The week started with realizing I’d missed a chance to attend one of the last tapings of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. An invite had come two weeks before for tickets to the May 11 show —that one, with all the hosts of late night—and was totally missed in the inbox. I’d be beside myself for missing such a seminal TV moment in person—but by Thursday it wasn’t so bad, because I got to be at a gathering that felt like the future of TV, the premiere of the new and improved version of Kareem Rahma’s Keep the Meter Running.

If you haven’t seen it yet, every episode, Kareem hops into a cab and asks the driver to take him to their favorite place, and to keep the meter running while they enjoy it. In their expanded format, Kareem and producer Adam Faze get to go deeper then they did in the original, and in the packed Metrograph theater for the premiere, there was lots of laughing and cheering, especially five minutes into the first episode, when Kareem stripped down to his boxer briefs in a Russian sauna with his new friends Eugene and Rustam.

Kareem gets emotionally naked in these episodes, too—he puts himself out there with no vanity, sharing his insecurities and regrets, which gives his new friends the chance both to share wisdom and advice and mock him mercilessly. You can see them having a profound impact on him in real time, and it serves the show’s purpose of showing how much value there is in every person you meet.

The spirit of Bourdain is strong in this show—like Tony, Kareem can have a great conversation with anyone, which is what makes his breakout project Subway Takes so much fun; he has a love for the working class (his parents were Egyptian immigrants and his dad was a cab driver); and he’s a bit of a punk—Kareem’s band Tiny Gun1 is noisy and arch and has great taste, like a New York band should. Unlike Bourdain, Kareem didn’t need a green light from the Food Network or Travel Channel to reboot this show—he spent seven months trying to develop the show with CNN, where Anthony Bourdain ended up, but walked away from the talks—he’s famous and successful enough now that he could find backing from AND Media and support from YouTube finding sponsors, and make the show on his terms, with his friends.

Keep the Meter Running is just good TV, and fact that these friends could make it together, something so humanistic and personal and laugh out loud funny, with no network or integrated brands to give them notes, and put it up on YouTube for anyone in the world to watch it for free, makes it even better. Adam said at the screening, “If this is a web series, then so is every show on Netflix, and every show on HBO Max, because it’s all the Internet now.”

I wrote a little while back about YouTube’s new studio era, and noted Kareem as one of the more exciting creators building in the space, along with Emily Sundberg and Feed Me. Seeing Emily beaming in the front row, and a theater full of creators like Amelia Dimoldenberg and Jack Coyne and journalists like Natalie Jarvey made it feel like a happening. I said as much to Emily coming out of the show, though we’d only just met: “Wow. This was a moment, right?”

In Emily’s really smart piece about the night, she writes:

I have sat through enough screenings and Q+A’s for friends who’ve made movies to now identify a secret weapon that no amount of money or production partner or Hollywood last name can buy: Making things with your friends. Trust is the obvious benefit of working with friends, but you also never really clock out (in a good way) because the project and your friendship are so tightly woven together. Sometimes I’ll hear about magazines or businesses trying to reverse-engineer their own version of Subway Takes (or How Long Gone, or TBPN, or Feed Me, or The Drunken Canal, or Byline) as if it can be broken down on a white board or in a Zoom meeting. They can’t and they shouldn’t.

This was something we thought about all the time in the early days of Next New Networks and YouTube—most of us started out in the space to have fun, and knew we had an edge if we could keep doing it—when you’re having fun, it shows up on the screen and it’s impossible to replicate.

There was one other night about ten years ago that felt like this one—the premiere of Lilly Singh’s Unicorn Island—and it’s usually the first thing I remember when people ask me what my favorite moment at YouTube was. The movie was one of the first YouTube Originals, and the brilliant marketing team (many of the same who sponsored Kareem’s party this week) had rented out the iconic Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. We’d worked with Lilly quite a bit at this point—she was one of the first creators featured in a YouTube brand campaign, with billboards and outdoor ads across major cities—and the premiere felt like the celebration of a new era. Tons of top creators at the time came out to walk the carpet and cheer her on. “Coming to to see the premiere of a friend’s own movie is a whole different feeling,” Jay Sean says in a video TCL produced where you can see all the creators marveling over the moment. Lilly made the movie with Astronauts Wanted, the production company helmed by legendary MTV CEO Judy McGrath, a hero of mine who mentored me when I first got the job developing YouTube Originals. I remember standing with Judy on the red carpet, then later at the afterparty as Lilly danced with her family and friends, and we talked about how these creators had so much more control over their destinies than many of the artists, performers, and filmmakers we’d worked with before, and that it felt like a moment had come where Hollywood would never be the same.

The creators of our current moment came out for this one, along with comedians like Eric André and Devon Walker and, most winningly, most of the longtime cab drivers featured in the show, with their dates and families. At the afterparty, two of the most memorable conversations I had were with Mary Shalaby, the comedian and actress who broke out on TikTok and Instagram and was just cast in a new NBC series, who made me feel like the future of comedy was in great hands, and an even longer one about food, travel, family, and love with Seth Goldman, the cab driver and Greenwich Village poet who took Kareem to David’s Brisket House in the original series. Something like that could only happen in the world Kareem and his friends are creating.

Elsewhere:

The YouTube-to-theaters pipeline: Glitch Productions’ The Amazing Digital Circus has surpassed $7.5M in movie ticket pre-sales in 5,000+ theaters, breaking records for Fathom, hot on the heels of Markiplier’s Iron Lung success.

The kids are alright: A new poll of Gen Z kids has only 5% wanting to be creators or influencers—a welcome change from those polls a few years back listing it as the top career aspiration. (via After School / Casey Lewis)

Evan Shapiro notes that Alphabet/Google is now the second most valuable company in the world, and shares a little of his life as a creator: “CREATOR” IS A JOB, MOTHERF*CKER

Natalie Jarvey has the recap on a busy week in creator events leading up to Brandcast, including Cannes and the Scalable Summit in LA: Cannes Lions’ Creator Boom Meets 2026’s Budget Buzzkill. Looking forward to her posts this week about Brandcast and Kareem’s premiere.

As a counterpoint to all the future of TV stuff above, Garbage Day has a piece on YouTube being “Like Television, But Worse.” They’ve also been covering the massive traffic decline on right-wing YouTube channels, which is interesting reading, and relates to Vulture’s much-discussed piece this week on clipping and other paid promotion in social media, “The Feed is Fake.”

Thanks for reading bonus video: hey/ya (elliott smith’s version)

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Kareem was part of the extremely smart team around Eddy Moretti and Spike Jonze at VICE when I got to work with them on things like the YouTube Music Awards. Tyler McCauley, one of my favorite people on the team, started Tiny Gun with Kareem, and it was a blast to see them rip through their songs at the Gramercy Theater a few weeks ago. Very grateful to Tyler for reconnecting with me + making sure I didn’t miss one of the better nights in 20 years of New York media.