The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 145. Gary Stevenson: Masculinity, Money, and the Myth of Meritocracy (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 27, 2025

How did Gary become a multimillionaire by the age of 25? How big a difference can a wealth tax make on regular people's lives? Have centrist politics failed on the economy? Rory and Alastair are joined by author of The Trading Game, Gary Stevenson, to answer all these questions and more. Visit HP.com/politics to find out more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics  Twitter: @RestIsPolitics  Email: [e-mail] Social Producer: Celine Charles  Assistant Producer: Alice Horrell Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to The Restis Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alastair Campbell. So here we are, Part 2, Gary Stevenson. And last episode very much about his kind of early life and his time as a trader. And I guess we're going to dig a bit deeper now into his economic worldview. And also, given this is the rest of its politics, a lot of politics too. Listen, I'm an economist, okay. Three years at LSC, mass and economics.

Two years at Oxford, economics. Five, six years in the city predicting on the future of the economy. I've made millions of pounds betting on the collapse of the economy. I made the enormous amount of money bet on the collapse of the economy after COVID. I can tell you now with absolute certainty, and I would like you to remember this because I know I do things like this. And people go home and they say, oh, that guy, young guy, he's passionate, he's a bit naive. Remember this because I will be correct.

In five years' time, the economy, in terms of living standards for ordinary people will be massively worse than it is now. I guarantee you that. I guarantee you that. And you're defining that in terms of median incomes or GDP? Living standards. Because you can't look at just median income when what's going to happen. prices are going to go.

So if you say tax wealth not work, yeah, right, let's say that happens. Yeah. Let's say that the current Labor government, you know, down the track a bit, think,

okay, we're just going to have to swallow very, very hard, we're not going to be able to build the sort of public service we want on the back of the current economy. Therefore,

we're going to have to go down this wealth tax route. Yeah. How big a difference can that actually make? So when you talk about, you know, that's your line,

tax wealth not work. But maybe we need to be even more radical than that and think about a total reshaping of the economy. And how does that even begin? Yeah, I mean, listen, this is going to get much, much worse very, very quickly. You know, you and I are sitting on the Titanic and the iceberg is over there and you've just asked me, you know, maybe we need to think about whether boats are the best way to cross the Atlantic. And that's a good question. Like, you know, there are probably big things we could change. if you don't change this very very very quickly living standards are going to fall very very quickly and the trade is he can get richer yeah yeah definitely and farraja win the next election he will also fail on the economy and you know labor will get back in they'll fail on the economy and what will

follow farrage will be something further right and can you take lessons back who aren't following you all the time yeah um to why that's the case what are the three or four main reasons why that's going to happen the most the clearest way to explain this is imagine you are a billionaire you have a wealth of one billion pounds what people often don't realize is is the passive income that generates. So if you have a wealth of one billion pounds, you will have a passive income of something like 50 million pounds a year. That's from your wealth, income from your wealth.

So doing nothing. Yeah, that's not from your work. Four million pounds a month. So a million pounds a week. You have a passive income of a million pounds a week. Imagine you are that person. And bear in mind, there are people who are much, much richer than that.

You have a passive income of one million pounds a week. How much do you spend in a week? Not a lot. You know, I massively struggled to spend 10,000 pounds a week. So you spend 10,000 pounds a week. You live like the queen. And then you have 990,000 pounds a week

to, invest. The problem is the economy is not significantly growing. So the only thing you can do is buy existing assets. So what happens is these very wealthy people, they basically have no choice but to buy up existing assets from the middle class, from the government. Become richer. These groups cannot compete.

And what you see is the loss of middle class wealth holding. And the reason that living standards have been good in the West for the last 70 years is because we have had an unusually wealth holding middle class. That is not the norm internationally. That is not the norm historically. We will lose that. It is as simple as that. These guys, if you

Once they get to a certain level of wealth, they have no choice but to rapidly expand their wealth, which means the loss of wealth. And this is why you're seeing, look at government wealth. This is why middle class people can't afford homes, because they are being out-compete. They are being squeezed out by this growing super-rich class. I guess we also talk about the fact that we're getting older. You know, when the welfare state was set up, there were 20 working people for every one retired person. It's now like less than three working people for every one retired person. Fewer.

The big tech companies that you're going to. get in Silicon Valley, partly because our capital markets don't work. So if you set up some fancy AI company in Britain, it's going to be bought up by the US because you can't really get investment in Britain. They take more risk in the US. That our infrastructure is creaking. We don't really know what to do about our public services. So along with this issue about wealth, there's all these kind of background issues about a expensive, poorly provided for increasingly elderly society, low productivity, low innovation, even compared to places like the US, where in fact the wealth problem is even worse.

So it can't just be about wealth, can it? Because the US has got the wealth problem going through the roof, but their economy has grown 50% bigger than ours in the last 50 years. It's not just about wealth, but if the picture is of a broadly weakening economy, why is basically every stock market in the world at an all-time record high? Why is the wealth of the rich and the super-rich in this country at an all-time high? So this character, and don't get me wrong, there are. other economic problems in this country, in other countries.

But if the situation is of a broad economic weakening, then why are the rich and the super-rich aggressively, extremely rapidly getting richer? Let me flip that around. If that's the big problem, there are far more billionaires in the US. There's far more inequality in the US, but the American economy is growing much faster than ours and their productivity is much greater than us.

Have you heard this term that was bouncing around a lot in the US economics and political discourse the last couple of years? The vibes are off. You heard that term? The vibes are off. So for people who don't know, this is the idea that basically Americans think they're getting poorer, but they're really not. They're just, they're idiots, actually, they're getting richer. Listen, I went, again, I went to elite economic universities, and now I exist in a kind of politics, media space.

Most people are relatively rich, relatively financially comfortable. I don't think living standards are getting better for the average American. But the problem you have is, you know, the problem with the crisis of inequality, which is, as you say, if you have a broad economic weakening, everybody will say this is bad. The problem of a crisis of inequality is it looks great for the time. top 1%, and it looks pretty good for the top 5%. How many people outside of the top 5% are in this conversation? Top level politics, top level economics, top level academia, top level media, top level central banking.

Basically, what you have is you have a bifurcating economy. You have economy which is splitting. The top 1% is aggressively splitting off, and the top 5% are kind of hang on to their coattails. Let me try this one more time there, Gary. The US and European economies were about the same size 15 years ago. The American economy is now 50% larger than the European economy. Average incomes, even in a poor state like Mississippi, are now higher than average incomes in the United Kingdom.

And they have the most extreme wealth inequality of anywhere on earth. And more equal societies, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, are not remotely achieving those levels of productivity and growth that they are in the US. So what's the reason for that? I think there are a lot of reasons the US is growing quicker. I think you've seen they've moved into things like, They've moved into things like tech. They managed to capture big tech.

We have to accept the fact that the US is... The US is a much larger country with much more natural resources per person. It's much lower population density. It has some natural advantages. It's managed to capture some industries. But 15 years ago, we were the same size as them. So what have they done over the last 15 years in policy terms that we haven't done? Well, I think we've captured these growths, right?

They've captured tracking. They've captured tech. They didn't do it through wealth tax, did they? No. Rather the reverse. No, no. They've gone in the direction. But what will happen in the US is the EU.

US will continue to grow and living standards will continue to fall for the average person. It's the same thing that's happening here. You know, the US has the same problem. Just on your 1%, 5%, etc. And given that you come from a background where I imagine quite a lot of the people you grew up with will be tempted by the kind of populist far right. Yeah. Because they'll be saying, well, Labor hasn't delivered for me,

Tories haven't delivered for me, Brexit's been a disaster. And therefore I'm going to try something that says it's going to blow up the system, even if it's not. What is it say about those people that they're tempted by people who pretend to represent them whilst actually being as 1% as they come? I would put Trump in that,

I'd put Johnson in that, I'd put Farage in that. I think you just have to recognise that the average person is not super interested in politics and they're not super aware of politics. What people see, I'm always, he probably didn't see,

there was a sort of meme video that went around a few years ago of an ice skating race and they're going around and around the track. And just before the finish line, one of the skaters falls over and he takes out the whole line of it, all neck and neck. And there was one guy who's like, nearly a lap behind, comes around and wins. For me, that's Far Right, and that's also Trump. And that's the whole far right. Just unbundle that. Explain that. What it is, across the Western world, people have

voted, centre right, centre left, centre right, centre left. And they've repeatedly seen, increasingly rapid falls in living standards. So, you know, people will vote. So people skates in the front. Listen, Obama's big slogan was hope and change. Where are living standards now compared to when Obama came in for the average middle American. They're lower. They're significantly lower. So people will vote for sensible hope, sensible change,

sensible change. It is obvious that the political centre is and will continue to fail on the economy. And it's not obvious to the people who are speaking about it because they're rich. So it goes either hard right or hard left. Well, and there is no hard left in most countries. So listen, people are correct to demand

change and to insist that they will no longer vote for establishment political parties who have presided over significantly increasingly rapid falls in living standards for 20 years. Who did you vote last time? I vote for the Greens last time. But I'm in a safe seat. Because the Greens adopted my wealth tax policy in their manifesto. So, I mean, it would be pretty remiss of me not to vote for the single guys who literally adopted my policy. I mean, I was looking at some polling last week that said that I think it was 80%. Now, I know people always say, in theory, I don't mind tax, but when it comes on, but actually 80% people say they'd

they'd back a wealth tax. What would you, let's try and flip around, just be kind of back as a kind of, you know, somebody on the trading floor trying to work out probabilities. Do you see any downsides to a wealth tax economically? If it's badly implemented, I always remember, do you remember when the Conservatives brought in extra tax on second home buyers?

I was surprised by that, because for me, I see the Conservatives as basically a group that represents the economic interests of the very rich. and they bring in the second home tax and I was surprised so I looked into it there was an exemption for people who bought

seven or more at once and then Jeremy Hunt went and bought seven homes at the same time so this is the problem you have is people like me go out and say you need a wealth tax wealth not work reduce tax and working people

raise tax on the rich when they bring these in there are a lot of very wealthy very powerful people who have the ear of the politicians can influence the politicians in many case are the politicians and they say

yeah fine tax they're rich, but you can't do it like that. And they fill it with loopholes. And it ends up getting put in in a way that the actual really rich end up getting through the gaps and it hits the middle class. It's the fish rots from the head down. If you do not catch the people at the very top,

they will eat up all the wealth over time. So I think the risk is basically poor implementation such that you end up not getting the very rich and you end up how do you feel when you see this debate that's going on at the moment, which Farage is currently trying to tap into, that the non-doms are all leaving,

the super wealthy are all leaving Britain, because I mean, I know who funds these analyses. I know it's private wealth funds. Listen, I've been doing this work. So, you know, I'm relatively high profile the last two years. I've been doing this work in public for five years. And for years and years and years, I would go on LBC and talk radio, and I would say we need to tax the rich for free.

And I would go up against somebody who works for the IEA and is paid by a billionaire. This is the truth. Listen, you know it as well as I know. That's the Institute of Economic Affairs. There's two ways to make money in media. You sell news to the public or you sell the public to the rich. There's two ways to make money in politics You convince the public

You sell the public to the rich Listen I know When I first left trading The first thing I wanted to do was go to work for a think tank This is the obvious thing to do And I want to look for a left wing think tank Because you think these guys are going to be doing Working Inequality

I went I volunteered at a left wing think tank in London There was nobody working inequality You know why? Because they couldn't get funding for it So the problem you have here is That the rich are aggressively Going to try to prevent any increase on their taxation When I was writing in the book

I was reading hard times Charles Dickens. There's a section in there where they talk about how the rich were saying, if the government raises any taxes on them, they're going to take their factories and throw them into the seat. This is 150 years ago. You know, the problem you have is the rich are going to fight it every step of the way. They are winning. They're obviously winning. And they're funding groups like Nigel Fraud. They're funding the far right all over the world. And it's obvious why? Because everybody in the street knows the political centre has failed. Everybody knows. So something has to change. There's a quote from Milton Friedman, American economist. At a

times of crisis, the new idea will be chosen from the ideas lying around at the time. Everybody knows that we will get something new in politics. And it is really obvious what the loudest idea lying around now is, which is the far right. And the second loudest idea is us, tax the rich. So if you are a billionaire and you know that politics is going to move either towards the far right or tax the rich, what are you going to do? You are going to fund the far right and they are doing it aggressively. Look at what Elon Musk is doing. These guys know that they don't want to pay higher taxes.

and they are correct that the way to prevent yourself from having to be high tactics is to aggressively fund the far right. And I'm out here with a Patreon, you know what I mean? Tell us a little bit about what you make of Labour. What do you make of Rachel Reeves? What do you make of Kirstama? What do you make of what they're up to? So, you know, I don't directly lobby the politicians

because I think that I was writing for The Guardian and I switched to doing the YouTube because I thought that the fact that I look how I do and sound how I do will make the working class want to listen to me. But that same thing is a disadvantage when I talk to economists, when I talk to academics, when I talk to politicians, when I talk to, to be honest, a lot of the media until it's becoming popular. So I don't lobby them directly, but I work with people who do. Let's get for a second on that. We'll get some of the same.

What is it that you think is the disadvantage? I mean, as you say, you've studied economics. So why do you think there's a, is it that you're choosing to present yourself in a certain way? I mean, given that you know how to change codes, right? Yeah. presumably you could quite easily remember what you did. I remember when I was a kid somebody saying to me, if you want to be successful, you've got to change how you talk.

And I remember what I said to him. I said, if I have to change how I talk, there's no point being successful. Listen, I know there's a deeply entrenched prejudice in this country that people who sound posh are smart and people who sound the working class are stupid. I don't know. Don't think it's about a posh thing. But you did serious academic economics. So if you were talking to an economist, you wouldn't have to change your accent,

but you'd be talking. be talking in more technical language, right? They're going to say, oh, he does. So I'm three years at LSE, two years at LSC, two of my soul. You know, we've got a prime minister who famously, is that was a toolmaker. A deputy prime minister who's got a background that, you know, is frankly closer to J.D. Vance than it is to me.

Yeah. We've got for the first time ever a cabinet entirely made up of state educated people. And who makes economic policies? They have a lot of power to direct them, for sure. Yeah, but who are the economic advisors? Who are the big economist in government? I don't know the answer to that. What do you think his background is?

I know Torsten Bell very well. I think Torsten Bell's left wing. And do you think he's from working class background? I don't know. I know he's a twin. He's a poshest man I've ever met. Torsten Bell? Porteous man you've ever met.

You've just met Rory. That's true, actually. Second now. I've got a feeling, maybe we can check this. I reckon Torsten Bell went to a grammar school, same as you. But anyway, so you and Torsten Bell. Sure, sure. Maybe live next door to me.

Listen. Listen, before you go on, Lori, just when you were hearing Gary do that sort of, you know, this is what I really believe. Yeah. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much were you almost buying into it? I'm about 8. Because my being worried with it is the reality of politics.

My honest response is that it feels like you're getting a party political broadcast. You've taken on the tone of somebody who, who's like addressing millions of people and whipping them up. That's part of politics. And my guess is if you wanted to engage with politicians, you could. I don't think you need to conclude that the reason... 100%. I don't think the reason people aren't listening to you is that you've got an East End accent for a moment, right?

These people come from backgrounds, most of them poorer than yours. They grew up in families poor than yours, most of the Labor Cabinet. Yeah. I don't think they're going to be impressed or worried by your accent, and I think you're overplaying that. I think your class anger is not letting you see some of the realities of politics. I think what's more likely to be a problem is they don't appreciate being patronised because they also feel they've done economics degrees. They've studied this stuff quite seriously and you're talking to them like they're idiots.

You're saying, I can tell you what's going to happen in five years. This is the way the world is. This is a good point. I did economics. I'm smart at mass. And Rachel Rees is like, yeah, well, I was a chess champion. I'm pretty smart at mass too. And she's going to be listening.

There's some important background here. understand, which is that when you study economics, the vast majority of economic students want to work in finance. And working in finance is enormously better paid than working in any form of economic public service. And the vast majority of the best students will go into finance. Some of them will choose to go into public service. But you have to consider, imagine you are a young LSC student that has good enough grades to get a job as a trader and you are not from a rich background. If you go and work in academia, government, central banking, you are going to have to do a master's, a PhD, a postdoc, and you're not going to make any money for 20 years. You're going to be massively in debt by the time you make money.

I was a multimillionaire at 25. And when my brother needed to buy a house, I helped him. Now my sister needs to buy a house. I'm helping her. The truth is the nature of our economy and academic economics means there are very unlikely to be many, if any, economists from working class backgrounds in the public debate. So the end result is the vast majority of economists in public background. Either couldn't get a job in finance because their grades weren't good enough or they were so rich it doesn't matter.

That's the truth. And these guys, they went and saw the best students go work in the city, make millions of pounds. They went and locked themselves in a library in Oxford for 10 years. And they don't appreciate somebody coming back after making millions of pounds, after beating them in undergrad and saying, well, can I explain to you? Listen, let me say what happened when I went back to Oxford, right? I went back to Oxford. We had a lecture on interest rates. And I was at that point one of the most successful interest rate traders in the world.

And we had at that point incorrectly predicted that interest rates would go back up 10 years in a row. And I went to him and said, why do you think we're so bad at predicting interest rates? This is an Oxford macroeconomics professor. He said, no, no, no, you're wrong. We always knew rates would stay zero for 10 years. This is in 2017. That's just categorically wrong. I was quite shocked.

and I tried to explain to him that was wrong. I said, okay, I'm going to go. I'm going to send you the data. I went back, I sent you the data. He said, oh, yeah, you're right, yeah, you're right. We have been wrong. We have mispredicted interest rates. We have mispredicted the strength of the broad economy for 10 years.

That was it. He wasn't interested in talking. These guys have been wrong on the big economic issue of our time for 10 years in a row. This guy hadn't even noticed. These guys are so bad, they are unable to recognize that they are bad. I cannot explain to you how. serious this situation is. Listen, I know I do patronise them,

but the truth is, they're terrible. They're terrible, and the world's falling apart, and they themselves get rich while it happens. But the professors of economics at Oxford are not getting rich while it happens. You're confusing two different types of resentment. On the one hand, you've got a model where there's like the super billionaires for buying seven houses. You think the professors are Oxford are not rich. No, no, wait, you're doing two different things.

On the one hand, you're like, the people who become professors are losers who couldn't get a job in a bank. and if they had been smarter, they would have got a job in a bank. So there are different narratives. They're all got the same narrative, which is, I'm angry, I'm working class, and these guys who become professors, they don't make a huge amount of money.

They are there because they don't need the money. They come from rich families. They come from rich families, or they don't need the money. Rachel Reeves would be very happy to sit down and listen to you. Yeah, but listen, she wasn't before the election. We tried our best. But my guess is that if you were to say to it, the fact is,

you're just not smart enough to get job in a bank. I'm not saying that to you. Or you come from a rich background and that's why you went to department. I've been trying to get these guys to speak to me for a long time. I think they'll speak to you. Tell me what you thought of Gordon Brown as Chancellor. Gordon Brown is not somebody, believe me, who's motivated by getting rich. Yes, I was young when he was around.

I wasn't super politicised. My sense is that I think he actually is a very intelligent person and I don't think he's selfishly motivated. I think... But this is, I don't know the guy. This is just my sense. sense from outside. So in that sense, I think he's the kind of person that I think we need more in politics. Intelligent people who think sensibly about the economy who are not self-interested.

And also, I think because where I completely agree with you is about this issue of inequality. I think inequality is way worse than people understand. And what your book brought home to me articulated in a way that maybe I hadn't is that for the people you were working with, it's a deliberate strategy. Inequality is the strategy for the guys that you were working with. with the traders who are going to get rich by things going tits up for middle class and working class people. Right, okay, well, we're really getting into stuff now, but we'll be have a quick break in back in a minute. I'm David Aldoushoga. And I'm Sarah Churchwell.

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is termine the Dismet Ancestui. For the detail, the conditions apply, one of the things that I really

loved about your book is your description of the culture, the kind of anthropology of these bankers

and it totally reminded me of Parliament. My sense is the public does not begin to understand how bizarre these people are, how dishonest it is, how amateur it is, how little they know what's going on. Do you make politics now? The two worlds are identical. I genuinely think if you took a normal person and put them in Parliament, they would be so horrified by the kind of micro-bullying, bad behaviour, lack of knowledge. And then I'm reading you right about banks.

it's exactly the same. I mean, these characters you're surrounded by are some of the worst human beings I've ever seen in my life. Yeah, there were some good guys there. But yeah, yeah. Are you still your friends? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I still.

Can I continue to develop this before he gets on to this? Sure, yeah, sure. I mean, tell me about this, and it actually eventually leaves you basically to a nervous breakdown. I mean, I felt like in Parliament that after a few years,

you just can't handle this anymore. And part of that is, the whole thing is so mad. The people are so mad. The enterprise is so mad. The way people are acting is so mad. And a lot of it actually, oddly, isn't about, you know, smart economists with sharp brains.

It's actually people out drinking all night, getting no sleep, taking these massive gambols, wrecking their families. I think the big thing for me about the trading floor culturally is it's the absolute extreme of masculine, aggressive ambition. I had this Italian junior and the book is called Titsy and he was working with you when I was like a very successful trader

and he says you're a great trader but the problem is you're too homo homony lupus and I was like what the fuck is homo hominy lupus he says man is wolf to man and I stood up to him and I said look look at these guys around me every single guy in here

is trying to pick my pocket don't tell me man is fucking wolf to man because you're surrounded by waltz and that was the sense but for me what I wanted to get with and it's interesting you make this comparison to Parliament, because it's not just about the trading floor. For me, this is about a taught mode of masculinity that we teach all our young men,

which is that your job is to make money, your job is to do the best for you as an individual. Greed is good. You are supposed to win. There is no such thing in society. You have to win, you have to win, you have to win. And this is not just the trading floor. Politics has weirdly got an analogy, but it's different. So politics isn't about money, right?

People are not in there to make money. They're making whatever they're making. £80,000 a year. What they care about is winning. It's very tribal. It's a game. It's, can I stick it to the opposition? Can I get more votes to them? Can I land the headline in the newspaper today? So that's what's driving them. But what it's got in common with your trading floor is superficiality, micro-bullying, absence of values, pure competitiveness. Even trading, in my opinion, is not really, it is about the money, but it's not about the money. It is the same. It is about the winning. It is about the winning. It is about the competition. It's this obsession with winning being the best. Do you feel powerful when you're sort of saying up two million up, three million down? Do you feel power in getting that? It's a status

game. You know, it's the, for a lot of these guys, it's the logical equivalent. You weren't really happy. When you got the New Zealand account, you weren't very happy. No, no, it's, but yeah, it's a state, it's, it's just a classic, you know, it's Macbeth, right? It's the power game. You want to be the top dog. You want to be above those guys. Like, it would be meaningless without the money, but the money is about being the best. The money is about winning. What do you think it says about that world that at least in politics there are women?

I can't remember a single... Did you have any female traders? No, there's no female traders in the book, yeah. There's only one named female character, and that is the woman who brought me onto the trading floor. Yeah. And that was intentional, because, like, for me, do you ever remember the final scene of the Godfather,

if you've seen it where he's in there with his concierie and his wife's outside holding the two kids and the door closes on them. Like that's, the guys on the trading floor would go out on Thursday night to try to get laid, purely so they could try to boast about it to their male colleagues. Like the only romance there is between the traders. I read the audiobook, I recorded it. And when I read it, there were some points who had to stop because I got emotional.

And those points were the points at which the traders showed each other kindness. Because for me, what I see here is the end result of really a lot of men from different backgrounds who have received no kindness from a young age. They want to be close to each other, but the only way they know to get human closeness is to compete and to win. This feels to me very British boarding school, very Oxford, very Cambridge-like.

We train people that the only way, especially men, the only form of closeness they are allowed, is competition. And then they become desperately competitive. They become desperately competitive. And there's scenes where people are shouting at each other. And I really want to describe the way that their noses are touching, the way that they want closeness,

they desperately want closeness. and they can't get it. And I think a lot of people in the trading world really don't like this book. And I think they love the books that describe them as like cocaine snorting, like prostitute hounds. But what I wanted to say with this book

is these guys are fucking lonely. These guys are lonely and sad. And you have Caleb, my boss, who retires as a multimillionaire and builds his dream house and comes back three years later because he needs it. Do any of them have happy marriages?

Oh, some of them do. Yeah. I mean, I think I sort of made Billy out to be a bit more of a villain. You know, I drew out the villainous characters. the characteristics of him. I think Billy's got happy marriage. You know, he's not the perfect man.

And I went to a boys' grammar school and I think it starts with this kind of thing. And I know a lot of richer, posh of people do go to boys' schools. It starts there. Women are a thing that happens outside of work. You know what I mean? And life happens inside of work.

And I'm sure you saw similar things in Parliament. And we've mentioned masculinity. And, you know, we mentioned Farage a couple of times and the whole kind of Andrew Tate thing. And what do you think needs to change in relation to politics and masculinity? And that will, because your world sounds very, very masculine, very testosterone driven and very, very brutal. Yeah.

Okay. And the values don't come through to me. I don't have a feeling of people thinking, we're making the world a better place. I don't have any of that to all. In politics, at least you get some of that. But I just wonder what it says about us that that is now, in today's world, still so prevalent. Yeah. And probably becoming worse, I'd argue.

I think you need to recognise the reality of the world men are in. And especially importantly, the place class. plays in that. I think working class men, poorer men, are living in an extremely hostile world. But we live in the myth of meritocracy that tells you are what you make. Your value is the money that you make. And yet we actually live in an economy where the only way to get rich realistically nowadays for a young person is to have a rich dad. So if you don't have a rich dad, you're told, oh, work harder, work harder, work harder, work harder. Then your friend from school buys a house because his dad gave him 300,000 pound cash. He doesn't post on Instagram, you know,

I got this with my dad's money. We are telling young people in a world with almost no meritocracy that all the outcomes are because of meritocracy. And we tell people if you don't make money, you're a failure in a world that gives an opportunity to make money. It's an absolute recipe for mental health disaster. So you need to capture this. You need to accept this. You need to recognise the extremely hostile life

that we have put on men from working class backgrounds. And we need to be realistic and say, listen, first up, tell them the truth. Tell them the truth, which is the fact is, we, you're older generation, we fucked it up and we made it impossible for people from working class backgrounds to make money. So first of all, just accept that,

realize that because I have friends who work so hard they studied they got the right degrees they worked so hard and they struggled to pay the mortgage they struggle to put food on the table and they think that's because they've made a mistake but it's not it's because we made a mistake it's because the older generation made a mistake and created an economy with no social mobility so the first thing if you want to get the support of young men stop lying to them just back to you and your interaction with politics I reckon I don't know whether they're Greg Hillier, the chair of the Treasury Select Committee, listens to the podcast. But I'm sure some of them, well, we know a lot of MPs listens, but I reckon you should go and

try and speak to the Treasury Select Committee. No, I'm up to speak. To be honest, we tried before the election and they weren't really interested. We couldn't really get them in. But I'm much bigger now. Labor did reach out to us. I've been away for seven weeks. I'm happy to talk to them.

Listen, I want to change. I want to stop this economic collapse. And I'm well aware that there's probably no path to that. That does not go through the Labour Party. So if I was to rule them out, then I'd be ruling out my chance of change. I'd be very happy to speak to. Would you ever see yourself as an MP? It's not my plan now.

I prefer not to. Not my plan. Very political answer there. It's not my plan. No current intention. If I'm in a situation where I feel like that gives me a chance of getting this and it's my only realistic chance and I would have to consider it. But I don't even want to be a YouTuber.

I want to be on holiday. But you know, countries falling apart and someone's got to try and do something. Gary, I'm going to finish with this as my last question. There's a lot of things going on. I mean, you're making observations about psychology, lack of kindness and care in the home, structural inequalities of wealth, class, masculinity. Do you ever worry that some of these things are getting

overlapped and overlaired in your mind so that anger, class, family backgrounds, school, masculinity are feeding in ways which are misleading you. That if you kind of got back to your kind of self-ed-l-l-S-E trying to look at how you frame economic policy, that you might want to take a bit of a step back from that degree of kind of... I do worry about that. I do worry about that.

And that's why I still trade. That's why I still trade. Listen, you want to be a good trader. You want to make money every year. You haven't got no space for emotional biases. you've got to be right. You've got to be right. You've got to be right. You've got to be right. And I make money every year. I keep betting. I keep winning. The truth is the best paid 10,000 economists in the world that are all traders. And I'm the only one that's going to speak to you because they get paid not to speak to you. I keep trading. I keep betting. I keep winning. I think I'm good at this. I think I'm right at this. And I think we're going to keep being right. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. So Rory, what do you think of Gary Stevenson? Well, I was intrigued. I think he's a really, really talented writer.

And I thought his expose of working in the city, as I said, was extraordinary. And there's an incredible dystopian vision of his final moments in Japan, marginalized by the company, going through significant mental health issues, them trying basically trap him in a job he doesn't want to be in and giving him more and more meaningless work. I thought he, you know, we got a pretty clear idea, I think,

both of some of those struggles, but also of his character. And I think he's sort of aware of some of the things that people might notice in his character. You know, he talked about his competitiveness, talked about his anger, talked about class.

I was a bit thrown off balance by him saying that his great dream was to be Rupert Murdoch, not exactly the person I'd really want to be in life. He didn't quite say that. I think what he was saying is he'd like to be able to become on the left, as it were, what Rupert Murdoch has been on the right, which is dominating public debate. And that sort of jarred with me a bit, I must be honest. Yeah. What did you think?

I thought he's very engaging. I thought he's, you know, you and he, you and, and I have both been in this mode where you're talking about a book. Now, he said the book's been around a long time, but when you were talking about the book, you and I were new to the book, we read it, we both liked it, wanted to talk about it, and you slightly go into a mode of the stories that you tell and the points that you make. And there were bits of that, which were, I kind of knew he was on kind of book promotion mode, which is, you know, fair enough because we were asking about his book. Where I found him really interesting, I thought it's

very interesting, for example, when you sort of gave him that pretty harsh, you know, truth, you know, you basically said, oh, I think you could come over as pretty patronising about other people, not really understanding. He took that completely on board. He didn't sort of get pretty or defensive. He thought, yeah, I've thought about that. And I'm not sure how to deal with that. I'm always very wary of people who say, everyone knows.

You know, everyone knows this is this. And everyone knows this. Well, no, not everyone knows because not everyone thinks. it's the same about most things. But look, he's very, very passionate, he's very intelligent, he's got a good brain, and he's now decided he wants to put it to the use of trying to change the way that we think about the way the economy works. And he's basically asking for really, really big changes in the system. I mean, is there anyone he reminds you of, or do you think he's a very unique individual? I mean, it's an interesting combination,

because as you point out, it's not exactly his life story, because as you pointed out, a lot of the Labour Cabinet have more extreme life stories. It's sort of a kind of mindset, isn't it? It's a combination of a particular attitude towards the world. I'll tell you what, when you said, is there anybody who reminds me of? But if he up the charm a bit, he'd remind me a little bit of Alan Johnson. Okay, because Alan Johnson is phenomenally charming. He wasn't uncharming, but you felt quite.

quite a lot of the time he was on stories that I know, points to make that I want to make a little bit on transmit mode. But listen, he's a very, very effective communicator. I think he underestimates, maybe he wants to underestimate the extent to which politics would engage with him. I get the point about, you know, well, Rachel Reeves didn't want to see me and all that stuff. But I think actually politics would be keen to engage with somebody like him, not least because

he's clearly, you look at the numbers of his YouTube for his YouTube videos. he's clearly he's reaching a lot of people with the message he's trying to put over. I didn't find him cynical, which was, as you say, you read that sort of horrible kind of portrayal of the world that he was in, the people who was surrounded by, quite easy to become cynical. I didn't find him as a cynical person. I was intrigued about what he said and maybe even more so what he didn't say about his relationships with his parents, with his, you know, family and friendship and that sort of stuff.

And so anyway, I found him very intriguing as a character, yeah. I think he was a very interesting character. I wonder a little bit whether it's not a type that I've seen a little bit in politics, particularly in more kind of radical, almost revolutionary politics, which is the whole system screwed. You know, we need a very, very dramatic change. If not, we're all going to hell and a handbasket. And in a sense, it's this odd combination of extreme pessimism,

extreme optimism. It's an incredibly bleak, dark picture of where we are and then a very, very hopeful picture of how the whole thing can be turned around. And I'm always a little, maybe that's just because I'm a Tory, a little bit doubtful about that. I mean, I tend to think, as you picked up, if we just to finish on the substance of it, that our economic problems are about much, much more than this question of inequality. I mean, that's why I was trying to get pointing to the US and that the solutions are going to be about much more than a wealth tax. Even if wealth tax were useful, it would be one small part of many, many different things. And actually, it will have consequences. I mean, we wouldn't get into this, but generally countries that impose, if you want to impose a very

large wealth tax, I don't know how big a wealth tax is, but generally countries impose very large wealth tax, get massive capital flight. So there's a huge moment to of readjustment. And if on the other hand, you impose quite a small wealth tax, then you probably don't achieve many of the policy objectives he's talking about in terms of equality. I mean, that's me, from me. Yeah, well, just on that, though,

if you remember when we interviewed Rachel Reeves in opposition, and one of the reasons why you didn't really take to her was because you felt there was a gap between what the economy needed in terms of genuine reform and the proposals that she was then coming up with. And he, in a way, is saying, I think the wealth, you know, tax wealth not work is just a nice tight slogan for one part of the things that he's that he's talking about. But of course, the other thing is he says, he's not a politician. And even though he didn't 100% rule out that one day he might, you didn't have a feeling there that this is somebody who wants to be a politician. He wants to influence debate and he wants to generate a sense of anger about the state of the world and understanding about it.

and say too well. There's another guy who just popped into my head when you say, who does you remind you of? He must be a little bit of Janus Varifakis, the former Greek minister of finance, very left wing, very charismatic, very dogmatic in his, in his, you know, what is right and what is wrong and what everyone knows. It's been interesting for me when we're out and about, and I know you get this as well, and people say, oh, have you got coming up and leading and what have you? It was interesting to me how a lot of people, didn't know who he was. Lots of people that I said Gary Stevens,

they didn't know who he was. But those that did were broadly, very, very enthusiastic about him. And that probably was a younger demographic than the ones who'd never heard of him. Yeah, there's a whole thing that we've done a little bit of, but maybe we could do more of him.

We did Kate Roweth. We've done Gary. I mean, there's a lot of quite interesting generally younger thinkers out there, making much more radical challenges to our system. in a world where we're a bit lacking in ideas, I think it's quite a rich scene to mine. Yeah. Well, listen, and what I said in the introduction of part one is that we are, you know, we had a lot of people saying we really, really like to hear you talk to Gary Stevenson.

So there you are at listeners and viewers. You asked, we delivered and we hope you enjoyed it. Very good. Bye-bye. Bye. It's David Olusioga from Journey Through Time. Here's that clip that we mentioned earlier. If you look at all of the accounts of the fire at this point, as we get to the end of Sunday the second, the first day, this fire is not behaving in any way the way fires traditionally did in London. And there are some people who've argued that it was becoming a fire storm, that the heat and the wind and the movement of air caused by the fire was feeding. It was becoming self-sustaining, as it were. John Eveling, who's a great writer and a diarist of this moment, he talks. about the sound of the fire.

He said it was like thousands of chariots driving over cobblestones. There are descriptions in peeps and elsewhere of this great arc of fire in the sky. Imagine that everything around you is coloured

by the flames, yellows and oranges and above you is this thick black smoke. This is a city you know. These are streets you walk. This is a place that's deeply familiar to you and it looks completely otherworldly. It looks like another, like a sort of landscape you've never seen before. People describe the fire almost as if it's supernatural.

If you want to hear the full episode, listen to Journey Through Time, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, it's Ormond Peston from The Rest Is Money. I've just had the most gripping conversation with an economist Nick Bloom from Stanford, who's published a very influential paper on the costs of leaving the European Union. He and his colleagues calculated that leaving the EU has cost us 8% of the EU. of our national income, our GDP. That's 240 billion, more than we spend on the NHS every single year. What's really striking is that his numbers are now the numbers being used by the Chancellor,

Rachel Reeves, when she talks about the advantages of getting closer to the EU. So if you want to know how damaging Brexit has been and whether that 8% number is robust, whether it's real, join me for the latest episode of The Rest is Money.