Transcript - America This Week, May 17, 2024: "Delusion, Not Just Once A Year"

A wild backlash against a poll underscores the never ending cycle of mad delusions that American pop culture has become. Plus, Heinrich Böll's my-how-relevant "Christmas Not Just Once a Year."

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, what’s going on?

Walter Kirn: It’s so complicated, but I’ll explain it in a nutshell. I’m at a juice fasting spa somewhere near Palm Springs, California. Yep. And I’m admitting it too. For the last five days and for the next four, I will not eat solid food. I haven’t eaten it and I won’t eat it.

Matt Taibbi: Okay. And why is that?

Walter Kirn: Because it’s a juice fasting spa. So that means that you come here and there is basically a lock on the door, and you’re only allowed to drink juice, rather than eat solid food, and get a lot of water into your system. And you are also expected, and I’m just going for it, Matt, because our audience deserves the truth. I think that’s the premise of this show. You’re also expected to do daily colonic therapy. It’s exactly what it sounds like.

Matt Taibbi: We need imaging.

Walter Kirn: Not only are you expected to do it, I have met expectations and done it.

Matt Taibbi: Wow.

Walter Kirn: So you’re looking at somebody who, according to the California thesis about health, is as healthy as a person can get. I’ve had no solid food, only organic juices, daily colonics, walks in the desert, saunas, and let’s see, what else? I’ve stood on one of those machines that vibrates you at incredibly high speeds. Yeah, it’s sort of like what they had on the Flintstones back when, remember when Wilma would get on the reducing machine and she’d put a belt around herself and the motor would run it. So I’ve done all those things. I’m four days in. I call myself the healthiest podcaster in America right now.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, that’s fantastic. The healthiest podcaster.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. It won’t be true next week, but it’s true at this moment.

Matt Taibbi: Can you do other things? Can you do coke?

Walter Kirn: Here?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah.

Walter Kirn: No. Okay. This is a place that, not to bust anybody’s anonymity, but movie stars come right before roles in which they have to weigh 15 pounds less than they do. Yeah. Okay. And you’re only allowed to drink juice and go to these colonics. And one of the ... So we don’t yet have anal surveillance in America, but they do have it here at this spa. I’m not kidding you. And they can tell-

Matt Taibbi: You said that with a little too much confidence that we don’t have anal surveillance in America.

Walter Kirn: That we know of.

Matt Taibbi: That we know of.

Walter Kirn: We had it in the nineties under the guise of alien abductions, which we all know were MKUltra kidnappings, which used psychedelic drugs to simulate alien abductions and then included anal intrusion. But anyway, here the colon therapist can tell what you’ve eaten. So if you cheat ... Exactly, it will go into a clear tube, which she examines.

And so here may be the best story I’ve ever heard, and I can’t use the guy’s name. He’s a major Hollywood action star, usually as fit as you can believe, just glistening with oil and deltoid and peck splendor in the movies in which he beats people up, hand-to-hand combat. But he’d gained a little weight. So he came out to this spa to lose it before his next film, except he has no actual discipline. I don’t know how he’d ever gotten fit in the first place. So what he did was, and this place is in the middle of nowhere, is he had a confederate every day bring him In-N-Out burgers, drive to the place and deliver In-N-Out burgers. But he had a problem. How did he get rid of the scraps? How did he get rid of the wrappers? You can’t just have the smell of In-N-Out burgers wafting from your cabana or your room.

Matt Taibbi: This is like the great escape.

Walter Kirn: Yes. So what he did was every day he would order FedEx to come and he would fill a FedEx box. He would fill a FedEx, this happened years ago, and the person who told me who busted this story doesn’t work here anymore, so I don’t think anybody’s in danger. So he would fill the FedEx box with his extra french fries and pieces of bun and wrappers and greasy napkins, and he would FedEx out his detritus, his In-N-Out detritus. But he was caught by his colonic therapist. “What are these french fries I’m seeing?” See, colonic therapists can tell what a french frie looks like after it’s passed through the human digestive system.

Matt Taibbi: Is that a knowledge set that you want to have? I guess you do. I don’t know.

Walter Kirn: Yes. But Matt, the reason I’m telling this is that this is the final act of the deep state. They will bug our toilets. And if we don’t eat the bugs, if we have too much meat, if we consume an inordinate amount of carbon-releasing food or something, or if for whatever reason, they will analyze us through that, because there’s no lying to your dentist, there’s no lying to your hairdresser, and there is no lying at all to your colonic therapist.

Matt Taibbi: Well, they have to automate it, right? Have a little Bluetooth mechanism down there?

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: I mean, you could have a whole range of things. You could have a tumescence detector as well, right?

Walter Kirn: Oh, yeah. Full total body awareness. Total body awareness.

Matt Taibbi: Total body awareness. Yeah. DARPA already working on it. I’m sure.

Walter Kirn: I know they are. There’s probably a system, there’s probably a pilot program in some small American town that doesn’t realize it, where all their sewer pipes run through this center where people are sitting at desks watching clear plastic pipes as the sewage of the city flows through, coming from the different houses and so on. And they’re analyzing it, whatever.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. They know exactly how many french fries we’ve eaten and how many we’ve lied about already.

Walter Kirn: Well, do you remember, this is no joke. During COVID, they were using samples of wastewater in certain cities to estimate the levels of COVID infection. I don’t know if you remember that. And then they were using the results of those tests as the basis for lockdowns. Like, “We tested the sewage in Red Lake, Nebraska. We’ve got a high COVID count. We’re closing that school.”

Matt Taibbi: Precious bodily fluids.

Walter Kirn: Yep. That’s the future.

Matt Taibbi: Got to analyze them. Yeah. Wow. Well, that sounds exciting, Walter. Maybe I’ll try that sometime. You’ll have to let me know how it goes.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: But I’m glad to hear that you-

Walter Kirn: See, you haven’t asked why I’m here.

Matt Taibbi: I’m debating whether I want to know or not.

Walter Kirn: Well, because I’m not an action star trying to lose weight.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. What are you doing?

Walter Kirn: Four years ago, my father passed away and it was nothing that anyone should feel terrible about. 82 years old, but he had a difficult passing because he had ALS, and it was right during COVID. And when he finished, I was so grateful for my own health that I said, and it was so stressful seeing him off, a month at his bedside. I said, I’m going to go and really relax and indulge myself once this is all over. But it was COVID and it was impossible to do that for years. And these places were kind of paranoid. How do you do the mask and the distancing thing and so on when you’re sticking tubes up people’s asses? So this whole world of psycho California style spa detoxing kind of froze up for a while. And I’m keeping my promise to myself in this very new age therapeutic way that I have a restart in honor of my dad. That’s how I’m justifying the crazy expense.

Matt Taibbi: Well, that’s a noble cause. I thought it was for something darker than that, but that sounds great.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, my heroin addiction.

Matt Taibbi: All right, I’m going to keep quiet about that one. Well, excellent. I’m glad to hear you’re doing that. You sound healthier than me because you probably are. And I’m happy for you.

Walter Kirn: Briefly, briefly.

Matt Taibbi: We have a show today that is going to be more about mental unhealth. So it’s good that you have a little bit of contrast going. The story we picked to discuss this week was more on the nose than any story that we’ve ever probably chosen in terms of its relation to current events. But we want to both begin and end this show with a little bit of fiction. So Walter, I haven’t even shared this with you, but if you’ll just bear with me. This is like a minute and a half clip and it’s the ending of a movie called Erik the Viking. Do you remember that one?