How I Built This with Guy Raz - Video Artist: Casey Neistat

Episode Date: March 2, 2020

When Casey Neistat was a teenager, the odds were against him; he had dropped out of high school, was washing dishes to pay rent, and was a father by age 17. But he eventually scraped together enough money to buy a camera and an iMac, and began churning out short films that went viral even before YouTube took off. Despite having to start his career over several times – Casey Neistat became a brand name in social media and advertising, and is now one of the biggest names on YouTube, with an audience of nearly 12 million. PLUS in our post-script "How You Built That," Pat Erley explains how struggling with a perpetually stopped-up sink inspired him to design Dripsie, a no-clog sink strainer. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe, all loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries, visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the home we booked on Airbnb. It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city,

made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. So before we start the show, I want to tell you about two live episodes I'll be recording in just a few weeks and how you can come see them in person. If you are a fan of 90s alternative music, you will not want to miss my live conversation with the founders of Sub Pop, the legendary recording label behind bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, The Shins, and many, many others. That show is happening on March 26th in where else, Seattle, at Benaroya Hall, and then the very next night, March 27th, I'll be in San Francisco interviewing Ken Grossman, founder of one of the biggest craft beer makers in America, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. That's happening at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco.

Now, if you haven't been to a live recording of the show, they are super fun. Come on down, meet your fellow listeners, be a part of the show, laugh, cry, grab some How I Built This Swag, and come say hi to me and the team. So I really hope to see you in either or maybe both San Francisco and Seattle on March 26th and 27th. For tickets, visit NPR Presents.com. And we're spending every waking moment together making videos. And we ended up calling it the Nyshtap Brothers and calling it a TV show. And what's incredible is you end up selling it to HBO just a short time later for like $2 million, which must have been life-changing for you. Yeah, it was, it was incomprehensible to us.

It was, we shot this video on a $200 camera we bought at Walmart. We edited this in I-Movie. You know, this is when HBO was, you know, Sex in the City, Sopranos, six feet under, the wire. And the Nystatt brothers? From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Casey Nystatt scraped together $1,200 to buy an IMac, started making home movies, and turned video vlogging into a multi-million dollar business. So in almost every episode of this show, you'll hear a story about a person or people who built a company around a thing, PETA chips or yoga pants or cell phone cases or coffee, a tangible product that's become a well-known brand, something lots of people use in their daily lives. But today's guest is a little bit different.

Yes, he's got a pretty well-known brand, and yes, lots of people consume it. And yes, it's become a profitable business. Except Casey Nystad's business is Casey Nystatt. He is the brand. Casey is a filmmaker, but he's best known as a YouTube personality, with almost 12 million subscribers to his channel. He's posted hundreds of videos on YouTube, like snowboarding through the streets of New York after a blizzard.

He's documented some of the most personal and intimate moments of his life. Yeah, what did he say? And his signature style of filmmaking and candid first-person delivery... We just finished the steady cam shot where I'm carrying the gimbal on my skateboard. It's going to look so good. He's actually influenced a whole generation of YouTubers. Casey's a legend. He deserves to get his own memorial. He's legendary.

And more than a decade ago, he recognized the potential of YouTube as a way to build out a media company. But even though Casey Neistadt is one of the most successful self-taught filmmakers to come out of YouTube, It's an unlikely success story. At 16, he was a high school dropout. At 17, he was a father. And for a while, Casey washed dishes and restaurants and lived in a trailer just to keep his head above water. Casey grew up in a mainly working-class neighborhood in the industrial town of Groton, Connecticut. His dad was a salesman for a restaurant supply company,

and his mom stayed at home to look after Casey and his three siblings. There was an omnipresent financial stress that was in my household that was never not there. The majority of my parents' fights, I remember being about money. And, you know, this was the 80s where there was a lot of tumult in the economy. And I just remember my dad's business being so tied to that economy. And I remember him coming home later and later. I remember his stress. I remember hearing my parents have to discuss how my dad was.

going to have to ask his mother, my grandmother, for some sort of loan to help him keep his company from going bankrupt. But how that, you know, how that manifest in the household was, we, you know, we didn't, we didn't have much, but I don't remember, I don't remember us wanting much either. There's always enough food in the house, never anything fancy. We got that cereal that came in a big bag and was called like tastios instead of Cheerios. But my parents' financial burdens, I think, were largely shielded from us, but it was by no means sort of an affluent childhood. It was not, we were not a household of means. Were you a pretty well-behaved kid, or were you, I don't know, a troublemaker? No, it was awful. I was awful. You know, looking back at it and I do spend a lot of

time reflecting on it, I think that I would describe my parents, you know, parenting style as one of, like, absence. Like they were never around and I always felt like we were on our own. It was a very lord of the flies mentality in our household. And because of that, I remember like being really little and my older brother and I accidentally burning down the tree for it. I remember like my parents throwing the Christmas tree sort of over a cliff in the backyard after Christmas because it was easier than trying to throw it away. And my, my big brother, Van, and I thought it would be hysterical to set it up on the train track. So the train would have to crash into a vertical, perfectly mounted six-foot-tall Christmas tree. You know, I remember getting, it may have even

been suspended, but I think it was detention in school because I was skateboarding in the hallways. So it was that sort of thing. And I think that I was absolutely a problematic kid. I mean, when you have that self-image as a kid, you kind of, you become that. If that's what you're told you are, then you, um, you know, for better or worse, you then, that's who you are. That's your identity. Yeah, look, you know, I spend so much time now, Guy, thinking about this because I, my parents and my teachers and all of that, it affected me. But the thing that stands out the most now when I look back on it are the parents of my friends. I remember them, you know, calling me a loser, like

literally using that word. I remember, you know, I remember my friend from seventh grade, like asking his mom if I could go on a ski trip with them and her explaining why I couldn't and I could hear her give that explanation and I remember those things vividly and that affected me it struck me deep if I came across you as a

15 year old right and I was like hey Casey like let's talk like I want to just find out what's going on with your life like would you have been sort of sarcastic and and joking or would you have been willing to kind of sit down and have an earnest conversation about what was going on

in your life? You know, that's tough. I don't know if anybody's ever asked me that before, Guy, but I think that I know that the,

I was, you know, I almost only spoke in the most sardonic of ways. I was always joking. I was never serious. But I think that that shell, that superficial

shell, was very fragile and I think it could have been broken very easily. I remember vividly, Lou Gebordi, he was my 10th grade English teacher. I remember causing

so much trouble in the class and having the whole class laughing and all at his expense he couldn't teach and he pulled me out into the uh into the hallway instead of throwing me out of class he pulled me into the hallway and he just like you know he looked to me dead in the eye and said what's wrong and i just like i burst into tears um burst into tears and had a very earnest conversation with him about my parents splitting up and all this sort of tumult in my life and um you know he he he was able to the reason maybe why i remember his name among all of my my teachers is he was able to break through that shell very, very easily. And I mean, what, you were, because you were like 15 when your parents split up.

And, I mean, it sounds like you took that really hard. Yeah, I took it really hard. You know, I don't think, I don't criticize them for this. I can only imagine what it was like for my parents. But, you know, my mother, whether it was on purpose or not, it really felt like it was our fault. And then my father was just so caught off guard by it that he sort of pulled back. He withdrew. And that left us sort of confused.

And it was not a, it was not a, it just wasn't a very happy household at that time. You were clashing with your, with your mom a lot, fighting? Yeah. You know, I don't, I don't know if this is fair or not, but I think all four of us kids directed the blame at my mother. And I was always the most vocal about that. So throughout the divorce, I really vilified her for, you know, for bringing us to that place. And then ultimately, you know, I brought that frustration to school. And ultimately, I was, I think, suspended from school for using my pager in detention.

I had a beeper back then. Nobody had cell phones. And my friend texted me, and I wanted to call him back. So I walked out of detention. It was a huge deal. And my mother that night. You know, she screamed at me and she said, you know, give me that beeper, get out of this house. And I didn't want to be seen weak in her eyes. I didn't want to back down or relent to that.

So I left. I was 15 years old. It was a Tuesday night and a school night and it was cold. And I left. I walked. I took a backpack and I left my parents' house and never went back. Where did you go? You know, that first night I stayed at the one friend's house that I could have walked to, and I stayed slept in his basement, and then I spent the next couple of days in various friends' houses until their parents would be like, that kid Casey is actually sleeping here, why is he here, and then I'd move on. And then ultimately, there are these two kind of cool girls, and they live not too far from the high school in this apartment complex, and they were cool because they had just graduated, and they had their own apartment, they both had jobs, and they paid rent. and I just got in a real job washing dishes, and I was making like, you know, 100 bucks a week washing dishes on Saturdays, and the cool girls invited me to move in with them

as long as I chipped in on rent. And I was like, sweet. So I had a permanent place to stay on their couch, and I think I had to chip in like 200 bucks a month or something like that. So you're basically crashing at their house, and they're a couple years older than you, and I guess soon you start, like, dating one of them,

This is Robin. One thing leads to another guy. And yeah, she and I started dating. And it was a fun couple of weeks. Ultimately, school finished up. And her lease was up. And she didn't know where to go next. And she and I decided to leave Connecticut altogether and move to Virginia,

where my big brother Van was in college at the College of William and Mary. And you just figured, we'll figure out when I get there. Like, we'll go see him and then maybe get a job there or something. Yeah, I think, you know, we were just so naive. And she was a waitress and had a couple of really good waitressing jobs. So she had no trouble at all finding a job, waiting tables. And, you know, anywhere there's restaurants, there's somebody willing to hire a kid for eight or ten bucks under the table to wash dishes. And I knew that would happen.

And that's exactly what we did. All right. So you're living in Williamsburg. You know, both of you are so young and not quite sure. How this is going to end? But you find out that Robin is pregnant at a certain point. Yeah, you know, I think that she and I both knew that she was pregnant, but really didn't.

We're not willing to confront that. Like, we knew something was happening. Her body was changing. She was feeling different. We had been wildly irresponsible with sex as teenagers tend to be. and we went back to Connecticut for a visit and it was on that trip that like her cousin who was this older woman who looked after us

and I remember her pulling Robin aside and being like you're pregnant and she could just tell at a glance you're pregnant and that was the first time somebody else acknowledged what we knew and it was less of a gotcha moment and more of a moment where she and I both were forced to confront this reality

and I remember drawing driving the 10-hour drive back to Virginia. And for the first time, like, she and I were talking about, like, okay, we're going to have a baby. You know, we packed up our things and we said goodbye to this really, like, fun life that we had built for ourselves in Williamsburg, Virginia, and we moved back to Connecticut and into the basement of that cousin who was, you know, almost like a mother figure to her.

I mean, at this point, right, you could react in a million different ways. And I, obviously, I think it's natural for us to put ourselves in that situation I think what would I have thought? And I think I would have been terrified. I mean, were you, did you feel that way at all? I didn't. And I remember not feeling that way. I remember it was nothing but excitement for me and enthusiasm from me.

And I remember Robin freaking out. She was stable as a rock, but I remember late in the pregnancy, her having a really tough time. A tough time with... Emotionally, just what's going to happen in life with, you know, with the fact that she's, you know, she's with this 16-year-old who's supposed to be her caretaker of her and her unborn child, and I was washing dishes. And, you know, she had a very natural freak out. And I remember my reaction to that as, like, one of total kind of bewilderment. I couldn't understand why she was freaking out. Wow.

And this is not something that I acknowledge in retrospect. This is something that I was, how I felt then. How I felt then was, this is great. Finally, I have a reason to be responsible and finally have a reason to get life started. Wow. And the minute she got pregnant, I was like, okay, great. Now it's about proving to this little baby, proving to this kiddo that I made that, you know, that is, dad's not a loser. And that he can have the life that I wished I could have had.

Yeah. And my mission was just to accomplish that. Like, all I had to do was do it. The odds of that happening were really slim, right? The odds of you having, of actually that, you know, this whole thing falling apart and your life falling apart and you not becoming financially secure and all these things. Like, that was a much greater possibility, right? Like, the statistics were not on your side. Well, I think we can both say right now that it is objective.

true. Yeah. But at the time, that was a non-computer. That wasn't even in your mind, right? No, because look, I, I, I, my parents didn't, you know, step in with money or anything, not that they had anything to step in with. You know, Robin didn't really have any parents, so we didn't have anyone to turn to. We were all on our own. And, you know, I was making $8 an hour. And it felt like we were at sort of the bottom rung of a gigantic ladder. And then it really felt like, okay, great. The only place we have to go is up. And that's really exciting because I didn't think you could go down any further. Like you literally couldn't be paid less in the state of Connecticut. And I just didn't see things getting worse. I only saw things getting better. So Owen is born, I think, in 1998. And you're a 17-year-old dad. And do you and Robin at this point

say, all right, well, we should probably talk about, like, you know, getting married, it's probably the right thing to do. Is that a conversation you guys had? It may have come up, but I think that, you know, she was pregnant within weeks of us meeting one another, and she's a tremendous person. But I don't think that the way, I don't think that what drove our relationship was that she and I had particularly extraordinary feelings for one another. I think what drove our relationship with a shared desire to give this little boy the best life we could give him. I was not much of a boyfriend at all. Yeah. I definitely didn't give her much attention. Um, and she was patient with that. Where did you guys

live in, in the first year and a half of his life? Um, I bought, uh, a trailer, um, like a mobile home. And we lived in a, uh, like a trailer park, which was amazing. I remember being so proud of that. That was such a defining moment in my life because the trailer, I think, was $12,000. And I put, I think $8 or $900 down and then got a mortgage for the rest that my grandmother co-signed for. And then we had to rent a little piece of land that we parked it on. And we lived there. And to me, that was like an unbelievable source of pride. I remember, like, getting in arguments with Owen's mother because I would have to have the carpet vacuumed in a certain pattern.

And if the pattern wasn't there, I'd be upset. So I was vacuuming, like, three times a day because I was so proud of this home that I had for my family. And I guess you should mention at this point, Casey, that you had dropped out of high school by then. Yeah. Yeah. Like you were, I guess you're making minimum wage at the restaurant. But I mean, it sounds like you were, even with all those other things, you were pretty optimistic about your life in your future. Yeah, I was optimistic. And I was, you know, I think because I had nowhere else to go, I was home every day with my kid. His mother worked days. I worked nights, which meant every day from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m. It was just. the two of us. And we were, you know, wildly close. You know, he was my little boy. And, uh, his first word was daddy. And, um, I was there for his first word and his first step. And it was

wonderful. I loved every second of it. At this stage in your life, did you have any ambitions for what you thought you wanted to become or was, you just kind of kind of like putting one foot in front of the other? I always had this vision of the future. You know, like I always, I always used to say, even when I was very young to my sister, I was like, well, when I grew up, I'm going to be rich. And I remember, you know, when Owen was born, I was working in a restaurant. I remember sort of hatching these plans and, you know, spending 40, 50 hours a week in the bottom of a chowder pot scrubbing it, you sort of spend a lot of time in your own head. And I remember then just like obsessively identifying the weaknesses and the way that the restaurant, the business was run.

I mean, like, okay, so when I start a restaurant, here's exactly how I'm going to run it, here's how it's going to be profitable, here's how it's going to work, that's the plan. In time, I guess your brother Van moved to New York after he finished college. And what was he doing there? So he actually, he didn't finish. He didn't graduate from William and Mary. My parents couldn't afford tuition any longer, so he had to drop out. and he dropped out of college and moved to Brooklyn.

And he had a series of kind of interesting gigs. And throughout that, he bought an IMac computer, which was the first consumer market computer that you could edit video on. Was it like one of those blue or purple ones? It was blue. The first year was only blue. Purple was the next year. And that's what he was doing in New York. And I remember when he bought that computer, he called me to tell me about it.

And that sounded like the coolest thing I'd ever heard. And that year, Owen wasn't quite too yet, but that year, we drove into the city and we stayed in his apartment, his one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. And while we were there, all we did was play with my brother's computer. Because he had a computer, but he didn't have a video camera. And I had a video camera, but no computer. So we had all this footage of my son running around the Central Park Zoo. and he and I just tried to figure out how to edit it. And that moment, I mean, I can tell you how the room smelled.

I could tell you exactly the layout. I could tell you where his computer was in relationship to his bed. Like that moment, which was almost exactly 20 years ago, was so crystal for me because it was such a big deal. I had never sort of had my breath taken away so much. I had never seen such a tool of empowerment. a way to express yourself. I imagine it was like when you put a pianist in front of a piano for the first time

or you hand a writer a pencil for the first time, I just remember having my breath taken away by this machine. And when we ran out of footage to edit, it came with like a dog being bathed in a kitty pool that came default on the computer so you could have some footage to play. We edited that because I just wanted to manipulate video. It was just so exciting for me. guy like that moment. And after that vacation, you know, came to an end, we got back to Connecticut

and I applied for a credit card so I could buy that machine. And I was only able to get a credit card with a $400 limit. So I got another credit card that also had a $400 limit, up to $800 bucks for keeping track. And that in combination with my tax return from that year gave me enough money to buy a computer of my own. Wow. And my life immediately changed. Because all my days were Owen, my two-year-old at the time, almost two years old, he and I making videos. And that's all we did, all day, every day. And you would mostly video him? Well, he was, I had to, you know, I was a sole caretaker. So he was my partner in crime, but he was also my muse and the subject of all of my videos. And that's all we did. And you would just go back and plug your camcorder into the computer and sort of capture all that film. And you had to do that in real time then. He couldn't. It wasn't. wasn't like a digital capture, right?

It's like... Yeah, it was shooting to tape. Yeah. And moreover, the machine only had a 10-gabite hard drive, which held about 12 minutes of video. So I would edit one video at a time, and I remember I would back up my footage to VHS tapes because VHS tapes were pretty cheap.

I remember then every video, every video then guy opened with, like, the title screen, and the title screen was Trailer Park Productions, and there was a picture of my trailer, because we had one car and Owen's mom would take that car to work in the morning so everything was shot within the confines of the trailer park. And this was being done really just for your own family archives, right?

Like you take videos of your son and you were kind of just editing them and then putting them in an archive. Oh, I mean, Guy, I considered these, like, Academy Award-winning movies. The version of sharing them then or the version of virality then is I would then take those VHS tapes on my nights off.

And I would drive to my friend's house, to my relatives' house. I'd make them all sit on the couch. I'd put the VHS tape in. I'd make sure everybody was quiet. And then I'd click play and make them watch my videos. Then I'd take my VHS tape's house and I'd drive to the next house. That was how I found my audience. What were the videos?

Like to describe, I mean, because I'm thinking it's like Owen walking next to a duck pond or Owen. Yeah, that's pretty close. I mean, there's literally a video of Owen next to a duck pond. an old mystic village, which was across the street from where we lived, there was a duck pond, and that's where I shot one video. But I remember, like, one of my first big movies, like, the one that I was immensely proud of was, um, Owens' mom's birthday. And I, like, went and filmed the birthday and all this. And then, like, at the end of the video, I jumped off of, like, the garage into the swimming pool at her cousin's house. And, like, that was, like, the grand finale.

And I made every family member I had watched that stupid movie over and over and over. Um, but no, I never considered these to be home videos. I considered these to be like these were movies. And immediately then when I would show up at the restaurant I worked in, all I would talk about to everybody I worked with was how I am now like a filmmaker. That's what I do for a living. And washing dishes is what I'm doing now. But I'm a filmmaker.

And I guess it was around that time where I guess you and Robin decided to split. I'm assuming the relationship just wasn't working. And you decided it was time for a change. Yeah, I think that when she and I split, you know, it's pretty, I was upset about it. And ultimately, I just kind of made a rash decision because I was going into New York to visit my brother then with some degree of frequency. And he and I and his girlfriend kind of hatched this cockamamie plan to, like, start a movie production, a video production company. And I was like, great, great. I'll be the CEO.

And they're like, of course, of course you'll be the CEO. And the minute that happened, it was not I'm going to go stay in New York. It was I am moving to New York City. And I remember during a smoke break in the back, like having this conversation with the cooks at the restaurant in the weeks preceding my leaving. And I remember them saying to them, you know, like, the great thing about this restaurant is that if you ever want to come back, Casey, you can just come right back and pick up right where you left off. And I looked him in the eye and I was just like, I'm never coming back. I'm never coming back. So what?

You just like pack up your life and move to New York? Yeah, I mean, I would say that it was probably like two duffel bags. And I remember Van's girlfriend, whose name was Melissa. She was like, Casey, you know, I have this sublet. Like this friend of mine is looking for somebody to live in their couch to help subsidize the rent for this summer. Do you want to do it? I'll loan you the money. And I was like, really?

And she put up the like $1,500 for three months to be on this couch. And it was like a 250 square foot studio apartment in these village that had been walls had been put up to make it a two-bedroom. And what did you do for work? So I did temp work at first. And ultimately I got a job as sort of an artist's assistant getting $10 an hour. But it was exciting because I got to be around an artist who was using his creativity to sort of make a living in a career, which was something that was fascinating to be

close to. I'd never seen that before in my life. And there was consistency there because he had a lot of. of work to be done in as many hours as I could work, he would pay me for. And I needed it. I needed the job because I was taking the train every four days back to Connecticut, where I was staying in my dad's building of his company. He had an attic that was unused, it was just used for storage. That's where I would stay with Owen, because I, to go a week without seeing him, was, I'd just start to implode. So really for your first, like, I guess, two years.

in New York, it was whatever you needed to do to go back to Connecticut every few days to spend time with your son. Yeah, I mean, the first three months in New York City were really separate from the other 17 and a half years I ended up spending in New York City. The first three months were unique because those first three months were June through September of 2001. And my sublet was up August 31, 2001. I think it was September 1. I moved into another friend's house who they're only living there for a month, and they're like, sure, you can flop here if you give us a couple hundred bucks because we're moving out. And they lived on Rector Street in the financial district. And I moved in with them, and I bought myself another month.

And then, you know, 11 days later was September 11, 2001. And we were hundreds of feet from the base of the World Trade Centers. So much so that when the first plane hit, I was knocked off the couch. And I remember being like, just thinking it was a cannon. I don't know, whatever reason I remember the scene in Mary Poppins, the family that's the subject of the movie, they lived down the street from an old ship captain. And he fires the cannon every hour. And the whole house shakes.

And like in that moment, like half a sleep, half awake, I assumed someone had fired a cannon. And I looked out the window and saw paper falling. And I thought it was like maybe a promotion. where they're like shooting a cannon full of flyers for free tacos or something absurd like that. And I looked up and saw a building on fire. And ultimately, like, I left. I ran and got on my bike and was biking away, biking north to my big brother's apartment. And the second plane hit.

And I, you know, I can remember feeling the heat from the second plane and falling off my bike. And stuff was falling around me. And it was just a kind of terror that, yeah, that, yeah, I'll never forget. I had my video camera, my DV camera in my hand, and there's one shower I'm trying to, as I'm biking away, film the towers, and it crosses over. And in that crossing over, you can see my face.

And I'm just white. But that's really, like, for me, that's the bookmark where, like, my life in New York City began. Because if ever there's a reason to kind of give up or throw in the towel, it's a terrorist attack of such severity that, you know, changes the daily life for, I think, all Americans.

Yeah. But to be so literally so close to it. You know, I remember my dad called and he just said, like, it's time to come home. And I remember, you know, speaking to Owens, mom's friends, the ones who put us up when we had nowhere else to stay. And they gave me the same sort of line that's like, you'd be crazy to stay there. Like, you don't even have a place to stay right now. You don't really have a job. What are you going to do?

And ironically, like, it was making that decision. Like, I'm not going anywhere. That's when things started to turn around for me. That's when I started to find a footing in New York City that had eluded me in the previous three months. What was that footing? So it started with finding a place. There was sort of a mass exodus of, I think, people like me that were sort of on that precipice of surviving or not in New York City. And a lot of them left.

And one of those people was a friend of a friend. And he had lived in something called an SRO, a single room. occupancy. And it's where you get a room, but you don't get a bathroom or a kitchen. And it wasn't much of an apartment, but it was a room that had a door with a lock on it that was mine. And no matter what I couldn't be kicked out of there, it was mine. And that

was, you know, the ground from underneath me going from a liquid to a solid. And in the meantime, I mean, you are still working as an assistant for this artist, but you had your IMAQ set up in that little room and you were just taking videos of stuff like around New York? All day, every day. Nonstop. Just with your camp quarter like going out and just shooting stuff? Anything. Anything. Anything. Every time I'd see something interesting, I'd make a video about it. Not only that, but my

proximity to my brother Van for the first time wasn't 100 miles or 300 miles, but he lived right down the street. So Van and I were spending every waking moment together making videos. And we were kind of all over the place. And ultimately, we land. ended a real gig, like a high-paying, high-profile video job to make a birthday video for someone. For who? So the artist we worked for liked the little videos we made, and one of his art collectors, a guy named Tom Healy, went to, the artist and was like, you know, I need to make a video for my husband, Fred's 50th birthday party. How do I do that? He's like, oh, you need to talk to the brothers.

Talk to the brothers. And, like, you know, I remember being so nervous speaking to Mr. Healy because he's this, like, fancy art collector. And we were like, do we charge him $100 or $500? And ultimately, we landed on $5,000. Like, we're going to swing the fences here. Yeah. Yeah. It was the biggest number we could think of.

And he didn't bat an eye at it. He was like, sure, let's do it. It was a huge deal. And it was a video that you would make of his life. life. You know, effectively, you just wanted a funny video of people saying, happy birthday, Fred, to play on a screen at LaSerk for Fred's 50th birthday. For $5,000. And I think for $5,000 bucks. And now that I know what it costs to have a meal at LaSerk, I understand why he didn't bat an eye at the $5,000 bill for the video,

because it's probably what he spent on martinis that night. But then he handed us a list of people to interview. And it was like, you know, people like, President Bill Clinton and the current governor of New York. And it was these high-profile individuals. I mean, I remember interviewing guy, showing up for the interview with President Clinton. And this is just a few years after he left office. And, you know, we had a really funny gag we wanted to do for the video.

We had a funny joke. We wanted the president to deliver. And we showed up and we told his handlers, we had this joke. And they're like, absolutely not. We've got a pre-approved script. And that's all he'll be reading. And we were intimidated. There were secret servicemen there with guns.

We're like, no problem, we understand. But then they left us alone in the conference room, and we jumped on the teleprompter and kind of like reset it, turned it off. And then when the president came in and sat down, he sat there, and I just remember him like, looking left, looking right, kind of looking his handlers, like, being like, guys, what are we doing here? And I turned to him, and I was like, Mr. President, I have a funny idea. And he smiled, and I was like, here's what I want you to say.

And he was like, sure, that sounds hysterical. And we hit record and he delivered the joke. and it was the standout highlight of the video that we played at Fred Hockberg's 50th. Do you remember what you haven't had him say? Vividly, guy. So Fred Hockberg, whose birthday it was, who was a prominent businessman, his mother is Lillian Vernon of the Lillian Vernon Catalog, who was sort of the catalog queen of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

So we made the president a T-shirt that said Fred Hockberg turned 50s, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt from Louis and Vernon, which is funny because she was a huge campaign contributor of his. And when he saw the t-shirt, the president just started laughing. And he did the joke just as we asked. He held up the t-shirt and the entire room full of people there to celebrate, burst into laughter and it was a big hit. And that was the first real paid gig we ever had.

But your first gig was like doing a video with Bill Clinton. I mean, you must have thought in your mind's like, oh, my God, I hope he doesn't find out that we're kind of, you know, amateurs. No, that never, ever occurred to us, ever. It didn't. I mean that. Just like the dishwasher, who was just like doing that as a holdover until he figured out his career, we were Oscar award-winning world-famous filmmakers

that the world had never heard of yet. Supremely confident. You just walk in and you're like, okay, this is what you do, listen to us. No hesitation at all. No, in the zoom in, in the micro, we were just too terrified individuals. But to zoom out from there, we had this sort of, I could say it was confidence, but I think it was far more just arrogance. We were just these arrogant, you know, I was 21 at the time, Van was 26 at the time,

were just these arrogant kids who thought we knew something that nobody else did. When we come back in just a moment, how Casey and his brother Van took that momentum and turned it into a TV show. And what happened when that show did not exactly go as planned? Stay with this. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the early 2000s, and Casey is starting to make a name for himself in New York. After that birthday video with a cameo from Bill Clinton, Casey and his brother, Van, would build a pretty successful business, producing videos for art gallows.

and other clients. But the real breakthrough happened when Casey realized he had an important story to tell about, of all things, his iPod. This was 2003, so like the first generation iPod had been around for a little while, but it was still like the talk of the town. It was the hottest piece of check there was.

And I had one. It was given to me as a gift, and it cost $400. So it was something way outside of my price, outside of anything I could afford. But I had one. And the battery died in it. It wouldn't hold a charge.

So I called Apple computers. They had like an 800 number that a human would answer back in 2003. And the person on the other end of the phone explained to me that Apple as a policy does not replace the batteries in their iPods. And I was so offended. I was so upset. I love my iPod guy. I was so upset that I again felt like that 15-year-old kid with a parent saying don't do this or a teacher saying no to me. that I was like, you know, I need to, I need to vent this.

So I called them back. The guy said, sure enough, different operator or different tech support person, he said, yeah, no, we don't replace the batteries, but you can just buy a new one. The visuals in the video are my brother, Van and I, running around Manhattan, and this is when they had that ubiquitous ad campaign of the silhouettes dancing with an iPod. And it was brightly colored. They were everywhere. And much like you would see a disclaimer at the bottom of a pack of Marlboro Reds that says these cigarettes will give you cancer, we spray painted using a stencil, a disclaimer on the bottom of every one of those posters that said iPods Unreplaceable Battery lasts only 18 months. And we made a video of just that.

And this is, you know, three years before YouTube, so we put it on a splash page. We bought iPodsdirtysecret.com, and we put it on that splash page. You just bought a domain website and are you by a domain name? Yeah, it was like $4. Yeah, right, gotcha. And then I remember just, like, very angrily, like, emailing every single journalist I could find this email saying, like, hey, check out this movie we made. Or pretending to be someone else being like, hey, look at this movie I found, and just trying to get somebody to publish it somewhere. And, you know, within 24 hours, it was everywhere to the point where the site was crashing. But it did millions and millions of views in the days when to go viral required actually emailing something.

somebody the video. All right. So this gets traction and what happens? Like, are you contacted by the media? Like, what kind of attention did you get for this? It was a kind of attention that I had never experienced before. It was, I remember the Washington Post wrote a huge article, and it was the first time I'd ever read the word viral video. But it was everywhere. It was viral in the most literal sense of the word viral. Everywhere it went, it just sort of multiplied. I remember being back in Connecticut with Little Owen, and we were walking around and somebody came up to us. And he was like, hey, I work in energy

and I just got back from Saudi Arabia. And I saw your face and your video on the news there. You made something about Apple. And I was like, yeah, that's me. So it was kind of a, it was something that I don't think we could have in our wildest dreams ever anticipated. At this point, by the way, what was your primary source of income? Like, were you still working with that artist?

I was still an assistant. I was getting paid very well, though, you know, because I was running the entire shop. I was running the whole kind of career of this prolific artist. And I felt like all of a sudden I sort of was figuring it out in New York. And after iPod's Dirty Secret exploded, so many people came to my brother Van and me saying, what else have you done?

And we're like, are you kidding me? Here's a hundred other movies we've done. and that happens enough where people are like, okay, these guys have something. And the opportunities we got then started to be more and more interesting. And I remember one time getting an offer to direct a TV commercial. And that sounds glamorous. But what it literally was was a candy bar company wanted to test their candy bar marketing in a very tiny market. And they had $10,000 as an all-in budget.

And the minute they greenlit that and we got the money, I quit my job. We're like, okay, we're professional filmmakers now. And what was left of the money we spent to get our first studio. And it was a tiny 400 square foot studio in Chinatown. And I remember we had enough money for one month. And at the end of that month, we wouldn't be able to pay anything unless we could figure out how to make money in the next 28 days. So, I mean, it was the first thing you did to make that? it happened? It was a it was a kind of hustling that was able to be furthered by the fact that we didn't, we no

longer had day jobs. So Van and I just ran at making movies like nothing else. We just won after another after another week. You know, some of the gigs were hundreds of dollars and some of the gigs were more, but we didn't say no to anything then that involved showing up with a camera. And the opportunities these were all over the place, everything from like wedding videos to, you know, being introduced. And I don't know who the conduit was for this, but being introduced with a guy named Andy Spade. Sure. I interviewed Andy and his late wife on high-biltless, Kate, you know. Two very, very dear friends of mine and two people I love very, very much.

But at the time, I didn't know who they were and we were invited by. I knew that Kate Spade was a handbag company. We went and sat with the CEO, Andy, and he's like, oh, I like the little videos you guys do. And we're like, yes, sir, thank you, sir. And he was like, you know, we're going out to Arizona next week to film, to take some photos for our spring line or whatever it was. And he's like, if I give you guys a couple bucks,

if we give you some money, you think you can come with us and make videos. And we're like, yes, we can, sir. Of course we can, sir. And we went and made some fashion videos for him. And he remains one of the most sort of brilliant marketers in the game. And under his direction, I think we made really powerful, really smart videos for Kate Spade handbags. And that was a kind of validation that obviously went way further for us than making kind of a terrible candy bar commercial. And ultimately, we were introduced to a guy named Tom Scott through Andy Spade.

and Tom Scott was this just genius entrepreneur. Founder of Nantuck and Ectors, right? Yeah, and he turned that into a wildly valuable company that he sold and became very wealthy because of that. And then he built a media company. And we went in and met with him, and I remember him being very stoic and sitting in the corner sort of nodding his head at Van and I

as we're doing our dog and pony show. And he looked at us and he said, I want to do something big with you guys. what would you like to do? And we're like, okay, great. And we went away. And we're like, what does something big mean? And I think to this day that what he meant was he wanted to make a big movie with us,

but we didn't understand that then. So we came back to him and we said, look, all we really know how to do is make these little videos. Right. We struggle to make them because we spend so much time trying to keep the lights on. So if you can agree to try to pay our overhead for the next year in that time, we will make. a mountain of videos, and we'll figure out to do with it. And our pitch guy, our pitch was no more complicated than that. That's all it was.

We said, we'll make you videos, just just pay us like a basically a retainer that will help us keep our company going. We never said, we'll make you videos. We just said we'll make videos. Right. Okay. To talk about it now, he was just like, I saw in YouTube a kind of spark that, you know, that I identified with. And I knew that you were just sort of being held back by a lack of resources. So if I were to free that up, I knew it would take us places.

And we shook hands, and he agreed to finance us, and we walked out of there. It was the hugest deal we could have ever imagined. And with that support now, what kinds of, like, what were you able to do? Did you need money to travel? Did you need money to buy better cameras? Did you... We didn't spend it on gear. I don't know that we would have known what to buy.

We were still using I-Movie. but basically it was like, what's an awesome video we want to make today? And, you know, like, I think a good example of that is I wanted to make a movie with Owen, like a real movie with Owen. I was like, Owen, let's make a movie together. And he's like, okay, great. And I was like, can you write it? And, you know, he's eight years old, nine years old at the time.

He's like, yes, I can. Okay, so you want to make a movie about a cruise ship wherein a gigantic blue monster crushes the ship and kills all the people on board? Yeah. That sounds totally awesome. And he wrote a movie called The Blue Monster. And I went to the beach and I covered myself in blue paint and seaweed. And he had to battle that monster.

And the movie was like a story of my kid and me wanting to make a movie. Who is going to come out of the water and he is going to attack the ship. We are going to make the boat. out of cardboard. You know, I remember Guy, one of the videos was my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife. My girlfriend at the time were having just wild problems in our relationship. And I made a movie that took probably a month to make, and it was called Love versus Ego. And it was my love for her versus like the ego that is the fighting that the two of us were

having and how to reconcile that. This is Candace, my future ex-girlfriend, and the source of all the material I needed to make this movie. was a movie that I was only able to make because I was able to sort of indulge because we didn't have to worry about paying right. So Billy Bragg said, love is like being on a ride at the fun fair. The sort you want to get off because it's scary and then as soon as you're off you want to get right back on again. That's the uncertainty, the excitement you get by embracing ego. John Lennon compared love to a flower. This is still before you had a YouTube channel and we're going to get there in a bit, but I'm just wondering,

I mean, were lots of people watching your videos in 2007? And, you know, no, no, no one was watching it. Well, there was no way to watch videos then. You know, we had our videos on our website that we updated as best we could, and there was definitely like a little cult following because we put our videos into little film festivals. Like, we made a lot of bicycling videos, so they were in the bike film festival in New York City.

And at that time, certainly still the pie in the sky was to make a feature film that got into a Sundance or something like that. Right. That was still the ultimate. destination as a filmmaker. Right. So in that time period, I mean, I'm assuming you and Van are making a bunch of videos. And I guess in 2008, you like do a deal with HBO to like a big deal, $2 million deal to pick up. Yeah, I mean, you're, you're jumping ahead a little.

But let's, so Tom Scott, our financier, he would come visit us every six weeks to see. what we had been doing to check in on his investment. And I remember the first time he came, we had 43 minutes of little videos all play at once, just back to back, to back, to back. And he looked at it and he was like, I don't know what this is, but keep going. And he said the same thing the next month. And he said the same thing the next month. And the fourth month, he showed up with this woman. And he introduced her name was Christine Vashon. And he pulled this aside and he's like, Look, she's a big-time movie producer. And that's when it occurred to us

that maybe we had created something that was actually packageable. And we ended up calling it the Nistap Brothers and calling it a TV show. In each episode, we'll show what's going on in our lives through a series of short films, but this is not a reality show. I mean, it was effectively a YouTube vlog.

It was a YouTube vlog before the words YouTube vlog existed. It was sort of access someone's life in a way that I don't think people had seen before. And one overall theme to tie everything together. This was 2007, 2008, when reality TV was the real world, was Survivor, and were these highly produced, very glossy shows that were, you know, calling themselves reality. And all of a sudden we were making a show that was our reality, but instead of it being told by a producer, it was being told by us.

And that's what this was. And what's incredible is you end up selling it to HBO just a short time later for like $2 million, which must have been life changing for you. Yeah, it was, it was incomprehensible to us. It was, you know, this is when HBO was, you know, sex in the city, Sopranos, six feet under, the wire. And the NYSTAT brothers, like it, we shot this video on a $200 camera. We bought at Walmart. art. We edited this in I-Movie, and it was the most validating feeling. It was so overwhelming, and it was a celebratory time in our tenure as professionals and as brothers that was

extraordinary. I think it took about two years for HBO to eventually air it, and it aired like late at night, right? It was sort of like 11, 12 midnight, something like that. Yeah, so that celebratory moment faded very quickly. For reasons outside of our control, the head of programming at HBO left the company in the days after she bought our show. Wow. And they brought in a new head of programming who understandably had her own mission and that mission did not include our show. So they sort of swept it under the rug, which was really frustrating. You know, we spent two years waiting, and this was two years after telling everyone on planet Earth that we had achieved the impossible.

And there was no follow-up. There was no validating that Hollywood reporter story that says, HBO buys the NYSTAP brothers. And it was a very humbling, but more so frustrating time for us. And it was, you know, in those two years that Van and I, you know, made a decision to kind of go our separate ways and no longer work together. And just pause for sake. Why? I mean, you guys had this great thing going.

I think the most kind of reductive way I can explain it is like when you have a partner, you have someone to blame all of the failures on and someone to attribute all of the successes to. And when you combine that understanding with having nothing, it works because you, you're in this together. But when you combine that with success, it becomes a far, far harder equation to navigate. And I think that we did a very poor job of navigating it. There was tension between the two of you? Oh, yeah. I mean, all of a sudden, we were these big hot shots. We had money. We had a show that HBO just bought. We could do whatever we wanted. And I think that all of those factors combined yields a very explosive relationship. And it just, it's just, it's

kind of came to a head and we couldn't come to terms with what we wanted to do next or directionally where we wanted to go. And ultimately, Van just kind of made a decision that he wanted to move out west and that's what he did. And I stayed in New York and, you know, he continued to pursue his career as a, as a fine artist and filmmaker. And I pursued mine. This was around the time when, like, coincidentally, YouTube started to become a thing, like a really big thing. And I guess it was around 2010 or something. something like that, where you, like, you decide to build your own YouTube channel? You know, I needed a way to identify myself outside of the Nystatt Brothers.

So, yeah, the first thing I did was found an LLC called Casey Nystatt LLC. And I remember getting a checkbook back that said my name on it. And then I started a YouTube channel. And I remember, like, the first video I put up on the YouTube channel said, Casey Nystad at the end of it instead of Nystad brothers, and it was a very foreign feeling. But whether it was the Czech book, an LLC, or that video, the goal was the same, which was to, again, start a career over from what felt like scratch. Why don't we come back, how Casey reignited his career by crashing his bicycle into every obstacle he could find. And later, taking a plane to just about.

every country he could think of. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So after parting ways with his brother, Van, Casey Nicestad decided to start his own YouTube channel to share content that was kind of similar to what he had made for the HBO show. And his first few videos did okay. They had a small following, nothing major, but pretty much everything changed on one day when Casey got a $50 ticket from the NYPD for not riding his bike in the bike lane. Look, I wasn't exactly the safest cyclist and ticketed me for running a red light, which I certainly did and was guilty of, and ticketed me for myriad offenses.

But to give a ticket for riding not in the bike lane just felt so ridiculous. And I filmed the guy on the officer on my iPhone. He was actually pretty jovial about it. Oh, he didn't care that you were filming him? No, he was. He thought it was kind of funny. I think he knew exactly what he was doing. He was giving me a hard time.

It was torrential rain. Right. He didn't get out of his car. He didn't get out of his patrol car. So he stayed dry. He only yelled at me through the window. And I'm standing there in the pouring rain. He's actually very nice in the video, I have to say.

He was very courteous. He's very courteous. And there's even a postscript that is, I maintained a friendship with that officer for years after that, years. He loved the video. Mm-hmm. So I took that video. and my anger, once again, fueled an idea, which is to illustrate why it's not safe

to only ride in the bike lanes, and I rode my bicycle. In the most slapstick of ways, I crashed into every obstacle that was blocking the path of the bike lanes. And I mean, like, you know, whether it was a garbage can or a New York City occupied taxi cab,

I would ride my bike into it at full speed without even blinking. and take these huge falls. And by the way, these were real, like, you were really doing these stuff? Yeah, yeah. I mean, really hard falls. We made that little video. I put it on my personal YouTube channel and called it Casey Nice at, and it starred me.

And not since the iPod movie had I seen a kind of reaction. It was everywhere. And the difference now is that social media was just really starting to pick up. And I shared it as best I could, but it didn't. need that. I don't know who picked it up, but it just exploded with a kind of velocity that I hadn't seen before because of the maturity of YouTube, the maturity of social media, the maturity of just kind of online communication versus 2003. And this time I was prepared. This time I knew exactly what to do with that kind of attention. Which was? Which was when people would get to my YouTube channel. I'd say, what else is this guy done? So I worked aggressively to put new, fresh content up there that felt smart. And on top of the of that now brands would see that and they'd be like this is clever stuff that clearly people you know people want to see more of and out of that I built sort of what was my first business post-nistap brothers post working with my brother and what that business was was making videos on YouTube that would

garner enough attention and enough interest from the industry that would then offer me jobs and I would get a gig to direct a commercial and I would take that revenue that money and reinvested in myself making fun passion videos, videos that I made just for me and populate my YouTube channel with them that would then yield more commercials. And that worked. You would basically make what you want to make, and advertisers would help you pay the bills and you could make some money. And then you could make whatever you wanted for fun and not worry about having to monetize that. That's right, because the advertisers would be excited about the videos that I was making. They'd be like, wow, we like how you make videos, make those videos for us. And I said no to nothing. And I was like,

great, let's do this. And it was a lot of kind of jobs that I wasn't necessarily interested in, but paid the bills until I got a phone call from Nike. And they were like, we loved your videos. Would you come out here and talk to us about a bigger project we're thinking of with you? And I was like, free trip to Oregon. Hell yeah, I'll come out there. And then I got to a hotel, and I went in the hotel,

and there was a pair of new Nike's on the bed. And I was like, holy smokes, I have made it. Free sneakers. This is it. And they brought me in, they had me sign an NDA, and they showed me this new product, which is essentially like a Nike branded Fitbit. It was something called a fuel band. And they're like, we want to push this. And we want you to make us some videos for it.

And I came back and I wrote three scripts. And they were like, great, green light, let's do it. Just send us a budget. And it was going to be like athletes and people doing, you know, active stuff. Exactly, exactly. So it was the three videos where the first one was going to be like an announcement video. And it was just going to be like really rough and dark and kind of like bleak, aggressive New York City and people running in the cold. And it just say like coming soon.

And we did all that by having the titles be written in like graffiti around New York City. They loved it. And then the second video was working with three huge athletes and Nike athletes, million dollar athletes kind of thing. And we'd make a video about them like getting after it and making it count by, you. using these fitbits. Make it count was the tagline? Was the campaign slogan, yeah. And then it came time to make the third video.

And the third video was meant to show how people around the world make it count. This little girl in Paris makes it count every day by walking to school instead of taking the bus. Right. This woman makes it count by taking the stairs instead of the elevator in her office. That was the pitch, and Nike liked it. But this was about three months into the relationship, and I just decided I didn't want to do it. Like, I was exhausted, and there was too much.

much back and forth after all the edits with the previous videos. Yeah. I had kind of a crazy idea and I called my editor and I said, look, we've got the budget, which I've never really disclosed this before, but this seems like a great place to say, Guy, I think our budget was around $80,000 to make this commercial. Just this one or all three? Just this one. Got you.

Just this one. These were a big budget. Yeah. And I was called my editor and I said, I said, hey, Max, you know, instead of spending this money on this commercial, instead of spending the $80,000 making this commercial, here's this idea. Let's take all of it, and let's go to the airport, and let's fly on whatever the next flight out is,

to whatever destination we can find, and let's go to that place and soak it up, and then go to that airport and fly out from there, and let's do this and travel all around the planet everywhere we've ever wanted to go until we run out of money, and we'll somehow make some sort of video out of that. And I did call them at sort of the ninth hour, And I said to the executive, his name was Alex Lopez.

I said, Alex, I want to do something really different here. And he said, yeah, I know. Your script's great. And I was like, no, I want to do something even different from that. And I remember him just sort of pausing and then saying, look, you just can't screw me over here. Casey, I went out on a limb to make this happen. And that scared me, but I said, I understand. And he said, okay, just make it great.

But please, please don't compromise this. And I was like, I get it. And that was it. I didn't tell him what we were doing or how we were doing it. And Max and I jumped on a plane, and we just started flying around the world. We'll definitely make this flight, but we're cutting it close. So far the trip is off to a fairly irresponsible start. I mean, that video, I mean, I've read a lot about it and read a lot of the way you've described it.

But from what I understand, like, the idea was you're going to spend about six hours in each country. Film stuff, run back to the airport, and catch the next flight to wherever else. Like whatever the next logical place was to go to. Yeah, I mean, it was both figuratively and literally, like, I wanted to dip our toe in the water of all these locations. And I remember things like going to internet cafes and searching, like, biggest waterfall. And then sending an email to Mary Beth, who was like, my assistant back in New York City was helping us figure this out. And we're like, Mary Beth, there's a waterfall called the Victoria Falls, and it's in Africa.

And her being like, I can get you there, but it's going to require six flights. being like great. In each of those six locations, we'd be like, okay, we have 40 minutes here, we have an hour here. We have three hours here. I remember seeing like at the time this hotel that it opened in Singapore where there was a swimming pool seemingly floating in the sky. And I took a picture of the computer screen in the internet cafe on my Blackberry, and I sent that picture to Mary Bath, and I said, get us here.

And that's how we did it. It was just sort of this fantasy of where do we want to go next. And needless to say, this video became huge. I think the last time I checked it had like 30 million views on YouTube, I mean, this thing was huge. And I have to imagine that Nike was pretty happy. I mean, yeah, I think that that video was so successful online and within the advertising community

because it touched people in kind of an emotional way. Yeah. You know, I remember Mark Parker, was the CEO of Nike at the time, who I'd never met him saying to me that his assistant was playing that video on her computer, his receptionist, and he walked over and watched it over his shoulder. When the video was over, he said, he shook his head and said, I need to get out more. And that every job opportunity I had for the next several years was companies from all walks of life coming to be being like, hey, can you do for us what you did for Nike? and I mean it and that defined my career until about 2014, 2015.

It was the only every job I had started with that conversation. Casey, you know, it's interesting because people who don't know you well but have seen your videos you know,

they've seen you in your sunglasses like with the mirrored lenses and, you know, they're terrific, but somebody could interpret that as like, oh, this guy is such a bro. right? And I think anyone listening to this might think, well, is that the same guy? And I just wonder what, how you think about that. Like, do you, are you a different person in those videos?

No, not necessarily. I think that I'm just very comfortable with picking a part of me and making the video about that part of me. So if you take the bike lanes video, that part of me there is the wise ass. And if you take the, you know, if you take the make it count, that part of me is a curious adventure. And if you take, like, that scene, love versus ego from my TV show or any of the movies I've made about my now wife or my kids, I'm just sort of a family man, sort of like a romantic. And I think that, you know, not everybody likes all of my videos. And when someone dismisses me based on a perspective that they see that is isolated or siloed in one video, it's challenging. And I think a big part of what I do is not taking any of that personally. but understanding that, you know, if you meet somebody at a holiday party and maybe you've had one too many drinks, they're going to dismiss you as like maybe a loud mouth and not know that that's who you really are.

And at a certain point, Casey, I mean, you really, you know, once you kind of split with Van and went your own way and start to produce these videos and then kind of really became, you know, known and somebody who was sought after by companies and brands to do stuff for them, naturally, I mean, I imagine that you would, you start to think about like, okay, what it's the next step, right? Like, how do I really create something of scale? Sure. So, you know, in the years that succeeded the Nike video was when my, like, production company, Casey Nice. LLC, where I made videos for brands that really took off and it was exciting. But the circular nature of just every client asking me to make them the Nike video got to a really frustrating place.

And you couldn't scale yourself, right? I mean, it's just you. No, it was limiting, but it was also guy, I was making real money then. I mean, I was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. This was more money than I made even post HBO. It was a legitimate business. I had employees. It was exciting. But it fizzled out for me very quickly because it was, I felt like a one-trick pony.

Right. And I was seeking what's next in life. And I got a random email to my website. And it was from the Sundance Institute, which is sort of the nonprofit wing of the Sundance Film Festival. and they said we're doing a program with MIT Media Labs where we pick individuals and give them fellowships at MIT. And we think you'd be a prime candidate for this. And I've never jumped at something so much in my life because I never finished high school.

And while I think that I've done well enough in my career to excuse that, I've always been insecure of my lack of education. So I jumped at it and I said, let's do it. So, and I read that while you were on that fellowship at MIT, you came up with this idea for a new social media platform that you called Bean. What was it? Yeah, so, I mean, what it literally was at this point in time was this is when Google Glass, the eyewear that was a wearable computer was at its peak, and I got a pair, and I love the fact that I could capture everything I was seeing in real time. So I wanted to create an app that effectively did that. It captured what people were seeing in tiny little nuggets, and then they could share it.

this was at a time when Instagram filters were exploding and this idea of curating how you want the world to see you was very new but felt very uncomfortable for me. So let me create an app that was in the other direction where it was purely about exactly what the reality of your perspective is. And I sat down with my professor, a gentleman named Sep Kamvar, who was a ten-year professor at MIT, and I was so nervous pitching him the idea.

And he looked at me and he goes, Casey, is this a project or is this a business? And I don't know why, but with absolute unwavering confidence, I said, this is a business. And he said, okay, great. So you're going to need some investors. These are angel investors. You want to go to your friends and family, anybody you think I'll write you a check. And he's like, you want to raise a couple hundred thousand dollars here and this will let you get your company started.

And I was like, okay, okay, okay. And I'm writing this down word for word. And then he looks at me and he goes, And Casey, and I look up in the paper, and I look at him in the eye and he goes, I'd like to be your first investor. You can put me down for $100,000. It stopped me cold. Wow.

I had never really had anybody believe in me like that before. It brings me back to maybe Tom Healy in 2001. Yeah. This was just what felt like a stupid idea. And this man was willing to write a check that was more money than my parents had made in any year of their entire life. And it was just an idea. It was nothing. So I went then to friends and family, which is just what you call it.

I didn't actually ask any friends or family. I asked all the rich people I knew. I didn't want to ask anybody who I'd have to later in life answer to because I lost their money. And ultimately, I raised just under a half a million bucks. So at the same time, around the same time, you raise this money, and presumably you've got the money, and now you've got to create the company, and you've got to find the talent and build this thing. But at the same time, from what I understand,

around March of 2015, you decide to put a video up every single day on your YouTube channel. You're going to do a daily vlog, which sounds kind of insane, like an insane amount of work. Yeah, yeah. You know, I left MIT. All I had was my idea and this money. Right.

And I thought about it. and I thought, you know, I need to really go hard on YouTube to get my audience engaged. So when I tell them about this product that they'll be there for me. And I came up with this idea then to make a video every day. And every day share sort of a story from my life. And I thought I would do it for a week or two weeks. And that's exactly what I did. But two weeks came up and I had one more idea.

And three weeks came up and I had one more idea. And all the while, my audience is going from 100,000 views to 200,000 views to 500,000 views to 800,000 views. And my YouTube channel that took me, you know, six years, seven years at the time to get from zero subscribers to 400,000 subscribers. All of a sudden, every night I'd wake up and there'd be 10,000, 20,000 new subscribers. And I had never seen anything like it. And I remember about two weeks into that, I walked outside of my office and there were three girls. standing there saying, can we get a selfie with you? And no one in my life had ever asked for a selfie before. I'd never heard those words. Right. And I just kept going and kept going and kept going.

And by the time we were ready to launch the app that summer, the audience I had en masse was huge. And it's a parallel. I did an interview with Emily Weiss, who started Glossier. And she started I was a blogger and when and over time just gained so many followers and readers who were sort of saying where is your product like we we want something from you and it was sort of a sort of made sense you know for her to and when she released her line of products she had all these devoted loyal readers and again that wasn't her plan but it's a similar story like you had spent all of this time working on content that people liked and you amassed this massive following. So it only made sense, at least the way I see it, for you to build a product, to create something that people could use or you could turn into a business. Yeah, that's right. And I think that sort of the critics were quick to say that, you know, the only reason why I was doing this daily show was to get attention to market it. But what would be wrong with that? That's like, I don't get, even if you were doing that,

Like, that's called marketing. Like, what would have been wrong with that? Yeah, I mean, I don't think you're wrong, but my response to that is like, yeah, totally. The reason why I started this daily show is to talk about my tech company. Like, that's totally the truth. But it got boring fast, so I made it about me because that's something I'm much more comfortable talking about. And it took on a life of its own. But the symbiosis between my tech company and my daily YouTube show was totally apparent and totally deliberate.

And that's something I'm very, very proud of that, you know, my, I still, to this day, I've never written a line of code and I was very insecure within my own company. You know, Matt, my business partner is so wildly talented, not just writing code and building products, but managing teams and things like that, that his confidence and his skill set, which is just to this day, you know, I'll never stop being impressed with what he's capable of. it made me feel insecure because to me it highlighted just how little I had to offer to my own company until it came time to communicate the company and then I was able to lean into what felt like my unique skill set for the betterment of this company. But it sounds like you still felt a little bit, I don't know, I say this very gently because I feel this way even after 23 years of doing what I do, but like an imposter a little bit. Guy, I literally walked out of my therapist this morning and came to the NPR studio to record this with you.

And that's what I was talking to her about is just this idea of the imposter syndrome. And that's something I still feel like to this day. But I also am very quick to acknowledge that I think that is by far my greatest asset. If I knew then what I know now about what it means to start a tech company, I wouldn't have not only not done it. I would have run as far away from that idea as I'd probably. possibly could have. Right.

It was not knowing, and this has been true, my entire career. You know what, my entire life, professionally and personally, if I had known the right way to do things, I would have never done them. Yeah. So you launched this app in 2015, and this thing was going to allow people to kind of shoot little snippets, videos of things they saw in the world. How did the launch go? We launched the app, and it was a very successful.

launch in terms of downloads and it went gangbusters and people were very excited about the app. And I have to say it was really fun. It was a really fun product to use. But we struggled. I think that the idea and the marketing were always better than the product that we were able to build. And at the time, Snapchat stories had just kind of come out. Right. To be honest with you, I was a huge fan of Snapchat stories and the more I used it, the more I realized they did what I wanted to do, but they just did it way better. And, you know, they were being really successful and we were sort of stagnating. And we built a number of different versions of our app. And there were moments of really like spikes in growth and downloads and engagement and then moments where it would sort of trickle off.

And that went up and down for a long time. And there was just a tremendous amount of uncertainty. and I got very, very scared. What were you scared of? Were you scared of not being able to? It was only one thing. It was only one thing. And that was letting down the people who I felt invested in me. Right.

And then I was terrified for my employees. We never missed payroll. But I remember we got to a point where our runway was getting shorter and shorter. I felt like we were just sort of getting our butts kicked. I think within a short period of time, right? Like many months, you guys sold it. You sold it to CNN. What was the reason you did that?

I mean, reportedly for $20 million, which is a lot, but presumably you could have kept it going and scaled it more and maybe sold it for a billion. I don't know. Who knows? What was the thinking at that time? when I met with Jeff Zucker and I met with the folks at CNN, and they expressed to me how they wanted to leverage the technology that we had built and how they wanted to further the ideas that we had incubated and some of their intentions.

It was such an wildly exciting opportunity. I mean, you could essentially, what I imagine, not only pay back your investors with a bit of a return, you could pay you could make a little bit of money yourself and and then you would also have the backing of one of the biggest news organizations in the world and endless resources presumably and and their influence you could really scale this so it so that was it was it was all those things it was to me it was you know I obviously I was excited about the financial opportunities of building a company like this, but I wasn't, that was not a real motivating factor because like I said,

in years prior, I, you know, was making real money directing videos. And the funny thing about money, at least for me, is that like I always wanted to be really rich and have private planes and drive fancy cars and things like that. But the reality is the moment in my career that I got to a place where I didn't have to worry about paying for food or covering rent, I stopped really being motivated by money. The minute I knew that I could pay for college for Owen was the minute that I just, you know, it's like, okay, what a stupid thing to focus on is money. And I didn't want to be an executive. It was the ideation that was exciting for me. SEP, my MIT professor, he characterized it as, I'm really good at being the second man in a bobsled team, which means I get really excited and

I can push really, really, really hard. But the second it launches out of the gates, I just sort of jump in and I'm like, okay, what now? And that's what it felt like. And the idea that a CNN with all of their myriad resources could help us zoom down that and win the bobsled race felt fantastic. You know, in reading about the story, what's interesting is that the CNN shut this down, you know, not too long after they acquired Beam. But I think the quotes that I read from you are like, you know, hey, they left us alone. They let us do whatever we wanted. They've been great.

And even the CNN quotes were like, listen, we took a risk. We're really happy we took this risk. It was a smart risk to take. It didn't work out. And we're all friends. I mean, it sounds almost too good to be true that everybody was sort of, I don't know, kind of walked away from that saying, all right, you know, we tried. It didn't work. And it's fine.

Look, to this day, it still kind of strikes me. Like, I remember vividly meeting with Jeff Zucker the day before it sort of announced publicly. and going into his office and him like giving me the same sort of hello Casey that he'd always given me and we shook hands and chatting a bit and he's like, look if I could do it over again, I'd do the same thing. Did you know, by the way, going into his office that it was going to be shut down? I did. If you look at a company like that, and this is my understanding, if you look at a company like that, they need to see real growth.

They need to see a real trajectory for success. And they need to see it fast. And I think that I don't think we're able to deliver on that. Did you walk away from that relationship financially set for life? Could you stop working? Probably. Yeah, I think that if we didn't live in New York City or Los Angeles, that that would probably be the case. I can tell you that in the terms that I think of, which is can I now give my children the lifestyle that I've always wanted to give them?

The answer is yes. And when I look at the things that I have, it's not, you know, like a, it's not the cool car or the, you know, like the necklace that maybe I can buy my wife or anything like that. But the idea that, you know, my kid's going to, like, graduate college this year with no debt. Right. That, to me is, like, you know, that's the dream. I mean, a kid who was born when his dad was 17 years. old, right? I mean, it's kind of amazing that you were able to do that. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I think how I think of it is that it's amazing. He was able to do that.

Yeah. I mean, as I said to you earlier in this interview, all the odds were against you. Like, the statistics were against you when he was born. Yeah, but, you know, like, you know, like, then and even now, I don't know that I've ever looked at any aspect of my own life within those terms. There's like a great Steve Jobs quote that's like, you know, you realize the life, the world around you was created by people that are no smarter than yourself. And then he has something sort of poetic about challenging that. And I think that my frustrations in life as a very, very, very young kid, I only ever interpreted those as these people around me. They don't understand things the way that I understand things.

They don't see the things the way that I see things. And therefore, what they're saying, their criticisms of my values are invalid because of that. So to say statistically that a teenager shouldn't be able to, you know, raise a child that is a contributing member of society in a positive way, I think that that is, I don't subscribe to that. I call BS on that and I say that no, that's not true. You just do it.

And I think that if you say you can't start a tech company because you have a 10th grade education, I say, no. If you say, you can't go to MIT because you get a D-minus in your last semester of school at age 15. I say, no, that's not true. And, you know, I guess I apply that to every facet of my life. See, when you think about, you know, the trajectory of your life, right, and all that's happened, right, in between, like from, you know, dropping in high school and having a kid at 17 and, you know, washing dishes and struggling and, you know, in your 20s and then building this incredible career, having 12 million people follow you on YouTube and, you know, and, you know, become financially successful, you know, as a filmmaker. I mean, how much of that do you attribute to how hard you worked and how much just because you were lucky? It's 99% luck.

And beyond just being wildly fortunate, I'm wildly privileged. I may not have done well in school, but I was offered an education at a young age. My parents didn't have much, but I was never hungry. Right. It did not come from an abusive household. I'm a wildly privileged individual. I always say that, like, I was born with a winning lotto ticket in my hand. All I had to do was cash it in.

And that cashing it in is hard work. Like, that's what that meant. To cash it in was hard work. And I did my part. But I could have never done my part without first winning the lotto on life. And I'm not naive to any of that. I didn't ask to be born in the United States of America. I didn't ask to be as lucky as I am,

but none of that has ever lost on me. Every day I remind myself of that, and I have a debt, and that debt can only be paid via hard work. That's Casey Nistad. Since leaving Beam, Casey's gone back to making videos, some for fun, and some for brands. In fact, just days before he taped this interview,

Casey made a video for Etihad Airlines called the most expensive plane ticket in the world. And if you remember that video he made about his girlfriend, Candice, Love versus Ego? Well, Candice and Casey are now married. They have two daughters together. And they also have a podcast. It's called Couples Therapy with Candice and Casey. And please do stick around because in just a moment,

we're going to hear from you about the things you're building. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today's story starts with Pat Earle. and Pat lives way out in the countryside. On a four-acre homestead right outside of Cleolum, Washington, we live in between Cleolm and Ellensburg. This is a place so off the grid that it's got its own well and a septic tank. So you have to be careful with what you put down into a septic system

because if you put the wrong materials down there, then it has trouble decomposing. Anyway, on his homestead out in the country, Pat does not have the luxury of a garbage disposal, which means all the food from his family meals, all those little pieces of rice and spaghetti, they started to get piled up in the little strainer in the sink. When the basket filled up, then the whole sink would clog up, right? And you would have to be fishing through murky water,

getting stabbed by knives, things like that, and it was just kind of a wreck. And frankly, who among us has not kind of been there, right? You know, try to pull all the muck out of the sink strainer, just so the water will drain? Anyway, one day, Pat just put his foot down. And I vowed never to have to do that again. And just 15 minutes later, Pat started to come up with a design for a sink strainer that would not clog. So I wanted to make the design such that water could still drain around the sides of it.

Also, we could make a stem that's taller than the basket is deep. So when the basket's totally full of crud, the water is still draining through the stem. Pat's actually a pretty handy guy. So he went on YouTube to teach himself how to use design software so he could make his first program. But when it came to calling around to get it made, he realized he didn't know any of the industry lingo. I definitely had to almost practice saying these words because if you want to manufacture to take you seriously, you can't sound like a total idiot. And Pat actually had to learn a lot of new words. A3 polishing, overmold, step file.

Anyway, about one month and one totally failed prototype later. Grooming. That was a weird one. Pat had finally designed a strainer that sat snugly in the sink and allowed water to drain through the sides and through a hollow stem in the middle. And then, last March, it was like Christmas Day. I was waiting for it to come and took it out of the package and plopped it into the sink and it just fit perfectly. Then I spent probably three hours trying to clog it. He's not kidding. To test the new strainer, Pat just started throwing food into it.

Yeah, I mean, so I would go rifling through our pantry and I'd find some oats. And I was like, oh, yeah, that would definitely clog a drain. And I would dump as much as I could in there until everything was full except for the stem. And it would still drain. And I'd say, great, and I would dump it out. And then I found an old mason jar of soup in the fridge. And I dumped that down.

And no matter what Pat put into the strainer, it did not clog. And I just looked at my wife and I said, this is it. This is going to work. After making a few more tweaks, Pat found a partner to help with the business end of things. and they ordered 10,000 strainers from a manufacturer in New Jersey. And they've already sold 6,000 of them on Amazon and on their website. They call the product Dripsy. It's the little things that we use every day that we don't think about that really affect our lives.

So it's not necessarily that you have to take the first man to the moon or build rocket ships. Sometimes it's just building something that works better than anything else that's already out there. If you want to find out more about Dripsy or hear previous episodes, to our podcast page, how I built this.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do give us a review.

You can also write to us at hibt at npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at How I Built This or at Guy Raz. Our show is produced this week by Rachel Faulkner and Sequoia Carrillo with music composed by Rumtin Arablui. Thanks also to Candice Lim, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Rainy Toll. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR. The news is about more than what just happened.

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