So before we start the show, I want to tell you about to live episodes. I'll be recording in just a few weeks and how you can come see them in person. If you are a fan of 90s alternative music you will not want to miss my live conversation with the founders of sub pop the legendary recording label behind bands like Nirvana Soundgarden The Shins and many many others that show is happening on March 26th in where else Seattle and Benaroya Hall and then the
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Then our spending every waking moment together making videos and we end up calling it The nice stepbrothers and calling it a TV show
and it's incredible as you you end up selling it to HBO just a short time later for like 2 million dollars which which must been life-changing for
you. Yeah. It was it was incomprehensible to us. It was it we shot this video on a 200 dollar camera. We bought at Walmart we edited this in iMovie, you know, this is this is when h
Yo was you know Sex in the City Sopranos Six Feet Under The Wire and then I Stepbrothers.
From NPR it's how I built this show about innovators entrepreneurs idealists and the stories behind the movements they built and Gyros and on the show today how Casey neistat scraped together twelve hundred dollars to buy an iMac started making home movies and turn video vlogging into a multimillion-dollar business.
So in almost every episode of this show you'll hear a story about a person or people who built a company around a thing pita chips or yoga pants or cell phone cases or coffee a tangible product that's become a well-known brand something lots of people use in their daily lives. But today's guest is a little bit different. Yes. He's got a pretty well-known brand and yes, lots of people consume it and yes, it's become a profitable business.
Except Casey neistat's business is Casey neistat. He is the brand Casey is a filmmaker but he's best known as a YouTube personality with almost 12 million subscribers to his channel. He's posted hundreds of videos on YouTube like snowboarding through the streets of New York after a blizzard.
He's documented some of the most personal and intimate moments of his life.
Yeah, what did he say?
And his signature style of filmmaking and candid first person delivery. We just finished the Steadicam shower. I'm carrying the gimbal on my skateboard. It's gonna look so good. It's actually influenced a whole generation of YouTubers. He's a legend he deserves to get his own memorial and more than a decade ago. He recognized the potential of YouTube as a way to build out a media company, but even though Casey neistat is one of the most successful self-taught filmmakers to come out of YouTube.
Tube it's an unlikely success story at 16. He was a high school dropout at 17. He was a father and for a while Casey wash dishes and restaurants and lived in a trailer just to keep his head above water Casey grew up in a mainly working class neighborhood in the industrial town of Groton, Connecticut. His dad was a Salesman for a restaurant supply company and his mom stayed at home to look after Casey and his three
siblings. There's an omnipresent
Financial stress that it was in my household that was never not there the majority of my parents fights. I remember being about money and you know, this was the 80s where there's a lot of tumult in the economy and I just remember my dad's business being so tied to that that economy and I remember him coming home later and later. I remember his stress. I remember hearing my parents have to discuss how my dad was going to have to ask his mother and my grandmother.
Now for some sort of loan to help him keep his company from going bankrupt, but how that you know how that manifests in the household was we, you know, we didn't we didn't have much but I don't remember I don't remember us wanting much either. There's always enough food in the house whenever anything fancy we got that cereal that came in a big bag and was called like tasty O's instead of Cheerios, but my parents Financial burdens, I think were largely shielded from us, but it was by no means so
An affluent childhood it was not we were not a household of
means or you a pretty well-behaved kit or were you I don't know a
troublemaker. No, it's awful. I was awful, you know, I looking back at it and I do spend a lot of time reflecting on it. I think that I would describe my parents, you know, parenting style as one of like absence like they were never around and I always felt like we were on our own it was a very Lord of the Flies mentality and are
household and because of that, you know, I remember like being really little in my older brother and I accidentally burning down the tree Ford. I remember like my parents throwing the Christmas tree sort of over a cliff in the backyard after Christmas because it was easier than trying to throw it away and my my big brother van and I thought I'd be hysterical to set it up on the train track. So the train would have to crash into a vertical perfectly mounted six-foot-tall Christmas tree, you know, I remember
Getting it made him in suspended but I think it's detention in school because I was skateboarding in the hallways. So it was that sort of thing and I think that I was absolutely a problematic it
mean when you have that self image as a kid, you kind of become that if that's what you're told you are then you you know For Better or Worse you then that's that's who you are. That's your identity.
Yeah, you look like, you know, I spend so much time now guy thinking about this because
Cuz I my parents and my teachers and all of that it it affected me. But the thing that stands out the most now and I look back on it are the parents of my friends. I remember them, you know calling me a loser like literally using that word. I remember, you know, I remember my friend from seventh grade like asking his mom if I could go on a ski trip with them and her explaining why I couldn't and I could hear her give that explanation. I remember those things vividly and that affected me.
Struck me deeper if I came across you as a fifteen-year-old, right and and I was like, hey Casey, like let's talk like I want to just find out what's going on with your life. Like would you have been sort of sarcastic and and jokey or would you have been willing to kind of sit down and have an Earnest conversation about what was going on in your life? You know, that's
that's tough. I don't know if anybody's ever asked me that before guy, but I think that II know that the I was
Was you know, I almost only spoke and the most sardonic of ways. I was always joking. I was never serious. But I think that that she'll that superficial shell is very fragile. And I think it could have been broken very easily. Yeah. I remember vividly Luca boardy. He was my 10th grade English teacher. I remember causing so much trouble in the class. I'm the whole class laughing and all at his expense That Couldn't teach and he pulled me out into the into the hallway instead of throwing me out of class. He pulled me into the
Any just like, you know, you looked me dead in the eye and said what's wrong and I just like I burst into tears burst into tears not a very Earnest conversation with him about my parents splitting up and all this sort of tumult in my life. And you know, he he was able to the reason may be why I remember his name among all my teachers is he was able to break through that she'll very very easily and I mean what you were
she would like 15 when your parents split up and
I mean, it sounds like you took that really hard. Yeah, I took it really
hard. You know, I don't think I don't criticize them for this. I can only imagine what it was like for my parents but you know my mother whether it was on purpose or not. It really made thought like it was our fault and then my father was just so caught off guard by it that he sort of pulled back he withdrew and that left us sort of confused and it was not a
It was not a just wasn't a very happy household at that
time. You were clashing with your with your mom a lot fighting.
Yeah, um, you know, I don't I don't know if this is fair or not, but I think all four of us kids directed the blame at my mother and I was always the most vocal about that. So throughout the divorce. I really vilified her for you know for bringing us to that place and then ultimately, you know, I brought that frustration to school.
And ultimately I was I was I think suspended from school for using my pager in detention at a Bieber back. Then nobody had cell phones and my friend texted me and I wanted to call him back. So I walked out of detention. It was a huge deal and my mother that night, you know, she screamed at me and she said, you know, give me that beeper get out of this house and and I didn't want to be seen week in her eyes. I didn't want it back down a relent to that. So I left.
Died I was 15 years old. It was a Tuesday night and a school night, and it was cold and I left I walked out. I took a backpack and I left my parents house and I never went back.
Where did you go? You have that first night. I stayed at the one friend's house that I could walk to and I say slept in his basement and then I spent the next couple of days and various friends houses until their parents would be like that kid. Casey is actually sleeping here. Why is he here and then move on and then ultimately there are these two kind of cool girls and they live not too far from the high school in this apartment complex and they were cool because they had just graduated and they had their own apartment. They
both had jobs and they paid rent and I just got in a real job washing dishes and I was making like, you know, a hundred bucks a week washing dishes on Saturdays and the cool girls invited me to move in with them. As long as I chipped in on rent and I was like sweet so I had a permanent place to stay on their couch and I think I had a chip in like 200 bucks a month or something like
that. So you see you're basically crashing at their house and and and they're a couple years older than you and I guess
Didn't you start dating one of them says this is
Robin one thing leads to another guy. And yeah, she and I started dating and it was a you know, it's a fun couple of weeks ultimately School finished up and her lease was up and she didn't know where to go next. And she and I decided to leave Connecticut all together and move to Virginia where my big brother van was was in college at the College of William and Mary
and he just
figured wolf figured out when I get there. Like we'll go see him and then maybe get a job there something.
Yeah, I think you know, we're just so naive and she was a waitress and at a couple of really good waitressing job. So she had no trouble at all finding a job waiting tables and you know anywhere there's restaurants. There's a somebody willing to hire a kid for 8 or 10 bucks under the table to wash dishes and I knew that would happen and that's exactly what we did. All right. So you're
living in Williamsburg, you know, both of you are so young and and not
Quite sure how this is going to end but you find out that Robin is pregnant certain point.
Yeah, you know, I I think that she and I both knew that she was pregnant but really didn't we're not willing to confront that like we knew something was happening. Her body was changing. She was feeling different. We had been wildly irresponsible with sex as teenagers tend to be
B and we went back to Connecticut for a visit and it was on that trip that like her cousin who was this older woman who looked after us and I remember her pulling Robin aside and being like you're pregnant and she just tell at a glance you're pregnant and that was the first time somebody else acknowledge what we knew and it was less of a gotcha moment in more of a moment where she and I both were forced to confront this reality and I remember
Driving the 10 hour drive back to Virginia. And for the first time like she and I were talking about like, okay, we're gonna have a baby, you know, we packed up our things and we said goodbye to this really like fun life that we had built for ourselves and in Williamsburg, Virginia, and we moved back to Connecticut and into the basement of that cousin who was you know, almost like a mother figure to her. I mean at this point, right you can
react in a million different ways. And I obviously I think it's natural for us to put ourselves in that situation.
Ation, I think what would I have thought and I think I think I would have been terrified. I mean were you did you did you feel that way at
all? I didn't and I remember not feeling that way. I remember it was nothing but excitement for me and enthusiasm from me and I remember Robin freaking out she was stable as a rock that I remember late in the pregnancy of her having a really tough time and a tough time.
But emotionally just what's going to happen in life with you know, with the fact that she's you know, she's with this 16 year old who's supposed to be her caretaker of her and her unborn child and I was washing dishes and she had a very natural freaked out and I remember my reaction to that is like one of total kind of bewilderment. I couldn't understand why she was freaking out well and this is not something that I acknowledge and retrospect. This is something that I was I was how I felt then and how I
thought then was this is great. Finally. I have a reason to be responsible and finally have a reason to get life started. Wow, and the minute she got pregnant. I was like, okay great. Now it's about proving to this little baby proving to this kiddo that I made that you know that his dad's not a loser and that he can have the life that I wished I could have had in my mission was just to accomplish that like, all I had to do was
do it.
The odds of that happening were really Slim Right the the odds of you having
of actually that
you know this whole thing falling apart and your life falling apart and you not becoming financially secure and all these like that that that was a much greater possibility right? Like the statistics were not on your
side. Well, I think we can both say right now that is objectively true. Yeah, but at the time that was a
non-compete I wasn't even in
Mind right? No because look I my
parents didn't you know step in with money or anything? Not that they had anything to step in with, you know, Robin didn't really have any parents. So we didn't have anyone to turn to we're all on our own and you know, I was making $8 an hour and it felt like we were at sort of the Bottom Rung of a gigantic ladder and then it really felt like okay great. I'll the only place we have to go is up.
That's really exciting because I didn't think you could go down any further like you you literally couldn't be paid less in the state of Connecticut and I just didn't see things getting worse. I only saw things getting better.
Wow. So Owen is born I think in 1998. Yeah, and you're a 17 year old dad. And do you and Robin at this point say? All right. Well, we should probably talk about like, you know getting married. It's probably the right thing to do.
Wood. Is that a conversation? You guys
had it may have come up but I think that you know, she was pregnant within weeks of us meeting one another and she's a tremendous person, but I don't think that the way I don't think that what drove our relationship was that she and I had particularly extraordinary feelings for one another thing what drove our relationship with it was a shared desire to give this little boy the best life we could give him. I was not much of a boyfriend and all
It definitely didn't give her much attention and she was patient with that. Where did you guys
live and and the first year and a half of his life?
I bought a trailer like a mobile home and we lived in a like a trailer park which was amazing. I remember being so proud of that that was such a defining moment in my life because the trailer I think was $12,000 and I put I think eight or nine hundred dollars down and then got a mortgage for the rest that my grandmother co-signed for.
Then we had to rent the little piece of land that we parked it on and we live there and to me that was like an unbelievable source of Pride. I remember like getting in arguments with Owens mother because I would have to have the carpet vacuum in a certain pattern and if the pattern wasn't there I'd be upset. So I was vacuuming like three times a day. So proud of this home that that I had for my family and I guess I guess
she mentioned this point Casey that you had
Dropped out of high school that my like you were. I guess you're making minimum wage at the restaurant. But I mean, it sounds like you were even with all those are the things you were pretty optimistic about your life and your future.
Yeah. I was optimistic and I was you know, I think because I had nowhere else to go. I was home every day with my kid his mother work days. I work nights which meant every day from 7 a.m. Till 4 p.m. It's just the two of us and we were, you know, wildly close, you know, he was my little
Boy, and his first word was Daddy and I was there for his first word and its first step and it was wonderful. I loved every second of it
at this stage in your life. Did you have any Ambitions for what you thought you wanted to become ER was we just kind of like putting one foot in front of the other?
I always had this vision of the future, you know, like I always do
Has used to say when I was very young to my sister. I was like, well, I grew up on to be rich and I remember, you know, when own was born. I was working in a restaurant. I remember sort of hatching these plans and you know spending 40 50 hours a week in the bottom of a Chowder Pot scrubbing it you sort of spend a lot of time in your own head. And I remember then just like obsessively identifying that weaknesses in the way that the restaurant the business was run. I mean like, okay, so I when I start a restaurant here's exactly how I'm going to run it.
How it can be profitable. Here's how it's going to work. That's the plan
in time. I guess your brother van moved to New York after he finished college. And what was he was he doing
there? So he actually he didn't finish he didn't he didn't graduate from William and Mary he my parents couldn't afford tuition any longer so he had to drop out and he dropped out of college and moved to Brooklyn and he had a series of kind of interesting gigs and
Throughout that he bought an iMac computer, which is the first kind of the first consumer Market computer that you can edit video
on was that was it like one of those blue or purple
ones? It was Blues be a first year was only bring purple is the next year and that's what he was doing in New York. And I remember when he bought that computer it called me to tell me about it. And that sounded like the coolest thing I'd ever heard and that year Owen was wasn't quite to yet but that year
We drove into the City and we stayed in his apartment his one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. And while we were there all we did was play with my brother's computer because he had a computer but he didn't have a video camera and I had a video camera but no computer. So we had all this footage of my son running around the Central Park Zoo, and he and I just tried to figure out how to edit it and
That moment I mean I can I can tell you how the room smelled I could tell you exactly the land. I can tell you where his computer was in relationship to his bed like that moment, which was almost exactly 20 years ago was so Crystal for me because it was such a big deal. I'd never sort of had my breath taken away so much. I had never seen such a tool of empowerment way to express yourself. I imagine it was like when you put a Pianist in front of a
You know for the first time or you handle writer a pencil for the first time, I just remember having my breath taken away by this machine and when we ran out of footage to edit there was a came with like a dog being bathed in a kiddie pool that came to fault on the computer so you can have some footage of Play We edited that because I just wanted to manipulate videos just so exciting for me. I like that moment and after that vacation, you know came to an end. We got back.
To Connecticut, and I applied for a credit card so I could buy that machine and I was only able to get credit card with the four hundred dollar limit. So I got another credit card that also had a four hundred dollar limit update hundred bucks after keeping track and that in combination with my tax return from that year gave me enough money to buy a computer of my own. Wow, and my life immediately changed because all my days were Owen my two-year-old with the time almost two years old. He and I making
Us and that's all we did all day every
day and you would mostly video him.
Well, he was I had to you know, I was the sole caretaker so he was my partner in crime, but he was also my muse and the subject of all of my videos and that's all we
did and he would just go back and plug your camcorder into the computer and day and sort of capture all that film and you had to do that in real time. Then he couldn't it wasn't like a digital capture right it to like
yeah, it was shooting to take. Yeah and moreover the machine only had a
10 gigabyte hard drive which held about 12 minutes of video. So I would edit one video at a time. And I remember I would back up my footage to VHS tapes his VHS tapes were pretty cheap. I remember then every video every video then guy opened with like the title screen in the title screen was trailer park Productions, and there was a picture of my trailer because we had one car and Owens mom would take that car to work in the morning. So everything was shot within the confines of the trailer
park and this was being done really just for your own.
Like family archives, right like you take videos of your son and you were kind of just editing them and then putting them in an
archive. I mean guy I considered these like Academy Award winning movies the version of sharing them then or the version of virality then is I would then take those VHS tapes on my nights off and I would drive to my friends house to my relatives house had make them all sit on the couch. I'd put the VHS tape in I'd make sure everybody was
quiet and I click play and make them watch my videos and I take my VHS tapes house and I drive to the next house. That was that was how I found my
audience. What were the videos like described? I mean because I'm thinking it's like oh and walking next to a duck pond or oh, well, that's yeah we close. Yeah. I mean, there's literally a
video of our next to a duck pond in Old Mystic Village, which is across the street from where we live. There's a duck pond and that's where I shot one video. But I remember like one of my first big movies like the one that was immensely proud of was
Owns mom's birthday and I went and filmed the birthday and all this and then like at the end of the video. I jumped off of like the garage into the swimming pool at her cousin's house. And like that was like the grand finale and I made every family member. I had watched that stupid movie over and over and over but no, I never considered these to be home videos. I consider these to be like these were movies and immediately then when I would show up at my at the restaurant I worked in all I would talk about everybody I worked with
How I'm now a filmmaker, it's what I do for a living and washing dishes what I'm doing now, but I'm a filmmaker and I guess it was around that time where
I guess you and Robin decides to split. I'm assuming the relationship what would just wasn't working and and you decide it was time for a
change. Yeah. I think that when she and I split, you know, it's pretty I was upset about it. And ultimately I just kind of made a rash decision.
Because I was going into New York to visit my brother then with some degree of frequency, and he and I and his girlfriend kind of hats this cockamamie plan to like start a movie production of video production company. I was like great great. I'll be the CEO and they're like, of course, of course, you'll be the CEO and the minute that happened. It was not I'm going to go stay in New York. It was I am moving to New York City and I remember during a smoke break in the back like having this conversation with the cooks at the
In the weeks preceding my leaving and I remember them saying to them, you know, like the great thing about this restaurant is that if you ever want to come back Casey, you can just come right back and pick up right where you left off and I looked him in the eye and I was just like I'm never coming back. I'm never coming back.
So what you just like pack up your life and move
to New York. Yeah. I mean I would say that was probably like two duffel bags and I remember Vans girlfriend whose name was Melissa.
So she was like KCI, you know, I have this sublet like this friend of mine is looking for somebody to live in their couch to help subsidize the rent for this summer. Do you want to do it? I'll loan you the money and I was like really and she put up the like $1500 for three months to be on this couch and it was a like a 250 square foot studio apartment in the East Village that had been walls had been put up to make it a two bedroom. And and what did you do for work? So I did temp work at first and
Ultimately got a job is sort of an artist's assistant getting $10 an hour, but it was exciting. So I get to be around an artist who is using his creativity to sort of make a living in a career which is something that was fascinating to be close to I'd never seen that before in my life and there was consistency there because he had a lot of work to be done in as many hours as I could work you'd pay me for and I needed it. I needed the job because I was taking the train every 4 days back to Connecticut where I was staying in my dad's building.
One of his company he had an attic that was unused was just used for storage. That's where I would stay with Owen because I did go a week without seeing him was just start to implode
so really for your first like I guess two years in New York. It was whatever you needed to do to go back to Connecticut every few days to spend time with your son.
Yeah. I mean the first three months in New York City were really separate from the other.
17 and a half years. I spent ended up spending in New York City the first three months were a unique because those first three months were June through September of 2001 and my sublet was up August 31 2001 and I think I think it was September 1 I moved into another friend's house who their only living there for a month and they're like sure you can flop here. If you give us a couple hundred bucks because we're moving out and they lived on Rector Street in the financial district, and I moved in
Them and then I like bought myself another month and then you know 11 days later was September 11th 2001 and we were hundreds of feet from the base of the World Trade Centers so much so that when the first plane hit I was knocked off the couch and I remember being like just thinking it was a cannon. I don't know. Whatever reason I remember the scene in Mary Poppins the family, that's the subject of them if they lived.
The street from an old ship captain and he fires the cannon every a right in the whole house shape, right and like in that moment like half-asleep half-awake. I assumed someone had fired a cannon and I looked out the window and saw paper falling and I thought it was like maybe a promotion where they're like shooting a cannon full of flyers for free tacos or something absurd like that and I looked up and saw a building on fire and ultimately like I'm you know, I left Iran. I got on my bike and was biking away bike.
with my big brother's apartment and the second plane hit and I you know, I remember feeling the heat from the second plane and falling off my bike and stuff was falling around me and it was just a kind of Terror that
Yeah, then I'll never forget it was I have had my video camera my DV camera in my hand and there's one shower. I'm trying to as a bike away film The Towers and it crosses over and in that crossing over you can see my face and I'm just white but that's really like for me. That's the that's the bookmark where I like my life in New York City began because if ever there's a reason to kind of give up or throw in the towel, it's a terrorist attack of such severity that changes the daily life for I think.
Americans yeah, but to be so literally so close to it. You know, I remember my dad called and he just said like a time to come home and I remember speaking to Owens mom's friends the ones who put us up when we have nowhere else to stay and they've gave me the same sort of line. That's like you'd be crazy to stay there. Like you don't even have a place to stay right now. You don't really have a job. What are you gonna do and ironically like it was making that decision like I'm not going anywhere. That's when things started to turn around for me. That's when I started.
I find a footing in New York City that had eluded me in the the previous three months. What was that footing? So it started with finding a place there were sort of a mass Exodus of I think people like me that were sort of on that that precipice of surviving or not in New York City and they have a lot of them left and one of those people was, you know, like a friend of a friend and he had lived in this something called an SRO a single room occupancy.
And it's where you sort of you get a room, but you don't get a bathroom or kitchen and it wasn't much of an apartment, but it was a room that had a door with a lock on it. That was mine. Yep, and no matter what I couldn't be kicked out of there. It was mine. And that was you know the ground from underneath me going from a liquid to a solid.
And in the meantime, you are still working as an assistant for this artist, but you like you had your iMac set up in that little room and you were just taking videos of stuff like around New
York all day every day
non-stop just with your camcorder like going out and just
shooting stuff anything anything every time I'd see something interesting. I'd make a video about it. Not only that but my proximity to my brother van for the first time wasn't a hundred miles or 300 miles, but you know, he lived right down the street so
And I were spending every waking moment together making videos and we were kind of all over the place and ultimately we landed a real gig like a high paying high profile video job to make a birthday video for someone for who so the artists we worked for like the little videos we made and one of his art collectors guy named Tom. Healy went to the artist was like, you know, I need to make a
A video for my husband Fred's 50th birthday party. How do I do that? He's a guy you need to talk to the brothers talk to the brothers and like, you know, I remember being so nervous speaking to mr. Healy because he's this like fancy art collector and we were like to recharge him $100 or $500 and ultimately we landed on $5,000 like worked for the whole thing the fences here. Yeah. It was the biggest number we could think of.
And he didn't bat an eye at it. He was like sure let's do it. It was a
huge deal and it was a video and it was a video that you would make of his life,
you know, effectively just wanted a funny video of people saying happy birthday Fred to play on a screen at Le Cirque for Fred's 50th birthday for 5,000 bucks. I think for 5,000 bucks. And now that I know what would it cost to have a meal at Le Cirque. I understand why he didn't bat an eye at the five thousand dollar bill for the video. This is probably what he spent.
Tan martinis that night but then he handed us a list of people to interview and it was like, you know people like President Bill Clinton and the current governor of New York and it was these two high-profile individuals. I mean, I remember interviewing guy showing up for the interview with President Clinton and this is just a few years after he left office and you know, we had a really funny gag. We wanted to do for the video. We have funny joke. We wanted the president to deliver and we showed up and we told his handlers we had this Joe.
Like absolutely not. We've got a pre-approved script and that's all he'll be reading and we were intimidated their secret service men there with guns were like no problem. We understand but then they left us alone in the conference room, and we jumped on the on the teleprompter and kind of like reset it turned it off and then when the president came in and sat down and sat there and I just remember him like looking left looking right kind of looking his handlers like being like guys, what are we doing here and I turned to him and I like mr. President. I have a funny idea and he smiled and I was like
Here's what I want you to say and he was like sure that sounds hysterical and we hit record and he delivered the joke and it was the standout highlight of the video that we played at Fred hochberg 50th. Do you remember what
what you have had him say
vividly guy? So Fred hochberg whose birthday it was who was a prominent businessman. His mother is Lillian Vernon of the Lillian Vernon catalog who sort of the catalog Queen of the 60s 70s and 80s.
So we made the president a t-shirt that said Fred hochberg turned 50 and all I got was this lousy t-shirt from Lillian Vernon, which is funny because she was a huge campaign contributor of his and when he saw the t-shirt in the president just started laughing and he did the joke just as we asked he held up the t-shirt and the entire room full of room full of people there to celebrate burst into laughter. It was a big hit and that was the first that was the first real paid gig we
Had but your first gig was like doing a video with Bill Clinton. I mean, you must have you must have thought in your mind like, oh my God. I hope he doesn't find out that we're kind of, you know amateurs
know that never ever occurred to us forever. It didn't I mean that just like the dishwasher who was just like doing that as a hold over till he figured out his career. We were we were Oscar award-winning world famous film.
Makers that the world had never heard of
finally confident you just walk in and you're like, okay. This is what you do listen to us. No, no hesitation at all.
No, and in the zoom in in the micro, we were just too terrified individuals, but to zoom out from there. We had this sort of I could say it was confidence, but I think it was far more just arrogance. We were just these arrogant, you know, I was 21 at the time they almost 26 of the time. We're just he's arrogant kids who thought we knew something that nobody else did.
When we come back in just a moment how Casey and his brother van took that momentum and turned it into a TV show and what happened when that show did not exactly go as planned stay with us. I'm guy Roz and you're listening to how I built this from NPR.
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Hey, welcome back to how I built this I'm guy Roz. So it's the early 2000s and Casey is starting to make a name for himself in New York after that birthday video with a cameo from Bill Clinton Casey and his brother van would build a pretty successful business producing videos for art galleries and other clients, but the real breakthrough happened when Casey realized he had an important story to tell about of all things his iPod. This is
2003. So
First generation iPod it around for a little while, but it was still like the Talk of the Town. It was the hottest piece of checked there was and I had one it was given to me as a gift and they cost $400. So it was something way outside of my my price outside of anything I could afford but I had one and the battery died in it wouldn't hold a charge. So I called Apple Computers. They had like an 800 number that a human would answer back in 2003 and the person on the other the other end of the phone explained to me that
Apple has a policy does not replace the batteries in their iPods. And I was so offended I was so upset. I love my iPod guy. I was so upset that I again felt like that 15 year old kid with the parent saying don't do this or teacher saying no to me that I was like, you know, I need to I need to vent this so I called them back.
Insurance purposes your call may be monitored or recorded. Thank you for calling Apple. My name is Ryan. May I have your first name? Please?
Like I said fair enough different different operator different tech support person who said ya know, we don't replace the batteries, but you can just buy a new
one
the visuals in the video are my brother van and I running around Manhattan.
And this is when they had that ubiquitous ad campaign of the Silhouettes
dancing. Yah. Yah.
Yah, and it's brightly colored. They were everywhere and much like you would see a disclaimer at the bottom of a pack of Marlboro Reds that says the cigarettes will give you cancer. We spray painted using a stencil a disclaimer on the bottom of every one of those posters that said iPods and replaceable battery lasts only 18 months and we made a video of just that and
This is you know, three years before YouTube. So we put it on a splash page. We bought iPods dirty secret.com and we put it on that
splash page. But Abdul minute website under you bed domain name. Yeah, only four dollars. Yeah, right.
Gotcha. Then. I remember just like very angrily like emailing every single journalist. I could find email saying like, hey check out this movie we made or pretending to be someone else being like, hey look at this movie. I found and just trying to get somebody to publish it somewhere and you know within 24 hours it was
Everywhere to the point where the site was crashing, but it did millions and millions of views in the days when to go viral required actually emailing somebody the
video. Alright, so this gets traction and what what happens like are you contacted by the media? Like what what kind of attention did you get for this?
It was a kind of attention that I had never experienced before it was I remember the Washington Post wrote a huge article. It was the first time I'd ever read the word viral video, but it was everywhere.
Is viral in the in the most literal sense of the word viral everywhere when it's a sort of X remember being back in Connecticut with little Owen. We were walking around and somebody came up to us. And he was like Hey, I'm I work in energy and I just got back from Saudi Arabia and I saw your face in your video on the news there you made something about Apple and I was like, yeah, that's that's me. So it was kind of a it was something that I don't think we could have in our wildest dreams ever
anticipated.
At this point by the way, what was your primary source of income? Like what are you you still working with that
artist? I was still an assistant. I was getting paid very well though, you know says running the entire shop. I was running the whole kind of career of this prolific artist and I felt like all of a sudden I I sort of was figuring it out in New York and after iPods dirty secret exploded so many people came to my brother van and me saying what else have you done? And we're like, oh are you kidding?
Kidding me. Here's a hundred other movies we've done and that happens enough where people are like, okay these these guys have something and the opportunities we got then started to be more and more interesting, huh? I remember one time getting in an offer to direct a TV commercial and that sounds glamorous, but it literally was was candy Barr company wanted to test their candy bar Marketing in a very tiny market and they had $10,000.
Is an all-in budget and the minute they greenlit that and we got the money. I quit my job like, okay, we're professional filmmakers now and what was left of the money we spent to get our first studio and it was a tiny 400 square foot studio in Chinatown, and I remember we had enough money for one month and at the end of that month, we wouldn't be able to pay anything unless we could figure out how to make money in the next 28 days. So
I mean was it first thing you did?
Did to make that
happen it was a it was a kind of hustling that was able to be furthered by the fact that we didn't we no longer had day jobs so van and I just ran at making movies, like nothing else. We just one after another after another. We you know, some of the gigs were hundreds of dollars in some of the gigs were more but we didn't say no to anything then that involved showing up with a camera and the opportunities were all over the place everything from like wedding videos.
To you know being introduced and I don't know who the conduit was for this but being introduced to a guy named Andy spade and
I interviewed Andy and and his his late wife on How I built this Kate and you know
to very very dear friends of mine and two people. I love very very much but at the time I didn't know who they were and we were invited by and I knew that Kate Spade was a handbag company.
Inside the CEO and and he's like a I like the little videos you guys do we like? Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. And he was like, you know, we're going out to Arizona next week to film to take some photos for our spring line or whatever it was and he's like if I give you guys a couple bucks for give you some money you think you can come with us and make videos and we're like, yes, we can sir. Of course we can sir and we went and made some fashion videos for him. And he was a he remains one of the most sort of brilliant.
Marketers in the game and with under his Direction. I think we made really powerful really smart videos for Kate Spade Handbags. And that was a kind of validation that obviously went way further for us then making kind of a terrible candy bar commercial and ultimately we were introduced to a guy named Tom Scott through Andy spade and Tom Scott was this just genius entrepreneur founder of Nantucket Nectars.
Right. Yeah, and he turned that into a wildly valuable company that he sold and became very wealthy because of that and then he built a media company and we went in met with him and I remember him being very stoic and sitting in the corner sort of nodding his head at Dan and I as were doing our dog and pony show and he looked at us and he said I want to do something big with you guys. What would you like to do and we're like, okay great and we went away and we're like What is something big mean?
And I think to this day that what he meant was he wanted to make a big movie with us, but we didn't understand that then so we came back to him. We said look all we really know how to do is make these little videos but we struggle to make them because we spend so much time trying to keep the lights on. So if you can agree to kind of pay our overhead for the next year in that time, we will make a mountain of videos and we'll figure out what to do with it and our pitch guy. I'm our pitch was no more complicated than that. Well,
It's all it we
said we'll make you videos just just passed like a basically a retainer that will help us. Keep keep our company never said will make you videos. We just said will make videos, right? Okay
the talking about it now, he was just like I saw in you to a kind of spark that you know that I identified with and I knew that you were just sort of being held back by a lack of resources. So if I were to free that up, I knew it would take us places and we shook hands and he agreed to finance us and we walked out of there.
It was the hugest deal we could have ever imagined
and with that support now what kinds of like what were you able to do? Did you need money to travel? Did you need money to buy better cameras? Did you we didn't spend
we didn't spend it on year. I don't know that we would have known what to buy we're still using iMovie. But basically it was like what's an awesome video we want to make today, right? And you know, like I think a good example of that is I wanted to make a movie with
Women like a real movie with Owen. I was like, oh and let's make a movie together and he's like, okay great and I was like, can you write it? And you know, he's eight years old nine years old the time. He's like, yes I can.
Okay. So you want to make a movie about a cruise ship? We're in a gigantic Blue
Monster crushes the ship and kills all the people on board.
That sounds totally awesome. And he wrote a movie called The Blue Monster and I went to the beach and I covered myself in blue paint and seaweed and he had the battle that monster and the movie was like a story of my Kiddin me wanting to make a
movie out of the water.
And he's going to attack the ship. We are going to make the bow out of
cardboard. You know, I remember guy. One of the videos was my girlfriend at the time who is now my wife my girl that time we're having just wild problems in our relationship and I made a movie that took Ryan month to make it was called love versus ego and it was my love for her versus like the ego. That is the fighting that we're the two of us were having and how to reconcile
that this is Candace my future.
Ex-girlfriend in the source of all the material I needed to make this
movie that was a movie that I was only able to make because I was able to sort of indulge because we didn't have to worry about paying right. So
Billy Bragg said love is like being on a ride at the funfair the sort you want to get off because it's scary and then as soon as you're off you want to get right back on again, that's the uncertainty the excitement you get by embracing ego John Lennon compared. Love to a flower this
Tell before you had a YouTube channel, and I just and we're going to get there a bit, but I'm just wondering I mean we're lots of people watching your videos and 2007 and and you
know, no no no one was watching it. Well, there's no way to watch videos then, you know, we had our videos on our website that we updated as best we could and there was definitely like a little cult following because we put our videos into little film festivals like we made a lot of bicycling videos. They were in the bike film festival in New York City and at that time certainly still
The pie in the sky was to make a feature film that got into Sundance or something like that. I was still the ultimate destination as a filmmaker, right? So
in that time period I mean I'm assuming you and Van are making a bunch of videos and and I guess in 2008 you like do a deal with HBO to I'd like a big deal to million dollar deal to pick
up. Yeah. I mean you're you're jumping ahead a little but let's
So Tom Scott our finance year, he would come visit us every six weeks to see what we had been doing to check in on his investment. And I remember the first time he came we had 43 minutes of little videos all play at once just back to back to back to back and he looked at it and he was like, I don't know what this is but keep going and he said the same thing the next month and he said the same thing the next month in the fourth month. He showed up with this woman and
He introduced her name was Christine Vachon and he pulled us aside and he's like, oh she's a big-time movie producer. And that's when it occurred to us that maybe we had created something that was actually package double and we end up calling it The nice stepbrothers and calling it a TV show in each episode will show what's going on in our lives through a series of short films, but this is not a reality show. I mean that's it was effectively a YouTube Vlog it.
Was a YouTube Vlog before their words YouTube Vlog existed. It was sort of accessing someone's life in a way that I don't think people had seen But finish this is from 2007 2008 when reality TV was the real world was Survivor and was these were these highly produced very glossy shows that were were, you know calling themselves reality and all of a sudden we were making a show
Was our reality but instead of it being told by a producer as being told by us and that's what that's what this
was. And what's incredible is you you end up selling it to HBO just a short time later for like 2 million dollars which which must have been life-changing for
you. Yeah. It was it was incomprehensible to us. It was you know, this is this is when HBO was you know Sex in the City Sopranos Six Feet Under The Wire and then I stepbrothers like it we shot
This video on a 200 dollar camera. We bought at Walmart. We edited this in iMovie and it was it was the most validating feeling it was so overwhelming and it was a celebratory time in our tenure as professionals and as brothers, that was
extraordinary. I think it took about two years for HBO to eventually are it and it aired like lay the night right it was
Sort of like 11:00 12:00 midnight something like that.
Yeah, so that that celebratory moment faded very quickly for reasons outside of our control the head of programming at HBO left the company in the days after she bought our show wow, and they brought a new head of programming who understandably had her own mission and that mission did not include our show so they sort of swept it under the rug which is really frustrating.
You know, we spent two years waiting in this is two years after telling everyone on planet Earth that we had achieved The Impossible and there was no follow-up. There was no there was no validating that that Hollywood Reporter story that says HBO buys the nice stepbrothers and it was a very humbling but more so frustrating time for us and it was you know, in those two years that van and I, you know made a decision to kind of go our separate ways and no longer work together.
And and and just just pause for sake why I mean you guys had this great thing going I
think the most kind of reductive way. I can explain it is like when you have a partner you have someone to blame all of the failures on in someone to attribute all of the successes to and when you are when you combine that understanding with having nothing it works because you're in this together, but when you
Combine that with success it becomes a far far harder equation to navigate and I think that we did a very poor job of navigating it
there was tension between the two of you.
Oh, yeah, I mean all of a sudden we were these big Hot Shots we had money. We had a show that HBO just bought we could do whatever we wanted and I think that that all of those factors combined yields of very explosive relationship and it just it kind of came to a head and we couldn't come to terms.
Terms with what we wanted to do next or directionally where we wanted to go and ultimately then just kind of made a decision that he wanted to move out west and that's what he did. And yeah, I stayed in New York and you know, he continued to pursue his career as a as a fine artist and filmmaker and I pursued mine.
This was around the time when like coincidentally YouTube started become a thing like a really big thing and I guess it was around 2010 or something like that. Were you like
decide to build your own YouTube
channel, you know, I needed a way to identify myself outside of the nice stepbrothers. So yeah, the the first thing I did was was found an LLC called Casey neistat LLC and I remember getting a checkbook back that said my name on it and then I started a YouTube channel and I remember like the first video I put up on the YouTube channel said Casey neistat at the end of it instead of my Stepbrothers.
Very foreign feeling but whether it was the checkbook an LLC or that video the goal was the same which is to again start a career over from what felt like scratch.
Let me come back how Casey reignited his career by crashing his bicycle into every obstacle. He can find and later taking a plane to just about every country. He could think of stay with us. I'm guy Roz and you're listening to how I built this from NPR.
You might know Nick Kroll from his very raunchy animated Show on Netflix Big Mouth. Are you the puberty fairy puberty fairy and the hormone monster? I'm not a fairy. Well now he's starring as a romantic lead in a movie set at the Olympics actor and comedian Nick Kroll next time on it's been a minute from NPR.
Hey, welcome back to how I built this I'm guy Roz. So after parting ways with his brother van Casey neistat decided to start his own YouTube channel to share content that was kind of similar to what had made for the HBO show and his first few videos did okay. They had a small following nothing major, but pretty much everything changed on one day when Casey got a $50 ticket from the NYPD for not riding his bike in the bike lane.
Look, I wasn't exactly at the safest cyclists and ticket me for running a red light which I certainly did and was guilty of and ticket me for a myriad of offenses. But to give a ticket for riding not in the bike lane just felt so ridiculous and I film the guy on the officer of my iPhone is actually pretty good. He won't even care that you're filming him know he was he was he thought it was kind of fun. I think he knew exactly what he was doing. He was giving me a hard time. It was terrific.
Rental
rain, right he didn't get out of his
car. He got out of his patrol car. So he stayed dry. He yelled at me through the window and I'm standing there in the
Porsche very nice seeing you. I have to decide to say he was very courteous nice very courteous.
And there's there's even a PostScript that is I maintained a friendship with that officer for years after that years. He loved the video. So I took that video and my anger once again fueled an idea which is to illustrate why it's
Safe to only ride in the bike lanes, and I rode my
bicycle.
Obstruction in the most slapstick of ways I crashed into every obstacle that was blocking the path of the bike lanes and I mean like, you know, whether it was a garbage can or a
New York City occupied taxi cab.
I would ride my bike into it at full speed without even blinking and take these huge Falls.
And by the way, these were real like you were really doing stuff. Yeah, I mean really hard
Falls.
We made that little video. I put it on my personal YouTube channel and called it Casey neistat and it started me and not since the iPod movie had I seen a kind of reaction. It was everywhere in the difference. Now is that social media was just really starting to pick up and I shared it as best I could but it didn't need that. I don't know who picked it up, but it just exploded with a kind of velocity that I hadn't seen before because of the maturity of YouTube the maturity of social
The other maturity of just kind of online communication versus 2003 and this time I was prepared this time. I knew exactly what to do with that kind of attention which was which was in people get to my YouTube channel. It's it would also this guy done. So I worked aggressively to put new fresh content up there that felt smart and on top of that now Brands would see that and they be like this is clever stuff that clearly people, you know, people want to see more of and out of that.
that I built sort of what was my first business post neistat Brothers post working with my brother and what that business was was making videos on YouTube that would Garner enough attention enough interest from the industry that would then offer me jobs and I'll get a gig to direct a commercial and I would take that Revenue that money and reinvest it in myself making fun passion videos videos that I made just for me and populate my YouTube channel with them that would then yield more commercials and that
worked you would basically
Make what you want to make and advertisers would pay help you pay the bills and you could make some money and then you could make whatever you wanted for fun and not worry about having to monetize
that that's right because the advertisers would be excited about the videos that I was making them wowee like how you make videos make those videos for us. And I said no to nothing and I was like great let's do this and it was a lot of kind of jobs that I wasn't necessarily interested in but paid the bills until I got a phone call from Nike.
And they were like, we love your videos. Would you come out here and talk to us about a bigger project? We're thinking of with you and I was like free trip to Oregon. Hell. Yeah, I'll come out there and then I got to a hotel and I gave what in the hotel there's a pair of new Nikes on the bed and I was like, holy smokes. I have made it free sneakers. This is it and they brought me in they had me sign an NDA and they showed me this new product which is offense essentially like Nike branded Fitbit. It was something called a fuel band and they're like we want to push this
And we want you to make us some videos for it and I came back and I wrote three scripts and they were like great green light. Let's do it just send us a budget
and it was going to be like athletes and and people doing, you know active stuff exactly exactly. So it was the
three videos where the first one was gonna be like an announcement video and it was just going to be like really rough in the dark and kind of like Bleak aggressive New York City and people running in the
The cold and it just say like coming soon and we did all that by having the titles be written like graffiti around New York City. They loved it. And then the second video was working with three huge athletes and Nike athletes million-dollar athletes kind of thing and we make a video about them like getting after it and making it count by using these fitbit's
and make it count was the was the tag
was a campaign slogan. Yeah, and then it came time to make the third video and the third video is meant to show how people around the world.
Make It Count this little girl in Paris makes it count every day by walking to school instead of taking the bus right this woman makes it count by taking the stairs instead of the elevator in our office. That was the pitch and Nike liked it but this was about three months into the relationship and I just decided I didn't want to do it like I was exhausted and there was too much back and forth after all the edits with the previous videos. Yeah. I had kind of a crazy idea and I called my editor and I said look, we've got the budget which I've never really disclose this before.
But this seems like a great place to say guys. I think our budget was around $80,000 to make this commercial
just as one or all three
just this one guy just this one. These were big budget. Yeah, and I was called my editor and I said I said, hey Max, you know instead of spending this money on this commercial instead of spending the 80 grand making this commercial. Here's this idea. Let's take all of it and let's go to the airport and let's fly on whatever the next flight out is to whatever destination
This is we can find and let's go to that place and soak it up and then get out of that Airport and fly out from there and let's do this and travel all around the planet everywhere we've ever wanted to go until we run out of money and will somehow make some sort of video out of that and I did call them at sort of the ninth hour. And I said to the executive is name is Alex Lopez. I said Alex I want to do something really different here. And he said yeah. I know your scripts great housing. I want to do something even different from that and I remember him
Him just sort of pausing and then saying look you just can't screw me over here Casey. I went out on a limb to make this happen and that scared me, but I said, I understand and he said okay just make make it great. But please please don't compromise this and I was like I get it and that was it. I didn't tell them what we were doing or how we're doing it and Max and I jumped on a plane and we just started flying around the world
definitely make this flight, but we're cutting it close so far the trip is off to a fairly irresponsible.
Start me that video. I mean I've read a lot about it and and read a lot of the way you described it. But from what I understand like the idea was you're going to spend about six hours in each country film stuff run back to the airport and catch the next flight to wherever else like whatever the next logical place was to go
to. Yeah. I mean it was it was both figuratively and literally like want to dip our toe in the water of all these locations and
I remember things like going to internet cafes and searching like biggest waterfall and then sending an email to Mary Beth who was like my assistant back in New York City was helping us figure this out. We like Mary Beth. There's a waterfall called the Victoria Falls and it's in Africa and her being like I can get you there but it's going to require six flights and I've been like right and each of those six locations. We be like, okay, we have 40 minutes here.
Even our here we have three hours here. I remember seeing like the time this hotel that it opened in Singapore where there's a singing swimming pool simulate floating in the sky and I took a picture of the computer screen and the internet cafe on my BlackBerry and I sent that picture to Mary Beth and I said get us here and that's how we did it. It was just sort of this fantasy of where do we want to go next?
And needless to say this video became huge. I think the last time I checked I had like 30 million views on YouTube. I mean this thing was huge and I have to imagine that Nike was pretty
happy. I mean, yeah, I think that that video was so successful online and within the advertising Community because it touched piece people in kind of an emotional way. Yeah, you know, I remember Mark Parker was the CEO of Nike at the time. I had never met him saying to me that his
Assistant was playing that video on her computer's his receptionist and he walked over and watch it over his shoulder when the video is over. He said he shook his head and said I need to get out more and that every job opportunity I had for the next several years was companies from all walks of life coming to being like hey, can you do for us what you did for Nike
and
I mean it and that defined my career well and toll about 2014-2015 is it was the only
every job I had started with that
conversation Casey, you know, it's interesting because people who don't know you well, but I've seen your videos, you know, they've seen your sunglasses like with the mirrored lenses and you know, they're terrific but somebody could interpret that as like, oh this guy is such a bro, right or and and I think anyone listening to this might think is that the same guy and I just wonder what I you think about that like,
Teeth are you a different person and those
videos? No, not necessarily. I think that I'm just very comfortable with picking a part of me and making the video about that part of me. So if you take the bike Lanes video that part of me there is the wise ass and you take the you know, if you take the make it count that part of me is a curious adventure and if you take like that scene love love versus ego from my TV show or any of the movies I've made about my now wife or my kids.
I'm just sort of a family man. So you have like a romantic and I think that you know, not everybody likes all of my videos and when someone dismisses me based on a perspective that they see that is isolated or siloed in one video. It's challenging and I think a big part of what I do is not taking any of that personally but understanding that, you know, if you meet somebody at a holiday party and maybe you've had one too many drinks they're going to dismiss you as like a maybe a loudmouth and not
That's who you really are.
And at a certain point case, even you really, you know, once you kind of split with an and when your own way and start to produce these videos and then kind of really became known and somebody who sought after by companies and Brands to do stuff for them. Naturally. I mean, I imagine that you would you start to think about like, okay. What's the next step? Right? Like, how do I really create something of
scale? Sure. So, you know in the years that succeeded the Nike video
Oh, uh was when my like production company Casey neistat LLC where I made videos for brands that really took off and it was exciting but the circular nature of does every client asking me to make them the Nike video got to a really frustrating place and you couldn't
scale yourself. Right? I mean, it's just, you know, it was it was limiting but it was
also guy was making real money then I mean it's making, you know as making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. This was more money that I made even post HBO it will it was a legitimate business I had employed.
is it was exciting but it fizzled out for me very quickly because it was I felt like a one-trick pony, right and I was seeking what's next in life and I got a random email to my website and it was from the Sundance Institute, which is sort of the nonprofit wing of the Sundance Film Festival and they said we're doing a program with MIT media Labs where we pick individuals and give them fellowships at MIT and we think you'd
be a prime candidate for this and I've never jumped at something so much in my life because I never finished high school. And while I think that I've done well enough in my career to to excuse that I've always been insecure of my lack of education. So I jumped at it and I said, let's do it.
So I and I read that while you were on a fellowship at MIT you came up with this idea for a new social media platform that you called being. What what was
it? Yes.
I mean what it literally was at this point in time was this is when Google Glass that I wear that was a wearable computer was at its peak and I got a pair and I love the fact that I can capture everything I was seeing in real time. So I wanted to create an app that effectively did that it captured what people were seeing in tiny little nuggets and then they can share it. This is at a time when Instagram filters were exploding and this idea of curating how you want the world to see you was very new but felt very uncomfortable for me solely on create an app that was in the other direction where it was purely about
exactly what the reality of your of your perspective is and I sat down with my professor a gentleman named step cam VAR who is a tenured professor at MIT and I was so nervous pitching in the idea and he looked at me and he goes Casey is this a is this a project or is this a business and I don't know why but with absolute unwavering confidence I said, this is a business. He said, okay great. So you're going to need some
Esther's he's our Angel Investors. He want to go to your friends and family. Anybody you think I'll write you a check and he's like you want to raise a couple hundred thousand dollars here in this will let you get your company started. I was like, okay. Okay, okay, and I'm writing this down word for word and then he looks at me and he goes and Casey and I look up in the paper and look him in the eye on you as I'd like to be your first investor. You can put me down for $100,000. It stopped me
cold. Wow.
I had never really had anybody believe in me like that before.
It brings me back to maybe Tom Healy and 2001. Yeah, this was just a what felt like a stupid idea and this man was willing to write a check that was more money than my parents had made in any year of their entire life and I was just an idea was nothing. So I went then to friends and family, which is just what you call it and actually ask any friends or family. I asked all the rich people. I knew I didn't want to ask anybody who I'd have to later in life answer to because I lost their money.
And ultimately I raised just under half a million
bucks. So at the same time around the same time you raise this money and presumably your you've got the money and now you've got a create, you know the company and you've got to find the talent and build this thing, but at the same time like from what I understand and around like March of 2015 you decide to put a video up every single day under YouTube channel, you're going to you can do a daily vlog.
Ugh, which sounds kind of insane like an insane amount of
work? Yeah, you know, I left MIT. All I had was my idea and this money right and I thought about it and I thought you know, I need to really go hard on YouTube to get my audience engaged. So when I tell them about this product that they'll be there for me and I came up with this idea then to just make a video everyday and everyday share sort of a story from my
Life and I thought I would do it for a week or two weeks. And that's exactly what I did but two weeks came up and I had one more idea and three weeks came up and I had one more idea and all the while my audience is going from a hundred thousand views to 200,000 views to 500,000 views to 800,000 views and my YouTube channel that took me, you know, six years seven years at the time to get from zero subscribers to 400,000 subscribers all of a sudden.
And every night I would wake up and there'd be 10,000 20,000 new subscribers and I had never seen anything like it and I remember about two weeks into that. I walked outside of my office and there are three girls standing there saying can we get a selfie with you? And no one in my life had ever asked for selfie before I never heard those words. I just kept going and kept going and kept going and by the time we're ready to launch the app that summer the audience I had amassed was
huge and it's a parallel we did I did an interview with
Emily Weiss you started a glossy a and she also starred as a blogger and when and overtime just gained so many followers and readers who are sort of saying where where is your product? Like, we we want something from you and it was sort of a sort of made sense, you know for her to and when she released her line of products. She had all these devoted loyal readers and again that wasn't her plan, but it's similar story like you had
Spent all of this time working on content that people liked and you amass this massive following so it only made sense. At least the way I see it for YouTube build a product to create something that people could could use or could you could turn into a
business? Yeah, that's right. And I think that sort of the critics were quick to say that you know, the only reason why I was doing this Daily Show was to get attention Market it and
what would be wrong with that? That's
Don't get if you even if you were doing that, like that's called marketing. Like what would have been wrong with
that? Yeah. I mean, I don't think you're wrong but I my response that is like yeah the totally the reason why I started this Daily Show is to talk about my my tech company like that's totally the truth, but it got boring fast. So I made it about me because that's something I'm much more comfortable talking about and it took on a life of its own but the symbiosis between my tech company in my daily YouTube show was
really apparent and and totally deliberate. Yeah, and that's something I'm very very proud of that. You know, my I still have to this day. I've never written a line of code and I was very insecure within my own company, you know, Matt my business partner is so wildly talented not just that writing code and building products but managing teams and things like that that his confidence and his skill set which is just to this day. I'll you know, I'll never stop being impressed with what he's capable of it made me feel insecure.
Eric has to me at highlighted just how little I had to offer to my own company until it came time to communicate the company and then I was able to lean into what felt like my unique skill set for the betterment of this company, but it
sounds like you still felt a little bit. I don't know. I I say this very gently because I feel this way even after 23 years of doing what I do, but like like an imposter a little bit
guy. I literally walked out of my therapist this morning.
Morning, and came to the NPR studio to record this with you. And I that's why I was talking to her about is just this idea of the Imposter syndrome and that's something I still feel like this day. But but I also am very quick to acknowledge that I think that is by far my greatest asset if I knew then what I know now about what it means to start a tech company. I wouldn't have not only not done it I would have run as far away from that idea as I possibly could have right it was not knowing and this has been true my entire
Rear, you know what my entire life professionally and personally if I had known the right way to do things. I would have never done them.
Yeah, so you you launch this app in 2015 and and this thing was going to it was going to allow people to kind of shoot little snippets videos of things. They saw in the world. How did how did the launch
go we launch the app and it was it was a very successful launch in terms of downloads and it went gangbusters and
and people were very excited about the app and have to say it was really fun. It was a really fun product to use but we struggled I think that the idea and the marketing were always better than the product that we were able to build and at the time Snapchat stories had just kind of come
out right to be
honest with you. I was a huge fan of Snapchat stories and the more I used it the more I realized they did what I wanted to do, but they just did it.
Way better and you know, they were being really successful and we're sort of stagnating and we built a number of different versions of our app and there were moments of really like spikes and growth and downloads and engagement and then moments where it would sort of trickle off and write that went up and down for a long time. And there was just a tremendous amount of uncertainty and I got very very scared. What were you scared of where you scared of nausea? It was it was only one thing.
Thing it was only one thing and that was letting down the people who I felt invested in me, right and then I was terrified for my employees. We never missed payroll. But I remember we got to a point where you know, our Runway was getting shorter and shorter. Yeah. I felt like we were just sort of getting our butts
kicked I think within a short period of time right like many months.
Use you guys sold it you sold it to CNN. What was the reason you did that? I mean reportedly for 20 million dollars, which is a lot but presumably you could have kept it going and scaled it more and maybe sold it for a billion. I don't know. Who knows. What was I thinking at that time
when I met with Jeff Zucker and I met with the folks at CNN and they expressed to me how they wanted to leverage the technology that we had.
I'd built and how they wanted to further the ideas that we had incubated and some of their intentions. It was such an exciting wildly exciting
opportunity. I mean you could you could essentially what I'm aggen not only pay back your investors with a bit of a return you could pay you could make a little bit of money yourself and and then you would also have the backing of one of the biggest news organizations in the world and endless resources.
Presumably and and their influence he could really scale this so it so that
was that it was it was all those things. It was to me it was, you know, I obviously as excited about the financial opportunities of building a company like this, but I wasn't that was not a real motivating factor because like I said and years prior, I you know was making real money directing videos and the funny thing about money at least for me. Is that like I always wanted to be really rich and have
Private planes and drive fancy cars and things like that. But the reality is the moment in my career that I got to a place where I didn't have to worry about paying for food or covering rent. I stopped really being motivated by money right the minute. I knew that I could pay for college for Owen was the minute that I just you know, it's like okay that what a stupid thing to focus on is money and I didn't want to be an executive. It was the ideation that was exciting for me, except my MIT Professor. He characterized it as I'm
Good at being the second man in a bobsled team, which means I get really excited and I can push really really really hard but the second it launches out of the gates. I just sort of jump in I'm like, okay what now?
And that's what it felt like and the idea that a CNN with all their Myriad resources could help us Zoom down that and when the bobsled race was felt
fantastic, you know in reading about the story. It's what's interesting. Is that the CNN shut this down, you know, not not too long after they acquired beam and but I think the quotes are read from you or like, you know, hey, they left us alone. They let us do whatever we wanted. They've been great and even the CNN quotes were like
Listen, we took a risk. We're really happy. We took this risk. It was a smart risk to take it didn't work out and we're all friends like it. I mean, it sounds almost too good to be true that everybody was sort of I don't know what kind of walked away from that saying. All right, you know we tried it didn't work and it's fine. Look I to this day. It's
still kind of strikes me like, I remember vividly meeting with Jeff Zucker the day before it sort of announced publicly and going into his office and him
Like giving me the same sort of hello Casey that he's always given me and we shook hands and chatting a bit and he's like look if I could do it over again, I'd do the same thing.
Did you know by the way going into his office that it was going to be shut down I did
if you look at a company like that and this is my understanding if you look at a company like that, they need to see real growth. They need to see a real trajectory for success and they need to see a fast and I think that I don't think we'd be able to deliver on that. Did you
did you walk away from that relationship?
Financially set for life. Could you stop working?
Probably? Yeah. I think that if we didn't live in New York City or Los Angeles, that would probably be the case. I can tell you that in the terms that I think of which is can I can I now give my children the lifestyle that I've always wanted to give them the answers is yes, and when I look at the things that I have it's not, you know, like a something cool car or the like
like the necklace that maybe I can buy my wife or anything like that, but the idea that you know my
My kids, you know like graduate college this year with no debt.
Write that to me is like, you know.
That's the dream. I mean
a kid who was born when his dad was 17 years old, right? I mean it's kind of amazing that
you were able to do that. Yeah. I mean, I don't
I think how I think of it is that it's amazing huge. He was able to do that. Yeah.
I mean as I said to you earlier in this interview, all the odds were against you like that the statistics were against you when he was born.
Yeah, but you know like then and even now I don't know that I've ever looked at any aspect of my own life with in those terms. There's like a great Steve Jobs quote. That's like, you know, you realize the life the world around you is created by
People that are no smarter than yourself and and he has something sort of poetic about challenging that and I think that my frustrations in life is a very very very young kid. I only ever interpreted those as these people around me. They don't understand things the way that I understand things. I don't see the things the way that I see things and therefore they're what they're saying their criticisms of my values are
Valid because of that so to say statistically that a teenager shouldn't be able to you know, raise a child who that is a contributing member of society in a positive way. I think that that is I don't subscribe to that I call BS on that and I say that no, that's not true. You just get it you just do it and I think that say you can't start a tech company because you have a 10th grade education as you know, if you say say you can't go to MIT because you know, you got to
D- in the your last semester of school at age 15 I say no, that's not that's not true. And you know, I I guess I apply that to every facet of my life.
Casey when you when you think about, you know the trajectory of your life, right and and all that's happened right in between like from you know, dropping out of high school and having a kid at 17 and you know, washing dishes and struggling and you know in your twenties and then building this incredible career having 12 million people follow you on YouTube and and you know become financially successful, you know as a filmmaker, I mean how
Of that do tribute to how hard you worked and how much just because you were
lucky. It's 99% luck and Beyond just being wildly fortunate. I'm wildly privilege. I may not have done well in school, but I had I was offered an education at a young age. My parents didn't have much but I was never hungry and I did not come from an abusive household. I'm I'm a wildly privileged individual. I always say that like
I want I was born with a winning lotto ticket in my hand. All I had to do was cash it in and that cashing it in is hard work. Like that's what that meant to cash name was hard work and I did my part but I could have never done my part without first winning the lotto on life and I'm not naive to any of that. I didn't ask to be born in the United States of America. I didn't ask to be as lucky as I am.
But I meet that none of that is ever lost on me every day. I remind myself of that and I have a debt in that debt can only be paid we are hard work.
That's Casey neistat. Since leaving beam Casey is gone back to making videos some for fun and some for brands. In fact just days before he taped this interview Casey made a video for Etihad airlines called the most expensive plane ticket in the world. And if you remember that video he made of his girlfriend Candace love versus ego. Well Candace and Casey are now married. They have two daughters together, and they also have a podcast it's called couples.
p with Candice and Casey
and please do stick around because in just a moment. We're going to hear from you about the things you're building, but first a quick message from our sponsor flow space a logistics platform for startups and Fortune 500 companies to store manage and fulfill their inventory all on a network of over 8,000 warehouses and fulfillment centers. Visit flow dot space / NPR
Hi, this is Felix Contreras from NPR musics out Latino
podcast as part of our Black History Month coverage. We
take a look at the
afro-latin root of reggaeton and its rise over the last decade to become one of the most listened-to musical genres on the planet to check it out download all Latino from wherever you get your
podcast. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that and today's.
Starts with Pat early and Pat lives way out in the countryside on a 4-acre homestead right outside of cleome Washington. We live in between Cle Elum and Ellensburg. This is a place so off the grid that it's got its own well and a septic tank.
So you have to be careful with what you put down into a septic system because if you put the wrong materials down there then it has trouble decomposing
anyway on his Homestead out in the country. Pat does not have the luxury of a
Garbage disposal which means all the food from his family meals all those little pieces of rice and spaghetti. They started get piled up in the little strainer in the sink when the basket filled up then the whole sink would clog up right and you would have to be fishing through murky water getting stabbed by knives things like that and it was just kind of a wreck and frankly who Among Us has not kind of been there, right, you know, try to pull all the muck out of the sink strainer just of the water will drain anyway one day Pat just put his foot down.
Vowed never to have to do that again
and just 15 minutes later Pat started to come up with a design for a sink strainer. That would not clog. So I wanted to make the design such that water could still drain around the sides of it all so we could make a stem that's taller than the basket is deep. So when the baskets totally full of crud the water is still draining through the stem. That's actually a pretty handy guy. So he went on YouTube to teach himself how to use design software so he could make his first prototype.
Type, but when it came to calling around to get it made he realized he didn't know any of the industry lingo. I definitely had to almost
practice saying these words because if you want to manufacture to take you seriously, you can't sound like a total
idiot and Pat actually had to learn a lot of new
words a three polishing overmold step file.
Wait about one month and one totally failed prototypes later grooming. That was a weird one. Pat had finally designed this.
Raynor that set snugly in the sink and allowed water to drain through the sides and through a hollow stem in the middle. And then last March it was like Christmas day. I was waiting for it to come
and took it out of the
package and plopped it into the sink and it just
fit perfectly then I
spent probably three hours trying to clog it. He's not kidding to test the new strainer Pat just started throwing food into it.
Yeah, I mean, so I would go rifling through our pantry and
I'd find some oats and I was like, oh, yeah, that would definitely clog a drain and I would
dump as much as I could in there until you know, everything was full except for the stem and it would still drain and I'd say great and I would dump it out and then I found an old mason jar of soup and the fridge and I dumped that down and no matter what Pat put into the trainer. It did not clogged and I just looked at my wife and
I said this is it this is going to work
after making a few more tweaks Pat found a partner to help with the business end of things and they ordered 10,000 strainers from a
Are in New Jersey and they've already sold 6,000 of them on Amazon and on their website, they call the products drip. See it's the little things that we use every day that we don't think about that really affect our lives, you know, so it's not necessarily that you have to you know, take the
first man to the moon or build rocket
ships. Sometimes it's just building something that works better than anything else that's already out there. If you want to find out more about drip see or hear previous episodes head to our podcast page how I built this that npr.org.
Org, and of course if you want to tell us your story go to build npr.org and thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there. Please do give us a review. You can also write to us at HIV T at npr.org and if you want to send a tweet, it's at how I built this or add guy Roz our show is produced this week by Rachel Falkner and Sequoia Carrillo with music composed by rumty narrow Bluey. Thanks also to Canada slim Julia Carney Neva Grant and Jeff.
Jurors are in turn is rainy toll on guy Roz and even listening to how I built this.
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