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

0:03Hello and welcome to another episode of the Louis Theroux podcast.

0:16Joining 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 a 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 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 his message and his story of kind 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

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4:08How's life? Busy Busy Stressful couple of weeks Yeah Stressful couple of weeks The doc's just gone out I really enjoyed it Found it interesting and insightful I was surprised Maybe I shouldn't have been The level of pushback Not so much in the programme but in the afterlife, some of the reviews, especially like The Guardian, you would think would be on side. Did you read that one? No, I never read them, but... 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. Yeah. Some others, I mean, some other, Financial Times, three stars, you might expect that, some of the others.

4:54but what was your take on that? 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. I don't know, I think it's maybe something about class. some of the caricatures some of the characterizations felt ad hominem and actually class based exactly as you say it's almost like this guy's annoying 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 go on how would you intentionally annoy them by the way you speak?

5:50When I went on Rester's Politics, you see me going on Rester's Politics. Yeah, this is our sometimes studio down the hall. Yeah. Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart, one ex-sort of advisor, Tony Blair, one former Tory MP, minister, both sort of centrist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you went on there and go on. And actually, one of the blurbs... It's on the front of my book, Rory Stewart. Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell. Roy Stewart loved your book 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 say he's a conservative like minister in this like 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 What kind of things did he mean?

6:47Just like people who sort of didn't really care about the future of the country. Self-serving? Corruption? 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. Right, where they go, maybe we're the bad guys. Have you seen what's on our hats? There's a skull and crossbones on the hat. Do you think maybe? And through the whole of Roy Stewart's book, what he's so funny about 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 versus politics i was really looking forward and i just thought i just wanted to like get going a little bit i thought it'd be funny did you a little bit um it's interesting like being in the spotlight and seeing the different reaction you get from different people it's strange though you're all you've come 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.

7:48Then 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 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 yeah in the end it becomes uh what what clip is going to go viral and um and negotiating a series of encounters like in these digital arenas yeah do you know what i'm talking about oh i do because obviously i you know we're talking at the back end of a sort of two three week press campaign i've been doing I mean, there was a Piers Morgan one.

8:36Piers Morgan, yeah, very combative. Whether you would be willing to disclose actually how much money you're worth to the next five million. And then he said, OK, you said, if you do it, I'll do it. Yeah. And he said, all right, I'll agree. And then you said, I'm worth, give or take, five million. And then he refused to then follow up on the deal. Yeah. Which was quite shady. Honestly, you know For the documentary I didn't find out Until 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 doctor 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 doctor to come out And it kept getting delayed and delayed and delayed Didn't come out until July And obviously we got Keir Starmer 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 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 to 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 um we went to we went to news uk rupert murdoch building to do piers morgan and um Channel 4 PR lady was with me.

10:00She was like, how do you feel? And I said, I feel like you're sending me into the lion's den with two broken legs because I was knackered. Before the interview? Yeah, because I knew, you know, I did Piers Morgan last year. And if I may say so myself, I think I kind of dance rings around them. But then you come back and that like did massive, like he was a 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. And she said, you know, what do you want to do?

10:24And I said, make me look knackered because I fucking am knackered. And it's kind of, I don't really have the energy to fight it, but 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's 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 I ended up. The most recent one is today in the FT. Yeah, I haven't read it. I haven't even read the first one they did.

10:52I won't. It basically is a guy who's apparently done an article about you accusing you of exaggerating your credentials. Yeah. Gary Stevenson may have been city's most profitable trader in developed market foreign exchange. Okay. It's the headline. Yeah. And then it says, my testy exchange outside a London pub with the self-proclaimed currency trading legend. Okay. 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.

11:29Yeah, the thing that's really unpleasant about this is, so obviously I've had 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 let off some steam, and this guy comes up to me, I'm the guy that did the hit boost on you two years ago. And I was like, fuck you, what, mate? How do 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 C Bank's number one trader in 2011 this piece came out two years ago and it feels like somebody fucking sniffing your under air on the fucking washing line this guy and it's 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 it obviously everybody messages me and it's just like You're post-grad, right?

12:22Yeah, 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.

12:34It'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. Well, I suppose to try and, in a friendly way, push back a tiny bit, what I'd say is you're in the public eye. In a way, they're paying you the compliment of paying attention, right?

13:06And 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 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 would like. You can react angrily and you think, who am I becoming? I don't know if you experienced that.

13:41It's a feeling of like, wow, you feel like 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 interesting. Not interesting. What I see is that it's very upsetting to you. Some people it bounces off, but you're not one of those people. 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 he said what he said he thought I'm a liar he said he thought I'm a liar he came in the pub and said I'm a journalist I write for the Financial Times I wrote that piece on you I wrote that piece on you yeah yeah yeah and I think I said to him so he 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 loser I think it was a coincidence.

14:40There was like a journalist thing going on there. And I was there 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 are you doing? I mean, and to be honest, I probably should have just said like, listen, no comment, no comment, no comment. because I should have known he was trying to do another piece.

15:09But, you know, I'm too busy. Yeah, you gave him a spicy kind of opening, like a spicy little mise-en-scene 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 edge of basically breaking down. Yeah, I mean, the thing is, the thing you've got to understand, Louis, I 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.

15:56And that was as a trader, so you put the bets on. As a trader, you're not really trading. It's not your job to think about what that means. wealth inequality specifically would be endlessly getting wider, right? Yeah. Not income inequality, although maybe that as well, but mainly the accumulation of wealth by the very rich showed no sense of getting, you know, that that was a continuing and a self-feedback loop. Yeah, but also poverty, and the poverty would get worse and worse. 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 the same thing next year.

16:34How do you make money out of the wealth gap increasing? I know this is in your book, but you bet on interest rates staying very low. 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.

17:16And that recovery didn't happen in 2009. It didn't happen in 2010. By the beginning of 2011, I had become very sceptical about the recovery happening at all, but everybody still thought it was going to happen. And I studied maths and 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 the 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.

17:57Sometimes 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 and it's hard for me because because I know what's going to happen 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 I did watch it 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.

18:36And 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 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. 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 correctly is that actually the rich being rich makes us poorer not relatively but absolutely is that right yeah so i think the problem you have is once the rich get incredibly rich um it snowballs um 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 billion in the documentary, he said he won't accept less than 12%.

19:52All right, let's say... That's him, Haider. You interview him at One Hyde Park, Lebanese-born businessman who says he's looking for 12 % or 13 % return. Yeah, yes. These guys... I mean, you seem to... There's no animosity between you. It's a friendly enough encounter. He gives a lot of money to reform, I believe. 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 a billionaire making 12%, you're making 120 million quid a year.

20:30And imagine you're making, this is passive income. Doing nothing. Yeah, imagine you make, if you're making 120 million quid a year, how much would you spend? I have no clue. Well, I mean, I would struggle to spend the 1 million. I wouldn't know how you would spend, but let's say you spend 10 million a year somehow, right? Live like the queen. you've got 110 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 pushed 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.

21:17You know, for a long time, working class people like my dad, who worked for the post office for 35 years, could buy and own property. That's no longer really silly possible for working class people. Who owns those properties now? You know, who is on the other side of the mortgages? You know, I think if we see if we were seeing massive growth in the world of the super rich, and also growth in the world of everybody else, then, you know, you might still have some cause to be concerned, because you might worry about monopolization of politics, monopolization 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.

21:53Like 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. What I'm concerned about is not the rich in and of themselves, it is the collapse of the ability of everybody else our own wealth you know it's it's 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 you know when i first started my youtube i was talking about the government deficit at the time it was 350 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 I communicate to the public how big this number is.

22:42And I settled on this is more than three times the wealth of the world's richest man, Jeff Bezos. So six years ago, 350 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 40 50 percent a year you know this is basically the medical definition of cancer you know we are not growing at 50 percent a year and billionaire wealth is growing 12 percent a year 50 percent a year it's just simple math you cannot have a small group of society growing their wealth at 12 20 30 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 do you um i was going to lead up to this, but let's just get this out of the way.

23:37So what do you think is going to happen? Because you seem, you know, 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 going to happen? So I think you... We've got Andy Burnham in, just a couple of days in. I've heard you say in 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 yeah I think here's the play because I see it um so the center which you know labor is is the center even the conservatives are kind of the center um 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'll 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 recognize that the status quo is not bad the status quo is bad and aggressively worsening in an accelerating fashion that is what's 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 in I'm committed to not seriously changing anything if 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 challenge and the mission for people like me and i think that the thing which i need to think more about and thing which i've broadly failed on is we need to convince the center to give a little bit of ground on this we need to recognize that if they don't give us something on this, then they are opening the door to increasingly really serious extreme fascism.

25:36That is what will happen. Because until and unless they give us something on this, they will again and again and again fail on living standards. So I probably need to stop winding up Rory Stewart and figure out how to befriend him. According to some polling, 75 % of the public support a wealth tax. Gabriel Zuckman, a leading voice on economic inequality from a French economist, has said 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. Just to be really simple, I've heard you mention a couple of ideas.

26:15Is your idea a 2 % annual tax on wealth above? 10 million. 10 million. Yeah, the current primary campaign here is 2 % above 10 million. You know, that exact design is not my design. that's a pre-existing campaign from Tax Justice UK and Patriotic Millionaires who work on this stuff. Gabriel Zuckman's plan is a 2 % minimum tax on wealth of above 100 million euros, which is, I guess, about 90 million pounds. To be honest, 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 and if it's worth above 10 or if it's worth above 100 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 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 to 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.

27:56Did you pay attention to the Sunday Times rich list when it came out in May? Not really, not this year. It's the 38th edition. Just a random fact, just for people at home. I mean, one of the striking details is I think there's 350 people on the list. In 2000, I guess their net worth was around 100 billion. This year it was up to 741 billion. Top of the list, do you know who was number one? This is UK only, obviously. I'm not trying to catch you out. It's not a gotcha. Is it the Mittals or the Ambani's or something like that? Interestingly, the Mittals are no longer listed. Maybe they've left. They've fled the coup, right?

28:42Which is kind of a pattern. Yeah. So it's the Hinduja family, listed at 38 billion, stayed at number one. Next down, David and Simon Rubin and family, 29.971 billion. Number three, Sir Leonard Blavatnik, 26.852 billion and so on. But the narrative, the spin that the Times put on 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, 111 of the UK citizens who appear in the main list no longer live on the British mainland. 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 Norwegian accent that was an attempt what do we make of that I mean I guess it's a familiar it's a familiar counterpoint to one that you're probably used to hearing so at the moment we have a tax regime which taxes you largely based on residents 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.

30:18Somebody who has a well-paid job gets paid for working. 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. They own other people's debts. They might own your mortgage. They might own your government 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. It's not from their work. If I was to tax you on your work, you could feasibly do your work from Dubai.

30:54But if I was to tax a billionaire who owns£5 billion,£10 billion in British property and they go to Dubai, their money is coming from the people who live in those British properties. If I own£5 billion of British government debt, my money is 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 income you have made on your Chinese government debt? And if I tried to say to them, oh, actually, I live in Britain, they would say, all right, well, you're not getting your money anymore.

31:24You know, it's as simple as that. I think 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 say we can't tax them because they can leave. Well, China doesn't allow it. You know, 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.

32:04You know, 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 um okay i'm not a specific expert on that but i'll go and 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, oh, but that's quite hard, isn't it?

32:38Let'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, 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 so absurd. 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 it. You know, when I interviewed Dan Needle for the documentary, he's a guy.

33:07Dan Needle was a tax expert. Tax expert. And I said to him... You gave him the needle. He seemed to be needled by you. You weren't trying to needle him. He called it populist claptrap. I mean, his politics are sort of centrist, aren't they? Or maybe even slightly left-leaning. I mean, he's definitely the country's most prominent anti-world tax campaigner. Is he? Oh, yeah. Is that his main bag? 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 wealth tax world, like he is definitely this country's most prominent anti-wealth tax campaigner.