Recurrent Ventures’ Post

WOW. I’m blown away by the response to our latest YouTube video: 2M views, 65K likes, thousands of comments (and only a handful insulting my appearance). Peaked at #12 on YouTube’s trending page. Friday-Sun was the most viewed stretch in the history of The Drive going back over 12 years to when it was captained by a group of guys I can only hope to emulate. Throw in an imposter TikTok account that reposted the full video and nearly 5 million people watched us do our thing this weekend. It’s so, so exciting to see the bets Joey Rassool and I are placing pay off like this. (And by the way, you see my mug on camera, but what you don’t see is how much work Joey is doing to produce, script, shoot, and edit these, not to mention wrangling me. He deserves most of the credit!) When I started as editor-in-chief of The Drive in 2019, one of my core beliefs was that an automotive site should be able to speak to enthusiasts and a much larger general audience at the same time, through the same story. It’s one thing to try to offer something for everyone, to review Hondas and Lamborghinis. It’s quite another to bring together camps that conventional wisdom would tell you can never mix and show that actually, they can. What it takes is understanding two connected truths. Car culture is American culture, for better and worse, which means there are literally endless stories out there. Tell them well, treat people on the other side of the screen like smart human beings, and don’t write off 80% of your potential audience just because they don’t know or even care about the difference between horsepower and torque. That is how we put it all together. I don’t think any single outlet is fully representing and embodying this, including us at The Drive. The work is not finished; it’s an incredibly hard thing to do that’s only gotten harder in the last five years. We don’t always get it right. But when we do—the written version of this story was also a smash hit—it’s magic. Finally, I want to thank our CEO Andrew Perlman for giving us the runway to get to this point. Our new era on YouTube is fully underway. Let's go.