One-On-One

by Philip Spires

  C Welcome again to One-On-One. My name is Christine Gardiner and today I meet again with Haji Salleh Abdullah for our third examination of his wealth, power and influence in today’s world. In our previous programmes we have discussed his allegedly dubious methods of operation and of the origins of both the man and the wealth, focusing on his apparent ability to beat the markets. In this third interview, I want to focus on where he intends to go from here. What can be the remaining ambition of a man who has, almost literally, everything? Haji Salleh, welcome again to One-On-One.

  T [merely nodes in acknowledgement]

  C Haji Salleh, you are the richest man on the planet.

  T If you say so.

  C I don’t. Others do, however. Current estimates of your wealth, when qualified by your own current estimates of one to two per cent growth per day, mean that each day you earn approximately twenty billion dollars. In the half hour this programme takes to broadcast, your fortune will increase by more than five hundred million dollars, about ten million dollars a minute. Thus, in each minute of your life, you can earn more than most people on the planet earn in a lifetime. Are you really worth someone’s lifetime every minute?

  T I think there may be some confusion on units embedded within your question. I neither earn nor spend people’s lives, let alone equate units of time to their presumed worth.

  C What on earth do you do with the money?

  T [shrugs] I would have thought that would be obvious, Christine. I am a capitalist. The money is not the product of the process, it’s the fuel that maintains it, the raw material, if you like. I make it by virtue of having it. That’s what I do with it. Welcome to capitalism.

  C That’s rather glib.

  T [shrugs again] At least it’s both accurate and honest.

  [As CG speaks, she turns to indicate everything around her, and her following words are delivered as background to a steady left to right pan. Through tropical vegetation beyond a pool, there is a large beach of white sand with several houses built on stilts across the line where sand meets trailing ground vines. On moving right the sea appears behind the infinity pool which, in full shot, appears to create three horizontal blue strips across the screen, a light blue for the pool, a darker blue for the sea beyond and another lighter blue for the sky above a distant horizon. As the pan continues, the pool gives way to a large terrace, palms, tropical garden and a large, open-fronted, palm-leaf-roofed bar, abutting the right-hand side of the swimming pool. The pool is empty and there are no ships on the sea, but a couple in beach wear are sitting at the bar, their stools, part-submerged in the pool. There appear to be no other guests]

  C Our surroundings today are more in keeping with what our viewers might associate with uncountable, quite unfathomable wealth. The wooden house, the shack on a rock in the middle of the sea, where we conducted our previous two interviews, on the other hand, is not. Which is the real you, Haji Salleh, the hermit’s house or the millionaire’s playground? Where is your real life?

  T They are both real. And both illusory, at the same time. You visited my family home with me a few days ago...

  C For the sake of you, the viewers, let me explain. We are here in this hotel, which is on a large island in the South China Sea. Over there [she points with her right hand between the camera shot and Haji Salleh, roughly along the line of the beach we saw in the panning shot] is what people here call the mainland, which is just another island, but an extremely large one. Haji Salleh’s family is normally based over there on the mainland...

  T And Haji Salleh, as well, actually.

  C ...Haji Salleh and his family are normally based over there in what can only be described as a palatial house, set in its own grounds, surrounded by high walls, with security cameras, automatic gates and all the trappings you might associate with the super rich. There are even private security guards. We have not included shots of the house in these programmes...

  T It’s where my wife and children live. They have a right to privacy.

  C And we respect that right. But it’s not where you live most of the time, is it? You seem to prefer a mixture of your shack on the rock plus places like this. I’ll ask you again, if I may, which is the real you, Haji Salleh?

  T It’s all real. It’s all the real me, except for the right leg, of course, which went the same way as your left one forty-three years ago. What’s left is all real and it’s all me.

  C You are avoiding the question.

  T The answers are not only trivial, they are also obvious. My family home is where I have my family life. I go to the island to work. When I have had enough work and need a change of scene, I often make the short trip here or into the town over there for a little rest and recuperation.

  C It’s a town renowned for its nightlife, its cheap alcohol and even cheaper women. The Filipinas are the best, I’m told - certainly the cheapest.

  T [he laughs] Chris, I don’t know what you are trying to accomplish via this line of questioning. I am a Muslim, so I don’t drink any alcohol. You have stayed with me for almost two weeks, so you know that to be true. I am happily married and so do not seek out places for casual sex. The nightlife, if that term can be used for what this town has to offer, is noisy, silly or sleazy, and none of it interests me. I go to the ‘shack on the rock’, as you describe it, merely to work. When I need a break, or perhaps a bite to eat, I come into town.

  C But what on earth is there left for you to accomplish? What is there to work on? You have already told us that your systems are fully automated, and your millions per minute come in without your even having to lift a finger. Whatever can you find to motivate you now?

  T The possible motivates me. The probable even more...

  C [interrupting] I understand, for the benefit of viewers, that your main area of interest now is the biological.

  T ...and English grammar.

  C [smiles and gestures an invitation to continue]

  T You want a presentation? Well, I call my system event theory. It’s not a formula or an equation: it’s hundreds of them. In terms of my work on financial markets, it’s fair to say that it focuses on the prices of a known set of securities - shares, bonds, some derivatives, et cetera - and that data is completely known at any one instant. Equally, their historical values are also known, and associated data about each of the securities is published and is available in real time. There are many other things that might and do affect the prices and the values, whose variation I intend to monitor. These data might affect the security directly, or they might influence the market overall, or merely a sector via their influence on sentiment. On the face of things, the effects of these data are not predictable.

  C But you can predict everything, can’t you? You look at what might be called ‘the big picture’.

  T Overall, the picture can look rather different than the sum of any selection of the individual parts. It’s like a system in Brownian Motion, where particles collide and exchange energy. Some collisions result in particles slowing down, but others appear to result in a speeding up. But overall, the global picture is known. The sum of all this change, all the individual collisions, still gives rise to the thermodynamic characteristic of the system, where behaviour over time is predictable.

  C So what you are saying is that there is a problem predicting behaviour in the short term, but in the longer term the position is clear. Is that correct?

  T Not really, but it comes close. It is worth remembering that in Keynes’s words, ‘In the long term we are all dead.”

  C But please correct me if I am wrong. I want to be clear on this. Your systems make their money exclusively on short term trades.

  T I will correct you. It’s not true. Initially...

  C You told me you started with ten thousand dollars. Let’s take it from there.

  T Initially, I may have taken a few bigger ri
sks, perhaps, but essentially the same system has been used throughout. In the beginning, it was primarily the short-term trades that generated the spectacular growth my funds displayed. If we go back to the Brownian Motion analogy, we left it where we could easily measure the overall effects of the sum of all the collisions, but what we could not do was predict the outcome of a particular collision, nor predict when the next collision might occur. Put simply, the overall sum is known, but the individual transactions are not. We can roughly predict how these events are distributed throughout the range of possible outcomes, however, because this distribution is what determines the overall status of the system, which, as I have said, we know. We have to assume that the probability distribution is normal.

  C And for the benefit of our viewers, you are using the word ‘normal’ in a technical, mathematical sense to indicate likelihood of expectation.

  T [thinks for a while before commenting as an aside] Is there any other interpretation?

  C Go on.

  T Until I developed the current event theory, the location of a particular collision in such a system along the axis of possible events was quite impossible. We could always describe the sum, if you like, or the overall shape of a series of events. And the more events we considered, then the better became the fit between our prediction and actual occurrence. In other words, we always knew the size and shape of the box, but we could not see inside it, and when we tried, we could find no detail, despite the fact that the shape outside, which we knew, was merely the sum of everything that happened inside.

  C And your work has changed this?

  T Indeed. In hopelessly simple terms, I can model the miniscule changes that combine to create the overall shape of the system.

  C The size and shape of the box...

  T Precisely... and then, knowing the changes required to keep the shape, so to speak, I can predict, within acceptable levels of accuracy, the small-scale changes that must be happening inside.

  C And if the box changes shape...

  T Then effectively the system starts all over again from scratch. The universe it inhabits has altered, but the universe it came from may recur.

  C And so your ten thousand dollars are invested in those securities whose values you know will change and whose changes you can predict.

  T More or less. All the values will change, and I can’t predict everything. I invest in the ones where my event theory seems to predict the change. It’s not a certainty, even then, but as long as the predictions are roughly correct on around two thirds of the attempts, then the one or two per cent growth that the model predicts will be achieved.

  C It’s as simple as that.

  T [laughs long and hard] It’s not simple at all, Christine. I have described precisely nothing of the system itself, of how it works, or the technical detail that underpin its theory. All I have done here is to use words to describe an analogy of its overall effect and, of course, we already know that, don’t we?

  C Indeed we do. But the strategy changes, doesn’t it?

  T Well it has to succeed as predicted at first. If the system is not the model that the theory predicts, then it is no system. That has to be tested. Over the years I have tried out these systems in numerous modified forms hundreds of times on fantasy portfolios. I had some success. Each modification improved the system. But then about ten years ago I began a new direction in the investigation. I realised that previously I had only been reworking the same ideas, the same theories of probability and randomness that everyone knew. The new work took me in a completely different direction at least initially, and then it seemed to turn full circle and approach our current knowledge, both to confirm it and to cast it in a wholly new and unexpected light.

  C I understand that you developed some original material along the way.

  T It was a little more than original, in the sense the word is used today. Let’s say it was unique. It might even be a new branch of mathematics. [He pauses here for several seconds. He is clearly deep in thought, and so is not interrupted.] Let me use calculus as an analogy. Until Leibniz, our methods of describing change were either particularistic or inaccurate. Then calculus came along, a method that paradoxically embedded assumptions about inaccuracy at its core. As a result, our ability to interpret and thus predict change was completely transformed. Now think of possibility and probability, and consider the effect of an invention similar to that of calculus, not in its detail but only in its effect, which alone transforms our ability to explain the link between what is possible and what is probable.

  C Just so we can be clear... Back then, before calculus, we could not explain how things changed, and calculus gave us that ability. In the same way, we currently cannot use our knowledge of probability to predict future events. All we can do is later summarise them. With your systems, prediction becomes possible. Is that a useful summary?

  T [smiles] Excellent, Chris. The possible is always possible. With my work, prediction becomes probable.

  C And I believe the calculations are not done in this world, so to speak, they are completed in an imaginary world you have created... or is that a touch naïve?

  T I give nothing away when I point out that the world we live in and perceive is three dimensional. If we include time, then events with which we are familiar are experienced in four dimensions. Cosmologists, on the other hand, interpret the universe in rather more dimensions than this - there is much current debate about this...

  C ...but your systems are different again...

  T Indeed. I create an imaginary space which can have n dimensions...

  C And how many is n?

  T However many you want it to be! How many dimensions would you like, Christine? I’ll get you some for Christmas.

  C You’re a Muslim.

  T For Eid, then... I was trying to be culturally sensitive.

  C Sorry, I interrupted... n dimensions, as you put it...

  T Indeed. I work in a universe with n dimensions. I export data from a known system into the imaginary space and manipulate it using the mathematical tools I have developed for that space. The results can then be mapped back onto the three or four dimensions of the universe we perceive, and inferences may be drawn.

  C ...and it is these inferences that provide you with your predictions...

  T More or less. You see, Chris, there are some things that must happen, other things that may happen, and some things we convince ourselves will happen, but cannot.

  C I thought things were too simple...

  T Let’s take an example from everyday existence. A male brain perceiving the proximity of a female body must respond in a certain way. However we try to influence it, whatever we do to deny it or control it, there is a reflex response in that brain. It is in-built, and we are probably born with it.

  C [laughing] Males might be... I hoped we might keep sex out of a discussion on financial markets... though I did expect brains to figure.

  T [thoughtful] Brains in more ways than one, given what we have just been talking about.

  C [pauses] I don’t follow...

  T [pauses] Let’s pass that one by... it’s all a matter of spelling. So there’s a reflex action when a male perceives female presence.

  C But that response can be tempered by things we learn?

  T Indeed, such as learned behaviour via culture and experience, and also notions of self-preservation if the female is a little threatening...

  [He turns playfully towards Christine Gardiner and leans back in his chair to put a theatrically safe distance between them.]

  C So the urge is reflex and automatic, but the response may or may not happen as a result of the interplay between the inevitable, the learned and the imagined...

  T Indeed.

  C And after that?

  T Well, that is a given. But it’s the con
flict between the learned and the imagined that my systems model. The imagined is what creates the fluctuations, the learned is the direction in which the fluctuations move and the inevitable is where they eventually try to gravitate, which is usually towards the gratification of the reflex.

  C And the differences between these expected movements at any one instant are your opportunities.

  T That is the world my systems inhabit.

  C And, presumably, the in-built reflex is the base of self-preservation, of perceived profit, one-upmanship...

  [Haji Salleh pauses and leans forward.]

  T I thought you might assume that, given the national psyche of your place of residence.

  C And my assumption would be inaccurate?

  T Not completely, but largely. Individualism is an illusion peddled by capitalism, Chris. In the history of human existence, there has never been any evidence of a society that operated internally on the basis of unfettered self-advancement.

  C [Sounding confused] Surely...

  T Human beings have always lived in cooperative societies, formed by groups we call communities. There has always been internal friction, sometimes sufficient to break apart a particular group, but never so fundamentally as to challenge the reflex response, which is to cooperate and live together. Communities have competed, rather too regularly for their own good, but it always happens at the group, not individual level. In fact, internally, groups have usually had systems that try to prevent individual competition, or, where it is allowed to exist, to force it into special confines, quite separate from everyday existence. [Pauses] If I have given anything away to you over these interviews, then it is contained in those last statements. These are the assumptions that underpin my work and my ideas. The rest is just data, freely available data.