Casey Neistat and Matt Hackett on Live Video's Struggle for Interestingness

I mean, didn't Google just announce last week some clip-on camera that captures what's in front of you? In typical Google form, they pitched it though. It's like this is the center of our AI learning platform about the world, which is the same marketing mistake they made with everyone wanting a face computer. Now everyone is computer. Everyone does not want an AR learning camera clipped to their chest. But they probably do actually want a camera.

Mmm, I think from really a creative perspective, I think that the struggle for interestingness—that's a line that we see—is allowing. We were pitching, but like solving the struggle for interestingness from a video perspective is paramount to having anything succeed. I think what Snapchat did that was so amazing, beyond the story mechanism being so fascinating, was that I dismissed lenses as kind of a gimmick when it first came out. But what lenses did was it solved the struggle for interestingness from both the creator's perspective and the viewer's perspective.

Here, put dog ears on. That's amore, that's interesting, that's fun. I think the trouble that we're seeing—certainly we saw at Beam— is that they're seeing with spectacles, and that I think every single live platform, none of which have truly succeeded yet, is because they don't address that struggle for interestingness. I think that the reason why video games have succeeded in the live space is because they do. Here’s something that we all understand—it's a game—and I get to see your face playing it. That’s dealing with the struggle for interestingness.

But I think broadly live is too wide open. There is no box there. I think what we were trying to do with Beam—like one of the things we talked about—should be a four-second clip or a six-second clip. So if you string a bunch of them together, it needs to feel fun, like you're watching an edited movie. We were wrong; it got boring quickly. Watching people's raw lives got boring quickly.

So how are you going to deal with that in the future if you're handling multiple feeds from all over the world? With the product, we learned a lot with Beam V1 that we imported to a much, much smaller problem set, which is what we're dealing with in panels—the product that's out now.

Panels is just purely about opinion. It's what is your opinion on these five stories today, these things happening in the world? We wanted to be this place where you get to actually see the full spectrum of perspectives on an issue that might be controversial. That might be, you know, what do you think about the Republican healthcare proposal?

To actually see you at a civil debate in video looks like on that. The reason we made it more interesting is it's just really contained. So I think we took a lot of the little product cues about how to set some up—in context both to create and consume—in which they're gonna be articulate and pointed and fast.

Let me do that some priming, and there are just some ways that we actually try and guide you towards creating something that's really compelling. But the domain is much, much smaller. We're not trying to make this. That's not the platform for everything you could possibly take a video of in the world. It is what do you think about this story?

Yeah, it's, it's, if you had so many cameras, I'd say something interesting there. You have no idea what to say. If you hand someone a camera and say, you know, what do you think about the latest healthcare proposal? They might know probably something to say, and that something will be tied to a specific narrative. So, that is an attempt at addressing that struggle for interestingness.

Right, I mean, it's tricky because it seems that the internet deviates towards like kind of a [ __ ] show most of the time. People aren't—you've turned off YouTube comments. I see that you still have them, but I'm mature enough. YouTube comments—yeah, better. You still get views? Yeah, not as many as you. Yeah, you'll get an island in the algorithm for that. They punish you severely for that. Oh really...?