Gary Stevenson: The People's Economist

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Science, Leisure, Social Sciences, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2025

⏱️ 232 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Matt and Chris take a look at one of the UK’s most compelling economic crusaders: Gary Stevenson, aka Gary’s Economics. A millionaire trader turned YouTube firebrand, Gary’s message is simple and potent: wealth inequality is spiralling, the ultra-rich are hoarding everything, and economists and politicians are either complicit or clueless.

Gary’s story has all the trappings of a mythic arc: from humble East London roots to Citibank’s trading floor, where he made millions betting against the poor during the financial crisis. Now he claims the system is so broken that only someone like him, working class and mathematically gifted, someone who entered the high-power world of financial trading and took on the system, could see it. As Gary puts it, a sort of economic Copernicus, who brought a revolutionary message that was dismissed by a stultifying orthodoxy.

With his righteous critique comes a hefty dose of swagger, whether it is in considering himself like a Usain Bolt of trading or in the frequent laments about how exhausting it is to be a lone voice of truth facing bad-faith hit pieces. Gary straddles an odd tension: self-effacing underdog one moment, saviour-on-a-soapbox the next. He rails against academia, dismisses journalists as clickbait merchants, and urges people not to heed critics, due to their ulterior motives.

Our hosts explore the contradictions of a millionaire revolutionary who's not even bothered but also a bit miffed the phone isn’t ringing; a tireless advocate for the poor but also someone who seems to frequently drop in his elite credentials and just how rich he is.

So strap in for a deep dive into charisma, critique, and class warfare economics. Is Gary the economic truth-teller we need, or a populist guru-in-the-making with revolutionary zeal and a finely tuned YouTube brand?

Sources

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast,
0:29.0	where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer,
0:32.9	and we try to understand what they're talking about.
0:35.6	I'm Matt Brown, the psychologist from Australia.
0:38.0	With me is Chris Kavanaugh, the anthropologist from Japan, formerly Northern Ireland.
0:43.9	And we're going to decode a potential guru today.
0:46.9	Hey, Chris.
0:48.1	That's always what we do, Matt.
0:50.3	That's nothing new.
0:51.8	That's what we exist to do. We service the discourse by producing a podcast where we decode people who may or may not fit the secular guru template. Is that not what we're here for? That's what we're here for. That's what we signed up for. Yeah. Yeah, we do other things. We do other things. We, we, we, we, we, we, we monitor the
1:16.9	gurus we've already decoded in the discourse. That's something that doesn't sound great.
1:23.9	You know, I, I did see Matt that someone on our Patreon, they were bored and they used a like analytical tool for videos to quantify the amount of movement in it.
1:37.0	And they compared my amount of movement with your amount of movement for some, you know, random segment of video.
1:43.9	And I believe the analytics
1:46.4	proved that you move 75% more than me. Or it was something like that. It was a ridiculous amount
1:54.0	more. So quantifiable proof now, Matt, that you cannot sit still. I see. I see. Okay. So it's been quantified.
2:02.7	Yeah, that's it.
2:03.5	You can't be numbers.
2:06.0	I'm sorry, Chris.
2:07.2	I add to this people who are making these metrics.
2:10.4	I plead guilty.
2:11.5	I'm sorry.
	...

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