Tamagotchis and reality TV: 2023 cultural predictions

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Tamagotchis and reality TV — 2023 cultural predictions’

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

Lilah Raptopoulos
This time last year, I sat down with my colleague Matt Vella to talk through our cultural predictions for 2022. Matt is the editor of the FT Weekend Magazine. So he’s in the business of noticing cultural trends and good stories. And two years into the pandemic, he was really looking forward to a lighter news cycle.

Matt, is there anything else that you would like to see in 2022 that we did not get to?

Matt Vella
I mean, I guess the small scandal, if that makes a comeback, I’ll be so happy. Like . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
I think there was like a time that the, they had to shut down the Large Hadron Collider because there was like some baguette in it . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Uhm hmm. (laughs)

Matt Vella
That kind of story where, you know, nobody gets harmed except some (laughter) subatomic particles. I could deal with that . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Fast forward to today.

Matt Vella
That didn’t happen so much, did it?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I don’t know . . . 

Matt Vella
Mmm not.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I don’t think so. 2022 has not been the easy year that Matt had hoped for. Russia’s war in Ukraine has reminded us that peace is precarious. There’s an energy crisis. There’s a looming recession. But in all of our lives, there have also been lots of good things. And next year, there will be more. So as the year winds down, we’re still looking forward and thinking about what comes next. Which means that today Matt is back to talk about 2023. You sent us a ton of predictions over the past few weeks and we go through them and we add some of our own. Then we invite FT editors and reporters to share their predictions on their own cultural beats. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

Matt, welcome back to the show. I am so thrilled to have you on.

Matt Vella
Thanks so much.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So we’re reuniting here after a year. And last year, I was listening to last year’s predictions and the most popular one for 2022 was the return of the flip phone.

Matt Vella
Mm hmm. (laughter) Yep.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Which, I’m sad to say, didn’t happen.

Matt Vella
Yeah. That Apple flip phone that they introduced was pretty amazing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) Really top notch.

Matt Vella
Mmm.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So we’re gonna try this again.

Matt Vella
What was your cultural wish?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, first, I wanted a remake of Three Men and a Baby.

Matt Vella
Yeah. So you wanted Three Men and a Baby and instead you got Dahmer. So . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter)

Matt Vella
I think that, that’s like a pretty good precursor to the rest of the year.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I think that basically sums it up. OK. So should we go into our first prediction?

Matt Vella
Yup.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. This is from Alice Danvers. Ah, Let’s hear it.

Alice Danvers
Hi, I’m Alice Danvers. I think with Twitter on fire that blogging is gonna make a comeback. I also think that there is space for Tamagotchis to make a comeback that basically bakes. But again . . . 

Matt Vella
Oh, my God, Alice on fire.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So what do you think? What happens if everybody leaves Twitter?

Matt Vella
Huh Twitter. I will say I’m 100 per cent pro the revival of Tumblr. You know, like let’s get Ouija board and some tarot cards and say, I’ll sit up here and just bring it back to life because I’m ready to go back to that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
I don’t know if it’ll actually happen. What do you think?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I mean, this is like a desire. It feels like a desire for old school technology, right? Like we want Tumblr, we want the blog. The Tamagotchi, Alice says, is a vapes, but a game. (laughter)

Matt Vella
(Blowing sound) Surely.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
A vape . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Tamagotchi for people . . . 

Matt Vella
That has a Tamagotchi built into it is something that we could have.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Tamagotchis are, it was like a late nineties or early 2000s game that you would clip on to your belt and you had to sort of just, like, feed a little animal and make sure it didn’t die.

Matt Vella
Yeah. I mean, it’s perfect for embedding in a vape, you know, as you’re (laughter) killing yourself, you take care of a fake life. Yeah, it’s perfect.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the other thing, we don’t have to go deeply into Twitter, but the thing that it makes me think about is, like, over the past few years, so much of the influencer economy and even like the media economy is built on how many followers you have. And if one platform just kind of like disappears, then does having a lot of followers actually correlate to being more important?

Matt Vella
Hmm. Hmm.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Like, does that just, does that just not matter anymore?

Matt Vella
I don’t know. I think the underlying vibe of the kind of panic on Twitter is like, “somebody, please stop this thing ‘cause none of us can really cope with the thought of it not being here anymore”. But it’s getting pretty crazy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mmm hmm.

Matt Vella
It’s a little bit like when your favourite celebrity goes from having like a fun meltdown to “Is this . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
Person gonna, like, hurt themselves”? Please stop . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
You know.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. OK, shall we go to the next one. The next one is Flora McKay from London.

Flora McKay
Hi, Lilah, this is Flora McKay, calling from Mile End in London. My wish for 2023 is that we see Big Brother style authenticity and reality come back to the world of reality TV. Luckily, we’ve got that show coming back for us. But I want to go back to like the old days of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with Lisa Vanderpump. But, yeah, I’d love to see real people living real lives. No kind of constructed narratives, no sort of self-constructed identities. Just everyday, boring life.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. What do you think? Do you want real world season one style of reality TV?

Matt Vella
No, but I would definitely take early Real Housewives. There definitely was something going on with Bravo this year. I never heard of BravoCon before, and then all of a sudden it was like everything in my feed for weeks. And so I definitely think there’s something around the sort of, like, low stakes drama. I’d, I’d totally sign up for that. I completely see the appeal in, in the reality TV show where like, the slightest is that you came an hour later than what the invite said, like easy to handle sort of interpersonal drama that doesn’t escalate into murder or (laughter) robbery or, you know.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Is that what’s happening, Matt?

Matt Vella
I . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
I mean, for those who don’t know, meaning me, like what’s happening on Real Housewives right now, that’s different from . . . 

Matt Vella
Oh God.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What was happening ten years ago.

Matt Vella
OK, well, I’ll, I’ll stand it. Fine.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK.

Matt Vella
It’s just, you know, there are people going to, who are facing jail sentences for for fraud and there are home invasions happening. And I mean, I guess in the sense of like television reflecting reality, maybe that’s accurate or whatever. But I’m definitely down to come back to social faux pas. And you won’t believe what she said? I don’t know. You . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
You don’t partake in reality television?

Lilah Raptopoulos
I do. But not The Real Housewives. I’ve been trying to avoid it for my sanity.

Matt Vella
Mhm. Mhm. I think some of the other people who wrote in made a similar point of kind of wanting some kind of authenticity, whether it’s in reality TV or television, film or . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
Books, I think. I was thinking about why that is the case, and I think it’s because there’s so much more media now and it’s coming out so much faster. And the more you see and the faster you see it, the more the patterns become obvious. And I think that kind of yearning for (exhales) a little bit of unscriptedness, even in the quote, unquote “unscripted” programming out there. It totally makes sense and I feel the same.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mmm hmm. Yeah, I was actually talking to a listener recently and she’s a documentarian and she was sort of lamenting the loss of like real old school documentaries. And it made me think about how I miss that too. Like, I miss the days when a good documentary was like, somebody spending months on the road with a handheld camcorder, like following people around and getting access. Like Paris is Burning . . . 

Matt Vella
Yeah . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
About . . . 

Matt Vella
War Room . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
New York’s drag scene .

Matt Vella
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And the eighties’ War Room. Yeah. Hoop Dreams from ‘94. It followed high school students . . . 

Matt Vella
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
From Chicago that wanted to be NBA players for, like, five years.

Matt Vella
Uhm hmm.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And now it feels like there are all these Netflix documentaries that I don’t even know if they could be called documentaries. They’re like perfectly shot. They’re produced like movies. A lot of them are produced by celebrities that they’re about . . . 

Matt Vella
Mmm hmm.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(laughter)

Matt Vella
Mmm hmm.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Like the J-Lo documentary .

Matt Vella
Mmm hmm.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And Lizzo documentary and, you know, all the stuff produced by Harry and Meghan. And I watch it. I like, lap it up, but I also leave it feeling like bad for Jennifer Lopez for not getting an Oscar. (laughter) I think like . . . 

Matt Vella
I mean . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Like, is this what I’m trying to learn? I don’t know.

Matt Vella
That is a true tragedy. But . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
It is a true . . . 

Matt Vella
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Tragedy.

Matt Vella
I know. It’s pretty formulaic, a lot of that stuff.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. So I wanna see more real documentaries in 2023.

Matt Vella
Found footage. Blair Witch.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Found footage. Yeah.

Matt Vella
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, let’s do . . . I’m gonna play the next one. The next one is from Mariann Raad. She is, full disclosure, my friend’s little sister. Let’s hear it.

Mariann Raad
I’m Marion Rudd from Miami, Florida. I’m a friend of the podcast and my prediction and wish for 2023 is a dating app that’s similar to the new social media app that just dropped this year called BeReal, where it’ll help us make dating apps feel less curated, a little bit more organic, and kind of limit our options maybe in how many people we can talk to. I think we might see a trend also in like speed dating. I’m contemplating giving it a shot myself in the new year. Kind of scary, but maybe it’s a high-risk, high-reward situation.

Matt Vella
Well, I am married (laughter), which is a little like in the dating apps world, it’s a little like that scene in Interstellar when they go to the like really big planet, if they’re only there for a little while. When they come back, 40 years have passed. So (laughter) unfortunately I don’t know what the kids are doing, but it, it, it’s really interesting. And in her note, I thought I picked up on sort of like de-gamifying this thing like and I met my wife on Tinder, full disclosure. So . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh wow.

Matt Vella
I’m very like happy and thankful that Tinder exists. But the swiping is, I mean, it can be unhealthy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Uhm hmm.

Matt Vella
So . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
I think speed dating is a really good one. What do you think?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. BeReal is a really interesting app to me because it feels like this reaction against how curated the internet is becoming, like how corporate it’s getting and how like corporate every app gets over time. So it’s like an app where it sort of pings you at a certain time and has you just like take a snapshot of where you are and it’s very uncurated and it sends it to your friends and you get it from them. It’s like a check in. And I get that. Like I get why people want to do that.

Matt Vella
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I mean, dating wise, I make it a rule not to talk about my dating life on this show (laughs).

Matt Vella
OK . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
But I will say . . . 

Matt Vella
So you just . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
That in 2022 . . . 

Matt Vella
Let me totally be a wife guy (laughter) and then you’re not going to, like, step up. Thanks. Thanks a lot.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. No, I get, I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I’ll say in 2022, I noticed that, like, people’s hearts were not in the apps anymore. Everyone was, like, resigned . . . 

Matt Vella
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
To being there.

Matt Vella
Little like Twitter.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I found people are talking more in person, a lot more in person, getting set up, tapping their networks. That was happening. There is this big piece in New York Magazine. You’ve disproved it. But that like the one relationship that Tinder wants you to maintain as a relationship with Tinder (laughter) that that’s become a lot of people’s longest relationship over the past ten years.

Matt Vella
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So, yeah, so I, I get it. Like, I think speed dating would be a hilarious thing to go into style.

Matt Vella
I think it might need a rebrand for, for 2023 . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
Because at this stage it’s not really speed dating. It would be slow dating, right? Because . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
Compared to the apps and compared to swiping and location . ..

Lilah Raptopoulos
You’re right.

Matt Vella
You’re actually just spending 15 minutes in front of another person. Even if you’re not into it. It is a slower version of what you’re doing with an app.

Lilah Raptopoulos
All right. Rebranding speed dating in 2023.

Matt Vella
Yeah. Artisanal . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Artisanal. (laughter)

Matt Vella
Meet kits or something? I don’t know. (laughter) You could workshop it, but . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, the next listener call in is from Anton Zhdanov from Ukraine.

Anton Zhdanov
Now that we can confidently say pandemic is a matter of the past and most of the countries have lifted any Covid-related restrictions, apparently, except for China, that is still clinging to its zero-Covid policy — I expect to see more world tours announced by famous music bands.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, more world tours, more famous bands, more sort of big performances. That seems to be true. When I talked to Arwa Haider, our music critic, she said the same thing. What do you think?

Matt Vella
I mean, recent events seem to suggest there might be some kinks to work out, but definitely prove the listener’s point about how much pent up demand there is.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And by recent events, you mean Taylor Swift?

Matt Vella
Yeah, whenever I say.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Inability to.

Matt Vella
Guess, I’m just referring to whatever has happened with Taylor Swift in the last (laughter) two or three days. But yeah, I think that’s definitely gonna happen. I think the economics of being a major recording artists are completely reliant on, on touring at this point. So yeah, I think it’s great.

Lilah Raptopoulos
One thing that I noticed in this answer and, and a lot of listener write-in answers, is that it feels like there’s this tension right now between like everything opening and there being tons of excess. And then on the other side, there’s this like nesting and recession planning, and it’s like we’re sort of straddling the line. There is one listener who is a baker named Alex Caffee. She said that fancy cakes are making a comeback, and she thinks that 2023 will be marked by indulgence. That history shows that after a plague, there’s a renaissance, so we’re all just going to indulge. But then on the flip side, there were a lot of listeners that were like, “We’re in recession world, don’t bother us.” Like Sarah Barraclough from London said that we’ll be doing more dinner parties and brewing our own beers and baking our own bread to keep costs down. And she thinks there will be a rise in thermal loungewear. (laughter)

Matt Vella
Hah! Ha ha ha ha ha.

Lilah Raptopoulos
To keep heating bills down. (laughter)

Matt Vella
Yes. Bring on the Uniqlo. (laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
One listener said that we’re moving deep into like next level cottagecore where there’s more second hand and farmhouse furniture in our homes. One person said We’re a couple stressful news years away from full on bonnets. (laughter)

Matt Vella
You mean like a reversion to pre-whatever?

Lilah Raptopoulos
To Oregon Trail.

Matt Vella
OK. All right. (laughter) Well, how to be optimistic about the end of the world? That is (laughter) very . . . And do you stay in for it or do you go out? That’s really . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
Like the question. No, but . ..

Lilah Raptopoulos
That is the eternal question.

Matt Vella
Not to be stuck too much on television. But I do think one of the reasons White Lotus has hit so hard this year is that it kind of addresses this question in a way like basically Brexit happens and you have this thing that’s not supposed to happen that that happened and everyone’s brains start to get scrambled and then Trump . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
Beats Hillary, which wasn’t supposed to happen. And it’s just been like an unending, things that weren’t supposed to happen after the next. Like war in Europe. But like that doesn’t, that doesn’t compute.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
Ahh, not to mention the, the little thing of the pandemic. And I feel like that bizarre sound from the music at the intro that, like, (makes sound) sound is like, please don’t put . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
That in and please put a cut into the actual music if you can. But that’s the sound of all of our brains turning into soup after the last (laughter) six years of relentless events.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Matt Vella
And in a way, we’re all sort of Jennifer Coolidge bumping around the end of sort of an opulent era, not really knowing what to make of it all and being kind of confused all the time. But at the same time, a lot of people have more than anyone’s ever had. You and I included.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
I mean it’s, what do you do with that? Do you enjoy it?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
Or do you, you know, do you freak out about it?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I think you just do both. It’s like one of those situations where it’s an and/and instead of an and/or. I mean, I don’t know if we have any other choice.

Matt Vella
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. There are a few, like, really wacky ones that I would love to shout out that we got from listeners. One is the ri — and please interrupt with any, any thoughts on any of them — one is the rise in olfactory art from Charlie Warren. It’s like making smells as art. Apparently this was big in the eighties . . . 

Matt Vella
Really?

Lilah Raptopoulos
And he would like to see it come back.

Matt Vella
Wow.

Lilah Raptopoulos
In 2023.

Matt Vella
What I appreciate about that is in the post, sort of respiratory, global pandemic, that’s a very hopeful, you know . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
Come to my art gallery and sniff (laughter) this, with all these other people who will also be sniffing. Yeah. I mean, hey, if it happens, I hope it’s great.

Lilah Raptopoulos
We’ll be there. If it happens, I’m reporting it.

Matt Vella
I think it’s great. (laughter) Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Someone said, thanks to Depop, we are living in the multiverse of pants. We have wide leg chinos, cargo zip offs, boot cut jeans, but also skinny jeans for men. Skinny ties. Skinny lapels. Yeah. So 2023 will be a rise in, in a plethora of pants.

Matt Vella
So we’re gonna go even more, the kaleidoscope of men’s pants, is gonna get even more fantastic. And yeah, OK, I’m on board for that. I’ve definitely had a sort of George Costanza “what is the deal with pants” type (laugher) of thing several times this year. But you know . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, me too.

Matt Vella
Like, you know, great.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Totally.

Matt Vella
Skinny pants. Pants.

Lilah Raptopoulos
There is somebody who said that Dobermans are cool like this, like certain new breeds . . . 

Matt Vella
Ohhh, they’re not.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Of dogs that are getting trendier.

Matt Vella
Sorry.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
Hard disagree. I think any kind of scary dogs, no bueno. But, you know, more power to you if the Dobermans do it for you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. OK, Matt, this was so fun. I’m gonna push it to you for a final prediction. Do you have one last thing that you think or you want to happen or you think will happen next year?

Matt Vella
Ah, I, I want — this is not a prediction.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK.

Matt Vella
Because, you know, sometimes the light at the tunnel, at the end of the tunnel, is, is an oncoming train. And I really hope (laughter) that’s not where we’re going. But I really hope that we will get our crap together and pull back on this sort of scary erosion of LGBT+ rights that we’ve seen all over the world.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
Like especially in the United States in the last few months. And it’s you know, there’s a lot of different issues that have — centrist person would think it’s a regression, but I think it’s been really scary at the end of the year here to see, see how much could be taken away that I think a lot of people thought, you know, was progress that we can kind of count on. What about you?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yours is excellent. Mine is, mine is . . . 

Matt Vella
I want Mike and Ike’s to come back, or some some kind of candy from the eighties that I . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
I want Three Men and a Baby again, no I’m kidding. (laughter) My actual one is much less serious. In a recent episode about music, we talked a lot about Etta James.

Matt Vella
Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And I kind of want a voice like Etta James to get really big again, that isn’t Adele. No offence to Adele. She’s a talent of our time. But yeah, I don’t know. I want a voice that fills a room.

Matt Vella
Hmm. Interesting.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s my request.

Matt Vella
Interesting.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Matt, thank you so much. This was exceptionally fun.

Matt Vella
Thank you. I’ll see you in 2024.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Matt Vella
Cool.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Something like it.

Thanks again to everyone who sent voicemails and emailed us and wrote in on Instagram with your predictions this year. Honestly, talking to all of you is one of my very favourite things to do. And now we are turning to some of my other colleagues. We asked them for their cultural predictions on their beats, from music to fashion, to film to art. Here’s what they had to say.

Arwa Haider
Hi, I’m Arwa Haider. I’m a music critic for FT Weekend. In 2022, some of the most fun moments for me came when pop artists, contemporary pop artists like Harry Styles or Olivia Rodrigo came out with surprise guests from different eras, or Beyoncé put Grace Jones and Tems on the same track. And you just have this meeting of generations and different global styles. In 2023, I would love to hear more of that creative rapport across generations and global genres. So I think we’ve moved beyond the nostalgia industry and into a place where the potential to bring audiences together in a way that maybe hasn’t happened before and it just feels really positive. And I can’t wait to hear more of that.

Lauren Indvik
Hi, I’m Lauren Indvik, fashion editor of the FT. Next year, I hope to see governments make real strides to regulate the fashion industry’s environmental impact. Europe is definitely leading the way here. Trend wise I don’t make predictions. I like to think we’re in a, in a post trend environment, people should wear what they want. But in general, we are seeing a freer approach to fashion, mixing more new things with vintage, not aiming for this sort of like perfect Parisian minimalism, which I think is great.

Patrick McGee
I’m Patrick McGee in San Francisco, and my tech prediction for 2023 feels more like a hope than a real prediction. And the hope is that Apple CEO Tim Cook pulls off one of those Steve Jobs “one more thing” surprises and delivers a headset for augmented and extended reality. If we know anything about Apple product launches, it’s that they say no to ideas far more than they say yes. So if it’s the case that Apple is readying the launch of a headset, you can be sure it means they have solved a host of issues that could make this whole metaverse thing more of a mainstream reality.

Raphael Abraham
Hello, I’m Raphael Abraham, the deputy arts editor of the FT. And I think a couple of things we can expect to see next year in the film world is, I think, more autobiographical stories from filmmakers. So Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, which is based on his life as a young film-maker growing up, is coming our way. And there’s also a lovely little Spanish film called Alcarràs. I think given that my favourite film this year was Aftersun, which is a first time film by Charlotte Wells, I think what I’m most looking forward to are the things that we can’t see coming, the completely unexpected little gems that you discover.

Jan Dalley
Hello, I’m Jan Dalley. I’m the arts editor at FT. What I do hope for next year is that we’ll all get a bit more confident about going out to live performance events. I think during the lockdowns, we all lost the habit of going out. Some people have told me that they haven’t even been back to a cinema, and I just hope we can all rediscover that pleasure, the pleasure of being within an audience, responding to live action arts. And there’s nothing like it. It’s a real joy. And we need to re-establish that, I think.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week and the final show of the year. Thank you very much for listening to FT weekend the podcast, from the Financial Times. Thank you also for being part of it, for talking about cultural trends with me, for telling us your stories. This might sound cheesy, but it’s honestly quite hard for me to express how fulfilling of a year this has been. We’re taking a few weeks off, but we will be back for our first episode of 2023 on Friday, January 6th. It’s a good one. My colleague Helen Warrell has written about women spies in MI6, which is Britain’s foreign-facing intelligence agency. She spent six months with them, which is unprecedented. And she joins me to talk about what their lives are like. Then, right after you’ve made your New Year’s resolutions, we have Tim Harford on to tell us about the value of quitting.

I would really love to hear what you thought of the show this year. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap, mostly Instagram and chat with me there. You can email us ftweekendpodcast@FT.com or you can follow the show on Twitter @ftweekendpod. As a holiday gift to us, we would love if you could take a minute or two right now to just leave us a rating or a review on Apple or on Spotify — that really helps support the show. And if you like this episode, give it a share and tag us.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos, and here is my exceptional team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. I’m gonna pause here to shout out our talented engineers, Breen and Sam, for making this show sound as gorgeous as it does week after week. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and thanks as always goes to our head of audio, Cheryl Brumley. Have a very happy holidays and we’ll find each other again next year.