Oct 10, 2016 · 35m · how-i-built-this
VICE: Suroosh Alvi
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of NPR's How I Built This, host Guy Raz interviews Vice Media co-founder Suroosh Alvi, exploring his journey from debilitating heroin addiction to co-founding a disruptive countercultural publication that survived financial ruin to become a four-billion-dollar global media empire.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 25.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 3.3 Guest teaching 2.2 Guest disagreement 0.5 Guy pushing back 1.3
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 29:51 Defending Vice's subjective journalistic model
Alvi rejects the criticism from mainstream news organizations that Vice is merely self-indulgent, arguing established players are threatened while praising Vice's point-of-view storytelling and Peabody wins.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 29:30 Raz confronts Alvi with criticisms of Vice's reportingRaz directly challenges Alvi by raising frequent mainstream critiques that Vice's content is self-absorbed and lacks real journalistic rigor.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 14:10 Revealing the fake Village Voice trademark lawsuitAlvi educates Raz on the truth behind Vice's rebranding, explaining that their claimed trademark legal battle was an entirely fabricated media stunt.
Guy holds their own ▶ 31:08 Raz brings up the McAfee geotag blunderRaz demonstrates specific knowledge of Vice's past controversies by recalling the infamous incident where Vice journalists accidentally leaked fugitive John McAfee's location.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Upbringing, Academic Pressures, and Early Addiction | 3 | 1 | 0 | 1 | Guy Raz conducts a gentle biographical interview tracing Suroosh Alvi's Pakistani-Canadian upbringing, parental expectations, and early drug struggles. The tone is entirely conversational and collaborative. | |
| Family Turmoil, Relapse, and Hitting Rock Bottom | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Alvi openly details reaching rock bottom with heroin addiction, his recovery process in Montreal, and the chance encounter at an NA meeting that connected him with a magazine opportunity. Raz listens attentively and asks clarifying narrative questions. | |
| Founding Voice of Montreal and Developing an Editorial Voice | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Raz probes the founding of the Voice of Montreal, noting they were an underdog compared to established alt-weeklies. Alvi readily agrees they were considered a laughingstock and explains the early creative direction. | |
| Assembling the Team: Gavin McInnes and Shane Smith | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Alvi narrates bringing in Gavin McInnes and Shane Smith, recounting their wild early dynamics and ad sales hustle while surviving on welfare. | |
| The Village Voice Pretext and Rebranding as Vice | 4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Raz presses on the split from the original Haitian publishers, prompting Alvi to confess that fabricating a trademark lawsuit from the Village Voice was a total PR lie to launch Vice independently. | |
| Securing First Investment from Software Mogul Richard Szalwinski | 4 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Alvi explains how bluffing in a local newspaper interview led to a sudden $250,000 investment from tech millionaire Richard Szalwinski with zero due diligence. | |
| Mid-Show Station Break and Upcoming Collapse Teaser | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Mid-show transition and station break where Raz sets up the next act of the company's near collapse. | |
| The Dot-Com Crash and Confrontation in Nantucket | 4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Raz walks Alvi through the sudden dot-com bust, confronting Szalwinski in Nantucket, and reclaiming their company equity for pennies on the dollar after hitting rock bottom again. | |
| Rebuilding from Scraps and Eliminating Fashion Debt | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Alvi recounts aggressively shedding debts with Italian clothing manufacturers and pivoting toward raw gonzo video production with their breakthrough Pakistan arms bazaar segment. | |
| Survival Instincts and Outlasting 1990s Media Rivals | 6 | 5 | 3 | 5 | Raz challenges Alvi directly on mainstream criticisms that Vice journalism is self-indulgent, reporter-centric, and prone to rookie mistakes like the John McAfee geotag leak. Alvi defends Vice's subjective reporting style while acknowledging high-profile missteps. | |
| Reflecting on Global Growth and a $4 Billion Empire | 4 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Raz and Alvi reflect on Vice growing into a global media brand valued at $4 billion, closing with lighthearted banter about Alvi being the rare Vice executive without tattoos. | |
| NPR Politics Podcast Promotional Announcement | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Standard NPR Politics Podcast promotional announcement read by Guy Raz. |
Statements from this episode (14)
Alt-weeklies failed to properly cover underground counterculture
“The depraved underground culture that, that I was obsessed with was not being covered properly in the alt-weeklies.”
Vice's co-founders supported themselves on government welfare while starting the magazine
“Well, we were on welfare.”
Founders faked a Village Voice lawsuit to justify rebranding as Vice
“We told the world that we were being sued by the Village Voice, and that's why we had to change the name to Vice.”
Vice launched using small loans and computers from the founders' parents
“I borrowed five grand from my parents. Gavin borrowed five grand from his parents, and Shane got 5000 dollars worth of computers from his dad. His dad worked in, you know, IT or something, and so it was with that, you know, 10,000 dollars Canadian that we star…”
Early Vice advertisers were given total freedom over their purchased pages
“Our view towards advertising, if you buy that page of advertising, you own that page, you can do whatever you want with it.”
Founders bluffed about an investor's interest to secure a meeting with him
“We said in, in that interview in La Presse that he was interested in buying us, and he then read it, and then had his office contact us a few days later and said he wants to meet you guys.”
Founders secured a $1 million valuation on a single piece of paper
“We pulled it from the air and came up with this number, somehow justified that it was a million bucks, and he read it. It was all on one piece of paper. It said the price of vice. He read it, and he said, that's a lot of money, and then he signed it, and they …”
Vice founders briefly held $44 million in paper wealth before the crash
“Yeah, and like we did a stock trade, you know, our shares for his company, which was called NormalNet, and they're like, you're worth forty-four million dollars now.”
Shane Smith bought Vice back from investors for pennies on the dollar
“For pennies on the dollar, Shane did a deal, and, you know, he was nice to us in a way, like, even though he put us out of business, but he was, he agreed to sell the company back to us, and we did a deal with him.”
Shane Smith settled Vice's apparel debts for ten cents on the dollar
“We owed all this money to these Italian, like, fashion companies who were manufacturing our clothes, and Shane went and took meetings with all of them, and figured out how to reduce the debt. So he's like, well, I know you want 200,000. I've got 20. Take it or…”
Vice pitched its first MTV video project as 'Jackass meets 60 Minutes'
“We took a meeting with MTV, and they said, if we gave you money to make a DVD, what would you do? And we said it would be, like, Jackass meets 60 Minutes. And that worked.”
A Vice travel segment about illegal arms reached CNN's homepage as news
“That segment eventually ended up on the homepage of CNN, and they treated it as news.”
Vice accidentally exposed fugitive John McAfee's location via unscrubbed photo metadata
“There's the one, the McAfee story, I don't know if you remember that one the guy who did the He was the guy who did the antivirus software, he was, like, on the run from the police a couple years ago? Exactly, where we kind of embedded with him, and released a…”