Decoding the Gurus - A Return to Gary World

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

In this exhausting deep dive, Matt and Chris take a break from counting their billionaire stipends to devote (what some might call) an inordinate amount of time to Gary Stevenson’s recent appearance with a challenging interviewer: Tomás from Despolariza. They grapple with the indeterminacy of Schrödinger’s Gary, who oscillates between being an economic and mathematical genius revealing what THEY don’t want you to know on YouTube, and a pragmatic but selfless political activist who oversimplifies complex problems and sacrifices nuance (and himself) in the name of urgent reform.Despite insisting that he hates fame and has no desire to promote his best-selling book or be a popular YouTuber, Gary takes the time to remind us all of how often he’s recognised on the street and precisely how many millions of views his channel racks up each month. These are depressingly familiar guru tropes, as are his sweeping claims that you can’t trust politicians, economists, academics, journalists, the media, his old colleagues… or even graphs.Gary’s core message that growing inequality is economically and politically unsustainable is an important one. And his ability to communicate the stakes of that problem to a large audience could be beneficial. So the criticism lies not with his stated goals but with the guru-tastic packaging and unwillingness to deal with complexity.Luckily, there is a solution... Gary. Only he and his YouTube channel can save your grandchildren from abject poverty and Nigel Farage. And if you doubt him, just look at how many millions he made for himself and the bank with his uncanny predictions… or those monthly viewer stats. Oh, and did we mention he has an elite education from LSE?Links#89 GARY STEVENSON - Economics, Trading, Inequality, Wealth, Populism, Tax, Depolarize.Zucman, G. (2015). The hidden wealth of nations: The scourge of tax havens. In The hidden wealth of nations. University of Chicago Press.Francis-Devine, B. (2025). Income inequality in the UK. House of Commons Library.Francis-Devine, B. (2025). Wealth in Great Britain. House of Commons Library.

Music Hello and welcome to the Curtin the Guru is the podcast for anthropologists from the psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer. We try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matthew Brown and with me is the Charlie Munger, my Warren Buffett, my offside, my right hand man, Chris Cavanaugh. Chris, how you going? Yeah, yeah. That's many people call me the wizard of investing.

They, you know, my friends, they're like, Chris, you went in elite university, like super mega elite, right? You, and you're from a hard knock background, can you give us advice about how to be super wealthy? And I say, you know, well, the first step is gotta be me. Yup. That's right. I'm not an economist, but I did get excellent grades at school. I am a professor, don't you know? And bucket loads.

You like to moonlight as a statistician of sorts. That's what I do. I do indeed. Yeah, so you know. I got a manuscript coming out that's mainly mathematics. It's got proofs in it and everything, Chris. It's come out. Look at that.

Look at that. Thing for me, Matt, is I'm so tired. I don't want to be doing this. You know, other people could be here. I have many other things. I could be climbing up walls. I could be eating sushi and stuff, but there's nobody else. There's literally no one else is going to take on these god damn fat cat gurus.

Someone has to do it. You know, you know, he's doing it. You know, the who wants to do that? No, I don't know. You know, nobody. Who wants the clip? No, I don't want it. No, you don't. Nobody. Who wants to produce 65 clips out of a two hour episode? Who wants to do that? Who wants to go back to a guru that we've already covered and have to listen to them all over again?

Definitely not me, but I do it for the kids, Chris. I do it for our kids and our kids' kids and our kids' kids' kids. Yes, so that's true. We are back in Garryland, Gary Stevenson. And I should tell a little tale here, Matt, it'll be a brief one, but just to mention that this came about because somebody posted this on the subreddit saying here's a new interview with Gary. He addresses various criticisms that the DTG guys raised and I think gives good answers. And I was interested and looked at it and he does provide some answers that are relevant, the points that we raised. And we played a couple of clips from it in the last supplementary material, mainly his dance on graphs. And then some people in the subreddit, again, Matt was saying, oh, you know, hiding his

good arguments here, you know, selectively clipping him and whatnot. Now, we were going to do the Foo episode anyway, but be careful what you wish for. Because I will not miss a single argument that Gary makes in this. OK, it's going to be a thorough breakdown of that. But I do think it is a good thing to do, because like my original plan was we'll go back and, you know, take some of the clips out of this just to just to do like, you know, a mini follow up as we occasionally do with like Dr. K or Joe Rogan or Sam Harris. And that's what I was intending to do.

But for that to happen, you have to take like 10 clips. And as I said, I've took 65. So this is very likely to be a full length decoding again. And yeah, sorry. That's the way it went. But I think there is stuff here. But yeah, and this, by the way, is a conversation that was on YouTube, fittingly, from a Portuguese YouTube channel called Despolarization, Depolarization. And the title is Gary Stevenson, Economics, Trading, Inequality, Wealth, Populism, Tax, Depolarize. And the guy interviewing him is a guy called Tom. He seems

to be like a kind of a member of the rationalist community, or at least I detect some rationalist motifs in this content. So yeah, and he actually, he does a pretty good job in this interview of putting difficult questions and following up points and whatnot. It actually, in this respect, is probably one of the better interviews I've seen where, you know, Gary, it's long form. Gary gets to respond to the points, but he also gets like kind of critical points rears. Yeah. Yeah. It's unusual, generally, for any of our people we cover to actually be posed difficult

questions in a long form scenario or not. And yeah, well, listeners can be the judge as to the way in which Gary deals with them. But I think some of the same points are raised that we raised in our episode. So yeah, it makes sense to return to it. And you know, I'm not looking to take it down, Gary. I mean, I think, Gary, that's not what I'm about. I'm only doing this because you made me. Well, that's the main reason.

But trying to find a positive thing to come out of it, I think it does provide some interesting examples on just how to be a judge of character and just detect whether or not certain rhetorical stratagems are in play or not. Yes, that's right. And let me just make one final reminder before we get started that as we declared on the last episode, neither Matt nor I are opposed to a wealth tax on the rich billionaires. We're also not super in favor of growing inequality. So actually, almost all of the potential policy prescriptions that

are discussed are all fine with me. And in most cases, they wouldn't in any way impact me because I am nowhere near the brackets that they're talking about. So I'm just pointing out that this is not a response which is based on, we want to destroy Gary's agenda. Actually, if he succeeds and manages to get reforms made that mean there's higher taxes put on like the Uber wealthy. All good. Yeah, indeed. Yeah.

So there you go. Now I am an, oh yeah, the, all the thing we're not funded by billionaires. Okay. You'll see why that's significant. Yeah. Unless one of the Petron members is secretly a billionaire, but if they are, they're not sharing. If you exist, if you're out there in the Patreon, you selfish bastard, you could do a little more. Yeah, that's it. Sadly, we're not. Peter Till has not reached out. Not yet, not yet, but hope springs

eternal. Now, I'm just going to give a little bit of flavor, Matt, to start again. I don't want to miss anything, lest I be accused of hiding what they were talking about. But so the intro, which we're not going to spend that much time on, was talking about like Gary's background. Some of it is familiar and just like a little clip to hear the the kind of vibe of the interview. I got expelled from school when I was 16 for selling drugs. So I got into a grammar school. I don't know if Portuguese people know what that is, but it's a free school that's designed to sort of give poor kids

a chance to compete with a fancy private school. So you have to pass a test when you're, I think, 10 years old. I got into that fancy school, which is a little bit further from my house, and then I got expelled from school for selling drugs when I just turned 16. What were you selling? I mean, I wasn't, I wouldn't say I was a drug dealer, but it was so, you know,

I went into this kind of slightly fancy school, but I came from a very, like I came from like the poor part of town. The kids in that school were generally better off, and you know, you get to 15, 16 people start smoking weed. People just come up to me and be like can you get me some weed because they knew that I could like because you know on my street it was very easy to get you know so you know I was poor they had money I wanted money I was like delivering papers so they'd like offer me some

money to get them some weed it was like I wouldn't say I was a drug dealer I suppose if you want to like be technical about it I suppose perhaps I, but yeah, I got expelled for selling an extremely small amount of cannabis when I just turned 16. Yeah, I don't want to try to portray myself as some sort of kingpin gang leader because that's not what I was. That's nice. Like I actually genuinely mean that, you know. Just talking about the background, Gary went to a grammar school, so did I. As it happens, it sounds like he did the 11 plus. This is a test in the UK where you were kind of sorted into these schools. And the thing with grammar schools, or at least in the case of Northern Ireland, they didn't cost hardly anything

at the time. So this was a way where people got into good schools without having to pay for private education or this kind of thing. And then there was people taking drugs and selling drugs in my school as well. That was, you know, it's cannabis. But the thing is, Gary here, I would say somewhat uncharacteristically downplaying, it's not a big deal. You know, he kind of just says, yeah, yeah, yeah, somewhat uncharacteristically, downplaying is not a big deal. He kind of just says, yeah, yeah, yeah, like that's what he did. But this gives a good vibe of like, you know, at the start of the interview, they're talking about his background, they're looking

at some photos with his family and stuff and talking about his upbringing. Yeah, a little bit of colour, a little bit of background to Gary. Yeah. Well, now I'm at, so, you know, there's talk about that. Then we get to what we knew was coming, the LSE and the Citibank era. We know their story, right? We've heard it in the previous content, but then let's hear Gary describe his university life and introduce it to the audience.

In the last year of LSE and you need to get an internship, right? Yeah, second year. So I went to LSE, London School of Economics. For those who don't know, that's like a super elite economic school in London. Like, it's obviously not as famous as Oxford or Cambridge, but it's like just as hard to get into really. So I got really good grades in my exams and stuff. I got into this fancy school and it's full of, it's like just as hard to get into really. So I got really good grades in my like exams and stuff. I got into this fancy school and it's, um, it's full of, it's super international.

It's like where like millionaires, like super, super millionaires from China, India, Pakistan, Russia, the middle East. Like it's where they send their kids. So like Gaddafi's kids were at LSC. I think the same time I was there and it's that kind of place. So like Gaddafi's kids were at LSC, I think the same time I was there. And it's that kind of place. Um, and, you know, at this point, at this picture, I'm probably at LSC at that time. So like, I was kind of, I was like a little like kind of hood rat kid, basically, but

I was like really good at maths and I got in there. Ah, the familiar Gary motifs. It washes over me. So super elite university, Matt, were very fancy, very famous. Only the rich can get in there, or if you happen to be Gary, because you're a math swiz, right? Yeah. He does mention his excellent grades there a few times. And it wouldn't be a Gary interview unless he brought up his amazing math skills, his excellent grades there a few times. And it wouldn't be a Gary interview unless he brought up his amazing math skills,

his amazing grades, and the very prestigious schools he got into. I have to give him a bit of a pass in this specific instance, Chris, because the interviewer is asking him about his autobiography and about his young life and so on. So, yeah. Yeah, that's true. That's true.

But it does happen. Look, it does happen every interview, regardless, without fail. But yeah. It's just the constant reference of the super elite, super incredible university. Like, Countdown, LSE, it's got a reputation. But anyway, okay.

I mean, this is actually the first hint of a common theme with Gary, which is kind of putting things in an archaic way. Like I'm sure the LSE is a very high status score. I'm sure it probably does have a higher number of rich or international super wealthy students. But to hear Gary say it, it's like all of them. Yeah, except him. Except him. Yeah. Yes. Yes. That's that's the kind of thing.

Like, it's not completely false what he's saying, but it is like a kind of exaggerated caricature, as we talked about last time. And that is the common issue. Like a lot of Gary's stories do feel like exaggerated hyperbole. OK, so Tom responds to this point and raises the card, Kim, organized by City. Like that combination of those three things is like so, I know it's almost an archetype of working class East London. Yeah, it's class, yeah exactly.

So, am I not to swear? Yeah, it's alright. So, I was like fuck basically. My plan was to get these grades and it turns out the jobs are going to be given out based on these extracurriculars. And I was kind of pissed off. I just, because I knew I was good at maths

and I just decided to be like really like loud and kind of obnoxious in the lectures. And I just hoped that like somebody would notice and basically work because like LSE is like that kind of place. And I was studying in the library one day in my second year. So I would have been, I think just turned 20

or maybe just before 20. And somebody said, are you Gary Stevenson? I said, yes. And he said, Citibank hire one trader a year through a card game, which is basically a maths game. And like I heard you're good at maths. So if you like apply for this game, maybe you can win and maybe you can get a job.

And I was like straight away, like, this is, this is like, this is basically my only chance basically because I don't need to have played the clarinet in the Royal Albert Hall, it's like a fair game. And I was so competent at games and maths. And that's probably why Citibank did it right because they knew that there were these maybe people falling between the cracks who were really talented.

I realized now what they were doing was, they would pay some of their interns. So the interns come in after second year, some of them get offered jobs. And like if you're at LSE or Oxford or Cambridge, they're going to pay you some money and they're going to say, find us those hidden gems at your university. Because they did it to me the next year and I found somebody like that. So two points here, Matt. Again, this story has, you know, I'm sure there's, there's elements of, of truth to it, but it has like Gary was known around the university as the math's whiz kid because of interjections at lectures.

So then someone at the library comes up to him and it's like, you're Gary Stevenson, right? And then he finds out about the thing that he's like, this is my only chance. You know, if he doesn't get this, this is it. And it's, it's a key in all that hyperbolic and nothing where he says, you know, if you went the LSE or Oxford or these lady institutions and you were an intern, they would send you back to like spot the other diamonds in the rush. Just to mention, again, my friend who was at SOAS, not Oxford, not Cambridge, he came back at a jobs fair and he was recruiting people.

Right. So like, I think this is just a common thing. It is not restricted to like the most elite. So it's again, it's just like everything is hyperbolic always. Yeah. It's a good story. It's a good story. Yeah. You know, I think Gary's quite endearing really in this, in this bit and telling, telling the story, cause it's a good story. You may have a working class background and the rough, rough and ready past selling drugs casually, um, not in the scary kind of way. Uh, it's, uh, it's all cool, but you know, but really good at math, uh, you know, known, known around the place for that.

And he's got one shot to make it big time. And yeah, it's the stuff movies are made out of. Yeah. So like the guy, Tom actually doesn't entirely understand the story, right? Because like the game was rigged against Gary. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard the story a few times and I've, and I'm still sort of a little bit confused by it because it is confusing. Oh, you're like Tom. Yeah, because was it rigged against him or rigged so that you could win? Well, so the way it was set up, he explains it in excruciating detail in the book.

It's like a poker game, right? You're betting on what other people are holding and whatnot. You know what you have, but you have to kind of guess what other people are holding and whatnot. You know what you have, but you have to kind of guess what other people are doing based on their bet. And in the story, he works out a strategy which is better than everyone else's because he's Gary. And then he uses his street smarts and he's doing so well that each round people are dropping out or whatever. And mean, it gets towards the end. He gets, I can't remember if it's like a terrible hand or a hand where it should be good. It would only be bad if everybody else had like, you know, like you've got a king,

but everybody else has aces, but that would be so rare. And then it turns out that everybody else does have aces and you feel, but you actually did the kind of right thing. It's just that and then it turns out city and I said they rigged the game against Gary to see what he would do. Now the interesting thing is like the financial times said you know this sounds fantastic but they investigated and said like they got you know all the people that said this was broadly what occurred at least in the final round. So, does that make more sense then? Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. So they do do this kind of

gamified testing thing of Gary Biddles. But there are other recruits who were being tested at the same time? Yeah, well, that's a good point. So Tom brings up this point, right? This is a lot of effort to recruit a single person. But if I were one of those people who got a really high card, and then in the end, the guys from Citibank came out and said, Hey, guys, this was all a test to see if Gary could withstand being such a bad position. I would be like, come on, what about me? You know, I'm good at this too. You know, I get a chance to win those guys. They don't give a shit. I tell you why because what I realized when I went to that final was so I don't know like if you went to like a kind of elite university or anything but like when you go to an elite university everybody there is from a rich family and when they what I realized when I when I don't come from a rich family and I'm

not good at like, and when I went to the final, I knew my only way to get a job at Citibank was to win that final. But these other guys, they didn't go to that final with the intention of winning the final. They went there in nice suits, trying to make some connections so they could put those connections on their application form. That's what they did. So the other recruits, it wasn't just Gary, didn't care at all about the outcome of it because it doesn't matter to them.

They come from super wealthy backgrounds and they don't care about winning games, showing off, that kind of thing. This didn't ring true to me in terms of, like I don't think people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are known for being less competitive, like less, less ego driven, you know, less interested in showing off or succeeding. No, no. And like, you know, again, Matt, there's the present.

I don't know if you've been to an elite university like me, right? Like, but everyone else there is like super rich and thing. And just again, Matt, I went to Oxford. There was plenty of rich people wandering around Oxford, but there's plenty of normal people like me, middle of the road people and so on. So like the presentation is extreme, as is the presentation that like the only person in the room, the only one that actually cared about winning the game is Gary.

Everybody else is entitled rich arsehole, basically. And maybe, maybe it's true. Like everyone else just fails upwards, basically. They can't help but be ushered into these jobs. Just simply from their social connections, their high socioeconomic background. Oh, yeah, yeah. We can let them spell it out in some detail. You were playing the trading game, but they were playing the networking game.

They would have gotten jobs. They will have gotten jobs. They don't care about winning. And this, I think, is a very interesting thing about being first about elite society in general, but also about being this kind of poor outsider in elite society, which is what you realize is these guys don't really give a fuck about being the best. Like this is the thing, right? So I come from a poor background and my dad worked for the post office and I'm poor and my dad's poor. And if I don't do something big

I'm gonna be fucked basically so I need to I need to win I need to win but these kinds of people who go to LSE who go to Oxford who work on trading floors and elite jobs nowadays their dad's rich they live in a nice big comfortable house with a nice big garden their dad works for the investment bank he's making a million euros a year, you know, or they go to private schools For all they need to do to win is follow the path that their dad sets them So there's this big difference between poor people and rich people which is poor people need to stand out to have a chance But rich people they want to fit in this is a big difference because in the society we live And I think this this is sort of the story of the society we live and I think this is sort of the story of my whole career is because I come from a poor background I need to be

the best I need to be the best I need to be the best but people from rich families they just need to fit in. Yeah because they don't want to be... You don't want to stand out. Yeah you don't want to stand out and you don't want to risk being like unagreeable towards anyone. Exactly listen if you know that as long as you don't piss your dad off, you're going to inherit 10 million euros, what are you going to do? You are not going to piss your dad off, right? You know, and your whole life is about don't piss your dad off, don't upset your

community because, listen, these guys are playing life on easy mode. Kind of point, Matt. Elon Musk's daughter, just as an example of somebody that is the child of the wealthiest man in the world and seems to be willing and interested in pissing off their follower, right? Yep. Once again, I think the theme here is hyperbole. It's not that there isn't a grain of truth in this. People from middle-class backgrounds tend to have better access to social networks, old boys networks, those things tend to exist. Yes, that's true. But the way Gary presents it is that he's a fucking unicorn and everyone else is playing

life on easy mode. There is like every single other person who might be entering such a career has got a father with – if it isn't Gaddafi, he's got 10 million pounds. Only Gary is smart. Only Gary is trying. Everyone else is just on autopilot going through blindly. And the theme, of course, the theme of the story is that Gary is a very special guy, right? With an amazing rags to riches, school of hard knocks, designed to be appealing backstory.

He's kind of doing the class warfare position of it that he's a member of the working class, real people, and he's like got into the hall of power, right? But like, Matt, you know, I can't help but think about my own circumstance. Right. And like my dad worked as an electrician for BT, British Telecom, you know, fine job. And my mom was a- Were you rich? Were you rich? Were you rich? No, not like you and your dad with the god damn stair company. With our stair empire. the god damn stare company. With our stare empire. Yeah, like so absolutely not. No, no inheritance of millions, right? My mom was a medical secretary and I had a choice when I went to university and I actually applied to do law and I applied to do study of religions with Tibetan

and I ended up doing study of religions with Tibetan. And now this whole thing about like the presentation that if you're a rich person, you only do what you're told. Like there's no rebels in the upper classes and the people that are less well-off that don't come from inherited wealth, all they care about is like making money, right? The most money possible because they know what it's like to scramble. And I know so many people from my background, from working class background, who went and studied English literature or whatever, because that was their passion. And they go on to do different kinds of jobs. Some of them are earning more, some of them are not.

But it's just that kind of white washing of like, if you disagree with Gary, it's because you must not know what it's like to struggle or whatever. And like, again, I started studying study of religions with Tibetan as my undergraduate. It's not because I had like a trust fund that I could fall back on. So that's right. So your family wasn't rich, right? You weren't playing life on easy mode, but nevertheless, you somehow resisted the temptation to become a trader and instead study something that you thought was interesting. And look, in Brisbane, where I studied, there's the fancy option, which is University of Queensland. There's the slightly lower status option, which is QUT, University of Technology.

And then there's Griffith University, which is where I went to. Perfectly fine university, but the third most prestigious. I didn't give a shit about going to the prestigious university. And you might say, oh, that's because your father had a stare empire. He didn't have a stare empire. He was a builder, right? He built houses at that time and we were not rich. But I studied with the other people in my share house.

We all paid 45 bucks for a room and we lived in a share house. They were all on our study, so they had less money than me. They came from poorer backgrounds, I guess. But we were all studying psychology. And we're all studying psychology for the same reason, which was that we thought it would be cool to study psychology. And we're all studying psychology for the same reason, which was that we thought it would be cool to study psychology. So just that flattening kind of narrative, which is that there's two kinds of people. There's super rich people who are going to make a lot of money, but they don't even have to try and they're just playing life on easy

mode and they just get ushered into a comfy comfy seats because of who they know. And then there's the the poor, hungry people who naturally anyone with any kind of intelligence and talent is going to go for the brass ring and and try to get into that right. And there's a lot of us who who don't think like that. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing is like I feel that a motif that comes across a lot is Gary is the champion of the working class Gary has, you know, their avatar that can beat the snobbish elites at their own game. But it just cuts out the whole middle of society between like the two extremes as if they're not there and they don't really matter, right? And like, they do. Anyway, anyway, okay. So after LSE, as we know, he won that and he got into the trading game. Yeah, so you can kind of sense like this, it's addictive and it's obsessive. So every trader has

a P&L, profit and loss. And you know, there's a spreadsheet that goes out so you can see everybody's P&L. So everybody knows what everybody's making. And you know, some guys are in the red, they're losing money. So it's this kind of place where everybody walks around with a number on their head.

And that year, 2011, I was Citibank's most profitable trader and you can kind of almost see it in this photo. It's like slang to get to my head a little bit. Yeah, you're not even smiling anymore. Yeah, I think I'm the big shot, even though like I'm a lot smaller than this guy next to me. What I really wanted to do with my book was really get under the skin of these ideas about competition and ambition, wanting to win. But it's a very masculine, very competitive place and it's all about numbers, it's all about money. But it's also about this game.

This is a room full of people playing one big game about what's happening in the world. And in a lot of ways I miss that. I miss that because I'm super interested in the economy. It's quantified, you can see who's doing better than others. Gary, as we know, the most best at Citibank. That's established. And it's a hyper competitive, hyper masculine environment.

Gary misses it. He wanted to peel back the curtain there. By the way, I worked in sales, Matt, when I was a teenager. We also had how much you sold this month, and who was the lowest, I worked in sales map when I was a teenager. We also had like how much you sold this month and like, you know, who was the lowest, often me. Unlike Gary, I was the best at convincing people to part with their money. But you know, they love me. I mean, you know, again, I'm sure there's lots of grains of truth to this.

I'm sure that's the culture of this place. There's a lot of things about that, but there is a fair bit of truth of this. I'm sure that's the culture of this place. There's a lot of things about that, but there is a fair bit of truth in it. But once again, I don't think I've ever heard a personal anecdote of Gary's in which the subtext or the main takeaway is how fucking special Gary is. He brings it up in every single one. I'd just like to hear one anecdote where that wasn't the main take-all. Well, we did hear one at where that wasn't the main takeover. Well, well, we did hear one at the start, the drug dealer thing. That's why I was so astonished. No, no, that is the, that's him establishing

that he's the rough diamond, right? So, yeah. Yeah, so when you take it in the larger narrative, yes, you're right, but he wasn't the best drug dealer. Did he? Absolutely. So he did pull back there. But so the thing about that is because of that trading, this raises a familiar motif. Now I can come here and I can tell you what I think is going to happen and you can say I'm wrong,

blah, blah, blah. Maybe you will. We'll see. And maybe some people will believe you. You know, people disagree with me a lot. But when I was a trader, people disagreed with me a lot and I fucking loved it. Because if I walk into a room and 100 people say I'm wrong, then I'm gonna take everybody's money. And at the end of the year, everybody has to accept Gary was the best trader.

So I kinda missed that fairness, that transparency. And you know, in the end, trading, how many worlds are there where a kid like me from nothing, from poverty, can walk in and at like 24, 25 be the big name at the bank? That echoed to me, you know, when Brad Weinstein said, when everybody says that I'm wrong, that feels good, because it shows me just how far ahead I am of everyone else. And Gary here is saying like, you know, people are going to disagree with me, right? They're going to say my figures are wrong. That's what I like because just like in trading,

I beat them all, right? Like I won because people say I'm wrong, but I'm the one that was like the best trader. And he's arguing that means that, you know, he's right about what he wants to say about the economy and stuff here. And it's this is just like a really very familiar motif in the gurus here that you hear over and over, like I'm better at making predictions. I have a track record even from from people that have no track record. It's all self declared. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, the sympathetic way to look at that is I can see that there is appeal in any kind of job or endeavor where there is a clear marker for being right or wrong.

This is why some people like to study maths, right, because it's not like a matter of opinion. You'll either be right or wrong. You know, so I think that part of it I kind of juggle with. But yeah, once again, the theme of it is. Gary's, Gary's always right. He's a legend. He's proved to everyone. They disagree with him, gets turned out to be proven wrong. And yeah, anyway. And now, Matt, one thing here is that this is the last bit

before we start getting into the economic meat of this conversation. But I do have to mention this. Now, this is the thing, Matt, where this guy, Tom, he brings up a set of arguments that he wants to re-esr with Gary. And I think there's four. So the first of them concerns the Financial Times

article. So first little piece of discomfort for you. Yeah, come on. The Financial Times article. Oh yeah. So the Financial Times article, for those of you listening to us who haven't read it, basically they claim they spoke to seven or eight people who worked with you and they said that it was like you probably had access to the short-term interest rate traders spreadsheet, but it was impossible for you to know if you were the best in the world, which is what you normally claim. Well, Citibank has two trading departments. One is like global foreign exchange and one is what they call local markets. So

there is a spreadsheet for global foreign exchange. And so I know with absolute certainty, I was number one in global foreign exchange. In the whole world? Yeah, in Citibank globally. Yeah. So you had access to the P&L of every Citibank? Yeah, we can see that. Well, foreign exchange has New York, London, and Asia, which is Tokyo and Sydney. And yeah, we can see that. There are a lot of lies in that Financial Times article.

Yeah, I mean, I'm used to it by this point, but I don't think it's... So as far as you know, you were the top trader, but not every Citibank was in that spreadsheet. So there's also local markets, which is the other side. But I was told by the global head and also by my boss local markets, which is the other side. But I was told by the global head and also by my boss. Yeah, you were the top in global city 2011. I'm pretty sure that's true. So that's your main source is what your boss told you. So global foreign exchange we can see. But I was told, yeah. So this is a challenge map, which is often referenced as like it's fairly So this is a challenge, Matt, which is often referenced as like it's fairly meaningless, but it is a claim that he almost constantly repeats at every interview. And the Financial Times article challenged, right, that it's essentially he claimed to be, you know, the best trader and in Citibank, the most profitable and eventually gets down to a particular year.

profitable and eventually gets down to a particular year. But that is challenged by his colleagues in the article who say he wouldn't know. And also he wasn't. Yeah. Yeah. And they're liars, right? The financial scientists lying, the former college lying. Well, so first of all, you heard Tom raise the point that like, how, but how would you know, did you have access to everybody and everyone else's department? And Gary kind of implies, well, yeah, you know, we could see some profit and loss and other departments. And, uh, my boss told me and he's like, but where you were lying on that, like your boss told you that's the source. And, uh, yeah, so we haven't got yet into why the Financial Times might have wanted to lab like this, but. Yeah, yeah.

You know, he could see. He could see all the data from all the other traders. But even if he couldn't see, his boss told him. So just like doubly, doubly. Anyway, I think, look, it doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter whether he was a good trader, a pretty good trader, a very good trader, or the best trader in the city.

I thought it was claimed to be the best trader in the world. I know it's kind of changed a little bit from different branches and just foreign exchange and so on. But there's a bit of a pattern here where the person that's always talking about their elite skills, how they always can predict things right and everyone else in the room is an idiot and how they've been so successful. The self aggrandizement and the hyperbole is a bit of a theme.

Well Tom, the guy actually makes this point. Yeah, I completely understand that. But apart from that, like if it's not, I mean, I'm not sure about what I'm about to say, but maybe let's say you're you're you are exaggerating it. Is it necessary though? You know what I mean? Because you could say I was one of the top traders in Citibank. I don't think there would be any need to exaggerate it, you know. Yeah, there is no need. And so it would almost be a shame, you know, that that would be happening. You know, the book is there, you know, I haven't exaggerated anything in the book.

I mean, I think whatever I said, I would have been accused of dishonesty in the book. So, you know, I think in a way it is it's kind of funny, right? Because like, you know, you read the book. The message of the book, the intended message of the book is like that the global economy is collapsing and it's going to destroy the living standards of your kids and your grandkids. For me personally, I think that's quite an important story. But the other message of the book is that there's a bunch of guys who are watching it happen and they're so obsessed with competition that they don't give a fuck.

And then what you get is a bunch of traders come out and say Gary was not the best trader in the world. Listen, whether I was the best trader in the world or not, your kids and your grandkids are going to be fucking poor. I think that's the fucking story. You know, I quit banking in 2014, okay? I didn't release this book until last year, 2024. If what I wanted was to make the fucking Gary Stevenson show, Gary's the best trader in the world, why wait 10 years? So many things that are just a bit odd, right?

Like the segue to the world is about to end, we're on a highway to ruin these masterminds because they're masterminds like him, like, like he was, um, the FX traders, like foreign exchange, it turns out is the engine that's driving the world to, to ruin and so they know, but they're just so damn competitive that they, they can't mean, I don't expect foreign exchange traders to care about anything about except foreign exchange trading, right? Um, that's why't expect foreign exchange traders to care about anything except foreign exchange trading, right? That's why they're foreign exchange traders, yes.

Yeah, that's right. But anyway, I don't, so it is the segue to the blustery kind of response, you know, well, you know, why would I lie? I've got no reason to lie. And the most, the more important thing is, is that everyone is going... It's about the kids. It's about the kids, the more important thing is, is that everyone is about the kids. It's about the kids, the world. Yeah. That's the real issue here. So let's stop talking about this.

Yeah. So this is like the fit that gets me is like the guy's point at the start is like, you know, if you just said I was like a good trader, it wouldn't impact any of your message, right? Like you could say that, you know, maybe you just say, well, I exaggerated a bit or whatever, but your message is still the same. It doesn't hinge on you being the best trader. But Gary's response is to say, yeah, so there's no reason why I would lie about it right then. I haven't exaggerated anything. And if that's true, then the world revolves around Gary based on the way

that the book is described. But so he's saying it's not important. Like what's really important is what's happening. That's what the book is all about. But then like, why not just drop the claim? Why does that matter? Cause Gary's point is that his colleagues are lying about him and he was the best. Here again, he does this thing of flipping between saying the best trader in the world. But the claim that he sometimes goes back down to is the best trader in a department in the city. Right. In the foreign exchange. The foreign exchange specifically at Citibank with maybe some other branches as well.

Yeah, that's right. So it just moves around and it just smells a bit. It doesn't ring that true. Imagine if you were saying to any of the other gurus and you were saying to them, you know, you've made these claims and they were like, well, look, I just want to save the world. Like I want to try and get these elites that are taking all our money, these people that are pumping these vaccines into our kids. You know, the things that are said about me, they're obviously annoying, but that's not what it's about. That's what Russell Brand does.

Right? Like Russell Brand often says that, you know, they're trying to make this about me, criticism of me, because I'm revealing the truth. And if you think that they're trying to make this about me criticism of me because I'm revealing the truth. And if you think that's being unfair to the way that Gary is framing this. So let me just go back a little bit to him talking about, you know, why his colleagues would disagree with him. I don't think it's complicated what happens here, right? Like you write a book, you call the global head of trading the slug. And then the global head of trading the slug and then the global head of trading comes out and says, this guy's a liar.

You know what? What do you think is happening here? It could be that, but in my head, at least it could be true that you, you exaggerated, you're exaggerating your claims to grow your channel and your movement and so on. Do you think my colleagues are happy about the book? No, I don't. I haven't read it yet. I don't think they probably are. If you were one of my colleagues who was unhappy, what do you think you would do? You're saying they probably are taking some form of revenge

against you. What do you think they would do? Just imagine you're in that situation. You're like a very rich, very powerful wealthy man. Somebody's written a book that portrays you in a negative light. And a lot of your ex-colleagues were in a negative light. What would you do? What do you think you would do? What I would do is maybe not what most people would do. But I can imagine people using the opportunity to say- They're probably going to call each other up, right? And say, what the fuck are we going to do? And they're going to make a plan, right? And what's the most obvious plan?

To tell the newspaper she's a liar. I'm going to call them and they're going to say, the newspaper journalist is going to say, do you have any other sources? And he's going to say, yeah, I do. This guy, this guy, this guy, and this guy. I mean, this is the most obvious predictable response. Conspiracy, hypothesizing, like, you know, it's the evil people in the book. They all got together and they concocted, you know, the story and said, like, the journalist is going to contact.

We've got to take this guy down. Yeah. When I read the FT article, it didn't sound like they cared very much. Like they said, oh, yeah, Gary, he's a pretty cool guy. Yeah, I don't know about that. You know what I mean? It didn't sound like that. No, a lot of them said, you know, I like Gary.

Yeah, we got on, but like, I think some of his claims about. A bit over-egged. Yeah. That like, that was it. Like it didn't sound like there was a conspiracy, but so, so Gary has moved from the Cassandra type, you know, slugger hand, which is don't worry about that because the world's going to hell in a hand basket. I'm the only one telling you the truth about it.

To anyone who criticizes me is clearly fermenting a conspiracy and lying in order to take me down again because they don't want the truth to come out. Yeah. And at this point as well, that it'll come up again where it's like, I finished my banking job in 2014, and then I haven't released my book and gone on a media tour until 2024. So that means why would I exaggerate?

I couldn't possibly. Yeah, that's right. Like, I'm sorry. There's like a dozen reasons why you did it right. The person that's pointing out here, Tom, is saying, well, you're saying, why would I exaggerate? But I can think of a good reason because it's a better story and it would increase your YouTube channel and that kind of thing.

There is a coherent story, but Gary's kind of like, no, no, no. It doesn't make any sense. Why would I? We're 10 years? And you're like, It doesn't make any sense, but the guy that's always talking about his massive numbers, always talking about his amazing grades, always talking about how he's the most smartest person

in the room. Why would he exaggerate about his traded numbers, Chris? It makes no sense. There's nothing to it. And yeah, as you kind of suggested, Matt, and there was a theme right throughout the last content that we covered, that you know, Cary doesn't want to do this. And he doesn't want to be doing YouTube. He doesn't want to be talking about this.

And we'll hear this from Pete for clips. So after we were saying, you know, why did I, why did I wait 10 years? It doesn't make sense. I spent 10 years floating around Think tanks, sense. I spent 10 years floating around, think tanks, doing more study, working as a journalist, you know, trying to research publicize this. This idea of writing the book, it was a last alternative for me. I don't like being famous, you know, I don't like- Before the YouTube started blowing up, like how many, how many subscribers did

you have? 1.2 million now, right? 1.3 million now. Yeah, so yesterday you had 1.2 or something like that. But at what point did you have 1.2 million now, right? 1.3 million But at what point did you start writing the book I started writing the book in 2022 oh, so you had 100,000 subscribers No, no, no, I had only on the YouTube when I when I first got the deal I think I had maybe something like 20,000 subs on YouTube. Okay. Yeah. And it was like, I was doing the YouTube. You know, people can go and watch my YouTube,

it's called Gary's Economics. And the YouTube doesn't really talk about my trading career. The YouTube is like educational, economics, explaining the economy, explaining what's happening. But you do say like a lot of times I was the best fucking trader in the whole fucking world. That's like, I mean, you know how it goes, right? Like I get caught.

So obviously, you know, people can go. I wrote my first article in March 2020, beginning of COVID, because I could see it was going to be an absolute economic disaster. And in the article, I barely mentioned my career. But obviously people like call me up and say, what the fuck are you doing? Like, why are you not mentioning your career? Like if you want these articles to be read, you need to mention

your career. So then I start to use them, but I held them back. I like I like that. Yeah. So just just backtrack. Let's follow that. He claims that he never never talks about his career never talks about being a trader is just educational. Yeah, certainly. I mean, we listen to a lot of these episodes. It's every episode. And the guy says, no, no, you do.

And well, well, you're the hard guy. In the first episode, he didn't. And then people, just like the guy at the library. They're calling him up saying, Matt, you've got to tell people. You've got to tell them you're the best best trader. Like, what are you doing? This is why we're not getting the traction. So yeah, that is, I mean- It could be true. It could be. Could be true. Yeah. And Gary doesn't want to be like the book, Matt. It was the last effort. They didn't want to do it. But you know, how do you accidentally publish? Like how is your first book for Penguin and this huge

international bestseller? So he's saying he had 25,000 whatever subscribers, right? So he doesn't have a huge audience if he's right about the timeline. So did Penguin come and head hunt him because they heard, you know, for the grapevine, there's this guy, there's this traitor. Or is it that Gary pitched a book and had it chopped round and then got an offer from Penguin? Because like not everybody gets offered book deals just randomly. I mean, we do, but apart from us, right? Like Penguin aren't rocking up to people usually, you have to make a pitch and whatnot. But in any case, Gary didn't want to write a book, but then he did write a book and the book is doing well. So

how would you know that kind of thing? And I would like to say also, by the way, I really worked hard on the book and I think it's a very good book. But it's part of the political project. It's like it's working, right? You know, I can't walk down the street in London, like it's working. Yeah. And before we were recording, you said that you weren't expecting to be this recognized in Porto, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was, I've been recognized by like Portuguese people, like three or four times a day every day. Some guys stopped me on that, that big bridge by the river, over the river. Ponta da Luís. Yeah, the big famous one. And he had my book in his bag. It was like crazy. So that's like, I was in it before I was here, I was publicized in the book in Italy. And I did get recognized a bit in Italy.

But here has been way, way more. And yeah, that's super cool. And that's like, that's crazy for me. And I'm really pleased to see because I know you have a lot of economic problems here just like we do back home. In fact, often they're the same economic problems. But worse. Yeah, well in some ways, yeah.

But yeah, I'm really happy. I'm really happy to see that Portuguese people, I'm not from this country, it's a long way from home, but I'm glad that I can. Yeah, because at the end of the day, I think this is not gonna be the kind of problem that will be solved just in the UK or just in Portugal. But if we can stand together across Europe, across the Western world, we

can really do something, I think. So, yeah, to reiterate, the book is part of the political project. It's not about Gary, it's about fostering policy change. And he hates being in the spotlight, but he's very glad to be recognized on the street, kind of semi-famous over there in Portugal. He was recognized more in Portugal than he was recognized in Italy, not that he's paying attention to those kind of things. No, he actually hates it.

He hates being recognized in the street, but he puts up with it because it's part of the political project. Chris was, you read the book. To what extent was it about Gary? And to what extent was it about? It's not a vital for like, I mean, I know that Gary is like, he says, he's kind of suggesting it's a critique of the system, right? It's peeling back and revealing that the people that are behind the wheel, the movers and shakers at the bank, the ones that are making millions. They're a bunch of jerks, the ones who are not Gary.

Yeah, they don't care about the economy going to ship because they can make money out of it. So that's bad. Right. So that is in the book. That is in the book. But I mean, the general book is just mostly about Gary and his trading. A lot of it is, you know, will he get a payout from the bank at the end?

You know, there's a large section on that. There's him being a better trader because he realizes that the economy is going to go to shit. But I mean, there is the overarching thing that basically like because Gary has the working class roots and because he's paying attention to the hardships of people that he's able to meet the bets that win. So I guess you can say that that is pointy night. People are suffering and rich people are profiting off it and that's bad. Right? Okay. Fine. Yeah. There is a little bit of a leap from Gary being recognized in public, his book sales doing well and the political momentum existing across Europe to create laws that will address

this. But it's a bit like the underpants gnomes, right? Question mark, question mark, revolution. So we might be doing him at his service here because there are things that make Gary a bit different than others in this space, man. I've got a lot of videos on the channel about why economics education is weak at the moment. Moving on. Yeah.

But I just, these guys were wrong again and again and again and again. And that was amazing for me. That was amazing for me because you you know, you study economics at the London School of Economics or, you know, you prob-, I think ordinary people believe that elite economists from elite universities in elite jobs, like, kind of know what they're doing, kind of understand what's happening. But like, I was there with them and they were wrong again and again and again and again and I start to think, to be honest be honest like I was kind of excited because I was like like this is it like I'm kind of like this is a I'm at the foreground here you know because I'm I've done the study

I'm here on the trading floor with like the best people they're wrong all the time so like this is like open game. Yeah knowledge gap is an opportunity. Yeah exactly and I was like damn I want to be the guy. And also as a trader, you get this right, you're going to make a lot of money. You're going to make a lot of money. So the top economists in the world, they're... At the elite institutions, like the LSE. Yeah, that's right. The absolute elite.

And they're all wrong, though. I mean, they're professional economists, but they're actually trading in foreign exchange, but they're all wrong. And Gary. Oh, no, no. The economists are not trading for an exchange. Yeah, I think in this, I think in this story they are. I think he's this is the top in this story. They are.

Well, I, yeah. And so you're right. You're right. There are people in trading that are not aware of what's going on, right? Because they come from the elite universities and they've learned the techniques from the elite economists who are elitally wrong. But but like, isn't the thing that the traders know that the economists are all bullshit and they don't care about what economists say because they're just about

making money? Well, it's confusing because in this story they are the economists. They're the ones who graduated from the elite LSE with the economics degree. Now they're trading foreign exchange, but they're still economists doing economy stuff. And they're sort of getting by, but they're getting everything wrong. And Gary can see that they're wrong. And, you know. It's not just Gary though, Matt.

There is a figure in the book. There's another guy that he says can see things like him. It's another guy from a working class background. In the book, he's called Billy and he basically told me like, fuck your textbooks, go and find out it's your job. Like this, you're in the, this is, you're in the premier league now. Play the real game, find out what's happening. So I went out and I asked people, people I think this is actually where I was quite

advantaged by the fact that I came from a poor background because I could just go and I could like speak to my friends I could speak to my parents and I could speak to my friends parents and be like you know why are you guys not spending money and you know if you haven't ever done that like you should do that like you learn a lot but I mean and what did the answer was it fear because they just come out of 2008 no I think it was I mean you I think you know, what do you think people said? Don't have money, mate. Exactly. They said, I don't spend any money. What are you talking about? Like I spend everything I get.

Like my, my outcome is like, my outgoing is more than my aim. I can't spend any more. So everybody says that. What are you talking about? I can't spend any more money. But maybe those conversations were just with the lowest 10 or 20%. And maybe between 20 and 90, people would have answered something different. I think that's the biggest thing. I think that's the biggest thing. spend any more money. But maybe those conversations were just with the lowest 10 or 20%.

And maybe between 20 and 90 people would have answered something different. I think that's like people in the middle. I think these are just ordinary people, you know? You know, I think that's what it was. And then you don't need to take their word for it, right? Like you look at their financial situation. This is like the movie, The Big Short, where they go off and actually do the research and visit the housing estates and stuff and looking at the people

giving lines and stuff, and they realize that the mortgage-backed security market is totally corrupt. But with Gary, he just needs to talk to his friends and family and it turns out that they're not spending money because they don't feel like they have very much money and they can't afford stuff. No economist has thought of that. No. That's not, that's not in their fancy models.

That's right. This gave him the edge to. I do like that Tom beat the point of like, is there an issue that, you know, by only a handful of people that it might not represent the entire economy of our country. Maybe you're missing some percentiles and Gary's like, nah, nah. They're just people, man. They're just people. You can extrapolate from the 10 or 15 people you talk to, to the entire nation. That's the way it goes. So this actually leads to Gary's economic thesis, his overall thesis. He summarizes it here and we're going to get into this point in like some of the

objections, some of the responses he has, the criticisms around it, but it's, it's a good place to start by him outlining his general idea about this topic. I had friends like single, single mothers, like poor families, but most of them they own property. Yeah. That was like very like realistic and achievable thing for even a single mother about this topic. I had friends like single mothers, like poor families, but most of them, they own property. Yeah, that was like very like realistic and achievable thing for even a single mother. 30 years ago, 40 years ago, you were able to buy a property.

Same here. Yeah, yeah. So what you had there was like ordinary poor people, our parents' generation owning property. But then when I look at my friends, I see a lot of people who would never be able to own property. So they're straight away, that's it. That's your answer. Like it doesn't make sense. So what that means is middle-class families,

like families in the middle, are moving from being property-owning, wealth-owning families, to being non-property-owning, non-wealth-owning families over time. So what you see that it doesn't make sense to ask, that means their wealth is going down over time. It doesn't make sense to ask a family like that. Why don't you spend more money? Because like you can't dis-save forever. Eventually you're going to hit zero.

So like straight away, bam, the reason these guys aren't spending money is because they're losing their wealth. You follow that? Parents generation, middle-class families or working-class families were able to buy houses, right? Despite, you know, maybe not having the best income, but they could save up and they could get mort families were able to buy houses, despite maybe not having the best income, but they could save up and they could get mortgages and they get houses. And then now, Gary's friends, none of them are able to afford houses. So this speaks to the fact that something's going on, because people's wages are whatever. Maybe they've increased or maybe they're correcting for the inflation, they're similar, but they're not able to get on the property ladder. So what is

going on? And there might be an answer to that. What I couldn't get out of my head when I left this meeting was the similarity between the situation of Western governments and the Western middle class, which is in both cases, you're losing your assets over time. Your wealth, how much wealth you have is going down over time. You're accumulating debt over time, which must mean you're spending more than your income year after year. And what I couldn't really shake from that was the impossibility of it. In theory, it should not be possible for both the public sector and the private sector to lose their assets, to accumulate debt and to see their wealth share fall.

Like these, unless you, that can only happen if there's been like a war or like an earthquake or a disaster and the actual assets are being destroyed, which wasn't happening. It's theoretically impossible for governments to be increasing the national debt, like issuing treasury bonds and things like that, and for people to be more indebted. I mean, actually, if people are not buying property and not making investments and not borrowing for that, then actually they're going to be less indebted, frankly, if you're not getting onto the property ladder. But anyway, let's just, let's just take it as, take it as, take it as a given. So you're following the public and the private sector are losing their assets. They're accumulating debt. Wealth is going down. Where is it going, Mark? What is going on here? We cannot accurately measure the wealth of the very rich. It's very, very difficult. We have economists doing that if you want. There's an economist, French guy, Gabriel

Zuckman. He's really good. Bring him on. His French accent is quite strong, but he's a good economist. He's doing that. He can do that. What we can see is falling living standards. And what we can see, look at the numbers, look at European government wealth, look at it. Go and get the graphs of European government wealth. Where has it gone? It's collapsed. European governments used to hold significant amount of wealth, now it's massively negative. And then look at the increased size of debt of your average Western European family.

Who's it to? We can see, what we see is the collapsing wealth of the middle class and the collapsing wealth of governments. That is what we can see. That is what is obviously true. The statistics don't show you where it's gone because it's gone to a group of people who are very difficult to measure. Listen, honestly, I find it frustrating because I worked for these things and I know it all bushy. So it's the ultra wealthy, right? Like Gabriel Zuckerman says the ultra wealthy are hiding their wealth. It's difficult for them to be tracked down because they have offshore accounts and they

have transnational assets and all these kinds of things. So kind of like a vampire bat, it's been sucked out of the economies and nations wealth and then ordered by these elites. And that's what's going on. That's what's going on. Yeah, I understand. So that's the basis. One thing I might mention here is, you know, Gary relies on the fact that he knows people and none

of his friends are getting houses. He's from a relatively modest background. I'd say I'm of a relatively modest background. I'm from an Irish Catholic family two generations ago, everybody was working in fairly standard, you know, kind of working class jobs, working in bookies or working in garages, you know, these kinds of things. Previous generation, my parents' generation, a few more people going into trades, engineering, working as secretaries or one or two school teachers,

right? This kind of thing. My generation, my current generation, all of my cousins, all of them, and there's a lot of them, we've got a lot of cousins, all of them that stayed in Belfast have houses. I was wondering about this and I was talking to my mom, the Czech, and they all do. Some of them have more than one house. But from what Gary said, that's not possible. Right?

Like there's even cases where there are people who are single. There are people that are married with two incomes and they've, they've got on the property market. So how is this going on, Matt? Like how has my anecdotal experience contrasted with Gary's? What should I do? If I talk to people back in Belfast, they're buying houses. Does the fact that Gary's family is in London, does that possibly relate?

And does it speak to the fact that maybe there might not be a universal experience around this topic. I don't know. Gary's from an elite institution. He's the economist and mathematician, not me. But how do we reconcile the fact that we both have talked to people in our networks and we have such vastly different experiences? Yeah. I mean, I could talk about my personal experience, which actually supports Gary's premise, which we wouldn't disagree with, which is that property has become more expensive in capital cities. High demand areas. Yeah, high demand areas.

Mainly capital. Well, Belfast is a high demand, but let's... Well, not that high demand. Let's be honest, Chris. It's a very high demand city, okay that high demand. Let's be honest, Chris. It's a very high demand city. Okay. Be honest. Anyway, Brisbane, where I grew up, is a high demand city.

And Australia's got high immigration population, keeps going up. Brisbane is a popular location. I actually bought a house back when I was on a PhD scholarship. It's true, my wife was working at the time and that she wasn't earning very much money. And yeah, we could buy a house for $180,000. And that house today is probably worth a couple of million.

And I very much could not afford to buy it. I mean, all I had to do was just keep it, you know, and I'd be one of these fat cats, right? it, you know, and I'd be one of these fat cats, right? But you know, now I live in a house which is below the median house price cost in Australia and the countryside. At least you have a fucking house. Gary has a house.

I don't have a house. My cousin's all have houses. Gary's house is in London. Mine's in a very low demand area. But you know, I mean, on the other hand, my brother, who's a school teacher, he bought some land, scraped together some money, built a place with my dad's help, mainly themselves, like on the cheap. But it's worth a huge amount of money now, because it's a high demand area.

So I mean, so what's not in dispute is that in high demand areas like London or Brisbane, the cost of housing as multiple of people's wages, their incomes has increased a great deal. But Gary's interpretation of this is this is because all of the super rich people are buying up the houses and there's not enough left over for the rest of us. But by that sort of reasoning, like my brother would be one of these elite fat cats, but I'm not. I mean, the alternative explanation is just it's high demand, right? There's a scarcity of land in high demand areas. The price of land has gone up. And if you're lucky enough to be holding it 30 years ago or 10 years ago or whenever, then you're in a good shape. Now, if you're lucky enough to be holding it 30 years ago, or 10 years ago, or whenever,

then you're in a good shape. Now, if you're unlucky like me, and you missed out on these sorts of things, then, then no. Well, like, yeah, I'm not arguing that like, it's really easy to get on the property ladder or those kinds of things. I'm just saying that, like, in my case, it's not like I have a family of Gaddafi children or 10 million trust fund babies. These are people from fairly moderate Irish Catholic backgrounds. A lot of them have managed to get onto the property ladder. I could get onto the property ladder if I bought a house out in the stakes in Japan, right? Like because the population is decreasing here.

So actually housing prices outside, you know, Tokyo or the main centers, I think are, are not high because the demand and supply issues. But in any case, it's just that flattening of the whole narrative where like the story that he weaves there, yes, it's, it's just that flattening of the whole narrative where the story that he weaves, yes, it's appealing. It definitely applies to a lot of people, but it's too flattening. Right.

It's kind of casting things in this very simple binary. And actually, this leads to the guy Tom who raises this critique. Yeah. So this is one of my critiques I have for you, which is, I think you polarize this issue a bit in the way that you, most of the time I hear you talk about ordinary working class people listening to us at home and the filthy rich who needs a tax. And if you look at this graph, which is from the fairness foundation, which

I'm sure you know, you can see that, yeah, definitely the wealthiest 1% and wealthiest 10% are growing, their wealth is growing at a much faster rate than everyone else. But it's a gradual curve, right? There's like a peak at 20%, right? So the second decile, then it goes down a bit. But then like, right at the middle, it's gradually going up. Sometimes I hear you say that people get money. Let's say in COVID, people got a lot of money, but they were spending that money on their rent and on their food. And that was all going to the richest of the rich. It wasn't some of it was going to the five, fifth, six, seven, eight, you know, I think it's it it's spread all along there. This is him making the point. Now here he's talking about, you know, wealth distribution and whatnot, but he, he's raising the same point about like only focusing on the top, not point

1% and the bottom, you know, 10% doesn't model the entire economic reality. Well, and this is the point that I've made before too, which is that you can look at the statistics 10% doesn't model the entire economic reality. Well, and this is the point that I've made before too, which is that you can look at the statistics and the vast majority of housing is owned by the people that live in it. So by definition, it can't be the top 1% or nor.1% or whatever percent you want to get,

because like 60% is under occupied. So the people living in it, they're owned by the top 60%. Right? So housing as an investment, if you're rich and you own the place where you live and you presume you've got extra money, you're looking to invest it, most of them do not invest in accommodation, in housing, unless you're proposing there's a whole bunch of empty houses out there, like middle income, like middle standard type housing, which the super rich are buying just to hoard and not renting them, just keeping them for no reason.

Then it's actually a pretty poor investment in any case to be buying accommodation in order to rent it, which is why you see in the statistics again, is that most people who buy an investment property to rent it out to someone else are kind of mom and dad type investors for whom it can kind of make more sense. If you're super rich, you're into these SPACs and private equities or fascinating, exciting hedge funds type things because they are frankly offer a better return on investment. So yeah, it's just interesting how the narrative is very compelling because everyone who has missed out and not owned property during these great housing booms that have happened in Australia and New Zealand and many places in the world,

including Europe. It's natural to feel disgruntled and resentful. I certainly do because I didn't benefit from it. But the cause is not the super rich buying up all the houses. This is not the reason. No, there's a Gary doesn't like graphs, right. But there's a there's a graph which shows the proportion of tenure from 1980 to 2024, right, the UK. And if you look at that graph, Matt, the owner occupier rate is like a very flat curve that hovers in 1980 just below 60% and ever since then, basically up over 60%. And then you have social renters and private renters.

And there's been some little changes there, but they both occupy the remaining 20 to 15% individually. So like houses are registered in the UK. So like there isn't a secret world of a hidden houses. Like because even if you take it that the rich have hidden company, they have offshore companies and they've got shell companies and whatever. They're still only playing with the 20%, which is private renting, right? They cannot be holding the owner-occupier one because then they're forced to live there. So like it's, yeah, even if you take it that the figures are not that reliable, and I think in housing,

they're reliable with housing because it's no- Yeah, but even if you take it's not, you're probably only giving yourself single digit percentages to play about. So like, Gary's account, it should take account of the fact that a lot of people are the owners of their house or they are renting a second house. And like the big difference is age. That's the key predictor. Like if you're 16 to 24, you're much more likely to be a private renter. If you're 65 or over, you're 80% or whatever likely to be an owner occupier. So it's like it's age, but also those people die,

eventually, right? And their house doesn't just get knocked down. So, yeah. So, so Gary's sweeping account does not match the data, like it hasn't changed a huge amount in the last 30 years. No, and but speaking of that, Matt, so there's a discrepancy between the kind of statistics and Gary, right? And this guy, Tom, was showing him some around wealth, but Gary has a counterpoint.

Have you heard this phrase, when you know what's in the sausage, you don't want to eat the sausage? Yep. So I studied economics three years at London School of Economics, two years at Oxford. I've been in the sausage factory of economic graphs and economic statistics. You should be very very careful what you believe when you're given a statistic. Fairness Foundation, they're doing the same thing you're doing. How do you think they measure wealth change of the top 1%? Well, let's go to the next slide. So you have property, private pension, financial and physical.

How do I find out like, okay, top 1%. How do I, how do I get those numbers? How do I find out how rich I want to find out how rich the top 1% is? Where do I get the data from? That's a great question. Let me know. Surveys, surveys. Okay. You're a billionaire. Some guys send you a survey. How much wealth do you have? What do you do? Is it exclusively surveys though?

How else do you find out how rich the billionaires are? If it's public, for instance, what stock they own. And sometimes it is. You can evaluate based on that. You know Rishi Sunak? Former, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He appeared in the Sunday Times Rich List, 720 million pounds. He was like very high in the Rich List. Do you know where he was the previous year? What?

He wasn't in the Rich List. Because of his father. He married into wealth. No. His father-in-law. Because nobody knew about him. Nobody cared about him. It's extremely difficult to measure the wealth share of the top 0.01%.

Extremely difficult, extremely difficult. I mean, how do you do it? How do you do that? That's Sunday Times Rich List. Everybody knows it's made up. Everybody knows it probably excludes a lot of the genuinely richest people because we don't know these. Listen. What you want, if you're a billionaire, is to be totally unknown. Of course you do.

You know, only the stupid billionaires want to be known. Only people who are stupid like me to be public. The best thing you want to be in life is rich and unknown. It's a lovely life to live. You don't want to be famous, okay? All of these statistics, all of these surveys, they are totally missing the enormous increase in the wealth share of the top 0.1%. Now I know you looked into this as well, Chris, and you know, there's a kernel of truth here. There is a fair reliance on self-report surveys when they try to get estimates of wealth, that's true. And it is more difficult to capture the top 1%, partly just because they're quite rare.

So it's difficult to sample a small number of people who if you want to get up, because they hold a lot of the wealth. But yeah, I think he's exaggerating a little bit there because they don't just use surveys, they can also use tax data. Because the thing about all of the wealth that is held by super rich people is that it is almost invariably invested in order to have a return. So you can infer wealth from income by applying assumed rates of return, right? So if someone owns 100,000 in dividends, the average yield is 2%, you can guess how many millions of stock they have. But what about, Matt, what about the Panama Papers or the offshore tax havens and Cayman Island accounts and shell companies? Isn't it the case that rich people with good accountants are able to move money around

and not to mention because of the different tax laws between countries that you can set your headquarters up in a country like Ireland, for example, and avoid paying tax on a lot of stuff that people might feel you should be paying tax on in the countries you're operating in. Well, I think that's typically applicable to companies and corporations, right? They've got a lot of flexibility in doing that. As you well know, as someone who's in the UK and Japan, you are liable to be taxed generally in the jurisdiction in which you live, right? So there could well be people breaking the law and hiding their income.

But, you know, there are a lot of people who aren't. Yeah. But well, so the one thing that is true is like, I thought everybody knew that, like, it's not news to me that the ultra wealthy are engaged in, like, clever ways to try and pay less tax or to obscure their wealth in certain respects. This is my image of what the ultra wealthy and accountants do, but I thought they were always doing this. I didn't think it's a new thing they've started doing. My baseline assumption is that millionaires will try to just hide wealth and that various countries and locations

benefit because people do do that. Like you said, like Ireland, but like Switzerland, right? Other countries set up that they're going to be repositories for people to escape the regulations in other countries. Well, yeah, to some degree, but look, I think it's a lot of shades of gray here. I mean, you looked into the academic research on this too, and it's a well-known thing in terms of, it is a problem assessing wealth generally, not just of rich people, but of anyone,

because what you're obliged to report to the tax department is your income, which is what you're liable to be taxed on. There isn't some law where we all report, okay, this is my estimated wealth at the moment, right? This is not a thing that is typically gathered, except in the few countries that do have some form of wealth tax. They attempt to do it. But yeah, I think what you're saying is true on the margins, but I think it's also You know, there's there's an infinite number of tax dodges I'm certainly not aware of but it's still generally the case that you can get a pretty good estimate by Doing things like that capitalization method and you can also

Sort of figure out how much money you might be missing by looking at the national income accounts data with tax data to estimate Sort of the sort of gap in wealth shares. I mean, in the papers that I looked at, they sort of would estimate what proportion of wealth is held by the top 1%. And then after incorporating these uncertainties or biases down, they would maybe revise it up from whatever percent up a few percentage points. Again, the theme is it's not that he's totally wrong. It's just that he's exaggerating for rhetorical effect. Yeah. So there's a French economist that he references with Guy Roszukman who specifically

wrote a book about the hidden wealth of the ultra wealthy. And he is making a claim like he's done a model to try and work out and estimate how much it is. And it's like a huge amount of money that is being hidden. But it's not something that switches the amount of wealth in the country to 80% the ultra wealthy and 20% the rest of the economy or that kind of thing. It's not like that. Okay, but Chris, Chris, the important thing to understand here is that there's certainly a kernel of truth of what Gary is saying there. It is difficult to measure wealth generally, but particularly when they're trying to build up those distributions of the percentiles, the 1% present a challenge because they're only 1%, right?

So a survey is only going to pick up a few of them, and there's going to be a lot of uncertainty in their estimates. I mean, keep in mind, these are anonymous surveys. So there isn't anything to be gained by concealing your wealth in an anonymous survey, right? So there actually isn't a really strong reason to assume that they're gonna be Keeping it a secret, but it may well be the case that the richer you are the more likely you are to underestimate it because whatever You don't know exactly how much that van Gogh is worth or whatever, right?

So there is that but you know, this is not news, you know, no data is perfect and economists have studied this a lot and triangulate their estimates using different methods. We talked about those different methods as capitalization methods and assuming the different rates of returns, making assumptions about returns on capital, linking it up to national data sets and figuring out what the sort of gap is. There are ways to estimate what the error is. And with all these things as a range, but from what I've seen, the range is in about a few percentage points.

So the estimate of the wealth held by the top 1% in the UK is like 20, maybe 22% in that sort of range. And there is uncertainty around it, but that uncertainty is like maybe 3% to 5% based on the limitations of the self-report data. So the issue is, is not that there's no validity to what Gary's saying, but it's rather that he takes advantage of the fact that there's some uncertainty,

there might be some bias in the data. So from there, he goes, we don't know. We have no idea how much wealth the top 1% have. They might have all the wealth. We don't know. No point 1%. That's right. And this is why graphs and data are all bullshit. Right. So you can rely purely on vibes. And this is the bit that I objected because that's simply not true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, so like you said there, this is the way that Gary Frim's that same narrative. And really to be honest, the problem you have here, really, the whole problem isn't the top point 1%, that's the whole problem. What you are having is top point one. Yeah. You're having this tiny group at the top, absolutely sucking all of the wealth out of society and what that means is you're seeing compression within the rest of society. So if you don't look at the top 0.1% what you're going to see is inequality is decreasing because they can't suck wealth out of the poor because

the poor have got no wealth. So they're sucking wealth out of the middle class. So then you're seeing the middle class being compressed to the poor and then if you look at that you're going to say inequality is decreasing. But if the reason that inequality is decreasing in the middle is because it's all being accumulated at the very top where it doesn't exist in the surveys. Well, that's not inequality decreasing, right? But if you look, the thing is, if you look at what people call the 20 80 ratio, that is decreasing and the night is decreasing. So if the richest 10 guys in the world, steal all the money from the middle

class, the surveys show that as decreasing inequality and it's completely bullshit. Because they're taking it from the 80 and from the 20. Yeah, but they also what happens is it disappears from the surveys entirely. And there's a guy called Gabriel Zuckman, a French economist, he wrote a book called The Hidden Wealth of Nations, which basically it tries to work out what's actually happening to inequality by looking at how much wealth is simply disappearing from the surveys. Because that's what happened when it gets sucked into the top the top 0.01%. It doesn't show up as extremely increased inequality. It simply drops out of the

data altogether because of course, billionaires don't answer surveys honestly telling you how rich they are. So I think you need to be very, very careful with these statistics. Yeah, I saw, I've seen actually some YouTube videos where some influencer, you know, one of these sort of success type stocks and money making type things is interviewing rich people. And they were really happy to tell how rich they were because they enjoyed bragging about it. Remember, this is an anonymous survey, right? There's no reason to hide how much money you've got. But just notice the language. The language is that they're sucking all of the money out of the rest of society. But remember those statistics that we know are

approximately correct. It's about 20%, at most 25%, held by the top 1%. Now Gary's saying now, well actually it's not the top 1% anymore. It's now the top 0.1% that are taking all of the money. It's going to be a lot less than 20%, right, whatever this amount is. And it's just rhetoric. It's rhetorical language and sweeping hyperbole. You know, that's not the way to think about economics or the causes of unpleasant things like housing unaffordability. Yeah. Well, and so Gibralt Zuckerman, by the way, I believe he put the figure in his book accepting his calculations or whatever.

It was around seven or eight trillion in household financial assets held offshore, which was eight to 10% of annual global GDP. But that's not like speaking about any individual one country. So like Zuckman is doing what Gary says, right, which is saying there's a lot of wealth being like kind of hoarded off the books by the ultra wealthy. And it's a significant amount, right? Like it's a chunk of global wealth. But it's not enough to do all the things that Gary's saying, right? Even if we accept Zuckman's estimate, it doesn't account for like the majority of wealth.

But also Chris, in looking at the time series data and looking at how that wealth held by the top 1% has changed in the UK over the last 100 years. I know Gary doesn't believe in data or graphs or anything like that. But I mean, what I've seen is that it hasn't changed very dramatically, like since the 1960s. Well, they're hiding it. So they weren't hiding it back in the 1940s or 50s or 60s, but now they've started hiding it now. Well, wouldn't they have been hiding it then too?

If they were hiding it then too, then the graph shouldn't be flat. Why not? Because nothing's changed. They've always been stealing the majority of their wealth just isn't in the graph ever. It's never been in the graph. No, but Gary is arguing that it's dramatically changing, that there's been dramatic changes, right? Where 30 years ago, things were pretty much fine.

They've gotten incredibly worse since then. But the data doesn't really show those dramatic differences. Data, shmada. Okay. Have you talked to people out there? Um, so yes, look, no, we were focusing on this for the issue of household ownership, right? And, and Tom does get to this point as well. And he's trying to

present like more data about it. I understand what you're saying makes absolute sense. But do you think so we're looking at a server we're looking at this graph. It's by it's the state is from the Office for National Statistics, which is a government thing. And yeah, you can see that, for example, property, it's not it's not as polarized as you talk about it. No, it's gradual. The top, the bottom 30% don't own any property. But then from then on up, it's gradual. And I don't think these people are lying.

Maybe the top 1% will lie a bit. Right? Of course. So maybe you're saying that the ball at the top is like 10 times bigger than that ball. Of course. I've never said it's not gradual. And it's not, it's not me. This is the people around that ball. Of course, I've never said it's not gradual. And it's not me, this is the people around me that like to like, I've always said this,

people like to say to me, at what point are you rich? They want me to say, oh, 10 million euros, you're rich. As if you go to bed with 9999999, you're not rich. You wake up with 10 million and you're rich. Of course, this is a continuous problem. It's not like discreet. It's not like, I'm not the guy out there like saying there's like 10 billionaires

in an office ruling the world Like this is this is an economic analysis inequality is increasing larger and larger wealth share is being sucked into the tiny group at the top Yeah, so we're just taking that on faith basically I mean so Gary is conceding that yes, there's a spectrum of gradually increasing wealth You know It's a whole distribution ranging from the first percentile to the hundredth percentile. We can all agree on that. But still Gary does talk in quite sweeping language about the top one percent, top one, 0.1%.

He's clearly talking about the tippy top of the distribution. And he's saying that they are sucking out all of the wealth vampire like from the rest of society. And this is why the rest of us are doing it tough. But, you know, as we've talked about, the statistics show that most housing is owned by the people who live in it. It's true that the bottom 20% or whatever don't own their own houses, and that's sad, but the people who are paying lots of money and benefiting from rising asset prices are often in the top 50%, the 60th percentile, the 70th percentile, right? There's a great big, you know, swathe of percentiles there.

And when you look at the trends, according to Gary, like in the last 30 years, we've seen this massive crisis, right? Where things went from being pretty okay 30 years ago, single moms being able to buy their own houses and being financially secure, till now, where it's absolutely impossible. So he is clearly claiming that there's this massive crisis of inequality that has transpired

over the last 30 years. But again, if you look at the data, the data clearly shows that that is not the case, right? There's been trends downwards in terms of the share of net wealth held by the top 1% over time, particularly since like a long time ago, like 100 years ago or more, where it was up to 70% back in the 1900s. But in more recent times, it's been decreasing. And yes, it has been increasing a bit, but it's within this range of like 15 to 20%.

That's just them getting better at hiding it. OK, that's that's what's happening. That's that's Gary's answer. Right. It's like you believe those graphs. I can make your graph. Listen, listen. Did you make those graphs? Listen, if you want me to bring up, listen, I told you I don't want you to make the graph yet, I just want you to show some graphs. Listen, I worked in the sausage factory. OK, listen, I told you, I don't want you to make the graph. Yeah. I just want you to show some graphs.

Listen, I worked in the sausage factory. Okay. Listen, I know these graphs are bullshit. I know the graphs are all bullshit. Right. And the guy, Tom, tries to kneel them down a little bit here and get a prediction. So listen to this. And if you look at what percentage of their own property accounting for mortgage an ordinary person owns at the age of say 30, 40, 50, all of these numbers are significantly less than they were 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. Government wealth is unambiguously collapsing through the floor. So the middle class wealth is clearly disappearing and the government wealth is clearly disappearing. So your bet

would be that if we looked at this same survey, this is a survey made between April 2020 and March 22. If we looked at the same survey 10 years from now, you'd probably see across the board less wealth, so people declaring less wealth. But the top would be the same because they're not declaring the wealth. The problem you have is when you look at like dollar values or this is in pound values is that when wealth inequality increases, the price of assets increases significantly. And that is because very simply rich people use the vast majority of their income to buy assets. Whereas ordinary people use the vast majority of their income to buy goods and services. So as wealth inequality increases, one of the major consequences of that, and we're seeing it everywhere, and you're definitely seeing it here

in Portugal, especially here in Porto, is increasing in asset prices, most visibly for ordinary people increasing house prices. So you end up in this situation where an ordinary family, they used to own one house, no mortgage, it would cost like 50,000 euros, 100,000 euros, which I'm sure you could get a house for that not that long ago here in Porto. In the future, they will own like 5% of a 1 million, 2 million euro house. So the guy Tom there to me sounds like he wants Gary to kneel down like, you know, what are these claiming, right? Like, so you're saying the top 1% won't change, you know, the vampire will suck out. So obviously the wealth has to disappear. But Gary's answer is kind of like, no, well, you know, it's more complicated, right?

Like, because I think that's a very clear claim that you want to make. So his answer then, Matt is saying like, when people previously owned houses, now they will only earn like 5% off a house? I think what he's referring to is that even people who buy houses are taking out loans for that house, right? And again, he's exaggerating saying, whatever, 30 years ago, people just owned their houses outright, didn't have any debt, right? That took like 20 years to pay off for mortgage. I know. I know.

So this is inaccurate. But I think what he's pointing at is that because asset prices are much, much higher, people are borrowing more money to get it. The issue is that he's conflating different things. So there's lots of drivers of that. So interest rates, they were as high as 17% back when I was a young man like over 30 years ago. But for a long long time they've been incredibly low. They have gone up a bit recently but they have been incredibly low. And what that means is the cost of

borrowing is so much cheaper. So that drives asset prices up because you could borrow a lot more and it costs you the same amount in interest as borrowing a lot less back then, right? So the prices increase to suit. So you don't have necessarily poor people competing with rich people to buy things. You just have people with similar amounts of money willing to pay more because the interest that they're paying is relatively less. Makes sense? Okay, yeah.

Anyway, my point there is, is that there's multiple factors driving asset price increases. Interest rates is just one of them, but there's heaps of things going on. Well, the guy, Tom, does make a point about, so in this story, the only people benefiting from house prices going up are the Uber wealthy. But then Tom, the host, wants to make the point to Gary, it's not as easy to just say that house prices going up only benefits the Uber wealthy.

And I think a lot of economists blindly look at that and they say, well, people are rich enough because their wealth value on paper is higher. But that, that wealth exists in a form of a house, which they can only access by selling their house. I don't know. And you can say that about the wealthy too. Oh, it's non non liquid in the wealthy's wealthy too. It's non-liquid in the wealthy's hands too. Listen, if I own one house, the only way for me to access that money is to sell the house,

right? If I own 20 houses, then I can rent out 19 houses. You know, I also own the stock market. I think when asset prices, I think you need to recognize a flat position on housing is not is not zero houses. A flat position is one house. And that's one house with a mortgage paid off. If you don't have one house with a mortgage paid off, you're not winning when house prices go up. Especially if you have three or four kids, they all go to the house. It's better than if the prices were going down, right? You are winning.

Do you think so? Do you think that you think that the ordinary I think that the ordinary people of portugal so if we called up like a 20 year old portuguese young man studying university now and say do you want house prices to go up or go down what do you think you would say i'd say i want them to stay the same and go down then i'll buy them and then i want them to go up this is like monopoly economics right where you you say you keep buying houses you get as buying houses, you get as many houses as you can. I mean, that's not what super rich people do with their money. Yeah. Matt, no, you buy like Donald Trump has property, right? Doesn't he have big skyscrapers

and stuff? That's right. He bought five houses and he turned one of them into a hotel. Like I do like Tom's point there where Gary is like, but now, but like you're not actually benefited the house. And he's like, it's better than if your house price goes down. Like if you own a house and all your house prices are going down, that's worse for people. And then Gary's like appeal is if we ask the young student, like would they want house prices to go up? And the guy, Thomas Wright, like, no, they wouldn't want it to go up until they buy it.

And then they'll want it to go up. Like, that's, that's kind of common sense. And in fact, you know, just putting aside Gary world for a little while here and talking about the real world. I mean, this is one of the biggest political obstacles to doing something about housing affordability. I mean, the problem is that most people, maybe 60, 70% of people still own their own house. So in terms of the electorate, most people are quite happy to see house prices go up. It makes them feel richer. I kind of agree with Gary. It's a Ponzi scheme. Yes, they can be sort of recycled into, let's say you retire, right? So you sell your inner city house for all

this money and you go live there. You do a sea change or a tree change or you go to retirement home. You can sell it and you can capitalize that money. But ultimately, it doesn't really make anyone richer. But it's a real obstacle, I think, to policy that would help with this because most people are not actually in the housing market at the moment in terms of being a new, as a first home buyer. So there isn't the political will to make meaningful change that would fix it. And the real thing that would help with it is increasing supply. That is absolutely the thing that matters.

You have to increase the supply of housing. But the issue is, look, there are multiple things going on. Actually, the cost of building houses has increased a lot over recent years. It's increased by about 50% in Australia over the last decade or so. So just materials, labor, a whole bunch of stuff It's increased by about 50% in Australia over the last decade or so. Just materials, labor, a whole bunch of stuff that goes into a house has become more expensive.

This is one issue. But most of the cost of housing in a fancy city like London or even Brisbane is actually just the cost of the land because you have scarce land. Really what it boils down to then, because there's no more land, right? You can't zone any more land in desirable locations in the inner city. There's limited stock. So the cost of it is just being bid up. The only way you can make more housing is to zone stuff from low density to medium density, from medium density to high density. And again, the obstacle here is not that there's this wealthy fat cats, Elon Musk

and George Soros are running around buying up all the houses. That's not what's going on. What's preventing it is the people who own a house in a low density area, they don't want to see that kind of redevelopment happening. So there's big just sort of obstacles to increasing the supply of housing in desirable inner city areas. And that combined with low interest rates, cost of construction, there's probably about six or seven other factors coming into it. I mean, that's ultimately what is driving in affordability of housing in those desirable locations. So the point that's complicated is well taken.

But it's not just on the issue of housing that Gary kind of oversimplifies things. So they talk a bit about wages. OK, here's a good question for you. When wages fall, who wins? When wages fall, who wins? It's complicated because of what you said, there's a marginal propensity to consume. And so if you're from a poor family, you'll spend all the money you have. And so if wages fall, there'll be less money in those hands being spent. Companies might profit because they have a bigger profit margin. Unless they change their prices.

It's, it's complicated. I would say when wages fall, workers lose and owners win. Okay. But owners of company in this, in companies in this case. Yeah. Owners of assets, owners of assets. I own a company today. I own housing tomorrow.

I own Apple stock a week later. I own gold. Assets, assets, assets, assets. I'm a trader. I put it to you that wages falling and house prices rising are basically the same thing. I think it's a bit too simplistic. It's a simplification, but it's basically the same thing. There's an asset price. There are second and third order consequences of each of those things?

Yeah, you know, and people have like, people have mortgages and this kind of thing, but, you know, what really matters for housing affordability? You know, like I think the guy's Tom's responses are, are good because he's trying to point out like, yeah, you can tell like a simple narrative, but if you start thinking through the complexities, it isn't like this simple moralistic play. Yeah. But, but Gary doesn't feel like that. No, no, no, it's very simple.

I mean, that's the thing that's frustrating. Like even my attempt there to provide a more detailed explanation for what's going on. Like, I appreciate it. It's unsatisfying, first of all, to listen to. Because people... I didn't say anything. what's going on. I can appreciate it. It's unsatisfying, first of all, to listen to. I can see your eyes glazing over. And I'm sure that I, like, you know, I missed out like half a dozen things because, you know, it's just really, it's just a complicated thing. It resists simple narratives. And I think that's the frustrating thing with Gary, which is that he's got a nice, simple, compelling

narrative. It doesn't make sense in many ways, but I guess that doesn't really matter. It's people are, you've got a grievance, things are tough, someone's to blame, simple problem, simple solution. Yeah. Well, I mean, just to illustrate that, listen to another exchange between the two of them. Yeah, within the realm of housing affordability itself.

Is it good for you, for Portuguese workers, if food is expensive? No. Is it good for Portuguese workers? I mean, it depends. Yeah, if you're a farmer, maybe. Yeah. Is it good for Portuguese workers?

But only if you're the owner of the farm, not if you're working on the farm. Is it good for Portuguese workers if energy is expensive? It could be good for everyone if everything is more expensive. You think it would be good for everyone if everything is more expensive? Yeah, because if you're making more money, it's like that's why when you go to poor countries things are cheaper because the economy is... What matters is the ratio, right? What matters is the ratio. Yeah, exactly. What matters is the ratio.

Yeah. If you're a worker, if wages are expensive relative to goods and services and houses, that's good for you. There, again, like Gary wants to say, you know, if food is more expensive, that's bad. That's universally bad. But the guy told him the same. Well, yes, like I see what you're saying. But actually there's complexities hidden in there. Right. And then like when he gives the the example that if you're in a country where things are cheaper because

the economy is less healthy than in other countries, then this isn't good, right? This isn't good when... Yeah, like everything is super expensive in Switzerland and most of Europe, partly because there are rich people, yes, but also largely because everyone is earning pretty high wages compared to how much they earned a long time ago or how much they earned in many other parts of the world. So yes, increasingly expensive, desirable assets, scarce assets, like a beachside house or an apartment in the inner city, is going to be more expensive when the people living there have more money to bid on those goods. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, Gary said it's the 0.1%. It's not the 1%. It's the 0.1%. To be honest, I think this is the big con which is being played on on the Western middle class

Which is they're being given higher house prices and told it makes them rich when it's becoming it should be becoming Increasingly more and more and more and more obvious higher house prices make you poor Because housing is a basic essential expensive housing makes you poor expensive energy makes you poor expensive food makes you poor unless you poor, expensive energy makes you poor, expensive food makes you poor unless you are the guy who owns the houses who owns the energy who owns the food and that's me. And that's the rich like this is this is a this is this is a class war and the rich are winning, you know, and the way

you see that listen I would when I was a trade in 2011 is a scene in my book with that guy actually sorry the rich are winning. Who are they? Are you when you say the the rich are winning who are you talking about? It's asset owners. The most important thing is it's not about your job it's about your asset ownership in your family. But when I say that I want you to recognize for an ordinary person you think if somebody is a millionaire they're rich. If they have like a million euros in assets they're rich and of course a million euros in assets, they're rich.

And of course a million euros in assets is more than your average family will have. There are families out there, more and more and more of them, that have a hundred million, five hundred million, seven hundred million, three billion, five billion assets. Okay, here's a question for you. Say you are a Euro billionaire. You've got exactly one billion euros in assets. What's your passive income going to be on that? 50 million?

About 50 million, about 50 million. So about 4 million euros a month, passive income. So does that blow your mind, Chris, that if you've got, how much was it? 1 billion euros, then actually you've got more money than you know how to spend. 1 billion euros. Yeah, you've got like a huge amount of passive income from interest. Did that blow your mind? No, it doesn't. But it does speak to this issue that Gary's concern is not with like,

it's not the all in podcast hosts, right? It is Elon Musk, right? He were kind in this category, but you have to be like the top, top, top, top, top in order to qualify. It's just his metric for wealth. Isn't it like the, like the ultra ultra elite? Well, it's shifting. He's it moves around, right? Like at other times, even in that clip at the beginning

there, it sounded like he's talking about anyone who basically owns a significant amount of assets. So you might define it as anyone who's getting more of their income from assets than from their labor. So that would set the bar a lot lower. Try to be charitable here. I mean, look, I think there's some things he's saying that are right, like for instance, he's right to say that house prices or asset prices going up does not benefit people whose only asset is living the house that they live in, that's true. And I also agree with him that I think the interests

of people with assets and people who don't have assets who rely on their wages are not aligned. And just like the interests of people who already own their own house in a desirable suburb, their interests aren't aligned with the people that would like to live there, because that would mean developing and building, spoiling their nice, leafy inner city suburb with mid-rise housing. So I don't disagree with the general premise that we should be doing something about wealth inequality and not letting it get extreme. And I definitely agree with the idea that we should be doing something to improve

housing affordability for everyone and discouraging just the uncontrolled growth in and these kinds of nonproductive assets. But the only thing that I dislike is just this hyperbolic, simplifying narrative because it's such a, it's the wrong topic to be doing that kind of thing. You say that? Well, I'm going to let Dario to respond to you. Here's his rejoinder. If you look at the history of Europe, the history of the world, up until World War II, we all lived in extremely unequal societies with tiny, extraordinarily wealthy aristocratic elites and enormous amounts of extremely poor peasants. That is because if you do nothing to stop wealth accumulation

and compound interest of the very rich, then they outcompete everybody else over time and end up with all of the assets. So I'm not Mahatma Gandhi, I'm not what the Therese are, I'm not more a philosopher. I'm an economist, I've got a very good track record of predictions, I've made a lot of money on it. If you do not take action against the wealth accumulation

of the very rich with extremely large passive incomes, it is a mathematical certainty that they will swallow the middle class over time. And what that means is no home ownership for ordinary families, for your viewers, for your listeners, for their kids, for their grandkids. It means no wealth for government, which means no welfare state, no education, no housing, no healthcare. Yeah.

Well, you know, when he started, I was going to throw him a bone because I was like, yes, I agree with that. He's completely right. If you don't do anything to rectify the natural tendency of wealth to accumulate, because it does, just by the virtue of compound interest, compound investing, then it does tend to increase, just naturally increases. It doesn't take some sort of evil capitalist society for it to even happen. It happened naturally in the Middle Ages and then like he said in pre-World War II Europe.

He was quite right in pointing out that pre-World War I, the vast majority of wealth was held by aristocrats. That changed very quickly due to the various disruptions that occurred in the 20th century. And now it's starting to edge up again. So it's not wrong there, but I don't know. When he started going on about how he's like the most amazing economist and, you know,

I like it's like, you don't need like, this is clear. Well, that's the hyperbole, right? He's not Mahatma Gandhi. He's just telling it like it isn't. The entire wealth of the middle class except for this Uberly will disappear. There will be no more social welfare programs. There'll be no housing. There'll be no education. It'll all be gone because the billionaires are just taking more and more of the wealth, sucking it up and hiding it offshore. And that to me just...

I mean, you know, I may as well be going on Gary's thing, but it just doesn't ring true because there's this aspect where that's a dystopia, right? Where like it's got to the stage where we're no longer even anybody's living in houses anymore, right? Where like, it's got to the stage where we're no longer even anybody's living in houses anymore, right? Like it's only the ultra elite who own all the houses and it's, it's like a sci-fi thing. But he was saying the same ago that he's not doing a binary. Like this sounds like a binary. Like you said, it's not 10 people, but is it like a hundred? How many is it that is in this class versus the rest of it? Well, the thing is you don't need to be a top trader or go to an elite school to study

economics to understand about basic trends in inequality and what will happen if you don't have some form of wealth distribution through taxation. But that's the thing. I mean, if he's merely a polemical figure and he sometimes presents himself as this, yeah, I don't have time to do all this complex stuff. Yes, I'm simplifying it for everyone. I'm just, I'm just a man with a mission. I'm campaigning for higher taxes on the wealthy and that's, that's fine. You know what I mean?

He's could be the Greta Thunberg of, of wealth redistribution. And I'm here for that then that's fine. You know what I mean? He's could be the Greta Thunberg of wealth redistribution and I'm here for that. That's fine. I just, I don't think you need to be dismissing all statistics. You don't need to be ignoring the multiple causes of things and making false linkages, for instance, between the top 1% and the cost of a house and middle sex.

These are separate issues. Yeah. Well, the guy Tom does make this point for you, Matt. Generally about agreeing with him, but also the lack of nuance. And I understand. And I think you're right. I think it's probably only going to get worse. The only reason I'm showing you these graphs is because I think for people like me, if you want to convince people like me to follow you, maybe you have to be a bit more nuanced, you know, and not talk about, not say that 100% of the mortgage is going

to the rich. You don't say 100%, but you say the money that people are spending on rent and mortgages and food, it's all going to the ultra rich. It's not. It's also going to pay the people who work in the supermarket and the people who work in the bank and the pension owners and the, you have probably have teenage neighbors in your poor neighborhood who own Bank of America stock because they now have Revolut and other stuff like that, you know? So everyone has access to be on the side of the good side of the mortgage. Yeah. And you know, you know, listen, Thomas, there's a reason I went back and I did two years at

Oxford. And there's a reason that it was 10 years between me quitting and me starting a YouTube channel. There you go, Matt. So there's a call for nuance, right? And Gary mentioned he went back to Oxford and there's a reason that he did that. Okay, so What is that reason? I don't want to try to fix the economy on YouTube. I think it's stupid You know, I think it's it's dumb. It shouldn't be a youtuber. It should be academics and it should be people in government Okay, I went into academia. It's fucking broken. It's broken as shit. They are not gonna fix anything. They're not gonna fix anything. Okay Look at the politicians. You think they're gonna fix it anything. They're not going to fix anything. Okay. Look at the politicians you think they're going to fix it. Listen, I don't

want to be on YouTube. You know, I don't like getting recognized in Lidl when I'm trying to buy chicken stock. It's difficult for me to even live my life in London now. Okay. And I tried a lot of things. I tried a lot of things to fix this problem before I decided I'm gonna have a YouTube channel with my name on it and a book with my face on the front cover. Okay, I don't want to do this. I'm not an extroverted person. Okay. I was floating around politics and academia and think tanks for a long time,

trying to find somebody who is going to successfully stop our economies and our living standards from collapsing. And you know what? I didn't find that person and I'm looking for that person, but I didn't find that person. So I started a YouTube channel. The politician, you mean the leader of politics? It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be me. It find that person. So I started a YouTube channel. The politician you mean like the leader. Yeah, it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be me.

It shouldn't be. It should be a guy in politics. But listen, okay, you walk down the street somebody's house on fire. What do you do? You call the fire brigade. But what if there's no fire brigade? You know, the people who are supposed to be fixing this are rich. They're benefiting from it.

They don't give a fuck. They're not going to do anything. Okay. I'm trying to find a way to fix it and I thought, and I still do think, that there is a big gap here on things like YouTube. You know, I think that YouTube social media is going to become more and more powerful influential in politics. I think you can clearly see that in the US. I think it's going in that direction. I thought there was a big gap for somebody explaining it how it is, the economy in ordinary

terms for ordinary people. And unfortunately, that doesn't mean you do have to simplify things a little bit. Listen, if I could fix this by writing like academic papers at university, I would be in a fucking university times. And I was, and I left because it wasn't going to work. Well, he enjoyed getting recognized in Porto, but hates it in London. Little, by the way, Matt, little is the cheapest supermarket, you know. All right. Oh, yeah. And buying chicken stock. And so he didn't say waiters or Marks and Spencer's right.

It's it's he's going to Iceland and little because he's still Jenny from the block. Chris, he's still buys his stock cubes. The blog. And but like he could have said, you know, I don't like getting recognized on my world tour where I'm running promoting my book. That's right. I didn't want to write this bestselling novel all about my life. What an amazing trader I am. I hate this shit. But I realized that the most, the only way to fix the world is to have an incredibly popular YouTube channel.

Is to become a YouTuber. That's it. And look, like that line as well. Look, I could have been an academic. I could have wrote all these papers. That's what I want to be doing, right? But that's the bullshit. It's all bullshit. But it's all bullshit. They're just making graphs. But there's so many inconsistencies because like sometimes he talks about how, you know, it's all abstract maths, but he understands, you know, he studied this amazing maths, he's really good at maths and you need to have this amazing technical knowledge. But then at other times it's like, that's all bullshit.

What he needs to do is go talk to your friends and stuff like that and pick up the vibe from the street. Just like the consistency of like, are you happy with your success? You like being famous? Cause sometimes it seems like he is. He talks about it in a very positive way. Then other times the narrative is different. And I just, he just gets suspicious when the narrative changes to suit whatever the sort of the theme of the, of his rhetoric is at this given time. And, you know, he concedes at least that he is simplifying things, right? Right, yeah, this is one of the times that he answers us.

But again, like his brand is that he's the big brained economist from the elite school, which is going to, you know, go to the heart of the problem and explain. Well, he is that, but he's also a man of the street who knows how to explain things like you take two Jaffa cakes, put one here in your tea. Like, I mean, while he explains about your keep, you're laughing, but in every Gary explains video, there's two digestive biscuits. So yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I mean, and the premise, so yeah, so it switches between, I'm giving these deep technical knowledge, deep insights to look, I'm just, it's a political project, I'm trying to make the world a better place by, you know,

hopefully influencing politics. But again, he doesn't seem to be interested in the policy when he gets challenged on his very simple approach to this, which is a wealth tax on the top 1%, which has many problems, he says, well, I'm not really interested in the details. That's for other people to figure out. I'm just an activist. Spoiler, Matt, spoiler. But I will get to that, but there is one thing there as well. This is a minor point. You might call this nitpicking, but you give this analogy of like you're walking down the street and you see a house on fire. What are you going through?

And then he's like, well, you call the fire brigade. But what if you live in a society where there's no fire brigade? I'm like, that's like quite torturous. I'd like to imagine Jordan Peterson wouldn't find himself in that situation. Yeah, I just wouldn't be there. It wouldn't be possible. Yeah, so it's, you know, there's no politician, Matt, that's doing it right. There's no academic that's doing it right.

The journalists aren't doing it right. Gary can go on the YouTube. There's a big gap there. That's where the real political power is going to be. And you mentioned that he acknowledges that he's dumbing things down. He does here again kind of acknowledge that. So, you know, you know, do I dumb things down? Yeah, of course I dumb things down. But is there anyone else on the internet producing economics content that is as simple and as understandable as me? I don't think there is, you know, and, and I'm using that to generate political power, which I

hope to use to protect the living standards of ordinary working class people here in Portugal and in the UK where I'm from and across the Western world. And you know, yeah, it is stupid. It is a stupid way to do it. The way to make things better shouldn't be by starting a fucking YouTube channel. It's fucking stupid. But I went to university. It's not going to work. I worked in the think tanks. It's not going to work. I looked at the political parties.

It's not going to work. I am trying to do this in a way that I think will work and it's working. You know, we're getting 50 million views a month on just the YouTube, you know, and it's growing. So do I simplify things? Yes. Do I simplify things? Yes.

And the reason I simplify things is because I want your viewers, kids and grandkids to be able to raise a fucking family and fucking dignity. And if I have to simplify things to do that, then I'm going to do it. So in that sense, you're a utilitarian. You don't mind maybe simplify, oversimplifying things because of your goal. I'm not a philosopher. I just don't want things to be fucking shit. Even though you, whether you know it or not, you are. Yeah. Um, I, I, I gotta say like a warning sign that should go off for people is anytime that somebody says, look, the only reason I'm doing any of these things that grow

my channel or promote my book or whatever, it's for your kids. And it's the sea of the world and the planet. Like, I don't want wanna do any of this. Like, and if people are criticizing me for being stupid, for trying to see of all of you, for being like the guy that wants to see of your grandparents and grandkids and all the little animals in the forest.

If people wanna criticize me- Then I'm guilty, guilty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just like that rhetoric should be like a big warning sign because it's presented in the language of, all right, yeah, like, fuck it. I'm just doing something stupid, but at least I'm doing something and I'm doing it for the right reasons. But his thing where he was like, look, it doesn't work.

Politics doesn't work. The fig tanks, they don't work. Politics doesn't work. You know, the big tanks, they don't work. They don't fuck all my channel. Fifteen million views a month. And it's growing. And I'm like, so what? Chris, well, you should probably get a hundred million views. Like, has he got a political project which is like, you know, going to change?

It's just that thing. It's the same thing with Gary saying I'm being recognized on the street. So therefore the project is working and my YouTube channel is growing. So therefore, you know, it looks like something's actually happening here. And it's like all that's happening is your personal brand is getting bigger. There's no no actual like policy change or anything that's happened. It's just a YouTuber has gotten more attention.

Well, this is the same thing we've seen with our classic gurus, right? Who are obviously almost always on the right side of the spectrum, but they almost invariably end up coming around to creating a grand project, right? A grand project to save the world from the terrible people. You know, they're not doing it for themselves. Jordan Peterson's many, many business interests are not for

himself. He's trying to save. He says this quite often, like, you know, he'll make money. Yes, he's a capitalist, you know, he believes in these kinds of things, but it's all about saving society from totalitarians and the woke collapse of institutions. Like everybody is claiming that they are doing this for the purist. Motives, right? Like, ah, and look, there are people out there with pretty good motives, but they just generally don't have all of these red flags attached to them and they don't tend to be acting like

this. Yeah. Well, also, but like Matt, there's a thing that like who else is making economic content that anybody can understand? Oh, I've watched a lot of it. But do they have 1 million subscribers? That's the question. I probably some of them do. But do they have Jaffa kids?

So, yeah, it's it's frustrating. But this is the bit that like grinds our gears. It's all of this is wrapped up in the Gary story. Right. And it's like, so if you're criticizing Gary, you want people, you want old grannies to not be able to afford their heating in the winter. You want the billionaires to get richer. That's what you want by criticizing Gary for simplifying the message. You don't care about the poor.

And it's like, no, you can criticize Gary. And you can also think that those things are bad, right? The two things are separable. Gary and wealth inequality are not intrinsically linked together. So yeah, it's that thing. No, it's that thing. No, Matt, there's one thing that we have to not miss here. It's the point where it is reused about how what he's doing is populist rhetoric, right? And the guy, Tom, does the best job of highlighting this that I've seen and Gary's responses are quite interesting. So let's move to the topic of populism. So I'm 100% with you on the goal of trying to solve the cost of living crisis. And I think wealth should be taxed more. I like the idea of taxing wealth more than income. I like your passion. I think we also have a common

goal in the sense that I think polarization, people being stuck in political tribalism, like anti-immigrants versus woke. So whatever words you want to use, blinds them from these big problems, which is the accumulation of wealth. So we're 100% on the same page. Nearly everything. The only thing is like the method, you know, and I think maybe this is the harshest critique I have for you today, which is I think you're a populist, Gary. Okay, you're a new form of left-wing populism. And I don't know if it's conscious

or unconscious, like how much you've thought about simplification. But if you look at it, you're this larger than life, very outspoken character, who claims to represent the people character who claims to represent the people and against this political and economical elite. You use a polarization of like wealthy against working class and you propose a very like a one solution proposal for everything. And this is the populist playbook. Yeah, I like this interviewer, don't you, Chris? I mean, because like, I think he, well, first of all, he sets up a good shit sandwich there. And, but you know, he's, I liked the things that he said was good about Gary.

Like I'm also sympathetic with Gary's focus on like material things, economic stuff, right? Rather than sort of, and he's kind of right about that sort of culture worry stuff. And it is kind of right about that sort of culture war-y stuff. And it is kind of a distraction, I think, if you're at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Whether you're right-wing or left-wing, if your head's full of culture war stuff, then you're not thinking about the material stuff that matters, like healthcare, education, housing, minimum wage, stuff like that. So I think Gary, in that sense, it could be my kind of guy. But he's very accurate with his criticisms too.

Like he said, this is the populist playbook. It's a left-wing variant of it. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's a left-wing variant. And look, populism, there's a place for it, right? Like there's a place for slogans. You don't think so. I mean, look, our, what's the word? Our lens is an academic lens, right? But you know, Chris, come on, step outside your bubble.

Understand, it's a big wide world out there. There is a time and a place for politically oriented messaging. Yeah, sure. It definitely works as a tactic. I just feel like, you know, not to geek it up, Matt, but it's like Boromir holding up the ring and saying, is this a gift? We can use this. Like, this populism. No, we know in general populist movements don't end up doing great things typically.

But yeah, I'm sure there's plenty of examples like people can counter present. But yeah, so I just find populism, if you're going to decry it and it's over simplifications and whatnot on the right, that you should be a little bit consistent when it comes to the same strategies applied on the left. But there is no doubting that it's effective in terms of like activating people and potentially increasing support. Yeah, no, despite my earlier words, I basically do agree. I think the problem with populism is what this guy is identifying, which is the simplification, you know, forming like an emotionally compelling narrative that isn't grounded in reality.

So if you're a right-wing person and you're arguing for lower immigration, instead of actually providing good reasons for that, you were saying that they are eating the cats and the dogs and you are making out that the recent immigrants are the principle cause of, of all the social problems, crime and stuff today, when those assertions are not factual, then that's just a bad thing. It doesn't make it like completely independent of whether immigration should be higher or lower or whatever. And it's the same thing with Gary. You can be broadly sympathetic or even strongly agree with the idea of getting

a better, more healthy wealth distribution so that it isn't so skewed to ultra-rich people and go, well, the arguments you're putting forward for that are not just simplified approximations of the complex reality, but really just false. And in that case, you're not really helping the argument. No. Well, let's hear Gary's response to the question that was raised. Yeah. I mean, I think it's fair to say I'm a populist.

I don't try to be polarizing. I try not to villainize the rich. I'm a rich person. I'm a member of this group, Patriotic Millionaires, which is a bunch of rich people campaigning. I don't think this is happening because the rich people are evil. You know, so much people are really nice. You know, I met some of them, I hang out with some of them. But look, you know, again, it's the same thing, essentially. So look, I always view this.

I always view this in two ways basically, which is, okay, there's a serious problem. I want to fix it. I'm very confident. If you do not stop the rapid growth in wealth inequality, this will get worse relatively quickly. It's going to be really, really serious. So how do we stop it? There's basically two in my mind, completely separate fights here, which is one like a technical Technocratic what is the actual like concrete tax policy solution to fix this and that's like a technical discussion Which we could have here. It might be a bit boring. We could do it. The other one is how do you actually get the power to do that? because We're not winning it, that? Because we're not winning

it, you know, we're not getting it. Inequality is getting worse. The rich, especially the very rich wealth accumulators in most countries pay almost no tax. Working people pay 50, 60% tax. Donald Trump's just got in, he's reduced tax on the rich. This seems to be the direction of travel. We're losing. We're losing. Things will get worse. You need to win two fights if you want to change the world, which is one, popular support and another implementation. What do you think of that, Chris? Yeah, I think that is actually a good distinction that he makes, right? Between one being that there's the things that you say

in order to create support and generate sympathy and raise awareness. That's political campaigning or conscience raising. And then there is the actual policy implications and technical aspects of it, which can be different than the broad message, right? You might have a specific message, which is like get vaccinated. But the actual rollout of how you're going to provide the vaccines and all these different places and whatnot is like a technocratic logistic matter. Right. So like I do agree with him. There's that distinction there.

And if you present yourself as doing one, I look, I'm campaigning to raise awareness of this issue. I'm not focused on the technocratic solutions or how they'll be implemented. That is one thing, but in the case of Gary, I think he kind of slides between which one it is that he's actually engaged in, but, but here, at least he's acknowledging that distinction. And it sounds like he's firmly saying he's just in the campaigning promotion side of things.

Well, yeah, that's what he says here. But yeah, I think I'm a bit less sympathetic to him or the point here than yourself, because first of all, at the beginning there, he says he doesn't vilify the rich, doesn't sort of flatten it into the simple categories, but he does. In his rhetoric, we've heard him do that many, many times. He always frames this as absolutes. And I'm just doing this. But he does. He, like, as far as I recall, every time he's talked

about it, he's framed it in terms of absolutes, right? There is one distinction that I think he makes, which comes up quite a lot in his content, which is he does clarify that he's not really vilifying the day traders or the, you know, people who are millionaires. It's the billionaires. That's who he's focused on. Like that's, it's not 0.01%, right? Not the, but it does move around. It does move around.

And those distinctions tend to be really important for my second point, because like when it comes to what's pushing up housing affordability, if it's the case that it is in fact, the day traders that are worth a couple of million pounds, that are the ones responsible for pushing up prices, then that's kind of important. Because if you've misdiagnosed the cause, then you're distracting people with a faux solution to the problem rather than actually identifying the thing that needs to happen.

So like you, Chris, I'm sympathetic to a point that's related to what he's saying, but isn't what he's saying, which is that you can, with public messaging, focus on a slightly simplified version of the complicated, technical, messy reality in order to instigate change. And I've said similar things myself about health messaging, for instance. People would be very quick to point at Fauci or any medical authorities if they get some little technical thing wrong or something turns out to be not quite what the best guess was at the time, further evidence comes in. But when you're doing health messaging, you can't give people like 150 page report with lots of caveats and complications, right? You need to give them a

clear guide for action. So there's that version, but it has to be directionally correct in terms of the thing that you are suggesting people do is fundamentally the thing that's going to fix the problem, right? So if you're telling people to wear a mask, get vaccinated, whatever, social distancing or whatever, it may not be the whole story. It's a bit more complicated than that. There's a lot of little details that are not included in that, but it's still basically the solution to the problem. Now, with Gary, he makes this distinction between, well, you can have this very complicated, technocratic discussion about what should be the actual policy things we should be doing.

That's not my job. At the moment, I'm just focused on getting power, get mustering public support and the will to change. But he does, he does have very clear, he's not raising awareness about social inequality. He's saying we should do a wealth tax on the top 0.1%. He's very specific about that. He's very specific that the solution to housing affordability is gonna be taxing these billionaires. Right?

And if that's not the solution, then he's not so... I think he's just not doing... Like before when he said he doesn't vilify the rich or whatever and he's not making it into a black and white binary, I don't think that should be true. And I don't think it's also not true that he's attempting to raise awareness about social inequality. No, his podcast, professors to inform people about the economic reality. And he advocates for very specific policy options with a huge amount of certainty.

It's not like spitballing. Oh, maybe one idea is we could do this. I'm not really sure if that's going to work. He's like super clear. So I just, he's misrepresenting actually what he does because it suits him in this picture. Why in this moment? Yes, I do get that. And actually, almost immediately after when he's presenting the character of his critics, you might hear a little bit about that kind of rhetoric, which he says he doesn't engage in.

But also, I think there's a bad question from Tom in the middle of this. We've been praising Tom, but you're about to hear a relatively bad question from him. So listen to this. So you're playing your first playing the popular support game and then maybe later on, you'll play the... If you don't win that first game, you don't get to play the second game. You the second game you know i'm saying like you know you can have the best front line in the world if you don't have a goalkeeper you're gonna fucking lose you know how far would you go like let's say a new study came out that if you wore a wig and a clown's nose from now on and you know i wouldn't

make you grow i wouldn't do that you know or or lying a bit or you know, listen, I, I, I, I've been accused of lying. I don't lie. Um, I do what I think is, is right. You know, I live in my own conscience. Um, I tried to simplify things and I tried to win the public, but I don't, you know, the thing is at the end of the day, I'm competing against people who tell you the problem is foreigners and immigrants and they're funded by billionaires. Okay. I'm not funded by billionaire. In fact, I would be a much, much richer person if I was not here with you. If I was still in a skyscraper, you know, I don't need to do this.

I don't, I don't make money from this. I'm not paid to be here. So the, like Gary's critics, I mean, he kind of presents there that largely his opponents are essentially the anti-immigrant Nigel Farage. But there are criticisms of Gary from sources that are not, for example, we are not right-wing populists and we are not opposed to wealth taxes, yet we are critical of the way that Gary presents and simplifies things. So we're not funded by billionaires either. We don't have to be here. We're doing

this at a spare time. So yeah. We should be focusing on first we get the power, then we can worry about the messy realities and truth, something, things like that., we've got to get the power. Gary's not getting anything from this. I might question that as well, but yeah, so the one aspect there that's of notice, there's lots of other people with large YouTube followings. This is going to repeatedly come up and they have bigger audiences than Gary. Like Russell Brown's YouTube channel is much

bigger than Gary's. Does that mean that he is therefore politically more powerful than Gary? Like there's a very one-to-one translation with the notion that a YouTube audience translates to political power and I just don't, I hope that isn't the case because if it is, we're screwed because the politics of various people were large YouTube channels. So yeah, it's almost certainly not the case. And I think Gary's response would be, well, we just got to make the channel bigger. If it becomes the absolute biggest channel and everyone in Britain is watching my

YouTube videos every day, then we'll have the political power we need to, to, to, to help the poor. It's just, like you said, it's kind of convenient that that one-to-one correspondence is there. Yes. Well, to be fair to Tom, like that question about the client, I just thought the example was kind of silly, right? Like saying, you know, if you dressed up like a client

and that would meet your message better, would you do it? It's like, because that's just easy for them to say like, no, no, I wouldn't do that. Right. But the more nuanced question was one like, what if lying is more effective? Is that okay then? And the guy says, no, no, no. But like what happened to the mean thing is just get the power. And he did mention like, he's not getting anything from this, right? He doesn't have to be there as per usual. He could be out, you know, drinking pina coladas and Tom does push back. And by the way, Chris, that line about, you know,

this guy's motives are pure, right? He doesn't care about money. He's not trying to, there's no self-interest in this guy whatsoever, because he's already rich, right? He doesn't need to be doing this. Does that remind you of anyone? Matthew McConaughey. we had exactly that line in the Matthew McConaughey episode from, because it's a, it's an effective rhetorical trick there when there is kind of a slight mismatch between what appears to be the motivations of what they would like to project. I like in the McConaughey one, that was the other guy, the self-optimizer guy, Dean Grazio, who was saying like, you know, you kind of hate wouldn't need this.

Can you like, why would he do that? Has any money? Why would he be telling self-help? That makes sense. He definitely does protested too much on that one. Yeah. Well, so Tom does push back on this claim that there's no benefit to Gary from like his YouTube channel and public profile getting bigger.

And listen to this. You probably make good money on from YouTube at this point. To be honest, we don't put ads in the video. Okay. Yeah. So really like until like we had a big explosion in views like this year, but until this year I was not really making hardly anything from the YouTube because I don't do my own shooting. I don't do my own editing. So I've got to

pay for that kind of stuff as well. Obviously if it grows, we will start to make money from it. But you know, I've been doing YouTube for five years and I made money like two months, you know, so like I don't make a lot of make the YouTube. Okay. I mean money in two months seems like Gary's channel. Let me just have a look for up to the information. Okay. 1.4 million followers. He says he doesn't put ads in, but what I presume he means there is that he doesn't have sponsors.

Yes. There's two kinds of ads on YouTube, right? There's the YouTube monetization, where ads appear naturally. And I think our videos that go onto YouTube are monetized, right? So we don't have advertisers either. That's it.

Yeah, but we do make some money from YouTube. Yes. And if you scale that. That too. Multiply that by a large number. Yeah. So it's that kind of hyperbole, Matt, where he's like, you know, I have to pay editors, I have to pay people to film things.

So I don't make any, you know, it's only two months, really, I've possibly made profit. And is that really the case? So you've only made money in the past two months for your 1.4 million follower YouTube channel. Interesting. Interesting. So let me flag my doubt there, but it is clear he could be monetizing more. He could have advertisers and other things. He could be taking it to a Huberman level and have like a hundred different sponsors. Yeah, so give him time. I'll say this, compared to Huberman, he has virtually no amount of time. Yeah, compared to Huberman, yes. Now, we've gone a little while without slamming the

economists, so of course that has to come up. And this is part of why it's important to simplify messages. Yeah. I mean, of course I simplify it. Like everyone in the game of like public relations of economics simplifies. Like you have to simplify. Um, you know, I would love, I would love to be that poindexter sitting in like a room with no window somewhere, drawing up the tax policy that's going to save the world. Where is that room, Thomas? Fairness Foundation.

You know, these guys, look, I know the guys who run Fairness Foundation. They're great guys. I like them. I know the guys from Tax Justice UK. I work with them. Before I did this, I was floating around these spaces. You know? Yeah, I imagine you were involved. But one of the things I want to show you from the website is a policy. You probably know this, but you say annual wealth tax, right? This is your proposal and they put it in this evidence, compelling evidence to emerging evidence

versus low to strong impact. And you're only talking about one of these, right? Is the reason you're only talking about one of these because it's the most simple one for people to understand? Yeah, I focus on the wealth tax because I think the wealth tax is the simplest way to push it. Okay, so you know you're kind of a populist in a sense. Yeah, of course Okay, it's just like my opponents are populists. You don't you don't win the you don't Listen, I went to these universities right and I've been in this think tank space. Yeah, I don't if you spend time in that space It's a bunch of really nice fucking posh people. Okay. Yeah, I guess it's just it's interesting

Isn't it like it's like having your cake and eating it too like Gary's brand is that he deeply understands economics Like it is Yeah, that's right. It's unlike it is but then here He says well, that's not what I do. I'm simplifying things because because I'm really an advocate, but that's not true, right? He says his mission with Gary's economics was about explaining how economics works to the wider public. And he does present himself as someone who

understands economics far better than mainstream economists and academics. And he says he can't, he said he'd love to be that guy, that technical geek in a room somewhere or whatever, but he can't because he's talking to the public. But like we covered in the original episode, there were so many easy to understand, clear and straightforward, yet accurate and detailed economics channels on YouTube. So you can do that. So I don't know, just that's flipping around. Like he just flips around for presenting it one way or the other, depending on what suits him. Well, let me just clarify your point there,

Matt. So when you say he's not accurately describing what he does here, you mean normally he doesn't acknowledge that this is what he's doing. But here he is relatively accurately describing what he does, right? Which is select one point and promote it over all else and acknowledge that that is oversimplifying the situation because he wants to have an easy to spread message. But elsewhere on his channel and in various things, he presents it that he is helping people to understand the economics that economists won't talk about, and which is actually like the most important aspects of economics. So it's not that he's like campaigning and giving a misleading representation for cause. It is that he is, you know, revealing the truths that the academic disciplines don't want you

to know about. That's right. So which is it? Is he giving people the deep, unfiltered, ultra truthful explainer, leveraging all of his experience and all his amazing knowledge from being at all the best universities and being the best trader in the world

to tell you how things really work? Or is he banging on a drum, providing a simplified picture because he's advocating for something good that is reducing wealth inequality? Yeah, it seems like whichever suits him at the time. Schrodinger's Gary. Schrodinger's Gary. Now, let's return a little bit, Matt, to what you were talking about because you suggested that you are YouTube channels that are doing the same thing as Gary, but they're doing it with more nuance.

Is that really the case, Matt? Is anybody actually doing what Gary's doing? They're great guys and you know, like they want to make things better, but they go home to their nice big houses and their nice comfortable families and they don't mind that they lose, you know? I come from a poor family and I know what's happening and I know what's going to happen and I want to fucking win and I want to fucking win, you know? I come from a poor family and I know what's happening. And I know what's gonna happen. And I wanna fucking win. And I wanna fucking win, you know?

We need people on YouTube, obviously. Look at what is happening in the US. Oh, right. Listen, you know as well as I know who's gonna win the next election in this country. And it's the same guys who are gonna win the next election in my country. And it's the same guys who won the last election

in America, okay? And you don't need to be a student of history. Do you think Faraz will win? Yeah, I think he will. I think unless... I don't see anyone in the UK who has a better chance of stopping him than me and my YouTube channel. And that's fucking ridiculous, but that's the truth. Wow, how does that make you feel?

It makes me feel fucking stressed out. That's how it makes me feel. You know, I don't want it to... I say a million times that I don't choose this part of YouTube because I'm not one of those guys, hi guys, I don't like to to, I say a million times, I don't choose this part of YouTube because I'm not one of those guys, hi guys, I don't like to do that, you know, I don't really enjoy the pressure and the stress. I do this because it's an emergency and I know that if we don't have compelling output on social media, then we're not going to fix it. So look, there's a hundred think tanks writing 57 page PDF reports and sending them to politicians how many people are there doing it on YouTube and winning the popular support it's just me and I

don't want it to be just me and personally listen I studied maths I studied economics I had to learn to write a fucking book you know I'm not a fucking writer I'm not a YouTuber I'm a mathematician I'm an economist I want to be in that room writing the tax policy. I don't want to be making videos on YouTube, but nobody's making videos on YouTube. You know what I mean? Yes. The very reluctant YouTuber. It's a motif.

Familiar. Now, his usual approach in, I guess, presenting himself as a very special and unique individual is that he knows more than everyone else. But there, it's the different angle, which is he cares more. The people from the other institutes, these other think tanks, they might be focused on social inequality. That might be on the label.

They might be... They're all rich. They're all rich. And they don't really care if they lose. Only Gary really cares. Yeah. They're all rich. They're all rich. They're all rich. And they don't really care if they lose. Only Gary really cares. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, the other YouTubers as well, you are talking about economics channels, Matt, but our other economics channels as focused as Gary on wealth inequality and apparently opposing Farage. That's good to hear. It would certainly be a shame if it ends up that Gary is co-opted by right-wing people who start using this kind of talking points, including it as part of their... No, Chris. The right's never going to use like anti-elite. That's not what they do. I mean, it's really interesting to listen to him because it's not, and I'm not sort of trying to cut him down or overly criticizing, but I genuinely find his rhetorical maneuvers

quite interesting because I think that is what they are. And we've covered a few of them. And another one of them, when he's facing this pushback here is to make those references, like you said to Nigel Farage, right wing extremists, racists, like that's who he's up against, right? So if you criticize him, there's a way, these guys, they're evil and they're funded by billionaires. And you're criticizing me for cutting a few corners, not following the letter of the law or whatever. So that's

quite an effective approach as well, I think. Yeah. So everybody has their own issue. And well, one point though, Matt, he is right, at least on the point of there's a lot of reports issued by a lot of think tanks and it doesn't ultimately tend to end up like completely switching the political agenda. Now, I might add to that. There's a lot of YouTube channels with a lot of political messaging and that also doesn't tend to completely swing the priorities and policies of politicians either. But what about that?

If you want to have an impact, making a simple message and a kind of anti-elite populist thing, it could work, couldn't it? Well, I mean, I'm very familiar actually with that sort of interplay between academic-y, boffin, technocratic stuff and advocacy, activist stuff, because that's literally where my actual work in gambling sits, Chris, right? It sits there and I give presentations and people come and they're the head of charities or another people that's like literal advocacy

sort of gambling group and whatever, all sorts of people whose role is mainly in that advocacy role. There is a spectrum and there's a legitimate distinction between people like me who do very dry, very technical, very statistical and boring, frankly, stuff that often isn't very compelling in terms of advocating for change. But that material is then referenced and relied upon by people who have more of a policy activist advocacy, however you want to describe it, slang.

So this is entirely normal for that spectrum to exist. But the difference is, is the people that are out there doing advocacy for gambling reform, they are not telling people that researchers like me, we don't care, and it's all bullshit and totally ignoring everything that is in our boring reports. No, they actually listen and they're informed by that and that informs their advocacy. So they know that they're advocating for something that might actually work. So when it comes to gambling, for instance, one of the things we know that's going to work is going to be like loss limits, right?

Carded gambling, where you have mandatory limits basically on what people, on what people spend, right? This is, this is what the research tells us. That's what advocates tend to be advocating for. But in sort of Gary world, right? You'd have one of these advocates out there with a YouTube channel, telling everyone that only they understand gambling problems and addiction and how the big companies are ripping people off.

Um, and which is true, they are then advocating for something that is completely unconnected to what the research says might actually work, misrepresenting the dynamics of everything. So I think he's leveraging or pointing towards a legitimate spectrum, but the analogy doesn't really work because like most of our gurus, he frames himself as a brave, unique source of truth without any regard for anybody else basically. Yeah. Well, there's a section later, I'm not worried to get on to other topics, but he returns

to the kind of populist framing at the end when he's giving this kind of spiel about what's going to happen in this. And I think it's interesting to listen to because he does paint a somewhat dire projection of the future, but you know, with the possibility that, you know, if we make the effort, we can do things, but we're probably going to lose. So I think it's a kind of interesting presentation. So listen to this. I don't do this because I think it's easy. I think the truth is even if I win the PR battle, we will fuck up the implementation. Probably because we don't have enough popular understanding of it. We don't have enough popular support of it.

I don't do this because I think I'm going to win. I don't do this because I think I'm going to lose. That's what I think. And I think the kids of our viewers will live in desperate poverty. That's what I think. That's why I do. I do it because I want to try to win. I want to try to win.

But if enough people understand that it's important, the implementation is important, then I can get the public behind me to stop the government from fucking up the implementation. One thing I want to say is people say it's impossible, but we did it. We did it. 100 years ago, people in this country, in your country, in my country lived in desperate poverty and desperate inequality. And there was no public health care, there was no public education. People lived in shit low quality houses, they ate shit food. But people like my grandparents, probably your grandparents, they fought for something different. And they

demanded something better. They demanded education and health care and food and housing for everybody. And they knew that the way to do that was by taxing the rich. I mean, we had taxes on the rich of 90, 95% in my country, in the US. And that led to a situation where ordinary people could afford good quality housing. So for me there, the salient thing is, you know, he acknowledges that the implementation is important because probably it's going to mess up. It's not even going to work right, even if we get the support for it. But he does say, like, if he can get the support behind him, he can stop the government from fucking up the implementation. So again, like, we better just hope that if Gary gets the support that the government then brings Gary in to, like, make sure the

implementation policies are exactly right. Otherwise, it's probably not going to work. And then he invokes the specter of, well, feudalism and rampant inequality and World War II and bonds and huge wealth taxes and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it's an interesting framing we'll probably lose but there's a 1% chance if you focus on me that we can succeed. Yeah, it's kind of the Jodkowski framing. Like Jodkowski frames it as we're almost certainly all going to die horribly in a

short period of time. But if you listen to me, there's, there's a chance. There's a chance. Right. So I think, I think it falls into that category. I mean, it is interesting what is referencing there, like these very high tax rates that historically existed in the UK. And it's super interesting to me in sort of researching economic stuff,

history of it, Matt, that, you know, in the UK, we think wealth inequality is bad now, and it's inched up a little bit over the last few years, but before that it was declining. None of those levels are even close to pre-World War II, like around 1910, turn of the century sort of area, when the top 1% owned more than 70% of the wealth. Now the top 1% is like, whatever, you can argue about it, but maybe a quarter, maybe 25%, something like that. Incredibly high. And it's true that the kind of socialist policies, if one of the better phrase, in the labor governments,

but also of wartime governments, right? To pay for the incredibly expensive costs. I mean, and you know, yes, that kind of produced more equality, but that was kind of, at least the wartime stuff was a byproduct. The UK became incredibly poorer. There was food rationing for decades after World War II. It was an airway. You had high taxes on high income and what not, and a low tax increases.

But you also had things like conscription. A lot of sacrifices were made. The rich sacrificed a lot of their money. The rest of us might have gotten shot. But the other interesting thing too is he's sort of referencing, I think, very high tax rates in the 1970s, labor governments. And that's true. They had incredibly high tax rates on wealthier people.

But importantly, I think it wasn't a wealth tax, right? It was an income tax, right? Those were income taxes. They were tax rates on investment income. Yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, that was kind of our substantive criticism of Gary. That's just obsessive focus with a wealth tax, the wealth tax, the wealth tax. When, you know, a lot of other sources, including Labour government in the UK, which considered a wealth tax, rejected it, opted for things like this instead.

There's a range of ways to improve wealth inequality apart from... No? Wow, you sound like such a point dexter. I think people can wrap their heads around the difference between income tax and a... I think people can wrap their heads around the difference between income tax and a, I think people can do it. Yeah, well, you know, look at you, assuming that people could handle complexity. That's not what Gary says. You know, say, no, I've got a graph.

You know, Russell Brown doesn't understand graphs. Okay, I don't know the guy, but you know, probably he doesn't, right? You know, like, you know, you know, I could pull out a big fucking graph and slap you on the face with it if I want, you know, you, you're a cameraman, you're not trained to understand economics graphs. You know what I mean? It's yeah, it's absurd. Well, actually, so, you know, Tom has a bit taken back by Gary saying that he's not going

to win. And he asked him like for a follow up, you know, you don't think you're going to win? What's, what's the reason? And the reason will surprise you, Matt. Why do you think you won't win? Because I think they'll, I think, I mean, I think eventually they will probably attack me and they'll take me out and I'll be gone. I think that they will fund a lot these far-right political parties, which are generally trying to reduce taxes on the rich. They have a lot more money. They have a lot more money. They have a lot more. Listen, the history of

human civilization is largely one of desperate inequality. The last 70 years are not normal. Yeah, our grandparents fought for that and they got that. But we're not fighting for it. And if you don't fight for it, you're going to lose it. I'm fighting for it. I'm here in Portugal to encourage Portuguese people to fight for it. If enough of us fight for it, I think we can make it better. I think history shows us that. I think what happened in the second half better. I think history shows us that. I think what happened in the second half of the 20th century shows us that. If we fight for it, we can make it better.

It's possible to tax them. Lower rates of inequality are possible, but only if we fight for it, only if we protect it. Yeah, well, he's right, I think. And in some ways the last 70 years have been exceptional, at least in the UK, in terms of much more reasonable wealth inequality. Like I said, pre-World War I, it was pretty amazing, the wealth concentration. On the other hand, he does say that they're going to take him down, those evil forces. Gary is central to this struggle.

There's a chance that we can avoid this. There's hope. We've done it before. We've, we've had welfare systems, but if they take out Gary, if they take out Gary, what hope do we have? I mean, they'll probably take him out, right? It'll probably be hit bases. They'll probably be decoding the gurus, doing episodes on them. And that is probably what will cause it all to collapse.

What are we doing, Chris? We're supporting the far right anti-immigration racist by even criticizing Gary. I know the mere thought of it. And alongside that, Mike, you know, we're picking on someone that is very tired. You know, they're playing a PR game. Listen, you know, my background, do you think I want to be working in PR? You think that's what I want to my background. You think I want to be working in PR. You think that's what I want to be doing. I don't want to work in fucking PR, but the fucking PR of

the left is fucking shit. So I have to make a YouTube channel to convince the public that you need to tax the rich. You know, it's I don't want to be PR. I don't want I was retired. You know, I could be in the Philippines drinking Pina coladas, you know, I do this because I fucking care about living standards and people don't have to believe that in the end of the day is the ordinary

working people here in Portugal, in the UK that will decide whether to believe me or not. And if they don't believe me, I'll be fucking rich. Either way, it's their kids and their grandkids on the line. Yeah. I'll still go whiplash Chris, because now he, so he's continuing on describing himself as like a PR, he's doing PR for the left, essentially doing straight up activism. But when we first covered Gary, we evaluated him as he presented himself at that time, which is economics explainer.

The guy that understands economics, that truly understands it, which is going to help you understand how economics works. And you can check, you can Google this. This is how his channel is described and this is how he's presented it. But in this interview, that's no longer what he is. He's now just a proper political activist. He's a PR, he's a propagandist for good to try to fight the evil billionaires and the anti-immigrant far-right people, all these people that don't want any kind

of wealth distribution. Yeah, PR from a quantity of PR guy, but he doesn't want to be that, Matt. This is what we forced him to be because nobody else is fucking doing that. Gary has to go on the YouTube thing when he wants to be in the room, working on the numbers, working out the code, but nobody else is fucking doing it, right? This is the problem. And as you said, there is a kind of dual presentation there. At one point, the interviewer Tom presses him a little bit on, you know, the

details about the wealth tax that he's proposing. And this interaction does further emphasize that point of distinction that you're drawing. So let's talk about the tax itself. So your proposal, your simplistic proposal is 1% on everyone and all wealth above 10 million. Yeah. How much would that be in tax revenue per year in the UK? Not enough. Two billion. Not enough. Not enough. I mean, that be in tax revenue per year in the UK? Not enough. Two billion.

Not enough. I mean, to be honest. What's your estimate though? I don't know. If you want the numbers, talk to Aaron Advani, talk to Ben Tippett. I'm not the numbers guy. I'm the YouTube guy.

Oh, but come on. You should know this. Why should I know? Why do I need the numbers? You're saying that interview after interview, video after video, you're saying 1% for the air for wealth above 10 million. Come on.

This is a number you should have in your head. That's just how much Rishi Sunak is worth. So you should know this. Listen, dude, I'm on holiday. Listen, you can go and do the numbers. You can go and do the numbers. It's not going to be enough because these guys make 5% a year. Right?

So if you tax them 1% a year on their 5% a year, then they're going to make 4% a year. It's not going to stop their wealth from growing. I think really, unless you stop the wealth of the super rich from growing, then you're not going to stop the wealth of the middle class and the governments from falling. I think realistically, that's what you need to do. Yeah. So this was the issue that we brought up in our original coverage, Chris. Like I actually, with a little bit of help from an AI, crunched the numbers. It's not very hard to do, right? Because you can guesstimate how many people

have got that much wealth and you can guess, you know, 1% of that. It's not difficult to come up with some ballpark figures. And it was very clear from that sort of back of the envelope calculation that it really wasn't gonna do very much. And Gary never addressed that. He's just been hammering this wealth tax, wealth tax, wealth tax.

That'll fix it. That'll sort it. But now, like, he hasn't like this is his, this is his one job. This is literally his one job. Like, like he is on holiday, man. He's on holiday. I'm just, it's just amazing how, how he hasn't done. Like it was amazing to me initially that he doesn't present any details of this

explaining how it would work and why it's the best answer or explaining how it's the, you know, it's the cause of, you know, increasing house prices, just saying that they're buying up all the houses and it will be fixed by this wealth tax. So now we say, well, it's not going to work. It's not enough. He's not the numbers guy. Yes, you are. You've been, it's completely the opposite of what

he's been saying every episode. He's the brilliant numbers guy, right? He knows more than anyone. That's all the numbers in Craftsman. It's all- Now he's a PR guy. He's a PR guy now. It's very hard to evaluate him, even by his own metric because he's switching it. He's changing the rules.

Look, Matt, let's remind you, Gary and graphs, they don't go together. And I admire your passion, bro. Another critique you get is that you never show any numbers. Like I showed you so many, I showed you more graphs today than maybe you've shown on your whole YouTube channel. Is that because you don't trust the surveys or because it doesn't fit your simplistic view of things? Listen, I'd say, probably you already know this, right? But I'll tell you how these numbers work, all right?

There's right-wing think tanks and there's left-wing think tanks, and they want to get the numbers that they want and they pay the money to the economists and they get the numbers that they want and they pay the money to the economist and they get the numbers that they fucking want. That's how economics works. That's it, Matt. You know, so all the numbers, they're just like kind of, you know, lies, lies and dumb lies, right?

That's statistics you want to one. You can make numbers, say anything you want, Matt. Yeah. So if you could do that, then what are we even talking about? Are we even talking about economics with no numbers? Like, if there's no numbers, like, how do you judge it? Apparently, just go talk to your friends. Well, this is a good point.

Yeah. So, you know, we did cover this in a supplementary material, but for those that haven't heard it, there is some pushback and there is a response from Gary about this. OK, let me ask you a question. How many traders you think are looking at these graphs? I have no idea. That means zero.

These graphs are not for the economists. They're not for the traders. They're for the public. They're bullshit. Traders want to know what's happening. Listen, when I was a trader and I was making, you know, tens of millions of dollars a year for the bank, you think they asked me to bring up graph? No no the reason they back me is because I'm right again and again you want to know evidence go and watch my first video on my channel the covered one june 2020 what does it say

it says that there's going to be a cost of living crisis and inflation crisis a massive increase in prices of the gold price of stock prices of housing prices was I right on every single one of those predictions seems to me yeah yeah the same guy Was I right on every single one of those predictions? Seems to me, yeah. Yeah, the same guy who was right on every single one of his predictions in 2011, was right on every single one of his predictions in 2020. And that's why banks pay me millions of pounds

to manage their money. Now I'm out here telling people for free on YouTube, what's gonna happen. I don't need to do that. I could get paid millions of pounds a year to not tell you, okay? I'm telling you. And okay, if you want me to- That's you. And okay, if you want me to draw a graph, you know, listen, I'll find you 10 geeks to draw a graph. They're bullshit. The graph's a bullshit.

So what are you basing your... what are you basing yourself on? On actual genuine understanding. So, but where does the idea wealth inequality is rising? Where does it come from? From the fact that ordinary families and governments' wealth are collapsing. So it has to be going somewhere. You think it's going somewhere? You think it's disappearing? I'm just curious.

It has to be going somewhere. So that's your main argument. Get a bunch of geeks in the room to look at graphs if that's what you want to do. They'll make a graph for you. Any graph you like. Yeah, well, I think the interviewer is doing a lot of our work for us here. I have all of the same questions for Gary, but let's just follow the logic. First of all, like the graphs that they show the public, they're all bullshit, right? They're just doctored, manufactured bullshit.

But traders, you think traders look at those? They don't look at those. They're looking at the real graphs. They got the good graphs. They got the good graphs in there. But Gary doesn't even need that. He goes on intuition and vibes and he's always right. And now he's telling me-

That's why the banks pay him millions. Now, admittedly, it's been 10 plus years since the banks paid him. But they wouldn't give millions back if he wanted. And they did pay millions after a very complicated legal settlement. But anyway. They paid him millions at one point and they could pay him again. Like he could be, as he said, Matt, it could be sipping Pina coladas, it could be retired, you know. So yes, this is just as we previously covered. Gary has this thing of implying that you can't trust statistics, right?

Because people can play around with figures, which is true. They can selectively cite, you know, different kinds of data and whatnot. But that is not the same thing as saying like nothing is like, you can't believe anything. You're everything is equally as valid because that is the way that people react to, you know, anti vaccine sentiment or climate science, climate science data. Exactly. Any time people want to dismiss any kind of evidence, they they claim basically everything is corrupt. You can't trust any of it. All of the data is bullshit. And so Gary's doing that, right? He's just doing it in service. They seem to do it in Peterson, right? It's so complex, the climate, you can't model all

these people with their graphs. They have uncertainty in those graphs. That's right. But Jordan Peterson, he grocks it. And he doesn't need to worry about any of those details. So I mean, it's very similar. And of course, like whatever Gary is saying, the theme is always the same, right? You can't trust anything. You can't trust any graphs, any data. You can't trust any of the people. They either don't know they're stupid or they don't care, or they're deliberately

lying to you because, because they're making money from deceiving you. Really, it's just Gary. He knows, he's the smartest. He's got the best motivations, though, Chris. That's the key thing. Well, he does, yes, but you might not have the exact numbers to hand, but it doesn't matter, right? Because numbers are bullshit anyway. And when it comes to the issue of right implementation. So as he has noted several times, there might be issues with implementation, right? They might fuck it up, especially if you don't have Gary in a key role, they'll sort it out, but on implementation loopholes. This is the realtor.

And I think actually this is probably what we will get down the line because it will become, it will become increasingly politically unavoidable. You have to tax the rich and politicians will do this. They will fuck up the implementation. And I'm aware of that. I'm aware of that. And I know you're going to hark back to the fact, well, you focus on PR and you're not focusing on implementation. Listen, when we win the PR, I will focus on implementation and I will be there making YouTube saying they're putting loopholes in the bill.

And I will try my best to stop them from putting loopholes in the bill and I will try my best to stop them from putting loopholes in the bill. Listen. Gary, you know, the politicians are probably going to fuck it up even if Gary gets the support for it, but he'll still be there. If he's not in the room, he'll be on YouTube. So once as a PR guy, he's mobilized all of society to campaign for this vague thing. Yes, and defeated Nigel Farage, the first YouTube channel.

Yeah, this vague thing, which there aren't any numbers involved. His Wealth Tax idea, which he talks about every episode, probably is not going to work, but that doesn't matter because he's not in charge of actually figuring out solutions now. He's just the PR guy mobilizing support. Once he has mobilized support and the government's like, okay, right, we're gonna have to respond to this, then Gary's gonna switch to being the numbers guy again and actually gonna stop that.

On YouTube? I don't know. I don't know. He's gonna... He's gonna... Somewhere. Well, he did say there that he was... He'll be there on making YouTube saying they're putting loopholes in the bill. So right. He's going to kick the bus, as honest. Yes.

So he might also be in the room advising the government, but he could also be letting the public know what's going on on his YouTube. So he's multitasking. He's going to be very tired. Very tired. So you get the general theme, Matt. Now the last thing I want to focus on, you know, this is a bit of a rationalist theme podcast, right?

So inevitably there has to be a request to Steelman, your critics position. Steelman, I mean, actually in general, I don't see it as a bad thing to do. It's just the way Lex Friedman kind of employs it is annoying. But like the basic thing about look at someone else's opinion and show that you understand that and can present like the strongest version of it. Fine. Right. Fine. That's not a bad thing. So the host tries to get Gary to steal man. And it's I think what happens is quite telling.

So let's listen to this little exchange. So another little game we play here is steel manning. So in the spirit of showing people at home and in society that your ideas are only as strong as your ability to attack them, I ask people famous for defending a whole bunch of different ideas from, I don't know, people who defend monarchy to people who defend racism. I've had all kinds of people. Yeah. And I asked them to steal man the opposite position to their to their natural position. So I invite you to steal man the idea that wealth tax will not solve this problem. Well, I mean, there's a lot of opposing arguments. There's a lot because there's an awful amount of money that gets paid to people to argue against this. I think it's always really

interesting when I go on like, TV, there's always this debate format. So it's like this is me and there's an opponent. And I'm always going on for free. And I'm always going on against somebody that works for something tank owned by a billionaire paid by a billionaire. So there's an awful lot of money that gets paid to argue against this idea. So do you think the Dan, the guy that was on with you on Diarover CEO, do you think he's funded by someone to go on that debate? I mean, he is himself a very wealthy man, right? Yeah. So he was there. And they cut out where he said, the reason I don't want to

pay tax is because I might have a disabled son one day. And at the same time, the government was slashing support for disabled people across the country. They cut that bit out. He doesn't want to pay tax because he's rich. Good start there, Matt. Have you detected the steel man of his opposing position? Uh, explain that to me. What else is he still running it?

Not so well so far. He's managed to imply that everyone that criticizes him is funded by billionaires. And the guy Tom points out, like you debated with a guy who was a CEO type guy. So like, was he funded by billionaires? He's like, well, no, he's rich. He tells an anecdote about him saying something that looked bad, but it wasn't released on the episode. So not a great start to Steel Money. The opposition to say, well, they're all funded by billionaires. Let's get back to the start. So the host tries to bring things back. Okay, well, let's take that for granted, but let's let's get back to the scene, buddy Okay But in that case so you're talking more about when you go on TV and stuff

You think the people who they choose for your opponents on TV they're funded They work for these think tanks, the IEA, these like billionaire, you know, these billionaire funded think tanks Yeah, mostly or or they are directly rich people themselves or they or they work for the rich Listen, you know, there's two ways to be a journalist. You sell news to the public or you sell the public to the rich. Okay. Never heard that. And you can guess when the public's getting poorer and the rich are getting richer, which one of those things is becoming more profitable?

You know, your viewers can think about that. Okay. So continuing along the same theme. Yeah. All of the people who debates are corrupt in some way. Can't be trusted. The journalists as well. It's really quite similar to the playbook of the right-wing gurus. Nobody likes journalists. I feel sorry for journalists.

They're always in the pay of the other side, aren't they? Journalists and the blood-sucking lawyers, those are people, you know, the constant villains. But so to keep track, his critics are funded by billionaires or they themselves are billionaires or they're corrupt journalists. Okay. That's the steel man so far. He may not understand what steel mining is. Yeah. he think that could be the issue? Yeah, so here Tom attempts to like get a back up track. So now, you were steelmaning wealth tax doesn't solve this problem. Well, because there's a number of arguments. One is it's bad for the economy.

I mean, I don't even think there's any point arguing against that. I think it's really, really clear that rapidly increasing inequality is bad for the economy I think living standards are collapsing living standards will continue to collapse I mean you can see in front of your eyes if you think this is working then you're either rich or blind okay so let's let's do this a different way because you're but there's another argument against which is make make sure if you make all your your arguments do the steel man till the end and then pick on yourself oh so you want me to list up the arguments against yeah Yeah, like pretend you're someone

manifesting the problems with wealth tax and why it won't solve this. So argument one against is like, if rich people are magic, you kind of made it, rich people are magic, rich people are our god, if you tax them, we are taxing our god, all good economic comes from rich people,

we kind of tax them, we shouldn't tax them. It's kind of more of a moral, religious argument, but it's been going back a long time and it's very popular. Do not tax rich people because rich people are God. That's number one. So he still was having trouble there with the concept of Steele-Vardy, but when he got round to that, he got the first argument that people make against his position is we can't tax rich people, they're gods. That's the number one argument that comes up is like don't tax rich people, they're gods, right?

He's definitely got a grip of the steel mining. Yeah, he does not. He does not have a grip of the steel mining. Yeah, he does not. He does not have a grip on it. Oh, well, OK. Does he does he do any more steel mining? Is this is the sit for the steel mining? Well, no, there's there is a bit and he does get the better argument here. He devotes like an entire line

to a better argument against it. But this is the second part of the Steve Manning. Second one is do not tax rich people because they are powerful and they will leave. This is a very popular one. If you tax rich people, they will leave. Are there any others? Are there any others? Don't tax them because we need them. Do you think it could raise inequality? Oh, so there's another one, which to be honest doesn't get mentioned much, which I think is actually more important. Because I can make a causal I can

There's another couple of things right which is one basically the implementation will be shit And I think this is actually to be honest. This is probably actually the most realistic implementation be shit. So we always remember about Probably more than 10 years ago now The British conservative government, which is our center right political party, they brought in like an extra tax on the buying of second homes. And I was interested in this because it was surprising because they're normally like a don't tax the rich party. It's conservative. Yeah. So I looked into it and there was a loophole that said if you buy seven or more at once, you don't have to pay. It's extra tax.

Oh, I saw that, man. That's unbelievable. How did they justify that? That's the end. That's the end of the story. To recount them, the rich people are gods. That's number one. So we can't tax them. Second, we shouldn't tax them because they're too powerful and they'll leave. Right. That is one that people make at least more than the first one. But yeah, but it only got mentioned as like a one line. No response there. And then don't tax them because we need them. That was the first one. Then he got the implementation. And Tom said, what about the case

that you could meet that it will actually increase inequality? There might be some unintended causal things that you could game out where it leads to increased inequality. And he said, yeah, you could do that. But it didn't go on. Then he went on to the conservatives having loopholes and stuff, right? Yeah, yeah. I don't know what the guy was referring to in terms of that, somehow

creating more inequality. But you know, I mean, he did get there in the end, to some extent, Chris. So first of all, it is it is a decent rejoinder to say that, you know, wealthy people will basically relocate to lower tax jurisdictions in the same way that corporations do. Yes. As an Irishman, you should be well aware of this. The Irish economy runs on... I guess that's the Southern Irish economy. You know, like Melbourne, I would just... Correct, the Celtic tiger.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's that. The other one, you know, the other one where he's on the right track is, it's a decent counter-argument, which is that, you know, you're removing the incentive for rich people to try to make more money, you know, or even to become, you know, wealth beyond a certain point, right? So that's going to discourage investment and all of the things that trying to make money does, right, presumably,

according to economic theory in terms of investing money. The other fair one was that implementation. The information is too hard. And this is the thing that we raised in our original coverage. The problem with the wealth tax is that wealth, it's not something that is recorded, reported necessarily. Now some countries do do it. There are a couple of Nordic countries which require people to actually report their wealth and so on. But it's not something that governments generally know about and you can store your wealth in all kinds of instruments, like entities, financial entities that can be located overseas and all kinds of complex tax arrangements. So

you can kind of distance yourself from your wealth, you know what I mean, while still sort of having indirect control over it and still receiving income from it. So it is problematic and a lot more problematic, for instance, than property taxes. Because property taxes, the government knows exactly where all the property is, it's all registered, they know who owns it.

You can't take your property and take it to Ireland. And you know, a lot of wealth, a huge amount of wealth, is stored up in property, both, not just Delta Rich, but amongst everyone who owns stuff, right? A lot of people keep their wealth in property. So this is the thing that Gary never really talked about on his podcast, which is that there are other taxes which can act to redistribute wealth that are much more feasible. So anyway, I'm just defending him here, basically, which is that there are other taxes which can act to redistribute wealth that are much more feasible. So anyway, I'm just defending him here basically, which is that you're not really

like that. I think he is. He is getting there in terms of steelmanning. Like he's not explaining it much, but I think he's hinting at a genuine objections to his proposal. Yeah, but that's piss poor, Matt. Like the thing is, yes, he mentioned eventually with like prompting got to two or three objections, which people do raise, but he, he spent like probably maximum two minutes on it, whereas his anecdote at the start about the guy on diary of the CEO is longer, right? More impassioned.

And like the whole point is just model. Like it wasn't endorse it. It was just what do your critics say? And it's, it obviously was like difficult for him to get to that. And he wants to quickly move on. But like, that shouldn't be hard. You know, you can take the position of the people that are arguing against you Present the charitably and say this is what people will say and you know They have this point in this point and this sounds convincing However, I think this is wrong right then we can get into why that is but like for lots of the gurus You should be able to do that. Yeah, it's really yeah people some characters seem to really struggle like if I was asked to say steel man some characters seem to really struggle. Like if I was asked to, say, steel man,

you know, like an anti-climate action, people would say we shouldn't do anything about climate change or it's not real or whatever, then I could steel man that. It'd be harder to steel man the people that are straight up denialists sympathetically, right, because they are disregarding the data. But you know, people can make arguments,

like the best arguments against doing something about it is that it's incredibly expensive. Incredibly expensive. And I don't agree, and I've got lots of arguments against that. But that is probably the best argument they've got. You can identify that. You can still man the arguments for the lab leak. I could still man the arguments for people that don't like vaccinations. It's not

that hard. No, no, but it's that point. It would be like you ask me, well, what does Gary present himself as? And me going, oh, he presents himself as the fucking savior of the world. He's the one that's going to do it. And they're like, no, no, no. That's our critique of what he's doing, right? Like what Gary's self-presentation is, that he's one guy who cares a lot about the public and wealth inequality. And, you know, he's seen it in his daily life and he's he's doing what he can to try and address it and he's even sacrificing his time, his reputation. He's willing to take a tax from media and billionaires just on the off chance that he'll be able to make an impact on people's daily lives.

So that's Gary's health presentation, right? It doesn't mean I have to endorse it to explain how he presents himself. So that's the bit where like, I mean, and just that the first effort is So that's the bit where like, I mean, and just that the first effort is the mean argument is like rich people are gods. And like, I mean, I guess some people might have evoked that there is like, you know, Musk's stance and whatnot, but that's not the mean criticism of Gary's position that I've seen, you know, in general, like the mean criticism is it's overly simplistic. Yeah, that's, that's the kind of thing. So anyway, I just think he did a bad job at that.

And it is somewhat telling when you're like the whole concept of presenting a strong opinion of your opponent's criticism is an F, Matt, through you. So yeah, yeah, agreed. Now, no, the very last thing, Matt, the last bit, and you can move into charitable space here. Some people will see this as like a low blow, not fair. The very end of the interview is a kind of, like people will see this as a gotcha question, but see what you think.

I know you love to say you're not Mother Teresa, not Maganda, you say that a lot, but do you think there's a moral position which is that if you have a lot of wealth and giving away a bit of your money will not change your quality of life, that it's morally correct to give some of that money away to someone who will now be able to feed their kids because of it? To be honest, no, not really. I mean, of course, like if you do do that, that's a good thing. And you should be proud of doing that. Um, but I don't really get involved in people's lives. Like, I don't know, but you are politics is ethics applied to the masses.

Right. And so why do you want, why do you want to tax the wealth? Because you think it's unfair to people who can't feed their kids. Um, I don't want Europe to fall into mass widespread poverty. I don't want to live in this Dickensian time. You know, I don't, you've been to Mozambique, right? So you've been to countries that have serious poverty. I'm not an expert on Mozambique, but I guess there's a lot of poverty there.

Um, that's one of the poorest in the world. Yeah, listen. And that kind of poverty existed here in Europe, not that long ago. Um, I don't want to live that. So this is the, you know, the of critique, like you're a rich person, like why don't you help out if you're going to advocate for equitable distribution of wealth? And I would say just personally here that so far, I think Gary's response is very decent, right? Which is he's not telling people, other people to give away their money and donate things.

Like he's arguing for the need for a change to tax or this kind of thing. Right. Like it's not inconsistent to hold those two positions. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think so too. You can be advocating for what he's advocating for and not be some sort of saint who actually is

so good that they donate a large proportion of their money because they have millions. You can do both things. Probably everyone should be donating more money to charity than they are above a certain income threshold, anyone who's relatively comfortable. So probably everyone falls short of that bar. So I think it's a bit of a difficult question. Yeah, it is a difficult question, but so it continues. And I think to be fair here, Tom makes the question more reasonable.

So listen to the way he nuances it. I think it's important that someone like you exists. Let me just make that clear. But the reason I ask is because final critique, then I'll leave you alone. You should, I think for someone like me, your message would be stronger if you would be the change you want to see in the world in that sense, because I've heard you saying that you don't give away any of the revenue of your book, you're not into charity, you're not really into helping people around you.

And don't you think it would make your message a bit stronger if, let's say, you don't need the money, 50% of your book's revenue went towards helping people eat their homes? Yeah, you know, it might be, but like, it's just, to be honest, this kind of gesture politics is just not really my instinct. You know. It's more alignment, like with, with your message. What's, you know, my alignment, listen, my alignment is I tell the public what's happening,

you know, and I get up every day and I make a video, I work hard at it, I think a lot about it. You know, I have to make my decision about how much to give and how much to keep, you know, and I've decided to give basically all of my time and energy. And to be honest, if I'm being totally honest with you, I think if anything, I probably work too hard. And I think if anything, I'm thinking about giving less money or less time, less time, less energy. If you're somewhere between like I guess your your wealth your net worth is somewhere between 10 and 100 million let's just say you're in like

worldwide you're in the point zero zero zero zero one percent right of the wealthiest. Well I don't think my worth is not 10 million. No but somewhere between 10 and 100 no? No no no no. Okay somewhere between five and ten. Listen I made enough money. It doesn't matter you still. I made enough money that I never have to work again. And ever since then, I've dedicated all of my time and energy to fixing this problem. What about that? I mean, is he obligated to make a bunch of charitable donations? I accept that there is a disconnect between his personal behavior and his message.

I mean, and he's constantly bragging about how he is one of the ultra rich that he's suggesting should have wealth redistributed away from them. So that is, that is a point that is a disconnect, but I mean, I could still conceive of a person that was pro-social enough to want to donate a fair chunk of their time to advocating for something without actually being a saint that actually cares so much that they'll actually disadvantage themselves materially. But I guess the thing that I think that makes this like a better question than people will give it credit is because he's not saying donate like half of your wealth or or nobody should listen to you. Right. What he's saying is like, given everything you say,

wouldn't it be just like a signal to people of your government? If you did something like donate 50 percent of the income of your book. Right. He's not even talking about your wealth because you're constantly saying, I don't need the money. I've already earned more than I need. So like the money doesn't mean anything, right? You say the YouTube revenue, they're not earning very much. So you could easily like set up a, you know, a Gary inequality charity, right? And it's just that bit where it's kind of like, then he moves on to, okay, well, like how much, you know, how much wealth do you have between 10 and 100 million? Right? Like, you know,

are you in there? And then Gary's like, no, no, no, I'm not that. I'm not that. And he's like, well, like how much, you know, how much wealth do you have between 10 and 100 million? Right? Like, you know, are you in there? And then Gary's like, no, no, no, I'm not that, I'm not that. And he's like, well, more than five. And, you know, clearly Gary doesn't want to discuss his general wealth, but he's, he's also constantly invoking that he's a millionaire, right? He's part of this. So like, when it comes down to it, he doesn't really want to discuss those things. And he regards it as like, look, don't need money. Sure, whatever. But I'm I'm donating time. And if anything, I have to be too much time. And I think those aspects kind of show this is a sensitive spot. Right. Like, well, it's well, I think it all accumulates.

Right. It is it is it is something, as you said, like the bragging about the wealth, the fact that, you know, he does retain profits from his advocacy activities. And at the same time, a lot of his discourse is incredibly centered around himself, around growing his brand, growing his channel, and so on. So, you know, none of those things are, I guess, clinches. But when you start putting all of this stuff together and the fact that he hasn't seemed to have thought through any of the specifics or made any like strong attempts to sort of realize this, like make this more concrete, uh, rather than just sort of easy satisfying YouTube content.

You know, it, it, it does, it does, it does sort of increase one's skepticism. Yeah. Well, it gets, it's just like, you know, I just remember like Hassan did a donation, the ideology, like one day thing where he donated the proceeds to. Yeah. But that got me the coverage. Huge, huge, right? So like, it's kind of like donating some proceeds from something. If you're over wealthy, it isn't a huge thing to do. Right. Like, so that's, that's kind of thing.

But the guy is, you know, I think just the point the guy Tom is making is like, you know, if you're talking about PR being the important thing and all this kind of stuff, like wouldn't these kinds of things, you know, help to move the needle for some people and yeah, I think that's the thing. about PR being the important thing and all this kind of stuff. Like, wouldn't these kinds of things, you know, help to move the needle for some people? And yeah, and you can argue either way, but I think his question is better than like, you need to donate all your money or else, like your arguments are crap. Cause that's not what he's saying. He's talking about. I understand. Yeah. Yeah. No, and he mentions the word alignment, you know, and it is sort of,

it would make his his behavior a bit more aligned with the message because, because currently his behavior seems very much aligned towards enhancing Gary in one way or shape or form. And which was, which would be totally in keeping with his previous career, which was also about making a lot of money, you know, working in the city, becoming rich, right? Enhancing Gary. And so one can't help but suspect that he's continuing with this since all signs sort of point that way. Um,

except though people, I think the issue is like the people, as we know from the coverage here, when the issue that you're focused on, like when the thing is making money for yourself on FX trading, there's a clear, like it's me benefiting, right? But when the thing is increasing a YouTube channel where you earn money, but you're talking about inequality, then things get muddled. Yeah. And same with this book, like he, even though you read the book and you've told us it is largely self-aggrandizing autobiography. But the way Gary presents it is that book is part of his advocacy campaign.

He wrote the book in order to try to bring about- He didn't want to write the book. He didn't want to write the book. That's right. He didn't want to, but he did it to whatever. So, but he's, you know, anyway. Yeah, sorry. It is a little bit like the climate change activists,

investing in oil drilling and flying around in a flyer jet. I mean, there is a congruence thing. Right. Yes. Well, last clip, Matt, because there is a rejoinder that Gary offers maybe to us and to Tom and to everyone I know. And I just think it honestly, I come out here every day. I make a video.

Do you know what the most common comment I get on my videos? Tell me how to make money. Tell me how to make money and I wake up every day and I tell people how to stop this problem and then I come on a show like this and they said, but what about money? Give me some money. Why why money? Listen, I'm fucking sick of money and I know that I have the luxury to

say that, you know, can we just fix the fucking problem? And you know I write a book talking about how society is gonna collapse and people say he didn't make that much money Like for fuck's sake you know it's just it's this money obsession that's killing our kids This money obsession turns the world into squid game, but all we do is all I want to make more money I want to make more money. I want to make more money than him listen Society's fucking collapsing and if people cannot stop thinking about their fucking money to stop society from collapsing, then they won't have anything. You know, so I just, you know, there's too much focus on money and not enough on you. Let them attack me. Gary, why don't you give us your money? Why don't you give us more

money? I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, which is telling the public the truth, educating the public, giving them the information that they need to fix this problem. And if they want my money, they can keep asking and I'll keep giving them information because that's what I think they need. All right, Gary. All right, Gary. Yeah, maybe people keep asking him how to make money because he's always talking about he's a fucking genius and making money. He's always bragging about how much money he's got. But then why are people always talking about money? I don't get it.

I don't get it either, Chris. I know, I know. I don't, you know, if you look at the comments on the Gary's video, I'm not sure that that is the most common message. No. But maybe he sees stuff that we don't see, right? That's it. And yeah, you know, there is something to be mad just that last thing with the rhetoric, you know, the cloaking of like, you, you guys all obsessed for money. The world rolls about money. You're all talking about money. Like, your thing is a wealth tax. And know that this guy is asking you directly about like how much you earn. Yeah. And his whole career was about making money until he made however

many million pounds and he's constantly bragging about it. But all the rest of you, you're all you're all obsessed with money. Come on, Gary. That's a beverage. Yeah. And then it's all the tax. You all want my money, but I'm going to keep, you know, I'll keep giving myself. I'll keep giving the information. Do I keep my money? I'm going to keep my money. Thank you very much very much I'm gonna keep the money from the YouTube and the

book and so on and whatever and I'm gonna give you information because that's what you need but that's the thing though I've got to keep coming back to it because he doesn't our main critique in our original episode was that the information in his podcast is incredibly thin. That is just a statement of fact. I'm sorry. He's a PR gamer. He's not there. Now he's a PR guy. I feel like I'm, I feel like I'm eating crazy pills because I'm the victim of a bait and switch because, because we cover secular gurus, right? We, we, we cover, we cover intellectuals. We cover, yeah, mainly people with intellectual pretensions who are trading on this special

knowledge that they've got which they are supposedly unveiling to people and you know position themselves as Soul source of truth relative to the corrupt institutions of journalists and so on and that is how Gary Presents himself normally. All right, that's how his podcast presents himself as that kind of guy and it suits him presents himself as that kind of guy. And it suits him in this interview to suddenly, I guess because he's getting asked difficult questions or like, what are the details? What are the numbers?

Hang on, this doesn't really, this part doesn't, this seems inconsistent. This doesn't make, can we go with that? And you know, now he's a PR guy. So he doesn't need to answer any of those questions. I'm sorry. Well, you know, I'll round up by saying, if you followed us through this long episode, I'm sorry. Well, you know, I'll round up by saying if you followed us through this long episode, I'm sorry, but you know, this is what happens when people say you didn't cover the argument

that he made. This is the capital that you wish for. But so Gary throughout this episode has said you can't trust academics. You can't trust politicians. You can't trust politicians. You can't trust the media. You can't trust the elites. You can't trust the his coworkers. Don't forget the graphs. You can't trust statistics. Oh, and you can't trust think tanks, sorry, including charitable think tanks about inequality, right? Because they're also they're well intentioned, but they're kind of crap.

So what can you trust? Well, fortunately, Gary has a YouTube channel where you can't trust that because you know that he has the best intentions because he tells you that he has the best intentions. And you know he has the best intuitions and can predict things perfectly because because he went the LSE and he tells you constantly. And yeah, and you know that it can't be anything other than the best intentions because he's already rich.

He's keeping his money. Thank you very much. But he's already rich, doesn't care about making more money. If he makes more money, that's incidental. What he cares about is making society a better place. And the way to do that is to grow his YouTube channel. Because that's that's the only way or I think his YouTube channel is the way we're going to muster up public support that's going to pressure

the government. And then when the government inevitably sort of fucks up the implementation, the YouTube channel is going to be where Gary is going to hold them to hold their feet to fire and save our children because our children are fucked unless Gary succeeds in this mission, Chris. Yeah, he is the watcher on the wall. That's the message that you get. And a rhetorical thing that we hear a lot among Stuller gurus is the criticisms, they will come from me. They will. People are going to critique me. But when they do criticisms, they will come from me. They will, right? People are gonna critique me. But when they do that, they're actually trying to steal from you, harm your children,

and they are taking down one of your only defenders who's actually motivated to try and help you little people. Right? And like, come on, come on, you can see. And you don't need to do any of that in order to make Gary's argument. No, you can advocate for wealth redistribution, for reducing wealth inequality without doing any of those things. It can be done. You don't have to do any of that. You know, you can actually, especially with Gary's credentials

and all of the free time he's got, because this is his one job, it seems, I think you can actually provide a little bit of detail. You know, you can actually just do basic checks of like how much money, like a 1% wealth tax, which you've been talking about forever, will bring in. Maybe there are some other taxes you should be advocating for.

You know, what you can actually substantiate claims like housing's unaffordable because the rich people are buying up all the houses because they seem on the face of it incredibly flawed. So, you know, if your job is to be the economics understander and the person that is providing information to the people, then you could do a better job of it as well. That's all. Well, I, yeah. And I also think the notion that like, you know, basically, I mean, if you want to make the case that like media and think tanks have all got this wrong and like,

everybody is kind of looking down on the knowledge of, you know, the regular people. Maybe you can credit the regular people and the general audience that they can handle some complexity to explanations. You don't need to like dumb it down to, there's a single thing that will work and this is the only solution and whatnot. That seems to me to be like discrediting

the ability of the audience to handle complexity. I do, however, think that Gary's right in terms of that is a much more appealing approach to say that there are the evil elites out there. People are trying to steal your money. They're trying to hurt your friends. The populist playbook works. So he actually is correct in terms of if you want to get a more successful YouTube and you want to get a bigger channel, if you want to make a populist political movement, these kinds of messages resonate more as we've seen. Yeah, that's exactly right. So populist, the populist playbook does work in terms of garnering support amongst the disgruntled populace for the leader. But where they fall down, of course, is in those simplistic policies.

You don't have to look very far on the right to see all kinds of populist movements in Australia, UK, and the United States. And they almost always are tapping into legitimate grievances of some kind or another, but they point the finger at the wrong causes, right? They're usually a simple cause and a simple fix. And so you're, and even on the left, like I remember like populist movements that were for good things, like saving the environment, would focus on something like not using a plastic bag at the supermarket, you know what I mean?

Yeah. Whereas there are like vastly more important things, but everyone's feeling good because they got a bag. You know, so I do have an issue. I think it's not enough to say, oh, you know, populism works because it's emotive and it's a good hook and it gets everyone on board because they also fizzle out very quickly because they don't often don't achieve anything. Or if they do achieve something, they achieve the wrong thing because they are not actually focused on the correct causes. So if you really care about housing in affordability, and I do actually, right.

It's a big problem in Australia. I'm concerned about my kids being able to, you know, do things like get settled in a house, um, just, just like a lot of parents in Australia, I'm concerned about my kids being able to do things like get settled in a house, just like a lot of parents in Australia, then you have to focus on what are the real causes. And I'm far from convinced that someone like Gary is pointing us towards them, but it's an interesting topic, economics and the causes of things. All right. All right. Now, there we go, Matt.

Well, we've we've reached this epic Gary. Are we done with Gary now? We should discreetly close. We'll exit. We'll exit that Gary discourse. I mean, it might pop up on supplementary materials, but Gary, if you're listening, this is us out of the Gary game. All right.

You're welcome to your right to response if you want to come on. We'll be happy to discuss the details of our criticism in person. But yeah, I think we've covered Gary. I'll have a lot of economics questions for Gary. If you come. Gary, sorry. We're going it. I'll have a lot of economics questions for Gary Gary sorry, we're good So graphs and numbers Yeah, yeah

so there we go into the rear-view mirror goes Gary and I apologize my because it's my fault for Getting so many clips from this episode, but you know know, it happens from time to time, right? You get excited. You get excited. You get too hyper. And yeah, that's what happens. There will be two versions of this. So if you're hearing this on the main feed, you're hearing the director's cut.

Oh, sorry, the opposite one. The mainstream release, right? This is going to be way out of the line. If you're hearing this on the Patreon, congratulations, you viewed it for the director's cut, which is probably way much longer than it should be. But there we go. Now, Matt, the very last thing, we need to do this. Okay. I've got a system and I have got a list of people that I haven't shouted out who deserve a shout out. They've been waiting or ignored for too long. And finally, Matt, their day has come.

So with the help of my new and improved list, allow me to thank some of our kind patrons, if you would. So conspiracy hypothesizers, Matt, we have Becca Thompson, Chris and Matt slash Fiction Writers Group, Daniel Kunz, Darren Ferrocano, Gagère. I think some of this is beautiful names, but nonetheless, Cara, Lamine Kane, Leonard Kuipers, Medmat123, Michael Horn-Green, Sam Hall, DG Waring, and Shunik Sokhar. They are all conspiracy hypothesizers, and they deserve recognition, Matt, because I

have not tried them out for far too long. So there we go. Thank you one and all. Thank you very much. I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions and they've all circulated this list of correct answers. I wasn't at this conference. This kind of shit makes me think, man. It's almost like someone is being paid.

Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Yes, yes. No. Revolutionary geniuses, Mark. conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Yes, yes. No revolutionary geniuses, Matt. The mid tier able to access the code in academia, the real precious resource. It's a sweet spot Chris, their min maxing. That's the juicy part of the curve.

Yeah, and they've got names which are all easy to pronounce. So good job to them there. We have Chris Miles, Curious George, who challenged us not to think about a monkey when we heard his name. Hope you didn't Matt. Eric Stern, Jack with three A's, Karina, reiterative number four, and Tommy Brooks. That is our revolutionary geniuses for today. Pickings a little bit slimmer there Chris. Well, there we go. That's fine. I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time. And it is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm. I'm someone who's a true polymath, I'm all over the place.

But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption. Now that's just a guess and it could easily be wrong. But it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. Okay, well last month, Galaxy brain gurus, those that really, really, really like us, and so forth, the show intangible ways everyone's contribution is tangible, but theirs is just slightly larger. So more tangible. What? Yeah, that's it.

But there we have Carina's Chunky Lover 676 7 6 9 5. Jake Lawrence, Kyle Dunn. Good, good old commentators there on the Patreon. Ogelli also gets, okay. And Paul BFB. Brilliant. They're legends. Legends. They are legends. Legends. Their tales will be told in the stars for eons to come. So thank you, one and all.

We tried to warn people. Yeah. Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything. Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense. I have no tribe. I'm in exile. Think again, sunshine.

Yeah. Michael O'Fallon. You remember him, Matt? You remember the good old Michael O'Fallon? I checked in on him again, you know, once or twice. How is he doing? Yeah, same old, same old. He's still working against... What's he against? The globalists.

He's against the globalists. The globalists and the work Marx has done. He's working away. He's got his own mission. They've all got a mission. They're all fighting against the forces of darkness. They are. They are.

Different definitions of who the dark people are. You worked very hard today. I'm just going to give you a little treat to end with. You are still stuck in the fog of cognitive dissonance somewhere between 2017 you and early 2020 you. And ladies and gentlemen, it is time to snap out of it. You've probably figured out that I have been 2021 me publicly for about seven years now, going way back. 2021 has been my marker. It's when I knew that things would drastically change. I knew that 2020 would lead up to it, but I knew that 2021 was the target. Privately, to specific leaders and friends, I have been 2030 me for at least five to six years. That

is why Dr. James White is saying the things that he is saying right now, especially on Twitter and on his podcast. That brings back very fond memories. Does anyone else, does it have this effect on everyone where you're sort of mentally trying to construct like a timeline? It's a complex time travel story, right? I was 20 up to 21 me for seven years, but privately, 20, 30, 40, 45 years. But I was 20, 30 me from 2017 to 2020.

It does feel a little bit like that was content made in 2021, where like it's not that important of a year. Like I wonder is he now still referring to 2021, him as the most important version of himself. Like, yeah. Yeah, we did an update on where he's, he's the different temporarily shifted versions of himself are at this point. So look, I think that's, look think that's an invitation for those of you

who have just joined us or just somewhat recently, go back and explore the back catalog. There's a goldmine there. Maybe not today, maybe you've listened enough today. You have a break. You have a break. Too much of a good thing can be unhealthy. That's right. As we know after listening to more Gary Gary content.

So yeah, well, that's it, Matt. Thank you for your hard work in the content minds. Let's retire to our hobbit holes for the evening and let Gary rest. He's very tired. We're all tired. We're all tired. We're all tired. Yeah. We're all tired. Okay, thank you Chris. Goodbye Gary. Good luck. Yeah. All right. Bye bye. Bye bye. I'm going to be a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a

little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a You