Ben Mezrich, THE ANTISOCIAL NETWORK:
[0:01]Hi, this is Vivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
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[0:35]Okay, now back to this amazing podcast.
[0:38]Ben Mezrich is the author of the anti-social network, the GameStop Short Squeeze,
[0:43]and the ragtag group of amateur traders that brought Wall Street to its knees.
[0:47]Ben is the New York Times best-selling author of the Accidental Billionaires,
[0:52]which was adapted by Aaron Sorkin into the David Fincher film The Social Network,
[0:56]and also Bringing Down the House, which was adapted into the number one box office hit film 21.
[1:03]He also wrote many other best-selling books.
[1:05]His books have sold over six million copies worldwide.
[1:09]Welcome, Ben. Thanks so much for coming on Moms.
[1:11]Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss the anti-social network.
[1:14]Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about it.
[1:17]Oh, I also love, by the way, that basically you infuse all of your stuff with your own parenting,
[1:24]and being a father, and from your profiles about you and trying to put eye jobs in your sons' eyes
[1:31]to, in this book, talking about Roblox and Fortnite, which I have kids too,
[1:35]and we are like a Roblox family.
[1:37]I like bought them all shares in the Stanstalk that I came out,
[1:40]because I'm like, you guys are going to fund the rest of this.
[1:43]Anyway, I really appreciate that element of your story.
[1:47]Yeah, my kids are central to everything I do,
[1:50]especially in the pandemic, because they're in the same room most of the time.
[1:53]But yeah, now they're 11 and 9.
[1:56]It's pretty, as you know, full-time, so all of my books have something to do with my kids,
[2:01]at least, since they've been around.
[2:04]Well, it's nice to hear. I think not all...
[2:06]I mean, not to make the sounds so gendered, but not all male authors do that.
[2:10]Not all women authors do either, but it's just very nice to see it from the dad's perspective.
[2:15]Well, thank you.
[2:16]So can you tell listeners who might not be familiar with the anti-social network,
[2:20]what it's about, and how you stumbled on this particular story
[2:24]and decided to make it into a book sort of in real time, as you did?
[2:27]Sure, yeah, the anti-social network is really about the whole GameStop drama
[2:30]that people remember back in January.
[2:33]You know, kind of at the height of the pandemic,
[2:35]suddenly this crazy stock GameStop,
[2:38]which is the company that we all know, some of us know.
[2:41]It's a video game store that's usually in malls
[2:44]that it doesn't really do very well as a company,
[2:47]but it's beloved by gamers and people like that.
[2:50]Anyways, for four days in January, the stock price just went insane.
[2:54]It went from a few dollars a share to $500 a share.
[2:58]It captured the news.
[3:00]It was basically all these people on Reddit.
[3:02]There's random people sitting on their couches
[3:05]who decided to try and beat Wall Street by buying up shares of this stock
[3:10]that a Wall Street firm was shorting,
[3:12]meaning a Wall Street firm was betting that stock would go down
[3:15]and everyone gathered together and decided,
[3:17]we're going to make this stock go up.
[3:19]And it ended up being very revolutionary.
[3:21]In my mind, it really changed how Wall Street has to look at things from now on.
[3:25]And I got involved.
[3:27]I was sitting at home and I was watching this happen
[3:29]just like everyone else.
[3:30]I was stuck at home during the pandemic and still am.
[3:32]And I've always been into penny stocks and sort of gambling.
[3:36]I've written about Vegas and Facebook and social networks.
[3:39]So it kind of fit what I do.
[3:41]And I started getting emails and phone calls and people were like,
[3:44]you've got to write this story.
[3:46]And so I dove in and this happened so quick that I was writing it while it was happening.
[3:50]And here we are, I don't know, six, seven months later in the book is out.
[3:53]So that's kind of nuts and abnormal.
[3:56]But that's how I got in.
[3:57]That's kind of the story.
[3:59]That's so crazy.
[4:00]Yeah, I do know about shorting stocks.
[4:02]I went to business school.
[4:03]I took a few things away.
[4:05]So I do know what you mean in that regard.
[4:07]So when a story is happening in real time like this and you were at home,
[4:10]like, how did you go about covering it and knowing you were doing it in such a unique way?
[4:15]Like how, like, did you just start calling people?
[4:18]Like, how do you just like jump in and do that?
[4:20]So my normal way I write a book is I really dive in.
[4:24]I get to know the characters.
[4:25]I spend time with them.
[4:27]I'm on the phone with them.
[4:28]I'm usually a novice learning something.
[4:30]So I'm not a Wall Street trader.
[4:31]I don't really know that much about banking or, or, you know, clearance or all of this
[4:36]things that go into how Wall Street works.
[4:39]So I dive in.
[4:40]And because of the pandemic, it was not as in person.
[4:43]It was Zoom calls, but really I reach out to everyone in the story.
[4:46]And then I start watching, you know, YouTube because the main characters,
[4:50]this guy who called himself floor and kitty, who made hours and hours of these
[4:54]YouTube streams.
[4:55]So I watch every one of them and I get to know as much as I can, getting sources
[4:59]for a story like this, you know, can be tricky.
[5:01]And, you know, a lot of people don't want to talk to me because I wrote the book that was the social network.
[5:06]And they're all afraid of being Zuckerberg.
[5:09]What people do want to talk to me because they want to see themselves in a movie.
[5:12]And a lot of my books end up being movies.
[5:14]So it's a mixed bag of whether people will talk to me or not.
[5:17]But, you know, I dove in and I started, you know, all day, all night for the first few weeks,
[5:22]trying to get all of my sources and information.
[5:24]But then I just started writing because, you know, a lot of it was news stories and
[5:29]things that were happening live.
[5:30]There was this congressional hearing in the middle of it where all of the main
[5:33]characters met face to face for the first time over Zoom.
[5:37]So to me, that was a very central scene in the book.
[5:39]So I really just watched it as it was happening and it was writing as it was happening.
[5:43]It's a crazy kind of moment.
[5:45]But, you know, when people read the book, they'll see.
[5:47]I think it feels very intense because it really was happening while I wrote it,
[5:51]which I think is unusual.
[5:53]Yeah, absolutely.
[5:54]No, you can tell, you know, the edge of your seatness of it all.
[5:58]I also read, bringing down the house like forever ago.
[6:01]And well, I shouldn't say forever ago.
[6:03]I can't remember what year that came up, but I read it.
[6:05]And then I had, I've had it forever.
[6:06]So I should do 2002, yeah, made myself.
[6:10]But the movie was 2000 and I think seven.
[6:13]Yeah, I didn't see the movie, but I did love the book.
[6:16]So way back in the day.
[6:17]So I've been sort of following your career ever since then.
[6:19]And now I think it's so neat.
[6:20]You're doing a Charles Dickens serialized book.
[6:23]What is that about?
[6:24]Tell me about that.
[6:25]Yeah.
[6:25]So the Boston Globe called me up.
[6:27]This was again in the height of the pandemic.
[6:29]And they said, you know, when you do a serialized novella for us.
[6:33]So basically put a chapter up a day.
[6:35]So this ran last spring and it ran for 20 days.
[6:40]I wrote a chapter a day.
[6:41]And it was, it was like a DaVinci code style thriller.
[6:44]It takes place in Boston because back to revolutionary times.
[6:47]And it really worked.
[6:48]We had a quarter million readers by the end.
[6:50]It was one of the most successful things in the globe.
[6:53]And so a movie company and publishers came to me.
[6:56]And then I developed it into a full-size novel.
[6:58]And it's going to be a series of novels.
[7:00]And the first one comes out in February.
[7:02]And it's going to be a movie.
[7:03]Spielberg bought it.
[7:04]Oh, my God.
[7:04]So it's really cool.
[7:06]It's called, well, in the globe, it was called the mechanic.
[7:09]But it's going to be called the midnight ride.
[7:11]And so it's it's my first attempt at a fictional thriller of that sort.
[7:16]Like DaVinci code style.
[7:17]I'm hoping people like it because I really loved writing it.
[7:20]And I would love to write more of these.
[7:21]So that comes out in February.
[7:22]But yeah, that that's a fun one too.
[7:24]So I've had a busy, busy.
[7:26]I mean, my gosh, you know, this is why the kids are on Fortnite and, you know,
[7:31]I feel bad because I know it's wrong.
[7:38]But it's like, listen, they're learning a lot about how to hunt things down in Fortnite.
[7:43]You know, I actually think there's a lot of value to Minecraft, honestly.
[7:47]I think that spatial relations and I mean, that is, they're like building full-on houses.
[7:52]And that has, you know, with the antisocial network and Bitcoin billionaires in the book.
[7:56]So they're right, I'm writing about this transformation
[7:59]and how we're moving online.
[8:00]We're moving digital and I'm watching it with my kids.
[8:04]I don't know if you know it's just, but my son would rather buy an outfit
[8:08]for his Fortnite character than buy something real.
[8:12]So true.
[8:13]What about NFTs and what is this as ridiculous or dogecoin?
[8:17]I look at my kids and I'm like, to them, it makes perfect sense.
[8:20]Yeah.
[8:21]Stuff is just as valuable as reality.
[8:24]And so it does segue into the way I wrote what I write about because I'm watching it
[8:28]happen real time.
[8:29]They're living virtual lives now.
[8:31]And as much as it makes me nervous, I have to say, this is the future.
[8:35]Just like that.
[8:36]Yeah.
[8:36]When people say, like, you know, screens are bad.
[8:39]That's so, I mean, part of it, and my older son is 14.
[8:42]Like a lot of his social life this summer was with his friends who don't live
[8:46]where we live, but he would be like playing video games with them.
[8:49]And I know video games are bad, blah, blah, blah, but like they were
[8:52]socializing all day.
[8:53]Like how is that so wrong?
[8:55]I mean, is that so different than me being an Instagram?
[8:59]I mean, they're like, you know, this, I don't know.
[9:01]This is a screen.
[9:02]I don't know.
[9:02]I mean, yeah, I mean, just stuff to say, but I do think that we're in a new world now.
[9:07]And that's part of what I'm trying to chronicle with these books.
[9:09]My mother was trying to bring my older daughter to go buy like some dress for the holidays
[9:14]or something.
[9:14]And she's like, well, I think I'm going to take her to Bloomingdale.
[9:16]And I'm like, Bloomingdale.
[9:18]I'm like, she doesn't shop there.
[9:20]You know, she's never even, I don't think she's stepped foot in Bloomingdale.
[9:22]I was like, I can't believe Bloomingdale is frankly even still in business at this
[9:26]point, right?
[9:26]Like what on earth?
[9:28]And she's like, no, it's fabulous.
[9:30]We'll have lots of options.
[9:31]And I'm like, mom, kids don't shop at Bloomingdale.
[9:33]It's like, yeah, yeah, it's different.
[9:36]Well, when my kids walked into Toys R Us for the first time when they used to be,
[9:39]they were so blown away because they'd all their shopping had been Amazon and
[9:43]things like that, but they did love it.
[9:45]So I do feel like there's, there's something real valuable about those
[9:48]stores.
[9:49]I hope they continue doing this.
[9:51]In the profile of you in the Washington Post, you said something like that you have
[9:55]had a bunch of doubles and one home run and that you're not a household name.
[10:00]And you're not like Michael Lewis,
[10:01]who you've sort of elevated to this, you know.
[10:03]My favorite.
[10:04]He wrote that.
[10:05]What did I say?
[10:05]Did I not say Michael Lewis?
[10:06]Yeah, Michael Lewis.
[10:07]My younger brother's favorite author is Michael Lewis.
[10:09]And every time I write a book,
[10:11]it'll be like, my brother will read it and say,
[10:13]you know, it's really good, but it's no Michael Lewis.
[10:15]So it's like, listen, I love Michael Lewis.
[10:17]I think he's an amazing, amazing writer, but it's true.
[10:19]I've had two home runs, you know,
[10:21]the social network and the movie 21
[10:24]was off of my book, Bring It Down the House,
[10:25]which was my most successful book, I think.
[10:27]But I've had a lot of, you know,
[10:29]singles and doubles and books that have, you know,
[10:31]made a lot of noise and stuff like that.
[10:33]And it's an interesting,
[10:34]it's an interesting world writing nonfiction
[10:36]because I think the difference between nonfiction
[10:38]and fiction is you can have a massive bestseller.
[10:41]But your next book,
[10:42]if the topic isn't something everyone's interested in,
[10:44]it will be more niche.
[10:45]And it's not that your audience will carry with you
[10:48]from book to book necessarily.
[10:50]They've topic based as opposed to fiction
[10:52]if you had a huge book.
[10:54]The next book would be huge as well
[10:55]because everyone's just reading you for the fiction.
[10:58]So it's a different type of writing.
[11:00]I think that's how I analyze it anyways.
[11:02]Yeah, I mean, I love what I do
[11:04]and I love the form of narrative nonfiction.
[11:06]I write, which a lot of critics, you know,
[11:08]they don't love necessarily.
[11:10]So I definitely, there will be some reviews out there
[11:13]that take aim at the way I write
[11:16]because I write it like a thriller.
[11:17]I want it to be like a movie.
[11:18]I'm very cinematic.
[11:20]And I see each story as if it's a movie in my head.
[11:23]And then I try and write it that way.
[11:24]So, you know, not all readers love the way I write,
[11:27]but I do have this core audience
[11:29]that seems to like it a lot.
[11:31]No, I love that style.
[11:32]I think it seems too.
[11:33]I think, you know,
[11:34]because you're really immersing yourself
[11:36]when you read a book, right?
[11:37]You're taking yourself somewhere else.
[11:39]So the more visual it is, the more you can be fully.
[11:42]It's like virtual reality for not on screens.
[11:45]It's essentially what we're all doing.
[11:47]It's all the time.
[11:48]We just don't have the...
[11:49]Exactly. I agree. I love it.
[11:52]And I've always thought, you know,
[11:53]there's multiple ways to write a scene.
[11:55]So I interview everybody in the scene.
[11:56]I figure out what they said.
[11:57]I get all the, you know, I go there.
[11:59]I take pictures.
[12:00]I know exactly what it is.
[12:01]And the question is, do I want to write it
[12:02]in an encyclopedic fashion where I basically write,
[12:05]this is what happened and write quotes and things like that?
[12:07]Or do I want to visualize it
[12:08]and make it seem like it's actually happening?
[12:10]And so I choose the latter.
[12:12]And so I really try and form the scene
[12:14]as if it really is a scene in a television show or a movie.
[12:17]And sometimes when people read it,
[12:18]they go, what actually happened here?
[12:21]And I think this is what happened.
[12:23]But it's from the point of view of all the different people
[12:24]where they are and I try and find the true line through it.
[12:27]So it's, you know, it's...
[12:28]My methodology goes back more to Michael Crane meets Hunter
[12:32]as Thompson than it does to say Michael Lewis,
[12:34]who would write the scene very differently than me.
[12:36]But I think there's space for different types of nonfiction
[12:39]out there, even if some reviewers in the New York Times
[12:42]don't think that.
[12:43]I mean, reviews whatever, you know.
[12:45]And I get some great ones too.
[12:47]I mean, it's a mixed tag, right?
[12:50]And the ones sort of the younger reviewers
[12:52]seem to love my work more than the older reviewers.
[12:55]That's what I have found in the past.
[12:57]It's just one person's opinion, you know.
[12:59]I think there are lots of more valuable metrics,
[13:01]which I feel like you're off the charts in.
[13:03]So, you know, obviously you don't have to worry,
[13:05]but how did you get started in this career?
[13:09]Yeah, so I wanted to be a writer for 12 years old.
[13:11]My parents had a rule.
[13:12]So I love television and I was always watching television.
[13:16]And my parents didn't want their three boys to watch TV.
[13:19]So the rule was in our house,
[13:21]you had to read two books every week
[13:22]before you were allowed to watch TV.
[13:24]And at the end of the week, my dad would actually test us
[13:26]because he had read everything.
[13:27]And so we would sit down at the end of the week
[13:29]and talk about the books we had read.
[13:31]And anything counted.
[13:32]So even an anime or anything counted as a book
[13:36]as long as it had writing in it.
[13:38]So by the age of 12, I knew this is what I wanted to do.
[13:40]So I basically started writing.
[13:42]And when I graduated from college,
[13:43]I moved into an apartment.
[13:45]And my roommate was Scott Stawsell.
[13:47]I'm on a Cascot, who runs the Atlantic Monthly.
[13:49]Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[13:50]Scott and I lived together in an apartment in Boston
[13:52]and just wrote.
[13:53]And we had crappy jobs and wrote and wrote and wrote.
[13:56]And I got very lucky and I sold my first book.
[13:58]I think I was 24 years old.
[14:00]And the book didn't, nobody read it.
[14:02]But I had six novels that came out year after year
[14:05]from age 24 to 30.
[14:07]And then the biggest thing happened.
[14:09]And it was kind of life-changing
[14:10]where I met this group of kids
[14:12]who were going back and forth to Vegas
[14:15]and had one millions and millions of dollars
[14:17]playing Blackjack.
[14:18]So I hung out with them.
[14:19]I started going to Vegas with them.
[14:20]And that turned into my first successful book,
[14:22]which was bringing down the house.
[14:23]So basically I wrote a book a year starting at age 24.
[14:27]And my sixth book was bringing out
[14:29]and it kind of exploded.
[14:30]And that's how I became a non-fiction writer.
[14:32]So I never set out to be a journalist.
[14:34]I never set out to write non-fiction.
[14:35]I've never been for newspapers.
[14:37]I'd never taken internalism class.
[14:39]I wanted to write thrillers.
[14:40]But the first one that was successful
[14:42]happened to be true.
[14:43]So that's kind of how it developed into that style.
[14:46]And I've been writing thrillers ever since.
[14:48]And I was fortunate also.
[14:49]I made a great connection to Hollywood.
[14:51]So that became a movie 21.
[14:52]And in the process, I became friends
[14:54]with a lot of producers and people like that.
[14:56]So from then on, when I had a story,
[15:00]I would write a proposal, send it and sell it
[15:02]and Hollywood first, and then write the book.
[15:04]And so for the past, I don't know, 15 books.
[15:07]I've sold the movies first and then written the book.
[15:10]So it's kind of a different process,
[15:11]I think, than a lot of writers out there.
[15:13]Interesting.
[15:14]But then you also wrote the book about the X-Files.
[15:16]It did.
[15:17]So that was back in my thriller days.
[15:18]I was almost moved into television
[15:21]although I never really wanted to write TV at that time.
[15:24]And the X-Files came to me and said,
[15:25]would you write a thriller for like a standalone book
[15:29]starring Mulder and Scully?
[15:31]So I wrote, I'd never been out of the country at that point.
[15:34]And so it takes place in Thailand.
[15:36]So I did it from a Felder's guidebook.
[15:37]And I wrote this thriller about Mulder and Scully
[15:40]called Skin About a Skin Transplant Gone Bad.
[15:43]And so this professor at Columbia
[15:45]gets a transplant from a murder.
[15:47]And then he starts murdering people
[15:48]and it turns out the skin comes from this monster town.
[15:51]Anyways, I wrote a book for the X-Files.
[15:52]Yeah, it's back in that gosh, 2000 or something like that.
[15:55]Sorry, I know, I'm like digging deep into your back.
[15:57]Oh, it's here.
[15:58]Sorry, you have an backless conversation.
[15:59]TV movie back in called Fatal Error,
[16:02]start in Antonio Sabbato, Jr.
[16:04]And Robert Wagner, it was TBS's first movie.
[16:08]And it was like, who, who, who, who, who,
[16:09]I remember there's a scene in the movie
[16:11]where Antonio Sabbato, Jr. leans over a patient's chest.
[16:14]And he goes, we've got a subdural hematoma.
[16:17]And my dad who's a doctor is like,
[16:18]you know, that's in the head, right?
[16:19]So the quality of the work at the time.
[16:22]So I was writing like pop thrillers.
[16:24]I didn't really know what I wanted to write.
[16:25]I just wanted to write.
[16:27]So my first six books were medical thrillers.
[16:29]And yeah, one was made into a TV movie called Fatal Error,
[16:32]which I don't recommend anybody.
[16:33]No, I will not.
[16:34]Go on Amazon, but it sits there.
[16:36]I'm in it for like five minutes.
[16:37]That's kind of funny.
[16:38]And then the X-Files, but then the Vegas kids
[16:40]just kind of changed my life
[16:41]and bringing down the house was a book
[16:43]and the movie was 21.
[16:44]And that leads us into the next phase of my career
[16:47]where I'm finding these true stories.
[16:49]Cause what happened was that book was read by like
[16:51]every college kid, it was one of the crazy huge books
[16:55]among 20 some things and younger.
[16:58]And so I started getting emails and phone calls
[17:00]from anybody who had a story.
[17:02]So like a lot of times from prison,
[17:04]but just tons and tons of stories were coming to me.
[17:08]And that's how the Facebook story happened.
[17:09]It was just two in the morning and I was sitting there
[17:12]and I got an email from a Harvard senior.
[17:14]And it was like my best friend founded Facebook
[17:17]and no one's ever heard of them.
[17:18]And it wasn't Zuckerberg.
[17:20]It was the other guy.
[17:21]And so I went out to a bar and he walks at Wardo
[17:23]and if you've seen the movie,
[17:24]the social network he looked kind of like
[17:26]Andrew Garfield and not quite as good looking.
[17:28]Yeah.
[17:29]The reality version of the movie.
[17:31]And he proceeded to tell me this story
[17:34]about him and his best friend.
[17:36]They were kind of geeks nerdy guys at Harvard
[17:38]and Mark Zuckerberg wanted to get into these finals
[17:41]but couldn't get in and Wardo got into one
[17:43]because his family was wealthy.
[17:45]And Mark got angry and went out one night
[17:47]after a bad day and got drunk and proceeded to hack
[17:49]the computers at Harvard,
[17:51]making a website where you could vote
[17:52]on who the hottest girl at Harvard was,
[17:54]which nearly got him kicked out of school.
[17:56]I thought the attention of the winkle by twins
[17:59]who you couldn't invent if you wanted to.
[18:01]Like they're the perfect Hollywood characters,
[18:03]the giant Greek gods, you know,
[18:05]six foot five identical twin Olympic rowers.
[18:08]I mean, the fact that they really exist is shot.
[18:11]No, and they are the bad guys in the story
[18:13]and the social network and so,
[18:15]anyways, I thought this was an incredible story
[18:18]and I wrote a proposal, a book proposal,
[18:20]and my book proposal leaked onto the internet.
[18:23]Galker, which is back alive again, I hear.
[18:25]They printed my entire book proposal,
[18:27]which I kind of never seen before
[18:29]and everything exploded when they did that.
[18:31]First of all, Aaron Sorkin saw it
[18:34]and was like, I wanna write this as my next movie
[18:37]and David Fincher saw my book proposal online
[18:39]and said, I wanna direct this as my next movie,
[18:42]but only if we do it right now
[18:43]because who knows if Facebook would be around in here
[18:45]because this was before it became the monster it was.
[18:48]And I hadn't actually written the book yet.
[18:50]So basically I sold the book, sold the movie,
[18:53]locked myself in a room and I wrote that book
[18:55]over about 11 weeks and Aaron Sorkin out there.
[18:58]I was handing the book.
[18:59]It's just crazy how that all happened
[19:01]and that became the social network.
[19:03]So my career just was in a different place than where I'd started.
[19:06]I was this non-fiction guy writing thrillers
[19:09]and just fortunately fell into a couple of really big stories.
[19:13]And you also do like middle grade
[19:15]and you also write with your wife, you do everything.
[19:17]This is like crazy.
[19:18]Yeah, my wife and I do a middle grade series
[19:20]called Charlie Numbers.
[19:22]The latest one was called Charlie Numbers
[19:25]and the Willy Mammoth was the last one.
[19:27]There's been three so four so far.
[19:29]Bringing down the mouse, Charlie Numbers
[19:31]and the Willy Mammoth, Charlie Numbers in the man
[19:33]in the moon, the three out,
[19:34]so far a fourth one is coming.
[19:36]Yeah, we write right together on that
[19:38]and it's aimed at like, you know, 12 year old,
[19:40]somewhere in the middle grade age range.
[19:42]But kids as young as like nine or 10,
[19:45]oh, we have to like, I'd say 14.
[19:47]And I love writing it.
[19:48]It's fun to write for kids.
[19:49]It's fun going to schools and talking to kids.
[19:51]My kids are in that age range
[19:52]so they can kind of read my books now
[19:54]and my wife, Tanya and I have a great writing relationship
[19:58]because she remembers every detail.
[20:00]like I have no memory with my grade school high school.
[20:04]So the school in the book is kind of based on her grade school.
[20:07]And writing women characters for me has always been difficult.
[20:10]You know, my books are very sort of,
[20:13]the younger, you know, bringing down the house anyways
[20:15]was basically, you know,
[20:17]from the point of view of the main character.
[20:18]It was a guy on the social network
[20:20]was a little bit more broad,
[20:21]but again, it's nerdy guys, right?
[20:23]So it's great to write with her
[20:25]because it's sort of a different feel
[20:27]when she, you know, is writing the girl characters
[20:29]and stuff like that, but yeah, it's been great.
[20:32]It's been, I want to trim my hands
[20:33]it all sorts of things and we'll see what takes off.
[20:36]So after all these books,
[20:39]if there's one thing you could change
[20:40]about the publishing industry, what would it be?
[20:43]Wow, I, you know, there's a lot of things
[20:45]I change about the publishing industry.
[20:47]I think it's interesting now that a lot of books
[20:50]are dominated by the political stuff, I get it.
[20:54]I get why people are interested in it,
[20:56]but do people really need 10 books about Donald Trump?
[21:00]Let's just, we did one, let's be done with it.
[21:02]It just seems to me like the landscape of book selling
[21:06]revolves around celebrities and politics,
[21:08]which I totally understand because we all love celebrities
[21:11]and we're all stuck in this political drama.
[21:14]But when you're trying to get a book out there,
[21:15]that's a book you are competing with, you know,
[21:19]I remember my first, the BEAs are this big book conference
[21:22]in New York at the Japanese Center at the time
[21:24]and every person with a new big book comes there
[21:27]and you do little talks and you have, you know,
[21:29]little groups of book sellers you're talking to
[21:31]and it's really important.
[21:32]And I remember I was there, this was years ago
[21:34]and I was there and I had a little group
[21:36]and then there's this massive crowd of people
[21:38]walking by all excited to see someone
[21:40]and it was sting.
[21:41]And I love sting, but that captured to me the book industry.
[21:48]Every book seller in the room and every publishing worker
[21:52]and everyone wanted to go see sting
[21:56]and all of the authors were over here with like three people,
[21:58]three people, three people.
[22:00]And to me, I understand that because I've consumed pop culture
[22:04]as well, but I wish there was like a separate world
[22:07]where the authors are and then the celebrities are over here
[22:10]because authors have to become celebrities
[22:13]to get people to read their books now,
[22:15]which I love being out there and I love doing the social stuff
[22:18]and I love doing publicity, which is really a big part
[22:21]of the fun, but the reality of the business
[22:23]is it's very push towards how do we sell this book
[22:28]to the biggest market?
[22:29]And then you look at like the today show
[22:30]used to have authors on, right?
[22:32]When was the last time you saw an author on the today show?
[22:34]When was the author is like the fit person down on the list
[22:38]after like the sports people and the actors and everything
[22:41]like that, which I totally get and I totally understand.
[22:43]But if I would have changed something
[22:44]about the published industry,
[22:46]the today show would have authors on every morning.
[22:49]That's my, you know, my, it would be awesome.
[22:52]Wouldn't it?
[22:53]That would be awesome.
[22:54]I have lots of authors.
[22:55]No, my whole thing is like I feel like authors are rock stars
[22:58]and should be treated as such and like there should be like,
[23:01]you know, they should be-
[23:02]Well, we're nerdy rock stars who never leave our houses.
[23:04]So it's kind of a different form of rock star.
[23:07]Yeah, but there's so much about authors
[23:10]that's just, I don't know.
[23:11]I think as a group, it's so underrated, right?
[23:15]introspective, verbal, sensitive,
[23:18]you know, have such amazing perspective on things.
[23:21]Like, I don't know.
[23:23]I could spend my, I do.
[23:25]I said like all day with rock stars and it's, you know.
[23:28]It's really, it's a, it's an interesting, you know,
[23:31]time to be navigating it.
[23:32]As things turn digital, maybe, you know,
[23:34]and as to everyone in the podcast world and stuff like that,
[23:37]authors do get a chance now to talk more
[23:39]to people who are interested in.
[23:40]But slowly, you know, the mainstream is definitely
[23:44]celebrity and political, and that's pretty much.
[23:46]Yes.
[23:47]And that, oh, sorry, we've like totally gone over here.
[23:49]But and then a lot of books depend on celebrity endorsement
[23:52]to break out, which also I find problematic, you know,
[23:55]just a shame because there's so many other amazing books too.
[23:58]So it's tricky.
[23:59]Exactly.
[24:00]It's tricky to find new voices and new books you want to read
[24:02]because the books that get front and center, you know,
[24:05]the rock is talking about it.
[24:06]Right.
[24:07]And that's just the way it works.
[24:09]So, you know, it's a, it's a different world.
[24:11]Yeah.
[24:11]That's true.
[24:12]Got to get our books to the rock.
[24:15]That's what I try to do every day.
[24:18]Amazing.
[24:19]OK.
[24:19]So what's aside from the books you already mentioned?
[24:22]What else can we look for from you?
[24:24]Sure.
[24:24]So the antisocial network is out now.
[24:26]So that's what I'm running around talking about.
[24:27]I'm on the show billions on Showtime.
[24:31]So if you'd like to show billions of
[24:33]and season five of that.
[24:35]So I had a great time in the right is from season five.
[24:37]And then, you know, the midnight ride comes out in February.
[24:41]So those are kind of my main projects.
[24:42]Right now I'm running around.
[24:43]I don't know what the next book after the antisocial network will be.
[24:46]But this will be a movie.
[24:47]We're actually going into production shortly.
[24:49]We have a script in and they're looking at a short list
[24:52]of directors and actors now.
[24:54]So I believe you will see the antisocial network
[24:56]on the big screen within a year, which is very exciting.
[24:59]And then my, I had a book called Seven Wonders,
[25:01]which I sold the NBC at the television show.
[25:04]So I'm slowly beginning to develop that as well.
[25:06]So I, you know, I'm around, I'm doing a lot of stuff.
[25:09]Wow.
[25:10]People read the books and check it out.
[25:12]And it's fun to talk about.
[25:14]So I love, love doing this stuff.
[25:16]What advice would you have for aspiring authors?
[25:19]Well, I would say I have a lot of advice for aspiring authors.
[25:22]I think the key is obviously to read as much as you can
[25:25]because you have to develop your voice and figure out what it is
[25:28]that you can write.
[25:29]I think that you should personally, I think that you should keep
[25:33]in mind an audience.
[25:33]So you should try and write things that people want to read.
[25:36]So I do think it's a business to some extent.
[25:38]So if you like to write super literary and poetry,
[25:41]I think that's phenomenal.
[25:43]But it's difficult to have a career in that.
[25:45]So you should try and find ways if you want to do this for a living
[25:49]to write that in a commercial fashion.
[25:52]I think to some extent, I still believe in the traditional root
[25:55]of sending out query letters and getting agents
[25:58]and selling your books that way rather than the self-publishing
[26:01]group because I feel like there's just a free for all day
[26:03]and it's very hard to break out and the reality of it.
[26:06]But then the other thing is you have to write a great first book.
[26:09]And so how to do that outlines their hateful and everyone hates them.
[26:15]And I hate them.
[26:16]But the outline to me has been the key to my career.
[26:18]Before I sit down to write a book, I write an outline that's
[26:21]so specific that I know the page numbers of every chapter
[26:25]from beginning to end of each chapter.
[26:27]And I never miss by a page.
[26:28]Some of my outlines are ridiculous.
[26:31]And I have two lines.
[26:32]I usually write a full outline and then a line by line
[26:35]which each chapter is just one sentence
[26:37]because I feel like you can sum up the chapter in a sentence.
[26:40]And at that one, I write the page number
[26:42]to beginning of each chapter.
[26:43]So I'm just telling you this to tell you how crazy I am
[26:46]about outlines and as much as I hate them
[26:48]and I hated learning about them in school,
[26:50]I have found the outline is the key to a book for me.
[26:53]And that's why you'll, when you read my books,
[26:54]they're constructed on a very strict,
[26:57]almost screen outline with three acts
[26:59]and you know where something's going to happen in each book
[27:01]and you can analyze it that way.
[27:02]So that's a piece of it.
[27:03]Do you ever share your outlines?
[27:05]Like do you post them anywhere?
[27:06]So interestingly enough, because I work with Hollywood a lot,
[27:09]I have to often send the more rigorous outline
[27:12]to the producers because I usually have a screenwriter
[27:15]writing the screenplay as I'm writing the book.
[27:17]So I can give them the outline so they can get started
[27:19]and before they see the book.
[27:20]So that's probably why I developed it this way
[27:23]is I use them as pitching tools.
[27:25]One day, if I ever taught a course,
[27:26]I would probably bring in the outlines
[27:28]and you could see the developments of the book.
[27:31]So how it starts from the synopsis,
[27:34]which is like 14 pages long, to a brief outline
[27:38]that I do on my phone to a full outline,
[27:41]then back to a single sentence outline
[27:43]and then start writing.
[27:45]My goal is when I start writing,
[27:47]I have everything is done, the work is done,
[27:50]the research is done and I've compiled
[27:53]thousands of pages of research, the outline is done.
[27:55]And so I can just sit and write
[27:57]so that it only takes eight weeks.
[27:59]And that's how I can write a book so quickly
[28:01]because basically all of the hard work is done
[28:04]before I start writing.
[28:05]So the writing just booms out over a couple months
[28:08]with kids flying by and playing
[28:11]and my wife yelling at me and it's a crazy process,
[28:15]but it's quicker that way.
[28:16]So I highly recommend the outline
[28:18]as hateful as it can be.
[28:19]I love it, that's very cool, amazing.
[28:22]Well, when you start teaching your master class,
[28:24]let me know.
[28:25]I feel like you need to sign up for that right away.
[28:27]I think I could at least give you the idea
[28:29]and a master class of how I do it,
[28:31]and if you want to be creating up to attempt
[28:34]it, you have to feel a little crazy because it's nuts.
[28:37]All right, well, when it goes live,
[28:38]you have to email me or something.
[28:40]I'll take it, awesome.
[28:42]All right, well, I'm sorry.
[28:43]I feel like I somehow ignored your current book,
[28:46]but this is also great.
[28:47]I hope people are reading the antisocial network
[28:50]and I'm sorry.
[28:51]I was just, I am so in admiration of your whole necklace,
[28:55]I just had to go there.
[28:56]So I apologize if I've ignored the book today.
[28:59]It's a little bit.
[29:01]That's all right.
[29:02]Listen, it's about the GameStop drama
[29:03]and if you were hearing the word GameStop
[29:05]and wondering what the heck was going on,
[29:06]pick up the antisocial network
[29:08]and every high school kid knows the story.
[29:10]I'll tell you that.
[29:11]But it's a fun wild one.
[29:13]It involves really crazy characters,
[29:15]dude in his basement and Brock didn't math
[29:17]who kind of launched this revolution
[29:20]and made $50 million and meanwhile,
[29:23]a hedge fund lost billions in this.
[29:24]It's one of those types of stories.
[29:26]So it's a fun one.
[29:27]So hopefully people will check it out.
[29:29]Perfect.
[29:30]Well, thank you so much for all your time.
[29:32]Oh, anytime.
[29:33]I love it.
[29:34]Thank you.
[29:34]Appreciate it.
[29:35]Okay, take care.
[29:36]Bye-bye.
[29:37]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time
[29:39]to Read Books.
[29:40]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
[29:42]at Zebioans and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[29:45]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebioans.com
[29:48]and sign up for my virtual book club
[29:49]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[29:52]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound
[29:55]for the Sound Editing.
[29:56]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[29:58]for providing this fantastic intro.
[30:00]Now trim music.