There is a specific small dread that comes with wanting iced coffee in Italy. You know the order is wrong before you say it. The barista knows it too.

Gstaad Guy just handed his millions of followers the password. In a video posted this week, the luxury-lifestyle satirist declared the caffè shakerato his “drink of the summer,” and pitched it squarely at Americans who would rather not be the person requesting a venti iced anything on the Amalfi Coast. His version adds a touch of vanilla. The classic is a simple nod to La Dolce Vita.

What you are actually ordering

The shakerato is three ingredients and one piece of theater. The barista pulls a fresh espresso and shakes it hot with ice and simple syrup in a cocktail shaker, hard, until the drink transforms. La Marzocco notes that the vigorous shaking stretches the espresso’s natural crema into a tight, stable foam. Strained into a chilled coupe or martini glass with the ice left behind, it arrives looking like a cocktail. It is just coffee: non-alcoholic and dairy-free in its classic form, which makes it the rare universal order. The syrup does double duty as sweetener and foam stabilizer.

Barista Magazine traces the name to the English verb “shake” with an Italian ending, and notes the drink’s exact origin is unknown, usually credited to Italian bartenders in the 1990s. Federica, a manager at Rome’s Sant’Eustachio il Caffè, told the magazine it is “so much more fun to drink than a normal espresso.”

How to do it like you have done it before

Say “un caffè shakerato, per favore.” That is the whole script. It works at nearly any bar in the country, from a Milan counter to a beach kiosk in Puglia, no specialty café required while on your Eurosummer. A few notes that separate the traveler from the tourist: it is an afternoon drink, the natural answer to the hour when a cappuccino would raise eyebrows. Drink it standing at the counter, the way Italians take their coffee, and know that sitting at a table typically costs more for the same glass. And if you like Gstaad Guy’s vanilla twist, ask for “vaniglia” without apology. Flavored syrups are an established variation, and even Ina Garten has a vanilla version.

Why this endorsement travels

Gstaad Guy built his following on two characters: Constance de von Gstaad, an old-money European, and Cousin Colton, his new-money American counterpart. The act runs the real Eurosummer circuit from the Swiss Alps to the Côte d’Azur, and a meaningful slice of the audience books the same coastline his content is set on. A thirty-second Reel naming the right coffee order does what a thousand-word travel feature cannot: it lands in the feed of someone flying to Rome in June and tells them exactly what to say at the bar.

The shakerato earns the moment on its own. It runs through an Italian summer the way the Aperol Spritz runs through happy hour: ordered standing, unhurried, and nearly universal. The difference is you can have it at 3 p.m. and still make dinner.

Megan Meadows

Megan Meadows is a lifestyle writer covering fashion, taste, and the way the internet lives, with a small-town eye for what everyone else stopped noticing.

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Last March, Ludwig Ahgren and Michael Reeves rode motorcycles the length of Japan with no smartphones, no maps, and enough Japanese to get themselves into trouble. It became one of the best YouTube series of 2025. So naturally, they’ve made it harder this year, just finishing their infamous two-week journey across China. The two have been recording their daily adventures with translations added afterwards, adding a level of humor to the fun, as listeners can now understand the bewilderment of people trying to help the travellers on their journey.

Their new adventure, Tip 2 Tip: China, sent the pair from the southern coast of China all the way to the Mongolian border in two weeks, without maps or smartphones. The final video was just released today. Ludwig and Michael’s route began in Guangzhou and ended near Erenhot, covering roughly 3,000 miles, about the same as going coast to coast in the continental U.S., with very minimal Chinese language skills and lots of rural terrain.

The rules were the same as last year: no highways, no maps, no smartphones, although Michael and Ludwig were allowed to let good samaritans pull out their own phones to translate. China presented a specific logistical challenge before they even got on the bikes. Unlike Japan, which still runs on cash, much of China’s payment infrastructure is built around smartphone QR codes, with smaller vendors and stalls often having no cash registers at all.

In preparation for their journey, the two spent months studying Mandarin before the trip. Clearly, their language preparation was not enough.. In episodes running around 30 minutes each, Michael and Ludwig showcase the Mandarin they learned while frequently failing to get their point across, at one point asking for a “pig shop” instead of a hotel. Their frequent miscommunications and antics travelling across the country have gone viral on Bilibili, the popular Chinese social media app often compared to YouTube.

Early antics included failing to find a compass, clogging a toilet, karaoke, getting pulled over, picking up a hitchhiker and getting invited to the mayor of a small Chinese city’s house. Their lack of experience in the Mandarin language lead to many mishaps, including an incident where the two accidentally crash a “happy funeral” in Hunan province, mistaking the funeral banquet for a restaurant.

It did not slow them down much. Over the course of the series they picked up a hitchhiker, got invited to a Chinese mayor’s home, and spent a day with a group of local kids, during which it became apparent that Ludwig is oddly good with children. They stumbled onto what viewers started calling “the most beautiful shortcut in the history of shortcuts.” There was a bread mishap with ongoing consequences.

The language barrier was worse than Japan throughout. Rural Chinese dialects can sound almost nothing like standard Mandarin, and the underdeveloped infrastructure of some stretches made navigation genuinely difficult. Mandarin is also a very difficult language to learn, having many different tones that can be unfamiliar to non-native speakers. Ludwig kept mispronouncing the Chinese word for “adventure” in a way that came out as “cat line.” 

Chinese traffic law added a wrinkle Japan didn’t: motorcycles are prohibited from expressways, meaning they were legally required to take the surface roads regardless of the rules of the challenge. The series ran daily on Ludwig’s YouTube channel, shot and edited ahead of release, with a buffer week built in for the editing team, with episodes already reaching millions of views on YouTube. The Bilibili audience followed along in parallel, with fan-run sites translating Chinese viewer comments back into English for Ludwig’s regular audience to read. Two groups of people watching the same trip from opposite ends of the language barrier. The full series is now available on Ludwig’s YouTube channel.

James Lewis

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In May 2024, YouTube superstar MrBeast (born Jimmy Donaldson) walked away from Night Media, the talent management company that helped scale his business to an annual revenue of $600 million to $700 million and attracted additional high-profile creators such as Kai Cenat and Hasan Piker. The departure was amicable. Night Media CEO Reed Duchscher continued working with Donaldson on the snack brand Feastables, but Donaldson no longer relied on external firms to manage production or growth. Beast Studios had already evolved into a self-contained operation capable of producing content at scale without being tied to a single studio, office, or centralized hub. As the streaming industry standardized around creator collectives and shared infrastructure, Donaldson moved in the opposite direction, consolidating control while expanding where and how his content could be produced. The pattern is unmistakable across the creator economy. Increasingly, talent built on YouTube, social media and streaming platforms no longer need to outsource work to management companies, creator hubs, or fixed studios. As IRL streaming and travel-based formats gain traction, centralized locations have become less essential to growth and, in some cases, a constraint on scale.

The story of the modern social media influencer began on Vine, the short-lived and influential six-second video platform. Before being discontinued in 2016, this precursor to TikTok peaked at over 200 million users. In 2015, Vine stars rented and worked out of an apartment complex in Los Angeles, and YouTubers like the Paul brothers followed, renting out mansions and collaborating on content. With the rising popularity of TikTok from 2018 onward, famous users of the app followed suit. Hype House, the most notable TikTok house, hosted the D’Amelio sisters and Addison Rae at its peak, but many left in 2020 to pursue their own independent business ventures. Similar patterns played out with Team 10, the influencer group founded by Jake Paul that fractured amid lawsuits and departure announcements throughout 2019 and 2020. In December, members of popular influencer group FaZe Clan left the organization and its L.A. mansion because of contractual disputes. These collectives proved the value of shared resources, but they also exposed the limits of fixed locations. Creators increasingly developed audiences that were tied to individual brands rather than shared spaces, weakening the role of studios and creator houses. As leading influencers began to attract attention comparable to traditional media companies, they partnered with larger Hollywood studios and streaming platforms, instead of working underneath them.  

These collapses foreshadowed today’s exodus: once creators build sufficient audience and brand equity, sharing infrastructure becomes a liability rather than an asset. Valkyrae’s 2024 launch of Hihi Studios, a creator-owned production company she co-founded with other gaming personalities, reflected this lesson learned. Rather than joining an existing multi-creator management firm, she built her own from the start, maintaining independence while building a brand strong enough to support production across locations.

Months after ending his management deal with Night Media, Jimmy Donaldson announced a reported 100 million dollar deal with Amazon MGM Studios to produce Beast Games for Prime Video. The show became Amazon’s most-watched unscripted show, drawing over 50 million viewers in its first month, prompting the platform to renew it for two additional seasons. Beast Industry Studios later hired former NBCUniversal unscripted head Corie Henson as president of the studio division in September 2025. As creators scale, many are moving away from fixed production environments toward destination content, where the physical location is central to the production itself. As platforms reward watch time and live engagement, creators are finding that scale increasingly comes from movement rather than consolidation. MrBeast’s move away from an exclusive relationship with Night Media and his company’s hiring of a former NBC executive, illustrates how large creators are redefining studios themselves. Rather than serving as a single production location, Beast Studios functions as an operational backbone that supports content produced across locations and formats, valuing efficiency location. 

The creator economy’s trajectory is now split. Emerging talent still relies on agencies and networks for growth and opportunities. But the endpoint for many successful creators is now independence instead of signing with an agency, especially as social media stars develop their own brands, work with streaming platforms and have the ability to operate anywhere. Whether this model proves sustainable remains to be seen, but it is already reshaping how digital content is produced, distributed, and experienced.

James Lewis

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