The Watch - 'Industry' Creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay on Episodes 4 and 5. Plus, 'Bad Sisters' and 'The Patient'

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

Chris talks about some new shows he has been checking out, including 'Bad Sisters' and 'The Patient' (1:00). Then he is joined by 'Industry' creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay to talk about how this season has turned this into a show about family (13:37) and the characters beginning to reckon with their bad decisions (34:36). Host: Chris Ryan Guests: Mickey Down and Konrad Kay Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Stand up and walk now. Hello, and welcome to the watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com. And joining me on the other line is my producer Kaya McMullen. Hi, Kia. Hi, Chris. No Andy today, but that's okay because we have a very long, very good, I mean, not good, like, because I'm good at it, but good because our guests were good. Very good interview with Mickey Down and Conrad K. The creators of industry. We're going to talk a little bit about episodes four and five. And we're going to do it in London, England. That's where I was. Not just to see those guys, although it was a true thrill to hang out with them.

I get to talk to them in person. But we wanted to continue this sort of season-long conversation with those guys. And I wanted to take advantage of being in the same city as them. So they came on down to the Spotify offices in London and I chatted with them. That was really awesome. Before we get into that, though, how are you? You know, people want to know how you are. Me?

Yeah. I'm great, you know, just enjoying the remaining days of summer and long. Los Angeles, watching some industry. I'm back on my Survivor kick. I took a little bit of time off, but I'm back in now. Are you doing the seasons chronologically? No. No, I'm kind of just like hopping around.

Just watched David versus Goliath. Yeah, that's a good one. Going back to Survivor, Redemption Island, which is not as good, but, you know, still entertaining. And yeah, that's about it. I am also watching anatomy of a scandal, which is interesting. Is it interesting? I heard it was horrendous.

I'm only two episodes in, so I'm like reserving any like very harsh criticism. That's very even handed of you. But they do, they are like heavy on the use of flashbacks. And all the flashbacks are shot in like the, because it's Davey Kelly. So it's shot in like the big little lie style of flashback where it's like all. all hazy and weird, but big little lies only did that, like, occasionally. And I would say, like, for this show, it's closer to, like, one-fourth of an episode is flashback. So, you know, time will tell.

So not the highest recommendation from Kaya McMullet and industries, but Kaya, do you know what, if you were looking for something to watch? Most people, I mean, usually I'd be like, listen to the watch podcast because we talk about TV, like... That is where I get the bulk of my TV recommendations. We sometimes recommend a show, like, once a month. But there's a new kid on the block, and it's the ringer's streaming guide. So Andrew Grotidaro and the team over at the Ringer put together a truly, like, awesome product. Like something that I have already started using pretty routinely.

It's a super comprehensive streaming guide where you can find recommendations, kind of keep track of the streaming wars and find out which each one of the services are playing. You can find movies, which is actually really crucial because like there's just as much streaming movies being made these days is I feel like there are TV shows. And it's really good to get the big picture list and be like, oh, okay, so this orphan prequel is actually pretty good or whatever, the sequel and check that stuff out. There's even a tab for like the rewatchables. If you're looking for some of the movies that we talk about on that podcast, and find out where it's streaming. So like Goodfellas is on Netflix and this is on HBO Max and yada, yada, yada. So

that's really, really convenient. The thing that I love about it also is as there's just tons of stuff coming out every week, the ring or streaming guide is going to be constantly updated. So there's a reason to go back to it every day, if not every week. I just sent in a list to Andrew today. They've got basically, it's more or less like what's essential to watch right now, list that's going to be changing every week and try to capture sort of the combination of critical darlings, popular picks. And the thing is, Kai, there's also a huge reality TV section in there where the

reality, the ring of reality gang are curating all the reality TV stuff that's going on right now. I have to tell you, I was going to save this for when me and Andy do our like European vacation catch-up sesh, but I got obsessed with a British reality show called A Place in the Sun. It was just like basically always on when I was in my hotel. And it's about, uh, English people who are trying to buy condominiums in like, myorka or different seaside Spanish towns. Okay. I like that. It's so long. I mean, it's only an hour, but it just basically feels like she shows them some condo that's

like kind of weirdly dark and in a complex and has like a bad pool. And she's like, what do you lot think? And then they just like kind of haggle over the price for a while and talk about how they had hoped to have a sun deck. Right. At the end, they just buy one of the condos. But it is kind of funny just to see Brits marauding in Majorca and in different Spanish town.

So that's not necessarily a recommendation. It's more of an anthropological observation. I highly recommend using the ringer streaming guide. When I sent in my list to Andrew for basically it's supposed to reflect next week's TV or the coming week's TV, I made sure that I put a show on there that I think you would like to. Okay. And if you have any homework for these coming days, this is your assignment. Great. All right. I don't usually get homework on the watch.

I know. When I do it, take it very seriously. But it's like, this is like your job. It's kind of like, don't work. I would just, I am assigning to you to check out bad sisters on Apple TV. So this comes from Sharon Horgan, who, as if you listen to this podcast, you know what a big fan I am of basically everything she's ever done, including Motherland, which showed up on my top 10 list, I guess, last year. This show is like a different look from her to some extent. you know, she's known for this very

acerbic comedy that she also like roots very much in very real human drama. This is almost like a little pulpy in the best possible way. If I had to, and I've seen other people make this comparison, but if I had to sum it up,

I would say it's like, Big Little Lies meets Fargo set in Ireland. So it's about a group of sisters who are very, very, very close. And basically the premise is is that one of the sisters is married to an absolute bastard. And at the end of the first episode,

without putting to find a point on it, because it's basically in the trailer, that bastard, said bastard dies. And the sisters are responsible. You get the impression that the sisters are responsible. And the mystery is like, what happened to this guy, who did it, who done it? So it's got that big little lies kind of like mystery to it,

but it's got a really great sense of humor. Eve Houston is in it. Amory Duff is in it. But Sharon Horgan is like the star of the show. and Brett Baer and Dave Finkel, who used to work on New Girl, kind of show run this show and kind of co-wrote some of the episodes

with Sharon Horgan, but it's unmistakably Sharon Hogan. It's unmistakably that, like, just really witty, really, really good. And actually, like, has, like, the big little lies stuff where you're like, oh, I really like looking at, like, what people are wearing

and, like, how their houses are interior design. Like, I'm like, is this the richest person in Ireland? how fuck do they have this like this furniture? It's really, really fun to watch. It's been, I think three episodes are up and the fourth goes up on Friday. So, okay, cool. Very, very, very, very enjoyable watch. I checked out the patient. All right. Not personally in therapy right now, so I can't speak to the sort of reality of it. But so this show is Steve Corell and Dominal Gleason. It's essentially a two-hander, at least of the episodes that have gone up so far. I'm not sure if we're going to get a lot of characters in there. And the premise is, again, in the trailer, Steve Corel is treating Donald Gleason.

Steve Carell is a therapist. Dominel Leeson's come to him. And he wakes up one day and Donald Gleason has kidnapped him and chained him to a bed in a house somewhere and is like, okay, now we're really going to do this therapy. Here's the thing about this. I'm very, I'm very curious about this show. Okay, so it's okay. I am, I am intrigued. But I, so the episodes are 20 minutes. long. Oh, interesting. And I think... That's really short. Routinely, Andy and I have been like, the thing about this show, too, is that it's only 20 minutes!

Thank God! Because, you know, I just think that with the volume of television, when you get something that's so concise like that, there's something about these episodes so far that feel like it's like half a sentence. And while I appreciate the brevity, and I think it's a creative way of doing it, and I actually quite like how they're kind of trying to jam a thriller into this newish format of what if we did a 22 minute drama or comedy. I'm not so sure that this style of story works for that. Now, I think only two episodes have gone up. I'm not sure how Hulu is going to be releasing these.

This is FX on Hulu. So they're going up kind of like maybe they'll put up another two. But just 20 minutes is like, like, okay, I've just gotten comfortable on the couch by the time this thing is over. Yeah, that's almost like a mini-sode, sort of. It is a mini-sode. I mean, we're getting into Quibi territory there. Honestly, yeah, because it's like, even like most like 30-minute comedies, it's going to be like

25 minutes with commercial. Yeah. So 20 minutes is like, doesn't seem like a big difference, but I feel like that is like, that's pretty short. Now, they have some flashbacks. You're getting to figure out a little bit about. who Steve Carell's character is and why he maybe is a little bit somber. But, you know, take for instance reservation dogs this year, and I know Andy just talked about it recently,

so I don't have to belabor the fact that it's just fucking incredible. But I was watching an episode the other night, and it was about 24 minutes. It was the roofing episode. And I just felt like it was expansive, like, both in terms of like the setting and the story that was being communicated and the depth of characterization that you were seeing. And yet it was still only, like, you know, it was less than half an hour. There's something about the way the patient, which is from Fields and Weissberg who did The Americans, obviously, is a big

greenwald favorite. And I did like the Americans. I'm just trolling him usually. It just feels like odd, I guess. And so I'm, the jury is still out if I am the jury. I, the juries. I'm still out on that one. But those are the new things that I was pretty into. You know, obviously,

industry is still cooking. Did you get a chance to watch the fifth episode? I am. I'm a weekly on top of it watcher. You get a notification? Yeah. Like Monday nights. I'm like, it's industry night. Yeah. Which is like saying something because the bachelor's on right now too. That is saying something. And then it's like, honestly, with this season of industry,

more often than not, you're going to end that episode pretty bummed out. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like necessarily a good time right now. I thought that the fifth episode was tremendous partially because it was, felt so different, partially because obviously it gets out of London. They go to Berlin. There's a lot of stuff that happens with families in this episode, but I thought that the stuff between Harper and her brother was extraordinary. And I was so happy to be able to talk to Mickey and Conrad about it. One of the things that I thought they've done really well this season is reckon with the hard partying that kind of came with the first season. Now, there are hints in the first season

with Rob's kind of behavior that it's going a little over the line. But I think it's been really fascinating to watch Yaz specifically, also Rob specifically, kind of dealing with like how far you can really push it. Yeah. Yeah. Why don't we get into my interview with Mickey and Conrad? Because it is a longer one. It's a great interview. Hey, thanks, Kaya. I had a great time listening back to it. Those guys are absolute princes. It was really, really cool of them to come down and talk to me again. and I hope we get to speak with them for the finale. It's been an awesome season of television so far. So check out the ringer streaming guide.

Check out bad sisters. Dabble with the patient. It won't take up much. Yeah, seriously. You could probably have it on your phone while you do the dishes or something and you get through most of an episode. Not that I am advocating for such a sacrilegious way of watching screen content. That's all I got.

Andy and I will be back to talk about House of the Dragon. we got to compare notes on international travel, international meals, all sorts of stuff. Kaya, have a great weekend. I hope everybody else has a great Labor Day weekend. Everybody stayed cool out there. It's going to get a little steamy in Los Angeles.

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This is a thrill. I'm going to be joined here today by Mickey Down and Conrad Kay, our buddies on the watch. No Andy, who's in a Scandinavian country to be named later right now. He's been traded

to Democratic socialism over there, but we're going to make it work with who we've got here today. Conrad, Mickey, thank you so much for coming in. Thanks for having us. So nice to do this in person. Yeah, this is amazing.

You've already had more interaction here. It's unusual Zooms. I wanted to start talking, well, I want to talk a lot about episode four or five. and generally about season two, but we've been really good about staying on on schedule with the show

because I think it's been one of those really great treats to kind of roll it out over the course of a couple of months and not just like kind of binge it and throw it down into the artery in the main line. But I was curious where you guys were doing pods about it.

There's other ringer pods. Like Woz and Jody are doing a pod about it. What's it like kind of watching the discourse around the show play out over weeks and weeks and weeks, especially it being the second season, but Mickey, like, you're, you know, are you watching it again as people are watching it,

or is everything kind of, like, still fresh in your memory? I found myself watching it again, basically as every episode comes out, or like watching bits of it, just to remind myself. Me and Conrad were talking about this the other day, saying it's just been the perfect amount of time before for us to have a little bit of distance from it, so you can see it again. Obviously not with totally fresh eyes,

because I've seen it every episode 200 times, but with fresher eyes. And it's, I like watching it along. I mean, like, I love the fact that it's linear and that it's not all out at once. I love the fact that the discourse is growing, people like you guys are talking about it. I feel like that's just like the fun of releasing a TV show.

Yeah. It feels also, it's like so many, you know, 150 people worked on it for God knows how long. And it feels it's, I don't know, it feels a bit... It's getting it to do. Yeah, it's getting it's due, but I don't even mean the discourse around it. I feel like just parsing out week to week is a bit fairer on rather than just getting swept away in the tide of all the other stuff, which, of course, is inevitably going to happen to it.

But it's been really, it's been great. watch the reaction to it. I love seeing people engage with it. Yeah, me too. I think the word you used the last time you spoke about it on the pod, Chris, he's talked about the density of it. And me and Mick really did in this season try and make the episodes, you know, stand up to a lot of re-watching.

So the idea that people have started talking talk about it more and write about it with a little bit more depth, that's obviously thrilling to us because we really did, we really did, you know, did our best of making the episodes as dense as re-watchable as possible. So the thing that it's really jumped out at me over the last couple of of episodes is I don't know if this is controversial or not, but it's like,

it's not a finance show anymore. It's a family show. I mean, this season definitely is about family. And I kind of always thought that the cool part about the first season was you Trojan horseed like a finance show into a millennial show.

But then this season, it's like your Trojan horseing a family drama into a finance show. And the thematic kind of cohesion among all these characters is fascinating. And I was wondering, not whether there was a challenge, But what were the conversations like in the beginning of the writing of season two?

Starting to talk about Harper's brother and Yaz's dad and Rob's kind of Empty hole where his sort of familial unit should be and even like the different you know Gods that Gus serves in the in the season making that more in the forefront rather than some of the more financial intrigue? I mean in the first season it was a pretty intent it was intentional for us to just show the present. Yeah. And I think that,

I think some people find it very hard to look into the characters because they were thinking, okay, you've shown what they're like in this sort of survival atmosphere where they have to basically, you know, get jobs at the end of this, but what has actually pushed them towards his job in the first place? And that's just because we couldn't show that stuff

because we was, you know, it's a very dense show in a world which people don't really understand. So there was a lot of stuff to basically set up in the first season. And we were, you know, and we were trying to make it feel like you've thrown, into this world in the same way the grads were, and we weren't going to spend much time

thinking about where they came from. And, you know, obviously, me and Conrad had had those discussions when we were writing it, but stuff that we just frankly didn't have time for. And we, like, there were versions of some of the episodes in season one where we, you know, there was a, we wrote a version in Outline at one point of Robert going back home. Yeah. Something that actually happens now in season two. And, you know, our collaborators justly said, this is not the sort of stuff you put

in the first season of a show where, you know, it's already quite a hard world to clip onto. So honestly, like, if you get a second season of something, you just want to expand as much as you possibly can and broaden the reach of it. And we thought, okay, we're underneath the skin of the characters a bit in their relationship with work. How do we get under their skin properly? How do we actually see where they came from? And that's the joy of doing a second season. You get to play in arenas where you weren't allowed to in the first one. And we thought that, again, me and Conrad had these things in our head.

We thought, okay, we need to put them on the screen now. That's a really good point because people always talk about the characters and they're like, they're really hard to empathize with, like, are they versions of you and Mickey? Like, everything's transactional, they're borderline sociopathic. How do you expect people to ever feel anything for these people? That sounds like a very specific Reddit thread. You've found out. No, it's a general consensus.

That's my mom, actually. And Mickey was like, but wait, you know, in private he says to me, but we love these characters, right? And I was like, yeah, of course you do. We write them from a place of, you know, deep affection for them. And then what we realized was that it's because we'd lived with them for so long and written these extensive biographies for them, but naturally none of that stuff is on screen.

So you live with the characters, you build them out, you talk to the writers about them. So we thought it was, we didn't want to, it wasn't as reductive as, let's provide a bit more of an empathetic key into these characters. But like episode five was an episode that we thought, it was time to sort of build the building blocks

of the why these people are the way they are. Because I think, you know, a very fair criticism to show in the first season is, you know, Harper especially was a kind of avatar in a way for a kind of, sort of every man, every woman, You could project yourself onto an underdog. You know, maybe in some ways a quite televisual trope of a character. And we wanted to build that out into something that was fully rounded and human.

And that is, you know, someone like, you know, we wanted to give Mahala, who's, you know, sensational actress, even more proper emotional stuff to chew on. Well, she's not the fuck up in that episode. And that's the thing. And it's like, so did you know her brother's secret when you wrote the character in the first season? Or is that something that comes through in between the seasons? I guess that might also be looking under the hood a little bit. but I'm just curious.

A little bit of both. We had many ideas about what had happened to her brother, and the best one, I think, won out. I feel like, you know, there were, I should, I probably shouldn't have too much of the process. I'm trying to come back. Because as Conrad said, we wrote quite extensive biographies, but in honesty, we were trying to figure out

what the best version of that relationship looked like and how it best serve Harper as a character because that is the reason to do it. Absolutely. And again, I mean, very practically, it felt like a story strand which we had to finish. It felt like if we would be doing the character

and the strand of the service if we weren't at some point going to touch on the fact that she had this missing brother, which was a huge part of her biography. Yeah. I mean, it's looming over her in the first season and you're just like, what the fuck is going on?

And then finally, like, in some ways I kind of like, it's not like I expected that specific plot revelation. But the thing that was really amazing, if you could talk a little bit about the casting of the brother, he has to do so,

much in 20 minutes of screen time. He goes from just being like, oh, here's this anonymous guy who's working in a kitchen somewhere and then it's like, oh my fucking God, like this is Jesse Pinkman, like playing tennis. Like, this is wild. It's mad. He has the full gamut of emotion. He has to go from sort of disinterest,

sort of feigned disinterest to the very depths of his soul have to be brought out in the space of 20 minutes. And it was a huge undertaking for him. It was very, very hard character to cast. Actually, we were really worried about it. Even as a concept because we thought, okay, for the reasons that you outlined, it's like how the hell are we going to find someone that both looks like her and is able to do this?

Yeah, and we're in the UK. Yeah. And they're super fraught emotionally charged scenes that, you know, they go from naught to 100 miles an hour in almost no time at all. They were, you know, they were super, they were incredibly difficult scenes to edit as well because there was so much, you know, there's a lot of backstory, but you didn't want it to feel too expositional in the dialogue. And it was just, it was that, I mean, that episode was from the, from this very inception,

we knew was a massive swing for the show, especially given that there's not a kind of robust, necessarily very robust work storyline through the distinct, like the other episodes, not as adrenalineized, but... We had to do it. We had to do it, yeah. And I mean, there was, you know,

the thing that we kept circling in the writer's room is like, what is this, why does she have a twin and why is he a tennis player? And what is that, what's... Thematically, what is that relationship saying? And then, you know, we thought, that whole episode, if you unpack it, Robert going to meet this sort of hyper-ambitious girl

at Oxford, him basically on the verge of becoming a pro tennis player and then walking away from it. It's all about the sort of cost of that unbridled ambition, the emptiness of success, and then the whole idea of like hyper competition, which is, you know, at the center of the show, we thought the really, the kind of sick thing was we were taking it all the way down to almost like the embryonic. It's like two people have come out of the same womb. And he says that horrible line to her, which was like, you know, sometimes we were born in the same womb, only one of us was going to make it out, you know, we thought that that, it was, there's all this mirroring going on in the episode. It's almost like, I sometimes think when I watch those scenes back, and we didn't conceive

of it like this, but when we were watching it back, it's almost like she's talking to a mirror version of herself, the one who opted in and the one who opted out. Yeah. And there's a deliberate echo of, she echoes her brother's line at the end of the episode. She says, maybe don't like what you're looking at. As she's standing next to Eric. And she's like, you know, it was all those things. It was the, it was the, you know, he's actually vulnerable in that moment in the elevator

because he's coming from the mental health services floor. She sees him. He looks like a sort of weak husk. And we felt like it was thematically the most clear declaration of everything the show was trying to do in one episode, wouldn't you say, Mick? Yeah, 100%. Just out of interest. Did you pick up on that he was coming out of Paypoint Services? I didn't.

Yeah, because everyone who spoke to, no one who's spoken to has picked up on them. But I didn't think he was coming out of a good day at work. Okay. You know what I mean? I just figured he had just been completely shattered by both thinking about cheating on his wife, but also just absolutely getting assassinated. And that was funny because I was going to start this conversation by talking about smoking because I love that the cigarette pack

is essentially the central motif of the fourth episode. And the idea that this guy thinks he's digging up these cigarettes because he's this badass and he's about to get back on the street and take over his department again. And at the end that cigarette pack is like the last cigarette you get before you're shot. You know what I mean? Like the one that they give you before you're assassinated. So I knew where he was when he was.

getting in, but I didn't know he was getting back from the health services. It's really funny the way that we conceived that episode because there were different versions of Eric's journey in that episode. And there was like the sort of the one that had loads of obstacles, which some of them he overcame him and then some of them he didn't. And what we ended up with was sort of slow march to death. Yeah. It's like a funeral dirt.

Last year. As soon as you see him digging up that rose bush, which is how we actually wrote it in this group, it feels like he's basically digging at his own grave. Yeah. Yeah. Which was, I think in some way, I think it actually is quite effective, but in some ways it feels sort of like an inevitability in a way that isn't very dramatic. No, I think so.

I think so. When we look back of that episode, we're super proud of it and like Ken is phenomenal in it. And we wrote it very specifically because we knew Ken could go there. Right. And we hadn't allowed the audience to see that in him in the show yet. But yeah, it is, I mean, it is kind of, there is a, I mean, I love the episode, but it does feel like, as Mickey says, like a slow decay towards an inevitability. When you get to the end, if you go back to the beginning,

there's something kind of pathetic about him wearing a Pure Point sweatshirt because it's like a guy who won't take off his high school football uniform. You know what I mean? Absolutely. And he's like living off of his old glory. He's like, I love the fact in, and we're going to jump back and forth between four and five because I wanted to keep talking about the brother scenes in five. You guys are doing drugs this season.

You guys are depicting drug use this season. Much closer to the way, like, Scorsese talks about doing violence. It's like, I don't mind indulging in the romance of it, but you have to have the consequences. You have to have, now you have to go fucking dig a hole for this body. And there was something about the scene where Harper's brother is doing Crystal. And she almost like sadly acquiesces to do it with him. And it doesn't seem to even have that much of an effect on her. She's so heartbroken about it.

Can you talk to me a little bit about how you, because, you know, obviously the show has a reputation for being this like hard partying depiction of these people. But like between Yaz, the hard. the Harper brother plot, like it does seem like you're reckoning with it a lot. It's a little bit more of a Sunday morning thing. Yeah, it's funny that you said, we did actually think about, does the show's reputation for, you know,

a hard partying show, there's a lot of drug taking? Would that actually dull the moment when Harper takes meth? And some of the executives, HBO said, like, it's just, it's more drugs. And the way that we try to execute it is that it feels like, you know,

there's absolutely zero fun in that moment. I mean, like, I think in all the other drug making moments, there's sort of a degree of fun. Even if you can look at it, you can look at it through, from objectively and think, okay, wow, that's kind of like that person's searching for oblivion. But in the moment, that character is actually enjoying it. Whereas this one, neither of them are enjoying it.

They're there because they... Well, he's almost like, I'm showing you how bad this is. Yeah, exactly how he's doing. He's saying, fuck it. When he's in that kitchen, he says, okay, fuck it. It's like, I'm trying to tell you how bad it was for me and what the consequences of that were. You're not listening to me, Harper.

Because you never have. You never have. No one did. So I'm going to show you first hand and you're going to do it with me and you're actually going to feel it. And then maybe you have some empathy because you're actually feeling what I felt.

Right. But yeah, I think the consequences in the drugs is something that I think it feels more, it's funny though, because we were always conceived in this season Yasmin as the one that has a habit that's turning into something that could be considered an addiction.

But I've seen some people have pointed out of it. It feels more actually that Harper is the one that's searching for oblivious. through drug taken. Because, you know, all the times that Harper takes drugs, she's always doing them with someone else. Why I always considered it sort of just like something that she was doing through proximity.

Yeah. Actually, she's actually taking drugs fair bit. Yeah. And she's using them as a crutch and she's using them. Conrad, you were spoken about this before, which is like the show in some ways. And Harper's, you know, attitude to work is like, he's always hitting a sort of dopamine hit button.

I feel like in this season, she's doing that in every single aspect of her life. She's taking drugs. She's getting horny off drugs. She's using Robert for sex. Having sex in the morning. Exactly. Yeah. I think just show, I don't know, the consequences of drugs is, I think the depiction of them in the first season was so casual.

And I think some people were very shocked by that. Yeah. And it's not like we didn't have any consequences. I feel like Robert. No, Robert especially. Robert has consequences. But I think in season two, it's just about showing that there are consequences of that kind of behavior. And also, maybe I had my father-in-law's voice ringing in my ears when he said, like, all these people deserve to be in jail.

The part, I mean, like you mentioned, yes. I mean, I think that that has definitely been what's been so great about Marissa's performance this year is like, she can kind of hold it together. Like, she is obviously somebody who you wouldn't look at and be like, oh, I bet like this person's like running out of rope here. But when she shows up to the party for the publishing house, and he's like, are you fucking high?

Like in the middle of the day, that's just a great, like, oh, like we actually are in her second half of Goodfellas moment here. It is spinning out of control for her. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, her cocaine use, I think, was, it felt sort of quite realistic to us, the way it was passed out. It's like, and then we and me and Mickey had this quite long conversation

about whether we should ever see her do it at work. Right. But I think the insinuation is that she's kind of always either about to do it or coming off it and when there's no real clean divide between her social life and her work life. Definitely. And I've you spoken to you about,

with you previously about what has brought her to that place. And in season one, she does take coat once in episode seven. And there was actually a line where Seb, her boyfriend at the time, said to her, have you ever done this before? And she said, no, I haven't. And then did it. And that was actually, in our conception of her, that was the first time she'd done it. And we got rid of the line because, I don't know why we got rid of that line.

Actually, I don't know. Probably time. Yeah, literally honest, probably time. But I was thought of her as. someone that was quite, you know, goody two shoes, obviously has this weird relationship with her privilege, meaning that she probably didn't want to be seen as someone that, you know, indulge that part of her psyche by taking drugs. And that's something that she's obviously done in between the two seasons and during the pandemic. She's, you know, she's, you know,

she's lent into that kind of stuff. Yeah, moving among kitchens, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I honestly think that's changed her, that has changed her personality. 100%, yeah. And I made her the person she is for season two. That negotiation she has with in the first season all the time of how much should I I'm privileged I need to hide my privilege I need to be a totally different person at work that's you know the main sea change in her between the two seasons is like

no this is who I am I'm going to lean into it do you guys do you guys like you were asking me about whether I noticed it was the mental health services there's a couple of I also thought that the moment where Yaz comes over to Harper's apartment obviously and she immediately puts

out lines and Harper's like well we are celebrating the bonuses and she's like, oh yeah, we are, right? And I thought for a second that was because she didn't get one. Like she had been fucking up at work, or maybe she was trying to make this two floors thing happen. But are we supposed to understand that she did get her bonus? It just doesn't matter to her because of her personal wealth.

Yeah, that's how we thought of it. It's like she got paid. I mean, and the amount that she was getting paid in relation to how much money she already had would not warrant her celebration in that mind. It has a slight, it has an almost. There is a slight plot point to it that comes out in episode 8 as well. Okay.

Which is a very subtle link, but it's kind of linked to it. I love the fact that like even though these people are obviously now in this supposed to be like, I mean, what does Harper talk about? Like the first episode of the show is the meritocracy of the nature of this business that they're in. It almost seems like in season two, some of the class stuff, some of the stuff about there, like where they're from, is starting to like kind of rear its head a little bit more. And you're almost allowed, have you allowed yourselves to bring more? of those things from their home lives in, you think? Definitely. I think so, yeah.

I mean, everyone keeps saying this, and Wals said this on the prestigious TV podcast, everything about the show is based on class. And that actually, I'm glad that the American audience is picking up on that, because I think that was something that we were not worried about, but thought that the American audience would not latch onto as well as the British audience would. I mean, in the press we've done a little bit of press, or starting to do the press for the UK release,

and every single person we've spoken to is just latched onto the fact that it's all about class. And there was an amazing comment, I think Conrad, you sent it to me on, I think it was the AVE Club or something. And someone's saying that this is basically like the equivalent of a Victorian novel. Yeah.

It's everything we wanted to do. I mean, we always, the thing that's funny because me and Mickey always find ourselves across whether it's industry or other stuff we've done or have done in the past. It always seems to be the thing we keep going back to in terms of to write about, especially when we're writing contemporary drama. I'm not really sure where that comes from.

But yeah, it seems to be... Aside from being English. Yeah, I guess so. But, you know, the thing that's cool about it is that a lot of the voices in the show are American. You know, I mean, you're writing for Eric, you're writing for Harper, you're writing for Jesse this season. How do you put yourself in that voice? Like, I don't know that we've talked about this before, but do you find... I think it's just the...

It's cut the culture we grew up in and from a very young age, the films we watched, all that sort of stuff. I think that's a big function of it. I think sometimes we can maybe get it wrong a little bit around there was this whole thing I saw on some Twitter thread about behoove and behoove. And actually, it's really funny because Ken Leong, when we were shooting that, he was like, you know I'm pronouncing it the British way? And we were like, yeah. And he's like, was that because I've been in Britain for a decade or so?

And you're like, let's go with that. It's also in the first scene of the whole thing, he says CV instead of resume. I thought, okay, actually, that was a mistake. That was us not writing the character correctly. But it actually feels like actually something that an MD that had been working in London for like 10 years would start to say. Start to call it a CV. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. There was one thing, like, we had Jamie O'Brien on this season,

who was incredibly helpful. She was around the show with us. And she, the one thing that she always used to do when she got the script has changed Got to Goton every single time. Control F, guy. Yeah, exactly. I mean, how many times have they said Got instead of Gotten? Speaking of the Americans on this show,

I wanted to talk a little bit about Jay, who is great in the first episode, but then is, like, is superb. the subsequent episodes, especially, I mean, even his disembodied voice at the end of episode three is like, you ever fucking click out of call on me? Like, I love that. Did you shoot him sequentially and did he kind of grow into the character of Jesse? 100%. I think he was still figuring out in the first episode, especially, I think the first scene he did was the one in the hotel bar, not the hotel bar, sorry, the, when they had breakfast

there when he's reading the FTA. And he's definitely still figuring out how to play the character Yeah, he's kind of What was the delight of getting someone of his calibre to play the role was people's expectations and they kind of learned what's the word? What they've seen of him in the past? And he gave, he has a kind of obviously inherent

likability, affability and it gave a warmth to the character which made it very hard to place what his direct intentions were which is really good for hopefully how the season plays out but he, I think he sort of, I don't know whether he deliberately did this, but he started sort of carry himself slightly differently and look, look slightly older and, and it was, I don't know, he found the character somehow. It was in like a slouch in a way he held his head and it's a very, you know,

it feels almost like counterintuitive casting in a lot of ways, but I think it was one of the biggest successes of the second season. Yeah, I mean the bird shoot, like episode obviously lets him kind of become himself and that, but, like, I just thought he was just extraordinary in that episode. But we realized, actually, I mean, I think we'd written a lot of two-old. No, we would start, we'd started to really polish up the dialogue on 203 by the time we'd cast him, and we lent into that kind of puckish, kind of mischievous energy that he has. And, like, we started to write dialogue that we thought would suit his voice.

Right. Without ruining it, in episode six, though, he has a big episode in that. And there's a turn in that episode, which I think, with the prejudices you have, against J. Deplace and the way that characters he played before. And the thing that Conrad was saying, which is the mischievous sort of nature of that character that you've seen in episode three. Like, there's a turn that he does in six,

which I think is just like cold as ice. So good. I can't wait. I want to ask you guys a little bit about Michael Mann. Because I'm man-pilled, so maybe I can't see it. But I know I saw you on Instagram putting up Heat 2, the book. And we talked a little bit about how that scene in 2 or 3 was supposed to feel like the bank robbery.

Oh, no, the end of two was supposed to feel like the bank robbery. And then I think I lost my mind and started talking about Manhunter when we were talking about one of the episodes recently. It feels like Nathan's music has evolved this year and kind of has a little bit of like the tangerine dream vibe of like early Michael Mann movies. But I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about the non, sort of like written influences on this season

and whether or not they were different from the first season or whether or not you guys were looking for feelings like like the bank robbery. When you say non-written, what do you mean? Like just cinematic rather than like, oh, we want it to feel like a Victorian novel or whatever, yeah. It's a very good question. I mean, the influences are actually the same between the two seasons.

It's just that I think we executed them closer to the version that we wanted. Jamie O'Brien again, she said that in season one we were reaching for something. And hopefully I think in season two, we come slightly closer to grasping it. I mean, the references are the same. We always talk about the same stuff. We talk about Moneyball. Moneyball. Social network.

Really, we have some weird kind of kids, Larry Clark film. Yeah. James White. It was a film not many people have seen. It's excellent. It has very good clubbing sequences, very good, like, young people living in big city sequences. Girls, obviously, a very big influence on the show. Peep show.

Peep show, enormous influence on the show. But there are certain things that we think. Like, you said this before, Com, but like, when we're watching the dailies and we're in the edit, or we're in the edit, we're like, we're like, Oh God, that looks like Bennett Miller. That really gives us a little bit. Also, like, Mick, I mean, Mick is, we're both got East Thieves or whatever. Is that the right word?

Like, obviously, like, really obsessed with the way the show looks. But Mick to, like, a perfectionist, that's why I love working with him because he's got such a perfectionist eye for stuff. He's kind of a bit finchery in the way he's like, oh, that's not quite right. And the look of the show is obviously we're obsessed with it, and we wanted it to feel incredibly textured. And obviously, we don't shoot on film. Yeah.

But it feels different this season. Yeah, yeah. And it was kind of like it was about bringing up the saturation of the Bloomberg's, crushing all the blacks in the grade, making it feel like, you know, you talk about Michael Mann, and I'm not saying in any way it looks like this, but like for me, the best looking film ever or one of his thief. Yeah. And it's that kind of like, hardly con.

Yeah. And you can see it. And it's like you see it in the Safty Brothers work as well. Yeah. It's kind of what me and Mickey call it. It's almost like heightened reality. So it's like super lived in visceral, but also just looks like incredible. Like it just looks like the sort of.

life you want to be living. Yeah. And then when, so then when you do pull the rug out and you have Harper Smoke and Crystal in the morning, you're like, oh, fuck, this is really bad.

Like this, it feels bad. It's gray out. It's like this, I mean, you even imagine that it's this German sky. Did you get to go to Berlin?

Yeah, yeah, we did. We didn't actually film that scene, though. We filmed that scene in Wales. We found a sort of a... You should tell me that you shot it on the volume

on the Mandalorian stage. We found a skyline and it's a little bit like Berlin. I think they did a really good job. Amazing. Amazing. But yeah, but go to Berlin, which was very, very fun.

Did you do the club scenes there? We did the outside of the club scene there. So there's a really famous club in Berlin called Watergate, which was the inspiration for the club. Obviously, we were saying it was there. And they've got, it's on the river, and there's this amazing sort of smoking area outside, which no one ever uses actually,

because everyone smokes inside clubs in Berlin. And then the reason we chose this is because we thought it was really cinematic because across the water, there's this huge neon universal sign, like Universal Studios. Oh, wow. And when we were filming there,

We were like, okay, we've got to get that sign in. And our producer, Eddo, was like, I'm not sure we're actually allowed to get that. This is a Warner Brothers company. It's hard-breaking. Given what happens in that episode, I think that, like... Yeah, it's funny. It's one of our, when we came to make the show, you're talking about Trojan horseing, like a millennial, a young person show in or whatever.

Like, Mickey and I were just obsessed with getting a good clubbing on screen. And, like, we tried it in season one. And then we were just like, we've got to do it. We had this amazing new director called Caleb Fermi. who's never directed TV episode. And he did five, right? He did five and six. Okay.

And to be, I mean, the club scene, I think in Berlin is just fantastic. You know, there's this great, there's this great Mia Hansen love film called Eden. Mm-hmm. Love it. Really good movie. Has incredible club scenes in it. And we're like, we've got to do our version of that. And like, Mick came up with this brilliant idea, which I think the social network does or something,

where basically you just kill the internal dialogue in the scene. Yeah. So it's like, so you can't hear the characters and you subtitle. And it's like, that is the experiential experience of being in a club. Yeah. Screaming in people's ear. I have to admit, though, I stole... We have a great friend who was a writer on season two of industry called Joseph

Charlton, and he had a play in the West End called Anna X with Emma Corrin and Nabahn, actually, from season one. And they just had that idea. It was amazing. It was like really loud music, and the text was projected on the back of the wall. I thought, that's the best version of the club. Because as Conrad said, when you're in those clubs, they're just like, you know, very numbingly loud.

The funny thing is, though, with the shooting of club scenes, so there's this, it's on YouTube, but it's basically a behind the scenes of collateral, making collateral, and then the Koreatown club scene that's in collateral, and they have them shooting it, so there's no music playing. And it's all these people just dancing as Tom Cruise, like, somersaults across the floor. The really disconcerting thing is they have to, obviously, because I was there on the day we were shooting that, they have to cut the, they play the music so everyone gets into it, into the vibe. And then they cut it out.

And what you hear is you just hear the bang, bang, bang, bang of people's feet going left to right. It's like the audio version of the lights coming on at the end of the night. night where you were just like, oh, I don't want to see people dance to no music at all. Also, actors never shout loud enough in pubs or in clubs. And we said, like, if you're, if shout as if you're, like, you're trying to deafen the person you're acting with. Like, if you think you're too loud, you're not allowed enough.

It's like, scream it. And in season one, I think when we did that club scene in episode one, we played the music into their ears. Yeah. Yeah. Which was a lot easier to act with. But yeah, you got to, like, it makes sense, you've got to see the veins in their neck and stuff.

Otherwise, you just don't get that same. Or it just looks like collateral. Which I mean, like, in collateral it works because then Tom Cruise like shoots up the entire nightclub. But it's tough if you're not going to do that. We didn't have that luxury. Can I ask you a little bit to do a little like transatlantic translation stuff? Because I think I get the Gus plot this season so far.

But obviously there's like things like constituencies and who Aurora is and like what she sort of represents. Can you give me a little bit of like a of an explainer about like what what American audiences might not understand about like what he's doing? So Gus is, no, he obviously meets he meets Aroar in the shoot. Aroar is an MP member of parliament for Croydon East, which is a fake constituency because we don't want to get in trouble with the government. That's what they would come after you before. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And it's also like what government? You said that I didn't. And so, you know, we present her as a sort of, like, quite ambitious, black Tory MP. She's, you know, she should be in her constituency office, which is sort of like a surgery where you meet constituents, i.e. the public. And you hear the complaints at a very local level. But instead, she's on this pheasant shoot with, you know, headfire managers and, you know, tech wizards and whatever. And, like, which is just suggesting that that's sort of what she's interested in. And she's interested in using that, you know, the proximity to tech and healthcare and telehealth

in order to basically rise up the ranks. So in episode four, he goes to work with her. He, you know, his expectations for working in, for the Tory party and for the government are high. He thinks, okay, wow, I'm going to be in... Beyond clerical. Yeah, I'm going to be in the House of Parliament. It's going to be like House of Cards.

I'm going to be, like, walking through past these paintings of Gladstone, and I'm going to feel like I'm starting my career in power. And instead, he's put up this very junior level in a... It's the interacy office, which is, I mean, this is a very, very weird reference. It's not weird at all, actually, but some of the scenes, I think, were kind of inspired by, you know, the film in the loop. Yeah. It's obviously the thick of it, the film of the thick of it, I guess. And there's a really, really good sequence where obviously, like, who's the guy he plays him?

Tom Hollander. Tom Hollander. Yeah. Yeah. Tom Hollander plays, like, a Secretary of State. And obviously, he's in Washington, and he's hobnobbing with the sort of. of the US secretives, like, you know, the, what's it called deputy, whatever. And then he's pulled back to his constituency office in like somewhere in the north of

England to deal with a war that's falling down. This is the whole humpty, dumpy, the fucking egg. I just thought that was really funny. And it's so typical to Britain because we have this, you know, the way that our government works is that you were, you know, you were elected to represent the constituents. Yeah. but obviously because... We have that too.

Yeah, you do, I guess. Apparently. Yeah. But I feel like they, there's some people, obviously, there are back benches in the, in government who make that their entire life's work. And there are ones that, you know, use as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. I feel like in America, usually the congressperson is from the place that they are representing. That was the case for a time.

It's starting to get more and more common for people to just be like, oh, is there an opening there? I will run. Yeah. That happens more in the second. In the UK, it's like, you know, in 2010 when David Cameron became the prime minister, and they were on up to that, he basically had this sort of A list of MPs, which were taken from different parts of walks of life. And he thought, okay, I'm just going to find you seats. Like, I'm going to put you here. You've got nothing to do with it. And you actually end up with this system where someone from, you know, London usually is representing, you know, somewhere in like the north of Wales. Or anyway. So Gassas has gone to work for her. He has expectations of what it's going to be like. It's nothing like that. This guy comes. in who we present as this quite comic character, holding a Tupperware foot of shit. Gus thinks, okay, what the hell am I doing? And what we're trying to do with him is show that actually the thing he went into

politics to do ostensibly, originally, which is, you know, climb the greasy ladder, takes the backseat a little bit to actual public service. That's what I was going to say, is it seems like he has like a moment of actual, like, empathy and connection with this guy. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that's the way we built the story out is to show the kind of the, the stuff that Aurora is ignoring.

You know, she very, we very deliberately wrote her kind of sprinting out there because she's had an interaction with this guy before. And as Mickey says, like, her, the way she sees herself ascending. And, you know, for her,

her career is a kind of game. It's like, how quickly can I get at the top? Yeah. So, she's going to get, like, this assistant secretary of cabinet position,

the next one and the next one. And then I think, I think, yeah, as Mick says, we were trying to show that they're, we're trying to show whether Gus has the room for empathy on an individual level.

And whether that's going to actually, be enough for him as a career and whether as a series wears on, you see how that he has to, he kind of gets given quite a stark choice about that stuff. You know, the thing that's been brilliant about watching this season is, I was thinking about Yaz's,

like pandemic speech like her, like I've been going through kitchens and buying pajamas and stuff. And you're able to do stuff that feels very relevant and contemporary, but never date yourself. And I was wondering if there were any, did you have any tricks when you were ready? writing this thing, any references to say

what a character might have been doing during the pandemic like Harper living in a hotel, Yaz's having this sort of partying lifestyle, to not make it feel like, oh, this is going to be out of date three months after it hits Sky Atlantic or something, like this will change. There seems to be almost like this way

in which you don't reference anything that's happening like in the moment, but it is something that happened 15 minutes ago so that you feel like you're in the moment. It's a very good question, actually. I mean, we... That must be so hard. It is really difficult.

I mean, the COVID conversation was obviously a massive conversation about whether it would feel dated by the time it aired and whether it felt like it was too much in the rearview mirror. And I actually really dug my heels into that, I think, wrongly thinking it was still going to feel like something that was soul of the world. And in fact, like, because of the way culture is and because of the way people are, it already feels like it happened in a different lifetime. And I think that we also had this rule, this hard and fast rule, which was like, and actually, the COVID experience, what we're trying to say with Yasmin versus Harper versus all these characters, the COVID experience was not a homogenous thing, that it was so individuated by socioeconomic circumstances, all this sort of stuff. You know, for the mega rich, it's like it barely happened.

Yeah. And so we also thought that if we put that on screen in any way, there was nobody who could watch it and say, actually, that's not what that was like because, you know, there would be an office with one guy with a mask on at any one point in time. with the economics and business stories, it's like we were always trying to write stuff that felt, you know, we had a very good consultant on season two who was kind of a bit of a Zorro figure

and doesn't really want to be named, but he had his ear to the ground and was like, you know, these are the things in the market that are not going away, frankly. And they will feel relevant, like structural things or, you know, there's a whole storyline coming later down the season

where Amazon are involved in a purchase. And like, he was like, these are things that are going to feel relevant whether the show comes out in a year or two years. He literally predicted stuff. Yeah, he literally predicted stuff. But it's like, Season two could have been about crypto, and it would have been, like, slippery for you guys, right?

Like, if you had done, like, the most, like, up-to-date... I mean, it almost... Oh, yeah, you know what episode 6 is about, yeah. Is it about crypto? No, it's about Reddit. Reddit. Oh, okay. It's about GameStop.

Or a version of that. Right, because we had you guys on to talk about that, and I was really... I was curious whether or not it was almost like... Okay, so I'll be fascinated to see how Six comes out. But, Mick, can you think of any examples of stuff where we just took things out for timestamp reasons. I swear there are someone. I just can't think of any. Boris Johnson being the Prime Minister.

Well, we had a big, not a fight, but we had a sort of back and forth with Jane Tranter, who was the CEO of Bad Wolf, is the production company that makes industry. And there is a scene in episode four where there's a sort of slow pan up to a picture of a Roar, the MP, with a guy who, actually, am I going to get in trouble for this? I don't think so. I blow it a blonde wig. I always forget that the libel laws in England are really tough. Just because we record it here, doesn't make us.

subject to their laws. The question was, is he going to be the... Is Boris Johnson going to be the prime minister when this comes out? And the answer now is no. Can you imagine though if, like, out of all his problems, he was like, I have to sue the fucking guys from his industry. Wouldn't surprise me. But yeah, like the COVID stuff feels like it's so well dealt with.

And it also actually winds up being something that's kind of meaningful because I do think now it's like your personal experience with what happened is so. weirdly individualistic. Like, yeah, obviously there was a collective sort of trauma and there was an obvious, like, I think a real disillusionment with, like, institutions that came out of that that gets reflected in this show as well. But then there is the kind of, like,

I was on my personal journey and there was only the specific. And I was, did you co-late those from friends? Did you kind of like just hear things on the air that would, in the wind that would make you say, like, there's a girl like Yaz, who's in a kitchen every night just off her head. she comes from shops online. Totally.

I had so many different experiences from friends, friends of friends. As Conrad says, for the mega rich, it felt like it barely happened. People were able to get out of the country somehow, you know. Right. Living their fourth home. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, when we were at peak lockdown, I remember seeing people on Instagram who I know who live in London, like in France.

Right. And I was like, how the hell did you get there? And it's like, oh, I had some sort of... A private boat. Or whatever. Yeah. Or like, I have a permit that allows me to go through Monaco or something like that. And it feels like, I'm.

Like, yeah, those are luxuries that most of the people, 99.9% of the people don't have. And I feel like, obviously, the show is playing in a sort of a place where privilege is kind of at the surface. And we were going to go through that Jamie Henson character, Jay, from episode four, we were going to show, actually, what the flip side of that was a little bit. Yeah.

And unfortunately, we didn't have much time to do it. I mean, really, the second season through Yasmin's story, we were really, it felt like we were kind of writing privilege in her story in season one. But in season two, we were like, right, this is a story about a woman and her privilege in the world. And that's the main reason we decided to put her father on screen. You're asking earlier about like, why bring these people, why bring their families into the picture at all? And, you know, I think Yasmin's relationship with her dad explains so much about the way she sees herself, her relationship to her own femininity, her sexuality, but also

just her relationship to what she expects from life and what she expects to be given to her. Right. I think people have been a little bit. I mean, people are saying, wow, she is really on one this season. I mean, she's in her villain era to use that colloquialism. But she's, I feel like, as soon as you see her dad, it's not like we, you know, we don't forgive all her foibles when we see him, but they do explain, he does explain a lot. I mean, the first thing he says, Marisa picked up in this, actually, which I thought

was really smart. First thing he says when she comes in is, wow, you look great. You know, we're suggesting that he hasn't seen her for, you know, months and months and months. And the first thing he says is, first thing he does is comment on her appearance. Yeah. I don't think that she's a villain at all. I mean, I didn't read it that way. I think that she's falling apart. But like, I mean, it's just, I think that even in the way that she's casting about to kind of have these cathartic moments where she keeps looking for like, I mean, obviously connection. I mean, this is the thing about the show that's so cool this year is that

it starts with how these people are all defined by their work and how they perform at work and how they're being evaluated at work. And then the second season is like, they all have to go home, you know? and they all have to kind of figure out whether or not their fathers care about them or their brothers care about them or if they don't have anybody there. I guess the last thing I wanted to ask about is I have to ask about the smoking again. So when I come here to London, I always notice that there seems to be a habit of every single person before they go into work burns one incredibly hard. It looks like the Matthew McConaughey and True Detective like smoking and looking at the phone

really quick thing. and then each character in the show smokes differently and smokes at different times. Am I reading too much into it, or was there ever any discussion of, this is how Eric smokes, this is how Harper smokes, this is how,

or is it just like natural? I don't know, it feels like for Eric and Harper is a bit of a valve release, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's like, an exhalation.

It's usually, I mean, the fact that they keep bumping into each other in the smoking area, it probably suggests that they're actually, maybe one's waving for the other. That's a convenient screenwriter. device as well. You can always bring them together when you're going to point in the music. That's the greatest thing

about smoking in general. Even when they banned it indoors. There's something fundamentally really cinematic about people blasting darts, I think. It just looks good. It looks cool. I don't know. I think it's like a... It feels very retro in some ways because actually me and Mickey were a

music festival last weekend or two weekends ago was a Mick, I can't remember. I remember very vividly looking around and thinking, I'm a crowd of what, 700 people or something? It's like, I'm the only one smoking a cigarette. I was like, that is bizarre. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I feel like everyone's a fucking person is smoking or vaping here. Oh, it's like it's more of a health kick now. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I feel like the only people who smoke are posh people now. And they tend to smoke inside as well. I mean, if you, I'm trying to think of anyone smokes inside in season two of industry. I think that's something definitely Asbin would do. Yeah.

Or allow, you know. Yeah, I was when it was an absolute rap for me is when I started smoking inside. Really? I met a girl and she smoked indoors and I was like, we could do this. And she was like, yep. Yeah. I was like, sit here and smoke. And that's why I went from like two a day to 10 a day.

I haven't had a cigarette for like seven years. It was when we were at, me in Conrader, when they ended up a festival, we had a play on. And I didn't really smell. I smoked like socially. And I smoked on holiday and like, I had a couple of drinks I'd smoke. And I think I smote like 30 in a day.

And I was like, it was never. And I woke up and I felt awful. They might have been like the four bottles of wine. They may hang over so bad. It was awful. I know. Yeah. They're so good.

They're delicious. Well, this has been a positive health and wellness podcast with Mickey and Conrad. Thank you guys so much for coming in. This was awesome. It was really good to do this with you guys in person. It's so much fun in person. Thank you for having us. Thank you.