Finally, Gary Stevenson Has Been Found Out - Konstantin Kisin

0:00Konstantin Kisin:I've bought two mattresses in my entire life. Both times I walked into a shop, lay on it for about four seconds and thought, yeah, that'll do. Genuinely world-class decision-making, which is crazy because you spend a third of your life on the thing and most of us buy one the way you'd buy a toaster. Today's sponsor is Avocado Green Mattress. Certified organic mattresses. No polyurethane foam anywhere near them, just natural materials and they're handmade. The bit that actually got me is you don't have to buy it blind. Avocado has real showrooms plus retail partners across the US. So you can go in, lie down properly, not for four seconds, and work out if it actually suits you before you pay for it.

0:39Konstantin Kisin:They're not everywhere yet, so check the store locator for what's actually near you. Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. You can experience them in person at an avocado showroom or a premier retailer near you. Or shop online at avocadogreenmattress.com slash trigger to check out their mattresses and furniture sale. That's avocadogreenmattress.com slash trigger. avocadogreenmattress.com slash trigger. Right, I'm going to level with you. I'm not a gamer, even though I look like one. I'm not going to pretend I've been grinding through RPGs between recordings, or that I have strong opinions about which Final Fantasy was the best one.

1:22Konstantin Kisin:I think it's Japanese and I think there's a sword. That's genuinely everything I know. But our social media guys showed me this app and I genuinely thought, that's quite clever. It's called Snacksy. Basically, game publishers need new players and they're willing to pay to get them. Snacksy just passes that money onto you. You play games you were probably going to play anyway. You own coins and you cash them out for real rewards. PayPal, Amazon, Netflix, gift cards. If you prefer gaming credit, you can redeem for PlayStation, Xbox, Steam and Nintendo or cash out your Ineba wallet. I've got no idea what that means.

1:56Konstantin Kisin:Actual money, not just points that expire. It takes a few minutes to set up. You open the app, swipe through the game offers, pick something that looks decent, play it, earn, redeem. That's the whole thing. There's a sign-up bonus worth up to$10 if you use our link, which is in the description of this episode. That's S-N-A-K-Z-Y, SnackSync. Click the link in the description to get started. And when you sign up, use the code TRIGGERPOD. That's T-R-I-G-G-E-R-P-O-D to claim your$10 bonus. And the app is mobile only, so click the link from your phone, not your laptop. The rise and fall of Gary's economics.

2:44Anyone who knows me will tell you that I do not believe in making politics personal. I believe that the failure to treat our political opponents as human first and wrong second is one of the great challenges of our time. The power of atomizing technology has transformed the public debate into a public shouting match. Why? It's not just that the internet has given everyone a voice, it's that it has given a voice to people who never have to sit in the same room. Before the age of YouTube and social media, political and media opponents didn't have the option of shit-talking each other from the safety of their podcast studios.

3:18They had to sit across from each other in TV green rooms and then sit together in one room and at least pretend to be talking to each other. Having done a fair bit of media in my time, I can tell you that meeting the people you're about to debate in the green room beforehand is an important part of the process. It might be that the extent of what you can discuss without an argument erupting is limited to the weather because it's 2026 and we can't seem to agree on what a woman is. But still, you're forced to be civil. The effect of this you know from your own experience. The way you react to someone accidentally cutting you up in traffic is far less restrained than your response to someone accidentally bumping into you on the street.

4:00The action is the same, but the level of offense both taken and expressed is not. Why? Reassured by the physical distance and feeling of safety it provides, we feel comfortable to engage in more confrontational behavior. This difference has been recorded in study after study. Not that you need a study to understand this. The great American philosopher and former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson said it best when he said, social media has made you all too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face. This is why whenever I've had disagreements with other people, I've always tried to engage with them in person.

4:36We did this with Jimmy the Giant, a New Left content creator who made a video calling me a grifter and eventually apologized and took it down after we had a rather robust discussion in our studio. We did this with Dave Smith over Israel, with Peter Hitchens over Ukraine. We just did it in a blockbuster upcoming interview with Tony Blair's spokesman, Alistair Campbell. I always try to criticize people's ideas, not them personally, because I know that physical separation is corrosive to public debate. Not only do we feel safe and far from the people with whom we disagree, but there is now a giant audience which is not in the room who are watching all the drama.

5:12Drama, remember, is above all a performance. And in today's world, you don't have to play to the audience. You just have to play to your audience. And your audience doesn't want you to self-moderate. They want you to ramp it up to 11. A significant portion of the content creator space has realized this, which is why we're living in the age of the character. Andrew Tate is the heel, a well-known character in combat sports from which he hails. Kander Soans is the entertaining conspiracy loon character. And Gary Stevenson is the articular and courageous champion of the downtrodden character. It's important not to confuse actual articular and courageous champions of the downtrodden with the character.

5:53You can help poor people and you can want to help poor people. They're not the same. The problem with Gary Stevenson is not him as a person. I'm sure he's a perfectly nice guy. It's just that he doesn't understand basic economic concepts. Daniel Priestley once spent several minutes trying and failing to get Gary to understand the difference between assets and income. This clip is really worth listening to in full, even though it feels dry and technical. Just watch Gary's brain short circuit repeatedly as he ironically complains about how much tax he paid when he was making millions as a Citigroup trader.

6:28Listen, I want my tits off and I paid, it was 50 % top rate tax. 50 % top rate tax plus national insurance, 60%. So a million a year. To bring my family out of poverty. At the same time, the Duke of Westminster inherited 10 billion pounds and paid nothing. Do you think that's fair? That's not true. Okay, why is it not true? Because the Duke of Westminster is one of the highest taxpayers in the country. So they pay 0.6 % a year. So I paid 60 % and this guy pays 0.6%. Apples with apples, inheritance tax is 40 % across the course of your life. If a person lives who owns a trust for 70 years, then 6 % times 7 would be 42.

7:06So they actually pay more. So he pays 0.6 % a year. Pro-righted. You're telling me 0.6 % a year. But that would be the same as... What percent did I pay per year? No, no, no. 60%. Hold up. So you're saying I pay, what's 60 over 0.6? No, no, no. 100 times the tax rate is what I pay. You're not comparing apples with apples. You're talking about income versus the transfer of an estate. So why is it that the GQ Westminster can be worth£10 billion?

7:29Konstantin Kisin:Just hold on. You're comparing your income versus the amount he inherited, which is not a fair thing. That's not income. Because that's his income. Inheritance is not income. So wait, wait, wait, wait. So if I get given£10 billion, I don't pay any tax. But if I work for£10 billion, I pay 60%. Well, if you inherited... If this is the tax system that you want, you will end up in a system... We're the kids of the rich world and everything. I'm just saying you're... That's what I'm saying. Winston Churchill famously described his political opponents as modest men with much to be modest about. Gary has no such problem.

8:01What he lacks in expertise, he more than makes up in the complete absence of modesty. He was, after all, the best trader in the world, according to one Gary Stevenson. A recent article in AFT suggests that, to put it mildly, some of his colleagues didn't quite see it that way. Gary has now moved on from his success in the world of finance to being one of the world's leading experts on inequality, a title given to him by, well, himself. He appears to have confused his online fame with knowing things. But Gary is a political campaigner, not an expert. He's the Greta Thunberg of tax. There's no denying he has built up a large audience.

8:39That makes him an expert in one thing and one thing only, building up a large audience. And it's true. You can build up a large audience by making good arguments about important issues and offering genuine insight. But you can also do it by pandering to people's anger and economic illiteracy. In the words of the great American economist Thomas Sowell, when you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. Gary has done fantastically well out of advocating policies that would make this country poorer on the basis of false claims about the source of the problem he so passionately wants to address.

9:15This was described in extensive detail in a well-referenced post by tax expert Dan Needle, who appeared in Gary's recent documentary. Needle sums up his breakdown by saying, Gary Stevenson clearly cares deeply about inequality and passionately wants a wealth tax, but he's uninterested in the detail of either the problem or his solution. He exaggerates his expertise and his research is sloppy. Given the size of his audience, that's a shame. Even The Guardian agrees publishing a scathing review of the documentary. It's The Guardian, so they still think a wealth tax is a brilliant idea. But even they are shocked by how unpersuasive his arguments are when challenged properly and how lost he appears when he comes up against the most basic counter-arguments to his well-rehearsed talking points.

10:01Gary thinks he's Robin Hood, the man who took from the rich and gave to the poor. There's only one problem with all of this. Robin Hood didn't take from the rich. He took from the sheriff of Nottingham, who was, pay attention now, a tax collector and debt enforcer taxing ordinary citizens to within an inch of their lives. Robin Hood is not a story about taking from the rich and giving to the poor. It's a story about resisting a tax regime that is starting to take the piss. The weird thing is, Gary knows what Britain's actual problem is. In fact, he summed it up very well in that clip we played you with Daniel Priestley when he kept complaining about having to pay 50 and 60 percent of tax on his earnings.

10:41Our problem is not that the rich are doing well, it's that the country is doing badly. We have the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, thanks to the lunacy of net zero, which has both destroyed our manufacturing and made us uncompetitive in the world of AI, where most future growth is going to come from. We've made hiring people expensive by raising national insurance and a huge risk by introducing the employment rights bill's day one sick pay provision. And we've chased out both successful innovators like the founder of Revolut, Nick Stronsky, and the young talent that could replace him in the future by making Britain a terrible place to run a business.

11:20Instead of generating enough wealth for everyone to do better, we keep raising taxes. The tax burden is now the highest on record in an attempt to maintain the illusion that we're still a wealthy country. We're not. We're currently somewhere between 25th and 29th in GDP per capita in the world and are projected to be overtaken on living standards by Poland. That's not my claim. It's Keir Starmer's. Look, I'm not a billionaire. I don't oppose wealth taxes because I'm going to have to pay them. It's just a terrible idea that isn't about helping anyone. It's about envy. I was born in the Soviet Union.

11:58I've seen what happens when feeding the green-eyed monster becomes the basis of government policy. And so, wishing Gary no ill will, I have to confess a profound sense of relief at the complete implosion of his credibility. Not because I enjoy watching anyone fail, but because bad ideas are dangerous precisely because they are appealing to our worst instinct. Those of us who comment on these things in public have a duty to tell the truth, not pander to them. If you enjoy these videos, remember that they're released as articles on my sub stack days, weeks, sometimes months ahead of time. So head on over to www.constantinkissen.com right now and subscribe.

12:39That's www.constantinkissen.com and go ahead and subscribe right now. The news doesn't just tell you what's happening. It often tells you what to think is happening. And these days, the biggest red flag isn't what's said, it's what gets left out. That's why I use Ground News. It's the only app that compares how the same story is covered across the political spectrum and show you what whole audiences are not being told. The Blindspot feed is one of my favorite features. Every day, it flags upwards of 20 stories that are being ignored either by the left or the right. Follow along at ground.news slash trigonometry.

13:12Like this, a new study from UC San Diego found that climate change cost almost twice as much as we thought because earlier estimates left out damage to the oceans. That's a pretty big update and yet no coverage. Literally zero came from right-leaning outlets. All this. A recent Gallup poll found trust in the media has hit a record low with just 28 % of Americans saying they trust newspapers, radio, and TV to report the news accurately and fairly. That's a staggering result, but if you only read left-leaning news, you likely never saw it at all. Go to ground.news slash trigonometry to get 40 % off their unlimited vantage plan, the same one we use, and stop being managed by the media.

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