One thing I've been struck by with movies and films like the Wolf of Wall Street, the film Wall Street, Fight Club, or even the Great Gatsby is how many people end up coming away with the exact opposite message of the movie. They end up idolizing the vapid, shallow lifestyle that the movie is critiquing, because even though the film is critiquing that it can't help but also make it glamorous. Michael Douglas has said that he has had people come up to him and tell him that Gordon Gekko inspired them to get into finance, so it's not surprising that Belfort is now inspiring a new generation.
It's because film is a visual medium, and in these movies the protagonist always looks cool. He may be doing terrible things, but he's wearing hip clothes and driving a gorgeous car while he does them. The visual language is all screaming "this guy's great!", and it ends up overwhelming the message the story is trying to tell.
If you want to know what most people will think of a character in a movie, watch the movie with the sound off.
I also think having that a big part of it is that at least the characters had a high point, even if they paid the price.
Like Jordan Belfort eventually loses his wife and access to his kid in The Wolf of Wall Street. But that can happen to any Joe on the street anyway, and he didn't get to have drug fueled orgies like Jordan did. Walter White descends into chaos and death in the pursuit of using his singular skills. But before he dies he leaves an enormous amount of money to secure his family's security forever and he get to experience a moment of pure fulfillment, working for himself, achieving at the outermost limits of his abilities. Joe Sixpack can get cancer and leave his family a pile of debt after spending his life working middle management at a life insurance firm, achieving no self-actualization and leaving his family in financial destitution.
These programs think that they are portraying some sort of cautionary tale by saying "Look this person got to have everything, but then they lost it all due to the method with which they acquired it", without realizing that the common man on the street could do everything by the book and above board and still find themselves losing everything and in the same spot as the characters in these shows, and they didn't even get to have fun along the way!
I don't know. My biggest frustration in season one was "why the hell doesn't Walt have life insurance if his family depends so much on his income?!" I bet Joe Six-pack working middle management at a life insurance firm has some form of life insurance, so his family is still financially fine without anyone having to resort to cooking meth.
It happened with books too: See "Liar’s Poker", by Michael Lewis. He says that he wrote it "so that fewer idealistic college kids would dream of working on Wall Street. ... Somehow that message failed to come across ... They'd read my book as a how-to manual."
I’m increasingly suspicious of the idea that humans are independent and rational, because so much humam behaviour can be explained as uncomplicated animal mimicry.
I wonder what that says about people. I remember being extremely impressed/infatuated with Matt Damon's character in The Talented Mr. Ripley when I was 18 or 19. So impressionable I was!
Maybe it says they have a innate ability to not simply do as they are told. Instead they gather in lots of details from the movies and books, but don't necessarily trust the spin put on them.
I don't know if it's a matter of the protagonist looking cool. When Breaking Bad was on the air, I had a surprising number of friends who identified with Walter White. He did not look cool, he did not act cool, and the writers of the show did everything in their power to communicate "This man is a moral monster and a horror of a human being." Yet some people that I otherwise respected still identified with him. They would get angry at Skyler White for leaving her husband, as if the mother of a new baby should stay loyal to a drug dealing serial killer.
The interesting realisation for me about Walter White came when I started watching the season through for a second time.
But first... SPOILER ALERT!
I mean the first time around I had some sympathy for the guy - he was a disappointed and somewhat embittered middle aged man still trying to do his best to support his family, and then he's given this crappy cancer diagnosis. I felt bad for him. Fair to say that by the time he just lets Jesse's girlfriend, Jane, choke to death on her own vomit whilst unconscious I'd entirely lost that and felt nothing but loathing for the character (which isn't to say I didn't enjoy the show, or think he was a great character).
But what I realised on revisiting the show a couple of years later is that Walter White didn't break bad. He was bad from the very beginning. I mean look at the way he interacts with people in the early episodes of season 1: he's largely an asshole. The only thing that changes is that, initially because he's driven to, he becomes much more comfortable with manifesting his assholery overtly.
> Fair to say that by the time he just lets Jesse's girlfriend, Jane, choke to death on her own vomit whilst unconscious I'd entirely lost that and felt nothing but loathing for the character
> But what I realised on revisiting the show a couple of years later is that Walter White didn't break bad. He was bad from the very beginning.
Jesse's girlfriend got him hooked on heroin. Jesse was on a downward spiral and would surely die thanks to her continued interference. Walter saw the toxicity of both the drugs and the relationship and did Jesse a cruel but necessary kindness by letting her asphyxiate. It wasn't ethical, it wasn't humane, but it served a greater purpose (even if it was so Walter wouldn't be without an assistant).
He did far worse deeds for less grounded reasons as the series went on; there are better examples to choose from to make a case of villainy. If anything, what changes through the series is his disconnectedness from everything he was fighting for. As he lost his son's respect, his wife, his family, and his friend, his world became significantly more introverted and he was willing to tolerate greater and greater amounts of collateral damage in the interest of his own survival (since he had nothing left to care about but himself until the ending).
It's a great show, and I agree with a lot of what you're saying.
> Jesse's girlfriend got him hooked on heroin. Jesse was on a downward spiral and would surely die thanks to her continued interference.
Jesse was on a downward spiral, yes, but the other two points are less clear. They might be true from Walt's perspective.
> Walter saw the toxicity of both the drugs and the relationship and did Jesse a cruel but necessary kindness by letting her asphyxiate. It wasn't ethical, it wasn't humane, but it served a greater purpose (even if it was so Walter wouldn't be without an assistant).
It's impossible to tell how much Walt's letting Jane die / killing Jane had to do with helping Jesse. I think it's clearer Walt killed Jane to keep control over Jesse and to protect himself. And that worked out pretty well, for a while. Jane didn't fear Walt, and she knew too much about him for Walt's comfort and safety. So he let her die / killed her.
> He did far worse deeds for less grounded reasons as the series went on; there are better examples to choose from to make a case of villainy.
This is true. For me, Jane's death caused a major nosedive in sympathy for Walt. Definitely previous things he did were villainous and later things even more so. But there was something about Jane's death. A big step down in his descent.
I think that's right. I recently heard someone argue "Power doesn't corrupt, but rather it reveals who you really are." I think that applies to Walter White. He was morally corrupt from the start, but that became more obvious as he gained money/power.
I think it was Michael Irvin who said something similar when he was talking about how people say, "Money CAN buy you happiness." He said no, it just makes you more of what you already are.
If you're a huge asshole before you got rich, now you're just a rich asshole. If you're an empathetic, kind person, before you got rich, now you're just a rich, kind person. He also lamented society benefits more from the latter than the former for obvious reasons.
Very much. I watched the show for the first time by "binging" the first four seasons, just ahead of the season 5 premiere, so I went in already having heard all the buzz about the showing being "Mr. Chips to Scarface." By episode 2 or 3 I was already thinking he was always Scarface.
I saw Walter in the beginning as someone who had no control of their life (even in his choice of how to die/reject treatment).
He slowly gains this confidence and control. He goes from being talked down to and ignored to being powerful (though at massive cost), but there's something appealing to that story of taking control. There's also an element of masculinity tied up in this too - when he stomps on the bully's leg in the clothing store early on. I think it's just being the alpha monkey.
Skyler was pretty controlling and self-righteous, I found her to be a pretty unlikable character. She cheats on Walt primarily to hurt him and she was also hypocritical, breaking the law for Ted when it suited her and helping with the money laundering without taking accountability for anything.
Walt at least (early on) started with the goal of raising money to leave his family - though this obviously mutates pretty quickly.
the writers of the show did everything in their
power to communicate "This man is a moral monster
and a horror of a human being."
No they didn't. No they didn't. No they didn't.
The qualifiers of his moral character only took on darker notes toward the end of the series, near the fifth and sixth season. But remained justifiable, within the context of the fatalistic continuity of the series, where characters are left with limited options, granted the hand they are dealt.
Throughout the rest of the series, Walter White is as laughable as any petulant straight man in a comedic duo (e.g. the Hardy role of Laurel and Hardy, Larry Appleton from Perfect Strangers, the Moe of the 3 stooges), while Jesse Pinkman plays the foil.
As a comedic duo, the two are rendered harmless, and thus, any morality is diffused by the beat of each joke, within the care free scope of a goof. It's all gallows humor, with a wink, shrug and a nod that everyone's hands were tied, so just go with the flow and enjoy the ride.
In the case of Walter White, I think it's a slightly different phenomenon: the wish-fulfillment fantasy of the tortured genius who is allowed to be a snarky misanthrope because he's so brilliant. There have been a whole bunch of (usually male) protagonists like this, especially recently: Walter White, Don Draper, Dr. House, Rick Sanchez... I'm sure you can fill in plenty more examples.
> He did not look cool, he did not act cool, and the writers of the show did everything in their power to communicate "This man is a moral monster and a horror of a human being." Yet some people that I otherwise respected still identified with him.
That's because nobody starts watching from the later seasons, they start watching from season one. In the beginning, Walter White is an overqualified for his work, struggling to support his family on a meager teacher's salary, and then a cancer diagnosis kicks in. Everybody identifies with him because most of us feel like we struggle with unfulfilling work and with money issues, and then the cancer diagnosis is the cherry on top - how can you judge somebody who's put in that position? Who will leave his wife saddled with debt and put in charge of raising her kids alone?
Breaking Bad reminds us that in human psychology, first impressions have outsize influence over our perceptions of other people. Battered women stay with their husbands because they still see the caring individual their husbands were when they were first dating, and hold onto hope that somewhere, their husband is still that person; if their husbands were originally abusive in the first set of dates they never would have stuck around.
I think a big part is the emotions surrounding the combined feeling of thinking you're smarter than the rest while being stuck at a lower station in life. Unfairness compounded by the one thinking they're smarter so it's even more unfair. 'I'm smarter than this guy, why is he rich'
It's very easy to fall into this mindset and I think a lot of people identified.
Oh that really depends on which season. The brilliance of that story was how he evolved into the moral monster from someone who was morally unassailable. Could it happen to you? To me? What are our limits, and where is the tipping point of no return once we start down the path?
I think he had tons of charisma and that is why people like him. Most people like actors who are the strong, silent type with good looks. That's why that type is in almost every action movie and TV show.
I don't think it's just the visual element. I mean Scarface looks pretty terrible by the end of the movie, and people idolize him. I suspect it's more that stories are now told purely for short-term entertainment value. We don't focus on the substance of the story or the moral, we focus on the kind of clips that end up in a trailer. You see similar trends in popular literature too.
>I mean Scarface looks pretty terrible by the end of the movie, and people idolize him.
You got the wrong idea. I don't think anyone idolizes Tony. It's a great movie and Tony is a great character and Scarface tells an interesting story, not because the protagonist made himself rich. Same as Godfather, I like it and I like them not because they are rich, but it was because they made interesting choices. Let's talk about Scarlett in Gone with the wind -- was she rich? Was she poor?
Recently, I listened to Shit Town and it gave me an everlasting impression on me. The main character in the story was a very poor man. I liked him -- not because he is poor either, but because he is interesting.
Who cares about whether the character is rich or poor, the character's background is merely a medium to tell the story. Being very rich or poor or desperate is just a convenient choice to get the story flowing because the characters in such extreme circumstances tend to have interesting experiences and choices.
>You got the wrong idea. I don't think anyone idolizes Tony.
If you'd like I can provide a short list of rap songs about selling drugs which contain lyrics positively representing scarface/Tony. People idolize him. He's a self made man who took what he wanted. He's betrayed in the end, but plenty of people look at that as the actions of outside actors and not the consequences of his behavior. I'm not going to go into possible alternative analysis for Tony's character/the events of the movie in which he's a heroic figure betrayed by Sosa and the government (which can also be viewed as a bad guy in drug culture), but it's there.
TL;dr- There are people who aspire to be Tony, understanding full well that Heavy Weighs the Crown.
I do wonder, though - do people want to be Tony end-to-end, or do they just like the middle and think it wouldn't end that way for them? Even a visceral, horrid ending is easy to downplay when it's just on a screen.
I mean, what does Jay-Z have to say about Montana? Fuck Sosa, this Hova this is real life // This is what the ending of Scarface should feel like. Because he's better than Tony, and he's going to make it all work.
There are definitely people who idolize the Achilles bit, living gloriously and briefly, but I feel like the most common reason people celebrate that is that they get to downplay the messy ending.
Sorry, I think I expressed what I meant the wrong way. Not that no one idolizes Tony. What I meant was not all the people who liked him and liked the movie idolize him. I liked the movie not because he was rich or someone to be idolized.
>but plenty of people look at that as the actions of outside actors and not the consequences of his behavior.
That's the recipe for a great story/a great movie: The great moment in storytelling is when the viewer/reader starts to see the world as the protagonist sees it. The viewer stopped caring about whether the protagonist was objectively right or wrong/moral or immoral, the viewer starts caring more about whether what they did given the situation make sense or not.
That is - given the situation, could/would you have done the same? The answer for me in the cases of Tony Montana, Scarlett O'Hara, Michael Corleone were a really convincing yes.
Yeah, I've always found idolising scarface a little strange. Likewise, I find it odd when people go around wearing t-shirts with Che Guevara's face on them: I mean, the guy's allegedly a mass murderer. Kind of an odd hero to pick, right?
There are some of those names who killed civilians in bulk, and some who killed enemy soldiers — and most people would hold that there is a moral difference.
Did Washington kill civilians? He was a slave owner. Not sure mass murderer is on the money like it is for Stalin and Mao. Don’t know enough about Che.
During the Revolutionary War both sides committed a number of acts that would be recognized as war crimes today. Washington destroyed Iroquois villages, true, but keep in mind that the Iroquois supporting the Loyalists were outright scalping and murdering civilians. I think you would find little argument that destruction of property, while a bad thing, is a lesser crime than actual murder. Nobody played clean in that war.
the problem lies deeper than film. america at its core is obsessed with wealth, and it's always been this way. the ethics of how the wealth is acquired and spent matters very little. we idolize drug dealers, mobsters, serial bank robbers, bookies, counterfeiters, etc.
There are many movies and shows that promote those positive values. Marvel superhero movies, children movies, movies like Marshall. Films and documentaries that critique consumerism or society. TED talks, YouTube channels like The School of Life, even blogs like Brainpickings.
I see a lot of comments reading into this with convoluted explanations when it's simply that tv/film is an escapist medium and most people 'live vicariously' through the main protagonist or the character(s) they relate with the most.
>He may be doing terrible things, but he's wearing hip clothes and driving a gorgeous car while he does them.
You think they're terrible. Ascribing to everyone the same moral code and then reasoning why they might ignore it seems like a poor basis for reasoning? To me it's about understanding what metrics really matter to people
Kind of like how people want to look like Rambo too. They don't care about the moral consequences of their hero's villainous actions- they just want muscles and guns.
The original Rambo is actually surprisingly nuanced and, well, non-Rambo-like. It's the sequels that cemented the word as a synonym for mindless slaughter.
Such movies should not show the person until the very end, just a series of shorts of the victims lifes becoming worser by one phone call. Absence of moral should be depicted as the absence of a person and decency it is.
To be fair, he also managed to get expiry dates put on milk which may very well in the long run have saved many more lives than was lost because of him.
Fight Club gets a lot of retroactive flak now that people know how they were "supposed" to read it. The book was a dramatization of the way young men feel about life. If the author and book had any valid insight, then of course young men would identify with the "bad" lifestyle in the movie, and not suddenly turn into old men while watching the movie. The movie is entirely showing the fantasy from the "vapid" perspective. It does nothing in itself to destroy the fantasy except at the very end where it shows "maybe it's possible to take this too far?"
> If the author and book had any valid insight, then of course young men would identify with the "bad" lifestyle in the movie
Nicely put. I don't really understand how the negative ending of Fight Club is supposed to stop people from identifying with it; it's not as though it shows another happier path people with the same sentiments ought to endorse.
"If you feel this way and commit to it completely, things will go wrong for you" is totally compatible with "many people feel this way", and if the movie wasn't relatable it's not clear to me how it would have anything useful to say.
I think the problem with Fight Club could be that the movie changed the ending just enough that the message was lost. In the book is was more obvious what the message was.
Fight Club had a lot of messages. I could name a couple more:
* A generation of men raised with absent father figures is leading to listless depression.
* Every person has an idealized version of themselves in their head where they are powerful and purposeful.
* Modern middle class culture has no real danger in it, and we have lost our connection to the world of physical violence and dominance.
* Living for the acquisition of more IKEA furniture is a poor life decision.
And so on and so forth. Like most decently thoughtful and provocative film and writing it throws a lot of things at you and makes you think and reconsider your values a little. It has a lot of messages, some contradictory, some confusing or banal, and some intriguing.
This always perplexed me. With Mad Men and Breaking Bad too, people idolized the main characters, which is interesting not only because they are bad people but because they are deeply unhappy, too.
There's something extremely surface-level about people's takeaways from film characters. They want a certain level of panache that the characters can muster, but they ignore that even the characters themselves are miserable.
There's a fascinating TLP article on this very topic[0]. Here's the most relevant bit:
*
The reason TV sociopaths are admired is that they are on TV. They have a story.
Do you really admire Tony Soprano? Which part? His loveless marriage to a crazy person? A mistress who is even crazier? His gigantic belly and panic attacks? The fact that no one actually likes him? That his daughter was dating a black guy? ("I wouldn't have a problem with that." Yes you would if you were Tony.) What part do you admire?
The answer you tell yourself is you admire his power, that he can do whatever he wants. No he can't. The whole show was nothing but repeated examples of how limited his options were. The things you think you admire-- having hot sex with the other crazy woman at his psychiatrist's office, eating microwaved Sysco at Italian restaurants, avoiding his wife-- can be done by anyone, you don't need to be Tony to do it. But when you do it.... it just doesn't feel the same. I know.
What people admire about Tony isn't his freedom; that thing you think is freedom is actually the lack of freedom. His story. His identity-- that he has one, an obvious one, a clear one. Tony Soprano is not free, his behavior is completely tethered to what makes sense for his character. He acts exactly like Tony Soprano would act. That's what people want: the limitations of that identity: if I know who I am, I know what I am capable of, I know my strengths and my limits, I know how I'd react to unknown dangers. And I want other people to know this. If other people know who I am, I wouldn't have to keep proving myself. Strike that: I wouldn't have to prove myself in the first place.
*
Translating to the present topic, what makes Jordan Belfort attractive is not his role as "rich stock trader crook" or the cars and yachts that go with it, it's that he has a role and is confident that that is his role, as opposed to, let's say, oscillating between "Maybe I should start day trading" and "Maybe I should write the great American novel" and "Maybe I should write an indie game" but never doing any of them because that would remove the option of doing the other ones.
I noticed this exact thing when Desperate Housewives became popular. Suddenly (it seemed), many of the people around me started to act like the characters on the show; tuning in for more information each Sunday night. I seriously kid you not, some even started to take their kids' Ritalin just like on the show. It was... bizarre. Many people really do take their cues about how to behave/act from the pseudo-Jungian gestalt that is TV/YouTube/Pop-media. I just can't understand it, but I do observe it. Maybe that is more to say something about me than anything.
This is interesting, do you think people do this because the people they see in Desperate Housewives and the examples in the parent comment have a sort of "clearly defined" identity and people watching this media look at how explicitly defined these characters are portrayed and contrast it against their own sense of self, find it lacking (either because it is, because they imagine it to be, or because something like that is inherently truly difficult to pin down because in reality "bright line" definitions of character don't exist?) and then start to model their life on what they see because it gives them something concrete to centre themselves on?
That's a lot for one sentence. I think the people I know/knew whom are like that are doing it out of boredom mostly. Their lives are fairly comfortable, they have never really seen hunger nor war nor diseases. Most of their lives have been really nice. As such, to give meaning to those lives, they need strife, and the path that the media/gestalt provides is a 'safe' one to introduce struggle, so to speak. They tend to be somewhat religious as well. Having been to those congregations, the pastors/priests/padres stress that you have to really confess your sins a lot, because we all have a lot of sins, so struggle that way. Turns out, almost none of the flock has anything to confess, but 'sin' is at least something to struggle against. There is also an out-sized (though still very small) anti-vax/flat-earther/conspiracy element too, as that also provides some meaning to their otherwise safe and comfortable lives.
In essence, those that get their 'plan' from the TV/gestalt just need to volunteer more and travel.
A while back I got very interested in Lucian Freud, moreso for the relationships he had with his portrait subjects rather than the portraits themselves. Long story short many of these relationships became romantic (many even led to children), but across both the romantic and non-romantic ones the subjects seemed to find Freud's keen (even selfish) interest in portraying them seductive. He could be demanding, cruel, temperamental, etc. but he was fundamentally a talented painter who was very simple to understand: he wanted to paint you, he was very interested in you, and didn't much care about how this affected you. For the reasons you outline, at least a broad subset of people find this kind of singular character (literally) attractive.
Animal Kingdom did not made me feel like crime life is good and murder there felt badly. Similar with American Psycho. Westworld made mass murder by the end feel fine, a bit sad at maximum, while Game of Thrones made them feel disgusting. People don't root for sociopaths or even good guys in Game of Thrones as much. So I think a lot of admiration for sociopaths comes from how they are shown on screen, what kind of music is played etc, and not just from what they technically do.
Similarly, I like horror movies a lot. But, it is not nearly the same as video of real person suffering (or realistic portrayal). I don't like those at all. Horrors are made to feel you fake bad and it is similar with most popular movies about sociopaths.
Were Draper and White unhappy because of their actions in the shows, or where they already unhappy and their actions in the show were them making the best of it? They both had a tragic backstory (child abuse, cancer) before the show started. Maybe other hurting people identify: Better to be a drug kingpin than just waste away into nothingness.
At least in the case of Breaking Bad, you can sort of believe Walter White at the start of the show is "making the best of a bad situation" but then he indeed "breaks bad" and turns into a genuinely bad and selfish character. He is terrible to Jesse, he lets innocent people die.
Something similar happens with Vic Mackey in The Shield: he starts as a morally grey antihero (if you forget he's a cop killer, of course) but gradually turns into something else. He's selfish, murderous and in the end doesn't really put his friends first, contrary to what he claims. He's a fascinating character, but not someone we should root for! (But we still do!)
> Maybe other hurting people identify: Better to be a drug kingpin than just waste away into nothingness.
It seems like this is an obvious read, right up until I see people mystified by these shows. "Better to be hated than pitied" is a simple enough sentiment, and if it comes alongside direction and certainty than all the better - even the certainty of having no way out.
Most people don't actually do that, thank god, because they have consciences. But it's simple enough to understand "I want to just commit to something, anything, and stop feeling empty" as a principle. Hell, Jim Profit literally slept in a cardboard box every night and people wanted to be him.
That's a very good point. They may or may not be making the best of their circumstances, but they're certainly trying to break out of "something" pre-existing.
That might have also to do with how movies are made usually. If you really think about it, most detectives in detective stories abuse power and do things that cops really really should not. But, we are supposed to suspend reality and root for them.
Same with action movies - main character does a lot of damage to everyone around, steal cars, hurt innocent people and we are supposed to ignore that. Happy end involves massive fight in the middle of city that would displace thousands of families. And so on and so forth.
People take the usual expected reading of movies and apply them to these too.
It is possible to make movies differently. I have seen movies that made me feel bad about violence and events and that made it clear that "this is not a cool thing". But the movies mentioned here are not like that - they sort of criticise it but are still made so that we feel happy about them. They show events from the point of view of perpetrator, but not much from point of view of their victims.
It's not just movies. Real life attitudes toward war are similar. Hawks advocate for fighting, especially fighting on foreign shores, with little regard for collateral damage. And that attitude is far older than movies, so movies didn't create that attitude, though they may reinforce it.
To your point its possible to make movies differently, there is a game called spec ops that is very subversive of the military shooter genre. Where other games want you to feel cool shooting and killing people spec ops constantly wants you to feel bad about your actions, at one point asking "do you feel like a hero yet? "
I liked the game as a shooter but I thought all the moralizing was ham fisted nonsense. It was incredibly obvious what it was doing and it didn't affect me the way it seemed to affect a lot of other people.
Haven't watched "Mad Men", but I think part of the appeal of Walter White was that his character, being the show's main character, was also the most well-written and nuanced which almost necessarily leads to him being the most sympathetic. The reality that he was unhappy is more than outweighed by the fact that he was living out carpé diem rather than surrendering to terminal illness.
> Haven't watched "Mad Men", but I think part of the appeal of Walter White was that his character, being the show's main character, was also the most well-written and nuanced which almost necessarily leads to him being the most sympathetic. The reality that he was unhappy is more than outweighed by the fact that he was living out carpé diem rather than surrendering to terminal illness.
One other thing is that he had great talent and competence as a chemist, which was often on full display. Many of the other characters in the show had no clear talents, or if they did, they it was more background or reputation than something clearly shown.
I think any character that shows extreme talent will attract fans, regardless how evil or unhappy they are, because people will divorce the talent from the other attributes and admire it on its own.
Not only great talent, but unrecognized and unused talent -- he was working as a schoolteacher and at a car wash. And there were allusions that he had been cheated of his fair share of a prosperous company.
I think your on to it. But can we just say that people and characters aren't just "good" or "bad".
I want to be Don Draper because he is handsome, well dressed, and extremely intelligent. That doesn't mean I want to do everything negative he did. Although I wouldn't mind being able to drink at work.
When kids play Batman, one of them has to be The Joker. It could be that they like clowns or the color purple. It doesn't have to mean that the child is murdering cats in the backyard.
I think that some of it is that many people who identify with these characters are themselves deeply unhappy and don't believe that there is no hope for them to ever be happy. From that perspective, it is logical to conclude that if you are going to be unhappy either way then you might as well be cool/tough/glamorous/rich.
I disliked Don Draper from close to the start of the series ( I hate watched it...) and disliked Walter White after he killed SPOILER's girlfriend by neglect until maybe the last episode of Breaking Bad (the unfolding trainwreck was compelling), and was pulling for Tony Soprano and Nuckie Thompson to die after the first seasons (those pesky survivors to the end at least).
A big part of this to me, is the idea of yourself as an archetypal character. People are different each day, some days you are having conversations with strangers at coffee shops and patting yourself on the back for being so socially adept, other days you just don't want to talk to a soul. Some days you love your career path, other days you wish you had chosen something else. The idea of some reliability in your mood, desires and personality is attractive: "I am the computer guy, everyday, all day, 100%".
The idea of these characters who are so certain of who and what they are, and are driven by some greater purpose is very alluring, even if the personality is toxic and the purpose immoral.
These films are meant to depict a certain type of person, one who is drawn to the appeal of wealth and particularly the excess and display present in certain communities. I can imagine how someone who had this type of predisposition would feel inspired if they were exposed to that lifestyle by one of these movies and develop an aspiration for the specific position where previously it was a more amorphous longing for wealth and privilege.
This is the only comment in the whole thread that comes anywhere near the way I think about this subject. Everyone is presuming that people have their value systems formed by watching movies. I think that's as false as it is dismal. The way we form our value systems is highly complex. We get a lot from parents and real life role models, our own thinking about things, real life events, the systems we're part of, chance circumstances, and much more. A film or book may very well hint at the writers' value systems, but that is not simply transfered to the viewer. The viewer brought their own value system in with them, and at most had it very slightly modified, or more probably enhanced by whatever they identified with in the story, regardless of the presumed moral.
Think of it this way: It's a lot easier to look at someone ostentatiously wealthy and just say "well, I'll just cut out the bad parts like doing hard drugs and pissing it all away by being an asshole" than it is to look at Mother Teresa and say "I'll be just like her, except a billionaire".
That is to say, making a ton of money seems a lot harder than just not being an asshole.
Same thing happened with Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker [1]. Written as a parody. Now distributed to junior bankers as a handbook of hustle and an advertisement of the good life promised.
It's misleading to say it was written as a parody.
To quote from the Wikipedia article: "semi-autobiographical book [...] describing the author's experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s".
Before reading Liar's Poker I was ignorant about, and extremely hostile to the financial industry, and the book brought about complete change. The book is at best ambivalent about high finance, but clearly also glamourises the industry.
Indeed the one thing that sticks out in my mind about The Wolf of Wall Street is that no effort was made to show all the harm he did to the people he stole from. It was just one very, very long spectacle. Not a film I'd watch twice.
Agreed. It's a celebration of a lifestyle that Hollywood perpetually presents as the pinnacle of human experience - drugs, loose morals, sexual promiscuity, and fast cars; the means of acquisition aren't usually considered as important as the acquisition itself.
I think one reason is that in these movies those actors you mention are the “heroes” of the story, in the sense that they’re the ones who undergoe the transformation. The flip side, all the people who have lost everything because of Belfort are not portraited at all.
Another reason might be that many people are simply greedy and the consequences for the main actors weren’t that bad in the end after all. I think the real Belfort made an appearance at the end of the movie and gives speeches nowadays...
I remember in Marketing class they taught us about "Herb the Nerd".
In the 1980's Burger King was expanding and as part of this came a big advertising campaign centered around a nerdy-looking guy called Herb, who was the only person who hadn't been to a Burger King. If you could spot him in a Burger King restaurant, you could win money. It was a colossal failure, and instead of increasing customer volume, ended up having the opposite effect and decreasing it.
Why? Because the overt message of
"Herb the Nerd" <-> "The only person who hasn't gone to Burger King"
was shortened in people's minds to
"... Nerd" <-> "... Burger King".
It's fascinating: indirect/subtext messaging will beat direct messaging every time.
Interestingly, American Psycho isn't on that list. Nor should it be.
It's easy to come up with a few theories as to what sets it apart, but I would love to see a proper analysis of how it tackles the subject matter without glorifying the lifestyle unnecessarily--and what other films should learn from it if they aim to accomplish the same
Aside from Patrick Bateman committing gratuitous murders on screen, the major difference is that he hates his life and he never looks like he's having fun.
Jordan Belfort might be doing terrible things (although not as bad as serial murder), but he looks and acts like he loves every minute of it. Bateman doesn't.
You could also compare The Hangover and Leaving Las Vegas. One makes a drug-filled weekend in Vegas look sort of fun, and one does not.
You're super hopeful if you think people don't idolize Patrick Bateman, but they do. People don't see the story, they see a young, good-looking Christian Bale with a powerful suit on walking the streets of NYC with headphones on. People want that image, and the message is lost or separated entirely.
Except "edgy" people view some bastardization of nihilism as a cool thing to aspire to. To this end they view Patrick as an ideal character. Powerful (at least more so than Steven nobody), and the psychopath concept intrigues them because it separates a person from their emotions, which for many people seem like an improvement, as not feeling would hurt less.
These films of destructive and unhealthy people are usually aspired to because even when the characters hit their rock bottom, they still have more money, power, control, and agency than the average viewer.
There are plenty of Hollywood films that promote those values. The Stephen Hawking biopic. Even the Harry Potter series. Marvel superhero films like Dr. Strange. Other biopics like Hidden Figures, etc.
I don't think that these films critique anything, they just tell a story and it's up to the people's judgement to critique the events and characters in the story.
I wouldn't say that people who idolize these characters have poor judgement or bad morale though. I mean, we shoot people or do illegal street racing in virtual environments for fun all the time, maybe it's just a human nature to entertain the idea of what we could have done if sociatal norms or laws wouldn't stop us.
Idealization of a persona usually doesn't mean wanting to become exactly that person but to have some quality of that person.
Maybe those people who actually do something are simply racionalizing their actions through these fictional characters?
I think what people attach to (rightly or wrongly) is that these characters usually have wrestled themselves into a position of total control over their own lives. Most people watching the film won't have that freedom to stick it to the man, or run away from their situation and live a life that's their selfish own: there are usually financial, family, or even self-doubt constraints.
Control over your own life is something that everybody craves and it's clear that these characters have it in abundance,
even if it's only for a brief period of time - i.e. to the end of the film. But up until that point, they're seen as individuals who have broken free from their respective shackles.
This also applies to almost every single gangster movie. "Scarface" being really the case study.
I believe it is mostly due to the last scene of these movies where the hero dies in some crazy action scene. Lot of adrenaline, and it looks so "cool" on screen that you can't help thinking "wow this guy was awesome!".
One movie that dealt with that really well was "Goodfellas". During the 2nd part of the movie, the downfall is filmed in a very slow, almost boring manner. And the end is boring as f*ck, specifically to avoid this pitfall of glorifying the "hero".
It's like how Truffaut said it's impossible to make an anti-war film, it looks too cool and exciting on the screen and there's no real understanding of the human costs involved.
It's part of the appeal of a popular movie: striking a chord with multiple audiences simultaneously, one with irony, another without. In many ways, if movies didn't do this, you probably would be less likely to have seen them.
Because excitement, notoriety, achieving exceptional status - regardless of the specific around it - is wildly different than the average, mediocre, mundane life (relatively speaking).
It's not like those viewers are stupid. People just see what they want to see. It's very hard to focus on an external stimulus in a way that really lifts you out of your own private world.
I am always amazed by how many people get into this "Beat the system and make tons of money" mindset.
If there's anything that has proven itself time and time again, it's that people who seek immediate wealth, and who fantasize about their "million dollar idea", are absolutely not the kinds of people who become successful and wealthy.
The people who become devoted to a field or a technology - who make the business their passion, and focus on filling a need - these are the people who earn a fortune.
You can't just make money by trying really hard to be rich, unless, of course, your business model is funneling cash off of suckers with a predatory get-rich-quick scheme.
Kind of tangential, but a self-sabotage concept I find fascinating is called "short term mood repair." That's a phrase that one of the top academics studying procrastination uses to describe one of the most common prompts for procrastination. (Tim Pychyl)
In this concept, you have some tiny anxiety about upcoming work that probably never even reaches your conscious thoughts. And the absolute fastest way to make that anxiety go away (i.e. repair it) is to pivot away from the upcoming work. Rationally, this is a terrible idea. But emotionally, it's very functional. Procrastination creates a short term fix to that anxiety.
Or, maybe more familiar to people here, this is just another example of System I and System II thinking from Thinking, Fast and Slow.
I think there's something similar going on with "Get Rich Quick."
The desire to get rich is both rational and emotional. Yes, obviously, it's rational to want to have money. And then also, there's often an emotional anxiety about our place in the world and having money is a fantasy that resolves that anxiety.
So, everyone who points out that Get Rich Quick is not an effective strategy for actually getting rich is right. Rationally, you should choose behaviors that lead to steady accumulation of wealth.
However, I do think Get Rich Quick does provide a functional, short term, solution to the anxiety that's prompting people to want to get rich. In other words, these people in the article are performing self-care with a "short term mood repair" strategy.
Another concept that Dr. Pychyl introduced me to is that MRI scans show that the same parts of our brain light up when we think about strangers and when we think about our future selves. In other words, it's easy to sell our future self short.
Your comment is hosted on ycombinator.com, an enterprise founded with the specific goal: "Beat the system and make tons of money". The only distinction is the "immediate" part.
"He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications."
The part about "make tons of money" isn't there, but I don't think anyone disagrees with that part -- YC recently launched a separate branch to handle nonprofit ventures.
> Since some people were confused when we funded Watsi, I’d better clarify that the money we’re putting into the nonprofits will be a charitable donation, rather than an investment in the narrow sense. We won’t have any financial interest in them.
Good point. The commenter is (fairly) looking down on the specific category of get-rich-quick clowns, but there is an equally large number of "big idea" startup-bozos in the tech world. It's a similar delusion but articulated in a different way.
Still, the point remains. If your primary goal isn't filling a need or making something that people want, then you're less likely to be successful.
Every entrepreneur envisions profit at the end of the process, but it cannot be the primary goal of your company. Profits come from great products and services, so make a great product or service and the profits follow.
You also have to be prepared to work 60+ hour weeks for years, only making enough to get by, and still fail and lose money in the end. A lot of these get-rich-quick schemes claim that there is no work and little risk involved.
A labor-free, low-risk, high-profit career simply doesn't exist. You can pick two of those three things, but not all three.
> people who seek immediate wealth, and who fantasize about their "million dollar idea", are absolutely not the kinds of people who become successful and wealthy.
Replace "absolutely not" with "almost never". It's relevant because that vanishingly small percentage of people who do manage to become wealthy get an absurd amount of attention, which inspires others to mimic them, and so the cycle continues.
Nonsense! Anyone can become rich if they just want to! For those who don't buy the OP's argument and want to get rich quick, I'm looking for investors for my ICO. It's like bitcoin but for people who like to eat pizza.
Nowhere near it. Doge has a "market cap" of about $630m, with volume last 24h of $62m. Bitcoin Cash is at $25 billion, with 24h trading volume of about $1.2 billion.
> ... it's that people who seek immediate wealth, and who fantasize about their "million dollar idea", are absolutely not the kinds of people who become successful and wealthy.
There is an old saying: Making a million dollars and spending a million dollars are the exact opposite thing.
>The people who become devoted to a field or a technology - who make the business their passion, and focus on filling a need - these are the people who earn a fortune.
I am always amazed people think this is the case.
The people who make money from a technology are very seldom the ones who devote their life to it. They are the ones who know just enough about it to be at the right place at the right time.
It's so meta. I still remember the "Hey I quit my job and got rich as a blogger who tells you how to quit your job and get rich as a blogger" craze of 2010.
The connection you made is a reach, but competition is an aspect of the genre. Gun bars and other recurring themes like disses and self-hype are just part of the game. It's built-in.
It's still pretty bad with travel blogs. They'll always have at least one mention per article about how you, too, can travel the world and get paid to blog about it, after you drop $300 to join TravelBlogSuccess.
Does anyone remember the "million dollar homepage" guy? There are certainly legitimate ways to make a good chunk of change using what is basically just a neat marketing idea.
But, typically, they only work once, or a small number of times, and then then copycats don't attract money anymore.
Caring a lot about specifically making money is, in my opinion, absolutely key to making money, because otherwise you just end up focusing on other things (family, pleasures, ideals, etc.). If I wanted to make money, I'd design a very different thing in a very different way compared to if I wanted to make something me and my circle of friends would find useful. These things are practically disjoint.
> The people who become devoted to a field or a technology - who make the business their passion, and focus on filling a need - these are the people who earn a fortune.
This is a bit mixed up. Like, these are different things.
Devoting yourself to something strikes me as the hard way to make money. For the vast majority of people, this will absolutely not work, simply due to probabilities. It's like devoting yourself to being a professional athlete. Good luck, there are millions of others like you.
> who make the business their passion, and focus on filling a need
This, to me, IS a "getting rich" mindset, as I don't really understand why anyone would get into it otherwise. Most people I know who really care about technology are often tragically far from any kind of user and therefore can't think about filling a need. People who care a lot about a subject are often filling their own need, but there's no guarantee whatsoever that that need has anything to do with any kind of customer. Quite the opposite, most useful needs are already filled, it's the small niches that an individual might want filled. There are also large chunks of people who like filling a need in a "helpful" sort of way (i.e., writing documentation) who often get no kickback from it at all.
If anything, a person super passionate about something, if they actually want to make money, needs to wheel that around almost completely and care about all sorts of other things, such as marketing and business management, things many people plain find hard to digest.
You need to, specifically, really care about making money for many of these things to not be somewhere between gross and boring to you.
I'll speculate that one common way this mindset gets acquired is by encountering enough ways that the system really is rigged, or that the pieties learned as a child seem false. There's not much distance between "the system is rigged" and "I want to be the predator, not the patsy." I'm not defending this way of thinking: I think it's wrong. But to counter something it helps to understand it, not just marvel at it.
To be fair, predatory schemes can take many forms. Bad financial products, pseudo-science products, even a lot of advertising strategies these days use predatory tactics.
At the heart of it is the fact that these needs that you talk about people filling can be needs people think they have, but don't actually have. "My chakra is out of balance and it's the cause of what is bad in my life. I must buy this raw water."
Buffett's field of study is the finance and economic system.
It should be easy to see that one of the things that separates Warren Buffett from the rest of us is that he has a unique perspective of the financial world – he sees all of the dynamics and intricacies of the financial world in a way that few others do.
It took years for him to build the mental framework that led to his deep understanding and unique view of the world. And as a result of his devotion to this pursuit and his willingness to immerse himself in it, he developed the structural underpinning for the mental vista that yields the rare and valuable perspective that enables him to see the financial world with the clarity of a composer likely unattained by anyone in history.
This is why Goldman Sachs calls him when they need help, like they did in the financial crisis.
I kinda think Buffett's way of investing is obsolete these days. Every single analyst is studying the fundamentals and financials of companies now. Every single analyst has access to the same information he had. It was different decades ago when we didn't have BloomBerg, Thomson Reuters, FactSet, etc. Now everyone does. His advantage now is just that he has boatloads of money to buy companies and turn them around.
you dont understand his strategy if you think it is out of date.
1) he buys equity in the private markets not in the public markets
2) he has capital to buy entire companies
3) he can evaluate a company based on the people, not based on financials
4) he commits to not meddling in operations. Today's tax structure forces entrepreneurs to sell because of huge tax implications of passing down a privately held company.
5) emotionally he is very strong and he is willing to wait on the sideline for years if necessary.
He holds on to huge amounts of cash. Meanwhile shareholders are getting mad that he is not getting the returns and start talking about how he should just pay out the dividends, people start talking about how he has lost his touch or his method is out of date. The market is skyrocketing. Then the crash happens and he buys tons of distressed assets at a discount and he is brilliant again.
If the sudden taxes kill the company, then certainly. It's in the US's best interest for them to avoid those taxes because if they don't then the US loses out on taxing future profits of that company.
Whelp, better just never tax anyone just in case they make some money in the future that we can continue to not tax, because then they'll threaten to fire all their workers and take their money overseas!
It should be easy to see that one of the things that separates Warren Buffett from the rest of us is that he has a unique perspective of the financial world – he sees all of the dynamics and intricacies of the financial world in a way that few others do.
And it doesn't hurt that he can get special deals that most people can't.
This isn't an ordinary investment, in which an investor buys common stock. Buffett's $5 billion is buying him 50,000 shares of a special class of so-called "preferred stock," which will pay him a 6 percent dividend, or $300 million a year. Just for the sake of comparison, BofA's common shareholders get a quarterly dividend of one penny a share. That means that if you owned $5 billion of ordinary BofA common stock at its current price of about $8 a share, you'd be getting a paltry $25 million a year in dividends—less than one-tenth of what Buffett will get. (Earlier this year, BofA tried and failed to get permission from the Federal Reserve to increase the dividend.)
BofA can buy back Buffett's investment at any time for a 5 percent premium.
He didn't start out getting special deals. This is an example of the Pareto Principle [1] / Matthew Principle [2], which appears to be a natural law, an organizing principle like gravity.
You know speaking of Warren Buffett, he came to mind while I was reading the article, as someone who pretty much behaves the exact opposite of this. No ostentatious display by the 3rd-richest person in the world... hmm that's interesting. You'd think it would give pause to the many suckers out there, but apparently they all still think things in the world are exactly how they look. That's why it's not fair to target young people - they haven't learned yet.
Challenging myself to find a photo of Warren posing ostentatiously with a car, I found this which cracked me up:
Oh my god those photos are way sadder than I was prepared for. And they're definitely designed to appeal to poor people, not rich ones. So, they're just another part of the ongoing extraction of wealth from the already-poor.
Most of the photos feature cars. Is a car a sign of wealth? If Warren converted his entire net worth to Lamborghinis (say $200,000 each) he'd have about 400,000 of them. A Lamborghini is worth to him, proportionally, about what 25 cents is worth to me. Even if you're "only" Steve Ballmer that car is worth only 75 cents to you in rdiddly dollars. If you were hanging out with actual rich people flaunting your $200K car they'd be like yeah congratulations, you found a quarter, Janice would you call security and have this gentleman removed please?
EDIT: They'd be like oh yeah I bought four of those with the interest earned by my cat's litterbox. Janice would you etc.
Besides, they technically devoted themselves to the field of finance. They didn't just decide one day that they wanted to be billionaires and only work 1 hour per week.
They worked their asses off to get where they are today, and the goal wasn't even necessarily to make a fortune...
> You can't just make money by trying really hard to be rich, unless, of course, your business model is funneling cash off of suckers with a predatory get-rich-quick scheme.
More wealthy people make their money this way than you might realize. Rare indeed is the person who became wealthy by actually creating something of value. Much more common is the person who cheated someone (or many someones) out of something. Making money is easy. Doing something decent is hard.
What a distorted way of looking at things. You don't make money by cheating people out of something. You make money by doing something people want you to do. (Or doing something they didn't know they wanted you to do.)
That's reality. Uber wouldn't be a billion company if they played fair and by the rules. They are a billion company because they found loopholes and exploited them.
Worked for one the biggest - and most "respectable" player in this "industry".
Between terrible security practices - had to fight for basic stuff that would make any of you grab pitchforks, attempts to get away with as much as they could with regards to regulation and finally the terrible ethics of the system, I didn't last long.
>”I’m never going to work for someone,” Oyefeso says in one of his videos, in a somewhat cartoonish, nasal voice, while he drives his Rolls dressed in a bathrobe.”
What’s with this obsession of not working for someone else? American/British managers in particular are some of the most democratic and “least power distance” bosses out there, especially compared to other countries where there is still a very hierarchical management structure.
The only time I ever hear now seriously about “your boss is horrible time to quit and start your own business!” or “time to escape cubicle nation!” is with someone selling a particular product.
If you have a specific skillset, and your talents and work ethic are obvious to your managers, you can end being mostly self-managed at your job.
However, if you have no skills and work a job where your raw output is all that matters, managers will breathe down your neck trying to get the most output out of you as possible.
These get-rich-quick schemes prey on those unskilled workers. They promise a world where you have no boss, only work a few hours a week, and make enough money to afford whatever you want.
It preys on people's fantasies, and their lack of understanding of how successful people get where they are.
If you want to escape your cubicle farm and get a job where you don't hate your boss, teach yourself a valuable skill and seek gainful employment using that skill.
But don't ever expect that there's some magic lifehack that let's you stop working and make enough money to afford every luxury you ever wanted. Just because there are some examples of people doing that doesn't mean anything. For every Bitcoin millionaire there are ten Bitcoin bankruptcies.
Yet all people have to do is wave around "This is the next big thing", and gullible people will swarm it in hopes of getting in on the ground floor.
What a defeatist attitude. The people I know who "got rich quick" did it by providing a valuable service and working hard at it. I can't think of any in my circle who came from money.
It's because people don't know themselves. They are busy emulating all the of the ideas and imagery floating all around them without ever bothering to listen to who they truly are inside.
Some people are leaders. They push up against the halls of power, and if others hold them back, they will find a way to break free. These are the people who proclaim they will never work for someone else.
Some people are care takers. Some people are healers. Some people are followers. They just want to be told what to do. There's nothing wrong with that!
Society at large is always telling everyone to be a leader, and I think that's the main issue. Few are cut out to be leaders, and it's not always all it's cracked up to be.
Great point, I don't think people think about this enough. When you are your own boss, start your own company, freelance, etc you have tons of bosses they just have another title. You have clients, shareholders, someone to be accountable to. Getting clients is not always easy. Sure you might be able to pick what clients you take on but if you only want the best you could have some pretty rough months. Even if you built a product, a simple saas type of deal and want that passive-ish income you need to make the users happy.
I have an an employer, but I could go do this work for many other companies and freelance/run my own show and potentially make a lot more. I would then have to hire a number of other people to do quite a few of the things that I don't do or do it myself and literally have 0 time plus figure out benefits and may not have consistent pay (at least not guaranteed). This is all assuming it also worked out! I'm enjoying using my skills and getting a fair agreed amount without having to deal with anything else really. Trade offs. No such thing as a free lunch.
American individualism, I suspect - part of how deeply rooted that mindset is in all the different strata of classes. Proving that you can make it on your own, especially with how "equalizing" social media is on the surface (everyone has an account, the only limit is how you portray yourself!) is a pretty tempting goal to go after for some folks.
Honestly, I don't want to work for someone else, and I've ended up as a consultant/contractor who provides a service on the basis of a completely equal footing with the client. I find it far preferable to being a standard employee, I get more control and usually more respect. Plus, everyone knows it's just a gig, not your life.
I literally quit and started my own business because of a horrible boss and 8 years on it is easily one of the best decisions I ever made. I agree that it's not for everyone though.
Maybe it’s time the EU took a look at advertising. I mean, we’re building things like the GDPR and a lot of legislation to protect minors from the dangers that come from social media. We see loot boxes, underage gambling, traders selling you recommendations for their own products, scammers, young people prostitute them selves to get photo shoots at exotic locations or for luxurary stuff for likes. Probably worse than that too, and at the heart of it is advertising and how it makes money on popularity, lies and knowing every about everyone.
Popularity will always be worth money to someone, but the current business practices surrounding it just don’t seem healthy.
I mean, that's only because you/we romanticise our industry.
What a bizarre false dichotomy. Literal prostitution, retail job, or software development. There are plenty of others out there that are needed that people work in. Become an apprentice, learn a trade, and start business. Work in retail, become a manager, own a location, climb the ranks. Get a finance degree, work at a firm, create a consultancy.
becoming a manager in retail is really not that hard. most of my friends that started working retail in high school are managers by now (unless they left for a better job).
The alternative is genuine entrepreneurship or working your butt off in school in an area that is actually in demand rather than a pointless degree. There seems to be an assumption now that everyone is entitled to a nice cushy lifestyle but if you don’t work in school, don’t develop in demand skills or find a gap in the market to exploit then it’s not going to happen.
Ah shit, that was my mistake, I didn't just pick an in demand niche that no one else had already identified and filled. Good thing I had this safety net to fall on after I spent my savings that took me 30 years to build up to make an attempt on a business.
As it stands in the US currently if you don't receive help from your parents or some other rich connection, the average person is winning the lottery if they start a business and succeed. There is nothing between you and homelessness if you don't have the business succeed, and any sort of health problem will nuke what savings you have immediately
Yeah, seems like wealth is generally created over generations, rather than lifetimes (common case might be something like: 0 - 1 your grandparents immigrate and work hard to survive, 1-10 your parents work hard to go from subsistence to middle class, 10 - 100 you have enough safety net to take risks/follow passions/start successful bussinesses). Of course there's always exceptions.
...or wages have simply not kept up with inflation. I'm a high school teacher in a state that has a teacher shortage (and yet performs at toward the top of the national rankings). I'm good at my job - do it because it matters in a way that most jobs don't - and have rapidly moved up into the best districts in the state. In demand isn't always the issue. My take home pay is 27k. Teaching is obviously in the news lately for pay concerns - but this hollowing out of wages is across the board.
> Unless you are in a highly demanded domain like software, there are few opportunities for young people.
If you mean old style "Jobs", correct. If you mean opportunity to impact the world and get paid for it, nonsense.
There has never been a time that it has been so easy to 1) Reach millions/billions of people (Internet), 2) Raise money (kickstarter, VC/startup culture), 3) learn about something for free (MOOCs), 4) bring a real product to market (Amazon fulfillment) .
The only thing missing is real ideas and the work ethic to use 1-4.
For whatever reason, the EU has never been terribly interested in regulating advertising; that's nearly all national agencies, and varies greatly by country (some of the Nordics ban a lot of advertising to kids, say).
I was hoping, based on the title, that this was going to address the exploding popularity of people starting IG accounts for their huskies and then claiming the animals are part-wolf. This is a real phenomenon with (albeit smaller) consequences.
I know of a guy who “pivoted” from exotic car rental operator in Florida to Forex and Drop Shipping coach via Instagram. His Lamborghini, chartered jets and 30k followers really shine but I also know he still buys fake shoes. Wouldn’t trust him with $1.
Gary Vaynerchuk is spot on in that there are too many experts and not enough practicioners. Showing others how to make it is how these guys are trying to make it.
I suspect many of these people touting their nearly purchased Lamborghini and the like are actually just renting them.
There was a reddit post where a similar "influencer" described the process of faking the purchase. He would go to a showroom and ask to sit in the vehicle and film it. Most of the time, if the salesperson isn't busy they will let you do this. Sometimes even let you start it if they are nice. This influencer would just then record a conversation in another car about buying and taking delivery etc and dub over the video of him in a show room. Pretty straight forward.
>I suspect many of these people touting their nearly purchased Lamborghini and the like are actually just renting them.
Yes, this is incredibly common in the entertainment industry (particularly Hip Hop), and I also saw a lot of people like this when I lived near a wealthier part of LA for a couple years
I was thinking the same thing. These guys sound way too much like the self-help scammers who attach themselves to multi-level marketing schemes, and convince the incoming masses that they have the secrets to wealth and success when their only line of business is selling ostensible secrets to wealth and success.
Color me surprised when a pyramid scheme shows up in this story.
> Showing others how to make it is how these guys are trying to make it.
You don't actually have to know how to make 30K/month. You just have to have enough people watch your video and sign up to buy your $9.99 ebook. The infomercial is 24/7 now. Kevin Trudeau forever, man! /s
I'll show you how to make €100,000+ per month, just buy my ebook with monthly subscription to my "WWWinners!!11one Club" it's €100,000 per month. Bargain!
Being in the Amazon retail space, I know someone who made $100k in a month selling coaching services when their Amazon business had only done $500k revenue in the last year. I haven't used their services so I don't know whether that's a good or a bad thing.
But I also know many coaching programs that sell for $2k, 5k, 10k+/person but aren't perfect. Something that might have worked for them might not work for someone else, especially if they forget to mention important steps. To learn more about the coaching trend look into Clickfunnels and the Art of High Ticket Selling COD Facebook group.
That's because his "followers" are just all fake crap accounts, or people who follow because he's using a bot to follow/unfollow them. Doubtful any of them are willingly paying attention to him. Just look at the wild swings on both sides, as Instagram cleans up the fake accounts.
The difference is that Tai Lopez is just selling knowledge, no different than an audiobook or a college program. The guy in this article is actively participating in a pyramid scheme.
Slightly OT, but for the rest of us "fake it till you make it" is terrible advice. Because if you don't make it, you have lived a fake life and this will eat on you.
Actually the proverb is sort of short for "have courage through the difficult part and you will be successful in one way or the other". It's not about being fake. The OP title, though, is a play on the term, referring to actual fakeness.
Only if you can't maintain emotional separation. Actors, Doctors, and Lawyers, all legitimate respectable honest jobs, require workers to maintain emotional separation from their work.
The number of layers of meaninglessness at play in being a fraudulent media influencer who pretends to be rich so they can make a buck off of selling artificial bets against the abstract perceived value of companies which employ the people who (in some cases) spend their time doing actual real things is staggering.
On a 8% average, Bezos makes over $8 billion a year (He has been making more than that). Considering there are 2,208 billionaires according to Forbe's, that is mind blowing that he gains more wealth every year than all but about 2000 people alive HAVE.
This article describes essentially rough influencers that use their social media marketing capabilities to fuel pyramid schemes with cheap high-risk financial products as their fig-leaf.
While selling those products is regulated in many markets they apparently seem to get around that through obscurity.
Nothing new! Same as the Crypto bubble / hype. Seen many people ploughing money because they wanna get rich quick. All because bitcoin or *coin is going up & 'blockchain'.
A lot of influencers revolve around the fashion industry on Instagram, Who are contacted by streetwear brands and Designer Labels such as Vetements, Balenciaga and OFF-WHITE... Solely using influencers has pretty much pushed their lines into the eyes of consumers and it's a really good way of getting people to take notice of your business.
