Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
When James Pumphrey, Jeremiah Burton, and Zach Jobe all walked out of Donut Media in the summer of 2024, the internet buried the channel overnight. Comment sections called it cooked, blamed private equity, and told everyone to unsubscribe. Two years later, almost none of that turned out to be true.
Donut is sitting above nine million subscribers, landed an exclusive Tubi streaming deal for HiLow with Fox, signed with Hollywood agency CAA, put Real Mechanic Scrub into nearly 2,000 Walmart stores, and locked Allstate and Hankook into third-year partnerships run like a NASCAR team. Nolan Sykes took over as editor-in-chief and made the one decision that saved it — instead of hiring clones of the departed hosts, Donut brought in Tristan Kim and Steph Gutierrez and let them build their own audience, then leaned into raw garage content like the $500 Civic that ate $50,000 in parts.
It wasn't a clean ride. The Past Gas format change split fans, and in mid-2026 Donut shut down its entire podcast division alongside layoffs. But a company that trims a struggling side project while its core channel grows isn't dying — it's restructuring. This is the story of how the car community wrote an obituary two years too early, and why the 2024 split ended up making everyone better off.
When James Pumphrey, Jeremiah Burton, and Zach Jobe all walked out of Donut Media in the summer of 2024, the internet buried the channel overnight. Comment sections called it cooked, blamed private equity, and told everyone to unsubscribe. Two years later, almost none of that turned out to be true.
Donut is sitting above nine million subscribers, landed an exclusive Tubi streaming deal for HiLow with Fox, signed with Hollywood agency CAA, put Real Mechanic Scrub into nearly 2,000 Walmart stores, and locked Allstate and Hankook into third-year partnerships run like a NASCAR team. Nolan Sykes took over as editor-in-chief and made the one decision that saved it — instead of hiring clones of the departed hosts, Donut brought in Tristan Kim and Steph Gutierrez and let them build their own audience, then leaned into raw garage content like the $500 Civic that ate $50,000 in parts.
It wasn't a clean ride. The Past Gas format change split fans, and in mid-2026 Donut shut down its entire podcast division alongside layoffs. But a company that trims a struggling side project while its core channel grows isn't dying — it's restructuring. This is the story of how the car community wrote an obituary two years too early, and why the 2024 split ended up making everyone better off.
