The Weekly Bev - 9th Edition

👀 Looking Ahead

To start, I wanted to touch on two quick things…

1. I promise: this is the last time I mention the new company before I actually tell you guys what it is! I cannot wait to show you what we’ve built and give you the behind-the-scenes founding story. For full transparency, I’m holding off on announcing the name and mission of the company because I want to point you to an actual website when I do. We’re less than a month out from finalizing the site, so it’s coming very soon. As a token of my appreciation for your patience here, I wanted to include a little easter egg 🐥 What do you think it is?

   

2. We’re getting incredibly close to day 1000. I wish I could invite every person who has ever watched the vlog, but unfortunately that’s not possible. I don’t know the exact headcount I’ll be able to invite, but I do know that you can guarantee an invite for you and a friend by referring people to the Weekly Bev via your link below! Also, if you’re reading this, reply with a blurb on why you should be selected for an invite. I’ll pick one Weekly Bev subscriber :)

🏎️ Miami GP Recap

Wow! F1 weekend was amazing (as usual). I was there with Toni Brown to help her shoot some content for JP Morgan Payments (a big sponsor of F1). There are a few ways to “attend” a GP, and this was my first time doing it this way. In 2022, I worked with Alpine on internal media. It’s extremely fun, but very much a job. You are shooting and editing constantly, you have amazing access to the paddock and a team garage, but you don’t get to watch much of the track action. In 2023, I went with Heineken as a creator. This is still “work” given that you have deliverables, but the idea is to experience the race and enjoy all of it. You have amazing access and the ability to watch from the paddock club. This year, my experience was an awesome hybrid of the two. Toni had two main deliverables over the weekend that I shot and edited with her, but when we were done with our work each day the rest of the time was ours! Here’s a quick recap…

Thursday: I flew in, and it was a bit…bumpy, as I outlined in the vlog haha. I grabbed some dinner at Komodo (which was awesome) and then went to bed.

Friday: The first day at the track! Toni and I arrived early to start knocking things off the shot list. Once we finished, we explored the track. I then left a little early to meet a friend for dinner and finish editing for the night.

Saturday: A lighter shoot since we hit it hard on Friday morning. We found ourselves in the paddock for the afternoon through qualifying. We originally did not have paddock access, so it was a pretty sweet surprise. The paddock is so fun because of the people, not just celebrities and drivers, but the people who I have made connections with over the years. Seeing familiar faces for the third year in a row gives me a feeling of “belonging” to the F1 community in a small way. The few hours we were there was probably the highlight of my weekend!

Sunday: We arrived at the track early again. One deliverable was already done and approved by JP Morgan. We just needed a couple shots for the 2nd deliverable and we would be done for the weekend (minus editing). Once we completed the shot list, we ended up at the Red Bull Energy House, which was an awesome place to view the race. Around lap 20 I made my way out of the stadium to catch my flight. I’m a bit sad I missed Lando crossing the line for his first win, but I did get to see him rip around the track quite a bit.

I had such a great time with Toni and JP Morgan this weekend and feel really grateful to have carved out some space for myself among the F1 community. I want to keep exploring the sport and finding ways to work with brands and teams in the future. The atmosphere of events like this weekend is incredibly exciting to be around, and I’m crossing my fingers I can get more of it!

🌴 Mystery Links

Een, twee, drie, vier

⏰ TikTok Thoughts

I’m sure I’m not breaking this news to anyone, but last week President Biden signed a foreign aid package that included a bill that would ban TikTok if its China-based parent company ByteDance fails to divest the app within 270 days. I’ve been publishing content on TikTok for awhile now and many of you have found my content through TikTok, so I’ve received a lot of requests for my thoughts on this recent development. Frankly, this is normally not something I’d opine on in the vlog because it’s hard to provide sufficient context for something like this…Enter: the Weekly Bev 😎 

When TikTok launched and skyrocketed in popularity, it proved there was (and still is) an insatiable amount of demand for short form video content. Instagram has since launched Reels, Youtube has launched Youtube Shorts, even X (FKA Twitter) now hosts a ton of short form content. I think it’s safe to say the medium of short form content is the new paradigm and is not going anywhere, regardless of what platform is the dominant player. This is important to note because I think its incumbent on us as creators to understand where you guys as viewers are and make sure our content is accessible in that medium. One of the driving factors behind the inception of the daily vlog was the fact that short form content was the definitive content-choice of consumers. This TikTok development is not a consumer choice event, it is a regulatory event and I think it would be a mistake to confuse the two. Now, I tend to believe there’s too much money at stake for the TikTok app to be outright banned (conservative estimates value the app at ~$100 billion), but if it were to disappear out of thin air, I’m confident either a new entrant would capture the leftover demand or it will flow into an existing platform like Instagram. Either way, there will be a platform optimized for short form content where I’ll post the vlog every day. We’ve all heard Gary Vee push the value of diversifying across platforms for years now, and he’s definitely right in this instance. That’s also one of the reasons I started this newsletter!

Now, with all of that said, this kind of begs the question: will the daily vlog ever not be short form? I’ve thought about this a lot, and the answer is…the short form nature of my daily vlog is integral to the series, so I can say definitively it will never be anything else. It will never be a 10 minute Casey Neistat-style vlog (which I’m a huge fan of). I’m always going to see how you guys react to content and where attention on the internet is moving. For example, if the wave towards long form content (circa ~2015) were to happen again, I would reconsider my focus across mediums and if needed I would sunset the vlog (in an incredibly beautiful way) to reallocate my time to that medium.

In summary, I’m not a TikToker, I’m a creator and I’m a filmmaker. The platform on which I post my work will consistently change, my type of content may change, but I will always remain flexible, I will always meet you guys wherever you may be consuming content. I will always try to tell great stories.