Listen here.A former top-ranked City of London stockbroker has written a manual for winning at business, politics and life. There's just one catch: to follow it, you'd have to think like a psychopath. Geraint Anderson, the man behind the legendary "Cityboy" column, tells BizNews editor Alec Hogg why he built his new book around Trump, Musk and the 'manosphere', how a near-fatal motorbike crash changed his mind about the game he was winning, and why the book is now selling harder in South Africa than almost anywhere else. He also explains, only half-joking, why he's booked in to be clinically assessed for psychopathy himself..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..Edited transcript of the interview.Alec Hogg (00:01) Well, it's such a pleasure to be talking to Geraint Anderson, who was better known as Cityboy, a man who gave the people in the financial services sector in the UK quite a few gears. He had a column that was in the newspaper you'd get when you went onto the Tube, so you can be sure it was very well read as Cityboy.Hilarious. We then got him to write a column for us at Moneyweb back in the day, when I was there, obviously. And I didn't know what had happened to him since. But up pops a book called How to Con Friends and Manipulate People. Now, Geraint, I knew there had to be a follow-up to Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, but my goodness.This is a lot of fun. And I think you've got to start right at the outset: it's not a template on how to be a psycho. It's actually, read the last chapter first, and then you'll see you're using humour to say, whoa, be careful what you might become if you get too involved in, I suppose, the Ten Commandments of being a corporate animal.Geraint Anderson (01:25) That's it. Yeah. I mean, it came from my twelve years in the City. And then I was looking around at the world, full stop, and I was looking at people like Andrew Tate, the so-called manosphere guru. I was looking at people like Trump, Elon Musk, one of your South African buddies, and I was thinking, just a minute, the values these people are espousing seem to have no empathy.Win at all costs, no conscience. People are pawns in your game to be manipulated. And suddenly I thought, just one second, this sounds suspiciously like being a psychopath. So I took their so-called ethos, their strategies, to their logical conclusion. The idea is that by doing so, I'd expose just how ridiculous and dangerous they are, because you may succeed with some of the advice in the book, but you really become the very worst version of yourself. And you probably, unless of course you're a real psychopath, won't be able to sleep at night. So it's a kind of parody, and the advice is disturbingly effective. That's what I was just saying to you earlier, that someone came into a book signing I did in Canary Wharf in London, and they literally said, "Just to be clear, this is a parody?"And I said, well, in the final chapter, I do recommend that you kill your chief executive in order to get his job. So I like to think this is a parody, but the advice is disturbingly effective, Alec. That's the weird thing. And I've got a feeling that when it comes out in America, there's a quite high chance people are going to take it as a manual for how to succeed on Wall Street.Alec Hogg (03:16) Yeah. Well, you said it's done quite well in South Africa. So I wonder if we haven't got people who are following it as a template.Geraint Anderson (03:23) Well, that's it, man. My publisher just said, you know what, there are two places, two regions, we didn't expect this book to do well in. One is India and the other is South Africa. And I thought, South Africa, it's my old mate Alec, I used to write a column for him. I don't know what the financial situation is, how finance is in South Africa. But what I do know is that in London it seems to have got worse and worse in terms of manipulation, and that's because my personal belief is that, a bit like corruption, it seeps down from the top. If you have a corrupt leader, then his deputies become corrupt, and so forth, and it seeps down through the entire society. When you have someone like Trump, and various other so-called strongmen who've come in since the 2008 financial crisis to supposedly sort out their countries and offer extreme solutions to extreme problems,it seeps down through society. So if I was an American, for example, working in some municipal role, or maybe some minor official, I'd look up at my boss and go, that guy lies all the time, fifty thousand lies and counting since 2016. That guy is extremely vengeful towards anyone who dares cross him. That man will only have loyalists underneath him who do exactly what he says. And then I'd surely conclude that that is the way you succeed, because after all, he's done rather well for himself. He's the most powerful man in the world. So really, this book is a corporate self-help book, but obviously it's trying to remind the reader that therein lies madness. If you go down this path, you and society will not ultimately benefit.Alec Hogg (05:25) Great fun. It really is, as long as you approach it in that respect. Machiavelli's The Prince, was that part of your intention, to show what he was showing back in Florence? That's a classic; maybe yours will be too.Geraint Anderson (05:43) Absolutely. Yes. I cite three books as guides. One, of course, is Trump's The Art of the Deal, which is an extraordinary read with the benefit of hindsight of what's happened since: never admit defeat, win at all costs, vengeance is acceptable. He basically says lying is fine.Then the other book is The Art of War by Sun Tzu, the Chinese general, who, as you know, in every single Wall Street film, requires at least one broker to mention it every twenty or so minutes because it's deemed to be the guidebook. But ultimately, and I think you've nailed it here, Alec, what I'm trying to do is update Machiavelli's The Prince and say, okay, his ethos is:ethics have no real place if you're trying to win, and this is Florence, I think it was the sixteenth century, and the victory will justify any actions, and it's only a fool who has ideals or morals of any kind. In some ways this is an updated version of that, but with its tongue firmly in its cheek.As I said before, the slightly disturbing thing is that the tricks I myself used to use, when I look back at them, were kind of mildly psychopathic. I'm talking about things like, towards bonus time, I'd blow my own trumpet as much as humanly possible, in a subtle way of course, to ensure I was stealing thunder off colleagues who'd perhaps had just as big a role in some deal I'd done, or some major bit of commission I'd earned. Likewise, I used to do this other, with the benefit of hindsight, slightly dubious thing where I'd pretend to have conversations with headhunters. What I mean is, say it's coming up to September, October, you're not a hundred percent sure you've fully delivered, but you know you're sought after. So what you'd do is have muffled conversations,Alec Hogg (07:51) Mm, yeah, yeah.Geraint Anderson (08:09) just within earshot of your line manager, saying, "Look, call me back later, let's discuss this on my mobile at lunchtime." Just to keep them on their toes. So I look back at my own behaviour, Alec, and think, just a minute, you weren't exactly the best version of yourself, Geraint. And it's actually got to the stage now where something quite interesting has happened: I've lost control of the narrative regarding this book.The Times did an article, I wrote it, but they headlined it and said I was a "Cityboy psychopath." Likewise, I did a podcast with a guy here, and he framed it as "I spoke with a psychopath." Suddenly I realised I'd completely lost control of the narrative. Now people are saying I actually am a psychopath, and I started looking at my behaviour against the checklist and,I hate to say it, I think I'm about an eight or nine out of forty on the psychopath checklist. You have to be over twenty-five to be classed a psychopath, but the average American man is around four. So I'm actually going to be clinically assessed by a psychologist in the next week or two. And remember, a psychopath is not generally some bloke waiting down an alley with a machete to chop you up. A psychopath has certain traits that are extremely useful in banking. They're fearless, they're supremely confident, they have glib, superficial charm, they're manipulative, they're ruthless, they lack conscience, they also have an ability to read others, they like high-risk jobs like finance,and they hate jobs that require lots of training and so forth. So I've lost control of the narrative, and now I'm actually going to assess whether I am, indeed, on the psychopathy spectrum.Alec Hogg (10:12) But if you were a proper psychopath, you wouldn't have shared all the secrets with the rest of the world, surely.Geraint Anderson (10:18) Well, that's true, but remember, I'm out of the game now. If I was still in the City, of course, I'd be holding them close to my chest, ensuring no one else, well, some of them are quite well known, but now that I've left the City and I'm essentially living a life of writing books, it felt like quite a nice sequel to Cityboy, in the sense that Cityboy was a memoir exposing the reckless greed that lay at the heart of finance in the noughties. That was the period Gordon Brown, the prime minister who supposedly saved the world with his economic interventions post-2008, called "the age of financial irresponsibility," referring to the period between the mid-90s and 2008.Funnily enough, that was exactly the period I was in finance, between 1996 and 2008. I think what this book's trying to do is expose something other than short-term reckless greed. It's trying to expose a particular mentality that's become pretty commonplace in the corporate sector and, of course, in politics. For example,those guys in Silicon Valley who are selling us and our children social media apps that are addictive by design, and yet they're keeping their own kids in forest schools, where they play with bits of twig and make bivouacs or whatever, and they have strict contracts with their nannies refusing to allow any screens in front of their kids. So they know the dangers they're creating. We've seen it across the world. I have a house in Mexico, and all the kids these days are just playing on their addictive-by-design apps. I find that quite psychopathic behaviour, and the hypocrisy, obviously, is ridiculous too. So I see problems in both finance and politics.Geraint Anderson (12:39) As regards the problems in politics, I think it all comes down to the 2008 financial crisis, because three things happened. One, real wages really didn't grow, taking inflation into account, for a long period, so people thought the American dream was false, and they got pretty angry about that. Two, we had a massive increase in inequality, because interest rates stayed low for so long. If you had assets like shares or property, you got richer and richer, because money was cheap, debt was cheap, there was no point keeping money in the bank, you had to invest it. And three, the banks and the bankers were bailed out. And that confirmed all the conspiracy theories about the deep state, about elites being in some kind of cabal looking after their own. I put a lot of the political developments that have happened, whether Brexit, Trump, or these other strongmen who've appeared across the world, down to the 2008 financial crisis.Alec Hogg (13:42) It's so interesting, there are many parallels. I don't know if you've come across a guy called Ryan Holiday. He's quite famous now for writing about the Stoics, and he's clearly transformed. But he wrote a wonderful book called Trust Me, I'm Lying, and he gave the inside track on the communications industry, the PR industry if you like, and how they manipulated journalists, got their message, true or false, into the public domain, and people would act on it. I think that's a bit of a guidebook for anyone wanting to understand that industry. A similar one is Robert Cialdini's book, Influence, which explains how others can influence you because of certain deep-seated traits we have as human beings.It was recommended, in fact, by Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett at one of the Berkshire Hathaway AGMs. The unfortunate thing, both with Holiday's book and Cialdini's book, and maybe yours, is some are going to pick it up and take it literally as a guidebook, as a way forward. Did you ever consider that would be a possible problem?Geraint Anderson (14:59) I have, and in fact you've hit the nail on the head about a concern I've had. When I was talking about it with my agent, they said, look, you have to give proper advice, this can't just be flim-flam, you have to give stuff from a genuine insider. And remember, without blowing my own trumpet and sounding too much like a narcissist-slash-psychopath, I went from being an intern to heading up the second-highest-ranked equity team in London in about nine years.I then gave a draft of this book to some American friends, and they came back and said, "Geraint, people in America," which, without generalising about an entire nation, has a slight issue understanding irony, saying one thing and meaning quite the opposite, "are going to take this as a manual, mate." And I said, no. What I hope is that the final chapter, called "But Seriously Folks," gives a fairly comprehensive and convincing account of what the book's intention actually is: to help you identify psychopaths and the tricks they use. Because one of the things I think, especially in this world of AI, matters most for my children's education, is to see through the nonsense.I want them to question everything they're told. I want them to look for evidence, and I want them to think: from whom, to whom, for what. Who has written this, who are they writing it for, and what is their agenda? Only then can you cut through the nonsense that's prevalent. Because one of my other targets, which I get a little upset about, is conspiracy theories. I studied history at university, and I've got really sensible, seemingly wise, educated friends who believe some of the most extraordinary things. Obviously it was rocket-propelled by Covid, Trump, the lockdowns we had,Geraint Anderson (17:21) and obviously the internet and social media playing their role. But I despair, because if we can't agree, vaguely, on what reality is, we have no chance whatsoever of working together. And of course a real conspiracy might be that the elites are quite happy for us to be divided, to see ourselves as a group of individuals, like chimpanzees fighting for our bit, fighting for our status. I find that fascinating too, that it may be an accidental by-product, but we are, as Thatcher said, famously, back in the eighties, "there's no such thing as society." We're just a bunch of individuals trying to get to the top, and cooperation with others is dismissed as the foolishness of socialism and communism, long discredited, and we may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. If we view ourselves that way, a psychopath who isn't impulsive, isn't reckless, but who really considers their actions and only thinks about themselves, will probably do extremely well. I remember a story about Bill Gates when he first met Warren Buffett at a dinner party, the first time they met, and they were asked what the reason for their success was, and they both said, simultaneously, "focus." I found that fascinating in itself, because again, psychopaths are focused on the end result. A bit like the Argentinian football team, frankly, though they didn't actually succeed in the end, I'm pleased to say. I wrote a few articles for various magazines saying England have got three FIFA fair play awards, they've only won one World Cup. We're notorious, and we need to think more like the win-at-any-cost, Hand of God, Argentinians. It was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but in some ways it wasn't. Nice guys come last sometimes. I'm aware, Alec, you've hit on the biggest dilemma of the book, or the biggest contradiction: how can you write a convincing, funny book without actually offering advice that's quite effective?Alec Hogg (19:51) If you'd had, in your introduction, just one line from Charlie Munger, saying that if you want to get to the truth, find out what you must do to not make it happen, in other words, invert, he talks about "invert, invert, invert," that's what you've done here. You've inverted a successful life, in a way that, hopefully, not too many people are going to read this and say, yes, I'm going to make gazillions now. In a country like South Africa, I suppose, where 53% of working South Africans gamble, according to a research report out this morning, a lot of them on sport, because many of them can't make ends meet without somehow getting more money by having a punt, and in that way, of course, they get themselves into ever deeper trouble. There's a lot of that in society at the moment. But when you look back on your career, take us briefly through how you arrived as an insider, and what made you think, no, this is not what I want to do. Because as Cityboy, you were telling an insider's story to a world that had no idea what was going on, but was suspicious about why these fellows in pinstripe suits were making so much money.Geraint Anderson (21:19) Yes, so it really comes back to the fact that I should never have been in the City in the first place, they let me through by mistake. I was selling trinkets on beaches in Europe that I'd bought in India, and I'd planned to do that for five to ten years. My mother clearly thought I was going off the rails, my hair was down to my backside, I had loads of earrings and a beard even more ridiculous than this one.She got my brother, who worked in the City, and said, "Can you get this fellow a job, for God's sake, he's, I've got three sons, two are doing okay, and the last one, the black sheep, I'm a bit concerned about him." He got me a job, and I decided to do it for two years, because he said, "You do this job for two years and you'll be able to live in Goa like a king for thirty years." I thought, that sounds a really good deal. After two years, I was earning more than my father, who'd been a public servant for thirty years. I thought, okay, I'll just do one more year, and did that for a further ten years. The interesting thing about the City is that when people look at the principal character trait these financiers and bankers have, it's not greed, it's not materialism, it's competitiveness. As soon as I found out there were external surveys ranking the best teamsI thought, I want to be number one, I'm going to make this team number one, and I worked out the hacks to do it. To give you another example of ruthless manipulation, just before those voting forms arrived on the desk, I'd take these lads out for three-thousand-pound meals at Pétrus, buy them a three-hundred-pound bottle of champagne or whatever it might be, take them to some of the less salubrious things we used to do, strip joints and so on, which are all well detailed in Cityboy. I really wanted to win, and I thought, okay, this is giving me a purpose. But I was always questioning what I was up to. My dad was a Labour MP, my mum was an incredibly Christian, religious lady whose parents were missionaries.Geraint Anderson (23:51) I'd been a bit of a hippie, so I was always questioning it. Then in 2007 I had a near-fatal motorbike accident, nearly ripped my knee off, went through my front teeth and my lips, and so on, and I suddenly thought, just a minute, life is short, you could literally get run over by a bus tomorrow, just like you almost were, it's not a dress rehearsal, come on, let's put your chips in. And I'd also, of course, earned a sufficient amount of money to be okay for the rest of my life, if I wasn't going to get divorced three times or develop a serious gambling addiction or something. So that's how I was feeling. And then, just at that moment, someone offered me an anonymous column exposing everything. Those five hundred thousand to a million people in London who read that column every Friday, really, they were like my therapist, I was doing a confessional, I was getting it all off my chest, they just didn't realise. Then a publisher came and said, why don't we do a book about this? And I thought, yeah, this seems like a good escape clause, I can now pivot, to use the trendy jargon, to a new career as an author.Alec Hogg (25:10) Well, it's well worth reading this book for what you shouldn't do. I've wondered if you also drew anything from Jonathan Swift, because in the... do you want to tell us about that?Geraint Anderson (25:25) Absolutely. Jonathan Swift is a great British satirist. Obviously Gulliver's Travels, where he mocks, for example, Catholics fighting Protestants by comparing them to people who argue over which side of a boiled egg you should eat, the pointy end or the other end, just the absurdity of mankind. But he wrote a particular pamphlet that's really the inspiration for my book. The shortened title is A Modest Proposal. It came out in 1729. The concept he states, in a very deadpan, serious way, is that the starving Irish had a solution to their problems: they should fatten up their babies and sell them as food products to their rich English landlords, and therefore get money and be able to eat. There's no winking at the audience in this pamphlet, he's saying it deadpan, he explains how they should be fattened up and what recipes should be used. What he's doing, obviously, is highlighting the indifference of the ruling classes in Ireland, who were literally sitting back as the people around them starved to death. In the same way, without sounding too pretentious, I'm trying to say,what has the world become, that really the way to survive it now, the way to thrive as a politician or a businessman, is to act like a psychopath. So in that sense it's an attack on the way of the world, an attack on late-stage dog-eat-dog capitalism, in a nutshell.Alec Hogg (27:20) We had the privilege of talking to an insider on the whole SpaceX story at the time the mania was there, and he explained exactly what was going on. I hope people in the BizNews tribe sold their SpaceX shares, I know my wife did, as a result of that, fortunately, because we've seen what's happened there. What, as an insider, do you want people in our business community to take out of this book? And I really hope your sales in South Africa go through the roof, because they deserve to.Geraint Anderson (27:55) That's kind. I think two things. One, I want to help people identify psychopaths, and when I say psychopaths, I don't just mean that one percent of the population who are clinically diagnosable, genuinely empathy-free, conscience-free psychopaths. I want to help people identify the tricks, the machinations of these people, so they don't fall for them. So the idea is, you don't marry them, you don't promote them, you don't vote for them, you can spot them in the office, and you can stymie their strategies and plans. That's one thing I hope is possible. The other thing would be, on a more general basis, to look at politicians and try to work out their agenda, work out what they're doing to manipulate you. It's not new news that politicians lie and manipulate and do all those things, but it seems to have been rocket-propelled by modern developments, particularly social media. It seems either we've become more gullible, or they've become more sophisticated.I hate to sound like a miserablist and a pessimist, but with AI, facial recognition and all these other tools, it's going to become a harder and harder job to disentangle nonsense from reality. And as soon as that happens, I think democracy is, you know, for the chop. Although democracy, well, what did Winston Churchill say, that democracy is the worst system apart from all the others. Obviously democracy has many flaws, but you need only look at China, and you need only look at Russia under Putin, and you can see that's a place of fear, a place where, ultimately, violence in the system is used. So I suppose it's a plea for humanity to just try to understand and relish democracy and our freedoms, and try not to treat each other as pawns in a game for our own self-aggrandisement, power and wealth.Alec Hogg (30:31) What a wonderful way to end there, because we're seeing around the world that autocracies are using, perhaps, social media, or maybe the useful idiots, to promote their systems. But it comes down to freedoms. What are your freedoms in a Western society, and what are the freedoms, or lack of them, in the societies so many seem to admire nowadays? Geraint Anderson is the author of How to Con Friends and Manipulate People. It's a guidebook on what not to do. Charlie Munger would say this is one to read, because it shows you how to invert. And if you're an investment banker, or indeed married to one, or friends with one, hmm, this is prescribed reading. Good to be talking to you again, Geraint, and I'm Alec Hogg, BizNews.com.Geraint Anderson (31:24) Thanks, Alec. Thanks a lot.