The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1180: Dystopian Las Vegas w/ Lee Scrivner

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

69 MinutesPG-13Lee Scrivner is an American cultural theorist and academic, best known for his works Casinolabs (2025), Becoming Insomniac (2014), and “How to Write an Avant-Garde Manifesto” (2006). His research and writing focus on the Victorian and early modernist periods, as well as on contemporary issues. He has lectured at Birkbeck, University of London; Bosphorus University in Istanbul; American University in Washington, DC; and at National University in San Diego.Lee joins Pete to talk about the themes explored in his latest novel, "Casinolabs." The novel is published by Imperium Press' new division, Exeter House.Lee's SubstackLee's TwitterCasinolabs at Imperium PressCasinolabs at AmazonPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingiano show. For the first time, Lee Scribner's here. How are you doing, Lee? I am doing really well. Thank you for me. Tell everybody a little bit about, oh yeah, yeah, no problem. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself before we jump in.

Well, my name's Lee Skribner, and I just recently finished a novel that I've been working on for way too long, many years. But it takes place in Las Vegas, and I grew up in Las Vegas and was there in the 80s and 90s, mainly, mainly the 80s, actually, so I'm kind of old. But then I moved around a lot and traveled the world. and finally finish writing this novel, and I, you know, just want to get it out there. And I think, you know, it represents a lot of the kinds of things I've been thinking about lately. Well, I think, well, it's put out by Exeter House, which is Mike Maxwell's other house. He also has Imperium Press, and he's been on the show multiple times.

I've had multiple authors from Imperium Press on the show. Thomas 777 writes for Imperium Press. So, yeah, I think it's cool that he's doing something. He's branching out and looking at doing other divisions for different subjects. So how would you describe this novel? Were you looking to create metaphors for life, or are you telling a story, or all of the above? Well, before I go there, I just want to say, yes, I do very much appreciate that Mike Maxwell has kind of taken me under his wing and given me a spot in his Exeter House publishing concern. when I finish the novel I put it out to gosh like 50 different agents to try to get some

to try to get some agent representation and you know I don't want to be one of these sour milk sour grapes type folks but I didn't get a whole lot of positive feedback and I don't think I mean you know it's it's hard to get an agent and and that's usually the first place you go if you're serious about getting published unless you want to publish self-publishing stuff. But as soon as you start looking for agents, you get a little bit dismayed because you start reading the kinds of books they're looking for. And they're looking for the kinds of books that most of the people that probably are listening to your podcasts are not interested in reading or writing. So I think they're, and I think Mike identified this problem.

as well, both in Imperium Press and in Exeter House, that there's a huge population of people out there who are not being served by the publishing industry. And so, you know, not only as readers, but as writers, you know, because if you go to some people who are, you know, the New York literati, and you read the kinds of books they're asking for, you feel like, you feel like, they must get funding from USAID because most of the stuff that they're looking for is, you know, transgendered stuff and stuff with a powerful female lead and all this stuff that's, that's, you know, of a certain type. And I just feel like a lot of, you know, they wouldn't publish Lord of the Rings, basically.

And I think that's really a shame because, you know, not everything. is kind of ideologically acceptable. Not everything that's good is ideologically acceptable to the mainstream presses and the mainstream agents these days. And I think that's a shame because there's some good stuff out there that runs counter to kind of the mainstream leftist agenda or narratives and stuff. So I didn't, when I set out to write this book, I didn't set out to write an agenda-driven book or an ideologically driven book. I just wanted to tell the story that I felt like I was

kind of destined to write or interested in writing. And so it's not, it's a story. I mean, the first thing to know about my book Casino Labs is that it's a story about, that's very close to me. It's got people, I recognize people in the story as almost people I know. You know, my father's a psychologist and one of the main characters is a psychologist. So not to say that that's my father, but I think in some ways the book is what I would consider like an autobiographical fantasy. So there's elements of autobiography in the book, but it's like breathed through a filter of slight fantasy. It's augmented and articulated in a certain kind of fantastical way. But I think that, you know, it's like artistic license that gives the

a little bit more symbolic power to the narrative. You said a lot there, but one of the things I wanted to say is that those books that are being published for, you know, oh, this has a trans lead or something. No one's reading those. Yeah. No one's reading them. And, you know, the good, The good news is no one's reading them. The bad news is they're probably using our, you know, tax money to buy 50,000 copies of them so that they can perform patronage to these maniacs that, you know, hopefully this spirit of this age is coming to an end. And these people can retreat into their shadows where they belong. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if there, if a lot of money.

was being, you know, changing hands in order to make it look like there was a huge demand for these kinds of topics. And it actually reminds me, you know, I'm also in academia, and I've been teaching for, you know, 20 years in higher education. And I've published a few things in that, in that, you know, in higher education, in academia, as a literary scholar and, you know, looking at cultural trends and things like that. And so as you do when you're a professor, you need to publish. And in order to publish, you go to sources like, you know, call for papers.

The University of Pennsylvania puts out a website called UPenn Call for Papers. And so it's like they basically describe the kinds of papers that they're looking for to publish in academic journals. And it's very much the same thing. It's like, you know, trans this and gender studies that and a lot of racial studies, you know, African American studies and stuff like this. and you know 60% 80% of the papers that are asked for

from scholars to be produced and published even at that first stage are seem to have some kind of left-leaning agenda to them and again like I don't know that there's a huge population

of people clamoring you know to read you know the queering of Shakespearean Milados in You know what I mean It's like these are

These These titles and these subjects are Seemingly Being dictated From the top down And they don't And I think that's partly why Academia

Especially in the Higher Humanities Has had such a bad reputation lately As being kind of totally out of touch disconnected and only reserved for people who are independently wealthy or elite speaking to each other. And they leave out a lot of people, I think, who are literate and competent and articulate and intelligent. And I think that's a real shame. And so I see a big parallel between the kinds of ideological hoops you've got to jump through in order to publish both in academia and in fiction.

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Relax in our exquisite accommodations. Step outside and be captivated by the Wild Atlantic Surounds. Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with. you in mind give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from trump dune beg search trump ireland gift vouchers trump on doonbiog kush farraga i assume you don't mind talking about where you um what you've been doing for the last 10 years where you've been teaching um i mean you have a wikipedia you have a wikipedia page right no i don't mind

yeah um it's pretty i mean it's prestigious i mean i know i know i know the university I know people who've gone there. I know a lot of people, a lot of powerful people, some powerful people have gone there. So what's it like teaching at American? Actually, I don't teach it American anymore. I taught there briefly right before I moved.

Probably the Wikipedia might be a little out of date. But I taught there briefly right around the first Trump term. I think it was 2016-17. and then moved to Moscow, actually. And this is another thing I'll disclose. I don't mind disclosing it. It's my wife's sitting in the State Department, and she's been there for 16 years.

So we got posted to Moscow, and so I left American University. And, you know, and it is hard, you know, working through some of these institutions. I feel like, you know, I, one thing I'll say is like I never treat a student, like if I have a student, I subject them to the same scrutiny and the same rigor, intellectual rigor, you know, kind of no matter who they are. And, but it's, it's, I don't know if it's a way to weed out, like ideological dissent or whatever, but they, they do, I don't know how I,

stayed in academia so long, but because every once in all I'll run into someone, a colleague who is, you know, has a little bit more of a wider view of reality than is the norm. But you kind of, kind of fly under the radar a little bit and do a lot of these training courses that teach you how to be inclusive and stuff like that.

and I feel like I don't need those really, but they're just part of the zeitgeist. Everyone has to go through that. And I don't know if everything's going to change now with the lack of funding from USAID or whatever. But so anyway, I was in Moscow for a few years and then came back and taught at different colleges and then went back to Moscow. So I've been to Moscow twice and you know what? since Trump is now reconnecting diplomatically with

the Russians I might be going to Moscow again in the near future, I don't know. Interesting, interesting. All right, let's jump into casino labs. It takes place in the early 1990s, Vegas. What was it like there in the early 1990s?

Yeah, so like I said, I grew up in Vegas in that period. My dad was a psychologist and not just any psychologist. He worked in the graveyard shift at a crisis unit at the university medical center hospital. So basically people who would try to commit suicide or whatever, he'd be, the police would bring in people to him that were either threatening to commit suicide. And they, he would psychologically evaluate them, determine if they were kind of a harm to themselves. or others and, you know, send them on their way to, you know, a rehab center or whatever. So he, I think he kind of saw some of the refus, the wreckage of the 24-7 party atmosphere of Las Vegas

during that time period. So he also, I think I said, he just worked in the graveyard shift. So he was gone a lot at night and slept a lot during the day. day. But I just remember one of my formative kind of thoughts on some of my ideas that I explore in the book, I remember walking around Vegas at night with friends or alone. And not, you know, I lived in the suburbs. So as a lot of people think of Vegas and they think it's just one giant casino. But of course, there's a suburban kind of sprawl around the strip. Like Henderson somewhere. Yeah, there's Henderson in the kind of south-east, and then in the northwest, there's another Henderson-esque community called Summerlin. And this was actually before Summerlin was built.

So there's a place called the lakes. But basically, I lived on the west side and kind of just a suburban area. And anyway, I remember walking around just in the outskirts at night, and I would look down to the city. the night, you know, you could see kind of the glitz from the periphery of the city, look down and you could see the glitz. And for some reason, you know, I was, I was on a bit of a, I'll get back to that in a second, but I was on a bit of a purity kick for many years during my high school years. Like, I didn't, I wasn't really into, you know, drugs or alcohol so much, not that I really. We used to call that straight edge. Yeah, no, I, I wasn't straight edge. I mean,

Yeah, so I guess I acted straight edge, but in my experience, straight edge people would like fight people for smoking. Like, hey, you're smoking a cigarette. I'm going to punch you in the face. I never did that. But I went even farther. Like I didn't like touching plastic. I was kind of a hippie, actually. I would remove plastic threads from my shoes and replace them with cotton threads. that might have been an extreme example, but I was a little bit weird like that. So I felt this urge to seek purity. And so I remember walking around at night. And the reason I'm walking around at night is because in Vegas, in the daytime, it's too hot in the summertime.

So like, you know, when I was a teenager, I'd be out of school for the summer. and my friends and I would spend a lot of time during nocturnal hours when it was a little bit more conducive to kind of being outside because during the day was too damn hot. So I just remember looking down at the city landscape and seeing all the glitz and lights and I got this, I don't know, almost this theory that if I was going to be a creative person, I had to turn away from the stimulation of the lights of the city and look out into the void of night where there were no lights and almost create light out of nothing because when you have a creative act you need to create it in a vacuum or i mean not that all creativity comes out of a vacuum but there is a sense in which it comes from nothing uh and since that is the case if you over if you're surrounded by overstimulation all the time it will stifle your creativity and it will stifle your, you're, the life of the mind or whatever. So that, that's like really the first step

into some of the ideas that informed this novel. And there are, there are many others. But I want to just say that, you know, again, this is a story that is, you know, it's like a fictional story with characters and interactions and plots. And it's not, it's not really a, it wasn't meant to be a theoretical novel, although after I started writing this novel, I started noticing, hey, you know, I'm actually articulating some of these kinds of theories. And so maybe I went with that. So it does have a theoretical framework or some kind of philosophical ideas that are embedded in it. But at the end of the day, it's not just a ideological piece of text or writing. It has a story, a very human story of, you know, family ties and

and betrayal and feelings of, you know, feelings of betrayed loyalties and things like that that are in the novel. Well, start talking about Morton Waterhouse. Okay, great. Okay, so Morton Waterhouse is like, you know, the main character, or one of, I'd say that one of the two main characters, but probably he was, probably the main character. He works in...

So let me just talk about the first chapter. And I don't want to like give the whole game away. And there's some chapters at the very end of the book that are... It's like an M. Knight Shilomon. Some very surprising things that might happen at the end that I won't give away. So spoiler alert. But I'll talk more freely about the first few chapters. So Morton Waterhouse is a greeter at like a Caesar's Empire, a Caesar's Palace clone casino called Caesar's Empire.

And he's dressed in a toga. And he wanders around the casino all day and greets the incoming tourists who he sees as kind of riff-raf and rabble. But he'll greet them in Latin. and he's walking in a toga, he sees himself as a Caesar. And they have these in Vegas, or they used to. They don't really have them anymore, but it used to be in the 80s. They'd hire people to dress as Julius Caesar, and they would greet guests coming in from the strip, and they'd come in, and the Caesar employee of the casino would say,

Greetings, welcome to Las Vegas. Well, Morton Waterhouse, I don't know whether it's because he started working at Caesar's palace, and he is of a certain kind of temperament. But he starts to become obsessed with Rome. And so instead of greeting everyone in English, welcome to Las Vegas, welcome to Caesar's Empire, he greets everyone in Latin.

And he says, Salueete, Chivis Romani. And he's basically saying, greeting says, hail citizens of Rome. And he gets in trouble for this. So he gets called to his boss's office And the boss is like, hey, I'm getting lots of complaints here that you're, you're yelling gibberish at our guests.

And he says, you're supposed to call everyone Caesar, or Caesar's plural. And this actually refers to something that, you know, when Jay Sarno opened Caesar's palace in 66, he required everyone to be greeted as a Caesar. And so the word in Caesar's palace, the word Caesar's palace is not possessive like a palace of Caesar. It's actually Caesar's plural palace. And that was done intentionally to imply that everyone who comes to visit Caesar's palace is a Caesar. So everyone's a Caesar. So Morton Waterhouse's boss is telling Morton Waterhouse to call everyone a Caesar. not just, you know, hail citizens of Rome.

He's telling them to call everyone a Caesar. And Morton Waterhouse kind of just goes back down to the ground floor with his tail between his legs. And he's like, man, I got to call everyone Cesar's. I thought I was a Caesar. And this bothers him. And he has this identity crisis because now he feels like what's the distinction between him and everyone else that comes to Cesar's palace? to think that he was a Caesar and they were just the citizens. And now he's a face in the crowd.

And of course I think there's, you know, it gets back to that kind of neoliberal ideal of everyone gets a trophy. There are no hierarchies. So the hierarchies of society have all been flattened and everyone's a Caesar and everyone gets a trophy. And so this is kind of step one, and this is the first chapter in the novel that I just described. Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th, because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs. When the doors open, the deals go

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and he has a sister. Yeah. Yeah, and then, of course, there's Dr. Stephen Nichols, who is a psychiatrist, a psychiatrist who, would it be a stretch to say there is some inspiration, even if it's very small from your dad? Oh, no, it's not small at all. Actually, it's funny because, you know, he's very much mirrors my dad, but also Bill, you know, of course, if you want to just cut right to the chase,

I see kind of Morton Waterhouse as a mirror image of myself, as a lot of authors do. Maybe it's not cool to say that and to kind of let the cat out of the bag. But the father in Morton Waterhouse's father, who's crippled with Munchausen syndrome, and he thinks, we'll get into that in a minute, but he's kind of my dad. He's kind of modeled after my dad. is modeled after my dad, the father of Morton Waterhouse, so Bill Waterhouse. But Nichols, his psychologist, is also mirrored or modeled after my father. So my father gets to play double duty in these two roles.

I mean, you know, maybe that's a generalization or an exaggeration, but there's elements of my father in two of the other main male roles in this book. you know, for what it's worth. And my mother, funnily enough, who I love and everything, but she doesn't appear at all, so I don't know what to make of that. Anyway, but let me just say one kind of slightly interesting thing, if you don't mind. Absolutely, please. Yeah, so the origins of writing this book actually are a little bit funny and almost mystical because, you know, I lived in Vegas most of my earth.

earlier years, but I went to college in a few different places, but I ended up in Salt Lake City as an undergrad and went to the University of Utah. And there I was living with a woman, and this was like 98, okay? And when I was there, I had this dream, a very, a very clear, vivid dream that seemed so significant, right? And the dream was an image or a vision of someone floating through space in a toga. And this was long before I had any idea about writing this book, right? This is like the first glimpse of what this book was to be. He's floating through space in a toga. And I woke up and I thought, what does that mean? You know what? It reminds me of. It reminds me of Las Vegas where you have guys in a toga and they're on a moving walkway. And

they're floating through space, like they're not taking any steps, but they're actually going through space in a moving walkway. So that's what it reminded me of, and I thought, hmm, that's weird. Now, this girl and I broke up, and a few years later, I find myself back in Las Vegas. I was working at UNLV as an adjunct professor teaching English at UNLV, and then another girl I was dating who was a, who worked at the front desk at Caesar's Palace, called me one day, and she's like, Lee, I know you need a summer job because your adjunct job at UNLV doesn't pay you over the summer. So here at Caesar's Palace, it looks like there's a job opening up that you might be interested in. You tour the moving walkways and you greet guests as they come into the casino.

No. And so for one summer, I did that. I walked around Caesar's Palace and sometimes the moving walkways would break down and I'd restart them with my key. And pretty soon they broke down and they wouldn't start back up again. So they had some mechanical problems. So I had nothing to do. I would just wander around Caesar's Palace and get paid for it for months and months. But the whole time I was like, yeah, this is weird that I had that dream of the guy wandering around Caesar's palace. And here I am wandering around Caesar's palace, getting paid for it. And so I started thinking, hmm, you know, I like writing fiction. Maybe I'll write a story about a guy that wanders around Caesar's palace and greets guests, and he thinks he's Julius Caesar. So that's when I started writing this story. when you describe that job when I look at the job that's described from Morton Waterhouse

and I think of other jobs you do in a casino it seems to me are most of these jobs when you describe most of these jobs and now we're not we're not talking about the novel at all would you describe most of these jobs as just most people are thinking they're temporary these are not these are jobs you do while you're going to college before college save money for college maybe after college if you can't find a job these i'm not saying they don't sound like serious jobs because i mean obviously they can pay the bills but it doesn't sound like anything long term except for maybe a couple people well you'd be surprised because uh i don't know if that's this is still the case, but all through the 90s, Vegas, it was growing hugely. And one of the

reasons for that was because you could move to Vegas with no college degree and make $80,000 a year parking cars as a valet. And I don't know if that even sounds like a lot of money now, but it was a lot of money then for a kid out of high school. Yeah, I'm, I mean, I was working, you know, working for a large company in the 90s. That's especially for a kid right out of high school. That's a lot of money, especially back then. It's a ton of money. And so I knew tons of kids.

I mean, so it was kind of a disincentive to go to college because, hey, you could just go right into working down at the casinos. You could be a keynote runner. You could be a whatever and just start making money. And so in a way, it's, Vegas has gotten a reputation as being a not a very intellectual town because, you know, there's no, I mean, there is a college, but not to say that you need to have a college or a college degree to be an intellectual by any means, but, you know, it, it rewards or incentivizes just, you know, parking cars and being cool with it and having a job where you're flipping cards or, you know, collecting dice, you know, your work at the

craps table. And most of, I'd say most of those kinds of jobs, like a pit boss. casino manager. Those, those are long-term careers, actually. My, you know, close friends of mine, like my best friend's dad was a casino boss in Caesar's Palace. Like I said, my dad is a psychologist, but a lot of people's parents growing up, their parents' career was in the casinos. Interesting. Interesting. I don't know how much that's the case now because like anywhere, I think, the the wages have stagnated for various reasons. And, you know, a lot of people came in from other countries and, you know, Vegas looks a lot different than it did in the 90s.

But, and I assume the kinds of pressures have had the same results there as well where wages have kind of stagnated. And then 2008 was a big problem for Vegas and it put the brakes on a lot of construction. And actually, it's funny because I think the Vegas I describe in my novel is a 1990s, Vegas, where Vegas in the 90s was an interesting place, and it's quite different now. And this is a theme that is explored in the novel of how every casino in Vegas in the 90s was built to look like a cultural, manifestation or a simulation rather of some distant faraway culture or other culture. So you had the Paris, which had its own little mini Eiffel Tower, and you had the Venetian was built,

and inside the Venetian you had little gondola rides. So you could visit Paris and the Venetian, and they're just like a block away from each other, or less than a block. You don't have to get on a plane. They don't really do this anymore, but they really had like everything. They had the, the, the Luxor was built in the 90s. Caesar's Palace was built in the 60s. I actually think, I go into this a little bit in the novel that, you know, prior to the 1960s, which is actually really interesting, all Vegas casinos had what I would consider a very self-referential theme. And by self-referential, I mean it, the theme was, hey, you're gambling in the Old West. So you had the Four Queens and the Golden Nugget and, you know, prospecting and the California.

Like all the casino themes and branding was very much like, hey, this is where you are. You're in the West. You're gambling. You're playing cards. But then in the 60s, Jay Sarno opened Caesar's Palace and also around the same time period, the Aladdin was opened. And both of these were the first casinos that had like kind of an extracurricular casino theme attached to it. So in Caesar's Palace, you can be suddenly like in ancient Rome and in the Aladdin, you can be in the Middle East on a carpet ride, magic carpet ride, with its own like with its own aesthetics and everything.

and so that took off. Now in my novel, so let's, again, let me just cut to the chase about some of the parts of the novel that Casino Labs book, what that refers to is a company called Casino Labs, and they are a casino theme design firm or a casino architecture firm, and they build casinos. And their big schick is they're going to build casinos from all over the world. So they built the Luxor.

They built the Aladdin. And they built Caesar's Palace or Caesar's Empire, that's what it's called in the book. And so they're going to build all these different casinos that represent our simulations of other civilizations. and I just think that that is becomes kind of a metaphor like Vegas is I think both a metaphor and the real thing of like cultural decline of postmodernity so so Vegas in the fact that all casino are like a simulacra of they refer to events historical events civilizations cultures of the past but they are devoid of the history and meaning of those civilizations or those cultures so the book actually refers to Jean-Baudriard

in some of his theories. I don't know if you're familiar with Bodriard. I'm familiar. Yeah, okay. And so for those of your listeners who aren't, I'm sure many of them are, so I don't want to be condescending or anything, but I just don't know. So the idea of the simulacra is basically this, that like in normal history, I guess you could say, you had, let's say, Excalibur's sword or something. And that's an object from, you know,

when the Brits fought against the Anglo-Saxon invasion, King Arthur, the sword, the Excalibur's Sword represented, you know, British nationalism. And the ability to fight simply. Now, that image gets passed down through the generations, and it gets taken up in the Middle Ages by like Cretien de Troyes or Wolf von Eschenbach and those medieval tales of King Arthur, and then they get retold again in the 19th

century with Tennyson and Mort Arthur and Once and Future King, E.B. White or whatever. And then now we have a casino called the Excalibur in Las Vegas. Now, you could go to the Excalibur, and you can go to a buffet in the Excalibur, and, you know, there'll be, there'll be guys on horseback having jousts at the Excalibur, like you're at a medieval times Renaissance Fair thing. And you could, and a guy could be wielding Excalibur in front of you while you eat your buffet meal. but whether or not that that Excalibur has any reference to the original Excalibur that signified you know British nationalism or you know the fighting off of enemies or anything like that it's devoid it's been stripped of that meaning and now everything in Vegas is takes that on that significance or that lack of significant significance and as Baudriard said

is just kind of a it precedes from a simulacra it's a procession of simulacra so it's just these images that are constantly being replicated and regurgitated time and time again without any sense of meaning or purpose and morton waterhouse in the novel gets subjected to that and I think ultimately fights against that because he's looking for you know maybe not in a pompous or pretentious way and I didn't even realize that this was his goal or his motive when I started writing the novel. But as I started, as I kept writing it, I just got the sense that he was, he wanted to look for something a little bit more deep because he was really into the inheritance of the past. And some of his colleagues, when he goes to work at

Casino Labs, start to mock him for wanting something deeper. And they're like, dude, we're building casinos here. Like, hello, this isn't, we're not building museums or, We're trying to bring new cultural meaning to the world. We're just building casinos. So you're trying to look for something that's a little too deep that's not actually there. And so he wants to build casinos that actually help people, as if he's taken kind of a Hippocratic oath. He wants to heal society with the kinds of activities you get to you get to engage in when you're at one of his casinos that he designed. So you have like bowl leaping and

like I don't know, something a little bit more ancient and ritualistic that gives into something a little bit more deep and meaningful. Would it be, would it give too much a way for me to ask? if the former program called MK Ultra was at all a inspiration. Funny you should mention that. I'm glad you did

because you know, the National Security Archives just released some new documents that were requested of them. These literally just came out like the day before Christmas that just passed.

like a month and a half, two months ago. So they released all these new documents on the MK Ultra program. And, I mean, it is a little bit of a spoiler alert, but as Morton Waterhouse gets deeper and deeper into casino labs, he realizes that actually the whole thing is just like a front for a CIA operation or an MK Ultra operation. There's more to the spoiler alert, and there's more to uncover, so I'm not giving away the whole story. But that is one layer.

You get past that layer and you realize, hey, this isn't what I thought it was at first. But I actually think it's interesting that the MK Ultra operation is actually connected or seems to be not too different. in effect to this kind of thing that I was just describing with Baudriard, because one of the purposes of M.K. Ultra was to try to break down people's identity. You know, you go to these newly released National Security Archives documents, and, you know, they use drugs, and they use sensory deprivation. to try to break down people's identity. And I think the idea of casino labs would be to say,

okay, all these cultures that you thought were, that you thought were significant, your background, your cultural inheritance are nothing. They're just like, they're just flashing lights used to sell hamburgers, used to entice people to gamble in Vegas. but at the end of the day let me just put out another catchphrase or whatever

but like Marshall McLuhan would say something like the medium is the message and the meaning what's the meaning of the casino medium the message is just you just sit there

and give your money away I mean I like gambling but I used to kind of make fun of people who would sit there and just pump hundreds and hundreds of dollars into the slot machine and just sit there hour after hour after hour. I'd call it a sitcom like these people were just sitting. It was like a sitcom and they just give their money away and ha ha ha. At the end of the sitcom they kind of saunter out of the casino penniless.

And again, if you think I'm being judgmental, I was that person for a few years. For a few years, I was actually pretty much addicted to gambling. Is that common around Vegas, even if somebody's not working in the casinos, that they're a strong draw? Yeah, yeah. And I think my friend thinks that it only gets people who aren't from there. because I think people who are from Vegas, either they know better or they realize that, see, with people who just visit Vegas, they gamble and then they could always go away. And then the draw to gamble is no longer there. By, you know, they're just not, they're just have no proximity to gambling so they don't do it.

but for those people who do live in Vegas, sometimes they'll go on a bender and just like for six months, they go through a gambling phase, which I did. It was a few years actually, where most of my spare money was like, and it sounds stupid and it sounds like something you should know better about,

but like, have you ever won like a thousand dollars in gambling or anything like that? Never a thousand, but I mean, I was at a casino recently and won a few hundred. I'm like one pole, one pole. Wow. See, it's a thrill, huh? Oh, yeah.

It's like, how the hell did this happen? Oh, yeah. That's easy. Yeah. But like, yeah, I remember, you know, I never went to the casinos. Like I said, I grew up in the suburbs and, you know, the casino was just a world that I didn't even know about. And then, you know, when I came back to Vegas later in the 90s, I, you know, my friends would just go out and drink and gamble.

And I was like, you know, I've been such a purist ivory tower type person for so long. I'm going to see what this is all about. So I went through a hedonistic phase. And then one day I was down at the casino and I won like $1,000. And then the next day I just could not sit still. it's like you have that money burning a hole in your pocket you think oh i got this thousand dollars let me go back down and try to win more and then you're chasing the dragon your uh so and i kind of feel like i was doing research because if i was going to write a book about

i had to actually know what it was about on some some level some deeper some real level um but yeah the movie the movie casino tried the movie casino tried to portray that with i believe believe the the Japanese businessman where he they he is supposed to be on a private plane out after he had won you know club I think it was close to a million dollars and they fake like it had a you know like there was mechanical difficulty they get him back into the casino he starts playing it but at like 10% of what he was playing before and as he's winning he's feeling the loss of oh, I'm not winning. I'm losing because I'm playing less,

and then he just starts playing more and more and more. So there was anyone who's seen that movie can get a peek into the mind of a gambler, even if that's somebody who's going to be betting a little more than $5 on Blackjack or something. Right, right. No, I think it's very psychological. There's so many different, I mean,

I can't tell you how many times I sat, there. And, you know, like I said, I was a, I was an English teacher, English professor, and so I wasn't, I don't have a lot of money, you know, but I was so curious about this whole gambling thing. And I just remember sitting there like, while gambling, just thinking like, what is this? Why do I pursue this when I know it's like a dead end and a death spiral? And on some level, I just, I kind of got off on the idea that here I was, Lee Scrivener who used to be so ivory towery and lofty and high-minded and I'm becoming degenerate just like everyone else. And that idea itself was kind of thrilling to me. It's terrible.

Yeah, I mean, I actually know somebody who basically gambles for a living. Right. Yeah. If he's listening to this, hey, how's it going? Yes, I'm talking about you. Read Casino Labs. Yeah. But yeah, it's, to people like that, it just becomes very technical. There's, I don't know how much of the rush is there anymore. You know, it's just, it'd be, it's sort of like Robert De Niro's character in, in casino, where he, he could win thousands and tens of thousands on a weekend. And it was all math to him.

Yes, absolutely. Like, I mean, when I told you that I got to this huge rush winning a thousand and couldn't sit still the next day, that was just my entree into casinos and gambling. But I got to be like that. You know, I'd be gambling and I'd win a thousand. I'd lose a thousand. I'd win $5,000. I'd lose $5,000. You get stoic about it pretty quick because it just starts to lose meaning. It's like, you know, it's the fun. And speaking of the simulacra, like money itself, it loses meaning. You stop thinking about all the things you could buy with that money. I mean, I've lost, I don't want to tell you how much I might have lost, but, you know, I have kids now. And so when you have kids, you're like, why would I waste so much money when that might be my child's college tuition someday? This money has value and purpose. It's not to be just played with for dopamine rushes and stuff. But when I was at a certain level and I was gambling a lot, yeah, I was very stoic about it and very much more mathy about it.

And there was even a time where that same girlfriend actually that worked at the front desk at Caesars. Her father was a notorious gambler in Vegas and he did a lot of kinds of gambling poker and whatnot. was magic. And he, my same girlfriend was like, hey, can you run some bets? This might be kind of controversial, but like he was, he was blacklisted from the casinos. This guy. And anyway, so this guy, this girlfriend's father was like, hey, Lee, can you, I'm going to give you $65,000. And you need to go down to the, the, the, um, the, um, the, the, um, the, the, um, the, the, um, the, the, the, um, the, the, sports bets down for me. And this is back when, like, cell phones were just those little flip phones.

And I just remember going to the casino with like, 65 grand in cash. And he would call me on these little tiny, first generation slip, flip cell phones and be like, yeah, could you do like, uh, the over under on the raiders? I want the over. And I'd, like, lay five thousand. and an over-under bet $10,000 on a, you know, what's the line? They're cowboys by five or whatever, and you just bet cowboys. And after an hour or two, I call them at half-time at a big game and be like, he's like, did you bet $10,000 on this game like I told you to? So I was like a money runner at that level for a while.

None of that's really in the novel, but maybe that something like that, be in my next novel. I don't know. I don't know if I want to be the guy that writes about Vegas, but a lot of interesting stories with that whole operation as well. One of the things you mentioned when you talk about how, you know, you could go to Paris, you could visit Paris, you could do this. It's almost like, it seems to me an adult version of like Epcot Center where, yeah, they have the Walk of Nations there. And, you know, Epcot, Center to me is, it's four, kids but it's really it really cater a lot of it caters more towards adults honestly and it just seems it's that whole thing of you get to live in a fantasy for a little while you get to

visit somewhere else for a little while but you don't have to travel but really what it is is you're stepping outside of reality it's you're getting to escape reality and There's a certain level of like when you're winning, like if you're in a casino and you're up, you've pretty much escaped reality. Yes. Because you're winning. You're, you know, people are looking at you. You're also having, if you're, ever last time I was in a casino, there was a, there was a woman who she was playing one machine and her account was up to well over like four or five thousand dollars at that point. I mean, that's not a lot, but for, for, you know, just these video machines, that kind of, you know, that kind of is, especially when someone's on a role like that.

Yeah. And she almost, she almost became like, like, she's a rock star in that, in that little niche, in that little, in just this little corner of the world for, you know, for an hour or so. And it is. It's, it's not real. It's your, you're not experienced. anything real. Yeah. I mean, you feel like a rock star with all the dopamine and adrenaline and stuff, but you could be hooked up to the oxygen tank and, you know, you could be on your last leg and your last penny, but as long as you got 4,000 in the machine, you're a Caesar, you know,

you're an emperor. And I think that's a bit of a trap. You know, you can feel this way. Meanwhile, while you're just sitting there, throwing everything away. But you, you know, for a moment, you'll feel great. And I think that's one of the ways they trap you. But, but that idea that Vegas is like a theme park was, again, very much a 90s thing. And it was superimposed with actually a little catchphrase, which is like, you know, make Vegas family friendly. And that also, it's actually explored in the novel where, you know, casino labs, the firm is trying to, like, give your casino a theme, an aesthetic, but also to make it family friendly. They're trying to make it family friendly.

That was a theme in a lot of places at the time. I lived in Fort Lauderdale, and Fort Lauderdale, most famously for people our age, was it was spring break. It was where you had spring break and it was debauchrous and it was just one long party. and right around the same time, I mean, this was more 87-ish, 88-ish. They just decided, well, we want to be more family-friendly. We want to attract a different clientele here.

And that seems like it was a theme. It seemed like there was a spirit as such because I know when people have described Vegas in like the 60s, how it was much more people wearing. suits, men wearing suits and women getting dressed up where it was a little more seen as glam. Yes. And then as it became, let's just call it cheesy as everything, as time went by. And also as you're losing, as the culture is losing any kind of formality whatsoever.

And it's just degenerating into the casual nature that we see now. And I'm, and believe me, I'm as guilty of it as anyone else. I mean, I don't want to put a jacket on to go to the, to go to the grocery store. So like that. Yeah. Yeah, Vegas has like become a microcosm of the country or the, you know, the civilization itself where, yeah. I mean, you look at, you look at pictures of people in the 60s on airplanes or in New York or in Vegas. and yeah, they're all, they look much more.

They're healthier. They look more formal. They're thinner. And then if you just look at Vegas now, everyone's just wearing shorts or sweatpants and overweight. And, yeah, it's just a microcosm, really. But, yeah. How do you, if you were to look at the culture and how much the culture has changed, how when you look at your this novel what can you make any correlations well the novel i think

it's uh it presents Vegas as a a metaphor for this degradation of culture uh and not just a metaphor but like the thing itself um it is it is what we've come to Vegas is what is what we've come to and there are yeah there's it's it's basically like the post war neoliberal order writ large and morton waterhouse is kind of like this this promethian hero figure is trying to like uh you know somehow create a new create society anew i mean that might be quite pretentious of an assessment of the novel but that's kind of how i see it um yeah there's all there's a there's There's another whole, I mean, I know we're running out of time, but there's a whole other aspect where Bill Morton's father... I have time. I have time. Go right ahead.

Yeah. Bill Morton's father complains that he's been brain rattled by seeing a nuclear bomb. So just north of Vegas, there was the Nevada test site. And so they were launching or detonating nuclear bombs above ground for many years and then below ground up until 92 and all that. stopped. And so Bill Waterhouse complains that his brain has been rattled irreprovedably because he was in close proximity to one of these nuclear detonations. And so all his problems, he kind of blames on the bomb. And he forgets himself. He has amnesia. And again, this is another kind of layer of this whole thing throughout the novel, where there's this sense of identity, an identity that has been stripped away, memory that has been stripped away, everything's amnesiac and, you know, so there's some kind of correlation between Bill Waterhouse's

memory has been deteriorated by the seeing the nuke, and then kind of the cultural memory that has been deteriorated in these casino themes. and then the MK Ultra project that they uncover literally tries to subject its test subjects to sensory overloads, sensory deprivation, drugs, and all kinds of... In fact, it's like if you go to these... Interestingly enough, if you go to these National Security Archives

that were, again, were released just a month ago, they still are redacted on some level, And so I just read them a few days ago. And it's very interesting because there's Sydney Gottlieb was one of the people that spearheaded the MK Ultra project. And in these newly released documents, he's being asked like, you know, what were your methods to try to erase people's memory? What were your methods to try to get people to question their identity? their deeply held thrownness and their sexuality and all kinds of like identity, manifestations of identity, the MK Ultra project was trying to strip those away.

And one redacted portion was like, oh, we're using drugs and LSD, but we're also using redacted. And I was thinking like under that redaction was, probably like video poker. Of course, that's just my imagination running away with me. But if my novel Casino Labs is a serious account, and I think it's fanciful on some level, but there's a lot of truth to it,

and it's not out of the realm of possibility. But you could imagine that under that redaction, they use slot machines and video poker and other casino-esque modalities to degrade people's sense of identity. And if my novel is true, that would actually be what was there under that redaction. That's pretty much what I was hoping to hear some go a little bit deeper. Let me ask you this. Were you, is it true that at one?

time you were in a in a band with the drummer for the killers? Yeah, I was in a band for a few years. It was your band, right? It was my band. I was the singer and the guitar player. Yeah, we didn't go very far, but we were very close to going maybe far, but it never happened. It was one of those almost famous situations.

But, you know, like I've been in proximity to fame a few times in my life. When I was about 12, I played tennis against Andre Agger. And he was 13. And he went on to, of course, have a huge career in tennis. But, you know, I was an okay 12-year-old, and he grew up around down the street for me in Vegas. All right. I don't want to bore people with tennis talk, but after we stopped recording, I want to have a tennis conversation with you. We could do a whole episode on tennis.

No, but then, yeah, the killers. Like, so we played gigs with the killers before they got signed. And we kept losing members. One guy, one of our drummers was from Liverpool, and he had problems with the INS. So the INS is like really, really effective when your drummer is from Liverpool. For some reason. And so we, you know, Ronnie Vanucci sat in on a few practices with us,

and we were kind of like, yeah, Ronnie, you want to join our band? And this was before he joined the killer. Or he was, we didn't know this, but he was in the process of being like, entertained, what's the word, like auditions or auditioned, yeah, courted by the killers. And, yeah, like a month later, he was in the killers. And, you know, they were just starting to get a lot of buzz in Vegas. And we played shows with them several times.

and then they got signed in flute of London and did a little UK tour and started playing. And their manager, actually my wife's brother was their manager's roommate who is, I'm sorry, I'm going through all these connections, but basically the manager of the killers, his brother is the lead singer of Imagine Dragons. Look that up, it's true. So the manager, Robert Rueh. Reynolds brought us into his, brought my band into his office

not long after he signed the killers. And he's like, you got any demo tapes? A CD at the time. And he sat and listened to a CD of my band. And he's like, I'm not hearing any immediate hits here, but I kind of like this one

song. And it didn't really go anywhere. And then a few weeks later, he had an emissary come watch us play a few gigs. And his impressions were largely positive, but then our band broke up and I ended up moving to London, like, I don't know, a few months later. So it's, you know, never happened, but it's very interesting to speculate. All right.

Well, I guess, do you think there's anything else we need to add before we can start doing the promotion part of this? Yeah, I think we're good. I think we covered most of the major topics, I guess. Cool. All right. So Exeter House is at, if you go to Imperium Press, you'll see up on top, up in the banner. You'll see a link for it. You can click on that, and you'll see the, I guess, three books so far that have been released.

And yours, I believe, is the latest, or at least the second, the most, one of the most recent yeah and um yeah no i i this is a great talk um i look forward to asking you a couple questions about tennis after we finish this because we very much we might we might even have some connect we might have some connections there oh awesome yeah yeah but uh lee i really appreciate it and um yeah good luck with good luck with this and i encourage everybody check this is uh this is fiction like um like we would want fiction to be written. Not like when you get.

Yeah, well, I mean, all you have to do is walk through. All you have to do is be subscribed to thrift books or any of these websites. And then you get the email. And it says, oh, here are the books that are on sale for you this week. And you look at it. And you just know it's the most, it's either vile trash or it's absolute pablum. Right. Right. No, you walk around Barnes and Noble and like all the covers are just looking at you and you're like it. Unless you're in the, you know, classics section, which is smaller and smaller every time I walk in. But yeah, everything that's new is like, oh my God, this is just terrible.

All right, Lee, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me.