The Rest Is Entertainment - Should You Leave Twitter?

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

Elon Musk is suing advertisers over an X / Twitter 'boycott' which in addition to content and his own posts is for many as a bridge too far. Will courts find in his favour and will a drop off in users hurt the company overall? Katy Perry's comeback appears to have fallen flat, but has it? The reception to her new music seems to suggest it has, so what can be learned and how do you make a successful comeback? Lastly, Mr Beast. Shooting of the world's biggest gameshow which he's producing for Amazon is underway but it hasn't gone smoothly so far. Sign-up to The Rest Is Entertainment newsletter for recommendations - http://www.therestisentertainment.com Marina: Corridors Of Power (BBC iPlayer) Richard: To The World's End (BBC iPlayer) Twitter: @‌restisents Instagram: @‌restisentertainment YouTube: @‌therestisentertainment Email: [e-mail] Producers: Neil Fearn + Joey McCarthy Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/trie  It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Redeem data in 1GB increments. Save by mixing to lower cost plan and supplementing with rolled data. Downgrades effective following month. Full terms at Sky.com/mobile. Fastest growing 2021 to 2023. Verify at sky.com/mobileclaims. For more information about how you can use Snapchat Family Centre to help your teenagers stay safe online visit https://parents.snapchat.com/en-GB/parental-controls Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When things heat up, you don't just want a cold one. You want the coldest one. The cold-loggered, cold-filtered, cold-certified one. Mountain Cold Refreshment. Coors Light. The chill choice. Visit CoorsLight.ca to learn more. Celebrate responsibly. Must be legal drinking age. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest Is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osman. Hello Marina, how are you this week? I'm very well and how are you? I'm really well. Can we start with the big news of the week?

Is it to do with how your kitten's settling in? Yeah. She came home middle of last week. There's still her, Lottie called. Yeah. She's not stopped purring since the second we got her home. I promise we'll get onto entertainment everyone. She's been kept apart from Liesel. The two of them are circling each other like, um, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in heat is that I, and by the way, I'm in the film heat rather than the cat thing. More news next week as they meet, they've had a brief introductory hiss. They're aware of each other's existence.. They're aware of each other's existence.

They are very aware of each other's existence. Liesl essentially sits like downstairs looking upstairs the entire time with just an air of slight quizzicality. I think she's playing it pretty cool. I would say Lottie just wants to play. You know Lottie's not going to be the problem here. Scrappy do. Yeah, she really is going to be. How dare you pull my kitten Scrappy do. I know, I know, she's not going to ruin the franchise. She's not going to ruin the franchise. Poor Lottie. Well, what really is gonna be yeah How dare you? I know I know Poor lot of well, what if she ruins the front of the whole brand comes down cuz I've lost a I don't think so She's cute and also

I'm meeting Spielberg this week Are you yeah, right? Oh, we're definitely gonna have to talk about that I mean, we'll lead with lotty, but then we'll then we'll get on to big that. I mean, we'll lead with Lottie, but then we'll get on to Big Steve. I mean, that's massive. I can't really believe that we're going to now also talk this week about Twitter now called X. Yeah. That's something we're going to talk about. So you say, should you leave Twitter? Essentially is the, or should one leave X, which sounds

more of an algebra equation. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about Katy Perry. Has she become a sort of designated train wreck? Her first single off her new album, Flot, and she seems to have been sort of shoehorned into one of those narratives of like now a failure. Is this true? Why did it happen? What can be done about it? Should anything be done about it?

And we're also going to talk about, you've heard us talk before about Mr. Beast and this huge deal he signed with Amazon Studios. Well, the first bits of filming have been done and rest assured, a lot has gone wrong. And we're going to talk about that. Now he owns a media company. It turns out that's harder than it looks. So first thing we want to talk about is Twitter. Musk is essentially taking loads of advertisers to court, all sorts of trouble over disinformation. He's having a go at Keir Starmer. Are we in the dying days of Twitter and should we leave?

A huge amount of me feels that I can't even rationally talk about this. One of the things that social media has done is made everyone this sort of pooterish character. Don't forget there's a long time on Twitter where people would say things like, I won't be posting here for a week because I'm going on holiday. It's fine, just don't post. We can all do it. We can all become deranged because of social media. I mean, there was one person I saw this week, he's got quite a big following saying, you know, that Twitter's now like Paris under the Nazi occupation. So some are collaborating, some are refusing to give up the city, some are fighting for liberation. It's just like,

oh my God, have a day off from taking yourself this seriously. So I'll tell you what I'm doing Well, I'm being a Renee from hello. Hello. Yeah friendly on the surface, but helping British airmen in the attic I mean do people have any idea how mad they sound? I mean, I've read one of the Times columnists sort of saying, you know, I'm going to leave after I've filed this column I see she's still on it on Monday morning after we've but you know, you work for Murdoch Yeah, and that's fine But if you want to talk about engines of disch and that's fine, but if you want

to talk about engines of disinformation and engines of polarization, have a look at your stablemate Fox News over the past decades now and what that's done. They've had to pay out billions anyway on this false election thing and the voting machines or whatever. I mean, have a day off your high horse, I would say, to a lot of these people. It's just a social media platform to have as much of people's identity as it seems to be tied up with how it fares, whether it says, in which case you've sort of ceded control of part of your identity to one of a number of weirdo billionaires who own these platforms who are just generally quite bad people, I think.

Certainly, it's easier to not buy a paper than not be on Twitter. I think lots of people have left and saying it's become very difficult to navigate with with the amount of hate I personally don't see it because I don't and I've never used Twitter for my political discourse call me weird I just right from the start. I thought I'm not sure if this is the place for me So useful for links and what have you so if there's newspaper things, there's always interesting articles But I'm not going to start engaging about the state of the world on Twitter. And by the way, the whole of the world is not engaging with the world on Twitter. Nothing political ever gets changed in this country on Twitter. Around the world it does, which is why Twitter is banned in

Iran and China and has just been banned in Venezuela and things like that. So it's... So it's just look at the places it's banned and then think whether you want it banned in the UK. Why don't we try and get banned in Venezuela for 10 days, the rest is entertainment. I dispute Maduro's election win. I think it was stolen from the people of Venezuela and I challenge him to allow people in Venezuela to listen to this podcast. I'm watching our listener top line just drain in real time. It's going like this. You don't think people want to hear Venezuela and Maduro talk from us? Anyway, so I don't use it for political discourse.

And what the far right does, and has always done, what they're very clever at doing is using something like Twitter to leverage the amount of noise that they make. And they know they're doing, that's the game they've always been playing, and Twitter has always been like that, which is why I've never gone anywhere near political Twitter, because you can see in real time it's being used. So the political side of it is less interesting to me.

What I think is interesting is Twitter for quite a long time is an incredibly useful place for new creative voices to be heard. I agree with that. And for illustrators, joke writers, all sorts of things, people to be able to put this stuff out there, to be amplified, to make a living. We used to look for writers on Twitter, you get people who would never dream of being a joke writer or sending stuff into a TV company and you just go,

but you're really funny when you come in for a day and sit in a writer's room. And that's a great thing, it used to be a great marketplace. Now the algorithm I think definitely has changed in that regard, it's much harder to share your stuff, it's much harder to sell your stuff, it's much harder to share a Patreon or any of these ways that creative people make money and they are now not able to do that. And what do you do after 10 years if

your business plan gets torpedoed like that? The political side of things, it was always a cesspit. Can I add one thing on that? I agree that many people have come up far that way and they've managed to get themselves commissioned to do all sorts of different things, whether's joke writing whether it's writing journalism whether it's all sorts of things as well Yeah, it is a lesson to all of us. It's good not to have all your eggs in one basket. It is good to have Real relationships with people that you can feel you can Contact outside the platform. Wait, wait, wait all your eggs in one basket. Sorry. I just had to say I'm do you know what if I didn didn't say it I was gonna literally explode. No, or we would have had to edit it in. Yeah, we would have had to. It's that good.

So yes, all your eggs, I'm so sorry, all your eggs in one basket. It's good not to have all your eggs in one basket. It's good to be diversified in terms of how you are able to get work and it's always good to be able to have personal relationships with people that are not social media personal relationships. 100% but it's been useful in time if you're someone who doesn't know how to travel to London or where the media is that you can get yourself known. That was an incredibly useful thing and of course all those people's relationships are now in the real world which is very helpful. But also you can go to TikTok and you can do it that way in lots of other ways and that's what people are doing. Well, do you know what? That's the point is this whole thing about Twitter. Twitter is for old people.

Yeah, my favourite thing is like don't forget to register to vote. By the way, if they follow you on this platform, believe me they're registered to vote. Or people are talking about their GCSE results, I didn't do well on my GCSEs and I'm fine. Nobody, nobody doing their GCSEs follows you. Let me tell you this right now, it's extraordinary. The only message you should ever give on Twitter is don't forget you have to retake your driving test at 80. But I see why, is there's a certain bit of left leaning media for whom Twitter has been just a lovely warm bath for a really, really long time. You know, it's always been fun to do. They liked to fight on there too. And they did. They enjoyed fighting. They changed nobody's

minds I don't really think. And actually I've mentioned him before, Gerard Lanier, who's a really interesting kind of internet prophet and a bit of a Cassandra on lots of these things and there's a good book he wrote which is very slim called Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and it really clearly explains that these platforms, all of them by the way, are about keeping people angry because then they stay on the platform longer and they know this and there's been tons of research done that so what they really always want to do is make you cross. That's always been my attitude towards it

is knowing that I've always tried to not do that I've always tried to be I've always tried to just do jokes do nice things you know I for example posted a picture of Lottie the other day which went down very very well yeah she's not the brand breaker some people seem to think she's gonna be. So I've always done that and I've always had that in return and I'm very like this and I'm a white man so there's a lot of abuse I don't get on Twitter just by the very nature of who I am but I also don't attract anything negative really because I don't really post anything negative and that's not me sitting on a fence

that's me going no I choose to use going, no, I choose to use this thing for fun. I choose to use this thing to hear the latest rumors about Fulham, to be shown interesting articles from America and tweet along with the Olympic closing ceremony. That's what I choose to use it for. And I do and I can. And I've been very, very lucky in that regard. But I do think if you've ever tried to use Twitter for politics then it's not having an impact because in Britain politics is all on Facebook. I

don't think it has a huge influence on things like the riots because that's all on Telegram and that's on Facebook. I certainly think that's the case and I think that people thinking this has happened because of social media, if we turn this into a social media story I'm afraid it'll keep on happening. That isn't the story. And we've seen this in lots of different ways since the, I suppose, the big political shocks of 2016. I do think that foreign states medal in our politics.

And I do think that obviously social media is one way to do it, but I don't think that that's why Brexit happened. There's a huge cope in all of this where people are just thinking, oh, something awful's happened and I need to sort of either litigate it away or explain it away via Russian interference and if Trump's coming about this time again it's not because of social media and it makes it might help people to think that this is why and it's a useful bogeyman but I actually think that the causes of it are something much deeper and as I say it's

a bit of a cope saying it's all to do with social media because it's not. Well I'll say two things firstly Marina has rubles sticking out of her pocket, someone's a shill, alright comrade, and secondly I think that all of us tend to think the world looks a bit more like us than it actually does and we think the world looks like the people around us a bit more than it does and even at those people who say yes I understand I'm in a bubble but you but I get a rough idea of what Britain is and who lives in Britain. So what do you think the alternative is for people who either a want to find a way to monetise their creativity or b just enjoy the fellow feeling and the

friendship groups that they've made on Twitter? Just get a WhatsApp group for your friends, honestly, this is incredible, most people do this. No one is going to cancel you in your WhatsApp group. You can make much more amusing jokes. Just do all that. And if you want to get noticed as a creative, obviously, TikTok. It's like we're talking about, there's a big row on the steam trains. Yeah. And talking of internet profits, that's the other thing people say, but you're

making money for Elon Musk. I tell you one thing that Twitter is not doing, and that's making money for Elon Musk. It's a mate thing that Twitter is not doing and that's making money for Elon Musk. It's at least half the value of the company. Scott Gallaway, he's a brilliant sort of entrepreneur and professor and maybe some of you listen to one of his many and brilliant podcasts like Pivot or something like that. But he is, he is like, there's never been a case of a company that's losing like this. Yeah, I think he's literally the worst performing company in history. Yeah don't worry you know like you can leave but people are leaving or people are just and the main thing is that people don't

want to advertise on it. Now Elon Musk who said not so long ago to companies didn't want to advertise go fuck yourselves now is literally trying to take them to court in Texas for not advertising on his platform. Good luck with that. Yeah he's suggesting that advertisers have joined together in some sort of consortium to wrong him and he's suing them in a I'm gonna say a very friendly court in Wichita Falls in Texas and the judge is a major Tesla shareholder but to answer the original question I mean I still use it.

I don't use it anything like as often as I used to. I've certainly, anytime something comes along with a timeline that I'm like, this is grifting, pure and simple, I mute it instantly. You know, I'll try and tweet nice things and you know, there's still plenty of- I've never blocked or muted anyone on Twitter.

Have you not? Not one single person. Wow. I like to see it all. Do you see? I don't, I can't handle it. I'm very bad with conflict. I don't need for it to be algorithmically sent to me by Russian bots. I can find it in the real world. I feel, you know, Aristophanes first mention on the podcast, maybe? I can't remember. To be insulted by you is to be garlanded with lilies. Wow. I feel I should have that as my bio.

That's a nice one. That's good, yeah. First time on the podcast. First time on the podcast. Not the last. We should interview Aristophanes. He's a very, very funny guy. In Roman times, of course, X was called Ten, right?

Yes. Yeah. He was Greek, but other than that, yes. Was he? And they say you don't learn anything on podcasts. Well, he could be the first for our breakout series, The Creators. The Greek squad. But if you do wish to leave Twitter, I by all means don't feel the need to make a huge announcement about it. You can you can just sign off without saying anything at all.

And I hear threads is perfectly nice. I hear blue sky is perfectly nice. Or but also you could just not be on it at all and see what happens, I would say. And listen, I give that advice to someone who's not leaving it, but if you do choose to leave it, if it is too upsetting for you, if you do find it too difficult, there's a way in which you could just not be on it. Yeah, just log off. Here's me being kind and gentle and there's you going, just log off. Yeah.

That's good. Is it such bad advice? It's like two completely different types of therapists and you know within the first session which one works for you. They keep coming back to you because you're telling them what they want to hear, whereas I'm curing them. Yeah, well, I mean, listen, that's pretty good. I like to think of myself as a Plato to your Aristophanes. Well, now Plato was Roman, right? No, Greek again. He was Greek again. What about Plato and Socrates? Okay, Socrates. I know that Plato and Socrates were linked, so therefore Socrates is Greek, plus

Brazilian because of the football. This is really taking people behind the scenes of Athenian philosophy, isn't it? So who was Roman? Like no one. Who was Roman? Marcus Aurelius. Julius Caesar. Paola Maldini. Of course from Milan. So Milan is not Roman. Welcome back everybody. That Twitter handle is at

Richard Osmond. We are now talking about Katy Perry. We are now going to talking about Katy Perry. Katy Perry was, I want to say, once the biggest pop star in the world, but it's a little bit like being world number one in tennis, that you can possibly have never won a grand slam. But she had five number one singles in a row, which I think is still the record. Well, five number one singles from the same album. Album, sorry.

Only women ever to do that. Michael Jackson did it as well, but she's the only woman ever to do it. From the same album. Now she recently taken a break, she's become a mother, she's been one of the judges on American Idol for about seven seasons roughly, don't quote me on that, but she's now decided to leave that and return to supposedly her first love, music. She's got a new album coming next month, 143 or 143, I don't even know how you say it yet, and that might be part of its difficulties. 14-3 I'm hearing. It's named after the France vs New Zealand rugby league score in 1979.

She had a comeback single called Woman's World which failed to chart but got a huge amount of negative attention for reasons we will come to. And she's sort of been wedged into that failure narrative now, where almost everything she does feeds into the idea that it isn't working. She's got another single that has just come out called Lifetimes, which is a sort of off the peg club music. Oh yeah. That's the music I like. Now it's interesting to talk about what has gone wrong and what can be put right. Because as I say, this is a woman who's absolutely

at the top of her game, seemed to be in control of absolutely everything, was, as I said, took a break. There's lots of interesting things. Came back at a time where female-led music is absolutely dominating the charts. So there's an opportunity to her to come back and be Lady Gaga, but she's come back and it seems to have all gone away from her. Lady Gaga I think is one of those stars as is a sort of genre of one almost in some ways and I know it's

always dangerous to say that but she does have such a sort of defined image and way of doing things. The first single Woman's World was this kind of I mean really kind of calamitous girl girlboss, feminism word salad that when you think of the summer that we've been talking about, people like Charli XCX, all these young stars coming through, it just seemed so old fashioned and almost like it was a parody, which will come to what she said about it. And the reaction was really swift and horrible. Also lots of her early, her early albums,

her really big success was produced by Dr. Luke. Now Dr. Luke, he worked on the first three albums. Now Kesha, a former Dr. Luke artist, eventually went public and said that Dr. Luke had sexually assaulted her and physically and verbally abused her for a decade and so he's a sort of persona non grata in lots of ways. Whilst he is responsible for loads of Katy Perry's most successful albums to go back with him and then especially in a some sort of faux feminist message or real feminist message. Anyway it went so badly wrong I don't know who her publicist is but can I just say they are terrible because it went so badly wrong she had all this opprobrium sort of tipped all over on the internet. Then she issued a statement retrospectively claiming that it was satire. I'm gonna read the statement because it's very special

With this set it's like we all were not about the male gaze But we really are about the male gaze and we're really overplaying it Which is like a reset for me and a reset of my idea of the feminine divine. Well, you just made it worse Wow It's sometimes it's not the disaster, it is the attempt to cover up the disaster and saying that it was satire, which was new, and saying it in that way. You just didn't get that it was about her reset of the feminine divine. What was it called? Yeah, the feminine divine. Yes, interesting. She seems stuck on post feminism where the world has not only gone on to post post feminism, I think we're now

on post post post feminism. And so she's two posts behind. First of all, and I know you mentioned Lady Gaga earlier and there's people like Cher who can go off and do it and go act, but then very few. I think we want still to believe that musicians have to be musicians. They are artists and they have to sing and they have to make music. Now, if you take a long period out and go and be a television judge on a show that I don't think people anyone would really claim Is particularly about the music and then you sort of say right? I'm coming back to music. I think there's a world where Maybe if you don't take your fans with you with an amazing song people just think oh I see you've come to look at this quadrant of your media empire have you yeah

I mean authenticity is everything whether you're genuinely authentic or your PR are very good at faking your authenticity and the acts that are huge today, we talked about many of them before, we could have some like Billie Eilish, there is an authenticity that feels real and I was thinking exactly that, to come off eight seasons of American Idol and to come back and say, no, I'm here to save pop music. You know, you have to come back with a banger and she hasn't come back with a firework or a roar she's come back with women's work. I'll say this for her you know that time out that she had and you think oh I don't know has that has that ruined your career having that that time out in the last eight years she sold her music rights okay she sold her music

rights for 225 million dollars she had a residency Vegas, earned her 148 million dollars and for being a judge on American Idol she got paid about 200 million dollars. So there's half a billion dollars she's made in the last eight years which might hopefully just soften her landing from height. I don't think we believe these people. Someone like Taylor Swift has somehow managed to make herself extremely relatable but I saw morning, she was photographed getting off or getting onto Friend of the Podcast, Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos' yacht. And I just thought, yeah, you're in your stage of your life where you're going on the boat with Jeff Bezos.

I mean, can you imagine Charlie XCX doing that? No, of course we can't. No. You're sort of in the persona era of your career. If you're a musician of questionable commitment to the art of music, as I would say as Katy Perry is, it reminds me a little bit of J.Lo who had something similar this year. Again, she self-financed a documentary called This Is Me Now, which people sort of laughed about, and that cost her 20 million, but you know, you can't self-finance something for 20 million if you don't have 20 million lying around.

So she's not doing too badly. Then she released the album, which didn't do well. She then announced a tour, nobody bought tickets, so they then said, it's going to be more of a greatest hits arena tour. And everyone was still like, remind me the J-Lo hits. She's always to some extent felt overvalued as a music star, even though she's done very well. And I'm sure she does loads of really lucrative private gigs etc etc, but she's not going to sell out an arena tour and in the end they had to pull the arena tour. But like we think you know she is a movie star, big movie star, particularly on Netflix where her movies might get panned but they are... JLo this is. Yeah this is JLo. Her movies might get panned but something

like that, Atlas was number one for how many weeks. she's done very well as a as a sort of as an actress and as a She's got you know, she's got an alcohol brand of some type or another Yeah, this is what she should do that Yeah, they you're in your persona years now You're diversified into a number of different revenue streams and you do talk about them like revenue streams and you don't talk about the art anymore That's what you do talk about them like revenue streams and you don't talk about the art anymore that's what you do and unless you are so committed to one particular avenue someone like Madonna who continues to make music, continues to tour, nobody ever says I don't think she's interested in it people might say

well she likes the attention, so what I mean she remains the person that she always was but that's not to say that going into five or six different things isn't good business and I'm sure Katy Perry's business manager is a lot better than her publicist, if I can see they are. But I think it's most important if you can have a good business manager or a good publicist, always choose a good business manager. Well the business manager can tell you to fire the publicist at some point and surely must have at this point in the summer. I don't know if she really cares that much about music and being anything. She obviously doesn't need to work again. But people miss the attention.

I personally would not have, if I had been her publicist or her agent, have had her leave American Idol until the album had been a real hit. Because at the moment it seems like she's shut the door on a very successful television judge career and this is tanked. Now she's been asked to perform at the VMAs, the MTV Video Music Awards, so there's a lot riding on that performance. But you know what, she performed at Joe Biden's inauguration, she performed at the King's coronation. I mean you know she's... Yeah exactly. She performs, she does private gigs for really old guys now. Yeah but you know

and there's a lot of money in it, yeah and it's a question of can you can you have your cake and eat it and it looks like you can't. All the people at the top of the pop charts at the moment, as you say, are either younger and just fully on it, or they're the older generation who've always committed to what it is that they do. And there is a world that you can get into where celebrity meets billionaires, and you can get lost in that world. And listen, I mean, that's okay, you're allowed to, you're allowed to go on yachts and this or the other, but you can't do that and then come back and say I've got this relevant fresh new single about feminism because... Yeah, you're not an artist. I mean honestly you're not, really you're not. And if you don't write your own songs, which she mostly doesn't, you've got to

assume that people who do write songs and who do write hits, and there are many of them, want to give it to a young fresh artist and want to give it to them rather than someone who is maybe not going to turn it into a hit. I mean what she has ahead of her of course is that lovely you can then become a legacy act who people adore if you know if you bide your time now for a little while and you know do your UN ambassador stuff but yeah a hard environment for her to come back in at the moment never been a better time for female led pop music and this incredible sort of energy around all of that. She tried to parachute into it and very, very interesting that she's been deflected. The parachute did not open.

The parachute didn't open but she landed on half a billion dollars so she walked away unscathed. It's a cushion. Yeah. Okay, now finally I think we're going to talk about Mr Beast. Yes. Mr Beast, Jimmy Donaldson, 26, he's the world's most successful YouTuber. He's got north of 300 million subscribers on YouTube. He recently did a deal with Amazon. I'm not going to describe as a legacy TV company, but they are a sort of a proper TV company that is making television to bring a show, both what they want is his audience to come to Amazon and they've paid him $100 million to create a show which is going to be called Beast Games.

We don't really know much about it at the moment. Apart from it's gonna have the biggest prize in history, I think it's gonna have $5 million prize. And we know it involves very large numbers of contestants. I know a few things about it. Oh, you do? Just from insiders, but nothing particularly special. But the most interesting thing, of course course is it's been mired in controversy

Already, there's a weird sort of world in YouTube where legacy media won't touch you because they're kind of fine No in fact if they write about you it's slightly in awe because they don't understand it the second you come on to their patch and You're making like a regular television program. They're like, oh making a regular television program. Are I might just write it down. Now I'm gonna have a look at you this is what I mean a lot of people when they originally came to bid for this show and other companies were also in for it I'm told that Ted Sarandos was just like a Netflix cosy Netflix was just like I don't know I mean no one's really had a proper look at this guy yet because he's a youtuber and youtubers don't get scrutinized in

the same way and the sort of slight like oh we've been outbid nevermind you know because you don't know what's gonna happen now I'm not saying it's gone that wrong by the way I should just give you a few little stats about mr. beast he brings in about 700 million a year until about Katy Perry money yeah till about five minutes ago his mom Sue was their compliance officer wow good name for us compliance officer Sue yeah just talk to Sue and his philanthropy channel where he does these huge stunts and huge giveaways to people that loses money. The gaming channel MrBeast React where it's him and his friends makes a lot of money because it's honestly just watching some people play computer

games. I've watched huge amounts of it in my time, vicariously by my children I should add and he's got his feastables, which is it, his chocolate business is mega, he's like sort of a wonker of some sort. And he is operating out of Greenville still, North Carolina, and he's got on his walls, he's got a picture of Elon Musk dressed as Napoleon, and Steve Jobs, these are his heroes, he's obsessed with growth, he's got a great big room full of cash, because he's constantly giving cash away to people and he has you know pulled off this phenomenal growth, he has become this extraordinary huge figure and obviously these channels wanted to try and get him in so they could bring

the audience but he has started to become beset by more of the sort of scandals that you might see at other companies and there are various allegations surrounding Ava Chris Tyson. And Ava has left the company. Has left with immediate effect. Beast Games has itself, there was an episode, elements of it were being filmed in Nevada recently. There were 2000 contestants. You had to put five days of underwear in a ziplock bag, give them any medication you needed. You can already see where this is going. I think it's reported that you got a thousand dollars extra if you

signed away any right to a future class action. People have complained about Mr Beast things before, but again, as you said, Richard, people don't really take a notice because lots of people in the legacy media don't watch YouTube and they're not really aware it's happening and they have no idea that this guy is bigger than anybody they possibly could imagine on their legacy channels. Yeah, another thing that's great we've got a target, just to speak to that contract that people signed, the contract clause says, I understand that such activities may cause me death, illness or serious bodily injury, starting with death there, including but not

limited to exhaustion, dehydration, overexertion, burns and heat stroke. Yeah, I think quite a lot of those things are reported to have happened. Yeah, and by the way, that is actually a fairly standard line in a contract of that sort of thing, if you're making a survivor or something like that. So I was reading all this stuff. Now, two interesting things.

Firstly, the show he sold to Amazon has a thousand contestants, okay? That's the show he sold. So this whole thing in Nevada is essentially a pre-show, which I'm guessing he owns. I'm guessing that's on his channel where he's got 2000 people. So 2000 people come down to Nevada to qualify to be in the biggest game show of all time. And by the way, everyone who got knocked out got a thousand dollars. There are large amounts of money involved here.

The latest video he did was, survive 100 days in a nuclear bunker and win $500,000. We know what Mr. Beast does. If you sign up for his show, you know what he does as well. I watched this at the weekend. It's brilliantly done. It's great. You know, they're 20 minutes, these things.

They're such high production values and such high cost and outlay for something that is 20 minutes. Exactly that. It is crazy. So there are issues, people are saying, oh we had heat stroke, we had exhaustion. It sounds to me like it was just a regular, you've got 2,000 people in a stadium. Statistically some people are not going to be particularly well. I think they filmed it during the CrowdStrike outage as well. They did, they say that. And I must say it's quite new that we've got these kind of Squid Game the Challenge where we also saw stories, some stories like this emerge.

This is very new, this idea of doing shows with a thousand contestants. This doesn't really happen on blankety blank. Yes, you're quite right. It's a big happening. It's like a big live event. Yeah. And at big live events, of course there are all sorts of issues. Now he is someone who's not put together a huge show like this before, and this is the pre-show show as well. The actual show, I know for a fact the show runner is a brilliant person who's done all sorts of shows like this. They're in fairly safe hands when it comes to the actual show.

I was talking to somebody involved in it, they said the sets that they are building, they said, I've never seen sets like this in a TV studio in my life I've literally it is extraordinary and we use them once and then they go and we replace them with another extraordinary set and they say the one thing that mr. beast is saying constantly to them which if you say to an experienced TV producer actually is a very freeing they're saying the most important part of this challenge however long this challenge goes on for them the single most important part is the first 15 seconds. It's like after 15 seconds that either people are either in or out.

So you know the people making the show, that's what they understand about how to do these challenges. They've got a huge amount of money to spend on incredible contraptions and incredible things and they have to hit people right between the eyes within 15 seconds and they've got this enormous prize. So I think it's going to be great. And I think a lot of the stuff around the production of this show is just stuff that happens when you have a thousand people in a stadium in Las Vegas. I'm sure there were issues and I'm sure there's payouts and what have you.

But it's a large amount of people doing something. What's going to be bigger for MrBeast is the stuff you were talking about before which is looking back through his old tweets, you know, finding him using discriminatory language and that's something that hasn't come out even though he's sort of built himself into one of the biggest moguls in the world because he's a mogul in a world that's felt completely untouchable. And not understood by the old moguls. And now he is definitively touchable. This is a culture clash in lots of ways. You can read people who've worked with him who say, oh, he really doesn't like people

being called things like production assistants. They're called friends of friends because it's too legacy, it makes it sound too industry. And they don't really believe in lots of forms of health and safety because they've never done it that way and why should they? And they fundamentally believe they know more about this than these kind of ailing television Yeah, also they do they they do they did squid game without getting rights There are things they do that if you have a proper lawyer and stuff that that you don't do well They are now getting a proper lawyer and all sorts of other

Yes, I saw I saw they were advertising this is this is when you I mean listen just have to look at a job advert And go okay. That's interesting I wonder what's up at this company. They are advertising for a chief HR officer And they've just implemented mandatory sensitivity training. Sorry also a chief financial officer and a general counsel Okay, something happened here. I wonder what it was. Yeah, it's not we need we need eight more creatives I'm a veteran crisis PR not like some hey I'm a YouTube crisis PR. It's like oh, you're one of the ones that the old guys use also no panic But we could use a doctor. Yeah

Now there's lots of things about this that they did It's a non unionized show and I think that's significant and worth saying this is very much that kind of grind You know new media culture the tech culture. They're doing six or seven day work weeks, which is why you can't get unionized crew. I think it's fair to say that there are lots of those shows in the old days, everything from Big Brother to Survivor to everything worked out that if people need regular medication, you don't have to say it, but maybe don't book them on the show because it is a recipe for disaster. And rather than thinking, not knowing those sorts of things, not war gaming backwards backwards from worst-case scenarios is the mark of

someone you, we should say that Mr. Beast whilst you're talking to me about the producer, they wanted to have full control of it and the only way they would sign the deal is if they had full control of it which is why some of the other players fell out of the bidding and decided not to go ahead with it. Yes, I mean you would hope that he's smart enough in everything he's done so far, it seems that he's fairly smart, that he would understand that if you're making a legacy media show, probably best to have someone at least on your right hand side who's made a legacy TV show before. And you know, that's the vibe I get from the set is that people

are doing the job they've always done, but they're learning new ways of doing it. When that happens, when those two worlds collide, either you get something which is a terrible mishmash that nobody's interested in, or you get something incredibly new that changes TV forever. So I think both of those scenarios are still on the table. Which he is, yeah, another thing that's worth talking about, I think, is, you know, do our Amazon care about this, the stories that have come out? We know that in lots of ways they don't care in the same way that, I don't know, clearly the BBC would have to care or, you know, NBC would have to care in the US. But the head of Amazon Studios, Jennifer Salk, they did their first ever presentation for advertisers last year. And now this is really sort of

significant. And he was right at the centre of this. Mr. Beast Games was right at the centre. They're way behind we should say in streaming Amazon I can't remember what they you know, they're like they're like about a third of YouTube and about a third of Netflix and YouTube a 10% ish and Amazon about 3% ish Now they said it was gonna be very expensive to advertise on this show But you could have your product integrated within it. They were going to do all sorts of new and innovative things that were very, very expensive. Um, it's interesting to see what advertisers will feel. I think they will see the finished product if it's good and think,

I don't care about any of those stories. It doesn't matter much in the same way as you saw that with these large crowd games like Squid Game, the challenge, it ended up being brilliant. And people didn't mind, but advertisers have to feel confident. And this is part of the problem with Twitter, is that do you want your product advertised next to this stuff? It will have to prove itself, this show we should say,

but I still think it can be huge for them. One really amazing thing, everyone at the, and listen, I'm sure this wasn't a master plan, but it's brilliant. Everyone's saying, oh, we were like really hungry, because like the games were going on so long and we hadn't been fed and then someone gave us feastables, chocolate bars and then they filmed us eating them. Okay so you gave like a load of starving people a chocolate bar and then filmed them going oh my god this is amazing. That's

great I'm not, I'm sure that's not what they did but I'd love to see the advert. I don't know what's going to happen to Sue the compliance officer brackets mum. Yeah poor Sue. Yeah she'll maybe be given some actual brackets in one of those jobs that's you know chief investigations officer or something. Production assistant. Yeah. Yeah and that's us I think this week isn't it? What about some recommendations? Recommendations well can I say one thing firstly which is with just announcing the the audiobook reader for we solve murders Which are very exciting. Here's the wonderful Nicola Walker. Oh, so I'm so excited Oh, that's fantastic from unforgotten and a million other things one of our very finest and funny

She is terrific. So she's done there. She's done the audiobook of we solve murders I think there's little clips online of her reading stuff out. So that's lovely isn't that? Recommendation I would like to recommend it, this is a hard watch by the way, but I think it's absolutely extraordinary. No, it's on BBC Four. It's a series called Corridors of Power, Should America Police the World, and it's documentaries. The documentary maker, Drawer Moria,

has assembled this extraordinary cast of talking heads to talk about these interventions that America made in the spirit of Never Again, after the genocide of World War II. It's amazing in retrospect so much of my opinions on these things because you know how Iraq turned out, or certainly in the medium term, and you know how Bosnia turned out. And my views on lots of these people had sort of calcified into the people who made those decisions into very simplistic black and white, often villainous views, and

to hear them talking about their emotions and how they went through, how they reached these difficult decisions is extraordinary and you end up with something so much more nuanced but it is a very difficult watch in lots of ways but I can't recommend it enough, I think it's brilliant. And that's called again... Corridors of Power Should America Police the World and it's on iPlayer now. I'm going to recommend an iPlayer thing as well which is, which is Aristophanes, My Life in Rome. It's an amazing documentary, they do really lovely curated things on iPlayer every now and again and this is one and it's called To the World's End, Tales from a London Bus

and it just goes the 31 bus from Camden down to a world's end in Chelsea but stops at various points and it's in the early 80s and some of the people who it talks is an incredible Irish woman in Kilburn, incredible young girl in Labyrinth Grove as well, just slice of life type stuff, it's 15 minutes long I think, a one-off and it's so beautiful, sort of a time that's lost but also you think... I was on the 31 bus this morning no way are you kidding me yeah okay I'll watch that definitely it's really really good I really really love that so Nicola Walker doing the audiobook lots and lots of lovely recommendations please send us your questions for the questions edition of this show which will be on Thursday the rest is entertainment at gmail.com

yes thank you for all your questions and yeah next week on this show we'll talk a little bit about our friend Steven Spielberg as well. How about that? Alright then, see you Thursday. See you Thursday everyone.