- Risk-taking is out of control. People lose everything and they're like, whatever- - YOLO. - I'll make it back. Yeah, I'll make it back tomorrow. If you were trading for Morgan Stanley and you're down 5%, that's a terrible year. - Hello, and welcome to WSJ's Take On The Week. I'm Miriam Gottfried. And joining me today is my colleague Alex Saeedy. He is a banking reporter, and he has the distinct honor of sitting right next to me in the newsroom. Welcome, Alex. - Hello, Miriam. - So welcome to the show. We have bank earning season coming up. These days, things are going really well for banks. They are making a lot of money and every time there's a major global event, it seems like they're finding new ways to profit off of it and be right in the mix. We also have talk of deregulation of banks. So you could say that banks are quietly booming right now. And on that topic, we have a really exciting conversation today, and we're in a larger space to host that conversation because joining us are two people who have worked inside banks who are now translating that experience for a TV audience. Today we have Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, the co-creators of HBO's hit financial drama, 'Industry'. 'Industry' focuses on the lives of 20-somethings working in banking and finance. The show's fourth season premiers Sunday, January 11th. And everyone, especially my husband, is really excited about it. Welcome, Mickey and Konrad. - Thanks, guys. Good to be here. - Thanks having us. - Welcome. - So you both worked in banking, as I said. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience and why you thought it would make for a good TV show? - Me and Konrad, we met at university, we met at Oxford, where there was a kind of, I had absolutely no intention of going into finance when I went to university. But there's a sort of culture there, especially at that time, 2008 actually, just post-2008, where there was a kind of still a drive to get, I suppose, smart young graduates into the financial services industry. And there was a kind of, you know, they would come and they'd court you and they'd take you for dinner and eventually you find yourself working at one of these places. And I was very ill-suited to it, I'll just let Konrad speak to his own experience, but I found it very, you know, I found it difficult, I was, you know, I'm not a mathematician, but I did find it sort of a fascinating place. And I worked a 200, 300-year-old institution surrounded by people who had the kind of like, a lot of people who had their sort of like class entrenched in them. And it was a really Type A personality world. And it was, you know, I worked in investment banking so it was a much more sort of slightly more cerebral, slower pace than Konrad who worked on a trading floor at Morgan Stanley. But I just felt like there's fascinating people. They're all incredibly motivated, and motivated kind of by the same thing, which is sort of avarice, money, success, ambition. And that just makes for a really good drama. And then the reason, you know, our way into the show was, obviously you've seen that world portrayed on TV and in literature and film before, but our route into it was from the bottom up, which is the people with the least amount of power trying to accrue power, which is kind of what opened the show up for us. - Mickey said I worked on a trading floor, so he did IBD, I worked in European equities for a year at Morgan Stanley then I sold American equities. I was just very, very, I mean like historically bad at the job. Like when I was made redundant, my boss who was an Italian salesman, he was like, I really like hanging out with you, you're the worst salesman I've ever worked with. - Like what was it like? - Just like the total inability to, there's a bit in Season Two of 'Industry' where Robert has this kind of phobia of picking up the phone. I had exactly the same thing where I was really, I just had a kind of stage fright. I didn't like the feeling of picking up a phone to talk to an expert about something which I knew nothing about. It kind of pinched my stomach in a really weird way. I just couldn't do it. - We've never worked on a trading floor, but we cover finance day in, day out. We know how boring it can be at times, but also how electric and dramatic it can also be. And I think you guys have done a great job capturing that, certainly in the early seasons on the bank floor. And I do wanna ask, Season Four is coming out. We are spending less time at Pierpoint in this season than in past ones, and we're actually looking at a lot more of the entities that are disrupting banks these days. There are fintechs, there are crypto firms, you have short sellers, you have the media involved. I guess, I'd like to understand a little bit more why you chose to focus on this part of the financial universe in this season as opposed to the core ground of banks where 'Industry' has taken place for so many seasons so far. - Well, I mean there's a couple of things. There's practical reasons, there's sort of creative reasons. There's firstly, obviously we were writing from experience, the first season was this slice of life show. It was really about, it was kind of a YA show about young people entering a workplace, and that workplace just happened to be something that me and Konrad had done. But it was kind of universal, it was, this is what it's like for a young ambitious person to leave university and go and work somewhere which is very cutthroat and energetic and frenetic. And that was the energy of Season One. But because the characters had very little power, that's inherently quite anti-dramatic because they can't actually drive story. So by the time they got to Season Two, we expanded it to the point where like they were actually able to like drive story, drive decisions, and Harper, for instance, her relationship with Jesse Bloom actually opened up her character for us. 'Cause we were like, this is the person that when she actually has a goal, she's the sort of the person that has her foot on the accelerator in order to achieve that goal. And that's sort of what the character became. And then as the seasons continued, Season Three, there was a shift to Yasmin and it reflected a sort of a quite different take on what it's like to work at Pierpoint from the perspective of someone that isn't like Harper, someone that's a little bit more like a deer in the headlights. There was more soapy elements in Season Three. And it's always been a reflection of what me and Konrad are interested in and wanna write about. And in Season Three it was ESG and inclusion- - Right, right, right. - And we thought that was a kind of like- - And bank failures, - And bank failures, and- - Very of the moment. - It was. - Yeah. - And the practical reason is we never know whether we're gonna come back for a season. So we just blew the whole precinct up into the end of Season Three and we destroyed Pierpoint. So when we came back to Season Four, we were like, what does it look like if we have a completely different institution that we're looking at? And it just felt quite right given what's happening in fintech and tech in general to sort of be in the nascent stages of a bank. - This is a thrilling season, without giving too much away. There's a lot of drama. And I would say a big theme is fraud, right? And last year was a huge year for fraud. I think a lot of people didn't see it coming, but through the unexpected collapses of First Brands, Tricolor, the subprime auto lender, Jamie Dimon very cryptically warned there are cockroaches lingering in the financial system. And I'm curious, what do you guys think about fraud given that you've worked in finance? - A big theme of the season was storytelling, and the link between kind of identity entrepreneurship. One of our writers had this really good line of basically like, if you are a criminal and you get away with it, you're an entrepreneur. - Right. - So there's a sort of fake it till you make it energy which the show has had the whole time. And look, I'm not saying that like, it's not as reductive as saying that all entrepreneurs are criminals or vice versa. But there's a kind of gossamer-thin line between- - For sure. - And like the Elizabeth Holmes thing is a really good example- - Right. - We talked about in terms of like, I'm sure there's a way she rationalizes the failure of the company or its success, the idea of like she just wasn't given enough runway 'cause eventually it would've become successful. - Right, right. - And I think, again, not to get into spoiler territory, but one of the characters definitely believes that if we can reach terminal velocity, it doesn't really matter what we did in the past 'cause we're gonna be a success in the present. - Right. - I think that's why it's interesting to focus on tech as well. 'Cause it's a conflation of business and cult of personality, which I just found really interesting. And that is kind of at the core of what a fraudster is or a conman is. It's someone that just can tell a really compelling story. - We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll have more about the next season of 'Industry' with Mickey down and Konrad Kay. - All right, so coincidentally, the biggest banks in the country are reporting their earnings. We have JPMorgan on Tuesday followed by Goldman Sachs and Citi. One of their biggest and best performing businesses right now are what we call their Wall street arms. That includes trading and investment banking where both of you guys have a pedigree in. And it's something that people want to understand. Well, that's half the reason you created the show, right? There's a kind of an innate curiosity about how this kind of opaque and powerful industry works. And I wanted to ask you guys, I mean, maybe we can start with your background in sales and trading, what makes a really effective salesman in the highest echelons of Wall Street? And beyond that personal level, what, in your opinion, builds a great sales and trading franchise and differentiates them from one another? - You're asking the wrong thing. Couldn't have two worse people. - Yeah, exactly. I think if we knew that, we wouldn't be sat here. - Should we ask you what builds an unsuccessful sales and trading- - The inability to pick up the phone. - I mean, look, I actually know some quite successful sales guys still and I think they would say, 'cause I've actually spoken about this, just personability really, genuinely. One of my good friends is a sales trader at BarCap and he's very good at his job. But he's really, it's just like, he effectively always explains it to me, it's about trust, right? So like in your stomach, you know, you're doing a big equity block. You immediately know without even thinking about it who that guy's gonna be because you've spent so much time face to face with them or because you've taken them out on enough dinners to know enough about their wife or their kid or, and it sounds really basic but it's a human, it's a person-to-person business. - Yeah. - And so like he says that basically all of his best clients, best trades just come from having really intimate personal relationships with people. - Right. - Which I can never foster 'cause I'm a very antisocial person. - It's television. But it's interesting, right? And such a quantitative industry, right? About dollars and cents, it's actually like humanity. I quite like in the new season, short selling is like a really big new alternative pathway that some of your characters are going down. What do you find interesting about short sellers and what was it about them that you wanted to showcase in the season? 'Cause I agree, they're a fascinating group of people. We have a colleague who's writing a book about Hindenburg- - Yeah. - Yeah. - Right now, so- - It was actually very useful for us 'cause it gives you the, you'll see when you watch the season that a lot of those investigative, again, not to go into spoiler territory, but a lot of the investigative strands starts to feel a little bit like a procedure or like a- - For sure, for sure. - Or like a police show really. And that idea of investigation and the idea of like a clear, to be reductive, villain in the show. When we thought about the short selling community and what they were trying to do, what they were trying to expose, it's incredibly televisual and dramatic. - Absolutely. - It's how can we, we're gonna stake something, it's gonna be us against the world, it's gonna be the thing that Mickey said, there's a wall of people saying one thing because they're incentivized to via capital. We are gonna be a lone voice that's gonna say the exact opposite thing, we're gonna stake our reputation on it, we're gonna stake money on it, and there's gonna be a ticking clock because literally when we put the trade on, the timing is everything. - Right. - So like there's so much, from a dramatic point of view, you've got the investigative strand and you've got the ticking clock. So it was kind of like catnip. - And people have often said it's very difficult to root for the characters in the show, but this narrative construction has actually allowed you to root for someone for the first time. - Definitely. - There is a scrappy underdog story at the center of this, which just hasn't been the case before. - But I think their moral ambiguity is like what makes the characters so interesting. - Definitely. - They're neither good nor bad, they're just trying to succeed in this world. - There's a character, I mean I won't, again, go into spoiler territory, but like later on in the season, a character gives a speech to that effect, saying, you know, my motivation and principle is the profit motive. I mean, I'm not here to basically be didactic about the sort of morality of the thing I'm looking at, I'm here to make money. - Right. - And I think that's quite interesting as well because in the same way that we, when we explored ESG in Season Three, there was a question of like, do people, are they sincere when they're pursuing these sort of directives, or is it just another way of making money in 2022 or whatever it was? I think that's the same thing here. It's like, do I care about the fact that this thing is societal bad or do I just wanna make money out of it? - I cover private equity. You see a lot of people leaving the banks to work in private equity to make more money. Maybe they're going to hedge funds, maybe they're going elsewhere starting their own firms. Do you think banking has lost its appeal to some degree for young people, or it's like less cool as a place to work? - It's funny because I said before that the people I know that are still in it are these relationship people. But when I actually like knuckle down in it, I know very, very few people in banking now. Everyone that I started with has pretty much gone to private equity, hedge funds. And I think it was always that kind of like lily pad stepping stone towards that world. But I think even more so now, no one wants to be involved in, people want to feel like they're entrepreneurs in this industry, they wanna feel like they're working for- - Yeah, I mean the biggest banks are huge behemoths now, so you're like a cog in the machine, and I think the show really reflects that. - I think as you get older, people really don't like to have that feeling of being part of a wider superstructure. They feel like they wanna be self-starters, or even if they're working brutal hours, they wanna feel like they're doing it on their own terms, you know? - Yeah, I just wonder like, does this talent drain, what does this mean for banks? I mean, I'd be interested in your thoughts on it too, Alex. - Yeah, I mean, you guys highlight the culture problems at some large investment banks, right? It's not a place that often empowers you, especially in the earlier years. And we've seen like private equity firms more aggressive in their recruiting tactics, and now they're more alternatives. But it seems like, nevertheless, the promise of riches, right? And to take someone who maybe came from a very modest background and catapult you towards the higher echelons still draws people, I think. - It's still a great starting salary. - Right. - Yeah. - It's still- - It's a stepping stone. - Leagues above what you're gonna earn at a startup or a junior at a law firm or a journalist or whatever. - For sure. - Definitely. - There is a level of, even though you talked about the cool factor or like it's not like the 80s. Like my dad worked for Salomon Brothers in the 80s. And that was, you know- - Interesting. - And Michael Lewis. - Yeah. - That kind of time. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - That was a sexy job. And that was like, and you know, the stories of the trading floors, the pictures on the trading floors, the cigarette smoke, there was an allure to it. And I guess the sheen really came off that after 2008- - After 2008, yeah. - Yeah. - To some extent. And by the time me and Mickey was sat in those banks, I think the luster was definitely kind of off it. But equally like it appeals to a certain type of person to work for a blue blooded institution like Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, the names, for better or worse, carry a weight to them. I've said this to Mickey a million times and I've said it in multiple interviews but like as a 21-year-old carrying around a Morgan Stanley gym bag felt a bit like driving a Lamborghini. - Yeah. - Yeah. - 'Cause it was like a- - Oh, God. - No, no, no- - I know, you were flashing a status symbol. - I'm saying, "God," because I totally believe it and I felt exactly the same. - But it was a way of conferring status to people when you yourself had no idea who you were. So it was insanely seductive. - It was identity. I could walk into the pub with my nice suit and tie and say I work for Rothschild. - Exactly. - And they'd take me seriously for the first time in my life. - Do you think the show has made people more or less interested in a career in finance? Because it shows such like, I mean some of the scenes are just so painful to watch in a way, but like I heard that Oliver Stone's 'Wall Street' actually made people more interested in Wall Street even though the characters were seen as being despicable. - Absolutely. - Well, absolutely. Because I mean, anything in this ilk, anything said in this world has to feel very seductive in it's first act 'cause you have to basically convince the audience to think that these people are having a great time and you have to lean in. And then the third act is usually when it all goes to hell and you reveal the person's pursuit of this thing is actually not gonna be edifying, it's actually gonna be, you know, it's gonna destroy them. And a lot of finance bros just watch the first act and just think, okay, that looks fun. - That looks great. - I can take drugs and have loads of sex and that looks like rock and roll. And they don't really watch the third act where it feels like it all implodes. And I think like it's weird because I still get LinkedIn messages, I check LinkedIn probably once every six months to see what's going on down there. And there's usually a slew of messages from people being like, bro, love your show, got me into finance. Like some guy told me- - No way. - I'm doing an NBA because of the show. - Wow. - Which is fun, I mean like, you do you. - There's a level of dishonesty as well with the way people engage with this thing, I think, where they're like, they watch 'Wall Street' or they watch 'Industry' and they say these people are sociopathic, they're dead-eyed. When in fact what they're really saying is like, I recognize parts in myself I haven't necessarily nurtured or I'm too scared to think about. But like those traits, you know, avarice, blind ambition, they exist in everybody. - Yeah. - So it's like they're part of the human experience, the spectrum of experience. - No, totally. I mean, I was thinking like the characters are borderline sociopathic in some scenes, for sure. And a lot of my experience watching this show is like my husband watching it and me watching over his shoulder and then having to like literally walk away because it's like too painful to watch sometimes. I'm like, oh, my God, I can't believe they're doing this. But like your characters really seem to thrive on this risk-taking even though it often leads to their own undoing. - Right. - It made me think about like the risk-taking that's become like so common in like the culture of young people today. Like with people getting so into the meme stock craze and like crypto and polymarket and betting. Do you think all those things sort of like feed the interest in the show? - Yeah, I 100% agree. I think, I mean, it's like kinda this thing, it's like this meme stocks and like polymarket, that feels like it sort of democratized finance for a lot of people. But what I've seen is that, as you said, like risk-taking is out control. People lose everything and they're like, whatever- - YOLO. - I'll make it back. Yeah, I'll make it back tomorrow. If you were trading for Morgan Stanley and you're down 5%, that's terrible. - You're like on your way out. - People are down like 200%. - Right. - Young people as well have this real, I'm talking about the generation behind us and the one behind that is the idea of like clout-chasing, right? So it's like you need to be rich as quickly as possible. There's no like- - They're impatient for the riches, yeah. - They're like impatient for like riches beyond because they're comparing themselves to these YouTubers who are like crashing Lamborghinis for likes and stuff. It's like that kind of relationship to money. They're like, they got that in a week, why can't I get that in a week? - Our generation made loads of excuses for wanting to be rich as well, I think, the Millennial generation as well. It wasn't very cool. - Right, you had to have a social purpose behind it, right? - You had to have a social purpose behind it. Exactly, exactly. You couldn't just say I wanna make money- - For money's sake. - Right. - Salomon Brothers 80s version. - And that has really roared back- - Yeah, it's come back. - In the last 10 years. It's kind of worse. - We had dinner with a quite famous hedge fund manager a few years ago and he said like he would never recruit Millennials because they had this weird relationship with money and he would only recruit Gen Z people. But he said half of Gen Z doesn't give a damn about making money but doesn't make excuses for that, and half of them are just what Konrad said, this sort of secure the bag mentality. - Purely profit motivated, yeah. - Yeah, everything's profit motivated - I think everything is for clout. Everything is how quickly you can put it online and get laid or whatever. I'm being serious. - No, yeah. - It's a pretty simple system these people follow. - That's definitely reflected in the characters in 'Industry'. - I would agree. Yeah. - So Alex, you've written a lot about the lives of junior bankers in a series of articles that kicked off in 2024. And one of them followed the death of a B of A junior banker and it showed that some junior bankers are working 100 hours a week or more on a regular basis. And I couldn't help thinking about 'Industry' when I was reading your articles. How closely do you think the show matches your reporting? - I mean, I would certainly say some of the experiences in Season One had some eerie similarities, both in the experience of these really hardworking youngsters. It's often the ones who are from the less privileged backgrounds who are doing double time to prove they belong. It was very eerie in some ways how similar the story you guys told was to the reality of a situation that happened in New York in 2024. And I guess, you know, just briefly, I mean there was a death of a banker in London in 2013, I think it was an intern. Did that inform some of your storytelling? - It happened a few times as well even while we were there. - Yeah, it's happened several times. - And it feels like, I think that's one of the things that people were most shocked by. I mean, obviously we were depicting this world where everyone is incredibly ambitious and they're working very long hours and that was kind of alien to a lot of people. But the idea that actually you're gonna lose your life because of this ambition, I think was just really quite shocking. And I think that kind of was a routine because you can say what you want about the characters, they're sociopaths or whatever, but like we wanted to show there are stakes to that kind of ambition. - Totally. - And we didn't wanna be didactic, we didn't wanna say like, do not go into it, it's not a PSA. - Right. - Don't go into banking because this is what's gonna happen to you. But it was good to show actually like there is a version of this- - This can happen. - Which can happen, yeah. And there's a version of this which is gonna hollow you out. - Right. - In your reporting, have you found that there's been any kind of evolution in work-life balance? - Yeah, it's interesting. I would say that there are some institutions that have proactively tried to put in place formal guardrails that will ensure, okay, like you need to like make sure you're only logging these many hours. If by Thursday you're already above a certain like threshold, we're gonna try to pull you off of more work. And I know people at institutions where that has actually helped them. I know another bank where they actually put in place new rules after our reporting about how the old rules weren't working. Where now there's actually a formal complaint mechanism that juniors can activate when they feel like their superiors are overburdening them with work. And I've been told this is actually helping people feel like they have a lifeboat when that wasn't there previously. At the same time, these are formal systems we're talking about. And banking and many industries, it is a culture, and it is mostly created by people who've been there for a really long time and who feel this sort of need to have people progress through their careers as they themselves did. - We're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we'll have one final question for Mickey Down and Konrad Kay of 'Industry'. - So we've talked a lot about the pathology of your characters and I wanna put like a hypothetical to you guys. How do you think two of the more cutthroat characters in the show, Harper and Eric, how do you think they would play the Venezuela reopening trade? Do you think, would they be willing to maybe look past a few sanctions, try to talk to some people close to the government? Like how do you think they would approach a Trump trade in our day and age? - I think there's an evolution in attitude towards what the characters are doing throughout the season, which is really interesting. You'd have to ask me, is the Harper and Eric at the end of Season Four the same as the one at the start of Season Four, and would their reaction to that trade be the same? I'd say from where we leave them off in Season Three, Harper would absolutely do that trade. And she would've absolutely no moral compunction at all about that trade. - I was in the gym, I was texting Mickey about this when he was traveling. I was saying there's this really old guy, I have no idea who he was, he's on Bloomberg TV and he's talking about investment opportunities in Venezuela. And I was like, this is, something in the pit of my stomach was just so reviled by the whole thing. I found it so, I found it actually, and I very rarely get a reaction like this, I just found it so disgusting. The idea of it I think is kind of abhorrent. - But it is the trade everyone's trying to get in on right now. - Sure, and it's the nature of the world, but if you don't take stock of this stuff and pause sometimes, what's going on? - Absolutely, absolutely. Right, no, in the ceaseless chase after money, you kind of forget that- - It's unbelievable. Just the monetization of the event is crazy. - Yeah. - It's just amazing. - The financialization of everything over the last 20 years is crazy. Like if you can't see the negative side of it, then I can't help you. - That is the operating system that we explore in this show as well. Like people who have behaved like that and are always constantly chasing money. So I think without that, it wouldn't really be a show so- - Right, it's a 21st century nihilism, and you guys do a great job at depicting it. - And with that, we're gonna have to wrap it up. - All right, thanks guys. - Thanks you much for joining us- - Thank you so much. - Mickey down and Konrad Kay. - Thank you. - I don't wanna spoil anything, right? But I thought this sort of like younger enterprising person, I saw a little bit of myself in, in a way. - Oh, it sounds a lot like you, Alex. - That's good.