Scorpion: Exclusive Interview With the Real Walter O’Brien

For those of us who watch Scorpion weekly on CBS, we feel like we know who Walter O’Brien is.

He’s wicked smart, has a little bit of trouble connecting with people, is basically in love with Paige, and he runs Scorpion which is comprised of a rag tag team of geniuses, or as Walter O’Brien described them,  “a dysfunctional family of superheroes.”

I had a chance to talk with the real Walter O’Brien about his companies, Scorpion and Concierge Up, and his work on the show, Scorpion.

While on the show, Scorpion’s home base is a garage, O’Brien said the beginning of Scorpion was “in a house on a farm in Ireland.” However, O’Brien and his colleagues quickly learned that there wasn’t any reason for them to have a home base, so to speak. “There’s almost zero reason to ever meet in person or there’s no advantage to you if we’re sitting in cubicles next other or not, as long we have a good laptop with a good connection to the Cloud,” O’Brien explained.

In addition to Scorpion, O’Brien also has a company called Concierge Up. What’s the difference between these two companies? O’Brien described it this way: “Scorpion solves any technical problem, and Concierge Up solves any funded problem.” When he says any funded problem, he means it.

Concierge Up has tackled a variety of cases from people wanting a secret room in their house to picking a winning race horse based off DNA. According to O’Brien, this shift happened organically and didn’t feel like something they couldn’t handle. “To us, it was still a bunch of geeks fixing problems,” O’Brien said. “Some of our clients reached out to us and starting asking us to fix non-technical problems — my daughter has anorexia. Can you find all foods that are odorless and tasteless but high in calories and fat? Or my mom has throat cancer. Can you find all non FDA approved solutions outside of the US?”

O’Brien explained that it works because Concierge Up “bring[s] a level of kind of Military discipline to problems” that people don’t really use when tackling every day problems. My favorite case that O’Brien told me about came from a royal family – that’s right, O’Brien has worked with five royal families. One of them asked Concierge Up to “fix the education system in [their] country.”

Anyone have any idea how you do that? No? Me neither. I’m not even sure where to begin tackling that problem.

When I said as much to O’Brien, he just immediately went into what they did. While I was still wrapping my head around the question, O’Brien told me about how what the royal family really wanted was to bring Silicon Valley to their country before they ran out of oil. To me, this story is proof that sometimes you need a bunch of geniuses to help you out. Granted, I don’t have problems that complex, but O’Brien convinced me that if I had any problem, Concierge Up could help me out.

Even though you’d think that we hadn’t gotten to the Concierge Up part in Walter’s life on Scorpion, O’Brien shared that we’ve actually already seen Team Scorpion take on some Concierge Up cases. Remember the case in Vegas in season one? That was a Concierge Up case.

“The whole show was about Walter was doing this as a private contractor and Cabe, the [Homeland] guy, he didn’t hire them for this. This wasn’t a government gig, and Walter was like ‘I’m allowed to do my own private gig and solve my own private problems.’ That was the beginning of Concierge Up.” O’Brien went on to explain that, “several of these stories on the show, even if they look like they were brought by the government, they’re actually in real life, half of them are brought by individuals.”

O’Brien hopes that Scorpion will continue to evolve just like his companies have. Now, Scorpion and Concierge up “have IQ and EQ. ” On the show, O’Brien pointed out that Katherine McPhee takes on the role as the first “Super Nanny.”

If you’re like me, then you often had moments when watching the show where you question why Paige (Katharine McPhee) is brought along on some of the cases. O’Brien stated that the Super Nannys, or Super Butlers, play an extremely important role in his businesses.

In addition to helping the geniuses out by “teaching them what normal looks like, what normal people with EQ would say and do,” Super Nannies are the client’s account manager and project manager. They are the client’s one point of contact. “You would have one Super Nanny for you to talk to, and that Super Nanny would deal with everybody else. So from your project, your preferences, your billing cycle, your invoices, everything you would just deal with that one Super Nanny,” O’Brien said.

To wrap up, I’ll leave you with these important words from O’Brien: “What I really want people to do is think for a moment about what they would like? If they did meet an affordable Santa Claus who could figure out any kind of problem for them, what’s their top three wishes? And then go to Concierge Up and type them in. A memorable way of phrasing this is if you want to search something, type it in Google. If you want it to happen, type it in Concierge Up.”

So, what are your wishes?

Scorpion airs Mondays at 9/8c on CBS.