Casey Neistat: How to be Heard

[Music] i look around especially in the last 18 months of my life which have been so transformative and like you know i'm 35 now but i'm also like a guy who's a married guy with two kids who like lives in a house in new york city who like doesn't party or drink alcohol or do drugs or really do anything that you would describe as fun except for maybe every once in a while in the afternoon play like 25 minutes of call of duty only a sam's next door and he'll come play with me and like there's no phone calls before or after and it's not a big deal but like i am like i have found in the last year that i am now an adult and when i think about how i got to this place right now it it has enabled me or forced me to sort of look back at my life and say how did i possibly get here um and there's a lot i learned from that so i'm gonna pause right now um and play like a two three minute video for you guys because like i said i don't talk real good but this video is really good and i can see that you guys are like all slowly dozing off right now so we're just going to like play this video but this video probably more than any other video that i've ever made was an inflection point in my career that led to a place that doesn't even make sense especially when you see how stupid this video is um this is a really stupid video it's really dumb sorry okay it's the one that's labeled play this video first remember we talked about it [Applause] i'm getting a ticket for riding my bike not in the bike lane look at these look at this guy double park right here in a bus lane you're not giving him a ticket you're a bicyclist so it's anywhere um from ten dollars uh up to 130 depending on your wrecking but it's a bicycle summon device so some just for not riding on a bicycle anymore [Music] so i got a ticket for not riding the bike lane but often there are obstructions that keep you from properly riding in the bike [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] listen up as you've been hearing on our show and elsewhere the police continue to crack down on biking infractions as the number of bikers explodes throughout the city ticketing is on the rise casey in manhattan you got a ticket this month yeah i got a ticket about three weeks ago for riding my bike not in the bike lane not in the bike lane alex is holding up a sign that says you could have just said it okay his sign says not illegal yeah i wish i had known that before i paid the 50 ticket well so [Music] by the way that um the cop the cop that's in that video at least twice a year i'll be riding my bike like now like this literally happened last summer i'll be like riding my bike or riding my skateboard to the city and like six inches behind my back tire lights go on sirens go off the horn cars are pulling over and i'll look behind me and he'll be hanging out of the window you'll kiss me all right literally like i got a bunch of pictures from my wife this summer and it's her and that cop yeah i take himself so we're cool now uh okay so how you get from a to b i i made that movie at like a kind of a strange place in my career where i had spent a decade working with my big brother van and we were fine artists because we didn't know what else to call ourselves and we went from museums and art galleries to maybe making some tv commercials that were really really horrible but they hired us for whatever reason and their text always cleared um and then did some more experimental work and my brother and i we really we ran the gambit of what you could do pre-youtube when you had two guys two video cameras and a couple computers that could edit on them and we took that all the way to hbo we took that all the way to that guy that i told you tom scott saying i love what you do what could we do together and i said to him just give us enough money to survive for a year and we'll make all this work and then we'll figure out to do with it and that's what we did and then at the end of that year we formed and padded it together into something that looked like a tv show that hbo bought for two million dollars and it was just huge like we had made it and that was in 2008 when hbo bought the show and then all this like bad stuff happened and and the head of um the head of programming for hbo left the job and she bought our show but they still wanted the show and then it took two years before they put it on air within that two years my brother and i made the decision to stop working together it was all this stuff but where it left me was in early 2011 realizing i hadn't actually made anything in like three years and i kind of felt like a loser and i started a youtube channel called casey neistat not called the nicest brothers it was my channel i was really insecure about it and i started putting videos up on that youtube channel and i remember summer 2011 was the same time that my hbo show like was on it was like i literally was a guy who had a show on hbo that i wrote directed and starred in that was on every week and i had a youtube channel with like 30 subscribers and i was like man this sucks um and i was beating myself up about it and then i got like a bike ticket i got a ticket for riding my bike i was really upset and i went and i shot that movie with my friend oscar maybe you've seen him in some of the vlogs um and we made that movie for like 40 bucks and i say 40 bucks so the bike broke halfway through to fix the tires like 40 bucks shot on a point and shoot and we put it on the internet and it exploded i mean it exploded i remember the mayor of new york city at the time michael bloomberg being asked in a press conference about that video i was like um but the biggest thing that came from that was i got a phone call um from a an editor at the new york times and he was like we're doing this thing at the new york times videos and they're opinion focused and we loved your bike lanes movie and i was like you got the wrong this is the guy who made the bike that i the movie where i crashed my bike into a cop car you sure you mean you want to talk to me and he was like yes we love that would you make movies like that for us and the reason why i say inflection point is because i wasn't sure what to do my brother and i had found what i thought was the absolute apex of success in the hbo show three years went by sort of sitting on my hands i started putting these little movies up on on youtube and then all of a sudden what i always knew as and i still believe is the most prestigious news outlet in in the world that is the new york times wanted me to to make videos for them and they were going to pay me for that and it was a huge deal so the reason why i put so much emphasis on this story as the prime example of my career how do you get from here to how do you get from there is i remember being on the phone with lindsay who was like the junior editor at the times who was help who would help me and her and i got to be friends and we were chit-chatting and i was like how do you get how do you get a job at the new york times and she was like um you know i went to i went to harvard and i majored in journalism and she's like and i've committed my life to this and that's how i got this job as a junior editor at the new york times and she was like how did how did you get this job at the new york times i was like i crashed my bike into a cop car um so that's why that's why that movie is such a literal representation of getting from somewhere where you are to somewhere you want to be and having no idea what the right trajectory is because if you ask me how you get a gig at the new york times i would probably respond to you by saying go to harvard but i didn't have that opportunity so by by hustling by doing the only thing i knew how to do doors opened for me that i couldn't i couldn't have otherwise imagined um so so with that following that trajectory like these kind that kind of video got a lot of attention a lot of eyeballs and people were looking at me and i started making moves to new york times and those would get a lot of attention by smart people who didn't waste their time on youtube but would actually see videos on the new york times and sort of elevated who i was what i represented and what i could do and along with that came some real opportunities in the advertising space now my career in advertising up until this point was basically directing really terrible tv commercials that none of you have seen my mantra about the ad world was um a line that i saw from the bc boys where i said like the world of advertising is a nice place to visit but a better place to rob because it was just an easy way to get paid for me but i was really embarrassed about the work that i did there because what working in advertising was for me up until that time was they'd have like a script then they'd have a shot list and then they'd have like a storyboard which is literally like pictures of what every shot should look like and you'd show up on set and you'd be like i'm here ready to express myself artistically and creatively and they're like cool here do this and it was just like i felt like a robot could do it but it was a it was a means to an end it was a way of getting paid but as my youtube videos as these kinds of videos really took off they really found their footing um agencies advertisers clients companies would see them they'd be like he's capturing this tremendous audience making work like this what could he do for us and they would call me in and sometimes they would say like how about doing this just like you would do it for you and i was like this doesn't work and i remember pitching this idea of like why don't you just to my my agent like why don't you just get them to give me their money and then i'll go make a video and i'll like do it for them but the way i do it for me and them sort of like scratching their heads and being like that will never work and i like fired them i stopped working with them right then and there and i started to pursue that and it came to a head when i was able to get this gig with nike now nike had done a little project in new york city and they asked me to make a bike movie because i saw this bike movie for their little event i made them this little bike movie they loved it there was like no budget it was like a cool event for like 50 like bearded new york city skateboarding hipsters but it went over really well and they were like we want to do a bigger campaign with you and i was like great but there was no agency there was no one involved they're like so what would you do and how much money would you need and i was like yikes so i i gave them some ideas for some videos that they loved it was to launch one product and i gave them that i remember they asked me for a budget and i didn't know how to do a budget so i literally sent them a single number that's it they're like we just need they're like we everybody loves the ideas we're signed off let's do it we want to make all three videos this is perfect um just let us know the budget so i just like replied inline email with a number and click send and they came back like a week later and they're like yeah i guess that's fine um uh i don't know and um so the gig was to make the gig was to make three videos um and i had scripts for all three the script was like a single piece of paper that was like here's what the video would look like if i had to write a script for that i'd be like i'm upset about a new york city cop i get a ticket from a cop and then i'm gonna ride my bike crash it into stuff it will be funny period casey neistat like that's what a casey that's what a casey script looks like i don't know how to write and that's sort of what these three scripts look like that i sent to to nike and they're like we get it we loved it love the energy so i spent like four months making the first two videos and they were great and they're both on my youtube channel and i'm both i'm really proud of them um the second of which had like their huge like huge athletes in it like a us football player an olympic athlete like the best skateboarder in the world one funny thing is like they really rode me about like casey when you're around these athletes we can only get a certain amount of time they're under contracts and all this like you have to know what you're doing and i was like cool and they gave me like this big nfl star and we had no plan i had no idea what i was doing and we walked by like a high school and i was like let's go into the high school and he was like sure we went to high school like hung out while he was like high schoolers they were psyched to meet him and it was like this huge deal and we made the video and nike's like you know that in order for us to get permission to use that footage we um bought that high school a new scoreboard for their football field you know then they're like this is why we like to know ahead of time and i was like i totally understand um so it came time to make the third video um and now just to set this up a little bit more this was a couple years after i had done that this is when i was really finding my own footing and this was right after i sort of made this this decision to myself that i was going to pursue a new kind of work that i didn't want to make crappy tv commercials anymore but i wanted to do stuff that i really believed in and i made these two videos that i liked but it came time to make the third video and i remember like i i called my editor who's also one of my closest friends and i was like maxie instead of making the video that like i i wrote like the the script the treatment that i wrote i have this other idea but it's not really an idea for video i just think it'd be a fun way to spend their budget and i was like is there any way you can like just like just disappear with me for like the next couple weeks like we'll just take off and he was like yeah man what do you want to do and i was like okay this is like always been a dream of mine and they gave me all that budget up front like literally like wired 100 of the budget to me don't ever do that and i was like okay here's what i want to do that's something i've always wanted to do let's just go to the airport and buy a plane ticket to wherever the next flight out is then we'll go to that place till the board then we'll do that again to where the next we'll just keep doing that until we completely run out of money and he was like she's like yeah man let's do it but what about the nike video and i was like we'll figure that out we got the budget um and and so that's what we did and we i mean the spoiler alert like the movie came out great it was like the one of the most successful videos that nike's ever done it was like this huge huge huge deal but there was a real moment and by moment i mean like three and a half months where we had come back from what was the most fun expensive vacation we'd ever had and we were just sitting on like two hard drives worth of footage being like what have we done it's like we just have a whole bunch of footage of maxine casey on vacation and like i remember little things like vividly i remember we were supposed to premiere this video at south by southwest um and the date kept approaching and approaching and approaching and nike was like look we trust you we don't even have to see it so if you can have it done by and we missed it we didn't even show it like we didn't have it done we were going to premiere in new york city with this big product we didn't have it done i remember nike executive showing up um alex lopez awesome guy the guy who greenlit the whole thing shows up in my office and just like standing over my shoulder and max says we're like on the computers and he's like in the most polite way he could possibly be like what is this what am i looking at and we had no idea the the shot at the beginning the shot at the end where i'm like running into my office i have on bright red nikes with a huge swoosh and i think those shots are great because they sort of bookend the whole video but the reason why their shots are in there is because when i handed the video into nike they're like casey we love it are you wearing nikes in this and i was like i didn't have any and they're like do you have the fuel band on and i was like no that's a casio and and they're like yeah you know also you didn't cover your patagonia logo it's in every single shot and i was like ah so i was like just send me something with a really big swoosh on it and that's what those shots are from um also that um gigantic sinkhole that i jumped into i saw that on like a buzzfeed list of like craziest places to swim in the world and i was like let's go here and it was in oman in the middle east i think it's called like the bachmini sinkhole or something like that and we got tremendously lost going there we had one day we didn't want to be stuck in the middle east for two days um we're running out of money we spent like eight hours driving to the desert we finally find this place it's not like a national park there's no signs or anything like we pull up to it and like climb all the way to the bottom set the cameras up run all the way up to the top and look over and i was like i was like max it's too high and max was like casey do you see the shadow line he's like you literally have two minutes to jump or you're going to be completely in the dark and i was like okay and i walk over the edge like this this is one of the scariest moments of my life not because the height or anything like that but because i was sitting like this and i look up and there's this guy there with like 50 goats behind him and he's got the whole very traditional garb on um in a big like bright red like painted red kind of beard and i look around like this and he like sees this like tan muscly like nike shorts wearing dude in the middle of the desert and he looks at me and goes like this and i like you get that thing where you're like you get vertigo i was like i could step out and i looked at him and i was like and he goes and i literally was like like step onto that rock maybe like four feet that's a meter in english um to the left and i look over at him and he goes and like to this day it was like it was like very high what difference could that have made that he felt that siri enough to come over to me and stop me um so that video was a huge smash hit it was viral those all over the place it was on the news it was like brought me in to be interviewed it was like nike had this entire marketing strategy behind it where it's going to be like hashtag something travel like casey and the minute it launched they cancelled everything and they're like we just have to let this go like we've never seen anything take off like this and i think up until the world cup the following world cup that was their most watched video they'd ever put on the internet um and before i post i was like guys do you mind like me telling the story that like you didn't say this was okay and they're like this is why i wanted to work with you man and i was like well that's why nike is nike but um more than that it was a real sort of validation of what it means to follow sort of your instincts and that is a very literal very risky very dangerous way to do that and i mean that both metaphorically and literally but a very risky way to do that here i was sort of you know i was setting off on my independent career my own career then i'd been given the chance of a lifetime to work for the brand of a lifetime and i literally stole their entire budget to go on vacation had i not delivered they probably would have been like okay because the budget was still less than what they spend on snacks on a typical commercial but even so would have meant burning a relationship with the most sought-after brand in the business and squandering an opportunity but i still felt the need to sort of take it on and that's what it yielded and what that did in my career that was another one of those inflection points is immediately after that i got calls calls from everyone and they all said the same thing like hey do that for us um and that was really fun for a couple of years um because i'd always say yes then you'll do something different and the client would be happy and i was like this is insane like i finally now i'm figuring out how to make money doing just making my crazy videos and that's all i did that was all i did and i did that for about two years and then i got really really bored of it um i would make a branded video like that it would be enough money for like three months and i'd make cool youtube videos and then that money would sort of fade now take on another gig you know continue that and it got to a place where i felt like i was i was no longer exercising my ambition i felt like i wanted more and i wasn't getting it and then somehow out of the blue out of nowhere i get a phone call from a guy named sep kamvar and sep is a professor at mit and long story long they invited me to mit they offered me a fellowship at mit the fellowship was uh um it was paid for by the rockefeller foundation it was organized by the sundance institute like the sundance film festival the sundance institute and it was it was being put on by mit now those are like three three entities that had like wikipedia to understand just how big of a deal they all were um and they had chosen me as the filmmaker that they wanted to hand a fellowship to and bring me to mit um which of course i took and from a career very uninteresting career perspective that means putting my entire company everything on hold earning no money like literally going and saying and staying on campus in cambridge massachusetts and going back like literally showing up in a classroom in a lab like a science lab every day um and that's what i did and i remember like explaining that to candace's right after we got married and she was like you want to do what now she's like you really want you want to go to college and i was like yeah this this feels right um and i remember being there and it was all post grads it was all students that were there that had already graduated from mit or an equally prestigious university and i dropped out of high school in the 10th grade and i remember like talking to my professor and as he and i got closer and closer and i was like why did you like why me um and he you know he had a flattering very kind answer uh i think the previous person that they had engaged with the previous person that had done a similar fellowship was jj abrams so i was like why me and he gave me that flattering explanation but then at the end of that he kind of started laughing as he's like eating his fancy food up for lunch and he was like you know casey you're the only high school dropout there's also an mit fellow well that's great and i think that that is also another one of those examples of like how do you get into how do you get to be a part of in any capacity one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world i don't know i did it by stealing money from nike and going on vacation don't do that but i'm just trying to really illustrate that the path from a to b is never what you expect it to be um so this brings me to kind of my third act the tax shorter don't worry um of micro before i do that i want to show you guys something that's somebody's business card i'm gonna pick it up but i just want to show you something real quick check this out that's my mit student id i am anytime i get carded or have interactions with the police like we need to see some idea i give them this they're like this is an expired student id from three years ago and i was like oh that's my student id from mit um but part of the reason why i went there beyond the fact that you'd be a total idiot not too but part of the reason why i did that because i was exhausted of making these branded spots i wanted to figure out what was next like this is when i was now in my 30s i was 32 at the time and i was like i need to figure out what this next step is i know what i want now it's time to do and i was like this time at mit not working not doing what i've always done will force a reset in my life in my career that will will map the trajectory for what's next and what's next is that phase in your life where you're not figuring out you're doing it um and candace was like kenneth my wife was like i don't know what the hell you're talking about but i have a great time in cambridge casey and i went there and i i just watched and i looked around and i'd never been surrounded by so many people that were so much smarter than me normally i'm surrounded by people that are just a little bit smarter than me like today and every time i'm on a bus or on an airplane or anytime in public but this was like a collection of the world's greatest minds in one building and then me and i spent a lot of time looking around and i realized something very very naive and kind of stupid which was that like technology this thing that they do there the name is is the power of it is limitless and that's like such a naive thing to say it's like a platitude it doesn't mean anything but for someone who's always been so cognizant of the limitations of what making video can do also it was like tech anything's possible and then at the same time i read this book um called hatching twitter great book great book nick bilton wrote it should read it it's about the origin of twitter how twitter went from nothing to what it is now and what i took away from the book is that those guys are idiots just like me they're no smarter than me um and i know jack dorsey jack's jack's sort of a friend of mine the ceo of twitter very smart guy but i read the book and i was like okay he got at the twitter launch party he got really drunk and like busted his face open and the whole launch was a failure i was like i can do that and that's when i decided i was like i want to be a technology entrepreneur that's what i want to do and i was like even have an idea how to do it has to do with video and i pitched this to like my professor and he was like great is this an idea or is this a business and i was like it's a business set and he was like fantastic and i was like what do i do and he's like you need to raise money and i was like okay how do i do that and he walked me through the steps and then right then and there he he was like and i want to be your first investor casey i want to be your first investor here's a hundred thousand dollars this guy's a professor like he's not he's not a zillionaire he's not a rich man and that's when i was like oh like i guess like failure at that moment like the minute i accept this man's money someone who i respect number two on the list of two people i've ever met in my life that i would call a mentor i was like i can't let him down if i like slide that check closer to my if i take that and that wasn't the scary that was terrifying that was a terrifying moment but i did it and then i just sort of ran around to ask everybody else i knew for money um gary vaynerchuk i asked for money um i remember gary i asked him for money and i pitched him on my idea and much like everybody else halfway through my like pitch he just glazed over and i knew he had no idea what i was talking about like i completely lost him and at the end he was like okay great he's like i'm in i'm in how much can i be in for and i think i said i don't know what i said but i probably said a hundred thousand dollars and he's like i want to give you five five hundred thousand and i was like gary do you know like what do you what is it and he said something really profound he was like casey i'm betting on the jockey not on the horse he's like i don't know what it is i don't know what it is that you're what it is that you're going to do what it is that you're going to build but i'm betting on you and you know like the next two years were me going back to new york city and trying to find somebody to help me build this i've never written a line of code in my life and i met a guy named matt who i completely fell in love with who quit his job was like let's do this he and i became partners we put our heads down we went and we built the totally broken i'm gonna make a video about this because it's a total scam what we did um we never had a pit stack when we were fundraising like we never had a proposal we built an app that was not a real app it was fake where it was like it looked sort of like an app like a snapchat or twitter or something you've seen but it was like you touched on one of the the cells on it and like a video starts playing and like it's a really impressive little app and we pre-loaded all the videos and then we like had like we faked the whole thing but we never told them that it was fake and we even knew that they would press a certain spot because that's what everybody pressed it's like when they say pick a card at any card and they know which card you're going to pick we knew what button people were going to pick when we put the most sensational video and we just did that we did it to everybody and like we've eventually raised like three million bucks to build this thing and we built this crazy app and and before we launched it two months before we launched it i said to matt i was like matt we need like a huge platform to launch this with and i was like you know i wasn't i made some cool virals and i'll make a viral video for this but it's not enough i was like i have this idea to make a reality tv show about our startup that will get people excited about what we're doing and then they'll they'll download the app and that's how we'll do this and then like 15 minutes into making that i was like god it's really boring in this office all day every day so i turned the camera on myself and that's that was sort of how the vlog was born um a daily show that was about me and i was able to lean into my company and succ like wild success the launch of beam of my company one of the most successful app launches of the year and you know there was ups and downs of the company over the next couple years but i would say as the realization that our app that i had at that point taken almost four million dollars of other people's money opm it's a good one to know from down with opm um that this app was not going to succeed like this app like we were getting our we were getting our butts handed to us by snapchat like there's no like we're not going to win this game but at the same time the vlog was taking off in a way that i could never have imagined and i was like okay what is the link between me making videos on youtube and i was having a failed piece of software like what do we do here and i had no idea but again like how do you become a successful technology entrepreneur i don't know i mean i bet if you were to go to school they'd give you some trajectory but for me the recipe was by making more stupid youtube videos um and i remember as we were in the final throws of trying to sell beam like figuring out a way out i met with i met with the ceo of cnn and he sort of said he was like we had this great conversation and he was like we didn't meet about beam we're meeting about other stuff and he was like what can i do to get you to come work for cnn and i was like nothing like i don't want to be on tv and he was like okay and then i was like walking up the door and i was like you know what your technology sucks i was like and i mean that like the cnn's app it's it's it's okay it's getting there but i was like you know what you don't have is a startup mentality here what you don't have is a young fresh set of eyes focused on technology i was like that's what this company is missing and he lit up and he was like okay and then this big conversation this big conversation took place and started meeting with all of his counterparts and they absolutely loved what we what we had built and our product didn't succeed but what we did was we demonstrated an understanding in a space that is the most mysterious video and mobile no one knows that but we did something that people really liked just because like we lost the fight didn't mean we lost the war like we had built incredible technology and they loved it um and they fell in love with it they're like we want to do more like we want to work with your entire team what can we do here and at the end of that story is is cnn buying beam buying beam for 25 million dollars and leaving my thanks leaving they didn't buy the app like we shut the app down like the app's dead they didn't buy the app but what they bought was this vision that we had as a company and they believed in that vision so much that you know like we don't work out of cnn we stay in our offices we don't answer to cnn they just want us to do what we've been doing um and they want us to operate how we've been operating and they're giving us these kinds of freedoms to continue what we did because we tried once and it didn't succeed that doesn't mean it doesn't mean we failed at all it's like how many of you guys do you guys remember odeo do you guys love odio that website crickets crick odio was a failed podcasting website but after it failed then they built another website that was called twitter and then they're like bourbon if you guys download bourbon probably not because it didn't go very far but after bourbon failed they turned it into instagram and that is what cnn bet on it's like okay you tried something that didn't work but you showed us something we saw something there that was amazing and we've seen what you've been able to do in media what do you want to do next and i said here's what i wanted to do next and they said okay and they bought the company and they sort of rolled out the red cnn red red carpet for us for us to do that and that's that's where we are now so when i sort of say as an adult that i'm able to stand here and look back that's what i see but when i when i look to what's next i see like more opportunity and more possibility than i've ever seen before in my career and the comfort that i take in looking back at what's what what brought me to this position of success it was the fact that i never had an idea what i was doing and now instead of being scared of that i embrace that i hold it as close to me as i possibly can and that is what we're taking uh on this new mission on this new thing where we have all of cnn's resources all of their energy we have all their access we have everything we need in the world to make something great all we have to do is do it and when the ceo of cnn or anybody else says okay great how do you do that my answer is always the same we're just like i don't know but i have no doubt that we will find that path um okay i think that's it guys thank you yes i was 14 minutes over yes and that's okay though because we love you right but because of because we do have to be sensitive to the time we can either go for a break or we can have casey answer a couple questions what do you guys want okay so if anyone does need to get something to eat a drink or go to the bathroom just excuse yourself quietly everything is still available for you back there we figured you'd probably want casey dancer if you need one of those big hooks you know with a long stick that you put around people would stay here all night i'm sure to hear you talk okay so two you had your hand up very early yes hi casey how are you i'm right over here are you looking up casey hey uh my name's michelle and thank you for everything you've done i'm a vlogger because of you you pioneered the industry you changed advertising and thank you i was in television i was one of those people and because of you i go to people and now they do what nike did to you here's my here's your money go do what you need to do so thank you thank you uh it's because of what you did you you made that medium successful and you and you showed people that it's content driven and i mean so i have two questions for you one of which is you are wait wait hold on what's your channel called michelle ferrari oh thank you thanks casey michelle ferrari um two questions you are a skilled uh you know you're amazing at production value you do great things the balance between um quan content versus quality you know like this is just as valuable if you're saying the right thing where do you see that going in terms of television and how do you how do you what's your projection for that i mean one when it comes to technology and production which i appreciate the compliment but didn't i preface this whole talk by saying my entire video for today is out of focus um i never know what i'm doing with production and i think when it comes to technology as a whole in video production it's a race to the bottom i mean my cell phone that cell phone in your hand they shoot 4k video that's incredible and what people most people don't know is like literally half of my vlog was shot on a cell phone like a half of every episode was shot in a cell phone people don't know people don't care the race the bottom means the technology the hardware itself this stupid stuff like i like it because i like tech and i'm a nerd but like it's just going to disappear and it's going to be understood that everything's going to look great so it's like we all get the same tool and what can you do with it but the tool itself is now egalitarianized it is now a true meritocracy everybody gets the same tool and like with that tool you can like wage war and build an empire or with that tool you can like shoot a stupid cat video that like goes viral and i'll end up watching 100 times but it changes the value so like for all of the people in here who are advertisers that want to go and make a high production quality video for their client and they want to charge this amount of money but you know i go to them i'm a vlogger and i'm like hey listen i can shoot it on my iphone and hold it up and i'm going to get way more engagement way more views and then that high-end production value it's it's creating a big change in the industry so how do we well i think so but i think there's a i think there's a gigantic disconnect i just think it's a differentiation in the industry i think that you know feature films we see today everything from star wars to you know the movie every movie that's nominated for in austria this year was now shot on digital not shot on celluloid i think that the industry itself is changing imax movies are you know a multiple of five or six more expensive than 35 millimeter movies like there's all kinds of nuance in there and just because you can have six million subscribers and make videos on your cell phone doesn't invalidate big beautiful amazing productions so not to get too into the weeds with this but like it is a nuanced discussion when you get to that level of granularity because there is tremendous value in beautiful productions i love them i appreciate them but that doesn't mean that an incredible story can't be told using the most primitive technology one example my favorite example is i saw this mike tyson documentary this is a couple years ago in the theaters at an independent theater in new york city and then the same day because candace had just broken up with me so i go to movies by myself the same day i went and saw transformers 3 or whatever the hell it was and so i watched this movie that was literally just a camera fixed on one man's face as he was talking for two hours and then the next movie was a 200 million dollar production the most ambitious cgi in the history of cinema i fell asleep in transformers and i was fixated by my mice tyson stories so it is like it is always the quality of what is delivered not how it's delivered but then the nuance of that doesn't mean that it invalidates one or the other like jackson pollock dripped paints and and you know like yeah it's it's it's what it's always what you do with it any other 25 part questions thank you one one one more question we got a couple that's it this is what this is q and q i know yeah qaqa yes qqa uh we got a minute two and a half minutes on the clock so you have a uh at ten seconds i'm not gonna pick because i can't pick favorites but you want to win no i want you to pick you want me to pick yeah jeez okay well sure you gotta you gotta be loud is that your question the answer is good thank you everyone for coming i mean one i think influence is a horrible word um i hate that word influencer but it is real i think the reason why influencer is a terrible word because it talks about the effect not the cause it's like um it would be like calling a musician an ear pleaser you know or like someone who paints portraits like an eye pleaser like it's it's what it influences what it does if you create stuff that affects people um that's near here over there but you know i i don't think like there's a lot of talk what's your name what kevin was saying it's like in the ad industry right now like the biggest topic of conversation is influencer marketing because it's disrupting the entire marketing market as a whole before you would do buys media buys you'd do them on television you would do billboard buys you'd do magazine buys because that's where the eyeballs were now eyeballs are on people that are using snapchat really well doing youtube really well working in other genres where the creator is also controlling the distribution and the big fat question mark that kevin asked is like is there value there and the answer is absolutely the reason why it's disrupting the industry so profoundly is because unlike a blank billboard that you just pay and you put your ad up there that influencer is also having a huge hand in dictating the creative behind that distribution and what that does is it makes the creative industry the advertising industry vulnerable because you don't need agencies you just call casey you don't need agencies just call michelle just call michelle so you can get on her channel and that is the disruption that you're seeing and i think that it's valid i think that it matters i think that it's right i think that it's effective but i also completely empathize with people in the ad space that are made nervous by it because it's unaccountable it's reckless it's inconsistent there's no way to really like a tribute roi it's a much much more complex monster because it's like it's there's no head on that snake it's like an army of ten thousand soldiers that a single general or a single country that they're fighting for everyone is rogue in the influencer space but they're also controlling the mediums they also have the biggest reach so what was your question again i have no idea what you asked me kevin oh easy question so the question was like what's the one tip for people clients brands agencies that are considering working with influencer marketers and that answer is do the work do the work like why is it that there are 10 influencers i mean i'm one of them so i'm not complaining but why are there 10 influencers that get 99 of the work and it's because it's because people in the ad space one i think they're scared of working with people that are unknowns and two it's like there's maybe a reluctance to actually get out there get your hands dirty and find people that are making the kind of content that works best for you like if you if your job is selling tampons don't go on don't go to the biggest skateboarder on youtube and be like hey man we know you have an audience of 13 year old boys will you help us sell them maxi pads like it doesn't work like know your audience and know who know who these influencers speak to and how can be effective and i think that that is something that's tremendously overlooked in the industry i think numbers are what's looked at and not impact my channel i was doing uh close to seven figure deals on my youtube channel and i had 400 000 subscribers it was because of the quality of the work and the way it was impacting people and affecting people it's not the numbers so much it is what's being communicated and i think that's something that does not get anywhere near enough attention in the um this got real industry real fast didn't it um do we yeah so i know there's a lot of people who didn't get their questions answered from casey we are on a tight timeline but you can all send us a tweet use the hashtag h ask casey and if there's some way we can get casey to answer some questions in the future we will try to do that for you and if you are willing to just do that on on my plane or not if there is like you better follow him though if you're not following yes yes thank you so much casey for being here we really appreciate it thank you everybody smile thank you thank you that's it we go now

Channel: Haste & Hustle

Views: 1,028,955

Rating: 4.9073305 out of 5

Keywords: CaseyNeistat, Casey, Neistat, HasteandHustle, Hustle, Niagara, contentcreation, video, youtube, filmmaking, CNN, influencer, marketing, entrepreneurship

Id: vyM4P3jXToA

Length: 47min 10sec (2830 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Always said vlog was started for Beme never about the art just the money. Also I sort of find it haphazard how he goes through life with big dreams without a plan on other peoples money.

The truth is great businesses happen when you spend countless hours planning and doing boring stuff instead of making vlogs, hanging with viner/Snapchat buddies, and telling stories about vacations.

[u/CandiceOscar]

This is not new. He's said this in the vlog almost as many times as he's told the same boring mountain climbing story, or rehashed his 9/11 tale, or stated how hard working he is.