Alex Barker

Hey listeners, I'm Alex Barker, a journalist with the Financial Times.

A few years ago, my fellow reporter Patricia Nilsson and I spent six months looking at how money flows in the porn industry.

We gathered our findings in a new audiobook, The Kink Machine, The Hidden Business of Adult Entertainment, and today I'm dropping into your feed to share a preview.

Patricia and I quickly learned that while performers are required to literally bear it all, information about the people and businesses who run this industry are kept undercover like a state secret.

We started to find a power structure that includes billionaires, tech geniuses and the most powerful finance companies in the world.

It's a story about control, influence and an industry with staggering cultural reach.

If you want to hear more, find The Kink Machine, the hidden business of adult entertainment at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever you get your audiobooks.

That's me, Alex Barker.

I manage Patricia's team of business reporters, but my main job is writing about the media industry.

The Murdochs, Netflix, that kind of thing.

When Patricia asked to look into porn, I knew it wasn't exactly the FT's cup of tea.

But it was different and intriguing and only career-threatening if we really botched it up.

So I said, sure, see what you can find.

And bit by bit, this story of the power behind porn drew me in too.

It started with a routine email from Patricia, a little update on her reporting with a bombshell buried halfway down.

She said, I think I found the secret owner of the world's biggest porn company.

And she had.

But it was just the first turn in that maze.

Once we started following the leads, we soon realised we weren't just tracking one man or one company, but power.

And that's when I really got hooked.