222 Casey Neistat on Writing Your Own Rules to Creative Success

"It's what you do with the tools, not what the tools are themselves." - Casey Neistat If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes and video at http://lewishowes.com/222. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 222 with the one and only Casey Neistat.

• 0:07Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:33Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to episode number 222 and a big shout out to our sponsor for today's episode. And that is the School of Greatness book. That's right. If you want to live bigger, love deeper, and leave a legacy in your life, in your business, in your relationships, in your health, then make sure to preorder a copy of my new book today. Go to Amazon, go to barnesandnoble.com, type in the School of Greatness and preorder a copy or even 10 to give away to your friends. Or you can head over to greatnessbook.com and sign up there to learn about all the bonuses and goodies we're giving away. And get your book there at greatnessbook.com. We have a special guest in the house today. His name is Casey Neistat. And I learned about him through a few different friends, Gary Vaynerchuk, Ryan Holiday, Rich Roll,

• 1:17Lewis Howes?

  and just started kind of following him on Snapchat and seeing what this guy was up to and became fascinated with him and his life. Incredible storyteller, incredible director, video editor, movie maker, all those different things. But also has an incredible voice and shares his story on a daily vlog right now on YouTube. Has over 1.1 million subscribers on YouTube, huge following on every social media site. Also launched a new app called Beam, which we'll talk about today. But I think you guys are going to really enjoy this episode because it comes from a creative's mind, comes from a creator's thought process on how to live a great life. So without further ado, let's go ahead and dive in this one with the one and only Casey Neistat.

• 2:04Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. Very excited today, we got Casey Neistat in the house. Good to see you, man.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Good to be here, thanks for having me.

• 2:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, we got introduced, I believe, through Ryan Holiday originally. Was that right?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15Lewis Howes?

  Or Rich Roll, maybe?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  One of the two.

• 2:17Lewis Howes?

  And then I saw you at VidCon in the Instagram Lounge and I was like, I gotta go say hi because we've been trying to meet and put a face to the face and now we're here.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  That Instagram Lounge was like...

• 2:29Lewis Howes?

  It was amazing, right?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Thank God for Instagram.

• 2:31Lewis Howes?

  It was unreal, huh?

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, VidCon was like this sort of mosh pit of an event of just a weekend, really. And there were a few areas of refuge in that Instagram Lounge.

• 2:42Lewis Howes?

  And that was it?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Was it, yeah.

• 2:43Lewis Howes?

  Because you were like probably swamped everywhere you went, right?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  It was tough, it was tough, yeah.

• 2:46Lewis Howes?

  Everyone wanted selfie with you.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just like VidCon was an amazing experience. I'd never done it before, but it is just a concentration of all sort of YouTube fandom, kids that really love and have really great relationships with YouTube.

• 3:00Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  And they're all in one place. So when you would step outside there, it was really overwhelming, exciting at first, which quickly turned into overwhelming.

• 3:08Lewis Howes?

  Like I needed some space and time to like just relax.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  And all those delicious free cookies they have in the Instagram Lounge.

• 3:12Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh, it was amazing, yeah. So I met a lot of people in there. I was hanging out with I justine and had her on the podcast and a lot of other good people in there, so it's good times. Now for my audience, probably doesn't even know who you are, to be honest. It's mostly entrepreneurs, mostly people doing online business, people trying to get to the next level in their life, but not a lot of big YouTube personalities that they follow. So I want to let you tell, show your story really quickly about how you got to where you are now. You just hit a million subscribers a week ago and then you had a million point one in the last six days, right?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, really just tremendous, exciting growth on YouTube.

• 3:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  But yeah, the abbreviated bio, god.

• 3:48Lewis Howes?

  And you're also the founder of a new company called Beam.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, the technology company.

• 3:52Lewis Howes?

  Which Gary Vee's an investor in, right?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, Gary's a part of it.

• 3:54Lewis Howes?

  He's a good friend of mine as well.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Great guy.

• 3:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Great guy.

• 3:57Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. So sorry, go ahead and with the little bit of backstory about it.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, the abbreviated bio is like I started making movies when I was really young, like as a teenager and sort of wove my way through the industry until like, you know, late, late... Two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight is when I really kind of hit, found my stride in the mainstream space. So I had a television show on HBO that I wrote and directed and starred in and made a couple, produced a couple of feature films that were very successful.

• 4:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Uh, and that mainstream, that mainstream success kind of crescendoed, peaked for me in like two thousand and ten.

• 4:32Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 4:33Speaker 01

  When I decided that, that I just, I wasn't so into it. It wasn't, it didn't really mesh well with what turned me on, what excited me about making movies. And that's when I really defected and I left the mainstream space, left TV, left films and shifted all of my focus to, to new media.

• 4:52Lewis Howes?

  Creating your own content on YouTube and other places.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, just really embracing the channels and of distribution that I think young people were embracing. And moreover than, than just the numbers, but the relationship that young people were developing via these new distribution platforms.

• 5:09Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Versus the relationships that historically people like you and me, old people like you and me.

• 5:15Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Have always had with television and film. That's right.

• 5:18Lewis Howes?

  Okay. So what was the relationship you had with it when you're on HBO? How long were you on HBO for?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  One season, yeah.

• 5:25Lewis Howes?

  One season and you did some other movies. Were you just feeling like you weren't connecting with your audience that well? Or were you feeling that the industry itself wasn't fun or because of all the politics?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  It was, it's all of those things, but really it was, I mean, it was all of those things very much. Like the political aspects of mainstream media are really uninteresting to me.

• 5:45Lewis Howes?

  The time it takes to release something.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Just all of it. It was like, I was such a, last night I was at the VMAs and it was such a harsh reminder of just how stagnant and stodgy and uninteresting the bureaucratic process is that is mainstream media.

• 5:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Um, and I think it really mitigates, marginalizes what is sort of the artistic and creative spirit of, of making movies, making videos.

• 6:08Lewis Howes?

  Or making music or anything creative online, right?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Anything creative. You bureaucratize the spirit of the creativity and what's left is the mush that you see on TV.

• 6:16Lewis Howes?

  Now, if you're an artist or a filmmaker or a content creator in general, do you feel like you shouldn't even go mainstream towards TV or towards film or towards working with a music label? Or should you focus on creating it all yourself? Because it, it still helps a lot of people who don't know how to do the online stuff.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, there's, there's, there's no answer to that question. I think that it's one thing that.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Everybody but the successful people fail to realize about any creative industry is that there is absolutely no defined path.

• 6:47Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  There isn't one, so it's about paving your own path. And now for me, my path meant mainstream just didn't work and new media did work. And for other people, it's entirely antithetical to that where mainstream is exactly the right place for them. So there is no formula that's right or wrong. I'm just much better versed in my own.

• 7:06Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  The trajectory that I follow myself and that includes really running away from the establishment into whatever the most forward-thinking space is.

• 7:16Lewis Howes?

  And when was that time, did you say you started moving online?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  It was really, it was a pretty aggressive inflection point in my career, 2010, but it just happened at once.

• 7:24Lewis Howes?

  Right, got you, 2010. And when did you start to realize, once you went online and followed your path, that oh, I'm picking up traction and it's actually doing something, it's giving me money, it's making me opportunities? What was that?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  It was slower, much slower than you'd think, much slower.

• 7:39Lewis Howes?

  Like a year ago or something?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it manifested in a number of different ways. Like my early, career-wise, my early sort of means of income when I was online is by doing advertising.

• 7:50Lewis Howes?

  YouTube ads.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Not YouTube ads, just doing any kind of advertising, branded content, because I would make the very best movies I could possibly make, I'd put them on YouTube. And they wouldn't always get huge numbers, but I think important people, the people who made decisions in the branding space would see them and they had an appreciation for the style or the tone or their perspective. And they saw an opportunity to sort of partner with me for their companies.

• 8:12Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  And that's how, you know, early in those days, like 2011, 2012, I was doing big branded content deals with companies like Nike and Google. Huge companies, even though my reach and my audience wasn't that big, it was because, I think, of an appreciation.

• 8:28Lewis Howes?

  The style.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, for what I was making.

• 8:30Lewis Howes?

  It was art. And they liked it and it matched with their brand.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know about, yeah, I would, I think calling it art is a determination that you can make. I don't know that I would call it art, but I think they just saw something like, okay, we have an appreciation for what this is.

• 8:44Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  What can we do with, with this guy?

• 8:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  And those branded deals were sort of the earliest.

• 8:51Lewis Howes?

  Money makers for you.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's the first thing that really quantified what would be called success in that space is showing that appreciation and then figuring out how to turn it into something that actually helped pay the bills.

• 9:01Lewis Howes?

  What was that first branded deal that you're like, whoa, this is actually something, you know, was it a couple of grand? Was it 20 grand? Was it like, oh, okay.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  I mean, no, these are, these are real money deals. And when I say real money, that's because prior to jumping into this space, I had historically worked in advertising.

• 9:17Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, literally since the early like 2005-ish, 2004, even before that, I was always doing ad deals because ads are how I paid the bills. And I was never successful, worked doing TV commercials. I'd get a lot of them because people would like my work and I'd get the job. So I was a terrible TV commercial director. I just didn't know what to do. You show up on a union set with a, with a half a million dollar budget.

• 9:40Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  And you have everybody doing everything. And like, I literally was like, what do you need me here for? You have a storyboard and a DP. So you have like a drawing of what the picture should look like. And then a cinematographer to capture that picture. Like, what do you need me here?

• 9:53Lewis Howes?

  To direct, yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd do my best, but whether I like gave it everything I had, or I just like slept in my trailer for the whole shoot.

• 9:59Lewis Howes?

  Got done.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  At the end of it, it looks the same, which was something that was like the mushy in, in, the mushy invisible commercials that your entire audience sees on TV every day and forgets them before they're over.

• 10:11Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  And that was frustrating for me. And when I, when I shifted to online, I remember saying to the, the TV production, the commercial production company I worked with that represented me, that got me the jobs. I said, I don't want to do this crap.

• 10:22Lewis Howes?

  For the online stuff, yeah.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  No, not for the online stuff, for mainstream television. I said, I don't want to do this like crap. I don't want to make TV commercials anymore. I'm going to go make online content. Get me deals where I get to work directly with brands, no agencies, and I just put videos on the internet and they said like, that will never happen. Wow. So I stopped working with them right then and there. Screw you. Yeah, and, and went in my own direction. And that's when like, that's when the real brand deals started to happen, you know? Were they your relationships or people just came to you? It was a combination of both, you know, like. Referrals and whatever. Nike, for example, like I look back and I did a tiny job for Nike. That was like Nike has some brilliant people working for them and one of them is a good friend of mine named Julian.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  He was like a special forces guy, so he just has like a tiny tertiary budget that he was able to do interesting things with. Right. And he asked me to make a bike video. And nobody that saw this video, and this is like really early on, way back in the day. And I made this video and I, I put it online and they loved it and I loved it and nobody saw it. But about a year and a half later Nike called me and they're like, let's do, we want to do something big. And it was a three video deal, real money, um, really big deal. Six, multiple six figures. Yeah, yeah, big time. And, uh, the kind of money that would be spent on a, on a typical TV commercial, except for it was a budget that was given to me entirely. With full, my, you know, full discretion on my end. Amazing. And we made three videos and the first two were, were very successful.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  They started their huge, you know, triple A, a hundred million dollar athletes like Hope Solo. You know, just kicked ass in the World Cup and, and, and, um, in Damacan Sioux and the NFL, like really amazing. And we made a fantastic movie together and they were very successful. And the third video, three of three videos for Nike was this video that I pitched them that they were totally hip to. And at the ninth hour, I decided not to do that video at all. But to just take the whole budget and do something I've always wanted to do, which is like travel around the world until the budget evaporated, till I was out of money. And then I figured I would turn that into the Nike video.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  And Nike

• 12:28Lewis Howes?

  And how did that do?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  It's, I think, still the most watched video that Nike's ever put online in the history of

• 12:36Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:37Lewis Howes?

  And what do they think about it?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  It might be number two. We might have been displaced, but I know I held that spot for like well over a year.

• 12:41Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  They were nervous at first.

• 12:43Lewis Howes?

  More than any LeBron James video or any, you know.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  You know, I have to check numbers, but it killed. It was like, between Nike's channel and my channel, it was like 20 million views.

• 12:52Lewis Howes?

  Wow, amazing.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Um, but not only that, but because of the narrative, which was very open, and I discussed this with Nike ahead of time, so it's not quite as nefarious as it sounds, but like, I took a budget that I was supposed to spend on making a commercial and instead I spent it doing something that I personally wanted to do, which was like run around the world like a crazy person.

• 13:07Lewis Howes?

  And have fun.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  And have fun, but really it didn't, it didn't diverge at all from the narrative, which is this idea of like, make it count, just do it. So even though it was a really indirect commercial, it was much more about a brand. It had nothing to do with the product. In fact, I was not wearing any Nike gear in the entire commercial. I'm wearing a Patagonia coat.

• 13:26Lewis Howes?

  Shut up.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  And the product that it was supposed to be for, I didn't have in my possession for the entire shoot.

• 13:29Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  There's no Nike branding in it whatsoever.

• 13:33Lewis Howes?

  But the story was Nike.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Sure, but when they saw it, they were like, we don't know what this is, but we think that people are gonna like it. So just put it on your YouTube channel and let's see what happens.

• 13:44Lewis Howes?

  And we spent a few hundred thousand dollars, so let's see what happens, right?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you, you know, they, I think they didn't know, but it was wildly successful. It thrust me way out in the limelight. It had, it was all over the news. It was in newspapers. It was in, you know, homepage of yahoo.com. It was everywhere. And it really was exciting for me and I think exciting for Nike. And I look at a company like Nike and you wonder why they are such a kick ass brand. You wonder why there are so many people so loyal to that company. And it's not just the product. It's the ethos behind the brand.

• 14:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  And when I look back and I say like, who's the maniac who wrote me this big fat check and then just let me do my thing? Like, that's crazy. How do you get that approved? You realize that that is what makes Nike great.

• 14:27Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  And, you know, like being at the VMAs last night where I had both hands tied and both feet tied and like a babysitter and a minder and like all these leashes put on me by Viacom.

• 14:38Lewis Howes?

  Of what you can do or you can't do.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Everything, everything. You realize that like, okay, this is why MTV is quickly getting more and more irrelevant.

• 14:46Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Is because it's like the stodgier and more bureaucratic you are when trying to apply, or appeal rather, to today's youth, today's young people, the people that are this, that comprise this generation. They only respond to honesty, integrity, and like a real sort of forward looking perspective on what creativity is.

• 15:07Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  And I don't think you can bureaucratize that. And now there are more and more companies, Nike's certainly always been one of them, that realize that and they know that they have to take chances. And you're seeing more and more of that. And I think that that in itself is why online content is proliferating in the way that it is. And television and these sort of old media is depreciating at such a rapid, rapid pace.

• 15:31Lewis Howes?

  If someone offered you a TV show, would you take it?

• 15:33Speaker 01

  No chance.

• 15:34Lewis Howes?

  Even if the biggest network?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  No chance. No chance. I was on the biggest network.

• 15:38Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  No chance. There's no way. The viewerships I do now, it's.

• 15:43Lewis Howes?

  Crush it.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  There's, yeah.

• 15:44Lewis Howes?

  So you put out a video, how many viewers in the first week?

• 15:47Speaker 01

  I mean, right now, and this is changes daily, but right now, it's like a bad day for me on YouTube is about 700,000. A good day is about a million and a half. So that's about where I average.

• 15:57Lewis Howes?

  Every day or?

• 15:58Speaker 01

  In aggregate. So my YouTube channel does, you know, anywhere close, around a million views a day.

• 16:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  And if you just appeal like raw numbers, apply that to television, that would be a hit show.

• 16:10Lewis Howes?

  That's like the biggest show. It's like the Biggest Loser or something, you know, it's getting that many.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  It would be considered a very, it would be considered a very successful show, but it's not just the numbers. It's the relationship that young people have with content that they see online, that they choose to watch, versus the content that they see on TV, which is fed to them.

• 16:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  And that is a sort of a profound idea that I didn't understand. Until my show on HBO.

• 16:39Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh. Huh.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  It was the kind of thing where it's like, how old are you?

• 16:44Lewis Howes?

  I'm thirty two.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm thirty four. So when we were kids, like, we watched however much Nickelodeon or MTV is we possibly watched.

• 16:51Lewis Howes?

  TRL?

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, before our parents yelled at us. But you have no control over that.

• 16:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  You turn on the TV and you're at the behest of whatever, whatever the channel is putting in front of you. And if you liked it, you kept watching. If you hated it, you kept watching. And that was it. That was your relationship. But when it comes to online content, like, I look at the way my son consumes this stuff. And it's like, if he's not interested, he doesn't watch it.

• 17:12Lewis Howes?

  He goes to the next video.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  There's a billion channels on YouTube.

• 17:14Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  And, and the inverse of that is if you do watch it, it's because you genuinely want to consume that stuff. So the relationship that, that the people who, who choose, who like, take their precious time to watch my stuff online versus the people that maybe passively consumed it on TV, that relationship is so different and so huge.

• 17:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  That it makes, it makes it very hard for someone like me to be attracted at all to something like TV.

• 17:42Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. Man, that's fascinating. And, you know, I see you running around with all the big YouTube and Instagram and Snapchat influencers. And you guys are constantly doing cross-promotion. And that's just building you even bigger than any TV show as well. When you get a group of you together shooting video, it's like, no one can compete with that viewership.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I also think it's like, it's, this is so new, this space. And it's so undefined.

• 18:08Lewis Howes?

  Still.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Oh, of course.

• 18:10Lewis Howes?

  Not even, you know, five years ago, people feel like they're not in unless they were in five years ago, but you can still jump in today.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  It's in its infancy. It's more competitive. It's much harder to get to, to, to get anywhere in the space now. But it's so new that, for me, what's most interesting about any overlap with other, other big YouTubers or big people in the space is that, like, we need to share our experiences and share our understanding because it's such an undefined space.

• 18:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  That there's no other way to really learn about it than by being in it. There's no, it can't be taught. YouTube doesn't know. They're building the best tools they can, but it's, they're just providing us the tools. It's up to us to build the house.

• 18:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  So being around other YouTubers, you know, like at Big Town, for example, where we first met, is it just a tremendous opportunity for me to really share my own understanding? And then to learn from other people. And that's what's most exciting about, about the collaborations I do with other, other YouTubers.

• 19:00Lewis Howes?

  Well, how, how long was that video shoot with Nike where you went around the world? How long did it take?

• 19:05Speaker 01

  We did that shoot, we said 10 days, it was actually nine days. And then there was a huge battle on Reddit because nobody believed that I did that in 10 days.

• 19:13Lewis Howes?

  How many different countries?

• 19:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know the number, but it's, it was absurd.

• 19:16Lewis Howes?

  You were flying everywhere.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the reality of it was, it was like much less rom- mm. It was incredible, but it was much less romantic than it looked in the big.

• 19:25Lewis Howes?

  You weren't sleeping, you were like, you know.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  We went the first five days without laying vertically. I'm sorry, without laying horizontally. So that meant we were sitting in like, you know.

• 19:33Lewis Howes?

  Trains and planes.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Trains, planes, coach seats in the back piled in the middle. And these aren't coach seats on like British Airlines or something nice. This is like inter-African airlines from, that are just like really punishing day in and day out. And most of the hotels we were in, we were in for an hour or two.

• 19:49Lewis Howes?

  Just shooting and then it's on the next.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 19:51Lewis Howes?

  Get the shot, go.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 19:53Lewis Howes?

  Got a bite to eat, see ya.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  There was no sitting on that beach. We literally got to the beach, ran through it and then got jumped on a plane to leave.

• 19:59Lewis Howes?

  Shut up.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:00Lewis Howes?

  Wow. What's the key to being successful on YouTube or creating content online right now? Is it having the nice fancy camera? Is it the production value? Is it your personality?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Look, if I could, if I could define what it took, I think a lot more people would follow that trajectory. It's the greatest job in the world, but, so I don't know what's right, but I can definitely tell you what, what it's not. And what it's not is having the best gear, first of all. You know, like the vlog that I posted this morning, which is, I posted like five hours ago and it's really.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  I'm looking at my cellphone right now to figure out, to tell you guys exactly how many views it's done in the last couple of hours.

• 20:38Lewis Howes?

  Lose your cellphone?

• 20:38Speaker 01

  I don't know what I did.

• 20:39Lewis Howes?

  It's on the ground?

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Is it on the ground? How do I lose a cellphone? Like, I'm sitting in one spot here. But what the key is not, is the gear. And I think that's what's so...

• 20:49Lewis Howes?

  Limiting for people, when they think, "I've gotta have the right gear, the right mics."

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's wrong. My HBO show was shot on a point-and-shoot that we bought at Walmart.

• 20:57Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 20:58Speaker 01

  But, I mean, so much of my YouTube, one of my most-watched videos on YouTube called "Bike Lanes," which has over 15 million views, that was shot on the crappiest of point-and-shoot cameras.

• 21:07Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, just so... It's not. It's what you do with the tools, not what the tools are themselves. So I'm just looking at my stats right here. So my video that I posted this morning, so I posted it 3 hours and 58 minutes ago, and it has 140,000 views.

• 21:22Lewis Howes?

  On YouTube?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the last 3 hours. This video primarily was shot on my cellphone.

• 21:29Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Because...

• 21:30Lewis Howes?

  iPhone 6?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Because MTV didn't allow any cameras at the VMAs. But they did, like, allow cellphones. So I'm, like, standing there being like, "You guys realize that every cellphone has a video camera built in, and how ridiculously contradictory..." All this means is that there's gonna be a million bad videos posted, instead of a million videos. Regardless, like, you know, half that video was shot on my cellphone.

• 21:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  And it's just not. It's like, if you can do great things with a terrible camera, you can do great things with a great camera. So I really like to drive home that point, because my favorite aspect of creating online is how accessible, democratic, egalitarian it is. Like, we all, you know, me selling a TV show for a couple million dollars to HBO, I believe that it was, like, primarily the merits of what we made. But I also know that we had, Christine Bouchon is our producer, who's tremendously influential, she's a big-time producer, she's the one who got us the meeting with Carolyn Strauss, the former head of programming at HBO.

• 22:28Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  They had a relationship. There's nepotism involved, there are big Hollywood producers and agents and facilitators involved. And your average kid, sitting in Ohio right now in front of his computer, doesn't have that kind of access.

• 22:39Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  What he has is an internet connection and a crappy camera from Walmart.

• 22:43Lewis Howes?

  That's it?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  And that should be enough. And I think right now, because of technology, for the first time ever, that is enough. And I love that. I love that. I love how fair that is.

• 22:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. What about when editing comes into play, when people are like, well, I don't know how to use these editing tools and I can't edit the way you do. You've got incre- when I say you're an artist, it's like your editing is so stylistic and beautiful in my mind. When I watch your videos, I'm like, I love the way you edit it. And I feel like that's an art form. And that takes time and energy. It's like, how do you, if you're not Casey Neistat, who's been doing this for 15 years, and can whip it out and edit, and in a couple hours after he shoots it, or 10 minutes, how does someone get over that?

• 23:24Speaker 01

  I mean, work. You know, I watched LeBron James play basketball and I'm like, it's bullshit that he's so much better than I am. But the guy's been like, he's dedicated his life to something. And of course, he should be incredible at it. And something like editing, like, there's only one way to get good at editing, and that's to put your 10,000 hours in.

• 23:42Lewis Howes?

  Or outsource it.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  You know, I don't know. I've never outsourced any of my vlogs.

• 23:47Lewis Howes?

  All your editing you do.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Soup to nuts, top to bottom, that was just me. And I have worked with collaborators. That Nike video, which I think is one of the best videos I've ever made, my friend Max Joseph edited that. Cause he's a better editor than I am. But, you know, Max is a big, famous Hollywood director. So he's not the kind of person to be able to edit my stuff. But the truth is, like, my HBO show was edited in iMovie, which is a free download.

• 24:11Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  So again, it's like-

• 24:13Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't have to be this elaborate editing with text overlays and graphics or anything. It can be simple and still be effective.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't even think it's that. I think it's less than that. I think it's that these tools are accessible by all. These tools are free and we can all use them. And it really doesn't matter what the tool is. It's what can you do with it?

• 24:32Lewis Howes?

  What was the dream for you growing up? Cause I know you, you lived in a trailer home, I saw for a while and you, you know, you had a kid when you were 16, is that right?

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I was one of four kids and we kind of like lower middle house, uh, lower middle class household. Um, and it's just tough because there was my older brother who was the first born and he's so incredibly good looking. And then my sister was the second born and then my little brother is the baby. Yeah. And I was like this accident that happened 13 months after my sister was born. And I think like when you're in that position as a kid, you're just, you learn quickly. You have to scream the loudest to get noticed. Uh, I was the youngest of four, so I get it. Yeah. I get it. Uh, so I don't know, but yeah, I, you know, I was really got in a lot of trouble in school. I never did well. I didn't, never did well at all. Um, dropped out of high school in the 10th grade, ran away from home kind of thing. Um, never went back. Never finished.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Uh, never finished, never went back to my parents' house. Like never, uh, yeah, never looked back on either of those. Have you talked to your parents since? Yeah, very, very close relationship. You just never went back to? Just never went back, like never moved back even mom and dad. Uh, I mean, like bounced around to friends apartments for a while and like. At 16? Uh, no, I was at 15. Wow. I was 15, yeah. Um, but yeah, no, then had a baby when, uh, my son was born. It was two weeks after my 17th birthday. So the whole pregnancy, I was 16 years old. That's gotta be emotionally heavy, man. Were you okay with it? No, you know, it's, I say this with much reluctance, but honestly, looking back, and this is unique to me, this is not advice to any kids that might be listening to this great podcast. It was the greatest thing that could have ever happened to me.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Having a kid when you were 17? Yeah, yeah. Why's that? I mean, you know, I have a, another daughter now and like, I really like believe I was put on this planet to be a dad. It's my favorite. I've never not been a dad. I was a kid when I had a baby, so I was either a child or a parent. And I never not want to be like, it's, it's, it's this, this, the profundity that is living for something bigger than yourself. And for me, that's what having a child was. And it seems a little bit absurd to say that at age 17, that it had that impact on me. And I, I don't know how cognizant of it I was then, but looking back at it, it was like, that's, that was the inflection point. Wow. Because prior to that, I was just like another selfish little punk ass high school kid who.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Getting in trouble. Yeah, sold dime bags in the parking lot and like just caused trouble, but immediately after Owen was born, it was like, okay, now if I screw around, it's not just me, but like. And that is a huge deal. And like, everything that I've ever done, especially since then, in the really, really hard years right after he was born, was just like, you do it because you're, you're fighting for someone else. And the motivation that is that, I think, is so much stronger than anything else out there. Any of my other self, uh, selfish sort of ego-driven ambitions pale in comparison to, to the ambitions that are, you know, wanting to succeed for someone else.

• 27:32Lewis Howes?

  That's interesting. A couple of things. One is, you know, some people would just go get a normal job to pay the bills so they could, you know, pay for their child, their child at seventeen or eighteen and not go after their dream. But it seems like you went after your dream even more so. How were you able to handle that without, because I'm assuming you weren't making a lot of money when you were seventeen to twenty-three doing film?

• 27:53Speaker 01

  I mean, hunger is a very, very powerful motivator. And when I was living in that trailer park with the kid, like, we were on welfare for a while. I was a dishwasher. I worked in a crappy seafood restaurant as a dishwasher. Which now, just sort of parenthetically, my favorite piece of advice to give to young people saying, I don't know what I want to do with my life. I say, get a job doing something you hate. Because the fastest way to figure out what you love and where you want to be in life is by spending a lot of time doing something you hate.

• 28:23Lewis Howes?

  So it's miserable.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, spending fifty hours a week scrubbing pots and pans was like, I was just in my head the whole time fantasizing about what I want to do in life.

• 28:31Lewis Howes?

  It's brilliant. I, I was a truck driver for three months, driving from Columbus to Cincinnati and back every day. And I could only go fifty-five miles an hour, pedal to the metal. And it was so loud and obnoxious and I couldn't do anything. It was just like the most draining time of my life.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  But it got you thinking.

• 28:47Lewis Howes?

  It got me thinking. I was like, what do I need to do to get out of this?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And for me, at that time in my life, it was sort of, I mean, I, I guess you could say I was making okay money. I was making enough to like feed my kid and pay my, I think it was three hundred bucks in rent. Uh, three hundred bucks a month rather than mortgage on my trailer. But my biggest fear was not being broke because like, when you're at rock bottom and you're on welfare, you can still like afford food.

• 29:14Lewis Howes?

  Get by, yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Get by might be a, like, I could afford food and I could afford my trailer. So it was like, we weren't homeless and we weren't starving. So to me, that was absolute destitution. Wasn't really like that bad. There's no dignity in it, but still, it wasn't.

• 29:28Lewis Howes?

  You weren't on the streets.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  That's right. So with that, like my, it's like, what is it? Laszlo's hierarchy of needs. Laszlo's hierarchy. Laszlo's hierarchy of needs, like, so like. Basic needs were met. Basic needs were met, then I started to look around and I realized like the greatest fear for this like beautiful little baby boy was that he would grow up and see his dad as a loser. And that is a, once those basic needs are met, that's incredibly powerful motivator. Yeah. Because, you know, my dad, who's, who's absolutely not a loser. But I watched my dad to provide for his family of six. I watched him work sixty hours a week, hating every minute of it. And he came home from work just hating his job and. Or feeling trapped, probably.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  I'm sure, yeah, he had a family to take care of. He struggled. Now he does what he loves. He has a coffee shop now and he's never been happier. That's cool. But I watched that and like I just saw myself going down that trajectory and it wasn't just a job that I hated. It was a job that I hated that, that didn't provide. It was a job that I hated that did nothing but cover those basic needs. And that was the motivator. That was when, that was the motivator. The catalyst for me giving up and moving to New York and going for it was, I still look back and I don't know what that, what that was. Like I, there are only like two times in my life where I genuinely have no idea what I was thinking. And I moved to New York City in June of two thousand and one with eight hundred dollars and a three, a place to stay for three months. And that was it.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Where'd you move from? Uh, Connecticut, like three hours outside the city. Gotcha. So you'd probably been in the city a number of times. Sure, yeah, yeah. Take the train and. But I knew one person there and I had. And they let you stay for three months? Yeah, that's exactly right. Three months and eight hundred bucks. No job, no prospects, no education, no, no skills. And how old were you then? Uh, nineteen. Nineteen. And what was the dream to do? I mean, I wanted to make movies. But you didn't have the skills yet. You were kind of doing a little bit. I knew how to edit an iMovie. Wow. No, I didn't have any skills. Nothing. Okay. So you wanted to make movies in New York City, but you had no clue, no connections? I knew one thing and I knew that I would never be able to do it in Connecticut. Right. You knew you had to be there to see what was possible. Yeah.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Okay, and what, what happened? What was the turning point? I mean, it was tough. I bounced. I was a bike messenger. It's a horrible job. I was a bike messenger and this is back, this is 15 years ago, but it was back when you paid for your cellphone minutes. Remember those days? Oh my gosh, yes. And they would call me on my cellphone to let me know where I had to deliver and pick up packages. And at the end of the first week, my pay was $280 and my cellphone bill for that week was 350. No. So it cost me $70 to be a bike messenger. That's right. Oh my gosh. Miserable. I also got hurt. It was a nightmare. By a taxi or a car? Yeah. I got dorked. So you're not making, you're losing money, working for people. No health insurance, yeah. But you know, like eventually I met this artist guy and I did some like grunt work for him. And when I say grunt work, I mean grunt work. Right.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  And showed him some of my movies and kind of met some other people. I'd show my movies to anyone who would listen, anyone who would watch. And eventually the first paid gig I got was I was hired by this guy who was an art collector and he's like, I want you to make a movie for my husband for his 50th birthday. And I was like, great. I would love to make a movie for your husband for his 50th birthday. I would take any job. Sure. Bar Mitzvah videos, wedding videos. And he was like, okay, here are a list of people that, that we were gonna want you to interview for his wedding, his, his birthday video. And it was like, no joke, like Hillary Clinton, Mario Cuomo, President Bill Clinton. And I was like, oh my God. Really? And they knew all these people? Yeah, very, so. They were connected. It wasn't like, go find them.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  So this man's husband, Fred Hochberg, he is the, I mean, I think he's currently, if they didn't just shut him down, I think they just shut him down, the chairman of the Import Export Bank. He's, you know, he's in the Obama administration. He is, um, he is a, he was the dean of the new school. He's a major guy. He's a very dear friend of mine. As a kid. And that, the wife asked you to make this video? No, his husband. Oh, he's got you, got you, got you. But, and yeah, so we just kept showing up in places with our camera. We had no idea what to do.

• 33:40Lewis Howes?

  So you and a buddy, you hired a guy?

• 33:41Speaker 01

  It was my brother Van and I.

• 33:43Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  But I just remember like when we went to interview Bill Clinton, which was terrifying.

• 33:47Lewis Howes?

  And you're 20.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  I'm 20.

• 33:49Lewis Howes?

  What the heck?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  And we like set up our camera and like hit record and we're in this room. And we're like, here's what we're thinking of doing with the president. And Secret Service is like, uh, we have a teleprompter, pre-recorded message for him.

• 34:01Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  And we're like, okay. And we just sat there and then they went to go get the president and they leave us in this room with a teleprompter. And I grabbed the laptop and I did like Ctrl, Alt, Delete, shut down the laptop. So the president walks in and they sit him down. And he's looking at us and he's like, what's going on here? And Secret Service is like, or his handlers were like, we have a pre-recorded message. I'm just having some trouble with my computer. I'm very sorry, Mr. President. And as we're waiting, I just like, look at Secret Service, look at my brother. And I like gently walk up to the president and I introduce myself and I was like, here's my idea.

• 34:34Lewis Howes?

  No, he did not.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  And he was like, he like, I remember him kicking back, clapping and being like, I love it, boys, let's go.

• 34:40Lewis Howes?

  Shut up.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Camera was already rolling. He said the joke we wanted him to say. And we like hit record. He was out of the room before she got the teleprompter back.

• 34:48Lewis Howes?

  Shut up. It was like a two minute thing.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  It was like 15 second thing.

• 34:51Lewis Howes?

  What was the joke? Do you remember?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  I do remember.

• 34:53Lewis Howes?

  Can you say it?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Fred Hochberg was the guy whose, whose, uh, birthday it was. Fred Hochberg's mother is a woman named Lillian Vernon, who started the Lillian Vernon catalog, which is like the first mail order catalog ever.

• 35:05Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  And she made a, she sold that company, I want to say for $500 million in, in 2002 or something like that. In any event, she is a big campaign donor. So we had, uh, we had, we made a T-shirt for the president that said, Fred Hochberg had Lillian Vernon donate to my campaign and all I got was this silly T-shirt. Something like that, something like, it was really crass and funny. And when like that video played at his birthday in front of the president and everyone else, like everyone laughed and loved it. But, you know, like that video, people watch that and they're like, this is great. This is great. What else have you done? Wow. And then that little kernel just like slowly, slowly rolled down the hill. Amazing.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  And it was like tough, like the paycheck for that, I think just covered, maybe covered. No, the computer and camera that we had to buy to actually shoot it. To do it, right, right. And like, which was a crappy. You got a couple of grand or something. It was like literally like, I don't think we made any money on that. Right, right. But you made the connections, the experience. I mean, like, it was, there was never, we never said no. Yeah. Didn't matter what the job was. You had to a 20? You'd say yes to everything. Wow. And then like made a bunch of little silly videos and, um, yeah, and that, that sort of, that kept going. And this is pre YouTube? Pre YouTube. Five, because YouTube's 2004, 2005? Uh, yeah, 2000, is it 2004, 2006 is YouTube? Yeah. Um, but yeah, and, uh, I think it was 2003, I made a movie called, uh, iPod's Dirty Secret.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  It's a movie I made with my brother where I had a Gen one iPod and the battery died and Apple refused to replace it. Their policy was just to instruct you to buy a new one. So I made a video that spray painted a disclaimer on every iPod advertisement in New York City that said iPod's unreplaceable battery lasts only 18 months. And I made a little three minute video of that, uh, my brother and I made it. And I posted that online and it got like. Pre YouTube. Yeah, this is three years pre YouTube and it got six million views. What? Where? Why didn't you even post it? Yeah, it, this is pre social media too, so it was not posted, it was purely from email. Oh, my goodness. If you can imagine. And that, um, like the term viral movie was coined talking about that film in the Washington Post.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Uh, and that really put us on the map in a huge way. Like that was a gigantic, yeah, a huge, huge leap forward. What happened after that? Uh, what happened after that is people looked and they said, have you done anything else? And the answer was, yeah, here's 50 other movies I've made that nobody wants to see. And that really, that started to pick up some traction. One of the movies was a movie series I shot in my apartment with my brother called Science Experiments, which was literally, we bought Mr. Wizard's World book of little experiments you can do on a kitchen table. And we just made films about them. Uh huh. Uh, and that like did well in the fine art world. Like that was introduced, that was invited rather to the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil, which is their national art show.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  I was 24 at the time, was the youngest invited artist in the 52 year history of the institution. And that was a big deal, like flown down there and all of a sudden like I was, I was the big deal.

• 38:02Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  It was a movie that we shot. And the reason why we shot a movie about science experiments, we couldn't afford to shoot anything else. All we had was my apartment.

• 38:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  And so we just would shoot things on a kitchen table because we didn't have anything else to shoot.

• 38:15Lewis Howes?

  Wow. And that all led into bigger, bigger mainstream stuff, eventually HBO, other movies, Nike campaigns, commercials. And then it brought you back to where we are. Now, what you're doing, which is just taking over the world with everything and your new app. I'm curious, what, what about your new app? Why did you come up with the idea with Beam and why?

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's, it's actually, it's a, it's a, it's a very organic transition from that story to leapfrogging all that mainstream stuff from those early days. It was at the height of the mainstream success that I said, why am I so miserable right now? And I realized that like, the reason why I loved making those videos so much in the early days was they were a means of me sharing my ideas and perspectives with the world. And then with success came all these other things. And I realized at the end of that, like, it's not about sharing perspectives and ideas. It's about all these other things like ego and money and all this stuff that I really don't care about. Just not that interesting to me. And that's why I said, the hell with it. Let me go to YouTube where I can just make whatever I want and then share it. Or it's purely about ideas and perspectives.

• 39:20Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  And Beam, my, my technology company is a, is a product that it's something I thought up while at MIT last year. I was invited to, to MIT as, as part of a fellowship with the Media Lab, MIT's Media Lab. The Sundance Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation paid for it. So I lived at MIT. I was, I lived on campus and I worked out of MIT for the first half of 2014. And while I was there, I was incubating this idea. MIT is not involved at all with, with the company, but it was an idea that, that it always existed in the back of my head. And while at MIT, my biggest takeaway when I looked around, the people I was surrounded by, is that with technology, anything is possible. So when I left MIT six months later with that understanding,

• 40:04Speaker 01

  I really set off on this mission to achieve this, this goal, this dream of mine, which is to figure out how to enable others to share their perspectives and ideas via video. Without, uh, without the burden of creation. Yeah. So, the aspect of creation, I think, is the biggest barrier. You want to share something that you think's amazing, but first you have to create something. Yeah. And creating something is not for everybody. We're not all artists. We don't all have the means that you and I have been discussing for the last thirty minutes. So, so what can you do? How can you enable everyone from, you know, my mom to a kid in junior high school to share? And share with, in the most dynamic, uh, medium ever to exist, which is moving imagery, which is video,

• 40:49Speaker 01

  but without having to create? How do you do that? Hmm. And that was the problem that I wanted to solve. And that's a problem that we did solve and have solved with Beam. Yeah. And what's the difference? So, people know what Beam is. What's the difference between Beam and Snapchat or anything else? Yeah, so Beam is a, a, a social network. It's a platform that we launched, uh, five weeks ago now. Uh, my business partner in Beam is a guy named Matt Hackett. And that was the, uh, he was the, the VP of Engineering at Tumblr before he joined Beam, before he and I partnered up. A very well-versed in the technical side. And the way Beam works is, uh, you're, it's an app. You download it, but when you're looking at the app, you see a feed. A feed that's not so dissimilar from maybe a Twitter feed or even your email feed. Um, and it's everyone's name. So, it'll say your name or my name.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  And when you hold down on my name, you get to see a short video. Which is, that's fairly typical. There's nothing super, super progressive about that. But the way you capture is, is, I think, what, where we're headed when it comes to these sorts of platforms. And the way you capture is there's no interface for video recording. There's no big red button that you hold down. There's no cinematography. There are no effects. There's nothing. Um, you literally cover the proximity sensor. You cover that little sensor and it's the ear hole, this ear speaker on your phone, on your iPhone. And the screen goes black and it immediately starts recording four seconds of video. Only four seconds? Only four seconds, yeah. And the minute those four seconds are up, it makes a noise. Or the second those four seconds are up. Thank you.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  It makes a noise and it's immediately posted. It's sent out to everyone who follows you. Wow. And if you want to share more than four seconds, you cover it again and it'll capture another clip. Sure, but and what that manifests as, what that ends up being is sort of the anti duck face selfie, where people look into their phones the way they look at a mirror. And what it starts to look like is a true perspective on how people interact with the world around them. And the sort of wishy washy way I like to phrase it is that social media has become about how to share with the world how you want to be seen. Yes. And Beam is about sharing with the world how you see it. And, you know, we're, like I said, we're a month out now. We have several hundred thousand users.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  So we're able to really get an understanding of how people use this beyond an anecdotal like beta group. And it really is just that. You go through the feed. I follow like a couple in Russia. I follow some teenager who lives in a hotel in Dubai. Like I follow all these people that I just discovered on the platform, beyond all my friends. Right. And yeah, every time I hold down that cell, I'm seeing the world through their perspective in these quick little clips. Wow, can you do a demonstration for the video real quick? Yeah, I don't know how, I don't know how interesting this is going to be for everyone at home. But so, you know, one of the ways that I like to capture with this is you can cover that proximity sensor with your thumb. You can cover it by holding it up to your shoulder or up to your chest or something like that. And it initiates a record.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  But what I like to do, and it looks a little bit ridiculous, but I hold it up to my chin like this. And while you're holding it up to your chin, what's interesting about it is you know it's capturing what you're seeing. And the other thing about holding it up to your chin is that it's very close to your mouth. So you can sort of narrate what you're seeing in a very natural way. Interesting. And when I say hold it up to your chin, what that accomplishes is that your chin actually covers the proximity sensor. So you see the proximity sensor. You cover it like that and it shuts off the screen. It's recording. You can't even see what you're recording. No, there's no preview. There's no review.

• 44:17Lewis Howes?

  Wow, so if you try to reverse it and do it to yourself, you wouldn't be able to see what you're looking at.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. So when I say the anti-duck face selfie, it doesn't mean that there's no way to capture yourself on here. I film myself all the time.

• 44:29Lewis Howes?

  But you can't see what you look like first and censor it.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  The difference, the way I like to describe it is the difference is like when you're doing a selfie in any other platform, it's the way you look when you're looking at yourself in the mirror. That's exactly right. And when you do it on Beam, because you can't see yourself, you look the way you look when you're actually speaking to another person. And that in itself is what we really tried to capture with Beam is like, how do we emulate the human interaction as much as possible?

• 44:55Lewis Howes?

  Wow, okay. And how are you feeling, how do you feel people are enjoying it compared to, I would say Snapchat's a competitor, I'm assuming?

• 45:03Speaker 01

  You know, I don't know, competitor, I think is a really strong word.

• 45:06Lewis Howes?

  It's a similar area. It's a cousin.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  I'm a huge Snapchatter. I do like a quarter of a million views or something like that, 200,000 views per snap. Like I love Snapchat. It is such a great platform. And I look at Beam to Snapchat as the same way that I look at maybe an Instagram to Facebook. I use Facebook all the time. I check Facebook every day, just like apparently a billion other people.

• 45:27Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  And I also love Instagram, but Instagram for me is a place where I put one picture up.

• 45:33Lewis Howes?

  Every few days or something like that.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's it. And it does that really, really well. And Facebook's this big thing. And when I look at Snapchat, I think Snapchat's this big thing. It's where I go to stories for messaging for all these other features that they have. But it's not a singular sort of interaction. And that's why I think like, I think there's a real place in this world for a product like Beam. I think, again, comparing Facebook to Instagram is probably a fair comparison to where Snapchat has a relationship, to where Beam rather has a relationship to that cognitive space that is Snapchat.

• 46:06Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. What's the vision for it, for you?

• 46:09Speaker 01

  The vision for it for me is, obviously, take it as big as it can, but what we're seeing right now, like I said, with hundreds of thousands of users, on a beta product, we launched as a public beta. It's not finished, not even close to being.

• 46:19Lewis Howes?

  So can people download it right now?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  People can download it right now.

• 46:22Lewis Howes?

  It's available right now, no codes.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  No code. You just download it off of, off of the Apple Store. The App Store and it works. We had a code system up until literally last week because it was such an early beta that we wanted to make sure we can control capacity and onboarding and things like that. So, so you had to punch in the code, but now anybody can use it. But even so, you know, it's, I think it's

• 46:42Lewis Howes?

  Still beta, it's still growing.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Still beta. It's also, you know, there are core functionalities that are still aren't there. People have expectations. They're not built yet. You know, we are a team now of 13, growing as fast as we can. We hired three people last month, but it's going to take some time until this product matures into a platform. Right now, it's, it's a, the functionality is pretty narrow.

• 47:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, got you.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  But the core functionality is there. And the vision that you asked me about is like what I want it to be and what it is right now. But in a, in a widespread adoption, it will be this in a much more,

• 47:15Speaker 01

  I think impactful way is that you scroll your finger down this list and you hold down in any cell and all of a sudden you're in that person's world and you're seeing it from their perspective. And our, our company manifesto is to promote empathy by sharing perspective. And if you think like, you know, what that girl who lives in Nebraska who gets bullied every day, the power of her being able to share what it's like to live the world as her, that's a, that's a really big idea.

• 47:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  And look, I make no misconceptions. This is primarily used for teenagers and people who have a lot of fun with it and things like that. But I do think in aggregate, at scale, a product like this could have a meaningful social and cultural impact on people when it comes to the promotion of empathy because you're able to, to, to better really understand what it means to live as someone else.

• 48:02Lewis Howes?

  Someone else's perspective. I like that. Why only four seconds?

• 48:06Speaker 01

  I think four seconds is the minimum amount of time that you can capture a moment without it getting boring. So when I compare Beam to a product like Periscope,

• 48:19Speaker 01

  I think the trouble with live broadcasting, with live, uh, live sharing apps.

• 48:24Lewis Howes?

  You're on for a minute or two and then it's like.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Well, I think the reason why they're utilities and not platforms is because live is by definition boring. The only thing that's ever succeeded in media live is the news and is sports.

• 48:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Uh, and those are pretty, pretty narrow. They, they're not dynamic at all.

• 48:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Uh, and that doesn't mean that there's not interesting things around us all the time. But like, you know, my daily videos are essentially a documentation of my life, but if they were 24 hours long, they would be incredibly boring to watch.

• 48:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Instead I pluck what is eight or 10 minutes of what's really interesting out of my life. So how do you emulate that in a way? That removes that burden of creation from the user, but addresses what is the struggle or the battle for interestingness.

• 49:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  And you're, you, there's a forced compartmentalization. So I see something like, like Jack, who, who works at Beam. He's a head of community. He's here with me. He's just here a minute ago. And when he saw your amazing view, I saw him immediately beam it.

• 49:20Lewis Howes?

  That he was holding the phone.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And after four seconds, the phone went back in his pocket.

• 49:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Now, if you were given an option to have 30 seconds or a minute and a half, he would have posted 30 seconds. But I can tell you as a storyteller and as a filmmaker, four seconds is enough to capture exactly what he wanted to show.

• 49:36Lewis Howes?

  It's funny here because you know, I'm on Snapchat. I only get like a thousand views every time I snap or something. So it's not even a fraction of what you get. But I noticed that even myself as a user, like I will thumb through like 15 seconds is too long. You know what I mean? I get bored after like four or five, six seconds of watching someone else's perspective or whatever. And I'm constantly trying to get to the next thing. So it's kind of interesting.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Look, the 10 seconds, to me, 10 seconds is an eternity.

• 50:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's a long time.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  It's an eternity. And when you're consuming on mobile, like I have no idea the numbers because they're not public, but, uh, that thing you're describing where you just tap through, through, through is, I think is not a.

• 50:11Lewis Howes?

  Everyone does that.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a common behavior because 10 seconds is, is a really long time.

• 50:15Lewis Howes?

  Is that what it is? 10 seconds of Snapchat?

• 50:16Speaker 01

  10 seconds, I think is the longest you can post a clip. And look on Beam, if you want it to be two minutes, you can.

• 50:20Lewis Howes?

  You just hold it down again and again.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. You just have to, it forces you to stop every four seconds and say, did I just capture that? And if the answer is no, keep going. But usually the answer is like, yeah, I captured that.

• 50:29Lewis Howes?

  Four seconds. That's powerful. Um, I'm curious now with your, you know, you're, you're married now. You've got two different children, but you're constantly on the go. You're constantly traveling. You're up to big things. You've got this technology company. You've got YouTube, your other content that you're creating, you've got sponsors paying you for things. How are you able to have a great family life and be this father that you say you were born to be? While you're gone a lot, do you bring your family with you? Is it more about the quality of time you have when you're with them? How do you manage that all?

• 50:59Speaker 01

  It's a daily struggle.

• 51:01Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 51:02Speaker 01

  It's a battle.

• 51:03Lewis Howes?

  And with your wife, you know, because you're gone constantly. I see you on the road all the time.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  I don't travel like I used to. That's for sure. I've almost stopped altogether. My speaking engagements and production is non, almost non-existent. When it comes to, you know, going to produce big movies elsewhere. So primarily I am in New York City. And, you know, like we bought a house last year in the city that is across the street from my office. I'm literally like 120 feet from my office.

• 51:32Lewis Howes?

  What part of town are you in?

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Tribeca.

• 51:34Lewis Howes?

  Nice. Sweet.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  It's so there's all these sort of shortcuts to spending as much time with the family as humanly possible. And then, you know, the traveling, like it's not that frequent, but when there have been big trips, like, yeah, the family comes with. And, you know, we were all just in Texas a week ago and we were on vacation earlier this year for my birthday. And the baby came and my son came and we brought baby to South Africa. My wife's South African when she was a month old.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Two months old. So you just, you just do it. But the truth is, it's like on that grand scheme of priorities in life, like family's number one. So everything like any decision point is requires like, is this what's best for the family or not? And if it's anything but yes, you don't do it.

• 52:24Lewis Howes?

  If you didn't have the two children and the wife now, where would your life be?

• 52:27Speaker 01

  You know, I have no idea. I really don't. And honestly, like, I don't know. I appreciate the question, but I don't know that that is a.

• 52:36Lewis Howes?

  Answering.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  No, I just like, I think that living in retrospect is a really bad idea. I say this about everything. Like I look forward with a laser focus because, because to pay too much attention to the past and what could have been is, is, is a tremendous exercise in futility. Instead of looking forward and saying, where do I want to be? Just having all the momentum be there, I think is, is what's the best practices for me. I know that. If given an opportunity to go back and change anything, I would change nothing because I'm incredibly happy right now. That's great. And I love it. And I think if it wasn't for those hardships, even really terrible things happening,

• 53:16Speaker 01

  I don't know that it would have added up to where I am right now, but I work as hard as I can every day to always make the best decisions I can to contribute to that. Sure. What's the movie you've yet to shoot that you've always wanted to create? You know, you'd be surprised how often I get asked that question. And the answer is, I don't know. And the answer why I don't know is a somewhat like, not somewhat, is an extremely egotistical answer, but it's true. And it's that in life, I've only ever done exactly what I want to do. And if I'm not doing exactly what I want to do, I shift focus and do everything I can until I realize that. So if there was something that I were dying to do, I mean, really dying to do, especially, I would have done it. Yeah.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  And like right now, what I want to do is, is I want to see how far I can take this daily video thing. Because it's been 159 days of posting. On your YouTube channel. That's correct. Every day. 159 days. That's right. And the impact has been greater than any other singular thing I've done in the previous 15 years of making movies. Wow. So where were your subscriber and life at? What is this, half a year ago, I guess? Yeah, I mean, well, somewhat ironically, you know, when I started being the technology company, I always knew that I'd be leaning on my social reach to promote it. Of course. And the irony comes from the place that as this company that I, that I run and day to day, I'm, I'm in there, it's my company, demanded more and more from me. My social reach was an atrophy. Really? Well, I wasn't able to make movies.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  So I made a decision in, in March that I would start making, doing daily vlogs. And my intention to daily vlog was to have it be almost a reality show about the technology company. Smart. So they're all interested in when is it launching? What's happening? Exactly. And then on like day two, I was like, there's not enough content here. I already talked about it all. I said it all in like half of the first episode. So what else do I have? My life. Sure. And I realized that I think it's much more interesting to sort of be able to focus on a character, focus on me, than it is on a company. And I think that a lot of people's, at least intrigue in Beam, whether they like it or not, it's up to them, but certainly their intrigue enough to get them to step foot in the door first. Has been because they understand the relationship that I have with this company.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  And I think that the problem with most technology companies or most technology companies face is that most people just see an app or see anything that's consumer facing, something that just exists. It's very hard to understand there are people and passions and missions and ambitions behind that and real work. And that's something that the vlog enabled me to do is like you see all of us in this space. You see us busting our ass, you see us working till the middle of the night to make this thing. And then you get to see the power of it. And all of that happened via this vlog that I started under much more literal pretenses and has now become this incredibly dynamic thing. That's giving me a platform to discuss almost anything.

• 56:15Lewis Howes?

  Amazing.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  But no, I can't underscore enough the profound impact, the overwhelming impact that uploading daily has had on me, has had on my company, has had on everything. My understanding of filmmaking, my understanding of media and the space and everything.

• 56:31Lewis Howes?

  What was your subscriber base app before you started that?

• 56:34Speaker 01

  It took me the first, it took me five years to get to, let me see, I'm probably gonna butcher this, but I'm just gonna throw it approximately in front of this. So it's like line, line score before I say this, but this is close. Five years to get to 100 million views and 500,000 subscribers. And three months to get to a million subscribers and 200 million views. And now we're at, I think, closing in on 220 million views, might have just passed 220 million views.

• 57:06Lewis Howes?

  100,000 a day, or week it looks like right now.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  I mean, the last week, but that was a particularly good week. I don't know. There's some sustainability issues here across the board. I haven't slept since I started this vlog.

• 57:16Lewis Howes?

  But you would say the daily posting of video, and it's not just random content, you're editing it. You're spending, you're up at night editing it for whatever, a half hour, maybe longer and putting it up every day.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Did you say a half hour?

• 57:27Lewis Howes?

  I don't know. How long are you editing for? An hour?

• 57:29Speaker 01

  My fastest edit is four hours.

• 57:31Lewis Howes?

  Holy cow.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  The edit this morning was about nine hours. Yesterday's edit was 11 hours.

• 57:34Lewis Howes?

  You spent nine hours yourself this morning?

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:37Lewis Howes?

  What time did you get up?

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Well, I was up at six, but last night I got, I left the VMAs early. I was home by eight forty-five. Edited till I passed out at about one in the morning. Woke up at six. At the morning? Yeah. So you're spending most of your time editing every day? Not most, but I like, my routine in New York City is I like, I leave the office, what I would call early, like at seven, six thirty, get home, an hour with the baby. She goes down to bed. My wife like says goodnight. She goes into the bedroom and I like hold myself up in the corner of the apartment. And I usually work until midnight or one in the morning, fall asleep. Editing. That's correct, yeah. Exclusively. And then wake up at four thirty in the morning to finish the edit by eight AM. That's seven days a week. And you've never thought about bringing on someone else to do editing? It doesn't work. They can't capture your voice, your story, your message.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  There, there isn't a voice or a story in the message. The story is told in the edit. The edit is where it's written. And they can't be you in the edit? How are they supposed to empathize with what my day was? Because the, the sum of the vlog, the narrative of the vlog is not a collection of the parts. It's like me taking a step back and saying, what did I actually experience today and what affected me? Wow, man. And you can't, you can't have a third party emulate that emotional relationship. Your life is editing. Yeah, it's a big part of my life. Oh, my goodness. But I love every, I mean, I don't love the fact that I don't get to sleep. I'm like permanently exhausted, just beaten up, but I, I like. You love the process of editing and telling the story.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  It's like you get the crap beaten out of you and it takes everything that you are. And at seven fifty-nine every morning, I'm a completely broken man. And then at eight AM, I have this, this rush of adrenaline and that is when I click post. And then everyone's like, they all know it's coming. It's just like, in that thrill, that rush is like, I can't survive without this. And it drives me through the next twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes until I'm a broken man. At seven fifty-nine the next morning, then I click upload and I get this rush. Oh, my goodness. And that is the, that is the cycle, that is the virtuous cycle that is a daily upload. Now, how, how long can you sustain it for? Well, that's the million dollar question, isn't it? Did you give yourself a year or six months?

• 59:44Speaker 01

  I, I mean, I, I didn't think I would go this long, but I tell you, like, this is a quote from my, my very talented friend, Ben Brown, who's been daily blogging for three or four years now. He said, "You know what happens if you keep doing it, but you don't know what happens if you stop." And I'm sorry, I butchered that. You.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  You know what happens when you stop, but you have no idea what happens when you keep going. What's possible. Yeah, something like that. Anyways, I'm either telling that backwards. We get the idea. But the point is like, this, this. I mean, you've doubled your subscribers, you've impacted the world. I mean, yeah, forget about those numbers. All I know are like, what's actually, what actually happens. Like, I know what, I know what like, people say. I know like, I can feel it. And I don't mean that in any sort of spiritual way. I mean, like, that's quantifiable, based on the feedback, the comments, like, the things people say to me when they stop me in the street. You probably get stopped all the time, right? It's ridiculous. In New York City, there's a crowd outside my office all day, every day. Waiting for you to Snapchat them, like. Uh, and waiting for me to come outside.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  But they see you Snapchatting from the window. I've seen a couple where you're like, here's what's happening in my back alley or something. It's nuts. It's nuts. Wow. But like, anyways, like, that impact, the idea of like, being able to build that by doing this thing that I do all by myself, and the idea of giving that up, to me is just like. What's the biggest fear? That those people will go away? No, it's not about that. I just think it's like, I think that as a filmmaker, anyone who's in the creative space, is, is, to be an artist, and I hate that word, artist, but to be an artist is sort of. A creator. Sure. It's predicated on one thing. And that one thing, in its most crass,

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  in its most crass definition, it's that you are such an egomaniac that you believe the world actually cares about your opinions enough to share them. Okay, so basing on that, based on that assumption, which I think is pretty accurate, then what is the greatest quantification of success? And it's how many people choose to hear your perspectives or ideas. Like, that, to me, that's the only quanti, that's why, that's why for me, like, somebody watching my YouTube video on their cellphone is not a bigger deal or a lesser deal than premiering a movie on, at the Cannes Film Festival, which I've done twice.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  To me, it's one in the same. It's like somebody chooses to watch your stuff, but they don't.

• 1:02:09Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  And, and the fact that it's happening at such a crazy rate and the relationship is so, so great with the content.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  To sort of give that up after working so hard to get there, something I just, I wouldn't want to do.

• 1:02:22Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. Man, this is a, this hour has flown by. It's been an hour. I said it was gonna be like 45 minutes, but this has been like flying by. I've got a few questions left for you.

• 1:02:34Lewis Howes?

  And I know Tim Ferriss said, he said he needs like four hours with you when he did the recording. Now I know why I would need more time. So hopefully we can do another session when I'm back in New York and get part two with you. But um, few final questions and thanks for sharing so much that you've shared. I want to know, what are the tattoos you have and what do they say?

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  You know, I'm covered in tattoos and the only thing I like more than tattoos, cause I love tattoos.

• 1:02:55Lewis Howes?

  Crystals now.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  No, is, is bad tattoos.

• 1:02:59Lewis Howes?

  You love bad tattoos?

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Oh my God, they're my favorite.

• 1:03:00Lewis Howes?

  How many do you have? Bad tattoos?

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  I have no idea. I love all my tattoos.

• 1:03:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, how many do you have, period?

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  I, I, if I could, if I give you a number, I have no idea.

• 1:03:08Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  But for me, like what a tattoo is.

• 1:03:11Lewis Howes?

  You have them all over you.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  And I should say, I don't like tattoo culture. I think it's really stupid, but I like the idea of a tattoo is that something affects you so much in life that you want to preserve it forever. So the reason why I love bad tattoos is like that girl with the rose on her ankle.

• 1:03:24Lewis Howes?

  The dolphin.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  The butterfly on her shoulder from like.

• 1:03:27Lewis Howes?

  The tramp stamp?

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, spring break, Daytona Beach, 1996. Like, so she's like, you know, she's a mom now in her 40s who has this faded butterfly on her shoulder. But when she looks at that, and I, I hope she has the same optimism that I imagine, she has to remember what it was like to be 21 years old at Spring Bay, Daytona Beach in 1997. And that's awesome. So all of my tattoos are, are literally just that idea. They're just notes written on me. So I will remember a specific moment in my life. Like that says, it says 30 on my right, I'm sorry, my left forearm, the number 30. And it was just that like. That means very little to me right now.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  But when I think back at when I got that tattoo, it's like the day I turned 30. And the idea of being 30 that day, I was like, holy shit, I'm an adult. Like, it was the most overwhelming feeling ever. It happened a couple of years ago for me, it was crazy. Yeah, well, it happened four years ago for me now, and it seems like nothing, I was a kid back then. But in that moment, it was such an overwhelming feeling that I wanted to make sure I never lost that. So I wrote it on my arm in a way that couldn't be erased. And that's what that was for me. Sure. It was such a moment that I had to make sure I remembered it. And every one of my tattoos is just that. Like, I have a tattoo on my, my right calf, and it's literally teeth marks. And it's because, like, this is two years ago, I think.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  I was swimming across, three years ago, two years ago? I can just look at my, I'm literally just checking the date on my, 2013, two years ago. Whoa, August 26, 2013, so exactly two years ago. I was swimming across the Zambezi River from Zambia into Zimbabwe with my son, who was 15 at the time. Wow. And I was bitten by a tigerfish, which is very dangerous, but it was a small one. I dare you, viewers, listeners, to Google tigerfish, you're gonna see some gross images. Oh my gosh. And it bit my leg, and my kid and I made it across the river safely. And when I got back, like, I was looking at this bloody bite wound on my, on my leg, and I was like,

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  my god, this is probably the last one of these trips that I get to take with my kid, because he's a, he'll be 16 soon and not wanna hang out with dad. Right. And it was such a special trip. And that moment in the trip was such a crazy thing to happen to you, like, what a wild story. Right. And it's just such a big moment for me, that was all like, that, that this tiny little bitefish bite mark represented, that I didn't wanna let that go. So I literally, like, got the bite mark tattooed under my leg, like, the exact bite mark. I had to wait for it to heal, and then she, she traced where the teeth marks were. And then it says to it, you know, like Zambezi River, and then it says the date. So it's like, no matter what, I look at my, my calf, and I just like, I'm stuck with that moment. And I could not be happier to be stuck with that moment. Amazing. What's the next tattoo you wanna get?

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  And they're never premeditated. Something has to hit me.

• 1:06:24Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so you don't already have the next one?

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  No, I hope I never get any more tattoos.

• 1:06:29Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:06:32Lewis Howes?

  Final two questions.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:06:34Lewis Howes?

  First off, where can we go and connect with you? What's the main place? Beam, go download the app.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you should download Beam, first of all. Download the app. Be patient with us, it's getting there, but you should download it right now.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Follow your friends, follow some strangers. But my YouTube channel is it. I just type my name into YouTube. Actually, I think if you just type in the word Casey now, it's the first auto-populated. Yeah, it's a pretty.

• 1:06:59Lewis Howes?

  It's pretty sweet.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  It's funny how we judge success.

• 1:07:02Lewis Howes?

  Right. Google Louis, the first, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  But that's it. YouTube is my main outlet for that kind of thing. And then Beam is the main focus of my entire career right now.

• 1:07:13Lewis Howes?

  Nice, we'll have everything linked up in the show notes too, where to follow you. So that's good to know. Daily videos, every morning, 8 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Check that out, I love it. Final two questions, and you're gonna wanna record this for yourself too. If there are three truths that you need to be true. So every video you've ever created that's been deleted from time. It's your last day. And you get to write down three simple things on a piece of paper that'll leave with your family and the world. Three things you get to say. What would those truths be?

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  God, you know, I think I'm too verbose to say this in my three short terms.

• 1:07:48Lewis Howes?

  Three truths.

• 1:07:51Lewis Howes?

  You gonna hold that up for you or no?

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Way to put me on the spot. No, this'll be like a 77-hour vlog if I try to.

• 1:07:56Lewis Howes?

  Three truths. You get a one piece of paper, it's your final day, 100 years from now, whatever it is. You write down, truth number one.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  Truth number one is that a life not shared is a life not lived. And I totally believe that. I think that if you are the most successful person ever, but you don't share your life, that it doesn't count. And that's why family is everything to me. Friends are everything to me. That's one. Okay, number two is, I think the secret to success, and this is for anybody in any field, is working hard and being brave. If you work hard, and work harder than everyone else, and you're brave, meaning that you take chances that no one else will take, you will succeed. It will be the scariest, most arduous road that you could ever take, but you will succeed.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Those are two things that most people are just unwilling to do. And the third truth is that uh is that health is probably the best gift you could ever give yourself. And I think young people, and by young people, I mean anybody who's who is healthy by definition. Take that for granted, because like, everything you are is is only facilitated by your physical being. So to not preserve that is to is to cut everything short. And I think that that's something that is so obvious. But every time I see somebody drinking a Dr. Pepper, you realize that it's not obvious enough.

• 1:09:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  I'm not, I don't mean to shit on Dr. Pepper. I just mean this idea that like, people casually drink things like soda.

• 1:09:35Lewis Howes?

  Constantly, every day, or yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  Just like, don't look after themselves, because like, the brain that you have is is everything, and this body is just a, that's your, that's your shell. And once the shell goes away, like, the brain dies, and that's terrifying. So if you can prolong that, or have it be better, because of, because of fitness, because of taking care of yourself, you'll live a better life. Was that three?

• 1:09:56Lewis Howes?

  That's a three. I like it. I like it.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  You have to write those down for me, so you forgot them.

• 1:10:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I'll write them down. Before I ask the final question, I acknowledge all my guests at the end. So I want to acknowledge you, Casey, for a moment, and acknowledge you for your creativity, and your consistent creativity. I think it's incredible what you're creating and putting out in the world, constantly evolving over the years, constantly evolving every day, to put out something powerful, to share your story with the world, and inspire millions of people. It's incredibly inspiring for me to watch what you do, and constantly pushing the envelope, pushing your health even, to create something that's magical, and creates possibilities for people. So I want to acknowledge you for for your service, and what you're doing.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for those kind words. I do appreciate it. It means a lot.

• 1:10:42Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Final question. What's your definition of greatness?

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Oh, God. Really. I thought we agreed you were going to be lobbing me softballs today.

• 1:10:51Lewis Howes?

  It's pretty easy.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  I think the definition of greatness is to um is to die broke, and leaving the world a better place than it was when you were born.

• 1:11:04Lewis Howes?

  Casey, thanks for coming on, man. Appreciate you.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is great. This is great.

• 1:11:11Lewis Howes?

  There you have it guys, thank you so much for being here. And make sure to share this episode over on Twitter with myself @lewishouse and @caseyniestat and also with the link lewishouse.com/222. That's right, share this with your friends over on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. The link is lewishouse.com/222. And make sure to tag Casey everywhere. Go download the app, Beam, and try it out a little bit. I've been playing with it, it's been a lot of fun. Make sure to follow him on Instagram and Snapchat and all these other places to see behind the scenes of what he does, on how he creates such incredible content. I think you're gonna be really inspired by this guy. Again, share it with your friends, lewishouse.com/222.

• 1:11:54Lewis Howes?

  Go back to the show notes to see all the information about how you can connect with Casey. Check out his videos and also watch the full video interview of this episode. You can go watch it live as well, it'll be up on YouTube here also. So, thank you guys so much. Make sure to preorder a copy of my new book, The School of Greatness, coming out October 27th. That's right, go to greatnessbook.com or Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Buy a few copies and get ready for greatness to drop into your doorstep soon when it comes out, October 27th. I love you guys so much, I appreciate you. You know what time it is, it's time to go out there and do something great.