Ok first off Olivia Nuzzi is nuts trying to write anything long form on a phone is psychotic behavior and I won’t stand for normalization. But I’m currently walking around Brooklyn finishing Christmas shopping and trying out a new way of commuting: Sans headphones. All I’m left with is my thoughts and observations as I walk and I can’t stop thinking about how batshit crazy it is that two professional athletes in LA went on with the same livestreamer and proceeded to out themselves as at best idiots, at worst outright racist.
Puka Nakua and Mookie Betts went on with a live streamer named Aiden Ross who has a history of saying supremely racist things to the point he’s been booted off platforms, and are now in trouble because they said or did racist things with him. Diego Pavia said he would give his Heisman trophy if he won it to Theo Vonn, a former reality star who now does podcasting and streaming and has also said lots of racist things.
That’s just in the last week; Google “athlete apology streamer” and you’ll find so many results from the post pandemic world across all major sports leagues. This isn’t new, but it is something sports media training has seemingly lost the war on.
How did we get here? Well the Galaxy Brain podcast explains it best: YouTube won the podcast and TV wars, and we all sat back and let it happen.
If you don’t want to watch the podcast, you can read or listen to it here. But the primary thesis of the episode is that YouTube, in it’s ability to offer an easy content distribution platform for all media, became the only place to consistently find everything that you wanted. While Spotify spent the money (and now Netflix is trying too), YouTube was always just… there, offering free money to whomever wanted to spend the relatively short amount of time uploading their content. Add in their inherently better algorithm due to their pervasive data mining, and they became a monster for content.
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