[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[00:02] Bob Dobbs: I'm here with
[00:03] Bob Dobbs: Cameron again,
[00:05] Bob Dobbs: and Cameron McEwen in California,
[00:08] Bob Dobbs: and we're starting number seven or eight,
[00:14] Bob Dobbs: seven or eight recording.
[00:18] Bob Dobbs: So we're looking at my pamphlet,
[00:23] Bob Dobbs: my broadside,
[00:24] Bob Dobbs: my book in quotes,
[00:26] Bob Dobbs: and
[00:27] Bob Dobbs: Cameron has...
[00:30] Bob Dobbs: Just listened again to what we said last week,
[00:33] Bob Dobbs: especially the ending,
[00:35] Bob Dobbs: and he has some interesting points to make.
[00:38] Bob Dobbs: So
[00:39] Bob Dobbs: I'll let
[00:41] Bob Dobbs: Cameron lead.
[00:43] Cameron McEwen: All right.
[00:44] Cameron McEwen: So first,
[00:47] Cameron McEwen: I find your modern history interesting.
[00:52] Cameron McEwen: And as we get into it,
[00:54] Cameron McEwen: we'll be getting into your book.
[00:57] Cameron McEwen: that.
[00:58] Cameron McEwen: fits our purpose here perfectly.
[01:02] Cameron McEwen: One of the things that
[01:03] Cameron McEwen: I was interested in was your recourse,
[01:08] Cameron McEwen: repeated recourse,
[01:11] Cameron McEwen: to disappearance.
[01:13] Cameron McEwen: Disappearance of the chemical body,
[01:15] Cameron McEwen: disappearance of factual news,
[01:20] Cameron McEwen: and those are things that
[01:24] Cameron McEwen: I think are indeed happening.
[01:26] Cameron McEwen: But
[01:27] Cameron McEwen: I relate it to the cul-de-sac that we've entered into that is a kind of retracing of old ways of thought that don't lead anywhere.
[01:41] Cameron McEwen: But people,
[01:44] Cameron McEwen: including all of McLuhan research,
[01:46] Cameron McEwen: have no idea of how to get out of these cul-de-sacs.
[01:52] Cameron McEwen: It's as if they're in deep canyons.
[01:56] Cameron McEwen: And what they need to think is immediately beside them,
[02:00] Cameron McEwen: but in another canyon.
[02:02] Cameron McEwen: And they simply do not know how to go from one canyon to another canyon,
[02:09] Cameron McEwen: even though the human condition is nothing else but going from one canyon to another.
[02:17] Cameron McEwen: So you have this modern phenomenon of people are lost in what they most are.
[02:25] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[02:26] Bob Dobbs: Good.
[02:27] Cameron McEwen: But that's kind of getting aside from where we were.
[02:31] Cameron McEwen: I think it was very interesting what you were saying about the Trump phenomenon,
[02:38] Cameron McEwen: which is kind of a fog of unknowing in which people are trying to feel themselves around in by talking.
[02:54] Cameron McEwen: what they're talking about and what they're grasping is just this fog.
[03:00] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[03:01] Bob Dobbs: Well said.
[03:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[03:04] Cameron McEwen: so I don't know if you want to take up from there or if I should...
[03:08] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[03:09] Cameron McEwen: I have something to say.
[03:11] Bob Dobbs: I wrote,
[03:12] Bob Dobbs: in the spring of 2017,
[03:15] Bob Dobbs: I wrote a short thing called How President Don Trump...
[03:18] Bob Dobbs: I always called him Don rather than Donald.
[03:21] Bob Dobbs: It has different...
[03:23] Bob Dobbs: Suggestions.
[03:24] Bob Dobbs: How President Don Trump has become the first executive political leader to put on the shamanic tradition.
[03:31] Bob Dobbs: So those that respect the shamanic tradition will say,
[03:34] Bob Dobbs: that's ridiculous,
[03:35] Bob Dobbs: Bob.
[03:35] Bob Dobbs: The guy's a dumb asshole.
[03:36] Bob Dobbs: He's no shaman.
[03:39] Bob Dobbs: But in the McLuhan style,
[03:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying what they're not expecting.
[03:44] Bob Dobbs: And turns out that,
[03:46] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[03:47] Bob Dobbs: from the spring 2017,
[03:48] Bob Dobbs: it's now three and a half years,
[03:51] Bob Dobbs: he has wiggled out of every situation.
[03:53] Bob Dobbs: He's going to probably wiggle out of this loss and retrieve the White House.
[03:58] Bob Dobbs: It was a big day today.
[04:00] Bob Dobbs: A couple of the states have said,
[04:02] Bob Dobbs: yep,
[04:02] Bob Dobbs: we're going to have open hearings and decertification of the election.
[04:07] Bob Dobbs: So he's always getting further than people expect.
[04:10] Bob Dobbs: So that's kind of like a shaman,
[04:13] Bob Dobbs: a guy that can't be trapped by the tribe.
[04:16] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[04:16] Bob Dobbs: he's above the tribe.
[04:17] Bob Dobbs: He sees through the tribe and its conditioning.
[04:22] Bob Dobbs: And he plays off it.
[04:24] Bob Dobbs: And that,
[04:25] Bob Dobbs: as McLuhan says,
[04:26] Bob Dobbs: new art is ugly.
[04:28] Bob Dobbs: This may be why Trump is considered so,
[04:30] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[04:31] Bob Dobbs: evil and duplicitous.
[04:34] Bob Dobbs: He's ugly,
[04:35] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[04:35] Bob Dobbs: because he's actually in a new mode beyond what I call the TV body in the chip body and Android Meme mode that people can't place in the old venerable.
[04:48] Bob Dobbs: industrial literate institution of the White House.
[04:51] Bob Dobbs: You can't put the two together.
[04:53] Bob Dobbs: So
[04:54] Bob Dobbs: I found this really great quote from Interior Landscape.
[04:58] Bob Dobbs: So I said,
[04:59] Bob Dobbs: I began by saying,
[05:00] Bob Dobbs: no previous president of the USA has ever used the office of the White House to provide a training in perception in Western art.
[05:08] Bob Dobbs: And this is partly,
[05:11] Bob Dobbs: this is for,
[05:13] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[05:15] Bob Dobbs: schooled scholars of McLuhan.
[05:18] Bob Dobbs: Those people know that that was McLuhan favorite phrase.
[05:22] Bob Dobbs: We're providing a training in perception,
[05:24] Bob Dobbs: right?
[05:25] Bob Dobbs: So
[05:26] Bob Dobbs: I'm putting on the McLuhan cliches for those that know,
[05:30] Bob Dobbs: have studied McLuhan and know the cliches.
[05:32] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?
[05:34] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying that's directed at the hidden audience of the McLuhan.
[05:39] Bob Dobbs: But for general people,
[05:41] Bob Dobbs: they're going,
[05:41] Bob Dobbs: what is a training in perception?
[05:43] Bob Dobbs: How can that be?
[05:43] Bob Dobbs: What is that?
[05:45] Bob Dobbs: And then I said,
[05:45] Bob Dobbs: in Western art,
[05:46] Bob Dobbs: there are two schools or approaches to the creative act,
[05:48] Bob Dobbs: as spelled out by Marshall McLuhan.
[05:51] Bob Dobbs: So the two schools are the cathartic ethical view of art and the cognitive view of art.
[06:01] Bob Dobbs: The cognitive view of art came in 170 years ago.
[06:06] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said,
[06:07] Bob Dobbs: would dare to look at popular culture and,
[06:11] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[06:11] Bob Dobbs: what was considered the...
[06:13] Bob Dobbs: crude,
[06:14] Bob Dobbs: vulgar,
[06:15] Bob Dobbs: and yet see patterns of popular culture and mirroring patterns in high culture.
[06:21] Bob Dobbs: So the ethical view is looking at,
[06:26] Bob Dobbs: well,
[06:26] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan called it the vertical school of symbolism,
[06:30] Bob Dobbs: and the cognitive school was the horizontal,
[06:34] Bob Dobbs: and the cathartic ethical vertical school
[06:42] Bob Dobbs: thought the world was ugly or fallen and was trying to get out of it so if you look at pop culture is ugly and you're trying to get out of it you go to the opera or something or whatever was considered uh high culture go where i didn't go to the opera or something oh
[06:58] Bob Dobbs: i see yeah yeah yeah ballet whatever yeah whatever is considered high culture and not consider culture in the shop windows which is what um beau lair did in uh flowers of evil
[07:12] Bob Dobbs: At least that's what the critics tell me he did,
[07:14] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[07:14] Bob Dobbs: the people who studied him.
[07:17] Bob Dobbs: So that's the vulgar world.
[07:19] Bob Dobbs: So
[07:20] Bob Dobbs: I suggest since Trump is easily criticized on the ethical level,
[07:25] Bob Dobbs: and that's all we got from then until now,
[07:29] Bob Dobbs: what about the cognitive level,
[07:30] Bob Dobbs: how people can't see what he's referring to?
[07:35] Bob Dobbs: I like the idea that he ran unopposed because he got into the Twittersphere,
[07:40] Bob Dobbs: and George Bush and...
[07:42] Bob Dobbs: All those other old hacks weren't very good at that level.
[07:46] Bob Dobbs: And he was.
[07:47] Bob Dobbs: So he was a master of the anti-environment.
[07:50] Bob Dobbs: Whatever mastery that is,
[07:51] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure.
[07:52] Bob Dobbs: But it certainly worked for him.
[07:54] Bob Dobbs: So we need to look at Trump as a cognitive phenomenon or as a perceptual problem.
[08:02] Bob Dobbs: And the ethical doesn't work.
[08:04] Bob Dobbs: So that was my point.
[08:06] Bob Dobbs: And,
[08:06] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[08:07] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan beautifully laid it out.
[08:08] Bob Dobbs: You can look at the beginning of my...
[08:11] Bob Dobbs: book and see that quote.
[08:13] Bob Dobbs: It's one of the earliest quotes,
[08:15] Bob Dobbs: and
[08:16] Bob Dobbs: I don't want to go into it.
[08:17] Bob Dobbs: I don't want to say it all now,
[08:18] Bob Dobbs: but it's there.
[08:19] Bob Dobbs: Take a look at it.
[08:20] Bob Dobbs: And a lot of thought was put into those statements by McLuhan.
[08:26] Bob Dobbs: So what do you think of that?
[08:30] Bob Dobbs: Take the cognitive approach.
[08:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[08:33] Bob Dobbs: go ahead.
[08:35] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[08:36] Cameron McEwen: just first a theoretical point.
[08:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan did outline those two approaches,
[08:42] Cameron McEwen: but he disagreed with both,
[08:44] Cameron McEwen: right?
[08:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[08:45] Cameron McEwen: He thought that both the vertical and the horizontal were Gnostic,
[08:51] Cameron McEwen: were attempting some kind of false closure.
[08:55] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[08:56] Cameron McEwen: Where they differed vertically and horizontally was how they actually made the closure.
[09:02] Cameron McEwen: So the vertical guys made a closure through mind.
[09:06] Cameron McEwen: And the horizontal guys made a closure through emotion.
[09:12] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[09:12] Cameron McEwen: And
[09:13] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan wants to say that both of those closures are false,
[09:19] Cameron McEwen: and they don't understand the dynamic between them.
[09:26] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,
[09:27] Cameron McEwen: there is no closure in life.
[09:30] Cameron McEwen: The life itself is dynamic and includes.
[09:36] Cameron McEwen: these minor disruptions like horizontal and vertical.
[09:41] Cameron McEwen: But leaving that aside...
[09:45] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[09:45] Bob Dobbs: how would you describe his solution?
[09:49] Bob Dobbs: Or did he get to a solution,
[09:50] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[09:51] Bob Dobbs: the third way?
[09:52] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[09:53] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[09:56] Cameron McEwen: One way of putting a solution is to jump to 1964.
[10:00] Cameron McEwen: He's just finished
[10:02] Cameron McEwen: Understanding Media,
[10:03] Cameron McEwen: and he reads Wolfgang
[10:07] Cameron McEwen: Kohler's book,
[10:08] Cameron McEwen: Gestalt Psychology.
[10:10] Cameron McEwen: And from that moment on,
[10:12] Cameron McEwen: from 64 until 79,
[10:15] Cameron McEwen: everything is figure and ground for McLuhan.
[10:18] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[10:19] Cameron McEwen: And so if we want to take horizontal and vertical,
[10:25] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan shows that it's not that either one of those is the ground.
[10:33] Cameron McEwen: Rather,
[10:35] Cameron McEwen: there is a dynamic where the vertical can be figured on the ground of the horizontal and there can be the horizontal figured on the ground of the vertical.
[10:48] Cameron McEwen: And what's needed is to understand the range of that variation.
[10:54] Cameron McEwen: And once the range of that variation is understood,
[10:58] Cameron McEwen: then any phenomenon that is encountered in life can be seen to take up some possible position in that range.
[11:12] Cameron McEwen: And then,
[11:15] Cameron McEwen: given his view on all-at-onceness,
[11:19] Cameron McEwen: What human being is,
[11:21] Cameron McEwen: is not something vertical,
[11:22] Cameron McEwen: is not something horizontal,
[11:24] Cameron McEwen: but is a kind of stance in front of these perpetual possibilities of that range.
[11:32] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[11:33] Cameron McEwen: But maybe we can come back to that at some point.
[11:37] Cameron McEwen: But before I forget,
[11:38] Cameron McEwen: I want to go back to what you were saying about Trump.
[11:42] Cameron McEwen: I've been reading a book on
[11:44] Cameron McEwen: Eskimos by a guy by the name of...
[11:47] Cameron McEwen: Pride,
[11:48] Cameron McEwen: P-R-Y-D-E,
[11:49] Cameron McEwen: who lived with the
[11:52] Cameron McEwen: Eskimos in the
[11:54] Cameron McEwen: 50s and 60s and learned their
[11:58] Cameron McEwen: Inuit language and had kids with Eskimo women and stuff like that.
[12:05] Cameron McEwen: It gives an interesting view of the Eskimo landscape as they were going from traditional life thousands of years old.
[12:16] Cameron McEwen: to a life with radios and rifles and all that sort of stuff.
[12:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[12:22] Cameron McEwen: So...
[12:23] Bob Dobbs: Much like Ted Carpenter's experience,
[12:25] Bob Dobbs: right?
[12:26] Cameron McEwen: That's absolutely right.
[12:27] Cameron McEwen: So,
[12:28] Cameron McEwen: but he talks about shamans,
[12:32] Cameron McEwen: and shamans weren't necessarily sterling individuals,
[12:41] Cameron McEwen: right?
[12:41] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[12:42] Cameron McEwen: They were feared by the tribe,
[12:45] Cameron McEwen: but...
[12:46] Cameron McEwen: They really didn't understand themselves and what they had to contribute was largely through trances and through being something other than this physical person that
[13:03] Cameron McEwen: everybody knew.
[13:04] Cameron McEwen: And so to me,
[13:07] Cameron McEwen: that description of a shaman fits what you were saying with Trump.
[13:13] Cameron McEwen: I think that you were saying with Trump that...
[13:16] Cameron McEwen: The person of Trump,
[13:17] Cameron McEwen: the chemical body of Trump,
[13:20] Cameron McEwen: wasn't some great perceptualist,
[13:24] Cameron McEwen: wasn't somebody who had figured out the movement of the world and was able to kind of use his understanding as a lever.
[13:33] Cameron McEwen: Rather,
[13:34] Cameron McEwen: he somehow impersonated beyond himself something that was alive now in the world.
[13:45] Cameron McEwen: and was not really grasped by anybody,
[13:50] Cameron McEwen: but they were in the grasp of it.
[13:52] Bob Dobbs: Excellent.
[13:53] Bob Dobbs: Well said.
[13:53] Bob Dobbs: That's really good.
[13:57] Bob Dobbs: Shane Phatic,
[13:58] Bob Dobbs: what was it?
[14:03] Bob Dobbs: So Carpenter.
[14:05] Bob Dobbs: So this was written the same time as Carpenter?
[14:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[14:10] Cameron McEwen: I think so.
[14:11] Cameron McEwen: Maybe a few years after Carpenter was up there.
[14:15] Cameron McEwen: This guy was,
[14:17] Cameron McEwen: Carpenter,
[14:17] Cameron McEwen: I think,
[14:18] Cameron McEwen: was largely in the
[14:20] Cameron McEwen: Hudson Bay region,
[14:21] Cameron McEwen: and this guy was up in the Arctic on
[14:25] Cameron McEwen: Victoria Island and Cambridge Bay up in there.
[14:28] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[14:32] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[14:34] Bob Dobbs: young people today may not know the word Eskimo.
[14:36] Bob Dobbs: It's Inuit.
[14:37] Bob Dobbs: They grow up in Canada with that term,
[14:39] Bob Dobbs: right?
[14:40] Bob Dobbs: The Inuit?
[14:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[14:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[14:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[14:42] Bob Dobbs: so just show where.
[14:44] Bob Dobbs: up to date on the change there.
[14:48] Bob Dobbs: This point about the shaming goes in the trance,
[14:51] Bob Dobbs: what is the trance state of Trump?
[14:54] Bob Dobbs: Is he,
[14:55] Bob Dobbs: is it possible he tranced?
[14:58] Bob Dobbs: You know how McLuhan said in the Malinowski that modern man,
[15:02] Bob Dobbs: or might later say post-modern man,
[15:05] Bob Dobbs: he can't live in any culture because he's experiencing the media of so many different cultures and new media that he's perpetually detached or alienated.
[15:18] Bob Dobbs: in a new hyper state of awareness.
[15:20] Bob Dobbs: Remember that quote?
[15:21] Bob Dobbs: We've talked about it before.
[15:25] Cameron McEwen: I don't remember it off the top of my head,
[15:27] Cameron McEwen: but what you're saying makes great sense,
[15:30] Cameron McEwen: right?
[15:31] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[15:31] Cameron McEwen: if a person can't live in a culture but needs culture,
[15:37] Cameron McEwen: then they're alienated from the human condition and they're in a cul-de-sac.
[15:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[15:47] Bob Dobbs: Let's just see if I can bring it up.
[15:49] Bob Dobbs: Multimedia,
[15:50] Bob Dobbs: was that the term he used in that period?
[15:57] Bob Dobbs: I have here a quote from Clayson Archetype.
[16:00] Bob Dobbs: Today the multimedia have,
[16:01] Bob Dobbs: as noted,
[16:02] Bob Dobbs: demobilized consciousness.
[16:05] Bob Dobbs: We speak of a lie as credibility gap.
[16:08] Bob Dobbs: It's not a lie,
[16:08] Bob Dobbs: it's credibility gap.
[16:09] Bob Dobbs: Truth once again becomes trust,
[16:11] Bob Dobbs: not Cartesian certainty.
[16:14] Bob Dobbs: Let's see if there's another one.
[16:22] Cameron McEwen: Nope.
[16:22] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[16:23] Cameron McEwen: Now that movement from
[16:26] Cameron McEwen: Cartesian certainty to trust is what I was talking about earlier,
[16:30] Cameron McEwen: the movement from the vertical and the horizontal to something dynamic of both.
[16:37] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[16:39] Bob Dobbs: So I'm scanning down through my...
[16:42] Bob Dobbs: My old book,
[16:43] Bob Dobbs: where I have a lot of my clone quotes,
[16:44] Bob Dobbs: to see if I can come across that one.
[16:48] Bob Dobbs: What is it?
[17:01] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[17:02] Bob Dobbs: here's a quote from early
[17:05] Bob Dobbs: 50s. Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a minotaur.
[17:10] Bob Dobbs: Which must be slain by the hero artist.
[17:14] Bob Dobbs: If you can't get into the culture and have time to eat it,
[17:23] Bob Dobbs: appetite becomes frustrated.
[17:26] Bob Dobbs: You're not in a cultural framework for it.
[17:28] Bob Dobbs: So it just occurred to me,
[17:29] Bob Dobbs: thinking of that now,
[17:30] Bob Dobbs: that people from the
[17:34] Bob Dobbs: 60s and 70s on are chaotically hedonistic,
[17:37] Bob Dobbs: trying to find...
[17:40] Bob Dobbs: satisfaction of the new appetite inspired by this strange condition of not being in a culture anymore,
[17:47] Bob Dobbs: any particular culture.
[17:49] Bob Dobbs: It just occurred to me that point.
[17:52] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[17:53] Cameron McEwen: If you look at
[17:55] Cameron McEwen: PBS these days,
[17:58] Cameron McEwen: it's almost nothing but eating.
[18:00] Bob Dobbs: Really?
[18:01] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[18:02] Cameron McEwen: It's unbelievable.
[18:03] Cameron McEwen: You turn it on and it's somebody who's doing Iranian cooking or Greek cooking.
[18:09] Cameron McEwen: Some Canadian is in China doing dim sum cooking or something.
[18:17] Cameron McEwen: It's unbelievable.
[18:18] Cameron McEwen: It's just program after program after program of eating.
[18:23] Cameron McEwen: And what's interesting is that they make something,
[18:29] Cameron McEwen: and that takes a few minutes.
[18:30] Cameron McEwen: And then they start to eat it,
[18:33] Cameron McEwen: and that takes a long time.
[18:35] Cameron McEwen: And viewers get to see these people just eating.
[18:39] Cameron McEwen: And then they say,
[18:40] Cameron McEwen: oh,
[18:40] Cameron McEwen: that's so delicious.
[18:42] Cameron McEwen: Mmm,
[18:42] Cameron McEwen: that's wonderful,
[18:43] Cameron McEwen: you know.
[18:47] Cameron McEwen: Crazy.
[18:49] Cameron McEwen: If you take some distance to it,
[18:50] Cameron McEwen: it's crazy.
[18:52] Cameron McEwen: But that's all PBS is now.
[18:54] Bob Dobbs: That's incredible.
[18:57] Bob Dobbs: So what would,
[18:58] Bob Dobbs: remember McLuhan said,
[19:00] Bob Dobbs: I think Stephen Hero,
[19:01] Bob Dobbs: Joyce,
[19:02] Bob Dobbs: has the character say,
[19:02] Bob Dobbs: the one thing that's common among all the different cultures on the planet,
[19:07] Bob Dobbs: was the digestive system.
[19:10] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[19:10] Bob Dobbs: So eating,
[19:12] Bob Dobbs: chemical body eating,
[19:13] Bob Dobbs: is the new Esperanto.
[19:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[19:16] Cameron McEwen: but he was using
[19:22] Cameron McEwen: Joyce there to talk about digestion in every sense.
[19:25] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[19:26] Cameron McEwen: And he took
[19:27] Cameron McEwen: Joyce to be talking about digestion in every sense.
[19:30] Cameron McEwen: So not just physical eating,
[19:32] Cameron McEwen: but intellectual eating.
[19:34] Cameron McEwen: buddy.
[19:37] Cameron McEwen: has to come to terms with the world and so that's the basically digestion there is the drama of cognition.
[19:45] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.
[19:46] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[19:47] Bob Dobbs: I talk about putting my five body models.
[19:49] Bob Dobbs: We have chemical body stomach,
[19:51] Bob Dobbs: astral stomach,
[19:52] Bob Dobbs: TV body stomach,
[19:54] Bob Dobbs: chip body stomach,
[19:55] Bob Dobbs: and then the Android Meme stomach.
[19:57] Bob Dobbs: We've got five stomachs.
[20:01] Bob Dobbs: So I've systematized what you just said.
[20:06] Cameron McEwen: And do you,
[20:09] Cameron McEwen: is that a,
[20:10] Cameron McEwen: the five stomachs,
[20:12] Cameron McEwen: do you see that as a diachronic?
[20:16] Cameron McEwen: model,
[20:16] Cameron McEwen: that is to say something that happens,
[20:18] Cameron McEwen: that develops through time,
[20:20] Cameron McEwen: or do you see it as the condition of humans all at once?
[20:26] Bob Dobbs: Now it's all at once.
[20:29] Bob Dobbs: The chip body came after the TV body,
[20:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[20:33] Bob Dobbs: the anti-environment came after the analog media.
[20:36] Bob Dobbs: If you don't get too metaphysical about it,
[20:39] Bob Dobbs: there's a kind of a sequence there in our experience of it,
[20:42] Bob Dobbs: but now they're all happening at the same time.
[20:46] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[20:47] Cameron McEwen: But my inclination,
[20:50] Cameron McEwen: and I think McLuhan inclination,
[20:52] Cameron McEwen: at least some of the time,
[20:54] Cameron McEwen: was to say,
[20:55] Cameron McEwen: OK,
[20:55] Cameron McEwen: this now has to be all.
[20:58] Cameron McEwen: Like Elliot said,
[21:00] Cameron McEwen: all is always now.
[21:01] Cameron McEwen: So and no matter how these things came in sequence,
[21:07] Cameron McEwen: if they came at all,
[21:08] Cameron McEwen: they had to have a basis in possibility.
[21:12] Cameron McEwen: So somebody might...
[21:15] Cameron McEwen: well not know that they have these five stomachs,
[21:19] Cameron McEwen: but the five stomachs must have been there as a possibility,
[21:23] Cameron McEwen: which then became realized in consciousness given certain conditions.
[21:30] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[21:30] Bob Dobbs: why are they already there?
[21:34] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[21:35] Cameron McEwen: if they weren't already there,
[21:37] Cameron McEwen: how could they unfold at some time in history?
[21:43] Cameron McEwen: It's like...
[21:45] Cameron McEwen: some very elaborate chemical preparation.
[21:52] Cameron McEwen: Maybe it's never been made before in the history of the world,
[21:55] Cameron McEwen: but it's possible to be made because of the underlying elements which can be manipulated into that new chemical formulation.
[22:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[22:10] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says somewhere,
[22:12] Bob Dobbs: maybe in Take Today,
[22:13] Bob Dobbs: every
[22:13] Bob Dobbs: that Joyce understood he can make a whole universe out of two words,
[22:17] Bob Dobbs: or that every word in the language retrieves,
[22:21] Bob Dobbs: echoes,
[22:21] Bob Dobbs: and creates all the other words.
[22:23] Bob Dobbs: So if technologies are like words,
[22:25] Bob Dobbs: then you begin with speech,
[22:28] Bob Dobbs: and you're going to get these extensions of different parts of the body and get to where we are today.
[22:34] Bob Dobbs: And that's like the secret techno-wisdom that Ivins Wake is showing.
[22:40] Bob Dobbs: And that's like the most...
[22:45] Bob Dobbs: esoteric,
[22:46] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan might say,
[22:47] Bob Dobbs: percept or concept of what's going on.
[22:51] Bob Dobbs: If you realize that if we blew up the world and then there's just a bunch of people with not much and maybe don't even have a memory of what happened eventually,
[23:02] Bob Dobbs: they could start the process of invention again,
[23:05] Bob Dobbs: starting with speech and early notation or text,
[23:11] Bob Dobbs: as Derrida might call it,
[23:13] Bob Dobbs: and unfold the extensions of our body faculties.
[23:17] Bob Dobbs: That's an inevitable somnambulistic process.
[23:21] Bob Dobbs: Does that fit your synchronic meaning of all inventions are implied?
[23:30] Cameron McEwen: I'm not so sure about that because
[23:32] Cameron McEwen: I don't see any inevitable sequence to these things.
[23:41] Cameron McEwen: At any given time,
[23:45] Cameron McEwen: you need to be able to understand why something happened in terms of what happened before.
[23:54] Cameron McEwen: So,
[23:54] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[23:55] Cameron McEwen: if we are trying to understand a chemical reaction in a laboratory,
[24:06] Cameron McEwen: If some solution is in a...
[24:11] Cameron McEwen: beaker and then another solution is added to it,
[24:16] Cameron McEwen: we have to be able to understand the combination or combustion of the two things in terms of the sequence of actions which led to it,
[24:31] Cameron McEwen: right?
[24:31] Cameron McEwen: There was this material and then this material was added to it and then this happened.
[24:38] Cameron McEwen: So that kind of...
[24:40] Cameron McEwen: sequence is based on the possibilities
[24:46] Cameron McEwen: are built into elements,
[24:48] Cameron McEwen: but there isn't any necessary sequence to it.
[24:52] Cameron McEwen: If the world were blown up and there were some humans with language that survived or came from someplace else or whatever,
[25:03] Cameron McEwen: there wouldn't be any necessary sequence to them,
[25:08] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[25:08] Cameron McEwen: inventing letters and inventing printing and inventing electricity and all that sort of stuff.
[25:17] Cameron McEwen: That might be built into language as a possibility,
[25:22] Cameron McEwen: but there's no necessity there.
[25:24] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[25:26] Bob Dobbs: I guess I'm not saying that's inevitable,
[25:28] Bob Dobbs: but if there's going to be progress,
[25:32] Bob Dobbs: it would have to go through each level of the body faculties,
[25:35] Bob Dobbs: and then finally getting to extending the central nervous system.
[25:38] Bob Dobbs: It might take 2,000 years or
[25:41] Bob Dobbs: 10,000 years,
[25:43] Bob Dobbs: but there may be no way to go unless there's
[25:47] Bob Dobbs: There may be no other way to go unless there are technologies,
[25:50] Bob Dobbs: and that's in the world of science fiction and fantasy,
[25:53] Bob Dobbs: that would move us to think completely different ways,
[25:58] Bob Dobbs: whatever strange things that people could imagine.
[26:02] Bob Dobbs: Actually,
[26:03] Bob Dobbs: personally,
[26:04] Bob Dobbs: I'm doing that with a cold fusion battery or box.
[26:08] Bob Dobbs: It is based on something that regular scientific knowledge doesn't have.
[26:13] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[26:15] Cameron McEwen: a lot of your work…
[26:16] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[26:19] Cameron McEwen: You're a specialist in thinking outside of the box.
[26:22] Bob Dobbs: So people say,
[26:25] Cameron McEwen: oh,
[26:25] Cameron McEwen: Bob is crazy,
[26:26] Cameron McEwen: or
[26:27] Cameron McEwen: Bob isn't really doing McLuhan,
[26:29] Cameron McEwen: or Bob is doing whatever.
[26:33] Cameron McEwen: But the interesting thing is that the need for McLuhan research,
[26:41] Cameron McEwen: or the need for modern American history,
[26:46] Cameron McEwen: which is a modern world history,
[26:48] Cameron McEwen: as Wyndham Lewis was already saying in
[26:51] Cameron McEwen: Cosmic Man,
[26:54] Cameron McEwen: the need is to go from a way of thinking and a way of experiencing,
[27:00] Cameron McEwen: which is extremely dangerous,
[27:03] Cameron McEwen: which is nihilistic and is hell-bent on destroying the world,
[27:11] Cameron McEwen: destroying civilization,
[27:13] Cameron McEwen: conceivably destroying the biosphere.
[27:15] Cameron McEwen: So the great need is to be able to think differently.
[27:20] Cameron McEwen: And people,
[27:22] Cameron McEwen: there's very few people like yourself that are saying,
[27:26] Cameron McEwen: here's an example of thinking differently.
[27:29] Cameron McEwen: Why don't you try to understand this?
[27:32] Cameron McEwen: And I think that's at the very bottom of your book,
[27:35] Cameron McEwen: actually,
[27:35] Cameron McEwen: that it's an exercise in trying to think differently about stuff that you think you know.
[27:44] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[27:44] Bob Dobbs: said again.
[27:47] Bob Dobbs: You should be my,
[27:48] Bob Dobbs: I should put you on TV and do the interviews.
[27:55] Cameron McEwen: I forget the name of that guy that used to have ads on TV for,
[28:03] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[28:03] Cameron McEwen: you have a can that doesn't open right.
[28:05] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[28:05] Cameron McEwen: I've got the magic can opener.
[28:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[28:09] Bob Dobbs: Is that a Canadian phenomenon or American?
[28:12] Cameron McEwen: I think the guy was from Canada.
[28:17] Cameron McEwen: I forget that whole history.
[28:18] Cameron McEwen: I haven't thought about it for decades.
[28:21] Cameron McEwen: But there was a guy that sort of came out of nowhere and was able to get on TV and sell a whole series of things,
[28:30] Cameron McEwen: which nobody needed,
[28:31] Cameron McEwen: but he was able to convince them that they needed it.
[28:35] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[28:38] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[28:38] Bob Dobbs: So as I say,
[28:40] Cameron McEwen: go back to go back to go back to Trump,
[28:43] Cameron McEwen: because
[28:44] Cameron McEwen: I.
[28:47] Cameron McEwen: I've kind of led away from some interesting things that you were saying about the Trump phenomenon,
[28:54] Cameron McEwen: that that relates to your book on the one hand,
[28:58] Cameron McEwen: and it also relates to the interesting stuff that you were talking about.
[29:02] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[29:03] Cameron McEwen: Where were you left off?
[29:05] Cameron McEwen: Was Trump a shaman?
[29:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[29:08] Bob Dobbs: well,
[29:10] Bob Dobbs: I had to go through the...
[29:15] Bob Dobbs: synchronicity of McLuhan evolution,
[29:20] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan thought disguised as a linear evolution.
[29:26] Bob Dobbs: I had to include all the strange modalities that Marshall talked about that people never discuss,
[29:32] Bob Dobbs: like ESP,
[29:33] Bob Dobbs: all those different explanations of ESP or probings about it.
[29:37] Bob Dobbs: And then I had to come up with,
[29:39] Bob Dobbs: where did the word,
[29:41] Bob Dobbs: how did he anticipate meme?
[29:43] Bob Dobbs: And I found this.
[29:45] Bob Dobbs: section in
[29:46] Bob Dobbs: Cliché to archetype on verbal modules.
[29:49] Bob Dobbs: So there it is,
[29:49] Bob Dobbs: a module.
[29:51] Bob Dobbs: It's a meme.
[29:52] Bob Dobbs: So
[29:53] Bob Dobbs: I was trying to get to a point of explaining this bizarre behavior of Trump using McLuhan.
[30:00] Bob Dobbs: So I had to take a lot of obscure aspects of McLuhan.
[30:04] Bob Dobbs: So a big chunk of the body of the book is giving the background in McLuhan that leads up to Trump.
[30:15] Bob Dobbs: You look at Biden.
[30:16] Bob Dobbs: I used to joke about Trump.
[30:20] Bob Dobbs: He was a kind of stutterer.
[30:22] Bob Dobbs: He wouldn't finish his ideas.
[30:24] Bob Dobbs: And,
[30:25] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[30:25] Bob Dobbs: good McLuhan scholars know the famous quote by McLuhan that the stutterer creates involvement.
[30:30] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[30:30] Bob Dobbs: you're waiting to see what he's trying to say.
[30:33] Bob Dobbs: And in each electric phase makes more and more involvement.
[30:37] Bob Dobbs: So the stuttering phenomenon comes finally to
[30:43] Bob Dobbs: Trump.
[30:44] Bob Dobbs: who doesn't finish his sentences or maybe uh moves on to another shifts to another sentence that's the kind of let me just interject that uh McNamee actually says that all language is stuttering which he and then he gives some quotes from Finnegans Wake so
[31:05] Cameron McEwen: the stutterer is a person that can't complete
[31:12] Cameron McEwen: a sentence and maybe can't even complete a word because these things get broken up.
[31:19] Cameron McEwen: But language is nothing but sound that's broken.
[31:23] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[31:23] Cameron McEwen: And therefore,
[31:24] Cameron McEwen: apparently,
[31:25] Cameron McEwen: both Joyce and McLuhan hold that if you want to understand language,
[31:30] Cameron McEwen: you have to understand stuttering.
[31:32] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[31:33] Bob Dobbs: And it explains why people can't stop gossiping and talking.
[31:38] Bob Dobbs: Conversation,
[31:39] Bob Dobbs: speech is so involving.
[31:41] Bob Dobbs: Because it's stuttering.
[31:43] Bob Dobbs: So,
[31:44] Bob Dobbs: but,
[31:45] Bob Dobbs: in the literal term of stuttering,
[31:47] Bob Dobbs: someone who's obviously hasn't got his language down,
[31:50] Bob Dobbs: so he's stuttering,
[31:52] Bob Dobbs: that
[31:54] Bob Dobbs: Trump created a kind of mental agility of stuttering effect,
[32:01] Bob Dobbs: so everybody got so involved trying to complete him.
[32:05] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[32:06] Bob Dobbs: we see,
[32:07] Bob Dobbs: I see the president...
[32:11] Bob Dobbs: Representative of the office of the president-elect,
[32:13] Bob Dobbs: which is a non-existent office,
[32:16] Bob Dobbs: Mr.
[32:16] Bob Dobbs: Biden,
[32:17] Bob Dobbs: he has one-upped Trump.
[32:19] Bob Dobbs: He creates involvement because he doesn't complete his syllables.
[32:30] Bob Dobbs: You've seen him,
[32:31] Bob Dobbs: right?
[32:31] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't even get half a third.
[32:34] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't get much of a sentence out.
[32:37] Bob Dobbs: Trump got a sort of half a...
[32:39] Bob Dobbs: Maybe he got a sentence out here and there,
[32:42] Bob Dobbs: but where he was going,
[32:43] Bob Dobbs: he didn't complete.
[32:44] Bob Dobbs: And then how about creating more?
[32:46] Bob Dobbs: This is so McLuhan in traditional McLuhan probes.
[32:51] Bob Dobbs: He creates involvement by disappearing,
[32:54] Bob Dobbs: by hiding in a basement.
[32:56] Bob Dobbs: This is so counterintuitive.
[32:57] Bob Dobbs: How could anybody run for president doing that?
[32:59] Bob Dobbs: But every new president always pushes the envelope and does a new variation.
[33:06] Bob Dobbs: You might say of the big now.
[33:08] Bob Dobbs: But anyways...
[33:09] Bob Dobbs: Biden is worse than Trump.
[33:14] Cameron McEwen: That's interesting.
[33:19] Cameron McEwen: One thing I can fill in there is you were talking about Trump not completing his sentence and
[33:27] Cameron McEwen: Biden not completing his syllables.
[33:29] Cameron McEwen: But in the endless talk going on,
[33:33] Cameron McEwen: especially on TV,
[33:36] Cameron McEwen: people are completing their sentences.
[33:39] Cameron McEwen: But they don't lead anywhere.
[33:41] Cameron McEwen: They're completely meaningless,
[33:43] Cameron McEwen: right?
[33:44] Cameron McEwen: So you have an idea of completion that is useless and dangerous.
[33:50] Cameron McEwen: And that's what's sort of going on in one bubble of the public sphere.
[33:56] Cameron McEwen: And then you have these rival bubbles that are impersonated by
[34:02] Cameron McEwen: Trump and Biden.
[34:04] Cameron McEwen: And then beyond that,
[34:07] Cameron McEwen: you have...
[34:07] Cameron McEwen: you can look down on this and see the collision of these bubbles.
[34:13] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[34:14] Bob Dobbs: I agree.
[34:17] Bob Dobbs: What are you trying to say with that?
[34:20] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[34:21] Cameron McEwen: nothing.
[34:21] Cameron McEwen: It's just a riff on what you were saying.
[34:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[34:27] Bob Dobbs: I know.
[34:28] Bob Dobbs: Just wanted to see what you'd say if I said what I just said.
[34:33] Bob Dobbs: Tried to get you to go meta.
[34:36] Bob Dobbs: So.
[34:37] Bob Dobbs: I'm looking at different quotes that I have in my Phatic communion book.
[34:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm in the McLuhan section,
[34:43] Bob Dobbs: and let's see if any of these quotes here fit Trump.
[34:48] Bob Dobbs: Trump acting out the situation.
[34:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[34:55] Bob Dobbs: so here's,
[34:57] Bob Dobbs: camp is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay of their lives.
[35:03] Bob Dobbs: Is Trump failing to give a replay of people's lives?
[35:11] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[35:11] Bob Dobbs: if he's not finishing anything.
[35:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[35:15] Cameron McEwen: I think that's one of the things that...
[35:18] Cameron McEwen: scares people is that
[35:22] Cameron McEwen: Trump is a kind of union shadow of everybody's life that they don't want to acknowledge,
[35:35] Cameron McEwen: and therefore it's externalized and demonized.
[35:40] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[35:41] Cameron McEwen: Something that Jordan Peterson talks about a lot,
[35:44] Cameron McEwen: I think.
[35:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[35:45] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.
[35:46] Cameron McEwen: a lot about Peterson,
[35:47] Cameron McEwen: but I believe he does.
[35:48] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[35:49] Bob Dobbs: So now Trump doesn't give a replay.
[35:59] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[35:59] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[36:00] Bob Dobbs: He shows that by apparently he's up to like 30,000 lies now.
[36:04] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't care what he said yesterday.
[36:07] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[36:08] Bob Dobbs: He creates it.
[36:10] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[36:10] Bob Dobbs: remember McClellan's line on the frontier.
[36:13] Bob Dobbs: You must create a new identity every day because there's anti-environment to create an identity.
[36:19] Bob Dobbs: Then you have that role or job for a span of time.
[36:24] Bob Dobbs: And on the frontier,
[36:25] Bob Dobbs: everybody's challenging everybody every day.
[36:28] Bob Dobbs: So Trump is the ultimate frontier mental cowboy because he makes no references or doesn't acknowledge anything he said yesterday.
[36:37] Bob Dobbs: He is announcing he's a new being every day.
[36:40] Bob Dobbs: There's no continuity.
[36:41] Bob Dobbs: And then there's that Tom Snyder interview with McLuhan where
[36:45] Bob Dobbs: Snyder says,
[36:45] Bob Dobbs: have you noticed that people find it hard to follow you?
[36:49] Bob Dobbs: And he says,
[36:49] Bob Dobbs: yes.
[36:49] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[36:50] Bob Dobbs: that's because they try to connect what I am saying now with what I just said before.
[36:58] Cameron McEwen: Notice how this fits my all-at-once analysis.
[37:02] Cameron McEwen: The idea that I think
[37:05] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was always talking about after
[37:09] Cameron McEwen: let's say 1955 until 1979,
[37:14] Cameron McEwen: is that human experience can be seen as a kind of jumping from microsecond to microsecond between different forms of experience.
[37:28] Cameron McEwen: So all human beings are always on the frontier.
[37:33] Cameron McEwen: They're always going from one form to another form.
[37:37] Cameron McEwen: And
[37:38] Cameron McEwen: What is in between those forms is the tactile gap,
[37:42] Cameron McEwen: and it's navigated by the nobody,
[37:46] Cameron McEwen: because it's in between.
[37:49] Cameron McEwen: And that's what you were just talking about with both
[37:52] Cameron McEwen: Trump and McLuhan.
[37:55] Cameron McEwen: So we might say that this,
[37:57] Cameron McEwen: in fact,
[37:58] Cameron McEwen: is everybody,
[38:00] Cameron McEwen: but it's something that people...
[38:08] Cameron McEwen: I find it very hard to understand,
[38:13] Cameron McEwen: as you were just saying with Tom Snyder,
[38:15] Cameron McEwen: and even though they're doing it,
[38:19] Cameron McEwen: they don't know that they're doing it,
[38:21] Cameron McEwen: they fear that they're doing it,
[38:23] Cameron McEwen: and they would rather end up in the ridiculous situation of the world today than actually admit who they are and what they're doing at every second.
[38:38] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[38:39] Bob Dobbs: That will be a new kind of shadow of ourselves.
[38:45] Cameron McEwen: You could say,
[38:47] Cameron McEwen: and I forget who did say this,
[38:49] Cameron McEwen: Elliot or Pound or somebody,
[38:51] Cameron McEwen: talks about the shadow that falls between.
[38:57] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[38:57] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[38:58] Bob Dobbs: what you've just been saying,
[38:59] Bob Dobbs: do you have a quote in mind where he says this?
[39:02] Bob Dobbs: The first part of this paragraph you were just uttering.
[39:08] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[39:08] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[39:09] Cameron McEwen: I think he,
[39:11] Cameron McEwen: when McLuhan began to understand this,
[39:15] Cameron McEwen: which is a new understanding of time,
[39:17] Cameron McEwen: right?
[39:17] Cameron McEwen: It's sort of a quantum physics understanding of time.
[39:21] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[39:23] Cameron McEwen: It's a question of trying to understand time as plural,
[39:28] Cameron McEwen: because what's being talked about is a synchronicity that at the same time is dynamic.
[39:36] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[39:36] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[39:36] Cameron McEwen: So.
[39:37] Cameron McEwen: in terms of quantum physics,
[39:40] Cameron McEwen: the understanding of a particle as a potential position.
[39:48] Cameron McEwen: The one hand is synchronistic because it's talking about all of the potential positions of the particle.
[39:55] Cameron McEwen: And on the other hand,
[39:56] Cameron McEwen: it's dynamic as specifying some point out of that potential as a kind of likelihood.
[40:08] Cameron McEwen: And human beings don't want to understand themselves like that.
[40:13] Cameron McEwen: They want to understand themselves as having some sort of inner direction.
[40:18] Cameron McEwen: Whereas what McLuhan is talking about,
[40:23] Cameron McEwen: which he found in people like Jung and
[40:26] Cameron McEwen: Joyce, is the idea that instead of having inner direction,
[40:31] Cameron McEwen: we are directed.
[40:33] Cameron McEwen: And it's when we're in between the points of being directed,
[40:42] Cameron McEwen: that's being on the frontier that you were talking about.
[40:46] Cameron McEwen: But,
[40:46] Cameron McEwen: um,
[40:50] Cameron McEwen: We have to understand ourselves as acrobats that are human beings because we have an
[41:04] Cameron McEwen: inherent ability to ride that in between.
[41:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[41:10] Cameron McEwen: And so something like that is what is already functioning.
[41:16] Cameron McEwen: The very first time there's language,
[41:19] Cameron McEwen: because the sound that is emitted by the speaker has to go through a gap whereby it is transformed from all of the sounds that have ever been made before in the history of the world to
[41:40] Cameron McEwen: a new kind of sound that's understood by the hearer.
[41:44] Cameron McEwen: And it's that.
[41:45] Cameron McEwen: transformation that in between the two that
[41:49] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says is always going on with human beings and and that he he can't put a finger on it because it's inherently in between it's not something that can be specified as a point correct
[42:07] Bob Dobbs: now I'm looking at a quote here consciousness is not a verbal process with all our multimedia
[42:14] Bob Dobbs: post-linguistic situation.
[42:17] Bob Dobbs: We're in a more ethereal tactility or concrete tactility so that Trump comes along,
[42:25] Bob Dobbs: and he's not a verbal process in the normal sense of finishing his sentences,
[42:31] Bob Dobbs: but he may be expressing the most modern consciousness,
[42:34] Bob Dobbs: which is not a verbal process.
[42:37] Bob Dobbs: And then we have the problem of defining what consciousness is at that time.
[42:43] Bob Dobbs: And then you got Barry Nevitt saying that Finnegans Wake is a recently achieved form of consciousness.
[42:49] Bob Dobbs: Wow,
[42:50] Bob Dobbs: if anybody is miming Finnegans Wake,
[42:52] Bob Dobbs: it's Trump.
[42:53] Bob Dobbs: So if language has this tactility from the beginning,
[43:00] Bob Dobbs: what do we call this new situation?
[43:03] Bob Dobbs: And I call it,
[43:05] Bob Dobbs: I use his quotes on ESP to point to it,
[43:07] Bob Dobbs: this new situation where we're not in a verbal landscape anymore.
[43:13] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[43:14] Cameron McEwen: right.
[43:14] Cameron McEwen: So one of the differences between your story and my story,
[43:19] Cameron McEwen: and that to my way of thinking,
[43:22] Cameron McEwen: they're both interesting and we need to figure out a good way of sort of automatically translating between the two.
[43:31] Cameron McEwen: My way of thinking about complications like that is to think of how after the elements in chemistry...
[43:41] Cameron McEwen: were uncovered at the start of the
[43:43] Cameron McEwen: 19th century.
[43:45] Cameron McEwen: Here we are 200 years later and the complications that we've learned that characterize the chemical world are just unbelievable,
[43:58] Cameron McEwen: right?
[43:58] Cameron McEwen: You have proteins in the human body that have,
[44:02] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[44:03] Cameron McEwen: 19 elements in them and are hugely complicated in the way that they're...
[44:10] Cameron McEwen: folded and how they react with other folded proteins and all this sort of stuff.
[44:16] Cameron McEwen: So the sorts of complications that we found in the chemical world,
[44:24] Cameron McEwen: once the chemical elements were discovered,
[44:27] Cameron McEwen: gives a model to my way of thinking of the sorts of complications that must be true of human consciousness.
[44:37] Cameron McEwen: So for me,
[44:38] Cameron McEwen: that's a synchronic explanation,
[44:41] Cameron McEwen: and it's what my ultimate
[44:50] Cameron McEwen: sort of story for McLuhan is that he saw the unfolding of that kind of a science of human experience as a one way out of our cul-de-sac,
[45:05] Cameron McEwen: right?
[45:05] Cameron McEwen: Where now with you,
[45:07] Cameron McEwen: what I hear you saying is that another way of understanding this is to understand it as a diachronic story,
[45:17] Cameron McEwen: a story in time.
[45:19] Cameron McEwen: where different sorts of complications develop through different technologies,
[45:28] Cameron McEwen: and that this story of developing technologies is another way of explaining where we are.
[45:41] Bob Dobbs: It's another way of explaining.
[45:46] Bob Dobbs: There's your way,
[45:47] Bob Dobbs: and then there's the other way.
[45:49] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[45:51] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[45:53] Bob Dobbs: so go ahead.
[45:53] Cameron McEwen: And I don't see them as incompatible,
[45:59] Cameron McEwen: right?
[46:00] Cameron McEwen: The interesting thing about what you do is you take up the sort of understanding media position of McLuhan,
[46:07] Cameron McEwen: and you show that with the different technologies,
[46:14] Cameron McEwen: there are inherently different anti-environment.
[46:20] Cameron McEwen: physical anti-environment and psychological anti-environment that go along with them.
[46:26] Cameron McEwen: And if we don't understand those anti-environment,
[46:31] Cameron McEwen: which is what we're living in,
[46:34] Cameron McEwen: then we're going to increasingly screw ourselves up.
[46:38] Cameron McEwen: And that's true.
[46:41] Cameron McEwen: You're like a chemist who is saying,
[46:47] Cameron McEwen: look,
[46:47] Cameron McEwen: You're pouring all these different chemicals together and these things can blow up.
[46:55] Cameron McEwen: And that's true,
[46:56] Cameron McEwen: right?
[46:57] Cameron McEwen: So my interest is,
[46:59] Cameron McEwen: what are those chemicals?
[47:01] Cameron McEwen: And your interest is,
[47:03] Cameron McEwen: well,
[47:04] Cameron McEwen: probably there are chemicals there,
[47:07] Cameron McEwen: but if we don't pay attention to these complicated solutions that we're pouring together,
[47:16] Cameron McEwen: then we're screwed.
[47:17] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[47:18] Cameron McEwen: And those things are entirely compatible.
[47:21] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[47:22] Bob Dobbs: Then there's the services.
[47:24] Bob Dobbs: I like to point out the services.
[47:25] Bob Dobbs: So I found the quote.
[47:27] Bob Dobbs: It's from Prospect Magazine,
[47:29] Bob Dobbs: a Canadian air magazine,
[47:31] Bob Dobbs: September,
[47:32] Bob Dobbs: October.
[47:32] Cameron McEwen: 1962.
[47:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[47:34] Bob Dobbs: September,
[47:35] Bob Dobbs: October 62.
[47:36] Bob Dobbs: You're just predicting I was going to say 62,
[47:38] Bob Dobbs: right?
[47:39] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[47:39] Cameron McEwen: sir.
[47:40] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[47:40] Bob Dobbs: So here's the quote.
[47:42] Bob Dobbs: And I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself.
[47:48] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[47:48] Bob Dobbs: get out of the cul-de-sac.
[47:50] Bob Dobbs: To free himself from media for the first time in history.
[47:54] Bob Dobbs: He has been the victim,
[47:55] Bob Dobbs: the servomechanism of his technologies,
[47:57] Bob Dobbs: his media from the beginning of time.
[48:00] Bob Dobbs: But now,
[48:00] Bob Dobbs: because of the sheer multiplicity of them,
[48:03] Bob Dobbs: he is beginning to awaken.
[48:05] Bob Dobbs: Because he can't live with them all.
[48:08] Bob Dobbs: That's a pretty amazing statement.
[48:12] Bob Dobbs: about an effect that no one ever talks about,
[48:15] Bob Dobbs: that we are waking.
[48:17] Bob Dobbs: He's explaining
[48:18] Bob Dobbs: Finney is awake.
[48:20] Bob Dobbs: There's too much to read in that book.
[48:23] Bob Dobbs: So we can't live with the book.
[48:25] Bob Dobbs: So we're forced to awaken.
[48:28] Cameron McEwen: But notice one important thing in that quotation is that we can hear McLuhan talking about himself.
[48:37] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[48:38] Cameron McEwen: He's
[48:40] Cameron McEwen: In the decade before that,
[48:42] Cameron McEwen: let's say 52 to 62,
[48:45] Cameron McEwen: the whole story of McLuhan is that he has himself awoken from thinking that all consciousness
[49:02] Cameron McEwen: was basically literary to understanding that there are all of these different media.
[49:10] Cameron McEwen: these different media are more important than the messages that are said in them.
[49:18] Cameron McEwen: And so we need to understand how a world is relative to the particular medium that's in play.
[49:30] Cameron McEwen: And that is difficult on two counts.
[49:34] Cameron McEwen: It's difficult because of the multiplicity of media.
[49:38] Cameron McEwen: And with every message,
[49:39] Cameron McEwen: you can say,
[49:40] Cameron McEwen: well,
[49:41] Cameron McEwen: what would the message be in another medium?
[49:43] Cameron McEwen: And that destabilizes the message.
[49:46] Cameron McEwen: And then if you say every message is a medium.
[49:50] Cameron McEwen: then there's no message that is true.
[49:54] Cameron McEwen: And that destabilizes things in another way.
[49:57] Cameron McEwen: And in order to get to 1962 and say that this multiplicity offers a way of liberation,
[50:05] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had to live through that kind of madness for
[50:10] Cameron McEwen: 10 years.
[50:13] Bob Dobbs: Is this quote that I'm quoting from 62,
[50:16] Bob Dobbs: that's a sign to you of him waking up?
[50:19] Bob Dobbs: of the 52 to 62 process?
[50:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[50:22] Cameron McEwen: but it's also a sign of nightmare.
[50:24] Cameron McEwen: That prospect is a very complicated piece of work,
[50:32] Cameron McEwen: right?
[50:32] Cameron McEwen: He talks about we've externalized our nervous system and to have our nerves outside of us is extremely painful and we can't sort of intract.
[50:49] Cameron McEwen: our nervous system again because it's been extracted.
[50:53] Cameron McEwen: It's a very sort of telling essay on both the individual psychological level with McLuhan and as a kind of reading of the world.
[51:07] Cameron McEwen: When he says prospect,
[51:09] Cameron McEwen: it's a very nervous prospect that he puts forward in that essay.
[51:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[51:16] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[51:17] Cameron McEwen: One of his...
[51:18] Cameron McEwen: deepest and darkest essays,
[51:20] Cameron McEwen: I think.
[51:21] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[51:22] Bob Dobbs: No,
[51:22] Bob Dobbs: it's one of my favorites.
[51:23] Bob Dobbs: So then you see,
[51:25] Bob Dobbs: here's a quote,
[51:27] Bob Dobbs: a familiar quote from 1964 in Understanding Media.
[51:32] Bob Dobbs: Let's see how this complements the prospect quote.
[51:35] Bob Dobbs: Rapidly,
[51:36] Bob Dobbs: we approach the final phase of the extensions of man,
[51:39] Bob Dobbs: the technological simulation of consciousness,
[51:41] Bob Dobbs: when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.
[51:48] Bob Dobbs: That's interesting.
[51:49] Bob Dobbs: Knowing is extended to the whole place.
[51:53] Bob Dobbs: Much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.
[51:57] Bob Dobbs: For with the telegraph,
[51:58] Bob Dobbs: man had initiated that outering or extension of a central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting.
[52:06] Bob Dobbs: So that would appear to be an optimistic definition of consciousness,
[52:13] Bob Dobbs: extending consciousness.
[52:14] Bob Dobbs: But then you have in the prospect,
[52:17] Bob Dobbs: he's already...
[52:17] Bob Dobbs: explaining the effect of consciousness in the opposite way,
[52:25] Bob Dobbs: where you can't live with them all.
[52:26] Bob Dobbs: So those two quotes go together really well,
[52:30] Bob Dobbs: and it's complementary.
[52:32] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[52:33] Cameron McEwen: But at this point,
[52:36] Cameron McEwen: we can see what is wrong with nearly all McLuhan scholarship,
[52:42] Cameron McEwen: if we want to call it that.
[52:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[52:45] Cameron McEwen: When he talks about the...
[52:47] Cameron McEwen: exteriorization of consciousness.
[52:51] Cameron McEwen: People tend to think of that as sort of involving the idea that well we know very well what consciousness is and so now it's going to be exteriorized and
[53:08] Cameron McEwen: that kind of it's kind of a foggy bubble it's
[53:17] Cameron McEwen: something that we don't really understand,
[53:21] Cameron McEwen: but we can make quotes,
[53:23] Cameron McEwen: right?
[53:23] Cameron McEwen: One of my professors used to say that the whole history of philosophy was people coming to a point where they didn't understand something,
[53:34] Cameron McEwen: and then they would begin to quote other people.
[53:38] Cameron McEwen: So my way of interpreting this,
[53:46] Cameron McEwen: is to say that...
[53:48] Cameron McEwen: what is meant by the exteriorization of consciousness is to people begin to understand consciousness in a whole new way,
[53:58] Cameron McEwen: namely as the mobilization of the possibilities of experience from microsecond to microsecond.
[54:09] Cameron McEwen: And then once we get to that point,
[54:15] Cameron McEwen: we can.
[54:16] Cameron McEwen: foresee the development of consciousness or the study of consciousness,
[54:22] Cameron McEwen: study of consciousness by consciousness,
[54:26] Cameron McEwen: developing more or less as chemistry did.
[54:29] Cameron McEwen: We have a basis suddenly for examining the interior landscape that is analogous to the ways in which we have examined the exterior landscape over the last 200 years.
[54:45] Cameron McEwen: And so the exterior of consciousness means...
[54:51] Cameron McEwen: something like the development of all of the infrastructures that we have seen with the development of the study of the exterior landscape but now directed to the interior landscape.
[55:07] Cameron McEwen: In the exterior landscape there were universities,
[55:11] Cameron McEwen: there were research departments and corporations,
[55:14] Cameron McEwen: there were patent offices on and on and on like that.
[55:20] Cameron McEwen: The same things won't necessarily happen with the exteriorization of consciousness,
[55:27] Cameron McEwen: but analogous things will happen so that we can quite quickly know incredibly complicated things about consciousness,
[55:37] Cameron McEwen: but it has nothing to do with what we think about consciousness now.
[55:42] Cameron McEwen: It's something completely different.
[55:45] Cameron McEwen: The prospect essay is saying,
[55:47] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[55:48] Cameron McEwen: we have this.
[55:51] Cameron McEwen: ability,
[55:52] Cameron McEwen: but it's very fearsome because people,
[55:58] Cameron McEwen: when they see the possibilities of consciousness,
[56:04] Cameron McEwen: this rebounds back on who they think they are and what they think they're doing and what they think is right and wrong and all that stuff,
[56:13] Cameron McEwen: because all of these things are only a mode of consciousness,
[56:17] Cameron McEwen: Whereas suddenly we're faced with the whole.
[56:20] Cameron McEwen: panoply of consciousness,
[56:24] Cameron McEwen: right?
[56:24] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[56:25] Cameron McEwen: So in the Understanding Media book,
[56:28] Cameron McEwen: he's saying,
[56:28] Cameron McEwen: well,
[56:28] Cameron McEwen: look,
[56:29] Cameron McEwen: here's this great opportunity that we have.
[56:33] Cameron McEwen: And as a matter of fact,
[56:34] Cameron McEwen: if we don't take it,
[56:35] Cameron McEwen: we may not survive.
[56:37] Cameron McEwen: But look at how great this is in a way.
[56:44] Cameron McEwen: But he's always going back and forth between these two things of what
[56:48] Cameron McEwen: Um, risk.
[56:50] Cameron McEwen: strains our ability to look at consciousness once it's exteriorized,
[56:57] Cameron McEwen: and he knows the pain and difficulty of this because he just lived through it for a decade,
[57:02] Cameron McEwen: and the potential that it offers on the other hand.
[57:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[57:09] Bob Dobbs: so an interpretation of the extensive consciousness,
[57:13] Bob Dobbs: four years later he starts talking about the technology becomes a living organism.
[57:18] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[57:19] Bob Dobbs: the HAL of 2001,
[57:22] Bob Dobbs: the Space Odyssey.
[57:23] Bob Dobbs: That's an extension of consciousness.
[57:27] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[57:27] Bob Dobbs: I remember reading this sentence back in the
[57:29] Bob Dobbs: 60s. I certainly didn't think that meaning.
[57:33] Bob Dobbs: But that is another aspect of the extension of consciousness,
[57:36] Bob Dobbs: into something outside of ourselves that we would think is inanimate or not organic,
[57:42] Bob Dobbs: that actually is organic.
[57:44] Bob Dobbs: And then I say that's where we got with the tech body.
[57:48] Bob Dobbs: So there's a fine line between,
[57:51] Bob Dobbs: maybe no line,
[57:52] Bob Dobbs: between Trump,
[57:53] Bob Dobbs: this artificial intelligence that's fully aware of everything,
[57:59] Bob Dobbs: faster than we can algorithm,
[58:02] Bob Dobbs: and us.
[58:03] Bob Dobbs: No difference.
[58:04] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[58:05] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan talks about total fusion way back in the
[58:08] Bob Dobbs: 50s between humans and technology.
[58:12] Bob Dobbs: The fusion,
[58:14] Bob Dobbs: paradoxically,
[58:15] Bob Dobbs: or in a tactile sense,
[58:17] Bob Dobbs: creates more splits.
[58:20] Bob Dobbs: So,
[58:21] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[58:21] Bob Dobbs: a tactile thing is touch and then not touch.
[58:25] Bob Dobbs: So blocking,
[58:26] Bob Dobbs: emerging,
[58:27] Bob Dobbs: interplay constantly.
[58:29] Bob Dobbs: And this is why consciousness is not a verbal process.
[58:34] Bob Dobbs: It's something else,
[58:36] Bob Dobbs: which is what you're trying to say.
[58:37] Bob Dobbs: And I'm just bringing in other quotes that might push it further to get to an understanding of the tech body.
[58:44] Bob Dobbs: So I do this whole...
[58:47] Bob Dobbs: stretch of qualities of ESP that McLuhan is describing and saying,
[58:51] Bob Dobbs: what you think is ESP is
[58:54] Bob Dobbs: 19th century.
[58:55] Bob Dobbs: We are living in a new situation where prophetic awareness is not even important.
[59:01] Bob Dobbs: Artistic awareness is not important.
[59:03] Bob Dobbs: He would say his awareness is important,
[59:06] Bob Dobbs: but it's pretty hard to translate what he meant to other people.
[59:12] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[59:12] Bob Dobbs: he said people have our...
[59:16] Bob Dobbs: People have a hard time projecting to me,
[59:19] Bob Dobbs: and I have a hard time projecting to people.
[59:21] Bob Dobbs: And this is the expert in communication,
[59:24] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[59:25] Bob Dobbs: who can't communicate.
[59:27] Bob Dobbs: This is the cul-de-sac he's admitting even he is in.
[59:34] Bob Dobbs: How do you respond to that?
[59:42] Bob Dobbs: Does he provide a solution?
[59:46] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[59:48] Cameron McEwen: in my view.
[59:50] Cameron McEwen: He points to a different kind of solution.
[59:59] Cameron McEwen: I think what he wants to say against the vertical view or the horizontal view is that there
[1:00:12] Cameron McEwen: are different kinds of solutions that peoples and cultures have.
[1:00:20] Cameron McEwen: attempted to formulate.
[1:00:22] Cameron McEwen: And now we're in a position where we can see all of these attempts at formulation as possibilities.
[1:00:35] Cameron McEwen: And the study of those possibilities offers us a whole new solution,
[1:00:45] Cameron McEwen: but it's not anything that Uh,
[1:00:49] Cameron McEwen: comes to a closure at any given moment.
[1:00:52] Cameron McEwen: It's something that is dynamic,
[1:00:56] Cameron McEwen: it's collective,
[1:00:57] Cameron McEwen: as you say,
[1:00:58] Cameron McEwen: it has a life of its own,
[1:01:01] Cameron McEwen: but it's an avenue that is open to us if we can overcome all of the difficulties inherent
[1:01:17] Cameron McEwen: in knowing that our
[1:01:18] Cameron McEwen: current experience and our current identity and our current values are only one possibility amongst a whole bunch of others.
[1:01:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:01:32] Cameron McEwen: So we spent 2,000 years consolidating a certain form of identity.
[1:01:40] Cameron McEwen: And now that's being blown up in just a few years.
[1:01:44] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:01:45] Cameron McEwen: So as McLuhan would say,
[1:01:46] Cameron McEwen: we're going.
[1:01:48] Cameron McEwen: through a epyllion evolution in 10 minutes.
[1:01:51] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:01:52] Cameron McEwen: And that is what causes our problems.
[1:01:56] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:01:56] Bob Dobbs: So maybe you respect the honesty or clarity of McLuhan,
[1:02:02] Bob Dobbs: who's showing how much of a cul-de-sac we've always been in and how deep it is today,
[1:02:09] Bob Dobbs: and yet he flips around implying a solution,
[1:02:13] Bob Dobbs: which would be recognizing the cul-de-sac.
[1:02:15] Bob Dobbs: So he's asking every department in the university to recognize they're nowhere near being useful.
[1:02:22] Bob Dobbs: And he's not blaming them as stupid.
[1:02:26] Bob Dobbs: He's saying we need to recognize through Ivins Wake,
[1:02:30] Bob Dobbs: the cul-de-sac that all our departments have got into,
[1:02:33] Bob Dobbs: we've got to redefine what education is.
[1:02:35] Bob Dobbs: And he got to the point of saying,
[1:02:37] Bob Dobbs: forget teaching,
[1:02:39] Bob Dobbs: have bullshit sessions.
[1:02:41] Bob Dobbs: Just allow people to express it.
[1:02:43] Bob Dobbs: and hop about and experience different ideas,
[1:02:46] Bob Dobbs: different notions.
[1:02:47] Bob Dobbs: Just hear the different ideas.
[1:02:49] Cameron McEwen: He was saying that already in 1955.
[1:02:55] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:02:55] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:02:55] Bob Dobbs: I know.
[1:02:57] Bob Dobbs: But he talks about a quietism.
[1:03:02] Bob Dobbs: He basically said,
[1:03:03] Bob Dobbs: hey,
[1:03:03] Bob Dobbs: do not leave your home.
[1:03:06] Bob Dobbs: Look at the cul-de-sac,
[1:03:08] Bob Dobbs: the storm you're in the middle of,
[1:03:10] Bob Dobbs: and stay in your home and observe it.
[1:03:13] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever seen that quote?
[1:03:16] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:03:16] Cameron McEwen: but I think that's possible for him.
[1:03:19] Cameron McEwen: To my mind,
[1:03:20] Cameron McEwen: it's a good example of how McLuhan is always talking about himself along with other things.
[1:03:28] Cameron McEwen: So one of the things that
[1:03:31] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, on the one hand,
[1:03:33] Cameron McEwen: deeply regretted,
[1:03:35] Cameron McEwen: but on the other hand,
[1:03:36] Cameron McEwen: found fascinating as something to think about.
[1:03:40] Cameron McEwen: was the complete lack of communication that he had with his kids.
[1:03:44] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:03:46] Cameron McEwen: He wanted to tell them things that he thought were very important,
[1:03:52] Cameron McEwen: and they simply couldn't get it.
[1:03:56] Cameron McEwen: And so he didn't sort of hate them for it or something.
[1:04:02] Cameron McEwen: He realized from his own home that there were really deep
[1:04:08] Cameron McEwen: problems of communication that he didn't know how to get around.
[1:04:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:04:14] Bob Dobbs: And that's why he comes up with that statement.
[1:04:16] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:04:16] Bob Dobbs: I can't project myself and they can't project themselves to me.
[1:04:19] Bob Dobbs: I can't project myself to them and they can't to me.
[1:04:22] Bob Dobbs: And then he had the same problem with the members of the explorations group.
[1:04:27] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:04:27] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:04:28] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:04:28] Cameron McEwen: So when I talk about McLuhan talking about himself at home,
[1:04:32] Cameron McEwen: I don't mean that he's not also talking about his colleagues or talking about his students.
[1:04:38] Cameron McEwen: We're talking about his fellow Catholics,
[1:04:42] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:04:46] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,
[1:04:47] Cameron McEwen: the decisive...
[1:04:51] Cameron McEwen: Happening in the modern world is people unable to let go of a way of thought and experience that is leading us to disaster,
[1:05:07] Cameron McEwen: but they're so fearful of the only way of getting themselves out of that cul-de-sac that they would,
[1:05:15] Cameron McEwen: at the end of the day,
[1:05:15] Cameron McEwen: they would rather blow up the world than make the slight skip.
[1:05:21] Cameron McEwen: or hip hop that he is recommending.
[1:05:24] Bob Dobbs: Right now,
[1:05:26] Bob Dobbs: that's also always been the problem,
[1:05:28] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:05:30] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[1:05:30] Cameron McEwen: But the problem at a time when your major weapon is a spear and nobody ever goes more than 10 miles from where they're born,
[1:05:41] Cameron McEwen: that the problem of not being able to hip hop in your thought is completely different from people that have atomic weapons.
[1:05:49] Cameron McEwen: You can send them around the world in
[1:05:51] Cameron McEwen: 10 seconds.
[1:05:53] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:05:54] Bob Dobbs: so what I noticed through the years is that McLuhan was very sensitive to the actual dilemma almost every year.
[1:06:04] Bob Dobbs: So he would make statements like,
[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: executives,
[1:06:07] Bob Dobbs: they're all hankering to become teachers.
[1:06:09] Bob Dobbs: They all want to get into the universities.
[1:06:13] Bob Dobbs: And regular businessmen would say,
[1:06:14] Bob Dobbs: that's nuts.
[1:06:15] Bob Dobbs: I don't know any businessmen.
[1:06:17] Bob Dobbs: or any colleague of mine who wants to be a teacher,
[1:06:20] Bob Dobbs: but he would make that kind of statement.
[1:06:23] Bob Dobbs: He was like sense-making the psychology,
[1:06:25] Bob Dobbs: the strain in people in,
[1:06:26] Bob Dobbs: say,
[1:06:26] Bob Dobbs: 1965,
[1:06:30] Bob Dobbs: that a novelist would take,
[1:06:32] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:06:32] Bob Dobbs: 300 pages to show.
[1:06:34] Bob Dobbs: He would just say it.
[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: He was actually quite frank about the frailty of people or about what they were hiding in their daily activities,
[1:06:44] Bob Dobbs: what they were frustrated by.
[1:06:46] Bob Dobbs: Did you get what I'm saying here?
[1:06:47] Bob Dobbs: He always seemed to be tuned in to the dilemma in the general population on trend levels.
[1:06:57] Cameron McEwen: But as you say,
[1:06:59] Cameron McEwen: he would say something and one of the responses,
[1:07:04] Cameron McEwen: there were actually different responses to what McLuhan would say.
[1:07:10] Cameron McEwen: Sometimes he would say something and people would be kind of amazed.
[1:07:15] Cameron McEwen: at its clarity and it was sort of a bingo moment yes but usually they said just what you were talking about with the business people McLuhan says all the business people want to become professors and then the business people Selye don't know anybody like that or McLuhan says it's the end of the book and everybody takes
[1:07:37] Cameron McEwen: 20 years to explain how stupid that is.
[1:07:41] Cameron McEwen: ridiculous idea and dangerous idea and all this sort of stuff,
[1:07:45] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:07:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:07:45] Cameron McEwen: So one thing that's going on there is that
[1:07:50] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan second sight is being exhibited.
[1:07:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:07:54] Cameron McEwen: When a person has second sight,
[1:07:57] Cameron McEwen: they can see something,
[1:07:59] Cameron McEwen: but they don't necessarily know when that is,
[1:08:03] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:08:03] Cameron McEwen: So McLuhan can see something that,
[1:08:06] Cameron McEwen: in fact,
[1:08:06] Cameron McEwen: did happen,
[1:08:07] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:08:08] Cameron McEwen: If you.
[1:08:08] Cameron McEwen: fast forward to 1995 or 2005 or something like this,
[1:08:14] Cameron McEwen: every business person in the world does indeed want to be some sort of professor and telling people the truth about everything because he's some kind of genius
[1:08:31] Cameron McEwen: that maybe he needs to buy his own television network and show people how all this works.
[1:08:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:08:38] Bob Dobbs: be
[1:08:38] Bob Dobbs: Everybody trying to be a consultant to everybody else.
[1:08:42] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:08:43] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:08:44] Cameron McEwen: And everybody desperate to show that their particular point of view works when,
[1:08:53] Cameron McEwen: in fact,
[1:08:54] Cameron McEwen: no particular point of view works.
[1:08:56] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:08:58] Bob Dobbs: And so we witnessed Bill Gates advising the whole world what to do about the plague.
[1:09:03] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:09:04] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:09:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:09:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:09:06] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:09:07] Cameron McEwen: that's a...
[1:09:09] Cameron McEwen: With McLuhan second sight,
[1:09:11] Cameron McEwen: this is a big problem for him.
[1:09:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:09:13] Cameron McEwen: Because when he says stuff,
[1:09:16] Cameron McEwen: he's not unaware that he may not be talking about now.
[1:09:21] Cameron McEwen: He may be talking about some other time,
[1:09:23] Cameron McEwen: but that's slippery.
[1:09:25] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:09:26] Cameron McEwen: If you transfer that to the house and he's talking to the kids and stuff like this,
[1:09:32] Cameron McEwen: part of his mind is aware that he may be saying stuff to them.
[1:09:37] Cameron McEwen: that doesn't relate to them.
[1:09:39] Cameron McEwen: And it doesn't relate to now at all.
[1:09:41] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:09:41] Cameron McEwen: He's just kind of flapping his lips.
[1:09:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:09:46] Cameron McEwen: And that's a difficult position for somebody,
[1:09:49] Cameron McEwen: right,
[1:09:49] Cameron McEwen: to be aware that they're just flapping their lips and they're talking about something in the future.
[1:09:56] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[1:09:59] Cameron McEwen: it could be 20 years,
[1:10:00] Cameron McEwen: it could be 20 minutes,
[1:10:01] Cameron McEwen: but they're talking about something that doesn't really relate to what's going on now.
[1:10:08] Cameron McEwen: And yet the people that they're trying to communicate with have no other orientation but that particular noun.
[1:10:21] Bob Dobbs: The proof of him admitting that he didn't know what time it was,
[1:10:26] Bob Dobbs: he had quotes like,
[1:10:27] Bob Dobbs: we're all deaf,
[1:10:28] Bob Dobbs: blind,
[1:10:29] Bob Dobbs: and whatever the third term is,
[1:10:31] Bob Dobbs: mutes.
[1:10:32] Bob Dobbs: We're all deaf,
[1:10:33] Bob Dobbs: blind,
[1:10:33] Bob Dobbs: and mute,
[1:10:34] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:10:34] Bob Dobbs: Before the present.
[1:10:36] Bob Dobbs: He would admit we didn't know a lot in different ways.
[1:10:41] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:10:42] Bob Dobbs: who did that?
[1:10:43] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if people admitted it so casually about how we don't know anything.
[1:10:49] Bob Dobbs: But the paradox is more and more opportunities are given to people as we get into the digital era and social media to mouth off their ignorance,
[1:10:59] Bob Dobbs: to search for an audience for their wisdom.
[1:11:06] Bob Dobbs: And then McLuhan would say,
[1:11:07] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:11:07] Bob Dobbs: consciousness is not a verbal process.
[1:11:09] Bob Dobbs: He's always telling people that
[1:11:14] Bob Dobbs: I'm flapping my lips,
[1:11:16] Bob Dobbs: and you guys don't know that you're flapping your lips.
[1:11:19] Bob Dobbs: I do.
[1:11:21] Bob Dobbs: So he would say,
[1:11:22] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:11:23] Bob Dobbs: I need speech to communicate things with you.
[1:11:25] Bob Dobbs: I've got to use words with you.
[1:11:27] Bob Dobbs: So he was always commenting on the inadequacy of communication in many ways.
[1:11:35] Bob Dobbs: And yet by doing that,
[1:11:36] Bob Dobbs: by being honest about it,
[1:11:38] Bob Dobbs: he becomes known as the communications expert.
[1:11:41] Bob Dobbs: You become an expert in what you can't do.
[1:11:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:11:46] Cameron McEwen: So let's just imagine for a minute that what McLuhan wants to do is institute study of the different incoming forms of consciousness that
[1:12:03] Cameron McEwen: human beings.
[1:12:04] Cameron McEwen: instantiate from microsecond to microsecond.
[1:12:09] Cameron McEwen: So one of the things that would have to be done is people would have to appreciate that their experience is only one possible form amongst a myriad of other possible forms.
[1:12:24] Cameron McEwen: And then once they began to study,
[1:12:27] Cameron McEwen: the most important things that they could look at would be failures.
[1:12:33] Cameron McEwen: Because if you think of the physical sciences,
[1:12:39] Cameron McEwen: stuff that's already been proven is,
[1:12:42] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:12:42] Cameron McEwen: it's uninteresting.
[1:12:44] Cameron McEwen: What you're looking for are exceptions to what we already know.
[1:12:48] Cameron McEwen: And when you look into the exceptions,
[1:12:50] Cameron McEwen: into the breakdowns,
[1:12:52] Cameron McEwen: then you can have a breakthrough.
[1:12:55] Cameron McEwen: And that's basically the Nobel Prize awards people that spotted.
[1:13:00] Cameron McEwen: problems and then we're able to make a contribution to those problems.
[1:13:05] Cameron McEwen: And so
[1:13:06] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was constantly talking about what would we need to do to go from here to a possible solution and he was talking about how would that solution work.
[1:13:19] Cameron McEwen: So it's complicated but it's in some ways it's completely obvious and it's amazing that people
[1:13:29] Cameron McEwen: simply don't get it.
[1:13:31] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:13:31] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:13:32] Bob Dobbs: I just looking,
[1:13:33] Bob Dobbs: scanning through my quotes,
[1:13:35] Bob Dobbs: and so McLuhan was telling people,
[1:13:37] Bob Dobbs: sex isn't what you thought it was.
[1:13:39] Bob Dobbs: Racism isn't what you thought it was.
[1:13:42] Bob Dobbs: War isn't what you think it is.
[1:13:45] Bob Dobbs: Every major noun in people's lives,
[1:13:49] Bob Dobbs: or newspaper headline kind of use of nouns,
[1:13:53] Bob Dobbs: he was pointing out it was not what you thought it was.
[1:13:56] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:13:57] Cameron McEwen: And notice how this goes right back to
[1:14:00] Cameron McEwen: 1930. In the Nina Sutton interview,
[1:14:05] Cameron McEwen: it seems that he already was reading
[1:14:08] Cameron McEwen: I.A. Richards in
[1:14:10] Cameron McEwen: Winnipeg.
[1:14:11] Cameron McEwen: And he found this very disorienting because Richards and Empson,
[1:14:20] Cameron McEwen: both of whom were friends of Eliot,
[1:14:23] Cameron McEwen: they were looking at language.
[1:14:26] Cameron McEwen: as words being inherently ambiguous.
[1:14:32] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:14:34] Bob Dobbs: The seven types of ambiguity.
[1:14:36] Cameron McEwen: Ambiguity,
[1:14:37] Cameron McEwen: that's correct.
[1:14:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:14:38] Cameron McEwen: So words aren't kind of labels that are stuck on things.
[1:14:46] Cameron McEwen: Words are inherently ambiguous,
[1:14:49] Cameron McEwen: and great poets mobilize that ambiguity.
[1:14:55] Cameron McEwen: And so what you were talking about just now,
[1:15:02] Cameron McEwen: of these uncertainties,
[1:15:04] Cameron McEwen: actually go back to the very start of
[1:15:07] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan career,
[1:15:09] Cameron McEwen: and he was constantly trying to balance.
[1:15:14] Cameron McEwen: ambiguities that are inherent that could never ever be sort of demobilized from language,
[1:15:24] Cameron McEwen: because that's what language is,
[1:15:26] Cameron McEwen: is that ambiguity,
[1:15:28] Cameron McEwen: and the possibility of ground,
[1:15:32] Cameron McEwen: which he found by converting to Catholicism,
[1:15:36] Cameron McEwen: and also found in the possibility of a new type
[1:15:44] Cameron McEwen: of study of consciousness once it becomes exteriorized.
[1:15:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:15:52] Bob Dobbs: there's lots of journals of studying cognitive processes or consciousness or alternative consciousness,
[1:15:59] Bob Dobbs: psychedelic forms of consciousness.
[1:16:01] Bob Dobbs: That's a very,
[1:16:02] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:16:03] Bob Dobbs: regular word thrown around consciousness.
[1:16:05] Bob Dobbs: But nobody grabbed at the dimensions of this problem of consciousness like McLuhan did.
[1:16:13] Bob Dobbs: He actually had broken into a new sea.
[1:16:17] Bob Dobbs: I had something else there.
[1:16:19] Bob Dobbs: He explains Orwell is not what you think it is.
[1:16:24] Bob Dobbs: Space flight isn't what you think it is.
[1:16:27] Bob Dobbs: Yet the global theater contained all those capabilities.
[1:16:32] Bob Dobbs: You had edible spaceships.
[1:16:34] Bob Dobbs: You had flight in a disembodied state.
[1:16:41] Bob Dobbs: What is that process?
[1:16:43] Bob Dobbs: You're pointing out that people have no clue where they're living and the terms they use.
[1:16:51] Bob Dobbs: He's actually telling people to shut up.
[1:16:54] Bob Dobbs: Anything you say is not relevant.
[1:16:58] Bob Dobbs: But of course,
[1:16:58] Bob Dobbs: he wouldn't come out and tell everybody to shut up all the time.
[1:17:01] Bob Dobbs: So he would digress like a Maritain and bring up other interesting patterns.
[1:17:07] Bob Dobbs: That's just a filler until he gets back to telling you.
[1:17:10] Bob Dobbs: to shut off,
[1:17:12] Bob Dobbs: which is what he says Joyce and Burroughs were saying in that 1964 review.
[1:17:16] Bob Dobbs: They were advocating shut off the electric button.
[1:17:20] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:17:21] Bob Dobbs: it was a dire situation.
[1:17:23] Bob Dobbs: At the same time,
[1:17:24] Bob Dobbs: he told us to relax.
[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:17:26] Bob Dobbs: this is where I get my quadrophrenia,
[1:17:27] Bob Dobbs: jumping from one posture to another,
[1:17:31] Bob Dobbs: and then the Android Meme imitates that.
[1:17:36] Bob Dobbs: Again,
[1:17:36] Bob Dobbs: you come back and...
[1:17:42] Bob Dobbs: So here's the,
[1:17:42] Bob Dobbs: I'm not going to go there.
[1:17:44] Bob Dobbs: This is what,
[1:17:44] Bob Dobbs: I remember what I wanted to say to you.
[1:17:47] Bob Dobbs: Someone brought up,
[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: where did McLuhan get the idea of extensions?
[1:17:53] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:17:56] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:17:57] Bob Dobbs: did he,
[1:17:58] Bob Dobbs: maybe was he the first or something,
[1:17:59] Bob Dobbs: or where did he get it from?
[1:18:00] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[1:18:01] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:18:01] Bob Dobbs: Ralph Waldo Emerson said it in 1870.
[1:18:06] Bob Dobbs: And I was thinking of saying Bucky Fuller and
[1:18:09] Bob Dobbs: Ed Hall.
[1:18:10] Bob Dobbs: They came up with the extensions of our faculties.
[1:18:14] Bob Dobbs: But then someone said,
[1:18:15] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:18:15] Bob Dobbs: Cameron says he didn't get it from,
[1:18:21] Bob Dobbs: he lists all three,
[1:18:22] Bob Dobbs: Emerson,
[1:18:23] Bob Dobbs: Bucky Fuller,
[1:18:23] Bob Dobbs: and Hall.
[1:18:25] Bob Dobbs: I forget what you said.
[1:18:26] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:18:26] Bob Dobbs: he got it from the Manitoba guy.
[1:18:29] Bob Dobbs: Who was it?
[1:18:29] Bob Dobbs: Rupert?
[1:18:30] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:18:31] Cameron McEwen: right.
[1:18:32] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:18:32] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: W-R-I-G-H-T.
[1:18:34] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:18:35] Bob Dobbs: I one-upped everybody and said,
[1:18:37] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:18:37] Bob Dobbs: he got it from his father.
[1:18:39] Bob Dobbs: you
[1:18:40] Bob Dobbs: How do I explain that?
[1:18:42] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:18:42] Bob Dobbs: his father was a Rosicrucian,
[1:18:45] Bob Dobbs: and the phrase,
[1:18:46] Bob Dobbs: the medium is the message,
[1:18:47] Bob Dobbs: or the medium is the massage,
[1:18:48] Bob Dobbs: is about magical hypnosis,
[1:18:51] Bob Dobbs: or it's a technique of deception or manipulating anti-environment,
[1:18:57] Bob Dobbs: like imagination is not embedded in any of our faculties or extensions of the faculties.
[1:19:03] Bob Dobbs: So the essential act of magic is what the medium is the message referring to.
[1:19:09] Bob Dobbs: And he might have gotten fascinated by,
[1:19:11] Bob Dobbs: especially the occult versions of magic,
[1:19:13] Bob Dobbs: from his father's talk about the rosy cushions.
[1:19:16] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if the mother participated in that,
[1:19:18] Bob Dobbs: but according to the biographies,
[1:19:21] Bob Dobbs: that was what his father was into at some point.
[1:19:24] Bob Dobbs: So what do you think of that?
[1:19:26] Bob Dobbs: Do you think he got it from his father?
[1:19:31] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:19:31] Cameron McEwen: I don't know of any evidence that he did.
[1:19:35] Bob Dobbs: Other than...
[1:19:36] Cameron McEwen: I'd be very interested in...
[1:19:39] Cameron McEwen: actual texts,
[1:19:42] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:19:43] Cameron McEwen: There is one newspaper report of a talk by his father,
[1:19:47] Cameron McEwen: but it's not...
[1:19:49] Cameron McEwen: It's not very illuminating in terms of McLuhan.
[1:19:58] Cameron McEwen: I think it's pretty clear that
[1:20:01] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan got the idea of extensions from
[1:20:04] Cameron McEwen: Wright because we have Wright's book with McLuhan notations in Toronto.
[1:20:12] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:20:12] Cameron McEwen: And the quotations from Wright's book are...
[1:20:19] Cameron McEwen: very close to what McLuhan would investigate for the rest of his life.
[1:20:25] Bob Dobbs: But like you said,
[1:20:26] Bob Dobbs: moving from,
[1:20:27] Bob Dobbs: if you run out of things to say,
[1:20:28] Bob Dobbs: you start quoting others.
[1:20:30] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was always looking for validation of what he intuited or could say.
[1:20:37] Bob Dobbs: So he's always quoting others.
[1:20:40] Bob Dobbs: I remember people saying back then in the
[1:20:43] Bob Dobbs: 60s, you know,
[1:20:43] Bob Dobbs: they admire Norman Mailer.
[1:20:45] Bob Dobbs: And they'd say,
[1:20:46] Bob Dobbs: that's an act of imagination.
[1:20:47] Bob Dobbs: This guy's making up a whole story,
[1:20:50] Bob Dobbs: and he's not quoting anybody else.
[1:20:52] Bob Dobbs: He creates a whole world.
[1:20:54] Bob Dobbs: Whereas McLuhan appeared to be,
[1:20:56] Bob Dobbs: to these people,
[1:20:57] Bob Dobbs: unoriginal.
[1:20:58] Bob Dobbs: All he did was quote people.
[1:21:00] Bob Dobbs: But they didn't understand that he was arraying a bunch of quotes to show they're all saying the same thing due to a pattern anti-environment.
[1:21:09] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[1:21:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:21:11] Cameron McEwen: I would say,
[1:21:13] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:21:13] Cameron McEwen: it's certainly true.
[1:21:15] Cameron McEwen: that
[1:21:16] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan sort of wrote through quotations.
[1:21:23] Cameron McEwen: In
[1:21:24] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg Galaxy,
[1:21:27] Cameron McEwen: it's illuminating to go through the book and identify just what is McLuhan and what he's quoting,
[1:21:39] Cameron McEwen: because it's not clear from the typography.
[1:21:44] Cameron McEwen: exactly what's going on.
[1:21:47] Cameron McEwen: And that's true of most of his books.
[1:21:50] Cameron McEwen: But what I would recommend for people is to see his quotations as related to his second sight.
[1:21:59] Cameron McEwen: I think he makes a lot of quotations as challenges to himself,
[1:22:07] Cameron McEwen: as a way of saying,
[1:22:09] Cameron McEwen: here's something that
[1:22:12] Cameron McEwen: I can see leads somewhere,
[1:22:15] Cameron McEwen: but
[1:22:15] Cameron McEwen: I can't see it exactly.
[1:22:17] Cameron McEwen: I need to keep looking into it.
[1:22:21] Cameron McEwen: So just as an example,
[1:22:24] Cameron McEwen: I'm writing about this in the latest Postman doing on the
[1:22:28] Cameron McEwen: Citadel of Consciousness,
[1:22:29] Cameron McEwen: where I actually quote you,
[1:22:31] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[1:22:31] Cameron McEwen: In 1951,
[1:22:37] Cameron McEwen: in one of his essays,
[1:22:39] Cameron McEwen: I think it's on the aesthetic moment.
[1:22:42] Cameron McEwen: He quotes Ruskin from Modern Painters on the grotesque.
[1:22:48] Bob Dobbs: And the picturesque,
[1:22:50] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:22:51] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that he mentions...
[1:22:53] Cameron McEwen: He does talk about the picturesque at that time,
[1:22:57] Cameron McEwen: but not Innis particular quotation.
[1:22:59] Cameron McEwen: But in the particular quotation,
[1:23:02] Cameron McEwen: Ruskin talks about gaps that are leaped over because...
[1:23:11] Cameron McEwen: They can't be formulated in words.
[1:23:15] Cameron McEwen: And he talks about how it's necessary for consciousness to confront this kind of gothic jarring.
[1:23:30] Cameron McEwen: So McLuhan quotes that in 1951.
[1:23:38] Cameron McEwen: He quotes it again.
[1:23:41] Cameron McEwen: In
[1:23:41] Cameron McEwen: Burroughs' 1964 essay,
[1:23:46] Cameron McEwen: he quotes it in between 1951 and 1964.
[1:23:52] Cameron McEwen: He again quotes it maybe three other times in essays.
[1:23:59] Cameron McEwen: And so
[1:23:59] Cameron McEwen: I see him as making this quote as a way of saying,
[1:24:05] Cameron McEwen: here's something,
[1:24:07] Cameron McEwen: Marshall,
[1:24:07] Cameron McEwen: that you need to get through your head.
[1:24:10] Cameron McEwen: And then the next time he quotes it,
[1:24:14] Cameron McEwen: I think it's in 1955,
[1:24:19] Cameron McEwen: the quote is saying to him,
[1:24:20] Cameron McEwen: you still don't get this through your head,
[1:24:22] Cameron McEwen: Marshall.
[1:24:24] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:24:24] Cameron McEwen: And then the same thing again in 57,
[1:24:26] Cameron McEwen: 59,
[1:24:29] Cameron McEwen: 64.
[1:24:29] Cameron McEwen: And if all of the quotes are read like that,
[1:24:33] Cameron McEwen: as McLuhan trying to say something to himself that he doesn't quite get.
[1:24:39] Cameron McEwen: We're talking about originality in a whole new way.
[1:24:43] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:24:43] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:24:43] Cameron McEwen: These people that are saying,
[1:24:45] Cameron McEwen: oh,
[1:24:45] Cameron McEwen: Norman Mailer's original and McLuhan isn't.
[1:24:49] Cameron McEwen: That's a tired,
[1:24:51] Cameron McEwen: old...
[1:24:53] Bob Dobbs: Use of the imagination.
[1:24:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:24:57] Cameron McEwen: The whole movement towards reality TV,
[1:25:01] Cameron McEwen: right,
[1:25:02] Cameron McEwen: is the movement away from these stupid stories that people told.
[1:25:08] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:25:09] Cameron McEwen: people would...
[1:25:11] Cameron McEwen: Maybe at one point,
[1:25:13] Cameron McEwen: a thousand years ago,
[1:25:16] Cameron McEwen: people told stories...
[1:25:19] Cameron McEwen: sort of out of their unconsciousness,
[1:25:21] Cameron McEwen: and it was interesting for the tribe for them to do it.
[1:25:25] Cameron McEwen: But by 500 years ago,
[1:25:26] Cameron McEwen: people are telling stories for money,
[1:25:29] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:25:31] Cameron McEwen: And they have an audience that doesn't want to know something new like the tribe.
[1:25:37] Cameron McEwen: They want to fall asleep,
[1:25:39] Cameron McEwen: or they want to distract themselves,
[1:25:41] Cameron McEwen: or they want to amuse themselves,
[1:25:43] Cameron McEwen: or have something to talk about at bridge,
[1:25:46] Cameron McEwen: or something like this,
[1:25:47] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:25:47] Cameron McEwen: And so that notion of creativity is just nuts.
[1:25:52] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:25:53] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:25:53] Cameron McEwen: Nobody's interested in that,
[1:25:54] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:25:56] Cameron McEwen: Even Norman Mailer made the transition from,
[1:26:02] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:26:03] Cameron McEwen: dreaming up stuff in your mind,
[1:26:05] Cameron McEwen: some kind of fantasy that's now only interesting as psychology or something,
[1:26:10] Cameron McEwen: to being a reporter.
[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:26:15] Bob Dobbs: And so...
[1:26:17] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan becomes the most famous guy in his period for having the deepest mind that everybody has to bump up against.
[1:26:27] Bob Dobbs: They don't necessarily study him very much,
[1:26:30] Bob Dobbs: but they all acknowledge that he's saying something that no one else is actually able to do.
[1:26:37] Bob Dobbs: All the while,
[1:26:38] Bob Dobbs: he's saying communication is very difficult between people.
[1:26:41] Bob Dobbs: Not much matching happens.
[1:26:43] Bob Dobbs: He's admitting it.
[1:26:45] Bob Dobbs: And then he's quoting other people.
[1:26:48] Bob Dobbs: It's a new kind of creativity,
[1:26:49] Bob Dobbs: as you're saying,
[1:26:51] Bob Dobbs: to quote other people while everybody else is trying to market their subjectivity and their fantasy stories,
[1:26:57] Bob Dobbs: which is what the kids are doing today.
[1:26:59] Bob Dobbs: They got their podcast and they're trying to present their life as important for people to pay attention to.
[1:27:07] Bob Dobbs: They're all using their imagination in the cliche,
[1:27:11] Bob Dobbs: old-fashioned way.
[1:27:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:27:14] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:27:15] Cameron McEwen: When McLuhan and then later Peterson get idolized in the way that they were,
[1:27:26] Cameron McEwen: they get swept up into that same world,
[1:27:31] Cameron McEwen: which is a kind of negation of what they're trying to do.
[1:27:38] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:27:41] Cameron McEwen: You have this temptation to think that...
[1:27:45] Cameron McEwen: If you get out there and you broadcast what you're talking about,
[1:27:52] Cameron McEwen: then this is going to end up in the sort of communication that we need.
[1:27:58] Cameron McEwen: But both of these cases,
[1:28:01] Cameron McEwen: and there's probably many other analogous cases,
[1:28:04] Cameron McEwen: show that that doesn't work,
[1:28:07] Cameron McEwen: that the processes,
[1:28:08] Cameron McEwen: I guess you would call it the tech body,
[1:28:11] Cameron McEwen: are more powerful.
[1:28:13] Cameron McEwen: and are able to easily just sort of consume these feeble...
[1:28:21] Cameron McEwen: Feeble radicals.
[1:28:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:28:26] Cameron McEwen: It's just these attempts are feeble.
[1:28:29] Cameron McEwen: They're not able to actually achieve anything.
[1:28:33] Cameron McEwen: They get eaten.
[1:28:35] Bob Dobbs: And that's a favorite word,
[1:28:37] Bob Dobbs: puny.
[1:28:37] Bob Dobbs: They're puny.
[1:28:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:28:41] Bob Dobbs: So...
[1:28:43] Bob Dobbs: developing that,
[1:28:48] Bob Dobbs: Ion likes to say to the audience,
[1:28:51] Bob Dobbs: you notice Bob,
[1:28:52] Bob Dobbs: if you ask him something,
[1:28:54] Bob Dobbs: he'll tell you what William Ivins Thompson said.
[1:28:58] Bob Dobbs: Or what McClure said.
[1:28:59] Bob Dobbs: He never tells you what he thinks.
[1:29:02] Bob Dobbs: And so just having Ion say that made me look at it and say,
[1:29:06] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:29:07] Bob Dobbs: I'm doing McClure.
[1:29:07] Bob Dobbs: I'm just quoting other people.
[1:29:10] Bob Dobbs: And it does create a mystique or it's kind of a stuttering.
[1:29:15] Bob Dobbs: I never say what I'm saying.
[1:29:17] Bob Dobbs: So everybody's trying to get past the quoting
[1:29:20] Bob Dobbs: I'm doing,
[1:29:20] Bob Dobbs: and I'm pretty good.
[1:29:21] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's always astounded at my memory of page numbers and quotes.
[1:29:25] Bob Dobbs: But they're trying to get past that to see what is the guy who's saying all these quotes actually saying himself.
[1:29:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:29:32] Cameron McEwen: but that's a complete mistranslation,
[1:29:36] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:29:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:29:37] Cameron McEwen: because web...
[1:29:39] Cameron McEwen: What McLuhan was saying is that everything we do is a quote.
[1:29:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:29:45] Bob Dobbs: that's,
[1:29:45] Bob Dobbs: yes.
[1:29:46] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:29:47] Cameron McEwen: It's impossible to do anything but quote.
[1:29:50] Cameron McEwen: The only thing that human beings do is they go from one type of quote to another type of quote.
[1:29:56] Cameron McEwen: And in going between different kinds of quotes,
[1:30:03] Cameron McEwen: they open up the space of possible study of quotations.
[1:30:08] Cameron McEwen: But nobody wants to say,
[1:30:10] Cameron McEwen: my identity is a quote,
[1:30:12] Cameron McEwen: my values are a quote,
[1:30:13] Cameron McEwen: my God is a quote.
[1:30:17] Cameron McEwen: They need the...
[1:30:19] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg was above all a kind of glue.
[1:30:22] Cameron McEwen: It was a glue between a person and their identity,
[1:30:26] Cameron McEwen: a glue between a person and their God,
[1:30:28] Cameron McEwen: a glue between a person and their values.
[1:30:30] Cameron McEwen: And what's going on in modern history is the refusal to give up that glue.
[1:30:36] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:30:37] Bob Dobbs: So here's a couple of quotes from Cliché to archetype,
[1:30:40] Bob Dobbs: 1970.
[1:30:41] Bob Dobbs: The archetype is a retrieved awareness or consciousness.
[1:30:45] Bob Dobbs: It's a retrieved awareness or consciousness.
[1:30:47] Bob Dobbs: The archetype is consciousness.
[1:30:49] Bob Dobbs: It is consequently a retrieved cliché,
[1:30:53] Bob Dobbs: an old cliché retrieved by a new cliché.
[1:30:57] Bob Dobbs: Since a cliché is a unit extension of man,
[1:31:00] Bob Dobbs: an archetype is a quoted extension,
[1:31:03] Bob Dobbs: medium,
[1:31:03] Bob Dobbs: technology,
[1:31:04] Bob Dobbs: or environment.
[1:31:05] Bob Dobbs: So in that part of that book,
[1:31:07] Bob Dobbs: he's talking about the interplay of cliché to archetype.
[1:31:10] Bob Dobbs: He uses the word quotes a lot.
[1:31:13] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[1:31:13] Cameron McEwen: what you just said is a translation.
[1:31:19] Cameron McEwen: of my translation.
[1:31:21] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:31:22] Cameron McEwen: Because if human beings can do nothing but quote,
[1:31:27] Cameron McEwen: then they're sort of print setters that are taking a cliche off the row of cliches to put onto the print box,
[1:31:40] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:31:40] Cameron McEwen: That's all human beings are.
[1:31:42] Cameron McEwen: And if human beings want to be able to get a consciousness of that process,
[1:31:48] Cameron McEwen: They have to step away from them taking cliches and start concentrating on the role of cliches that are in front of them.
[1:32:00] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:32:01] Bob Dobbs: let me quote you.
[1:32:04] Bob Dobbs: Actually,
[1:32:04] Bob Dobbs: it's McLuhan.
[1:32:05] Bob Dobbs: But,
[1:32:07] Bob Dobbs: camp is a kind of dropoutism resulting from the anti-environment.
[1:32:11] Bob Dobbs: All the earlier forms go into quotes,
[1:32:14] Bob Dobbs: as it were.
[1:32:16] Bob Dobbs: when they have this new world to encompass them.
[1:32:19] Bob Dobbs: So when something becomes an art form,
[1:32:21] Bob Dobbs: it becomes a quote.
[1:32:23] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:32:25] Bob Dobbs: That's never been said before in the context of Macaulay.
[1:32:27] Cameron McEwen: And notice how this goes back to the original mass medium of language.
[1:32:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:32:33] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:32:34] Cameron McEwen: The when sounds are first understood,
[1:32:38] Cameron McEwen: they're quotes.
[1:32:40] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:32:41] Bob Dobbs: Is that the replay?
[1:32:42] Bob Dobbs: That's the concept?
[1:32:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:32:45] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:32:45] Cameron McEwen: well.
[1:32:47] Cameron McEwen: The amazing thing about human beings is that origin and replay go together.
[1:32:53] Cameron McEwen: The very first time a word is understood,
[1:32:56] Cameron McEwen: the person that understands it has replayed in his or her mind what the other person had already had go through their mind.
[1:33:05] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:33:05] Cameron McEwen: So origin and replay go together,
[1:33:10] Cameron McEwen: and that goes back to what we were just saying about...
[1:33:14] Cameron McEwen: The feeble types of creativity that people were doing and are still doing with their novels.
[1:33:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:33:24] Cameron McEwen: which is a crazy word,
[1:33:25] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:33:25] Cameron McEwen: Novel.
[1:33:27] Cameron McEwen: Which means something new is nothing new.
[1:33:33] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:33:33] Cameron McEwen: It's just a cliche.
[1:33:36] Bob Dobbs: What is it he says?
[1:33:38] Bob Dobbs: And take today,
[1:33:39] Bob Dobbs: the old is new and the new is old.
[1:33:41] Bob Dobbs: And there's nothing...
[1:33:44] Bob Dobbs: old under the sun it flips into if people are amnesia and don't know you're quoting they think you're saying new stuff i get away with that a lot you know you can quote McLuhan Thompson these people that people haven't read and you sound incredibly original yeah
[1:34:05] Cameron McEwen: and in a certain way it is original because um you're uh practicing hip-hop um
[1:34:13] Cameron McEwen: between these quotations and cliches.
[1:34:17] Cameron McEwen: And the only way people have of being original is that hip-hop,
[1:34:24] Cameron McEwen: and the hip-hop has both a vertical dimension and a horizontal dimension.
[1:34:29] Cameron McEwen: The horizontal dimension is simply going from one cliche to the next cliche,
[1:34:37] Cameron McEwen: which is all we ever do.
[1:34:39] Cameron McEwen: And the vertical dimension is to become conscious.
[1:34:42] Cameron McEwen: of that so that we can begin to study it.
[1:34:47] Cameron McEwen: And so between these horizontal and vertical...
[1:34:51] Cameron McEwen: dimensions of quoting,
[1:34:56] Cameron McEwen: then you can see how cliche and archetype work together.
[1:35:00] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:35:00] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:35:01] Cameron McEwen: And the horizontal way,
[1:35:03] Cameron McEwen: one way of looking at it is that we only deal with archetypes.
[1:35:09] Cameron McEwen: We go from one archetype to the next archetype in every microsecond.
[1:35:15] Cameron McEwen: But it turns out that...
[1:35:18] Cameron McEwen: Because these are archetypes and are collectives and are common,
[1:35:24] Cameron McEwen: you could say,
[1:35:25] Cameron McEwen: then they're cliches.
[1:35:28] Cameron McEwen: So we're going from one archetype to the next archetype.
[1:35:31] Cameron McEwen: We find out that they're cliches and then we can study them.
[1:35:36] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:35:36] Cameron McEwen: And so they become archetypes again.
[1:35:38] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:35:38] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:35:40] Bob Dobbs: do you have the flap of the hardcover from cliché to archetype?
[1:35:48] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.
[1:35:48] Cameron McEwen: I don't have the book in front of me,
[1:35:50] Cameron McEwen: that's for sure.
[1:35:51] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:35:51] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:35:51] Bob Dobbs: on the flap,
[1:35:53] Bob Dobbs: it had a section.
[1:35:54] Bob Dobbs: I think on the inner left flap about old archetype is new cliché,
[1:35:59] Bob Dobbs: and old cliché to archetype.
[1:36:01] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that?
[1:36:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:36:03] Cameron McEwen: sure.
[1:36:04] Bob Dobbs: It was a nice little poem.
[1:36:07] Bob Dobbs: And then Barry says consciousness is the interplay of archetype cliché.
[1:36:12] Bob Dobbs: We've been talking and started with consciousness,
[1:36:15] Bob Dobbs: so we've gotten to the essence.
[1:36:17] Bob Dobbs: In Cliché to archetype,
[1:36:18] Bob Dobbs: so look at this quote from Cliché to archetype.
[1:36:23] Bob Dobbs: As an art form,
[1:36:24] Bob Dobbs: the happening does not so much address the audience as include the audience.
[1:36:28] Bob Dobbs: So as an art form,
[1:36:29] Bob Dobbs: that means as a quotation or a bunch of quotes,
[1:36:32] Bob Dobbs: the happening does not so much address the audience as include the audience.
[1:36:36] Bob Dobbs: It expects the audience to immerse itself in the destructive element.
[1:36:39] Bob Dobbs: That's in quotes,
[1:36:41] Bob Dobbs: as it were.
[1:36:41] Bob Dobbs: At various times in the history of the theater,
[1:36:43] Bob Dobbs: the audience has been included in the show to a considerable degree.
[1:36:47] Bob Dobbs: In the newspaper,
[1:36:48] Bob Dobbs: it is decidedly the audience that is the show.
[1:36:51] Bob Dobbs: Such in large degree is the nature of language,
[1:36:54] Bob Dobbs: or quoting,
[1:36:55] Bob Dobbs: it is a happening,
[1:36:56] Bob Dobbs: I'm adding that part,
[1:36:57] Bob Dobbs: it is a happening that includes all publics and all past perceptions,
[1:37:02] Bob Dobbs: quotes,
[1:37:03] Bob Dobbs: in an inclusive Donnybrook of coincidences and adjustments.
[1:37:07] Bob Dobbs: Once Joyce discovered language Innis way,
[1:37:09] Bob Dobbs: He knew he had found out the means to transform the entire human community into a workforce for the artist.
[1:37:16] Bob Dobbs: There's a great line.
[1:37:18] Bob Dobbs: Just start gathering quotes,
[1:37:20] Bob Dobbs: like he did with Encyclopedia Britannica when doing Finning His Wake.
[1:37:23] Bob Dobbs: Joyce,
[1:37:24] Bob Dobbs: that is.
[1:37:25] Bob Dobbs: Gerd Stern and the other poets of The Happening are delighted to discover that all human artifacts are available as dramatis personae in their theater.
[1:37:35] Bob Dobbs: It is the same discovery of the world,
[1:37:38] Bob Dobbs: in quotes,
[1:37:39] Bob Dobbs: It is the same discovery of the world that has created camps.
[1:37:42] Bob Dobbs: So that's an expanded pattern of what we're talking about.
[1:37:50] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:37:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:37:52] Cameron McEwen: All of that that you were just talking about is to say that the human being as a print setter has this shelf of cliches in front of him or in front of her.
[1:38:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:38:10] Bob Dobbs: the cliche was the term for that in the printing press,
[1:38:13] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:38:14] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:38:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:38:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:38:16] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:38:17] Cameron McEwen: And so when you're talking about all human artifacts and all of this sort of stuff,
[1:38:22] Cameron McEwen: that's just another word for this shelf of possibilities that's there.
[1:38:30] Bob Dobbs: I was just thinking that talking about all the conversation on CNN and Fox News,
[1:38:35] Bob Dobbs: they're all discussing other people's quotations.
[1:38:39] Bob Dobbs: They're quoting other commentators constantly.
[1:38:42] Bob Dobbs: Somebody said this,
[1:38:44] Bob Dobbs: and they bring on an expert to counter what he said,
[1:38:46] Bob Dobbs: and that expert quotes a bunch of other people,
[1:38:49] Bob Dobbs: and build his case against the original Kroker.
[1:38:52] Bob Dobbs: So somehow McLuhan.
[1:38:56] Bob Dobbs: What?
[1:38:56] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.
[1:38:57] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:38:58] Cameron McEwen: keep your thought.
[1:38:59] Cameron McEwen: But I just want to point out that most of these people are quoting themselves.
[1:39:04] Cameron McEwen: They're going from one panel to the next panel.
[1:39:08] Cameron McEwen: And they always say the same thing,
[1:39:11] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:39:11] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:39:11] Bob Dobbs: that's right.
[1:39:13] Bob Dobbs: And they become a cliché.
[1:39:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:39:16] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:39:17] Bob Dobbs: And then you have to up the ante by retrieving a more extreme form of cliché,
[1:39:21] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:39:21] Bob Dobbs: like a RuPaul or a Jerry Springer or some kind of weird
[1:39:26] Bob Dobbs: Howard Stern exaggerated host in the communication process.
[1:39:32] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:39:33] Bob Dobbs: that all merged,
[1:39:35] Bob Dobbs: and that would be the...
[1:39:39] Bob Dobbs: Co-anesthetic.
[1:39:40] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's becoming a director,
[1:39:43] Bob Dobbs: but it has to be complemented externally by anti-environment becoming one director.
[1:39:49] Bob Dobbs: He explained how we get to Trump.
[1:39:52] Bob Dobbs: And now Trump is not just a chemical body.
[1:39:54] Bob Dobbs: He's the other bodies plus the tech body.
[1:39:58] Bob Dobbs: This is how we got to see
[1:40:00] Bob Dobbs: Trump as a collage.
[1:40:02] Bob Dobbs: Does he quote people?
[1:40:05] Bob Dobbs: Maybe he only quotes himself,
[1:40:07] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:40:08] Bob Dobbs: And he doesn't get that right,
[1:40:10] Bob Dobbs: apparently.
[1:40:14] Bob Dobbs: He actually was at a conference.
[1:40:17] Bob Dobbs: I heard about this.
[1:40:20] Bob Dobbs: years ago,
[1:40:21] Bob Dobbs: and he's promoting Art of the Deal,
[1:40:23] Bob Dobbs: and the topic of religion came up,
[1:40:26] Bob Dobbs: and he announced that nobody knew the Bible like he did.
[1:40:32] Bob Dobbs: And then he proceeded to explain something in the Bible completely wrong.
[1:40:37] Bob Dobbs: In other words,
[1:40:37] Bob Dobbs: he never read it,
[1:40:39] Bob Dobbs: and he just had vague memories of other people's quotations all mixed up in his head.
[1:40:44] Bob Dobbs: And then maybe his niece,
[1:40:45] Bob Dobbs: Mary,
[1:40:45] Bob Dobbs: comes along and explains how,
[1:40:47] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:40:48] Bob Dobbs: in her...
[1:40:48] Bob Dobbs: tell all book that he of course never read the bible but see there's a kind of uh bravado of making consciousness that's going on with trump he's showing how what you're talking about tactile hip-hopping he is miming that right in front of everybody showing how we're making shit up all the time because
[1:41:07] Bob Dobbs: we have to because we're so uh involved with everybody in offices and in institutions it's amazing how much people have to interact and talk with each other
[1:41:18] Bob Dobbs: When you think of the agricultural societies,
[1:41:21] Bob Dobbs: a couple hundred years ago,
[1:41:22] Bob Dobbs: people would be by themselves all week,
[1:41:24] Bob Dobbs: and then they'd go to church or go down to the local store to talk to some humans.
[1:41:28] Bob Dobbs: So the demand on people to talk,
[1:41:31] Bob Dobbs: we've exhausted all creative scenarios 50 years ago so that new shows quote old shows,
[1:41:39] Bob Dobbs: but this endless quotation has now created vast producer mania of making rather than matching.
[1:41:48] Cameron McEwen: So they think.
[1:41:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:41:50] Bob Dobbs: and then we want to bounce off the matching.
[1:41:53] Cameron McEwen: It's not real making.
[1:41:55] Cameron McEwen: It's fake making.
[1:41:58] Cameron McEwen: It's fake making in the sense that it's fake creation.
[1:42:03] Cameron McEwen: What goes on Innis false consciousness is that people think that they're making and they're understood as making,
[1:42:13] Cameron McEwen: but in fact they're just matching this cliche or that cliche.
[1:42:18] Bob Dobbs: If you take the position or an angle of perspective to be that critical statement you just made,
[1:42:25] Bob Dobbs: you're still involved anyways.
[1:42:30] Bob Dobbs: You are reduced to the same process.
[1:42:36] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure about that.
[1:42:37] Cameron McEwen: Why?
[1:42:39] Bob Dobbs: I'll try to show you're implicated too.
[1:42:42] Cameron McEwen: I have nothing against learning.
[1:42:46] Cameron McEwen: my limitations,
[1:42:48] Cameron McEwen: but I don't see what you're saying here.
[1:42:51] Bob Dobbs: I think the use of the word false doesn't work.
[1:42:54] Bob Dobbs: Remember,
[1:42:55] Bob Dobbs: we have genuine fakes.
[1:42:56] Bob Dobbs: That was McLuhan thing.
[1:42:58] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:42:59] Cameron McEwen: you're right.
[1:43:00] Cameron McEwen: When I used the word false consciousness,
[1:43:03] Cameron McEwen: I was going back.
[1:43:06] Bob Dobbs: You were quoting someone who didn't know any better.
[1:43:08] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[1:43:09] Cameron McEwen: 1950s
[1:43:10] Cameron McEwen: French
[1:43:13] Cameron McEwen: New Wave or something like that.
[1:43:14] Cameron McEwen: Marxism.
[1:43:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:43:17] Cameron McEwen: I agree.
[1:43:18] Cameron McEwen: That's a bullshit phrase.
[1:43:22] Cameron McEwen: What I was trying to say...
[1:43:23] Bob Dobbs: I gave you an alibi,
[1:43:24] Bob Dobbs: though.
[1:43:24] Bob Dobbs: I said you quoted an erroneous person.
[1:43:27] Bob Dobbs: You slipped up.
[1:43:32] Cameron McEwen: I made an error going to an error.
[1:43:36] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:43:36] Bob Dobbs: so how do you get yourself out of that now?
[1:43:38] Cameron McEwen: It's an important point between the two of us.
[1:43:42] Cameron McEwen: I often think that you use making and matching.
[1:43:45] Cameron McEwen: in a way that
[1:43:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan didn't do,
[1:43:49] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:43:49] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,
[1:43:51] Cameron McEwen: at the end of the day,
[1:43:52] Cameron McEwen: matching is not even possible.
[1:43:55] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:43:55] Bob Dobbs: that's true.
[1:43:56] Cameron McEwen: We're always making,
[1:43:58] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:43:58] Cameron McEwen: we're always,
[1:43:59] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:44:00] Cameron McEwen: we're always making,
[1:44:01] Cameron McEwen: because even when we're matching,
[1:44:04] Cameron McEwen: we're doing something that's optional.
[1:44:07] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:44:07] Cameron McEwen: because McLuhan would quote,
[1:44:09] Bob Dobbs: the roots of matching is the word making.
[1:44:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:44:15] Bob Dobbs: Etymologically.
[1:44:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:44:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:44:17] Bob Dobbs: you're right.
[1:44:18] Bob Dobbs: So the book created,
[1:44:20] Bob Dobbs: now he says he's a manipulative status of manners.
[1:44:23] Bob Dobbs: So the Gutenberg Galaxy prompted people to think they were matching,
[1:44:29] Bob Dobbs: but they were only,
[1:44:30] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:44:30] Bob Dobbs: they weren't matching.
[1:44:32] Bob Dobbs: But the book biased them to think they were matching.
[1:44:35] Bob Dobbs: And then the electric age makes people think they're making,
[1:44:38] Bob Dobbs: and they're not making.
[1:44:40] Bob Dobbs: They're quoting everything,
[1:44:41] Bob Dobbs: but it makes them have the bias.
[1:44:43] Bob Dobbs: that they are subjectively projecting anti-environment,
[1:44:48] Bob Dobbs: and they're being imaginative.
[1:44:51] Bob Dobbs: You take any teenager in school,
[1:44:53] Bob Dobbs: they all celebrate,
[1:44:54] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:44:55] Bob Dobbs: back when they had schools,
[1:44:57] Bob Dobbs: I was thinking the 60s and 70s,
[1:44:59] Bob Dobbs: they'd all romanticize having an imagination.
[1:45:03] Bob Dobbs: Now that is kids living in the 19th century,
[1:45:06] Bob Dobbs: as McLuhan said.
[1:45:07] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what I mean?
[1:45:09] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[1:45:11] Bob Dobbs: The cliches that comes out of kids.
[1:45:13] Bob Dobbs: That's why I could,
[1:45:14] Bob Dobbs: how can a teacher mark these kids?
[1:45:18] Bob Dobbs: How do you mark such obvious silly thinking?
[1:45:23] Bob Dobbs: What weird process are you going through as a teacher in high school or something?
[1:45:27] Bob Dobbs: Or in college?
[1:45:29] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:45:30] Cameron McEwen: but that's no different from...
[1:45:33] Cameron McEwen: Being on a hiring committee for a department and all of the graduate students that you have to grade have CVs that are 78 pages long and they've contributed
[1:45:49] Cameron McEwen: to
[1:45:50] Cameron McEwen: 40 journals and they've had talking points at
[1:45:56] Cameron McEwen: X number of conventions and all that sort of bullshit.
[1:45:59] Cameron McEwen: And it's no different.
[1:46:01] Cameron McEwen: It's like kids in grade three making stuff up.
[1:46:06] Cameron McEwen: And you say,
[1:46:07] Cameron McEwen: how are they going to mark it?
[1:46:11] Cameron McEwen: That goes right up to throughout society.
[1:46:15] Cameron McEwen: How are you going to mark this bullshit?
[1:46:20] Cameron McEwen: There's nothing there to be marked.
[1:46:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:46:22] Bob Dobbs: there's no standard.
[1:46:24] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:46:24] Bob Dobbs: so,
[1:46:25] Bob Dobbs: but you see how,
[1:46:26] Bob Dobbs: if anybody's listening to this,
[1:46:28] Bob Dobbs: they should have gotten an insight.
[1:46:29] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:46:29] Bob Dobbs: the Gutenberg Galaxy.
[1:46:31] Bob Dobbs: made people think they were matching,
[1:46:35] Bob Dobbs: gave preference to matching,
[1:46:38] Cameron McEwen: but they weren't.
[1:46:39] Cameron McEwen: I don't follow you there.
[1:46:41] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:46:42] Bob Dobbs: the extension of the eye,
[1:46:44] Bob Dobbs: the printed book,
[1:46:45] Bob Dobbs: leads people to engage in matching or thinking they have to match,
[1:46:49] Bob Dobbs: imitating the book so they can all look like they're on the same page.
[1:46:53] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:46:54] Bob Dobbs: But it's a mannerism.
[1:46:55] Bob Dobbs: It's a superficial mannerism that dominates the gossip.
[1:47:00] Bob Dobbs: that favors matching or the idea of matching,
[1:47:03] Bob Dobbs: but they're not matching at all.
[1:47:05] Bob Dobbs: Just like today in the electric age where everybody's forced to make,
[1:47:09] Bob Dobbs: nobody can be on the same page,
[1:47:11] Bob Dobbs: there's too much media quotation going on.
[1:47:15] Bob Dobbs: So the manners of today is to celebrate your making and being an individual or hyper-subjective or imaginative.
[1:47:23] Bob Dobbs: And yet that's just the surface reality.
[1:47:25] Bob Dobbs: We're actually probably actually matching now.
[1:47:29] Bob Dobbs: and not making,
[1:47:31] Bob Dobbs: because we're all living in a very uniform,
[1:47:34] Bob Dobbs: similar world,
[1:47:35] Bob Dobbs: at least electrically,
[1:47:37] Bob Dobbs: over the whole planet.
[1:47:38] Bob Dobbs: We're not in our chemical body cultures anymore.
[1:47:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:47:42] Cameron McEwen: so if I were to imagine how McLuhan might talk about this,
[1:47:48] Cameron McEwen: I think what he would say is that making and matching are possible to conceive.
[1:47:59] Cameron McEwen: across a spectrum where each one of them can be figure and each one of them can be ground.
[1:48:06] Cameron McEwen: And across that wide spectrum of possibilities of making and matching,
[1:48:15] Cameron McEwen: you can understand almost everything that's going on.
[1:48:21] Cameron McEwen: It's like in chemistry,
[1:48:24] Cameron McEwen: you could say there's a...
[1:48:28] Cameron McEwen: variety of positions that the carbon atom can take up and all varieties of life rely on these different configurations of carbon and
[1:48:44] Cameron McEwen: so if you figure out the complete valence of carbon then you figured out the complete possibility of life and similar with making and matching
[1:48:58] Cameron McEwen: If you have the complete valence of making and matching,
[1:49:02] Cameron McEwen: you have a complete map of what's possible in experience.
[1:49:08] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:49:08] Bob Dobbs: And remember,
[1:49:09] Bob Dobbs: when he's talking about making and matching,
[1:49:11] Bob Dobbs: who's he quoting?
[1:49:13] Bob Dobbs: E.H.
[1:49:13] Bob Dobbs: Gombrich.
[1:49:17] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:49:19] Cameron McEwen: And some other art theorists.
[1:49:22] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:49:22] Cameron McEwen: At the time he came up with all of this making and matching stuff.
[1:49:27] Cameron McEwen: He was reading a whole series of art theoreticians.
[1:49:36] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:49:36] Cameron McEwen: In the early
[1:49:38] Cameron McEwen: 1950s, he had read a lot of film theoreticians.
[1:49:41] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:49:43] Cameron McEwen: And then in 19,
[1:49:46] Cameron McEwen: I think it was 1955,
[1:49:49] Cameron McEwen: Gilson gave lectures in
[1:49:52] Cameron McEwen: Washington.
[1:49:54] Cameron McEwen: In a series where Maritain had lectured and
[1:50:03] Cameron McEwen: Who did you just mention?
[1:50:04] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:50:04] Cameron McEwen: Gombrich.
[1:50:05] Bob Dobbs: Gombrich.
[1:50:06] Cameron McEwen: That's right,
[1:50:07] Cameron McEwen: and Gombrich had two.
[1:50:08] Cameron McEwen: And so when McLuhan began to think,
[1:50:13] Cameron McEwen: his whole notion of creativity got kind of a boost between 1955 and 1962,
[1:50:27] Cameron McEwen: thinking about these art theoreticians that were basically
[1:50:32] Cameron McEwen: saying that there is no such thing as matching,
[1:50:37] Cameron McEwen: there is only making,
[1:50:39] Cameron McEwen: but making is,
[1:50:43] Cameron McEwen: in fact,
[1:50:44] Cameron McEwen: how we can also gain stability,
[1:50:47] Cameron McEwen: which is sort of the track that Maritain and Gilson took,
[1:50:52] Cameron McEwen: whereas other art theoreticians like Rosenberg would be more inclined to celebrate the new.
[1:51:02] Cameron McEwen: break from the past.
[1:51:03] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:51:05] Cameron McEwen: So that was,
[1:51:07] Cameron McEwen: as you were saying correctly,
[1:51:09] Cameron McEwen: that seven years of looking into art theoreticians lies in the background of
[1:51:16] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg Galaxy.
[1:51:17] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:51:18] Bob Dobbs: And did you say that Maritain and them wanted to retrieve matching or they were favoring making?
[1:51:25] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:51:25] Cameron McEwen: no,
[1:51:25] Cameron McEwen: they were favoring they were showing that it was possible to come up with
[1:51:31] Cameron McEwen: stability through making.
[1:51:34] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:51:35] Bob Dobbs: okay.
[1:51:36] Cameron McEwen: In other words,
[1:51:38] Cameron McEwen: they were not turning their back on modernity.
[1:51:41] Cameron McEwen: They were showing that through modernity there were traditional things which could be discerned,
[1:51:50] Cameron McEwen: but not discerned through matching.
[1:51:53] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:51:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:51:55] Bob Dobbs: do you know in Exploration Verbi Vocal Visual number
[1:51:58] Bob Dobbs: 8, there's a section Thank you.
[1:52:00] Bob Dobbs: about literature coming in,
[1:52:02] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:52:02] Bob Dobbs: 1500s,
[1:52:04] Bob Dobbs: 1600s.
[1:52:05] Bob Dobbs: And they started looking at figure and ground.
[1:52:10] Bob Dobbs: I don't think he used those terms,
[1:52:12] Bob Dobbs: but he says the novelists began to say,
[1:52:16] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:52:16] Bob Dobbs: this character has a certain humor,
[1:52:18] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:52:18] Bob Dobbs: the medieval four types of humor categories.
[1:52:23] Bob Dobbs: But they said there's a context,
[1:52:26] Bob Dobbs: anti-environment.
[1:52:28] Bob Dobbs: their background or the scenario they come out of that conditioned them or provided the ground to the humor.
[1:52:35] Bob Dobbs: So I thought it was interesting that the eyeball notices figure and ground.
[1:52:42] Bob Dobbs: The pre-eyeball,
[1:52:44] Bob Dobbs: pre-literate people don't have figure and ground distinguished.
[1:52:50] Bob Dobbs: It's like everything is in front of your face,
[1:52:53] Bob Dobbs: a flat perspective like I think you said television was.
[1:52:56] Bob Dobbs: So no perspective.
[1:52:59] Bob Dobbs: So perspective comes in with figure and ground.
[1:53:02] Bob Dobbs: Now metaphor is made up of two figure and ground,
[1:53:06] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:53:06] Bob Dobbs: in
[1:53:07] Bob Dobbs: Laws of Media.
[1:53:08] Bob Dobbs: He does the tetrad metaphor.
[1:53:10] Bob Dobbs: So what do you think,
[1:53:12] Bob Dobbs: I've never had a chance to bring this up with anybody,
[1:53:14] Bob Dobbs: what do you think that figure and ground is a visual process from the eye,
[1:53:22] Bob Dobbs: from the literate eye?
[1:53:24] Bob Dobbs: What do you think of that?
[1:53:28] Cameron McEwen: Now,
[1:53:29] Cameron McEwen: let's just contextualize this in McLuhan.
[1:53:33] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan read Kohler's book on Gestalt psychology,
[1:53:38] Cameron McEwen: which is where he got the figure and ground from.
[1:53:42] Cameron McEwen: That was 1964.
[1:53:45] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:53:45] Cameron McEwen: But he says that his work before that implied figure and ground.
[1:53:52] Cameron McEwen: So you're not incorrect to go back to 1957.
[1:53:56] Cameron McEwen: and say that he saw something like this.
[1:53:59] Cameron McEwen: But when we're talking about stock figures and their use in art,
[1:54:09] Cameron McEwen: I think McLuhan would say that all figures in literature are stock figures.
[1:54:18] Cameron McEwen: And you're right to say that what the novel does is it sort of contextualizes.
[1:54:25] Cameron McEwen: these stock figures that had always been around.
[1:54:30] Cameron McEwen: But if we then think about primitive people and think about mythology,
[1:54:38] Cameron McEwen: then mythology also has stock figures.
[1:54:41] Cameron McEwen: And what's different is that it contextualizes themselves,
[1:54:46] Cameron McEwen: it contextualizes those figures differently.
[1:54:49] Cameron McEwen: And so this is a really interesting thought.
[1:54:52] Cameron McEwen: I never actually thought about it before.
[1:54:54] Cameron McEwen: You can see that it leads to interesting stuff.
[1:54:58] Cameron McEwen: Where it leads is to consider
[1:55:01] Cameron McEwen: The psychological anti-environment mythology versus the
[1:55:09] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg Galaxy.
[1:55:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:55:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:55:13] Cameron McEwen: and
[1:55:15] Cameron McEwen: I haven't thought about it before,
[1:55:16] Cameron McEwen: so I don't know how to sort of talk about it off the top of my head,
[1:55:21] Cameron McEwen: but it's something I'm going to look into for sure.
[1:55:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:55:24] Bob Dobbs: look up the,
[1:55:24] Bob Dobbs: if I find it quickly,
[1:55:26] Bob Dobbs: I'll email which section it is in number 7.
[1:55:31] Bob Dobbs: Or is it number eight?
[1:55:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:55:33] Bob Dobbs: it's number eight.
[1:55:34] Bob Dobbs: X-rays is number eight.
[1:55:35] Bob Dobbs: So figure and ground is an extension of the eye.
[1:55:44] Bob Dobbs: I thought I had something else to say there.
[1:55:48] Cameron McEwen: That's only one.
[1:55:49] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:55:50] Cameron McEwen: it's possible to imagine figure and ground as an extension of the eye,
[1:55:54] Cameron McEwen: but that would only be one.
[1:56:01] Cameron McEwen: utilization or one mobilization of figure and ground.
[1:56:05] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:56:06] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:56:06] Cameron McEwen: Ultimately,
[1:56:07] Cameron McEwen: for McLuhan,
[1:56:08] Cameron McEwen: ultimately,
[1:56:10] Cameron McEwen: figure and ground is itself subject to figure and ground.
[1:56:14] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:56:14] Cameron McEwen: That's what he means by metaphor in a lot of media.
[1:56:17] Cameron McEwen: That whatever is figure and ground and whatever is ground can be figure.
[1:56:23] Cameron McEwen: So the figure and ground is at once a technical term.
[1:56:30] Cameron McEwen: And a cliché.
[1:56:32] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:56:33] Bob Dobbs: and
[1:56:34] Bob Dobbs: Barry Nevitt says that Finnegans Wake makes the ground bigger.
[1:56:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:56:42] Cameron McEwen: and vice versa.
[1:56:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:56:45] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:56:47] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:56:48] Bob Dobbs: so then looking at my book here,
[1:56:59] Bob Dobbs: I'm showing that the global village is not what he discovered.
[1:57:05] Bob Dobbs: He shows that the global village was happening in the 19th century.
[1:57:09] Bob Dobbs: And the management of it is George Orwell's scenario,
[1:57:13] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother,
[1:57:13] Bob Dobbs: and that goes back to 1900 or 1934.
[1:57:17] Bob Dobbs: And then you get the global theater.
[1:57:20] Bob Dobbs: Is that an original point?
[1:57:23] Bob Dobbs: Is that what McLuhan was really pointing out?
[1:57:25] Bob Dobbs: The global theater as a anti-environment,
[1:57:31] Bob Dobbs: well beyond the global village?
[1:57:37] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:57:37] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:57:37] Cameron McEwen: you know.
[1:57:39] Cameron McEwen: He used Global Village in a series of different ways.
[1:57:44] Cameron McEwen: In my latest post,
[1:57:49] Cameron McEwen: I quote a letter that he wrote to
[1:57:52] Cameron McEwen: Jackie Tyrwhitt,
[1:57:55] Cameron McEwen: where I'll just find it here.
[1:57:57] Cameron McEwen: He says something like,
[1:58:01] Cameron McEwen: we have the Global Village,
[1:58:02] Cameron McEwen: but we need to invent the Global City.
[1:58:05] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:58:06] Bob Dobbs: that's...
[1:58:07] Bob Dobbs: He talks about,
[1:58:08] Bob Dobbs: and we manage the airport.
[1:58:11] Bob Dobbs: The airport is temporary management.
[1:58:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:58:12] Cameron McEwen: that's the same letter.
[1:58:14] Cameron McEwen: Exactly,
[1:58:14] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[1:58:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:58:15] Bob Dobbs: it's about 1960-61,
[1:58:18] Bob Dobbs: that letter.
[1:58:18] Cameron McEwen: 1960,
[1:58:20] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:58:20] Cameron McEwen: it's right at the end of 1960.
[1:58:21] Cameron McEwen: You're right,
[1:58:22] Cameron McEwen: December of 1960.
[1:58:24] Bob Dobbs: It's an important letter.
[1:58:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:58:27] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:58:27] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:58:28] Cameron McEwen: But let's just go back a second.
[1:58:30] Cameron McEwen: We were talking about the stock figures.
[1:58:33] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:58:33] Bob Dobbs: remember in Collegiate Archetype,
[1:58:35] Bob Dobbs: he talks about the guy from Winnipeg.
[1:58:37] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:58:37] Bob Dobbs: the semanticist,
[1:58:40] Bob Dobbs: general semantics,
[1:58:41] Bob Dobbs: what's the name of the,
[1:58:42] Bob Dobbs: Hayakawa.
[1:58:44] Bob Dobbs: And somebody,
[1:58:45] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:58:46] Bob Dobbs: almost drowns in the river near the Manitoba or maybe in Madison,
[1:58:51] Bob Dobbs: Wisconsin,
[1:58:52] Bob Dobbs: and the title is Saved by a Stock Response.
[1:58:55] Bob Dobbs: Remember that,
[1:58:55] Bob Dobbs: Joe?
[1:58:55] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:58:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:59:00] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:59:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:59:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:59:03] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:59:03] Cameron McEwen: There's a headline.
[1:59:04] Cameron McEwen: I think it was in the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin.
[1:59:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:59:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:59:10] Bob Dobbs: And did it involve Hayakawa?
[1:59:13] Bob Dobbs: I think it did.
[1:59:13] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:59:13] Cameron McEwen: I think so.
[1:59:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:59:14] Cameron McEwen: It was Hayakawa in a canoe or something.
[1:59:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:59:18] Cameron McEwen: In a Wisconsin lake.
[1:59:20] Bob Dobbs: And he was known to talk about stock responses probably.
[1:59:25] Cameron McEwen: He was probably known as a critic of stock responses.
[1:59:29] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:59:30] Cameron McEwen: And the joke was that by exercising his...
[1:59:32] Cameron McEwen: stock response he saved himself okay so um so let's just uh let's not skip over the the uh point we were at we're talking about stock responses and then you were talking about the um uh global village and then on to the global theater uh and
[1:59:53] Cameron McEwen: asking you know what was original about McLuhan and what's original about McLuhan at least in my view um
[2:00:01] Cameron McEwen: is that what he says is,
[2:00:03] Cameron McEwen: look,
[2:00:04] Cameron McEwen: by going from cliche to cliche to cliche in our lives,
[2:00:08] Cameron McEwen: if that's what our lives are,
[2:00:11] Cameron McEwen: then basically we are always a stock figure.
[2:00:17] Cameron McEwen: And the global village is a village of stock figures.
[2:00:24] Cameron McEwen: And the global theater is an even more explicit array of stock figures.
[2:00:31] Cameron McEwen: figures.
[2:00:32] Cameron McEwen: And what we have to be able to do is situate ourselves in that theater,
[2:00:39] Cameron McEwen: which means that we have to be able to take our identity as always,
[2:00:45] Cameron McEwen: in a sense,
[2:00:46] Cameron McEwen: fake.
[2:00:47] Cameron McEwen: It's always a stock figure.
[2:00:49] Cameron McEwen: It's always somebody who we aren't.
[2:00:52] Cameron McEwen: And it's always somebody who we will not be when we are somebody in the next moment.
[2:00:59] Bob Dobbs: Because of multiple media,
[2:01:01] Bob Dobbs: because you're translated in different media.
[2:01:06] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:01:07] Cameron McEwen: no,
[2:01:08] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:01:09] Cameron McEwen: it's because there is no you in that sense.
[2:01:13] Cameron McEwen: When you say you are being translated,
[2:01:16] Cameron McEwen: you're presupposing that there's some sort of fixed you that then is confronted by mixed media or something.
[2:01:24] Cameron McEwen: But that's not the way it is.
[2:01:25] Cameron McEwen: There's no you there.
[2:01:26] Bob Dobbs: No,
[2:01:26] Bob Dobbs: that's what I mean.
[2:01:28] Bob Dobbs: You're just constantly translating yourself.
[2:01:32] Cameron McEwen: No,
[2:01:33] Cameron McEwen: but you're using the active and I'm using the passive.
[2:01:37] Cameron McEwen: That's an important difference.
[2:01:40] Cameron McEwen: You're being translated.
[2:01:42] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:01:43] Bob Dobbs: that's true.
[2:01:43] Bob Dobbs: So he says in the newspaper they would describe someone as given age and some other point,
[2:01:54] Bob Dobbs: maybe a profession.
[2:01:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:01:57] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[2:01:57] Cameron McEwen: He says you're a dentist and a Hungarian.
[2:02:02] Bob Dobbs: Say it again?
[2:02:03] Bob Dobbs: A dentist and a?
[2:02:05] Cameron McEwen: He says.
[2:02:07] Cameron McEwen: your identity is that you're 35 years old,
[2:02:10] Cameron McEwen: you're Hungarian,
[2:02:11] Cameron McEwen: and you're a dentist.
[2:02:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:02:14] Cameron McEwen: That's who you are.
[2:02:16] Bob Dobbs: There's the stark responses necessary in the newspaper.
[2:02:19] Bob Dobbs: Because we have that quote from 49 where he suggests turning media off,
[2:02:25] Bob Dobbs: but we have the demobilization,
[2:02:27] Bob Dobbs: decentralization of psychology.
[2:02:30] Bob Dobbs: And the electric anti-environment moving people into making.
[2:02:33] Bob Dobbs: Multiple consciousness,
[2:02:34] Bob Dobbs: multiple eccentricity is what's happening.
[2:02:37] Bob Dobbs: So you balance it off in the newspaper,
[2:02:41] Bob Dobbs: which is a cross-section of the community,
[2:02:43] Bob Dobbs: with stock characters.
[2:02:45] Bob Dobbs: That helps to centralize what is increasingly decentralizing.
[2:02:51] Bob Dobbs: Then the global theater is a vastly decentralized situation compared to the global village.
[2:02:58] Bob Dobbs: And then you have the masked man who is being individualized.
[2:03:03] Bob Dobbs: disembodied and separated from the media anti-environment the global village,
[2:03:08] Bob Dobbs: which is that quote we were talking about.
[2:03:10] Bob Dobbs: And you're acultural,
[2:03:13] Bob Dobbs: and that leads to vast hyper-subjectivity.
[2:03:17] Bob Dobbs: And so McLuhan said by 67,
[2:03:21] Bob Dobbs: we're going to be confronted by increasingly bizarre forms.
[2:03:26] Bob Dobbs: He was referring to Twiggy and things like that.
[2:03:28] Bob Dobbs: But he said,
[2:03:29] Bob Dobbs: this is just the beginning.
[2:03:30] Bob Dobbs: More and more bizarre...
[2:03:33] Bob Dobbs: phenomena.
[2:03:35] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:03:35] Bob Dobbs: these are quotes,
[2:03:36] Bob Dobbs: but it gets,
[2:03:38] Bob Dobbs: maybe because there's so much media,
[2:03:39] Bob Dobbs: you're quoting from different media out of context in another media,
[2:03:43] Bob Dobbs: and that's the definition of symbolism,
[2:03:45] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:03:46] Bob Dobbs: a figure on the wrong ground.
[2:03:48] Bob Dobbs: Remember that?
[2:03:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:03:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:03:51] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:03:52] Bob Dobbs: this constant translation leads to contrived illusions.
[2:03:58] Bob Dobbs: The line in...
[2:04:00] Bob Dobbs: In Interior Landscape,
[2:04:01] Bob Dobbs: I think in the Joyce essay,
[2:04:04] Bob Dobbs: there's fake media creating fake illusions or fake figure and ground.
[2:04:11] Bob Dobbs: If you have contrived illusions.
[2:04:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:04:17] Cameron McEwen: but you don't.
[2:04:17] Cameron McEwen: It seems to me to be something that I can deal with.
[2:04:30] Cameron McEwen: easily in terms of people intensely identifying with some stock response because
[2:04:45] Cameron McEwen: they're terrified of letting themselves go between stock responses.
[2:04:52] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:04:52] Cameron McEwen: But your explanation is more diachronic,
[2:04:58] Cameron McEwen: more historical.
[2:04:59] Cameron McEwen: What you see going on is a movement from sort of one technology to another technology.
[2:05:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:05:07] Cameron McEwen: And
[2:05:10] Cameron McEwen: I find that interesting,
[2:05:11] Cameron McEwen: and
[2:05:12] Cameron McEwen: I find it especially interesting to try to understand sort of the translation between the two,
[2:05:19] Cameron McEwen: because
[2:05:20] Cameron McEwen: I think
[2:05:21] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan did have those two ambitions,
[2:05:25] Cameron McEwen: those two masks.
[2:05:28] Cameron McEwen: that he would play off.
[2:05:31] Cameron McEwen: So one way that we might clarify this a bit would be to talk about the tech body because
[2:05:40] Cameron McEwen: I kind of understand what you're talking about there because
[2:05:47] Cameron McEwen: I translate it into what you're getting at.
[2:05:51] Cameron McEwen: But
[2:05:53] Cameron McEwen: I know that I don't really understand it and I'd like to understand it more.
[2:05:58] Cameron McEwen: So can you talk about the tech body a bit?
[2:06:01] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:06:02] Bob Dobbs: The tech body came from ION,
[2:06:05] Bob Dobbs: which is a non-physical source of information.
[2:06:08] Bob Dobbs: And
[2:06:10] Bob Dobbs: ION explained that everything that we see in the news and increasingly in our domestic anti-environment is controlled by,
[2:06:20] Bob Dobbs: you could say,
[2:06:21] Bob Dobbs: algorithms,
[2:06:22] Bob Dobbs: but he called it the tech body.
[2:06:23] Bob Dobbs: So the tech body has been running the information society.
[2:06:28] Bob Dobbs: In a way we would never imagine,
[2:06:30] Bob Dobbs: at least now,
[2:06:31] Bob Dobbs: maybe in
[2:06:32] Bob Dobbs: 2,000 years or something,
[2:06:34] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:06:35] Bob Dobbs: some daimon or demon is manipulating the...
[2:06:40] Bob Dobbs: the brains of everybody.
[2:06:41] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:06:42] Bob Dobbs: this is implied,
[2:06:43] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:06:43] Bob Dobbs: starting 20,
[2:06:44] Bob Dobbs: 30 years ago with the digital environment.
[2:06:47] Bob Dobbs: They track what you're interested in and then they'll show ads of similar activities,
[2:06:52] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:06:53] Bob Dobbs: So there's a kind of an ESP going on there.
[2:06:56] Bob Dobbs: But I am saying the tech body has acquired the most immense consciousness and is leading you to
[2:07:09] Bob Dobbs: A situation where everything will be taken care of you in the information identity world,
[2:07:14] Bob Dobbs: but it'll be taken away impulsively,
[2:07:20] Bob Dobbs: chaotically,
[2:07:21] Bob Dobbs: for no reason from you when the tech body feels like it.
[2:07:26] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:07:27] Bob Dobbs: Ion said you'll notice in your computers more and more,
[2:07:30] Bob Dobbs: or maybe in your cell phones,
[2:07:32] Bob Dobbs: but I don't have a cell phone,
[2:07:33] Bob Dobbs: I just use my computer,
[2:07:35] Bob Dobbs: it'll be constantly having crazy glitches and then they'll be cleared up.
[2:07:39] Bob Dobbs: And then they'll come back and another odd glitch will happen.
[2:07:43] Bob Dobbs: I've been noticing this the past year and several other people have commented on this.
[2:07:49] Bob Dobbs: Suddenly,
[2:07:49] Bob Dobbs: for no reason,
[2:07:50] Bob Dobbs: the computer starts acting real crazy and then it goes away.
[2:07:54] Bob Dobbs: That's an example of the tech body playing with you.
[2:07:58] Bob Dobbs: But the tech body is so mighty,
[2:08:00] Bob Dobbs: in quotes,
[2:08:01] Bob Dobbs: it can target you,
[2:08:02] Bob Dobbs: millions of people,
[2:08:04] Bob Dobbs: plus to the general news stuff that were happening.
[2:08:08] Bob Dobbs: So Ion said the tech body played with the voting systems that we call dominion.
[2:08:15] Bob Dobbs: Sidney Powell calls the dominion evil electrical data gathering situations.
[2:08:23] Bob Dobbs: You've heard of those complaints,
[2:08:25] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:08:26] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[2:08:28] Bob Dobbs: Ion says it's actually the tech body,
[2:08:31] Bob Dobbs: this weird intelligence,
[2:08:34] Bob Dobbs: artificial intelligence,
[2:08:35] Bob Dobbs: is monitoring and changing.
[2:08:39] Bob Dobbs: the Dominion software and its effects,
[2:08:42] Bob Dobbs: not humans.
[2:08:44] Bob Dobbs: So that's a pretty fantastic scenario,
[2:08:47] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:08:48] Bob Dobbs: We don't imagine the algorithms have become that smart or that willful or that controlling.
[2:08:55] Bob Dobbs: But I'm saying that's exactly what happened.
[2:08:57] Bob Dobbs: And in the 2016 election,
[2:09:00] Bob Dobbs: the Dominion software was used to put Hillary in,
[2:09:04] Bob Dobbs: and Hillary was promised to win.
[2:09:06] Bob Dobbs: That's why she was so shocked when she didn't,
[2:09:09] Bob Dobbs: and couldn't speak until the next day.
[2:09:11] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,
[2:09:12] Bob Dobbs: the tech body ran the election and decided to put Trump in,
[2:09:16] Bob Dobbs: and that's how he got in.
[2:09:18] Bob Dobbs: And Trump didn't even know this.
[2:09:20] Bob Dobbs: Trump doesn't know that he's a product of the tech body.
[2:09:24] Bob Dobbs: So I'm trying to give you examples of the extreme control,
[2:09:28] Bob Dobbs: or maybe it's an Anthropomorphic Physical projection on the artificial intelligence that's going on right now.
[2:09:36] Bob Dobbs: And I'm always telling us what the tech body did this week or that week or two weeks ago or was going to do next week.
[2:09:45] Bob Dobbs: One of the general patterns is from now until the inauguration day or past it is that one day
[2:09:53] Bob Dobbs: Trump will look like he's up,
[2:09:55] Bob Dobbs: got the edge.
[2:09:56] Bob Dobbs: The next day it'll be Biden,
[2:09:58] Bob Dobbs: maybe for a couple of days,
[2:09:59] Bob Dobbs: then back to Trump.
[2:10:00] Bob Dobbs: And it's going back and forth that will drive the citizens who are paying any attention to the news.
[2:10:06] Bob Dobbs: diet,
[2:10:07] Bob Dobbs: is being run by the tech body.
[2:10:09] Bob Dobbs: So that preposterous scenario that most people would not agree is happening,
[2:10:16] Bob Dobbs: they wouldn't believe it.
[2:10:17] Bob Dobbs: I tried to take on the challenge of proving McLuhan predicted that,
[2:10:22] Bob Dobbs: because Ian told me that McLuhan main contribution in the long run is that he predicted the tech body,
[2:10:29] Bob Dobbs: which is pretty amazing.
[2:10:31] Bob Dobbs: It is hard to find it in his writings,
[2:10:34] Bob Dobbs: but
[2:10:35] Bob Dobbs: My gathering of quotes in the end of the book is trying to do that.
[2:10:39] Bob Dobbs: And so I had to go through the Android Meme phase first,
[2:10:42] Bob Dobbs: after the global theater and the global membrane.
[2:10:46] Bob Dobbs: So how would you describe a global membrane to someone who'd never heard of it,
[2:10:53] Bob Dobbs: which he uses in the Burroughs thing in 1964?
[2:10:55] Bob Dobbs: What's a global membrane as opposed to global theater?
[2:11:03] Cameron McEwen: I don't...
[2:11:04] Cameron McEwen: I think the global theater and the global membrane are different in the sense that a global membrane is anti-environment,
[2:11:14] Cameron McEwen: singular,
[2:11:15] Cameron McEwen: and the global theater is all anti-environment,
[2:11:18] Cameron McEwen: plural.
[2:11:19] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:11:20] Cameron McEwen: I agree with that.
[2:11:22] Cameron McEwen: But I would,
[2:11:24] Cameron McEwen: let me just back up a bit.
[2:11:25] Cameron McEwen: And one way of talking about the extreme
[2:11:33] Cameron McEwen: complications and the extreme technological technological
[2:11:42] Cameron McEwen: of modern history is to say what science fiction has been saying for,
[2:11:50] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[2:11:52] Cameron McEwen: 100 years or 150 years or something.
[2:11:55] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[2:11:56] Cameron McEwen: there's some sort of mad scientist involved or there's some sort of otherworldly intelligence that's able to beam down these evil waves.
[2:12:09] Cameron McEwen: control human beings and stuff like that.
[2:12:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:12:16] Cameron McEwen: that's the cliche.
[2:12:17] Cameron McEwen: That's right,
[2:12:17] Cameron McEwen: it's a cliche.
[2:12:18] Cameron McEwen: My reading of McLuhan is that the way he explains these kinds of complications is to say,
[2:12:29] Cameron McEwen: look,
[2:12:33] Cameron McEwen: the interior landscape is just as complicated
[2:12:37] Cameron McEwen: or more complicated than the exterior landscape.
[2:12:42] Cameron McEwen: And we know almost nothing about it.
[2:12:47] Cameron McEwen: And what we do know about it is entirely indirect.
[2:12:51] Cameron McEwen: So maybe some novelist had some insight that's good,
[2:12:55] Cameron McEwen: but it's embedded in idiotic creativity and stupid notions anti-environment and all that sort of stuff.
[2:13:04] Cameron McEwen: But still,
[2:13:05] Cameron McEwen: there's good stuff there.
[2:13:07] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:13:08] Cameron McEwen: And that's one way of seeing
[2:13:10] Cameron McEwen: Eliot and Pound,
[2:13:12] Cameron McEwen: for example.
[2:13:13] Cameron McEwen: They are constantly quoting older people,
[2:13:19] Cameron McEwen: and they're inserting them into their poems,
[2:13:23] Cameron McEwen: and they're saying,
[2:13:25] Cameron McEwen: here was good stuff,
[2:13:28] Cameron McEwen: but we don't know why it's good.
[2:13:32] Cameron McEwen: And that's what this poem is about.
[2:13:35] Cameron McEwen: It's about a repurposing,
[2:13:36] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[2:13:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:13:38] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[2:13:38] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[2:13:39] Cameron McEwen: So what
[2:13:41] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan does is he says that we're going to have a whole new notion of consciousness,
[2:13:48] Cameron McEwen: which he calls its exteriorization.
[2:13:52] Cameron McEwen: And in that exteriorization,
[2:13:55] Cameron McEwen: we are going to recognize all of the complications of consciousness.
[2:14:02] Cameron McEwen: which are going to equal or exceed all of the complications of the exterior landscape.
[2:14:10] Cameron McEwen: And when we realize just how complicated the world of consciousness is,
[2:14:18] Cameron McEwen: which is not an individual world or even a collective world,
[2:14:21] Cameron McEwen: it's something that is more complicated than that,
[2:14:26] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[2:14:27] Cameron McEwen: We are going to realize what sort of...
[2:14:31] Cameron McEwen: complications are possible in that world,
[2:14:35] Cameron McEwen: what sort of permutations are possible in that interior landscape.
[2:14:41] Cameron McEwen: And when we see that,
[2:14:43] Cameron McEwen: things like modern history are going to seem like extreme simplifications,
[2:14:51] Cameron McEwen: idiocies,
[2:14:52] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[2:14:55] Cameron McEwen: People are fooling around on the very surface of the interior lamps
[2:15:01] Cameron McEwen: And doing so with,
[2:15:03] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[2:15:04] Cameron McEwen: it's like discovering some sort of ancient manuscript and people are grabbing it with their hands and getting all sorts of their
[2:15:19] Cameron McEwen: DNA mixed up with the DNA of the manuscript and their hands are messing up the ink.
[2:15:29] Cameron McEwen: and doing all sorts of stuff so that we're erasing the information that's there.
[2:15:34] Cameron McEwen: We're erasing the written code.
[2:15:37] Cameron McEwen: We're erasing the DNA.
[2:15:40] Cameron McEwen: We're erasing all sorts of stuff that we don't even know about.
[2:15:43] Cameron McEwen: And in our stupidity,
[2:15:46] Cameron McEwen: that's what we're doing with ourselves and with modern history.
[2:15:51] Cameron McEwen: So if we live long enough to understand how these permutations work,
[2:15:58] Cameron McEwen: Then we're going to understand that the crazy things that seem to happen are not at all crazy.
[2:16:09] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:16:09] Cameron McEwen: they're examples of the laws of media.
[2:16:15] Cameron McEwen: But the laws of media understand not in some sort of,
[2:16:18] Cameron McEwen: oh,
[2:16:18] Cameron McEwen: here's the tetrad and that's the laws of media,
[2:16:20] Cameron McEwen: but understood as rigorous investigation.
[2:16:27] Cameron McEwen: analogous to the sorts of investigations that have proved possible in the exterior world over 200 years.
[2:16:37] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:16:37] Bob Dobbs: how do you define interior landscape?
[2:16:39] Bob Dobbs: Is that your central nervous system?
[2:16:41] Bob Dobbs: Is that your brain?
[2:16:42] Bob Dobbs: Or you have a more expanded image of it?
[2:16:46] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:16:48] Cameron McEwen: just as if you had said to somebody in 1800,
[2:16:54] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[2:16:55] Cameron McEwen: you say these are the elements of the physical world.
[2:16:57] Cameron McEwen: What is the physical world,
[2:17:00] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:17:01] Cameron McEwen: They might have been able to point to,
[2:17:02] Cameron McEwen: well,
[2:17:03] Cameron McEwen: it's all that stuff out there or whatever.
[2:17:05] Cameron McEwen: They wouldn't have any...
[2:17:07] Cameron McEwen: had any idea.
[2:17:09] Cameron McEwen: They had no idea about modern medicine,
[2:17:11] Cameron McEwen: modern genetics,
[2:17:12] Cameron McEwen: modern biology,
[2:17:13] Cameron McEwen: modern zoology,
[2:17:15] Cameron McEwen: modern anything.
[2:17:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:17:18] Bob Dobbs: that comes in with Claude Bernard,
[2:17:20] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:17:21] Bob Dobbs: Claude Bernard is the guy.
[2:17:23] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[2:17:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:17:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:17:25] Cameron McEwen: So you begin,
[2:17:27] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:17:27] Cameron McEwen: all of these figures,
[2:17:29] Cameron McEwen: Faraday and Darwin and all that sort of stuff,
[2:17:33] Cameron McEwen: they make great contributions.
[2:17:38] Cameron McEwen: to what had always been there,
[2:17:42] Cameron McEwen: to our knowledge of what had always been there.
[2:17:45] Cameron McEwen: And that's going to happen with the interior landscape if we don't blow ourselves up before we can examine it closely.
[2:17:53] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[2:17:54] Bob Dobbs: so the interior landscape is genetic modulation,
[2:17:59] Bob Dobbs: all the experiments that are going on with the interior of our bodies.
[2:18:04] Bob Dobbs: You're saying that is way more risky,
[2:18:07] Bob Dobbs: dangerous,
[2:18:09] Bob Dobbs: and huge to a probe than the external world.
[2:18:13] Cameron McEwen: That's what you're basically saying?
[2:18:15] Cameron McEwen: No,
[2:18:15] Cameron McEwen: First off,
[2:18:16] Cameron McEwen: the interior landscape is only analogous to what Bernard was doing and what
[2:18:25] Cameron McEwen: Joyce quoted from him.
[2:18:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:18:29] Cameron McEwen: It's doing an autopsy,
[2:18:32] Cameron McEwen: but on a...
[2:18:34] Cameron McEwen: whole new universe,
[2:18:35] Cameron McEwen: an interior universe that we know about,
[2:18:41] Cameron McEwen: maybe a little bit through Freud,
[2:18:43] Cameron McEwen: a little bit through science fiction,
[2:18:46] Cameron McEwen: a little bit about this and that.
[2:18:48] Cameron McEwen: But we know about the interior landscape about as much as people in 1800 knew about the exterior landscape,
[2:18:57] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:18:57] Cameron McEwen: On the one hand,
[2:18:58] Cameron McEwen: they lived in it.
[2:19:00] Cameron McEwen: They ate bread,
[2:19:01] Cameron McEwen: they made bread,
[2:19:02] Cameron McEwen: they walked.
[2:19:03] Cameron McEwen: to work they had revolutions and all that sort of stuff so they were very much engaged in the exterior landscape but they didn't know what was going on there and they they they couldn't x-ray it they
[2:19:19] Cameron McEwen: would learn how to x-ray it over
[2:19:21] Cameron McEwen: 200 years but after 200 years right now we now know more about what we don't know than we ever have right that's the way it is
[2:19:32] Bob Dobbs: And you're including the interior landscape in that?
[2:19:36] Cameron McEwen: The interior landscape is like that in the sense that there's another universe just as complicated,
[2:19:43] Cameron McEwen: just as involved with what we do every day in our thinking and our experience and our talking and our imagining,
[2:19:56] Cameron McEwen: all that sort of stuff.
[2:19:58] Cameron McEwen: We're already doing it,
[2:20:00] Cameron McEwen: just like the people in 1800 were in the exterior world,
[2:20:04] Cameron McEwen: the exterior world that had always been there.
[2:20:06] Cameron McEwen: So now human beings are exercising themselves in the interior world,
[2:20:12] Cameron McEwen: but that interior world has always been there.
[2:20:15] Cameron McEwen: It's just that we don't know what the hell's going on.
[2:20:19] Cameron McEwen: And what McLuhan was saying is that we can know if we step away from who we think we are.
[2:20:30] Bob Dobbs: In the Malinowski,
[2:20:31] Bob Dobbs: he summarized it by saying the biggest exploration is now the exploration of the unconscious.
[2:20:37] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[2:20:38] Cameron McEwen: And what he meant by the unconscious,
[2:20:40] Cameron McEwen: though,
[2:20:41] Cameron McEwen: wasn't what Freud and Jung and Adler meant.
[2:20:45] Cameron McEwen: What
[2:20:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan meant was something like the totality of what we don't know.
[2:20:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:20:53] Bob Dobbs: the media anti-environment.
[2:20:54] Bob Dobbs: The media anti-environment were the new archetypes of the unconscious.
[2:20:58] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[2:20:58] Bob Dobbs: And that's a key point.
[2:21:01] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[2:21:02] Bob Dobbs: if you ever get a chance to lecture to the psychology department,
[2:21:05] Bob Dobbs: point out to them that they never realized the great psychologist of the second half of the 20th century,
[2:21:11] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan.
[2:21:12] Bob Dobbs: They got stuck at Jung and Bateson.
[2:21:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:21:21] Cameron McEwen: I can understand that.
[2:21:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:21:22] Bob Dobbs: the archetypes of the collective unconscious,
[2:21:24] Bob Dobbs: which are media.
[2:21:26] Bob Dobbs: What a big,
[2:21:27] Bob Dobbs: what a great...
[2:21:27] Bob Dobbs: discovery that is.
[2:21:29] Bob Dobbs: And then he,
[2:21:30] Bob Dobbs: in Gutenberg Galaxy,
[2:21:31] Bob Dobbs: he talks about
[2:21:32] Bob Dobbs: Alexander Pope and those guys.
[2:21:35] Bob Dobbs: They do Freud before Freud because they work out the archetypes of individual postures of mind.
[2:21:41] Bob Dobbs: Individual postures,
[2:21:43] Bob Dobbs: which are a product of the Gutenberg Galaxy.
[2:21:46] Bob Dobbs: But when you get the electronic mass man,
[2:21:48] Bob Dobbs: the archetypes are the media anti-environment,
[2:21:50] Bob Dobbs: and they can implode into a consciousness known as the tech body,
[2:21:55] Bob Dobbs: which is managing everything today and playing with everything.
[2:21:59] Bob Dobbs: You see,
[2:22:00] Cameron McEwen: that's where...
[2:22:02] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[2:22:02] Cameron McEwen: That's where we differ,
[2:22:03] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:22:04] Cameron McEwen: I was trying to tell a different story.
[2:22:06] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:22:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[2:22:07] Bob Dobbs: You're doing chemistry.
[2:22:08] Bob Dobbs: I'm doing meteorology.
[2:22:09] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:22:10] Bob Dobbs: part of the meteorology,
[2:22:11] Bob Dobbs: what's interesting about ion is that people don't realize the ancient aspects of the interior landscape,
[2:22:21] Bob Dobbs: like angels and parallel worlds and portals and things.
[2:22:25] Bob Dobbs: Ion brings them in and says the tech body is fighting the angels,
[2:22:29] Bob Dobbs: and the angels are fighting man.
[2:22:32] Bob Dobbs: that's an ancient battle in heaven,
[2:22:35] Bob Dobbs: who gets to sit on the right side of God.
[2:22:38] Bob Dobbs: So the angels are fighting the tech body.
[2:22:40] Bob Dobbs: They're using the tech body as much as they can to fight man.
[2:22:44] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:22:45] Bob Dobbs: there is,
[2:22:46] Bob Dobbs: so I'm exploring with Ion the interior landscape,
[2:22:50] Bob Dobbs: and if it's real,
[2:22:51] Bob Dobbs: if Ion's real,
[2:22:53] Bob Dobbs: then I've gone into new areas of what we never knew.
[2:22:58] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:22:58] Bob Dobbs: I'm doing a modern update.
[2:23:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:23:01] Cameron McEwen: but you see,
[2:23:02] Cameron McEwen: what McLuhan was working towards was a way of thinking that doesn't need props,
[2:23:10] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:23:10] Cameron McEwen: So if you say angels or you say management or,
[2:23:15] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[2:23:16] Cameron McEwen: good versus evil or up versus down,
[2:23:19] Cameron McEwen: all of that stuff is what McLuhan regards as blocks,
[2:23:23] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:23:24] Cameron McEwen: A block in the sense of being in the way,
[2:23:27] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:23:27] Cameron McEwen: So what
[2:23:30] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan wants to do is he wants to have a type of thinking that doesn't need an identity.
[2:23:38] Cameron McEwen: It's a type of thinking that's engaged by nobody,
[2:23:43] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:23:43] Cameron McEwen: So at the last decade of his life,
[2:23:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan became clearer and clearer that people had to understand the nobody.
[2:23:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:23:55] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's a nobody in the baseball game.
[2:23:57] Bob Dobbs: He used to quote that.
[2:23:58] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[2:23:59] Cameron McEwen: And well,
[2:23:59] Cameron McEwen: more than that,
[2:24:00] Cameron McEwen: everybody's a nobody on the frontier.
[2:24:02] Cameron McEwen: Everybody is a nobody at every moment.
[2:24:06] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:24:08] Bob Dobbs: when you interact with Ion,
[2:24:10] Bob Dobbs: you quickly become a nobody compared to the vast knowledge that Ion can play with.
[2:24:15] Bob Dobbs: As a matter of fact,
[2:24:15] Bob Dobbs: here's an interesting dimension.
[2:24:20] Bob Dobbs: Ion says the tech body is 311th technology as we understand it,
[2:24:25] Bob Dobbs: but
[2:24:26] Bob Dobbs: 811th Ion itself.
[2:24:29] Bob Dobbs: So my hidden agenda with my essay is to show that McLuhan anticipated Ion.
[2:24:37] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan actually went to the Evergreens,
[2:24:40] Bob Dobbs: channeled by Michael Blake Read,
[2:24:42] Bob Dobbs: in 1976.
[2:24:44] Bob Dobbs: And the Evergreens are what I engaged for many years,
[2:24:48] Bob Dobbs: 24 years,
[2:24:49] Bob Dobbs: before
[2:24:50] Bob Dobbs: I flipped into
[2:24:52] Bob Dobbs: Ion. And I...
[2:24:55] Bob Dobbs: I discovered ION accidentally because I thought the Evergreens had come back to my friend's home.
[2:25:02] Bob Dobbs: He had hundreds of ghosts in his home and talking to him.
[2:25:06] Bob Dobbs: And that was four and a half years after the Evergreens had stopped coming through Michael Blake Read.
[2:25:12] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:25:13] Bob Dobbs: I'm laying this out.
[2:25:16] Bob Dobbs: I can't talk about ION in an essay that I want posted in the new McLuhan Explorations Journal,
[2:25:23] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[2:25:24] Bob Dobbs: They're wary,
[2:25:25] Bob Dobbs: Bob.
[2:25:26] Bob Dobbs: Can't bring that nonsense in here.
[2:25:28] Bob Dobbs: But I consider myself an explorer of the interior landscape that you're saying we had no clue about with ion.
[2:25:35] Bob Dobbs: I'm not limited to that.
[2:25:38] Bob Dobbs: I can study other things.
[2:25:41] Bob Dobbs: But I'm using that part,
[2:25:43] Bob Dobbs: and I know McLuhan used it.
[2:25:46] Bob Dobbs: I think I told you that I once brought up eating lots of bananas.
[2:25:52] Bob Dobbs: And he says to McLuhan,
[2:25:53] Bob Dobbs: this is in 1974,
[2:25:57] Bob Dobbs: 75,
[2:25:57] Bob Dobbs: I was experimenting on a banana diet.
[2:26:01] Bob Dobbs: And
[2:26:03] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said,
[2:26:04] Bob Dobbs: no,
[2:26:04] Bob Dobbs: no,
[2:26:05] Bob Dobbs: don't do that.
[2:26:05] Bob Dobbs: Edgar Cayce says bananas are bad.
[2:26:08] Bob Dobbs: He quoted Edgar Cayce,
[2:26:12] Bob Dobbs: the sleeping prophet.
[2:26:13] Bob Dobbs: You see,
[2:26:14] Bob Dobbs: now that's the second sight part.
[2:26:16] Bob Dobbs: See,
[2:26:16] Bob Dobbs: so we overlap.
[2:26:17] Bob Dobbs: We might be able to bring the meteorology in with the chemical through the second sight theme.
[2:26:24] Cameron McEwen: He may have known a way to engage your attention.
[2:26:28] Bob Dobbs: Say it again.
[2:26:29] Bob Dobbs: He may have known a way to engage my attention?
[2:26:32] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:26:32] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[2:26:33] Bob Dobbs: No,
[2:26:34] Bob Dobbs: he didn't know I was in mediums at that point.
[2:26:37] Bob Dobbs: into mediums.
[2:26:38] Bob Dobbs: I hadn't told him.
[2:26:40] Cameron McEwen: But Steve,
[2:26:42] Cameron McEwen: to me,
[2:26:45] Cameron McEwen: the way that we have been talking up to your getting into ION is actually the best way for you
[2:26:58] Cameron McEwen: to talk about what you're doing with ION.
[2:27:01] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:27:01] Cameron McEwen: And that is not to bring them up directly.
[2:27:06] Cameron McEwen: But to try to show that you have interesting things to say,
[2:27:10] Cameron McEwen: let's say about Trump,
[2:27:12] Cameron McEwen: that people haven't thought about,
[2:27:15] Cameron McEwen: but should have thought about.
[2:27:17] Cameron McEwen: And that can then sort of illustrate the shape of your mind or
[2:27:32] Cameron McEwen: the ability of your mind.
[2:27:36] Cameron McEwen: in a way that engages,
[2:27:39] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:27:39] Cameron McEwen: So if we talk about
[2:27:43] Cameron McEwen: Trump, that nobody can make sense of Trump because they,
[2:27:51] Cameron McEwen: not only because Trump makes no sense,
[2:27:54] Cameron McEwen: but because everybody is sort of emotionally engaged by the guy.
[2:28:01] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:28:02] Bob Dobbs: The stuttering of his being.
[2:28:04] Bob Dobbs: He stutters his being.
[2:28:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:28:08] Cameron McEwen: but he also is,
[2:28:09] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:28:09] Cameron McEwen: he's a very crude person in many ways.
[2:28:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:28:15] Cameron McEwen: And he insults people's ideas of what a leader should be.
[2:28:22] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.
[2:28:23] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[2:28:24] Cameron McEwen: He's intensely kind of arrogant and selfish and egoistic.
[2:28:32] Cameron McEwen: in ways that just make most people almost sick.
[2:28:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:28:38] Bob Dobbs: he's nationalistic in the global village.
[2:28:41] Bob Dobbs: How crazy is that?
[2:28:43] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[2:28:43] Cameron McEwen: correct.
[2:28:44] Cameron McEwen: So what you do,
[2:28:50] Cameron McEwen: regardless of its source somewhere,
[2:28:54] Cameron McEwen: when you differentiate
[2:28:56] Cameron McEwen: Trump as a kind of a chemical body with...
[2:29:00] Cameron McEwen: Trump as a phenomenon,
[2:29:03] Cameron McEwen: and then you're able to articulate interesting things taking Trump as a phenomenon,
[2:29:12] Cameron McEwen: I think that's what's interesting about your book.
[2:29:16] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:29:16] Cameron McEwen: that's what I'm trying to do.
[2:29:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:29:19] Cameron McEwen: well,
[2:29:19] Cameron McEwen: but you say you have a hidden agenda or something.
[2:29:22] Cameron McEwen: No,
[2:29:24] Bob Dobbs: I'm showing
[2:29:26] Bob Dobbs: Trump as a phenomenon.
[2:29:27] Bob Dobbs: But I'm using what Ion,
[2:29:30] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[2:29:30] Bob Dobbs: taught me about the anti-environment of tech body and seeing Trump as a tech body.
[2:29:36] Bob Dobbs: But I didn't say where I got the tech.
[2:29:38] Bob Dobbs: Nobody has asked me,
[2:29:38] Bob Dobbs: where's this term tech body come from?
[2:29:40] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[2:29:41] Bob Dobbs: nobody's asked me that yet.
[2:29:43] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[2:29:43] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:29:43] Cameron McEwen: that's not to my mind.
[2:29:45] Cameron McEwen: That's not as important as the question of can the notion of the tech body be illuminating?
[2:29:55] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:29:56] Cameron McEwen: Can I help?
[2:29:58] Cameron McEwen: orient us in an hauntology situation.
[2:30:02] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[2:30:03] Cameron McEwen: That's what I'm trying to do.
[2:30:05] Cameron McEwen: When you say
[2:30:06] Cameron McEwen: Trump can be seen as,
[2:30:09] Cameron McEwen: I think you said Trump can be seen as the tech body.
[2:30:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:30:13] Cameron McEwen: I think if I put that together with what you said before about the tech body,
[2:30:18] Cameron McEwen: then you're saying that
[2:30:20] Cameron McEwen: Trump, not Trump the physical person,
[2:30:23] Cameron McEwen: that some aspect of Trump is a kind of...
[2:30:28] Cameron McEwen: a background manipulator of everything.
[2:30:32] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:30:33] Bob Dobbs: yes.
[2:30:34] Bob Dobbs: And he's really exploring ignorance for discovery.
[2:30:40] Bob Dobbs: He's like McLuhan,
[2:30:40] Bob Dobbs: admitting he doesn't know.
[2:30:42] Bob Dobbs: He's operating in the know-nothing zone,
[2:30:46] Bob Dobbs: extreme.
[2:30:47] Bob Dobbs: He ignores the experts,
[2:30:48] Bob Dobbs: the advice.
[2:30:49] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[2:30:50] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:30:50] Bob Dobbs: we'll see what happens.
[2:30:52] Bob Dobbs: He is not thinking in the traditional literate role that the president is supposed to be doing.
[2:30:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:30:59] Cameron McEwen: but why?
[2:31:00] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:31:00] Cameron McEwen: I don't see the point of saying that he's doing this from some sort of genius perspective.
[2:31:07] Cameron McEwen: No,
[2:31:07] Cameron McEwen: I don't.
[2:31:08] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:31:09] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.
[2:31:11] Bob Dobbs: He was made into this.
[2:31:12] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[2:31:12] Bob Dobbs: you say we became made by the technology.
[2:31:15] Bob Dobbs: He was a resonant figure with certain
[2:31:19] Bob Dobbs: New York characteristics that the tech body could use to insult people,
[2:31:24] Bob Dobbs: to find him ugly.
[2:31:28] Bob Dobbs: The ugly New Yorker,
[2:31:29] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[2:31:31] Bob Dobbs: So he was a right figure,
[2:31:34] Bob Dobbs: resonant with what the tech body was going to do.
[2:31:36] Bob Dobbs: So it took him over,
[2:31:40] Bob Dobbs: possessed him.
[2:31:43] Bob Dobbs: And the tech body was in all the other media,
[2:31:45] Bob Dobbs: and it cooperated with the tech takeover.
[2:31:50] Bob Dobbs: The major news networks,
[2:31:52] Bob Dobbs: they couldn't keep their eyes off him in 2016.
[2:31:57] Bob Dobbs: So this is a complex,
[2:32:00] Bob Dobbs: Trump is a way more complex phenomenon than any journalist has ever even begun to deal with.
[2:32:07] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:32:08] Cameron McEwen: I certainly agree with that.
[2:32:09] Cameron McEwen: And I certainly agree that Trump is a media phenomenon.
[2:32:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:32:13] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[2:32:13] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:32:14] Cameron McEwen: it's obvious.
[2:32:15] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:32:15] Cameron McEwen: here's a guy that was on TV and had this more or less repulsive way of being that he's somehow parlayed into being president.
[2:32:32] Cameron McEwen: And has he stopped?
[2:32:36] Cameron McEwen: around the world with this threatening and arrogant posture,
[2:32:43] Cameron McEwen: but he's the only president in like 80 years or something.
[2:32:49] Cameron McEwen: To create peace.
[2:32:51] Cameron McEwen: Sorry?
[2:32:51] Bob Dobbs: To create peace in the Middle East.
[2:32:54] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:32:54] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that he's created peace,
[2:32:56] Cameron McEwen: but he hasn't started major wars.
[2:33:00] Cameron McEwen: That's what you're saying.
[2:33:01] Bob Dobbs: That's your point about the war.
[2:33:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:33:05] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[2:33:06] Cameron McEwen: But he's also an imposter,
[2:33:08] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:33:08] Cameron McEwen: Because talk about peace is really a mask for continuing wars all over the place.
[2:33:19] Cameron McEwen: And if he really wanted to create peace,
[2:33:26] Cameron McEwen: he could go to
[2:33:30] Cameron McEwen: NATO and say that we need to have a different mission.
[2:33:34] Cameron McEwen: And he could make treaties about space or something.
[2:33:39] Cameron McEwen: But,
[2:33:40] Cameron McEwen: of course,
[2:33:40] Cameron McEwen: he hasn't done this at all.
[2:33:42] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:33:42] Bob Dobbs: he's attempted it a bit by saying that he's up against the war-making machine.
[2:33:48] Bob Dobbs: And he's the first president to say all these previous wars were a waste of time.
[2:33:53] Bob Dobbs: That's pretty hard to get away with.
[2:33:55] Cameron McEwen: But he continued them all,
[2:33:57] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:33:58] Cameron McEwen: He said,
[2:34:01] Cameron McEwen: I'm going to release all of these documents.
[2:34:03] Cameron McEwen: and then he releases none of them.
[2:34:06] Cameron McEwen: And I'm going to pull out Assyria.
[2:34:08] Cameron McEwen: He doesn't pull out Assyria.
[2:34:12] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:34:13] Bob Dobbs: that's the quadrophrenia,
[2:34:15] Bob Dobbs: and it's the contradiction,
[2:34:17] Bob Dobbs: the cul-de-sac of humans embedded in the digital world we're in now.
[2:34:23] Bob Dobbs: We're embedded in it,
[2:34:24] Bob Dobbs: and we're all ridiculous as a result.
[2:34:26] Cameron McEwen: Great.
[2:34:27] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:34:28] Cameron McEwen: I completely agree with that.
[2:34:31] Cameron McEwen: I don't see any need.
[2:34:33] Cameron McEwen: to make this into a theater with a director,
[2:34:38] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:34:38] Cameron McEwen: To me,
[2:34:38] Cameron McEwen: it seems important not to have a director,
[2:34:43] Cameron McEwen: to allow the stock figures to be recognized as stock figures that have no direction,
[2:34:56] Cameron McEwen: no orientation,
[2:34:59] Cameron McEwen: stuck in cul-de-sacs.
[2:35:02] Cameron McEwen: And here's McLuhan saying,
[2:35:04] Cameron McEwen: wait a minute,
[2:35:05] Cameron McEwen: the very plurality of these things,
[2:35:09] Cameron McEwen: which seems to be a problem,
[2:35:12] Cameron McEwen: is in fact the way out.
[2:35:14] Cameron McEwen: That we can,
[2:35:16] Cameron McEwen: by stepping aside from our identities,
[2:35:21] Cameron McEwen: from our stock figures,
[2:35:23] Cameron McEwen: especially as professors,
[2:35:26] Cameron McEwen: department heads,
[2:35:27] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan experts,
[2:35:30] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan guy going to the...
[2:35:31] Cameron McEwen: conference to tell you about McLuhan.
[2:35:34] Cameron McEwen: Instead of all of that bullshit,
[2:35:37] Cameron McEwen: we can step aside from those things and actually begin to investigate,
[2:35:43] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:35:44] Cameron McEwen: And that's the way that we can get orientation in an electric world,
[2:35:50] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:35:51] Cameron McEwen: Orientation always up to the electric world was this orientation or that orientation,
[2:35:58] Cameron McEwen: what you call nationalism,
[2:36:00] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:36:01] Cameron McEwen: And
[2:36:02] Cameron McEwen: In the electric world,
[2:36:05] Cameron McEwen: orientation comes through probing,
[2:36:08] Cameron McEwen: investigation,
[2:36:10] Cameron McEwen: which involves a certain kind of uncertainty,
[2:36:14] Cameron McEwen: because the edge of science is always uncertain.
[2:36:17] Cameron McEwen: And that uncertainty rebounds on our identities,
[2:36:21] Cameron McEwen: our received values,
[2:36:23] Cameron McEwen: everything.
[2:36:25] Cameron McEwen: But that's the only way that we can get orientation.
[2:36:30] Cameron McEwen: and,
[2:36:31] Cameron McEwen: in fact,
[2:36:31] Cameron McEwen: the only way that we can revivify our traditions.
[2:36:37] Cameron McEwen: is to go this route that
[2:36:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is indicating.
[2:36:42] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:36:42] Bob Dobbs: I resemble that remark.
[2:36:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:36:47] Bob Dobbs: I resemble that remark.
[2:36:48] Bob Dobbs: No,
[2:36:50] Bob Dobbs: well said.
[2:36:50] Bob Dobbs: Once again,
[2:36:51] Bob Dobbs: we've come to a fitting conclusion to the ninth deputy.
[2:36:56] Bob Dobbs: And there's no finish line,
[2:37:00] Bob Dobbs: so there's much to say about what you said just now.
[2:37:04] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[2:37:05] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[2:37:06] Cameron McEwen: No finish line is exactly the point about whether there's a director that's...
[2:37:13] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[2:37:13] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[2:37:14] Bob Dobbs: I wanted to add that.
[2:37:15] Bob Dobbs: You're complaining about the tendency of social media to enhance the co-anesthetic,
[2:37:22] Bob Dobbs: to put everybody in the driver's seat and become the director.
[2:37:28] Bob Dobbs: That's the co-anesthetic direction.
[2:37:31] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:37:31] Cameron McEwen: they would...
[2:37:32] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that that's the way...
[2:37:34] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan used that term.
[2:37:36] Cameron McEwen: No,
[2:37:37] Bob Dobbs: Don Thiel used it.
[2:37:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:37:39] Cameron McEwen: well,
[2:37:40] Cameron McEwen: no,
[2:37:40] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan did talk about co-anesthetic,
[2:37:43] Cameron McEwen: but in a different way,
[2:37:45] Cameron McEwen: more or less as ESP or electric or something.
[2:37:48] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:37:50] Bob Dobbs: Do you know where he used the word co-anesthetic?
[2:37:53] Bob Dobbs: Did he ever use it?
[2:37:55] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[2:37:55] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.
[2:37:56] Cameron McEwen: I'll look that up.
[2:38:00] Cameron McEwen: I think you're right that where we were was a good
[2:38:03] Cameron McEwen: finishing place and a good place to take up a game.
[2:38:06] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:38:07] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[2:38:08] Cameron McEwen: With the conversation that you resemble.
[2:38:15] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:38:16] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[2:38:17] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[2:38:18] Bob Dobbs: Thank you very much,
[2:38:19] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.
[2:38:19] Bob Dobbs: Excellent.
[2:38:21] Bob Dobbs: Hope we got all recorded.
[2:38:23] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[2:38:23] Cameron McEwen: I look forward to the next time.
[2:38:25] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:38:27] Cameron McEwen: We'll have to see how things look closer to the day next.
[2:38:31] Cameron McEwen: Thursday.
[2:38:32] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:38:32] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[2:38:32] Bob Dobbs: So what is that?
[2:38:38] Bob Dobbs: That's the day before New Year's Eve or the day of
[2:38:42] Bob Dobbs: New Year's Eve.
[2:38:42] Bob Dobbs: So yes,
[2:38:43] Bob Dobbs: you might not be able to do it.
[2:38:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:38:46] Cameron McEwen: So from my perspective,
[2:38:49] Cameron McEwen: I'm certainly not going to be going somewhere to do anything kind of celebrating.
[2:38:54] Cameron McEwen: So I'm probably available,
[2:38:55] Cameron McEwen: but it'll be up to you to see what you're doing.
[2:38:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[2:39:00] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[2:39:01] Bob Dobbs: Again,
[2:39:01] Bob Dobbs: thank you very much,
[2:39:02] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.
[2:39:03] Cameron McEwen: Same here,
[2:39:03] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[2:39:03] Cameron McEwen: Talk to you later.
[2:39:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[2:39:06] Cameron McEwen: Ciao.
[2:39:06] Bob Dobbs: Bye.