The Wild West of Noughties Reality TV

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Rest Is Entertainment – "The Wild West of Noughties Reality TV"
Air date: April 6, 2026
Hosts: Richard Osman & Marina Hyde

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Richard and Marina take listeners on a deep dive into the explosive, infamous era of early 2000s reality TV—a time they describe as "the Wild West" of unscripted entertainment. Against the backdrop of newly popular, often critical documentaries exposing the behind-the-scenes abuses, manipulations, and ethical quandaries of that period, the hosts reflect on how reality television changed entertainment and broader culture forever.
They also cover the rapid rise and abrupt fall of Sora, OpenAI’s much-hyped video generation platform, and discuss what its closure reveals about the realities and future of AI in Hollywood.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Rise of Noughties Reality TV

[03:10–04:16]

• The hosts chart the birth and rapid global dominance of reality TV, triggered by huge hits like Survivor and Big Brother.
• Richard shares the little-known roots: “...that was my idea. Just the idea of putting people on a desert island and then voting people off one by one. I had no involvement after that.”
• The show Survivor was first made in Sweden as Operation Robinson before going global.

[04:16–05:56]

• The wave began with “social experiment” premises featuring ordinary people in unique situations.
• Marina notes the initial innocence: “There was an innocence to them as contestants.”

[07:02–07:38]

• With ratings and profits soaring, shows became increasingly extreme, creating a “ratchet effect” of escalating spectacle to hook viewers.

2. Behind the Curtain: Darker Sides & Ethical Breakdowns

[07:38–09:32]

• Discussion of America’s Next Top Model’s notorious photo shoots and the psychological toll on contestants.

• Marina highlights, “There was one girl whose mother had been killed by gun violence and she had to be sort of like this, splattered against the wall. And if you weren’t up to it, you weren’t hard enough for this business.” ([07:43])

• Exploitation was rampant:

  • Contestants didn’t have agents or advocates.
  • Producers rationalized manipulation as a “quid pro quo” for fame.

• Marina draws parallels to Pygmalion and Sartre’s No Exit (Huis Clos), reflecting on the darkness of “I own you...you wouldn't be anything without me.” ([09:16])

3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Richard on reality TV’s philosophical roots:
  “There’s actually a genuine play that's behind the whole of reality television, and that is Jean Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, which is where hell is other people.” ([09:32])
• Both realize they attended the same 1990 Edinburgh production, adding a personal twist to the show's conception. ([09:48])
• Marina, on the genre’s moral collapse:
  “They were almost sort of meat puppets. They could be manipulated, actually. Their interactions could be completely misrepresented...” ([08:34])

4. Wildest Shows & International Extremes

[12:33–15:15]

• Richard recalls “absolute wild west” pitch meetings, describing now-infamous shows:
  • Chained: people handcuffed together
  • Shattered: sleep deprivation
  • The Chamber vs The Chair: contestants put in extreme conditions (e.g., “tied to a chair, lowered into a pit, attacked by bees”—hosted by John McEnroe)
  • Fear Factor (hosted by Joe Rogan)
• The “ratchet” kept pushing boundaries; as Marina notes, “[producers] would try and get their shows up in, like, 10 days.” ([13:08])

[17:15–19:22]

• The Swan: women undergo months of extreme makeovers and plastic surgery—without mirrors—before “the reveal.”
• Germany’s Sperm Race and The Great Donor Show (Netherlands):
  • The latter was staged to drive up organ donor signups, with “a woman dying,” three candidates, and a last-minute twist revealing the entire thing was a hoax for social good. The hosts highlight the public outrage and legislative impact.

5. Echoes in Today’s Social Media & Streaming

[16:11–17:15]

• Marina observes Gen Z and Gen Alpha are “doing exactly the same thing again” via YouTube families and challenge videos, just on new platforms—demonstrating how the cycle continues.

[20:49–22:28]

• Both hosts question whether new documentaries are really for learning/atonement or just a “second bite at the footage.”
• Marina on reboot culture: “It’s another form of reboot of kind of old IP.”

6. Moral Reckonings and Accountability

[22:28–24:03]

• Richard bluntly rejects producer excuses: “Everything I hear from those producers' mouths, I'm like, no, absolutely no way. No one was thinking, I'm sure this is okay.”
• Marina: “You knew it was wrong at the time...People did know that it was wrong.”

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Segment: SORA & the Shifting AI Landscape in Hollywood

[26:05–40:30]

1. SORA’s Meteoric Rise and Sudden Shutdown

[26:05–27:59]

• Disney invested $1B in OpenAI’s SORA, a tool that could generate near-cinematic video at the press of a button. For months, Hollywood feared disruption.

• Marina: “They initially began by just copyright infringing on a completely unprecedented scale...” ([26:39])

• Richard reveals the real reason for shutdown: “It was wildly, wildly unprofitable...costing them $15 million a day.” ([27:26])

[27:59–29:07]

• Each video cost OpenAI between $2–30 to generate (“but it was free to the user...great novelty, then you’re like, okay, I’m never gonna do that again.” – Marina, [27:59])
• Massive computing and energy costs were unsustainable.

2. AI’s Looming, Quiet Influence

[29:07–32:19]

• SORA didn’t die due to Hollywood pushback, but economic reality.

• OpenAI is more interested in “enterprise, business and going all the...making your entire running your company for you.”

• Big “PR coups” matter more than product viability.

• Marina: “The relationship between Hollywood and the AI companies reminds me so much of the special relationship... Only one side’s thinking about it, and it’s definitely not the AI companies.” ([31:53])

3. The Real AI Shift: Back-End Domination

[36:05–37:53]

• While SORA is dead, Chinese platforms like Kling and Sea Dance thrive, subsidized by the government and free from Western financial constraints. Hollywood “can’t afford to not do it anymore.”
• Most AI in the industry is hidden—used in development, editing, previsualization, etc.—and is reshaping the workforce and costs.

[37:53–40:30]

• The last protected “frontier” is the faces and lives of recognizable stars and high-end writing. All else, the hosts agree, is already being absorbed into the AI “bedrock” of the industry.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “There was an innocence to them as contestants.” – Marina (05:56)
• “They were almost sort of meat puppets. They could be manipulated...” – Marina (08:36)
• “There’s actually a genuine play that’s behind the whole of reality television...Jean Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, which is where hell is other people.” – Richard (09:32)
• “With things like America’s Next Top Model and the Biggest Loser...You can see these things start in quite a pure way...they start in quite a gentle way...they start purely.” – Richard (14:46)
• “I think they’re like a second bite at the footage. I don’t believe they’re doing it to sort of cleanse the earth and plant new things...” – Marina (22:28)
• On SORA: “It was costing them $15 million a day.” – Richard (27:26)
• “...the main way it’s going to make producing things cheaper is by getting rid of a lot of jobs. But it is there and it is there quietly.” – Richard (37:53)
• “The real story of AI has not been that all along...AI has been getting its hooks into Hollywood...for a very, very long time.” – Richard (35:14)
• “You knew it was wrong at the time, you know, and people had lived through eating disorders and lived through all sorts of things and actually were aware of it and it was a nonsense.” – Marina (23:03)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:10 – 05:56: Roots and global takeover of reality TV
• 07:38 – 09:32: Escalations, exploitation, and dark psychology
• 12:33 – 15:15: Most egregious, extreme and infamous reality shows
• 17:15 – 20:26: The Swan, The Sperm Race, The Great Donor Show
• 20:49 – 22:28: Motivations for modern exposé documentaries
• 22:28 – 24:03: Moral reckoning, complicity, and media culture
• 26:05 – 29:07: Sora’s rise, hype, collapse—economic and technical realities
• 36:05 – 37:53: Kling, Sea Dance—AI’s quiet takeover in Hollywood
• 37:53 – 40:30: The future—AI’s last frontiers, Hollywood’s compromises

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Recommendations & Closing

[40:30–42:09]

• Richard recommends Stacey Solomon: Sort Your Life Out (BBC One) for its surprising depth and humanity under the guise of home decluttering.

• Marina and Richard preview upcoming episodes and encourage listeners to join the show’s member community for bonus content.

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Tone Observation:

• Witty, irreverent, and insightful, with a blend of cultural criticism and dry humor.
• Both hosts openly challenge industry narratives, admit their own complicities, and ponder the cyclical, self-cannibalizing nature of pop culture and technology.

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Summary Conclusion:
This episode of The Rest Is Entertainment is a must-listen for pop culture aficionados and media professionals alike—fusing gossipy reminiscence, behind-the-scenes confessions, and clear-eyed critique of how fame, tech, and power intersect in modern entertainment. Whether reflecting on the abuses of reality TV’s golden age or the shadowy frontiers of AI, Marina and Richard expose the paradoxes at the heart of showbiz: the tension between what is shown and what is hidden, between innovation and exploitation, and between memory and accountability.

Transcript

[Marina Hyde]

The rest is entertainment. Is presented by Octopus Energy. Now remember, Octopus Energy, do something really great. If they've got your birthday when you call in for whatever reason to Octopus, the hold music is the number one selling single from that year, the year of your 14th birthday.

[Richard Osman]

And we discovered, didn't we, that yours was the only way is up by Yaz and the plastic population. We're going to discover mine.

[Marina Hyde]

Now yours is I just called to say I love you by Stevie Wonder.

[Richard Osman]

Okay, yes, I prefer yours.

[Marina Hyde]

Yeah.

[Richard Osman]

Do you think it's weird to have whole music which is I just called to say I love you. Because listen, and you know that I love Octopus Energy but I will rarely ring them to tell them I love them. Yeah, yeah, I would usually, but you know, be. I just want to chat to them about something to do with my energy. And I don't mean that sort of energy.

[Marina Hyde]

Well, look, they can butt surface the number one single of that year for you. And you can always choose not to have the music you can choose for. No, but I think only animals do that. As I've said, and I want to go on the record as saying that

[Richard Osman]

I sold my car in Carvana last night.

[Marina Hyde]

Well, that's cool.

[Richard Osman]

No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny.

[Marina Hyde]

They're picking it up tomorrow.

[Richard Osman]

Nothing went wrong.

[Marina Hyde]

So what's the problem?

[Richard Osman]

That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes to smoothing. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.

[Marina Hyde]

Wow.

[Richard Osman]

You need to relax. I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood? I think it's laminate. Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.

[Marina Hyde]

Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply. This episode is brought to you by TaxAct. Don't do your taxes alone. Join TaxAct's National Admin Night. Admin nights are social gatherings for getting through your to do list. So get ready for a night of fun. Finding deductions and filing tax with TaxAct where you can file your federal and state return for just $49 through April 8th. Let's get together and get them over with. Visit taxact.comadmin-knight for details. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Rest Is Entertainment.

[Richard Osman]

With me, Marina Hyde, and me, Richard Osman. How lovely to be here. Lovely to see you, Marina.

[Marina Hyde]

It's lovely to see you, Richard. Very nice to see you.

[Richard Osman]

What's been keeping you?

[Marina Hyde]

All my children were Very tired the other night. And I said, well, what would you like to watch? And they just went, a Richard episode of Would I Lie to you?

[Richard Osman]

Oh, my gosh.

[Marina Hyde]

So I know it's the one with Jason Isaacs, which I strangely hadn't seen,

[Richard Osman]

but he's a lot of fun, Jason Isaacs, isn't he?

[Marina Hyde]

Yeah, that came across.

[Richard Osman]

Yes. Yeah, I thought he was terrific. Well, listen, that's a case for the nspcc, I think, rather than for anybody else. What might we speak about this week in the world of entertainment?

[Marina Hyde]

Well, I know we're gonna talk about, as Bill last week, we're gonna talk about reality TV reckonings, as it were, this kind of emerging gen where reality TV ethical abominations of the 2000s and 2000s are sort of repackaged in documentary format, perhaps for learnings. I don't know. We're going to talk about why that's happening and why it's happening now.

[Richard Osman]

Yes. And I'm going to give a few examples of some of the more egregious reality shows of the. Of the noughties, and also quite why it was such a wild west back then, because it really, really was. And we are also talking about. We spoke last week about AI and books, and again then we said we're talking about Sora, which was OpenAI's video thing, which Disney put a billion dollars into, and they've shut down. We'll talk about why they shut it down, what that means for Hollywood.

[Marina Hyde]

Let's talk about reality tv. It was a different time, Richard.

[Richard Osman]

It was a different time.

[Marina Hyde]

It was a different time.

[Richard Osman]

It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times.

[Marina Hyde]

It was 100. Yeah, the turn of the millennium era was kind of golden era. Golden, we can argue about golden. And it was unbelievably influential. It's no coinc that the most significant reality TV star of that era was Donald Trump and that he couldn't have become president without having done reality TV because it re having failed in the 80s essentially in property or had to go away with his tail between his legs. He came back as a complete force via one of the absolute sort of marquee reality TV formats.

[Richard Osman]

We want to talk about reality TV because there have been a whole slew of programs recently. Big, big exposes on Netflix and various other streamers. Big expose of the Biggest Loser and the things that happened behind the scenes on that show. That was a weight loss, weight loss, US show. There was the expose of America's Next Top Model, which went behind the scenes on that and showed how various people were treated on that. There's about to be one on one of the most extraordinary shows ever made, the Swan. Yeah, I think that. So reality TV didn't used to exist as a thing and we had docusopes. Reality TV really came about because of the enormous success of Survivor and Big Brother. I remember because I may have mentioned it before, that was my idea. And just the idea of putting people on a desert island and then voting people off one by one. I had no involvement on it after that. And I remember it would have been 93, 94 when the first ever territory made that, which is Sweden, they made a show called Operation Robinson and that was the first ever sort. It then goes over to the States is huge. John Damol comes up with Big Brother, which is essentially Survivor, but not in a desert island in a fixed rig house. And these shows absolutely bestrode the world. They were beyond enormous.

[Marina Hyde]

It was interesting, funnily enough, in that Q and A answer, just that Lisa Carter gave us last week when she said, oh yeah, you know about quitting at the top. And she said we were number one, we quit. Or maybe actually Survivor was.

[Richard Osman]

And so very first reality TV meant something very specific, which is sort of like a social experiment. Ordinary people put in an unusual situation and you film them and you see what happens.

[Marina Hyde]

And there was an innocence to them as contestants.

[Richard Osman]

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

[Marina Hyde]

Yeah, but wouldn't that. Yeah, they didn't have those sort of things in the same way.

[Richard Osman]

I don't think exactly that to them reality TV meant, oh my God, what are all these things that aren't, you know, the 60 Minutes new show or a big drama, you know, what are these things?

[Marina Hyde]

And it helped that there was a writers strike at a certain point where. Which meant that they didn't have any

[Richard Osman]

writers will always help themselves out by going on strike at exactly the wrong time.

[Marina Hyde]

Yeah.

[Richard Osman]

We are now looking back 25 years hence at quite what that meant. And the chase. It was. It was. It was a gold rush for non scripted programming. So there was this enormous gluttony of shows because there was an enormous glut of viewers and an enormous glut of money. But there's always the law of diminishing returns in all of these things. And so things started to get more and more extreme. Certainly in a pitch, the hook would have to be bigger in a show. The kind of cliffhanger at the end of each show would have to be bigger as well. You know, that's how culture works. And it led to some of the extremes we're now seeing being exposed.

[Marina Hyde]

Yeah, I mean, America's Top Model was full of it because there was such a ratchet effect with it. Fashion is obviously, can be quite absurd anyway, but they were made to do like victims of shooting fashion, victims of a shooting as a fashion spread. So they would all have to be sort of splayed back against all. There was one girl whose mother had been killed by gun violence and she had to be sort of like this, splattered against the wall. And if you weren't up to it, if you weren't hard enough, then you weren't hard enough for this business. And it was all of that, you know, it was. And she loved to scream at people, Tara, because she just. It's so interesting seeing how episode one starts and then where she is as time goes on, and you just feel that it's chasing that dopamine that just became unavailable from the things that they used to do in the earlier series. You know, performers didn't have to be treated with respect in the same way that they had with established stars. And I.

[Richard Osman]

They didn't have agents. They didn't. Yeah, exactly.

[Marina Hyde]

But it was almost like there was this kind of pent up rage about dealing with talent and it could be sort of dispensed with. And they were almost sort of meat puppets. They could be manipulated, actually. Their interactions could be completely misrepresented, as you say. There wouldn't be an agent saying, hang on, what the hell did you just do to my client?

[Richard Osman]

And there's a sense of quid pro quo, which is, listen, you would not be in front of this many viewers if you weren't on the show. You want something out of it. And so it felt, I think to some producers, like, this is fair enough. Everyone's getting something out of it.

[Marina Hyde]

Well, it's like that. It was something very pygmalion. About it.

[Richard Osman]

I was going to say, I knew it would be Pygmalion. Not like that.

[Marina Hyde]

Yeah. But actually like the George Bernard Shaw play, which they've quite sanitized. Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. I built you. I made you. I created you from nothing. I can make people believe you're anything, but in a much darker way, I own you. And you wouldn't be anything without me.

[Richard Osman]

Do you know, there's actually a genuine play that's behind the whole of reality television, and that is Jean Paul Sartre's the Hui Clo, which is where hell is other people.

[Marina Hyde]

Three people in the anteroom of hell.

[Richard Osman]

That's where that comes from. I was watching it at the Edinburgh festival, maybe in 1990 in the bedlam Theatre.

[Marina Hyde]

I saw that production.

[Richard Osman]

No way. Oh, my God. That's really weird.

[Marina Hyde]

Hilarious.

[Richard Osman]

Jesus. Listen, we're on the right podcast.

[Marina Hyde]

Yeah, I know. So I think, you know, lots of other bits. She Ra was there as well.

[Richard Osman]

She Ra. I remember him being there. Peston. Yeah, Peston was in it. And I came out of that. And that idea of head is other people. And that's. I thought, well, that's where, literally, I think two days later, the idea for Survivor came from. So it comes from Sartre, and that we both saw. That's so weird.

[Marina Hyde]

Oh, my God. We were in that tiny. Because it's not big theater.

[Richard Osman]

And the great thing is, the most profitable franchise in the history of television came out of it, and neither of us made any money from it. So that's great.

[Marina Hyde]

I don't think I deserved. I was just in the audience, Richard. I think even I would not be trying to take that. But what was interesting in this, anyway, to. Back to that.

[Richard Osman]

Sorry, enough about plays.

[Marina Hyde]

But back to reality.

[Richard Osman]

All right, all right. Timothy Chalamet.

[Marina Hyde]

It felt a bit more documentary at the start, and documentary makers have quite strict codes, and there's quite a lot of sort of ethical underpinning and philosophy to it all. And then it became like, okay, she didn't do the thing we wanted to do. Would it be possible for us to edit the time when she did and make it look like she did it at the moment? We need it for the kind of emotional arc of this episode.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah. And my counterpoint to that is certainly in the very early days of Big Brother, it was being streamed 24 hours a day. And you remember those days where, you know, people watch people sleep. And actually, you know, that generation of documentary makers in the. In the. Who are so lauded from the 60s and 70s who showed life as it is. All of that was very old, artful and all of that was constructed in an edit suite. And actually Big Brother particularly was one of those shows where everything was on show all the time. Quite hard to do a villain edit. If everyone has seen your dailies. It absolutely from that point onwards became the norm that you could, you know, create your own narratives. But I think in the very early days of Big Brother, at least there was a purity to it, which is, let's just see what happens. Let's put these. It was enough at that point.

[Marina Hyde]

Interesting things did happen. Do you know, there's a US series where. And it's not like the first series, they decide, first of all, they get on, they start getting on very well and they try to sort of live in a harmonious little community. But one of them does literally lose their mind, I think, but not in a. In a sort of violent way, but thinks that there are being messages left everywhere saying if we all walk out, we will all get a million pounds. They debate it for hours, saying, even if not, we'll be making a point. They start digging up the garden, looking for buried money. And actually the guy who. It's cbs, isn't it? Les Moonves, he ran cbs. He's like the kind of titan, sends a message saying, you tell them that if they walk out, we're putting another lot straight back in because they're just losing the show. They think these guys are actually going to do it. It's like a cult moment.

[Richard Osman]

But imagine that, the meeting where. Les, we just. We just need to talk to you about the. This. This new show. Everybody then came into the market, they said, what else have you got? What can you do with people? What sort of environment can we put people in? How can we put people in? We did a show years ago, Endermobile, called Chained, where people were handcuffed together. In fact, there's a Show on Channel 4 now called Handcuff. It's exactly that. We did a show called Shattered, where you weren't really allowed to sleep, although we worked up very early in the production process that you couldn't do that. And so they weren't allowed to sleep, but they were allowed a 15 minute sleep every two hours or something.

[Marina Hyde]

That was what. By the way, you remember, we've talked before and we've got a great sort of bonus. I can't remember if it's one or two episodes about him. Mike Darnell, the absolute evil genius who worked at Fox and was the evil genius of this era. And whenever he heard, a lot of people, you. When they heard the show was coming out, they were like, right, we're doing the same thing then. And they would try and get their shows up in, like, 10 days. One of, like, I think the chamber was versus something called the chair. And you would say, I remember the chair that you tied. You tied to a chair lowered into a pit. You would, like, something like, would happen. Like, you'd be attacked by Bees. John McEnroe hosted.

[Richard Osman]

He was. But that was a. That sort of started as a quiz show, which is. Can you answer questions under pressure? Which is sort of a perfectly neat idea. And then, yeah, someone. Because Fear Factor was huge. Fear Factor hosted by. It's funny that people who disappear from our culture. Fear Factor was a huge show in America. We made it hosted by Joe Rogan. Where is he now?

[Marina Hyde]

I knew that.

[Richard Osman]

Yes. So it's now 25 years on, and these documentaries, looking back at what happened and the morals of the time, are becoming incredibly popular. Really, really huge hits.

[Marina Hyde]

I think it's interesting also that Y2K stuff has been sort of fetishized for so long, but people are now moving back into the 90s in terms of.

[Richard Osman]

That's the last great decade.

[Marina Hyde]

Yeah. Rather than saying, wow, this is an amazing time, which. At which point you always want to say, this was the era of trainwreck celebrities, the 2000s. You know, it was an awful time. Reality TV was so dark or whatever. Now people have moved back to the 90s. They feel able to take a look at this and look at the dark side of the decade that they've just spent the last however many years fetishizing.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah, exactly. I mean, listen, there's some dark sides to the 90s as well, but we'd have to worry about that for a while. Yeah, yeah.

[Marina Hyde]

And then they'll make the documentaries about those.

[Richard Osman]

With things like America's Next Top Model and the Biggest Loser. You can see that these things start in quite a pure way and quite a gentle way, which is. Oh, that's an interesting idea. You know, people are interested in weight loss. We can get some ordinary human beings and we can help them lose weight. Oh, you know, it's a dream to be a model. You know, we can get people from all across America. They can come and do various tasks, and one of them gets a huge contract.

[Marina Hyde]

Well, I mean, God bless.

[Richard Osman]

They start purely.

[Marina Hyde]

Yeah, well, yeah. Tara Banks, who was the sort of host of it and also felt like, oh, I'm becoming a mogul var it. Which I think was probably a key part of his appeal to her. I mean, God love it. I do think she's one of. She is a monster, but I think she's one of those monsters that's made not born to become a successful model as she did. Modeling is a disgusting business. It always has been. And it's maybe a bit less so now, but to some degree it always will be. And for her to come up and do as well as she did, being a black woman in that business, I think some bad things have happened to her and she never talks about them because I think she sort of self identifies as a strong person and I'm all for that as a credo. And she'd internalized, I think so much of that awful industry that what they ended up doing to these. And they would have these hopefuls. I made them do these shoots.

[Richard Osman]

Like it's really worth watching, by the way. If you haven't, if you haven't, then. But feel free to watch them and come back again.

[Marina Hyde]

It's called Reality Check Colon America's Next Model. And that colon makes me think, oh, there's a strand in this Reality Check. Something else. They're just trying to build a continuum. It's quite difficult to hear from Gen Z about, you know, I can't believe you lived through these brutal times. You're like, I know your biggest star is like, you know, MrBeast and you know, all the other lots, many other YouTubers who are arguably making people do quite odd things for money. And also you're watching families like this where there's no control. I mean, there's much less control. And you know, there have been documentaries about YouTube. Families like Piper Raquel and Netflix have done a few of those where you think, well, they had. Absolutely. They have. These people have no.

[Richard Osman]

Oh, we're doing exactly the same thing again. Yeah, we're doing 100% the same thing again. So the Swan, which, as I say there's, there's about to be a documentary about now, so you can't watch that one yet. But the Swan was a series. Amanda Byram hosted it. And the Swan was a show where women with poor self image, I don't know where they cast them from.

[Marina Hyde]

Ugly Ducklings. Ugly Ducklings, as they like to call

[Richard Osman]

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

[Marina Hyde]

Because reveal is such a huge part of reality tv. All of it. Yeah. Even if it's. And all the particular on the makeover

[Richard Osman]

shows and expectation of making this have clearly come across stories that suggest maybe this wasn't as wholesome as that description makes it sound. So it'll be interesting to hear what happens with that. It was a wild west, as you say. We have. We have not learned from it at all because we're still, you know, this, this is the very beginnings of the attention economy. I get in. The attention economy has only ramped up. Can I mention two shows, though? One was a German show which is called Sperm Race. And sperm race was 12 German guys. We take them all to Cologne and they give us a sample of their sperm. Take one sperm from each of these men, place it near an egg, and whichever sperm reaches the egg first, that person wins a Porsche. And you go, okay. So it's like the other one was. And as I say, it was an absolute wild west at this time and stuff was coming out that you'd be like, whoa, okay. Dutch Enderme had a show called Die Grote Dernischeur, the great donor show. And the idea of this show is there is a. A woman who is dying and there are three people who need a kidney transplant. She interviews them and decides that she's going to give her kidney to one of these people. There's enormous furore from everywhere. The Dutch government, the Dutch church, every, you know, everywhere had gone absolutely crazy. It was, it dominated.

[Marina Hyde]

They're very liberal, Richard.

[Richard Osman]

They are. But dominated the news in the Netherlands for a really, really long time. And they knew the day it was going to go out. This is 2007, sort of June 2007. And this show goes out and everyone is watching it because everyone is like, I mean, this is absolutely mental. Goes out on a Dutch channel called bnn and it goes out, this show, Dakota Donor show, five years to the day that the guy who set up BNN had died because he was on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. And the Netherlands had the slowest take up of organ donations in Europe. The entire show was a publicity stunt. The woman was an actress. She wasn't dying at all. The three people who needed a kidney all needed a kidney. They were on the organ. They were on the waiting list for it. And the entire show is, you have got to sign up for organ donation. You have got to do it. The whole thing was a hoax. The whole thing was to raise.

[Marina Hyde]

They call it the nudge unit in Danish.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah, exactly. So all of these.

[Marina Hyde]

It's so extreme.

[Richard Osman]

Changed the law in the Netherlands. Even on during the show, 12,000 people signed up. You know, 350 people a year were dying in the Netherlands. Before that, they got over a million people, which in the Netherlands is all like watching this show because they were expecting, oh, my God, what are they doing now? And they did this show which had enormous impact on social change. We knew right from the start, by the way, the Duchess said, look, this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it. So we were getting pressing.

[Marina Hyde]

Well, that really is a social experiment. How amazing. That is totally fascinating, I must say that. But a lot of the ones they're going back to, obviously we've just said that they've got brutalities of their own. Gen Z and Gen A. What I find quite sort of depressing about this as a genre is a big part of me suspects it's a chance to have a second bite at the footage because what else are you going to do with the old, you know, so. Oh, I mean, we were just talking about it, you know, if you repackage,

[Richard Osman]

you know, you can. I mean, Big Brother, you could definitely do that. Definitely. People, you can have talking heads talking about that as it goes on. I mean, as you say, it's an amazing way of repurposing stuff and, you know, it's social history now.

[Marina Hyde]

Yeah. But there's a part of it that just feels. I don't feel, because, you know, there was that huge scandal just this last week about the married at first sight Australia. They got someone who'd been thrown out of the show or had left the show, someone called Brooke Crompton and she came back on for a dinner party at which her role. She'd clearly just been told to insult everyone. She insulted, absolutely everyone, abused them. It was really horrible. This has aired incredibly recently. Last fortnight there's been this huge outcry. The statement is hysterical from. This behaviour is not a reflection of who I am at my core. And I hope that Australia will one day see this. The grandiosity of Australia. Yeah, I hope they will see this. But my feeling when they do, when they were doing this and with this whole new genre is it's a nice idea. I think they're like a second bite at the footage. I don't believe that they're doing it to sort of cleanse the earth and plant new things, because we're not seeing that at all. And also another part of me does feel like we're stuck in this endless. Which we've talked about on so many different subjects. It's another form of reboot of kind of old ip.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah. I will say this, though. The one thing I always think when I watch those shows, you watch the Biggest Loser and things like that, the documentaries, and they'll have the producer on and they'll say, yeah, but don't forget, you know, things are very different then. And I was there then and things were not that different then. You knew what right and wrong was. And the people who would. When I see some of the justifications for what people did on those shows and I think back to rooms that, you know, I had been in and everyone knew, everything I hear from those producers mouths, I'm like, no, absolutely no way. No one was thinking, I'm sure this is okay.

[Marina Hyde]

I totally agree. And when I look back on some of the things I wrote about celebrity culture, because a lot of this was in the noughties and it was such a completely toxic era for celebrity culture. And, you know, it was the era of Britney and shaving her head and being completely tormented. And I've said before on this podcast, I remember once seeing when there was a big. Lots of rumors that she was pregnant. Paparazzi put the camera up her skirt and there was blood on. On her knickers. And the headline was simply, she's not pregnant. We knew this was wrong. I wrote about all of that stuff in Heat magazine, the Circle of Shame. Celebrities being kind of reduced to this. You know, they're sweating, they've got cellulite, all of that stuff. You knew it was wrong at the time, you know, and people had lived through eating disorders and lived through all sorts of things and actually were aware of it and it was a nonsense. I completely agree with you. It was done and it made a lot of people lots of money. But it's. People did know that it was wrong. We've got worse now because you've kind of. It's permeated everything. This type of culture, reality TV culture has sort of permeated everything. You see it in the Oval Office now all the time. But.

[Richard Osman]

And it came from the Bedlam Theater in 1990, a production of We Clo

[Marina Hyde]

that we were in the same. It wouldn't have been the same night,

[Richard Osman]

but it might have been.

[Marina Hyde]

It might have been, you Never know.

[Richard Osman]

You never know. And another time we'll talk about the story of space cadets because we always have questions about space cadets. And that was something in the very early days, that one. I have to say I was at the beginning involved with a story for another time when we convinced people they've been to space.

[Marina Hyde]

After the break, we're going to be talking About Sora, the OpenAI's video app that is now no more.

[Richard Osman]

It was going to destroy Hollywood. It has now destroyed itself. Protein is now at Starbucks and it's never tasted so good. You can add protein cold foam to your favorite drink or try one of our new protein lattes or matcha. Try it today at Starbucks. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing company. No matter how you do game day, on the couch, in the crowd or manning the snack table, Athletic Brewing fits right in with a full lineup of

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[Richard Osman]

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Find Ollie sleep solutions for the whole [e-mail] that's o l l y.com.

[Richard Osman]

Welcome back everybody. Now, Sora, you'll remember last year we told you it was this incredible piece of kit that was going to ruin Hollywood. Disney put a billion dollars into it. It could make just extraordinarily film like video. Just unbelievable what it was doing. The worry was that it was going to put lots and lots of people out of business, that it was going to absolutely, you know, destroy the Internet, you know, cover it in slop. But it is dead. OpenAI have stopped it. We're going to talk about why.

[Marina Hyde]

Yes. Remember six months ago, genuinely, it was the, I think most downloaded app in the app in the app store and they wanted to turn it into a social platform and they initially began by just copyright infringing on a completely unprecedented scale. You can make anything happen at all. You could make. And then it sort of galvanized Hollywood into saying this can't happen. And there was a sort of huge pushback. But then so they disabled the use of characters and actors who hadn't given permission. But then they did do a deal with Disney and they who was going to invest a billion in OpenAI. And they used, said they will use character likenesses. There were 200 characters, not voices, anything that kind of used other human stuff they couldn't really do, although they are made by human animators.

[Richard Osman]

So the question is, has SORA closed down because Hollywood pushed back? No, no, very much. SORA is shut down because it was wildly, wildly unprofitable. And even in the world of AI and that crazy wild west, it was absolutely unsustainable. Don't forget OpenAI have got very, very large pocketed backers, lots of VCs involved with it. Microsoft puts a lot of money in and this thing was costing them roughly. Sora, just existing in the real world was costing them $15 million a day.

[Marina Hyde]

It's so nuts. And I've seen estimates on each video, some saying a $30 per video generated something, $2 per video, but, but it's free to the user. And it's. It was so. And also it was a sort of great novelty, like one of those actual, you know, they show you that you can do it and you can make, you know, you can make Elsa and Anna do this or that and then you're like, okay, I'm never gonna do that again.

[Richard Osman]

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

[Marina Hyde]

But there was an energy issue at the moment.

[Richard Osman]

So, yeah, I think it's fine. I think, I think everything is. Let me just check on the straight of hormone. Everything. I think everything is good. So it was costing them a huge amount of money and using up an awful lot of computational power they could use elsewhere. And as you say, it wasn't actually particularly doing them any good because what is it?

[Marina Hyde]

It's just nothing. I mean, they had a big sort of meeting and they said, avoid distractions. And it's all about for them, like business and productivity applications. Don't be distracted by side quests. You know, they're now in the Pentagon, sorry, Department of War, to give it its new title, and they want to stay dominant over Gemini. They're really worried far, you know, much more worried about Anthropic and Claude. And they've got to allocate resources, as you say. Let's talk about the Hollywood side of it, because to me, in a way, first of all, Disney, they've got a new CEO now, and this deal was done on the previous one, Bob Iger. So it's quite nice in some ways that Josh d' Amauro doesn't necessarily have to have this headache, but they used up a huge amount of goodwill doing this because people were very angry about it. And the story they'll probably tell themselves is that Hollywood did what it does best when the chips are down. We all came together and we pushed them away. What has actually happened is it's like, yeah, there's no money in your business. And I'm just speaking as OpenAI there. It's like, yeah, we passed through. There's nothing here.

[Richard Osman]

Well, it's like we talked about the book business the other day. They've absolutely passed through like a hurricane and left a lot of mess behind. But there's two types of business here. There's the direct to consumer business, which is what this is supposed to be. This is supposed to be millions of people making videos. If you pay them an extra $4, that's the kind of freemium version of it, you can make extra videos. Big companies could pay $10,000 a year and be able to use this stuff. And they're just in the millions of people sitting at home making videos market, it didn't exist in any way whatsoever. OpenAI found that out very, very early on, and therefore it was not sustainable for them. But I think they still have designs on being in the back room of Hollywood. That's what AI is particularly interested in is. Is interested in running the bits that you don't see. It's interested in what's interesting.

[Marina Hyde]

And yes, in enterprise and business and going all the. Making your entire running your company for you.

[Richard Osman]

And what it's done in books and in video here as well, it is when those first the Chat GPT stuff was coming out and everyone's going, oh, my God, have you seen this thing and what it can do? And then when SORA came out and everyone's going, oh, my God, have you seen this? Have you seen what it can do? Those are huge PR coups for OpenAI. So chat GPT and Sora, huge, absolutely huge PRQs with OpenAI at a point where they're going, we want to be the preeminent AI company of the world. So headlines, headlines, headlines. Not something they were making a huge amount of money out of, you know, books and videos and stuff like that. And then you get to the point where actually the headlines are unhelpful because the industry pushes back, and at that point, they move on because they weren't interested anyway.

[Marina Hyde]

Actually, the relationship between Hollywood and the AI companies reminds me so much of the special relationship. Like, only one side's thinking about it, and it's definitely not the AI companies or like, you know, lots of boxers do this, or Conor McGregor. You know, I don't even think about my opponent. Okay? They do not even think about Hollywood at all. They really do. As you say, they might be interested in some sort of corporate thing, but that could as well be a soap company or a car company or whatever it is.

[Richard Osman]

It's good for headlines until it's not good for headlines, and then you move on.

[Marina Hyde]

But, yeah, another thing I'll say about them is I don't trust anything they say anymore. I don't want to say they lie all the time, but they fib all the time. They fib all the time.

[Richard Osman]

I don't want to say they lie, but they are. Your honor, I didn't call them liars. I called them fibbers.

[Marina Hyde]

But they announce complete cobblers, and it's not actually true. And just to say they did the same with that massive investment, they said Nvidia is investing 100 billion in US and now it's been sort of commuted back in some weird way to 30. This thing isn't even happening at all. And the trouble is it's reported on by journalists who are scared because they're in another industry that's terrified by this thing. And so they report on it as though all. I think you have to now say every time you're reporting on this at all. Okay, how much is this going to cost this company? Because all the divisions are fighting for access to tokens or whatever so they can do their little bit. And if it doesn't sound realistic, like they're going to use all this power for what, making videos of Elsa? And it's also going to be a social media platform. That's as bad as Will Smith's idea for a social media platform. I don't really believe in it.

[Richard Osman]

What's his idea for a social media platform?

[Marina Hyde]

Oh, my God. He had this thing.

[Richard Osman]

I know this is a sidebar, but

[Marina Hyde]

it's a real side.

[Richard Osman]

Anytime I hear his name, Will Smith

[Marina Hyde]

pitched this idea for something I can't remember what it's called. It's like Earth 2000 maybe. It's a film. And he pitched it to Sony and we know about all of this because of the Sony hack that happened. And Will Smith pitched it and said, I want to own all of this. He was entering his kind of mogul imperium and he wanted to own all of it, but it wouldn't be. It was going to be so mesmeric for the planet and everyone was going to want to talk about it that it wouldn't be possible for them to do it on the existing social networks. He also wanted a social network created just to talk about this universe he was building out. It didn't happen. And you know, some other stuff happened in Will Smith's life which was rather more prosaic.

[Richard Osman]

And Park.

[Marina Hyde]

Yeah, and Park. But I don't think. Why, why would you believe anything they say? I think that they make up all these sort of stories and it's not at all clear. He. It's very odd to me and Sam Altman, my worst one currently, it's very difficult with the Tetlords because there is a lot of. There is. It's a bit like the world's richest man. In fact, many of them are the same people. But there's the churn of like, who is the most loathsome. He's had it for me for quite a long time. He's been number one for many, many, many, many weeks. They've completely eliminated the look of him even they've eliminated that uncanny valley in AI Really. It doesn't look like that any longer. We used to look at things and say, yeah, but it doesn't look quite real now. It's like, okay, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt really are fighting on a bridge and I really fully believe it. Not with him though. They can't do it with him. He looks like someone who's wearing a sort of state of the art human in the next situation of it might be convincing.

[Richard Osman]

Maybe he is.

[Marina Hyde]

Maybe he. Yeah, I wouldn't rule it out.

[Richard Osman]

I wonder who it is. Maybe it's Paul Chuckle that'd be a reveal, wouldn't it?

[Marina Hyde]

It would be a second act in his life.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah. So is this good news that SORA has closed down and we're not going to suddenly be flooded with all of this slop? I will say this about it, which is the real story of AI has not been that all along. So that's been, you know, headlines and Sora and what it can do. But AI has Been getting its hooks into Hollywood and into all the different film industries of the different countries in very, very different ways for a very, very long time. So Sora is gone. It's disappeared. You cannot use it. However, everybody I speak to uses Cling, Right? So Cling is Sora, but it's Chinese. Cost about the same. Cost you about $10,000 a year for a really big professional subscription to this. Now, why can Cling do that when OpenAI couldn't? It's because Cling is Chinese. It is backed by the government, is not backed by venture capitalists. So they are not fussed about getting a return. What they're fussed about is getting market share and having a land grab, and they do not need to worry about losing $15 million a day. So everyone is using Kling. It does pretty much exactly the same thing. It's a rival by the. Lots of people. You see Dance as well, which is the ByteDance version of it. But they're both.

[Marina Hyde]

Which was Tom and Brad fight on the. On the bridge. That one. That was a sea dance.

[Richard Osman]

That was sea dance. So these things are still out there. They're being used by everybody. You're not seeing them on screen yet because, you know, Hollywood works out what is, you know, acceptable and what's not acceptable. And lots of backroom stuff is acceptable. Lots of early development work. They figure they can do that and nobody knows about it. And I get it. And by the way, they have to do this because, you know, their competitors are doing it. You can't afford to not do it anymore. This is, it's. This, this has happened. It's always already done. This is not kind of. This is not a fight that has to be. That's going to be fought. It is already done. You know, I. I've spoken to lots of people who said that. So many Hollywood productions and developments, they're always all using Runway Gen 3 as well. Yeah, that's a huge thing in Hollywood at the moment. So these things are absolutely powering the next generation of Hollywood. They're certainly powering the development of what is happening next. And so while all eyes were on, you know, our kids in their bedrooms going to make a thing about Elsa. The AI industry is absolutely the bedrock now of a lot of Hollywood. And listen, it's going to make producing things cheaper, but the main way it's going to make producing things cheaper is by getting rid of a lot of jobs. But it is there and it is there quietly. That's the thing that they didn't look for Headlines or anything like that. They just looked to sell it and people are using it and it's going

[Marina Hyde]

to be because Hollywood is complicit in it. Hollywood doesn't want those headlines either. They like the headlines that they, they fought back against the AI companies.

[Richard Osman]

You can't do a likeness of Robert De Niro. Oh my God, you can't be Matt Damon. This is. We will fight for our people, we'll fight for our writers, we'll fight for our talent. Whereas every single other bit of the business they are not fighting for. They're fighting for the bit that is visible. They're fighting for the bit where people are famous and people are celebrities and people are allowed to write articles. The rest of it they are absolutely integrating. And by the way, so is every other industry in the world. It's not like Hollywood are going to hypocrites or kind of awful. They just, just, they can't run their businesses without it now in, in the same way that, you know, if you're a healthcare company, you can't run your business with, without it anymore, you certainly won't, won't be able to within a year. So the only bit of the Wild west that remains, because they're in all of those areas, they're in development, they're in edit, they're in, you know, post production, they're in all of those areas. The only bit that remains is this idea of can you make films without actors and writers? It's the only thing that that's left. And in some ways it's the bulwark that Hollywood actually is standing up to. Which is, which is good. You know, it is, it is an area where I think if AI is comfortable that it can be helpful in the development of most of what happens in, in Hollywood and it can own some of the means of production. I think it's the one thing that's happy to go, okay, just for now, we'll let that go. But you know, if you're Robert De Niro, when you want to take half a billion dollars for your likeness in perpetuity, I guess those deals will start happening. So the walls will slightly crack if you are Kling or you are Sea Dance. They worry an awful lot less about your copyrights and your likeness and your IP and good luck suing them. So the walls are cracking there as well. So, you know, it is the last frontier idea, this idea of, you know, is it a real human being I'm watching, is that really Tom Cruise? Is this really written by a, a human Being, I think in terms of people's images, I think there is a slippery slope because I think that, you know, you'll be able to do that with Kling almost immediately and. And it's probably going to be quite hard to sue them. I think the last thing that will remain is high end writing. I do think that that's the last thing that will remain because that's the. We've spoken before. That's the thing that AI is worst at. But Sora didn't work. And it didn't work not because Hollywood pushed back, but because it was making no money. But these big AI companies and these big AI text to video and prompt to video things are absolutely in the heart of Hollywood and you are not going to get rid of them, I think.

[Marina Hyde]

Okay. Have you got any recommendation?

[Richard Osman]

I have indeed. I'm sure I've recommended it before. But I will do every single series. Stacey Solomon, sort your life out on BBC one. You can get it on iplayer. It's so beautiful. I love it so much. Much. I love her. And it's about people who, you know. And everyone's had the situation where your house just feels like, oh, it. I'm slightly overwhelmed by how much stuff I've got. And you know, it's not arranged properly and they just go in and they take all of your stuff and they lay it out in a warehouse and it's just like all the best television programs. It is not about the thing that it says it's about. It is not about decluttering your house and, you know, getting better feng shui. It's about who you are as a human being and the things you've accumulated and why and the things you care about and why and the things that you should really let go and why. And just week after week you're just like weeping. It's like a home improvement show. But of course it's not. It's about humanity. So I love that show. And can I also say, can I also a plea from our producer, Joey. We get so many questions about Sort yout Life out and I don't know anyone who makes it. Listen, I admire them, but we know no one on that team. If you are on that team, do get in touch with Joey. Cause we have got a lot of questions for you.

[Marina Hyde]

The email is thereestertainmentalhanger.com we will be back on Thursday for a questions and answers episode and also on Friday with the second part of our great fun Spice Girls series, the story of the Spice Girls. If you want to join as a member for ad free listening and those bonus episodes. It's theresticentertainment.com otherwise, see you on Thursday.

[Richard Osman]

See you Thursday.

[Marina Hyde]

Spring just slid into your DMs. Grab that boho, look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals that can keep up with you. And hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up. Spring's calling. Ross.

[Richard Osman]

Work your magic.