TV Property P**n & Scarlett Johansson vs AI

24:16Now, Sam Altman says that it's actually another Royce actress who's voiced this, but you can't say who it is for privacy concerns. But obviously the feeling is that he's just fed a load of Scarlett Johansson stuff to his machine who can now talk like scotty hanson the fact that he treated her i mean you know these people are not the brightest i know they've got the future of the entire of humanity in their hands but obviously this feeds into hollywood's paranoia about ai that it will come and take their jobs but also us normies paranoia that it will take everybody's jobs there's something so creepy about this that this woman said no yeah and then they just did it anyway and also that here he's taken a film which is fairly dystopian and certainly not a good advert for personal assistance and gone it's listen he likes the film he's got a crush on scarlett johansson and he's a billionaire so he's kind of going great and he's had meetings with scarlett johansson and said could we use your voice she said no and he hasn't heard no for a long time he hasn't heard no but he's also one of the things about films and him is so weird he said that he really liked the social network because he thought it might um encourage people to do startups he thought that open time was problematic because it wasn't encouraging enough people to become physicists he liked jaws he hoped it might encourage people to swim.

25:26Yeah, and they're regarded as these kind of philosopher kings. James Marriott, who writes brilliant columns in The Times that I absolutely love, was talking about this the other day, saying that all these people, you have to listen to all these people now, like they've got these amazing philosophies. Elon Musk will go on shows and say, let me tell you something about the Romans, they were incredible innovators. I'm like, sorry, this is like the Lady Bird Guide to stupidity. Everything is like it's come out of the sort of business section of the airport bookshop. And actually they're these weird, creepy, often very stunted men you know the social network is really interesting because it shows how Facebook was born out of this kind of weird night of terrible misogyny Sam Altman how is your favourite movie I just everything about you is he just doesn't understand movies Meta's first chatbot really quickly started to say that Zuckerberg was creepy and manipulative no really like the machines out of the mouth of the machines really quickly it would be interesting to see what Scarlett Hansen does with this because she has got an appetite she has shown herself to have an appetite for these kind of legal battles in the past when Disney brought Black Widow out and they're quite sexist and particularly in a lot of the early Avengers.

26:29And she has to go through all of that, but eventually you're going to get your one movie that's your dedicated movie and you get your big payday. And they put her movie in streaming and in theatres on the same day. So they kind of completely kneecapped her box office and did her over on that. And she sued Disney, which is quite punchy. Yeah, it was not when I got, with the CEO, but she sued them. And the reason they did that, by the way, is obviously to build up subscribers and in that fear that they were being left behind on streaming. So it's using people's work. So this is a sort of similar, again, it's a kind of tech argument.

27:04We were talking about this the other day on the questions edition of the show. Yes, questions and answers edition. Which, you know, in our law, we call it the tort of passing off. Can you just get somebody who sounds like Stephen Fry to do an advert? I think that in America, it's different. They call it the right of publicity, right to publicity. But she would have quite a good claim here. I very much doubt that whoever made, I think it was Anna Perna made her, but whoever made, whichever film production company made her, I doubt they've licensed it to OpenAI. No one's really licensed anything to OpenAI.

27:37No one's licensed anything. And they say, oh, we've changed all our models on freely available stuff. It's like, well, I mean, how do we know? And people are saying, oh, well, in Discovery, in any potential court case, we'd be able to find out whether, if there is an actress who's been told she has to stand like scarley hansen that that's one thing if they've trained the machine using her you'd have to have whistleblowers it's really impossible to say so i don't know what she will do about it but she does she has as we say she has had an appetite for these kind of fights that might have a trickle down to other people in the business and clearly hollywood is super paranoid about the idea of being replaced by machines hollywood and Holly Willoughby.

28:18Genuinely, there's something super creepy behind it. But there's a great documentary we're watching at the moment about the oil companies in the 70s and how they did all their own climate change research. They're these amazing departments. And the departments are saying to them, oh, this is definitely leading to climate change. Just so you know, we've got all of these numbers. Then the oil companies just kind of going, but we really like selling oil. I mean, it really, honestly, we make a lot of money from selling oil. So they absolutely shut them down and they started having you know um pr companies saying well we're uncertain and it looks like it's exactly the same in these big new ai companies a lot of who set up saying actually we are on the side of good and we've got groups of people who are doing research into how we can keep this under control and how we can make sure it doesn't you know fall into um the hands of bad actors but that doesn't seem to be how it's playing out so they don't know look what happened with facebook where all these people said we basically invented this machine and we obviously He had no possible idea that it would be responsible for swinging elections.

29:15They don't know any of these things until it's too late to know. They're unbelievably good at coding, which, by the way, I'm not. So that's a real skill. No offence, but they're not philosophers and they're often very, very emotionally stunted. And they don't know. And the idea that we're allowing the future to be at least partially in the hands of this guy when he will do things like this. These are the warning signs. these are the red flags and it may just be like oh it's just scarlett johansson's voice but it's not it's a real warning sign as to the much wider issues in this level of power and just the unknowns of it all and also i mean you do sort of slightly feel i wonder if this would have happened to a man i don't know but a woman of course this woman said no and he just thought well i'll have it anyway i'll talk a little bit about alexa and siri which which are on their way out really because they seemed unbelievably futuristic but actually you you realize now how unsophisticated they are and Actually, they're just a huge database of things which has to be typed in by somebody and then is regurgitated to you.

30:14Actually, this new generation of chatbot assistants, it is going to be incredible. I mean, I think of all the things that AI is going to do, this is going to be one of the useful ones that you will have an incredible, you know. You know, if you ring up something about your gas bill and you're on hold for a robot and you're there for ages, you won't have to do that from two years' time because your computer will do it. So your robot will talk to their robot. It'll all get sorted out. And, you know, so that's a good thing, I think, because I think Siri and Alexa, which they thought were going to be huge money spinners for them and haven't been at all.

30:43They haven't been able to really monetize them particularly. Almost all uses of Alexa and Siri are turning the lights on and off and playing music. And that's it. And saying, you know, play Rest is History, please. So these new ones will have to have much more of a personality. You know, you can sort of have a relationship with Alexa and that you can ask her to do a fart noise and she'll do it. but with a chatbot that learns who you are and learns everything about you and learns the things you like and you don't like and learns the things that you laugh at or don't laugh at then it is going to be a very very personal relationship a very very useful relationship as well in some things yes but the human in terms of human relationships we simply don't it's completely distorting and we don't know the story of social media and the things that have happened over the past few years couldn't be more salutary in terms of maybe maybe this maybe this won't be a utopia Yeah.

31:32We must know this. Even these small things, what Sam Altman's done, this is a small thing. There's something interesting about the fact that sort of old fashioned movie star, a real human that lots of people have a crush on, like, admire, think is amazing, has just come out and said this. I think it's actually quite a sort of moment because he could barely do any wrong because people are all saying, oh, it'll be so interesting. And, you know, obviously, I understand that, you know, AI and diagnostics and all sorts of other things are going to be very useful. The human relations side of things, which is clearly what happened with social media, cannot be an afterthought because we've already seen how utterly corrosive it is, particularly to children, to all sorts of things.

32:11It's not that she's fighting back against the fact that she could have been paid for this. She didn't want to be paid for it. She didn't want to be the voice. She's kind of made a movie in which she says this stuff is really bad. He just did it anyway. And I think that it's such a sort of, in a way, it's such a simple story to understand. it's interesting it's sort of an adjunct that scarlett johansson thing to the to the apple advert recently that they took off which where they were crushing musical instruments and crushing kind of paints and stuff like that to you know put everything in an it's now all in an ipad and again that's people it's a very very visual representation of people going oh hold on yes i sort of i said because it's like being you know all that shit stuff yeah it's like being a frog in a pan and the heat is just gradually rising it takes a while occasionally to go oh no you are okay you actually do want to get rid of all of this stuff and you know you do want to steal scarlett jansson's voice um and there's a sociopathy to the fact that neither of those people could see yeah that they would you know that's really bad that was a real pr i mean more than an own goal and this is more than an own own goal for sam altman this is really quite bad and it's it's really it's crystallized so much of what people think um so i think that those are quite interesting but it's the sociopathy that makes them not see yeah how could you have done this how could you think this is a good advert how could you think that and also once once you're a billionaire tech bro it's like sort of being a child king in the kind of 15th century is nobody is saying no no nobody is going to say no because you want to be around the court you know because someone who's a multi-multi-billionaire money does rain out of their pockets you know around them and so they're suddenly surrounded by people who are going yep yep like it while stuffing pound notes into their pockets.

33:48Ingrid, my wife, got down to the last three to be the voice of Siri many years ago. Yeah, it was a huge, huge thing. They auditioned like everyone and she was out in LA and she got down to the final three and they were going to go to Poland and she would have had to, you know, sort of say words for kind of the next four months. But she got down to the last three. That's incredible. She was so nearly the voice of Siri, which would have been so weird at home. Don't you think you'd never know if she was in? So would she have just had to say all the words. Yeah, pretty much. That was the gig. They were going to fly her to Poland and just for months upon months.

34:23Read the dictionary. Every film ever made, every word in different intonations. And yeah. Wow. You would be driven nuts? You would be driven nuts. Yeah. I think it was well paid. Yeah. I think. She certainly said, I was gutted not to get it. What price not being nuts though? Exactly. And also what price not being Siri now? Yeah. You know, I think on reflection she's happy she didn't do it. But at the time, you know, like any actor, she's thinking, oh, that would have been a nice one. A bit more fun now. Shall we talk about property shows? Oh, please. This is off the back of a new property show just launched on Netflix called Buying London.

35:00And The Guardian described it as possibly the most hateable TV ever. And it's essentially it's a selling sunset for London. So Selling Sunset was the sort of grand pappy or grandmammy of these sort of big, elaborate, expensive property shows. And it's essentially showing people around very, very, very high end, very expensive, super prime properties in London. In the London one, they've had to explain at the start, by the way, you get absolutely no square footage of your money in London. So they've had to sort of essentially do an international disclaimer as to why the houses people are about to see are incredibly small and cost a bazillion pounds.

35:35Because in Selling Sunset, you go up into the hills, you've got these incredible kind of 10 ,000 square feet houses overlooking. Dating all the way back to 1996. Yes, exactly. And here you're seeing a sort of two up, two down in Mayfair. What I'm going to do at the end of this piece is reveal what I think the three greatest property shows of all time. But there are two very, very different types. There's the wonderful long-running British TV daytime and sometimes primetime stuff, The Home's Under the Hammer, Escape to the Country, Place in the Sun, Location, Location, Location. people love looking at property but i think what the producers of selling sunset and these other shows worked out is very occasionally when we're moving house we look at properties that we can afford and that's the only time in our life we ever look at properties we can afford because the whole rest of the time all we do is surf the net and look at properties we can't afford okay that's the that's the real fun of property so you've got these amazing daytime shows we've got uh here but yeah selling selling sunset was the first big one of just showing these huge multi multi multi million they've always sort of destroyed a special needs school to build on top of it it's absolutely it's so there's no they are obscene enormous they're the size of football pitches there was an amazing thing i forgot to say when we talked about the sunday times rich list last week one of the guys if you want the opposite of a hollywood movie it was this guy made all this money and said um he knocked down the hospital in which he was born and built a golf course that's sort of what you're getting is that listening sunset where There's all these, but actually all reality TV really is people fighting over money or power or both.

37:04So it is sort of perfect for it. And you have these feuding glamourzons really in Selling Sunset. But I think they're properly brilliant monsters, these women. You know, Christine and Chris Shell, you know, they're like the final form of girlboss feminism. The London one, they've got a guy called Daniel Daggers. Let me see a birth certificate, please. And he's got an agency. Now, I think his glamourisms, talking to someone in the business, shall we say, I think his glamourisms have been brought in because I'm told that there are some people who actually do sell houses for this guy and they're not necessarily the ones swinging their hair on the television.

37:40I mean, there was a lot of hair swinging. There was so much hair swinging. More than you normally get when you're being thrown around a house. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, the other problem you've got is that people don't want in the super prime space, they don't, you know, there's no benefit to putting your house on the thing. you don't really it's a bit sort of declassive you don't want to put your house on a netflix show it's not going to help you sell it at all because the leading time is so long it's like nine months it was either gone or it hasn't and we love selling i mean i think selling sunset is hilarious and it's very watchable and whatever there's something about that oceans remove that helps you think this is what americans are supposed to be like of course it's big of course it's enormous everyone's unapologetic it's like yes of course i've got like 40 foot marble counter if we see british people doing it we slightly feel they should be apologizing they should apologize it was sorry you should be apologizing for being such an asshole and it should work in other ways because we are obsessed with class and if you like if ever like i don't know colleen rooney puts some pictures in the house from instagram you know just even in the background of instagram and the mail will like collate them all in a story on mail online all of the underneath comments will be like well you can't buy class can you or something like that you know even even when it's just a very very sort of neutral space they want to say that people want to say that so really this show on paper i feel should work because people are just saying this is absolutely disgusting i wouldn't live in it if you paid me and these kind of horrendous architectural mishmashes what's the next one yeah but but i i didn't feel it did work like selling what did you feel i feel see i'm not a fan of selling sunset i love watching high-end property shows i just because for exactly that reason i love looking i love looking at a 40 million dollar house and going oh i'm so happy i don't want to live in that 40 million dollar house you could pay me to live in it yeah but you know because you just saved 40 million dollars but you know that you just think this is amazing i know it exists but i don't want to live in it and so i don't have to pay are you like me do you like but this is a separate type of show because i don't even think of it as that i just think of it as a sort of absolutely bizarre confection where it's a complete mcguffin what hitchcock called a mcguffin which is something just moves along the plot i almost feel that the houses in that are they move along but what you really want to do is watch them feuding over each other's weddings over different deals they're fighting over money and power so i don't really care whether it's houses or not see see that's where i am exactly the opposite because those bits i can i will fast forward through those bits because as a tv producer i know they're fake right i know it's just nonsense i mean it's sort of fact i like fixer upper stuff i really like fixer upper shows i love fixer upper shows buying london um the first episode uh got some interesting houses in there and again they do have a thing they have property developers who become part of the thing because they will always put their properties on show and what have you.

40:16You'll never see a buyer unless it's, again, an Instagrammer who wants to be on the TV. Who, by the way, won't buy the house because they don't have anything like enough money to buy it. No, of course they won't. But even on that show, there's this sort of awful thing. He's got a house in Radlet that he wants to get the instruction on, which is sort of very Hogwarts-y. But they had to have that house because otherwise all the houses would have been incredibly small. Yes. Even though they were costing for£40 million. so they had to have a house right out in Hertfordshire because only then can it look even vaguely like something that would be on Selling Sunset but on then, so he's got his estate agents and one of them is, they sort of say at the beginning but you're friends with him, you're friends with Daniel aren't you and she goes, yeah I've worked with Daniel for a lot of time now yes I'm a friend of his and so the other two women are kind of just sort of there's a bit of sort of ominous music and then he's going, Daniel Deggis is going oh there's three of you I've taken three of you to show this house and I'm only going to give you one of you the instruction I don't know I don't know who it's going to be and the three of them go oh I'd really like to have this house and they go I'd think I'd really be really good at selling this house and at the end of course they give it to the South African and then you know because they were at a big dinner at someone's posh house in Chelsea and suddenly they're all looking daggers at this woman you think none of this is real no none of it honestly I'd rather you show me the second and the third bedroom because you didn't you've skated around the house a little bit and there's other stuff that I would like to see.

41:36Can I just see the 16 and a half bathrooms, please? Yes, please. Could I see, you know, what's the waste disposal system like? Because I haven't seen it. Have they got a boot room? Have they got a boot room? Exactly. So you're watching this, you just think, well, look, I know this is not true. This is absolutely nonsensical. It makes me feel like Daniel Daggers is not true. But it was, no. I know he is true. If I don't believe in Daniel Daggers, I don't know what I believe in. I don't believe in anything. If you tell me that. It's like Father Christmas to me, Daniel Daggers. But I don't like them all fighting beneath him.

42:05Yeah. I don't, as I say, it is girl boss feminism, Selling Sunset, but you get that feeling that these women have it on their own terms in some kind of slightly warped way. But I didn't like that element of this show. But just in terms of these property shows, which are here's a house, someone is going to buy it or not buy it if it's Selling Sunset. I want to do my, what I would say are my top three. Number three, I will say million dollar listing because of all the ones that are about, you know, those sort of LA and stuff like that. That's the one where they've got more houses. And occasionally they'll do a nice kind of mid-century.

42:39Whenever they have these beautiful kind of mid-century houses in the Hollywood Hills that you just think they're just so full of history and just beautiful and with kind of fittings and stuff that you just think, God, this is incredible. The people always just go in and go, well, we'll just gut this. Absolutely get rid of all of this because I can't. This just needs to be white and bright. And it's like you think, oh, my God, you're absolutely destroying Hollywood. But that's a fun one. And I think of the daytime ones, see, Homes Under the Hammer is a really interesting one. I think they've done nearly kind of 1 ,600 episodes.

43:10They've done a lot. And the teams are working on it absolutely permanently because, you know, there's auctions and then they're going back in six months or a year's time. So that's a team who was working, I think, every day apart from Christmas. And over the years, they've had six or seven different presenters. They did an amazing thing where it used to be Martin Roberts and Lucy Alexander. And they decided they needed a third host and went for Dion Dublin. But the great thing about it is they went from the, just as a producer, this is what I'm always watching. You watch the beginning of Homes Under the Hammer.

43:39It used to be Martin and Lucy going, if you're thinking of getting a property bargain, why not go along to your local auction? And Lucy would go, that's what some of the people on today's show did. Let's take a look. Suddenly, if you've got three of these people, you've got to write a three-hander for every single show. So Martin's got to go, lots of people in Britain love buying houses in auction. And Lucy's going, yes, we're going to see a few of them on this show. and then Dion's got to say, yeah, let's find out what happened. I'm like, come on, man, that's not extra information. So I love that as a producer, seeing that.

44:09And sometimes they'll go back to somewhere in six months, sometimes a year. So it's a very interesting, for people who are interested in production processes, it's a really interesting production process in that when you first film it, it's sort of meaningless. It's when you finally film it. And I was talking to the producer, it's a guy called Matt Masters, and he was saying that's the thing, you have to sort of keep in touch with the people doing it up. Occasionally, you have to go and see it because sometimes if they think it's finished, it's not really finished. And they have great relationships with the estate agents.

44:37So the invisible hand of the production team will say, by the way, that looks crap. Yeah, I don't think that's finished. But occasionally, if they say, well, look, I'm selling it anyway, you will go up and you'll do a piece saying it's not quite done. So you film, you sort of go around, then you film your finished item. And it's like a jigsaw puzzle. So you're piggybacking these things, which I find interesting from a TV producer's point of view, because I love the jigsaw puzzle of it. I think we've had every single presenter of Homes Under the Hammer on House of Games, because I'm such a fan of it.

45:09Whenever I see a name on a list, they go, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes, please. Martel can come on. Yeah. Oh, Jackie Joseph can come on. Yeah. And I spoke to one of them once. I said, what's the best house you ever saw? And they said, I've never seen a good house. I was like, come on. I mean, they were being funny. Don't hear that on the show. One of the great things about Homes Under the Hammer is the music choices, which is always, you know, there's always got Rip It Up and Start Again by Orange Juice or Build by the House Martins. It was a two-bed cottage in Maidstone. And this song started, I can't recognise that.

45:41And it was Maid of Stone by the Stone Roses. And I thought, come on, that's pretty good. That would be so fun. I'd love to do a week doing that. Well, people always say, oh, that must be the best job in telly, being the person who chooses music. You think, that is not a person's job. That is the editor and the producer. So they're all kind of going, yeah, we could have a bit of fun. So it's literally an editor just at the end of their tether. I saw one the other day where there was a woman talking about daughter had loads of horses or something, so they needed a garden. And then they played My Lovely Horse, the father-to-do revision entry, straight after it.

46:14So I love that. And there's also just a shout-out to the best edited clip ever of daytime TV, which is Dan Mayers, one of Martin Roberts doing the imaginary piano. Have you seen that? You were talking to me about this just a moment ago, yes. If you put Martin Roberts' imaginary piano, and it's very, very funny. I think number two, I have to choose between Escape to the Country, which I love, and Homes Under the Hammer. I think I have to go for Homes Under the Hammer. But number one, a show we haven't mentioned yet, which I think combines all the good things of these shows, which is one where the properties are unbelievable.

46:46I mean, unbelievable. One that's not in Britain, so we don't feel guilty about watching it. And one where the soap opera is actually believable. and incredibly charming. And there's a new series starting on Netflix this week, and it's the Parisian Agency. Oh, yes. I've seen it. This is very good. Oh, my God. It's so good. It's like three really hot French brothers and their grandma and their mum and dad, these beautiful houses in Paris, and then they go down to the Côte d 'Azur and what have you. But they're so lovely. Yeah. And I believe... And they're also very French. It is absolutely delightful.

47:20So Buying London starts on Netflix this week, but also Parisian Agency starts on Netflix this week. I think if you don't like buying London, I can see reasons why you wouldn't. By the way, I'm going to keep watching it. Oh, no, don't be ridiculous. Oh, my God, yeah. By the way, the Parisian Agency, which I adore. I think season four has just started, so there's lots to catch up on. Just halfway through season three, they're going, we have a British real estate agent coming out who's got lots of properties, and so we really have to impress this guy. And who is it? Daniel Daggers. No. Yeah, for about four episodes, they keep going, oh, Daniel Daggers is coming out next week.

47:57We've got to impress Daniel Daggers. And here he comes, Daniel Daggers. And so I knew the guy before buying London. I'm like, yeah, I know Daniel Daggers. Yeah, I'm a Daniel Daggers guy already. But maybe there'll be a crossover, maybe the Parisian. But those brothers on the Parisian show are such a delight. Any recommendations this week? because so many people have asked me about flops since we're talking, not that Horizon and American Saga and Megalopolis are yet flops and maybe they will not be flops. People ask me about books about flops and there is a book that I think is absolutely brilliant and it's out of print but you can get it on millions of our sites like Abe Books or World of Books, all those sort of things and it's called Final Cut, Dreams and Disasters in the Making of Heaven's Gate and it's by the executive at United Artists who kind of effectively greenlights the film.

48:49So that's the film we were talking about. Heaven's Gate is almost the trope namer of mega flops. And it comes at the end of that period of extraordinary innovation in Hollywood in the 1970s. And Michael Cimino, who is the maker of Heaven's Gate, and how it all, who's come off The Deer Hunter, which is a huge hit, and then how it all goes wrong with this film and it collapses the studio. And it's so interesting. There's questions we've talked about before when people say, but do you know if it's going wrong? but this guy is the executive and he's really unsparing of himself and he writes it brilliantly and it's a complete anatomy of how it happens and you kind of can see how it did happen because in retrospect, of course, we're all like, how the hell did you just keep giving this guy this money?

49:30That's Final Cut and it's by Stephen Bach, B-A-C-H. Amazing, and I will recommend Glow Up, which is on, I think it's BBC Three, but it's certainly on BBC iPlayer, which is on about season six, but it's the hunt for makeup artists. But you know, it's fascinating generation, fascinating creativity it's a it's a world that i i know nothing about and the people who come in they'll have like guest judges are going the guest judges coming on is sebastian and they go oh my god they go absolutely crazy because there's like a huge instagram star to them and i'm like oh i don't know who that is and i love something yeah if it's a world that i don't know anything about and suddenly and you realize how big it is for people and in some of the stuff they do is absolutely unbelievable so glow up and it's the the whole of this new series is on is on iplayer now and on that bombshell please send your questions in uh the rest is entertainment at gmail.com and we will answer as many of them as we can and more top threes as well because i love to i know you hate a top three but i love a top three no i enjoyed doing i enjoyed being near the top three i was top three adjacent we got asked last week didn't we about our top three cartoon mice so we're gonna have to do that on thursday show so we will think about yeah we will go to the cartoon mice all right then take care everyone bye

50:42Thank you.