You might be right about this, and I can't say because I haven't followed stick and ball sports for years so I can't name an active NBA player off the top of my head. But I do think there is something that happens when you age, where you are disconnected from popular culture in a way that you aren't when you are younger. There are musicians now that I have no idea who they are, but my kids listen to them and tell me all sorts of trivia about. They are charismatic and iconic to them in a way that musicians from my era were to me. I also think that the collective knowledge of most societies has been fractured with the advent of the internet. It used to be that most of the news you consumed for everything was controlled by your local newspaper, radio, and TV stations. Even when cable came along, there was one Cable News Network. Others followed, of course, but now we are fed information based on an algorithm that weights things that you already like, which by definition would give extra weight to things you already know.
This recent US election, near the end, saw both candidates hit multiple podcasts that I was assured by news stations and influencers are a big deal, but more than half of them I've never heard of before, and I forgot their names already. I did look a couple of them up at the time, and they had millions of subscribers, but I'd never heard of them. I don't think there would have been a person with that much influence as those podcasters in the 1980s without them being a household name. Back in the day, everyone knew who Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh were, but they only had about 20 million active listeners each at their peaks. Mr Beast had over 250 million viewers and around 25 million subscribers when I found out who he was because he was in ads for Honey, and I still didn't know his name until later when I said to a coworker "who's this dolt in the Honey ads acting like he's a big deal". She assured me he was a big deal. He was never presented to my on any platform because his content isn't in my interests, and therefor my algorithm.
