← How I Write
Loading summary
Transcript106 lines
- [00:00]
A
Bill Browder's written two books, Freezing Order, and also a book called Red Notice, which was everywhere when it came out in 2015, and it is a page turner. So I had to ask him, how did you think about building character? How did you think about bringing people into the story, keeping people engaged? But also, before we get into the interview, I want to give you a sense of the background. Like, what is this story all about? And it begins in the mid-90s, where Bill, he's an investor. He's working at Salomon Brothers, and he says, I'm going to go invest in Russia. So ends up leaving Salman Brothers. He raises his own fund, $25 million fund, and all of a sudden, it just explodes. Next thing you know, he's made 800% on his money, and now it's 2005. He's making his 261st trip from London to Moscow, and he lands in Moscow, and now he's detained at the airport, spends the night there, has no idea what's going to happen to him. He's terrified. And the next day, he ends up being thrown on a plane back to London. And he says, well, what the heck was that? Why did that happen? So he launches an investigation. He finds an auditor, a lawyer named Sergey Majinsky, and he says, hey, can you look into this, help me figure out what happened? Next thing you know, Sergey, he himself is captured by the Russians, but his fate ends up much worse, and he ends up being killed. And so Bill, he leaves the investing world and he devotes his life to getting justice for sure Day. And. And that is what this story is about. That's the context that you need to know for the conversation we're about to have. All right, let's get into it. You wouldn't believe it, but how I write costs a fortune to run, and it's thanks to Mercury, but I can even do it. They're the sponsor of this episode, and a banking platform that I've been using for the past four years to run my own business. When I started How I Write, I expected finances to be an absolute nightmare. I got team members in four different countries. I had things to think about, like currency exchange and taxes and expenses, and I was just dreading it. But honestly, banking has maybe been the easiest part. I can't remember running into a single problem, and it's because I've been using Mercury. I switched over from other, more traditional banks because Mercury is so well designed. It's easy to get started, it's easy to use, while also feeling Totally legit and secure. And Mercury gives me all the tools to run a global company like virtual cards, unlimited users, and the ability to customize each user's access level to exactly what they should see. And you know what? If anything goes wrong, if I have any sort of challenge, I can always talk to their support team, which is super responsive and actually helpful, which is pretty rare these days. And all that is why I can't imagine banking any other way. Merkur is a fintech company, not an FDIC Insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Column and a members fdic. All right, back to the episode. Well, talk to me about beginnings. After you wrote Red Notice, you said, I wanted to write the kind of thing that if you read the first 10 pages, you just wouldn't be able to put the book down. So how did you go about doing that?
- [03:02]
B
Well, the first thing I would say is that I'm not the best reader in the world. And so I get. People give me books, I buy books. I have a big stack of books next to my bed, and there's a huge stack of unread books because I've read the first 10 pages, got bored, and put it down. And I said to myself, if I'm going to spend two or three years writing this book, I absolutely don't want to spend all that time and have somebody read the first 10 pages and stick my book into their pile. And. And so it was just absolutely crucial to me that when you started reading the book and you never wanted to put it down. And so at every. And my psychology has been. And it's not just the first 10 pages, it's every page. I always said to myself, why should anyone give a shit about what I'm saying in the next sentence? Why should anyone care? Why should they want to read that sentence? And. And if. And I'm not. So I suspect just based on all the books that I put down, that there's a lot of writers out there that write to write. And so I was writing for the reader because I didn't want the reader to, like, lose interest, to be bored, to not care, and to put the book down. And so the process. And it's not the first 10 pages, it's the first, every page of the book is just to say, why does anyone want to read to the next page? What's going to make them want to turn the page and carry on? And it was an obsession of mine, and it continues to be an obsession of mine. All my writing, I just don't want people to put my book down.
- [04:43]
A
Yeah, well, like at the beginning of Red Notice, it's really a function of two things. First of all is obviously the quality of the writing itself, but then also just the story of being detained at an airport.
- [04:55]
B
Well, in fact, it's always the story. I mean, the writing is just sort of a technical thing. This is the story. It's always the story. Being detained in an airport, getting arrested in a Russian airport is a pretty dramatic thing. And of course that's going to be dramatic. In my second book, Freezing Order, there's a whole chapter about a deposition at a law firm in New York, which is a really boring thing. And I spent a month reading through all the transcripts of the deposition and all the other things going on to try to try to piece together a narrative of why that should be exciting. And I think most people who read it thought that was a pretty exciting chapter. And so anything can be exciting. And again, it's not about the writing. It's about the storytelling. It's about where's the drama, where's the tension, what's the uncertainty of whatever it is you're talking about? So how'd you make it exciting? Well, I made it exciting because in that particular story, there was a lawyer who used to be my lawyer and then switched sides to work for the Russian government, the Russian mafia. And then he was trying to use the deposition to get personal information about me that the Russian mafia could use to kill me. So that becomes exciting. But a deposition by itself or a discovery request could be the most boring thing in the world. But I was able to look at the whole thing and remember and find and weed out, you know, the things that would make a reader interested.
- [06:23]
A
Well, it seems like what you're implicitly saying there is. You need to find the core thread, the core thing. Right. Like you look at a deposition, you're like, oh, my goodness, there's so many transcripts, so many things I could talk about. No, this is about a lawyer on this side who goes to that side. There's the core thing. And then I would say maybe everything orbits around that or something like that.
- [06:41]
B
Well, it's. It's. It's about the. What a person reader can relate with. They can relate with betrayal. A lawyer betrayed me. They can relate with the Russian mafia. They can relate with feeling scared. And so it's finding things that, you know, where there's the empathy and the engagement of the reader that makes it. Which I think makes my writing readable.
- [07:06]
A
How do you think about the pacing of stores.
- [07:09]
B
Well, that's another thing. It has to. First of all, end of every chapter has to leave you with some uncertainties. You want to know what happens after that. It's kind of like watching a miniseries, same type of thing. And so at the end of every chapter, there's some challenge or there's some uncertainty that you then want to pick up through the next chapter and see how it resolves itself. And during the chapter you also have to create some challenge that you then overcome or you partially overcome or something like that. Because again, it's, you know, why should anyone care? Why should anyone have any interest in whatever I'm writing about? Everyone's interested in their own lives, not in somebody else's life. So what can you say about your own life, your own story that will make them interested?
- [07:50]
A
Yeah, actually, now that I'm thinking about it, when I think about reading Red Notice, I can see, I would guess that you write chapter by chapter because the chapters are these sort of contained units.
- [08:04]
B
Absolutely. So the way I write a book is I write a mini book first, which is just what are the individual stories. And it's not just like a 10 bullet point outline. I write a mini chapter for each chapter. And so let's say if the book is 140,000 words, the pre book is 50,000 words, it's like a third of the book and it lays it all out. So I already know the drama, I already know the, you know, the challenges and the resolutions all the way through. And then I have to fill it in and bring the color and the life and the characters into each of those stories.
- [08:44]
A
Okay, so let's go specific. So let's talk about that chapter in Red notice Tuesdays with Maury, right? Where you meet your wife and you're like, I don't know, does she like me? Does she not? She's sort of there as you're giving the speech. And then Tuesdays with Maury was just actually three words from that chapter. Obviously you give her the book, but it was just one very small part. So is that something that develops and is like an emergent property or is that. Nope, this is going to be the Tuesdays with Maury chapter. Talk to me about that.
- [09:13]
B
Well, this was going to be the chapter about how I wooed my beautiful, intelligent, amazing, who's now my wife to be with me, who had a million other options and didn't necessarily. I wasn't distinguishing myself and I needed to find a way to distinguish myself. That's what the chapter was about. And it just so happened that I was able to distinguish myself through a series of challenges, challenging situations in the courtship by giving her a copy of Tuesdays with Maury. And that's what warmed her heart after a few false starts and various other problems along the way in this courtship.
- [09:58]
A
Right, so then that's hindsight. So now you're writing your third book. So talk to me about where you're at now and giving a sense, sort of looking forward. This is what I have. This is what I don't have. This is the roadmap for where I think I'm going to go.
- [10:10]
B
So my third book is going to be about a friend of mine who helped me in all the amazing stories in the first and second book, a guy named Vladimir Karamurza who helped me get something called the Magnitsky act passed, which is named after my murdered Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, which is the justice that we got for Sergey. So he helped me get this Magnitsky act passed. Putin hated him for doing that, tried to kill him twice. But the main focus of the third book is about him being arrested in Russia, put in jail, and sentenced to 25 years in a penal colony in Siberia. And it's about the challenge of how did I get him out of jail, because he eventually gets released. And so we know that the drama is all about all the different things to try to get him out of jail. And it's a great story, and anybody who reads it will be fascinated and thrilled and scared and all that other stuff. But the challenge I have is that I've already written two books before. And so if you just jump right into this story about this friend of mine, you're not going to be invested in him, you're not going to be invested in me. And so how do you get invested in everybody to understand the stakes without repeating two books, the stories of two books before? And so I've got to tell other stories in order to feed into this unbelievable, difficult situation that we then end up resolving the stakes.
- [11:45]
A
The stakes. The stakes. So how do you go about building the stakes, thinking through the stakes?
- [11:49]
B
Well, everybody has to get to know you, and they have to get to know you and care about you.
- [11:54]
A
This is you as the writer.
- [11:55]
B
Well, me as the character, and Vladimir and various other people involved. And so as they. As their lives weave together and weave apart and so on, you have to then get to know each of them, become invested in them. So when the things that are really unfortunate happen, you've got to be rooting for the people who have had the.
- [12:14]
A
Unfortunate things happen, what are the advantages and disadvantages of writing in the first person?
- [12:22]
B
Well, I don't think there's any disadvantage. I mean, the advantage is that I don't have to do as much research. I mean, there's a lot of research I've got to do, but, you know, it's all in here. I mean, the disadvantage is that I'm now a 61 year old man. I don't remember every single thing that happened. A lot of, a lot of stuff has happened in my life. And so I often have to go to the other characters who I was interacting with and spend time with them to try to reconstruct all the events and scenes and situations and conversations. Because sometimes they are all the time, they'll remember something differently than I will, or, I mean, not just differently, but things that I didn't remember. And we have to put it all together and then try to create a narrative. I'll say, you remember that day when we were in the Parliament in the Hague and we were trying to do this and what were you trying to do? And why did that weave it all? I pull on the threads and take rigorous notes and then kind of pluck out the interesting things that would be interesting to somebody outside. And, and also how does it all tie together with the rest of the story? And so that's, and that's always very, it's actually very satisfying to do that. The only people I can't do that with are the bad guys because they're always, you know, they're the good guys and the bad guys in the story. And so, like, as I was talking about before, there was this traitorous lawyer who switched sides and I couldn't go and talk to him because he's switched sides. He became an enemy. And if I said anything that was wrong, he would sue me because he's a lawyer. And so I had to rely entirely on the transcripts, the court transcripts. But the court transcripts told everything. There was so much stuff from depositions and court transcripts. I could get all of his quotes and speeches and then distill the things that were interesting from all those documents.
- [14:18]
A
So you've mentioned court transcripts a few times, which then implies you spend a decent amount of time doing research as you're writing these books, huh?
- [14:26]
B
Yeah, there's no question. I mean, everything is research. I mean, the outline is in the head, but all the details are in the research and the recollection and the recreation and all that kind of Stuff, and it's gotten easier with AI because some of the stuff that I would have to really go deep into Internet research and stuff like that gets a lot faster now. But. But I have to do a lot of research, and. And. And I have to do a lot of original research in the sense that, you know, no one's ever written about some of this stuff before because I'm first person writing about it.
- [14:58]
A
And then you talked about research, and I've talked about recollection because a lot of this stuff is intense stuff. Do you feel like, yeah, talk to me about recollection.
- [15:07]
B
Well, recollection is interesting because again, I'm 61 years old. I've had a lot of experiences in my life, a lot of intense experiences. And so I remember stuff, and then sometimes it comes back to me when I'm going over stuff. And it's often the things that come back to me which really make the story come alive. And so I have to go over situations a bunch of times for it to all come back. And when you read the books, it's just. It's really very visual and intense. But that doesn't come, like, from just, you know, it's a torturous process to write these books. I mean, it's something that, you know, people say, wow, isn't it satisfying? Isn't it a catharsis? No, it's just pure torture. Every day that I'm writing is pure torture.
- [16:04]
A
Is that like a it sucks torture, or is it like, it's meaningful, let's go for it torture?
- [16:10]
B
Well, there's a process. It sucks at the beginning because when you're staring at a blank sheet of page, a sheet of paper, you've got nothing. It sucks. And then eventually when it starts to form its own body, then it starts getting pretty cool. And then when you have something that you like, then it's really satisfying. It's satisfying when there's something where I could go back and read it and it's entertaining and I know it's good, and then I feel. Then it's great.
- [16:35]
A
And then in that process of recollection, do the ideas come to you? Like, you're just sort of. You're just sort of sitting there. You're, like, pecking at the keyboard. It's like, I'm gonna write a lot, and then I'm gonna kind of distill and distill? Or is it a little bit more of like a. I don't know. I went for a walk and wow. I just remember that thing.
- [16:50]
B
It's Everything. I mean, it's. I mean, the best, the best places I've ever come up with ideas are on the shower by far. I would say, like, you know, 40% of the inspiration of every, every, every book comes from standing under a stream of hot water.
- [17:07]
A
Yeah. So we can increase the writer output with more showers.
- [17:11]
B
Well, a good hot shower when you're stuck with something and then all of a sudden it comes to you when you're not trying to think about it. And they're like, all of a sudden, there it is. Yeah. And of course, I have my phone with me just generally and taking notes whenever something comes to my mind. And it always happens. Not when you're trying to make it happen. It just happens throughout life, which is one of the benefits of taking three years to write a book, because stuff comes at different times that builds up the story and makes it good.
- [17:39]
A
And now do you write the books in a pretty linear fashion?
- [17:42]
B
Yeah. So I started out with what I think is just the outline of the story. Then I do these mini books where I fill it in, and then I do these full on books after the mini book, filling in each chapter. So it's a very, very organized, linear, outlined process.
- [18:03]
A
Okay. So we're talking about how do you get your writing done and if you're thinking about work and how you can be more productive there. Well, I recommend a tool called Basecamp. Basecamp is a project management tool. And it's different from the other ones, which are loud and noisy and cluttered. They're feature bloat. Basecamp says, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to keep things simple so that you can focus on what actually matters, which is just getting the work done, you know? Now, for us, Basecamp is a place where we can track what we're doing with how I write, when episodes are being recorded, where we're recording them, the publishing day, all those sorts of things in one place for our entire team to look at. And I had the founder of Basecamp, Jason Fried. He came on the show and I noticed that he really cares about writing. He cares about manifestos, he cares about great copy, he cares about telling a great story. And him and his co founder, they've written five books. And I can tell you that they bring the same care and attention to detail to their books as they do their software. So if you're thinking about work and you're asking, hey, how can I be more productive? How can I make my team more cohesive? Well, then I recommend Basecamp. All right, back to the episode, what are you trying to achieve with writing your books? Obviously, there's a sense of justice, there's a real sense of mission, but why books? And how does that fit, fit into the ensemble project of what it is that you're trying to do?
- [19:24]
B
So I'm not an author. I wasn't. I didn't go to the Iowa writers thing or whatever, Vermont, you know, I. I was a hedge fund manager. Yeah. And I had some really terrible stuff happen to me. What happened to people around me, happened to me. Happened. You know, my lawyer, Sergey Magnitsky, was murdered, tortured and murdered. And because he was my lawyer. And I felt so compelled to do something about that that I gave up my life as a businessman and I started becoming a full time justice campaigner. And what I discovered is that I would go as a justice campaigner, I would go and meet with politicians and government officials and law enforcement people and I would tell them the story of what had happened and then try to get them to support me in parliaments or wherever. And it became really tedious. And more than. And being tedious, it also maximum I could get half an hour with somebody. I mean, nobody has that much time. And I mean, it's really interesting. So I thought, I really should get a movie. I should do a movie about this. And I went to Hollywood to meet people and they said, this will be a hundred times easier to get a movie made if you have a book. And I said, okay, I'm going to write a book so I can get a movie made. And so I started working on this book and my expectation was that it would just be the intellectual property for a movie and that nobody would read the book and that 10 million people would watch the movie. And that's how I achieve this general knowledge of my situation. And then I wouldn't have to go brief everybody in the world and I would have created groundswell of support. Well, as it turned out, I wrote my first book, Red Notice, and it turned into a major international bestseller. I mean, I can walk down the street in different places. People recognize me. It was everywhere. And what's interesting is that to this day, I mean, the Red Notice was published in 2015. So we're now in 2026 or 11 years later. And Hollywood is like absolutely petrified. They don't want to go anywhere near this story.
- [21:34]
A
Is that because of the content?
- [21:35]
B
Yeah. They don't want to touch, you know, going after, you know, they don't want to. Nobody wants to be on Putin's shit list, right? But it doesn't matter with my objective because everybody's read the book. So, you know, one of the objectives of getting everyone to read or hear know the story was to get the Magnitsky act passed, which is a law which freezes the assets and bans the travel of human rights violators and the people who killed Sergey. And I got the Magnitsky act passed in 2012. And that's one of the main sort of culminations of Red Notice is the justice that we get from that. What's interesting is that when I wrote the book and I wrote about getting the Magnitsky act passed, and it's all very dramatic and great and everyone feels good about it, and I had a senator from Australia read Red Notice. It was so inspired by reading Red Notice during COVID she got in touch with me cold and said, I want to do a Magnitsky act in Australia. And as a result of her inspiration from Red Notice through Covid, I never even visited Australia. I did a bunch of zooms with different members of their parliament and different officials and so on and so forth. We got a Magnitsky act passed because she read the book. And so it actually very strongly supported what I was trying to do.
- [23:01]
A
And then what do you get from the articles that you don't get from the books? And what do you get from the books that you don't get from the articles?
- [23:10]
B
You write an article for the Financial Times, and I don't know what their circulation is, but I don't know, let's say a million people, what's the probability that somebody actually read the article? Low. And if they read it, what's the probability they read it all the way through? Low. And what's the probability that they remember it afterwards because they read a lot of articles. Even lower. With a book, if you write a good book, a book that people will care about what happens in the next page and read it to the end, you've got 12 hours with that person, and you've got 12 hours to, you know, flesh out human emotion. You know, you feel something when you read my books and you remember it afterwards. And many people remember all sorts of stories and come up to me and talk to me about the stories that they read. And so it's a completely different thing. I mean, it's. And it's kind of risky because, like, let's say that you're listening to this podcast and you're a campaigner that's had something terrible happen to you, and you say, I listen to Bill Browder. I'm going to go and I'm going to go and write a book. You know, the chances are, as a chance at work with mine that, like, you write a book and, like, nobody reads it. I mean, most books, nobody ever reads. And so it's a really risky proposition to spend three years, you know, whatever, four hours a day for five days a week for three years, and then not doing other stuff, and then finding out that, like 1,000 people read your book or 500 people read your book, and it doesn't make any difference at all.
- [24:39]
A
So what happens to most writers?
- [24:41]
B
Yeah. And so. And if you're a campaigner, if you have something terrible, you know, that that's probably too risky a proposition to, you know, when you could be doing other stuff.
- [24:50]
A
How do you balance the desire for truth with the desire for safety for the people that you love?
- [24:59]
B
Well, this is an interesting point. Everybody told me throughout my campaign, and it wasn't just with the book, but with everything. Bill, just keep your head down. Just this terrible thing happened. It's terrible. Maybe you can set up a scholarship fund for Sergei Magnitsky's son and his widow or whatever, but just go to ground. And if I had done that, if I had just disappeared, they would have killed me, and nobody would have known why they killed me, and nothing. And they would have gotten away with it.
- [25:37]
A
And the Russians.
- [25:38]
B
The Russians. But by going public and by being everywhere, it's counterintuitive, but it actually, you know, if anything ever happened to me, and particularly because the book was well read, everyone would know who did it, why they did it, what, who, you know. Exactly. And so it became. Doesn't mean that they don't want to do anything to me. But what it means is that the cost of assassination and the. And the prospect of assassinating me without any repercussions, cost is up, and the prospect of no repercussions is pretty low.
- [26:10]
A
As you think of the components of a good book, like there's layers to the cake or different instruments that create a symphony. What are those different instruments that you need? The ensemble of those to write a great book?
- [26:21]
B
Well, you need characters that everybody can relate with. People first. You need pick characters. But what's also interesting is I have this thing where sometimes places are characters, where the place takes on its own sort of feeling. And the other thing you want to do is you want to make sure that everybody wants to be familiar with stuff, and so you want to share with people places, people, situations that they're familiar with. And So I had so many people write to me about my book. You say, I grew up in Chicago and I was a investment banker. We have so much in common. Everyone wants to relate with the character and different people, different situations. And so the more touch points that you can have where people. Where there's something relatable and understandable and part of their, part of their.
- [27:24]
A
Now is that touch point. Like, okay, we're in London. Oh, the London Eye, the Golden Gate Bridge. Is it like landmarks or something?
- [27:29]
B
Yeah, well, it's usually not the London Eye or the Golden Gate Bridge, but it would be like, you know, the Villa d' Este Hotel in. In Lake Como. Something specific, classic, you know, something where like.
- [27:40]
A
You know what? That's exactly what happened to me. I was reading Red Notice, I was like, I know that place. The big swimming pool.
- [27:44]
B
Yeah, of course.
- [27:45]
A
Crazy gardens.
- [27:46]
B
And maybe like, I can imagine you.
- [27:48]
A
You know, taking the phone call as the markets are taking. Like, actually, that's exactly what happened to me. I was just. Just the juxtaposition of your, you know, your, your wife at the time being there, David being there. David, your son. Right. Both of them being there. Then you're getting this call from Russia. And yes, the place is indistinguishable from that story because that chapter is about relaxation and just chilling out for a bit.
- [28:10]
B
Yeah. And. And, and the place becomes a character.
- [28:12]
A
Yeah.
- [28:13]
B
And. And, and so, you know, that, that, that, that touched with you. But. But there's probably like 150 or maybe even a thousand other things that somebody might be able to relate with throughout the story. And different people relate with different things, but the moment you relate with something, it connects you with me. And by connecting you with me, you become part of the whole thing. And that is a really important part of writing. And it's an important part for the reader's experience to feel connected.
- [28:46]
A
Yeah. So tell me more about bringing a place to life. What is it that you focus on? Sight, sound, smell, vibe? Like, what is it?
- [28:55]
B
It's whatever it is that's sort of distinctive and unique about that place. So, you know, like, for example, there is a. In the first chapter of Red Notice, we talk about the airport, Sheremechevo airport in Moscow. And it has a certain smell.
- [29:15]
A
Yes.
- [29:15]
B
And it has these weird things on the ceiling. These sort of like brass things on the ceiling look like coffee cans. And anybody who's ever been in Cheremetyevo knows the smell at that time and knows these coffee can things. And immediately, for anybody who's ever been in that airport, it immediately grabs you because that really gets you. As you felt like with Villa d', Este, anybody who's ever been in Moscow, Sheremetyevo airport will have that same feeling. And so, yeah, you have to be descriptive, but not boringly descriptive. You want to describe things that are poignant. You don't want to just describe stuff for the sake of describing it. You want to describe the two or three things that any person who's ever had that same experience will be able to relate with. And it also, then, because it's such a poignant experience, even if you haven't had it, you kind of get to get it because it's poignant.
- [30:12]
A
Yeah, I really noticed that of you could basically, as you're reading your books, you would describe somebody or something. It'd be two to three descriptors, super vivid. Get on with it. Two to three descriptors, super vivid. Get on with it. Like with the Moscow airport. I think it was built in the 1980s, but it had really shown its age. And you can see that boom. Got on with the story.
- [30:33]
B
And then it also brings you a feeling of what Moscow is like, because just a couple things which. And people don't have that much mental capacity to bring in all the details, but just a couple things. So that's like. Yeah, it's kind of this dated, strange, unkempt place.
- [30:53]
A
Tell me more about building how you build. Build the relationships that the readers have with characters that are not you.
- [31:03]
B
Well, I mean, that's the most important part because. Well, there's two types of characters in my book, in my books. Friends and enemies. Yeah. Good guys and bad guys.
- [31:13]
A
Sure.
- [31:15]
B
And you want to see the humanity and the charm and the lovability of the good guys. And. And you want to see the, you know, just the rotten shittiness of the bad guys. And it's not. I'm not caricaturing them. I mean, you know, sometimes good guys become bad guys and bad guys become good guys. I mean, there's definitely those types of transitions, but you want to basically, you know, with not too much information, get a sense for those people so that you can. And again, it's just a few details because you don't have that much time and you don't have that much of people's attention. Because if I spend too much time describing a person, you're going to get bored. And so it's a real challenge to be able to share enough information so you understand that person, you understand why they're likable. What's likable about them? But you're not about oversharing information. So you're thinking, why am I spending all this time on this person? What's relevant about this person? Enough time so you can get through it, get the information. Because information may not be relevant here and now. It may be relevant. You know, five chapters down the. Down the road.
- [32:22]
A
You seem like you really developed a knack for finding the truth about things in your work before becoming a writer. Like, there was a line in Red notice where you talk about how you were amazed at how open people in Russia were about what was going on. And if you could just find the right person to interview, they would just share everything.
- [32:43]
B
Yeah, and I think that's true. It's not just true in Russia, but it's true everywhere. People are. People want to talk about stuff. They want to talk about themselves. They want to brag, they want to. They want to impress. Everybody wants to. And so there's. And I'm always interested in getting to the bottom of things. When I was an investor, I wanted to know what was really going on in that company. Is it, you know, is it going to do much better than everyone thinks? And that's why. And is the stock price really low? And eventually that. And then when we discover all these crimes in the companies, we then started researching who's doing all the stealing and how they're stealing. And pretty much everything is transparent in the world. I mean, it's not nearly as opaque as one thinks generally.
- [33:30]
A
Wait, okay, explain that. It seems like a lot of things are mediated in a way where there's always kind of a narrative here and a narrative there. But I guess what you're saying is things are very transparent so long as you know who to talk to, where.
- [33:42]
B
To go, as long as you're ready to, like, talk to people. I mean, if you're just like, you know, if you're an investor in the stock market and you just read your screen, you're not going to learn anything. You know, if you're a person working in a parliament or congress and you read the, you know, economist, you're not going to, you know, you'll just learn the headlines. But if you go. If you go and, like, visit a bunch of people and go and have coffee with them or lunch or breakfast or, you know, all you have to do is dig below the surface and start talking to people, and you learn a lot of stuff in every different context.
- [34:17]
A
Interesting. So then what is like, if you're trying to make sense of A situation you've found oil company that you think is way undervalued. You're looking at the assets. You're like, that doesn't match up with the valuation of the company. Okay, so you're starting off where and you're ending up where. Like, what do you do to kind of make sense of reality, to find the truth?
- [34:40]
B
You know, some people are too smart for their own good, so there's too many different things they're looking at. So, like, I mean, there's a chapter in Red Notice where I'm talking about discovering something called preferred shares of Russian companies. And I go to meet the CFO of a, of an oil company, oil refinery, I think it was. And I was just sort of going through and saying, well, how many shares do you have outstanding of your company? And he said, well, are you asking about ordinary shares or preferred shares? No one ever heard of preferred shares as an investor in Russia? And I said, what are preferred shares? He said, oh, these are the shares where they have a guaranteed dividend, which is 10% of the profits of the company. I said, that's interesting. And do the ordinary shares have a guaranteed dividend? No, they don't have an ordinary dividend. I said, like, I'd never heard of these preferred shares before. And so I, I, so after the end of the meeting, I call up my Russian stock broker. I said, you know, I'm looking at this company, but I'm not interested in ordinary shares. I'm interested in their preferred shares. He said, I've never heard. And it. No one's ever asked me about preferred shares. And so he said, let me come back to you. And he said, well, the ordinary shares are trading at $10 per share, but the preferred share is only trading at $1 per share. I said, well, how can that be right? So these are better shares because they have this dividend and they're cheaper and then they're 90% cheaper. And I started poking around like maybe there's something wrong with them. And there was nothing wrong with them. It's just nobody had ever asked the question. And I discovered this and I bought the preferred shares and of course they became, I mean, we made a huge amount of money on these preferred shares because no one ever bothered it. But it was, I wasn't spending my time getting into the quality of the oil or this or that. It was like something much simpler than that. It was just like, this thing doesn't make any sense. And if you had been like a oil petroleum expert, you would have been Spending all this time on all this nonsense about the quality of their equipment or this or that, when there was just something so blatant staring, staring you in the face. Much simpler.
- [36:51]
A
Okay, so break a book down into chunks. We've talked about the planning phase about, you know, 50,000 words. Maybe there's an idea phase before that. Actually, there's just, you got to live life, man. You know what I mean? And then there's the writing. We talked about the editing. So just like walk me through the entire timeline.
- [37:07]
B
Well, so you start out with, I want to write a book. Okay, what are you going to write a book about? Why is that interesting to anybody other than yourself? You come up with the idea and then you say, well, how do I make, you know, where's the drama? Where's the challenge? What's the overall arc of the book? So in red, notice it was all like a rags to riches story and then flying too close to the sun and everything's screwing up. And then a tragedy and then trying to make some sense and some justice from the tragedy. That's a good overall narrative arc. Then you take that and you say, okay, what are the really interesting things that happen? And then you say, okay, I mean, I'll start with a chapter title without actually writing the chapters. And I like to have really short chapters, 10 pages max. And so I have 45 chapters or something along those lines. And so I'll have 45 of these little things and then I start filling it in. And by the way, when I have the mini book, that's when I go to the publisher.
- [38:28]
A
Oh, really?
- [38:29]
B
Yeah, I go to the publisher with the mini book.
- [38:31]
A
And what do you send them? You send them the mini book. The mini book, that's it. And then they say, you say, hey, look at this.
- [38:37]
B
And I look at it just purely from as a businessman, why should they want to pay me a big advance or give me a good deal if they're going to take a huge risk? You're taking much less of a risk if you can actually see what's there. And so it's obvious that there's a book there, a good book that they want to buy, and so they're ready to give me a decent advance, all that kind of stuff back to the timeline.
- [39:02]
A
Mini book.
- [39:02]
B
And then so once the mini book is in shape, then. And I know that there's going to be a publisher. I don't know how people write without a publisher because again, you could spend three years of your life and then not have anyone to distribute Your work. And so I want the publisher who's going to get it all out there, who knows how to deal with bookstores and all that kind of stuff. So I get the book deal, and then I have the book deal. It's really helpful to have a book deal, because then there's a deadline, and there's a deadline and somebody who's paying you money and you're responsible to deliver something on a certain date, then you had this mini chapter that you have to make into a real chapter. And that's actually the satisfying part, because then, you know, pretty much everything you're going to say is just, like, really getting in. And that's when it becomes fun and interesting and gratifying when you get the chapter done. But I'll tell you an interesting story about my second book. So my second book, my publisher was Simon and Schuster, same as my first publisher. And I had a deadline and I wrote the mini book, and then I wrote the book, and I think it was due on June 1st. And I'd finished writing, like, the first week of May, and I was going on vacation with my family to Portugal, and I decided to then give the manuscript to my wife, to my son, who at the time was, I guess, in his early 20s, into my agent. And I thought, okay, done. I'm sure they have a few things to say. And all three of them came back and they said, this sucks.
- [40:40]
A
Oh, boy.
- [40:46]
B
What'd you do? And I said, oh, shit. And so I called up my publisher and I said, listen, I need another three months. And then I just rewrote, like, a third of the book, and then it didn't suck anymore.
- [41:03]
A
I want to go to chapter endings, so I want to read you this chapter ending, and I want to hear what really matters to you as you're thinking about ending one. This from Red Notice, he didn't realize that Russia had no rule of law. It had a rule of men, and those men were crooks. Talk to me about what goes into those.
- [41:24]
B
Yeah, this was, I think, when Sergei Magnitsky was arrested or being imprisoned. And if I can remember correctly, and it was like a big revelation moment when, you know, we thought that somehow how could the people who did the crime arrest the person who was reporting the crime? And, of course, I mean, I'm a big believer in show, don't tell, but doesn't harm anybody at the end, to summarize in one sentence or two sentences what you've just seen and what you've been shown. And it really. I mean, it kind of like, you know, it puts the nail in properly. And that's kind of, I guess, where that sentence came from.
- [42:14]
A
So as you're writing your books, what would any given Tuesday or Wednesday look like? And how do you fit the writing and the researching of books in with the rest of your life, the rest of your commitments?
- [42:26]
B
It's hard. I mean, I've got young kids going to school. I've got to take them to school. You know, I'm trying to stay in shape. I've got to go to the gym. You know, I've got business, a lot of business stuff going on. I've got all sorts of things happening in my life. And so. And part of the reason why I think this third book is going to take longer than the first two is that I don't have that, like, you know, big, you know, I've got to carve out. At the moment, I'm sort of doing two to three hours a week. I'm two to three hours a day, three days a week. And that's not enough to, like, get this thing done as quickly as I want to do it.
- [43:01]
A
Oh, for the book.
- [43:02]
B
So what do you do?
- [43:02]
A
Do you just say, hey, you're not allowed to contact me? I'm. I'm focused?
- [43:06]
B
Yeah, that's what I try to do.
- [43:07]
A
And where do you write?
- [43:09]
B
I write wherever I can. I write on airplanes, I write on trains. I write in a study. I write on a beach. I write wherever I can. I just write wherever I have to write. It doesn't really matter. I'm not precious about my environment. I just try to focus in on what I'm doing.
- [43:29]
A
Do you work with an editor or somebody like that?
- [43:31]
B
Yeah, absolutely. In what capacity? So much. Read back and forth to Wordsmith. Any help I can get. I try to get as much help. And then the other thing I do, we never finish the full writing process. Once I'm finished with the book, before I give it to the publisher, I give it to ten friends.
- [43:50]
A
Oh, wow.
- [43:52]
B
And not just to, like. And I'm not looking for people to, like, you know, blow smoke up my backside. I want people to tell me, like, really, you know, everything they've got to say. And they re. And 10 smart friends. 10 and different types of friends. They don't have to be literary people. They can be any type of person, but somebody who's going to take the time and energy and really read it carefully and mark it up and tell me what's what. And they bring different things to the story. I mean, not the story, but to the quality of the book. And by the time it gets to my editor at Simon and Schuster, she's got nothing to say.
- [44:31]
A
How do you write about those difficult things that have happened? Being detained? Do you feel an aversion to writing about those things, or is it easier to write about those things harder?
- [44:41]
B
Well, because I'm trying to write for the reader, and those are exciting. Yeah. And so that's the easiest stuff to write about. The hard stuff to write about is something that's not exciting. The deposition. You know, there's a chapter in red notice about when I was at Salomon Brothers, long before I ever moved to Russia, and I was in the investment bank and I had been assigned to start buying Russian stocks by a senior guy in the New York office. I was in London and I was working in the investment bank and I was buying some shares. And one of my rivals inside the investment bank turned me into the compliance officers. Because you're not supposed to be buying securities if you're an investment banker. You're supposed to do that on the trading floor. And there's a thing called the Chinese Wall. And so I wrote this big story about the Chinese Wall. And again, it was one of these things where I was able to make it interesting. So everyone said. I never knew Chinese walls in investment banks could be so exciting. And the reason why it was exciting was because there was this rival who wanted to turn me in, and I was doing something that was sort of wrong, and I was frog marched out by the sort of internal police. And it became an interesting chapter. But again, that was a big struggle. How do you make the Chinese wallet and investment bank interesting? Because I needed to talk about that story to further the story. Yeah.
- [46:00]
A
One of the things I've noticed so far in our conversation is like looking for the stakes, looking for the conflict, looking for the tension, looking for the rivals. And if there's the two sides, those things are clear. Once you get clear on what those pieces are, my sense is that whatever those fault lines are, the story kind.
- [46:18]
B
Of unfolds from that and it moves. And everyone wants to read it to the next page.
- [46:23]
A
Let's talk about endings. Let's close with a. I'm going to read this. So here's how you end Red notice. And then we can end with focus on endings. Early in this book, I said that the feeling I got from buying a Polish stock that went up 10 times was the best thing to ever happen to me in my career. But the feeling I had on that balcony in Brussels with Sergey's widow and son as we watched the largest lawmaking body in Europe recognize and condemn the injustices suffered by Sergei and his family. Felt orders of magnitude better than any financial success I've ever had. If finding a 10 bagger in the stock market was a highlight of my life before, there is no feeling as satisfying as getting some measure of justice in a highly unjust world.
- [47:05]
B
Yeah. That almost brings tears to my eyes listening to you read it. Which means that it was a good ending, right?
- [47:11]
A
Yeah.
- [47:12]
B
Yeah. And it's the crux of my whole life, which is going from a pretty narrow finance guy to being a fighter for justice. And it sort of sums up everything. Yeah.
- [47:31]
A
Thank you very much.
- [47:31]
B
Thank you. Yeah.