So here's an interesting question.
Why do celebrities keep dying?
And is it ever going to stop?
The answer to the second question I think is no, in fact I think these deaths are going
to accelerate but the reason why is kind of interesting.
Over the past week we've seen Carrie Fisher, George Michael and Debbie Reynolds die.
I'm not sure who Debbie Reynolds was, but she means a lot to my camera man apparently.
When these things happen, it's disturbing and one of the reasons that we're all so much
more aware of it is social media.
It gets thrown in our face very quickly.
But it's not just that.
It's not just the fact that this news is served up to us as quickly as possible by a news
cycle that is desperate for red meat.
More of these folks really are dying.
That's because we actually care about more people.
There are more celebrities for us to worry about, and there are more celebrities to die.
If you're my age, some of the most significant people to die this year were popular music
artists like George Michael, Prince, and David Bowie.
These folks got famous, or got more famous through MTV.
Music Television, a channel that used to play music videos.
This gets to the broader reason why we have so many more celebrities today.
The main reason, I think, is cable television.
30-35 years ago there were only three broadcast networks in the United States.
So that meant that everybody watched like three television channels.
That's where we got all our famous people.
There were just that many famous people.
You had TV, you had some movies, people used to know a lot more about politicians and world
figures back then.
There just weren't that many celebrities.
There weren't that many people to care about.
So starting in the 1980s we got this incredible ballooning of cable television.
We know pop music artists a lot better.
We've got figures like Bob Ross.
Do you remember the guy who used to paint the little trees?
That's definitely one of the celebrity deaths that has effected me the most.
And that's a cable television star.
This all happened about 30 years ago.
And the people that became famous through that have now started to die.
This process is only going to speed up.
And this incredible explosion in celebrities, in people to pay attention to and care about,
didn't stop with cable TV.
The internet has actually made that weird galaxy of stuff grow exponentially.
So if you find your day derailed by news like this, if you find yourself getting depressed
about the deaths of celebrities... people that might have had some impact on your life
in some way...
It's about to get much much worse.
Five or ten years from now, we might have a somewhat significant celebrity death every
day of the week.
There's just a lot more celebrities.
I think this means that we all need to get a lot tougher.
I think it's not just celebrities.
I think that the current news cycle really loves serving up disaster.
And if we take it personally every time they serve up a disaster like this we're just going
to run out of emotions.
Or we're all going to go insane.
Neither of those sound like a good thing.
So the next time a celebrity dies, why don't you take it as an opportunity to step back
and be grateful?
Be grateful for the contributions of this person.
Be grateful that we live in a world that has so many different avenues for entertainment.
Be grateful that we live in a world that gives more and more people the opportunity to have
their 15 minutes of fame.
But don't let it get to you.
Don't let it dwell in your mind.
Don't let it ruin your day, because coming up pretty soon, if you let it ruin your day,
every single one of your days will be ruined.
Thanks for watching.
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