Casey Neistat (The Untold Story): "I was a homeless dad at 15 & had $200k debt!"...The Crazy Story Of How I Became The World's No.1 Video Creator!
Guests: Casey
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
It got scary. We had to move into a higher security building and I didn't know what to do. That's when it got dark. Casey Neistat. The godfather of YouTube. The king of vlogging. One of the most prolific creators in history. Throughout your story, there's this objectively delusional persistence towards a goal. The word I've been using is patience because patience is so unattractive. And I think you need to remove this idea of success being this romantic, beautiful thing.
It's not. When I started my daily vlog, making a video a day, 800 days in a row, it took eight years to go from zero to a couple hundred thousand subscribers, failing year in and year out. And I'm $200,000 in debt. Awful. You're a loser. But patience will smash into opportunity. And then it went to 10 million subscribers in like 18 months. So in life, you can get whatever you want. But are you willing to do that for 20 years? If you're not, don't bother, man.
You sold the company, you've built the channels, you've made a huge name for yourself. At that point, that's when it got hard. Because the only goal that anyone should have in life is one of happiness and fulfillment. And like this idea that you have to win to be happy could not be further from the truth. I had by every definition achieved success. But I wasn't running the marathon because I wanted to get across the finish line. I was running it because I loved the running.
And the fame was f***ing insane. Like we had to move to LA and I didn't know what to do until now. Is this a new Casey? What can we expect? Casey is a legend. He's a legend to so many people. He's one of the originals as it relates to creativity, content, video, and YouTube. And although most of us know Casey, what most of us don't know is the underdog story, the true, deep, uncovered motivations that drove him to become arguably one of the world's most famous, most acclaimed, most celebrated online creators ever.
And it's a story that you'll relate to. It's a story of a completely normal dude that was down and out, that had a very big indistinguishable passion. And the more interesting, maybe for me as someone that's watched Casey's journey for afar, is what he's doing now. For the first time ever, he talks about what his life is right now. Now that he's not uploading videos every day, now that he's a little bit further out of the spotlight. And Casey gives us this blueprint for how we can take that thing that we enjoy doing, that thing we consider a passion or a hobby, and drag it up the mountain and make it an incredibly lucrative job.
How do we turn our passion into a career? And how do we become number one at the thing we do when everything, everything seems to be against us? That is the story of Casey Neistat and that's the story you're going to enjoy today. Thank you. Casey, what do I need to know about your earliest years to understand the man that sits before me today? I almost think of people's lives like a set of dominoes that have fallen. What are those first dominoes that fell to create the man that sits here today?
Oh, man, how much time you got? Plenty. So my whole childhood was just completely unsupervised. Like there was no, did you do your homework tonight? There was no like dinner at six. It was like, be home before dark, you're gonna be in trouble. Trouble never being defined and like dark never being defined. And it was just kind of like a very loose, kind of fucked up wandering childhood of exploration. I was telling this story recently, but there were railroad tracks behind our house.
And one of the things we used to do for fun, we were little kids, is we'd collect pennies and change and we'd lay them on the railroad tracks and the train would go over them and flatten them. Very cool. But the train would vibrate the tracks as it approached and the coins would fall off of it. So the only way to address that is you'd put the coins on the train tracks when the train was really close. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know. I was in grammar school, which is sixth grade.
Like, how old are you then? I was like 10 years old. It's a little kid. And like, you know, train tracks, huge freight train coming and me putting nickels on the train tracks to try to get a flattened coin. That's kind of what my childhood was like. As you look back, what is the power and the gift that that unsupervision gives you? Because I resonate with that so much. I think the reason I became an entrepreneur was because I've always said this.
When I was 10 years old, my parents weren't there when I went to bed and they weren't there when I woke up. And being the youngest of four, it was like they'd assumed I'd also been parented already. So they just... They like gave up or something. They just got busy. So in that void of independence, I conducted a lot of experiments. And I almost hear that in what you're saying as well. The unsupervision allowed for exploration, that allowed for something.
Yeah, I think it's like necessity is the mother of invention. And I think, you know, if you're 10 and your parents all of a sudden are absent, you're just forced to figure shit out. It's funny because like all I want to do as a parent now is protect my children from the hardships I had when I was little. Yeah. But it is those hardships I had that made me who I am. And it is like this impossible dichotomy to address. It's impossible as a parent. Like I constantly think I'm fucking up my kids.
Like we send them to a private school because we can. Like if you can afford it, which we can, we're fortunate. Like why would I not send my kids to the best school? But in the back of my brain, I think what's best for them is to be in some New York City public school figuring it out. Like I think that's what's best, but I don't do that. because I had a terrible time at public school. I hated it. So I want to protect them from that. So I send them to a really fancy school that's lovely and warm and cozy.
And like, am I helping them? I don't know. But no, I think that exactly what you were saying, like I had no choice but to figure it out when I was little. I worked from when I was super young, I figured out how to make a dollar. Like I was a paper boy when I was really, really young, delivering newspapers. And I'd make like 30 bucks a week. And then when I got to eighth grade and I started smoking pot, and I realized the math behind weed sales I was like, okay, there's a 400% of Forex return if you buy quarter ounces and break them down and you sell them as dime bags.
But if you buy a quarter pound and you sell them as eighths, you're looking at a 1600% return. I was like, okay, so how do I come up with 250 bucks to buy the QP? And then let me break that down. And then like, I haven't had puberty yet. I'm a little kid. Like these guys are going to beat the shit out of me if I mess with the wrong people. So I need to befriend the guys that can protect me and like figure out that business. all of that was because I had, like, I didn't have a choice.
Why were you unsupervised? Where were your parents? And this is what I mean by when I say my parents were accidentally great. And I do think they tried their best. You know, like, my dad worked a zillion hours a week. He had no choice. I think we lived, like, a very middle-class family. You know, like my parents had like nice cars. They had Volvos, but they always bought like five-year-old Volvos. Never new cars. And like we lived in a house that was like comfortable, but like, you know, there's never any food in our house.
It was like, it was fine. We always made it by like we'd go on vacation, but it was always like in the back of the station wagon. And we'd go to like a town two hours away and stay in a shitty motel for two or three nights. But my dad worked all the time. And I only understood later that it was very like... hand to mouth, you know, he's paycheck to paycheck kind of guy. And my mother, you know, I don't, I still don't understand my mom. I think she was one of eight kids.
My mother is the tail end of an aristocracy. So it's like, I always describe her side of the family as like all the privilege and entitlement of an aristocrat with none of the money. So I, you know, I don't, my mother was just always kind of an enigma and always kind of absent, um, um, And I think that they were just, they tried the best they could. And we were just kind of left wandering as kids. They divorced at some point. Yeah, that's when things got really hard.
In what way? I think that childhood always felt like you were sort of hanging on by a thread. I was like one of four. My older brother, Van, was the firstborn. And he's such a, Van is such an incredible guy. And he's so magnetic. And then there's my sister, who's the only girl. Yeah. And then there's my little baby brother, Dean, who was the baby. And then I was just kind of this like accident that happened 13 months after my sister and two years before my brother.
So it was like I was always the loudest and the squeakiest to get the most attention. And, you know, that was... I kind of think that characterized what the challenges were for me as a kid growing up. And then it just got, you know, the tumult of living in that house just kind of precipitated until my parents split up, which happened under very like... auspicious, shitty, fucked up circumstances and kids being blamed when the kids shouldn't have been blamed.
And I say all that without faulting my parents. Again, I think they were trying their best. But looking back at it, it's like, what the fuck, guys? I heard you say previously that you had to tell your father that your mother had cheated on him. Yeah, I remember that vividly. I can picture the table we were sitting at. I can remember his posture. I can remember his response to it. But yeah, my mother, she's a good woman. She has faults like all of us humans have faults.
But I think she let those manifest in a way that were really dark at that time in her life. And it was apparent to me as a 14-year-old exactly what was going on. exactly what was going on. It was so fucking crystal clear. As a 14-year-old? Yeah, like abundantly clear. And I never really understood my own father's perspective on that. But I understand that his perspective now, it's like, you know, he's working a million hours a week to keep his head above water.
And also like, you don't want to see that. You don't like the truth sucks. So just like put your head in the sand and ignore it is a very natural response to it. But I was like fighting with my mother at the time. about, you know, all kinds of shit that a teenager fights with their parents about, getting in trouble at school and all of that. So I was mad at her. And I think I, you know, part of me addressing that was just sort of confronting my dad.
What are you going to do about this woman? At 14 years old, you knew your mother was cheating on your father. Yeah. And you told him. Yeah. How does one know that? I mean, it was super apparent. I mean, there's a handful of very specific situations that just made it abundantly clear. And, you know, I think that's why, like, you know, at the time, obviously, fault my mom through and through. But looking back at it, it was probably something closer to like a cry for help or a cry for attention or just a way of her...
you know, her letting the struggle she was facing and the totality of her life manifest, like this is the only way I can express it, is by doing this kind of fucked up, awful thing. As you step out of that chapter of your childhood, what are the fingerprints, the character fingerprints that are left on you that still are with you today? What did that chapter of your life, those first sort of 15 years, Oh, I don't think anything has changed. Like, I don't think it's even fingerprints.
It was so, like, acute the way that I had, that I saw my future when I was that young. Like, I knew exactly my plan. Really? And exactly my plan. And look, the specifics of how that plan was going to come together were… ambiguous at best, but I knew exactly my plan. New York City was always the plan. I remember it was like page 41 in my social studies book was a two-page spread of the New York City skyline. And I wouldn't let myself look at that page because I would have such an emotional response to it.
Like Tom Hanks in the movie Big... I would play that movie on repeat because I was like, that's me. Like, that's me. I'm going to move to New York City and get to be the kid that I wish I could be. Like, that's me. To this day, like, I know every word of that movie. That movie is like a Bible for me. It is a roadmap for me. But, you know, like, I've made 500 YouTube videos about this single idea. But, like, the mission of my life, and this was defined then when I was a little kid, the sole mission of my life is to realize all the promises I made to myself as a kid.
Like when you're a little kid and you're like, someday I'm going to be an astronaut. Like your mom yells at you and it's like, well, someday I'm going to have kids and I'm not going to yell at them. Or like you're fucking hungry and you're all out of mac and cheese. And you're like, someday I'm going to have a refrigerator that's always filled up with food. Like whatever it is. You know, you have a boss that's an asshole. And it's like, someday I'm not going to have any boss.
And like all of those promises, like my promises could, you know, they could fill up a phone book. And my sole mission was always like, no, I have to check every single one of these off. the how was always gray, but the to-do-it was always vivid. And there was never even a doubt that it was going to happen. Like, there was never an if, ever. There was nothing even close to that. But life throws at you at that age things that you could never have predicted.
Yeah. And those things don't seem to have deterred your pursuit of that mission. You have a child that's 16, 17 years old? Yeah. That was difficult. Yeah. So I moved out. Moved out is such a funny way of characterizing. I say moved out and I picture like a moving truck pull up. I got in a fight with my mom at age 15 on a Monday night, school night. And she gave me this ultimatum. This is when she and my father were like, you know, really... They were splitting up and getting back together.
It was like a really gnarly time in the family. But we got into this fight, and I just remember thinking like, I was so mad at her at the time. I was like, you can't tell me what to do. And she was like, you need to do this, this, and this, or get out of this house. And I was like, all right, I'm going to go. And I just like left. Why did you go? That night I stayed at a friend's house down the street because his parents were like... weirdly religious, but also kind of absent.
They were always like very warm to me. So I was like, hey, can I sleep here? And he's like, yeah, sure. And I slept in another friend's house and then… So you ran away from home. Yeah. So as I moved out, it wasn't like, you know, put the couch over there. It was like I just took a backpack and it was as close to like a stick with a red handkerchief on the back. But I eventually moved in with these two girls. They were great. They were super fun.
Yeah. And they were like, let's say I was 15. I think they were 17 or 18. And then, yeah, I started, one of them, she and I kind of got close and then immediately she was pregnant. And a year later, yeah, we had a kid. And that was challenging. But even so, I never… I remember one moment where she started freaking out in the car because she was eight months pregnant. And she's crying and just dealing with it. And I pulled over and I was like, what are you upset about?
And she was like, what are we going to do? We don't have any money. You don't even have a job. What are we going to do? And I was like, what do you mean, what are we going to do? It's going to be fine. We're going to have a kid. It's going to be great. It's going to be fine. Were you not scared? Then, no. It just, everything made sense. I was like, oh, this is great. There's a naivety to... It's beautiful. Now I'm scared. I always say that like, I had nothing to lose then.
I had nothing. I had nothing. I had no reputation. You know, like my friends' parents all thought I was a fucking degenerate. They wouldn't let me hang out with my friends because I was such a bad influence. So it wasn't like I had like a reputation. Nobody knew me. I had nothing. I had no money. I had no resources. I knew no one. And when you have nothing to lose, you're just like a rat that's cornered. And it was like, oh, I'm going to chew my way out of this one.
And now I'm like, I'm so scared at everything I do in life because I'm like, it's so good right now. I don't want to fuck anything up. Take it really easy. Like, I'm really happy right now. I want to protect what I've got. But no, there was a naivety then that was just, that was, it's hard for me to empathize with how bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, naive I was. I remember when my son, Owen, when his mother, when she and I split up, she dumped me because I was just such a pain in the ass and God bless her for doing so.
But I remember I was like, then I was like, okay, I've got a plan. In five years, I'm going to move to New York City and I'm going to figure this out and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. What were you going to do in New York? I don't know. I had some cockamamie plan. There's always a plan. I don't know what the specifics are, but I knew that like up until that point in my life, I'd only ever worked in the back of restaurants, washing dishes or like being like a prep cook or just being like the low man in the totem pole who takes out the trash and scrubs out the garbage cans and like does all the shit work mop.
It was the only job I'd ever done. My father sold used restaurant supplies, like if you need to do oven or walk in fridge. So he could always get me jobs in restaurants. And I remember like moving to New York City. My only plan was like, I'm just not going to work in a restaurant. That's my plan. I'm going to do anything that's not working. But I had this five-year plan to move to New York City. And like six months later, I quit my job and moved to New York.
When you look back at that sort of like 19 year old kid that quits his job and moves to New York. So up until that point, what do you now know as a guy that's in their 40s about the brilliant accidental decisions you were making at the time? Like what are the, you know, like the accidental brilliance that is probably objectively stupidity. Like that's a stupid decision. But in hindsight, you go, I was a genius. You know, I never would say in hindsight I was a genius.
It was raw stupidity and fearlessness. But it's like all those stupid fucking quotes that everybody posts on Instagram that I hate. About like, you know, you only live once, follow your dreams, pursue this. Like, fuck you. Fuck every one of you. I hate that shit. I hate inspo porn, even though I'm very guilty of it. fanning the flames of inspo porn. But like, there's so much truth to all of that. And the reason why I hate that shit is like, if you have to be told that, it's too late.
If you're going to learn that from Instagram posts, it means nothing to you. It's just masturbation. Like it's doing nothing for anyone. People just put it up there to feel good about themselves. But... All of it is true. And what I mean by that is like, I could never do at age 42 what I could do at age 19, which is just say, fuck it. I've got a 10th grade education, no high school diploma, no work experience, no life experience, and a two-year-old.
What's the best thing I can do right now? I know, let me move to the most expensive, challenging city in the world with no plan. If I hadn't done it then, I don't know that you could ever do that. And I think that like when I say those cheesy quotes are true, it's like you kind of have an obligation in life that if you feel something that is so powerful to you, like follow through with that. And I'm not naive to that now. I wasn't naive to it then, but I think now I can articulate it, which is like this idea of privilege.
If you're born in the United States of America, if you get to sit at a table and do this. No, I wasn't a rich kid. I was on welfare and got free diapers and milk from the state. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to feed my child. I worked 60 hours a week in a kitchen making $8 an hour. I think $7.25 an hour was my starting salary. I'm the luckiest person in the world to get to do that. Are you crazy? Like, do you know what some kid in South Sudan would do for that opportunity?
And I just walked into it. I'm like a healthy guy. I've got two legs that work. And like, I have a brain. Like, I'm the lucky, I won the lotto on life. So like, if you start life with this winning lotto ticket and it's like, oh, a little hiccup. I accidentally had a baby when I was a fucking teenager. It's like, oh, no big deal. Like, they'll just push through this. This is going to be great. But... And it's like, I want to live in New York City.
It's like, let's go for it. Let's do it. The privilege there sounds like a privilege of mindset. This objective privilege, I guess, from being… Yeah, like I push back. And when people say that, my response is like, fuck you, privilege of mindset. No, that's an objective privilege. Name one time in the history of humanity, like when the Sumerians invented the written word 5,000 years ago, name one time when people had the kind of opportunity that like people like us born in the West have.
Like that's never existed before. Never, ever. Maybe it's a little bit easier for our parents to… You know what I mean? Like maybe like post-war USA was like a little bit easier than it is now. Maybe now it's a little bit harder than it was for me 20 years ago. But like still, give me a fucking break. Like this life is like, it's the hardships we face now are so menial compared to what they were 100 years ago. Objectively, 200 years ago. You ever see that thing that went viral?
It was like… The reasons why people died in London in the year 1892. And like the fourth most popular cause of death was teeth. Like 60% of the population are dying because their teeth are fucked up. Like we have it pretty easy. Why don't people? So there's going to be another guy right now that's like washing pots in the back room at the seafood restaurant on the $7 an hour. And he might be listening to this right now. And he hears you say that.
But why don't people take action beyond that point and take the big bet when they have objectively potentially nothing to lose? well, what's that line from, is it Caddyshack or Fletch? And he's like, the world needs ditch diggers too. That's a very cynical take on it. But I think a very practical take is like, not everybody wants it. And I think that's okay. I think it's a wonderful thing. I never understood that. I think like in life, you can get whatever you want, but you can't want whatever you want.
If you don't want it, there's no creating that. But do you think sometimes people want to want it, but they don't really want it? Yeah, of course, of course. And I think that's okay. I think if you really fucking wanted it, You wouldn't need this like inspirational podcast to make you make that decision. You'd already be fucking doing it. That's not to be defeatist. It just means that like the only goal that anyone should have in life is one of happiness and fulfillment.
Right. And like this idea that you have to win to be happy could not be further from the truth. Like, why do we hear about rock stars and famous actors and these people that we see as sort of like the absolute apex of success in the industry? Why are they all fucking killing themselves and dying of alcoholism and like all that darkness happening at the highest level? It's like, because that doesn't equal happiness. Like, what is happiness for you?
And an example I like to point to is like my best friend in the whole world. We grew up together like... I ran away from home. I stayed with him for a little while. Like we've been together since we were kids. You know, like when I moved to New York, he stayed in the hometown. And like when I quit my job washing dishes, I gave him that job. He literally took over that job. And now, you know, here we are 25 years later, he still lives in that town.
You know, he still has a job very similar to what he had 25 years ago. He's got three amazing kids. He lives like a very, what I would say is like very classic, archetypal, middle class American life. And like, I look at him and I'm like, that is the embodiment. of happiness and fulfillment. He has this amazing relationship with his amazing wife. He has these three brilliant little kids that he gets to make sure they get to school every single day.
He's got a cute dog that he goes on runs with. He has this amazing life. And no part of that life was being like, fuck this. I want to live on the moon someday. I need to run away from all this. His focus in life was something completely different. And I think that I didn't understand. I struggled to appreciate that when I was younger. But now I see like so much to that. And that's why I think like adjusting the pie in the sky is just one of happiness and fulfillment.
And defining those is up to you. Brony Ware, I was talking about her the other day. She's that, I think it's called palliative care nurse in Australia who interviewed people with one day left to live. And she asked them what their biggest regret in their life was. Number one regret of the dying was not living a life true to myself. And for those people, those that do have this aspiration to start that business or become a ballet dancer in Europe or whatever, that are held back by potentially some form of fear.
You know, is there anything that one can offer them to get them just to take that first initial step, which seems to be the hardest, like getting off the couch or getting out of quitting the job that you might offer to your children if they came to you? Yeah, I just think that failure is... I think failure is like the greatest gift. I think failure is like it hurts so bad. But failure is like is a part of life. And if you're not willing to accept that, like failure is part of it.
You've got to keep failing. Anvil, the story of Anvil. You know this? I made a whole video about this. I made a YouTube video about this. And then the leads, there's a movie called Anvil. I think it's called The Story of Anvil or something like that. Anvil was this like big hair rock band in the 80s. And they opened for like Def Leppard, you know, like 50,000 people kind of thing. But they never headlined. They never broke through. They were always the opening act.
They were always like the bridesmaid, never the bride. And the movie opens showing these huge concerts in the 80s and Anvil just rocking out. And then it cuts and it shows the lead singer. And he lives in Canada and he drives a little van. He delivers food to old people making minimum wage, like barely able to keep his head above water. And he performs still in his leather outfits as like this middle-aged 50-year-old guy to like six people. And they'll be just drinking beer and he's there giving it his all.
And the movie is about how relentless this guy, like he's just not willing. He borrows money from his sister to record an album. Nobody buys it, can't pay her back. She's got kids and shit. Like it is the most devastating story you've ever seen because he's unwilling to give up that dream. Like he just wouldn't let it go. This is his whole life. And then this documentary comes out and it's fucking fantastic. And because of the documentary, Anvil blows up.
And all of a sudden, he is that superstar. Like on tour, selling out arenas in Japan and shit. Like he did it. Had he given up at any point in time, The documentary wouldn't have been interesting. We're just going to have another person who threw in the towel. But they made this, like a filmmaker saw this story and was like, that's crazy. I need to tell that story. And it yielded that success. Had he not been willing to take on 40 years of failure, 30 years of failure, he would have never found success.
And I think that's the most extreme version of that. The reason why I was interrupting myself is because I made that YouTube video about, that's basically the story I just told you. And like the director reached out and was like whatever the guy's name, the lead singer of Anvil. He's like, dude, he loved your YouTube video. Starstruck. You know what I mean? But I think failure is overrate. I think failure, people are so scared of failure. And I think the fear of failure is that it's a fear of what other people are going to think about you.
Persistence. That's what I heard through that story as well. Just this almost objectively delusional persistence towards a goal. And I don't know if those words are correct, because in that situation, I... I question whether Anvil's success was ever really making it or the journey itself was the success. But in your story, I see the same level of persistence that a bystander would go, that guy's crazy. Because there was various stats I saw about how long it took you to get to various success milestones.
§02Transcript — part 2
Even when you started daily vlogging, I think it took you five years to get to like 400,000 subscribers. Yeah. Throughout your story, there's this persistence where I go, this guy would have carried on doing this because he wasn't doing this for any particular milestone. What role does persistence play? Yeah. It's funny because persistence is such a, it's a more accurate word. But the word I've been using lately is patience because I think it's so much less sexy.
I think persistence is like, like under the picture of like a little kitten hanging off the branch. It's like persistence. You know what I mean? We'll never say patience. Patience is so unattractive. And when people say to me, like, what's the one piece of advice you give to an aspiring creator? And, you know, patience. Like, patience above every... Because, like, if you're not willing to give up, if you're willing to stick with it forever, you will find success.
Or you'll die trying. In which case, fuck it. Like, whatever. You know, you're not going to be that... person in the palliative care saying, I wish I hadn't given up. Because you didn't give up. You just kept going. You're going to be that person who's like, I've got one day left. I can still pull this shit off. But patience is a really unsexy way of saying it. And I think you need to remove the sexiness. You need to remove the sensationalism that inspiration has...
been perverted with is this idea of like, it's this romantic, beautiful thing. It's not. It's fucking awful. Like failing year in and year out and having everybody roll their eyes at you. And I'm like, you know, whether you're a musician who's performing at the mall and no one's paying attention to you or you're that YouTuber who uploads and you get zero views, like it's fucking awful. It's embarrassing. You're a loser. Like I talked to Mr. Beast, Jimmy, and it's like his war stories...
from when he started YouTube and he was using his mom's busted compact computer with a built-in webcam, making these videos that no one watched. They're all deleted scrubbed from the internet now. They're terrible. And just like him going to school the next day and it's like two of his friends from school saw him and both acknowledged how terrible they were. Like that kind of like, Being told you're, that's failure. Being told you suck over and over and over and over.
And then seeing how much you suck. Be quantified by a lack of views or no one showing up to your concert or no one laughing at your jokes because you're a stand-up comedian or no one showing up to your restaurant because you're a chef. Like that sucks. Starting an online store, no one buys your fucking t-shirts. That sucks. Failure sucks. So combine that with patience. That suck. Are you willing to do that for 20 years? If you're not, don't fucking bother, man.
Don't bother. And that's why I like the plainness of the word patience is because that is what it is. There's nothing. Persistence. Persistence is like, oh, you're at mile 22. Persist, man. You'll get across the finish line in four short miles. That's beautiful and fun and hardcore. That patience that you and Mr. Beast have both shown and many others... Where does it come from? Because objectively, any sane person, if everyone's telling them they're a loser and they suck and their parents are saying, you better go get a real job, anyone who's acting in line with their apparent incentives in that moment would quit.
I think very simply it comes for me, and I think probably for Jimmy too, we've talked about it. He and I have talked about it, but there's no... Plan B, there was no other option. You know, like I had no backup plan. There was nothing else I could do. It wasn't like I had a college education and there was like a job and an ad agency waiting for me where I could just say, fuck it and go make 80K a year and get a nicer apartment and relax and have a nice go of it.
It was like, if this doesn't work, I'm back in the kitchen making $7.25 in an hour. Like, you know, getting money from the state so I can pay for, like, groceries on a fucking wick. I was on wick. Women, infants, and children. It was a card. You'd swipe it and you would pay for your diapers and milk. And that's it. If you tried to buy, like, a Nintendo with it, it wouldn't work. Like that, I remember that. That was the fallback. That was the alternative.
Yeah. every single turn, that was the alternative. Like I moved to New York City and I was here for three months. I had a three-month sublet that my brother's ex-girlfriend paid for. She was like, I'll loan you the money. And I was like, cool. It was her parents' credit card that paid for it. And it was like $1,800, $600 a month, $400 a month for three months. I shared it. In any event, that lease was up. I had nowhere to live in New York. And I was like, fuck, what do I do now?
And I moved in with some, this guy was like, hey, man, I need extra money. If you want to sleep on my couch, my dad pays my rent. So you could sleep on my couch and just give me like $300 a month. And that way, the money goes to me. And I was like, deal. And I slept on his couch for exactly 11 nights from September 1st to September 11th, 2001. And then the morning of September 11th, the entire apartment blew up with me in it and him in it. And I remember like later that day, like getting on the phone with my dad, And like the towers are still on fire.
And my dad being like, I think it's time for you to come home now, come back. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like, what are you talking about? What do you mean? Why would I come back? And he was like, terrorist blew up your apartment. You have no job. You have no prospects. You have no money. And now you have nowhere to sleep. I'm like, I'll figure that out. I'll be fine. Later, dad. Like, that's patience. That's delusional patience.
But you asked why. Like, what fuels that patience? The plan B was literally moving back to southeastern Connecticut and getting a job in a restaurant. I read a study once about this whole idea of plan A thinking, and they take a group of people and they tell them to do a puzzle. And in exchange for doing the puzzle correctly, they'll get a snack. So they take two groups and they say, OK, do this puzzle. If you do it correctly, you'll get a snack.
Then they take another group and they say, do the same puzzle. If you do it correctly, you'll get a snack. But then they say to the group, you can also get the same snack just down the hall in the vending machine. And in the second group, where they're given a plan B to get the snack, motivation levels drop, they spend less time trying to do the puzzle, and their performance towards doing the puzzle plummets as well. Just by being aware that they can get the same reward down the hall, performance drops.
And if there was ever a case for the psychology, and they've done this multiple times in multiple studies, but it is pretty solid evidence that even the presence of a plan B can reduce motivation towards your plan A. Completely. Completely. I mean, I wish I knew that study because that's such a beautiful, beautiful illustration of what it is and also what it means to have a knife at your back. I remember the thing I used to say back then. When I first started to find success… And I would always be like, my life is like I'm running from a pack of starving wolves.
If I slow down at all, I will be eaten alive. Like I have one choice and it's to keep going as fast as I can or I'll be torn to pieces. And that's what it felt like. And I love that. Like that sounds like negative and dark, but like I love that. It was such like a motivation. And I pitied the friends. Like I remember I first moved to New York City my first summer here. I don't know how, but I fell in with this click of... Because I thought the girls were pretty, but these rich kids.
And I'd go out with them. And I just remember the way they would pick up the tab. And they're my age. We're all 19, 20 years old. And they're picking up hundreds of dollar bar tabs and always had taxis. And a taxi to me was like... You know, it's like a private jet. I had all this money and I would always kind of look at them with this kind of like jealousy. And like, it was less of a jealousy and more just fantasize. Like, imagine if I was the same age I am now, but I had a credit card with an unlimited amount of money.
Like I went to her apartment. She lives on like the 26th floor. She has a two-bedroom apartment and she lives alone. I'm sharing a 200-square-foot studio with strangers I met on Craigslist. We have to wait in line to use the bathroom in the morning. And I fantasized about what that would be like. And then seeing as they got older and as I got older, them sort of, the sort of wandering and not sure where they want to go in life and all of that, whereas for me, it was such a, you know, there was such a defined path.
because I didn't have any of those luxuries or any of those benefits, that I now look back at that as being virtuous. So how do you do that for your kids? Well, that's the million-dollar question, because I never want my kids to feel that bullshit that I had to feel, like the shame of always hiding in the bathroom when the bill came. I would always do something. I wasn't just a total take, but like… I just, you know, like, I always kind of felt like a scumbag because I was never able to contribute the way that other people were.
And, like, that's a really shameful thing. And, like, I can remember so many times, like, when I would meet a young lady and she'd be like, let me go back to your place. And the excuses that I would come up with... Because I lived in an SRO for a while. I lived in a halfway house that I bribed my way into. A halfway house, for anyone that doesn't know in Europe, is a... It's where you get out of jail, and you're not allowed to live normally yet in the public.
So they put you into a building where they can monitor you. How did you get in there? I bribed the guy at the door. There was like a guy behind glass with like a little slot and you'd have to check in and check out. And I went there and I was like, hey, do you have any open rooms? And he was like, no, get out of here. And I came back with a carton of cigarettes with a hundred dollar bill in it. And I was like, I need a room. And he was like, all right.
It was like 531 is yours, write your name there. And he was like, it's $450 a month cash or whatever it was. Interestingly, when you tell that story of being in a halfway house and having no money and all these things, objectively, someone looks at that situation and goes, oh, man, I feel so sorry for you. I'm so psyched. But this speaks to how a mindset and a perspective can turn hell into heaven or heaven into hell. Yeah, I mean, like I've, the reason why I learned about that is it was my, I had a friend, her cousin lived there.
And he was like, here's how I got it. I bribed the door guy. And he's like, it's cool. It's like, don't talk to anybody in the building. And he's like, you know, some of the people in here are undocumented immigrants. And a lot of them are like, they just got out of jail. I was like, okay, that's cool. And he's like, some of them are homeless people that were given these rooms. I'm like, okay, I can handle all that. They told me the whole thing of how to get in there.
And there's no bathroom and no kitchen. How did this change, Casey? I know video had come into your life around... Video came into my life before I moved to New York City. That was the catalyst is my baby mama dumped me. I came into New York to hang around my brother Van, who I like worshipped. And he had just bought... He was doing like temp work. He lived in Brooklyn. He had bought the first iMac, like the one that was like shaped like a big...
blue TV. And it came with like footage of like a dog in a plastic like kiddie pool, a pool for children to play in. The dog was getting a bath. So you could play edit with the footage that came with it. And he and I would just kind of edit that footage over and over. So we didn't have a camera. So I bought a camera. And he had a computer. And I came in and we'd like film stuff and edit videos of it. And I was like, I can figure this out. And I like maxed out a credit card and started making terrible videos.
And I was like, that's it. I'll become a filmmaker. And then I moved to New York. Like it was one of the three things I brought to New York when I moved here. It was this huge iMac and like a backpack full of clothes. And then like my BMX bike, which was stolen the next day. And you're like 19. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What was it? Do you ever think about the psychological reasons why you were so drawn to video and storytelling generally? I don't know.
I have an answer to that, but I don't know if this is the, why I was drawn to it, or maybe I've just said this so many times, it's become my default response, but I definitely felt like I never had a voice. You know, I think it's because I was like, that third out of four kids or like I never did well in school. I was always in trouble. So teachers never listened to me. I was always in trouble and getting in fights and stuff. So my friends' parents never liked me.
And I just felt like I was never heard. And then I started to make videos. I was able to kind of articulate my thoughts or an idea in the form of a video and people would respond to that. So I think that was part of it. But, I don't know, I think I also just liked it. Like there was something about it that felt so fun. And there was something in the end that you would have that was like this finished, done thing. Did you like movies? Yeah, but I was never like a cinephile as a kid.
You know, like I had my favorites. You know, like I loved the movie Big. And I do remember in seventh grade, we got to do this program where you could like choose a profession and then you got to go do that job. And like there's a Pfizer pharmaceutical had like its headquarters in nearby towns. Like a lot of the kids went there to be chemists or scientists and they have to go spend like two hours at Pfizer. There's a submarine military base. A lot of kids got to go onto the base and see what it's like to be in the Navy.
And mine was I want to work at a video rental store because I want to get paid just sit and watch movies all day. And they're like, all right, I guess we could organize that for you. And I remember going there and it was like this kid. And he was like, yeah, I worked a day shift. Nobody ever comes by. And I was like, what do we do? And he's like, we have to put away those movies. It took like three minutes. And I was like, now what do we do? And he's like, just wait for customers.
So we just sat there and watched TV for like eight hours. I was like, this is a job I could get into. But I don't think it was like the Quentin Tarantino where he worked in a video store and studied film. I never had that. Do you think that's part of the reason you were successful at it, though? Because your style has always been so clearly original in so many ways. That's how it feels. It feels like you are, in fact, someone that didn't go to movie school.
And that's why people resonate with it. Yeah, I... I always say that my filmmaking style is because I was never taught the right way to do it. So I was forced to find my own way to do it. And I think that kind of thinking is at the same time as sort of like consumer-grade video creation became this ubiquitous thing with computers and editing software and cameras for the first time ever in the history of humanity. In the early 2000s, you could buy a DV, digital video camera, and you could buy a computer and plug it in.
You could edit your own videos. So my aspiration to make videos and this machine that let you do it, those happened at the exact same time. And because of that, I was forced to create my own style. My hard drive was 10 gigabytes. I could edit 12 or 16 minutes of video before the hard drive was full. So no, I made really short videos, and that's why. I didn't have a choice. I had to be a short video. But I do think, yeah, like the lack of formal education in that capacity forced me to be a different kind of filmmaker or approach it differently anyway.
Do you look back, I'm so compelled by originality as like a subject and the power of originality, because when a couple of people in society or the world or business or creativity or movies take the risk of being original, The issue is they draw in, and that originality is resonant, they draw in a big audience who then look up to them and almost confuse their admiration for that person with their aspirations for themselves and go, I will create like Casey.
And that is the way to be successful. It's a very logical deduction, but it's clearly flawed because there can be no other case. It was tremendously flawed. It's what I fucking hate about YouTube. I call this like the Mr. Beastification of YouTube. And I have to be very careful here. Jimmy's a genius. What Mr. Beast has done on YouTube is brilliant. And it's because of his brilliance. So this is not to take away from him at all. I think he is incredible what he's done.
And he has no control over the fact that millions of people are trying to copy him. But the fact that millions of people are trying to emulate what he's doing, that is the Mr. Beastification of the platform that I hate. Because Jimmy's always been very honest. His goal has never been like, ask me my goal. And now in the most sort of intellectual of terms, I'll look back at it. And I'll be like, video for me has always been a way of... a refined self-expression for me to take my thoughts and force them into this sort of articulate six, eight minute compartmentalized little video and share it with the world.
Like that's been my motivation. Jimmy's from day one has just been a fine success. He was a kid who had no money, he had no resource, he had no friends, he had nothing. And he's like, this is a tool I can use to take me to the highest planes of business and all of that. Jimmy is just as passionate about his chocolate company, Feastables, as he is about his video creation company, Mr. Beast Enterprise. He's just as passionate about his philanthropy being successful and helping as many people as possible as he is about making a video about what it means to live in a million dollar house.
His passion is about that winning. So for him, it's beautiful. But in the most reductive sense, when people look at that, they're like, hey, that's what it means to be a YouTuber. All that matters is views. And I put next to no value on that. None. Again, this isn't the takeaway from Jimmy because what he's done is incredible. But when people aspire just to get that view count up, to me, it's a race to the bottom. I fucking hate it. I hate it. And I do think it's because of people not knowing what to do.
So they look to see, well, who's successful? That's how I'm successful. Let me be that. And it will never work. It will never work. It requires... sort of an introspection of like, no, why do I want to do this? What is true to me? And then you go and do that. And maybe you'll find success and maybe you won't, but at least it'll be true. Why does truth end up mattering more in that case than view? So if there's one path here and I can get a million subscribers by just doing a Jimmy or Casey knockoff channel, or there's this other path, which I go, oh, there's no blueprint here and it's never been done before.
And I don't think anyone's going to like this stuff and it's probably not going to pay my bills. What's the case for pursuing the latter, the true path? I think that truth lasts. Truth matters. Like there's a direct, there's no correlation rather between the movies that have won Best Picture, the Academy Award for Best Picture over the last 80 years and the highest grossing movies. Those two things have been the same like three times, four times.
Like one of them I think was Gone with the Wind. Meaning that the movies that... The movies that the world determines are the most quality, most important, greatest films, the greatest contribution to culture and humanity are almost never the same movies that make the most money. Transformers 9 was a really cool movie. I don't fucking remember what happened. I think there was a dinosaur in it. But like you see a movie that affects you. You see a movie that matters to you.
You see Little Dieter Needs to Fly, this documentary by Werner Herzog. You see the Anvil story and you're thinking about it. I haven't seen that Anvil story in five years. I think about that movie every day. That lasts. So that matters. And me as a 42-year-old grown adult, like I know in life that's what matters. There's always going to be junk food. There'll always be an appetite for it. There'll always be an appetite for fucking reality TV and bullshit.
And, you know, like whatever pop stars are popular this week and will disappear next week. But the musicians that like change you, the ones that write that song that like makes you cry, like you'll never forget that. So for me, like if you want to be an artist or you say you want to be an artist... how could there be any other goal but that? And just to bring this full circle, I think the magic of Mr. Beast, of Jimmy in particular, I don't think he's ever wanted to be an artist.
And that honesty is why I have so much respect for him. He's an empire builder. And that's what he's wanted to do. And he's done that through video creation. But again, neither here nor there, not to digress. For me, it's like great work matters. And it does. It changes people. It changes me. Look at the work that Spike Jonze did. Not his Oscar award-winning movies, but I look at his little weirdo music videos that I used to watch when I was a kid.
And I watched those music videos over and over. What's Up Fat Lip? The music video that he made with Fat Lip, who was kind of a popular hip-hop artist who didn't have any money. And he was like, I got this new song, Spike, but I don't have any money to make the video. So they went out and they put Fat Lip in a clown costume, and they filmed it on a VHS camera. It's like one of my favorite music videos ever. But I saw that and I was like, I can be a filmmaker.
Now, if he had made a video just trying to get the most views or whatever it was, instead of just him and his friend Fatlip trying to make something great, it might not have done that for me. And that changed my world. So like, if you're going to share your fucking inspirational quotes on Instagram, then step up. Like make the thing that could change the world. Make the thing that could affect someone. Don't just give me Mickey Mouse bullshit that's going to get views.
I look at both you and Jimmy as pioneers, but for very different reasons and seemingly with very different motivations. You strike me as someone that was really inspired by the art form and the storytelling side of the creative production process. And Jimmy took this... It seems like he took this other approach where it was much more about what the data was telling him to make. Both of them created originality, though. Completely. You know? Completely.
I think Jimmy is... In the history of, I think Jimmy is the most important YouTuber in the history of YouTube. And I think that arguably, I think he's one of the most important people in the history of entertainment. Full stop. I don't know that anyone has built an empire that reaches as many people as what he's doing. I think there will be case studies taught about him at Harvard. I think he is a true pioneer in every sense of the word. Do you care about the views?
No, but that's easy to say. I'm like, you know, I don't worry about paying rent anymore. And I kind of usually don't check the prices at restaurants before I order dinner. So it's easy for me to say. Obviously, like it's, it's, there was a time when that really mattered to me and was super, super important to me. But I've grown up and I've, you know, a level of financial security, which is super real. So it's, it's less about that and more about doing good work.
If one of your kids came to you and they said, Dad, I want to be a YouTuber, and what would be your response to just that first surface level question? I mean, it's happened. Little Francine is like, she's so good too. But Candice always gets, not mad, but she's always like, take it easy, Casey, because I have a tendency to over-intellectualize it. But I'm like, Franny, you can make whatever you want, but you're not allowed to share it. And she's like, why?
I want to get subscribers and views. Yeah. And I'm like, well, if you make it, like, I want, I just want to make sure you're making it for you because you want to make something. Not because you're looking for that. I don't know words I use with her, but like that validation. I don't know if she would know that word. But that's when Candice is like, take it easy, Casey. She's eight. And I'm like, okay. All right. Just do your thing, kiddo. But yeah.
Yeah, I think like the concern. What is the concern? Is why? Like if she wants to do it because she wants to be an artist, fuck yes, I will drop everything to help you on this mission. If you want to do it because your little girlfriend at school did it and she got 35 likes and you want to get more likes than her, then like pump the brakes, kid. Like that's, you know, like that's... What if she says I want to be bigger than Mr. Beast? The same thing.
Then, you know, it's like why? Like why? Why do you want to do that? And also, fame is a very weird, very strange thing. And I think the most strange thing about fame is it's not what you think. There are people who have achieved and felt some degree of fame, and there are people who haven't. And if you're in the haven't camp, there's no way to understand the have camp. There's no way. There's no way. And having been over here, you know, like to see someone aspire for that is like, you know, like no way.
What's the warning? The warning is just like, if fame is a byproduct of what you're doing, then it is what it is. But if fame is the end game, Then you're just like one of those fucking reality stars with the fucked up faces because you've had so much plastic surgery. And like, what are you doing? What are you offering the world? Like, why are you here? Like, you're benefiting the world in no way whatsoever. You're elevating the world zero. This is pure, like, narcissism.
This is just, just, just for some weird ego journey that you're on. Again, this is one of those moments where my wife would be like, back off, Casey. She's eight. Let her finish her mac and cheese. I wouldn't say it to the kid, but like, yeah, if she says, I want to be bigger than Mr. Beast, like, then yeah, I get nervous. What if she says, okay, I want to do, I want to make YouTube videos because I love creating videos, but I would like some advice to add on how to be a successful YouTuber.
Yeah, you should see her. She has a whole channel that is stop frame animations of her stuffed animals. She's not allowed to have her voice in it or her hands in it. You're not allowed to identify that it's in our apartment. But she makes those and they're fucking great and they're funny and they're really good. So that like, yeah, we support her so much. We buy her the equipment. We help her make it. We're part of the audience. We have like a family iMessage thread that we distribute the videos on.
she even has her own Instagram handle that has zero followers. Candace and I don't follow it. We pass the phone around to watch her Instagrams because we don't want her to even associate one like with why she's doing it. Even if that like is from us. My sister texted and was like, hey, you sent me a screen capture of Francine's TikTok or whatever. Can you send me her account? We're like, no. This is clearly coming from your experiences, right? Yeah, protect them as long as you can, man.
Keep the kids so far away from that. Keep them far away from views and likes. Yeah, from seeking validation. Did you ever fall prey to that? Did I ever fall prey to that? Yeah, but I'm different because I was old. Like I was literally your age that you are right now sitting across from me before I had an Instagram account. Think about how much more you know than an eight-year-old. Like for an eight-year-old, that's the world that she's growing up in.
It's a really scary place. Like social media, we're seeing how much it fucks kids up. We're seeing the mental health crisis. We're seeing how it's manifesting. We're seeing eating disorders because of Instagram. We're seeing like all of these social issues because of social media. And I think wanting to protect your kids from that is sort of a universal thing, not just someone who has lived in that space. You know, I think I've had a unique experience with it because I was, I had achieved some level of success outside of social media in the world of regular old media.
And then it was on social media that I found real success. But I was able to do that with that kind of hindsight and with that kind of clarity of being an adult, being pursuing this career for 15 years before I was. On social media, you found real success. Yeah. Was that due to your daily vlog predominantly? Was that the real catalyst moment in terms of growth? Yeah, 100%. You know, like I, Van and I, my brother Van and I had a television show on HBO that we sold to HBO in 2008.
§03Transcript — part 3
And that television show was exactly my daily vlog. Full stop. Only eight episodes or something. Eight episodes, 22 minutes, 22 to 24 minute episodes. But if you watch that daily show, it looks like an early version of my vlog. It's identical. It's the same exact shit. But that was before YouTube was really a thing. YouTube was invented in 2000 or launched in 2006. And it was really just a place for watching like basketball highlight reels and like Charlie bit my finger.
So, you know, we put that show on HBO and... Very highly reviewed, but nobody watched it. It was on at midnight on Friday nights. Like it wasn't a breakout success. And then Van moved to California. So I was kind of on my own. And I was like, I just want to do that. So I tried to sell it to MTV. And they didn't get it. They're like, we know this is great. Like I showed it to someone there and they brought me in. And I met with the heads of MTV, like met with some really powerful people.
And they're like, this is not like anything we've ever seen. This is fantastic. But we're not sure this works on TV. And I was like, okay, cool. And then, yeah, and then I put it on YouTube. And how did that go? Well, you know, you talked about the numbers before. So before my daily vlog, I was considered like a successful YouTuber, a celebrated YouTuber. I think it was 280,000 subscribers. And it had taken me almost a decade to get there. I started my YouTube channel in 2007, maybe.
And by 2014, 2015... I had 280,000 subscribers. I had a couple of movies that went truly viral that had like 5, 10 million views. All of my movies did more than like 50,000, 60,000 views, which is amazing. And people liked my videos. Like the New York Times saw my YouTube videos and like make videos for us. I was doing that back then. So by all definition, very successful on YouTube. But then I started my daily vlog. And it took whatever that was, eight years to go from zero to a couple hundred thousand subscribers.
And my daily vlog went from a couple hundred thousand subscribers to 10 million subscribers in like 18 months. It was a kind of like explosion that I had never felt in any other capacity in my career, my life. What's the lesson that you take away from that about consistency or compounding or, you know? Yeah, that's that thing, patience. I wasn't really doing anything different. I mean, certainly I was working much harder to create a video every day.
It was hard work, but really it was just like, I had this square peg. And I tried to knock it through thousands of round holes for 15 years. And sometimes I was able to jam it through and sometimes it would kind of fall through and I wasn't able to duplicate it. And then all of a sudden, like the moons aligned. Like the fucking planets aligned, Pluto was lined up, the sun shined through, like, the light came through, the city illuminated. And like 2015, YouTube was just becoming something more.
It's the first generation that grew up on YouTube. Like it had been around for, you know, nine years and people had a relationship with this platform. And no one was doing anything of any significant production quality. And I had 15 years of experience in making short videos. And I brought all of that to YouTube. And then just the episodic aspect of it. So it was like, you know, make one video of me running around New York City, hanging around with my wife, having lunch, doing something else.
And then the video's over. And it's like, oh, who's this funny looking guy in New York? Whatever. Do that seven days in a row. And you're like, oh, this is kind of fun. I get to hang out with this guy. Yeah. do it 300 days in a row. And it's like, I've become part of your life. And that just snowballs. Like it snowballs in every way. It snowballs algorithmically. And that's what those, that quantitative explosion was. It snowballs financially because you get paid whatever, call it a 10th of a cent per view.
And that doesn't mean much if you're getting 10 views. But if you're getting a hundred million views, the money starts to become substantive. Brands, the kinds of companies you always wanted to work with, maybe one out of every hundred creative directors at an agency has seen your videos, but all of a sudden you go from getting 100,000 a month to 100 million a month. And now every creative director has seen your videos. They're like, we want to work with that guy.
And it just was, you know, it happened so quick and was so explosive and so exciting and so fun. Sounds like that was your anvil moment in some respects. Like you'd put in 15 years of work and then you're... craft and patience had met opportunity in a way. And people might look at those moments and go, oh, that was, you know, that's luck because, you know, you just, but what is the rebuttal to that? What's the like? They're right. It was luck. But like luck is, what is it?
Luck is where preparation meets opportunity. I'd just been preparing myself for that moment for 15 years, you know? And then the opportunity opened up and I was right there. And the truth is like most of us see opportunity just flies by us all day, every day when I'm ready for it. I was seeking it for that long. And, you know, there's some other circumstances too. My friend Max pointed this out to me when he and I were having a meeting last week, which was like, when I launched that YouTube channel, the daily vlog rather when I launched that in 2015 I had had a show on HBO that they bought for $2 million I had had movies that I produced two of them in the Cannes Film Festival I won the Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards which was like the Academy Awards for indie films like I worked for the New York Times.
I made movies for Nike. I had worked for myself at that point in time for 12 years in my own studio. I had by every definition achieved success. But the exact time I launched that YouTube channel, I was $200,000 in debt. Meaning I was more broke then than when I was on welfare getting checks for my kid because I was so deep in debt. Because the year preceding that, I was invited to MIT as a fellow. And as a high school dropout, it was like no greater honor than to get to go to one of the most prestigious academic institutions on the planet and be invited there.
And I remember going there and being like, whatever I do on the other side of this is going to be different from what I'm doing now. And what I was doing then was making TV commercials and doing fun stuff like that. A good career. Around that time, you read this book. Yeah. What was so inspiring or perspective shifting about that book, Hatching Twitter? It wasn't around that time. So I went to MIT as a fellow. I worked out of the MIT Media Lab. And my lab group was called the Social Computing Group.
And it was, you know, eight or 10 technologists, one artist who was a painter, and then me. And... And to this day, I don't know what I was doing there. I'm incredibly close to the professor. I talk to him all the time. He's since left there. And he is a mentor of mine, somebody I speak to regularly. I still don't know what I was doing there. So mostly I just observed. I was given no assignment. I just observed. And I didn't have any friends. I was living in Boston.
My pregnant wife was alone in New York City hating me because I abandoned her. And I read this book. And all I knew is that when I was there, I wanted to figure out what to do next. And the magic of hatching Twitter, by the way, Nick Bilton has since become a good friend. But the magic of this amazing book is it reveals the madness that was a technology startup. Like the chaos. Like, you know, these guys are all very smart. All the guys that started Twitter.
But like... I don't think they're smarter than me. I think that you have regular people and smart people and then these geniuses that you just can't relate to. And I think that I live somewhere between regular and close to smart, but not fully smart. And I think these guys are like, they're just smart, persistent people that wanted to do something. I was like, I can do what they did. I can do that. And when I left MIT, I was like, I'm going to start a technology company.
Yeah. And I didn't know what that meant, but it just sounded like a great idea. But the whole time I was at MIT, I wasn't making any money. So I was living off my credit cards and off my debt. My business had a revolving line of credit at Chase Bank that was maxed out. And then I started this company, which was basically just meeting with people, telling them I wanted to start a company. And... And yeah, and so six months later, I was $200,000 in debt.
I couldn't afford my half of rent that I owed to my wife, who was pregnant. And that's when I started a daily vlog and started a technology company. And it made sense. But the reason why I give that long preface about like, I found all this success is it was like, I found all that success. I knew there was snack down the hall if I didn't want to do the puzzle. And I was like, fuck that. Let me burn it to the ground. Like, let me go $200,000 in debt and do something that I have no idea.
I've never written a line of code in my life. Let me start a technology. Let me start a software development company. I've still never written a line of code in my life, but let me do that. That's a good pursuit for me. And that's what I did. I'm not sure what I was thinking. What were you thinking? I don't know. It felt like a great idea. It also like... How old were you at this point? You were, what, 35? Yeah, and I also like... Those guys were such superstars to me, like Mark Zuckerberg, like that...
In The Social Network, the movie The Social Network, that scene that juxtaposes him just sitting in his dorm room writing code with all the cool kids getting on that bus, going to the party with all the hot girls, and he's just... I was like, I want to be that guy. And also, I didn't think of anything more explosive. It was like, I was still, you know, I had financial success, but the $2 million from the HBO thing didn't make me a millionaire. It's like, cut it in half from taxes.
You're at a million. Pay back our investor. You're $400,000 left over. There's two of us. Give half that to Van. It's $200,000. And then three years goes by, and it's like, you're making middle-class income for three years. We're not rich. And I was like, I want to be rich. I want to be a billionaire. Yeah. Let me start a tech company. That's how I'll get there. Unqualified. I mean, when I look through your story, I see someone who was seemingly unqualified to pursue the things that he pursued over and over again.
You weren't qualified to get into movies. There was no formal education by any objective standards. You weren't qualified to be starting a tech company. What was I thinking? What was I thinking? What is unqualified? Because I think most people would say, well, I'm not a tech entrepreneur. They would like self-label and then disqualify themselves from doing that. And I think in most people's lives, they're actually spending more time disqualifying themselves psychologically.
But you seem to be taking the opposite approach, which is you seem to be qualifying yourself for things that you're objectively unqualified to be pursuing. I had this conversation with Candice, my wife, last night because it was like... What do we do with these little girls, our daughters, to show them they can do anything? And if they were boys, I knew what to do. If they were boys, force them to work with their hands. It's one of my regrets with my son.
My son is 25 now and he's a superstar. He's fantastic. But he loved academia and I indulged him in that. And I wish I had been more forceful in encouraging him to learn to work with his hands. Why? Because I think you learn something about life. by learning how to build and do things. There's this great South Park special that's on TV right now. And like the handymen who like fix your broken toilet become the billionaires. And all the intellects are standing outside of Home Depot, like holding up signs that are like, I'm a biologist, please hire me.
Like we'll trade for, because it's like, and they're sitting around there like, I wish I had just learned to work with my hands. Why didn't anybody tell me? And I think what they're saying with that or what I feel, what I was able to deduce from that is it's just like there are universal aspects of life and humanity and the world that you learn from working with your hands. And like this rule of mine, which is that if you don't know what you want to do in life, do something you hate.
Yeah. And through that process, you'll figure out what it is that you love. Like I learned that I wanted to be a filmmaker by scrubbing out chowder pots in that fucking seafood restaurant in Connecticut. 40, 50 hours a week, just hating it. 90 degrees back there in the summer. Stinks. Scrubbing that pot. Hated it. It's a lot of time thinking about what do I wish I was doing. So for like kids, it's like, yeah, no, no, no. You don't get to go to college.
Instead, I'm sending you to this school where you're going to learn how to rebuild diesel engines. Enjoy it. I don't know that I can do that to my little blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughters. So you asked me about what it means to be unqualified. I don't know. But I think like, you know, when my bicycle was broken at home and I was a little kid, like I didn't have the tool to fix it. I first had to build the tool that I could then fix my bike with.
Like I wasn't qualified, but I had to find that qualification. And in everything that I did, it was the same kind of thing. So why wouldn't I think that I'm qualified to do anything? It's part of that, as I hear you say that, and thinking about this idea of doing stuff with your hands, it's part of that because what it teaches you, and I was thinking about your bike example there, is that when something is broken or when there is a challenge, You're learning, you learn at that very young age that Casey can solve that problem himself.
And that lesson of I can close the gap between what I want and where I am is like an overarching superpower for the rest of your life where it's, you know, the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. The gap between Casey being a guy that's, you know, making videos to the tech entrepreneur. You learned very early in your life that Casey can close the gap. And a lot of people never learn that. They think, oh, I'm unqualified to close the gap, or I don't have the skills to close the gap, or the money, or I'm scrubbing pots in a back room.
I can't close the gap. But that's evidence. And evidence comes from, you know, closing the gap a couple of times with a bike and... I had a friend DM me this week, and it was something like, I don't know what it was, but it was this thing that was like, how to figure out who high agency individuals are, something like that. And like, it was like five bullet points. And number five was like the goals in question. Who would you call? From George Max, a friend of mine, former him.
Is that what it was? It was like, who would you call if you're stuck in a Thai prison to break you out? Yeah. So that's George Mack, who's a former employee in one of my former companies. He's a superstar. He's an incredible guy. He does tweet threads and he did one like last week, which is how to spot a high agency individual. And I think about that a lot because someone very close to me couldn't find his partner. He couldn't find his wife. And in a moment of panic, he thought she had been kidnapped.
And he's thousands of miles away from me. And he didn't know what to do. And he called me in that moment. He was like, what do I do? And I was like, give me all of the information. And he gave me all the information. And I was like, I need more. And I'm like asking him all these questions. I'm writing it all down. And then I'm like, what are you doing right now? And he's like, I'm going to go to the police station. I was like, do not go to the police station.
Here's what they're going to do. And I was like, this is why you don't do that. Here are the things you can do to be effective. Call the bank, find out what her last transaction was, figure out what her password is on her iCloud account. And like going through all these facts, like do all that and call me back. And then I hung up with him and I'm like, how do I solve this problem? And it wasn't, There was never a moment of, is there someone that can solve this problem that's not me?
It was that thing that's like says, either in Lockheed Martin or at NASA, where it says in like 100-foot letters, it won't fail because of me. Like that's what that moment was. It was like, no, I'm the only person who can solve this right now. And like, sure enough, the next phone call, I called him, it was very Jason Bourne, but I called him like 11 minutes later. And I was like, she's at the tennis club, she's asleep on the couch. And like, it was much credit to my younger brother, Dean, who is an actual jet pilot in the Air Force for helping me figure that out.
But like, it was interesting. Like, there was something about the fact that he called me. There was something about the fact that I could hear in his voice a total uncertainty. And his instinct was, there has to be a higher authority that can solve this problem. And how antithetical that was to my own thinking, which was, there's no higher authority. There's no one that can solve this. Better than I can solve this right now. And I think I applied that to most of what I've done throughout my whole life.
I remember I was really broke way back in the day. I had a 1986, I think, Volvo 240. Whatever the one that had the dual halogen headlight was. Great year. And somebody crashed into the front of the car. And the estimate to fix it was like $2,200. And the insurance company just gave me that money. And I was like, fuck this. I was like, I can fix this car myself. I remember my baby mama being like, what do you know about fixing cars? I'm like, how hard could it possibly be?
And in that moment, I took the whole front of the car apart. I did not do a good job. I did a good enough job. And I pocketed all of it like $150 to replace those halogen headlights, like screwed all back together. I mean, before we started this podcast, you're like, Casey, what are you doing with your time? I'm like, just building out my studio. I wanted to build my girls a tree fort in there. There was never of like, what carpenter do I hire to build a tree fort?
It was like, no, no, no. I'm going to do this. How hard can it be? How hard can any of it be? Like, give me a big enough pile of balsa wood and enough time, I will build you a spaceship. As a mantra for life, how hard can it be? There's an air of naivety, which is... Once you realize how hard it can be, it's like, I will never do a software development company again. If I knew now... If I knew then what I know now about building that company, no fucking way.
No chance. There's no chance. It sold for, what, $36 million though? Something like that. Which is a success. It has a success. A million failures though for that one success. And the failures keep me up way more than the success puts me to sleep. What are those failures? You know, like some of the really key failures were like the naivety that an exit is the holy grail. Like for me, like we were all out of money. Like my partner, Matt, and I cut our salaries and for the last year, and I think the last couple of paychecks was paying out of my pocket.
So when we sold the company and everybody got to have a job and everybody got paid out, one of the... One of the aspects of the sale was that every employee that had equity would get a full cash payout immediately upon the sale. I thought everybody would be psyched. But when he told everybody, they weren't. Because for them, it was like, no, no, we signed up to build this company with you. This is fun. This is a startup. This is why we didn't take twice the salary from Facebook.
We wanted to do something novel with you. And now we just get to go work for a big company. in that moment of feeling like I was letting down all of these people that helped me get there. It was like, yeah, I got to get this fat check. I made me a millionaire. I was like, I got to be a millionaire, but I feel like I disappointed the people who got me there. Like the people who like held me up so I could reach the top. I let all of them down. And maybe that's unfair, but that's how it felt.
That's how it still feels. It feels weird. I have zero employees right now. I don't have an assistant. Your producer had to call a friend of ours last night to be like, I haven't heard from Casey in three weeks. Is he going to show up tomorrow? Because I don't check my email. I don't have an assistant. I don't have a schedule. I have no one. I mop my own floors. And I think a lot of that is like the post-traumatic stress of having 35 employees at my tech company and feeling like I let a lot of them down and never wanted to feel that way again.
So I was just like, fuck it, I'll just mop my own floors. I might miss an appointment. But... there's a million failures that fall underneath that umbrella of being a manager, being a terrible manager that, um, I think about way more than the moments of elation that were, you know, selling that company. What was that moment like though? If I zoom in on your psychology throughout that period, you, you go on this incredible journey to build this business twist turns.
And I mean, that's the story of most tech startups. Most of them fail. Most of them run out of cash and then you get this exit. Um, objectively people look at that go congratulations amazing you you know smashed it you're rich you know you've got money now what's going on in your psychology the day you get the call you call your investors one of your investors i think is a good friend of mine and an investor in one of my companies gary vaynerchuk um and then it's done how are you feeling if i was a fly inside your head i mean good it was like super thrilling to get across that finish line a month after then So a month after that, to get specific, the company, CNN, Turner bought our company and Matt, my business partner, and I signed a three-year deal with them to stay out and work with them for three years.
And just to tell the finish line, they fired us 11 months later. So for a month into that, it was about how do we build this business into a success underneath this bigger company? And it was exciting, but I also think there was a huge amount of naivety on my part about what the realities of that looked like What I interpreted as ambiguity from CNN about what to do wasn't at all ambiguity. It was them looking to me to lead. And my lack of awareness of that.
is something I look back at now and just sort of shake my head. Like, this is what I mean by like a thousand failures. Like, I can tell you, and I don't think this is an unfair characterization that like, I think they bought my company because they're like, this kid is a star and we want to, we want his reach alone is worth this amount of money. And as a bonus, we're getting all of this technical know-how and skill and we're getting the brilliance of his partner.
And like, this is a great deal for us, but we want that influence. He'll use all of these brilliant people that he has around him to help promote that influence. Like that's what they wanted. I can say that. They also wanted to exploit my reach doing stupid Mickey Mouse shit. Like they had some million dollar deal for me to like do commercials for a watch company. And I was like, guys, this isn't why. I want to work with you. And I said no to that.
And there's a huge, I can point to all these things, like them being a big corporation and us being a nimble startup and them wrecking that culture. But the reality is the reason why we didn't succeed under CNN was because of me and only because of me. It was my failure. to recognize the opportunity and build within that. And I attribute that to ego. I attribute that to naivety. Someone like you doesn't belong at CNN, though. Sure, easy to say now.
But like, fuck you, man. I can build a spaceship. I can do whatever I want. I'll fix that Volvo. I can build a fucking company for CNN. You know how incentivized I was? Like, if I built that company to be a success, like the incentives that they gave for me were out of this world. The people I was working with at CNN— were incredible. They're brilliant people. That the only reason it didn't succeed was because of me. And I don't know, you asked how I felt a month later.
When I look back at it, it's like a month later was when I was probably at like peak hubris. Like I know it all. Look what I did. I know everything. What about 11 months later? 11 months later, it was just exhaustion. I wanted to get out. Just let me, let me. Like when they said we're shutting down the company, I remember it was like super weird. Like I was in South Africa with my family and they're like, we're gonna let you know before the end of the year.
And like December 31st, I like called my kind of boss at CNN. I'm like, what's going on with the company? Are you guys shutting us down or are we gonna keep going? They're like, we're going to talk when we get back. And we got back and we're like, we're going to meet here. I'm like, why don't we just meet at our offices or your offices? They want to meet in like a neutral location. And there was like a head of HR or something in the meeting. And they're like, we want to let you both know we've decided to shut down the company and release you from your, or whatever they said.
And I was kind of like, okay, cool. Like, it was not a big thing. It was kind of what I expected. But it was like a sigh of relief, weirdly. What does your plan become for your life? After that? Yeah. You know, you're this guy that's checking off your bucket list, the bucket list you had as a child. You've sold the company, you've built the channels, you've made a huge name for yourself in movie making. At that point, 11 months later, after leaving the HR meeting at the neutral location, what's the future?
That's when it got hard. Dark. That was like a moment of real darkness in my life because, not because of those external factors, but just internally. Like the fame then was something that I just did not understand. Like the only way to quantify it was I had done like 3 billion views in two years, something like that. And the content was all me. It was the real version of me. I wasn't playing a character. I wasn't acting. I didn't have on a Superman costume.
I wasn't like, I'd always say like, I love Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt's character in Fight Club. But if I met Brad Pitt, he's not that person. You meet me. I am the person you think you know. And the fame was fucking insane. Like we had to move into a higher security building in New York City. Like it was, it got scary, that kind of fame. And when I was winning, like putting a video out every day and I had this company, I was cool shit to talk about.
It was, it was like, you know, you're like coasting on that. But I felt like I wasn't winning. Like I didn't want to do my daily show anymore. I was exhausted from it. CNN had just kind of fired me, so I wasn't building anything with them. I wasn't sure what to do, but I still couldn't step outside without like being like Justin Bieber kind of swarmed. And I didn't know what to do. And I kind of like started this other company called 368 with my partner at the time, Paul.
That was a cool project. I started up a new daily show with my other friend, Dan. That was kind of exciting. But basically, it just felt like a bunch of sort of slow starts. Why did you say dark? It's a very interesting word. Because it was the first time, like, it was that thing that I referred to before, which is like, you attribute happiness and fulfillment with winning. And I had won. Like this was the first time in my life where I achieved like a level of financial security that, you know, like if I played my card rights could have meant financial security for the rest of my life.
Like for a guy who couldn't afford diapers, that's a fucking journey. That is a big box on the list to check off. You know, like for a guy who like made, would drive around in my car, giving people VHS copies of my videos. I had 3 billion views in two years. Like that's a big box to check off. Like I'd done those things. And instead of feeling like I was like, I had done it, I had earned it. Instead of feeling like I was standing on top of the mountain, I just kind of was like, well, what now?
Like, this isn't it. It wasn't like, I wasn't running the marathon because I wanted to get across the finish line. Like, I don't know where, I've run 24 marathons. I don't know where any of my medals are. I was running it because I love the running. Like, I loved it. And it kind of felt like that was over and I didn't know what to do. And it kind of, yeah, it got weird. It got dark for a little bit. And that's when we decided to like leave New York and move to LA and...
If I was a flower on the wall then, in that moment in your life where it's dark and weird, what do I see in the walls of your home? Well, first of all, the house was really nice because CNN had just bought my company. So it was a really nice house. Candice bought the fancy wallpaper. But no, it was mostly like I had a little baby at the time. And then like a three-year-old. So I was kind of at home, chilling, hiding. I didn't want to go to my studio.
There should be too many people outside. Yeah. And yeah, just unsure, uncertain. Like I think so much of our decision to move, we moved to LA for like three years. It was a disaster. We moved back to New York. But so much of my enthusiasm to leave New York was just like, I need to get away from all of this. And I pictured like LA, like I was moving to the moon. Like nobody would know me there and I could just go to the beach every day and chill out.
§04Transcript — part 4
Couldn't have been further from the truth, but that's, so there was like, we decided to move to LA and we didn't move for another seven months or whatever. And those seven months were just kind of me hiding and waiting. And Candice, you've kind of indirectly made her famous as well because of that whole, you know, everything that happened in that chapter of your life, which means that both of you can't just like leave, live a normal life. Can't just walk down the street together.
How is she feeling in that moment? And does that add strain to the relationship? Yeah. I mean, it was always... That's a whole other podcast. But my daily show was effectively... I was just pulling stories from my life. My own real life experiences. Let me figure out how to turn that into a narrative. I'm coming on your podcast today. Let me film my journey here and then talk about what this is about. And then my journey home. And let me make that...
today's video. And so it was just this vacuum. And whatever was closest would get sucked in. So she's my wife, she's my partner, my best friend. So she would get sucked into the content all the time. Mostly she's willing and supportive, but not all the time. But I still had to make my videos. So it had this burden on her, this stress on her. Some of it was positive. She's building her own company then. And it brought enough exposure to her that people were like, oh, I love what she's doing.
And it yielded, a kind of, it shined a light on her brilliance as a designer and a jewelry designer and an entrepreneur herself. And she embraced all that. But ultimately, yeah, it was a big stress on our relationship. If this next 10 years of your life is a movie, what is the narrative of this? this movie? I don't know. You ever seen Kiona Skatzi? No. It's this amazing movie. There's no story at all. It's just beautiful establishing shots of cities with weird music and nothing happens.
Like, that's what I feel like my life is right now. It's just like... It's so beautiful and wonderful. I'm doing fuck all right now. I'm doing nothing. And I feel guilty because I still like, I get paid jobs and I take those paid jobs. I do them as best as I can. I think I do a good job with them. But I feel a little bit like a... a little bit like I'm selling out or something because I still need to make a living and I still can. But I'm mostly just riding the momentum that I created years ago.
And then just like, I race home from work every day at like 4.30 in the afternoon so I can be home when my kids get home. And I just sit around. You can ask me out to dinner. You can invite me to go to the Met Gala. I'm like, I can't, man. I just go home, play with my kids every day. It's my favorite thing. Kids go to bed at 7.38, whatever. Go to the gym for an hour. Come home, bother Candice for an hour. Watch TV, go to bed. That's my life. And then during the day, go hang out in my studio.
It's just this clubhouse. Fun shit in it. Build stuff. Make things out of wood. go home, tell Candice I worked a lot today, play with the kids. I just do that over and over and over. And then it's like Christmas and we go visit her family or it's like summertime when I go to the beach. I'm just coasting through life right now. It's fantastic. Is this a new Casey? Because the other KC seemed really like as if they were striving towards some bucket list thing that they'd written when they were a kid.
This KC seems to be... Yeah, I mean, look, I'm at peace right now, but this is not a sustainable... I'm at peace right now, but I'm hyper-cognizant that this is not sustainable. Why? Why? I mean, because I'll just be broke in my three years. But moreover, like the only thing that brings me a sense of true like fulfillment in what is a big part of my life is when I make something that I think is good. creatively so like I think I'm a good dad that's that part of my life and I think I'm a good husband that's that part of the life and I'm super fitness focused and I care a lot about my physical existence it's a part of my life but then there's the majority of the pie chart is like my professional life And if I'm not making something, even if I make something that's good and I don't share it or post it, that checks out.
That does that. I made something great. What did I do recently? Like I made my mother-in-law's for 70th birthday. And she was like, well, you make me one of those slide shows. And I know she was picturing like, you know, you drop all the photos into like Windows slideshow maker and push a button. So I made like this great video. We like played it at her 70th birthday to all of her old lady friends. Nobody saw that. Like that did it for me. And I don't feel like I'm cashing that check right now.
I don't feel like if I'm looking at that as staying healthy, it's like instead of going to the gym, I'm eating junk food. Instead of going for a jog, I'm sitting on the couch. When I get to the office, instead of putting my head down and just making something great, which I can do, I just kind of putz around and reorganize my tools every day. Do you know what I said earlier, before we started recording, about this word boredom? I use the word boredom, not because I'm implying that nothing is happening, but so many of the creatives I've spoken to tell me that you need to have chapters and seasons in your life of like basically where you're just chilling because those, they kind of cultivate an energy towards the new thing.
Maybe it gives you enough time and space to stand back from the picture to see the whole painting or to, I don't know, get some inspiration from something your kid says to you one day or... Yeah, yes, look, absolutely. Like there's a pendulum and my pendulum's gone so far when I'm making a video a day, 800 days in a row, while running a company with 38 employees, while having a wife and a brand new baby at home. Like, you know, I didn't sleep for three years.
Like I was running at full speed, millions of people with their eyes on me every day. And like, you could definitely justify as a pendulum swung in the other direction. Now, like, I just need this time to decompress. But I don't accept that. Because to accept that is to sort of justify my current laziness in general, sort of laissez-en-faire attitude towards life. I recognize how indulgent it is right now. And I'm not doing this because I need it.
I'm doing this because I can. If I was broke right now, I'd be fucking busting my ass every day. If my kids were hungry right now, I'd be busting my ass. I'm doing this because I can. I'm not solving the puzzle because right down the hallway are all the snacks I could ever want. And I'm very aware of that. So I hear you, but I do not accept that justification. This is just pure indulgence. And that's all it is. It's great. Can we go have some snacks and build a shelf this afternoon?
It's very honest of you. I don't think anyone's ever said that to me. Because people do justify their indulgence. It's very interesting. What can we expect from you? Can we expect anything? Do you know the answer to that? Because so many people are like ultra fans of you. I think there's an anticipation of what's Casey, what's the next big thing Casey's going to do? You know, I don't... The short answer, like, but I've been saying this for a while and I haven't done it, is like, this version of my life right now that I do love, I really just...
I have all these movies written. When I say movies, I mean YouTube videos. Written, they're like really meaningful and awesome. And some are deep and some are shallow and some are one-day shoots and some are three weeks of writing. Yeah. I just want to make those. I just want to go to my office every day alone and make these videos and put them out on YouTube. And like I deleted the YouTube studio app from my phone. I don't look at comments or views anymore.
I don't check AdSense. I don't do it. I just click upload and then go back to work. That's what I want to do right now. And when I'm beating myself up about my laziness, it's because there's nothing stopping me from doing that. I just, I keep kicking the can. But like, that's what I want to do right now. Like, that's it. I just want to put my head down and make the things that I think are great. I'd give a shit if anybody watches them. You talked about privilege earlier and acting on your privilege.
Yeah, that is the, that to do that is the ultimate privilege. Like there is nothing more. There's nothing more. That's like the most privileged existence. So why aren't you acting on your privilege? You've got the lottery ticket. You know, I think of like, just to go back and be as honest as I is because I don't, I don't, I don't have to. And I'm embarrassed to say that, but that's the truth. Jack over there, Jack Sylvester, he's a producer's podcast and directed it with me since the very beginning.
And you're the reason why he got into video. He told me many years ago, I think he told me two years ago when we first started this, he says, he said, Casey is his dream guest. Jack, I'm glad I didn't cancel today. I thought about it. It's like, you know, instead of doing that podcast, sure it'd be cool just to sit in my office and do nothing again. I'm glad I'm here. But my question really is about 19-year-old Casey when he first arrived into New York City.
What is the advice that Casey needed to hear at that point that he just didn't get? And I'm speaking to all the Jacks out there that are 19. Fuck, that's tough. A quick digression. Like hearing that and then knowing that I'm like my notes app, I have 25 great movies that I wrote that I really care about. It makes me feel like Spike Jonze has this great idea for a music video to make with Fat Lip. And if he just decided to go make shelves and have lunch and not make that video, it might not have made me get off my head.
Like that's a fucking motivator. Like that makes me want to create stuff. But what's the one piece of advice? I think that, like, nobody cares about you is something that was never made clear to me. And I mean that in the most positive, optimistic, inspiring, motivating way. Like, I think that, especially if you see yourself as a creative or you want to exist on YouTube or as a filmmaker or as a musician or as an artist or a painter, any of those things, like...
you think that everybody's paying attention. And because of that, it kind of controls how you think. And even when I was young and fearless and nothing to lose, I was still so cognizant of like, how are people going to react to this? And what's the best way to do? Like, I was so aware. And the reality is nobody gives a shit. Everybody is so focused on themselves in this world. Nobody has time for you. And the sooner you accept that as a creative person, the sooner you're free.
Like you're totally free. Like do exactly what feels right to you. And if you can get yourself on that trajectory, then it goes back to what we were talking about before, about being novel, about being an original, about not being a photocopy of somebody who did something. If you're that photocopy, you will never be the original. But the moment you accept the fact that Nobody cares. Do your thing. Nobody cares. And then you start to go down that path.
You will just get better and better and better. Then you sprinkle on that patience I was talking about. You just keep going. You keep going. And eventually like that persistence will just smash into like opportunity. Preparation will smash into opportunity. Persistence will smash into opportunity. And like your moment of explosion, your detonation will happen. That was verbose, but you asked a big question. Thank you so much, Casey. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for.
But I did have a question because you are, I mean, many people consider you to be the very king of vlogging. And we've started a weekly vlog where, which is going really well. We've uploaded, I don't know, eight or so videos and we've got- Congrats. Engaged audience. Great. Because you are the king of vlogging in my eyes. The question I want to ask you selfishly is, What do you make of that whole medium? It's been on a journey. There was a lot of daily vloggers back in the day.
I used to watch the Shaytards and I used to watch you and then, you know, doing these daily vlogs. And as you said, I felt like I was your friend living your life with you. The algorithms change, things change. It doesn't seem to be the case that there's daily vloggers anymore. Even like vlogging on the platform seems to have kind of fallen down a little bit. What do you think of... I mean, at the time, like when I was doing my daily vlog, I really thought that it was like the ultimate maturation, if that's a word, of reality television.
Because you've got Kim Kardashian, and then you have her TV show. And in between those two things are all these producers and directors and writers and all of this fabrication. So what happens if you remove the middle part? And it's just sharing your world. Like that was the most sort of optimistic, whimsical trajectory that I saw the genre taking. And I think it just never happened. It never manifested that way. Instead, it was a pursuit of sensationalism and views.
I think it was corrupted by the view count. I don't fault anyone. I was susceptible to that too. It was corrupted by the view count. So it could have been something virtuous turned into something, I think, much less interesting. And that crashed and burned. And now in the ashes of that, I think we're seeing really, really interesting things. I think we're seeing niche succeed, which is so fucking wonderful to see. You had to be a YouTuber to succeed back in the day.
Like one of those. You had to fit in. You had to be one of those. And now it's like we have these micro creators that are finding their audiences. Like a friend of mine, all he's into is like fish tanks. It's all he does. is Fishtanks. His channel's huge. He's so good. These guys, Retro Dodo, they're friends of mine. They came to New York to film with me. Their whole channel is just retro video gaming devices. They're wildly successful. They release books.
And that is so amazing. You have eight episodes of your vlog out now. I haven't seen any, but like, I'm sure they're much more about this than they are the intimacies of your life and how you get, you know, like, you're able to lean into that niche. So I think like this thing had all this potential and it crashed and burned. And now out of those ashes, we're seeing these sort of beautiful little things sprout up. And I hope that that's the trajectory.
And you're not tempted to vlog again on a daily basis. If I could do it without having any notoriety or attention from it, I would do it. That's the only reason you don't do it? It's a big part of the reason. So interesting. The thing that I fantasize about is like Quentin Tarantino just disappears off the face of the earth for like six years. And then it's like, hey guys, I had a new movie coming out in six months and he is the only thing. anyone talks about is that movie.
And then he goes and disappears, crawls back into his cave. And it's like, that is the ultimate. I don't fucking know anything about that guy. Is he married? I don't know. Does he have kids? Like, where does he live? I don't know. What is he doing right now? I have no idea. What kind of car does he drive? Don't know. What are his hobbies? No idea. I know nothing about him. But his work, I know every word to every movie he has ever made. I appreciate that man for one reason.
That is his artistic contribution to the world. Like that is the ultimate. So for me, with like daily vlogging, it's like, I don't know how to separate the like selling of me and my personality with the art and that conflation starts to fuck with my head. And then when people in the street come up to me and... engagement yeah it it's it's that turning into something in the real world that just freaks me out how long have we been talking we've done a while the question left for you is what is one piece of feedback you want to give to me oh gosh shit what is one piece of feedback you want to give to me yes me steven but might be nervous to tell me When you set up a studio in New York City, don't do it 40 minutes out into fucking Brooklyn.
You figure out how to build this studio in downtown Manhattan so all of your guests are five minutes away instead of 40 minutes away. You were really busy today. No, putting up films and watching TV. It's been nothing. Our studio was in Lower Manhattan until this was the first time we've ever done it here. But that is great feedback. Don't do it again. That's great feedback. Did you come here on your skateboard? I thought about it, but it doesn't have the range.
Oh, shit. I appreciate that. Casey, thank you so much for the inspiration. Yeah, this is fantastic. I've talked about you for many, many years. And it's really about the principles of towards life, but also creation and the artistic side of your work that have inspired me so profoundly. clearly on the importance of truth and authenticity in what you produce, has made me rethink a lot of things that I do. And I think in a really important way. And you're someone that is further up the ladder that I think creators like myself are climbing.
So if you had to shout down these messages, mean that I don't have to go through the darkness or the confusion or all of those things that you've been through. So I thank you for that. And I'm very excited to see what you do because you're a pioneer and people that are creating for their own authentic reasons always make the most interesting shit. And so that's going to be a source of inspiration for me if you do make those 25 videos in the notes of your phone.
So please do. I appreciate that. I will do it for you. thank you casey thanks for having me do you need a podcast to listen to next we've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done so i've linked that episode in the description below i know you'll enjoy it