Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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When you hear the phrase finance bro, what or who comes to mind?
For me, it is a white guy of a certain age. He's probably like 5'9". He tells women he's six feet tall. There is a little bit of like performance of success.
First of all, I want to stand up for 5'9 men everywhere. I've often asked, is that a real 5'9? I'm like, yes. Who exaggerates about that? But Pretty similar to Roxanna, except I believe the current finance bro outfit is a puffer vest. that you wear with your company logo. You walk in packs out of your office to get your slop bowl.
It is not quite as cool as being a finance bro in the Gordon and Gecko days. That said, people may dislike you, but many of them want to be you or maybe date you because they assume you are either making a lot of money now or are on your way to being a money-making person.
Over the years, I've been noticing one particular archetype that has endured the test of time. The finance bro. You know, there's the big short, Wolf of Wall Street, and iconic characters like Wall Street's Gordon Gekko, American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. High paying, high powered jobs, skyscraper corner offices, capitalism personified on the big screen or even the small screen.
Finance pro aesthetics have even permeated our social media trends.
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Chapter 2: What is the finance bro archetype and who embodies it?
I even think about the quarter zip movement, a trend that became popular in 2025 for young black men on TikTok looking to quote, upgrade their look as they joined the job market. And then of course, there's our prestige TV diet, Mad Men, Billions, Succession, Mountainhead, and of course, my absolute personal favorite, Industry on HBO. What's at the root of our love affair with the finance bro?
And how does he keep reinventing himself? To help me answer this question, I'm joined by chief correspondent and business insider and host of channels, Peter Kafka.
Hello.
And Roxanna Haddadi, TV critic for Vulture and New York Magazine. Thank you. Very often when people, I think, talk... you know, an everyday, you know, conversation about why they think our economy is so messed up in their opinion or why they feel like it's impossible to get a job or why groceries are so expensive.
I mean, increasingly people are looking at finance boroughs like, okay, is this your fault? I mean, how many times have you seen on social media outlining the ways in which private equity have kind of broken a lot of like American institutions that people really lean on? It seems that the finance bro might be hurting us. Why are we still holding on to him?
Because they look great and they seem to be having fun. And even if they're not the richest people on the show, they still get to go to a fancy restaurant, a quarter client. It is foreign, right?
It's exotic.
Yeah. I also think like so much of our pop culture appetite is voyeurism and spectacle and And I think that that will always endure. I mean, Brittany, like even the way that you've been talking about this, it's like we sort of used finance bro and tech bro interchangeably. But like you could arguably call Mad Men a show about ad bros.
Ad bros. That was like the hot job at the time. They're like the same way that these are kind of hot jobs of today. Yeah.
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Chapter 3: How have finance bros evolved in popular culture?
And I think it's become a lot more like Mad Men with time.
I mean, it's set in Britain, and the longer the show goes on, the more it's interested in specific British ideas about class, which are pretty obscure to me, honestly, and I think probably a lot of the viewers. But it seems now it's more interested in that than it was at the start when it really was a workplace show. It portrays these people as... They're all motivated by money, right?
No one's there because they want to make the world a better. It's not like a doctor show or a lawyer show where there's some idealist like everyone is there to make money. Everyone there knows that it's a competitive thing. And so to make more money, you will have to step over and on the person to your left and to your right if you want to move up.
Part of why I really got bought into industry really quickly, I was like, eh, is because the character of Harper was unlike any other black woman I'd seen on TV before. There's always some level, as she sees as she continues to move up in the world, there's always some level of power that she cannot access, but it's the desire for it that is rotting her from the inside out.
And then married with insecurity, right? Like, especially in the first season, she has sort of a Don Draper mystery. And she's keeping that a secret. And that's going to be an issue. And I think she also has a wayward brother in the first season. Yeah, wayward brother. It comes back around later. Yeah. I do think that was interesting that they sort of made that an initial weakness for her.
Because honestly, if you're killing it at the bank, you know, they're going to let you keep killing it. They're only going to fire you for faking your resume once you've lost them a ton of money.
One of the things that I wasn't prepared to come in with mindset-wise and understanding-wise, and I think showing it through the character of Harper is really smart, is just how different specifically English concepts of like wealth and class are from America. It's very, very different. And I appreciate seeing like Harper come up against that in so many ways.
And Eric as well, being the other American character on the show.
I think that's one of the tensions of the show, right? And again, especially the more it goes on in last season with Rishi explicitly, right? Indian descent. Yes. Was in London. Is hyper successful and has other problems as well and is literally trying to buy his way into class. He can't do it. And the town he's trying to buy his way into basically doesn't want him there.
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Chapter 4: What makes the finance bro mythology compelling?
I wonder, what are your thoughts on how industry has handled the world of finance so far? Because I think about like, And Wolf of Wall Street, it's presented as this big party. Same thing with The Great Gatsby. It's this big party. And American Psycho. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of murder that happens in that movie, in the book. But it's almost like Regency-era England for me.
It's full of all these inane social codes. And the most tension is hanging on the tiniest of gestures. How do you think that industry almost characterizes the world of finance? What kind of world is it?
Well, I think from like a visual perspective, there's very little that is glamorous about their lives, right? Like they don't have real personal lives. They only socialize with each other. Their apartments are mostly empty. They've got roommates. Yeah. Yeah, right? It doesn't look like the money is getting you material things. It is like the winning that is the point.
At least in my eyes, it is not really presenting it as like aspirational in terms of what you acquire, which I think is very different from Wolf of Wall Street, right? Like a lot of the critique of Wolf of Wall Street at the time was, was like, this sort of looks like a blast. Like, look at Jordan Belfort's house. And I don't think there is any of that within industry.
I do think a core element to all these shows about money is no matter what the creators are trying to critique in terms of avarice and wealth getting and all that. Yeah. That it is a lot of fun to be in that world. And I think for a lot of people who don't spend time thinking about business and finance, they assume that being a stockbroker or working at a bank is sort of the most exciting thing.
But actually, and I bet the show will get to it, it's the lower end of the totem pole. You want to be at private equity or a hedge fund. And if you go to work at a peer point for a couple years out of school – And then you're going to, you know, after you get your MBA, but you're really training to become someone at private equity or a hedge fund.
Personally, I will say, I think the industry is a better show than Succession. I know that some people find that. I know some people find that, you know, to be like shaking the table. But hear me out.
The characters in Succession, even if they lost the company, even if they never had the love they wanted in their family life, et cetera, you knew that they would, in their own depraved way, be okay. But on industry, the stakes feel higher. I mean, not everybody who was working at Pierpoint had any kind of safety net or a particularly strong one if they did.
I don't know, it makes me wonder, like how much does risk matter in the identity or does risk matter in the identity of a finance bro?
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