Transcript

#56 “The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water.” - Gillian Tett

From 3 Takeaways · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 34 min · 5,871 words · 36 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "#56 “The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water.” - Gillian Tett", an episode of 3 Takeaways published July 23, 2024 (34 min, about 5,871 words). It mentions 9 people, works and ideas, including Julian T., Anthro Vision, COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump, Financial Times.

What this episode is about

In this episode, Gillian Tett, an anthropologist and editor at large for the Financial Times, explores how anthropological insights can illuminate contemporary business and cultural trends, such as the marketing of KitKat bars in Japan and the dynamics behind the 2008 financial crisis. Tett also discusses the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on society, and shares her perspectives on emerging phenomena like cryptocurrencies, gaming, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) from her new book, "Anthr

Key takeaways

  • Culture shock isn't just a pandemic leftover; it's a chance to redefine our everyday rituals and connections.
  • In an age of digitization, we blindly hand tech power to a few, while feeling lost in their complex realm.
  • Anthropology isn't about finding bones—it's about empathy, learning from difference, and questioning our own cultural assumptions.
  • Rising powers like China challenge the status quo; America's role is evolving, impacting the future of the global order.
  • A fish can't see water; to understand ourselves, we must explore other cultures and uncover our own biases.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Julian T., COVID-19 pandemic, Financial Times, Columbia
  2. – 10:00: Donald Trump
  3. – 15:00: Donald Trump, Nestlé
  4. – 20:00: The Big Short
  5. – 30:00: Anthro Vision
  6. – 34:03: Anthro Vision, COVID-19 pandemic

Notable quotes from "#56 “The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water.” - Gillian Tett"

  • And Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn tomman welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be here with Julian T she's chair of the editorial board and editor at…
    about Julian T. · at
  • Thinking that two or three things about the world are very interesting right now in the short term we have just collectively been through a massive period of culture shock and…
    about COVID-19 pandemic · at
  • Social silence because often those silences are very important I was fascinated by your portrayal of Donald Trump style from a cultural perspective can you talk about that well Donald Trump has always fascinated me like almost every other.
    about Donald Trump · at
  • Kit Kat and it seemed to be all about brown chocolate bars didn't work ter well in Japan and then one day the owners of the Kit Kat Group which were then bought by Nestle a…
    about Nestlé · at
  • They couldn't see the consequences of what they were doing or the context I mean there's that wonderful scene in the movie The Big Short based on Michael Lewis's book where a…
    about The Big Short · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Julian T. — Person · Main guest · 1 mention · first at
    Primary interview subject explaining her 'anthro-vision' lens—using anthropology to interpret business, politics, technology, and culture (e.g., Trump, crypto, AI).
  • Donald Trump — Person · Referenced public figure (case study) · 5 mentions · first at
    Used as a cultural/anthropological case study to illustrate how elites and media misread signals (e.g., 'bigly', wrestling-style performance) due to 'tunnel vision'.

Books & papers

  • Anthro Vision — Book · Primary recommendation · 3 mentions · first at
    Julian T's new book discussed as a key resource for understanding cultural phenomena through an anthropological lens.
    Healthiness of theet P food and using her anthropology lens she predicted the 2008 financial crisis her new book which is wonderful is anthr Vision a new way to see in life and…

Companies & orgs

  • Financial Times — Company · Affiliation · 1 mention · first at
    Julian T's affiliation as chair of the editorial board and editor at large, providing context for her expertise.
    Tomman hi everyone it's Lyn tomman welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be here with Julian T she's chair of the editorial board and editor at large of the financial…
  • Nestlé — Company · Case study · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of the KitKat success story in Japan, illustrating cultural adaptation in business.
  • Harvard — Company · Affiliation · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as part of the host's affiliations, providing context for her background.
    Three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn tomman welcome to another episode today I'm.
  • Columbia — Company · Affiliation · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as part of the host's affiliations, providing context for her background.
    Three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn tomman welcome to another episode today I'm.

Places & events

  • COVID-19 pandemic — Event · Core topic · 2 mentions · first at
    Discussed as a significant cultural shock that has forced people to rethink social rituals and patterns.

Media & podcasts

  • The Big Short — Media · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as an example of understanding the financial crisis through real-life experiences.

Full transcript with timestamps

welcome to the three takeaways podcast which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers Business Leaders writers politicians scientists and other newsmakers each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn tomman welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be here with Julian T she's chair of the editorial board and editor at large of the financial times in the US she is unusual in that by training she is an anthropologist and she uses her perspective as an anthropologist to explain a wide variety of business and cultural phenomena including for example how KitKat bars became such a runaway success in Japan it had nothing to do with their taste she also explains why the best way to sell pet food to

Americans is not to emphasize the healthiness of theet P food and using her anthropology lens she predicted the 2008 financial crisis her new book which is wonderful is anthr Vision a new way to see in life and business I'm excited to find out how she sees the world today including new phenomena such as cryptocurrencies gaming artificial intelligence and nfts or non-fungible tokens where people are paying tens of millions of dollars for Julian welcome and thank you so much for our conversation today well it's great to be part of your show so thanks for including me Julian what is on your mind what are you thinking about well I'm thinking that two or three things about the world are very interesting right now in the short term we have just collectively been through a massive period of culture shock and by that I mean that everyone's lives have been overturned by having to go into lockdown

jump into World be confined in small spaces with people who are just like us for a period of time and now as covid-19 begins to gradually recede they're starting to go back into real life and that is culture shop forcing us all to rethink many of the micr level rituals and patterns and social ties that we took for granted in the past but we can't take for granted anymore so that's one thing that fascinates me the other thing that fascinates me is the march of digitization and the wedding that's overtaken so many parts of our lives with Innovations like Ai and most of us have absolutely no idea how these work and don't really know where it's going so we're putting huge amounts of power in a small group of techies Geeks whatever you want to call them that for the most part are operating in Realms we don't understand and then last but not least we're seeing a big Power shift across the world more broadly as we see

the rise of China as we see America's SC Ling to try and redefine its role on the world stage and that's also having big implications for how the global political economy is going to be going in the future it it is indeed a time of enormous change I am fascinated by your lens of anthropology what is anthropology what does it mean to you let me say what anthropology is not it's not about Indiana Jones although frankly that's what many people who are non-academics assume it's about because they've seen pictures of anthropologist going off to Wild and wacky seemingly exotic parts of the world and studying strange peoples and Gathering bones and digging up artifacts and getting exotic ritual things and stuff like that and it's understandable that people think that's what anthropology is because that's what it was in the 19th century it was about a group of white Europeans and Americans mostly men going and

staring at people in the N farflung parts of the British Empire or native American Indians and basically trying to understand how better to control convert trade with or tax them or in some cases to study them as crucibles in the process of human evolution for clues about how and why those white men had become Superior 20th century anthropology kicked back against that big time and basically went from being a Bastion of racism and imperialism to really becoming a part of Academia that was dedicated to trying to argue that that all humans are valuable all humans are equal we're all United in a spectrum of cultural difference and it's a spectrum it's not boxes it's a spectrum and that it pays to study each other to understand each other so people like Fran boas one of the earliest anthropologists in New York really went out of his way to argue for tolerance and diversity and cultural relativism

the Nazis burnt his books in protest because they thought that what anthropology stood for was so antithetical to Fascism but today anthropology is different from both of those two approaches in a way because out of this idea of cultural relativism arose the concept that if you go out and study other people with respect and tolerance and humility you don't just learn something about the diversity of The Human Experience and cultures but you also learn something about yourself because there's this wonderful Chinese proverb that a fish can't see water we are all so embedded in our own cultural assumptions that we can't see them for good or bad and it's only when you jump out of your fish bowl that you realize how odd the water that you're swimming in might actually be or if you go and ask fish in other fishbowls to talk about you then you begin to see yourself clearly so today anthropology really is

about both understanding other people's culture to get empathy for difference in a world that we need that and then flipping the lens and looking at yourself more clearly to understand the peculiarities of your own culture so it's really a double win and we need it very badly right now and it really is much broader and much different than the way for example an engineer would look at the world anthropology was really very different from most of the intellectual tools that have dominated the 20th century because we developed as a society some brilliant ways of analyzing the world be that with economic models or big data sets or corporate balance sheets or engineering analysis or medical analysis but all of these fantastic Innovations suffer from a flaw which is that they tend to be bounded or limited by tunnel vision they're defined by what you put into that model or they're defined by the

research process which usually starts by presuming that you know the precise topic or question that you want to answer in your studies and there's nothing wrong with that in some ways that's inevitable but the problem is that if the context around your model or engineering algorithm or big data set is changing you may end up missing a lot of the really important things in life the analogy I use in the book is that if you walk through a dark wood with a compass you don't want to throw away your compass it's very useful in telling you which way to go but if you walk through that dark wood and only St down at the dial of that compass and never look up you're probably going to walk into a tree or trip over a tree route so what anthropology does by looking at the cultural patterns and Frameworks that shape Our Lives is that it forces you to look up and around and to see the context in which all these intellectual

tools like economic models have been created so it's really about lateral Vision not tunnel vision it's about paying attention to the parts of the world that we talk about and also the parts of the world that we ignore the social silence because often those silences are very important I was fascinated by your portrayal of Donald Trump style from a cultural perspective can you talk about that well Donald Trump has always fascinated me like almost every other journalist and one of the key moments when I realized how wrong the media was getting Donald Trump partly because they were looking at him through tunnel vision was a moment when I was on the news desk of a financial Tire in the Autumn of 2016 during a debate When Donald Trump said the word bigly and everybody on that news desk including myself laughed instinctively because it sounded funny but the thing about jokes that you need to understand is that they

are cultural manifestations you have to be in part of an ingroup to get a joke you have to have shared cultural assumptions to make everybody laugh and jokes often work by playing off contradictions and social silences the parts of the world we don't really really want to acknowledge or talk about if I stopped as an anthropologist and thought about why it was the media or laughed at the word bigly what I could see was partly that it defined us as journalists in opposition to him because we were kind of scorning him and the reason it defined us is that the media works by essentially being in a craft that's all about command of language there's this unstated assumption that if you want to have power or credibility in America you need to have command of words be educated and that's so deeply embedded that in some ways being educated is one of the few types of acceptable snobbery what was interesting about Donald Trump was

that he recognized as much through Instinct as any conscious thought that there were large parts of the electorate that really resented that and was tapping into their resentment to get support from them and he also recognized again through Instinct I think that actually although we journalists are trained to assume that the only valid communication is with work words taken literally and logically in real life many people communicate through nonverbal ways and those non-verbal cues can be incredibly important so one of my friends told me earlier on in the campaign if you want to go un understand Donald Trump go and see a wrestling match because to many voters Trump was best known for what he'd done with wrestling on television he borrowed almost completely the performative style of wrestling in his political campaigns wrestling matches are all about manufactured drama and aggression and

name calling things not quite little Mark Rubio with that kind of name and they're about a situation where the audience knows that it's partly for show and dramatic and yet it still matters and all of that was borrowed into the political Arena and informed how Donald Trump connected with voters and the really important thing which is why anthropology matters is that most Elites including J didn't understand that because they were used to looking at the world through words and most of them had never been to a wrestling match because it was largely a non-elite sport so jumping out of your Fishbowl would have actually been incredibly helpful for journalists in 2016 both to understand other people who were different to them but also to look back at themselves and see their own shortcomings so jumping out of that Fishbowl you talk about the example in your book about KitKat bars in Japan can

you tell us about that one of the arguments of my book is that in a world that's both globalized and polarized it really pays to get empathy for other points of view or to recognize as one Anthropologist told Intel repeatedly that just because it's your worldview it's not everybody else's and you need to do that both to see dangers coming down the tracks or see how other people are misinterpreting what's happening or have different views in a way that could harm you but also because it can sometimes really generate innovative ideas and opportunities and what happened with Kit Kat in Japan was that they had been trying for years to sell the Kit Kat biscuit as a British product because it essentially originated in Britain it had this British slogan have a break have a Kit Kat and it seemed to be all about brown chocolate bars didn't work ter well in Japan and then one day the owners of the Kit Kat Group which were

then bought by Nestle a Swiss company noticed that KitKat bar sales were surging for 3 months each year in cusu the southern island and they realized that some teenagers had started a craze for giving each other Kit Kats at exam time because the word KitKat sounds like the Japanese phrase ketsu which means we shall overcome in Japanese and they were doing that for exams now somebody who had a very a superior view of culture and assumed that actually their own culture was correct might have said well that's kind of weird we're going to ignore that and carried on as before but the nesty owners had the wisdom to say this is kind of weird but let's try and play into it and they began to try and Market the Kit Kat bar as a good luck token for exams and then as a pray tool so-called omamori a Shinto Shrine token and it became so popular that within a few years 50% of Japanese teenagers were giving each other Kit Kat bars at exams

not what people people who make British chocolate bars are expected but becoming a prayer tool but that happened and then they really lent into it and started to basically embrace all of these Japanese flavors so they created Wasabi Kit Kats bright green matcha Kit Kats sweet potato kit cats soy sauce Kit Kats you name it and eventually the brand became so Japanese in its nature that tourists to Japan began to buy KitKat as a Japanese souvenir and then KitKat bar were reimported back into Britain green tea flavored bright green actually made in the German Factory to be sold to British consumers as a Japanese delicacy by which point today KitKat is both British and swiss it's owned by Swiss people and Japanese and if you like the Green Tea kab Bar in Germany so you can't say exactly where it comes from or what it is culture is a spectrum it's not boxes it's constantly moving like a river with new stream coming in but the

point is this that Vision might seem very threatening to some people but it's also gloriously creative and I guess what I take away from KitKat is that if only our politicians could begin to embrace the same kind of mentality towards how they conduct political Affairs and see their identities as a Kit Kat bar the world wouldn't be in such a mess today either inside countries or between countries on the geopolitical stage if only if only Julian how were you able to predict the 2008 financial crisis people sometimes ask me how did I foresee the 2008 financial crisis and the key issue was really I use the same tools I'd use in my anthropology research in a place called Tajikistan and applied it to the financial system and the bankers in the city of London and Wall Street because humans are all humans they're all social groups which share creation mythologies and have rituals and symbols that unify

them those creation mythologies always have flaws and they always make people succumb to tunnel vision so in my case one of the great aha moments came when I went to an investment banking conference in 2005 on the French Riviera and I realized that investment banking conferences are ritualistic events that are very similar to the type of ritualistic weddings I'd studied as a researcher in Tajikistan they essentially unite a scattered tribe bring them together to both reflect and reaffirm a shared world view or set of assumptions culture to basically maintain that Vision going forward for good and bad and when I looked at the cultural practices at the investment banking conference I saw in 2004 or 2005 I realized that financiers were a distinct tribe in this particular field of cred derivative that I was studying at the time they spoke a language that no one else understood a bit like the medieval priests in the

Catholic Church who spoke Latin and the congregation didn't make sense of that the financiers in 2005 spoke Banker speak with all these acronyms like CDO and CDs that no one else understood and that gave them power and a sense of identity and belonging they had a shared creation myth about how this Innovation was supposed to make financial markets more liquid and good for everybody and that creation myth was riddled with contradictions as all creation myths are for example they said that these new techniques would share risk across the system to make the system more resilient without noticing that they were introducing a different type of risk into the system but they couldn't see the contradictions because they were a tribe set apart and when I looked at their PowerPoints they were full of graphs and charts and algorithms and numbers but no faces even though they claimed they were doing all this stuff

in order to serve people and I realized that what was going wrong in was that Bankers were so cut off from the end results of their products they were disconnected from the actual users that they couldn't see the consequences of what they were doing or the context I mean there's that wonderful scene in the movie The Big Short based on Michael Lewis's book where a hedge fund Trader goes and meets a pole dancer in Florida who's taken out subi mortgages and realizes the crazy practices happening at the end of the subprime mortgage train and what's surprising was not that that was happening but that so so few Bankers ever actually got out and experienced real life like an anthropologist to see what was happening to see the context and consequences so when I saw all those patterns at the investment banking conference I went yikes this is nuts this is going to blow up and I went off and rode a series of

pieces saying how dangerous it was eventually it did blow up even more than I expected but it just showed the point about if you ignore cultural patterns and practices if you simply try and pretend that finance and human behavior is just driven by numbers and rational thought you will end up missing the most important developments in life Julian I can't wait to ask you about some of the new phenomena that many people are having trouble figuring out how do you see cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin cryptocurrency is an area which is absolutely something that anthropologists are better placed than pure economists to look at I should stress by the way that anthropology isn't either all I'm not saying anthropology has all the answers but anthropology plus economics or anthropology Plus Finance or plus medicine is a really powerful combination and the reason why anthropology helps with Bitcoin is

because Bitcoin is not just about value as defined by economists or even just the law of supply and demand as defined by economists although that's important it's also about the fact that a sense of belonging and tribal patterns are defined by things like memes it's about the idea that there's power structures at the heart of every money system which often get En olded by economists and what's happening right now is a shift in the pattern of trust instead of trusting institutions in a vertical way increasingly money in cryptocurrencies based on horizontal patterns trust in the crowd and Trust in the algorithms that the crowd are administrating people recognize that value is not created just through monetary numbers but has a wider sense and anthropologists are recognizing that actually exchanges of all sort are what binds communities together not just Commerce with money or intermediated by money so I think

cryptocurrency is fascinating there's a huge battle going on right now as people who are in institutions and government try and seize control over cryptocurrency when you look at what central banks are doing when you look at the big institutions on Wall Street that's all about the power structures and the struggles trying to cease control but anyone who thinks that memes are irrelevant and don't matter is looking at purely from a narrow economic perspective not from the perspective anthropology and I don't see this disappearing anytime soon I think it might or I think it certainly will evolve I suspect Bitcoin may not be the main currency of the future or the main asset in the future again I wouldn't even use the word currency necessarily but the idea of challenging institutions using digital networks and trying to find alternative ways of exchanging value is going to be here for a while

another new phenomena is so-called nfts or non-fungible tokens where people are buying the rights to a digital good and they're spending in some cases millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars can you explain what nfts are how you see them and what you think the future will be mft is are partly a way of thumbing your nose and rebelling against the do system of the 20th century in that it doesn't make any sense from a classic economic perspective to spend that much money on a digital token but it doesn't make necessarily any less sense than spending that much money on a piece of actual art whose value is determined in an equally subjective way lfts are also a sign that people sometimes regard Bitcoin as being something which is not just about money in a traditional economy sense they have a lot of it they want to demonstrate r that they can spend it it's about display it's about a sense of power it's

about a sense of testing boundaries and it's also in this case about the idea that if you're losing faith and trust in other assets why not buy an nft to actually display that there are other ways of preserving value and status and last but not least it's a reminder that not everything in life has a utilitarian perspective gaming has become a huge industry particularly with covid and the revenues for gaming as you know are greater than the revenues for Hollywood and movies how do you see the future of gaming and these budding metaverses I think what it shows is several things firstly that the original creators of social media had this utopian idea that internet was going to connect us all and basically be a Kum by Our Moment for Global society that would basically cause us all to collapse into an undifferentiated mass and be the antidote to tribalism they couldn't have be more wrong what's happened is that as

people have gone from real life with all their tribal allegiances and creation myths and social boundaries and they've gone from that into cyberspace tribalism has actually intensified because the crucial thing to understand about digital experience is that it's customized we can personalize our identity our new sources our groups in a way that would be seem completely alien to 99% of societies around the world where identity is given to you you don't create it but the idea of personalization and customization is absolutely the core of 21st century Society where we're all kind of used to a pick and mix culture where we have a music playlist and extend that analogy onto everything else including our own identities and friendship groups so what's happened is as people have gone online they're creating new social tribes and boundaries and gaming like Bitcoin like crypto is part of that you're creating means and activities to

Define your identity and to feel a sense of community to speak your own little language if you like and at the same time people are increasingly going from one layer of abstract cyberspace to another layer of cyberspace they're going from being online digitally into being in Virtual Worlds that they create and they can play and they get absorbing Thrills and entertainment but the overarching picture is of a deliberately fractured landscape where people are looking for meaning group excitement entertainment validation all the things that people have always looked for in the real life but now they have this pick and mix power where they can customize it to their own desires and during lockdown when we've all been trapped in our physical spaces and I've been unable to roam and Collide and Define our identities with groups of people this has often been one of the biggest Outlets Julian you talked about

artificial intelligence earlier in our conversation how do you see future of AI the future of AI at the moment is in the hands of a tiny group of Geeks and I don't use that word in a disparaging way but I mean highly trained technocrats who are operating in a small ghetto speaking a language that no one else understands and for the most part being left free to do their own development at break neck speed in a way that people are either ignoring and or simply don't understand even though it has the possibility of impacting us all in some ways it's very similar to what was happening in finance in 2004 or five when small group of Geeks were developing Financial derivatives which also had the ability as we discovered to impact us all and no one else understood because they spoke their own jargon so this is worrying and AI urgently needs to be put into a social context exposed to more external scrutiny exposed to

Common Sense in the sense of common view of other people and having a diversity of perspectives oversight and Views is critical to getting Common Sense people need to look at the social context in which AI is been created because who the coders are the programmers are and the degree of bias they carry is absolutely important people need to look at the ethical implications and the social context in which AI is deployed because again that is critically important but on a slightly more positive note people also need to recognize what AI can't do because the thing about Ai and big data sets is they tend to operate by hoovering up enormous amounts of data about what humans do online or anywhere else and then scanning that data for patterns and correlations assuming that equates to causation and projecting what's happened in the very recent past or the near past into the future but as any Financial

product should tell you if it's worth it Sal the past is not always a good Guide to the Future context change and also because AI platforms and big data sets tend to pick up areas of noise they don't always pick up areas of silence or the stuff that we don't talk about as well they don't always capture the complexities and contradictions of our existence our cultural patterns and these can often be very complex and contradictory and so if you want to understand the shortcomings of AI that can sometimes crop up think about this although AI platforms can scan medical records scan financial markets design Bridges beat humans at go there's one thing they can't do or at least one thing yet and probably will never be able to do which is to tell a really good joke and the reason is partly because jokes Define groups you have to be inside a group The in group to get a joke if you're not you don't get it and

the boundaries of groups are often fluid but also because jokes operate by playing off the contradictions of our culture that don't necessarily make sense from a rational logical way and they also play off silences and that's hard for machines to capture or predict so in some ways the good news is that as long as humans have jokes as long as they show that culture matters because jokes are embedded in culture AI won't do everything the jobs of comedians are safe thank heavens but I'd say that we ought to celebrate this because actually jokes and the contradictions of culture are what makes us human and they're also why a world of AI needs another type of AI anthropology intelligence to make sense of it not as an either or but more as a checks and balance how can listeners use anthro Vision to widen the lens through which they see the world so they see some of the Unseen prejudices and biases as well as to go back to your

example of the fish the water around them well I basically stretch the book around three parts because I think there are three steps that everyone could and should take one Embrace a bit of culture shock however you can in your life the value of immersing yourself into the lives and minds of people who seem a bit different from you is really really important it's not something most people want to relish or Rush towards because guess what culture shock is hard we're all trained to run away from it but doing that gives you empathy from another point of view and teaches you that not everyone thinks the way you do and both shows you potential risks and potential opportunities as a result of that and you don't have to go to the other side of the world to do it just going down the end of your street and talking to people who are different from you is really important so that's the first step second step is after immersing yourself

in the lines of others to get empathy for others flip the lens and look back at yourself as if you were a martian as if you were a child as if you were a foreigner or as if you were basically living in a foreign land and were visiting it as a tourist try to see yourself objectively that way and then thirdly try to look at Social silences think about what the rituals and rhythms and symbols of your life are revealing and then think about what you're not talking about the blank bits on the mental map you have to organize the world the things you never discussed because it seems taboo or obvious explore all the ways that you are essentially embedded in your cultural assumptions and not seeing them for good and bad before I ask for the three takeaways that you'd like to leave the audience with today is there anything else you'd like to talk about that you haven't already mentioned or what should

I have asked you that I didn't one thing I'd like to say is this I think that many people today instinctively realize the importance of getting lateral Vision not tunnel vision partly because the last 15 years have created shocks over and over again whether it's a 2008 financial crisis or whether it's the covid-19 pandemic we're living with now whether it's a rise of AI and Tech or whether it's environmental risks are suddenly overturning all of our ideas about how we're going to live in the future so the recognition about the dangers of relying on tunnel vision and I think people generally don't describe this in terms of looking for lateral Vision or looking for anthro vision they talk instead about the rise of sustainability or environmental social and governance issues but at the end of the day sustainability is anthro Vision it's about taking a broader view of the world it's about recognizing that

walking through a Darkwood and night with your compass um your economic models or your corporate balance sheets or your big data sets relying on those alone looking down just at the DAR your compass is dangerous you need to look up look around and appreciate the cultural context we live in Julian what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with the three takeaways I have are really driven by lessons I give my own girls one is that what really matters in life is not what happens to you but how you react to it and often adversity happens but out of adversity can often come the best opportunities and most of the greatest breakthroughs I've had in life have been through unplanned surprises coming around as a result of adversity and unexpected events the second thing I'd say is that it really pays to live your life as if it was a glass half full not half empty and we all have a choice about how to

live you can either celebrate what you have and what you have been lucky enough to enjoy and appreciate it or you worry about what you don't have but I really do think that the secret to a happy life and the third thing I say is that be curious always because curiosity is something that nobody can ever take away from you and when I look at people who are older than me and I'm now officially middle-aged in the eyes of my daughters 53 people who are older than me who live meaningful powerful lives are driven by curiosity and empathy but curiosity and empathy a desire to explore things that seem strange different to get out of your box is absolutely crucial to living a vibrant life and I'd say it's doubly crucial to appreciate that and celebrate it after a year when so many of us have been physically locked down trapped with our own Tiny Tribe of people our pods to use a CO language and all too easily

sucked into mental ghettos in cyberspace now more than ever we need to be curious as we all try and build back better Julian thank you this has been terrific I really enjoyed your book anthro vision and thank you for our conversation today well thank you for your interest and your own curiosity if you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new Fresh weekly episodes be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3 takeaway.com or follow us on Instagram Twitter and Facebook note that 3 takeaway.com is with the number three three is not spelled out see you soon at 3 fre takeaway.com

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "#56 “The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water.” - Gillian Tett"?

Lynn Tomman (Host), Gillian Tett (Guest).

What is "#56 “The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water.” - Gillian Tett" about?

In this episode, Gillian Tett, an anthropologist and editor at large for the Financial Times, explores how anthropological insights can illuminate contemporary business and cultural trends, such as the marketing of KitKat bars in Japan and the dynamics behind the 2008 financial crisis. Tett also discusses the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on society, and shares her perspectives on emerging…

What is mentioned in this 3 Takeaways episode?

9 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Julian T., Anthro Vision, COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump, Financial Times, Nestlé. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "#56 “The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water.” - Gillian Tett"?

The episode runs 34 min; the transcript is about 5,871 words in 36 timestamped sections.

More from 3 Takeaways

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.