A Hollywood Frenzy with T.J. Newman

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest This mind's out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in 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 podcasts 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 punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:47Today's interview is not for the nervous flyers. That includes my wife, Deirdre. Man, if you're listening, you might want to turn this one off. The incredible TJ Newman joins me to talk about her brand new novel, Worst Case Scenario. From her stunning debut falling and its gripping follow-up drowning, worst case scenario is yet another step up.

1:18I'd like to take a second to recommend my friend Andy Ostroy's great podcast, The Back Room. Every episode is a fun, incredibly honest take on our society and the political situation, along with some brilliant guests. I've been honored to join Andy on the show, and you know anywhere that accepts me with no filter deserves a shout out.

1:45So joining us now on Open Book, and she is a returning star to Open Book. She's a bestselling author, international bestselling author. She's crushing it in every which way. She's a former flight attendant. It's sort of a crazy story. Her new book is called Worst Case Scenario. It's great to have you back on the show. Who knew and when did they know that T.J. Newman was such a brilliant suspense writer? That's my first question. And welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me back. It's great. It's great to be talking with you again. And who knew? I mean, I guess I'm going to give credit to my agent for knowing that there was something there.

2:24Because, you know, I got stories to tell and I thought I could write them, you know. And let's start with TJ Newman. You were like, hey, I got stories to tell and I can put it down in a gripping, intense way. And so you just said one day I'm going to start with a pen and a paper or a word processor and I'm going to bang out some great concepts and ideas and grind out a story, right? Sort of. I mean, yeah, I'm a lifelong reader and writer. I've always dreamed of wanting to be a published author. My road to get here was long and hard and uphill and certainly not in a straight line. There was lots of starts and stops and lots of rejection.

3:01That's why I guess I credited my agent for because, yes, to your point, I thought the stories that I had to tell people would connect with and people would enjoy and people would find interesting. But, you know, when I started trying to put them out there, nobody seemed interested at all until, you know, my 42nd agent that I sent my manuscript for my first book to said, yeah, this is a good story. Let's, let's get it out there. So let me, let me rephrase the question. I want to phrase it like an entrepreneur. Okay. You're, you've got a job. Good job. You're a flight attendant. You have a good job, good pay, good benefits, getting to see the world, but you have this burning desire.

3:40You have this burning passion to do something else. How do you get the courage up to go from, you know, you could have been golden handcuffed into that job, right? Good pay, good job, good career. How do you go from that? Take us through the thought cycle, the fear cycle, going from that into the realm of living your dream. I'll actually translate it to entrepreneurial terms as well, because when I was just dreaming of this life that I am now living, I didn't know fully what direction to go in. And I was in my mid twenties, didn't know where to go living at home with my parents after graduating from college and pursuing my first attempt in New York at being an actor.

4:22And I didn't know what to do with my life. And I took a seminar in entrepreneurship because I was looking at everything, including starting businesses, because I had some business ideas too. And I remember in this entrepreneurial seminar that I took, they used the example of a pizza parlor. And they said, look, if you're going to open up a restaurant, let's say a pizza parlor, it's going to be expensive. It's going to be a lot of work. It's going to be a huge risk. You are going to work constantly. And the chances are very good that this is just not going to succeed because that's just how starting a business goes, right?

4:54You're just, especially a restaurant, something like that. You're just probably not going to succeed. You need to be able to answer the question, why is the pizza that you're going to make and sell something that the consumer is going to want to buy over the pizza parlor that's at the street? Cause there's tons of pizza parlors over them, over any of them. Why are people going to go out of their way to buy your slice of pizza? And if you don't have a good answer to that question, then you should probably reconsider whether or not you going to all the effort and pain that you're going to go to, to open this pizza parlor is worth it.

5:28And that stuck with me. And when I was writing stories and coming up with all sorts of different things, I never found that slice of pizza. But when I had the idea for my first book, something clicked in me and I went, I don't know who would be able to tell this story better than I can. With the lived experience that I've had and being a flight attended for 10 years and the way my mind thinks and the way that I see the world, I don't think anyone could tell this story better than I could. And that's why I spent as long as I did and worked as hard as I did and refused to stop with that book was because I knew I had a slice of pizza that people would want and people would go out of their way to get.

6:11And it was that belief that made me push forward with that book. And that's somehow how we're here talking about my third book coming out. Well, listen, I asked the question because I love, love the story. And I always try to push people towards their dreams. Life is short. And you had your fits and starts. You had your failed moments where 40 plus people turned you down. And now you're onto a catastrophic trilogy, girl. Okay. I mean, you got three books. Every time I read the book, I feel like I'm getting constipated because everything gets tight on me. Okay. My God. Okay. So the seed for this book really happened during your first book, which was a bestseller called Falling.

6:48Tell us a little bit about the research and give us the plot line. I don't want to ruin the book for anybody. All I can tell people that are listening in, if you open this book, you read five pages, you're already in it. You're out of the plane in five pages, by the way, but you're in the thick of it and you won't stop reading it until you put it down. It's a great summary, great beach read. If you fear flying, I don't want to read it. I'll just tell you that. But if you don't fear flying, it's very, very enjoyable. But go ahead. Tell us how you got the idea and tell us what the plot is. Yeah.

7:18So the idea for this one, the seed was planted years ago, actually, when I was doing research for my first book, Falling. And I was having questions every day with pilots that I would be flying with about flying, about like the nuts and bolts of flying, policy, procedure, those types of questions. But I was also asked them questions about the psychological side of being a pilot, the emotional side of being a pilot. And the question that I asked all of them was, what's your biggest fear? As a pilot, what's your biggest fear? And one day when I asked this pilot this, I was stopped dead in my tracks because he looked me in the eye and said, my biggest fear is a commercial airliner crashing into a nuclear power plant.

8:00Jesus. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That was my reaction. And I immediately started to sort of downplay it, right? Because in my mind, I'm going, we live in a post 9-11 world, we have shown, it has been proved that, you know, these, these structures are fortified, they are able to withstand something like that happening. Like, that's not a rational fear, because we know that that these facilities are safe. And I'm telling him all of this. And I'm going into why I'm not afraid of this. And he's just listening to me. And when I finally get to the end of my reasoning, why I'm not afraid, he looks me in the eye and goes, and that's exactly what they want you to think.

8:40And that it was like a moment, you know, where like the hair on the back of your neck stands up on edge and you just deeply unsettling moment. And I tucked it away. And when I went back to, you know, looking at, okay, what is my third book going to be? And I knew I had to go bigger than my first, bigger than my second. I wanted to see how big I could get this, if I could get this as big as possible. And I went back to that idea and I started researching just to see like, is there something there? Is there actually something to that? So I started researching, not expecting much. And very quickly, I realized he was completely validated in his fears.

9:18and I mean, to the point that I almost don't write the book because I found the research so terrifying. The premise for this book and what happens afterwards is completely plausible. And that terrified me. Yeah. So let's go over it. I don't want to give up the plot and the personalities and people because it's just too much fun. And I don't want to give that up to people. But let's talk a little bit about a nuclear reactor, talk about things that can go wrong in a nuclear reactor. And there are several levels of things that can go wrong. And of course, if you're at a level seven, that's something like a Fukushima in Japan, or it could be a Chernobyl, which was a real disaster in 1986.

9:59It was actually in Ukraine, I believe, right? It was on the northern side of the USSR. Former USSR, yeah. Right, former USSR. But that land has been irradiated and sort of still 38 years later, sort of a wasteland. But a level eight nuclear disaster at a nuclear reactor is a big leap from a level seven. So tell us what the difference is between a level seven and a level eight. Sure. The INES scale only goes up to seven. And seven is Chernobyl and seven is Fukushima. And the scenario in which I envisioned for this book would be a lovely, it would exceed anything that we have seen. It would impact on a global scale.

10:45It would not be localized. It would be on a global scale, the potential for what the ramifications could be. Because if you think about, if you think about, if you have an accident, an incident at a nuclear their power plant, depending on the location, depending on the size of it, it's in the air, it's in the water, it's in the soil. We are a massively agricultural country and most of our agricultural endeavors are used for exports to other countries. We wouldn't be talking about a food scarcity issue solely in the United States. It would be all around the world. And most of the countries that we export to are countries that are already plagued with issues due to climate change and agricultural issues that they have there as a result of that.

11:28So we are such a more globally interconnected planet now that something like this doesn't happen in a vacuum. It would not be easy to quarantine. It would not be easy to control the ripple effects of something like this. And in the book, the incident happens at a nuclear power plant that's in Minnesota, basically at the top of the Mississippi River. And if you look at a map of the country, the Mississippi River, it just, it's like a spine, just goes straight down the entire country, top to bottom. And then the tributaries go out. If you have a contamination at the top in Minnesota, like in the book, it would seep all the way down and all the way out through the whole country.

12:10Drinking water, water for agriculture in the air, it would be everywhere. People would have to evacuate the area. You mentioned Chernobyl. You think of the exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. There's nothing there. Everyone had to leave. You go there now, you can look it up online. It's just a ghost town. Everything just frozen in place from that moment. Now put that in the heartland. Put that in the Midwest and just imagine where's everybody going? Where is everybody leaving when they have to leave this area? We would have a mass migration of which we've never seen before.

12:46It would be a refugee crisis of American refugees on American soil. Yeah, no, it's unbelievably scary. And, you know, I'm sure terrorists have thought about it. It's not like you're the first person to think about it, but you're the first person to really explain it in a way that makes it palpable and makes it real. You do something else in the book, which I find interesting. You've taken your life experience and you've infused it in the book, It's like if I wrote a book about a plane crash, even if I'm like an excellent writer and I got an A in English composition freshman year, I can't grasp all of the different technical nuances that you have.

13:26I think you first worked for Virgin. I think I remember that correctly. And it was one of the first airlines to really embrace technology. I remember they had those in-seat communication devices, and eventually they were the first people to get the Wi-Fi on the phone. Tell us about how you incorporated that background of yours and that embrace of technology into the book. Yeah, absolutely. In my first book, that especially takes place in my first book. And when I was writing my first book, we were, Virgin America was one of the first airlines to have fleet-wide Wi-Fi. We were one of the first to bring back after September 11th, when everything was sort of pared back and stripped down within the airline industry.

14:05We were the first to bring back and see TVs and entertainment, live satellite TV, which would be showing the news. It would be broadcasting that, you know, planes used to be before technology, just sort of an isolated bubble, you know, for just a handful of hours. This group of people was its own little sovereign nation floating above, you know, the rest of the world untouched. There was no way to communicate up, communicate down. It was just sort of like this floating entity of humanity. Well, as soon as you start incorporating technology, you can now penetrate that distance, that bubble. It's no longer an isolated thing.

14:43You know what's happening on the plane as it's happening on the ground. And I think as a storyteller, I saw that and saw how that could be both a wonderful, it's like any technology, it's like anything. It can be used for good or used for evil. And it plays very much a part in my first book, Falling, where the pilot finds out, due to technology, due to the internet, finds out mid-flight that his family's been taken and that if he doesn't crash the plane, his family will be killed. So what does he do? With this book, the way technology came into play, which was really helpful, is that, and this isn't really a spoiler.

15:21It happens in the first sentence, actually. So it's not a spoiler. the pilot who's flying the plane has a Widowmaker heart attack and dies instantly. And it happens to happen at the moment when they're doing a bathroom break and the first officer is in the bathroom and he was the only pilot in the cockpit. Obviously, the plane ends up crashing. Again, not a spoiler, this happens on page five. But of course, if you see a plane go down and it hits a nuclear power plant, there's going to be a question of, is this a terrorist incident? Which it wasn't, but at the time you don't know this. So then you see, you know, we're sort of toggling back and forth between the White House and on the ground.

15:55It's the book's kind of like a like a like a West Wing episode inside like a giant action movie, because we're kind of going back and forth between them of what the response is going to be to this crisis. And one of the things that helps helps the situation and damps down the reaction is that we do have those social media accounts, we do get to see what happens on the plane in those moments. And we realized this was not a terrorist attack. This is not targeted. It's not happening on other planes. This was an isolated black swan freak accident purely in the absolute definition of the name. And that is helpful in that they can narrow the focus of, okay, this wasn't an attack.

16:34This was an accident. How do we respond in kind? And this is absolutely brilliant. Even the way you're talking about it makes it palpable and suspenseful. I guess what I felt is we don't have enough contingency plans. You know, I mean, it's what I felt is that like, I almost want to put you in the White House situation room with a group of people and say, hey, this could happen. How would the FEA handle it? How would the Nuclear Commission and the things that supervise and regulate nuclear reactors handle it, et cetera. But you're in Minnesota. And I mean, this takes place in Minnesota. And I think you've explained why, because you're going to come down the Mississippi River and all these tributaries, you're basically going to affect the heartland of the United States by irradiating the main artery of the United States and then all the capillaries and, as you say, tributaries.

17:27Let's talk about Minnesota for a second. Minnesota's in the news. And Minnesota's connected cosmically to what's going on politically in the country for the last four years. And so hear me out. George Floyd, tragic murder. There's riots ensuing. Joe Biden's about to pick the senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, to be his vice president, but he can't pick her because of what's going on over there. So he decides to pick the African-American woman, the Indian-American woman, Kamala Harris from California. They ride into the presidency. So now she becomes the nominee and she picks somebody from Minnesota.

18:00So all roads in the last four or five years, politically, have led back to Minnesota, at least for the Democrats. So I guess my question is, What did you learn about Minnesota, if anything, when you were writing the book? It's a great question. And the reason that I placed the book where I did, where I set it, where it did, was I realized that, as you mentioned just a moment ago, there's not enough contingencies. Well, where? Because depending on the size of the market that you're in, there may be. If something like this, if it happened in, say, Los Angeles or New York or Chicago, one of these massive markets that have the resources, that have the attention, that have the contingencies, it may not turn out the same way.

18:46Now you place this in somewhere like a small power plant in rural Minnesota that was built in the 70s, that is in the process of being decommissioned. And all of these things sort of give it not the attention and not the resources and not the upkeep and maintaining that would be happening in a larger market, right? And it made this really interesting sort of parallel because the community on the ground, the town and the community on the ground, they are the first responders. They are who are going to have to solve this problem because due to circumstances with the crash, which again, I don't want to spoil too much in the book, but it's hard to get there.

19:28It's hard to get the help that they need. So basically, it's them. It's them on the ground with what they have and who they're with, undermanned, under-resourced, out of ideas, out of time, just making it happen because that's just all they have. And I realized in writing this, it became this really nice parallel of, like you're saying, there's the bigger stuff that gets more attention, but then there's also the smaller stuff, the rural places, the things that you don't think about that don't get the attention, that aren't considered, you know, too big to fail. These are the things, these are the connections.

20:04This is what everything else is playing into. And, you know, there's the whole, you're only as strong as your weakest link. Like these are real parallels in the book and looking in the real world of, you know, these pockets of the country that are as vital to the big picture as the big markets, but they don't get the attention. And what does this look like when we don't pay attention to those places. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. There's a, listen, there's a butterfly effect, you know, something can happen over here that affects everything else. I mean, it's just, it's the way the world works and you can have a mistake somewhere in the system that has a catastrophic consequences.

20:44You also have a benefit that goes on something positive in the system that also has positive effects. And in the book too, if I, if I can just say one more thing, it just brought this up to me. Like there's two storylines that are happening at the same time, We are facing a potentially seismic shift in the fate of humanity with this event if we don't figure out what to do about it. We are battling that, which is so epic and hard, I think, for the reader to kind of wrap their mind around in a lot of ways, just because it's hard to think of something in terms that big. At the same time, there's a rescue mission happening on a bridge of one person.

21:26One group of firefighters is doing everything that they can to save one life. And I kind of toggle back and forth between those two storylines. And it also made a nice parallel, again, kind of to this idea of like bigger market, small town, rural versus the fate of humanity, the life of one little boy. And it really is a nice sort of parallel going through the whole book, this idea of like, what are we if not the individual? What is the whole if not the individual? And it's that balance of trying to keep both in mind and understanding that both are as important. A rural town in Minnesota is just as important as New York City.

22:05And incidents like this are what show you that that is an absolute fact, but we tend to lose sight of that in our everyday lives. I would add something and I want you to react to it. You're also showing what I would say everyday people, which includes you and me, just average people going to work, doing their thing, and they're thrusted into these extraordinary circumstances. And so one of the things that works in your books, you love people, TJ. I think you really do. You're a lover of people because your heroes are ordinary people that go out of their way to do extraordinary things. Do I have that right?

22:37You have that dead on. You know, all three of my books, There's a theme through all three of my books. They're all standalone novels. They're not related in any way to each other. The only thing that's like thematically similar to all of them is these are everyday people thrust into an extraordinary situation and we see what they do. And I think this is because I spent so long on the plane and my, when my mind would go to stories and I would think like, what would happen if something goes wrong? I'm not on a plane with, you know, a Navy Seal and the Fire Chief and Thor and Captain America. I'm with a school teacher.

23:17I'm with an accountant. I'm with a grandma and a grandpa. And so my brain was always, okay, if something does happen, who are we going to be? What is it going to bring out in us? And I have a deep-seated belief in the goodness and heroic nature of the everyday person. I firmly believe that most people simply need the opportunity to present how heroic they truly are. I firmly believe that in my bones. You're writing about crisis, a catastrophe, but embedded in this is this very uplifting message about the human condition and the better parts, the better angels of our nature. Absolutely. All of my books are terrifying.

24:03I will fully admit that they are terrifying and the situations are dire. They are ultimately about hope. They are ultimately about working and sacrificing and protecting the people that you love and protecting the greater good. They're uplifting books at their core and at their essence. I love a survival story. I love a rescue mission. I love attempting to avoid disaster. It's that dissonance between peril and success. That's where my books live. And that's what I love to explore. You're making quite a stir in Hollywood. So tell us about that, right? You're ready to rock and roll in Hollywood, right?

24:45You were a bestselling, you're a flight attendant, bestselling author, but now you're a little bit of like a Hollywood maven, no? Tell me what's going on. It's wild. Both of my first two books have movie deals. Falling is with Universal. Drowning is with Warner Brothers. There's exciting updates all around there. With Drowning, Paul Greengrass, Academy Award nominated director of Captain Phillips, United 93, the second Bourne movie. He is going to be directing Drowning, and it is being adapted right now by Steve Clovis, who is, his resume is incredible, but I think he's most well known for adapting the Harry Potter novels.