Casey Neistat's guide to posting every day

0:00Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

0:42Cheating on your partner is a huge breach of trust. All of the pain and the guilt and the reality of what was happening hit me just like a tidal wave all at once. Why do people cheat? And why does it make us so mad even when we're not the ones it's happening to? That's this week on Explain It To Me. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

1:12Welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of daily podcasts. I'm your friend David Pierce. And as of today, The Vergecast is in fact a daily podcast. We're going to be in your feeds and on your YouTubes or wherever you find The Vergecast five days a week. I would say in general, we have lots of ideas about what we're going to do, but almost no religion about any of it. We have lots of series we're going to try to do inside of the Vergecast, lots of fun bits that make more sense to do in a daily podcast world. The show where Neal and I yell at each other once a week is basically not going to change, so don't worry if that's the Vergecast you know and love.

1:48But in this expanded format where we get to do more stuff and we get to do it on a faster timeline and we get to be more just engaged in your life and with the news every day, I'm very excited about what we're going to get to do here. Today on the show, we're going to talk about posting with one of the original posters, Casey Neistat, who spent years posting something on the internet every day. And he has a lot of thoughts about what it takes to do that and also what it looks like to do that now in 2026. So we're going to talk about it. But first, here is a look at everything happening on The Verge today.

2:21It's 90 seconds on The Verge for Monday, June 1st, 2026. NVIDIA made a big announcement of a new chip line called the RTX Spark, which it says is the most efficient PC chip ever built. Did it offer any kind of statistics or numbers to back that up? No, it sure didn't. But NVIDIA seems to have big plans to take the best of its gaming technology, the best of its AI technology, and the best of mainstream computing needs and smoosh it all together into one chip that can do everything. The first devices are coming out this fall. I promise you they're going to cost a fortune. But this is one to watch out for.

2:52This week is also Computex, the big computer trade show. And one of the big themes of the year seems to be everybody from Dell to Acer to, frankly, just about everybody else trying desperately to compete with the MacBook Neo. $600 laptops are about to get a lot better. This week is also Microsoft's Build Developer Conference and just two things to keep an eye out for at Build. One is the Copilot Super app that I think is coming. We're going to get the combination of all of Microsoft's Copilot Assistant stuff, all of the coding stuff, all of it in one place. This is the new trend for AI companies, and Microsoft's on it too.

3:24The other is just a lot of little things designed to make Windows nicer to use, because frankly, that's long overdue. Last bit of news for today, Anthropic has confidentially filed to go public. We don't know a ton of the details yet. They're still mostly under wraps. But we do know that Anthropic just recently raised money at a$965 billion valuation, which actually makes it more valuable than OpenAI, which is also trying to go public. SpaceX is going public in two weeks. We are about to get a huge referendum on how people feel about AI and where all of this money is really going to land. You can read more about all of that at TheVerge.com.

3:58That's it. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for June 1st, 2026. All right, let's get to our main topic for today. Casey Neistat, if you don't know, is a hugely successful YouTuber. He has been one of the most influential people in the vlogging community for many, many years. and starting in 2015, he spent over 800 consecutive days posting every single day. He made a video and he published it every single day. And so as we embark on this journey of posting every single day, I figured it would be fun to call Casey and see if we can get some tips on how to actually do that day in and day out, but also to just get a sense of how he thinks about posting.

4:40Obviously, the internet is a very different place than it was in 2015 when Casey started posting every day. But he's also still a hugely successful and influential creator. He spends a lot of time talking to other creators about how to make this stuff work. And in a world filled with vertical video and algorithmic timelines and social media feeds that seem to have less and less to do with social and more and more to do with media, I just wanted to get Casey's read on where we are in the creator landscape right now. And to see if he could help me feel any better about the idea of what it means to do this every single day.

5:14because I'm excited and slightly terrified. Let's get into it. Casey Neistat, welcome to The Verge Cast. Great to be here, David. I am very excited to have you here. We've been sort of like loosely talking past each other about doing this for a very long time. I'm happy to have you here. Available anytime. I got nothing else going on. Just call me. I'm here. So I've brought you here for a very special occasion, which is that we're running this episode on the first day of The Verge Cast being a daily show. and I both want to talk to you about kind of the state of posting and making things online as somebody who's been doing it for a very long time and was very early to a lot of the things people are doing now I also need some therapy about how this is all going to go for me and how to do it without dying but I want to start with sort of the state of things because okay I've spent we've spent a lot of time talking on this show about the clip economy and kind of the the race for everybody's attention and the ability to just chop everything you make into a thousand little pieces and put it everywhere in front of people and sort of win the attention game that way.

6:13You were thinking about how to post a lot way before most people were thinking about how to post a lot. And you were like, in 2015, you're like, I'm going to start making stuff every single day and I'm just going to put myself in front of people. What was the impetus behind that all those years ago? Well, it's a much more compelling story in retrospect because it seems so smart and considered and calculated. But the reality was I found myself in a situation where because I was just about to launch my own like venture-backed startup that I had never been further from making movies because I was so kind of distracted.

6:53So the idea was like, let me create a, let me upload every day and I'll make like a video every day about my startup. And it would promote the startup and I had endless material. And then it turns out like five dudes in a room writing code is really an interesting subject matter. And it eventually sort of consumed every aspect of my life in like this perpetual search for interestingness to make the videos. But it wasn't much more considered than that. Yeah. But I still think there's something in that insight of like, not just I'm going to make a bunch of videos and promote my startup, which I think is a relatively normal insight to have had in 2015.

7:32But there's something about just the sheer volume play of it that it seems like even existed in your head. And then you're just like, I'm going to do this. And then again, and then again, and then again, and I'm going to keep doing this. There must have been some kind of idea about like, this must add up to something. No, in fact, it was the, no, it was the opposite because David, I treated my YouTube channel as this precious thing. I think misguidedly early in my career where like, I never monetized any of my videos. It was for me, I thought of it as like a forum where I just put like really great videos that I was proud of.

8:04And I remember like posting, you know, daily vlogging back in the day was just like kids holding their camera up being like, now I'm going to get coffee. This coffee's good. Now I'm going to get in my car. I'm in my car now. And it was this diary sort of thing, but it was not, it was not considered like real content creation or creative expression. And I remember like day three or four of uploading my daily videos, somebody was like, I saw a comment, I was like, Casey's a great video creator. This is so beneath him. What's he doing? And I was like, shit, I'm so busted. Because there was a little part of me that felt like that.

8:41Like, I felt like I was diminishing my work. So all of the learnings of the power of daily, like I said, really came in retrospect. Like, my foresight in getting into it was much more skeptical, which is a generous way of framing it. I would say it was much more like deeply insecure and uncomfortable with what it was. But what I learned from it is something much, much more powerful, which is like, and I think this is the opportunity you have in going daily, which is when you have a daily conversation with an audience, podcast, video, radio show, whatever it might be, a relationship develops that reduces the necessity for the subject matter to always be something overwhelming.

9:27And what I mean by that specifically is like, go look at the 100 videos I made before I started daily videos. They all had like really meaningful subject matter. It was meaningful for me. Or even if you look at the videos I've made in the last like, you know, seven years since I stopped doing daily, everyone has a very specific narrative to it. And like in the last couple of weeks, I was kind of like, you know, screw it. And I started making like my using my daily video format. I only do it a couple of times a week. But it really is like I just finished it today, a video today. It's about nothing.

9:56Like I hang out with my friend, I like run into somebody in the street and then it's me hanging out with my like UPS delivery driver. That's the whole video. Because what I found is like when you do it daily, people aren't just signing up for whatever it is that you're going to be sharing via the Vergecast. They're signing up because they like you. They want to hear about you. They want to keep up with you. So there's this sort of equanimity that happens with the subject matter and then who's presenting the subject matter. It makes me think back to early, early days when I first moved to New York and I used to listen to Howard Stern every day.

10:31I listened because I liked his celebrity guests or whatever silly goof they were doing that day. But in the early hours, it'd just be him BSing with his co-hosts. But I was signed up to listen to him. So it didn't matter what the subject matter was. I was there for that. And I think that's the power that you have with quantity. So how do you think about that in your own work? Because I know a thing you've talked about before is sort of struggling with when this thing becomes about me, how much of me do I share with you? And how much do I sort of make this about me all the time? And that starts to feel uncomfortable.

11:10But also like the thing that makes me itchy about what you just said is the part of me that goes, okay, well now I can get to a point where actually you're coming here to see me and not this good work that I've done, which is just like as a reporter feels weird, but also just like makes it feel like I'm terrified that I'm going to start doing a bad job because there's no pressure because it's just sort of a hang we have every day. and I feel like running against that feels like a hard thing to do where it's like I could settle into this idea that I'm just here every day and that's going to be enough and I think you see a lot of creators do that that it truly is like quantity over quality in a very real way I am desperate to avoid that trap I don't subscribe to the quantity over quality perspective like I you know whatever I posted a video every day for 800 days in a row and every one of those videos was the best video I could make that day and I'm proud of all the work.

12:04That's a good way of looking at it though. If I think it's good, then I did it. Like if I don't think it's good, then it's garbage. So I don't think it's quality over quantity, but I do think it's like the weightiness of the subject matter versus the sort of more laissez-en-faire subject matter. Yeah, that idea of like, I'm just gonna make the best thing I can today actually feels very freeing because it's like, it's not, this is not required to be the best thing I've ever made in my entire life every single time. But it is required to be the best I could do this time. And I think there's something nice about that.

12:39That's like, I'm obligated to try my hardest. And like this is what Jon Stewart always said about The Daily Show, I remember. It was like doing, it was like the best thing about this is if we do a horrible job, there's another show tomorrow and it's gonna be fine. And the worst part is if we do an unbelievable job, there's another show tomorrow and we have to go do it again. And there's like, there's something about that that I actually love as a constraint. Yeah, I just, I'm plugging this book because I just finished reading it. Oh, I've heard great things about this book. It's fantastic. But how constraints make us better.

13:08And I think about that a lot because my only, the constraint when I was doing daily was it has to be every day, no matter what. And that's like, it is an amazing constraint because there were some days when like, I had nothing to create and there's no, I couldn't pull from anything. And, but I still had to make it. And that was a forcing agent that I think really moved me forward in my process. And I think when I think of a podcaster or a radio host, I think it can have that same forcing agent. But David, we moved on from something that I didn't address, but I think you brought it up. And it's a really, it's really astute, which is like, how much of yourself do you give away?

13:49And I think there's two, I have two takes on this. One was me, which is like very quickly because I had no understanding as naive as that sounds. Like I really didn't appreciate what it meant to put so much of myself out there. You know, my first videos when I was doing the vlog was a couple hundred thousand views. But when that turned into millions of views, it had an impact on my real life. So like in my earliest episodes of the vlogs, like my little baby's in there because I was a dad. She was my whole life. And then like a few months later, like my kids just don't show up anymore. I'll still talk about them reference.

14:21but like keep that out and like it it required me to sort of figure out how much of me i'm going to put out how much of me i'm not going to put out but ultimately like expanded pretty wide like it really did capture the near totality of who i am in my life so that's one version of it another version of it that i have just extraordinarily deep admire admiration for is like marquez brownley Marquez puts out several videos a week. He's got a podcast. He's second channels. He floods the zone with his content without ever compromising his own integrity or the quality of the content. But moreover, he doesn't ever cross that line and feel like he needs to give more of himself away.

15:06I'm speaking only based on a viewer and a fan of his. I've never had this conversation with him. But he doesn't give much of himself away. But as someone who's been watching his content for a decade, what he's gotten really good at is how he frames whatever he's reviewing or whatever it is that he's talking about. And Marquez is one of the few creators out there that I don't care what he's talking about. I still want to hear what he has to say. So he can be reviewing some phone I have no interest in or some camera that I'll never buy. But because it's him, I'm like, oh, I love that guy. Yeah, I'd love to spend 12 minutes with him where he's talking about this new microphone that I could care less about.

15:47So I think he's giving a different version of himself away, which is it's his own focus and his own ability to sort of speak in a way that people want to receive without ever having to expand how much of himself he's giving away. I think about this on some simple levels, like how much do I talk about my kids, right? And like, should our audience know a lot about what my kids are up to? And I think that line is sort of ever changing for me. Like for a long time, I didn't say their names on the show. And like, I've gotten more comfortable with that or like, so little things. But then there's like, at the beginning of a bunch of our episodes, for the longest time, there's always just been a little opener that's just like me on some stupid adventure.

16:27and it's just like two minutes of me talking about how annoying it is that there isn't a good bacon, egg and cheese in Washington, D.C. And there's a portion of our audience that really likes that. And it's like, it's fun. It makes you guys feel human. I like being connected to you in that way. And then there's a portion of our audience that is like, shut up and talk about tech news. And it is sort of the eternal struggle, right? What do you tell new creators these days? I feel like you've become sort of the Yoda of the creator space. You're in everybody's video where they're like, I'm going to YouTube.

16:58How do I do this? You just did this with our friend Joanna Stern not that long ago. People who are coming to you trying to break into this space, I assume the biggest thing most people are trying to do is figure out in some way, how do I become a thing, right? How do I make people care about me as a person? What do you tell those people? First of all, I'm surprised that people still come to me for advice. Because my advice is antiquated and I stand by it. but my general feeling now on YouTube is that, you know, first of all, I dislike, I admire it, but I dislike, because it's not my thing, how most of, at least from my anecdotal experience, how most people approach the platform, which is primarily data-driven, retention rates, engagement, length of video to maximize.

17:52It's a game to be won. All of these things are a game to be won now. And to me, that is so antithetical to the creative aspect. And whether it's me doing it daily or anything I've done in the media space, television, film, everything, it's always been creativity first. And why I champion YouTube historically and why I continue to champion YouTube is because there's no barriers to entries. The top of the funnel is so wide. You can quite literally introduce any version of creativity to this platform and do your thing without any obstructions. I spent a decade plus working in the formal media space, whereas you have executives and you have channel leads and you have all of these people, all these filters, the people that select what gets into a film festival, distributors, all these filters between you, your creativity, and your audience.

18:46and what's so amazing about youtube is for the first time in media the history of media it's reduced that to zero like what you create and what you determine is what you want it to be is what exactly the audience will see and that's like a romantic vision that i fully subscribed to back in the day it's what i fully subscribed to today and most conversations that i have start from a place that I could give not two shits about, which is about how do I maximize engagement and should I be making shorter stuff so more people will watch it? And it's just completely uninteresting to me. And I say that with full respect for the soul-crushingness that is having a video that doesn't get views.

19:30And I understand the motivation of wanting to succeed on this platform with the metrics that it provides you. but that's where most conversations start and those conversations end really quickly well is it is it maybe easy for you to say that as somebody with whatever 12 million youtube subscribers and uh like what i wonder i mean and i think it's it's if you were starting out now even with you and all the i think you also have a sort of unusual set of skills and you came to this platform with an unusual set of like cinematography skills if nothing else uh my guess is you would have a much harder time breaking in now on a pure, I'm just going to make good stuff and trust the platform than you did, you know, whatever, however many years ago.

20:15I think you're, you're understating that. I think if I did exactly what I did today, exactly what I did a decade ago today, I wouldn't see 10 % the response that I had a decade ago. I think that's right. And I think that's the part that makes me sad is I think, I think there is a a long time where YouTube was the thing that you were describing. And the cynical part of me believes that that part of YouTube and of social media in general might just be dead. Well, I hope you're wrong. I think the numbers validate your take on it, but I hope you're wrong because that's pretty crushing. That means that we're heading towards a world that's nothing but algorithmically motivated slop.

20:56But like I watched whatever Charlize Theron's new rock climbing action movie is on Netflix the other night. And that's algorithmically created slop. Like completely unwatchable. And I do feel like there's an extraordinary trend towards that. But I'm also like I am a romantic and I do believe in the outliers. And I think that like Like, you know, Christopher Nolan can exist in a world where he surfs above that. And Quentin Tarantino does too. And I think that, you know, it might be getting harder and harder to succeed with that. But I still think, like, it comes down to a matter of motivation because that opportunity still exists.

21:38And, like, to defend myself in the it's easy for me to say because I've got 10 million subscribers. You know, I think back to my earliest days of making videos. and like my line has always been like you make a living so you can make videos you don't make videos so you can make a living and you know like I was I was making$12 an hour as a dishwasher and when I was not working you know 60 hours a week in a sweaty seafood restaurant kitchen I was at home on my iMac TV the one that you can see right behind you right here nice like editing an iMovie 1.0 making little videos and how I shared them my version of YouTube 25 years ago was I would export to a VHS tape.

22:22I would get into my 1989 Ford Taurus and I would drive to people's house, sit them on the couch, put it in, click play, watch them as they watched it, take it out, and then drive to my next friend's house. So like my view count then was somewhere between like two and six. Right. Six is a huge hit. Your viral sensation at six. Six is viral. Six is viral. But like, you know, and like iPod's dirty secret the first video I ever had that really popped off, like I built a splash page for that. So, you know, like I've always, I've always, it is easy for me to say now because I have a big channel and I'm diving off a very tall diving board.

23:01But it is, I've been consistent with this through the, you know, 28 years of being a filmmaker, which is that it's always been about creativity and creative expression. And I still believe like you put enough stuff out there. If it's good, your audience will find it. And it might be six people or 10 people, and it might be a million people. I keep seeing celebrities' posts, me in the 90s versus now. While the person staring at me in the mirror is definitely not the same person that could pull off bootcut jeans, time creeps up on us so slowly. You don't see it until suddenly you do. Same thing goes for your bills.

23:37A dollar here, an uptick there. It's a slow burn until one day you realize the price you're paying now is way higher than when you signed up. But at T-Mobile, customers had the lowest wireless bills versus Verizon and AT &T over the past five years. And with T-Mobile on their experience plans, you get a five-year price guarantee, so you know exactly what your plan price will be for the next five years. So at least that's one thing that won't change over time. I can't guarantee you'll still look good with frosted tips, but T-Mobile can give you a clear guarantee on your wireless plan. Lower bills based on RSX billing snapshots from Q321 to Q425 compared to average AT &T and Verizon bills.

24:15Comparison excludes discounts, credits, and optional charges. Price guarantee on talk text and data. Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. See T-Mobile.com. Hi, I'm Maria Sharapova, host of the Pretty Tough podcast. Each episode, I sit down with high-achieving women to discuss the pursuit of excellence without apology. This week on the show, clinical psychologist and founder, Dr. Becky Kennedy, and I unpack what it really means to raise kids today. I think parenting is the most important job in the world and the one that has the most impact on your world and the world. It is nonstop. Check out Pretty Tough, new episodes on Wednesdays.

24:49You can watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app.

24:59In the span of a decade, Ben Shapiro built The Daily Wire into a conservative media empire. He produced hit podcasts that bit at liberal excesses and documentaries and lectures about the founders, the genders, the gospels. He peddled polos, hats, candles, provided a home for deplatformed conservative stars like Matt Walsh and minted stars like Candace Owens. Let's put a pin in that. The Daily Wire even has kids programming a judgmental puppet named Zoodles, Zoodles, Zoodles, who shares Shapiro's load-bearing eyebrows. This year, though, the empire showed signs of collapse. The Daily Wire's YouTube videos are down from millions of views to the lo-fi figures.