Inside Job

Anyone still upset about the 2008 financial crisis, here's a film that will further fuel your furor: Inside Job. There's been a lot of books, a lot of films, lot of news, etc. written about the whole ordeal, but Inside Job does a great job of getting you excited and angry. Honestly, it was a little one-sided and put a LOT of blame on a LOT of people, but it also was pretty accurate in its lesson: We tried to get bigger profits by taking more profits, and when the fit hit the shan (I learned that phrase from Colin Cowherd), the ones who were responsible got off scott-free with millions, and regular citizens got left holding the bag. O, and the film's narrated by Matt Damon....always nice to hear a familiar voice.

It goes to the same message I had about the Penn State scandal with Joe Paterno, and the same message that I deal with in my case at work (and also, just to top off the analogy, the message in Spiderman): With great power comes great responsibilities. Sure everyone wants the power, wants the chance to be able to control things, decide the fates of others, and have an impact in the world, but when you take that power it's not free; you have to understand the responsiblity that comes with it. When you're a head coach of a prominent college powerhouse, you have a responsibility to report child molesters on you staff...when you are the CEO of one of the top 5 investment banks in the country, you have a repsonsibility not to sell bad investments to your clients; when you're an attorney who handles all of an individual's legal problems, you have a responsibility to do the best job for them.... So much in life revolves around that one principle. You can take the good but you gotta be there when the bad comes.


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When will Survivor and Amazing Race come to an end? Hopefully never. I've been watching those two shows since 2003, pretty much every episode of every season, and it really never gets old. Just like football never gets old, baseball never gets old, making money on the stock market never gets old, the news never gets old, Jeopardy never gets old, those 2 reality shows never get old. You know how I know? Cuz they would have been cancelled already due to bad ratings if it got old for people. We're in Survivor 23 now and Amazing Race 18, and each show has seen hundreds of contestants, but each year viewers like me keep coming back. For the Amazing Race, it's the thrill of the chase, the excitement of traveling to new and exotic places all while triggering your competitive juices in a run-for-your-life race, while Survivor is exactly what we face in our everyday interactions with people: co-existing with others, getting annoyed at some and wishing we could vote them off like in Survivor, all while trying to stay alive in a game of human chess: You win or you go home with nothing. I hope Survivor and the Amazing Race stay alive primarily because I'm still YEARNING to get on, but also because they're the equivalent of addictive potato chips: I just can't get enough of them, and I'll be watching.

Fantasize on,

Robert Yan