Gary Stevenson: The Waterstones Interview

Gary, welcome to Waterstones, thanks for having me. We are right at the top of our building which has a very impressive view of the London skyline and if you turn your head to the left you can see some of those big buildings. You'd really have to shake your head, but a lot of those big city buildings that appear in your book The Trading Game. I thought we should probably start with that title first because the trading game was a real game, could you explain it briefly? what the trading game was and also why it was really the only route for you into trading.

Yeah, so this trading game was a competition run at universities by City Bank, the big American bank, in the early 2000s, I don't know when. I'm pretty sure they stopped running it now but I don't know when they stopped running it and it's basically a card game like a gambling card game so I guess a bit like poker but it's designed to emulate the way that is negotiated. Works in financial markets um and I heard about this game when I was an LSC student in 2006 at the end of 2006 um that was my second year at LC London School of Economics, so the London School of Economics for those who don't know is essentially very prestigious. . a finance school nowadays people go there to try to become bankers and I was there since 2005.

I was studying mathematics and economics and I naively thought that you go to university, you study very hard, you get good grades. a good job and, um, I was rudely woken up, let's say what's described in the book, basically, um, you know, my first year was pretty normal, I studied, I did my exams and then I showed up for the second year and basically everyone in LC were gone. completely crazy, they had become just obsessed with trading and not just the Investment Bank and the way it manifested was basically everyone was talking in these three letter acronyms cdss cdos NBS m& and I had no idea what any of this I meant and one of my friends told me that second year is an internship year and the way you get an internship is the only way to get a job and the only way to get an internship is to apply to 30 banks and you.

I have to send them your CV and cover that and that's when I realized that all these guys LC has a lot of very rich students. That's when I realized that a lot of these guys had basically been preparing this cover letter since they were like, I don't know six years old, they all would have liked to have been President of the Junior United Nations or to have trekked through the Sahara Desert with charity or having played the OBO at the Royal Albert Hall and I was like you. I know when I was a teenager I worked at DFS, which is a sofa store in Beckton next to a sewer.

Work fluffing pillows and trying to turn me into a Grime MC. This is my type and I thought this probably wouldn't look good on a cover, so it was quite depressing for me, you know, because, like you, I was a very good student, I had very good grades and it's okay, I didn't study that much, but you know, I thought if you do it. Well, in your exams you'll get a good job and I found out that, you know, it doesn't really work like that, but luckily this boy from Grimsby from the previous year, who I'd never met before, turned up in the library one day and He said, "You know City Bank High." One year as a trader, do this card game and it's basically like a math game.

He just briefly described the game to me and, um, I entered that game, won, and became a tra. he became a City Bank merchant and that is the origin of this book. It must be very strange to remember that moment as you say because your path to lsse was even unconventional and even more unconventional to find yourself as a trader in City. Bank, but that moment of luck, I guess, that that game exists, especially if it doesn't exist now, you have to feel like, I don't know, do you believe in destiny or do you feel like it was always meant to happen?

Or do you just feel very lucky? I think when you sit back and look back now it's easy to talk about it as fate um and you know you know I was also expelled from school when I was 16. in the book and it's nice that he could have ended up with a criminal record that he didn't have and would never have had if he had, yeah, um, but at the same time I think he should somehow try to be fair to young Gary. Young Gary was crazy like young Gary. You've read the book like it's incredibly competitive, and I suspect that if this random trapdoor hadn't opened, I would have discovered that I would have found the window open in the back. somewhere because you know, I mean, you've read the book and that's why I wrote it, obviously that was me, but I think I'm a little calmer now, but um, he, he wouldn't, he wasn't the type of person.

That worked very, very hard, but he was the kind of guy that makes it happen because you know, I don't think it's a coincidence that the same guy who found this unorthodox route to the bank three years later was the best trader in the world. . on that bench, you know, I recognize that there was, if you come from where I come from, you need luck and skill, you know you definitely need both, but you know it wasn't all luck, it was a little complicated. There, which helped me understand it, it's really interesting to hear you talk about Gary as almost like a character in a book, the book is really engaging to read and it moves at an incredible pace and there are fantastic characters that we meet through it.

But was this the first? I guess I wonder what his approach was in writing the book, presumably the first book he ever wrote, and I wonder how he approached telling his own story and if there was any kind of influence on the way he He sat down to read. to write that, I never thought about writing, you know, I studied mathematics and economics, you know, my sister studied creative writing, so it's like she's the creative one. I'm the numbers guy and um I never thought about writing a book um I started writing articles about economics um back in 2020, a literary agent called me and was like have you ever thought about writing a book and I was like That sounds like a lot of work, man, and um, but as soon as he said I got off the phone and I had a very clear image in my head of what I would write if I wrote something.

I wanted to write a first-person experiential emotional account of what it's really like. being on the trading floor because I can't watch Wolf of Wall Street to be honest, I can't watch it like I've seen it it's too glorified it's too much there are these stereotypes of traders and but I wanted you to really get to know these real people and you know, I worked with some terrible people, but for the most part I didn't work with anyone who was irredeemably evil. You know, these are real people, they're complex characters, they come into space for a reason and what.

I really wanted to capture the madness but also the sadness of the space, so I really wanted to go back to when I was writing it and you know, this is the first time I've done any kind of creative writing. relive it really go back to that space really inhabit that space live it again and you know, I think really for me it was like when I went through it I wasn't very well supported and I was quite alone and it felt like I was going through this again with a older me and younger me, kind of encouraging him to talk a little bit about how he was feeling, you know a little bit.

Yeah, so, yeah, that's how I wrote it, really trying to live it up. It's very interesting that you mentioned the W of Wall Street because I think some people will obviously equate the two things. I have a hard time watching that movie too because it seems like, when you say glorification and celebration, it's almost too entertaining as a movie, it's too clever. because it's morally dubious, but you look at the world you were working in, as you say, with rather naïve eyes when you enter it. In fact, I think a lot of your previous success had to do with your naivety and your clearly a lovely young man, when you came in you were doing things like drinking coffees and doing that kind of intern stuff, but you really applied yourself to it, which which meant they wanted you to come back and work for them.

Was there a way? where, as you say, you were being a little nicer to your younger self and you were impressed with how hard you worked to get that foot in the door and make the most of that opportunity. God knows he couldn't do it now. back I look back and I see how I think, well I mean you've read the book to the end so you'll know so when I came in I was that kind of id and I know it's not just me kids because there's a lot of kids . so where where I'm from they'll make it happen they'll find a way, you know, no matter what it takes, they'll make it work and like there's a story at the beginning of the book that's when you know I'm super super, I've been there, it's my internship, a week-long internship and you know I work hard at this week-long internship, you know, I really try to impress everyone and then on the last day, The boss says, Okay, I'm going to buy burgers for the whole floor. , you have to go and take orders from everyone and bring everyone's burgers to the floor and I'm like you know, yeah, okay, and I act cool because I'm thinking how I'm going to do that and then when I come back, you know, man, I made it.

I bring like 150 burgers to the trading floor somehow and then I'm knackered and everyone's like. about something like that and everyone laughs at me and then I'm young and I say I don't care, I don't care, you know whatever, they pay me 700 a week to buy hamburgers, whatever, but you. I can see that he's a little bit hurt and he's holding it back and I think that's kind of like you know I was raised and I think a lot of especially young men are raised to be successful, make it work and you a lot of people. included to do that, suppress a lot, you know, we go through a lot of things and we just put it to the side and you see the effect it has over time, basically, the burger thing is very funny because of course, when you say that they were preparing you to fail, it should be impossible for you to get that many burgers at lunchtime and it actually takes you back to the original trading game because you had the same experience there where in the final In fact, it fixed the game so that you couldn't win and that was because they wanted to test what your reaction would be to that and you went on and on and on and on because you and that's how you won the game.

He did it because they could see that in you, yeah, there's something strange, I mean, in a sense, you know the book is called the trading game, obviously there's this literally literal trading game, but I think there's a lot of ways in which that you can take it and that game. There are two games going on right there, there is the literal game, but they are playing me, they have manipulated the game behind my back without telling me and they continue to do so. I keep finding myself in these types of situations as if they were some kind of me.

I think you are right in what you say. They were a little delighted with this naivety because kids like me where I come from don't appear in commerce anymore and they also liked one thing that really caught my attention when I thought about it. a young Trader was how quick everyone on the trading floor says we want this guy and he had absolutely no idea what he was doing and he was very aware that he had no idea what he was doing and it gave me a bit of fear. and a bit comical, why am I so popular when I have no idea what's going on?

And the irony is that I became a very successful extreme trader, so even though I didn't know anything, they were the guys who were kind of right and I think there was this somehow, they knew better than I did what kind of T They could see the talent I had more than I could. But then you see that there is a balance of IM power throughout the entire book, which is clearly what I was doing. I have a lot of talent, but I don't have any power, and you kind of see me naively overcoming obstacle after obstacle and every time I find some strange way, more and more strange as the book goes on, I think it's a good way to overcome it, but um, yeah.

I think, in a way, for me it's kind of a metaphor for the way society is built, you know, which is that you know kids like me, from my kind of background, we work really hard and then you know There are these from the book. when I got my first bonus and, yeah, it was a lot more than I expected and you know, when I was a kid and a lot of kids lived like that, you go to the store and you buy the cheapest, the cheapest and when I was in college, I had lunch two scotch eggs from Saints Brid every day and then you turn up at 21 and get paid almost half a million pounds and I just look back and think of all those scotch eggs. and it makes you feel, but it makes you feel that the way us poor people live our lives, it's all a game, you know, these guys barely work, they live lives of luxury, we give up our tits to eat scotch eggs. for lunch, you know, the way they played me with these burgers, the way they played me with this game, it's like, I think, it's a microcosm of the way our society, my Faith, you mentioned, a kind of huge bonuses that came as a result of your hard work and you were almostparalyzed by the inability to spend that money, as you say if you grow up poor when they give you that it's kind of almost not real and you actually describe very well the kind of unhappiness that actually comes from receiving that kind of wealth, living the kind of life you led, going to different parts of the world as part of your job, but really nothing like that. actually make you happy or fill the void, you know, it's funny, this didn't actually make it into the book, but I remember having Southern.

It has come back to me a conversation I had with the girl I was dating back in the day and I got this first big bonus and it's one of the first moments where I really thought about why this money doesn't make me happy and I think when I do I don't want to glamorize poverty at all, but when you're young and you come from where and you have nothing, everything is like a positive bet because you have nothing to lose and suddenly they give you this money and it's like I never had anything. Do you know when I was a child?

I lived in a small room with my brother in a bunk bed and everything I had was on a random shelf, not like a shelf from a dresser that had been pulled out right under the bed, everything I had was in that drawer and suddenly someone gives you half a million pounds, you know like I don't have mine, you know, you know, I've never had anything when I was afraid of shops, I didn't know how shops worked. I've never been in the shop and suddenly you get half a million pounds and you know what you're doing and then there's a scene in the book where they say, "I'll buy your dad something" and I'm like, I don't even know what that means, You know because I have never bought anything from anyone, they say: how does your dad like it?

I like football, you buy him Sky Sports and then I buy him Sky Sports, but what did they do? I don't know, before I worked in the bank, we went with my dad to León Orian every week, you know, it was £23 a year for a children's season ticket and we used to sit next to each other and watch the game. with Harry Sambi, who is also a character in the book, but when he worked at the bank he no longer had time for that, he was so busy that then they think that this money is like a way to bring happiness to my family.

They don't realize that it's actually taking me away from my family and then I would wake up on Saturdays and see my dad watching the midday kick-off on Sky Sports and it would make me very unhappy and it was just this. but it's another one of those things that you just compartmentalize and you just hide the things that you're losing and you focus on the things that you're gaining, but you know, I think the book Lo captures very well this kind of descent into unhappiness and also maybe Some kind of madness that came, so what do you do?

I think there is this, but it's not just me, although I come from a poor background. I think there is this trading floor. it's a room full of people who to some extent have traded their happiness for money and are trying to give it back, yeah that's why you see them, they go and buy an awesome new bike, and never ride it, they buy a whole new set . of skis, they are trying to regain the happiness and the youth that they have lost and it is a big thing that I wanted to convey in the book is the sadness of these spaces, you know, you know, it is a room full of very unhappy men and very rich men and unhappy and what does it mean that we have built our society that way?

As I said before, there are some 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 also at the end. Which one is Caleb? Could you tell us a little about Caleb and why he is so good? an amazing character, yeah, I mean, Caleb was kind of Caleb, he was the guy who ran the trading game competition, um, and a very smooth, charming, charismatic man, he was the youngest managing director of City Bank, which which is really important, um, and somehow he walks in he's this huge, larger than life guy and, um, he recognized it very quickly.

Gary is very, very smart. Let's bring this guy in and of course you know I'm basically like a little kid and I look at this guy like he's some super rich trader. the guy I want to be like this guy um and then he hires me, he brings me in and um and very suddenly he leaves and in a way he leaves it's like because he and in a sense, he lived the dream and another big The theme of the book is You go? You can go? People leave and this guy does it? um and then that, but you know, as it develops, it turns out that this match was not as simple as it seems and um, maybe he he seemed to be able to leave but he couldn't leave and this kind of you I don't want to give too much away, but It raises questions essentially about appearances, this guy seemed so seductive and so complete and yet he couldn't leave despite being super rich and this reflects of course my own journey which is my own beginning of questioning in case of you leaving and of course those kind of bigger questions about really I think the effects of money and the effects of greed and the effects of power on the individual and you know, I think we all face these questions on some level, you know we're all after money and we have questions about, you know, I should work harder, I should put in more time than my family, but um he was my first boss and he was also my final boss, he wasn't my boss all the time, um, and Our relationship went on a journey, let's just say I don't want to reveal too much but readers can experience it. what I experience, yeah, because there's something mafia-like in the kind of threat that you basically can't, like you say, if they're going to pay you, yeah, that's what's the question that you keep asking in the book, because if you You see, if you try to leave the job, your bonus for those who don't understand is not just a big check that you get and that's it, it is paid incrementally over a period of time, which means if you say I'm going to leave the job. job, farewell bonus.

Yeah, so it's like how do you actually get the money you were supposed to get? Yeah, I wanted kind of one thing that I really wanted to do with this book. I think I was very lucky. from a literary perspective, you have a good opportunity here 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 very far from each other, but they are completely different worlds, TRUE? so you want to play with contrast, you know, we talked about waking up and taking a shower with this little Argos hand hose that connects to the taps and then going to these huge skyscrapers and then working. with these Millionaires and then go home to your Crowded House and this kind of thing, but you know the opening scene of the book, so I'm basically being threatened by this character, Caleb, and it's very, it's very Mauresque, you know. , And you know.

When I was a child I came from a very poor background, I grew up in a quite difficult area. I was expelled from school for selling drugs. You know, I wouldn't say that I was a drug dealer or that I was ever a criminal, but you know these elements existed. All around me on the street I grew up, you know there were drug dealers and they were criminals, like I grew up with these people, um and you know I did the right thing, I studied hard, I got a good job and you think you go down that path, you choose another path and then I quickly became very senior at the city bank and suddenly you look good when you are doing what they want you to do, everything is fine as soon as you start.

Suddenly these guys are acting the same way that drug dealers on the street act properly and what I wanted to do was, you know, collapse that physical space and say, listen, these people can look very different and they can direct your life. and they may have all the power, but once you dig a little below the surface, you know if they're better than us, you know, and you know, my experience with those two spaces was that they're basically the same, you know? I think it's an empowering message that you know for people on both sides of the coin, meaning if you come from a poor background, don't think that these people are better than you because they're not, and if you come from a rich background . background, don't think that 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 where we live with growing inequality, you know, and people who know the work that I do out of this. book, I know this is something I'm very passionate about, I think it's a huge problem.

One of the other fascinating characters in the book is Billy, who is quite an enigma, but tell me a little 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 to work there in 200 eight he was already between 40 and 40 years old, he's from Liverpool, he's a scouser, he had a strong scous accent and, um, from a very working area. Coming from a class background, he started working as a teenager at the Halifax checkout and managed to work his way up over the course of about 30 years to become a senior trader at City Bank and, as I turn up, he's had a tough couple of years .

He hasn't done very well and basically hates everyone on the floor. He thinks they are really partisan. People say who is this guy, not who is this fool. Bas, he's not making money, yeah, but obviously, because you know. Look, he has a similar background to me and I think he's a guy I want to become friends with. There's a scene very early in the book when some guys at another desk keep playing music and he keeps saying that he can change. They turn down the music and keep turning it down. Can you turn down the music?

He eventually he just pulls the speaker wires through the desk and he just cuts them off and I was like and then the guy was like, What's going on? And then I said, This is the guy I want to date, but suddenly, in the 2008 crisis, this guy makes an absolutely incredible fortune and it turns out he's been sitting there betting that the world is going to explode for years and we formed a very close relationship. Bond and he takes me under his wing and, I guess, he becomes a spiritual guru to me in a way and also a trader because he is a very, very good trader, and after I have my first big loss .

He is in my second year as a trader. I instinctively went back to the textbooks. I started bringing my textbooks to the office and right now I'm sitting next to Billy. I'm like Billy's Junior and I'm reading the textbooks every day. day after day, like the second or third day, Billy just can't take it anymore, he just takes the books out of my hand straight into the trash and says what are you doing? You are not a child anymore, you are not going to discover the key to the world in those textbooks if you want to know what is happening in the world if you want to know what is happening in the economy go home and ask your mother what is happening in her economics what do you ask your friends ask your friends mums you know walk down the High Street and see what's happening, the shops are closing, you know, you know, look, you know, look at the homeless people, there's more or less, you know, look at what's advertised cheaply and he basically tells me: I know if you want to understand economics, there comes a time when you have to go out and look at economics, basically, you can't just read about it in books and that was a big moment for me in that, in a sense, it's. kind of a catalyst for everything that has happened since then, which is my willingness to get out of theory and into the world and that is what drives me to become the successful Trader Ian, yes, because you had good sense as you say .

What was really happening? So after that crisis you mentioned, where Billy makes a lot of money, everyone hopes things will go back to normal, yes, but your sense told you no, it's not going to go back to normal, it's broken, its interest rates are. Everything will stay low and that's how you made your millions, you know as a trader, because you kept betting against what everyone else expected. We were talking about the kind of moral juus of something like Wolf of. Obviously, Wall Street, looking back, now makes enormous amounts of money when you make it about sort of wealth inequality, you say that's what you were able to see, how you felt writing about it and now obviously you're an activist. in terms of economics, but how does it relate to the fact that you made that money basically thanks to a broken economy?

Yeah, there's a scene in the book that I think is pretty good, I say so myself, which is where I got this penny. moment when I finally realized this is this this is this this is what's going to happen, you know, I'm starting to realize that it's 2011, which is the year of the sovereign debt crisis, so, like everyone Europe's big governments basically collapse financially. And I start to see before this happens that these governments are going to go bankrupt and I start to see the similarity between them and my friends and my friends' families who, when they lose their house, go into debt and I start to think, well, everything Ordinary people are losing their assets and going into debtGovernments that are losing their assets are going into debt, where is it going?

And so, you know I'm surrounded by these millionaires, okay, okay, what we have here is you know there's a shift in power, there's a shift in ownership, there's a shift in wealth, it's "It's draining from the classmeans of governments to the rich. Well, what are the rich going to do with that? They're going to buy more assets, which means it's going to accelerate, which means the middle class is going to be completely impoverished there." There's going to be an explosion of poverty in this country, governments are going to go bankrupt, that's going to basically cause the collapse of Western society and then there will be a drop of a penny, it's like I know what I have to do.

To buy a green euro dollar, you look back and think here is a very talented young man, he is obviously smart, he has discovered something. really important and your instinct is monetized and that's the person I was trained to be that was my job, you know what I mean, so it's kind of like I think it is when I look back, I don't think about it morally. I'm, you know, I'm a mathematician at heart, I think listen, this is the society that we live in, you know there are people whose job it is to run our economy and they get paid 50 thousand dollars a year and there are people whose job it is.

It's betting on our economy and they get paid £2 million a year, right? You can't structure your economy, what do you think is going to happen? Know? And now I've walked away from that money and now I'm trying to keep our economy from collapsing, I'm not doing the best job so far, but I'm still trying, you know, you know, I'm not you. I'm not here trying to be M Mandi. I am not a moral philosopher. You know what I want? What I wanted to do with this book. I don't want to make any moral judgments, you know, it's a bit like if you read sincere for voler mhm.

I think the most powerful way to show people how broken our system is is not for me to tell them it's broken, it's for me to take it. Take them with me to the places I've been, take them to the top of the mountain and show them the coming tsunami. Hmm, you know, people can make their own judgments about whether it's right or wrong. Those interested can go and see the work that I do now you can check out my YouTube channel and I think it's pretty clear where I stand on this, but you know, I was a young kid, my job was to bet on the economy and that's what I did and you know it's not just me, you know the 10,000 highest paid economists in the world, all the traders, all the traders, they don't work for their governments, that's just the way the world is.

I'm afraid I didn't make it. The way we talked at the beginning about that kind of unhappiness that arose from the work that you were doing and it's very clear that you're much happier now that you've left that world and with the kind of new direction things have taken is that the same have to be hopeful about what the future holds or are you still really worried about how you say how that economy is doing? You know, I'm a person who has made millions of pounds basically betting on the collapse of Western society and I came to this kind of conclusion in 2011 and you know, I was 24 years old and I didn't think this was definitely right, but I was confident enough to bet on it and I bet big and by the end of the year.

I was the best trader in the world and I got paid millions of pounds and then I thought, "Okay, maybe this isn't just a theory, but still your job is still a trader, so you do it again and get paid like another million pounds." you know what I mean and then you say okay, but no one talks about it, you turn around and look at these guys who are supposed to understand economics, you know you've read the book, most of these guys are, at best, crazy, at worst. idiots, right, and then you start thinking, okay, maybe we're in trouble here, but what do you know?

Know? Know? Know? I was sure things were going to get worse. and this Arthur character where I say: should we do something? and he says, well, we put the Bett, you know, listen in my of Hearts. I am an economist, an analyst, I am a trader. I make predictions, I have no hope. I look at what surrounds us. You know, when I was a trader, people had a lot of opinions. There's a line from JB in the book. Opinions are like us. We all have one. I don't want to know people's opinions. I want to know which one is yours.

The bets are good. I work hard every day to try to stop the economic collapse. If you look at my bets, I'm betting on the collapse because that's what I think will happen. I don't want that to happen. I do not want that. happen, but you know, this is knowledge that I carry with me every day and I have carried this knowledge for 13 years at the beginning of covid. I knew this was going to be an unprecedented economic disaster, that's why I started my YouTube channel because I want to tell people and look, if I could stop this economic disaster, I would stop myself, okay, I'm doing the best I can.

I have had to find ways to move forward as a person with this knowledge that I have. The way I deal with it is I do my best to stop it and that's what I do every day and if people want to see the work that I do, my YouTube, my Instagram, my TW, that's it, my Twitter is all. You know, I feel better as someone who knows what's happening and trying to stop it, rather than someone who just bets on it, but if you ask me if I'm hopeful, see if I thought there was no chance, then.

I'd be on the beach in the Philippines somewhere drinking a piña colada, you know what I mean? I think we have a chance here, but ultimately it will depend on the people of this country and the people of the world, you know they are enough. ready to put aside their selfish motives and work together to solve a social problem. I am, but you know I'm in a luxurious position where I don't need the money. You know the question will really get to the hearts and minds of the people of this country and the people of the world to let them know, I know which side of the fence I'm on, if enough people join me, we can stop the disaster, we begin the talk talking about the title of the book trading game, um, it has a subtitle that is a confession, yeah, just to finish, what is a confession about this subtitle? there was some there was some conversation about this subtitle um so obviously there's a genre of literature confessional literature that you know talk about on the road this kind of stuff um and I think this book falls firmly into that genre.

I want what I wanted this book to be as much as possible completely completely honest Mom didn't want to paint me in a positive light um this is what I saw this is what I saw and this is what I experienced um and I want I want you to see what I saw and I want you to live what I lived um and I want you to feel what I felt um it's also a book that in my opinion makes a strong argument that society is going to get significantly worse from here because of the lack of action, if we do it, if we don't do anything about it eventually, um, obviously the subtitle raises questions about personal guilt, um, I think that's probably too much. to get specifically on the collapse of Western society, but you know he was a young man.

I was driven by lust for money, greed in many ways. But he was a young man who lived in poverty. Once I made money, I decided to walk away. I know there are people in the book who I wouldn't say I consistently treated the best. People who read the book will see it, but I have come to terms with what I have done and try to become a positive person. strength um for me it's a confession in the sense that it's an honest story it's from the heart you know sometimes it wasn't easy to write you know I put a lot of emotion into it I put my you know I put my heart into this um I think that's the only way I think it's the best way to convince other people to believe the things that you believe so um it's confessional in the sense that that's real and I hope that people experience that and that helps people change their minds about some. things and to feel what I feel about where we are as a society.

For this reader, it was like you say that it honestly means that you, as a reader, are taken on a journey that I did not take. I don't know anything about before, but you live every day, every month, every moment is through the book, so it definitely worked for me, Gary, thank you so much for giving me some time to talk to you about this, thank you, thank you for your time.