The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - How Money Laundering Took Over London — with Oliver Bullough

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

Oliver Bullough, a journalist and the author of “Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals,” joins Scott to discuss how Britain essentially became the epicenter for money laundering and kleptocrats. Follow Oliver on Twitter, @OliverBullough.  Scott opens with his thoughts on the latest surrounding Elon and Twitter, plus we hear why he thinks we’re seeing massive layoffs at growth companies.  Algebra of Happiness: don’t bring your full self to work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Episode 164. Dr. Strangelove premiered in 1964 mary poppins premiered in 1964 did you hear that mary poppins stopped wearing lipstick while episode 164 mary poppins premiered in 1964 true story i killed my best friend accidentally i didn't mean to of course it ends up that if you give him a spoonful of sugar after his insulin that's a bad idea that mary poppins is full of go go go welcome to the 164th episode of the prop g-Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Oliver Bulla, a journalist and the author of Butler to the World, How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats, and Criminals,

and Moneyland, Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back. Okay, what's happening? So, the markets are down, the risk of nuclear war is up, and worst of all, it looks as if Comrocket will not replace the dollar. It's as if the bad news just won't relent, and we really, really tried to make it a week without talking about Elon, but what do you know, here we are again. So, obviously, you've heard by now that Elon has temporarily, big air quotes here, put his deal to acquire Twitter on hold. Something Matt Levine points out is simply not a thing. You can't put this deal on hold.

He's signed an airtight purchase agreement. By the way, my date with Sofia Vergara is on hold. My plans to pee only twice a day and have the flow of the Canadian side of the Niagara Falls are on hold. This is in a word or specifically two words or is it one word? Bullshit. And this is nothing but Rocket Man posturing to try and get out of what is a shitty deal that he agreed to. You know when you sign an airtight contract to buy something from someone and then the value of that asset goes down by 50% since you agreed to sign or you signed that airtight contract and so you look for any ways to get out of it? That's what we are seeing here. Supposedly in his latest shocker, he has found out that, oh my God, oh my God, who would

have thunk it? More than 5% of Twitter's accounts are fake or spam. So let's break this down. In sum, Elon Musk has said to his lawyers, get me out of this. I fucked up. And he could try and negotiate a lower price, but it's unlikely the board will do that, realizing that this guy has just monkeyed with the company and abused the board and management, and he's no longer a credible acquirer. So they would likely just say, everyone get back to work. Go away. You need to pay us a billion-dollar breakup fee, and we're going to sue you in Delaware

court for the $45 billion that you owe us, which you guaranteed we would have, which we did not talk to other suitors, which we incurred huge distraction, in which we started giving you confidential information based on this airtight legal contract that you're going to show up with $45 billion. But here's the thing. I don't see how practically, legal agreement or not, you can force somebody to show up with $45 billion. I think likely the way out here, the reason this deal effectively doesn't close, and this deal is not going to close, folks. This is over. As a matter of fact, if you look at the stock price, the deal is supposed to consummate at $54.50. Now, it's supposed to close in about, call it, six months. Generally, roughly, people expect about an 8% return to the markets, 12% more frothy times. Let's call it 8%, meaning that if we're six months away from the close of this thing, if the market thought it was going to close, it would trade at approximately a 4% discount to the offer price,

or it would be trading somewhere around $52. But it's not. As of the recording of this video, it's trading at $38 or a full 33% below where it's supposed to close. Now, what does that mean? What does that mean? It means the market believes there's about a 70% to 80% likelihood this deal isn't going to close, and it's not. When he starts coming up with bullshit, false flags, and head fakes for why, he's shocked. He's just shocked. But by the way, by the way, there was an analysis done by a firm called SparkToro that attempted to discern the number of the percentage of fake

accounts on Twitter. And they came back with somewhere between 18 and 22 percent. However, they found, most interestingly, that of Musk's 90 million plus followers, approximately 72% are fake or bots. And by the way, who's been the biggest beneficiary in the world of the fake accounts and spam and bots that litter the septic pool that is, or the septic tank that is the feces of the sewer that is Twitter? Who's been the biggest beneficiary? You guessed it, Elon Musk. Why?

Because a lot of these bots are out there pounding away at anybody who questions Tesla and also pumping Tesla stocks. So the notion that he in any universe didn't realize that a large majority or a large percentage, whatever the hell I'm trying to say here, of Twitter's accounts weren't spam or bots is just so insane. His tweet might have well been the following. Hey, I think you're all fucking idiots and will believe anything I say. This is him. This is simply him saying to his lawyers, get me out of this for an exit wound that is as painless as possible. When I say painless, okay, I may have to pay that billion-dollar breakup fee. I would really not like to. But more than anything, I don't want a judgment against me for $45 billion,

which legally, legally, I'm on the hook for. And here's the problem with all of this. I said initially that when it comes to his side hustles, Elon Musk brings more volatility than value. This deal is not going to close. All it has done is create a tremendous volatility and distraction at Twitter. You're going to have people leave. You're going to have – essentially, he's become a human poison pill.

He's outed the company. He's only having a billion dollars in EBITDA, which would have been absolutely soaked up by all of the interest on this debt. And now there's all these sort of weird dynamics now. Morgan Stanley was raising the money, thought they were going to get $750 million in fees for raising this money. They want the deal to close. So he's sitting there trying to talk to his equity investors who have likely said to him, let me get this, boss. I can buy the stock at $38 right now, but I'm supposed to wait until it closes and pay 54 with you such that all the EBITDA can go away paying the interest on the debt

you're going to have to raise and hope that your free speech weirdness results in a stock worth 100 or 150 bucks in two to three years. No equity investors want to line up besides Elon other than total sycophants and stenographers who say, yeah, we like you.

We want to be involved in your next thing or SpaceX or we want to take SpaceX public, so we'll throw a few hundred million dollars at this or we're a VC fund that wants to cozy up to you, so we'll come in for couch change. This deal makes absolutely no sense for anyone. The equity investors, the debt holders are fine. The debtors who issue $15 billion on debt are fine because the company is worth at least $15 billion. And if he defaulted on the debt, they could sell Twitter for probably at least $15 billion. But it makes the least sense of all for Elon and his co-equity investors who are paying $54.50 or were supposed to pay $54.50 for a company that without this exogenous intervention, that is this acquisition offer. Where would the stock be trading? Well, let's look at it. The stock was trading at about 32 bucks before he started acquiring shares several months ago. Since then, the peer group for Twitter is down between 20 and 40 percent, meaning without this external event, the stock would probably be in the low 20s. And when this external event goes away, which the markets are already perceiving,

see above trading at $38 when the acquisition price is $54.50, the market is going to take this thing way down. Now that it looks as if this deal isn't going to close, a few interesting things are happening. Tesla stock is going back up because Tesla shareholders saw this as nothing but downside for them. What's also interesting is every time this deal looks less likely to close, what other stock goes up? Truth Social. Because once Elon Musk and once I get control of Twitter, Trump is going back on this platform.

Truth Social lost its A-Rod, its Barry Bonds. Anyways, this is going to be interesting. But to be clear, the notion that Elon Musk didn't know that greater than 5% of Twitter's accounts were spam or fake, which, by the way, he has been the massive beneficiary of and he has known this all along, is nothing but bullshit. And that's less than 140 characters. Okay. And other news. A recession appears to be looming. Let's not say appears.

A recession is looming over the U.S. economy. And the cohort that is about to get kicked in the gut repeatedly, most recessions are either blue-collar or white-collar recessions, meaning some recessions are especially difficult on sort of frontline workers and others are more difficult on our kind of information worker. This one is going to be the Patagonia Vest recession, specifically those who haven't experienced a bear market nor this volume of layoffs since the early 2000s, and that is information age workers. That is people working for unicorns, private companies worth over a billion dollars,

and also public growthy companies. Simply put, when interest rates go up, they really impact growth companies. Why is that? When you're making money, you don't care as much around interest rates. You make money off of higher interest rates because you can put that money, you earn cash on your profits. But what happens when you're losing money because you're funding growth? The cost to fund that growth gets much greater and your stock goes down or your valuation goes down because you're saying, I'm going to make billions of dollars in the future. Well, that billions of dollars in the future gets discounted back at a higher interest rate, meaning those cash flows that you're

expecting in the future are worth less and it's going to cost more to fund the capital required to get to those profits. So you are seeing while the NASDAQ and the S&P are down, it doesn't really explain the carnage and the growthy part because the biggest companies where the indices are weighted, specifically a Google or an Apple or a Microsoft that are profitable, their stocks are off. I think Apple's off 15%. They're off maybe a maximum of 25 or 30%. But when you're talking about the growthy stuff that still requires capital to keep growing, these guys have just been taken to the woodshed. And what's happening? Whereas the market

before was saying, yeah, no problem if you're losing money. As long as you're growing, you're worth X. Now that the market has decided you're worth 0.3X and this growth is no longer can be justified with this type of economics, you are going to need to cut costs dramatically. And you have in every boardroom right now a huge chart, huge org chart saying, okay, how do we cut 10, 20, 40% of our staff? And this is a generation that hasn't seen layoffs. This is a generation that is used to bringing their dog to work. And their biggest problem is, well, what snacks am I going to have today? That's probably a bit of an exaggeration.

But the employment market, the demand for information age workers has been so incredible. Work from home, work from home, that is about to become unemployed from home. The level of layoffs here is going to be extraordinary. And what will be even more extraordinary is how this generation that has never seen a bear market responds to it. Winter is coming. That was cheery. Stay with us. We'll be right back for our conversation with Oliver Ballou. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates

their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions.

What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Oliver Ballou, the author of Butler to the World, How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats, and Criminals. Oliver, where does this podcast find you? I'm currently in a holiday inn in London. How did that happen?

A holiday inn in London? Oliver, I'm sorry. How did that happen? I'm here for work and I needed somewhere central to stay. And sometimes a man's going to do what a man's going to do. And it is conveniently located, though it does feel a little bit pre-loved. So let's bust into it. Your latest book, Butler to the World, explores how Britain essentially became the epicenter for money laundering, kleptocrats, and other kind of dark sources of capital. Let's start there. Walk us through how the country ended up being kind of the ultimate washing or global washing machine. It's a really important

and almost infinitely expandable question. But the short answer is essentially Britain used to be the oligarch to the world, right? We were, we had the empire. We were the country that did what Putin is doing now. If we didn't like a country's foreign policy, we bombarded them until they changed their mind as a rule. And then we ceased being able to do that anymore. We couldn't afford it anymore. And so we're a little bit in the position of being like an aristocrat who's had to sell his big house

and his place in town and his yacht and all the lovely fripperies he had as an aristocrat. And the only asset he's got left is his knowledge of how to be an aristocrat. So instead of building an empire on our own account anymore, we essentially advised other people into how to do it. So we went from being the world's oligarch to the world's butler. And so if you are an oligarch or anyone really, and you've got a problem that needs solving, you might have some money you need to launder, you might have some journalists you might need to silence, you might have whatever. Britain can help you do that,

provided you're rich enough to afford the fees. So I'll give you sort of the outsider's view, and you tell me where I have this correct or incorrect. My sense is that Tony Blair said we need something to prop up the economy and created very strong private property laws saying that to an African warlord, somebody in the Gulf, or an oligarch, if you park your money over here, you can trust that in addition to having access to nice restaurants and a very nice city, no one can come take that money from you. It will give you safe haven from your past and how you made that money. And to be fair, when I go to London, I've been going to London between four and 10 times a year since I was eight. It feels like over the last 30 years, it's had a multi-trillion dollar facelift.

And I can't imagine that isn't one of the benefits or positives of this. Isn't this a function of private property laws that said, as long as you have money, it's safe here, or it can't be accessed here? Yeah. I mean, Tony Blair's government certainly is to blame for having prioritized welcoming money here, over checking the provenance of that money. But actually, the problem goes back even further than that. In a way, certainly where I trace the problem back to, it's sort of the 1950s is where this begins. Towards the end of the Second World War in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, the Allies came up with this very restrictive post-war financial system, which was designed to prioritize employment over speculation, designed to prioritize production over consumption, and so on.

And it was a very successful system. It created a very stable, prosperous world that created consistent economic growth all across the Western countries. But it was very annoying for the City of London, which had been the engine of the British Empire, had been used to moving money around the world at great profit to itself. And suddenly, it wasn't able to do that anymore. And you had a cohort of bankers in the City of London who kind of chafed at the restrictions which this new, very sort of democratic financial system placed them under. And so they looked for ways to

evade these restrictions. And what they came up with was very simple and kind of doesn't really make sense in retrospect because the world has changed so much since then. But they realized that if instead of banking with pounds in London, they banked with dollars, they were able to essentially simultaneously evade both British and American restrictions. So you had these very tight laws everywhere in the world, except suddenly after 1955, and particularly after 1956, except in London, where there was a loophole, where as long as you use dollars in London, there were no laws, you could do what you liked. And as a result, the, the, the U S banks open branches in the city of London, the European banks, the Japanese banks, because it was just so much more profitable to

move money around in London than it was anywhere else because there were no rules. Um, and you know, yes, a lot of that money was legitimate money being moved by multinational corporations, but let's be honest. A lot of it wasn't legitimate money. A lot of it belonged, I mean, could be to the Soviet Union, could be to criminals, could be to tax evaders, could be later as the sort of time moved on into the 60s and 70s, could be to the dictators of South America or Sub-Saharan Africa or so on. So essentially what the City of London did was, well was well i mean it created what they called offshore so it created a a legal space where there were no rules which essentially prioritized people who could afford the fees london charged over anyone else and that's essentially what's been happening

ever since the uk has been earning fees allowing anyone who can afford those fees to dodge the restrictions of anyone else. And that's what I mean about being a butler. So yet the problem has accelerated. As you said, in the last 30 years, the city, London as a whole, has had a massive facelift. But it begins back then. You can trace the origins of this amoral enabling culture back to the 1950s. But it picks up pace. And by the 1970s, you start getting money from the Gulf countries. By the 1980s, there's a lot of money from Europe.

By the 1990s, you start getting money from the former Soviet Union. By the new millennium, it's money from China. And now, essentially, it's money from everywhere. And the interesting thing about the last couple of months and the Ukraine crisis is the fact that suddenly there seems to have been this realization that perhaps just moving money for anyone, no questions asked, was a pretty stupid way to make a living. And suddenly there's this scramble in West London in particular to try and identify who owns what, was the money that bought it legitimate and so on. But it's going to take years to try and untangle the mess that we found ourselves in because so much money has come here from so many different places. Yeah, I think there's so many layers to this. So we're not, you know, we're sort of, it's hard for us to be judgmental because in Florida,

we have, I think, outside of London, the largest number of mansions purchased by Russian oligarchs. It feels as if everyone, to a certain degree, is in this business. I would argue that there's very strong moral arguments, but I would argue this is actually a great business. That being a safe haven for capital at a premium price is economically very advantageous. Where you get into trouble is when you begin realizing the second order effects of people you've never met and what it means for democracy, and that you might be funding a war effort or funding, you know, genocide light. And my sense is that the Ukraine conflict has brought, you know, bubbled all this up.

Where do you think are the biggest problems, the most immediate externalities that highlight just how wrong this is and how short-sighted these policies were? Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right that the U.S. has been in this game as well. My last book, Moneyland, I spent a bit of time in Florida, a bit of time elsewhere, California, New York, and so on, looking, tracking down some of these mansions that have been built. The key difference between the US and the UK is that the US has a very robust enforcement apparatus, the FBI and other agencies, that will actually investigate financial crime

and prosecute in a way that is vanishingly rare. Here, these agencies are incredibly under-resourced in the UK, and that has been a strategic choice by successive governments to essentially under-regulate the system to attract more money here for precisely the reason that you state. The calculation has been that this is essentially free money, right? You've got money flowing in here, fees are being earned for moving it around, it's easy work. And essentially, you can attract money into your economy, which can then be used to build roads and hospitals and schools and all the good things that we want. As you say, there is a moral point which has been insufficiently understood by politicians

that essentially it's not free money at all. Someone is paying for it just at the other end. If money is being sent here and being used to build schools and hospitals and roads in this country, often that money has been stolen from schools, roads, and hospitals in Nigeria or Angola or Venezuela or Russia or Ukraine or wherever. And that's one point. And the second point, which I think is as important in the long term for why this is a bad business model, is that you end up with a sort of crowding effect in the economy that it becomes so profitable to move money around, to serve the needs of the oligarchs, to be a butler in my term, whether that's a lawyer fighting their legal battles or a reputation manager fighting the press or an investment manager dealing with their money

or whatever, that you end up attracting many of the brightest and the best citizens of your country into the butlering profession. And you end up essentially with a brain drain away from other segments. You have ended up with this, and the soccer pyramid is a pretty nice metaphor for it, with essentially this incredibly wealthy clique of clubs at the top of the game and everyone else sort of scrabbling around for the various crumbs that might fall out of their windows. And that's, again, the sort of structure of the British economy, that this butlering industry benefits hugely a pretty small number of very well-connected people. It sounds like such an apt metaphor for big tech in the US, where it's remarkable, the wealth creation,

the prosperity, but it hasn't translated into progress for the country. It just hasn't really trickled down. So you brought up a favorite subject in the Galloway household. You brought up Premier League soccer or football. My sons, and we don't know what to make of this, we feel a bit awkward. We have Chelsea hats and we watch Chelsea FC. And the first thing we do when we go to London is we go to a Chelsea game. Can you, just as a means of explaining kind of a real world application, can you talk a little bit about Roman Abramovich, his ownership of a London asset, what happened and what likely happens and what it means and what we can draw from it? Yeah, I mean, he's a fascinating character. You know, the most well-known of the oligarchs, probably. I would say the smartest of the

oligarchs, always ahead of the game. He worked out the threat that Putin posed to the oligarch's business model, I think, before anyone else did. He was able to essentially sell his company back to the state in a way that no one else was really allowed to. And he managed to gain this huge reputation, not just in the UK, also in Israel and in Portugal to a certain extent, in order to gain a degree of protection outside of Russia, which who knows, maybe we'll serve him well in the long term. But yeah, I mean, his iconic purchase was Chelsea Football Club. And I can remember really clearly after he bought it, I was living in Moscow at the time, and I can remember watching a Chelsea game,

I forget who they were playing, on British television, just when I was sitting in the office in Moscow quite late. And I was watching a feed of a British TV channel, and they showed Abramovich in his box, you know, in the director's box in the stadium. And at the time, there was this huge political kind of speculation in Russia over who was going to succeed Putin when he stepped down as president, because under the constitution, he had to stop being president in 2008. Who was it going to be? Was it going to be Dmitry Medvedev, who was, you know, an old friend of Putin's, seen as quite sort of dovish? Was it going to be Sergei Ivanov, who was another former KGB man, seen as quite hawkish? Then there was this leading

opposition candidate, Mikhail Kasyanov, who had formerly been prime minister, who was another former KGB man seen as quite hawkish. Then there was this leading opposition candidate, Mikhail Kasyanov, who had formerly been prime minister, who was seen as quite pro-Western maybe. And they were the three people everyone talked about. And I remember the English TV feed just panned to show him sitting in the box, watching his club playing football. And with him in the box was Dmitry Medvedev, Sergei Ivanov, and Mikhail Kasyanov, all watching football together with the oligarch. And it was so amazingly sort of revelatory about the role that having an asset like that plays. If you're an oligarch, you can invite people to these amazing parties. You can say, enjoy the best seats in the house to watch a you know, a team playing in the best league in the world. It's an amazing thing. And it real sign of how, you know, deeply the disentanglement

between the oligarchs and London is having to go. You know, the fact that he's having to give up this prized, prized asset is extraordinary. I mean, obviously, it hasn't actually happened yet. So who knows exactly where that's going to go. But, you know, he was very embedded here until just three, four months ago. Sort of very hard to believe that he was ever going to have to do something. We'll be right back. What software do you use at work?

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Need to hire? You need Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. So is there a glass half full scenario here? Is Britain having a healthy immune response? And will this result in better laws, better governance? There have been some really noticeable responses to the Ukraine crisis. Before the crisis, back in January, a government minister resigned because of the government's failure to tackle economic crimes, take it seriously. Since then, there has been a long overdue law passed to impose transparency on offshore owned property. Oligarchs will now find it harder to use offshore companies to anonymously own their mansions in the UK, which is good. We also promised an economic crime, another one, a second economic crime act, which was supposed to come in the next year,

which will impose a degree of order on Britain's chaotic corporate registry company's house, which is used by money launderers, has been used in all of them, the biggest money laundering scandals in moving money out of Eastern Europe into the West, from Danske Bank downwards. They're really huge, like hundreds of billions of dollars worth of money laundering. So that's also good. But I haven't yet seen any sign of a political realization that the real problem isn't so much a legal one, but an enforcement one. You know, so even when good new laws are passed, and some of them have been quite imaginative, there was one passed back in 2018 called the Unexplained Wealth Orders, which was supposed to cut through the kind of legal obfuscation oligarchs are able to do to, to cut to the source of their wealth.

Even that collapsed under the weight of, of the legal assault put on it by oligarchs lawyers, because, uh, there wasn't enough money given to the law enforcement agencies to use it properly. Um, so, you know, we need to at least double the resources going to the big law enforcement agencies if not triple and there's been I've seen no sign of that yet so you know is the glass half full I wouldn't say so I'd say that the glass is maybe an eighth full you know having gone up from a 16th so you know that's that's not insignificant progress but there's a huge amount of work still to do are you comfortable making any predictions around what might happen over the next 12 or 24 months? Are we going to see, is this going to be a blip and it'll be back to business as unusual?

Do you think that there's going to be new laws? Do you think that politicians are going to find support in a movement around going after this type of capital? What do you think happens in the short and medium term here? I'd say this depends on two things. One of them slightly depends on the White House. You know, there is, you know, particularly post-Brexit in the UK, there is a huge amount of attention paid

to what the White House thinks and what Joe Biden thinks. And if, you know, he has made a very strong case for fighting kleptocracy, he's put some really good people on that case. And there's been some new laws with corporate transparency in the US. If that continues, then there'll be quite a lot of sort of trying to be Joe Biden's best friend, which will likely mean the UK will do some similar things. And a second important point is what happens to Boris Johnson, the prime minister. He, you know, and I kind of overstressed this, does not personally care about this topic. We saw this,

back in December, Joe Biden held a summit for democracy in the US. Boris Johnson went and promised some, you know, reforms. He then dropped that promise within weeks, despite the fact he'd made it to his closest ally nominally. So he clearly isn't particularly interested when the Parliamentary Intelligence Committee did a report into Russian interference in the UK back in 2020. He dismissed it. It was a pretty good report, actually. Some really important recommendations and very sober. He dismissed it as It was a pretty good report, actually. Some really important recommendations and very sober. He dismissed it as an attempt to delegitimize Brexit and refused to take it seriously at all, even though it had nothing to do with Brexit. He's not someone who personally

could care less about criminal finance. He just wants more money to fund his lifestyle. If he ceases to be prime minister, which is not an inconceivable possibility because he's in a bit of spot of trouble, then we might end up with a more serious person. And if we do have a more serious person, then we'll get a more serious response. So, you know, my sort of ideal scenario would be that, you know, that the White House continues to lead on the response to illicit finance around the world and put pressure not just on the UK, also on other European countries, but particularly on the UK. And also that we get a different prime minister who might be able to recognize that this issue is of greater

significance than his own political future, which we don't currently have. So final question, Oliver. A lot of young people listen to the podcast. You just, A, you seem like a really interesting guy, but what you do seems really interesting. How did you get to this point? How did you find this career and specifically this topic? Yeah, so I'm a Russianist. I've just always been very passionate about the former Soviet Union. I don't quite know why.

I think because I was growing up in the 1990s when it was all kicking off in Eastern Europe and that was just seemed to be where the cockpit of history at the time. Um, always been fascinated by history. I studied history at university and then, and then after university, I just moved to Russia because I wanted to be there while things right out of college, you moved to Russia. Yeah. Yeah.

Immediately. Just, just cause I wanted to know what was happening. Um, and I sort of fell into journalism because I needed a job. Uh, it wasn't really deliberate. And, um, and then you can't spend much time in Eastern Europe before you realize that corruption is a big problem. And you can't spend long looking at corruption before you realize that if you want to understand it, you need to recognize the role played by the Western financial system in laundering

the money, not just the role played by kleptocrats in stealing it. And I suppose, you know, it makes me quite angry, really. I know a lot of people whose lives have been kind of ruined by corruption in eastern europe and and i'd like that to stop and there's no point in in appealing to vladimir putin's better nature right i mean the guy's not going to change no matter how many articles i write about him um but i do feel that you know if i write about the enabling of corruption in Western countries, then it may have an influence on Western politicians, and it might help to change the situation here.

And if we make it harder to launder money, then it'll be less attractive for people to steal it. If less money gets stolen, then less of my friends have their lives ruined. And so that's good. So that's sort of the calculation, really. Oliver Ballou is the author of Butler to the World, How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats, and Criminals, and Moneyland, Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take it Back. His journalism appears regularly in The Guardian, The New York Times, and GQ. He joins us from a holiday inn in London.

Oliver, I appreciate your time. I'd invite you to a Chelsea game, but I think it'd be awkward for both of us. What club do you support now? Well, I'm from Wales, so when I support football, I support Hereford FC, but I'm from Wales,

and in Wales, we prefer rugby. So Cardiff rugby is more my thing. If ever you're in Wales, let's go to a Cardiff game. I'll hold you to that. That sounds like fun. Oliver, thanks for your time. This was great. Thank you. Algebra of happiness. So in my very cheery, optimistic review of the news or prediction, I talk about the layoffs that I believe are coming for our information age workers and that a lot of young people aren't going to be prepared for it.

And that is those of us who are my age have been through economic cycles, and we realize that a lot of our success and or failure is not entirely our fault. And what I would suggest is that you don't bring your full self to work. And that is you recognize that if you get laid off, yeah, it's a little bit about you, but it's more about the market. And that is market dynamics always trump individual performance. You can be outstanding at what you do. You can start a great company. And if you started at the wrong time, it's not going to succeed. You can start a bad company at a certain time, and it might be sort of successful. Actually, that's not true. A good economy can't save a bad company, but a bad economy can absolutely put a good company out of business. And we have, I think, incorrectly told people to bring their full selves to work.

I think a lot of CEOs who were trying to pose for the woke cameras or trying to become, seem more engaged, I don't know what the fuck they were doing, but I think it was a mistake to pretend that we wanted your political viewpoint or that you should think about work as your life such that you can work harder or such that we can encourage you to make this your life. Whatever it is, whatever the reason, it was wrong.

An organization is a great place to create economic security. It's a great place to make friends, to find mentors. I even think young people should find mates at work. A third of relationships begin at work. I'm not suggesting, and I want to be clear, I think once you get into a senior level position of power, you got to take that shit off campus because it can result in abuse of power. But we used to have L2 weddings all the time. We had profit weddings, my first company all the time. I think that's a wonderful thing. Anyways, I don't know how I went down that path. But don't bring your full self to work.

Or just keep in mind, if you get laid off, trust me on this one, as someone who's, I think I've been fired from most every job I've had at some point. Nothing's ever as good or as bad as it seems. You're gonna be fine. It's not an indictment on you. It's not an indictment on your politics. It's not an indictment on your core beliefs or who you are as a person.

It just meant that that organization at this time has fewer resources than they had yesterday and needs to make hard decisions. Your full self is your relationships with hard decisions. Your full self is your relationships with your family. Your full self is the relationship you have with yourself. Your full self is a relationship you have with your community, with your God. Your full self does not show up at work and nor should it. Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our associate producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download,

and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the PropG Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week on Monday and Thursday. And one quick reminder before we sign off, we answer your questions about business trends, big tech entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind on the pod every Monday. To submit a question, please visit officehours.propgmedia.com. Again, please visit officehours.propgmedia.com. Again, that's officehours.propgmedia.com.

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