This is Paul Adamson and welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of my online magazine InCompass.

I chat informally with personalities from a wide variety of backgrounds on a wide variety of subjects.

If you like this podcast, you can go to the magazine's website, Encompass-Europe.com,

or any of the main platforms for free access to all the podcasts to date. I hope you enjoy this

conversation. My guest is Julian Tet. Gillian Tet is the chairman of the US editorial board,

an editor-a-large at the Financial Times. Her latest book is called Anthrovision,

How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life. Before we talk about your book, Gillian,

let me first of all ask you your sort of personal journey.

You have a PhD in social anthropology.

How did somebody with a PhD, social anthropology, end up at the financial times writing about

business and finance?

Well, I think that's a very polite way of saying, how come you're so weird?

And to be honest, I've had that question thrown

at me all my life. And that's really one reason that prompted me to write this book. Because,

you know, it is pretty unusual to have a background in cultural anthropology. In my case, I have a PhD

based on fieldwork in Soviet Tajikistan, which is just

north of Afghanistan on the map. If you visualize a picture you've seen about Afghanistan from the

news with big snowy mountains and you add in electricity and take out black fails on the women,

that's Tajikistan. And I lived there as an anthropologist and studied

Tajik wedding rituals for a year and a half of my life. And that's not an obvious way to then go

on and write about international finance and markets and economies and politics. But I happen to believe that they are intimately connected because at the end of the day,

we're all human, we're all tribal, we all inherit cultural assumptions and patterns from our

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