Beyond the Usual: The Rewatch

No press trip. No brand deal. Just me looking around Atlanta and deciding I needed content. This episode covers an 800-foot water slide through the city, a tourist-in-my-own-town day in LA, and a tennis tournament where my personal obsession collided with the travel show — including lunch with the Bryan Brothers, the winningest doubles team in tennis history. This is the entrepreneurial instinct that built this show when nobody was handing me an itinerary.

Norway Tourism invited me to Oslo for Nobel Peace Prize week — flights hosted, hotel hosted, meals hosted, a fully stacked celebrity-style itinerary. I break down what a real press trip actually is, why brands spend thousands to host media, and what "fam trip" even means. While there, I found time between events to interview Black American expats living in Norway — a conversation that got more complicated than I expected, including a phrase I used that turned out to be genuinely controversial.

I produced three episodes solo in the British Virgin Islands. For Hilton Head, I hired a crew with my own money — a producer friend, two videographers, and a production assistant, for about $3,000 to $4,000 out of pocket. This is the rewatch where I find out if hiring help actually made the show better. Four episodes: Sea Pines Resort, an alligator wine-and-cheese tour, a century-old seafood shack, and the Gullah Geechee culture keeper who taught me I loved this part of the job more than anything else.

Ten years ago, I self-produced a travel show with no crew, no budget, and no idea if any of it would work. This is the first episode — filmed in the British Virgin Islands — and the first time I'm watching it back publicly. I break down what I got right, what makes me cringe, and what it actually took to make a travel show happen from nothing. If you're building something with no blueprint, this one's for you.