Welcome back to Second Thought, my weekly tour of the zeitgeist! This one’s a big one: I’m announcing my new podcast. But before I let you in on why I’m launching one, and how you can follow along, I want to tell you about my first guest. His name is Casey Neistat, and he is one of the earliest, and most successful, YouTubers in history.
Since running away from home at 15, and then starting a channel where he started posting about New York’s bike lanes and layovers, Casey has amassed millions of followers and billions of views. But I wanted to talk to him not because he’s popular but because he saw what was coming. Casey, who’s 45 now, knew that YouTube would upend media. He saw that self-appointed celebrities—the people we now call “influencers”—would dominate our screens. In our interview, he argues that the one-two punch of iMovie, which is the editing software that came with Apple iMac DV computers starting in 1999, and then YouTube, which launched six years later, would change everything about who gets to make movies and how we watch them.
