Your daily dose of Nas Daily is no more
Goodbye, Nas. That’s what a lot of fans of Nuseir Yassin — better known as Nas Daily — are saying this week as he bids farewell to his extremely popular, and sometimes controversial, daily Facebook video blog with his final video which was due to drop Saturday.
For the more than 11 million Facebook followers he has corralled over the past 1,000 days, his roughly one-minute travel/culture videos from all over the world are like digital postcards from a friend on perpetual vacation. They’re daydreams on demand, whisking you away to Armenia and Zimbabwe and seemingly everywhere in between.
And each one ends with this trademarked, “That’s one minute. See you tomorrow!,” often shouted in unison with a crowd of his fans at his
chosen destination.
Though his exit may not have the cultural import of the death of Anthony Bourdain last year, the men shared a similar enthusiasm for getting off the beaten travel path. And though he lacks Bourdain’s age, experience, depth and poetic way with words and imagery, Nas — something of a rock star in his field — also brings the perspective of a non-American, young man of color, a rarity in the rarefied world of travel blogging.
People, not panoramas
Yassin doesn’t much care about hot tourist spots, where to stay or what to wear. (Most famously, he sports a version of the same T-shirt in every video, one that now says “35% life,” as a reminder that, as a 26-year-old, he’s approximately one-third of the way to life’s finish line.)
Although some of his videos are whimsical tourist bait (cute cats in Istanbul), Yassin mostly focuses on uplifting or touching profiles of people, communities and issues such as the Canadian businessman who single-handedly brought 300 Syrian refugees to live in Canada; the New York woman who rescued and placed 1,500 older dogs; and, underscoring the prevalence of suicide in Japan, a look at a young man who literally rolled dice every day for six days to decide whether to kill himself. (Sadly, according to a Nas Daily post last week, he recently did take his life.)
As Yassin is a Palestinian Muslim who grew up in Israel, several of his videos have dealt with the thorny topics of religion and race, sometimes awkwardly. The first time I became aware of him was about a year ago in a fourminute video he posted about a conversation that he, a not particularly religious Muslim, had with a Jewish family he bumped into while filming on the streets of Jerusalem.
When Nas, whose nickname means “people” in Arabic, tells them he’s Arab-Palestinian, they don’t believe him, claiming he looks too “intelligent” and “French” and that Palestinians are “barbaric.” Meanwhile, the Jewish man’s teenage sister asks, “Why do they kill us?” The conversation, which went viral, leaves Nas speechless and crestfallen as he realizes his usual upbeat, communitarian, can’twe-all-just-get-along positivity can’t soften this family’s hardened beliefs.
But his optimism remains untarnished. As he detailed in his “The Israel and Palestine Offer” video, he even is letting overseas visitors stay for free in two of his apartments — one in Rawabi, Palestinian territory, the other in Tel Aviv — so they can see the lives behind the headlines. He calls it “Airbfree.”
Nas naysayers
Nas has many devoted fans, but he also has more than his share of detractors who claim he is naïve at best or a deluded, globe-trotting son of privilege at worst, making “Kumbaya” videos for a largely white, American and European millennial audience hungry for the exotic and esoteric without the depressing or the difficult.
Unlike Bourdain, he doesn’t much deal with the more troubling aspects of the societies he visits, whether it’s China or Rwanda.
One pro-Palestinian site charges he’s “whitewashing Israeli oppression,” another that, as a relatively well-off Israeli Palestinian with a passport, he has an advantage most of his fellow Palestinians can’t access. A pro-Israel blogger came hard for Nas’ “both sides are wrong” position, demanding “Nas Daily, pick a side, it should not be that hard!” (Nas has made a video against boycotting Israel.)
In Australia, he was taken to task for using the phrase “these people” to describe Aboriginals, forcing him to post a defensive video in response. In Singapore, he was chided for portraying the stereotype of “the perfect country” and accused of taking sponsorship money from Singaporean authorities (which he denies) and ignoring grimmer social realities underneath the gleaming surface.
Most recently, he and his team, including his girlfriend, Alyne, were involved in a scuffle at Barcelona’s airport en route to Malta for New Year’s Eve and the scene of Nas’ final video. (He has had trouble getting into countries before, including his first three attempts to get a visa for Australia, and there are 15 countries that don’t recognize his Israeli passport though he made a video about Pakistan anyway.)
One video, recorded on Day 508 of his journey, is simply titled “People Hate Me.”
Rapid rise
Certainly, Nas enjoys a lifestyle of which most people his age anywhere in the world can only dream. Born to a psychologist father and teacher mother in the small Israeli town of Arraba, he received a scholarship as an aerospace engineering student to Harvard University, graduated with an economics degree and landed a six-figure position as a coder for the money-transfer site Venmo.
But the tech-bro life proved unsatisfying — so he saved $60,000, quit his job, bought a camera and vowed to travel the world, documenting it every day in one-minute videos because that’s the most he thought most attention-scattered people would absorb. At first, he was going to upload only 60 videos but kept going, ultimately deciding to quit after 1,000.
Since then, he has been featured in global media and, even though Nas says he has no sponsors, he has turned his ebullient persona into a moneymaking enterprise. The Times of Israel recently caught up with him on his stop in Tel Aviv where “hundreds of people showed up … hoping to pitch him video ideas, meet him and talk to this 26year-old who’s made a business out of his one-minute daily videos.”
According to Business Insider, “Nas has created a business off of his personal mantra of selffulfillment. He sells themed T-shirts that spell out what percentage of your life is already over. Nas consults for businesses and people looking to produce multimedia content. He earns revenue from Facebook ads embedded in his videos. He puts his total net worth at roughly $250,000, which he says is “far less than what other travel vloggers earn.”
Now, with the weight of having to crank out a daily video off his shoulders, Nas plans to move to San Francisco and start a company to concentrate on long-form videos and maybe, down the road, go into politics.
Yet whatever one may think of his politics, methods or ambitions, it’s hard not to be charmed by his infectious enthusiasm. (It’s appropriate that one of his videos, recorded on Day 755, is called “Why I Always Smile.”)
And inspired by the people he meets who often have fascinating stories to tell the world, whether it’s young Armenian chess players; black Canadian modern explorer Mario Rigby, who connected with his roots by walking across Africa; or the late Irfan Hafiz, the Sri Lankan man who wrote three books despite being paralyzed and having the use of only one finger.
(One nit to pick: Judging from his video archive, it looks like he came to Texas only once and, of course, it was to Austin.)
The result is that Nas has joined the likes of hitmaker DJ Khaled as being one of the bestknown Western pop-culture personalities of Palestinian descent. What he does with this exposure and opportunity now that his roller-coaster life of travel-shoot-edit-repeat has slowed down remains to be seen. Freed from the snappy one-minute format, maybe his new projects will provide the depth and context the Nas Daily videos have lacked.
But, beginning this week, a sizable portion of the internet will be feeling a little downcast without its daily dose of upbeat global adventure. That’s one minute, and we won’t see you tomorrow.