YouTube star and tech entrepreneur Casey Neistat is in Toronto this week for the Influence Toronto 2017 influencer and entrepreneur conference. He sat down with the Star to talk about his YouTube channel, which has more than 8 million subscribers, his new venture with CNN — Beme News — his advice for young entrepreneurs and influencers just starting out, and thoughts on what drives credibility in the news industry. His responses have been edited.

Can you tell us why you think people are drawn to you?

I was on YouTube for almost five years and in those five years I was able to accrue about 400,000 YouTube subscribers and then I switched what I was doing on my channel to a daily upload, a daily reality show about myself and in the next two years it went from 400,000 subscribers to 8 million subscribers. So I learned a lot about what a subscriber relationship looks like on the platform and I think it has a lot to do with building relationships with the person on the other side, in this case me. And I think that no matter how good the work was that I made before I started my daily show, people couldn’t have the same relationship with the work that they could with the individual. So I attribute a lot of that growth to the fact that people were able to sort of develop a relationship with me via this sort of daily reality show.

How do you draw that line about what you’re going to make public about your life and what you’re doing versus what you’re going to keep private?

It’s entirely intuitive what gets shared and what doesn’t, I’m a very open person, I’m not someone who really holds back much, I think that honesty and transparency is the only way you can get to know someone.

You’re here at Influence Toronto 2017 — is there a message that you’re hoping to leave or advice that you have for young entrepreneurs, young people coming up?

The thing that I hope to drive home here at Influence Toronto and when I speak to young people the one thing that I really try to focus in on is just how unique of an inflection point we are in the media industry right now and this inflection point will not last. The opportunities that anyone who has interest has to succeed right now will not be there a decade from now… I think right now we are seeing a gigantic turn in the landscape of media, where it’s going from these big powerful companies to sort of the individual creator, but I don’t think it will be as open, as fair, and as accessible looking ahead, I think it will become more and more constricted…now’s the moment.

You’ve recently launched Beme News, can you tell me a little bit about your goals for that?

When CNN bought my company, the opportunity was to leverage all of the resources that they have as a news organization and then the resources we have as a technology company, young people that are trying to do interesting things and then together we want to build something really new. I think next year 2018, is when you’re going to see really meaningful stuff and Beme really defining what it is. But I’m very excited about it.

Are you going to be launching on other platforms or are you sticking with YouTube?

For Beme, we’re platform agnostic so we’re going to go wherever the eyeballs are. I think that’s true for my own career as well. I think right now YouTube is sort of the richest, densest social media platform out there, not by a small margin, so that’s the main focus of where I disseminate my work.

What is it about YouTube that’s kept you there for now?

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YouTube is this incredible porous, wildly open, global distribution platform where you can put up anything you want and reach whatever audience is interested in whatever it is that you’re posting. It is this sort of xanadu, this idealistic place for distributing content, it doesn’t mean there’s not hiccups and faults, but it is like everything that I ever wanted distribution to look and feel like.

In this era where we’ve got all these people calling “fake news” do you have advice for the bigger news organizations on how to combat that, create more trust?

When I think of the future of news media I think it’s really about personality driven content, I trust a journalist and therefore I will listen to whatever that journalist has to say.