Casey Neistat (TW/IG: @CASEYNEISTAT, YOUTUBE.COM/CASEYNEISTAT) is a New York–based filmmaker and YouTuber. Casey ran away from home at 15 and had his first child at 17. He went on welfare to get free milk and diapers and never asked his parents for money again.
His online films have been viewed nearly 300 million times in the last 5 years. He is the writer, director, editor, and star of the series The Neistat Brothers on HBO and won the John Cassavetes Award at the 2011 Independent Spirit Awards for the film Daddy Longlegs. His main body of work consists of dozens of short films he has released exclusively on the Internet, including regular contributions to the critically acclaimed New York Times Op-Docs series. He is also the founder of Beme, a startup aiming to make creating and sharing video dead simple.
Spirit animal: Sled dog
“I always say I got all my understanding of how business and life works from studying the Second World War.”
Aside from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Casey’s favorite book is The Second World War by John Keegan. He’s read this massive tome three times, cover to cover. He remembers showing up to work and getting in trouble because he was tired from staying up all night reading this textbook.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is Casey’s favorite movie, made during World War II. Wes Anderson studied this film, and you can see a lot of his adapted style in this movie.
• Favorite documentary
Little Dieter Needs to Fly by Werner Herzog is Casey’s favorite documentary, made in 1997. This is about a U.S. fighter pilot in Vietnam who gets shot down in his very first mission, and is trapped as a POW for a number of years. This documentary will bring you to your knees. Any time you are having a bad day (or you think you have it hard), watch this movie and you will understand what it means to survive. (See Jocko Willink, here.)
Casey made the short film Bike Lanes in 2011, and it became his first viral hit. He was given a summons from a New York City police officer for riding his bike outside of the bike lane, which isn’t an actual infraction. Instead of going to court, fighting the $50 summons, and wasting half a day in the process, Casey redirected his anger and made a movie that expressed his frustration in a clever way.
Casey begins the movie by repeating what the cop told him: He has to stay in the bike lane for safety and legal reasons, no matter what. Casey proceeds to ride his bike around NYC, crashing into everything that is in the bike lanes preventing people from following this rule. The film’s grand finale is Casey crashing into a police car that was truly parked in the middle of a bike lane.
His movie went tremendously viral and was seen around 5 million times in its first day. At one point, Mayor Bloomberg had to respond to a question about the video in a press conference. When in doubt about your next creative project, follow your anger (see Whitney Cummings, here, and James Altucher, here).
Make It Count, at close to 20 million views, is Casey’s all-time most popular video on YouTube. The catalyst: He’d built a successful career in advertising by 2011 but was extremely bored. He was in the middle of a three-commercial deal with Nike: “The first two movies were right down the line, what you’d expect. I had big, huge, $100-million athletes in them. They were very well received. I loved making them. But when it came time to make the third movie, I was really burnt out from the process.
“At the ninth hour, I called my editor up and said, ‘Hey, let’s not make this advertisement. Instead, let’s do something I’ve always wanted to do, which is: Let’s just take the entire production budget and travel the world until we run out of money, and we’ll record that. We’ll make some sort of movie about that.’ And he said, ‘You’re crazy, but sure.’”
The Make It Count video literally opens with scrolling text that says, “Nike asked me to make a movie about what it means to make it count. Instead of making their movie, I spent the entire budget traveling around the world with my friend Max. We’d keep going until the money ran out. It took 10 days.” They covered 15 countries.
Make It Count became a video about chasing what matters to you. This was the entire message and point of the campaign to begin with. Make It Count ended up being Nike’s most watched video on the Internet for several years.
TF: How can you make your bucket-list dreams pay for themselves by sharing them? This is, in effect, how I’ve crafted my entire career since 2004. It’s modeled after Ben Franklin’s excellent advice: “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.”
Casey’s subscriber count and success on YouTube hockey-sticked when he decided on his 34th birthday to vlog (video blog) daily. Shay Carl (here) had the same experience.
“You realize that you will never be the best-looking person in the room. You’ll never be the smartest person in the room. You’ll never be the most educated, the most well-versed. You can never compete on those levels. But what you can always compete on, the true egalitarian aspect to success, is hard work. You can always work harder than the next guy.”
Casey walks the talk. He wakes up at 4:30 a.m., 7 days a week, and he immediately finishes his vlog edit from the night before.
Casey works out immediately after 8 a.m., which usually involves running (8 to 12 miles) or the gym. He likes listening to the Jonny Famous playlist on Spotify.
He goes into the office by 9:30 a.m. after his workout. He works in his office all day, and tries to get out by 6:30 p.m. to race home and give his baby a bath. He will then hang out with his wife for about an hour until she goes to bed around 9 p.m.
After his wife goes to bed, he sits down and edits until he passes out at his computer, usually around 1 a.m. Casey usually sleeps on the couch until 4:30 a.m., and then he starts the process all over again.
• Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”?
“My grandmother. She passed away at 92. She’s my hero, she’s my muse, she’s my everything. She started tap dancing when she was 6 years old. She was a little fat girl and her parents made her do something to lose the weight, so she started tap dancing, and she loved it. She fell in love with something at age 6 and she didn’t stop tap dancing until the day before she died at age 92. She died on a Monday morning, and the first thing we had to do was call her 100 students to say she wasn’t going to make class that day.
“What is the ultimate quantification of success? For me, it’s not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate. And this woman spent all day, every day doing what she loved.”