Shane Smith

“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.”

“Whenever I view success, I'm dressed as Mozart on an island.”

“The whole sort of debate of classic objective journalism versus a new immersion journalism - that can go on forever... I made no bones about my position: I don't think you can be objective.”

“When you're a younger company, you struggle, struggle, struggle with, 'How are we going to pay the bills, and how are we going to hire people, and how are we going to get a bigger office?' Just managing the company is so hard.”

“TV never takes any chances; they never do anything different.”

“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.”

“It's our job to get into the hardest-to-see places and bring back the best footage - we have the best footage of North Korea ever shot. If that's a stunt, then I'll keep on doing stunts until I die.”

“American media has just become talk radio, incredibly partisan name-calling and op-eds.”

“I have a place in Costa Rica that is in the middle of the jungle. There's no Internet. There's no TV. Do I work there? Hell no.”

“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.”

“My last passport, I had North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Liberia, Guinea... I had, like, every war-torn country in there.”

“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.”

“When you're 18, 19, you want to live fast and leave a beautiful corpse behind.”

“A lot of what happens in the world is full-on crazy and doesn't get reported on.”

“I have the greatest life in the world because I created it.”

“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.”

“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 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 want to go to the Maldives before they sink, but just because it's the most beautiful place on earth.”

“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.”