When Celebrities Become Cops

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Joey can we leave this in as the as the opening can we do a cold open please please just so people understand what it is I put up with.

I know, I know.

And you know, last week, people go, do you know what, Marina?

She's so smart.

She's so brilliant.

And I'm like, yeah.

She fucking can't do an intro.

Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde.

And me, Richard Osman.

Hello, everybody.

Hello, how are you?

I'm very well.

How are you?

Yeah, I'm not too bad.

Can I give a couple of updates on we talked about what's going to be the new Traitors last week, Destination X and the box and all sorts of things.

Destination X, i got to say i'm now really enjoying doing not insane numbers in terms of it's not doing super badly so i suspect it might come back but i'm enjoying it now episode two was better i agreed with you and episodes three and four are even better than those although it is quite easy to guess where where you are at any given time the box which is itv's um version they've announced their host i saw that who is your boss and mine gary lineker yeah he'll do one i think i'm looking forward to that one also keeps him out of the country which is probably good for us right do you know what i mean because he's very very hands-on on this page.

He's heavily hands-on in this podcast.

And yeah, it's probably best that he's unboxing celebrities.

Yeah, he's always like, please do a deep dive on Joe Pasquale.

We're like, okay, I guess we have to.

That's on its way.

The Inheritance, Liz Hurley did turn up with Billy Ray Cyrus

at the press conference.

So that's exciting.

That's exciting.

Yes, I saw the pictures.

Yeah, people who are working on shows, there's a show called Nobody's Fool with Danny Dyer and Emily Atak for ITV, which is supposed to be an awful lot of fun.

And the Bond show that they have, which, you know, 007 Race to a Million on Amazon Prime, the first series of which, I have to say, didn't seem to have been touched by entertainment hands.

Apparently, the next series is very good.

Oh, really?

Yeah, apparently.

We're going to have to return to Bond because there have been many developments in Bond.

So let's, over the next few weeks, return to Bond and one of our episodes.

What should we talk about this week then?

No, what are we going to talk about?

Let's not pretend we're just making it up.

We're going to talk about a different form of law enforcement, less covert than James Bond.

Dean Kane from Superman has announced he's going to be an immigration and customs enforcement ICE agent in the US.

So we'll have a look at that.

The history of celebrity law enforcement,

which is surprisingly rich.

Oh my gosh, there's a lot of it, yeah.

We're going to talk about AI slop in books.

I just noticed how many AI versions there are of Thursday Murder Club and things like that and talk to lots of other people.

And it is extraordinary.

It's a huge, huge industry.

So we're going to talk through some of that.

These things, you know, people are just, you know, making money from Amazon and Amazon.

I think are finding it almost impossible to stop the slop.

And we're also going to talk about about anime, which is another enormous industry and it's huge with Gen Z.

And it's,

by some accounts, bigger than some of the biggest sports in the US with Gen Z.

So we're going to talk about what that means and how everybody is trying to get in on the Act because it's such a gateway to kind of keeping those eyeballs.

Law enforcement, celebrity law enforcement.

Our friend Dean Kane.

So Dean Kane has said that he would like to sign up as an ICE agent, Immigration and customs enforcement in the US.

They're on a massive recruitment drive at the moment because they feel that there's going to be much more work.

And I think that they have actually said that they're very interested in having his application.

So he was, of course, Superman in Lois and Clark, The New Adventures of Superman, which ran for a few years in the mid-90s, but has assumed a sort of outsized cultural importance for reasons I can't fully put my finger on.

I don't know why, but he was very handsome.

Yes.

At the time.

Yeah, in that kind of Superman way.

He often is.

Yeah.

He's no David Corrin sweat.

No, David.

How is he allowed that name?

It's amazing, isn't it?

You can't have that name.

I'm so sorry.

If he had existed in old Hollywood, he would have just been called David Diesel.

He'd have been refitted and it would have been simple.

David did.

You can't be called David Corren sweat and be a movie star, but anyway.

Dean Kane, not his real name.

No, he's got a Japanese surname

because he's got Japanese heritage.

He's been one of those celebrities, a bit like Kevin Sorbo, who used to be in Hercules, those ones who exist, the sort of out-right-wing celebrities.

So, you know, he's occasionally on Fox News, but acting-wise, I would say that he can't get arrested, but he may now be able to arrest people.

Oh, that's good.

Because

he wants to sign up, you know, this big drive.

When I say that's good, I mean your point is good.

Not Dean Kane being allowed to arrest people.

No.

Anyway, there is...

quite a rich history of this in entertainment, not of ICE agents, by the way.

Funnily enough, Jack Osborne did train as a reserve police officer.

He did it for a show called Armed and Famous, but I think he was the only celebrity that, after the camera stopped rolling, thought, I'm actually going to complete this training.

And then not so long ago, a few years ago,

he was forced to clarify that although he was working near the border, he was not a border agent.

Yeah, I'm not a border agent.

I am, you know, a reserve police officer.

I love it.

Every week he brings in like a massive stash of drugs.

He goes, I found some more.

They go, where's he getting this stuff from?

This guy.

But he's not a border agent.

And as we can see, there has been a sort of historic thing where celebrities now wouldn't want to associate themselves with that kind of thing.

Some, but there are these kind of out-right-wing celebrities who certainly exist in like the Fox News ecosystem, if not any longer the Hollywood ecosystem.

But there were people who were cops first.

Dennis Farina, who's in Law and Order famously, he was a cop for something like 20 years in Chicago.

And then Chuck Norris, I think when he was in the Air Force, he was in like the Air Force Police.

But the history of celebrities becoming reserve police officers, which is something that you can, you know, sometimes it's for PR, sometimes it's for community engagement.

It's very attention-grabby.

I always think

the only two things anyone will ever slow down for on the street is a film crew or a police unit.

But I do think those two things go hand in hand.

And so I wonder if when the bright lights of Hollywood are perhaps not knocking quite as loudly as they have been, you go, oh, I'm going to do something else that will grab me some attention.

Stop, look at me.

No, I mean, literally, you have to look at me because I'm pointing something at you.

Yeah, and it's a gun.

So, people who did it for community engagement, people like Lou Farino, the incredible Hulk, Shaquille O'Neal, has done it in loads and loads of cities.

He was sort of community engagement.

How is he getting a uniform?

I would worry, that's my worry about being a it's not my only worry about being a police officer, but I would worry about the uniform.

I think they'd specially make one for you, you see.

But Erica Strada, punch and chips, he became a reserve police officer and he was sort of interested in protecting children online.

We talked about her last week, Pamela Anderson.

Yeah, the great Pamela Anderson.

Yeah, the great Pamela.

They're still together.

Yeah, they're still together.

When she was on Bay Watch, she did proper sort of criminology training.

And I think she did do reserve police officer training, but she was sort of busy filming and she never took up the role.

Steve Guttenberg, of course, went to Police Academy.

Yeah, but not for real.

But Dan Aykroyd, by the way, he was one of those honorary ones, a bit like Elvis, where Dan Aykrod was a huge supporter of sort of Blue Lives groups, as it were.

I mean, again, now you would not imagine that celebrities want to get involved in any of those kinds of things.

And we'll come to that in a minute.

But Dean Kane has himself been a reserve officer

since 2018.

In our country, Penny Lancaster, Rod Stewart's wife, she and Lucwoman, etc.

Where's she getting all these drugs from?

Well, she did the Queen's funeral policing arrangements on that day and lots of other things besides.

Are you thinking of Penny Penny Mordaunt?

No, no, I'm not.

It is Penny Lancaster.

It is Penny Lancaster.

She was involved in Fighting Crime and Famous, or Famous and Fighting Crime, which would be our version of Armed and Famous.

And she was on that.

Jamie Lang was on that.

He was really, really good.

Jamie Lang's great on anything you put him on.

And essentially, they're arresting this guy.

He's very, very drunk and very, very angry.

And he's just shouting at everyone.

And then he turns and goes, Aren't you the guy from Maiden Chelsea?

And the guy goes, I am.

And we can talk about it if you go quietly into the back of the van.

And the the guy goes, Sure.

And in he goes.

He's just going to anecdote him into submission.

That's that, you know, that's actually a form of restraint that's, in my view, totally fine.

My favourite ever, obviously, for obvious reasons, who was a reserve officer, is Mr.

Stephen Seagal.

Oh, my goodness.

If you are a member of our club, you might have heard my two-part eulogy to Renaissance man career of Stephen Seagal.

It's got plenty of life left in it.

He claimed to have been a reserve deputy sheriff in New Mexico, excuse me, for 20 years.

At the time that he was, and this is the point we're looking at his career, not the time when he was making Under Siege.

When he was a straight to...

Dark Territory.

When he was,

this time it's a train.

When he was a straight to D V D star by that point, but he was also a philanthropist.

You'll remember he's a Tibetan llama, an energy drink retailer, a fragrance entrepreneur.

I think, what was it called?

It's got centre of action.

He was the lead singer and lead guitarist in a band called Thunderbox.

Thunderbox.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thunderbox is actually the word for the field latrine, if I can put it that way, that's used by one of the characters in Men at Arms, The Evelyn War with the Sword of Honour.

Yes, the Thunderbox was

the old army name for a toilet.

I don't think Stephen Seagal knew that

when he started his blues band.

I've heard him.

I think he did.

Anyhow, but he wanted to be involved in reality television, so they thought, okay, let's do a show about it.

Thus was born Stephen Seagal Lawman, which ran across sort of five years on the AE network in America.

But it was the, by the way, it was the biggest show.

It had their biggest opening numbers ever when it came out.

I had to go back and look at it because obviously I watched the whole thing.

The opening voiceover says, It all began 20 years ago when Stephen Seagal, a world-renowned seventh-degree Aikido expert, was shooting a movie in Jefferson Parish.

The sheriff asked him to teach his men some self-defense and weapons skills.

The training was so successful that Seagal was deputised.

Okay, so maybe.

I mean, maybe.

Sure.

He is an asset in certain situations.

I mean, maybe not.

No, I mean, obviously he's an asset to Putin, quite literally, I think.

He's a Russian asset.

He's a Russian asset.

I meant an asset in a more

prosaic way.

He's a police sort of asset.

If you take his film persona, he would be unplayable in any bar fight setting.

Simply unplayable.

If the police are called to a bar fight, he can improvise a weapon out of anything.

A bar towel, a beer mat, whatever it is and he will defuse that fight or simply overpower the the miscreants yeah were i a miscreant in a bar um and see if it's a go i just go come on just like just like jamie lang has turned up i'd be like i'm going into the back of the van that's uh there's no no point me fighting on well he does that speech he might say what does it take to change the essence of a man which is a speech he does do in a bar fight in i think on deadly ground sorry in the middle of a bar fight he says what does it take to change the essence of a man and by basically speechifying his way before beating this guy up or maybe the guy and then the guy just sort of goes away because Segal has actually improvised a speech for once he hasn't used a microwave as an improvised weapon he's just improvised a speech and he just overpowers this guy he should have called his fragrance the essence of a man yeah I know it was right there was it Steve it was right there that was actually a tagline I think for Calvin Klein Eternity

the Essence of Man the Right Man no the Helen Christensen voiceover I can remember it's coming out of a memory hole this okay the essence of a man the right man he must must be a little bit mysterious but so alive what that must be a Calvin Klein what's it like inside your head just out of interest it's just a really rubbish memory palace

I want to get rid of a lot of this stuff I feel like a hoarder at memory palace I don't want it memory mall I don't want it

out of town out of town malls are real like off-brand stuff okay sorry where were we okay so Steven Segar lawnman episode one was called The Way of the Gun.

It's America.

Also a good name for a fragrance.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know.

Again, that is a good one.

Of course, he has to, you know, he always has to bring in the Eastern bullshit.

And he's saying the Zen masters in archery did not pull the arrow, they used to push the arrow.

It's the same with this pistol.

It's like, I don't think that's physics, by the way.

But anyway.

There was one of those very controversial sheriffs, Joe Arpeo, and I can't remember what.

He sort of reinstated chain gangs, I think, and made them do it in pink.

And he became, he went the other way, didn't he?

He was a lawman who became a celebrity, or a course celebrate, at least.

Yeah, he became one of those big Fox News figures,

like a hard nut sheriff.

He eventually overstepped the laws.

He was enrolled to serve, and I think he had to end up, he got ended up getting pardoned by Trump back in 2010.

Pardoned by Trump, by the way.

An amazing name for a fragrance.

And a reality show.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Pardoned by Trump.

Actually, why doesn't he do it?

Because he's got some ridiculous ones.

Undefeated Trump.

We've done all his fragrances together.

Anyway, and then Stephen Sagal became a volunteer posse member for Joe Arpe at one point.

And he was in an armed SWAT raid.

And actually, at this point, people started to say, this is really weird.

They dug in more into the training.

They thought, I didn't really buy half of this stuff.

Can anyone say they're a reserve police officer?

And to bring it full circle back to Dean Kane, I think you kind of can.

It feels a little bit like one of those online modules that I never do,

supposedly mandatory training models that I never actually complete.

I think you can kind of get away with not doing it.

You have to complete the mandatory training models.

I love mandatory training models where

it says you find five pounds on the desk in the head of HR.

Do you tell HR that there's five pounds on the desk?

Steal the money.

Go right.

I'm going to go steal the money.

Why don't you have another go at this question?

Tell HR, congratulations, you're passed.

Anyway, sorry, that's a side question.

I remember speaking to someone who worked on Marvel Films, who's a very, very significant producer on Marvel Films, and said, ever since that all this kind of workplace culture had been

changed so radically, she was constantly having to do these training modules constantly.

And they were real sit-up ones where you couldn't just sort of leave it on while you did your actual job.

And they would say, you know, you're going to be locked out of all computer systems unless you've completed this.

And she'd think, I'm in the middle of a shoot and I've now got to go and do some sort of training about how not to hit someone at work or whatever it is.

Is it good to hit someone at work or not good to hit someone at work?

And you must sit up and be present.

And you know, anyway.

I wonder whether he will get a reality show out of it.

Because as we keep saying, people are looking for content that will draw back in people who perhaps have been put off in recent years by thinking that a network or a channel or whatever only appeals to one type of person.

Yeah, certainly if you were CBS or NBC or anyone, the idea of doing an ICE reality show, but being on the side of ICE is something that would appeal to Trump and to that administration.

I mean, it would be absolutely, in terms of the tide of history, it would be

paramount will just do it.

Yeah, exactly.

Of course, we'll do it.

It would be a terrible stain, which would last for hundreds of years.

But listen,

for the next six months,

smart move.

So let's talk about then about like copaganda and as they call it, which is the idea of cops being heroes, which until relatively recently didn't even cross anybody's mind.

Cops were always heroes in almost everything apart from sort of every now and then you'd get some increase left field like art house movie like Bad Lieutenant.

But in general, when we watch television, the cops were the heroes.

Yeah, and if there was a cop who wasn't a hero, the hero cops brought that cop down.

That was the idea of it.

No, it's fascinating in the world of literature because there's so many long-running detective series.

So Michael Connolly, who writes the Bosch series, is very interesting.

So Michael Connolly series, which is all set in LA.

And Michael Connolly started as a reporter in LA, who's a crime reporter.

And this Harry Bosch series, and TV bits of it as well.

They're probably one of the best written police procedurals you'll ever read.

If you love a police procedural and you're interested in LA at all, it's really, really worth reading.

His first two books were absolutely, oh, I'm going to do this traditional kind of copper's hero.

Knew everyone in the LA PD, knew everything about it because that was his beat.

And then between the second and third book,

you had the Rodney King incident.

And you can see from then on, Michael Connolly's books changed very, very, very quickly.

They changed when that happened.

They changed when OJ happened.

And almost all crime writers now, after George Floyd, have started writing very differently.

The new Mark Billingham books.

So Mark Billingham writes these brilliant novels about Tom Thorne, who's sort of like a London Harry Bosch.

He writes brilliantly about London, Mark.

Funny books, but very, very real, quite gory.

But he always writes about cops and he always writes about the Met.

And again, he's always, you know, you always hint at things that do go wrong in the Met.

But his new book, which is called What the Night Brings, is he absolutely takes head-on the fact that the public, it seems, no longer trust the police after Sarah Everard and after all of these things.

And he really, really takes it head-on.

It's got a brilliant, inciting incident, this book, and it's really, really interesting.

But it is impossible now to write a simple copper's hero book.

And no one was writing, by the way, cops as heroes, but you would write a book, and the assumption was that the police investigating were the good guys.

Well, police are such useful characters

in the whole of fiction going right the way back to Dickens because in something like Bleak House where the inspector is obviously in a way the only character who can sort of move between all the echelons and tie the supposedly disparate bits together.

So they're a very useful character in so many ways especially if you're writing big kind of things about the state of the nation, the state of the city.

They're incredibly useful as well in terms of you know your plot can just happen.

You know if you if you have amateur detectives it's actually slightly harder because you have to go, something has to happen in your world which drags you into a crime.

Whereas if your daily job is I work in a police station and every half an hour, like a phone rings and something happens, there's your plot straight away.

So writing police officers is the easiest way to write crime fiction.

Crime fiction, I think, really does represent the world as it is in a very, very interesting way.

And crime fiction writers are very quick to understand that the game has changed.

So there's, you know, you can write kind of, you know, there's no coincidence that Morse went back to his, you know, the kind of 50s and 60s when they did that series.

It is, it is harder now to write about police officers without showing quite how compromised various police forces have become.

It actually makes crime fiction better.

It's the truth.

It makes it more truthful and, you know, it actually gives you more plots.

But look at Brooklyn 9-9, which, you know, in its final season, absolutely, they went, we've had such joy of showing these heroes this whole time, and now we're going to show that they're not heroes.

Yeah, in in 2020, how many people who are involved in the absolute mega industry, which is American TV police procedurals,

even comic or serious,

all of them sort of had to felt they had to come out and say something about Black Lives Matter, about George Floyd, or whatever.

And I think Brooklyn 99, they all started donating to like bail services and things like that.

There's a sort of collective

show runner and cast and and whatever.

We did move through that kind of anti-hero phase of cops.

One of the best things I think that's ever been on TV is the Shield, which is absolutely incredible.

And that was real, you know, that's part of that golden era of TV that started with the Sopranos, that particular phase where sort of terrible, terrible people, terrible men particularly, were anti-heroes were the heroes.

You saw that transition.

But now, as you say, it's hard to imagine it.

And then I'm thinking, but is it?

Because everything swings around very quickly.

And I don't think it's particularly hard to imagine somebody thinking, well, we've got to cater to a different audience now, or clearly the vibe has shifted.

And maybe we'll follow Dean Kane as an ICE agent, and lots of people will actually watch this.

Well, there are things, you know, Night Coppers, which I love on Channel 4, and it genuinely shows the reality of most police officers' lives, and it which is 90% mental health work, 90% sort of trying to just help people.

Being able to show both of those sides, being able to write books like Mark's book that talks about the rotten side of the met in a in a really really really serious way but also having something like night coppers which shows you know we we do need law enforcement it is important it's important for vulnerable people that there are strong people and good people and finding a way in our culture that we can have both of those seems to be seems to be the uh the way forward talking of um corrupt cops I think I don't know if I talked about this before if I have it's a long time ago I think my favorite documentary of all time is Precinct 75 or it's also called The Precinct, which is about a corrupt cop in Brooklyn in the 80s, I want to say.

It is so good.

It's so brilliant.

And all the people involved are sort of a bit, you know, have kind of come out of the other side of it now.

So they all talk and they all tell you this incredible story of police corruption.

I mean, I mean, I've seen it as very, very, very, very...

Could not be more corrupt.

Yeah.

That was a magnificent thing.

But I think that TV and film worked out a long time ago that they can show police officers as villains as well as heroes.

But it's fascinating now that the world of books is well, you cannot write a straight police procedural now without tackling this absolutely head-on.

So, a few recommendations there.

Honestly, Mark Binningham's book, I'd really recommend.

Any of Michael Connolly's books, Precinct 7-5, and perhaps not the new adventures of Superman, but the Stephen Sagal documentary.

Lawman.

Stephen Sagal Lawman.

Lawman.

I mean, he's a preposterous figure.

Shall we do some adverts?

Let's please do that.

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Welcome back, everybody.

Now, one of the biggest industries in the world, and it may leave some people completely untouched, so we thought it might be an interesting thing to talk about, give an overview, and that is anime.

What is anime, and what does it mean that anime is enormous?

Where does it take us?

Anime is a style of Japanese animation.

Really, crucially, it is not a genre, it's just like a medium.

So, it can be an epic, it can be a comedy, it can be sci-fi, it can be whatever you like.

And it used to be a sort of niche interest.

Like they had dedicated special fandom.

It's part of a taku, you know, geek culture in Japan.

During the pandemic, it became a streaming hit.

And like lots of things, which is run by people who are rather older, it might not have been clear to people that that was going to happen.

But Japanese anime is now this massive growth market.

They think that anime's market value will double by 2030.

And there are a lot of surveys, surveys, many of them are very large, so you have to treat them with caution, that suggest it's more popular among Gen Z than the sort of biggest US sports and that more people in Gen Z watch it than watch the NFL.

Yeah, it's

bigger than the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Bigger than anything

you could mention, really.

And as I say, that's not necessarily complete sort of...

pure statistics, but the fact that it can even be said suggests such a big cultural shift.

All the streaming and services are really investing in it because it's something like 40 of people up to age 34 watch anime and then it immediately drops off as you can see amongst older people and it goes down to sort of 10 in kind of 30 yeah it's funny we we are very much the generation who's brought up on american culture yeah and so we will always you know revere scorsese or you know the shield as we were talking about just something like that something that comes from that culture whereas the next generation definitely they are much much much more interested in japan korea china completely the other way on the map exactly yeah and obviously they the streaming services really want to build tight relationships with that particular cohort because they're going to go on and on

and so Netflix Disney plus there's a service called Crunchyroll which used to be a which is huge it's massive it's got

18 million maybe more now 20 million subscribers

and it started as a pirate site but it's now owned by Sony

and that's kind of like a pure anime subscription service that I think you can get in the UK for about a five or a month something like that.

But it also, so it's got, you know, you don't have to subscribe, this stuff you can do, but

they also have publishing arms, they have live conventions, they have, they have all sorts of things.

Well, that's the thing, it's a whole sort of culture.

It's a whole world.

And people feel, isn't, I saw actually, like a couple of weeks ago, the LA Dodgers did a big night.

which was in association with

sort of timed with the anime expo and all of that, which is really interesting because it's sort of showing that they need, even like a sports team that you would think they have decided that they need anime to engage younger fans rather than the other way around as for how it went mainstream it's partly the platforms and the fan culture but it really works online so obviously as we've become more and more digital and everything is online it works very well online and celebrities started saying they were into it because it used to be like

you know, you'd almost be bullied for being into it.

It was dweeb culture, etc., etc.

But like Megan thee Stallion, Billie Eilish were like mentioning characters in their songs.

And the idea that anything now is sad or nerdy, that idea has sort of gone out of fashion.

Well, I think the place where the culture forks off, I would say, because I think the counterpoint to anime is Disney.

Yeah.

Right.

Or certainly was.

You know, we knew what animation was, and it was Disney, and it was princesses, and it was princes, and it was castles, and it was animals, and, you know, all sorts of things.

Disney, amazingly brilliant storytellers.

and actually anime starts sort of 1960s Astro Boy is probably is the probably the first kind of anime TV thing manga is the magazine version and the book version and anime is the TV version so Astro Boy which was 1963 Osama Tezuka who's often called the god of manga and he loved Disney So he absolutely grew up on Disney.

This is the thing that he loved.

He loved that storytelling.

But coming from where he came from, he wanted to tell slightly deeper, more philosophical stories, which is where anime is always gone.

You know, anime anime for all its kind of brashness and bright colours and speed and noise, you know, tries to tell quite deep, quite interesting, quite unusual, often quite dark stories.

He was also the first, he sort of set out the kind of the visual aesthetic, which, you know, the big eyes, the dynamic storylines, all of that kind of stuff.

But it was a sort of deliberate attempt to take what Disney had done and to take it into a different culture.

And then kind of 80s is when it got huge.

I remember, you know, the things like

Akira, Dragon Ball Zed, Sailor Moon, all that kind of stuff.

It's intrinsically Japanese and Japanese dominated.

The Japanese content industry is the third biggest in the world.

It's actually US, China, Japan, and then the UK is fourth.

But they are worried.

It's not bad.

Fourth grade.

I mean, that's punching, but they're worried that they're losing control of it because it's very expensive to make in the traditional

style.

And we know they've got a declining population and their industrial base is buggered in lots of ways.

But the economic and security minister is in charge of their anime and manga strategy.

Wow, that's cool.

I know, Richard.

Imagine a government having a cultural strategy.

Imagine that.

Anyway, what do you mean?

Listen, I saw Lisa Nandy saying she wasn't going to watch Master Chef, the new series that they're airing, which still has Greg Wallace in it.

So maybe that's a strategy.

Anyway, in Japan, they're not.

Did you watch it, by the way?

No, I didn't.

Yeah.

Oh, and it was listening.

It's fine.

Yeah.

It is what it is.

It is what it is.

Well, in Japan, they're doing things a little bit differently.

Minoru Kuchi said,

the minister in charge of the anime and manga strategy said, the export value of the content industry is bigger than steel, petrochemicals, and semiconductor sectors.

So it's quite big.

They did have their own...

sort of almost like nationalized streaming platform called Cool Japan, but that hasn't really taken off.

And Netflix are really investing very, very heavily into it.

But what people like about this, though, remember, is that the audiences are mega-engaged.

Private equity companies are buying up lots of these anime houses.

And a big fear, if you look on the fan communities, is that Disney will buy up one and ruin it like they have with Star Wars and eventually maybe Marvel.

And that's people's sort of big fear because think how angry people were about the Studio Ghibli thing.

As soon as you take anime and subsume it into other cultures, and K-pop Demon Hunters is sort of a perfect example of something that has touches of anime, but touches of Western animation and touches of Korean animation.

But when something really really goes over the top into popular culture it becomes its own thing so anime will not when it becomes huge with everybody it will not be the thing that people think of as anime now it'll be anyone doing any sort of animation which isn't a traditional Disney animation so K-pop demon hunters will firstly it will it's a threat to traditional anime because people sort of think oh this is the stuff people have been talking about all this time and it absolutely isn't that is where our culture is going the Americanization of Entertainment is on its way out, that is for sure.

And entertainment from Korea, Japan, and China, that is what Gen Z are interested in.

That's what Gen Alpha are particularly interested in.

That is definitively where our culture is going.

The stuff that we grew up with is going to seem like an anachronism, I think.

But in terms of music, in terms of style, fashion, in terms of manga, in terms of anime, in terms of Disney

making anime movies, which they definitively will, or movies in an anime style.

That is what is going to happen.

It's going to happen to our movies, it's going to happen to our animation, it's going to happen to literature.

You know, that, I think, is where everything is heading.

Yeah, they'll have to co-opt it to survive.

And you can see that already now they're just trying to buy into it, and then soon they will start generating their own versions thereof.

And it speaks sociologically to something, which is, you know, in the generation we grew up in, the idea of America, which is there was a bit of hope and there was excess and there was

what can we what can we do pioneers and this whole new world starting and actually this generation growing up growing up into a very very different world yeah and when they are shown something that has a bit of magic to it a bit of alienness to it a bit of unusualness to it that speaks more to the way they were brought up and the world they're being and certainly a lot more darkness to it and a lot more darkness to it exactly

exactly that um i don't have any recommendations on anime so i asked my son who is the the world's hugest anime fan he has said cowboy bebop full metal alchemist brotherhood and pretty much anything by studio trigger that's my son's recommendations for you but i do that's where our culture is going that's where it's all headed in you know we'll we'll still have you know the stuff we grew up with but that is where it's going that's where it's going next and that's where all the money is going to go.

Now, can we call it book slop, Richard?

Talk to me about AI books.

Amazon has a real problem with this.

If I just give you an example of the sort of thing that happens.

So if you put Thursday Murder Club into Amazon, firstly, Thursday Murder Club turns up first, which is great.

But there are now about 40 books that are companion books to the movie.

That's what they've done.

So there's a million things.

There's Solving the Movie Mystery, The Thursday Murder Club Movie Review by Kendra G.

Candelara.

Kendra G.

Candelara.

Yeah.

Produce yourself, Kendra.

You don't exist.

Possibly not real.

That, by the way, will cost you £10.18.

You can get it on Amazon Prime.

And, you know, you might,

two people in the world might think, oh, this is a real book about the movie.

Considering it's only taken a 20-word prompt to get there, because that's all it takes.

You can put a 20-word prompt in, choose your cover art style,

and then you can put it on Amazon.

And it's like 78 pages long, and it's entirely fictional.

There's not someone who knows anything about the movie, hasn't been involved, anything like that.

So it's just they have a title that they know people might put into the

search bar, and they will give you this.

And as I say, if three people

pay £10 for that, then you've made some money because it literally costs you nothing at all.

The Thursday Murder Club: A Guide to the Plot, Theme, Cast of a Novel-inspired, Cozy Crime Film.

That's by Raymond Milton.

That'll cost you £16.55.

Again, you can get it on the same money, Raymond.

You can get it on Amazon Prime.

The Thursday Murder Club movie review by Efrath Makia.

Efrath Makia

joined the throng as well.

He'll tell you all about the secrets behind the casting and the chemistry between the various leads.

That's all there if you want to see it.

Doris M.

Francis

has written a book.

Not Doris as well.

Not her first book, actually.

Her previous book was about the moment Rory McIlroy hugged his daughter on the 18th Green of the Masters.

That is, she's written the 78 page.

Wow, what can she do?

But this book is David Tennant and the Thursday Murder Club Mystery: How one of Britain's most beloved actors was cast in this film.

So she's written a whole book about that.

Now, all of these are AI-generated.

Okay, every single one of them is all completely nonsensical.

So, can I just

understand it, okay?

Yeah.

You can write a prompt in as little as 20 words.

You can choose your art style, blah, blah.

It's interesting how many, some of the first people to be ripped off were people who write books about how to make it in publishing.

There's a woman called Jane Friedman who does quite a lot of books on,

you know,

trying to sort of help people self-publish try and make a small business you know publishing yourself

and she suddenly found so many books under her name and Amazon said to her this was a couple of years ago oh you haven't copyrighted your name so that's too bad have you copyrighted your name

you can't copyright a name you can't copyright a title you know you can't copyright anything I mean listen you can do a cease and desist I'm sure of that but what a lot of these things are and non-fiction authors get it particularly you'll write a non-fiction book and within days there are 10 praces of your book under the same title, often with a picture that looks like you or a name that looks like you, because it is not illegal to write a sort of companion to a book, to write a book.

Which is fine, by the way, if you're an A-lister because no one, they're going to notice the difference, and with the best will in the world, they're going to notice the difference with you.

But so many people who are not like a name that you'd ever know, but write books that you might want the service of or the or the And you've just read about this book or heard about this book and there's two books with very, very similar titles.

And so you can see that accidentally there will be people who

depress their prices, right?

Because you're competing with something ridiculous that took no time and money.

I mean, it started a few years ago.

Vice did a great article about it, sort of 2013, I think, when they looked at Kindle Unlimited.

The YA top 100 chart then.

YA is young adult.

That's why you get a lot of sort of romantic, you get, you know, hunger games, things like that would be YA.

So a huge, huge market.

They looked at the top 100 Kindle YA books, and 81 of them were ai they're absolutely nonsensical can i give you some of the titles so these were all in the amazon kindle top 100 so they'd all been paid for uh when the three attacks apricot barcode architecture department of vindu stands in front of his parents tombstone so these are all ai in the charts the first the first paragraph of apricot barcode architecture was black lace pajamas very short skirt the most important thing this lace pajamas are all wet Often they have fed an existing work in and said, just make a version of this.

I mean, I'm sorry to say, we found my daughter reading something called The Chamber of Serpents, and we were really quite mean to her, saying, I can't believe you're buying this trash.

You're reading this trash, blah, blah.

I later discovered that Kindle just pushed all this stuff.

I mean, Amazon have tried to say you're only allowed to upload three books to Kindle a day.

So, yeah.

But by the way, can we just talk about the actual, actual, there are other types of risk that are already manifesting themselves?

Because there's a lot of bio,

you'd be quite scared if you were the subject of one of these.

There are a lot of fake biographies out there, a lot.

I looked to see if there was one of you.

There isn't yet.

Good.

But

apart from, first of all, there's lots of books about subjects like ADHD that people have a genuine need and interest to learn about.

And people have just thought, oh, this is a real trigger word for sales, and have created things that have completely sort of bogus medical advice in or

clinical advice.

And there were fake biographies of Scottish politicians in that were having to pull them, saying that John Swinney, the first minister's mother, was Polish, she was born in the US.

The Canadian election, a whole story emerged.

There was all these fake quotes from a biography of Mark Carney, fake quotes from him, which actually he never said.

So you can see that people sort of seized on these things.

And so Amazon has said, oh, you have to inform us if there's AI generated content.

But one author was telling that, Jane Friedman, who I was telling about, who writes those sort of publishing books, saying, yeah, but there were 29 books in one week that I had to have a lot of things.

I mean, in Amazon's defense,

it is an absolute onslaught and a deluge.

And they've said, look, if something is 100%, it cannot be an AI-generated book.

That is against other things.

However, if it has been AI-enabled in some way, we can have it.

I guess they're kind of going that self-published authors are producing

front covers by AI and stuff like that.

But so it's almost impossible to say if something is AI-generated or AI-enabled.

It's kind of the same thing.

Yeah.

And so that you can see why there are farms of people literally typing in buzzwords, putting in a prompt, knocking up a 78-page book.

Some of these are physical books as well.

So it's not just Kindle.

They will send you this book.

It is not going to be good if they do send it to you.

There was not a single review of any of these books.

There's no reviews of any of this stuff.

It's just to try and catch people.

If they catch like five people,

you know, if you charge £16 for a book on Amazon, you're going to get £6.50, let's say, for every single one.

It has cost you zero to make that.

So if you're doing 1,000 books a month and you're selling three copies of each, say, because some people are accidentally clicking on it, that's £3,000 times £6,

you know, you're making $20,000 a month.

Well, it's really interesting that so many of the ways into this were by those authors who do write books about how to make money in the, you know, small, how to make a sort of cottage industry of your own publishing.

Yeah.

Now, there was a company, there is a company called Publishing.com, which is a good domain name, and these twins founded it.

Have you looked into these twins?

Oh, dear.

They're called Rasmus and Christian Mickelson.

Oh, yes.

They're like 29.

And

they post as twins on Instagram, but I think they've stopped posting.

They're like those people who kind of did nothing except for workout all day, and then they started selling books about how to work out and then thought, hang on a second, could see that this kind of weird, like sub-scam, but just self-help section of Amazon was a real like tiger economy.

They then started selling $2,000 courses and guides to publishing AI books.

Apparently

they made their first million

when they were 25 and they earned their second million like four days later.

And apparently they made $50 million in 2022.

So I can only imagine how much they're making now.

This is how big it's really quick.

I mean imagine how much they're making now if they made 50 million in 2022.

They are now under

the Federal Trade Commission that are investigating them.

I do think that in a world where there are only

a limited number of book buyers and book readers, this is an issue.

And as you say, it's particularly an issue for people who write technical books, for people who write non-fiction non-fiction books, for books where someone can just say, here is a summary of everything that was just said in that book for cheaper and under a fake name.

I do think you're right about the biographies as well.

It's a company sitting there somewhere inventing names, just anything you can put into a search bar, they're doing a version of.

So just be careful, especially with books when you're not absolutely certain the name of the title.

Just be absolutely certain you're giving your money to the right people.

But Amazon's got to get better at dealing with this because obviously saying you can only upload three a day, that's incredibly easy to get around.

You can have many profiles, what's the difference?

So they've got to get better at somehow weeding this out because

it's very, very difficult to see how

I mean anyone bar the A-listers can really make money if it carries on for too much longer, particularly in non-fiction.

Exactly.

Rhys James, the wonderful comedian who's just bought out a book which is I haven't read, but I know will be terrific because he's one of the funniest men in the world.

He just did a very good Instagram post where he reviews the five worst rip-offs of his book.

And it is number one

is called Rhys James.

When everything said you can't, he whispered, watch me.

I mean,

it's an absurd world.

And I do, the one good thing I think about all of this, I know we were terrified about AI and AI slop and not ever believing anything.

We get to the stage where we're aware that there's so much slop out there that we seek out human connection and we seek out human writers writers and we seek out human bands and we seek out live and we seek out real human connections i think it's so huge it's so big and it's so dumb and it's so exploitative of people and it's making as you say money for people who have literally done nothing achieved nothing created nothing that the culture turns and we become people who seek out

looking into each other's eyes, hearing a story

from someone personally.

But it's toxifying the marketplace, and in the end, people don't want to go on to Kindle because they feel they're just going to be

there are there are other choices for e-readers, and they might feel that they're not going to be flooded with the same amount of stuff.

Yeah, the Etsy of books is on its way, I'm sure.

That's a good one.

Any recommendations this week?

I have.

I saw a play that I loved, which I've been really wanting to see.

It's Good Night Oscar, which with Sean Hayes

from Willem Grace.

And it's a one,

he won a Tony for this performance, and he did it a while ago in New York, and he's brought it to London.

It's at the Barbican.

And it's about a story which I'm afraid I didn't know so much about, but it's about sort of late night TV and this guest, this brilliant guest, Oscar Levant, who is a incredible sort of

kind of like a musical genius, but also very, very funny.

And the script by Doug Wright has got a lot of great one-liners in.

And it's about his appearance.

He comes out of

a mental hospital unauthorised to appear on a chat show.

Oh, wow.

And

so it's one night.

Sean Hayes' performance is absolutely amazing and it's great.

It's funny.

And if you're interested in television and the changing, those changing tides in television, about when people started trying to be a bit more honest on television and it wasn't so and late night, which I guess has got a sort of poignant topicality to it.

I loved it.

It's on at the barbecue.

Can I just say, although this isn't the most important thing, performances start at 7 p.m.

There's no winterfall and it finishes at 8.40.

Oh my god, that's the dream.

Well, I have to just say, I just merely put it out there.

Yeah, people, listen, yeah,

we'll pay the same for our tickets, but

you can really be shorter.

I mean, it's very civilized, isn't it?

Isn't it civilized?

What about you?

Talking to civilized, I recommend a couple of things on iPlayer.

They have various curated collections, and Simon Jenkins has this collection.

And we watched a few of them this week.

One is called Special Report, and it's all about

why

young women are moving to London in the 1960s and it's like a cautionary tale about women from the provinces moving to London and where they live.

It's just sociologically it's really really wonderful.

It's just a beautiful bit of filmmaking as well.

And also there's a wonderful John Betchemin documentary where he just goes on an old branch line of the railway to Burnham-on-Sea and just talks about the death of the railway.

I've seen this.

I've seen this.

I've seen this a while ago.

It's brilliant.

But that collection, it's just lots of old documentaries from the 50s, 60s, just about britain and how it used to look and how it used to be and they're very very moving i think that about wraps us up we've done so many recommendations this week i know a lot we will be back as always on thursday uh with a question and answers edition well by the way we're going to do a special question and answers edition soon with chris columbus the film director who's done the um thursday murder club movie so if you have any questions for chris about home alone about the harry potter movies mrs doubt fire the state of hollywood now um we we won't do much on thursday murder club but if if you've got a particularly good question, then we'd love that.

But Spielberg, he works a lot with Robert Eggers.

You can email any questions you have for Chris Columbus.

He is the loveliest man in the world, by the way.

So you can sort of ask him anything, best three movies, anything you want.

And that is the restaurants entertainment at goalhanger.com.

If you send your questions to that, and we've got a bonus episode on Friday for our members about the tortured birth of Euro Disney, now Disneyland Paris.

Disneyland Paris, beautiful.

Yeah, so you can join if you'd like at the wrestlers entertainment.com and you can have ad-free listening.

There's a Discord, and

otherwise, we will be back as always on Thursday.

See you then.

See you then.

Hi, it's William DeRimple here again from Empire, another goal hanger podcast.

Here's the clip from our recent series on the five partitions that created modern Asia.

And it was deeply emotional.

Sparsh picked up some pebbles from the village, which he made into jewelry, family heirlooms for his family going down the generations, because he was always saying, you know, my family doesn't have archives, etc.

We lost everything in partition, and there's nothing that we have from Baylor to show where we came from.

But so he wanted wanted to pick up something from Bela and make it into heirlooms for the next generations, you know, three, four generations from now, they'll still have a piece of Bela with them, even if, you know, the relationship between India and Pakistan worsens again.

And, you know, even if his kids can never visit Bela, they'll always have a piece of Bela with them.

This connection with earth, dhurti, you know, they call it dhurti in India.

And zameeen is the Urdu word for exactly the same thing.

But it is much more than just the earth.

It is who you are, where you have grown from, where your forebears have grown from.

And the number of people I know who have been lucky enough to travel across the border, and I count myself as one, who find it impossible to leave without a scoop of earth.

And I have one too, you know, in Lahore, picked up a handful of earth and brought it back with me because I thought, you know,

this is the stuff my grandfather used to walk on.

To hear the full series, just search empire wherever you get your podcasts.

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