Failed “Finance Bros” Find Success with HBO’s “Industry”

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1:43This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For my money, forgive the pun, one of the best things on television is a show about making money, making as much of it as possible. Industry on HBO is a financial drama centered on a group of junior employees at a fictional investment bank in London. Industry is currently finishing its fourth season, and the show was created by Mickey Down and Conrad Kay, two old Oxford friends, both of whom did stints in the financial world. In fact, they say if they'd been any good at finance, they probably wouldn't have created a TV show about it in the first place.

2:24Mickey Down and Conrad Keg, welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I have to say I'm a huge fan of this show. Conrad, tell me how this show came about. You both worked in finance. You knew each other from university.

2:39Konrad Kay:Yeah, I mean, we were spat out pretty unceremoniously by the financial industry. My boss, when he fired me, said I was the worst ever salesman that graced the doors of Morgan Stanley. What were you selling? US equities, but selling is a very strong version of what I was doing. I think you're supposed to make about 40 outgoing calls a day. I made about four a year. So the metrics didn't really stack up. So they picked me up on my collar and threw me out onto the street. I'm very happy bullshitting in all areas of my life, apart from the area where when I have to pick up the phone to a Dutch pension fund manager has looked at Apple stock for 20 years and I have to pretend to tell him something about the stock that he doesn't know.

3:15Konrad Kay:That was really tough for me, to be honest. Mickey, did you get into finance too for the obvious reason you wanted to make some money and please your parents? That's exactly right. Well, my mom thought that finance was too much of a spivy career. She's an architect, which I think blows my mind because she's one of those immigrant mothers who just says, if you're not a lawyer, basically you don't have a job. Doctor doesn't count? No, doctor. That was never going to happen for me, David. So it was lawyer or nothing. And I had no interest in being in finance at all when I got to Oxford. I really had no interest in anything other than just like partying and having a lot of fun.

3:48And it was around us that suddenly, you know, in the second year, everyone started getting these jobs or internships. I looked around and said, God, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? So I applied to all those jobs, didn't get any of them. Ended up working for the home office, the civil service. And then I went to work for Rothschild, which is a kind of, you know, old blue-blooded institution. I mean, I have like kind of quite fond memories of it because I liked the people I worked with, but the job itself was just not for me at all. I was like incredibly ill-suited to it. At that level, it's literally just staring in front of a computer screen and doing PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets.

4:22And literally, it's just an exercise in do you have the ability to stay up 100 hours a week. So from there, what's the origin story of industry? I'd sold this thing to NBCUniversal, which was a kind of comedy short about a young guy who didn't want to be a banker and wanted to be a DJ with some sort of autobiographical elements. But it felt, it really felt like a sort of hobbyist vocation. It didn't really feel like something that I could sell my parents on, quite frankly. But then when I made this thing and it was bought and I got an agent, suddenly it felt like a job. And I could then take that to Conrad and say, look, we should try and actually make a career out of this.

4:56So we started writing a script that we called Not an Exit, which is essentially, it was a kind of cathartic exercise. It was about two guys who were in banking who absolutely hated it. and it was a bag of ideas, was a mess. There was like 10 page scenes of characters called Mickey and Conrad. The whole first episode, it was a guy basically like working off a hangover, which was kind of what, I mean, the same DNA as industry. What seems to me key to the show is not just the milieu, that you've created these characters who are all so deeply, deeply damaged. Thank you. You're welcome. look you know you could say the same with dostoevsky so it's it's it's a high praise um that seems to me even harder the conception of the of the main characters well i think the thing that really unlocked the show for us and there was a bit of this in northern exit because it was you know it was that was a little bit more upstairs downstairs in terms of its lens because we were still dealing with people at the very top of the industry as well as the sort of mickey and Conrad's of the industry.

6:00But it was Jane Tranter who produces the show with us through her company Bad Wolf, who when she found out she had two bankers working with her on another project said, have you thought about writing this world? And we said, we had written it. It's this thing not an exit. And she read it. And then she said, you should really focus on the prism of people with the least amount of power. Because all the things you discuss, well, you know, Wall Street, Succession, all the literature in this world, it's all through the top down lens. It's all about people who have power rather than the people who are trying to accrue it and that kind of unlocked it for us and it also it allows the characters to be damaged to behave sort of like free of easy explanation and to like be sort of heinous because they are young and those behaviors are somewhat more excusable when you're young and that kind of opened up for us and also it like it was a dramatic challenge because it's quite difficult to make characters who have no power active which is the reason the show is sort of moved in the direction it has because it's just dramatically inert and it feels like you know it's actually quite hard to move story on when no one knows

7:01Konrad Kay:it has a you know an ability to do it everybody really loves especially in the first two seasons writing about the characters and pathologizing their behavior and saying they were all like kind of dead-eyed sociopaths and there was this quote that me and mickey kept thinking about when people put that exact thing to david milch when he was writing his shows for hbo and especially with deadwood and he said well what you was you see and categorize as pathology and pathologized behavior and sociopathic behavior. I'm saying it's people vibrating against the coercions of their present environment and their past.

7:30Let's be specific about that. You have a character named Harper, who in some sense couldn't be more marginalized in this world. She's a woman, she's black, she's American, so she's a real outsider, and she fakes her resume. This doesn't seem like necessarily a typical person in the finance world, at least as I know it from way outside. Why did you make her your main character? Well, I mean, we actually had a few different permutations of the main character, and we had, you know, all the characters that surround Harper are kind of analogs of people we know, they're people who went to university, they're people who went to school, they're people we worked with.

8:10But Harper felt like... Yeah, composites. But, like, firstly, we realized we were writing for an American audience, even though the show is sort of UK-based, so we wanted a kind of American lens into it. And then we thought, if we're doing a show about people with least amount of power trying to accrue it, let's just actually kind of figure out the person who has the least amount of power and is the most marginalized. And that's not necessarily to say that we're going to write her towards that and she's going to make excuses because she's marginalized, but we're going to create a character who would feel like the whole world's against her in this world.

8:42Konrad Kay:Me and Mickey were really interested. I mean, when I was at Morgan Stanley, the word that kept propping up in all the literature was this word meritocracy. and so the first season for us in terms of how we built the characters what was interesting to us it became a sort of dramatic social experiment of like nominally all of these characters are coming into the institution and the institution is telling them you are all equal and you're you're going to start on the same start position and then it's going to be a race to the finish line and some of you will get jobs and some of you won't but effectively it will be a level playing field which is like one of the great lies that any institution ever sells anybody because everybody, of course, in their interactions with their bosses, in the hierarchy they find themselves with, they hit their own glass ceilings, which are functions of where they come from.

9:23Konrad Kay:And honestly, in the first season, me and Mickey were just really interested in the idea of luck. I'm speaking with Conrad Kaye and Mickey Down, who created HBO's show Industry. More in a moment.

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11:39I want to play a clip from season three, and this is Harper arguing with the other really main character, Yasmin. Let's listen. You revel in my disgrace. You revel in other people's pain. It fucking nourishes you. Okay, Yas. I did everything in my power to try and stop Petra. I did. But this is the business. Sorry, the world is showing you what it is without any of the protections that you are so clearly used to.

12:14Konrad Kay:And I am genuinely sorry that you think I am so sick that I could somehow get off on your unhappiness now. So you don't? You didn't today? I needed my friend today. Harper, I needed my friend and you used me. Now, it's a great scene. And to some extent, it violates what they teach you in writing school, which is to always show, never tell. It's almost like an operatic scene where two people step to the front of the stage and they spell out in very distinct terms their anger with each other. Underneath it, maybe their love for each other, their resentments and who they are. And the show does that more than many other shows.

12:59The language of the show is front and center. That's the aspirational cruelty. That's the sort of thing that if you went away for five minutes and could write down your feelings that you might say to someone that you want to hurt, that's not something you'd probably say in the moment.

13:13Konrad Kay:We're also just writing towards our references as well. For us, the stuff we grew up loving and watching, the language and what was coming out of people's mouths could be as dramatic as what was actually happening in the scenes. I mean, you know, there's that great truism or like cliche even about like Sorkin and Fincher, like social network stuff where those scenes of two people talking can have as much drama as a car chase. And that's kind of industry's MO, like people talking is violence. Language is violence. Language is action. So, yeah. We had to do that as well because, you know, we had a lot of.

13:43We'd have a budget for car chases. Exactly. We ride a lot of dense two-handers. We have to make them feel like they're electric.

13:49Konrad Kay:And we're pretty bold and obvious about what we wear on our sleeves. I think you can really see a lot of these sort of disparate influences all over the show. And we like to leave the fingerprints on it. Like we draw from Mad Men, we draw from The Sopranos. A lot of the needle drops this season are direct lifts from Mad Men. We almost feel like those two shows are kind of in conversation with each other. Mad Men has always been influential to the show. But like Peep Show, Girls, obviously in the first season, we wanted to write a show about ambitious people who are really, you know, quite hard to like sometimes.

14:17I always say that my favorite genre is Michael Douglas. Michael Douglas. Michael Douglas with his ass out. And his hair up. His hair up with a suit and doing something shadily sexy. That's what I love. You guys don't seem averse to the rewards of capitalism, and yet you're making a show that in some ways, not to be over self-serious, but is a critique of capitalism to some extent. How do you circle that square? It's interesting. It's a kind of critique of unchecked capitalism. It's a critique of the dark heart of capitalism. I don't think capitalism by its very nature is a bad thing. But I think, honestly, when you write a show about finance, in the same way you write a show or a film about war, you have to kind of make the thing feel kind of seductive in the first act.

15:03And that's always kind of what we've done. I mean, you see any single piece of literature or art about finance, and the first act is always, look how great this is. And the third act is always like, look how bad this is. And that's, you know, sometimes people just ignore the second and third acts. And that's why you have a lot of finance meme bros loving American Psycho and Wall Street and not really seeing the cost of that kind of living. Look, we left the university. There's only one real reason you go into finance at the age of 21. And in an interview, you would tart it up and you would say, I want to see my deals on the front page of the Financial Times and I really care about macroeconomics, all that stuff.

15:42The real reason you go into finance is because you want to make way more money than your peers when you're 21. one you want to go to a job that gives you a prestigious uh sounding title and that's kind of what we were like before we could formulate our own identities we allowed the institution to make them for us and that's you know i look back on that person i kind of cringe because i was just such a sort of weird and it's kind of juvenile approach to identity and life and money and and my job but i still have some of that in me i still feel like i want to make money i still feel like I want to be successful.

16:13I do have this sort of attitude, which is like, I'm never contentious in my career. The reason our show feels like it's constantly, you know, changing and vibrating with electricity is because me and Conrad are, in terms of our careers. And, you know, we want to be successful. We were finance bros in the first instance. Partnerships are not easy to sustain, no matter what they are. Marriages, creative partnerships. What are your ambitions going forward after this, either together or separately? Oh, I want to work with Conrad forever. I mean, it's very difficult to find someone you want to, you don't want to tear apart having spent every day with them.

16:52I mean, obviously there are moments, there are very few moments of tension between us. What's the biggest fight you've ever had? No, I think maybe when we were writing season one and I went to a stag do and came back really hungover and didn't want to work. Yeah, that's what we had.

17:07Konrad Kay:We had a proper set too that time. We didn't enjoy fighting so much that we never did it again. Yeah, it was horrible. There was no green light then. So actually, I think it was a frustration that we were in development hell. I don't know. It works for us. We feel, honestly, we have amazing collaborators. We love working with the people we work with. But there's a moment that at the end of the long day when you've been shooting, you get in the car, there's me and Conrad. We live together as well during the shoot, which is crazy. That's crazy. You live together? We live together. We live together during the shoot.

17:34When we're in production, I spend more time with Conrad than I spend with my wife and my children. And it's just like, it's very difficult or hard or rare, I think, to like have a partnership with someone that you can stand to that level.

17:46Konrad Kay:But David, it's a commitment. I mean, you said marriage. It's like it is a marriage and like anything in life that's worth doing and is good is a commitment. I think we know, look, we've been best friends. It predates our work relationship. I think if you're thrust together and the work relationship is the basis, then the idea of a kind of creative divorce is more easy to see. But we're enmeshing each other's lives. We love each other. It's a very fraternal relationship. It's not to say it's always perfect. I mean, I'm a very complicated person. He's a very complicated person. But it's kind of like understanding each other's weaknesses, strengths, pushing each other to be the best version of ourselves, giving each other space within the relationship to flourish.

18:23I have to say, by way of thanks, this is, in such a grim world that we're living in lately, this is the most uplifting relationship I've encountered in quite a while. Thank God. Okay, Mickey Down, thanks so much. Thank you so much, David. Thanks for having us, David. It's an honor.

18:41Industry is on HBO Max, finishing its fourth season. You can find our TV critic Ingo Kang's review of the show at newyorker.com. And, of course, you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well. newyorker.com. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer.

19:23With guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barge, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett. And we had assistance this week from Richie O'Too in London. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.

19:46Do you know about these stories? In 1933, Huey Long invented a holiday to prevent a bank from collapsing. In 1960, years before he was assassinated, someone tried to kill JFK with a car bomb. And in 2014, remember this, there was a whole news cycle about President Obama's tan suit. On the podcast This Day in Esoteric Political History, we talk about the forgotten stories that may teach us a lot about the very strange moment we're living in right now. Check it out, This Day in Esoteric Political History from Radiotopia.