144. Gary Stevenson: From Teenage Drug Dealer to Millionaire Trader (Part 1)

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2:03Welcome to The Restless Politics, leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And we're with Gary Stevenson. And there are several reasons we're with Gary Stevenson. The first is, you would be pleased to know, Gary, that a lot of our listeners and viewers have said, why don't you get Gary Stevenson on the podcast? So here you are. But also because he's got a very interesting life story, working class background, grew up in ilford essex east londoner and he became very clever at school uh became a trader became very very wealthy got disillusioned with it uh had a bit of a breakdown i think and the other reason i want to talk to him is i'm you know as you know very interested in mental health and i think he went through quite a lot but now has emerged as a sort of leading voice of frankly calling for a whole new approach to the economy and I think he's getting into quite a political space.

2:59So we're going to do this in two parts. We're going to talk about his growing up, his background, his influences and then this sort of remarkable time as a trader and then in the second part we'll talk much more about politics. So thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. And Gary, let's start, if we can, with your life because I know you've written about this and you've written a very very beautiful book uh trading game which i'd recommend highly i mean you're a really good writer amongst many other things but tell us a little bit about this incredible vision which you begin the book with which is the contrast between your life and this fancy investment bank where you end up working yeah so i grew up in in ilford which is kind of uh east london essex contested territory um i'll call it east london okay but It depends if you ask.

3:50But for me, it's East London. Okay. Yeah, Little Terrace House by the railway. Ilford is an extremely South Asian area, so a group with a lot of recent migrants from Pakistan, India, East Africa. And what's your ethnic background? My dad is English. My mum is Italian. Yeah, my mum is Italian. One of the really interesting things about your childhood, you're the second person that we've interviewed in recent weeks who was brought up in the Mormon faith. Who else did you have? Jacinda Ardern, former Prime Minister of New Zealand. Really? Yeah. Okay. Her family became Mormon because a missionary knocked on the door.

4:29Well, most people do. Most people do. So my dad's parents were converted. You know, my dad's dad came back from the war. Some, you know, some bright-faced young, they send these like teenage boys, you know, 19-year-old boys knock on the door. Have you thought about God? And it's quite funny because my memory of my dad's dad is like a very, you know, taciturn, very sort of respectable working class, stiff upper lip. But then he's, he makes you question, you know, this guy's out there killing people for years, you know, so he became a Mormon. And then my mum's mum, yeah, my mum was raised single parent by a mum.

5:02And yeah, they're both knocks on the doors. Going through the book, I don't get a feeling of really good relations with your family. Yeah, I wanted to do this thing. People ask, some people have asked me, are you trying to protect your family by not keeping them in the book? But what I wanted to do, and I spoke with you a little bit about this before, is I wanted to do this thing like what I think they do in Slaughterhouse-Five, which is where they give you this. I wanted to do a very realistic interpretation of how most modern men talk about their mental health problems and in fact how they deal with their mental health problems, which is number one, they work really, really, really, really hard.

5:34They throw themselves into their work. They compulsively overwork. And number two, they very gently hint at problems. And then they rapidly veer away into talking about work. It's like, how does a man tell his best friend he's depressed? He takes him to the football. He sits next to him for 90 minutes and he says nothing. and what I wanted to do was for me I think in my opinion you read the book I think it should be pretty obvious that basically every major character in the book has a pretty serious mental health condition but it's never discussed How would you define the various characters and what they've got?

6:12And let's start with your childhood and parents Oh so my parents what I wanted to do was hint that there's problems back at home because I think it's very very difficult to become a trader nowadays it's like one of the hardest jobs to get and the people who get into it they have to be obsessed and they have to work obsessively they work obsessively they work crazily hard and personally I don't think that's a physically healthy thing to do and I don't think healthy normal people do that so the people who end up on that trading floor they're pretty much all crazy basically but they're trying to deal with something but nobody ever talks about it and I think this is as much as mental health has moved done.

6:53I think the truth is the vast majority of men still never do talk about it. So tell us about your family and childhood. My parents are very religious. My mum in particular is extremely religious. They're Mormons, as we've mentioned, which for those who don't know is a kind of, it's quite similar to Jehovah's Witnesses. It's very American, very American, like modern, you know, pleasure denying Protestantism, I guess. My dad's very English, very quiet. My mum is from an Italian family she's let's say a lot less quiet um small house I shared a little tiny bedroom bunk bed with my brother um my my dad worked very hard early mornings late nights he worked for the post office for 35 years um raised by my mum uh it was not an easy house to grow up with it was quite volatile um lots of noise not a lot of space um anger yeah my mum was difficult especially my dad was very quiet but my mum was difficult yeah yeah yeah um my sister wrote a musical actually called poet in the corner basically about our family um and yeah my mum is a character let's say what did they think about the way they were portrayed in the book so my dad my mum is extremely dyslexic and so is my sister actually so my mum hasn't read the book my dad listen to it i don't think so no my mom my dad read it so the book was like number one for two weeks last year and 11 weeks this year so it's It's a big deal.

8:17My dad messaged it. You can go back to number one after this, Gary, honestly. Oh, hopefully, hopefully. Every time, every time. I honestly think it's a very good book. My dad read it and he actually, I think I messaged him on the books number one and he just like, well done. That's my dad. When I was a kid, like, you know, 11, eight stars or whatever. Well done. That's all he would say, one text. And so I said to him, I pressed him a little bit. Did you like it? He said it was very good, but there was a lot of swearing. That was my dad's take, which is, I can't disagree with that in my opinion.

8:45Yeah, they're there. To be honest, I got expelled from school for selling drugs when I just turned 16. I stopped going to church when I was 15. How did they feel about that? They weren't happy, but I've got an older brother who also stopped going to church a few years before. Were you a kind of child prodigy? I mean, you got 11 A stars. I got 8 A stars and 3 A's for GCSE. And then I got 4 A's for A level. And I won a couple of math competitions when I was a kid. So you were a very smart child mathematician. Yeah, in particular at maths. But to be honest, I was good at most subjects. And it was, not to sort of pick myself up, it was a bit effortless.

9:24It was a very crowded house. There was no desk to work on. I would enter these competitions and I would win these competitions. And I wasn't doing anything. Did you work hard though? Not really. But I got expelled from school at the beginning of year 11, which is the GCSE year. And then I had, I don't know, eight or nine months in which I had to study at home. On your own? Yeah. Because my parents were working. My brother and sister were both. My brother was working by then. My sister was still at school. And I was there lying on the floor with a little wooden board. Yeah. Is it tough for your brother and sister who were less academic than you to have a brother who was kind of effortlessly getting all these A stars?

10:02My brother actually also got very good grades up until his A levels where he did really badly. And I think he just can't. My brother, he doesn't like me speaking about him. He's a peculiar individual. I see why. That's the introduction to him. Yeah, I love my brother and he's one of the smartest people I've ever met. He's unusual. My sister, as I said, was heavily dyslexic. So I think it was particularly difficult for her. And me and my brother passed our 11 plus. We went to grammar school and my mum didn't let my sister take her 11 plus. And that kind of, I think my sister really internalised this.

10:35Yeah, my brother's really smart and I'm like the slow one. My sister is also extremely smart. She wrote this very successful musical, but she's dyslexic, you know, and obviously caused her to struggle in school. one of the things i really i mean i agree with rory i think it's very very well written and it's what i i hadn't read it when it came out i read it yesterday um and i just i read it straight through and um it sort of draws you in very very quickly i think the introduction is brilliant um but i'm really intrigued because a lot of the book is about class basically yeah i think so and but i'm intrigued you're clearly somebody who wants to hold on to your class because, for example, sometimes it is deliberately, not the dialogue, but the writing is deliberately ungrammatical.

11:16Yeah, yes. Like, you know, I didn't do nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of thing. Did an editor try to get you to soften that or change that? It was funny. So you guys will probably know, publishing is quite a middle-class industry, and my first interaction was with the guy who's now my agent. He's not going to like me saying this. I wrote the pitch quite long, the whole of part one of the book, 20 ,000 words, and I sent it to him, and he sent it back with his edits. and like all of this intentional ungrammatic. So it was intentional? Yeah, so I read the book. You guys might not have read it. I love this book.

11:48It was a book called Who They Was by a British-Polish author called Gabriel Krause. I don't know if you've heard of it. And he wrote this book in extremely aggressive, like London, modern London slang, which is an accent and a voice I grew up with. I never spoke it to the extent that this guy spoke it, but I grew up around this, this kind of modern London accent, which maybe some older people are not. It's different to the old Cockney accent. But what he did was, he made it so beautiful. He wrote in this aggressive slang that was so beautiful. And it was a massive inspiration for me when I wrote the book to do that as well, to capture that.

12:22I wanted to capture, like, my, you know, I'm from East London. I've got a load of mates. In particular, I've got some Greek Cypriot mates. They have six pints down the pub and then these beautiful storytellers. I wanted to capture that pub storytelling dynamic. But what I wanted to do, I wanted to have two voices, which is one this very like authentic we're in the pub we're having a chat voice and another which is more of a classic literary voice and i wanted to use that when me sort of i'm having especially when i'm having very traumatic difficult times i wanted the character to lapse into this much more poetic classic literary voice and what i wanted to do there one that is representing basically the code shifting that somebody anybody like me that comes from a poor background and goes into these spaces has to do but two what i wanted to show was i'm not using that ungrammatical voice because it's the only voice that I'm not.

13:07I read Dickens. I read Shakespeare. I've done this stuff. And for me, what I want to say is these two voices are of equal value. And it says something about our country and about class in our country. And I wanted to say, I can use both of these. And these are both as beautiful as each other. That's what I wanted to do when I wrote it. No, it's good. Well, it definitely worked. Let's then get to the kind of big hinge that happens right at the beginning of the book, which is you, with all the complexity of your life, weirdly end up turning up at an investment bank yeah and it's a bit we we one of our colleagues um anthony scaramucci the mooch who comes from quite a modest uh italian background new york turned up for his first interview with goldman sachs and he's he talks about walking he's wearing the wrong suit 100 flammable yeah yeah and and he's immediately kind of mocked by this kind of very fancy new york banker who's like no you can't come in there dressed like this you gotta and so the mooch unlike you i mean you you've you've um been quite interested in holding on to your roots the mooch has gone the other direction he's now botoxed kind of beautiful drives that whatever works for him drives the maserati has these kind of exquisite italian suits he's kind of completely embraced the kind of wall street dream but i guess he would have started with a background not very different to yours right but tell us a little bit about how that felt for you we've had the kind of mooch's version What's your version being a kid?

14:30Before I was on the trading floor, I went to LSE, Lund School of Economics, which you guys will know, but maybe not everyone will know. It's a super, super elite prestigious university, like maybe even more elite in some ways than Oxford and Cambridge. And it's this like super international money. So this is where like top guys in the Chinese government or, you know, in the Pakistani military or Indian government, Indian businessmen, like super wealthy people from Asia, Latin America, North Africa, sending their kids here. here and um that was sort of my first sort of introduction to this like these massive class differences but you've got to reckon i got expelled from school at 16 and i've i've been like killing my exams from a kid and i had this unbelievable self-confidence my mathematical ability and um i turned up my first day at lse wearing a echo track suit which i don't know if these are still popular they said this massive rhino motif and my plan was because i didn't even have a I didn't have a desk at home so my plan was always sit at the front you listen to everything they say you understand so I would go and sit the front of these massive economics lectures in my like echo hoodie and I would call out the lecturers and stuff people thought I was insane basically but like I I just wouldn't and in a sense this is kind of your classic like immigrant American dream thing it was because I grew up in a very very like I went to schools that were 80 90 % South Asian I was like I am not gonna let these guys stop me because I thought I was the best basically and there's one little scene in the book I did very well in my first year exams and my good friend one of the few guys who's in with their real name Sagamalde no Sagamalde his parents literally owned the entire East African soap and cooking oils industry still do to this day I said to him why does everybody know who I am now?

16:07because everybody suddenly recognised me and he said oh because of your grades but this guy Sagamalde was number one in first year so his grades were better than mine and I was like but your grades are better than mine and he said yeah of course but nobody expected it from you, basically. And I think that was... Because also, I was always... I was at grammar school. I was always like the poor kid in the grammar school. But everybody knew I was like the smart kid. I hadn't really encountered this, like... This kind of incredulity that poor kids must be dumb. Can I come to this? Because there's a connection to Alistair.

16:34So Alistair doesn't come from a background. He's a middle-class background. But he also arrived at Cambridge and felt pretty out of sorts and pretty alienated by class structures and suddenly confronting people he'd never seen before in his life. It's a period of Alice's life he doesn't like to talk about very much, but you basically responded by getting pretty angry, not by buckling down and working unbelievably hard. What's your sense of how you reacted in different ways? I mean, so he basically arrived, was so angry with what he saw about these kind of upper-class toffs pushing him around that he basically just became furious and drunk for three years.

17:09And you instead decided to work really hard. There's a line, I think he's Kanye West, success will be the best revenge like that was i just yeah i got there in the end yeah i was very for me i was like i'm going to show these guys like no matter how much their dad is paying to send them across the world i'm going to be the guy that beats them in the exams it was like that was that was my you've both got in common so you're both very competitive right i'm very competitive oh yeah i mean i think it's tapered off a little bit when i was a kid i was like you show me a game i'm going to win it and obviously i eventually got my job through a game like a card game competition um yeah but i think that was you know the other thing is the big thing is i knew that i was disadvantaged and but i knew that we had to find our ways through it you know and it was quite fun i went to this i went to this grammar school this very very indian grammar school in east london and um i had all these kind of middle class indian friends and to be honest i kind of owe my career in a way to them because they were they had all this knowledge they were like i wouldn't even know what lse was you know i mean you have to go to LSE, you have to study economics, you have to do maths.

18:14And then there was a point where they were like, and now we all apply through schemes for ethnic minorities. And I was like, I was like, fuck, basically. And they were all much richer than me. But then when I was a kid, you just accept it. You just accept it. You're just like, what's the way? I'm always looking for the back door. Pick you up on that. Yeah. Because that's a big theme in politics today, particularly in the US. So you just said they all applied through schemes for ethnic minorities and I'm fucked. And this is something JD Vance would talk about, right? white working class people feeling that the whole diversity agenda is favouring middle class people at their expense?

18:49I mean, the truth is, race almost doesn't really come into it in a way. I don't think they had an advantage because they were non-white. They're advantage because they're middle class. They're advantage because they're middle class. And with parents who push them and schoolers. Yeah, because it's not like, you know, it's not like there's not working class. They're really poor. Like, so I grew up in East London. When you grow up in, especially in Ilford, East london you recognize that there's no such thing as the south asian community you know there's there's there's rich people and there's poor people you know a lot of the pakistani recent migrants were extremely poor none of them got into the banking you know i mean really really to be honest i think a lot of this race thing is a cover for the class thing okay gary roy quick break then back for more

19:32i want to just read a bit but this is the bit that i sort of took out of it those drug dealers You're talking about drug dealers in your area. You became one on one occasion. Were you a really kind of serious drug dealer? You just sold some drugs. I was at grammar school, right? And people just knew, because people knew Gary's got black friends. It's really stupid, simplistic stuff like that. They would see who I would hang around with, and they would ask me to bring them drugs. So a real drug dealer would not be impressed by your drug dealing? No. Oh, no, I very much doubt it. I've never tested it out, but I very much doubt it.

20:01Anyway, it goes on. These drug dealers, the ones who are drug dealers, they didn't have the options i had of the options other kids had they can't go to lc they can't win investment banking internships and card games which you did they have no reliable routes out of poverty and so instead they sell drugs sometimes they do other things fraud burglary some of them make money others of them don't make money some of them go to prisons others don't sometimes kids like that really sometimes kids like that really bad things happen to them sometimes they get stabbed they get killed sometimes people wait for them outside nightclubs and cars and they wait for them to cross the road they run them over and their bodies spasm on the floor what I realized then is that we are the same this is you and the traders we are all the same the drug dealers, the bankers, the traders me now, me then and you name them all we're all the same the only difference is how rich our dads were if those drug dealers went to Eaton or St Paul's or whatever the fuck boarding school Rupert had gone to they would be there with me on the trading floor sitting next to Arthur's sitting next to JB buying fucking green euro dollars and that's where I kind of felt this is ultimately a book about class and the education system.

21:05It's about, because a lot of the traders, to me, they come over as kind of quite working class people. In a way, well, there's this cultural myth in the trading floor of the sort of, especially in London, of the sort of Cockney, white boy market dealer kind of guy. It's an extraordinarily masculine space, an extraordinarily competitive space. And a lot of these cultural values align with a lot of the cultural values of working class, especially working class men. But I think this, It's exactly as that says. Honestly, the personality type of the person who becomes a drug dealer from a poor background and the person who becomes a trader from a rich background, it's the exact same.

21:42There's a character in the book, JB. It's this kind of very masculine, aggressive, competitive person. If you come from a poor background, you're very likely to end up in drugs, in crime. The cliche in trading, when you're talking about trading here, you're talking about people buying and selling, I guess, currencies, commodities, shares, bonds, is that you went from a world in which you had the kind of classic image of the kind of Cockney kid shouting on the floor of the stock exchange to a world which you're part of the transition to which is increasingly dominated by maths geniuses yeah and and and many of them now increasingly from east european chinese uh south asian backgrounds right so you're at this sort of weird cusp where you've got part of the culture of the kind of old cockney screaming on the floor and part of the culture of this kind of new generation of maths geniuses coming in and then somewhere floating on the top weirdly in the book are kind of these sort of chinless upper class wonders who are still sort of somehow there despite the fact they don't they're not part of either wearing pink shirts you're obsessed with pink shirts aren't you pink shirts is a bit of a metaphor in the book it's a metaphor pink shirt pink shirt well we we when i was a kid only millwall fans wore pink shirts yeah for me it was um it's a class transition thing it's a class you see it and interest so because i work in foreign exchange because of the introduction of the euro I work in rich world foreign exchange.

23:16When the euro was introduced, the number of rich world currency foreign exchange traders had to half because the number of currencies had to half. And what that meant was they didn't hire anyone for like 10, 15 years. So when I come in, I'm like 21 years old. And it's a lot of these older guys that are from the previous world, basically. And in that previous 15 years, I start in 2008, you've seen this transition to, you know, the MIT maths whiz kid, the LSE maths whiz kid. and you see the world changing. You know, one of the guys I worked with was an ex-rugby player, basically. And yeah, and then I'm sort of...

23:50And they partied. I mean, one of the things that comes across in the book again and again is you're this little maths whisker, but you're perpetually being taken out to dodgy bars till three, four in the morning. Yeah, somewhat against my will a lot of the time. And that must be weird too, because this new generation of people of kind of maths geniuses might be quite kind of introverted, hardworking, serious people. they're not naturally up till four in the morning putting down the expensive wine and getting two hours sleep are they yeah yeah so you see the culture changing and i got i got taken to las vegas when i was 21 and i was still at university and i got text by in the book he's called rupert like are you free on these days and it was like a week before my exams i was like yeah he was like come to las vegas because he his real character is was he one of the pink shirt people he went to boarding school his dad was in the army yeah yeah um he was um you got the sense that he had a very strict father and he was just hoping if I make enough money my dad will be proud that was the kind of but boarding so I thought Rupert was an amazing character because he was vicious vicious violent aggressive like he he he literally growled at me like a wolf at one point like like a dog for about a minute and like gnashing his teeth and kicking his desk um you could hear him growling behind you extremely physically violent guy but then he has these moments of bizarre kindness so like um my friend harry his his mum passed away and it was rupert that was like we need to do something we need to help harry we need to go out there and it was also when i had when i was really struggling with my mental health he's the guy that like he was on a zoom call sat me down and was like let's talk about what you need what you want it was this bizarre character just on the i said in the introduction that one of the reasons i was really keen to talk to you is because you know the mental health stuff when you're describing particularly when you're in japan in the book are you in the middle of a of a what would be called a breakdown are you are you recognizing that you've got depression or what's what's going on so i was diagnosed with a situational depression when i was in japan um i would i'm not a psychologist i would confidently say i had a depression you could say a burnout you could push it towards a breakdown i i went down to about eight stone in weight i'm not a tall man but that's not a lot um i wasn't eating i wasn't sleeping i bought a flat ripped all the furniture out didn't furnish it just like mattress on a concrete floor and a TV that was all I had um I didn't realize the thing is nobody knew I was depressed my girlfriend at the time in the book she's called wizard she was the only person who really recognized it but everybody else thought in a really which is really stupid when you think about it they thought he's rich he's successful he must be happy and there's one little scene in the book where there's another character JB who's obviously having a breakdown massive breakdown and I go to one of my friends on the on the desk Snoopy and I say should we do something about JB.

26:28And Snoopy says to me, don't worry, JB is the richest man I personally know. And I think it's so absurd, but it shows you how unhealthy you are. He probably meant by that, I don't know, I think I probably meant that, you know, he needs to get himself into a decent place and get real. I think it's more simple than that. I think so many people are so obsessed with money that they simply cannot believe that you can be rich and unhappy. It's so stupid and so absurd but the thing is so many people especially young men are quite unhappy and they tell themselves i'll just work harder i'll make more money i'll work harder i'll make more money if i make the money i'll be happy so they need to believe that if you have money you'll be happy because that's their whole plan is i'll make more money and what did you learn about yourself going through that and then hopefully coming out of it you know i don't want to undermine depression because it was really hard but personally i'm i'm glad i went through it actually.

27:20I think I'm a much kinder person now since going through the depression and also a less selfish person. It's a really small scene in the book, right? I went to karaoke in Japan and I am actually not a bad singer, would you believe? But I hated karaoke. I would get really self-conscious. The Japanese people would always be like, go sing one and more. And they said it's about making other people happy. This guy sat me down and said, listen, you're doing it wrong. It doesn't matter whether you sing well or sing badly. What matters is that your guests have a good time. and this is like i think japan as a culture probably takes this too far but it's a very different approach to selfishness and then i started to go to karaoke and i would try to laugh and make a joke and try to entertain and then suddenly i started to enjoy it more and for me it was weird because surely i should be happier when i'm focusing on my own enjoyment my own happiness but i don't think life is like that i don't think humans are like that i think yes humans are selfish at times and at places but i think it's also a really important part of being human to care about others and to make others happy.

28:19And you don't think you had that before? No, listen, I think, and I think British society and I think also American society has gone too far on this. That message was never in my life. You know, I had this religious stuff about God and that, but I never really had this simple idea, which is you, as a human, will not be happy unless you try to make other people happy, unless you care about other people. I was told, get rich or die trying, and I was watching MTV Bass with hip-hop stars throwing strippers into swimming pools, you know, get rich, get rich, you know, you wave all this expensive stuff that in front of young kids who can't afford them and you make them go insane and the truth is i know money is important and i know i have the privilege of saying this as somebody who has money i don't think it's possible to be happy unless you care about making other people happy and not just your your kids your wife your family i think it is it is fundamentally mentally unhealthy to not care about the broad health of the society that you're in my opinion so because what came through the the world you were in and the trading floor is a lack of really oh it's extreme it's so extreme on that it's me me me selfish selfish is it impossible to think about other people in that environment do you feel strange if you do suddenly think i wonder what poor people think i wonder what foreigners think i wonder what it's like to live on the street so i had a boss in the book is called chuck who got diagnosed with a brain tumor while he was working with with us and he brought us all into a room and he said i'm sorry guys like yesterday i got lost on the way home i went to hospital i've got a brain tumor but the doctors say they think they can operate it so I shouldn't have to take much time off work that's what he said that's what he said and it was so it was so funny but so sad and it's just it's just we we honestly I think we train our young men to be kind of psychopathic with with regards to work and and I know it's it's cliche and it seems stopping but there is more to life than that but it's but we've also created this world where for so many men and women if you don't work really hard every hour god gives you can't put food on the table and that's what i want to change that's why i do the work that i do just on the on the i'm interested in the in the values and also you know this is a political podcast the the politics i guess there's a bit in the book where i think gordon brown is chancellor and he's talking about taxing the bankers and bonuses and all that stuff and you lot just laugh well it's kind of it's in a weird way it's funny right because that would have been 2009 yeah so i start june 2008 so 2009 i am still a very poor person Like my net wealth is like basically zero.

30:40I've made like basically no money. And I'm surrounded by these millionaires. Although at that point, I don't know quite how rich they are. And I've worked my tits off to get into this place. And then suddenly, here's Gordon Brown. We're going to tax the bankers. Can you imagine how I felt, basically? Like you've worked like 21 years slaving away to get into this place. And it's like now they're going to tax. Now they're going to tax. Specifically, it's not going to affect. These guys are already millionaires, right? It's me who's going to be affected, who has nothing to do with the crisis, right?

31:04So you weren't laughing, but they were. No, but then I turned around and this guy, Billy, who's another Scouser in a working class background, he's grabbed me by the shoulders and he's like shaking me. He's like, don't worry, get away. They're never going to tax us. And they're laughing. And the thing is, they were right. And when I introduced Caleb, who is my boss, I described him as he's the most confident man I've ever met. And he has the confidence. Obviously, you know, I come from a poor background. And you see this kind of swagger confidence of, for example, drug dealers. but then there's this contrast of this guy who comes in from a rich background very rich guy and he knows that him and his class will always win and he's always right he is always right this guy works for one of the banks that blew the world up and he made millions on the blob of the world and it's it's it's comedy but they are 100 % right they were right they are right they're still there they're still making millions of pounds and look you know 2008 crisis was resolved in such a way The rich got massively richer, the poor got poorer.

32:00Covid crisis was resolved in such a way. The rich got massively richer, the poor got poorer. So they have the confidence. They basically own the political class. But hold on, do they vote? Oh yeah, of course they do. But they don't always vote Conservative. So Billy, this Scouts working class guy, he was extremely left-wing in his politics. And he had a lot of scorn for these. Overall, it's definitely more right-wing, Conservative-leaning than the population. There's no doubt. Did you feel political when you were doing the job? Did you have any sense of, as you were doing it, this is wrong, this is fueling inequality, we're actually betting on poor people saying poor.

32:37This, in a sense, I think this is another, what I wanted to be a big theme of the book, which is I never consider myself to be a political person. Why not? Why not, did you say? I grew up, get rich or die trying. You know what I mean? You grow up in, listen, you grow up in London, you're poor. But what about now? Now you think about yourself a lot. Of course, now I consider myself a political person. yeah so where are your politics define your politics for me I have in my opinion I have the politics of a car mechanic which is this economy is desperately broken do you want to fix it or not you know Labour are not going to fix it the Conservatives are not going to fix it UKIP are not going to fix it I want to fix it so politics how can you fix it outside politics oh no don't get me wrong like I know that if I want to change policy at some point you need to influence politics my plan is the Rupert Murdoch plan that's my plan if you if you control what the public believe then the politicians have to do what you say.

33:27Okay, well, we said we're doing a two-parter and that's the end of part one. We've discussed Gary's background, his entry into trading. We're going to end there for now. We're going to come back next week for part two, where we're much more into, if you like, an economic and political worldview and he's rather depressing predictions for the future. If you'd like to listen to part two right now, you can sign up to The Rest Is Politics Plus at therestispolitics.com. You'll receive all our members' benefits, such as early access to question time episodes ad-free listening, access to our brand new mini-series on JD Vans.