MINDSET OF THE RICH

Unify - Hate Divides Us

The games and strategy of rich people. What I learnt at Citibank

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT BELOW

This is the first video I’ve seen of this guy. His channel is at https://www.youtube.com/@garyseconomics/videos. This video seems pretty good, although I don’t think I’d call Trump a conservative. Maybe I’m wrong. I think he’s probably right about the powerful rich being game-players who say whatever they think will get them what they want, which is mainly more wealth and power. I haven’t seen any of his other videos yet, but I plan to check out at least one more. I’m hoping he’s wrong about Trump and that Trump will bring needed changes. If not, I’m hopeful that at least RFK Jr will improve healthcare. Also, I hope RFK Jr will run for the presidency in 2028, if he’s really a populist.

BOOK ABOUT CITIBANK

We are going to talk about truth, lies and games. Okay, so today is the thirtieth 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 ten £, 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 three or four weeks, every single day, I would have two or three or four meetings with senior management at Citibank. And at the time, I was living in Tokyo, working in Tokyo, in Japan.

MANAGEMENT TACTICS

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 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 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 at 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.

RICH V. ORDINARY PEOPLE

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?

TRUMP & MUSK

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 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-immigration and yet enormously increased the number of legal immigration 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.

WHAT DO THEY WANT?

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.

GAME MINDSET

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 go 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, 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 it's 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 friend's 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 not, 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 the way that it is.

DESIRE CAN SHAPE BELIEF

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 4 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 trades 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 inconsistent 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.

AVOID THE GAMES

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 it to happen to us.

DON'T HATE, BUT UNIFY

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 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. ... 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.