HBO’s ‘Industry’, and Esther Perel

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘HBO’s ‘Industry’, and Esther Perel’

Lilah Raptopoulos
If you’ve been watching the HBO show Industry, you’ve probably asked yourself how these characters could possibly love the world of banking.

[CLIP FROM ‘INDUSTRY’]
Come on, this is critical business.

[CLIP FROM ‘INDUSTRY’]
Is there a patient I’m going to table somewhere?

[CLIP FROM ‘INDUSTRY’]
Hey, what the fuck are you doing?

Lilah Raptopoulos
There’s a lot of yelling. People get coerced into doing unknowable doses of drugs to impress their clients.

[CLIP FROM ‘INDUSTRY’]
You know how strong these are?

[CLIP FROM ‘INDUSTRY’]
Yes, he says, lying confidently.

[CLIP FROM ‘INDUSTRY’]
Craig, Craig, no, no, please just don’t take two. Just take half and see.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Co-workers threatened to kill each other. Everyone is doing whatever is necessary to get ahead.

Speaker 6
 . . . Worried about? People are just knots of fear. OK? We loosen them. We win. This isn’t utopia. This is par.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And there is zero sympathy if you fall behind. The show can be extremely unpleasant. But two seasons in, I love it. I feel sympathy for these people, even though their lives seem horrible, and they can easily just opt out. And I’m not quite sure why I care so much about them. My colleague Henry Mance, the FTC’s chief features writer, has a theory.

Henry Mance
The characters in Industry, you know, they love money. They love the idea of success. Some of them come from wealthy backgrounds. Some of them come from, from poorer backgrounds. But for them, the city is, as one of them puts it, the ultimate meritocracy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah

They’re here because [sic] the place you go and test yourself. And they’re really ready for that. And a lot of people watching the show will be slightly repulsed by banking, but they’ll also be kind of sucked in by this idea that it is really a gladiatorial environment. It is a place where people go to slug it out with all their talents and, and all their energies.

Lilah Raptopoulos
After Season 1 Henry wrote a piece about Industry, and then a totally unexpected thing happened. The show’s creators DM’d him on Twitter and invited him to be a character on the show.

Henry Mance
I kind of have often thought that journalism could be more authentically played on screen, and then like, yeah, obviously someone comes into like Twitter DM’s and says, Go on then. And so I was like, Yeah, yeah, I want to do this.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Today I talk with Henry about Industry and his experience being on it. The show is part of a trend. Like Succession and Euphoria, it depicts a pretty harsh version of the world we live in. So why do we love it? Why do we keep getting sucked in?

Then I hand the mic to Lucy Kellaway, who is a very popular columnist for many years at the Financial Times. She interviewed star psychologist Esther Perel at the FT Weekend Festival. And we’re bringing that conversation to you. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

[MUSIC FADES]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Before Henry became the FT’s chief features writer, he was a political correspondent, a media correspondent. And, yes, he also reported on finance. He started at the FT as an emerging markets reporter. So when we invited him on to talk about Industry, we knew we could trust his assessment of how true to life the show is. And we also knew he’s an excellent critic.

Henry, hi! Welcome to the show!

Henry Mance
Hi Lilah!

Lilah Raptopoulos
So we are here to talk about Industry Season 2, which aired in the US earlier this summer. It just aired in the UK. First, can you tell us a little bit about what the show is about?

Henry Mance
Yeah. It came out a couple of years ago, the first season, and it’s about a group of young graduates going in to be trainees at an investment bank, and they’re living this fast, wild life of investment banking. But it’s also about being young and about possibility and about trying to find your way in the workplace, which I think is something that will resonate to people who, you know, whatever career they’ve gone into, it’s that moment when you’re like, “Hold on. Am I an adult? Are these people the adults? Am I meant to be doing what they’re doing?” And it does that really well. And the two writers were themselves briefly City workers. And so they sort of brought in all their experience and also, I think all their resentments of the City and sort of pulled it into this HBO show.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, you get a sense of why it’s popular with like anyone who’s had a corporate job. I’m curious why you think it’s popular now, specifically now?

Henry Mance
I think the sort of fascination with money and, you know, powerful companies and the very driven individuals within those companies, I think that’s kind of timeless. I mean, you can take it back to Wall Street or other sort of depictions on screen. I think what’s, what may have changed and what may be really interesting is the generational divide at the moment. So I think people find young people in the workplace kind of, like a very foreign species. I’m no longer that young, and I’m sort of slightly perplexed around some of the conversations that I had, you know, some of the language that’s used. Do these people want to work like the lost generation? Do they want to make that trade-off of personal life or professional success? And so I think anything that youth-focused has a real appeal.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I hadn’t thought about it this way until my conversation with Henry. But Industry is a little like a corporate version of Euphoria, the HBO show that dramatises a group of American teenagers through high school. It’s also a lot like Succession, the show based on Rupert Murdoch’s family and its Machiavellian quest for money and power. All three of them offer quite a bleak perspective on people’s ability to maintain their integrity. Henry, we had you on some months ago now to talk about Succession and, watching the show, you can like kind of feel the similarities, but it also feels kind of different from Succession because it feels less like you’re looking at people and thinking like, where is the humanity in this person? Oh, here it is in Episode 4, Episode 8, and more like you’re watching people’s humanity get tested and get sort of stripped away.

Henry Mance
Yeah . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. What do you think?

Henry Mance
I think the, the comparison is hard to avoid, partly because the dialogue in both of them is so sharp. I mean, I think there are real differences. Industry has loads of sex. Succession has, has no sex. And it’s quite, it’s, it’s sort of quite striking.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, you’re right.

Henry Mance
But here it’s really young people, and we’re sort of shown that full excess is, and to a point that some viewers find unrealistic, but the writers insist this is what their experience of the City was like. I mean, they’re both shows that find real comedy in these stressful battles for power and influence, and there’s this kind of jostling between big egos. I would say that, yeah, the irredeemable nature of the characters is a common thread. You think you found someone in Industry who you really like, and then they, they’ll be distorted by the banking world. And yet, what keeps you going is, is the sort of the pace of the narrative and the quality of the script, I think.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. You know, one other thing that I like about the show, Henry, is we’ve reported a lot in the FT and a lot of, a lot of publications have reported on how bad of a workplace environment the banking world is. But if you’re not in it, it’s kind of hard to visualise how all that stuff plays out like. Why people are doing 14-hour workdays and what inappropriate client meetings really look like, and the drugs and the bullying. And when it’s on screen, usually it’s kind of glorified like Gordon Gekko and Wolf of Wall Street and that sort of thing. But I feel like this is a real exercise in show-don’t-tell, in a way that I haven’t really seen in a show about the banking world before. Like, it feels kind of true. You can get a sense of how you can get stuck in that world and the rush of it and the complicated dynamics and how boundaries get crossed and that sort of thing. Did you feel that way?

Henry Mance
Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think it’s also, it’s picking on the City a time of transition. So because it’s after the financial crisis, because there’s more regulatory scrutiny, because banks are under pressure to sort of clean up their act, both in terms of their balance sheets and, and also their sort of working practices, you know, there’s this transition. So there are, there’s mental health support. There are rules around bullying. The question is, to what extent can these characters — who desperately want money, who desperately want success — to what extent can they abide by these rules? Because ultimately, for some of them, it’s a break on their ability to make money. And so, you know, if it takes being inappropriate to win a client or, you know, to make more money for the bank and for yourself and therefore to get a permanent job or to get a promotion, well, you know, why not do it?

Lilah Raptopoulos
The arc of Season 2 revolves around a venture capitalist named Jesse Bloom, played by Jay Duplass. The character has been compared to Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and billionaire investor Bill Ackman. Bloom pits the workers at the bank against each other. The central character there is a young woman named Harper. She’s brought Bloom in, and now she finds herself kind of torn between this big fish she’s caught as a client and the commands she’s getting from her bosses. The tension comes to a head when Harper unwittingly helps Jesse Bloom short some stocks. Here’s how the scene plays out.

(Excerpt from Industry)

Harper Stern
 . . . Joined by CEO, founder and chief PM of Crotona Park Capital Jesse Bloom. Thanks for joining us, Jesse.

Jesse Bloom
Thanks for having me.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So Bloom, the venture capitalist, goes on a CNN roundtable to answer questions about this incredible amount of money that he made off of the pandemic.

CNN Anchor
You were early on the right side of the trade after your comments incriminating . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
And the journalists are suspicious.

Henry Mance
Your CNBC appearance at the start of the pandemic is now historic. It was quite the performance, the voice catching, the fear. You deserve a Tony.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Meanwhile, as he’s on TV, Bloom is texting Harper to buy certain stocks. And as Harper instructs her colleagues to go ahead and make the purchase, Bloom uses his TV appearance to influence the market.

Henry Mance
You were speaking earlier about the proliferation of big tech and its over-reach into every corner of our lives. Anywhere else in this world, Amazon’s purchase of Fast Day would be waived through.

Jesse Bloom
Has an anti-competition inquiry . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
You probably recognise the voice of one of those journalists grilling Bloom on CNN. It’s Henry. I wanted to know why he agreed to be on the show. So as proof that authenticity matter to them. After you interviewed the writers for Season 1, they slid into your DMs with an ask (chuckles). Can you tell me what happened?

Henry Mance
Yeah, I was coming back from like a book festival where I’d given a talk to a, you know, a depressingly small number of people. And so I was kind of not feeling world-famous at this point, but here was an offer. And they said, look, it’s a bit of a strange one, one of the writers said. But, you know, would you be at all open to taking a part in Season 2, essentially playing yourself? For me, it was like absolutely, definitely out for this would be because . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. What made you want to do it?

Henry Mance
Well, like, obviously, you know, everyone knows the reach of TV. Everyone knows the glamour of this kind of golden age of TV where you just see such beautiful dialogue and, you know, great, like mesmerising performances. But I think also for me, like, I have watched journalists being portrayed on screen and generally wanted to throw something at the screen. I mean, it’s sometimes it’s so unrealistic. I think my particular example of this would be, you have a journalist who’s chasing down some corrupt politician, and they’ll have gathered some evidence and they stand up at a press conference and they say, you, sir, are corrupt and bringing down this country. And the whole thing kind of descends into uproar and the politician looks shocked and doesn’t know how to act.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Henry Mance
I’m like, that’s just not how it happens. If you ask that at a press conference, everyone would just yawn because it’s like the easiest question to say, No, I’m not corrupt.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. It’s interesting because, in some ways, I don’t know, at least I find that in journalism, partially because of Hollywood’s depictions of journalism, it makes for a lot of conspiracy theories, like people think that there are things happening behind the scenes that really like no one has time for, let alone the capacity for evil energy for. But also there are truths that come out and there’s entertainment that comes out of like the process of finding a story.

Henry Mance
So I think that what we expect of high-end drama is, is to stretch our possibilities so far sometimes that it’s hard to, you know, carry that or tally that with the reality of journalism, which is often depicting things which are in plain sight, but which are still very outrageous. And, you know, the time spans, which things have to happen in, in dramas are just not the time spans things happen in, in real life. So it’s not something that you could, between Episode 1 and Episode 2, you can . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Solve . ..

Henry Mance
. . . have all the developments. Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Henry ended up in two scenes in Season 2 of Industry. One is a blink and you’ll miss an appearance in Episode 2, he’s interviewing Jesse Bloom on stage at a conference. And the other is that CNN scene. And that scene is, by the way, an example of something that might happen in actual journalism. Henry doesn’t accuse Bloom of corruption on TV. He’s sort of circling it because he doesn’t know for sure. So, Henry, what do you think? Do you think this is one of those rare shows that gets journalism right?

Henry Mance
It does get right that we’re often on the outside, you know, looking out of a window, peering in, seeing something, but not quite being able to put our finger on it or not, not, certainly not having the ability to, to prosecute these people. And it takes patience, and it takes sort of constant questioning and constant sort of raised eyebrows at powerful people, before you get a result.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Henry, I guess my last question is like, what’s your sort of big picture take? Where do you place Industry in the sort of 2022 TV canon?

Henry Mance
You know, I think it get loads of things right about, about why people go into certain careers, about, you know, how the culture of workplaces really intrudes upon the personalities of, of those just starting their careers. And, you know, how even good people who go into the workplace or people who think they have certain boundaries or certain standards, end up dropping those under pressure after a few years.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. OK. Henry, thank you so much for being here! How should people contact you if they want to book you for a future (laughter), for a future show?

Henry Mance
Yeah, just for the DMs, I mean, that’s, that’s how all my best stuff is arrived now. I mean, I have to say that, yeah, for every one TV offer, well there’s probably been a thousand people with zero followers offering me money . . . (laughter) So, yeah, but I mean, the serious thing though is that like HBO in particular have this amazing history of casting people who aren’t actors into roles. And so I do think that’s like, that adds a nice prism to drama because, you know, there is this test for, for so much drama of whether it really stands up to people in the know. And yeah, it was really fun to try and see that myself.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Henry, thank you so much! This is so fun.

Henry Mance
Thanks a lot, Lilah!

Lilah Raptopoulos
You can read Henry’s stories about Industry on FT.com. I’ve put them both in the show notes.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Esther Perel is probably the most famous therapist in the world, which is not something a lot of people are famous for. She’s a speaker, a bestselling author, a podcaster, and she’s known for giving very clear language to complex psychological concepts and for helping us understand our relationships. I have been following Esther’s work for years. I’ve interviewed her on the show a few times, and here is a quintessential Esther pluralism.

Esther Perel
When we ask one person to give us security, predictability, reliability, stability, dependency, and also adventure, and mystery, and unknown, and discovery, and excitement and passion and all of this. Seriously? We’re asking one person to give what a whole village should provide. So diversify!

Lilah Raptopoulos
Today we’re bringing you a conversation between Esther and a different host, Lucy Kellaway. Lucy has held many roles at the Financial Times, but she was especially beloved for her very funny column that criticised corporate guff, which is basically buzzwords that mean nothing. She actually left the FT a few years ago and is now a high school economics teacher. So here are Esther and Lucy on the FT Weekend Festival main stage talking mostly about wanting too much from our romantic and workplace relationships. Enjoy!

Lucy Kellaway
One of the things that you write about so brilliantly is how our expectations are sky-high. And this, I imagine, applies to people of all ages.

Esther Perel
Yeah.

Lucy Kellaway
We expect so much from these relationships that we feel that we choose them. The longer we wait before we choose them, the higher our expectations are. Now you give such really lovely advice to people, but don’t you sometimes feel like slapping the entire human race and say, lower your blinking expectations?

Esther Perel
No, I do not say lower them. I said diversify them. It’s not the same. I think the expectations are what they are, but we don’t, but we came from a model where our intimate relationships, which not, were not necessarily even called intimate relations. I’m going back about 60, 70 years. That’s your parents, your grandparents and some of us. So I’m not going back very far. We came from what I like to call the production economy model of relationships and marriage, you know — sustainability, companionship, family life, children, social status. Then we added romanticism, affection, trust, intimacy, sexuality. We brought desire in to replace duty. Then we turned it into an identity economy. And we want you to help me become the best version of myself. And now we’ve gone yet another level up, which is that I want to also find you, my beloved, to be the one and only soulmate on this planet. And soulmate has always meant God. The one and only was the divine, and not a human being. And when we want to experience ecstasy and wholeness and transcendence and meaning in this one relationship with this one person, as Robert Johnson, the analyst, says, we have collapsed the spiritual with the social.

Lucy Kellaway
There’s a great big piece at FT on this today, which is saying that office life as we knew it, is still, employers are trying to bring it back, but it’s slightly refusing to come back, which in my view is the biggest disaster for relationships at work. And I adored the office, and it’s lovely being back here with FT people. It was absolutely the best thing, and it’s failing to come back. So I wondered what you thought about working from home and all of this flexible working will have on relationships between colleagues at work. What, what are we losing?

Esther Perel
So you know, what do you gain and what do you lose from working remote? I think that a certain age, and here I think the age factor and experience factor is very, very significant, can work more remote because they have retrofit, they have internalised, they have relationships that pre-existed. They have a sense of who to talk to. I think it’s worse for people starting out. I think what you lose is the serendipity. You lose the happenstance. You lose all the non-formality of relationships in the workplace. You lose meeting that person that suddenly finds an interest in you and becomes your mentor for life. You may say one to three words to somebody, and then you get to the job. You get to the task. You don’t spend too much time talking about the world, life or anything. And then when you’re done, you disappear. It’s like this. And I think over time, we are going to get a sense of what this does, which I don’t think in four months since we really came out, we can already know.

Lucy Kellaway
And what will it do is your best guess?

Esther Perel
Well, one of the things it’s doing, it’s very interesting, right? On the one hand, people are less at work. Most people want hybrid. There’s things that they think they really don’t have to go to work for. And there are many things that they think really are better done. But it’s really tough to be in an office where your day there’s only four people on this huge floor. I mean, it feels awful, you know, saying, why am I here? And there is no atmos . . . you know, the energy of an office. But at the same time as we are less absent, our expectations of the workplace have risen exponentially. We don’t want a resource manager. We want a relationship manager. We want a leader that understands what it means to live in times of crisis and global uncertainty. We want somebody who understands that we are not interested in work balance, life balance. We are interested in integrating our personal life into our work life. And that means that I want my company to attend to my psychological needs, my wellbeing needs, my existential aches, and my needs for belonging. All the while, I’m not there.

Lucy Kellaway
And so do you think, I hope from the way, I really hope from the way you say that, that you think that these expectations are absolutely ridiculous and not achievable?

Esther Perel
No. They’re not ridiculous. They may not be achievable, but they actually are not ridiculous because work and family are the only two hubs left. Since we don’t have religion here and we don’t have the traditional social structures and our institutions are crumbling, the only thing people have to give them that structure in life is their relationships and their work. And their relationships doesn’t just mean their family relationships. I’m talking in the broad sense of how we live in relationships so that we don’t just think that love and commitments belongs to romantic love. It’s not a crazy thing. It’s so understandable.

Lucy Kellaway
My students have learnt about anxiety through TikTok. TikTok says that if you find yourself doing this or if you zone out a bit, you have anxiety. This is making them miles worse. Miles, miles, miles worse. I mean, it would be funny if it wasn’t so serious. So by talking about mental health without understanding anything about it, half the young people in the world diagnose themselves about having a disorder. And this is really, really a problem. First of all, do you agree with this? And what should we do with our young people to give them more resilience and jolly well toughen up? (Laughter) I know it’s so un-PC, but I can see the average age is quite old here (Laughter), and I don’t think you’re half-select types. Otherwise I know you would cancel me, but you know, whatever. Do I care (Laughter)?

Esther Perel
So, the mental health crisis is really, on the one hand, very useful because it makes a lot of people pay attention to something that wasn’t looked at before. But on the other hand, it’s a deviation. It’s a deflection. That’s the word. It’s a deflection. If people are depressed, if people feel despair, if people feel anxious, and you need to be able to sit with them as parents and as teachers and as therapist about the job market, about the loneliness that they are feeling in the midst of many other people, about the effects of social media on their sense of self, about climate crisis, about war, about . . . It’s like this, if you talk about these things and you tell them we all are living, this is what I mean by the holding environment, leadership in a time of crisis, it’s that you actually name it rather than looking at the symptoms. You know, the symptom is just a response to something, and that something is more societal and more collective. We don’t want to help our children to become more resilient. Resilience is not a bunch of traits in an individual. Resilience is the ability to tap into the collective resources. And so in light of the big issues that are happening, we are dealing with a collective resilience. And if everybody goes at it alone, then we will be overwhelmed and depressed and school-avoidant and phobic and OCD and, and, and, and. But if we create a team together where we understand what we are, how we maintain hope and joy and love in the direst of circumstances, then we will not have a mental health crisis. We will have a world in crisis with people that are coping.

Lilah Raptopoulos
There is so much more to this conversation, and I’ve linked to the whole thing on YouTube in the show notes. But I did want to play you two of my favourite questions from the audience.

Unidentified
So I wanted to ask you about the importance of sex as you get older in your 70s and 80s in terms of intimacy and closeness.

Esther Perel
OK, let’s talk a minute about sex. And I don’t want to talk about sex 70s and 80s. I just want to talk about sex through the lifespan. But if you asked me, and this is what I wrote Mating in Captivity about and this is what a lot of my work is about, is I am not so interested in what people are doing sexually speaking, but I am interested in the erotic because the erotic is the poetics of sex. The erotic is what gives meaning to sex. The erotic is what makes you feel alive. Everybody knows the difference between a relationship that isn’t dead and a relationship that is alive, between surviving and thriving. So to do the sex as the, as the regular thing like that, it’s not the point. The point is what is pleasure, what is connection, and how do you like it? And do you have a relationship that allows it to change so that you can do harder or softer or frequently, more frequently or less frequently as you like? That’s what I would like us to talk about when we talk about sex rather than doing sex, you know, approach because that stuff you can measure. And so people and scientists love it, but mind thing is more mystical and it is a much more, it’s a different quality that is not nearly productive that you can’t measure. But when you feel it, you know it.

Unidentified
Yeah. So my question is, if we expect too much at the moment and we want the whole village of one person, then what should we reduce that to? What should be the minimum requirement?

Esther Perel
There are certain things you can have with a partner or partners, for those of you who live with more than one. There is a need for community, a need for many, many friends. Many couples lose their social connections. Most men in straight relationships lose their social connections. Their wives of girlfriends or female partners often become the minister of social affairs. The worst thing that can happen is when they divorce in their 60s, they are often completely alone. You need a circle and that, and that circle is intimate. It doesn’t end. For some, it’s also sexual, but for others it’s intimate. You need best friends. You need to maintain that whole thing around. You need to do things that you can’t necessarily do in your relationship at certain stages because, because we want to reconcile two fundamental opposing human needs in these relationships today. I want security and adventure with the same person at the same time. That’s a complicated thing. So you don’t diminish your needs. You think about with whom, who needs to be here with us for that to take place? The nuclear family, I’m sorry to say, but it’s a bit of a disaster. It’s an overworked, overwhelmed system with two parents working with the lack of resources for which they have to pay way too much if they can afford it for these little Smurfs that are getting more attention than they ever got any time in history.

Lucy Kellaway
OK, we’re ending that on that negative note (applause). That was amazing!

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. Before we go, I want to remind you that we have still got our listener call out live. We’re challenging you to challenge us with one thing that you think most people would find very boring, but we could make interesting on the show. We’ve already gotten some really good ones. One person suggested we talk about the origin of paper plates. Another about the history of salt. There’s one asking why two wheels are more fun than four wheels. Just send us a topic that you want us to cover that seems kind of niche. We are actually missing some niche mysteries and some niche gossip. So if you have something like that, definitely send it in. There’s a link in the show notes. You just have to tap it, and it will bring you to a site where you can leave us a message from whatever device you’re on. It’s super easy, and we might even play your message on the show. Don’t overthink it. Just do it now. If you’d like to say hi in other ways, we love hearing from you. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. The show is on Twitter @ftweekendpod, and I am on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap. You can keep up with the call-outs and the cultural conversations that feed into the show on my Instagram. Links to everything mentioned today are in the show notes alongside a link to the best offers available on a subscription to the FT. Those offers are at ft.com/weekendpodcast. Make sure to use that link. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos, and here is my exceptional team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smith is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and special thanks go, as always, to Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.

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