Mickey Down

That's exactly right.

Well, my mom thought that finance was too much of a spiffy career, even though 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.

And 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.

I 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.

And literally, it's just an exercise in, do you have the ability to stay up 100 hours a week?

I had sold this thing to NBC Universal, 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.

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.