Speaker 1the rest is entertainment is presented by octopus energy whose generation business backs builds and manages renewable energy projects on screen though the practicalities of sourcing power are slightly more negotiable
Speaker 2certainly in scripts i mean my favorite energy source story back to the future of course they're supposed to have plutonium they don't have plutonium so they were like back in
Speaker 1when they go back when they go back yeah so they need to get 1.21 gigawatts which they
Speaker 2get from the lightning strike which they know is going to happen at 1004 very very clever monsters inc now you know where the power source is monsters inc everything
Speaker 1in monstropolis is powered by children's screams which is why they need to sort of harvest them
Speaker 2yeah may not work in real life on
Speaker 1screen keeping the lights on does seem to require an unnecessary
Speaker 2amount of drama now octopus energy generation has rather less need for a screenwriter it backs builds and manages renewable energy projects with 5.7 gigawatts of capacity and the power source is a power source which is powered by children's screams which is why they need to sort of harvest them yeah may not work in real life on screen keeping the lights on does seem to require an unnecessary amount of drama now octopus energy generation has rather less need for a screenwriter it backs builds and manages renewable energy projects with 5.7 gigawatts of capacity and across its portfolio enough to power all the homes and businesses of birmingham leeds and manchester combined a slightly more conventional approach to generating power this episode is
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Speaker 4want to be the one who's always in the know about the game the scores the plays here's a tip the apple sports app just pick your favorite teams and get automatic live updates without even knowing their schedules and when your team scores it shows up right on your iphone lock screen making it easy to check in anytime so rule the group chat and download apple sports for free on the app store or find it on your new app store hello and welcome to this episode of the
Speaker 1rest is entertainment with me marina hi and me richard
Speaker 2osmond hi marina hello
Speaker 1richard how are you i'm okay how are you i'm pretty good thank you i'm i'm pretty good i've got lots of things happening today but other i'm launching my new we're going to talk about this today we're going to talk about this we're
Speaker 2going to talk about what marina did next and what it tells us about the culture yeah yeah um other things we're talking about we i think our first story might be the most mental thing we've ever spoken about if i say italian brain rot then um half the listeners are sighing and the other half of listeners are going huh but uh either way we're going to take you through what it is and why this week is very very important yes the brain rot wars brain rot wars
Speaker 1um we're going to be talking can you buy your way onto the bestsellers list richard we're going to talk about aria manual the hollywood super agent whose book roll the calls came out this week and
Speaker 2out recently exactly and there's some controversy over it we also get to talk a little bit about aria manual himself which is always fun because he's one of the most mental people in hollywood and that is uh there's some competition for that but talking of things that are genuine insanity the world of italian brain rot the world of
Speaker 1italian brain rot what is italian brain rot brain rot is like an online i can't believe we're starting a podcast with that sentence well it's not the first time that we have mentioned this we have mentioned it yeah i believe i took you right into this whole life you did yeah i believe i took you right into this whole life you did yeah last year when it came out okay but um i tell you it's like an online word it's an internet culture word for sort of poor quality content and a sub-genre of that is italian brain rot um which are sort of weird ai generated hybrid creatures characters with italian names italian-ish names nonsense names really they interact in kind of absurdist i think quite nihilist ways there's ballerina cappuccino she's like a dancing sort of ninja cup of coffee there's bombardero crocodilo playing with a crocodile head as i say they're all these hybrid creatures there's tralala tralala that's the shark in sneakers the first one of all uh yes the first one of all and i mean they're loads of these now but actually the one who's emerged as the biggest star is tung tung tung
Speaker 2sahar and that's why we're talking about it this week as well because there's something very so tung tung tung uh this isn't an april
Speaker 1fool i obviously would be very unseasonal so tung tung is based on a sort of elongated kind of indonesian drum now the original creator with the seven prompts of um tung tung tung so her is a indonesian sort of teenage kid whose um handle is noxa internet handle and by
Speaker 2the way only created in february 2025 that's how quick this
Speaker 1oh my god that's a distant i know i
Speaker 2know it's amazing
Speaker 1isn't it it's got um human limbs and a baseball bat like
Speaker 2tung tung tung so like
Speaker 1just like tung tung tung so and if you're asking where you see these things there are masses of online content like absolutely massive youtube people using themselves then people bring them into their own kind of content um they are they've been adopted tung tung tung so her has gone as a skin into fortnite this is when you can play as different characters you know and steal a brain rock which i believe i talked to you if you listen to this podcast i'm over a year ago which is a roblox game now roblox as you know is the gaming platform for which is particularly kind of gen a focused it is worth 46 billion and um i mean it's so it's this is a big thing right can
Speaker 2i can i just because let's go back there are some people who are utterly lost at this point the reason we are talking about it is we have all these unusual little creatures almost all ai generated yes which which are kind of play things for a generation of creators and a generation of consumers so we have nihilist children and nihilist children which of course i got three is all children um so triple t tung tung tung so her i'm going to call him slash her you're going to
Speaker 1call use triple t
Speaker 2triple t there as you say triple t was used in roblox and used in various things uh and the question that is now coming about is can it be copyrighted the reason that's the question is it's created by ai the indonesian creator of it took 15 minutes and seven prompts to create this character which by the way is not that he's not cheating that's what how all these characters are created they're created by a series of prompts it went out into the world hundreds of thousands of users shared it used it didn't completely new things you know created a world around it it is now enormous does that indonesian kid still own triple t or more to the point do the uh large agencies who've paid that kid of some money own triple t can you own something that you created in 15 minutes with seven prompts that is making hundreds of millions of pounds i mean billions of views of this character and other italian brain rock
Speaker 1characters just as predicted in adam smith's the wealth of nations do you know what all exactly is predicted in exactly what i was you
Speaker 2know what i was rereading desk capital just to see what mark said to say about it and there's
Speaker 1a seal section just about
Speaker 2and it says not not to be read until 2026 and it actually has a weird it's like a it's like a sausage but that has tank wheels uh is the uh is is the chapter heading so that's where we are these these these things are thrown out there into the culture they are co-opted by thousands of kids whole worlds are built around these characters which one's married to who who whose enemies of who is it actually have fights you know sort of quite a creative world i would say
Speaker 1there's a lot i like about it and also just how much it is meant as an absolute two fingers to all human adults exactly
Speaker 2my favorite thing about it but also to all celebrities yeah because what they have done this generation is created a world of characters who are their own celebrities who don't exist who they can impose whatever they want on project anything they want on to can make uh interact with each other can build whole big soap storylines of these absurdist characters of these absurdist um memes they can create anything they want out of them there is a huge huge huge amount of money in it now and that's the reason it's fascinating the absurdity of it is fascinating the creativity of it is fascinating but the legality of it i these things were created by ai they were firstly created by ai and then created by fan culture so who owns them it's interesting
Speaker 1the people who have inserted themselves into this so there is a company called momentum lab their sort of backstory is they seem to have sprung out of the goodness of their heart richard to take care of creators who create things in this kind of space and put things out in the world that become very popular and they become hugely viral to allow the original creators to benefit from that virality yeah and indeed yeah momentum labs to take their whatever percent
Speaker 2i should point as momentum m-e-m-e yeah
Speaker 1yeah which is clever yeah super clever yeah and there's a games company called do big studios who created that game that was on roblox called steal a brain rot which i do you remember i was telling you i i ended up telling you because i was talking to you about grow a garden which became this huge kind of runaway thing on even by the standards of um roblox games but what was coming up behind it was steal a brain which is such a basic game it's literally like running a gauntlet and just stealing other people's brain rot i used to hear this wailing from upstairs from my daughter her and then one of her brothers saying the game is called steal a brain rot
Speaker 2what did you expect so what if i've stolen your brain
Speaker 1rot yeah i said oh my god i can't get involved in any of this but i did sort of find it fascinating as i say roblox is worth an unbelievable amount of money you know it's probably worth that half warners or whatever it was worth about the same for a bit it's it might be the stock might be rebounding it's not clear but at a certain point steal a brain rot had something like 26 million concurrent users that means at any one time they had that and that was their kind of peak so it's interesting momentum then said do big studios put tung tung tung sahar in this game triple t triple t along with all all the other brain rots because that and they did it
Speaker 2because they're going i mean they're all made of ai so they're in public ownership so we like playing green sleeves over an advert exactly we can do exactly what we want with this and then
Speaker 1momentum lab said no you've got to pull it
Speaker 2momentum has been very yeah the the medicines on frontier yeah of this story and they said
Speaker 1you've got to pull it our creator has to benefit from it they did pull it at first and now they're like no we're putting him back in and we're suing momentum to say you cannot copyright it's certainly in the u.s it is global this thing it kind of particularly took off in south america the brain rot there's lots of kind of it will be a global story and everyone's jurisdictions are different but they're saying that there is insufficient human input into tung tung tung sahar you didn't think you'd be saying
Speaker 2tung tung tung sahar by the way one of my
Speaker 1children is in the other's phone as this so it's really yeah one of the things i like about it is that people have become so obsessed with tung tung tung sahar that they're trying to they've always tried to backwards engineer the exact prompts that we use that's a whole subculture of the subculture is people saying what did he type in to get this exact image out and people have tried to sort of go back it's like the key to all mythologies they've tried to go back and try and work out what there's seven prompts seven prompts and they've tried
Speaker 2to work out what they were seven prompts one billion dollars yeah you do the math and lots of people currently are doing the math yeah or over here they do
Speaker 1what is interesting is it like a lot of these things there isn't any case law it this will be this ridiculous creature is going to be a test case as to what actually you can copyright when it's ai generated i find that quite fascinating yes the other thing i think is very interesting is there's something just i mean the bit the bit that to me is the most interesting is the fact that there's a lot of people who are trying to figure out how to do this and i think there's a lot of people who are trying to do this and i think there's a lot of people who are trying to figure out how to do this and i think there's a lot of people who are trying to figure out how to do this and i think there's a lot of people who it to me it is that kind of hell of generational fu that like it this represents it's great the first time when you saw all these things um and there was another one that came out which i'm going to also talk about skibbity toilet
Speaker 2skibbity toilet and when
Speaker 1this came out i remember i'm god i remember when skibbity toilet came out
Speaker 2god do you remember this is like cider with rosie isn't it but but for skibbity toilet
Speaker 1well because my children were showing to me skibbity toilet with rosie and and i god i remember um john brown he's brilliant he was the showrunner of the franchise saying yeah i mean imagine how many more people have watched this in an episode of succession which he also wrote like yeah and i let me tell you what it was it was like it came out of nowhere it is it became beyond massive with jenna skibbity toilet it was this guy called alexi garasimov created it he's a georgian guy um it is a sort of absurdist dystopian thing i mean i understand anything that children are into it's a story of a war there are like loos with human heads in and then there are other creatures which have cameras for heads or tvs for heads something like that security cameras that sort of thing uh there's a war that ip has now been scooped up by someone called invisible narratives but
Speaker 2garasimov is a he's an illustrator so he actually created he's an
Speaker 1ep he's moved away from the soul creator it
Speaker 2wasn't it wasn't yes that's not an ai thing so it's a it's a slightly different thing
Speaker 1but he was by the end he must have been using it he can post that often i mean he posted daily
Speaker 2updates on this but the creation of the original idea and original thought came out of his brain as far as one can tell but now
Speaker 1there's a huge backlash there because people are saying they've taken his creation away from him you know these people who are these kind of big agencies or these big like hey let me represent you and take your kind of idea away from you yeah welcome to show yeah welcome showbiz the showbizification of brain rot is just sort of kind of nuts but and the thing i find most hysterical is the adult companies not adult like that but like the grown-ups in hollywood saying yeah we need we probably need to get in on this brain rot thing there is a stealer brain rot movie in development which when i told my children that they were like how long does it take to make a movie i was like oh i mean it's it's a long time to make a movie like two and a half years and they're like what like how embarrassing no one's gonna care about the brain rot okay so when i read about the stealer brain rot movie being in it's like you know yourself as a writer i would have loved to picture it's like trying i don't know it's like trying to make a pop song about i don't know gravity or so i don't know it's it was such a sort of weird category mistake like you can't develop a movie for sort of two and a half years then finally get it into theaters whatever they don't even want to go to the movies they don't want to watch it like that they want to watch it on a phone this is such a category mistake i can't believe you're making it but there's a story a company called story kitchen that sort of often develop stuff out of games are doing it they're so embarrassing you have to give a little statement to the trade papers we're thrilled to bring stealer brain rot to the big screen okay why are you doing it uh they wrote new beanie and they signed it off new beanie pizzanini six seven it's like oh my god this is so cringe i luckily no children are reading the trade papers but also no children are going to go to the theaters to
Speaker 2watch this i bet your daughter reads variety
Speaker 1yeah oh she's happy she never
Speaker 2offered i love um story kitchen story well welcome in what are we mixing what's that you smell why it's a little stealer brain rot movie sit yourself down take the weight off your feet and enjoy yeah you can put this in a hangar somewhere in the valley i
Speaker 1mean you absolutely and the um and i don't know where skibbity toilet is currently being run out of but it isn't georgia anymore and these people are trying to develop like they're developing masses of merchandising masses of they're just trying to sort of roll it out but it's so against the original spirit of it which is as a sort of as i say it's a sort of a form of rebellion it's like the thing that people like most in some ways is showing their parents this stuff so their parents can go i what am i raising what what are we raising isn't that
Speaker 2everything you know that is everything gets co-opted everything starts well not everything but all sorts of things start as this little underground thing that you know all the people don't understand look at punk in the 70s and then look at the money everyone made out of punk in the in the late 70s you know look at emi making money out of punk i mean it's just it's i'm when i when i'm equating uh brain rock with punk you know what i mean it's just it's it's it's it's it's it's oh yeah but
Speaker 1it's a similar spirit yeah exactly
Speaker 2it's a similar spirit and these things always get ruined people always jump in and also by the way they will make some money off it because there will be a generation coming along afterwards who weren't at the forefront who weren't at the vanguard who just grow up liking the characters and looking at the characters and go oh i like that funny character and they'll go and see a movie about it but this first generation this first wave of kids who we think are insane this is like incredibly creative generation what an incredibly brilliant thing to have and i think it's a great thing to have and i think it's a great thing to have in your generation this ridiculous stuff that nobody above the age of sort of 13 has any understanding of that you yourself can constantly remix that you yourself can be an active part in and you know create and develop what a what a lovely thing to have it is like
Speaker 1growing up with punk it is and it is a digital generation digital folklore that everyone sort of owns it's difficult to i suppose someone did start it off it's very interesting when you look at those i've something you've just said reminded me that there's there's so few films that have made over a billion you know or whatever i can't remember how big the list is now say it's 60 or something but actually only a few of those are a tiny few like less than five i think are originals and one of them is free guy which is that ryan reynolds movie when i say it's original and it's not a franchise thing when i saw it in a cinema it's kind of like in a sort of gaming world and um once all the sort of fortnight skins are getting thrown in near the end and i think it's a great thing to have and i think it's a great thing that children were like cheering in the cinema they absolutely loved it and it's sort of it's quite hard to explain that that is what an original is that really speaks to people so i'm not saying that these films can't potentially but there's something that is so antithetical to the spirit of the brain rot in the idea of like a hollywood studio making a film about it but how lovely that
Speaker 2we're in a position now where we're defending the uh the idealism of brain rot yeah you know and it is and there are so many of these characters by the way
Speaker 1they are you cannot believe how many there are more characters as you i think your celebrity's point is very interesting the idea that i remember someone else saying to me is like oh my my children couldn't name a celebrity they probably know the rock that's it they have they could not name one and the idea that they're they're as you say you control these people they're not really interested in like waiting for celebrities to parcel out their exciting high-end entertainment projects to them yeah um obviously they you know there's things like taylor swift that transcend all of these things but in general they're not really interested in that they want constant production they want to be part of it they want it to be a sort of experience that you could generate your own stuff as well yeah and it's
Speaker 2like a pokemon we're a live soap opera it just it takes an awful lot of things that have come along like collecting things like what's new what's next what's coming next week added to just this thing that you can interact with things hollywood and tv still talk about oh we should make more interactive television tv that's interactive you think you are so for that i mean yeah that horse is not just bolted on by a horse it's not just bolted on by a horse it's not just bolted on by a horse that horse has lived a long happy life and died at the age of 18 in a beautiful meadow i mean it's it's long gone this stuff this remix culture this creating your own stuff this interactive culture it is it's happening somewhere entirely different and it's happening because an indonesian kid saw a drum that wakes you up for sahur you know the meal uh before ramadan uh and decided to put seven prompts into an ai thing and that's where that's where that billion came from it's it's i find it i think the reason we're talking about it is because i think if you just look at it at a glance it seems absurd it seems like ai slop it seems like the end of culture and i think i think it's probably the beginning of something really interesting we said before every generation there are the same amount of creative people like your generation is no more creative than any other generation you're not so you know you were just born in the era you were born in and you reacted to that and you created within the uh parameters of what you were shown and this generation there are a lot of hugely creative kids out there what what are they going to be coming up with it's going to be crazy because they've been taught that they can do something that we were not taught that we could do no you know they have an extra club in the bag you know and i think it's i think it's fascinating so let's of course it's mental it's also fascinating
Speaker 1from the legal point of view i do remember that um you know i once had a legal case against alton john who i literally love but we have since put up for these differences aside but um there was a and he sued over it by the way there's absolutely no way he would ever have even seen it it was just like you know there's lawyers he just yeah someone's seen something on page 87 of whatever um and we won the case the guardian won the case which was great i was really pleased they actually fought it because it's it's just so expensive to do something like that but i remember the qc who we had at the time saying um oh gosh there is so little case law in our whole in what we have that relates to irony and satire and this is now a piece of about four pieces of case law that we have i was like wow my really stupid diary about elton fake diary about elton john has become significant in some way because then it irony and satire have more protection in law than they had before because there's there is a precedent and unbelievably tung tung tung sahar is going to be like a test case for what you can copyright when created by ai what you what can be copyrighted in this new way creating culture and this kind of fan culture and you know how much can be can sort of be assigned back to the creator and how i mean it's really interesting that again i just find it always quite funny when something super absurd becomes a piece of case law one final
Speaker 2question do you think there's a way that any adults listening to any adults listen to this i don't know if any adults listen to this any adults listen to this can find a way to enjoy italian brain rot or is it's very
Speaker 1meant to exclude i think it's very design is meant to exclude but for me i mean if you listen to this podcast you probably quite like behind the scenes stuff and so therefore you can look at it as a cultural phenomenon yes i think anyone who listens to this podcast could be like yeah i'm not going to be watching it every day and trying to generate my own stuff but i like to see that it's going on i like to see that you know children still hate us right rightly rightly and yeah i think yes for sure i think that that is something that anyone would be interested in it is a massive cultural
Speaker 2take a look is it also something that the alt-right will at some point um co-opt it's
Speaker 1interesting why haven't they because you you would think wouldn't you i think because they do it with most things yes and especially kind of absurdist and nihilist internet stuff it's right up their street they haven't yet i love that you know um does not actually work for like ben shapiro or someone yet but you know may eventually oh i cannot
Speaker 2wait for this generation of kids i mean this is a great weapon to have it's such a great weapon to have something that parents genuinely dislike not even their parents but anyone in their 20s i cannot wait till that generation of 45 and see what it is that's upsetting them yeah
Speaker 1it will be it will be
Speaker 2amazing it'll come to you it'll come to you shall we go to a break and after that we are talking about your next career move which i'm fascinated to talk to you about exactly what you are doing next and i would say it's an exclusive but if we didn't get an exclusive on that then what would we get what were we even doing at yeah exactly see you in a moment this episode is brought to you by our friends at lloyds now let's talk
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Speaker 2entertainment now marina you i was just reading last week your last ever column for the guardian yes which is where you used to work i don't know if you know
Speaker 1that i i wait yeah wait what uh and
Speaker 2i was looking at i was doing something which you would never do which is i looked at the comments and they were so positive it was unbelievable i felt i felt like i'd gone back to like 1992 or something there was a there was a real sense of de-ream things can only get better everyone was so thankful to you and everyone was but one of the things everyone was asking is what's marina going to do next and lots of people going i presume she's going to another newspaper i presume she's doing this that or the other so lots of people were wondering but we are going to reveal now exactly what you are going to do next and we're going to do next what form it takes and why and it's not italian brain
Speaker 1rot it's not it may be okay i just you know let's not rule it out no i'm launching something today we're recording on monday in partnership with girl hanger who make this great podcast with us um and it's called always on and it's going to i know we're naming after the nervous breakdown it's going to give me and it's one place for my writing also my new youtube show and various other sort of projects that are coming down the pipeline and it's you can go to marina hide.com it's free to subscribe i'm going to keep it free for quite a long time because i want to see if people like it um and then maybe towards the very end of the year make it paid um and a paid offering so it will be writing it's also videos there's quite a lot there already um and it will be about entertainment and culture and politics and sport and you know all my personal obsessions yeah so
Speaker 2essentially you've been writing two columns a week for very very very long time yeah and i'm going to keep it free for quite a long time doing for the guardian who pay you a sum of money uh it goes out the guardian sort of get the traffic from that you get the lovely you bask in the reflected glory of it but this is far more i mean you're you're you are you are doing what we talk about a lot which is you're sort of taking everything in-house well that's why we are
Speaker 1talking about really because it's it's forget about me for a minute but it's what what what this sort of move symbolizes and other people are doing it as well i think it's it's a lot of work and i think it's a lot of work and i think it's a lot of interesting the idea in the old days that you could set up independently if you were a journalist or someone who was part of a legacy media organization was just unthinkable like you know i am now i suppose bundling as it were i'm putting lots of my things all together someone once said to me there's two ways to make money in media bundling and unbundling i'm currently bundling i look forward to the unbundling era and the idea that is that bits
Speaker 2right sorry i should have checked that a very very early on do you
Speaker 1think i would do you think i would ever leave this podcast don't be stupid um but it's interesting because lots of people are making these kind of moves and what i think is particularly interesting is that you know you can't sometimes hear about the kind of big splashy things but there is a whole middle class as it well the sign of any prosperous society is a sort of thriving middle class and there's a merchant yeah there's a whole middle class of people as it were who have left legacy titles and thought well And specialists are particularly interesting who have said, okay, I'm going to it the journalism is now sort of part of the creator economy in some ways sometimes people feel like oh i might be a micro influencer but i have seen far better engagement doing it this way
Speaker 2so if you're an aviation expert for example rather than working for an aviation magazine you just got you you literally you have a site where people it's incredible some of the people
Speaker 1i follow on substack or some of the i'll talk about the different platforms and what they offer so but some of the people i follow are just total specialists and you think well no legacy media title would ever get someone like there's a person i follow called casey lewis she's absolutely brilliant she does gen a and gen z trends i mean if you how could you possibly have that as a correspondent in a newspaper media outlet whatever but it is so great you get it almost every day from her and it's an amazing digest of all this stuff around it someone else i follow will you know do deep analysis of sort of franchise box office right and it's so specialist like how i don't know how many people could be interested in it but enough to make this person way more money than they could possibly have
Speaker 2imagined well like a niche magazine you know wx used to be full of just hundreds of magazines for very niche interest but if people are you know happy to pay five pound for a magazine each month it's a business yeah and i suppose
Speaker 1what drew me to do it so i was thinking okay i want to do this what i do like is i love more of a direct relationship with readers i really like that i love that you can do like i'm going to do regular q and a's things like that that's quite i've really enjoyed it yeah i bet you have from youtube who i've there's great people who run youtube in the uk that i love the data you get back and you get it as you know instantly in an ongoing basis so you can see i've got sort of a couple of videos there's a new one coming batman city but um there's one already up there about tech bros and how they're changing the way they dress for quite an interesting reason and it's so interesting to see how to get the sort of feedback on all of that and the data on that
Speaker 2now so you leave the guardian and i'm listening i'm assuming that other legacy media organizations uh would have wanted your services but i've i have both presented and listened to this podcast for long enough to know that probably isn't the direction of travel anymore so what made you think no i'm just going to do this myself well
Speaker 1yeah no you're right i've i've been really lucky and you know all over the years and every year some of the other titles would offer me jobs which is very nice but that there was no way i was going to go to another title as i'd i mean this sounds so kind of pretentious doesn't it but i wanted to own my own value i don't see why i would need to go to another title yeah i can own it yeah you want to see
Speaker 2you want to sink or swim by
Speaker 1yourself yes yeah and i you know i've been around a long time and i back myself to do it and i don't need to be saying would it be possible for me to write about x today and then having some guy on the phone to me saying i don't really like what's happened in the third paragraph here it's like oh i tell you what i think i'll just do it by myself thank you so that that was that was a draw wow not having some guy telling me they didn't like the third paragraph uh no offense i would call it gloves off yeah marina
Speaker 2height gloves off i would call it marina hide unshackled and the picture would be like you but like with gaffer tape over your mouth as if like what you're about to say oh my god i'm finally finding my voice yeah i can't
Speaker 1stand that have you noticed that i haven't said that i can finally say what i like don't be ridiculous i said what i liked at the guardian there's absolutely i cannot stand that play i it makes me feel it's so mortifying particularly when people who leave the bbc do it's like you've had a great living off those people for like 25 years and it's a it's a wonderful organization and i don't really i and you know what they always turn out to have nothing to say i definitely think that there's no particular reason that opinion has to be delivered in a thousand word chunks and it can easily and be and really excitingly i've made a few videos already and i really enjoy the process of being able to embed all the clips and funny kind of bits of footage and i don't know movie clips and everything in there and i think it's a really good thing to do and i think it's a really so that it's it's quite a sort of complete world and you don't have to click out to see what something's about it's all embedded in it in a in a weird way so i i'm enjoying doing those a lot that's something totally different that i'm having to learn from scratch but it's fun again it's fun to learn new things and to say how does this work and what what makes people stay watching it and you know how do i structure this because it's different to structuring things where you can kind of bury a lead a bit further down you can't do that you've got to say things at the top and i don't know i like learning the rhythms and the new dynamics of different ways of presenting the same thing it's all opinion in
Speaker 2the end yeah that's what i wanted to talk about so you said this funny enough in the italian brain rot i was talking about creative people and creative people in every generation that they follow the same paths usually which is what's next what's interesting if i'm going to be doing x amount of work is there a way of increasing the revenue i get from that x amount of work that's a that that's sort of how you build a creative career so you you've been writing two columns a week for 25 years anyway so you're going to keep doing that there's nothing that's going to stop you writing two columns a week
Speaker 1oh my god i can't stop it no of course you can't of
Speaker 2course you can't and so at some point you do have to say okay what's the best way for me to do that why do i enjoy doing it i enjoy doing it because i like you know to explore the world around me and i like to interact with people what's the best way for me to do that what's the best way for me to have control over that what's the best way for me to grow that in a direction that i want to where there isn't another stakeholder who wants a certain thing that i don't want and there is now that platform that allows you to do that it's scary because you're because you're turning down a salary right you're turning down a salary you're going to zero pounds you're doing exactly the same amount of work as before and you're building something but we got to the stage in our culture where that feels for a lot of journalists like a risk that's worth taking well
Speaker 1yeah it is scary but i want to be scared again because i feel that making doing things i've done things over the last few years i started screenwriting i did this podcast and i did all of those primarily well first of all because i was massively interested in them but i did consciously say i want to be scared again each time because i feel that being scared about things first of all even though you're quite targeted you're doing tend to be doing more work it makes you feel younger because you you are not in a comfort zone and you don't feel that and i feel that i enjoy being out of the comfort zone and learning and you and thinking okay how does this work how am i going to make it work backing myself i guess do you think the other thing you said was yes um you know you want more control and you want you think why why can't i own my own value and i'm afraid that's what i really thought which is i would like to own my own value and i would like to be in have more control and put things in one place and see what i can build because i'm interested in building something it's exciting to take a risk and it's also exciting to build something and to think that you know further down the line you can bring up other people perhaps via that which i think that is of particular interest to me so i i have to say that i am really excited about it it's called always on you can find it at marina hide.com i've already done a lot of writing i've done some writing about celebrity traitors the 21 types of tv detectives you can see on celebrity traitors tom hiddleston richard is on a press tour that i'm hugely enjoying at the moment for his everest thing and uh yeah so i've written about him when i left the guardian i actually they i've said a quote saying i was so grateful for my because it's 25 years there but i you know ultimately we're all in the audience business and i'm it was a great privilege to serve that one and i i do regard myself as being in the audience business if you write opinion if you write something different in newspapers if you do investigative reporting it's totally different but if you write opinion you are in the audience business yeah you're
Speaker 2in the entertainment business yeah ultimately yeah yeah exactly and uh oh well listen i'm i'm very excited okay let's finish today talking about ari emmanuel the um probably the greatest agent in hollywood certainly the most famous one anyone who watched entourage ari gold jeremy piven's character is based on ari emmanuel and and in a much earlier iteration of him and now
Speaker 1you know they own ufc they own yeah he's in he's enormous he's a loss and the
Speaker 2reason that he has been in the news is he's written a memoir called roll the calls and it's sort of his entire history in hollywood and moving off in the world of agencies and um everyone who's read it said it's it's it's full of him being angry about other people which makes for a very entertaining uh reading wrote it with jay morringer who wrote spare with prince harry and shoe dog with phil knight and open with andre agassi three of the best non-fiction
Speaker 1books like he's the market leader
Speaker 2obviously only the best for the best of the best of the best uh so ari has written this book and he punches uh he said if you want to know the sort of man he is here's a couple of quotes ari says rage is the air that i breathe my needle is in the red zone from the moment i wake up and also if you want to know what a great writer jay morringer uh is ari says this he says my head is full of battery acid and bumblebees so that's who he is so he's he represents um oprah and the rock and larry david used to represent everyone it's everyone
Speaker 1they're enormous i mean they're also caa which is the sort of right their rival but they are an enormous hugely powerful he used
Speaker 2to represent donald trump when donald trump was the apprentice he he got rid of him in 2016 when trump became president although he's he still has some connections anyway the reason we're talking about it is there was a scandal in america this week um his this book roll the calls went in at number two on the new york times bestseller list okay so he's a new york times bestseller a couple of days later publishers weekly bring out their list which is much more on Nielsen figures, it's sort of the real set figures new york times it's slightly more opaque as to how they work it out publishers weekly came out and it was nowhere in the top 25 oh can
Speaker 1you buy your way onto a bestseller list richard
Speaker 2well the interesting thing is is if you look at the actual figures he sold i think just about 18 000 hardbacks in his first week which is not terrible not great i mean it's you know it's a perfectly
Speaker 1reasonable let's be honest he's the most powerful person in entertainment but also no one normal knows who he is or has ever heard of him
Speaker 2exactly so so 18 000 is good he's
Speaker 1not like it's not like it's prince harry yeah
Speaker 2exactly writing about princess or charles spencer yes which just did unbelievable business last week i mean over a hundred thousand in a week anyway so he sells this uh 18 000 which should see him in publishers weekly at number four but he is nowhere to be seen on publishers weekly
Speaker 1because he's been excluded for
Speaker 2what well they have said that there are a significant amount of bulk buys of this book which triggers their algorithm which says this is not um allowed in the charts so the allegation is that he or somebody in his employer or an agency have been bulk buying the book to kind of stuff the uh figures and therefore
Speaker 1there are certain bookshops that report to the lists for the new york times and publishers know these i'm not saying that this is what's happened here but there is there have been previous stories which i know you're going to get to where people have known which stores report and you make a bulk order from that store and some other store you know so you can kind of uh you can basically inflate it that way yeah exactly and
Speaker 2and usually in the new york times if they think there's evidence of bulk buying they will put a little dagger sign yeah so they'll put you in the list but there's a little dagger sign some of the names who have been accused of bulk buying it won't shock you they come from a certain demographic so pete hexeth uh ted cruz uh donald trump jr his book the republican national committee spent a hundred thousand dollars bulk buying that book to put it in the new york times bestseller list but as i say with a with with a little dagger next to it now aria manuel trump
Speaker 1himself in the 80s the art
Speaker 2of the deal is there's various arguments that say that
Speaker 1it's trump it's always reported that trump bought tens of thousands of copies of the art of the deal in the 80s to make it into this kind of illusion of an amazing kind of cultural artifact well that's why i want to
Speaker 2talk about this because i want to talk about the different between a bestseller with a capital b and a bestseller with a little b so if you at any point in the uk are in any of the sunday times top 10 lists which is hardback fiction hardback non-fiction paperback fiction paperback non-fiction if you are ever for a single week even at number 10 on that list you are a sunday times bestseller and you for the rest of your career can write sunday times bestseller on the cover of any book you want to do everybody does everybody does because it you are ever in that new york times top 20 20 for the new york times bestseller list you can be a new york times bestseller for the rest of your career forever and ever and ever and ever it's just a thing that you can have on the front cover of any book that you do as i say if you're talking at a conference you can do it if you're trying to sell the film rights or something it's a new york times bestseller and that lasts forever and i've said before on this if you do it in more than one territory you're an international bestseller and you can say that you cannot write bestseller if you have sold five million books but you've never spent a week in that top 10 you can't do it if if in your first week you didn't sell like crazy but you just sold a lot of you know sold a little a little for years and years and years you are not a capital b bestseller you're a small b bestseller which just means you are one of the best-selling books whereas if you are capital b you are a bestseller which is new york times and which is sunday times as well so what's happened with uh ari emmanuel here there are lots of reasons why you might bulk buy a book is the truth especially if you're lots of clients or you know you've got a big company and you want to you want to buy it and give it all as gifts for people that's absolutely allowed to allow ceos
Speaker 1do this quite a lot if they've got a book out it's it's a whole thing yeah you'll go
Speaker 2to a conference and there'll be like one on every single chair and you know if you're smart at all you will buy that through a store that is the reports the list yeah so there are ways of doing it's not always necessarily a kind of you know someone shady has gone into a store and bought 40 copies here 40 copies here sometimes that does happen and we're not suggesting that's what's happened here but certainly if it sounds like 18 000 individuals have not thought oh i'd like the sound of that book here's 25 and gone into a store and bought it and read it and liked it and that's why he he's a bestseller so there's lots of ways you can do it now you can definitely game the system in different ways so the most famous one was a writer called larry serum who wrote a book called handbook for mortals and this was back in the glory days of twitter when twitter was very good at investigating is is this
Speaker 1like a ya title a ya title
Speaker 2yeah and there was a book called the hate you give by angie thomas which is which is a huge bestseller in ya circles and everyone loved and then one week this book by uh larry serum is at number one again weirdly with about 18 000 copies so very similar to um roll the calls and the world of uh ya twitter got into an investigative mode because it is of course possible to have a unexpected hit but usually you'll know that it's going to be hit in a couple of weeks beforehand because there'll be buzz building or there'll be reviews building
Speaker 1movies or something like that yeah you've sudden people are talking about it you start
Speaker 2to see the sentiment or you start to see like like someone has come out and said oh my god this new book is coming out or a big website has said this new book is coming out and so an unknown author it happens pretty much every week an unknown author will be catapulted into the top 10 because something has happened which meant everyone's buying this book with this book the handbook for mortals there was none of that at all it was published by a and incidentally never published a book again um anyone who read it was saying and again that there's such a lovely community the ya community so you watch loads of videos about this and no one's saying this is terrible they're quite
Speaker 1a monstrous community the ya community aren't they i mean they will hunt you down and punish you like no one else on the internet i think if you
Speaker 2wrong them for sure but i think they're supportive of each other anyway so she had written this book and so people started doing um their research into how this might have been uh catapulted to number one in the new york times list so they were ringing around lots of the ny t book uh bestseller uh reporting bookstores and said has anyone rung you about this book they said oh yes yeah and there was a couple of bookstores one in las vegas they said oh yeah someone rang and said do we report to the new york times and we said yes and they said could i buy 87 copies right uh and wow this pattern was repeated you know over and the imdb page which is still there uh it said oh yes it's um you know being adapted for a movie and the author uh was going to play the star of it and also you can you can see exactly what was going on is they'd knocked off this book and wanted all the accoutrements of having a hit and so this is going to be the first in a kind of five-part series and they're all going to be made into movies and i'm going to be the star of it and it was all based on nothing it was built on nothing she said she later said no it's just a it's just an innovative business model i just thought i was going to be selling so many conventions i thought i would buy them uh i think okay uh listen i get it so she she sort of denied it but you can do it you can buy yourself onto those lists but you are almost always found out if you do it in such a way it's almost impossible to go from nothing the standing start to get on on those
Speaker 1lists because aria manual is it again it's not clear that this has occurred but the fact that it has even been written about as a possibility given how powerful he is it's quite hard that people must have some form of conviction about it if they are writing it because he this is not somebody that you can
Speaker 2just drag across twitter well what they're writing is that publishers weekly did say that it triggered yeah our warning thing which means that we left it off the list so you can definitely report that i mean you can then start looking into what publishers weekly's algorithm says about uh bulk orders but i really wanted
Speaker 1to talk about this book by the way on the podcast yeah because i'm obsessed with him and i rang i wrote to the publisher in the uk for honestly about every week for the whole summer saying anything yet can i have it yet can i have a look at it yet we'd really like to do something about the podcast and in the end it was like offered to me the day it came out it's like don't worry i've already bought it off amazon anyway i guess we're now talking about on
Speaker 2the podcast yeah for all the
Speaker 1wrong reasons well sort
Speaker 2of although you know i i i do really want to read it because it it does sound amazing in lots of different ways um but the key thing is that anyone who does bulk buy to try and get in that top 10 which is not what we're suggesting he's done it's just saying that's what public publishers weekly have um suggested anyone who does do it is because of that prestige is because even if you're at number 10 in the uk or number 20 in the states forever and ever you are a new york times bestseller or you're a sunday times bestseller but there are lots of ways because it's so important to be on that list because it can really make or break a career and because funnily enough you don't have to set an awful lot to get on the list in the uk there are certain weeks i mean now this time of year it's you have to set a lot of copies to get anywhere near any top 10 but in kind of february march you know you can sell maybe 1100 1200 hardbacks and get in that top 10 so if you're a publisher uh and you've got a book that's going to sell 800 copies you know getting another 300 copies could make your author forever and ever and ever a sunday times best study you can have on the cover of all those things that's why you see so many authors doing book tours in the first week of a book coming out it's all about that first
Speaker 1week yeah well we've both just done it
Speaker 2yeah it's all about that first week you know you you want you want to hit big and hit quickly and if you can do a go around independent bookshores bookshops all around the country and sell three or four hundred copies across you know 10 15 20 events that could make the difference between being number 12 and being number nine and so that's why lots and lots of uh authors will do that some of
Speaker 1those independent bookshops will put will agree to put the figures through in the week of publication even if it wasn't the event itself wasn't necessarily in that week
Speaker 2uh yeah you can all pre-sales count towards your first week of sale so anything that happens before publication week that all goes all in the first week for your first week which is why authors always asking you to sort of pre-order and stuff like that because because it does make a huge difference um if you find yourself in one of these big subscription boxes there's romanticist subscription boxes and fantasy ones and crime ones there've been lots and lots of number ones which are because you're in that you'll see something that sells 12 000 copies because it's in a subscription box which are these things that you subscribe to and uh they make they do really very very beautiful covers and you know sprayed edges and things like that and and they choose their books incredibly carefully that's sort of a route into the top 10 as well and equally if you know tesco's all the big supermarkets you know put you in their book club that would be a route into the top 10 but again it's very very hard to get onto those lists because they know what their customers like so it has to really deliver so there isn't a shortcut really there isn't there isn't like a simple shortcut into that top 10 hype doesn't do it interviews don't do it anymore you know tv interviews won't won't do it anymore but that is just about being a big b bestseller almost all of the books at the top of the list now are not that week two is the really important part of books because that is word everything is word of mouth every trick in the book you can throw out like box office hold like box office like for instance
Speaker 1there was you know yeah you
Speaker 2look at the correspondence by virginia evans which is sold over half a million copies now and it's just doing insane numbers and that you know didn't go crazy in its first week it's just one of those books that everyone read and everybody loved and that is a bestseller with a small b and if you have a bestseller with a big b you get prestige you can write bestseller for the rest of your life on the front of your book if you are a bestseller with a small b you get loads of money and people love your books and you get loads of readers and it's you get to write loads and loads more books so being a bestseller with a small b is much more important but if you are high profile if you are somebody who a publisher spent a lot of money on then getting a big bestseller with a big b can be very very very important
Speaker 1any recommendations yes
Speaker 2i keep seeing slightly kind of lukewarm reviews of the social reckoning and i loved it so much i thought it's great which is the erin sorkin follow-up to the social network jeremy strong as mark zuckerberg um mikey madison i i absolutely adored it if you like erin sorkin it is i mean i watched this
Speaker 1yesterday kieran loved it yeah from start to finish same yeah uh it's i i felt like my only criticism i would love it to have been done for tv because i think if you do it for netflix then many more people see it ideally before the midterms and i think that it would it's it's not going to make and i mean it's you know it's effectively bombed it's but if you've done it over three nights or admit they'll never agree to three now but they might have agreed to you could they could split split it down or done it in a slightly different way i just think more people would see it if you're going to do it for a long time you're going to have to do it for a long time going to the cinema to watch a film about facebook you already shared these views about facebook for sure i would love discovery for this particular story to reach beyond the converted
Speaker 2yes but um yeah
Speaker 1i made the terrible
Speaker 2mistake of going along wishing to be entertained by a film and i and i
Speaker 5yeah hugely was again
Speaker 2is there's five or six lines in there that you're you just you want to take out a notebook and write them down she just said god you've done it again just put something so beautifully and so perfectly and the before i thought the performances are amazing um billy magnuson in that movie i thought was unbelievable bill burr as well uh he doesn't who hasn't acted an awful lot uh he anyway i i thought it was great i can i also sort of put uh put in a word we talked a while ago about strictly embedding in the new presenters i think they are bedded in i thought this week's show was absolute perfection i thought i thought it was brilliant i i said you have to producers know what they're doing producers have a plan uh and i i think it's it's it's really firing on all cylinders now and for you i'm gonna do your recommendation for you which is your new endeavor always on uh which is your columns uh pieces to video loads just loads and loads of things that come out of your brain on any given day all in one place and we can find it at marina
Speaker 1hide.com well that's
Speaker 2my recommendation oh thank you um so this week we have a q a which will be on thursday but we also have two more traitors reaction episodes after thursday and friday's thanks everyone has been so lovely about those gangbusters yeah i know it's incredible i'm really
Speaker 1glad we split it down to per episode now i mean
Speaker 2you have to so much to talk about yes there is but the god the amount of messages i get really sociologically kind of forensic examinations of group dynamics and on that show but it's it's it's those are lots of fun to do right so we do do one do one on thursday do one on friday q a as well and our bonus episode this week is the tim hanks the man behind it
Speaker 1all right see you that's a lot i seem to see you tomorrow because there's a lot going
Speaker 2on talk about always
Speaker 1on yeah this is exactly it's it's yeah it's a busy time this is like our world cup uh celebrity traitors
Speaker 2yeah it's like uh we're like gary micah and alan in new york
Speaker 1we need a kitchen island it's like tapas all
Speaker 2over yeah yeah all right see you next
Speaker 1time see you next time you uh i hate mondays king's hawaiian
Speaker 7cinnamon swirl bite uh taylor hansen sure
Speaker 3i'll try one hey let's get back to work please but taylor hansen's making my
Speaker 4day way better with these new soft and swirly king's hawaiian cinnamon bites taylor hansen nice try one there's nothing like it
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