Words matter. These are the best Shane Smith Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Whenever I view success, I’m dressed as Mozart on an island.
Do whatever interests you the most. Passion breeds success.
I want to go to the Maldives before they sink, but just because it’s the most beautiful place on earth.
I think if you look at the failure of journalism in the modern age, then I don’t want to be called a journalist.
I want to be like Tom Freston. Tom just flies around everywhere, gets to make movies, gets to start TV shows, hang out with cool people and do whatever he wants.
If not doing VICE, I probably would be selling Cokes on the beach in Vietnam. I like the sea.
I want to build the next CNN with ‘VICE’ – it’s within my grasp.
TV never takes any chances; they never do anything different.
Are my politics Democrat or Republican? I think both are horrific. And it doesn’t matter anyway. Money runs America; money runs everywhere.
The best piece of advice I ever got from anyone was when Spike Jonze said, ‘Take money out of the equation.’ And that’s actually when Vice started making lots of money. That’s when I stopped worrying about money and started worrying about what I wanted to do.
I think the biggest issue for legacy media – both TV and film – is that it just costs too much money to develop a TV series or movie. And most of them don’t work. Then the one that works has to pay for the rest.
I never thought we had a chance of impacting anything. I am just starting to realize that we can change things – not just VICE, but all of us. In fact, we have to.
Gen Y consume most of their media online and mobile. Gen Y, as the Baby Boomers drop off, are the largest cohort with the largest amount of money – despite the fact that half of them are unemployed.
Most of the time, when the mainstream media reports on something, it never tells the whole story.
I came to America from Canada because Canada is stultifyingly boring and incredibly hypocritical.
If you look at film, distribution is pre-bought. If you’ve paid for the distribution, you say, ‘I have to make sure it’s a film that gets enough butts in the seats.’ I think that’s the problem: It becomes prohibitively expensive, and you can’t develop films for a smaller amount of money.
Advertisers realize that Gen Y is the largest purchasing cohort. Also, that you’re going to have to accept some different modes of thinking if you’re going to get to them.
There are only two companies in the world that can help me. That’s Facebook and Google, because they are going to make me the largest digital network in the world, which is my goal.
The greatest propaganda coup of the American Right has been to convince its citizens that we are in the grip of a liberal conspiracy. As a result, Obama is to the right of Richard Nixon on most issues. And there is we believe, certainly some space to exploit there. And we, VICE, aim to exploit it.
If you look not just at the Arab Spring, but at what I call the ‘Youth Spring’ that has started in Europe, young people are starting to find a voice, and they are not looking to the traditional media to reflect that.
I don’t care if I die – look, I’m old – but you want your kids to have good times and a good life.
A lot of what happens in the world is full-on crazy and doesn’t get reported on.
When you’re 18, 19, you want to live fast and leave a beautiful corpse behind.
American media has just become talk radio, incredibly partisan name-calling and op-eds.
I think that Twitter and YT and blogs are keeping media more honest. Everyone can be a journalist now. Everyone is a fact checker.
If you’re big in Montreal, you’re big in Quebec. If you’re big in Toronto, you’re big in Canada. But if you’re big in New York, you’re big in the rest of the world.
The greatest propaganda coup of the American Right has been to convince its citizens that we are in the grip of a liberal conspiracy.
People think because ‘Vice’ is irreverent and because we’re crazy, we’re stunt journalists. You know what? I don’t actually care.
I thought I was a pretty good writer, but I didn’t have anything to write about. I wanted to go out in the world, have some adventures and then write about them.
All I know is that when I go somewhere, I’m not an autobot. I am a human being. I am not an actor.
Online is a revolution. The Internet is a revolution. And we should be revolutionary in the content that we put on it rather than derivative.
I don’t know about you, but there is nothing that’s scarier than young people who have no future. If you take away someone’s future, they have nothing to lose.
The problem that we’ve had is four media companies run media, globally. And some say they’re on the Right and some say they’re on the Left; look, they’re all afraid of losing Ford as a client. So they’re all, by definition, huge companies that are going to be inherently conservative.
You have a lot of companies developing stuff that’s just derivative. If ‘The Voice’ is the No. 1 show on TV, they say, ‘Let’s do 100 different versions of ‘The Voice.’ The problem is, by the time you get to market, it’s already saturated, and everybody hates the format.
Everyone is trying to say, ‘This is Gen Y; we’re not an old company. We’re not doing old content.’
