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.
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 he ends up leaving Salomon 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 Sergei Maginsky, and he says, hey, can you look into this?
Help me figure out what happened.
Next thing, you know Sergei, 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 Sergei.
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.
Alright, let's get into it.
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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?
Well, first thing I would say is that I'm not the best reader in the world.
And so 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, you know, two or three years writing this book um, 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 um, 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 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 if, And 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 and to put the book down.
And so the process is not.
The first 10 pages is 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.
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 in an airport.
Well, in fact-
It's always the story.
I mean, the writing is just sort of a technical thing.
It's the story.
It's always the story.
I mean being detained in an airport is.
You know, 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 like a month reading through all the transcripts of the deposition and all the other things going on 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, you know, 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.
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.
Well, it's, it's, it's about, um, what a person, a 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.
How do you think about the pacing of stores?
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.
You know, it's kind of like watching a mini series, same type of thing.
And so at the end of every chapter there's some some a challenge, or there's some some uncertainty that you then want to pick up through the next chapter and see, see how it resolves itself.
And during the chapter you also have to create some challenge that you then overcome, or you're partially overcome, or 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?
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.
Absolutely.
So I mean, the way I write a book is I write a mini book first, which is just you know what are the individual stories.
And it's not just like, you know, 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 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.
OK, 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 it's like an emergent property?
Or is that, nope, this is going to be the Tuesdays with Maury chapter?
Talk to me about that.
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 from, 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 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 challenges, problems along the way in this course, shift 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 give me a sense, sort of looking forward.
This is what i have, this what i don't have, this is the roadmap for where i think i'm going to go.
So my third book um, is going to be about um, a friend of mine um, who helped me in all the uh, uh 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 the named after my murdered Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, which is the justice that we got for Sergei.
So he helped me get this Magnitsky Act passed.
Putin hated him for doing that, tried to kill him twice.
But the main, the main focus of the third book is about um him being arrested in Russia um 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 gonna be invested in him, you're not gonna be invested in me.
And so how do you get invested in everybody to understand the stakes without repeating the stories of two books before?
And so I've gotta tell other stories in order to feed into this unbelievable difficult situation that we then end up resolving.
The stakes, the stakes, the stakes.
So how do you go about building the stakes, thinking through the stakes?
Well, everybody has to get to know you and they have to get to know you and care about you.
This is you as the writer.
Well, me as the character and Vladimir and various other people involved.
And so, as their lives unfold, weave together and weave apart, and so on, you have to then, you know, 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 unfortunate things happen.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of writing in the first person?
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 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 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 um, 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 to create a narrative.
I'll say you remember that day when we were in the parliament and in in the Hague and um, you know, we were trying to do this and uh, and like what were you?
What were you trying to do?
And why did that?
You know, and I weave it all, you know I, you know pull, pull on the threads and and take you know rigorous notes and and then you know kind of pluck out the interesting things that would be interesting to somebody outside.
And and also, how does, how does, how does it all tie together with, with um, the rest of the story?
Um, and so that 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.
Cause 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's this, uh, this traitorous lawyer who switched sides and I couldn't, um, go and talk to him because he's, uh, switched sides.
He's, he became an enemy.
Um, and, and if I said anything that was, um, wrong, he would sue me cause 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.
Like you know, there was so much stuff from depositions and court transcripts.
I could, you know, I could get all of his um quotes and and speeches and and and and.
Then, you know, distill the things that were interesting from from all those documents.
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 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.
But um, 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 I have to do a lot of research, and I have to do a lot of original research in the sense that no one's ever written about some of this stuff before, because I'm the first person writing about it.
And then you talk about research and I've talked to him about recollection, because a lot of this stuff is intense stuff.
Do you feel like Yeah.
Talking about recollection.
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, you know, go over over situations a bunch of times to you know, for for it to all come back.
And when you read the books, it's just you know it's really very visual and and and intense.
But that doesn't come like from just you know it's.
It's a, it's a torturous process to to write these books.
I mean, it's, 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.
Is that like a it sucks torture or is it like it's meaningful, let's go for it torture?
Well, there's a process.
It sucks at the beginning, because when you're staring at a blank sheet of paper and 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 like entertaining and I know it's good, and then it's great.
And then in that process of recollection, do the ideas come to you?
Like you're just sort of sitting there, you're like pecking at the keyboard.
It's like, I'm going to write a lot and then I'm going to kind of distill and distill.
Or is it a little bit more of like I don't know.
I went for a walk and wow, I just remembered that thing.
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 is comes from, you know, standing under a stream of hot water.
Yeah.
So we can increase the writer output with more showers.
Well, a good hot shower when you're stuck with something and then all of a sudden it comes to when you're not trying to think about it and then, like all of a sudden, there it is.
Yeah.
And, of course, I have my phone with me just generally and like you know, taking notes whenever something comes to my mind.
And it always happens.
You know, 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, you know, builds up a story and makes it good.
And now do you write the books in a pretty linear fashion?
Yeah.
So I, you know, I started out with what I think is the, just the outline of the story.
Then I do these mini books where I like 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.
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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 into the ensemble project of what it is that you're trying to do?
So I'm not an author.
I didn't go to the Iowa Writers thing or whatever, Vermont.
I was a hedge fund manager.
And I had some really terrible stuff happen to me.
What happened to people around me happened to me.
My lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was murdered, tortured and murdered because he was my lawyer.
And I felt so compelled to get 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?
What I discovered is that I would go as a justice campaigner.
I would go and meet with with um 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 um tedious to and and and and.
More than it, and being tedious it also I, I you know maximum I could get half an hour with somebody.
I mean, nobody has that much time.
And, um, I mean, it's really interesting.
So I thought, you know, I really should get a move.
I should do a movie about this.
And um and I um, I went to Hollywood to like meet people and uh, they said, you know, 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 like the intellectual property for a movie and um uh, and that nobody would read the book and that, you know, 10 million people have watched the movie.
And that's how I would achieve this, like general knowledge of my situation.
And then I wouldn't have to go brief everybody in the world.
I would have created a groundswell of support.
Um Well, as it turned out, I wrote my first book, Red Notice, and it turned into a major international bestseller.
I mean, you know, 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, 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.
Is that because of the content?
Yeah, they don't want to touch.
You know going after.
You know 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 Sergei.
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.
I 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.
And then what, 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?
And you write an article for the financial times and I don't.
I don't know what their circulation is, but I don't know.
Let's say, a million people.
What's the probability that, that somebody actually read the article, you know, 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 when 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 flesh out human emotion.
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 kind of risky because 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 listened to Bill Browder.
I'm going to go and write a book.
You know, the chances are, as the chances were with mine, that like you write a book and like nobody reads it.
I mean, so 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, and then, and then, finding out that like, a thousand people read your book or 500 people read your book and doesn't make any difference at all.
So what happens to most writers?
Yeah.
And so.
And if you're a campaigner, if you have something terrible, that's probably too risky a proposition to when you could be doing other stuff.
How do you balance the desire for truth with the desire for safety for the people that you love?
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.
You know, just, you know, this terrible thing happened.
Yeah, it's terrible.
You know, maybe you can set up a scholarship fund for the, for Sergei Magnitsky's son and his widow, or whatever.
But just you know, go to ground.
And if I had done that, if I had if I had just disappeared.
They would have killed me and nobody would have known why they killed me, and they would have gotten away with it.
The Russians.
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.
You know exactly.
And so it became.
It 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 prospect of assassinating me without any repercussions the cost is up and the prospect of no repercussions is pretty low.
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?
Well, you need characters that everybody can relate with.
People first.
You need characters.
But what's also interesting is I have this thing where sometimes places are characters.
Huh.
Um, where you, um, where the place takes on its own sort of, um, uh, feeling.
And, and.
The other thing you want to do and and, and so um is is you want to make sure that everybody wants to be familiar with stuff.
And so you want to have, you want to share with people places people, situations that they're familiar with.
Um.
And so I have so many people write to me about my book and say you know I grew up in Chicago and you know I was a investment banker.
You know, we have so much in common.
Everyone wants to, like, relate with the character.
And so and like in different people, different situations.
And so the more touch points that you can have, where people, where there's something relatable, understandable and part of their part of their character,
Now, is that touch point like, OK, we're in London.
Oh, the London Eye, the Golden Gate Bridge.
Is it like landmarks?
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 Lake Como.
Something specific.
Classic.
You know, something more like, you know, that's exactly what happened to me.
I was reading Red Notice.
I was like, I know that place.
The big swimming pool.
Yeah, of course.
Crazy gardens.
And maybe- And I can imagine you taking the phone call as the markets are taking.
Actually, that's exactly what happened to me.
I was just thinking of just the juxtaposition of your wife at the time being there, David being there.
David's 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.
Yeah.
And the place becomes a character.
Yeah.
And so, you know, that touched with you.
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 with me.
And by connecting you with me, you become part of this.
You become part of the whole thing.
And that is a really important part of writing.
And it's important part of for the reader's experience to to feel connected.
Yeah.
So tell me more about bringing a place. life?
What is it that you focus on?
Sight, sound, smell, vibe?
What is it?
It's whatever it is that's sort of distinctive and unique about that place.
For example, in the first chapter of Red Notice we talk about the airport Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, and it has a certain smell.
Yes.
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 Sheremetyevo 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 like grabs you because you've that's really.
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, not just describe stuff for the sake of describing.
You want to describe the two or three things that any person who's ever had that same experience will 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.
Yeah.
You know, I really noticed that of you could basically, as you're reading your books, you would describe somebody or something and 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 like, you can see that, boom, get on with the story.
And then it also brings you a feeling of what you know, what Moscow is like, because just a couple of things which you know and people don't have that much mental capacity to bring in all the details, but just a couple of things, so that you, you know it's like yeah, you know, it's kind of this outdated strange, unkempt place.
Tell me more about Building, how you build the relationships that the readers have with characters that are not you.
Well, I mean, that's the most important part, because you know well there's two types of characters in my book and my books.
Friends and enemies.
Yeah.
Good guys and bad guys.
Sure.
And and you want to see the humanity and the charm and the and the lovability of the good guys.
Um, and, and you want to see the, um, uh, you know, just the rotten, um, shittiness of the bad guys.
And, and, and it's, and it's not, I'm not caricaturing them.
I mean, you know, sometimes good guys become bad guys and sometimes and and bad guys become good guys.
I mean there, there there's definitely those types of transitions, but you want to you um, get a sense for those people so that you can and again, it's just, it's 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 the person, you're going to get bored, and so it's a real, it's a real challenge to be able to like, share enough information so you understand that person, you understand why they're likable, what 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 who?
What's relevant about this person?
Enough time so you can get through it?
Get the information, because the information may not be relevant here and now.
It may be relevant, you know, five chapters down the down the road.
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.
Yeah. share everything.
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.
They want, everybody wants to.
And and, and.
So there's and, and I'm, I'm always interested in in, you know, getting getting to the bottom of things.
When I was an investor, I wanted to know, you 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 and and, eventually that and then, when we discover all these crimes in the companies, we then start researching who's doing all the stealing and how they're stealing.
And, and pretty much everything is transparent in the world.
I mean, it's, it's, it's not nearly as opaque as, as, as one thinks generally.
Wait, okay.
Explain that.
Like 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.
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 economists.
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, or lunch, or breakfast or or, you know, 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.
Interesting.
So then, what is If you're trying to make sense of a situation?
You've found an 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.
What do you do to kind of make sense of reality to find...
The truth.
You know, some people are too smart for their own good.
So there's too many different things they're looking at.
Yeah.
So, like I mean there's, 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 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, well, 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 after the end of the meeting I call up my Russian stockbroker and I says 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 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 shares are 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 they're 90% cheaper.
Right.
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, you know, we made a huge amount of money on these preferred shares because no one ever bothered it.
But it was.
You know I wasn't spending my time like getting into, like the you know, the quality of the oil or this or that.
It was like something much, much simpler than that.
It was just like you know this.
This thing doesn't make any sense, and and if you had been like a oil petroleum expert, you would have been spending all this time on all this nonsense about, like you know, the quality of their equipment or this or that, when there was just something so blatant staring, staring in your face, is much simpler.
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 again, there's just you gotta 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.
Well, so, um, uh, you, you start out with, um, I want to write a book.
Okay.
Um, what are you gonna write a book about?
Uh, why is that interesting to anybody other than yourself?
Um, you come up with the idea and then you say well, how do I um make you know where's the, where's the drama?
Where's the challenge?
Where's the, what, what, what's, uh, you know, what's the overall arc of the book.
So in Red Notice it was all.
It was like a rags to riches story.
And then you know flying too close to the sun and you know everything's screwing up and then a tragedy.
And then you know trying to make some sense and some justice from the tragedy.
That's a good, you know, overall narrative arc.
Okay then then um, then you, you take that and you say okay um, what are the really interesting things that happen?
And and then you say okay, i mean, i'll start with with a chapter title without, without actually writing the chapter.
So am i, am i like to have really short chapters.
You know, 10 pages max um, and and so you know 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.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I go to the publisher with the mini book.
And what do you send them?
You send them the mini book?
The mini book.
That's it.
And then they say, hey, look at this.
And I look at it just purely 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.
Right.
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 you a decent advance, all that kind of stuff.
Back to the timeline.
Mini book and then?
So once a mini book um is in, in shape, then uh, and I get the, the and I know that there's going to be a publisher.
I don't want to write, I don't, I don't know how people write without a publisher.
Um cause, I you know again.
You know you could spend three years of your life and then like and not have anyone to distribute your, your work.
And so when the publisher is going to like get it all out there and knows how to deal with bookstores and all that kind of stuff.
So I get the book deal.
And then once I have the book deal, it's really helpful to have a book deal.
Cause then there's a deadline.
Hmm, and there's a deadline and somebody who's paying you money um uh, and you're responsible to like, deliver something on a certain date.
Then you, then I, then you have this mini chapter that you have to make into a real chapter.
And, and that's, that's actually the satisfying part because then, 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 and um gratifying when you get the chapter done.
But I'll tell you an interesting story about my second book.
So my second book, I had a I had my publisher was my same simon schuster, same as my first publisher and um, i had a deadline and i wrote the mini book and then i wrote the book, um and um, i think it was due on june 1st and i'd finished writing, um like the first week of may and i was going on vacation with my family um, to portugal, and we were, and i and i decided to like then give the manuscript to my wife uh, to my son, who at the time was um, I guess, in his early twenties, and um uh uh, into my agent.
And I thought, okay, done.
You know, I'm sure they have a few things to say.
And all three of them came back and they said, this sucks.
Oh boy.
What'd you do?
And I said, oh shit.
Um, And so I called up my publisher and I said, listen, I need another three months.
And then I just wrote, I rewrote like a third of the book and it didn't suck anymore.
I want to go to chapter endings.
So I want to read you this chapter ending.
I want to hear what really matters to you as you're thinking about ending one.
This is 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 this.
Yeah, this was, I think, when Sergei Magnitsky was arrested or being imprisoned.
And if I can remember correctly. uh, correctly.
And it it was like a big revelation moment when, when you know um, you know we, we thought that like somehow, how could the government, the people, the people who did the crime, arrest the person who was reporting the crime?
And, um, and of course, I mean, uh, I'm a big believer in show, don't tell.
But it doesn't harm anybody at the end to summarize in one sentence or two sentences what you've just seen, what you've been shown.
And it puts the nail in properly.
And that's kind of, I guess, where that sentence came from.
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?
It's hard.
I mean, I, I, um, uh, you know, I've got a kid, they've got young kids going to school.
I've got to take them to school.
I, you know, I'm trying, trying to stay in shape.
I've got to go to the gym.
I, you know, I'm, uh, I've got a lot of business stuff going on.
I've got all sorts of things happening in my life.
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.
Oh, for the book.
Yeah.
So what do you do?
Do you just say, hey, you're not allowed to contact me.
I'm, I'm focused.
Yeah.
That's what I try to do.
And where do you write?
Um, I write wherever I, wherever I can.
I write, I write on airplanes.
I write on trains.
I write in a study.
I write on a beach.
I write wherever I can.
I can, uh, I just write wherever I have to write.
It's, it's doesn't really matter.
Um, I'm not, uh, I'm not precious about, uh, my environment.
I, uh, you know, I just try to focus in on, on what I'm doing.
Do you work with an editor or somebody like that?
Yeah, absolutely.
And what capacity?
Um, So much read, read back and forth to wordsmith and any, anything, any help I can get.
Um, I try, I try to get as much, much help.
Um, and then the other thing I do, uh, we never finished the full writing process.
Once I'm finished with the book before I give it to the publisher, I give it to 10 friends.
Oh, wow.
And and not just to like um, and I'm not looking for people to like you know blow blow, smoke up my backside.
I want people to tell me like really, you know, everything they've got to say.
And um and they and 10 smart friends 10 you know and different types of friends that you know there'll have to be literary people.
They can be any type of person, but you know somebody who's going to take the time and energy and, like you know, really read it carefully and mark it up and tell me what's what.
And and um, and they bring different things to the um, to the, to the story i mean um and not the story, but that to the, to the quality of the book.
And by the time it gets to my editor at simon and schuster um, she's got nothing to say.
How do you write about those difficult things that have happened being in detained like?
Do you feel an aversion to writing about those things, or is it easier to write about those things harder?
Well, because i'm trying to write for the reader and those are exciting, And so that's the easiest stuff to write about.
The hard stuff to write about is something that's not exciting.
The deposition.
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 and 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 was sort of wrong and I was frogmarsh out by the Sort of internal police and and it became an interesting chapter.
Um, but again that That was a big struggle.
How do you make the Chinese wall at an investment bank interesting?
Because I needed to talk about that story to further the story.
Yeah, one of the things I've noticed so far in our conversation is like looking for the stakes and 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 of unfolds from that.
And it moves and everyone wants to read to the next page.
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 Sergey 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.
Yeah, that almost brings tears to my eyes listening to you read it, which means that it is a good ending, right?
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.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Yeah.
