Wiretap - Spoiler Alert

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

Howard boycotts all predictions of the future in order to embrace the present, a futurologist discusses his vision of a brave new world, and Scott Thompson on the prophecies of dreams.

Hi, everybody. I'm J.B. Poisson and I host Frontburner. It's Canada's most listened to daily news podcast. Just the other day, we were in a story meeting talking about how we can barely keep up with what's going on in Canada and the world right now. And like, it's our job to do that. So if you are looking for a one-stop shop for the most important and interesting news stories of the day, we've got you. Stop doom scrolling. Follow Frontburner instead. This is a CBC podcast. to wiretap with Jonathan Goldstein. On CBC Radio 1, today's episode, Spoiler Alert, in which Dr. Toffler predicts the future. Scott Thompson dreams the future, and Howard Chakowitz forsakes the future. Hello. Howard?

Hey, John. Hi. Hey, Howard. How are you doing? Fine. Nice, nice to hear from you. That's surprise. I have some good news for you. The Wiretap picnic. is, uh, it's on. Oh, I'm looking so forward to that, fried chicken. We'll all be getting together, Gregor and Josh. Great. I was just looking at the weather report, and Sunday's calling for some really, really beautiful weather. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. You're supposed to say spoiler alert before you say stuff like that.

When you tell the weather. Anything that you're going to talk about the future, you have to tell someone, spoiler alerts in this day and age. This is common modern etiquette. You say spoiler alert if it's a movie or something. It's not just for movies anymore. You don't just say it for movies and books and stuff. like that. Everybody's so preoccupied with what's going to be, and I just want to live my life with what is, you know? I want to be in the moment, be in the present. You see how excited I was and surprised I was when you phoned? Because I disabled my call display. So it was a real treat.

The phone rings. I don't know who it is. Hey, John. You knew it was me. Howard, who else calls you? Bill collectors, wrong numbers. Your mom, your mom phone me. Okay, all right. John, it's all about the now now. That's how it is for me. When I'm in a restaurant, I just open the menu, I close my eyes, I put my finger down, and whatever it lands on, whatever I pointed to, that's not a meeting. Why? So it's a surprise for me when the waitress shows up and she puts the dish down. Magic.

You know, you know how I used to read the last page of a comic book? I used to read it first to make sure that nothing terrible happens to the hero. Uh-huh. Right? I'm no longer, my friend. Why? I'm going to take things one step at a time now, like a man. You know?

No one I used to go to the grocery store. I used to buy something. I'm always looking at the expiry date to make sure it's months. No longer. I don't do that anymore. I want to be surprised when the food goes bad, when I grab that liter of milk and I throw it back in my throat and it's all spoiled and chunky, well,

that's part of my own personal mythology. Food poisoning. The story of food poisoning. It's a wonderful epic tale. You know how committed I am to this idea? How? I've stopped using the future tense when I speak now. The future verb tense?

Only the present tense. I know. I'll only use the future tense in an emergency. You just use the future tense. right now. Did I? Yeah, you said I'll only use the future tense in an emergency. That's, you were using it.

Okay, I think maybe I don't really know what the future tense is. But I do know what the future is, and I know that's something that no man can know. And so what's the something getting all hung up on it, you know? Which is why I took all the batteries that are my smoke detectors. Why would you do something? That seems really stupid. I have 15 senses, but I'm going to survive this new world. How would...

A smoke alarm isn't a problem. prophecy of the future. I mean, that's to save your life. I want my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my noggin to save my life. Well, good luck with that. I have not. Well, so be it. I lived a good life. Did you? I did. Mm-hmm.

Did you? I, I'm, I'm, I wouldn't even know. You know why? Yeah, I was waiting for someone to tweet you to tell you had a good life. Not me. No, thank you. I know I had a good life. Okay. Well, Howard, I'm, I'm gonna get ready for the picnic. I'll, I'll, I'll see you later. Please don't tell me that. Please. In the book of laughter and forgetting, and I hope I'm not spoiling anything for you here, Mylan Kandera describes watching a woman in her 70s getting out of a swimming pool.

She climbs out of the pool and waves to a young man sitting in a lifeguard chair. The woman's wave is the gesture of a flirtatious teen because in that moment she's forgotten how old she is and the point Condera makes is that we don't walk around thinking I am 45 or I am 73 most of our lives were no age at all we're simply ourselves although we are beings who exist in time

there is an aspect of us call it our soul that exists beyond time. In this eternal present, we are who we always were. Yet still, we're obsessed by the future, and there's a whole industry out there that caters to this obsession, whose sole purpose is to ponder what this future holds for us, and we call the men and women of this brave new industry, dreamers. Dr. Benjamin Toffler, you've just written a book all about the future called Looking Forward to Yesterday.

Yes. And how would you describe the central thesis of your book? Well, the basic point of the book is that in the future, we're going to look to the past for our inspiration. We'll move forward by going backward. And how do you mean? Well, for example, as the polar ice caps melt due to global warming, water levels will rise there will be a lot more

canals built to control the water and people will have to get from one side of a canal to the other and in Holland in the Middle Ages pole vaulting was developed as a way to get from one side of a canal to the other you'd go vaulting to grandmas so pole vaulting

will be one of the big ways of getting around in the future and you could also take a boat well it's not very portable is it you're going to want something you can take with you like a pole oh i okay i see there's so many inventions you know we're going to go back to in their purer form i mean the cell phone we're not going to be able to punch those tiny little buttons people are getting fatter all the time and we'll go back to rotary phones

because you'll be able to stick something into it like perhaps a pencil or a chocolate pretzel uh-huh because i mean it seems to me like people are you know pretty into these touchscreen smartphones with the apps and the internet all the time? No, the internet is the best a fad. It's a passing fancy. Here's my beef with email. I mean, oh, it's so convenient. It's so immediate.

It is also incredibly insecure. I mean, look at WikiLeaks. With that wikileg just taught us you can't use the email. I mean, people track that. But it's hard to hack into a telegram, isn't it? somebody hacked my telegram you never hear that right no of course not telegrams they aren't used well they will be because they're secure uh-huh the kids will all be using morse code now the way they use texting shortcuts you know you'd be like what's up on your text but in morse code that would be dot dot dot dot dot dot to dot dot dot dot dot dash dot dash extended dash dot dot dot dash dash dash dash dash dash

Don, it's up. As soon as the kids get a hold of this stuff, it's going to explode. Newspapers will make a big comeback because paper is, it grows right out of the ground. So paper will be making a comeback? Yeah, for sure. Because it seems as though we're moving towards what they're calling a paperless society. It's ridiculous to imagine we're going to have a paperless society, you know. First of all, how are you going to wipe your behind with a Kindle?

Or if you have fish and chips, what are you going to wrap them in? the online version of the Globe and Mail? I don't think so. You'd just be stuck with a big steaming piece of fish in your hand. That's stupid. It's foolish. Now, with the research of the paper, you're going to be faxing up a storm. You're going to be faxing people all the time,

and you're going to probably have the fax man, which is a mobile fax machine that you carry in your pocket. Like a walkman, you mean? Yeah, but a fax man. And I've already patented a number of different portable fax machines that work on a crank or maybe a magnifying glass, which is positioned above them to focus the sun's rays. Okay, so solar power will be big in the future because it's so sustainable. The thing that's great about the magnifying glass is so versatile. You can use it to heat your, boil your soup, for example.

otherwise you'll be eating raw chicken and you'll probably die and we won't need you anymore it's going to be a process of natural selection the people who have magnifying glasses or the ability to grind a serviceable lens will survive and those who can't

will naturally be outselected I have to say doctor that this sounds like a very unlikely scenario to me this is what's going to happen I don't make these trends, I just report them. No.

You know, we're also going to, I think we're going to see a big resurgence in the pneumatic tube. Oh, you mean those tubes that suck through? Hey, I'm going to send a message up to Larry in accounting. But, I mean, it's only good if you're in the same building, right? Well, no, we're going to expand the pneumatic tube system. The same way that the world now is covered in fiber optics, it's going to be covered in pneumatic tubes. underground? No, it's going to be above ground.

It's going to form a lattice work above the earth. I mean, you know, you look at a movie like, you know, the planet of the apes. Well, it's prophetic because in the future we will have hundreds of thousands of apes, specially trained, to do jobs that we don't really enjoy doing. In the future, we're going to be having apes living in our walls, and they will be doing things like running the elevator. You know, chimps will climb up and down, the cables, pull. pulling them up and down, and that's how we will, how our elevators will function.

We'll have escalators filled with monkeys, and you will hear them chittering beneath your feet as you ascend to the upper level of the mall. Dr. Toffler, just out of curiosity, you are a doctor of... Are you expecting me to fill this in? Yes. I am a doctor of Futurology. and what university did you graduate from Pearson College

dot com oh it's an online university but it's an online night school you can only use it at you can only log on it at night they really don't have the facilities to keep it going 24 hours I see and it is kind of ironic I mean what with you know your view on the internet

was it ironic Shakespeare wrote with a quill So that was what he had. Right. Like I can't live in the future. I can only predict it. Well, it certainly sounds like a brave new world. Well, it is incredibly brave. I'm very excited about it.

Well, Dr. Toffler, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Thank you. If you're absolutely loving your summer read and don't want the book to be over, your experience doesn't actually have to end when you finish reading. I'm Matea Roach, and on my podcast bookends, I sit down with authors to get the inside scoop behind the books you love. Like, why Emma Donoghue is so fascinated by trains, or how Taylor Jenkins Read feels about being a celebrity author. You can check out bookends with Matea Roach wherever you get your podcasts. I don't think I've ever thrown out a single fortune cookie fortune, ever. I don't go so far as to fold them into my wallet,

but I do usually hang on to them in some way, maybe tossing them into a sock drawer or placing them in the pages of a book I'm reading. There's just something about throwing one out that feels like an act of bad faith, because all prophecies should be taken seriously, even if it's a prophecy that comes in, and a cookie at the end of a meal of Muguaypan.

And I love the idea of possibly rediscovering these predictions of the future, in the future, holding them in my hands and thinking about what once could have been but never was, yet one day might still be, because the future often feels larger and more boundless than the past or the present. Perhaps it needs to be, because it's where we store, our hope. I mean, the last 10 years have been, honestly, the most difficult time of my life. Oh, yeah? It started with a fire bombing, and it ended with cancer this fucking decade.

Wait, I'm sorry, Scott. What are you talking about? Oh, you know I had cancer. You knew all that. Yeah, no, I do know that, yeah. I feel, I'm very healthy now. doctors say that it's highly unlikely it will come back i'm really happy to hear that but what is this about a firebombing i know i know it's funny i always dropped that like it's like oh no i prefer dentine

um 11 years ago i was fire bombed by the um Islamic terrorist group and it completely changed my life and were you the individual target or you just know my boyfriend i was collateral damage Who was your boyfriend? My boyfriend's name was Joelle Soler, a French filmmaker, makes documentaries. Okay. And he decided one day that he was going to make a movie about Saddam Hussein. So he told me that he was going to go to Iraq. And I was like, Iraq.

Who the hell cares about Iraq? I mean, this is before everything, you know, this is 2000, nothing was going on there. So I was like, oh, okay So he went there on his own Like he snuck into the country He lied He said he was a Saddam Hussein supporter It came back with all this crazy footage

And he started working on his movie It started playing around Different festivals It's called Uncle Saddam And it's a comedy Like it's a lighthearted look At a monstrous family I tell you

It turned into hell We had no idea what we were waiting into. So what happened was on November 1st, 2000, I woke up early in the morning and I went to the door, opening the door, and the lawn was all black, like burned. And I was like, what? And then I looked down and I realized that I was standing. in what I thought was a pool of blood, and I was freaked. So I look around, and I realized that there's red paint everywhere, like it's dripping off the house like blood,

and the tops of the palms were burned. And then I saw a note on the floor, and on the note it said, in the name of Allah, the merciful and compassionate, burn this satanic film, or you will be dead. and dead was underlined in case the whole thing didn't freak us out enough. So we called the police

and the police took hours to arrive. They laughed at us when we told them who we thought it was. We said an Islamic fundamentalist group and they actually said, what's that? Because you have to remember this is before the world shifted. Like no one, you don't tell people

in 2000, you've been targeted by a Islamic fundamentalist group. No one believed us. Nobody. And then I had to call the Canadian Consulate. I had to get protection. But they kept trying to kill him. And then he went into hiding. Oh, so you guys separated? Yes.

He went into hiding, and that was the end of my life. So what I do, when I get really troubled, when something I can't understand, I write. So I decided that I would write a one-man show about terrorism. I decided that I would explore violence and why I was drawn to it and why it was drawn to me. And was this a comedy? Yes, it was called The Lowest Show on Earth. Now, you have to remember people, you know, everyone was like, why would you? Who can't? What terror is? What an odd thing to talk about.

So I wrote this show. Now, this is in 2000. I wrote a monologue about Buddy Cole. Buddy Cole, your flamboyant character from Kids in the Hall. Yes. Deciding to go to Afghanistan. To a weapons of mass destruction bazaar. To buy anthrax. Because he hears that it smells so pretty. This was in 2000?

Yeah. That's really weird. It's very strange. Yeah, Buddy Cole goes to Afghanistan. He meets Uday Hussein, and Buddy's disguised as a Yemeni princess, so people think he's a woman. So Uday falls in love with him, kidnaps him, they steal a United Nations helicopter, they fly over the no-fly zone into one of Saddam's secret underground palaces, where they have a meal of roast tiger, and they watch the South Park movie on a giant television screen.

And then Ute wants to have sex with Buddy, thinking he's... princess and then in walks Saddam Hussein and then the whole end of the pieces

the three of them collapsed onto the pillows in an axis of evil and buddy thought to himself well at least the next few minutes

there'll be peace in the Middle East and I wrote this the year before September 11th and then I got an off-Broadway run.

I paid for this show. I put all my money behind it. I put everything into this show. This was my big break. This was my way out. And I was supposed to open September the 19th, 2001. A comedy show about terrorism. Wow. Yeah. I know. So what happened was on the 10th, my posters went up all over Manhattan. And then on the 11th, it all fell apart.

But I didn't know that it was over for me. Like, I did not know that. Like, everyone advised me to pull the plug because it made no sense why I was writing about all these things that were going to come true. But I was convinced that I could still do the show. And I remember wandering around, like, in a daze.

And it was, I guess, maybe September, for the 15th, 16th, something like that. And I suddenly realized that I'd seen it all before. What do you mean seeing it before? Well, now you're going to, you're going to think I'm crazy. It's just going to sound so crazy. but you have to trust me this is all true. Okay.

There's a part of the story that I didn't tell you about. In 1999, I had this compulsion to go to Peru. I was working on a screenplay about the center of the earth that became my graphic novel, The Hollow Planet, and I'd been doing research. And I discovered that the ink had believed that life began And in a place in Peru called Lake Titicaca, it's this incredible place.

It's 11,000 feet above sea level. And it's basically the Garden of Eden for the Inca. Their creation myth is that man and woman walked out of the lake. And that underneath the lake is an entrance to the caverns that lead to the center of the earth, right? Okay. So this is just this crazy belief that I just find it fascinating. So I decided that I would go to Lake Titicaca

And I went to Lake Titicaca. Yeah. Now, this is 1999, right? And on my last night there, I had a dream. And in my dream, my dead brother, Dee, was taking me through Lower Manhattan. And my brother, I committed suicide in 1995. So this is that brother. And we were walking along.

And he pointed in the sky. and I looked up and there was a jet coming in and we watched the jet and it waggled its wings and then it dove into a skyscraper and exploded and I said to my brother that's my plane I'm supposed to be on that plane so we started driving through lower Manhattan towards the plane crash

but as we drove through Manhattan it changed and it became farmland and we were in farmland And all of a sudden we saw another plane had come down, and there was a plane crashed in a field. And it was all burning up. And as we got close to the plane, I realized that everybody around it were people that I knew. And so I said to them, that's my plane, I'm supposed to be on that plane. So I crawled inside the burning wreckage.

And inside the plane, everybody was on fire, and they were all yelling at me to get out. that it wasn't my plane, I shouldn't be there. I was like, no, no, I'm supposed to be on this plane. And then there was a woman at the front of the plane, and her name was Mrs. White. She was a woman from my childhood. And she was, like in the front of the plane, she was in flames, like a flaming angel.

And I went up to her, and she says to me, Scott, remember this. Not all tragedies are yours. If you stay, you'll make a terrible, angel. And I wake up. And I'm in Lake Titicaca. I'm lying in bed. It's pitch black. And I say out loud, my brother's name. And I go, Dean, was that you? And the lamp on the bedside table goes on. And I just start crying. I just weep all night. I just weep. I just can't.

I get up. I start doing everything to try to make that go. Well, maybe a bug hit the lamp or turned it. And there's got to be an explanation. I would drop the, I took the lamp. I would drop it. I would throw a piece of paper at it. Nothing would make it go.

It just went. I said, Dean, was that you? It went on. The next day a maid comes in. You know, he's an Inca guy. and I say to him, I mean, my broken Spanish, I say to him, do you believe in visions? And he's like, yes, of course. People have visions here.

So I go to the airline the next morning, and then I fly home. cut to September the 15th or whatever New York City I'm in Soho and all of a sudden it hits me with like incredible force that this was the exact spot

that I'd been in in the dream where I'd seen the plane hit the tower and I remember thinking to my knees on the side of the road and I do a lot of crying I started to cry again and I just cried and I realized that I'd seen it all happen that I would get through this but that I had to cancel the show that it was not my time this isn't my time this isn't my plane this isn't my show this isn't my vehicle this is not your tragedy that's what I

took from it I went this is not your tragedy you are a minor player you are fine get a grip you're alive it's just a show there'll be other shows you just you can't this is an act of God you can't fight can't fight God and so that's why I canceled the show he's still there I know I know what am I supposed to do it's true On Wiretap today, you heard Howard Chakowitz, Sean Cullen, and Scott Thompson, whose Scott-free podcast can be found at New Scotland.com. Wiretap is produced by Jonathan Goldstein with Mirabirtwin-Tonic and Crystal Duhame. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.