The Rest Is Entertainment - The Wild West of Noughties Reality TV

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

Why are our TVs being flooded with documentaries about the problematic reality shows of the 2000s? Do Ai companies really care about killing Hollywood? How did niche French Existentialist theatre from the 90s inspire the biggest reality hit in history? The biggest (and most shocking) reality TV shows of the 90s and 00s are getting the 'tell-all' documentary treatment. Why did our culture create such a toxic environment for contestants, and has anything really changed? Sora2, the supposed film studio killer, has been shuttered by OpenAI. Can Hollywood breathe a sigh of relief, or is it because they're irrelevant to the tech titans of Silicon Valley? The Rest is Entertainment is brought to you by Octopus Energy, Britain's most awarded energy supplier. Join The Rest Is Entertainment Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus content, ad-free listening, early access to Q&A episodes, access to our newsletter archive, discounted book prices with our partners at Coles Books, early ticket access to live events, and access to our chat community. Sign up directly at therestisentertainment.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Video Editor: Adam Thornton & Joey McCarthyAssistant Producer: Imee MarriottSenior Producer: Joey McCarthySocial Producer: Bex TyrrellExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Rest is Entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. Now, remember, Octopus Energy do something really great. If they've got your birthday, when you call in, for whatever reason to Octopus, the whole music is the number one selling single from that year, the year of your 14th birthday. And we discovered, didn't we, that yours was the only way is up by Yaz and the plastic population. We're going to discover mine now. Yours is

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year for you. And you can always choose not to have the music. You can choose for, no, but I think only animals do that, as I've said, and I want to go on the record as saying that. Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Resters Entertainment with me, Marina. And me, Richard Osmond, how lovely to be here, lovely to see you, Marina. It's lovely to see you, Richard. Very nice to see you. What's been, what's been keeping you? All my children were very tired the other night, and I said, what would you like to watch and they just went a Richard episode of Would I Lidey? Oh my God. So I know.

It's a one with Jason Isaacs, which I strangely hadn't seen. He's a lot of fun Jason Isaacs, isn't he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That came across. Yes, yeah. He was, I thought he was terrific. Well, listen, that's a case for the NSBCC, I think, rather than for anybody else. What might we speak about this week in the world of entertainment?

Well, I know we're going to talk about, as Bill the last week, we're going to talk about reality TV reckonings, as it were, this kind of emerging genre where reality TV ethical abominations of the 2000s and 2010s are sort of repackaged in documentary format. Perhaps for learnings, I don't know. We're going to talk about why that's happening and why it's happening now. Yes, and I'm going to give a few examples of some of the more egregious reality shows of the naughties and also quite why it was such a Wild West back then, because it really, really was. And we are also talking about, We spoke last week about AI and books. And again, then we said, we're talking about SORA, which was Open AI's video thing, which Disney put a billion dollars into.

And they've shut down. We're talking about why they shut it down, what that means for Hollywood. Let's talk about reality TV. It was a different time, Richard. It was a different time. It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times. It was 100.

Yeah. The turn of the millennium era was kind of golden era. Golden. We can argue about golden. and it was unbelievably influential. It's no coincidence that the most significant reality TV star of that era was Donald Trump and that he couldn't have become president without having done reality TV because having failed in the 80s essentially in property or had to go away with the tail between his legs,

he came back as a complete force via one of the absolute sort of marquee reality TV formats. We want to talk about reality TV because there have been a whole slew of programs. recently. Big, big exposés on Netflix and various other streamers. Big expose of the biggest loser and the things that happened behind the scenes on that show. That was a weight loss journey. Weight loss, US show. There was the expose of America's next top model, which went behind the scenes on that and showed how various people were treated on that. There was about to be one on one of the most extraordinary shows ever made The Swan. Yeah, I think that, so reality TV didn't use to exist as a thing.

We had docu-soaps. Reality TV really came about because of the enormous success of Survivor and Big Brother. I remember, because I may have mentioned it before, that was my idea. And just the idea of putting people on a desert island and then voting people off one by one. I had no involvement on it after that. And I remember it would have been 93, 94, when the first ever territory made that, which is Sweden. They made a show called Operation Robinson. And that was the first ever survivor. It then goes over to the States is huge.

John DeMole comes up with Big Brother, which is essentially Survivor, but not in a desert island, in a fixed rig house. And these shows absolutely bestrored the world. So they were beyond enormous. It was interesting, funnily enough, in that Q&A answer, just that Lisa Cardre gave us last week when she said, oh yeah, you know, we were about quitting at the top, and she said, you know, we were a number one when we quit.

Or maybe actually Survivor was. And so the very first reality TV, it meant something very specific, which is sort of like a social experiment. Ordinary people put in an unusual situation and you film them and you see what happens. And there was an innocence to them as contestants. Exactly. And because in America,

really the only things they had were scripted and news. They didn't really have what we have, which is factual entertainment and things like that. So reality TV came to mean everything that wasn't scripted in America. And now it's sort of it means that over the hair. So it started like lots of these things. And factual entertainment would be, you know, documentaries, you know, behind the scenes at Marks and Spencer or inside the factory or the dog house when you're, you know, adopting a dog. It's just just little formatted real life.

Airport. Things. Yeah, that would be a docu-so. But we have a history of that. Yeah. But wouldn't that? Yeah. They didn't have those sort of things in the same way, I don't think.

Exactly that. To them, reality TV meant, oh my God, what are all these things that aren't, you know, know the 60 Minutes, new show or a big drama, you know, what are these things? And it helped that there was a writer's strike at a certain point, which meant that they didn't have any... Writers will always help themselves out by going on strike at exactly the wrong time. Yeah. We're now looking back 25 years, hence at quite what that meant. And the chase, it was a gold rush for non-scripted programming.

So there was an enormous glut of shows because there was an enormous glut. of viewers and an enormous glut of money. But there's always the law of diminishing returns in all of these things. And so things started to get more and more extreme, certainly in a pitch, the hook would have to be bigger. In a show, the kind of cliffhanger at the end of each show would have to be bigger as well. You know, that's how culture works. And it led to some of the extremes we're now seeing being exposed.

Yeah. I mean, America's top model was full of it because there was such a ratchet effect with it. Fashion is obviously can be quite absurd anyway. but they were made to do like victims of shooting fashion, victims of a shooting as a fashion spread

so they would all have to be sort of splayed back against all. There was one girl whose mother had been killed by gun violence and she had to be sort of like this splashes against war and if you weren't up to it

if you weren't hard enough then you weren't hard enough for this business and it was all of that you know it was and she loved to scream at people Tyra because she just it's so interesting

seeing how episode one starts and then where she is by the time as time goes on and you just feel that it's chasing that dopamine that just became unavailable from the things that they used to do in the earlier series you know performers didn't have to be treated with respect in the same way that they had with established stars and I didn't have agents they didn't yeah exactly but it was almost like there was this kind of pent-up rage about dealing with talent that and it could be sort of of dispensed with and they were almost sort of meat puppets. They could be manipulated. Actually, their interactions could be completely misrepresented. As you say, there wouldn't be

an agent saying, hang on, what the hell did you just do to my client? And there's a sense of quid pro quo, which is, listen, you would not be in front of this many viewers if you weren't on the show. You want something out of it. And so it felt, I think, to some producers, like, this is, this is fair enough. Everyone's getting something out of this. It's, it was something very pygmalian about it. I was going to say. I knew it would be George Burn ashore. Yeah, but actually like the George Bernard Shaw play, which there's quite sanitised Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn.

I built you, I made you, I created you from nothing. I can make people believe you're anything. But in a much darker way, I own you, and you would be anything without me. Do you know, there's actually a genuine play that's behind the whole of reality television, and that is Jean-Paul Sartre is the Huy-Clo, which is where head is other people. Three people in the anti-room of hell. That's where that comes down. I was watching it at the Edinburgh Festival,

or maybe in 1990 in the Bedlam Theatre. I saw that production. No way. Oh my God, that's really weird. It's no hilarious. Jesus. Listen, we're on the right podcast. Yeah, I know.

So I think, you know, lots of other bits of there as well. Shira, yeah. I remember him being there, Peston. Yeah. Peston was in it. And I came out of that and that idea of head as other people. And that's, I thought, well, that's where literally, I think two days later, the idea for Survivor came from.

So it comes from Sartre. That that we both saw. That's so weird. We were in that tiny, because it's not a big theatre. And the great thing is, the most profitable franchise in the history of television came out of it. And neither of us made any money from it. So that's great. I don't think I deserve.

I was just in the audience, Richard. I think even I would not be trying to take limb piece of that. But what was interesting in this, anyway, to back to reality. Enough about plays. But back to reality. All right, Timothy, shallame. It felt a bit more documentary at the story. start and documentary makers have quite strict codes and there's quite a lot of sort of ethical

underpinning and philosophy to it all. And then it became like, okay, she didn't do the thing we wanted to do. Would it be possible for us to edit the time when she did and make it look like she did it at the moment we need it for the kind of emotional arc of this episode? Yeah. And my counterpoint to that is certainly in the very early days a big brother. It was being streamed 24 hours a day. And you remember those days we, you know, people watch people sleep. And actually, you know, that generation of documentary makers in the, in the, who are so Lord is from the 60s and 70s who showed life as it is, all of that was very artful and all of that was constructed in an edit suite.

And actually Big Brother, particularly, was one of those shows where everything was on show all the time, quite hard to do a villain edit if everyone is seeing your dailies. It absolutely from that point onwards became the norm that you could, you know, create your own narratives. But I think in the very early days of Big Brother, at least, there was a purity to it, which is let's just see what happens. Let's put these, it was enough at that point. Amazing things did happen. Do you know, there's a US series where, and it's not like the first series, they all decide, first of all, they start getting on very well and they try to sort of live in a harmonious sort of community.

But one of them does literally lose their mind, I think, but not in a sort of violent way, but thinks that there are being messages left everywhere saying, if we all walk out, we will all get a million pounds. they debate it for hours saying even if not we'll be making a point they start digging up the garden looking for buried money and actually the guy who it's CBS isn't it Les Movers he ran CBS he's like the kind of Titan sends a message saying you tell them that if they walk out we're putting another lot straight back in because they're just losing the show they think these guys are actually going to do it as like a cult moment but imagine that the meeting where so at Les we just need to talk to you about this new show So everybody then came into the market. They said, what else have you got? What can you do with people? What sort of environment can we put people in? How can we put people in?

We did a show years ago, Endemol called Chained, where people were handcuffed together. In fact, there's a show on Channel 4 now called Handcuff. It's exactly that. We did a show called Shattered, where you weren't really allowed to sleep. Although we worked up very early in the production process that you couldn't do that. And so they weren't allowed to sleep, but they were allowed of 15 minutes sleep every two hours or something. There was what, by the way, you remember we've talked before, and we've got a great sort of bonus. I can't remember if it's one or two episodes about Mike Darnell, the absolute evil genius of who works at Fox and was the evil genius of this era.

And whenever he heard, a lot of people, you know, when they heard the show was coming out, they're like, right, we're doing the same thing then. And they would try and get their shows up in like 10 days. One of, like, I think the chamber was versus something called the chair. And you were tied to, you're tied to a chair, lowered into a pit. You were like, something like would happen like, you'd be a tax. by bees. John McEnroe hosted. He was, but that sort of started as a quiz show, which is can you answer questions under pressure, which is sort of a perfectly neat idea.

And then, yes, someone, because Fear Factor was huge. Fear Factor hosted by, it's funny, that people who disappear from our culture, Fear Factor was a huge show in America. We made it. hosted by Joe Rogan. Where is he now? I knew that. Yes.

So it's now 25 years on, and these documentaries looking back at what happened and the moral of the time are becoming incredibly popular, like really, really huge hits. I think it's interesting also that Y2K stuff has been sort of fetishized for so long, but people are now moving back into the 90s in terms of that's the last great decade. So rather than saying, wow, this is an amazing time, which at which point you always want to say, this was the era of train about celebrities, the 2000s, you know, it was an awful time. Reality TV was so dark or whatever. Now people have moved back to the 90s, they feel able to take a look at this and look at the

dark side of the decade that they've just spent the last, of many years, fetishizing. Yeah, exactly. I mean, listen, there's some dart size to the 90s as well. Yeah. We'd have to worry about that for a while. Yeah, yeah. And then they'll make the documentaries about those.

With things like America's next top model and the biggest loser, you can see that these things start in quite a pure way and quite a gentle way, which is, oh, that's an interesting idea. People are interested in weight loss. We can get some ordinary human beings and we can help them lose weight. Oh, you know what? It is a dream to be a model. You know, we can get people from all across America.

They can come and do various tasks and one of them gets a huge contract. Well, I mean, God bless. They start purely. Yeah. Well, yeah. Tara Banks, who was the sort of host of it and also felt like, oh, I'm becoming a mogul via it, which I think was probably a key part of its appeal to her. I mean, God love it.

I do think she's one of, she is a monster, but I think she's one of those monsters that's made, not born. To become as successful model as she did, modeling is a discontaliener. Modeling is a disgusting business. It always has been, and it may be a bit less so now, but to some degree it always will be. And for her to come up and do as well as she did, being a black woman in that business,

I think some bad things have happened to her. And she never talks about them because I think she sort of self-identified as a strong person, and I'm all for that as a credo. And she'd internalized, I think, so much of that awful industry, that what they ended up doing to these, and they would have these hopefuls.

I made them do these shoots. It's really worth watching. By the way, if you have a documentary, if you haven't, then feel free to watch them and come back and listen again. It's called Reality Check, Colon, America's not Nextop. And that colon makes me think, oh, there's a strand in this. Reality check, something else. They're just trying to build a.

Yeah, continue. It's quite difficult to hear from Jen Zed about, you know, I can't believe you lived through these brutal times. You're like, I know, your biggest star is like, you know, Mr. Beast and, you know, all the other, lots, many other YouTubers who are arguably making people, do quite odd things for money. And also, you're watching families like this where there's no control. I mean, there's much less control. And, you know, there've been documentaries about YouTube's families like Piper Raquel and Netflix have done a few of those where you think,

well, they had absolutely, they have, these people have no safe guy. Oh, we're doing exactly the same thing again. Yeah. We're doing it 100% the same thing again. So the Swan, which as I say, there's there's about to be a documentary about now. So we can, you, you can't watch that one yet. But The Swan was a series. Amanda Byron hosted it. And The Swan was a show where women with poor self-image, I don't know, where they cast them from. Ugly Ducklings. Ugly Ducklings.

As they like to call them. Were taken under the wing of a bigger swan and had like a makeover over a series of months, which included a glow-up but also included plastic surgery. It was extreme. Lots of stuff like that. The key thing about the show was these women. had no access to a mirror for the entire duration of the makeover. And that was the point of it, is they were being made over and made over and made over, but they could never see themselves until the last moment where they are revealed.

Because reveal is such a huge part of reality TV, all of it. Yeah, even if it's a, and all the particularly on the makeover shows. And expectation of making this have clearly come across stories that suggest maybe this wasn't as wholesome as that description makes it sound. So it'll be interesting to hear what happens with that. But it was a Wild West. As you say, we have not learned from it at all because we're still, you know, this is the very beginnings of the attention economy.

I get in the attention economy as only ramped up. Can I mention two shows, though? One was a German show, which is called sperm race. And sperm race was 12 German guys. We take them all to Cologne, and they give us a sample of their sperm. Take one sperm from each of these men, place it near. an egg and whichever sperm reaches the egg first, that person wins a Porsche. And you go, okay. The other one was, and as I say, it's an absolute Wild West at this time, and stuff

was coming out that you'd be like, whoa, okay. Dutchendomel had a show called De Groteurne Show, the great donor show. And the idea of this show is there is a woman who is dying, and there are three people who need a kidney transplant, she interviews them and decides that she's going to give her kidney to one of these people. There was enormous furorory from everywhere. The Dutch government, the Dutch church, everywhere had gone absolutely crazy. It was dominated. They are, but dominated the news in the Netherlands for a really, really long time. And they knew the day it was going to go out. This is 2007, sort of June 2007. And, and, and, and, this show goes out and everyone is watching it because everyone is like, I mean, this is

absolutely mental. It goes out on a Dutch channel called BNN. And it goes out, this show, a decorator donor show, five years to the day that the guy who set up BN had died because he was on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. And the Netherlands had the slowest take up of organ donations in Europe. The entire show was a publicity stunt. The world. The woman was an actress, she wasn't dying at all. The three people who needed a kidney, all needed a kidney. They were on the organ, they were on the waiting list for it. And the entire show is, you have got to sign up for organ donation. You've got to do it. The whole thing was a hoax. The whole thing was to raise the, you know, the Nudge Unit in the United States.

So, exactly. So extreme. It changed the law in the Netherlands. Even during the show, 12,000 people signed up. You know, 350 people a year were dying in the Netherlands before. for that. They got over a million people, which in the Netherlands is all like watching this show because they were expecting, oh my God, what are they doing now. And they did this show which had enormous impact on social change. We knew right from the start, by the way, the Duchess said, look, this is what we're doing it. This is why we're doing it. So we were getting pressing. Well, that really is a social experiment. How amazing. That is totally fascinating. I must say that a lot of the ones they're going back to, you know, obviously we've just said that they've got brutalities of their own, Gen Z and Gen A. What I find quite sort of depressing, about this as a genre is a big part of me suspects it's a chance to have a second bite at the footage because what else are you going to do with the old, you know, so, oh, I mean, we were just talking about it, you know, if you repackage. You know, you can, I mean, Big Brother, you could definitely do. There are definitely people, you can have talking heads talking about that as, as it goes on. I mean, as you say, it's an amazing way of repurposing stuff and, you know, it's social

history now. Yeah, but there's a part of it that just feels, I don't feel, because, you know, there was that a huge scandal just this last week about the married, Married at first sight, Australia. They got someone who'd been thrown out of the show, or had left the show, someone called Brooke Crompton, and she came back on for a dinner party, at which her role, she clearly just been told to insult everyone. She insulted absolutely everyone, abused them. It was really horrible. This is aired incredibly recently last fortnight. There's been this huge outcry. The statement is hysterical from Brooke. This behaviour is not a reflection of who I am at my court, and I hope that Australia will one day see this. The grandiosity of Australia, yeah. I hope they

will see this. But my feeling when they were doing this and with this whole new genre is it's a nice idea. I think they're like a second bite at the footage. I don't believe that they're doing it to sort of cleanse the earth and plant new things because we're not seeing that at all. And also another part of me does feel like we're stuck in this endless, which we've talked about on so many different subjects. It's another form of reboot of kind of old IP. Yeah. I will say this, though, the one thing I always think when I watch those shows, you watch the biggest loser and things like that, the documentaries and they'll have the producer on and they'll say yeah but don't forget you know things were very different then and i was there then and things were not that different then you knew what

right and wrong was and the people who would when i see some of the justifications for what people did on those shows and i think back to rooms that you know i had been in and everyone knew every everything i hear from those producers mouths i'm like no absolutely no way no one was thinking I'm sure this is okay. I totally agree. And when I look back on some of the things I wrote about celebrity culture during it, because a lot of this was in the noughties and it was such a completely toxic era for celebrity culture. And, you know, it was the era of Brittany and shaving her head and being completely tormented.

And I've said before in this podcast, I remember once seeing when there was a big, lots of rumors that she was pregnant. Paparazzi put the camera up her skirt and there was blood on her knickers. And the headline was simply, she's not pregnant. We knew this was wrong. I wrote about that all of that stuff in heat. magazine, the circle of shame, celebrities being kind of reduced to this, you know, they're sweating, they've got cellulite, all of that stuff. You knew it was wrong at the time, you know, and people had lived through eating disorders and lived through all sorts of things

and actually were aware of it. And it was a nonsense. I completely agree with you. It was done and it made a lot of people lots of money, but it, people did know that it was wrong. We've got worse now because it's permeated everything, this type of culture. Reality TV culture has sort of permeated everything. You see it in the Oval Office now. all the time. Yeah. But... And it came from the Bedlam Theatre in 1990, a production of Weaklow.

But we were in the same... We wouldn't have been the same night, but... It might have been. You never know. You never know. And another time, we'll talk about the story of space cadets. Because we always have questions about space cadets. And that was something in the very early days.

That one, I have to say, I was at the beginning involved with. A story for another time. when we convince people they've been to space. After the break, we're going to be talking about SORA, the Open AIs video app that is now no more. It was going to destroy Hollywood. It is now destroyed itself. Welcome back, everybody. Now, Sora, you remember last year we told you it was this incredible piece of kits that was going to ruin Hollywood.

Disney put a billion dollars into it. It could make just extraordinarily film-like video. Just unbelievable what it was doing. The worry was that it was going to put lots and lots of people out of business, that it was going to absolutely, you know, destroy the internet, you know, cover it in slop. But it is dead. Open AI have stopped it. We're going to talk about why.

Yes. Remember, six months ago, genuinely, it was the, I think, most downloaded app in the app store. And they wanted to turn it into a social platform. and they initially began by just copyright infringing on an completely unprecedented scale. You can make anything happen at all you could make. And then it sort of galvanized Hollywood and saying, this can't happen. And there was a sort of huge pushback. But then, so they disabled the use of characters and actors who hadn't given permission.

But then they did do a deal with Disney, who was going to invest a billion in OpenAI. And they said they will use character likenesses. 200 characters, not voices, anything that kind of used other human stuff, they couldn't really do, although they are made by human animators. So the question is, has SORA closed down because Hollywood

pushed back? No. No, very much. Sora was shut down because it was wildly, wildly unprofitable. And even in the world of AI and that crazy Wild West, it was absolutely unsustainable. Don't forget, open AI have got very, very large

pocketed backers, lots of VCs involved. with it. Microsoft puts a lot of money in and this thing was costing them roughly saw just existing in the real world was costing them $15 million a day. It's so nuts. And I've seen estimates on each video, some saying a dollar 30 per video generated, some saying $2 per video, but it's free to the user. And it's, it was and also it was a sort of great novelty like one of those actually, you know, They show you that you can do it and you can make Elsa and on or do this or that. And then you're like, okay, I'm never going to do that again.

And the reason it costs so much, by the way, that's the processing power is the computational power behind every single video that gets made. You know, we know that one of the key things about AI is they use a lot of chips and those chips are incredibly expensive. And, you know, the infrastructure behind AI is the thing that's, you know, going to destroy the planet if something else doesn't do it beforehand. So it was costing them a huge amount of money. Yeah, I think it's fine. I think everything is fine. Let me just check on the straight of Hormuz. I think everything is good.

So it was costing them a huge amount of money and using up an awful lot of computational power they could use elsewhere. And as you say, it wasn't actually particularly doing them any good. Because what is it? It's just a nothing. I mean, they had a big sort of meeting and they said, avoid distractions. and it's all about for them, like business and productivity applications, don't be distracted by side quests.

They're now in the Pentagon, sorry, Department of War, to give it its new title. And they want to stay dominant over Gemini. They're really worried, you know, much more worried about Anthropic and Claude. And they've got to allocate resources, as you say. Let's talk about the Hollywood side of it. Because to me, in a way, first of all, Disney, they've got a new CEO now, and this deal was done on the previous one, Bob. So it's quite nice in some ways that Josh DeMorrow doesn't necessarily have to have this headache.

But they used up a huge amount of goodwill doing this because people were very angry about it. The story they'll probably tell themselves is that Hollywood did what it does best when the chips are down. We all came together and we pushed them away. What has actually happened is it's like, yeah, there's no money in your business. And I'm just speaking it as open AI there. It's like, yeah, we passed through. There's nothing here. It's like we talked about the book business the other day.

They've absolutely passed through like a hurricane and left a lot of mess behind. But there's two types of business here. There's the direct-to-consumer business, which is what this is supposed to be. This is supposed to be millions of people making videos. If you pay them an extra $4, that's the kind of freemium version of it. You can make extra videos. Big companies could pay $10,000 a year and be able to use this stuff. And they're just in the millions of people sitting at home making videos market,

it didn't exist in any way whatsoever. Open AI found that out very, very early on and therefore it was not sustainable for them. But I think they still have designs on being in the back room of Hollywood. That's what AI is particularly interested in. It's interested in running the bits that you don't see. It's interested in... Well, it's interesting, yes, in enterprise and business

and going all the... Making your entire running your company for you. And what it's done in books and in video, here as well. It is when those first, the chat GPT stuff was coming out and everyone's going, oh my God, have you seen this thing on what it can do? And then when SORA came out and everyone's going, oh my God, have you seen this?

Have you seen what it can do? Those are huge PR coups for open AI. So chat GPT and SORA are a huge absolutely huge PR coups for Open AI at a point where they're going, we want to be the preeminent AI company of the world. So headlines, headlines,

not something they were making a huge amount of money out of, you know, books and videos and stuff like that. And then you get to the point where actually the headlines are unhelpful because the industry pushes back. And at that point, they move on because they weren't interested anyway. Actually, the relationship between Hollywood and the AI companies reminds me so much of the special relationship, like only one side's thinking about it. And it's definitely not the AI companies. Or like, you know, lots of boxes do this or Coddna McGregor, you know, I don't even think about my opponent. Okay. They do not even think about Hollywood at all. They really

do, as you say, they might be interested in some sort of corporate thing, but that could as well be a soap company or a car company or whatever it is. It's good for headlines until it's not good for headlines, and then you move on. But yeah, another thing I'll say about them is, I don't trust anything they say anything they say anymore. They've, they, I don't want to say they lie all the time. They fib all the time. I don't want to say they lie.

Yeah. But they are, your honor, I didn't call them liars. I called them fibbers. But they announced, completely. complete cobblers and it's not actually true. And just to say they did the same with that massive investment. They said, Nvidia is investing 100 billion. So now it's been sort of commuted back in some weird way to 30. This thing isn't even happening at all. And the trouble is it's reported on by journalists who are scared because they're in another industry that's terrified by this thing. And so they report on it as they're all. I think you have to now say every time you're reporting on this at all, okay, how much is this going to cost this company?

because all the divisions are fighting for access to tokens or whatever so they can do there a little bit. And if it doesn't sound realistic, like they're going to use all this power for what? Making videos of Elsa and it's also going to be a social media platform. That's as bad as Will Smith's idea for a social media platform. I don't really believe in this. What was his idea for a social media platform? Oh, my God, he had this thing. I know this is a sidebar, but any time I hear his name.

Will Smith pitched this idea for something. I can't remember what's called. It's like Earth 2000. Maybe it's a film. and he pitched it to Sony and we know about all of this because of the Sony hack that happened and Will Smith pitched it and said

I want to own like all of this he was entering his kind of mogul Imperium and he wanted to own all of it but it wouldn't be it was going to be so mesmeric for the planet and everyone was going to want to talk about it that it wouldn't be possible of them to do it on the existing social networks he also wanted a social network created

just to talk about this universe he was building out It didn't happen and, you know, some other stuff happened in Will Smith's life, which is rather more prosaic. And Park. Yeah, and Park. But I don't think, why would you believe anything they say? I think that they make up all of these sort of stories and it's not at all clear. He, it's very odd to me.

And Sam Orkman, my worst one currently. It's very difficult with the Tet Lords because there is a lot of, there is, it's a bit like the world's richest man. In fact, many of the same people. But there's the churn of like, who is the most loathsome. He's had it for me for quite a long time. He's been number one for many, many, many weeks. They've completely eliminated the look of him even. They've eliminated that uncanny valley in AI, really.

It doesn't look like that any longer. We used to look at things and say, yeah, but it doesn't look quite real. Now it's like, okay, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt really are fighting on a bridge, and I really fully believe it. Not with him, though. They can't do with him. He looks like someone who's wearing a sort of state-of-the-art human suit. Like, in the next situation of it might be convincing.

Maybe he is. Maybe he, yeah, I wouldn't ruin it out. I wonder who it is. Maybe it's Paul chuckle. That would be a reveal, wouldn't it? It would be a second act in his life, yeah. So is this good news that Sora has closed down and we're not going to suddenly be flooded with all of this slop? I will say this about it, which is the real story of AI has not been that all along.

So that's been, you know, headlines and, you know, Sora and what it can do. But AI has been getting its hooks into Hollywood and into. all the different film industries of the different countries in very, very different ways for a very, very long time. So Sora is gone, it's disappeared. You cannot use it. However, everybody I speak to uses Kling. So Kling is Sora, but it's Chinese. Cost about the same. Cost you about $10,000 a year for a really big professional subscription to this. Now, why can Kling do that when Open AI couldn't? It's because Kling is Chinese. It is backed by the government, is not backed by, by venture capitalists.

So they are not fussed about getting a return. What they're fussed about is getting market share and having a land grab. And they do not need to worry about losing $15 million a day. So everyone is using Kling. It does pretty much exactly the same thing. It's a rival by there. Lots of people you see dance as well, which is the bike dance version of it. Which was Tom and Brad fighting on the bridge?

That was a sea dance. That was sea dance. So these things are still out there. They're being used by everybody. you're not seeing them on screen yet because, you know, Hollywood works out what is, you know, acceptable and what's not acceptable. And lots of backroom stuff is acceptable, lots of early development work. They figure they can do that and nobody knows about it and I get it. And by the way, they have to do this because, you know, their competitors are doing it.

You can't afford to not do it anymore. This is, it's, this has happened. It's already done. This is not kind of, this is not a fight that has to be, that's going to be fought. It is already done. And I've spoken to lots of people who said that so many Hollywood productions and developments, they're always in all using runway gen 3 as well. That's a huge thing in Hollywood at the moment.

So these things are absolutely powering the next generation of Hollywood. They're certainly powering the development of what is happening next. And so while all eyes were on, you know, our kids in their bedroom is going to make a thing about Elsa. the AI industry is absolutely the bedrock now of a lot of Hollywood. And listen, it's going to make producing things cheaper, but the main way it's going to make producing things cheaper is by getting rid of a lot of jobs. But it is there and it is there quietly.

That's the thing that they didn't look for headlines or anything like that. They just looked to sell it and people are using it. Well, that's because Hollywood is complicit in it. Hollywood doesn't want those headlines either. They're like the headlines that they fought back against the area companies. You can't do a likeness of Robert De Niro. Oh my God, you can't be Matt Damon. This is we will fight for our people.

We'll fight for our writers. We'll fight for our talent. Whereas every single other bit of the business they are not fighting for. They're fighting for the bit that is visible. They're fighting for the bit where people are famous and people are celebrities and people are allowed to write articles. The rest of it, they are absolutely integrating. And by the way, so is every other industry in the world. It's not like Hollywood are kind of hypocrites or kind of awful.

just they can't run their businesses without it now in the same way that, you know, if you're a healthcare company, you can't run your business with without it anymore. He certainly won't be able to within a year. So the only bit of the Wild West that remains because they're in all of those areas. They're in development. They're in edit. They're in, you know, post-production. They're in all of those areas. The only bit that remains is this idea of can you make films without actors and writers. It's the only thing that's left. And in some ways, it's the ballwalk. that Hollywood actually is standing up to, which is good. You know, it is an area where I think if AI is comfortable that it can be helpful in the development of most of what happens in Hollywood and it can own some of the means of production, I think it's the one thing that's happy to go, okay, just for now, we'll let that go. But, you know, if you're Robert De Niro and you want to take half a billion dollars for your likeness in perpetuity, I guess those deals will start happening.

so the walls will slightly crack. If you are cling or you are sea dance, they worry an awful lot less about your copyrights and your likeness and your IP and good luck suing them. So the walls are cracking there as well. So, you know, it is the last frontier, this idea of, you know, is it a real human being I'm watching?

Is that really Tom Cruise? Is this really written by a human being? I think in terms of people's images, I think there is a slippery slope because I think that, you know, you'll be able to do that with Kling almost immediately and it's probably going to be quite hard to sue them. I think the last thing that will remain is high-end writing. I do think that that's the last thing that will remain because that's the, we've spoken before, that's the thing that AI is worst at. But SORA didn't work and it didn't work not because hollow pushback, but because it was making no money. but these big AI companies and these big AI text of video and prompt video things are absolutely in the heart of Hollywood and you are not going to get rid of them, I think.

Okay. Have you got any recommendation? I have indeed. I'm sure I've recommended it before, but I will do it every single series. Stacey Solomon sort your life out on BBC One. You can get it on I play. It's so beautiful. I love it so much. I love her. And it's about people who, you know, and everyone's had the situation where your house just feels like, oh, I'm slightly over. by how much stuff I've got and, you know, it's not arranged properly. And they just go in and they take all of your stuff and they lay it out in a warehouse. And it's just like all the best television programs, it is not about the thing that it says it's about. It is not about decluttering your house and, you know, getting better feng shing. It's about who you are as a human being and the things you've accumulated and why and the things you care about and why and the things you should really let go and why. and just week after week you're just like weeping.

It's like a home improvement show, but of course it's not. It's about humanity. So I love that show. And can I also say, can I also a plea from our producer, Joey, we get so many questions about sort your life out. And I don't know anyone who makes it. Listen, I admire them, but we know no one on that team. If you are on that team, do get in touch with Joey,

because we have got a lot of questions for you. The email is The Restors Entertainment at Gollhanger.com. We will be back on Thursday for our questions and answers episode. And also on Friday with the second part of our great fun, Spice Girls series, The Story of the Spice Girls. If you want to join as a member for Ad Free Listening and those bonus episodes, it's The Rest is Entertainment.com. Otherwise, see you on Thursday.

See you Thursday.