'Oh, that's why they're called the Steelers,' YouTuber I Show Speed confesses during Pittsburgh livestream

At any given moment Saturday, more than 30,000 people watched a 20-year-old’s livestream as he toured Pittsburgh.

YouTuber “I Show Speed” — Darren Watkins Jr. in real life — is on day 10 of 35 of what’s billed as the “irl stream in America.”

Speed, as Watkins is known, was famous enough to throw out the first pitch of Saturday’s Pittsburgh Pirates game against the Milwaukee Brewers.

Haven’t heard of him?

Watch the stream here:

Ask a teen or tween, and they might be among the 43.7 million people who subscribe to his antics on his YouTube channel.

It’s like watching a rougher, less-polished, more profane version of the MTV series “The Real World.”

It’s also literally cinéma vérité — “truthful cinema” — of the sort D.A. Pennebaker or Albert and David Maysles never imagined.

(Pennebaker, who would be 100 if he were alive, exemplified the genre with “Don’t Look Back” which followed Bob Dylan’s 1965 concert tour in England; the Maysles brothers made documentaries must-see-filmmaking with works such as “Grey Gardens,” an unflinching look at the Edith Bouvier Beales — a mother and daughter who shared the same name and were revered relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.)

Whether Watkins’ stream-of-consciousness stylings will be well-remembered or a fleeting fad is to be determined. He has been crowned the most popular English-language streamer of all time. A 2024 livestream from Indonesia garnered 1 million concurrent views, according to streamcharts.com, a site that tracks this trivia.

To put that into perspective, the most-watched episode of scripted television, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” the “M*A*S*H” finale, was watched by about 106 million people at any given moment in 1983.

Unscripted television is a different animal, however.

Speed’s soliloquies aren’t exactly Shakespearean.

“It’s a good-looking city,” he said shortly before 7 p.m. “What’s across the bridge?”

The South Side, some of his entourage told him. That side of the river was where the steel mills were, they said.

“What’s that?”

Initially, he misheard “steel,” he said. Regardless, he was unaware of Pittsburgh’s industrial legacy.

“Oh, that’s why they’re called the Steelers,” he deadpanned. “I swear to God I didn’t know that. I just thought it was a name.”

It hearkened back to an old-school NBC slogan: “The More You Know.”