Full transcript: Bill Browder on London Real
2:34 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Bill Browder, the investor, author and political activist often referred to as the number one enemy of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Your fund, Hermitage Capital, was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005, when you were denied entry to the country for exposing corruption in Russian state-owned companies. In 2009, your Russian lawyer, Sergey Magnitsky, was killed in a Moscow prison after exposing a 230 million dollar fraud committed by Russian government officials.
3:03 Since then, you have successfully lobbied governments all around the world to impose visa bans and asset freezes in your global campaign to target human rights abusers and corrupt officials. Your latest book, Freezing Order, is the New York Times bestseller recounting your story of Russian money laundering, murder and surviving Vladimir Putin’s wrath. Bill, welcome back to London Real. I’m really glad to be back. Thank you, great to have you here.
3:28 It’s been almost five years since you were here last time. You had just had your first book out. And you were about to start some of the adventures that you found out here, including going to Madrid and being picked up by Interpol. I remember last time you were here, Bill, and you would not accept a beverage from me, and I think I asked you about that, and I think I started to see get a glimpse into the life you might lead, or you’re maybe always worried about something bad happening to you.
3:57 And maybe we start there, and then we can go into what happened between Madrid. But how often is something like that on your mind? You did accept a drink from me today, I noticed. Well, since I actually knew you since five years ago, I met you. You didn’t poison me, so I, you know, I took the offer of the tea here, and I’m pretty sure that I’m going to be okay after this.
4:19 I mean, is it, you’re joking a little bit, but do you kind of like to meet people at first, or are you, I’ve got to be super careful I can’t just be, you know, drinking and eating and going meeting with people I don’t know, and so on. So you know, everyone has to be vetted, but you know, you’ve proven yourself to be a not a Russian assassin, so okay. I’m good. All right. So guys, I always want, I even told the guys today to just keep your eyes peeled.
4:42 That’s what I said. I said just keep your eyes peeled. I don’t want any random cleaners or inspectors coming here, and I just told them that, and I’m just thinking, well, that’s what I’m thinking, and I have to worry about this one day every five years, but this is something you’re probably constantly thinking about. So well, it becomes kind of like an instinct. I mean, it’s not, you know, if you do the same thing, if you stay vigilant for long enough, it just becomes, it’s it’s, you know, you’re vigilant without having to, like, be vigilant.
5:08 In other words, you know, it becomes a habit. You know, I do certain things as a habit. I don’t do certain things as a habit. I have a whole protocol, which I’ve mastered, and it’s worked so far. I mean, I, I mean, you know, knock on wood, but 13 years after I started this fight with Putin, and he really wants me bad.
5:27 I mean, and there’s, you know, it’s not just me saying it. I mean, we’ll talk about it today, but there’s a huge amount of objective information about how angry he is at me for all the trouble that I’ve caused him. And so, here I am, 13 years later, I’m still alive. I mean, that’s a huge accomplishment. I think it is.
5:46 Why hasn’t he been able to get you? Do you think? Well, I think in the past he wanted to get me one specific way. He didn’t want to, he didn’t want to use novichok or apartment bombs or something like that, because what he really wanted more than anything was to get me back to Moscow, torture me, and get me to retract all of my allegations about the murder of Sergey Magnitsky, the whole Magnitsky story, in an effort to somehow collapse the Magnitsky Act, which is the legislation which freezes assets and bans visas named after Sergey Magnitsky.
6:24 He really doesn’t like that legislation. He he thinks that somehow getting me to, you know, make some statement on TV after having been tortured for 20 hours, then they can kill me after that. But he wants, he wants that. That’s his, you know, he has this fantasy of of getting me to retract the Magnitsky Act. Okay.
6:46 And that maybe keeps you a little safer than if you just wanted to poison you. Here, which after we talked happened in the UK. He sent two guys over, and they poisoned someone. So, and it’s happened in Russia, and it’s happened all sorts of places. I mean, and there’s a number of poisonings that we don’t even know about.
7:03 I mean, these guys are, there was a whole crew, I mean, like a big crew of Russian, uh, a secret policeman living abroad conducting assassination operations all over the place and succeeding. And so their big goal was to use what I call legal means. Legal means. Um, getting, using, arresting me through Interpol or through an extradition request, getting me back to Moscow, torturing me, putting me on television, and then killing me. Right?
7:37 Okay. And then, and then to say to the West, you know, guys die in prison all the time. Okay. So that’s a bigger payout that he was holding out for. You have sources that told you that?
7:47 Well, but more importantly, um, if he had killed me, I would have just become this international martyr, and he’d, you know, there’d be sanctions and all this kind of stuff. Right? Um, everybody, you know, knew the Magnitsky Act. All these politicians knew me. It, that wouldn’t have achieved his objectives better than what he had cooked up.
8:05 Okay. All right. And are you learning what it’s like to deal with, um, a man like Putin? I was about to say, even a Russian way of doing things, and is there a Russian way of doing things? I mean, when they poison people, they use a specific poison that’s traceable.
8:22 It’s almost like they’ve got their signature on it, so they almost say, look, I did it without maybe it being provable. You know, is it, do they play a game a little bit different than, say, the West plays? Um, well, they play their own game, which is, um, they, so Putin historically has done what all this sort of um, asymmetric, plausibly deniable, you know, talking out of one side of his mouth saying, I’m a killer, talking out of the other side of his mouth saying, it wasn’t me.
8:51 That’s his modus operandi, and the West doesn’t do that. I mean, we’re not conducting, you know, poisoning operations all over the world. That’s a Putin thing. That’s not a West thing. Right?
9:01 He uses that asymmetric warfare, so whatever resources they use, it’s a form of, it’s a bit of a form of terrorism. Right? You can use something that has an asymmetric effect. You could argue that’s what’s happening in Ukraine right now, as well, or they have a little bit of poison, they go here and do that, and it causes this asymmetric effect on the world in the form of fear and terror, and it’s also probably putting fear into the oligarchs as well. Well, so Putin’s whole big thing is that he’s gotta be the scariest guy around.
9:29 That’s how he, uh, that’s how he succeeds. He, we’ve seen him to be kind of, uh, incompetent. I mean, you know, his war machine, you know, we thought the Russian military was the second most powerful military in the world. Well, you know, I don’t think that. I think that the Poles could probably, you know, deal with them in an afternoon.
9:48 Um, you know, they’re probably like number 13 in the world. Um, but you don’t have to have the best military in the world if you’re just a crazy guy like Putin and ready to do anything, and going around, you know, it’s kind of like a guy, you know, walking around the neighborhood, you know, with a knife, and just, you know, everyone just wants to avoid him. That’s sort of Putin’s big thing, is like, to say, you know, I’m the guy with a knife in the neighborhood.
10:11 You said one time that it’s not enough just to be the richest man in the world, which you contend that he is, but he’s got to be the scariest guy in the world. He’s got to be the everythingiest guy in the world. Exactly. In order to hold power in a place like Russia, or in his mind, to hold that power. Yeah.
10:26 And that’s how he’s done it. He’s, I mean, it’s Russia. It is not an easy place to hold power. Yeah. I mean, it’s a big country.
10:31 There’s a lot of people, you know, a lot of nasty people, just as nasty as him, wanting, you know, a bite at the apple. I mean, he’s the richest guy in the world. You know, other people want that. Um, and the only way to do that is to just be so scary to so many people that everyone’s like, you know, I don’t want to mess with that guy. Also, I was watching House of Cards recently, and there’s this, you know, fictional scene where the Russian president comes over, and he’s talking to, you know, the president, and he says, we don’t, we don’t, our presidents don’t retire here.
11:02 Is that a real thing in Russia, where, I mean, they have had presidents retire? Gorbachev, you know, died of old age, but when he leaves, I mean, it’s very dangerous for him, potentially. So when he wants to stay in power, is he fighting for his life sometimes? Yeah, I think you’ve hit the crux of everything that’s going on. So, you know, in theory, um, that he could leave power like anybody else, but he’s stolen so much money, he’s taken so many people hostage, he’s Killed so many people.
11:32 He’s just, he’s responsible for so much crime that if he ever were not to be president, he would be prosecuted. He would be stripped of all this wealth and fortune that he’s created, and he’d probably die and he’s a paranoid little man who needs to stay in power to stay alive for the rest of his life, and that explains everything that we’re in involved in right now. That, why, why did he invade a foreign country? He doesn’t have any beef with Ukraine. I mean, if you were to objectively just, just ignore all rhetoric that he said, is it not the breadbasket of Russia?
12:14 Does he not have to keep NATO from coming in and encroaching? Are there not some reasons, not justifying the war, that he’s doing that? Well, so, but let’s look at all these. So, um, NATO so while this has been going on, Finland and Sweden join NATO. Far more menacing than Ukraine.
12:31 I mean, they are real militaries. I mean, the, you know, the Finns could, like, you know, give Russia a run for their money any day. Um, is he going to war with Finland and Sweden right now? This is just pure smoke screen, hype to justify something much simpler. You know, to use another analogy, Wag the Dog.
12:52 So this is a Wag the Dog war. There’s no beef between Russians and Ukrainians. There’s some Nazis in, in Ukraine. The Zelensky is Jewish. Um, it’s absurd, and so if he really wants to create a, you know, uh, uh, Russian empire, um, you know, there’s a lot easier places that we don’t care about that he could be, um, going to, but he um, uh, he, he wanted a war.
13:22 He wanted a war, and he chose Ukraine, and he and they started conducting, this whole, you know, Nazis, fascist, blah, blah, blah, back in 2014 to justify, uh, invasion of, of Crimea. And by the way, there’s a great chart which explains everything. If you look at it, it’s Putin’s approval rating over time, assuming you believe it. But, but for the, for the purpose of this argument, let’s just say it’s true. Every time his, his approval ratings start to flag, in 2008 he goes into Georgia.
13:55 Yeah, it starts going down again. 2014, uh, Crimea. Starts going down again. 2022, full-on Ukraine. It’s just purely war is a strategy and a tactic for him to get everybody behind him.
14:12 And by the way, it’s also really good for him to get, get rid of all these pesky journalists and, you know, get rid of Facebook and Twitter and all this, the stuff that, that, like, just makes life difficult for him, and he can just, like, have a message, um, that, that he spreads around through his state media, and and nobody knows any different. Right? Clean house. Uh, never let a good crisis go to waste, and he creates one, and they can use it to clean house and get rid of all, you know, all, all the intelligentsia who didn’t like him.
14:46 They’re all gone. Yeah. Um, and so he’s got a sort of much more passive, docile population that’s ready to put up with whatever he’s got going, so he can stay in power. Okay. And Wag the Dog refers to that, to that famous movie where they created a war as a media event.
15:04 So was it other dealings that the president, people wouldn’t focus on those? They would. There was some kind of embarrassing thing going so they created a war with a fake country or something like that. Right? Okay, so he’s done that here, and it’s working for him, because his approval is back up 85.
15:17 Right? And you said before that this war doesn’t get settled either, Russia wins or Ukrainians win, but Putin will not come to any kind of treaty or treatise, because that’s not part of the game plan. Well, so everyone always asks me every day, what’s the end game? And they’re all hoping they’re all reading Putin’s speeches and thinking, well, you know, he says something about NATO, and he said something about, you know, wanting this done. Bass, why don’t we just give him NATO and give him Donbas, and then everything will be solved, and we all can all go back to our, but that ignores the elephant in the room, which is that that’s not why he’s doing this.
15:51 And so, first of all, you know, we can’t give him Donbas, because that’s a ridiculous why should he get that? Why should he be rewarded for an aggression? But, but secondly, he’s not going to stop there. He just keeps on going and going and going, because the purpose of this is to be at war, and and so he has no incentive. So whenever there’s a quote negotiation, he puts out some unreasonable terms, knowing that no one was ever gonna agree to those terms.
16:19 He doesn’t need, he, he can’t have a negotiation, because if he negotiates and stops, then the whole purpose of this thing has disappeared. He looks weak, right, which means approval ratings drop, and ultimately it ends in his loss of life in some scenario earlier than he wanted it. Right? Well, he wants, you know, he’s 70 years old. He wants to go until he’s like 90 years old or whatever.
16:41 Yeah, and again, you said that scenario earlier, if some of the presidents get elected and he stays in Russia. He’s finished, and he’s got nowhere else he can go. So there’s no good end game for him. None, even an optimistic one. The next ruler of Russia is going to find some way to get rid of him, and they’re very good at that, there.
16:57 Right? And if he can’t flee because there’s just nowhere for him to go, maybe because North Korea, you know, uh, yeah, or Saudi Arabia, but that’s not what he wants. I mean, and then after a while maybe they won’t want him there. No, of course not. They’re going to want to have good relations with somebody, and, you know, he’s a prize.
17:13 He’d be a prized hostage to hand over for, uh, you know, good treatment somewhere else. Okay. So understand the motivation, and then you can understand. Yeah, when I see some of the announcements coming out, it’s like when you’re here in North Korea negotiating, it’s like it’s all nonsense. It’s like, first, a grain deal, then there’s no green deal.
17:28 North Korea is like, oh, first we’re going to do this, now we’re gonna do this. They have one trump card, and they keep playing it over and over and over again, and if you believe anything they say, it’s the joke’s on you, because they have one end game, and that’s always that end game, and they feed you little bits of, you know, talking points in the meantime to get you going here, and here, and here, and there, and, and we’re also steeped in our own sort of Western values, that we think that he’s dealing the language, you know, we, we think he’s like us. He’s not.
17:54 He’s a, this guy is like a, a full-on psychopathic killer. You know, his heart doesn’t start beating faster if some, if, if a child was being tortured to death in front of him, he, he would feel nothing. He’s, he has no empathy. Um, no conscience, no moral boundaries. Um, and so we can’t look at this guy and say, he said this, and this in this speech, he, he said this, that must be what he’s trying to do.
18:22 And by the way, all the people in Washington, all the like policy experts, political scientists, are all, all sitting there reading his speeches and looking for hints about what he’s doing, and then, like, reporting to their bosses, this is what they’re trying to do. Let’s make a policy around this. Um, you know, you can’t be a political scientist, um, to deal with Putin. You need to be a criminologist to deal with Putin, right? But the only guy that rules Russia for 20 years, and out of the situation he found it, is that guy you just described, right?
18:51 Is there any other guy that can do that? Um, he’s, he’s the guy. Yeah, did you, is it, I hate to say this, does that country need a psychopathic ruler? Is it that crazy over there? You spent a lot of time there.
19:04 No, it doesn’t need a psychopath. You look at the history of Russia over 500 years. My dad read this one time, and he said it’s just a repeating cycle over 100 years. You could say that about most countries. Well, it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s I mean, Russia has got a particularly bad past.
19:16 I mean, they had the tsars, they had communism, and then they had this, and, and it’s, you know, there were like 10-year periods where things were kind of like okay. A lot of it’s the geography, right? I mean, it’s a, you know, it’s a tricky thing to keep together. I think that’s a myth. I think, really, I think it’s a myth that’s a tricky.
19:33 I mean, you know, Canada’s got a big geography. Yeah, really, it’s got a, it’s, I mean, it’s huge. I know, but, you know, this geo, this geopolitics involved in that whole region, and it seems to repeat itself on a regular basis. You know, I think that they just have had no tradition of, like, you know, non-murderous um dictators. Okay, cause or effect?
19:53 That’s the question, but either way, we’re here. You say Putin’s the richest guy in the world, and most people would say no. Bill, that’s Jeff Bezos. Can you talk to me about why you believe he’s the richest man in the world, and how he got to be that wealthy, and, you know, this, because you spent time in Russia creating wealth yourself, four and a half billion dollars at one point from basically nothing, and so you saw how it all worked. I was wondering if you could just give us the quick version of how that happened.
20:19 Well, so Putin comes into power, and um, he sees these oligarchs who are all rich, and he says, why am I a little guy and they’re all the big guys? And um, and so what does he do? He arrests the richest oligarch in Russia, he puts him in jail, and everyone said, oh no, he’ll be out of jail in two seconds, no way. A rich guy can stay in jail? And they sent him to 10 years in prison.
20:43 Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the owner of Yukos. Yeah. They stick him in jail. All the other oligarchs are saying, oh my God, this is serious. And they go to Putin and say, um, you know, what do we have to do so we don’t go to jail like that guy?
20:55 He said, it’s real straightforward. 50 percent. And by the way, if you don’t want to go with the 50 percent, I’ll just take 100, and you go to jail. And so how do you get that number that you said? Because I remember you told me this last time you were here, Bill, and you were the first guy that ever just put it flat out like that.
21:12 Putin has 50 percent of all the oligarchs’ wealth in some type of contract between those two? Well, it’s not, it’s not a written contract, because it’s a, and it’s a contract that he can only enforce if he’s a president. Right? Right. And so which means you have to have approval ratings.
21:27 So, yeah, he doesn’t need approval ratings. He just needs to control the place with all of his, um, strongmen and so on. I mean, approval ratings are helpful, right, so that people don’t rise up. That’s sort of his, you know, that’s his insurance policy, but the main insurance policy is, is actually he has guessed how many, um, uh, presidential guard members there are in Russia? Just throw it, just give me a while, throw essential guard members.
21:55 Um, this is like a secret service type thing, like an equivalent? Yeah. I mean, I guess the president in America, I’m just saying, probably doesn’t have as many as you think. There’s probably a hundred or something. Um, I don’t know, 500,000.
22:05 500,000. 500,000 people are working the Russian presidential guard. I mean, it’s a, so. And why does he have so many? Because he wants to have his own army, so his, so if the army ever goes against him, he’s got.
22:19 And these people are better paid, more, more luxurious accommodations, everything, either, like, the crème de la crème. And by the way, they’re not sending them as cannon fodder for the front line of Ukraine. These guys are there to protect Putin. Um, 500,000. 500,000.
22:34 He’s very smart. He’s bad at almost everything except for securing his own safety. Okay. What’s, okay, what’s he bad at? He’s bad at armies.
22:44 He’s bad at governing an economy. He’s bad at, I mean, Russia, Russia had every advantage in the world when he started. The West wanted them to succeed. They had a highly literate population, more literate than America, a fully installed industrial base, natural resources coming out of their ears. If this had been managed properly, 22 years ago they could have been a country like Germany or Japan.
23:09 But instead the size of the Russian economy is the same as the state of New York, and it’s just his total and absolute criminal mismanagement. I mean, it’s negligence of a scale you can’t even imagine. I mean, you know, when I grew up in the 80s, and you know, the Rocky movies were happening, there were two superpowers in the world. It was Russia and America, and that’s the way we thought it would probably be for 50,100 years. Now you could argue now that Russia will never, ever be a superpower ever again, and all they have is their natural resources, and they’ve come to squander every other opportunity to be leaders in technology, to be leaders in any other kind of innovation.
23:43 I mean, it’s a country blessed with everything. They’re blessed with natural gas. They’ve turned off the natural gas to Europe. What, so the Europeans are going to say, okay, you can turn it on, we’re going to depend on you from now on? No, of course not.
23:55 The Europeans are going to say, we’re going to find, um, secure forms of gas in perpetuity from somewhere else, and so the Russians have built all these pipeline networks and everything, and they’ve lost their main customer. I mean, you can’t, you know, having natural gas means nothing if you can’t sell it to anyone. Yeah. They may be able to sell it to Chinese, that’ll take them another 15 years to build those pipelines. Um, they’ve got all these super smart computer scientists.
24:19 Do any of them stay in Russia? No, they’re all, they’re all going out to California, where they can actually, like, start companies, and they won’t get stolen from them, right? Or they won’t also be conscripted that way as well. Indeed. The people in Russia, I mean, they’re not, they can’t, they’re not stupid.
24:32 They have social networks. They have technology. How do they buy into all of this when they can see their country not going to where it should go? A lot of them don’t buy into it. I mean, if, if you were to survey, you know, people between the ages of 18 and 30, like, I don’t know, four years ago, before all this really nasty stuff started, um, I think some, a majority of them wanted to immigrate to the West.
24:52 I mean, it’s obvious. There’s no, there’s no um, you know, mystery about it. But anyone who’s in Russia, you know, is chanting “Long live Putin,” because you’re not allowed to say anything other than that, and they’re scared, and there won’t be a revolt because he’s got the security locked down completely there, and you know, he’s probably figured out how to, how to, like, you know, read people’s faces for disloyalty, and even if it’s, like, you know, even if it’s, if it is just face disloyalty, machine.
25:19 I’m just making this up, but even if it was, you know, wrong 20 percent of the time, he’ll just kill everybody, and just in case anyone’s, you know, that 20 was, you know, so what if the, if 20 were loyal? I read a couple years ago they were installing the face recognition cameras in the Moscow subway system to make it easier to do the fares, and it was just fascinating to realize that it was also a great way to spy on people. And of course everything they do is spying on people.
25:46 Are they as good as the Chinese are at that? No, they’re bad at everything, you know, they, but they still do it, or try to do it. Yeah, well, they do it for different reasons, so they’re not, I mean, they’re spying. Yes, I mean, they, they have all this information on how they process it. Is you know, that you’ve got a bunch of C students from D universities with no motivation that are, you know, reading all the feeds coming in, trying to figure out what to do with it.
26:07 So they’re not very good at that stuff. They have it all. Okay. Chinese are much better. All right.
26:12 I want to finish with Putin, then I want to get into the book, and then a little bit more of the Magnitsky, because it’s important to maybe talk about what you did and the effect it’s had and the effect it will probably continue to have in the future. Um, how does this end game play out, like, if you really had to think about it and think 10 years ahead? I mean, what’s the most likely scenario that happens here with Putin, with Russia? If you look 10 years ahead, maybe 30 years ahead, maybe 50 years ahead, what do you actually think is going to happen?
26:36 Well, I think that this war is not going to end anytime soon. So a year, two years, five years, this could be like the Iran-Iraq war. You know, could go on for eight years. You could have a million dead on both sides. That’s the kind of war that, uh, that we’re looking at right now.
26:53 Um, how does it end? Um, it ends either with Ukraine winning or Russia winning, or some stalemate where eventually everybody just completely runs out of steam to do this, which is going to be a long time in the future, maybe after Putin is gone. Our nuclear weapons going to be used? Probably, probably not, just a veiled threat? I don’t think so.
27:12 Putin would do anything. I mean, he does such outrageous stuff. He just does all the time, and um, so and, and, and he’s thinking, okay, he’s gonna go and lob a nuclear bomb over some part of Ukraine, um, and he’s thinking, what are we going to do? I know, or are we gonna, like, no, we’re not gonna enter into a nuclear war with Russia over that. That’s what he’s thinking.
27:36 And we probably won’t even attack. I mean, because we don’t want to be at war with Russia. Yeah, so he’s thinking maybe then he’ll demoralize the Ukrainians into surrendering because he kills a million or two million Ukrainians. Is that the scenario of what might happen? Easily it could happen.
27:52 So he puts a low-medium-level nuke in there, it kills that many people, makes it radioactive for the next few hundred years, and then he says, look, America did it in Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Why are you getting so mad at me? And then the whole world is outraged, and then do nothing. Yeah, that’s what that’s, that’s his, uh, right. Just like the world’s been outraged before and done nothing when atrocities happened all around the world.
28:14 Rwanda, you could even say Nazi Germany. People knew. You could say these atomic bombs. You could say even now. So everyone’s outraged, but then no one’s going to do anything, because the US is not going to go in and start a war, and I don’t think any European nations are, and it’s really tragic.
28:31 It’s hard to watch, isn’t it? It’s horrible. It’s horrible to watch, and it’s so close. I have a do a little bit of breakdancing, and I know a breakdancer, and, um, he’s in Ukraine, and his Instagram every day is giving updates, and he’s like, it’s Monday morning, and this is when we get bombed by the Russians. And I know you don’t care, because you’re sick of hearing this, and this is something that happens every day, and a year ago he was just a guy that was dancing in his country and known around the world, and now he posts these messages, and it’s literally happening across the border from Poland, in the EU, right here while we all go about our business, and these drones are coming over and dropping these things that look inhuman to kill people, and we’ve got a potential nuclear missile going in, and that’s probably, it’s plausible, you know.
29:19 I mean, it’s more than possible. It’s likely. It’s likely, I know. And that’s something I probably agree with you. The fact that this is happening in 2022 is yeah.
29:27 It’s hard to believe. Yeah, there’s one guy. It’s one guy, it’s one guy. So I didn’t, how does this play out? He dies of old age, this war continues?
29:36 Well, so if, if, if the Ukrainians can continue the trajectory they’re doing a pretty good job on the battlefield. Um, I mean, they’re highly motivated. They understand that if they don’t win, then they get tortured in prison. Their women are raped, their children are stolen, their communities are destroyed, and so they have, you know, for them, I mean, there’s that, that’s a real motivation to fight in a battle, so they’re really motivated to fight, and we’re giving them a lot of tools to fight.
30:06 We’re giving them a lot, but we’re not giving them, we’re giving them just enough to not hold the Russians back, but we’re not giving them enough to succeed, and we could actually end this war ourselves. The West, America, basically, the United States. The United States is, they’re giving them arms but not enough, and they would admit it if you go to speak to someone in Washington, the high level in the US government. They’ll tell you that they’ll say, you know, we don’t, you know, we don’t want to, you know, they’re kind of afraid of what happens if Putin loses, because that would, we are, because that would upset him, and he might come after us, or if he loses, they’re afraid of what’s going to happen.
30:43 Why, they just think, you know, it’s probably better just to leave this at a low level, not to, um, not to, not to poke the bear. Like, always this has always been the appeasement, uh, strategy of Russia. Nobody wants, everyone’s afraid of this guy, and he’s done a great job of, you know, he creates, you know, 90 of his power is because we acknowledge him as being powerful. Okay. If we get rid of Putin, does it get worse?
31:07 Well, how does it get worse? From, to, I don’t know. You have a guy threatening nuclear war. How’s that how could it possibly be worse? This is a big myth that Putin has created.
31:15 So, you don’t think it gets worse? This is as bad as it gets? I mean, it could get much worse because he’s going to make it much worse, but it’s not like another guy is going to be worse than Putin. He’s a monster. But the US won’t, won’t arm, they won’t arm the people to win.
31:28 You’re saying they won’t? At the moment they won’t, but, but what’s interesting about the U.S. approach to this is, like, every time the Russia does something more atrocious, we give them better arms. I mean, we could have just given them better arms from the start, right? And we could give them the better arms they need right now. Before, you know, yes, we would probably give them the long-range missiles they’ve been begging for.
31:46 After the first nuclear attack, but they should get that long-range missiles now, so maybe avoid the first nuclear attack. Right. I can’t believe that we’re actually talking about a potential nuclear attack that’s going to go into the environment and leave yeah, we’re all going to have to take iodine here, and we’re all going to be watching, and like, just with our mouth, our jaws on the floor, when, you know, half a million Ukrainian people have been decimated by a nuclear weapon that Putin launches.
32:11 It’ll make Chernobyl look like just a blip. Okay, um, yeah, this is scary stuff. Um, super scary. All right. So then this keeps going on, and then sooner or later.
32:22 I mean, Putin can’t last that long. 30 years, he probably can’t last. Well, so, so what happens eventually is, so if, if, if the um, uh, war, were, if the Ukrainians were to succeed in this war, the Russians have no patience for a weak strongman. You can be a strongman, you got to be a strong, strong man. You can’t be a loser strongman, right?
32:42 And so the Russians will come and take care of him very quickly, which is one of the reasons why he’s so desperate to keep this war going. Um, so that’s one scenario, and if that scenario happens, then the whole system breaks, and any, anything good can come from a broken Russian system. There are some good people in Russia. Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin. Those are all sitting in jail.
33:07 These are all opposition people who stood up to Putin, who could form the next new, non-war, pro-Western oriented government. Okay. Um, or you could have a situation where Putin drops dead in his bed tonight, and the next guy that takes over in, you know, in a highly organized transfer of power is some other monstrous character who’s just as bad as Putin. Right? Okay, so these are both scenarios.
33:32 Let’s talk about the economic sanctions that are happening now because of the war, and also the Magnitsky Act, and how those are related, and maybe briefly, what Magnitsky was all about and the effect that it had on Putin, on oligarchs, on everything. Well, let’s start with the third question to work our way into the first. Okay, so the Magnitsky Act was named after my lawyer, Sergey Magnitsky. It was passed in the United States. It freezes assets and bans visas against individuals who do terrible things.
34:02 So, this was something. It sounds pretty obvious. If someone does a terrible thing, freeze their assets and ban their visas. How hard could that be? How, you know, and no one’s going to vote, like, you know, if you, if you, if you vote on that law as a senator, you’re not going to lose a vote in any constituency in America.
34:20 Really obvious. But it wasn’t so obvious when I went out and started to work on this thing. You know, the previous sanctions have been just, like, you know, we stopped selling to that country. Um, and I said, well, wait a second, why, why, why don’t we just, like, pinpoint, target, surgical strike against the individuals, and everyone said, yeah, that makes sense, and, and the more I talked, the more it made sense, and we ended up getting it past 92 to 4 in the U.S.
34:42 Senate, and 89 in the House of Representatives. Are we surprised it passed with that much of a majority? No, it was obvious. It was like motherhood and apple pie. So it’s a no-brainer.
34:52 It’s also government, but, uh, all right, it’s a no-brainer. And then, and then in Canada, we got it passed with 100 percent, and, um, you know, on and on and on, and that it now exists in 35 countries, and I was going to all these places and giving speeches in parliaments and meeting members of the government, and so on and so forth, and, and softening the ground, explaining to them why it’s a good idea, and they all did it. And so, the moment that Ukraine happened, instead of having to, like, everyone’s like running around like headless chickens, what’s our policy?
35:22 I said, wait a second, let’s use this thing. We have this template. Let’s, let’s go after the individuals. I mean, there’s a lot of other things going on in terms of response to Ukraine, but this was one of the main responses. Let’s go after the oligarchs who hold Putin’s money.
35:35 Let’s go after Putin and all the people around him. Let’s target their assets. Let’s freeze their assets, and we’re now even talking about seizing those assets. And this was a direct result of the Magnitsky Act. It was, but it wasn’t the Magnitsky Act per se.
35:50 No, so the Magnitsky Act was the template. They called the Ukraine something, something act, but, um, but it’s all this, it’s all the same exact template. It’s all the same basis, and, and, um, everybody, and, guarantee you that if I hadn’t spent 10 years going around and explaining to every member of parliament in every country that this is the way to do things, we, everyone there’d be like 15 different policies about how do you respond to Russia economically.
36:17 Is it fair for us to see the assets of individual Russians for an act that Putin does in Ukraine? Yeah, because they are holding assets for Vladimir Putin. Is that provable? Is that provable in a court of law? Well, so if, if you can show that these people have benefited, have gotten those assets from Putin’s largess.
36:37 I don’t see any reason why, why that, um, that’s not. I mean, yes, it’s provable in theory. I see that it’s just. I saw very quickly a lot of assets seized in London and all around the world, and I don’t know, it’s I could see why people wanted to do it, and I could see it in theory, but I also wondered, was there due process there? Well, you can take them to court and say, okay, where did you get your money from?
36:58 But they seized it first. It was like ask questions later. No, this happens all the time. If you, so if let’s say that that’s, um, uh, you and I were in a business deal, and um, and then you ripped me off, and, um, I could go to court without you being there, here in London, proper legal system, and I can get what’s called an ex parte freezing order, and and I would tell a judge, this guy ripped me off, um, I want to freeze his assets because he’s going to abscond, and you need to freeze him before he absconds.
37:27 And that’s a perfectly reasonable thing, and then you can come back to court and say that’s not true, and we can argue about it. That’s the same, same thing that the governments have done. Everybody, all the oligarchs have an opportunity to go back and say, yeah, I’m not a friend of Putin’s. I didn’t do this, and you should unfreeze my assets, and then you can have a proper discussion in a court. But you know, these guys would, and we’ve seen him you know, we go after an oligarch and they’re like, literally hightailing it on their yacht, you know, out to the high seas, to try to protect their yacht from being frozen.
37:56 Right? But why didn’t they do this before the invasion of Ukraine? Because the oligarchs didn’t know this was going to happen. Okay, but you know, you see where I’m going with this. I mean, it took Putin going to war with Ukraine for them to come in and now say, all right, we’re seizing your assets.
38:11 Why didn’t we seize their assets before? Oh well, we should have. We should have seized them when Russia invaded Georgia, or when Russia took Crimea, or when Russia carpet bombed Syria, or when Russia poisoned people in Salisbury, or a million other things that Russia has done so horribly. But we were all, everybody was so narrowly, all these politicians were all putting their blinders on, and so narrowly focusing on Russian gas or Russian investment, or just not wanting to rock the boat, that everybody gave Putin a pass for 22 years.
38:40 Is there any backlash, or will there be a backlash, from all the seizing of Russian assets on the back of this war? Well, I think there’ll be a backlash if that money is not converted to paying for Ukraine. Okay, so you’re happy it happened. You wish it would have happened sooner, and it’s, it’s, it’s doing the right thing. It’s sending the message back to Putin and everybody associated with them that this is not okay.
39:04 Well, more than that, it is saying, Putin, we’re going to starve you of your economic resources, right? We’re gonna, we’re gonna make sure that wherever we can, where we have power over it, uh, you’re not going to get that money. What percentage of his wealth is gone now? You think from the seizing, still a small percentage? Nothing’s been seized yet.
39:19 It’s all just been frozen. Well, all right. Frozen, then. So 350 billion dollars of Russian central bank reserves have been frozen, and then we also have 350 billion. 350 billion.
39:29 We’re located in other central banks, correct? So when the Russian, when the Russians want to hold euros, they hold it at the European Central Bank. Okay. 350 billion. 350 billion.
39:38 What do you reckon Putin’s worth? I, I think that Putin, well, it’s hard to know. You know what’s Putin’s and what’s what’s the Russian state’s? You know, yeah, to guess. I mean, you thought it was 200 billion a few years ago.
39:49 Yeah, I mean, I, I haven’t done a calculation. I don’t want to like throw a number out here today, but, but it’s a lot of money. You know, it’s like hundreds of billions. Yeah. Okay, all right.
39:57 So this is 350 billion of just the state reserves, a lot of money, and, and then, and then what we have, we’re just getting started with the oligarchs. I mean, you know, the, the, I think about 40 or 50 billion of oligarch money is frozen. Just Abramovich, just by himself, has seven billion frozen in Jersey, and another seven billion frozen in the Cayman Islands. That’s 14 billion just one guy. Do you have any sympathy for Abramovich?
40:22 No. He’s a, he, the whole, his whole, yeah. How did he make his money? It was just through, you know, back-slapping, good old boy stuff in Russia. Are you shocked that it took the West this long to take action against these billionaires that have traced around the world and bought football clubs in London and mansions in Chelsea, that this long they let it go on?
40:42 It’s terrible. It’s just terrible. All right, so the chickens have come home to roost, to a certain extent, over the past few months. Yeah. Is that maybe a, I hate to say that, but a good thing about the Russia-Ukraine war is it finally, there’s, there’s no good thing about the Russia-Ukraine war, but finally these oligarchs are being held accountable, and they maybe they never would have been.
40:59 Well, I mean, finally we’ve all woken up to how evil Putin is, but the trouble is that, um, we’ve woken up too late. We had enough. We had an opportunity to tie him up tight, to contain him, a long time ago, to create really serious consequences, a long time ago, where we might not have ever been facing this situation. Okay, and we just blew it. This was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you know, he started doing bad stuff in 2008, when he invaded Georgia.
41:26 Right? But it’s like pulling the Band-Aid off. Nobody wants to, what were you going to do, though? You couldn’t go in, you couldn’t, you couldn’t go to it. You do exactly what we’re doing right now.
41:35 You could have, you know, seized their assets all over the world. Um, supply weapons to the Georgians, let Ukraine into NATO, and, you know, not have any of the stuff. Okay, so it’s a continuation. It’s the same story. It’s just that the West doesn’t do enough until it’s too late.
41:55 It’s what you’re, and it’s, and this has happened in so many different situations in history. I mean, you know, in World War II, it’s the same thing. Is this because of our four-year election cycle in America, or is it just the fact that, is this the fact that everybody wants to just not have trouble? Okay. All right.
42:12 I guess I could see partially a reason for that. Um, so the assets have been seized. The percentage of Putin’s wealth is now seized and frozen, but it’s not enough to slow him down, and he only has one choice anyways. Well, so here’s the elephant in the room, which is that, you know, we’ve frozen 350, of central, 350 billion in central bank reserves. We’ve frozen the oligarchs.
42:32 We’ve got, uh, you know, sanctions on Sberbank and VTB Bank and all this kind of stuff. All good. On Gazprom and um, but one of the things we don’t do is we continue to buy Russian oil and gas to the tune of a billion dollars a day. So, I mean, if you think about it as a businessperson, we’ve dealt with his savings. The savings are all tied up.
42:57 I mean, he doesn’t have easy access to his savings. So the balance sheet is not in a great shape. But the income statement, you know, he earns a billion dollars a day and he spends a billion dollars a day killing Ukrainians, and as long as the West continues to buy a billion dollars a day of oil and gas, he can run this murderous war into perpetuity. Can the West afford not to buy that gas and oil? Yeah, because I think there’s other people who can buy oil and gas from.
43:28 And, but there’s one possible saving grace from this whole thing, which has nothing to do with any government policy, which is we’re going into a nasty recession. Interest rates are going to go up farther than anyone will be comfortable with. All of a sudden your mortgage will be double what you thought it was, before triple, and at the same time, they’re not, they’re probably not going to raise them high enough to contain inflation, so everything will be expensive, and as a result of that we’re going to go into a recession.
43:55 And what happens during recessions? The oil price drops. And if the oil price were to drop to 30 or 40 dollars, which is entirely possible in a nasty recession, and he’s pretty much out of business. There’s a great book about, uh, Reagan’s secretary of defense. I forgot the name of it, but he was going around the world trying to lobby to get the oil price down and talking to the Saudis, because they knew every dollar it dropped, it was making Russia weaker and weaker and weaker, and that’s what crushed them.
44:25 Right? Was ten dollars a barrel. Yeah. You know, it wasn’t Star Wars or anything like that. Yeah, it was.
44:30 Yeah. And so everything always comes back to money. Right? Isn’t that crazy? And so Magnitsky, maybe just to finish out on that.
44:38 You know, you started doing this in ’09, got it approved in ’12 and ’14, kind of in America, in Canada, and then, so America was 2012. Yeah. Global Magnitsky Act in 2016. Okay. Canada in 2017, UK in 2018, European Union in 2020, Australia in 2021, and, um, and then a whole bunch of little countries in between.
45:03 Is this your full-time job? Yeah. Okay, and how, what’s your metric of success of the Magnitsky Act, and how would you explain it to, uh, you know, an economic student or a political science student, the freshman year at Stanford or Chicago? How would you explain this case study? Was it more effective than we ever imagined?
45:22 Was it extremely effective? Will it become more effective? Have the problems? Well, so, the basis behind this is really simple, that if somebody, if a terrible person with no morals, um, and no respect for the law, is given a choice, you can do some terrible stuff and benefit from it, make money, whatever, um, nothing will stop that person from doing terrible things if the person is then faced with the benefit or the reward of doing something terrible on one hand, and a possible huge sanction, which will destroy their lives, on the other hand.
45:59 And then there’s a, you know, a weighing that goes on in their mind. And so the Magnitsky Act is all about creating a terrible consequence for a person who’s thinking about doing some atrocity. And at the moment, the Magnitsky Act now exists in a lot of places. It’s starting to be used, not aggressively, but starting to be used. About 500 people and entities are sanctioned in the United States, but in order to make this truly powerful, it’s got to be used in like 20,000 cases.
46:32 Why 20,000? Because at that point people will start to think, bad guys will start to think, you know what, it’s just not worth it, because I can make all this money from torturing these people or whatever, but I’m not going to be able to spend it, because it’s all going to be frozen, and I’m not going to be able to travel anywhere, and the probability is high that that’s going to happen. And so my goal is to get this piece of legislation in place and get it used, so that the probability of these bad guys, of these dictators and kleptocrats, you know, getting into trouble is so high that they, or the people below them, just don’t want to act on their orders.
47:07 And, um, then it becomes an unbelievably powerful instrument. Okay. So it hasn’t, uh, hit scale yet, as they say in Silicon Valley, no network effect yet, but you’ve had some serious success with it, and maybe you have been surprised at how effective it is? I think the world has. Well, first of all, I mean, the probability of getting a law passed in the United States is zero.
47:27 You could, I mean, you could win a 750 million dollar lottery more likely than getting a law passed. I mean, it’s just, you know, to have a guy like me just show up and and get a law passed, and to get a law passed in 35 countries, I mean, it just doesn’t happen, right? And and so yeah, this is, like, so far beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. But you know, I, I don’t sort of say, wow, I’m really good, Bill. You know, that I did this.
47:52 I, I’m saying, okay, now what? So now we have this. How can we make this really super powerful? And so, uh, you know, I just, I’m looking ahead, not behind. Can I ask you a question?
48:01 You you spent most of your life as an investor, you know, as a guy that was fascinated by Russia, obviously. I have a whole interesting family history from Russia, on the Communist Party, and you went there to make money, to take capitalism there, and you were very successful, and you had ups and downs, and you saw the inside of the system. But you were, what I used to do in the City. You mean you made money, and you made a lot of money for your investors, but for the last 15 years, you know, you’ve been a legislator, our lobbyist, doing a whole completely different thing.
48:34 How, how do you do that? Do you miss being an investment banker, an investor, a trader? Not, not as, not, not for a split second. I mean, this, this is so much more satisfying, what I’m doing now, but of course it’s much, you know, I, I have the luxury of not having to worry about um, you know, feeding my children and paying for their, uh, schools and stuff like that, because I was a successful investor, and so, I mean, if one can plot out a life where you make some money and then go and do good, it’s, it’s much easier than just trying to do good from the very beginning, because, you know, a lot of times you have to make all sorts of compromises if you just try doing good and you don’t have any money.
49:14 And I don’t have to make any compromises. And, um, uh, but it’s hugely satisfying. I mean, it’s like, you know, uh, I, I look at my, my friends who were my peers in the finance world, who are still doing exactly the same thing, and I’m thinking, you know, you have no idea what you’re missing by doing something truly meaningful. Yeah, I, I have the same feelings sometimes about my friends in finance that I left. Uh, yeah, it’s, it’s, look, it’s, it’s a certain, it’s a great thing to do for maybe a certain time in your life, but if you’re doing that later in your life, I definitely feel like you’re missing out.
49:49 And even you see people like Ray Dalio, who have done that now, actually transitioned to where they just want to pass knowledge and teach, and all these kinds of things. So I’m glad to do that. I should say there’s nothing wrong with it. I mean, and I loved being an investor, and it was really interesting and fun and challenging, and, you know, a great, it’s like a great game, but the game gets boring after a while. Right?
50:07 So you were kind of forced into this, and the situation was dropped on your lap, and your good friend, you know, was killed in a Russian prison, but it was also the time maybe for you to make this transition, and you went with it. Well, yeah, so I mean, if, if so, if I, if this, if this terrible stuff hadn’t happened to me, if I hadn’t been expelled from Russia and Sergey Magnitsky wasn’t killed, I might still be doing the same, the same exact thing that all my compatriots are still doing. And so, I mean, I make norm judgment about them doing it.
50:36 I would probably be doing the same thing, but I was, you know, life circumstances forced me into a life where now I have a life of, you know, fighting for justice instead of fighting for money. Do you miss things about Russia? I miss a lot of things about Russia. I mean, the people in Russia, in, so Russia, um, you know, we have a very superficial world in the West. You know, you have a beautiful conversation with somebody at a dinner, and they say, make all promises, and do all those things, and then you never talk to them again.
51:04 In Russia, if you have a real, if you have a friend, that friendship, you know, you almost, if you have to have a real friend in Russia, you, you almost can’t. You don’t have time to have a job, because friendship is so demanding, because the friendship is so real. I mean, the relationships in Russia with the people with, with your small circle are so much more profound than, than any, anything I’ve ever seen in the world. And I still have in my team the people who worked at Hermitage.
51:33 Um, long after we all stopped doing business, we all now are fighting for justice, and I’ve got people, uh, my colleagues, have been with me for 20, 25 years, just doing this stuff, because we’re also, you know, glued together as, as bonded, as, you know, in camaraderie, and and you know, and brotherhood in this, in our, in our mission. Yeah. So you still have friends that are Russian? Absolutely. Yeah.
52:00 I love Russian people. Do you hate Putin? Well, hate means it gives them some, some respect that I, I don’t think he deserves. I mean, I’m I consider him to be a menace. I, um, I, I don’t really feel hate.
52:16 I, I just feel like, um, you know, he, you know, he’s like nuclear waste. He needs to be, you know, taken out of this equation. Do you think he’s taking his focus off you for a little while because of what he’s dealing with in Ukraine, or will you always have a little space, special place? Oh, I’ve always got a special place. He, he hates me.
52:36 You should hear when he, when he mentions my name. You can just see him spluttering. You see his forehead, it’s, you know, furrowing up. He just hates me. Um, and he hates me because, you know, I, I am, I struck him back and caused him pain, and, and that’s, and he, and that, to allow that to happen to allow some nobody to strike him back.
52:59 It’s a terrible, sends a terrible message to everybody else in the world. If everyone else did the same thing I did, he would, he would, he would be nowhere. Right? You hurt him more than any single person in the world ever could, maybe even more than a country could. Well, at this point I think Vladimir Zelensky has hurt him more than I have, but, um, before that, probably yes.
53:19 Okay. You had a moment, I think, three or four years ago where President Trump was talking with Putin, and your name came up, and maybe you can explain the story, but it seemed that it was probable that you might be involved in a prisoner exchange after your first book, and you thought, well, that’s all behind me. Can you explain what happened, and how you felt at that time, and what you thought might happen? So this was July 2018, after you left here. After you left here, life got really exciting.
53:49 I hope that, I hope this is not a harbinger for no. So, uh, July 2018, I, um, uh, I’m in Aspen, Colorado, for the summer, where I’m trying to write my first, my second book, and um, the summit is taking place on a Monday morning between Putin and Trump. The previous Friday, Robert Mueller, who was investigating Russian election interference, had indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers, and so the obvious question at the summit was, um, will Russia hand over these 12 military intelligence officers?
54:28 So the two presidents have a meeting, a secret meeting. I should point out there was no, there was no National Security Advisor, no Secretary of State, no, no takers, just the two of them and one of Putin’s guys. They have some conversations that nobody knows what they talked about for four and a half hours. They then emerge to the joint press conference. Putin’s looking just like he owns the place.
54:53 Trump is a little hunched over, and one of the journalists asks Putin, are you going to hand over the 12 Russian military intelligence officers that were indicted by Robert Mueller? And Putin smiles. He’s been expecting this question. He’s been preparing for it all weekend, and says, yes, it’s entirely possible that we would, but we would expect some reciprocity and goodwill from our American counterparts, and specifically we would expect them to hand over Bill Browder.
55:23 Me. And so, um, you know, it’s one thing. I mean, you know, so, uh, of the seven billion people on the planet, I’m the guy he’s calling out, which was pretty horrifying. To surprise you, it didn’t surprise me. I mean, it horrified me but didn’t surprise me, because he has been chasing me all over the world since the Magnitsky Act was passed.
55:49 He, um, he, uh, ate Interpol arrest warrants, extradition requests, London lawsuits, surveillance, death threats, all sorts of nasty stuff, and mentioning me in all sorts of public occasions with his forehead furrowing up with anger, so that it upset me. It didn’t surprise me, but what did surprise me is what happened next. So the obvious follow-on question was to President Trump, and one of the journalists said, uh, Mr. President, what do you think of Putin’s offer?
56:21 And without skipping a beat, he said, I think it’s an incredible offer. And that did surprise me. The most powerful man in the free world offering me to Putin, who wants to kill me in a Russian prison. And it took Trump four days to walk it back, and it was only when the Senate arranged a vote, which was gonna, where they voted 98-0 not to hand me over, that, um, that the deal didn’t go through. That went to a vote on the Senate floor.
56:56 Yeah, they were going to hand you over, allow them to question you, or what? Well, we don’t know exactly what the what the mechanics were of the whole thing, but, um, yeah. That’s scary, horrifying, and you’re no longer an American citizen. So I’ve been living in London for 33 years, some British citizen, right? But I was living, I was in America at the time that this happened, so they could have handed me over, right?
57:20 Um, and that was Trump, with not a lot of political experience, trying to curry favor with the Russians, perhaps in an offhand comment that might have gotten you deported and beaten to death in prison. How do you respond to something like that? Well, I, um, I, I mean, the, there was some upside to the whole thing, which is that, um, all of a sudden the world wanted to know, who’s this Bill Browder and what’s the Magnitsky Act? And so I got the world, you know, educated on those things, which, which was helpful.
57:51 I mean, you know, more people knew about the Magnitsky Act, and and it was shortly after that that, um, uh, you know, other countries passed the Magnitsky Act, and so, you know, sometimes when life makes, gives you lemons, you make lemonade. And, uh, uh, how do you personally react? Do you get scared? Do you stay up at night? Do you watch your back?
58:09 Do you panic? Do you freak out? Or, I don’t, I don’t do any of that stuff. Okay, I um, I compartmentalize. I deal with the problem, I get it dealt with, and then I switch to a new compartment and deal with whatever, and do whatever I’m doing.
58:24 You always have, or you learn to do that now? 13 years of this, you learn to do that. Okay, but at first it was very emotional. Oh my God, it was terrible at first. Right?
58:33 You know, when I was thinking, when I was, and, and then I was sitting in bed, you know, staring at the wall, um, thinking about, you know, what it’s going to be like when I’m in a Russian prison and they’re torturing me. Right? You open up red notice, and you’re in Moscow airport, and you think it’s all over. They hold you for 15 hours. A question.
58:50 We talked about this last time you were here, um, and you’re thinking, why was I ever, why did I ever even think about coming back? And they release you, and you’re like, oh my gosh, I got out. Yeah, and that was probably your early days of getting used to a lot of this stuff, but this stuff would continue after you left this studio. In March of ’18, two months later, you’re in Madrid, and they grab you. You tweet out something from the back of the taxi.
59:15 Who has Interpol grabs you, instructed by Russia, I believe, and you’re off to another adventure, sure, of potential panic. That’s how you open up the latest book. Yeah, I, I, it wasn’t a taxi. I was in the back of a police car, arrested by the Spanish National Police on an Interpol warrant from Russia, and it was only because I had my phone and I tweeted it out that it created such a, a storm of indignation that they uh, the Spanish realized that they didn’t want to walk into this mess, and they released me.
59:48 So saved again by Twitter, this time, but that could have easily gotten you right back to Russia, and once you’re back on Russian soil, it’s over. Yeah, we’ve already been convicted and tried and sentenced in Russia. Finished, 18 years, and 18 years, 18 years. Right? Not to mention the extra bonus stuff you get when you get back there.
1:00:04 Exactly. So you were saved by a tweet again. How do you manage that adrenaline dump? Well, at the moment it was happening, I was, like, right in there, but I wasn’t panicking. I was tweeting.
1:00:15 You know, um, you know, I, uh, you have to think on your feet when this kind of stuff happens. Yeah. Wow. And so the, la, then, and then the last four years have been you negotiating these kinds of ups and downs, obviously getting the Magnitsky Act all around the globe. Um, dealing with some very interesting situations.
1:00:33 On the book, you talk about, you know, various ways they’re trying to get at you, including, you know, a very amusing honeypot tale in Monaco, where, um, they try to trick you I guess, uh, with a, a very attractive six-foot-tall woman, and see if you’ll buy into that. Well, but I was, I was smart enough to realize that, like, why would this, like, smoking hot, um, six-foot-tall model, um, you know, be so interested in this five-foot-nine middle-aged, balding businessman? You know, and what happened?
1:01:02 What was the situation like, just for people to know? In case, oh yeah, it was crazy. So, um, I, I was in Monaco specifically because there was a major political conference there. It was called the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The OSCE was having their annual meeting in Monaco.
1:01:18 Normally they do it in, like, Birmingham or, you know, Istanbul, but they’re doing it in Monaco because Monaco is a member of the OSCE. So I wanted to go there, and this is back in 2012. I wanted to present the um, Magnitsky Act to members of parliaments from other countries, because we were just getting traction in America, and so I show a movie about some of the characters that were involved in Magnitsky’s the crime that he uncovered, and his murder, and so and so forth, and, and um, and then, um, somebody at the end of the movie, some Belgian Member of Parliament, said, are you coming to the, uh, party tonight?
1:01:53 I said, no, where is it? He said, is that the Le Méridien Hotel on the on the water? And so I say, this is a good opportunity to meet some more parliamentarians from different countries, and so I go to the Méridien, and um, uh, I’m talking to different people at the cocktails and having, you know, good conversations, and I hadn’t eaten all day, and so I, there’s a buffet, and it looks quite nice, and so I go and stand in line for the buffet, and I grab my plate, and the, you know, roll of the, with the linen napkin and the fork and stuff, and I feel something bumping into my back, and I move forward because somebody’s bumping in, and I feel bumping in again.
1:02:32 Another turn around, and there’s this beautiful girl standing behind me, and she starts talking to me, and her name is Svetlana, and, uh, and she says, what are you doing here? As I’m here to, you know, uh, talk about human rights. Oh, human rights is so interesting. Now, what do you do? Uh, well, I’m, I’m normally, I’m normally involved in fashion, but, uh, but I’m really interested in politics as well.
1:02:56 Oh, and, um, anyways, I, I’ve just been like talking. I didn’t want to, and she’s Russian, so I obviously don’t want to talk to her, and so I, I kind of, uh, leave her, and, um, uh, and if she asked for my, my, um, uh, or no, so, so that then I, um, uh, uh, I’m talking to some other members of parliament who are at my movie screening, and, um, she comes up to this conversation, and, and, um, we all have a talk, and then the, the MPs who were the movie screening said, can I have your card? And it’s like, hand my card to this one in the, handi- or the other, and then she’s standing there wanting, like, with her hand out for my card, and then I handed my card to her anyways.
1:03:39 I finished up talking to all these people. I go back to my hotel, and, like, within, like, 10 minutes I get this email from Svetlana, you know, um, and it says William on my business card. Dear Mr. William, um, you know, would you like to meet for a drink? I, I thought we had such a good connection. Um, we didn’t have a connection.
1:03:59 Um, and so I just ignored it. Um, and then, like, an hour later I get another email, you know. Dear Mr. William, um, I can’t stop thinking about you. And I’m, I, at this point I’m just laughing, because it’s just like, you know, you are charming, though, I mean, it’s ridiculous. Okay, just ridiculous, and, and she can’t stop thinking about me, but come on.
1:04:21 If they were really, if they’re really going to do a honeypot, wouldn’t they, you know, choose a non-Russian and not have her name be Met Lana, or, uh, they just do stupid stuff. It’s like, totally, you know, are they really not that creative? No, it’s just like total Boris and Natasha hair-brained schemes. That’s what it is. Just, you know, that is what it is, because when I saw the poisoning incident here in the UK, and I looked at it, it was just like, these two Russian thug dudes checked into a motel, and then they went out there, and I looked at the tradecraft, and I was like, this is terrible, and this is, this is the crème de la crème of their assassination service.
1:04:54 Okay, so, uh, that’s, that’s how it works. That’s how they do it. That’s how they do it, and, and by the way, I was when I finally understood what was going on. I was terrified, because not because of Svetlana, but because if they, if they were like sicking her on me, then they were aware that I was there, and God knows what else they’re gonna do. It’s like, I hightailed it out of town after that whole incident.
1:05:13 And you’re a high-tailing tradecraft is pretty good. Like, you kind of, you’re good, you’re pretty good at that. Yeah. You have training on that stuff? Well, let me tell you, the whole industry of security is just a total hocus- pocus nonsense.
1:05:26 Um, you know, the best training is, um, thinking through, you know, if you actually have a real situation, you figure it out, really, and you figure it out quick. Yeah, because you said, uh, bodyguards offer fake security. The real security comes from having your enemies know nothing about you, that’s right, or taking into your own hands and making decisions. Yeah, which is what you did. You got up early that morning.
1:05:48 You took a taxi the other way to the town. You saw no one was following you, and you went back to the airport, right? If you have a bodyguard, first of all, that’s a potential security breach right there. Right? Like you know, next week he’s going to work for the other guys for twice the price, right?
1:06:02 Which you found also happening with lawyers. Yes, with surnames of Moscow and things like that. Um, uh, you said in Red Notice, if I’m killed, you will know who did it, and when my enemies read this book, they will know that you know. Do you feel better knowing that the world kind of knows now, as far as what your situation is, or someone like Putin? He doesn’t care anyways.
1:06:25 Well, up until recently that helped me. Now he’s been sanctioned by everybody for everything, and so I think that it’s, uh, it’s really, you know, all restraints are off now. Yeah. What happens from here on out? If you want to chart your next five years, your next 10 years, what do you want?
1:06:45 What do you want out of the rest of your life? As well, like, I obviously, you’re pushing this forward, and you want to get it to 20,000 people, but like, what do you see? What’s 2032 for you? Like, if everything works out well? I don’t know.
1:07:00 I mean, at some point it would be nice to just relax. Yeah, yeah, because you don’t do a lot of that. No, because you’re always looking over your shoulder, or you’re always busy. Yeah. I’m just like, you know, I mean, I’ve got a mission, and, uh, but it’d be nice to relax at some point.
1:07:15 Okay, all right. And maybe come off the mission? Well, or to dial it back a little bit. Okay, well, dialing it back also protects your personal security a little bit if you’re less in the spotlight. Or would that always be something you have to be worried about?
1:07:26 Well, I think the personal, it’s like, look at, um, uh, Salman Rushdie. 33 years after the, um, after the whole, uh, you know, fatwa, they stabbed him, and he’s lost an eye, and you know, all sorts of other nasty, you see things like that. Does that not make you feel good? Can you compartmentalize that, or is that still a little, I mean, it made me feel bad when it happened, and I think about him, but I don’t, you know, but I compartmentalize that too. You know, you have to, you can’t just spend, you know, you know, you’d be a mess.
1:07:52 I’d be a mess if I was spending all my life thinking about all that stuff. Okay. And again, if ten years go really well for you, it’s every country in the world adopts the Magnitsky Act, and it’s been used now in such a way where it’s as common as RICO. It’s as common as something to where every gangster says, you know what, I’m just not gonna do that. Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping for.
1:08:13 Okay, or every corrupt person in politics, it’s usually government but not always business as well, just thinks, okay, there’s ramifications here, and I need to think twice. Yeah, that’s, that’s the goal. Hit him in their wallet is the big lesson here. Yep. Right?
1:08:27 And, uh, money is the root of all evil, and you can fight evil by fighting their money, right? And follow the money as well. So, book is Freezing Order. I’m guessing people can get it in all the booksellers, Amazon, etc. Are there more books coming as well?
1:08:41 Well, I hope not. Okay. It means you know I will have achieved my objective of dialing it back at some point, if there’s nothing else to talk to talk about. But, um, who knows? Let’s see, let’s see.
1:08:53 You seem, um, uh, in good spirits, um, much better than I remember you last time. Um, you know, maybe because you didn’t know who I was last time, but also, um, you know, you seem in good spirits. Maybe it’s because you’ve had some success, uh, with all this, and all of your work is being proven, which is great to see. One thing I wanted to say in closing is I noticed the last time you were here we published that episode, uh, our YouTube was attacked with crazy bots, and this is an 18 before bots were a thing.
1:09:22 Yeah, and um, we put your episode up on our comments, we’re like, 10x, and again it was a little bit of this Boris and Natasha stuff, because the comments were so lame, base- level slander and antisemitic comments and stuff. That’s like, if you really wanted to get someone to think, you know, to counter your arguments, they would do it at this level, and I was like, this can’t be a bought farm, because you’d have to be a little smarter than that. But, but no, that that’s the point.
1:09:52 It’s I mean, you know, it’s just that’s how they operate. They’re not good. It was fascinating, and I saw it all, and I was like, this isn’t my first rodeo. Like, I’ve been doing this for eight, ten years now, and I could see it all coming on your episode, and these stupid baseline things, and I was like, is this really how they roll? It’s like, they weren’t trying to dissect the money, and I went, looked at the comments now, and it’s like, oh, we know Bill, you’re in it for the money, and I was like, you know, like my grandma wouldn’t even do that, by the way.
1:10:18 So again, it was just, I wanted to say that because I noticed it, and it was kind of amusing, and um, yeah, look, Bill, I really appreciate, um, all the work that you’ve done, and um, you know, I know it’s been tireless, and it’s been really dangerous, and um, I’ve, I’ve gotten to see it on the ground and be a part of it as well, so yeah, I just want to say I appreciate what you do, um, and I appreciate the effect that it’s had, and um, just want to wish you, like, continued success on your journey. Thank you. All right, thanks.
