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

0:00If you're looking for a potential bubble or you're looking for a potential place where things may not be quite as they seem corporately, I've noticed is they'll start using phrases a lot like he just doesn't get it. Like they just don't get it. Hello and welcome to Giant Ideas with me, Cameron McLean, and me, Tommy Stadlin. We're co-founders of Giant Ventures, which builds and backs purpose-driven companies. At Giant, we're lucky to meet extraordinary people with Giant Ideas that are changing the world. This podcast brings you behind-the-scenes access to those ideas and the inspiring stories of the people behind them.

0:35We explore how one giant idea can kickstart a billion-dollar company, shape culture, and transform life as we know it.

0:45Hello and welcome back to Giant Ideas. Happy New Year. 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. Succession writer Lucy Preble, and the creators of the BBC and HBO hit Industry, Mickey Down and Conrad Kay. 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. In this conversation, they get to the core of the character of bad business. What's it like to write about the worst people in business?

1:23What draws them to these people? Is there an inevitability to the moral dissent of business leaders with too much power? And perhaps most importantly, how can you, our audience, avoid becoming the next Kendall Roy? I hope you enjoy.

1:40Really, we have three of the best and funniest TV writers working today with us, so enormously excited for this. Can I start off with you, Lucy, and ask what attracts you to these kind of characters? is it the idea that you want to look exactly how terrible the human soul can be or are you actually looking for a sort of some glimmer of light gray and sort of some complexity in these characters well you hope to do a bit of both but I don't know 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're 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 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 and so it's kind of important to look at who they are and in doing so yeah hopefully you'll see a bit of ourselves a bit of humanity 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 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 yeah yeah um Conrad Mickey um a little a little distant yeah uh but you um on the same page um tell us about the are you trying to write a show by the way I liked it how you it described you as having quit the city is that in my case That's true.

3:16That's mostly true. But tell us, are you writing about bad people? Maybe start with you, Comrade. Or are you writing about an environment in which no one can really be the nice sort of person we read about? I mean, I don't know. The thing we always start, we set out to make the most entertaining thing we can. It's not like every season we sit there and think, what sort of moral case are we making about the people or capitalism or anything like that. I think one of the things our show asks is whether people who want to go work on a trading floor are sort of a certain type of person or whether that environment, that kind of ecosystem fosters a certain type of being in the world and whether it sort of hops you up and makes you the more steroided version of all of those worst impulses.

4:01I don't know. What do you think about it? 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 out people we knew. I mean, and people we worked with. To some extent, ourselves. So when it got to season two, people were saying, these people are terrible. You probably said this as well when you interviewed us for season one. How do you write these all for people? I said, well, I'm surrounded by them. All our friends are sociopaths. They transpired. So these people, but I mean, there are so many memorable characters in the show.

4:35I mean, Eric, Harper, Rishi, Jasmine. I mean, you see pieces of these people. You've got to write a character with a lot of love, and you can't go into a show, I mean, this is from our show in particular, but you can't go in there and think, I'm going to write the worst kind of person ever. I think you have to go in write with a position of empathy for that character. And as Conrad said, the show really is about how people mold their personalities to an institution that does only rewards... A certain kind of behavior. A certain kind of behavior. And we spoke about it in the kind of lofty terms in the writer's room.

5:06we 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? 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. So what is, I mean, we're all economic animals on some level, it's like, what is your incentive? There's no bonus, I mean, really tritely, there's no bonus given out at the end of the year for, like, people thinking you were very nice to your colleagues. Even at the FT, that is true. Lucy tell us have you met any of the type of billionaire that you might have used or I mean you never got to meet Ken Lay or no but I mean have you come across would it be useful would you would you like to corner some of these people or are you okay listening to them on podcasts and other things well yeah I mean do a bit of that I was very glad to unsubscribe for some podcasts recently when Mountainhead came out I've been listening for months and months some particular tech podcasts that were really started to grate Was it the Lex Friedman show?

6:03I'm not going into who it was. But, oh, my God. Like, it's fascinating when... That is genuinely really useful stuff. We didn't used to have access to that, so technology also great, you know, for us. But there's, yeah, that personal research, I did a lot more in early days. I did meet people who worked for Enron. I never met any of the big players, and that was somewhat deliberate. I didn't even approach them, because I knew I wanted to write that. That play was about the fall of the energy company Enron and it was sort of a vaudevillian play deliberately. 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.

6:48I mean literally in terms of like there is a lot of magic and entertainment and fun. They used to have Cirque du Soleil do their annual parties because I think there is actually a sort of exponential, link and 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 so big finance companies tend to be very very like show busy and glamorous in their events and stuff because they know that really the job is sort of money in suits and then the show business you go and it's just people in Ugg boots and caravans isn't it being very sort of miserable so I think there's an inverse relationship with what's glamorous and what's not um and I think yeah basically I met a few of them it was really useful and helpful 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 baudavilion it's not much use to meet them you don't really want to like them very much but also um I didn't want to feel beholden to them I wanted to feel like I could say what I really thought rather than thinking oh I wonder what Andy Fastow will feel about that and I really truthfully I don't really care what Andy Fastow thinks about that the CFO of anyone 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 of tech people and um is their intelligence so there's a line in the mountain where they're discussing something and they're saying oh the four Sigma, the Four Sigma IQ move.

8:19And you're like, I mean, what kind of anyway, but it's so crucial to them and their sense of worth that they are the cleverest people in the room. Absolutely. That was also a saying at Enron, like, who's the smartest guy in the room? 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 corporately, I've noticed, is they'll start using phrases a lot like, he just doesn't get it like they just don't get it like and getting it is is framed in intellectual terms the idea is are you smart enough to get it like to understand what we're doing here 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 yes if you're prepared to ask quite simple basic questions the 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.

9:14So you've got to watch out for when actually faith-based behaviour is being described as intellectual or intelligence-based behaviour. So the idea is that you're actually just buying in to some sort of Ponzi scheme or some sort of bubble, 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. You should be able to describe how your company works and what you believe in in fairly simple ways. I think you can see that also from, I don't want to call him the octopus guy. That sounds rude, but I'm sorry. Greg Jackson.

9:50Thank you very much. Sorry, Greg Jackson. 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. Something we talk about in the, 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. and how often obviously 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 Amazing. 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 and I often wonder do the people in industry do they have a code?

10:32Do they have for all the terrible stuff they're prepared to do Do they have lines they won't cross? Well, to an extent they did in the earlier seasons, we've sort of run out of ideas. We needed them to cross those red lines pretty rapidly. I think so. I mean, Eric, for example, as 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, I can be seductive, I can be a bullshitter, I can be a con artist in my lane in the parameters of this job, but I would not do anything criminal. and that's kind of why we The show would be better if we did probably Probably, more people would watch it A lot of people watch it already Lucy, to your mind I mean, like the Roy family are a long way from like my word is my bond kind of behaviour, but do they have do they have principles and codes that they will try to stick to over years or did they have?

11:25No, no I think, well the Roy family is a collection of people for those who don't know the show, they're sort of a media empire family based on a few combined. I think Logan Roy, he's the head of that family, you know, patriarchal figure. The code there is really, you know, don't mess me around and also bow to me. 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. It's like paying respect to the guy in charge. and also you know can we do a deal which is very contemporary as well 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 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 sometimes just frankly also then controlling the government like controlling who was going to get in and you know by obviously printing certain things in the paper about them 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 but then recently we've seen obviously with Musk a completely different approach where it's going much more back to that that kind of a legacy idea of getting in there and doing deals so So I think that's the code.

12:51The code is if you have power and I have power, how do we make it work between us, really? Tell us about Lumi, Comrade, because that's probably the closest to our audience today, isn't it? In season three of, series three of Industry, which is the one I think that really launched the show into another level of popularity, you have this figure played by Kit Harington, Sir Henry Muck, and he's running something which is at the forefront of the democratisation of the energy sector. and someone says, I keep hearing that, I have no idea what it means. Is there any part of him which is sort of, is he an unlucky figure or is he in terms of his business ventures?

13:29Or is he, I mean, he's in some ways trapped in his upbringing and expectations. Sort of. I mean, the archetype that we thought we were sort of skewering, maybe not that successfully, was the idea of more of a political figure, actually, than a business figure, which is the idea that if you're educated at a certain place, you have a certain level of polish, which means that 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. It's a kind of gentlemanly kind of understanding of 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.

14:06And I think we try to take that to its most extreme manifestation which is like whatever guy like that who is not unintelligent but is given the keys to running something that his spin, basically to see how far his spin would take him and whether he could bluster his way through it to be a successful entrepreneur. Well, would you say he's unlucky or not? I mean... I mean, you haven't seen season four yet, but I'd say he's unlucky. Yeah, he's pretty lucky. Again, this is back to my previous point, which is on the page, that character feels quite two-dimensional and, as Conrad said, 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.

14:48I'd say he's unlucky by the circumstances of the fact that his company collapses, but I'd say he's sort of at the forefront of the choices that caused that collapse as well. Yeah. When you're looking, I mean, there are obviously energy companies that have struggled with high prices here, so there's source material, and lots of source material for the world of succession. Are there things you see in the business world now, or anything that's caught your mind I don't know whether it's Musk or actually don't say it's Musk please so we were all fed up by like Alex Karp or something like this or anything that's caught it'd been in the headlines which you've found like that is brilliant I need to the ESG thing wasn't really us saying let's go and skewer ESG because of the concept was something we didn't believe and it was more just we were trying to I know the show is written for a quite cynical lens I mean it's 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 we're putting a statement about how the country works and the sort of the kind of the sort of I don't know the machinery of of politics media government 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 like if you came to the show you said okay these young people are doing a job most people don't understand what a trading floor is what an investment banking department is they don't know.

16:03They were always talking about the company in season two, that they were buying and selling shares. And most people don't understand what that means. So we said, we have to show what the company that they're investing in or they're bringing to market is. We thought, okay, what an interesting thing was energy. And then we thought about ESG as a concept. And we have a really good consultant who does not want to be named, but is quite senior or was senior in the company that he was in. And he thought this is something that is getting a lot of traction in the business at the moment and loads of people have very, very different 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?

16:46And we thought, okay, this is... HBO give us a lot of bandwidth to write contemporaneously about whatever we want. 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 It's the same with season four. We borrow from multiple different business stories that we find interesting and make it into some sort of zombie version of all those stories. I used to think that shows like yours were too negative about stuff. I just read Careless People, the insiders of Facebook, and I was like, these people are much worse than I ever imagined.

17:14There's a great alleged story about Cyril Sambo on the private jet while her minions are sort of working themselves to an early grave, and she's like, oh, I'm tired, I'm going for bed. who's coming to bed with me for a lie down and they're all like ah anyway um read that but um if anyone wants a nap after no um uh 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 sufficient evidence that there's loads of evidence if you want to look for it and i don't mean like i don't mean like oh these are just bad people and that are really different from us 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 and I would never say but I would think but I would never say it like and and that's quite exciting when you're a writer because you sort of allowed to go into those bits of yourself that's a real dick or a real bitch or something but you sort of define yourself against it and that's quite fun but honestly something we're 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.

18:26And 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. But also, if you just look at Elon Musk's childhood, if you just look at Donald Trump's childhood, you will understand that I don't mean this in a good way. I don't mean this and therefore they're fine. 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 tech often doesn't deal with because it's not necessarily very good at dealing with it.

19:08But I think we should be thinking about it. 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 how that other brain behaves or thinks is incredibly important. And sometimes, I say this as a writer, someone who grew up just entirely looking at screens and books, but 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.

19:43like 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. Parenting is hugely important which is why I record bedtime stories on my iPad. You record them yourself? AI is coming. Tell us about this how much accountability is there in your sense of because one I mean loses play Enron obviously you know one guy dies the other goes to jail of the top brass of Enron and I think Enron is a great story because there's accountability in not everyone sort of comes out brilliantly and but 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 I don't know do you feel like Eric or or some of the other figures.

20:45They do sort of pay for having to sort of play too. The consequences come in their personal life. Right. 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, ostensibly a huge success in his career, but he has lost his family. He is, you know... Spiritually dead. Spiritually dead. All the things that happen when you chase this. But I think that's kind of... I mean, it's a very trite way of putting it, but these characters, they're trying to fill a hole, and that hole is just being filled with money, but that hole is manifest in very different ways.

21:19And the show really is about the sort of people firstly that make that their North Star, but why are they doing it? So Eric, his background, Harper, her background. Harper, success at peer point in the financial world is an ocean between her and her background, her and her family, her and her parents. For some reason, we always end up writing about parentage, Always, yeah. It always comes back to parents. But yeah, I think it's, I don't know, the consequences usually come with a personal life and that's a really, yeah, very obvious thing to say but when you chase something like this and you chase it so aggressively as the characters in our show do then it's going to come with some personal consequences.

21:56When you talk about tangible consequences as well, we were so scared of, we were so scared when we first created the show of conceits and any kind of melodrama that we were always like, well, there can't be police in this, like, what are we doing here? No one can go to prison. That is very realistic. No, no, but you're talking about that real world stuff. Not to tease season four too much, but that stuff eventually is going to start catching up. When we sold the show to HBO, the reason it took so long to get on the air is because when our first pitch, they said, what's this thing about? We said, it's going to mirror the glacially slow atmosphere of the bank.

22:30Come back in three years. under Chatham House rules which I think has been possibly misunderstood by some people but under Chatham House is season four in New York? No we couldn't afford it Really? We had to roll that back with a single line of dialogue Great news We had to roll it back Lucy can I ask for the benefit of our audience are there any you've mentioned one red flag in terms of talking about things that just don't get it which I think is definitely something they say at Chelsea Football Club but are there any other red flags that our audience should look out for when they're um when they're investing or or working companies about something's going very wrong 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 um something that jeffrey skilling used to say a lot if he was ever challenged to enron was i am enron don't tell me what Enron is I am Enron 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 it's slightly messianic idea of like without me there would be nothing and I think sometimes that's something else to watch out for just not getting too grandiose and having a bit of humility without Tommy there no um quick final word do you have a favorite you have a soft spot for any succession character that you want to but you know anyone that you you wished it had all gone better for I like Carl because That's a random choice.

23:59Paul's the CFO, not in there. Yeah, because I like the actor a lot. Yeah, he's great. Comrade, any succession? It's a really boring answer. I like Tom. Tom. Yeah, great actor. He's excellent. And any industry character? I love Kit Carrington's character in the sense that I think it's a really great premise, that idea you were talking about of how far can you just get on presentation. 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 everyone's like that guy knows tech you know just because it was like he wasn't wearing a suit and it didn't make any sense you know and so it can go both ways thank you so much you've been brilliant thank you