Speaker 1What is happening, gorgeous people? Man, it has been a minute or two. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, and I hope you're all super stoked about what is clearly going to be a badass 2026, baby. The past few months for me, since we last spoke, has been a blizzard of album making. The album is now done. The new James Kennedy and the Underdogs extravaganza is coming your way soon, man. And boy, is it sounding good. Mr. Jeff Rose has woven his sonic magic across the thing once again. And I cannot wait for you guys to hear this thing. We've all worked so hard on it. We're super proud of it, and it is going to be coming your way really soon. So watch this space. But now that I got some more time, I think it's time to get back on the old podcast saddle and start having super interesting conversations with super interesting and awesome people. Case in point, we are kicking off January 2026 with our first podcast episode of the year with a super, super interesting guy who's led a super interesting life. This guy is a world expert. In all the things, I am fascinated by global power dynamics, organized crime, superpowers, and untangling the truth from the noise of which there is a lot these days. So it is my absolute pleasure to introduce you to Professor Mark Gagliotti. Mark is a historian, a lecturer, a prolific writer, and one of the world's leading experts on Russia, security, and organized crime. He also has a brand new book out called Homo Criminalis, How Crime Organizes the World, which is a thrilling whistle-stop tour of how the world is changing. The world's criminal underbelly has shaped state-making, capitalism, globalization, and all forms of so-called legitimate power. So I am absolutely bursting at the seams to jump feet-first into this one, and welcome on to the podcast, Mr. Mark Gagliotti. How are you doing, sir? Hi there, I'm well, thanks. Good to talk to you. You too. Thank you so much for doing this, Mark. I really do appreciate it, and I am fascinated by the world that you explore and explain. So before we do the deep dive into the detail, I wanted to start big and ask you, if you were to, could you explain the global power structure and dynamic as it is currently involving the hierarchy of superpowers and how organized crime slots into that? How would you describe that?
Speaker 2Gosh, okay, well, I'm glad this is a four-hour podcast, so we actually have a chance to talk about this. No, I mean, I think, look, I think for me the interesting thing is, look, on one level, we know what the power structure is. You know, there are the big countries like, say, China, United States, to a lesser extent, Russia. Which can throw their weight around, and there are the big beasts of the economic order. You know, whether we're talking about Elon Musk or Apple or Microsoft, who also have disproportionate weight. So in some ways, the world is as it looks, but at the same time, and again, this is a sort of key theme of the book, what we have to understand is the degree to which almost running like capillary veins through all of these structures, there are these channels of criminality. And it's not about, I mean, I would love to think that there was some kind of global criminal combine like Spectre, whose members meet in some kind of base, probably in an extinct volcano, who decided, and it's all, you know, number three, how do our operations in Asia proceed, and that kind of thing. It's not like that. It's actually about markets and understandings. And a whole bunch of people who, in and of themselves, aren't that important or powerful or smart, but nonetheless, put them together, and they represent sort of an additional force that in so many ways works with, not against, the overpowers of the world.
Speaker 1Well, it's interesting that you refer to this organized crime as veins that run through the entire global power system, because that's quite a presence, if that's the case. And I'm wondering, just for clarity, you know, are we talking still about, you know, the kind of Hollywood version of organized crime, you know, mafia, gangsters, and, you know, drug barons with machine guns, or are we talking about, you know, the more boring kind of, you know, offshore banking and all that sort of stuff?
Speaker 2Well, the point is, they're all part of one criminal ecosystem. I mean, yes, so you've got these, you know, drug cartels in Latin America, Afghan heroin barons, you name it. And increasingly now, the people who, underground laboratories create synthetic drugs. Yes, they're doing what we might think of as the kind of, the sharp end, the obvious crime. But, you know, what do you do with, when you have, you know, not just sacks, but almost sort of your carloads of cash, you have to launder that. You have to move that into the legitimate financial system so that you can hide its origins and then actually use it safely. And because then, that means it then goes into the hands of precisely these accountants and lawyers and other facilitators. And then a lot of that gets reinvested. And some of that gets reinvested. Some of it gets reinvested in totally legitimate activity, some of it gets invested in their kind of halfway house stuff, counterfeit goods, for example, you know, fine, so, so, so this is a, well, you know, once upon a time, it would have been CDs. Now, obviously, it's often, it's actually things like designer goods and such like, which a lot of people think, well, that's, that's crime, but it's, it's not really crime. But the point is, these are all interconnected. I think this is the thing we like to think that crime is. It's the other, that it's in other countries, or it's, you know, guys called knobby with broken noses, conspiring in that pub that you wouldn't dare go into. East End of London, yeah. Exactly, all of that stuff. And yeah, there, there is all that that goes on. But the point is, it comes all the way into our own, our own homes, even to the point of, you know, although clearly the sort of the big furniture makers claim to have very reputable sources, but, you know, there's a lot of illegal logging that goes in. There's a lot of illegal logging that goes into making the, again, I'm certainly not going to name names, because we live in litigious times, but, you know, the kind of furniture that may well be in large, fairly sort of well-known brand, sort of stores and things. And again, we don't tend to think of illegal logging as, you know, a crime. It's not like human trafficking or these very obvious, horrible things. But actually, a lot of the money that comes from illegal logging may well go into drug production. Or a lot of drug money might go into illegal logging. And the same bankers will happily launder the lot of it.
Speaker 1And when it comes to the money laundering thing, I've always wondered about the level of awareness on behalf of these major, you know, high street banks that, you know, many of them have been openly guilty of, you know, laundering, you know, massive amounts of criminal money through their systems, you know. And are they aware that they're doing so? You know, what? What's the level of complicity in this whole house of cards?
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, on one level, I'd say we should never underestimate the capacity of human beings to kind of rationalize what they do.
Speaker 3Right.
Speaker 2I mean, the thing of the matter is, look, if you turned up to a bank in the city with a suitcase full of cocaine-smeared $100 bills, they're going to call the police, obviously. The thing is, you don't do that. You've had the courtesy to pre-wash it. So, you know, what you do is there's a whole chain, you know. First of all, you get your original money and you move it into a banking system, even one in a very, very dodgy jurisdiction. You know, and often it's by what's called smurfing, which is because if you put in $10,000 at once, that has to be kind of recorded and registered and notified. So, you have lots and lots of smaller sums being paid in. So, you have a bunch of people whose job is just literally to go from bank to bank, paying money in. Right. Anyway, so you've got your money into the system, but it's in a very dodgy jurisdiction. So, you slowly, bit by bit, move it up the food chain. So, it then moves to slightly less dodgy ones, but it's still, you know, they're not going to be very, very stringent about all that know-your-client sort of stuff. And then, you know, after you've done a whole bunch of these transactions, first of all, you ping your money all around the world. Remember, money isn't a thing now. Right. It's a bunch of ones and zeros being moved around the virtual space. So, you know, because you want to make it as difficult as possible for the police to prove that it is. And, you know, after a certain point, you then move it into the, you know, the ones that, again, here I will name names, in places like Israel or Cyprus or Turkey or the UAE, where, you know, you're then just a jump or two away from the gold star jurisdictions like London, New York, Frankfurt. So, anyway, you're moving it up. And by the time it reaches there, well, in some cases, yes. The bankers may well have no idea. In other cases, they may well have an idea, but they have deniability. Someone I was at university with who then went into the city to get a very well-paying job in compliance, who, and then a few years in, well, I don't know, about 10 years in, actually left the city. He said, look, actually, the problem is this. In theory, my job is to make sure that my bank complies with all the various rules and regulations. In practice, my job was to ensure that no one can prove that the bank doesn't comply with all the regulations. And this individual decided that they'd had enough. I mean, admittedly, you know, after they bought their nice house in central London and paid off the mortgage. But, you know, I can't blame them for that. So, I think the thing is that, you know, some people don't know. Some people don't care. And some people, well, you know, they might have a bit of a concern. But as I said, all the... the t's have been crossed and the eyes have been dotted and when it comes down to it their annual bonus depends on the business they handle so they just kind of close their eyes and think it's probably fine and also they think well if it doesn't come to me it's going to go to a different bank in the city or it's going to go to frankfurt or new york or paris or wherever right again that's
Speaker 1always a great rationalization okay so it's not eight dudes sitting at a table in a darkened room smoking cigars you know with a single light bulb you know consciously conspiring to do these things knowingly it's much more just that kind of typical human ability to um convince yourself that it's
Speaker 2happening elsewhere and um change the subject look you do get those cases i mean there's every now and then there's big cases like the bank of new york case which is a massive sort of case of organized money laundering which again i mean it's great virtue and it's sort of a unique selling point when you got that is that you cut out a lot of the intervening stages it costs a lot of money to launder your money right because you're you're paying cuts and everything along the line right if you actually have dodgy bankers who are willing to sort of expedite the process they can offer you a much much better rate the point is they're also much more likely to get caught right and and they tend to but the thing is i mean and and these cases tend to involve you know tens hundreds of millions of pounds and we think oh my gosh but that is a drop in the ocean compared with the so total this is the total sums being laundered wow um because most of it just happens again in this much more gentle circulatory process of the global economy and it gets lost in
Speaker 1that so from the perspective of the system at large then is organized crime seen as just another very valid very morally neutral working part of the system you know a contributing factor that is bringing in this sort of massive amount of money that's being laundered and that's being laundered into the system that you're talking about and the ability to to move certain goods around the place you know is it not really a moral issue as far as the system is concerned because organized crime is just seen as a very valid and normal part of the working machinery i mean i think again
Speaker 2so it's unlikely that that many of these companies deal directly with organized crime again it's all through intermediaries it's all through people who swear blind that this is you know again if we take the example of logging you know that these are trees from certified sustainable forests blah blah blah and they'll have nice brochures to prove it right you know the question and and the question is when someone's offering you a good deal do you probe too deeply or do you accept the deal and then if it blows up in your face you say you were shocked shocked to discover there was anything dodgy about this but i think that you know in some ways if we really pull it back to the sort of macro level i want to talk to uh someone from the imf the international monetary fund and said look you know i know that nowadays again it's impossible to sort of disaggregate but if you could wave a magic wand and instantly take all the dirty money out of circulation would you do it and he said god no that would crash the global economy because of the degree to which you know everything has now got dependent upon that and and you may well not know it i mean you know you may well not know that uh part of the pension pot that you're collecting is actually invested in the economy and you may well not know that part of the pension pot that may well not know that you know one of its subsidiaries is actually using i don't know trafficked labor let's say or you know questionable materials or whatever um but you know but the point is that if all of a sudden you try and take that out the result is catastrophic i mean again just to flip it around if we think of the 2008 global financial crisis i mean that was a liquidity crisis basically there wasn't enough cash in the system to lubricate the workings of the global economic machine and although it's something that is very hotly disputed as far as i'm concerned i think the case has been made that although ultimately this was turned around by huge amounts of government intervention especially u.s government intervention governments don't move quickly and in fact the initial moves that helped stop the entire global financial system from just seizing up and stopping was and you know we ought to offer up a little prayer to them the drug barons because they spotted this as an opportunity they had huge amounts of cash that they hadn't yet been able to launder you know they literally were sitting on houses where every room is just stacked high with bank notes um and in those circumstances they thought well this is a good opportunity because at this point no one's going to question where money comes from and so you know again although in aggregate terms this wasn't a huge amount compared to what the governments eventually would spend but the point is criminals can move fast they could move in hours and days where governments take weeks and that probably helped you know stop the worst impact of the 2008 financial crisis now again not that therefore we should therefore be raising statues to the heroic drug lords but it's a reminder of the degree to which these days you can't really unpick the legal from the illegal yeah that's fascinating stuff man well using a
Speaker 1current example then of the very real world of the drug industry and the very real world of the drug industry and the very real world of the drug industry and the very real world of the drug industry recent u.s invasion of venezuela under the pretext of wanting to curtail the uh the flooding of american streets with illegal drugs is that legit as i doubt or is there something much more nefarious
Speaker 2happening under the hood there well i mean i think that there's something much more nefarious i think politically nefarious i mean criminal maybe with a small c or a moral sense but not what we think of i mean for a start it's worth noting that yeah do do drugs particularly cocaine pass through venezuelan ports yeah of course they do is that the main conduit no absolutely not i mean if you really want to address the flow of drugs and particularly this talking about fentanyl fentanyl doesn't come from from venezuela you actually you decide to invade mexico and nb donald if you're listening i'm not advocating that um you know it's it's clearly that this this was about oil this was about ego and this was just simply about uh a u.s president with little impulse control who's got all these cool toys to play with and wanting to play with them um but the interesting thing is this that there's now talk about how you know basically venezuela will be forced to trade with the united states and you know the u.s companies although u.s companies don't seem that interested in venezuelan oil because the huge amounts of money they'd have to invest and much of which would then be embezzled or stolen um but nonetheless you know what what is clear is that if there are some kind of sort of sweetheart deals between the united states and venezuela you know again this this is this is all perfect territory for corruption um you know as soon as you start to i mean again the market is a very very imperfect beast for handling economic allocation the only problem is all the other mechanisms seem even worse um but nonetheless as soon as you start distorting the market you create opportunities and basically you know smart guys in the market are in both the united states and venezuela and be thinking how can i make money off this and that's what we like to see that's what we saw in iraq for example after the invasion it's always what we saw in afghanistan so you know again just basically sit back and and wait because again almost anything that happens in the world every tax that is levied every ban that is introduced every invasion or whatever there will be people smart morally bankrupt but imaginary individuals imaginative individuals who will be thinking how can i make money off this and a lot of them are going to fail
Speaker 1but enough of them are going to succeed so is there an interest then in the system maintaining the status quo as it is with regards to the illegal status of certain industries such as drugs i mean you know if they if the government of the u.s really wanted to remove the criminal elements if of this um issue they could just like legalize drugs for example but is there a mutual benefit to the legal world and the illegal world of things staying as they are for certain industries remaining illegal there's certain benefits the legal world derives from that
Speaker 2that's a really interesting question and again it's a really big one um i mean in some cases we don't i mean there are some drugs which absolutely we shouldn't be legalizing because they are incredibly dangerous um you know there's a difference between marijuana and heroin um there's also the the problem of the kind of the moral stature of the various things that you know again although we we have internalized the idea that tobacco and alcohol are the acceptable drugs um you know and others people will then say oh but you know hasn't has nobody thought of the children and all that but even once you put aside those kind of concerns there there is there is this this issue about you know who who benefits from the continued illegalization not just of drugs but of all sorts of commodities and look one of them is clearly the criminals themselves criminals don't want legalization because then exactly you've got all sorts of new more competition you haven't got these sort of artificially jacked up uh prices you're going to face regulation and all that kind of thing and you suddenly you know you didn't if that's what you'd want you to do you wouldn't have been a gangster right yeah but then also the enforcement agencies now you know if you ask say in the uk on the whole the police again there's there's a various opinions, but there are a good number of senior police officers who would see a certain amount of decriminalization because they just think at the moment it's it's pointless it's a waste of resources and so forth however if you think of a country where you actually have a specialist anti-drugs force like say the dea in the united states legalized drugs and that's it they have no rationale anymore yeah you also have institutional interests and again i mean i don't want to say that every dea agent is thinking that but on the other hand it's clearly there is an institutional drive to actually say no what we need is more policing and that means more budgets because in a bureaucracy essentially your budget is your sign of virility and machismo um so you know you you have that um you also have again from the financial perspective um legalized drug movers do not need to launder their money which means that they won't be willing to pay way over the odds in order to have a blind eye turn to their financial transactions um you know and there's a whole variety of these little interests again none of which are critical none you know it's not like you've actually got the city of london turning to the british government and saying you must not legalize the following drugs because but all of these things act in some ways as a kind of a break on movement and on debate a subtle little resistance yeah it's a little bit of a break but i think it's a little bit of a break a subtle little resistance yeah it's a little bit of a break but i think it's a little bit of a break a subtle little resistance yeah it's a little bit of a break but i think it's a little bit of a break a subtle little resistance yeah it's a little bit of a break but i think it's a little bit of a break a subtle little resistance yeah exactly and given that particularly in democracies governments essentially tend to go for the line of least resistance right um this is one of the reasons why no one really wants to tackle these tricky issues
Speaker 1and i suppose it does make for convenience as well like it's handy if you want to put your hands on a shed load of dough like you just mentioned in the financial crisis but also as a cover for you know just illegally invading countries at will under the guise of uh drug policy or you know if you want to if you're a government and you want to do some covert operation off the books and you need some dudes that are working under the shadows to pull it off for you behind the scenes i suppose it's handy to have a few friends in the organized crime world to
Speaker 2um to call on yeah exactly and and then you can always you know if need be distract the populace with with some more dramatic videos of a ship being boarded or or indeed blown up or another drugs raid
Speaker 1well i want to come on to the orange man himself in just a bit because i would love to ask you some questions about what's happening there um but before we do that i want to stay uh at home for a second and ask you what role specifically does britain play in this whole global web
Speaker 2i mean britain as you'd imagine given its role very much as a sort of a crucial you know that he does punch above its weight a crucial player in global financial and indeed wider business circles is an interesting one because we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been You do what you're told. And yes, we have all kinds of icing on the cake. on the top of that cake, that says, and you pay your tax, and that's why there's a fire brigade that will come if your house burns down. And that's why all sorts of other benefits accrue. But when it comes down to it, you don't get to say, actually, I'll take my chances. I don't need a fire brigade, thank you. I'm going to pay for private health care, so I don't need an NHS, etc. No, you don't get to say that, because the state ultimately says, ah, ah, ah, that's your choice, but you still have to pay your tax, or else bad things will happen to you. States are engines for collecting revenue and then spending them, and if need be, backing all that up with force.
Speaker 1Well, I think that also perfectly covers the second question on the back of the book, which I was going to throw back at you, which is, when does a gang become a government? Because there are similarities, aren't there, in how the two things function. I mean, you know, gangs have extortions and protection money and things like that, which does have parallels between the way a government functions.
Speaker 2Yeah, and particularly, I mean, I mention in the book, a case when I went on a ride-along with New Jersey State Troopers into Newark, New Jersey. It's weird, it's always a bit sort of confusing, there's Newark right next to New York. And in some ways, Newark, I mean, Newark is a miserable, impoverished, downtrodden place, really. I mean, I lived there for two weeks, and we had multiple fatal shootings in that street. But the point is, it's also the place where a lot of the people who do the poorly paid night work for New York live. And this is a place in which basically, and there is, frankly, there's very high levels of corruption, even within the local police and so forth. But nonetheless, this is really where gangs control. I mean, once it was the Italian mafia that was dominant, they've largely moved out. There are still a few places I was once taken to go and have a drink in what was one of the remaining sort of mafia hangouts by a couple of local cops. But now, essentially, it's African-American and Latin American, drug gangs that control the streets. And, you know, this again, this is a raid. We're going into doing an arrest warrant. The interesting thing is that within Newark, there was, you know, quite well known, the sort of, not just the boundary lines between different gangs' territory, but also a sense of each different gang's characteristics. And they were clearly, they were the good gangs and the bad gangs. You know, the bad gangs, again, they were just simply predatory and exploitative. You didn't mess with them. You didn't mess with them because otherwise they would do horrible things to you. But then there were the good gangs who were still predatory and exploitative, but who understood that there was a need for some kind of social contract. So that, you know, if you paid your, you know, if you're a shopkeeper and you paid your protection, that's it. You were fine until the next protection was due. They weren't going to come tomorrow and just say, I changed my mind, pay us again. You know, that you could, for example, claim a degree of protection from other gangs. If they tried to sort of come in, come into the turf and so forth. So even at that stage, and I said, these are all deeply unpleasant individuals, I should stress. But nonetheless, some were, and I think for just for pragmatic reasons, they had realized that actually it is worth developing some kind of relationship with the local community because you were thinking of the long term and because you were fully aware that when it comes down to it, it's not just the local community could band together against you. That's unlikely in an age. That's unlikely in an age of automatic weapons. But on the other hand, what they could do is inform on you to the authorities. And the authorities, after all, the biggest gang in town, they have more guns and more people when they want to deploy them. So it just makes sense. The same way as like the Kray twins in the East End, they created a myth about the fact that, yeah, they were bad lads, but, you know, a granny could connect, collect her pension in peace and so forth. None of that was true. But nonetheless, it was part of the myth that they build, you know, going in when you go, you go into a pub, you buy a drink for everyone, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3Right.
Speaker 2As a way of trying to say, well, these are these are people who are, yeah, they're they're not nice people, but they are somehow connected to us. And there it could be worse. So we'll settle for these. So this is this is really how how gangs become governments often. It's when they realize that it's in their interests to at least convince the people that they are plundering that to a degree they are. Again, to think of how the Italian mafia, who framed itself in New York cause an Ostra our thing and somehow actually better than the alternatives.
Speaker 1Well, the third and final question on the back of the book that you pose is and it's an interesting word in this, which I want to highlight, you say, is organized crime at the heart of every modern state. And they use the word heart there, which I think is important because that's quite a central component to a system, isn't it? Is that your feeling? Yeah, I mean, it's a bit provocative.
Speaker 2Provocative because obviously we want to sell books. So you stick a comment like like that on the back. Yeah, again, I mean, I think it's a lot of people that I often find this when I go out and give public talks and things that people say, oh, you know, they're all corrupt and they're all rotten. And that's that's not true. And that's not fair. However, little I like standing up and defending our politicians and so forth these days. But I think it is again, it's this sense that we don't appreciate the degree to which. All the structures of the modern world are underpinned by and penetrated by criminality. I mean, I give the example in the book of the sand mafia that, you know, construction needs certain high grade sand and therefore that becomes a scarce commodity. And therefore you have organized crime gangs that essentially hoover up sand from beaches and from from riverbeds and such like so much so that you've got whole beaches in India that is disappearing. And the struggle over sand actually. It's something that, you know, basically people fight gun back gun battles over. Now, we don't necessarily think of that when you see another development going up another block of flats or another shiny office building. But it may well be that amongst the sacks of sand that are being used for its foundations are ones that have come from from these kind of criminal activities on the other side of the globe. You know, we now live in this extraordinary sort of globalization has become such a kind of. A bit of a kind of buzzword these days that means everything and nothing. But, you know, it is true that we now all live in one economic space, one information space, you know, with the Internet and the relative ease of the movement of people and goods. And to this end, everything is interconnected. You know, your your street corner pusher who is selling little bags of heroin may well never have left the country, not have a passport. But if you look at the economy. That has got that heroin to him. Let's say that heroin has come from Afghanistan. Maybe it was processed there. Maybe it was processed just across the border in Central Asia or in Pakistan. Then perhaps it was moved all the way along the so-called southern route via Iran, via Turkey. You know, it's an incredibly complex global infrastructure that has just led to that one rather unimpressive individual selling the drugs. So, you know, that person doesn't look like. They're representative of a global economy, but like it or not, they are. And likewise, modern states, the finances that drive them, the economies, the calculations they make, you know, the degree to which we often accept criminality abroad for our own national interest. I mean, until not so long ago in Germany, if you paid a bribe in Germany or, you know, basically were corrupt in Germany, that was a criminal offense. But if you're a German. If you're a German company that paid a bribe abroad, that was tax deductible. You know, again, that I should stress that has been changed. But nonetheless, for a long time, that that was the situation, as is, you know, how many of our big contracts for exports end up with all sorts of facilitation fees and so forth being paid. In other words, bribery. But we accept. We accept that because, well, we want to sell our goods abroad and we know that all of our rivals are going to be doing the same thing. I mean, there's a lot of furor at moment about the degree to which Russia and its conflict with the West is essentially weaponizing criminality and hiring gangsters to carry out sabotage attacks like the arson that took place in Leighton recently. But in some ways, that's just a particular kind of extreme end. Of a way to which actually states have used criminals as agents abroad, you know, for whenever they've needed to, whether it was the Sicilian mafia helping the allies into invading Sicily during the Second World War, which they did for their own interests, or today, intelligence services using the services of hackers to carry out cyber operations against other countries. Now, again, of course, I'm sure the British intelligence community, I'm sure, doesn't do that at all. But. But. Oh. Oh, there are certain other countries that don't have quite the same. Of course.
Speaker 1Well, I'm so glad you mentioned Russia there because I wanted to come on to that because we're living in very interesting times now. And we did talk at the start about the global power structure that we live within currently. And we have a very interesting leader of the West right now, you know, the orange one himself, who seems to have more in common with our traditional. rival in, you know, in the east russia you know he seems to have more common with their main guy putin than he does with working people of the people he's supposed to represent what the hell is going on with those two what is their relationship um is russia as powerful as we are led to believe um does it pose a genuine threat to western hegemony are those guys in a bromance what the hell is going on there
Speaker 2yeah i mean again sort of loads to unpack there i mean to start with the the trump putin relationship you know i mean i however much it would be fun i don't believe any of the stories about uh compromising materials or you know corrupt payments or anything like that i think it's much more simple than that is that trump is a kind of wannabe strong man remember it's not just putin trump basically hasn't met an autocrat he doesn't like i mean sure if he met maduro they probably hit it off perfectly fine no i mean i think it's it's that you know trump has a certain vision of the world which again means that firstly big powers get to tell smaller countries what to do right secondly it's that history is essentially shaped by a handful of great men and he obviously regards himself as that and i do would stress men um and and just in that context he looks at people like putin or xi jinping in china and he thinks yeah that's that's how it should be that you know the great and benevolent leader gives an order and people obey none of this faffing around with checks and balances and supreme courts and everything else so i think you know he actually shares a worldview with putin which is why they can get on more but ultimately trump's interested in trump it's interesting thing is if you look at the russian press and the russian expert commentary they have never believed that trump is on their side right they have always said that trump has his interests and we have ours and in some cases they coincide and that's great but then they're gonna eventually diverge right um but more broadly in terms of of russian power you often get this this uh stat brought up about well how can russia be a great power its economy is only the gdp the size of spain's or whatever it's a totally meaningless bullshit kind of analogy because it doesn't work that way because it's not like for example the russians are buying their weapons from the west so the ruble to pound euro dollar exchange rate doesn't really matter but also i mean yes russia is not it's not a great it's not a superpower it's not the soviet union sure it has one particular capacity which is its nuclear arsenal can blow up the world but that's all it can really do um it's a very limited thing at the same time what russia does have is a kind of perverse power of inconvenience okay what russia can do is just basically um mess things up for other people it can cast inconvenient votes in the security council of the united nations it can um support various sort of again disruptive powers around the world which again you know attracts attention and distracts western politicians and such like i mean putin for me i think you know i'm i have a particular axe to grind because i was in the first batch of brits who were banned from russia in june i've read about that um for my supposed russophobia and i think well actually the the greatest russophobe the greatest hater of russia sits in the kremlin because of what putin is doing for russia's long-term prospects um but nonetheless you know in in the short term this is this is an example if if you really don't care if you don't care if you're going to get a nobel peace prize if you don't care what people are going to say about you and if you don't ultimately value the sort of soft power ties that so much of the modern world is sort of connected by right then you have a considerable degree of autonomy but when it comes down to it sure putin you know he's fighting his war in ukraine and he's slowly and at huge cost winning or rather the way i tend to frame it is you know both russia and ukraine are losing but the ukrainians are losing a bit faster right but on the other hand he's also essentially having to sacrifice all of russia's stake in the global world i mean they couldn't do anything about venezuela even if they'd wanted to they weren't able to ultimately protect assad in syria except personally his regime felt but assad himself has a nice flat in moscow um you know they they basically even within what was once their sphere of influence of the post-soviet states in the south caucasus and in central asia they're no longer the deciding power the way they were now right the way they were then and now essentially china and other countries like turkey and iran are increasingly sort of encroaching so you know yes putin has has the power to continue to resist doing what we want but it's at a cost right and god knows when i'll ever get back to russia i'm still optimistic i feel i'm gonna have to outlive putin but yes i do have numbers on my side in that respect um but i do wonder what kind of a country it will be by the
Speaker 1time i'm able to get back yeah that sucks man well one of the other inconveniences that we're seeing with uh regards to russia as well is their ability to create tension in the narrative and to cause confusion and stress and arguments and division primarily online through the use of social media and the intensive use of these bot farms and click farms and things you know to flood social media with misinformation and disinformation and to just confuse the hell out of everybody and kind of enjoy the mess that unfolds when you're in a i'm thinking of course about brexit and of course these supposed influence that russia had in the brexit vote is that accurate is that actually you know russian power on display there or is their role in that in brexit in particular kind of blown out of proportion
Speaker 2i mean it's both true and blown out of proportion um no i would dearly love to be able to blame brexit on on putin um people who do these very very sort of deep calculations have suggested that maybe russian power is going to be a part of that and i think that's going to be a part of that and i think that's going to be a part of that and i think that's going to be a part of that and i think that's going to be a part of that and i think that's going to be a part of that and i think that's going to be a part of that and i think that's going to be a part of that russian propaganda changed the result by about 0.2 percent okay the vote was close but it wasn't so close that that really matters right what the russians can do and again there's a lot of mythology about yes they they absolutely do use misinformation disinformation and just simply amplifying the the narrative lines that they find most most useful is the russians got they haven't got magic mind control powers they can't change your view what they can do is what to use the kind of language of terrorism studies is to radicalize so again if you take brexit it is clear that the russians were you know the russians were trying to support brexit because you know from their point of view it was great brexit was a wonderful idea because it helped disrupt the european union it created just just created a lot of hassle and fuss in the west distraction a lot of this is about distracting us and dividing us um but so they they couldn't sort of essentially target it target people who are remainers and change their minds what they could do is take people who you might say were soft brexiteers people who broadly speaking thought that actually the european union wasn't a good thing but shall we say they didn't really care that much they weren't certain if they were actually going to go out and vote and that kind of thing and persuade them that in fact no this was an existential moment for britain and it was really important and they absolutely should should go and vote and we see that generally i mean putin's russia has no real ideology there's a sort of all nationalist patriotic stuff but there's no there isn't anything that it's not like it's the communist party or anything else and that's very liberating for them because it means that they can essentially amplify every single convenient voice so they just look for disruptive voices so if you look at america at the same time as they were supporting black lives matter they were supporting the national rifle association okay and if you look at europe they can support extremists of left and of right people who talk about the need to have a stronger state and people who are secessionists like the basques or indeed the scots um you know they don't care what they want to do is disrupt us and so what they will do is precisely every single convenient sort of radical voice that they think might help they will try and big up and amplify and it doesn't mean to say that these these people are in any way sort of pawns of the russians or whatever um but nonetheless just simply the fact that we are democracies which have all kinds of different shades of opinion and all kinds of disagreements and that works to the russians advantage the thing is now look the real disruptive things are nothing to do with the russians they're to do with the algorithms that shape our social media bubbles and that kind of thing you know i think elon musk rather than vladimir putin has a much greater role in sort of shaping narratives in in western democracies however what is what really does worry me is we are getting to see that the russians in some ways are learning the tricks from the advertising business in the west and they are turning to use artificial intelligence to micro target because once upon a time targeting was fairly broad so you'd find you know kind of a particular let's say online community that supported some you know view x and you just kind of try and hype amp it up now they can say well look you know when we have a constituency of people who let's say they are brits from the west who supported brexit who are now feeling disillusioned with the labour government and cats you know we can focus it down to that level and maybe have middle income but they're a bit worried about whether or not their kids are going to be a buy a home and we can create messages that are actually targeted for that constituency and send it to them because this is what advertisers have been starting to sort of to do right um and yeah so so the russians are going to are going to do it my concern is not so much about what the russians are going to do with this it's so in a way the russians got to realize the russians actually are very imaginative and they're actually very very tech oriented i mean russia is a lot more cyberpunk than any western western country that i would say that's a whole other one day i wanted to write a book about russia as a cyberpunk country but anyway too many projects not enough time um but what happens if let's say the chinese with hugely greater resources start thinking huh this looks quite neat you know how can we spread disaffection disarray and disunity in the west using these technologies or because actually this is stuff which is relatively cheap once you've got the computing capacity to do so right you know who knows who's going to be the next antagonist nation over the horizon you know at the moment we focus on the russians and the chinese with a little sort of side order of iran and north korea right but you know we don't know are we going to be fearing the the brazilians or the belgians or exactly whoever god knows um but nonetheless the idea is that sort of once once these techniques and technologies start to get developed they can be applied by others yeah and
Speaker 1very difficult to untangle and unpick that from legitimate forms of information as well because it's all delivered through the same noisy platforms yeah and because again it often
Speaker 2doesn't depend on lies we tend to have a focus that's all about disinformation and lies and the trouble is that has a tendency to lead to a sort of a game in which we look at inconvenient truths that don't fit our particular mindset and we call them lies and disinformation i mean i always find this bizarre sometimes i'll write some article that appears on online and you look at the comments which is always a big mistake which you've never ever but you know there'll be one comment that says you know who is this um neocon anti-russian nato shill and another one who's says oh i hope you've been collecting those checks from from moscow i mean i wish um off the same article you know you know we have the capacity to read different things into what we say but also i mean from the russians point of view what they have realized is that there is sometimes a place for a strategic lie but even more powerful is an inconvenient truth that is brought to people's attention and sometimes they will even create those truths there was for example in in france where the russians paid some locals to put anti-semitic graffiti on jewish cemeteries so that actually happened but yes it happened because you know they basically pay people to do it but then what happened is that the russian troll and media misinformation machine then used the footage of that to try and prove you see the french you know france is an anti-semitic country it proves the rise of nazism in the west and and such like so sometimes you you create a truth and then you spin that truth and that's harder to fight because it's not just simply saying no it didn't happen it's until you know the actual facts of how it happened and who did it right you know it's it's something that really did happen i think the
Speaker 1problem is is that finding the facts takes time and energy whereas flooding the internet with clickbaity emotionally triggering salacious video content takes seconds and certainly with ai now you know that can just be an unstoppable tsunami of disinformation and misdirection coming our way and i think that for me feels like the real battleground of the future is going to be in information do you think it is
Speaker 2horrific i mean you know in insofar as we none of us actually have answers you know if one looks at the current debate over grok and its capacity to sort of create pictures of people undressed i mean grok as an ai tool just simply made it easier but if you want to do that you can with a whole variety of other tools already and no one's going to stop it yeah um i think this this is the problem precisely is that technology is moving you know it's moving it's i mean i know we're wandering away beyond areas of the book and so forth um but you know it is moving at such a pace that it's not just that we can't regulate what's happening in the future we can't regulate what's happening tomorrow we have no idea what's happening tomorrow i mean my view is frankly if you want to know what's happening tomorrow you just read the best science fiction books out there um you know because they're probably going to tell you more than any number of government reports about what what's going to be happening in the future and if i can just loop this just briefly back to the sort of themes of the book i mean one of the things that does strike me is we're so bad at what's called red teaming in other words trying to put ourselves in the heads of the bad guys right and i think if if there's one thing that i would hope to do is to policy makers get from them from the book if they read it and i hope they will well buy it certainly but read it they might as well um is precisely this idea of whenever you're going to do something whenever you're going to bring in some new initiative or some new law or some new tax or some new regulation have some smart people sit down and think well okay how could this be abused and manipulated well how does this create criminal opportunities because i can guarantee you that it will now it doesn't mean say we don't do it because you know we don't do it we don't do it you know some things we're not going to just let people go into the supermarket and buy heroin um for all kinds of good reasons but but nonetheless at least then it gives us a chance of being ahead of the game because otherwise what happens time and time again is some new laws brought in often for the best possible intentions like for example banning cfc gases which create greenhouse gases and then only afterwards we realize how in the process we created a criminal market in both disposing of fridges and things that use the old cfcs and also in people who want to basically keep their existing ones yeah and then you have to go through all the process of working out how you can respond and what you need to change the laws or whatever by which time the criminals have been at it for years right well if only someone thought hang on hang on a minute if we're going to do x then the gangsters are going to do y so maybe we should work zed in to the principle as well just to try and head that off to the next level
Speaker 1right well unfortunately sir my time with you has come to an end and as much as i would love to keep talking to you for hours and ask you another 500 questions i'm gonna have to ask one more and get the hell out of your way so i want to finish with the biggie which is to talk at the moment just to calm everybody down a little bit are we heading towards world war three i don't think we
Speaker 2are that's that's the short answer the slightly longer answer is when it comes down to it everyone's playing brickmanship games and i'm not going to be playing brickmanship games for a long time so there's a chance that they'll sort of misunderstand and miscalculate but to be perfectly honest no one
Speaker 1has an interest in letting things go that far well amen to that thank you for reassuring us all mark we have now got to plug this incredible book of yours homo criminalis how crime organizes the world is out now please please please go and get it go and get five buy one for your friends buy one for your grandmother and join the joyride through the murky underbelly of how the world really works fascinating stuff and if ever we all needed a little bit of enlightenment and understanding of how the world really works right now and what is at play then this is the book for you homo criminalis by mark galeotti go and get it people also you can follow mark and stay up to date with everything he's doing at mark galeotti on all of his socials he's got tons of writing online get involved check it out show him some love and go on by the damn book mark thank you so much for the day man i really appreciate it it's been a fascinating chat i wish you all the best and i'll see you next time all the best with the book and everything going forward yeah absolutely i've had a blast oh me too thank you man speak to you soon the best wishes bye how about that then mr mark galeotti ladies and gentlemen let's hear it for him i love that stuff man how organized crime infiltrates and lives harmoniously within and underneath our entire modern world and and from what mark was explaining goes back you know right to the dawn of civilization and has stayed with us ever since as an integral vein capillary system and as an integral vein of civilization and as an integral system as he described it that runs through the whole goddamn structure and in many ways holds it together how mental is that so please go out and buy the book and support mark's work it is going to be a fascinating mind-blowing ride i promise you the book is available everywhere and if you haven't yet subscribed to the podcast please do click the subscribe button i don't have adverts on this thing i make no money doing this thing and it does take up my time baby so the least you can do is click that link and let me know the people listening to this damn thing if you get a minute to star button give me some reviews or leave some comments as well you know i put these things on youtube i don't think anybody watches it on youtube because there's nothing to watch but it's a good place to leave comments and join in the conversation and share your thoughts as well so if you haven't listened to the podcast on youtube it is also available there for your youtube premium subscribers i'll be back next week with another fascinating conversation with another awesome dude in the meantime have an awesome week take care of yourself take care of each other and i'm back to the studio to do some hard rocking with the underdogs baby
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