Hey everyone, I'm Rima Jres. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

And I'm Kimberly Adams. It's Tuesday, August 19th. Thank you everyone for joining us. Now, look, I know

there is a lot of heavy, heavy stuff going down these days. And obviously, we do talk about that on the show. But we also have to give our brains a bit of a break sometimes. That's why we have our smiles and we have our wins. And today we're going to dive into one of my favorite forms of

escapism these days, which is, as many of you will know, anime. And it's been a little while

since we checked in on the industry itself, which is still booming. If you've been on social

media at all this summer, you've probably seen like the K-pop demon hunters things,

which is technically a version of anime. But anyhow, it's been a minute since we checked

on the industry. And earlier this year, Netflix said over 50% of its users watch anime. And

then Delta Airlines recently struck a deal with the streaming service crunchy role to stream

some of its anime on flights.

So it's a big deal.

It's everywhere.

Yeah.

It's a massive industry and it's also facing some challenges.

So we're going to get into that and a lot more with senior editor of Anime News Network, Egan Liu, who is here to make us smart about all things anime.

Egan, welcome to the show.

Glad to be here.

So for today's conversation, I am going to be the stand-in for the listener who knows very little about anime, unlike Kimberly.

I actually don't watch, but I'm very curious to learn more.

So just to start us off, can you help put this industry

into context for us? Kimberly just shared some numbers, but really, like, how big is anime

compared to other types of media? Well, every year, there's a survey that's done in Japan to get a

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