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The rest is entertainment, is presented by Octopus Energy. Now, remember, Octopus Energy do something really great. If they've got your birthday, when you call in for whatever reason to Octopus, the whole music is the number one selling single from that year, the year of your fourteenth birthday. And we discovered, didn't we, that yours was um the only way is up by Yaz and the plastic population. We're gonna discover mine now. Yours is I just called to say I love you by Stevie Wonder. Okay. Yes. I prefer yours. Yeah. Do you think it's weird to have whole music which is I just call to say I love you ? Because listen I and you know that love octopus energy, but I will rarely ring them to tell them I love them. Yeah. Yeah. I would usually but you know, be I'd just want to chat to them about something to do with my energy. Uh and I don't mean that sort of energy. Well look, it they can butt surface the number one single of that year for you. And you can always choose not to have the music. You can choose for no but I think only animals do that, as I've said, and I wanna go on the record of saying that . This episode is brought to you by American Express. Wouldn't it be fantastic if when you bought something you love, you could get a little extra out of it? With books and stuff I, always try and do like a little bonus chapter or something like that. Or an interview on the audiobook, you'll always have an interview. When they used to have like secret tracks on the ends of albums, I don't want to sound too old, but something like that, it just feels like I paid my money already. I've got the thing I bought. Here's something extra. Or just popcorn when you go to the cinema. Any of those things, a little just a little extra that you weren't quite expecting. Well, Amex makes that a reality. You can earn points or cash back on the things you buy and use them on things you You can use Amex at more places than ever, so there's always plenty of ways to earn rewards and use them. Search Amex cards today to find the card that's right for you. Terms apply. Preferred rewards, gold, credit card representative, 85.8% APR variable, annual fee applies after first year, cashback cards also available, minimum spend required to earn cashback subject to status 18 plus. Rates may vary. T's and Cs' apply. Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina High. And me, Richard Osman. How lovely to be here. Lovely to see you, Marina. It's lovely to see you, Richard. Very nice to see you. Uh what's been what's been keeping you? All my children were very tired the other night and I said, What would you like to watch? And they just went, a Richard episode of Would I Lie to you? Oh my god. So I know. It's the one with Jason Isaacs, which I strangely hadn't seen, but he's a lot of fun, Jason Isaacs, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. That came across. Yes, yeah, he is he was I th I th I I thought he was terrific. Um well listen, that's um that's a that's a case for the NSBCC I think, rather than for anybody else. What might we speak about this week in the world of entertainment? Well, I know we're gonna talk about as as Bill the last week, we're gonna talk about reality TV reckonings, as it were, this kind of emerging genre where reality TV ethical abomin ations of the two thousands and twenty tens are sort of repackaged in documentary format. Perhaps for learnings, I don't know. Well we're gonna talk about why that's happening and why it's happening now. Yes, and I'm gonna give a few examples of some of the more egregious reality shows of the of the naughties and also quite why it was such a wild west back then, because it really, really was. And we are also talking about we s we spoke last week about AI and books and uh again then we said uh we're talking about Sora, which was OpenAI's uh video thing, which uh Disney put a billion dollars into and they've shut down talk about why they shut it down, uh what that means for Hollywood. Let's talk about reality TV. It was a different time, Richard. It was a different time. It was a different time. It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times. We can argue about Golden and it was unbelievably influential. It's no uh coincidence that the most significant reality TV star of that era was Donald Trump and that he couldn't have become president without having done reality TV because it re having ha failed in the eighties essentially in property or had to go away with his tail between his legs, he came back as a complete force via one of the actu absolute sort of marquee reality TV formats. We want to talk about reality TV because there have been a whole slew of programmes recently, big, big exposes uh on Netflix and various other streamers, big expose of the biggest loser and the things that happened behind the scenes on that show. That was a weight loss. Weight loss uh US show. There was the expose of America's next top model, which went behind the scenes on that and showed how uh various people um were treated on that. There's about to be one on one of the most extraordinary shows ever made, The Swan. Yeah, I think that so reality TV didn't used to exist as a thing. And we had DocuSoaps. Reality TV really came about because of the enormous success of Survivor and Big Brother. I remember 'cause I uh as I I may have mentioned it before, that was my idea. Uh and uh just the idea of putting people on a desert island and then voting people off w one by one. I had no involvement on it after that. And I remember it would have been ninety three, ninety-four, when the first ever territory made that, which is Sweden. They made a show called Operation Robinson, and that was the first ever survivor. It then goes over to the States , is huge. John De Mole comes up with Big Brother, which is essentially Survivor, but not in a desert island, in a in a fixed rig house. And these shows absolutely bestrowed the world. They were beyond enormous. It was interesting, funnily enough, in that QA answer just that Lisa Cadre gave us last week when she said, Oh yeah, you know, we quit about quitting at the top, and she said, We we you know we were number one, we quit. Or maybe actually Survivor was. And so very first reality TV meant something very specific, which is sort of like a social experiment. Ordinary uh people put in a unusual situation and you film them and you see what happens. And there was an innocence to them as contestants. Exactly. And because uh in America th really the only things they had were scripted and news. They didn't ha they don't really have what we have, which is factual entertainment and things like that. So reality TV came to mean everything that wasn't scripted in America. And now it's sort of it it means that over the hair. So it started s like lots of these things. And factual entertainment would be you know, documentaries you know, behind the scenes at Marks and Spencer or inside the factory or the doghouse when you're you know adopting a dog. It just just little formatted real life things. Yeah, lock you that that would be a docu but but we we have a history. But wouldn't yeah, but wouldn't yeah, for the they didn't have those sort of things in the same way, I don't think. Exactly that. To them reality TV meant oh my god, what are all these things that aren't, you know, the sixty minutes news show or a big drama. You know, what what are these things? And it helped that there was a writer's strike at a certain point where which meant that they didn't have any Writers will always help themselves out by going on strike at exactly the wrong time. Yeah. We are now looking back twentyive- yefars hence at quite what that meant. And that the chase it was it was it was a gold rush for non scripted programming. So there's this enormous glut of shows because there was an enormous glut of viewers and an enormous glut of money. Um but there's always the law of diminishing returns in all of these things. And so things started to get more and more extreme. Certainly in a pitch, some the the hook would have to be bigger in a show, the kind of cliffhanger at the end of each show would have to be bigger as well. You know, that's how culture works. And it it it led to some of the extremes we're now seeing being exposed. Yeah, th I mean America's top model was full of it because there was such a ratchet effect with it. Fashion is obviously can be quite absurd anyway, but they were made to do like victims of shooting fashion, victims of a shooting as a fashion spread. So they would all have to be sort of splayed back against the w.all There was one girl whose mother had been um killed um but by by gun violence, and she had to be sort of like this splattered against the wall. And if you weren't up to it, if you weren't hard enough, then you weren't hard enough for this business. And it was all of that, you know, it was and she loved to scream at people, Tara, because it she just it was it it's so interesting seeing how episode one starts and then where she is uh by it by the time as time goes on, and it you just feel that it's chasing that dopamine that just became unavail able from the things that they used to do in the earlier series. You know, performers didn't have to be treated with respect in the same way that they had with established stars and I They didn't have agents, they didn't yeah, exactly. But it was almost like there w uh the there was this kind of pent up rage about dealing with talent, um that and it could be sort of dispensed with and they were almost sort of meat puppets, they could be manipulated. Actually their interactions could be completely misrepresented. They as you say there wouldn't be an agent saying hang on, what the hell did you just do to my client? And there's a sense of quid pro quo which is listen, you you would not be in front of this many viewers if we you weren't on the show. You want something out of it. And so that it felt I think to some producers like this is this is fair enough. Everyone's getting something out of it. Well it's like that it's it was something very pygmalian about it. I was going to say it would be Burnershaw. Yeah. But the actually like the George Burnshaw play, which there was quite sanitized Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. I built you, I made you, I created you from nothing. I could I can make people believe you're anything and but in a much darker way, I own you and you wouldn't be anything without me. Do you know there's actually a genuine play that's behind the whole of reality television and that is Jean Paul Sartre's The Hui Clau, which is where headers other people uh three people in the ante room of hell. That's where that comes from. And I was watching it at the Edinburgh Festival maybe in 1990 in the Bedlam Theatre. I saw that production. No way. Oh my god, that's really hilarious. Jesus,. Listen this we're on the right podcast. Yeah, I know. So I think, you know, lots of other bit. Shearer was there as well. Shearer, yeah. I remember him being there. Peston. Yeah. Peston was in it. And I came out of that and that idea of headers other people and that's I thought well that's where literally I think two days later the the idea for survivor came from. So it comes from it comes from Sartre. That that we both saw. Oh my god. We were in that tiny because it's not a big theatre. And the the great thing is, the most profitable franchise in in the history of television came out of it and neither of us made any money from it. So that's great. I don't think I deserved I was just in the audience, Richard. I think even I would not be trying to take Glen P to that. But what and what was interesting in this anyway, to back to the that to reality. Enough about plays. But back to reality books. It felt a bit more documentary at the start, and you know, documentary um makers have quite strict codes and there's quite a lot of sort of ethical underpinning and philosophy to it all. And then it became like, okay, she didn't do the thing we wanted to do. Would it be possible for us to edit the time when she did and make it look like she did it at the moment we need it for the kind of emotional arc of this episode. Yeah, and my counterpoint to that is certainly in in the very early days of Big Brother is being streamed twenty-four hours a day. And remember those days where you know people watch people sleep and actually you know that generation of documentary makers in the in the who are so lauded from the sixties and seventies who showed life as it is that w all of that was very artful and all of that was constructed in an edit suite and actually big brother particularly was one of those shows where everything was on show all the time quite hard to do a villain edit if everyone is seeing your dailies. It absolutely from that point onwards became the norm that you could you know create your own narratives. But I think in the very early days of Big Brother at least, there was a purity to it, which is let's just see what happens. Let's put these bit it was enough at that point. Amazing things did happen. Do you know there's an a there's a US series where and it's not like the first series, they all decide first of all, they get on w they start getting on very well and they try to sort of live in a harmonious sort of community. But one of them does literally lose their mind, I think, but not in a in a sort of violent way, but thinks that there are being messages left everywhere saying if we all walk out, we will all get a million pounds. They debate it for hours saying, even if not, we'll be making a point. Um they start digging up the garden looking for buried m money. And actually the guy who uh the it's CBS, isn't it Les Mim is a d he ran CBS, he's like the big kind of Titan, sends a message saying, You tell them that if they walk out, we're putting another lot straight back in because they're just losing the show. They think these guys are actually gonna do it. It was like a cult moment. But imagine that the the meeting where Les we just we just need to talk to you about the uh this this new show. Everybody then came into the market. They said, What else have you got? What can you do with people? What sort of environment can we put people in? How can we put people in we did a show years ago uh Ender Mod called Chained where people were handcuffed together. There's in fact there's a show on Channel Four now called Handcuff. It's ex it's it's exactly that. We did a show called Shattered where you weren't really allowed to sleep, although we we worked up very early in the production process that you couldn't do that. And so they weren't allowed to sleep, but they were allowed a 15 minute sleep every two hours or something. That was one th by the way, this you remember we've talked before and we've got a a great sort of bonus at I can't remember if it's one or two episodes about in Mike Darnell, the absolute evil genius of who worked at Fox and was the evil genius of this era. And whenever he heard a lot of people, you know, when they heard the show was coming out, they were like, right, we're doing the same thing then. And they would try and get their shows up in like 10 days. One of like I think the chamber was versus something called the chair and you would tie to a chair. He was but that was a c that sort of start that does a quiz show, which is can you answer questions under pressure, which is sort of a perfectly neat idea and then yeah, someone took 'cause Fear Factor was huge. Fear Factor hosted by it's fun funny that who peop people who disappear from from our culture, Fear Factor was a huge show in America. We made it. Uh uh hosted by Joe Rogan. Where is he now? I knew that. Yes. So it's now twenty-five years on and these documentaries looking back at what happened and the uh the morals of the time are becoming incredibly popular, like really, really huge hits. I think it's interesting also that white UK stuff has been sort of fetishised for so long, but people are now moving back into the nineties in terms of that's the last great decade. So rather than saying, wow, this is an amazing time, which at which point you always want to say this was the era of train wreck celebrities, the 2000s, you know, it was an awful time. Reality TV was so dark or whatever. Now people have moved back to the 90s, they feel able to take a look at this and look at the dark side of the decade that they've just spent the last however many years fetishizing. Yeah, exactly. I mean listen, there's some dark sides to the nineties as well. But we'd have to worry about that for a while. Yeah, yeah. And then they'll make the documentaries about those. With things like America's next top model and the biggest loser, you can see that these things start in quite a pure way and quite a gentle way, which is oh that's an interesting idea. You know, people are interested in weight loss. We can get some ordinary human beings uh and we can help them lose weight. Oh yeah. America's net a dream to be a model. Um you know we can get people from all across America, they can come and do various tasks and one of them gets a huge contract. Well I I mean God bless they start purely. Yeah. Well yeah. Tara Banks, who was the sort of host of it and also felt like, oh I'm becoming a mogul varet, which I think was probably a key part of his appeal to her. I mean, God love it. I do I do think she's one of she is a monster, but I think she's one of those monsters that's made not born. To become a successful model as she did modeling is a disgusting business. It always has been and, it's maybe a bit less so now, but to some degree, it always will be. And for her to come up and do as well as she did being a black woman in that business, I think some th bad things have happened to her. And she never talks about them because I think she sort of self-identifies as a strong person, and I I'm all for that as a credo. And she she'd internalized, I think, so much of that awful industry that what they ended up doing to these, and they they would have these hopefuls. I made them do these shoots like that. Yeah, it's called Reality Check colon America's not next up model. And that colon makes me think, oh, there's a strand in this. Reality checks, something else. They're just trying to build a continuum. It's quite difficult to hear from Gen Z about, you know, I can't believe you lived through these brutal times. You're like, I know. Your biggest star is like, you know, Mr. Beast and, you know, all the other lots many other YouTubers who arguably making people do quite odd things for money. And also, you you're watching families like this where there's no control. I mean, there's the much less control. And you know, they've been documentaries about um YouTube s families like Piper Raquel and um Netflix have done a few of those where you think well they had absolutely they have these people have no Oh we're doing exactly the same thing again. Yeah, we're doing a hundred percent the same thing again. So The Swan, which as I say, there's there's about to be a a a documentary about now so we can you you can't watch that one yet. But The Swan was a series. Amanda Byron hosted it. And the swan was a show where women with poor self-image, I don't know where they cast them from. Ugly ducklings. Ugly ducklings. As they like to call them. Uh were taken under the wing of a bigger swan. And had had like a a makeover over a series of months which included, you know, a glow up but also included plastic surgery, blob. Lots of stuff like that. The key thing about the show was these women had no access to a mirror for the entire duration of the makeover. And that was the point of it, is they were being made over and made over and made over, but they could never see themselves until the last moment where they are revealed Because reveal is such a huge part of reality TV. All of it was yeah, even if it's a and all the particularly on the makeover shows. And uh expectation of making this have clearly come across stories that suggest maybe this wasn't as wholesome as uh uh that description makes it sound. So it'll be interesting to hear what happens with that. But it was a wild west, as you say, we have we have not learned from it at all because we're still, you know, this was this is the very beginnings of the attention economy, I get in the attention economy as as is only ramped up. Um can I mention two shows though? One was a German show, uh which is called Sperm Race, and Sperm Race was a twelve German guys, we take them all to Cologne, and they give us a sample of their sperm. Take one sperm from each of these men, place it near an egg, and whichever sperm reaches the egg first, that person wins a Porsche . And you go, okay. So it's the other one was, and as I say, it was an absolute wild west at this time and stuff was coming out that you'd be like, whoa., okay Dutch Endemol had a show called uh uh De Klote Don ish , the great donor show. Uh and the idea of this show is there is a woman who is dying, uh, and there are three people who need a kidney transplant. She interviews them and decides that she's going to give her kidney to one of these people . There's enormous furore from everywhere. The Dutch government, the Dutch church, every you know, everywhere had gone absolutely crazy. It was it dominated . They are. But dominated the news in the Netherlands for for a really, really long time. And they knew the day it was um gonna go out. This is 2007, uh sort of June 2007. Uh, and this show goes out and everyone is watching it because everyone is like, I mean, this is absolutely mental. Goes out on a uh Dutch channel called BNN. And it goes out this show, uh, Dick Rotterdona show, five years to the day that the guy who set up BNN had died because he was on the waiting list for a kidney transplant, and the Netherlands had the slowest take-up of uh organ donations in Europe . The entire show was a publicity stunt. The woman was an actress, she wasn't dying at all. The three people who needed a kidney all needed a kidney. They were on the organ d they were on the waiting list for it and the entire show is you have got to sign up for organ donation. You have got to do it. The whole thing was a hoax. The whole thing was to raise uh the you know It's so extreme. It changed the law in the Netherlands. Even on during the show, twelve thousand people signed up. You know, three hundred and fifty people a year were dying in the the Netherlands before that. They got over a million people which in the Netherlands is all like watching this show because they were expecting, oh my God, what are they doing now? And they did this show which had enormous uh impact on social change. We knew right from the start, by the way, the Dutch has said, look, this is what we're doing. This is why we're doinging it. So we were gett pressing. Well that really is a social experiment. How amazing. That is totally fascinating. I must say that a lot of the ones they're going back to now obviously we've just said that um it's they've got brutalities of their own, d Gen Z and Gen A. What I find quite sort of depressing about this as a genre is a big part of me suspects it's a chance to have a second bite at the footage, because what else are you gonna do with the old, you know, it's like, oh uh I mean we were just talking about it. You know, you can I mean Big Brother you could definitely do the definitely p people you can have talking heads talking about that as as as it goes on. I mean it's as you say, it's an amazing way of repurposing stuff. And you know it's recanting there is yeah, but there's a part of it that just feels uh I don't feel because you know there was that huge scandal just this last week about the married uh married at first sight Australia. They got someone who'd been thrown out of the show or la had left the show, someone called Brooke Crompton and she came back on for a dinner party, at which her role she'd clearly just been told to insult everyone. She insulted absolutely everyone, abused them. It was really horrible. This is aired incredibly recently, last fortnight. Ever there's been this huge outcry . The statement is hysterical from Brooke. Um, this behaviour is not a reflection of who I am at my court, and I hope that Australia will one day see this. The grandiosity of Australia. Yeah, I hope they will see this. But my feeling when they do when they were doing this and with this whole new genre is it's a nice idea. I think they're like a second bite at the footage. I don't believe that they're doing it to sort of cleanse the earth and um plant new things because we're not seeing that at all. And also another part of me does feel like we're stuck in this endless which we've talked about on so many different subjects. It's another form of reboot of kind of old IP. Yeah. I will say this though, the one thing I always think when I watch those shows, you watch the biggest loser and things like that, the the documentaries, and they'll have the producer on and they'll say, Yeah, but don't forget, you know, things are very different then. And I was there then, and things were not that different then. You knew what right and wrong was and the people who would you w when I see some of the justifications for what people did on those shows, and I think back to rooms that you know I had been in, and everyone knew every everything I hear from those producers' mouths, I'm like, no. Absolutely no way. No no one was thinking I'm sure this is okay. I totally agree. And when I look back on some of the things I wrote about celebrity culture during because a lot of this was in the noughties and it was such a completely toxic era for celebrity culture. And you know, it was the era of Britney and shaving her head and being completely tormented. And I've said before in this podcast, I remember once seeing when there was a big lots of rumours that she was pregnant, uh Paparazzo put her his the camera up a skirt and there was blood on her knickers and he it the headline was simply she's not pregnant. We knew this was wrong. I wrote about the all of that stuff in Heat magazine, the circle of shame, celebrities being kind of reduced to this , you know, oh they're sweating, they've got cellulite, all of that stuff. You knew it was wrong at the time, you know, and people had lived through eating disorders and lived through all sorts of things and actually were aware of it. And it was a nonsense to I I completely agree with you. It was done and it made a lot of people lots of money, but it you did people did know that it was wrong. We've we've got worse now because you've cut it it's bec permeated everything, this type of culture. Reality TV culture has sort of permeated everything. You see it in the Oval Office now all the time. Yeah. But And it came from the Bedlam Theatre in nineteen ninety , a production of We Clow. But we were in the same we wouldn't have been the same night, but it might have been. It might have been. You never know. You never know. Um and another time we'll we'll we'll talk about the story of space cadets . Because we always have questions about space cadets. And that that was something in the very early days that that that one I have to say I was uh uh at the beginning involved with another a story for another time when when we convinced people they've been to space after the break we're gonna be talking about Sora the open AI's video app that is now no more. It was gonna destroy Hollywood, it has now destroyed itself. Welcome back everybody. Now Sora , you remember last year we told you it was this incredible piece of kit that was going to ruin Hollywood. Disney put a billion dollars into it. It could make incr just extraordinarily film like video. Just unbelievable what it was doing. The worry was that it was going to put lots and lots of people out of business, that it was gonna absolutely, you know, destroy the internet to you know, cover it in slop. Uh but it is dead. Open AI have stopped it. Uh we're gonna talk about why. Yes. Remember uh six months ago genuinely it was the I think most downloaded app in the app uh in the app store. And they wanted to turn it into a social platform and they initially began by just copyright infringing on an completely unprecedented scale. You could make anything happen at all. You could make. And then it sort of galvanized Hollywood into saying this can't happen. And there was a sort of huge pushback. But then so they disabled the use of characters and actors who hadn't given permission. But then they did do a deal with Disney and they uh who was going to invest a billion in OpenAI, um, and they used said they will use character lights lightnesses. There were two hundred characters, not ness not voices. So anything that kind of used other human stuff they couldn't really do, although they are made by human um animators. So the question is, has Sora closed down because Hollywood pushed back? No. No. Very much uh saw it shut down because it was wildly, wildly unprofitable. And even in the world of um AI and that crazy Wild West, it was absolutely unsustainable. Don't forget OpenAI have got very, very large pocketed backers, lots of VCs involved with it. Microsoft uh puts a lot of money in and this thing was costing them roughly saw existing in the real world was costing them $15 million a day. It's so nuts. And I've seen estimates on each video, some saying uh a dollar thirty per video generated, some saying two dollars per video. But but it's free to the user. And it's it was so and also it was a sort of great novelty, like one of those actual, you know, they show you that you can do it and you can make all, you know, you can make Elsa and Ana do this or that. And then you're like And the reason it costs so much by the way, that's the processing power, it's the computational power behind every single video that gets made. You know, it w we know that but one of the key things about AI is they use a a lot of chips and those chips are incredibly expensive. Uh and you know, the infrastructure behind AI is the thing that's, you know, going to uh destroy the planet if something else doesn't do it beforehand. So it was costing them a huge amount of money. There was an energy issue at the moment. So I think it's fine. I think I think everything is let me just check on the straight off more moves. Everything I think everything is good. Um so it was costing them a huge amount of money and using up an awful lot of computational power they could use elsewhere. And as you say, it wasn't actu ally particularly doing them any good. Because what is it? It's just a nothing. I mean they had a big sort of meeting and they said avoid distractions and it's all about for them like business and productivity applications. Don't be distracted by side quests. Um, you know, they're now in the Pentagon, sorry, Department of War to give it its new title. Um, and they want to say d dominant over Gemini, they're really worried, far, you know, you've much more worried about um Anthropic and Claude, and they've got to allocate resources, as you say. Let's talk about the Hollywood side of it. Because to me, in a way, first of all, Disney, they've got a new CEO now and this deal was done on the previous one, Bob Iger. So it's quite nice in some ways that Josh DeMorrow doesn't necessarily have to have this headache. But but they used up a huge amount of goodwill doing this because people were very angry about it. The th the story they'll probably tell themselves is that Hollywood did what it bet does best when the chips are down. We all came together and we pushed them away. What has actually happened is it's like, yeah, there's no money in your business. And I I I'm just speaking as open AI there. It's like, yeah, we we pass through, there's nothing here. Well it's like we talked we talked about the book business the other day. They've they've they've absolutely passed through like a hurricane and left a lot of mess behind. But there's two types of business here. There's the there's the direct-to-consumer business, which is what this is supposed to be. This is supposed to be millions of people making videos. Can make extra videos. Big companies could pay ten thousand dollars a year and be able to use this stuff. And they're just in the millions of people sitting at home making videos market. It didn't exist in any way whatsoever. OpenAI found that out very, very early on and therefore not sustainable for them. But I think they still have designs on being in the back room of Hollywood. That's what AI is particularly interested in. It's is interested in running the bits that you don't see. It's interested in Well it's interested in and yes, in enterprise and business and going all the making your entire running your company for you. And what it's done in books and in video here as well, it is when those first the ch chat GPT stuff was coming out and everyone's going, Oh my god, have you seen this thing and what it can do? And then when Sora came out and everyone, Oh my god, have you seen this? Have you seen what it can do? Those are huge PR coups for um open AI. So chat GPT and SOAR are huge, absolutely huge PR coups for open AI at a at a point where they're going, we want to be the preeminent AI company of the world. So headlines, headlines, headlines, not something they were making a huge amount of money out of, you know, books and videos and stuff like that. And then you get to the point where actually the headlines are unhelpful because the industry pushes back and at that point they move on because they weren't interested anyway. Actually the relationship between Hollywood Hollywood and the AI companies reminds me so much of the special relationship, like only one side's thinking about it. Yeah. And it's definitely not the AI companies. Yeah. It or or like, you know, uh the l lots of boxers do this or Connor McGregor, you know, I don't even think about my opponent. Okay. They they do not even think about Hollywood at all. They really do as you say, they m they might be interested in some sort of corporate thing, but that that could as set as well be a soap company or a car company or whatever it is. It's good for headlines until it's not good for headlines and then you move on. But yeah. Another thing we'll say about them is I don't trust anything they say anymore. They've they've they They fib buttons. I don't want to say they lie. Yeah. But they are but they are f Your Honor. I didn't liars. But they announce complete cobblers and it's not actually true. And it just to say they did the same with that massive investment. They said uh NVIDIA is investing a hundred billion and so now it's been sort of commuted back in some weird way to thirty. This thing isn't even happening at all. And the trouble is it's reported on by journalists who are scared because they're in another industry that's terrified by this thing. And so they they report on it as though all I I think you have to now say every time you're reporting on this at all, okay, how much is this gonna cost this company? Because all the divisions are fighting for access to tokens or whatever so they can do their little bit. And it if it if it doesn't sound realistic, like they're gonna use all this power for what? Uh making videos of Elsa and it's also going to be a social media platform. That's as bad as Will Smith's idea for a social media platform. I I don't really believe in this. Well for a social media platform. Oh my god, he had this thing I know this is a sidebar, but it's anytime I hear his name Will Smith pitched this idea for something I can't remember what's called it's like Earth 2000 it maybe it's a film and he pitched it to Sony and we know about all of this because of the so the Sony hack that happened and Will Smith pitched it and said, I I want to own like all of this. He was i he was entering his kind of mogul imperium and he uh wanted to own all of it, but it wouldn't it it was gonna be so mesmeric for the planet and everyone was going to want to talk about it that it wouldn't be possible for them to do it on the existing social networks. He also wanted a social network created just to talk about this universe he was building out. It didn't happen and you know some other stuff happened in Will Smith's life which was rather more prosaic. And Park. Yeah, and Park. But I don't think why why would you believe anything they say? I I think that they they make up all of these sort of stories and it's not at all clear . He it's it's very odd to me and it and Sam Altman, my worst one currently. It's very difficult with the Tet Lords because there is a lot of there is it's a bit like the world's richest man, in fact many of them are the same people. But there's the churn of like who is the most loathsome. He's had it for me for quite a long time. He's he's been number one for many, many, many, many weeks. It they've completely elimin ated the look of him, even. They've eliminated that uncanny valley in AI, really. They don't that it doesn't look like that any longer. We used to look at things and say, yeah, but it doesn't look quite real. Now it's like, okay, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt really are fighting on a bridge and I really fully believe it. Not with him, though. They can't do it with him. He looks like someone who's wearing a sort of state-of-the-art human suit. Like in the next situation of it might be convincing. Maybe he is. Maybe he yeah. I wouldn't rule it out. I wonder who it is. Maybe it's Paul Chuckle. That'd be a reveal, wouldn't it? It would be a second act in his life. Yeah. So is this good news that uh Sora has closed down and we're not going to suddenly be flooded with all of this slop? I will say this about it, which is the real story of AI has not been that all along. So that's been, you know, headlines and you know, Sora and what it can do. Um but AI has been getting its hooks into Hollywood and into all of the different um film industries of the different countries in very, very different ways for a very, very long time. So Sora is gone, it's disappeared. You cannot use it. However, everybody I speak to uses Kling. Right? So Kling is Sora, but it's Chinese. Cost about the same, cost you about ten thousand dollars a year for a really big professional subscription to this . Now why can Kling do that when OpenAI couldn't? It's because Kling is Chinese. It is backed by the government, is not backed by venture capitalists. So they are not fussed about getting a return. What they're fussed about is getting market share and having a land grab, and they do not need to worry about losing fifteen million dollars a day for you know uh so everyone is using Cling it, does pretty much exactly the same thing. It's a it's a rival by the lots of people use C dance as well, which is the bike dance version of it. But they they're both which was Tom Tom and Brad fighting on the on the bridge. That was C dance. So these things are still out there. They're being used by everybody. You're not seeing them on screen yet because you know, Hollywood works out w what is, you know, acceptable and what's not acceptable and lots of backroom stuff is acceptable, lots of early development work. They figure they can do that and nobody knows about it. And I get it. Uh and by the way, they have to do this because you know, their competitors are doing it. You you can't afford to not do it anymore. This is it's this this has happened. It's already done. This is not kind of this is not a a a fight that has to be that's going to be fought. It is already done. You know, I I've spoken to lots of people who said that that so many Hollywood productions and developments that they're always in all using runway gen three as well. That's a huge thing in Hollywood at the moment. So these things are absolutely powering the next generation of Hollywood. They're certainly powering the development of what is happening next. And so while all eyes were on, you know, our kids in their bedrooms gonna make a thing about elsa the AI industry is absolutely the bedrock now of a lot of Hollywood and listen it's gonna make producing things cheaper, but the main way is gonna make producing things cheaper is by getting rid of a lot of jobs. But it is there uh and it is there quietly. That's the thing that they didn't look for headlines or anything like that. They just looked to sell it and people are using it and it's going to be a good because Hollywood is complicit in it. Hol Hollywood doesn't want those headlines either. Like the headlines that they fought back against the air companies. You can't do a likeness of Robert De Niro. Oh my God, you can't be Matt Damon. This is we will fight for our people. We'll fight for our writers. We'll fight for our talent. Whereas every single other bit of the business they are not fighting for. They're fighting for the bit that is visible. They're fighting for the bit where people are famous and people are celebrities and people are allowed to write artic les. The rest of it, they are absolutely integrating. And by the way, so is every other industry in the world. It's not like it's not like Hollywood are gonna hypocrites or kind of awful they just they can't run their businesses without it now in the in the same way you know if you're a healthcare company you can't run your business with without it anymore you certainly won't won't be able to within a year. So the only um bit of the wild west that remains because they're in all of those areas. The iny're in development, they're edit, they're in you know, post production, they're in all of those areas. The only bit that remains is this idea of can you make films without actors and writers? It's the only thing that's left. Uh and in some ways it's the ballwalk that Hollywood actually is standing up uh to, which is which is good. You know, it is it is an area where I think if AI is comfortable that it can be helpful in the development of most of what happens in uh in Hollywood and it can own some of the means of production, I think it's the one thing that's happy to go, okay, just for now, we'll let that go. But you know, if you're Robert De Niro and you want to b take half a billion dollars for your likeness in perpetuity, I guess those deals will start happening so the the walls will will slightly crack. Um if you are Kling or you are um C dance, they worry an awful lot less about your copyrights and your likeness and your IP and good luck suing them. So th th the walls are cracking there as well. So, you know, it is the last frontier. This idea of, you know, is it a real human beinging I'm watch is that really Tom Cruise is this really written by a uh uh a human being I think in terms of people's images I think there is a slippery slope because I think that um, you know, you'll be able to do that with Cling almost immediately and and it's probably going to be quite hard to sue them. I think the last thing that will remain is high-end writing. I do think that that's the last thing that will remain, because that's the we've spoken before, that's the thing that AI is wor st at. Um, but Sora didn't work, and it didn't because Holloway pushed back, but because it was making no money. But these big AI companies and these big AI textor video and prompter video things are absolutely in the heart of Hollywood and you are not going to get rid of them, I think. Okay. Have you got any recommendations? I have indeed, I'm sure I've recommended it before, but I will do every single series. Stacy Solomon Sort Your Life Out on BBC One, you can get it on iPlayer. It's so beautiful. I love it so much. I love her. Uh and it's about people who've you know, and everyone's had the situation where your house just feels like oh it I'm slightly overwhelmed by how much stuff I've got and y you know it's not arranged properly and they just go in uh and they take all of your stuff and they lay it out in a warehouse and it's just like all the best television programs it is not about the thing that it says it's about. It is not about decluttering your house and you know getting better thanks free. It's about who you are as a human being and the things you've accumulated and why and the things you care about and why and the things that you should really let go and why. And just week after we ek you're just like weeping. It's like a home improvement show, but of course it's not. It's uh it's it's it's about uh it's about humanity. So I I love that show. And can I also say can I also uh uh uh a plea from our uh our producer Joey. We get so many questions about sort your life out and I don't know anyone who makes it. Listen, I admire them, but we know no one on that team. If you are on that team, um do get in touch with uh with Joey 'cause 'cause we have got a lot of questions for you. The email is therest is entertainment at goalhanger.com. We will be back on Thursday for a questions and answers episode. And also uh on Friday with the second part of our great fun Spice Girls series, the story of the Spice Girls. Uh, if you want to join um for as a member for ad-free listening and those those bonus episodes, it's the rest is entertainment.com. Otherwise, see you on Thursday.