Sean Proulx, host of the Sean Proux Show on Sirius XM and the InstaLive show, Simone and Sean, joins us to talk about celebrity culture today, including the Will Smith, Chris Rock incident, TikTok, and TikTok.
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00:03:23.560The Japanese version was the best version.
00:03:26.680The Australian version, the American version, the Japanese version had the most meat to it.
00:03:31.580At first, in the Red Hot Minute, I thought it was some sort of stunt that they had.
00:03:36.920Because I could not believe that a grown man was going up to hit another grown man over a joke.
00:03:42.000And then that sort of went right into disgust over that.
00:03:45.860Because I just think, I think what happened is symbolic of where, at least for people who are celebrities, who have platforms, be it the movies, be it a podcast, be it a radio show.
00:03:59.000If you've got a platform and you're a known voice, people are kind of on Tinder hooks right now.
00:04:04.060And this, we don't know what we're allowed to say kind of culture.
00:04:06.720And we saw that we can't say certain things, can't make a joke about being shaved-headed without getting a smack to the face.
00:04:39.380And you could feel it's kind of palpable, this kind of society we live in right now, where we're not allowed to say anything for fear of being canceled, is rampant.
00:04:51.660And that was kind of cancel culture in a nutshell when Will hit Chris.
00:04:59.520Because if you look at it play by play, you've got Chris making the joke, cut to Will Smith laughing at the joke, cut to Jada Pinkett Smith rolling her eyes at the joke, cut back to Will Smith seeing that she doesn't like it, and then going and trying to cancel Chris with a punch.
00:05:20.440And that's the way it works on Twitter with these social justice warriors as well.
00:05:24.520You have these people who think the joke is funny, but, oh, oh, someone's offended?
00:08:22.040You didn't get to winning an Oscar by not knowing how the game is played.
00:08:25.960You're going to be the subject of jokes and ridicule and gossip for being who you are.
00:08:30.260And what's kind of funny, like, you make such a good point, because they know how the game is played.
00:08:34.780And I feel like there used to be a heavily managed game for these A-list celebrities and that they were untouchable.
00:08:40.880Whether or not we go back, you know, decades and how the old studio system would even just tell people, like, who they're dating and who they're marrying.
00:08:49.080And these were, like, godlike figures.
00:08:50.680And we still had that, you know, in the 90s, these box office gold, like the $20 million club people, the Julia Roberts.
00:08:56.580And, you know, they're these, like, ethereal figures that people kind of idolize.
00:09:01.720And now there's not – I found it interesting.
00:09:03.340Denzel Washington, I know, reportedly chatted to Will Smith.
00:09:06.020Or you can see pictures of it kind of saying, like, calm down, man, or whatever after that incident happened.
00:09:09.720I'd say Denzel Washington is one of the few, like, true classic movie stars left in that, you know, he's not doing these direct-to-video things every second week to pay the bills.
00:09:18.760I get you got to pay the bills, but I just mean he ain't doing that.
00:09:27.020But most of them – like, I guess I feel like – I'm trying to say Will Smith is – he's just become, like, a regular guy who, like, gets in a scrap with a guy now and we all see it.
00:09:35.860Well, and with someone like Will Smith, where a generation has grown up with him.
00:09:53.720And his putting out a memoir, sharing the deepest, most personal aspects of his life that he wanted to share, makes you feel like you know him.
00:10:03.040Whereas with someone like a Denzel that you've mentioned has that kind of can't-quite-touch-him quality, I think of Cate Blanchett as well in that category of someone who's uber-talented, accessible as an interview, but that's about as close as anyone ever gets to her.
00:10:20.900But celebrity has changed, as you mentioned in your intro, with the advent of TikTok and other social platforms like it, where the word celebrity, which really means celebrated person, we're celebrating you for a reason.
00:10:39.720Right, old Hollywood, we celebrated you because of the mythology about you and everything Anthony, you just described.
00:10:48.740And to this day, there's a Hollywood that we still celebrate the glamour of, again, at Cate Blanchett or Washington.
00:10:56.700But then there's the celebrity that maybe was spawned by Kim Kardashian.
00:11:35.980I wouldn't want to be them and have to worry about what I look like nine out of every 10 minutes of the day.
00:11:43.080But they sort of spawned this generation of what are you famous for exactly?
00:11:47.360And then to think that somebody can just get on a YouTube channel and talk about gaming or whatever and earn six figures is incredible these days.
00:11:56.640Sean, you mentioned TikTok stars, and it's interesting.
00:12:00.080The idea of, okay, you got your YouTube channel, you're going to talk about Call of Duty or whatever, and you get a bunch of hits.
00:12:05.860And it's one thing for maybe a video game company to be like, hey, this guy's getting a lot of traffic.
00:12:21.860They're making more money than the celebrities, these TikTok influencers.
00:12:26.180I mean, I don't even understand this world.
00:12:28.280But I think it's at least changing the way the younger generation, like teenagers today and people in their early 20s, think about popular culture.
00:12:36.220Yeah, I don't think the younger generation has any patience or any want for that kind of five steps away from being a celebrity.
00:12:45.960They want to see themselves reflected back at them.
00:12:49.340And they enjoy seeing people just like them doing whatever on a video, whether it's talking about Minecraft or whether it is doing some silly trick or whatever.
00:13:00.080They want to see that it's more aspirational.
00:13:02.220I want to be more like this than I want to be like this kind of floating ethereal celebrity that I don't even get anymore.
00:13:11.360I think that social media has taken down a lot of the barriers, a lot of the lines between us and them.
00:13:20.840And that's what this generation that was born, tuned in, tapped in, turned on.
00:13:25.880They know how to turn on an iPad at age six months and work it.
00:13:31.620That's what they want is to see their own, I think.
00:13:35.400Whereas people of a different generation, say mine and older, we still like to see people who have something that we don't, whether it's the lifestyle or the money or the perceived lifestyle.
00:13:47.680But that, to your point, a lot of these people who are used to, just as supermodels, had to watch their contracts suddenly be given to actresses.
00:13:59.100Actresses and actors are now watching contracts they once would have had be given to this guy in Brampton, Ontario, who's got X number of followers and who is a true influencer.
00:14:14.980Is it going to be like this for the next however many years?
00:14:18.160Is this like the way it's kind of locked in for a whole generation?
00:14:21.520Or are things changing so fast that this will pass soon?
00:14:26.300Well, it's interesting because one of the bubbles was burst quite recently about sort of the fakery of some of this.
00:14:32.700In a movie, a documentary, whose name escapes me, but what it did was it asked, put out an ad, and it asked for people to apply if they wanted to become famous.
00:14:46.120And so they got thousands of applicants.
00:14:48.620They littled it down to five, and they began Instagram accounts for each of them.
00:14:53.440Eventually, three people did not like the taste of fame they were getting, but two hung on, and we followed these two throughout the rest of the movie.
00:15:01.720But the way in which they got their fame was purchased followers, purchased lights, and then they would do things like go into some grubby backyard and fill up a kid's pool with water and then put rose petals in it and then put the girl who wanted to be famous, put her head back in it so she looked like she was at a spa, a close-up shot of her with these rose petals around her head.
00:15:24.600And then she would tag at Four Seasons, Los Angeles, that she was there.
00:15:30.040And they were creating all of these fake posts.
00:15:32.560They would rent out a private jet at $50 per photo shoot, and they would be there very much like the Tinder swindler and these people like Anna...
00:15:46.240Odelvey, like the faking their lives, faking it until they make it.
00:15:52.480And so there's an awareness to that now, though, that this stuff doesn't, you know, necessarily mean it's real just because it's showing up in your feed.
00:16:01.120Like, my ex and I used to always joke when we'd take a group photo, instead of smiling and saying cheese, we'd say Facebook.
00:16:09.220And because it's here's our great life and our great friends, and we knew how sort of true it was, but fake it was as well.
00:16:18.120It didn't matter what mood you were in or what was going on in your life, you still bought a bright, shiny smile for Facebook.
00:16:23.320And so there's an awareness now that this isn't necessarily someone's actual reality.
00:16:30.860So long answer to your shorter question, does this have a long shelf life for the next generation?
00:16:36.500I'm not so sure because the bubble has been popped a little bit there.
00:16:40.260We'll be back in just a moment with more full comment after these messages.
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00:17:00.800Sean, I want to talk to you now about how we consume our media, the different models out there we're using, the different platforms we're using.
00:17:56.520And we both have been friends for over 20 years.
00:18:00.180And we have a certain comfort in chemistry.
00:18:02.180And we decided why not have our own chat show on Instagram live and pull in from each other's faces and meet new fans and grow a new audience through the intermingling of both audiences.
00:18:18.300And it's very simple to do on Instagram.
00:18:22.460It's a choice, like it is when you go to post something, one of your choices is IG Live.
00:18:28.720And you go live, and it tells your audience that you are live.
00:19:03.380And the interaction factor is really what makes a show like Night G Show live work because people are commenting along as you go and throwing in their two cents.
00:20:19.180Who a celebrity is now has changed enormously.
00:20:22.200Like I said, it used to have to be someone – you were celebrated, and that was usually someone who was a movie star or on the radio or on television, sort of in that category.
00:20:31.240But now we have drag queens, for example.
00:20:33.580You would never have thought of them as celebrities.
00:20:56.280They're like on the cover of People magazine, and I think one of them is married to Zooey Deschanel now.
00:21:00.380So it's like he, the realist, the home reno people, they're at a celebrity level, I guess, equal to the movie stars because they're marrying the movie stars.
00:23:04.280And so that most famous quote of him, of his saying that everyone has 15 minutes of fame is becoming truer and truer the more we spend time on social media and do things like punch out comics.
00:23:19.000And Sean, you made a good observation when you were talking about how how things have become more democratized, how barriers have been brought down.
00:23:29.480And the us versus them or the us and them, how celebs are so different from us that we can now, I guess, relate to them.
00:23:37.560And maybe think our 15 minutes are just around the corner if we get the right number of followers or to your point about the documentary by the right number of followers.
00:23:46.220And the number of like, you know, little kids who say like, oh, I have a YouTube channel now.
00:23:51.720Is this I guess, is this healthy for society?