Casey Neistat: Return to NYC, Discovery, Community, Collaboration, Connection | Turn the Lens #21

Hey. Welcome, everybody. Jeff Frick here. Welcome to my coffee walk. It's Episode 21 of Turn the Lens. I'm not in the home studio. I'm not in the home office. I'm on my coffee walk. I try to do it most every day, its a leftover of Covid that that I think is pretty beneficial. And one of the reasons I love to take my coffee walk is unlike other kind of workouts, you just put your shoes on and go.  And so for Episode 21, really, I want to talk about Casey Neistat’s return to New York.

I figured what better way than to just grab the camera, not the camera, excuse me, just grab the phone and go. So we're shooting this on the phone. I got a little tripod. And really making it simple 

And I should be filming this on my Boosted Board with my helmet on and my JOBY and my DSLR and my whole rig, which I own, just like Casey's along with thousands, if not millions of other people that were inspired by his filmmaking, inspired by his creativity, inspired by the experience in which he demonstrates as he cruisin the streets, surfing the streets of Manhattan on his Boosted Board. That's how I first got initiated to Casey. That's how I first discovered him.

I was getting interested in Boosted Boards and I found his videos and that's when I started to watch him.

Now his love of riding his board through the streets of Manhattan is just unparalleled and, you know, you watch this thing and you're like, I Got to do this, I got to get it. And in fact, it changed my life. 

So one of the reasons I wanted to do this video on my own, Samsung, was to push myself right. Get out of my own comfort zone. I'm talking about working from home and being remote and trying to do things from more locations and take advantage of the technology. And why not just get out, throw it on? And for those of you that don't watch Casey videos, he wears Sunglasses. One, they look cool. But more importantly, when you're self-framing out in the sun, I can look and make sure that the shot's framed versus looking into the camera, you can't tell the difference.  Again, a Little trick.

Casey announced a little while ago that he's moving back to New York. And a lot of people don't understand in a kind of what Casey Neistat. Is, why he's so. Popular. He's not just a YouTuber who writes skateboards in Manhattan, but he's a lot more than that.

Why Casey is such an important person to me, why I think he should be important to people that are involved in the content business in 2022. And why, you know, and some of the lessons that I learned that I want to share with you that you can also learn from Casey. 

So the first one is the obvious one, and that's just his content creation skills. He does amazing, amazing work, which really shows the art of the possible and inspires a lot of people. And I think that's a big piece of his popularity is because we all would love to be able to make movies like Casey. We can't. He's got a unique style and in fact, there's whole videos on the Casey style and breaking down the Casey style. But there's a couple of things that we can take from him and use every day in our own video making, our own content making. 

He's got it nailed. What I think are kind of the Three E's of successful content and those are really, you know, entertainment, education and emotional connection. So the first one, entertainment it’s got to be entertaining, right? There's just too many options of other things to do. People are just not going to sit through garbage that doesn't entertain them to some degree, right.

The second one is Education, which maybe is not as obvious. But give me something new, make me think, give me something that I can go share with somebody else. Give me something that I can carry in my pocket that I didn't have before, some piece of knowledge about something that I didn't have before. So, you know, education Is a big piece of it.

And then the last one, this emotional connection and you know it from old Coca-Cola commercials and McDonald's commercials, right? Whether they make you smile or laugh or cry or feel warm or sad o longing, emotion is such an important piece. And as we learned recently in Rick Beato’s interview with Sting, Sting thinks the essential emotion is surprise, which kind of caught me by surprise. But then not really. When you think about some of the greatest pieces of music that you like, or the greatest novels or the greatest movies, right? It's the plot twist at the end that gets you so have surprise incorporated in your content. And if you watch Casey’s videos with that In mind, you will see it all over the place. 

One of my favorites is probably the one where he’s at the Fairmont Hotel. Casey climbs up this little itty bitty light well, emergency well, and the shot that comes after is pretty amazing.

Another piece of Casey’s filmmaking style that you can copy is his incorporation of the environment as characters. And whether that's Marlon, the UPS man, his beloved Boosted Board with the big racing stripe on top, the city of Manhattan Itself, which we knew when he went to L.A. that that was a Character that he could not live without. And he incorporates them into his stories. 

Great example. Recently, you know, my friend Keith Townsend was at VMworld Explore. 

First he rolls in with The CTO Flying Cloud, his I think 28-foot Airstream who doesn't love a good beautiful Airstream? But then he got the bill for the carpet in his booth. It was $6,000 dollars. And he built that carpet into a character that sustained throughout the entire duration of VMworld Explorer. And people were tweeting about the $6K carpet throughout the entire show, a really great example of someone kind of taking advantage of the situation and then baking it, baking it into the story. 

But that's not even at all, why Casey Neistat really changed my life years ago.

Discovery, right? How do we find things? How do we find new content? Whether that's new music, new TV shows, new movies, new books. How do we find content these days? 

And this is how it works. So as I'm watching Casey and I'm investigating Casey and I'm lovin watchin these videos of him skateboarding all over Manhattan, I got my Boosted Board. Suddenly, he's on an interview show with Sean Evans called Hot Ones. And I get exposed to Sean Evans on Hot Ones, it's now probably one of my favorite interview shows. There's a whole ecosystem of people, probably Marques Brownlee, one of the best, who does these huge product reviews. And then they're all breaking in to interviews. Rick Beato, who Is another great guy that I follow now, who is ‘What makes this Song Great?’ Which if you are of a certain age, you're going to love every single song in that playlist. And now he's doing interviews with Sting and with SEAL and all these hese musicians who are so appreciative of the way that he has treated their music and the way that he's explained their music in the way that he's. He's, you know, again, Rick is a great one. It's educational, you learn something, it's entertaining, it's great music, Ricks a good entertainer. And you get something to take away that you didn't have before. So this kind of content discovery is pretty cool. And the reason that it works. (sorry for the fly.) The reason that it works is because of the asynchronous content consumption. 

Right? So back in the day, right, Friday nights was the Brady Bunch at 8:00 p.m. and The Partridge Family at 8:30 on Friday nights. If you missed that, you didn't get to see it till the next week and you were out of the loop as to what everybody was talking to at school the next day with it. But most importantly that was a competitive situation for those time slots, right. It is not in your best interest to share audiences because it's such a competitive environment. 

What's changed in asynchronous, what's changed in YouTube consumption is now we're no longer competing for the same timeslot. And so what happens is you get on this path of discovery, of kind of intermingled and shared communities as you get exposed from one creator to another to another to another.

And that's what happened with Casey.

One was the whole filmmaking world and the gear and the techniques and that whole space, which is super fun and cool. And the other one was the whole person electronic vehicle world starting with Boosted Boards and OneWheels and my Super73 and EUCs and Group rides and that whole world and The Float Life and Craft and Ride and you know Shred Lights and a whole bunch of really cool people and companies that I got exposed to. 

One of the videos that Casey did that really taught me or showed me that Casey thinks of things differently and that his ability to intersect, you know, kind of business objectives, social objectives, community objectives and doing good is a little bit different than most people.

And this is 2013. There was a huge typhoon in the Philippines. I don't remember the name of the typhoon. And it wiped out, you know, tons of people in tons of cities. And it was a horrible thing. That coincided with a movie coming out, I think, called ‘The Life of Walter Mitty’, who sent  Casey a Letter and $25,000 and said, we would like for you to make a movie in the promotion of this other movie,  really around the topics of doing well, being inspired, taking charge. And what he did was take that money and basically finance a relief trip to the Philippines where he flew over there, I think he bought like an old school bus or rented a school bus, filled it full of food and provisions, and then drove it out to as close as he could get to the worst parts of the devastation and delivered it. Really interesting way to bring together, you know, kind of humanitarian aid, commercial promotion, great filmmaking, community. This whole thing really came together in that movie. And I think if you watch it, you'll kind of understand that he's got a slightly different way of tying these things together, a creative way, an effective way of tying these things together. 

I wanted to share, you know, another story that what Casey really sells, and that's hope. And in getting ready for one of my prior interviews, there was someone who really outlined hope as a really important ingredient for leadership and management. I hadn't really thought about it so specifically before, but you got to have hope, right? You want to be around to see how this thing is going to end. And Casey always does offer hope. They're very positive. They're very uplifting.

They remind me of a guy, Burt Franklin. Used to have this product called Business.

Plan Builder back in the day. And Business Plan Builder was basically a book and floppy drives with templated word documents and  Excel spreadsheets to build your own Business plan. There were financials. There was product Planning. There were letters, customer letters, all kinds of stuff. It was great.

And you bought it for $19.95 or $29.95 or so even if you never actually built your business plan or took a business out for 20 bucks or 30 bucks or 50 bucks, whatever it was you could buy into the promise of I'm not just stuck in this job that I don't like. I'm at least working on trying to do something different. Vast majority of people that bought Burt's Program probably never started their own business and probably didn't complete many of those templates. But it doesn't rReally matter because the value is really in the dream, the value is in the hope, the values is in the positive message that comes from just taking a swing and not kind of conceding. And there's a lot of that in Casey, in his movie-making that so simple hat everyone wants to try. It makes people know what's possible.

He really exposed me to the way this new content discovery works in an asynchronous world, the way that you can have collaboration and do audience sharing in an asynchronous world, the way that there's absolutely no difference as to when a particular segment was filmed or when it was not filmed. So many lessons learned from Casey. 

And even like when he got his Super73, I was thinking of getting an ebike. I watched his review then I watched Jesse Whalen's riding his Super73 through the deserts of Burning Man with his Dad. Epic. I'm like, This is it. This is the bike for me. And then, you know, ironically, Jesse in the later videos out rolling on the OneWheel through the deserts of Burning Man.

So, you know, he moves a lot of product. It really matters. Not as much because he's telling me that it is, but he's showing me the actual experience of that product. And I wanted it and I got it.

For him. It was the energy that that provides him. But I think also just because you can jump on your Boosted Board and immediately and be out in it, and once you, you know, kind of get the freedom of these electric vehicles, you get you can smell and hear and taste and see, you know, the environment all around you, but you can move through it pretty quickly and effortlessly.

And you don't really have to worry about wind and sweat and hills and those kind of things. But that's a different conversation for a different day.

I should be wearing, I have a lot of his shirts. If you see me wear the 10 million shirt, that's a celebration of his 10 million subscribers. A great message in there about how hard it is to get subscribers and where the toughest parts of the curve are. But he really embraced this idea of just work harder and in fact I have the sweatshirt ‘WORK HARDER’ and he kicked out a video. I forget exactly how many days in a row. A lot of days in a row, like two and a half years of kicking out a video every single day. And if you spent any time doing any of this type of creative work, even PowerPoint, you know, it takes a long time to get all the details right. 

At the time, he got meteoric growth on his follower count and I'm sure his income and his popularity but subsequently if you listen to some of the podcasts that he does now, it almost killed them because he really didn't have time for much outside of that world during that whole time. He had a couple of daughters who we've seen grow up. So pretty interesting stories and I kind of backed off that 

I'm going to say a lot more times going forward because I heard it from Sting and if it came from Sting, I'm going to go with it that you need to have surprise. The surprise, I'm happy to announce, is we have a rebranding of Turn the Lens, the podcast in the show. So the Thumbs are going to be different. We've got a brand new website. I encourage you to take a look. Let me know what you think. But thanks for tuning in to another Episode of Turn the Lens with Jeff Fick, we'll see you next time.

Thanks for watching on YouTube and thanks for listening in on the podcast.

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