Is the US Repeating Brexit’s Mistakes?

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Emma Varvaloucas: Is the traditional four year university model outdated and what could replace it?

 

Gillian Tett: The traditional university model is definitely outdated. We need to have systems for online learning, for lifelong learning, and much more flexibility going forward. But implementing that is very hard.

 

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by Emma Varvallucas executive director of the Progress Network and What Could Go Right? is our weekly podcast where we talk to fascinating, scintillating, interesting, compelling people. So today we’re gonna talk to somebody who is indeed wide ranging in her interests, who is one of the most prominent writers and commentators about what’s going on in the world, particularly economically and culturally. 

 

She is also now at the epicenter of higher education, in this case, in the United Kingdom. And so we’re gonna have a conversation that kind of dances between economics and tariffs, higher education, what’s going on in the world? What’s the nature of culture? Why are we here? Who am I? What, what is the meaning of life?

 

Emma Varvaloucas: She’s gonna tell us the answer too.

 

Zachary Karabell: So Emma, who, who are we going to talk to today?

 

Emma Varvaloucas: So today we are going to talk to Gillian Tett. She is a columnist and a member of the editorial board at the Financial Times. She writes a Wiki column there that comes out on Fridays if you’re interested. And she is also serving as Provost of King’s College Cambridge. She is a decorated journalist. Spent lots of years at Financial Times. She started a sustainability newsletter called Moral Money. She used to be managing editor. Lots of different positions there. And she’s also written four bestselling books. So are we ready to talk to Gillian Tett and find out?

 

Zachary Karabell: We are as ready as we will ever be.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, Gillian, thank you so much for being here. Very happy to have you. I think I wanted to start out with the conversation of the moment, which of course is tariffs. Of course, we are in a situation where Donald Trump has blinked, shall we say. We’ve got a 90 day pause on the quote unquote Liberation Day tariffs that he announced, and now he is kind of looking like he might make a deal with China. But we are still in a situation here where we have the highest tariffs that US has ever had in over a century, I believe. So. It still seems quite experimental and I’m wondering what the view looks like from where you’re sitting.

 

Gillian Tett: There are a number of big confusions about what Donald Trump is trying to do with his tariffs. One of them is whether the tariffs are intended to raise revenue and be permanent or be a negotiating tactic and therefore be temporary. A second confusion is whether Donald Trump is trying to essentially use them to wage geopolitical war by trade against China and just focusing on key areas which might threaten the US economy, like military tech sensitive AI developments or life sciences, or whether he’s trying to decouple the US economy from China more broadly, including with consumer goods or not. A third confusion is whether this is really just about China or about all other countries, including so-called allies like Canada or European Union. And the fourth big confusion is whether we can actually believe anything that Donald Trump says, given that he tends to toss out aggressive threats and then climb back from them over and over again. 

 

So you add this all together and it’s extremely hard to work out what is going on. The only things that are crystal clear is that one, Donald Trump is doing this in response to set of political economy problems that have developed in years that are genuine and real, and frankly have been ignored for far too long, like the hollowing out and de-industrialization of parts of America. And secondly, the suite of policies, his offering probably won’t solve these problems. In fact, in some ways they could actually make them worse, which is tragic.

 

Zachary Karabell: So by the time y’all are listening to this, I don’t know where I got the y’all from, I’m not from Texas, but it just seemed relevant somehow. Tariff policies could of course, have changed totally from our discussion right now ’cause it’s such a fast moving target. And one day the White House wakes up and says X, and then it wakes up the next day and says Y.

 

So we don’t even actually know, I mean, we’re recording this toward the end of April. We, we don’t even know what tariff policy is gonna be in two or three weeks, which is part of the problem with the tariff policy is that we continually don’t know what it’s gonna be in the next two or three weeks. I’m wondering, Gillian, given that you’re sitting right now at least, I mean you go back and forth between the United States and the UK and you’re now back in the UK, is there any commentary that that kind of looks at what’s going on in the United States, particularly around tariffs and creating sort of severing what had been a more open trade system and what went on in the UK with Brexit?

 

I mean, is that something that feels separate from the cultural stuff or, although if you wanna talk about the cultural resonance as well, does this, do, do people feel, this is kind of a familiar theme being played out in a somewhat different but related way?

 

Gillian Tett: Well I think that anyone sitting in the UK right now looking at America feels a horrible sense of deja vu because the 2016 Brexit vote ripped apart any sense of national unity as indeed the whole saga around Donald Trump is reinforcing polarization in America and Brexit also ripped apart the globalization trend, which the UK had been part of for so many decades, and in many ways tossed us back into reverse and were still, all the fighting and the economic shot of Brexit distracted British leaders and the British public from tackling many of the really longstanding core problems that they ought to have been tackling for a long time and was very negative overall.

 

And looking at what’s happening right now with Donald Trump’s shift on trade, many elements of this are playing out again in a very damaging way. And British people are torn between, on the one hand, feeling an element of sympathy for ordinary Americans caught up in this. They also feel a sense of frustration and horror about these policies insofar as they’re gonna hit, you knows, trades with.

 

There’s also a sense. America is not the whole world. There are other parts of the world which matter too, and one of the silver linings in this cloud is its force of British government to get serious about trying to reimagine its links with Europe and build deeper integration and collaboration.

 

Zachary Karabell: Is there any talk of reintegrating with Europe on the heels of potentially the United States, fracturing from both the EU and Great Britain?

 

Gillian Tett: It’s very unlikely that Britain’s gonna become a part of the EU again anytime soon, if ever. That ship has sailed, tragically in my view, and you know, it will take another generation for all the poison and bad blood to be healed. However, what we are seeing is the new labour government of the newish labour governor Keir Starmer, is starting to finally try to align itself more closely with the European Union.

 

In some respects, this should have happened a long time ago. Thank heavens. It’s finally happening now, and even on little things that seem irrelevant but are not culturally, like creating a youth mobility program, which now enable young people to move back and fairly freely, there are at least now talks happening around that, partly as a result of the shock of Donald Trump.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: What about wanting the lens to the rest of EU and other US trading partners? I mean, what are, what are people learning right now? What do US trading partners do in this uncertain environment? Is the answer just go to China or is there more than they could do in, in this part of a larger globalization package?

 

Gillian Tett: Well there’s a lot of fear of China in Europe. There’s also a recognition that they rely on China quite a lot for trading lanes and it’s real bizarre to not be forced to choose between the two, understandably. And I think that’s true of much of the rest of the world outside America. And there’s also concern that China will respond to being cut out of American markets by dumping heavily into Europe in a way that’s going to hurt European producers. So it’s a very tangled, complex picture around China, may doubly so because of the extraordinary fluctuations and vagaries of Trump’s policies, which frankly make China seem like the grownup instead of a partner in this current pattern, rather than, you know, a toddler having tantrums every five minutes like Donald Trump. So Europe is trying to hedge his bets. Europe is trying to keep calm and carry on, to use that old British metaphor. Europe recognizes that it needs to move very swiftly to make itself more competitive and for the first time, there’s real talk about embracing a whole strategic reform package proposed by Mario Draghi some time ago, which is needed very badly to make European Union more productive. And in the UK there’s a recognition that it can’t be business as usual if the UK wants to stay and compete.

 

Whether that translates into swift enough action to produce tangible results, though is still not clear, sadly.

 

Zachary Karabell: So Gillian, you often come at these things from a cultural perspective, given your background and things that you look at. And you know, one of the great questions for me over the past years has been how is it that these societies that are comparatively, at least in aggregate, more affluent than any set of societies have ever been, and on aggregate is an important caveat because obviously that affluence is, is not evenly or well distributed within multiple societies. But then again, it rarely has been period in, in human history. 

 

So what do you feel is the, the roots of this kind of rage and backlash that you saw in Brexit that you see to some degree in the United States? And yes, there is a degree of, you know, we’re rewriting the consensus. We’re saying that the neoliberal consensus, this kind of formula of more trade and globalization has failed. I feel it’s probably premature to make that statement anymore than it was premature to make the statement that it succeeded. How do you locate given that, even at the height of 20 years ago, most people weren’t in manufacturing. So the fact that that’s been hollowed out is a big deal, but it’s not, I think, a sufficient explanation for the kind of the roots of this anger and discontent that’s been roiling. So how do you think about this culturally? Like where, where’s this all coming from? Simple question. I know.

 

Gillian Tett: I think there are lots of roots connections, which are overlapping cultural patterns. One is fact that we’ve had, if you like, growing sense of income inequality. And not just income inequality, but transparency around the different life situations of different people. So if you go back a century and a half, you know, poor people knew that there were rich people.

 

They couldn’t walk into the shops where they were actually buying things. Usually now online you can see immediately what you’re missing out on. So you have large parts of population, increasingly able to see FOMO and feel FOMO and feeling angry about it. You also have large parts of parts of population whose living standards have stagnated, if not declined in real terms, particularly relative to others because this hollowing out in the deindustrialization has hit many median and poorer people harder, and nobody likes decline.

 

And there’s a sense of decline or stagnation in many corners of American society. That’s a stark contrast to say after World War II where conditions were stuck tough, but there was a feeling that things were improving for the better. On top of that, I would argue that the way that social media and digitization has fostered and fueled polarization and tribalism is adding to this sense of anger and anguish, and there’s a feeling that people are kicking back against an establishment, losing trust in authority figures and in institutions, only trusting their online crowd or their peer group at a time when those peer groups are becoming more fragmented. And there isn’t an overarching figure which could stitch us all together in many ways, the only thing that’s gonna bind society together in this situation is to have essentially a common enemy.

 

And that’s usually happened in the past via war. So all of that is fostering this sense of anger. And on top of that, there’s another very subtle thing, which really stems from my anthropology background that I’m interested in, which is this concept of agency and customization and personalization.

 

Because one of the things that digitization has done to us as humans in the last couple of decades is to give us the assumption that we should be able to personalize and customize everything around us according to our own desires. So, you know, a hundred years ago there was a one size fit all approach to most consumer spheres. You know, if you’re going to have coffee, you had it black or white. If you’re gonna have food, you have what was on the menu. If you wanted music, you switched on whatever was happening on the radio, or bought a vinyl record that somebody else had assembled. 

 

Now we’re constantly using a pick and mix approach to almost all aspects of our consumer experience. You know, we have playlists, we have customized meal order systems. We have customized media and we’re extrapolating that into identity as well. And we assume that we can sort of pick and mix so many aspects of our life that when it becomes clear that we can’t pick or mix the world we live in, or if you like, our career outcomes in dein, deindustrialized towns and things like that, that fosters a sense of disappointment and rage and anger, which is pretty brutal.

 

So I think all of those elements are feeding into it, each other, and creating this underlying problem of bitterness, anti-establishment rage, and general mood of, you know what Durkheim called anomie.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: As you were saying that, I was thinking about how I came home yesterday from the gym very upset that my headphones weren’t connecting to my phone. I couldn’t listen to my YouTube playlist while I worked out, and I had to listen to the gym’s music and I came home and I was like, what was that? I had to listen to what they decided that they wanted to play for me.

 

So yeah, I think you’re spot on.

 

Gillian Tett: In a sense, a political party is like a vinyl record. It’s a package of ideas that someone else has assembled, whereas today, people are increasingly gravitating towards. Brands and causes and single L ideas that they can pick a mix. You know, Trump is a great big, gigantic brand and people may not want the entire package that went with the Republican party, and Trump basically smashed that up.

 

But they like the concept of Trump, the brand. They like single issues like, you know, defend America, immigration, that kind of thing. And that makes for a very volatile mix in politics. It makes it very hard to talk about trade-offs in any intelligent way. It means you tend to get these capricious outbursts of energy that then die down, and in many ways it challenges the way that we thought democracy should be operating.

 

Zachary Karabell: I react to some of this in a more hopeful way, and look, I know I am susceptible to silver linings and, you know, may may not sufficiently honor the clouds, but the kind of efflorescence of individual belief, our own agency, and you, you referred to this, I find more hopeful. And, and, and that there’s a degree to which, you know, you just said something about it’s not how we think democracy functions or it’s not how democracy has functioned, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into anti-democratic, the way in which so many people seem to be leaping to the conclusion that there’s either democracy or there’s anti-democracy as opposed to, we could just be in a really confusing flux whose outcome we just don’t know. When things get upended, they get upended. You don’t necessarily know what’s happening on the other side until you’re on the other side. 

 

So I, I wonder whether there’s a degree to which this agency, while it can feel very angry and messy and chaotic, and risky and even dangerous, could also be kind of the proverbial cliched earth pains of a more inclusive set of social and political systems.

 

Gillian Tett: There’s two big trends shaping what’s happening now, which we don’t often talk about. One is shift towards a pick and mix world and extreme customization, or the expectation of extreme customization agency, and that’s very much what the rise of AI and agentic AI both reflects and plays into, because AI is the ultimate tool that can give us customized options and operates by collecting personalized data.

 

The other big shift is a move away from what might be called vertical axis of trust, where society is glued together by trusting in institutions and leadership and authority figures to a world of more lateral trust, peer-to-peer trust. And although peer-to-peer trust used to be constrained by the people who you could eyeball and be physically close to was just in small groups or the people who you could physically remember in your brain, like Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary anthropologist says, so when groups became too big, you couldn’t use peer-to-peer groups to trust together.

 

What digitized platforms have done is enable huge groups of people to interact through peer to peer trust or what Rachel Botsman, the Oxford professor, calls distributed trust. And when you put those two things together, they have enormous benefits because it offers individuals, more agency, more freedom, far more freedom, more choice, and in many ways feels dramatically more democratic.

 

And frankly, it’s pretty addictive. I don’t think most of us would want go back to a world where we had a one size fit all framework for everything and where we all basically got our information just from trusted authority figures. But the downside is putting those two trends together creates lots of echo chambers, which may not overlap, which can be very polarized because they define themselves against each other.

 

It creates the risk of constant disappointment because we all think we should have a choice, an agency in our lives. And in fact, not all, all of us do. And it also creates this recipe for very polarized. So that’s a combination, like all innovations, that has the potential to both be very good and quite bad.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: And it can be taken advantage of by smart players, right? Like right after the China US trade reciprocal tariff stuff started right a couple weeks ago. If you’re on TikTok, you are absolutely flooded with these videos from Chinese manufacturers making luxury bags and other things saying, Hey, by the way, we’re actually the manufacturers behind Hermés, right? It’s not true, but they’re saying, we make the Birkin bag, we make this, we make that, and actually you can get around the tariffs and buy directly from us. And it was abundantly clear on TikTok that China was driving these videos to you that there were hundreds of thousands of likes. It was video after video, after video.

 

And I remember thinking at the time, you know, in terms of China being able to take advantage of this, and China pushing that soft power, that cultural power that the US has really brought a knife to a gunfight, right? Which is ironic for the US. I mean, does the US have any kind of soft or cultural power these days, or is that really on the decline?

 

Gillian Tett: Well, there are two questions here. The first is, can, can people be manipulated as a result of these trends? Absolutely, yes. And we see a lot of signs that people are putting their trust into online crowds are at the mercy of frankly, leaders and authority figures and other forces are basically manipulating that.

 

So that is dangerous without any question at all. And a world of pick and mix again, can be manipulated all the time. One of the bitter ironies of pick and mix is that people think they’re making individualized choices. You know, me as an individual, I’m choosing exactly what I want, but as they make those choices around identity and information sources, they often become more, not less tribal because they choose to sign up to a particular sense of themselves and cling onto that choice even more tightly because they made it, which makes them almost more tribal and part of a group than less.

 

It’s very ironic, but in terms of what that means for projecting soft power and how this is being used in a sort of battle of manipulation online in platforms like TikTok, the answer is yes, absolutely. Groups like China and Russia have been engaged in lots of disinformation and manipulation in recent years.

 

America appears to have be a lot slower than some of its adversaries and jumping aboard this trend, maybe it’s a doing a lot we just don’t know about, but I suspect not from talking to American officials. I’ve actually been taking part in a disinformation campaign for the last two days, this information conference for the last two days in Cambridge. And one of the very clear messages there is that, you know, the West has been very slow to wake up to these risks, let alone kill on the offensive.

 

So in terms of soft power, what can the US do about it? Well, it can do one or two things. They can try and force the operator, the platforms to get rid of disinformation and misinformation. One would hope they’d do that and alert people to those dangers. If it wants to get aggressive, it could try and play the same tactics itself. I hope it doesn’t do that.

 

Zachary Karabell: You know, you mentioned Cambridge, and I want to use this as a pivot a little bit to higher education and something you said before about, you know, the pick and choose non-hierarchical world, you’d be hard pressed other than in some corporations, I suppose, to find a more hierarchical system than the way higher education, basically everywhere in the world is, is constructed, right?

 

You have a, a professor or a teacher call, whatever the title is, who stands or sits at the center of, of a group and delivers knowledge to either a totally passive audience or an audience that that person also then directs the conversation of. It’s a very, it’s a, it’s a very hierarchical system. I know you are there to learn if I, in this case, would be the professor and you would be the student, but you know, fill in the blanks. What is all this kind of world of that that you’ve just described so eloquently, how does that mess with that framework? I mean, right now, other than the political controversies around higher education and protests and how these are being handled, the kind of inherent infrastructure of higher education seems relatively unscathed or un, unevolved. You know, there’s not a lot difference between a, a lecture hall in Cambridge or Harvard or a community college in the United States now, and there was in 1970. Even if the world around it has changed, are we just, is this the last gasp of it and it’s about to crumble or is there something, you know, what’s going on?

 

Gillian Tett: I would agree with you on many points. Firstly, higher education is inherently, deeply conservative and does not change fast or willingly. Secondly, that in many ways, this mode is at odds with the direction of the wider world because a world where young people or even older people are able to pick and mix their coffee choices online or their information sources, you know, often get the shock when they can’t pick and mix their educational choices or educational journey quite as easily. And in theory, there’s no reason why we can’t do that. I mean, we’ve seen the rise of massive online open courses, MOOCs, which enable people to dip and dip out when it suits them fine. And to engage in education outside the normal wrapper of four year course or three year course when you are 18 or 19.

 

And you know, as the economies change of people’s need for learning changes, frankly there needs to be a lot more flexibility around the learning journey. In describing the shift was a pick a mix world and shifting patterns of trust. I’m not saying that that’s all necessarily good or endorse it. There is a real value as social groups in sometimes being forced just to get on with people you might not choose to be thrown into a room with, and to just suck it up if someone tells you to do something and to get used to the idea of being part of a disciplined system that someone else has designed rather than you yourself has designed. And it’s really interesting because there are signs that in fact, younger people, Gen Z often likes the situation where choice is removed from them and they just have to get on because if in a way they can switch off their brains and is almost more relaxing than constantly having to choose how to define yourself and what to do. 

 

I’m not saying that’s good in all circumstances, but there actually is a merit for part of one’s life and being thrown into a shared group experience where you’re living with others. You might not choose where you have to study stuff that you may not immediately gravitate to work on someone else’s schedule to reduce your essays or do your exams or turn papers and be exposed to things you might not otherwise have expected.

 

When we have permanent choice and control, we tend to go down intellectual rabbit holes of our own making, only seeking out things we know. And colliding with the unexpected can be really powerful. And in some ways that’s what university is all about. Should universities change? Absolutely, yes. Will they change? Probably not as fast as they should. But are there things about universities that we ly should celebrate and retain? Definitely. 

 

And I’ll just say that one of the things that makes Cambridge and Oxford distinctive is having what’s called a supervision system for undergraduates, which means taking professors and putting them into small groups of two or three people with undergraduates to engage in discussions about their essays.

 

It’s really all about Socratic debate and learning and that type of in real life, IRL, encounters, which force students to chat to people they may not agree with and defend their ideas, you know, verbally rather than just downloading an essay from chat, GBT. Is incredibly precious and arguably even more needed today than it was in the past.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Is the demise of, you know, Gen Z’s ability to intellectually reason or just basically use any part of their brain, overstated? I mean, you have people writing essays online, like Yasha Monk’s, persuasion Outlet. Someone wrote an essay recently that was like, people in college right now are illiterate, maybe not on elite campuses like Harvard or Princeton or Cambridge, but in your kind of run of the mill college in the US, they are functionally illiterate.

 

And I was, I mean, I haven’t been on a college campus in a while, so I’m wondering how that strikes you.

 

Gillian Tett: Well I haven’t been on college campuses where people have been functioning illiterate, to be honest. But that’s probably because my band of experience isn’t wide enough. You know, I can tell you that Oxford and Cambridge, they’re certainly not functionally literate. They’re some of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and I do notice quite a notable difference between the students here and some of the ones I’ve counted in America, because they are all trained to talk about their essays engaged in debate, and you know, pretty diligently trying to master a lot of the information and talk about it.

 

But chat GPT and other tools have indeed made it possible for people to do all kinds of shortcuts in their learning journeys. And that is not necessarily always a bad thing because like the introduction of the calculator, something like chat GPT, can save us a lot of time with tasks that may not be at the center of intellectual inquiry, but it can be a bad thing if it means we switch up our brains and we just don’t know right now, which of those two it’ll be.

 

Zachary Karabell: I wonder about the, this question of AI and chat GPT or any of the models, whether it’s Llama or Anthropic, you name it. How much that is overstated as a, as a risk to learning or understated as a tool for learning, like what’s your experience been so far? The, the thing that you hear about most is trying to identify AI or, or chatbot plagiarism, which is certainly problematic in writing, right? 

 

If you’re doing an essay, it’s even harder if it’s mathematical or science proofs and, and solutions, meaning there may be patterns that you can discern in AI generated prose that are somewhat easier currently, at least to suss out than AI generated science and mathematical solutions.

 

But I, like what’s, how are you dealing with that at Kings?

 

Gillian Tett: Well, the honest answer is that it’s still pretty early days, and I don’t think anybody at Cambridge as a whole has a really clear cut policy around it. You know, yes, chat GBT and other tools are used by students and sometimes by professors as well. To be honest, the marking for writing essays, what’s clear though, is relying exclusively on them is, is not a good idea because you know it needs human oversight and checks and balances.

 

The best uses of chat GPT are a bit like a sort of online tutor come friend who widens your sense of imagination and possibilities, and then checks against, you know, bad writing, stealing mistakes, et cetera, et cetera. So human and AI combinations are more effective than just AI and sometimes than just human.

 

But there isn’t a clear cut set of guidelines or outcomes. Right now we’re feeding our way, and frankly, there needs to be a lot more debate about it.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Gillian, I have a, a pretty wide question for you, partly inspired because this conversation went to places where I was completely not expecting, and you’re such a unique thinker. I’m just curious what other kind of big picture trends, or maybe not even big picture, but things that are tickling your brain right now that are on your mind.

 

Gillian Tett: Goodness me. Wow. Well, I could have had a very weird set of interests, which not too big a heathen, that’s part of my problem. One set of ideas on brain in is, is around the question of Gen Z and the shift from vertical to lateral trust, the rise of customized consumer culture and what that’s doing for other parts of the society and what that means for polarization, higher education, and how we are or are not operating social groups.

 

The other thing I’m extremely interested in right now is the, I think we’re at a big zeitgeist shift moment in terms of how we imagine economics and politics. And very broadly speaking, you know, we’ve been through several phases in the last 150 years around this. Pre 1914, we basically had a world of imperial economics.

 

Then we had the interwar years, which were basically protectionist nationalist economics. Then we had the post World War II period, which was really about keynesianism. And then we had from the 1980s onwards, kind of neoliberal free market thinking, epitomized by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. And from the 1980s onwards, because of the rise of computer power and the rise of the financial industry was dovetailing with the rise of kind of this vision of neoliberal free market economics.

 

There was a tendency to treat economics as a kind of discreet sphere, inquiry of itself that could be captured with quantitative algorithms and models and treated like a branch of physics, or Newtonian physics, and with similar tools used to analyze it. And politics was very much seen as a derivative of economics and things that couldn’t be neatly put into the economic models or balance sheet, like environmental risk, like tech change, like medical risk, like you know, social conflict war.

 

They were generally treated as externalities and sort of shoved to a side. And what’s happened the last 10, 15 years is those externalities have come to dominate and turn the models upside down, and many and many times become more important than the models. We saw that during the pandemic. We’re seeing climate change risks, you know, upend our models. We’re seeing, you know, social risks and tech change changing how we operate. And of course now we’re seeing geopolitical risk and protectionism very much at the fore. And essentially what’s happened is that instead of politics being derivative of economics, economics has become a derivative of politics and power.

 

And that requires a change in terms of how people look at the world and analyze it. It also, you know, by default changes how policy makers are acting today as well. In some ways, we’re more back to the world where we were in 150 years ago than we world we were in 15, 20 years ago. And that’s requires a big intellectual shift, cognitive shift, it’s only just started. It’s sometimes goes, this cognitive shift sometimes goes under the name of geoeconomics. It’s a very important one.

 

Zachary Karabell: So is this the germination of a, of a next book for you?

 

Gillian Tett: And I’m not sure is the answer. I’ve got about 12 different books I wanna write at some point. Yes.

 

Zachary Karabell: You could do parallel books, you could write several at once. You could use chat GPT, and could use a different AI chatbot for each of the 12.

 

Gillian Tett: But I need a research or two to do it, but yeah.

 

Zachary Karabell: Well, apparently not. You could just use the chatbot, have it, do all the research for you. Say, here, here’s my thoughts. 

 

So let’s extend this kind of big picture question with a two part. One is how surprised are you at the way the world looks now relative to what you thought, let’s say on the eve of Brexit? And if you were to take the same eight or nine year period and you were to do the impossible crystal ball question, right? Like we’re sitting here in 2035, how surprised are you that we are where we are now relative to wherever we were then? And what do you expect 10 years from now?

 

Gillian Tett: I’m very split, because, on the one hand, I’m not surprised to discover that systems can collapse and history can go, go into reverse. Because I saw that in an early part of my career in that I lived and worked in the Soviet Union when it was still the Soviet Union. In the last two years of the Soviet Union, I assumed that it was a pretty permanent structure, not least because my PhD was based on studying the Soviet Union.

 

So I was, you know, invested in the Soviet Union’s continued existence, if you like, and then it completely collapsed. And my research went from being current anthropology to being history and all of the assumptions I had basically crumbled, as did those of people around me. And you know, so once you’ve lived through that, you never quite trust anything is permanent and unchanging again.

 

And it shows you that, you know, there are different epistemologies out there and they can change. And ideas that seem completely dominant in one era may fall out of fashion and crumble. So on one level, I’m not surprised that we’re seeing a major zeitgeist shift. And that we’ve seen systems we thought were permanent crumble because that is what happens in history.

 

But as a human being who is very, very much a creature of the globalized liberal order and who is, you know, lucky enough to have a lot of privilege in my life and who’s benefited enormously from what happened after 1989, you know, I rode the wave, the globalization innovation, democracy in my own career, big time.

 

You know, I’m a creature of that. I assumed for much of the, you know, early naughties that that was on a fairly straight trend towards more and more of that, as did most people who went to elite gatherings. So of course what’s happened has come as a shock in that respect.

 

Zachary Karabell: And on the 10 years from now, question the impossible one?

 

Gillian Tett: I wouldn’t predict with much confidence where we will be in 10 years. It’s human nature to assume that we can just extrapolate the present more or less the same. And on that basis, I would imagine that America may wanna declined in its relative power and standing on the world stage to some degree. I’m distinctly concerned about the outlook of Britain. I fear that Britain may well have declined as well.

 

I think that China may well have consolidated its economic path and that, you know, there may be some kind of modus vivendi having emerged between China and America, which enables us to have a slightly less fractious existence going forward. However, I can see lots of much darker scenarios whereby we slide towards war. It’s that simple and that cannot be excluded. 

 

I can also see darker scenarios where, you know, whether it’s because of environmental risks or cyber hacking. You know, we see parts of our modern civilization under threat. That isn’t my dominant scenario at all. I like to think that we’re basically gonna continue with something similar to what we look at the day.

 

And it’s possible that we’ll even see sanity break out and drive us towards more cooperation. That’s what I very much hope for.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Can I ask you a really basic follow up question to that, which is, are you nervous?

 

Gillian Tett: I’m always nervous. I never really quite trust anything.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Hmm.

 

Gillian Tett: But I’m probably more nervous about the geopolitical outlook than I’ve been before given the scale of fracture and tension. I’m nervous about the volatility and unpredictability around Donald Trump and equally nervous about the level of anger that’s now bubbling in parts of the West.

 

But I’m also wildly optimistic about many other aspects of our lives. And one of the really amazing things about being in Cambridge is being surrounded by all this incredibly innovative cutting edge science, whether it’s green tech or it’s computing, or it’s quantum or it’s life sciences. And if I ever feel like succumbing to any depression or.

 

I go look at one of the laboratories and ask what some of the research doing, and that leaves me feeling wildly upbeat, cheerful, because what’s happening in science today is fantastically inspiring.

 

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, it’s, it’s such a fascinating eye of the beholder question, so I travel around a lot. Some of it, I guess professionally driven, a lot of it just personally driven. I don’t have a huge personal professional divide. And like it’s a truism that if you’re, I know a bunch of people who are in the business of global entrepreneurship, they meet with people around the world, they, they help mentor and sponsor. And if you go around the world and you meet with young entrepreneurs in any country, no matter how dysfunctional that country is, you tend to come away thinking like the future is bright. You’ve got all these young people with energy like wanting to change their societies in the world for the better, and they’re gonna do it and they’re committed to it and they’re smart. 

 

But again, it’s just a very particular slice that you’re looking at. And that slice is usually educated and affluent and it’s probably not, it’s not the right part of the kaleidoscope to draw, to draw complete conclusions from, but it’s, it is a part of it. That is my sort of caveat to, I am certainly struck in the world today by in your pick and choose universe, the way in which both social media and more global affluence, partly a product of the very neoliberal system that is in such disregard today, just how many people seem to be manifestly feeling like this is their moment to make their society and their future, and some of that manifests as an anger at the way things are and demand that it change. Some of it manifests as optimism about, you know, the future is ours and we can create it. And depending on where you are in the world, those are in more or less prevalence, right?

 

If you go to Saudi Arabia, there’s a degree of, this is our moment, right? We have this ability to seize our future. If you go to India now, in spite of all of its issues, there’s a certain amount of cultural optimism. Certainly not true in the United States. Certainly not true in Great Britain, you know, so it depends on where you are. But I’m really struck by that in a world where the dominant strain and part of the point of The Progress Network obviously is to try to, is to try to look at those thousand points of light, and it’s more like a million points of light. But you know, just, kind of in response at a personal level, I feel that very palpably when I listen and talk and go around the world, in a way that given how discordant that feeling of there’s a lot that’s going on that’s good is, sometimes leaves me feeling like, wait a minute, am I, am I completely missing the disaster that’s about to happen just because I’m listening too much to all these other things?

 

Gillian Tett: I think you know the answer is yes or no, because I think frankly, if you toured the world in, you know, 1905 or 1910, you might’ve had a very similar reaction in that you would’ve encountered a lot of people who were feeling that tech innovation was amazing, that they were getting more freedoms in parts of the, the Western world than they had had before.

 

That suddenly it was possible to invest anywhere in the world, to travel anywhere in the world. To trade with anywhere in the world. I mean, John Maynard Keynes described the mood in London before 1914 as being one where quote, the inhabitant of London could sit in his bed and order by telephone almost anything he desired from any corner of the world and have it delivered to his doorstep the next morning.

 

And that was before Amazon. And that was a function of, you know, growing globalization. And lots of people felt they had new freedoms. The flip side of that was that this was op, operating within a very ugly imperial structure and system. There were lots of people who were badly abused and excluded and exploited, and people who were glorying in the freedoms they could see, which were mostly the elites, but not just the elites, middle classes in, in Britain and America too were failing to notice that, you know, within this seeming, you know, aura of extraordinary progress, there were social and political currents, which were essentially leading them to war as well and growing geopolitical tensions. So it’s possible for both to coexist and to understand why.

 

Just read John Maynard Keynes’ book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which is what he wrote just after World War I, lamenting the fat that the elites have been so blind and continue to be so blind after World War I.

 

Zachary Karabell: That seems more like a no than a yes and no.

 

Gillian Tett: No. Am I optimistic? Yes. I’m vitally optimistic. Am I also pessimistic? Yes. There. We’ve rarely seen so many opportunities and so many risks in the world today. That’s just a reality.

 

Zachary Karabell: I don’t necessarily disagree with that. I just think the pessimistic stories are evident and prominent and constant. So it’s not, it’s not as if, it’s not as if I think, unlike the 1905 or 1910 example, we’re not living with any Blythe denial of all the risks and problems. If anything, I would say it’s the flip side.

 

We’re living in somewhat of a denial of, of the potential counter narratives, except now the counter narratives are positive. Then the counter narratives negative meaning I, I feel like we’ve, the, the, the script is flipped from what was a hundred years ago.

 

Gillian Tett: Yes and no. I mean, I think that what Keynes used to lament was the fact that all of the dramas about war and scandals and political fights, you know, as he wrote, were basically the fodder for, you know, the front page of the newspapers or, you know, used for dinner parties to live, enliven the conversation.

 

As he said, they weren’t seen as a real risk today. You know, we have an entire industry of people who spend all their time waving their hands about the risks. We don’t spend much time talking about the innovations and all the good reasons to be cheerful, but there’s still a sense of disconnect. That’s the nature of being human.

 

Zachary Karabell: I think that’s a perfect note on which to end the conversation. One, it’s always a perfect note when you can invoke Keynes, but the general reminder of, you know, what kind of cultural moment we might be in, what kind of cultural moments we are in, the unknown, the contingency, all of it. I wanna thank you for your thoughts far ranging. You’re a far ranging person, so it’s good that we have a far ranging discussion and I would, you know, encourage everyone to pay attention to Gillian Tett if you have not already.

 

Gillian Tett: Well, I’d like to say back to you, Zach. Thank you for creating this venue, which deliberately embraces optimism because we need more of it. 

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Thank you Gillian. 

 

Zachary Karabell: Thanks Gillian. 

 

Emma Varvaloucas: I think it’s one of those conversations where the risks are very apparent. Right? To your point where everyone knows what the risks are, I think. There are not so many people around with the, you know, the blinds over their eyes or like that meme, you know, sitting in the house, thumbs up, drinking coffee with fire, going all around them. 

 

How would you feel if you turned out to be like, I don’t know, something happens really, really, really, really bad. Right? I mean, not that there aren’t really, really bad things happening now, there’s, or Ukraine. Sedan. You know, there are things that affect people around the world, but if something, uh, truly horrific was going to happen to the United States.

 

Zachary Karabell: I certainly thought about this a lot in, at this moment in time, you know, the spring of 2020, you and I had met, we had been talking about founding The Progress Network and then suddenly the pandemic happens. Everything, the world is completely shut down. There was X period of time. I don’t know whether it was weeks or days.

 

It certainly wasn’t months, but there was certainly a, a brief period of time where I think many of us, and I certainly did, were suddenly left with the wow. Like is this the time when just everything, the narrative just goes off the rails, right? Is this the, is this the Walking Dead zombie moment? Is this the. You were living in one reality and then suddenly you’re living in another and, and essentially a massive portion of whatever your assumptions were about the world and society and all of it were just gonna be null and void. 

 

Now, that probably was extreme to think that, but it certainly felt that way for a period, or at least the question viscerally happened in a way that just, you know, I, I’m sure it happened in Syria during the Civil War in 2013 to a lot of people, if you were Syrian in Syria at that time. It certainly happened with the Taliban taking over in Afghanistan. So that obviously these things happen in specific societies, and that was a one of like, maybe the world is just gonna be completely different, not just our society imploding. The fact that that didn’t happen is not, I’m saying, you know, should give comfort to, oh, well, therefore, bad things won’t happen. I take it as an axiom that we don’t know and that there is X percentage, and I don’t know what the, I don’t know what numerical value to place on the X, that everything’s gonna fall apart in a really bad way, that we’re gonna tumble into whatever the talking points are of the people who in the United States are most viscerally convinced that our entire democratic system is going to crumble. Whatever attendant costs. 

 

It’s not that I believe that’s not possible. It’s clearly possible and its probability is clearly much greater than it would’ve been or, or would’ve seemed 20 years ago. What would I be saying from the fortified bunker, where we’re doing the What Could Go Right? podcast in 2035, worry, you know, scrambling and in some version of AI enhanced VPN so that the authorities don’t know my location, so they can’t arrest me for saying things that are forbidden. What would I be thinking at that moment about what I was saying 10 years before? I think partly I’d be thinking like, oh, well guess, I guess, I guess those people who were saying, you know, the end is nigh were right? 

 

But even then, I think I would feel like it’s all contingent anyway, meaning the fact that something went the direction it did. It doesn’t mean it had to, doesn’t mean it was certainly going to, and therefore it doesn’t mean that we know the future outcomes of it. And that, I guess I would still believe that the belief in our collective capacity to change our present for the better, um, remains. But, you know, if we go too down the theoretical, like what would I do in a, in a truly autocratic, repressive society, what would, who would I be in China today knowing that there’s a limit to what I could say without consequence? I mean severe consequence, right? I, I’m not, you know, I don’t know.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: I guess for me, I think about it lets us a theoretical future like where we’re gonna land and more so as a, am I being helpful or like, is this useful to people and are we not causing harm? And as long as I can answer those questions, you know, in a way that satisfies my me, then you know, I feel all right.

 

Zachary Karabell: And look, I continue to believe, and it’s more of a faith statement than a proof statement, that, too much certainty about the present threads leading to future negative outcomes, too much conviction in that can create. 

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Mm-hmm.

 

Zachary Karabell: Can create the fears, like I do believe that. I think it’s true how you live your own life.

 

You know, if you are essentially operating from a place of fear, I think you enhance the, the possibility and the probability that your fears come true. There’s a whole woowoo world of that that would, would agree with that. There’s a whole Buddhist and spiritual world that would agree with that. There’s also a real pragmatic world, like if you look at military training, part of the training is how do you get people to not function from a place of fear?

 

Like the point of doing a lot of drills is to drill the fear out or to allow people to process it and manage it. It’s like to hurry up, you have to slow down. It’s, it’s all these things you have to breathe, right? So that’s not just a, some sort of help, self-help advice thing. There’s a lot of more pragmatic, hardheaded evidence of that, and I’m, I think if you extrapolate that at a societal level, you get some of the same dynamics at play, I believe.

 

And then again, that’s a really hard thing to prove, right?

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. I don’t, I, I think that definitely needs to be a, a faith statement, as you said, and not a a proof statement. 

 

The other point I wanna bring up too is what Gillian said about the pain and anger it causes to see people around you have a bunch of things that you don’t have, and I, I think that that is also very insightful. See it all the time on TikTok, like, I’m not someone who’s materially deprived, but if you go on TikTok and there are people wearing, you know, $30,000 bracelets and giving you a tour of, uh, their $75,000 adorned arm, you know, that is not good for your psyche. Even if your life is fine and if your life is not fine, then I imagine that we can get into a real French Revolution scenario pretty quick, so.

 

Zachary Karabell: I agree that’s a, like the FOMO that online reality can create is so much more expansive than the FOMO of physical proximity or, or what would, what you could have seen with your own eyes and your own body at an earlier moment in time and that you really are able to like be the proverbial kid with the candy shop window, except the candy shop now is the entire world and a world of people living lives that you’ll never be able to access, and that is definitely not easy for most humans.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, like why do I need to know in my life that there’s a person out there that is so rich that she has a personal chef for her dog, like I didn’t need to know that. You know?

 

Zachary Karabell: That’s true.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: That’s unnecessary, but there is.

 

Zachary Karabell: Something you need to aspire to. Alright.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Anyway.

 

Zachary Karabell: On that note, thank you all for listening to this episode of What Could Go Right? We will be back with you next week. Please tune into our Progress Report, our shorter form, where we and Emma highlights some of the news that points in a better direction than you probably would’ve missed because it’s not usually news or it’s not news that is highlighted in any particular forum except ours. 

 

Send us your thoughts, your comments. Thank you to the Podglomerate for producing. Thank you to Emma for co-hosting, to the team at The Progress Network and the team at the Podglomerate.

 

And thank you all for your time. We honor it, treasure it, and hope to earning it.