How to be Heard in a Noisy World - Casey Neistat at Craft + Commerce 2018

[Applause] hey guys I've never been to Boise before in fact I don't think I've ever been to Idaho before I know it's about time I went for a run like that like 20 minutes ago with that guy right there there was like a moment where I was like maybe we can like skip the whole talk thing so you keep this run going well that's just a testament of how great this city is great to be here thank you for having me thank you convertkit for having me Thank You Nathan thanks for having me I'm really excited to be here and I wanted to talk to you guys today share with this audience say a kind of a version of my story that maybe I haven't been able to share in a video because it's it's a kind of a story that only works maybe to talk to people instead of to a camera lens and then I also want to focus a little bit more on what I do in business and why I do it and part of the reason why I embrace opportunities like this and you know believe my family and fly 2,500 miles across the country is because most of the world and most of the people have ever heard my name or might recognize me when they see me they only know me as this kind of youtuber they only know me via the the things that I put out there and the reality is that that that is just a part of who I am Who I am as a professional Who I am as a person who I am in general and and opportunities like this let me dive into some of my other passions in life beyond just making videos and beyond doing fun things on social media that just remind me you guys want to see something okay so I haven't even looked at the footage yesterday I having looked the first yet but we shot this movie yesterday in New York City that by some miracle what my computer is not working now by some miracle we didn't get rested for or go to jail for but I want you to know that I was very nervous about getting arrested or going to jail because I wouldn't make it to Idaho but I think my computer's broken this thing was just on what happened Apple okay I'll try to reset this but it's a really good time um while I'm trying to boot this up so I can show you this distraction let me get back to my talk it just reset WTF Apple computers if Steve Jobs were here right now okay I'm just plugging everything in this is so gonna be worth it no it's like I've been so tempted to like tweet this picture but then it would sort of like wreck the whole movie that we spent all day shooting and like I have some I would like live streaming this anywhere No right okay so I have some friends in the NYPD who gave me some really strong advice as to how did not get arrested doing this whole thing advice that I followed really really closely but I didn't get arrested which is just wonderful okay ready hold on I'll show it to you I'll show it to you I'll show it to you I'll show it to you this is so awesome okay this is like what you're about to see right now is this screen grab from hold on see if I plug this in this should come up on the screen isn't working oh it is my split screen working okay we're up no I don't need that ones power I'll take that one okay ready hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on make the things on the thing okay look that's Lady Liberty that's a boat and that's new of an American flag my shorts are also an American flag America all right all right all right so thank you for having me so you know I my both my life my career started from a very tumultuous place like I was one of four kids and I have an older brother who was also very handsome he's the handsomest of all the nice fat children and then after the older brother came my sister who's the only girl and girls are always fun and cute and then kind of came me thirteen months later mistake and then my baby brother and after my baby brother was born my dad got you know so he was celebrated as the last kid and I was sort of this forgotten thing in the middle and when I look back or like if I was speaking to my therapist I have and explain this to her I have like I always had to be really loud as a kid to get attention because I was battling like the cute girl the firstborn and the baby like I was just I always had to be loud and that manifested in a lot of different ways and ultimately it manifested would like me just being bad and I think now like as an adult as a father as a reasonable human being I can look back and I definitely think that my frustrations when I was young were because I wasn't comfortable in my environment I was always frustrated I was frustrated at home I was frustrated at school and when you combine that sort of combustible adolescence with my parents getting a divorce and myriad other sort of personal things it ultimately like had me running away from home when I was age 15 and and you know getting my girlfriend pregnant and having a kid at a very young age and being forced to leave high school not because I wanted to or some genius or some romantic vision of I had to pursue my dream I had to leave high school because I had a baby and a like a baby mama which is a totally PC title like if there's a better title for baby mama let me no but for now I'm just gonna say baby mama I had builds the pay like I had to get a job for very real reasons and having a job even at age 16 for cludes me precluded me from from being able to go to school so it was tough it was tough and sitting there for four years like I lived in a trailer park and like I remember like what our budget was like I brought home three hundred and eighty dollars a week that was my total take-home after taxes are our monthly costs broken down by the week we're like 340 or 350 bucks so our margins were like this and like couldn't go to McDonald's kind of Mardin couldn't go to McDonald's wouldn't afford the gas to get there not because we couldn't afford the cheeseburgers which we also couldn't afford and when you live in that kind of struggle where it's just pure necessity like I'm scrubbing dishes and on the late nights at the restaurant where I could tell the boss is gonna be like if somebody wants to go home early tonight they can I hide in the kitchen so I don't go home early because I can't afford to miss a half an hour of pay you spend that time for me it was like 40 50 60 hours a week when I had a second job in a kitchen there was 7080 hours we you spend that time just fantasizing about what you want to do with your life and and now as an old man I'm 37 yeah I look back and it's like I have such an appreciation for that time in this struggle I have such an appreciation for that really really hard upbringing and I think so much of my professional ambition so much my personal ambition to have a very you know like safe family into my career to sort of get to a place in my career that I'm not dependent on anyone where I have agency over what I do where I can't be fired because it's my job because it's my company all of those things came from that very extraordinarily vulnerable place so early in my life you know if I up when I was age 17 it wasn't just like Oh shucks mom's gonna be mad at me it was like well how am I gonna put diapers on my baby how am I gonna pay for this newborns food and and you know when it's sort of that no plan B no safety net you just sure you don't screw up and it was with that like that was the that was the rocket fuel that was what that was what powered the engine that I think has taken me all the way through my career and I put tremendous emphasis on that so you know I left Connecticut out for baby mama dumped me and I moved to New York City and that was really to pursue a dream a dream that was born from again feeling stifled and not being heard and and that not being heard is like I think Pete when I was like a really a bonafide loser like if you are a 10th grade high school dropout who can't really afford to put diapers on your baby you have to get money from the government you have to be on welfare get free diapers and get free milk and like all your friends are going out on senior skip day and you can't cuz you have to stay home with the baby and then you have to go to work that like I was a bonafide proper loser and that was a scary place to be it's all my friends treating it so my friend's parents treated me that's how I felt people saw me out of the corner of their eyes somewhere in there at peak loserdom 4kc i with like a computer that let you edit videos it was my older brother vans computer and I remember editing a little video on that and all of a sudden it was like this amazing feeling of self-expression it was a way of sharing sort of what happened or what I felt what I was thinking in a way that went so far beyond what I could do with words because what I could do was with words there's always sort of clouded by the fact that I was this loser but I was this dropout that was this sort of this burden on society and I fell in love with that process and I like it it overcame me John Balthazar II who's an artist says that in order to be an artist you have to be possessed and I don't think I was possessed up until that moment but I was blinded by this idea that all of a sudden I could compartmentalize my ideas my thoughts I can share my perspectives I can share understanding I could communicate by making videos and that's why when baby mama dumped me I was like okay well I need to chase this down and I moved to New York City and and it was a hustle and it was a struggle and I think again so much of what I've been able to share with the world so much of what's been received via my to channel and social media outlets has been sort of this you know 2015 until now kind of version of my life when the reality is there were 10 years of real hardship 10 years of real struggle living in New York City 10 years of you know living an apartment that was effectively filled up with undocumented immigrants and people that just got let out of prison an apartment were like I shared a bathroom with 20 other units on the floor units being in a room with no kitchen and it was it was gnarly like that was my life and all the while I was just making making making and the hustle part of that was that I never said no to anything I never said no to anything because I could always see an opportunity no matter what it was if it was a Bar Mitzvah video then I was like well maybe someone will be at this Bar Mitzvah that could be the key to the next door I want to walk through if it was a wedding video I was like well maybe the bride's dad will be that guy maybe the bride's mom is an executive at a media company like every every everything that came my way it involved a camera I saw it as an opportunity just parenthetically to that it's like now when I hire people or I I conduct interviews to hire people I can tell in a split second if they have that sort of eye for opportunity or they have this sort of entitled kind of that seems really popular right now where it's like I don't think that'll be fulfilling for me a sec you man you came to me for the job that's not gonna be fulfilling for you like what am I here to serve you I mean that by the way I get angry and I think I'm allowed to like I said I've never said no to anything I did every day I work for free I would always pick up a camera for free if someone said hey do you think yes like you're kidding me like you stranger want to validate me by letting me come to you with a camera everything was an opportunity I said no to nothing and I think it was just that that that yielded the success the initial success that I had I remember I there was this famous artist - who was in downtown New York he's like a really cool artist whose culture is sold for like tens of thousands of dollars and he made a bunch of sculptures out of you like when there's like inside or something that I'd put those police there like like look I saw horses and it's like police line do not cross the wooden thingies you know I'm talking about guys are barricades yet you guys kind of crossed over there I just want to make sure we're still together here right okay so he makes sculptures and he put a bounty out for like if you could bring them to him he'd give you ten bucks because obviously you can't just take them without breaking the law if you're willing to take that chance you would reward you I got wind of this I was like ten bucks are you kidding me that's like lunch for a week so I went around and I got like 12 of those things and I stacked them up on like a like a like a cart that I found in the street and I'm like pushy can't bring it on the subway I'm like this like 20 year old kid like pushing them down sixth Avenue in New York City in the middle of the day and I remember a cop stopped me and he like pulls up next to me he's like hey man what are you doing that was like I gotta move these gotta move them down to Chinatown not a lie by the way and I think it was exhibited ed pan with which I gave that the cop he was like all right and just go but I remember like I did that because sure I wanted to ten bucks but I also did that because here's the famous artist and like this guy's not gonna give some some scrub at the time of day but if I show up with this and that's exactly what happened I'm pushing into a studio him being like how'd you get these and I was like and he was like he's something he's like you want a job cause I guess I did and he hired me he gave me like ten bucks an hour okay not a cool job my job was he was building this huge sculpture of a building out of like cardboard and he needed 10,000 squares cut by hand they couldn't be cut them so my job was to sit in the factory with no bathroom and cut cardboard squares all day long it was like torture not like it was just torture but I knew there'd be something there and then what I did and I did this with my big brother van I credit my brother van so much for this because he was always he always led in these things but after hours like nobody being this factory wasn't the artists to do just this like dirty space he rented we'd make videos of this guy's art sculptures like because they're so cool we make videos of them and then one day he busted us and he was like what are you doing you were like we were gonna always to anybody we just thought like anybody shown me let me see what you're doing and we showed him the videos and he watched the videos and he's like I don't want you doing anything else in here now but making videos and we were like okay deal cool I'm sure enough like you know those videos were a really great way for him to show off his artwork and one of his art collectors like you know like in order to buy it you got to be at a level before you're spending money on art you can't eat art you can't drive it anywhere you can't live in art you got to be to buy art one of his art collectors saw it and was like hey my husband is is turning 50 we're throwing a big birthday party for him you think these brothers you think they'd make a birthday video for my husband and the guy came to us and and he asked yeah yeah no birthday videos we got it no problem and he was like great just let me know your feet and we're like mm-hmm and we went and we debated this for like days days we're like to charge me 50 bucks we're like no no no then he won't take us seriously but if we offer ask for five hundred he might think we're being greedy and then we did some research and like the birthday party was at a restaurant called la cirque or i don't know what the Hellmuth star kids and we like look up the Sirk's menu and it's like appetizers $75 we're like okay well we go so we went to him we were like we would like to propose to you sir that we do this whole video for all-in fee of $5,000 and he was like great great what if they say yes you did not ask for enough money but not even we made this video and I remember the guys name who we made the video about his name is Fred Hochberg and his husband Tom his husband was like you know here's a list of people we want you to interview and he was like my assistant will set up the times and dates for you to interview these individuals and we were like cool done and he gives us the list and it's like first on the list President Bill Clinton second on the list like governor were like proof definitely definitely aiming above our pay grade here and we killed it we killed it with that video we almost got killed by Secret Service but we didn't but we killed it with that video um totally true story I'm like gonna run out of time telling you all my anecdotes okay this will be quick we go in Bill Clinton that office for like two years we just got Bush when we like go into his office it's dense and we go in and like his handler comes up and she's like a really smart super intimidating young lady and she's like she's like boys and we have like our Blake Salvation Army ties on and like shirts that are half tucked in and like mismatched shoes like the best most handsome OP that we could get for four dollars and and she's like she's like okay the president will be in here you have 30 seconds he's gonna read our prepared statement then you guys have to get out of here because he has to do more prepared statements and I was like I have a whole script for the president and she was like no no we have a prepared statement we handle our communications and I was like I understand in business I understand are really powerful words they don't mean anything that doesn't mean yes if somebody says like don't eat that cheeseburger and you're like I understand it doesn't mean you're not gonna eat the cheeseburger it just means you understood so she leaves the room and I'm sitting in there with VIN and I'm my brother I'm like van what do we do and he's like us it's gonna be stupid now look I know how does it look and I go in the teleprompter I'm like dude it's a Word document delete shut down computer so we're sitting there and all a sudden it's like boom doors fly open we like jump about our seats like this like Secret Service comes in it's really gnarly and I think comes a president he sits down he sits in his chair and she's like just a moment I'm sorry what's going on here and she's like I'm trying try and I looking at the end and I like look at the president and I'm like mr. president have an idea and he was like that's a great idea I love it and we shot the whole thing before she had the computer booted up and it was like the hit that joke like landed that was the hit of the movie and like that was a big opportunity for us and the movie played at his birthday party and it was huge and people asked us questions I remember there was one art collector there and he was like I'm sorry our dealer there and he was like hey yeah I'd love to show some of your work in mind my art gallery in Miami and one thing led to another and these are just all kind of building blocks these were all building blocks that took us a little bit further every single time I'm gonna skip a bunch of really fun details and stories and sort of fast forward to 2008 2008 was the year that we sold a TV show a TV show that my brother van and I wrote directed edited starred in did the animations for like we did everything they're basically YouTube videos that we put on HBO but we sold that TV show to HBO for like two million dollars it was it it was making it it was the benchmark it was the absolute high-water mark for any any person like us for our career that we could ever imagine it was beyond what I could have dreamt of when I was that kid in the trailer park who couldn't afford diapers it was HBO like come on The Sopranos this was like Sopranos Sex in the City this is like HBO's golden years - and they bought our show it was the biggest deal ever and then it kind of like nothing happened they bought our show we celebrate we told their friends there was like articles and newspapers and magazines and nothing happen we sat in our hands for two years and HBO sat on their hands for two years and ultimately they aired it and it played at midnight on Friday nights we had no control over when it aired or how often it aired it was one of the most well reviewed shows of that year but nobody saw it imagine if you could only see your favorite youtuber if you can only see my youtube videos once a week Friday nights at midnight like what my audience would look like what the reach could be didn't matter if people liked it they couldn't see it and after that it was it was sort of it was it was like a tough time it was really disappointing it was like I don't know it was like you chasing something your whole life and I was like that dog chasing like the curb of a car of the bumper of a car and you finally catch it and you're like this sucks it's like plastic we're supposed to do with this and that's what it felt like and after that you know like my brother and I kind of went our separate ways he wanted to move to California and focus on his art career I wanted to do more mainstream stuff all I cared about was me stream I wanted to reach as many people as possible with my ideas and my perspectives going back to that kid who never felt heard and it was in 2010-2011 that I decided to sort of leave all of that behind like stop trying to chase down feature film stop trying to chase down TV shows and instead focus on something that I had total agency over and I've been listening to some of the speakers today and I think there was a sort of a common thread which is this idea of how much control we as individuals now have over how we build personal brands and how we how we are heard and how we can be heard but this is 2010 this is you know eight years ago eight short years ago if you're anywhere in the spectrum of my age that was a blink ago and it was a really foreign idea to not want to chase down one of these big dogs to not want to be a part of an MTV or to be a part of an HBO but I didn't care what I cared about was something that was my honest perspective reaching as many people as possible and I saw the internet as a catalyst for that so I started a YouTube channel then I started a YouTube channel in 2010 and I didn't have much success like I remember how defeating it was how ego crushing it was that my like 12 year old son at the time who in like sixth and seventh grade he had friends in school who had bigger YouTube channels than I did and I literally was building a YouTube channel at the same time I had my own HBO show premiering and that was the struggle like the beauty of HBO the beauty of a YouTube channel a beauty of social media is that a Diyala tear we all start at the same place the entry point is the same no matter who you are Will Smith has a channel right now that's exploding and it's not these Will Smith's was making great content we all start at the same place and that was scary and hard for me and ultimately the first video I made that really exploded was like on my youtube channel was a little bit after I was a maybe a little more than a year after I launched my channel and it was literally that angry angry like ten-year-old kid who was pissed off at someone who wanted to be heard and instead of screaming I made a YouTube video okay I was gonna talk through the video why don't I just show you the video this video is I like to show this video for a lot of reasons but I'd like to show this video because I think this video really it's maybe the stupidest video I've ever made that's not even a joke it's like really is the stupidest video I've ever made but it I think it captures so much of what it is that is sharing a voice in capturing an audience in messaging something that is extremely relatable in a way that catches people's attention in just like stealing those barricades get that artists attention I could have never imagined what this stupid video that costs all and costs 40 bucks to make this video 40 bucks and where it brought me I could have never imagined so let me it's two minutes long when you play the video for you and then I can and then I'll break everything else down are we good if I click play it over there by the way these guys are good any screw up right here okay here we go I'm getting a ticket for riding my bike not in the bike lane so I got a ticket we're not riding the bike but often there are obstructions that keep you probably riding the bike [Music] [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 KC and Manhattan you got a ticket this month yeah I got a I think it's 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 Oh the sign says not illegal yeah I wish I had known that before it paid the $50 ticket well so fun video silly video exploded you know did like 5 million views in the first day and it just blew up on YouTube I think my favorite part of that is that the mayor of New York City at the time Michael Bloomberg had to answer to that video in a press conference and I look at a guy Mike Bloomberg I'm like think of all the things he's accomplished and now he has to answer a question about that video but I'd like to show that video because a lot came from that my my channel got a lot of attention I got a lot of attention from brands I had go on to work with and build a career in advertising and marketing with and I think probably most interestingly was I got a phone call from the New York Times and then New York New York Times it's a newspaper out of yeah and they were like we're pushing into video or doing some interesting stuff in video we're starting a program called op Doc's opinion documentaries we love what you did in the bike lanes video would you make videos like that for us and I literally asked them it was like you were talking about this scene I'm the guy who crashed the bike into a cop car I'm like yeah Casey we know and I did and I went on and I work with the New York Times for years I worked with them for a couple of years like spearheading the optics program my video is one of the first videos to launch that program we did a number of really successful videos together and all of a sudden I wasn't like this this kind of knucklehead to who's causing trouble on YouTube but all of a sudden that had sort of the New York Times and all the cachet that came with that and the doors that that opened additionally on a similar parallel at the same time brands the companies that I had made 30-second TV commercials for one of my revenue sources you know from probably 2005 until 2012 or so was being like a traditional commercial director you would show up on a set and you director other TV commercial it was a good paycheck it wasn't particularly creatively satisfying process but it was a way for me to make a living and after that video came out and I made other videos that got attention similarly brands started calling me directly saying hey would you do stuff for us and I started to realize the value of of influence the value of putting things out there that share a unique perspective that isn't otherwise available that isn't otherwise out there people had been bitching in New York City about the unfair enforcement of cyclists and on cyclist by the NYPD for years in most of those videos are thousands of them on YouTube it's some hipsters screaming at a cop to the cop either arrests him or something stupid happens and that's it and people don't want to watch that so how do you repackage that you how do you repackage that perspective how do you characterize it in a way that's approachable that people are willing to think about it and watch it engage with it like it and then it actually opens up a dialog none of that was premeditated by the way I don't want to make myself seem smart like that was I was just like that cop pissed me off let's go crash bikes into his car um okay last parenthetical here I got a picture like three years later no comment it was a picture from my wife and it's heard this big shit-eating ear-to-ear grin like this with the cop in that video he like pulled her over it was look good I know your husband made me famous funny other things happened in any event so it was it was always always in retrospective sort of every step of my career in retrospect it's like oh wow that's how that happened but at the moment looking ahead I had no idea where it was going it was always sort of acting out of instinct it was never acting out of looking around and seeing what the next guy is doing trying to emulate that or trying to find a similar trajectory it was always sort of being true to myself and always experimenting and always being fearless in that pursuit one of the businesses that I built off of that was an advertising company a production company where I brands would come to me and I would do I would make content for them make videos for them probably one of the bigger videos that I made was a video for Nike where they hired me to make a huge deal huge deals the biggest deal of my career in that space of the industry they hired me to make a video about their new sort of like Fitbit fuel band and instead of making their TV commercial I just stole the whole budget and spent it on like a vacation and then made a video about that trip it did not go down well not unsurprisingly until I handed in the video in the video went so viral the video was so big it was the most watched video Nike had ever put on the internet and it held that position until the World Cup happened four years later it was a smashing success it was a success that was so big that I'd built an entire career that I lived off of for almost five years after that one video and it was a video that had it knocked on that way would have cost me my career in that space but I looked at that opportunity and I was like I have an idea here that I believe in so much that I'm gonna do even though the consequences of it not being successful will be detrimental to me but I was more fearful of of the middle the middle always is what scares me the most I'm not scared of failure and I always want success it's the middle that I'm terrified of and I knew at the time with Nike if I did what I what I was supposed to do it would have been fine but it wouldn't have made my career wouldn't have done anything so I didn't do it and I did my own thing also somewhere in there another interesting opportunity was at the height of the success of that company that production company where I was doing multiple brand deals a year making videos for them this is before the word influencer existed this is 2012-2013 this is before branded content none of that lingo even existed that vernacular had not been invented yet I had a company it was a very formal interaction it wasn't like how much to first mention on your channel it was like it was I was being treated as if I was an advertising agency now it's just one guy with a couple of assistants working out of New York City with no formal experience but after several years of that I was I was given an opportunity something showed up at my door that I could have never imagined then it came in the form of a phone call and it was from a professor at MIT it was from some of the people who ran a nonprofit called the Sundance Institute which is a non-profit wing of the Sundance Film Festival and then it was somebody from the Rockefeller Foundation which is a nonprofit that bankrolled this whole thing and what they were looking for was one filmmaker in the whole world one filmmaker to invite to MIT to become an MIT fellow to work out of the Media Lab work a bunch of technologists and build and make things and they wanted to know if I wanted to go and I was like yeah I want to go you kidding me like you know bad I want to like wipe that chip of being a high school dropout off my shoulder like I don't care what you're offering me I just want to go so I can say you to all those people gave me for dropping out of high school that was my motivation but I went and and I say that I'm only 95 percent serious when I say that but I went and I knew it was a huge risk I just got married my wife had just gotten pregnant I was making a very good sustainable income doing this sort of brand work and with this very small agency that I had built and to go to MIT meant shutting all of that down for six months including like shutting down my marriage for six months but I did it and I gave myself this mandate I gave myself this this rule that no matter what I wouldn't back down from which was on the flip side of this I will do something that doesn't look anything like what I'm doing right now because I knew that safe place that I was in as a small sort of advertising agency in New York City I knew it wasn't sustainable I knew I didn't want to do it forever after four years of people calling me saying hey can you do for me what you did for Nike I knew it wasn't something that was scalable or even personally interesting mostly I was pursuing jobs for paychecks anytime I arrived at that place it means it's time to get off and find a nice to find a new avenue to go down so I went to MIT with really wide eyes and I learned so much there was one of the most incredible experiences of my life I was surrounded by people who were absolutely brilliant I was always every single day that done this guy in the room usually I'm only mostly the dumbest guy in the room but it was every day the dumbest guy in the room and I paid attention to the people around me and I learned a lot and basically what I was able to take in is that this very naive platitude which is that like technology is infinite what can be done within that realm you can do anything with technology and while I was there because I was lonely I couldn't even call my wife she was too mad at me for like six months pregnant I would just like go home and read books and I started reading books about technology about technology entrepreneurs about entrepreneurship in general and when I left MIT I'd this sort of Brandis vision of like I want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg er I want to be the next Jack Dorsey I wanted to start a social media network because I saw how they did it and I think I can do it and I remember like saying it's a Candace and she was like Casey please don't do this I never said it to my dad music he what do you know about technology why and there were very few people who had any understanding let alone belief and what it was that I wanted to pursue but it was something that I had to do and and building meme was like one of the most trying things I've ever done none of it made sense going in front of venture capitalists who hear from the smartest people in the world who control billions of dollars who just by one meeting one interaction decide whether to write you a check for a million dollars were knocked I was so far out of my comfort zone so far out of my league none of it made sense and by hook or by crook I got to a place we were able to start building to start doing it found a partner got some money got some capital got a space got a couple of employees got a couple of contractors started forward forward momentum and it was then that I sort of felt a kind of helplessness like what do I have to offer I've still never written a line of code and no idea what I had to offer this team as its as its leader it was it was via that process that I was like wait I have this YouTube channel like I know one thing that I'm really good at and that's selling and sharing ideas and that was where the idea for the vlog was born from it was purely a desire to share with the world what I was trying to do with this technology company the very truth of it was this the original vlog idea was to be a reality show about the tech company it was just like after realizing it was like four dudes in a room staring at a computer all day it wasn't very interesting or sustainable and that's why the camera turned on me and my family and every aspect of my life because I needed that to contextualize what the motives were behind this tech company but it was the tech company it was beam that was the reason for the vlog never the other way around and and ultimately like you know being had a lot of successes that had a lot of failures and it had a lot of successes and selling that company was one of the greatest triumphs of my entire life like to have an exit as an entrepreneur to have something that goes from an idea to selling it to selling it for to selling it for an amount that meant every every investor was able to get their money back and then some every one of those people who believed in me and wrote a check because they believed in me got their money back and made money that kind of success was something that was unimaginable and we did that and and that part of my life I think is something that I never took time to stop or appreciate there was a part of my life that I I still don't know how to share there was a part of my life that I never really got good at sharing with my YouTube audience it was like what it meant to like take the chances that we're starting that company and ultimately find success but it was huge and it had a tremendous impact on me and everything that I did and the immediate next endeavor in my life was something that I struggled to a point where I wasn't able to find a level of personal success beam under CNN under Turner I think ultimately was successful they're still doing great things for CNN see and very happy with what they're doing they're very happy with that investment but for me personally I didn't thrive in that environment like I should have her like I wanted to it was an environment where for the first time like I didn't know how to be the best version of myself I kind of struggled there I didn't find the success there that I wish I'd had and after leaving that after stepping away from that was when I knew that like I wanted to do something again like I wanted to do something again where I had total agency something that leaned into all of my passions and that was what got me to start my new company 3 6 8 and it's very scary it's very scary sort of this efficient task which is pushing this gigantic boulder up the hill and right as you start to get to the top you fall and it rolls over to back down to the bottom and why I keep running back down after and pushing it back up the hill or something I'll never understand it's something that my wife will never understand but that kind of I think that kind of pursuit again goes straight back to being that like that kid who has never heard I don't know that I'll ever find an off switch for chasing that down so what I want to do right now is I got to end this talk and then we're gonna do a little Q&A discussion up here which I hope you guys I'm out for but I just want to end this talk by showing you guys that Nike video maybe you've seen it maybe you haven't but it's really fun to watch in a theater like this with with other people but just to revisit it is this video that was a huge inflection point in my own career where I went from making goofy videos for fun - it actually becoming a business the videos the passion led the business it wasn't the other way around ok ready you guys psyched on this or you guys gonna hang out after this he can watch the QA there you know I'll leave ok cool there's like more more stuff but like I'm saving it like I got more

Channel: ConvertKit

Views: 154,164

Rating: 4.9392486 out of 5

Keywords: conference, blogging, youtube, casey neistat

Id: x9ULRUFJaeQ

Length: 42min 10sec (2530 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 28 2018