Gillian Tett Interview - three parts in one

FULL INTERVEW – ALL THREE PARTS


GILLIAN TETT INTERVIEWED BY ALAN MACFARLANE 5th OCTOBER 2023

AM
It's a great pleasure to talk to Gillian Tett, who is just transitioning, as they say nowadays, from one role to another, not leaving the Financial Times, but spending more of her time with us in King's College. So, welcome to King's.
GT
Thank you. I'm delighted to have a chance to talk to you, and even more delighted to be here.
AM
Great. Well, we'll talk later about your life and so on, but I want to just take you through some of your memories and thoughts, reflections, it's very early still, but about your time with the Financial Times. And I realise it's an anniversary, as you perhaps know, it's 30 years this year that you joined the Financial Times.
GT
Yes.
AM
The first thing to clear up is something you said in Wikipedia, which was that you joined the Financial Times because you decided that academia was a dead end intellectual endeavour.
GT
No, I didn't say it was a dead end. I said I was frustrated with anthropology because it seemed to be committing intellectual suicide.
AM
Those are the words.
GT And the reason I said that was because at the time that I was doing my anthropology, there had been a huge explosion of reaction against previous decades of anthropology where people had attempted to make sense of societies in a systematic way, whether it's functionalism or structuralism or whatever ism you want to have, there was an assumption that anthropologists could say something useful about the world. And then when I went to study anthropology, there was a real backlash against the idea that anybody had the right to say anything about anybody else. And anthropology had spent so much time deconstructing their craft and saying why they had no right to say anything about other cultures.
AM
I see. It was post-modernism.
GT
It was post-modernism writ large. And it seemed to be as if they were constantly defining themselves out of existence. And so that was one of my big problems.
AM
I see. Well, I totally agree with you. But I thought it was because you didn't think there was a career there.
GT
No, no. It wasn't that I didn't think there was a career there at all. It was because I was frustrated with the lack of self-confidence in the discipline. And that was one of the key problems.
AM
Okay. So take us through the stages of your time with the Financial Times. At first, you just joined as a junior employee. Is that right?
GT
Well, what happened was while I was doing my fieldwork in the former Soviet Union, I wrote a couple of pieces freelance while I was still doing my fieldwork. And then I asked if I could have an internship at the Financial Times in the summer of 1990. And I went there to sit on the foreign desk of the FT just purely by chance. And while I was there, I spent the first week making the coffee. And the second week, the Soviet Union, the first Soviet coup happened. And it was August. I was the only person in the entire building who spoke Russian. And so I was suddenly asked to call up all of my contacts in the former Soviet Union and to try and gather some material for the story. There was absolutely nobody else around. And then I used my PhD work to write an article for the FT about nationalism. And on the third or fourth day, the foreign editor at the time, who was called Yurok, suddenly came out of his office and yelled across the news desk, does anyone here want to go to Lithuania tomorrow? There's going to be a revolution. And I put my hand up and said, I'll go. And I speak Russian. And he said, OK, great. And literally, he gave me $1,000. There was no visa because the Soviet Union was breaking up. And so no one knew how to get a visa. I had to fly to West Berlin and then go across West Berlin to East Berlin in a taxi because the airports were not connected. Flew into Vilnius in Lithuania. I was almost the only person on the plane. And when I landed, they said, where's your visa? And I said, well, Lithuania has just declared independence. Give me a Lithuanian visa. And they wrote a piece of paper with me. And I came back eight months later. Eight months, gosh. And I just kept moving. And I basically turned myself into a war reporter, come foreign reporter, just by sheer default. And after that, I came back to Cambridge and said, I know you thought I was doing a PhD, but actually, I've been a war reporter for the last six months. But I'd like to finish off my PhD now. So they said fine. And I came back here and spent a few months here. And then I applied for the Financial Times Graduate Trainee Scheme and was accepted as a graduate trainee. So I joined the FT as a very regular graduate trainee and put the PhD aside for what turned out to be two years. And I went through the regular graduate trainee program. I got sent down to, it was a year, it was 1993. So the British economy was in a recession. So in fact, I was the only graduate trainee. They'd cut the graduate trainee program. They sent me to a regular journalism training school in the south of England, which was basically mostly local journalism. And it was full of people learning shorthand and local law and things like that, which I did for five months. It was not a very happy experience because I had just come back from the Soviet Union. I was keen to do war reporting. I was very young, very naive, very full of myself, not full of myself, but very determined and passionate to do things. And I became very angry because the supervisor of the training course was sexually harassing a lot of the girls, not me, but the other girls. And since I was the only person on the entire course who didn't depend on his letter of reference to get a job, I decided to challenge him. And I did so in a rather stupid way. I should have just reported him to a supervisor, but I challenged him directly. So I got thrown off the course and had to go and explain to the FT why I'd been expelled. And the FT in those days decided to cover the whole thing up and basically hired me anyway. And I became an economics reporter. And I basically did the classic journalism training apprenticeship for the next few years in the economics team.
AM
What was the difference between being an academic anthropologist or an academic and doing a PhD in journalism? What are the main differences between them?
GT
The main difference is the speed of thought and action and writing, obviously. The fact that information and knowledge is not studied for its own sake, but usually as a means to an end, which is to tell a story and communicate an idea or an event or an explanation of the world as quickly as you can. And it's also, you know, it's a big, competitive, fast-moving organisation and you are constantly having to make big compromises as a journalist about the world.
AM
And what kind of compromises?
GT
That if you are going to study, write something about Tajikistan, you know, as an academic or an anthropologist, you'd spend a year studying it very slowly and beautifully and absorbing the information and thinking about how to write it and basically trying to do so in a very careful way. If you're a journalist writing about Tajikistan, you might have the luxury of having a week to study it, possibly two. You might have the luxury of having a week or two to write the piece, but that's a luxury. Often you have to produce what you're writing in a day and inevitably, because you're writing to a short framework and you're trying to communicate with people who are busy and know nothing about your topic, you know, you have to be quite ruthlessly focused in how you write a story and recognise that you're not going to write the perfect nuanced story. And it's better to get 70% of the truth rather than aim for 100% and for the most part your competitors will get, you know, 30%. But, you know, you can't be a journalist without being willing to work with what's possible, not what's ideal.
AM
What were the worst sort of compromises you had to make as a journalist?
GT
The worst journalistic compromises were either pandering into stereotypes, because that was how you were going to basically write a piece that got accepted by the editor, you know, cultural stereotypes and things. You know, having to cut out a lot of the material that you'd gathered, you know, so I'd go and talk to 20 people for a story and only one or two would get in and often the other 18 had amazing stories and very human stories that I'd love to have captured. Yes, those are some of the bigger compromises. Writing stories when you've only done a bit of research and then subsequently realised that what you wrote was, if not wrong, then very incomplete or misguided, misperceived. Those are, you know, part of the approach of journalism.
AM
What were the differences in information gathering techniques? Because in anthropology you know the important thing is the fieldwork diary, the notes, maybe photography and film and things like that. Is it the same with journalism?
GT
As a journalist, what you're trained to do is to ask questions and often you're so busy that you ask very directed questions and these days you increasingly use press releases or text-based investigation on Wikipedia and the internet and that is effective and efficient. The problem with it is that the self-directed nature of the questioning means that you often miss out part of the story by not seeing what you don't see and one of the things that anthropology is fantastic at is trying to ask open-ended questions and look at what people don't talk about as much as what they do and one of the issues that is very, you know, relevant for journalists is it trying to adopt and copy some of that anthropological approach. Doesn't happen enough but it needs to happen.
AM
Well, we'll pursue this further but let's go to the next. What happened then?
GT
Well so I was working at the FT and I was basically a junior reporter and I was going through the apprenticeship process going up the system and then after some time, I basically started off in a junior level then I got...
AM
Specializing in Eastern Europe?
GT
I was, no, no, no, originally I was Eastern Europe and then I was put into the economics team to train me up in economics and in that position I went from economics to essentially to... I did the money markets. I was writing the statistical column and then I became the economics correspondent. Got a chance to go to Brussels for six months and basically just kept hustling and hustling, and then a job came up in Japan and so I went over to Japan and spent five years in Japan where originally I was a deputy bureau chief and then I became the bureau chief, and that was really my first big break as a journalist because I arrived in Japan at the very moment that the financial crisis was starting and...
AM
So what year is that?
GT
That was 1997 and I dived into it like an anthropologist, trying to immerse myself in the whole world of Japanese banking and finance, and I basically arrived at an interesting cusp moment in that up until that point the only journalists writing about Japanese banks were the Japanese media and foreigners were kind of excluded, and at the moment that I arrived they were just starting to open up a bit to foreigners. So I dived in but I became really the first foreigner to write about what was happening inside the Japanese banking system in that way and I'd say as an anthropologist it was fascinating, but the anthropology training really helped me because it made me much more open-minded about trying to listen to what they were saying, not just talk myself.
AM
Well as you know I've studied Japan a lot and I was there in 1997 as a visiting professor at Tokyo so...
GT
At Tokyo? Oh what a pity! Todai!
AM
Yep, Todai.
GT
So it's a pity we didn't meet. And do you speak Japanese?
AM
I don't speak a word. Oh well just a word or two. I remember being on the finance committee of King's College early on and the Bursar sort of tearing his hair out because he said we have investments in Japan but it's quite clear that their banking system and the investments and the whole economic system doesn't work in the way that it does here so we can't predict anything. There is something mysterious. Later I met the chief minister of finance or economics in Japan and we sorted out what I thought this was about, but you must have had that experience a lot.
GT
Yes, absolutely. You know, I mean, as an anthropologist we're trained to recognise that finance and economics is not a universal, you know, the way that we imagine the economic system is not universal. Money is not like gravity in the sense that it's, you know, I mean actually these days we know that even gravity isn't universal, it's a function of context and place, so perhaps money is like gravity. But many financiers talk about money and the markets as if they are universal truths that are found everywhere and not context-dependent, and going to Japan was a really powerful example of how and why money and financial systems are an expression of culture. And, yes you can use mathematics to work out values and things like that but actually if you just use mathematics you're missing half the picture and the Japanese had a fundamentally different vision of money and finance from the vision that was being promoted by the neo-liberal economic orthodoxies coming out of Washington, and so you had this huge culture clash all the time about what was happening.
AM
I mean if I put it that two of the differences, one is that the West from Adam Smith onwards has assumed profit maximisation at the individual level is the goal of sane rational human beings whereas the Japanese don't have that assumption that they are thinking in terms of other goods, other people and relationships, is that a reasonable assumption about one of the differences?
GT
Well there are several differences. I mean one of the differences I noticed between America and Japan is that the Americans have historically not had much sense of resource constraint, they don't think the pie is fixed, they always assume they can grow the pie and if you run out of land in the East you just go West young man, and Japan by contrast knows very strongly that resources are finite and there's always capacity constraint and there's always a sense of having to share out the pie in a way that's perceived to be equitable to maintain social cohesion, that's very strong. The Japanese also have a vision that actually money is something which is a reflection of relationships and creates relationships rather than sitting outside relationships and when it comes to deciding how to allocate money, one of the starkest differences that I noticed in 1997 was that in the Japanese banking world traditionally they would either give you money or they wouldn't give you money and there wasn't a sense of grading the price of money according to the risk. So you either got money cheaply or you got no money and people who wanted to get money who couldn't get loans had to go outside the entire banking system into the consumer finance sector. But the idea of having a yield curve for risk didn't exist whereas of course in America or the Anglo-Saxon model measuring the value of a, not so much relationship but a strategic investment, and trying to work out the risk and price for that is absolutely the bedrock of how they see finance. So that kind of difference was very fundamental to how the clash between Japanese and American bankers developed. And so to illustrate that what I did was I, it's in my first book called Saving the Sun, I actually focus on one bank called long-term credit bank or Shinsei and I knew the Japanese bankers there very well because I met them almost as soon as I arrived, and in 1998 Shinsei was originally one of the very strong banks and then it fell into big problems and in 1998 its leadership forged an alliance briefly with a foreign firm to try and save themselves and then they've collapsed completely. So I followed that story very closely from the Japanese perspective, spent many many hours talking to them, and then a private equity group from America came in of Wall Street financiers and they bought the Japanese bank and I got to know them very well too so I had both perspectives. And then they put someone in charge who was Japanese but had lived in America for years who was kind of a bridge if you like. So my first book was literally about these three different perspectives and I told this story like a narrative, I don't know if you've seen that book but it was basically, what's this book called? It's called Saving the Sun, it's written like a novel but it's true, it almost killed me to write it because it follows these three characters in the story, the last CEO of the Japanese bank, the brash abrasive American private equity guy who came in to buy it and then the person who tried to bridge the gap who was a Japanese who'd lived in America for years, and so that was my attempt to try and explain the story of the culture clash.
AM
Did he save the bank? The third one? Or bridge the gap?
GT
I mean it's an extraordinary story, basically so what happened when the bank collapsed is some of the senior old Japanese managers were thrown into jail and some committed suicide which was obviously incredibly traumatic. So when he came in the bank was very traumatised and you had these very brash, very insensitive Americans trying to tell them what to do, and the guy who came in who was called Yashiro-san, he did a good job of putting the bank together and turning it around, he did forge a new strategy, it worked really well for a few years and then the other Japanese banks copied it and basically did it better.
AM
Oh well that's something. I mean what I, as I recall I worked out with the Minister of Finance and other economic economists and so on in Japan was that the Japanese economy is divided into two parts. There's production and the labour force and the human consumption and so on side of it, and one, the production, in other words how a factory works is roughly analysable by western models. It's very efficient and so on, but once you get to employment and distribution and consumption it's embedded in the anthropological sense, in other words lifetime employment and you have to look after your employees
GT
Absolutely
AM
... and so you can't apply strict economic cost benefit analysis.
GT
No.
AM
Is that roughly right?
GT
Yes, absolutely, there's a very strong sense that communities are bound together by more than transactions and you need to have proper long term relationships and that's very deeply ingrained in the way the system works. During the Japanese financial crisis the CEO of one of the big banks was talking to me about the question of social cohesion and he said you have to realise that in Japan if the employee wage bill has to be cut by 20% then everybody's salary is cut by 20% including the CEO. Sometimes the CEO will take a 30% cut whereas he was saying in England if a company has to cut its salary bill by 20% it might fire 20% of the workers, and in America if a company has to cut its wage bill by 20% it will probably fire 40% of the workers and pay the CEO twice as much, and that's a difference.
AM
Just one other point which was a shock to me. As you'll recall from your undergraduate anthropology, anthropologists and legal historians make a big difference between status based societies where human relations and so on matter and contractual, and modern economics is based on the idea of contract, of free agreement to do something which is behind Adam Smith and so on. As I talked to my closest Japanese friends it became more and more apparent that the idea of contract is utterly abhorrent to the Japanese. They said for example when we buy a house of course there solicitors and people who draw up a contract, and we sign it, and then we throw it in the waste paper basket because if the human relations break down there's nothing that contract can do to protect you and it's meaningless. When we hired a piano teacher for our daughter we never dreamt of having any kind of contract, she just said I'll do this and you said I'll do this, and so it's a relationship, a multi-stranded relationship which can't be formalised into a single stranded contract. That was a shock when I first discovered it. Did you encounter that sort of idea?
GT
Yes, I mean Japan was a place which was very frustrating if you wanted to do things fast and be efficient in that you couldn't do things without spending a lot of time with people and having many meetings and listening to people and engaging in what they called Nemawashi, tending the roots and trying to work out what everyone was thinking and trying to read the mood overall. I used to find it very frustrating quite often dealing with Japanese companies and things. It is what it is, you can't really change that.
AM
Well it's such a fascinating topic I'd like to do another interview about Japan but just two final questions. What is it that you loved most about Japan?
GT
Well the crass answer is that I had a little cottage up in the mountains in EchigoYuzawa, a place called Tenjindaira near Minakami and I would go up there almost every weekend and in the summer I went hiking and I went swimming in the rivers, I went to onsen and to me that was the real Japan that I loved most of all. In the winter I skied madly and I skied insanely enthusiastically all the time. So that was one of the things but that really gave me a different side of Japan and I have my favourite onsen up in the Gunma-ken in the area there. The other thing I loved about Japan was just the incredible creativity and the fact that you had this culture which operated on quite different norms from Western culture but was as important as Western culture if not sometimes more important and you couldn't just patronise it or ignore it, and so many of the countries and cultures that were different from the West that anthropologists had studied had been less powerful and this was a different culture that was as powerful as the West.
AM
Well that's.., again I might talk about that more because one of my grouses with, not grouses but weaknesses of anthropology is that you can find these wonderful things and then people say well how many people have these beliefs and culture and you say well it's only a few tens of thousands in some remote Amazonian jungle, but Japan's 120 million people with their equally interesting and very different views and therefore it's a shock, it's a critique of us.
GT
Completely.
AM
So those are the things you really liked and what did you dislike about Japan most?
GT
The rules.
AM.
The rules?
GT
Yes, spoken and unspoken rules. The sense of having to always conform. I was very lucky there because I used my PhD to call myself Dr. Tet. One of the Japanese friends suggested to me before I arrived in Japan on the first time that I should always say Dr. Teto on my cards, Dr. Tet and that allowed me to be neither male nor female because if you were a young female in that situation, even as a gaijin and outsider, they tended to talk to you in Japanese talking down and you were expected to use female language but as Dr. Teto I basically became free of any gender and so they could reclassify me in their mind as a man and that helped.
AM
That's very interesting. I mean when you said the rules it's in some ways a very bureaucratic society, there are hundreds and hundreds of rules, many of which are unimportant but some you never know which are important and which are unimportant. I had a friend who was the Nissan Professor at Oxford who used to go out and we spent time with him once. He said he has a card index and every day he writes down on a card one rule he's broken so that he can learn all the mistakes he made. And then I went with him to the airport to meet his wife and she came off into the lounge and he went up and kissed her. That is one of the biggest rules, you don't kiss in public, even your wife, so I told him to write another card on that. Okay so we'll leave reluctantly Japan and come back. What did you do after that?
GT
After Japan I went to America for a year or rather almost a year and I wrote a book about Japan, and so I took a book writing sabbatical. And I had to do that because it was basically the writing of my first book on Japan was the hardest book I've ever written, it required an enormous amount of research and so I basically spent a year. Then I went back to London and was planning, I came off book leave and was planning to go to Iran to be a foreign correspondent in Iran. I was very excited because it was quite hard to get into Iran then but I got a visa and the then, my then partner was going to go with me. And then I found out that unexpectedly I was pregnant and although I was quite convinced I could have a baby in Iran, it was during the time when people were threatening Iran with missile strikes or something from the war, so I decided to stay in England and had to very sadly and reluctantly give up the Iran job and got posted instead to what seemed initially to be a totally unglamorous awful role which was what they called a Lex writer.
AM
Yes, I wonder what... that sounds like now to me.
GT
Yes, Lex is the kind of the column which comments on finance for the Financial Times. It used to be very dry, short, analytical notes and they're anonymous so no one knows who you are. So I thought, what on earth do I want to do that for but it was the only job on offer and because I was basically pregnant, I didn't have a lot of flexibility about my hours and things like that so I took that. Then I went off on book leave, then I went off and had my first child. A daughter. A daughter, yes and then I came back after six months because we had a lot of maternity leave at the FT and got back to the Lex .... Got back planning to basically spend a week or two on Lex and then start lobbying for another job and I was in my... During my maternity leave I was named as deputy head of Lex which was kind of meaningless because it was a very small team and the head of Lex did everything. It was just a purely symbolic titular post and then literally on day two of my return, the head of Lex resigned and so to my absolute shock, the FT said, right, well you're the deputy, you're now in charge. And the way these things work and I went... I don't want to, but anyway. So I basically ran it for the best part of a year and didn't enormously enjoy it but it was a really good training for myself. Taught me a lot.
AM
How many people did you have?
GT
It was tiny compared to other teams I've run, it was six people, but each day we had to produce three or four notes commenting on what was happening each day. They were anonymous and I was supposed to organize them to reach a common view on things. The people who worked on Lex were all very headstrong, very opinionated, .. impossible, yes they were impossible to control or organize and it was pretty, pretty, pretty tough, you know, but it worked and so, you know. And also I was a new young mother and the great thing about Lex was it was very regular hours. So I, you know, went in at 10, came out at 6 or 9 to 5, boom, done. Yes that was, and then at the end of that, I got, you know, after about a year and a half I got fed up and said I've got to move and so I applied for lots of jobs, didn't get any of them.
AM
All within the FT?
GT
Yes, so I tried to be an economics editor, I was turned down because I didn't have a PhD in economics or BA in economics, tried to be a banking editor, lost that, tried to be a defence columnist, lost that, you know, so literally four jobs in the rails turned down for. And then this job called capital markets editor came up, which at the time was a real backwater and quite low status and I thought what the heck, I'll take it. And I'd written a memo while I was on Lex in which I was very critical about how the Financial Times covered the financial markets, and I basically argued that, you know...the memo was called the iceberg memo, and I said that basically what you had in finance was a small part of the ecosystem poking above the water that was really visible and widely commented on and then you had a large amount beneath the water that was hidden and the stuff beneath the water was things like debt and credit and derivatives, and nobody wrote about that and no one even paid attention to it even though it was very, very big and driving most of the revenue in the City of London. And the stuff that the papers did write about were things like equity markets and currencies, you know, and that mattered but it was a small part. So I wrote a very critical memo about how we wrote about finance and then on the basis of that they said, okay, why don't you go and run the capital markets team. So I went across there in 2005.
AM
Why do you think you saw this submerged part of the iceberg and other people didn't?
GT
Purely because of my training as an anthropologist and I put it straight down to Pierre Bourdieu, you know, looking at social silences, looking at what people weren't talking about, asking what was not being discussed, you know, what sits outside the doxa. And on top of that, I mean, that was the main reason. Trying to look at things holistically, you know, and trying to challenge the mental maps that we always have to make sense of the world.
AM
One question that occurred to my mind even with the Lex column, you're organizing herding cats, six of them, and since then you've run, I don't know what the maximum number of people you were head of in your whole time at the FT. How many people did you have below you?
GT
About 60.
AM
To do it effectively, as you know, is an art in itself.
GT
A lot less than I have now.
AM
A lot less. But basically, some people hate that kind of work, personnel administration work. Some people love it and some are in the middle. They'll do it because it's obviously necessary. Where do you lie?
GT
Middle. I mean, I do it because it's necessary. I don't particularly want to boss people around. But what I do like is trying to build projects and teams and chase a goal as a group. I think I often have quite a strong sense of, you know, vision or strategy or big picture. I like mentoring and monitoring younger people and trying to give them wings. So you know, for that reason, I will do it. But I find a lot of the bureaucracy maddening and frustrating.
AM
And have you any tips for... it's too late for me, but for other people as to how best to do this kind of...
GT
Management?... Be organized if you can. Create a window each day for your own work and yourself so you don't go mad. Try to be, you know, fair and honest with people. Try not to play favourites. Be as open as you can to supporting everyone. Those are the key things.
AM
And lead by example.
GT
Yes.
AM
...otherwise they won't follow. So 2005 we've got to. Is that when you went first to America? GT
No, no. It was, 2005 I joined the Capital Markets team. Total backwater. One of the first things... and I thought it was a terrible career move. I literally thought my career had gone down the toilet. I thought I'd gone on the mummy track because I was pregnant again. And so I really thought, right, I'm getting totally sidelined within the FT. And I arrived at this team, literally like three people. And we were in about the most furthest reach in the newspaper from the main news desk. And I remember turning up and the people were lovely, but they were, you know, one of them was about to retire and two of them were... and one of them was a graduate trainee. It's like really kind of, you know, not mainstream part at all. And so I remember saying to them on the first day, right, we've all got to get out and start talking to real life bankers. We can't just sit in our desks and do press releases. So to lead by example, I said, right, I'm going off to this conference next week, which I found in my inbox. And went off literally on the first week to this big derivatives conference down in the south of France. And went there and was absolutely shocked by this kind of subculture I found. It's a bit like Japanese banking all over again, but this time it was derivatives traders. And basically used my same, exactly the same skills I'd used to deconstruct Tajik wedding rituals to try and understand the banking conference. And that was one of the things that started me on this path to try and deconstruct complex finance and which also enabled me to see the risks that were building in it.
AM
Well, that's what I was going to ask. What shocked you? I mean, was it that they weren't aware of the risks that they were taking or was it that...
GT
Well, what struck me going into the conference was firstly, you had a really clear cut sense of a tribe. And I joked at the time that a Tajik wedding ritual was just like an investment banking conference in that you had this big stylistic ritualistic event, which was pulling together a scattered group of people and using both formal and informal rituals to not just recreate their social ties, but also to recreate a shared world-view, which is really obvious stuff in anthropology. And when I looked at the world-view that they were creating, one thing that was very clear was that they were using a language that no one else understood and nobody else expected to understand. They kept saying that they didn't feel anyone in their bank understood them. They kind of had more in common with each other, even though they were living in Singapore and Tokyo and New York and things. And they were very connected by virtue of Bloomberg terminals. They were all part of what I call the Bloomberg village. And they sort of had this evangelical messianic zeal about what they were doing. They dressed it up in this very evangelical language about, we are saving consumers, we're helping spread liquidity, we're creating perfect free markets. And they sort of almost believed it. I mean, it's part of this kind of world.
AM
Almost believed it?
GT
Well, I don't know. I don't know what someone believes, but certainly at the time, it looked as if they had concocted this creation mythology, which subsequently was rubbish, but at the time seemed to be very widely held. And the great thing, again, as an anthropologist is that we anthropologists know that every community has a creation mythology and a shared story and a shared cognitive map that's full of contradictions, if not lies. But as Upton Sinclair says, it's very hard to get a man to understand if his job depends on not understanding. And in this case, I think the bankers did believe it. And they were kind of worshipping at the cult of liquidity, perfectly liquid free markets. And there's a wonderful anthropologist called Karen Ho, who wrote a book about this called Liquidated. And she said that there's this complete obsession, this cult of worshipping liquidity, perfectly free markets.
AM
What does liquidity mean?
GT
It means the ability to trade assets freely... So they can be freely traded.
AM
No transactional cost?
GT
No, they're freely traded. And the idea is you have a perfectly free market where everything trades everything. You get the perfect price for every risk. Goes back to my idea that in Japan, money is either given or not given, but there's no pricing adjustment. In Anglo-Saxon culture, the more that you get a market that's functioning and liquid and tradable, the idea is that everything will be priced according to the level of risk. That's the theory. So that's basically what they were doing.
AM
So it's a sub-tribe of the neo-liberal idea that the market can be made more or less perfect and so on. When you said you...
GT
And it was full of contradictions. I mean, to give two examples, if you looked at what... They said they were doing all this to reduce risk in the system, and all of their innovation was to cut risk. But the problem was that they were creating systems of trading, which were so complex and no one understood them. So that was injecting more risk in the system. Similarly, they said that they were doing all this to create perfect mark-to-market accounting. And in reality, the products they were creating were so complex, you couldn't trade them, and you couldn't mark them according to market prices. So they were using models to price them. So subsequently, you could look back and say the whole thing was completely contradictory, but they couldn't see it because they, like any group that anthropologists study, had this creation myth, which was very convenient to believe. It justified the hierarchy. It gave them a sense of self-worth. And they had a shared cognitive map, which meant that they kept everyone else out, and they were the only ones who could understand it.
AM
Well, one of the functions of language in these cases, for example, technical language and jargon, is explicitly to keep people...
GT
Completely. I used to joke the bankers were like the priests in medieval Catholic Church who spoke financial Latin. And the congregation did not understand it, but they basically sat there dumbly because the incense was waved and the Pope was blessing everything. And the same way, bankers in 2007 were speaking financial jargon no one understood, but the congregation thought this is fantastic because consumers were getting cheap loans, and Alan Greenspan had blessed it, so no one challenged it. So basically after that, so I went to this conference, became very alarmed, very fascinated, came back and decided to spend a year of my life writing a travel guide to the world of financial innovation. So I did that, and then became very, very concerned about how the financial system was spinning out of control.
AM
Did you publish that?
GT
Oh yes, I wrote lots of articles.
AM
Articles?
GT
Yes, illuminating it. Then I became convinced that there was going to be a crisis. That was in late 2005, and I went off on maternity leave for my second child and told everyone that my timing was dreadful because I thought the crisis would happen while I was gone. And it didn't. I came back in 2006, and the financial markets had become even crazier and even more extreme. So initially I thought, God, I got everything wrong. There hasn't been a crisis. I'm wrong. I didn't understand it. And then after two months, I kind of flipped again and went, no, actually, I'm right. They're crazy. The system is mad. And I wrote a series of articles basically warning of a financial crisis. And I got attacked a lot by the bankers for that. And on a couple of occasions felt very overwhelmed and quite scared.
AM
Did the FT try and put any pressure on you not to write this sort of stuff?
GT
No, never did. No, they were very good. We were still sitting in the really obscure part of the FT. We were so totally outside the radar. We literally sat next to the trash cans in the basement. And structurally, it was quite important because economics was a high status glory part of the FT. And they had offices overlooking the river and next to the editor's office. And that was like very high status and visible. And that's where I'd been initially. So that was like the glory part. And the capital markets team was like literally in the basement overlooking the trash cans. And no one ever paid us any attention unless I went out and yelled at them. And historically, no one had. And it was amazing because basically, I had this initially a four-strong team. And then there was another team next to me. And so I made a pact with the head of the other team to reorganize our teams completely. And no one even noticed. And so I kind of basically just built this kind of little mini group and very much fashioned it to my vision. And once a day, I'd pop out of my little hole and go and talk to the news editors and say, right, please, can we do X, Y, and Z? And they'd often go, oh, God, that sounds weird and boring. But quite often, they'd go, OK, fine. And then gradually, we began to get more and more attention in the marketplace for what was happening. And then the financial crisis happened. And suddenly, we became Flavour of the Month because we were pretty much the only team that was writing about it in advance and which had predicted crisis.
AM
Can you explain a puzzle in your Wikipedia, the article on you in the Wikipedia, where it says you gained renown from this work on predicting the coming global crisis. But according to the Wikipedia, all attempts to find....
GT
Oh, yes. That is really interesting because that's actually been since changed. I saw that the other day. There are people out there who definitely don't like me. And my Wikipedia page has been vandalized quite a few times. And I don't check it very often because I really don't want to read about myself.
AM
But there are contemporary articles...
GT
Oh, yes.. What's happened, I can show you because actually, I saw that last about two weeks ago and basically asked my colleagues at the FT. And they've now changed the Wikipedia page to cite all the articles I wrote predicting it. So, yes.
AM
It seemed a bit strange because...
GT
Yes, it happens. Believe me, it's not...
AM
That's all right. I don't need evidence because actually...
GT
I've just double checked it still is the same because
AM
Because I typed out your Wikipedia today and it still says this.
GT
Today? Okay. It...
AM
Before I came to see you.
GT
Was that today? Because it says here... did you go on my Wikipedia today?
AM
Well, maybe yesterday. Maybe it may be yesterday or the day before.
GT
May have been last week because it now says, she's written about the financial instruments were part of the cause of the financial crisis that started in the fourth quarter of 2007. She became renowned for her early warning that a financial crisis was looming and there are four or five references now ....
AM
That's fine. This...what you were discovering, well, two questions about that. One is that you found they were speaking this language which no one else understood. How long did it, as an anthropologist, it take you to understand that language?
GT
How long did it take? I mean, like anything, quite a long time. I had to put a wet towel over my head and just concentrate. But I had to do that when I first joined the FT and joined the economics team and I didn't understand economics and that was another bite of a jargon. So learning financial markets jargon was just like another type of jargon, really.
AM
And the second question is that you've written a book called The Silo Effect and I think it may have been then that you really came across the idea of silos and insulation and isolation of groups and how it impeded creativity and so on. Is that right?
GT
Absolutely. And actually, I became aware of silos because of the financial crisis in a sense that when the crisis happened, there was a widespread perception by journalists and politicians that somehow the bankers that had caused it had been evil and greedy and mad and I just felt that was wrong because the people I knew, were not stupid at all and they weren't mad and they weren't, generally speaking, deliberately evil. They were quite often greedy but that's human nature. And I realised that the people who made really dumb mistakes in finance were often trapped in a social system and a structure and a cognitive system which made them unable to join up the dots and see the consequence of what they were doing. They literally just saw their own little patch in front of their noses. So I kind of thought this was absolutely insane, you know. And so I wrote a book about the crazy silos that existed inside finance and how and why they'd made the financial crisis much worse.
AM
Do you think the anthropological finding that you go to a culture which behaves in a crazy way and previously everyone said they're mad and there's no logic to it, but the art of anthropology was to see what the inner logic was, and that these people are not villains and heathens, that they have their own system and how could they think otherwise, more or less, inside that system? Do you think that insight of, a central insight of anthropology was helpful?
GT
Absolutely. It's all about trying to see the world through other people's eyes and seeing the context and the environment.
AM
My only sort of criticism of, not criticism really but reflection on the silo effect and your frequent references to silos is that...
GT
And by the way it can be a criticism. You're being very polite. I've had lots of people be very rude to me over my life.
AM
No it's just that functionally silos are necessary.
GT
Completely.
AM
....And the art is to get enough of a silo effect to protect you against the vagaries of fortune and so on, but not to make it so strong that fresh ideas and contacts and reality cannot impinge on it.
GT
Absolutely. Could not agree more. And actually in my book The Silo Effect I write a lot about the benefits of silos because silos, I mean silos are inevitable. They're part of human life. We are drowning in information all the time and people and processes and things, and we cannot operate without some kind of taxonomy to sort stuff out. We need a way of sorting out our sock drawer. We need a way of sorting out our minds. So silos are inevitable. We need a classification system and I would argue that classification is culture and culture is classification. That is at the root of the whole thing. And silos can create accountability, they can create speed, they can create innovation. They allow people to move fast as groups. The problem comes when a silo is set up in a way that's so rigid that it stays like this even as the world around it changes. And that's a danger point.
AM
Well I thought of a useful phrase which I learned from a very close friend who was an industrialist, a very successful industrialist. And his idea, he was very interested in creativity and so on. And he came up with this phrase, bounded but leaky.
GT
Yes, exactly, that's brilliant.
AM
So you need the boundedness, but you need...And if you look at the history of scientific growth and so on, all scientists have their boundedness but then they have sufficient porousness.
GT
And they innovate at the edge of those boundaries.
AM
Yes, exactly. And that's one of the weaknesses of Japan because it tends to be too bounded and not leaky enough.
GT
Well one of the stories in my book is about Sony which basically created the Sony Walkman, which was truly brilliant.
AM
You've read the biography of Mr. Sony?
GT
Yes. So they created Sony Walkman but then they created these rigid different departments that couldn't collaborate. And because they couldn't collaborate, although Sony had software, hardware, and music, and consumer products and design all sitting inside Sony, so it should have been the company that dominated the era of digital portable music, because they were so segregated they couldn't collaborate and so Apple came in and created the iPod.
AM
That's interesting. Well we're just about at the end and in a way we're, as I hope to think, about halfway through the Financial Times bit and then there's all the rest of your life to deal with. Shall we end there and we've got to what, 2009?
GT
Sure, absolutely. Well, 2010, I'll just say the last bit about 2010, it's going to be the cliff-hanger for the next session. So I basically do the financial crisis, I go from being this maverick in the basement, constantly trying to yell at the world and getting ignored and then gradually getting traction and then the financial crisis happens and suddenly I become Flavour of the Month in a way that's actually ridiculous because I went from being here to there and in fact everyone exaggerated what I'd said. I didn't predict the entire financial crisis at all, I really didn't. What I did do though was say that something was going badly wrong. But in the way these things work is suddenly the high priests of journalism woke up and decided that they felt guilty about journalism not having seen the financial crisis before. So I was the one person they could point to practically and said, oh yes, she saw it, so they gave me lots of medals and awards and that, which was very nice but in some ways undeserved, but that was, you know, so whatever. And on the back of that, then I got promoted again in the FT and then I got asked if I wanted to go to America and do what was really a very big promotion, which was to be promoted to run the American operation of the FT. And that was kind of like a shock but also very exciting. So that was my jump into management.
AM
Let's have a jump next time.
GT
Okay, fantastic.
AM
I did talk to, I've done a long set of interviews with Vince Cable.
GT
Oh great, he's wonderful and he and I used to talk a lot.
AM
And he claimed that he'd also...
GT
Yes he had, he was one of the few politicians who talked about it. Yes, he's absolutely correct. Vince and I actually did quite a lot of panels together in 2008 and 2009 because, you know, we were like exhibit A of people. And again, it's like everything, I absolutely did not predict the scale of the crisis or the consequences, not a bit of it. I just was going, this is kind of mad what's happening. But you know, the way these things are, you know, it goes back to the compromise in journalism is that people are always trying to frame you into a box and a stereotype quickly. So I went from being a weirdo maverick to, oh, the prophet. And neither were true, but you know, that's part of life.

GILLIAN TETT - SECOND INTERVIEW 11th FEBRUARY 2024


AM
So we've done this, Gillian, back to front a bit but what I usually start the interviews with is to find out more about the child who is father of the man or mother of the man or whatever it is. When and where were you born?
GT
I was born in Britain, in Essex, and I grew up in some ways as a very suburban, dare I say, somewhat boring childhood, very stable family situation, lived outside London.
AM
Whereabouts in Essex?
GT
Well I actually grew up in Hertfordshire near Watford. The two things that sort of basically gave me a taste for adventure was that firstly, when I was very small, my parents moved to Australia for a couple of years and I had an experience, without being entirely aware of it of another world, another country. I came back to England when I was six. The second thing was that my family in their background had been part of the British colonial imperial structures for a number of generations and so I grew up very much with a folk memory of life beyond the UK, in India, Africa, Singapore and elsewhere. My father's family were all in Singapore during World War Two ..
AM
Were they imprisoned?
GT
They were, and my grandfather was on the Burmese railway and things, and so I grew up with that sense of that backdrop of the world beyond the UK.
AM
Well that's very important. Tell me a little more about your family antecedents because mine are the same.
GT
Well the one other thing I'd say is that you know I also grew up with a sort of a funny odd class juxtaposition in that my mother came from a fairly aristocratic background which was spiralling downwards very rapidly over the generations like many parts of the aristocratic family background.
AM
What was the name?
GT
They were the Carly, Read, and Spinks. My father came from very worthy, hard-working, I would say upwardly mobile family stock from the west of England who were in many ways going upwards and they sort of met in the middle, a good solid middle class collision. But I grew up very keenly aware of class snobberies and prejudices and things like that, and when I was actually 18 I was actually put into a quasi finishing school for a short period of time to try and give me polish, which made me keenly aware again of class structures and rituals and signalling patterns,
and probably made me fascinated by culture as well.
AM
What was your first memory? Your clear memory?
GT
Jumping into a swimming pool in Australia I think probably and the sunshine there.
AM
How old were you?
GT
I would have been 3, 4, I think.
AM
Tell me something about your schools.
GT
The first schools I went to in Australia, and the second school, the main school I went to until the age of 11, was just near London. It was a very charming, sweet, somewhat posh little girls school. I started playing truant when I was 9 and got into a lot of trouble, and the school told my parents that they thought the problem was that I was clever, and my parents, who were absolutely lovely, my mother was wonderful but wasn't somebody who had.. she'd left school at 16 because that was what nice girls like her did in those days, and she didn't really have much in the way of expectations for me academically or certainly not career-wise, and so she was a bit dumbfounded by this, and they put me in, somewhat suddenly, to sit 11 plus for an academic school which was over in London a long way away, and to everyone's surprise I got in and started travelling a great distance to go to this very academic school in North London which was a totally different environment and really was the making of me because it was full of very bright, hard-working, ambitious, often immigrant, first-generation immigrant kids and you know...
AM
What was the school?
GT
It's called North London Collegiate and it was...
AM
In Hampstead?
GT
It had a large Jewish,.. it was actually in Edgware, had a large Jewish diaspora which was fantastic because they had a very strong respect for girls education and education in general, and lots of the mothers of my new friends worked which I'd never encountered before, so that really was critical in terms of raising my aspirations and ambitions.
AM
So were there any teachers who you especially remember at any stage influenced you?
GT
Not particularly. I wasn't a terribly good pupil.
AM
You weren't? There's a rumour that you were bright, faded out...?
GT
Well I was bright by comparison to my first school and when I got to the North London Collegiate I was pretty darn middle of the pack, middle of the middling, so I wasn't. I was not a stellar student at all. I was what many people would call a late, late developer.
AM
One thing that happens... to me anyway and to many English children about the age of 14, 15 is that they are Confirmed into the Church of England. Did that happen to you?
GT
It did. I actually, when I was in my teens, was part of an evangelical Christian church and that was a very important part of my life.
AM
And you've remained a Christian since?
GT
I moved away from the evangelical church when I was 19 and was very, very separate from it for a very long time and then re-embraced the church, the Church of England, but not within the evangelical format that I had grown up within.
AM
So your parents were evangelical Christians?
GT
No, they weren't. My mother was to some degree, but when I was growing up not really, and my father at that point definitely wasn't.
AM
So how did you get this evangelical influence?
GT
In my early teens I became friendly with people who were involved with the evangelical church and got involved that way.
AM
And did you go to camps?
GT
I went to camps and I was very involved in a youth group and very involved in the structure and the framework for a number of years.
AM
And when you went to university did you join OICCU or...?
GT
The CU? No I didn't. At that point I'd broken very much with it.
AM
And since then, when you rejoined as a non-evangelical, has it meant a lot to you and does it mean a lot to you, or is it just something that...
GT
I have problems with some aspects of the church structure and a number of aspects of the catechism, but I believe very strongly in community and believe very strongly in spirituality and recognising, for me personally, I would not evangelically try to convince others of this point of view, but for me recognising that service of God is very important.
AM
When you were between about five and eight or nine did you have any particular hobbies? Did you collect any things?
GT
I was a passionate writer. I spent a huge amount of time writing fiction on my own. I've always been very fond of sport and I've always loved outdoors, backwoodsman stuff.
AM
You still run?
GT
I run, I ski, I do various sports and stuff like that but I've always done a lot of exercise.
AM
Did you keep a lot of your children's writing?
GT
I kept quite a bit of it, yes. And I was an obsessive writer.
AM
And reader?
GT
And reader, yes.
AM
When you were getting to the age of 13, 14, were you involved in any other extra-curricular things like music?
GT
I played the viola very seriously in quartets and the orchestra. I played in just about every sports team going, captained a number of them. I did Duke of Edinburgh. I did Girl Scouts, actually ran a group for a while. And I did a huge amount of art. I did a huge amount of art and almost went to art school.
AM
Really? Do you still paint or anything?
GT
No, haven't done it for years.
AM
You obviously had a very full life. You were doing games, sports, art, music and so on.
GT
And I also wrote obsessively.
AM
And so what strikes me about you, one of the things, is that you're extremely well organised in disciplining your life.
GT
No, I'm not well organised. I am extremely efficient and focused and disciplined about getting a lot of stuff done. I'm very good at landing 12 planes at once, you know, in my head. I'm not particularly effective, historically, at creating structures that I can explain to the outside world about how I do it. And one of the challenges has always been for me that when I'm in leadership roles, I have to force myself to get better at communicating and planning and creating structures around me that ensures that everyone else can land 12 planes at once, you know, at the same time too. So I'm organised in my head and I get stuff done, but it's no good just getting stuff done by yourself if you can't take others with you.
AM
Did you do any play acting, drama?
GT
I was chronically shy as a kid and teenager and never wanted to be front of stage on anything or on a platform. I found it cripplingly difficult to ever speak in public. So I did a huge amount of backstage stuff for the theatre and I designed theatre sets. And that was in many ways my main occupation at college, but never went on stage.
AM
This is, I hope you don't mind me asking you these personal questions.
GT
No, not at all, no.
AM
It's very revealing because...
GT
I'm a very open book as far as my life's concerned.
AM
I think you've mentioned to other people as well that with Ernest Gellner, your supervisor, he was a shy, withdrawn-ish man. And you were very shy and you hardly said a word to him.
GT
That was an utter waste. Tragedy. I know, it's one of the reasons I tell everyone, don't waste your opportunity to talk to brilliant people just because you're feeling shy.
AM
Because I've got this letter saying that I'm nearly your supervisor and so on. I remember you as very quiet, very shy. I wouldn't have known whether you were shy or not, but you were a very quiet student and didn't say much.
GT
I'm amazed that you can remember me actually. Most people can't remember me. I tend to be very good at blending in the background.
AM
Where I saw you was in that sort of strange empty space by the back door of the Department of Social Anthropology where we used to run pre-fieldwork seminars or something like that. And you sat there quietly and didn't say much. Were you involved in any politics at all at school?
GT
No. I didn't do any of the spotlight stuff at all. I was always sitting on the side just absorbing and observing other people. And I always had a very clear sense, clear tenacious dogged sense of determination where I wanted to get to inside of myself, but didn't stand up and hassle at all.
AM
That's a key clue. Where were you wanting to get to?
GT
I wanted to explore the world, have adventure and try and understand it.
AM
I'll go with that too. We were very similar, as you probably realise.
GT
I think a lot of anthropologists are like that. They tend to be slightly maverick loners who often have a whole internal world going on inside their heads and often don't, for the most part, feel the need to grab the spotlight and jump into the centre of the stage at all.
AM
In terms of this shyness, you don't now seem..., I mean, you're a very good communicator and head of college and so on. I've never seen you... When did it lessen, shall we say, I don't suppose it's gone away entirely, when did you become self-confident enough to...
GT
Good at faking it. The good of faking it actually is quite serious because again, one of the messages I try, I really want to try and impart to every single student here who's not feeling confident, particularly the girls, but not just the girls, is that if you start faking it, you might eventually fool yourself, as well as others. It was really during my 20s when I became..and in the early 30s, where I began to get more confident in myself, slowly. I was a very late developer, didn't really know what I wanted to do until really my mid to late 20s, and fell into it almost by accident. And through my 30s, when I began to have some success at work, I realised that being able to talk in public and being able to project was kind of part of the tools you needed for the job. I was very, very utilitarian in my approach. And bit by bit, gradually, got better and better at it. And it was purely a means to an end, rather than something I particularly wanted to do.
AM
So you did it by willpower, really?
GT
Yes, through the same thing as learning a language or learning any other skill, you just have to take a deep breath and practise. And one of the things I learnt, I was very lucky, was that the only way to get good at something is to do it a lot and practise, and to start off by practising small, because the first 20 times you're going to mess up, you might as well mess up somewhere small before you get suddenly chucked onto the big stage. So in my case, the first time I was asked to go on television, it was for some really tiny, tinpot little programme. I went on air, I panicked beforehand and slapped on masses of lipstick. And so when I saw the footage afterwards, every single question to me started with me going, mm, well, like that, which was kind of embarrassing, but actually good, because then I realised that going forward I would never make that mistake again. And I'm a passionate believer that if there are things you hate to do, and you're asked to do it, you should always say yes, and do it a thousand times on a small stage until you get better at the big stage, you know.
AM
I hope that applies to this interview too.
GT
Yeah, but that's, you know, I'm a great believer of that. And again, I'm a passionate believer. I mean, again, it's not a British thing, necessarily, but you just need to accept failure over and over again until you get it right.
AM
Going back finally to your school, you went down the arts and humanities side did you?
GT
I did, and it's one of the things I hate about British education, because actually I loved maths and physics as well, and probably would have loved to have done that, kept that up, but couldn't.
AM
You're reasonable at maths are you?
GT
Yes, I was pretty good. And actually physics was probably my strongest subject for a long time.
AM
But what A-levels did you do?
GT
I did English, French, maths and art.
AM
You did do maths?
GT
I did do maths, yes. I was going to do double maths originally, but then I did art as well.
AM
And how is it that you came to Cambridge?
GT
Really very stunning, actually. I was told not to apply for the fourth term because I wasn't doing well enough at school, and then came out with my A-levels and completely over-performed expectations.
AM
What did you get?
GT
I can't even remember, but it was pretty good. And whatever I got, I was then in school, they said, why don't you try and apply? And I did, amazingly. But I am keenly aware that all of my life I grew up with extremely low expectations of me, which is an extraordinary blessing, because it means that you can only ever outperform them and only ever do better. And that was, you know, it's a huge blessing. It really troubles me today that most kids growing up have the opposite thing, where they have very high expectations, they tend to under-perform, not the other way round.
AM
How was it, and it was Cambridge rather than anywhere else that you came to?
GT
It was Cambridge because that was one of the few ones I knew, and my father had been in Cambridge, some of his friends had been in Cambridge.
AM
And why social anthropology? Did you start in social anthropology?
GT
I did, because I had this absolute desperate desire to go travel and see the world. And I was fascinated by other people, and I had been living in my head writing novels and books about faraway places and strange lands, and thought that that was a way for me to understand people who were radically different from me.
AM
Had you been on a gap year?
GT
I had a gap year, because I did seventh term, and I went to Pakistan for that gap year, and I worked in and around a hospital in Pakistan for a while, and then went up to the north and worked with children up there.
AM
So the fact you ended up in Tajikistan was not entirely unprecedented in your experience?
GT
No. I mean basically I went off to Pakistan, I learned Urdu, and became very interested in languages. And the reason I.., and then subsequently I went to Western China, and spent a lot of time in Western China and Tibet.
AM
You did?
GT
Yes, I spent two full summers in Tibet, and studied Tibetan as well, and was actually originally going to go to Tibet for my PhD. I had originally hitch-hiked by myself from Lhasa into a place called Mount Kailash in the west of Tibet, and spent basically a couple of months with some pilgrims there, and learnt a bit of Tibetan that way. It was Kampa Tibetan, it was eastern Tibetan, not central Tibetan. And then on the basis of that, Carrie introduced me to a Kampa Tibetan family, who were in Cambridge, who were going back to the technically western Sichuan, but actually eastern Tibet, Kampa region.
AM
I know, Kanding.
GT
Yes, and so I went back with them for three months in the second summer of college, and I was going to go back there for my PhD, but couldn't because of Tienanmen Square. So we were casting around for where to go, and because of the.., it's probably why I would have contacted you, because I had this Urdu base, it made sense to look somewhere that was originally Hindi speaking, or Urdu speaking. And then Tajik is the one language in Central Asia which has got a Farsi, Urdu, Hindi overlap. And you know, they're different languages, but there is some vocabulary overlap, so that's why I went for Tajikistan in the end.
AM
Right, that's all very interesting.
GT
And it made it a lot easier to learn Tajik, because I already had that structure in my mind.
AM
When you came to Cambridge, you were taught by a lot of people who were my colleagues at that time. It was about '89 when we met, no a little over...
GT
'86.
AM
'86, that's right. So, Ernest was here as head of department. Were there any of the lecturers or teachers who had an influence on you then?
GT
Masses of them had an influence on me, and in some ways it's almost unfair to single them out, to be honest. I mean, Carrie Humphreys, Stephen Hugh Jones, Ernest, although he was from a distance, Chris Hann, yes, there were lots of them in it.
AM
And you enjoyed the course?
GT
I did, I loved it. I absolutely loved it. One of the things I did, and I can't actually remember who, it's really embarrassing who actually supported me in this, I was very interested in film and art in those days. I still am. So I actually did a lot of art and anthropology. I think it might have been Stephen Hugh Jones who basically let me, in some ways, devise my own course. In the third year I did my own thesis or project or whatever it was.
AM
That's when you borrowed the camera from us.
GT
I think it might have been. I did a video, but I think that was the camera. I think my project was actually on primitivism and the overlap, in some ways, cultural appropriation, cultural collisions, that kind of thing.
AM
Gilbert Lewis taught at quite a bit of art.
GT
I think that might have been him, yes.
AM
Art at that time. And how did you get on? What degrees did you get in the end?
GT
Oh, I didn't... I was not working at all hard for most of my course at all. I was very checked out and I was basically in the theatre all the time, designing sets, video sets. I took up almost all of my time. So I wasn't even that involved in college. So I was basically over in the theatre all the time.
AM
It's ironic that you've now become Provost of the college which set up the theatre, isn't it?
GT
Yes, totally ironic. But no, I was in the theatre all the time. I wasn't working particularly hard. I certainly was not a stand-out student in any way, shape or form. And then suddenly I realised in my third year, very late in the day, that I wanted to try and do a PhD. I scrambled to try and get to work really hard and scrambled to try and get a first. And it was a very solitary experience because it was the first exam in my life that I really cared about and where I knew really mattered. Because until that point, you know, expectations had been so low. And went into my exam, finals, knowing that everything rested on this, whether I could do a PhD or not. And I did something that I've never done since then, which is I sat there in my first exam and absolutely froze. I didn't write anything. And half an hour before the exam, I suddenly realised.
AM
Before the end of the exam?
GT
Before the end of the exam, yes, I suddenly realised, you know. So I scrambled to get like one and a half essays out, but I literally sat there for the first three quarters of an hour, or hour, and did nothing. And so they gave me a 2.1 in the end because the other papers were okay. So that was going to knock me out of any chance of getting a PhD. under the ESRC system. And it might have been my old supervisor, Malcolm Ruel, I think, who said, don't give up. There may be other ways to do it through the department. So I think it might have been Carrie or Malcolm Ruel. Someone found some money in the department and got me funding that way.
AM
William Wise perhaps?
GT
Could have been. Anyway, I got to do my PhD somewhere. So I got a grant another way, which was amazing. And then Tienanmen Square happened and I couldn't go to where I planned to do my fieldwork. So I then had to scramble again. So a strange chapter of accidents.
AM
Well, the next time we talk, we'll get on to your next bit on the Financial Times. But what could link into this for another 10 minutes or so is your book on anthrovision. Because you very much obviously appeal to my colleagues and impress them, even non-anthropologists, by the fact that you very much proclaim and are indebted to your undergraduate and graduate degree for your vision of the world and applying it in other fields. Can you tell me, tell us something about that book, 'Anthrovision'?
GT
Well, 'Anthrovision' basically came out of my frustration that I had been asked for many, many years, what was my degree in? And I used to say anthropology and they kind of do an eye roll, the people I was speaking to, and go, "what's the point of that? That sounds pretty useless". Because, you know, my career trajectory was so odd in terms of having gone and done my PhD in anthropology, started freelance reporting, got sucked into the FT, trained in economics writing, and then having a number of lucky breaks in terms of my financial reporting. And so people were saying, what's the point of anthropology? And the book was written basically to explain to people that there is a point in anthropology. It really is an incredibly valuable tool to look at the world, and to basically offer a kind of hymn of practical praise to cultural anthropology. And, you know, I didn't want to write about my own life at all. But what I've learned as a journalist is that one of the best ways to tell a story is to have some kind of narrative arc. So I used my life as a narrative arc because I toyed around with lots of other narrative devices and came to the conclusion that the best way to do that was to tell my own story only because it's probably more compelling than any other I could do, and because it's a way of sucking people in. I sort of hated doing it in some ways, but it's the easiest way to create that narrative arc. And also my own story in some ways illustrated what I hoped was the core message of my book, which is that anthropology is a three part journey. It's about making the strange familiar, getting inside the head of people who are very different from you, and getting out of your own comfort zone to have respect for difference. But then using that experience of jumping out of your skin to then look back at yourself, and making the familiar strange, seeing how weird our lives are and trying to be more objective about the weirdness. and then using that sort of inside-outside perspective to look at social silence and all the things that we ignore and that others ignore in our cultural patterns. And my own life, insofar as I could. I had gone to Tajikistan and then, trying to make the strange familiar and then flip the lens, trying to make the familiar strange by looking back at London and the financial world. and looking at what we didn't talk about was another way of trying to tell that story about how that three part journey can play out in someone's life in a way that I'd hoped would have resonance more widely. And, I've been pleased. I mean, parts of the book... I always hate what I write, but lots of the book I hate and I would do differently again now if I could. But, I think it's succeeded in some elements in terms of a number of people who have read it in senior positions, or claimed to have read it. I don't think everyone ever reads things, but claim to have absorbed the message of it, say repeatedly to me that it's made them think differently about the subject. And conversely, what really pleases me is at the end of the day, I've had a number of young anthropology students say it's given them the confidence to take what they're learning and think about how they can apply it in practical ways going forward. And that without doubt is the single most important thing to me. So I've had a lot of anthropologists or anthropology students and also high school kids who are thinking about studying anthropology say it's changed their views of the discipline, particularly it's changed, given their parents' view of the discipline, that they can actually do something useful with it. And if that's helped to contribute to raising awareness, then it's worthwhile.



GILLIAN TETT - THIRD INTERVIEW 8th SEPTEMBER 2024

AM
So, session three, Gillian. I think we'd got to the point where you had taken over as either in charge or nearly in charge of the American branch of the Financial Times and were setting it up. So I was wondering if you could say anything you like about those years. I think it was about eight or nine years you were there?
GT
Yes, so basically from 2010 I had the role of US Managing Editor in America, which basically meant I was running all of the editorial operations of the Financial Times in America. I actually had a year gap in 2012 when I was out of the country, but otherwise I was there in New York. And that was fascinating because America is a fascinating, complicated, overwhelming, intimidating, exhilarating story at the best of times. But being there as a kind of insider outsider in that the Financial Times is headquartered in London, but the US is actually one of our biggest markets for our newspaper. We have an outsized influence in America amongst the coastal, financial, political and financial elites. And so we actually punch above our weights. So we're in the American system, but not of the American system. So being an insider outsider, it's very, very exciting. So when I was there, I basically ran a team of journalists in New York and Washington and Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Atlanta for a while, and a few other cities. And we tried to provide good cutting edge coverage and newspaper content at a time when the whole media world was shifting very rapidly from print onto digital. So that created a lot of challenges. We as a newspaper were moving from having a very segmented day based around a print publication rhythm into a 24-7 news operation that was constantly rolling online, at a time when of course, American politics was becoming increasingly febrile. And fast forward to 2016, and we have the rise of Donald Trump. And suddenly, the country is convulsed by these extraordinary political dramas. And so I was basically trying to oversee how we covered it with a front row seat.
AM
So what were the main difficulties in running this organization and what you faced there?
GT
The difficulties fell into three buckets. On the one hand, we found it and find it increasingly hard to compete financially in terms of hanging on to talent and recruiting talent. Because one of the big changes that's happened in the last 15 years between the UK and the US, particularly post-Brexit, is that relative salaries have diverged. So it was a challenge basically keeping our reporters and keeping the best reporters. We had incredibly talented journalists, and we still do have incredibly talented journalists, but the days that we could just snap our fingers and get the best in the market, that's changed. Another problem is that the actual media business has changed radically in the last 15 years in that it's gone from being print to digital, which means that it's 24-7. You're not driven by publishing deadlines. You're dealing with not just text, but also video and audio as well. There is an arms race in terms of big data analysis. So all of our competitors are investing heavily in having extraordinary cutting edge graphics and multimedia offerings and things like that. So we're trying to integrate all of this into the way that we operate. And the other thing that's very challenging is that as news has gone digital and as social media has exploded, the relationship between a journalist and the reader or the audience, as we now call it, has changed radically in that in the old days, a journalist would basically and a newspaper would present the news and they would curate it as they wanted. And it was very much a hierarchical relationship where essentially the newspaper was giving the news to the reader and the reader, for the most part, couldn't try and fashion the news themselves or even necessarily comment back or interact. And what digital news has done and social media is create this concept of citizen journalism and flatten the power relationship whereby readers can now pick a mix of news they want to read. So they personalise and customise what they're getting. They can respond very quickly. They can interact with the author. And it's a much more interactive, dynamic process now creating news. So that was the second bucket. And the third bucket of challenges was around the nature of the story, because when Donald Trump was elected, that changed how the White House started to put out information in that it wasn't done through staged press conferences anymore. It was done through tweet. It was a very fast paced story where people didn't know who to contact. People around the world were very interested in that. And so that again changed the dynamics of how we worked quite rapidly, which made it hard as well.
AM
Right. So what were the major rewards? What did you find most satisfying about that period?
GT
Well being in America is an extraordinary experience. You are dealing with a country that's not only the biggest economy in the world, but believes it is the biggest, most dominant player on the world stage and also has a concept of American exceptionalism in that they believe that they are special. You can sit there and argue with that concept and say that's rubbish, but it is an extraordinarily self-confident, overpowering country. So trying to understand it is critical for understanding how the world works. And just having a front row ringside seat on both the country and the country in a moment of extreme flux and the type of tensions and conflicts and self-debate and self-reckoning that was unleashed by Donald Trump was extraordinary.
AM
Well that overlaps with the next question, which is what is your feeling about, well what is your prognosis, I mean how America is developing, where it's likely to go in the next few years?
GT
America is deeply troubled in some ways. It has a combination of an incredibly dynamic, powerful private sector and a corporate base that's actually becoming increasingly powerful on the world stage today, rather than less powerful. If you look at metrics about what proportion of global companies and global corporate power are found in different regions right now, America's rising really quite dramatically at the moment. All of the talk about Chinese companies taking over the world has not actually happened when you look at the actual metrics in terms of corporate power. And if you look at financial power, again it's very striking that the private American companies are getting a bigger and bigger footprint on the world at the moment. And a lot of business has been moving out of Europe and out of London in particular to America, and the capital markets have been becoming more and more dominant. Again, the great surprise of many people is that Chinese capital markets have not been nearly as dominant right now as we had expected. So the private sector in America is on an absolute roll and becoming more and more powerful. And the innovation and the extraordinary drive of the tech companies in particular is quite remarkable. The public sector is a complete disaster and the public sector is both deeply inefficient and the political system, as well as the judiciary, is all under attack. But the debt level is rising, the ability of the government to tackle the problems to do with the social problems, environmental problems, etc. etc. is increasingly challenged, and the political climate is increasingly poisonous. It is not clear to me whether we are at the high watermark of the polarisation and hatred. We may be actually, surprisingly, because it's very interesting to see how the Democrats have pre-positioned themselves at the moment. But we may not be, and much depends on what's going to happen in the next three to six months in terms of the political climate. But the question about whether America actually can tackle its structural problems to do with income inequality, education, ability to plan for the future, etc. etc. is very unclear right now. So it is still the dominant power on the world stage, but an increasingly insecure one.
AM
One specific question. You mentioned the debt levels which are rising and public debt is one trillion every three months added to the local debt, and then the public debt, not the county debts or local level debts. A lot of people talk about de-dollarisation, in other words, they can maintain this as long as people buy treasury bonds, but if there is a break away from that, countries refuse to buy the American debt, then the dollar will no longer be the world currency. Do you think that's a likelihood?
GT
Well, there's three or four things going on here. The first thing to say is that so American debt, total debt level, federal debt, or government debt is about $26 trillion. And of that they have to roll over about nine trillion in the next 12 months. And because the deficit's rising, and because the debt servicing costs have increased significantly, the size of the auctions they're having to arrange to sell this debt are set to expand by about 30% over the next 12 to 18 months. So that's a lot of debt they have to get out and sold at the moment. You can't necessarily put federal and municipal debt in the same basket, or agency debt, because in fact there is some sign that international buyers are shying away from federal debt and buying more municipal and agency debt. And there is quite a distinction there. This distinction is not as stark as in China, where you have central government debt is very modest, but below the central government tier in China, the debt levels are terrifying right now. And you have this great big split between central and local. In America, it's not quite the same as that. But what you do have is an increasingly challenging debt situation, which at the moment, neither party's indicated they're going to deal with. So at face value at the moment, Harris's plans would add about $2 trillion, and Trump's would add about $7 trillion. Now, that is manageable, more or less, if they manage to keep confidence in the debt markets. The big threat to that at the moment is, one, if Trump wins in November, his team have said repeatedly they want to weaken the dollar, which could be quite a blow to confidence. Their plans on paper are very inflationary, and they've indicated they want to undermine the independence of the Federal Reserve. So if you take those three things together with the outlook for the debt, refinancing needs, you could very well end up with some kind of big crisis over the next two, three years. Under Harris, I think it would be less likely to have a full blown crisis, but it's there as a risk. The problem though is in assuming that there's going to be de-dollarization, is at the moment, there is no obvious alternative to the dollar on the world stage, because the euro is not sufficiently well managed, and you do not have sufficiently deep, fungible capital markets at the moment, and you don't have enough of a liquidity base to make the euro a viable reserve currency. The Chinese are hobbled by the debt problems at the sub-Federal level, and the fact that capital markets are still not sufficiently open and porous for anyone to actually treat it as a reserve currency, and nobody trusts either Xi's policy at the moment, because it's so opaque, nor do they trust the data, which you would need to actually measure debt levels, project economic things and stuff. So the Chinese are doing a good job right now of making their currency used in trade invoicing, but only cross-border trade invoicing. The third-party trade invoicing at the moment is still very, very modest. And the real issue about the dollar is not just the lack of alternatives for reserve currency, it's that the stickiness of trade invoicing around the world, about 80% of cross-border trade invoicing right now is in dollars. The stickiness of that is unlikely to shift quickly. So net-net, I think probably de-dollarization is not going to happen on a significant basis within our lifetimes, but there could be a crisis and that would definitely accelerate de-dollarization at the moment.
AM
Right. Okay, so...
GT
There's probably far more than you wanted to know.
AM
No, that's very interesting. Coming back, well, leaving America, so you came to become Provost of King's and started almost a year ago. Tell me why you did that.
GT
Well, I was... First of all, I loved my time at Cambridge. I loved my time in anthropology. Always had a sort of hankering to come back into this environment at some point. I was very curious to see how it had developed over time and where both Britain and British academia was going. But the main reason I did it was because I believe very passionately that Britain doesn't have a lot of jewels in the crown right now that it can boast about on the world stage. And it doesn't have a lot of resources which are completely world-beating. But its intellectual capital is one part of that. And in many ways, its universities are the jewels in its crown. And it frustrates me that there's been so little awareness, appreciation, applause for them and that they are so often squandered and that everyone from the government to the wider public isn't out there cheerleading for them every five minutes. So I was kind of curious to see if there was any way I could sort of help simply champion, cheer-lead, support all the amazing work that's been done here. So that was the other reason for coming back.
AM
So looking back over that year, your first year, this is probably a good time for you to say fairly candidly what the high and low points of what you've discovered when you came.
GT
Wow. Well the high points are many. Getting to know the amazing fellows, hearing about their work. I'm like a kid in a candy store in terms of hearing about all the research. Everything from taking part in Afghan conferences, which I was doing yesterday, through to hearing about extraordinary biodiversity projects, spending time with the engineers, doing the quantum computing, talking to people about all the amazing... There's a variety of stuff that people are studying is extraordinary and just amazing. It doesn't necessarily always hit you in the eye because people are not out there hustling their ideas in a super aggressive way and broadcasting it. You have to dig, but there's an extraordinary kaleidoscope of brilliant minds, brilliant people and brilliant ideas around there. So that's been incredible. Talking to the students has been amazing. I find them really exciting and inspiring. And just realising that, you know, these are people who are so full of potential and, you know, sometimes a little nudge or an idea or planting a thought in someone's mind can actually open their eyes to a whole different set of possibilities. But that's great. Living in King's is obviously extraordinary and a real privilege and spending time in the chapel is one of the things I absolutely love. And just walking or rather jogging around Cambridge is just beautiful. So that's been amazing. And being able to use convening power to bring people together and try to spark conversations and illuminate ideas and things. That's been good. The frustrations have been the very amorphous, unclear nature of the government structures. Sometimes some of the systems and processes are frankly baffling and peculiar and very irrational. And often I think end up harming the university, not helping and that's sad. I think there is a naivety sometimes inside the college and the university about how the world is changing and how their place is in the world. And the lack of awareness about what's happening in the wider world and the considerable vulnerabilities is something which I find quite surprising and quite frustrating sometimes. An awful lot of time in the college is, in my view, misallocated, doing things which do not necessarily make sense from a big picture view. So spending 120 man hours debating a fence doesn't seem to me like a very intelligent use of brilliant minds, time and attention. These are people who should be winning Nobel Prizes, not worrying about the shape of the fence. And the financial constraints in the UK is a real challenge.
AM
So when we talked before you started, I set you three goals. You asked what you should do and I said you should do nothing and conspicuously do nothing but do a lot by being here. And I suggested three goals and I wondered how you would achieve them. One was to get us a new coffee machine in the Fellows combination room. The second was to get a toilet for the visitors. I can't remember what the third was. But in each case it shows how difficult it is even to do a very small thing in this college.
GT
Yeah, yeah. I mean on the coffee machine issue, that is a huge song and a dance and it's, you know, again it comes back to the corporate governance issue. I can't wave a magic wand and just get a coffee machine and let us go out and buy it. I have thought about buying it myself and I would buy it myself. But, you know, again, it's not clear to me people even want a new coffee machine. I mean, you might want a new coffee machine, but whether the majority wants a new coffee machine, it's very hard for me to tell. I have thought about just putting a new coffee machine in there myself and just paying for it and seeing whether anyone uses it or not. And I'm not sure they would, but you know, we could try that experiment. On the toilet issue, I couldn't agree more. It's absolutely beyond insane that we don't have a toilet for visitors. You know, I'm outraged and horrified and I've made my outrage and horror very, very clear many times. And that is not something that I can wave a magic wand and do either. It's part of the governance structure. And therein lies a tragedy because, you know, really obvious, intelligent initiatives which could and should make the university dramatically better all the time are constantly blocked by, you know, the governance structure. And I'm very happy to do nothing conspicuously. And in fact, I haven't actually done very much in the first year as far as I'm concerned, other than bring in some speakers into the college, some of which went well, some not so well, you know, get a bunch of students out into international initiatives. And then in the first few weeks, I addressed what were, in my view, three immediate reputational risks hanging over the college, which I thought if we didn't address, could end up causing, you know, a lot of damage. So the only thing I've really done tangibly is put in motion things to address those three risks, and then try to do a bit of, you know, PR, intellectual debate, promotion. But I haven't actually done anything else. But, you know, the reactions to even that modest things of what I've done, it shows me that people, generally speaking, don't want me to do very much, except, you know, be symbolic.
AM
Yeah, that's probably true. So I won't ask you what you intend to do over the next...
GT
You can tell me, I mean, I have a very clear idea, but...
AM
Tell us one or two things you'd like to do.
GT
Okay, well, the big slug of what has driven me coming here is to bring the world to kings and kings to the world. That was a common mantra. So that's what I've been trying to do. You know, some people might think I've brought too much of the world to kings, in the form of speakers who they, you know, some of them were liked and they didn't. But that's been the big picture. And that's very much what I intend to keep doing. If you break it down to more tangible steps, the way I imagine it is, you
know, a four part, four pillars of what I'm trying to do, based around the letter PR. Essentially, you know, one, I'm trying to project the college on the world stage and project the fellows research and all the intellectual riches on the world stage more effectively. Partly to raise money, but also primarily just to get more recognition and respect for what's being done in the college. And doing that both by, you know, talking about it, you know, all over the world, meeting with people, trying to tell journalists about it and things like that. But also, I'm going to be creating a podcast quite soon, where I'll basically be interviewing the fellows about their research and then pumping it out that way. So that's going to be a sort of dynamic way of trying to expose this stuff to the wider world. So that's projection. Second part is to promote intellectual exchange inside the college. And that's really about having, using my convening power to have dinners, discussions, debates, you know, talks, that kind of thing. The third area is trying to proactively connect the students to the wider world in terms of jobs. And Myphanwe CHECK, the senior tutor has got plans to create a futures tutor, which I think is starting this month. We're going to try and tap into the alumni network and, you know, get more internships, more talks, more ways for the students to actually get out into the wider world and use their skills after graduation. And the fourth thing is really about professionalising the operations, not in a way that's going to make them commercial, but it's going to bring them into the 21st century and make them less risk prone. And that's mostly sitting with Ivan, who's doing a great job, and Polly CHECK. And they are just working through the long, slow, tough battle to take, you know, this whole structure and infrastructure and make it less risk prone for the next hundred years or so. And that's everything from, you know, making sure the buildings don't fall down to making sure we have a cash flow statement, we haven't had a risk register, you know, some kind of grown up system for managing, you know, the all the stuff that Domus Bursar does, etc, etc. And that last part is deeply unglamorous, is what I call the plumbing. But in my view, if it doesn't happen, the college has condemned itself to becoming a sort of dining society and not much more.
AM
Right. Good luck.
GT
Yeah, so those are the, you know, those are the goals.
AM
They're all doable.
GT
Possibly.
AM
A lot of this footling around for hours discussing very small things and so on. I wondered to what extent your anthropological training helped you endure all that. Because, as you know, one of the main themes in the middle part of the last century in anthropology was functionalism. And one of its great contributions was to go to strange societies, find that they were doing apparently bizarre and foolish things, and then see what the function was, you know, they were tying their women's feet or eating each other or whatever it was. And at first sight, it seemed a bit strange and useless. And then Malinowski and co came along and said, well, actually, it has a wider function in a different way. So a lot of what you see is maybe like that. And I was wondering more generally, you found anthropology extraordinarily useful in study and understanding of business organizations and written very well on the subject. Are there any ways in which you think your anthropological training has helped you understand the rituals, myths and functions of this place?
GT
Absolutely. I mean, it's been an absolute game changer. And it's fascinating, you know, because I know I use it every single day. And I'm, you know, I am mentally treating it like a Japanese community or Tajik village or, you know, Tibetan community, things like that. And yeah, the reality is that this place is deeply immersed in, you know, a number of rituals and traditions and, you know, has a founding mythology, etc, etc. In a way that is both very self conscious and very unconscious simultaneously. So as an observer, I find it absolutely fascinating. You know, the challenge for me is keeping both my analytical observational hat on and my leadership hat on and recognizing that there's all kinds of explanations for what goes on here. Many of which are entirely valid and many of which are, you know, rooted in the fact that, you know, the way that the community has operated in the last, you know, two, 300 years is beautiful and astonishing. However, you know, my role here is not just to be an observer, and not just to be a carrier of the torch and tradition, but also to see and think about whether it's, you know, fit for purpose in the modern world. And, you know, in some ways it is, but in some ways it isn't some of the practices. And, you know, I have a choice, I could either just say, okay, fine, I'm going to do absolutely nothing and the college can just swing if it doesn't work out and etc, etc. Or one can say, actually, there are things about the ecosystem and the cultural practices and traditions and rituals, which have served it really well in the past 150 years ago, but are not likely to serve it as well in the future. And so how can one mindfully look at those and not necessarily change or replace, but maybe add new ideas into the mix. So that's kind of the tension on the one hand, recognising the beauty of the cultural traditions here, and being part of it, but then also recognising there may be times when it may not serve best purpose today.
AM
Very good. Changing gear now, I know your particular expertise is in economics rather than politics, but there are a number of events going on in the world, as you know, not American politics alone, but big seismic changes. One of them is the relationship between America and China. And I wondered if, and you know, China through Hong Kong and through other forms in America quite well now, how do you think that relationship is going to work out?
GT
Well, the relation between US and China is absolutely toxic right now, and is at risk of becoming even more so. And it is without question the single most important relationship on the world stage today. What's been striking in America is the degree to which there has been a bipartisan swing towards increased hostility towards China. And what's equally striking is that, you know, inside China itself, it seems, I say seems because I haven't been there for a few years, but it seems that there's actually a fairly across the board wariness of the US intentions as well. And of course, that's made worse by the persona of Xi Jinping has significantly changed the dynamic and introduced a newly ideological component into what's happening or intensified that. And in America, you know, figures like Donald Trump, and to a certain degree, Biden, have really, you know, made hay out of opposition to China, being part of their strategy and plank. So the relationship is very troubled, in a potentially quite scary way. There are areas of collaboration, quite surprising areas of collaboration, which are emerging from time to time, subsea cables is one, AI frameworks, surprisingly enough, it's another. There are areas of surprising competition. So I'm one person who thought that climate change would be an area of collaboration. And it's turning into an area of geostrategic competition in terms of green technology. But the relationship is very troubled. I happen to be very strongly with Stephen Roach, that what is badly needed right now is equivalent of a secretariat for US China relationship that takes place in a third country, not either country, and which provides a dedicated, you know, spoke, or air traffic control place for managing that relationship. But that hasn't come forward yet.
AM
Right. Well, moving on from that one to the American-Russian relationship, you're off to Kiev shortly. And you've been following the war there. What are your prognostications and feelings about that?
GT
Russia is fundamentally an imperial power in the way we've not seen in most other major 19th century imperial powers recently. It's unashamedly chauvinist and determined to impose its vision on other countries around it in its orbit. And under Vladimir Putin, it has become not just aggressively imperialist, but also aggressively authoritarian and determined to crush any dissent inside Russia and any free speech and any movement towards the West. So I don't see anytime soon a thawing of relationships between the West and Russia, unless Putin is removed or dies. You know, it is possible that if someone like Trump comes in, he will, partly because of the German far right and far left, he might try to soften the level of opposition a bit. But actually, you know, what I've actually been made aware of in the last couple of days is that actually, people like Mike Pompeo, if Trump were to win, are actually as likely to double down on aggression towards Russia as, not aggression, but, you know, basically keeping Russia at arms length as the Biden administration or the potential Harris administration. So I don't see any rapid thawing of that at all. And Ukraine, I suspect, will drag on a lot longer.
AM
And what will be the outcome?
GT
Not clear at the moment. I imagine probably at some point it will end up in a frozen conflict, whereby Russia probably hangs on to part of the eastern Ukraine. The rest of the country probably remains intact and probably tries to rebuild itself. My nightmare scenario is a replay of Chechnya and Grozny. But I do not see a world where the Ukrainians will in any way accept a modus vivendi easily with Russia after what's happened. I'm also very much in the group of those who believe very strongly that, you know, the battle unfolding in Ukraine is not just about Ukraine. It's a much bigger litmus test for whether we actually believe in values of democracy and agency and freedom, etc., etc., or not.
AM
Right. And then the third, the Middle East, particularly obviously Israel, Gaza, but also the rise of increasing importance of Middle Eastern countries, financially at least, economically. As you know, I was very pleased personally to see a protest camp, a Palestinian supporting protest camp in front of King's for a long time after it disappeared in London and elsewhere. And if you supported that in some way, then I'm very glad you did. But having laid my cards on the table, what are your feelings about the outcome of that war that's going on there?
GT
The war that's going on is horrific, absolute tragedy. You know, I mean, it makes my blood boil, both because of what was done to the Israelis on 7th of October, where lots of innocents were killed in horrific circumstances, but also the subsequent torture of the Gaza people, Palestinian people in Gaza has been absolutely horrific. And, you know, my heart bleeds for both sides right now. I am vehemently opposed to Netanyahu's policies and vehemently opposed to the man himself. I'm also opposed to Hamas. And, you know, I'm just horrified. I don't believe that any solution is going to work except for a two state solution. I believe that most people who have spent time in the region and are involved in trying to seek some kind of, you know, forward path, agree with that. I was with the head of the CIA and the head of SIS yesterday. And that's basically where their heads are and where most diplomats in the region from the West are. And it's also de facto where much of the, you know, mood is right now in places like Saudi. But as long as Netanyahu is in power, and as long as Hamas continue to be dominant, I don't see how much hope for a sensible solution. It's outrageous that we don't have, you know, proper, you know, people aren't working with the PLA and groups like that right now. You know, to me, the big swing question right now is what the Saudis are going to do. And you have an incredibly ambitious, proactive leader now in Saudi Arabia. And he's significant for three reasons. Firstly, that, you know, the time may come when he wants to play a more visibly active role in geopolitics in his backyard, and might actually get more involved in trying to create some kind of deal going forward. They've not done that yet. And in fact, one of the things that's very striking is a lack of Arab support for the Palestinian people, which is shameful. Secondly, the Saudi economic plans right now are very striking. And Vision 2030 has the ability to not just generate a lot of growth in the area, but also suck in a lot of capital. And, you know, up until now, the Middle East has been a petrodollar recycler, and they've been using their oil dollars to basically cycle back into the US Treasury market to support it. You know, if Saudi embarks on its Vision 2030 plan, with any degrees of serious commitment, it's going to start importing capital into the region. And that's going to change global financial markets quite a bit. But the third issue, of course, is Iran, and the degree to which it is or is not, you know, now a nuclear power, the degree to which it is or is not actively cooperating with Russia and China, to present a kind of front against the West, and the degree to which it will or will not, you know, stop its involvement in the region. You know, one immediate casualty of what's happened is Lebanon, which is an absolute tragedy again of what's happened. And that economy is in free-fall right now. So it's a complete mess.
AM
And do you see any likelihood in the next few months that the Americans will put real pressure on Netanyahu?
GT
I would love to think so, but I don't see it, because unfortunately, fear of Iran is complicating the American position towards Netanyahu right now. Sadly.
AM
Right.
GT
You know, I mean, the Saudis could behave, could play a very useful proactive role right now. But sadly, they haven't yet.
AM
So I think we've...
GT
It's hard to escape the conclusion that one of the reasons why October 7th happened was because Israel and the Saudis were about to create some kind of peace deal, which the Palestinians wanted to blow up, or rather not the Palestinians, but the Hamas wanted to blow up. And that's, again, another absolutely appalling tragedy, because if there had been some kind of framework for a detente between Saudi Arabia and Israel, we'd be looking at a very different situation now.
AM
I've got through all my questions except one.
GT
We've got loads of time.
AM
But I was wondering if there was anything that you would have liked me to have asked you before I get on to my last one.
GT
No, I'm very happy to talk about anything. I mean, I guess the question you should have asked, I mean, you could ask is, you know, or the point I'd like to stress is that, you know, like everything, the first year I was here, you know, was an extraordinary experience of extraordinary steep learning curve, absolutely joyous, wondrous, you know, exploration and chance to journey into a whole new, you know, world. You know, I made some mistakes, did some things really well, some things not so well, spent quite a lot of time after the first year thinking about what was going to happen next. Spent quite a lot of time after the first year thinking about what went well and what didn't and trying to work out how to course correct for the second year. And I'm a passionate believer that, you know, what, you know, leadership means is being open minded to possibilities and trying to listen and learn what you can about how to course correct when you need to while also keeping hold of your true north. So it's been fascinating. I feel extraordinarily lucky to be here. That's one thing I would emphasise.
AM
Well, we've been extraordinarily lucky to have you as well.
GT
I'm not sure everyone would always say that. Anyway.
AM
I feel that when people ask me. But I see the best sides of you, no doubt, but anyway. So the last thing which you don't need to say anything about, but you had a lovely wedding recently, so you've married Henrik, which brings in the question of family. Some people like to say at the end of this interview, you know, I would like to remember my great grandfather or something or grandmother or husband, wife, children. Is there anything you want to say about any of your family?
GT
Wow. Gosh. Well, I have had a lot of amazing people in my life, in my family. My mother's mother, my maternal grandmother, was a huge impact on me. She was born in an era where she was unable to really ever study at college or travel or have much independence and spent her whole life deeply frustrated. And so from a very young age, implanted in me a desire to get out and use whatever opportunities I might have to travel and be independent, because she hadn't. So she was a great inspiration. I had an extraordinary great aunt who was de facto like a grandmother on my father's side, who had raised my father, who again was single because she was part of the generation who, for whom all the eligible men were wiped out in World War I. So she basically spent her whole life as a single businesswoman, coming from a very, very humble background and was remarkable and instilled in me this extraordinary belief that you can go out and do things by yourself, even or especially as a single woman. So I'm very lucky to her. So I would say a huge posthumous great thanks to my grandmother Joy, great aunt Ruth. And another woman who also inspired me enormously is an aunt Catherine, who sadly died last year, who again was a very strong woman, not single, but forged a life for herself in Switzerland with a family. So she showed me again what you could do. My own mother was amazing, but came from a family who basically did not encourage her to stay on at school after 16. Very sweet, very kind, very gentle. Spent her whole life basically convinced that she was stupid and living with very 1950s values. But just wonderfully kind and would have been absolutely, she died so many years ago, it would have been beyond a shock to see me in this role, because I think her highest aspiration for me was to be a chalet girl. But she was wonderful, really wonderful. And the great thing about coming from that background with no expectations is that if you ever do anything at all, you're always exceeding other people's expectations, which is good. So those are the people I'd like to say amongst my, you know, forebears who I'm very, very grateful to. I am endlessly grateful to my own two kids. You know, for many, many years, we were effectively a tight unit who sort of clung together to survive and thrive in often very difficult circumstances. And they are extraordinary. And I would be nothing without them today. You know, when I was a single mum for many years, struggling to keep myself together and the kids together, you know, I would take them with me and they'd travel with me for years and all that kind of stuff. So they got exposed to the world of work pretty young. But they are flexible and adaptable and amazing. And then last but not least, you know, endlessly grateful to Henrik for coming into my life completely unexpectedly two and a half years ago, three years ago, and showing me that you're never too young or never too old to reboot your life and reinvent yourself.
AM
Well, I remember one last question. If you were anticipating that if you were giving advice, you achieve an enormous amount, you are amazing. And I won't ask you again about how you managed to do so much. You are here, there and everywhere and doing all this. But if you're
giving advice to young people starting out, maybe in the academic or business world, particularly female, could you give one or two pieces of guidance?
GT
I would say first of all, don't listen to people who want to give you advice because, you know, first of all, recognise there is no template for your professional life. You just have to grab at whatever opportunities come at you with as much joy and passion and enthusiasm. Don't obsess about destination. Just enjoy the journey. If you don't enjoy the journey, there's no point in doing it. Point one. We could all get run over by a bus tomorrow. You know, I've nearly died three times and none of us know how long we've got to go. And so you've got to enjoy the journey. Point one. Point two is never take no for an answer. Never give up. Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Don't be scared of being ambitious. Don't feel you have to apologise for trying to do things. Be willing to fail. Be willing to try again. And don't let other people's expectations hold you back. Third thing is that necessity is not just the mother of invention, but inspiration and determination. And if I hadn't had a bunch of things happen to me when I was very young in my life, which were pretty, you know, pretty tough to deal with, on some occasions very traumatic, I would not have done anything that I've done in my life for the most part, because much of what I've done has been forced on me because I literally had no choice but to get out there and fight and, you know, find ways to keep moving forward. And last but not least, I'm a passionate believer in karma. And if you give yourself to the world and give yourself to other people and try to sow the seeds of kindness and generosity without any expectation of ever coming back to you, the universe has a way of repaying you in the future. And that is just an incredible, beautiful thing.
AM
As you are.
GT
No, hardly. But I mean that, you know.
AM
Lovely. That was really lovely. Thank you.
GT
Well, that's probably not very helpful.


Well, that's a lovely ending. So I'm going to stop there.