culture that spawned not only him but also the 2008 financial crash with 2 former bankers turned t.v. writers whose new show industry exposes the arguable plus war at the heart of the city of london but what drives those who make it to the top of the world of banking we investigate the real american psychos as well as those crushed by modern capitalist society with the man behind killing dr mark freestone all of the more coming up in today's going underground but 1st coronavirus has arguably shine a light like no other on the relative responses of capitalist and neo communist societies to pandemics here in britain economic protection is under the thumb of a former banker bailed out goldman sachs boris johnson's chancellor is she soon but what's it like to work in the city a new drama premiering tonight in the americas on h.b.o. and here in britain on b.b.c. 2 tomorrow focuses on the lives of bright graduates who enter the bailed out city of london for money their behavior intersecting with geopolitics like a potential u.s. china war it's called industry and paints

a tragically vivid and had mystic portrait of a dystopian source of neo liberal 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 in the editor used to work in sport f.x. said it was accurate and 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 our own experience has been correct left out so that in 2009 does the 10 and everybody felt the pressure of getting a good job or was there and we wanted to finance it and i personally found out very elsie's to it very very quickly come around last slightly longer but what it did spot was this 1st script rewrites recite right let's 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 were at the very very bottom i think it was this because he wasn't sure about this world was so deals with people at the top. what we thought interesting i found interesting about that well is that it's never really been to the interest of people who have at least our very into if the 1st i'm. gradually iraq's capital and while it's my pleasure to congratulate you on this placement and what to stay here starts now we've seen your vouches for you the impression that you make on clients will all be evaluated in 6 months time on risk day that's reduction in force you'll 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 clearly before you went in the city tensions were

or were under the plane but you are very conscious of not trying to glamorize as has been done in the ninety's arguably the city of london which actually is in the news for making money out of covert arguably you didn't want to glamorize it make it set up of it's to be perfectly honest we didn't have a very main mickey sort of out of the outside were very clear that we didn't want to make it so ideologically driven show about what necessarily our kind of take on that world was i think what we've chosen to book on the on screen. because i get away from what me and sort of think about it but i think it's pretty imbedded in the subtext of the shower rather than the text of the show. and you know i think. what we're really interested in really as writers was the kind of a lot it's this place still oh not 6008 search for a certain type of person a certain type of graduate but as mickey says it's really you know it's a soup inside a real world and for a lot of people it's a real black box but we thought if we could sort of crack it open to the president these 5 characters who are all in some way i've

a socio economically or gender wise or racially that you know that's some variant of as an outsider we thought it out get a kind of a a kind of universality to it the people could appreciate people who worked on it some people who didn't what let's get rid of the need to ask you did someone very close and dark is very competent i'm sorry if you lost but if you do that here but you don't use the very small one of those new you know like regional knocked up security thank you security if you can i just hope we just do that for you to clean our stuff on your face you see what you've done is actually arrest a billboard to how gauche you are i want to get back to intersection out in class in a 2nd but. time and time again we don't 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 book we call the show contemporary show that sort of set possibly even the word last 3 years but what we've been trying to do in the 1st season there are bits in

a season which people could suggest that maybe slightly sensationalized and that's true and you know there are things that i'm practices that happen the show is probably when you have to get away with in today's climate but what we try to do in a serious basically dramatize that culture share from what you were talking about as an individual isn't a collective it's a collective as well you're sort of thinking about the situation thinking about yourself that your own bottom line and the idea that you know it's pushing agree young graduates the point where you know that some of that mental have. the house has been strained to their physical health is drained it's no longer acceptable so i feel like. a 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 that only do something so i think there probably is probably a little bit more than all the more from trying to see that space go through more death i think they realize the needs 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 are what they really want to get out of life make clear on the current through the plot i think the truth is i mean the thing that i've always found interesting about this speaking to a mickey talked about as well in terms of cultural change and breaking these institutions bringing themselves up with the kind of the work climate in 2020 or around you know what attitudes to gender sort of toxicity and bullying all that sort of stuff you know i think you know as much as these institutions change there's still this inherent. contradiction in them which is basically you know we might be you know all about it to talk about being a meritocracy and about being more and more of a collectivist saying we're 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 the 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

that's been also as a reformer on but it's didn't stop the kind of that that's that kind of a kind of opium effect the bad light of 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 america terms like work capitalism and spin that reagan fatter thread through and they're 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 it's something that just so presents persons in british society and it would be innocent in doing a disservice to the show if we hadn't touched on that and i feel like and it made clear it was attracted to that question about you know what makes us from what makes someone from the from his own class and whether money can be something that

sort of stimulates human and pushes you into classes of where you were born and and also there's a reality american attitude to a class for us the british one and whether the american see the possible to give money in your job and your sort of material stuff in the british one which is basically about where you were a school where you played and your parents why did you read younger a fair chunk for the least amount of applicants the year before. it's a marginal gain about marginal goings i think on the back don't. i play thankful to do you think is my mother's life too since christ and margaret thatcher went east on the ones recently which here in this carpenter and conrad is a particularly exciting thing to write and a lot of fun to write given american reviews have talked about news room and other comparisons but he have things as mundane is 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 look the cornerstone for the show to me and mickey was always. like given the fact that we came from that world we thought it would just be to not render it as accurately as we could only as much specificity as we could and wouldn't it wouldn't be tricks the drama of it i mean for us i mean i don't know at this is just personal taste i know if i said mickey as well as my partner is like we find this much drama in the kind of smaller moments and the kind of you know whatever it can be as mundane as getting you know going to the coffee room or you know a sort of happenstance encounter with someone in an elevator but those that those little small moments the drummer kind of office life is all about and we want it you know there's something inherently true about the watchability of people at work you know that's like good workplace dramas always seem to work and for us in terms of writers we were always very keen to honor those smaller moments in the drama as well because i mean you know all of our favorite work place 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 tried in terms of everything from the there in the sound design to the set the production design mimic you are obsessed with the small details like if you look at people's desks in the show you'll find that you know what they happen to have on a desk is like the but they're biography a lot so for us that the show kind of lived and died by its leaves us 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 didn't sit around they want to kill or are talking about power clubs. and coersion and class war. while you're having lunch i mean i would say the very boring part of the bank that got the bank the austin area to run is work unless they were going to expend their time. sitting in front of a computer doing excel spreadsheets and power point presentations as it was getting very very tight in the process interesting read all other other power drinks are available. how late you talk about what mickey was just saying but we do have

a chance or the exchequer recent act who used to work in to vestment bank bailed out goldman sachs i mean if someone watches your show and then thinks about the different things reason agha's doing to help the economy how can we fit in the idea that he may have worked in the kind of depicted in this show rather not mean i think i think what the show manages to do and i hope that matter 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 in psychopathy at the top of these institutions and i'm not going to state that just the states it's what tends to be put 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 it's these places that on some levels of these places

are very corrosive to the light as i said before me mickey would never really interested in writing something that extracts about why banking never seen anyone for 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 it's not very political answer but. i think mediocrity is too well hidden by parents who hire private tutors. i'm here on my own yeah i mean i shouldn't if you are shouldn't think this is a deep academic tome on the. in fact there there are a lot of of course a lot of drugs involved in the program don't know whether you'd say that that was accurate i have only seen 4 of the episodes haven't 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 a wider irony there hanging over the entire plot i think. people generally have to cope with. so i think there is a risk an irony about where this is come where you 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 caught all the people who were brutalized by the supply chain of cocaine into the room with the people who happened to be doing the drug but that still be that but i still end up doing it and i would think i probably wouldn't. make it down conrad kay thank you out on 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 is a more coming up in part 2 of going on the ground. that's kaiser financial survival guide liquid so how does it you can convert into as quite easily. to keep in mind though as a to mean to place in the lunch does it for. the or tactics that can be used to get innocent people to confess to crimes they didn't commit. i don't even think people in the us really get that the police are allowed to lie to the person who falsely confessed actually came to believe the lie that they were told about their own behavior once a false confession a stake in the case is closed nobody really can tell the difference between a good confession and one that isn't. welcome back in part one we heard from 2 former 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 doctor behind its lead character villain l. dr mark freestone is catalogued not only psychopathy and i 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 great american writer norman mailer equated it psychopathic rebellion against totalitarianism. that's an interesting definition i think such a path research has moved on a lot since since the sixty's and seventy's and now we understand it's like a pos have a problem of the wiring in that brain means that they don't really process in motion and importantly risk in the same way as other people do they they don't realize it motions other people they can't see things like sadness or fear and they

can't 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 high risks with the situations that they do in everyday life but that's financially high risk decisions or high risk relationships drug taking things like that and that's because we think of as i said some folks who are in the bright well given your famous for killing eve is an image much of the in the very book you written you say media portrayals of psychopathy are often one dimensional when you've got to give credit to feed you want to purge in that the killing 8 team for bringing me on to try and make a sock of half you is at least superficially believe it because they have that 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 she's a child. from a broken family and she's in syria

a lifestyle that really pushes had to take account of risks that we have a psychopathic 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 the unicorn fetus is not someone that you'd be very lucky to meet in your life ever i don't think you know hopefully not and you 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 of that that talks about psychopaths he said the modern corporation has the. actress tics of a psychopathic way particularly interested in the individual psychopaths not the systemic ones because of course famously it's been said that if you're in a psychopathic society it's normal to be a psychopath the outliers or the non psychopath well let's just show you i think my interest has been i i was

a sociologist working with. patients in high secure all spittles and prisons that's how it came into this line of words and i was a supposed quite struck by how bad we were as a society and they bring out what you do you get sucked at scouts are not necessarily good approach but provide a minute garments within which they have any realistic chance flourishing because if somebody isn't very good at making decisions or breaking in france is about other people's emotions and they don't really get it 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 call it a loose end and we always try to of us like say that you know it's one of the last 5 years that we don't particularly want psychopaths at random or 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 your criminal comes through the mental health system tend to repent even if they've been

rehabilitated and so whatever it is that we're doing isn't really working i never really thought that was good enough i think that we needed to work a lot harder to try great environments for such a task and actually have a meaningful and productive life and the book is kind of a buy a house just sort of past quite a quite a 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 psychopathy checklist which is quite a high payoff and most people in the population in the u.k. have no psychopathic traits so they might have maybe one trait and that could include things like being a bit impulsive or taking risks or being dependent on other people being sexually

promiscuous so it's not necessarily the case that you have the cool features a cycle but if we understand this somebody who's conning and manipulates if you used grandiose who used. remorseless and callous in that the way that they treat other people so it's not common to meet psychopaths in the general population it's very unlikely that you work with them although we know also from bob has research that there are some professions such as stockbroking and chief executive officers that tend to attract psychopaths more than others but it's not likely you'd meet one in your you every day life whereas in prison we know that up to 15 percent of the prison population would be diagnosable asika pass a very different environment to work and i want to get to that class dimension in a 2nd b. you don't think there's a danger then of before you get into the case studies of physiologically understanding psychopathy you mentioned the brain the make dilla the prefrontal cortex big pharma loves things like that they can give medicine for you

firmly on the side of the physiological element of psychopathy rather than the class and societal. context of like a psychopathy i'm not i think the evidence for. the problems if only one in a 1000 people is a psychopath you haven't got a big sample to understand how people with this diagnosis fit into society you don't really understand what the needs of the research evidence is for the way that psychopathic brain. operate is pretty good we have some genetic evidence some genetic research as well that suggests there's a assess it genes that seem to be linked to the way that people develop as children and that some of those children with those genes will then go on to become sort of us that not all of them i think as a surprise it's more interesting to think about well. if there are these they all side of us have these brain wiring to function what they all in prison want they

all criminals and there's a an interesting case of professor jim fallon he's a research a psychological researcher and united states as part of a study scan his own brain using a technique called positron emission tomography pet scan and he didn't realise what he done but he'd actually put its own brain scan into the sokal he was looking at and he realized that this person who scanners are can have very hard if all of the physiological in the case of psychopathy but he left the a normal life and this was his brain he did the normal life he had a successful career research and yet he had all of that is logical characteristics of a psychopath so it's not the case that everyone with these deficiencies ends up in prison and some of them can be quite successful but we do know that yet the majority of psychopaths that we encounter are in prison service is mental health services and usually that that for quite a serious crime and that a quite a long time as well i don't be flippant but tell me about your favorite of the 1000

cases i mean they're all quite grim but maybe just briefly tell us about one of the i suppose there's a character in the book called tony who is the closest to a successful psychopath he's had a very successful career but unfortunately career is based almost entirely on the conning and defrauding people around him and he has a very sort of his father was a very successful con man who was never as far as we know you trying to get it and he was. he was a sort of international playboy he used the proceeds of his cons to fund its very lavish lifestyle and tony tries to do this but he's simply not quite as good and he also has some quite deviant sexual tastes involving power control and. and sadism and his eventual crime he's cool side abusing a sex worker quite seriously so he sort of you know he. he plays the lifestyle of the he school sat and then the interesting part of this is that the reason he's cool is not because he committed the crime but rather because he pays the sex

worker the check from his own personal bank that he sets up with the proceeds of the various other fortune activists is that he's engaged in the past few years and then he's forgotten to top the bank account up with funds so when sex worker goes to cash that check it bank says and at that point the police are involved and the terrifying thing about that case is that it shows that this is the tip of an iceberg that there are men like tony who regularly commit crimes but not all of them a detective maybe this speaks to the idea of a brief press analysis american psycho that some people a supported by network were a sort of social consensus that people who appear outwardly successful or have to be as accountable for their actions as some other of us to and i think tony was just such a fascinating character because he managed to maintain such composure and sort of poise all the way through his incarceration he never really gave away that he was

involved in a sort of very unpleasant sleezy crime and you always saw himself a superior to the rest of us working with him so he i think personally he remains one of the most interesting cases in that for me anyway well how ironic then the aside from what you say in the book about the theory to mental health provision as to his networking in his own community and ultimately community and that sense of belonging you believe could be a therapeutic approach to rehabilitation for psychopaths absolutely that's a really good point i think that psychopaths we know don't really respond to punishment and it's interesting that the response of most of our societies to a psychopathic who breaks the law is to punish them and punishment quite severely and in the united states whether you score high on the psychopathy checklist or not can be a bear of whether you are. capital punishment or whether you are excluded from capital punishment depending on the the jurisdiction you're in so i think if we

were if we were able to focus on what is the role of somebody with these traits in society because in i think there's. a good theory of buying i think it's more so she passed by and merican psychological john lives the way he proposes that there's a gene that these people carry that goes into very very effective in situations where not taking other people's emotional needs into account is actually quite effective and uses the example of hunter gathering societies will vikings where being a warrior who's remorseless and relentless in your pursuit if you are desires and goals is actually quite helpful but in a modern society where we're all supposed to be networked in part of social groupings around each other being a sort of lone wolf who's not accountable and doesn't really think about other people's emotional responses to our actions isn't very valuable and actually gets you labeled as a psychopath and a deviant and a widow but if we were able to find a way to sort of encouraged psych to pass through a process that rather than punishment encouragement to try and get into

identifiable pro-social goals and to understand how other people will respond to that more unappealing social traits that site that sort of couse behaviors with people i think that would be a very productive way forward and there's been some work in creating social microcosms in the prison service and the forensic mental health services the high seat here mental hospitals in the u.k. to try to create the social life because those web site are passed work with other psychopaths and stuff to try and create a community a therapeutic community that allows them to explore more preprocessor goals than the offending that they've been so used to in their lives so that's promising i'm none of it's got great evidence yet but nothing as far as i could pass go yet does really ultimately found thank you and making if i can back my journey and if i'm dangerous my that now that i'm the show. we'll be back on wednesday until then never miss an interview by subscribing to our channel on you tube and joining the

on the ground on twitter facebook instagram and son back. this is a story of women women with troubled histories and complex court cases you know some. leave. out there. who were not. the person that. the cheesiness of the day are considered the most dangerous of criminals she's in a still. mouthing off 23 hours of the day tell me that it's not enough to listen to the world of women on death row on our team.

by claims victory but what about those who voted for trump will they say now no my president pain is your of they think another wave of terrorism is me a liberal ideology showing signs of exhaustion. you know those will suit will push sleeves. but. truth to the lovable was you were sure to keep the quote i care born to the doesn't actually matter bench to put have been murdered by. you to go there when you're all of those who do because those told me game we will see in the movie confused with it would seem the most serious but is the most insidious some of what is in your speech comes off the news the in. the 20th century was thing in a revolution the great depression and world wars the 21st century of mental illness

. those aren't my words that's what surfaced some psychiatry to tell us the only question is should we accept it as a fact. yes or no. supporters of president. of the opposition called into the republican. expressed hope.