This is a clip from my upcoming interview

with Waterstones about the book, The Trading Game

that's coming out March the fifth.

If you preorder from Waterstones using the code in the description,

then you can get 20% off.

So that will be valid for all preorders.

So up to March 4th.

Hope you enjoy the interview.

You actually, you describe very well the sort of unhappiness

actually that comes from being given that kind of wealth, living the kind of life

you were living, going to different parts of the world as part of your job.

But really none of that actually making you happy or filling the void.

You know, it's a funny one.

This didn’t get into the book, actually, but

suddenly it's coming back to me.

One conversation I had with the girl who I was dating at the time,

and I got this first big bonus, and it's one of the first few moments

when I sort of actually thought about why does this money not make me happy?

And I think when you’re...

I don't want to glamorise

poverty at all, but when you're young and you've got nothing,

everything's like a positive bet, because you got nothing to lose.

And then suddenly you get given this money and it's like, I've never had anything.

You know, when I was a kid,

I lived in a tiny little bedroom with my brother in a bunk bed,

and everything I owned was in a random shelf.

Like a chest of drawers that had been taken up, just under the bed.

Everything I owned was in that draw.

And then suddenly someone gives you half a million pounds.

You know, I didn't have my own, you know,

I'd never owned anything.

I was scared of shops.

I didn't know how shops worked.

I'd never been in a shop.

And then

suddenly you get half a million pounds.

You know what?

What do you do?

And then there's a scene in the book where they say, buy something for your dad.

And I'm like,

I don't even know what that means,

you know, because, like, I've never bought anything for anyone.

They’re like, what does your Dad like?

I dunno he likes football, buy him sky sports then.

But what they didn't know was before I was working at the bank,

I used to go with my dad to Leyton Orient every week.

You know, it was £23 a year for season ticket for kids.

And we used to sit next to each other and watch the game with Harry Samby who's

also a character in the book.

But when I was working at the bank, I didn't have time for that anymore.

I was so busy.

So then they think that

this money is like a path for me to bring happiness to my family.

They don't realise that actually it’s taking me away from my family.

And then I would wake up on Saturdays and I'd see my dad watching the midday

kick off on Sky Sports.

And it made me so unhappy.

And it was just this.

But it's another one of those things

that you just kind of compartmentalise and you just, you hide away

the things that you losing and you focus on the things that you winning.

But, you know, I think the book, it captures it very well, the sort of descent

into unhappiness and also perhaps a sort of madness that came.

So what do you do?

I think there's this, but it's not just me.

Even though I come from a poor background, I think there's this,

that trading floor is a room full of people who to some degree

have traded their happiness for money and are trying to trade it back.

Yeah. And that's why you see them.

They go and they buy, you know, amazing new bike and they never ride it.

They buy a whole new set of skis.

They’re trying to buy back the happiness and the youth that they've traded away.

And it's a big thing I want to get across in the book is

the sadness of this space, you know.

That is a room full of very unhappy men and very wealthy, unhappy men.

And what does that mean?

That we've constructed our society in that way?

There are some, as I said earlier, fascinating characters in the book

that you worked with.

And I wonder if we could talk about a couple of them.

The first of them

is the man who sort of frames the book because he's there at the beginning

and he's there right at the end as well, which is Caleb,

could you tell us a little bit

about about Caleb and why he's such an incredible character?

Yes, I mean, Caleb was kind of...

Caleb was the guy who ran the trading game competition and

very smooth, charming, charismatic man.

He was the youngest ever

managing director at Citibank, which is like a really big deal.

And he sort of comes in, he’s this massive guy, larger than life.

And he recognised very quickly, Gary’s like really, really smart.

Let's get this guy in.

And of course, you know, I'm just like a little kid, basically.

And I see this guy like he's the super rich trader.

Like he's the guy.

I want to be like this guy.

And then he hires me, he brings me in, and

then very suddenly he leaves

and he sort of, he leaves.

Because he's, in a sense, he's like, lived the dream.

And another big theme of the book is,

do you leave? Can you leave?

Do people leave? And this guy does it.

And then that sort of,

you know, as it develops,

it turns out that this departure was not as simple as it seems.

And perhaps he had appeared to be able to leave, but he wasn't able to leave.

And they sort of, you know, I don't wanna give too much away.

But it raises questions essentially about

appearances.

This guy appeared so seductive and so complete,

and yet he was unable to leave despite being super rich.

And this mirrors, of course, my own journey, which my own

beginning of questioning, should you leave.

And of course, that raises bigger questions about really,

I think, the effect of money and the effects of greed and the effects of power

on the individual. And

I think we all face these questions on some level, you know,

we all pursue money and have questions about, you know,

should I work harder or should I spend more time with my family? But

he was my first ever boss and he was also my final boss.

He was not my boss the whole time.

And our relationship went on a journey, let's say, I don't want to give

too much away, but, you know, readers can experience what I experienced.

Yeah.

Because there is something almost mafia like in the sort of,

the threat of you not basically being able to as you say,

are you going to get paid is the question you keep asking the book.

Because if you leave, if you try to leave the job,

you're your bonus for those who don't understand

is not simply a big check that you get and that's it.

It's paid incrementally over a period of time.

So that means if you say I'm leaving the job, goodbye bonus.

Yeah.

So it's like, how do you get,

how do you actually get the money that you're supposed to get?

Yeah, I wanted to,

one thing I really wanted to do with this book.

I think, like I was quite lucky.

Like from a literary

perspective, you've got a nice opportunity because I grew up in East London,

not far from these skyscrapers, and then I work in this space,

and these two spaces physically are not that far apart.

from one another, but they're completely different worlds right.

And so you want to play with like the,

the contrast we go in, you know, we talk about waking up like

and having a shower with this little hand hose

from Argos that you plug into the taps

and then like going into these massive skyscrapers

and then working with these millionaires

and then going home to your, like, crowded house and this kind of thing. But

you know,

the opening scene of the book is basically me being threatened

by this character Caleb and it's very, it's very mafia esque, you know,

and when I was a kid, I come from a very poor background.

I grew up in a pretty rough area.

I was expelled from school for selling drugs.

You know,

I wouldn't say

I was a drug dealer, ever a criminal, but you know, these elements existed

around me in the street I grew up, you know.

There were drug dealers and there were criminals.

I grew up with these people.

And, you know, I did the right thing.

I studied hard.

I got a good job.

And you kind of think that you're you're going that way.

You're choosing another path. And then

I quickly became very senior at Citibank and then you suddenly see,

like, when you’re doing what they want you to do, everything's fine.

As soon as you start veering, suddenly,

these guys are acting just like the same way that drug dealers on the street act.

Right.

And what I wanted to do was,

you know, collapse that physical space and say, listen,

these people may look very different and they may, they may run your life

and they may have all the power.

But once you dig a bit beneath the surface, you know,

are they any better than us?

Are they any, you know, and, you know, my experience

of those two spaces was, you know,

they're basically the same, you know, and I think that is an empowering message,

you know,

to people from both sides of the coin, which is like, you know,

if you come from a poor background, don’t think these people are better than you

because they're not.

And if you come from a rich background, don't think you're

better than those people because that can get you in trouble.

You know, and I think that's very, very relevant in

this society we live in of increasing inequality.

You know, people who know the work I do outside of this book will know

this is something I'm very passionate about, I think it's a massive problem.

One of the fascinating characters in the book, is Billy.

He's quite an enigma.

But tell me a little bit about him and why he was so important.

So Billy was the only trader on my desk who didn't go to university.

And when I started working in 2008, he was already in his mid-to-late 40s.

He's from Liverpool, he's a Scouser.

He had a strong Scouse accent and he came from a very working class background.

He started working as a teenager on the cash desk at Halifax

and he's managed to work his way up over the course of like 30 years

to being senior trader at Citibank. And

when I turn up, he's had a rough couple of years.

He's not done very well and he basically hates everyone on the trading floor.

He thinks that they’re really posh, and people are like who's this guy?

Who's this dickhead basically, because he's not making any money.

But I obviously, because I see he's

from a sort of similar background to me.

I think like, this is a guy I want to make friends with.

And there's one scene really early in the book when some guy's on another

desk, he keep playing music, and he keeps saying “turn the music down.”

They keep turning it back on, and eventually he just pulls

the wires of the speakers through the desk and just snips them.

And then the guys come “What, what’s going on!?”

And then I was like, this is the guy I wanna hang out with.

But suddenly in the 2008

crisis, this guy just makes an absolute unbelievable fortune.

And it turns out he's been sitting there

just betting that the world's going to blow up for years.

And we formed a very close bond

and he sort of takes me under his wing and

he kind of becomes, I guess, a bit of a spiritual guru

to me in a way, and also a trading guy, because he's a very, very good trader.

And after I have my first big loss,

which is into my second year as a trader,

I instinctively went back to the textbooks.

I start bringing my textbooks into the office and I'm sitting next

to Billy by this point, I'm like Billy's junior, and

I'm reading the textbooks every day.

After like the second or third day, Billy just can't take it anymore.

Just slaps the textbooks out of my hand straight into the bin.

He’s like “What the fuck are you doing?

You're not a kid anymore.

You're not going to find out the key to the world in those textbooks.

If you want to know what's happening in the world,

if you wanna know what's happening in the economy,

go home and ask your mum what's happening in her economy.

Ask your friends, ask friend’s mums.

Walk down the high street and look at what's happening.

The shops are closing down, you know,

look at the homeless people.

Is there more or less of them?

You know, look at what’s being advertised on the tube.

And he basically says to me, you know, if you want to understand the economy,

the time comes, you have to go out and look at the fucking economy.

You can't just read about it in books.

And that was a big moment for me where it sort of, and in a sense is

sort of the catalyst for everything that's happened since,

which is my willingness to sort of step out of the theory and into the world

and that’s what propels me into becoming the very successful trader I became.

Yeah, because you had a good sense, as you say, of what was actually happening

so that after that crash that you mentioned, where Billy makes

a lot of money, everyone's expecting for things to return to normal.

Yeah.

But your sense told you it's not.

It's not going to return to normal. It's broken.

Interest rates are going to stay low.

Everything's going to stay down here.

And that was how you made your millions, you know, as a trader,

because you kept betting against what everybody else was expecting.

We were talking about this.

If the moral deviousness is something like Wolf of Wall Street, obviously

looking back now, making huge amounts of money when you're doing it.

But wealth inequality, as you say, that's what you could see.

How did it feel writing about that?

And sort of now, obviously, you’re an activist in terms of economics,

but how does it sort of square with you sort of having made that money

basically off the back of a broken economy?

Yeah, There's this one scene in the book which I think is quite good to say myself,

which is where I kind of have this penny drop moment.

I finally realised, this is it.

This is what's going to happen, which is you know,

I start to realise like, it's 2011, which is the year of the sovereign debt crisis.

So like all of the big governments in Europe basically collapsed financially and

I start to see before this has happened,

like these governments are going to go bankrupt

and I start to see the similarity between them

and my friends, and my friends families

start losing their houses, going into debt.

And I start thinking, okay, well,

almost all the ordinary people are losing their assets,

going into debt, governments are losing their assets, are going into debt.

Where's it going?

And then, you know, I'm surrounded by these millionaires.

Okay, what we have here is, you know, there's a shift of power.

There's a shift of ownership, there's a shift of wealth.

It's being drained out of the middle class, out of governments, into the rich.

What the rich going to do with that?

They're going to buy more assets, which means it's going to accelerate,

which means that the middle class will become completely impoverished.

There'll be an explosion in poverty in this country.

Governments will be bankrupted.

It's going to you know, it's going to cause

basically the collapse of Western society.

And then it's, there's this penny drop, it’s like, I know what I’ve got to do.

I've got to buy green Eurodollars.

You look back and you're like, you know, here is a very talented young kid.

He's obviously smart.

He's figured out a really important thing and his instinct is: monetise.

And that is the person that I was trained to be.

That was my job.

You know what I mean? So it's sort of,

I think it's,

when I look back I don't think about it morally.

I'm you know, I'm a mathematician in my heart.

I think, listen, this is the society we've built.

You know, there are people whose job it is to manage

our economy and they get paid 50 grand a year.

And there's people

whose job it is to bet on our economy, and they get paid £2 million a year.

Right.

If that is how you can structure economy, what do you think is going to happen?

You know, and I've walked away now from that money

and now I sort of try to prevent, you know, economic collapse.

I’m not doing the best job of it so far. But I'm still going for it.

You know, I'm not out here trying to be Mahatma Gandhi.

I'm not a moral philosopher.

What I wanted to do with this book, I didn't want to make any moral judgments.

You know, it's a bit like, have you read Candide by Voltaire?

I think the most powerful way

to show people how broken our system is not for me to tell them it's broken.

It's for me to take them with me, take them to the places I've been,

take them to the top of the mountain and show them the tsunami that's coming,

you know, and people can make their own judgments

about whether it's right, whether it's wrong.

People who are interested can go and look at the work that I do now.

They can look at my YouTube channel

and I think it's pretty clear where I stand on it.

But, you know, I was a young kid.

My job was to bet on the economy.

And that's what I did.

And it's, you know, it's not just me, you know, the best paid

10,000 economists in the world.

All traders, all traders, they don't work for your governments. So

that's the way the world is I'm afraid.

I didn't make it that way.