S8 EP8: Gary Stevenson discusses his Mormon upbringing, sparring with Rory Stewart and why a wealth tax could save the economy

Louis is joined in the Spotify studio by author, YouTuber and inequality economist Gary Stevenson. Gary tells Louis about growing up in a Mormon family, his disagreement with Rory Stewart, and why he thinks a wealth tax could solve financial inequality. Please note this episode was recorded before Gary announced he was stepping back from his YouTube channel. Warnings: Strong language. Links/Attachments: Documentary: How to Get Filthy Rich with Gary Stevenson (2026) - Channel 4 https://www.channel4.com/programmes/how-to-get-filthy-rich-with-gary-stevenson Book: The Trading Game, Gary Stevenson (2024) https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/455809/the-trading-game-by-stevenson-gary/9781802062731 Podcast: The Rest is Politics: 144. Gary Stevenson: From Teenage Drug Dealer to Millionaire Trader (2025) https://open.spotify.com/episode/5vfmQmoA9frvGh5aRQvZLi Book: Politics on the Edge, Rory Stewart (2024) https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442034/politics-on-the-edge-by-stewart-rory/9781529922868 TV Show: That Mitchell and Webb Look (2006-2010) - Channel 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h242eDB84zY Video: “I'm QUITTING!" Gary Stevenson vs Piers Morgan On Wealth, Economic Growth & Elon Musk (2026) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLmFZBB3Apw Article: Gary Stevenson may have been Citi’s most profitable trader… in developed market foreign exchange (2026) - Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/5c48b680-daf6-40d2-9522-ad997eb07b63 Video: How COVID-19 MAKES the Rich Richer - Gary EXPLAINS the theory (2020) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiblHqbpXHs Article: The Sunday Times Rich List (2026) https://www.thetimes.com/sunday-times-rich-list Play: Poet In Da Corner, Debris Stevenson (2018) https://open.spotify.com/album/2QDC46EK9W1ndEyFbFkabH Play: My Brother’s a Genius, Debris Stevenson (2026) https://www.nyt.org.uk/get-tickets/my-brothers-a-genius-london Credits: Producer: Tom Fuller Researcher: Beth Johnstone Senior Assistant Producer: Maisie Williams Audio Mixer: Tom Guest Video Mixer: Alfie Butler Production Manager: Francesca Bassett  Music: Miguel D’Oliveira  Series Producer: Millie Chu Executive Producer: Arron Fellows     A Mindhouse Studios Production for Spotify  www.mindhouse.co.uk  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Louis Theroux Podcast.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Joining me today is author, YouTuber and inequality economist Gary Stevenson. Gary started his YouTube channel Gary's Economics in June 2020 after leaving a successful and lucrative career as a trader at Citibank in 2014. Since then, he's amassed 1.6 million followers, spreading his message that extreme wealth concentration is destroying the economy, wreaking havoc on society and sending us spinning into a dystopian future. Gary's prescription of a wealth tax on those with assets of over £10 million has become even more of a talking point in the wake of the release of his new documentary

• 0:58Speaker 00

  for Channel 4, How to Get Filthy Rich with Gary Stevenson, produced by my company. Naturally enough, when we recorded our conversation in July this year, that was our starting point. I should also say, I wasn't just keen to talk to Gary because I was tangentially involved in his documentary. It's also his status as a guru of where we find ourselves, the economic landscape, which, as we all know, the world's first trillionaire was newly minted just a few weeks ago, Elon Musk, but also his ability to grow a platform online as a digital influencer, spreading

• 1:40Speaker 00

  his message, and his story of coming to wealth as a trader from a background of growing up working class, his dad was a postman, and the way in which his extraordinary mathematical gift paved the way for him to make wealth for himself before the scales fell from his eyes. We talk about all of this in the chat. A quick warning, this conversation contains strong language. All that and much, much more coming up.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Hulu on Disney+. I'm a big fan of TV, you know that, and I like TV that has big emotions behind it, that makes you feel things. Shows like Rivals. Have you watched Rivals? Everyone's been talking about it. It is the Jilly Cooper adaptation. One of the pleasures of it, it's unapologetically adult. Don't watch it with a small child. Watch it with your loved one or your friends and enjoy the professional competitiveness that takes place in this landscape of alphas, alpha men, alpha women, all of them at the top of their game, all of them living luxuriously, comfortably in beautiful homes and enjoying

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• 3:54Speaker 00

  How's life?

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Busy.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Busy, stressful couple of weeks.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, stressful couple of weeks. The doc's just gone out. I really enjoyed it, found it interesting and insightful. I was surprised at, maybe I shouldn't have been, the level of pushback, like not so much in the programme, but in the afterlife, some of the reviews, especially like The Guardian, you would think would be onside.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Did you read that one?

• 4:22Speaker 01

  No, I never read them, but.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  I mean, I'll put it out there just so people are educated on it. The Guardian gave it two stars and called it a faintly embarrassing waste of time.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Some others, I mean, some other, Financial Times, three stars, you might expect that, some of the others, but what was your take on that?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, The Guardian's a funny one. The Guardian called my book completely devoid of introspection, which I think probably says more about The Guardian than the book. I'm interested in it, to be honest, because purely economically, these guys should be my allies. They're not the super rich, you know, but often they're not.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I don't know, I think it's maybe something about class.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Some of the character, some of the characterisations felt ad hominem and actually class-based, exactly as you say. It's almost like this guy's annoying.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. But the truth is, the truth is, I think sometimes, sometimes I do intentionally annoy the middle class, sometimes in the way that I speak, and maybe that's, maybe that's been a bit unwise.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  Go on. How would you intentionally annoy them by the way you speak?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  When I went on Riss's Politics, you see me going on Riss's Politics?

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is the sometimes studio down the hall. Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart, one ex sort of advisor, Tony Blair, one former Tory MP, minister, both sort of centrists.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  And yeah, and you went on there and go on. And actually, one of the blurbs.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  It's on the front of my book, Rory Stewart.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Rory Stewart, Alistair Campbell.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I've read his book, Politics on the Edge, and I loved it. I thought it was so funny. It was like, he kept like, so he's a Conservative minister in this Cameron government and later whatever may, and he kept like seeing Conservative MPs do these like really, really terrible things and kept being like, oh my God, even in the Conservative Party, this kind of thing is happening. And then dealing with it by like walking across Scotland or something.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  What kind of things did he mean?

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Just like people who sort of didn't really care about the future of the country.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Self-serving, corruption.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, perhaps, things like this, but I love the way that, you've seen that Mitchell and Webb sketch with the Nazis with the hats?

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Right, where they go, maybe we're the bad guys.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Have you seen what's on our hats? Have you seen, there's a skull and crossbones on that, do you think maybe? And through the whole of Rory Stewart's book, what is so funny about it is he never has that moment, he never has that, are we the bad guys moment? He's constantly convinced that him and his group of people are the good guys that have been, and bad people have corrupted their like holy space. And I thought it was the funniest book I've read in ages. And so when I went on Riss's Politics, I was really looking forward and I just thought, I just wanted to like get him going a little bit. I thought it would be funny.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  Did you?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  It's interesting, like being in the spotlight and seeing the different reaction you get from different people. It's strange though, to be honest.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  You've become, you know, we can go into the backstory and it involves you growing up working class, becoming a trader, making a lot of money and then stepping away, then you reinvented yourself, well, having gone through the academic track for a bit, as more or less a digital influencer on the subject of inequality economics and building a big platform. And now you're in, now you're having to run the gauntlet of podcasts and media appearances, another one, which is strange in its own right, because that's, sometimes, you know, you're, obviously you're building your profile, you're getting the message out, but you're also having to take part in these gotchas, right?

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  In the end, it becomes what clip is going to go viral and negotiating a series of encounters like in these digital arenas?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Oh, I do, because obviously, you know, we're talking at the back end of a sort of two, three week press campaign I've been doing.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  There was a Piers Morgan one.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Piers Morgan, yeah, very combative.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  Where it became about whether you would be willing to disclose actually how much money you're worth to the news, five million. And then he said, okay, you said, if you do it, I'll do it.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  And he said, all right, I'll, agreed. And then you said, I'm worth, give or take, five million. And then he refused to then be.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did, yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Follow up on the deal.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Which was quite shady.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Honestly, you know, for the documentary, I didn't find out till really late notice when it was going to come out. And I was on holiday in New Zealand, I was doing a tour of Australia and New Zealand, and they pulled me back early because they had a doc coming out. So I came back early from holiday in March, doc might come out in April, start the YouTube channel up in April, ready for the doc to come out, and it kept getting delayed and delayed and delayed. Didn't come out till July. And obviously we got Kirst, I'm leaving, and Andy Burnham coming in, and like in the last few months, there's been like realistic prospect of me actually being able to influence government, right?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  So it's been like quite a tense campaign for me because I've been trying to do all this lobbying behind the scenes and like trying to, you know, make great YouTube videos to try and push the agenda. And then the doc didn't come out till like four months into the season, and it's been a rough four months of me like being in the press. And I was knackered even before the press campaign come out. And I remember sitting in, we went to, we went to News UK, Rupert Murdoch building to do Piers Morgan, and Channel 4 PR lady was with me, she was like, how do you feel? And I said, I feel like you're sending me into the lions den with two broken legs, because I was knackered.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Before the interview?

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I knew, you know, I did Piers Morgan last year, and if I may say so myself, I think I kind of danced rings around them. But then you come back now and that like did massively, like it was massive viral on the internet. So I knew when I come back, they're just going to be shooting for me, basically. And I knew I was knackered going in. And the lady, the makeup lady was doing my makeup, but she said, you know, what do you want to do? And I said, make me look knackered because I fucking am knackered.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  And it's kind of, I don't really have the energy to fight it, but you just, you just think, well, I'm just going to fucking go in and tell the truth then. I'm going to tell the truth, which is fucking economy is going to collapse, it's going to keep collapsing, I'll be right, I've been right on this for a long time. If you want to stop it, I can help you stop it. If you want to make it like a stupid playground game, then that's kind of how it ended up.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  The most recent one is today in the FT.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I haven't read it, I haven't even read the first one they did.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  I won't, it basically is a guy who's apparently done an article about you accusing you of exaggerating your credentials.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Gary Stevenson may have been Citi's most profitable trader in developed market foreign exchange.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Is the headline.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  And then it says, my testy exchange outside a London pub with the self-proclaimed currency trading legend.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  So they're kind of marking your homework on whether you were the most successful trader in the world or not. But he's sort of saying like, yeah, he was an excellent trader, but maybe not quite to the hyperbolic levels he describes himself as.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, the thing that's really unpleasant about this is, so obviously I've had like my big press campaign, I've been doing interviews and one day last week, busy day press, went out with my mates to the pub to just like let off some steam. And this guy comes up to me, I'm the guy that did the hit piece on you two years ago. And I was like, what mate?

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  How'd you feel about that? I mean, what can you say? It is what it is. I think I've been pretty clear about what I was, which was Citibank's number one trader in 2011. And this piece came out two years ago and it feels like somebody fucking sniffing your underwear on the fucking washing line, this guy. And then like, you know, he calls up all my old mates, oh, you know, and they're all telling me, you know, people, somebody called up Oxford, my Oxford University fucking supervisor, did Gary really graduate from Oxford? And obviously everybody messages me and it's just like.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  When you're doing your post-grad, right, in economics.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it just, honestly, it just feels, and then to have this guy come up and get right in my face, you're like, you're trying to have a drink with your mates in the pub. It's a bit disgusting, to be honest. You just feel like, can you just like fuck off? You know what I mean? I mean, obviously this guy thinks I'm a liar or whatever, and he'll never be able to prove I'm a liar because I didn't fucking lie. And I'll never be able to prove I wasn't because there's no fucking award for it. But he's going to get fucking clicks on his piece, isn't he? Maybe no one ever reads any of his other pieces.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Well, I suppose to try and in a friendly way push back a tiny bit, what I'd say is like, you're in the public eye. In a way, it's, they're paying you the compliment of paying attention, right? And when you reach a certain level of success, I've had it a couple of times over the years, and you've got a message that discomforts certain people, then they will come after you. And it doesn't mean it feels nice. And, and actually, it is weird. If you've ever been doorstepped by a journalist or approached or photographed when you weren't expecting to, what felt like a private thing, it's surprisingly intrusive and feels like a violation. And that doesn't bring out the best part of you, is what I like.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  You can react angrily and you think, who am I becoming? I don't know if you experienced that, it's a feeling of like, wow, you feel like, you like, you know, you can react in a way you might not be proud of, but nevertheless, it's sort of what happens. I'm not trying to trivialize it or minimize it, but when you're at a certain level, that's what happens. And I guess what my takeaway is like, it's, it's interesting, not interesting, what I see is that it's, it's very upsetting to yourself. Some people it bounces off, but you're not one of those people.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Uh, no, it does upset me. It does upset me. It doesn't stop me from doing what I do. But I mean, in the last few weeks, it does feel like it's kind of, it's never really happened to me in real life before. I've never had someone, this guy got right in my face in the pub, you know what I mean?

• 14:05Speaker 00

  Said what?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  He said he thought I'm a liar. He said he thought I'm a liar.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  He came in the pub and said, I'm a journalist, I write for the Financial Times.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  I wrote that piece on you.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Wrote that piece on you.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think I said to him, so he.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  He said he bumped into you. Do you think that's true? Or do you have any reason to think he actually sought you out? Do you think it was his regular?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I think it was a coincidence. There was like a journalist thing going on there. And I was there to like, with a mate who happens to be a journalist. But yeah, he come up to me and obviously I was just like, well, you print lies about people every week or you make an exception for me? You know, obviously, you know, I don't engage, but if someone comes up to you in person, he's printed lies about you, you know, what are you going to do? You're going to say, well, what the fuck? I mean, and to be honest, I probably should have just said like, listen, no comment, no comment, no comment. Cause I should have known he was trying to do another piece, but you know, I'm too busy.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, you gave him a spicy kind of opening, like a spicy little mise en scène for the beginning of the article. But there we are. I was struck as well, and you know, obviously reading your book, I can see you're a sensitive person. I was struck in a recent video you did about Elon Musk, where towards the end, you're having to do retakes because you seemed on the, on the edge of basically breaking down.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, the thing is, the thing you've got to understand, Louis, I like, started to really develop these ideas about the economy in 2011, right? I was a young man, 24 years old. And I came to the conclusion that this gets worse and worse and worse. And that was as a trader, so you put the bets on and as a trader, you're not really trading, you don't, it's not your job to think about what that means.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Wealth inequality specifically would be endlessly getting wider, right?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Not income inequality, although maybe that as well, but mainly the accumulation of wealth by the very rich, which showed no signs of getting, you know, that that was continuing in a self-feedback loop.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, but also poverty and the poverty would get worse and worse. And these, this is either, and then, you know, you come to that conclusion once and you put the bet on and you get paid a lot of money and then you do it the same thing next year.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  How do you make money out of wealth, the wealth gap increasing? I know this in your book, but you just, you bet on interest rates staying very low?

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so back in 2011, 2012, we're just after the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, 2008 was a massive shock and the way that economists and governments reacted was cut interest rates to zero, print a lot of money, quantitative easing, give out a lot of money, fiscal deficits. And this is like a textbook economic response. It's supposed to work, it's supposed to stimulate. And because the economists did what the economists are supposed to do, the traders, who are also economists largely, predicted a recovery. And that recovery didn't happen in 2009, it didn't happen in 2010. By the beginning of 2011, I had become very skeptical about the recovery happening at all, but everybody still thought it was going to happen.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  And, you know, I studied master economics at university for my undergrad. I could see the predictions were wrong, so I just wanted to understand why the predictions were wrong. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, talking to people about it, researching into it. And I came to a conclusion that I still believe, which is the reason why the economy is staying weak for the long term, why living standards continue to fall, is basically because wealth inequality is increasing, the super rich are getting richer and richer, the middle class is getting poorer, governments are getting poorer, and that will worsen in a compounding way. Sometimes I use the metaphor, we have an economy that has cancer and doctors that have not yet discovered cancer. That's basically what happens. And they're like, you keep getting sicker, we don't really know why, we're not dealing with the underlying problem. So that's what I've been doing for a long time, right?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  And it's hard for me because, because I know what's going to happen. You know, you know, that is my skill. My skill is correct prediction of the future. That is what I've made all my money on. You know, if you can go back, go back and watch my first video on YouTube, June 2020.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  I did watch it.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  I've correctly predicted cost of living crisis, inflation crisis, house prices going up, gold price going up, stock price going up, government deficit, austerity, all of these things correctly predicted, you know? This is what I'm good at. And I've got a very long track record of making good, correct predictions. And when I look at the world right now, I'm very, very confident that living standards are going to get much, much worse. And you should be upset. And, and the problem I have is I can't tell myself comforting stories like, oh, it's just Gary's an idiot. You know what I mean? Because I've seen it be right every year.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Just to make it really simple, it's not just that, I mean, there's a temptation to see the super wealthy as somewhat obscene just in their own right, like taking trips on rocket ships that cost tens of millions or, I don't know, whatever they happen to be up to, like these mega, mega billionaires, Elon Musk, obviously a trillionaire allegedly. But your point is, you know, some might be tempted to say like, the rich being rich doesn't affect us as long as, you know, everyone's gone up a bit. Your point, if I understand it correctly, is that actually the rich being rich makes us poorer, not relatively, but absolutely. Is that right?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think the problem you have is, once the rich get incredibly rich, it's nobles. And that's just because of exponential growth and passive income. So, you know, if you take Elon Musk, if he's worth a trillion, you know, these guys, we interviewed one billionaire in a documentary, he said he won't accept less than 12%. All right, let's say, let's say.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Bussim Hyder. Interview him at One Hyde Park, Lebanese-born businessman who says he's looking for 12 or 13% return.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, these guys.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  He's like, I mean, you seem to, it's no, there's no animosity between you, it's a friendly enough encounter. He gives a lot of money to reform, I believe.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  I've heard so, yeah. And he was a gentleman to me. You know, he made me a tea, like, seriously, like, I've not got a bad word to say against him from our conversation, he was like perfectly respectful. But once you have these guys, like billionaires making 12%, if you're billionaire making 12%, you're making 120 million quid a year.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Imagine you're making, this is passive income.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  Doing nothing.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, imagine you make, if you were making a hundred and twenty million quid a year, how much would you spend?

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Um, I have no clue.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I, I would struggle to spend the one million. I wouldn't know how you would spend. But let's say you spend ten million a year, somehow, right? Live like the Queen. You've got a hundred and ten million pounds left over. The only thing you can do is buy assets. You know, we don't live in rapidly growing economies where there is massive, you know, massive amounts of growth investments you can make. You're buying assets, you're buying assets, you're buying assets. Um, push up asset prices and it squeezes other people out. You know, I mean, this is, this is the story. It's, the growth in the wealth of the super rich has happened exactly alongside the collapsing wealth of the working class and the collapsing wealth of the government. These are two sides of the same coin. You know, for a long time, working class people like my dad, who worked for the post office for thirty five years, could buy an own property.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  That's no longer realistically possible for working class people. Who owns those properties now? You know, who, who is on the other side of the mortgages? You know, I think if we see, if we were seeing massive growth in the wealth of the super rich and also growth in the wealth of everybody else, then, you know, you might still have some cause to be concerned because you might worry about monopolisation of politics, monopolisation of power. But what we are seeing is massive growth in the wealth of the super rich at the exact same time as collapsing wealth of the working class, collapsing wealth of governments, and collapsing wealth of the middle class. Like, this should be like an enormous cause for concern. Like, it's very, very clear that what used to be owned by the working class is now owned by the super rich. What used to be owned by Western governments is now owned by the super rich.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  What I am concerned about is not the rich in and of themselves, is the collapse of the ability of, of everybody else to own wealth. You know, it's, it's.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  So if you want to go into space, fine, but, um, actually, your super wealth does have an impact by kind of sucking up the assets that the rest of us would really like to have some access to.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  When I first started my YouTube, I was talking about the government deficit. At the time, it was three hundred and fifty billion pounds. And I was kind of trying to figure out in my head, how can I? This is such an enormously big number, there's always this problem of how can I communicate to the public how big this number is? And I, I settled on this is more than three times the wealth of the world's richest man, Jeff Bezos. So six years ago, three hundred and fifty billion pounds was more than three times the wealth of the world's richest man. And just a couple of weeks ago, the world's richest man has gone through a trillion dollars. So this is an incredible speed of growth. You know, we live in economies that are growing one to two percent a year. And yet Elon Musk's wealth is growing forty, fifty percent a year. You know, this is basically the medical definition of cancer.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  You know, we are not growing at fifty percent a year and billionaire wealth is growing twelve percent a year, fifty percent a year. It's, it's just simple maths. You cannot have a small group of society growing their wealth at twelve, twenty, thirty percent a year in economies that are going one to two percent a year and not expect them to relatively quickly own all of the assets in that economy.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  Do you, um, I was gonna lead up to this, but let's just, let's just get this out of the way. So what do you think is gonna happen? Because you seem, you know, you, as you say, you've got a track record of making predictions. You seem to have limited hope of a major change of course by governments. So that leads to what? A kind of apocalyptic feudal society, immiseration? What do you actually think is gonna happen? So I think you, we've got Andy Burnham in, just a couple of days in. I've heard you saying the past, well, Burnham will get in, he won't do enough, then they'll bring in Farage, then he, he won't be able to fix it, right? Am I sketching it out?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think here's the play because I see it. Um, so the centre, which, you know, Labour is, is the centre, even the Conservatives are kind of the centre. They're not really sold on the inequality stuff. They're not serious about top level inequality. They're trying to sort of tinker their way out of it. They make little changes here and there. They'll, they won't be able to do anything big because the government wealth position is quite bad, they can't raise a lot of money. Um, if they really want to raise a lot of money, they'll have to tax the super rich, which they're not really willing to do. Um, you've got to recognise that the status quo is not bad. The status quo is bad and aggressively worsening in an accelerating fashion. That, that is what is happening to the wealth distribution, which means if you don't do anything, you're, you're aggressively worsening, which makes like Keir Starmer's job, you come

• 24:40Speaker 01

  in, I'm committed to not seriously changing anything, and things will worsen. And it'll be the same situation for Burnham, um, and, and they will continually fail on living standards. Um, and then you know that that creates an interesting space for political ideas and economic ideas because the public increasingly, like quite desperately want like some sort of significant, meaningful change on the economy. And the, the, the challenge and the mission for people like me, and I think that the thing which I need to think more about and the thing which I've broadly failed on is we need to convince the centre to give a little bit of ground on this. We need to recognise that if they don't give us something on this, then they are opening the door to increasingly really serious extreme fascism. That is what, that is what will happen because until and unless they give us something on

• 25:25Speaker 01

  this, they will again and again and again fail on living standards. Um, so I probably need to stop winding up Rory Stewart and figure out how to befriend him.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  According to some polling, seventy five percent of the public support a wealth tax.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  Gabriel Zuckman, a leading voice on, on economic inequality from French economist, has said very rich, the very rich have lower effective tax rates than the rest of the population. So in other words, the very rich are paying as it stands, according to Gabriel Zuckman, less tax. What, just to be really simple, what do you, do you have? I've heard you mention a couple of ideas. Is your idea two percent, a two percent annual tax on, on wealth above?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Ten million.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Ten million.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the current primary campaign here is two percent above ten million. Um, you know, that exact design is not my design, that's a pre-existing campaign from Tax Justice UK and Patrati Millionaires, who work on this stuff. Gabriel Zuckman's plan is a two percent minimum tax on wealth of above a hundred million euros, which I guess about ninety million pounds.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  To be honest, like I'm quite agnostic about the exact design. I think the most important thing is that it is not avoided at the top end. That's the most important thing. You need to capture that. This is the real long-term problem is the very top end because they are growing incredibly quickly, nothing is being done about it. They are able to use their media power, their financial power, their political power to block it from getting done. We need to get in there and get something so that we can start taxing these people. Um, and if it's wealth above ten or if it's wealth above a hundred, in the first instance, I don't really mind because we need to start building the infrastructure to make sure that this works, to make sure that it's not avoided.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Um, and that work is not seriously being done by governments. The work is being left to like people like Gabriel Zuckman, people like me, which is like kind of absurd, like, you know, this work should be being done by governments and by big teams of serious academics. Um, what I really want is governments and, and economists to start taking this seriously and to start a real serious conversation about what can be done to tax the very rich in a way that they can't avoid.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Did you pay attention to the Sunday Times Rich list when it came out in May?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Uh, not really, not this year.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  It's the thirty eighth edition. Um, just a random fact, just for people at home, which is, I mean, one of the striking details is I think there's three hundred and fifty people on the list. In two thousand, I guess their net worth was around a hundred billion. This year was up to seven hundred and forty one billion.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  Top of the list, do you know who was number one? This is UK only, obviously. This is, I'm not trying to catch you, it's not a gotcha.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Is it the Mittals or the Ann Barnies or something like that?

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Interestingly, the Mittals are no longer listed.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Maybe they've left.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  They've fled the queue, right? Which is kind of a pattern.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  So that's the Hinduja family listed at thirty eight billion, stayed at number one. Next down, David and Simon Rubin and family, twenty nine point nine seven one billion, number three, Sir Leonard Blavatnik, twenty six point eight five two billion, and so on. But the narrative, the spin that the Times put on it or the Sunday Times was, and this is the headline, billionaires are abandoning Britain, this is what it means. And they go on to say nearly a third, a hundred and eleven of the UK citizens who appear in the main list no longer live on the British mainland.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  And the suggestion is that the modest changes that Keir Starmer made to things like inheritance tax, non-dom status have scared them. And now the super rich are turning their backs on Britain. And then there's a culture spin. Norwegian shipping baron John Fredriksson closed his Chelsea offices, moved to the United Arab Emirates, declaring that the UK had gone to hell.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Norwegian accent.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  That was an attempt.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  What do we make of that? I mean, I guess it's a familiar, it's a familiar counterpoint to what, one that you're probably used to hearing.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  So at the moment, we have a tax regime which taxes you largely based on residence. It means that we basically, to a broad degree, allow billionaires to choose where they pay their tax. I think it's important to recognise what a billionaire is and the ways in which a billionaire is different from somebody who maybe has a very well-paid job. Somebody who has a well-paid job gets paid for working. You know, I was a banker, I was getting paid millions of dollars a year. I get paid to work. Billionaires get paid because they own assets. It's housing, buildings, natural resources, productive assets. Skyscrapers own other people's debts. They might own your mortgage. They might own your government

• 30:23Speaker 01

  debt. So these people are, in some ways, more mobile because they don't have a job. They can live anywhere. But it's important to recognise that their money comes from you. You know, it's not from their work. You know, if I was to tax, you know, you on your work, you could feasibly do your work from Dubai. But if I was to tax a billionaire who owns £5 billion, £10 billion in British property, and they go to Dubai, their money's coming from the people who live in those British properties. If I own £5 billion of British government debt, my money's coming from the British government. If I own £10 billion of Chinese government debt, at the end of every year, China would come to me and say, can we have our tax, please, on the, on the income you have made on your Chinese government debt? And if I tried to say to them, oh, actually, I live in Britain, they

• 31:07Speaker 01

  would say, all right, well, you're not getting your money anymore. You know, it's as simple as that. I think we've, we've created this game where we allow the wealthiest people in the world, who, by the way, own everything in our country, to choose whether or not to pay tax in this country. China says, if you own our country, you pay tax in our country. And then we're surprised, and then we say, well, you can't tax them because they can leave. Well, China doesn't allow it. You know, it's, if you, if you create a tax system which allows the people who own your country to choose whether or not to pay tax, then you can't tax them. We don't have to use that tax system. We could use a tax system which says, if you own significant amounts of British assets, you must pay tax in Britain.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  You know, this, and it's, I think the world tax debate has moved into like a kind of, if it wasn't so important, it would be almost funny, where somebody like me comes up and says, oh, my God, there's a massive, massive problem in the area of the economy I'm an expert in. And if we don't take action, it's going to absolutely collapse the country into desperate, desperate poverty. And people turn around and say, oh, how do we fix it? And I say, oh, well, okay, I'm not a specific expert on that, but I'll go in, I'll research it, and I'll, you know, I'll bring the world expert over, and we think we can do it like this. And they say, but that's quite hard, isn't it? Let's not do it. You know what I mean? It's like I've come up, and there's a fucking hole in the bottom of the boat. Wealth is hemorrhaging out. Can you come and help us stop the hole? And people say,

• 32:31Speaker 01

  oh, but are you an expert in hole stopping? Maybe it's hard to stop holes. If you don't stop this, society will collapse. We need to deal with this. And it's, it's so absurd, this, this, you know, you know, well, Gary hasn't got all the answers. Do I need to have all the answers? What I'm telling you is if you do nothing, society will collapse. And I'm willing to work with whoever wants to do, you know, when I interviewed Dan Needle for the documentary, he's like.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Dan Needle was a tax expert.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Tax expert. And I said to him, and I was.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  You gave him the needle. He seemed to be needled by you. Not, you weren't trying to needle him. He called it populist claptrap. I mean, his politics are sort of centrist, are they? Or maybe even slightly left leaning?

• 33:08Speaker 01

  I mean, he's, he's definitely the country's most prominent anti-world tax campaigner.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Is he?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  Is that his main, his main bag?

• 33:15Speaker 01

  I'm sure he does other things as well. And, you know, from what I've seen of his work, he's done perhaps some good things, like exposing some tax avoidance by some high-profile figures. But as somebody who is in the world tax world, like, he's definitely this country's most prominent anti-world tax campaigner. And it was frustrating for me because I'm an expert on economics and inequality. Dan Needle's not, not an economist. And he's an expert on taxation. And, you know, I know a lot about taxation, but I'm probably not an expert, as, as expert on taxation as him. And I say, look, you know, if we don't do anything, society will collapse. And he says, well, your specific policy proposal is not going to work. I said, please, help me. Help me. You are the man that we need. You are one of the country's most prominent tax experts. I'm not a tax expert to the degree you are. I am an inequality expert. I'm an economics expert. I can guarantee

• 33:58Speaker 01

  you if we do nothing, there will be like horrific, long-term consequences to our society. Help me design it. Help me design it.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  He said, absolute populist claptrap, and the people pushing this should be ashamed of themselves.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Should be ashamed of themselves, yeah. That's what he said.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Claude. I have Claude on my phone. It's an AI that helps out with projects, gives me advice. I asked it for the best episodes of the Louis Theroux podcast. It came back very quickly, mentioning Adam Buxton, John Wilson, Marco Pierre-White, all solid episodes. Nice to have Claude as a listener. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight, not something I do very often, but you might, or strategising your next business move, I definitely do that. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Claude's been helpful for me. You know, sometimes you just need like a screen grab,

• 35:15Speaker 00

  like a metaphorical one, a sense of what the landscape looks like. What's the key part of the narrative? You know, Steve Coogan, what are the key episodes? What are the, the parts of, of his story that I need to dig into? The landmarks on the journey? And it'll give you citations. You can click through to the relevant websites, magazine articles, stories, podcasts. And like that, in the blink of an eye, you have all the information at your fingertips. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/theroux. That's claude.ai/theroux. And check out Claude Pro, which includes all of the features mentioned in today's episode.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  I'd like to go back, if, if that's all right. And, you know, you're known not just for your ideas, but for your origin story, and some of that's laid out in the book. There's almost a Harry Potter dimension. I overuse that analogy, but never mind. And you're like, you've got wizarding powers in the form of your maths ability. Born to a muggle family, if you like. As you said, in Ilford, dad was a postal worker, mum was a homemaker. And both of them Mormon, I was interested to read.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Did they meet in the church?

• 36:38Speaker 01

  They did, yes. They grew up in South London, met in the Mormon church.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  There were three of you. Is it, you've got an older brother?

• 36:43Speaker 01

  An older brother and a younger sister.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  And a younger sister. Younger sister's quite a noted poet. She wrote a play, or musical, grime musical called Poet in the Corner.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Your, your older brother, I've only got little kind of, you've referred to him as quite an unusual character at times.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  And then I think somewhere in your sister said, like, he used to build supercomputers?

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Oh, that's probably an unintentional exaggeration. He's a computer programmer. He doesn't like me talking about him, so I can't talk about him too much. He's a, he's a, doesn't like to be in the spotlight.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  But you're all kind of, it's, the crumbs suggest that you're all remarkable in a way. And, and, and, you know, in this, I guess, small house in Ilford, kind of amazing to think about. But, but, you know, not, not, not at all well off. And it was difficult. You were having, you know, there wasn't a desk at home because you, so you're having to do your homework on the floor. How much can you say about all of that? Do you mind talking about that a little bit?

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't mind. I have to, I can't talk too much about my brother and sister because I don't like to be mentioned publicly too much. But yeah, I can speak about it. Yeah, sure.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  What are we gonna say? Well, there's suggestions that your parents were, again, your mum gets one mentioned. I feel really, I feel almost bad bringing it out because it's all slightly behind a veil slightly. But you talk at one point about your mum saying, like, we were never that close. Just to throw a little remark. Was it a difficult, emotionally difficult upbringing?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was difficult. It was difficult. Like, you know, five people in a crowded, in a small house. I shared a small bedroom with my brother.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  My mum could be a little volatile, let's say. Very religious parents. Yeah, crowded house, we'll say. Yeah, it was difficult. But then my mum, she was always very good to try and like find what we were interested in. So I was interested in maths from like a very young age. And she really took time to encourage that. But yeah, it was, it was a difficult house, like just crowded, lots of volume and emotion and lots of people in a tight space.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  They must be proud of you, but I get the sense that they haven't maybe, well, maybe shown it as much as they might in this. I only say that because I, I think a couple of times you said, well, you don't think your mum's read your book, for example.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  She said she has. My dad messaged me and said mum, he said mum's read it. And I said, what did she think of it? No, did she? My dad said he'd read it. And I said, what did you think of it? And he said, too much swearing.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  Too much swearing.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Too much swearing. They're not big swearers, my parents. I'm pretty sure my mum said she has. My mum's quite severely dyslexic, so I think she might have maybe done the audio book. But my, my, my parents are very religious and my mum is like, she doesn't like swearing and there is a lot of swearing in the book. So she might, it might have, she might have found it difficult. Yeah, I don't know. I think they've always, it's been a funny one because I, I did, I was very good in school and I always used to get like really, really good grades and my parents sort of, I guess they got used to it. It's kind of what they expected from, from me. So like, you know, I won a couple of math competitions in school and it was always just like, you know, they just kind of rolled with it. I don't know if they were like intentionally trying to like keep my feet on the ground or whatever. But then, so I got expelled from school for selling cannabis when I was just turning sixteen.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  And that was quite a big thing. They weren't happy about it. But really, there was a lot of conflict about religion because my parents are very religious Mormons. I stopped going to church at fifteen. They weren't very happy, especially my mum wasn't very happy. Yeah, it was, there's a concept in Mormonism of the, the straight and narrow path and the great and spacious building, which is the idea that like the way of God is difficult. It's a very narrow path and you have to be very careful. And off to the side, there's a great and spacious building in which presumably some kind of orgy, I think. And I think when I went off.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  Orgy?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  I guess so. Yeah, don't quote me on that, but it always sounded dead fun in the great and spacious building. And I think it's when I, you know, because I was very, I wanted to make money. I was very like direction, like directed on that. I stopped going to church. I got expelled from school for selling drugs, you know, I got a job at a big bank. And I think they perhaps sometimes thought that I was off in the great and spacious building rather than, rather than on the straight and narrow path. So yeah, it's difficult. You know, I'm sure they are proud of the things that I've done and also things that my sister has done. But I think, especially my mum, I think it's a bit complicated by this. Like at the end of the day, it's sad to say it, but she thinks we're going to hell, you know what I mean?

• 41:25Speaker 01

  And that's like, you know, yeah, so I think, and she obviously always wants us to come back to church, which is not on the cards. So yeah, I think it's, you know, it's a complicated thing.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Do your maths talent and certain things in your book made me think, I wonder if Gary might be autistic? Have you been asked that before?

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, people have suggested it. Obviously now in the last few years, there's a lot more sort of discourse on this kind of thing. It's not something that was mentioned so much. But yeah, I don't know. Nobody in my family has ever been good at maths, as far as I know. So my, my maths ability was always quite weird in the sense that like, it always, it always felt, so I would, I won these competitions and I did incredibly well in my undergrad degree and in particular maths and abstract maths. And I've always had this weird relationship with it where the way it would work is I'd get a question and I'd look at the question and I wouldn't immediately know the answer, but I wouldn't have to do any work. I would just sit for maybe, depending on the difficulty of the question, thirty seconds, two minutes. And then the answer would kind of just be like passed forward. That's how it felt to me.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  In your head?

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  Without actually writing.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Not always. I don't want to pretend it was always like that, but it would often be like that. Like it would just come to, I would look at it and it, it felt like the work was being done by somebody else in a weird way. And you know, a lot of the, when I did my undergrad, if you do maths, you have to do a lot of proofs. And proofs were interesting for me because I had to start interrogating this, what felt to me almost like a different person in the back of my head and say, tell me why. Because to do a proof, you need to show all your steps of reasoning. And I would say, don't just give me the answer, build it back, build it back, build it back. And I had to try to develop this skill of like, not just, and it's always been like that for me. Like the answer comes and I just know that it's right. You know, the thing is, I've, I've been with that guy for so long, he never fucking gets it wrong, you know what I mean? And my job is like trying to fucking translate.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  And a lot of the YouTube and a lot of the work that I do now is like trying to like interrogate this guy and be like, can you give me, make it clear for me so I can fucking make it clear for them? And I think one thing that's, that's frustrated me in the last press campaign is because I feel exhausted. When, when I get tired, like I can't do that explanation. I can just be like, I know the answer. It's always right. The predictions are always right. Can't you fucking see that it's always right? And I lose that, that ability to, to build it back. Like the way I've seen my life, it's obvious to me I've got some sort of gift and I don't know why I have that gift. And I didn't really do anything to get it.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  But I'm not going to protect my community. Who is? You know, it's my job, isn't it?

• 44:14Speaker 00

  Quite an emotional thing.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Because I know where this is going to go, Louis. I know, I know what happens next and, you know, you and the people can listen, who listen and all the, you know, the people I interviewed in the documentary and the Guardian, whatever can go and say, oh, Gary's a liar. Gary's an idiot. But I've been, I've been watching these predictions for fifteen years and I've seen them be right year after year after year. And I, I went to university with the people calling me an idiot and I know they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. And I know I've been poor and I know how this is going to affect the people on the street, you know? So it is emotional, you know, and it frustrates me because, you know, you get into by people and you know they're, you know, they don't really know the people getting hurt by this. You know, obviously I'm a rich person and I know it's not me, but it's, it's, it's my friends and it's my family.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  So it's, you know, poverty, it frustrates me in these conversations. Poverty is like an abstract concept for these people. Poverty is a real thing. It's hard. You know, it destroys families, you know what I mean? It, it, it stops people from being able to have freedom and, and comfort and, and joy and opportunity, you know? And it's, it's real, basically. So yeah, so it is upsetting. It should be fucking upsetting, shouldn't it? If you ask me.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  There's a moment in the book where early on you get your first bonus. That's one of those set piece moments and it clearly has a big impact on you. Do you want to talk about that for a second?

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I started in two thousand and eight. I got hired by this guy. In the book, he's called Caleb. And then he quits in two thousand and nine and he's, he was like my big sponsor. And he says, you can tell me, you can ask me any question you want. And I said to him, all I have to do is get paid a hundred thousand pounds. So I would have been twenty-two and that's like for me a hundred thousand pounds.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  Focused on making money at this point?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was still living at home with my parents. Hundred thousand pounds. He's like, oh my God, so big. That's my dream. And he said, oh, it's not possible. And I was like, go on, just, just tell me. If you're going to make a hundred thousand pounds, you'd have to make ten million dollars for the bank. So I'm like, okay, I've got my plan, make my ten million dollars, get back to the desk, head down, put the plan on. By the end of the year, twelve million dollars. And I go into the bonus room, I've got a new boss and I'm expecting to get paid like something like a hundred and twenty grand because I made twelve instead of ten. Sitting in the room and the guy shows me, this massive guy in the book, he's called Chuck, showing me this piece of paper and I'm looking for like something like a hundred and twenty grand. And the number at the top is three hundred and ninety-five thousand pounds. And there's nothing on it that's like a hundred and twenty, so I'm like confused.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  And I point to the top number, three nine five, like, is it that? And he's just laughing. He's like, yeah, it is. And I remember like it was yesterday, I said, I remember exactly what I said. I said, wow, that's a lot of money. And he was just laughing and I took it and, oh, looking back, the next thing I remember, I'm sitting on the trading floor next to, in the book, he's called Billy, this like working class gauze who kind of took care of me. I felt like I was going to start crying and I was very confused because obviously like this, it should be great and I should be really happy and it should be everything I ever wanted. And then I felt like I was going to start crying and then Billy, who was a nice guy, he sort of come around the other side of me so people couldn't see me. He's like, listen, go outside, take a little sit down.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  There's a little patch of grass in this, in Canada Square, the central square in Canary Wharf. And I went and I sat on that little patch of grass. I remember the sun is sort of on the one side, which is not blocked by skyscrapers. And I'd forgotten to bring like my coat or gloves or anything, bonus days in January. And I was just sitting on the grass and the first thing I thought about was my dad. My dad and, my dad worked in central London for the post office and you know, like he'd wake up early and he'd be back late. My mum used to wake us up in the morning so we could try and see his train. His train used to go past the back of the house, try and, you know. And that's not just my dad. You think of everyone's dad. I grew up in a very immigrant area. I went to school with a lot of like newly migrated Pakistani families. A lot of them were very poor.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  And you just think of all the poverty and how hard our parents worked.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  And then just suddenly one day someone gives you three hundred and ninety-five grand, basically. And it was.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Really shocking, because what it did was, it made me feel like the poverty was like a dance that we were made to do, you know, almost for their entertainment, you know? And it makes you realise, what I think is true, to be honest, which was it was never necessary. The poverty, we don't have, working people don't have to live in poverty. I'm not saying we can have luxury for everyone, but you know, we have created societies which have made that unnecessary. But then obviously, the next thing you think is if I made 395 grand, what did fucking Rupert make? And what did those dickheads on the next desk make? And then I think, I think the way I put it in the book was, something changed in me

• 49:08Speaker 01

  there on that patch of grass, and my life changed, and my career changed. And after that, it wasn't a career anymore, it was bank robbery. And then after that, I think that started the period of my life which is categorised by obsession, basically. Obsession with being the best, obsession with being the best trader, obsession with making the money. And it started, it started me on a track which led me to make a lot of money, but it really started me on a track towards like a very bad path in terms of mental health and things like that.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  The mental health, we talked a bit about how it was partly maybe to do with realising that we're on this, or your perception that we're on a kind of collision course, right? That this society, economy is going to get worse and worse, but maybe there's more than that? It feels like your self-care is not very good, like you're not, you've got no furniture. This is even before you go to Japan, because you end up going to Japan for a break, but even before that, it feels like you're coming apart at the seams. Are you overworking? Is it the sense that you're, you don't fit in, you know, at work? What was behind all that?

• 50:14Speaker 01

  You know, weirdly, I think the trading floor is one of the places in my life where in a weird way, I felt like the most like I fit in, in a strange way. I was, I became incredibly, so I was always very competitive as a kid, and I became really, I have this like, I can get addicted to computer games. I've got a terrible fucking Duolingo addiction, oh my god.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  Do you? Are you on a streak at the moment?

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Something like 3,000 days, yeah. I speak seven languages now, yeah.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  Stop it. Which seven?

• 50:42Speaker 01

  English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and a bit of German.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  You can't keep all those streaks going at the same time, can you?

• 50:51Speaker 01

  You only need to play one language to keep your streak up.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Okay, I didn't know that.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  This is not an advert for Duolingo, just to be clear. But anyway, look.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  I've got a 1,200 day streak.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Oh, nice. What language?

• 51:00Speaker 00

  French, français, bonjour.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Oh, nice, nice. We could talk some French afterwards.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  We could do that afterwards, yeah, we won't go down that rabbit hole.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but basically, I have a tendency, if something really gets under my skin, just obsessed, like once, there's a computer game called Goulet de Kings 2, oh my god, I started playing it, I lost seven months of my life. I learnt so much about medieval history. But I became like ruthlessly obsessed with this game of trading, obsessed, obsessed, obsessed. But the reason why I say I fit in is because that kind of obsession is common on the trading floor. A lot of people are obsessed with it in that way. So I kind of enjoyed it, but you know, the amounts of money.

• 51:35Speaker 00

  Very masculine.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, it's incredibly testosterone, a lot of competitiveness.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  But Rupert, there's a bit where you talk about Rupert, and he says Rupert's got a problem, and you know, what is it Rupert? He says like, if I meet someone and I think they're better than me, I hate them.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  He says as soon as he meets someone, he needs to know straight away whether they're better than him or whether they're worse than him. And if they're better than him, he hates them. And if they're worse than him, he despises them. And I think, you know, in a lot of ways, I love competition, but there's definitely a dark side to it. There's this quote, ambition is a great man's madness. And I think.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  I've heard you use that before, you say it wasn't Shakespeare, it was a contemporary of Shakespeare's.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it might be somebody more recent. I should remember it, because I always say it, but also, that first bonus was so much more than I'd been expecting. I was totally in shock, I didn't know who to speak to. There's something about it which is legitimately scary, because you realise in like, this guy's 23, what the fuck is, there's a whole world out there of people getting paid millions, what does that mean? It's scary. It's scary to people who've seen their parents struggle making 20 grand a year. It's scary to know that there's kids out there getting paid 395 grand at 23 years old, and to think what the other people are being, and it's just. Because I knew how it affected me, and I saw how it affected her, and then I remember going home and playing Pro Evolution with my mates.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  And you know, this is post 2008, so a lot of my mates couldn't get jobs, just playing Pro Evolution, and oh, you know, what did you get? Did you get a bonus? Oh, I got like 2 grand, oh, I didn't get a bonus. And then like, what did you get, Gary? What did you get? And I remember I was sitting there, you know, in my mate's bedroom in his mum's house, playing Pro Evolution with, you know, my best mates from high school, thinking, do I tell them? Do I tell them? You know, because part of me wants to tell them, because part of me is proud, you know, but part of me knows if you tell them, it's going to change this. This is going to, this is never going to be, after you've told them, it's never going to be the same as before you told them, you know? And I did tell them, and I remember telling them, and I remember the way like, you kind

• 53:43Speaker 01

  of felt the fucking room drop two degrees, and nobody knew what to say, you know? And it's, these are kind of amounts of money, they're enormous, and it does a lot to wave that kind of money in front of the eyes of a poor man, you know what I mean? And it's, it was a lot, it was a lot for, you know, a young man from a poor background to have that amount of money dropped on his head at such a young age. And you know, I wasn't that close to my family, and like most young men, we weren't really talking about emotions and that. But you know, once you, I went to a grammar school, and I was like one of the poorest kids in the grammar school. And that's, you know, that's, me and my friends got used to that dynamic, which is Gary's the poor but smart kid.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  And then suddenly, I was the richest kid out of all my, at 23, 24, you know, it changes the dynamic, and it creates, suddenly like jealousy and envy in some degree creeps into your, which I didn't even anticipated that, because I'd never been, I'd always been the poor one. Yeah, and then, you know, and then what happened was, suddenly, I went in a couple of years, I went from being on the trading floor, I was like the young, smart up-and-comer who gets everybody's lunches, within a couple of years, I was the top trader on the floor. You know, and then that affected those relationships, and suddenly there's envy there as well, you know what I mean? And yeah, it was just a lot, it was a big rollercoaster. But it was also scary getting that, those amounts of money, I think when you're a poor, when you come from a poor background, and suddenly you get 2 million dollars dropped

• 55:10Speaker 01

  on your head, there's something terrifying about that, because you're scared that, what do I do with it? I don't know about investing.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  When people must come up to you, boys, young men, saying, okay, inequality, yeah, okay, whatever, but how do I make a tonne of money as a trader? How can I do what you did, Gary? And what do you tell them?

• 55:27Speaker 01

  It's sad when I hear that, and like, I totally understand it, because, you know, it's easy for me to come here and say, let's save society, now I'm a rich man. You know what I mean? I've made my reputation, I've made my money, I've made my financial security. If I wasn't a rich man, I probably would be trying to make money. I mean, the first thing to say is, people won't like me for saying this, it's incredibly difficult to make money as a trader. It's incredibly dangerous, there's been a massive increase in young people, predominantly young men, doing things like day trading online, most people lose money, some people lose a lot of money, it can be addictive, it can be incredibly dangerous, there's a lot of like bad information online, I would advise against it, I don't think it's a safe thing for people to be doing.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  So there's this saying, we used to say on the trading floor, which I think is a poker saying, if you don't know who the idiot is at the poker table, it's you. You heard this one?

• 56:23Speaker 00

  No, I like that. I think it rings a bell, it seems very true.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Like, you've got to bear in mind, I started working as a professional trader when I was 21 years old, and I'm working 100 hour weeks, I'm getting in at 7 in the morning, I'm working late, and I'm able to play for a long time, not with my money, you know, I'm able to sit alongside some real experts on it, and I'm doing this obsessively, obsessively, day after day after day, in a room full of people, a room full of 200 people doing it obsessively, day after day after day after day after day after day for years. And, you know, not all professional traders who work for a bank like Citibank are good at it, but the good ones will start to take bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger bets, and they will in some ways dominate the markets.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  And if you are sitting at home in your kitchen, and you've watched a YouTube video, you have to bear in mind, you're competing against me, you know what I mean? And like, not to be like disrespectful, but you know, if you came to me, Louis, today, and said, hey Gary, I've got Usain Bolt on next week, do you think he'll teach me how to win the Olympic 100 metres? I'm not saying I'm Usain Bolt, but the truth is, I did this professionally, 100 hour weeks for seven years, and I was, and I studied before that, you know, economics. So I just think, if you think you can consistently beat people who've been doing it professionally for, in a very intense way, for years and years and years and years and years, you'd

• 57:54Speaker 01

  better have a really fucking good reason why. You know, you've done your job for many, many years, right? And you're very esteemed for it, you know? And if I said to you, you know, Louis, can you teach me to be a good documentarian? You probably could, but am I going to become as good as you? You know, you started much younger than me, you know what I mean? You know, you're, you know, probably the most famous, you know, it's you and David Attenborough in this country, you know what I'm saying, right?

• 58:17Speaker 00

  I like that.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  You know, so, like, I think it's just, you need to recognise, it's gambling, and the gains are monopolised by a small minority at the top. And if somebody's teaching you, why the fuck are they teaching you? If they're good? What, you know what I'm saying? They'd be, why would they teach you? If they were that good, they'd be just fucking doing it, wouldn't they? You know, like, so, yeah, it's, but I understand, I understand the sentiment, I understand the mentality, and I, what I really think about is, how can we take, what makes me sad about it is that same motivation that, you know, it's primarily young men that motivates them, I want to go out and make money, I want to go out and make money. How can we redirect that into, I want to go out and fix these fucking societal problems so that my kids don't have to live in the kind of poverty that I'm living in?

• 59:03Speaker 01

  You know, can we redirect that into something that's actually building? Not like, oh, I'm going to compete with the traders, because you're not going to win that, you know, let's fix the fucking problems.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  Nice. Feels like that was a good place to end.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Don't you? I mean, Millie opened the door, didn't you?

• 59:19Speaker 01

  She opened the doors.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  That's always a hint, isn't it? Thanks, Gary, that was really good.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  That's all right.

• 59:33Speaker 00

  And welcome back. A big thanks to Gary. His documentary, How to Get Filthy Rich with Gary Stevenson, is available to stream on Channel 4 in the UK. Mindhouse produced it, that's my company, that's my disclosure. So, a few small footnotes. Deborah Stevenson, Gary's sister, who goes by Debris, D-E-B-R-I-S, Stevenson, and who's poet in the corner, I think we mentioned, her new play last year was called My Brother's a Genius. I think it's fictionalised, but it sounds from reading a synopsis that it might be based on life experiences, maybe even to do with her relationship with Gary.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  It's about a woman who's, well, a girl who's growing up and her brother is a maths whiz. What else to talk about? Well, I think, for me, I felt a bit like part of the problem, but maybe part of the solution, inasmuch as I was another digital arena Gary had to pass through to spread his message, suffering the indignity of me inflicting questions upon him. And I thought Gary bore with that with patience, and was a very open and accommodating guest, and I'm used to hearing him in spiky confrontations, and it was nice to see Gary bring, kind

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  of speaking from the heart in a way that felt a little bit less stressed, but you can see that the emotions are close to the surface. Gary feels very deeply about the work that he does. That's it for this week, apart from the credits. The producer was Millie Chu, the assistant producer was Beth Johnston, the production manager was Francesca Bassett, the music in this series was by Miguel de Oliveira, the executive producer was Aaron Fellows, this is a Mindhouse Studios production for Spotify.