Draw My Life - Casey Neistat

okay so I was born March 25th 1981 I can't draw very well so my friend Kim is gonna do that part March 25th 1981 my mom said that she was watching a horror movie when she went into labor with me so there's that I had three siblings and we lived in a lower-middle-class part of Connecticut my dad was a restaurant supply salesman he sold forks and knives and dishwashers and stuff like that he worked a lot and my mom was pretty hands-off when it came to parenting I described the majority of my childhood as wonderfully unsupervised I was a pretty bad kid like there are these train tracks in our backyard and we'd hang glass jars of mayonnaise off of the bridge so the jars would smash on the windshield of the train as it drove by also this one time my brother and I lit the tree fort on fire we didn't mean to we just want to have a small fire in our wooden feet for [Music] I didn't hate school but it wasn't great I was always in trouble breaking something school trouble teacher trouble I remember vividly this constant anxiety I felt for most of my early school years there was a constant tension that my parents our teachers were going to find out about whatever trouble I was up to getting trouble really escalated when I got to high school I was always in the vice principal's office then detention then suspension freshman year was pretty uneventful but by my second year I was trying to find my place in school and started hanging out with some of the really bad kids I got into a lot of fights and it was around this time that I discovered smoking weed and drinking alcohol this was also around the time my parents told us they were getting a divorce that didn't go well at all I put all the blame on my mom I really didn't like her then one night we got into this big argument and she ended the fight by saying do what I say or get out of this house and I left I was fifteen years old and I ran out at 9 o'clock at night on a Tuesday okay so 15 years old and on my own I I stayed with some friends for a while and eventually moved in with these two slightly older girls naturally one of those girls became my girlfriend and a few weeks after I moved in with them my girlfriend got in a fight with her roommate and she told me she wanted to leave so her and I got her Honda and we left we drove from Connecticut to Virginia where my big brother van was in college I was happy in Virginia but after three months there my girlfriend got pregnant so we moved back to Connecticut I dropped out of high school we lived in her friends basement for a while and eventually found an apartment I worked in this seafood restaurant I was a dishwasher I made 8 bucks an hour then the following April just after my 17th birthday Owen was born and I was a dad now I don't know that teenagers are emotionally equipped for the magic that is having a child but the feeling I had in the hospital just after he was born it was similar to Christmas morning when I was little like that feeling you have when you get exactly what you want we moved into a trailer park it was cheap and in a less dangerous neighborhood and we were poor we were really poor we were even on welfare for a little while but I never liked the idea of handouts slowly things settled life was ok I made a little bit more money in the restaurant and when he was about a year and a half old we drove in the new york city and stayed at my brother's apartment in Brooklyn it was our first vacation my older brother had just gotten an iMac one of those funny shaped blue ones actually this is the exact iMac this is the first iMac you could edit video on and we made this little movie of taking Owen to the zoo I love the process when we got back to Connecticut I immediately maxed out my only credit card and bought my own computer I spent all my free time making these little movies and for the first time in my life I felt like by telling these stories I had a voice then for a lot of good reasons Owens mom dumped me it sucked I didn't know what to do now before the break-up I had this plan this dream to move to New York City in like five years but I just kind of said to hell with it and decided to move to New York City immediately it was June 2001 I was 20 years old and I moved to New York City I was here to become a filmmaker filmmaker sounded so much cooler than dishwasher this was without a doubt the hardest time of my life I I didn't know anyone I didn't have a plan and for the first time ever I didn't get to see my kid every day he stayed in Connecticut with his mom and I'd go back to be with him three days a week it made me so sad I didn't want Owen to grow up and think his dad was a loser that town in Connecticut was it felt like a dead end that first summer in New York City I worked as a bike messenger and eventually this artist named Tom Sachs somebody my brother knew hired me for ten bucks an hour put aside a hundred dollars a week because that's what it would cost to get back to Connecticut to see Owen no matter what I wouldn't touch that travel money at the end of that summer my three-month sublet was up and I moved into a friend's couch in the financial district of downtown Manhattan my buddy said that I could stay there for a month and the day I moved in was September 2nd 2001 [Music] the blast from the first plane knocked me out of bed and by the time the second plane hit I was on my bike trying to get away the blast from the impact of the plane knocked me off my bike to the ground [Applause] my dad called me that morning and he said to me it's time to come home time we moved back to Connecticut and I thought about it but I figured I could barely afford to eat I didn't have anywhere to stay no education few prospects I thought there's just no way if you get any harder than this and if I could figure out how to get through this I'd be ok and and so I did I committed everything to New York City to my big dream and that's when things started to turn around my manual labor job turned into a real job with real opportunities as a studio manager for that artist a friend of a friend freaked out after the World Trade Center attacks and left the city I took over his super cheap apartment all the while I was making movies about whatever subject matter I could come up with I worked with my brother van we made movies for anyone that would pay us birthday videos and in the act for reals we literally said yes to anything that involved pick me up a camera then 2003 I got my first iPod and when the battery died a year and a half later I got really pissed off and made a video about their dead battery policy and I put that on line now this is like three years before YouTube but that video exploded this is back in the day when the word viral was used to describe an STD not a video Casey started with you you know I got the first ipod generation 1 and all of a sudden people started asking about other movies we had made in in 2004 a video series we had shot in my apartment called science experiments was invited to be shown at the Sao Paulo biennial in Brazil things things started to get good I had a little bit of money and I was able to spend more time with Owen and for the first time he and I started taking trips together what the pretzel for you're gonna feed the pretzels and the dolphin yeah when we traveled I felt like I was able to get to know him in a way that was entirely new when we traveled it was just us I love that [Laughter] in 2006 I met this guy named Tom Scott he ran a group of local TV channels and he hired van and me to make some videos the videos came out great and and he made this big offer to us he simply said I want to bankroll a big project you guys do now I've always understood luck to be where opportunity meets preparation and this was a big opportunity and we were certainly prepared so he agreed to fund us for a year it wasn't a lot of money just enough so my brother van and I lived and documented stories from our lives every couple of weeks we edit these experiences together to form like a 25-minute movie sort of eventually we had eight of those 25-minute episodes and we called that a TV series then in 2008 we we sold that eight episode TV series to HBO for just under two million dollars it was it was a big deal [Music] HBO show premiered in 2010 then my brother and I stopped working together I produced a couple of movies and ultimately I just shifted all of my focus to YouTube I found my voice telling stories with my videos back in that trailer park and I had finally found an audience for it on the Internet Owen Owen turned 16 a couple months ago he's taller than me now he's smarter than me and he's definitely better-looking than me we would never stop traveling I don't think we ever will and I I owe that kid a lot the first two decades of my life were spent being told I was wrong not fitting in but this last decade of my life you know those days when you're in a rush to get somewhere and you catch every green light that's that's what it's felt like [Music] 33 years old and I have no intention of slowing down [Applause] [Music] Oh [Music] like [Music] don't meet me in no it could [Music]

Channel: CaseyNeistat

Views: 8,566,904

Rating: 4.9686751 out of 5

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Id: V6Y-ahQFQDA

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 09 2015