Kevin Spacey’s “Sex Addiction”: A Real Disease?

0:03Hello and welcome to this week's episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde And me, Richard Osman. Good day to thee, Marina. Hi, internet talker. Yeah, is that how they talk on the internet? Yeah. Do you say me thinks as well? Because it's an instant block. Oh, I see what you mean. No, I was sort of doing Hamnet talk. Oh, I see. Yeah. Ah, okay. What used to be called Shakespeare talk. And now it's just Hamnet talk. Hamnet talk, yeah. Well, hopefully we're going to have a slightly cheerier experience than that particular motion picture. we are talking about the return of bts who obviously the k-pop group who became the biggest act in the world they've been doing their military service and now they're back we are also talking about i think it might it might be the one of the wildest trials in hollywood history and we'll tell you why kevin spacey is back in court with his production company um suing the insurers and we'll tell you why uh later because it's so mental it is talking of which speaking of which speaking of which we will also as we head into the final week of the traitors be doing a sort of where are we now after last week's we have to talk about it oh i've we've both got a huge amount to say oh we have theories we have theories let's begin though with bts um who as i say they've finish their compulsory national military service.

1:26I mean, that's the mad thing, isn't it? There's seven of them. Yeah. They started, I mean, sort of 13 years ago when really they were put together, when they were all very young teens. And everyone in South Korea between the ages, I think, between the ages of 22 and 28, you have to do your national service. Although the government have just issued a decree saying if you're in a K-pop band, you can defer it until you're 30. I mean, imagine K-pop being that big, the government going okay we do need to just carve out vets i suppose and k-pop band members but um yeah they're all back their national service was staggered very cleverly so that each of them could have a slight hint of a solo career yeah in between but they are now all three men and they are in a way back in a way yeah of course i mean they've gone from one army the k-pop industrial complex how free are they really we'll be suddenly getting to that to another we're going to talk about them coming back and we're going to talk about the money we're making all that but i want to posit their uh a thesis which is so k-pop and and and south korean culture in general we know has been absolutely enormous you know the demon hunter squid game i mean everything we we know exactly what some south korean culture has done and is that do we think a fad a generational thing or is this a realigning of the spheres has our culture which for so long has been american based and western european based in terms of what has global reach is halyu which is this idea that south korean culture korean wave goes around the world is this now the new normal is this something that just endures forever and ever and ever and i think the bts comeback might be it might give us a big clue to that definitely agree with that i think that's a We'll definitely be going through all that.

3:14And I'd sort of like to go back just a tiny little bit as a bit of background on what they gave us and what that means, what you've just said, which is that I guess they gave the world, the wider world, this idea of stans, these incredibly obsessive fandoms. Their fandom is called Army. Yeah, ironically. Yeah. The idea of super fandom as it exists at the moment, this whole idea of parasocial relationships, those incredibly sort of obsessive fandom relationships where you think that you know the artist and they're one of your friends and therefore you have a right to kind of almost stalk them, you have a form of ownership over them.

3:56And actually, you don't need these people at all. You've never met them and you're huge amounts of removed from them. But people feel incredibly tight and close to people who they've never met. And that's the thing that's been monetised throughout our culture. And obviously, Western stars often do call out their fans for this kind of type of obsessional interest and in some ways desire to control their lives. Taylor Swift's done it. Chapel Rowan's obviously done it several times. But this never happens in K-pop. Yeah, a lot of it comes from that very unmediated relationship that social media influences have and the way that they present themselves.

4:28There is that thing of, well, I wake up with you. I go to sleep with you brushing your teeth. So it's that feeling that people are your genuine friends. People always said with artists that social media would give them this ability to have this unmediated relationship with fans and to be able to talk directly to their fans and not have to wait for the media or to be spun by the media. So it was removing this block. And actually it did do that. But what it also did was bring them right up to your door and make them think, OK, well, you do talk to me directly. And to lots of degrees, that relationship is tipped over into something very unhealthy, certainly unhealthy for the artists involved in it.

5:06But we've always had, you know, boy bands and girl bands and fandom and stuff in the 70s. And right back to the Beatles, this is the absolute weaponization of that. Yeah, they're heavily mobilized. I mean, yeah, it's unbelievable. This is like drone warfare for the parasocial relationship. I agree. It used to be sort of, you know, artillery fire randomly going off in the Beatles time. It is now an absolute laser focused military industrial complex that absolutely drags every single ounce of passion and cash from the fandom. And it's just extraordinary how it's taken over the world. I think it's so interesting.

5:45I suppose one of the things that K-pop also gave us is that thing of absolute maximum availability of the artist. Now, we've all, by the way, boy bands and girl bands in all cultures have always worked. insanely hard and you don't get a day off and we all know this and you know if you collapse with exhaustion you get a special injection and you go back on the stage but it's like the podcast industry yeah very much like that it's like goal hanger yeah it's very which we live like this which is why we're able to talk you just sort of walk past robert peston on a drip yeah but you don't really no but what the korean model of all this did was make all of the rest of that look like the sort of indolence, the haute drug-fuelled indolence of the 1970s LA Canyons, okay, where, you know, maybe you'll write a song this year and maybe you won't.

6:32Like My Bloody Valentine taking five years to do your next album. Yeah, they work incredibly hard. We should say, actually, who is the entertainment company, because I find this completely fascinating. The entertainment company behind BTS is a company called HYBE, H-Y-B-E, all capitalised. now when BTS it's a huge thing that it's it's presided over by a guy called Bang Seahook Chairman Bang Hitman Bang he's sometimes called he's incredible Hitman Bang I've got a huge amount of time there was a funny story about he anyway when he became very very successful he obviously thought I'll buy a mansion in Bel Air or Beverly Hills or somewhere like that and he he immediately had a lot to say about American workers he was like yeah I'm now experiencing this like if we say we're doing something in South Korea we're doing it you just mean you're thinking about it because he couldn't get he couldn't get his renovations done he felt like just remodel that wing and it would be done within 15 minutes like it would be in South Korea whereas he's like oh my god you know the building workers of Bel Air truly they epitomise the laziness of American culture anyway amazing name for a band as well the building workers of Bel Air I could see Hitman Bang putting them together they're the new village people except they're all construction workers and they actually do stuff um but they have this relationship with fandoms and they foster fandoms they got out of their previous distribution deal and they did a distribution deal with universal but they have a sort of partnership with universal um and which is the biggest record company is bts or the whole of hybe hybe yeah um but obviously therefore bts um and lucian grange who's the chairman of New Universal said he was particularly fascinated by Hybe's approach to engaging the superfan.

8:22By the way, Chairman Bang, Hitman Bang, is in a little bit of trouble in South Korea because he's under criminal investigation for unfair stock trading in Hybe shares around their IPO a few years ago. He denised all the charges. It's just got everything. It's got everything. It's really serious. He's got an overseas travel ban. A lot of his stock has been frozen. he's still one of the richest men in South Korea I bet he is but he was different when he came up with his band first of all he wanted BTS to be hip hop but he thought he just couldn't quite see how to make it happen but he became obsessed with the idea of like Korean fan culture super fandom and he thought I just feel like no one has yet fully monetized this and fully understood how to rocket boost this so he made them a K-pop band but he was different to a lot of K-pop Svengali's because a lot of people will know that you know you're in this incredibly regimented life and they you know they control everything about your life he didn't take their phones off him them he didn't give them a huge number of conduct rules I mean obviously within reason but the only things he said to bands in his stable were you have to grow or you know you you get chucked out but they were seen as much more authentic BTS but and he went early got them a YouTube channel they were always on social so they were seen as more authentic than lots of manufactured k-pop bands but equally what we talked about that lifestyle where you're constantly working you have very little to authentically sing about and so what he did that's the problem often with boy bands it's like can i really believe any of this because all i know that they do is like work very hard and go on stage so he thought i've got to create a world like star wars or marvel with and have all this law behind them um and be more immersive so they created this thing called the Bantang Universe, which is like a dark mirror version of the band, who were all going through really bad things like suicide attempts, trauma, all these abuse.

10:22They're surprisingly emo, BTS. It's so weird. Yeah. And they're trying to escape from this. And there are all these multiple timelines. And they tell these stories via their videos, but they're not in consecutive order. And obviously, it sent people nuts. We live in an era, as we've said, of detectives and Easter eggs and all these things. So people were trying to work out the different timelines. The fans became incredibly invested in this whole story. So it got rid of that whole problem of how can they even incredibly sing about love when they're not really allowed to have girlfriends and they don't even have time for one.

10:56Yeah, it created a whole world. It created a narrative. And the interesting thing about BTS... But the darkness of the narrative is so horrible. But that's South Korean culture. They're very, very good at that, the sort of crossroads of dismay and joy. Why is it, Richard, that these one-note howls of anguish about this particular stage of capitalism have spoken not simply to people in South Korea, a turbo capitalist society, but across the Western world? Why is it that there has been that cultural shift to our own country, to America? They have made the art about it. They made the TV about it.

11:31They make the death game TV. They make all these kind of absolutely brutal youth things. and it's so interesting that those have spoken far more eloquently to young, very young people, Gen Z and Gen A even, than many things produced in the West. Yes, anybody listening to this who's got any children under 25 or, you know, nieces and nephews will know that America does not particularly appeal to a huge generation. They're like some American artists, you know, Taylor Swift and what have you, and there's great artists coming out of America, but the idea of American culture does not interest people.

12:04And we're talking about BTS because they were the first band from South Korea to actually make it in the States, to really properly make it in the States, number one albums, number one singles. The fascinating thing, again, just this idea, Hitman Bang and his team, if you manage, take that, which can't have been the easiest gig in the world, profitable, I'm guessing, but can't be super easy. Or you manage One Direction, you just wait for somebody to leave. At some point, somebody leaves. Now, BTS have had this amazing thing of they had to split up because the South Korean government wanted them to do their national service.

12:38So there was an enforced hiatus in this band. So they've had this three, four-year hiatus since 2022. They've all managed to do their staggered national service, but they haven't sort of been out of the conversation. If you look at the streaming numbers for BTS themselves, they've gone down 30%, 20%, and then sort of stabilised. Like Hybe's stock price. Exactly. And now it's resurgent. I mean, Hybe's stock price and the streaming numbers for BTS are very similar on a graph. But they have launched a number of solo careers. So they've kept themselves in the conversation. And now they're sort of more than the sum of their parts.

13:19But it's interesting how the comeback and the dynamics of it are different to the setup. Oh, talk us through that. Well, what happened with kind of traditional, with sort of Western artists was that kind of if you build it, they will come thing. You know, we'll invest in artists, we'll make great music and then fans will come if it's great. And that's been the model that, you know, the American and the British music industry was basically built on. And this is completely different to what K-pop was built on, which is involves primarily servicing and second guessing the fandom. It's much more about where are the fans will go there.

13:55I don't really know so much about an artistic vision. It is so much more of a market vision. It's like an extreme form of sort of artistic capitalism. It's like drilling for natural resources in that they can do the sonar thing. They can work out, I think there's oil here. We're pretty sure there is. So this is where we will drill. And then they'll adjust and adjust and adjust where the hole is. And then eventually a load of money will shoot out. and so what chairman bang said is that they they they want to bring a deep understanding of how to turn fans into active participants and co-creators not just consumers so there you see well that's this is a huge thing so but you also rather like what's happened just to go back to your point just very briefly about has all culture kind of gone like this look at sports okay which we used to say is a sort of say you're watching people drive cars around a track or you're watching people play football it happens for sort of 90 minutes once or twice a week uh you know sometimes more but just generally that's about it how do you keep people in a kind of absolutely sensory overload of a digital world engaged and you bring plot lines in you bring all this other content in so actually those moments of like in in music it would be your moments of performance or the time you release a single.

15:12That's just, they are punctuation points in a constant stream of content and plot lines around the product, which is kind of the band and their story or whatever, or the drivers in Drive to Survive, or football where the managers have ended up becoming main characters because they talk a lot more than the players. And all of these things have been, how do we just keep the eyeballs in the sort of big interstices between when... Big what now? The big gaps between when the events occur. Gaps, you say? Well, there used to be little things, and now you've got to keep them going. But even more than that, it's not just the always-on nature.

15:50It is the absolute laser-focused monetization of superfans. And you realize almost everyone in our culture is not a superfan of anything. Perhaps when we were 14, we were a superfan of something. But most people, we have lots of different things that we like. I can listen to BTS. I can watch F1. you know there's a million things that i like but you realize that now things are absolutely being fine-tuned to completely play to obsessional fans and it's quite it's sort of overwhelming if you're just like a like a regular fan but the way that these industries sport music um movies all these things are making money out of super fans is sort of it's so depressing well yeah The problem with movies is that they don't really have super fans.

16:36They lost them with Marvel. When I said movies, I thought, hold on. Yeah. One of these things doesn't exist on that list. I wonder why that's the one that you'd think was in most trouble. Yeah. Anyhow, it's interesting. They've got their own platform for super fans. Weverse Hype have got this thing. And it's like a membership culture. Because first of all, they got a bit sick of thinking, oh, we create all this stuff. And then it's monetized by kind of third party platforms like Spotify or YouTube or whoever it is. So we want to have our own platform. But what they've tried to do is get Western artists to join this platform.

17:09And they say it's all about superfans. There's no hate here. It's only people who... It's only people who love me. Superfans are notorious for everything being harmonious at all times. Well, lots of Western artists have joined. You know, big people like Ariana Grande, Gracie Abrams. Lots of people are still kind of coming onto this. They say, but it is a huge parasocial world. And what's so interesting that the hype executive who came up with this whole thing said, the thing we're really digging into is the psychological mechanism of falling in love so that's what there it is that obsessional thing and if you look it's like it's like the birth of you know advertising as as we know it in the early part of the last century when they realized that actually there are chemical reactions in our brain that can make us buy one type of vacuum cleaner instead of another it's it's like that but for hormones yeah male and female male and female yeah but the the way that the comeback is different to the setup i find absolutely fascinating well i've just taught you know about the absolute maximum availability of all of these artists hype have said that they're trying a new experience model based on scarcity oh my okay so given everything we've just discussed right yeah exactly exactly exactly uh uh maybe the only way partially I think perhaps that's the only way you can get the band on board because they obviously would have said we don't want to do what we did before we now are worth whatever you said and we don't necessarily think we want to work seven days a week and we've been in the actual army yeah and we've been in the actual army and enough but okay so this is the exact quote and then afterwards I'll attempt to translate the word salad for you scarcity is an important element that enhances the added value of the fan experience to innovate future fandom businesses we will design and this is just with the BTS comeback, we will design and test an integrated online and offline experience model based on scarcity.

19:03Wow, and they say punk's dead. Yeah. So if I can translate that, I would say that there's not going to be so much and if you love them, you are going to have to fight for what there is. I mean, so on the nose. These one-note howls about, okay. So there may well be limited access to new releases. We can already see that members of that fan club army have a whole day where they can get tickets to the concerts before everyone else. Now, by the way, if you think that, I mean, they could easily sell out in a day, BTS, easily. Look who else sells out in a day. They've only got 79 dates, which at the moment isn't that many.

19:40So they're going to do VIP events. I'm talking to people sort of vaguely connected with this. VIP events, limited performance calendars, lots of offline stuff. and what they hope is that these restrictions will open up new revenue streams and justify the much higher prices being charged for what less there is. Are we moving past a Keynesian model, Richard, of superstardom, where you just say, oh no, it's scarcity. It's nothing to do with demand. It's to do with we're going to change everything. Supply will control demand. I mean, I do think that actually there's a more prosaic answer to that, which is what you're saying of that when a band is a little bit older, but they're still making money, they do have a tiny bit more power.

20:29And so they can say, we're only going to do 78 days. I know it'll go up to 150 or 160, but we're not going to do the work that we did before. And so as a canny business person, you know, it's like, if you're De Beers, and for years and years, you made all of your money from the scarcity of your product, and then suddenly you have an oversupply of it, then you hold it back but this is based this is totally the de beers model but de beers are the only people at that point who had access to those diamonds they still do as we as i've talked about in this podcast before they still do that thing where you go and sit in a room and you get shown a shoebox and those are the diamonds you'll be having that's the choice there is no choice can i say by the way and amongst all of this that they're a great band that's the thing with all of this k-pop stuff there's something at the heart of this which is you can exploit people all you want and you know you can exploit fans all you want but if you haven't got a good product it's not going to work and there's also something so chilling about it which is that they tell them absolutely horrifying you know cat's eye who's also who are also a high product who are absolutely massive um there's actually and that's interesting there's only one south korean only yunche in cat's eye is south korean and they they went through that whole process to find them they what they modeled them on the spice cars you know everyone has a sort of distinct role and they made a documentary or someone made a documentary for them potstar academy which you can see on netflix and if you're in my house, you've already seen it three times.

21:49Oh man, I'm sorry about that. And they were voted for on Weverse and all of that sort of stuff. They'll get shouts out in photo shoots and every girl will do cool. And then they'll shout moody and then they'll immediately shift into a moody pose. Sweet, and then everyone will be sweet. And they tell them that their body language is constantly assessed by fans and that K-pop fans don't get it wrong. And they'll know if there's tension between you because they'll be able to read your body language. You wouldn't have had this trouble with Brian Harvey, would you? And they'll guess right. And as I say, they never hit back at fans.

22:24There's none of that. They never say, they don't write songs about being in the midst of that fan experience. So they're very, very different from Western artists. And yet Weverse, lots of these artists, for someone like Gracie Abrams to go over to that platform is very interesting to say, okay, I commit or I submit or whatever it is, but I believe that this is the way to kind of maximise attention and maximise. And she's absolutely right. Yeah. Right. Shall we go to a break? I feel like we should. And then we'll talk about the absolute craziest court case. I think even in a city that is used to crazy court cases, LA, this one is an absolute doozy.

23:06Kevin Spacey versus the insurers.

23:20welcome back everybody now we'd like to talk to you about a legal insurance dispute but wait because it sort of hinges on sex addiction and whether it is as chas michael michaels says in blades of glory a real disease with doctors and medicine and everything the patient is mr Kevin Spacey, Oscar winning and formerly hugely esteemed actor who whose career sort of fell apart in the wake of all sorts of allegations of sexual misconduct, some of which he's fought in court and won and some of which remain pending court cases. He denies all of them, of course. But it's as I say, this insurance case starts this week on Tuesday, unless they settle between us recording this on monday and then opening the case tomorrow so the basic principle is this you make any sort of thing a tv show a film you know if an artist is doing a big world tour there are there's a massive industry which is the insurance industry where you essentially if you're a record company or if you're a in this case a television company you ensure your leading actors or your leading musicians so that if something were to happen to them you are not out of pocket so if you're making for example house of cards and one of your actors breaks their leg and you're delayed by six months that is covered by insurance the company who made house of cards uh which starred kevin spacey are media rights capital and the insurers are someone called fireman's fund the fireman's fund which is often the case in america that the big kind of unions have essentially you have big arms which are insurers so ordinarily in this thing someone is ill the insurance pays out doesn't happen very often but if it does that happens or you know there's someone that has a bereavement in their family things get delayed for two weeks whatever it is these things are all covered in these insurance things it's a big business it's a huge industry there's not a single creative endeavor that happens without a big insurance policy the crux of this one as you say is whether house of cards was not able to continue because kevin spacey had an illness which meant that he was not able to do this final series.

25:39And that illness, it is claimed, is some form of sex addiction. And he said if he had not sought treatment for it, which I'm certainly going to do a big sidebar on, he would have taken his own life. And the judge is really not keen on even discussing in these terms. But they've said, you can say that you would have, would you have killed yourself if you'd had to return to House of Cards season six, he is going to take the stand. And And according to his statement, we'll have to defend that point that he would have killed himself if he was forced to return to House of Cards season six. But we'll come back to the case in a minute.

26:13Let's just pull back for a second because House of Cards is interesting. House of Cards is basically the birth of modern streaming. It's a Netflix show. Or I suppose if you want to talk about it in terms of the streaming wars, this show is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. It is the inciting event. It was very, very expensive. It was prestige. It starred hugely acclaimed movie stars. It had a big, very revered Hollywood director, David Fincher, EP'd it and directed the first two episodes. And it all dropped on the same day. And so that whole binge model thing, which we now just take as standard, that all came with House of Cards.

26:55And they did five series of the show with Kevin Spacey. Then comes what we must refer to as the unpleasantness. and it actually begins with a number of men on the crew make accusations that Kevin Spacey is sexually aggressive. Then outside this, this is in 2017, which is, you know, the start of Me Too. So outside the set, an actor called Anthony Rapp says that Kevin Spacey molested him when Anthony Rapp was 14 and Kevin Spacey was 27. Kevin Spacey says, I'm sorry for being drunk and inappropriate, but, you know, I don't think I did anything. And he also, oh my God, the gay community hating forever for this, chose that moment to come out.

27:37Until then, he had effectively been closeted. And obviously, people thought, when you're accused of underage sex abuse, this is the moment you're going to come out. I mean, he loses everyone at this point. He is eventually cleared of that accusation in court, but many others come forward. And in fact, he's still got a civil trial in our courts because he was director of the Old Vic and all of those sorts of things. And there were many accusations from over here in our courts in October later this year. Anyway, when all this comes out in 2017, he checks in for a stay at The Meadows, a sort of head spa in Arizona, which I will come to.

28:17But Netflix's content chief at that time is a guy called Ted Sarandos. Heard of him. And he says, no, just fire him. that's remember netflix is this kind of fledgling um big player it's obviously been a successful business but it's a fledgling big player and they've created this thing and they've everybody is moving towards what they're doing it is moving towards this streaming model and importantly for this case at least and one wonders how one gets around this there there is a paper trail of ted sarandos essentially saying that just saying i fire him fire him i don't want this guy on the show and you know he's like this again with any of these things they're legal things but also there's reputational things and ted sarandos is like no i'm not i'm not having him anywhere near this as you say enormously prestige thing that we are that is the absolute beginning of what we're trying to build they had these two huge shows and the crown was one and this was the other so they kill him off between seasons as a character Frank Underwood it's all based on our own house of cards but they spin it off into this American world so season 6 is Robin Wright Penn who is his wife and it's all a bit of a horror show because how can you not have him and the show is cancelled and the 3 spin off shows they had coming off it are dead now MRC Media Rights Capital say they lost 80 million on all this and 50 million maybe with interest so again And again, they would be insured for it if this was an illness, if he'd got cancer or had an accident.

29:53And again, they might not be insured for that whole 80 million, but that is what they would claim for. They would say, the show has been cancelled. We had these putative spin-offs and real spin-offs. And we are predicting that that has cost us 80 million. But yet it all comes down to, was it something completely out of their control? Was it an act of God? Was it an illness? Or has something else happened here? that's the case. Let me just do my sidebar on The Meadows, where Spacey... The Meadows class of 2017 is quite interesting. Is this like a Betty Ford type clinic? Like a rehab clinic? Yeah, it is.

30:30But the fact that it's called The Meadows... Have you ever seen that Mike Myers movie, So I Married an Axe Murderer? Yes. Which is familiar. The most famous bit in it is this conspiracy theory scene where Mike Myers' father, who's also played by Mike Myers, says that the world is run by a secret society called the Pentavirate. And they meet triangulately at a country mansion in Colorado known as the Meadows. And in it are like the Queen, the Vatican, the Rothschilds, the Gettys and Colonel Sanders before he went to it's up from Kentucky Fried Chicken. Anyway, this one's in Arizona. That's from the film.

31:02That's from the film. This Meadows is out in Arizona. But it became, for me, I really recognised it as a sort of, it's the ultimate tactical rehab destination for me too, okay? Because Harvey Weinstein when all the allegations come out he goes to the meadows what's interesting is that media rights capital have sued spacey before that's the first way they tried to get their money back here's here's the real wrinkle of the thing if you think it already sounds bad yeah it gets much much much worse so media rights capital sue kevin spacey and saying your behavior your actions mean that we have lost all this money because you have left essentially our franchise and all the spin-offs have come to an end and it is your fault because of your behavior and they won that case and they won 31 million dollars in damages from kevin spacey which he says he doesn't he says he doesn't have he says i'm homeless aka he later clarified that i live in airbnbs okay that's not the same thing so media rights capital i've already thought right we need to make some money back off this and the first thing was kevin spacey they win 31 million dollars someone at media rights capital thinks i It feels like we could get more than$31 million.

32:15And the key to it is, was Kevin Spacey ill or was he fired reputationally? And if he's ill, we could get more money. We could get that$80 million we sat around talking about, couldn't we? So they then go to Kevin Spacey and say, look, we recognize that you owe us$31 million. You say you can't pay us. I'll tell you what. Why don't you just pay us$1 million? So essentially, we'll waive$30 million. but for that you have to give us all of your medical records from that time you have to give us access and be on our team testify for us and we can use your medical records to testify for us as well and for that we will waive 30 million of the 31 million that you owe us and he says yes and which is where we find us that's where we are today so he's got to take so keep an eye on this because he's got to take the stand and say, I would have killed myself if I had not sought treatment for that.

33:14It was that. It was a life-threatening illness. And that's why I went to the meds. My sex addiction is a life-threatening. Also, we're not talking about sex addiction. It's exactly the same with Harvey Weinstein. Have you got an abuse addiction? This is the allegation. No one is saying that you have a sex addiction. I don't care if you have sex with lots of people. What we're saying is that you have an abuse addiction because there's a number of people making sexual misconduct allegations against you exactly the same as harvey weinstein it's not the same of harvey weinstein because harvey weinstein's been convicted and kevin spacey has not yet and he may never be uh but it's the same sort of thing so he now has to take the stand and say i i would have killed myself had i not sought treatment for that the trouble is he's previously taken the tack of saying i was completely available to work and i should never have been fired for house of cards he's literally on record of saying that yeah yeah but you know and as we say ted sarandas has been on record of saying i'm going to fire you because reputationally this is no this is no good for my company uh but but the the case is still going ahead and almost always because it is a time of recording there's lots and lots of disputes with insurance companies of course there are like in our daily lives you know something happens they these things are almost always settled out of court by the big insurance companies and the big media conglomerates lots and lots of these cases they're almost always settled this is i cannot think of a similar case firstly of this size that has come to court and secondly that pivots entirely on whether sex addiction is a real disease with doctors and medicine and everything real disease with doctors and medicine and everything so there is our primer on a case that barring last minute intervention is starting this week so keep an eye on that one because i I think it will be one.

34:57Let's consider it developing. Yeah. Very little good in that one, yet at the same time, sort of fascinating. Yeah. Shall we finish with The Traitors? Again, if you're not watching The Traitors, please feel free to switch off. But we can't not talk about it. Well, it just goes without saying that for the next, basically, week, every single thing that happens in our country anyway will be just seen as a spin-off in The Traitors' universe. But we generally defected last week, and it was impossible to remove for people just doing it as a meme of traces. So, I mean, I'm just going to throw something out there, Richard.

35:32The oft-quoted line, we should be proud of ourselves for getting to the final eight. Discuss. They do. When they were sitting around, it's always a very, very moving episode that when they have the dim, they do talk. But yes, the idea to be proud of yourself, we all know who gets through to the final eight, And that is the remaining traitors, one random good player who somehow has gone under the radar and the useless faithfuls. Those are the people who remain. This one so particularly, the fact that there was not one single vote at the last round table for either Stephen or Rachel, the only two remaining traitors.

36:11I'm so sorry. I mean, I can't. I used to call it the idiot premium. Now, this is the most eloquent argument against Darwinism that's out there. It is survival of the thickest. The entire episode was full of questions to which the answers were, because you're stupid and you're no threat to them. So here we go. Why am I still here? Because you're stupid and you're no threat to them. They must be keeping me around for a reason. Yeah, you're stupid and you're no threat to them. I'm wondering if it's because I'm close to someone. No, it's because you're stupid and you're no threat to them. despite the jesse murder yeah they still didn't trace anything back to steven or indeed rachel and by the way because of the the setup of what where this is it is it is not a general stupidity these are people who can absolutely function in in the world but when we are put together as a group of people there is a personality trait that allows you to be manipulated and those are the people who remain you know these are people who who you'd go to the trenches within lots of other ways and they've been you know they'll be smart in lots of ways but in this particular psychological experiment they have a personality trait that allows them to be manipulated into certain types of behavior well all the strongest characters are gone well should we discuss yes isn't that interesting because we're almost now the end game the last few episodes are like an old-fashioned version of the traitors where it's just oh it's just some people and i wonder who the traitors are and i wonder who who are not we've had such an incredible sort of uh casserole of drama leading up to this in a way it's quite nice the last episode last week you're like yeah nobody is going to throw a grenade into this let's just have a normal episode of the traitors i used to love that show but it has been so dramatic the fiona and then harriet thing we have to discuss there we've discussed the fiona thing we have to discuss the harriet thing um let's discuss harriet right now great novelist has a book coming out has a has a backlist as well she absolutely did the playbook which we would call the farage playbook right so nigel farage is on i'm a celebrity and he says when he's doing the task the good thing about doing the task is they have to show you on television.