When you let aero truffle bubbles melt, everything takes on a creamy, delicious, chocolatey glow. When you let the bubbles melt in a cup of coffee, it's mind bubbling. So now we'll see people filtering in.
00:01:31.340I mean, this is fascinating watching them come in because on my last podcast, I had no access to the statistics or any of the, you know, kind of information about what was happening outside my little square.
00:01:49.520And you are so aware of your audience that it's almost chilling.
00:14:33.020I knew that that's what you thought in your head when you were saying that.
00:14:36.400I'm like, oh, he thinks that he's in his kitchen.
00:14:38.320And I was going to touch on that because, you know, here we were looking at, you know, Scott made a Dilbert Museum.
00:14:45.580in his house, which was next to his office, a room next to his office. So we were in there
00:14:50.140all looking at everything in awe. I mean, my God, the, the span of Dilbert, the Dilberritos were in
00:14:56.780there, you guys, everything. Um, but then Shelly took us aside, meaning us like, you know, us here
00:15:05.040and just a few other people that are, you know, podcasters, his ex, ex friends, not ex friends,
00:15:11.960and said, Hey, like, I'm not letting anyone in here, but do you guys want to see Scott's office?
00:15:17.480And this is after coming out of the museum. And I was like, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And so when she
00:15:22.700opened the door and Walter, you were, I think you were like right behind me. And I remember hearing
00:15:28.240you going like, Oh wow. And you were saying like, what was going on in my head? Because you walk in
00:15:35.240there and it's like it's a pretty big room and there's scott's desk with the cabinets behind it
00:15:41.920with the books on the shelf with everything and you were just like filled and you're like come
00:15:48.400over with like scott's essence in there it's so moving the first real cartoonist i ever met
00:15:54.460as a as a child i thought that there were two jobs that i would just absolutely kill to have
00:16:00.660and one was astronaut and the other was cartoonist um the the people thought these things up and they
00:16:08.300got to live in the world of their own imagination I mean ultimately I became a novelist but but but
00:16:13.900I can't hang pictures of the scenes from my novels on the wall as a cartoonist can and to go inside
00:16:22.000your own head as it were and look around at your own creations and then create new ones seems almost
00:16:29.760like the nuclear fusion of mental work. So I was in awe. I love that. All right. So we did talk to
00:16:42.800Walter before the show briefly about some things we want to touch on for you guys.
00:16:47.820We always like to start with a light story. I don't know if this is light. It is of other world.
00:16:53.780Let's get light. It can be anything you wanted since it may be completely imaginary. So let's make it light today.
00:17:00.720All right. So you wanted to be an astronaut. And had you become an astronaut, maybe you could tell us more about aliens. Do they exist?
00:17:09.940Well, so here's the thing. We noticed the other day, or someone released the fact that the government has registered the domain name alien.gov and aliens.gov.
00:17:24.280uh everyone suddenly went does this mean you know disclosure looms does this mean
00:17:30.980that this website this domain name will be filled with pictures of you know craft maybe little
00:17:37.800creatures lying in refrigerated glass cases i figured it was just a new new branch of the
00:17:44.780government well exactly my first thought when i saw it was i i can't believe they didn't have
00:17:50.740these already registered i mean aliens.gov is sort of almost uh redundant of course we're governed
00:17:59.460by aliens we've known it all along uh not only that our government governs aliens to some extent
00:18:07.540i know that's a controversial word for for migrants but you know it attempts at least to
00:18:13.140govern them so these were natural uh domain names that they should have had from the very beginning
00:18:18.740of the domain name Irma. That they just registered them now is suggestive. It means they have
00:18:26.600something to tell us. It's sort of like when your parents put out the dish of milk and the
00:18:35.560cookies for Santa the night before. It fires your imagination. Suddenly you're seeing Santa in your
00:18:41.480mind. Maybe they're just going to leave these websites up empty so that we can imagine them
00:18:47.660for a long time. But I think they'll probably start filling them with information. And this
00:18:55.200information will probably resemble the information that I've been getting for years now. Because not
00:19:00.980only was I fascinated as a boy with the topic, I'm fascinated as an adult. And as an adult,
00:19:05.920I'm in a position to speak to some of the people who, you know, have been there, people who've
00:19:11.360worked in satellite intelligence, for example, and who tell me, oh, yeah, those things come in
00:19:17.240and out all the time. We just don't tell you about it. What do you mean in and out? And they
00:19:22.160mean of the atmosphere, the upper atmosphere. They're zipping in and out. Oh, especially around
00:19:27.720the time of wars or, you know, in the old days, nuclear tests. I've accumulated a lot of this
00:19:37.340knowledge and done these interviews at length over the years. And it has led me to the conclusion
00:19:44.360that we have either been subjected to the world's longest and most complicated lie since the 1950s
00:19:52.560when, you know, the flying saucers started showing up in the movies and on our cereal boxes and
00:19:59.160everywhere else, or there's something to it. And if I'm going to be frank with your audience,
00:20:05.960I think there's something to it. And I think the inequality of knowledge, the division of
00:20:13.500knowledge between those who have it and those who have to just watch Steven Spielberg movies and gas
00:20:19.900is so great that it's kind of tearing apart society in a strange way.
00:20:26.760They say that the rich and the poor are the two groups that are always at each other's
00:20:32.360throat through history. You know, the Marxists would tell us that. But those who know and those
00:20:36.960who are kept in the dark are also natural adversaries. And I think one of the problems
00:20:43.520with our society is that it's so divided between people who think they have inner or insider
00:20:50.600knowledge and those who must always guess or give up on guessing because they've despaired of being
00:20:58.380told anything interesting or important. I think that gap needs to be closed.
00:21:04.160have you ever seen anything yes of course i have i live in montana i'm the sky the big sky country
00:21:10.960the sky is bigger than anything and it is a absolute stage for you know astral and cosmic
00:21:19.760phenomena now one time i stopped my car and told my wife that a giant illuminated centipede was
00:21:26.640crawling across the sky and it looked like the invasion was coming it turned out to be starlink
00:21:32.320If anybody's seen Starlink in a dark sky as it emerges bead by bead, pearl by pearl in this long string and then disappears in the same fashion, they will have seen something that most of mankind throughout its history would call God.
00:21:50.740I mean, but have I seen things that aren't Starlink?
00:23:22.380I'm not sure if I would see them, though.
00:23:24.120I mean, you know, I live right near Chicago, so I think there's plenty of light pollution most of the time, and it would be kind of hard to see.
00:23:31.100In Chicago, you know, there's a theory that a lot of the aliens actually live underground and have their laboratories and sort of nests there.
00:23:38.880And so in Chicago, I think they come up through the manhole covers, not down from the sky.
00:23:45.380I'll start looking down a little more.
00:23:46.700Yeah, I feel like I'm suddenly worried about ocean aliens now, which I never thought till recently. Because here on the Jersey Shore, you might remember we had these drones. Scott said I was his best drone reporter and the best one out there because I was reporting on them every night. And they were real. And there were a ton of them. They were loud. They were bizarre. I don't know. They were, I mean, to me, I'm not saying those were aliens, but we were doing something.
00:24:17.560So, you know, nobody wants to talk about it.
00:24:19.540And, you know, when I use the term aliens, I see in the comments, as I see every time I use it, it's just a distraction.
00:31:57.760And that he would also frame things as being like, you know, the most likely thing to happen next is the most interesting or the most entertaining or the most ironic.
00:32:10.180I mean, COVID was COVID was begun in the consciousness of most Americans as a bunch of supposed surveillance videos of Chinese train stations and so on where people were falling over.
00:32:24.660And what was causing them to fall over?
00:32:26.980Now, that's how you start a miniseries. I'm sorry. And then in the next chapter of COVID, it was sailing toward us on a cruise ship on which it had broken out. And would we let the cruise ship land? And would the infection come across the ocean into our very country and secure perimeter?
00:32:52.300that was suspense and then it did and then it started breaking out here now i'm sorry
00:32:58.800it's true that pandemics and viral events do have a storyline you know there's infection and then
00:33:06.540there's symptoms and then there's illness and then there's spread so in a way pandemics are stories
00:33:13.700but this was framed and and created in a way that a hollywood script writer would would put it
00:33:21.480together and when i notice that something looks like a script i really start to wonder who the
00:33:29.180writers are and then i wonder who's paying them because we're writers we don't do it for free
00:33:35.060well i i certainly noticed when it was leaked or revealed that during the january 6th investigations
00:33:42.160they hired hollywood scriptwriters on that committee they did listen i i hate to be this
00:33:49.680way, but I'll just give your audience some unfiltered truth. One time I was in Los Angeles
00:33:55.500and I had a meeting with some other writers for a project that we were contemplating. And it was at
00:34:02.560two o'clock in the afternoon, say. And at one o'clock, I got a call from one of the writers
00:34:08.360said, we can't meet today. Somebody's in town that I need to meet with instead. And I said,
00:34:19.720And what they meant by that was that the CIA comes through town and it maybe has stories that it wants to tell or it has technologies or weapons, let's say, that it wants to see celebrated in cinema.
00:34:34.500Maybe because that scares our enemies to see what, you know, America supposedly has in its back pocket.
00:34:41.520But in any case, there, of course, is a synergy and a communion between our national security state and our national entertainment state.
00:35:04.900You already know that the CIA has a big chunk of money allocated for movies.
00:35:11.520And that they actually, you know, kind of will give you like a plot that they want to happen and give you information to put in there for propaganda.
00:35:23.320But, you know, it's a mutually beneficial arrangement for the intelligence services.
00:35:31.660It might be propaganda for the screenwriter.
00:36:28.880There's really good information in TV shows all the time because writers are very competitive.
00:36:36.400and they try to get closer to the source of these stories than other writers they try to get better
00:36:43.100versions of them yes they may try to improve on them or or or sort of you know impose their own
00:36:49.420style but but they're really actually good investigators good detectives and they come up
00:36:54.920with some great stuff and the things you see on television uh which are presented as fantasy and
00:37:00.340fiction are often quite true. In some ways, they're used to immunize you against the revelations that
00:37:07.380they are true. So what's happened with the alien subject is that for years and years, we've been
00:37:13.520treated to movies and TV shows. And so if you then see one yourself, you go, ah, you watch too much
00:37:19.500TV. Oh, you've seen too many movies. If we notice political plots or conspiracies, and we talk
00:37:29.020about them, we're often told, you watch too much TV? What a wonderful method for defeating
00:37:38.880people's discoveries of inconvenient truths in advance, to put them on TV first, such that it
00:37:48.320sounds like you're just repeating crap you watched. Now, you're a writer, and you've written
00:37:55.760books that have become movies, I think Up in the Air might be the most famous with George
00:37:59.780Clooney. When you write, do you use that kind of detective process? And how do you go about
00:38:08.700finding the closest source to the truth? Well, see, I write about what I like to call
00:38:15.460normal life or everyday life. I want to write about phenomena that we all are exposed to,
00:38:22.660Not necessarily secret military plots or political intrigue that goes on behind closed doors, but the lives we all lead.
00:38:32.540So Up in the Air was a story about what I thought was the least well-covered institution in American life, which was airports.
00:38:41.840We all go through them and none of us notice them or we notice them, but we don't talk about them or we have feelings about them, but we don't think they're important.
00:38:54.180But one thing that's true is that we all go through those airports.
00:39:17.960I go around and I look for, you know, I look for habitats.
00:39:22.020I'm like a biologist in the field or, you know, an anthropologist.
00:39:26.140I look for ecosystems and habitats and so on, which are not celebrated or written about or talked about.
00:39:37.840But in this case, I looked at one that we all live inside without noticing, like fish in water, and that is the world of airports, hotels, sweet hotels, Applebee's, chain restaurants, and so on.
00:39:52.820I just thought it was fascinating that we, you know, as Americans, we want to be sophisticated. We still live in a kind of inferiority complex to the wondrous, intelligent geniuses of Europe and the rest of the world.
00:40:07.200so we we discount our own contributions to the world uh a novel in which an applebee's is
00:40:14.080described thoroughly oh you know how beneath us all i love that cafes and in paris you know yeah
00:40:22.920well i mean i i'll tell you personally i i was i i worked i still work for a big consulting firm
00:40:28.200where we do a lot of travel a lot of flying and when up in the air was in the theaters
00:40:32.540my project manager said hey we're all going to have a you know project outing we're all going
00:40:37.220to go see up in the air together and we all sat there and watched the movie and then at the end
00:40:41.960we're like okay that was pretty depressing it was just you see you see i like to call it one of the
00:40:50.020last depressing hollywood movies yeah uh you know it was a fairly big budget it was it was paramount
00:40:57.080studios it was a big director jason reitman and one of the world's biggest stars george clooney
00:41:02.260and it had an unhappy ending now that is an achievement i mean uh you know almost all
00:41:09.820movies now end with the world being saved uh you know the person getting the love of their life
00:41:16.340and i remember joy you know a little everybody loves gossip i remember george clooney telling
00:41:20.740me you know i don't get the girl in this movie and that is like gary cooper losing a gunfight
00:41:27.860in the last room people are gonna pay attention that's so true i mean why do we have to walk out
00:41:34.220of a movie feeling good i mean don't you just want to feel like i i like feeling right you know
00:41:39.640yeah it was a great story and you know very kind of um satirical i kind of saw it as like the other
00:41:45.400side of the story of the office you know you remember those two guys that come in bob and
00:41:49.200whoever and they lay people off and it was kind of like the story of that person that lays people
00:41:55.120off and um well yeah i mean for the audience the the hero of up in the air has a or the protagonist
00:42:02.340at least has a peculiar job which is that he goes around to big companies and orchestrates their
00:42:10.540layoffs for them and goes to their you know executives and gives them the bad news now what
00:42:17.560could be more dramatic than that and and people say walter um how did you know about that form
00:42:24.400of consulting how did you how did you know and I say I didn't I made up a job for the guy out of
00:42:31.980thin air out of my head that I thought would lead to interesting scenes because really I was
00:42:39.560I wasn't interested in my protagonist as much as I was in his world and you know when you travel
00:42:47.460all the time you become very detached and in a way it's a luxury to be that detached you know I
00:42:53.940I used to talk to business flyers and they say, everybody thinks I'm unhappy, but the secret is
00:42:59.540I'm very happy. I get treated really well by the airline because I have a million miles.
00:43:05.200I'm led into all these clubs. I'm given all this free food. I get to stand first in line.
00:43:10.780I'm special. At home, I'm not special. At home, it's, you know, did you feed the dog? Here,
00:43:16.980it's, you know, here they'll hold a plane for me for five minutes because I'm a platinum status.
00:43:23.100Yeah, I've seen it. And I'm like one tier below that. Or like that was the highest I could get
00:43:29.840just be partly because I live in Chicago, and it's pretty competitive. And it's like the top
00:43:33.2603% that get into that upper tier. And but I knew people that I worked with that were in that and
00:43:39.600they would always get the first class tickets. They could even reach out to airline to fix my
00:43:44.860flight problems in a way that I couldn't do. And they would hold them, they would do all sorts of
00:43:51.120things and it's like wow there's just such a class power so so i asked the director of the movie
00:43:57.520i actually met him first or one of my earliest meetings of him with him was in chicago you know
00:44:04.860chicago's a hub for united airlines and they were scouting it as a location and and and i said so
00:44:10.600what's your status on your airline he said well i'm global services and that is the high echelon
00:44:17.740united airlines um classification and i said well what's the what's the nicest thing they've ever
00:44:26.540done for you as a global services member he said once they held a 747 for me in japan wow that was
00:44:34.280flying to the united states holy and i went wow the ability to have a 747 wait at the curb
00:44:41.860you guys we got to start rethinking what power is i mean
00:44:46.420forget it let's also rethink what powerlessness is because because the reason the movie is a little
00:44:54.380bit sad or bittersweet is that its hero mistakes this kind of power for real power right which it
00:45:02.180which it is not what it is is flattery by a corporation that wants you to or your boss who
00:45:09.300pays the bills to keep spending money that's right marcella i want you to jump in i see you have a
00:45:15.720question yeah um so i have two questions one is about the rash um is the script you wrote um
00:45:23.500and i want you to talk about it if you can and where it's at now um in the process okay well
00:45:32.160What Marcel is referring to is a satirical, a sort of dark comedy that I wrote about pandemics and about mass hysteria in general.
00:45:45.760It's called The Rash. It's not about COVID.
00:45:49.120It's about a fictional skin disorder that causes people to scratch.
00:45:55.280Or is it that the scratching is what causes the skin disorder?
00:45:58.500Nobody really knows. Society is confused. You know, do I have the rash because I scratch or do I scratch because I have the rash? Well, I use this fictional disease, I guess, or it could be mental delusion to explore the process by which an entire society goes crazy.
00:46:21.300OK, and similar movies were written all throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s, satires of American madness.
00:46:33.820Network was a movie in the mid 70s about network news, which proposed that the news would start staging events in order to cover them because real life wasn't entertaining.
00:46:46.640anymore now that was thought to be cynical ridiculous and outlandish but of course we
00:46:53.440now know it as our everyday life wait walter will there will there be like a million dollar
00:46:58.760hard to get ointment that people need well you know what i've done a good job in laying my premise
00:47:06.500because what you want to do as a writer when you create a premise is to get the audience guessing
00:47:11.540about how it will work out and of course you're right that when there's a rash that may or may
00:47:19.300not exist there's a company that has a product that will cure it only what are they curing in my
00:47:26.180case they don't know so you know to kind of give away a bit of the plot a company has a drug
00:47:35.460whose only effect is that it makes people really lazy and really apathetic and they go
00:47:42.500this drug is perfect for curing the rash because it doesn't stop the itch it just makes you too
00:47:48.340lazy to scratch it um and so that's all i'll reveal about them yeah yeah so so so i wrote this script
00:47:57.620uh it was it was uh brought to me by nicole shanahan she didn't have the story idea but
00:48:03.700But she wanted a story in this general domain to make us aware of some of the things that had happened to us during the COVID period.
00:48:13.580But these are the same things that happen to us whenever power wants us all to do the same thing or wants to fill us with fear so that they can then cure the fear to their advantage.
00:48:26.760So I went and wrote this script and I gave a little presentation about it in Washington, D.C.
00:48:35.000I made a teaser trailer, a little two minute trailer that showed you what the movie might be like if it's ever funded, you know, if it ever attracts the money it needs to be made, which it hasn't yet.
00:48:47.220And I spoke about it at a Maha event in Washington, Make America Healthy event.
00:48:53.200Well, within days, I suddenly had the media from Politico to Yahoo News to The Hollywood Reporter to a British publication to the editor of Mother Jones magazine attacking me for even thinking, for even considering satirizing the holy, sacred COVID pandemic.