David Baldacci: Author on his newest novel 'Nash Falls'

An attorney by education, David Baldacci is an acclaimed novelist with a penchant for suspense and legal thrillers.  

He’s written over 50 books, and his specialist knowledge of the US political and legal systems make his stories international bestsellers. 

‘Nash Falls’ is his newest work, the tale of an ordinary businessman recruited by the FBI to help bring down a global crime network.  

Baldacci has been writing for over thirty years, and Walter Nash, the protagonist of the novel, is unlike any he’s written before. 

“I’ve been writing a long time and one of my chief things that I do to keep myself motivated is just to challenge myself,” he told Jack Tame. 

“Get out of my comfort zone, create characters I haven’t created before.” 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Tame podcast
from News Talks at.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
B David belt Archi is one of the world's favorite storytellers.
He's written more than fifty books, and his specialist knowledge
of the US political system and law make his stories
international best sellers. His newest book is called Nash Falls.
It introduces a new character and is the start of
a brand new pulse Pounding series. And David is with

(00:33):
us this morning. Calder, Welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
Thank you. It's great to be on.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Great to be speaking with you. Well, just a few
months after your first visit to New Zealand as well,
so it's really good for our audience to be hearing
from you once again. Tell us a little bit about
nash Falls, because this is an entirely new character.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
Yeah, Walter Nash is und like any character I've written about.
He's not in the military, he's not an age and
or a detective. He's never lifted a weight, he's never
fired a gun and anger. He's a businessman, very successful,
has a nice life with his wife and teenage daughter.
Arrangement's father who just recently passed away. He was a
Vietnam veteran, and at the night of the father's funeral

(01:13):
at his home, very late at night, Nash is the
only one awake. An FBI agent all of a sudden
shows up and tells Nash that the company he's working
for is actually part of the criminal organization and they
want him to help them take it down. So he
gives nation choice work with us, because if you don't,
you're going to go down. And if you work with us,
you're going to have to give everything you have. So
it's really quite the Hobson's choice. You know, no matter

(01:37):
what choice he makes is going to be the end
of Walter Nash.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, it's it is a tricky choice to make, and
I'm sure viewers will get our listeners will have a
good sense of where he might go with that. But
where do you come up with this kind of concept?
Because obviously, you know your stories deal with conspiracies and
with power and with law enforcement a lot of the time.
But where did you get the idea of Walter Nash?

Speaker 3 (02:01):
Well, you know, I've been writing a long time and
one of my chief things that I do to keep
myself motivated just to challenge myself, try something new, get
out of my comfort zone create characters I haven't created before,
and so Walter Nash is sort of my experiment of
I could take a human being and suddenly rip everything
away that they've had in their life and see how

(02:23):
they can keep going, how they can pick themselves back up,
and how resilient they are. And interesting is in a
novel to see how a fictional character could do that.
And that was my test with Walter Nash. I could
push this guy not just up against the wall, but
through the wall and see what he would do.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
So is that there's quite a deliberate decision. You challenge
yourself to get outside of your comfort zone for creative purposes.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
You really have to, Otherwise you're just going to become
a book factory where you're writing the same plot and
over and over again, but just changing the names. I
never want to do that. I'd be bored writing it
and you'd be bored reading it.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah, that's so good. So do you see this becoming
a series of sorts? Do you know it?

Speaker 3 (03:01):
Then? Early on there will be at the end of
the hardcover for Nash Falls their first two chants of
a book called Hope Rises, which is the sequel, and
that will be out in April of next year. And
I could not finish this book in just one single volume,
had to be two novels, and you will learn a
lot more about Walter Nash and Victoria Steers, his protagonist
in the next novel, So that one is done. And

(03:23):
I wanted readers in Nash Falls to be able to
get a few chapters at the end about Hope Rises,
so they can have that sort of bridge between the
two books.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, oh fantastic. So, like I said, your stories often
involve power and the use of power. How are you
thinking about your storytelling in this specific moment, because it
feels like, you know, when we are considering who wields
power and how power is being exercised, not just in

(03:51):
the US, but around the world at the moment that
we are at a moment of significant change, we are.

Speaker 3 (03:57):
You know, and I think money equates with power great wealth,
which we have enormous concentrated pockets of wealth around the world.
Certainly we have that in the United States, and I
don't think we've ever had a closer nexus between great
wealth and political power, at least in my country, than
we have right now. And for a lot of people
it's very disconcerting. You know, if you're enormously wealthy, you

(04:20):
have your own agenda and the means to influence people
and politics to get laws passed will help you. And
we're definitely seeing that happen right now. No matter whether
it's good for everyone else or not. If it's good
for the wealthy people, then they have the means and
the resources to get laws and acted that will help them,
or laws that ignored will also help them. So it's
it's quite a challenging time right now. I mean great

(04:42):
for fiction writers because you know, I only have to
write about things are plausible, and I would challenge anyone
to say that what I'm writing about is not plausible
if you just look at the events going on in
the real world.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
Yeah, I mean, that's it. It sometimes feels like, you know,
a lot of the institutions that for a long time,
outside observers have sort of felt, would you know, would
provide a check on certain parts of the executive certainly
in other parts of the US government, of perhaps acting
in ways that we haven't seen before, and that certain

(05:15):
individuals have a degree of impunity when it comes to
exercising power. Do you personally feel worried by it.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
I did, you know, I do every day. I mean,
the founding fathers did not build this country to be
that way. That's why we had three branches governments so
they could out checks and balances on the other The
one thing they were terribly concerned about was an unshocked
executive power, which we seem to have right now. Look,
I don't care what country you live in. If you're

(05:42):
a student of history, you will realize that when you
put all your faith in one leader to make all
the decisions and no one will challenge that leader, it
never ends well for anyone. So why should we expect
it to end well today?

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (05:54):
That's interesting. Do you think that because of your writing
and storytelling, the way in which you observe the world
and the way in which you kind of observe these
extraordinary times differs from you know, the average person who
might just be getting news updates and that kind of thing.

Speaker 3 (06:10):
I absolutely do. I mean I look at it as an
opportunities for stories that I can tell, but I also
look at it as for I try to take, you know,
at a macro level, all the enormous things that are
going on. AI crypto, powerful politicians, enormous wealth. That's interesting
to write about. But what makes it truly interesting is
writing about stories where those sorts of things impact everyday people. Yeah,

(06:32):
that's where you can bring it into people's homes and
so they can look at it and ask the question,
my god, what would I do if that were me?
Which really makes people.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
Think, Yeah, you're listening to Jack Tam I'm speaking to
David Baldaci about his latest thriller. It's called Nash Falls.
Do you think when in observing the world as you do,
that you are able to not necessarily predict the future,
but you're able to view things in a historical context
in a way that perhaps others don't.

Speaker 3 (07:01):
I think it's I think everyone should read more history
because history will deaf and only give you good guidance
in the president and in the future, because things happen
over and over again. The one thing that remain static
throughout history as human beings. You know, Shakespeare centuries ago
I wrote about people who are petty and jealous and hatred,
were full of hate and anger, and today we have

(07:22):
the same. So it's just a different sort of stage,
but the same actors playing the roles. So I think
historical perspective is truly important. And I read a lot
of history over time, which makes me realize the times
when we're in right now are quite frightening.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
Yeah. Do you feel optimistic for your country?

Speaker 3 (07:39):
Have to be?

Speaker 2 (07:40):
You know?

Speaker 3 (07:40):
I feel like there are enough good Americans out there
who they don't. I think they think this is not
who we are, what we want to be, This is
not what we envision this country to be, This is
not what we fought all those worse over the years
to be. And I think that, you know, positive change,
pensilans will swing back and maybe we can get back
on a good track.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah, you made some really interesting comments to to penelview
a seen It is regarding artificial intelligence, and it came
from an experience you had watching your son using chat GPT.
Can you tell us what happened?

Speaker 3 (08:13):
Yeah? So he put in there right a plot that
sounds like a David Baldacci novel, and then within three
seconds here was a plot that sounded like an amalgamation
of all the books I've written. And I come to
find out that they had taken virtually all of my books,
most of them off of a Russian parrotid website. To
feed into the large language models. I've been involved in
a class action lawsuit against a Open AI and Microsoft

(08:33):
AI for the last nearly three years. We just settled
the case in California with Anthropic for one point five billion,
but it continues to go on, and I think that
we have to make a stand. When people feel like
they can just take your property without permission or compensation,
that's the hill that you have to die on.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah. Interesting how we were talking about individuals with impunity.
But I suppose there's a good argument to be made
that some country, some companies are maybe behaving as though
they similarly have a kind of degree of impunity.

Speaker 3 (09:06):
Really are you know? I definitely have gotten a very
personal taste of that.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, do you see there? What do you see as
being an appropriate balance then, for the use of these
large language models and artificial intelligence whilst also protecting or
adequately compensating the creators on whom whose work these models rely.

Speaker 3 (09:29):
Well, you know, I license my work all over the world.
I do you know. I have lots forty five different publishers.
I have licensed my work for television, I've licenses for films,
I have licenser for streaming, So they can come to me,
we can negotiate a deal, but no one ever came
to me. So, I mean, I'm very used to working
out deals. So people can use my material if they want,

(09:50):
but they have to get my permission and they have
to pay me. We have to arrive in an agreement.
I would imagine that. You know, if I went and
try to steal Microsoft of metas intellectual property, they'd probably
assume me right.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
Yeah, So how was the rest of the legal pro
he's going for you? You're part of this big classiction lawsuit.
But is it likely to be resolved anytime soon?

Speaker 3 (10:14):
It doesn't look like it's going to be resolved anytime soon.
And I never say never. I'm scheduled. I think to
be deposed sometime in January. We've gone through a lot
of discovery. We have to turn over every scrap the
paper you ever created. You know, I was a lawyer
for ten years. I understand how that game is played.
It's no fun being in litigation. But in litigation we
are Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
Like I said at the start of this interview, you
were in New Zealand at the start of this year.
Are we going to see you Beck here sometime soon?

Speaker 3 (10:39):
I loved. We loved our visit. We were there for
a couple of months in Australia and New Zealand. The
book I'm working on that'll be out in the fall
of twenty twenty six is actually said in Australia and
I may jump the ditch to go over to New
Zealand during the course of that novel as well. We
loved our time there and we're looking forward to coming
back do it.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
We would love that we have this like you know,
this this kind of little brother chip on our shoulder,
and that we absolutely love any global reference to New
Zealand anywhere. If our country is ever referenced in a film,
we love it. If it's in music, we love it.
And if it was in a David Baldarchi novel, I
can tell you we would be delighted. Okay, hey, thank

(11:17):
you so much. Congratulations on Nash Falls and we look
forward to speaking soon.

Speaker 3 (11:22):
Thank you very much. Take care.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
That is David Baldarcie. Nash Falls is available now. We've
got all the details for it up on the news talks.
He'd be website and yes, I did wonder of course,
if his time in New Zealand had acted as a
little bit of an inspiration for Walter Nash. He said,
Oh Walter Nash, Okay, I'm not sure what his knowledge
of former New Zealand prime ministers is, but you know,

(11:45):
I mean, you'd be turning back the hands of time
a little bit anyway. Yeah, fantastic read nash Fall. So
all the details are up on the website.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
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