The Rest Is Entertainment - Has Charli XCX Escaped Brat Summer?

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

How do you follow up a monster hit like Charli XCX’s BRAT? Will a corporate buyout ruin Letterboxd? Are we all just content creators now? With everyone from your dentist to your neighbour posting content, and massive companies eschewing traditional advertising to pay micro-influencers, are we all just influencers now? Richard and Marina explore the booming content creation industry… do dentists make better content creators than Premier League footballers? Charli xcx has released her new album, Music, Fashion, Film, two years after the inescapable success of BRAT summer. How is the pressure to follow up a huge cultural hit different for modern pop stars? Cult film app Letterboxd is up for sale for a reported $250 million. Why do the likes of A24 and Sony see it as such a valuable asset, and can its highly engaged community survive a corporate takeover? The Rest is Entertainment is brought to you by Octopus Energy, Britain's most awarded energy supplier. Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. Lending is subject to status. You could lose your home if you don't keep up your mortgage repayments. Conditions apply. 1996 average first-time buyer deposit based on Office National Statistics House Price Index data. Summer sale is here: get an annual membership for a third off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Video Editor: Adam Thornton Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Senior Producer: Joey McCarthy Social Producer: Emma Jackson Exec Producer: Ami Bennett Filmed at www.westdigitalstudios.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The rest is entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. Now, we're going to be talking about an expression which I hadn't heard till seven seconds ago, which is someone getting their flowers. Can you tell me what that means? Well, it means like you've been around a long time, but people suddenly think, hang on a second, you're amazing and you should be recognised. So you're finally getting your dew. You're getting your flowers. And you're being garlanded.

Now, I would say someone like this is someone like Gene Smart, who plays the lead in Hacks. She plays Deborah Vance. Okay, Jean Smart is extraordinary. She did a huge amount. of TV and stage work. And there was a sense that she was sort of always brilliant. But then this one role came along, Deborah Vance and Hacks, they literally just give her the Emmy every year now.

She gets her flowers every year. She gets her Emmy every year. As we always talk about Octopus's customer service, your accounts run by about 10 or 12 people. You've got a small team. They know who you are. Yes. And they are permitted to send flowers every week to a customer who might just be going through something, whatever it is.

So they can recognise it's not an apology. It's just because someone was going through something and you get your flowers. Another example of they seem to do business in a very interesting and customer-focused way. Imagine if Gene Smart is an octopus customer, might get her flowers twice. Yeah, every week. Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Resters Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard. Ozman, hello, Marina.

What are we talking about this week? We are going to talk about this idea that there's some incredible statistics about how many people self-define as a content creator. these days and we thought it was worth exploring that and what it means. Yes, we're going to be talking about Charlie XX's new album and how you follow up an enormous hit like Brat. And we are also talking about the film website Letterbox, one of my absolute favourite websites in the entire world, which is

unbelievably brilliant, but it's up for sale and everyone's worried it might no longer be quite as brilliant. We shall find out, I suppose. Okay, are we all going to be content creators because Illuminate, who are the entertainment data experts, they do a sort of six-monthly report. They found an unbelievable statistic, which is that 39% of Americans now identify as content creators. 39%? Nearly two in five, identify as active content creators across digital platforms. And I think it's interesting. The word creator in itself is, you know, when everyone's sort of had to stop talking about global warming and started calling it climate change.

The word itself is now professionalized. Instead of just being like a YouTuber or an influencer, which seemed like it was from fake work, but tens of millions of people now identify as paid creators. I think that's extraordinary because we will get to the difference between just identifying someone and actually making money as one. But that means that there is a sort of massive middle class in the creator economy, which I think Goma Sachs, they projected that next year it will be worth $480 billion the creator.

When we're talking about creators, these are not just kids playing video games. These are dentists who come home at the end of the day and do dental tutorials. These are accountants who come home and talk you through spreadsheets. There is huge amounts of niche content out there, which is monetizable, which is made by professionals. But I think that 39% of everyone being a content creator might be pushing it a bit. self-identifying thing is doing a lot of work. But there's this is incredible gig economy now of people taking their professional skills, finding a niche audience and then finding ways of monetizing the audience. It's a, it's a real thing. Yeah. Media content has become democratized incredibly fast.

This has happened really, really quickly. But also the world of work is changing so rapidly that, as I say, hundreds, hundreds of millions of people around the globe will identify as content creators. And that original Goldman report found that sort of 4% of them made over $100,000 a year. I mean, there's still a lot, 4% of a lot of people making a lot of money. So there's a few different areas. So we should start with business before we get into the everyone of it. I was listening to something the other day with the CEO of Unilever, who's called, yeah. No, no, it's really interesting, right?

You know, you really do have a hinterland. Yeah, no. Yes, I do. But, okay, so Unilever is one of the world's largest consumer product companies. They've got masses of brands. They've got about 150 brands and things like Dove and Vaseline and Helmonds and whatever it is. They're one of those companies that owns all the other companies you've heard. Yeah.

And 4 billion people sort of touch one of their products every day effectively because they've got, they operate in 190 countries and it's kind of everything. But they don't have a product called, which is a uni lever. No, they don't. Which is a lever that does everything. Like a kind of one of those remote controls that controls everything. that does everything. If I was unilever, that's what I'd be doing. They have 100,000 employees, but what's really interesting is that they've replaced almost completely replacing ads with

creators. They have scaled from having 10,000 paid creators to, they have 300,000 paid creators. Yeah, and this is, by the way, what we would also call influences. This world where we say, people who are sending you things. That world has changed utterly. We think of influences of people or sort of, you know, over a million followers on various things, which is what they now call a macro influencer. And the world we're talking about is the world of micro-influences, which is somewhere between 10 and 100,000 followers. So you can have 10,000 followers and be making money.

Because, you know, either they've worked out that having a lot of small influencers is actually a much better bang for their buck than having two or three massive influences. Or just traditional broadcast advertising. He's presided over this complete shift away from it. He says he wants one in every zip code, every postcode around the whole world. And so instead of that kind of top-down corporate messaging, it is all social first and creator disseminated. That's one big company, but it's really interesting to see that they are already on 300,000

paid influences. That's insane. Not just one big company, but sort of a company that's always been at the forefront of advertising, always been at the forefront of branding and marketing and where we go next and where they lead, an awful lot of other people will follow. So this is not going to get any smaller in the next few years, this idea of micro-influences. Those are the small ones.

But then equally in business, you've got, and people talk about this all the time now, founders can't just be, you know, you can't just invent your thing. Documenting it and posting about it is just a huge, social activity is a massive part of the job. And you're expected to document your thinking publicly. it's not like an optional marketing strategy anymore.

You have to build the product, then you have to run the company, but you have to be an always-on creator. You have to. You have to tell your story. Because there's no search traffic anymore. Yeah, and it's a familiar thing. We've all, you know, that idea that, you know, the story behind a brand is very important and, you know, the origins of a brand is important.

But now it's sort of everything. At the beginning, as you say, when you're launching a product, if you go for an IPO, you can see now that the, you know, Elon Musk is the most obvious example, but it happens all the way down, that the founders of a company, or the chief executives of a company, have to be able to tell their own story in their own space before you have an IPO. I mean, you literally sort of can't do anything in any sphere now without going on camera and telling people what it is without posting. Without posting. Yeah, I find it exhausting. Yeah, but then, so moving down from that, the sort of middle class,

it's interesting that there are so many now journalists who are sort of just like have become a creator. And there's a woman who's studying all these people who were just moving away from kind of traditional legacy outlets. And she said, there's not one creator that's losing sleep, wondering, is the Washington Post or the New York Times taking my audience? Because that is not happening, but the reverse is. So these big, big kind of legacy things, people are moving away and people are moving into these kind of individual spaces. So the next thing you have to think of is, Like, is the creator economy, is it like a content industry or is it actually like an acquireable asset class? Clearly, like, Unilever thinks it's almost like an asset class.

You know, an asset class is something like shares or whatever, real estate or bonds or something that performs, shares similar characteristics and kind of performs in the same way in markets. So, but life has become lifestyle content. So all of these people, the supposedly private self, everybody posts all things like their pregnancy tests or their child's first steps or their child's first steps. everything. It becomes public labor all the time. And it started with things like the mummy bloggers and then suddenly these people who were just doing something at home about and then really interestingly you saw, oh my gosh, these people are now creators. They have these huge businesses. But it's now so far vast and it's everywhere. I mean, dating is completely enmeshed with it.

But this idea of creator as a social identity, a lot of it is a form of, you know, people want to say they're a creator. Why do you think that is? It's like people have always wanted to say they're an artist. Yeah. Because it's, you know, there's because they are an artist at heart. That's the point. And, you know, lots of people in their hearts are creative and they are creators. And this gives you the opportunity to self-identify as that.

In the same way that very, very rich men and children are very, very rich men have always self-identified as film producers. But, you know, it's like, it's a thing you can say and do. I think personally, I think it's very good to have any outlet for creativity. I also think that it's great that it's reducing obstacles to genuinely creative people to make a bit of money as well. But the idea that 39% of people self-identify as content creators is plainly absurd. But that's, you know, 49% of people in Britain self-identifies working class. And we know that's not true as well. It's so you can't identify as what you want, right?

There's an awful lot of right-wing bloggers who are self-identifying as content creators who don't let anyone else self-identify. And he goes, but hold on, you're saying that you're a content creator, but you know, you don't make any money. So you're self-identifying. I want to. Yeah, but I think that money doesn't have to be involved for people to feel that, but creation is now default behavior. It's, you're, if you feel like if you're not doing it, then you're not participating. And that's been very, and obviously AI is going to further turbocharge that, because it's much easier to create things. But there's that, what felt like a newish category, what they call a prosumer. So you're not like,

just a producer, but you're also a consumer. That's now, I think it's almost a cultural norm. It certainly is if 39% of people are saying it. Well, there's two personality types, and this ties into it, which is people who are always on transmit and people who are mainly on receive. And culturally, we've turned into a group of people who are always on transmit. And that's, you sort of think, well, we need receivers as well for this economy. We can't, we can't all be transmitting all the time. But if you're a pro sumer, then you're both. And that's what people are. because they're sort of, they produce stuff themselves, but they are also, the consumption is part of the participation. So going back to that thing of like the most intimate moments of people's lives are posted, but actually people are just online all the time.

And I've talked about this before, but you are basically, you work for the platforms. People spend five or six hours on these platforms. They work for the algorithm. Every day. Every day. That is, if you did five to six hours of anything else, you would be doing what we used to call a part-time. job. And they have other jobs. They have other jobs. But I actually increasingly think that their real role in the economy is the five to six hours they're spending online powering these vast

and insanely rich companies, often for free. So micro-influencing is interesting, I think. And the reason why it's really, really taken off, because you would say someone with 10,000 followers, is that really of any use to a brand? Now, the engagement is the absolute key. And that's what all advertisers and all marketers look for. So if you've got, say, people over at one million followers, they get an engagement of about 1%. By engagement, that could literally just be replying, or it can be the most important engagement, of course, is buying, is, you know, putting some money into the ecosystem. Micro-influences have about three times that. They have like 3.2% engagement. So they've got far fewer people, but the people who are following them are far more engaged.

And because it is a more personal thing, if you follow Cristiano Ronaldo, there's 600 million people following him. And so you know a lot of those are bots. A lot of those are not. There's a lot of natural wastage there. If you've got a dentist who has 12,000 people following them, those people tend to be quite engaged. They're following for a reason. They've chosen to follow that person. They chose to follow for very niche advice. If you're a dentist, I choose dentist because there are examples of these people making a million pound a year who become creators. All day, every day, you've got new patients coming in and you're saying, oh, by the way,

you're brushing slightly too hard, or this is the new way to brush it, and make sure this is how I would floss, not that. And every time, every single patient is saying, oh, God, that's really interesting. And next time they come back in and go, I really started flossing differently because of what you says, thank you. It doesn't take more than a couple of years of that to think, I mean, everyone I talk to really, really likes this advice that I give.

Why don't I just sort of stick it on a video. I've got a couple of hours at the end of the day. I could do this. I can get a ring light. Yeah, I can get a ring light. And so you show people how to brush. how to floss. You show them stuff that is obvious to you because it's in your professional wheelhouse, but it might be less obvious to them. And suddenly everyone's like, everyone's

like that one individual person. So instead of talking to one patient at a time, you talk to 12,000 people, it doesn't take long for an oral B to go, oh, that's interesting. This person, lots of people seem to really, really like what they do. We will put some money into them. And by the way, just huge multiples less than you have to put into, you know, someone like Stacey Solomon or someone with huge following. We'll put some money into them. We'll see what return we get on our investment. And over the last few years,

they have seen time and time and time again that they're getting really, really, really good return on their investment, that these people with smaller followers, but more engaged followers, are such a huge driver of the economy and people who people trust. But Unilever have 300,000 of these, and they want to massively scale that.

What could we do? We do. This is... I'm so sorry, you're involved in content creation right now. No. I know you've tried to stay away from it. I've fallen into my own snare. Yeah, but that is extraordinary that there are that many, and they're just trying to really, really build that up.

But what's more extraordinary is that it works. Yeah. That's the really, really interesting thing. It works so much better than the absolutely multiple millions and billions that they have effectively plowed into top-down corporate-led advertising. You see why the business up it works, and you see why this is a viable job for an awful lot of people. If you're sitting there and you have a job that you're aware you can,

you know things that other people don't know and things that people might find useful in their daily life, you can just start doing that, you know, don't do the things that everyone else has done. If you want to become a beauty blogger, that's dumb. There's people who are amazing, that, there's brilliant, unless you've got a new angle. But if you're a professional person who does something interesting that people don't know about, you can make money out of that. Brands will give you money. And if people come back and you get engagement, they will give you more money and you will grow more people. That's a interesting job to do. But everybody now works for the algorithm. That's the problem with it, I think, that is to do this, you are relying on Instagram or TikTok or

whatever platform you choose, and that can be taken away from you almost immediately. So, for example, if you're on TikTok, two ways are getting paid as a micro-influencer. First of you get money directly from the client, from a uni-leaver or someone like that. They will pay you for a post. or they might put you on a retainer, depends how that works. But secondly, the place where you can really make money is that you get a share of any marketplace money coming in. So TikTok has a very good shop front, which people buy things through. You get a share of that.

And that suddenly, you're like, but hold on, I used to go into the dental surgery every day. Now I'm getting money every time someone buys a particular type of toothbrush. Suddenly I'm on $250,000 a year and I can just sit at home. However, TikTok tomorrow, in the same way that, you know, Facebook have done with big publishers, TikTok tomorrow could change their terms of service. TikTok tomorrow could end your business. And that's a very precarious place to be.

But all work is precarious. And that's what people think now. I guess so. So people think more and more that all work is precarious. Yeah. And why would you not have a side hustle doing these things and always? Yeah, I suppose so. But if this is becoming such an enormous business and the one thing we need,

know about the TikToks and Instagrams and Facebooks of this world is the more money there is to be made, the more they try and rake of it. And that's probably coming out of your pocket. That, I would say, is speaking to your point about you being completely reliant on the platforms, and you are sort of working for the platforms as well. Everybody works in the content minds now. Everybody works down the content minds. But it's a very, very interesting way of getting, because the only way it really works is if you're good. The only way it really works is if you have authority and if people trust you and believe you. And you promote things to them that work for them because then they return.

So it has a meritocracy to it. I mean, as always, I always think of the hilarious thing of I bang on all the time about how, you know, there's fewer barriers to entry in the content, you know, these days. And how when I started on TV, everyone was middle class. And then you look at some of the big YouTubers and influencers. You go, oh, you all went to public school as well. There's something, you know, it happens there. But I do think it's a 39% of people saying their content creators and a good number of people genuinely making a living out of it

in a way that didn't used to happen. You talked about journalists as well. The other side of this coin, it's not just the own... Because it's become the kind of aspirational identity. Yeah. But the idea now that bands and journalists and people on that side of things have their own patrons and can get paid individually by people. Again, it's having that niche audience,

but who really trust you and like you and believe in you. And if you're a content creator, I always seen that podcast, Finn versus History, which is Finn Taylor and Horatio Gould. Someone's telling me the other day how much money they each make a year. And it's a huge amount of money entirely off their own back, entirely off people, you know, paying them directly, entirely off having a group of people who love what it is that you do

and being paid directly. And that, by the way, is much less platform-dependent than a lot of the influence and things. there are ways and means now of making money that they didn't used to be. And I just think that, you know, we can sort of talk about the platforms and we can talk about, oh God, everyone that was a creator. But there's just, there are so many people out there now who can make a living doing this, who wouldn't have been able to do it five years ago. Yeah, it's something about that is very powerful.

It's got a huge middle class. That's what I'm saying. Like for all economies, if they have a successful and thriving middle class, then perhaps they're going somewhere. Yeah, this is, this is definitely that. But, you know, it's, it's, it is very easy to sneer at the world of influencing, but it's, I'm not, I think we're all going to be there. No, I mean, previous, I mean, previously it's, you know, listen, I've written books where implementers have been the murder victims. You know, I've been, I've done it to. We solve murders, the first one. The next one is out in September. It is. But, you know, it, I think there is this, something has happened, something has changed and there are a new group of content creators who can get paid directly

by people to speak direct to small. It's a vast class of them. But the idea of the nicheness of our culture being where the money is now and the idea of journalists being able to write a Patreon for, you know, not a huge amount of people, but for that to be a better living than writing a column for a national newspaper or something like that. You know, it's, there's something good in that, isn't there? There's something isn't there in, we're destroying the hierarchy of work. This idea that you go to work for 45 years at the same place and you have a boss and your boss has a and your boss's boss has a boss.

You are now, if you are really good at what you do, you don't have to wait five years to be promoted. You don't have to go and sit in the meeting where people are less talented than you are telling you what to do. You don't have to constantly be sort of overlooked because somebody went to the same school as the person you're working for, wants to get the job instead. You can go home, but you can turn your ringlight on.

You can tell people what it is that you do and how you do it. And if they think you're good, if you give value to them, then you have a completely different way of making a living. and you have a completely different career. You don't have that 45 years and a carriage clock at the end of it. You have, it's hustle all the time, it's graft all the time, but there are ways and means of getting paid just to be yourself with your own skills.

I should say this section of the podcast is not sponsored by Big Ringlight, but, you know, if you're interested, hit me up. Shall we go to some adverts and afterwards talk about Charlie XX? We should do talking of macro-imluences. This episode is brought to you. by Lloyd's rewards. Now, a big mistake that people make is leaving the cinema as soon as the credits roll because there might be a bonus scene right at the end.

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Welcome back everybody. Now, Charlie XCX, one of the few people in the show business to have a surname that's entirely made of Roman numerals. Emanya Vidich is my other favorite. Has a new album, Out Marina. Yes. It's called Music, Fashion Film. She says it's about process. How did you find it, Richard? I loved it. I think, you know, I'm a big fan of Charlie X.EX. Well, I always find interesting. So obviously, Brat was so enormous.

That was two summers ago. Two summers ago. And this idea of how you follow up something that's absolutely enormous, I always find quite interesting. What she's done is sort of what Nirvana did after Nevermind when they bought that in utero, which is a bit scrappier, which is a bit scrappier, a bit scrapier, a bit more scrappy. A bit kind of, no, we're not going to do this stadium stuff anymore. We're going to show you who we really are. And she sort of paired it back a bit as a bit grungier, a bit more guitary. So she sort of said, I'm not going to try and compete with this Uber pop of Brat.

I'm actually going to show you a different side of myself, which I think is quite a smart way of following up something. Because you can't get bigger than Brat. No. And actually, it's really interesting. Brat was such a, I mean, obviously we talked about it at the time. For someone who'd been a sort of relatively niche artist, it became a complete phenomenon. And, I mean, for me, I find it quite depressing that like anything that it feels, talking of our monoculture, anything that feels countercultural that hits immediately

becomes hoovered up and commodified instantly by the mainstream. I mean, some of the stuff that happened with Brat, you would not be wanting if you were a cool and edgy pop star. I mean, like, do you remember during the election, Kamala Harris changing her whole page to right? It's like, this is so, I find so much of what happened with it, so awful. There's a certain thing about being too big, because everyone, Everyone climbs on everything.

You know, you can't, you know, everyone is making, as we said, everyone's making content about everything. So everyone is making content about your thing because it's the thing that people are talking about. Yeah. It's a lot. It's, it was really awful. And it was, it was so, it was like the total mainstreaming of something, you know, she's supposed to be a sort of like edgy art school kind of club girl. And then I don't know. I have to say it's difficult.

nowadays we particularly demand reinventions and pivots and by saying how am I going to follow up, you know, by more of the same. People feel they have to kind of reinvent themselves and that everyone's got to be in a series of eras, if you will. And so, you know, I suppose she says, oh, I'm a contrarian. This is like some kind of interstitial album and I'm just going to do, I found quite a lot of it quite phoned in, I have to say, but I also what I like about, What I do like about it is the sense that after everybody piled on to Brat and just joined the bandwagon, perhaps it will serve as some kind of fandom call. Which is what Nirvana did with in utero.

I hate these fans. I want to get rid of these new fans. Which is very, very common. If you're Charlie X, EX and you're in the moment, as you say, Brat was so enormous. But, you know, she sat and recorded that in the studio with her mates. And when it first started going massive, she sort of starts counting the money and thinks, oh my god this is insane and then as you say it goes super super massive and suddenly your public property in a way that you weren't before and suddenly everyone is thinking what is she going to do next

that's a lot of pressure i think if you're charlie xx you think i'm going to do 20 albums in my career you know they're all going to be individual ones this is going to be a good one you know can we talk about her time since then and what she has actually done because i think it's quite interesting so you obviously have this absolute monster hit but just gets co-opted by everybody she did the moment the a 24 sort of mockumentary which it's weird i was really looking forward to that and I found it it was kind of less funny than it should have been and it was whatever but it's sort of about a meta version she is becoming very very matter anyway then she got a sub stack because you know she's an artist she said she talked a lot about film as she did

the Wuthering Heights soundtrack yeah and then the first single from this new album she's saying the dance floor's dead you know it's all about rock music instead to a huge degree it's so meta and it's supposed to be phoned in and like does she get you know of course she gets to just She gets the joke before you. In fact, you just wrote the joke. I don't mean this. Yes, I mean this. No, I don't really mean this.

It's difficult when any artist gets. We talked about this a bit with Harry Stiles to the point where, and he actually took a long time away, where you get to a stage in your career where you can only sing about what it's like to be really famous. Yeah. And I always think that can be quite a difficult spot. I mean, I think, you know, I want to talk about some of the other people who followed up massive hits and who's done it well and who's done it badly. And I think she's done it pretty well. I think she seems to be in control of who she is. You know, there's interesting things.

But I just think you can't judge on this. Brat was so huge. And she's still Charlie X, the X, that she was five years ago. She's still like a woman who just wakes up in the morning. So, you know, she has to deal with all of that. And that's quite difficult. You look at some like the people who followed things up best. So Fleetwood Mac, when that first, when Fleetwood Mac itself came out

and was like massive, like huge in everybody. I'm thinking, oh my God, you're never going to follow that. And there's no way you're following up Fleetwood Mac. And they followed that up with rumours, which is, by some standards, one of the biggest albums of all time. They sort of just did the same thing. Yeah. But better.

They didn't feel they had to pivot. Yeah. But now we live in a period where everyone has to reinvent. Yeah. So Nirvana did pivot, that's for sure. Radiohead is a perfect example. So the bends, and more particularly, I think, it had been so insanely enormous. I'd say the creep was brat enormous.

Yeah. That you got these guys from Oxford here, he'd sort of, you know, They've been in a band for a while, released this song that the world had just eaten up. And I, oh my God, what do we do next? Easiest thing in the world there would be to do the Ben's Part 2. Actually, they come back with OK Computer, which if you look back is sort of an insane masterpiece. They then followed that up, by the way, with Kid A, where they go, no, this is the band we were all along. OK, computer was us just letting you know we weren't just the Ben's.

And then they followed that up. That's an extraordinary way to do that. And they've got longevity. And they've got that kind of life. You look in movies, you look at someone like Tarantino who has to follow up, Reservoir Dogs, which again exploded like a bombing culture. It was huge, and a huge movie. You think, oh, my God, how do you follow that up?

And forget true romance, because that wasn't really, that wasn't his directing. He comes up with Pulp Fiction, which has a lot of the stuff from Reservoir Dogs, but shows the sort of genius of his filmmaking, you know, plays about with timelines, you know, extraordinarily iconic, builds on everything that people had loved about reservoir dogs and comes back with that. So, you know, it is absolutely doable. You get someone like, so Donna Tart with a secret history is probably the perfect example in books. So she comes out of the secret history.

I mean, it's almost impossible to have a more iconic book than secret history. It was absolutely enormous everywhere in the world. The pressure to follow up that up from the publishers, from everyone, even back in those days of culture, would have been enormous. I mean, crazily enormous. She waits 10 years, does The Little Friend, which is a great book. Then waits another 10 years for the Goldfinch, which is another great book. So you can do it. You can follow up these enormous things.

You can do it. But there's a lot of pressure. Most people fail. Look at guns and roses after appetite for destruction. They're in that Use Your Illusion era. What about the November rain video, which is iconic? Listen, nobody loves November rain more than me. Harper Lee.

What about me? I like it more than you. Oh, do you? How much do you like it? Out of 2000. No, just ask you. I'm not playing your game. No, I'm just interested because you said you liked it more than me.

I like it more than you. Harpoli and J.D. Sanager, both interesting. but, you know, Catcher in the Rye and Killer Mockingbird. Hapley never... Huge Brat Summers. Huge Brat Summers, those too. Those are the Brat Summers of their time. You know, Harpally never follows up to Kill a Mockingbird.

She does the kind of prequel, which she'd written before. J.D. Sandiger does a few short stories, but really spends 45 years writing nothing at all. I mean, that's an option you can take when you've had a massive... Yeah. Terence Malik, after Badlands and Days of Heaven, doesn't make a movie for 20 years. It's hard to do it. And I think, you know, stone roses are my... God, the perfect example.

That was massive the stone roses and they think of how are they going to follow this up. It's going to be amazing. And they did the second coming, which is absolutely fine. But it took them a long time, cost them a lot of money and was kind of fine. I think it's good. But none of them had to live in a culture that we have to live in now where you've got to be an always-on pop star. I mean, just saying the thing she's done since, in the old days, she'd have gone away for, could have you had been away for three or four years and then come back. She's done the moment.

She's done her substact. she's done the Wuthering Heights soundtrack. There's a whole lot you have to do because you can never be off. You've just got to constantly produce or you fall by the wayside. That's why I like this album because it's not her.

She hasn't tried, she's just made a good album with her mates. And I think that's all that you can have real, real control of. Quite apart from anything else you do in between times and who you are and how you promote yourself. When you're in the studio,

that's all you can do is keep your head down, write some songs you like, record some songs you like, put them out, two years later, do that again, two years later, do that again. And I do think there's something that's incredibly noble about that. If you want to take advantage of everything in our culture and the money that's in our culture, the best artists every couple of years, look at Madonna now with the new album, they just go back in. The new album is brilliant. They go back in and they do it again.

You know, they get their head down, they do good work and they put it out and people like it again. And that's when you get this kind of longevity. It must be so hard in the culture that we have at the moment. It must be so hard. But that's why when I listened to the album, I thought, yeah, that's fine. I thought, you know what? That's exactly what it should be. It should be absolutely fine. It should just be an album. You go, oh yeah, that's good. In a couple of years, she'll do something else.

And a couple years after that, she'll do something else. Yeah, it'll be good if the politicians don't bandwagon on this one. I can't see see, I mean, some of the songs, I can't really see which one they choose. I can't see Andy Burnham doing a Commodore Harris. No, I mean, piling onto, yeah, that that track that sounds like an edging

video, if I may, if I may. Or can I talk about another album that I absolutely love? You don't want to talk about edging videos. Okay, fine. Listen, you go ahead if you need to. I will stick with November rain. Which sounds like an edging video. Oh, God, no, please.

Neutral Milk Hotel, he did in the airplane over the sea. And that's an album that every indie kid and the whole world loves and was super massive. He has never recorded another record since. It's hard, man. It's hard if you're a creator and stuff comes out. You can react in one or two ways. You can either go into your shell or you can go, I've sort of just got to get back on it.

Something out and then, yeah. Yeah. So can I give the last word to Joseph Heller? Please. So Joseph Hedder, I love. And after Catch 22, so an interviewer said to him, I don't think you've ever done anything as good as Catch 22.

And Joseph Hedler said, well, yeah, you're right, but who has? And, you know, you're lucky to have. You're lucky to have these big, never mind, stone roses, brats, you're lucky to have them. And if you're smart, you can carry on your career and keep doing good work and keep doing good work can keep making good music.

But my God, the pressure of it is insane. Yeah. Or M. Knight Shyamaland. Oh, that's a great example. After Sixth Sense. Yeah, after Sixth Sense. But also, like, everything after that becomes more and more. There's a really good book about when he's making this film, The Lady in the Water,

and there's a great book about it called The Man Who Had Voices. It's incredibly pretentious. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. It's a journalist. He's like giving full access to him for the making of this film that turns out to, spoiler. Not Be One to Trouble to score it.

That's a tough, wonderful. Pollard because it's such, it's so brilliant, really, it's got such a brilliant, unique twist to it. A bit of whom I thought, think, thought, okay, I need to just make sure I got a brilliant twist for every single thing that I do now. And that's, you know, perhaps he would have made more interested in films if there hadn't been quite as successful. You're just chasing that first high. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's, anyway, I recommend the album. Now, shall we talk about Letterbox? Yeah. Which is the social media film discovery platform, which became huge in the pandemic.

Lots of really bad things became huge in the pandemic, but this was one of the good ones via the app. And it's really interesting. It's like it's massive with Gen Z and kind of younger millennials. And it's a huge amount of people have discovered film culture this way. It's a discovery engine first, I guess. And it's pushed that generation in the direction of things like horror and world cinema and other sort of different genres of things.

Yeah. Describe what it is, it's sort of a repository of any movie ever and just people review them and rate them. And there's loads and loads of lists. There's loads and loads of posts you can read. Any movie you like, you can do the deepest of deepest dives here. You can see everything ranked. You can see the top of the top of all times. Your letterbox's top four. That's become a sort of form of, you know, taste as an identity and a shorthand for yourself, a way of signaling status.

Yeah, and it sounds, you know, there's a million things that are a bit like this. It's just curated very, very well. There's two New Zealand guys, Matthew Buchanan, and Carl von Rando, who originally came up with it. And there's just something about it. It has an aesthetic to, an indie aesthetic to it, that it is appealing to go and visit. When you look at the reviews of films, you're like, huh, oh, this is really interesting. Yeah, it does, but it does connect to the thing we're saying in our first item today, which is that, like, watching and then posting about it have now just sort of become two sides of the same coin.

You know, I mean. If you watch a film, you think, I tell you who's going to be interested in my view and this, everyone. Everyone's across it. But the nice thing about Letterbox actually is the top reviewers are actually rather interesting. And if you look through the top 500 films on Letterbox, for example, you can tell it's very global because, you know, there's a lot of Japanese movies on there. It's not all the usual suspects. In fact, I don't think Usual Suspix is in the top 100. There is stuff that you will discover there, however much of a sinist you might be, there is stuff there to discover.

I absolutely love it as a website. I love, because I mean, listen, I love a list, of course I do, but I love discovering new things. They have an amazing thing. They do this sort of video rental thing. And you have to pay like 15 quid to, you know, it's like buying a video in the old days where they have films that just sort of played in festivals and never got a proper release.

And you can, you know, watch these movies. You can put them on TV. And so it's probably, it's the real deal. You know, it really is it has bona fides. It is interesting, it's intriguing. Whether it remains that way, we're about to find out because it is up for sale, which is not always the best thing that can happen to someone. It's up for sale.

It's valued, I think, at about 250 million. And so we talk about why it is a desirable asset. There are lots of people who might be in for it. Sony, Paramount, Versant, which is the Comcast sort of thing. Even like Netflix, you can sort of see it. A24, which we'll get to. So if you think Comcast owns that Versant owns Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango, the kind of ticketing and pre-booking or whatever.

Which have a similar vibe. Rotten Tomatoes has a similar vibe. This feels a bit more of a deeper dive, but it does a similar thing. What's appealing to it is you have, for any of those companies who would want to integrate it into their corporate structure, is that you get direct access to film enthusiasts, obviously. You can influence discovery and you can get kind of first party to kind of taste data on things. It's very, very useful for marketing, quite obviously. And mainly, it's really cheap.

Like, explain, look at the entertainment M&A prizes that might be around. There's not that much that costs 250 million. And that is, but you do also have to be incredibly careful. And now people know it's for sale within the community because of a hyper-engaged community. Everyone's worried. They're very, very worried. kind of like fan movements to kind of try and buy it themselves. The idea that A24 may wish to buy it, that would probably be the least offensive thing to lots of these.

Because if you're on the site at the moment, one of the interesting things about it is, and you realize how rare it is in our culture. You look at Wikipedia and this, where it's kind of under-monetized. And you think, oh my God, thank God, that something is under-monetized. I'm not constantly being driven towards something. I'm not constantly being sold to. There's bits of advertising and there's a Patreon tier for power users of which I am not one. But you are not, you don't feel you are constantly being fed by the algorithm and you're not being constantly monetised by it.

It still feels like an indie site. It feels like something you've stumbled upon that it is a community and those things are rarer and rarer. And usually they're quite niche. There's plenty of them with their niche. When you get something at this size and you're still going, oh my God, it still seems to be. run by the users. But as you say, as soon as, you know, venture capitalists look at something that's undercapitalized, they like to capitalize.

Well, if you look up, it's possible. This is why I think perhaps A24 would be the best fit for it. I don't know. Because that is obviously, A24, it didn't even exist 15 years ago. And it's like modern art house. Again, a young company, it deliberately cultivates fandoms and merchandise and socials what it's made for internet culture. It thrives, by the way, their movies completely thrive on something like Letterbox

because they are all suited to internet culture and they all understand it. I think A24 themselves say that the Brutalist was such a hit largely through Letterbox. It was like one of the incredible sort of things that power the success of that movie. And yes, and people want to discover that other directors in their whole stable of otas and all of that. You can see that it's amazing to some degree that A24 has been able to keep that kind of edgy, this and keep that. And a lot of people call it a cult and say their fans are like cult like they pay to carry around the merchandise.

But you have to take a hat off completely. I should say full disclosure, I have things in development with them. But on the TV side. But it would make sense for them to buy something like that. I mean, it would make sense, by the way, for all of these people to buy an asset that is of this price and you can see how it could out. But many of these people could completely ruin it. Yeah, there is a sort of.

a public benefit corporation called Intrinsic Entertainment Collaborative who are trying to raise money to buy it themselves. And I mean, it's possible could happen. You know, because it has such an engaged community who would all be happy to, you know, chip in. But yeah, I don't want to fast forward three years and be on Letterbox and just go, oh, this is not as good as it used to be. They've destroyed it, yeah.

Because at the moment, they own such a dedicated audience. Yeah. And, yes, it would be interesting to see how it plays out. I think perhaps I don't think the intrinsic will get it. No, I don't think they will either because there's people with deeper pockets who could do things that would fit into other businesses far more. So if you don't use letterbox, then there's letter boxed without the letter E at the end. If you're interested in it, it's really, really worth having a look at.

I guarantee you'll find something that you find interesting very, very quickly in it. It's an example of just something that works for all of its members, I think, and that's very rare. Perhaps you get goalhanger to buy it. Yeah. Just then we can hang out with them. Yes. Yeah, that'd be fun.

Any recommendations this week? Well, it sort of fits into what we've been talking about, but I read a very interesting book called Rate This Book by Benji Wilson, which is about how five-star ratings took over the world. Touches on much of which we've spoken about today. And it's really, really interesting how this one thing has come to dominate almost everything. And you think you understand how much of it there is an art world, but you haven't scratched this office.

So that's an interesting one. It's called Rate This Book. by Benji Wilson. Oh, that's very cool. I want to add to my previous recommendation of Widows Bay, which is on Apple, because I've seen the first few episodes that have dropped, and now I've seen the whole thing is all dropped. So genuinely, it's brilliant, but I do need to say it does get really scary.

So it remains funny, but it gets, it's like really scary as well. Apple have got so many good shows at that. Yeah, but just if you started watching it, and it was too scary for you, I apologize, and if you're going to start watching it now, it's brilliant. And Matthew Reese's performance is insanely good. but it's really scary as well. So what I recommend also is there's a new series of my favorite show on BBC One, which is FAC or Fortune,

where Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould take people who think they might have masterpieces and they go through all the verification processes. And it's just, it talks about art history, there's lots of science in it, lots of human stories. And the first one this week is about a woman in Liverpool who believes she has a Faberget flower. And it's such a great story as well. The thing I love about that is go,

no oh oh no oh it's just they they tell it brilliantly they tell human stories with it as well it's it's one of those shows that just keeps on giving so fake off fortune we will be back on thursday with a Q&A we will and you will be bringing us for our members a very special episode of the world cup yeah it's the world cup of movie quotes are the greatest movie quotes of all time i'm dying for that one yeah it's really good and it's really good and that's a good idea of the boy trying to work out what What works as a movie quote, what doesn't work. And yeah, it's myself, Betterhal on Ivo Graham. And we will let you know which movie quote to the British public thinks is the greatest of all time.

And we are also just in the midst of recording our history of James Bond as well, which will be out for members soon, which we're really having. I'm really enjoying it. I've said a number of inappropriate things in the first recording. Oh my God, you said something so inappropriate. It wasn't. I think because you explained afterwards why it wasn't inappropriate, but at the time it sounded it. So listen out for that one that comes out.

See on Thursday. See on Thursday.