The Rest Is Entertainment - Lisa Nandy, Tech Bros & The Sephora Crisis

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

As the government debates a new bill covering how AI has to abide by copyright laws, is it better for creative industries to keep their friends close but enemies closer? Sephora, Drunk Elephant, Sol de Janeiro are at the front of what some have called an epidemic amongst 'tweens' (pre-teens). These beauty and skincare brands are often pushed by influencers but what does it tell us about modern advertising and commercialism. Finally Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has upset the TV industry after attacking a lack of creativity and diversity. Do her points have merit or is it misplaced and is she simply looking to score some easy points? Join The Rest Is Entertainment Club for ad free listening and access to bonus episodes: www.therestisentertainment.com Sign up to our newsletter: www.therestisentertainment.com Twitter: @‌restisents Instagram: @‌restisentertainment YouTube: @‌therestisentertainment Email: [e-mail] Producers: Neil Fearn + Joey McCarthy Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Or go to hundaevleader.ca to learn how war keeps you going. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Osmond. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. It's beginning to look a whole lot like Christmas Richard. How are you? Yes, I'm all right. this podcast is not going to be Christmasy at all. No it's not. I'll say that. So if you've had too much Christmas already, stick around. What are we going to talk about this week? We are going to talk about can AI write books and should authors accept money from AI companies

whether they copyright to their books. We are going to talk about the phenomenon of tweens basically. Sephora tweens they call them but we don't have that many Sephora stores in the UK so we could it's tweens becoming obsessed with luxury skincare via online, you know, video influences on TikTok but primarily YouTube and it's been called a curious phenomenon. I'm going to explain exactly why it's bleak. YouTube and it's been called a curious phenomenon. I'm going to explain exactly why it's bleak. And we are talking bleak. We are going to talk about Lisa Nandy, who's literally upset every single person who works in television this week.

Secretary of State for Cardiff doesn't know anything about television. Well we shall discuss. As I say, shall we start with AI and books, which has been much on the mind of all sorts of authors recently. And I was in the Houses of Parliament last week. I don't know if you've heard of them. It's quite fun going there. You must have been there. Have you in the past? Yes, I have visited the Houses of Parliament many times. Yeah. I quite like this. It's quite chilled, isn't it? You can wear jeans. It's like school trips going round.

Yeah. You know, it does wear off the magic. Does it? In some ways. Yeah. I was there not as a tourist, although I was. I went along to a committee room and the Lords this week are discussing AI and they're discussing particularly AI and copyrights and Baroness Kidron who was the film director, knows of what she speaks, she'd organise a few people to come along and talk. She should be the Culture Secretary. We'll get to it later.

We will get to the Culture Secretary. We're talking about this debate they're having and an amendment they're putting forward to the government's AI bill. What's happening at the moment essentially is there are all sorts of scrapers and crawlers on the internet which are picking up every single bit of content they possibly can and putting them into those large language models as we know. So generative AI is getting cleverer and cleverer and cleverer and picking up all of this material. You're never quite sure if your stuff has been picked up, although I'm going to read you a couple of AI written things in a bit which would tell you that an awful lot of people's work has been picked up by these AI scrapers. Essentially Baroness Kidron and

a number of other Lords are putting some amendments to this AI bill and they're saying three things. This is all they're saying. They're saying we already have a UK copyright law, respect it. Okay, if you're a generative AI company, respect UK copyright law, which you think would be self-evident, but we live in the world of tech bros and these things are not always self-evident. Secondly, be transparent about what your crawlers are doing. So these crawlers you set amongst the internet, you have to tell us what they are doing, what they are for, what is the purpose of them. That's fairly simple. And the third one, be transparent about any copyrighted materials you have scraped. And those are the only amendments and those all of which...

That's all they want and yet that's all they've done. And none of those things are on the table from the tech companies extraordinarily. Books are copyrighted. My work is copyrighted. Your work is copyrighted. The work of children's authors are copyrighted. The work of non-fiction authors are copyrighted. We know that if someone wants to reproduce it, they have to pay. If someone wants to make a film of it, they have to pay. If you want to make a theatre, think of it. They have to pay. If you want to quote it, you have to pay. I mean, that's how copyright works. The same with songs, it's the same with films, it's the same with everything. And, you know, that's been absolutely set

in stone for many, many, many years. And you know what? It's also worked very well. No one seems to mind it. If you need to borrow something, you can. If you need to make a film or something, you can. But you need permission from the person who created the thing in the first place. That's what creating something is. And we're in a world now where that seems to have gone out of the window because of the two letters, which are AI and the absolute frenzy it sends everyone into. And not only in the business world, in the world of government. In the business world, I understand why AI

sends you into frenzy because it saves you an awful lot of money. In government, I sort of get it because government spend an awful lot of money and AI is going to save governments an awful lot of money. It's going to save the NHS an awful lot of money, all of those things. But we also have to understand that things are being stolen. So it's as simple as that. Kate Moss, the author, was there and did a wonderful speech. In a very basic way, these people are not disruptors, they're thieves. It's a new emerging technology and people push things as far as they possibly can until someone tells them to stop. And what the laws are asking, what Baroness Cudron is asking, is for people to maybe stop and maybe to pay people.

The EU passed a law, and this is the law that one thinks our government is going to pass, which is that creators need to opt out of having their work scraped. They'll need to sign something. They will need to make a declaration, probably have to pay for it, to say, oh, no, I don't want you to take my copyrighted material and take it for your own, which is like asking a news agent to sign a thing that says, oh, by the way, I do need you to pay for those Mars bars. You know, it's a given if you walk into a news agent that you can't just steal a Mars bar. It's not like, oh, sorry, I didn't see the news. I didn't have a sign up saying he'd opted out of me stealing his Mars bars.

So that's the situation that we're in. It feels insanely simple. We have copyright in this country and it is respected by people and we now have this new industry which is not respecting it and which is stealing people's work. Just in something like newspapers, I still don't understand why lots more people aren't banding together and firms in class actions essentially. The New York Times has got a case against open AI because they say that quite obviously that it's crawled all over all of their stuff and you can and that they're able to tell some of that stuff. I was talking to someone at Banner J saying you know you should be involved in some of this

because they will be using all of your stuff but then you hear these stories about to some extent publishers have, some publishers are already selling out to these people. Big publishers, HarperCollins did it. There was this guy who was an author and a writer on the Colbert, on Stephen Colbert's show. He said that he was offered, I think by HarperCollins, $2,500 for the right for them to scrape,

crawl all over his children's book. Essentially they reasoned with him and he has a whole sort of email trail of stuff saying that it's kind of better that you're getting this money than no money for it. Which feels like such a defeat, but you know, I don't know, Lionsgate has allowed all of their TV and film library to be crawled over by some stuff. There's definitely an argument for it. There's definitely an argument to get into bed with an AI company because then you're in a partnership and you have some control over what happens. I don't think you will. I think that's probably right but you certainly have more control than you know if you just leave it to the wolves. I think you should leave it to the lawyers.

That's my this is my view. The lawyers will be absolutely rubbing their hands in glee and ironically sending AI generated letters left, right and centre. Probably. The HarperCollins thing is interesting because these large language models have essentially run out of stuff to copy and to scrape. And they've certainly run out of high quality stuff. So an easy place to go is to a big publisher who has a huge back catalogue of nonfiction particularly. That's what they've done essentially and they said to Harper Collins, here's a large sum of money, can we train our AI on your back catalogue? For an awful lot of back catalogue that was

written 10, 20, 30 years ago and is no longer selling, there's sort of an economic argument if you're an author to go, well, I can cash out on that, I can take it, you know, they can have a three year option on it and they can renew it after three years and there's a sum of money. I could do with £2,500 now. That is work that's simply going to go into the large language pool. So what they're not doing is saying, we're going to do direct copies of your books. We need high quality pros to train our model. That's the argument. And the argument of Harper Collins would be, this seems fine, you know, and we're in bed with this company and they're not suddenly going to do a direct version of one of our films.

They're never going to eat our face. Yeah, exactly. Of course not. Yeah, okay. This leopard is just a cub. Yeah. Its teeth are not sharp at all. In America, a few authors have taken these LLMs to court. A judge has just thrown two of the cases out. A judge said any individual work that is scraped is such a drop in the ocean that it's almost meaningless and so

therefore it's absolutely worthless. And it's also saying that... Every snowflake is part of an avalanche, Richard. And every... And as he said, large language models don't copy, they synthesize. And so these authors have lost. Now we are being told black is white and it's happened many times before with these big Tech companies. They've got a huge amount of money. They can be hugely helpful to governments It's this is one. Yeah, you see open AI you just I just saw that he's another one of the guys Sam Altman He's kicked in a million for Trump's inauguration thing

Yeah, so it's like a of course they are but don't you think that everywhere you're seeing these legacy companies? media entertainment publishing whatever chasing this short money Because they can't think of anything better to do and I'm not saying that these are badly run businesses But many of them we have commented on aspects of the movie industry the publishing industry whatever that have been badly run I have no hope that getting into bed with these people is going to help I mean, what did you feel when you go there and you're sitting there? What did you say when you were there? I felt I didn't say anything. I just listened and I felt that I know you're on receive not transmit.

I was in Parliament as I was respectful. Boy like me in Parliament. Yeah. So no, I listen because there are some very, very bright people talking there. The main thing I took away is almost all creative people are excited about AI. Anybody who is creative, a new technology comes along, it is exciting because you think, what can we do? What's next?

What can we do? So this is not a gang of Luddites, right? Authors, filmmakers, television producers, they are not Luddites. They are people who are genuinely interested in this new technology. If you're a sci-fi writer, then why would you not be conversing with AI? I mean, but of course you would be, because it's fascinating, but it's a new way of speaking,

it's a new way of thinking. What is happening is very, very simple, which is we have copyright laws and things are being stolen. And the third side of it was a series of lords just talking, people with law backgrounds, all sorts of things, and just saying, it's hard because they can just, they can offshore this stuff and, you know, we can have all the laws we want, but, you know, you can operate your crawler or your scraper in Kazakhstan or in, you know, Texas.

And, you know, you can take what you want, you know, it is a wild west. To which the answer is, well, I'm sure they can, but, you know, it's still useful to make a stand. And one of the key things they were saying was it is going to be hard to get any of these amendments through and it is genuinely useful for anybody, if you're a reader, if you're a writer, if you're a creator, if you enjoy anything like that, write to your MP. Really just start this conversation. Start saying this is not a complicated area. The technology is crazily complicated, but stealing copyright is not a complicated area. The technology is crazily complicated, but stealing copyright is not complicated. It's just stealing. It's just stealing. We are possibly at the last point where we can say or do something about that. But the

other interesting thing is what does happen to art and literature and film with AI? What can it do and what can't it do? I did a couple of things just to see what it has stolen and what it hadn't stolen and this is from a leading large language model. That is so difficult to say. If you're in the car now, try saying leading large language model. The fancy version of it. We first asked, write the first paragraph of a Stephen King novel about an old man with a secret. Okay. The old man sat on the porch of the house at the end of Wicker Lane,

the one with the peeling paint and the wind chime that never seemed to stop, even on a dead still day. His name was Vernon Hatch, though no one really called him that anymore, not since most of the people who might have remembered it were long gone. He was just the old man now, a fixture of the town, like the statue of some forgotten war hero in the park or a creaking sign outside the diner. People said Vernon Hatch had lived there forever, that he was part of the landscape and maybe he was. But if you ask Vernon, really asked him, he'd tell you that the house wasn't his at all. Not really. He was just keeping it warm for when it came back. Two things. Firstly, any pro-stylist in the world can write a

paragraph of Stephen King. Okay, you ask any writer and they could do that. That's not writing a Stephen King novel. So it's perfectly serviceable. But what it definitely means is the AI has read a Stephen King book. Yeah. And when I say it's read a Stephen King book, it has stolen that book, that's Stephen King's copyright.

But it has it. Firstly, it's never gonna write an actual novel that you're going to want to read, but it has definitely read every single novel there is. You know, it has definitely read all of this stuff. You put pretty much anyone's name into it. Why isn't it going to write a novel you would want to read? I don't think it's interesting.

I honestly think that this thing couldn't do anything 18 months ago and now it can do that. Yes, but there's a lot of things it can't do. It can do what it's prompted to do. It's very, very good when it is prompted. But what is the prompt for a novel? Writing 90,000 words where you're constantly defying expectations and things pay off later on and characters,

you know, there's things that it is hard to do. You could definitely knock out a version of something that looked like a novel for sure. Stephen Fry was talking about AI and he said a great thing, which is he said AI knows every single fact about World War I. It knows every single date. It knows every single battlefield, AI knows every single fact about World War I. He knows every single date, he knows every single battlefield, he knows every single word ever written. He said, but I know more about World War I because I've read the poetry of Wilfred Owen. And it's that essentially, is what is the prompt that gets AI to write the poetry of Wilfred Owen or to write a novel? It's quite hard to do. It can take on every single sort of

prosaic task it can do and it can knock out a great paragraph. I think that there are certain things that are beyond it, but it's only going to get better and better. Well there's a new company isn't there? Got people really angry. It's a tech startup more than a publishing company called Spines. And they had a bit of a sort of flurry over the last couple of weeks where they've launched themselves. I want you to picture four tech bros. Of course they're wearing black V-neck t-shirts and that's one with a man bun.

And they've all got beards. They've all got beards, yeah. They're going to publish 8,000 books next year and they're gonna charge you between $1,200 and $5,000 to have your books edited, proofread, formatted, designed and distributed with the help of AI. But they are not a vanity publisher. Can we just explain the difference between, because some people, mainstream publishing,

the publisher takes all the risk and if they pay some money and if your book doesn't work out then that's on them. Hybrid publishing, something like Unbound, you know, where you can split the risk and you kick-starter things. And then there's vanity publishing publishing which has always been around well ever since there have been people who have enough money and those people often now call themselves independent publishers. And essentially that's do you have to pay someone to publish your book? You have to pay and you so yes these people's spines are saying they have had a massive push

back I will say from everyone from the Society of Authors to everyone saying these people are dreadful. And they're saying, well, why shouldn't we help people? The trouble is the reason that these people get even a hearing at all to some degree is because I think almost all areas of the entertainment industry, if we count publishing as part of a leisure and entertainment or whatever, always felt very gatekeeper-y to a huge number of people. And the difference in what has happened in the digital age is that many of those things have been able to be disrupted in various ways.

Obviously, people create content, as they call it, and it's all sorts of different things. And it can rival Hollywood in lots of different ways, as just one example. And I do think that people sort of slightly feel about publishing, like they do about lots of these things, people still feel shut out and that is why... Absolutely, well that's why the rise in self-publishing has been so brilliant. The barriers to entry now are much, much lower. You can upload your own things to online portals. Self-publishing industry has been a brilliant thing and the lovely thing about self-publishing actually is there's been some huge successes that have come from, I mean huge, huge successes and

have gone on to traditional publishers as well. But someone like Colleen Hoover still does self-publishing as well. She does a hybrid model. So that's there. Yeah, a company like Spines is certainly saying, we can do this 8,000 times a year because we'll take whatever it is that you've got that you've spent all your time writing and that you care about and we're just going to run it through some AI processes. And we're going to publish 8,000 books a year, which is 21 books every day, which is on an average working day, one every half an hour. So you just have a little think about whether their marketing push is going to be what you want it to be, whether their duty of care over the work that you've done for five years

is what it is, is what it's going to be. You are far better just going on all sorts of internet forums, finding those tools for free and finding that community of self-published authors and just doing it yourself. And this company, who've raised $16 million, they are a tech company. They are nothing to do with literature. I looked on their website, God bless me, and literally on the front page I said, here's one of our best sellers, Carlos Andromeda. By the way, you can't find his book anywhere on Amazon, so where it's best selling, I don't know. They've sold millions of books according to them. Again, very hard to verify, very hard to find anything they've done.

If you want a published bound book, by all means go to a Vanity Publisher, because that's a really lovely thing to have. If you've got memoirs and you want your kids and your blankets to have them, then that's a really beautiful thing to have, it's a beautiful present to give to somebody. But if you want to write books and have people read books, then there is an avenue to market now, which is not giving money to these tech bros who are backed by venture capitalists. But I also asked it to write a Marina Hyde column.

Oh my God. I'm sure it did it very well. About Keir Starmer and freebies. Because I thought it's the sort of thing you might write about. Yeah, I can't remember that. You know I can never remember anything I've written. I've read your work. I'm not going to read the whole thing but it goes on for some while. Please don't. I'll just read the last paragraph which is, The bigger problem of course is how all this looks to the public. At a time when people

are grappling with cost of living crisis, when heating the house feels like an act of extravagance, the free luxury tickets might as well be golden parachutes. The Labour spin doctors are probably frantically googling how to make Starmers gifts sound less glamorous. One pound seventy-five bottle of little wine consumed on the night bus has a certain ring to it. Huh. Well, I mean, you know, can it start tomorrow? We fetishise writing and always have done, but it's just like hand weaving, you know, and if there are machines that can do the brunt work of it easier, then they will do. And it's just we have to keep our eyes bright and clean and remember what art is, but also

remember that it can only do it if it's trained on things that have already been written, have already been done, and are already under copyright. And if it does that, it has to pay people. So write to your MP. It's the first time we've ever said that on the podcast. But it really is genuinely worth writing to MPs. It's one of the things that people don't tell you. They spend so long feeling they have to get an answer to these things. If it's not abusive then they really do take a lot of time trying to try and get answers to these, then they really take notice. Yeah,

but certainly every single writer and creator and artist and filmmaker and television producer should be writing to their MP He has now is the time now is the time to strike. Should we go to an ad break? Shall we? Holiday shopping is never easy An ugly holiday sweater. How did you know? Should have been a holiday scratch and win Holiday scratch and win tickets available in stores now must be 19 plus to play. Scratch and Win Tickets are not for kids. This episode is brought to you by Canon Canada. From street interviews to vlogging or filmmaking, great content gets even better when you're

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McDonald's has the gift that keeps giving. To Peter, your dog sitter, and Claire, who shovels your stairs. And to you, when you spend $25 on McDonald's gift cards in restaurants, get a coupon for a free Big Mac or McChicken. See details at participating McDonald's restaurants. Welcome back, everybody. Now, Christmas, an awful lot of people will be thinking about what to buy for teens and tweens and the world of Sephora is rearing its head. Marina can you

talk us through what's going on there? I'm using Sephora here as a sort of buy word for luxury skincare because although they're huge in America there are only a relatively few stores in the UK although by the way they're planning a mega expansion. Sephora five of them. Yeah. Very good. Okay. Many of our listeners may have a skincare regime. I have to say, for me, even the word regime is the alarm bell.

Like, when I hear the word regime, I think of elections being done away with. Anyhow, today we will talk, we're going to talk about the tweens, pre-teen girls who are being specifically either marketed, in fact increasingly marketed to, but influenced by online videos that they watch and have their own skincare regimes. And what's so fascinating about this and what makes it a completely different phenomenon, which I'm very wary of saying normally, to anything we've seen before, because of course young girls and girls perhaps too young to wear makeup have always been fascinated by makeup and wanted to dress up and all those things and that's always existed. The brands we're talking about and if you are a parent of one of these children, aged children or if you even go into one of these shops, any form of luxury skincare thing, you will see young girls wanting to buy brands like Drunk Elephant, Summer Friday, Laneige,

Solda Gennaro. These are incredibly expensive things. And by the way, when I say expensive, I don't mean that when I had my first job, I could have bought anything like this. This is like what you buy when you're in your thirties and you've got it. You're into a number of jobs in your life. Okay. And you will mothers. It's like an anniversary present. Yeah. You hear mothers saying I would never buy this stuff for myself and yet my 10 year old wants it. Okay, first of all, obviously the first and most obvious thing is if you're 10, your skin's never going to be better than it is right now at this minute and anything you buy is going to make it worse.

You're not listening to this podcast though, so it's irrelevant. And again, we talk a lot about how businesses in this particular in this era try and grow and they try and find audiences that are completely not their original audience. So whether that's be women watching Formula One or trying to get 10 year olds to spend £40 on something. I went on Saturday, they have girls, young girls absolutely queuing and they've got security guards and they're in a queuing system to just get into the shop. Where is the money coming from? There have been reports in America of them grabbing products out of the sort of 20 and 30 year olds hands because you know, maybe they haven't learned the manners yet. They're quite young and they just think oh

There's only a few of these and I want them but the influence of the platforms can't really be overstated Obviously, they like TikTok and they like insta these children. They're children. Let's call them Let's call it what it is. Is that unfashionable? Let's call them children. Can you say that anymore? Let's call it what it is. Is that unfashionable? Let's call them children. Can you say that anymore? But YouTube, because many people do put parental controls on their YouTube, is the chief means of discovery of all this stuff.

But this obviously doesn't contravene any parental controls. In the US, Gen A is now responsible for 49% of drug store skincare sales. And Gen A is 14 years old and under. It's unbelievable. I mean, that's, yeah. And this isn't just the US, it is everywhere. You go into one of these shops. I mean, if you wanted to see a woman, hi,

walking around West Sephora in West Wales, White City, saying to her daughter, that's my daughter, you are welcoming the jackboot of the patriarchy onto your throat right now. This is what you're doing. I am the ghost at the feast in that store. I'm available anytime I'm in there. But you're seeing these young girls in there saying, this does this, this does that.

They literally sound like they're PR reps for the companies. It's absolutely extraordinary. First of all- And how are they being sold to? Are they being sold to you by adverts or by influencers? Not by adverts, not really by adverts. Once again we see that thing of the collapsing, complete collapsing of adult and child media. These things were originally meant for kind of older women, you know, get ready with me videos, all of those things that you see, you know, they've become sort of tropes on the, any sort of short-form video platform. But they're meant for women in, I don't know, their 20s or 30s, whatever it is.

And now, because so much of media and children listen to the same music as their parents and they watch the same kind of videos. It's quite interesting, I was talking to Adam Curtis, the documentary maker about Generation A earlier this year, and he was saying they know everything because they've always had the answer to every single question in their pocket,

and they know absolutely everything. But what they don't have is quite understandably they have not developed any form of emotional intelligence to fit with that knowledge so they're really overdeveloped in one area and not in the other because they are still children. Not a lot of information but very little processing power. Yeah anyway so it is girls getting involved in this but there's also a big trend on it for boys as well called looks maxing and so you see all these looks maxing videos and there are child influences. So there are people like Northwest, Kim Kardashian's daughter and Penelope Dizek,

who's Courtney's daughter, Courtney Kardashian's daughter, Harper Beckham, I saw a thing recently where she was saying, I want to create an amazing brand. It's like, wow, you're 13, okay. Because it's on all the time. When I was growing up, you had monthly magazines and very occasionally there was a fortnightly magazines, but this is on all the time. So the was growing up you had monthly magazines and you know very occasionally there was a fortnightly magazines but this is on all the time so

the churn is wild and you see this is completely different to makeup for a start. Makeup is fun, makeup is dress-up, little girls have always liked makeup and it's much less depressing than skincare in lots of ways. Skincare, particularly expensive skincare, is tied into all those notions of self-improvement, of unattainable ideas of perfection, you know, I go back to the word regime. And also you can't immediately, make up, you can immediately see the effects, you can see what it does, you can see where skincare actually... Yeah, and you wash it off and it's been some fun.

Skin is the sort of thing, we still talk about good and bad skin, there's not a lot of other areas that we talk about good and bad and you're just written off. What you're trying to do is get children addicted to the idea of routine. In my view, it's one of the many, many things that has kind of crept in when organized religion has been sort of driven out of society. But you know how it is, you know, you read these things and you go into these places and they've got these things written on the wall like, all our products are blah, blah, blah. These are like catechisms. They're like the sorts of things that would have been written on church walls in the old days. It's very, very religious and it's very odd.

So for it even sounds quite religious. It does, doesn't it? It sounds very, very cult-like. One of the things that I think is most interesting, having thought about it, because now I'm close to it with one 10-year-old child, I find it utterly depressing that all her friends are trying to... Someone told me that this was happened when they were 10 and I was like yeah I don't think what happened to my daughter and now I find myself just constantly like trying to put the other side in a quite forthright way you know by saying things like my face isn't my fortune and you're a lot happier it's a much better route to happiness if your face isn't your fortune because there's only one way it's

going to go after a certain age. Tell me about it. Yeah. That's uh listen I traded off my looks for so long. Yeah. And now it's uh yeah that's why I have a podcast now. Back to why I think it's become a form of entertainment because it's ultimately it is their entertainment and that's why we're sort of doing on this podcast particularly because this is a generation whose entertainment has been intrinsically linked with products right from the very time they ever saw anything, okay? Unboxing videos, they've watched unboxing videos of you know all these sort of funny things that you think never heard of have existed. Little things like the LOL dolls, these dreadful little monsters. I can't tell you about them but just

suffice to say they are dreadful and they you know watching people unbox things like that. In Roblox the game the platform that they all play on and the gaming platform they all play on you know people have now started like Claire's accessories have opened a world in Roblox all these sort of the platform that they all play on, and the gaming platform they all play on, you know, people have now started, like Claire's accessories have opened a world in Roblox, all these sort of things so that they can reach them there. They have an absolutely bizarre and I think incredibly depressing sense that in order to be paid for creativity, content creation, there needs to be a product. That's how they see entertainment to a huge extent. So that- Children. Yeah, children, because they've seen so much of this stuff. They've seen so many content creators Weaving sponsorship into the actual brand of things so they think it's a quite a short step from there to thinking the product is the entertainment

Yeah, and so with all these very expensive skincare things Nonetheless, it is a buy-in that's relatively simple because then you buy one of them and you make your own video about it. You're creating your own content. Are the companies complicit in this in a lot of ways in the same way that some companies when Europe stopped buying cigarettes just took cigarettes to India and Africa and tried to open up new markets? Is that what's happening here?

Are the big skincare giants essentially trying to expand their market? Are they closing their eyes to what's happening here? Are the big skincare giants essentially trying to expand their market? Are they are they are they closing their eyes to what's happening here? It's interesting. I don't think it came from them I don't think they had the idea that they could ever sell to this particular I've looked as much as I can into the history of it your market research wouldn't necessarily tell you that a 48 pound You know face cream could be sold to a 10 year old because you just wouldn't think it was possible Where on earth would they have that money? No parent would buy it. It's extra seizure And the child doesn't need it and they but as they saw the phenomenon developing and it is huge and you You can see it in the stores. It's absolutely bizarre and you think where all these people getting the money

I don't understand any of this now they've lent into it But also these children are buying things with retinoids and stuff that kind of breaks down and destroys the skin barrier Which by the way when your 10 is perfect, no one's listening No, 10 year olds are listening But if you all happen to be in the car your skin is perfect and it will never be better than it is right now So all of these things that are really bad They were buying all this stuff anyway, because they just see it and then they thought oh I need something else like all of these things You know, it creates a problem and then you buy something else to fix it.

Like lip balm. Yeah, like lip balm. I know since you spoke about this, every mother of a 10-year-old, 11-year-old, 12-year-old says exactly the same thing, which is this is an insane market which didn't exist 10 years ago and is now absolutely huge and is absolutely meaningless. Actively harmful and dreadful and it's incredibly bleak to get children into these bizarre cycles of sort of improvement which is a scam, a form of self-improvement which is a scam and I

said as I say there are these kind of quasi religious things written up on all the walls in the shops but it's interesting they're now sort of putting lots of stuff out saying here are the products of ours which are safe for children because they can't believe they've got this sort of stuff. So, Drunk Halifim will put out a post saying, don't use retinoids if you're 10, but these are the ones you can use. I tell you what else is interesting in it, and there's a lot of content comes from Korea, the so-called glass skin and things like that. South Korea is regarded, interestingly, by this generation as very, very aspirational. There's lots of interesting culture. And yet, when you look at the culture,

the culture is quite dystopian and bleak. And if you look at the society, we know it is a massively patriarchal society. The birth rate is something like 0.8 per couple now. A society that is in a huge amount of trouble. yet it does feel young people will watch all sorts of K dramas They've much more in many ways than they are influenced by America in the way that my generation Well, they've got all the retro stuff which is that they'll watch Friends and Gilmore Girls and stuff from ages ago Which feels quite sort of necrotic in itself as a sort of there's not new culture But they definitely look to South Korea the glass skin the things like that, that is a very big influence on this particular kind of culture and on the videos that they watch and all of those things.

What can be done about it do you think? As always with all of these things, try not to buy into it, but it really makes me think, my God, I mean, all of these things, I don't want to be talking yet again about how things that seem like they've progressed have gone backwards again, but that is what I definitely feel. I mean, I just think it's absolutely extraordinary that you should be yoking yourself into this terrible, into a regime. It's a call the skincare regime for a reason. Can I add one caveat for parents who are listening at the moment, because it's the week before

Christmas and it is very possible you have bought something in one of these ranges for your child for Christmas if you have absolute free pass. Listen, it's Christmas, okay? We worry about this in the New Year. In the New Year we fight. For now, listen, it's got Merry Christmas. You can't. You have to just buy the present. It's lovely. Join me on the skincare barricades in January. Yeah, but honestly amnesty for Christmas, absolute amnesty. Should we continue with our remorselessly negative podcast? Sorry everyone, just getting a few things off our chest before before the new year. It'll all be sweetness and light after that. Lisa Nandy. She's been getting some something

she's already got off her chest again, off her chest. She is the Secretary of State for Culture and she talked to The Guardian, I think, last week and she said she had a very interesting suggestion for why it is that young people are watching streaming platforms. She thinks it's something to do with diversity. She said, if the shows that UK broadcasters make don't look like and feel like the country, if they're not relevant to people, if they don't directly connect connect with people then they'll switch off and that's what we're seeing we're seeing people leaving TV to go to either streaming services or online and that in itself is really dangerous not just for the TV

industry but for the country because it's atomizing I really think that TV won't survive unless it addresses this question okay where do we begin with that where do we begin with how wrong, how incorrect? It is so incorrect. By the way, this is the second time she's attacked television in the month since she's been Culture Secretary. I am told actually from people closer to this than me that she's spending a lot of more time on football, which is obviously part of that great DCMS brief, the sport part of it, and not the only part of the sport part of it. She wasn't originally going to be the culture secretary.

Tangum Debonair was the person that people thought was going to be the culture secretary, but she lost in Bristol West and Lisa Nandy was a sort of late addition, as it were, to the front bench that became the cabinet. Now, so maybe she has been playing catch up at the start, but sorry, who are your spads? This is not the reason. Does she actually, the reason that young people don't watch so much linear TV, first of all linear TV, PSP, TV, private service broadcasting, skews older, okay. But that's quite a metropolitan. Lots of people do watch linear TV. Many more maybe than it's quite a metropolitan elite point of Lisa and Andy to make. The reason that young people watch streaming or they watch short form video platforms

is because they like, particularly, let's say streaming because that's particularly one of the things she's saying. So why might they watch Netflix? They like the variety and the quality of the content. They like fiction, particularly humorous, so that's expensive to make. And they like things based on relationships. And they also like short form video,

which I don't think anyone is suggesting linear TV companies produce the public service broadcasting and they also like older US shows for some of the things we were just mentioning Gilmore Girls, Friends, Suits, whatever for nostalgia and to a time. Which are not diverse. Please they are the least diverse thing in the world and actually do you remember Richard when we did that Royal Television Society conference where we were expected to roast Ted Sarandos, the Netflix co-CEO, at the end of the day? The person who went on before us was Lisa Nandy. I don't know if you remember this.

So we watched her and whoever interviewed her asked her what she'd been watching recently that she liked. And she looked so completely nervous and said, oh my advisors are looking at me and I was like, oh my god, what is it? And there was a really long pause and then she said, Emily in Paris. I'm like, okay. You've just won a landslide general election victory and what you're too wet to say that you like Emily in Paris, another of the whitest shows on TV, let me be honest with you, this

is it all over. But you're watching Emily in Paris, you're on the streamers, is it because the streamers. Is it because Emily in Paris is diverse? I don't think you'll find it is. Yeah, there's always been a diversity issue in television. I agree. There's always been a diversity issue in any middle-class profession. You walk into parliament, there's a diversity issue. You walk into the law courts, there's a diversity issue. And then TV, ever since I walked through the door in the early 90s into a company full of public

school boys, there's an issue and I didn't feel represented in the early 90s into a company full of public schoolboys, there was there's an issue and and and I didn't feel represented and actually I went into the world of entertainment where actually it is quite diverse and you are working with lots of different people from lots of different classes and if you want to go to a quiz on a weekday and see the crew working on those shows, if you want to see a diverse workforce there is one for you, it's right there for you and TV has been very very good at trying to increase diversity and diversity on screen. Bits of it haven't. Documentaries, news, current affairs, I think, are still very, very middle class and white dominated, which perhaps are the bits that Lisa Nandy sees most or is around most. But television

at the moment is in an absolute crisis and the industry of television is in a crisis and 70% of freelancers are out of work. So if you are in charge of British television from a government point of view, which Lisa Nandy is, there is a huge job to do. And saying to people, your problem is your things are not diverse enough and that's why people have gone to streamers. It makes no sense to anyone who works in the industry, who have worked their socks off to try and make their industry more diverse over the years, but as seen people leaving to the streamers, which were funded by venture capitalists,

were funded by, you know, money from America. Well, all the money goes to America. All of it is going there. They are not making shows that are more diverse than on British television. The people behind the scenes are not more diverse. All that look and feel like the UK. What are you doing? I mean, something like sex education. It's set in that kind of Netflix never space. It could be anywhere really. And that's what you want.

You want shows that you can sell into any territory. And that's why a lot of Netflix shows look the way they do and not just Netflix shows, other streamer shows, and they sell them all across the world into all sorts of different cultures and actually diversity in TV. I couldn't agree with you more. We need more of it. But it is expensive to achieve right so maybe she could consider in fact the government wants to cut the DCMS budget and they want to continue to freeze the license fee which they've frozen for so

long which means that it's a real term's cuts every year so it's more diversity is very expensive to achieve. Well, that's that's the evidence suggests I'm afraid whether or not she likes it, that it will lead to a smaller market for you because in lots of ways it can be sold into fewer territories. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do it at all. But the idea that it sort of axiomatically leads to growth is so wrong headed that I'm stunned that the Culture Secretary could possibly hold it because it's simply not the case. And the reason I was able to work in television is because I was on just the very end of that

time where actually we looked after kids from working-class families and kids from low-income families. So I could go and get a job for six months. It wasn't hugely well paid because I didn't have a debt from university. That had all been paid for. I got the house and benefit when I first moved to London. These things were there. None of those things are there anymore. If you want working class people to enter this industry, they're not going to. I know if you're a low income kid, you want your first job to give you a wage packet. You need safety. That's the thing you need because at the end of the week, there is nothing to fall back on. And if you don't have those things, you're not going to go into those industries. And TV at the moment,

you're not going to go into because the money is not in there because everyone's gone to the streamers. So if you want more diversity I'm afraid you have to let working class kids find a way to support themselves in the first couple of years of their career and that feels like something a government should be able to do. The things that lead to growth always always have been having hits and having hits requires having a diverse group of people coming up with those hits. It's always been the case, but Endemol for many, many years, we would always try and think outside the box

and bring in people who didn't come from, you know, the place that people traditionally came to. And it made us an awful lot of money over the years because different people from different backgrounds have different ideas and those are the ones that sell. So that's what we always did. And I think it'd be almost impossible to watch this weekend strictly, for example, and not say I cannot think of a show that more looks like Britain and more

speaks about Britain than that. It doesn't speak to all of Britain. I get it. But it's almost impossible to speak to more people at the same time in such an interesting way as Strictly does. That's not a show that at the moment you're going to see on the streamers. By the way, the streamers do great things. The streamers also have all sorts of, you know, ways of getting more diversity behind the scenes. But they don't have to. It's not their raison d'etre. The BBC for many years has got big production bases now in Glasgow, in Belfast, in Manchester, which allows workers in those cities to stay in their own city, to stay in the city they are from and have a job and have a career, which is something that you don't have to do if you're Amazon

Prime, if you're Netflix or if you're Disney, all of those things. That is what the public service broadcasters have done. And they're very heavily regulated on all sorts of points. What about Netflix? Is it regulated at all? Is Apple regulated? I mean, I saw this, there's all sorts of mistakes made with news via Apple. Maybe you should regulate Apple News. Maybe you should turn your thoughts to this, rather than a TV industry that is sort of on its knees in lots of ways and has gone further to try and achieve this than so many other industries in this country.

And it just simply isn't the case that doing this is going to create hits. Yeah, the industry is on its knees because of the way where advertisers have gone. And because the BBC has on its knees because of the way where advertisers have gone. Yeah. Okay, and because the BBC has had its license fee frozen. That's why the industry is on its knees and it's not going to get back off its knees. And I'm saying by all means say your industry has to be more diverse. It's absolutely acceptable thing to say. The same could be absolutely said for parliament, the same could be said for so many places.

But don't say it now and don't blame what's happening on it because those two things are not true. And if your advisors are telling you they're true, then I don't know what they're reading. And please don't think that fixing it is going to lead you to growth. Oh, a hundred percent not. Because that is really that South Park episode, you know, number one, collect underpants, number two, question mark, number three, profit. I mean, that really is it. So if you're saying if the

shows you could broadcast as don't look and feel like the country if they're not relevant from people, people who go to the streamers. Harlan Coban, right, for me once the biggest show in the world last year, but that's a like a big ITV show. I mean it's great, it's a brilliant show but it's not telling us anything about the country that we're not seeing on BBC or ITV. Sarah Lancashire and Keira Knightley in Black Doves, it's the biggest show on Netflix at the moment. It's not telling us anything about our country. It's not representing people who aren't represented on the BBC. I mean, it's nonsensical. Baby Reindeer, The Gentleman,

Friends, the fact that huge amounts of viewing on these forums are Friends and the American Office and all of these shows. To say that the lack of representing your country is the thing that's sending the people to streamers is just plain wrong. And either she is misspoken because she's absolutely right that we need more diversity, but she for some reason decided to say, and if we don't get it, then people will go to streamers. It's just incorrect. It's a fundamental failure to understand the entire television and short form video landscape.

At a time when an awful lot of people are out of work and are looking to the government to somehow give them tax breaks or find a way of, you know, reinvigorating this British industry, it's hard to think of a time in history when there's been a better creative skill set in any area than there is in British TV and film right now. In terms of the facilities we have, in terms of the people we have and the training they've had, in terms of the hits they've had, the awards they've had, there is such an extraordinary group of people in Britain.

And film. And in film, exactly that. And Lisa Nunley is absolutely right about if we're scattered to the, you know, the four wins when it comes to media, then there is atomisation. Well, genuinely, I would say to her and I say to that whole department and whoever has come up with this, you have an enormous opportunity. You don't want the world to be atomised. You've got some of the greatest creative minds in the world. You've got some of the greatest creative facilities in the world, but they're

going to need a bit of money. They're going to need tax breaks. They are going to need the BBC and Channel 4 and ITV to be able to work together. You know, these things that governments can actually do, you know, it's there. But simply saying I need stories that represent Britain, otherwise that people go to the streamers. It's just, it's insulting to a generation who have made extraordinary things and have tried to bring Britain together and have tried to represent where they're from. And, you know, the amount of people who got in touch with me after reading that was absolutely extraordinary.

Yeah, same with me. I thought that some people having to go at Channel 4 was bad. This is like double Channel 4. Yeah. It's like Channel 8. It's quite something. And maybe she misspoke and maybe there's-

What's the second time she's attacked TV since she's had the job since July? So I think- Maybe there's some grand scheme behind it so I think maybe there's grand maybe there's some grand scheme behind it I certainly hope so but um yeah you've got an industry that's in an awful lot of trouble and the reason you're saying it is in trouble is incorrect I'm very happy to go on record as saying that. Likewise. Any recommendations because it is Christmas. Okay yeah I would like to recommend a substack by a guy called Richard Godwin who writes about

Cocktails he writes about drinking brilliantly he and he wrote a book called the spirits the spirits which is very good and his um newsletter is called the spirits and It is it comes every Friday afternoon Honestly at about four o'clock, so there's wonderful writing and he talks all, and then he teaches you all these different cocktail recipes. And I mean, there's one every week more than that. And he teaches you how to make all the sugar syrups

and all of that. I really like it. There's something about that. It's the most perfectly timed newsletter I get. For a common Friday, yes, please, please explain to me about something I'm getting. And he sometimes gives you your advanced shopping list. It's really, really good. It's Richard Godwin's The Spirits. And I would, this is week four Christmas, just the best present you can get for the least amount

of money as a book. You know, go to any secondhand bookshop, go to any independent bookshop, buy a paperback, buy a new hardback if you want, talk to the booksellers, they'll tell you something great for Christmas. But it's something that you can give that doesn't cost a huge amount of money but that lasts forever and ever and ever. Go to the book trust if you want to donate books for kids and things like that as well, which is a lovely present. No one will ever mind you giving them a charity present. But books, books, books is what I say. You don't even have to buy mine. But just... But buy riches, please.

They're also easy to wrap. There you go. And on... Finally, finally we end on something nice. An easy to wrap present. See you on Thursday for Q&As? Absolutely. See you on... Oh, we will have to... I'm sorry, there's a significant amount of Quality Street discourse that we will have to address. Oh gosh, yeah. We'll have to go through. My goodness. That's...

I mean, we should just make the rest is Quality Street, it turns out. Or Bookshelves. The rest is quality street, it turns out. Or bookshelves. The rest is bookshelves. See you on Thursday. See you on Thursday.