"Real ghetto style," Alvi said from the cab, explaining his propensity not to plan, or even garner press credentials, before he travels. "Grab a camera and go. Same style we did Vice, just like we did VBS.tv."

Vice equals Vice magazine, the free monthly glossy that Alvi co-founded along with with Gavin McInnes and Shane Smith in 1994 in Montreal. VBS.tv is the magazine's online video site, which the founders quietly launched in February, and which according to Alvi racked up about 650,000 unique visitors this May. The videos: Women undressing while being interviewed (Shot by Kern), profiles of skateboarders (Epicly Later'd), investigations into waste dumps (Toxic West Virginia), and documentaries of foreign musicians (Heavy Metal in Baghdad), just to name a few.

And now Alvi was on his way to the Middle East to video The Black Lips, while partner Smith was en route to North Korea, after a brief stopover to film in the Sudan. All this from a couple of guys known more for their coverage of urban youth culture than international affairs.

"Yeah, VBS.tv is a little broader than Vice is," Alvi said, explaining his interest in global stories. "When people come to the site I think they're surprised, because they expect us to only be experts in poo-poo, kaka and the bum bums, if you know what I mean."

That broad scope comes courtesy of filmmaker Spike Jonze, who Alvi says inspired them to begin videotaping their stories. Jonze, who is now the site's creative director, got involved with Vice after cold-calling their offices in 2002 to invite the founders to a screening of his recently completed film Adaptation.

"We thought it was like some NYU film student being like 'hey guys, I made a movie and I want to show it to you,' which is totally what Spike said. And we were like 'who is this,' and he said his name and we were like 'Spike who?'"

The founders became friends with Jonze, who helped them film their first video series, The Vice Guide to Travel. Alvi and company had so much fun filming the series they decided to continue doing video work. Through Jonze they got in contact with MTV which, according to Alvi, had been planning to launch a broadband site for some time. VBS.tv went live four months later.

Since then, their video coverage of Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda was the subject of an NPR piece on Tell Me More!, and their coverage of toxic waste dumps was featured on ABC World News.

These days VBS.tv is planning a redesign. They currently publish about 30 minutes of new material a day, although Alvi says that's probably way too much content for the average viewer. The staff also wants to make the site more accessible, easier to navigate, and rely less on offline visual metaphors: with the current design, the videos are surrounded by an image of a television. The navigation metaphor is a remote control.

"When we launched the site we wanted to make it as familiar to people as possible," Alvi said. "But that was one of Spike's comments, is that it looks too much like TV. We want to take advantage of the Internet more. So there's definitely a big challenge in redesign ahead of us."