Matt Elek - Vice Media

Full transcript: Matt Elek on London Real

7:31 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mr. Matt Elick, who is a managing director at Vice Media here in London. You are in charge of publishing, digital events, television and communications for the Europe, Middle East and Africa.

7:46 You’ve been at Vice almost 12 years since graduating from the London School of Economics. Vice started as a punk magazine in Montreal in the mid 90s. And now you guys attract, I think, nearly one billion YouTube views a year across your brands like Vice News, Motherboard, Noisy, Thump, Munchies, Fightland. I’m sure I’m missing more. You guys are on HBO. You guys are getting parts of you bought by Rivermurdox Fox.

8:13 It’s pretty crazy. Matt, welcome to London Real. Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here. Thanks for being here. You know, a good friend of ours who kind of does a lot of our YouTube stuff.

8:21 And now he works for a multi-channel network. He was down in Cannes a few months ago. And I think it was one of the MIP conferences where a bunch of the television people were there. And he said, you know, Shane Smith went on stage and was talking about what you guys did. And then YouTube kind of said, this is the latest in news.

8:35 And he wasn’t expecting Vice News to come up. And apparently you guys rolled some footage and just blew this whole audience of people away. These were like industry people, buyers and all this stuff. And I think everyone was just like, wow, this is the next level of news. So he was just saying amazing things.

8:51 And I was just wondering if you could talk me through your last 12 years of Vice, what it was like when you started, and what you guys are up to now, including the news. Sure. So I guess I started in 2002, the UK office with two other guys, a guy called Andrew Crichton and Andy Kapper. And previous to that, of course, Vice had been going for eight years, I think. And it started in Montreal as a sort of punk rock fanzine, sort of partly funded by a government get back to work scheme kind of thing.

9:23 And so it was three friends and they had then, to make a long story short, they’d gone to New York and had a little bit of investment and started growing up and expanding. And then so we launched the first foreign edition of Vice. And so that was it. It was a really earnest kind of independent publishing effort for us. And we were reasonably good at it and we built an audience pretty quickly and then we expanded into other markets in Europe.

9:48 And we started in Sweden. After about a year doing UK, we did Sweden. And we did Italy, I think, was our second, and Germany. And for the first couple of years, and certainly the first ten years of Vice, we built an independent publishing business. Which I guess in the independent publishing world, we were sort of big fish in a very, very small pond.

10:09 The world of independent publishing is not, particularly these days, not a place to make tons of money. But at the time, we were doing well and we all enjoyed it. But I think we always had more ambition, right? We didn’t just want to have cool zine, because lots of those indie publishing efforts, that’s what they are. They’re cool zines.

10:28 A lot of it often is driven by the founder who wants to go to the right parties and make a bit of money and be a thing. And we were always, I guess, a little bit more ambitious and international about that stuff. So we were doing the magazine, and then we had a website. And then Shane and Spike Jones, who’ve been friends for a long time, were talking about video, and Spike, I guess, was making films and had been doing so for a while. And so he sort of convinced Shane that, of course, he should be shooting all this stuff.

10:57 He wrote good articles. Making a leap into filming them isn’t such a big leap. And so Eddie Moretti, who’s the Chief Creative Officer at Vice, and Sarush, one of the co-founders, went off and they made our first big piece of video, which was a documentary called Heavy Metal in Baghdad, which was… I’ve seen that, yeah. That was what, 2008 or 2009? Or is it that far back?

11:17 I think it was earlier than that. It was 2005, maybe? Something like that. So Spike and Shane had already spoke, because Shane has that famous quote where Spike was like, you’re getting all this on video, right? And Shane was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

11:28 And then he was like, okay, we’ve got to start taping everything. Yeah, and so that article, Heavy Metal in Baghdad was a magazine article. I remember the feature. It was like a two-page story about this band in Iraq. And you had sent people out to Baghdad to cover it?

11:41 I think we’d… I can’t remember the details, and I wasn’t involved in finding the story. But I think someone had found this story, and I can’t remember how. And so it was just an article. It was like a really good article about kids in Iraq.

11:55 And this was in the context of, we’re like two years into the Iraq War at this stage. Early days, yeah. So it was a really interesting way of sort of contextualizing what does it mean to be a young person living in Baghdad right now? Because if you watch the news, you basically just see death and destruction and maiming and good guys and bad guys, and it’s presented in this kind of Star Wars, the good and the bad. And so a lot of that stuff we were doing at the time, or at least certainly that article anyways, was about contextualizing being young or contextualizing just like real normal people and what happens in their lives and within the context of these things.

12:29 And so they went out and they shot this, what was meant to be just a short piece of video. I think it was meant to be, I don’t know, 20 minutes or half an hour. And we, around that time, we were launching what was then called VBS, Vice Broadcasting Systems, which was like an early version of an IPTV network. And so that became the sort of, that was the launch piece of content. And people liked it a lot.

12:52 I mean, I think it turned out even today, like maybe one of, certainly one of the better things we’ve ever made, or in my opinion it is anyway. And this is all before YouTube, just to give people context. I mean, there wasn’t really online video in 0506, right? YouTube was like 07, 08 when it kind of… I can’t remember.

13:08 Yeah, there wasn’t a lot out there. I mean, there were certainly things, but it wasn’t yet the engine, the internet that it is now. So when you released Heavy Metal and Baghdad, that was as a film, kind of independent cinema, or did it make it to television? So we first did it, I think we released the first bit online, and then they went, everyone liked it, so they went back and they shot another segment. I think they went back about a year later.

13:29 And then, and at this stage, Eddie and Suresh I think had developed a relationship with the guys in the band, and it became, it wasn’t just pure, we go, we shoot, and we get back on a plane. There was a relationship, and I think they felt attached to these guys and their story. And so in some ways it came back, and it turned out Spike did, I think, a bunch of the editing, or certainly worked on it, and it became a big thing. It got theatrical release around the world, and in this country it ran on the BBC, as well as being, as I said, in theatres.

14:01 And it was a real stake in the ground for us. And I think to some extent also a learning process of which maybe the main output, or the most important thing, was we were like, oh fuck, maybe it’s not as hard as everyone makes it out to be. If you have a good story and you get a camera and you’re willing to take the risks and you go there, you’ll come back. And I think that, for us, that kick-started. It kick-started, A, our shift into video.

14:28 I think it, to some extent, made a name for ourselves in terms of telling good stories and being thought of as a go-to resource for the way that we present stories from a young person’s point of view. So coming back to the first thing you said, how do we get from the start to the news? That, in some ways, was a step in that direction. And so then we then started spending a lot more time in video. And some of it was through design and strategy that I think Shane in particular identified this was gonna be the next big thing in online.

15:03 And we wanna get in early and build up some knowledge and figure out the model. And there’s a lot of smart and aggressive commercially people. So let’s get a business model. And we’ve never been in the habit of being like, well, we’ll just get an audience and we’ll figure out how to make money at some stage down the road. That’s a lot of the startup mentality now.

15:25 Our thing was always like, it has to be profitable on day one, and we have to figure out what’s the advertising model? How do we get users? So when you start to marry up a really good craft that we are developing in how do you make video and how do you make online and how do you make stuff relevant for young people? And you married it up with a lot of people working on it. And how do we make money out of this?

15:49 That was those two things working in parallel got us to where we were. And then at some stage, our website started doing a lot better and VBS was doing well and we merged them into vice.com. And then from there, we started rolling out. We were like, what does the next generation MTV look like? And MTV, when I say MTV, in the 80s and 90s, it was the bellwether of everything to do with the world of young people.

16:15 And arguably, it sort of shed that reputation over the last 10 years, but nobody’s really moved in to sort of replace it as the voice of that generation, the voice of generation Gen Y. And so we sort of had that in the back of our heads, like, how do we become that? I think we have a good starting point. So we were like, okay, well, clearly it’s online. TV has a role to play, but young people are first and foremost digesting all their information and content in a digital space.

16:44 So we were like, all right, well, let’s launch channels that people are really into. So instead of just being a lifestyle show, people are really into music. They’re into fashion. They’re into sports. They’re into news.

16:55 They’re into technology. And wherever we can find, like areas that we think young people are into and we feel passionate that we can make good content in that space, then let’s launch a channel. And so that kind of brings us up to today, right? We were launching all these channels and for the most part, they’ve all been pretty successful. And then news became a big focus of ours over the last 12 months in particular.

17:16 And now, as you know, for us, a huge amount of resource and time and energy and passion. I think a lot of what’s a driven advice and why I think we’re good at making stuff and some people aren’t is, for the most part, the people making this stuff really, really give a shit. And there’s this sort of saying advice that Shane used to say is like, if you make grapple grommets, you’ve got to really fucking care about what you’re making. No matter what it is, really stick to your craft.

17:45 Do it well. Care about it. Be passionate about it. So we kind of stick to that mantra that we, for the most part, the people who are in charge are making our music content. They live and die by it.

17:55 They love it. They’re out every day. The people are making news. It’s the same thing. It’s sticking to that.

18:00 So that’s kind of a history of vice in six or seven minutes. That was good. I was going to cut in, but it was a nice, long diatribe. You said you were focused on revenue from the beginning, and that’s like the last thing that you would think when you think of vice. But do you think that kind of kept you ahead of the rest of the pack that was just creating content for content’s sake back in the day?

18:22 And do you think it also came from your print background where you had to sell profitable magazines every month? Well, I think that’s, to some extent, it’s true. I mean, I think print was, it’s funny because print is such a small part of what we do now. But for some of us, and certainly those who did the magazine for a long time, yeah, I mean, it provided the benchmark on so many things. So on the content side, it was like when you launch an independent magazine and you go up against the eMaps or the Conde Nast or IPC or with the big publishers, you’re at a major disadvantage from day one because you have no distribution, and they, for the most part, own distribution, and they can outrank you.

19:01 And if you go into WHSmith, you mostly don’t really realize that where that magazine sits on the rack is a commercial transaction. Someone is paid to be the first magazine you see, and the people who paid the least money sit at the back of the rack, and you’re at a disadvantage, and you don’t have economies of scale and all those kinds of things. So when we were doing the mag, we were like, okay, well, the best thing we can do to sort of get our thing out there is let’s differentiate.

19:25 Like, let’s do stories that people won’t do. Let’s say things in our magazine that people are unwilling to say. And to some extent, like, let’s reflect what people really think rather than what the magazine industry would have you, would like to have you believe that people think. So I think we developed a really good way of telling stories and finding narratives, and we developed a kind of idea in journalism of like, rather than just reporting on the news, let’s get stuck in, and if there’s a story, whether or not that’s heavy metal and Baghdad and it’s music related or it’s news, or even if it’s just funny stuff, like let’s get stuck in the middle of it and give our account of what’s going on.

20:05 So we kind of differentiate it in that sense on an editorial level, and that kind of permeates through a lot of stuff that we do today. And I think those learnings in independent magazine publishing of when you want, the best way to win is by having a better story and be more interesting and be more exciting and differentiate and all that kind of stuff. You know, that served us well. And on the commercial side, yeah, you’re like, you know, when you’re a free mag, when we launch Vice in the UK, you’re a free magazine, which at the time, every one we talked to was like, free magazines are bullshit.

20:36 Nobody wants to, you know, read them. They’re not worth anything. People don’t want to read them when they’re free. Yeah, they’re like, because it’s free, there’s no value in it. And, you know, fast forward five or six years later and then you had, you know, shortlist and you had London, was it London Light and the London Paper and now the Evening Standards free and then now Time Out’s free.

20:56 And so that model is now kind of, you know, not at all a weird thing. But at the time, free magazines were like, you know, things that Australians picked up at the train station. So we, you know, took a while to convince people that like, actually, you know, our readers are buying tons of magazines. But, you know, if we hit them in lifestyle locations and you give them the right content and it’s free and it’s differentiated and the storytelling’s better, that’s a much more effective way of getting into someone’s life rather than just, you know, the self-selecting distribution of the people who are going out and spending money.

21:26 And so that model for us, was something that we were really challenged on in the early days. So convincing advertisers that that was the right thing to do wasn’t that easy. But, you know, fortunately the strength of the content was really good and we managed to convince some people that the distribution model worked and over time it got easier. Did you use those same advertisers in print initially on your video stuff? Because you said you were looking, you know, to have revenue models right from the start.

21:53 Could you go to those kind of print magazine guys and say, look, we’re doing this over here? Yeah, I mean, yeah, we, you know, we had relationships, of course. And, you know, but when we were a bit smaller, we were selling a lot of ads to like, you know, music labels and fashion companies. That was a big staple of the early days of Vice. But then you start to grow up and then all of a sudden, you know, the bigger fashion companies are interested all of a sudden.

22:19 So you’d get, you know, Nike or you get the Adidas of this world or Levi’s. And then, you know, just kind of, to some extent, you get the more interest you get inbound from some slightly bigger players who have bigger budgets. And there’s sometimes a bit of a fallacy that the bigger players are, you know, more risk averse. And sometimes they really are. But at the same time, they’re the ones that can afford to spend a bit of money not really knowing if it’s going to work or not.

22:45 So sometimes they can, you know, they come with goods and bads. And one of the goods sometimes is an ability to take more risks. Whereas sometimes you do get brands that are willing to take those risks and have to, you know, I was listening to the guy, the marketing director at American Apparel on your show the other day. Oh, yeah, yeah. Ryan Holiday.

23:04 And he was talking about, you know, they didn’t have the budgets of the H&Ms of this world. So their marketing was necessarily more daring. And those people are nice to work with because they’re willing to sort of get in. And the American Apparel and Levi’s relationship has been a strong one for a long time. But now, yeah, I mean, we find that now that we’re a much bigger company and a bigger audience and a more robust commercial setup that we have relationships to.

23:26 Yeah, I think Saroosh, one of your founders was quoted as saying, you know, you guys aren’t purporting to be objective because no news is objective. So you guys are subjective and substantial is kind of what he said. So you kind of put yourself in the experience and then go all out, right? Yeah, yeah. So that’s it.

23:43 I mean, I think a lot of the stuff you see on Vice is exactly that. I mean, we’re not pretending to be the BBC. We don’t have the resources to be able to go out and, you know, to get every single facet of every story, nor should we, nor is that necessarily what we want to do. We want to tell our story so that it comes in this idea of like, this is our view on the world. It’s not, you know, we’re not pretending that it is every single fact that’s ever been delivered on a single subject.

24:08 But what we give is our view and our view is oftentimes the view of, you know, a young person because for the most people, for the most part, it’s 20-year-old people making these stories. And so we think that resonates well. We think that exactly what Saru says. Like, if you look at the objective news in the UK, like, to me, when you look at the spread from the Guardian to the Times or, in fact, the Guardian to the Daily Mail, you’re like, look, we’re all not, this isn’t total objective news.

24:33 We can all tell that there’s a slant on these things. So we are like, look, we don’t have a slant at all, but our slant might vary from journalist to journalist depending on their experience and whatever story they’re telling. You know, it’s funny, yes. I was at Google the other day and the guy was like, Brian, you should identify your London Real fan and put a name on him and give him an age and give him a job and tell yourself what he likes to do on weekends and, like, identify this target person.

24:58 And he’s like, and then when you make future content decisions, say, you know, would Bob like it? You know, that kind of thing. I thought it was interesting, that concept. And I was wondering if you’ve targeted your audience. Is it like a 20-year-old or is it a 25-year-old?

25:12 Would you guys think about things that way? Yes and no. I mean, no in the sense that I know that lots of brands they like to create, you know, this is Chloe and she’s a fashion retail assistant. She’s 21 years old. She earns $18,000 a year and they create these fictitious characters that are audience profiles.

25:30 And I think it’s a, you know, it’s used enough by people who know more about marketing than me to that it must be a useful way of sort of segmenting and bringing to life the idea of who these people are. But no, I mean, we’re not like, we don’t go, what do we think, you know, Chloe’s going to like to see today? And let’s go make content for that. You know, a lot of our stuff is, what do we want to make? What do we feel passionate about?

25:51 We have, you know, as I said, lots of young people that go out, they find stories. And we’ve always been pretty democratic that, you know, it’s been a long-held mantra that you can be like, you know, the youngest kid in the office or you can be the oldest guy in the office. If your story’s good and you’re passionate about the subject matter and you’ve got, you know, the will to go make it, then we’ll help you make it and we’ll help you kind of turn that into something we think is good.

26:13 And so we’ve had a, you know, really open mind to the people we work with, how old they are, how much experience they have. And, you know, that’s how it’s always served as well. You know, our, it’s sometimes actually the opposite is what doesn’t serve us well. Anytime that we’ve been, you know, committed to making stuff with people from traditional backgrounds, oftentimes that’s the stuff that doesn’t work. You know, especially with, especially with stuff like hosts, you know, they’ve been through theater school and then they went to host training and so you get them and they’re just like, this is how everybody does it, so I’m going to do it exactly like that.

26:47 And I think that’s the turn off for, like, for younger people is it all feels so fake and contrived. And I think, you know, a lot of what we do and why we’re successful is, you know, you sort of get what you see. It’s authentic. And when I say authentic, I don’t mean it in a cheesy marketing way. I’m like, these are, the people you see are the ones who’ve made the stories, who did the research, who, you know, flew to the country and, and you get a, you know, there’s a sort of earnest, an earnest outcome there because it is.

27:15 And so I think that works. And a lot of the formal training that goes into, you know, as I said, presenters in particular can sometimes be a hindrance to making stuff that feels authentic because they’re like trained to act a certain way, which immediately you can often tell that people don’t feel comfortable doing it. Yeah. And especially if it’s in the medium of television, maybe people are used to that. But as soon as you go online and you’re on someone’s computer or someone’s phone, it really doesn’t work.

27:43 Because all of a sudden, you know, it’s a different medium. Yeah. And you see like, you know, those YouTube stars, I think are stars because clearly they have no training. They’re like, they’re just the opposite kids in their bedroom. And it’s very relatable to young kids because you’re like, hey, shit, I got a bedroom that looks just like that.

27:59 And this guy looks like me and talks like me and, and it feels real. And I think after, for a long time of, you know, the celebrity driven years of the 2000s in particular, there’s a sort of antidote that I think that people are really looking for of just things that are real, you know, things that, that feel relatable. You, I think you once said, young people are smart and they’ve been marketed to for so long, they can tell when someone is bullshitting them. And then you said the days of an advertiser first approach are finished.

28:27 Do you still believe that? Yeah. I mean, I think the young people being sophisticated in the way that they just decipher communications is, I mean, that’s a given. Probably subconsciously done. They probably just tune out without even knowing what they’re doing.

28:41 Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. It’s just like, you know, if you watch it for long enough and you spend enough time engrossed in media and for most kids, that’s, you know, their entire lives, then you become pretty good at picking out what’s real, what’s not, when you’re being marketed to and when you’re not. And, but that’s not something necessary that you should shy away from. I mean, I think that’s, if you take that as a given and then you work within the confines of that as the reality of how people consume media, then it necessarily sort of guides your discussion about, well then, how do we market to them?

29:12 And it’s the funniest thing because lots of brands, it’s like, let’s apply a really complicated, you know, construct to how we do that. And you’re like, just to be honest, just tell people what are the facts. And like, look, if there’s something that maybe you think is a bit of a negative, like don’t shy away from it, tackle it head on, like, you know, just be straightforward. And it’s funny how often people find it difficult to just, you know, come right out with it. Right.

29:38 You know, Twitter like profiles or something was like, yeah, we’re a little less crappy than most big companies or something like that. I don’t know. It was like the epitome of vice by just like trying to call it exactly as it is. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, people are, young people in particular, our audience, they’re smart, they’re smart and they’re savvy and they’re sophisticated and they’ve been through, they understand it.

30:01 And, and so, you know, that just means that you, in some ways, it’s really liberating, and if we can just kind of call it as it is and let’s present things as they are, you know, when you talk about sometimes the way that we work with brands, I mean, look, we don’t, we’ve never made a secret, like we need to work with advertisers and we like working with advertisers and we think that, you know, they’re the lifeblood of our business in the sense of commercial revenues. I mean, we’re at, we give all our media away for free for the most part. But we think we’re pretty upfront about that.

30:32 And, and I think to them, for the most part, you know, they’re like, you know, I’m not sure about it. And when you’re, when you’re like, here’s a show and it’s, you know, it was made possible because we’re working with brand, you know, A on it, people are really sort of receptive to that because at least you’re just, everyone, everyone gets the transaction. I think that’s the thing, right? Everyone gets the economics of it. I want to watch this show and somebody had to pay for it and it’s not me because I’m watching it for free online.

30:59 Right. So for the most part, people accept that. In the same way that, you know, it’s a long held acceptance that, and then I watch three minutes of ads and I may not like it, but I get that that’s necessary in order to have that. And then we move on to the next thing, you know, and online it’s, there’s, it’s, you know, people understand this. And so I think we’re, we’re better, better than most at sort of articulating that in a way that we think is fairly transparent and, and that young people kind of, you know, understand and accept and appreciate the honesty, I think.

31:29 Is your audience millennials and what is a millennial these days? Does that constantly change that kind of age range or who that is? I don’t even know what that term means per se. Well, I mean, yeah, who knows? I guess largely it’s defined as 18 to 34 year olds, although I’ve been saying that for five years.

31:46 So maybe it’s slightly shifting, but I think, and I don’t know who made this a rule, but it’s anybody born after 19 January 1st, 1980. So I think arguably that’s Gen Y, although I then heard Gen Z written about in like an article, I think in Wired about a year ago. So maybe it’s, maybe it has a limit. I don’t know when that limit is though. Okay.

32:08 So, but your target, your target is 18 to 34 or 15 to 30 or somewhere around there. It’s probably the most. Yeah. I mean, 18 to 34 is the broad thing. But again, coming back to your thing of, you know, what is Chloe and her 21 year old sales assistant?

32:21 What does she look like? I’m like, we’re not, we don’t go out and we go, oh shit, this might appeal to a 35 year old. So we, we can’t make that or, you know, we’re trying to, we just make things that we, we can’t make them that we do, we’re trying to create our own Connections that we’re trying to make. But it’s not like, it’s not probably true, it’s probably true that we’re really talking about what it’s going to be. It’s, it’s more of a creative and emotional thing.

32:43 Right. But the beauty of YouTube is, is it’s like one of the most democratic, immediate feedback mechanisms out there and you can see who’s watching it and where they are. And then, you know, right away, how many views there are. So you do get some really quick feedback? Don’t you?

32:57 Yeah, no, YouTube’s great for that. I mean, YouTube is, For every brand, they can go, we’re the hottest thing on earth, and then you look and you’re like, well, you have 84 video views, so you can’t be doing that much good. Is that your metric? Is views ultimately the metric of everything? No, because of course, it’s not always as straightforward as that, but it’s a good basic indicator, right?

33:24 People who have 5 million subscribers, they must be doing something reasonably well because you cannot get 5 million subscribers by putting out dog shit every day. Which is you guys for Vice News, it’s about 5 million, right? Or Vice the main channel? Vice main channel, I think, is about 5 million. But that’s not to say that content can’t be marketed and you can’t drive traffic to a video that you put up and there’s a big business built around that.

33:47 But yeah, the other one is likes and dislikes. I mean, again, it can’t be done algorithmically, right? Nobody can, as far as I know, game it so that a computer gives you 100,000 likes on a video. And I think our ratio, our Vice’s ratio of likes to dislikes and our content, I believe that we’re number one out of all the YouTube original content programming. So that’s like, you’re like, look, if you have 5 million subscribers and you have half a million views on a channel and your likes to dislikes ratio is the best in the business, you’re like, well, shit, then we’re pretty sure we’re doing something right.

34:22 Right. Now I think you guys are. Did Google and YouTube invest some money with you guys in Vice News like six months or a year ago when you went to do this? Do they kind of do like joint ventures and stuff or do they kind of see what’s hot and go with it? Well, you know, we have a good relationship with YouTube and we’ve got a partnership on news and we’ll be forming a big part of their marketing campaign in the US, I think kicking off sometime fairly soon.

34:43 So no, I mean, YouTube are amazing partners to have, right? They’re far and away the biggest video portal in the world by like, I don’t know the number, is it like 90% of all the video traffic is YouTube or online video? So yeah, like, you know, if you want to be big, being big on YouTube makes you genuinely big. Yeah. And so, you know, we continue to, we weren’t sure when we went on YouTube, like, how’s this going to work?

35:11 Is it going to cannibalize our own channels? You know, we didn’t just want to be an MCN on YouTube where we’ve got a much bigger business than, you know, becoming a company like that. And in the end, it turned out it was a big help, like, because it just gives you access to a wider pool of people who are consuming video. And so we, you know, we tend to put up an exclusive on Vice. We’ll give it, you know, we’ll air something on Vice, then it maybe ends up on YouTube after that.

35:38 Sometimes it’s concurrent. But what YouTube’s done is it’s added scale. I mean, for sure, you know, it’s hard to exactly correlate because other parts of our business have grown, but the big acceleration we’ve seen over the last few years, especially in our video, you know, coincides by and large to doing lots more stuff with YouTube. So, you know, exactly whether or not it’s one or the other that came first, who knows? But it’s big.

36:04 It’s, I mean, as YouTube’s been great to us, I mean, any kind of, you know, original content and serial content, you know, they love serial content. So like they invited us down to their studios and we can use that and they’re always super helpful. And, you know, they continually remind you they’re the second largest search engine in the world. And we get so much organic traffic from YouTube. We get like, you know, by a factor of 10, it’s our biggest social media platform, if you want to call it that.

36:26 Yeah. Because people just find us. Yeah. You know, via YouTube. So, yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s, yeah, I mean, they’re, it’s a phenomenal platform.

36:33 But you know, as I said, it’s, it’s a part of our business. We’re not a, you know, we’re not just a YouTube company, right? So you’ll put content on your own site and your own proprietary delivery system that you can run your own ads on and that kind of thing. But then a lot of times you’ll later release it to YouTube. Well, it’s, it’s, it can be both, right?

36:50 Depending on the content and where it came from and what time of year it is and what channels it’s on and all that stuff, we’ll, you know, we’ll come up with a release strategy around each individual thing and then put it out. But, you know, our own channels get a lot of traffic. I mean, it’s a big, big channel, but it’s not as big as YouTube. I mean, nothing is very little is as big as YouTube. So, so the, you know, we, all these things come with some thinking behind them.

37:15 And, you know, smarter part of smarter people than me in our marketing department come up with these things and, and put them out. Why does Vice News work so well? And was the timing of Ukraine, did that have a lot to do with it? Because you guys got a lot of seriously positive feedback for the way you guys covered that whole incident.

37:36 I mean, Vice News, I think, does well for lots of different reasons. But the main one is it fulfills, you know, fulfills a consumer need, if I can use kind of cheesy marketing termination, terminology. So when we, we started doing a lot of content on YouTube on our Vice channel, right? And we were making all sorts of different stuff. But one of the things we were making is a lot of sort of current affairs, the news type stuff that we were making because we wanted to.

38:00 And we thought it was, you know, we were just into the subject matter. Short stuff for kind of longish form, like 20 minutes stuff. Both, but a lot of long form. Right. And, and interesting, like when we first started making stuff for YouTube, a lot of people were like, so look, here are the rules of YouTube.

38:13 Make it two minutes and don’t go too deep into anything. And if you can make it funny, even better. Don’t tell me about that, man. We put 90 minute videos up on YouTube. So that was it.

38:22 So we were like, okay, well, we’re not sure that we agree with that. So let’s just make the content that we want to make. And the beautiful thing about online video is the format is totally open, right? So if you, if you make something and the edit needs to be eight minutes and 21 seconds, that’s how long it is. And if the edit is, you know, 64 minutes, then that’s how long it is.

38:40 And, and of course, you know, there’s nuances in that. But, but so we started making, we were releasing like longer form documentaries. And some shorter form and, and what we’re finding is a lot of our current affairs content was getting traction and getting, you know, reasonably big numbers on stuff that, you know, to some extent almost surprised us about how much traction we got. And the beauty of YouTube, right? Yeah, exactly.

39:02 I mean, you get immediate feedback, right? And then so we were out, we started, we sort of set out to then go look at, all right, well, look, we’re getting all this traction. There must be something in it. And again, looking at what people are telling us, which is like, young people don’t like news, young people are disengaged with the world around them. It’s a me, me, me generation that don’t give a shit about anything other than what they can see in front of her, you know, six feet in front of their face.

39:28 And so, I don’t know, we just challenged that. We were like, that doesn’t make sense to me. And it’s like, you know, so many things that we’ve done over the years. People are like, this is the way it is. And then we go, what, I’m not really sure that that doesn’t make sense to me.

39:39 I don’t believe that that’s the way that life is. And so we started doing some research and what we found is actually it’s the opposite. It’s like, are the responses we had backward, people were totally engaged and they were fascinated by the world around them and they were, you know, emotional around the world around them. They felt, you know, they felt a connection through the internet that, that in some ways like was unprecedented. And, but what they didn’t like was mainstream news.

40:02 They didn’t like how it was delivered, who was delivering it, the agenda that came with it. And so, and to some extent, I think it ties in with Twitter and Facebook as becoming so critical to people’s, you know, consumption of media, because getting news from your friends and having that filter recommendation sort of made it, made it a more legitimate source because you, you know, there’s more trust to your peers and there’s more trust to, to that filter. And so we were like, well, look, if, if the demographic and news consumption is old, because young people aren’t watching that news, but they’re not, not watching that news because they don’t care.

40:37 They’re not watching it because that’s not my news. That’s my dad’s news. Like this is, this is a generation above me’s point of view on the world and it’s not mine. And so between those two factors, we were like, well, you know, we really feel strongly that if we go at this hard and, and, and, you know, we, we do it properly and we do it our way and we make the kind of content we want to make and we tell stories in the world that are, you know, not maybe part of the mainstream news cycle and, and it’s not driven by an agenda.

41:04 And we think we’re onto a winner here. And so that was kind of underpinning the move into news, a mix of us going, well, shit, the stuff we’ve made so far is doing really well. And, and we think there’s a big appetite. That’s that’s not catered to by everybody else. And, and so I think, you know, we’re only two months in or something like that.

41:21 And it’s been a, you know, just phenomenal two months. That’s it. I think it’s too well, don’t quote me on that. Maybe it’s three months, four months, it’s early, early days. And you guys don’t have a newsroom or anchors or anything like that per se.

41:34 I’m guessing that’s a creative decision you guys made early on. Yeah, I mean, we’re not, we’re not a breaking news site, right? So having a newsroom where someone goes, oh, and now we’re going to go to, you know, Charlie and Nairobi where he’s going to talk about this, that, that to us, I mean, it just didn’t, it didn’t make sense for the kind of stuff we were making and also the way that we wanted to deliver it. I mean, it doesn’t sound very vice-ish right away when you mentioned that it already sounds. Yeah, exactly.

42:00 And so, um, and in terms of hosts, I mean, what we went out and we tried to find was, you know, like I was saying before, people that we just, we liked the stories they made and the way they made it. And, you know, some of them did come from journalism, you know, traditional journalism background, like Ben Anderson, who’s a, who’s a host on a lot of our stuff is, you know, he’s, he’s in the States. No, he’s based, he’s based out of London, but he does a lot of our global stuff.

42:24 And, you know, he, he’d made stuff for the BBC. He’d made stuff for Al Jazeera. He’d made stuff for the big broadcasters. But whenever we watch this stuff, we’re like, that’s that guy makes stuff that we really like. That seems, that seems like our kind of guy.

42:36 And so we have a relationship with him and, and now he makes stuff for us. And so it was cherry picking the people we thought, like, fit our mindset. And, you know, and, and, and we’re young enough that we thought we’d get a young person’s point of view. So we just went out and we found those people. And some of them, a lot of them are actually, were like staff writers who had been working for us on Vice for a while, but who, you know, had a real interest in, in news.

43:00 So like, you know, there’s a guy called Henry in the London office and he was, yeah, you know, he was our news guy for vice.com. And then as we started launching news, you know, he was just chomping at the bit to get out and start making stuff that was a lot more current affairs focused. So some of it was like just bringing people up. And we’ve done that forever. Like that’s, you know, as I said earlier, we always felt that no matter how old you are, where you came from, if you had good ideas and you’re good at execution, then we’d put you in the, in the, in place.

43:28 So some of them we brought up, some of them we went out and found, but we always applied that, you know, they wanted, they needed to be the right profile and have the right point of view and, and not be so sort of jaded with mainstream news that you couldn’t pull them back to making stuff that we wanted to make. Is it tough to get your guys to make a transition from print to video or do you see some people that can do it or some that can’t, although a lot of your videos, it’s not like people are, like you said here in the report. I mean, a lot of times it feels like journalism as in they’re either doing voiceovers or they’re just constructing a story behind the camera.

43:58 Yeah. I mean, a lot of them do both, you know, like Alex Miller, who’s the editor-in-chief in London, is on camera a lot. And he’s also, you know, he’s not just the editor-in-chief in name. Like he sits at a desk when he’s not shooting and writes and edits and, you know, and Rocco, who’s the editor-in-chief in the US, same thing. And Tom Littlewood, who’s the editor in Germany, same thing.

44:18 So, you know, a lot of that, there’s a lot of trust, obviously, with those guys with the vice tone of voice and our mentality around content and, and creative. So in some ways they’re like the natural people to be able to sort of put in that place because, you know, A, they get the tone of voice and B, they’re not, they definitely didn’t have any formal, you know, video training in that sense. So I think a lot of the times that you see those types and even, you know, Thomas Morton and to some extent, even Shane, who presents a lot of our stuff.

44:48 I mean, you know, you get, you get their personalities on the screen because, you know, they’re, they’re real people who haven’t, you know, they’re not acting and they’re not sitting there in the green zone kind of, you know, with a microphone just giving you the facts. Yeah, I know. It’s hard to, it’s hard to put your finger on what that quality is. But like when Shane’s in Liberia, he’s not doing that thing, you know, he’s not doing that reporting from Liberia thing, you know, which I guess you get probably either by watching media all your life or growing up, you know, at the BBC or something, I don’t know.

45:19 Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s real. And I guess Shane, certainly the best known of the, let’s say, the onscreen personalities that we have and Shane is Shane. Like when you see him in real life, what you see on the videos is what he acts like 24 hours a day. And so, and I think that just comes across.

45:39 And I think, you know, it’s not unique, right? There are other people in this country, you know, you imagine Louis Theroux is Louis through 24 hours a day. But sometimes you watch things and you’re like, I don’t really know. I get, I get a, you know, two dimensional mouthpiece, but it’s hard to sort of dig beneath that. And, you know, sometimes I think it turns people off.

45:58 It turns young people off. I think we’re really looking for, they’ve seen that and it doesn’t seem to make that much sense. And the world is so transparent through social media and through online video and all that stuff that, that, you know, they kind of see it as, as, you know, smoke and mirrors to some extent. Talk to me about Ukraine. I know you also had a vice reporter, I think, it was Simon Ostrowski, that was held captive for a while.

46:20 What happened in Ukraine for you guys and what was that all about? I mean, I think to some extent it was, as it was played out in the media, it was as it happened. I mean, you know, he, he disappeared one day and we found out about it, you know, really quickly. And when you guys always going to be, when the stuff started happening Kiev, were you like, we need to be there right away? Was that always just an obvious thing for Vice News?

46:44 Or it was kind of at the same time you guys were launching, wasn’t it? Yeah, I mean, it was, I mean, just to call it fortuitous would be inappropriate. But when we were launching news, there was a number of big things happening. And so I think, you know, we, you know, we were there and Simon is a great journalist and speaks fluent Russian. And so we did some great reporting.

47:07 And to some extent, yes, I mean, it was, it was a coincidence that that helped us build an audience. And, you know, but we felt passionate about that subject and that’s why we were doing it. And so Simon disappearing obviously was extremely concerning. And, you know, fortunately, I think despite what some people might assume is our the back end of Vice, you know, we’re pretty organized and have policies and practices about what happens when the shit hits the fan like this.

47:32 And in some ways, it was amazing seeing it all kick into action. And to kick into action, like, you know, four weeks into being live was a pretty real way of testing out all the preparation. Like what if they don’t like correspond to us within so much time and then we send someone to look for them? It’s all the same protocols you’d expect out of, you know, the BBC. I mean, you we didn’t just go in all guns blazing and be like, shit, let’s just get them on a plane and we’ll worry about the details later.

48:00 It’s all pretty considered. So, look, it sounded like a harrowing kind of ordeal. And to some extent, I know as much as everybody else and so far as, you know, Simon did report after her and took everybody through what happened to him. So, yeah, I mean, it was, you know, it was but it was it was uncomfortable as maybe an understatement for a few days there. But but I guess, you know, we always felt like we were in as good a position as we could be in to remedy the situation, given that lots of those things are out of our control.

48:33 But whatever we could control, it felt like we were on top of it. Is there are there war zones that you’re like, I don’t want to go there. Does that ever worry people on the news floor where now you’ve got this stuff happening in Iraq now and it’s just like, how close do you get? You know, Syria has been kicking off for the last year and a half, two years. And that’s a dangerous place as well.

48:49 I don’t even know what the protocol is, is when you sort of send people in and when don’t you? Again, you know, it’s yeah, of course, we have those discussions and we have a head of news in Europe and a head of news in the UK that are, you know, making those kind of judgment calls of risk and we have companies we work with that help us deal with that. And and look, we’re, you know, we’re like, like I’m sure like almost every news business on Earth, first and foremost, is the safety of the people.

49:18 Right. So we’re really conscious of that. And and to some extent, I think aware that as, you know, new boys in the game, you know, more than anything, you you can’t put anything other than safety first because, well, for real life reasons, but also, you know, because I think people would assume that that might be the the chink in your armor. So, no, I mean, look, it’s a it’s an ongoing process. And we try and put people in the right places and safeguard them as best we can and pull them out if anything goes wrong.

49:48 And I think but I don’t think that’s unique to us. I think that’s any any company involved in news gathering or current affairs has to go through that. And of course, it would be incredibly irresponsible not to be doing anything like that news. Is that just the most ultra highly competitive space there is? I mean, does everyone want to be in news?

50:04 And like in retrospect, are you are you just like, I’m surprised you guys are either having the success or you you’re still going to go into news? Yeah, I mean, I think it’s news is a really broad catch all term for things. Right. I mean, we’re not breaking news, right? We’re not BBC 24.

50:21 It’s not like, you know, if there’s a big fire somewhere in London, we’re going to have a reporter there going, hey, there’s a big fire. And now there’s fire trucks and like and that’s fine. Right. And there are there are people out there like Sky and BBC who, you know, have been doing this for a long time and and that’s their thing. And they do it very well.

50:36 And, you know, there’s value in that. Our thing is is more sort of storytelling. It’s usually trying, maybe not trying, but certainly we find ourselves often out of that mainstream, you know, political agenda. So if, you know, there’s a sometimes there becomes these subjects that everybody focuses on because it’s that’s the main news piece. But often it means ignoring stuff that’s going on in other places.

51:03 So, you know, for instance, we’ve been doing a lot of stuff in in in Brazil right now where, of course, every media company has focused on the World Cup and the football and there’s a little bit talking about, you know, the shit that’s going on, you see the bad stuff behind the scenes. But it’s not a great deal. But, you know, I think for us, you’re like, well, that’s our you know, that’s our angle is there’s a lot of angry young people often who are poor, for whom, you know, they spent, I think it was like 12 billion dollars or something like that, building stadiums and putting more police on the streets.

51:37 And, you know, some of the stuff we’ve done is like maybe 12 billion could have been spent, you know, putting in a sewage system in the favelas and trying to get people out of poverty and maybe building hospitals instead of football stadiums. And these, I think, are very legitimate things to talk about. And I think it’s not to say that, you know, we want to piss all over the World Cup, but I think a lot of the media just isn’t seeing any of that. And some of the footage we had was like at the, you know, the final, the Confederations Cup, like a year ago, that there were these huge riots going on outside the stadium of people sort of protesting the arrival of the World Cup.

52:13 But that certainly didn’t, you know, I had never heard of that until I saw us do it. And so, you know, it’s finding those things that aren’t sort of, you know, necessarily intentionally a sort of counterpoint to the mainstream agenda, but just things that we think are interesting and underreported and where we can get something that’s unique and interesting and differentiated. So, you know, the other thing we did is around the launch, we did a lot of stuff in Venezuela and, you know, watching that stuff as well.

52:41 You’re like, wow, there’s some very troubling social issues in Venezuela and there’s a lot of stuff happening there. But, you know, you didn’t really see it on any mainstream news. You didn’t watch the BBC 10 o’clock news. And every night it’s, here’s what’s happening in Venezuela again. So, there’s flashpoints around the world.

52:57 And I think we’re, you know, we spend a lot of time looking at those stories and covering the stuff that other people aren’t covering it. And oftentimes they’re driven by young people. I mean, I think there’s a lot of angry, disenfranchised young people who feel that their jobs have been stolen and their future has been stolen by the generation above them. So, you know, and to some extent, you know, they’re probably right. And so this stuff, you know, a lot of the stuff that happened in Eastern Europe and in particular in Greece around the collapse of the economy, I mean, most of the young people you’re seeing were there for that reason because, you know, they’re gonna be paying off that debt for the rest of their lives that was racked up by their parents.

53:35 So, we, I don’t know, we spent a lot of that stuff really interests us. And I think the mainstream news is often not that sympathetic. And I think they’re seen as troublemakers or as, you know, a small vocal minority, but the rest of the country is fine. And, you know, maybe sometimes that’s true. But, you know, like the London riots, when they happened, I don’t know, you know, you could argue it was just kids causing trouble and I’m sure part of that’s true.

54:02 But sometimes I think you need to look at like, why are they so willing to cause trouble? And is it part of maybe it’s being disenfranchised? And part of it is they have nothing better to do. And part of it is the education is so bad, they don’t really feel they can do anything better than that. I mean, I’m not qualified to say that, but that stuff really fascinates us and I think that’s the stuff that’s underreported.

54:20 Yeah, the London riots was really interesting because I know, I always feel like it wasn’t properly covered. I don’t feel like I really got a good answer. And I know later they ran like some of the criminal profiles and some of the people that had done looting and these people had jobs and like it was really weird. These were like middle-class people with jobs and they had done the looting and it was like completely opposite of what, I guess, was kind of portrayed to be, so.

54:42 Yeah, it’s interesting to think of why people do that. And look, maybe it’s just a sort of mob mentality that you see other people doing it and you then, but it just seems that there’s more to it than that. And I agree, I’m not really sure that anyone got to the bottom of it, but I worry a little bit that the answer was, well, we’ll just lock them all up. And then you’re like, okay, so they were slightly disenfranchised or at least they lacked some sort of moral fiber to think that what they did was wrong to begin with and now they got a criminal record.

55:11 Like this is not helping the situation to some extent, not that I’m saying they should get away with it, but it seemed like a very heavy-handed response and I’m not sure that was, it was like a very American response to things. It was like, we’ll just put them in jail. Yeah. And then when they come out, they’ll be fine. Yeah, it also makes me think it could happen again fairly quickly if things weren’t addressed.

55:33 Yeah, yeah, it was weird. I don’t know, I still haven’t wrapped my head around that whole thing. I mean, and then I guess what else is weird is it seemed to disappear. I mean, maybe it’s still just bubbling underneath the surface. It was really weird.

55:44 And I thought the reporting was really bad and I remember my buddies in the States asking me and the way the world media made it look like is that London was a war zone. And I was walking around, even Hackney and stuff, and I was like, okay, it’s not a war zone here, but every single camera you saw was like someone throwing a firebomb here and there. And it was just, yeah, again. It was a weird vibe. It was weird.

56:06 I was walking home from work that night and I left a bit early because I live in East London and so I was like, I’ll just go home a bit early. And I remember walking home and just thinking, there was such a weird feeling. All the shops were shut, which is weird for like 6.30. And there was nobody on the street, but like that profile of like 14 to 40 year old men. I mean, this is Bethlyn Green.

56:29 So that’s, you know, maybe not that unusual sometimes, but it was just the weird edginess that I’ve never felt before in a big city. We could just feel something was happening. And then like an hour later, it all kicked off. Yeah, I was right at my old street and I was walking along and a few businesses had shut and like some of the like corner shops and the convenience store guys were out in front of their shop like ready to protect it. And it was just like this really eerie feeling.

56:53 Yeah, you could feel it right away. Yeah. It was just like everybody was on edge and it was like, Jesus, yeah, yeah. Anyways, I remember that. You know, Shane Smith is 44.

57:03 I think Sarush has got to be in his 40s. You’re probably in your 30s. How do you stay on top of this younger demographic as you guys get older? I know you can say, look, let’s just keep it real and stuff. But I mean, does part of you always think we need to have that young editor or someone telling us what time it is?

57:19 Yeah, I think that’s true. I mean, you know, the average age, particularly of the content creators in Vice is under 30 for sure. Okay. And I don’t know what it is exactly. But yeah, I mean, we have always hired young people.

57:35 Some of that’s because they’re the ones most attracted to us, you know, like, and some of it’s a conscious decision of, you know, appointing a 45 year old editor makes no sense. I mean, our sort of mantra is about making content, you know, for young people, by young people. So therefore, if you’re gonna follow through on that, you gotta hire young people. And we also like hiring young people because they come, as I said before, they come at it with a really open point of view of what something should look and sound like.

58:06 So, you know, getting kids right out of film school, when A, they’re full of beans, right? They’re like chomping at the bit to just make stuff. And I think often if you came out and you, you know, you go in as a, you know, a graduate at the BBC, there’s a sort of track you get on, right? And obviously there’s some flexibility, but I’m gonna do a graduate thing for a year and then I might become a junior associate producer and then maybe I’ll be a producer and then maybe by the time I’m 30, I’m gonna make something fine, you know?

58:34 But sometimes, you’re like, I’m 22 and I’ve got more energy and I’ve got ideas coming out of my ass and I just wanna make stuff. And you know, that’s, those are the exciting people to work with and you get, I think a lot of time, hopefully we get that through on our content because that’s the mentality that people making it. So we’ve had that, you know, yes, we’re some of the elder statesman device are elder in the vice sense, right? I mean, mid 40s, I suppose in the grand scheme of things is not that old, but yeah, I mean, as I said, it’s young people making this content, it’s young people cutting, it’s young people shooting.

59:05 And I don’t know if we could do it any other way, it wouldn’t make sense. How important is it to have young people editing that content and producing it, let alone the shooting and the story ideas and stuff? But it’s as important as the people on camera. I mean, it’s funny now that we spend a lot more time doing it, you always think when you’re younger, like whoever’s on camera, that’s their story. And then, you know, once you’ve done a long time, you’re like, you know, the editor is in some ways just as important as anybody else who works on it.

59:32 And the producer, you know, that team of people really matters. And so yeah, you got to have an editor. And sometimes it would be very hard to edit the stuff we’re making without a young editor because the cultural references and the delivery of everything is not something that’s easily decipherable from someone who isn’t living in that culture. So yeah, I mean, it matters. It does, yeah.

59:54 It’s across the board. How do you decide what to go into? You guys came out with munchies like a month or two ago and I was like, wow, Vice is getting into food. That’s crazy. And then I was like, wow, that’s this great idea.

1:00:03 You know, now it seems like such a great idea. Or Fightland, I mean, how do you choose what to go into, what not to go into, you know, whether that’s diluting your brand or promoting things? It’s like a mix of gut reaction and instinct as well as doing research a little bit, you know. So for news, I think, and because it was such a big move for us, it was driven by an instinct that shit, we’re making stuff and people like it and it’s newsy. So maybe we should do this more, like this feels like the right decision.

1:00:34 And also a conscious decision of looking at media and going, I don’t know, this is a weird certain environment right now for news coverage for young people. And then we’re like, well, before we go and spend all this time and money doing it, maybe we should put some feelers out and do some research and make sure that our instincts are right. So that was, for us, in some ways, the most traditional launch we’ve ever done of, you know, before we really got deep into it, let’s make sure that we’re right.

1:01:02 News was, you took your time on news and made sure you had it right. Yeah, I mean food was, I would say, a little bit more instinctive in the sense of if you did like a straw poll of the people in our office, you know, like every night it’s, what are we gonna go do? And like, what’s the new fucking burger van and the new pop-up restaurant and the new this and the new rockstar chefs. And it’s funny because you see it happening around you and then if you take a step back, you’re like, if this is a real thing in culture and everybody I can see and I know around me is really into it, there’s no media that caters to it.

1:01:32 And so for me, I always, you know, I really like man versus food and you’re like, but there’s only one of those. And maybe you could say there’s a handful of others that are in that space, but for the most part, it’s MasterChef and it’s Gordon Ramsay and it’s, you know, there’s a handful of celebrities and there’s a handful of formats and that’s kind of it. And so we’re like, well, why don’t, you know, people are really into it and it’s a real thing in culture.

1:01:53 We should be able to make this. And so we started making, we made the Fresh Off the Boat with Eddie Wong and that was a huge, huge hit. And Munchies, which is now called Chef’s Night Out was the original title of a show we made and that was a huge hit. So a lot of it, I mean, again, it’s a good format online because you can test and figure it out, you know, in TV, I guess a lot of the time, when you commit to something, you better hope it works because it’s formatted, it’s got to be really rigorously scheduled where we’re like, oh, why don’t we make a couple episodes?

1:02:22 We’ll see how it goes and we can tweak it as we go and we, you know, we’ll find the formula. How important is it to be here in shortage? Like kind of on the, people don’t know shortage, it’s kind of, you know, it’s a really weird thing. It’s like kind of, it used to be really kind of a poorer area where the artists were. It’s now really being in flux with tech, with people from the city, it’s being quote unquote gentrified, but like how important is it for you guys to be here as opposed to somewhere else or as opposed to Birmingham, you know?

1:02:51 I don’t know. You know what? The reason we were here originally is Chino, it was cheap and yeah, it was just circumstance. Like we just ended up here, I think, because we had originally, we had this investor really early on who had like a little magazine shop and we rented three desks off him. But then, you know, it just kind of evolved around us and we stayed here.

1:03:15 So I think it’s, I don’t know, I wouldn’t say it’s been central necessarily to what we’re doing, but we would have found it. We would have really struggled to do this in Birmingham. I think shortage is in some ways the natural place, but we were just, you know, immediately made sense for us. But you know, I suppose it’s conceivable that we could leave and life would go on and we wouldn’t necessarily change, but shortage has kind of peaked and now it’s gone back to being normal to some extent.

1:03:41 I feel like maybe like five years ago, shortage became like the Nathan Barley version of itself. Like it kind of lived up to all stereotypes and it became achingly cool. And I’m sure, you know, often people would assume the advice is, you know, entwined and all that, and maybe we were, maybe we weren’t. But it’s kind of gone back to normal now. I feel like it’s re-established itself as sort of just a nice place to work filled with well-meaning people doing good jobs kind of thing.

1:04:07 Do you have to go further east or north to kind of get to the next shortage, do you think? Yeah, well, I mean, it seems like, you know, it seems like, you know, Dalton took that over and maybe, you know, Clapton and places like that. But no, it’s nicer in here. And you know, I think there’s lots of businesses that are similar to ours and exactly why we all clustered here is, and the government would love to take responsibility for it. I’m not sure they have anything to do with it really, but it is now a thing.

1:04:32 I mean, you know, there just is stuff happening here, which is beneficial to us. And it makes it attractive as well as a place to work for, you know, when you want to recruit. It’s a bit nicer than working in like, you know, Victoria or Canary Wharf or somewhere like that, which is not that inspiring and not that easy to get to and all that stuff. No, not a lot of fun. I’ve been in those places.

1:04:50 Let’s talk investment. I mean, you guys sold the chunkier company to, I think it was 21st Century Fox, like 5% like a year ago. You guys had some big valuations of like billions being talked about lately in the news for even double that with potential partners and investors. How does that affect you? You know, how do you keep, how do you stay who you are with those potential investments?

1:05:12 Or should you be completely open to having big investors like that? Look, I mean, we’re focused on making content and doing that. So, you know, as in when we have conversations with other media companies, really the outcome we’re looking at is how is this gonna make us a better company? How can we make better content and we make more content? And how do we sort of put that out into the market?

1:05:34 So, you know, all of the partners that we have and, you know, obviously we have great relationships with them and maybe that’s not obvious, but we do. But that’s the reason, right? I mean, we’re just passionate about doing that thing and we’re always looking for ways to help. And sometimes it’s partnerships, sometimes it’s investments, sometimes it’s finding the right people. You know, I think Tom Freston as an example, joined the board a while back.

1:06:02 And I know that, you know, he’s been a real mentor to Shane and a big help. So it’s, but for us that, you know, that’s the focus isn’t, you know, a lot of like startups or let’s say like tech companies, it’s just a focus on moving the needle evaluation, things like that. Our focus is content. Our focus is entertainment, making, making vice become the best source of entertainment and news for young people in the world and becoming a sort of, you know, a real cultural entity that people will love and care about and think back on in 50 years and go, fuck, that changed my life.

1:06:37 I watched stuff and that was my source of information and it shaped my view on the world. And I think oftentimes we’ve kind of said that if we focus on that and we put the audience first and we think about making the best stuff we can, then, you know, the brands will come in behind us. And if the brands come, then money will come behind them and we’ll be in good shape. So we’ve always held that as a mantra that if you make stuff for advertisers or you make stuff for investors, it’s not gonna feel as good as if you’re like, who’s the audience for this content and how can we make something they’re gonna love?

1:07:11 And if we make that, everything else falls into place behind it. It’s interesting what you say about the tech scene because that is what it’s all about. It’s like, where did you raise money, Lex? And where are we gonna raise money times 10x and 20x? Well, that’s when I come back to, we were talking about revenue before.

1:07:24 I mean, we’ve always tried to be a real business, you know? So we’re not just out there to, you know, I don’t know, imposter up and figure out a commercial strategy later. In some ways, we did it the hard way, right? We built a business that was self-sustaining and had revenue and sometimes revenue is better than other times. But for the most part, we’ve been a pretty successful commercial operation.

1:07:46 But really, that is a bolt-on to the content that we make. And again, like I said, if that comes all the way back to magazines of if we make the best magazine we can and we differentiate it and we’re smart about distribution, then we’ll be able to convince brands that this is the right thing to do. You know, what we’re doing now, in some ways, it’s not that difficult as it was way back when, like make good content, then we’ll find the brands, then we’ll get distribution right and then we’re good.

1:08:10 It’s, you know, those core truths have never really deviated in our business plan. Do you think you’ll be bigger than Sky News or BBC News someday?

1:08:22 I don’t know, man. The goal is we don’t have an individual company in our sites that we’re like, I wanna necessarily be bigger than them. I think Shane sometimes says these things around, I wanna be 10 times the CNN, but I think the point of it is around digital scale and influence, right? We think that the internet offers us to be able to reach a lot of people with our content and YouTube is a vehicle for that and Facebook’s a vehicle and we have the ability to get a lot of scale because the way that media is distributed has changed.

1:08:56 And we think we can tell really good stories that will have a long-lasting cultural impact on the world around us. And we think, you know, in our noblest of days that we’re telling stories that add real value to the global discussion around various issues. You know, we’re telling stories that if we weren’t telling them, maybe they wouldn’t get told. And whether or not you can argue about the nobility of that, but that drives us on a day-to-day basis. So it’s not, can we be bigger than this person or that person, or can we get our value to this or blah, blah, blah.

1:09:25 It’s like, it’s, I think Shane has said, in his words of if you take money out of the equation, what does it all mean? And I think for him, that really drives him. It’s like, I know he’s a passionate environmentalist and he’s got two little kids. And I think it drives him to sort of make the world vaguely a better place in different forms. But anyway, look, at the same time, we’re a commercial organization.

1:09:51 We’re not just driven because we’re nice guys and we, you know, want to change the world. But I think all these things, sometimes it’s like people would like to paint you as you’re one or you’re the other or you’re something like that. And it’s very easy to sort of couch people in specific terms of reference versus other companies or causes or business models. And I don’t know, I guess we’re a lot of those things. What do you think of places like the Young Turks that kind of bring in a new spin on news or even Russia Today, they kind of got like Abby Martin and she moves with the camera.

1:10:18 I mean, they’re kind of fresh approaches to news but really different than your approach. I think a lot of the news stuff that’s coming out, you know, we’re not the only ones trying to do it. I think some are better than others. But the ones that I think work best are the ones that seem to be sort of earnest and sort of valuable. So I think our attitude towards those, I don’t want to call them competitors but for the sake of this discussion, I’m calling competitors is to try not to be competitive that I think we can all help each other out.

1:10:49 I think we’re all trying to accomplish in some ways a very similar goal of transforming that news landscape into something that works today instead of, you know, so in some ways working against, I mean, not specifically, we’re not trying to take down any news stations but trying to establish this as a legitimate place for people to consume news and to put our opinions across. I think there’s a lot of good people doing interesting things. We’re not the only ones.

1:11:15 Yeah, it’s nice not to fight with other media organizations. Like, I don’t know, we’ve never tried to do that and I’ve had BBC people in here doing interviews before our show and it’s nice not to go at it kind of like the old way where you see everybody fighting, you know, for kind of this tiny little part of the space, you know? Yeah. Why, you guys bought ID magazine like last year or before you guys still have print even though it’s like 5% of your revenues.

1:11:38 Why still be in print? Well, we bought ID in December 2012. Not necessarily because we wanted a print. We didn’t want to buy a print magazine. We didn’t buy it just because it was a magazine.

1:11:53 You know, we wanted to do something in fashion and we felt as a media company that wanted to cater to interests of young people it was imperative that we had a presence in fashion and ID was such an iconic fashion media brand that had real heritage, that people really loved, that people, contributors and audience just felt really passionate about and Terry was like a legitimate, Terry Jones, the founder, like a really legitimate visionary in the fashion space and the media space. But Terry was a little bit older and we had some staff who had worked there and we just had the sense that it might be something, it might be a discussion worth having and as it turns out, you know, it was and so we took it over but the idea was always going to be that we would keep the magazine because we like the magazine and it’s an integral part of the ID brand and we’re absolutely not touching it but that we could do something in digital that they hadn’t been able to do before and we had the know how, we had the capabilities, we had the scale, we had the resources to, you know, launch something really exciting in the fashion space and that’s, I mean, that’s basically the strategy for ID.

1:12:59 I mean it’s, in some ways it’s kind of black and white. I think what everyone expected us to do is what we’re doing and but, you know, so far it’s gone really well and one thing that Vice has is we have a big geographical footprint and that allows us to grow rapidly. So, you know, we launched the site in the UK and the US at the end of last year and by, you know, June, whatever date it is today, we’re in Poland, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Australia. We got a bunch of launches coming up towards the end of the year so our ability to, you know, to scale, no, no, this is digital.

1:13:32 So the magazine we’re only doing out of the UK, we’ll do a global edition out of the UK. So I’m talking about digital growth. I mean, that’s- For ID or for ID. So there’ll be an ID, Poland site or an ID. So you could go onto ID today and click on, if you’re in the UK, you’ll get sent to the UK site but you can select to go to the Polish site and you get ID in Polish with Polish content and all that.

1:13:53 That’s pretty intense. Do you do that with Vice across the board into other languages or- Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Vice is in, I think it’s like 12 languages or 15 languages, something like that. So yeah, you get Vice and it’s all, you know, let’s get a bit more of a, you know, geotargeted and the advertising is geotargeted and it’s language-based. So, you know, there’s a Russian site in Russian language.

1:14:13 There’s a Brazilian site in Portuguese. There’s a Chinese site in China, Chinese site in Chinese, China site in Chinese. So yeah, you know, scale and geographical, our geographical footprint is a big strength and so when we make something, we were able and that’s kind of the idea with ID is let’s not just make it a, you know, a cool English language site. Let’s do it everywhere. You mentioned China.

1:14:35 You guys do news in China, right? Or you have a media company now in China. We have a media company in China. Okay, that’s gonna be interesting, how that works going forward, I guess. Yeah, I mean, look, so I look after Amiya so I can’t give you a great deal of detail about their day-to-day operations.

1:14:49 I mean, you know, obviously I know what they get up to generally. But yeah, China to me seems really exciting. I always seem like China just generally is a country. It’s sort of, and I’ve never been there so I can only say so much but it’s often painted as this polar opposite of what happens in Europe and America and from friends I know who lived there and who visited there, I’m like, I don’t know, it sounds pretty similar to everything I know about. So, I don’t know, but I know that our Chinese business has done well and is growing very rapidly and it’s a market I know that we’re obviously very excited about.

1:15:24 You guys seem to have cornered the market on North Korea in more ways than one. Like Shane was originally there doing a documentary a long time ago and then you guys went back with Dennis Rodman. I don’t think, does anyone else have access to North Korea or have you guys pretty much cornered the market on all? Yeah, we’ve done a few shoots there and they’ve all done well. I mean, it’s a weird place.

1:15:45 But yeah, I mean, you know, obviously we’re not the only ones who’ve been there but certainly the coverage that we did and, you know, that Shane and Ryan had done over the last few years, that has been interesting. It’s shone a light on North Korea that I think very few people have ever seen and yeah, it’s been very successful for us that coverage we did. It seems like maybe like Berlin was before the fall of the wall. It seems like North Korea is like one of those last few places that won’t exist in 30 years where, you know, there’s media blackouts and there’s this totalitarian regime and I don’t even know if that will exist anywhere in the world in 50 or 100 years if information really is accessible everywhere.

1:16:25 It just seems like crazy town. It’s totally impossible to fathom how things go on. I think Christopher Hitchens wrote about it and he was just like, it’s almost like, you know, there is some type of theocracy where there is a god and that is Kim Jong Il and that it’s just this wildest place that he had ever been. Yeah, it’s so fascinating to, well fascinating and depressing to understand how you can just control a population through brutality and misinformation.

1:16:55 I mean, it’s… For so long, too. Yeah, yeah, and man, it’s super depressing sometimes. The thing that I think is maybe the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard in my life is that idea that if you’re punished, and I can’t remember what the list of things you can be punished for, that, I think it was Kim Jong Il and one of the Kims, anyway, that it would take three generations to purge you of, you know, the evilness. So they put you in the gulag and then they put the next three generations of your family.

1:17:26 So you’d have kids that were born in the gulag who will die in the gulag and their kids will be in the gulag. It’s like the most hopeless, depressing thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Wow, I thought the Venetians were bad with like banishing people. But that is bad. Do you miss Toronto?

1:17:41 What’s your relationship like with London? You’ve been here a long time. Yeah, I’ve been here a long time. Yeah, you know, I grew up in Canada. I have really fond memories of Canada.

1:17:52 My parents still live there and I still go back a few times a year and my wife and I still talk about moving back there maybe at some stage. But yeah, I mean, it’s the most idyllic, or at least I think of it as being this really idyllic place to grow up. I mean, I grew up in Toronto in the fairly far downtown. So it was this lovely mix of being in a big urban center. But like I said earlier, like I played ball hockey five days a week on the street and you just, safety just was never really an issue growing up and it’s just a really easy city to live in.

1:18:24 Or at least it was when I lived there. So now I still think back on it really fondly, but Canada’s a very, in some ways it’s the greatest strength and the greatest weakness is it can feel a bit isolated. Like it’s a sort of, it’s a secondary market when it comes to things like media and entertainment a lot of the time. I mean, it has a really robust environment but it’s not the leading edge like London or New York. So when I moved here and you wanted to do something really, really cutting edge, it felt like you had to get out advice.

1:18:56 Being in Montreal and having lunch in Montreal, I think, it was the same thing. It was like being big in Canada is one thing but if you wanna be big, you have to be big in America or you have to be big in England or Europe. So I don’t know, but I mean, it’s literally, I’m a loyal patriot to Canada and even though I lived here for a long time, I still feel absolutely it’s my home and even if for whatever reason I never lived there again, I’d still think of it as, as home, as home, yeah.

1:19:24 What’s up for you in the next couple of years as far as like your day to day advice? I mean, what are your goals or what are the things you’re working on? We’re working on all sorts right now. It’s really fun and exciting and exhausting but- Is it full on every day? Is it like constantly out of control?

1:19:43 Are you constantly running around to this meeting, that meeting? It just seems like it’s a super high growth place to be and it would be crazy. Yeah, but it’s fun. I mean, I think, I’ve been advised for a really long time and I think if it wasn’t like that, you’d start to go, well, should I have been here a long time? Maybe it’s time to do something else but our business is constantly evolves and changes and grows and mutates into great things and so I’ve just never gotten bored of it.

1:20:08 I’ve never woken up one day and been like, I don’t know, enough is enough and maybe what they’ll come one day but about every three years, I feel like my job is fundamentally different than it was three years ago and so it kind of feels like, why would I leave? And it’s funny, I do think sometimes if I ever think about it, then you’re like, but what would I look for that I don’t have right now? I work with close friends, we’re doing well, I love the creative that we do, our brand relationships are good, everything is good, so it’s very difficult to then figure out what would I do that would be different?

1:20:47 And often you’re like, oh, I can’t really come up with that many reasons, except for maybe geography, I mean, that’s, talking about Canada, getting to Canada one day would be, maybe that’s a reason, but who knows? Right, are there brands that now these days, does every brand pretty much call you back now? I mean, does every brand at least wanna talk device now as opposed to maybe five years ago where only certain brands would talk to you? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, we’re having our moment in the sun to some extent and hopefully that moment will go on for a long time, but yeah, it’s just different doing business when people know you and trust you and care about you than when you’re having to fight just to get on the phone with somebody and same with the content creators and other media companies and now people will call you up that you wanna work with and they wanna do things because your vice versus before trying to convince people, you haven’t heard of us, but we’re the school media company and we have some scale and we’re trying to, so no, it’s like, it’s fun, it’s fun doing that because we spent so long in the trenches and look, we’re still in the trenches, I mean, we’re not huge, huge just yet, but yeah, I mean, it’s nice having recognition to some extent in an industry because you spend a lot of time not getting it and I have so much sympathy for, or empathy, I guess, for people who start media companies

1:22:18 Or their own businesses or ventures and to sort of go at it for that long and knock back that many times and keep coming back and it’s tricky. Yeah, it’s interesting how you guys started like, Dan Rather would say something bad about you or the New York Times or something like that and you must be like, oh, wow, we must be getting somewhere if people are saying, oh, these guys don’t know news or, in retrospect, that must have been the leading indicator of success. Yeah, I think we always had a mentality that we just, you could hate us or you could love us, we just wanted you to have an opinion about us and that wasn’t to say that we were always being necessarily antagonistic for the sake of it but the worst thing that someone can kind of say about something that you’re doing as a project is nothing because then it’s like, you haven’t even registered so at least if you kind of registered and people hate it, you’d be like, well, we did something but if you don’t even get off the ground, it’s like, wah, wah.

1:23:16 It’s funny, we have a tag line up on our Twitter and it says, putting the BBC out of business, that’s what London Real is doing which is a bit of an inside joke because we all know with the TV license, you can’t put the BBC out of business and like today, we got an email back from a guest we invited on and his PR agent guy was like, we will not come on your show, we quite like the BBC and we would not like you to put them out of business and I was just laughing, I was like, are you serious? You took that seriously, so I don’t know. Yeah, that’s it.

1:23:45 I think up until now too, we’ve been fortunate in some ways because we kind of compete with everybody and nobody. We’ve never been, we’re not taking on Sky News, we’re not taking on the Guardian, we’re not taking on ad agencies, we’re in a weird way in a nice position of we sort of compete on a small level with lots of people but we don’t really compete directly with anyone because we’re such a varied business and I think to some extent, it helps when you’re breaking new ground and things like online video that we’re just a bit farther ahead of the competition so you don’t have that day to day. There’s not like some vice copy somewhere that gets under our skin, it just doesn’t work like that.

1:24:33 You guys do what you wanna do. At the end, I always ask everyone here a few questions, I’m gonna hit you with the same ones. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Matt Ellick and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him to do or not to do?

1:24:49 That’s a good question. Where were you then? Nothing, I don’t know. I don’t really have any regrets in life so I don’t really feel like there’s anything I’d call up and say, you really fucked this up and you should steer clear of it. Were you in England at that point?

1:25:01 Yeah, I moved here when I was 19. Okay. So, no, I mean, there’s not a lot of things that I, I don’t know, I don’t really know if there’s anything I really regret. Starting vice, I think I once had a plan to maybe I’d do it for a few years and then get out. But I didn’t, so that would’ve been a mistake.

1:25:20 And no, I don’t know, and I even would, one thing that pops up in my mind is like, I went to university and I finished it and part of me looks back and I’m not really sure why because it was interesting and it was a way to pass time that was fun but I’m not really sure. I don’t look back and think that was a critical moment in my life of getting through university, it didn’t. So, I don’t know, that was like one thing. I could maybe be like, you know, you could’ve gotten out a bit earlier and gotten into real life but I’m not sure that’s wise advice.

1:25:51 Okay, so you’re still not convinced your education was crucial in your current career path? I don’t know. Who knows, but it was all very theoretical. I just found the whole thing impractical. Okay, that’s an interesting observation.

1:26:04 Best advice you’ve ever received while you’ve been at Vice? Is there any one piece of knowledge or advice you got over the years that was like big for you?

1:26:15 No, I mean, I guess, you know, I think to some extent it maybe, you know, goes back to your parents of like, you know, be nice and I think sometimes, you know, you watch like The Apprentice and there’s sort of this, seeming this is conception that you have to be hard and evil in business in order to get ahead and to me that never seemed right and you come across them every once in a while and you’re like, why? Like, we’re all, we can disagree about things and we can, you know, we cannot work together but that’s not a reason to come charging into anything with preconceptions of disliking people or being mean. So I don’t know, I think that’s like a good mantra, be nice to people.

1:26:50 That goes a long way. I think if everyone’s just sort of a bit nicer, life is a bit more pleasant and it’s a very easy, free thing to give out. I bet in your space over 12 years, you’ve come back around the same people like someone at different times, working at different times. I mean, look, that’s a fact, at least in media, you might not see someone for five years but they’ll almost certainly pop up somewhere else and look, you know, I hold them sometimes, when you cross paths with people you don’t like, it’s like five years go by and you still hold grudges but you just go in and go like, oh, fuck that guy.

1:27:26 You remember that, right? Yeah, so I don’t know. So I don’t know if that’s a piece of advice or maybe it’s something my parents drilled in but yeah, be nice, you know, it’s easy. Last question, to the 20-year-old that’s listening out there, what advice do you give to them, you know, if say they want to get involved, if they want to one day work for Vice or, you know, I don’t know, we’ll get involved in the media business themselves, what would you recommend? I mean, I think it’s around working, you know, it’s working hard.

1:27:52 I think certainly it’s really interesting. You can see when we have people come in and they’re really junior kids and it’s like when they get the job or they get, you know, through the door and then they’re like, well, I’m in now. And that, you know, sometimes there’s this like sense of entitlement that, well, I’m here and so therefore I’m going to succeed. And like, you know, the best people are the ones that just put your head down and work hard, like figure out your craft, make it better.

1:28:20 So, you know, it’s that, I guess, look, I’m, it’s probably that mentioned, be nice and work hard, you know. And I read a really interesting quote the other day. I really liked it anyways. I was in the back page of the Sunday Times Magazine with some interview with a politician and she had had some quote from her father that was like, it’s okay if you’re a street cleaner. I can’t remember the exact quote, something like, it’s okay if you’re a street cleaner but you should always try and be the best street cleaner in the entire world.

1:28:43 And that seems something that’s good. And for young people, they’re like, you know, whatever you’re going to do, if you want to work at Vice, you want to make films, you want to sell ads, you want to be a graphic designer, then just be like, then try and be the best graphic designer and hopefully that will get you a long way. So yeah, effort. It seems like a major thing. Do you get tons of videos sent in from around the world for people that want to have their video on Vice or be Vice reporters?

1:29:10 I mean, it seems like you must get sent tons of things. And I was just wondering, how good are they? Are most of them not very good or are you quite surprised with what you guys get sent? You know, it varies. We get sent lots of stuff.

1:29:23 I mean, not a lot of it, to be honest, lands on my desk. But it’s weird, a lot of the time you can just tell and not just on content creators, but I don’t know, sometimes you just meet people and you can just immediately know that they’ve got their shit together and they have a sort of, you know, a sensibility about what’s good and what’s bad. And certainly the ones that come in with that attitude of like, you know, I’m going to be the next big thing and you want to hire me because I’m the best thing on earth.

1:29:51 Like almost, you know, 99 times out of 100, that is definitely, it is the reverse is true. Okay, as in medium, short term, they’re going to be a nightmare. Yeah, well, I don’t know. It’s just like, it’s a bad attitude, right? You know, it’s a weird thing, particularly if you’re only just starting out to come in and say, I’m the best thing that’s ever happened in filmmaking.

1:30:17 Like, look, when you’re 60, maybe you can look back on life and say, I made the best films. You know, there’s a couple of people out there in the world but it’s a weird mentality to have right off the bat as to think I’m the best before I’ve even started. Right, well said. And I guess everything you guys do is really collaborative, you know? Whether it’s- Yeah, I think we’re like, you know, I think I said it earlier, like, there’s lots of like earnest people who really care about what they’re doing, working very hard at it.

1:30:41 And a lot of the time I think people, you know, wonder about the Vice Special Sauce and what differentiates us and why did we grow? And you’re like, there’s a really, really dedicated group of talented people working extremely hard all the time. And some of them have been there a long time and some of them are new, but the secret of it is that we work very hard at it and we care deeply about the stuff that we’re making and the audience we’re trying to reach and we believe in ourselves and we believe in what we’re doing.

1:31:09 And that’s like, that in itself, I think is something that’s actually difficult to achieve. You know, I think often people think you can solve it with tech or there’s some silver bullet. You’re like, no, it’s just smart people working very hard and, you know, being very dedicated to it. Well said, Matt, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

1:31:27 People wanna get in touch with you. Are you a Twitter guy or are you a LinkedIn guy or do you want people not to get in touch with you? You can get in touch with me. I have a Twitter account that I don’t use, but I think it beeps on my phone if someone, you know, tweets at me, so. Okay, are you guys hiring?

1:31:44 We’re always hiring, yeah. Okay, selectively. Selectively, I mean, yeah, if, you know, it’s on our website, you look, there’s a job section and, you know, we’re growing really quickly so there’s always something going on. Okay, cool. They can find you at Vice.com across all your YouTube channels.

1:32:00 It’s gonna be fun to watch everything that you guys are doing in the next few years. I can’t imagine what verticals you guys are gonna go into, but it’s great stuff. Thanks so much for coming on. As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. All the best with you and yours and take care.

1:32:13 Thanks so much.