Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Daniel Silva AKA the Spymaster of the Summer

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

In this episode, Anthony talks with multiple New York Times bestselling author Daniel Silva. Daniel discusses his writing process, revealing how he maintains discipline, and balances his many great sources. He then takes Anthony through his brand-new page-turner The Collector, which promises spies, thrills, an art heist and more… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts

you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punch. So let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. A glass of Don Julio on the rocks, a big rock, I might add, and a slice of orange. Imagine that in one hand and a Daniel Silva thriller in the other. That's my idea of a perfect summer night. I have devoured all of Daniel's books over the years, and I've even been in the acknowledgments a few of them, which I'm very happy about. But I have to say, his most recent thriller, the collector may be its best yet. It's a masterpiece. With too many New York Times bestsellers for me to mention, Daniel is one of our great American novelists. I'm lucky enough to call him a friend, and I couldn't be more excited to welcome him to today's open book. So joining us now on Open Book is

Daniel Silva, a best-selling author, a journalist, Gabriel Alon himself, if I might add, I do think that that's your doppelganger. And out now with a best-selling book. book called The Collector, I believe the 23rd of the Gabriel-Lawn series, although I've also read the Unlikely Spy and all the other stuff that you've written. An amazing friend, too, by the way. And so I'm always very grateful for our conversations. I want to tell you this, and I know other people feel this way, and I've shared your book with so many of my friends, and one of President Bush's chiefs of staff said, I'm so jealous that you're going to be interviewing Daniel, who's read every one of your books, but my cabal of friends say the favorite part of their summer is the delivery or the

purchase of your book, okay, because then to them, the summer has started. They have a spy thriller in their hands. Start with the creation. Okay, I know you're already working on your next book. So start with the creation of the ideas, the formation, and how do you get so canny about predicting the future, Daniel? Well, let's take the last part first. You know, I think that the cardinal sin of any international thriller would be to be behind the curve. And so it forces me to try to imagine the world that I'm going to be publishing into a year from when I begin to write. So I have to sort of think like an intelligence officer. You know, an intelligence officer doesn't tell his elected leader what happened yesterday.

I mean, he does, but every once in a while. But what you pay your intelligence services to do is to tell you what's going to happen to. tomorrow what's going to happen next week or one year from now, 10 years from now. And you have to sort of look over the horizon, look around the corner, anticipate. And so that's what I try to do. The first question I ask myself, if I'm writing something that's, you know, timely and close to the answer as this one is, is, you know, what environment am I going to be publishing it to?

What is the world going to look like? What's going to be going to be in the headlines at that summer? And, you know, this one is really right on the edge. Now, it is set last autumn, but, you know, it is right up to the minute in terms of what's going on in Ukraine. And, you know, one of the things, most interesting thing that's happened along the way is, you know, I was talking to my sources, and they include Supreme Commander of NATO and a commander of all ground forces, NATO, former CIA director, State Department people. And one of the first questions each of them asked me is, well, when are you going to publish this book? Because what you are talking about might well happen before you publish. And, you know, there is an element of internal opposition to the unnamed Vladimir Putin in the novel.

And when Progozian was doing his brief uprising a couple of weeks ago, heading up the road toward Moscow, I was like, oh, gosh. Well, I mean, you're right there. Yeah, so but in terms of the idea generation, as when I get a, of the current book in hand, as I like to describe it, when I enter clear air and I see how I'm going to finish it, you know, usually the next one starts to rise to the surface. What I like to do is to get writing as quickly as possible because I have, I struggle with letting go of a manuscript.

It's very hard to let go at the end. And really the only way that I can move on, stop second-guessing myself, stop thinking about the novel that I just finished is to start the next one. And so I finished this book, the final copy edits on May 29th, something like that. And I signed my name 12,000 times for signed editions. And I got that out of the way and started working on the new books. I was able to write that four or five thousand words of the new book, a couple of chapters, before I started the publicity for a this one. And so it starts with the smallest idea. And it starts with it assembling the characters, well, which characters from my family of characters am I going to use for this one? What's the,

what's the broad setting? What's the general intent? Do I have a title for it or a theme for it? And if you think of the book as an arc like this, if I can see about that much, if I can just see enough those eight to ten chapters just to get going, I'm pretty comfortable starting at that point. and I do not know everything. I do not need to know everything that's going to happen. I don't want to know everything that's going to happen. I want to go on the journey at that side of my characters. And this book, I have to say, I didn't know until, as I was read in the climax,

I really didn't quite know who was going to survive the ending of this one until I actually wrote it. It was, I kept myself in suspense. Well, I mean, I got to go back for a second, Daniel. So, Daniel, you're very good at this. You write about the near future, then the future happens. Thankfully, and especially for my friend Franco, the owner of Cafe Milano, that was averted. Can I tell you the funniest thing about Cafe Milano? Every time we go there, the first question that Laurent asks us, the very famous matriety of Cafe Milan is,

would we like to sit in the blast zone or not in the blast zone? Right, exactly. So for my viewers and listeners, what Daniel's referring to is there's a scene in one of the Alon books where there's a bomb that goes off. A terrorist has planted a bomb. Cafe Milano is one of the more Tony restaurants in D.C. And it's well visited by the nation's leaders, cabinet members, presidents, etc. Bomb goes off in the restaurant. And obviously people are hurt. Gabriel Alon himself is wounded in that attack. And then coincidentally or not so coincidentally, because this is part of your genius. We have a situation where a terrorist, I think it was an Iranian terrorist, was about to blow up the restaurant, and it was averted. And so some people have said to me that a lot of people in the intelligence arena are reading your books, and you were predicting something that was about to happen.

And in a weird way, you possibly help them prevent it from happening. But now we got this unique situation. I don't want to give up this book of The Collector. I thought it was a virtuoso of yours. I thought it was a total masterpiece. I don't want to give up the book, but there is a plot line that I do want to discuss without giving up too much detail. If there was a bomb to go off in the Ukraine, a nuclear bomb, of course the Russians would

want that to appear like a false flag situation, that it wasn't in fact them. And so they would have to find fissile material from another part of the world that couldn't be traced back to them. And therefore, that's part of the plot line that Gabriel and his co-execkel. cohorts are working on. One, had you come up with that plot line, give us a little bit of, let us get into your inner sanctum if you don't mind, and tell us about how your characters are evolving over the course of this series. Well, let's go to the plot line first. You remember last October, November. We became alarmed. I think that's the right word, alarm by the kinds of

statements that Putin was making, not only Putin, but the people around him, and his propaganda this on Russian television. I mean, daily warnings that Russia was going to use nuclear weapons if it felt it needed to. It was just a drumbeat of nuclear, very loose nuclear talk coming out of Moscow. But I think more alarmingly, we were picking up signs that the Russians were really casting about for an excuse, a pretext to use nuclear weapons, and that they were trying to perhaps create a dirty bomb, not a actual detonate hole bomb, but a dirty bomb, a radiological dispersion device, and that they were looking for perhaps material from a Ukrainian nuclear power plant or something that they could then create, you know, have a dirty bomb

attack, then use that as a pretext to launch their own tactical weapons. And we were so alarmed by this, that President Biden took the extraordinary step. And I don't think we can understate how it was of publicly warning Vladimir Putin do not use nuclear weapons or a dirty bomb in Ukraine, that it will be catastrophic. You know, there's a lot of happy talk during that period from people. Well, he's a rational actor. He would never do it. This is, you know, gamesmanship on his part. But behind the scenes at the White House, CIA, the Pentagon, we were tabletopping this, Anthony. We were worried that something was going to happen. So my novel is set during that period.

It is sort of an alternative history, if you will, of that, a hidden alternative history of that period. And, yeah, for a dirty bomb or a false flag nuclear attack to have any, and I stress that word, any, credibility. The fissile material could not come from Russia's nuclear stockpile because we could, in very short order, by testing the radiological fallout, we can determine the prognolts of that material. So that's what the plot is about in the nutshell. Does your wife, Jamie, ever get jealous of all these beautiful women that you create in these novels? We're now dealing with Ingram Joanne. No. She's okay with it, right?

I love pairing Gabriel with a good commercial, beautiful woman at his side. And I think that the character that I created in this novel is one of my favorites that I've done in a very long time. Yeah, I was going to ask you that. I mean, she is by far for me the most interest. I don't want to say the Black Widow, all the different. I don't want to say the most. She's at the top of the list because she's got everything going on, including the environmentalism. So I'm a criminal, but I'm also an environmental.

I'm a criminal environmentalist, which I find to be literally very, very enjoyable. She was going to be paired with a oil company executive. And so, you know, literature and tension requires conflict, you know. And so we have a radical environmentalist paired with an oil executive to try to save the world. And so I gave that to her character for that reason. But she was a delight to work with. There are a couple of scenes. the novel, some of the dialogue and exchanges and banter between Gabriel and Ingrid Johansson,

I feel some of the best stuff I've ever written. I, after the minute she came into the novel, she just sort of jumped off the page. I can't wait to use her again. Ingram survives the climax of the book. Yeah, the problem with your novels, unfortunately, is I savor them, and so I don't really want to finish them. You know, I find myself, if I'm in a quiet place, I want to write. read them, but I don't want to read them. I'm not in a quiet place. But when I, when I finish this

novel, I was like, okay, I got to wait another 11, 12 months for the next one. But let me ask you this, because we're both lovers of books. We're both bibliophiles. You have a book collector in the book, The Collector. You pick three books, the Great Gatsby, or as you call it Gatsby, the beautiful and the dam. Those are both written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. And then Thomas Mon is in the book, the death of Venice. And so why those three books, or were those just, random books out of your brain or where there's symbolism in those three books as are related to this book? Anyone who's read my book by books, I should say, knows that they have all sorts

of Gatsby illusions all through them. I'm a F. Scott Fitzgerald, you're going to be a huge influence on my writing and my style. I mean, I cannot write like F. Scott Fitzgerald, obviously, but he's a, I just adore Fitzgerald. Beautiful and damned. I mean, it's obvious illusions in the novel to that choice. Well, Gabriel says more than once, which one are you? Are you the beautiful or are you the damned? damned because of what you have done.

And the book, Compromot, Russia's use of Compromot to compromise and turn people from, you know, law-abiding, decent people into their assets, how ruthlessly they wield Compromach, how the entire systema, as they call it, in Russia is based on Compromot, that anyone who is in the inner circle or making money in Russia is compromised in a very real sense by, just by their participation in the system. So Compromot is very much at the forefront of the novel. And a major character in the novel, an oil company executive, is completely compromised by the Russians and does Putin spitting. You know, the Fitzgerald references, I may have told you this, I grew up in the town of Port Washington,

where Fitzgerald at the tip of the town is what he said was East Egg at Sands Point, and West Egg was King's Point. And so we were forced very early in our lives to read Fitzgerald's works because he was a celebrated figure in our town. He said something I want you to react to. He said that there are no second acts in American life. Did he get that right, Daniel? No. You know, Donald Trump is on about his 18th act or something like that. Right, exactly.

If you have a huge fall, it's difficult to come back from that. I would think in American life. But look, we're a forgiving country, I think, still. I hope. He wrote Gaspi. It took him a very long time to get tender as the night finished. I mean, it's a combination of about two or three manuscripts. He had all kinds of false stars.

He was struggling with drinking. And then he went sort of downhill from there and it ended up out in Hollywood. Didn't have the career that he should have had. And maybe he was in the weird way. telling his own future. Yeah. No, it's it's an interesting thing because I often think about it. I'm on my ninth act myself, Daniel. I'm talking to you on the anniversary of my White House press conference. Okay. And so 11 short days later, I was blown from the White House. But as I tell people, life goes on, you know, have to take yourself that seriously. But I just find Fitzgerald, for me, like for you, is a very compelling

novelist. And he was in touch with a lot of our feelings and emotions. And I think, you do that, I think you do that beautifully. I mean, you explain all of our contradictions. So let's talk about this philosopher king, Gabriel Alon. I heard the interview with you and George Stephanophilus, where you talked about Alon being a cold figure in the beginning. And now he's more likable to you. He seems like he's become more of a philosopher king. He's more accepting of human frailty. You know, my grandmother had one of the best lines that I always share with people, the best among us, choose not to judge human frailty so harshly. It was sort of a, you know, she was very Roman Catholic, and her attitude was, we're all frail, let's take it easy on each other, you know, and not stand

on ceremony. So tell me about your friend, Gabriel Alon, how is he evolved? And do I have it right? Is he become more of a philosopher? He's more like Solomon now. He has, he has the slingshot of David, but he talks more like Solomon now. I don't know if you ever saw the documentary, the gatekeepers. It was about the recent Shindet. Yes, it was on show time. And I forget which

one it was, but he remarked that all of us become liberals in the end, meaning all of us who fight this secret war to defend Israel in this neighborhood and who sometimes do operations

and assassinations and targeted killings and who are on the front lines of this sometimes very dirty war, that in the end, they all become quite liberal in their approach and they want to do whatever they can to end this conflict and make peace, in reasonable terms, obviously. And Gabriel certainly fell into that camp quite early. I mean, he is by no means an extremist or anything like that. What it has happened is that he's just become. I've lightened the series. I've lightened the tone. Placing him in Venice gives it just a wonderful, you know, look and feel and taste and smell to it, the food, the wine,

the wine bars where they stop in the afternoon and have a little chichetti. It's just a delight to set the series there to base the character there, I guess is how he would describe it. He is hysterically funny. He is quite humorous. I mean, When you read the dialogue, every piece of dialogue, everything he said is just slightly off. He never responds directly to some of them. It's quite funny. It's a thriller. It is at the end of it.

It is edge of your seat thriller. But along the way, it made me laugh out loud. Some of the responses I got from my broader reading community included lines like stored it coffee out my nose at this line and things like that. It's got a nice touch to it. And one of the things that Gabriel has done, he has collected villainous characters along the way and turned them into protagonists. That's the magic of the series. People who tried to kill him are now his friends.

Thieves, criminals, art thieves, assassins, they are his friends and associates. And I write them in that way. And that's the magic of the series. Yeah, I mean, but that's also the, there's a metaphor for human nature. a metaphor for our relationships. 80 short years ago, we were adversaries with Germany and Japan. They're our greatest allies today. We have this sort of thing going on in our lives as human beings. Let's go to Russia for a second. I want to get your thoughts on Russia. Today's Russia. And somebody said to me, a student of Russian literature, that the pain comes from the dislocation and the

geography. And I just want to get you to react to this. What do they mean by the pain? All that pain in Russian literature, all the struggle of the Russian people. They're not quite in Europe. They're not quite in Asia. And so they always feel left out as outsiders. And so they vacillate from morose insecurity to great overconfidence and arrogance. What are your thoughts on that? Well, first of all, I mean, if you start from the climate alone, okay? Yeah. A brief hot summer, a brief period, we're looking back in history, of course, where we have fresh vegetables and, and, I mean, it's a hard, hard land. And then, of course, it was cut off from Europe and did not experience the Enlightenment, which therefore did not experience, you know, an early

exposure to democracy. I hate generalizations and, and, or say, you know, that Russians are are by nature, you know, patriarchal society. But I'm not sure that democracy, a true democracy, is it really a natural fit for the country? I hate to say that. And the criminality that goes on inside Russia today, as you know, is just astonishing. It's a criminal state. It's a mafia state run by the boss of bosses, but the gangs underneath him and everything. It is, it's a mess.

and at the same time the level of brilliance, the music, the literature, it's a strange combination of incredible beauty and pain and sadness and unfortunately just failure. They just can't get there. Yeah. One of the richest countries in the world, though, right? Daniel, I mean, it's got all. It's natural resources, and that's part of the problem that Putin has just become, you know, the world's gas station, and they're going to mine and, and, and, and, and, and, and,

hacked down their forests and that's going to be their economy. I am alarmed by it. There was a great map that was on Farid's show the other day, Fareed Zakaria, GPS. It put the countries in red that are still trading with Russia. And it's all of Africa. It's a huge section of Central Asia. And I was wondering if get your thoughts on this. Are we, because of this war, reordering the global economy in any way? Yeah, and there's no question. I mean, we've, the great irony of what we did there is we've actually hurt ourselves, and we've also repositioned the U.S. dollar. You have to be very, very careful. We benefit from the dollar being the reserve currency, but we made a decision 22 years ago to weaponize the dollar. And there's a great book called Treasury Wars, Daniel, where we use

the dollar as a mechanism for sanctions, countries that we like on the SWIFT system, the international banking system, countries that we dislike, we take these punitive measures towards. It's been a very effective political tool. And here's the problem with that tool. Daniel, our politicians don't have to have any recourse. So our politicians no longer want to make decisions, right? They seed war powers of the president. The Congress doesn't like voting on those things. And so this is a mechanism by the administrative state where we can do things that politicians are no longer comfortable doing. We're watching the movie Oppenheimer this summer. And of course, Harry Truman has to make things. this decision to detonate literal death, create the sun on earth to wipe out 220,000 people.

He makes that decision. We can debate that decision today, but he's making decisions. Our politicians are not doing that anymore. And so this is creating some havoc. And you know this intuitively. Anytime we make a decision like that, we're creating unnatural alliances. The Chinese and the Russians have a 1600-mile border dispute. Okay, the Chinese still believe that there's a large swath of Siberia, which was taken from them by the Russian Empire in the 1630s that belongs to them. And so these have been antagonists for several centuries. And yet because of the decisions by the United States, we've put them into an alliance with each other. And so, you know, we have to be careful about that. That's one of the things I did learn in my 11-day ill-fated stint. Any decision that's being made by the president comes with great.

ramifications. We all view in the U.S. the bin Laden raid being a successful rate, but there were ramifications, okay? We upset our relationship with Pakistan. We invaded a sovereign nation. We set an alarm bell off all over the Middle East. All those tyrannies, they were super worried about potential invasions, but they were also worried about the conservatives saying, okay, you have to reject American policy and break your treaties with America. If you don't, they're coming for you or they're coming for our country, too. So there was lots of negative ramifications that came out of that, which you and I both know. But I want to get your opinion of this. So is there an optimistic outcome for the Ukrainian war? Is there an optimistic outcome for the Russians? Is this something

that you and I, for our lifetimes, we're going to be plagued with this level of cold war, hot war antagonism with the Russian people, many of which you and I both know, like you said, are kind people. We both know many Russians that we have a tremendous amount of respect for. Look, you know, one of the things that I talk about in the novel is what happens when Russia experiences a disaster's war or foreign policy adventure. Russo-Japanese war led to the first Russian Revolution of 1905. Collapse of the Russian Army in World War I led to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Bolsheviks and the murder of the Tsar and his family.

Misadventure in Afghanistan led to the collapse. of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin knows his Russian history. He knows that if things go much worse, I mean, you know the percentage is three quarters of the Russian military inside Ukraine right now, or something insane like that. Is it 200,000 casualties or 300,000 casualties? The possibility of the fall of Putinism and regime change should not be off the table. And that is what I hope we're trying to achieve, to be honest with you. That's what I would be thinking about. I agree with Ann Applebaum. You know, a lot of people are worried about, well, is the next person who takes over going to be worse than Putin? And Applebaum's thesis is no one is worse than Putin

because he knows how to use, operate the levers of power so effectively. So I would like to see this end with the end of Putinism. And what I'd really like to see is his butt in the dock at the hay. But I think that's probably too much to help for it. Yeah. No, listen, I want to be optimistic. I am a Russian dissident. I'm going to say that. I am a Russian dissident. I am a Russian pro-democracy activist.

People always ask me, are you anti-Russian? No, I am pro-Russian. I am for the Russian people. I would be on the front lines in Russia against Putin. I have tried to, and all of the works convey that. I'm a pro-democracy advocate. I'm a human rights activist. I want the Russian people to have democracy.

We've got to get rid of this guy. I hope that, maybe I'm crazy. I hope that is our unspoken policy goal. And it says to use this as an opportunity to move moving off the stage. Well, we were talking about Donald Trump in passing, but that's something that both of us would have to worry about. Yeah, I was going to say that, you know, Donald Trump's repeated statement that he can end the war on day one of his of the second term.

Well, what would that look like? You know, locking in the gains of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, just go ahead and hand those over to the Russians. You can be sure that Vladimir Putin is trying to hang on in the hopes that Donald Trump gets back into office, and we should probably expect a great deal of Russian intervention in the next election. Yeah, well, I mean, it would be a great tragedy

for us. Obviously, if we had that situation unfold, and it would be a challenge to Western democracy. So, you know, the one thing I always worry about with these criminal indictments with Donald Trump is that prison is very empowering for political figures. You know, we know that, right? I mean, we know good examples and bad examples. Letters from the Birmingham jail by Martin Luther King Jr. would obviously be a good example. We should not expect that. No, but we have bad examples. There's another example. Yeah, no, the Adolf Hitler in 1924. You said it.

I didn't mind that. Yeah, exactly. No, we have good and bad examples of political imprisonment, but what we do know about political imprisonment is that it does lead to a galvanization of those groups. Whoever is supporting the good or bad political figure seems to galvanize around him. So we have to be worried about that. Nelson Mandel is the one that is apart from Dr. King, Nelson Mandel, and the time he's been in prison. Yeah, 27 years in prison, and he comes out to lead the country

and do his best to unify that country. Of course, you write about South Africa in your book. We'll leave that plotline threaded there. Daniel, I want to ask you this, because I've always, I mean, I've always been dying to ask you this. I might as well ask you this on our podcast. When you think about the world and you know the spycraft and you know the seam between good and evil in the world, and you know the complexity. Are you an optimist? or a pessimist, a realist? How would you describe yourself and how do you think about the future of the world? We were talking about the climate a moment ago with my character. I don't know about you. I'm alarmed by this summer. So I know we're having a sharp fluctuation because of the El Nino cycle. But it was 152 degrees apparent temperature, not actual temperature in Tehran the other day, 152 degrees.

We cannot, humans cannot live in that kind of climate. We're about to have a section of the earth and the, you know, Pakistan, parts of India, that region that's going to back Iraq, going to be uninhabitable pretty soon, at least for large portions of the year. We're going to have millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people on the move pretty soon. We are losing cropland around the world to climate change. When you see, I'm very worried about the unraveling of democracy and democratic norms. I worry about competition for scarcity of resources, water, for one. I think the world's going to be, it's going to be more chaotic than it is even right now.

That's what I would say. You know, I try to portray, my characters are professional spies and intelligence all. and they're supposed to make these kinds of ruthless hard decisions. But I'm also, as I said before, I believe in human rights. And I'm personally, you know, left of center. And I worry about the world that we are on course for spies and intelligence officers have to prepare their countries and their leaders for the decisions that they're going to have to make.

And we in the Northern Hemisphere are going to face some difficult decisions because of them. And Israel, I mean, Gabriel lives in Venice now, but my goodness, it was, you know, I guess that Prime Minister Netanyahu had to go into the hospital with a little bit of heat, exhaustion, or dehydration. It's on fire with the temperature. The Mediterranean, you know, this is going to create a lot of instability, I'm afraid. Well, I mean, I want to throw one more thing out you. I'll let you go in a second, but we both know what Dunbar's number is. It's why we have a difficulty maintaining more than 150 relationships. And the irony of our evolution is those relationships got us here. You know,

we were able to have these nice small villages and the villages turned into city-states and then we had the administration of larger entities. But unfortunately, we can only really relate to about 150 people, at least according to Dunbar. So when you have a plastic cup or you have a plastic bottle and you're discarding it, you're not thinking about the 8 billion people and the impact that were holistically having on each other. So is this feature of our evolution, which got us to where we are today, preventing us from dealing with the problems that we have? Look, I mean, the statement that came out from China on climate was very revelatory in my opinion. I mean, are they at 1.2 or I can remember what their current population is, okay, we have these people. They need electricity for this. We are not

going to make any drastic changes to our power grid and power consumption anytime soon. This is not going to be our decision. So, you know, I am worried that there's just going to be, weave together an international coalition to take this on is going to be very difficult. We're talking about the heat. We need air conditioning. People aren't going to be able to survive without air conditioning. and we need electricity to power the air conditioners.

We're not going to be able to marshal a broad coalition to get this done. It's going to fall on individuals and making decisions. That's where I'm at on this. No, that's interesting. And we have to, you know, try to get as much into, we're going to have great electric cars soon. You know, try to drive less, try to use less. try not to do everything you can with recycling do your bit we're all going to be in this together

by the way we've gone from climate climate change we're now in the climate crisis and when we get to 1.5 which we're going to just blow past that 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial we're going to go to a climate apocalypse and let's leave on an up note yeah no no but I think it's important I think it's to at least discuss it because, you know, we, we have climate declinists, if you will. They believe they don't believe in the climate change that's happening. It's irrefutable. I mean, if you look at the data, you look at the information and you look at the admission, it's irrefutable. But I guess so the reason I'm asking you these questions is that you're good at predicting things. Isn't there a lot of money to be made in renewables? And yeah, well, I think that's ultimately, that's ultimately going to be the ticket.

You know, I've made investments on the blockchain where you're literally paying people to pick up plastic, okay? And so you have companies that are producing plastic like Coca-Cola. They'll drop ship money into companies, which will incentivize the youth of the world to get the plastic out of the ocean, to get the plastic off of the, off of the, we're just in that vexing dilemma that you're describing because you need the air conditioning. The air conditioning emits carbon. So you're cooling off the inside while you're heating out, heating up the outside. Actually, it, you'll admit carbon by, you know, producing the electricity. But you're not actually, you're taking the heat from inside the building and sticking it out on the street.

Anyone who's walked along a New York street past an air conditioner knows you get that little blast of warm air, right? So you're making it actually hotter outside. So it is not a solution by any means, but it does be people safe. No, 100, 100%. So we'll have to see how this happens. So we're at the point in the podcast where I'm going to read you five words. And then you react to these five words. You can give me a sentence, a word, a paragraph.

So let's start with the collector. Well, I will say that it's a title that I wanted to use for a very long. long time. And I stayed away from it out of respect for John Fowell's book. And the way I just had to use it and the way I dealt with it is one of the quotes in the epigraph of the novel is just a perfect, that fits perfectly into the novel. So I gave a tip of the hat to one of my literary errors, John Fowles, and I stole his great time. Okay. America. America. Incredible. blessed land with incredible people. Let's just take a deep breath. Let's stop this culture war. Let's stop this war of whipping up anger. Let's let's heal our divisions. We are a great

people. Russia. Find a way to extract yourself as quickly and as painlessly as possible from this situation and and become a decent country. Gabriel alone. One of my best friends. I love every minute I spend with him. I feel so blessed that I had the inspiration to create him. And I got a few more left in it. Daniel Silva.

I guess that I can see that career is heading towards an end at some point. I feel like I am so blessed and so lucky in that I was able to do what I always wanted to do from the time I was a young. Well, listen, I think your best years are ahead of you. I don't think like you've got your best years ahead of you. You know, but listen, this is a phenomenal book. I'm looking forward to the next one already. With great sadness, I finished this book two days ago. I say with great sadness because I now have to wait 12 months for the next one.

but the title of the book is The Collector by Daniel Silva, and it's just another amazing piece of literature. There's so much to learn from your writing and from your personal thoughts. So thank you today for joining us on Open Book. Thank you so much for having me. What a wonderful interview. So Daniel is one of the greats. I have to confess it isn't a true summer for me until I am handed the hard cover of a Gabriel Alon book. And the collector has everything.

It's geopolitics. It's art collecting. It's what happens to real spies in real situations. And if you read the book without giving too much away, there's some predictions about the future. Now, you will recall that Daniel, a couple of years ago, blew up a very tony cafe Milano in Washington, D.C. And of course, people thought that was outrageous until about six months after that book came out. They caught somebody trying to do that very same thing. So either he's predicting the future.

or he's helped writing the future. But he's absolutely a brilliant novelist. And I've learned so much from him about life, travel, spycraft. And it's a real page turn, a real page thriller. So grab your tequila, your coffee, your wine, your tea. But whatever you fancy, get it in one hand and get Daniel's great book in the other. And that makes for a perfect summer evening, summer morning, I might say. And by the way, if you start reading the book, you'll be like me.

You'll be turning pages until late. late, late in the evenings. Go ahead. Okay. So this week on my podcast, I had Daniel Silva, okay, who's an award-winning spy novelist. And you're a fan of thrillers, right? Ma, you like some. What books do you like to read the most, Ma?

I find a human mind. Very interesting. Maybe I'm nuts, but I like to read about it. Okay. So let me ask you this, Ma. I've been reading this man's books for the last 20 years. and he's actually put me in his books because I've helped him with some of the plot lines. You think I could be a good spy, Ma?

Do you think I would make a good spy? Absolutely. Anthony, you think that I'm blowing smoke up you, but I'm not. You have a magical brain, which I really believe took after my father. It sounds a very conceited thing, but my father was at genius level. And I think you have that. And I think that you would make a very good spy, but I wouldn't want you to be a spy because it's a dangerous, a dangerous thing to be a spy. Do you like the James Bond movies, Ma, or not really?

Not really, no. Okay, tell me why. Because they're fake. Too fake, right? There's too much. Too fake. Yeah. I like the real world things.

Like more realistic movies. Okay, so you would like Mr. Silva's books because they're very realistic, okay? Let me ask you this. Could you be a spy, Ma? Could you be inconspicuous? Or you're running your mouth too much all day in the town of poor Washington? What do you think? I think that if I was, you know, not four feet 11, a statue that was tougher and not so, I have like a me low personality, usually unless someone hurts me, then I'd be tyrant.

But it takes me a while to get there. And I think that I would be very caring to the people. I can't say I would be a spy. would be very caring. I don't think I could be a good spy. No, I don't, I don't think you could be a good, no, I don't think you could be a good spy because blah, blah, blah all day long. You're like, you're like Siri before there was Siri or Alexa before there was Alexa. You just have to ask you who's having the affairs in Port Washington, you know every detail. Am I wrong? Without saying my experience, sometimes there was a very bad person in my life who I couldn't

diagnose and it took me years to figure it out. So I'm not a good spy. All right. I don't think I'm a good spy. We know you're not a good spy, but you definitely got a lot of good information. So you'd be somebody that the spies would want to talk to, Ma. I love you, baby. All right. All right. Bye. Bye. I am Anthony Scaramucci and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. You can also

text me at plus 1, 917, 909-29-996. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.