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- [00:01]
Marina Hyde
The rest is entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. Now, fan mail is one of entertainment's strangest bargains. You send total devotion one way and the understanding that nothing may come back.
- [00:12]
Richard Osman
Certainly in our day, you would write to a film star or a singer. I wrote to Howard Jones. And maybe three months later a sort of signed photo comes back that's clearly pro forma. You know that, you know, Howard's never
- [00:23]
Marina Hyde
really looked at Steve Martin used to have the performer sort of thing which would just leave blanks. Like insert like small detail to make a joke about how completely impersonal his personal reply to you was. It was just like a standard thing.
- [00:37]
Richard Osman
Impersonal is interesting. That's why we're talking about this. Because with Octopus Energy, you always can reply to their emails. And not only can you reply to them, they will go to the same small group of people who always deal with you. That's like, unbelievable.
- [00:48]
Marina Hyde
It's almost unprecedented that a company you're giving your money to will actually respond to.
- [00:53]
Richard Osman
You are contemptible in some way.
- [00:56]
Marina Hyde
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- [01:02]
Richard Osman
Hey, Meta, where's the nearest metro station? Closest metro to you is Union Square, about three blocks away.
- [01:07]
Marina Hyde
Hey, Meded, text mom. I'm getting on the train now.
- [01:10]
Richard Osman
Sending message.
- [01:10]
Marina Hyde
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- [01:39]
Richard Osman
plants starting at $5.
- [01:41]
Marina Hyde
With the grill fired up and your backyard set to perfection, you'll be able to invite friends and family over to kick off the party. Start celebrating with low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot, prices may vary by store exclusions. Apply to see home depot.com pricematch for details. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Rest Is Entertainment with me, Marina
- [02:06]
Richard Osman
Hyde, and me, Richard Osman. Hello. Hello, Marina.
- [02:08]
Marina Hyde
Hello, Richard. How are you?
- [02:10]
Richard Osman
Yeah, I'm not too bad. It's been too hot.
- [02:12]
Marina Hyde
I like it.
- [02:13]
Richard Osman
I know that. Yeah, but this hot, but yeah.
- [02:15]
Marina Hyde
No, you're right. There were moments when even I was wilting.
- [02:18]
Richard Osman
Try being 6 foot 7 in this heat.
- [02:20]
Marina Hyde
I'd love to. I'd love to be 6 7.
- [02:21]
Richard Osman
No, you wouldn't.
- [02:22]
Marina Hyde
Yes, I would.
- [02:22]
Richard Osman
You are much nearer the sun. It is much, much hotter. I promise that. We've sort of got a summer special this week, funnily enough.
- [02:29]
Marina Hyde
Yeah.
- [02:29]
Richard Osman
We're gonna talk about Love island becoming literally the biggest show in the entire world. How that happened and where it leads us.
- [02:36]
Marina Hyde
Yes. We're also going to talk about. Kylie Jenner is advertising Meta's new smart glasses. We're going to talk about smart glasses. Also, what the kind of move towards celebrities means for Silicon Valley and celebrities. Okay, let's get to Love Island.
- [02:52]
Richard Osman
Yes, let's.
- [02:53]
Marina Hyde
Let's journey to Love island, which is now an enormous hit in the us. It is. It's the biggest show on US tv, generates kind of huge stars, like lots of reality shows. We're going to talk about reality shows and how. I think reality stars have a much sort of bigger cultural cachet now than movie stars. Now, in the past 24 hours, there've been a couple of stories about Love island contestants. One's been removed from the UK version and one from the US version of the show. But for Thursday's Q and A episode, I can see we've had questions about TV participant vetting. So why don't we leave those aspects of contestants screening until then? And today we're talking about it as a sort of broader cultural phenomenon.
- [03:34]
Richard Osman
So the origin story of Love island is a fascinating one. So the last three seasons in fact, moved to Peacock in the States and a new host, Ariana Maddox, who's also worth talking about because she's an interesting one, and three seasons ago started really, really, really climbing the ratings. Last season almost doubled its audience. This season has almost doubled it again. So it's uber massive. It's beyond massive. It's absolutely huge. I mean, it's a. It's a phenomenon. It's making an insane amount of money, a lot of that money going to the uk, which is nice because it's a UK format, an ITV format. But to speak to your point about ordinary people becoming celebrities and that being more interesting to people than film stars and what have you. Of course, Love island started in 2005 as Celebrity Love island in the UK. In the UK, I watched that series. Whenever you have a successful regular show, the thing you do is you say, oh, why don't we do a celebrity version of this? And, you know, that's a very familiar path to tread. In the case of Celebrity Love island, they did two seasons of it. It was sort of an attempt to take on Big Brother. It sort of worked, sort of didn't work, you know, got a lot of column inches back when columns were measured in inches, but it didn't really take off. And 10 years later they said, I think it was Angela Jane at E4, said, well, why don't we bring back celebrity Love island?
- [04:59]
Marina Hyde
And.
- [04:59]
Richard Osman
But without the celebrities, why don't we make Ordinary People? And from that moment, this franchise was born. And, you know, it's been a few dips, but it's currently, it's never, ever been bigger. They ditch celebrities, they put ordinary people in there and more than any other show, pretty much, they turn them into characters and personally, they turn them into celebrities incredibly quickly.
- [05:20]
Marina Hyde
People come in with sort of 20k follower counts, they leave with a million plus, they get all, you know, sponsorship bonanzas, all of these sorts of things.
- [05:29]
Richard Osman
It's like being a goalkeeper for Kate Verdi.
- [05:32]
Marina Hyde
I was about to say, I mean, everybody wants to sign him.
- [05:35]
Richard Osman
That's the history of the thing. And I say it was. It was. It was big in the UK as Love island, then moved over to the States. Quiet start. But now has become definitively the biggest show in the world. So I think it's definitely worth us talking about it and. And talking about what? This. This reverse pivot of going from a celebrity show into a regular show, why that made it the biggest show in the world. An interesting sidebar, Traitors in the us, which, as you know, is celebrity based
- [06:03]
Marina Hyde
in the sense that they are, all. Because, as we've talked about on the podcast before, reality TV is now a sort of professional class within entertainment and people hop from show to show. And if you've, you know, one Big Brother, you might get onto Traitors or
- [06:17]
Richard Osman
whatever it is, but Traitors now in the States is going to do a regular version.
- [06:20]
Marina Hyde
Yeah.
- [06:21]
Richard Osman
You know, in the same way, in the UK we went from a regular version to a celeb version. In America, they're going from a celeb version to a regular version. That's when you know you've really made it. When your format is big enough and strong enough, you can put ordinary people in it.
- [06:31]
Marina Hyde
So talk to me about Love island and how it became this phenomenon.
- [06:37]
Richard Osman
Well, it's hard to say how it becomes a phenomenon because it's a regular television show and it became a phenomenon because people kept believing in it and, you know, so the team behind it. It's quite hard to work out exactly who came up with Love island, because really, it's sort of just putting couples in a villa and letting them swap. And back in 2005, there were a billion of those formats. Every single format was Sex on the Beach, Sex With My Ex, Just a Load, where, you know, there were these shifting sands. But this is one. Firstly, it was owned by ITV Studio, so people like Rachel Arnold and the Talca Snackers, who are still around now making great shows, they were there. So it had brilliant people behind it very, very early on. It obviously had the money of an ITV studios behind it very early on, and a channel as well. And it had a headwind. And then they just started making it really, really well. And, you know, we often say, oh, my God, what a great, great idea. That was so obviously a big hit. But usually with things like Traitors, Race across the World, Love island, the ideas themselves are fairly prosaic and fairly universal. They just made incredibly well. And that's what. That's what ITV have done. So they were doing that, doing what we would have done 25 years ago. That is making a really good television show as well as we possibly could. But I think the key was, at the same time the culture was changing and what we thought of as celebrity was changing.
- [08:00]
Marina Hyde
Yeah, I don't think people want appetite. First of all, the character types I think have changed in all of these shows is that we used to watch. You know, it's right back in Those, you know, 20 years ago, like you're talking about, we watched reality TV for the train wrecks and it was quite simplistic for messes and for things like that. People in reality TV are now seen as heroes, which is very. A definite shift. Like all of these formats, it's got these kind of terrible stories and some tragedies in its kind of long history. People who aren't able to deal with the fame it brings. But then I suppose that's like movie history or any type of thing.
- [08:37]
Richard Osman
Yeah. And, you know, we have, I hope over the years on this podcast, we've spoken quite a lot about those things and we always will do. You know, we talked about Married at First Sight recently. So I think just on this occasion, we can concentrate on something else, which is there is something extraordinary about these formats.
- [08:52]
Marina Hyde
A different kind of fame in a different kind of audience.
- [08:54]
Richard Osman
But fame in every. Any of its iterations brings all sorts of issues and difficulties and problems, that's for sure.
- [09:01]
Marina Hyde
There's another huge show that just went absolutely nuts for a particular reason, which is in the US called Summer House. Have you seen this thing? It's Bravo. You can watch it here. And it's essentially some people, hot people go to the Hamptons and Share a house, whatever. But there was a love triangle in it. Someone found out that her best friend and a guy, she had a sort of situationship were going behind her back. Chiara, I mean, it's become so massive, it blew up beyond all belief. I saw this guy saying of reality TV producers saying, oh, Chiara's this generation's Julia Roberts. There were these amazing shots of her finding out about it. And then there were these pictures of her like crouched down outside the. Hilariously outside the Hermes shop in Manhattan on the pavement and like a passerby helping her when she sort of found out about it. It's so all out there. You're involved in all their dramas all the time. And so they have these huge social moments. She now, by the way, has got a million followers. She's going on Dancing with the Stars. She is presenting Love island after sun that is absolute gold dust. And she's obviously got masses of red carpet and sort of sponsorship, things like that. So I think that what people want now and I'll contrast later, we'll come to why I think this is so why Movie stars in a way are out of step with our kind of cultural dynamics. What they want is permanent act. They want permanent drama, they want permanent candor, they want retail opportunities. All of these things, you know, bring it. They want imperfection. And reality TV is still about in all of these formats, even though it's about revealing who you are. And it's impossible when you're in these kind of long term formats, particularly something like you can't really hide yourself in the Love island bit.
- [10:50]
Richard Osman
I know, and this is a sticking point where lots of people, they go, oh, reality TV isn't real. And you know, you can edit people to look weird and people play up to the cameras. What you're saying is, right, long form stuff, which Love island is, which Big Brother is. You cannot hide yourself.
- [11:04]
Marina Hyde
You can't edit yourself.
- [11:06]
Richard Osman
You can't edit yourself. And you know, you at home might be going, oh, yeah, but I can see through that. You think, yes, everyone, everyone can see through it. And that's what character is. We can tell they're not being authentic either.
- [11:15]
Marina Hyde
Got reality stars who are exposed in these long formats and people do feel they're more real than anything else. Yeah, you've got influences, a class of people which people are also obsessed with but sort of actually detest and think they're lying to them, even though they are obsessed with them. So it's a kind of complicated relations. But they do think that they're lying to them and that they're managing. And then you've got very remote movie stars which, who will come to that are not these type of celebrities at all. And they don't respond in real time to anything.
- [11:42]
Richard Osman
Well, there are two. There are two. This is the interesting thing, I think, and this is why reality TV is so powerful, is there are two types of reaction you can have to somebody on screen. So that person on screen is giving you a version of themselves and you have an opinion on that. And what you're doing either saying is, I love that person. They're so authentic, even though they're messy or they're difficult or, you know, they cause in trouble, they are authentic, or you're. I don't believe that person is being real.
- [12:09]
Marina Hyde
Yeah.
- [12:09]
Richard Osman
And both of those things make for amazing television. They make for judgment. It's like someone started at work and you immediately start talking about them, go, well, what do we think of X? It's that. But for everybody in America, they can all talk about these people and they go, are they real or are they not real? And it doesn't matter either way because there is a. There's a built reaction to both of those.
- [12:32]
Marina Hyde
And by the end, they do feel that they are real because they do understand that the format will expose and that eventually.
- [12:38]
Richard Osman
But people can still be fake.
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Marina Hyde
People can still be fake. Yes, you can be a fake person,
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Richard Osman
but at least they're really fake. But that's exactly it. Everyone's being real. Some people are fakes, but they're real fakes. Yeah, yeah. They're not. No one's acting up for the cameras because you cannot do the, you know what the camera is just. You cannot have that relationship.
- [12:55]
Marina Hyde
It will weigh you out.
- [12:56]
Richard Osman
It really. You will always blink first if you're looking into a camera.
- [13:01]
Marina Hyde
I agree. Whereas movie stars, they tend to be. First of all, they tend to be very guarded. And the way they deliver what they do is, I think now, completely out of kilter with the dynamics of what we expect in the modern world. They are the opposite of always on. This thing that they do takes a very long time to create. The creation of it happens away and you don't see it. And then you are presented with this sort of stone tablet, as it were.
- [13:25]
Richard Osman
And by the way, traditionally has had a prestige and has a prestige in the lifetime of the people who are in these films. And so they still act as if there is a prestige, which I'm sad to say, has long gone.
- [13:37]
Marina Hyde
Yes, it's definitely, definitely degraded. And there Are so many fewer, sort of fewer of those types of stars for this reason that the market is shifting. But nothing in their world happens in real time. If you look at these reality shows, you look at like that girl in Summer House, if you look at Love island, people can communicate with these people in real time. Reality stars, your cultural footprint is immediate. You can message, you can about the dramas that we can see happening. There are these social media moments happening all the time where people maybe find out what's in the series behind people's back. So they have a much closer relationship with their fans and they are always on, they're constantly monetizing. They have a kind of direct consumer relationship. The relationship with the audience is very, very different. Both as a way of selling things because they almost all end up with sponsorships or in many cases come in to Love island because they want that. If you look at someone like Molly Mae, ha, she quite obviously she targeted the show because she wanted to become a certain type of person and it has made her that type of person.
- [14:38]
Richard Osman
And by the way, no judgment on that. That's the culture we live in and that's what I would be doing if I was in my mid-20s. You find your route through.
- [14:47]
Marina Hyde
But movie stars, they don't particularly open movies anymore. People are going for the ip. There's certain people like Zendaya or whatever that people will want to go and see, but there are many, many fewer. Jacob Elordi it was really interesting the other weekend, not the weekend we've just had, the one before. I was Talking to a 15 year old girl about all her cultural taste and she was really, I was really grateful to her. She spent a lot of time talking to me about it and I was talking to her a bit about the pinups, for want of a better term. And you know, she was like, yeah, yeah, you know, Jacob Elordi, all of those. But she said, one of the things she said was there's a feeling that we need more guys, that there aren't guys.
- [15:23]
Richard Osman
Yeah.
- [15:23]
Marina Hyde
And I said that's so interesting. But why has the market not provided? Because, and I think it's really interesting if you look at music, music is dominated by solo women. Ye reality television is a female led medium Books now.
- [15:38]
Richard Osman
All the biggest selling authors in the world are women currently.
- [15:41]
Marina Hyde
She said they're just like, there's not enough guys, they don't have enough pinups. And I said that's so weird that there aren't people sort of coming through. And you know, there was absolutely no shortage of loads of movie stars, loads of TV stars. But the women dominate all these things.
- [15:57]
Richard Osman
Yeah. It can't all be Harry Styles.
- [15:58]
Marina Hyde
No. But reality TV is completely female dominated. They are the power. Funnily enough, when I. This is a medium I know absolutely next to nothing about, but I do know this about it. It's like opera women. This is an art form in which women wield all the power. We don't care about men in reality tv. In lots of these shows, they're stooges
- [16:19]
Richard Osman
a lot of the time, aren't they?
- [16:20]
Marina Hyde
They're like pantomime idiots or they're a plot device. You know, in the Real Housewives, they just sort of exist around the edge of it. And actually when that guy was saying about this girl Kiara from Summer House. Oh, she's this generation's Julia Roberts. That's what. In all of their imperfection. But they're also very ambitious women in reality television. And all of these things are what make them compelling as stars in a way. Yes.
- [16:44]
Richard Osman
And also the ambitious thing. Cause it works the other way around in a way, is if you are an ambitious woman in your early to mid-20s and you do have ideas and you do want to be in the middle of the conversation, this is where you go, yeah, you back yourself.
- [16:57]
Marina Hyde
Yeah, all these women back themselves.
- [16:59]
Richard Osman
And this is a great. Well, funny enough, Ariana Maddox, who's been the host for the last three seasons, when you look into her story, she wanted to be a Broadway performer, you know, so she trained and did, you know, you know, went to theatre school. And not from a particularly rich background, certainly not from a connected background. Moves to New York to try and get work in the theater in the way that one would have done 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 even.
- [17:24]
Marina Hyde
Yeah.
- [17:25]
Richard Osman
And then moves to LA to try and be an actor. She is a bartender. So goes to be a bartender at the bar owned by Lisa Vanderpump from Vanderpump Rules, which is an enormous Bravo show in the states and did 11 seasons of that was much loved. And her dream of playing on Broadway came true. Cause she's cast as Roxie Hart in Chicago because she's a big star, but also is amazing. I mean, she's incredible. Something she would not have been able to do with her lack of connection. She's not Nepo Baby or anything like that. So she. She found a route through one of these shows to do the thing that she wanted to do. Then she went on Dancing with the Stars came third. Now she's Hosting this. And the whole thing is massively taken off. I mean, again, she has a brilliantly messy personal life as well. Cause she was with Tom Sandoval, which is. There's so much to unpack. But that's what they want.
- [18:21]
Marina Hyde
They want ambition and massive imperfection.
- [18:24]
Richard Osman
But also she's talented.
- [18:25]
Marina Hyde
Yeah.
- [18:25]
Richard Osman
You know, and it's quite hard if you are talented, to make it in this world. Certainly if you have no connections, it is difficult to do that. And so when we keep saying, oh, well, these talentless people keep getting famous, I tell you who else is getting famous. Talented people.
- [18:38]
Marina Hyde
Yes.
- [18:38]
Richard Osman
But this is the route through that they are taken because they can't ask their mum or their dad for a job. So, you know, they'll do this instead.
- [18:46]
Marina Hyde
Well, there's a famous quote about writing, which is, writing's easy, you just open a vein and bleed. But. But that's a sort of. That's said by someone like Red Smith or Hemingway or whatever. And it's a sort of.
- [18:56]
Richard Osman
I also thought it was Joan Didion,
- [18:57]
Marina Hyde
but it's attributed to various different people. But I think whoever said it, it would definitely be from the prestige category. But that idea that among certain types of writers, you know, you just lay your soul on the paper and then it's a prestige thing. Whereas people who do it in this format, you know, there's nothing in reality that's remotely prestigious. I don't. I think those are sort of false snobberies. There's something about exposing yourself and being very, very open that is sneered at still in this, but maybe by people who don't understand where everything has gone. Because it's not sneered at by the audience at all.
- [19:31]
Richard Osman
No. And also the audiences are sometimes sneered at by that group of people as well, because they're going, oh, but can't you see X, Y and Z? And the thing you can tell about a reality TV audience is, yes, they can see X, Y and Z. Also, they're seeing a bunch of things that you don't see. And sometimes you get years ago and like Big Brother, people would say, oh, I hate all of them. And you go, if you've looked through those 16 people and there's no one you find a human connection with that is on you. Yes, that is on. The beauty of these shows is we find the person who we identify with, we find the person in whom we find some heroic characteristics. We find the person that we want to get their comeuppance. And usually in reality tv, if not in life, those are the things that happen. But even viewers of these greatest.
- [20:13]
Marina Hyde
Last time, after the first episode, episode, a lot of people were like, oh, I don't know whether this is going to work. Because they couldn't allow themselves to commit. It's like, don't worry, this, this will work. And it was only towards the end when they thought, oh, this is. Alan can't handle being a traitor. This is very funny that they felt that they were coming into the format and that they, you know, they could maybe give it another chance. Maybe they'll watch episode two.
- [20:35]
Richard Osman
I mean, it genuinely has the, the moral nuance and sophistication of a 19th century novel. Yes. I mean, an audience is really, really capable of keeping four or five things in their head at the same time when they watch these shows. And there was drama, drama, drama. It's like, you know, it's like something that comes out in a periodical once a week, except it comes out every day and there's, there's cliffhangers. It's genuine, an incredible form of television. We talked in previous times about the exploitation of people who are on these shows and that's definitely an issue. But in terms of television and in terms of the opportunity it provides people who are on it, it's kind of unrivaled. It's like a bullet train through culture.
- [21:12]
Marina Hyde
I agree. And it's. But the always on nature of it isn't just the format bit like what we were talking about when we were talking about sport and how people are starting to consume football as just one example differently, which is that instead of these kind of 90 minute things that happen relatively infrequently, you've got all of this plotline and social activity and everything happening all around it and there's a whole ecosystem of stuff around it. That means that if you're really into one of these shows, you can sort of get new information and new real time drama about it every single day.
- [21:47]
Richard Osman
Yeah. And it has a lot in common with sport in that if you love sport, you can absolutely immerse yourself in that for your whole life. You will never run out of things to talk about. You will never run out of new storylines, you will never run out of new characters. There will always be a new season. And it's the same with, with reality tv. It has a huge amount in common with sport that, you know, there are definitely rules, but actually it's slightly out of your control. You never quite know what's going to happen.
- [22:12]
Marina Hyde
But it's fan service, it's audience service. Right in the same way that recording artists have realized that they can't disappear for five years and then come back with an album and everyone will still be there. This is. We've talked about this before. People dropping things all the time, and just this constant sort of just remaining part of the culture for fear of it moving on beyond you.
- [22:32]
Richard Osman
So your point about movie stars, I think is interesting. I often feel in my position, so I have, you know, I have a profile. I do TV shows. I've got the books and this, that, or the other. And I understand absolutely what I'm constantly being asked to do, which is make myself constantly publicly available to promote those things. And not to sort of go on a show and say, you must read my book, but to constantly be present in the culture, to show who I
- [22:56]
Marina Hyde
am, to show up in your podcast, Rich.
- [22:58]
Richard Osman
I suppose so. But I get to talk about other things and not myself on this, which is what I like. Oh, yeah. But the idea makes me so tired.
- [23:08]
Marina Hyde
Yeah.
- [23:08]
Richard Osman
When I see the. The graft involved.
- [23:11]
Marina Hyde
Oh, my gosh.
- [23:11]
Richard Osman
You know, and I could see people in their 20s. It's amazing. You, of course, you constantly have a camera pointed at yourself and you can do stuff. I really, really get it. But there comes a point, if you're a movie star, if you're a TV presenter or an, you know, actor or a singer of an older generation, where you're just saying, I don't. I just don't have the energy to turn myself into the product. I really, really don't. And we have enough track left that I can write my books, and that's the product, and that's enough. And, you know, and I'm happy with that. But what everybody would really, really like is for me to be the product and the books to be the thing that you can buy because you like that product. And I. That I cannot get on board with. But this new generation and these new generation of TV shows, that is absolutely the way around that it is. And I really get it. And I think it brings some really interesting things into our culture, and I think it brings some really interesting people into our culture who'd have had the door shut in their face before now. And so, you know, those are big conclusions to take from a reality dating show. But that's. It's so enormous, and it's so enormous for a reason, which is our culture has absolutely changed Underneath Us from 2005 and Celebrity Love island with Jane Middlemess to, you know, 2026 and this behemoth.
- [24:25]
Marina Hyde
Yes. And it's above all it is what audiences want.
- [24:29]
Richard Osman
Ye. And it's good.
- [24:30]
Marina Hyde
And yes, they're giving audiences what they want. And people, I've said this before, but so many writers, people who write comedy or fiction, are obsessed with reality shows because eventually, as you say, you point the camera and eventually people start making, you know, reveal themselves. But they also take extraordinary decisions in the moment. And their impulses are so interesting to watch. And so many, like real prestige writers, are obsessed with these type of shows
- [24:56]
Richard Osman
because it reveals character. And that's what I'm saying.
- [24:58]
Marina Hyde
Well, it's a shortcut to seeing people be put in extremist situations and then having to make a choice.
- [25:04]
Richard Osman
I would go so far as to say if you love Middlemarch, then you'll love Below Deck. Because it's the same stuff.
- [25:10]
Marina Hyde
Yeah.
- [25:11]
Richard Osman
You know, but yeah, in conclusion, it is the biggest show in the world. And while there are issues with that, I think it's worth sometimes going. Do you know what? This is actually not bad. There is something quite interesting about this and there is an audience that's being super served and an audience that really, really engages and understands what it is that they're watching in a way that if you don't watch, you don't understand.
- [25:34]
Marina Hyde
Okay, after the break, we are going to be discussing Kylie Jenner's collaboration with Silicon Valley overlords, Meta for their smart glasses.
- [25:42]
Richard Osman
Talk about always on.
- [25:43]
Marina Hyde
Yep.
- [25:44]
Richard Osman
See you in a mo. This episode is brought to you by the Lloyds 5k house deposit.
- [25:54]
Marina Hyde
Lloyds are offering a 5k house deposit which was last seen in 1996. What are your entertainment memories of the 1990s?
- [26:01]
Richard Osman
I feel guilty talking about the 1990s because you look back and it was such a golden era.
- [26:06]
Marina Hyde
We'd never had it so good and we didn't even realise because we were young and we just thought we were entitled to it all.
- [26:10]
Richard Osman
We absolutely took it for granted. Yeah. Britpop was absolutely in its pomp Oasis plane to a quarter of a million people. You had Blur, Spice Girls.
- [26:19]
Marina Hyde
I'm so sorry.
- [26:20]
Richard Osman
Spice Girls. Amazing movies at the cinema. Trainspotting. I mean, it felt a time of absolute optimism, but at the time you just assumed that was the way that the.
- [26:28]
Marina Hyde
A very British type of optimism.
- [26:30]
Richard Osman
Yeah, but part of the optimism, of course, is the that mortgages were more affordable and that is what Lloyds is dealing with right now.
- [26:36]
Marina Hyde
Yep. Last seen in 1996, Lloyds are now offering 5K deposit mortgages to first time buyers. Search 5K First Time Buyer 1996 Average
- [26:45]
Richard Osman
first time buyer deposits based on O and S data subject to status. Your home may be repossessed if you don't keep up repayments. Conditions apply.
- [26:53]
Marina Hyde
Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goal Hangers. The rest is football. This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer, and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies, most transfers arrive instantly. Me Wise uses the mid market exchange rate like the one you see on Google with no markups or hidden fees. So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today. Be smart. Get wise T's and C's apply. LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your Small Business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com SmallBusiness.
- [28:27]
Richard Osman
Welcome back everybody. Now before we talk about Smart Glasses, our bonus episode this week, not just for members, for everyone. I'm doing a series called the World cup of I've done these many times before in different formats back when Twitter was at its height. The first one we're doing is the World cup of US Sitcoms. I've got John Robbins and Maisie Adam in the studio.
- [28:45]
Marina Hyde
I am dying to hear this.
- [28:47]
Richard Osman
And we're going through more in common. Our lovely polling friends have polled the British public. We're going to find out what the favorite US Sitcom of all time is, but we're going to chat about our favorites as well and little stories about the sitcom. So we're doing a who series of those. But the first one, the World cup of US Sitcoms, will be out this Wednesday for everybody and then for members after that. But it's really good fun and we we thought it was gonna be a short recording and we did a whole bunch of them and we were arguing so much about everything in a. In a nice way. We really, really enjoyed it. So I hope you enjoy that. Talking of enjoyment, I remember a while back when Google bought out their Google glasses. And I was like, this is the worst thing that's ever gonna happen. And then I was delighted because I. They absolutely failed. No one bought them. They were an absolute nightmare. And you thought, good, that's gone away. It has not gone away. Quite the opposite.
- [29:35]
Marina Hyde
Yeah. Smart glasses. There's a new collaboration, Meta Smart Glasses. And I suppose we're going to talk what it means for both Silicon Valley and celebrities who have actually stayed quite separate, interestingly, in terms of promotional activity. But Meta have got a deal with Ray Ban and they've had these glasses out for a while, different ones. You'll probably have noticed Mark Zuckerberg has been or has taken to the stage various times wearing them. We'll get to that in a second.
- [30:00]
Richard Osman
I mean, if he's refusing to put them on, that would be bad.
- [30:03]
Marina Hyde
But Kylie Jenner is the new face of their new glasses. One's called Starfire. They cost about three or four hundred dollars. Her voice is the AI assistant. She's been very hands on, blah, blah, blah. All the things celebrities say when they do a brand collaboration, to me, it's quite interesting because. Because Silicon Valley, first of all, it's interesting to me on the marketing. They don't sell things in this way. Think of what everyone has. Sort of all of those companies, all of those tech overlords have sort of copied Steve Jobs, which is, you know, you walk on stage and you tell people about a new piece of hardware, which I suppose is fine if it's like all software, I guess, or if it's. If it's a sort of some. If it's some kind of desktop thing or a hardware thing or whatever, or even Meta's various other products. But the sort of corporate narcissism of Mark Zuckerberg, who would walk on stage wearing these gloves, glasses, it's like, yeah, like your Earth's most malevolent dweeb. No one's gonna buy anything off you, do you? You can't disrupt everything, mate. Okay, here's how you actually sell things, okay? You get really hot people to take sexy photos, aspirational people, and then people want to buy the thing. So if you have a look at the pictures of Kylie Jenner leaning into the camera in her smart glasses, it's like, all right, you know, where is Zuckerberg? For a long time, I think, thought he could just walk on a stage wearing these things. I think Jimmy Kimmel just described Zuckerberg as now dressing like a Chechen Molly dealer. And, you know, he walks onto stage
- [31:25]
Richard Osman
a Chechen Molly dealer.
- [31:27]
Marina Hyde
But they now have a vice president of Fashion Meta. So they did this whole thing totally different.
- [31:32]
Richard Osman
Do you know what? I literally never heard back.
- [31:35]
Marina Hyde
Yeah.
- [31:35]
Richard Osman
When I applied for that, could they just acknowledge. Just say you've had it, because otherwise maybe it went to junk.
- [31:43]
Marina Hyde
Yeah. Can I just check that you received it? Yeah, but I mean, I don't, as you know, I don't like to say wearable, but in this case, these are accessories that they're trying to sell, and this is how you sell accessories. And it's interesting that celebrities have actually mostly stayed away from tech. Kylie Jenner, obviously, these people are completely plugged into the platforms. They don't exist really without these platforms. But I remember there was a point where Kylie Jenner said something like, oh, is anyone else not really feeling the new Snapchat design? And it wiped a billion off the company. That was a while back. Okay. Don't worry. It's recovered. But when you think about something like fashion or jewelry, think of how many celebrities have deals and campaigns and whatever. And actually speaking about movie stars before the break, that is actually one way for those people to stay always on. They're present because they are viewable in advertising campaigns.
- [32:32]
Richard Osman
I mean, you look at Beckham at the World cup and he's getting more minutes than any of the players.
- [32:35]
Marina Hyde
It's unbelievable.
- [32:37]
Richard Osman
Absolutely extraordinary, his ability to sell everything.
- [32:41]
Marina Hyde
Well, that's the thing about the Kardashian Jenners, that there's nothing they won't sell. Celebrities have been very wary about doing things with Silicon Valley. If you look at the much more kind of typical Silicon Valley reaction, I think celebrities slightly feel that this thing might destroy them. Yes, Movie stars. And they're probably right. Scarlett Johansson obviously had a huge kind of blow up about her voice being used as an AI assistant. Witherspoon recently, who has a sort of lifestyle portal and recently said, oh, women, we need to understand AI all of this. She got a massive backlash. It wasn't even paid for, by the way. So celebrities are very aware of it. But the Kardashian Jenners were. Will sell absolutely anything. I'm amazed they don't have defense contracts. Amazed they will sell anything. Any backlash is water or Fed UPS back when they draw their power from it, they just don't care. So rather like Becca, there are certain people who just don't Once you've promoted a sort of emirate or whatever, you don't obviously mind, but what happened with Instagram is that that was only made into a. Which is a Meta product, obviously, that was only made into a thing because fashion and celebrities thought, thought, oh, hang on a second, I can control images of myself, I can release things. And that allowed people to be always on in a different way. So celebrities and movie stars and what have you made Instagram a thing? And they're now realizing, I think, they have to do these with these glasses.
- [33:56]
Richard Osman
Well, that's the interesting thing about it because so Google Glass launched and it was a big tech product. It was a tech play entirely. It looked like a tech play, as you say. They were just sort of worn by the tech pros and it disappeared entirely. What Meta did very, very early on is while on one hand thinking about what the smart glasses can do, and by the way, we should talk about what smart glasses do, which means, yeah, okay, good. But they teamed up immediately. They went to Essilor, Luxottica, which is one of those big brands that essentially owns everything that you've ever heard of, and they are the owners of Ray Ban. So they actually, they went to the makers of Ray Ban and said, no, we're going to make a fashion item. We will put. Put all of the tech inside that fashion item, but it's going to be fashion first. And, you know, we're constantly told that tech stocks, you know, trade, you know, 10 times more than any other stock. And tech have suddenly realized that actually fashion stocks are the ones that really trade above everything. So they have.
- [34:50]
Marina Hyde
They finally realized to sell it in a fashion way as well. Yeah, don't bother doing a deal with Ray Ban. If Mark Zuckerberg is going to wander out, I don't want to buy anything off him.
- [34:57]
Richard Osman
And so Kylie Jenner, I think, interestingly, I think these were already a hit before she signed, lined up with them. You know, they sold a million in a year. They reckon They've sold 3 million year. People are actually using them and wearing them. And it got to the point, I think, where she was able to say, oh, okay, this is a.
- [35:12]
Marina Hyde
They didn't look fashion. I'm sorry, they did. I get that they were made by Ray Ban and whatever, but they didn't look fashion. Now the ones she's done look fashion.
- [35:20]
Richard Osman
Oh, they look fashion. Yeah. I mean, as. Listen, I. I have so much more to say about this, but, you know, since I got turned down for the VP job at Meta, just I feel
- [35:29]
Marina Hyde
Yeah, I say Snapper, bring out some glasses. But they.
- [35:32]
Richard Osman
Again, Stephen Meiselle, you can't have glasses called Snap. Well, that's a terrible idea.
- [35:37]
Marina Hyde
Yeah, maybe, yeah. Snap glasses. Steven Meisel is going to do the campaign. Kai Gerber. They've got loads of celebrities doing those. So this is becoming a different thing. And yet they are, are they not, Richard? Like the. One of the darkest iterations of surveillance capitalism.
- [35:51]
Richard Osman
They might be the worst thing in the world, I think.
- [35:54]
Marina Hyde
So they're literally powered out glasses.
- [35:56]
Richard Osman
So they're pervert glasses for sure, though it's weird they didn't go with that name. So you. They are essentially glasses which are a camera, which have speakers as well, which have recording capability, both audio and visual. So you can walk around essentially either filming what is right in front of you or live streaming what is in front of you. I mean, particularly live streaming. That's. That's without consent. You can do all of those things. New ones have AI capability. So whenever you're looking around, it can be giving you information about what's around you. They say, oh, you can find out what sort of tree is next to you.
- [36:31]
Marina Hyde
And many of the firms have plans to integrate facial recognition into the.
- [36:36]
Richard Osman
Into these systems, if anyone ever were to do that. There was two Harvard students in 2024 who. They did a viral demonstration with Ray Ban meta glasses. They combined it with facial recognition software, which some of the companies say they're not going to put in, but we know they would eventually, some of them. And also public databases and they could identify strangers on the street in real time. They surfaced names, addresses and phone numbers within seconds. The experiment was dubbed IX Ray, and it sparked widespread alarm. But that was a year and a half ago and that. That alarm seems to have dispersed a little bit. It'd be handy, though, when you can't remember someone's name. That actually is handy. And it will, it will, it will get rid of the. The embarrassment I see almost on a daily basis of if I'm walking down the street and someone recognizes me but isn't sure where they know. They know my face. So assume I'm someone from work. And so they'll give me like a really sort of sight, embarrassed nod. It will solve that for them because they'll go, oh, that's that guy from.
- [37:29]
Marina Hyde
Yeah, yeah, I'll be able to run through all the hits.
- [37:31]
Richard Osman
Yeah. Whichever show I do.
- [37:34]
Marina Hyde
And in the same way that people will unblock phones for you, you know,
- [37:37]
Richard Osman
you can just go to shop on
- [37:38]
Marina Hyde
the high street and someone will unblock the phone. Someone will disable the recording light fee for like $100 or something.
- [37:43]
Richard Osman
Yes. So they have a little recording.
- [37:44]
Marina Hyde
This is supposed to show that matter
- [37:47]
Richard Osman
of thought of thought of all this. So they've got a tiny, tiny light which is on when someone's recording.
- [37:52]
Marina Hyde
But you can have it.
- [37:53]
Richard Osman
You can also. You can just cover it up. It's like the easiest thing in the world. And we do recognize that meta are above everything. A data company.
- [38:02]
Marina Hyde
Yeah.
- [38:03]
Richard Osman
An information company. So while they say, oh, no, we will have pretty strong safeguards in place when these are being used, let me tell you. I'm aware that all of our previous products, we said that and hasn't really paid off, but these ones, you're going to be absolutely fine. So you're going to be walking around a street where everyone is going to be wearing Ray Bans. They're all filming you at all times. They can capture what you're saying. There'll be an AI display telling them who you are. All of that stuff is possible. All of that stuff is probable. And now they're being advertised by the most beautiful people on the planet and built by a company with an almost endless reserve of money. That's scary. Right? Right.
- [38:43]
Marina Hyde
Yeah, I do. And I think it is a. I would, you know, if you were advising people, as I say, the Kardashian Jenners, they literally don't care hardly what they advertise. But a lot of other people would think, do I really want to be associated with these things? That the law is so far behind, as always, the law is so far behind in being able to keep up with this. How do you consent? You know, they are complete. We know that they are. People call them Creep Magnum. They're pervert glasses. You can see pickup artists filming all the time and then just immediately posting. And you haven't obtained people's consent. There are stories about people who have fled abusive relationships and then it's quite clear if they're being filmed at work because lots of people just do, like. Well, someone we might talk about. Michael Barrymore, bizarrely.
- [39:29]
Richard Osman
Yes. Barrymore meets Zuckerberg this week.
- [39:32]
Marina Hyde
Michael Barrymore. If you don't know who he was. Our younger audience, Michael Barrymore was a massive light entertainment presence on British television for a long time. He hosted loads and loads of the big shows. He was loving, funny and he was
- [39:45]
Richard Osman
the biggest, you know, he was Ant plus deck.
- [39:47]
Marina Hyde
Yeah. He came out as gay relatively late on in his career. He. And then there was this huge scandal where somebody was found dead in his pool after a party and that person, a man had been sexually assaulted. It was not clear what happened. It's never been fully clear what has happened. Michael. Michael Barrymore was never charged with any offense, but he effectively fell completely from grace in that moment.
- [40:12]
Richard Osman
Yeah, he's someone who actually was cancelled. People can play the record. He really was. Yeah, yeah.
- [40:16]
Marina Hyde
However, you hear a lot about, oh, Nigel Farage has got so many followers on TikTok. He's got 1.5 million. Michael Barrymore has 4.4 million. He's been reposted by people like Sabrina Carpenter and what he does is he just basically sort of wears glasses like this and he goes out to the shops and buys munchies and things like that and, and chat and chats and he puts it on. On. TikTok has got a huge following from it. He probably earns at least a quarter of a million a year from it. And it's a very, very big thing. But again, people were saying, well, hang on a second. If you're recording people in whatever, the supermarket. Yes, none of these people have really consented. There are people, there have been stories, I'm not saying that this is true of the people who he has filmed, but there have been stories of people who've fled abusive relationships or whatever. And then if you put it on a sort of mass viewership platform where it gets masses of hits and you think, oh, okay, that person works in, you know, the ASDA of wherever, then you are. Are effectively doxing people.
- [41:11]
Richard Osman
Yes. So this week, funnily enough, as door, the shop workers union came out and said, you, you, you can't do this. They're talking directly to Barrymore because it's so high profile and he was filming in shops. And by the way, no one who's in those videos has personally complained, but they, they raised it with us door just to say, look, by the way, this stuff is going out and I don't know who's in the background and no one has signed a release form. If you sign any, if you film anyone in a shop and regular tv, they have to sign release form to say that's fine. And by the way, of course 99% of people are very happy with that. But if you are going around, he's sort of an interesting test case. Michael Baramog says you say 4.4 million followers and his whole shtick is he will just go around and talking to people and put those interactions out.
- [41:50]
Marina Hyde
But there's something so different even. I mean, we know that the hardware is to bring it even back to the glasses. There is something so different, even between holding a phone up so people know sort of they're being filmed. Filmed and filming with glasses, where people don't really know they're being filmed or don't understand it in the same way.
- [42:07]
Richard Osman
And by the way, I'm sure that he is telling people that he's doing that, but. But it would be very easy to do without doing that, by the way.
- [42:14]
Marina Hyde
So many people don't tell people. And you can, you can see on TikTok, there are massive reams of footage. Yeah. So the hardware is changing people's behavior in another even darker way than the last bit. The last bit.
- [42:27]
Richard Osman
The camera quality is now amazing. The audio quality is now amazing. It's, you know, it would have passed for broadcast quality. You know, it's just, it's incredible what you can do. There are platforms who are ready to receive this instantly. Every single time a video goes viral. That is, that's marketing for the glasses because, you know, you know how it's been filmed. And the whole thing now becomes an enormous tech snowball where it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
- [42:54]
Marina Hyde
The law is miles away from catching. How can you.
- [42:57]
Richard Osman
Yeah.
- [42:58]
Marina Hyde
You know that there are. There are consumer protection lawsuits, I think, pending in the US because people can see where it's going, but it's very slow. You can't.
- [43:07]
Richard Osman
And also, when you've got that much money, who cares? Yeah, I mean, you know, that's, that's the point. I mean, you know, it's like the, you know, trying to sue them for stealing the copyright of every book ever written.
- [43:15]
Marina Hyde
Well, they get fined, like, ridiculous amounts. They get that fine, sort of $15 million, which is like one second's profit.
- [43:22]
Richard Osman
Yeah. But these things are. I do genuinely think these things are insane. I don't know what one one does about that. I don't know what I would do if I were in government about it. I don't know if it's a cat that's already out of the bag. There are loads and loads of reasons why these things are great. By the way, what a lovely way to capture your child's birthday party. They have live translation in these things. There are incredible things about them. As someone visually impaired, they could genuinely be transformative. When you put AI in that and everything can become clearer and sharper. And you, you can explain what something is to me, absolutely transformational. All those things said. There will be some terrible things that happen because of these. There will be some awful consequences. Because of these. And I would bet any money that no one pays for those consequences.
- [44:06]
Marina Hyde
No. And as always. And the other thing is, as we often say with the platforms, you work for them for free. Yeah, you pay to work for them for free. So all of these, because all of these things are training Meta's AI. All of this stuff is being fed back and it's training matters. AI in these kind of human interactions, the things that AI is less good at. You are working for the company and you are training them. Everything that you film with these glasses, all of that. People basically work for these companies now. They spend so many hours a day on these for these companies that effectively you spend six hours a day working for free for a tech company and then you start. That is actually your real job in the economy. You have this other thing that you think is to do with it and what could pay you some money and how you pay your rent, but actually what you really do is you work for free down these people's content mines.
- [44:54]
Richard Osman
Yeah. And a lot of those people are the same utter dullards who tell you that government is trying to track you all the time and say, you don't understand how the world works. You go, you're wearing their glasses, man. Can I if. In case people feel anxious about this. And I think sometimes when you think about technology and you think about all of these things, you know, it is quite anxiety inducing the way I always try and think about these things.
- [45:12]
Marina Hyde
Things.
- [45:13]
Richard Osman
You know, I love nostalgia. So you look back at the 1950s and there's lots of things on Facebook. Oh my God, look at that street and the cars and we left our doors open, yada, yada, yada. There's a very, very monetizable accounts on, on Facebook that do that all the time. If you think of today as the olden days, I always find that's a really nice perspective to have. If you look back and go, oh, my God, this literally is the first time that people were like wearing glasses. Like, the first time, like one of the unions just said, oh, you shouldn't really wear these glasses in our shop. Can you. I mean, it was crazy how unsophisticated they were back then. I heard a podcast and they were talking about Love island. And it's just a thing that people would sit and watch. Like they would sit down in front of a screen and they would watch that. So I always think of when you walk down the street, look at the fonts on the signs, look at the product in the shop and look at the wrappers of chocolate bars and imagine in 40 years time how insanely old fashioned that's going to be. Look, and sometimes I think that's quite a nice way to get rid of techno anxiety.
- [46:09]
Marina Hyde
I'm not sure that.
- [46:11]
Richard Osman
Has that not helped you?
- [46:12]
Marina Hyde
No, I think, you know, people were right to be sort of suspicious of the robber barons and things like that.
- [46:17]
Richard Osman
Oh, of course they were. But it turns out there's nothing they could have done about it. So that's where anxiety comes from. It comes from our absolute inability to do anything about it.
- [46:26]
Marina Hyde
They did eventually break up some of the. You know, these companies are so much bigger than something like Stanford Standard Standard Oil, which was dealt with. I think there are no. I think, I think they should definitely try and break up some of these.
- [46:36]
Richard Osman
Oh, I'm not saying don't do that. I'm just saying that if you are walking down the streets, if you're walking down the street listening to this and you are not able to, you know, be part of a class action lawsuit, then one thing you can do is at least go, ah, one day this will all be sepia photographs on whatever Facebook is at that point.
- [46:54]
Marina Hyde
Right.
- [46:54]
Richard Osman
Probably be like an artificial dinosaur living in your house. Any recommendations?
- [46:59]
Marina Hyde
I have got a recommendation. It's only just out and you'll be reading stories from it all week, I should think, and beyond. It's called Regime Change. It's the book about the Trump presidency by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Scott.
- [47:12]
Richard Osman
Looking forward to that.
- [47:13]
Marina Hyde
It's really amazing. I'm sort of in two minds somehow about how these books works. When you are reporters. They're both very, very kind of good reporters like you don't necessarily produce. Not all of this is produced for you and the outlet you work for all the time. And some of it is kept for the book, but lots of it needs to be written about in a way that I suppose it just works particularly well in long form and as a reminder of, you know, we become so, so desensitized and we obviously have to desensitize ourselves. But to remind you what you're living through in terms of the Trump presidency, it's extraordinary. And I can't. You'll be, as I say, you'll be reading highlights and lowlights from it over the next weeks because. But it's a really good reminder of just how insane the times through which we're living are. And so I'd write that's Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
- [48:05]
Richard Osman
Excellent. I'll recommend a book as well. I recommend John Grisham's new novel, the Widow. I love John Grisham. This is billed as John Grisham's first whodunit. And in a sort of, I suppose a very specific way it is. But you know, there's always plenty of murders in, in a Grisham. But it's, you know, it's, it's that thing of within the first four pages, you're like, okay, I absolutely understand what this is about. So this widow has got a huge amount of money. You don't know where it is. No one else knows she's got it. And you're her lawyer. Done. I mean, and also, by the way, you've got gambling debts. John, you have me for 350 pages.
- [48:40]
Marina Hyde
Do it quickly.
- [48:40]
Richard Osman
But it's, you know, he's just, you know this, there's a reason he sold so many books. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Love that. John Grisham, the Widow.
- [48:49]
Marina Hyde
Other than that, we will be back on Thursday with a Q and A and tomorrow for everybody. First episode free the World cup of U.S. sitcoms.
- [48:59]
Richard Osman
Yeah, I hope you enjoy it. It was really fun to do.
- [49:00]
Marina Hyde
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- [50:15]
Richard Osman
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