Casey Neistat: Google AI, Work/Life Balance & Getting Out Of Creative Ruts

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Casey Neistat last year, we produced a collab video on Retro Dodo, but once the cameras turned off I asked Casey if he would be up for a short interview about creating content online and the challenges it brings. He was more than happy to answer them, on camera too.

I also wanted to pick his brains regarding AI and how it uses content produced by creatives. Casey has been one of my favourite video creators for many years now, and he has been in the online media space for far longer, so I am beyond excited to share this interview with you because his outlook and advice might just help you in some way.

What's Your Thoughts on Google's New AI Search?

I think that Google as a verb is something that your kids won't know, they won't be Googling anything they'll have some sort of AI assistant that they ask questions and get answers from. I think Googling is going to go away or at least Googling as we now know it is going to become something radically different

Whether it's Bard or ChatGPT I think it's the greatest intellectual property theft in the history of intellectual property theft.

ChatGPT and Bard is going to give you a very thoughtful answer with no (or very limited) accreditation of where it's getting that information from and it's not thinking independently.

This isn't General AI this is artificial intelligence that's able to take a portrait of everything that's ever been shared online by individuals like yourself, that you put
your work into and it's able to sort of... pluck more information when it wants.

So you end up getting, this sort of amalgam of real people's hard work, thoughts and opinions or facts or research with no accreditation to them and it spits
out this answer. I think for the end user is great, I use it all the time, but how it got there regarding othres information... they'll have to answer for it in some time.

Bing which uses ChatGPT as it's API, actually gives credits to what its sources. How it works is you plug your inquiry into Bing and it uses ChatGPT to get that information. Bing then searches it along their traditional web search methodology to come up with the most likely sources that ChatGPT usde to get
that information to list as its sources. That is in my
opinion (there are no facts behind this) but like what that feels like is Microsoft sort of hedging themselves, by saying look "we're not totally stealing your work".

I think we're just in this time where it's all new technology and Google and
Microsoft just don't know how to make that accreditation fair. At the end of the day, all of this, the value of of true individualism and individual thinking is only going to accelerate because that bottom 99% and it's really that bottom 99.9999 percent of people who are not really thinking individually but they're looking to others and they're just able to regurgitate other's work, they're all going to be replaced by AI in a much more effective, much more practical way and all it's going to leave is that layer that very small layer of people who think truly independently
and I think there's something to that, that's romantic and magical and awesome
and something about that makes me want to work harder to ignore the world
around me and ask myself, like what's true to me what do I care about what do
I actually want to say here?

How do you manage work/life balance when creating content?

I have no work-life balance.

I reached a level of financial security for the first time in my life a few years ago
and I think in its most beautiful take, you're able to then think more freely and think less about making ends meet.

That's what I aspire towards but how that literally manifests, is me just like watching TV all day or I'll go run for three hours or just procrastinate and do nothing all.

Before, I couldn't pay rent right and now it's like... well i've got some savings so uh... I'm gonna watch another episode, I deserve it! The pendulum of swinging so
extreme to making a video a day for 800 days or 700 days in a row whatever my
daily vlogs ended up being, the stress that that had on me was immense, because I was doing my daily Vlog at the same time, I was building my startup and running my startup and I had a new baby and a new wife, those three - four years of my life were so extreme that I'm now on the other side of that.

I'm excited to have all that noise and uncertainty behind me and I really do want to get back to work and I feel like I'm getting closer to that so I appreciate the luxury that I have and that I could take that time to figure it out but most of it is just me being irresponsible...

How do you get out of creative ruts?

If you want to make some just start doing something, you can't figure out what your next great book is that you want to write... then write a crappy book and through that process you're going to figure out what the great one is.

If I can't figure out what the next video is I just make a crappy video and make it about anything and through that process you'll find the next thing. It's true with
anything, like when I get into a rut and all I'm eating is junk food all the
time and I'm feeling slovenly and gross... it's like yeah I want to get to a place
where I'm super fit and I'm running everyday, so let me just do one terrible run today and I'll feel better and then through that process I'll start to fixate on
it and then later in the day when I go to eat that donut I'm like no!

Then two weeks later you fixed yourself. Just take the first step.
Just do the work. If you're stuck, do the work. If you can't write something just write anything. Can't figure out what to shoot? Pick up the camera and go outside.

If you don't know how to edit that video because it's too complicated just start chopping it up and through that process you'll always find whatever it is you're looking for.