That YouTuber Who Drove 3,300 Miles With 3 Baseball Bats To Fight Google For Removing His Video? His Wife Deleted It.
BF NEWS - Angry because his single YouTube video on how to get rich quickly had been taken down, 33-year-old Kyle Long drove more than 3,300 miles from his home in Waterville, Maine, to Google’s headquarters in California, intent on convincing the tech giant to restore his account.
But what Long didn’t know, relatives told BuzzFeed News, was that the video and his account had been deleted not by YouTube, but his wife.
“I just didn’t tell him it was me taking it down because I didn’t want him losing his shit in front of my kids,” Samantha Long, his wife, told BuzzFeed News. “He was mad initially, but I said I didn’t know what happened.”
We’ve got an update on the man who drove 3,300 miles from Maine to California to confront Google officials for removing his YouTube video, and it’s a shocking twist: it wasn’t the gajillion dollar internet behemoth responsible for deleting the video, but the person he least expected…
His wife.
His wife who, apparently, hates billion-dollar payouts and vacations to Mexico, and loves world hunger.
Samantha Long said her husband’s idea of approaching Google officials about the video wasn’t initially to confront them about the deletion, but to pitch the content of the video directly, thinking it would lead to an immediate payout from Google executives.
“He made me sit down, and he did a mock presentation to me,” Samantha Long said.
“He came up with this crazy idea to make everyone millionaires,” Kevin Long, his father, said. “He had good intentions — he wanted to solve world hunger and this and that. It was bizarre and crazy, and it wasn’t going to happen.”
After what he was sure to be a billion-dollar payout, she said, he planned to head down to Mexico with his fortune.
Samantha said she tried to talk him out of it and explain to him that YouTube would not pay him for the idea, but he would have none of it.
His wife who Kyle thought – correctly, it seems – was too “basic” (classic YouTuber burn) to understand the plan.
“You can’t talk Kyle down from anything if he’s got his mindset,” she said. “He told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about, and that I didn’t have the mind that he has — that I’m not open minded and I’m basic.”
We all deal with haters when we come up with the next revolutionary idea. People get uncomfortable when confronted with new ideas. They like what they know. They find comfort in the status quo. We know there will be obstacles and doubters – we just never expect it to be the person we lean on the most.
Mrs. Long did save face a little bit at the end, maybe remembering she’s supposed to be ride-or-die no matter what:
“Do I think he would have hurt anybody at Google, absolutely not,” she said. “He was just trying to make the world a better place.”
As for the three bats, she said their three kids play in little league, Long plays in a softball league, and she’s sure they were accompanied by baseballs and gloves.
But it was too little too late. The damage had already been done. Not just for Kyle who is sitting in a jail cell, but for starving children across the globe and the millions of us out there who just got robbed of the opportunity to make 1 million dollars just from watching a YouTube video.
PS,
Counterpoint: yeah, this guy does seem like he needs some help.
In 2015, after he led police in a slow-speed pursuit on an interstate, Kevin Long said Kyle told him he thought he was receiving a presidential escort, which is why he didn’t pull over.
(via BF News)