Darren Watkins Jr., far better known as IShowSpeed, has attained a kind of fame that’s hard to wrap your head around. The 20-year-old streamer, named Rolling Stone‘s most influential creator of 2025, doesn’t just have 135 million followers online. He also gets mobbed and chased by fans wherever he goes, from Europe to South America and, most recently, just about every corner of the mainland U.S. In August, Speed embarked on a 35-day tour of 25 states — and the camera was never off, even while he slept. The marathon livestream came to an end on Tuesday night at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where friends, family, and other celebrities came to attend the premiere of his new YouTube series, Speed Goes Pro.
On the red carpet (actually green, to fit with the football stadium venue and sports content of the series), a member of Speed’s team tells Rolling Stone that one of the streamer’s favorite movies is The Truman Show. It’s only a halfway apt comparison to Speed’s situation: Unlike Jim Carrey’s unwitting reality show star, Speed is well aware that he’s a household name who shares almost every waking minute of his life with the world — and he thrives off it. Earlier that day, he had been filming around town, going for a spin in a low rider, hanging out with rapper YG, and seeing where admirers had mocked up a star for him on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. While he was hyped for the crowds (including some who trailed his car on electric scooters for a chance to appear on his stream), in quieter moments, he yawned and remarked on how tired he was. It’s exhausting to be this much of a public figure, even with stamina like his. Nonetheless, one of the members of his team tells me, Speed recently floated the idea of streaming nonstop for an entire year.
After some apparent delays, Speed’s massive tour bus, trailed by a convoy of black SUVs, rolled up to the entrance of the Coliseum, where it was greeted with a rah-rah routine from University of Southern California cheerleaders and a drone filming his big entrance from above. The L.A. youths who had been shadowing and filming Speed through the afternoon found themselves shut out of the event as he prepared to rub elbows with the likes of Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian, who brought a few of her kids. Also in attendance were Olympic gold medal gymnast Suni Lee and WWE wrestler Randy Orton, both guest stars on Speed Goes Pro. Speed himself took to the carpet in a suit and black Yeezys, surrounded by his camera crew, and appeared totally re-energized as he glad-handed with producers and posed for pictures.
With all the people he needed to greet, Speed had only a brief moment to speak with Rolling Stone. “I’m very excited to not live on a bus anymore,” he says. “I was sleeping on a couch, and it was very hard, and now I’ll get to go back to my bed.” Asked what the craziest stop on his tour was, he doesn’t skip a beat. “I might have to give it to the Bay,” he says. “And Washington D.C. It was just insane.” The streams from his time in San Francisco, Oakland, and the nation’s capital did indeed feature some of the more frenzied throngs of people screaming his name and reaching out to touch him, held back only by a cadre of burly bodyguards. (Side note: This reporter learned a lesson about trying to riff on a stream after joking that Speed could get in trouble for shouting out the Bay Area while in L.A., which led to comments from viewers such as “bruh was hurt.”)
The first two episodes of Speed Goes Pro, a five-part series in which Speed trains with some of the top athletes in the world to see if he has what it takes to make it in their sport, were to be shown at a screen set up at the football field’s 50-yard line, immediately after Speed ended his tour stream. But, true to the chaotic and improvisational nature of his medium, the screening was delayed by about 25 minutes as Speed wrapped things up and attendees were corralled to their seats with buckets of kettle corn and hard Topo Chicos. If it felt a little odd to debut the show in a vast arena that remained mostly empty for the occasion, it was still evocative of Speed’s incredible ambition. Who knows, maybe a year from now he’ll be selling out entire arenas with whatever he cooks up next.
The audience — a good number of them from Dick’s Sporting Goods, the sponsor for Speed Goes Pro, as well as a group of contest-winners sitting down front — was certainly amused as they watched Speed talk trash with Tom Brady amid drilling for a matchup in which he would play passing defense against the legendary quarterback. And they cheered when, following a few disappointing 40-yard dashes, he ran his last in just 4.49 seconds, finally living up to his childhood nickname. The second episode, in which Speed tests his talents for gymnastics against Lee, was likewise entertaining, with the streamer trying to perfect a “front full” tumbling technique and a “giant” maneuver on the high bar. While he’s warming up with gymnast Nastia Liukin, another Olympic medalist, she asks about a bandage on his shoulder. “Oh, I got bit by a monkey in Turkey,” Speed explains, as if this were the most natural answer he could possibly give. “So it’s a rabies shot.” Overall, the show does a commendable job of blending Speed’s charisma and sense of mischief with the most structured premise than he’s ever had, rounded out by ESPN-style narration from actor Liev Schreiber.
A cocktail reception followed at the top level of the stadium, and partygoers took in views of the city while sipping Speed-themed margaritas that the man himself is still too young to legally drink. A DJ played the expected songs from Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter, occasionally slipping in a throwback like MGMT’s “Electric Feel.” The strong scent of commingled colognes filled the night air, and word went around that the lobster roll hors d’oeuvres were best avoided.
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Frederick Richard, a 21-year-old Olympic medalist and world record-holder for the most backflips performed in 24 hours (he goes by “Frederick Flips” on social media) was one of Speed’s trainers for the gymnastics episode of Speed Goes Pro, and tells Rolling Stone he was impressed by both his natural ability and commitment to hard work. “I think his strength is in the mentality of, there’s no giving up, there’s no backing out,” he says. “This stuff is scary. When you’re on the bar and it’s 10 feet up, you’ve never done this movement — you’re scared for your life. But [Speed] says, ‘I’m not backing out. I go for it.’ And that mentality is what it takes to make big progress.”
“He had like, 48 hours, so he really put everything in,” Richard adds, noting that Speed was willing to hit the gym at 5 a.m. to make the scheduling work. “It was fun to watch him learn from the ground roots, try to achieve very high, complicated skill.” He has “a lot of respect” for what Speed did with the show. “It’s just inspiring,” Richard says. “I want to do things like this too, build my sport up. So it’s cool to see people our age doing big things.”
Meanwhile, the architects of Speed’s landmark U.S. tour were taking a well-deserved breather after the last big thing. Ames Ward, the producer who was seen on the stream waking Speed up that very morning, says the experience of bringing Speed to so many cities in little more than a month was simply incredible. “Completely life changing,” he says. “Feel like it needs time to process. But no one has ever done anything like this before. There was no blueprint.” He says Speed and the crew did only about “half” of what was on their itinerary, since you could never tell what might happen when you got into the “flow” of a place and started attracting more and more people. “What’s amazing about him is he’s able to generate a moment out of anything, but simultaneously, you have to be generating moments all the time,” Ward says. As to whether he could keep up that grueling schedule for a whole year, as Speed had casually suggested, he’s definitely open to it. “I think that I could, probably,” he says.
Sydney Long, a video editor for Speed, has one word for what it felt like to conclude the trip with this glitzy celebration: “Crazy,” she says. Although Speed was traveling with a large team, including about 20 security personnel, she and Ward handled all the production themselves, an extraordinarily feat. “It was more than a tour,” Long says. “It was more of a… I don’t even know!”
Maybe that’s because Speed is a new and different sort of superstar. Musicians can go back to their hotel to unwind after a concert. Actors aren’t swarmed on the street (in part because they aren’t constantly broadcasting their locations). Speed is always on, always accessible, always directly engaging with the fans who propelled him to this level. You can’t help wondering about streamer burnout, but for the moment, it seems that he’s all gas, no brakes. As he shifts into another gear, don’t be surprised if he leaves other streamers in the dust.
From Rolling Stone US
