The Rest Is Entertainment - When Celebrities Become Cops

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

Why are right-wing celebrities signing up as ICE agents? Is Anime bigger than The Superbowl? Can Amazon stop the Book-Slop deluge? From Elvis to Steven Seagal, Richard Osman and Marina Hyde unlock the history of stars becoming law enforcement. They also explore the story of anime and Amazon’s ongoing fight to stop the A.I Kindle scam of ‘Book-Slop’ 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 Akude Video Editor: Kieron Leslie, Charlie Rodwell, Adam Thornton, Harry Swan Producer: Joey McCarthy Senior Producer: Neil Fearn Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello everyone, this episode is brought to you by our good friends at Sky. Now, whether you're dancing through life in the Emerald City for the first time or flying back for a magical encore, Wicked is now on Sky Cinema and with a Skyglass TV, Oz feels closer than ever. Bring the gravity-defying ballads home with a Dolby Atmos soundbar built in for a truly cinematic experience. The high notes and the harmonies have never sounded better. Skyglass automatically adapts the picture and sound to whatever you're watching.

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No, I don't say that. Do I do? Hello and welcome. Can we, Joey, can we leave this in as the opening? Can we do a cold open? Please, please. Just so people understand what it is I put up with. I know, I know.

Honestly, I walk down the street, people go, do you know, Marina, she's so smart. She's so brilliant. And I'm like, yeah. She fucking can't do an intro. Hello and welcome to this. This week's episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osmond. Hello, Richard.

Hello, how are you? I'm very well. How are you? Yeah, I'm not too bad. Can I give a couple of updates on... We talked about what's going to be the new traitors last week. Destination X and the box and all sorts of things. Destination X, I've got to say, I'm now really enjoying. Doing not insane numbers in terms of...

It's not doing super badly, so I suspect it might come back. But I'm enjoying it now. Episode two was better. I agreed with you on that. And episode three and four are even better than those. Although it is quite easier to guess where you are at any given time. The Box, which is ITV's version, they announced their host. I saw that.

Who is your boss and mine, Gary Linnaker. Yeah. He'll do what, I think. I'm looking forward to that one. Also, keeps him out of the country. It's probably good for us, right? Do you know what I mean? Because he's very, very hands-on on this show.

He's heavily hands-on in this podcast. Yeah. It's probably best that he's unboxing celebrities. Yeah, he's always like, please do a deep dive on Joe Pascuali. But I guess we have to. That's on its way. The inheritance, Liz Hurley, did turn up with Billy Ray Cyrus. at the press conference.

So that's exciting. That's exciting. Yes, I saw the pictures. Yeah, people who are working on shows there's a show called Nobody's Fall with Danny Dyer and Emily A-TAC for ITV, which is supposed to be an awful lot of fun. And the Bond show that they have,

which, you know, 007 race to a million on Amazon Prime, the first series of which I have to say didn't seem to have been touched by entertainment hands. Apparently the next series is very good. Oh, really? Yeah, apparently. We're going to have to return to Bond

because there have been many developments in Bond, so let's, over the next few weeks, return to Bond on one of our episodes. What should we talk about this week then? No, what are we going to talk about? Let's not pretend we're just making it up. We're going to talk about a different form of law enforcement, less covert than James Bond. Dean Kane from Superman has announced he's going to be an immigration and customs

enforcement ICE agent in the US. So we'll have a look at that. The history of celebrity law enforcement, which is surprisingly rich. Oh my gosh. There's a lot of it, yeah. We're going to talk about AI slop in books. I just notice how many AI versions there are. of Thursday Murder Club and things like that

and talk to lots of other people. And it is extraordinary. It's a huge, huge industry. So we're going to talk through some of that to these things. You know, people are just, you know, making money from Amazon and Amazon. I think I're finding almost impossible

to stop the slop. And we're also going to talk about anime, which is another enormous industry. And it's huge with Gen Z. And it's by some accounts, bigger than some of the biggest sports in the US with Gen Zad. So we're going to talk about

what that means and how everybody is trying to get in on the act because it's such a gateway to kind of keeping those eyeballs. Law enforcement, celebrity law enforcement. Our friend Dean Kane. So Dean Kane has said that he would like to sign up as an ICE agent, Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the US. They're on a massive recruitment drive at the moment because they feel that there's going to be much more work.

And I think that they have actually said that they're very interested in having his application. So he was, of course, Superman in Lois and Clark, The New Adventures of Superman, which ran for a few years in the mid-90s, but has assumed a sort of outsized cultural importance for reasons I can't fully put my finger on. I don't know why, but he's... He was very handsome at the time. Yeah, in that kind of Superman often is.

Yeah. And he's no David Corencewet. But... How is he allowed that name? It's amazing, isn't it? You can't have that name. I'm so sorry. If he had existed in old Hollywood,

he would have just been called David Diesel. He'd have been refitted and it would have been simple. You can't be called David Corrin's sweat and be a movie star, but anyway. Dean Kane, not his real name. Is it not? No, he's got a Japanese surname because he's got Japanese heritage. He's been one of those celebrities, a bit like Kevin Sorbo, who used to be in Hercules, those ones who exist, the sort of out right-wing celebrities.

So, you know, he's occasionally on Fox News. But acting-wise, I would say that he can't get arrested. but he may now be able to arrest people. Oh, that's good. Because he wants to sign up, you know, this big drive. Well, I say that's good. I mean your point is good. Not Dean Kane being allowed to arrest people.

No. Anyway, there is quite a rich history of this in entertainment, not of ICE agents, by the way. Funny enough, Jack Osborne did train as a reserve police officer. He did it for a show called Armed and Famous, but I think he was the only celebrity that after the camera stopped riding, thought, I'm actually going to complete this training. And then not so long ago, a few years ago, he was forced to clarify that although he was working near the border, he was not a border agent.

Yeah, I'm not a border agent. I am, you know, a reserve police officer. I love it. Every week he brings it like a massive stash of drugs. He goes, I found some more. Where's he getting this stuff from? This guy. But he's not a border agent.

And as we can see, there has been a sort of historic thing where celebrities now wouldn't want to associate themselves with that kind of thing. Some, but there are these kind of out right-wing celebrities who certainly exist in like the Fox News ecosystem, if not any longer the Hollywood ecosystem. But there were people who were cops first. Dennis Farina, who was in Law and Order famously, he was a cop for something like 20 years in Chicago. And then Chuck Norris, I think, when he was in the Air Force, he was in like the Air Force police. But the history of celebrities becoming reserve police officers, which is something that you can't, you know, sometimes it's for people. are. Sometimes it's for community engagement. It's very attention grabby. I always think the only two things anyone will ever slow down for on the street is a film crew or a police unit. But I do think those two things go hand in hand. And so I wonder if when the bright lights of Hollywood are perhaps not

knocking quite as loudly as they have been, you go, oh, I'm going to do something else that will grab me some attention. Stop, look at me. No, I mean literally you have to look at me because I'm pointing something at you. Yeah. And it's a gun. So people who did it for community engagement, people like Lou Farino, the Incredible Hulk, Shaquillo O'Neal has done it in loads and loads of cities. He was sort of community. How is he getting a uniform? I would worry.

That's my worry about being a, it's not my only worry about being a police officer, but I would worry about the uniform. I think they'd especially make one for you, see. But Erica Estrada, punch and chips, he became a reserve police officer and he was sort of interested in protecting children online. He talked about her last week, Pamela Anderson. Yeah, the Great Pamela. Yeah, they're still together. Yeah, they're still together.

When she was on Baywatch, she did proper sort of criminology training, and I think she did do reserve police officer training, but she was sort of busy filming and she never took up the role. Steve Guttenberg, of course, went to Police Academy. Yeah, but not for real. But Dan Aykroyd, by the way, he was one of those honorary ones, a bit like Elvis, where Dan Akrod was a huge supporter of sort of Blue Lives groups, as it were. I mean, again, now you would not imagine.

that celebrities want to get involved in any of those kind of things, and we'll come to that in a minute. But Dean Kane has himself been a reserve officer since 2018. In our country, Penny Lancaster, Rod Stewart's wife, she and loose woman, etc. Where is she getting all these drugs from? Well, she did the Queen's funeral policing arrangements on that day, and lots of other things besides...

Are you thinking of Penny Mordant? No, I'm not. No, I'm not. No, I'm not. It is Penny Lancaster. She was involved in... fighting crime and famous or famous and fighting crime which would be our version of armed and famous

and she was on that Jamie Lang was on that he was really really good Jamie Lang was great on anything you put him on and essentially they're arresting this guy he's very very drunk and very very angry and he's just shouting at everyone and then he turns he goes aren't you the guy from Maiden Chelsea and go I am and we can talk about it if you go quietly into the back of the van and the guy goes sure and and and he goes he'd just get an anecdote him into submission

That's actually a form of restraint that's in my view totally fine. My favourite ever, obviously, for obvious reasons, who was a reserve officer, is Mr Stephen Segal. Oh my goodness. If you are a member of our club, you might have heard my two-part eulogy to Renaissance man career of Stephen Segal. This has got plenty of life left in it. He claimed to have been a reserve deputy sheriff in New Mexico, excuse me, for 20 years. At the time that he was, and this is the point. we're looking at his career, not the time when he was making Under Siege.

When he was a straight, not Dark Territory, when he was, this time it's a train, when he was a straight to DVD style by that point, but he was also a philanthropist, you'll remember he's a Tibetan llama, an energy drink retailer, a fragrance, entrepreneur, I think what was it called? It's got a centre of action. He was the lead singer and lead guitarist in a band called Thunderbox. Thunderbox? Yeah. Okay. Thunderbox is actually the word for the field latrine, if I can put it that way,

that's used by one of the characters in Men at Arms, the Evelyn Ward that's sort of on it. Yes, the Thunderbox was the old army name for a toilet. I don't think Stephen Seagall knew that when he started his blues band. I've heard him. I think he did. Anyhow. But he wanted to be involved in reality television, so they thought, okay, let's do a show about it. Thus was born that Stephen Seagal Lawman, which ran across sort of five years,

the A&E network in America, but it was the, by the way, it was the biggest show, it had their biggest opening numbers ever when it came out. I had to go back and look at it because obviously I watched the whole thing. The opening voiceover says it all began 20 years ago when Stephen Seagall, a world-renowned seventh-degree Ikeido expert, was shooting a movie in Jefferson Parish. The sheriff asked him to teach his men some self-defense and weapons skills. The training was so successful that Seagal was deputized. Okay, so maybe.

Yeah, I mean, okay, sure. He is an asset in certain situations. I mean, maybe not now. I mean, obviously an asset to Putin, quite literally, I think. He's a Russian asset. It's a Russian asset. I meant an asset in a more, more Brazate way. It's both sorts of assets.

If you take his film persona, he would be unplayable in any bar fight setting. Simply unplayable. If the police are called to a bar fight, he can improvise a weapon out of anything. A bar towel, a beer mat, whatever it is. And he will diffuse that, or simply overpower the, miscreants. Yeah. Were I a miscreant in a bar and Steve as a girl, I'd just go, come on.

Just like Jamie Lang has turned up, I'd be like, I'm going into the back of the van. There's no point me fighting on. Well, he does that speak. He might say, what does it take to change the essence of a man, which is a speech he does do in a bar fight in, I think, on deadly ground. Sorry. In the middle of a bar fight, he says, what does it take to change the essence of a man? And by basically speechifying his way before beating this guy out, or maybe the guy,

And then the guy just sort of goes away because Segal has actually improvised a speech. For once, he hasn't used a microwave as an improvised weapon. He's just improvised a speech and he just overpowers this guy. He should have called his fragrance, the essence of a man. Yeah, I know. It was right there. Was it, Steve, it was right there. That was actually a tagline, I think, for Calvin Klein, eternity. The essence of a man, the right man.

No, the Helen Christian, it's in voiceover. I can remember it's coming out of a memory hole this. The essence of a man, the right man, he must be a little bit mysterious, but so alive. That must be a Calvin Klein. What's it like inside your head? It's just a really rubbish memory palace. It's just, I want to get rid of a lot of this stuff. It's like a hoarder's at memory palace.

It's like memory mall. I don't want it. It's like out of town, out of town mall with just loads of different shops. Yeah, it's a real, like, off-brand stuff. Okay, sorry, where were we? Okay, so Stephen Sagar Lawman. Episode one was called The Way of the Gun. Okay.

It's America. Also a good name for a fragrance. Yeah. Yeah, I know, again, that is a good one. Of course he has to, you know, he always has to bring in the Eastern bullshit and he's saying the Zen masters in archery did not pull the arrow but he used to push the arrow

it's the same with his pistol it's like I don't think that's physics by the way but anyway there was one of those very controversial sheriff Joe Arpaio and I can't remember he sort of reinstated chain gangs I think and made them do it in pink uniforms and he went the other way didn't he was a lawman who became a celebrity

or a course celebrity at least yeah he became one of those big Fox News figures like a hard nut sheriff he eventually overstepped the laws he was enrolled to serve and I think he had to end up he got ended up getting pardoned by Trump back in 2010 pardoned by the way yeah an amazing name for a fragrance and a reality show yeah uh yeah by Trump actually why doesn't he do it because he's got some ridiculous ones like undefeated Trump we've done all his fragrances anyway and then

Steven Segal became a volunteer posse member for Joe Arpa at one point um and he was in an armed SWAT raid. And actually, at this point, people started to say, this is really weird. They dug in more into the training. They thought, I don't really buy half of this stuff. Can anyone say they're a reserve police officer? And to bring it full circle back to Dean Kane,

I think you kind of can. It feels a little bit like one of those online modules that I never do, supposedly mandatory training models that I never actually complete. I think you can kind of get away with not doing it. You have to complete the mandatory training models. I love mandatory training models where it says, you find five pound on the desk in the head of HR. Do you tell HR that there's five pounds on the desk, steal the money?

Go, right. I'm going to go steal the money. Why don't you have another go at this question? Tell HR, congratulations. You've passed. Anyway, sorry, that's a sidebar. I remember speaking to someone who worked on Marvel films, who was a very, very significant producer on Marvel films and said ever since that all this kind of workplace culture had been changed so radical she was constantly having to do these training modules constantly and they were real sit-up ones where you couldn't just sort of leave it on while you did your actual job and they would say you know you're going to be locked out of all computer systems unless you've completed this and she'd think I'm in the middle

of a shoot and I've now got to go and do some sort of training about how not to hit someone at work or whatever it is. Is it good to hit someone at work or not good to hit someone at work? And you must sit up and be present and, you know, anyway. I wonder whether he will get a reality show out of it because as we keep saying people are looking for content that will draw back in people who perhaps have been put off in recent years by thinking that a network or a channel, whatever, it only appeals to one type of person. Yeah, certainly if you were CBS or NBC or anyone, you know, the idea of doing an ICE reality show,

but being on the side of ICE is something that would appeal to Trump and to that administration. I mean, it would be absolutely, in terms of, you know, the tide of history, it would be... Paramount will just do it. Yeah, exactly. Of course we'll do it. It would be a terrible stain, which would last for hundreds of years. But listen, for the next six months, it's a smart move. So let's talk about then about like copaganda and, as they call it,

which is the idea of cops being heroes, which until relatively recently didn't even cross anybody's mind, cops were always heroes in almost everything apart from every now and then you'd get some increased left field, like art house movie like Bad Lieutenant. But in general, when we watch television, the cops were the heroes. Yeah, and if there was a cop who wasn't a hero, the hero Cots brought that cop down.

That was the idea of it. No, it's fascinating in the world of literature because there's so many long-running detective series. So Michael Connolly, he writes the Bosch series. Very interesting. It's a Michael Connolly series, which is all set in L.A., and Michael Connolly started as a reporter in L.A.,

he's a crime reporter. And there's Harry Bosch series, and there's TV bits of it as well. They're probably one of the, best written police procedurals you'll ever read. If you, if you love a police procedural and you're interested in L.A. at all, it's really, really worth reading. His first two books were absolutely, oh, I'm going to do this traditional kind of copper's hero, knew everyone in the LAPD, knew everything about it because that was his beat. And then between the second and third book,

you had the Rodney King incident. And you can see from then on Michael Conley's books change very, very, very quickly. They changed when that happened. They changed when OJ happened, and almost all crime writers now after George Floyd have started writing very differently. The new Mark Billingham books, so Mark Biddingham writes these brilliant novels about Tom Thorne, who's sort of like a London, Harry Bosch, he writes brilliantly about London, Mark. Funny books, but very, very real, quite gory, but he always writes about cops, and he always writes about the Met. And again, he's always, you know, you always hint at things that do go wrong in the Met. But his new book, which called What the Night Brings, he absolutely

he takes head on the fact that the public, it seems, no longer trust the police and after Sarah Everard and after all of these things. And he really, really takes it head on. It's got a brilliant inciting incident, this book. And it's really, really interesting. But it is impossible now to write a simple cop-as-hero book. And no one was writing, by the way, cops as heroes, but you would write a book and the assumption was that the police investigating were the good guys. Well, police are such useful characters in the whole of fiction going right the way back to Dickens

because in something like Bleak House where the inspector is obviously in a way the only character who can sort of move between all the echelons and tie the supposedly disparate bits together. So they're a very useful character in so many ways, especially if you're writing big kind of

things about the state of the nation, the city. They're incredibly useful as well in terms of your plot can just happen. You know, if you have amateur detectives, it's actually slightly harder because you have to go, something has to happen in your world which drags you into a crime. Whereas if you, if your daily job is I work in a police station and every half an hour like a phone rings and something happens, there's your plot straight away. So, so writing

police officers is the easiest way to write crime fiction. Crime fiction, I think, really does represent the world as it is in in a very, very interesting way. And crime fiction writers are very quick to understand that the game has changed. So there's, there's, there's, there's, you know, you can write kind of, you know, there's no coincidence that Morse went back to his, you know, the kind of 50s and 60s when they did that series. It is, it is harder now to write about police officers without showing quite how compromised various police forces have become. It actually makes crime fiction better, is the truth. It makes it more truthful and, you know, it actually gives you more plots. But look at Brooklyn 9-9, which, you know, in its final season, absolutely, they went, we've had such joy of showing these heroes this whole time. and now we're going to show that they're not heroes.

Yeah, in 2020, how many people who are involved in the absolute mega industry, which is American TV police procedures, even comic or serious, all of them sort of felt they had to come out and say something about Black Lives Matter, about George Floyd or whatever. And I think Brooklyn 9-9, they all started donating to, like, bail services and things like that. There's a sort of collective showrunner and comedy. showrunner and cast and whatever. We did move through the kind of anti-hero phase of cops.

Well, one of the best things I think that's ever been on TV is The Shield, which is absolutely incredible. And that was real, you know, that's part of that golden era of TV that started with the Sopranos, that particular phase that were sort of terrible, terrible people, terrible men particularly were anti-heroes were the heroes. You saw that transition. But now, as you say, it's hard to imagine it on yet.

And then I'm thinking, But is it? Because everything swings around very quickly, and I don't think it's particularly hard to imagine somebody thinking, well, we've got to cater to a different audience now, or clearly the vibe has shifted, and maybe we'll follow Dean Kane as an ICE agent, and lots of people will actually watch this. Well, there are things, you know, night coppers, which I love on Channel 4, and it's, it genuinely shows the reality of most police officers' lives, which is 90% mental health work, 90% sort of trying to just help people. Being able to show both of the. those sides. Being able to write books like Mark's book that talks about the rotten side of the Met in a really, really, really serious way, but also having something like night coppers, which shows, you know, we do need law enforcement. It is important. It's important for vulnerable people that there are strong people and good people. And finding a way in our culture that we can have both of those seems to be the way forward. Talking of corrupt cops, I think, I don't know if

I talked about this before, if I have it, it's a long time ago. I think my favorite documentary of all time is precinct seven five or it's also called the precinct which is about a corrupt cop in Brooklyn in the 80s I want to say it is so good it's so brilliant and all the people involved are sort of a bit you know kind of come out of the other side of it now so they all talk and they all tell you this incredible story of police corruption I mean I've seen it as very very very very good not be more corrupt yeah that was a magnificent thing but I think that TV and film worked out a long time ago that they can show police officers as villains as well as heroes, but it's

fascinating now that the world of books as well, you cannot write a straight police procedural now without tackling this absolutely head on. So a few recommendations there. Honestly, Mark Billingham's book, I'd really recommend any of Michael Connolly's books, Precinct 7-5, and

perhaps not the new adventures of Superman. But the Stephen Sagall documentary. Lawman. Lawman. I mean, he's a preposterous figure, so... Shall we do some advert? Let's please do that. This episode is brought to you by Sky Sports. The curtain's about to rise on a new Premier League season,

the national soap opera with 20 clubs chasing glory, redemption or simply survival. And this year, Sky Sports will show 215 games live compared with last season's 128. It is an episodic drama with no time for rewrites four fixtures a week and, for the first time, every final day fixture shown live. all in one place. Ten months of unscripted theatre, new heroes and old rivalries, from final act twists to title challenges fading to black. If football is theatre, this is the main stage.

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Hello, I'm William Durimple. And I'm Anita Arndon. We're the hosts of another goalhanger show, Empire. And we are here to tell you about a recent series we've done on partition. On the 14th and 15th of August, 1947, Pakistan and India announced their independence from the British Empire. But as these nations gained their freedom, their rushed and violent division, resulted in the deaths of well over a million people and the forced migration of over 14 million more. It's a piece of South Asian history that many people are familiar with,

but in this series, we want to explore it alongside four less well-known partitions which continue to affect the region in monumental ways. Yeah, you're quite right. In one episode, we dissect how Dubai almost became part of modern India, and in another we're going to unpack the history behind the headlines about the conflict in Kashmir. We also explore how the separation of Burma from India is linked to the origin of the Rohingya genocide and how East and West Pakistan separated in 1971 to create Bangladesh.

So if you'd like to hear more about the five partitions that completely transformed modern Asia and how the weight of the memory of partition has been passed down through the generations, we've left a clip of the series at the end of this episode for you to listen to. welcome back everybody now one of the biggest industries in the world and it may leave some people completely untouched so we thought it might be an interesting thing to talk about give an overview and that is anime what is anime and what does it mean that anime is enormous where does it take us anime is a style of Japanese animation really crucially it is not a genre it's just like a medium so it can be an epic it can be a comedy it can be sci-fi it can be whatever you like and it used to be a sort of niche interest um like they had dedicated special fandom it's part of a taku you know geek culture in japan during the pandemic it became a streaming hit um and like lots of things which is run by people who are rather older it's it might not have been clear to people

that that was going to happen but japanese anime is now this massive growth market they think that anime's market value will double by 2030. And there are a lot of surveys. A surveys, many of them are very large, so you have to treat them with caution, that suggest it's more popular among Gen Z than the biggest US sports and that more people in Gen Z watch it

than watch the NFL. Yeah, it's bigger than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Bigger than anything you could mention, really. And as I say, that's not necessarily complete sort of pure statistics, but the fact that it can even be said suggests such a big cultural shift. All the streaming and services are really investing in it because it's something like 40% of people up to age 34 watch anime.

And then it immediately drops off, as you can see, amongst older people, and it goes down to sort of 10% in kind of 30% of 70%. It's funny, we are very much the generation is brought up on American culture. And so we will always, you know, Revere Scorsese or, you know, the Shield, as we were talking about, just something like that, something that comes from that culture, whereas the next generation, definitely they are much, much, much more interested in Japan, Korea, China.

Completely other way on the map. Exactly, yeah. And obviously, the streaming services really want to build tight relationships with that particular cohort because they're going to go on and on. And so Netflix, Disney, Plus, there's a service called Crunchyroll, which is huge. It's massive. It's got 18 million, maybe more now, 20 million subscribers.

and it started as a pirate site but it's now owned by Sony and that's kind of like a pure anime subscription service that I think you can get in the UK for about a five or a month something like that but it also so it's got you know you don't have to subscribe this stuff you can do but they also have publishing arms they have live conventions they have all sorts of things well that's the thing it's a whole sort of culture and people feel isn't I saw actually like a couple of weeks ago the LA Dodgers did a big night

which was in association with a sort of timed with the anime Expo and all of that which is really interesting because it's sort of showing that they need even like a sports team that you would think they have decided that they need anime to engage younger fans rather than the other way around. As for how it went mainstream, it's partly the platforms and the fan culture but it really works online.

So obviously as we've become more and more digital and everything is online, it works very well online. and celebrities started saying they were into it because it used to be like you'd almost be bullied for being into it it was dweeb culture et cetera et cetera but like Megan the Stallion Billy Elishwoman mentioning characters in their songs

and the idea that anything now is sad or nerdy that idea has sort of gone out of fashion Well I think the place where the culture forks off I would say because I think the counterpoint to anime is Disney Right. Or certainly was. You know, we knew what animation was, and it was Disney. And it was princesses and it was princes and it was castles and it was animals and, you know, all sorts of things. Disney amazingly brilliant storytellers. And actually, anime starts sort of 1960s Astro Boy is probably the first kind of anime TV thing. Manga is the magazine version and the book version and anime is the TV version. So Astro Boy, which was 1963, Osama Tazuka, who's often called the god of manga. he loved Disney so he you know absolutely grew up on Disney this is the thing that he loved he loved that storytelling but coming from where he came from he wanted to tell slightly deeper more philosophical stories which is where anime is always gone you know anime for all its kind of brashness and bright colors and speed and noise you know tries to tell quite deep quite interesting quite unusual often quite dark stories he was also the first and he sort of set out the kind of the visual aesthetic which you know the big eyes the dynamic storylines and all of that kind of stuff.

But it was a sort of deliberate attempt to take what Disney have done and to take it into a different culture. And then kind of 80s is when it got. I remember, you know, the things like Akira, Dragon Balls, there's Sailor Moon, all that kind of stuff. It's intrinsically Japanese and Japanese dominated. The Japanese content industry is the third biggest in the world. It's actually US, China, Japan, and then the UK is fourth.

But they are worried. Fourth is not bad. Fourth grade. I mean, that's punching, but they're worried that they're losing control of it because it's very expensive to make in the traditional style. And we know they've got a declining population and their industrial bases are good in lots of ways. But the economic and security minister is in charge of their anime and manga strategy. Wow, that's cool.

I know, Richard. Imagine a government having a cultural strategy. I imagine that anyway. What do you mean? Listen, I saw Lisa Nandi saying she wasn't going to watch Master Chef, the new series that they're airing, which still has Greg Wallace in it. So maybe that's a strategy. Anyway, in Japan, they're doing it. Did you watch it, by the way? No, I didn't.

Yeah. I mean, it was, listen. Fine. Yeah, it is what it is. It is what it is. Well, in Japan, they're doing things a little bit differently. Minora Cucci said, the minister in charge of the anime and manga strategy said, the export value of the content industry is bigger than steel, petrochemicals and semiconductor sectors. Wow.

So it's quite big. They did have their own sort of almost like nationalised streaming platform called Cool Japan, but that hasn't really taken off. And Netflix are really investing very, very heavily into it. But what people like about this, though, remember is that the audiences are mega engaged. Private equity companies are buying up lots of these anime houses. And a big fear if you look at the fan communities is that Disney will buy up one and ruin it like they have with Star Wars and eventually maybe Marvel. and that's people's sort of big fear

because think how angry people were about the Studio Ghibli thing. As soon as you take anime and subsume it into other cultures and K-pop Demon Hunters is sort of a perfect example of something that has touches of anime but touches of Western animation

and touches of Korean animation but when something really, really goes over the top into popular culture it becomes its own thing so anime will not, when it becomes huge with everybody it will not be the thing that people think of as anime now. It'll be anyone doing any sort of animation, which isn't a traditional Disney animation.

So K-pop Demon Hunters will, firstly, it's a threat to traditional anime because people sort of think, oh, this is the stuff people have been talking about all this time. And it absolutely isn't. That is where our culture is going. The Americanisation of entertainment is on its way out, that is for sure. And entertainment from Korea, Japan and China, that is what Gen Z are. interested in. That's what Gen Alpha are particularly interested in. That is definitively where our culture is going. The

stuff that we grew up with is going to seem like an anachronism, I think. But in terms of music, in terms of style, fashion, in terms of manga, in terms of anime, in terms of Disney making anime movies, which they definitively will, or movies in an anime style. That is what is going to happen. It's going to happen to our movies. It's going to happen to our animation. It's going to happen to literature. You know, that I think is where everything is headed. Yeah, they'll have to co-opt it to survive. And you can see that already now

they're just trying to buy into it and then soon they will start generating their own versions thereof. And it speaks sociologically to something which is, you know, in the generation we grew up in the idea of America which is there was a bit of hope and there was excess

and there was what can we what can we do pioneers and this whole new world starting. And actually this generation growing up, growing up into a very, very different world. And when they are shown something that has a bit of magic to it, a bit of alienness to it, a bit of unusualness to it, that speaks more to the way they were brought up and the world they're being brought up into. And certainly a lot more darkness to it. And a lot more darkness to it. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly that. I don't have any recommendations on anime. So I asked my

son, who was the world's hugest anime fan. He has said, cowboy bebop, full metal alchemist brotherhood, anything by Studio Trigger. That's my son's recommendations for you. But that's where our culture is going. That's where it's all headed. You know, we'll still have, you know, the stuff we grew up with. But that is where it's going. That's where it's going next.

And that's where all the money is going to go. Now, can we call it book slop, Richard? Talk to me about AI books. Amazon has a real problem with this. If I just give you an example of the sort of thing that happens. So if you put Thursday Murder Club into Amazon, firstly Thursday Murder Club turns up first, which is great. But there are now about 40 books that are companion books to the movie.

That's what they're done. So there's a million things. There's Solving the Movie Mystery, the Thursday Murder Club movie review by Kendra G. Candelara. Kendra G. Candelara. Yeah. Produce yourself, Kendra. You don't exist. Possibly not real.

That, by the way, will cost you £10.18. You can get it on Amazon Prime. And, you know, you might, two people in the world might think, oh, this is a real book about the movie. But considering it's only taken a 20-word prompt to get there, because that's all it takes. You can put a 20-word prompt in, choose your cover art style, and then you can put it on Amazon. And it's like 78 pages long. And, yeah, it's entirely fictional. There's not someone who knows anything about the movie, hasn't been involved, anything like that.

So it's just they have a title that they know people might put into the, you know, the search bar. and they will give you this and as I say if three people you know pay 10 pound for that then you've made some money because it literally costs you nothing at all the Thursday Middle Club

A Guide to the Plot theme cast of a novel inspired cosy crime film it's by Raymond Milton that would cost you £16.15. Again you can get it on you Raymond You can get it on Amazon Prime The Thursday Murder Club

movie reviewed by Efrath Machia Ephrath Machia is joined the throng as well he'll tell you all about the secrets behind the casting and the chemistry between the various leads. That's all there if you want to see it. Doris M. Francis has written a book. Not Doris as well.

Not her first book, actually. Her previous book was about the moment Rory McElroy hugged his daughter on the 18th Green of the Masters. That is, she's written the 78 page. Wow, what course you do? But this book is David Tennant and the Thursday Murder Club mystery, how one of Britain's most beloved actors was cast in this film. So she's written a whole book about that.

All of these are AI generated. Okay, every single one of them is all completely nonsensical. So can I just, to understand it, okay, you can write a prompt in as little as 20 words. You can choose the art style, blah, blah. It's interesting how many, some of the first people to be ripped off were people who write books about how to make it in publishing. There's a woman called Jane Friedman who does quite a lot of books on, you know, trying to sort of help people self-publish, to try and make a small business, you know, publishing yourself. And she suddenly found so many books under her name.

And Amazon said to her, this was a couple of years ago, oh, you haven't copyrighted your name, so that's too bad. Have you copyrighted your name? You can't copyright a title. You know, you can't copyright any of your things. I mean, listen, you can do cease and desist, I'm sure of that. But what a lot of these things are, and non-fiction authors get it particularly,

you write a non-fiction book, and within days there are 10, pracies of your book under the same title, often with a picture that looks like you or a name that looks like you, because it is not illegal to write a sort of companion to a book, to write a review of a book. Which is fine, by the way, if you're on A-list, because they're going to notice the difference. And with the best world, they're going to notice the difference with you.

But so many people who are not like a name that you'd ever know, but write books that you might want the service of or the... And you've just read about this book or heard about this book, and there's two books with very, very similar titles. And so you can see the accident. there will be people who buy these books. And they're not having to depress their prices, right? Because you're competing with something ridiculous that took no time and money. I mean, it started a few years ago. Vice did a great article about it. It's 2013, I think,

when they looked at Kindle Unlimited, the YA, top 100 chart, then YA's young adult. That's why you get a lot of sort of romanticcy, you get, you know, hunger games, things like that would be YA. So a huge, huge market that looked at the top 100 Kindle YA books and 81 of them were AI. They're absolutely nonsensical. Can I give you some of the titles? So these were all in the Amazon Kindle top 100. So it all been paid for. When the three attacks, Apricot Barcode Architecture,

Department of Vindu stands in front of his parents' tombstone. So these are all AI books. The first paragraph of Apricot Barcode architecture was black lace pyjamas, very short skirt. The most important thing, this lace pajamas are all wet. often they have fed an existing work in and said just make a version of this I mean I'm sorry to say we found my daughter reading something called the Chamber of Serpents and we were really quite mean to her saying I can't believe you're buying this

trial you're reading this trash blah blah I later discovered that Kindle just push all this stuff I mean Amazon have tried to say you're only allowed to upload three books to Kindle a day so yeah but by the way can we just talk about these the actual, there are other types of risk that are already manifesting themselves because there's a lot of bio, you've been quite scared if you were the subject of one of these, there are a lot of fake biographies out there a lot. I look to see if there's one of you, there isn't yet, good. But, apart, first of all, there's lots of books about subjects like ADHD that people

have a genuine need and interest to learn about and people have just thought, oh, this is a real trigger word for sales and have created things that have completely sort of bogus medical advice in or clinical advice. And there was fake biographies of Scottish politicians in having to pull them, saying that John Swinney, the First Minister's mother, was

Polish, he was born in the US. The Canadian election a whole story emerged. There was all these fake quotes from a biography of Mark Carney, fake quotes from him, which actually he never said. So you can see that people sort of seized on these things. And so Amazon

said, oh, you have to, in inform us if there's AI generated content. But one also was telling that Jane Friedman, who I was telling about who writes those sort of publishing books saying, yeah, but there were 29 books in one week that I had to have taken down. I mean, in Amazon's defense, it is an absolute onslaught and a deluge. And they've said, look, if something is 100%, it cannot be an AI generated book. That is against our things. However, if it has been AI enabled in some way, we can have it. I guess they're kind of going that self-publish authors are producing you know, front covers by AI and stuff like that.

But so it's almost impossible to say if something is AI generated or AI enabled. It's kind of the same thing. Yeah. And so you can see why there are farms of people literally typing in buzzwords, putting in a prompt, knocking up a, you know, 78 page book.

Some of these are physical books as well. Yeah. It's not just Kindle. They will send you this book. It is not going to be good if they do send you to you. There was not a single, review of any of these books, there's no reviews of any of this stuff. It's just to try and catch a people. If they catch like five people, you know, if you charge 16 pound for a book

on Amazon, you're going to get £6.50, let's say, for every single one. It just cost you zero to make that. So if you're doing a thousand books a month and you're selling three copies of each, say, because some people are accidentally clicking on it, that's $3,000 times six pound you know you're making 20 grand a month well it's really interesting that so many of the ways into this were by those authors who do write books about how to make money and you know small how to make a sort of cottage industry of your own publishing now there was a company there is a company called publishing dot com which is a good domain name and these twins founded it

have you looked into these twins oh dear they're called rasmus and christian mickleson oh yes they're like 29 yeah uh and um they post as twins on Instagram, but I think they've stopped posting. There's people who kind of did nothing except for work out all day. And then they started selling books about how to work out. And then thought, hang on a second, could see that this kind of weird, like, sub-scam, but just self-help section of Amazon was a real, like, Tiger Economy. They then started selling $2,000 courses and guides to publishing AI books.

And apparently it made, they made their first million. when they were 25 and they earned their second million like four days later and apparently they made $50 million in 2022 so I can only imagine how much they're making now this is how big it's really quick I mean imagine how much I make now if they made 50 million 22

they are now under the Federal Trade Commission they are investigating them I do think that in a world where there are only a limited number of book buyers and book readers this is an issue and as you say it's particularly an issue for people who write technical books for people to write nonfiction books for books where someone can just say here is a summary of everything that was just said in that book for cheaper and under a fake name i do think you're right about the biographies as well it's a company sitting there somewhere inventing names just anything you can put into a search bar they're doing a version of so just be careful especially with books when you're not absolutely certain the name of the title just be absolutely certain you're giving your money to the right people.

But Amazon has got to get better at dealing with this. Because obviously saying you can only upload three a day, that's incredibly easy to get around. You can have many profiles. What's the difference? So they've got to get better at somehow weeding this out because it's very, very difficult to see how, I mean, anyone bar the A-listers, can really make money if it carries on for too much longer, particularly in non-fiction. Exactly. Reese James, the wonderful comedian who's just bought out a book, which is I haven't read. but I know it will be terrific because he's one of the funniest men in the world.

He just did a very good Instagram post where he reviews the five worst rip-offs of his book. And it's number one. It's called Reese James. When everything said, you can't, he whispered, watch me. I mean, it's an absurd world. And I do, the one good thing I think about all of this, I know we were terrified about AI and AI slop and not ever believing anything. we get to the stage where we're aware that there's so much slop out there

that we seek out human connection and we seek out human writers and we seek out human bands and we seek out live and we seek out real human connections. I think it's so huge, it's so big and it's so dumb and it's so exploitative of people and it's making, as you say, money for people who have literally done nothing, achieved nothing, created nothing, that the culture turns

and we become people who seek out looking into each other's eyes, hearing a story from someone personally. But it's toxifying the marketplace. And in the end, people don't want to go on to Kindle because they feel they're just going to be, there are other choices for e-readers and they might feel that they're not going to be flooded with the same amount of stuff.

Yeah, the Etsy of books is on its way, I'm sure. That's a good one. Any recommendations this week? I have. I saw a play that I loved, which I've been really wanting to see. It was, it's Good Night Oscar, which, uh, Sean Hayes, um, from Will & Grace. And it's a one, he won a Tony for this performance. And he did it a while ago in New York and he's brought it to London.

It's at the Barbican. Um, and it's about a story, which I'm afraid I didn't know so much about, but it's about sort of late night TV and this guest, um, this brilliant guest, Oscar Levant, who is an incredible sort of kind of like a musical genius, but also in a very, very funny. And the script by Doug Wright, it's got a lot of great. one line is in and it's about his appearance he comes out of a mental hospital unauthorised to appear on a chat show and it's it's so it's one night the Sean Hayes's performance is absolutely amazing and it's great it's funny and if you're interested in television and the changing that there's changing tides in television about when people started trying to be a bit more honest on television and it wasn't so and late night which I guess is kind of poignant topicality

to it. Um, I loved it. Um, it's on at the barbican. Can I just say, although this isn't the most important thing, performances start at 7pm. There's no winterfall and it finishes at, uh, 840. Oh my God. That's the dream. Well, I have to just say, I just, I merely put it out there. Yeah. Listen, yeah, the, that we'll pay the same for our tickets, but, uh, you can really, you can really be shorter. I mean, it's very civilised, isn't it? Isn't it civilised? Um, what about you? Talking of civilised, it recommend a couple of things on IPlayer. They have various curated collections and Simon Jenkins has this collection and we watched a few of them this week. One is called Special Report and it's all about why young women are moving to

London. It's like in the 1960s and it's like a cautionary tale about women from their provinces moving to London and where they live. It's just sociologically it's really, really wonderful. It's just a beautiful bit of filmmaking as well. And also there's a wonderful John Bechamon documentary where he just goes on an old branch line of the railway to Burnham on sea and just talks about the like the death of the railways. I've seen this. I've seen this. I've seen this a while ago, but it's brilliant.

But that collection, it's just lots of old documentaries from the 50s, 60s, just about Britain and how it used to look and how it used to be. And they're very, very moving. I think that about wraps us up. We've done so many recommendations this week. I know a lot. We will be back, as always, on Thursday. with a question and answers edition.

By the way, we're going to do a special question and answers edition soon with Chris Columbus, the film director who's done the Thursday Murder Club movie. So if you have any questions for Chris about Home Alone, about the Harry Potter movies, Mrs. Doubtfire, the state of Hollywood now. We won't do much on Thursday Murder Club, but if you've got a particularly good question, then we'd love that. But Spielberg, he works a lot with Robert Eggers. You can email any questions you have for Chris Columbus. He is the loveliest man in the world, by the way.

So you can sort of ask him anything, best three movies, anything you want. and that is The Restors Entertainment at Gollhanger.com if you send your questions to that. And we've got a bonus episode on Friday for our members about the tortured birth of Euro Disney, now Disneyland Paris. Disneyland Paris, beautiful. Yeah, so you can join if you like at the Restorsentatement.com and you can have ad-free listening. There's a discord and otherwise we will be back as always on Thursday. See you then. Hi, it's William Drimple here again from Empire, another Goldhanger podcast.

Here's the clip from our recent series on the five partitions that created modern Asia. And it was deeply emotional. Sparsh picked up some pebbles from the village, which he made into jewelry, family heirlooms for his family going down the generations. Because he was always saying, you know, my family doesn't have archives, et cetera. We lost everything in partition. And there's nothing that we have from Baylor to show where we came from. But so he wanted to pick up something from Baylor and make it into airlines for the next generations.

You know, three, four generations from now, they'll still have a piece of bailer with them, even if, you know, the relationship between India and Pakistan worsens again. And, you know, even if his kids can never visit Beela, they'll always have a piece of Beela with them. This connection with Earth, Dherty, you know, they call it Dherty in India, and Zamin is the Udu word for exactly the same thing. But it is much more than just the earth. It is who you are, where you have grown from, where your forebears have grown from. And the number of people I know who have been lucky enough to travel across the border, and I count myself as one, who find it impossible to leave without a scoop of earth.

And I have one too. You know, in Lahore, picked up a handful of Earth and brought it back with me. Because I thought, you know, this is the stuff my grandfather used to walk on. To hear the full series, just search Empire, wherever you get your podcasts. 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, just one sleek screen that does it all. It adapts to what you're watching to, a Spanish villa in the Day of the Jackal, a jungle paradise in a nature documentary, or poolside in the White Lotus.

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