A dystopian source of neoliberal inequality industries to writers former bankers mickey down and conrad kay joins me now from london thanks so much for coming on a lot of people loved it and the editor used to work in sports f. X. Said it was accurate the city of london being empty because of tell me about industry and how it somehow goes in the micro of graduate employment to war in the South China Sea in anticapitalist demonstrations. Well that it was false as you said it was bought from lawsuits already experience its been corrupt lets say that in 2009 because of the 10 and everybody felt the pressure of getting a good job was there and we wanted to finance it and i personally found out very elsies to it very very quickly come around last slightly longer but what it did spot was this 1st script rewrites resized right lets get it which was a really poor attempt to try to capture the role that it was missed by me clearance experience sitting at room about a mix yet the key that unlocked it was writing from the experience of people who are at the very very bottom so i feel like it always does this because he wasnt sure about this world. Deals with people at the top of it and thats what we thought interesting i found interesting about that well is that its never really been seen through the prism of people who have at least our very into if the 1st im. Gradually iraq happened and while its my pleasure to congratulate you on this placement and want to stay here starts now weve seen your vouches for you the impression that you make on clients will all be evaluated in 6 months time on risk day thats a reduction in force youll be standing in this room telling all of us why you should be hired permanently to your desk and make he was making films conrad you directed hamlet university so can you before you went in the city tensions were or were under the plane but youre very conscious of not trying to glamorize as has been done in the ninetys arguably the city of london which actually is in the news for making money out of covert arguably you didnt want to glamorize it make it set up of its to be perfectly honest we didnt have a very main mickey sort of out of the outs and were very clear that we didnt want to make it so ideologically driven show about what necessarily our kind of take on that world was i think what weve chosen to call it on screen. Because i get away from what me and sort of think about it but i think its pretty imbedded in the subtext of the shower rather than the text of the show and you know i think. What were really interested in really as writers the kind of a lot its this this place still oh not 6008 search for a certain type of person a certain type of graduate but as mickey says its really you know its a soup inside a real world and for a lot of people its a real black box but we thought if we could sort of crack open to the president these 5 characters who are all in some way i have a socio economically or gender wise or racially that you know thats some variant of as an outsider we thought it out give a kind of a kind of universality to it to people could appreciate people who worked on it some people who didnt what lets get rid of the need to ask us to come to someone close to god its very comforting im sorry if you lost but if you do that here but dont use the very small one of those new you know like regional not Club Security thank you security if you can i just hope we just do that for you please ask yourself and your peers you see what youve done that is actually arrest a billboard to how go he well i want to get back to intersection out in class in a 2nd but. Time and time again we dont want to give away the plot the i hear optics comes out it seems that your fictional Investment Bank be a point obsessed by what it looks like to the outside presumably because the reputation of bankers is a bore we call the show a contemporary show that sort of set possibly even the word last 3 years but what weve been trying to do in the 1st season there are bits in a season which people could suggest that maybe slightly sensationalized and thats true and you know there are things that im practices that happen to show or its probably when we have to get away with in todays climate but what we try to do in a serious basically dramatize that culture share from what you were talking about as an individual isnt a collective its a collective as well youre sort of thinking about the situation think about yourself that your own bottom line and the idea that you know its pushing a gray young graduates the point where some of that mental. The house has been strained to their physical health is drained its no longer acceptable so i feel like the. Wife still sort of you know it is unlikely to say those things have done surely future upticks but i feel that you know it would be probably a disservice to the industry it is just its only Due Diligence i think there probably is probably a little bit more than olivia and more from trying to see that space go through more i think they realize they need sort of a comparative reaction changed and clearly conrad the brain drain element of the attraction of Financial Institutions because they pay more money over the dreams and ambitions of young people what they really want to get out of life they clear on the current through the plot i think the truth is i mean the thing that ive always found interesting about this one will speaking to a mickey talked about as well in terms of cultural change and right in these institutions bringing themselves up with the kind of the work climate in 2020 round you know. Attitudes to gender sort of toxicity bullying all that sort of stuff you know i think you know as much as these institutions change this stillness inherent. Contradiction in them which is basically you know we might be you know all of that itch to talk sobbing america talk racine about being more and more of a collectivist saying were all coming at us and direction but the metrics and evaluation is still very much the same as a bad debate and so you sort of every february january your boss takes you to run he slides member life over and you get renumerated based on your comments appealing americal thing so i think i mean that kind of practice well obviously thats been also as a reformer im biased and stop the kind of thats that kind of a kind of the opium effect of bad like id like living and living that paycheck and so i still think really applies to all these people who work in this industry and making the script is so brilliantly observed you use american terms like work capitalism and spin that reagan fashion thread through at their important to. I mean arguably it has been written before the idea of banter in the office and identity politics very important to you that the issue of class was there in addition to race and sex discrimination i think so i think its something that its a so present persons in British Society and it would be this d im doing a disservice to the show if we hadnt touched it i feel like and it may include it was attracted to that question about you know what makes us what makes some through the from a certain class and whether money can be something that sort of stimulates you and appreciative classes of where you were born and and also the psoriatic the american attitude to a class british one and whether the american see the cost was if you have money in your d job and your sort of material stuff in the british which is basically where you are a school where you get your parents why did you read your graffiti joke for the least amount of applicants the year before. Its a marginal game about marginal gains nothing wrong with a back go i play thankful to do you think is my mothers life teaches christ and not a factor when you stand on the moms are you someone who here you know as a carpenter and conrad is it a particularly exciting thing to write and a lot of fun to write given american reviews of talk about news room and other comparisons but he have things as mundane as buying lunch at the office right up to a possible war between the us and the South China Sea and not conscious about the human casualties of that just conscious of making money out of the war yeah no totally i mean like the cornerstone for the show to me and mickey was always. Like given the fact that we came from that world we thought we were just it would be to not render as accurately as we could only as much specificity as we could and it wouldnt it wouldnt be true to the drama of it i mean for us i mean i dont know at this is just personal taste i know if i select as well as my partner is like we find as much drama in the kind of small amount. Once and the kind of you know whatever it can be as mundane as getting you know going to the coffee room or you know sort of happenstance encounter with someone in an elevator but those that those little small moments a drummer a kind of office life is all about and we want it you know theres something inherently true about the watchability of people at work you know thats like good workplace dramas always seem to work and for us as we intend to write as were always very keen to honor those smaller moments in the drama as well because i mean you know all of our favorite workplace dramas are all about the kind of that the breath of the office and what it actually feels like to be in those places and we try to in terms of everything from that there in the sound design to the set for the Production Design mimic you are obsessed with the small details like if you look at peoples desks in the show youll find that you know what they happen to have on a desk is like speech the but theyre biography a lot so for us that michelle kind of lived and died by statehouse and we were very militant about all of us. And making how does it differ from when you were in the city presumably your colleagues didnt sit around they want to kill are talking about power class and coersion and class war. While youre having lunch i mean i would its a very boring part of the bank got the pack the carrots to his work unless they were coming spend their time. Sitting in front of a computer do excel spreadsheets of power presentations as it was getting very very tight in the process interesting read all other other power drinks are visible. Ill let you talk about what mickey was just saying but we do have a chance or the exchequer recent act who used to were going to vestment bank bailed out Goldman Sachs i mean if someone watches your show and then thinks about the Different Things richardson aghas doing to help the economy how can we fit in the idea that he may may have worked in the kind of depicted in this show well i dont i mean i think i think what the show manages to do and i hope that you. Just as to not trade in stereotypes i think you know a lot of the a lot of the depictions of this well classically on some level get a lot of it right in terms of the level of sort sociopathy and psychopathy at the top of these institutions and im not going to state that just the sites is what tends to beat on screen quite a lot while we were hoping to do is show 5 pretty flawed pretty human pretty vulnerable characters who you know very very young very impressionistic and show on some level how they vary so its these places that on some levels of these places are very corrosive to the light as i said before mickey would never really interested in writing something that tracked about why banking never seen anyone put their i. Q. Want to see before. How many of these have you had 94 new york far here and a sky. Where you hear them well so a very political answer but. I think mediocrity is too well hidden by parents who hire private tutors. Im here on my own yeah i mean i shouldnt have us shouldnt think this is a deeper academic tome on the power. In fact there are there are a lot of of course a lot of drugs involved in the program to know whether youd say that that was accurate i have only seen 4 of the episodes havent seen the other 4 do you think the bank has understood while they were taking all the cocaine that the supply of drugs is about supplied the mondavi drug. Smuggling let alone Foreign Policy of the drugs market why there irony there hanging over the entire plot i think those are not really succeeded people generally have to cope with. So i think there is a risk in irony about where this is kind of well used or said i think the memory. To get off. I did. I always had the thought that if you if you took it could be some sort of weird reality experiment where you took all the people who were brutalized by the supply chain of cocaine into the room with the people who have to be doing the drug but that still be there but it still end up doing it and i would think they probably wouldnt. Make it down conrad kay thank you after the break from bankers to assassins we ask the doctor who inspired killing eve about the making of a psychopath and if those deemed psychopaths by society are really just a product of it all the more coming up in part 2 of going underground. You will see wolf wheres. Your. Wu lovable was. Sure. I can border. To put a gun. You got to go with us because all of those who knew the story could be game we will see in the to be confused with the weve seen the. News but its the most severe summer put in your citys come on and used. The 20th century was going in a revolution the Great Depression and world war the 21st century real mental illness. Those are my words thats what sort of this time psychiatry the only question is should we accept it as a fact. But the pandemic no certainly no border is just blind to nationalities. As americans we dont have a therapy we dont have the facts in the whole world beats to be the chief. Judge of. Comedy crisis what is this time to time so we can do better we should. Everyone is contributing each of our own way but we also know that this crisis not go on forever the challenge is creating the response has been massive so many good people are helping us. It makes us feel very proud that we are in it together. Welcome back in part one we heard from to form a bank has turned t. V. Writers who talked about psychopaths in the city of london that featured in the new show industry another t. V. Show that draws from reality for its psychopath is killing eve and the dr behind its lead character villain l. Dr mark freestone is catalogued not only psychopathy and high finance famously depicted in american psycho but those who have been crushed by a society that arguably created them his new book making a psychopath is out now and he joins me from london mark welcome to going underground so what is a psychopath the a Great American writer Norman Mailer equated it psychopathic rebellion against totalitarianism. Thats an interesting definition i think such a path research has moved on a lot since since the sixtys and seventys and now we understand that psychopaths have a problem with the aryan that brain means that they dont really process in motion and importantly risk in the same way as other people do they dont realize it motions other people they cant see things like sadness or fear and they cant really make very good judgments about decisions that might be not in their best interest for example so they tend to be people who take very hard risks with the situations that they do in everyday life but thats finance the hardest decisions or high risk relationships drug taking things like that and thats because we think of as i said some folks who are in the bright well given youre famous for killing eve isnt it a bit much the in the very book youve written you say media portrayals of psychopathy are often one dimensional when youve got to give credit to feed you all a bridge in the killing a team for bringing me on to try and make a sock of half you is at least superficially believe. I dont because they have the traits that accurately represented in things like the psychopathy checklist the psychopath test we can apply as ability but but. But she also has a more interesting backstory as well you know shes a child. From a broken family and shes in cus a lifestyle that really pushes her to take account of risks that we could pass off very happy to take regardless of the consequences so i thought it was really interesting that they wanted to make such a plausible character. Even though maybe some of it is a little bit. Like to call it unicorn and that the mouse unicorn features is not someone that youd be very lucky to meet in your life or i dont think you know hopefully not you go through case studies i might ask you about a couple of them in a 2nd but you do quote robert have one of the founders of psychiatry segment out of the talks about psychopaths he said the modern corporation has the characteristics of a psychopathic way particularly interested in the individual psychopaths not the systemic ones because of course famously its been said that if youre in a Psychopathic Society its normal to be a psychopath the outliers are the non psych about well lets just show you i think my interest has been i i was a sociologist working with. Patients in high secure also those prisons thats how i came into this line of words and i was a supposed quite struck by how bad we were just society at figuring out what to do with something thats. Not necessarily good approach but provided with environments within which they have any realistic chance of flourishing because somebody isnt very good at making decisions or breaking in france is about other peoples emotions and they are very good at deciding what it is a good level of risk is taking you know financially. Risky decisions or deciding what to do with their lives they are counted out in a loose end and we always try to of us like say that you know its one of the last 5 years that we dont particularly want psychopaths around us in our society so when we think about what are we going to do with these people we need to have a solution for those people who committed crimes provides them with a way back into society but at the same time we know the psychopaths who comes here chris and it comes through the Mental Health system tend to reoffend even if theyve been rehabilitated so whatever it is that were doing isnt really working and i would never really thought that was good enough i think that we needed to work a lot harder to try great environments where psychopaths can actually have a meaningful and productive life and the book is kind of a buy a house just. Sort of past quite a lot of regular basis i think and what proportion of psychopaths in society maybe maybe around this team making going underground oh he talking about one of the scale of this. So it into the general population i think probably about one in every 500 to one in every 1000 people would meet the criteria for a robot has cycle of the checklist which is quite a high payoff and most people in the population in the u. K. Have no psyc