Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and
Speaker 2: Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: So one of the great things about working in New
Speaker 1: York City, there are many great things.
Speaker 2: You get to take the subway all the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's not one of them.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: I do actually like the subway. You get around pretty quickly,
Speaker 1: But it is the access you get to book parties
Speaker 1: that you get to go to, and that includes one
Speaker 1: for our next guest, who is a New York Times
Speaker 1: bestselling author, biographer and a prolific writer a business management
Speaker 1: trends of which he has joined us before to talk about.
Speaker 1: But he is at with his first work of fiction,
Speaker 1: written some thirty years ago, set in nineteen ninety one Moscow,
Speaker 1: a year when the Soviet Union was dissolved. And I
Speaker 1: have to say, in kind of reading again in for this,
Speaker 1: I was googling that year and the Soviet Union. I
Speaker 1: kept coming up with a Metallica concert that played in
Speaker 1: Moscow for the first time ever. It was like one
Speaker 1: point six million people. I think it was an open
Speaker 1: air concert, but it was a year in time when
Speaker 1: it seems scot and the former Soviet Union would be
Speaker 1: on a very different front and a much more democratic track.
Speaker 2: It was supposed to be the end of history.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, or a new chapter.
Speaker 2: Yeah right.
Speaker 1: Journalists and author Kevin Maney joins us now in our
Speaker 1: Bloomberg in Director Broker Studio to talk about his first
Speaker 1: work of fiction. It's entitled Red bottom Line. It is
Speaker 1: about the Soviet Union back in the nineteen nineties, but
Speaker 1: again a work of fiction. So nice to have you
Speaker 1: back on with us.
Speaker 3: How are you good. Yeah, this is great. I'm glad
Speaker 3: to be here.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm really glad to have you here. And I
Speaker 1: know at the party it was we talked about the
Speaker 1: book and stuff, but I want you to share with
Speaker 1: us with our audience. It is your first work of fiction,
Speaker 1: written about three decades ago.
Speaker 3: Right. Well, So the background story is that in the
Speaker 3: late eighties and early nineties, as the Soviet Union was
Speaker 3: disintegrating in the East Block and the Iron Curtain was
Speaker 3: coming down and all that stuff was happening, I was
Speaker 3: a reporter for USA Today and I was covering that
Speaker 3: as a journalist, and so in the it was just
Speaker 3: one of these like one set of more kind of
Speaker 3: history making kind of time when all these crazy stuff
Speaker 3: was happening all around me. And so I had this
Speaker 3: idea that, you know, despite all the stories I've written
Speaker 3: for the newspaper everything, that I would use that as
Speaker 3: a setting for a novel. Now I had never written
Speaker 3: a book before. At that point in time, I was
Speaker 3: thirty thirty one years old, and so I wrote this
Speaker 3: a draft of this novel, and then basically did nothing
Speaker 3: with it for thirty years. But I held on to it.
Speaker 3: But I held on to it well, so so thirty
Speaker 3: years later, I actually was writing it when my daughter
Speaker 3: was first born. And so thirty some years later, she
Speaker 3: starts asking me about it. She says, you know, you
Speaker 3: wrote that novel? Where is it? I'm going like, I
Speaker 3: wrote it at a floppy disc. I worked perfect, like
Speaker 3: I've never gonna it turned out that I had a
Speaker 3: print out of it, like you know, the printouts that
Speaker 3: were all like to pash together with the polls on
Speaker 3: the size and stuff. And I pulled out the print
Speaker 3: out and I started reading it, and I'm going like, wait,
Speaker 3: this is actually pretty good with a little work.
Speaker 2: Why didn't you collect dust on a floppy disc for
Speaker 2: thirty years?
Speaker 3: Though?
Speaker 2: Like what stopped you from pursuing.
Speaker 3: You know, I didn't know anything about the book business.
Speaker 3: I sent it to a couple of editors randomly, which
Speaker 3: is probably dumb. Didn't hear anything back, and I just
Speaker 3: kind of figured, well, you know, all right, never mind.
Speaker 3: You know, it's like probably not that good. But then I,
Speaker 3: you know, I went on and started writing nonfiction books
Speaker 3: and had a lot of success. I have published nine
Speaker 3: nonfiction books, all about business and biographies and things like that.
Speaker 3: So when I returned to it, you know, I had
Speaker 3: more of a path and more of a knowledge of,
Speaker 3: like how to get this thing published.
Speaker 1: I think what's interesting is it takes us back to
Speaker 1: a different era, right And I know at your book
Speaker 1: party we talked a little bit about it and stuff.
Speaker 1: But you think about, you know, what our expectations were
Speaker 1: for a Russia moving forward or a Soviet or what
Speaker 1: the new Soviet Union or not, you know, the dissolution
Speaker 1: like they did their first presidential election. Like you just
Speaker 1: think about what where it was and where it could
Speaker 1: have gone.
Speaker 3: Well that was, you know, and when you read the
Speaker 3: if you read the novel, because it's you know, it's
Speaker 3: all real stuff that I experienced. I mean, it's basically
Speaker 3: a made up story based on real facts of what
Speaker 3: was happening. And there was this optimism. There was a
Speaker 3: sense among young people and there's you know, these young
Speaker 3: characters in the novel who were all into this idea
Speaker 3: of like creating businesses and you know, getting into private
Speaker 3: enterprise and you know, making contacts with Westerners and and
Speaker 3: there was this incredible optimism that there was something new
Speaker 3: was going to rise out of this and everybody felt that, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: everybody felt that, and you know, and us business people
Speaker 3: were starting to go over I you know, I ended
Speaker 3: up being present at the opening of the Moscow McDonald's.
Speaker 4: I was going to talk about that because that's like
Speaker 4: so iconic from that era, and it was also iconic
Speaker 4: two years ago around this time. We talked a lot
Speaker 4: about it because when McDonald's exited the country in the
Speaker 4: wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it brought back those
Speaker 4: images from the early nineties of people waiting in line
Speaker 4: to try the first big mac.
Speaker 3: That's right, yeah, and it was it was. I mean,
Speaker 3: we forget about it, how but it was this incredible cultural,
Speaker 3: geopolitical event that McDonald's opened in Moscow, and there were,
Speaker 3: Like I think there were thirty eight thousand people that
Speaker 3: went the first day to that McDonald's because they were
Speaker 3: so hungry for not hungry for burgers, but hungry for like,
Speaker 3: you know, American stuff.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's funny. I have a conversation when
Speaker 1: I was with my husband and we just said, you know,
Speaker 1: what if we had decided rather than especially if you
Speaker 1: look at the tensions between US and China today, like
Speaker 1: if we decided, well, let's work with Russia and let's
Speaker 1: manufacture stuff there, Like just if we'd made as a
Speaker 1: as a world, as a you know, generally decided to
Speaker 1: work more with Russia going forward, Like you just wonder
Speaker 1: how things might have played out differently.
Speaker 3: Well, there wasn't the transition time. There wasn't enough time
Speaker 3: for enough stuff to happen because pretty quickly, and I
Speaker 3: experienced this because I wasn't living there, but I was
Speaker 3: traveling there frequently, right and from the late eighties to
Speaker 3: around nineteen ninety two, you could actually sense every trip
Speaker 3: that things were getting like more chaotic, more dangerous, more weird,
Speaker 3: because you know, there was this sort of transitions of
Speaker 3: the government from Gorbachev, Yels and Yeltsen was kind of
Speaker 3: a disaster. He wasn't really he started handing out whole
Speaker 3: industries to his friends, which is what the birth of
Speaker 3: the oligarchs was. And you know, sort of mob activity
Speaker 3: was running half the economy, and so there was never
Speaker 3: a chance for this to really catch hold before the
Speaker 3: Russian society basically got sick of this and was welcoming
Speaker 3: somebody like Putin to come in and say I'm going
Speaker 3: to actually create some order out of this chaos. And
Speaker 3: then it just all kind of fell apart as terms
Speaker 3: of being able to connect with the West.
Speaker 4: What I think so notable about the novel is that
Speaker 4: it paints a picture of what could have been in
Speaker 4: Russia and what many people in the early nineteen nineties
Speaker 4: thought would actually happen. It's there collecting dust for thirty
Speaker 4: years before you go and publish it, and here you
Speaker 4: are publishing it, and it's the complete opposite of what
Speaker 4: ended up happening, as you just described, right, right, So
Speaker 4: what was the moment you think it went wrong or
Speaker 4: went on a different path. Wasn't Yeltsin was?
Speaker 3: It was under the y To administration, right, And you know,
Speaker 3: I mean, look, I never met Boris Elson. But there's
Speaker 3: lots of reports about him. I mean, you know, the
Speaker 3: guy was kind of a disaster as a leader, and
Speaker 3: it just let things sort of fall apart all around him.
Speaker 3: So what could have been set on a path of
Speaker 3: creating a more global, western facing country just got derailed.
Speaker 3: And then you know, and Putin wanted to take it
Speaker 3: in a completely different direction once he got aboard. But
Speaker 3: you know, the point, one of the points you were
Speaker 3: sort of alluding to here is that if I had
Speaker 3: sat down to write this novel today, trying to rely
Speaker 3: on my memory or my notes or something from I
Speaker 3: could never have captured all the details that I did.
Speaker 3: I think one of the even like for me rereading it,
Speaker 3: one of the magical things about it is that I
Speaker 3: wrote it in the moment, So I was recalling like
Speaker 3: all these sort of very fresh, tiny little details about
Speaker 3: what life was like for individual Russians or for somebody
Speaker 3: who was trying to run a factory and trying to
Speaker 3: transition to capitalism and all these things. And because I
Speaker 3: was writing it while I was there, those are captured,
Speaker 3: and then you know, all these years later, now I
Speaker 3: was just able to put a little bit more shine
Speaker 3: on them and make it, you know, a more holistic
Speaker 3: story that works better.
Speaker 1: What was that like when you picked it up again, right,
Speaker 1: because you hadn't read it really in thirty years there
Speaker 1: is and like to go back there and be like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, like, yeah, this is exactly what was
Speaker 1: going on.
Speaker 3: Well. What was fun for me was because I had
Speaker 3: I remember very little of it, so it was almost
Speaker 3: like I was reading here for the first time. I
Speaker 3: got I would who is this guy that wrote this thing?
Speaker 2: Is actually pretty good? Published?
Speaker 3: You know what?
Speaker 1: It's fascinating, right, It's like a window back into kind
Speaker 1: of exactly what you were experiencing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh I had, I had, so I wrote this
Speaker 3: little author zone in the beginning that that, you know,
Speaker 3: after before I thought of doing anything with it. I
Speaker 3: actually sent it to my daughter and she is she's
Speaker 3: a journalist and editor herself. So she reads it and
Speaker 3: she writes back to me and says, you know, Dad,
Speaker 3: this is really good, but like here I've got like
Speaker 3: two pages. No, say you can make it better. But
Speaker 3: one of the things I thought was funny that she
Speaker 3: pointed out was so the like, especially the main character,
Speaker 3: there's kind of this nineties sort of you know, the
Speaker 3: characters from friends kind of like language and snarkiness that
Speaker 3: are in the book that she said, like it is
Speaker 3: sort of inappropriate today, right, and like so if I
Speaker 3: were writing that book today, like it wouldn't even have
Speaker 3: that sort of language in it.
Speaker 2: But it's emblematic of the time.
Speaker 3: It was epblematic of the time.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, like a time without iPhones and a time
Speaker 4: that people had to actually you know, make plans to
Speaker 4: meet in certain places, right.
Speaker 3: And you know, make jokes about things that nobody would
Speaker 3: want to make jokes about it exactly, and stuff like that. Right.
Speaker 1: That's a really good point.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: It's just again, it's a snapshot in time, right, and
Speaker 1: it takes you back there and you realize, okay, the
Speaker 1: things that have changed and what is appropriate or not.
Speaker 1: I want to continue the conversation. We're going to do
Speaker 1: a little bit of news, Kevin. But the one thing
Speaker 1: I think about is more broadly is I think we
Speaker 1: think democracy is going to of course always win, and
Speaker 1: people are going to always want to move increasingly that
Speaker 1: decoration in that direction. We've thought it with China, right,
Speaker 1: with all the Western businesses moving in, and yet here
Speaker 1: we are and it feels very very different. So I
Speaker 1: want to maybe dig into that a little bit when
Speaker 1: we come back. We're going to continue with journalists and
Speaker 1: author Kevin Maney, New York Times best selling author. I
Speaker 1: should point out he's here in studio, but we're talking
Speaker 1: about his first work of fiction. It's entitled Red bottom Line,
Speaker 1: again taking us back to the Soviet Union in the
Speaker 1: late eighties and early nineties. Will continue in just a moment.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to all.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, back in the USSR. And that is what
Speaker 1: we are talking about. Red bottom Line. It's a new
Speaker 1: book by New York Times bestselling author and journalist Kevin Maney,
Speaker 1: his first work of fiction, although it was written about
Speaker 1: thirty years ago, and it is though it takes you
Speaker 1: back to the Soviet Union in the nineteen nineties. You know,
Speaker 1: we kind of tease Kevin that this whole idea that
Speaker 1: we think democracy will prevail, and right now we feel
Speaker 1: like democracy is under attack globally.
Speaker 3: Give us some.
Speaker 1: Thoughts, as you've been a journalist, just thinking about kind
Speaker 1: of what's going on in the world and how democracy
Speaker 1: continues to be tested, because we think every time a
Speaker 1: market seems to open up its arms to it, we think, okay,
Speaker 1: it's just going to continue. And it's not the case.
Speaker 1: It wasn't certainly in the Soviet Union, it hasn't really
Speaker 1: been in China, even though a lot of Western companies
Speaker 1: moved in there, and we thought it would be a
Speaker 1: different outcome.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I mean, I'm not a political expert
Speaker 3: and go more of a business expert. But and you know,
Speaker 3: my observation is.
Speaker 1: We thought, like the business momentum into these countries, right,
Speaker 1: would kind of.
Speaker 4: I mean, you mentioned McDonald's that was like a seminal
Speaker 4: moment when it came to the the former Soviet unions
Speaker 4: embrace of capitalism.
Speaker 3: Well, yes, but there was a I think there was
Speaker 3: an interesting nuance that there was not so much about
Speaker 3: like this anticipation that Russia or China when you know,
Speaker 3: in this nineties and we're going to be democratic, But
Speaker 3: there was this anticipation that there was going to be
Speaker 3: a legal system, a rule of law, a set of
Speaker 3: rules that everybody could play by that was not the
Speaker 3: whims of a dictator or something like that. That's what's
Speaker 3: really important to to businesses more than you know, more
Speaker 3: than the fact that the people are going to vote
Speaker 3: for their leaders. The fact that that you know, the
Speaker 3: opposite of what's happening now in Russia or in China,
Speaker 3: you know, where she is sort of taking all these
Speaker 3: these sort of random actions of penalizing tech companies and
Speaker 3: other you know, and there's an uncertainty, and that uncertainty
Speaker 3: is what the business you know, business people don't want,
Speaker 3: you know, less than the idea of pure democracy, right
Speaker 3: the rules change.
Speaker 1: It's funny that you say that we're you know, zekeer
Speaker 1: like having Chinese ev maker making its debut here in
Speaker 1: New York and I po it was a big deal here.
Speaker 1: But part of the questioning with the.
Speaker 2: Executive Yeah, it was the CFO right about.
Speaker 1: Okay, Chinese government involvement. And that's part of the problem
Speaker 1: right now, right like we just don't know as investors,
Speaker 1: and we've seen certainly investors pull back when it comes
Speaker 1: to China overall of just not knowing do the rules change,
Speaker 1: especially if you're investing in a business.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and you know, and and there was this,
Speaker 3: you know, in the in the moment when the book
Speaker 3: is said, there was this rush into uh into Russia
Speaker 3: by a lot of businesses McDonald's and Procter and Gamble.
Speaker 3: There was there was One of the impetuses for me
Speaker 3: going over in the first place, in fact, was there
Speaker 3: was you know, the Russian people had never seen much
Speaker 3: of anything of American products. And I learned about a
Speaker 3: convention that was going to happen where all these companies
Speaker 3: like Procter and Gamble and Unilever or whatever, We're going
Speaker 3: to show stuff like toothpaste and deodorant, and you know,
Speaker 3: and and I an enormous convention center where there was
Speaker 3: all these you know, typical displays of all these little things,
Speaker 3: and just mobs of Russian citizens coming in and just
Speaker 3: with bags and trying to grab everything that they could.
Speaker 3: But all those companies wanted to go in because they
Speaker 3: they were anticipating that the economy is going to open up,
Speaker 3: there's going to be this hunger for Western may products,
Speaker 3: but also that there was going to emerge out of this,
Speaker 3: you know, the Gorbachev era, something that was more predictable
Speaker 3: and stable than you know, under the whims of the
Speaker 3: former Soviet premiers, that could just basically, you know, order
Speaker 3: anything to have happened, right, and that was what was important.
Speaker 3: And then you know, and then it all fell apart
Speaker 3: when another sort of dictator like figure came into power
Speaker 3: and shut that down.
Speaker 4: You know, you say you're not a political expert, You're
Speaker 4: more an expert in business. But I'm still going to
Speaker 4: ask you some questions about the politics, because you absolutely
Speaker 4: understand it. We had it on the program a couple
Speaker 4: of weeks ago.
Speaker 2: David E.
Speaker 4: Sanger from the New York Times. He's got a new
Speaker 4: book out called New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's invasion
Speaker 4: in America's struggled to defend the West, and he argues
Speaker 4: that you know, we didn't the West didn't see coming
Speaker 4: post the collapse of the Soviet Union what we see today.
Speaker 4: We were busy fighting, you know, this war on tear,
Speaker 4: And in the meantime, China's has the Belton Road initial
Speaker 4: around the world, and Russia is coming back with its
Speaker 4: plans for an empire once again. And I'm wondering if
Speaker 4: you see any similarities now in twenty twenty four to
Speaker 4: what you saw what we saw before the fall of
Speaker 4: the Soviet Union, Like if there is sort of a
Speaker 4: new kind of axis forming right now between Russia and China.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, it seems like to me like the
Speaker 3: opposite of what was happening back then. Right, I mean
Speaker 3: there was this, there was this moment in time and
Speaker 3: again it's like it's almost like it's so different now
Speaker 3: that we almost can't believe that it actually was happening.
Speaker 3: But the in the if you grew up in the
Speaker 3: nineteen eighties, there was this thing called the Iron Curtains, yeah,
Speaker 3: which was impenetrable, right, it was, and it was all
Speaker 3: those Eastern European countries. It was a Soviet Union. China
Speaker 3: was a closed nation essentially to the West. So there
Speaker 3: was this entire part of the world that wasn't even
Speaker 3: part of the global economy.
Speaker 2: But is that happening again, that seems to be we're returning.
Speaker 3: That's what there was this, Yeah, So there was this
Speaker 3: moment in time that was mostly contained in the nineteen
Speaker 3: nineties really between China and Russia and the Deng Jumping
Speaker 3: Area era in China, when it seemed like all of
Speaker 3: that was this. I mean, this was the era when
Speaker 3: the idea of globalization was birth, because there was this
Speaker 3: moment in time when it seemed like the whole world
Speaker 3: was going to play together. And if the whole world
Speaker 3: was going to play together, then there was this prospect
Speaker 3: for a kind of global piece that was never possible before.
Speaker 3: And in the late nineteen nineties that was sort of
Speaker 3: the that was sort of where we were, and the
Speaker 3: economies around the world were absolutely booming, you know, and
Speaker 3: that was the whole dot com move in the US,
Speaker 3: and the markets were going crazy. And to me, what
Speaker 3: marked the end of that was nine to eleven. Suddenly
Speaker 3: it just was like this this wayake up call that
Speaker 3: the world was not playing going to play together, and
Speaker 3: you know, and then we started to see things roll
Speaker 3: back in Russia and China through the two thousand and
Speaker 3: twenty tens, and we are we've kind of moved back
Speaker 3: to that era when there was this entire part of
Speaker 3: the world that was operating separately from the rest of US.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's kind of fascinating. I do feel like,
Speaker 1: you know, some of the alliances. We've talked a lot
Speaker 1: about kind of the Middle East, and I'm lumping a
Speaker 1: lot in there, but just kind of the amount of
Speaker 1: money that's coming out of the Middle East and going
Speaker 1: into so many different areas, whether it's business, whether it's renewables,
Speaker 1: whether it's sports, and just that how countries, United States
Speaker 1: and others are picking when to look away because of
Speaker 1: the money involved, or they needed the need for an
Speaker 1: alliance versus when to say, wait a minute, something's not here.
Speaker 1: It's just it's an interesting time to say the least.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and you know the And there's another sort
Speaker 3: of sad thing about this too, is it that?
Speaker 1: And just got about forty seconds last.
Speaker 3: That I'm not rush because I was. I've always written
Speaker 3: about technology, and so one of the things I sought
Speaker 3: out in Moscow in the late eighties and early nineties
Speaker 3: were these little startups that were starting to bloom. And
Speaker 3: there were so many smart, incredibly talented, like software people
Speaker 3: in Russia at the time, and there was this seed
Speaker 3: of what could have been a global tech industry that
Speaker 3: came out of there that just got snuffed and either
Speaker 3: the smart people that had those ambitions came to the
Speaker 3: US and set up in Silicon Valley, which a lot
Speaker 3: of them did, or they just sort of disappeared and
Speaker 3: that never materialized.
Speaker 1: Right like what could have been right, very different. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much. This is what we were I was
Speaker 1: hoping we could do with you, so thank you so
Speaker 1: much for five times really appreciating that awesome Kevin Maney,
Speaker 1: we said New Times best selling journalist and author his
Speaker 1: book Red bottom Line