https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ACAJQ1PMuOA
One of the things I’ve noticed about celebrities, and it’s a big danger, imagine you become famous and as a consequence of that, now you have a persona and that’s you defined by the social crowd. And there’s a certain brand significance that goes along with that, a reputational significance and a value, even an economic value. But the problem is, is it can become a trap. Because if you can only be what you’ve already been, then you can’t be anything new. And that’s where people fall into this trap that you described of something like self mimicry. This worked for me before, look at the effect it produced, I just will do that again. But then you’re instantly false. You’re instantly false when you do that. It’s like you’re sacrificing your future self for whatever your past self once attained. And then you lose that spark that actually is likely the driving force of whatever made you attractive to begin with. Yeah, I completely agree. And I always say to my sons, really my basic rule of life is try never to go back full stop with anything. It’s never the same, there’s always a reason that you’ve moved on from whatever it is. And to try and replicate previous behaviors, to try and replicate previous relationships, to try and replicate perhaps a job that you once loved and lost, to try and go back, I think you often forget why you left in the first place or why things didn’t work out. You read it and see it all the time. Memory tends to sugar coat things. And it’s only when you actually, if you do allow yourself to fall back into these previous habits or behaviors or whatever it may be, that you then realize it wasn’t what you thought. And the mind, I think, plays tricks with you a little bit. So I think that, I do think particularly with politicians, particularly with sportsmen, entertainers, that you’re right about the brand thing, is they can very quickly get pigeonholed as to this or that or this. And then they start to play up to the thing which they were originally identified as being. And maybe it was what they’re actually like, or maybe it wasn’t, but either way, it becomes a very difficult thing to then escape from. You become tagged with that. I know pop stars who are still seen as the nicest people in showbiz. I know them to be utterly horrific. Conversely, I know people I’ve met in business or politics who have terrible reputations, but actually are very nice people. So it’s an interesting thing that public branding of people can be instantaneous and very long-lasting and often completely wrong. But the danger for any public figure is to try and play up to your caricature. Now I think the one saving grace you can have is self-awareness. To me, there are two types of public figures. Those who’ve got self-awareness and those who don’t. I think that I have a big persona, perhaps slightly caricature persona sometimes. I like to deliberately antagonize and create debate and so on. But I always do it with a sense of self-awareness. And the times I described to you earlier, where I’ve slightly lost the plot and become a performative theatrical artist, if you like, rather than a proper journalist, of when I’ve forgotten the self-awareness streak, when I’ve been driven by adulation and praise, usually, into thinking that somehow, right, this is the new me and this is great and I’m going to be this person, rather than just being honest with yourself about who you are. I think I’m pretty aware of who I am, warts and all. And some of the traits which other people say is being a me disagreeable, I’m very relaxed about. In fact, I’m less relaxed about some of the more positive traits. People say, oh, you’re such a nice person. Well, it sounds almost brand damaging to me. I don’t want to be just nice. I can’t think of anything worse than being nice. I’d rather be challenging. I’d rather be- It’s a shallow version. Why would you aspire to just be nice? It seems to me that people who are inherently known as nice people, A, they rarely live up to that brand, in my experience, in terms of high profile people, I know. And it must be an unbearable pressure to constantly wake up every day and think I have to be nice all day. When in fact, your natural and more honest instinct may be to be disagreeable from time to time, because that’s what you’re actually feeling. And often you’d be right, by the way, to be feeling disagreeable about something. So I do think that, I mean, I think, I was struck by something you told me when I interviewed you, that you felt as you’ve got older, you’ve evolved and you’ve learned things about yourself. And I feel exactly the same way. I’m not the same person I was. I think I still have the same sense of virtues, which perhaps were instilled in me when I was a child by my family, at a very strong family, a very strong upbringing. But I do think I’ve evolved as a person. And I do think if you don’t evolve as a person, I’m not sure what you’re doing here. It’s, you know, the world’s a tough, difficult, complex place. And you should evolve emotionally as you get older, and hopefully in the right direction. Getting a good night’s sleep is one of the most important things you could do for your health. Just like your diet and exercise routine are unique to your body’s needs, so are your sleeping habits. That’s why Helix Sleep provides tailored mattresses based on your unique sleep preferences. Myself and a bunch of us here at The Daily Wire have tried Helix Sleep mattresses. I gotta tell you, once you switch over from your store-bought mattress to the Helix Sleep mattress, there is no going back. The Helix lineup includes 14 mattresses, each designed for specific sleep positions and preferences. They’ve got side sleeper models with memory foam layers offering optimal pressure relief. 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And there are a lot of great movies and there are a number of, so Pinocchio is a puppet. So someone is pulling his strings, right? There’s forces behind the scenes that are making him who he is and he’s unconscious. He doesn’t know it, but he has a good father who was a very positive figure who sends him out in the world to free himself of the behind the strings marionette players. And he faces a number of temptations and there’s four cardinal temptations, which I think are extremely well laid out. One is hedonism, narrow and shallow hedonism. And that’s played out in the scenes of Pleasure Island. And the consequences of becoming a narrow hedonist is that you end up as a voiceless slave. That’s how that you end up turned into a donkey that can do nothing, pray, sold as slaves to work in the salt mines. So that’s the fruits of hedonism. Another scene that perplexed me for a long time was that Pinocchio is enticed into being an actor. And I thought, what in the world does that mean? Because the people who made this movie were obviously Hollywood types and what’s so wrong with being an actor? But the answer is to be found in the discussion that we were just having. If you’re playing a role and you’re doing it as a fictional character and you’re playing a role in a movie, let’s say, and everyone knows that what you’re doing is fictional, that’s one thing. But if you’re an actor who’s attempting to play a role for your own egotistical gratification, then that’s a catastrophe. And what happens in the Pinocchio movie is that he is enticed into going on stage as a puppet and he does a wild dance and tangles himself up in his own strings and ends up face down in front of the crowd and then also enslaved. One of the other temptations, just interestingly enough, because it’s germane to our current culture, is that the fox and the cat, who are agents of Mephistopheles, essentially, also entice Pinocchio into playing the sick victim. And so that’s actually how they entice him originally to go to Pleasure Island to become hedonistic. They tell him that he’s sick and unable and has been victimized and needs a break. And as a consequence of his poor victimized position, it’s perfectly okay for him to be narrowly and self-servingly hedonistic. And so it’s a lovely narrative layout of the sort of plethora of moral problems of beset people as they try to transform themselves, let’s say, into real boys, because of course that’s what the movie’s about. And it’s very interesting to sketch out the nature of those temptations, this acting temptation. You see celebrities become their own mimics. Like Elvis, in some sense, became an Elvis imitator by the time that he ended, he came to near the end of his life. I mean, he could still put on a wicked performance, but you could see that immense pressure, the category pressure building around him. And you can imagine how intense that is, especially perhaps at the time he lived, because he was a singular celebrity. There’s lots of celebrities now, but there were much fewer back then. And the pressure to abide by the way you’ve been defined must be almost overwhelming. And it isn’t obvious that we really know how to rectify that. I think the confession idea is a good one, is that you need to keep your inadequacies foremost in your mind, and you need to serve some principles that are higher than yourself. But that’s easy to say in the abstract. It’s not so easy to actually do it when you’re the one being tempted. Yeah, I think you also rightly said you have to have people around you who perhaps are disagreeable enough to be completely bluntly honest with you. Whether it’s my mother, or one of my brothers, or my sister, or my sons in particular, I’ve encouraged them to be very independent minded and to let me know if they see or hear something I do which they think is wrong and explain why. And they do that regularly. And I find that litmus test from people who really know you better than anybody else. So they really understand when you’re making a fool of yourself, or just behaving like a bit of a dick, right? You just need someone who’s gonna tell you. And one of the big problems with modern celebrity is, because I’ve interviewed a lot of very famous people, is that they often surround themselves with pure sycophancy, and they don’t tolerate anyone drifting outside of sycophancy. All the teams around them are so fearful of losing their very cushy jobs that they render themselves as useless sycophants permanently to avoid upsetting. So they may almost be almost wrongly second guessing the people they work for who might be perfectly okay people because they think if they’re not sycophantic, they’re gonna lose their job. So there’s constant kind of pressure to blow smoke up the derrières of these people.