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Head on over to Freeman Beyond the Wall dot com
forward slash Support and do it there. Thank you. I
want to welcome everyone back to you the Peking Yana
Show for the first time. Lee Scribner's here. How are
you doing?
Speaker 2: Li? I am doing really well. Thank you for everybody
a little bit about it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, no problem, tell everybody a little bit
about yourself before we jumped in.
Speaker 2: Well, my name's Lee Scribner 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 eighties and nineties, mainly mainly the eighties actually, so
I'm kind of old. But then I moved around a
lot and traveled the world and finally finished writing this novel,
and I, you know, I just want to get it
out there. And uh, I think, you know, it's a
it represents a lot of the kinds of things I've
been thinking about lately.
Speaker 1: So well, I think, uh, well, it's put out by
Exeter House, which is Mike Maxwell's other house. He also
has Imperium Press, and that's he's been in the show
multiple times. I've had multiple authors from Imperium Press on
the show. Thomas seven seven seven writes for Imperium Press.
So yeah, I think it's it's cool that he's doing something,
he's branching out and looking at doing other divisions for
different subjects. So what would how would you How would
you describe this novel? Were you looking to create metaphors
for life, for you telling a story, or all of
the above.
Speaker 2: 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. I when I
finished the novel, I put it out to oh gosh,
like fifty 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 the 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 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 those they're 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, there's 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, there 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, uh, 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 that's I think
that's a shame because there's some good stuff out there
that you know, 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 started. 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 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 a like an autobiographical fantasy.
So there's there's elements of autobiography be in the book,
but it's like breathed through a filter of slight fantasy.
It's it's augmented and are articulated in a certain kind
of fantastical way. But I think that, you know, it's
like artistic license that gives a little bit more symbolic
power to the narrative.
Speaker 1: You said a lot there, but one of the things
I wanted to say is that those books that are
being published for trans Oh this has a trans lead
or something. No one's reading those. Yeah, no one's reading them.
And 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 fifty thousand copies of them so
that they can perform patronage to these maniacs that you know.
Hopefully this the spirit of this age is coming to
an end and these people can retreat into the shadows
where they belong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of money
was being you know, changing hands in order to make
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,
twenty years in higher education, and I've published a few
things in that in that, uh, 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
as you do when you're a professor, you you you
need to publish, and in order to publish, you you
go to sources like you know, call for papers. The
University of Pensilvania puts out a website called upen 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 it's very much the same thing.
It's like, you know, trans this, and gender studies that,
and a lot of a lot of racial studies, you know,
African American studies and stuff like this, and you know,
of the papers that are asked for from scholars to
be produced and published, even at that first stage are
seemed 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 mulattoes in you know, 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 you know, people who are
independently wealthy or you know, elite speaking to each other,
and they leave out a lot of people. I think,
who are you know, literate and competent and articulate and intelligent,
And I think that's a real shame. And so I
see a lot a big parallel between the kinds of
the ideological hoops you got to jump through in order
to publish, both in academia and in the in fiction.
Speaker 1: I assume you don't mind talking about where you what
you've been doing for the last ten years, where you've
been teaching. I mean, you have a Wikipedia you have
a Wikipedia.
Speaker 2: Page, right, No, I don't mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty I mean it's prestigious. I mean 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 an American?
Speaker 2: Actually, I don't teach at American anymore. I taught there
briefly right before I moved it. 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 twenty sixteen seventeen, 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 in the State Department and
she's been there for sixteen years. So I I we
we got posted to Moscow. So I left American University,
and you know, and it's 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 uh,
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 a while I'll
run into someone a colleague who is, you know, has
a little bit more of a wider view of reality
than than is the norm. But 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 but they're
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
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.
Speaker 1: Interesting. Interesting, All right, let's jump into Casino. It takes
place in the early nineteen nineties Vegas. What was it like?
What was it like there in the early nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2: 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 like 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 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 refuse, the wreckage of the twenty four to seven
party atmosphere of Las Vegas during that time period. So
he also, I think, I said, he just worked at
the graveyard in the graveyard shift, so he was gone
a lot at night and sleep slept a lot during
the 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 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 this a suburban
kind of sprawl around the strip of 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
is actually before Summerlin was built. There there's a place
called the Lakes. But basically I lived on the west
side and kind of just a suburban area and uh, anyway,
I was just 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 and 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 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.
Speaker 1: Used to call that straight edge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, I wasn't straight edge. I mean, yeah, so
I guess I acted straight edge. But in my experienced,
straight edge people would like fight people for smoking, like, hey,
you're smoking a cigarette, I'm gonna punch you in the face.
I never did that, but uh but I did, Yeah,
I was. I wasn't even farther like I would. 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 it 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 your 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 an ideological piece of text
or writing. It has a story of very human story
of you know, you know, family ties and and betrayal
and feelings of you know, feelings of betrayed loyalties and
things like that that are that are in the novel.
Speaker 1: So, well, start talking about Martin Waterhouse.
Speaker 2: Okay, great, Okay, So so Martin 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 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 night Shylaman some very surprising things
that might happen at the end that I won't give away,
so spoiler alert. But 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 raff
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 eighties 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 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 he
greets everyone in Latin and he says salawet day achivis Romani.
And he's basically saying greeting, says hale 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 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 sixty six, 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 the 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 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, hale 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 Caesar, so 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 Caesar's Palace.
He used to think that he was a Caesar and
they were just the citizens, and now he's he's a
face in the crowd, and and of course I think
there's you know, it's it gets back to that kind
of neoliberal ideal 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.
Speaker 1: Well, the I mean, he you're also he also has
to deal with with a father who has issues, and
he has a sister.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And then of coursers doctor Stephen Nichols, who is
a psychiatry or psychiatrist. Who would it be a stretch
to say there is some inspiration, even even if it's
very small from your dad.
Speaker 2: Oh no, it's not small at all. Actually it's funny
because you know, he's very much a mirrors my dad.
But but also Bill Moore, see you know, of course,
if you want to, if you want to just cut
right to the chase, I see kind of Morton Waterhouse
as a as a a mirror image of myself, as
a lot of authors do. I maybe it's maybe it's
not cool to say that, and to kind of let
the cat out of the bag. And then but the
father in Morton Waterhouse's father who's crippled with with munchause
and syndrome. And he thinks we'll get into that in
a minute. But he's kind of my dad, and you know,
he's kind of modeled after my dad. So Bill is
modeled after 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. And it's like two roles. I mean,
you know, I 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 funny, 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 I if you don't mind, absolutely, Yeah. So the
origins of writing this book actually are a little bit
funny and almost mystical, because, uh, you know, I lived
in Vegas most of my early earlier years, but I
went to colle 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 ninety eight, Okay,
and when I was there, I had this dream, 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 aatoga 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 atoga 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 it. And I thought, Hm, that's weird now, Mike.
It's 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 you tour
the moving walkways and you greet guests as they come
into the casino. And when she and so I, for
one summer I did that. I walked around Caesar's Palace
and sometimes the moving walkways would break down, and you
would I'd restart them with my key, and uh, pretty
soon they 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 walk wander around
Caesar's Palace and get paid for it for months and
months and uh. But the whole time I was like, yeah,
this is 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, Hm, you know, I like writing fiction.
Maybe I'll write a story about a guy that wanders
around Caesar's Palace and great guests and he thinks he's
Julius Caesar. So that's Uh, that's when I started writing
this story.
Speaker 1: When you describe that job. When I look at, you know,
the job that's described from Morton Waterhouse, and I think
of other jobs you do in a casino. Uh, 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.
Speaker 2: Well, you'd be surprised, because I don't know if that's
this is still the case. But all through the nineties,
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 eighty ninety thousand dollars 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 you
know that a kid out of high school.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I was working, you know, working for
a large company in the nineties. That's especially for a
kid right out of high school. That's that's a lot
of money, especially.
Speaker 2: 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
knot 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 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 agree to be an intellectual by
any means, but you know it 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, you work at the
craps table. And most of I'd say most of those
kinds of jobs, like a pit boss, casino manager, 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.
Speaker 1: Interesting.
Speaker 2: Interesting, Yeah, And I don't know, 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 it, Vegas looks a lot different than it
did in the nineties. But and I assume the kinds
of pressures have had the same results there as well,
where wages have kind of stagnated. And then two thousand
and eight was a big problem for Vegas and it
put there on a lot of construction. And actually it's
funny because I think that the Vegas I describe in
my novel is a nineteen nineties Vegas, where Vegas in
the nineties was an interesting place and it's quite different now.
And that this is a theme that is explored in
the novel of how every casino in Vegas in the
nineties was built to look like a cultural manifestation or
a simulation rather of some distant, far away 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 in the Venetian and they're
just like a block away from each other, 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 Luxor was built in the nineties.
Caesars Palace was built in the sixties. Actually, think I
go into this a little bit in the novel that
you know. Prior to the nineteen sixties, 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 all the casino themes and branding was very
much like, hey, this is where you are. You're in
You're in the West, you're gambling, you're playing cards. But
then in the sixties, 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 extra curricular casino theme attached to it.
So in Caesar's Palace, you could be suddenly like in
ancient Rome, and in the Aladdin you can be in
the Middle East on a on a 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, I let me just cut
to the chase about some of the parts of the
novel that Casino Labs the book what that refers to
as 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 stick is they're going
to build casinos, you know, from all over the world.
So they build the Luck, they built the luxor they
built the Aladdin, and they built Caesar's Palace or Caesar's
Empire what it's called in the book. Uh, And so
they're going to build all these different casinos that represent
our simulations of other uh, other civilizations and uh 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 uh like cultural decline of postmodernity.
So so Vegas in the in the fact that all
casinos are a 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 histories 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 Boudriard. I'm familiar, yeah, okay,
and uh so for those of for those of your
listener listeners who are, and 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 invasions. King Arthur, the sword,
the the the EXCaliber 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 Middle Ages by like Cretian detroits or
wolf from von Eeschenbach and those medieval tales of King Arthur,
and then they get retold again in the in the
nineteenth century with Tennyson and mort Arthur and once in
future King E. B. White or whatever. And then now
we have a casino called the Excalibur in Las Vegas.
Now you can go to the Excalibur, and you can
go to buffet and the and you know they'll be
there'll be guys on horseback having jousts at the ex
Caliber like you're at a medieval times Renaissance fair thing.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: And you could and a guy could be wielding ex
Caliber in front of you while you eat your buffet meal.
But whether or not that that ex caliber has any
reference to the original ex Caliber 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, it is just as kind of a it
precedes from a simulacra. It's a procession of similar 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 fights
against that because he's looking for you know, not maybe
not in a pompous or pretentious way. And I didn't
even realize this was his 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 trying to re you know, bring new cultural
manifest new cultural meaning to the world. We're just building casinos,
so you're, you know, you're you're trying to look for
something that's a little too deep, that's not actually there.
And so he he wants to build casinos that that
actually help people, as if he's taken kind of a
hippocratic oath, like 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 bull leaping and like, I don't know,
something a little bit more ancient and ritualistic that feeds
into something a little bit more deep and meaningful.
Speaker 1: Would it be Would it give too much away for
me to ask if the former program called mk Ultra
was at all a inspiration.
Speaker 2: Funny, you should mention that. I'm glad you did, because
because you know, the National Security Archives just released some
new documents that were requested of them. Uh 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 the actually, 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,
you know, 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
the mk Ultra operation is actually connected or seems to
be not too different in effect to this kind of
this kind of thing that I was just describing with Bowdreyard,
because one of the one of the purposes of mk
ulture 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 of Casino Labs would be to say, Okay,
all these cultures that you thought you 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 mccluan would call,
would say something like, the medium is the message and
the meaning what's the meaning of the casino medium? The
messages just just you just sit there and give give
your money away. I mean, I like gambling, but I
used to kind of make fun of people who would
sit there and 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 sit calm,
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 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.
Speaker 1: Is that is that common around Vegas? If even if
somebody is not working in the casinos, that they're a
strong draw.
Speaker 2: 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 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 that they're just not proxy. 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 uh just like for six months,
they just 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
if you've ever have you ever won like a thousand
dollars in gambling or anything like that?
Speaker 1: Never a thousand, but I mean I was I was
at a casino recently and one a few hundred. I'm
like one pole, one pole. Wow.
Speaker 2: See that's a thrill. Huh oh yeah, it's it's like
a dopamine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, that's easy.
Speaker 2: 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 nineties, I uh, you know, my friends would just
go and drink and gamble, and I was like, you know,
I've been such a purest Ivory Tower type person for
so long, I'm gonna see what this is all about.
So I went through a hedonistic phase, and uh, and
then I one day I was down at the casino
and I won like a thousand dollars, 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. You're so and I kind of
feel like I was doing research because if I was
going to write a book about Vegas, I had to
actually know what it was about on some some level,
some deeper, some real level.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the movie Casino tried. The movie Casino tried
to portray that with I believe the the Japanese Businessman
where he they he is supposed to be on a
private plane out after he had won. I think it
was close to a million dollars, and they faked like
it had you know, like there was mechanical difficulty. They
get him back into the casino. He starts playing it
but like ten percent 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 a somebody who's going to be betting a little
more than you know, five dollars on black track or something.
Speaker 2: Right right now, 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 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 Scrivner, who used to be so ivory, towery and
lofty and high minded, and I'm becoming degenerate just like
everyone else, and that that idea itself, I was kind
of thrilling to me. It's terrible, but.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I actually know, I actually know somebody
who basically gambles for a living. Right listening to this, Hey,
how's it going? Yes, I'm talking about you.
Speaker 2: Read casino Labs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but but yeah, it's to people like that, it
just becomes very technical. There's there. I don't know how
much of the rush is there anymore. Yeah, it's just
it's sort of like Robert de Niro's character in uh
in Casino, where he could win thousands and tens of
thousands on a weekend and it was all math to him.
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, Like I mean when I told you that
I got 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 five thousand, I'd lose
five thousand. And you get stoic about it pretty quick
because it just starts to lose meaning. It's like, you know,
it's the fun speaking of the simulacra, like money itself,
it loses meaning, it's you start 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's 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 when I was at a certain
level and I was gambling a lot, it, yeah, I
was very stoic about it and very much more mathey
about it. And and then there was even a time
where that same girlfriend actually that worked at the at
the front desk at Caesar's. Her father was a notorious
gambler in Vegas, and he did a lot of kinds
of gambling, poker and whatnot. His name 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 is this guy. This girlfriend's father
was like, hey, Lee, can you I'm gonna give you
sixty five thousand dollars and you need to go down
to the uh the the Mandalai Bay and put some
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 sixty
five 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 the over under
on the Raiders and want the over? And I'd like
lay five thousand dollars in an over under. Bet ten
thousand dollars on a you know, you know it's the
line they're Cowboys by five or whatever, and you just
at Cowboys. And after an hour or two, I call
him at halftime at a big game and be like
he's like, did you bet ten thousand dollars 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 in the novel, but maybe that's
something like that'll 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.
Speaker 1: One of the things you mentioned when you talk about
how you know you can go to you can visit Paris,
you could do this. It's almost like it seems to
be an adult version of like Epcot Center where yeah, yeah,
they have the Walk of Nations there and yeahcot 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 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 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 because you're winning, you're you know, people are looking
at you. You're also having a if you're remember last
time I was in a casino, there was 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 roll like that. Yeah, And and she
almost she almost became like like she's a rock star
in that in that little niche, in that little place,
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 you're you're not experiencing anything real.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you feel like a rock star with
the 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 uh, your
last penny. But as long as you got four thousand
in the in the machine you're in, you're a caesar.
You know, you're an emperor. And I think that's that's
a bit of a trap. You know, you can you
can feel this way. Meanwhile you're just sitting there throwing
everything away, but you you know, for a moment you'll
feel great U And I think that's one of the
the ways they trap you. But but that that idea
that Vegas is like a theme park was again very
much a nineties thing, and it was super imposed with
actually a little catchphrase which is like, you know, make
make Vegas family friendly. And that also is actually explored
in the novel where you know, Casino Labs, the firm
is trying to like give your the casino, give your
casino a a theme, an aesthetic, but also to make
it family friendly. They're trying to make it family friendly.
Speaker 1: So there that was a that was a theme in
a lot of places at the time. I lived in
Fault Lauderdale and faul Lauderdale most famously for people, our
age was it was spring break. It was where people
where you had spring break and it was debaucherous and
it was just one long party. And right around the
same time, I mean this was more eighty seven ish
eighty eight ish, they just decided, well, we want to
be more a family friendly, we want to attract we
want to attract a different clientele here, and that seems
like it was a theme. It seemed like there was
a spirit. There was a spirit as such, because I
know when people people have described Vegas in like the sixties,
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 it and then
as it became let's just call it cheesy as everything
as time went by, and it also as as you're
losing as 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 UH, to go to the grocery store like that.
Speaker 2: 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 sixties 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 it's
a microcosm really, but uh, yeah.
Speaker 1: 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? Uh, what can you
make any correlations?
Speaker 2: Well, the novel I think it's uh, it presents Vegas
as a a metaphor for this degradation of culture, and
not just a metaphor, but like the thing itself it is,
it is what we've come to. Vegas is what is
what we've come to and there, Yeah, there's it's it's
basically like the post war neoliberal order writ Large and
Morton Waterhouse. It's kind of like this, this Promethean hero
figure is trying to like, you know, somehow create a new,
create society, a new I mean that might be quite
pretentious of an assessment of the novel, but that's kind
of how I see it. Yeah, there's all 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.
Speaker 1: I have time, I have time, Go right ahead.
Speaker 2: 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 ninety two when all
that stopped. And so Bill Waterhouse complains that his brain
has been rattled irreprievably too, 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, memory that has been stripped away. Everything's amnesiac,
and you know, so there's there's some kind of correlation
between Bill Waterhouse's memory has been deteriorated by this seeing
the nuke and then kind of the cultural memory that
has been deteriorated in the in these casino themes, and
then the mk Ultra project that they uncover, like literally
tries to subject its test subjects to you know, sense
re overload, symmetry, 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 at least just a month ago, uh, they still
are redacted on some level. And so I 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 thronness, and their their sexuality and all kinds
of like identity manifestations of identity. The the mk Ultra
Project was trying to strip those away, and 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 reaction 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 used 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.
Speaker 1: That that's pretty much what I was. What I was
hoping to hear some go a little bit deeper. Yeah,
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.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was in a band for it was you.
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 twelve, I played tennis against Andre
Agassy and he was thirteen, and he went on to
of course have a huge career in tennis. But you know,
I was an okay, twelve year old and he grew
up around down the street from me in Vegas.
Speaker 1: All Right, I don't want to bore people with tennis talk,
but okay, weeks after we stopped recording, Oh, I want
to have it. I want to have a tennis conversation
with you.
Speaker 2: We could do a whole episode on tennis.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: 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 Ions. So the
I S is like a really really effective and your
drummers from Liverpool for some reason, and uh so we
we uh you know, Ronnie Venucci sat in on a
few practices with us and we were kind of like, yeah, Ronnie,
you want to join our band. And this is before
he joined the Killers, or he was we didn't know this,
but he was in the process of being like, uh, entertained,
what's the word like auditioned, auditioned, Yeah, courted by the Killers,
and uh yeah, like a month later he was in
the Killers and and you know, they were just starting
to get a lot of buzz in Vegas and we
played shows with them several times, and uh, and then
they they got signed and flew to 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 the the connections, but basically,
the manager of the Killers, his brother is the lead
singer of the of Imagine Dragons.
Speaker 1: Look that up. It's true.
Speaker 2: So so the manager, Robert 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 a like I
don't know a few months later. So it's, uh, you know,
it never happened, but it's very interesting to speculate.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, I guess, Uh, do you think there's
anything else we need to add before we can start
doing the promotion the promotion part of.
Speaker 2: This, Yeah, I think I think we're good. I think
we covered most of the major topics. I guess.
Speaker 1: 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. And yeah, no,
I this is a great talk. Look forward to asking
you a couple of questions about tennis after we finish this,
because very much, well we might we might even have
some connection, We might have some connections there. But yeah,
but Lee, I really appreciate it. And yeah, good luck
with good luck with this, and I encourage everybody check
this out. This is uh, this is fiction like like
we would want fiction to be written, not like when
you get here. 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 problem. Right.
Speaker 2: No. You walk around Barnes and Noble and like, all
the covers are just looking at you, and you're like,
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.
Speaker 1: All right, Lee, I appreciate Thank you very much.
Speaker 2: Thanks, thanks so much for having me