Gen Alpha Runs Culture Now

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Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina High. And me, Richard Osman. It's very nearly 2026. We stand on the threshold for 2026. We're looking back into the mists of 2025. Do you remember 2025, everyone? How long ago in your brain would you say the millennium was? Like eight years? It feels really recent.

It feels like maths I can do, but yes, spiritually it feels much, much more recent. Yeah, it's a quarter of a century ago. That's terrifying. But it also feels like a form of Kansas that we're not in anymore because... When we look at some of the things, we're going to talk about this year and we're going to talk about who had a good year and who had a bad year. And some of these things, you wouldn't even know what you were...

remotely what you were talking about. Oh, that's, yeah, we should, I mean, my first one, my first good year is something that in the year 2000, you would have understood. Okay. But, yeah, a lot of them. I think, let's do a... Year 2000 check as we go along. So what someone from the year 2000 who's just woken up now, thawed from ice, would make of it. Can I start with my first Goodyear? Yes, please. Goodyear, linear television.

Yeah. Do you remember linear television? I believe it was called television then. Yes, person from 2000. We mean TV. And a great year mainly for two reasons, which is Celebrity Traitors and Dancing with the Stars. So Celebrity Traitors, enormous, mega... hit and we could talk about who um the various people in that who had a very good year because of it and dancing with the stars

has become a huge hit in America as well, especially with the younger generation. So in an era of consolidation and AI and, you know, no one's watching TV and no one's got any attention span anymore. And no one likes BBC things. Yeah, exactly that.

No one's watching the networks anymore. You know, it's shown that there is another generation who can be drawn onto linear TV. But, I mean, the best year of all has got to be everyone and anyone involved with... celebrity traitors the traitors extended universe has had a uniformly pretty amazing year yeah so the new one is starting by the way on new year's day new year's day so a couple of days time which is very exciting but

All being well, we'll be there with some reaction episodes. We're not talking about 2026, though. No, we're not. We can't. We've got to talk about 2025. Turn back from that threshold. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so within that, within the celebrity traitors... Who had the best year. Yeah, I mean... 15 million tuned in for the final. I mean, that's crazy. And Gen Z, Gen Alpha, they all watched it. It was proper...

I think people have let the rules on swearing, things like that sort of slip away when it's that compelling a game. And I think that it's become family viewing, actually, which I think is quite interesting. If you put things in that nine o'clock slot, they're not supposed to be. In all of my anecdotal experience of all sorts of families I know, it's family viewing now that.

Yeah, and so what lessons do we learn? What can you take from traders that you can move forward with and apply to another format next year to make sure you do this again? And I've got a list here. These are the lessons you can learn that you could apply.

to make something equally as big a hit. I have nothing on my list because you can never, ever learn any lessons from anything. The big lesson to learn is you can't, it'll come out of a clear blue sky the next big hit like this. Just a series of things. great creative people and they cast something well and they make it well, then every now and again lightning will strike and you'll get an enormous hit. And that's the only thing you can do.

But like Kate Phillips said in her interview with us, which I love doing. So it's the head of content at the BBC. At the BBC, and it was very moving, her whole bit about public service at the end. But actually what she said about that was, you know, that thing that she'd been looking for since the pandemic.

She was trying to get programs that address the three Gs, the three generations together, and anything that sort of feels like it might do, anything like that at all, she was sort of making bets on. Not on all of them, but that was...

If she had any list, I suppose that would be a very, very vague, nebulous area of her list. Make sure that everyone likes. Yeah, but that might bring people together in a sort of compelling and propulsive way. I think that idea that you have to watch the next episode and all of that.

that everybody's talking about it. But how interesting it made us all feel better. Yes. And how lovely, because that's what entertainment is supposed to be, really. I know we talk a lot about the politics and the business of entertainment, but really I hope what we talk about most... is the entertainment of entertainment. Yeah.

people who just sort of spread joy and do extraordinary things that they don't need to do, but they do them anyway. Well, the escapism of it, I think, particularly in that show, in a world of just ever-darkening news stories, the escapism of it, the sense that... it's absolutely no stakes because honestly like someone's charity is going to win yeah does it really matter you know and then it's absolutely at the same time everything

And you've got to watch it, you've got to watch it, you've got to be able to talk about it the next day. I'm so interested to see what it's going to do for the numbers of…

the civilian version, which is beginning again, because so many people felt like, oh, I don't really watch that show, even though I know a lot of people talk about it. Oh, it sounds a bit mean. Yeah. And because it was a celebrity version, they felt that they'd been given sort of license. Oh, this is a sort of standalone. It's a discreet.

I can just go in and watch it. And now I would be so interested to see how many of them are pulled into the civilian version, which I'm told is amazing. Yes, we're told there's gameplay we've never seen before. But I do think...

That idea that, you know, people do say sometimes about reality shows, oh no, there's a meanness to it and, you know, people are murdering people. You think, well, the fascinating thing about traitors, what's really at the heart is, I mean, they are, but they have to. Yeah. They have been given up.

a job and you know some people wear that very reluctantly some people embrace it but you're there's just it's like watching a football match and go it's a bit mean isn't it because one team's trying to score in the goal of the other team and the other team i mean it's just i mean that's That is the entertainment that we have set up. But also like football in that people are talking about the tactics.

All the time. And only about the game. Nobody's saying, oh, it's interesting when, you know, ex-person started talking about their relationship at home and where it all went wrong with their famous ex-boyfriend. None of that. It's just all the game, all the time. You don't have to think about it. Yeah, all game, all the time. So how about...

Good year from you. Well, a good year for me, I would say that Gen Alpha has had an amazing year. So anyone basically born from 2010 until now, I've got three of them at home. They have been the tastemakers in so many different ways. I would say last...

year um i mean sometimes you think is this really a matter of taste um last year the oxford um dictionary word of the year was brain rot and if you didn't know what if it got you got to the end of last year and you're like what i've never heard this word you didn't get to the end of this year and think that i would say

Kids run movie theatres. We talked about that a lot. Most of the big hits and certainly the thing that sort of appeared to rescue the cinema back in spring, which as you know, I saw and found it. definitely brain rotting, was a Minecraft movie. K-pop Demon Hunters. My God. Thank you, Gen Alpha, for that. That is the biggest thing you can possibly imagine. I think it's currently on its 25th week on the Netflix top 10. All the sort of...

All their memes. I mean, obviously, once the Prime Minister's doing 6-7 in a classroom, as my children say to me about four months prior to that moment, the meme is now dead. I'm sorry to hear that meme was dead because I was really enjoying it. Yeah.

Even the shows, things that became really big suddenly in their third thing, like The Summer I Turned Pretty, that's a huge hit. Although it's a big nostalgia show for millennials and even maybe some Gen X people who kind of, it reminds them of things that they saw when they were. That's a big, big gen alpha show. And I just think that in almost across everything, those books came out, for instance, in, I think, 2009 to 2011, those original summary term pretty books. But they're now...

My daughter's reading them all. It's almost like they came out at the wrong time and now they find their perfect moment. So I do think of Gen Alpha as increasing like complete tastemakers. Obviously, all the kind of games and the endless kind of churn of those Roblox games, but they become these big cultural things and they just can't really be ignored as a sort of... And very, very monetizable.

Yeah. I mean, incredibly monetizable because there's just a lot to spend your money on. And they really regrettably expect everything to be monetized and everything to be gamified in a way that you can spend a lot of money and lose out. For instance, at the endless blind box culture, we did the La Boo Boo's.

But all of those things, they sort of dominated. It's really interesting. I'm going to end up mentioning South Park in a later item, in a later pick. But so many of those things featured in South Park. And you think that's so odd. It's completely from the ground up, basically from children, and it's kind of dominated the big political satire of the year. So I would say Gen A, the tastemakers. Because when we were that generation, I mean, we had...

Space Hoppers and Etch-a-Sketch, and that's about it. Yeah. We weren't making any cultural... I mean, we were to ourselves, perhaps, but... We weren't making any money for anyone. No. It's funny, like, generations before us... that could be sent up chimneys, so they were making money. This generation are making money for big corporations by demanding spin-offs from every single piece of IP, whereas we were absolutely economically hopeless. Yeah.

They didn't run movie theatres for us, let me tell you. Yeah. We just sat there. Yeah. Watching Blue Peter. Who's making money out of that? John Noakes? Not much. Should I do a bad year? Yeah.

Bad year for anyone who thought there would ever be any consequences to working in Saudi Arabia. Oh. Because it turns out there are not. No. So we had the Riyadh… Comedy Festival would be the main version of this, and a lot of comedians going over there, and a lot of comedians who've talked about freedom of speech and all these things, and deliberately going somewhere where we know there wasn't freedom of speech and there were things they weren't allowed to...

Do your bone sore jokes. No, they didn't do any of that. And lots of them have tied themselves in knots explaining why they did it or just said, I did it because I wanted to and I did it for money. And nobody really cares.

Certainly not enough people care. The culture doesn't care. The people who are booking them for other things certainly don't care. The people who are booking them for shows don't care. They were allowed to do it. They got paid a load of money to do it, and they're allowed to justify the reasons for doing it. But they... Definitely, in the same way as the killers of Jamal Khashoggi, they got away with it.

Yeah, and you could see that we recently had the Red Sea Film Festival, which honestly started about five minutes ago and was tiny. And it's now, it had so many stars and directors. I remember somebody, a director actually saying to me two years ago,

should I go they'll open it with my film and I was like oh do you have to I don't think you have to now nobody would ask you that question now everybody went over everyone's given these kind of confected awards and I definitely think that the Saudis will be buying actually

into Hollywood in a much more open way next year. Yeah, they definitely were. So you're right. There are arguments for going out there. There definitely are. There are arguments for going out there, engaging. There are arguments for taking their money. When we talked about the Riyadh Comedy Festival, Andrew Maxwell had a very, very good...

argument for it and you think that's absolutely fair enough and there are definitely some of the american comedians when you listen to their um explanations you think okay yeah i absolutely get it but certainly for people who think this is a tide they are going to stem and that there are ways and means of stopping people taking money that they think is unacceptable, that I think is impossible.

I think comedians, once you've sort of gone through that barrier once, once you've breasted that tape, I think that tape is forever broken and people can run through it at will now. And I think they will as well. And as I say, sometimes there'll be good reasons for it, but certainly it's good news if you are happy to be paid a lot of money and not worry too much about the ethics or optics.

of that money because there are no ethics and there are no optics left. Okay. My bad year, which I've got to hope that the tape can be somehow unbreasted, is control in the world of entertainment. I think that obviously... Trump's attempts to control entertainment. We had lots of different things. We had Jimmy Kimmel being taken off air for sort of perceived disrespect in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting.

Trump quite clearly wanting the Ellisons to get Paramount. And who knows how the ongoing story with Warner Bros. will play out. He's got this thing called Media Offender of the Week. And what was... It's not that he does it because you expect him to do things like that. It was very, very disappointing that ABC, under the aegis of Disney, took Kimmel off the air. I think that was very, very dangerous.

I have to say there's some great pushbacks. I have loved South Park. And even though they've had jokes in the series about like, oh no, South Park's just all about politics now. But it's been great that something exists on... the Addison's platform, which you know that they don't want to have their... And also, America is all about politics now.

Yes, I'm afraid it is. What are you going to do? So I've loved that sort of pushing back against control. The other area in which I think control is becoming a big problem, I think documentaries are becoming totally corrupted. I think there are so many documentaries that are executive produced by their own. subjects obviously the Beckham one was a very high profile one at the start but the Simon Cowell one which we talked about

The Victoria Beckham one was even more so, and I really found, essentially, there's a big story in her family, which we ended up talking about quite a bit this year, which is that they're estranged from their eldest son. None of this was mentioned in the documentary, and I realise it's painful and awful, but...

If you're going to do a supposed warts and all documentary, you talk about that. Megan with Love. All of these things are completely controlled by their subjects. I have to say, a lot of them are on Netflix. If you talk to great documentarians or read the work of some of the ones that are now dead...

They have incredibly strict rules about what they think their ethics are and how you deal with subjects. And it really is one of the most precise and ethical and moral kind of versions of the art form. I think that's all gone. You know, if I'm watching a sort of... advert for Victoria Breckham's makeup brand, and she's really going to end up, because of this, probably being able to sell her makeup. You know, I get what it is, but I think what's worrying is that people just don't...

people don't notice that anymore. So I don't know whether that tape can be unbreasted, but there will always be quality documentary makers who understand how to engage with subjects. If you were a celebrity, though, or someone with a... I mean, it's hard to argue.

that you should let somebody else produce your documentary if you are allowed to. No wonder. This would never have been allowed in the past. You look at all the great documentary producers or people who ran documentary departments, someone like Sheila Nevins at HBO, and... Although their documentaries were about quite outlandish and extraordinary things, they had very, very strong rules about how these things should be run. And yeah, now I think...

that everyone just... It's like once you start giving people copy approval or... I mean, they've all basically got copy approval and they know how to parcel out bits of stuff and kind of memeable bits of content that are good enough and give a sort of...

of impression of candor and an impression of a curtain being revealed but in fact they're actually all about control and the subject has commissioned themselves they're sort of dreadful vanity works in my opinion and I really would love to see less of them and You know, the people who don't make documentaries like that, I'm all for. But it's become such a fashion now. If you're a celebrity, as you say, why wouldn't you? Let's go to a break. We're going to come back with a good year.

And a rather lovely good year, I think. This episode is brought to you by Channel 4. Now, Richard, settling down on a winter's evening, turn the TV on, what sort of thing are you searching for? Well, when you think about Channel 4, you think about quirky, you think about slightly off the wall.

I, my absolute go-tos, well, three things my absolute go-tos, Grand Designs, because Kevin MacLeod is the greatest television presenter in the history of factual entertainment, 24 Hours in Police Custody, again, because it changed the way those things were done. You know, it changed. We'd seen all sorts of police investigation things, but 24 hours in police custody absolutely had a new, unusual, refreshing way of covering those cases.

Every single time there is a new one, they have to release them. They can't sort of release them week by week because they're literally waiting for court cases to come through. Some of them are waiting for years. For years and years and years. But any time a new one pops up on the streaming service, I'm like, here we go. And I also love The Dog House, which is just about rescue dogs and people who want dogs. And it's almost like a slightly kind of matchmaker-y.

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back everybody now richard you promised a nice good year yes um a good year for love oh can i read you out a series of celebrity couples from this year and you just give give me your immediate take on them okay how would that be yes Okay, I'm going to start with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey getting engaged. Your English teacher's marrying your PE teacher. Yes, please. We all loved it. It was a sort of another way for her to have...

full spectrum dominance of all the headlines. Feels sort of real though. Oh no, I think it's real. Yeah. And he seems nice. He seems like a really, he seems like a very nice guy. So we're, yeah, that was good. That was a sort of happy ending and it seemed like it was happening in a perfect. So we all enjoyed the internet breaking, although, of course, it doesn't really ever break. It never breaks, really, does it? I wish it would. Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson.

Well, now they were in the naked gun and then they, yeah, they seem to have had, we now know that it was not a showmance, which I obviously thought it wouldn't be. But also, it's such a sort of, like she said, the way she's described it, because it seems to have existed in a very time-limited period. She said, we had an intimate week. It was like a Nancy Meyers movie. I mean, just keep talking, Pamela. I'm loving this. You know, we haven't seen each other really since. But it was so sort of...

of revealing and i think people just saw oh my god these two wonderful sort of i can't even call them older people because they're still so sort of gorgeous and amazing but it was there was something stolen and i dare i believe this to be true but also be a wonderful movie In the future, just, you know, Pam and Liam's week. Didn't Liam chase a bear away from their front door in his dressing gown or something? And she helped him with some form of gardening task.

I mean, I'm here for absolutely every second of that week. Sydney Sweeney as Pamela Anderson and Glenn Powell as Liam Neeson. Why not? Why not? In the future. This is a late stage role for them both. But how lovely as well. They both went, yeah, it was a week. It was great.

Yeah. But we move on. I absolutely love that one. Okay, hit me with another one. They've done the whole thing with a minimum of drama and the maximum of seeing to know what's healthy and happy for them. Yes. That's the way to do it. I wonder if you have the same view on this one, because I think there's a similar demographic to it, I would say. I don't know if it feels the same. Liz Hurley and Billy Ray Cyrus. Okay, that one's great, because...

They revealed she was essentially costumed in a plaid shirt and a sort of achy-braky coat. I don't know if she actually watched. I feel sure she would have been wearing cowboy boots at the time. Everything about the union of the two dynasties, the Cyrus's of Nashville. who are pure chaos and drama, and Liz Hurley, who is sort of mother bikini designer, sheep farmer. I can't remember what her ever-expanding Instagram bio is, but I love it all. That was great because it was so unexpected.

This is what we want. We want culture clash things. And as far as we know, that one is still extant. Yes, it seems to be, doesn't it? I think that's still going. I want to hear plenty more about that next year. And interestingly, in terms of celebrity power... Those two really multiply each other. Yeah. Don't they? Which is not always the case.

Pam and Liam, they are both absolutely famous enough in their own regard and they have a real similarity, I think, of status. There's something about Liz Hurley and Billy Ray Cyrus where you think, oh, you are both amplifying each other. Yeah, different audiences, the whole thing.

Isn't that what love is? Amplifying each other. I think we do now need to, okay, and if they have to executive produce a documentary about themselves, fine, I'll give up my principles and watch it. And they met on a movie as well. Yes, they did. They met on Christmas in Paradise. Yes!

Yes, which I watched. It's always Christmas in Paradise. Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau. Oh my God. I want to hear a lot more of that. There was a funny thing where they were having to go and see some former world leaders and she was... They're in like an absolute little mini suit the other week. There's a lot more on that bone, let's just say that. I think there's a bouncing back from Orlando Bloom and him bouncing back from, you know... Canada. Yeah, from Canada.

Because his dad, Pierre Trudeau, who's also Prime Minister of Canada, he briefly dated Barbara Streisand. Well, there you go. There's a precedent. I'd like to hear a lot more about that one. I think it was Prime Minister. Sorry. Very good. Very good. I'm going to finish. Listen, we have to finish here. I mean, love, it takes many forms, does it not? And relationships take many, many forms. And, you know, there are people that we're so...

happy for and people who wear their love very, very lightly. I wonder if we could talk about the marriage of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez. Well, I mean, this is, this is a, what I found interesting about this, I mean,

As, you know, I yield to no one in my admiration for people who have... I mean, actually, on one of our very first podcasts, we talked about, you know, their place out in the desert where they've got that 10,000-year-old clock or something, that 10,000-year clock, and Lauren was draped over its collar. Well, we've come a long way since then. They took over Venice, as we remember for the wedding. But I will, yeah, of those, that is a completely, what they've given is a completely different.

ultra rich aesthetic it's like goodbye stealth wealth or all your quiet luxury okay she wants to look really hot really rich and really in love and like she's having a really really good time All the time. This is a different... Perhaps she is. She does look as though she is all the time. It's been quite transfixing, that one, and we'll have to keep an eye on it. But they want to put it all out there all the time, which I find sort of fascinating because...

What normally used to happen in the old days is that when people became very rich, they retreated into kind of snobberies and privacy and all sorts of things. I do remember, well, we did talk about this briefly, but when they had this... The party for Kris Jenner, whose new face certainly had a good year.

They made everybody get out on the pavement outside, you know, everyone from Meghan and Harry. Even though you can drive in because they want people to go in front of all the paparazzi. Do you think it's performative in some way, their love? That seems very cynical to me. No, I think he's so incredibly grateful that she wants to have sex with him. Nobody could be more grateful. Yeah, you can see that. So, listen, Good Year for Love, our favourite romance, I think...

Pam Anderson and Liam Neeson. Then we'll have Travis and Taylor because there's a lot more to come. And then just because it's fun when two unlikely friends get together, we'll go with Liz Hurley and Billy Ray Cyrus. Right. I know a lot of people think that Sydney Sweeney had a bad year and she'd been because she had...

I suppose she had a couple of movies that didn't do very well, but most particularly, she had a big scandal, which people... I can't even believe I'm saying this. This is how you knew it was 2025, that they thought her jeans advert was something to do with... Eugenics. I can't. So there we go. Anyone from the year 2000 who has just thawed out. Firstly, they're going, oh, I loved the bit about Pamela Anderson and Liz Hurley. I was absolutely on board with that.

I wasn't quite sure who Taylor Swift was. They are now kind of going, oh, a jeans advert and eugenics, you say. Tell me more about your year. Okay, well, at the start of this year, Sydney Sweeney, she's been in a couple of rom-coms. And she's been in euphoria.

Even though she is super hot, she's also been miscast in a couple of things. Now, I, as you know, believe she would continue to be miscast. She did a good horror. She continued to be miscast, but she was good in that, Christy, which I've seen. The boxing one. The boxing one. Although, let me say again, nobody wants to see Sydney Sweeney put on £30 and get beaten up.

And in a domestic violence boxing movie, okay? Nobody wants to see this. I sound like that guy on Tootsie. Like, Michael, no one wants to see a play about people who go back to live next to nuclear waste. You can get that in New Jersey. Anyway, so we... And then she also starts going out with Scooter Braun, which is, for me, a depressing relationship. Remind us who Scooter Braun is. He's the person who discovered...

Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande managed their early careers. They all absolutely detest him. He owned Taylor Swift's Masters for a bit. Everybody, everybody. He's a sort of universally loathed figure. Apart from by Sidney Sweeney. Apart from by Sidney Sweeney. Yeah, I mean, so the relationship wasn't great. I mean, people were screwed up. They mess at Lauren and Jeff's wedding, I believe.

Did they? Yeah. Someone said to me, it's like a 20-year-old kid signing for it, one of the kids signing for our NASA. Okay. So, okay, but I would argue that... A lot of people know, everybody knows who Sydney Sweeney is now. Not everybody, but a lot more people know who she is than this time last year.

There's been a big vibe shift where people are not necessarily thinking that they must only make one particular type of entertainment for one particular type of political audience. Who knows if she's a Trump supporter or not? I just would argue with the fact that you can't argue with hotness. She's a lot more out there than she was last year. She was good in that film that was a bad idea, but she was good at it. And I don't know. I just think more to come. I actually think...

I definitely don't think she's had a bad year. I agree. Listen, personally, who knows what sort of year she's had, but in terms of her profile, she's had a good year. And as you say, if she's a good actor, which she seems to be from some of her projects, then having that high profile can only help her. It gives her more choices.

more choices means more opportunities. And yeah, she will, in a world where there are fewer and fewer stars, she seems to have found at least the first rung on that letter. I feel like there are a lot of stars. It's just going to be so weird to go back and... see it is Euphoria the final season of Euphoria where when they last had Euphoria there were some people in it and now it's like oh coming back Sydney Sweeney Zendaya

Jacob Elordi. I mean, it's nice. All the most famous people in the world. Yeah. So that will be interesting. I think the set's quite interesting too. Anyway, so I think she's had a good year. Bad year. But really, it's a secret good year. Bad year for AI musicians.

I would say. You know, we talk about AI slop a lot. And I do, you know, but my view is always it's creative people are going to kick back against this. Everybody's attitude towards AI is, I hate it. And I hate the fact that everyone else loves it. And you think, no, everyone hates it. We all hate it. There's always going to be a group of people who can't tell the difference between two things. There always has been. There's always been high culture, low culture, all of that stuff. But...

I genuinely think that the rise of AI, let's say in music, is making people really, really appreciate musicianship. It's really making people who have read any AI literature... appreciate authors it's really making anyone who's had to sit through that awful ai reality show non-player combat appreciate what tv producers do for a living so there's been a bunch of bands who have

you know, genuinely done good numbers on Spotify who are not real. So the Velvet Sundown, who we've talked about before, we've got, you know, two million streams. But guess how many two million streams is? Almost none. There's a band called Breaking Rust and there's this huge thing about Breaking Rust when they got to number one. They're going, oh my God, they're literally number one on us. This is like the worst thing that could ever happen. With, by the way...

absolutely terrible song. I won't even tell you what it's called because there's absolutely no point. But they got to the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart, number one. Number one on the, let me repeat that, the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales.

chart so it's they've got a chart for everything in america yeah it's country it's digital and it's sales it's not even oh i'm going to stream these things they got to number one to get to number one on that chart you have to sell 3 000 copies and those are 99 cents each. So you could literally buy number one on that chart.

for $3,000 I would love to buy you a number one oh I would love that as well I know oh my god let's do that I bought you an executive producer credit on a very bad film and I would really like to buy you a number one record at some point in one of the really obscure I can't afford to own one of the big charts. Even that one is, yeah, let's try and find the most obscure chart we can buy a number one in. And while, you know, there's been lots of...

you know, wailing and gnashing of teeth and lots of articles about how awful it is that, you know, this music is being made. You know, they've been number one in the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales Charts. Meanwhile... Oasis have just contributed over a billion pound to the UK economy just by playing live shows. A billion pound, a billion pound just from some kids from Manchester who...

Go in the bedroom. Yeah, exactly that. Playing guitars and then going out and entertaining people. People standing next to each other, sitting next to each other, singing along, cheering along. Coldplay made even more Coldplay, like 1.52 billion just in...

ticket sales they made you know there are these huge tours by real human beings who write real songs that mean real things to people and there's this utter just sort of Dross, which we all have to pretend to be terrified about, and Tilly Norwood, the...

ridiculous AI actor and listen we all know things we've talked many times about what's going to happen with AI but I tell you one thing that's going to happen and that is it puts a huge premium on real human beings with real hearts doing real things and entertaining us

doing stuff that a machine will never be able to do. And I think that this year was a bad year for AI musicians. I think next year will be a bad year for AI musicians. And I think it's going to be a bad century for AI musicians. Well, I think it's really interesting. I was talking to you.

sort of big financial investor. No, not a big computer. I was talking to a big financial investor who is just by investing so heavily in all... I mean, the most disparate types of live, I couldn't believe it, all the different things, just thinking, oh, yeah, no, I'm going to have a punt on that because I think people want to come together.

really interesting different things to do with sports to do with music to do all sorts of different things anything where people might physically come together this guy is trying to put money into it and I thought it was really very interesting I think live events theatre all those things if we can find a way

of reducing the ticket prices for live events and it's hard and i know it's really hard for local theaters these are not people who are making millions upon millions each year and fifa i mean i mean jesus come on lads So I do know it's hard for local theatres, it's hard for local venues, just the admin around putting on live events.

is difficult and can be a lot easier but it's the the demand the pent-up demand to do real things next to real human beings and seeing someone do something live on a stage that you know has not been made up i think is is That's the human spirit. That's the human condition. And I think there's a lot of money to be made in it. And all this AI stuff will continue and it's absolutely fine. But think about what you like. Think about what the people around you like and realize that most of us.

will react against this, and most of us want real things, and that's what we'll seek out. Thank you for a lovely year. Oh, it was so lovely. We've had such fun, haven't we? Yeah, we've talked about a lot and a lot of nonsense. But yeah, it's been an enormous amount of fun. I look forward to 2026 with you very, very much. Oh, me too. So much, always. Yeah, and also to everyone who's listened. I can't tell you how much we appreciate it.

And it's lovely, you know, people come up on the street all the time and talk about the podcast. Oh, I'd like to say thank you. I have so many people come up. And I just want to say to all of you, or like tap me on the shoulder or the tube or whatever, all of you, it's so lovely. Thank you. And people are so apologetic. They say, oh, I'm sorry, you don't want to hear this.

We always want to hear it. Genuinely, it's lovely because there's no point speaking if no one's listening and it's a partnership between everyone. So it's a privilege to do. So yes, always, always come up and if you've listened, then... Do tell us because it's an absolute treat. But, yeah, Happy New Year, listeners, and a Happy New Year, Marina. Happy New Year, listeners, and to you, Richard.

Hello, I'm Professor Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens, creator of Vsauce. We thought we would join you for a moment, completely uninvited. We are not going to stay too long. Unless you want us to, of course. We're here to tell you about our brand new show, The Rest is Science.

Every episode is going to start with something that feels initially familiar, and then we're going to unpick it and tear it apart until you no longer recognize it at all. You know how banana flavor doesn't taste like bananas? Yeah, what is that about? So it is supposed to taste like an old species of banana that was wiped out in a banana apocalypse. And now you will only find it in botanical collections in the gardens of billionaires.

Wow. Banana candy is actually the ghost of a long extinct banana. So if you like scratching the surface, thinking a little bit deeper or weirder, yes, definitely that too, you can join Michael and I every Tuesday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.