Okay guys welcome back to Gary’s Economics.

Today

we are going to do a final channel

update before I go on holiday.

Okay I'm talking to you today on the 25th of June.

We won't put this video out until much later.

In the middle of the start

of a beautiful London heatwave.

I am about to

fly off to Japan in a few days to finally do

this long cycle I've wanted to do for ages.

so I thought it'd be a nice time

to just look back a little bit on what has been

a mad year for me and for the channel

and for the world and talk a little bit

about what we've achieved

and what we're going to do in the future.

So the first thing to say is,

of course, that this year has been basically

just a massive, massive year for growth on the channel.

At the moment I'm shooting this, we are

about 275,000 subs on YouTube.

A year ago that was something like 80,000.

We've had massive growth on Instagram, on TikTok.

We've started to really cut through

quite a lot, basically.

And that's

thanks to a lot of your support sharing the videos.

Thanks to a lot of hard work

from the team that we've put together.

And yes, something to be proud of,

in terms of how we're affecting

the conversation.

You know, my aim

with this

channel has always been basically

to build the bridge between

inequality and the economy.

I think that

almost everybody agrees

that high levels of inequality are a bad thing,

but I think people have

believed or been kind of fooled

into believing for a long time that

high levels of inequality

are kind of

a necessary sacrifice,

kind of the price you pay for a good economy

in a capitalist society.

But those of you who know my history will know

I made a lot of money basically

betting that high inequality

will destroy the economy in the long term.

And what I really want to do

is get people to see

the things that are happening

in the real economy, in their real lives.

Increased difficulty with

buying houses,

in many cases, just paying the rent, buying food

and connect them

with the really rapidly

growing inequality we're seeing in society.

I think that if we can get people

to recognise that

the reason that they or their kids

or their grandkids are struggling

economically is because of growing inequality,

and that problem will get worse and worse,

that we can start to take action on it. And,

we definitely have been making progress on that.

This year, I brought in for the first time

a couple of professionals.

Professional videographer,

professional channel manager

to help me manage the growth of the channel

during the book release. And,

in order to do that,

we went and got some funding from like a big

charitable foundation here in London.

They do a lot of work on inequality.

That's why they funded us.

And, they've been sort of surveying people,

and they've found there's been a massive increase in

people who think that the reason

the economy is bad is because of

growing inequality, basically. And,

you know, when I heard that,

I was really proud because that's

partly, I think because of this channel.

And I think that's partly

because of the work that we do here.

So we're getting out there, we're reaching people,

we're still not reaching enough people.

I think still, most people in the country don't realise

growing inequality is the reason for growing poverty,

for growing difficulties in their lives.

But we are making progress.

I watch a lot of news in the morning

because I want to see what people are being told,

and I watch the most basic commonplace news in the UK.

I watch BBC news and Sky news.

And I was watching

BBC radio five live

while I was eating breakfast the other day and,

they were interviewing a Green candidate.

We mentioned on another video

that the Greens have basically adopted

our policies of a wealth tax.

And I was watching the interviews and

nobody was talking about wealth inequality,

and it was kind of making me think like,

what more do we have to do to really get this issue

really into the discussion

so that mainstream politicians have to talk about it.

So it has to be mentioned.

And exactly when I,

was thinking

that I was eating my porridge, there was a caller,

a lady called Helen from Burnley called in and,

she basically said, you know,

are you guys aware of how much money

has being given out

during Covid, the government deficit,

since Covid is £700 billion

and are you aware of where that money's ended up?

Whether it's ended up with the richest people,

whether it's increased inequality?

Because what I'm seeing is

a massive increase in the wealth

of billionaires and millionaires.

And, I don't think people are talking about it.

People aren’t doing anything about it. And,

it was immediately obvious

because nobody else really talks about these issues

and because of the language

she was using that she got that information

from this channel. And,

you know, I know that's a one off instance,

but it was quite emotional for me to see that we’re

starting to cut through, we’re stating

to affect the conversation.

And I think that's,

that's something we can all be proud of.

It's part of the conversation now.

But at the same time, realistically,

it's not a central enough part.

I think we're starting to make cuts

throughs with people on the street,

but we're seeing a lot of other problems coming in.

The rhetoric that the problems are primarily

caused by immigration

is growing and growing and growing.

Partly because of the, you know, the resurgence

in the return of Nigel Farage.

His voice is way, way, way louder than mine.

And,

because this inequality problem is not being fixed, it

inevitable that the economic problems

and the living standards

problems will keep getting worse

and people will become very dissatisfied

with the incoming Labour government.

They'll become very dissatisfied with the status quo.

They’ll want change,

and they'll be looking for an alternative. And,

at this point in time,

when you look at the loudness of ‘the

problem is immigration’ versus

the loudness of ‘the problem is inequality’,

it's really hard to see them not winning.

And, I want to be really clear when I say this.

You know, I'm not saying that immigration doesn't

cause economic problems for certain groups of people,

you know. In fact, I think it probably does.

I think the problem you have here

is that it is going to drown out this narrative.

And if we don't win this narrative, then

the economy will continue to collapse, basically.

That's the problem on one side.

On the other side,

we have an incoming Labour government,

who are advised by a group of mainstream economists

and journalists

who are super, super resistant to taxation.

There was a tweet by a guy, what was his name?

Dan Neidle recently, which said,

if taxing wealth is so easy, why doesn't anybody do it?

And he showed that, you know, across the world,

wealth taxation is quite low.

And, I thought that was quite funny because, you know,

what we have at the moment is a situation

where basically across the Western world,

living standards are falling.

And it's pretty clear that what is being done

across the Western world is

a kind of a unanimous shared economic opinion

being driven by these

relatively well-paid economists.

And it's not working. It's not working.

And we need to do something different.

But unfortunately, I think what we have

is a lot of relatively well-paid

economists and academics and politicians

who have decent salaries

and decent houses and mortgages to pay

that just don't want to pay any more tax, basically.

And even though I'm quite explicit,

I'm not trying to tax them, I'm

trying to tax the very rich.

I think they're just very instinctively conservative,

very instinctively protective.

I continue to believe that

we're not going to get change

delivered to us from well-paid people,

from the richest people in society.

You know, I would like this sort of...

this well-paid middle class

who are not the sort of asset, super rich

to support us,

because I would like them to realise that

if things keep going

the way they're going, living standards will collapse.

And we'll keep

campaigning them,

we'll keep lobbying the Labour Party,

we’ll keep trying to build support.

But I really don't think we'll win

unless we have ordinary people demanding it.

So I'm going to keep doing it.

And, we're going to keep pushing it

and hopefully we’ll make it.

But for the moment, I'm going on holiday.

For me personally, it's been an absolutely crazy year.

I wrote a whole book, which, came out in March,

The Trading Game.

I've talked about it a lot on the channel.

It was a Sunday Times

number one best seller for two weeks.

It was in the top ten for eight or nine weeks.

I had press

all over the world, loads of press in this country.

It's blown up

this channel massively.

I've been getting recognised in the street

a lot, in the gym, in Lidl, all over the place.

And that's great.

It was always part of the plan

to, sort of, use my face and use my name.

But it's been a lot, basically. It's been a lot.

I think people who only watch the videos

probably don't realise that I'm also

doing a ton of interviews

for all different press all over the world,

and speaking to people

about how we can sort of grow this movement,

and also like

thinking all the time about

what are the ways that we can communicate

to push this message out there.

And, you know, you write a book,

I was published by Penguin, you know,

you get a massive amount of support,

like I had basically a full time

publicist working with me.

She was amazing.

She has to be like,

take a lot of the credit for

the growth of this channel.

But at the end of the day, she's trying to sell books.

She's not trying to push a political message,

you know, and,

I obviously say,

you know,

I want to try to push this

political message,

but I'm always thinking,

how can we use this publicity and to help grow

these ideas?

And, it's a lot of work.

It’s been a lot of work creatively.

I'm always thinking about new ways

we can push things creatively. And,

it's just been hard basically, it's exhausting.

I'm not the kind of person who

loves being recognised in the street.

I don't want to tell people

not to say hi to me in the street

because everyone's really, really nice

and I really appreciate everybody's support.

But it's just weird. It's just I'm no used to it.

I'll get recognised like seven, eight times a day now,

and it's just a bit scary.

And, you know, like,

weird things happen,

like Mail on Sunday did a massive, like,

two page hit piece on me.

I've got friends from Citibank forwarding

mails from, like,

FT reporters asking if there's any dirt,

any dirt on Gary Stevenson

which is stressful and stuff.

You have to sort of,

it’s new for me, stuff you have to deal with.

But really more than anything,

it's just stressful sort of seeing...

Seeing how difficult it's

going to be to win this fight.

I think we've got a long way to go

before we get accepted by these sort of

well-paid, fancy posh

economists who don't like the idea of more taxes.

We've had the big boost from the book now.

I need to think about

how can we keep growing it, as well as

how can we keep making content?

And, yeah,

basically the last month or two,

I've been pretty exhausted, and,

I've decided to take a bit of time off.

Go back to Japan, where I lived for two years,

do this big cycle I want to do.

Just basically tear away

and try and sort of refresh myself creatively,

which means that we're pre-recording loads.

I don't think this will go out

until maybe the end of July, maybe even into August,

but we're trying to pre-record loads

so that we don't leave a big gap.

But we might end up doing a gap.

Depends sort of what I need personally.

But I've been thinking about what we're going to do

when we come back.

How we are going to manage the channel.

This year we managed to get, as I've said,

a little bit of external funding on the channel,

and that's basically paid

the wages of my videographer,

my manager, and we’ve got another guy doing subtitling.

We had somebody help us

with just the branding of the channel a little bit.

But it's tricky,

external funding is tricky because we had,

obviously we had the election called early,

and they didn’t want me to do any political videos.

So, I basically just funded some videos myself.

And also the funding will run out at some point

and we sort of have to decide what to do.

At the moment,

the channel is making just kind of roughly enough

from YouTube revenue

to pay for the staff that we've got.

But I think going forward,

if it's going to be really a thing,

I'm probably going to need more support,

a bit more creative support,

a bit more help

by structuring the videos,

managing the videos, managing the YouTube.

I look at

how much we’ve grown

because we’ve had a publicist from Penguin,

and I do think if we had some real

PR support on the channel, it could be really bigger.

So,

I've been thinking for a while about whether we should

basically open up for donations

so that we can hire more staff, and,

I think I'm going to do that.

So what I'm planning at the moment is to

start a not for profit company

so that anyone who donates, can know

for sure that the money is not going to me

and basically open a Patreon,

see if we get some money in,

and then maybe just build up a little pot of cash

so that I can get the support that I need.

I know that with people that say, well,

you're a millionaire, Gary you should fund it, but,

I'm a millionaire that spends most of my time

working for free on a YouTube channel.

So, I don't really

want to start funding it myself as well,

because, I'm already working for free.

I've worked on it for free for a long time, and,

I don’t think it’s going to work basically,

if we're going to have to make it as big as we need,

we're going to need staff.

And I think if we're going to really, really grow,

we're going to need more people. And,

I'm not going to be able to keep funding it myself.

I have funded up till now.

But if it's going to go,

we're going to need a bit more money.

So I think I'm going to open a Patreon.

I'm not going to say to anybody, you need to donate.

You need to donate.

I'm going to open it,

see what we get,

and if we get enough money,

we can hopefully use that to make a few more videos,

mix up a little bit the creative output,

make some longer videos,

get some stuff with animations in.

But yeah, I think that's what we're going to have to do

because it's just basically

getting too big for me to manage it.

I want to be able to like, totally split

the finances off.

Really what I want to get is the finances separate.

So I can just focus on the creative side

and not have to worry about having to fund it as well.

So we'll do that.

I'll try and get that sorted,

hopefully before I’m back.

But first and foremost,

I'm going to take a little break, go and chill out.

Try and come back with some good,

creative stuff because,

one video

a week on top of all of these mental interviews

is quite a lot.

And sometimes I feel a little bit creatively burnt out.

But yeah, I'm not going to stop.

I think the way that this channel

is going to go,

I'm probably always going to have to

take bits of time out to just escape the pressure

and the constant creative churn,

because it's hard to do something

good, new, creative once a week.

But, I'll keep doing it.

I'll keep doing that at a pace that works for me.

We'll open for funding, but we won't paywall

any of the content.

We'll just see what we get

and whether that means we can grow

more quickly and get

get more staff and get more support.

If you do choose to donate,

we'll really appreciate that.

But for now,

thank you very much for all of your support,

whether that's in the last 2 or 3 months,

whether that's in the last 3 or 4 years.

Thanks for your supporting on the channel.

I really, truly believe if we don't manage

to get some action on this rapidly

growing inequality, that it will have

a devastating impact on ordinary people.

But I think we can. I think we can do it.

I think if you see the growth of this channel

this year, it shows that demand is there.

I'll do my best to try to get the strategy right.

If we get a bit of funding,

then I'll try and get some experts in who are not

economists trying to run a YouTube channel on the side.

But we'll keep growing.

We're going to get opportunities here and

people are supporting it,

and, I'll keep fighting for it

if you keep fighting for it,

but maybe not for the next couple of months.

Have a good summer. And,

good luck.

Thank you.