"I miss the old VICE, this stuff was pure gold!"
Thanks.
"Back when Vice actually did journalism."
So, look.
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When we made this, we were like,
"DVDs are gonna take over the world."
It's the future of Vice.
♪♪
I'm Suroosh Alvi.
I'm the co-founder of Vice Media.
"Gun Markets of Pakistan"
was the first video I ever did
and maybe the biggest thing I ever did.
I should've just retired after that.
And I've been getting trolled for it for the last 16 years.
In 2006, we did a deal with MTV
to make this, the "Vice Guide to Travel" DVD.
Our pitch, when we went to MTV,
was "It's gonna be like 'Jackass' meets '60 Minutes.'"
We'd done a travel issue of the magazine
and I'd written this article
about this gun market in Pakistan
that I'd gone to with my parents a couple of years before that.
The, kind of, tourist brochures
that they used to produce in Pakistan
had the gun market listed
as a place for tourists to go check out,
see how local artisans and handicraft makers
are making these guns
that they're knocking off all day long.
So my parents took me there
on this kind of, like, family vacation to the gun markets,
and that's how I discovered it.
Alright. So let's see what these trolls have to say.
Yes, it is very cheap.
3,050 rupees?
I wouldn't compare it to the handmade Kalashnikov
in the gun market compared to an AK-47 or a real Kalashnikov.
I'm sure there's-- you'd notice a difference.
This is like a Kalashnikov?
-Kalakov. -Kalakov.
I think they take a certain amount of pride
in the fact that they -- "Look at us.
We can do this with our hands.
We don't need the high-tech machinery,"
and the shit works.
Naeem, who's our host, is part of the Afridi tribe.
He was born and raised there
and now works as a protocol officer for the government.
So that's an exchange of the conversation
I had with Naeem in the car, which, you know,
turned into this, like, really comedic moment.
He's the founder of the heroin trade.
The concept.
Of what?
It was just weird,
like I was trying to understand, like, who this guy was,
and I think we were just having a bit
of a communication breakdown.
In the edit room, somebody saw that and they're like,
"That's fucking hilarious. We have to put that in."
Oh, God. No!
Well, the good news is we got the hat back.
It was at Eddy's dad's hat.
And for some reason, Naeem Afridi,
who became the star --
He wasn't even supposed to be on camera when we organized it.
He was just like, "I love this hat.
I want to wear this hat." And so he just took it.
I think Eddy was like, "Okay, this hat is, like,
important to me and I don't want to lose it
in the tribal areas of Pakistan."
I think Naeem was actually angling for, like,
"Eddy's gonna give this to me," you know?
But that didn't happen.
I'm getting trolled by an Indian dude, it seems --
not the first time.
They really don't like me.
And that's okay.
Yeah, I wasn't scared, but I was like --
I felt totally safe there.
Things had probably happened, but honestly, I felt at home,
I mean, again, I'd been there before.
I'd gone there with my mom and my dad
and it was totally safe.
And that's part of the protocol.
Like, the tribal areas, you can't really enter them
unless you're a resident of the place.
So how it got setup was, you know,
my mom called her friend who worked in the government
to escort us to make sure there would be no issues,
to make sure we wouldn't get shot at.
And when you're surrounded by, like, all these militia guys,
like, you feel secure, like you're taken care of.
Last thing they want is an international incident
because a couple of Canadian dudes get kidnapped.
So it wasn't a big deal, but I was nervous.
I was nervous that I was gonna, like, screw it up.
You know, we'd spent all this money to go there
and produce this thing. I had never done it before.
And we kind of had no idea what we were doing.
So on that level, I was anxious, but I wasn't scared,
like, "Oh, I'm gonna get kidnapped or shot or killed,"
or anything like that.
Yeah.
They say I'm a Pakistani agent.
They say I'm, like -- it's intense.
Yeah, I get a lot of hate from Indians.
But I'm not sweating it.
Aw, here's somebody giving me props.
Thanks. That's nice. I'll take it.
Because now I see things like "What happened to that dude?
Like, he got so old. Is he okay?"
That hurts.
Thanks. "Back when Vice actually did journalism."
So, look, I think when people say
"I miss the old VICE, this stuff was pure gold,"
it's because it was like an alternative
to the traditional news.
It was like a little rawer and rough around the edges.
What was interesting about "Gun Markets of Pakistan"
was we did a deal with CNN,
and they put our videos on their website.
We were like, "This is kind of interesting and unexpected
that CNN wants our content."
And then it was surreal because we're like,
"Wait, I went to Pakistan
to make this kind of fun little video."
It wasn't news.
But other people were seeing it as news.
And that was like an epiphany for us that,
"Oh, we don't have to be so precious
about how we define what news is.
It doesn't have to be like capital-J journalism
in order for it to be considered news."
And so what we were making was one part travel,
one part news, one part character-driven documentary.
You got Naeem Afridi.
And it made something kind of new.
And for us, that's how we got into the news space.
But it's not traditional news, that stuff.
We'd evolved and it's changed.
We learned a lot in these early days doing our shoots
with just a couple people.
In this case, it was two people, right?
Me and Eddy.
Eight years later,
I'm in Pakistan on another shoot,
and we have eight people.
Or maybe it was even 10 people.
Like, too many. Like, what happened?
We'd become the thing that we said we weren't going to be.
And I think you need to strike the balance.
Like, yeah, I talk about 2006
and being in the field with two people,
but that's not how I even want to operate now in a way.
You have to find the right happy medium and balance.
So things have changed a lot and I think it's important
for us to maintain some of our kind of DNA
in the content that we're making as we evolve
and get bigger.
Alright. So those are my tales from the comments.
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