Okay.

Welcome back to today's special bonus

edition of Gary's Economics,

where we are going to talk about truth, lies and games.

Okay, so today is the 30th of January,

which means it is the release

of the paperback of my book,

this, new paperback version. It's much cheaper.

I think it's about £10, something like that.

And to commemorate the release of the paperback,

I wanted to do an edition

where I speak about a story

that happened to me when I was a trader,

which I write about in the book,

which really helped me to understand, in my mind,

Donald Trump during the last Donald Trump presidency.

So obviously Donald Trump is back.

And I wanted to share a story

from the book which helped me

think about it, deal with it, and understand it.

Okay, so towards the end of my time at Citibank,

I decided I wanted to leave.

And, the opening scene of my book is,

my boss at the time, basically, pretty strongly

threatening me that,

I could get in quite a lot of trouble

if I tried to leave the bank.

That led to the beginning

of kind of a crazy period in my life

where I was quite frequently

threatened by senior management at Citibank.

And I entered this period at work,

which I call the meeting period,

which was where

for about 3 or 4 weeks,

every single day,

I would have 2 or 3 or 4 meetings

with senior management at Citibank.

And at the time I was living in Tokyo,

working in Tokyo, in Japan.

And Citibank is obviously

a massive, massive, massive organisation.

And there's all these different members

of senior management.

And every meeting

would have like, a different combination

of bank senior managers in the meeting.

So one day might be a one-on-one

with a specific manager in Tokyo.

And then the next meeting might be four guys,

one in New York, one in London,

one in Tokyo, one in Singapore.

Then there might be a big zoom call with like ten guys.

And each one of these meetings...

what was interesting about these meetings was

each one of these meetings,

the management would have basically

a different kind of strategy

of what we're going to do in this meeting.

So you might, for example,

have a good cop, bad cop meeting.

So for those who don't know,

you're meeting with two guys

and one of them just like shouts in your face.

And then he takes breaks and the other guy

says, listen,

I want to help you, I want to be on your side,

I want to deal with this.

But then you might have another meeting

where you just have

6, 7 top senior management,

and beforehand they've decided with each other,

what we're going to do

is we're just going to be really,

really supportive to Gary.

We're going to tell him we're behind him.

So you would have this like

really weird combination

of, you go into to one meeting

and a guy would, like, scream in your face for an hour

and you go into the next meeting.

Sometimes these meetings

could be like even directly back

to back in the same kind of like zoom office room.

And everyone would be like,

we love you, we support you.

And, sometimes you would get this amazing situation

where the same guy

who had just been shouting you for an hour

was also scheduled to be in the next meeting,

which was immediately afterwards.

So you'd have a guy stop shouting at you,

sit down,

turn on this like zoom call on the big screen.

And one by one, everyone, including him, would say,

we believe in you, you know, we’re really behind you,

we really support you.

And,

you know, when I told Jack about this earlier,

he said, oh it must have made you go mad.

But actually, these little weird features

were kind of what kept me sane in the period

because they were so funny.

It was so funny to see this guy

immediately switch from being like,

like a crazy animal,

just shouting at you

to being like a kind of cuddly teddy bear.

Just because he's turned a zoom call on

and it's a different meeting.

And what this made me realise,

and it wasn't just this,

it was a lot of things when I was working at Citibank,

is that

rich and powerful people

have quite a different attitude and approach to truth

and lies and games compared to ordinary people.

So I think most ordinary people,

when they are having a conversation with somebody,

there is a kind of assumption

that if you say something, it is because you

believe it,

and it is because you think it,

it is because you feel it.

That is why you say things.

And there's a kind of assumption

that people say things because they're true

or it's what they think.

But a lot of rich people and a lot of powerful people,

they don't

approach their conversations in this way,

especially if it is conversations

which have any relationship

with money or power or their work.

They will often go into

a conversation with a kind of a game playing mentality,

which is what is our objective from this conversation?

What is our objective from this meeting?

So in the case of the story in my book,

they didn't want me to quit.

So it's like,

what is our strategy

to stop Gary from quitting basically.

And then you'll go in basically

playing a character and trying to think, what is the...

what do I need to say

in order to get the things that I want?

What is the optimal choice of words, choice of strategy

to try and get the outcome that I want?

And because I spent a lot of time at Citibank,

working with very rich, very powerful people,

you start to realise that this is a very normal way

of interacting,

of human interactions

in this world of rich and powerful people.

And for that reason,

when Donald Trump came into power,

I was not really surprised at all

by the way,

the things that he said and the way that he behaved.

So Donald Trump

and of course, you've also got Elon Musk

now in this new administration.

They both tend to do this thing

of saying an awful lot of things.

They say, we're going to do this.

They say we're going to do that.

And sometimes the things that they say seem crazy.

And you get people in the media saying,

oh my God, if they do that policy,

how is it going to affect us?

What's it going to do?

And then what you would often

find in the last administration is

he would say, we're going to do this thing.

And then nothing would come of it.

There would never be any actual policy

or ever even any attempt at a policy. And this

confused people because a lot of people assumed

that if somebody like Donald Trump says,

I want to do this thing, or I'm going to do this thing

that means that he wants to do this thing,

or he's going to do that thing.

But from somebody who's

been in these meetings

and seen how people basically say

whatever they think works in that specific meeting,

I was not surprised at all, really.

This is a very, very common way

of rich and powerful people behaving.

So what that means is we shouldn't really read anything

in terms of what rich or powerful people

actually say, or actually want,

or actually are going to do from what they say

they want, or what they say they're going to do.

When people...

when rich and powerful people say something

really more than anything,

it tells us something about what

they want us to believe.

And this also explains often why

what people say is so at odds with what they do.

For example,

you've got the Conservatives

who continually said

they were anti-migration and yet enormously increased

the number of legal migration into the country.

You have Elon Musk,

who again, is trying to fund anti-immigration parties

and yet is trying to increase

immigration of many kinds into the US.

When these rich and powerful people speak,

we should always be asking us

fundamentally, at the very heart,

what do these people want?

And in the vast majority of cases,

what rich and powerful people want

is more wealth, more power,

not just for them, but also for their kids.

So a few years ago,

when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine,

I won't lie, I was surprised.

I'm not a Putin expert,

and I was surprised he did that

because I thought immediately,

he's already super rich, he's already super powerful,

that jeopardises

his situation, it jeopardises his future.

Why would he do that?

And the first thing I did was

I went onto Wikipedia, I looked up Vladimir Putin.

I wanted to know how old he was.

Does he have any kids? Does he have any sons?

And that is because I understand that most

elderly, wealthy, powerful

men are primarily concerned

with successfully transferring their wealth

and their power to their kids

and in many cases,

they're focused on getting it to their sons

or one particular son.

And I think this is

the way that you can primarily understand

people like Musk, people like Putin, people like Trump.

You need to understand their motivations.

What do they want? What do they want?

What do they want?

And of course, everyone is an individual

and people want different things

and you can't perfectly know what Putin wants.

We can't perfectly know what Trump wants.

We can't perfectly know what Musk wants.

But most of the time

it is about amassing further wealth and power

for themselves, for their kids.

You know, they always say in football,

you know, don’t watch the man

watch the ball

because he's going to throw all kinds of feints.

Pretend he's going to be this way,

pretend he's going to go that way.

Ultimately, he wants to get the ball into the goal

and most of the time, getting the ball into the goal

means getting more money, getting more wealth.

And I wanted to say like, this is not...

if you want to understand,

I spoke to a friend about this

and he said, you know, I can't really understand

this way of being, where you’ll basically say anything

if you think is going to get you what you want,

because most people don't do that.

But the truth is,

when you are in a game situation, this often happens.

I was around a friend's house

playing Catan a couple of months ago.

Good friends house, I’m good friends

with both her and her husband.

And her husband was trying to do this trade with me.

And he said, look, I'll trade this with you.

And I said, no.

And he said, listen, I've got this card.

If I use this card, I'm

going to take that resource anyway.

So whether you do the trade

or I'm going to take it anyway.

So I did the trade with him

and it later transpired

he didn't even have the card that he said he had.

And I was kind of shocked,

basically because it was a lie

and I was sort of like, wow, I can't believe you lied.

And he said, look, it's a game.

You know, I'm trying to win the game.

You know, that's...

that’s the way that it is.

And I'm reminded also of a friend of mine

when we were teenagers,

I used to play a lot of Monopoly,

and I played with my high school friends.

And I think the first three games

I won, I was quite good at monopoly,

which is quite a big deal because it’s

a 5/6 player game.

And then one of my friends decided that the way to win

Monopoly is to specifically stop Gary from winning.

And he would attack all of...

every time I tried to trade with someone,

he would just attack that other person,

like brutally insult the other person.

And I would ask him afterwards, like, why, why,

why are you telling everyone these deals are bad?

You know they're not bad deals.

But he would genuinely believe in his heart

that they were bad deals.

And I would start doing a thing where

if he attacked a deal,

I would start saying to the person

I was trying to trade with, okay,

if you think that's a bad deal,

let's completely flip the deal.

I will take everything you were going to have,

and you can have everything I was going to have.

And this friend of mine would immediately

switch on an instant

into attacking the other side of the deal,

and he didn't think it was at all consistent

to attack both sides of the deal.

Whichever side of the deal I was on.

I think what this shows is

when people really, really want something,

they will

basically believe

whatever they need to believe in that moment

and say whatever they need to say in that moment

to get that thing.

So don't expect consistency.

Don't expect consistent ideology.

Don't expect consistent beliefs.

What you should expect

consistently is a consistent drive

to accumulate wealth and power.

And what I want you to do when that happens

is to not get sucked in to the games

that are being played.

Lots of words are going to be thrown around.

Lots of stories are going to be thrown around,

lots of ideas are going to be thrown around,

which are generally going to

be designed to destabilise you

and make you weak

so that your wealth

and your resources can be transferred

to the powerful over time.

Don't get sucked into the game.

I think if you can be dragged

into a game playing mentality,

we can end up in a situation where it's a straight

shoot out in a game between the powerful and the weak,

and unless you're a multi-millionaire,

you are one of the weak.

The way you win this game is to not play the game.

Step outside the rules of the game, and realise

you need to ally with other poor

and ordinary people because if you don't,

the rich will win the game,

they will take your resources.

And ultimately,

in a crazy way,

I think that's how I won my battle with Citibank.

I went a little bit crazy.

I broke a few of the rules, I stepped outside the game,

and I never got sued, and I never went to prison.

I never got bankrupted.

And that is why I was able to write this book.

It's out today.

I'm very proud of it. It's called the Trading Game.

I wanted to talk about truth, lies and games

because for me, a big part of the story is about

how I got sucked into a game,

how young people get sucked into a game,

and how when you get sucked into a game,

an obsession with the game

can basically kind of kill your humanity inside.

And it's that journey for me.

I don't want it to happen to you.

I don't want to happen to us.

Listen,

the next few years are going to be a difficult time.

And they're going to be difficult

for your mental health,

and they're going to be difficult for society.

And they're going to be difficult

economically as well.

I think the most important thing

is that you try to stay mentally healthy.

And that means talking to each other,

trying your best to be compassionate

and understanding of each other. Very rich and very...

very rich

and very powerful people

are going to be trying to drive us apart

and to make us unstable and to make us angry

and to make us hate each other.

There's a great section in a great book about this.

I think it's the two minutes hate

or the three minutes hate in 1984 by George Orwell,

but he's basically talking about how

if the powerful can convince the poor to hate,

not even anything specific, but just hate in general,

then it's very easy to control them.

Because people who hate are not people who can unite.

And who of you can't unite,

are not able to be powerful.

Stay strong, speak to each other.

I'll finish by just saying

thank you to everyone who supported us

so much since the comeback.

The views have been just crazy.

And the amount of attention has been crazy.

But I'm really appreciative.

And I will try my best

to build something that can help us,

but you need to build things to,

be there for each other.

Thank you for support.

Thank you

especially for everyone who signed up for the Patreon.

We really appreciate that.

If you can buy the book, it's a very good book,

but if you can't,

then just support us

and then help us to drive forward

and help us try to make things better.

Thank you. Good luck.