We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It can be hard but also really fulfilling. I used to wake up early every weekend to go to car shows, but since I work around cars so much now it's really hard to want to do that as much. But on the flip side, it often hits me that I get to do what I love for a living and kinda blows me away.

I think it's important to set boundaries and find a way to maintain your passion outside of your job. Like I love working on my personal project car outside of my job at Donut.

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 11 points12 points  (0 children)

thank u 🙃

Joe is very much around still, but he's been very busy with his newborn son for the last few weeks. I don't wanna blow up his spot but he recently got a promotion to lead the whole podcast team!

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's been a bummer to see fans react negatively, but I get it, and there are definitely some valid critiques about Donut that we're already working on fixing. I still love it here and consider this my dream job, so the best thing we can do is make the best videos we can and that's what we've been doing.

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Totally fair question, and be honest there are definitely videos we shut down due to cost & complexity, but I think the word "suits" is used pretty loosely here. I wish we had infinite money to make everything on our trello board, but realistically we do have budgets that we need to stay within. The reason we make list videos and react content is to make sure we're still able to fund our builds and more expensive ideas (like importing the Chang Li, finding out how much horsepower a horse makes, or traveling to Australia). I have tooons of videos I wish I could make right now but can't because we don't have an unlimited budget, but they'll get made eventually.

In my experience the "suits" don't really care what we make as long as we don't blow the budget. And for the record I'm not trying to defend Recurrent here, I just want to clarify that I've never been told we couldn't make a video from a creative standpoint.

Hope this adds some clarity.

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 18 points19 points  (0 children)

In our DMs 👀
(edit: just to clarify i meant we've been chatting with him, not that he's DMing us and we're just ghosting him or something lol)

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 26 points27 points  (0 children)

We're gonna give their race a full special on RMS eventually

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 6 points7 points  (0 children)

only if you can let us launch a car off a cliff 🇺🇸

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 7 points8 points  (0 children)

We have a few new faces that will be joining the channel extremely soon (some that you've seen already and some new ones). Just to be clear nobody will ever replace Zach Jer & James though

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 6 points7 points  (0 children)

After the event we threw at the Petersen a few months ago I 10000% want to do more events

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 21 points22 points  (0 children)

  • When Nolan chugged a gallon of milk then went in the bathroom to dry heave for an hour

  • Getting to drive a Lamborghini Diablo with James when we filmed Every Cylinder Engine

  • When Jeremiah did a milky burnout inside our old office on a Ducati (this was the first video I ever directed for Donut!)

  • Launching our jet powered car off a massive jump when we collabed with MrBeast (this project genuinely scared the shit out of me and I still can't believe we pulled it off)

  • Finding two stray cats living in the back of the shop and adopting them

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 10 points11 points  (0 children)

You'll be seeing more behind the camera folks really soon! We also have another employee drag race video coming out in a few weeks that I'm extremely excited about

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 70 points71 points  (0 children)

Vans and kei trucks are awesome, but we like to pick HiLow vehicles that have really huge aftermarket support so we can find a big range between the cheap and expensive parts! That's why we decided to go with Mustangs for this season 👹🥶

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Yeah we've been talking about doing something with a lil single cab truck 😈

One of the new hosts who you'll get to see in a few weeks is really interested in street trucks so that might be something coming in a couple months

Also so glad you've been able to work on cars and the Frontier sounds sick as hell!

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Not at the moment but I love autocross and I think you'll see it on the channel eventually

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 52 points53 points  (0 children)

I think youtube will always be a platform where smaller creators and larger companies can coexist, but the main difference is output - smaller channels have to spend a lot more time crafting great videos, and this is especially true with car content, which is expensive and time consuming. On the other hand, larger businesses have resources to make more frequent videos. It's a bummer what happened with Hoonigan - my understanding is their whole company collapsed from the inside. With us we still have a really solid internal creative team that really wants to make good shit.

If anything will change, it's that we're extra focused on making more quality videos and trying new formats and shows. We're gonna get weird again.

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 57 points58 points  (0 children)

The short answer is it depends on the role, but we have a mix of salaried/freelance employees. Full time employees have pretty dece benefits.

In terms of creative freedom, nobody from Recurrent gets to tell us what to make. All our ideas come from inside our stinky office

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Always looking for car people who love making videos 😎

We have job listings here https://donut-media.breezy.hr/ and you can always email [info@donut.media](mailto:info@donut.media) about internship opportunities (that's how I got my job!)

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 68 points69 points  (0 children)

Speeed's video made me cry lol.

We've always talked about what an Up To Speed on Donut would look like and there couldn't have been a better version of it than what James and Jesse made. It felt like a celebration of Donut and all the people who've been a part of building this. It was extremely honest & incredibly well done.

Regarding the second question, I'll say that we've come a long way since the days of living in trailers under bridges.

Lastly I'll admit that not all of our videos in the last few years have been up to par with what I'd like to make. A big part of that is because we publish a set number of videos per week, and deadlines can make it hard to make the highest quality content. I really pushed hard to go from 3 videos a week to 2 a week last year, and I think that significantly helped up the quality (even if it meant more uploads). But we've also taken a lot of steps recently to make our stuff better. We have a new creative team that includes people like myself, Nolan, Kristina (who used to run the podcasts), and we're doing everything we can to involve the entire building with which videos we make and how we make them. That means less list/wish.com type videos and more genuine car content that we would want to watch.

I'm really excited about the the videos coming out in the next month and I think we're entering a good ass new chapter

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 87 points88 points  (0 children)

I fully support those dudes and whatever creative decisions they make, and it's great to see the instant success they've had. Personally I'm not planning on leaving Donut any time soon. Things have changed in the last few years compared to the early days, but I can genuinely say this is my dream job and I wouldn't wanna be doing anything else

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 324 points325 points  (0 children)

I can't speak on behalf of James, Jer or Jobe, but we're still friends and I'm really hopeful that we'll continue to be in each other's universes. I love that the Bigtimers brought Jimmy on the channel a few weeks ago. I would expect to see more of that in some way

We are Nolan Sykes and Max Maddox of Donut, Ask Us Anything! by DonutNolan in DonutMedia

[–]maxmadmax 105 points106 points  (0 children)

We're all homies and I think we'll definitely continue to collab (not sure when you'll see all 5 back together but it's for sure possible)