Finally, Gary Stevenson Has Been Found Out - Konstantin Kisin

"The rise and fall of Gary's economics." Anyone who knows me will tell you that I do not believe in making politics personal. I believe that the failure to treat our political opponents as human first and wrong second is one of the great challenges of our time. The power of atomizing technology has transformed the public debate into a public shouting match. Why? It's not just that the internet is given everyone a voice. It's that it is given a voice to people who never have to sit in the same room. Before the age of YouTube and social media, political and media opponents didn't have the option of shit talking each other from the safety of their podcast studios. They had to sit across from each other in TV green rooms and then sit together in one room and at least pretend to be talking to each other. Having done a fair bit of media in my time, I can tell you that meeting the people you're about to debate in the green room beforehand is an important part of the process. It might be that the extent of what you can discuss without an argument erupting is limited to the weather because it's 2026 and we can't seem to agree on what a woman is. But still, you're forced to be civil. The effect of this you know from your own experience. The way you react to someone accidentally cutting you up in traffic is far less restrained than your response to someone accidentally bumping into you on the street. The action is the same, but the level of offense both taken and expressed is not. Why? Reassured by the physical distance and feeling of safety it provides, we feel comfortable to engage in more confrontational behaviour. This difference has been recorded in study after study. Not that you need a study to understand this. The great American philosopher and former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson said it best when he said, "Social media has made you all too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face." This is why whenever I've had disagreements with other people, I've always tried to engage with them in person. We did this with Jimmy the Giant, a new left content creator who made a video calling me a grifter and eventually apologised and took it down after we had a rather robust discussion in our studio. We did this with Dave Smith over Israel with Peter Hitchens over Ukraine. We just did it in a blockbuster upcoming interview with Tony Blair spokesman Alistair Campbell. I always tried to criticise people's ideas, not them personally, because I know that physical separation is corrosive to public debate. Not only do we feel safe and far from the people with whom we disagree, but there is now a giant audience which is not in the room who are watching all the drama. Drama, remember, is above all a performance. And in today's world, you don't have to play to the audience. You just have to play to your audience. And your audience doesn't want you to self-modulate. They want you to ramp it up to 11. A significant portion of the content creator space has realised this, which is why we're living in the age of the character. Andrew Tate is the heel, a well-known character in combat sports from which he hails. Candace Owens is their entertaining conspiracy-loon character. And Gary Stevenson is the articular and courageous champion of the downtrodden character. It's important not to confuse actual articular and courageous champions of the downtrodden with the character. You can help poor people and you can want to help poor people. They're not the same. The problem with Gary Stevenson is not him as a person. I'm sure he's a perfectly nice guy. It's just that he doesn't understand basic economic concepts. Daniel recently once spent several minutes trying and failing to get Gary to understand the difference between assets and income. This clip is really worth listening to and fall even though it feels dry and technical. Just watch Gary's brain short-circuit repeatedly as he ironically complains about how much tax he paid when he was making millions as a sitting-group trader. Listen, I want my tits off and I paid it was 50% top-rated tax. 50% top-rated tax plus national insurance, 60% to a million yen. To bring my family out of poverty. At the same time, the Duke of Westminster inherited £10 billion and paid nothing do you think that's fair? That's not true. Okay, why's it not true? Because the Duke of Westminster is one of the highest taxpayers in the country. So they pay 0.6% per year. So IP is 60% and this guy pays 0.6%. Apples with apples. Inheritance tax is 40% across the course of your life if a person who owns a trust for 70 years, then 6% times 7 would be 42. So they actually pay more. So he pays 0.6% a year. Pro-rightly, 0.6% a year. But that would be the same as what percent did I pay per year? No, no, no, but that's 60% total. So you're saying I pay what 60% of a 0.6? No, no, no, no. 100 times the tax rate. You're not comparing apples with apples. You're not, you're talking about income versus the transfer of an estate. So why is it? Because the Duke of Westminster, because we work. 10 billion pounds. Just you're comparing your income versus the amount he inherited, which is not a fair thing. That's what it's about. Because that's his income. He inheritance is not income. So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So if I get given 10 billion pounds, I'll have pay the tax. But if I work for 10 billion pounds, if they're 60%. Well, if you inherit-- This is the tax system that you want. You will end up in a system where the kids of the rich world and everything. Just saying you're, that's what I'm saying. Winston Churchill famously described his political opponents as modest men with much to be modest about. Gary has no such problem. What he lacks in expertise, he more than makes up in the complete absence of modesty. He was, after all, the best trader in the world, according to one Gary Stevenson. A recent article in FT suggests that, to put him mildly, some of his colleagues didn't quite see it that way. Gary has now moved on from his success in the world of finance to being one of the world's leading experts on inequality, a title given to him by, well, himself. He appears to have confused his online fame with knowing things. But Gary is a political campaign and not an expert. He's the greater tumberg of tax. There's no denying he has built up a large audience. That makes him an expert in one thing and one thing only, building up a large audience. And it's true, you can build up a large audience by making good arguments about important issues and offering genuine insight. But you can also do it by pandering to people's anger and economic illiteracy. In the words of the great American economist Thomas Sol, "When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear." Gary has done fantastically well out of advocating policies that would make this country poorer. On the basis of false claims about the source of the problem, he so passionately wants to address. This was described in extensive detail in a well-referenced post by tax expert Dan Needle, who appeared in Gary's recent documentary. Needle sums up his breakdown by saying, Gary Stephenson clearly cares deeply about inequality and passionately wants a wealth tax. But he's uninterested in the detail of either the problem or his solution. He exaggerates his expertise and his research is sloppy. Given the size of his audience, that's a shame. Even the Guardian agrees publishing a scathing review of the documentary. It's the Guardian, so they still think a wealth tax is a brilliant idea. But even they are shocked by how unpissuous of his arguments are when challenged properly. And how lost he appears when he comes up against the most basic counter-arguments to his well-rehearsed talking points. Gary thinks he's Robin Hood, the man who took from the rich and gave to the poor. There's only one problem with all of this. Robin Hood didn't take from the rich. He took from the sheriff of Nottingham, who was pay attention now, a tax collector and debt enforcer taxing ordinary citizens to within an inch of their lives. Robin Hood is not a story about taking from the rich and giving to the poor. It's a story about resisting a tax regime that is starting to take the piss. The weird thing is, Gary knows what Britain's actual problem is. In fact, he summed it up very well in that clip we played you with Daniel Priestly when he kept complaining about having to pay 50 and 60% of tax on his earnings. Our problem is not that the rich are doing well. It's that the country is doing badly. We have the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world. Thanks to the lunacy of net zero, which is both destroyed our manufacturing and made us uncompetitive in the world of AI where most future growth is going to come from. We've made hiring people expensive by raising national insurance and a huge risk by introducing the employment rights bills day one sick pay provision. And we've chased out both successful innovators like the founder of Revolute Nick Stronsky and the young talent that could replace him in the future by making Britain a terrible place to run a business. Instead of generating enough wealth for everyone to do better, we keep raising taxes. The tax burden is now the highest on record in an attempt to maintain the illusion that we're still a wealthy country. We're not. We're currently somewhere between 25th and 29th in GDP per capita in the world and are projected to be overtaken on living standards by Poland. That's not my claim. It's key as standards. Look, I'm not a billionaire. I don't oppose wealth taxes because I'm going to have to pay them. It's just a terrible idea that isn't about helping anyone. It's about envy. I was born in the Soviet Union. I've seen what happens when feeding the green eyed monster becomes the basis of government policy. And so, wishing Gary no ill will, I have to confess a profound sense of relief at the complete implosion of his credibility. Not because I enjoy watching anyone fail, but because bad ideas are dangerous, precisely because they are appealing to our worst instinct. Those of us who comment on these things in public have a duty to tell the truth, not pander to them. If you enjoy these videos, remember that they're released as articles on my substack, days, weeks, sometimes months ahead of time. So head on over to www.constantincision.com right now and subscribe. That's ConstantineKissin.com and go ahead and subscribe right now. The news doesn't just tell you what's happening. It often tells you what to think is happening. And these days the biggest red flag isn't what said, it's what gets left out. That's why I use ground news. It's the only app that compares how the same story is covered across the political spectrum and show you what whole audiences are not being told. The blind spot feed is one of my favorite features. Every day it flags upwards of 20 stories that are being ignored either by the left or the right. Follow along at ground.news/trigonometry. Like this, a new study from UC San Diego found that climate change cost almost twice as much as we thought, because earlier estimates left out damage to the oceans. That's a pretty big update, and yet no coverage. Literally zero came from right leaning outlets. Or this, a recent Gallup poll found trust in the media has hit a record low with just 28% of Americans saying they trust newspapers radio and TV to report the news accurately and fairly. 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