Latest / Giant Ideas / Succession and HBO-hit Industry Writers Talk with Henry Mance about Writing, Power, and Corruption

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Succession and HBO-hit Industry Writers Talk with Henry Mance about Writing, Power, and Corruption · Giant Ideas

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you're looking for a potential bubble or you're looking for a potential place where things may not be quite as they seem, um, corporately, I've noticed, is they'll start using phrases a lot, like he just doesn't get it.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like, they just don't get it.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_04: Hello, and welcome to Giant Ideas with me, Cameron McLean, and me, Tommy Stadlin.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_04: We're co-founders of Giant Ventures, which builds and backs purpose-driven companies.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_03: At Giant, we're lucky to meet extraordinary people with giant ideas that are changing the world.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_03: This podcast brings you behind the scenes access to those ideas and the inspiring stories of the people behind them.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_04: We explore how one giant idea can kickstart a billion-dollar company, shape culture, and transform life as we know it.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_04: Hello and welcome back to Giant Ideas.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_04: Happy New Year.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_04: We return to normal scheduling next week, but this week we are sharing an exclusive conversation with some of the best television writers in the world.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_04: Succession writer Lucy Preble and the creators of the BBC and HBO hit industry, Mickey Down and Conrad Kaye.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_04: This conversation was recorded at our Giant Ideas Live Summit, chaired by someone who I think is one of the funniest writers in the world, Henry Mance, the FT's chief features writer.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_04: In this conversation, they get to the core of the character of bad business.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_04: What's it like to write about the worst people in business?
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_04: What draws them to these people?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_04: Is there an inevitability to the moral descent of business leaders with too much power?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_04: And perhaps most importantly, how can you, our audience, avoid becoming the next Kendall Roy?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_04: I hope you enjoy.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_06: Can I start off with you, Lucy, and ask what attracts you to these kind of characters?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_06: Is it the idea that you want to look at exactly how terrible the human soul can be?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_06: Or are you actually looking for a sort of some glimmer of light grey and sort of some complexity in these characters?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you hope to do a bit of both, but I don't know.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I guess what draws me to them is, I suppose in olden times, if you were trying to write about power and you were trying to write about humanity, you, if you were Shakespeare, you'd write about kings and queens, and you sort of do everything through that lens.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess now, in terms of power, that's our equivalent a little bit, is who's who's owning the newspapers and who's owning the technology that we work in and live in now more and more.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's kind of important to look at who they are.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: And in doing so, yeah, hopefully you'll see a bit of ourselves, a bit of humanity.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: But you might also see glimpses of things where you think, oh, I should know that about that person when I consider that I'm buying that newspaper or I'm using that product.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: I should have an understanding of how they see the world because it might be how they're trying to make me see the world.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_06: Um Conrad, Mickey, um a little distant, yeah.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_06: Um but you um on the same stage.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_06: Um tell us about the are you trying to write a show?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_06: Uh by the way, I liked it how you it just it describes you as having quit the city.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_06: Is that in my case that's true?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_06: That's mostly true.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_06: Um but tell us, are you writing about bad people?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_06: Uh maybe start with you, comrade, or are you writing about an environment in which no one can no one can really be uh the nice sort of person we read about the guardian?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, we uh the thing we always start, we just we set out to make the most entertaining thing we can.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's like not like every season we sit there and think, what sort of moral case are we making about the people or the or capitalism or anything like that?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: I think one of the things our show asks is whether people who want to go work on a trading floor is sort of a certain type of person or whether that that environment, that kind of ecosystem fosters a certain type of being in the world, and whether it makes it it sort of hops you up and makes you the more steroided version of all of those worst impulses.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um I don't know.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think about that?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_05: I think that it's very funny that this sort of idea that we write about the worst people on earth has been attributed to the show when we just started writing about people we knew.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, and people we worked with to some extent ourselves.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_05: So when uh when it got to season two and people were saying, these people are terrible.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_05: I think you probably said this as well when you interviewed us for season one.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_05: So how do you write these all for awful people?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_05: I said, Well, I'm surrounded by them.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: All our friends, all our friends are sociopaths.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: It transpires.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_06: Um these people, but I mean, there are so many uh memorable characters in the show.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, Eric, Harper, Rishi, Jasmine, you you see people, P pieces of these people.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_05: I uh you've got to write a character with a lot of love, and you can't go into a show.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, and this is talking from our show in particular, but you can't go in there and be like, I'm gonna write the worst kind of person ever.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_05: I think you have to go and write with a position of empathy for that character.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_05: And as Conrad said, the show really is about how people mould their personalities to an institution that does only rewards uh certain kind of behaviour.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_05: A certain kind of behaviour.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_05: And we spoke about it in the kind of lofty terms in the writer's room.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_05: We always said the show really is about when you're in an environment where you're not allowed to be vulnerable with people or show empathy, what do you become?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_05: Where that kind of thing is in currency, and really the only currency is the number at the end of your name at the end of the year.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: So like what is what is I mean, we're all economic animals on some level.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's like what is your incentive?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: There's no bonus, I mean, really tritely, there's no bonus given out for the end of the year for like people thinking you were very nice to your colleagues.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: Even at the FT, that is true.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_06: Um Lucy, tell us, have you met any of the any of the type of billionaire that you might have used, or I mean you never never got to meet Ken Leigh or um uh from Enron?
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_06: But I mean, have you come across would it be useful?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_06: Would you would you like to call corner some of these people, or are you okay listening to them on podcasts and other things?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, I mean do a bit of that.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um I was very glad to unsubscribe for some podcasts recently when Mountainhead came out.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I've been listening for months and months to some particular tech podcasts that were really starting to grate.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_06: Was it the Lex Friedman show?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going into it once.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: But oh my god.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's it's fascinating when that's really that is genuinely really useful stuff.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like we didn't used to have access to that, so technology also great, you know, for us.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um but there's yeah, that that personal research I did a lot more in early days.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: I did meet people who worked for Enron.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um I never met any of the big players, and that was somewhat deliberate.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't even approach them because I knew I wanted to write that.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: That play was about the fall of the energy company Enron, and it was sort of a vaudevillian play, deliberately.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was sort of a lot of jazz hands and music and dance, a kind of way of showing that those companies view themselves in, you know, literally smoke and mirrors way, I guess.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Literally, I mean literally in terms of like there is a lot of magic and entertainment and fun.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: They used to have Cirque de Soleil do their annual parties.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think there is actually a sort of exponential link, um sort of like reverse exponential link between how glamorous the work you really do is and the kind of reputation and glamour you want to sort of project.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: So big finance companies tend to be very, very like showbusy and glamorous in their events and stuff because they know that really the job is sort of money in suits, and then in the show business, you go and it's just people in ug boots and caravans, isn't it?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Being very sort of miserable.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's sort of an inverse relationship with what's glamorous and what's not.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think, yeah, basically I met a few of them, it was really useful and helpful.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're actually planning to sort of villainize people, as I was in that particular show, trying to make it quite broad and vaudevillian, it's not much use to meet them.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: You don't really want to like them very much, but also um I didn't want to feel beholden to them.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to feel like I could say what I really thought rather than thinking, oh, I wonder what Andy Fasedau will feel about that.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I really truthfully, I don't really care what Andy Fastow thinks about that.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: The CFO of anyhow.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_06: And can I also watching Mountainheads, one of the things that strikes me, and indeed living Silicon Valley vicariously, it seems that one of the things that is absolutely crucial to this um the discourse of tech people and um is their intelligence.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_06: So there's a line in Mountainhead where they're discussing something and they're saying, oh, the four sigma uh the four sigma intelligence uh four sigma IQ move.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_06: Like, I mean, what kind of a guy?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_06: Anyway, but um it's so crucial to them and their sense of worth that they are the cleverest people in the absolutely.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: That was also a saying at Enron, like who's the smartest guy in the room?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a really good thing to start watching out for if you're looking for a potential bubble or you're looking for a potential place where things may not be quite as they seem um corporately.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've noticed, is they'll start using phrases a lot like he just doesn't get it.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like they just don't get it.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and and getting it is is is framed in intellectual terms.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: The idea is, are you smart enough to get it?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like to understand what we're doing here.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're not someone who gets it, sometimes what that means is that you are someone who's prepared to ask like Emperor's New Clothes questions.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: You're prepared to ask quite simple, basic questions, that if a corporate structure is being run in a dodgy way, or you're dealing with a con artist, they really don't want to answer.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got to watch out for when actually faith-based behaviour is being described as intellectual or intelligence-based behavior.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea is that you're actually just buying in to some sort of conzi scheme or some sort of bubble.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: But the way that you're kept away from knowing that is the sort of intellectual boundary of if you ask that question, you just don't get it.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: You should be able to describe how your company works and what you believe in in fairly simple ways.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think you can see that also from I don't want to call him the octopus guy.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds rude, but I'm sorry, what is uh Greg?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, Greg Jackson.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: But like if you can communicate fairly simply and directly what you do and why you care about it, that's a good sign, I think.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: Something we talk about in the room, I feel very conscious about sex in this room of people, but something we talk a lot about in the room is the line between entrepreneurship and criminality.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: And how and how how often, how often, obviously, like there's a sort of moral line to that stuff, but as you say, the register of the way people talk about stuff can be very seductive one way or another.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_06: Amazing.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_06: Do these people, Mickey, do these people one of the things I ask myself is well, the line from the wire, which is when Omar says, probably after gunning down several people, a man got to have a code.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_06: And I often wonder, do the people in industry, do they have a code?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_06: Do they have, you know, for all the terrible stuff they're prepared to do?
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_06: I think they have lines they won't cross.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_05: Well, we to an extent they did in the earlier seasons, then we've sort of run out of ideas.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_05: And we needed them to cross those red lines pretty rapidly.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_05: I think so.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, Eric, for example, is a character, he says, you know, he gets pissed off with Harper the lead when she dips her toe into the lake of criminality and says, you know, that's you know, we I can be seductive, I can be a bullshitter, I can be a con artist in my lane and the parameters of this job, but I would not do anything criminal.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_05: And that's that's kind of why we the show would be better if we did, probably.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_05: Probably.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_05: Probably more people would watch it, probably.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_06: A lot of people watch it already.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_06: Lisi, to your mind, I mean, like uh the Roy family are a long way from like my word is my bond kind of uh um behaviour.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_06: But do they have do you do do they have principles and codes that they will try to stick to over years, or did they have in the No, no.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think, well, the law the Roy family is a collection of people.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: For those who don't know the show, they're sort of a media empire family um based on a few combined.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think Logan Roy, who's the head of that family, uh, you know, patriarchal figure, the code there is really, you know, don't mess me around, and also bow to me.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we see a lot of that now, don't we in high levels of politics and sort of corporate world where it's also about being a good courtier.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's like paying respect to the guy in charge.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and also, you know, can we do a deal?
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Which is very contemporary as well.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: So there's there's not much of a there's not much of a code, except I would say that we used to see with legacy, it's interesting, I was I was listening a lot to what Greg was saying about like with legacy media companies, there was always this huge overlap with government, this huge kind of like what you would probably call corruption, and and and sometimes just frankly, also then controlling the government, like controlling who was gonna get in, and uh you know, but by obviously printing certain things in the paper about them.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if that's better or worse than the tech approach, which mostly over the last couple of decades has been we hate government, we hate government, we're sort of staying away from it.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: But then recently we've seen obviously with Musk a completely different approach where it's going much more back to that kind of uh legacy idea of getting in there and doing deals.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's the code.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: The code is if you have power and I have power, how do we make it work between us, really?
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_06: Um tell us about Lumi, uh, comrade, because that that's probably the closest uh to our audience today, isn't it?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_06: Um in season three of uh series three of uh of industry, which is the one I think that really launched the show into a another level of popularity.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_06: You have this figure played by Kit Harrington, uh Sir Henry Muck, and he's running something which is at the forefront of the democratization of the energy sector.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_06: And uh someone says, I I keep hearing that, I have no idea what it means.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_06: Um is there any part of him which is a sort of is is he an unlucky figure, or is he a um in terms of his business ventures?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_06: Or is he, I mean, he's kind of in some ways trapped in his upbringing and Mexico.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_06: Sort of.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the the the archetype that we thought we were sort of skewing, maybe on not that successfully, was the idea of and more of a political figure actually than a business figure, which is the idea that if you if you if you're educated at a certain place, you have a certain level of polish, which means that you when you walk into a room, you can bluster your way through most things you see in people like Boris Johnson, Cameron to a lesser extent.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's a kind of uh a gentlemanly kind of understanding of and and through your vocabulary, through your choice of words, you command a certain level of respect and authority, whether you actually have the minerals to back it up or not.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I think we try to take that to its most extreme manifestation, which is like whatever guy like that who is not not unintelligent, but is given the keys to running something that his his spin, basically to see how far his spin would take him and whether he could bluster his way through to be a successful entrepreneur.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um would you say he's unlucky or not?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_05: I mean I mean you haven't seen season four yet, but he's unlucky.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, he's pretty much again.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_05: This is back to my previous point, which is on the page, that character feels quite two-dimensional and as Conrad says, an archetype of something we've maybe seen before, but it's in the playing of the character that brings like Kit brought vulnerability to that character that was not there at all.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_05: Um I'd say he's unlucky by the circumstances of the fact that his company collapses, but I'd say you know he's he's sort of at the forefront of the choices that cause that collapse as well.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_06: When you're looking, I mean, there were there are obviously energy companies that have uh struggled with high prices here, so there's source material and leaving uh lots of source material in the for the world of succession.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_06: Are there things you see in the business world now or anything that's caught your mind?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_06: I don't know whether it's Musk or actually don't say it's Musk, please.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_06: So we're uh all felt by like uh Alex Carp or someone like this, or anything that's caught been in the headlines which you've found like that is brilliant.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_05: I need to the ESG thing wasn't really us saying, let's go and skew at ESG because of the concept of something we don't believe in.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_05: It was more just we were trying to find no, the show is written for a quite cynical lens.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, it's uh it started off as a show about young people going to finance and it sort of broadened its scope to be somewhat of a sort of statement, and this is a really grandiose way of putting it, a statement about how the country works and the sort of the kind of um the sort of I don't know, the machinery of of politics, media, government.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_05: The reason we wanted to put Lumi on screen is because up to that point people really don't understand what they were doing in the show.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_05: If you came into the show, you said, okay, these young people are doing a job.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_05: Most people don't understand what a trading floor is, what an investment banking department is, they don't know.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_05: They were always talking about the company in season two that they were buying and selling shares in.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_05: Most people don't understand what that means.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_05: So we said we have to show what the company that they're investing in or they're bringing to market is.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_05: And we thought, okay, what an interesting thing was energy, and then we thought about we thought about uh ESG as a concept, and we have a really good consultant who does not want to be named but is quite senior, um, or was senior in the company that he was in, and he thought this was just thing that he was this is something that is getting a lot of traction uh in the business at the moment, and loads of people have very, very differing opinions about it, and it kind of is it's the sort of encapsulation of what you're trying to do with the show, which is like, is there a moral, is there something moral that can come out of business in a really, really basic way?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: And we thought, okay, it's a lot of people.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: HBO give us a lot of bandwidth to write contemporaneously about whatever we want.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: So like ESG was it's been a big thing for years, but it really felt like it was heating up when we were writing about it, and like it's the same with season four.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: We we borrow from multiple different things business stories that we find interesting and make it into some sort of zombie version of all those stories.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_06: I I used to think that shows like like yours were too negative about stuff, but I just read Careless People over the inside of fact of uh of Facebook, and I was like, these people are much worse than I ever imagined.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_06: Like um, there's a great alleged story about you know Cyril Sambo on the private jet while people who are, you know, her minions are sort of working themselves to an early grave, and she's like, Oh, I'm tired, I'm going for bed.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_06: Who's coming to bed with me for a lie down?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: And they're all like, ah anyway.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_06: Um read that book.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: But um pretty bad.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_06: Uh if anyone wants a nap after that.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_06: No.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_06: Um Lucy, I mean, we did you have to sort of suspend, you know, uh, did you have to imagine that these people that who you were seeing the facade of were much worse than in the news, or is there sort of sufficient evidence that there's loads of evidence if you want to look for it?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean like I don't mean like oh, these are just bad people and they're really different from us.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like often when you're writing the kids in succession, particularly, we would like joke, like think, what's the worst thing I could say right now?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I would never say, but I would think, but I would never say it.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and and that and that's quite exciting when you're a writer because you're sort of allowed to go into those bits of yourself that's a real dick or a real bitch or something that you sort of define yourself against it, and that's quite fun.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: But honestly, something we were really trying to look at in succession was the way that really, really terrible lack of love and terrible lack of parenting produces people who are weak and morally flawed.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I know this sounds like a little bit like serious and psychological, but I'm a writer here to talk about that stuff, and I would say that we're seeing that on such a huge level globally right now, and obviously it's massively global and structural and economic, obviously.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: But also, if you just look at Elon Musk's childhood, if you just look at Donald Trump's childhood, you will understand, and I don't mean this in a good way, I don't mean this in like and therefore they're fine.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean you will have a really great understanding of how we are in the position that we are in culturally, and so sometimes when I attend things like this, I also think a lot about the value of love and parenting in a way that like tech often doesn't deal with because it's not necessarily very good at dealing with it, but I think we should be thinking about it.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: I've got an 18-month-old, and you can see how a brain is formed in contact with another brain, like psychologically, that that's how we evolve and grow and learn, and the way and how that other brain behaves or thinks is incredibly important.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: And and sometimes I say this as a writer, someone who grew up just entirely looking at screens and books, but like there can be something that's not present in that dynamic, and that tech can also be thinking about on some level, but sometimes it's like we talk about everything except that, and how actually we can help think about that, like and so a show like Succession is also trying to express that, and you've got hugely damaged, abused people running the world, and it's no sort of wonder why some of it's in the state it is, so that's just a thing.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_06: You're right.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_06: Parenting is you know hugely important, which is why I rec record bedtime stories on my iPad.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_06: Um my kids every night.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: You record them yourself, it's just AI.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_06: AI is coming.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_06: Um tell us about this.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_06: How much accountability is there in your sense of because one of I mean Lucy play Enron, obviously, you know, one guy dies and the other goes to jail of the top brass of Enron.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_06: And I think Enron is a great story because there's accountability.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_06: In not everyone sort of comes out brilliantly in, but it it does feel like in the banking world, maybe unlike in Elon Musk's world, there is there is a level of like these people do suffer and they do, they are there isn't just a sort of endless share price ride where they get richer and richer and end up with billions, whatever happens.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_06: I don't know.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_06: Do you feel like Eric or um or some of the other giv uh figures?
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_06: They do they do sort of pay for well, usually the consequence the consequences come in their personal life.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_05: So obviously, you know, Eric, I mean, if you haven't seen the show, he ends up in the third season with an enormous payout, lots of money, uh ostensibly a huge success in his career, but he has lost his family, he is you know spiritually spiritually dead.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_05: Um all the things that happen when you chase this.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_05: But I think that's that's but that's kind of I mean it's a very trite way of putting it, but like the these cat these characters there are trying to fill a hole, and that's that hole is being filled with money, but that that hole is manifest in very different ways.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_05: And the characters really the show really is about the sort of people, firstly, that make that their North Star, but why are they doing it?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_05: So Eric, his background, Harper, her background, Harper success in at Pierpoint or in the in the financial world is an ocean between her and her background, her and her family, her and her parents.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_05: For some reason, we always end up writing about parentage.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_05: Always, yeah.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_05: It always comes back to parents.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_05: But yeah, I think it's I know they they the consequences usually come with a personal life, and that's a really yeah, very obvious thing to say.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_05: But you know, when you trace something like this and you trace it so aggressively as the characters in our show do, then it's gonna come with some personal consequences.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, when you talk about tangible consequences as well, we are so we were so scared of we were so scared when we first created the show of of conceits and any kind of melodrama that we were always like, well, they can there can't be police in this.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what are we doing here?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like, they no one can go to that.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_06: That is very realistic.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, but if but you're talking about that real world stuff, um, not to tease season four too much, but uh that stuff eventually is gonna start catching up.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_05: When we sold the show to HBO, the reason it took so long to get on the air is because when our first pitch, we said they said, What's this thing about?
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_05: We said, it's gonna mirror the glacially slow atmosphere of the bank.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_06: Come back in three years.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_06: Um under Chatham House rules, which I think has been possibly misunderstood by some people, but uh uh under Chatham House is season four in New York?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: No, we couldn't afford it really to roll that back with a single single line of dialing.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_06: To roll it back.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_06: Um Lucy, can I ask uh for the benefit of our audience, are there any in you've mentioned one red flag in terms of uh talking about things as they just don't get it, um, which I think is uh definitely something I say at Chelsea Football Club.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_06: Um but are there any other red flags that our audience should look out for when they're um when they're investing or or or working in companies about something's going very wrong?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think the only other one I think is when when a leader starts um when a leader starts describing themselves in terms of being like inseparable from the company and that the company cannot exist without them.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um something that Jeffrey Skilling used to say a lot if he was ever challenged at Enron was I am Enron.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: Don't tell me what Enron is, I am Enron.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so that kind of like we see that obviously a lot now with tech with tech leaders, but it's often a bad sign, that slightly messianic idea of like without me there would be nothing.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think sometimes that's something else to watch out for, just not getting too grandiose and having a bit of humility.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_06: Without Tommy there.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_06: No.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_06: Um quick final word.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_06: Uh do you have a favourite, do you have a soft spot for any succession character that you want to but you know, anyone that you you you wished it had all gone better for?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_05: I like Carl because I've That's a random choice.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Carl's the CFO, not in the parameters.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, because I like the I like the actor a lot.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he's great.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_06: Comrade any any succession.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_06: Um it's a really boring answer.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_06: I like Tom.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_06: Tom.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_06: Very active.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_06: He's sexy.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_06: And any industry characters.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: I I I love the Kit Harrington's character in the sense that I think it's a really great premise, that idea you were talking about of like how far can you just get on presentation.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: It happened a little bit in tech as well, but the reverse, that thing of if you just wear sort of like, you know, crazy Bermuda shorts and have mad hair for a while, if you walked into a room and everyone's like, that guy knows tech.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, just look at it like he wasn't wearing a suit.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it didn't make any sense, you know.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so it can go both ways.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you so much.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_06: You've been brilliant.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you.