Much of the fun of talking to an expert comes in finding out how much more they know about that subject than you do. That gap, for better and worse, is also where the terror of it resides. If I had my way, I would simply say "what even is this thing?" and then sit there criss-cross-applesauce for an hour while having it explained to me. But on a podcast, everybody has to talk.
This was what I worried about when we had on Nathan Grayson, our old GMG coworker, Aftermath co-founder, and author of the new book Stream Big: The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen to talk about that embattled, huge-but-not-profitable streaming platform. I find Twitch fascinating, but I am not a Man Of Game, and I am old, and I know astonishingly little about this particular economy; Drew, by his own admission, knows even less. I was worried that I wouldn't even know enough to get to the interesting stuff.
As it turns out, I needn't have worried. Stream Big is a breezy read, and Nathan proved both a good talker and a patient explainer of basic things to the two old goofs that had him on their podcast. After a brief overture on the topics of unnecessarily formal family interactions and our respective microplastic consumption habits, we got to the Twitch stuff. There's a lot about the business that I find incomprehensible, but Stream Big and Nathan's answers to our questions brought home the extent to which this particular online culture and media business are like others I know much better.
Twitch is an authentically popular platform with its own culture, mores, lore, and heroes and villains that exists at the whim of a corporate parent that doesn't really care that much about it. In Twitch's case, that's Amazon; for all of us at the old company, that meant a series of less competent but similarly checked-out business types. Our conversations about how Twitch exists within Amazon, how its business works for the streamers that make the platform what it is, and the ways in which corporate profit-seeking has applied downward pressure on viewers and streamers alike felt less alien and much more familiar as time went by. Some of it is unique to this business—the unbelievable grind of full-time streaming, the unreal administrative burdens that come with getting yourself discovered on a platform that doesn't really work for creators in that way—but none of that unpaid overtime and high-pressure alienation will feel new to anyone who has spent much time making stuff online.
This looks like an individual medium, but isn't—at the highest end, creators need production teams and both more hours than are in the day and often more money than they earn in revenue to be as accessible and omnipresent as they need to be. Nathan also spoke about the strange kind of fame that big streamers get, and the impossible challenge of managing a public profile grounded in some oppressive expectations of how available and "real" a creator should be relative to your more conventionally famous types. The ways in which corporate pressures have conspired to make this experience worse for both creators and consumers was also familiar, and led us into a conversation about Twitch's future and then more broadly into the conflict between what is valuable versus what can be monetized. Aftermath has placed the same bet on what's actually valuable here that we have at Defector. We talked about that some, too.
And then we opened the Funbag, where we were met by questions about how to survive a 19-hour plane ride—Nathan recommended a Steam Deck; I told a story about getting awakened on a long flight by someone who wanted to offer me brandy—and whether we'll ever see a big league pitcher be good into their mid-40s again. I'm bullish on that, and one of the last images of this episode is Bartolo Colon triumphantly shaking around his tummy after hitting a homer. It was nice to be back in my comfort zone, if nothing else.
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