The Manipulation Expert: How to Spot a Psychopath - Geraint Anderson AKA Cityboy

Geraint Anderson thinks he might be a psychopath. So he got himself tested.

He fell into the City by accident, while he was selling trinkets on beaches and smoking weed. He turned up to the interview in a £6 Oxfam suit, and the interview involved four bottles of champagne and a strip club. Nine years later the former intern was running the second-highest ranked team in London. Then he wrote an anonymous column exposing everything he’d seen, which became Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile. It sold over 400,000 copies in seven countries. A forensic psychologist has since told him he’s not a psychopath. She also told him he can turn the dark triad up and down whenever he likes.

Geraint joins hosts Jack Frimston and Zac Thompson for the most honest conversation we’ve had about manipulation, in the City and everywhere else. He explains why he kept a spreadsheet of every client’s wife, dog and football team. He explains why he made clients his “best friends” so they’d vote for him in the rankings, and why he grabbed the coattails of the nerdy genius and took the credit.

He breaks down what really goes on in the Square Mile. A power station in Utah exploded and he walked onto the trading floor with a nosebleed showing on every screen. His bank lost £1.2 million. He and his team made a sell call against the entire City and it came good. A rival recently messaged him on LinkedIn with just “proper psycho”. He explains why insider trading is stealing from your granny’s pension, and why the bonus system rewards psychopathic behaviour.

Along the way: a knife at his neck at 16, hanging off a cliff in Nepal, why not giving a shit is a superpower, why you should invest in your most insecure mate, the Domino’s shares that went up 15 times, Sam Altman, why Silicon Valley’s real psychopaths won’t let their own kids near a screen, a business partner blackmail story that’s hard to believe, and the three questions to ask before you believe anything.

Chapters

00:00:00 Welcome to the Show: Meet Geraint Anderson AKA Cityboy, Ex-Banker Turned Bullshit Detector

00:03:45 The Making of a City Manipulator: Spreadsheets, Cocaine, and Madonna Concerts

00:07:55 The Knife to the Throat: Fearlessness, Going Limp, and Psychopathic Traits

00:21:09 The Bloody Nose Disaster: Losing 1.2 Million Quid on Cocaine and Scottish Power

00:24:52 The Superpower of Not Giving a Shit: Imposter Syndrome and Philosophical Detachment

00:28:13 The Conspiracy Theory Takedown: COVID, 9-11, and W