The Salt Path Controversy - Explained

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1:44Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osmond. Good day to you, Marina. Good day to you, Richard. Now, how are you? Yeah, I'm not bad. You have a slight cold. I do. I feel like I have an extreme cold, but, you know, thanks for minimizing it. Yeah, only extremes. But other than that, very well. And how about you? Yes, I'm not bad at all. It's an interesting week this week. We've got some fun stuff to talk about. We're talking about, if people have seen the story over the weekend, the book The Salt Path. If you don't know that story, I shan't give you any spoilers.

2:23I will tell you I'm transfixed by it. Yes, it is quite a tale. I'll say that. We're also talking about one of the great format successes of all time, which is nowhere near any terrestrial TV channel. It's on YouTube and it's called Hot Ones. We'll be talking about the history of that and the future of that and the money that it's making. And we're also going to be talking about The Velvet Sundown, an AI band and the absolute sort of wild story around AI music and how an AI slop and how it's coming for absolutely all of us. I mean, all three of these stories, I think, are fascinating. Genuinely, I'm excited to talk about all three of them.

3:00I'm often excited to get your take on things. All three of these, I'm very excited. Well, I am always excited to get your take on this. I shouldn't say I'm often excited to get your take. Occasionally not. I'm always excited to get your take. Sometimes you know what I'm going to say. Occasionally, I think, yeah. Yeah, occasionally you don't, by surprise. Well, both of us are gripped by the tale of the salt path. Now, if you haven't heard of the salt path, let me take you through it. It's a true story of a couple from Wales who, through no fault of their own, lose their house and become homeless.

3:27Not only that, the husband in this couple, and they're called Rayner Wynne and Moth Wynne, the husband has a degenerative disease, something akin to Parkinson's, find themselves homeless and they embark on a 630-mile walk around the southwest coast of England called The Salt Path. So it's a memoir. It's a true story. It became a massive phenomenon. Book clubs all around the country love it. it's such an incredibly inspirational story people have really really bought into it means a great deal to a huge amount of people so much so that a movie came out a few weeks ago with Gillian Anderson playing Rainer Wynn Jason Isaacs playing Moth Wynn and it's just one of those incredibly rare success stories where a publisher picks up a small story a true story something that speaks to our time something that speaks about humanity something that speaks about human beings and readers really really jumped on board this book means a great deal to a great deal of people so just this incredible true story strength adversity uh bad luck just everything about life but it turns out perhaps it was not true and then this weekend a fantastic investigation in the observer came out by the journalist Chloe Hadjimateo, but also some additional reporting bilans on them.

4:46There's often quite a few people involved in a big team effort like this, saying that their names aren't really Rainer and Mothwin. Their names are Sally and Tim Walker. Walker? Yeah, Walker. I mean, it was right there. They turned walking into Wins, that's for sure. Yeah. Those were not the circumstances of how they lost their home. In fact, it's quite a convoluted tale, but it suggests that Sally Walker embezzled money to start with and then as I say it's quite convoluted there's a loan there's all sorts of other things but the embezzlement is the key part of it and it also contains commentary from various sort of consultant neurologists who say that this diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration you would normally expect in fact nobody really lives beyond eight years and it's an awful awful condition um and 18 years on to be flourishing is essentially unheard of and of course occasionally medical very i mean in a blue moon a medical miracle occurs but there is a considerable doubt cost on the nature of of that aspect of the story as well so it's pretty much all of it i mean i i think they did the walk yes i think yeah i don't even know if they did all of that so it is this incredibly inspirational true story which turns out it may well not be true can we not have nice things this is like captain tom's family all over again but could she not have a spa complex richard no she couldn't she had to have it knocked down i bet she has got one but i bet the walkers have got one but um i can't uh i cannot overestimate how much this has gone off like a bomb in the world of publishing because this is a huge huge huge lead item for everyone this has been one of the massive success stories and you know publishing you know you don't have all that money and they pay for everything these big success stories and the salt path is one of those books that has paid for so many other books over the last eight years it is massive and everyone in publishing is absolutely reeling this week all of this has been put to uh reina and moth win and in in significant detail and they've issued the following statement which is not very detailed they've said the salt path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey moth and i shared an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives this is the true story of our journey well thanks for the blub but that does not respond even vaguely to any of the material allegations in this particular investigation a spokeswoman for the winds has said that the allegations made in a sunday newspaper were highly misleading they are consulting lawyers yet they're consulting lawyers um clearly they're this is published by penguin random house yeah i mean they'll they'll have a lot well let i mean let's start talking about it because well yeah no absolutely i'm published by penguin random house and you know a bomb would have gone off there this week because this would have gone and you see now i i have another theory um which is that i actually think you know you we've all heard the expression and it means lots of different things where there's a hit there's a writ yes people often come out of the woodwork when something becomes successful rather like those consultant neurologists i'd be surprised if this was the very very first that after a book has been that successful that penguin random has have heard that maybe the circumstances at the start of it certainly that lead to the whole story taking place don't necessarily add up i would be surprised if that's the first because there has been online commentary which i actually wasn't aware of but i've gone back and i can see i haven't i keep like as often and these things you you read people going oh this was an open secret and i definitely don't think it was an open secret i'd never heard before that this was fake i hadn't really got involved in the salt path world i know i can sort of feel that's that book is not not for me um but you know people say oh no we knew and we'd be at festivals gillian anderson when she said they said oh how did you find reina win when you met her and she went uh i thought she was quite guarded and you think yeah really the two central tenets that are at heart of this book the things that make it sell a huge amount of money the things that make it really resonate with middle britain and with readers across the world are they lost their house through no fault of their own these allegations suggest that is not the case they lost their house because um sally walker had embezzled money they then borrowed from somebody else and that person had called in the loan and so the house no longer belonged to them and also the ability somehow to turn back the course of an illness through communing with nature i mean you have a huge responsibility everyone everyone one who writes about anything uh medical and any form of even in the broadest terms alternative treatment has a huge responsibility to bear and if you're publishing anything that suggests that then you also have a huge responsibility to bear as i say i mean i saw i saw a woman saying that my husband's got cbd and i've lost count of the times in the last five years that people said you must read this book and perhaps he should go for a long walk and the despair that i had of understanding that's not something that he was able to do and not quite understanding what it was that must be in this book.

9:51If you're talking about, you know, medical things, and you're talking about what nature can do, and you're talking about, you know, medicinal effects of things, that is a big issue, not only for the winds, by the way, and that's their place, but for the publisher. Yes, for the publisher, it is, the medical aspect is probably the most serious aspect of it. It's interesting, I kept thinking back, and as I say, I don't know the origin story of this but but obviously she's a first-time writer and i wonder if she perhaps glossed over as you might do the circumstances the loss of house because it's much better to get on the walk of course you would and they've said and your editor would say well hang on i think we really want to delve more into this because it the payoff doesn't make is not so satisfying yeah and also don't see the tragedy you know we've got to go really down because in reina wins version of the book there is a bad guy who is an old colleague of moth wins who he sort of asked him to invest in something and then pulls the rug from under them and takes their house.

10:46So there's a proper bad guy at the start of the book who we're like, oh my God, you're so unlucky that that happened to you. And yeah, you would think that an editor might be saying, oh, let's find out a little bit more about that person. I think that person who is Ros Heming's husband passed away a few years ago. And she said, Ros Heming said, in a way, I'm sort of glad he didn't see this book ever come out because it would have absolutely, it would have hurt him so much. the lies in it well i think it's yeah i think it's interesting but i do nonetheless think what's the editing procedure there when you're saying um okay this person did this thing to us you're still thinking if you're the lawyer okay can this person be identified if this person can be identified are they still alive you're you're going through all of those different pros you know you have to be so careful with all of these things as we say and you can get away with things in books that you might not be able to on tv or whatever but if that person is dead then even so i think you'd have to produce i i would be if i was publishing this book i would require these people to produce some forms of evidence and maybe they just said well we don't have anything left because we put us what we had in our backpacks and we we weren't on our wall it's too painful for us uh yeah if over the next few days weeks whatever the amount of people coming out of the woodwork because they've been emboldened by this and it's gone public to speak out and the claims are able to be fairly incontrovertibly proved to be false.

12:13What do you then do if you're paying a random house? Gosh, it's a very interesting question. I think that probably you try and claw back some of the money that you've passed over. I don't know this particular contract. The contract would normally be that they have guaranteed that everything in this piece is truthful. and again things can be highly misleading but if something is a deliberate lie then you know penguin random house i guess would would would have some sort of recourse obviously any money you do get back in that's got to go straight to some sort of charity i mean that has to because penguin random house will know also that you know they've they've been remiss here you know you know when you're involved in a book and you have that sort of fan groups around the book you know how much these books mean to people and especially with this one it's to do with illness you know what this means to people so you know that people are going to be very very hurt i suggest that there would be on one hand there'll be some legal issues if these things do turn out to be not true and on the other hand some some reputational work that would need doing and someone's getting a new neurology wing aren't they yeah exactly we'll get on to more you know other instances of disputed memoirs or memoirs that have been proved to be false in a minute but as we've talked about so many times and we're going to probably talk about in another item on this podcast people are obsessed with authenticity in this age they are totally obsessed they've you know as we've said people feel that instagram influencers or the beckhams or whoever are mis-selling them something when it's really not that big of a deal this i have a lot of sympathy with anyone who feels lied to by this book if the allegations in that article are correct and by the way the winds slash walkers have not said they're not correct.

13:55They've just said, this is a lovely uplifting story. This is our truth. Now, to some extent, all memoirs, I was thinking about this on the way in to talk to you and I was thinking, to some extent, all memoirs are reality bending because you're writing them at a point in that you're not writing them contemporaneously. And usually you want to be the hero of your own memoir one way or another. Well, I mean, yes, that is the tricky element of lots of them. And as the reader, you're thinking, am I getting, is this the, you know, what is truth? Am I getting the kind of recovered feeling as it occurred at the time?

14:29Or am I like most things in human life, you know, that I'm getting order is being imposed on this kind of tide of experience that happened back in the day and a narrative is being created. So to some extent, all memoirs have those sort of things. And, you know, you leave out lots of things and you, you know, you shape a narrative, but this is likely to send, you know, the mumsnetters, the tattle lifers, all the people who might go nuts about things like this, off the dial, especially as they've loved it. It's meant such a lot. It's become this film. It's one of those inspirational stories of, you know, boomers walking somewhere, which is actually a genre.

15:08I mean, it really is a genre. There's been so many of these sort of films and books over the last, yeah, you know, something happens to a boomer, maybe health-related, or maybe something else related. Then they meet a baby tiger and everything's okay. And if they walk, yeah, they need to walk. So it's worth thinking. So if I take you through the publishing process and where Penguin Random House, which my publishers would have been since Michael Joseph, which is one of the imprints of Penguin Random House. When this came in on submission, you would buy it, I think, because of the story. You would immediately or you would certainly take a meeting.

15:38You kind of go, oh, this is really, you know, there's not a lot that gets sent into publishers where they go, I haven't read this before. And she can clearly write Rainer Wynn. I mean, it's not my cup of tea, but she, you know, she no markets that, you know, it's uplifting and all of those things. So Raina and Moth will come in. You will chat away. It will not be an enormous book. You're not thinking, oh my God, this is going to be the salt path. Yeah. This is going to sell too many copies. This is going to be a movie with Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. You're definitely, definitely not thinking that.

16:06You're thinking, is this worth a£30 ,000 advance and some marketing money? It's probably what you're thinking at that stage. I don't think you'd even need to pay 30, to be quite honest. But that would be if you really like it and you're thinking other publishers are going to look at this, other publishers are going to see that there's something in this. Now, the contract you sign or the contract that the Wins would have signed, they take on all the indemnity for any lies that are in their account. So Penguin Random House, same with Hachette, HarperCollins, all of these companies, if you sign something like this, the onus is on the author to be telling the truth.

16:39There is nothing beholden on the publishers to have fact checked. this stuff. Okay, I mean, one imagines you would, and you'll certainly do some of your due diligence, but they do not have any legal issues, because Rainer and Moth, or, you know, however they sign their contracts, one assumes, by the way, that the checks got sent to Tim and Sadie Walker, but that's another thing. So, one, they would have signed their contract, therefore everything is on them. They have said to Penguin Random House, to Michael Joseph, everything we've told you is true, and in the same way when the movie rights are bought and normally movie companies do quite a lot more due diligence because they're not paying 30 000 pound for something you know they're paying and as i said it's so weird something being on the screen is so different i mean i was i'm thinking i'm adapting something at the moment and it would be so different even though in the book if you can vaguely identify people it doesn't matter you've got to create completely new characters because it's it's too close so making a movie you're spending millions so you'll spend three four million probably so at that point you think maybe we do our due diligence but also the place i'd like to be is inside the heads of uh of sally and tim walker when the movie deal gets made because i think they probably got away with it with the book they've done two follow-up books which are wild silence and landlines you know rain and win's got a very very nice career you know she's made millions you know they've got a nice house down in cornwall in fact in the second book is based on the fact that a city trader read the first book felt so sorry for them he gave them a property in cornwall to live in if they could rewild it uh before him i'd love to chat to him um oh you may well be hearing yes i'm gonna be hearing from lots more people on this story i'd like to have been in the head of reina winn where they go all his all this money and you think okay this is going to be on the screen we have got julian anderson and jason isaacs this is suddenly going to it's interesting when when you do a movie you know it weirdly gets a lot more publicity than a book so a book kind of sold forever and ever and ever and is much more lucrative than movies for an author but when a movie comes out there's a weird thing where you get elevated in traditional media okay but i'm not saying she has done this but maybe if this isn't true by this stage the truth you know how the truth reality bending that's what i'm talking about the truth has sort of become that for you and you think that that's exactly what happened i think you think you're you sit still and safe and i don't think you're you're worried because if a person were to have got away with something or got away with not the whole truth then i don't think you suddenly think oh this is going to become so much more exposing because you're not really okay with that whole world and and the fact that it is going to become so and also you you've convinced you've convinced yourself that you're telling your truth and so whatever comes out oh no they could actually say oh is this true and you go no it was i was sort of it's very vibes based my truth yeah which um some people's uh truth is these days um but the second that it came out on screen you could tell that the observer who'd done this amazing um piece i think well this is a much bigger story now this was previously like a seven year old book which had sold a load of copies which have made a lot of book groups very very very happy but was sort of passing into the ether but now bang it's on the front pages again and boy is it on the front pages now with uh with with these revelations well it's only just starting as the week goes on.

20:01And I was, it makes, you think that because you're thinking how will it play out? And obviously, the most famous one in sort of recent decades has been James Frey's Million Little Pieces memoir, which that was famous. It went on Oprah's book club and he was, you know, and then it was found out to be mostly rubbish. Some readers sued random, I think that was Random House in America, readers sued them. I mean, I know you can sue anyone in America, but it's interesting because that's a different... There were other ones, but they haven't resulted in legal... Not all of them have resulted in... Sometimes there's counter-memoirs, obviously.

20:41By the way, the next book, if I was Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, I'd be thinking, I know the movie I want to be in now. Yeah, for definite. I mean, and so the question is, what you do at this stage... I mean, they're consulting lawyers. It's pretty difficult. There may be a sort of fudge where they say, we look forward and not back and we don't want to go into the full details like everyone we've made mistakes and we made financial mistakes and what have you and they could do that but I think people are now just going to want to find out absolutely everything and they want to have other people on the sofa because right now you've seen Rainer and Moth win many times I've seen over the last few weeks because this film came out and I think people are now just going to say well I don't understand how could this possibly have been published?

21:31How could also, they're going to say lots of things like that. And I'm going to speak now to people who are, we're talking about Salt Barth and they'll say, I've literally never heard of this. And I think there's two interesting things about that. Firstly, we're talking about it because in publishing terms, it is a proper phenomenon. I mean, one of the big sort of 10 books of the last five years or so. It's like, you know, this huge thing that came from nowhere. It's made a huge amount of money for everybody. So in publishing, it's massive. And I'm fascinated by the amount of people when you go online who say oh so this is the first i've heard of this book and i say this in publishing all the time publishing meetings i said it doesn't matter how much publicity you do nobody has heard of any books they just haven't there's it's a thing people who love books it's like you know professional golf if you know about golf you know all the players if you don't know about golf you don't know any of them you go tiger woods and it's the same with books you know so there's a huge amount of people who have never heard of this book wouldn't wouldn't dream of knowing it existed might know oh yeah wasn't there a film with that title there's a Gillian Anderson thing but even that mainly not because you know publicity doesn't um cut through uh and it will be fascinating to see the sales figures next week for this book well I've now bullshit because I thought I had to have a look at it and by the way every penny of that is still going to Rainer win and Moth win you know it's it's it's very very hard to give up maybe their creditors yeah maybe their creditors eventually it's very very hard to give upticks to books that are five or six years old a movie is one way of doing it they give you a couple of months of you know real kind of uplift in sales but if you have a movie and then after the movie a massive controversy where people are saying oh my god everything in this book is mental then who doesn't want to read that it suddenly becomes a very different reading experience but the money is still the same you know the money is still gonna go to them well we'll catch up at some length unspecified length if only with the sales figures on that one next week.

23:23But as I say, that's going to be a really big story and watch how it plays out and who first makes comment, who's first on the sofa and we'll take a look back at that next week. But it's amazing as well how the phrases fact check and fat check sound so similar and yet the exact opposite of each other. And on that, I think we should go to a break. We should, by the way, afterwards we're talking about more fakery but we're also talking about a rare good old-fashioned success story. A real hit.

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26:02Welcome back, everybody, after those unfunctionally honest adverts. Yeah. The world of music and the world of AI is a fascinating one, and it's been thrown into focus by this band the velvet sundown who are um gabe farrow lenny west milo rains and orion rio del mar good looking guys you've seen pictures of them it's entirely fake so that's not a real human being none of those people are real the velvet sundown are not a real group every single thing there is done by giving a simple prompt into suno which is one of the um the ai music making machines the velvet sundown have gone bigger than any of these other ai bands but there are huge amounts of them around at the moment but simple um a simple they've got more than 800 000 streams on spotify it's over a million now is it yeah they've put out three or two or three albums in the last month their artist blurb on spotify which was verified used to say their sound mixes textures of 1970s psychedelic alt rock and folk rock yet it blends effortlessly with modern alt pop and indie structures hmm uh there was a quote from billboard on there which by the way wasn't a quote from billboard this billboard article never really existed that said they sound like the memory of something you never lived and somehow make it feel real now in terms of like who they are or what what it is rather because it's not there's there is no they yes um but i feel like my own reactions to this are sort of like part of the story in some ways you sort of want it to be an art hoax you kind and that and that to me feels i'm part of a generation that wants someone to say i've done this to say and there was someone who came out and said I'm their publicist and then it turns out he's been debunked.

27:41Lots of people, by the way, are claiming credit for this which is the only funny bit of the story which is everyone's going, oh no, this was me. I did this. And the real people are going, no, we faked it. There's something about me that I want someone to say, there's a point to all of this. I'm trying to make a point about this or that. But why does it have to be anything? Other people are saying, you know, it's fine. It's good enough. I like listening to it. I played it to your husband. We didn't tell him it was AI and he was like, yeah, this is absolutely a piece of me. this is absolutely but exactly it is because it said all the things that you like into an algorithm and that's the music that it's come up with it's interesting if you listen to one of the songs which then I think it's much let you really can't tell and the mixing is so good that's what I really noticed about this just the advances from stuff that I heard of AI music honestly about three months ago and what you can hear now is that so quickly all of these things are being ironed out and I really felt that all those little clues really they had ironed out very very well yesterday then i listened to the whole album and at that point you were like this is there's something weird and it's hard to know maybe it's because you know but there is something odd about it lyrically certainly yeah actually john oliver did a thing on um last week tonight his ai band he kept talking about was the devil inside but again they talk a lot about dust and wind and i'm trying to work out whether are they sort of slightly copying each other these two ai bands there are certainly already ai copies of the velvet sundown i mean geez where do we go people are becoming angry because it's showing up on their spotify playlist they don't really know why in the same way that um google are trying to sort of say oh we're going to try and find a way of watermarking images that we've discovered to be ai people are saying well why shouldn't you just do this you've got to find a way to do this with music and then there are other people who think well i mean why why do you have to why can't you just have you know ever since sort of brian eno or whoever came up with the idea of ambient music saying oh this is just you don't have to sort of actively listen in fact there were composers there was one composer um sort of 19th century composer who talked about um fun making furniture music like you didn't have to sit it wasn't sit up music it was lean back music so at the moment the velvet sundown are on spotify and they're not labeled as ai and they're verified deezer have said um who are streaming rivals to spotify have said we put it through our algorithm we we are confident is 100 % AI generated and certainly nothing that's happened in the real world would suggest that it isn't.

30:07Their latest figure say 18 % of the music that people try to upload to it is entirely AI generated. The other thing I was thinking about when I was listening to this on Spotify was how much of this is like bots listening to this AI thing and it just becomes a sort of weird advertising transaction? Well that's the thing so there's money to be made on Spotify. We know it's a very very small amount of money that you make on advertising services if you're a band if you're a record company you're making a fortune from these places um but not bands and we'll get onto the record company question in a minute because that that's an interesting one so if lots of us are going to spotify or whatever streaming service and you'll have those discover playlists which will be you know a mix of new music old music stuff that we know you the algorithm tells us you like already a really useful way of hearing old music and finding new music as well now the velvet sundown are on a number of those playlists and and some other big playlists as well so to get onto a discover playlist it does actually cost you money yeah so if you're a band or if you're a record company you want to promote something you can get placed on one of these playlists and you get you get a smaller royalty smaller than than you're getting already to go on a discover playlist spotify are very open as well you know this is this is all there and the terms and conditions they'll say look people have to like it as well people have to engage with it and enjoy it and then it will you know go further and further up our various charts but if you want to be on this um these discover playlists this is something that that will cost you and that's something that velvet sundown have clearly done and that people have liked this uh this music as well but the interesting thing of course is if you are say shed seven okay and you've shed seven have got all their music on spotify and a lot of their stuff will get on discover play this because it's popular so they wouldn't necessarily have to be paying to be on these things but if you're shed seven and you're getting your very very small amount of money per song per stream then your management company is going to have to pay all of you from that and your management company is going to have to take their bit and the record company is going to have to take their bit if you have sat down and made an ai thing then nobody is getting paid apart from you it's what if i say to you you know you can get a smaller royalty on this i think great i haven't done it i literally done nothing these things you can you can make these songs in 30 seconds Velvet Sundown feels like it's something that they've spent a little bit longer, perhaps on.

32:23But you can make these things incredibly quickly and sit back and watch the money come in. You can have things. And again, Spotify absolutely say we have our eye on this stream farms, which are these depressing sheds all around the world, which are just hundreds, thousands of tablets and phones all streaming the same thing at the same time to bump your numbers up. Because, you know, even if you're getting 0.01 pence per stream, you know, it adds up eventually. so there are ways of grifting this system there are ways of using that system and there are certainly ways if you can sit at home come up with a new song put it on spotify put it on other streaming things and have a thousand phones listening to it at the same time there's money to be made there again if we go back to deezer they are suggesting that in this sort of feedback loop of ai made for ai sometimes up to 70 of those streams are bots listening to bots we talk a lot about can ai make movies can ai write books and those slightly longer form things it feels harder but there is a lot about music especially as you say sit back music that is a vibe and the one thing ai is very very very good at is a vibe it's going i know the sort of thing you mean this sort of thing yes yes it is that sort of thing and unless somebody takes a stand at some point and labels every single one of these things when it comes through we are going to be awash with it is going to be absolute slop.

33:44And I'd be interested to know your view about where that takes us. Let's just take music because the films and novels, I suspect, are going to come to this place in about 18 months time. But music as a test case for AI just absolutely flooding the market. What does that mean for us as consumers? And what does it mean for a 22-year-old in a band right now working your socks off to write music? Are you just another job that's getting replaced by AI? Because humans are annoying. I mean people in bands are definitely annoying that's not the whole point of them listen I grew up with one and I love him but yeah eliminating those pesky humans from that particular money making opportunity is you can see the appeal immediately but you can also see just the volume of it and how it's really easy for the whole tide of that and how it obviously takes a long time to create things or sometimes everyone says oh you know I wrote this song in 15 minutes it finally just came out but there are not that many songs that are like that and there's certainly not careers that happen like that and we also know that this idea that oh no, humans will find you out and humans can find meaning in a piece of toast that looks like it's got the face of Jesus on it.

34:59We are designed to find meaning in anything to see faces on trees to find meaning in the velvet sun to see ourselves in all sorts of things and they can definitely see themselves in the velvet sundown as always with these sort of things where it's a bit of a crapshoot and maybe people like it maybe they won't is the flooding of it people will flood the marketplace it's not like some things will try some will work they might be quite good doesn't really matter and we're all debating whether or not it's a pastiche or a satire on ourselves or whatever it is it's actually just the sheer volume in in a funny kind of way it reminds me of that you know that's the idea that most of the traffic on the world's internet now is whatever the percentage it's gone way over 60 it's just things like you know vending machines talking to each other and like have you got a smart coffee why is my coffee cup smart you know why is my toaster smart i like the idea of vending machines talking to each other i like that i like to think about what their problems are but the idea you know if we're talking about vending machines we're like i hate it when the thing gets stuck but from the vending machines perspective that'd be very different because they'd be like i hate it when something gets stuck because i can see someone's frustrated but also I've got it itches yeah you know I can feel it's there and I can't do anything so actually I'm interested in what vending machines say that's a novel yeah I mean you've made something rather beautiful out of that but I think actually what the vending machines talk to each other is but we will find meaning in anything yeah yeah we will and I will anthropomorphize it as them talking to each other yeah they're not they're not talking to each other okay but yes I think that the sheer volume that floods things means it's harder and harder to find um things and it's harder to find connections with those things which you say that take a long a long period of time to make um that are faltering um that require refinement or anything like that if you can refine in a millisecond some people are saying i'm really angry with spotify about this because they don't make it clear i think there will be some kind of premium to be had for people who really you know feel that they would be being lied to if they if this sort of thing um wasn't um clearly labeled as such but actually the majority of people just as the majority of people get the news app that's on their phone and are quite happy with which whatever one comes bundled free with whichever type of phone they've got they're quite happy to listen to lots of this stuff and again it's odd because as i said and when we were talking about the sort path people are obsessed with authenticity but they are and they aren't so they're obsessed with it but they're actually going to be quite happy you know not to mind the ai has an authenticity which is this is ai this is this This is the machine.

37:23And as long as you're not pretending it's real human beings and people, that has an authenticity. If I can strike a positive note, it would be this, which is, I do think, in the same way, listen, I don't want to hark on about the Industrial Revolution all the time, but in the same way that if you can mechanize the production of something, then 50 to 100 years later, someone who can actually do it with their bare hands becomes incredibly valuable. There's a premium on artisans. and I do think there comes a point where people who properly love music proper music fans you know I'm a I'm a sidelines music fan but proper music fans there will be a huge premium on human made music I think and there will be a huge premium on going to see human made music and I think that people will start to appreciate human made music it's already a huge premium it's very expensive yeah but so bands even now the way they make the money is touring so they've no longer making music, sending records.

38:18And it is harder for an iBand to tour. Absolutely doable, completely possible, but less fun because, you know, it's okay listening to the Velvet Sundown if it's in the background and everyone's chatting. If you're actually having to sit in a stadium, you are kind of going, oh, this is sort of awful, isn't it? So I do hope and I think that for bands who play live and make and write their own music, there will be a huge premium for that. I think the really interesting thing is the people who are who are trying to sue are the record companies because the real story of the spotify years and the streaming years is that the record companies have not lost a penny the record companies are still making an absolute fortune it's just they're not giving as much money of that money to the bands that they sign so the record companies are in a nice place now where they're going oh we're still getting all of this money we've done all these deals we're not having to pay our workers as much as we used to and the record companies are now seeing oh wait a minute spotify are now putting these songs on where no one gets paid it doesn't go through a record company so we are completely taken out of that equation because what we do is manage talent and this we don't manage computers which is what's happening so the record companies are launching lawsuits against a lot of these um ai streamers and things like that so it feels like if i was 21 and in a band you you're like kind of banging your head against the wall You hope that this whole thing, and I think this in lots of areas, this whole thing, the market becomes so saturated so quickly with slop, which is what we've seen in a lot of journalism and things like that, that actually this desire to find some truth and to find some human connection will become more and more powerful.

40:00So in the same way that New York Times and Guardian and the Observe that we talked about earlier, you know, they see numbers go up and up and up because people are desperate for a genuine human connection and desperate for something that hasn't been written by a machine. You hope that that's what happens in music as well. But it's going to be a bumpy ride for the next few years. will happen and you hope it happens with enough people but you but you also sort of have to acknowledge that many perhaps the majority really would be quite happy to read an ai generated article about an ai band and listen to the ai music most of the money in the world just be part of an advertising transaction but most of the money in the world most of the cultural money in the world doesn't come from those people most of the cultural money in the world comes from comes from early adopters who love something comes from fans and those fans you can you know will will still seek a human connection.

40:48That's not something that bands have ever massively been able to monetize anyway. You know, they want people who genuinely like what they do and like them as human beings. You know, look at this massive Oasis tour. They're making, you know, hundreds of millions. Now, Oasis is, I love Oasis. Oasis's lyrics could be written by AI. You know, they've never said, look, we're the greatest lyricist in the world. Some of the, you know, the chord sequences and stuff, that could be written by AI, but you could not invent Oasis in AI. You couldn't invent the history of that group. You couldn't invent those guys and how they interact with each other.

41:16That is something you can't invent. And that is something that people will pay for forever and ever and ever. You just hope that there are enough people still willing to pay for things and who take 100 quid and take and take and just take the love of human beings do something extraordinary that they don't need to do, but doing just to entertain you. That would be where I would err on the side of optimism. But my God, there's going to be an awful lot of this coming on. At the very beginning, we played the Velvet Sundown. now if you're listening to this and go oh you didn't play the velvet sundown we are currently talking about whether we can or not which seems ridiculous because it's made up you know it's just a machine but you know it has publishers and this out the other and you know putting music on things we we have done our own just to show what can be done i i just said i literally just went into suno i said i want a landfill indie band from the uh 2000s i asked chat gpt what they should be called and chat gbt said they should be called the quiet alibi and uh i said give me the sort of song that the kooks would have written and they said how about rewind the summer so this is and this took i'm going to say 45 seconds this is the quiet alibi with rewind the summer Your voice was heat in a motel room.

42:30Vinyl slow dancing under the moon. Time pulled the thread, but I still feel tight. Silhouette burned in the porch light. Let's rewind the summer, slow and rough. Trace every curve we couldn't get enough. Back to the night Your hands know mine Let's rewind the summer, one more lie. Listen, it's terrible, but so is almost all music I liked when I was 16. One thing we did discover is that it just can't handle a British accent. Doesn't like British accents. Can't do one. But a lot of British singers in the 2000s liked to have a slight transatlantic accent anyway, so I think we got away with it. but you know you can you can you can sort of make it do anything and it's it's listen it's profoundly awful uh there's going to be an awful lot more of it to come but i do think it places a premium on people who can really do it and uh let's let's hope it does anyway and perhaps we'll put the whole of that on after the final adverts on this thing we'll we'll we'll put the hold of rewind the summer by the quiet alibi yes but for now let's just accept that humans are becoming a prestige product and yeah i'm not saying that's sort of a good way of uh think about it and also let's pitch the um the vending machines um yeah that's meet cute that actually that was lovely yeah i'm i'm all out of revels oh i have plenty of revels can you get revels still in a vending machine oh yeah if you can't i don't think i've seen revels in a vending machine for many that sounds like an ai reminiscence i don't think i have seen revels in a vending machine for many years if you have seen revels in a vending machine at home please send in a picture see that's human interaction.

44:15AI wouldn't do that. Yeah, via the internet. Talking of humans as a premium product, can we talk about Hot Ones? Oh, please. Let's talk about Hot Ones, which is a YouTube interview series. And the premise of it is, it was created by a guy called Chris Schomburger, but it's presented by a guy called Sean Evans. And he interviews a celebrity and the questions are fantastic. We'll come to that in a minute. But celebrities have to answer questions while eating progressively spicier chicken wings with various hot sauces. And that is it. It's a very, very basic set. It's two black tables with some jugs of water and milk or whatever.

44:52You know, you can bring along various things. And Sean Evans asks the guests questions. And it started, you know, they used to get not very good people on. And now they get huge stars. They get anyone they want, really. They've had in the last six months, they've had Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez. They can get anyone they want. Will Ferrell's done it, Billie Eilish. I mean, it is for every PR, this is the stop. This is one of the ones that we absolutely, whenever you do any sort of PR thing, there's like a list of places to hit. This is number one on every A-list celebrity's PR list, wish list. They turned down Kamala Harris in the presidential election campaign because they just thought, oh, no, we don't really want to get into politics.

45:30And it's just become a huge thing. And the moments from it go viral all the time. And we can perhaps come to why that is in a bit. but why are we talking about them this week we're talking about it because you know i grew up in the format business and you know grew up in a world where you know who wants to be a millionaire and weakest link and all these things travel the world and something had to be on a terrestrial television channel and a hot one started somewhere very differently so 2015 as you'll know anyone who worked in sort of publishing or magazines or newspapers um everyone decided they had to pivot to video this was the thing everyone wants video we have to pivot to video and we have to set up our own little studio and do this out of the other and it came from a site called first we feast chris schumburg as you say so why don't we do like a thing where people have to eat you know hot wings of increasing strength sean evans who's working there said oh i love that let's uh let's do it did a couple of series where it was mainly sort of rappers and sports stars sean evans would always want it to be a um a sports reporter so they did this for a while the episode that makes that made them really big and you can see that find this on youtube it's very good as key and or the American comics, they did one.