"It's really hard to be optimistic right now"

An interview with Amran Gowani, author of the bleak high finance thriller *Leverage*

Back in July, novelist Amran Gowani and I spent around 7 hours in a car together driving to and from the NonFictioNOW conference. This is not necessarily the way you want to start a new friendship, but it worked out great! Amran’s a delightfully bitter conversationalist; we really bonded when we both agreed on the formula for success in writing (“Be born rich,” I said. “That’s what I tell everyone!” Amran replied.)

Inevitably given the length of our automotive confinement, Amran talked a bit about his first novel, Leverage—a bleak thriller about high finance, insider trading, and how the super-rich plot to destroy us all. I asked for a preview, and thoroughly enjoyed it in the way you enjoy thoroughly mean-spirited and depressing novels. The book is out today, and Amran was kind enough to talk to me about writing, Wall Street, and where we’re headed (nowhere good.)

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Noah Berlatsky: Leverage is a tech hedge fund thriller. Could you talk about your experience with finance capital? Why is this something you wanted to write about?

Amran Gowani: I started off my career as an organic chemist, and I was in my more noble days, hoping to become an academic. But I left that path, and when I wanted to do a career reset, I went to get an MBA.

That got me into the world of business and into the world of consultants and investment bankers and marketing people. Within a year of getting my MBA, I went back to work at a pharmaceutical company in the marketing division, and I got wind of an opportunity to work as a sell side analyst at an investment bank, writing research reports about whether to buy, sell, or hold equity investments.

I got the job originally at Deutsche Bank, and then I moved over to Jefferies, and I was working in this sector called specialty pharmaceuticals.

It was an extraordinarily wild time on Wall Street, in this sector in particular. These companies were doing accounting fraud and illegal marketing; these were the guys that perpetuated the opioid crisis. These were the guys that marketed their drugs illegally. These were the companies that gouged insurance companies for massive drug price increases and ripped off insurance companies and pharmaceutical benefit managers.

And our clients were these hedge funds that were just eating this up. Everyone knew these companies were committing accounting fraud. Everyone knew these companies were perpetuating the opioid crisis. But, “number go up”, right? And so there was a good return to be made.

Like any bubble that's speculative and is based on bad business practices, it ultimately burst. I got there right as the bubble started to inflate around 2013 and left right as the bubble burst around 2016, in part because of Hillary and Trump's commentary about drug prices during the Presidential election campaign.

Now, I want to be clear, I never worked at a hedge fund, but hedge funds were my clients. I did my job and I followed my compliance and regulatory guidelines. But I thought to myself, “Man, this thing is even worse than I thought.”

When I left that world, I became a stay-at-home dad, and I said I’ve got stories to tell. And that’s why I wanted to write a book.

One of the things that I thought about while I was reading Leverage—I presume you've seen the 1987 film, Wall Street. The main character there thinks he’s going to get ahead by working hard and being good at his job. But his boss basically tells him, “We don't really care about any of that. We want insider information.”

And that happens in your book as well. The main character, Al, thinks he’s a meritocrat, and then realizes it’s all just cheating.

There’s always a tension here because Wall Street has a lot of smart people. Some of them are brilliant even.

But there's nothing meritocratic about probability. The markets are based on human behavior, and there's bull markets and bear markets, and they're driven by herd mentality. Basically, at the end of the day, you can't beat the market unless you know what's going to happen beforehand.

And so there's a huge incentive to cheat, even if you're really smart, even if you structure your ideas well. And even the world class investors that make these huge returns year after year after year, either they are cheating or their luck runs out.

There was one guy who bet against the housing market and made huge money after the 2008 financial crisis. Everyone was like, “Oh, he's just one of these Masters of the Universe guys; he’s brilliant.”

He then proceeded to lose money for the next 10 years for his hedge fund. It didn’t matter how smart he was. One good play doesn't mean that you can beat the laws of math over and over and over again. And so, really, the only way to beat the laws of math over and over and over again is to cheat. There's a huge incentive to get more certainty in an inherently uncertain business.

In the book, there’s a constant barrage of racism against Al. Was that what you observed in the industry?

Luckily for me, this is where Al the character and I differ. Al, the character, is where I was mentally when I was still a chemistry graduate student. The more overt racism that I've experienced in my life was actually not on Wall Street because I was more established and more mature, more confident. If people would’ve said that shit to me, I would have been like, you know, I’ll punch them in the face, or we're gonna take this up with HR, or I quit, or whatever?

I had a lot more stability at that point, so I didn't experience that stuff directly. I have pretty much experienced everything that happens in the book, just not necessarily on Wall Street.

I observed more structural racism at the investment bank in San Francisco. Liberal San Francisco, where there’s supposedly no barriers for women, no barriers for men of color or women of color and so on.

And yet in the bank, there were nine senior analysts. They were all white men, and the only women and the only minorities were the junior people. And they never make it to the top because they get burned out and they leave.

There was structural racism that was apparent in the industry even just nine years ago when I was working there. And I don't think that's gotten better. In fact, it's probably gotten worse, as the Trump years have played out, and people have just leaned into those things. People have been getting more emboldened to lean into their worst impulses. In Leverage—I don't even know if I went far enough.

I know you told me that some people reacted to Leverage by saying, “Well, this is too over the top. It can't really be this bad.” But, you know, when I was reading it, your evil hedge fund billionaire villain, Paul Kingsley—he’s obviously an evil piece of shit, but I’m not sure he’s as bad as Elon Musk or Peter Thiel?

Paul is more evil than your average hedge fund guy. He might not be as evil as your average Silicon Valley guy, but by virtue of his hedge fund being located in San Francisco, he kind of has attributes of both, right?

What's interesting is, when I thought of creating a character, I was like, what if one of these hedge fund guys was actually dangerous and not just a weenie? There's a lot of guys out there that have a ton of money, and they say a lot of gross stuff, but they're weenies. They're not actually dangerous. They just fund political campaigns to get their tax cut. They just want to make as much money as possible. But they're not trying to transform the country into some kind of techno-fascist hellhole like the Silicon Valley guys are.

I mean, it seems clear that Elon Musk is a white nationalist and certainly pro-apartheid and perhaps even a legitimate, bona fide Nazi, right? I don't think Paul's that bad. Paul just wants money. He just wanted to enrich himself at the expense of everybody else. But he wasn't putting people in a concentration camp or actively trying to deport people…

Or cutting USAID and killing millions of people. Paul tries, but he isn't quite at that level.

I'm working on another book, and I will say it's still early days, but I am trying to think: If Paul was pretty much the epitome of evil in that mid-2010 zone, who will be the epitome of evil in the late 2020s? I'm having to really stretch my imagination to figure out who’s the worst person I can come up with.

One of the things I was interested in the book is that Al has a fair amount of sex with sex workers. But all the sex is off screen, and what you describe directly is him thinking about how sordid and depressing a lot of his sexual encounters are in retrospect. I’m curious why you made that choice; did you want to avoid the possibility that this wealth and power might seem glamorous?

In the original draft Al had a deeper relationship with one of the sex workers. There was more intimacy between them. Almost ironically, his healthiest relationship in the book was with a porn star.

But my agent, who is amazing and who’s been awesome to work with, was like: Hey man, it's your first novel and we really should be pitching a book that's a little more commercially viable. I think the publishers that we're going to pitch this to, the editors, are going to struggle with this part of the story.

And it was a very small part of the novel. There was, like, one sex scene, and there was a little bit more continuity between Al and one of the characters that was ultimately struck from the story because we didn't want publishers to reject the book. And, you know, there's enough depravity in the actual plot machinations.

There's a lot of chatter about whether there’s too much toxic masculinity in literature, and that probably influenced some of the thinking there. There's a version of the book where that stuff was included, and I don't think the book is materially worse or materially better. For commercial considerations, and just for the real odds of success of getting a book acquired by a publishing house, we decided to cut that part.

That's interesting, because I think that when people think about publishing, they tend to think that publishers want more sex rather than less.

In terms of what you were saying about glamorizing the lifestyle, I tend to think of it as the Scorsese approach to these stories. In Goodfellas, the mobster lifestyle looks really cool until you get assassinated. It looks really cool until you get caught by the feds, and now you’re in the witness protection program.

I mean, every Scorsese movie ultimately ends with, “Live fast and then suffer the consequences at the end.”

Had we kept that stuff in the book, ultimately the intention wasn't to glamorize the Wall Street lifestyle. It was to show just how empty the lifestyle ultimately is. You can do these seemingly exciting things, and they really don't define you as a person. They don't enrich your life. They just harm you.

Al has really debilitating suicidal ideation throughout the novel. You’ve said that you've experienced depression yourself. Could you talk about your experience with that and why you felt that was something you wanted to include in the book?

I definitely experienced severe depression in my early 20s. I should say, I was diagnosed with severe depression and I almost certainly experienced severe depression my entire young adult life.

Fortunately, I never had a suicide attempt. But I was fixated on and obsessed with suicidal ideation. I got therapy, I got antidepressants, and I worked through a lot of that stuff. And obviously everyone experiences these things differently, but my version of depression was constant, suicidal ideation, constantly wondering what the point of it all was. And bordering on nihilism and cynicism, thinking there's really no reason for me to be here on this planet.

When I came to writing the novel, there was just an inherent auto-fictional aspect of the story where I thought: This is something I think is important. It informs the character of Al as well by adding a layer of nuance and character depth. It also added a layer of dramatization to make a better story, that the stakes for the character are life and death, because he's grappling with his serial depression, suicidal ideation, and then he's in this depraved world of Wall Street, where the stakes perhaps aren't life and death for him, but they're life and death for real people.

Part of his depression seems to be guilt and stress from his job. But when you were working with Wall Street, that wasn’t really when you were experiencing depression, is that right?

Anybody writing a novel is always contending with fact versus fiction. When I was on Wall Street, I was a much more confident version of myself, more like I am today. And the minute I walked in the door, I thought, this is really screwed up. These conflicts of interest are absolutely insane. The things that we were doing made no sense; we were adding no value to society; we were arguably making society worse. These were things that went through my head while I was doing the job.

Had I depicted Al more like myself in my mid 30s or early 30s, then Al wouldn’t have been as vulnerable. He would have just quit, and we don't have a story.

That’s pretty much what you did, right? You just quit.

That’s what I did in real life.

But in the novel I took the more vulnerable version of myself from my early 20’s—Al’s 27 years old. I took a more vulnerable version of Al, and I put him in a circumstance where he has to sink or swim. He’s either going to succumb to the pressure and get crushed by the weight of the people around him and maybe end up taking his own life, or he's going to figure out a way to identify his self-worth and fight back and see what happens.

I wanted to end by asking…people like Paul Kingsley have taken over the world now. In your book, there’s at least some effort to hold Paul accountable. Do you still think that's feasible? Or does that seem overly optimistic now?

It's really hard to be optimistic right now, and anybody who's feeling very pessimistic about the world—myself included—that’s a completely rational feeling.

I'm not a historian, but I'm a student of history. History has shown that this isn't totally new. Extremely wealthy people—they accumulate massive amounts of wealth, then they buy Congress, they buy the Senate, they buy legislation, and they enrich themselves at the expense of everybody else.

But that can only happen for so long. We saw it with the Gilded Age, into the Roaring Twenties, and then the Great Depression. And when the Great Depression happened, it was a really ugly time for a lot of people. But then we got significant legislation like the New Deal that reined in corporations, that took money out of politics, that built a better social safety net.

We’ve seen in our own country's history that there's a path forward to better outcomes. Unfortunately, I think we might need to have a really ugly bust before we can start getting to serious reform.

And I don't want that for anybody. But the so-called big, beautiful bill—maybe that’s the kind of thing that is so ugly and so disruptive for lower income people, for basically everyone who's not in the top 2% of income brackets in the country—maybe it's a wake-up call.

I don't know what's going on with a significant portion of the country and what their values are. I'm not saying my values are always right, but at the end of the day, I think we should have a system that is fair, that is equitable, that gives people a chance to compete. I'm not even anti-markets or anti-capitalism. I just think if we're going to have a capitalist framework, it needs to be one where you can actually compete and you can get in the game. And now we have a system where you can't even get in the game.

We could reform that. But it's not going to happen tomorrow. And unfortunately we might need a lot of pain before it happens.

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Amran Gowani’s new book, released today, is called Leverage. You can also read more about him and his book at his website and newsletter here.

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