Married At First Sight: Tip Of The Iceberg?

28:30Richard Osman:But, you know, if you look at... So Enhanced, which had an IPO and is worth over a billion dollars, this company that will sell you peptides and all sorts of things, you know in their entry to the securities exchange when they had their ipo they described the enhanced games as simply a marketing tool this this this is not their company they're not building this thing you know this is literally a marketing thing and you know they've encouraged um all these sports people to come and do it and they put it on on sunday and lots of people watched it now the interesting thing about it is the sports people who were doing it and there's all sorts of people who did it.

29:04Richard Osman:Fred Curley, who was an Olympic 100-metre medalist. He did it clean, weirdly. There's a few athletes in this, Hunter Armstrong, the swimmer as well, who competed clean. Yeah, I saw him beat everyone clean. Which we will get to. He's literally the only clean athlete. You've ruined the advert. Yeah, you've ruined our advert, Hunter. Whether they are clean or not, because they can't dope test them. We have to get to the basics of, for how many years have people said about the Olympics, oh, I don't know why they don't just let them all take drugs and get on with it well okay firstly because it's dangerous and also it's ethically bankrupt etc this is a more interesting thing than it first seems because the first site it seems like a circus you think oh great the tech bros of course are pumping people full of drugs and then you know winding them up like toys and looking to see if they can break world records but actually you look at someone like ben proud who's the the british swimmer who's a silver medalist in the olympics i mean that's about as good as you can get in any you know lots of people swim it's really difficult and he's one of the very very best in the entire world and you know he says i don't make any money out of it so i don't make any money out of it someone has said to me i'll give you a million dollars if you break a world record yeah that's the prizes at this games were extraordinary really like really big money someone has also said i'll give you 250 000 pound if you win the race and there's only four people in the race by the way he says well that's 13 years of national championships that you know i would get the same money i saw 46 percent of elite athletes earn under 15 000 a year there's track and field and swimming and weightlifting they've chosen very very wisely because these things are high profile but you don't make an awful lot of money if you're usain bolt you make a lot of money most people do not make a lot of money so there there is a group of people who are incredible athletes who by the way throughout their entire career have been at the absolute cutting edge of how to train you know the cutting edge of this is a new way to do it a cutting edge of perhaps you can take this powder the cutting edge of seeing people who they're in a dorm with taking something illegal and not getting caught this is the world that they've grown up with they have grown up in a world where they absolutely are sort of put through the ringer physically and mentally for the entertainment of other people but for not very much money.

31:17Richard Osman:So when someone says to them, what we will do, we will take you to Abu Dhabi, we will give you a series of chemical interventions, all of which are legal in the real world. And then you come to Vegas and if you win a race against three other people, I'll give you 250 ,000 pounds. And if you break the world record, I'll give you a million pounds. Very, very hard to imagine what other than some internal morals would stop you doing that as an athlete. Because how else are you making the money? Ben Proud would have been training since he was a child you know just all day every day putting his body through extraordinary things now Ben Proud will be aware that there will be children watching this happening and they might be tempted to follow him and that's on his conscience but everything else involved you think well I sort of get it how long how much longer have you got in this sport five years six years you want to finally make some money and so that's that's what he's doing so I understand why the athletes are doing it and WADA quite rightly is saying that we don't know what these drugs do and he said yeah but these people they're like Formula 1 cars you know they've been put through like unbelievable training regimes which are absolutely not natural and which bodies are not supposed to do people have always harmed themselves you know from the Coliseum and probably before I think it was less voluntary the Coliseum but we've watched people harm themselves for our sporting entertainment what about boxing?

32:40what about what we know now about contact sports and degenerative disease i mean we know all these things and in some cases people are trying really slowly to find out because they don't want to stop watching those contact sports or they don't want to have to change the rules of those contact sports because maybe it's just a blip or maybe it's this or that we know this we already know that people are being made to do extraordinary and awful things to their bodies in the cause

33:04Richard Osman:of our sporting entertainment yeah that ucyk fight over the weekend which ended very controversially you think so that's sport so that's sport that's okay and this thing in vegas is not okay all i'm saying is morally it's a very very thin line between the enhanced games and what sport is anyway the one thing you definitely don't want is to encourage the massive amounts of putting drugs together in untested ways you know so all the doctors are saying we don't know what's gonna happen and of course you don't know what's gonna happen but is it like that scorpion fight in jarhead where they just like you'll watch anything and you'll bet on anything and it's just sport attainment and i think you know most sport most sports governing bodies the absolute key thing they understand and really know is people want what they're watching to be fair that's that is but also most sports governing bodies are some of the worst people out there and they do it very very badly and they have mismanaged their sports for so long that now other opportunities are suggesting themselves i'm not saying that that's necessarily this but many many other things and you can see like all sorts of breakaway things will happen because people will feel like i'm sick of this you run it badly and i get no cut of it and there's all sorts of different ways in which these kind of hegemonism monopolies are going to break up yeah now that you won't ever say oh well who'd screen it yeah now that you know there's there's there's so many sporting billionaires now that there are people in lots and lots of sports who are going to start saying I mean I can I might just do this myself I might just find a way to make this slightly more interesting for me because the sports people are the ones who were drawing the crowds not the sports administrators and I think that if I was an administrator in pretty much any sport I think people have got a lot better I think that's definitely true but this feels like when you look at it at first sight it looks absolutely appalling and when you actually pull back the covers you go this is sort of what's always been happening but they are being very they're sort of telling the truth about it that's their narrative and if james magnuson the australian swimmer i'm sure that his body can probably take more than say mine you know and if i was on the same regime as james magnuson who by the way came fourth in both of his races i think you can take two lessons one sport has always been very very very dodgy and this is almost no less dodgy than most sport has always been but on the other side the reason that sport makes so much money is people love it and when people love it you have that phrase again a duty of care to the people who are watching and if you're enhanced this company then you sell these products anyway and so obviously you believe them to be positive then you know you have to have a little look in the mirror and not just be thinking god i look young rfk is about to is about to sanction more and more peptides and more and more of these things so that you know lots of these things are going to be legal in america doesn't mean they should be legal and this is an advert for that so sport on this side i think it's fascinating what this says about sport and how actually as a sporting thing i kind of go we've always done that on the other side it's my god what sort of a society we're becoming i agree the one thing I would say as a positive was I don't think it played that well for them in some ways because the thing that you and I adore almost above all things in sport is its complete unpredictability and the fact that some of the people who take the most drugs were far behind and clean athletes won you can never fully control this thing and I sort of love that yeah you couldn't control it it didn't work the way they wanted to the first thing they had was one of the women's weightlifting.

36:46Richard Osman:They had two events. They were fairly sure they were going to get a world record in, so I think they must have done in training. One was the women's weightlifting, which didn't quite come down to a world record. And the other was Christian Colomayev in the swimming, because he'd already broken a world record on drugs. He'd already been given a million dollars last year as part of their marketing push. And he was the only one who broke a world record. So he's now made$2 million out of this, which is quite something. But, you know, Ben Proud won one of his races. So he's got a quarter of a million dollars.

37:17Richard Osman:You know, I sort of get it. But as you say, Hunter Armstrong wasn't on drugs. He was winning. Fred Curley, the sprinter, he wasn't on drugs. He won the 100 meters in, I was going to say, a slow time, like I can run 9.7. But, you know, he won 9.97 or something like that, which is, I mean, it's competitive. It would have put him last in the Olympic final. But, you know, he beat all the drugged up athletes. athletes but they reminded me of advertisers particularly the organizers because beforehand they kept saying oh you're going to see so many wild records broken a bit like when i look at an advert for some face cream you're going to exercise i was like yeah no you're not okay it's all listen i'm gonna buy it anyway i'm gonna buy it anyway but it's all a big load of hype and when it actually happens i'm not seeing exact i'm not seeing the thing you told me which is really what happens with all of these things yeah and also you know a lot of the swimmers are wearing the speed suits which are illegal as well i mean it is that they show the interesting thing is the regime they have been on had made very very very little difference to their performance i don't know if that's always going to be the case because what we want to think is oh my god if you did take all of these things then suddenly you know you'd be running 9.4 or something it's just like any old retail of in the sort of health beauties you know in five years time if they keep doing them surely they're going to beat world records because also more and more and more people are going to do it because as i say if you are an athlete and suddenly it's happened this first time and you know the world didn't end and you haven't made very much money in your career but you do feel that your body has been abused and you've been pushed to do things you don't really want to do and you feel like you've been running against people who are doped up and all of those things through your career i don't know why athletes in their kind of early 30s wouldn't be going oh do you know what next year i'll do enhanced games you know we'll go to abu dhabi there's doctors there i get it's all supervised it feels like more and more athletes would do it it feels like where you go i can't name the particular football club but it feels like where you go where they have the special medicine and the special doctors there's a there's a football not in our country where people used to go towards in their twilights and and do very well sometimes and maybe it will be a sort of twilight staging post Yes, like the senior snooker.

39:35Which I want to say is clean. It's drug free.

39:38Richard Osman:There's no drugs in that sport. There are no beta blockers. They used to have beta blockers. And, you know, this poor old Bill Wurvenhoek had to drink 16 pints before a match because he wasn't allowed beta blockers. Now, the organisers, they didn't release individual athletes' regimens, but they revealed that 91 % of the athletes used testosterone, 79 % used human growth hormone, 62 % used stimulants such as Adderall, 50 % used metabolic modulations, great band. 41 % used EPO and 29 % used an anabolic steroid agent, such as Deca and Durabolin. So these are all the things that people have been banned for over the years, lots of which are perfectly legal in lots of places.

40:16Richard Osman:But they're sort of finding different combinations of these things. And we don't know what happens when you combine all of these things. I thought it's, listen, as a spectacle, it wasn't amazing. They didn't break any records. I think it's a fascinating sign of things to come. though but as parents or as you know just human beings be wary of the huge amounts of money that are going in now to marketing peptides to you and marketing things to make you look younger train harder essentially that whole thing in vegas was an advert treated as such right well the last episode of the late show with stephen colbert and indeed the late show at all has gone out remember that CBS axed it in the midst of the Paramount Skydance deal, which they needed approval from the Trump administration from and ended up getting it.

41:10Stephen Colbert said it was an honor and a privilege, you know, the honor of my life to be here is in that sort of very goodbye to all that way. The President Trump, needless to say, posted about it in very, very derogatory ways, like he's talent is he's whatever i mean and it's all gone the end of a huge era not just his era so in some ways i can't really say the sun is setting on late night but you know what i mean yeah but i think the

41:35Richard Osman:the really interesting thing about it is is when this first happened and colbert was taken off air it was absolutely seen as a as a harbinger of oh okay now we have state-controlled media and this is straight out of a of a playbook that we're very familiar with and then you know when kimball was suspended as well. We think, oh, here we go. The whole of late night is being dismantled. Satire is being dismantled. We know this playbook. We've seen this a million times before. But actually, in the time between them announcing that Colbert is coming off air and now Kimmel is still there. If anything, he's got more powerful.

42:08Richard Osman:Seth Meyers is still there. Everything else is still going. It feels like the FCC, who were Trump's lapdogs in this, as in so many other things seem to have lost some of their bite you know they tried to have a go at the view and the view bit back so it feels like it's unfortunate for Stephen Colbert of course but it feels like this was the wake-up call perhaps that the American media industry needed. Yeah it's interesting the last series I saw got three times its normal audience because you know if you say to people you're not gonna have this thing anymore and this is why people actually showed up for it in the way that after Kimmel came back off his suspension, there was a huge sort of surge of viewers.

42:52But we have to accept equally. By the way, I don't think you can stop any of these things because as we said earlier in this very episode, there are many, many places that will screen things nowadays and we will definitely get to that in a minute. We have to say that Late Night itself used to be massive and even though it was incredibly expensive to produce, you've got huge writing staff, you've got big production, you've got all sorts of other things like that it was profitable and you had sponsors and you had lots of ad revenue because people watched it in a linear way and when you look at all the wars the late night wars of the 80s but most particularly the 90s even then though these shows were mega expensive and it's a little bit like buying sporting rights or something like that it's you kind of want to have it going through your pipes or you want to have it shown your channels but it it it does because it's and it's also it's something that's always been there you know some people will say now to to you about comedy commissioning why am i commissioning comedy i mean just because we always commission comedies why am i doing that because actually people aren't watching them and definitely the point at which i think the late show had got to it cost 100 million dollars a year to make and it made 60 million so you can see that it is it's just there It's there for prestige, yeah, a lost lead.

44:09And also it's there because we've always had things like this. It's interesting, all the other rival shows ran reruns sort of out of respect.

44:17Richard Osman:Against this last episode. Against this last episode. You can see what's happened. The clips are bigger than the shows. I mean, the clips get huge amounts of the opening monologue or some funny sort of moment or vignette from that night show. But they are also part of the old monoculture that is dead. In the old days, obviously, you know, you would, to put it in the most crude terms, And Red and Blue State or, you know, Republicans, Democrats, all watched these shows. They were part of the shared monoculture. Now, all of these shows are seen to be kind of hotbeds of kind of democratic degeneracy or whatever it is.

44:51And all of them, they are part of one complete siloed side of things, which was extraordinary and never existed in the old days. There is not a shared monoculture anymore that these shows sat at a sort of broad center of. yeah it doesn't exist anymore um and yeah as i say yeah it was hallowed and whatever it's interesting what he did next stephen colbert and i find this really interesting because he did this he popped up on public access tv which as you know is like mega lo-fi and back in the old days we thought oh my gosh i can't believe america has this thing where like almost anyone can make tv in waynesworld and it's not like all right we live in a culture where almost everyone makes tv all the time you know whether you're putting on tiktok or youtube or whatever and he hosted only in Monroe which is a community access program I it's a town of Monroe Michigan is a town of I think 20 ,000 people and he did this actually the night before or just before he took up the reins at the late show back in 2015 and on his last night in um in the actual late show chair he said the last thing I did before I took up this job was I hosted this public access tv show called only in Monroe and 12 people watched and to show business being what it is I'll probably that's probably where you'll next see me indeed 23 hours later he was hosting only a munro he made it really incredible he interviewed the two women who are the usual host this is a town of 20 000 people munro is a tiny and when you see that i mean this is very sophisticated they don't have a sophisticated setup as this that we're sitting in our podcast studio they have some sort of chairs and a little pot plant in the middle but he got jack white to do the music off a stereo and a reel to reel he got um eminem came on it's kind of like you know um they called byron allen and talked about what he was doing.

46:35Jeff Daniels was there. Steve Buscemi, they happened to find that there was somewhere in Monroe called Buscemi's Pizza or something like that. Steve Buscemi, zero relation, did an advert for them. So they had all sorts of fun things. And obviously he can create something wonderful. But it is the first thing that's on his new YouTube channel. There is now one thing on Stephen Colbert's newly minted YouTube channel. And it is his appearance hosting only in Monroe. It's sort of interesting. Lots of people are wondering what he'll do. we do know he will be writing with his son a Lord of the Rings movie.

47:06Richard Osman:Yes, that's crazy. That is nuts. Yeah, some sort of like small section of something from the Fellowship of the Rings. So I'm sort of imagining something a bit like Rogue One. It's kind of a Star Wars story and it sits within the whole lore. But anyway, but then why would you not go and do a show if you felt like it on YouTube? Leaving aside the political side of it for now. And that's, you know, why I prestige this by saying that all these other shows are still on. And there's quite a lot of them. They don't really need that many. is the truth. But as you say, that's... There are only three daily ones and then John Oliver's a totally different thing.

47:38It's just like a one night a week. But it's still a lot. Yeah.

47:42Richard Osman:Yeah, this was... It didn't make any money at all for CBS. Stephen Colbert was obviously paid. Now, there is zero way that Stephen Colbert is going to earn less money next year than he earned on that CBS contract. Because of his name and because of YouTube and because he can directly get paid, you know, the advertising money, he will be making more money. he will be making much more money but the show itself will be profitable if you because because everything has become we're on one now you're on a form of tv chat show now you're on a a screened visual chat show so he will make a fortune in the same way that conan makes a fortune from his show cbs are not only saving that 40 million dollars they're making a lot more because the thing that's replacing colbert and the daily show i think is very very interesting which is byron allen who's this amazing guy he started as a gag writer for stand-ups at 14 byron allen and then he did a bit of um stand-up and he just absolutely loved tv he's now a multi multi he's a billionaire his company which is uh entertainment studios it's worth over four billion dollars he has always run the show called comics unleashed which to us would be like a panel show really but it's it's comics doing a monologue and is sort of lightly kind of tied together he also does another show called funny you should ask which is very similar to celebrity squares so he's run those two shows for years and years and years byron and with loads of different comics um and if you want to know by the way how satirical they are they are norm mcdonald uh once said uh about comics unleashed i think it would be impossible to be more leashed uh so you know and byron allen will always say don't do anything topical because i want these to run and run around i want to be able to repeat these whenever whenever I want to do them so he does these two shows and they've been going out after um the late show funnily enough and now he said to CBS I will pay you for that slot I will give you money for that so I will buy that slot from you if you let me keep the advertising which he was doing years ago Byron Anna he's really fascinating he's made a load of money by always having smarter ideas than anyone else so now instead of Colbert you will have comics unleashed or comics leashed and funny you should ask just yeah all day every day cbs are saying we're doing this until we can work out how to replace the late show but i don't know why you would not just keep doing it because they're getting paid for it you know byron allen is taking all the risk he's keeping the um the advertising money he thinks he can find a way of of doing it he can run that without making a 40 million dollar loss that cbs was was making so that's what's replacing it which is hugely more vanilla for sure it is hugely more vanilla but does america really really need another show that's costing an absolute fortune and not paying its way that does the same thing as other shows because stephen colbert can go and do that because he will be doing that elsewhere you know everyone wins every yes he can make a show for i don't know for 20 million dollars a year and literally 15 of that will be profit.

50:42And he can take 10 people or whatever it is from the late show and they can do it. And we already know that fun viral TV does not have to be as we've always thought of it. But the other thing is that show can't be controlled by anybody. Even if Brendan Carr and the FCC and all these people want to play sort of whack-a-mole with people getting out of line or people speaking against the great dictator, so what, okay? There is a massive democratized thing out there that anyone can be a hit on and you can be sure if he decides to be a hit Stephen Colbert on it, he will be. And really good people will come there and then no one will control them and they won't get to YouTube and they won't stop because he can't possibly control any of that because otherwise, I mean, it's impossible for him to do that.

51:24So against legacy, old-fashioned things, he might be able to exact a measure of revenge or whatever, but you are just growing a whole load of other rebels and as well as dispatching a rebel to someone, you just can't be controlled at all.

51:37Richard Osman:Yeah, that's the irony of the thing. They're shooting themselves in their foot by releasing these people from late night because late night they have levers that they can pull. On YouTube, they don't have the levers. So I think Colbert is going to make more money from it. CBS is going to make more money from it. The shows that are competitors to The Daily Show are stronger than they were at the time when Colbert was taken off the air. So, you know, watch this space, but Colbert is going nowhere. You won't be able to keep these people down. Of course you can't. And that I think is very, very positive.

52:08Richard Osman:Conan has never been bigger or richer than he is now. Your reminder that we'll be talking to Steven Spielberg soon. Any questions you've ever wanted to ask Steven Spielberg, if you send them to thewrestisentertainment at goalhanger.com and we will ask him the best or the most interesting. Any recommendations? I really want to recommend Dear England, which is the new James Graham show. It's based on his play, but it's expanded beyond the Gareth Southgate verse into the Thomas Tuchel era. And I actually appeared in front of a select committee last week. We haven't talked about that. We haven't talked about it, I know.

52:44How was it? It was really interesting in lots of ways, but it was an absolute privilege to sit next to James. I think it's so fascinating. He's so interested. He talked a lot about local stories and he talked a lot about doing stuff in Nottingham and doing stuff with Sherwood, But he's also interested in these kind of very popular populist kind of national stories and to write something about the England football manager, just as when he did that play quiz, which became a brilliant TV series about the millionaire coughing scandal. He just does things that people are really interested in. And I think he is a most fascinating and interesting person.

53:21And it was a privilege to sit next to him, Dear England, about the Gareth Southgate era and beyond as part of the start of World Cup programming.

53:31Richard Osman:Can I say, because I watched the whole of that committee. I thought you were terrific. But all the way through, and he was great. He made lots of very, very good points. but he did keep saying and as Dear England which is on BBC on Sunday you never once plugged the podcast I couldn't believe it you could have just said and by the way we're talking to Steven Spielberg if you have any questions for him I don't want to talk about only in Monroe and what it normally gets as public access television but I can assure you that committee hearing would have got considerably fewer viewers than that so I'm sorry I didn't plug the podcast on it you thought you'd save you'd save your ammunition okay I actually didn't think it was necessary to do that and I didn't want to use any of my time that I could have been giving them useful statistics to plug our podcast Richard and I have to say that I don't think it is a huge audience that particular live stream A, B, C, always be closing always be closing I'm going to recommend three different documentaries so they're all on Netflix and two of them have something in common the Jamie Vardy documentary which is part of the Untold story that I watch all of the American Untold which are just sort of smaller stories from sport.

54:37Richard Osman:They've told Jamie Vardy's career. It's not, you know, Waikath O 'Kristi or anything like that. It's just this extraordinary story of him going from non-league and, you know, really becoming a pro at like 25 and what happened and then Leicester City is really, really great. And also The Miracle of Istanbul which is about the Liverpool Champions League triumph as well is in the same series. That's great. And the Kylie documentary which is wonderful. It's so great. Both that though, actually, the Vardy one and the Kylie one again how many times we have to see this the tabloid press were scum they were scum they were the worst of the worst every time you look into what they did you're like wow there must have been people there you think how on earth are you sleeping oh yeah I mean the Jamie Vardy one they do something so unnecessary and so cruel that is boggles the mind and Kylie as well it boggles the mind anyway that aside those three documentaries I enjoyed them all very much they're all on Netflix now for our members Marina you've just started this incredible series last week's one on Tradwise I absolutely love but you have it which was free to everyone but now it's for members only this week's one is about I'm talking to the brilliant pollster James Kanagasorium who's plugged into masses of currents in a much more technical way of our times than I am just doing it all on vibes and this one is talking about you know was Chalamet Timothy Chalamet write about ballet and opera and we get into whole like is classical music a dead art form or actually people listen to it but they don't really realise they're listening to it and stats based really he's got everyone's yeah it's so fascinating anyway so that is for our members if you want to join for ad free listening and bonus episodes it's the rest is entertainment.com otherwise we will see you on Thursday see you on Thursday

56:43Richard Osman:Turn it up! Storm has zero sugar and 200 milligrams of caffeine, so you can turn that workout up a notch. Good energy in, good energy out. Energy for life.