Has Charli XCX Escaped Brat Summer?

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1:18hello and welcome to this episode of the rest is entertainment with me marina high and me Richard Osmond. Hello, Marina. What are we talking about this week? We are going to talk about this idea that there's some incredible statistics about how many people self-define as a content creator these days, and we thought it was worth exploring that and what it means. Yes, we're going to be talking about Charlie XCX's new album and how you follow up an enormous hit like Brat. And we are also talking about the film website letterbox one of my absolute favorite websites in the entire world which is unbelievably brilliant but it's up for sale and everyone's worried it might no longer be uh quite as brilliant we shall find out i suppose okay are we all going to be content creators because illuminate who are the entertainment data experts they have they do a sort of six monthly report they found an unbelievable statistic which is that 39 of americans now identify as content creators.

2:1839 %? Nearly two in five identify as active content creators across digital platforms. And I think it's interesting, the word creator in itself is, you know, when everyone sort of had to stop talking about global warming and started calling it climate change, it's the word itself is now professionalized instead of just being like a YouTuber or an influencer, which seemed like it was from fake work. But tens of millions of people now identify as paid creators. I think that's extraordinary because we will get to the difference between just identifying someone and actually making money as one. But that means that there is a sort of massive middle class in the creator economy, which I think Goldman Sachs, they projected that next year it will be worth$480 billion, the creative economy.

3:10When we talk about creators, these are not just kids playing video games. These are dentists who come home at the end of the day and do dental tutorials. These are accountants who come home and talk you through spreadsheets. There is huge amounts of niche content out there, which is monetizable, which is made by professionals. But I think that 39 % of everyone being a content creator might be pushing it a bit. That self-identifying thing is doing a lot of work. But there's this incredible gig economy now of people taking their professional skills, finding a niche audience and then finding ways of monetizing the audience.

3:45It's a real thing. Yeah. Media content has become democratized incredibly fast. This has happened really, really quickly. But also the world of work is changing so rapidly that, as I say, hundreds of millions of people around the globe will identify as content creators. and that original Goldman report found that sort of 4 % of them made over$100 ,000 a year. I mean, that's still a lot, 4 % of a lot of people making a lot of money. So there's a few different areas. So we should start with business before we get into the every one of it. I was listening to something the other day with the CEO of Unilever, who's called...

4:24No, no, it's really interesting, right? You really do have a hinterland. Yes, I do. Okay, so Unilever is one of the world's largest consumer product companies. They've got masses of brands. They've got about 150 brands and things like Dove and Vaseline and Hellman's and whatever it is. They're one of those companies that owns all the other companies you've heard of. Yeah, and 4 billion people sort of touch one of their products every day, effectively, because they operate in 190 countries and it's kind of everything. But they don't have a product which is a Unilever? No, they don't. Which is a lever that does everything, like one of those remote controls that controls everything.

4:59a lever that does everything. If I was Unilever, that's what I'd be doing. They have 100 ,000 employees. But what's really interesting is that they've replaced, almost completely replacing ads with creators. They have scaled from having 10 ,000 paid creators to they have 300 ,000 paid creators. Yeah, and this is, by the way, what we would also call influencers. This world where we say people who are sending you things. That world has changed utterly. We think of influencers as people with sort of, you know, over a million followers on various things, which is what they now call a macro influencer.

5:34And the world we're talking about is the world of micro influencers, which is somewhere between 10 and 100 ,000 followers. So you can have 10 ,000 followers and be making money because Unilever, they've worked out that having a lot of small influencers is actually a much better bang for their buck than having two or three massive influencers. Or just traditional broadcast advertising. He's presided over this complete shift away from it. He says he wants one in every zip code, every postcode around the whole world. And so instead of that kind of top-down corporate messaging, it is all social first and creator disseminated.

6:11That's one big company, but it's really interesting to see that they are already on 300 ,000 paid influencers. That's insane. And also, by the way, not just one big company, but sort of a company that's always been at the forefront of advertising. It's always been at the forefront of branding and marketing and where we go next and where they lead. An awful lot of other people will follow. So this is not going to get any smaller in the next few years, this idea of micro-influences. Those are the small ones. But then equally in business, you've got, and people talk about this all the time now, founders can't just be, you know, you can't just invent your thing.

6:42Documenting it and posting about it is just a huge social activity. It's a massive part of the job. and you're expected to document your thinking publicly. It's not like an optional marketing strategy anymore. You have to build the product, then you have to run the company, but you have to be an always-on creator. You have to. You have to tell your story. Because there's no search traffic anymore. Yeah, and it's a familiar thing. That idea that the story behind a brand is very important and the origins of a brand is important. But now it's sort of everything. At the beginning, as you say, when you're launching a product, if you go for an IPO, you can see now that the, you know, Elon Musk is the most obvious example, but it happens all the way down that the founders of a company or the chief executives of a company have to be able to tell their own story in their own space before you have an IPO.

7:34I mean, you literally sort of can't do anything in any sphere now without going on camera and telling people what it is without posting. Yeah, I find it exhausting. Yeah. But then so moving down from that. There's a sort of middle class. It's interesting that there are so many now journalists who are sort of just like have become a creator. And there's a woman who's studying all these people who were just moving away from kind of traditional legacy outlets. And she said, there's not one creator that's losing sleep wondering, is the Washington Post or the New York Times taking my audience? Because that is not happening, but the reverse is.

8:10So these big kind of legacy things, people are moving away and people are moving into these kind of individual spaces. So the next thing you have to think of is like, is the creator economy, is it like a content industry? Or is it actually like an acquirable asset class? Clearly, like Unilever thinks it's almost like an asset class. It's, you know, an asset class is something like shares or whatever, real estate or bonds or something that performs, shares similar characteristics and kind of performs in the same way in markets. So, but life has become lifestyle content. So all of these people, the supposedly private self, everybody posts all things like their pregnancy tests or their child's first steps or everything.

8:50It becomes public labor all the time. And it started with things like the mummy bloggers. And then suddenly these people who were just doing something at home about, and then it really interestingly, you saw, oh my gosh, these people are now creators. They have these huge businesses, but it's now so far vast and it's everywhere i mean dating is completely enmeshed with it but this idea of creator as a social identity a lot of it is a form of i i you know you people want to say they're a creator why do you think that is it's like people have always wanted to say they're an artist yeah because it's you know there's because they are an artist at heart that's the point and you know lots of people in their hearts are creative and they are creators and this gives you the opportunity to self-identify as that in the same way that very very rich men and children are very very rich men have always self-identified as film producers but you know it's like it's a thing you can say and do i think personally i i think it's very good to have a any outlet for creativity i also think that it's great that it's reducing obstacles to genuinely creative people to make a bit of money as well but the idea that 39 of people self-identify as uh content creators is plainly absurd but that's you know i don't think it is but 49 of people in britain self-identify as working class i mean that's not true as well it's like you can't identify as what you want right there's an awful lot of right-wing bloggers who are self-identifying as content creators who uh don't let anyone else self-identify and you go but hold on you're saying that you're a content creator but you know you don't make any money so you're self-identifying i want yeah but i think i think that money doesn't have to be involved for people to feel that but creation is is now default behavior it's your if you you feel like if you're not doing it, then you're not participating.

10:35And that's been very, and obviously AI is going to further turbocharge that because it's much easier to create things. But there's that, what felt like a newish category, what they call a prosumer. So you're not like just a producer, but you're also a consumer. That's now, I think it's almost a cultural norm. It certainly is if 39 % of people are saying it. Well, it's, it's, there's two personality types. And this ties into it, which is people who are always on transmit and people who are mainly on receive. and culturally we've turned into a group of people who are always on transmit and that's you sort of think well we need receivers as well for this economy we can't we can't all be transmitting all the time but if you're a prosumer then you're both and that's what people are because they're sort of they produce stuff themselves but they are also the consumption is part of the participation so going back to that thing of like the most intimate moments of people's lives are posted But actually, people are just online all the time.

11:30And I've talked about this before, but you are basically, you work for the platforms. People spend five or six hours on these platforms. They work for the algorithm. every day every day that is if you did five to six hours of anything else you would be doing what we used to call a part-time job okay and they have other jobs they have other jobs but i actually increasingly think that their real role in the economy is the five to six hours they're spending online powering these vast and insane and insanely rich companies often for free so micro influencing is interesting i think and the reason why it's really really taken off because you would say about someone with 10 000 followers is that really of any use to a brand now the engagement is the absolute key and that's what all advertisers and all marketers look for so if you've got say people over at 1 million followers they get an engagement of about one percent and by engagement that could literally just be replying or it can be but the most important engagement of course is buying is you know putting some money into the ecosystem micro influencers have about three times that they have like 3.2 percent engagement so they've got far fewer people but the people who are following them are far more engaged.

12:37And because it is a more personal thing, if you follow Cristiano Ronaldo, there's 600 million people following him. And so you know a lot of those are bots, a lot of those are not. There's lots of natural wastage there. If you've got a dentist who has 12 ,000 people following them, those people tend to be quite engaged. They're following for a reason. They've chosen to follow that person. They chose to follow for very niche advice. If you're a dentist, I choose dentists because there are examples of these people making a million pound a year. Who become creative. who become creators uh all day every day you've got new patients coming in and you're saying oh by the way you're brushing slightly too hard or this is the new way to brush and make sure this is how i would floss not that and every time every single patient is saying oh god that's really interesting that's and next time they come back in go i really started flossing differently because of what you said thank you it doesn't take more than a couple of years of that to think i mean everyone I talk to really really likes this advice that I give why don't I just I'll sort of stick it on a video I've got a couple of hours at the end of the day I could do this get a ring light yeah I can get a ring light and so you show people how to brush how to floss you show them stuff that is obvious to you because it's in your professional wheelhouse but might be less obvious to them and suddenly everyone's like everyone's like that one individual person so instead of talking to one patient at a time you talk to 12 ,000 people it doesn't take long for an oral bee to go oh that's interesting this person lots of people seem to really really like what they do we will put some money into them and by the way just huge multiples less than you have to put into you know someone like stacy solomon or someone someone with huge followings we'll put some money into them we'll see what return we get on our investment and over the last few years they have seen time and time and time again that they're getting really really really good return on their investment that these people with smaller followers but more engaged followers are such a huge driver of the economy and people who people trust.

14:29But Unilever have 300 ,000 of these and they want to massively scale that. What can we do? We do. That's basically how we do this. I'm so sorry. You're involved in content creation right now. Oh, no. I know you've tried to stay away from it. I've fallen into my own snare. Yeah, but that is extraordinary that there are that many and they're just trying to really, really build that up. But what's more extraordinary is that it works. Yeah. That's the really, really interesting thing. It works so much better than the absolutely multiple millions and billions that they have effectively plowed into top-down corporate-led advertising.

15:01You see why the business of it works and you see why this is a viable job for an awful lot of people. If you're sitting there and you have a job that you're aware you can, you know things that other people don't know and things that people might find useful in their daily life, you can just start doing that. You know, don't do the things that everyone else has done. If you want to become a beauty blogger, that's done. There's people who are amazing that there's brilliant in that unless you've got a new angle but if you're a professional person who does something interesting that people don't know about you can make money out of that brands will give you money uh and if people come back and you get engagement they will give you more money and you will grow more people you know it's that's a that's an interesting job to do but everybody now works for the algorithm that's the problem with it i think that um is to do this you are relying on instagram or tiktok or whatever platform you choose and that can be taken away from you almost immediately so for example if you're on tiktok two ways of getting paid as a micro influencer firstly you get money directly from the client from a unilever or someone like that they will pay you for a post uh or they might put you on a retainer depends how that works but secondly um the place where you can really make money is that you get a share of any marketplace money coming in so tiktok has a very good shop front which people buy things through you get a share of that and that suddenly you're like but hold on I used to go into the dental surgery every day now I'm getting money every time someone buys a particular type of toothbrush suddenly I'm on$250 ,000 a year and I can just sit at home however TikTok tomorrow in the same way that you know Facebook have done with big publishers TikTok tomorrow could change their terms of service.

16:45TikTok tomorrow could end your business. And that's a very precarious place to be. But all work is precarious. And that's what people think now. I guess so. People think more and more that all work is precarious. And why would you not have a side hustle doing these things and always? Yeah, I suppose so. But if this is becoming such an enormous business, and the one thing we know about the TikToks and Instagrams and Facebooks of this world is the more money there is to be made the more they try and rake of it and that's probably coming out of your pocket is that i would say is uh is it's speaking to your point about that you've been completely reliant on the platforms and you are sort of working for the platforms as well everybody works in the content minds now everybody works down the content minds but um it's a very very interesting way of getting because the only way it really works is if you're good the only way it really works is if you have authority and if people trust you and believe you and you promote things to them that work for them because then they return so it has a meritocracy to it i mean as always i always think the hilarious thing of i bang on all the time about how um you know the there's fewer barriers to entry in the content um you know these days and how when i started in tv everyone was middle class and then you look at some of the big youtubers and influencers you go Oh, you all went to public school as well.

18:08There's something, you know, happens there. But I do think it's a 39 % of people saying they're content creators and a good number of people genuinely making a living out of it in a way that didn't used to happen. You talked about journalists as well. The other side of this coin, it's not just the… Because it's become the kind of aspirational identity. Yeah. But the idea now that bands and journalists and people on that side of things have their own patrons and can get paid individually by people, again, it's having that niche audience, but who really trust you and like you and believe in you.

18:38And if you're a content creator, I always think that podcast, Finn versus History, which is Finn Taylor and Horatio Gould. Someone's telling me the other day how much money they each make a year. And it's a huge amount of money entirely off their own back, entirely off people, you know, paying them directly, entirely off having a group of people who love what it is that you do and being paid directly. And that, by the way, is much less platform dependent than a lot of the influence and things. there are ways and means now of making money that there didn't used to be and i just think that you know we can sort of talk about the platforms and we can talk about oh god everyone's a creator but it's there's just there are so many people out there now who can make a living doing this who wouldn't have been able to do it five years ago yeah it's something about that it's got a huge middle class that's what i'm saying like for all economies if they have a successful and thriving middle class, then perhaps they're going somewhere.

19:34Yeah, this is definitely that. But, you know, it is very easy to sneer at the world of influencing, but it's gone somewhere different. I'm not, I think we're all going to be them. No, I mean, previously, you know, listen, I've written books where influencers have been the murder victims. You know, I've been, I've done it too. We solve murders, the first one, the next one is out in September. It is. But, you know, I think there is this, something has happened, something has changed, and there are a new group of content creators who can get paid directly by people to speak directly to a small...

20:06But it's vast. It's a vast class of them. But the idea of the nicheness of our culture being where the money is now and the idea of journalists being able to write a Patreon for, you know, not a huge amount of people, but for that to be a better living than writing a column for a national newspaper or something like that. You know, there's something good in that, isn't there? There's something, isn't there, in we're destroying the hierarchy of work. this idea that you go to work for 45 years at the same place and you have a boss and your boss has a boss and your boss's boss has a boss you are now if you are really good at what you do you don't have to wait five years to be promoted you don't have to go and sit in a meeting where people less talented than you are telling you what to do you don't have to constantly be sort of overlooked because somebody went to uh you know the same school as the person you're working for wants to get the job instead you can go home you can turn your ring light on you can tell people what it is that you do and how you do it and if they think you're good if you give value to them then you have a completely different way of making a living you have a completely different career you don't have that 45 years and a carriage clock at the end of it you have this hustle all the time it's graft all the time but there are ways and means of getting paid just to be yourself with your own skills i should say this section of the podcast is not sponsored by big ring light but you know if you're interested hit me up shall we go to some adverts and afterwards talk about charlie xcx we should do talking of macro influencers

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22:47welcome back everybody now charlie xcx one of the few people in show business to have a surname that's entirely made of roman numerals emania vidic is my other favorite has a new album out marina yes it's called music fashion film she says it's about process okay how did you find it Richard? I loved it. I think, you know, I'm a big fan of Charlie X. Yes, well, I always find interesting. So obviously, Brat was so enormous. That was two summers ago. Two summers ago. And this idea of how you follow up something that's absolutely enormous, I always find quite interesting. What she's done is sort of what Nirvana did after Nevermind, when they bought out In Utero, which is a bit scrappier, a bit kind of, no, we're not going to do this stadium stuff anymore.

23:27We're going to show you who we really are. And she sort of paired it back a bit as a bit grungier, a bit dirtier, a bit more guitar-y. So she sort of said, I'm not going to try and compete with this uber pop of brat i'm actually going to show you a different side of myself which i think is quite a smart way of following up something because you can't get bigger than brat you know and actually it was it's really interesting brat was such a i mean obviously we talked about it at the time for someone who'd been a sort of relatively niche artist she it became a complete phenomenon and i mean for me i find it quite depressing that like anything that it feels talking about monoculture, anything that feels countercultural that hits immediately becomes hoovered up and commodified instantly by the mainstream.

24:14I mean, some of the stuff that happened with Brat, you would not be wanting if you were a cool and edgy pop star. I mean, do you remember during the election, Kamala Harris changing her whole page to Brat? It's like, this is so, I find so much of what happened with it so awful. There's a certain thing about being too big because everyone climbs on everything. You know, you can't, you know, everyone is making, as we said, everyone's making content about everything. So everyone is making content about your thing because it's the thing that people are talking about. Yeah. It's a lot. It was really awful.

24:44And it was like the total mainstreaming of something. You know, she's supposed to be a sort of like edgy art school kind of club girl. And then I don't know. I have to say it's difficult. nowadays we particularly demand reinventions and pivots and people by saying how am I going to follow up you know by more of the same people feel they have to kind of reinvent themselves and that everyone's got to be in a series of eras if you will um and so you know I suppose she says oh I'm a contrarian I'm this is like some kind of interstitial album and I'm just going to do I found quite a lot of it quite phoned in I have to say but I also what I like about what I do like about it is the sense that like after everybody piled on onto brat and just joined the bandwagon perhaps it will serve as some kind of fandom cull which is what nirvana did with in utero yeah i hate these fans i want to get rid of these new fans which is very very common if you're charlie xcx and you're in the moment as you say brat was so enormous but you know she sat and recorded that in the studio with her mates and when it first started going massive she sort of starts counting the money and thinks oh my god this is insane and then as you say it goes super super massive and suddenly your public property in a way that you weren't before and suddenly everyone is thinking what is she going to do next that's a lot of pressure i think if you're charlie xcx you think i'm going to do 20 albums in my career you know they're all going to be individual ones this is going to be a good one you know can we talk about her time since then and what she has actually done because i think it's quite interesting so you obviously have this absolute monster hit that just gets co-opted by everybody she did the moment the a24 sort of mockumentary which it's weird i was really looking forward to that and i found it it was kind of less funny than it should have been and it was whatever but it's sort of about a meta version she is becoming very very meta anyway then she got a sub stack because you know she's an artist yeah um she said she talked a lot about film and she did the wuthering heights soundtrack yeah and then the first single from this new album she's saying the dance floor's dead you know it's all about rock music instead to a huge degree.

26:50It's so meta and it's supposed to be phoned in and like, does she get, you know, of course she gets the joke, she gets the joke before you, in fact, she just wrote the joke. I don't mean this. Yes, I mean this. No, I don't really mean this. It's difficult when any artist gets, we talked about this a bit with Harry Styles to the point where, and he actually took a long time away, where you get to a stage in your career where you can only sing about what it's like to be really famous. Yeah. And I always think that can be quite a difficult spot. It's, I mean, I think, you know, I want to talk about some of the other people who followed up massive hits and who's done it well and who's done it badly and i think she's done it pretty well i think she she seems to be in control of who she is you know it's just interesting things but i i just think you can't you can't judge on this brat was so huge and she's still charlie xx that she was five years ago she's still like a woman who just wakes up in the morning so you know she has to deal with all of that and that's quite difficult you look at something like um the people who follow things up best so fleetwood mac when that first when Fleetwood Mac itself came out and was like massive like huge and everyone's thinking oh my god you're never gonna follow that and there's no way you're following up Fleetwood Mac and they followed that up with Rumours which is by some standards one of the biggest albums of all time they sort of just did the same thing yeah but better they didn't feel they had to pivot yeah but now we live in a period where everyone has to reinvent yeah so Nirvana did pivot that's for sure Radiohead is a perfect example so the Benz and more particularly I think it had been so insanely enormous i'd say the creep was brat enormous yeah that you got these guys from oxfordshire who'd sort of you know they've been in a band for a while released this song that the world had just eaten up and i oh my god what do we do next easiest thing in the world there would be to do the ben's part two actually they come back with okay computer which if you look back is sort of a insane masterpiece yeah they then followed that up by the way with kid a where they go no this is the band we were all along okay computer was us just letting you know we just the bends and then they follow that up that's an extraordinary way to do that and they've got longevity and they've they've got that kind of life you look in movies you look at someone like tarantino who has to follow up reservoir dogs which again exploded like a bomb in culture it was huge and a huge movie you think oh my god how do you follow that up and forget true romance because that wasn't really a that wasn't his um he didn't direct directing he comes out with pulp fiction which has a lot of the stuff from reservoir dogs but shows the sort of genius of his filmmaking you know plays about with timelines you know extraordinarily iconic builds on everything that people had loved about uh reservoir dogs and comes back with that so you know it is absolutely doable you get someone like so donna tart with the secret history is a is probably the perfect example in books so she comes out the secret history it's almost impossible to have a more iconic book than secret history was absolutely enormous everywhere in the world the pressure to follow up that up from the publishers from everyone even back in those days of culture would have been enormous I mean, crazily enormous.

29:39She waits 10 years, does The Little Friend, which is a great book. Then waits another 10 years for The Goldfinch, which is another great book. So you can do it. You can follow up these enormous things. You can do it. But there's a lot of pressure. Most people fail. Look at Guns and Roses after Appetite for Destruction. They're in that Use Your Illusion era. What about the November Rain video, which is iconic? Listen, nobody loves November Rain more than me. Harper Lee. What about me? I like it more than you. Oh, do you? How much do you like it? Out of 2 ,000. No, just ask it. I'm not playing your game.

30:09No, I'm just interested because you said you liked it more than me. I like it more than you. Harper Lee and J.D. Salinger, both interesting. They're both, you know, Catcher in the Rye and Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee never... Huge Brat Summers. Huge Brat Summers. Those are the Brat Summers of their time. Yeah. You know, Harper Lee never follows up to Kill a Mockingbird. She does the kind of prequel which she'd written before. J.D. Salinger does a few short stories but really spends 45 years writing nothing at all. I mean, that's an option you can take when you've had a massive hit. Terrence Malick, after Badlands and Days of Heaven, doesn't make a movie for 20 years.

30:44It's hard to do it. And I think, you know, Stone Roses, oh my God, the perfect example. I mean, that was massive, the Stone Roses. And they think, are they going to follow this up? It's going to be amazing. And they did The Second Coming, which is absolutely fine. But it took them a long time, cost them a lot of money and was kind of fine. I think it's good. But none of them had to live in the culture that we have to live in now where you've got to be an always-on pop star. I mean, just saying the things she's done since, but in the old days, she could have gone away for three or four years and then come back.

31:14She's done The Moment, she's done her substack, she's done the Wuthering Heights soundtrack. There's a whole lot you have to do because you can never be off. You've just got to constantly produce or you fall, you know, by the wayside. That's why I like this album because it's not her. She hasn't tried, she's just made a good album with her mates. And that's all, I think that's all that you can have real control of. but quite apart from anything else you do in between times and who you are and how you promote yourself. When you're in the studio, that's all you can do is keep your head down, write some songs you like, record some songs you like, put them out, two years later, do that again, two years later, do that again.

31:50And I do think there's something that's incredibly noble about that. If you want to take advantage of everything in our culture and the money that's in our culture, the best artists every couple of years, look at Madonna now with the new album. They just go back in. The new album's brilliant. They go back in and they do it again. you know they get their head down they do good work and they put it out and people like it again and that's when you get this kind of longevity and it must be so hard in the culture that we have at the moment it must be so hard but that's why when i listened to the album i thought yeah that's fine i thought you know what that's exactly what it should be it should be absolutely fine it should just be an album you go oh yeah that's good in a couple of years she'll do something else and a couple years after that she'll do something else yeah it'd be good if the politicians don't bandwagon on this one.

32:31I can't see, I mean, some of the songs, I can't really see which one they choose. I can't see Andy Burnham doing a Commodore Harris. No, I mean, piling onto, yeah, that track that's like, sounds like an edging video, if I may. Or can I talk about another album that I absolutely love? You don't want to talk about edging videos? Okay, fine. Listen, you go ahead, if you need to, I will stick with November Rain, which sounds like an edging video. Oh my God, no, please. Neutral Milk Hotel, he did In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and that's an album that every indie kid in the whole world loves and was super massive he has never recorded another record since it's hard man it's hard if you're a creator and stuff comes out you can react in one or two ways you can either go into your shell or you can go I've sort of just got to get back on it something out and then yeah yeah can I give the last word to Joseph Heller please so Joseph Heller I love and after Catch 22 an interviewer said to him I don't think you've ever done anything as good as Catch 22 and Joseph Heller said well yeah you're right but who has and you know you're lucky to have you're lucky to have these big nevermind stone roses brats you're lucky to have them and if you're smart you can carry on your career and keep keep doing good work and keep making good music but my god the pressure of it is insane yeah or m night shayama land oh that's a great example after six cents yeah after six cents but also like everything after that becomes more and more there's a really good There's a really good book about when he's making this film, The Lady in the Water.

34:00And there's a great book about it called The Man Who Had Voices. It's incredibly pretentious. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. It's the journalist who's like giving full access to him for the making of this film that turns out to, spoiler, not be one to trouble the scorers. That's a tough one to follow because it's so brilliant. It's got such a brilliant, unique twist to it. A bit of it, I think, thought, okay, I need to just make sure I've got a brilliant twist for every single thing that I do now. and that's, you know, perhaps he would have made more interesting films if there hadn't been quite as successful.

34:30You're just chasing that first high. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's anyway. Anyway. I recommend the album. Now, shall we talk about Letterboxd, which is the social media film discovery platform, which became huge in the pandemic. Lots of really bad things became huge in the pandemic, but this was one of the good ones. This is a good one, yeah. Via the app. And it's really interesting. It's like, it's massive with Gen Z and kind of younger millennials. And a huge amount of people have discovered film culture this way. It's a discovery engine first, I guess. And it's pushed that generation in the direction of things like horror and world cinema and other sort of different genre things.