Brexit as Game of Thrones, with Gillian Tett

recent history lesson. On June twenty third, twenty sixteen, Britain held a public vote to decide whether the UK should exit the European Union or remain. The vote was for Britain to exit or brexit, but just to highlight the obvious, that was more than three years ago. Since then, the world has watched as the actual Brexit date has been delayed twice. It turns out divorce negotiations are just as dramatic for political unions as they are from marital ones.

As of this episode recording, current Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that the UK must leave the EU on October thirty first, twenty nineteen perhaps it's not a coincidence that that's Halloween. Johnson says this must happen with or without a deal. The latter is called no deal Brexit. Johnson has actually used the phrase do or die, and while most economists believe that no deal Brexit wouldn't lead

to death, they do predict serious economic harm. I'm deeply curious about what the impact of Brexit would be, as well as the conditions and personalities that have contributed to this whole affair as the Financial Times. As Jillian Tete, today's guest on the podcast, has said, Americans used to think that British politics is all like Downton Abbey, but now it's turning into Monty Python. At the risk of

analogy overload, you can also think Game of Thrones. Today's Brexit politicians are famous for their last minute, desperate moves, playground politics, and for having no long term strategy. Chaos and unpredictability are the order of the day. As this episode goes into production, time was running out to secure a deal or an extension, and Bloomberg reported that the Bank of England was dusting off its financial crisis playbook.

While the practicalities of Brexit remain in flux. It's critical to understand how we got here, as the fallout from Brexit will impact well everything. I'm honored to sit down today with Jillian Tete, a British author and the chairman of the Financial Times editorial Board in the US. Among many other things. Jillian has a way of looking at

the big picture questions and implications of Brexit. In the US as in the UK, We're watching the political norms and processes that we've all been used to for the last few decades breaking down, which leads to the biggest question of all is there a right level of dysfunction in modern democracy? So Jillian, let's start with this. Who are what is to blame for the chaos that is erupted? Is this, in the end a story of personalities and egos? Is it a story of this larger trend of nationalism?

Or is it a story of basic economics. I think what you can see when you look at the data is a populism right across the Western world has increased

dramatically since twenty ten. There's a very powerful chart which Bridgewater the Hedge Funds put together looking at what proportion of the vote goes to populist candidates, and it peaked at about forty in nineteen twenty nine, having been a lot lower earlier than the century, and then it fell back very sharply after World War Two, and from about twenty ten onwards it exploded again from a level of

around five percent to about forty percent. Now, it would be very easy to assume that's about economics, and certainly the two thousand and eight crisis had a very big impact on the political system in that many people felt very angry. But unlike the nineteen thirties when populism was last is high. The overall economy has not been shrinking

in the last decade. On the contrary, America has just had ten years of growth, and even Europe, including the UK, has actually done quite well economically in the last few years. Now you can say, well, in that case it's down to income inequality, and that's certainly part of the issue.

But in my view, one of the bigger problems is that our political systems are increasingly out of tune with our consumer culture and the way that technology has reshaped our ideas of what's normal in terms of expressing ourselves and getting what we want. So how does that specifically impact Brexit or how did that impact the original referendum? But what's happened in the UK it's essentially we've had

a system based around two key political pillars. Parliamentary democracy, which means essentially you delegate your chance to have a say to a politician on important issues. And then secondly, a three party political system which was dominated by the Conservatives who were basically sort of free market and Labor who were sort of blessed free market, but actually the ideological differences between them ten years ago was not very significant. Ithash,

it's a mishmash. Yes, what's happened is that the referendum essentially gave power to the people, not to parliament, and in many ways that actually chimes better with modern consumer culture because you know, in the UK, like the US, people are constantly voting on their phones, whether it's just liking or not liking someone's picture on social media, or voting for a reality TV show or something like that, and so having been given a taste of people power,

people seems to have really liked it. At the same time, the political parties which were based on being pro market or anti market have begun to fracture because the issues has become increasingly important. It's not based around free or unfree markets. It's actually based around the idea of what the British nation should be and how it should dovetail with Europe or not dovetail. So let's do the political

parties first before we get to consumer culture. Is it right to think then, that the political parties are trapped in an old paradigm of free markets versus not free markets, where the issues of the day have shifted under them. I think it's absolutely the case that the issue that divided the political spectrum really during most of the twentieth century, which was pro free market or anti free market, is no longer the only axis on which political parties are based.

And that's true in many ways of America as well as Europe. These days, question of whether you're a nationalist or globalist is increasingly the key question that divides and defines people. At the same time, though, there's also a bigger problem, which is that the explosion of technology in twenty first century has created a sense that people have a god given right to customize everything that you the consumer, have your iPhone and you can choose to shape the

world exactly as you want. You can order food as you want, you can choose your friends as you want. You shape your identity, you shape your news as you want. And the idea of traditional twentieth century political parties is a bit like vinyl records in the age of the playlist, because people today assume that they choose their playlist exactly as they like, and no one's playlist is going to be the same as anyone else's. And the idea of just accepting preset music packages just it isn't in tune

with consumer culture. So would you argue that increases unpredictability. I think people are increasingly going for what I call pick and mix politics, like pick and mix consumer culture. They're going for shiny brands, shiny ideas, shiny people. So, whether it's nationalism or Brexit or Green New Deal or

Trump the ebody politician, that's been the trend. And it's very, very volatile and very hard to predict what's going to happen because what you're seeing are these constant explosions of what I call cyber flash mobs, people getting very angry or very excited about an issue online, seemingly out of nowhere. So is the shininess, the shiny object phenomenon, the cyber

flash mob. This seems to me to be synonymous with a certain kind of short term thinking that is ruling our world, is at the expense of a longer term, more strategic thinking, or is it every bit is honest

and strategic in its way. Well, the good news about what I call this new era of pic and mixed politics and people power of you like, is that it does create a sense of being empowered, and often it's empowered, and it can sometimes be used for good because if you think how environmental issues come out of nowhere and suddenly coalesced around figures like Greta Tumberg, that's an example, if you like a populism for good or even hashtag

met the gender battles. But the problem, of course, is that you can't ever have a situation of long term planning and you can't talk about trade offs very easily when you're dealing with one dimensional, single issue political movements. Yes, instant gratification and trade offs are kind of two different modes of thinking, right absolutely, And if you look at what's happened in Britain turned up to Brexit, you know, why did Brexit happen? I do think the cultural politics

has changed significantly. I do think that two thousand and eight left a group of people in England feeling quite rightly angry about the way the economic structures had been formulated. And there's certainly a sense that people were getting fed up with the bureaucratic remoteness of Brusthels and European Commission because it didn't in any way, shape or form seemed to be democratic as far as people were concerned in their everyday lives. So that all contributed this general direction.

But the way that the Brexit issue was aid amongst the public was that people seized on it as a reason for their discontent and tragically voted for it without really having much idea what it actually was going to be or what it was. And what's become very clear in the intervening period of time is that even the leaders who were championing Brexit had no idea what it was going to be. So is it fair to say

that Brexit in a way masqueraded as empowerment. In other words, it was empowerment in the guise of or it was chaos and the guise of empowerment in the sense that people ultimately made a choice that may not be in their best interests. People votive of a Brexit for many reasons. Some people had sat down and really clearly thought, yes, I want to be free of the European Union and recreate Britain in a different image. And those people who

had that feeling tended to split into two camps. Some wanted to recreate a very free market Britain and make it turn it into a Hong Kong or Singapore off the edge of Europe. Others were just filled with nostalgia year and what I call the Daily Mail party, who wanted to go back to village greens and cricket and all those kind of things, and that was very backward

looking and ironically quite anti free market. So you had two very different visions of how to run the country in a Brexited scenario for those people who wanted out. But what's really tragic because I think that lots of people just voted Brexit because they wanted to kick the elite, or they were angry, or it seemed like something which just expressed how they felt at the time in terms of we just want to shake it up. A bit.

One of the tragedies of the UK, both a blessing and the tragedy, is it's kind of been quite a secure place for many, many, if not decades and centuries, so people in the UK don't really know how systems can crumble and how fragile countries can be, and I think they're probably a bit complacent and careless. I want to come back to that. But something you said it is super interesting because it seems to me that it's an odd clash of the nostalgia for an old world

combined with the embrace of the shiny new object. And so it's this odd combination of these two factors that helped create Brexit, at least in part. There's definitely a sense of nostalgia amongst many people in the UK, particularly the older generation. In many many families, including my own, the older generation voted for Brexit on some general sense of frustration with how the world had become and a

sense of nostalgia too, and the younger generation didn't. So that was definitely part of it, and you can see that in the polling data. In an overwhelmingly Brexit was something that older people voted for and overwhelmingly the younger people did not, but there was also a sense of just well, you know, stick it to them. We're fed up with these remote, facist bureaucrats in Brussels, who are you know, shaping our destiny in ways that we don't

don't like and don't have a saying. How much of it was this sense that the European Union us bureaucracy that was unanswerable to any real people. There was definitely a sense of frustration with the bureaucracy, which was partly whipped up by the media and by the Brexit campaign.

But having actually worked in Brussels myself at an early point in my career as a journalist, ironically at the same time as Boris Johnson, I can absolutely understand why people are disgusted and furious with the Brussels bureaucracy, because the reality is the European Union is very bureaucratic, and it is very faceless, and the biggest problem of all about the European Union is that it was dreamt up by a group of unknown officials who people don't feel

much identity with. And it's very interesting because if you turn over a euro note, the currency note, which of course the UK doesn't have, but it's very symbolic of what's happening. The Euro is the only currency in the world, major currency which has no faces on the side of

the note. It's just got imaginary buildings and they literally imagine new buildings because the commit couldn't decide which buildings to put onto the urinoes, and they couldn't agree on a face, because there is no one individual who acts as a founding father or is central to the founding mythology of Europe in the same way as America. And you might say, well, that's just an accident of history.

Who cares, But the reality is that Europe's never had a central pole around which the popular voters could coalesce or shared mythology, and the UK certainly doesn't have any sense of shared mythology or founding father sentiment for the European Union, and so in the end it end up literally being a sort of a bunch of faces bureaucrats in the eyes of most British voters. Isn't that so interesting?

Because there's a modern anonymity to that that seems clean and potentially empowering, and that it's not tied to a person and yet it's the very facelessness I've been rereading Joseph Campbell as well, in the lack of myth around it that is also potentially incredibly dangerous, because these myths in the founding they or a mother narrative is incredibly

important to us as people. Well, I'm trained as a cultural anthropologist and I have a PhD in it, and every single society in the world, as anthropologists, know a some kind of founding myth or some kind of shared mythology les source of the identity. And I remember being very struck when I first started coming to America just over a decade ago, that I'd go into bookstores and to see shelf off the shelf off the shelf of books on the founding fathers in America and someone's coming

from the UK. That was kind of weird. Yeah, And I realized that that was a glue which defines so much of the intellectual shared experience in America. I want to come back to your point about the arrogance of not recognizing fragility, because I think there's yet another link between Brexit and the financial crisis involving that. But before we go there, let's go back to the people you mentioned working with Boris Dance and I always have a

fascination with the personalities that the hearts of stories. And maybe I'm wrong to fixate on Boris dancing, or maybe I'm not. You're not wrong to fixate on Bross Johnson. I mean, you know, when he began to rise and became Mayor of London, many of us were pretty stunned and who a journalist who worked with him? And we rolled our eyes and went, goodness me, but you know, he kind of pulled it off as Mayor of London. He didn't do a bad job. Why were you stunned?

Paused on that. There was a great line I read about him about where some of his work as a journalist that he had made his name. I think this was from a Guardian piece that he made his name by almost single handedly developing a compelling narrative that everything emanating from the EO was either a lunar or a sinister. Toward the end of his time in Brussels, his distorted stories had damaged his credibility among his peers in Europe, but back home he was becoming a household name. Does

that sound about right? I think that's entirely accurate every sense. Does he stand for anything himself? I think, which is very modern in a way. Yep, himself Johnny Japes. You know, he's an entertaining performer. He makes people laugh, he gets away with a lot. I mean to give him credit. He did pretty good job when he was Mayor of London because Mayor of London is partly at showmanship and about promoting a city, and he had a team of

people beneath him who were actually running the place. So you're partly acting as a cheerleader, come lightning rod for popular sentiment about a city, and he did pretty well that way. Being Prime Minister is very different. When you said at the start of this conversation that the politicians didn't necessarily understand what they were unleashing with unleashing with Brexit,

would you put Johnson in that category. Well. Johnson famously wrote two op eds in the last few days, one pro Brexit, one Andy Brexit, and he couldn't decide which one to adopt, so he could have flipped either way. He chose to go with the Brexit side, as much to do with his positioning inside the Tory Party, it seems, and having gone down that path. He then basically pinned his color to that mast with more and more further part definitional exercise. Do I think he always believed passionately

and campaigning against Brussels? No? Was it very convenient for him? Absolutely? Yes, so very post Madern in a sense of defining yourself according to momentary whims rather than having some deep foundational

notion of self. Perhaps a little bit similar to the lack of a founding myth in an odd way, right, I think that he knew how to tap into voters and things, and I think that what does probably does define him as a generalized belief in the UK as a jolly, plucky little country that can stand up on the world stage. And he likes the idea of englishness in general and championing that. So I do think that's probably his guiding instinct. What about the other politicians involved?

Are there any who you look back and say this was admirable or did it feel like the proverbial cluster? Among all politicians? There are characters who have stood up and tried to champion reason within British political spectrum. I am one of those who have dealt with someone like Ken Clark for many many years. Who's a Tory, a centrist Toy, a very pragmatic, sensible Tory, who has fought to try and maintain some reason inside the Tory Party

very long time. He of course one of the people who got kicked out recently, but I'd say Philip Hammond was always the rather boring Treasury minister finance minister under Trees and May, who actually did quite a good job of trying to keep the ship steady. And again he got kicked out as part of the recent bloodletting and purge of people who defined the no deal Brexit. So there are people like that who've tried to stand up inside the Labor Party, which in many ways is even

more tragic given what should be happening there. You know, the Labor Party should be seizing on the madness of politics and actually formulating a proper opposition, and in fact they've veered wildly off to the left and become in many ways so alienating they're almost unelectable. Now. Tragically, they're again people there who've tried very hard to keep the party tethered to some kind of viable strategy. But it's been very tough. British politics a day is deeply, deeply tragic.

So is it more a tale of dysfunction than a tale of functioning? And what I mean is looking at it from the outside, when you see Parliament pushing back against Johnson's plans for a no deal Brexit, it looks like dysfunction. But then I wondered, is it function within dysfunction is a way of trying to put a check on a fairly someone who strikes me as having the potential to be a fairly autocratic ruler. And is it

a form of functioning or is it simply dysfunction. What what's happened is essentially the democratic structures are being stress tested to the limit. And you know the fact that the Parliament pushed back against no deal Brexit is in my view, just common sense in saying it would be absolute madness just to drive this country off a cliff for the sake of making a point. Problem, of course, is they pushed back against no deal Brexit. They've tried

to block it. Johnson then tried to essentially close down Parliament. He got overruled by the law courts. And now your face with the fundamental problem, which is or three problems. One is that no one really knows today what the ultimate source of democratic will is. In the UK, it used to be parliamentary structures and people delegate their votes. Then a long term the referendum and people had a

direct vote. The consequences of that is that the two parliamentary democratic structures are now pitted against each other because the results of a popular vote have gone against the parliamentary vote. Not clear what rules. And of course the old problem is that when the vote was put to the British people in the original Brexit referendum, they were only really given two options, which was to stay in the union or out of the union. And of course

now on the table there are three options. Says to stay in the union, there's to exit with a deal, and there's to do a hert brexit and exit without a deal. And no one actually knows where the population stands if they're faced with those three choices, apart from the two which they had initially. What do you think do you have a sense of anecdotally of where the population would stand, or maybe the better question is do you have a sense of where at the right place

to stand would be? Personally speaking? If it's up to me, I'd say we should basically revoke our Article fifty and stay within the europeanion. And that's my own personal view. I also recognize that many people in the UK are just absolutely fed up to the back of their teeth with the whole thing. And I also recognize there is a chunk of people who generally do you want to leave?

So my best guess is if you give the population those three options today, you'd probably get a majority, slight majority, who'd say let's leave with a deal just to get it over and done with. But they don't want to have a complete hard break because of the economic consequences. But it's not clear and why is it in Johnson's interest his self interest to push for foreign no deal brexit.

Johnson's pushing for a no deal brexit partly for internal political reasons to keep control of the Tory Party, because the majority of the Tory membership, not the parliamentarians, but the membership are strongly in favor of Brexit and in favor of a no deal, so he's trying to tap

into the bigger political party. He's also doing that because he wants to distance himself from the opposition parties for again, for political reasons, and I think there's also a sense of him just being absolutely frustrated that he can't get what he wants from the European Union because they're refusing to do anything. And of course if he does try and can keep negotiating with the European Union to get a deal, there's a very well danger that the thing

will just get delayed and delayed and delayed indefinitely. So do you understand where the European Union is coming from. Oh, they are absolutely fed up with the UK and cannot face having to renegotiate anymore. I mean, the awful thing about the Breakxit story is that you mentioned earlier it's like a divorce in that it's complicated trying to separate

a married couple, and that's true. But there's something else about the Brexitt story makes it like a divorce, which is that anyone who's been to a divorce or had close friends who've gone through a divorce knows that, you know, the fighting goes on and on and on, and people obsess about ridiculous things that they care about and no one else does, and they get a point where, no matter how polite their best friends are, they just can't bear to hear about it again anymore. It feels like,

you know, you're trapped in groundhog Day. And I think that's what's happened with Brexit, is it. On the continent, everyone's kind of moved on. They're like, oh my god, you're still arguing about this stuff. It's like, we're not going to go back and talk about this anymore. We

just don't want to hear these prop stories anymore. Even in the UK, there's this really bizarre mentality whenever I go back now, which is that no matter how bad things keep getting, and they keep getting worse and worse, at the moment, everyone's almost a new to it and they almost don't want to think about it or talk about it. It's like this willful mass, you know, blindness and sickness. They just can't even bear thinking about it anymore, exactly like a couple who's in the middle of the

most horrific divorce you can imagine. That's really interesting. It makes me think about that tragedy and life when the fading becomes about the fading rather than about the substance underlying it, And that seems to be one element of what you're saying that the fading has become about the fading. I think for the Tory Party, the fighting has in deep come about the fighting, and for the European Union they just think we're just not going to open that

can of worms again. We can't bear it. And then the other similarity, oddly enough, that lapped in my mind when you were talking about that, is this idea of big problems being so big that it's easier to ignore

them than it is to confront them. And it's a little bit analogous perhaps to the pension problem in the US, big frightening thorny, and it becomes almost unbearably tiresome to look at it, and so you just rather ignore it, even though this is something that arguably is going to affect everyone's lives, their children's lives, their grandchildren's lives, but it's somehow easier to look away. Why is that, Well,

it's partly a question of tragedy of the horizons. We as human beings are not very good at dealing with what I call boshomless problems. Problems are just need to go on and on, none which have no resolution, which abstract we're not very good at dealing with problems that don't develop instep changes dramatic births, but slow moving elliptical

problems are build slowly over long period of time. And in the case of engines crisis, we're very bad at thinking about problems that are abstract and we shown't have people that we can coalesce around as we try and imagine a narrative. Going back to what you said at the beginning, that there's this very modern component to what happened with Brexit, which is this such shiny object fascination

in this people empowerment. But yet there's also this very long term, sort of universal human truth to it in the bottomless problem issue, and it's really these things colliding, which is really interesting. I was also thinking about your comment about this putting democratic process in the UK under incredible stress, and it's putting it under an incredible stress in a time when everything is in flux. Right, is there an understanding of the magnitude of the instability this

could review. I spent the early part of my life in parts of Asia which had been scarred by horrific upheavals or in the case of China, cultural revolution, and then I did a PhD in based called Tajikistan on the Afghan border when it was in the Soviet Union, and then when the Soviet Union broke up, I watched that society, which I knew pretty well by then, completely

implode into killing and utter chaos. So I've seen society's implode with my own eyes, and having had that experience, I was always very struck that going to the UK in the nineteen nineties and naughties it was like going into a warm bath where everything kind of seemed fine and soothing and gentle, and there were different political parties but you could really not see that much difference between them.

And I think people have become incredibly complacent about maybe how precious and arrogant, how precious democracy is, and how precious stability is, and how you don't actually want to gamble with it too dramatically. People take it for granted. My parents' generation, my grandbrand's generation, were shaped by World War Two and a sense of shared sacrifice and unity.

But people younger than that have grown up in seeming endless, if not prosperity, then stability, the tragedy of people in so many ways, right that the very thing that you crave so desperately. You begin to take it for granted when you've had it for a long time, and in so doing you begin to put it at risk. That is absolutely the truth. And if there are some good things that have come out of this mess of Brexit, one is a fact that you've actually got a generation

of people who are newly engagement politics. One of the reasons why the Brexit vote went through was because the vast majority of millennials and students just didn't bother to vote. They took over granted and then they saw what happened. What happened, and all the surveys show, every single polit survey shows that if they had bothered to vote, the Brexit vote would have been resoundly defeated. So you do have younger patrol now who are getting more engaged in politics.

That's good. You do have people who are beginning to think about the constitution for the first time ever, and their decision by the Supreme Court to insist that Boris Johnson did not have the right to dissolve Parliament has really taken the first step to creating some kind of constitutional structure in the UK, and heavens knows we need that because the third point is that this crazy, crazy situation has at least made some people think about the

dangers of instability and what is at stake. And I would say the level of complacency is certainly ebbing today and that's a good thing for sure. That of course makes me think about the United States, because it's so interesting that our two countries are running in parallel in some ways. Would you say the parallel is between the character of Boris Johnson and the character of Donald Trump, or as the right analogy between Brexit and the election

of Donald Trump, or is it both. I think it's both in the sense of their characters are indeed similar, and their postsonas that they play and the role they occupy in politics is very similar. It's two brands of celebrity politics or celebrity politicians. But at the same time, I also think that the vote for Donald Trump with a squeal of rage against the elite and a desire for change something different, and that certainly was one factor

driving Brexit too. It's very striking that both Boris Johnson and Trump in a sense have become bigger than their own parties, or rather they're redefining their parties around a nationalist agenda rather than just economics, because it's very hard to say whether Donald Trump is a right wing or left wing, or Democrat or Republican in economic terms, and

ditto Bris Johnson. But it's also very striking that the only politician in Europe who've managed to campaign and win on a centrist technocratic platform recently has done so by essentially jettisoning the old parties in creating his own shiny party, and that was Macro in France. And he did it by literally kicking out all the old parties in creating his own party from scratch. That's kind of pick a mixed politics taken to a new level. Nowhere else is

a technocratic center actually won over. And so in that sense, both Boris Johnson and Trump are very much part of the same phenomenon. And what do you make of the fact that this is happening in tandem in our two countries in the UK and the US. Is there a broader lesson in that? I think what's happening right now as we're seeing today, just as we saw in the financial crisis, that we are living in an era or great contagion and globalization have delivered the ability of contagion

to enlabel ideas and panics to spread very fast. And the great irony is that nationalism and antiglobalization have been

fueled by the channels and platform the globalization. That's actually a fascinating comparison if you think about the channels through which the financial crisis spread, these subterranean aspects of the financial markets, very wonky financial markets, and then the channels through which this political uproar has spread, which are very human channels, and it's interesting to think about them existing

in tandem. But you can't, of course ignore the that also there's been deliberate attempts to spread negative ideas and anger and polarizing concepts by the Russians and others. It's fascinating those parallels. So back to this notion of it being in France where a technocratic centers candidate did emerge. Do you see the potential for that coming out of this in the UK? Well, I think almost every Western country right now wants to know how to clone Macron

and get them to speak their local language. Unfortunately, the kind of conditions and the political constitution that allowed France to create a new party quickly, which Macron did don't exist really in the UK or the US. It's very hard to create another party in the US, we know, and it's pretty tough in the UK as well. So will there be a shiny new party with a shiny new leader. Not easily, but it's not impossible in the UK. I mean, if there is a big political realignment and rupture,

then you know, never say never. If we do end up with even more of a crisis, never say never. There are people who could come back into the fray, you know. I mean, David Miliban is a name that's often mentioned as somebody who's a former labor leader who's charismatic, and it's somebody who people could rally around. Who's current

city in America? So who knows. I suppose it's just another interesting parallel that unpredictability is part of the ban of mader and existence, and yet it might be the salvation as well, just as unpredictability as part of the ban of moder and financial markets, but in some ways the source of progress as well. If you want to be optimistic, one way to understand what's going on is to say, okay, so we're seeing an explosion in populism,

but in many ways. It chafed in politics. It's really recognizing that twenty century political structures look as outdated today as twenty century shops on the high Street. People are expecting something new because that's what they experienced in the rest of their lives, So they're looking something new from politics, and you could say, actually, what you're seeing is a rise of a newly empowered political generation who are used

to voting on issues that they care about passionately. And it can be used for good hashtag me too, the green movements, these kinds of popular howls of outrage could be channeled for a much more positive outcome and rating social movements that we can all approve of. But I think back to where we started. It's the idea of long term thinking that has to be associated with that something other than this concept of instant gratification and lurching

for the new shiny object. There has to be a sense of something other than instant gratification at work if we're going to be optimistic about this right, well, the question is how you tap into the fact the millennials appear at the moment to be more idealistic in some ways in the sense of believing in community and having

less attachment due to materialist things than their parents. Many of them do care abo sustainability issues, and they often have a more egalitarian sense than their parents in terms of in America and the UK, how do you tap into those trends and sentiments while also creating a government that can work, right, It's actually interesting how you get millennials to take their concern about sustainability, which is a narrow concern about environmental sustainability, and how you get that

to expand into a broader question of economic stability and economic sustainability. Right, How you take a narrow focus on sustainability and make it a big focus on sustainability for all aspects of human life and human processes. But in many ways, the whole climate change debate has been the

trigger that sparked a lot of interest and sustainability. But it's going well beyond that now, yes, it really already Okay, yeah, if you look at how these issues are rolling together in terms of income, inequality, gender, things like that, it's unclear where it's going to go. But you know, anyone who thinks that's sustainability or the kind of ESG and run metal social governance issues are just a short term

flash in the pan. Should have a look at what's happening inside companies or even financial markets, where increasingly executive of feely under pressure to do things. And again, if you like, that's a sign of populism with a different face, but perhaps a less scary face than the way we normally associate the world with nationalism, perhaps a positive one. I want to go back to the EU. If Brexit does happen, does this have broader implications for the EU?

And I think back to the whole just the mammoth effort to keep Greece in deside the EU for fear that it would spread to Italy and for fear that there's some kind of contagion in this world of contagion. If there's Brexit, does the whole EU file apart well.

The good news from the point of the Union needs is that the sheer horrors that Britain's going through in a political sense and the pain it could suffer economically has been the perfect way to inoculate the rest of the European Union against the danger of European Union fever spreading. Don't try this at home exactly, and so all the surveys suggest that actually support for the European unions go up sharply when people look at what's happened to the UK.

So I don't expect to see the European Union fall apart in the short term. If the UK does leave, there will be an economic below. The bigger question, though, is that the economy is seem to be slowing down at the moment, we're heading back into deflation. There's a fight around the European Central Bank about how much more

it could or should actually provide monetary policy stimulus. And there's even a bigger fight about whether it's time for the European governments to create a pool budget and some

shared fiscal policy, as say the US has. Mario Draggie gave a bigger interview to The Financial Times recently where he said it's really down to fiscal policy now, i e. Governments in Europe have to act together to create tax and spending plans, and so the big question for the medium to long term future of the European Union, which surely has enough thing to do with the UK. But if will the European governments agree to do that, or if they don't, can they survive the next economic or

global recession. What do you think is that something they must do or is that something that will exacerbate the nationalist tendencies that are already at work in the UK by asserting yet more outside bureaucratic perceived bureaucratic control over people's lives. Well, that indeed is a big, big question, because my best guess is that they will have to do at some point to stave off a nasty downturn.

But as you say, the question is can they do it in a way that actually ensures a buying of the population rather than further alienation insofar as shared fiscal support or budgets are used to try and keep more vulnerable populations who feel angry about sort of being dispossessed. If you can use it to actually keep them on board, then it will actually increase support for the European Union.

But it's going to be tough. Well, I guess I like the idea that they're no easy answers to this, because the easy answers are not very appealing in this case. So I think I'm glad that there's some potential for optimism. Well, I think there definitely is potential for optimism. And if you want to feel optimistic, take note of the fact that grease is still in the European Union and it's

actually turned a corner eventually and doing slightly better. Take notice the fact that Ireland has really been a remarkable success story in terms of adapting to economic dislocation and is now not only very strongly pro EU but also dealing thus far with tremendous grace about the horrific problems being quoted by the Brexit saga for Ireland. So amid all this horror show of British politics, there are reasons

for optimism. And as I say, if nothing else, when all is said and done with Brexit, it will at least teach all the new voters in the UK to not take democracy likely, to not take their systems and structures for granted, and above full else to think, Okay, maybe we do need a constitution, and if we do want a constitution, what kind of country do we really want to be and how do we actually want to have a proper national debate about it in a way that frankly we fail to do so for the last

few decades. So well said, and on that note, thank you so much. For coming. Thank you. I expected my conversation with Jillian to be wide ranging, but wow, It's not often we get to discuss mythmaking and Joseph Campbell on a business podcast. But in truth, this all makes me think about how obviously entwined the worlds of business, economics, politics,

and yes, philosophy are. Right now, we're accustomed to thinking of all of these as separate worlds, but as with Donald Trump's election in the US, both the vote for Brexit and the implications of it are deeply economic. Indeed, there may be no place where the connection between these worlds is as obvious as it is with Brexit. But if Jillian is right, the silver lining is that it's making us all care and think, and that has to lead to a better world, doesn't it. Makia Killing is

a co production of Pushkin Industries and Chalkin Blade. It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive producers are Alison mcclein No Relation and Making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell. Engineering by Jason Rastkowski. Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany McLain. Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac twelve and let me know which episodes you've most enjoyed.