Co-creators Mickey Down & Konrad Kay on ‘Industry’

0:01Michela: Hi there, it's Michela. Most of the time here on Behind the Money, we're bringing you inside the real high-stakes dramas of finance and business from around the world. But this week, we're going somewhere a little bit different. That is, we're going inside the fictional world of the characters on the hit TV drama, Industry. Industry tells the story of some very ambitious young people making their way in London's financial sector. And it's not so terribly unlike the reality in which we're all living, which is part of what I find so fascinating about this show. Season 4 finale just aired earlier this week, and today we're going to be talking with the show's co-creators, Conrad Kaye and Mickey Downe, exploring the overlap between the show's storylines and real-world finance.

0:50Michela: And just a warning, there are spoilers ahead.

0:58Thank you.

1:28Michela: here in the office quite a bit over the last several weeks. Hey, Josh, glad you're here.

1:33Mickey Down: Very happy to be here.

1:34Michela: Welcome. And now joining us from the UK, we have the creators of Industry, Conrad Kay and Mickey Down to talk all about this show. Hi, Conrad.

1:45Joshua Franklin: Hello.

1:46Michela: And hey, Mickey.

1:47Joshua Franklin: Hello. How are you?

1:48Michela: Great. So glad to have you guys both here. So let's dive into it. You both have known each other for a while. You met at school attending Oxford, and then you both went into finance for a bit. What about that experience made you want to turn it into a TV show?

2:07Joshua Franklin: Yeah, I'm glad you qualified for a bit, because I was feeling like a bit of a fraud when I'm referred to as an ex financier, given I worked in finance for about a year. Conrad had a bit of a longer stint. And it was interesting way in. Me and Conrad met at a university. We end up in these jobs in finance. I worked in investment banking in motors and acquisitions, and Conrad worked on the trading floor. So you had a kind of like quite rounded take or view into the city. The first thing we wrote together was this proto-industry, which was called Not An Exit, and it was sort of a bag of ideas. It was kind of like a slice of life show, but through the prism of an investment bank.

2:47Joshua Franklin: It had characters who were MDs. It had characters who were the CEO. It also had characters based on me and Conrad, who were kind of at the bottom of the career ladder. And we kind of put it into a drawer and forgot about it until we met Jane Tranter, who was the producer from Bad Wolf who makes the show. And she said, have you ever thought about writing a show set in this world? And we said, oh, we actually had written one. And she read it and she thought, you know, this is a bag of ideas, but there's definitely something here. But the note that she gave us was like, just cut all these older characters and their perspective.

3:19Joshua Franklin: for the first season and make it about the people who are at the bottom, people joining the bank. And that was what unlocked it for us, because firstly, it allowed us to look on the show from a different lens, because stuff set in this world is usually from a top-down perspective. It's about the people who have the most power and the most money. And this allowed us to tell a story from a different perspective. But we did it through the lens of Harper, who's a biracial American woman, which gave this sort of picaresque go-getter quality, made it a bit of an outsider story. And then, again, like we've been doing this the entire time.

3:53Joshua Franklin: We've been kind of Trojan-horsing what we want to write about into industry. And in season one, it was about writing a slice-of-life show about ambitious people that happened to be set in the bank. And what it's grown into is something slightly bigger than that. But it was always kind of supposed to be a form of authentic rendering of the world that we had experienced.

4:11Michela: Yeah. Well, that's exactly what I want to dig into a bit more. Part of what I've really enjoyed about watching this show over the four seasons is, you know, as you say, season one, I sort of saw it also as like an intro to investment banking almost. But I've really loved how in seasons two and three and four, you've really dug into some major trends in finance and then turn those into really compelling storylines that your characters are then navigating through the seasons. So like in season two, there was the story of the rise of meme stocks and Wall Street bets like coming out of the pandemic.

4:55Michela: And then season three, the rise and fall of ESG, peer points meltdown, echoes of the Credit Suisse collapse. I mean, as someone working at the FT, that all has just been so fascinating to me. Why did you decide to pick out those kinds of themes and trends to help tell your story?

5:15Konrad Kay: I mean, look, every season of industry is about two years of mine and Mickey's life. So the ideation period before we start actually writing and breaking story, the macro landscape of the world in which we're writing inevitably creeps in. Just pick an example that you mentioned, like ESG. I mean, the show has always operated with its tongue in its cheek a little bit. And also as a kind of, I would say, a high-functioning black comedy satire as well. And for us, ESG and the kind of the supposed valorousness of it within a capitalist machine was kind of, it was sort of catnip for us to unpack and have a bit of fun with, because the show is obviously always operating on a pretty high level of cynicism.

5:54Konrad Kay: And to us, the kind of the messaging around that stuff that we kept reading about felt like something that was ripe to be skewered. So it became a sort of bedrock for the season for us. And then, you know, in season four is a really good example. Like, we really wanted to write about this sort of intersection of entrepreneurship and identity. and we wanted to take that to its most, you know, its most logical extreme manifestation, which was a kind of borderline sociopathic entrepreneur, criminal mastermind who's very, very close to building something, you know, building something that the original sin is based on a fraud, but he's very close to building something fully functioning.

6:28Konrad Kay: And if he can just get enough people to believe in, he can plug it into the financial system and it can get swallowed up and he can make a success of himself. So season on season, the reason the show has developed so much changed and involved is purely because me and Mickey as creators have kind of matured. So the slice of life show and the drug sex and hedonism of our youth, that was reflected in the first season. And then, you know, we've become older, we've become slightly more observant about the things we're writing about.

6:56Mickey Down: And so on that, I do want to drill into season four a little bit. I would say, while it's definitely not a kind of one for one comparison with the Wirecard story that was covered in the FT a few years ago. I think there are certainly a lot of similarities. And for people who aren't aware, that's a fraudulent German payments company that was a big focus of short sellers. I'm just wondering why you wanted to dig into that and what things you decided to borrow from and then things that you kind of wanted to maybe take inspiration from but kind of go in a different direction.

7:24Joshua Franklin: Sure. Yeah, we've always sort of, as Conrad said, we've always borrowed from reality. It's interesting because like, it's a kind of a balancing act between being referential to stuff and also trying to be a bit prescient because, you know, season two, for example, we did this whole thing about telehealth, which sort of came kind of to fruition after we wrote it. And then all the politics stuff, we're always trying to sort of be ahead of the curve in terms of what we think is going to happen to the country from the political angle in the next 12 to 18 months. But the Wirecard story was interesting to us because it was firstly about storytelling and secondly about incentive structures.

7:58Joshua Franklin: And that Wirecard was this kind of illustrious, prestigious company, listed company, taking in a lot of revenue. and everyone was incentivized to believe that it was this, you know, bear moth which was growing at a rate of knots and incentives were rewarded the growth rather than the truth of it. That was just a really interesting thing to deal with in season four. And like, as Conrad said, the show has evolved from this kind of slice of life show in season one to this espionage conspiracy thriller adjacent thing in season four. And we just thought it was quite interesting to have at the center of that, a kind of enigmatic tech leader who sort of encapsulates a lot of the characteristics of the fraudsters who have been exploiting vulnerable systems.

8:38Joshua Franklin: So like, you know, the leaning on complexity in masking risk and the leaning on like the lack of due diligence, the stuff that would have been a little bit more harder to pause with a bank like PeerPoint is easier to do in the fintech space. But quite honestly, I think people are constantly trying to like figure out actually what to do next. So that just felt like a quite interesting way in. And then again, it just felt like a really good, you know, as you said, it's not a one-for-one comp of the story. And, you know, we've also borrowed from, spiritually from other stories of fraud, but it just felt like a really compelling, slightly undertold story because, you know, it was a big thing in Europe.

9:14Joshua Franklin: And obviously you guys are kind of au fait with it, but I'm not sure it was a huge story in the US as much as it was here.

9:19Konrad Kay: I don't think Jan Marsalek ever took Marcus Braun to a glory hole. I mean, I think that was possibly an artistic invention on our part.

9:30Joshua Franklin: Or perhaps we have inside information.

9:32Konrad Kay: That's true. I mean, actually, that might have been exactly what he did, for all we know.

9:36Mickey Down: Now the FT just needs to keep on doing more digging in this story.

9:39Konrad Kay: I mean, people always ask me, Mickey, how real the show is. And I think it was a function of the fact that, in a way, it was such a verite rendering of a trading floor in an investment banking division in season one. And the stakes were so much smaller, but drawn into these magnificent proportions because the characters were so young. so getting the salad order wrong on their desk felt like a nuclear holocaust. But what we've kind of done, I think now the show has kind of morphed into more of a, rather than a mirror held up to reality, it's more of a kind of funhouse mirror held up to reality.

10:06Konrad Kay: So it's kind of hyper real. We always go for the most operatic and the characters, you know, we still write them hopefully with all the nuance of the humanity they had before, but they become larger cogs in a larger system and the apertures got wider and wider because frankly we've just become more interested in writing about the sort of ecosystem, system, not just of finance, but of capitalism more generally. So politics and the intersection of politics and newspapers, which is why, again, why the White Cards are repealed in some ways to us in terms of like a wider deconstruction of how these things all feed into each other and how people are kind of at the mercy of them, even though they think they're controlling them.

10:42Michela: What is the feedback you guys have received for this season? What has that been like? And maybe how has that changed from what you were hearing after season one aired?

10:52Joshua Franklin: Oh, God. I mean, it's been chalk and cheese. Season one, there was barely any feedback to season one. It came out during the pandemic. It kind of threw under the radar. It got some middling to okay reviews. But it was enough in that landscape to get us a season two. And, you know, it's testament to HBO that they gave us a season two.

11:12Konrad Kay: They would have been well within their rights to can it at that point, I think.

11:15Joshua Franklin: I totally agree. Yeah, but it's completely different in season four. I mean, season three kind of broke out. We were moved to Sunday nights. people started writing about it with quite a lot of intensity and there was a lot of coverage and the viewership climbed so in season four all those things happened again but i feel like people are really engaging it with in a way that i i really like and find gratifying that's not always a positive engagement i mean like people are you know arguing online about the direction it's gone in and you know i mean i honestly think any engagement is good on a tv show i think anything that makes you think about something and put your phone down and actually engage is a success if you watch eight hours of industry and you're, you know, you feel terrible at the end of it, or you feel like you want to, you know, go for a long walk, or you never want to watch it again.

11:58Joshua Franklin: The fact that it's actually eliciting an emotion, I think is a good thing and actually quite rare.

12:02Michela: Yeah. And, and I actually, I've asked Josh, as he covers banking for the FT, to ask some of his sources about whether they've been watching this show. Yeah.

12:12Mickey Down: And I'm curious, you know, what the feedback you get from people who work in the industry, because I'll say, you know, certainly, especially, you know, season one, season two, people from different banks would tell me, oh, this is JP Morgan, this is Goldman Sachs. And so I'm curious if that's gratifying in a way to hear people recognize their banks in the show. I'm wondering if that's kind of the feedback you were hoping to get on what you hear from people who work in finance.

12:34Konrad Kay: The ego of most of these guys who work in these banks mean that they always think that it's them who's sort of in the show. Especially people we work with, they're like, oh, that's obviously me in that situation. It's like, I haven't thought about you in 10 years. I don't know how it could possibly be you. unless it's subconscious, you know, which is also very true. I mean, there are definite composites of people we met in our time in the industry in the first season. I mean, look, Pierpoint is a composite of all of these banks. You know, like they like to think they have different cultures. They don't have different cultures.

13:02Konrad Kay: They have different histories and maybe different quarterly profits. But the cultures are pretty homogenous across all of them. I mean, especially the American ones, even though, you know, Morgan Stanley wants to say it's nothing like Goldman Sachs. I mean, how could they be?

13:16Michela: Josh is smiling here as you say that.

13:19Mickey Down: Well, I remember once talking to a source who was deciding which team at one of these banks to join. And he looked at the senior people he'd be reporting to and he judged which one to join based on which team had the highest divorce rate. And he thought that was somehow reflective of culture.

13:36Konrad Kay: Well, that's clever. But, yeah, no, people project themselves into the show all the time. And I think the show did a pretty good job of, especially in the first season of capturing just what the atmosphere of a trading floor was like. You know, and we did pride ourselves on trying to get the jargon and the cadence of the way people speak to each other as close to reality as possible.

13:54Michela: Actually digging into that a bit more, have there been any tiny or big details that you're aware of where people who work in finance weren't happy about how things were portrayed?

14:05Joshua Franklin: Absolutely. absolutely i got a quite an angry email from my agent from uh someone at a asset management company in season one and it was a really well actually it wasn't an angry email it was kind of like why did you mention us email and it wasn't even a disparaging mention it was just a mention i don't think people like to see themselves or like their institutions you know even discussed in a neutral sense on a team and show like this there was a very very very high-powered banker who was at a wedding with me who said that when it came out, he tried to call the global HR head of the company and said, how do we get this off the air?

14:42Joshua Franklin: So that was a kind of quite gratifying thing.

14:45Konrad Kay: We've had some very famous hedge fund managers, like world famous. One took us for dinner and he was like, I sat there with a pen and paper when Harper was trading that thing in 104, the cable mistake. And I was like trying to figure out whether the maths was checked out and like the maths was perfect. So we were like, we were pretty happy about that.

15:05Mickey Down: To Michael's point, I think you guys do a, I love especially the hand signals on the trading floor that you never really hold the audience's hand about what that means, but you just kind of like intuit from what's happening in the show.

15:15Konrad Kay: I'm pretty sure no one's made a hand trade on a trading floor for about 50 years, but to us it was cinematic and cool. So we just did it.

15:22Mickey Down: Yeah, no, I think it definitely adds something to the feeling of the show, especially in season four, there's just some interesting points that, you know, someone who follows the industry that they're just kind of interesting decisions, like even something like Temasek buying Peerpoint in season four. That's not something you would think of, like Temasek buying an investment bank.

15:40Michela: Yeah. How do you think about just those tiny details, I guess, that make their way into the show?

15:45Joshua Franklin: We have really good consultants, I would say that. I mean, the show was kind of born out of our experience on a trading floor and in an investment bank. And that allowed us to write sort of the cadence of the language and how people treated one another and the kind of personalities that were attracted to this industry. but we really rely on like really good consultants, really kind of high level consultants for some of the more detailed stuff. Because obviously, you know, me and Conrad, we've been out of banking for like a good 15 years now.

16:11Michela: Yeah. How are you guys staying in touch with what finance is like today? And I guess my more specific question is how often are you reading the FT?

16:21Joshua Franklin: I read it every day because they have it in my gym and I take it into the sauna and read it because it's either that or the New York Times and I think I prefer the FT.

16:30Michela: The printed paper.

16:31Joshua Franklin: The printed paper I took into this corner, yeah. That's extremely 1980s Wall Street. It's great. It's got a really good front page. And also it's just like, it's totally non-partisan. And it's kind of just cuts right to the core of actually what's happening rather than what the paper wants you to think, which I kind of appreciate.

16:48Michela: Yeah. Well, thank you. We will take all those compliments. Yeah, I guess we were wondering, this is a slightly self-involved question from the FT, but one One of our writers' names made an appearance in season four, Hannah Murphy, one of our tech reporters out in California. We were wondering if you guys knew about that or was it a coincidence?

17:08Joshua Franklin: No, no, she was at university with us.

17:10Michela: Amazing.

17:11Joshua Franklin: And a very good friend of one of the writers. Although it's not her voice that responds. I think she found quite funny, but she sent me a nice email being like, that was a surprise.

17:20Michela: That's great. You guys mentioned this a little bit earlier that, you know, maybe if season one was a mirror, now it's more of a funhouse mirror. What is your all's view on the finance industry? Is it good, bad, unnecessary, evil?

17:39Konrad Kay: It's maybe a bit of a boring answer, especially because we're on a podcast having a conversation about this stuff. But I feel like me and Mickey have never moralized in the show. We've never wanted it to be didactic. We very rarely speechify. And if we do speechify, we put someone in the scene who gives the exact counterpoint to the speech or we undercut it or we make it ironic or the filmmaking does something to subvert the expectation. You know, Eric gives this rabble-rousing speech which is met with a kind of cold email and then his world is taken away from him. Like, we don't really believe in the moral messaging of the show being something that's easily spelled out.

18:12Konrad Kay: We like to put all of these different ideologies on a plate, serve them up, let them compete with each other. I mean, I think if you watch, you know, if you watch four seasons of the show, as Mickey said earlier, we try to capture a feeling of what it's like to live in the world. And I think there's a very implicit critique of the price of a certain type of personality being exposed to a certain type of system and how incentive structures and reward structures work in those systems. I think that's kind of implied and like it's very hard to miss. But I think to like spell it out would almost reduce the meaning of loads of hours of TV and loads of hours of construction of the work.

18:46Mickey Down: I wonder as well the extent to which, you know, the show in some ways is both a kind of cautionary tale of going into the industry and also in some ways a kind of advertisement for it. And I think of like other pretty high profile representations in popular culture of finance and Wall Street. You've got like the movie Wall Street and, you know, Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker. And in both of those instances, the authors of those projects, Oliver Stone with Wall Street and Michael Lewis with Liars Poker, they both feel like people took the opposite message that they were trying to send, which again was very much on the cautionary tale side.

19:20Mickey Down: And people said that it was an inspiration for them to go into the industry.

19:24Joshua Franklin: I think it's interesting. It's a really good point. I actually think when we were conceiving of the show, I think people we actually interviewed to be in the first writer's room wanted some easier answers about how we felt about the industry. I remember someone that we interviewed for said, why is this not just a sort of like out and out takedown of this business? And we said, well, because, you know, firstly, we've worked in this, we understand that not everyone in this business is a complete sociopath and they might be behaving with the sort of weight of history and a hinterland behind them.

19:53Joshua Franklin: And we're interested in exploring what pushes someone towards this business. And then secondly, I just think it's not very interesting to watch the sort of public service announcement about how bad finance is. It's just not nuanced. It doesn't feel like something that me and Conrad would like to write. I think you're totally right there about things said in this world becoming handbooks or recruitment instruments for the business. I mean, I still get LinkedIn messages from people saying your show got me to finance, which I find really interesting. but like the seductive first act of the piece is really important because you need to draw the people into the world and make them want to stay there and then in the third act you show actually how this thing is not edifying and actually maybe the characters within that have been pursuing the wrong thing and then you're showing the cost as well i mean like every single film set in this world whether it's wall street everything has a it's kind of a third act that reverses the sort of seduction and sort of pops of color of the first and actually you know finance bros and meme culture, they very rarely see the third act.

20:52Joshua Franklin: They just sort of focus on the first act. They see actually the pomp of it and the good suits and the good ties and the good haircuts. They think, wow, I really want to do that.

21:00Michela: So in season four, we do learn a lot more about the journalist James Dyker and his character working at this finance blog, investigating tender. Why did you think it was important to have that journalistic angle in this season's story?

21:19Konrad Kay: To make his point about a conspiracy thriller, a great conspiracy thriller, always has a journalistic element and it always has a sort of procedural shoe leather detective element. And like for us, what was cool about Harper running a short only fund is it felt like an investigation, but with financial stakes. And we wanted to give her a kind of ally, someone to be very constructed for her to stumble upon this idea of this short herself in a position when it was still early enough to give the story stakes and give it a bit of a journey. So Dyker felt like a really natural addition to our universe in terms of setting up the story stakes.

21:57Konrad Kay: And we just like, to be honest, the show's in its, you know, its fourth season. To us, again, widening the scope of the story just felt like the natural place to do it. And that ecosystem, that closed feedback loop of capitalism we were talking about, it felt very organic to have a journalistic angle.

22:11Michela: Season three and four also does spend a lot more time with kind of the nobility class in the UK, which is super interesting as an American viewer getting a peek into how that works, you know, in modern day as opposed to maybe watching The Crown or something like that. But they're seen as these important gatekeepers. How realistic is that?

22:33Konrad Kay: I think, you know, pretty realistic. Like it's a truism about Britain that the class system is like insanely entrenched. And maybe in 2026, it's sort of easy to forget that. But it's sort of better at hiding itself. But in terms of the way the gatekeeping and the role of private schools play in the education of children in this country and the pipeline of those institutions to the bigger institutions, whether it be banks or whether it be to the top of our political class, that stuff is as entrenched as it was a kind of 100 years ago you know nothing has changed about that i think in our rendering of it like obviously it's slightly fictionalized but i think the most obvious side of it is the henry muck kit harrington character and the idea of a guy who is born to a very high station has everything materially given to him on some regard expects to inherit the world and maybe doesn't have the intellect or capacity to see his own failings and then kind of fails upwards.

23:30Konrad Kay: I mean, that's a story as old as time and one that still sort of exists. You only need to look at the last 15, 20 years of the Conservative Party in this country to see people like that all over it. I think that feels like a kind of true insight into, I think you wanted to call it the aristocracy. But Mick, what else do you think about that?

23:45Joshua Franklin: I mean, I think we live in a country where there's like a very clear pipeline to power from the age of about four. We still have, you know, hereditary peers live in the House of Lords, which means we have people who have been born to power at our actual legislators in our upper hearts of government. That's the stuff that doesn't exist in the US. We have a media landscape which is controlled by aristocrats. So yeah, I mean, look, it's not the 18th century, but there is definitely a kind of aristocratic sheen to the corridors of power in this country, which is just the product of a thousand years of a sort of feudal system, which we are still living in.

24:18Konrad Kay: The join the club mentality is still very much The behind-closed-doors nature of how power works in the country and some of the stuff that we did in Season 3 going into Season 4 is still very much. I think if you were to see the kind of casualness and banality of the way power is actually transferred and the way this country is actually governed, it would be quite shocking to people.

24:41Michela: Okay, we have a couple of questions, bit of a rapid fire. Josh, you want to take these?

24:47Mickey Down: we had one of our colleagues Henry Mance had a cameo two cameos I think actually in season two you had Patrick Radden Keefe in season four just wondering if you have any other cameo appearances on your wish list and you know any of them figures in finance you know Jamie Dimon or Bill Ackman appearance in the show

25:04Joshua Franklin: I was going to say Bill Ackman he's on your wish list

25:09Michela: or he's asked to be on

25:11Joshua Franklin: I was going to it's funny because we joked about the fact that like Entourage had like Tom Brady and LeBron James and we have the chairwoman of the London Metals Exchange, G.U. Evans. And that's sort of the extent of our cameos. I don't know. I mean, Conrad, I mean, there's people that have reached out to us. Auntie Scaramucci has become a friend of mine who we wanted to get on the show and we couldn't make the dates work. But yeah, I mean, there's a balancing act, right? Because if you put big finance people in it, it kind of starts looking like we are, again, a recruitment tool for the finance community rather than a kind of objective chronicler.

25:43Mickey Down: Totally a fair point there. And I'm curious. So another one, if you were starting a hedge fund, industry hedge fund, who would you pick from the cast to be your chief investment officer and your head of compliance?

25:55Joshua Franklin: Oh, God. Do I want to do insider trading? Harper, I think. Probably Harper. She's the only one that's actually sort of made money at this point.

26:06Mickey Down: Yeah, dubious ethics, but yes. And you feel like she definitely will try to do whatever it takes to generate the alpha. But then who's there keeping Harper in check? Who's your head of compliance?

26:16Joshua Franklin: Oh, God.

26:18Konrad Kay: Conrad? I don't know. We have a really good character who's like the specter of death at Pierpool and played by the actor Joshua James, who I can't... What's the name of the actual character, Mick? Do you remember?

26:29Joshua Franklin: Oh, God. Justin. Justin, yeah.

26:31Konrad Kay: Yeah, so he always pops up at inopportune times when people are getting their death rights read to them. I feel like he actually is the avatar of some sort of regulation. Actually, we had a risk officer in season one called Duncan. Was that his name, Meg?

26:48Joshua Franklin: It was. It was called Duncan Hicks.

26:49Konrad Kay: It was Duncan Hicks, who was like a sort of Scotsman who seemed to be a bit of an enforcer. So probably him, actually. In our universe, those two make the most sense, I would say.

26:59Joshua Franklin: They're the only two people that have actually given our characters obstacles to doing the things that are doing.

27:03Konrad Kay: To say Pierpoint has a risk department is a bit of a stretch.

27:07Mickey Down: As they find out to their peril in season three.

27:10Konrad Kay: For sure.

27:11Mickey Down: And then just the last one of these, You kind of mentioned it a little bit earlier on of, you know, people being composite characters. But I just wonder if there is a character on the show who is most like a person who you encountered working in finance or that you know in finance.

27:24Joshua Franklin: You get us in trouble if we answered that.

27:28Mickey Down: Well, without saying who the person is in real life, which is the character who's most close to someone in real life?

27:33Konrad Kay: I'd say Eric. Yeah, I'd say Eric as well. He feels like a sort of composite of all the sort of alpha guys that I met in my time in Longestowney who are running big desks.

27:42Michela: Baseball bat and all.

27:43Konrad Kay: Yeah, I mean, the baseball bat was a huge stretch, I think. Yeah, massive cliche. It's one of those cliches. It's not a cliche because a lot of the guys actually have that stuff, but it's a cliche when you choose to put it on TV for some reason.

27:56Michela: Yeah, it's so true that it doesn't feel true.

28:00Konrad Kay: Exactly. That's exactly it. That's actually a problem we bump up against quite a lot in the show where you're like, yes, this is true, but if you fictionalize it, suddenly it doesn't read.

28:08Michela: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. so are there any stories that you're seeing in the news right now that you'd love to see in season five

28:16Joshua Franklin: we'd love to but we're gonna have to just give a really boring answer and say we're not able to because i'm cautious because the people will just read into it in a million different ways um i mean we're always gonna we're always gonna borrow from what's around

28:30Michela: josh and i have been talking about our own predictions and i mean maybe this sounds super obvious, but just season four, pretty much no mention of AI. Obviously, that's been a huge story over the last, you know, year. So I guess, yeah, I've been kind of wondering.

28:48Joshua Franklin: Sort of intentional that it was kind of intentional. It's everywhere.

28:52Michela: Yeah.

28:52Konrad Kay: It's a bit like writing about COVID. Like there's a bit of a fatigue that sets in at some point. Like I feel like if you were to come to a hypothetical fifth season of the show and it'd be about AI, It'd be a bit of an exhale on the viewers' part when they tapped into the first episode and realized that they had to watch eight hours about that stuff.

29:09Mickey Down: When I was watching season four, I was already thinking you head to season five, like what it could be and like, okay, what are the topical things now? And obviously in addition to AI, I was thinking, well, Jeffrey Epstein, there's got to be a way to introduce that angle into the show. And then you get to the finale and you kind of find a smart way to introduce, certainly, allusions to that. What made you want to introduce that into the season, especially at the end, given that it was not as much in the headlines when you were writing it as it is today?

29:36Joshua Franklin: Well, I mean, look, it was, it's, again, it's not a one-for-one comp of that story. And it feels kind of strange that it's, you know, it's always been a big story. I remember reading about that story when I was at university and it's just been this sort of slow drip feed and then it's kind of huge eruption of it in the last couple of years. We didn't really want to set out to tell the sort of Jeffrey Apsley story and the same that we didn't want to set out to tell the Glenn Maxwell story. But there are, again, we take from stuff we find interesting We take from stuff we feel that's relevant. We borrow from places for characters that feel true to the character we've already created.

30:09Joshua Franklin: Like Yasmin is a character that even though she appeared to be superficially this ingenue and scared of her own shadow and getting the salad orders, she was also sort of a product of a cycle of abuse that we found really interesting and kind of harrowing. So, I mean, we found the logical endpoint to that stuff was some of the stuff that was being ripped from the news headlines. And it feels kind of strange that it's so topical now. I mean, I'm kind of happy it's topical because I'm glad that all this stuff's coming to light. But also it's horrific that it's happened.

30:39Michela: Well, I think that's all we have time for. So thanks for joining me, Josh, here in New York.

30:45Mickey Down: Thanks very much. It was a lot of fun.

30:47Michela: And thank you so much, Mickey and Conrad.

30:50Joshua Franklin: Thank you, guys. Really enjoyed that. Thanks for having us.

30:54Michela: That's it for this week's show. If you want to catch up on industry, it's available on HBO in the U.S. and on BBC iPlayer in the U.K. Behind the Money is hosted by me, Michela Tendera. This episode was produced by me and Safiya Ahmed. Fact-checking by Simon Greaves. Sound design and mixing by Kelly Gary. Special thanks to Misha Frankel-Duval. Original music is by Hannes Brown. Topher Forges is our executive producer. Cheryl Brumley is the FT's global head of audio. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

31:37Mickey Down: Ramadan looks different in every corner of the world. Different languages, different traditions, and different meals. But our goal is always the same. When you give to Islamic Relief USA, you provide a full month of meals packed with local foods and vitamins essential to the local diet. Help make this Ramadan hunger-free.

31:59Joshua Franklin: Donate a food package today at irusa.org. That's irusa.org. Donate today.