1000 Days, 1000 One-Minute Videos, One Backpack

Nuseir Yassin grew up in Arraba, a Palestinian-Israeli town in the Galilee, the son of a Muslim Arab mother and a father who worked as a teacher. He was, by his own description, the kind of high-school student who got into trouble for talking too much and got out of it by getting the highest test scores in the room. He went to Harvard at eighteen on a scholarship, studied computer science, and graduated in 2014 into a six-figure programming job at the New York office of a company called Venmo, which had just been bought by PayPal. By every external measure he had won. He had the Cambridge degree, the Manhattan apartment, the engineer's salary, the green card on the way. What he did not have, he wrote in the long blog post that he would publish on the day he quit, was a feeling that he was actually alive in any sense he could explain to his parents back in Arraba. He had crunched the numbers. He was twenty-four. His life expectancy, statistically, was around seventy-eight. He had fifty-four years left, and the office swivel chair he was sitting in was apparently where most of them were going to take place.

The plan, when he wrote it down, was deliberately self-contained. He would resign at PayPal with eight months of savings in the bank, fly to Kenya, and from that day onwards film a single one-minute video every twenty-four hours for one thousand consecutive days. The first frame of every video would be the same. He would walk into the centre of the frame, say, in his rapid Brooklyn-Arab accent, That's one minute, see you tomorrow, and walk out. He picked one thousand because it was, he wrote, a round number, easy to count down in public, and intimidating enough to keep him honest. He picked one minute because Facebook's autoplay algorithm had just been tweaked to favour short native video, and he had calculated, with the precision of a former Venmo engineer, that the maximum return on attention per second of effort was right around sixty seconds. He published the first video, from a hostel in Nairobi, on 9 April 2016. He titled the channel Nas Daily, from his nickname Nas, and gave himself no holiday for the next thirty-three months.

The early videos were not impressive. The first thirty are shaky, badly lit, and made with the iPhone camera held at arm's length. The audience was small. By day fifty he had around six thousand followers, most of them friends and family in New York and the Galilee. He has admitted in interviews that he very nearly quit around day eighty, in a hostel in Cape Town, after a single particularly bad night in which the video would not upload and he sat on the bed at four in the morning calculating how many of the next nine hundred days he would have to repeat exactly the same loneliness. The thing that saved the channel, he says, was day one hundred, on which Facebook's algorithm surfaced a single video about a Maasai grandfather in Kenya to a viral audience. He woke up the next morning in Zanzibar to two hundred thousand new followers and a chequebook of free phone numbers from production companies and brand partnerships. The audience growth, from that point onwards, almost never went down.

The format settled by month four. Each video had a single sharp narrative beat. A man who had built his own ski slope out of plastic in Lebanon. A grandmother in Estonia who had taught herself ten languages from cassettes. A Mongolian eagle hunter teaching his eight-year-old daughter, against tradition, to handle the bird. A blind chef in Madrid. A Bhutanese government office that calculated national happiness as a policy indicator. Nas, who is on camera unrelentingly for ninety per cent of every video, has an obvious skill for being interesting at the speed of social media without quite tipping into the sentimentality that most other one-minute travel videos of that era could not resist. The most-watched single Nas Daily video, on the Maldivian floating school built for sea-level rise, has now passed sixty million views on Facebook alone, which is, in absolute terms, larger than the population of every country he filmed in for the entire project except Brazil.

The criticism, when it came, was harder than Nas had expected. The faster he grew, the more the slower travel-writing community accused him of glib oversimplification. A long-form essay in a British magazine called him, only half-jokingly, the McDonald's of journalism, and described his work as the cheap calories of cross-cultural understanding. Other Palestinian-Israeli commentators were sharper still, accusing him of using his ambiguous citizenship to soft-pedal the politics of his own country in front of an enormous international audience. Nas has admitted some of this. He has said, in interviews and in his own videos, that he is not, by any honest standard, a journalist, that he is a storyteller working in the shortest format in human history, and that he believes the choice in 2017 was not between his videos and longer journalism but between his videos and no video at all. The next billion media consumers, he has insisted, are not going to read essays. The question is whether anything they see on their phones will increase or decrease their willingness to listen to other people. He has staked his entire career on the bet that one minute, done with affection, can increase it.

The schedule, more than the content, was what nearly broke him. He has said publicly that there were eleven separate occasions on which he filed a video from a hospital bed. He had food poisoning in Egypt that lasted nine days. He sprained an ankle in Slovenia. He filmed once, in Toronto, with the camera propped against a vending machine in an emergency-room waiting area, talking quietly so as not to wake the woman next to him who was asleep on her partner's shoulder. He travelled, for almost the entire eighteen months of the project, with a small team that grew from two to eventually a dozen, but the on-camera daily commitment was always his. He missed his sister's wedding. He missed his grandmother's funeral, which was held in Arraba on day seven hundred and three. The video he filed that day, from a beach in Thailand, was not about the funeral. It was a sixty-second piece on a small group of Burmese refugee children learning English from volunteer teachers, and only the very last frame showed Nas looking, for one half-second longer than usual, directly into the camera before the cut.

Day one thousand fell on Tuesday 3 December 2019, in Times Square, New York. Nas had arranged for it to be a small public event. Around eight hundred Facebook followers had been formally invited. Roughly fifteen thousand showed up. The video, the final video, the one that ends the channel, is filmed from a small stage in the middle of the square. He looks straight into the camera. He says, more or less, that this is the last one, that it has been a hard one thousand days, that thirteen million of them have been watching, and that he is going to walk into the centre of the frame, say That's one minute, see you tomorrow, and walk out. Then he does. The cut is the same as it has always been. The screen goes black. The credits, for the first time in the entire run of the channel, list every single member of the team, the family in Arraba, the production company in Singapore that had recently bought him out, and a single line that simply reads: To you, who watched.

What happened next is the part that confused most of his fans. Nas did not, as everyone had assumed he would, retire to a Mediterranean villa. He used the audience and the capital he had built to launch, of all things, a school. Nas Academy, founded in 2020 out of an office in Singapore, was a one-week online creator course built around the lessons of the thousand-day project, taught by Nas himself and by an evolving roster of viral creators from across Asia and the Middle East. The thesis was that the next decade of mass storytelling would belong to the global south, that the talent existed, and that what was missing was an institutional way to teach people in the Philippines or Nigeria or India that they could be Nas, too, if they were willing to work the schedule. The academy has, at the time of writing, more than half a million graduates across a hundred and ninety countries. It is profitable. It is also controversial, especially in India, where a short partnership with a venerable monastic order ended badly in 2021 and made international news. Nas has not, in characteristic fashion, walked away. He has stayed in Asia. He has continued, occasionally, to film. He has, in the public counting that obsessed him in 2016, used up almost five more years of his statistical seventy-eight. He has, by his own measure, never wasted one of them since.

The last word, in almost every retrospective on Nas Daily, belongs to the single piece of advice he repeats most often to the journalists who ask him what he learned in those thousand days on the road. He never says it is to travel more. He says, with the dry Brooklyn-Arab deadpan that has not changed in a decade, that the lesson is to count. He counts everything. The days he has left. The days he has used. The hours of sleep he gets. The number of friends he speaks to each month. The number of videos he files. The number of strangers he has shaken hands with this year. Almost no one, he insists, counts the parts of life that are actually finite. They count their money and their followers, which are not. The single useful trick of the thousand days, he has said, was the trick of putting a number on something that no one usually numbers, and then watching the number every morning. Almost any human, given a number and a daily deadline, will outperform themselves. He had outperformed his old PayPal self by a factor he could not, even now, calculate. The maths of his life, he says, are the only maths he is ever going to bother to do again.