The Rest Is Entertainment - South Park vs Trump

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

Is South Park the most important show in the world? Can Marina explain Roblox’s Grow a Garden to Richard? What makes Adam Sandler the most bankable actor in the world today? After South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone signed a $1.5bn deal with Paramount, they kicked off their 27th season by taking aim at Donald Trump and Paramount themselves. Trump didn’t react well with the White House claiming the “show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years” yet could the show now be more relevant that ever? It targets the right, the left and the centre. It gets people talking. It is also worth in the eyes of Paramount that staggering sum of money. So, is South Park the most important show in the world right now? ‘Grow a Garden’ is storming Roblox - the online universe where anyone can create games - beating records held by the likes of Fortnight in the process. But what is it, and is the secret of its success its simplicity? With Happy Gilmore 2 streaming on Netflix now, Richard and Marina discuss if Adam Sandler is Hollywood’s biggest banker and why people underestimate his talent and appeal. Recommendations:Marina: Diana World - Edward WhiteRichard: The Map Men (YouTube) The Rest Is Entertainment AAA Club: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to our Q&A episodes, ad-free listening, access to our exclusive newsletter archive, discount book prices on selected titles with our partners at Coles, early ticket access to future live events, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to therestisentertainment.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestisentertainment. The Rest Is Entertainment is proudly presented by Sky. Sky is home to award-winning shows such as The White Lotus, Gangs of London and The Last of Us. Requires relevant Sky TV and third party subscription(s). Broadband recommended min speed: 30 mbps. 18+. UK, CI, IoM only. To find out more and for full terms and conditions please visit Sky.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Assistant Producer: Aaliyah AkudeVideo Editor: Kieron Leslie, Charlie Rodwell, Adam Thornton, Harry SwanProducer: Joey McCarthySenior Producer: Neil FearnHead of Content: Tom WhiterExec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest Is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde and me, Richard Osmond. Hello Marina. You sound like, and you look like you're a long way away. Very far away in underwater, Richard. I am in Caffe Lonia. So we are parted, which you know, I hate. Is that Caffe Lonia, the nightclub in Croydon? Yes, it is.

That's the one, which is why it's underwater. No, I'm, I'm in the Greek Island of Caffeleonia and I'm missing you, but it is beautiful here. Oh my God. It is so beautiful. It's lovely. Uh, but listen, it's not going to stop us talking about entertainment. Is it?

No, it's not. No, it's not entertainment. Is it? No, it's not. No, it's not Richard. We're in a maelstrom right now. We're going to talk today definitely about, well, what, what we originally talked about was a sort of paramount deal going through, um, and, um, finally Trump's, um, giving approval to the deal. And then the unbelievable South park episode and the fallout from that and the fallout from all the different angles of things that have been done to appease Trump in the

Paramount deal. So that's one subject which has got many angles. We're also going to talk about Adam Sandler, how he became the most bankable entertainment star in the world, basically on the back of Happy Gilmore 2, which there's very few people in the world who are bigger fans of Happy Gilmore 1. I will give you my review of Happy Gilmore 2 later. And we're going to talk about Grower Garden, which you may or may not have heard of, but which is an unbelievably successful game on the Roblox platform.

And it's a sort of funny story and it's fascinating and we can talk about that as well. And you're going to explain to me exactly what Roblox is as well, because I've heard of it many times yet to live through it. But we're going to begin by talking about South Park, Trump, the Paramount deal. Possibly one of the most famous and controversial episodes of any TV show ever dropped this week, which is South Park's first episode of their new season, in which a number of things happen that directly relate to Donald Trump. It has been super massive. If you haven't watched it, it's on Paramount Plus in the UK, but people seem to have watched it in other places, but it has caused an absolute sensation. It calls into question a number of things,

the cancellation of Stephen Colbert, CBS's capitulation and paying off Donald Trump for a court case, and also sort of the future of satire. So shall we try and unpick all of those knots? Let's. I mean, we must say that the episode, unlike so many highly anticipated things, did not disappoint? Yes, it is. Whatever your view of it, it is certainly a piece of television that is quite something. Very brief background explainer. Paramount has been seeking to be sold by its kind of legacy owner, Shari Redstone, and they've been trying to push this deal through for

a long time to sell it to David Ellison, the 40-ish year old kid of billionaire Larry Ellison. If that sounds like the sort of person you might turn up in a South Park episode, I definitely wouldn't rule it out now. Anyway, Paramount owns various different things, part of which is CBS. You might remember that lawsuit that Trump had against CBS News, which was a bullshit lawsuit, sorry to say, but CBS completely caved on that and they paid him $16 million and he apparently, he has stated that he's also getting $20 million worth of free ad airtime in the form of PSAs, public service and announcements. Remember PSA because we're going to come back to that one.

Stephen Colbert, the late show has been canned. It's literally the late show now, isn't it? Yeah, it quite literally is. Now that show has been going for decades, obviously, originally started by David Letterman. Late night is in a lot of trouble in terms of viewership. It doesn't make what it made anymore, but obviously the timing is somewhat suspicious, coming so close to them desperately trying to get this deal through

the FCC, which is run by a little Trump minion called Brendan Carr. And Colbert himself on his show after CBS has settled that $60 million lawsuit, he called it a big fat bribe on the show and very soon afterwards was canceled. There are arguments either way as to whether it was an indirect response to it. And we will discuss that, but certainly that's what happens. So you think, okay, no one else surely inside that umbrella of companies is going to take on Trump, step up Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Yeah, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who are the creators of South Park.

This is an extra, this is a sort of unrivaled property on American TV in that it's been going for 28 years with the original creators. And I suppose you could say something like SNL, maybe Saturday night live is that sort of an idea. But basically there aren't shows like this that the same people keep making and it's very, very, very successful. So try and imagine the two deals happening. They also have a deal which was one of the craziest deals ever given to talent in history, which is Matt Stone and Trey Parker were given 50% digital rights to their shows of revenues about 15 minutes before like the whole of TV went digital. But anyway, and then people were saying,

well, there was a point this negotiation be going on for ages because they have an overall deal which is to produce their show. And then they also have this very, very special carve out that you don't see anyone else get, which is they get 50% of streaming rights. And that deal was up for renewal. Yes. So they had signed it with Warner Brothers, I think, for a huge amount of money for the streaming to go on HBO Max. Yeah, it aired on Max. Yeah. Yeah.

So it was up for negotiation this year. I wonder if you could tell our lovely listeners how much Matt Stone and Trey Parker sold the next five years of streaming rights for? Well, first of all, they issued a statement not that long ago. So it was a very, very fractious deal, this whole thing, because the new owners, David Ellison is coming in and he said, well, we don't want to just make a 10-year deal with these guys. We have to be able to have some say in this. And Matt Stone went out and put a statement out and said, the deal is fucking up South Park. So they had to then put a break on whether they were going to release the new season

and when that was going to come until the deal was done. Okay. The deal that they have just done, in fact, the day before whatever the South Park episode came out, which we're definitely going to come to because that was quite something. They take 275 million per year for a five-year deal. And then the streaming rights have been sold for 1.5 billion, which as I say, thanks to one of the all-time amazing deals for creators,

they get 50% off. So it's about a bit more than 2.5 billion for the next five years that they're going to split between each other in order to make their brilliant and very rude show. One imagines they've been paid two and a half billion by this company, they'll start towing the company line. I would have thought the first episode of the new season will be some sort of maybe a sort of a beautiful biopic about David Edison and what a wonderful man he is.

But no, they chose to do something very, very different. Yeah, it's interesting because honestly, as late as last year, in September, they were saying, oh, we're not even going to be on air during the election, the US election. We're completely sort of done satirizing Trump. They said, I don't know what more we could possibly say about Trump. Matt Stone said, well, they do now because the episode that aired last Wednesday explicitly featured Trump. In previous seasons, if you watch it, I watch it, Mr. Garrison had functioned as a kind of Trump avatar. So it wasn't Trump, but you knew that it was really Trump within the world of the show. Anyway, the episode is called Sermon

on the Apostrophe Mount, so it's basically about Paramount. It's incredible to think that absolutely every single person involved in that deal and Trump and the whole world just got absolutely, it's like a biggest screw you possible to all of them. It was sort of about religion in schools and obviously they use that as a jumping off point as they always do to go out of the places. The Trump stuff, you saw him in bed with Satan. He was very much the original Saddam character that they used to do. He looked exactly like that, except he had Trump's exact head in their cutout animation

put on top. But I did tell you to remember PSAs. There was a lot about Trump's tiny penis and so on all the way through. Then it ended with a PSA. This was not the comic book cartoon version of South Park. This was an AI deep fake of Trump. It was a PSA stumbling,

like shedding all his clothes naked through the desert. It was incredibly good this AI. By the way, it's an amazing deep fake. We all love AI now. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who obviously have quite a lot of money as discussed, bought a deepfake company at the end of 2022. I don't know what else they've been using it for, but if this is the only thing they do with it, well done, it was something to behold. Anyway, and then the episode ended with that incredible deepfake

of Trump talking to his own minuscule penis. Matt Steyn was on stage at Comic Con like a couple of, or a day after or something. And he said, oh my God, we had like four days in rooms with actual grownups arguing about that penis. And the way we eventually got it through is they put these little eyes on the penis. So they said it was a character.

I don't know how that gets you through paramount standards and propriety or whatever it is, but anyway, it's apparently enough. They did exactly the same thing on Last of the Summer Wine, didn't they? Same plot device. Anyway, they were editing this thing right up to the last minute after getting their multi-billion deal. I also love that Shari Redstone had the episode described to her by executives.

Obviously, with Shari with a hanky to her nose, you know, can't bear to watch it. It's only, don't worry love, it's only 20 minutes, but anyway, she couldn't get through it. And what happened with Trump's White House? Did they A, just rise above it? You don't have to acknowledge this stuff. Or did they respond by saying,

they did what they in fact did. They said the show, this was unfunny The show hasn't been relevant for 20 years and is hanging on by a thread With uninspired ideas in a desperate bid for attention I mean listen, I always give 2.6 billion to people who nobody cares about and nobody watches and have no relevance Of course, you know, they're probably richer than him now. I mean, you know, formally, not what he says he's got. The interesting thing here is of course Trump sues everybody.

That's his first line of defense against things. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are sort of trying to lure him into suing them because that is a court case that they would absolutely love, presumably. Yes. And I mean, there are certain people who shouldn't, you know, who are in litigation and it's going to be tricky for them. You know, Murdoch is, Rupert Murdoch is being sued by Trump. It basically snarls up all your business deals.

If you're a company and there's anything you want to do, if you're in litigation with Trump is very, very difficult. And this is basically what happened with the whole, basically what happened with the umbrella company of Paramount. Obviously, people at CBS News are very, very angry about the suing and all of that sort of thing, and the caving to his lawsuit, which as I say, was a rubbish lawsuit. They came in for attack. There were these incredibly cowed and craven CBS 60 Min minutes anchors on that South Park episode. So they really have like just scatter gun attacked everybody. But yes, I think they would love him to sue and they will continue to push on it.

Who knows? I mean, Larry Ellison's kid, David Ellison, as I say, really did sound like a guy that you might have in a South Park episode. But Matt Stone originally said, oh, no, no, we're not going to have him in. He seems like a really nice guy. Um, I've met him a few times. We're not going to, I mean, again, they also said they weren't going to satirize Trump anymore, so clearly I wouldn't set too much store by that.

But it's very interesting now because there is this sense in the US that Trump can just get all these things canceled. Whether or not it's true that Colbert was canceled to push this deal through, that they settled a lawsuit with Trump to push this deal through, these guys don't care at all. In fact, they would love nothing more than to have.

I mean, it's the best content for a show possible. You'd be watching it every week. And other people are feeling they have to pull back, or I see Jon Stewart, who's also on Comedy Central saying, oh, well, you know, I think I'm safe for now, but really having a go at them for cancelling Colbert. Comedy Central also owned by Paramount or the Paramount Skydance Corporation. And so South Park is, as I say, such an unusual thing in American culture. And there are people who it's quite misunderstood by certain people.

You know, the left has been complaining about South Park for a long time, because they felt like it was, you know, it's offensive. Not anymore, they're not. No, now they're not complaining. No, now they're not complaining. And, you know, anyone who describes them as centrists is, I don't know, centrists is like a sort of, like, I don't know, it's a bit like neoliberal. It's one of those words that people use and they don't really know what it means. They just want to say that they don't know, centrist is like a sort of, like, I don't know, it's a bit like neoliberal, it's one of those words that people use

and they don't really know what it means. They just wanna say that they don't like that person. I definitely don't think, if you know anything about them, that Matt Stone and Trey Parker are centrist at all. I mean, you know, they're basically, they're probably natural Republicans. They're definitely libertarians, but they don't really care about offending anybody

and they definitely would love to be embroiled in a lawsuit with Trump. It's quite hard to see where it goes from here in a way that's not like incredibly embarrassing to paramount all the time because now everyone's watching this show. And by the way, the reason they got all that money is because South Park is,

in terms of the things that are really popular on streaming, obviously you've got things like Friends, which are the most popular, but South Park's really not far behind and there is so much content, you know, 27 series or whatever it is. Teenagers love, I mean, you know, my kids love South Park, they find it absolutely hilarious and they love the back catalogue, but they love the new episodes and these are people who were obviously not even, like were not born halfway through its kind of season run so far. Plus, unlike Friends, these guys are making

at least five years of new episodes. So it's a very, very valuable property. And only the kind of serial awful management of Paramount had given them all these rights. I mean, don't forget that you still can't show Yellowstone on Paramount Plus because all the Taylor Sheridan shows are Paramount's biggest shows. It's such a sort of basket case of a company that you can show some of the spin-offs and you can show Tulsa King and you can show Lioness and Mayor of Kingstown and all the other shows and Landman, but lots of the Yellowstone things you can still only

watch on NBC because that, you know, they're two sort of biggest money spinners were on other platforms. Can I raise one point and one question? The point is a fascinating thing about South Park, which makes it different to all other those big long running animation shows, which take a long time to do. South Park is incredibly quick turnaround. The way they animated this computer animation and a version of cutout animation, which means it's more like a Saturday Night Live because it has a weekly schedule. They start writing the previous week and deliver it within six days, which is why they're able to do topical things and topical episodes. Unlike Saturday Night Live, it is funny. And why next week's South Park is going to be particularly interesting because next week's South Park will be all about this week's South Park or knowing the

South Park people, they'll do something completely different, but it is in their wheelhouse to be able to make it all about this week's South Park. So that's what's always sort of set that South Park apart from everything is it's the two of them occasionally they'll have script editors and writers and things. They do most of the voices themselves. They do most of the production themselves. They turn it around super quickly. So it's incredibly reactive. My question to you is there was an awful lot of gnashing of teeth when Colbert was taken off air and they said this is capitulation.

Why would Paramount Skydance agree for this episode to go out if they were in the business of capitulating to Trump? So does it put the Colbert cancellation in an entirely different light? Well, within the world of the South Park Sassade, not really. They clearly think that they're capitulating on all sorts of things. To me, the Colbert cancellation is inevitable and all of late night is in, I mean, no one actually really watches late night. Yes, they watch the viral stuff. They watch the clips.

They watch all the things and they still have that kind of presence in American culture via that thing, but the idea that they watch late night and sit down to watch it isn't what it used to be. And it's still incredibly expensive to make. It is incredibly expensive. The salaries, the staff, everything. It's, it has a legacy price for a 21st century audience. And that doesn't make sense.

I couldn't agree more. And I have long believed, I just remember a lot, God, I can't remember when I read this book, but it was maybe about like eight, eight years ago. It's a great book about Letterman by a guy called Jason Zinnerman, who's the New York Times. He wrote about comedy for the New York Times. And it's so interesting, you know, in those years when Letterman, those guys bestowed those huge big late night shows, people all across the spectrum tuned into those. And everybody, the political spectrum I'm talking about, now they are completely siloed kind

of in anti-Trump, Democrats sort of pro-democrat shows. And as a result, like half the people don't even watch and aren't even aware of them and think that they are kind of liberal, for want of a better word, liberal stooges. I do think the interesting thing about South Park is that Trump's normal thing of saying, oh, this is just the liberal elite attacking me, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think anybody thinks the guys who write South Park are liberal elite. You just don't think that. Anybody who has ever watched it, no matter what political persuasion they are, doesn't think that those guys are liberal elite because they've, they spend a huge amount of time taking the piss out of Woke and all of those sorts

of things. It's very hard to name a satirical show, which has laid a hand on Trump at any point, you know, has done something that has really cut through. Exactly. It sort of feels like the first time Tom Lehrer, the wonderful lyricist who sadly passed away at the weekend, he gave up satire. He said, the world scared me so much, I got to the point I felt like I was a citizen of Pompeii being asked to say something funny about lava.

That feels like what the last 10 years has been. Listen, this will be swept away, I'm sure, by something else. But it feels like the first thing to lay a glove on that regime, perhaps. Yeah. And it doesn't change anything. And as you said, you know, like that great old Peter Cook line about the cabarets in Weimar, Germany that did so much to stop the rise of Hitler. Okay. We know it doesn't stop things. Having said that, I find it so embarrassing that they actually issued a statement. Having what, once you've watched this episode, you think, I would simply not acknowledge

that this thing existed. And now it's like, I mean, everyone's gotta go and have a look for it now. And the micropenis character, all of it is coming back. I've, yes, I definitely think, and he's so obviously hurt by it, they don't care. You can't say that they're irrelevant, no one cares about them, they've just done

a massive, massive deal that, as I say, probably makes them richer than Trump. Real money, not the money he claims to have. I do think, in terms of allowing them to do that, sometimes people will have one licensed area of their company, which is used as a sort of fig leaf for all the other capitulations that they make. And I don't see what else they can do with that.

First of all, they need the money. Listen, the company was sold for just over 8 billion and they've just done a two and a half billion dollar deal for this thing. Okay. So that's how worth it is to that company. So what are they really going to do? You've just bought this thing. What are you going to do next?

I mean, you're going to say, no, Taylor Sheridan, you can't, we don't want any of your shows either. They have to like these people. It will be interesting to see how that talent relationship continues. It will be very interesting. And certainly next week's episode is going to be fascinating because they're literally writing it right now. Fun to imagine what they're going to write it about.

If you want to watch that, if you haven't seen it already, it does on Paramount Plus over here. I seem to talk to an awful lot of people who've seen it, who I don't believe are subscribers to Paramount Plus. So it seems to have been shared via various other places, but Paramount Plus is the official home of it in the UK. I mean, it'd be amazing to discover what the actual broadcast ratings for that were, because so many people were saying, I've got to watch South Park tonight. It was appointment to view. And I

think a lot of people will have actually just watched it live on Wednesday night before it went on to stream. Shall we go for an advert break? I think we should. Hey everyone, this episode is brought to you by Sky. Which means it's time to talk about Mr Big Stuff, the Sky original comedy which earned Danny Dyer a BAFTA for Season 1. His first BAFTA.

He returns as Lee, a man reacting to major life developments with self-pity, avoidance and long afternoons in a garden chair. His brother Glenn, played by Ryan Sampson, the show's creator and a fan favourite from Brassica and Plebs, takes a different approach, launching an investigation despite having no qualifications beyond stress, impulse and alarming levels of determination. One of those shows that is not exactly what you expect but also such a great reminder that the mighty Danny Dyer is such a colossus in the middle of our culture. It's sharp, it's chaotic, it's tender with cameos from Linda Henry, Sean Williamson and Rue Lensker to keep things grounded. Also, Danny Dye is one

of those people if you turn up on a TV show and he's also on you think, oh, we're in for a fun day here. And also whenever you're watching a TV program or a film and he turns up you're thinking, oh, we're in for some fun here. Listen, I've watched him on a film, I've watched him on an entertainment show, I'd watch him on Mr Big Stuff. All episodes of Mr Big Stuff series two are available on Sky and series one's there too if you'd like to trace the spiral back to its source. Requires relevant Sky TV subscription. I'm David Oleshoge.

And I'm Sarah Churchwell. Together we're the hosts of Journey Through Time, where we explore the darkest depths of history through the eyes of the people who live through it. Today we're going to tell you about our new series on the Great Fire of London, one of the great pivotal events of the 17th century, one of the most important events in all of English and British history. It began at a bakery on Pudding Lane and quickly turned into a catastrophe. It consumed 13,000 houses,

it decimated London and caused 10 billion pounds worth of damage in today's money. It even burned down the iconic St Paul's Cathedral. The city was already devastated by the Great Plague, but rumors of foreign invasion led mobs to attack innocent foreigners on the streets. In this episode, we'll explore the chilling consequences of rumors of fake news, of xenophobia, problems that clearly are not unique to today. From desperate attempts to save their homes and belongings, to the struggle to assign blame, which turned deadly. This is the story of the fire as it was lived through by the people on

the ground and the lasting impacts it left on the city. We've got a short clip at the end of this episode. Welcome back everyone. Marina from the Chaos of South Park Trump episode to the gentility of Grower Garden, which has become an enormous success on Roblox. Can you talk me through what any of those words mean? I'm quite close to the Grow a Garden phenomenon, Richard. I have three Grow a Garden players in my family. That's two of the kids and your husband.

And yes, I can tell you quite a lot about, okay, Grow a Garden and how big it is. It's interesting. It's on the Roblox platform, which is a platform that has free games on it and anyone can sort of create them. They're pretty low-fi, but they are huge. They have millions and millions and millions of people playing all the time and different games

become kind of really big and then fade away and some kind of behemoths that kind of keep going. If you've never been on it, they're mostly sort of younger players, although lots of adults play them. They're very low tech, weirdly, but it's massive. And it's interesting that we led with a story about a company that's just been sold for eight billion.

Roblox is currently, its market cap is like 80 billion or something. And so perhaps we're doing these the wrong way around. Anyway, but a lot of people, their sale price, their share price, sorry, went up about 21% in recent weeks. And there is some suggestion that a huge amount of that is due to the popularity of one game on it, Grow a Garden, which is currently the most popular game on Roblox. Can I, before we do the statistics, let me tell you what Grow a Garden is.

Yes, please. As I said, if you're not used to the, what I would call the Roblox aesthetic, it's very lo-fi. You essentially get an empty plot. It looks like sort of, you know, it's kind of like sub-Minecraft. You get an empty plot of farmland. So can I just say this is on a computer? It's on a computer.

Yes, Richard. It's on a computer. Yes, Richard, it's on a computer. Now it makes a lot more sense to me. I was really worried about land values. Yeah, you get an empty plot of land, farmland. You start with something like 20 shekels, which is the currency, and you need to buy some seeds, and then you need to plant seeds and tend to your garden and wait for them to grow into lovely plants. You can acquire exotic pets and you can sell stuff. You can go to the seed shop to buy more things. You can go to the gear shop. You can sell your wares.

And it's sort of quite calming and relaxing in lots of ways, although of course there are some users who found kind of ways around this to make it less pleasant. Plant wars. Plant wars. I feel like I've played games like this before, like SimCity had like a, like a SimFarm version of things like that. Well, there was Farmville wasn't there and, um, Stardew Valley.

So there's, it's, it sits in that kind of tradition. And anyway, let me just blind you with some of the statistics first, because not last weekend where they actually did have a new update. They have an update every Saturday. The previous Saturday, July the 19th, they had 22 million concurrent users for that update, which is by far a platform record, as I say, on this already unbelievably successful platform. It beats things like-

Even Fortnite, I think. The Fortnite's record was 16 million or something like that. And that was culturally one of the biggest things in the world. They've got 22 million concurrent users. Yeah, there was a May update where they had more concurrent users than all the top 100 Steam games combined. Every game on the Roblox platform is created by somebody. And actually this one is quite interesting. It only came out in March, by the way.

And it's amazing how these games kind of sweep to absolute prominence. That this kind of viral thing where, and I'll talk to you about at the end about what I think is coming after this one. And the creator was a guy called BMW Lux, but he- Is that his real name? Yes, I think it is on his birth certificate. I'm not sure in which order could be Lux BMW. I'm not sure in which order. It could be Lux BMW. Mr. and Mrs. Lux, daughter of BMW.

Anyway, whoever that creator was, he or she sold it in April when it had about a thousand concurrent users to a New Zealand guy called Janssen Madsen, whose handle is Jandal. Jandal is his handle is Jandal. Jandal is his handle. Jandal's his handle. So now he has it and he's got it in a joint venture with a studio called Splitting Point. You have to do all the patches and the updates and all of that. The whole point about games on Roblox is that you have to find a way to keep updating them or they become sort of old hat or no one cares anymore or people find their ways around them or they find different bits of source code and they can ruin them.

So there is actually a lot of pressure if you run a game like this, but he's very unusual this creator. He comes into the game and you can, which doesn't really happen with other creators. This is, like my children play a huge amount of Roblox and they have done for a long time and they've all the big games that have gone through

Roblox sort of Brookhaven, adopt me. I don't know, dressed to impress. There's lots of these games, jailbreak. They played all of these. Brookhaven, adopt me, dressed to impress, jailbreak, all the big ones. Yeah. Yeah. These, these are huge, by the way, these are such huge parts of my life.

So I find it hilarious that you don't actually even know what I'm talking about. But okay. But as I say, they're all different, like lo-fi things, but he comes into the game jandal and he can, you know, he can pick out individual users and give them things. But the clever thing he's done is that he has these kind of timed updates. So you all have to be there. And it's not like you have to spend money, Robux is the currency of the platform.

You don't have to spend money, but these kind of in-game items are available during these limited time updates. So there's like a half an hour time on a Saturday where, so if you want to get those mega, mega user numbers, which is he's obviously achieved and it's become the most sort of bigger thing in the history of the platform, he's created these event moments and the one that we've just had, we're recording this on a Monday, the one that happened on Saturday, Travis Kelsey had come and has done a huge collaboration and he gave all the players something. My children were so impressed, they know who

Travis Kelsey is. It's a real celebrity. It's not like a gaming celebrity, which is a gaming celebrity. It's not the same thing. They just thought, oh, this never happens in Roblox. You know, this is really unusual. And so it's extraordinary how successful this game has become. Kravis Kelsey also turns up on, on Happy Gilmore too, but we're going to get to that. We will get to that in a bit. But wasn't the original BMW Lux supposedly 16 years old? Yeah. I mean, Jandel doesn't look a whole lot older.

I've got to tell you, I've seen lots and lots of TikTok. No, not at all. I mean, he wanted to go to college and he wanted to get enough money, Jandel doesn't look a whole lot older. I've got to tell you, I've seen lots and lots of TikTok. No, not at all. I mean, he wanted to go to college and he wanted to get enough money, Jandel, to go to college and study marketing apparently. But I think it's probably, I think it's sort of burnt like 150 million in sales, which is via Roblox purchases within the first three months of actually existing. I mean, that's every single, every single parent listening to this. And I know Roblox is absolutely huge and the kids play it forever and ever.

And you know, I get it. It keeps them quiet, but now they must be going, how come you didn't make a billion dollars? You could have surely, you could have made grow a garden. It's only some carrots and some strawberries. It's so basic and it's so sweet. It's like, oh, I want to grow a sugar apple, a special elder strawberry. It really is quite adorable.

It's very interesting. And you can see these incredible data visualizations of the games that surge on Roblox. And there were things like, as I say, Brookhaven or Blox Fruits or any of those things. And suddenly they just become this dominant thing. It's interesting and it's quite hard to sort of understand the world and the mindset and sort of gen alpha of it all. But the next bit, I can see that the next big game that, as my children would put it, is really starting to cook is Stealer Brain Rot. Sorry?

It's called Stealer Brain Rot. Now, I don't know if we'll deal with Brain Rot in just a second. That's already a play on Grow a Garden and Stealer Brain Rot is a, you have to acquire Brain Rots. Do you know what Brain Rots are? Take a guess as to whether I know what they are. Okay. You don't know what they are. Okay.

Brain Rots are kind of a form of sort of gen alpha Pokemon, these kindesy little animal something hybrids that are ridiculous and that you've got to collect. It started with Italian Brainwart, which were these AI generated. Oh, I know this. I know Italian Brainwart. You know this. Well, Italian Brainwart was earlier this year, so it's before the flood times. I mean, who cares? They're like, Tral tra la la, tra la la la, the shark who was wearing the trainers. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous in the, you know, ballerina cappuccino, all these ones anyway. And so Stealer Brain Rot, the premise of this game is obviously Grow a Garden is very wholesome

and very sweet and blah, blah, blah. Ste brain rot already, a sort of play on the title, is a sort of alley. But the game is you have to acquire brain rots and store them in a base which you have to defend against all the other people who want to steal them off you. And you kind of get some, it's absolutely brutal. You get some weapons and all it is, is a sort of aisle between people's kind of fortresses where these brain rots are being kidnapped and stolen and taken away and yeah, it's, and baseball batted. I guess it's the obverse of Grow a Garden. And kids, you can see kids having sort of meltdowns, there's all these viral videos of kids having meltdowns about it because I suppose it sounds a little bit like

Grow a Garden and they've got their brain rots, which they're really proud of. And there are loads of adults do play Roblox, I should say. And then it's going in and stealing all these kids brain rots. But it's not, it's not compulsory, right? No, it's not. Nobody has to do it, Richard, but they do do it. This game is going massive now. So it's so interesting.

The games, you know, the game that becomes really big and then the game that's a kind of reaction to it. And I was saying to my kids, is this like a satire on Grow a Garden? And they're like, yeah, a bit, but it's sort of like a joke about life. Okay. Not a joke about life. A joke about life. Yeah, Stealer Brain Rot, is a joke about the pointlessness of existence, I think. But it's sort of, it's very, very interesting to watch this platform, which is, as I say, you know, worth 10 times what Paramount is something we've obsessed about all week,

all year is actually worth and is a huge, huge deal. And it's just, again, is very nimble and reactive and is constantly coming up with these new things that suddenly go viral and millions and millions and millions of people are playing them at once. If millions and millions of millions of people were watching one Netflix thing at once, we would never stop talking about it. We're going to talk a bit about how many people we think might watch, you know, might have watched Happy Gilmore and its opening weekend on Netflix, but it will not be, there were 22 million people watching it at once. There's just no, it just doesn't happen like that.

But it brings us back to the thing we talk about sometimes where the decline of terrestrial TV, when people say, no, you've got to appeal more to kids. It's crazy. You stopped appealing to kids and you know, you can get this audience back. It cannot be overemphasized that we cannot get that audience back because something like Grow a Garden, it's more fun. It is more fun than pretty much anything you could put on TV, because it's TV that you play instead of TV that you watch.

It's a completely different language. How could you put, I mean, me even trying to explain, me trying to pitch the idea of steal a brain rot to you is so absurd. It's just like a sort of collection of vibes and memes and, you know, reactions to the moment and it happens. And maybe in two weeks it will be the biggest thing and maybe it won't be anymore because something that's a reaction to that will have come along. And also because, because it comes from a subsystem, which is very, very, very

cheap to create something like that at any given time, thousands and thousands of people are creating it. And one of them comes out of the top and you cannot predict which it's going to be. And it becomes absolutely massive and it becomes organic and people add to it. And that's not something you've traditionally been able to do in television. It comes from nowhere. It's almost, it's like punk. Yeah, you're right. And that's something I wanted to do, something that made me think about you just, what you just said made me think about the gamification of absolutely everything, as we say.

They accept that whatever I would be planning otherwise to doing on a Saturday, I've got to be here for this thing because you've just got to be there and it's fun and everyone's there and talking about it or whatever. And we've talked about gamification of all different types of things, but it seems silly when we've had million quiz shows and phonings and all of that, but television isn't really a place where you can have gamification as it were. You can't grind and build stuff up and all the sort of things that feel just an intrinsic part of the dynamics of that generation and what they expect in everything. You know, you've got to work, you've got to stay, you've got to do all this stuff and then you get enough points and then you

get bigger and how could television be like that? I can't picture it. Maybe you can. Weirdly, there's a question I want to answer on our Q and A on Thursday, which is about, there's a French game show where you can build up huge, huge, huge amounts of money over a number of years. It's about as close as you can get, but it's genuinely at the start of this. I didn't think I would be comparing Grow A Garden to punk, but there we are.

Can I ask on behalf of parents everywhere, has it made your children more interested in actual gardening? No, when I said to one of my children, what do you like about it? And she said, I mean, it would just take so long and be such a hassle to do this in real life. Too low, isn't it? Okay. Yeah. And I'd have to wait ages. be such a hassle to do this in real life. True though, isn't it? Okay.

Yeah. And I'd have to wait ages. It's like, it seems like you're having to wait quite long for your sugar apples anyway, and she was like, yeah, but it's like a day. You know, it's not an unalloyed joy, is it? There's one thing I read about it, which is you can sync it up to your local weather. So the weather outside can be the weather. That's cool.

Yes. There's lots of stuff like that. And it does, as I say, it's, you know, it's occasionally these things are used by kind of malign actors to kind of build up lots and lots of money. And then they sell those things on eBay or El Dorado or other platforms where people will actually pay real life money for stuff that's been built up in game or for a profile that's been built up in game. But in general, it remains a place of quite bucolic lo-fi charm.

Yeah. That's one of those things about games. There is, there is some real joy to them. And there was some beautiful kind of very slow lo-fi games that do promote. People looking after each other. People are looking after themselves, people working hard. And this feels like one of them, right. But in the same way that we worry that violent video games will make our kids violent.

I think there's no evidence that gardening video games make our kids garden. So maybe there's something. No, but I do think they set the right circumstances for steal a brain rot to then come into existence. So it's a push and pull, Richard. I didn't say so many sentences in the last 20 minutes. I've never heard before. Absolutely gibberish, isn't it? I'm so sorry if it's remained gibberish for all of you,

so hopefully you're slightly enlightened. But anyway, it's a huge deal. And actually have a look at it. You don't have to play it yourself, but you can watch videos. If you just want to have a look, watch videos on YouTube of people playing it and you'll think, ah, okay, so that's that thing then. Marina, if I start playing that, that's the end of this podcast because I would get so obsessed with it. Well, you, you have that tendency, don't you? You're why you can no longer do fantasy football.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Shall we talk about something that feels more traditional and has sentences I would understand, which is the rise and rise of Adam Sandler. Yes. Lots of people have signed big deals this week, but he signed a $275 million deal with Netflix. He's Netflix's most bankable movie star. That's for sure. He writes, produces, he's got his own production company, stars in these things as well. Happy Gilmore 2 is out this weekend. It's been an

enormous success. And I just wondered if we could talk about what is it that has made Adam Sandler the king of Netflix? Well, it's really interesting and it's such a story of what happened to stardom and who realized it first and who didn't. If you look at those big stars, I suppose, big comedy stars of the nineties, early noughties, and you've got Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler,

Seth Rogen, I mean, you know, all those people, all the Judd Apatow crews. Adam Sandor had started as a sort of standup, and then he got SNL. He'd done Happy Gilmore, but he got his break in a Sony movie when Chris Farley died, that was Big Daddy. He became a sort of bought and paid for Sony star,

and a bit like Will Smith, it's very interesting. Both those two were the two people that Sony Pictures really kind of bet their studio on. He's so interesting as emblematic of what happened to Stardom. So they got paid in that old movie world, $20 million against 20% of the movie's gross receipts, whichever was higher. It's wild when you look at those numbers, okay.

A lot of this, by the way, we know from the Sony hack. Remember when the North Koreans, actually because of the South Park movie, hacked Sony. So much we know about of all of this from the Sony hack when North Koreans hacked Sony pictures and we got the emails of all sorts of people, but principally in terms of interest from Amy Pascal, who was a big executive and who looked after people like Will Smith and Adam Sandler. Now Sony executives used to joke

that Will and Adam bought their houses because they made so much money for the company. There was a point where they accounted for 23% of Sony Pictures profits and they got all this stuff. Like the basketball court on the lot was called Happy Madison Square Gardens. They always had used to the corporate jets Sometimes will Smith's entourage was so big you needed to but there's and what was great about will Adam Sandler particularly is that he's so prolific. He's he makes a lot of movies He wants to make a lot of movies. But by the time it got to Jack and Jill I think which he played a

Man and his own twin sister. And that was in 2011 and it was just really cringe and it didn't make any money. And also world record for the most ever Razzies. The last three awards. Yeah. One, one 10 Razzies. Well, the next one he did was called that's my boy. And that was, you know, like a classic sort of like one of those real late stage studio

things, which was a comedy that cost $70 million and shouldn't cost anything like that. It was all for the talent costs and that lost a load of money. And people or some people were beginning to realize, it's actually been realized this incredibly slowly in Hollywood, but that talent doesn't drive the theatrical business, the cinemas business any longer.

It is IP and it's brands. People don't turn out or we're starting not to turn out because Adam Sandler was in it. So in a way, although no one and still many people have not acknowledged this, A-list stars as an idea sort of collapsed. And at that point in 2014, Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix comes along and they do not see in Adam Sandler a washed up star that no one actually really cares about. They look at their data and they think, oh wow, all those people who used to go out in their teens and early twenties to watch Adam Sandler movies in the movie theaters, in the cinemas. They've all got kids, so they don't go out very much anymore. They're all, they all sit at home and they watch him like hell on our service.

They watched so much Adam Sander. He is brilliant for us. We should do a deal with him. So he sees the writing on the wall, Adam Sander and signs this. He was smart as well. He was smart enough to put his ego aside because at that time it was very different and Netflix was smaller and movies were still bigger and he was one of the first people to really, really get

that this was a great deal for him as well as a great deal for Netflix. Yeah, and so he did their first ever multi-movie deal and all those things we've come to know about Netflix, which is that they want a lot, they want a lot of whatever the thing they're buying is. So whether that's like shows with massive libraries that they can stream and they get people keep going back because there's 20 series of it. He's the perfect Netflix star, which he's very, very prolific. He wants to make a lot of movies. He's not particularly demanding. The humor is really quite basic and therefore doesn't feel like it can't be put in different territories.

It doesn't feel like it's so sort of like highbrow and uniquely suited to, I don't know, the North American market. It's got a real everyman quality for sure. Well, yeah. I mean, that's his screen persona, isn't he? He's like a sort of schlump who's a failure and he has to somehow pull it out of the bag to impress his friends. But he's a kind of, yeah, an overgrown man child really in almost everything.

But he did so well that, yeah, as you say, the next deal that he's done is a four movie deal or something, which is for $275 million. He's extremely interesting as someone who, as you say, worked out the way that wind was blowing. I would say when I'm thinking of Happy Gilmore 2, I understand that it wasn't made by Universal, who made Happy Gilmore 1, and so therefore it wasn't in theaters, and it's a Netflix thing, and they make a big deal,

and that's a part of his deal with them. This would have performed very well in cinemas, and there's not that many comedies they put in cinemas. I think so. And you make a lot of money doing it that way, and then you could have put it straight onto, you know, in a month or six weeks, you could have put it onto the surface. It also might not have done because it would have been made by Universal and there might

have been different restrictions on it and the budget might have been less. And, you know, because Happy Gilmore, it was huge, but it wasn't, you know, it's not Top Gun. So Happy Gilmore too is- But it's a cult thing. And over the years years it comes that thing where it accrues more fans because it's been constantly available on these services. But cult things are perfect for Netflix. Pop cult things are less perfect for cinema release. I think anyway, I watched it.

He's tell me, cause I did. I will watch it. So Adam Sandler does have this every man persona. You know, he studied at Tish and NYC. He studied under David Mamet. He's a super bright guy. Every time he's in like a, what people would call a proper film and uncut

gems or punch drunk love, he's a terrific actor. He's obviously a very, very smart guy. He's a, he's a terrific writer as well, but he does this sort of thing. So well, so murder mystery this sort of thing so well. So Murder Mystery and Murder Mystery 2 were his biggest hits for Netflix and I suspect this will join them in the pantheon. I loved it. I loved it. I love the original Happy Gilmore. This is so packed with cameos, which normally is the sign of this is going to be an absolute disaster. Like every golfer in the world is in it. Rory McIlroy is in it. Scottty Schaeffler is in it. He was the number one golfer. And by the way, turns

out a great actor. There is nothing that Scotty Schaeffler can't do. What? No way. Rory is a lovely present. Scotty Schaeffler actually a pretty good comic actor. Is Bryson DeChambeau in it? Bryson DeChambeau is in it. Brooks Koepka is in it, Jack Nicklaus is in it, Nick Faldo is in it, looking like he's had a makeover. I tell you who else is a great actor, is Bad Bunny, who plays Adam Sandler's caddy. He is so funny in this film.

He's so great in this film. He's full of stuff. Travis Kelce is in it. Eminem is in it. He turns up. Uh, do you know the original film at all? The guy who shouts out, yeah, the guy who shouts out Jackass all the time. Yeah. And then plays the son of the man who shouts out Jackass.

Uh, and, uh, is very, very funny. There's lots of kids of various, um, people from the original film shooter. McGavin is back and I thought it's a really, really, really funny film. It's un-we constructed. It's all of those things, but it's got, it's got a huge heart. It's got a proper plot. Haley Joel Osment plays the baddie, the kid from Sixth Sense. It's, I loved it.

And I think what Adam Sand was done throughout his career, he's shown himself to be an impressive businessman. But most of all, he's a great writer, writes a lot of his scripts with Tim Hurley. He he's also in this movie, has a great payoff line in this movie. I just thought it's exactly what Netflix is for, which is his two hours. Just absolutely entertained from start to finish. Oh, I'll tell you who's brilliant in it.

John Daly, the golfer. He is really great in it. I would say John Daly and Bad Bunny compete with each other to be the best celebrity cameo. And that was with Scotty Sheffler, a pretty close third. It's incredible how people who've worked with him, first of all, he's very, very loyal to his friends in terms of casting. So, you know, so many of his movies have the same people in, but they all are so, I remember reading one profile, maybe a New York Times thing or a New Yorker thing, and you couldn't move for people who wanted to help the writer just and be really, really nice about Adam Sander because they say he's so loyal.

So you had obviously Ted Sarandos saying, he's so loyal. You had Drew Barrymore saying, just anything you want, if you need anything more, anything for Adam. So you just write, you know, ring me to the right, the person doing the profile. All of these people absolutely love him. You couldn't really, I mean, you can find lots of people who've got bad words to say about his movies

because they think they're crude and basic and whatever, but you can't find people who've got too many bad things to say about him who've worked with him. It's sort of incredible, the roll call of people who are like, anything I could do to help. Yeah, I love, he talks about the casting of Eminem in this thing, and he said, everyone all the way through the script,

everyone's going, you should get Eminem to do this. It'd be really, really good part for Eminem. And he was like, oh, I don't want to bother him. You know, he's in Detroit, he's doing his thing. Everyone kind of, you've got to ask Eminem. He's like, oh, but Eminem's really busy. And he said in the end, he picked up the phone and asked Eminem. And Eminem went, yeah, of course I'm going to have you here,

are you mad? He was the first choice for Wonka, Adam Samler, the Johnny Depp Wonka. Sorry, I was imagining Eminem as Wonka. Oh no, not Eminem. That's very different. That's an alternative take, isn't it? Listen, it rhymes with a lot. Yeah.

And you know, maybe in the future, in a future version of it, they're always trying to make them darker and grittier. Don't forget. Do you have any recommendations this week, Marina? I do have a recommendation. I have a book that I've absolutely just finished and I absolutely loved. It's called Diana World by Edward White. And it's about the sort of obsession,

is the best thing I've ever read about Princess Diana. And I've read all of it, including her own books. I mean, it's quite sort of high brow, but it just managed to synthesize all the trash and all the treasure and all the sort of royal mythology and talk about like what she meant. It's not a biography at all. It's like a sort of,

it's a sort of biography of the obsession with her. It's really fascinating. I really loved it. As I say, it's quite a high-five, but it's brilliantly done. Every single thing from the different tabloid reporters, all the way through the mediums, all the people she, you know, the colonics,

the whole lot of it. And then right back to all the kind of ancestral stuff. It's all fascinating. Anyway, I really like that. So that's Diana World by Edward White. And I will recommend we've had the nieces and nephew here all week. So we've watched, for example, K-pop Demon Hunters about six times, which is very enjoyable, but a YouTube series I loved by these two guys called the Map Men. And they essentially they do like great YouTube videos and it's things like why is the United States of America the only thing that's allowed

to call itself America? Where did that come from? Despite the fact it wasn't sort of discovered by America over Spoochy. How did that happen? It does loads of things about why the English counties the size and shape and names they are educational, smart, funny. So if you've got kids at home and you want something to stick them in front of that actually is going to entertain them. And if they like that sort of thing anyway, the Math Men, I've been enjoying them all week. Oh my God, that sounds that I'm getting right into that. Let me tell you. All right. Well, on that note, we will be back as always with a for our question and answers episode on Thursday.

This week, there's no bonus episode for our members due to Cephalonia and various technical issues we've been having, but I have a special treat for all of our members. I have 10 pairs of tickets to give away for the Thursday Murder Club premiere. It's going to be in Leicester Square. All the stars will be there. We've got Sir Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren, Celia Imrie, David Tennant is in it, lots of huge names in it. I'll be there, my mum will be there, Marina I'm very much hoping you'll be there as well. So I think it'll be a fun evening. So if you are a member, look out for the newsletter. If you're not a member, feel free to join. There will be

other places to get those tickets to that premiere. Oh, it's so exciting. On that note, see you on Thursday. See you on Thursday. See you on Thursday. This episode was brought to you by our good friends at Sky who've made something rather special. Yep, a TV and a smarter one at that called Sky Glass. No box, no dish, no cables creating abstract modern art on the wall.

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If you fancy a TV with the latest tech and unmissable titles, visit sky.com. Requires relevant Sky TV and third party subscriptions. Broadband recommended minimum speed 30 megabits per second, 18 plus, UK Channel Islands and Isle of Man only. It's David Ullishogar from Journey Through Time. Here's that clip that we mentioned earlier. If you look at all of the accounts of the fire at this point, as we get to the end of Sunday the second, the first day, this fire is not behaving in any way the way fires traditionally did in London.

And there are some people who've argued that it was becoming a firestorm, that the heat and the wind and the movement of air caused by the fire was feeding, it was becoming self-sustaining as it were. John Evelyn, who's a great writer and a diarist of this moment, he talks about the sound of the fire. He said it was like thousands of chariots driving over cobblestones. There are descriptions in Peeps and elsewhere

of this great arc of fire in the sky. I mean, imagine that everything around you is colored by the flames, yellows and oranges, and above you is this thick black smoke. This is a city you know, these are streets you walk, this is a place that's deeply familiar to you, and it looks completely otherworldly. It looks like another, like a sort of landscape you've never seen before. People describe the fire almost as if it's supernatural.

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