
I'm having Coors Banquet 'cause of the Bud Light incident.
[Eddie] I only wanted to know two things.
- We got Gatorade. We got Jameson. - I will have the Malibu watermelon.
[Eddie] One, is this truly who you are?
- This is all fake. - Oh, fuck.
This is a fake bar you're in. You're in a studio.
- I'll come around and see what's real. - These are all lies.
I'll have a fruit punch Gatorade with Jameson.
- Oh, that's a fun idea. - Yeah.
[Eddie] And two,
how the fuck did you let Shane take over the company that you gave your voice to?
The story of VICE is there's really two stories,
and Shane is the backbone of both of them.
So the first story is my years at VICE,
and that was-- that culture was punk rock.
Like everyone's friends, everyone hangs out, you know.
Open floor plan, no offices.
Everyone can hear you on the phone.
So Shane managed to take that esoteric, hardcore DIY shit
and make it profitable.
Then when I left, Shane's attitude was,
"Where's the money?"
And the money was with young girls.
"Alright, what are they into?
"I don't care what it is.
"If it's kiddie porn,
"if it's snuff films, what are they into?
"Oh, they're into woke shit. Okay, let's do a bunch of woke shit."
Yeah, I know you got an NDA, but it's like,
did you choose to leave, or did you get forced out?
I just became incompatible with the brand.
Like, you know, I had an ad agency after that,
and it got shut down 'cause I said trans people are mentally ill gays.
I think too...
the problem with salesmen is it's not cool.
I think it is cool. You make the world go round,
but used-car salesmen ruined sales.
And I think Shane hated being the like,
uncool guy for so long.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you a very real question,
and it's like, one of the main reasons I came,
'cause I watch all your shit,
and I see everything you're doing, and I know your old work at VICE.
My feeling is you really are being the person
on some Life of David Gale shit.
What's David Gale?
[Spacey] I'm a murderer four days shy of his execution.
[Man on film] The murder's way too clumsy.
This guy is a major intellectual.
Life of David Gale is this film
where Kevin Spacey is trying to overturn capital punishment.
So what he does is him and his partner set up a murder,
but she's killing herself, and he sets himself up
as the person that did the murder,
and when he dies, they release the video
and realize they killed an innocent man.
So I'm playing a Hitler character to expose racists?
That's what I think.
- That's a terrible theory. - That's what I think, Gavin.
But, if you really believe this shit, then--
Believe what shit, though?
Like well I mean,
like...
all of it.
If your boss grabs your ass and it doesn't hurt
and you don't like it, quit.
- [Host] That's harassment. - Yeah,
- that's harassment. - [Gavin] Okay, then quit.
I'm so glad you found it out on TV
that you can't grab somebody's ass.
I swear to God, I did not know that.
Do you think white supremacy exists in the US?
Not to any measurable degree.
Women do earn less in America because they choose to.
They don't go the extra mile. They don't work all weekend.
Why am I sitting here? I'm sitting here.
You're making a mistake. You would be much happier at home
- with a husband and children. - Oh, boy.
You're not supposed to say it,
but one of the biggest problems with Jews is--
- Ow! Ow! What the... - [Laughter]
I was gonna say the problem with Jews is there's not enough of them.
[Laughter]
[Gavin] I've never met a bona fide racist.
Like, it's not a thing.
Yet it's all the fucking...
Joe Biden says white supremacy is the number one threat
to this country, and you're like,
"Okay, can I meet one of these fucking guys?"
What is this issue?
Yo, I'm wondering if this--
you're taking this position and being this character.
What character? Like, what position?
I think women would be much happier at home.
Is that sexist?
I can't tell you how many women I know that fucking hate their jobs.
But there's a lot of men that hate their jobs.
Generally men, when they talk about work, they want to help the other guy.
Women aren't into solutions. They just wanna bitch.
When you give them a solution, they're like,
"What the fuck are you doing?
"I'm going to continue bitching."
I have an idea.
I think we should arm wrestle to see what the truth is.
- Okay, I'll arm wrestle you. - Let's fucking arm wrestle.
So, one, two, three.
- Yes. - One, two, three.
[Straining]
Women are happier at home.
Amelia Earhart. [Laughing]
Feminism has ruined women.
Gloria Steinem was a shield for Shane.
[Laughing]
Gloria Steinem killed men's clubs.
That's why Proud Boys did so well,
'cause men's clubs are supposed to exist.
I'll never get to fuck my wife again if I lose [laughing].
[Straining]
This sucks. This sucks.
[Panting]
I guess women are great in the workforce.
- They're great in the workforce, man. - I love them suing people.
Their stupid HR jobs,
Controlling the company's social media. [Cackles]
No, I really think everyone should have the opportunity.
No one's saying they shouldn't have the opportunity,
but women tend to be happier at home.
You don't want government,
you don't like law, but you love rules.
- Like, do's and don'ts is rules. - Yeah, but it's a joke.
I'm not trying to catch you, either. I'm just--
Right, but I can't-- I don't enforce these rules.
But I can have rules.
I do think there is a thing about you that people are just scared of.
What kind of pussy is scared of ideas?
Like a Holocaust denier.
That's a pretty horrible idea.
Pedophilia, terrible idea.
Say you think all Blacks should go back to Africa.
That's a dumb belief. It doesn't scare me.
I won't argue with you. [Laughing]
- No? - Yo, you are consistent.
Well, I'm too lazy to lie, so.
I just wish I could argue with people about things I believe in, you know?
[Pensive music]
[Eddie] I think what I struggle with personally
when speaking to Gavin is the idea that he could possibly believe this shit.
What do you think is in the interest of your country right now?
[Speaking Italian]
[Eddie, voice over] I've met white supremacists.
I specialize in talking to these dumb fucks.
When I was interviewing a white nationalist group, Forza Nuova,
on our Sicily episode,
a passerby recognized them
and challenged them about their anti-immigration stance,
and they didn't like it.
[Eddie] Within minutes, they phoned plainclothes cops
to arrest us and take our footage.
[Men arguing in Italian]
[Man 1] Who cares? We didn't do anything wrong.
[Man 2] Why did they say they're taking you in?
[Man 1] I fought them on giving my ID card.
Let's go, guys. Let's go, guys.
Bye-bye. Let's go.
[Eddie] I believe that those people believe the shit they're saying.
[Laughter]
[Eddie] But there's something about Gavin that makes me feel he knows better.
He knows his opinions are horseshit.
I think he's less a white supremacist and more of a nihilist,
cashing in on this ridiculous caricature he's turned himself into.
And I feel this way because VICE was full of people like this guy.
They get off on having these ideas and being edgelords
because making people feel uncomfortable
makes them feel powerful.
It's all a punk rock fake-out.
Gavin is still out here making money, feeding his family,
telling incendiary jokes
because there's a large swath of this nation
that takes it as the truth.
This guy's not crazy.
He's accidentally representative.
But how the fuck did Shane take this man's voice and magazine
and sell it to people like Disney?
[Fireworks exploding ]
[Eddie] I like being a dad so far, like three months.
- [Eddie] I've been enjoying it. - [Dave laughs]
[Eddie] It's been cool.
[Dave] Damn, three months. You're new. You're fresh in it.
[Woman] Hi, guys.
[Eddie] Thank you for having us here today.
[Woman] I'm happy to meet you guys.
[Eddie] Yeah. So I figured you could read my friend Dave's palm first.
- Oh, no. [Chuckles] - Can I see your palms?
- Yeah. - Okay, close your eyes.
[Woman] Well, I do feel that you have a lot of deja vu, a lot of wisdom.
- [Dave clears throat] - Do you write a lot?
Well, yeah.
I used to write for a magazine called VICE.
And I think those early issues of VICE,
there was an issue where I painted the cover,
and I wrote like three articles in it under different names,
I did the comic strip in the back.
You know, basically whatever I want. I could do a goofy hitchhiking show
and serious news.
What I loved about your show though,
like, besides the camera work which was phenomenal,
was it was honest.
You know what I mean?
You straight up went to go find a dinosaur
and you were like, "I can't fucking find it."
- [Burping] - [Car honking]
[David] We just said we wanted to see the dinosaur
and they kept saying, "Do you want to see the dinosaur?
"Do you wanna see this dinosaur?"
"Yes, we want to see the dinosaur."
So we had to do this ritual.
So they pour us this clear liquid.
[Tribal drum rhythm]
I don't know what was in that stuff.
And then like some kind of dream or something,
this thing just came out and the people just screamed
and they were either saying he's an evil spirit
or it's the dinosaur.
And I'm like, "Oh, I guess that's the dinosaur."
And as fucked up as I was you know
I was believing it at the time.
[Woman] But I'm going to say you had a void.
There was a void energy, like just a numb energy.
I can feel it, but you tell me what it was. [Chuckles]
[Dave] Yeah, it was--
Can you tell if he's still cancelled by looking at his hand?
[Laughter]
Well, I still feel you have a lot to achieve
because you're very honest, you're very pure,
and that's why people saw that.
[Eddie] You weren't there when it turned to shit.
But you still told me not to go.
Yeah, 'cause I was like, "You will get fucked over."
[Eddie] I just thought that because, like, I had an attorney,
we had a contract, they're going to owe me money
- ...because legally in America-- - They do.
they owe me money.
You knew you weren't getting that money.
[Eddie] No, I genuinely did. That's where I'm stupid.
No, you're not stupid.
I think he really did believe. He really did trust them.
[Eddie] I saw Shane fuck a lot of people over.
- Yeah. - And like, I didn't like it.
And I did speak up for them.
You know, at VICE they would give everybody these rings that said VICE.
- Really? - And they gave me a gold one,
but they didn't give anybody else on my crew the VICE ring.
So I went and I made 'Rice' rings for everybody on my crew,
and I paid for it because I was just like,
"Yo, all for one or like none for all."
- You know, like Goonies. - [Dave] Right.
I don't know if you wanna use any of this for the documentary,
but like how long do you want to feel that for?
- Didn't you just have a baby? - [Eddie] Yeah, I did.
- Yeah, you just had a baby. - [Eddie] Three months old.
Yeah, three-month-old baby.
What a great time to make a documentary about VICE.
- [Woman] You got your baby. - Go fucking home
and be with your kid, dude.
[Dave] This is a weird Chink right here.
[Woman] Well, you guys have a connection though.
You know that.
Oh yeah?
I mean, he's pretty psychic. He told me not to go to VICE.
When I met you, you had just written Fresh Off the Boat.
And you were like a, you know, it became a huge TV show.
ABC bought it.
But I told you from the beginning, I was like,
"It's ABC, corporate America, white television.
"You think they're gonna make your book the way--"
[Woman] It wasn't exactly how you wrote it, right?
[Dave] Yeah, and he got angry, and I was like...
I always thought I could persevere.
I thought I could be like the change.
And so how long do you want to keep repeating that and feeling that feeling?
What is it that you want to manifest?
No, my thing is this.
I don't think it's about revenge.
It's justice.
[Eddie] Other people got fucked over more than me.
And I was like, "Somebody got to say something."
- [Woman] I believe-- - But why does it have to be you?
[Eddie] Choe fucking pisses me off
because it's easy for him to say, "Let it go."
Homie's got Facebook money.
But I also don't fault Choe because he doesn't know that I'm broke.
VICE owes me hundreds of thousands of dollars.
My son was born three months ago.
There's a triple strike going on in LA
and I overdrafted my bank account this month.
So yeah, I'm having a lot of trouble letting this go.
And sometimes I wonder,
would life have been better as the Asian hip-hop Guy Fieri?
[Funk music]
Hey, I'm Guy Fieri,
and haven't been to a new restaurant in 37 seasons.
But when I heard about Thai Taco Tuesdays at Anajak Thai,
I just had to come to Sherman Oaks and check out
what Chef Justin Pichetrungsi's doing.
Come on in!
It's not fucking open!
[Rock music]
Hell yeah, brother.
I'm with VICE legend Santiago Stelley.
- How you doing, Santi? - I'm good, buddy. How you doing?
Hell yeah, thanks for being on Triple D, man.
Weren't you working on some magazine called Colors before?
Yeah, so I worked for years at Colors Magazine.
My first contact ever with VICE
was because they had taken a page out of Colors magazine,
literally just ripped it and published it in VICE
as some sort of an advert for a shoe company or something.
Hell no, brother. I wouldn't even do shit like that.
I haven't shown up on my show for fucking 10 seasons,
but you know not to take a frame from another show
and put it in your show.
[Santi] Right? So, VICE was just starting to do video,
and after meeting them, they asked me if I'd go
to Bolivia to shoot a documentary the next day.
Hell yeah, Bolivia, baby. [Exaggerated laugh]
Fucking A.
And ended up going to shoot VICE Guide to Travel in 2006.
What are some of your favorite pieces from that era?
I went to Colombia with Thomas Morton
and with Ryan Duffy, and in that shoot,
I think we were there for about two weeks.
We shot "Columbian's Devil's Breath,"
which is the world's deadliest drug,
on YouTube nowadays,
"The Sewers of Bogota," "Bulletproof Tailor,"
[Gunshots]
"The Donkey Fucking Piece."
[Speaking Spanish]
It was just kind of all on the fly.
And when you do things on the fly, I mean...
it just has a different energy, you know?
If you see the "Columbian's Devil's Breath" piece,
there's a junkie who helps us to go buy what we need.
We landed at Bogota, and 20 minutes after that,
we were shooting with this guy.
And Ryan kind of built the whole doc around it.
Those kind of moments, that kind of spontaneity,
we kind of went into every shoot
with that mentality.
It's hard because that's not how content is produced, right?
It's not okay by the industry standards or whatever.
You gotta help me get something straight here.
Everybody always says, "Spike Jonze, creative director of VBS,"
but you're the creative director.
Can you have two creative directors?
Well, I mean, the whole Spike thing was used for years.
We talked and-- you know, that was--
that was the sales department or marketing kind of... tool.
I feel excited and anxious that, you know,
just to make sure we actually seize the opportunity as well as we can.
I think we're just at the beginning.
I feel like we've just built the foundation of what it can be.
It's like Viceland 1.0 right now.
[Santi] When we were doing VBS for the first five, six, seven years,
you know, I never had any interaction with Spike.
Neither did anybody else.
But for the most part, those formats that went on Viceland,
as little as I followed it,
were formats that had been created on VBS, right?
They weren't even VICE dot-com period formats.
And those formats, now they seem like obvious things,
but they weren't at the time. Nobody was doing any of this stuff.
As a guy stuck in a scripts format,
I was always very jealous about the stuff you guys were doing
'cause you're breaking form
- ...and, you know, subverting things, - Yeah.
and when I have to do my show talking like this,
it hurts my throat, man.
Fuck. Gotta drink so much water on Triple D just to keep this voice up.
Alright, guys.
So we got noodle supreme with shrimp.
Pad pong karee. It's like a Chinese-Thai seafood dish.
And then we got, you know, Dad's ribs.
Oh, hell yeah.
- So enjoy. - Thank you. Appreciate it.
- Thank you. - [Waiter] Yeah, dig in.
I think at this point I can cease being Guy Fieri.
- No. - There you go.
The food...
Oh, man. Bro, it is so hard to be Guy Fieri.
It's not even funny.
[Eddie] I have so much more respect for that guy
after being Guy Fieri for like three hours.
But the shit that you and Jesse did,
when you were doing it,
what credit did you get on each piece?
- There were no directors. - Yeah.
But then when you're the guy who went and spent a month in prison in Colombia,
which is... you know, stressful, interesting situation.
Happy I had that opportunity,
but it's a stressful situation to be in.
And then you're not really getting credited for it, right?
The show doesn't jump out of a bush into the camera.
- That's right. - It's directed, captured, hosted,
it's lived.
And at VICE, the funny thing is,
no one got a director's credit,
but Shane and Eddie's names
are on every single piece of content at VICE.
[Eddie] I personally feel that they didn't give director credits
because they didn't want people to come up.
Not having the director credit really hurt a lot of young directors at VICE.
For production out in the field,
we were always trying to send an expert, right?
Not somebody who's like, camera-ready but just like,
somebody who has deep knowledge on a subject matter.
For the most part, people were journalists
or had some sort of journalistic, journalism background.
But in post-production, all of our editors came from film school.
And so for a long time, a lot of the directors were the editors,
because they were these kind of film school kids
who knew how to tell a story,
and they were the ones just figuring out a pile of tapes.
What do we do with this, you know?
And then Shane just kind of sits in front of this bear
and regales stories of, like, his adventures,
and the assumption is always there that he's the guy who went and shot this story.
- [Eddie] Because Shane is a sales guy. - Yeah.
[Eddie] He wasn't a creative guy.
But Shane was somebody who you really just had to give him a little script
or here's your stand-up, you know,
and just bare minimum, man.
I mean, we shot a ton of interviews where he just didn't show up.
Not because-- I mean, he made it all the way to Guadalajara, Mexico,
but then he stayed in the hotel the day of the shoot.
And then after the shoot, he inserts himself in post-production.
And stylistically, that's off from what we do.
It's disrespectful.
Yeah, it was just very performative, right?
It was like he would do these kind of stand-ups.
He'd wait for the cop car sirens to be flashing by,
and then he'd do his, you know, urgent-sounding stand-up, right?
I went through that process once with him and just thought, “Man, I can't.
"Like, this, like, I'm gonna kill somebody.”
And I think he probably felt the same way,
and we never did a production again.
It's a totally different type of production.
- Yeah, the Shane production. - It's a totally different--
- Yeah, it's "Weekend at Bernie's." - Yeah.
Yeah.
[Eddie] How did the VICE on HBO show come out of your guys' work?
So I'm not credited on the HBO show
because I left once we'd finished it,
but my credit was removed.
But that was built off of our story bible.
I mean, we kept a story bible in the content department,
and you know, there were stories that we looked at for years to make, right?
And eventually when first the "VICE Guide to Everything"
came around or the HBO show came around,
we just opened up that VICE story bible.
- [Eddie] And then repurposed them. - And then repurposed them.
I mean, a lot of things were reshot.
But when it was republished, the credits at the end were taken off of everything,
and mostly it was interns.
They'd have them set up every one of these pieces.
It literally had been done five, six years prior.
I'm Chantal from the VICE office in Brooklyn.
I'm Katie from the VICE office in Brooklyn.
I'm Chelsea from the VICE office in Brooklyn.
- Brooklyn. - Brooklyn, New York.
Our colleagues in China spent some time with Enbo Fight Club.
Our colleagues over at VICE Colombia explored the Indigenous queer community
at an Amazonian beauty pageant.
This is VICE China's Out of Place: Part One.
This is Indonesian Death Cult.
This is Templo de Lucifer.
- Stay tuned. - Stay tuned.
Stay tuned.
[Santi] Which, in fact, I mean, was a part of why I left.
I mean, I had spent years
kind of not being credited for my stuff,
not being reimbursed for my stuff.
And on top of it, like, you know,
I was told for a whole long time
that they were gonna stop with this Spike Jonze kind of pitch, you know,
and that they'd give credit where credit was due, and they did not.
I mean, there was none of that at any point.
So at some point, you're like, "You know what?
I'm out of here. What's the purpose?"
[Eddie, voice over] Hearing Santiago talk about the Shane production
reminded me of this infamous David Carr piece on VICE.
It was the first time I ever heard someone call out
VICE's bullshit style of quote-unquote "journalism".
If you're a CNN viewer and you go,
"Hm, I'm looking at human shit on the beach."
I'm going to tell you one thing. I'm a regular guy.
And I go to these places and I go, okay, everyone talked to me about cannibalism.
Right? Everyone talked to me about cannibalism.
Now I'm getting a lot of shit for saying what cannibalism stuff, whatever.
Everyone talked to me about cannibalism!
Yeah, most of my boys, they would drain the blood
from an innocent child and drink it before going to battle.
- So you kill the child? - Yes.
- And then you drink the blood? - Yeah.
I lifted it up to the temple. I'm gonna eat it.
[Shane] That's fucking crazy.
So our audience goes, "That's fucking insane, that's nuts."
And New York Times meanwhile is writing about surfing.
And I'm sitting there going, you know what,
I'm not gonna talk about surfing. I'm gonna talk about cannibalism.
- 'Cause that fucks me up. - Just a sec, time out.
Before you ever went there,
we've had reporters there
reporting on genocide after genocide.
Just 'cause you put on a fucking safari helmet and went and looked at some poop,
doesn't give you the right to insult what we do.
So continue, continue.
I'm just saying that I'm not a journalist. I'm not there to report.
Obviously.
[Eddie, voice over] This interview really changed the culture at VICE.
It went all around the office, and for the first time,
we'd seen our bosses get spanked in public.
The immediate reaction from the top down
was that we needed the respect of real journalists like David Carr.
In retrospect, it was the right instinct
to consider accountability as journalists.
And this kicked off perhaps the most productive era
at VICE since Gavin left.
[Rhythmic hand claps]
Hi, I'm Shane Smith. We're here in the offices of VICE.
We shoot a lot of stuff here.
These are all the magazine covers over the years.
We've been doing this a long time.
We started out as a magazine, then we went into online video.
Most recently, our YouTube channels
like VICE, Creators Project, Motherboard, Noisey.
But what I want to show you today
is something brand new and really exciting.
We're gonna go check it out. Come with me.
- Come with me. - [Upbeat music]
[Eddie] After the rise of VBS and verticals like Munchies and Noisey,
Shane's next trip was VICE on HBO.
And with the Dennis Rodman North Korea episode,
VICE's power was undeniable.
♪ I saw you there ♪
♪ You were walking down the street ♪
♪ You stay awake, ♪
[Eddie] Shane had combined hard-hitting, front line news
with insane access and entertainment value.
♪ I saw you there, ♪
♪ You were walking down the street ♪
♪ Walking downtown ♪
♪ Make me dance to the beat ♪
While they preserved the integrity of the VICE on HBO show,
Shane spun a multitude of businesses off the reputation of that show,
and every investor wanted a piece.
[Song ends]
One of the most successful ventures was VICE News.
And its most decorated journalist was Simon Ostrovsky.
- [Shane] Simon, hi. - [Simon] Yeah, hi.
My name is Shane. I'm from America.
We're here with our friend Simon. We've been on a train for a long time.
We're going a bit goofy.
[Simon] At the VICE office, they had a screen at the entry
where you would see a part of this story on loop
where I'm riding the train with Shane.
[Soulful saxophone]
The interim between sort of mildly friendly drunk
and psychopathically pull-your-eyeball-out drunk,
there's this sort of level of like,
"I hate your fucking guts. No, you're okay.
"We're buddies, we're buddies. I want to kill you."
So you've got to stay somewhere in this gauge.
[Eddie] I remember seeing this clip.
We were like, "Oh, shit, this is Shane's, like, serious news friend."
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So everybody at VICE thought me and Shane were super tight,
- [Eddie] Yeah. - which was not the case.
How did you meet Shane and come to VICE?
Shane saw something that I put out on the BBC,
which was an investigation into the use of North Korean labor in Russia.
[Simon narrating] We headed further along the road into the forest,
and before long, we began to see signs
of woodcutting activity in the area.
After four hours on the track,
we finally found a group of North Koreans hard at work.
[Simon] There were these logging camps,
and these were essentially, like labor camps that were put together
with all the North Korean propaganda,
and Shane's producer saw that report,
knew that Shane was obsessed with North Korea,
and he was like, "Can you produce this for Shane?
"We'll do a whole thing for this thing called VBS TV."
You know? And I'd never heard of VICE at that point,
so I had no idea who Shane was,
and he comes in, and the first thing he does is,
like, start telling me how... awful and bullshit the BBC is,
because I think he had a really big chip on his shoulder about legacy media.
Yes. I was in a hot tub with him once,
and he told me that him and Elon Musk were gonna buy the BBC,
and I was like, "Isn't that a government channel?
"Like, wouldn't you have to buy like England first?"
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a public broadcaster.
You can't buy the BBC. It's, like, ridiculous.
[Simon] Probably one of the most embarrassing incidents of my entire life
took place on that very first shoot.
We're standing in at one of these remote North Korean labor camps
and there is a North Korean guy, and Shane walks up to him,
and he starts singing this national Korean song.
And he starts going... [Sings in Korean]
[Laughing]
And I'm like, "What is happening right now? What are you doing?"
[Singing in Korean]
Okay.
[Woman singing in Korean]
[Simon] I think kind of nobody knew what they were doing,
so there were no rules.
We could just do whatever we wanted.
It was the Outback Steakhouse of media.
No rules. Just right.
[Laughing] Until it all fucking went to shit.
- Yeah. - You're an actual journalist.
In your opinion,
what do you think was that secret sauce
that you guys figured out on the news side?
Well, so we figured out,
A, that if you go places and show things from the ground,
people will watch.
You don't even have to release it on the same day.
You don't have to be first.
You just have to tell a story.
Let's say there was some kind of a pro-Russia protest
that erupts outside of a Ukrainian naval base
that's being held hostage by the Russians, right?
[Reporter] In the scenes of escalating violence in eastern Ukraine
this one is particularly sobering.
[Simon] CNN has a 2pm deadline,
so they film a few shots of B-roll,
they go back and they put it on TV the same day.
[Speaking Ukrainian]
[Tear gas popping]
[Simon] We stayed there all day,
developed characters to see what would happen to them,
like what was their fate.
[Man] A bunch of guys put him into the back of the car.
It doesn't look very official to me.
[Simon] And we tried to use as little voice over as possible.
You know, we tried to let all of the people
that we were filming speak for themselves.
And sure, we didn't put it out as fast as CNN did.
We put it out the next day or two days later, even three days later.
Our viewers didn't care,
because they were seeing something that they never saw before.
[Chanting in Russian] Russia! Russia! Russia!
[Simon] Like they were seeing what people's lives were actually like.
- [Tear gas popping] - [Crowd clamoring]
We didn't get a chance to thank--
we wanna thank Eddy Moretti, we started the whole show together,
and our show runner, Vijay, who is awesome.
[Eddie] When the company really got supercharged
and started to win awards, a lot of it was your work,
you know, especially in the Ukraine.
[Simon] Thank you for saying that.
It was really jarring when VICE News got taken over
by this corporate hack named Josh Tyrangiel.
The reason that HBO and the Showtimes of the world
were interested in VICE as a news outlet
was because of the initial VICE News team
that I created with a bunch of other people.
And so it was really weird when the guys who sort of created the buzz
around the news operation at VICE all get thrown out.
It was all about loyalty for him.
That was Josh Tyrangiel's position.
"We have to get rid of the old team.
"Everybody has to sort of follow my each and every command,
"and I need to know that they're going to be loyal to me and to me only."
But he couldn't like, really fire me
like he did the rest of the VICE News team.
I was, you know, too big a deal.
I'd spent three days, you know, in a cellar with a bag over my head,
getting the shit kicked out of me by militants in Ukraine.
[Camera clicking]
[Simon] Josh was not able to fire me like you know,
because it would have been a bad look.
So he just tried to make my life so miserable
that I would want to leave myself.
He made my raise conditional on me moving to London.
He wanted to recalculate my salary into British pounds,
but the pound was collapsing at the time because of Brexit.
- Yeah. - And I was like, "Okay.
"Well, you can't use this calculation from a month ago
"when you gave me my raise.
"That's a twenty percent pay cut into nothing."
- And you had to move to London? - And I had to move to London for it.
And you know who all of this was being done through?
Nancy Ashbrook.
You know who she is?
The Harvey Weinstein...?
The Harvey Weinstein HR lady.
Tough as bricks.
I mean, she was...
I remember the higher-ups at VICE were, like, quite proud that they got her.
And I was like, "Dude, it's the Harvey Weinstein--
"Like why are you guys proud of this?"
Like, "Yo, she's fucking sick."
Yeah, and Shane was always saying stuff like that about his new hires.
But, you know credit where credit is due.
There was a sweet moment in, like, 2015
where every legacy media around the world
was, like, interested in what VICE was doing.
- Which to me, only makes it more tragic - Yes.
that as soon as they had cracked that code,
they threw it all out the window.
You know like some people don't learn from their mistakes.
VICE doesn't learn from its successes.
So we still have the long-form VICE News documentaries that you know us for,
but we're also gonna be doing a lot more short-form stuff
breaking news, live-streaming news,
and then we're gonna have a whole halo of text and photos
and social media around it.
You're gonna get all that stuff you know VICE for,
but also a lot more VICE News. Bango.
[Eddie] 2014 was the beginning of VICE's peak financial success.
Shane had convinced everyone that VICE was not only the future of digital media,
but also news and journalism in this country.
Why is VICE worth so much fucking money?
- Yes. - $4 billion.
- They got a word in.
- More than $4 billion. - [Kara] Okay. $4.4 billion.
- There you go. - [Kara] All right. Okay.
So that's $400 million.
- I'm not good at math. - You just rounded it down.
- We rounded it down. - Why? Because you guys are mean.
- No. Okay. - If you were nice, you'd say "five."
- Okay. - You'd round it up.
- Ten. - Anyway...
- Ten. - Ten.
- That's what I would say.
- Yes. - [Audience laughs]
'Cause I'm Shane.
So the whole thing is, is we sit there, and we said, "Okay."
[Eddie, voice over] In 2014,
VICE sold a ten percent share of VICE Media to A+E Networks,
a joint venture of Hearst and Disney,
for $250 million,
valuing the company at $2.5 billion.
In the same year,
Shane was compensated to the tune of $78,482,292.
Then in November 2015,
news broke the A+E cable channel H2 would be rebranded as Viceland.
A month later,
Disney doubled its stake in VICE Media to $400 million,
and the company was valued at $4 billion.
The next year, in 2015,
it was reported that Disney offered to buy VICE
for $3 billion, but Shane declined,
claiming that in the next decade,
VICE would be worth $50 billion.
I used to have a personal relationship with Shane.
I looked up to the guy and trusted him.
For years, I requested an accounting of my residuals,
and there was no response from VICE.
But I never bothered Shane.
When VICE started to miss payments to employees and vendors,
I caught wind and hired an auditor to look into my case.
By the time the auditor discovered that VICE owed me
hundreds of thousands of dollars and never reported it,
they went bankrupt.
I reached out to Shane about this,
and this was his response.
Eventually, the story became bigger than my residuals,
and I started to ask questions.
But the only question he ever bothered to respond to was this.
We're about to show you financial documents
we received from a whistleblower
who declined to appear in this documentary.
In late 2016, Shane and VICE went back to Disney,
looking to be acquired, but the jig was up.
By the time Disney did diligence in 2016,
all of VICE's numbers were down across the board.
At that point, when the cracks started to appear in VICE's financial picture,
Shane doubled down on his bullshit sales pitch
and took on even more money.
But with that money came the pressure
to continue scaling the brand,
and we all felt it as creatives.
VICE is one of the few brands
that really connects in a meaningful way with millennials
as their center sweet spot.
So I think that's-- it's the millennials
that we want to get excited about our business,
and so VICE is the perfect fit.
[Eddie] For me, going Viceland, it was a big mistake.
We were crushing the Internet. The Internet's the future.
Why would you go backwards and partner with this bum channel A+E?
Like, I don't watch anything on A+E.
Doing the worst thing possible is hot.
Like, doing-- like, 'cause that's how he got them.
'Cause he was like, "I will get the children to watch television."
And they were like, "Oh, oh, oh."
That's what got things to the four billy.
They had to take it there,
which I respect, but it was never gonna work.
[Eddie] Do you think it had to go this way,
or do you think the culture that, like, we all contributed to could have survived
without this fucking flameout?
I just think like, adults got in the room.
You know what I'm saying? I think that grown-ups...
[Eddie] The cops came.
I think the cops came. I'm serious.
And once the cops came and were like,
"Let's do, like, disruptive hyper-vertical
"like cloud-iterated, end-to-end, snackable,
"stackable like fucking content," then like you're fucked.
People are like, "Alright, how do we do this again?
"How do we formulaically, algorithmically do this again?"
The way to stay ill is to be like,
"No, we did that. Let's do some new shit.
- "Let's do that." - That's what I'm saying.
They were then being like, "Well, here's what the data says.
"Here's what the kids are into."
And then, like, backing stuff into that.
That's not how you do it.
It really was coming from, like Shane and Eddy Moretti
because they wanted us to be more advertiser-friendly,
and that's when we lost our voice.
In fairness to Gavin,
the reason he left was that he didn't want any of this shit.
[Eddie] Bro, what do you think Shane is doing right now?
Like, after going from four billy to no billy to like bankrupt?
If someone offers you four bill, take it.
- [Eddie] Take it. - Like, I get it.
It's kind of a flex.
Like, "No, $8 billion."
- Yeah. - You know what I mean?
Like, that's sick, but also like zero.
- I think it's gamblers' way. - [Fat Jew] It's a scam. Yeah. Go harder
I feel like Shane's gamblers' brain was just like,
"No, I'm gonna fucking win the next hand."
Just go fucking nuts.
I watched this fool gamble in Vegas,
and it was like, we went for the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight,
and we started gambling before the fight.
He went down a half million dollars
and then didn't even go to the fight.
He gives me his ticket, and he's like,
"Yo, go to the fight without me, whatever."
I go to the fight, and I'm there sitting with fucking Paulie Walnuts,
half the cast of "The Sopranos,"
watching the fucking fight.
He went to his room and got a private dealer,
opened up like, nine bottles of fucking DRC,
and was just gambling the whole time,
- never made it to the fight. - You have a problem, sir.
Sir, you have a problem.
[Eddie] Eddy Moretti to me is the one that creatively tanked the whole shit.
Eddy Moretti and his stupid hat, man.
- Spaghetti Moretti. - Spaghetti.
[Fat Jew] I think, like, the number one moment for me
that was the most magical is like,
we were smoking a dip.
We were smoking formaldehyde like right outside the VICE office.
[Eddie] What's that high like? I just have to stop and--
It's just like, not that fun. You're just like, "Ahh."
Like, you just don't feel good, which is kind of cool.
And I remember looking inside, and we were smoking,
and I'm like, "Who is that sitting in the lobby? I recognize that guy."
Turns out it's Rupert Murdoch.
He was sort of courting them on some level.
I was like in that moment, I think,
when you're, like, smoking a dip,
basically next to Rupert Murdoch,
- Like, that's the fucking thing. - [Eddie] That's crazy.
But how long can something like that last?
You know what I'm saying? It can't.
[Eddie, voice over] As a person who was at VICE for many years,
seeing how disorganized it was
and how a lot of it was a house of cards,
I started to wonder how this would end
and that it was possible that there was a very, very bad end
because gamblers go up and gamblers go down.
But once they go down,
they start to do crazy shit to try and come back up.
When VICE started to experience revenue shortfalls,
they began working in the shadows with people like Philip Morris
to create lifestyle campaigns promoting vaping
as a healthier alternative to cigarettes
because their metrics said that vaping
was a more profitable business.
Miles Skinner worked on the Philip Morris team.
[Miles] I know a lot of people who,
you know, have a bad taste in their mouth about VICE.
I don't. I had a great time.
I had a great job.
I got to travel the world.
I got to be in really weird rooms with interesting people.
You know, they had Virtue.
The version of Virtue that was existing to that point
was more like, you know, VICE content
that looked like VICE content that was really ads.
[Pensive music]
This was creating white label ad services.
In this episode of Rise As One,
our friends at Budweiser sent us to Beijing
to see how a group of local football lovers
are rallying their countrymen to get out on the pitch.
[Rock music]
[Eddie] Do you feel like VICE pioneered a lot of that, like, branded content?
It's funny because the VICE I knew and loved
was a bankrupt magazine that threw great parties.
- Yeah, yeah. - You know? And it was like...
hot girls, like good music.
Like, you know they had taste, good photography,
all of that stuff.
I think they stumbled into something that became their future.
You know, we booked nine figures in business,
and some of that was for Virtue.
And then some was when I moved on to a different team
that was a... little bit more clandestine.
- Yeah. - You know?
And that was based around one client, which was Philip Morris.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
You know how do we get people to quit smoking combustible cigarettes?
So, massive thought problem.
You know when they explained their rationale,
it was of course,
get people to quit smoking combustible cigarettes,
we create a market to sell them non-combustible solutions.
And you know harm reduction, you can spin it all ways.
You know Philip Morris has blood on their hands.
Is the vape business better for Philip Morris
than the combustible cigarette--?
- [Miles] Their metrics said yes. - Ew.
We put together a strategy
that was around most of these anti-smoking campaigns,
cessation campaigns.
It's telling people to do something.
And that's what Shane was always selling companies,
was that, "I know how to speak to that kid."
What do you think is at the core of that perspective?
To that kid you're talking to,
what do you think it is that we were all selling?
Make the cool guy feel rich and the rich guy feel cool.
- Yeah. - And, you know, it's yours.
Yeah.
And you can rule, you know?
It's like, it works.
People were coming to VICE, I felt, for two reasons.
One, 'cause it was cool and it was like, "Tell us what's cool."
Two is, you figured out the Internet.
And figured out you know, how to get over on it.
You know? I mean, it was, like, a lot of it was scam.
[Eddie, voice over] VICE made a lot of money by
basically playing three-card monte with Internet traffic.
And Taylor Lorenz, who wrote Extremely Online,
is an expert on this matter.
They did a lot of growth hacks because they needed to,
because they had to deliver those audiences.
So the metrics were always bullshit.
Throughout like the early, mid-2010s you know,
Facebook is just juicing traffic to media companies.
They weren't able to drive enough traffic from their own pages.
So they would, like, do these swaps,
where they would buy traffic.
Basically they would like pay for traffic
that they could then claim as their own.
It was like, "Well, let's fudge the numbers this quarter.
"Yeah, we're gonna get some traffic from here and there
"but like, it'll work out."
'Cause it was all like, trickery and these like,
digital marketing, kind of sleights of hand.
And it was about sort of projecting success
and coolness and culture, which is--
if you don't have the kind of business to back it up
or the community to back it up, then you're screwed.
I got an e-mail from a VICE employee
that was very high up in sales on an Apple campaign.
And Apple actually found out that they were buying traffic
from Pornhub and attributing it to their numbers.
Well, because they would do VICE Media Network or something.
They had all these ways of, like, obscuring that.
And then when you dug into it,
you're like, "Okay, but that's not VICE dot-com that you're talking about here.
"You're talking about all these other weird websites."
So that you can claim their numbers.
[Eddie] Yeah. It's insane because the people at VICE
didn't even tag it to the dates of the campaign correctly.
- Wow. - Like, they were that negligent.
Yeah.
[Eddie, voice over] Not only was VICE negligent
in reporting fake Internet traffic
on a million-dollar ad campaign for Apple,
but it was malicious in its direction of employees,
like Mitchell Sunderland, who VICE fucked so badly
that he ended up having to change his name.
[Sasha] Mitchell Sunderland was a staff writer
and an editor at VICE,
might have been 2018.
A mutual friend of ours walks through the door,
and she goes, "Oh, my God. What's this shit going on with Mitchell?"
And I was like, "What are you talking about?"
She's like, "Google it."
Every fucking news publication has an article.
"VICE's Mitchell Sunderland.
"Email thread with neo-Nazis," blah, blah, blah.
All this stuff.
So like it doesn't look good for Mitchell.
Mitchell was given a directive by VICE
to maintain relationships
with Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos,
who had actually written for VICE in the past,
to cede VICE articles to Breitbart
and other right-wing publications
because allegedly,
- they had better traffic than VICE did. - Yeah.
People who were studying traffic at the time
were seeing that right-wing people
would be more likely to click on a VICE link
if they saw that the person posting it
was railing on VICE rather than if they were saying,
"Look at this great thing that VICE is posting."
Nobody bothered us, you know as long as we were earning.
I mean, you've been to the London office.
We were in a separate building
like, down the block and around some weird little Shoreditch alley.
And, you know, our seats in London were...
We were sitting with or right above the guys
that were starting the work with Saudis.
[Reporter] It was at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul
that Jamal Khashoggi met his brutal end.
He'd been lured there to discuss paperwork
for his upcoming wedding.
But he was strangled as soon as he entered the building
by a team of Saudi assassins.
- I was privy to a little bit of it. - Yeah.
You know. I saw maybe one of those briefs, and it was very, very early,
and it had to do with tourism
and their ultimate goals of making it an inbound tourist destination
for people under 35.
[Rhythmic music]
[Narrator, female voice] Camels hold a very special place
in Saudi Arabia's heart.
They've been used for centuries as transportation, food, even as currency.
This annual month-long celebration of everything camel
is a chance to see and be seen for the country's elite.
[Eddie, voice over] Saudi Arabia's tourism board paid VICE millions of dollars
to make a video covering camel races.
[Narrator] Arabian camel racing has been around since the 7th century,
but has grown in popularity in recent years
due to the huge prizes on offer.
World leaders and dignitaries enter their prized beasts.
[Eddie] They actually trick a VICE journalist to go post this episode.
[Charlet] I've learned, I mean, they call us producers, right?
- I mean, I was a host. - [Interviewer] Mm-hmm.
I guess I was a content creator.
[Camel growling]
They've just decided that I should ride.
[Camel growling]
[Eddie] The person had no idea that it was a fluff piece
for Saudi Arabia's tourism board.
[Charlet] This is a time of massive flux,
so how better to deal with that than to remind yourself
of your roots, your regional identity,
and celebrate the camel.
[Eddie, voice over] They would just film the person's VO
and have the person say things
that they needed for this tourism video.
[Charlet narrates] As I watched the highly choreographed closing ceremony,
it was clear that in modern Saudi Arabia,
camels remain important.
They may not be a main source of transport or food,
but to Saudi's elite,
like Naif and the country's leadership,
they're a source of national pride and even regional solidarity.
You know, that's another three card monte, VICE, kind of...
you know, that's an old standard trick.
I haven't talked publicly about VICE hardly at all
for, like, various reasons.
[Interviewer] Oh.
But also because I'm worried that if I do,
I'm just going to talk so much shit
and I'm never going to be able to stop.
Are you excited of the idea of meeting MBS?
Of course. He's our new king.
We are moving with him.
We are changing with him.
For the better.
[Shane] What we look at is saying, okay, when I say partner with brands,
I mean partner, like production partner.
So we make it together.
We exploit it together.
And that could be a TV show.
It could be a short form. It could be long form.
It could be a film.
[Eddie, voice over] As revenue was falling,
Shane doubled down on the further narrowing of the brand.
Everything needed to feel like a sibling of the VICE on HBO show
because urgent, salacious journalism
was the one thing investors and legacy media understood.
[Fire blazing]
[Kara] Let's talk about what you're doing.
Now, there's been, like, 90 articles about your efforts.
Mostly, "We're going to fuck shit up.
"We're going to fuck the shit out of things.
"Fucking shit, shit, fuck," stuff like that.
So what are you doing?
[Audience laughs]
- Fucking shit up. - [Kara] Okay. Alright.
What we're famous for is giving over, Dylan going electric,
giving over the company to people...
Like, for example, a lot of people who are doing TV,
all the people who are doing our monetization
have never done anything in TV and, or TV monetization before,
and that's our strength.
- That you don't know anything? - Exactly.
- Okay. - Ignorance is--
Now, you do have some executives they've brought in th--
Yeah, on the business side, for sure, because as we grow,
we're doing a lot of international TV deals,
a lot of mobile deals.
We don't want to get hoodwinked,
so we have people coming over from Discovery and other companies,
but I'm talking about on the creation side.
So you have people that don't know anything--
- Correct. - [Kara] And the point being,
we're so stupid, we can't fuck up?
- Correct. - Okay.
[Eddie, voice over] It seems strange watching Shane talk
about how he installs creatives who don't know what they're doing,
but it was code for the existing VICE creatives
like myself and the people who worked on our show.
It was all posturing
to make it seem like he was going to retain the punk rock essence of VICE,
but in fact,
he was installing parrots on every show.
We ended up having to answer to a show runner
that came from Cesar Millan the Dog Whisperer.
[Uplifting music]
This guy was on this episode encouraging my brother and I
to stay at the Sausage Castle,
despite our protests about what Mike Busey was doing to people.
[Song ends]
Now, that's what I call "fresh off the boat", brother.
What's up, man?
[Eddie] And for some reason,
these white dudes always want to remind me that I'm Chinese.
[Upbeat music]
You gotta get control of this shoot, there's guns going off everywhere,
and son's throwing grenades.
Someone's throwing grenades.
I mean, son was throwing grenades,
and I was really like, man,
we really need better gun control laws in this country.
You're going to take your finger, and...
- Wait, wait, wait. Please don't shoot. - Oh, damn!
[Eddie] At one point, they almost shot our DP,
- Christopher Valona. - You okay, CV?
[Christopher] Yeah, I'm okay. I heard, like, it's like the war.
- [Mike] Welcome to my house. - [Laughing]
[Eddie, voice over] And we were still asked to finish the scene.
I didn't know that you were gonna shoot.
I was going to come in with a countdown, LA.
Okay. Like, I'm getting ready to shoot.
Everyone stand by, so you don't shit yourselves.
[Eddie, voice over] This is what Jesse was talking about
when he said Shane became P.T. Barnum
selling the freaks.
It wasn't the same voice that Gavin, Jesse, and Amy
had crafted with satire and a subversive purpose.
It wasn't even weird for weird.
It was weird for money, and I wanted out.
Go over to the camera and say that in Chinese.
- Into the cameras. - I don't--
Just make some shit up and say-- make it sound Asian.
[Mike] Allow the sake to flow down her juicy pooper.
Into LA's mouth. Open up wide, LA.
[Crowd cheering]
- Sake fruit salad. - This fucking sucks.
[Mike] This is the sake fruit salad here.
[Giggling]
I'm sorry. This sucks.
What's up, dude?
[Mike] Hey, mind if I talk to you for a second?
No, it's fine, man. I mean, my thing is really, I just like...
You know, man, this isn't my thing.
It's just like, I feel like that you're a [bleep] hilarious dude,
and all this shit is hilarious, and it's fun to be here.
But you just got to be careful not to use people.
Do you know what I mean? Like, you're using LA.,
and he's kind of this, like, funny Black guy with a big stomach.
You're using the Asian girl to come, like, speak Chinese on camera.
You just got to be careful about the way you use people.
And the women like-- you know what I'm saying?
Well, behind all this shit, man, honestly,
- we're all from different walks. - Yeah.
Black, white, Christian, atheist.
You hung out with Jews today,
Asians, dumb [bleep] like me.
- Yeah. - And the whole thing is,
we all find a common ground in our just being that outsider.
For me, watching and being a part of it, I'm uncomfortable.
And I feel like people who watch this are gonna laugh at you.
They're gonna laugh at LA.
They're gonna laugh at the girl with the melons.
But I think you should just think about, what is it you're trying to say?
- I apologize for any [bleep] - Don't--
- [Mike] But I do, man. - Thank you. We're good.
Thanks for coming.
[Bell dings]
[Background chatter]
[Eddie, voice over] While VICE had me boxing to sell ads at their upfront,
I was fighting their lawyers behind the scenes for my residuals.
We chased it for years.
But by the time VICE finally acknowledged the debt,
they were bankrupt.
I challenged the bankruptcy,
made my claim,
and although they never paid me my money...
[Crowd exclaiming]
I traded that debt for the rights to my show
and cancelled out my NDA with VICE.
By having that footage and freedom,
I was able to make this documentary.
I traded hundreds of thousands of dollars for the right to tell this story.
People ask me all the time why I went to VICE
despite people like Choe telling me not to.
I went to VICE because at one point,
it was fucking amazing.
It was a place you could be weird and have a voice
and for lack of a better term, be your goddamn self.
It was like Professor X's School for Mutants
or Bruce Wayne's Gotham orphanage
or Derek Zoolander's School for Kids Who Don't Read Good.
That's why we all went,
because we didn't fit in anywhere else.
And despite this insanely negligent,
borderline malicious environment,
a lot of good people did a lot of good work.
VICE gave us a home to tell stories from the gutter,
and the hope was that by telling these stories,
you could change shit.
[Eddie, voice over] We had a purpose, and VICE made a brand out of it.
But once that brand became bigger than the people
and the stories and the multitudes it hoped to contain...
It's not this, like, precious thing,
but it's this thing that's like-- it's a, it's a...
[Eddie, voice over] It was worthless.
[Up-tempo pop music]
The world is full of stories like this.
I saw a lot of them on Huang's World,
and in the end, there was one salt miner in Peru
that reminds me of my time at VICE.
In America, if you sell one bottle of this pink salt,
like, six to eight ounces,
people are paying upwards of $10 or $12 for it.
Did you know that?
[In Spanish]
So you guys are not aware of the amount of money they sell your salt for?
[Rock music]
[Eddie, voice over] The desire to scale Peruvian pink salt
or VICE magazine so everyone can experience it
instantly kills that thing you loved about it in the first place.
There's a magical number of people
who are meant to enjoy or experience something,
and the second you cross that threshold,
it becomes a pumpkin.
VICE is broke
because greed scaled it to a point where it mutated
and no longer resembled what made it special in the first place.
Not everyone is gonna get to smoke formaldehyde
next to Rupert Murdoch at the VICE office.
You kind of just had to be there.
[Upbeat theme music]
Oh, I mean, but these pants are weird.
Alright, you pick where it goes.
- Okay, right side for sure. - That's pretty big.
Is this the biggest one?
- [Man] That's the biggest. - Okay.
[Eddie] Here, I'm gonna keep it there.
I'm just gonna line it up just a little bit.
Yeah, yeah, 'cause it's a little slanted.
But isn't it going to, like, isn't your body just...
I still want someone to claim the panties.
- [Artist] Oh, you feel it, huh? - [Groans] No, that's good.
Alright, try not-- try to hold still.
[Eddie] I'll chill out if you put a couple fingers in there.
I might have to do it to hold you in place.
Was that Amber Rose that was telling everybody
that Kanye liked fingers in his ass?
Yeah, yeah, she was like, Mr. Finger in the Booty Boy or something.
Most geniuses are left-handed and like fingers in their ass.
- I know a lot of geniuses. - [Laughter]
Woo was on an episode with us too, right, Nick?
- Yeah. - Before we went to Taiwan as a pickup.
Yeah.
[Nick] Remember the guy in China did some shit like,
"You a party boy?
"Yo, you're a fun guy, right?"
[Laughing]
Then you were like, "What?"
He's like, "Yeah, you're like a fun guy, right?"
We were in that bar that gave us fucking... the balloons.
That was one of the guys.
- [Eddie] Oh. - [Nick] Yeah.
[Hip-hop music]
I remember, we go to this underground fucking bar,
and I think we're just gonna drink and stuff and I look at the tab,
but they started putting balloons on it,
and everyone was doing balloons, and I was like, "Oh, this is so sick."
Nitrous you were doing?
[Nick] It wasn't like any nitrous I'd ever done before.
It was like Chinese grade.
[Eddie] That shit was not nitrous.
[Nick] Yeah, I don't know what it was.
[Laughter]
- [Eddie] Is the tattoo done? - [Artist] Yeah.
- [Eddie] Oh. - [Woman] How's it feel?
You know, the very end of it,
- I felt a little sting. - [Woman] Yeah?
- But like, it feels-- - [Artist] That was the finger.
[Laughs]
It looks really good, though.
Go look at it. Go look in the mirror.
[Theme music ends]
[Woman] Stunning.
[Soft music]