World's #1 Thriller Writer: "STOP SCROLLING and BE HUMAN AGAIN" - David Baldacci

0:00Dirt. Sweat. Tears. Working hard can take its toll, but your relief doesn't have to. With Icy Hot Original No-Mess Roll-On, you get maximum strength, fast-acting, mess-free pain relief. So you're ready to go again. Ice works fast. Heat makes it last. Icy Hot. You're so back. Learn more at IcyHot.com. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs.

0:49So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 Sponsored Job Credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

1:03As a chef, I know flavor doesn't begin in the kitchen. It begins on the land. And West Home's nature-led Australian Wagyu is a story written in the landscape of Northern Australia. Cooking is storytelling, and West Home Wagyu carries a story of Northern Australia itself. Raw, powerful, and deeply authentic. It's a testament to the passion and care raised in the rhythm of Northern Australia. I'm Chef Maylin from ADA Club in Los Angeles, and I invite you to visit Westhome.com slash Maylin to learn more. And taste a story only Westhome nature-led Australian Wagyu can tell. That's W-E-S-T-H-O-L-M-E dot com slash M-E-I-L-I-N.

1:47The best books that I ever read, it wasn't just that they were fun. It was like when I walked away from them, I felt changed internally. And I started thinking about things otherwise I never would have focused on at all. And humans do that. It changes who they are because you carry forward their perspective throughout the rest of your life. You look at the world differently, and that's what really good books do. When I write books, I try to examine the humans, and it's not just an action story. I want you to dig down on what drives people to do stuff like this, whether it's good or bad or in between.

2:13And guess what? Good people do bad things, and bad people occasionally do good things. So that's what's so complicated about the world. I want people to get off their phones and actually look life again. I want people to relate to people and try to understand them and not stare at things on the screen because we're missing so much in life. And the older I get, the more books I write and the way the world is these days. My message in these books is, let's go back to being human beings again. And if I can help you do that by showing that human beings are really, really complicated, they're really, really fun to sort of take apart and see what makes them tick, it's a better way to spend your time than doing scrolling.

2:46Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is David Balducci, who has an amazing new book about to come out, Hope Rises. How many books now, David? 50? I think all told with my young adult stuff, it's like 60 books, but I stopped counting a while ago. All right. Well, I'll confess, I was a 32-year-old man. When I read a book, I picked it up in a bookstore called Brentano's, which is no longer around. And the title of the book was Absolute Power. How about that one? Remember that one? Long time ago. I want to start with your background, your legal background, how you got into storytelling and to become this prolific, incredibly successful writer.

3:35Then we're going to talk about this amazing book. Yeah. So I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, the old capital of the Confederacy. And when I was born, segregation was still legal. Civil Rights Act had not been signed yet. And books were sort of my safe space. And that's where I got my worldviews from, just reading lots of different books. I like to say I sort of traveled the world without a plane ticket or a passport through books. And my mom gave me a journal when I was seven or eight years old because I like to tell stories and tales. And I guess she needed a little bit of quiet. She told me later, she just wanted to shut me up when she came at the journal.

4:07So I started writing a little short stories. We love honest moms, David, right? We love honest moms. I still remember she said, you had gotten my last nerve boring, which was, you know, quite clear. And I just kept, I kept writing, you know, through high school and college and law school, I wrote short stories and novellas and screenplays. I just love to tell stories, but I went to law school. I became a lawyer. I moved to Washington, DC to practice law. And I did that for about 10 years, but I was writing that whole time. I'd written a script that has gotten a lot of hot, you know, attention out in Hollywood.

4:42I thought that was going to be my big break and it fizzled out, didn't happen. And my law office was near the White House back then. And I would see the president sometimes and the murder case and all that stuff. And I was, you know, history buff and I'd read about Kennedy and all the tryst and affairs he had. And I thought, what if I had a president who had an affair and something really bad happened and they had to kill the woman and there had to be a cover up i thought that could be an interesting story and that turned out to be absolute power you have the formula okay you know there's a few people and i'm a book lover and this podcast is all about interviewing authors okay but you have something in these books where it makes the brain thirsty you can't you know i had a i had a stay up two o 'clock in the morning finishing this because i was like another page and another page and so so let's talk about hope rising because it's a sequel to Nash Falls.

5:35I don't want to give too much away to people, but this is sort of a new story for you. Who is Walter Nash? Let's start there. And how do we find him in the story arc from the first book into this book? So in Nash Falls, Walter Nash is a businessman. I mean, he's different from anybody I've written about before. He's never fired a gun in anger, never lifted a weight, never been law enforcement, never been with any federal agency. and but he's done really well he's achieved the american dream you know he's done everything they're supposed to do he went to a good school he worked hard he made money he and his wife and daughter have a nice life the only smudge in his relationship in his life is with his father who he was estranged from his father was a vietnam veteran they had a falling out the beginning of nash falls the first book he's going to his father's funeral and he goes to the funeral with his wife and daughter and his father's best friend from vietnam gets up gives a eulogy and trashes Walter Nash in front of everyone, which is just a horrific sort of event for him.

6:34He goes home and late that night, he's out in his backyard trying to process all this. And then out of the darkness, this FBI agent shows up and gives him a choice. He said, the organization you work for, you made all this money from, they're a criminal organization. So here's your choice. One, you can work with us and lose everything you have. Or two, you don't work with us and you lose everything you have. Those are the choices. And that really sets Walter Nash off in this journey, you know, to try to bring this organization down. And he does it with enormous personal cost. And then we come to Hope Rises where he has changed who he is completely, physically and mentally and emotionally.

7:09And he's sort of right in the monster's lair. You know, he's on the inside trying to bring this organization down in a different part of the world. And then I throw him a lot of curveballs because look, when Nashville's ended sort of mid-story, I got like 10 ,000 emails from people who were royally pissed off that I had not finished the book and the first novel. But I needed an entire second novel to finish the story. And I think when you read Hope Rises, you'll understand why. It's incredible. Well, again, I don't want to give too much of the book away, but this is a guy that goes from a mild-mannered business person.

7:43He then becomes this physically imposing, tattooed operative, operating under a false identity. you know i mean his wife doesn't even recognize him okay so this ordinary man becomes unrecognizable and i guess is that something you have thought about in your own life i have thought about that in my own life i want to become johnny rambo everybody that reads this book has like a little bit of hey i'd like to be johnny rambo is that something you've thought of i've gotten a lot of emails from people who's like yeah can you know can you teach me close quarter combat and all that and can you teach me how to shoot a gun really well and can i take five guys out you know at the same time you know for me it was i think one of the themes i wanted to draw in the book was that you can do everything right in life but still get knocked on your ass you know and then what then what do you do you just curl to the fetal position or you get back up and yeah the fantasy of you know going to this guy who can take care of himself to be an action figure is a very cool one but you also have to realize that he's lost everything and everything he really cared about He never wanted to become this thing.

8:47You know, he was perfectly happy with his life. But I also think that as I was thinking about the world in general when I was writing this novel, I was thinking that a lot of people who did the right thing ended up losing everything they had through no fault of their own. And then what do you do after that? You know, and I bring Malta Nash along to say, I'm not saying this is the perfect model, but, you know, you get back up and you keep trying. But there's so much in here, right? I mean, there's a little bit of Sophocles in here too, right? He's got the whole identity crisis. He's trying to rationalize what happened at the beginning of his life and how he's different from his dad.

9:20Forgive me for saying this, Steve, but I'm Italian. You're Italian. The book is about revenge, David. I mean, come on, right? Am I wrong? I know it is. I mean, I'm biting into this book. I'm thinking, oh, everyone's going to get theirs. Okay. Do you see revenge as something that drives people forward and in some cases consumes them, David? I've seen that in my life. You know, people can let that one emotion not only overtake their lives, but bend their will in ways they never would have done before. It can be really debilitating. You know, it's kind of like doom scrolling on your phone all day and spending 10 hours past.

9:57And you have no you're never going to get those 10 hours back. And you probably haven't learned anything more that you didn't know before. No, it's all dopamine addiction. No, I'm with you. But I think the thing about your books that I love is human nature. I think the best fiction writers are people that understand the inside conversation. You know, I mean, let's talk a little bit about Victoria Steers, okay? I mean, so, you know, we have an external presence that we're giving and everyone gets a different impression of us. But then there's also something going on internally that we're talking to ourselves all day, trying to figure out who we are and how we're going to push into the world.

10:33Tell us about her and her redemption. When you created her, did you always intend for her to be more than a villain? or did that complexity did that complexity emerge as you were writing that complexity grew organically in the novel you know again i thought this was going to be this is going to be one book and done but the more i got into steers in the first novel i was thinking you know you idiot there's untapped potential there's opportunity to do something you haven't done before to take a character that you built into this monster and then instead of just having this ending where everybody could see it coming start peeling back the layers of this monster and see how it came about.

11:08How did Frankenstein was created? And I felt that was a far more sort of impressive way to tell the story than just having an evil person get their just-do at the end of the novel. And that's really why I ended up writing the second novel, just because of her character. Look, if you create an extraordinary character, at least for me, to be fair with the reader, you have to give it extraordinary motivation. Where did this thing come from. It just happened. And so I took time to really let readers know this is where this woman came from. For better or worse, this is what created this. Thank you for tuning in to Open Book.

11:43And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. What about the human emotion of knowing somebody's evil and yet you're still drawn to them. You still have almost like an attraction to them. I mean, I feel like Nash loves and hates her at the same time, right? And this happens in our lives all the time, right? So talk about that emotion if you don't mind. And what is it about human beings where we're sort of allured by that? Yeah, we love what we hate. I know.

12:24It's a fascinating element of the human mind and it shows that we can hold two opposing elements in our mind at the same time and that's just that's just humanity i don't i i don't think ai can do that but human beings certainly can and that was what was so fascinating to me about nash and steers's relationship because both of them under any other circumstances it would just put a bullet in the other one's head but then when you take it to another level and you give it time for the characters to actually get to know each other then all of a sudden the mind realizes there's more there than just this caricature I had in my mind for this person.

12:59And let me dig a little bit deeper. The fact is, unfortunately, these days, we're in such a rush to do everything. We never dig a little bit deeper into people. We have a label, we put it on them, and that's all we think. And we never change our mind about them. But once we do, you know, it's fascinating what you can find out. And that was really the whole point behind the Nash-Steers relationship. I wanted to show people that if you take the time to dig a little bit deeper than just the shallow end of the pool, It's amazing what you can find down there. See, this is such a good segue for my next question because of what you're saying about our society today.

13:33I find that when I'm reading your books, I'm getting a emotional kick. I'm getting a little bit of adrenaline, but I'm also getting a lesson in psychology. There's something going on in your books where you're explaining to me something about myself that I don't often examine. Is that intentional, sir? And if it is intentional, do you take a theme like that through each of your books and say, okay, I'm going to tell this story. But when you're done, you're going to say, whoa, there's something here about you in this story. When I was a kid, the best books that I ever read were, it wasn't just that they were fun.

14:09It was like when I walked away from them, I felt changed internally. And I started thinking about things that otherwise I never would have focused on at all. And when humans do that, it changes who they are because you carry forward their perspective throughout the rest of your life. You look at the world differently, and that's what really good books do. So when I write books, I try to examine the humans in it. It's not just an action story. I want you to dig down on what drives people to do stuff like this, whether it's good or bad or in between. And guess what? Good people do bad things, and bad people occasionally do good things.

14:40So that's what's so complicated about the world. And I do try to do that in all my books to allow people to— Look, I want people to get off their phones and actually live life again. I want people to relate to people and try to understand them and not stare at things on the screen because we're missing so much in life. And the older I get, the more books I write and the way the world is these days. My message in these books is let's go back to being human beings again. And if I can help you do that by showing that human beings are really, really complicated, they're really, really fun to sort of take apart and see what makes them tick.

15:12it's not it's a better way to spend your time than doom scrolling i'm with you and i and i'm gonna i'm gonna mention some of these people that i've met when i'm not doom scrolling okay amos decker yeah allelosius i think i'm pronouncing it right but i mean that is one southern name about that i mean whoa allelosius archer okay uh and others of course but what makes nash what makes Walter Nash different? What's the specific emotional or thematic territory that you're exploring here where you didn't explore with others? I mean, I know it, but I want you to say it to the audience. Yeah. So Amos Decker, he's a detective.

15:54He was a policeman. So he chose that life and that profession. Archer, he's a detective in LA in the 50s. He chose that profession. He chose that he wanted to live his life that way. Walter Nash chose none of this. He didn't want any part of this world. He was perfectly happy with the life that he had, but he was involuntarily thrust into this nightmare. And then he had to try to make sense of it. And then not just make sense of it, he had to survive it, you know? And then on top of that, he had to avenge people that he really loved and cared about. So for him, I threw him the most difficult challenge I've thrown any of my characters before.

16:27Here's a guy who does not want to be in this book, but he's in the book and now he has to get to the end of it. oh yeah but i mean the other thing is like you know when you've written your past books about people that are having affairs they're living these dual identities and they're almost double agents in their own lives right they're talking to their wife in one way they're talking to their mistress in another way and i feel you capture that with nash i feel like he's working for the fbi but he's inside this criminal empire simultaneously and so what does that say about the double agent existence and about the nature of loyalty and identity?

17:06What were you trying to capture there? I wanted to let people say that you can play two dissimilar roles at the same time, you know, and people do that all the time. I'm not just talking if you're a spy or not, but if you think about the course of your day and who you deal with and who you talk to throughout the day, you may become one person during the morning when you have to meet with a certain set of people. And then during the evening, when you have to be a different person, you change, you're a chameleon. We all sort of do that. It's just to what the degree we do that. I'm not screaming at my billionaire client like I am at my 11-year-old son.

17:34Is that what you're saying, David? Probably so. We all play those roles in life, and Nash is playing the role of his life. The stakes couldn't be higher for him. When I decided to put him on the – I was trying to figure out how is he going to get to Victoria Steers and the organization to bring her down. How is that going to happen? Could he do it externally? Very difficult. Do I have to put him into the lair of the monster? That seemed to me to be the only feasible way to do that. And in order to do that, one, I had to have him change his appearance. He couldn't be Walter Nash anymore. But then he had to change everything else about him on the inside.

18:07He had to stop being Walter Nash from his soul all the way out. And that's really hard for people to do. And throughout the book, sometimes he came really close to the line, the messing up, screwing up, making a mistake. It would have exposed him. But that just heightened the tension of the whole story. One last question on this character development, if you don't mind. When you're building this criminal empire, you have legal experience. And you have taken, you know, like me, I went to law school, you took criminal procedure. So do you think about the operational logistics that are going on here and the potential vulnerabilities at the same time?

18:41And like, if you yourself had to prosecute the case, right, a lot of that feels like it's in the book as well, right? It's almost like a legal brief inside this book. It absolutely is. Because at the end of the day, I mean, you bring people in, you arrest them, then you got to prosecute them. And not just that, you have to convict them. If you don't, you know, they walk away and double jeopardy attaches and goodbye, you know, they go on with their life. So I needed to give that, you know, throughout, you know, the FBI agent and Nash is not a lawyer. He has no clue about any of that stuff. He's a businessman.

19:09He knows some stuff, but he's dealing with the FBI and the FBI is telling him, you know, this is how we have to do it. This is how the evidence we have to collect. We have to be careful about how it's collected or else it's not going to be admissible in court. And Nash, you know, he really doesn't want to hear that. He just wants to get through the day, you know, each day. So he's living under a different set of pressures than the FBI. But also at the end, you have to realize that there's a legal process, there's a rule of law in this country. And if you're going to successfully prosecute someone, you have to dot the I's and cross the T's.

19:38If you don't, it was all for nothing. You know, I feel also from your writing style, again, you're just some writers got the whole book. They take an outline and they're going chapter by chapter and they delve into it. But I think what makes your writing for me so interesting, I sometimes feel like, whoa, that character is going in a direction I did not predict. And I'm wondering, is that planned, David? Or is this, did Nash ever take a story somewhere where you hadn't planned? You're like, you're typing and you're like, I'm thinking I'm going to go this way, but wait a minute. I'm going to go that way.

20:12Is that happening to you? Are you calling audibles? Use a football expression. Are you calling audibles? I do that. Switching things. I do that all the time. and I'll give you another football analogy. I like to think that I write in the trenches. I've tried to write from outline. Never anything that I put in the outline actually ends up in the book. It's just a waste of time for me. It works for some writers. It doesn't work for me. I like to write in the trenches. What's that? Not to interrupt you, sir, but I feel that from your writing. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's what makes writing so fresh. I'm like, this guy doesn't, I mean, I feel like you're typing while I'm reading.

20:45You know what I mean? Like, all right, let me go again, see what he's doing, right? Exactly right. Right. And when you read, you're reading a novel and you go, wow, I didn't know that Nash was going to go in that direction. Then fast, you know, go back seven months. I'm sitting in my computer going, wow, I didn't know Nash was going to go in that direction. So I always get this analogy about, you know, being in the moment and where you're thinking the best. So if you're Tom Brady in practice, you know that nobody on the defense is going to touch you. You know, there's not going to touch you. So where are you thinking the best?

21:15Where do you see everything crisply? All 11 guys on the other side and you're making your best decisions. There's no pressure. There's no stress. If he's playing in a game where 11 guys on the other side want to kill him, that's where the synapses fire off faster. That's where he's processing. That's where everything slows down and he sees the field. When I'm writing in the novel, that's where I am. If I'm in an outline, I'm in practice. I'm in football practice. I can always say, I haven't figured that out yet. I'll just kick the can down the road. If you're writing the novel, there's no kicking the can down the road.

21:44You have to go to another level to really dig out what needs to be written at that moment. And that's where I do my best stuff. You know, you're doing this a long time, about four decades, roughly, right? Tell me, tell me for all of us listening in, is it better now? Are you, are your characters emotionally deeper? Is it, you know, there's nothing formulaic about your writing. So it's not like, in other words, and I hate to say this about certain writers, like read the book, there's a plot, there's a this, there's a that, you know what I mean? And then, okay, and then his next book's coming, it's going to be more or less the same.

22:25I feel like this is a little bit like Warren Buffett, like you evolve your writing over time. So tell us about that evolution. Yeah, you're spot on with that. I never had this ambition to be bestselling in any type of writer. I spent 10 years of my life writing short stories just because I like to tell a story. So for me, it's always about learning the craft, getting better. You know, I think my early books, I was too verbose. I said in a thousand words what I should have said in a hundred. And now I try to say in 10 words what I used to write in a hundred. And that takes a lot more work. But I want my writing to be as clean and smooth as possible.

23:02I want every word to have earned its right to be in there. It's like the Gettysburg Address, the greatest political speech in American history. It's only 360 odd words long. It took Lincoln two minutes to say it, but every word had earned its right to be in the speech. And I think that I get my characters deeper and deeper with every book because I feel like with every novel, I'm writing my first novel. And I have no idea what the hell I'm doing. And that makes me try harder. I've got this huge chip on my shoulder because I don't feel like, you know, I know anything. But that makes you try harder.

23:31You know, if you think you, you never want to ask as a writer, how did I do it last time? And then just change the names, you know, and then the plot is the same. That's not where I want to go. And so every time I write a novel, it's like I'm writing my first novel over and over again. But I try to do it better than what I did before. I'm going to take a different approach to this question, okay? There's something in here that's counterintuitive. Your style, what you're doing, it's very fresh, David. So let me hit it from that angle. Intentional? You're just saying, hey, man, I'm, I don't know.