Nicolai Tangen: Hi everyone, I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund and today we have a very special episode. We are recording in front of a live audience of nearly 200 people. These are my colleagues at the Sovereign Wealth Fund and we are joined by the very impressive Elliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, the world's leading open-source investigative collective. Now Elliot is not a spy, not a trained journalist. It's actually a college dropout who taught himself to investigate war crimes from his kitchen table in Leicester. He's unmasked Russian assassins, exposed chemical weapons used in Syria, helped identify Navalny's poisoner, and I've been really looking forward to this Elliot. Warm welcome.

Elliot Higgins: Thanks for having me on.

Nicolai Tangen: So, just to start, what is Bellingcat?

Elliot Higgins: So, um, Bellingcat does something called open source investigation. So, that's using publicly available material to investigate a range of different topics. And really over the last 15 years, what is publicly available material has just mushroomed to just a huge extent. It's stuff like social media posts, satellite imagery available through things like Google Maps or other services. All kinds of things like marine traffic data or airflight data that's also publicly available. So we take all that data and then we investigate different things and that's included chemical weapons attacks in Syria, the downing of Malaysian airlines flight MH17, more recently a lot to do with America's bombing of Iran, ICE and DHS raids in the US as well.

Nicolai Tangen: So how do you decide what to focus in on?

Elliot Higgins: Well, early on it's I mean the whole field of open source investigation was very much led by kind of obsessive nerds on the internet just doing what was interesting to them. And really the big events were initially the Arab Spring in Syria, then the shooting down of MH17, then Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And so really that's kind of was just a bunch of volunteers doing things that were interesting to them. Now we have teams who work on financial investigations what we call online ideologies which is quite varied. But it's like at the moment we're looking at of course what's happening in Iran but we're also looking at the DRC and Sudan and other places where there's ongoing conflicts. Sometimes an investigation is a really, you know, multimon month process. Sometimes it's reacting really quickly to events that are happening on the ground in different contexts.

Nicolai Tangen: Now you live here in Leicester. You got an organization in Holland, but you have a big network. Just how does it work?

Elliot Higgins: So um we have the central Bellingcat organization which has about 35 staff members mostly researchers and trainers. We then have a community of volunteers who we train and we can direct. That's about 200 people. There's also a Discord server where we have lots of people. It's kind of our community server that has about 43,000 people on it. And they what's great about that is they kind of really have the values of Bellingcat that it's really really about the research first before they form an opinion about something. And that's something that's quite quite rare in online spaces, but also they find stuff that we're not looking at and then that becomes kind of part of our process as well.

Nicolai Tangen: So what are the values? What would make me become one of your kind of what should we say reporters or helpers or investigators?

Elliot Higgins: It's you never prejudge a situation. Just because you feel something should be the truth doesn't mean it actually is the truth. So um I think that's very important over contentious issues as well where there tends to be two sides who just want to pick fights with each other on the internet. We're not interested in that. We want to look at the evidence first and draw our conclusions based off that evidence. But also it's about inclusion as well. It's saying it's not just about what we do at Bellingcat, but teaching other people these skills so they can do their own investigations and form their own communities. So, community building with those values is something that's really a core part of what we do at Bellingcat.

Nicolai Tangen: Now, we have just so much to learn from the methodology here. So, let's just start with the beginning. 2012, you're sitting at your kitchen table and you're looking at YouTube clips from the Syrian war. What did you see? Why are you looking at YouTube clips?

Elliot Higgins: This is the thing. I wish I could say I had this noble intention to become a great human rights or journalist or No, I was arguing with people on the internet and I wanted to win the arguments. And there were all these videos coming from places like Libya and Syria. And really in those kind of online communities, they were just being used as sticks to beat each over the head with. They weren't facteing them. They were just saying, "Oh, this proves that I'm right and you're wrong." But I just wanted to know what was going on in these places. So I realized you could use satellite imagery to figure out where stuff was filmed. And we call this geolocation. It's a core skill now. But at that point it was just me winning arguments on the internet.

Nicolai Tangen: But what did you see?

Elliot Higgins: So pictures in Syria. I I didn't speak any Arabic, so I was really looking at the content of the videos and a lot of it showed unexploded munitions. Um eventually the aftermath of chemical weapon attacks and I systematically tracked all the videos coming out of Syria because they they basically use YouTube as their main distribution platform. Um and those channels are usually run by like media centers or arms groups. So you could actually have a catalog of all these channels and check them every single day. And no one else had figured out you could do that. So every day I would just go through hundreds of videos from Syria looking for stuff that was new or unusual. Uh really focusing on IDing weapons in particular.

Nicolai Tangen: Then you started Bellingcat and then the Malaysian airline was shut down. Just how did that case develop?

Elliot Higgins: So um I was blogging um on a really awful looking blogspot website and I thought I need a more professional website and a better name. So I launched Bellingcat in July 2014 and 3 days later MH17 was shot down. So you had this kind of real mass movement on social media of people digging through stuff trying to figure things out and Bellingcat kind of became the kind of center point of a lot of that. So I was publishing articles and then slowly building up a small team of kind of volunteer researchers who every day were digging through every bit of information about MH17 and searching for stuff and that led us to finding all kinds of stuff that no one else anywhere had found like the origin of the missile launcher where it had launched from and other details like that.

Nicolai Tangen: Now the Russian Ministry of Defense weren't particularly pleased with you.

Elliot Higgins: Yeah. So, we've had kind of an escalating campaign against us coming from Russia. Really started in 2015 with places like Russia Today and Sputnik News writing critical articles of us. Um, that led to them trying to hack our emails, our website. Uh, most recently there's been six Bulgarians who were jailed because they were spying on one of my colleagues for 2 years and that was linked to the Russian FSB. So, there's really been an escalation over the years of how they've responded to our work.

Nicolai Tangen: Now we continued poisoning in the UK. What was that?

Elliot Higgins: Yeah. So um when the Skripal poisoning happened, we we couldn't really do much kind of in the initial moment, but when the identities of the poisoners was were released, they there was a Russian news site that got the flight manifest of the flight and their passport numbers were just a few digits apart, which is very suspicious. So, one of my former colleagues, Christo Grozev, he he's very good at using the kind of um what you call the kind of gray market of data in Russia. In Russia, basically all government data is for sale if you know the right people to speak to.

Elliot Higgins: So, we got their passport registration.

Nicolai Tangen: Is that only in Russia or is that everywhere?

Elliot Higgins: It's mainly in Russia in our experience. There might be other places, but Russia is particularly bad for that cuz you know that snake rots from the head. You know, it it's everyone's corrupt. So, we were buying things like the restoration forms of passports and discovering they had the Russian MOD's phone number stamped on these guys passport forms and using government databases of house registrations and car registrations to kind of unpick their identity. And eventually that allowed us to find the real identity of these suspects.

Nicolai Tangen: And so what happened?

Elliot Higgins: So um well part of it is we were the first people to show that these two guys who had just been on Russia today saying they were tourists visiting Salisbury Cathedral and you know talking about the 123 m spire as they were on TV we were getting with data showing that they were Russian spies and we were able to publish straight away and that had a huge impact. We had like nearly every UK newspaper had our work on their front page the following day. Um, and that really kind of led us then to the poisoning of Alexey Navalny as well because we discovered the network of chemical weapons scientists who are producing these chemical weapons where they worked and we're able to buy their phone records from people in Russia and see them phoning up FSB agents just before they're going to poison him. So, we could track the FSB agents as well because the phone records aren't just who you've called, it's every single cell phone tower you connect to, which can then be mapped out. you can actually follow people as they're moving around Europe and Russia, you know, minute by minute. And that's what we did with their data because Russia is so hideously corrupt in that way.

Nicolai Tangen: And then he called them up.

Elliot Higgins: Yeah, he called them up. So um we we had this filmmaker with us who was just filming interesting things we were doing and we thought, wouldn't it be fun to call these people up now? got their phone numbers [laughter] and we thought it would be like over in 10 minutes they'd all hang up or you know swear us or something and that happened for the first three or four calls but then and Navalny was the guy calling of them up so then we tried we spoofed the phone number of the FSB called one of the guys up and Navalny pretended to be kind of an officer setting the assassination attempt it's worth tracking down the video and watching the whole thing it's in the documentary entry we did, but the full video is an hour long. And he got the guy to give him a blowby-blow account of exactly how the poisoning had done. They basically got to his hotel room, you put poison on the seam of his underpants, and then when he put them on and went to the airport, it activated and started to nearly kill him. But he just gave us a blowby-blow description of then how he when they recovered Navalny and he was injured they got his clothes and then cleaned his kind of underpants really carefully to get rid of the poison they'd used in the assassination and we recorded the whole thing and then that became our documentary but we'd actually Putin on the Friday after we did that phone call had just given a big speech about you know I have nothing to do with this Navalny you know this is all untrue and then on the Monday we're able to reveal this hourong video of one of despise explaining exactly how he did the poisoning.

Nicolai Tangen: Do you check your underpants every day? [laughter]

Elliot Higgins: I mean, I would advise everyone does that every day.

Nicolai Tangen: I mean, joking. I mean, you're a you're a high value target.

Elliot Higgins: Well, I mean, it's it's something we have to take seriously. So, it's like at the moment I have West Midlands or East Midland's counterterrorism police pay me the occasional visit to let me know what's going on in their world, which is always a bit disconcerting. um you do have to be kind of a lot more security aware and aware of when something weird happens is you kind of think about is that just general weirdness or is that a weirdness that's particularly focused on on me. It's like we had one guy after a big event we did in the Netherlands a couple of the team were walking around and this guy was following them around taking photos of them. So they managed to snap a photo of him thinking this guy's dodgy, maybe a spy. And they they spent weeks trying to figure out who this guy was. He was just a fan. He was just too shy to come up and say hello. So he's just taking photos from a distance, which is Yeah. We we contacted him and said, "Hey, by the way, please probably best not to do that in the future."

Nicolai Tangen: Yeah. Well, the the the people taking photos today are fans, too. So um now, um we put I think we probably put in a jingle here because I changing topics. the difference between now and 2012 in terms of what's available online in terms of material. What what's the magnitude of change?

Elliot Higgins: Well, I I think one real change is the access we now have to satellite imagery. So, back in 2012, you were very reliant on things like Google Earth and stuff like that. You might get one or two good images of an area a year, depending on when Google decided to update it. Now, companies like Planet image the entire surface of the earth every single day. You can go and buy that data and see what is on the ground at 50 cm resolution or 3 m resolution day by day. The amount of data being posted on social media has mushroomed as well, although that comes with the issue that we've now lost a lot of access to it. It used to be that social media companies had very open APIs, so we could just pull lots of data and look for specific posts in a specific time or place. Now, lots of those gates have been closed as social media companies try to secure their data to train their own AI. That means as investigators we have to become a lot more clever and creative.

Nicolai Tangen: Supposedly Israel hacked into normal surveillance camera all over Iran right to check out where the the leaders were. Do you hack into systems like this?

Elliot Higgins: No. And we we try to avoid crimes whenever possible, but

Nicolai Tangen: [laughter] to try what does that mean? Try to avoid.

Elliot Higgins: Well, well, it's for example the um someone might offer us hacked data. If it's already leaked on the internet and it's available to everyone, we will use it. But we will never actually hack anything ourselves.

Nicolai Tangen: What's the weirdest source of data you've used ever?

Elliot Higgins: Um, this wasn't one of our investigations, but I always I think it definitely ticks the weird box. So, several years ago, there was a Instagram post that was being shared on social media. Had been copied and pasted, and it was supposedly from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's social media account, and it showed a pair of women's leg in the bath. It's like a saucy photo. Now, very quickly, the WikiFeet community, which is the foot fetish community who rates people's feet, immediately said, "That's not her feet. we know what her feet looks like. It's actually this person's feet and they found the original photograph of it." So, but you know, in all of this work, I mean, if you go back to um you know, the rendition flights that were happening in the early 2000s, it was plane spotters who found that network. So, people with really really specific interests and hobbies can actually be a really useful source of information that you just have to kind of know what kind of people out there and how to interact with them safely, I guess. So nerds nerds are good nerds and perverts. Yes, [laughter]

Nicolai Tangen: we have the old nerd, too. We love him. Yeah. [laughter] What's the most shocking piece of disinformation that you've seen ever?

Elliot Higgins: Oh god. I mean, it's so so constant. It's like there's an ongoing um campaign from Russia at the moment. It's called various things. One of them is the Russian doll campaign because what they've been doing is making fake videos of news sites, including myself. Um, and they made a 3D animated kind of PlayStation 2 erographics avatar of me to do some of the videos. Uh, another thing they did in that campaign. So, a typical video would be like, you know, the Armenian president is a drug addict. Not that anyone would even bother interacting with that post, but they just churned dozens of these out every single week. And they said emailed them to us directly so we engage with them, which we don't. But they included jigsaw pieces in some of these posts. So, it' be the fake news video and a jigsaw piece. And um they were all numbered. So, I started piecing them together over a period of weeks and weeks. And what it was, it was a jigsaw puzzle of my face on a pile of poo with um belling uh Elliot shittings as the logo. Sorry, my language, but they had included this in their disinformation as a kind of weird personalized message to me. But things I like doing jigsaws. So for me this is just fun. And then I had like something I could kind of post on social media as well. So I was like this is just keep doing it. They actually started a third jigsaw puzzle. There were two and they did a third one. And I think I had posted so much about the second one they did they actually got told to stop doing it which I was very disappointed about because it looked good.

Nicolai Tangen: What are we up against in terms of number of people? What what kind of the resources let's say in Russia to conduct those kind of campaigns? What are we looking at?

Elliot Higgins: Yeah, I mean it depends on the starting point and the scale of something. So um with the Alex Pretti and Renee Good shootings in Minnesota there straight away you had videos that were being shared and dissected on social media. So in that case what we were trying to do is get information out quickly that looked at certain key claims which we could say yes this is true or not. So, Alex Pretti was disarmed and then shot and that became a point of contention. But we released a a video that kind of synchronized multiple videos to show the moment he was disarmed and then shot in one complete sequence rather than the fragments that were out there. So, that's when you kind of have to respond quickly because there is a discourse and you know the government's going to lie about it too. But in other cases, it could be a lot more, you know, gather a huge amount of information, start looking at what patterns it's showing you. um try to verify as much of that information as possible. So, uh we were looking at kind of Israelis um air strikes in Lebanon very very recently and that was a huge data set we were looking at rather than kind of individual videos and focusing on just one particular instance. So, there's just it's a matter of scale and you know what question we're trying to answer.

Nicolai Tangen: You mentioned the importance of speed in the Minnesota case. Just why is speed so important? Why is it so important to get the truth out before false perceptions have kind of established themselves?

Elliot Higgins: Because generally once people feel they know the truth about a subject, they'll not change their mind about it. And in those moments when there's, you know, just a few hours where there's a really vigorous discourse online and you know that there's going to be a government that's going to come out with a version of events that's probably not going to match reality. Trying to get as much information into that discourse is important because people will take those kind of objects you create and then spread them across multiple websites where all this discourse is occurring. So you don't have to distribute it just as as like a single note. You kind of can rely on other people to pick that up and take it elsewhere. When it's something that's a kind of longer term kind of deeper investigation, you don't have that kind of engagement happening. So you have to really approach that in a different way both in how you investigate it but also then how you distribute that information. How do you reach the audiences who want to see it?

Nicolai Tangen: So how fast do you need to be now? Let's say there is a shooting which is bad. How how quickly do you need to be out there with a narrative?

Elliot Higgins: Well, I mean I I think you've got at best two or three hours in many cases if it's something like those shootings in Minnesota. Um something that took a little bit longer but was still kind of influenced the discourse was if we look at the Iranian school bombing where the girls were killed. Um we found a video of Tomahawk missiles striking close to that building but not on it. We got that information out there probably within about 48 hours of the air strikes happening and then Donald Trump was being asked about you know why is there video of Tomahawk missiles by journalists who had seen our work know we're reliable and then could actually ask that question knowing that you know that is a fact not just something they've kind of read on the internet and rumored. And then Donald Trump responded by saying, "Well, the Iranians have Tomahawk missiles as well." Which is completely ridiculous, but he was forced into that position because we could present verifiable evidence.

Nicolai Tangen: How much more are governments lying now compared to 10 years ago?

Elliot Higgins: I It depends on the government, I think. More

Nicolai Tangen: I didn't want to be I didn't want to be specific. Certain governments that are kind of to the west of this country, they are lying. The thing is it's kind of it's authoritarian capture ultimately because then it becomes about loyalty tests. It doesn't come about the truth. It becomes about how you demonstrate your loyalty to the the ingroup and then how you can define the out groupoup by uh their refusal to tow the line. So this is really what we're saying seeing in the US this authoritarian capture of various institutions the presidency uh the kind of bending of the knee of various organizations where the truth is no longer important. It's all about those loyalty tests. How do you think this will develop?

Elliot Higgins: So, a lot of my work at the moment looks at issues around disinformation and democratic theory and kind of where we've got how we've got to where we are at the moment.

I think the the the one thing that really worries me about that work and I've spent a long time doing this is that the way we've kind of set up our society and information system now has changed completely. We've gone from this information system that was top down elite controlled and also normalized because of that. We had institutions, the media who you know they kind of controlled the flow of information to the public to a large extent and the public were recipients of information and in that relationship the public had to trust those institutions to produce verifiable information that they could be deliberated on it procedurally through courts through parliaments and then people would be held to account for wrongdoing. And that was the public the kind of social contract we had with those institutions. That's now collapsed into a peer-to-peer manyto many information system where institutions are competing for attention with the public in systems that rewards engagement over the truth and those platforms like X for example that monetize their social media process rewards basically engagement more than anything. So what that leads to is a system where populist authoritarian and conspiratorial ideas perform really well because they don't need the procedural certainty behind it. You just say this is true and people nod their head because they're prepared to believe that in a way

Nicolai Tangen: and the whole clickbased behavior.

Elliot Higgins: Yeah. It's just all about you know what engages people rather than what's truthful. And we see this often around conflicts where there's a lot of um public engagement. You know, the situation in Gaza produced a lot of um fake information because people just wanted to get the clicks and monetize the engagement that they were get getting on platforms like X.

Nicolai Tangen: What are the bigger questions on on [clears throat] democracy? I mean you talk about verification, deliberation, accountability. Could you just explain briefly the concept?

Elliot Higgins: Yeah. So you can understand democracy as having three core functions when it works well. That's verification. How do we know what's true? deliberation, how do we decide to what we do on that? And then accountability is how we hold powerful the powerful to account. And when that functions, it restrains power. But what we tend to see more in our democracies is a kind of performative version of that where it's not really about holding the powerful to account or real verification. It's about getting elected. It's about building a coalition of voters who will be enough to get you in. But that then slides into a form of um simulated democracy which becomes disordered where verification is now about a prereddecided set of truths and if you go outside of that you become attacked by the ingroup. Deliberation um is also about really identifying who's loyal rather than identifying what to do on this information and accountability is always targeted outwards from the ingroup and you can look over to the US and see that happening very very clearly every single day. And so what can democracies do to counteract this? Well, unfortunately it's a big issue and it requires a lot of um involvement with lots of different sectors. It I I speak to um policy makers, government, people working in civil society about these issues and there's a recognition there's a huge problem. The problem we've got is really since 2016 has been defined as an issue of foreign interference of disinformation and that if somehow we can get rid of that issue that that false information society will fix itself and democracy will flourish again. Problem is that's complete nonsense. It treats disinformation and the problems it causes as a kind of supply side issue that if only we get rid of the supply then all these problems will fix itself. But really that's driven when people feel a sense of betrayal of distrust in those institutions and they look for alternative sources in these online spaces where engagement is rewarded over accuracy. So even though they might be trying to seek this truth, they're going into environments which are not designed for truth seeeking. They're designed for engagement. So people get drawn towards more conspiratorial ways of thinking. And again, authoritarianism, populism, and conspiracy theories perform extremely well. and slow procedural verification through institutions, the media, through Bellingcat doesn't perform as well in those environments.

Nicolai Tangen: Do you think any of this is important for us as a long-term investor?

Elliot Higgins: Well, I think when reality becomes contest, I mean, does anyone work on anything to do with Iran at the moment? And do you know what the hell's going on? Cuz daytoday the story of what's happening changes. So without that reliability without being able to rely on what could be truthful and what's not then it's very hard to make any real you know tactical strategic decisions about things and this is where open source investigation is so valuable. I mean we train people in all kinds of different sectors I mean we've trained investment firms journalists you know all kinds of people to do this kind of work but if you take if you take the Iran conflict as an example how much information flow is there now from each side I mean how do you think they compare? um information I mean

Nicolai Tangen: because we got so much information there's lots of information it's just very poor quality information that you can't trust so you then have to use other ways of fig out what's going on and this is why at Bellingcat when we've been looking at around there is a limit on satellite imagery and social media information that has been useful in the past but there are other ways to look at what's going on there how is AI changing all of this

Elliot Higgins: um I think AI gives people a permission structure to deny my reality. So if they see a picture they don't like or a video, they can just say, "Well, that's AI." And that's the kind of end of their engagement with that particular object. Um, it also allows people to kind of make cases for stuff that's not really true. It's kind of you see so often people will engage with an AI image. They know it's AI, but it supports something that they think is true. So it's this kind of truthiness of the imagery comes across rather than it being factual. Um, I mean, one example of that is there was a far-right

Nicolai Tangen: I think that's a bit surprising. Do you think it will happen when you get more kind of agents in place?

Elliot Higgins: It it might do. I mean, I use AI a lot for various experiments and stuff like that. So, you know, just recently I I've for years wanted to scrape um all the Syria documents off the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons website because that's my thing I'm into. That's a nerd thing. Don't worry about it. But it I just basically went to Claude and said, "How should I do this?" And it wrote me a Python script and within 10 minutes it had done a job that I'd been putting off for eight years. So that can be really really useful for just kind of experimenting and poking around. We've t

Nicolai Tangen: and geolocation is a game you play with your son

Nicolai Tangen: I gather

Elliot Higgins: yeah so tell me about the game I mean how do you play a geolocation game Well, I'll just like find some photo and you know, he'll kind of try and find it on you. You know, nothing like a war crime, but you know, it's just um it's a fun thing to do. We're actually saying that there's like a game that's based off geolocation that's being released soon and we'll probably do a live stream of that for our fundraising. So, it's kind of weirdly like there's um this guy called Rainbolt who does this thing called GeoGuessr. So, GeoGuessr, it gives you an image and then you click on a map of where you

Nicolai Tangen: Cool. Now, you've been spending a lot of your life trying to find the truth, right? Which is in a way what you do.

Nicolai Tangen: What's uh what's driving you here?

Elliot Higgins: Well, I mean it was as I said when I started it was arguing with people on the internet to be honest, but um over the years it became really clear how important this information was in a lot of different contexts that you know this like with MH17 immediately the Russian government were lying and producing fake evidence. But we could say that was fake evidence because we could do open source investigation to examine it and verify if it was true or not. It turned out it wasn't true. With Syria and chemical weapons use, which I spent a lot of time on, there's a huge amount of disinformation and propaganda about that coming from online communities and the Russian government. Um, and again, it's there's always going to be things that are contested, but usually when there's that contestation happening, it's just two people or two communities arguing with each other about what they think should be correct rather than doing analysis. So we're trying to build communities around those values and ideas that you do the investigation, you verify information, and then you have your opinion. You don't have your opinion and then fit the investigation around that is often kind of what happens around that discourse.

Nicolai Tangen: What are the personal costs to you as a person?

Nicolai Tangen: Well, I mean, not monitor it, but just as a

Elliot Higgins: Well, I mean, there is the security aspect of it because um like there's certain places I won't travel to at the moment. Obviously Russia's off the table for ever, but like I can't travel to the US at the moment because um there's this conspiracy theory called the censorship industrial complex which presents the idea that the Biden administration and academics and journalists basically colluded to you know do various things and um Bellingcat kind of got tied up in that just we' kind of got had nothing to do with it but people don't like Bellingcat in certain communities so we got kind of named with everyone And there's people in the state department who've been looking up communications between myself, Bellingcat, and the State Department to prove their case, but they don't exist. So that just makes them think there's a big cover up around this stuff now. Um, Elon Musk.

Nicolai Tangen: So basically, you have to Sorry, Elon Musk.

Elliot Higgins: Yeah. So Elon Musk called us a psyop. So um, we know this. Yeah. The US administration is definitely knows who we are and we've been very critical of them. uh published embarrassing investigations and I don't want to take the risk of, you know, turning up at an airport in America and then being off to a nice detention center for some reason.

Nicolai Tangen: So, you basically have to stay in Leicester.

Elliot Higgins: Yeah. Well, I can throw a bit outside of it if I'm lucky, but [laughter] yeah.

Nicolai Tangen: How do you fund uh how does Bellingcat fund itself?

Elliot Higgins: Yeah. So um when I started I crowdfunded using Kickstarter but then as we've grown um there's been foundational funders like the open society foundations um family foundations we raise about 30% of our income from workshops we have small donations but um one of the things that's happened recently that's been a real shock to the whole kind of sector has been um the US aid funding cuts about 25 to 40% of the global funding for the kind of you investigative journalism NGOs's was lost overnight because of those US aid funding cuts. So even though Bellingcat didn't take any of US aid funding money, it the whole funding environment is a nightmare now. So you have to kind of really rely now on kind of small donors, high net worth individuals um cuz the foundations are now under a huge amount of pressure to basically save a lot of organizations that are going under and especially in the global south where a lot of that funding had was coming from us a lot of these small media NGOs's who doing really high quality investigative journalism just shut down overnight because of it.

Nicolai Tangen: So when you look at the world are you an optimist or pessimist?

Elliot Higgins: Um I I would say I'm a cynical optimist is the best way to think of it. I the thing is in my work I've seen what you can do this um you know getting not just what we do at Bellingcat but showing other people these skills be they um you know journalists in lots of organizations we've trained I mean we we've probably trained several thousand journalists and activists in open source investigation but also the online communities that have seen our work and learn how to do open source investigation just by the way we kind of include all the details in our articles do case studies and then they find stuff themselves that is really really impactful and does actually make a difference. That's something that gives me hope. The difficult part is doing that at scale. How do we get as many people involved for that as possible, especially now we live in this environment where, you know, the attention is really the name of the game, not the truth. And that's really kind of poisoned the information environment for a lot of people.

Nicolai Tangen: And is that a temporary thing? Are we just temporarily in a bad spot when it comes to lies and truth and democracies? or is this just a step on, you know, is this just going to continue and get worse?

Elliot Higgins: I think the situation we're in now at the moment fuels those kind of worst aspects and is the default state unless we actually take real action against it. It's been interesting to look at um Keir Starmer's recent kind of the reporting on what he's been saying about online safety, you know, 16 year olds being banned from social media. I think there needs to be more around education in terms of building critical thinking skills in young people. So a lot of our work at the moment is working with things like Cambridge University Press and Assessment, the National Institute of Teaching about developing those critical thinking skills and teacher training material. And for students, we work with universities to build investigative hubs and open source training materials so students can do their own investigations and build their own communities around that. So you have to proactively build this stuff. A lot of people, you know, look back at the kind of interwar period where, you know, there's the rise of fascism and they think that democracy just kind of fixed itself and figured it out and, you know, Nazi Germany was an outlier. But that took real action to build democratic systems to actually make people feel they could trust those institutions again after World War I. And nowadays, it's just kind of like, well, you know, people figure it out for themselves because democracy is the default. And that's really not the case.

Nicolai Tangen: So last question, Elliot, if you what would be your advice to young people who would want to try to make this a better place?

Elliot Higgins: Well, that's a that's a very big question. Um I think they need to really consider what they, you know, when they share information, when they look at something and they think maybe I should do that, they need to think about what impact that does have. It's it's like um I was talking my daughter's 14 and a lot of her friends use a lot of social media. We really trying not to let her use that much social media, but they'll mimic trends they're seeing and some of those trends are really about making stuff up because it'll get engagement and it's kind of actually talking to people about what impact that actually has and that has a big impact on society. If everyone's just telling lies for engagement and that's you know just the basics we need to start with.

Nicolai Tangen: Yeah. Very big very big thank you to you. Thanks for everything you're doing

Elliot Higgins: and thank you [applause and music]