In this episode, Matt and Chris take a look at one of the UK’s most compelling economic crusaders: Gary Stevenson, aka Gary’s Economics. A millionaire trader turned YouTube firebrand, Gary’s message is simple and potent: wealth inequality is spiralling, the ultra-rich are hoarding everything, and economists and politicians are either complicit or clueless.Gary’s story has all the trappings of a mythic arc: from humble East London roots to Citibank’s trading floor, where he made millions betting against the poor during the financial crisis. Now he claims the system is so broken that only someone like him, working class and mathematically gifted, someone who entered the high-power world of financial trading and took on the system, could see it. As Gary puts it, a sort of economic Copernicus, who brought a revolutionary message that was dismissed by a stultifying orthodoxy.With his righteous critique comes a hefty dose of swagger, whether it is in considering himself like a Usain Bolt of trading or in the frequent laments about how exhausting it is to be a lone voice of truth facing bad-faith hit pieces. Gary straddles an odd tension: self-effacing underdog one moment, saviour-on-a-soapbox the next. He rails against academia, dismisses journalists as clickbait merchants, and urges people not to heed critics, due to their ulterior motives.Our hosts explore the contradictions of a millionaire revolutionary who's not even bothered but also a bit miffed the phone isn’t ringing; a tireless advocate for the poor but also someone who seems to frequently drop in his elite credentials and just how rich he is.So strap in for a deep dive into charisma, critique, and class warfare economics. Is Gary the economic truth-teller we need, or a populist guru-in-the-making with revolutionary zeal and a finely tuned YouTube brand?SourcesGary's Economics- Understand the Economy Part 3: Why is Inequality Ignored?Gary's Economics- Signing off: How close are we to winning higher taxes on the rich?Novara Media- Everything They Tell You About the Economy is WRONG | Aaron Meets Gary StevensonGary Stevenson (2024). The Trading Game: A ConfessionFinancial Times: Gary Stevenson claims to have been the best trader in the world. His old colleagues disagreeFinancial Times: He made millions betting against economic recovery. Now he wants to fix thingsThe Daily Mail's hit piece on GaryReddit thread discussing Gary's ThesisPlain Bagel - The Canadian Housing Crisis ExplainedPatrick Boyle on the Pandemic Real Estate BubbleAsianometry on an...
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, the psychologist from Australia.
With me is Chris Kavanagh, the anthropologist from Japan, formerly Northern Ireland.
And we're going to decode a potential guru today.
Hey, Chris.
That's always what we do, Matt.
That's nothing new.
That's what we exist.
To do.
We service the discourse by producing a podcast where we decode people who may or may not fit the Secular Guru template.
Is that not what we're here for?
That's what we're here for.
That's what we signed up for.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We do other things.
We do other things.
Well, actually, we don't.
We monitor the gurus we've already decoded in the discourse.
That doesn't sound great.
You know, I did see, Matt, that someone on our Patreon, they were bored and they used an analytical tool for videos to quantify the amount of movement in it.
And they compared.
My amount of movement with your amount of movement for some random segment of the video.
And I believe the analytics proved that you moved 75% more than me.
Or it was something like that.
It was a ridiculous amount more.
So it's quantifiable proof now, Matt, that you cannot sit still.
I see.
I see.
Okay.
So it's been quantified.
Yeah, that's it.
You can't beat numbers.
I'm sorry, Chris.
And to these people who are making these metrics, I plead guilty.
I'm sorry.
I move.
I move sometimes.
That's the crime I'm guilty of.
I just want to apologize to you, the listeners, everyone, for being human.
For being human.
I can do no other.
Well, while we're on the subject, Matt, now, you remember there was a saga.
Here I squeak, Chris.
I can do no other.
Yeah.
Well, on that subject, Matt, yes, that's what I was going to read.
So, you know, the listeners had an intervention.
Old Squeaky was put out the pasture, dig into the back woodshed and put down.
But increasingly, people have noticed.
I have noticed, Matt.
That old Squeaky has been making his way back in.
And your lovely new chair, you know, the fantastic chair that you bought to stop things from squeaking, it's completely gone.
The chair you're sitting in now is not old Squeaky, nor is it the new chair.
It's a third unknown chair.
Yeah, yeah.
Look, you will not silence Squeaky.
You cannot do it.
You cannot.
He's too comfortable.
He's too comfortable.
He moves at exactly the same...
He's got one crime.
He's not perfect.
He does squeak.
But yes, I shuffle chairs.
I change chairs.
I don't know what happened to the chair that I bought.
The extremely expensive chair that doesn't squeak but has no other things to commend it.
So I think one of the children have taken it, which is probably for the best.
Okay.
All right.
Well, that just speaks to their high level of taste.
But as long as you have this kind of third variable chair, that's all right.
It seems to be doing the job.
Now, Matt, this week, we are not in right-wing Topia guru space.
We have been there recently, right, with Michael Schellenberger, Chris Langan, people like that.
But this week...
We're venturing into lefty waters.
In particular, waters that will inevitably lead to very passionate feedback, I predict, amongst Reddit and on Patreon and whatnot.
It already has when we announced we're doing that.
Because we're covering Gary's economics.
Gary Stevenson.
Yeah.
Well, you know.
People don't like it when we do left-wing gurus.
Some people don't like it.
Some people do like it.
I think the general criteria is, are you a leftist?
Then you might not enjoy it when we cover left-wing people.
That seems to be the determining factor.
Because if you look at the people that we cover, whenever we cover Yuval Noah Harari, Or someone like that.
We don't really get very strong feedback.
Or people say, don't be so mean to Yuval, right?
Nobody cares.
Nobody really cares.
But Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Zizek, right?
There's a connecting tissue to the people that often generate the most passionate response.
Who was the first person, the anti-racist lady?
What was her name again?
Robin D 'Angelo.
Robin D 'Angelo.
I think she was the first left person that we covered.
She didn't generate that much feedback, though, because at that time, I feel like she was already at that stage kind of beat up by everyone.
Well, that's what I was going to say.
We expected some blowback, but I think she'd already jumped the shark.
In terms of going a little bit too far and getting up even progressive people's noses.
So by the time we covered her, it was okay.
You were allowed to criticize her.
As for Gary, well, and for some of the others, we're ahead of the curve, Chris.
Can be a little bit ahead of the curve.
Sometimes people come around later on.
We'll see.
Well, let's see, Matt.
Don't you jump the shark?
Or does it jump the horse?
I don't know.
Like, who says that we will have anything critical to say about Gary?
Maybe we'll agree.
With everything that he's saying.
But yes, in any case, it is fair to say that he's rather popular at the minute.
I've seen him crop up on various shows.
He's hot right now.
That's what the kids would say.
And what he is, for those people who aren't familiar, is that he has a YouTube channel called Gary's Economics.
He also has a popular trade book.
Which came out last year called The Trading Game with Penguin Books.
And that book documents his time as a FX trader or some variety of foreign exchange trader in the city, in London.
He was in the beating heart of the financial district and he had a career.
He made a whole bunch of money and then he left it.
And now he's kind of talking about...
You know, wealth inequality, rich people hoarding money and the problems it caused and whatnot.
So it's a little bit like a whistleblower.
But another important feature is that, as Gary likes to highlight, he is from a working class background, right?
And he very much, his presentation is highlighting that.
He makes his videos in a kitchen with like Jaffa cakes, wearing a hoodie and speaks with a distinctive...
London twang, which you'll hear in the clips.
I recognize this from living in London.
You may not know it, Matt, but I myself am someone with a non-standard accent in the UK.
So, you know, an outsider in the latest institutions, I understand.
Maybe I understand better than most, Matt, this.
Presentation, okay?
Well, I've been listening to Gary's economics for a while now.
I listened to a few episodes long before we even had any thought of covering him in Decoding the Gurus.
It was recommended to me by a colleague who likes the cut of his jib, or did.
And I also noticed the accent, Chris.
I know my English accents.
Okay.
And, yeah, look, I think it's fair to say...
As it says on the tin, Gary's economics, he is kind of explaining economics to the layperson, explaining how it works.
But yeah, it's fair to say the general theme is that it's kind of rigged against you, rigged against the little guy.
If I want to send one message, it is that the game is set up in a way that you are being robbed of your wealth and there's very little you can do as an individual to stop that.
But no matter how much they rob you of your wealth, they can't rob you of your dignity.
And it's not your fault that you live increasingly in poverty.
The game is being set up such that the majority of this country increasingly will live in poverty.
But you can realise that that's not failing on you as an individual.
That is the result of a rotten system.
It is the result of a rotten system.
I think people can...
I can deal with poverty.
I know poverty is not easy, but, you know, I grew up in poverty and it was hard.
But what affected me in many ways more than the poverty was the judgement.
So don't judge yourself harshly, man.
Don't judge other people harshly because it's a system that's broken.
You should be proud of the work that you do and you should be proud of what you do to support yourself and to support your family and support the people around you.
Because I think once we manage to shake off this judgement and this idea that it's our fault...
Then we can start being proud of ourselves and each other and seeing the game for what it really is, which is a broken game that we have to fix together.
And, you know, the theme is that the inexorable trends of the system will lead to the rich getting richer and the rest of us struggling.
Yes, that's right.
And the kind of aesthetic of it, if you look at his little profile picture on YouTube.
He's got, like, a beanie on with, like, fingerless gloves.
He looks like a kind of modern-day vegan, right?
Like, you know, kind of man of the street, telling you like it is, and these elite fat cats, he went into the Dragon's Den, and he played the game better than, you know, the ones that were born with the silver spoon in the mouth, and he's going to tell you the things that they don't want you to know.
That's a little bit...
The kind of framing of things, right?
So the titles of popular videos that I see: What does Elon Musk want?
How to get rich?
The week Trump nearly crashed the world economy.
Why aren't we all getting rich from compound interest?
Why Labour and Trump will both fail?
The future of house prices?
This kind of thing.
So it's, you know, like political and cultural commentary, but with an economic spin to it.
Now, what we looked at...
There were a couple of sources.
One was, why is inequality ignored?
This is part of an Understand the Economy series, part three.
And this is a theme that he touches on quite a lot.
So this seemed worth covering as illustrative of the kind of output.
I also clipped from an interview he did with Novara Media.
Everything they tell you about the economy is wrong.
Aaron Bastani meets Gary's economics, right?
And lastly, his last video, signing off, how close are we to winning higher taxes on the rich, right?
So he's taking a bit of a hiatus.
So he made a little video to say, you know, where are we with the channel?
What's going on?
So that's the sources I've mainly...
Clip from and a couple of other things, right?
I don't think we're going to have much of a problem with the idea that the content we're covering isn't representative because I've listened to a bunch of episodes and yeah, I think it's fair to say the same messages, the same points tend to come up repeatedly.
Indeed, the same references to his own abilities and backgrounds, they tend to get repeated as well.
So yeah, I think we've got...
No trouble with the representation of the content.
Okay, that's right.
And just a note, Matt, since you mentioned that, I think it's worth probably telling people.
I didn't have to do this.
This is not something I've got to do all the time.
All right?
But I listened to the entire audiobook of the treating game.
So I inevitably have been colored for that for good and bad in terms of background knowledge.
But I could tell you, Gary's...
Background quite well from that book is that he presents it as that he came from a very working class background in Olford.
And when I say working class, it includes things that he didn't have a shower, had to like connect the hose pipe to make the shower work, didn't have a table to study on, had to use a plank of wood, right?
There are issues of this which seem to be somewhat self-apologizing because, you know...
Like, I'm not from a stunningly well-off background in Belfast, and I find few people that I knew in my network that did not have access to tables.
But nevertheless, nevertheless, set that aside.
But then he basically is very good at maths and this kind of thing, and then gets into LSE, this prestigious, you know, economic elite university, and there...
He's also top of the class in certain respects, doing maths fantastically.
And he wins this game, this kind of trading game organized by Citibank.
He beats everybody in the game and then gets offered a job as a trader.
And then the book is detailing his life as a trader and how he becomes super successful, a millionaire, and then eventually ends up leaving.
The bank getting in a war with the bank about getting a payout and whatnot.
And at the end, he's leaving the bank to go work for a charity, having kind of beat the system in a way, not in general, just for himself.
Right.
Like, you know, so that's the kind of deal that it that it weaves.
Yeah, and in his podcast material, he makes a bunch of points, but there are two ones that are recurrent, that at least came up an awful lot in all of the ones that I listen to.
One of them is advocating for a wealth tax on the rich, so an annual 1% wealth tax on people that have, and the threshold varies, but he's mentioned 10 million pounds and 20 million pounds.
I think as the wealth threshold to trigger that wealth tax.
So that's one thing he advocates for.
The second thing he tends to focus on is house prices and housing affordability.
And he's pretty consistent in blaming housing affordability on the very rich, buying up all the assets and driving up the cost of assets.
So there might be other ones that you've noticed, Chris, but those are the two big ones that I recall.
Yeah.
Yeah, I just remembered as well, Matt, that there was one thing I wanted to say before we started, because I think this is important to flash up at the beginning, right?
So if you take Gary's overall message to be wealth inequality is bad, we should try to make the ultra-rich pay more taxes, right?
Give them less ways to avoid faridating their tax off the tax havens or...
Putting it into properties or whatever the case might be.
Close the loopholes.
I think there are very few people, especially of the left-wing persuasion, who will have any issue with that general premise.
I certainly don't.
Inequality is a problem.
Completely agree.
And the wealthy finding ways to stop them avoiding engaging in tax evasion.
Great.
I'm totally on board with that.
So this is one thing that I want to...
People often seem to make this mistake of assuming that if someone is talking about a genuine issue and they are saying this is a problem, it could be addiction, it could be gambling, it could be political polarization, whatever it is, that if you look critically at them or you have things to say, that that means you're dismissing the problem they're discussing is real.
Trying to attack that idea.
And just to be clear, no, those two things are separate.
The problem can be very real.
Even the solution can be correct or viable or whatnot.
But that does not mean that the person doing it, that if you're critical of them, that therefore you are attacking that basic idea.
And that's important because people like Russell Brand in the past, various other people, Brett Weinstein does it.
But all of our gurus essentially try to wrap themselves in this cloak that they are doing things for very good motives.
They're talking about important issues.
And I think people get it with Russell Brand, for example, because he's an extreme example.
But Russell Brand, he is also talking about wealth inequality or addiction or whatever.
But if you're critical of Russell Brand, it doesn't mean that you are dismissing That there's anything to be talked about with corruption or wealth inequality or so on.
OK, I just want to flag that up.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I could put it in slightly different terms, actually.
So first of all, just to sign on that kind of putting your prize or, you know, biases on the table.
I'm the same as you.
I think the distribution of wealth is much too skewed at the moment.
I think that the, you know, wages have been stagnating for decades relative to Other forms of income.
And that is a serious problem.
So I'm in favor of reducing wealth inequality across the board.
I'd probably go further than Gary, actually, because he tends to focus on the top 1%.
And I think, actually, you can look at the distribution and the curves, and you'll see that there's an awful lot of wealth inequality where the meaty part of it is actually in the top 10% or 15%.
So it's easy to pick to sort of...
Pick on a very small outgroup.
And nobody likes billionaires.
Come on.
At least of all us, right?
But actually, it's a bit more uncomfortable when you start talking about, you know, more...
The upper middle class.
Yeah.
Now, the other thing, too, is housing affordability, I also think, is a major problem.
Again, almost everyone agrees with this, right?
These are normal things.
But that is not to say...
That the arguments for the diagnosis of the problem, as in what's causing it, or the arguments in favour of certain actions to remedy the problem are necessarily good.
Think about a student writing an essay saying that democracy is good.
They could still write a very, very bad essay putting a bunch of bad arguments to support that thesis.
So yeah, it's just an important distinction for people to wrap their heads around.
Yeah, two separate things.
Two separate things, but often not, it appears.
And in general, the last thing I'll say is that, you know, I'm not an economist, Matt.
I don't play one on TV.
I don't claim to have much knowledge of economics.
I do, however, know stuff about guru rhetoric and academia and discrimination towards people with non-standard accents.
This kind of thing, elitism in academia.
So that stuff I can speak to.
But, you know, the specific economic stuff, I'll leave more to you or other people.
Because you are someone with an interest in those topics, right?
Yeah, I have an amateur's interest in economics, just like I have an amateur's interest in history.
And, you know, we're not talking extremely technical arguments here, as we'll see.
Let's see.
We'll see.
Let's see.
Okay.
Well, alright, so first clip.
This is a refrain that you hear a lot in Gary's content and it's about economists and what they don't talk about.
Okay, what they're missing.
Okay, so the first reason economists don't talk about inequality is because of the way economics is taught at universities.
So, for those who don't know, I studied...
Maths and Economics at the London School of Economics for three years, my undergrad.
And then I did a two-year Master's in Economics at Oxford.
So I've spent five years at elite economics departments learning economics.
And I think it's important to understand the way that economics is taught at universities nowadays.
So the first thing to say is, and I think this will surprise a lot of people, in economics departments, we don't talk about...
The housing crisis.
We don't talk about why housing is unaffordable.
We don't talk about falling living standards.
We don't talk about why wages are falling, why it's hard to get a good job, why big cities are expensive, why things like energy and food are increasingly expensive.
These kind of big economic problems of our time are basically not discussed at university.
So he's been to the elite school.
LSE and Oxford.
Yep, yep.
And he's gotten very good grades there, as he's mentioned many times.
And they never, ever talk about, yeah, you know, inequality, housing affordability, that kind of thing.
Yeah, so just to say, Matt, this surprised me when I heard this claim, because although I'm not an economist, right, I did go to a university that had people studying economics, SOAS.
That was topics that were covered on economics courses.
And amongst the Patreon responses, we had some people that have studied economics in different institutions.
And they were quick to point out that they also had studied these topics.
And just doing a quick cursory look around economics courses, you can find...
These kind of topics being covered.
So his claim is quite a broad one, right?
It's saying that economists aren't interested, essentially they're not interested in things like inequality, housing crisis, all these kind of, you know, the things that actually matter to people in their lives.
So that's quite a claim to me.
Well, it is a surprising claim because the London School of Economics It has a Center for the Analysis of Social Exclusion, and it also has the International Inequalities Institute.
So it has a couple of research institutes specifically dedicated to that topic.
And again, you can do a little bit of a look around, like I did, and find that not only is there whole sub-disciplines of economics that are specifically focused.
On inequality, both within nations and across nations and all kinds of stuff.
But some of the very influential paradigm-shifting economists who focus on inequality are actually at the LSE.
Now, that doesn't mean, of course, that an undergraduate who's doing a thing, probably with a focus on trading.
You know, foreign exchange markets and things like that, they might not take those units.
But it is a sweeping claim that he's making and that is not true.
If you think we're, you know, reading too much into an offhand comment, he goes on.
So while economists don't care about inequality, housing crisis, what kind of thing are they doing at university then?
So what do we do at university?
The main thing is we do maths.
Heavily mathematised subject.
If you don't have a very good maths A-level, you basically can't even get into university to do it.
And then when you get into the university, it's just very, very, very heavily mathematical.
And once you go into postgrad especially, it's extremely phenomenally mathematical.
And it's not easy maths.
You're doing kind of a lot of algebra, a lot of simultaneous equations.
But basically, it's a maths subject at this point.
And it's important to say that the maths is...
It's not easy.
So I had a maths and economics undergrad and I was very good at maths as a kid.
But then when I went to do my postgrad at Oxford, even though I was very good at maths, I found the maths quite difficult.
And if you want to succeed, if you want to get good grades, you really, really have to spend a lot of time memorising the maths, basically.
You have to do a lot of maths and it's very, very tricky.
Maths.
Okay, there's a lot of maths there at the postgrad level, more advanced maths.
I do know that this is often what economists like to say as well about the level of their mathematical competence.
But in any case, he is endorsing the internal claim of the economics discipline, which is, you know, we do maths and modeling in a better way than most of the other social sciences.
You know, oh, sorry, not in a better way, in like a more advanced way.
Obviously, there's a critique in it, which is that he's pointing out that, you know, they might be getting a bit caught up in their models, right?
And he'll spell this out in more detail in the next clip.
And the context for this maths is they basically build a model, like a model economy, and everything affects everything else.
So if we...
Cut the interest rate a bit.
What does that do to GDP, for example?
Or if people suddenly start spending less money, trying to save more, what does that do to inflation?
This kind of thing.
If the government suddenly raises taxes, how does that affect the economy?
And you build this kind of mathematical model.
It's like a kind of, like a toy model, like a kind of game in a way.
We raise this a little bit, that falls, this thing rises.
And that's the kind of model that is basically used in modern economics.
But of course, when you build a model, you can't include absolutely everything that exists in the economy.
You have to make some simplifications.
Some things will be included.
Some things will not be included.
And the models which we study at universities nowadays, one of the big simplifications is that there is no inequality in the model.
In fact, it's more than just that there is no inequality in the model.
There is only one person in the model.
So these models are what they call representative agent models.
So rather than looking at 6 or 7 billion people in the world, or like 66 million people in the UK, or 300 million people in the US, they say, to make the model simpler, we are just going to look at one representative person.
So the average person.
So all you care about is averages, right?
You're just looking at one average person.
And of course, if we change the distribution, if I take some wealth from you and give it to Bill Gates, or if I take some wealth from Rishi Sunak and give it to you, that changes the distribution, but it doesn't change the average.
So basically, once you build this model, which only looks at the representative agent, which is the average, which is the aggregate, it's not only that there is no inequality in the model.
There is not even any possibility for inequality in the model.
These are models of averages.
These are models of aggregates.
Well, once again, Chris, it's very easy to fact check this.
Look, of course, there's a huge variety of models that get used in economics just like in any discipline.
You might have...
No.
There's only one type, Matt.
Judging from this, this sounds very bad.
This sounds like a big problem.
If economists are only using a model that can only have a single agent in it and they only care about averages, so they can't even look at interactions, right?
What the hell are you talking about?
This is a huge problem for the discipline.
Now, I know that there are models that don't involve agents at all, right?
That just are about interest rates.
You know, macroeconomic things, right?
So that could be true.
There might be some simplified ones that involve homogeneity.
And I think he's referring to representative agent models.
This is based on my Googling and stuff.
So this can be useful for certain kinds of things.
But he's ignoring the fact that there are heterogeneous agent models.
There are microeconomic models.
And there are, you know, all kinds of complex models that are used.
This is shocking.
Are you telling me there's overlapping generations models that can study intergenerational transfers and wealth accumulation?
Or that there's human capital and skill-based models that look at skill-based technological change?
And you said you weren't confident with the economics, Chris.
Look at you.
You sound like you know so much.
Keynesian and Calakian models.
Goodwin cycles, Mac.
Are people concerned about this?
The ones that I knew about before I went down this rabbit hole of looking at all these different models was behavioral economics, right?
That whole field, to my understanding, was challenging.
What economists often said was like beating up a straw man that nobody agrees with, like homo economicus.
Rational agent model, right?
Where people are just profit maximizing machines because what behavioral economics tends to show is like people are irrational.
They do things like they engage in costly punishment, giving themselves like economic disadvantage to punish people that aren't behaving well and whatnot.
But the thing is, when I look at this, it wasn't hard to find like tons of information about models which are very different.
What he talks about and which explicitly do model inequality and are like responses to the limitations.
And they're not like super advanced models that nobody talks about.
No.
They're really common.
Well, even without Googling it, I straight away smelt a rat because I knew that they do modeling on the effects of particular kinds of tax adjustments.
Because all tax is stratified.
There's incremental tax brackets and things like that.
There are things like consumption taxes, which applied to everyone equally, but actually turned out to be regressive taxes because poorer people spend more of their income on consumption.
The very basic stuff, which comes up every election cycle in Australia, where they're always fiddling with the various taxes, both parties are proposing different options.
They absolutely do income-based heterogeneous modelling to take into account the differential patterns of saving and spending and all kinds of stuff across the spectrum of income and wealth.
So it is just obviously...
The case that they do.
Yeah, there's an entire, like, there's also a set of economists that are collected together.
I mean, there's Marxist economists and so on as well, right?
But there are also a group of economists who tend to be very critical of the kind of neoliberal, like, market economic perspective.
And they go by the title heterodox, right?
It's kind of funny because, you know, like, heterodox podcasters, but the heterodox...
There's a lot of them.
And it also includes figures that I'd come across like a long time ago, right?
Joseph Stiglitz, the guy that used to be World Bank man, right?
He is in that category.
So is Thomas Piketty, right?
There's a huge amount of them that are critical of models that don't include various things or critical of various interventions that are favored in certain economic schools.
So it's just that presentation that there aren't.
You know, there isn't debate and division in the field when, like, economics to me is just a field like anyone.
There's tons of debates.
Well, one of the things that makes our ears prick up as decoders is when a figure is making a sweeping claim about academic or institutional orthodoxy, that they're all basically the same, that they don't care at all about X, right?
And they're all fixated on Y. It's something we hear a lot.
And I think that is what Gary is doing there.
And one of my particular interests is actually modern monetary theory, which is one of those sort of heterodox, not quite mainstream alternative views about things.
And it absolutely does focus on the effects of macroeconomic policy on heterogeneous groups, particularly labor.
And yeah, like these people exist.
Like it is a diverse field with a lot of different perspectives.
Yeah, so there's a different version of this critique which says there's a mainstream academic orthodoxy in economics which relies too much on representative agent modeling.
And this is drummed into undergraduates more strongly than alternative models.
That's a different critique, right?
And that's one that you could say, "All right, that's a reason." But that is not what this level of rhetoric sounds like.
What this sounds like is they are brainwashing you into this model and they don't even want to address those issues.
And again, I've got another clip that will highlight the degree to which this is being presented as the kind of complicity of the economics field in this industry.
Which is why when modern economists who've been to these elite universities think about the economy, they tend to think about them in terms of averages or aggregates, so that they're obsessed with the big aggregate measurements of the economy.
For example, GDP is of course the classic one.
Unemployment, inflation, central bank interest rates, level of government spending, level of government taxation.
These are things which you can measure on an aggregate economy.
But they're nothing to do with how is one person effective versus another person.
As soon as you take a model and you make it representative agent, a model of the average person, this model can't say anything about distribution.
It can't say anything about this group of people is winning, this group of people is losing.
We can't say anything like that in these models.
So I think this is really interesting, right?
Because if you want to be an influential economist in the world of policy or academia, you are going to have to have a PhD, right?
So you're going to have to have three years of undergrad, one year, I did two years of master.
You're going to be doing a PhD for like three, four, five years.
In the US, a PhD is like seven years.
You're going to have to do like some postdoc work.
And then you're going to, if you're lucky, become a junior professor.
So by the time you reach a point that you are like influential in economic policy terms, you've been studying these models for like 15 years, like something like that.
And the fact that these models don't include any distribution, don't include any inequality, We don't think inequality is important.
But what does it do to a person who has devoted most of their life to the study of economics that that study has consisted of 10, 15 years of very difficult mathematical analysis, mathematical manipulation, of very difficult, very complicated mathematical models with no inequality in them?
So, again, just want to repeat those.
Ultra-homogeneous representative agent models are absolutely just a subclass of economic models.
The second point too, of course, is that you can have measures, aggregate measures, like the Gini coefficient of income inequality or wealth inequality, which describe the degree of inequality.
As a whole, just like the unemployment rate is of interest to people who care about equality.
And I think it is a real furphy to imply that because you are studying something in the aggregate, then you don't care about inequality.
And also that it's not telling you anything about the individuals involved.
In fact, that made me think, Chris, of an old episode that we did on the health influences.
They were talking about gut health and biomes and things like that.
And they were telling us that Science, medical science, it just has the same treatment for everyone, right?
Yes, yes, it does.
But they do all of this science and they have all their experiments and stuff.
But all it's telling us is about people in general.
Really, it's not telling us anything about you personally and your own personal problems.
And that's exactly the same argument he's making here.
Yes, Dr. K. Dr. K said clinical trials are all about finding out things that work for a population, but they don't apply to necessarily you as an individual.
There's a lot of individuality that enters medicine.
The funny thing is that our system of medicine doesn't sort of factor that in.
We don't really factor in individuality in terms of our clinical trials and the gold standard of our information.
Ayurveda is fundamentally different because Ayurveda treats a person.
It presumes that all human beings are different and that in order to help someone, you have to understand individually how they function.
So if you look at our Western system of medicine, the idea is that a disease process is independent of an individual and has a treatment.
So the whole point of an RCT is let's remove all of the individuality, all of the specificity from an individual patient because...
If we take an individual patient, we treat cholesterol in this individual patient.
We have no idea how that's going to apply to the other 9,000 people we treat because this person is an individual.
So let's remove individuality from the equation.
Let's look at high blood pressure, and let's try to isolate this disease process.
Then we run into a problem in Western medicine because you can isolate this disease process in a laboratory, but the moment that you have a real person in front of you, things get complicated.
Also, Gwyneth Paltrow in the interview.
I think it happens a lot in the health influencers.
And it's the kind of thing that sounds good, right?
It's like people hate vaccines because it's the one size fits all.
Joe Rogan's got his bloody bespoke tailored treatments that's just for him.
That's the kind of thing that's quite appealing, right?
That this broad sweeping discipline doesn't care about people as individuals.
Yeah, but again, you know, we're gonna, and this is the contradiction that comes up because there are people, for example, Matt, like criticize the Gini coefficient as like, you know, not capturing all elements of inequality, which is true, right?
But there is also the case that when we get into it a bit later, Gary's going to be suggesting like a wealth tax, right?
Targeted at a specific band, but that's a general aggregate.
It's not like each individual person is treated as a, like you would be setting up a tax that applies to people that fit into this category.
So it's like kind of having your cake and eating it.
And all of this rests on the presumption, like we've highlighted, that if you do a PhD in economics, you're not allowed to focus on inequality.
You're not allowed to do modeling.
That has anything to say about distribution of wealth and inequality.
And it's just so wrong.
You can very easily find a whole bunch of seminars, a whole bunch of workshops, conferences, publications, articles, specifically talking about this, including from elite institutions and whatnot.
And you can argue about, well, are they achieving what they set out?
They talk about this a lot and this kind of thing.
He's saying here they don't even talk about it.
Like, they're not able to cover it because it's not in their models.
Well, there is the Journal of Public Economics, published by Elsevier.
The Journal of Economic...
Elsevier.
I'm going to say it my way.
Non-standard dialects.
The Journal of Economic Inequality, published by Springer.
Did I pronounce Springer right?
Is that right?
Springer.
Yes, good job.
Springer.
Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Labor Economics.
Now, if it was true that economists don't study, you're not allowed to study it, they've been brainwashed from the beginning, never to even think of inequality, I presume these journals are struggling to find papers to publish.
Also, what about all the economics professors at SOAS?
Because they seem to have spent quite a lot of time, like SOAS is a very lefty university, right?
So they are generally the dominant.
Economics perspective there is more towards the heterodox side.
So once again, it's about differentiating claims.
The way he frames it is extremely sweeping.
It does apply to all economists everywhere.
Maybe his claim is about the LSE specifically.
Maybe our friend Liam Bright, he's in the philosophy department, admittedly.
He's clearly a communist and he said LSE.
But putting him aside, maybe it's true that the LSE does have this kind of hyper-liberal, money-making, Yeah.
Attitude.
Because people like Gary, who were very keen to become traders, would tend to study there.
Absolutely.
So I went to university in London.
I'll mention this.
So the reputation of LSE, in particular, you know, you can study lots of things at LSE.
You don't have to study economics.
You know, you can go to study philosophy with Liam, and he's probably not going to make you do agent-based representational models or whatever, right?
But the...
The economics department there is broadly seen as being associated with the city and with a kind of more conventional, mainstream economics thing.
Now, as you pointed out, Matt, there's plenty of people in the economics department that won't fit that stereotype, right?
But I knew, as somebody in University of London, that the LSE economics students were known that they would sometimes wear suits to lectures or whatever.
Yes, the LSE has a particular reputation for people that are very fixated on money.
So it wouldn't surprise me if that was more common in LSE and there was more of an emphasis on that.
But that's a very different claim than all of economics across the UK or all of economics across the world.
The entire discipline of economics, right?
The LSE undergraduate syllabus is not...
The economics failed full stop.
And we will see, maybe in further clips, but certainly in the material that I heard, that this framing, that economists don't understand how the economy really works because they're actually not as good at predicting the future and trading as real practitioners,
like Gary was, that they've got a blind spot when it comes to Inequality and through their privilege, basically, I don't care about poor people.
It is a framing which is designed to aggrandize Gary himself as being the one understander you can trust.
Well, that's going to be a recurring theme, but let me play another clip which is building on the kind of themes that we've been talking about.
I think this is actually a very effective way.
To subconsciously convince, almost subconsciously brainwash a person into believing that inequality doesn't matter.
You never come out and explicitly say, like, inequality doesn't matter.
But you say, like, here's a really, really complicated game.
Here's a really, really complicated mathematical model that you are going to have to spend 15, 20 years of your life understanding in absolute fine detail.
And you never even explicitly mention it, but the model doesn't have inequality in it.
Doesn't have any distribution, doesn't have any space for that.
So imagine you're that kid, you went in 18 years old, and then you spent 15 years of your life paying, locked in libraries, doing really difficult maths with no inequality, no inequality, no inequality.
And then, first of all, whenever you...
Think about what's wrong with the economy.
You're going to go back to this stuff you studied, right?
And you're going to be like, maybe the problem is the interest rate is too high, or government spending is too low, or government taxation is too high.
You're going to focus on these things that were in the model.
You spent 20 years studying that model.
Of course, you're going to want to provide answers that are from the model that you told, the model that you've been spending 20 years of your life studying.
But if somebody comes to you and says, hey, maybe the problem is inequality, maybe the problem is distribution, how is that going to...
If it affects you emotionally, what's your emotional response to that going to be?
I think you're going to get a gut instinct, which is like, no, of course it's not.
It's not that.
Because if it was that, why the fuck have I spent 20 years studying something that's not even in the model?
And also, you kind of have a bit of professional skin in this game, right?
Because if this person is right with what they're saying, that the reason the economy gets worse and worse is because of growing inequality, then you have spent 20 years of your life...
Studying something that has nothing to say about the biggest economic issue of our time.
I guess that brainwashing didn't work on Thomas Piketty, who wrote a couple of books about capital and is a very famous modern advocate.
An economist.
He survived the brainwashing, Chris.
And he's quite a famous advocate for taxing wealth.
But, Matt...
I agree, of course, but let me play devil's advocate here.
Isn't Thomas Piketty an outlier?
Wasn't he someone that raised a number of critiques about the dominant narratives in the field and that's why he got attention for his book?
Maybe.
I think he's not the only one.
I think it's a pretty common thing.
Economists, I think, are always talking about taxation and progressive taxation.
Is standard.
Wealth taxes exist.
I think that they're pretty well studied.
That's the point I'm making.
Well, you know, the point that comes up here that, like, I think people should notice in our audience is when you present that, like, so first of all, he's doing the next thing of, like, if some guy comes up and says inequality, you're going to, like, disagree with that guy.
That guy is Gary, right?
That guy is Gary.
So Gary is saying, When there's some renegade like him who's coming up breaking all your fancy models with his insides, of course you're going to get emotional.
Of course you're going to say these lines because you've wasted your life in these libraries pouring over these dusty mathematical equations and whatnot that mean nothing.
And that is a convenient frame because what the general critique that I've seen of Gary is not like, well, we can't believe he's talking about inequality.
It's that he's really simplifying things and he isn't dealing with the complexity.
So it's the opposite of what he says.
He says people aren't willing to, you know, think about models that have multiple things in that.
But the response that I predominantly seen is that his solutions are too simplistic because they're not including a whole bunch of other factors, right?
And so I think it's less about people being triggered.
By the suggestion that inequality should be mentioned, and more that it's a very heavy-handed rhetoric, and it's kind of presenting anybody that disagrees, they're just the stultifying orthodoxy who's been brainwashed by not thinking critically about things.
And obviously that's extremely self-serving, but you've heard all the gurus that we cover, this is how they always present themselves.
If Jordan Peterson It's talking about climate change and saying the models don't model the real world, right?
They've just got all these models where they're predicting things, but the actual climate is too complex for their models, right?
And they've invested now like 20 or 30 years working on these models, doing IPCC reports and all this kind of thing.
You think they can say that their models don't work?
Well, that's because there's no such thing as climate, right?
Climate and everything are the same word.
And that's what bothers me about the climate change types.
It's like, this is something that bothers me about it technically.
It's like, climate is about everything.
It's okay.
But your models aren't based on everything.
Your models are based on a set number of variables.
So that means you've reduced the variables, which are everything.
To that set.
Well, how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation if it's about everything?
And that's not just a criticism.
That's like, if it's about everything, your models aren't right.
Because your models do not and cannot model everything.
Like when Jordan Peterson does it, people, well, not everyone, but like left-leaning people often are like, right, no, that's bullshit.
People do recognize that models are imperfect.
So they notice the heavy-handed rhetoric, but I think economists are a lot less sympathetic than climate change scientists.
So I think more people are okay with saying, what shit economists are, right?
Yeah.
Less popular than climate scientists, I suppose.
But yeah, look, the fundamental point is that this is not...
This is not a brand new idea that has not existed before.
In fact, it's an idea that is written about a lot, advocated for a lot, and analyzed a lot by professionals with a great deal of nuance and complexity.
And there are complexities and difficulties involved.
For instance, one of the problems, of course, with wealthy people is that they have very good accountants and they can have very complicated tax arrangements and they can change their domicile of registered Residence in order to avoid tax.
And taxation avoidance is always an issue when you are thinking about any kind of tax.
So I think to be contributing something useful, you have to do a little more than just say, inequality is bad, tax the rich.
If you're just going to be an activist and paint a slogan on a board, then that's fine, right?
But if you're actually offering some kind of intellectual contribution, given the pretty...
Complex and nuanced nature of the subject, you need to be offering a little bit more.
I haven't heard Gary ever address issues like that.
Maybe he has somewhere.
But I think the implementation issues are complex.
Well, Matt, I do have a response.
So maybe this is a good time to play that.
So here's a response I think he might offer to this.
I think when you see how these attacks are constantly attacks on things that I've never said, I think it kind of makes it clear what is really happening here, which is you basically have a lot of rich people who are just trying to find any way to argue against the idea that they should pay more tax.
It's a lot of rich people who control a lot of media, fund a lot of media.
They don't want to pay tax.
The last thing was...
This constant attack that I get, which is, well, taxing the rich is hard and if you want to tax the rich so much, can you please show me your completely designed tax plan?
I think it should be clear at this point that I am by far the biggest and most recognised public campaigner for the need to stop growing inequality and that there's quite a lot of pressure and work on just me to push this campaign.
I think we've had massive, massive amount of success.
But even just driving the sort of public education campaign is really, really knackering for me and it's been a ton of work.
It should be obvious that I am not going to be able to do that and simultaneously, by myself, design a complete tax plan for the country.
And this is what I mean when I say we need more people.
We need more people, you know.
I'm going to call out the think tanks, the left-wing think tanks.
Where are you?
We need you guys to make these tax plans.
I can't be the guy that wins the public support for this and gets attacked by the Daily Mail every day and writes the whole plan by myself.
We need to have more people behind this.
More people behind this.
So if there's any economists watching this, people in government, people in civil service, people in the think tanks.
Help us draw up these detailed tax proposals because I'm knackered and I can't do it by myself.
We need help.
We need help.
Yes, well, there you go.
He's too knackered from doing the podcast.
You know, he can't be expected to fill in the details.
But I think the issue is that people are dealing with the details.
I think the issue is that Gary frames himself as the understander.
Of economics.
Far better than anyone in academia, all of these eggheads and stuff who say they understand it.
None of them are focusing on inequality and none of them understand it as well as he does.
This is the recurrent theme.
But then when it comes to any kind of details, apart from tax the extremely rich more, this is the response.
And there are people who have written books like Tony Atkinson.
He's written a book called Inequality, What Can Be Done?
A very detailed treatment considering things like wealth taxes.
So, you know, Gary doesn't necessarily have to figure it out himself.
He could maybe read those books and maybe talk to those people and maybe get them to tell him.
And then he could do his activism with their help.
Yeah, the claim that he is the most recognized public campaigner on inequality as well.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm not saying he hasn't been successful in growing his YouTube channel and kind of getting attention on UK media.
But there's a lot of people who have had entire careers dedicated to highlighting wealth inequality.
And it does remind me a little bit that Russell Brand, when he was on his left-wing revolution fears, right?
Many people want a revolution, but I'm asking you what it would be like.
Well, I think what it won't be like is a huge disparity between rich and poor, where 300 Americans have the same amount of wealth as the 85 million poorest Americans, where there is an exploited and underserved underclass that are being continually ignored, where welfare is slashed while Cameron and Osborne go to court to defend the rights of bankers to continue receiving their bonuses.
That's all I'm saying.
What's the scheme?
That's all I'm asking.
What's the scheme?
What is it?
I think a socialist egalitarian system based on the massive redistribution of wealth, heavy taxation of corporations and massive responsibility for energy companies and any company that's exploiting the environment, I think the very concept of profit should be hugely reduced.
David Cameron says profit isn't a dirty word.
I say profit is a filthy word because wherever there is profit there is also deficit and this system currently doesn't address these ideas and so why would anyone vote for it?
Why would anyone be interested in it?
Who would levy these taxes?
I think we do need to like, there needs to be a centralised administrative system, but built on A government?
Yes.
There needs to be a government.
Well, maybe call it something else.
Call them like the admin bods, so they don't Jeremy, don't ask me to sit here in an interview with you in a bloody hotel room and devise a global utopian system.
You're not calling for revolution?
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm calling for change.
I'm calling for genuine alternatives.
We are, you know, we're starting a movement.
We're going to get politics back, you know, so that it's actually taking care of the little people that, you know, these elites.
So the rhetoric is very similar, but at least in this case, like Gary isn't leaning into right-wing populism stuff, at least not yet.
But it's just, yeah, that notion that, you know, nobody else is doing, I can't do it all.
Just like you're ignoring all of the economists that do focus on inequality, there's a lot of other people that have been running campaigns and promoting this topic for a long time.
I think if you're going to be an effective activist for a particular policy, it really helps to be specific about the policy that you hope to implement.
And to be specific about how it's going to get done and how the problems will get sorted.
And I know this from working with and talking to groups in Australia who are activating for policy change on gambling reform.
And it's not enough to just say gambling's bad, the gambling companies suck, they're ripping everyone off.
That's all true.
But to be an effective activist, you actually have to map out a specific plan.
Like what specifically are you banning?
What specifically, what measures are you looking to bring in?
How are they practical?
And that involves, in this context of economics, you have to do modelling.
For instance, if you're proposing a 1% wealth tax on the richest people, you need to figure out, first of all, what is your threshold?
That's step one, right?
And Gary's threshold bounces around a bit.
And then what you do is you do some economic modelling and you say, okay, well, what are the increased government taxation receipts?
What are they going to be from implementing that?
What is the slippage in terms of increased tax avoidance and so on going on?
What measures are you going to put in place to prevent that?
And then figuring out whether or not it's actually going to make a big difference to the things that you care about, like housing affordability.
And when you do those types of analyses, and I have had a bit of a play around myself, but I'm hesitant to reveal my half-assed attempts on the podcast.
But the point is, I'm not an economist, but if this was my thing, if this was literally my one job, and especially if I was Got such brilliant grades at the LSE and I was a superstar economics understander.
I could maybe do a little bit and present some of the details there.
Yeah, okay.
Well, now I'm on this issue about public campaigning and stuff, because it's very clear that Gary is kind of viewing himself as an activist, you know, promoting a particular political message, right?
He wants...
A wealth tax and he wants some reforms to housing or whatever, although the specific details might not be that clear.
But this is part of what he said taking a break is for.
This was always like the plan for the political project, but it's been quite a lot for me personally, and it's been knackering.
And yeah, I worry a little bit about how this channel...
It's going to work for me long term from a mental health perspective, especially if it keeps growing.
And I think politically, you know, if we want to win, I need to make the channel keep growing.
But I need to find ways to make sure we find that balance where the channel is growing, but I'm not going insane, basically.
That brings me on to my next point, which I've got written down here, which is how can we win?
So obviously I'm going away for a couple of months and I want to talk a little bit about...
When I go away, it's always...
I've taken breaks the last two years.
This one will be a little bit shorter.
There's always two reasons I go away, which is one, to stop me from going insane, and two, because the channel has been growing really quickly for about two years now, and every time the channel grows, I need to kind of take a step back, re-assess the situation politically and be like, okay, well, what are we going to need to be effective politically in the next couple of years?
The channel is much bigger now than it was even three or four months ago.
So what are we going to need now in order to win?
The point that I note there, Matt, right, apart from the thing about the mental health issue, which fair enough, you know, like if you're somebody that's prone to getting anxiety from overworking or whatever, right, comes up perfectly legitimate to take breaks.
No shade thrown for that reason.
But there is this conflation.
Of the growth of the channel with the success of the politics.
And I know that people will argue, well, look, if you have a huge audience, you're able to, you know, better influence things.
But like, again, there's plenty of YouTube channels with, you know, multiple millions of subscribers, you know, that have particular political points of view or whatever, and they're not dominating policy.
So Gary's YouTube channel is now over a million subscribers, but if he gets the 3 million, is that really going to supercharge the policy agenda?
I think there's a potential issue there.
And it also means that the audience is being asked to invest in the channel as a sign of political engagement.
Yeah, I mean, and look, as someone who produces podcast episodes with you, Chris, and we do a fair bit of research per episode, but not an extraordinary amount compared to some, Gary's economics, I think, gives the impression of one in which relatively little.
preparation is done per episode.
I mean, I think that's fair to say because he does repeat himself a lot and it's not tightly scripted.
If you watch other economics podcasts, you'll find that there is a density of information, a lot of citations, a lot of video graphics and statistics and analysis done.
Clearly it would take a lot of time to do.
Now, this factor is obviously not unique to Canada.
We've seen similar asset price inflation in the US thanks to its...
Low interest rates.
But given how long it's been since Canada has experienced a real estate correction, prices were already starting off with a relatively high base.
And with Canada's particularly resilient reputation, investors flooded in.
In 2020, it was estimated that one-fifth of all homes in British Columbia, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia were investor-owned.
With this percentage being as high as 42% in some subdivisions of Vancouver, With higher student populations.
It is worth highlighting that this investor demand has primarily been domestic so far.
While non-resident ownership is as high as 14.9% in the student-centric subdivisions of Vancouver, Across the province of British Columbia, the rate is much lower at 7% of condominium apartments and 2.5% of houses.
And while units not occupied by their usual residents sits at roughly 7% for both Toronto and Vancouver, some of which may be vacant, this figure can also include certain types of student housing or other forms of housing which, by definition, are not occupied by usual residents.
With there being mixed figures and debate on how many properties in Canada are truly left vacant by investors and the like.
So while foreign investors have had an influence on pocket regions of Canada, instead, it's truly the combination of all these variables, the policies encouraging high demand and speculation, without a subsequent follow-up in supply.
And as Canadians have tried to keep pace, something else has crept up to pretty concerning levels.
As prices have outpaced savings, buyers have borrowed the difference, contributing to record levels of debt in the country.
Sort of talking off the top of his head and kind of reiterating some of the same points again and again.
As well as that, his YouTube channel is monetized, I believe.
And with 2.2 million views per episode, that represents quite a significant amount of income.
Yes, it does.
And also having, you know, a best-selling number one paper-to-read book, I think, you know, books in general, not that profitable.
But if you are...
A super popular book you can get.
And to forestall the little guy from jumping out of the well, let me reiterate.
Hey, get back in there.
Let us reiterate, there's nothing wrong with a content creator making money.
But when you combine that with a self-aggrandizing narrative that centers the figure themselves 100%, completely ignores.
And disparages any other sources of information and also points to that kind of wounded bird grievance thing about people attacking him and he's just so tired from the arduous efforts to create these episodes.
It does smell a little bit off.
Yes, so the point that I would make there is...
Basically, every channel that I know of in the heterodox world makes the same appeal.
Like, Russell Brand has 6.8 million subscribers on YouTube.
He's constantly telling his audience, you know, you're helping to get the message out, take part in this, we can push back against it.
Trigonometry are saying, you know, if you subscribe and support us, you're contributing to free speech.
So, all these different YouTube channels are saying, make our channel bigger.
And we'll be able to influence the direction of the country.
And like, will they?
Now, in Gary's defense, I do have a clip that speaks to this.
So you mentioned about it's all around his persona and brand.
Now, he does make a point to say he doesn't want that to be the case.
The obvious, like the really, really obvious weakness at the moment is that at the moment, this idea and these like slogans, Is just way too tied to my personal brand, if you want to call it that, my media identity.
And you can see that in the way that the right-wing press has, especially in the last month or so, just really aggressively tried to attack me as a person.
They're not really engaging with the ideas.
It's just like, can we somehow attack?
Gary Stevenson, can we take him out?
And that is because they can see that at the moment, the economic ideas are really solid, but they are so attached to me as a person that if you can take me out, you can kind of kill the movement.
So I think what that shows us is that we absolutely need, in the long run, more people doing it.
We need more diversity of voice.
I think in particular...
We need what I'm thinking of as academic cover, which is economists, people at think tanks, people with these kind of academic credentials.
I have got two economics degrees from two top universities, but because I am a YouTuber now and because I look at sound work in class, it's very, very important that we have this academic cover.
So I think we really, really need more support from these think tanks, especially the left-wing think tanks like...
The New Economics Foundation, like IPPR, like the Resolution Foundation, they really need to be coming in and doing work on this.
I would love to see more economists from academia writing papers on this, speaking publicly on this, like looking into things like the squeezing out of wealth of the middle class, where's the wealth going?
You know, what would the dynamics of that be?
How does that affect living standards?
We need more academic cover, but we don't need just academics.
Yes, yes, we need more people involved.
Yeah, so it's not about him, Matt.
It's about the general thing.
So there was the issue there that he, you know, there's a Lex Friedman like, the slings and arrows, they're coming for me, right?
They're trying to take me down.
And this is in reference to some critical coverage in the Financial Times and the Daily Mail.
And there, just to be clear as well, he said, you know, they're not really dealing with my core message.
But the Financial Times is taking issue with claims that he made about being Like, the most successful trader in Citi.
And that sometimes in other...
Well, the best trader in the world.
And he does have a tendency towards aggrandizing statements.
Like, even in that one there, you'll notice he slipped in the fact that he's got these degrees from the elite.
Elite.
I swear to God, I have not listened to a single episode of Gary's Economics without him mentioning...
Dropping that in.
Dropping two or three of these in either.
He went to elite universities.
He got the best grades.
He was the best trader in the world.
He works it into pretty much every bit of content he creates.
Yeah, it does come up.
But the Financial Times, they actually did a fairly in-depth, critical evaluation of the claims, right?
And it's the Financial Times.
So in part, they have a focus where they're interested in claims made around trading and whatnot, right?
They point out they interviewed eight of his colleagues, including all the people that like him, people that, you know, didn't like him so much or whatever.
But the consistent thing from all of them was that his claims were hyperbolic and exaggerated.
Like, no, they weren't saying he didn't earn money and he didn't earn money that compared to ordinary people would be considered extremely high.
But just that he was not the best trader.
He wouldn't have the means to know that.
So they were just saying that's inaccurate.
And Gary...
Responded to that by kind of saying, yeah, all those guys, like, they're just interested in money and whatnot.
But actually, the article is talking about this penchant he has for hyperbolic claims.
And it isn't just the hippies, because there's this story in the book, which comes up and often in his content as well, where the way that he got his internship initially was he won this card game organized by Citi to identify promising people that might be good at trading.
And he won it because he had some knowledge about the structure of the game in advance.
And it turned out like one of the claims was in the last round, they give him the worst card where he couldn't win to just see how he would do.
But the Financial Times said, actually, this story checked out.
Like when we looked into it, other people verified it.
But so he presents that as, oh, this is just a hit piece trying to tear me down.
But it's more saying, actually, this person has a tendency to over...
Exaggerate certain things, like a self-mythologizing.
And also the Daily Meal piece, which he is also hinting at there, was pointing out that his mom on social media, when his book came out, like in the book he talks about, you know, not having a table, washing himself with like a hose connected for a shower head and all this kind of thing.
And his mom says, you know, actually we had, you know, our jobs were fine.
Gary was very well loved.
I paid for his university.
In the book, he didn't mention that.
She paid for his tuition at the LSE, but wouldn't buy him a table.
What a terrible woman.
Well, who knows, right?
Who knows?
So the Daily Mail are focusing on this because they see it as, oh, this guy is like a lefty inequality guy, but look at him being hoisted by his own petard.
But again, the criticism...
And there is self mythologizing and exaggerating things.
And there's nothing that would be lost by saying I was a successful trader.
I made millions and I come from a working class background.
You know, we weren't super poor, but I wasn't super wealthy.
You know, my parents helped pay for my university or this because like it's not like working class parents don't ever try to.
Contribute to their children's education.
That's a very normal thing to do, right?
So it's just that there's a kind of Dickensian presentation in a way, you know, like he has to be mathematically the best person at LSE.
He has to be the greatest trader.
Yes, it goes down to one year at Citi, but it's never just a middle-of-the-road person who did quite well.
It's always...
That Gary is kind of the main character in a way, and that the other people are NPCs, kind of.
Yeah, so we have to take that main character thing into account when he, before, is talking about the need for it not to be all about him and his brand, and we need to bring more diverse voices into it.
I mean, I'm a little bit suspicious, and it just cannot be emphasized enough, if you listen to economics podcasts like I have, that Gary's economics is different.
It's different from Asianometry.
It's different from The Plain Bagel.
It's different from Economics Explained.
There's probably a dozen others.
Because in none of them do they center themselves and their own narrative and special expertise.
The presentation is much more dispassionate and has far more information.
But as property prices have risen in the country, incomes have not kept pace, leaving Canadian households to become some of the most indebted in the world, as home buyers have made up the difference between their incomes and house prices using debt.
Now, interest rates are on the rise, home prices are down 12% from their peak, and people are starting to wonder if Canada's housing market is in a soon-to-pop bubble.
So...
As your resident Canadian finance YouTuber, I wanted to make this video to help answer the question, how bad is it really?
And to be clear, it's impossible to predict where things will go from here and to try and time a crash.
And I'll try to explain the important variables that will influence the outcome one way or another without making a grand statement about how now is the time to short Canadian housing.
But many Canadian households are currently experiencing significant financial strain.
And while there are some unique advantages Canada has when compared to the US in the real estate space, there are also some pretty depressing, unique features to Canadian real estate that makes the area harder to manage than an asbestos-laden popcorn ceiling.
So let's talk about real estate in Canada.
Buckle up.
It's going to be a ride on today's Plain Bagel.
That's not to say that Gary never includes any good information or that all his analyses are wrong.
I've seen a bunch of his videos and some of his analyses, I think, are fine.
And I think he makes valid points about the compounding nature of wealth, wage stagnation.
All those points have been made by other people many times, but he's not wrong to point them out.
Well, a bit more about the type of political campaigning that he's envisioning.
Because, you know, he was talking there about academics need to step up.
You know, presumably this is academics that...
We just need way more diversity of voice in general.
So one thing that I've seen which I've really liked, it's been very meaningful to me personally, is when different kinds of communicators and artists come in.
So there was a clip of me on the Rizzle Kicks album, Jordan Stephens, who I know a little bit, they put me on their album.
Somebody sent us a cartoon they've been making based on the educational series, Learning the Economy, which is on this channel.
That stuff is really powerful as well.
I think I would love to see...
More communicators.
I think when we get loads and loads of messages, like tons of messages of people like, we love what you're doing.
How can we help?
Can I come and work for you?
How can we help?
And it's impossible really for me to even read all these messages, never even reply to these messages.
So what I want to do is tell you, don't come to me.
Just do it.
Just do it.
Understand the messages and just do it.
Just go make the thing.
You know, this guy is making the cartoon, making the music, you know, whatever you want to do.
You want to print stickers, you want to make merch.
I'm not going to sue anybody for making any merch using our name or making any art using our ideas or make any music like taking clips.
Just go make it.
Do the thing.
I want to see more influencers coming through.
Talking about these ideas.
I want to see economists talking about these ideas.
I want to see artists making art.
I want to see musicians making music.
You know, stickering campaigns.
I would never, ever encourage anyone to do a graffiti campaign or a stickering campaign or a postering campaign.
Just do the thing.
Do the thing that you want to do.
Do the thing.
Use your skill.
And if that means just, like, making a little community group, talking to your community, the thing which I always encourage, just go and do it.
Share the message.
To me, there's the charitable way to read that, which is like, so he's saying, you know, you don't need him.
You go out, you know, just like if you agree with the messages, you know, find your thing and channel it into whatever kind of activism that, you know, suits you.
Fine.
I think that's a good message.
But there's also the side of it, which is like...
People are taking me.
They're putting me in the rap song.
They're making cartoons out of my content.
If you want to make stickers and use the channel, that's fine.
That's all good.
I'm kind of like, okay, so that sounds a bit more like homegrown fan content, right?
Yeah, organic stuff that kind of promotes.
The channel and the brand.
Those were the examples he provided.
But like you said, maybe those were just the examples that sprung to mind.
Maybe he was thinking of other stuff too that doesn't involve him.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, there was one thing I wanted to mention, not related to this, but it's that, you know, we've covered a lot of roller nefarious people, right?
You know, you've got your Scott Adams, you recently had...
Michael Schellenberger, Jordan Peterson, Chris Langan, the Red Skirk or whatever.
People that I think are doing serious harm to the world through serving as propagandists or just promoting rather hateful ideologies.
There's a lot of people that we've covered that fall into that.
And I would say probably the majority of it are in the right-wing reactionary.
Space within it, right?
Like racist stuff and all that kind of thing.
And so Gary, just to be clear here, like we are going to look critically at his content and whatnot, but it should be bore in mind that for all our critiques, his primary focus is wealth inequality and perhaps a wealth tax, right?
So like, even if we are highlighting things that he's, you know, doing that we consider like gurish.
That does make a difference that his agenda, such as it's presented as content, isn't really the kind of thing where you're going to have people dragged off the immigration, internment camps and whatnot.
So yeah, I just wanted to make that clear to people that we're analyzing the rhetoric and we put different people into the grometer and whatnot, but it doesn't mean that we're saying their overall effect is the same, right?
Even if they do display Guru-ish tendencies.
Indeed.
Yeah.
I don't think I can add to that, really.
That sounds right to me.
Anyway, back to what we were talking about.
Well, this is a very minor point, but the Democrats and all that kind of thing, they got criticized for their campaign focused on cozying up to celebrities or whatever, getting Oprah to endorse.
But is that not what that sounds a little bit like as well?
And I think this aligns with the fact that when Gary is talking about things, he's talking about the power of political slogans.
And that is kind of his vision of how...
You make the change.
So he has a slogan in mind as well.
So I think the first thing to say is I think what the last four months have proven is that the very basic strategy has a lot of potential, which is I think there is like a massive demand amongst the public for like a very clear, simple economic political message, which is the reason we are getting poorer.
Is because of this massive growth in inequality.
And we're not going to fix that unless we stop that inequality from growing, that inequality of wealth from growing.
I think that is powerful for a number of reasons.
One, because it's true.
I think that is the biggest thing.
Two, because it's simple.
Three, it doesn't muddy itself by trying to deal with loads of issues at once.
It just aggressively deals with this one issue of worsening living standards and worsening inequality.
So I think that...
Horse is running.
That can work.
That will work.
And I would encourage other people to look at that and say, you know, this is a message that can win politically.
The second thing is, I think the slogan tax wealth not work has a lot of legs in it.
You know, I know I don't really love condensing things into slogans, but the truth is, you know, I think you do need to do that if you want to win.
So I think the first thing is, I think this is a winning strategy.
I think if enough people get behind this, if enough people support this.
We can win power on this and we can change policy on this.
Just a very clean, simple economic message.
The reason living standards are falling is because wealth inequality is growing.
The rich are making enormously more money.
The middle class and the working class are getting squeezed out.
The only way to fix it is to stop growing inequality, to tax wealth, not work.
I honestly think that can win.
I honestly think that can win.
I have some quibbles there in terms of accuracy.
I don't think wealth inequality is the only reason why.
Say, the UK economy has not done incredibly well since World War II, really.
It's had its ups and downs, but it hasn't been doing incredibly well.
Inequality may well be part of that mix, but I think it's not the only reason.
On the other hand, I mean...
He is right, isn't he, about slogans?
Yeah, I think...
Well, that's what I was going to say.
I mean, I've been looking through the lens of...
He purports to have an economics podcast where he's going to explain to you how economics works.
And I think on those grounds, he scores pretty low just in terms of just the amount of good information per minute is really quite low compared to other podcasts.
He does make some nuanced points.
For instance, I did appreciate the point that he made about quantitative easing and its effects on inequality, the various stimulus packages and stuff that they use, the way they respond to Legitimate crises often is by injecting a bunch of money into the economy, which tends to flow into assets very quickly, which then tends to basically increase wealth inequality.
But generally speaking, it's pretty superficial and inaccurate.
On the other hand, if you evaluate him as an activist, let's forget about the monetization of the personal brand and so on for the moment.
I'll return to that, but yes.
If you think of him as purely activating for increased public attention on wealth inequality and measures to reduce it, housing affordability, you know, slogan type stuff, then, well, that's fine, right?
I mean, that's a different bar to clear, and it's not really what we look at in terms of, like, quality.
But in terms of those guru aspects, I am seeing a few of them.
Well, before we move on to another aspect of it, just because I have a couple of clips that relate to this.
You know, we flagged up this tendency amongst YouTubers, and Gary is no exception in this regard, about conflating views with something actually happening, right?
Inequality will get worse and worse.
Living standards for ordinary people will fall, and these people are not going to stop it.
So the responsibility has to fall upon ordinary people themselves to stop it.
When I first started talking about these things publicly in 2020, I was writing articles for newspapers.
I wrote an article for The Guardian.
And those articles are mainly being read by quite posh, quite privileged, quite rich people.
And I was convinced that we were not going to get positive change by talking to the group of people who benefit from the growth of inequality.
So I made consciously the switch to YouTube to try to convince ordinary people they need to do something.
And that's why we're doing this channel.
So I would encourage people to support.
Keep watching these videos.
Yep.
Keep watching the videos.
Yes.
So the Guardian, the audience there is part of the problem.
So you need to speak to the YouTube audience if you want to get like actual success.
Okay.
Okay.
That's possible.
But, you know, so Gary's Economics, what have they been doing?
This past while, what have they achieved on that channel, Richie Knight?
Okay, so what have we done this season on Gary's Economics?
We've only been back about four months.
In that time, I think we have been one of the fastest, if not the fastest, growing YouTube channels in the entire country.
We've successfully pissed off a big chunk of the most annoying people and newspapers in the entire country.
We have effectively driven...
Wealth taxes and the idea that we need to tax wealth, not work, really aggressively into the public conversation.
We're starting to achieve the things which I've wanted to achieve for a long time.
And that's basically thanks to you guys.
Last time I put the channel on pause was last year.
We shot, I think, at the beginning of July or the end of June.
And it was just after the general election had been called.
I was quite knackered then.
Probably not as knackered as I am now.
But I got quite emotional in that video.
I watched it back.
And the reason I got emotional was because I said in that video, I worked really hard last year.
We had the channel running for most of the first two-thirds of the year.
And then when the election got called, the channel grew massively.
But when the election got called a little bit earlier than I was expecting, it was just really clear to me that...
That we weren't going to be able, I wasn't going to be able to influence the election.
It was really clear that Labour were going to win, but it was really clear we weren't going to be able to influence their pitches, their policies.
And I think I said at the time of the video, it's difficult when you've worked so hard to look at how much work you've done and how far you've come and then to look up and realise how much further you have to go.
Yeah, he's achieved a lot, but the concrete terms is mainly...
Channel growth.
It's kind of ironic if the main people who are watching are not millionaires, like Eric, because he does like to emphasize how he's made millions of dollars trading and also made a lot of money from a bestselling book and making a fair bit of money from YouTube now.
Maybe he's making $6,000 or $15,000 per video.
Then, actually, by watching his videos, you're actually contributing.
To win a wealth inequality there.
Well, yeah, that's, you know, he has, well, he's part of the, there's a group of wealthy people that are asking for higher tax rates.
He's one of the good guys.
We know he's one of the good guys.
That's fine.
There's that.
Okay.
Okay.
So, you know, there was the election called and that was a little bit of a shame because, you know, we weren't going to be able to influence policies in enough time because Libra were obviously going to win.
Okay, okay.
But now, filming this 17th of April, this time we're putting the channel on pause.
It looks realistically, and I'm not just saying this, it looks like something that eventually we could maybe win.
The speed of the growth of this channel and this message...
In this last season, the last four months, has been just unbelievably big.
It was for periods the fastest growing YouTube channel in the country, which is insane for a channel which is essentially talking about redistributive politics and economics.
Every newspaper in the country has been speaking about it.
During this season, we had the spring statement, which is kind of like a mini budget here in the UK, for those who don't know.
And during the coverage of that budget, I think the single...
The most prominent criticism of the government's economic policies during that period was why are you not taxing the rich more?
You know, that's not just us and that's not just this channel that's pushed that message, but I think a big part of it has been us.
And I have said before on this channel, and I've thought for a while, I've been very confident for a long time that the economy would get worse because of this worsening wealth inequality.
And that would move the economic and political conversation into a space where people demanded something new.
Yep, okay.
So more stuff.
He's very pleased with the channel's growth, Chris.
Very pleased.
Yeah, that's what you're getting from this, right?
But the thing to note here is that we hear this focus consistently.
Gary's not the only person we cover that is...
Very focused on growing their channel.
And it's not because they themselves are, you know, wanting extra money or whatever.
It's because they want to help their audience or they want to improve society or they want to solve the meeting crisis or they want to, you know, address the what to what.
So this is not an unusual thing where people integrate their channel's growth.
With, like, whatever it is that they want to promote.
And I think you should be, like, if you're somebody that agrees with Gary, you should be a little bit skeptical.
Is that a reasonable thing to do?
Because, yes, it is true that, you know, as somebody becomes more prominent and they start cropping up across media, politicians have to respond to questions and, you know, prime minister's question time or whatever about these.
But, like, you know, People have been talking about wealth inequality before Gary's channel ever started.
And I think it's just worth keeping the kind of potential overlap of interests in mind here.
Yeah, I mean, it's just a common pattern we see with pretty much everyone we cover.
They generally purport to have a grand mission, right?
Something for the audience to sort of...
Virtually joining on.
If it's Dr. K, he's trying to do what area of effect mental healing.
If it's Huberman, he's trying to solve health and well-being in young men.
Other people are reaching out to meaning crisis in young men or something like that.
Trigonometry has got a political kind of anti-woke thing.
But they all have a grand admission.
And by subscribing and liking and watching, you are contributing to the grand mission.
So if you believe in it, you will feel right.
And they never have any other motivations.
And they do talk about that a lot.
And that is just something that is different.
Just pointing out that it's different from more run-of-the-mill content, history content, economics content, what have you, that is more dispassionate and doesn't pretend to have a grand mission and don't.
Encourage people to conflate their increased prominence with accomplishing these grand designs.
Yes, yes.
Now, two last clips, Matt, just on this topic, then we'll move on to something a bit different.
But this tying in of the channel success with the political mission, the listener and Gary, they're on the same team, albeit one of them.
It's the one that, like, is financially rewarded from the subscriptions growing so much.
But in any case, listen to this.
We've obviously not won the Labour Party over yet, which is a party in government.
We've not won the government over yet.
But I never expected to win them now.
I think I've said very clearly on the channel.
My plan was to make this something that we can hopefully force Labour to do coming to the next election.
The unbelievable growth in this channel, the unbelievable growth in this message in the last four months makes me, really for the first time in the history of doing this channel, makes me feel this is genuinely something that we can achieve.
generally something that we can win and...
*sad*
That is something that I am very proud of.
And it's something you can be very proud of because ultimately this is a YouTube channel.
It is increasingly a political movement which bases entirely its power on its popularity with the public, its popularity with you.
Its growth comes from people like you telling your friends, telling your families, telling your mum, like I always say.
It's working, you know.
The reason that think tanks...
Lobby the politicians instead of speaking to the public is because they don't think it works.
They don't think you guys are powerful.
They don't think you guys have power.
They don't think there's any point talking to you.
They don't think there's any point basing movement on you and educating you and you and we are proving them wrong.
And that's something we should all be very proud of.
Yes, indeed.
We should be proud.
So building that movement, building that sense of the in-group with the virtuous cause and...
You know, look at the outgroup.
You have politicians that don't care.
Even the Labour Party doesn't care.
Academics are out of touch and privileged.
Nobody really cares, but...
Gary cares.
Gary cares.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, come on.
Like, you know, pair this with the notion about the appeals to, we want to get economists, we want to get left-wing think tanks and whatnot.
Evolve.
But didn't you just tell people that think tanks don't care?
They don't care about the little people.
They don't even have the models, Chris, to encompass the fact that there are poor people.
Yeah.
Okay, the last clip, Matt.
I feel like I'm really hammering.
You are.
You are.
We get it.
We get it, mate.
But come on.
One more.
Last one.
Just give me one last one, okay?
What really matters here?
This is, by the way, directly follows on from that last clip.
When I think back to this season, I always think the video I did with Aaron Bastani at Navarra, right at the beginning of this press campaign.
And the first question he asked me was, were you surprised by how well the hardback did?
So the hardback came out last year and it was number one for two weeks.
And I always ask these guys not to send me the questions before because I like to sort of be kind of actually answering them in the moment rather than trying to like remember my rehearsed answer.
But I said to him, I was disappointed that the book didn't do better.
Because I thought the book got mischaracterised as kind of a finance book.
And I thought that it was actually a really good story.
And I thought it had the capacity to be much more than number one for two weeks.
And maybe people thought that was quite arrogant at the time.
But it's been number one for 11 weeks.
And I'll be honest, I didn't expect it to do that much.
And I think that kind of encapsulates how I feel about this whole season, which was...
The YouTube grew six times sub-numbers last year, and I didn't think we could possibly keep growing at that rate.
But then we've grown like two and a half times in the last three months.
Basically, everything this season was way bigger than I expected.
The book sold way better, the growth in the...
Subscriber numbers and the views was dramatically more than I expected.
The increase in public recognition that I get and public critique and the increase in recognition on the streets has all been just crazy.
It has been absolutely crazy for me.
Yeah, he seems interested.
This is just all from the same episode.
Imagine how many times...
You didn't go searching this stuff out.
No, it was just there in the one episode.
Subscriber numbers are up.
The book is sold more.
He referenced, by the way, Matt did an interview with Novara Media and he said that he was disappointed with the book.
I listened to that interview and he talks about how successful the book is.
One of the things that he says, actually, In that interview, and it's a good way to pivot a little bit to some of the other things that I want to cover.
You know, he's talking there about the added recognition from the book, from the YouTube channel.
The numbers, Matt, the numbers are blowing through the roof, right?
The fastest growing channel, blah, blah, blah.
But he mentioned this in the interview with Aaron Bastani, this interaction.
So, like, the book is good, in my opinion.
If it sells, that's great.
Pressure about is the political work and the political situation because, you know, things are growing really quickly now.
Like, my socials are growing really quickly and they're big now, right?
And I get stopped in the street and people say to me, you know, we're counting on you.
Some old lady stopped me the other day.
She's like, you're Gary, aren't you?
This is going to sound like I'm just, like, being a dick.
This is what she said.
And I was like, yeah.
And she goes, you're going to save us, aren't you?
That's what she said.
And...
It's a lot, right?
It's a lot, like...
It's a big weight to carry.
A big weight.
A big weight.
No, he is there, like, you know, doing the self-deprecating thing of, you know, like, he goes on to say and, like, it is hard because his overall prediction is people are still going to be fucked.
Like, there isn't a thing where people are saving their butt.
But it is still mentioning, you know, that people are walking up to him in the street now saying, you know, Gary, you're going to save us, right?
Well, yeah, there was another source where he was very proud.
He was describing how he was maybe the most successful public economist or something like that.
Maybe you recall?
There was an interview in the Financial Times where he mentioned that he was one of the most well-paid.
One of the most well-paid economists.
So yeah, it feels like there's two wolves inside Gary.
They're a little bit in contrast.
Like one wolf, it's a bit like Jordan Peterson.
One wolf wants to be the one who's carrying the burden.
He's got the grand mission to save the rest of the people.
And it's a terrible weight.
It's very stressful.
It's so tiring.
It's so hard to do it.
But the other wolf can't resist, frankly, bragging.
About just how amazingly successful and amazing he is.
So sometimes these incongruities do crop up.
Yes, on a couple of occasions.
So like Matt, you've heard of the Galileo gambit, right?
I have heard.
That does drink a bell, Chris.
You're familiar with that?
So that's when people compare themselves to Galileo because, you know, Brett Weinstein has done it, Jordan Peterson has done it, basically all of the gurus.
I can't believe it is actually a gambit.
Like, that's called the Galileo gambit.
And they keep doing it.
And they actually explicitly, they don't pick someone else, but go on.
Well, yeah, it's funny you should mention that, because, you know, Copernicus.
He was a guy, right, that also revolutionised our understanding.
Gary just has a thing to say about Copernicus.
But the end result is, you know, most of these discussions are just, you know, ten people with elite university degrees talking to each other.
So it's not that they even have to really deny somebody like me who says inequality is the problem.
It's just never in the discussion.
It's never, never in the discussion.
It's a little bit like, you know who Copernicus is.
Copernicus is this scientist who discovered that the Earth travels around the Sun.
And the Earth is just one of many planets travelling around the Sun.
And everybody accepts now that this is right.
But before him, everybody thought that the Earth was the centre of the solar system.
I guess it probably wasn't called the solar system at that time.
And everything travelled around, including the Sun.
And they had developed these really complicated mathematical systems.
Of making that work.
And the way that works is that all the other planets, they have to do loop-the-loops and spinning around.
That's the only way that it works to make sense.
So all of these guys spent their whole lives working out these complicated mathematical models of how everything goes around the Earth.
And then a guy came and said, actually, things don't go around the Earth.
And he was massively, massively attacked.
Nobody wanted to accept it.
Because you have all of these prestigious academics who have spent their whole life developing models of how things travel around the Earth.
I think that's kind of basically...
Where we are now.
And if I was right in saying that, that these guys are just missing the big thing, what would you expect?
You would expect, basically, that their models wouldn't work in the sense that they would constantly generate incorrect predictions.
And that is exactly what happens.
Okay, so he is explicitly comparing himself.
Copernicus, at least it's not Galileo.
It's not Galileo.
No, it's not Galileo.
Oh my God, there are so many problems with the comparison, apart from the obvious self-aggrandizing nature of it.
Copernicus had a model, like a mathematical model, an alternative model, which was shown to be in accordance with the evidence.
I mean, put aside a whole bunch of other facts, like people have known that Earth goes around the Sun in different places a long time before.
He doesn't have a model, right?
He's got a slogan.
That's different.
And he's not the only one.
Like, there's just so many problems with that, which makes the self-aggrandizing nature of it particularly offensive, I'm afraid.
Well, well, no, Matt, okay.
So, you know, look.
All right.
So he might have compared himself to Copernicus.
You know, that's not a great sign, right?
Some might call that slightly self-aggrandizing.
But, you know, our gurus, like people like Eric Weinstein, they're complaining, you know, they're not being called up by the government.
The people are not, like, respecting them when they've got all these insights about the field.
Like, Gary's not doing that.
So I made a lot of money in my early 20s, basically, because I was able to show that I was good.
So if you're good, go into trading, right?
I made a lot of money in trading.
You know, in my biggest year, I made more than $2 million, right?
So you're talking about someone getting paid $10,000 a week, basically, because they're good.
And, you know, I probably could have gone on to make a lot more if I would have stayed in it.
I left trading and I went to do master talks with two-year masters.
And my first macroeconomics lecture, there's a guy there talking about interest rates.
I was an interest rate trader and I was one of the best paid interest rates traders in the world, right?
And I said to him, why do you think we've been so wrong on interest rates for so long?
And he was like, oh no, he always knew rates would be zero, right?
Totally, totally unaware that that had even happened.
I sent him the data, you know, look, you guys have actually been wrong for like 10 years.
I wasn't even interested.
I wasn't even interested.
And I've been floating around this public media space for a long time, right?
And I'm starting to get some attention now, like since the book came out, this kind of thing.
You've got somebody floating around the space.
Was one of the best paid traders in the world.
Very strong track record for correct prediction.
Comes out, puts a video out, the beginning of COVID, basically correctly predicts everything that happens during COVID.
And very, very little interest.
So...
Is that true?
I mean, you've got a Sunday Times bestseller.
You know, I wouldn't say little interest.
Your book was nominated for one of the Financial Times book of the year.
Well, you know, this is a good point, right?
Who's interested?
Penguin.
Why Penguin interested?
Because they can sell a lot of fucking books and make a lot of fucking money.
Who's not interested?
The fucking government.
This is the point I'm trying to make.
Who's not interested?
Oxford University.
So the thing is, so banks look at me and say, this kid, predictions are right, give him in, how much do you want, whatever, million pound a year, you know.
I asked for a kid to sit next to me and read the newspaper.
And I got someone, they hired someone to sit next to me and read the fucking newspaper.
Because they're like, if Gary needs a kid to read the newspaper, get him a kid to read the fucking newspaper, right?
So many issues there.
The self-aggrandizing is so strong.
He works it into pretty much everything he says.
I made $2 million, $10,000 a week.
This guy, I predicted everything right.
Yeah, whatever Gary wants, he can have.
I mean, that is inconsistent, by the way, with the pretty reliable reporting we saw in the Financial Times, which he was a pretty standard kind of trader.
He wasn't the wunderkind that was revolutionizing trading.
That aside, that little anecdote about, you know, confronting the lecturer with amazing ideas and the lecturer just couldn't handle the, you know, high-level ideas that were coming at him and just had to...
That is precisely the stories that we heard from Chris Langan.
Chris Langan.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, finally, I, you know, thought, you know, I was having a hard time with this.
There were certain things that I, you know, didn't quite understand how he was, why he was doing them the way he was.
So...
I kept on trying to track him down to his office.
He was never in his office.
I would wait in the hall for, you know, hours and hours for this guy.
I never showed up.
Finally, I caught him in his office.
And I said, "Hi, Professor Leisnering, can I come in?" He said, "Well, I'm really kind of busy right now." And, "Well, I just wanted to ask you one question.
You know, how-- why do you do this?
Why are you taking a set theoretic approach to the calculus like this, you know?
I mean, they don't seem to be compatible." You know, on the one hand, you know, the calculus deals with change, whereas sets are static things.
Why are you taking this particular approach to it?
And he looks at me, and he's, you know, Asperger's victim, right?
And he looks at me, looks down at this thing, and says, well, you know, some people just don't have the mental firepower to be mathematicians.
Well, what was I supposed to do?
Hit the guy?
I wanted to hit him.
Right, right, but he says something that's sort of...
Pathetic, almost, to say.
It is pathetic, but it basically told me a lot about how he sees the world, how he sees other people.
I don't want to take a course from a guy like that.
Yeah.
No, that's right, Matt.
So, you know, I said about the phone not calling, and yes, he's complaining that academia aren't paying attention, right?
Like, the places that value, you know, like efficiency and success, they notice, right?
Banks, they'll give Gary a million to get him, whatever.
Penguin, they're throwing money.
Adam, his book, by the way, bestseller, During Greer.
That's also, by the way, very Jordan Peterson-esque.
Just a note, you know, Jordan Peterson is often saying government is inefficient and whatnot, but industry, industry is like the shark.
You know, it cuts out all the fire.
It won't be getting things wrong like that.
So nice to see a point where they agree there.
But, you know, I mentioned the phone isn't ringing.
And to be fair, that didn't come up in that clip there.
So I have to retract that.
Support this guy, support this guy, pay this guy, whatever he needs.
Turn up at Penguin, you know, send 20,000 words.
This guy, he can write, great story, give him what he wants, give him a load of money, get him in, right?
By the way, you got one of the biggest advances for a non-fiction first title.
It was a decent advance.
So he's not exaggerating.
The private sector that's trying to make money is interested.
But the government is not interested.
That's a fucking problem.
I would work for government for free.
I would advise government for free, but they don't call me.
Phone's not ringing, Chris.
They don't call.
They don't call.
They don't call Eric to sort out COVID or October 7th.
I'll be entirely honest.
One of the most off-putting things I ever heard in my life is that when you look at people who've been fighting the war longer than you are, and then you say, well, you know, you didn't endorse.
Did you ever call?
Did anyone ever call?
Never.
Not a single phone call.
Nobody cared about my endorsement.
Eric, I have to tell you, you know you don't get any apologies or...
Me?
Yeah.
Well, you don't get any someone coming around and saying, oh, I should have done this.
No, no, no.
That's what I'm saying.
So if you got a call and they said, hey...
How can I help?
Well, if they got a call and they said, what can you do to help?
Let's reverse that.
I have the paper that tried to figure out how we get American business the best and the brightest without hurting...
American capital, how it gets the best and brightest without hurting labor.
I have the history of what H-1B came from and the conspiracy between the National Science Foundation and National Academy of Sciences.
They don't know that they've got a huge problem that the CPI was directly broken by the Boskin Commission, and it uses a modified Lespares Index called a Lowe's Index, and it's supposed to be using a seasonal path-dependent index because an error in the CPI affects all tax brackets and entitlements.
So the error in the CPI was supposed to be the fourth largest program.
After, like, defense, Medicare, and Social Security.
The error in the CPI.
You know, so it's like, do you guys know how this thing works or runs?
Do you care?
Do you just want to move fast and break things?
You tell me.
If you want to move fast and break things and you want a map of where things are, I don't need to be, I don't need a job.
I don't need to be in the administration or anything.
I'm just like, do you want to win?
They're not calling, you know, the COVID dissidents who know how to sort things out.
Here, they've got somebody who, you know, made a lot of money.
He was a trader in the city, Matt.
He made millions.
All right?
He made bets.
Why isn't the government calling him to sort out inequality?
It's a mystery.
He got one of the biggest advances in the nonfiction book.
And these dunderheads at Oxford and the government are just ignoring what that...
So, you know, I'm just saying, there are some telltale signs that we've seen here before.
And another thing, Matt, another thing.
There's more?
How much more?
There's a little bit more.
There's a little bit more.
But, you know, we've talked about the wounded bird pose, right?
We heard a little bit of it.
It came up with the...
I'm being attacked.
They want to take him down.
They want to take him down.
I mean, it's clear why they want to take him down.
Yeah.
So there's a little bit discussion about this.
And this is actually one of the things that you should be interested in is how do people 3M the criticism that they receive, right?
And how do they respond to it?
Because this often does.
Separate the gurus from the boys, right?
So when I saw a section in one of the videos that we looked at was like response to critics.
That's where I'm like, okay, let me see what you're gonna say here.
So, okay, let's start that.
Just f***, basically.
I don't know if you've ever played The Sims.
When you play The Sims and you try to get your sim to do some studying.
And he's so knackered that he just says, no, I refuse it.
This is what my own brain is doing to me at this point.
I'm properly exhausted.
But I wanted to do a couple of videos covering just a couple of the common critiques that we've had in the last couple of months.
And I'm not going to do that video, so I'm just going to include them very quickly in this one.
One of the big criticisms we've had is that raising tax on wealth is pulling up the ladder.
You're preventing people from being able to get rich.
Now you are rich yourself.
And this is just like totally insane, basically.
The whole thing I'm trying to do is lower taxes on working people and raise taxes on hoarded wealth so that very, very wealthy people have to sell assets and those assets go back into the economy and ordinary working people.
Get higher wages and pay lower taxes and can afford to buy assets.
The whole thing I'm doing here is trying to make it so that ordinary working people, young working people who want to produce good things, who want to do good work, can get rich and buy assets.
The other attack which I get is that I want to increase taxes and increase the state, which is mad because I've always made it totally...
Totally clear that I'm not trying to increase taxes.
I'm trying to change who pays taxes.
I want to move the tax burden away from working people and towards the super rich.
So, you know, Matt, one of the things I want to point out is that you've got, you know, the highest motives, right?
It's like Lex Friedman.
Look, I'm doing a hell of a lot of stuff.
And all I'm trying to do is get a good thing, right?
Wealth inequality and higher taxes.
And I'm not even suggesting we tax.
Working people, right?
It's the ultra rich, which, by the way, I'm thinking like, well, that's sort of convenient because you're like, so you're not, he's not suggesting, for example, that we should tax traitors, right?
Would they be the ultra wealthy?
Well, that's the thing.
I've avoided sort of trying to make a rejoinder to some of his stuff or pick holes in the thing, but I have noticed that the framing And it's a very populist framing, is always about the ultra-rich, like the mega-rich, right?
Like the 1%, right?
George Shores, Jeff Bezos kind of people.
Yeah, so everyone who's in the 99% can be on board with that, right?
So it is by definition like a populist message.
But if you dig into the numbers a bit and you look at, for instance, who owns all the property...
In the UK.
If you look into where a great deal of the wealth is held and where the sources of wealth inequality are coming from, it's not just the mega-rich.
It's dentists.
It's professionals.
It's traders.
It's sometimes people's parents.
It's a bunch of stuff like that.
And I'm not arguing that we shouldn't tax them more.
I think we should.
But it's a less easy pill message to swallow.
Yeah, so he's actually arguing a message which is easier to promote, right?
Which is like, essentially, I'm not talking to anybody in my audience, really.
I'm talking about the mega-wealthy, right?
The people that have hoarded wealth over generations.
Who likes them?
Like the really difficult thing, I mean, look, I don't want to get into house prices and what's driving them and stuff, but there's a bunch of drivers, but there's a lot of similarities between Australia and the UK and other places where they're high.
And it's got to do with some stuff that he accurately identifies, like the financialization of these sorts of assets.
But one of the things that is a difficult pill to swallow is that there is a lot of tax incentives, tax breaks given to everyone who owns property, basically.
So you can buy a house and rent it out and there's breaks on capital gains tax.
There's negative gearing in Australia.
There's a bunch of tax benefits, right?
And you could make property much more affordable and bring house prices down.
But it's a very difficult political bill to swallow and neither of the current Australian mainstream parties can consider it because everyone who owns property, they hate the idea because they all enjoy seeing The house price is going up.
Now, I'm pointing this out not to get into a debate, you know, an economics debate about house price and stuff.
I'm just pointing out that often the solutions to problems are a bit unpalatable.
And I do notice that if you want to take a populist approach to things, then you definitely don't go down those roads because, you know, they're not as appealing as pointing the finger at George Soros or some aristocrat.
In a castle, he's worth 100 million pounds.
Yeah, and I feel people sometimes act like nobody wants to say that message.
Nobody wants to hear this.
Everybody wants to hear that message, right?
The message is about negative hearing and actually bringing house prices down.
A lot of people who own houses don't want to hear that message.
I'm telling you.
No, no.
So, okay.
Now, in regards to negative media coverage, a bit more.
So, you know, highest motivations.
He's a bit tired from things that are going on, but he's just, you know, he's trying to do good and whatnot.
So what about those other kind of attacks on him?
The last thing I've got here is the personal attacks on me.
I don't really like doing these lists, but I'm so knackered.
This is kind of all I've got left, really.
Loads and loads of personal attacks on me, which, to be honest, often are the funniest part of my day.
The one thing I want to say about this is, you know, I'm in a very, very fortunate situation here.
I don't need to win this.
I'm a rich guy.
If we lose, I'll continue to be a rich guy.
I'll get richer and richer.
I don't need to win.
So the Daily Mail can attack me all they want.
When the Daily Mail attack me, what they're trying to do is make sure that you pay higher taxes and your family falls into poverty and their billionaire owners don't have to pay tax.
So really, in a way, if the public can be convinced that I'm a dickhead, then I can finally go on holiday.
But it's your family's finances on the line.
So there you go.
An attack on Gary is basically an attack on poor people.
Exactly.
And to see that transparency metastasized into something criminal that I absolutely deny makes me question, is there another agenda at play?
Particularly when we've seen coordinated media attacks before, like with Joe Rogan, when he dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn't approve of, and we saw a spate of headlines from media outlets across the world using the same language.
I'm aware that you guys have been saying in the comments for a while, watch out, Russell, they're coming for you.
You're getting too close to the truth.
Russell Brand did not kill himself.
I know that a year ago there was a spate of articles.
Russell Brand's a conspiracy theorist.
Russell Brand's right wing.
I'm aware of news media making phone calls, sending letters.
The people I know for ages and ages.
It's been clear to me, or at least it feels to me, like there's a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces and these kind of voices.
And I mean my voice along with your voice.
And anyway, you know, this to me is a little bit of a more clever way than the Eric version of, you know, look, if the attacks are too much, I might have to take myself out of this discourse.
But there is a hint of that there, which is like...
Look, if you guys believe this crap about me or whatever, like I'm rich, I can just bugger off.
But again, the inconsistencies, like many times he talks about how tired he is, how buggered he is, you know, dealing with the...
You know, being targeted and stuff like that.
But just there is a throwaway line.
But he just mentioned, oh, you know, it's just the funniest part of my day to read the criticisms.
I know, but that's not even bollard.
Not even bollard.
Yeah, water off a duck's back.
I mean, it's just, I see this contrast, these two wolves, right?
One side wants to go, you know, I don't care.
I'm fantastic.
I'm doing amazing.
But it's a bit inconsistent with the sort of wounded bird thing.
Can I just say, Mark?
Can I just say, would you allow me to say that if you take Gary's account at face value, right?
You know, he worked his way up.
He worked hard at school and, you know, studied, you know, was quite bright and then won this game.
He got straight A's, Chris.
He got really good grades.
I know.
I've heard that many times.
Don't leave that out.
Well, he was also, but he was expelled for selling drugs before that, right?
So he came over that adversity and for his own graft and whatnot.
But I'm saying, take it for, Granted, the way that he describes, you know, he worked his way up and he went to university and he did very well there and then he got, you know, this position and he did very well at the financial company that he worked for.
So well, he became a millionaire.
And then he had a fight with the company about getting his earnings because he wanted to leave the company because he realized inequality is an issue and he didn't like his mental health.
So he battles them, he details it in the book, and he gets a payout.
He gets this thing which many people have been denied where the companies are holding some of the bonuses that they are paying you.
These are deferred stock options, aren't they?
Right.
Yes, that's a term for it.
Sorry, deferred stock options.
So it's a payout that you get over the course of your career with the intention of keeping you.
And if you leave the company early, you're not entitled to them is the general thing.
But there are ways that people have been able to get them.
Gary tried to get them by saying that he was going into charity and he had to go for various arbitration for about a year, but he got them in the end.
But it was like, I think he says one to two million dollars.
I can't remember how much it is, but it's a substantial amount.
So he got a payout.
He earned all this money.
Now he has a best-selling New York Times, whatever, Sunday Times best-selling book, which has been top of the charts for 11 weeks.
He's got a YouTube channel.
With a million subscribers, with tons and tons of views, and he's got a Patreon going now, so he's doing perfectly fine, like monetarily.
Like, this is not the most suffering person in the world.
Like, many people would be very happy for that life, but it's constantly presented, like Lex Friedman, that there is a massive burden, and it's, you know, taking a toll.
And there's lessons that have been learned and, you know, everything.
I mean, I guess it's just kind of like it feels a bit like being lectured by someone who was in the Ku Klux Klan about how not to be racist, right?
And of course, like, somebody with that experience, they do have things to say about being racist and, you know, the traps and those kind of things that apply.
But like...
Not everybody was in the Ku Klux Klan, right?
Like, you know, my image of traitors and life in the city and whatnot was similar to what Gary ends up having revelations about.
But I already knew that and it didn't appeal.
I already know that wealth inequality was an issue.
It was something that people were talking about in the university I was at.
So, like...
I don't know.
It's just like having somebody who is frequently reminding you that they're a millionaire, that they went to LSE and they are this super mathematical genius.
And then they kind of understood that the economy was in trouble and all this kind of thing.
And trading could make you wealthy, but it wasn't going to do anything.
I don't know.
None of that is news to me.
And also, I never saw the appeal.
Of being a traitor.
And it's not because I'm an uber rich elite person.
Or that I don't think anybody can ever speak about inequality and wealth taxes.
Like, that's fine.
Go ahead.
So, I don't know.
There's just like a presumptions aspect to, you know, Gary is kind of telling us.
But it's like, I didn't go into the city.
And earn millions.
Now, I went to, you know, I was in elite education, you know, in terms of like universities or whatever.
I saw people who prioritized earning money and went to work in the city.
And so he went and prioritized, you know, earning money, trading FX derivatives or whatever.
But it's like he does that and then also gets to claim the credit.
For being a campaigner for justice and good and all of these things.
But says, I can go away and be super rich because of how successful and smart I was.
Like, so even if none of this works out, it doesn't damage me.
But that's somehow like a good thing.
Yeah, I know.
And I just don't feel like it's, it isn't such a burden.
Like, he produces about one podcast episode a week.
And like, one of them is, should I speak to Labour?
So he talks 15 minutes about Labour wants to come on Gary's economics.
Should I let them?
And, you know, he rambles on for 30 minutes or 40 minutes or an hour once a week.
Now, you and I, Chris, have a podcast.
We produce a fair amount of content.
We do this as well as our day jobs.
It's not that hard, right?
And we do a lot more than Gary.
Just in terms of content that you produce, right?
You will not hear either of us going on about the great...
Cross, we have to bear for the very important mission of decoding the gurus and making sure people are not being hoodwinked by various influences.
No, it's just not that hard.
And I don't think you can have your cake and eat it too.
I don't judge people that prioritise making a lot of money.
Yeah, it's fine.
I worked for a little while.
I gave it a go myself, working for a while in construction.
In the end, I decided.
I'm not that kind of guy.
I much prefer to take it easy as an academic and do stuff that I enjoy.
I don't judge people that make those decisions.
But it does seem like Gary's had his cake and eaten it too.
Yeah.
And, you know, Matt, so just a clip that I think I'll play here.
So Gary talked there about, you know, the success, his level of wealth.
You know, like at the end of the day, he could just seal off in the sunset, right, if it gets a bit too much.
At another point, he was talking about the Patreon.
On that note, I wanted to really thank everyone who's subscribed to the Patreon.
Last year, we were funded by the Joseph Reantry Foundation, and this year, they didn't renew our funding, which meant we came into this year, basically, the only way that we could have funded it was basically me paying for it.
We opened the Patreon, and the Patreon guys have, you know...
They basically made it that I can have a manager.
None of the money ever goes to me.
I don't even see the money.
There's a separate bank account.
Someone else managed it.
And it means that I can totally focus on the creative work, the political work.
And I haven't had to focus on the financial work.
And also, it's just been really meaningful to me to see people willing to step in and support it with their money, which makes it feel like it's not just me doing it.
And that means I can use that money to think about things like getting an assistant, getting a PA.
I think...
We are probably going to need somebody to do outreach work.
I get tons of messages, so many messages, from including politicians, journalists, celebrities, influencers, people at these think tanks.
And it's impossible for me to even keep on top of it.
So we might be able to hire somebody to do that.
And we're only able to do that because of the guys who support the Patreon.
So I wanted to thank you, specifically, everyone who's on the Patreon.
So, you know, the incongruity to me there, first of all, is like he was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a charity that is focused on research or activism that helps to solve poverty in the UK.
So his channel was funded by a charity.
That's already somewhat surprising.
But after they've lost the funding, so they started the Patreon.
But he says, you know, the other option is I was going to have to pay for it.
And that's kind of like presented as, you know, but like, hasn't he just been saying he's a billionaire?
He's going to be fine.
Like, he knows how to bet on all the trades.
He knows all the things.
So like, he's got no concern with money.
But then why is this patron?
Like, because then he's talking about, look, I can hire a personal assistant.
We can get people to respond to the emails.
But this is the kind of thing that like.
You know, it's just...
Like there are other sources of income, right?
Like the YouTube monetization.
Well, the book and the YouTube, but like his primary activity is...
The YouTube.
Yeah, YouTube.
And that generates an awful lot of income.
He didn't mention that.
I mean, I presume he keeps that.
But yeah, so anyway, it's not, again, it's not to say you're not allowed to make money being a content creator.
It's that his presentation of it is that he needs more support.
He's not mentioning the other sources of income there.
I don't think he would have to dip into his...
He wouldn't have to pay for it himself because he makes more than enough money from YouTube to pay to make a 40-minute casual video from his kitchen.
I mean, we can't afford to make videos, right?
We've managed to swing it, and we're not millionaires.
So there's an incongruity there.
I mean, like you said, it's perfectly fine.
He says that the Patreon, he doesn't take any money for it.
It all goes back into the channel.
Fine.
You know, fine and dandy.
Let's accept that.
But you're such a financial whiz that you can essentially beat the market.
Almost constantly.
I'm going to play some other clips where he's talking about his ability to predict markets.
So why wouldn't you just do some of those bets that you are saying that you can't do that?
Well, that is a good question.
So, of course, when he is working for a big company, he's obviously trading with other people's money on particular markets.
And stuff like the facilities, both financial and technical.
And, you know, there's actually a pretty strong argument that was made by the people who the Financial Times spoke to, which said that actually he had quite a lucrative.
Yes.
Yeah.
He mentions that in the book as well.
Yeah.
He was assigned a lucrative spot.
So that's very different from trading on a personal level.
You're quite right too there, Chris, that with a fund, like a piggy bank of 10 million bucks, say, and being the best trader in the world, like, you know, understanding everything, it wouldn't be hard to generate an income of, say, $200,000 per annum.
That'd be pretty straightforward.
Surely that's pocket change for people that are, you know, that good at trading.
Well, that's the thing.
You could do it extremely conservatively and not have to think about it very much.
So anyway, whatever, whatever.
Okay, well, but he talks about, at one point, Matt, like advising all the people.
This is part of the reason I was thinking about this because he has a video about how to get wealthy.
And he kind of says, you know, like he doesn't give financial advice, right?
Because there's different kinds.
Yeah, I heard two reasons.
One is, one, you shouldn't try because the system's rigged against you.
But two, you can't do it like he does because he's tried advising his friends, but they have all the wrong intuitions.
Exactly.
I have the clip for this, so listen to this.
And I said, well, you know, it's gone up 20% and it's down 5%, so you're still up a lot of money.
Like, just don't do anything.
Just sit, wait, you know.
If you want, you can buy a little bit more on this dip.
And they both said, you know, you don't understand.
Like, I'm out.
Like, I'm wiped out.
Like, I've lost all my money.
And I was confused.
Like, how could you have lost money?
It's up 15% since I told you to buy.
And they both did basically the same thing, which was...
They didn't do anything when I said buy it because at the time it looked terrible because the price was really low.
It went up 5% and they thought, "Oh damn, I should have bought it." It went up another 5% and they thought, "Oh man, I really should have bought it.
I'm going to buy it now." Straight away they missed the first 10%.
Goes up another 5% and they make a little bit more.
They're like, OK, great, I made some money.
They buy a little bit more.
Goes up another 5%, and then they both just basically went totally insane.
And it didn't tell anything to me.
They bought a ton more gold.
They bought silver.
They bought platinum.
They bought palladium.
They bought Bitcoin.
They were buying Tesla.
Not telling me any of this stuff, basically.
Because they'd made a little bit of money trading on my recommendation, they basically became sort of convinced that they themselves are really good traders, and they did a load of stuff which I didn't tell them to do.
They bought loads, basically, and then it came down and they lost a ton of money.
So this is why I don't try and teach people to trade, basically.
You know, the few times I've given friends trading recommendations, most of the time they manage to lose a ton of money because trading's hard.
And, you know, I make money as a trader and every now and again I do say my positions on the channel.
But I was a professional trader for six years and I've been...
Looking at the economy for 20 years, and, you know, I have an extremely good track record as a professional trader, an extremely good track record as a personal trader, I don't think this is a thing which I can teach you to do.
You know what I mean?
You know, it's a bit like going and asking Usain Bolt, how can I win the Olympics?
You know, like, maybe train for 20 years.
I just don't think that it's...
I don't think it would be responsible.
I think it would be super dangerous, you know?
Yeah, Gary is not only Copernicus, but also the Hussain Bolt of trading.
Yeah, most of his anecdotes do tend to have a theme, which is that Gary knows everything.
Gary's fucking brilliant.
Other people don't know anything.
That is a common theme.
Yeah, but I play this clip, Mark, because, you know, as I say, I am not a...
Financial whiz kid, right?
I know people might be surprised, but like if you're the Usain Bolt of traders, right?
The world Olympic champion at trading, presumably you're pretty good at it, right?
And you're just describing something where you got a 20% return or maybe a 15% return, right?
Like on an investment, if you followed his advice, that's just one of his trades, right?
That is, if his friends said he did.
So, like, again, I'm a naive person that I am.
I'm kind of like, why would you want the Patreon with, like, a couple of thousand people in it when you could donate all the money yourself?
You can make the Patreon, but just give it to everyone for free.
Give all the content for free.
They can, like, you know, join up and they can join the movement, but you're funding it all with the money that you've set aside.
Just, like, put a five million or whatever.
Don't get any further down this road, Chris.
There's a man in a well.
He's ready to jump out.
You're just asking for a heap of trouble.
Look, the bit that I'm getting at is you have to be, I think, a little bit skeptical about the degree to which somebody presents themselves as being unconcerned about money or personal wealth or whatever.
I don't doubt that Gary's a millionaire.
I think this is a pretty well-documented thing.
A trader having a six-year career.
I think it's the case that everyone who is actively trading equities and things is concerned about making more money.
Right, right.
But then when your argument is, like, I have no interest.
Money means nothing to me because I have too much of it already.
But you're awfully concerned.
It's just like there's a kind of disconnect there.
And I find that a lot of Gary's fans seem to be maybe even more defensive about that point than Gary, where, you know, they're like ascribing that he's got absolutely no personal investment in this or whatever.
And I just am seeing indications that...
There is personal investment.
But I'm not saying he needs to fund it all himself.
That's perfectly fine for him not to do it.
But I'm just saying, for me, there's a gap in the rhetoric around the level of wealth and comfort.
And then the kind of notion, like, what we can do with the channel if we can just get a couple more donations for the Patreon.
Like, Gary can't hire a PA?
Yeah, that's fair.
That's right.
So just to be super clear, the critique is not...
It doesn't have anything to do with Gary or anybody making a lot of money, continuing to make money, being interested in making more money.
The critique is on the disconnect, right?
An inconsistency with that and the purported primary...
Lack of interest.
Yeah.
So supposedly, he doesn't care about that at all now.
He's got enough money.
He's made his money.
Right?
Like he could just put his money in some boring, buy some bonds, you know, buy some treasury stocks or whatever.
Forget about it, right?
Well, you can tell me.
Whatever.
There are safe investments, Chris, right?
Where someone who's got a lot of money can just invest in that safe thing, never think about it again, right?
That's what someone would do who had a lot of money and wasn't interested in getting more money.
Likewise, you wouldn't perhaps perhaps be so focused on, you know, having the best-selling book.
You know, having all these increasing subscriber numbers and views and talking so much about how amazing he is at making money and being demonstrably very proud.
There's a disconnect between that and the presentation of being someone who's not interested in money, but merely has a crusade to help the poorest among us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, on that topic.
I do have, as you might imagine, Matt, some clips that we might want to listen to.
So, yeah, let's see where this takes us.
I worked as a trader from 2008 to 2014.
I made a lot of money, especially in 2011, but also a couple of years around that.
If you can get a job as a professional trader, it's an extremely well-paid job and you will become a relatively rich person.
Basically nobody, not from a rich background, becomes a trader nowadays.
It's almost impossible to get that job.
And I got that job partially because I was a very good student.
I was a very talented maths student.
I got very good grades.
I got into a very good university.
And I got very good grades at that university.
But even on top of that, I needed to win a national card game to get that job.
And I think that shows you.
You know, this story is in my book, if you want, you can read my book, it tells you about this.
It's almost impossible for ordinary people to get that job nowadays.
So, unless you are, like, a kind of, like an extremely unbelievably talented mathematician, in which case, you know, go and study maths or economics at Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, and try and get a job as a trader.
This is just not a route that is open to you.
The trading floor has almost nobody from a poor ordinary background.
Almost everybody is from a rich background.
So if you come to me from an ordinary background, say, "How do I get rich?" I can't really say to you, "Do what I did," because it's almost impossible for you to do that.
So then you might say, "Okay, well, maybe I can't get a job as a trader, but you still trade personally." And I do still trade personally, and I've got a very good...
Track record trading person.
I have made quite a lot of money trading personally since I quit trading.
So this leads to the point about, you know, many people can try.
But, you know, the thing that got me in this as well, this is a clip that is ostensibly talking about that.
The system is rigged, right?
Like, you know, if you're a working class person, you're not going to get the opportunities, you know.
And just to be clear, this isn't like a new take, right?
This is something that people have talked about for centuries, let alone decades, about, you know, you don't have the habitus, right?
As Bordeaux would put it, however you pronounce his name.
But there is slipped in there.
Of course, like, you can't do it.
Basically, no one can do it, right?
Unless you're an extremely, unbelievably talented mathematician and you go and study places like the LSE or Oxford.
These are late.
Like, is there anybody that we know?
So, like, it's just whatever.
Even when he said, you know, nobody can do this.
This is not, you know, like a pop that's open.
The underlying message is like, unless you're me, right?
Unless you're...
Me.
Then you could do it.
That's why I could do it.
But in his defense, Chris, he did become a trader.
One of the few people from the small percentage from a less privileged background.
So, you know, he is a little bit special.
Well, is he?
I mean, just because how many people from Northern Ireland were in the anthropology department from my background?
When I, like, did my PhD.
I can tell you, Matt.
Zero.
Zero.
You're very special too, Chris.
But am I?
Am I special?
Like, my general message is just, like, I'm not saying, actually, you know, the kind of point about there are obstacles put in people's ways, right?
And if you have, you come from a family that is well off, or if you have access to resources, of course you're in a better position.
You have connections.
You're able to get internships.
You're able to work for non-paid internship positions.
All these kind of things.
These things are talked about and known.
And I agree with all of that.
But there is always this kind of underlying thing.
Unless you're a special wonder kid like me.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean...
Look, I'm just going on stereotypes here.
But weren't, like, traitors in the kind of new rich, like, down in London, sort of in the 80s and stuff like that, like, weren't they kind of looked down upon because they, at least some of them, well, many of them, did come from a less coos background and were kind of flashy and showy and they weren't always old tops.
I don't know.
I've just got to...
I don't know.
Well, like, you might have heard of this movie called Wall Street.
In the 80s, it had...
Is it Charlie Sheen?
Yeah, both of them, actually.
Charlie Sheen and Martin Sheen.
He was playing the dad in it.
But that is also a story where there's somebody not from that wealthy world who becomes attracted to it and then works.
The way up.
And then they lose the morals as they go on, right?
Like his dad, Gordon Gekko, greed is good.
Look at all this wealth.
And then I think they buy out his dad's company or they like do a hostile takeover at something at the end.
But I just mean this kind of notion that like, you know, there's a small amount of people who get into these and are able to claw their way up.
The Wolf of Wall Street is kind of the same, right?
Like the guy.
Learns a way to do these kind of high-pressure seals and then is able to exploit a whole bunch of people.
So I just...
On top of that, I think I'm right about that being like a bit of a prominent stereotype in the 1980s and 90s.
Of the London financial traders.
They were like, yeah, like new rich, you know, they bought sports cars and very loud and flashy with their money and they were new money, right?
It wasn't old money.
So, you know, I think at least a fair swag of them did come from not fancy backgrounds because all I cared about was, like, in terms of hiring, you know, this is where yuppies came from, yeah?
Upwardly mobile.
Young, upwardly mobile type things.
Anyway, it is just a stereotype, but it's just a vague memory.
Well, like the thing that we're not questioning is that like, if you look at finance professions or that or elite university enrollments and whatnot, you're going to see you're going to see an overrepresentation of people from like wealthy backgrounds.
I'm just saying it's not unknown.
It's not like there is a fair amount of social mobility there.
And look, in fairness to him, he's telling the story about the kinds of people who tend to become traders, at least in London.
And, you know, I think he's exaggerating a bit, but he does work in into that story.
A lot of examples of how he's a pretty special boy.
Special in many, many ways.
And I guess I'm primed to this because I have heard him mention these exact same things again and again and again.
And again.
Yeah, well, okay.
So let's go on a bit because he's got some issues with, you know, the elites in the rivalry towards the academics, in fact.
Because, like, the traitors actually, in general, even though, you know, he's arguing that they are profiting all things.
It's generally that they're using the system which is put in place for them to profit from.
But they didn't create the system, right?
So they're not actually the issue, really.
They're kind of like a symptom.
Whereas academics or economists, in Gary's presentation, they are like the defenders of the system.
So they don't want anything to change.
So they are the ones that are kind of getting...
Things wrong, right?
And here's an example of that.
So, you know, I know when I come out and say inequality is the big thing and you live in a world full of economists that say, oh, the problem is things to do with the interest rate, things to do with levels of government spending, things to the level of taxation.
I can sound like a bit of a quack, basically.
Why is this guy saying the problem is one thing when all of these prestigious elite economists aren't mentioning it?
Well...
They're an educational system which never talks about it.
And their predictions are constantly wrong.
Whereas, if you look at my predictions, and I correctly predicted interest rates after the 2008 crisis, but I've also correctly predicted things on this channel.
If you go back and look at the first video on this channel, which we'll link in the description, I predicted...
In the beginning of Covid, there would be an inflationary crisis, the cost of living crisis, a huge spike in the stock price, the gold price, house prices, a huge increase in inequality.
All of these things have happened.
So I know it's easy to dismiss somebody, especially somebody who doesn't come from a rich, privileged background, saying the elites are wrong on this.
But the elites are continually generating incorrect predictions.
And I'm generating correct predictions here.
So again, I think there's a kernel of truth in what he's saying, which is that economics, not academics in general, but economics...
No, economists.
Economists, rather, do have a tendency to come from a more well-off background than the rest of us.
That's fine.
But I think it would be a great exaggeration to say that it is completely dominated by ultra-wealthy types.
And I think a lot of people who go into academia are interested in not necessarily trying to max out the amount of money that they make in their lifetime.
I know Gary would say that it's because they come from a family that's so rich they don't need to care about money.
But that's not true of academics in general.
That's not true.
If you or me, I would say, like, you know, there is that thing as well, Matt, that built into this.
I just noticed these kind of techniques.
There's the built-in thing that, like, people are going to, you know, you might call me a crank because of my accent, because I'm working class.
And it's like, that's not, like, I haven't heard people saying, don't listen to Gary because he's working class and he doesn't know what he's.
I think Scott Adams claims he predicted it as well.
Nassim Taleb.
Oh, Taleb.
Yeah, as well.
And yeah, so, you know, at least in Gary's case, I think he has some financial bets that illustrate that, you know, he has taken positions and benefited from it.
But yeah, just again, like the pinch of salt thing comes in where like everything I say is right.
Like a recent prediction that Gary has said is that in the next five years, housing prices in the UK will double.
Okay.
Now, that is a clear prediction of a time frame.
And, like, it's what Daniel Leakins would refer to as a risky prediction because it doesn't just say increase.
It says the magnitude of the increase.
Let's return in five years and see if that prediction holds up because that is presented as, you know, like a very strong prediction that he's making now.
So, we'll be here in five years.
Matt, we can come and check if that one planned out.
I presume UK house prices, by the way, just to make clear.
So, let's put a flag in there, okay?
See you in 2040, Matt.
Okay.
Yeah.
And just to reiterate, I think the entire premise is wrong.
His premise is that nobody else is talking about inequality in academia.
Academic economists, theoretical economists don't care, don't even have the models with which to understand it.
And that's why everyone else is ignoring it.
And as we established, that's simply not true.
So, yeah.
Yeah, and Matt, you know this narrative that we often hear, that academia is taking out all of the renegade, insightful thinkers.
It wants to indoctrinate people into an ideology, and if you dare go against that, you're going to be kicked out.
So that is the position of pretty much all of the people that we cover.
So I think that what we have at the moment is essentially a broken education system in economics.
There's more to it than that.
And the second reason why we don't speak about inequality in economics enough is because we have a system which aggressively takes anybody who is good at predictions out of the conversation.
And to explain this, I want you to put yourself in the mind of a young 20, 21-year-old economic student.
Loves economics, love the maths, studying it loads at an elite university.
You, you know, you graduate, whatever it is, magna cum laude or whatever.
You're top of your class and then you have to decide what you want to do with your life.
So if you want to be in this conversation, if you want to be an academic or if you want to be advisor to government or if you want to work in, you know, public policy, you have to stay in academia.
You can't just do an undergrad.
You're going to have to do a master's.
It's going to cost you a lot of money.
You're going to do a PhD.
You're going to have to work, spend money, locked in libraries.
If you're lucky, you might start making money in your mid-30s.
Or you can go into the sea.
Not only does it pay you way, way, way more, but it gives you the opportunity to prove, look, I'm good because I can make predictions.
And academia doesn't really care if you can make good predictions.
So one thing which was really clear to me in my time in the city and my time in academia is if you're really, really good...
You want to be in the city.
Because if you're making good predictions, you'll be recognised, you'll be paid and everybody will know that is the guy over there who is right because they're really aggressively analysing who is the guy who is making good predictions.
They're tracking that and they're paying that.
So there you go.
Academics, I don't really understand economics because the system is basically you can make a lot of money if you become a trader.
Everyone wants to make a lot of money, obviously.
That's the highest priority of everyone.
Unless you come from an elite background, right?
Oh, yes.
Yes, if you come from an elite background.
And so all the smart people who are studying economics don't do PhDs and write books.
They'll be stuck in the library.
And who wants to be stuck in a library, Chris?
No, they want to go and trade and make megabucks like him.
Like, because they're super predictors.
They can predict, you know, they can make trades and, you know, make, like, you know, good trades more often than bad trades and make money.
So, yeah.
Okay.
So that's why, basically, academia is useless.
This is why nobody understands economics like Gary.
Yeah.
Now, the thing to me there, Matt, that jumps out is, like, aren't these two different things?
He's completing all of economics.
Like, ability to predict the whole model of the economy, which is a complicated thing, with the ability to trade successfully in a commodity or foreign exchange, currencies, or whatever.
And that seems to me like those are two different things.
Like, yes, one involves the economy, but it is not the goal of the economy.
So, like, I feel like, yes, There is validity to the point that the nature of working as a trader will optimize for people who are good at making profits from trades.
But being good at making profits from trades, is that the same thing as understanding the economic model in general?
No, it isn't.
It obviously isn't.
A clinical psychologist might be better at treating people and making them better than an academic psychologist like me.
That doesn't mean that they understand everything in psychology better.
Likewise, like you said, a typical trader is specialized in a very particular thing.
They might have spent the last five years doing nothing but trading, I don't know, rubles and...
Foreign exchange.
Yeah, that's right.
And they'll be focused on a particular timeframe.
So a bit like a clinical psychologist, they'll amass these kind of practical skills for having like an edge just over the percentage, just over random chance.
And so obviously that doesn't necessarily mean that you understand the economy better than someone...
He's been spending a lot of time in the library.
He's running simulations.
He's testing.
He's saying that academics never care about predictions, never care about making predictions.
Good economics is pretty scientific, and I think they do care about their models making predictions that fit in with reality, and they have a much broader scope.
I hate to sound like we are the academia defenders, right?
But come on.
It is a brash and absurd claim and self-serving claim, I think.
Yeah, but the thing is, I don't care if economist professors are bad at making predictions about the market or whatever.
That's fine.
I'm sure they are.
I wouldn't assume that they're good at it.
But I think the inference that traders who make money Are better at understanding the economic market in general.
That is not a logical inference because the goal of an individual is to make money.
A goal of an individual trader is to make money.
It's not to develop certain industries or this kind of thing, right?
Well, yeah.
When I say make predictions, I don't mean trading predictions.
I mean, you have a model.
Just like scientists make predictions, Chris.
So, you know, modelling, for instance, the effect of changing tax rates or modelling the effect of implementing a 1% wealth tax that Gary keeps talking about.
That is what other economists do, not traders.
They don't do that in their day-to-day job.
Exactly, exactly.
Now, Matt, we heard this story a bit earlier, but I'm just going to play it from like another angle, okay, because this is challenging the professor.
At Oxford story, which fits in with this theme, right?
So let's hear that retold for the second time.
Whereas when I went back to academia in 2017, I had, you know, my first lecture at Oxford and it was about interest rates and I thought, you know, this is...
Really interesting, right?
You know, this is the thing which we've predicted really badly for 10, 15 years.
This is the specific area I worked in.
This is the area I'm an expert on.
Like, it's really interesting, right?
Like, if you are at an elite university and you're studying something really important and we've been wrong about it for 10...
At that time, it was 10 years.
Now it's more like 15 years.
It's interesting, right?
This is kind of like an unsolved problem.
Like, there's a thing that we're really bad at.
You know, we can work out why we're bad at it.
So I went to the professor.
I said, why do you think we've been wrong about interest rates for 10 years?
And he said, oh, no, we always knew interest rates would stay zero, which is, you know, categorically wrong.
And I went back and I showed him the data and I said, look, you've actually been wrong for 10 years.
And he said, oh, that's interesting.
You know, it never went anywhere.
So what this shows is if you're good at predicting, which means you're good at working out what other people are wrong, the city will pay you.
Academia won't even notice.
It won't even notice.
So what does this tell you about academia's ability to improve?
Like if these guys are able to be wrong year after year after year after year for 10 years and not even notice, they're not going to improve.
They're not going to improve, basically.
So what you have is a situation where anyone who is good and wants to make money is aggressively paid to leave.
And if you're good and you stay, even if you are able to correctly identify an area where everyone is consistently wrong.
They don't really care and they're not going to listen.
There you go.
I think his logic is rock solid there, Chris.
What's wrong?
What's wrong with the logic?
Why do you have a problem with that?
Well, come on.
I mean, it's quite similar to Chris Langen's story there.
He's got his little stories about how he confront teachers in class and he'd say, hey, what about this thing?
And the teachers would just be befuddled because he'd just blown their mind.
And he went, well, these people have nothing to teach me.
It's all very self-serving, isn't it?
I mean, if you believe this narrative that any academic who is in economics, only the stupid ones, are not trading.
All the smart ones go into trading.
The traders really understand everything about the economy.
Of all the traders, Gary is the best trader, so he understands everything better than most.
And even when you tell an academic that they're wrong, they're just not interested because they've got their textbooks and they read them out because it doesn't matter if they're wrong.
Like, if you believe that self-serving narrative, then I'm sorry.
I've got a Bridget Bookland to sell, yeah.
Yeah, well, there was somebody in the subreddit who was interested in, like, you know, studies economics and went and read Gary's thesis, which is back from when he did this master's at Oxford.
And he is looking at the topic of inequality and housing a little bit in it.
But they kind of...
Make the point that, you know, one, his paper is proposing this model, but it's not actually based on like testing it out with data.
It's a theoretical mathematical model, right?
Exactly the thing that he's kind of complaining about.
And then they make out that, you know, this actually, the very topic that he's talking about is a very hot topic.
And there's a lot of, you know, aspects that his model just doesn't take care of.
It doesn't show any interest in them, whatever.
And they said, you know, their position was, look, this is a perfectly reasonable model for like a master's thesis.
It's an interesting topic, but it's the kind of thing that would get like incredibly critiqued, you know, if you were to present it as like an academic paper or whatnot.
But Gary seems to have viewed it.
You know, a little bit like all our gurus that he was able to see through a problem that other people haven't and he's kind of worked it out, but he's not really getting recognition for it, right?
Like people are treating it just like he's another master's student when actually he had all these insights.
And the other thing too is in order to write a master's thesis, even though it was not published, didn't lead to publications, he would have had to read.
The other research on inequality, and he would have had to cite it in his introductions, I presume, Chris, which, you know, does make me wonder because he keeps saying that nobody else studies this at all.
And he must know that they do because he must have cited at least some of that literature.
I can't imagine it passing without him doing a literature review.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, I guess.
I mean, I haven't read it, right?
So I'm going by a second-hand thing.
But yes, I would assume so.
And, you know, people are pointing out, like, when you look at the connection that he posits between inequality and house pricing, it doesn't hold.
There's lots of countries where it doesn't hold.
So that would be counter to the model, right?
Like, you would have to deal with that kind of data if you were, like...
Are you saying his model makes predictions that don't matter, Chris?
My goodness.
Yeah.
Well, but that's the kind of thing, right?
Like, so, you know, this is a very specific complete, but it's just like, you know, it kind of means that there is a prescription about what everyone else is doing wrong.
But like when people critically evaluate what Gary's doing, they don't find him doing things that are, you know, as revolutionary.
And most of the gurus that we cover, they have this story that they have these revolutionary theories that aren't recognized by the discipline.
And if they were taking seriously, Things would, you know, dramatically change.
So Gary doesn't claim to have a theory of everything, but he's certainly saying here academics are just, like, egregiously wrong.
Well, yeah, and he's certainly saying that his amazing theories about this are not being taken seriously because the institutions are fundamentally corrupt, right, or broken.
And, you know, even when you hold the proof, the evidence, right under their noses.
They won't even pay attention to it.
Again, this is identical to the narratives we hear from someone like Brett Weinstein and many other gurus.
Yeah, so just to put a pin on this point about academics and economists and what they're doing.
So what kind of person stays in academia when they know that if they're good, they will do much better and get paid much better leaving academia and going into finance?
Basically, people from rich families.
It doesn't make sense to do that if you're not from a rich family.
If you have the option, you know, I made millions of pounds in the city and that is what paid for this flat and my brother needed to buy a house, I helped him.
My sister's trying to buy a house, I'm helping her.
People from ordinary families cannot afford to make that choice if they're good.
So the kind of people who stay in academia, you need to be either not good enough to get into finance, from a rich family, or basically a little bit mad.
And this is what happens.
So you have this system which kind of brainwashes people into saying inequality doesn't exist.
It doesn't matter.
Which are you?
Incompetent or mad?
Yeah, again, I have to take offense to this because in his framing...
Okay, so the rest of us academics, we don't even...
Just to be fair, though, he is mostly completed by the economists.
I know, but that's what I'm saying.
That's what I'm saying.
Because most of us academics, we don't even have the chance to.
It doesn't matter how good we are at psychology or anthropology.
We don't have a chance to.
We can never be traders anyway.
We can't be traders anyway.
So maybe in our fields, the smart people do stay in academia because we just don't have a better option.
Not according to the Weinsteins, though, but yes.
Yes.
Same problem.
Or we all come from incredibly rich families so that we're just wallowing in money so we can spend our lives doing frivolous things in academia.
Not true also.
But I just dispute that.
I don't think everyone is like Gary.
And I don't think everyone, even if they don't come from an incredibly wealthy background, would necessarily turn their noses up at...
An academic career, which is relatively well paid.
Yes, I know it's not trader money, but it's relatively well paid.
And I think a lot of people, even economists, sometimes prioritize things that they're passionate about and the things that they believe in, rather than just chasing the option which pays the most money, like Gary did.
Yes.
And I have to say, I've got to mention my own little thing here.
I don't want to make a big deal about it.
Okay, okay.
I have to say, I am one of those people because I did for a short time leave CSIRO, work in commercial construction, and my dad did want me to continue running the business with my uncle.
In the end, I realized I didn't want to because I'd much prefer to have a nice, relaxed...
Academic job, have a tree change in the countryside.
Rather than do that, the business did go on to make many millions of dollars, whatever.
My uncle, quite rich.
No regrets.
No regrets at all.
And I don't think I'm unusual.
Lots of people, in fact, I've met so many people that they did have the talent, they did have the opportunities.
They could have taken a path where they were just trying to maximize the amount of money that they were making in life.
And they chose not to walk that path.
So I just don't accept Gary's narrative there.
Look, you know, we've got a sample of two academics here.
I just mentioned, as I've said throughout this episode, I'm not from this elite.
You know, my accent might give the impression that I'm from an elite family with a silver spoon in my mouth.
But that is not the case.
I made a choice whenever I was selecting university subjects between studying law, something which, at least in general, leads to wealthy positions later in life, or doing study of religions with Tibetan language.
And that's a little bit less well remunerated, I think, in general.
Yeah, and I mean, you know, I was aware of that.
It wasn't like I was completely delusional.
It also wasn't like I had a huge stock of, you know, money that I was able to go back on.
But like, so, yeah, it's just, I'm not saying that makes me, you know, what an amazing person.
I'm just saying...
No, it's normal.
It's normal.
Don't decide everything based on...
Like, earning potential, even when you're not from a super mega rich.
Like, I'm not super...
I did medical trials.
I worked in part-time jobs constantly.
Well, not even part-time.
I worked in jobs throughout my whole university career.
So, I got a hardship fund.
I mean, so our point here is that Gary's narratives often depend on some pretty broad assumptions.
About academics or about human nature and so on, which if you just think about it for a moment, don't bear fruit.
On the other hand, those narratives that he's telling are very self-serving in a guru-esque kind of way because they do act to undermine and delegitimize basically institutions.
And they do serve to aggrandize the special knowledge of the person in question.
We're just saying.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think I've hammered this into the ground, but I'm just gonna play this clip.
So the third reason economists don't talk about inequality is that pretty much all powerful, influential economists are quite rich.
They're quite rich.
They're generally from rich families.
If they weren't from rich families, they probably wouldn't have stayed in academia.
Economics has the worst social representation of different social classes of any subject in the big American universities.
So you have rich people who've gone in to study this subject.
They probably don't need money, otherwise they would have gone into finance.
And then they get paid to work for a think tank or work for a newspaper.
And they themselves are quite rich and comfortable.
The people who pay them are probably quite rich.
They're heavily incentivised not to talk about inequality, right?
In a quite obvious way, which is when somebody is rich and comfortable, they want to keep things the way they are.
You know, when you talk about a crisis of inequality, it hurts most people quite badly because wealth tends to concentrate at the very top.
But there's a sort of, you know, the top 1%, especially top 0.1%, does really, really well.
But there's like 5% or 6% at the top that benefit from that.
And these guys include basically any economist.
With a voice.
So, economists are wealthy.
They don't want to talk about inequality.
They've got a massive amount of skin in the game saying that inequality doesn't matter.
20 years, 30 years of education studying something which has nothing to say about inequality.
They need this to not be a problem.
Right.
So, we hear this reiterated that all economists come from wealthy backgrounds, at least the vast majority of them.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be an academic economist or working in a think tank or whatever.
Otherwise, they'd obviously become a trader.
Because there's no way they could afford to go to university, get a PhD like you did, Chris.
And like we said at the beginning, it is true that economics sort of veers all disciplines.
They do these studies, right?
And they look at the characteristics of the practitioners.
For instance, most academics tend to be left-wing, but some disciplines tend to be more right-wing.
I'm sure economics would tend to be more right-wing than psychology.
And the same would be true in terms of how many of them come from, say, parents with no bachelor's degree.
What percentage of academics in these different fields?
Now, happily, I have the figures right here in front of me, Chris.
And let's take psychology, since that's me, as a comparison point.
So in psychology...
We have 29%, this is across the world, 29% of academics in psychology have parents who don't have a bachelor's degree, right?
So this is a proxy for being less well-off, right?
Not being middle class.
In economics, it's lower.
It's 24%, Chris.
24% versus 29%.
So while it's true that there are these differences between the disciplines in terms of, you know, class and politics and all that stuff, it's not massive.
It's not massive.
So the premise that he bases that little speech on about this is the reason why people working in economics just simply don't care about wealth inequality, which we already established is not true.
The premise for his rationale for why that's the case is also incredibly weak.
Yes, there's slightly fewer people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds going into study economics or get PhDs in economics, but it's not huge relative to a field like psychology, which is, you know, kind of at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Yeah, yeah.
So maybe not as dramatic as claim is what that would suggest.
Now, I'm sure all our data is available.
Yeah, it could be.
I mean, I picked up the first paper that talked about this.
This is from the Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2023, the economics profession, socioeconomic diversity problem.
Well, in any case, we're dealing with a rigged system, right?
Now, we've heard that Gary was good at dealing with the thing individually, right?
But the problem is that we need to unfuck the system.
Right?
And we've heard through all the clips that we've played that he kind of used what he's doing on his YouTube channel as like making a genuine contribution to that, right?
Like building a movement that is going to put inequality front and center.
And then however it's dealt with, like a top 1% wealth tax or whatever, you know, those are details that will be sorted.
But...
The notion is that we need to change the world, right?
And we need people that are willing to, like, envision that.
So Gary does have that kind of visionary drive, as you can see from this clip.
There's a little scene towards the end of my book where when I used to be a trader, I was speaking to my junior, an Australian guy in the book, he's called Arthur Kapowski, where I said to him, like, do you think we should try and do something about the collapsing economy?
And he just didn't understand and he just sort of laughed and he was like, you know, there's nothing you can do.
There's no way you can stop it.
And the truth is, when I quit banking, I think in my heart of hearts, I believed that he was probably right.
That it was kind of a fool's errand that I was doing, walking away from a lot of money, to try to stop a bad thing from happening, which in reality, I would probably never be powerful enough to stop or even influence stopping.
And I probably really did believe that until up to about a year ago.
But I don't believe that anymore.
I think we can maybe do this.
So let's keep building.
Let's keep building.
So that is the correct message if you want to kind of motivate people to do stuff, right?
Because if you said, look, it's very unlikely anything is going to...
Happen.
But there is there is like a different process here where, you know, I've like I said, I've read the book, so I know the scene he's talking about.
Right.
And he basically he has a like breakdown when he's in Tokyo.
He gives various reasons for why it is right.
But there's a part in it where he's talking to someone one day.
He's like, you know, like, isn't the economy fucked?
Like, should we do something about it?
And the way that the person responds is like, what do you talk like?
What do you mean?
What are you talking about?
But he casts it as, like, they can't really get, they can't even see what he's, you know, talking about.
But I do think it's more the case of, like, if I was to come to you one day, Matt, and be like, Matt, should we fix the economy?
Like, should we just do it?
Like, most people's response would be like, what are you talking about?
Like, do you want to be, you know?
I'm a bond trader.
I've got to trade bonds.
So, Gary presents it as, you know, like, maybe that guy wasn't thinking big enough, but I do think this is something that we see that, like, the gurus often imagine, like, COVID thing isn't being done right, but maybe I could do it better.
Like, I could do it.
It's a very personified view of, like, saving the world.
But, you know, on the other hand, Matt, this is how I think a lot of people who have led a lot of movements.
Also see themselves, right?
You know, there's the revolutionary zeal, I guess, is the point of it.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
You have to be a little bit crazy, don't you, to want to change the world.
And, you know, I don't deduct any marks from him for, you know, being an activist and wanting to accomplish something.
That's perfectly fine.
But I do understand that if you just...
At 9 o 'clock in the morning at the trading desk in Tokyo.
Mate, the world's fucked.
Let's try and fix it.
He's going to go.
I think with these stories, it's very easy to kind of editorialize them in a way that, you know.
Yeah, this is a, I mean.
I know we're not analyzing the book, but a recurring thing that I got through the book was like, you know, and it's kind of the nature of a memoir or whatever that things will be like this.
But on the other hand, it does great a little bit.
Like everyone in the story is essentially like an NPC in some way.
They might be there to help Gary.
He might, you know, regard them as more of a nice person or less, but like they're not well-rounded characters in general.
You know, like they're villains.
Or they're good guys.
And Gary presents it that he's giving awards and all accounts.
But like in almost every single anecdote, he is the person that is, you know, kind of thinking more about the issues than other people.
He's the one that's not really enjoying being at the strip club.
You know, the other people are all into these kind of things.
And he's kind of like gliding above it and then interacting with people who are just like kind of caricatures, you know, for.
Some particular purpose.
And it's, it does kind of create because it ends up like that the world revolves around Gary.
So like there's scenes in the book where, you know, he leaves his job and everybody is like clapping as he's leaving the, you know, the trading floor.
There goes the legend of, of Gary.
And he doesn't look back because, you know, he's a shark.
He's moving on to the next thing.
And you're just like.
Was it like that?
Or is this like a little bit more in your imagination?
Did you tell me there was actually a scene where he dropped some bombshell or something and then the whole room collapsed and he just kept walking?
Oh, it's more like on his last day when he leaves the dream place he's been at for a couple of years.
He is known as the Golden Boy.
And, like, the whole training floor, you know, stands up.
It kind of, like, erupts in applause.
And he walks out, but he doesn't look back as he goes.
And, like, maybe, maybe it was like that.
Maybe it was just like that.
Yeah, maybe.
But, you know, these interviews in the Financial Times tell a slightly different story.
Yeah.
So, I mean, now, just to, like, finish that little bit off.
So, the...
The Financial Times stuff, you know, so there were people questioning his story or like disagreeing, but he kind of presents, well, they would, right?
Like, because, you know, of course, they're not portrayed the best or whatever.
But he also implies that, like, of course, they can't say he's right because they're, you know, like the academics can't say he's right because they're, you know, incompetent or they're too invested to protect their profits.
The traders also can't say he's right.
Doesn't listen to people who are right and who are demonstrably better in their predictions.
And aggressively takes everybody who's half good out of the conversation.
And if you do go into finance, obviously then once you're in finance, you can make a lot of money making good predictions.
But you're not allowed to speak publicly.
So when I was a trader, I was making a lot of money, betting that inequality would devastate living standards.
Keep interest rates low and push house prices up and push stock prices up and push inequality up further.
But I wasn't allowed to say anything about these things.
Yeah, so you're not allowed, right?
He was not allowed to say what he knew was happening because, you know, that's how the bank was making money and stuff, right?
So there's like an incentive not to endorse it.
And that means, Matt, that his ex-colleagues cannot endorse his narrative.
So, you know, it's a shame I've upset some of my ex-colleagues.
Because they're not all bad people.
They're complicated guys.
But, look, these are rich, powerful men that are not used to having someone else control their narrative, tell their story.
And it must have been weird for them to have, like, some kid that used to work with them write a book, you know.
Yeah, I've not experienced it, you know.
You know, I really tried in my book.
In my book, I didn't want there to be any, like, total bad guys, total good guys.
I wanted all the bad guys to do something good, and all the good guys to do something bad.
Because I wanted to show that it's actually, like, quite a moral grey area.
That rather than, like, being full of evil people, it's full of ordinary people in a kind of fucked up system.
And I think this story just kind of reflects that, you know.
It kind of reflects that, you know, these guys...
For me, what they remember of me is this little Cockney kid that turned up.
You know, and we have to remember, right?
I was only the top trader in one year and I quit the job the year after.
What they remember is Gary the intern buying burgers.
You know what I mean?
You know, they don't really remember 2011 where I blew it up.
This is like, why do they contradict his story, right?
Because they imagine him as like this Cockney intern.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, anyway, so as we hear from Gary, there are good reasons why you can't really trust academics.
You can't really trust the people that disagree with the story.
Pretty much the one person you can trust is Gary, right?
And it is remarkable, Chris, just how often he mentions how much money he made.
And I know one of the recordings you've got is an interview about that, but I've listened to quite a few of them, and the one that I sent you was one where he was explaining inequality.
But it is remarkable how much...
Well, rather, how little there is about economics in it and how much there is about Gary and how much money Gary has made and how fucking amazing Gary is.
I'm just telling you, it occupies a large percentage of pretty much every podcast of his that I've listened to.
And, yeah, his ability to make a lot of money gets mentioned every episode.
I've listened to probably about a dozen, and I think I've heard it in every episode, at least once, usually more.
It is worth noting and all this stuff of like, you know, these guys are used to, you know, setting the narrative about themselves and all this kind of stuff that like, I mean, Gary is the one with the like million subscriber YouTube channel.
He's the one being interviewed on this podcast.
He's the one with the best selling.
Right.
Yeah.
So their narrative that like Gary didn't make as much money.
As he claimed, it was, like, a bit hyperbolic.
Like, it's...
Like, their narrative would never have seen the light of day if the journalists from the Financial Times hadn't sought them out and asked them for comment, right?
Yeah, and asked a whole bunch of them.
That's the thing your journalists are supposed to do, you know, triangulate sources.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it's just, you know...
And then Aaron Bastani acts a little bit more, you know, but why would a newspaper...
Why would they investigate the claims that anybody made in a popular book?
Like, is that something, you know, what's the agenda?
And you're like, okay, okay, listen to this.
But why do you think they ran it?
Because that's a huge commitment to get a journalist to work on a piece that's 4,700 words.
That's going to have cost them a lot of money, and it wasn't that conclusive, right?
Basically, it's saying 95% of this guy's backstory, which, by the way, is just an incredible backstory.
It's hard to believe, right?
Yeah.
95%.
Confirmed.
School, LSE, how he got onto City, all confirmed.
Yeah.
But these several people don't think he's the world's top trader.
Yeah.
I think...
Where's...
What's driven that, then?
Because it seems kind of weird.
Obviously, it would be easy for me to come and say, you know what?
The establishment is coming to get me.
What is it Agitate always calls in the Matrix?
The Matrix, yeah.
The Matrix has gone for me.
But to be honest, so, you know, this one guy, he sort of, he really wanted to get this piece running.
There was a basically similar piece running.
Daily Mail, similar piece running like a kind of finance gossip website.
And I think he's called up the FT.
To be completely honest, I think the FT have just seen like...
So obviously the book sold really, really, really, really well.
And the book kind of pissed off a lot of people in finance.
Put a target on your back.
Well, I think, to be honest, I think all it is is some guy calls up, speaks with journalist of the FT, Gary's a liar.
The guy's literally thought...
Fuck me, Gary Zelaya's going to get a lot of clicks, isn't it?
I think it's honestly, I think it's honestly, because it will, obviously it will, right?
Like, you get a kid like me, comes out speaking like me, drops a bit of shit on the banking system, calls the global head of trading a slug because he looks like a slug.
You know, you're going to get people who are going to support it, right?
It's going to get clicks.
It's going to get clicks and...
I think it's...
Really, there's not much more to nothing than easy clicks, to be honest.
Well, there you go.
That's the scariest explanation for why people are saying what he was saying is not true.
I mean, it didn't have the sound of a hit piece to me and sounded reasonably fair when I read it.
But there you go.
You can't trust the academics.
You can't trust other traders.
Now, journalists too, Chris.
They're just click via, click via, you know.
You do hear this from like Jordan Peterson, from Brett Weinstein, from Lex Friedman.
You know, they're constantly, journalists are just running hit pieces.
They're all concerned with the click via.
Yeah, the thing you speak of is very important to me because I admire great journalism.
And unfortunately, in modern day, a lot of journalists...
Seek clickbait headlines, make accusations because they operate under incentive because they want the headline, the cheap shot.
I think there is room and desire and hunger for great journalists and that requires deep understanding.
And it saddens me how often one of the reasons, you know, I don't think I'm very good at this, but one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you is because I don't see enough high effort.
Deep dive research.
I don't know how many books I've read.
I've read a lot in preparing just to experience, just to try to understand.
It requires a lot of preparation, a lot of work, and I would love to see great journalists do that more.
And from that place, you can criticize.
From that place, you can really investigate the complexity of a situation, of people in power, their strengths, their flaws, the mistakes they've made.
But that requires great, great, great preparation.
So I wish there was more of that, of great journalism.
You know, Gary's narrative that there's an elite, you know, they don't have your best interests at heart.
It's a system that's rigged against you.
Nobody, the academics are lying.
The journalists are, you know, hiding the truth.
The creators are incentivized not to do it.
Is that not something that is particularly an appealing story in an era?
Of populism, that doesn't seem to come up as a possible insight.
Like three-word slogans as solutions to problems.
Yeah.
You might turn the mirror around and say that what Gary's doing is a little bit clickbaity, too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, no, we're almost done, Matt.
We're around the corner.
We're approaching the end.
I see the light at the end of the tunnel.
When we covered Russell Brand, and we noted that he found the rhetoric of, what's his face, Steve Bannon.
He did this thing where he listened to Steve Bannon, and he found that, like, you know, a bit like what Ryan Grimm said, 90% of what Steve Bannon was saying was right.
It was just, you know, at the end, he kind of...
And we know what happened to Russell Brand, right?
He ended up going down into the right-wing rabbit hole.
Now, Gary doesn't do the same thing as Russell Brand.
He's not, you know, arguing that Andrew Tate gets everything right or that kind of thing.
He does say he understands the appeal of Andrew Tate.
I lived in Japan for a couple of years where you have this concept of the hikikomori just stays inside, you know, doesn't try to date, doesn't try to get a job, just like, just gets involved in like computer games and anime.
And then obviously in the US, you've got the incels in here, you've got people who support Andrew Tate.
I've got no hate for people who support Andrew Tate because I see what we've put on the menu for them.
You know what I mean?
We put...
I grew up poor.
I grew up poor in London.
It's shit being poor.
People fucking look down on you.
People think you're fucking stupid.
People think you're lazy, you know.
I remember when we all turned like 16 and my mates all got cars.
I remember some girl saying, I've seen Raj's new car.
He must be doing really well for himself.
I was fucking 16. You know what I mean?
Because like, you know, the mainstream are not giving...
Like working class men, anything they aim for.
So he gets why there would be an appeal for Andrew Tia.
But listen to this clip.
Right.
And it does frustrate me that we don't think about that.
If you're not offering people a sense of the future, well, of course they're going to look at the past.
Of course they are.
I think we need to have something to offer.
We need to have something to offer.
And look at what's happening now, of course, with Donald Trump, Elon Musk, but also with...
For me, you know, I think I would have said exactly the same thing last time I came on.
These guys will continue to be successful.
And it was easy to predict that at that time because it's really clearly the way things are going.
But I think it's very, very...
The reason it's easy to predict is because it's easy to understand, right?
The existing status quo is obviously failing.
It is increasingly obviously failing to more and more people.
You know, people will vote for sensible change once, twice, three times.
It is obviously 20 years now of worsening living standards.
The mainstream media, mainstream politicians keep saying this is a recession, it's going to be one week year, two week years.
It's 20 week years now.
And it is increasingly obvious to everybody it's broken and it's going to get worse, it's going to get worse, and it's going to get worse.
And people just want...
Something new.
People just want something different.
And that, by the way, is correct.
That they are correct in wanting that, because they are correct in the assessment that if we don't change anything, we're going to be fucked.
And our kids are going to be fucked.
And our grandkids are going to be fucked.
That is totally, totally correct.
I mean, this is quite similar to...
Well, you know, it's not unusual, right?
If you're...
Russell Brand back in the day was saying what we need is a revolution.
The exact same thing.
It's the exact same I'm not saying that the apathy doesn't come from us, the people.
The apathy comes from the politicians.
They are apathetic to our needs.
They're only interested in servicing the needs of corporations.
Look at what?
Ain't the Tories going to court and taking the EU to court because they're trying to curtail...
Burbank bonuses.
Is that what's happening at the moment in our country?
It is, isn't it?
So why am I going to tune in for that?
You don't believe in democracy.
You want a revolution, don't you?
The planet is being destroyed.
We are creating an underclass.
We are exploiting poor people all over the world.
And the genuine legitimate problems of the people are not being addressed by our political class.
All of those things may be true.
They are true.
You know, the whole system is fucked.
Everything is going terribly.
You can't make incremental.
Improvements, reforms aren't going to do it.
You've got to be attacking the system.
You've got to be saying everyone is wrong.
You know, the elites are the problem, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, here's an interesting point of difference, I think, because while they have those similarities, right, and that they're very broad, populist kind of sloganeering.
Like, that's what they have in common.
With Russell Brand, he was very vague in terms of his prescriptions, right?
It was just, we need a revolution.
A revolution, spiritual revolution, yeah.
Yeah, transform ourselves or whatever.
With Gary, he does have a couple of concrete suggestions, but they're certainly not very revolutionary.
Like, the 1% wealth tax isn't crazy revolutionary.
Saying we ought to tax the rich more is vague.
Like, he's not calling for a revolution, but at the same time, Well, the rhetoric is revolutionary.
That's right.
The rhetoric is revolutionary.
So I guess they fundamentally are quite similar, I think, in that it's more about the vibe, right?
It's more tapping into what may well be a very legitimate feeling of discontent.
It's not so much about having a concrete policy plan.
When anybody asks him for those sorts of details, he says, that's not my job.
I'm too knackered to deal with that.
Someone else, I'm just here, you know, speaking my truth.
So, yeah, it's similar.
It's similar.
Yeah.
You could refer to it as soaring rhetoric, but obviously we're cynical people, right?
But like, it's just we hear a lot of this from a lot of people of different political persuasions, right?
And very often people that are partial to this kind of rhetoric are capable.
Of sliding to different sides eventually.
So I'm not saying I think that will happen in Gary's case.
I hope not.
And I don't see the same clear admiration that like Russell Brand and whatever mentioned.
But it's just that, yeah, I just have a little warning flag there whenever people are talking, you know, that essentially the populist narrative is exactly right.
It's completely right.
It's just like the prescription that's wrong.
And you're like...
Is the populist narrative completely right?
Well, the thing is, the populist narratives like this always point to some perceived problems, right?
So the UK...
Which are real.
Yeah, which are real.
Like the UK's economic growth over the last 50 years could have been better, right?
It hasn't been zero, right?
But it could have been better.
I don't know.
I'll take your word for it.
Yeah.
I mean, but you have the same things motivate populist movements all over the world, right?
In the United States.
They've got their problems, right?
But the thing about the rhetoric is that what they all have in common is they tend to simplify things.
You tend to point the finger at one cause and go, this is why everything is bad right now.
And in the case of Trump, we know the kinds of things.
It's immigrants.
In the case of Gary or Russell Brand back in the day, it's the rich people.
And while wealth inequality may well be an issue, it may well be a serious issue.
It's certainly not the only reason, and I think far from the main reason, why the UK might not be doing as well as it might be, right?
There are dozens of reasons.
And likewise, if you're looking at the causes of housing in affordability, which is a problem in many different places, not so much in Japan where you are, where they're still...
Yeah, you have a fair bit of wealth inequality over there, but not so much the housing affordability.
I mean, there's a lot of drivers of it, right?
So I get very suspicious when people claim that it's due to this one simple thing and we just need to get those people or do some simple thing, or whether it's a vague thing that is to be done, because then it's more about just tapping into grievance rather than an actual practical...
Well, I've only got two clips left, Matt.
One of them is kind of building on this.
It's showing the kind of presentation, the populist presentation.
And it actually does the other thing that you hear in the guru sphere where people link to history or some little story.
Jordan Peterson is fond of doing this, but listen to Gary and maybe you'll see what I mean.
I wanted to do a video.
This is so random.
I wanted to do a video talking about the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire.
The reason I wanted to do that video is because a lot of people don't know this.
The Aztec Empire, which was in what is now Mexico, was a massive empire with, they think, something like 12, 13, 14 million people.
And the group of Spanish people who eventually conquered the entire Aztec Empire And how was it that 3,000 people were able to conquer and destroy and take all of the wealth and the land of an empire which was more than 10 million people?
What they did was, they landed, they worked out the kind of political groupings and they allied with the larger group and they used that group to destroy the smaller group.
And then they split the larger group into...
Smaller groups and they did the same thing.
Again, they used a larger group to split into smaller groups.
Through that repeated plan, 3,000 people were able to totally dominate and take all of the wealth and all of the land of an empire of 13, 14, 15 million people.
More than 10 million Aztecs died at the hands of just 3,000 people.
This is what can happen.
If ordinary people in society allow themselves to be driven against each other and to hate one another, that can allow a tiny, tiny, tiny group of people to take all of your wealth, to take all of your assets and to totally destroy your civilization and your quality of life and everything that you care about.
This is the direction that we can go in if ordinary people are unwilling or unable To, you know, look to the people that live either side of them and stand with them to protect themselves from the rich and the powerful.
A small group of malevolently intentioned people, Matt, can completely screw over, you know, millions of people.
Just a little bit on the nose.
And like you, you know, hinted at with the other stuff, if you know the history there, what Gary's saying is correct about like...
Cortez and whatnot, you know, exploiting the rivalries and alliances.
But it's also that he was able to exploit the dissatisfaction with the ruling classes over there and their mistreatment of the peasants.
And there was an outbreak of smallpox, which killed estimated 30 to 50 percent of the population.
Right.
These kind of things matter.
So it's just like the story is not as simple as.
That narrative would suggest.
That's right.
It's not quite that simple.
There was a matter of technology and stuff as well.
Again, many factors, right?
But, you know, like real economics or real history, just like real economics, is complicated and kind of boring.
What you really want for soaring rhetoric and activating people is a simple narrative, a clear-cut enemy.
A villain.
Yeah.
And like a simple call to action that will make everything better again or get rid of the bad people.
That is just a common thing with politics.
It's not even a dig against Gary.
That's just how you do rhetoric as opposed to information.
Well, we'll finish with a little bit of soaring rhetoric.
This is the last clip, Matt, that covers that kind of thing.
So this is talking about, you know, what's next?
It's from the video about like stepping away for...
The next couple of months.
So let's see what's next.
But the last few months, when I've seen so many people across the country willing to take time out of their day, take effort to try and support a movement that they don't gain anything from personally, because they know it's what the society needs to protect each other, have made me believe that maybe we can win this.
Maybe we can...
Stop wealth from flooding away from more than any families towards the rich.
Maybe we can get that back and maybe we can win.
But it's not going to be just me who wins it.
And it's not going to depend really on me or what I do.
It's going to depend on you and how many of you are willing and able to spread that message.
I'm going to wait for a couple of months.
I'm going to be in Japan, Italy, Portugal, Sweden and mainly.
Promote my book.
But when I come back, I want to see more people making cool things.
If they're going to grind down the ordinary people in this country, I want to at least see you make some cool stuff on the way down.
That's what's going to help us win.
You guys, ordinary people, getting behind the simple idea that if you don't stop growing wealth inequality...
It will destroy living standards for ordinary families, for your kids and your grandkids.
I've said that before, I'll say it again.
We're not going to win this today.
We're not going to win this tomorrow.
So be calm.
Be patient.
Be there for each other.
God knows you're going to need each other.
But keep building.
If you keep building, we can win this.
Good luck.
Find words.
Find words.
It's a movement.
Mighty Wind is Blowing.
Gary's doing his part.
Yes, his part is that he's going to go and promote his book now for a couple of months.
But when he comes back, he wants to see that everyone has been making things.
As we heard earlier, he's not going to be suing anyone if they're making badges or pins based on his stuff.
So you could do that.
You could do other things, right?
It's not saying that's all it has to be.
Yeah.
Well, he'll be back putting his shoulder to the wheel, releasing...
On YouTube.
On YouTube, a monetized YouTube, a 30 to 45-minute talk from his kitchen each week.
He'll be doing the work, but it's a beautiful feeling to feel.
So many other people getting on board as well, spreading the word, building the channel, building the brand.
Do you ever think we're too cynical?
A little bit.
I think some people would say we're too cynical.
A little bit cynical.
It's the job, Chris.
The job makes you cynical.
It's like being a detective in New York City.
You know what I mean?
That's right.
That's right.
We could be wrong.
We could be wrong.
If it turns out that this movement is more...
Than YouTube and Facebook shares and that it does lead to political change in a way that Russell Brand and whatnot were never able to, at least not in any of the ways that they presented.
I mean, he's done pretty well for the Trump campaign.
But if it does, then fair enough, right?
Then fair enough.
And it is the case that, as we've said throughout this, the political activism...
It is a little bit like, you know, communication in public health arenas where, as far as I know, people are like, you have to simplify.
You have to, you know, encourage people, motivate them, give them a crusade.
This all sounds like that.
But we are not political campaigners, right?
We are looking critically at the content and the rhetoric.
And there's so many things that light up from other people that we've covered.
And it's just...
It's hard not to notice that.
I mean, that's right.
So when I started reviewing Gary's Economics for the podcast, I was assuming it was like an educational podcast.
Or like Jordan Peterson.
He's going to teach you about psychology.
He's going to help you be a better person.
Well, purportedly, right?
And same with Gary, right?
Gary's Economics.
And the titles of the things we're all about, this will help you understand.
But what I found is that there is very little economics talk in it.
And, you know, while there are a couple of ideas that I think were good, and I mean, you know, there's certainly a lot of things he said that were true, generally his analysis compared to other economics podcasts I've listened to was just incredibly simplistic.
Like it's quite representative, the kinds of broad sweeping.
Simplistic things that we heard in this episode, that's reflective of the other content that I've heard.
And I'd really encourage people to go listen to some other economics podcasts just to hear the difference.
There is a big difference.
So you won't hear much economics in Gary's economics, but you hear a lot about Gary.
You'll hear a lot about...
You'll hear a lot about...
Look, that's not even a criticism.
I'm just stating facts here, Chris.
You do hear a lot about Gary.
Well, it is titled Gary's Economics, you know?
Yeah, emphasis on the Gary.
You'll hear about his accomplishments and his special knowledge, how great he is.
You'll hear about how all the other experts and institutions either don't understand the issue or don't care.
We heard just then at the end how the message that we've got a sacred mission to accomplish.
He doesn't want people to support him or his channel for himself.
Not at all.
It's to accomplish our shared crusade.
He wants to grow the channel to achieve that grand goal.
You know, he's tired, right?
He's stressed.
It's taking a lot out of him.
He's suffering slings and arrows.
His mental health is suffering.
A lot of gurus are.
That's right.
The people questioning him just want to take him down.
We'll be added to that list.
I mean...
All of this stuff is very, very familiar.
So I guess I've got two issues with Gary.
One issue that I don't have is campaigning for a wealth tax or campaigning to reduce wealth inequality.
I'm all for that.
That bit I'm fine with.
I have an issue just in terms of the content being quite facile and thin as educational content about economics.
And it seems more like it's rather the groundwork for rhetoric.
Simplistic rhetoric rather than actual informative stuff.
And I've got to say, he lights up the garometer like a fucking Christmas tree.
That's just also a fact.
It is.
It is a fact, though.
And, you know, I'll say, Mark, because, of course, we will be added to the list of hitters.
People will take issue with this because he's quite a popular figure.
But I want to make just a couple of points for people at the end here, right?
So...
Yes, Matt and I are academics, right?
So one argument will be you guys are just defending the academic system.
Just to be clear, I'm not an economist.
I don't give a crap about economists, you know, in general.
What I don't like is presentations that are just not accurate, that present a field as an entire monolith and whatever.
And I studied at SOAS.
Unlike Gary, I went to SOAS, which is known.
As a lefty university in the UK.
I made the choice to choose a subject where I knew there wasn't much financial gain in it.
There was a lot of people that were thinking of studying Tibetan to make a big buck, but I wasn't one of them.
I'm also from a non-typical, non-elite.
Background.
None of my parents went to university.
I'm from Belfast.
I have an accent, which isn't typical in like the elite institutions in the UK where I went to do, you know, like a PhD.
So the usual critique that it's the reason that people are reacting is because they don't like hearing a working class person talking about inequality.
And because they are making so much money and they want to defend it or they're jealous or this kind of thing, none of that actually lands here, given who Matt and I are.
Because like we said, we're basically on board with the policy goals and the general thing that wealth inequality is a serious issue and that it will be good if we can reduce that.
Wealth tax, fine.
Like Gary's wealth tax.
Fine.
So the argument is not that we think, you know, he's got to be stopped because he's daring to talk about inequality.
Our argument is lots of people have been talking about inequality and he is presenting things in this very guruish package, which is what we cover here on the podcast.
So that's the critique, right?
The critique is not the inequality is a problem message.
Or we need to take some measures to address that, whatever they may be.
I just want to make that clear because it's definitely going to come off.
I know it won't matter, but I think you should just consider the usual objectives and how closely Matt and I resemble people that are really invested in defending bankers at Citibank or LSE.
Who cares a lot about wealth inequality, housing, affordability, things like that.
In the course of fact-checking Gary, I came across some books that looked quite good.
And I think there are some very interesting ideas in economics, none of which I heard on Gary's economics, stuff related to modern monetary theory, for instance, like a different way of thinking about the economy, which is more geared towards the rest of us rather than just...
You know, neoliberal type stuff or austerity, that kind of thinking.
I think there's a lot of interesting ideas around.
So, you know, I just encourage people to read those books, educate yourself a bit more widely.
And then when you come back to Gary's economics, you might find the ideas are a little bit thin.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, there we go, Matt.
That's our roundup.
I think it's fair to say that we're not huge.
Fans of the content.
But as I said, I've read the whole book.
So how many people listening did that?
I do want to say one nice thing, though, which is that in some of his videos, he says things that are fine and true.
You know what I mean?
I know that.
It's not totally boasting.
There is boasting.
You usually wave it into it.
But there is, like, interspersed is not particularly deep information, but I think you could still get something out of listening to more educational videos.
I probably should have said this earlier, but I would say, Matt, that my level of economic understanding, that you would come across quite a lot in his videos that, you know, you wouldn't have heard of.
Before I thought that much about, but that's part of the problem because he kind of suggests that there's nobody that is actually talking about these things where that's not true.
But I think in him talking about interest rates or derivatives or whatever the heck he's talking about, that a lot of people haven't come across that before.
A lot of people haven't even studied basic economic theory.
So he is giving information like that, but he's kind of tying it into...
You know, there's no point to actually study economics because it's all elitist talking nonsense.
But, you know, on this channel, I'm going to give you the real stuff.
And you're like, you don't need to tie that.
So, yeah, but I do think there is information there.
And maybe for some people, it's not that thin if you haven't, you know, like even got a basic knowledge about like economic terms and whatnot.
Yeah, that reminds me a little bit of Sabine Ostenfelder.
When she was doing straight-ahead science education, she did very well, I think, pitched at that particular level for people who'd be coming across things for the first time.
And it was only when, again, that theme of just weaving in this, you know, it's all corrupt, they're all wasting their time over there at the universities, but I'm here, I'm giving it to you straight.
It's only then that Sabine tends to...
Get very irritating.
So, you know, just like with a lot of content, there's good mixed in with the bad.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Well, now, Matt, we're done now.
Our next guru that we're going to look at, we're going to go into different waters, right?
We're going to have a look at the All In podcast, which is a bunch of elite billionaires.
Tech billionaires talking their ideas.
They probably got a different perspective about the economy and the importance of economic inequality, right?
Yeah.
So if you thought that we are overly sympathetic to the rich elites, let's wait till we hear the rich elites and see how sympathetic we are.
The people that aren't...
Well, they might be rich elites.
I don't know.
We don't have a means testing for it.
But the people that support us, Matt, who may or may not be rich elites, would you object to me giving them a little shout-out to your end here?
You know, giving them some credit?
By all means, I would say.
Okay, okay.
And I'm actually going to do something a little bit different, Matt.
I'm going to give a shout-out to people who have been with us.
A long time.
The OGs, okay?
Oh, yeah.
Because I probably missed them, to be fair.
I probably missed a series of them, but I can organize things, you know, by time.
So I'm going to give a bunch of people a shout-out.
And first, conspiracy hypothesizers.
Here we have Anonymous Ephesus, not a serial killer, just asking questions.
Chris Clark, Paul Taylor, Tim Nguyen, Potato Wire, me, Gretchen Cock, Joe Percy, Tom Allison, Christopher McLaughlin, Eason Jostad, Michael John, Fio V. Could be Fio Vaughan.
Could be.
Jim Murray.
Alicia Wilson.
Trenton Knorr.
Peter Astrom.
Sam Hurd Photography.
The Real Eric Kleinstein.
Brain Biter.
Amar Patel.
Shane Grunholtz.
Joao Barbosa.
Joao Barbosa.
Sorry.
Mr. Barrosa, James O'Donnell, Gavin Boyder, Dylan Selterman, Helen Moffat, and Andy Seaton.
Okay?
Those are conspiracy hypothesizers that deserve a shout-out, Matt.
They've endured our content for too long.
God bless them all.
And I know some of those names, too.
They really are from back in the day.
Thank you for still sticking around.
Appreciate it.
Yeah.
Let me just check, by the way.
They may or may not still be around, but in any case, we thank them.
Okay, we thank them.
I don't know if I've filtered it by current or not.
So anyway, if they're gone, they deserve recognition.
Thank you for sponsoring us for like a month, a couple of years ago.
I appreciate that.
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.
It just struck me as so funny that...
When Joe Rogan is hearing these stories that George Soros is trying to destroy the country from within, his reaction isn't...
Is that maybe just a bit overheated?
No, he's like, what?
George Soros is trying to destroy the country from within!
Who's paying him?
I know.
I know.
That's Joe Rogan for you.
So revolutionary geniuses, Mark.
And I find a little button to make sure that these are...
The current.
Okay, so all of these guys, they're still around.
Probably.
Probably.
Unless they've just forgot to cancel.
But Carolyn Reeves.
Paul Hahn.
Adam Session.
Good old Adam.
Oh, yeah.
David Love.
Juanita Custance.
That's my cousin.
I know that.
I know that.
She's getting shouted out again, and she deserves it.
So she's still on board.
She's still kicking in.
She's still on board.
Yeah.
Unless I've not clicked the button right.
Maybe she forgot.
Kim Young-Pun, Fraser, Alex A, Yellow Dreams, Adrian Barrett, Brandon H, Bullshido Media Foundation, Good Old Frost, Patrick Dunlop, Sean Veldman, Mike Nelson, Juha Vitamaki, Samuel Rivers, Ali Shoganesi.
God, I should be able to pronounce that, but I didn't.
Daniel Reed Miller, Dexter King-Williams, Ayuko Unu, Jessa, Louise Price, and Rebecca L. Shanawani.
Oh, and Kyle.
Kyle.
So, yes, Kyle as well.
So, thank you, revolutionary geniuses.
I'm usually running, I don't know.
70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea 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.
Now, Chris, that first guy, what's his name?
The sense maker.
What's his name again?
Jordan Hall.
Jordan Hall.
Did you see?
I saw a clip where he was recently talking to Jordan Peterson.
Did you?
Yes.
Yes, yes.
I've seen that.
Yes.
Do you ever get tempted, Chris?
Do you ever get tempted?
Revisit?
Yeah.
Are you talking about the fact that he began sensemaking at the age of six, I think, or four?
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
I wonder how many paradigms he had running simultaneously in his head then.
Probably not 30 or 40. Maybe at four, it would have had to have been, you know, five or six paradigms.
A bit less.
Maybe 40 or so.
Like, don't go too busy by then.
Even Jordan did seem surprised that he'd begun sensemaking at that early age.
Jordan did seem surprised, that's right.
Yeah.
So, now, people that Jordan would not be surprised to hear that he started sensemaking at such an early age include our Galaxy Brain Gurus, Matt, the long-timers, who we have here, Nazar Zobar, Chris Spanos.
Chrissy.
Coach.
Max Plan.
Maxie.
Josh Duttman.
I feel like I should do this for everyone else.
I've got to stop so I don't have to keep saying that.
Chris O!
Yeah.
Nazar.
Leslie Garfley.
Matthew Brown, but he's gone now.
David Jones.
Maytree.
Jay, Benjamin Ashcraft, David Small, DanLev151, Steve Daundley, The Soil Will Save Us, Tom, Tom Yasko, Bradley G. Wall, Alex Anderson, Kyle Wilson, Janet Uter, Kirsten Greed, Rob Leslie Jr., Hustletron9000, Loki, Chris Alex Bander, Jay Jones Jester, Tim Rossiter, and Adam T.
Thank you one and all.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
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.
They have no tribe, Matt, but they do have Patreon subscriptions.
So we thank them.
Yeah, so look, Matt and me, we're so not good.
We're very, very tired.
We're not good.
We're going to be taking about six months or so off.
In those six months, though, if you want to make badges, pins, take our content, promote it around your street, put posters up of us.
Just spread the word.
We're on a sacred mission here to take down every last one of these motherfuckers.
The gurus, I mean.
And, you know, it's a movement.
It's not about us.
It's not about us, Matt.
It's not about us.
It's really about you and the people that are trying to screw your fucking family.
You know your grandmother?
Those buggers.
They want to shaft you, your friends.
They look down on you.
They think that you are, you know, just a little person.
And all those fat cats smoking their cigars, looking down at you.
They're laughing at you.
They wouldn't like.
They wouldn't.
And the thing that would really annoy them is if you promoted our podcast.
They fucking hate that.
They are shaking in their boots right now.
They're really worried.
They hate people with Belfast accents.
It just sends them right off.
We're just having a little bit of fun.
It's just a little bit of fun, but we'll be back.
We are tired, but we're not that tired, so we'll be back in a week or so.
That's right.
Unlike Gary, we don't get to take this to ourselves.
