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Transcript

00:01

We speak student!

00:06

Power in Literature

00:07

Web Literacy

00:09

Fame and Power

00:12

[ bird caws ]

00:13

Why would a celebrity use their power for good?

00:16

This all depends on what drives

00:20

the desire to be famous to begin with.

00:21

If your goal is to become famous

00:23

because you wanna live the celebrity lifestyle,

00:25

you're probably not going to be philanthropic.

00:29

If your goal is to be famous

00:31

so that you can make a difference in the world,

00:33

then you're probably gonna become famous

00:35

and then do good.

00:37

There are plenty of celebrities

00:39

who are just saying like,

00:40

"Oh, yeah, I have enough cash.

00:41

Let me throw some money at this."

00:42

They don't really care about the issues

00:45

or, you know, they don't act

00:48

the way they tell other people to be acting.

00:50

But that kind of brings up this idea of --

00:52

There's a few reasons why someone would desire fame

00:56

and I think the most common one is probably just that people

00:58

want to be seen as having value.

01:01

You know, if you grow up in a house where

01:03

maybe you're not the smartest sibling

01:06

or maybe you're not the funniest or the most interesting

01:09

or whatever the case is.

01:10

You kind of want to be like,

01:11

"Hey, look! I'm valuable too!"

01:12

And so becoming famous is a way

01:14

to prove to yourself

01:15

and to everyone else around you,

01:17

whether it's your family, your friends,

01:18

or just kind of everyone,

01:19

that you're a valuable person.

01:21

And those people also

01:23

might not be doing the philanthropic thing

01:28

or the do-gooder thing,

01:29

because they just wanted to get to that point to say kind of,

01:31

"I told you so."

01:32

Well you have sort of a bifurcation of personalities.

01:34

So let's pull one example out of thin air.

01:37

The Kardashians, who, if they do stand for anything good,

01:41

I don't know what that is.

01:42

You see them focused a lot on sexual practices

01:46

and divorce and a lot of really odd entertainment things.

01:51

And then, at the other end of the rainbow,

01:53

is Princess Diana,

01:55

who famously went to Africa during the very beginning

01:58

of the AIDS scandal,

02:00

and was purposely photographed carrying

02:02

black babies who had AIDS.

02:05

And basically telling the world,

02:07

"It's not Ebola.

02:09

It's not even close.

02:10

And we need to take care of these people."

02:13

And she is cited, I think, pretty broadly

02:14

as someone who is truly courageous,

02:16

who used her celebrity and fame

02:17

and the royal brand and everything else

02:19

in the right way, the way you're supposed to do things

02:22

in this world when you're truly, sincerely trying to do good.

02:25

So how does that operate

02:27

in a very odd press that we have today?

02:30

That today, Princess Diana,

02:32

if she'd gone to the Ebola victims in Africa,

02:35

I don't think there'd be a whole lot of press attention to it.

02:37

But Kim Kardashian puts on 20 pounds

02:39

and wears tight jeans, that's the cover of People.

02:42

What is that saying about our world and sort of

02:46

what drives all this?

02:47

Yeah, I think it comes back to the reason

02:49

we obsess over celebrities.

02:52

And, as I said, it used to be

02:53

this kind of -- Princess Diana's a perfect example

02:55

because she actually is royalty and was a celebrity.

02:57

But, you know, it comes back to this idea of

02:59

what we used to value in celebrities,

03:02

in royalty, is that they were just

03:04

beyond anything we'd imagine.

03:05

They inspired awe in us, kind of like

03:07

you know, you compare Christians,

03:10

who might say like,

03:11

"God is this untouchable -- Can't understand him; he's an enigma."

03:16

Same with celebrities.

03:17

You know, they're the secular God.

03:19

We look up to them and we're like,

03:20

"We can't even -- Whatever they do,

03:22

we can't possibly understand it."

03:23

So it kind of started like that

03:25

and then now, as you're saying, you know,

03:27

what pair of shoes is someone wearing.

03:28

It's more just kind of

03:30

whether they're people, too.

03:32

They have worse lives than us.

03:35

The daily grind of getting away from our problems

03:38

and kind of escaping by looking at other people's problems.

03:41

So that whole process seems to me to be very ephemeral,

03:43

meaning it evaporates quickly.

03:46

There's no foundation.

03:47

It's not like owning a building in Manhattan

03:49

that you know is gonna be around a while.

03:50

Paris Hilton.

03:51

She was Kim Kardashian

03:53

eight years ago, I think.

03:55

And now you see kind of an aging

03:58

not, I guess, that hot anymore gal

04:01

doing a revamp of a cheeseburger commercial

04:04

where she's in a bikini sitting on a car

04:05

and it's kind of just very depressing.

04:07

How does that play out in like...

04:10

Yeah, what you're talking about is

04:11

people who are famous because they're famous.

04:13

And that's a new thing.

04:15

For the most part, that's a new thing.

04:17

Paris Hilton is one of the earliest examples of this

04:21

that people in our generation would think of -- our generation.

04:25

- [ laughs ] - Of course. Yeah.

04:27

But yeah, being famous for the sake of being famous is --

04:31

That's Paris Hilton, that's Kim Kardashian.

04:33

That's the Real Housewives.

04:35

They're famous because they're famous.

04:36

The difference is

04:38

there are plenty of people who are famous because they're talented,

04:41

or because they discovered something amazing,

04:44

or because they're running a country,

04:46

or whatever the case is.

04:48

So there are differen kind of categories

04:50

of fame and this Paris Hilton type of fame

04:54

is very ephemeral.

04:55

It does kind of go away.

04:56

Nobody has forgotten about

04:59

every president, up until now, of the United States.

05:02

We can name them all -- Hopefully, you can name them all.

05:05

But, you know, probably 20 years from now,

05:07

you're not gonna be able to remember Paris Hilton's name.

05:09

So that's the difference.

05:11

And people who achieve fame by actually doing something memorable,

05:15

those are the ones that are actually going to be remembered.

05:16

But it doesn't really matter because, you know,

05:18

Paris Hilton is in her heyday now

05:21

and who knows if

05:22

maybe that'll get her through the rest of her life

05:24

and she'll have all the money she needs

05:27

and have the fame and she's kind of over it

05:29

and then she can go live a secluded life.

05:30

So the money is an interesting thing.

05:32

I think most people are shocked at how little money

05:35

celebrities actually make.

05:37

[ record scratch ]

05:38

Once you get to a point where you can

05:40

launch your own line of clothing,

05:42

then the world's different.

05:44

But there's maybe five, ten of those people in the world.

05:48

Whereas there's hundreds of celebrities

05:51

who you'd recognize -- Go through the last year's worth

05:54

of People magazines, you'll see them all there.

05:56

But most of them don't make that much

05:58

for a TV series.

05:59

Really weird dynamics in this perception of great wealth

06:03

that people associate with power

06:05

when it's really an illusion.

06:07

And so much of Hollywood

06:10

is incentivized to have celebrities spend all their dough

06:13

because then they need the infrastructure,

06:15

meaning the agent, the manager, the next job.

06:18

Yeah, and you do hear about a lot of celebrities going bankrupt, right?

06:20

That's like one of the common stories

06:22

is the celebrity goes bankrupt.

06:23

So those people who have --

06:25

They probably didn't save their money well.

06:27

The seven million a year

06:29

would have gotten them through.

06:30

Well this is seven million in one year, at the end.

06:32

It wasn't like that for years and years.

06:34

Right, right.

06:34

But that celebrities who do make millions

06:36

can still go bankrupt

06:38

shows you that the people who get into

06:40

the celebrity lifestyle

06:42

for the wealth,

06:43

which is another reason that people wanna be famous,

06:45

are probably -- that type of personality

06:47

probably isn't gonna have you maintain your wealth.

06:50

Absolutely. And what a lot of people don't understand is

06:52

so many celebrities come from small towns in the Midwest

06:55

and they came out here desperate and hungry and pretty

06:57

and got an acting job through whatever process was involved.

07:02

A really nice home in Kansas City

07:04

is $400,000.

07:07

Well, $400,000 in Beverly Hills

07:09

doesn't buy you a parking spot.

07:10

So a lot of times,

07:11

what they think -- In Kansas City

07:13

on a million dollars, I don't know,

07:14

you can probably retire and live nice.

07:16

But a million dollars in California -

07:18

no, not even close.

07:20

So it's a very different dynamic

07:23

and a lot of them are not financial gurus

07:25

and so they go bankrupt

07:26

and it's incentivized by their managers and their agents

07:29

to keep them on the edge of going bankrupt

07:31

so that they need the next job

07:32

so they have a client to sell into the next deal.

07:35

So, a very sad thing,

07:36

but that's, I think, why so many go bankrupt.

07:38

Pro athletes, you obviously see that a lot, too.

07:43

Why do people wanna be famous in the first place?

07:46

What do celebrities do with their fame?

07:49

How has our perception of celebrity changed?

07:55

[ jazzy musical flourish ]

07:57

Part 1B - The Revenge.

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