Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - World's #1 Thriller Writer: "STOP SCROLLING and BE HUMAN AGAIN" - David Baldacci

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

David Baldacci has sold 150 million books, and when I picked up his first novel — Absolute Power — I was a 32-year-old lawyer who thought he had life figured out. What I didn't expect was to walk away from a thriller feeling like a different person. That's what David does. He doesn't just write stories — he holds up a mirror to humanity, all the mess and the greatness of it, and he dares you to look. Today on Open Book, we're getting into the new book, the craft, and why one of the greatest storytellers alive thinks reading books might be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. David Baldacci is an award-winning global #1 bestselling author and one of the world’s favorite storytellers. His books are published in over forty-five languages and in more than eighty countries, with over 200 million copies sold worldwide. Support his brilliant charity, Wish You Well Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting literacy efforts across America: https://www.wishyouwellfoundation.org/ David has written so many amazing books over the years, and his latest, Hope Rises, does not disappoint: https://amzn.to/48w4h7n Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. Pre-order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, out on the 17th of September in the UK and the 22nd of September in the US: ⁠https://linktr.ee/anthonyscaramucci⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And I started thinking about things. Otherwise, I never would have focused on all. 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 and 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. 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 just to take apart and see what makes them tick. It's a better way to spend your time than doomsrolling. Welcome 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. Well, I was a, I mean, I'll confess, I was a 32-year-old man. And when I read a book, I picked it up in a bookstore called Brentanos, which is no longer around. Right. 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. Then 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 travel 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 liked 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.

So I started writing a little short stories down. 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 loved to tell stories. But I went to law school. I became a lawyer. I moved to Washington, D.C. to practice law. And I did that for about 10 years. But I was writing that whole time. I'd written a script. It has gotten a lot of hot attention out in Hollywood. I thought that was going to be my big break, and it fizzled out, it didn't happen. And my law office was near the White House back then, and I would see the president sometimes and the motorcade and all that stuff. And I was in history buff, and I'd read about Kennedy and all the Tristan 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. 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 to stay up, 2 o'clock of the morning finishing this because I was like, another page and another page. And so let's talk about Hope Rising because it's the sequel to Nashville. I 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 Nashville, Walt Nash is a businessman. I mean, he's different from anybody I've written about before. He's, you know, never fired a gun in anger, never lifted a weight, never been law enforcement, never been within any federal agency. But he's done really well. He's achieved the American dream, you know? he's done everything they were 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 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 an horrific sort of event for him. He goes home and late that night, he's out in his bed. 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 Walsh 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. And he's sort of right in the monster's layer. 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 Nash Falls 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 in the first novel. But I needed an entire second novel to finish the story. And I think when you read Hope browsers, you'll understand why. It's incredible. 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. He then becomes this physically imposing tattooed operative, operating under a false identity, you know. I mean, his white 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, A, I'd like to be Johnny Rambo. Is that something you 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 to have 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 on the book

was that you can do everything right in life and still get knocked on your ass. You know, then what do you do? You just curl to the field 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. You know, everything he really cared about. He never wanted to become this thing. You 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

into that losing everything they had through no fault of their own. And then what do you do after that, you know, and I bring multination 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.

Forgive me for saying this, Steve, but I'm Italian, you're Italian. The book is about revenge, David Boutout. I mean, come on, right? Am I wrong? I know, it is. I mean, I'm biting into this book. them be, oh, everyone's going to get theirs. Okay. Do you see revenge of somebody 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 were done before. It can be really debilitating. You know, it's kind of like doom scrolling in your phone all day. It's been 10 hours past and you're never going to get those 10 hours back and you probably haven't learned anything more that you didn't know before. Yeah, 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. Tell 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 emerge as you were writing? That complexity grew organically in the novel. You know, again, I thought this is 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've done, 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 you know how did frankenstein was created and i felt that was a far more sort of impressive way to tell the story than just having you know an evil person get there 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 a reader,

you have to give it extraordinary motivation. You know, where did this thing come from? It does this happen? And so I took time to really let readers know, this is where this woman came from. You know, for better or worse, you know, this is what created this. Thank you for tuning in an open book.

And 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? It does. 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. It's a fascinating element of a human mind. And it shows that we can hold two opposing elements on our mind at the same time. And that's just humanity. I don't think AI can do that, but human beings certainly can. And that was so fascinating to me about Nash

and Steers' 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, mind realizes there's more there than just this caricature I had in my mind for this person.

And 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 your 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. I 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 thing? 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. 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 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 and it, it's not just an action story. I want you to dig down and 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. So 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, but really, really fun to sort of take apart and see what makes them tick. It's a better way to spend your time than doom scrolling. I'm with you, and I'm going to mention some of these people

that I've met when I'm not doom scrolling, okay? Amos Decker. Yeah. Alalosius, I think I'm pronouncing it right, but, man, that is one southern name about D'Alchia. I mean, whoa. Alolosius, Archer, okay? 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 it with others? I mean, I know it, but I want you to say it to the audience. Yeah. So, like, Amos Decker, he was a, he's a detective. He was a policeman. So he chose that life and that profession. Archer was a, he's a detective in L.A. in the 50s.

He chose that profession. He chose that he wanted to live his life that way. Walter Nass chose none of this. You know, 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 thought, I thought, whom the most difficult challenge I've thrown any of my characters before. Here's a guy who doesn't 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? What 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. You mean I'm not screaming at my billionaire client like I am with my 11-year-old son? Is that what you're saying, David?

Probably so. You know, we all play those roles in life. And Nash is playing the role of his life. You know, the stakes couldn't be higher for him. And when I decided to put him on the, I was trying to figure out how is it going to get to Victoria Steers an 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 layer of the monster? That seemed to me to be the only seasonal 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. He had to stop being Walter Nash from his soul all the way out. And that's really hard for people do. And you may, you know, and throughout the book, you know, sometimes he came really close to the line had a messing up, screwing up, making a mistake. It would have exposed him. But that just heightened the tension of the whole story. You know, 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. He took criminal procedure. So do you think about the operational logistics that are going on here and the potential vulnerabilities at the same time? And like if you yourself had to prosecute the case, right? A lot of that feels like it's in the book as well, right? There's almost like a legal brief inside this book. It absolutely is because the end of the day, I mean, you bring people in, you arrest them,

they're going 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 Walt Nash is not a lawyer. He has no clue about any of that stuff. He's a businessman. He 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 out of 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

or the rule of law in this country. And if you're going to successfully prosecute someone, you have to dot the eyes and cross the T's. If you don't, it was all for nothing. You know, I feel also from your writing style, and I'm, you know, 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. Is that happening to you? Are you calling audibles? Use a football expression. Are you calling audibles?

I do that. 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 the trenches. I've tried to write from the out of line. It's never anything that I put in the outline actually in some of the book. It's just a waste of time for me. It works for some way. 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. Writing so fresh. I'm like, This guy doesn't, I mean, I feel like, I feel like, I feel like, I feel like, I feel like, I feel like, you know, let me go, you know, let me go again, see what he's doing. Right. Exactly right. And when you, when you, when you, when 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 give 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, they're just not going to touch you. So where are you thinking the best? Where 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. You 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 is a long time, about four decades roughly, right? Tell me, tell me for all of us listening in, is it better now? Are your characters emotionally deeper? Is it, you know, there's nothing formulae. about your writing. So it's not like, in other words, I hate to say this about certain writers.

I can 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. I feel like this is like, you know, a little bit like Warren Buffett. Like you're, you're, you evolve your writing over time. So tell us about that evolution. Yeah, you're, you're spot on with that. I, you know, I never had this ambition to be bestselling in any type of writer. I, I, I spent 10, years of my life writing short story 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 brooks, 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 100. And that takes a lot more work, but I want my writing to be as clean and smooth as possible. I 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 link in 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 of my shoulder because I don't feel like, you know, I know anything, but that makes you try harder. You 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 like, 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. Or do you have attention to everything? Do you have attention deficit like me? I mean, what is? There's something going on here. I, what I like to do is people say, where do you get your ideas from?

Well, I wake up every day and I walk out the door. And I just look around. I don't stare at my phone. I just see what's going on around the world. I read a lot about what's going around the world, issues that are important to me. I try the process it and go, okay, how can I take a press perspective on that and turn a real life event or a feeling or a theme or an emotion and set it in a fictional novel? How can I do that to show people?

people that if they're not thinking about these big issues out in the world, how can I show them when they pick up the book? They read a really exciting story, but they come away thinking, wait a minute, now that I think about it, he was actually maybe trying to say this. Maybe I should start thinking about that a little bit more. Oh, let me look at this. Oh, there's a news article about this that's going on. And maybe those two tie together. Because at the end of the day, you know, I want to write exciting stories that people have fun and their page turners. I get then, but I don't want it to stop there. I don't want, I want people to keep thinking about this stuff, you know? I mean, listen, you're writing, when I think of David Balducci, I think of a lover of

humanity. And I mean all the complexity of humanity, the good, the bad, the evil, the indecisiveness, the impetuosity, the planning. I mean, the whole, the whole emotional spectrum of humanity, I feel like you will take the good and bad. There's an unconditional love. that you have for the human species. Okay, and it comes out in your writing, sir. And so that's why I'm always drawn through your books. Okay, so we're down to the point in the podcast where we've got five words. My producer and I pluck these words out of your book.

Okay. And so I'm going to say the word and then you give me like a sentence, okay? All right. And since you're Italian, maybe give me two sentences on the first word. Okay, you're ready? Revenge. Revenge, David. It's always a dish best served cold and you get a hell of a lot. have a lot of it in this book.

And even though we're not supposed to want it, and they tell you're digging two graves, we're all locked in, right? We know that about ourselves, right? Okay. Second word, Nash, which is our character here. A man who didn't want to be there,

but now that he's there, he's going to get the job done. Yeah, you never know who the hero is going to be in life, right? That's what they say in the military, right? You know, the unexpected hero, right? Right. Okay, I say the word hope. Well, we all should,

carry in our lives. Okay, okay. Fourth word, America. A land that's still one of opportunity and a great nation. Okay. I, you know, I love this country like you do. I love this country the way our grandparents love this country, David. Okay, I'm going to give you the last word, or I'm going to say the last word,

David Balducci. Is it there a Baldacci? It's Belducci. Yeah, I say Belduci. I'm sorry, because my last name is Garamucci. You get it put a you in the, it's a grocery store. too. Take it as a, take it as a compliment, Valdaqi. Okay, I say David Beldachi, you say what? The guy who likes to play around with words. Well, so much more than that, sir. And also,

I appreciate all the work that you do with the literacy foundation, your charity, you know, and I'll just mention it here. You co-founded with your wife, something called Wish You Well Foundation to support Literacy, Cross of America. Where can people find that charity before I let you go? They can go wish you well, foundation.org, you can learn all about the charity and what we do across the United States to promote reading and literacy. Look, as you know, if more people read, we'd have a better world. So we have to get more people to read. I'm with you. I'm surrounded by books all day.

I put a podcast together to interview authors, and I hope I can entice you back because I know you're coming with another book, sir. I hope I can entice you back on our podcast. But thank you so much for joining us today on Open Book. Thanks a lot. Enjoyed it very much. Take care. When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel in their paychecks, their communities, their futures. What does this mean for individuals,

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