If anyone could out-con a con, it’s Oobah Butler. The British filmmaker, journalist, and provocateur has spent the past decade exposing society’s absurdity one elaborate hoax at a time. He catfished TripAdvisor with a fake restaurant, sold bottled Amazon worker urine back to the company, and made himself a one-man media experiment. A longtime VICE collaborator, Butler joins host Jackson Garrett on the premiere of VICE Culture Club to discuss his latest scheme: a documentary titled How to Make $1 Million in 90 Days.
Butler’s latest project takes aim at the gospel of greed. He sets out to join the world’s most shameless money-makers through any possible hustle, including crypto, online courses, outrage marketing, and an “ethical sweatshop” run by children. The film is part satire and part social commentary. During his latest mission, Butler immerses himself in the world he’s spent years dissecting, testing where criticism ends and complicity begins. The kicker is that he actually pulls it off, and what he finds at the top of the pyramid isn’t freedom—it’s a massive loophole. “Buy, borrow, die,” he explains, the tax-free cheat code used by the rich to stay rich.
After the laughs subside, the conversation turns to Butler’s creative code, always punching up. Butler insists that real comedy doesn’t bully; it exposes. “The punching up thing is a big golden rule for me,” Butler says. “Comedy that targets the powerless just feels hacky.” That belief drives everything he makes, from fake influencers to undercover documentaries. It’s also why his inbox is probably full of legal threats.
At one point, Butler calls this era “a golden age of bulls–,” a time when confidence has replaced competence. “The audacity to even ask is the secret,” he says. “You can get away with anything if you’re confident enough.” That idea fuels his filmmaking and his curiosity to see how far ideas can go. He admits that pitching projects often feels like running a con itself. “So much of my life now is just convincing people to back something that, on paper, sounds stupid.”
For all the pranks and madness, there’s purpose behind Butler’s mischief. He doesn’t trick strangers for cheap laughs. He uses deception to expose systems of power. From fake influencers to undercover exposés, every scheme is meant to hold a mirror to the world’s scams. “People won’t read about tax loopholes,” he says, “but they’ll watch me trick Amazon into fixing potholes.”Watch the full episode of VICE Culture Club with Oobah Butler to hear how he nearly sold his own future, why he still believes in mischief as activism, and what it really takes to make a million dollars in the golden age of bulls—.
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