Konrad 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?

U.S.

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 who's looked at Apple stock for 20 years and I have to pretend to tell him something about the stock that he doesn't know.

That was really tough for me, to be honest.

Everybody really loves, especially in the first two seasons, writing about the characters and pathologizing their behavior and saying they're 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, especially with Deadwood.

And he said, well, what 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.

Me and Mickey were really interested.

I mean, like, 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 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 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.