Celebrity Secrets - How the Celebrity/Wealthy Mindset Can Foster Callous Behavior

By 2009, the world had officially gotten online. The year 2009 was when Google finally took the crown for the most used search engine. Yahoo! And Microsoft were the top searches, and Amazon was about to surpass eBay as the world's retail therapy king. Finally, Pornhub had just started to dominate Redtube as a smug king of the Internet. That last bit will be significant in a moment. Our point is the wild west of the Internet was settled by 2009. Google, Pornhub, and Amazon had settled onto their thrones. And yet, rapper and shock artist, Eminem, had never heard of internet porn whatsoever.

I want to read to you a snippet of the interview by Complex, who spilled the beans about internet porn, ironically while Eminem was showing off his massive collection of porn DVDs. Just a quick warning that I'll be reading the interview as it was posted to Reddit and Complex, swear words and all. Joe will take the role of the interviewer for this part.

·         Interviewer: Can you still shock people when there are no taboos left?

·         Eminem: I don't think I'll ever run out of ideas on how to shock, and if I do, I'll probably just stop. But I definitely know what you mean. Kids nowadays are so used to seeing crazy shit. There's so much crazy weird shit on the Internet. It's certainly getting harder to shock people.

·         Interviewer: Speaking of which, you've always said you don't use computers or the Internet. Is that really still the case in 2009?

·         Eminem: Yeah, I don't even know how to turn a computer on. It’s probably better that way. I look at stuff, but as far as actually sitting there knowing how to work it and knowing what sites to go on...

·         Interviewer: So, you're saying you still buy porn on DVD, then? There's a lot of free porn on the Internet, I think is what Noah is trying to tell you.

·         Eminem: Oh, there is? Maybe I should go to the Internet.

·         Interviewer: There's something called Spankwire...

·         Eminem: What? Spankwire?

·         Interviewer: Imagine a YouTube of pornography.

·         Eminem: Really? I know what I'm doing for the rest of the day when this shit's over. You can look up anything?

·         Interviewer: Yep!

·         Eminem: Nostril fucking?

·         Interviewer: Maybe so. Like any genre or actress.

·         Eminem: I have to go back and look at my pornos because there's a couple of chicks that really...

·         Interviewer: ...changed your life?

·         Eminem: Yeah.

·         Interviewer: Wow, Complex just put Eminem onto streaming porn. I'd like to apologize to music fans around the world now.

·         Eminem: If my album doesn't come out, it's Noah's fault.

Whether we look up to them because we want to emulate their success or because we love their work, America has a celebrity obsession. And the pool of people we consider celebrities grows bigger every day. Successful capitalists like Jeff Benzos and Mark Cuban are lumped in with the celebrities. Reality TV stars are given the celebrity treatment, and mega YouTube personalities are labeled as a celebrity for their entertainment and are seen as royalty. Our children listen to their TikTok rants on their phones, our spouses read their tweets while they're on the toilet, and every election, we are exposed to their political opinions.

Well, on today's episode, we want to ask the question if our celebrity icons really love us back, or does wealth, success, and the celebrity life insulate them to the point of being callous? So, I want to explore this question by busting a few myths.

Myth 1: Does the good life, aka wealth insulation, alter our behavior as people? Does money make us callous or cautious? If we became celebrities overnight, would being surrounded by ‘Yes Men’ change us?

We're going to get in the signs of wealth and celebrity in a moment. But first, I want to share another prime example of wealth insulation that went viral after it debuted on Ellen. So, we found out that Eminem doesn't really know about internet porn, and that's kind of a big one. Even if you're against internet porn, you at least know about it. Right?

Well, Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, went on Ellen DeGeneres's talk show, and he played a game of Price is Right. If he won, the audience gets a gift. Right off, he said, "I haven't been to the grocery store in a long time." In a nutshell, he got most of them wrong (except for dental floss, he got that one right). Most of the items he guessed the price on he never heard of before. This is what it means, to me, on celebrities and the super-rich. They never take the garbage out or put gas in their car. Everything is done for them. Overall, they live very different lives than the rest of us.

Now first off, we don't want people to think we're making celebrities out to seem evil, and we don't want to seem like we're bashing on millionaires unnecessarily. In all reality, we want to become one eventually. But we do want you to be self-aware enough to realize that it does change you. We're going to harken back to an article that we talked about before in our classism episode. It was about Christopher Ryan, and he talks about how wealth insulation begins. Poor kids pretty much ganged up on him while in India while he was eating and waiting for him to leave his food on the table. He talks about realizing that he could, with his money, he could change their lives. However, he also understood that you have to be callous when you hit a certain wealth bracket. You have to be able to turn on blinders because no matter how many times you see someone needy, being extremely wealthy is not going to help everyone.

In that same article, they talk about a University of Toronto study, and they talk about why that callous happens. They say, “The rich are less generous when inequality is extreme. If the person who needs help doesn't seem too different from us, we’ll help them out.” I hadn't really thought about this article too much until I saw Taylor Swift on Twitter. Taylor Swift started giving out money to needy fans who are affected by Covid, and it looked like she was doing about $3k a pop. Fans would plead their case, and she would reach out to them and try to change their life for them. We bring her up because we also want to show that celebrities aren't all the same. We're not going to label all of them as the same calloused group. What this also means is most are willing to help out their friends. We don't want to callous ourselves too much, but enough to where we don't give it away to all of the needy around us.

Myth 2: Celebrities are mega-talented, right? So, why shouldn't they insulate themselves? For that matter, what's wrong with us using one's influence to gain opportunities and autonomy?

Now we want to talk about how celebrities get that wealth. Where does that wealth come from, and what does it look like? We started to talk about the idea that they're getting their hair and nails done for free, and they're getting the food brought out to them for free. I kept that in the back of my mind because it is fascinating how much free stuff they get and are banking because of it.

For this, I found a Vulture article, and it just demonstrates the pure money in the pocket that they get for being themselves. Imagine every year you get $100K in free goods for doing nothing. In the article, the number one freebie is apparel. Right off the bat, just imagine not having to buy clothes anymore. We're looking at Calvin Klein, etc. However, there is an exception—Louis Vuitton will not give out gifts or discounts. But the point is this isn't that stuff from Ross or Marshalls. These are incredibly high-end things. They give it for free because they want their brand to be seen on a celebrity.

Another one that popped up is baseball players in the Major League. They get $30,000 a year to wear specific gloves and use certain bats. I know that we sound like we're bagging on people who are extremely talented. We're just saying that if everything gets handed to you before you even get a paycheck for your actual job, then you can't help but possibly be calloused. Let's look at another billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg. Now he bought a house in Palo Alto because of his work. But then he started buying houses that surrounded it. So instead of the Mansion, he went with the humble house and then everyone else's humble house around him. Then he would lease them back to their former owners. Afterward, he made plans to demolish and rebuild them. In a nutshell, he spent $43M on them to have them destroyed and rebuilt to avoid having people around him.

Why do people become rich in the first place? Overall, we want to have more money than our neighbor based on the hypothetical study where it was if you made $50,000 and all of your neighbors made $25,000, you would be happier. This is also referred to as the Easterlin Paradox, where they found citizens do not become happier as the country becomes richer; when everyone gets more affluent. It's a flat level line, and a British study supported this too. Overall, wealth doesn't make everyone happier if everyone goes up. 

Again, there was a study by Paul Piff, and they tweaked a Monopoly game. They rigged it, so one player had huge advantages over everybody from the start. They rolled more dice, and they had more turns. Generally, they had all the benefits, so you have no chance to beat them. They found out that after people played for more than 15 minutes, the rich players often talked about their own skill instead of their advantages. They created a narrative that allowed them to win and feel good about winning.

And it's just like that in life. In summary, wealthy people tend to believe that they earned the ability to look down on the people around them. Even though they were like us and had tough times, they don't think they deserve it more and are better than everybody. They believe that their skill is why they are where they are.

Myth 3: Okay, if wealth insulation is bad for you emotionally, what about the craft? Does everything you want stunt the creative process that much?

So, what's our lesson with creativity and money mixing? As said by Quincy Jones, “When you chase music for money, God walks out of the room.” And I think it carries across creativity in general too. Not to beat up on Johnny Depp too much, but you said his stepdad was Robert Palmer. It's important to note that if you have a wealthy parent or you have a good family income, you're more likely to have creative people. I wanted to go out and prove that money kills your creativity, but what it actually does is sets you up to have creative children.

This information comes from a Smithsonian article, and during one of the studies, researchers found that if a house has an income of $100,000, they are twice as likely to produce a musician, artist, or actor than a house with an income of $50,000. It makes sense because lower-income homes do not have the expendable income to put their kids in, say, drama class, or enroll them in piano lessons. The stakes were not as high either because kids who failed in the acting or music industry had a family with money to fall back on. They have less risk than the average person.

I've talked to and listen to creative writers, and they say how if you write enough and you make enough money, you become less of a writer. You become more of an intellectual property manager. You are just using your own stories you've written, and you're just licensing them, reselling them, and changing them. That's kind of why people become famous actors. And when they're celebrities, they're not so much doing it for the craft at a certain point. They're not creative because they want to make a good movie. They're just going out and collecting their $100K in free stuff every year. If they know that if they show up at a party or something and they'll get paid for it, why not just reach for the money?

It would seem like if you are an artist and you had enough money, that you wouldn't have to worry about money anymore. You would look for the roles that really challenge you. I believe some actors actually do that, but not the majority. I think creative people start creative, and it makes them money, and then they become more efficient money-makers instead. I believe insulation allows them to do that because nobody's there to tell them to please go be creative.

Final Thoughts

Wealth can callous you and make you less generous and can change your personal narrative. You start justifying your good fortune to yourself. But being a celebrity and getting all the free stuff you've ever wanted for being yourself doesn't make us happier, unless it's by comparison to our neighbors. And once you're wealthy, you're more apt to blame your own skill instead of luck. Sure, becoming a celebrity definitely requires luck as well as talent. Unless you're a Reality TV star, then it's all luck.

How could celebrities not consider themselves superhuman to justify the little riches that are thrown at their feet, like offerings to a God? It's not money alone that insulates celebrities, nor is physical isolation, being taken from cramped apartments where they have to see their neighbors every day to mansions on a hill. Instead, it may be a joining of forces; wealth callously, isolation from everyone except Yes Men, and the lazy efficiency of the human mind, which will reach for a reward if it doesn't have to be creative anymore.

So that's our lesson for today. As creative people, we need to keep interacting with the public. We need to practice self-awareness, and we need creative struggle. Yet the reward for becoming a celebrity is each of those things getting stripped away, replaced by expensive wines and free designer jackets. Why are we so shocked with Bill Gates doesn't know the price of pizza pockets or how Eminem has never heard of internet porn? Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't be listening to insulated celebrities whenever we vote on Health Care policies or Presidents.