Dialogue 9 — Transcript

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: I'm here with

[00:03] Bob Dobbs: Cameron McEwen again for our ninth session.

[00:07] Bob Dobbs: The very first session was about the drama of cognition.

[00:10] Bob Dobbs: Then we decided to look at my book,

[00:12] Bob Dobbs: and this will be the eighth session on my book,

[00:16] Bob Dobbs: and the ninth session total.

[00:18] Bob Dobbs: So

[00:19] Bob Dobbs: Cameron asked me to explain my charts,

[00:22] Bob Dobbs: and I'm always happy to do that.

[00:24] Bob Dobbs: So we would go over to,

[00:29] Bob Dobbs: if you're handy,

[00:31] Bob Dobbs: listening.

[00:32] Bob Dobbs: Go to ionandbob.com or ionandbob.blogspot.com.

[00:37] Bob Dobbs: Either one gets there.

[00:38] Bob Dobbs: And that's I-O-N-A-N-D-B-O-B,

[00:41] Bob Dobbs: one word,

[00:42] Bob Dobbs: ionandbob.com.

[00:45] Bob Dobbs: And you would scroll to the bottom of the home front page,

[00:50] Bob Dobbs: and you'll see at the very bottom underneath the search area verticals of all kinds of topics in red or orange.

[01:02] Bob Dobbs: You would scroll down from the top.

[01:04] Bob Dobbs: It says links in black,

[01:06] Bob Dobbs: then the orange list,

[01:07] Bob Dobbs: then another three words in black,

[01:09] Bob Dobbs: popular IM posts.

[01:11] Bob Dobbs: You go down those oranges,

[01:14] Bob Dobbs: and then the third one down,

[01:15] Bob Dobbs: popular Bob posts.

[01:17] Bob Dobbs: You'd go to one,

[01:19] Bob Dobbs: two,

[01:20] Bob Dobbs: three,

[01:20] Bob Dobbs: four,

[01:20] Bob Dobbs: Bob's charts.

[01:21] Bob Dobbs: Down from the dark words,

[01:23] Bob Dobbs: popular Bob posts,

[01:24] Bob Dobbs: 40 years in the wilderness,

[01:25] Bob Dobbs: the new co-chose,

[01:27] Bob Dobbs: the Bob show with Love Job,

[01:29] Bob Dobbs: and then Bob's charts.

[01:30] Bob Dobbs: out.

[01:31] Bob Dobbs: Since these dialogues will go on and be prominent in history for millennia,

[01:37] Bob Dobbs: for those that want to know who I was and what I did with my bride of 53 years,

[01:43] Bob Dobbs: the top category there,

[01:46] Bob Dobbs: popular Bob Post,

[01:47] Bob Dobbs: we're in now,

[01:48] Bob Dobbs: 40 years in the wilderness,

[01:50] Bob Dobbs: lots of good photos there.

[01:52] Bob Dobbs: And then of 1969 to 2009.

[01:57] Bob Dobbs: So now you click on Bob's charts.

[02:00] Bob Dobbs: And you scroll to the bottom of the charts that are presented to you,

[02:04] Bob Dobbs: and you get to the bottom,

[02:06] Bob Dobbs: and you will...

[02:08] Bob Dobbs: Where is this?

[02:18] Bob Dobbs: The first chart,

[02:21] Bob Dobbs: when you click on Bob's chart,

[02:22] Bob Dobbs: is McLuhan,

[02:23] Bob Dobbs: Tetrad,

[02:25] Bob Dobbs: blah,

[02:25] Bob Dobbs: Scroll down past that one,

[02:26] Bob Dobbs: the next one,

[02:27] Bob Dobbs: that's four.

[02:29] Bob Dobbs: 5,

[02:31] Bob Dobbs: 6,

[02:31] Bob Dobbs: 7,

[02:33] Bob Dobbs: 8,

[02:33] Bob Dobbs: 9,

[02:34] Bob Dobbs: 10,

[02:35] Bob Dobbs: 11,

[02:38] Bob Dobbs: 12.

[02:40] Bob Dobbs: So 12,

[02:41] Bob Dobbs: 13,

[02:42] Bob Dobbs: and

[02:43] Bob Dobbs: 14 going down the vertical.

[02:47] Bob Dobbs: 15.

[02:48] Bob Dobbs: Would they say 12,

[02:49] Bob Dobbs: 13,

[02:49] Bob Dobbs: 14,

[02:50] Bob Dobbs: 15?

[02:51] Bob Dobbs: Those four are what we're going to deal with.

[02:57] Bob Dobbs: At the bottom,

[02:57] Bob Dobbs: you'll see Bob Dobbs'

[02:58] Bob Dobbs: signing note chart.

[03:00] Bob Dobbs: So,

[03:03] Bob Dobbs: go back up to number 13,

[03:04] Bob Dobbs: Bob Dobbs'

[03:05] Bob Dobbs: bottom-up chart.

[03:07] Bob Dobbs: So,

[03:07] Bob Dobbs: this was made in 1985,

[03:09] Bob Dobbs: and it was simple McLuhan.

[03:12] Bob Dobbs: You have the ground on the left side in green,

[03:17] Bob Dobbs: and then across the top,

[03:19] Bob Dobbs: the word figures.

[03:21] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[03:21] Bob Dobbs: bottom-up means,

[03:22] Bob Dobbs: that was a popular phrase in the

[03:25] Bob Dobbs: 80s, it's action,

[03:28] Bob Dobbs: culture,

[03:29] Bob Dobbs: growth.

[03:29] Bob Dobbs: technology that comes from the people.

[03:34] Bob Dobbs: Generally,

[03:35] Bob Dobbs: somebody or a bunch of people,

[03:37] Bob Dobbs: smart people in a culture might make an invention of something.

[03:42] Bob Dobbs: So that's bottom up.

[03:47] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[03:47] Cameron McEwen: can I ask a question here?

[03:50] Cameron McEwen: Does bottom up mean that the reality of the thing comes from the bottom?

[03:58] Cameron McEwen: And that the top is a derivative?

[04:01] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[04:02] Bob Dobbs: The top down is the bureaucratic control in a culture of the effects of the technology or culture that's starting to become well used by the culture.

[04:15] Bob Dobbs: In other words,

[04:15] Bob Dobbs: a cliché.

[04:17] Bob Dobbs: So when the printing press came in,

[04:20] Bob Dobbs: as an example,

[04:22] Bob Dobbs: came out of Germany,

[04:25] Bob Dobbs: That brought in the ability to read the Bible privately.

[04:29] Bob Dobbs: Eventually,

[04:30] Bob Dobbs: after a few years,

[04:31] Bob Dobbs: people started to be able to get access to the Bible.

[04:34] Bob Dobbs: And the

[04:35] Bob Dobbs: Catholic Church in Rome,

[04:36] Bob Dobbs: they objected to people reading this copy of the King James Version of the Bible.

[04:44] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what Bible they were using in 1450,

[04:47] Bob Dobbs: 1500,

[04:48] Bob Dobbs: 1550.

[04:50] Bob Dobbs: Anyway,

[04:50] Bob Dobbs: so the Vatican said,

[04:51] Bob Dobbs: we've got to stop this.

[04:52] Bob Dobbs: So they...

[04:54] Bob Dobbs: started a war against the Protestants.

[04:56] Bob Dobbs: So that was top-down control,

[04:58] Bob Dobbs: bureaucratic control,

[05:00] Bob Dobbs: a medieval cultural institution that's unhappy with a new technology which really creates a new culture which changes us into a,

[05:09] Bob Dobbs: well,

[05:09] Bob Dobbs: beginning of mercantilism and then capitalism.

[05:12] Bob Dobbs: So you see what I mean?

[05:13] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[05:14] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[05:15] Bob Dobbs: What top-down is?

[05:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[05:20] Cameron McEwen: But the chart that we're initially looking at,

[05:23] Cameron McEwen: I believe,

[05:23] Cameron McEwen: is the reverse of that,

[05:25] Cameron McEwen: bottom up.

[05:25] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[05:26] Cameron McEwen: So

[05:28] Cameron McEwen: I take it that bottom up means that the force or reality comes from the bottom and shapes the top,

[05:38] Cameron McEwen: and the inverse,

[05:40] Cameron McEwen: the top down,

[05:41] Cameron McEwen: is what you were just explaining,

[05:44] Cameron McEwen: where the force or reality comes from the top and shapes the bottom.

[05:49] Bob Dobbs: It tries to.

[05:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[05:51] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[05:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[05:52] Bob Dobbs: No,

[05:53] Cameron McEwen: that's correct.

[05:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[05:54] Cameron McEwen: And so that,

[05:56] Cameron McEwen: as I was hoping,

[05:58] Cameron McEwen: that indicates to me that your charts capture somewhat of what I mean by the figure and ground spectrum,

[06:11] Cameron McEwen: namely that along the spectrum of possible figure and ground configurations,

[06:20] Cameron McEwen: According to McLuhan,

[06:22] Cameron McEwen: the figure and ground can flip,

[06:25] Cameron McEwen: and it's very important for McLuhan to understand,

[06:32] Cameron McEwen: reading anything or viewing anything,

[06:36] Cameron McEwen: to understand what sort of figure and ground configuration is at stake for the thing that you're trying to understand.

[06:45] Cameron McEwen: And if I'm right about your charts,

[06:48] Cameron McEwen: then that's kind of the idea behind them.

[06:52] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[06:53] Cameron McEwen: Is that right?

[06:53] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[06:54] Bob Dobbs: because on the bottom-up chart,

[06:57] Bob Dobbs: the upper left-hand corner,

[06:58] Bob Dobbs: you have ground.

[07:00] Bob Dobbs: And that's supposed to be in big words,

[07:02] Bob Dobbs: big letters,

[07:03] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[07:04] Bob Dobbs: to stand out.

[07:05] Bob Dobbs: And then to the right of it is figures.

[07:07] Bob Dobbs: So that's supposed to show figure and ground relationships.

[07:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[07:15] Bob Dobbs: exactly.

[07:15] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[07:15] Bob Dobbs: good.

[07:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[07:15] Bob Dobbs: So.

[07:18] Bob Dobbs: And ground,

[07:20] Bob Dobbs: for the bottom-up chart,

[07:21] Bob Dobbs: my first category,

[07:23] Bob Dobbs: well,

[07:23] Bob Dobbs: only category for ground is secret government.

[07:27] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[07:27] Bob Dobbs: what I'm saying there is in the first case,

[07:30] Bob Dobbs: at the time of the phonetic alphabet and papyrus,

[07:32] Bob Dobbs: the secret government was phonetic alphabet.

[07:36] Bob Dobbs: It shaped people more than what bureaucrats are trying to do.

[07:39] Bob Dobbs: You see what I mean?

[07:40] Bob Dobbs: You see?

[07:41] Bob Dobbs: It's a bit of an ironic statement.

[07:44] Bob Dobbs: So what you have is six...

[07:48] Bob Dobbs: types of cultural action,

[07:50] Bob Dobbs: six figures affected by the phonetic alphabet and the papyrus.

[07:55] Bob Dobbs: So the categories from left to right are popular art form,

[07:58] Bob Dobbs: highbrow art form,

[08:00] Bob Dobbs: technological art form,

[08:01] Bob Dobbs: popular archetype,

[08:03] Bob Dobbs: in brackets,

[08:03] Bob Dobbs: user as monarch of,

[08:05] Bob Dobbs: which is an update of McLuhan user as content,

[08:09] Bob Dobbs: and then ghetto,

[08:10] Bob Dobbs: what drops out,

[08:12] Bob Dobbs: anti-environment,

[08:14] Bob Dobbs: and what's a major historical symptom.

[08:17] Bob Dobbs: So these are simple,

[08:20] Bob Dobbs: cliche,

[08:21] Bob Dobbs: famous terms,

[08:22] Bob Dobbs: famous people,

[08:23] Bob Dobbs: famous phenomenon,

[08:25] Bob Dobbs: to give somebody an idea of figure and ground.

[08:27] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[08:27] Bob Dobbs: back in 1985,

[08:29] Bob Dobbs: not many people were skilled in thinking this way,

[08:34] Bob Dobbs: right?

[08:34] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was not being made well-known,

[08:38] Bob Dobbs: kind of suppressed,

[08:39] Bob Dobbs: and there was only a few people out there doing McLuhan or talking about him.

[08:47] Bob Dobbs: So

[08:48] Bob Dobbs: I was on the radio at the time,

[08:50] Bob Dobbs: so I thought I had an audience,

[08:51] Bob Dobbs: so I decided to make some teaching aids.

[08:55] Bob Dobbs: So this is what this is.

[08:58] Bob Dobbs: So at the time of the...

[09:00] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.

[09:00] Cameron McEwen: Let me ask a question here.

[09:02] Cameron McEwen: Am I right that the,

[09:06] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[09:06] Cameron McEwen: if you look at phonetic alphabet and papyrus,

[09:10] Cameron McEwen: and you come across,

[09:11] Cameron McEwen: you have Christ,

[09:12] Cameron McEwen: Plato,

[09:12] Cameron McEwen: and Aristotle,

[09:13] Cameron McEwen: spoken word,

[09:14] Cameron McEwen: tribe,

[09:15] Cameron McEwen: family,

[09:15] Cameron McEwen: and Caesar.

[09:18] Cameron McEwen: The understanding of Christ or Christianity or Plato and Aristotle obviously varies over time.

[09:30] Cameron McEwen: It varies for any one person over time.

[09:35] Cameron McEwen: It can vary within a single text depending on what's being talked about or described.

[09:47] Cameron McEwen: When you use these terms,

[09:50] Cameron McEwen: are you aware that these are sort of hand signals?

[09:56] Cameron McEwen: and are not definitive of something that doesn't change either over time or over interpretation or something?

[10:11] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[10:11] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[10:11] Bob Dobbs: They're meant to be cliches.

[10:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[10:14] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[10:14] Cameron McEwen: Good.

[10:15] Cameron McEwen: Good.

[10:16] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[10:16] Bob Dobbs: I'm taking what people have heard of.

[10:18] Bob Dobbs: Most

[10:19] Bob Dobbs: Westerners know this stuff,

[10:21] Bob Dobbs: North American Europe,

[10:23] Bob Dobbs: back then.

[10:24] Bob Dobbs: They've heard these names,

[10:25] Bob Dobbs: Shakespeare,

[10:25] Bob Dobbs: Francis Bacon,

[10:27] Bob Dobbs: Martin Luther.

[10:29] Bob Dobbs: But you can work with cliches because you're using a ground which is a span of time,

[10:35] Bob Dobbs: several centuries.

[10:37] Bob Dobbs: So it's vast generalization.

[10:41] Bob Dobbs: It's like once Eric McLuhan last interview before his father died in April 1980,

[10:49] Bob Dobbs: he said he was a specialist in generalities.

[10:52] Bob Dobbs: He was being interviewed about his potential of taking over the Cochos,

[10:56] Bob Dobbs: which was closed two months later.

[10:59] Bob Dobbs: So these are generalities,

[11:01] Bob Dobbs: or these are clichés that build to a generality.

[11:06] Bob Dobbs: And I agree with McLuhan.

[11:08] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[11:08] Bob Dobbs: we had so much cultural information from 3,000,

[11:12] Bob Dobbs: 5,000 years.

[11:14] Bob Dobbs: He said you use the percept or the idea that the medium is the mass.

[11:19] Bob Dobbs: He used to cover vast stretches of...

[11:21] Bob Dobbs: time.

[11:24] Bob Dobbs: Great.

[11:24] Bob Dobbs: Are you familiar with that idea he said?

[11:31] Cameron McEwen: I can imagine him saying that.

[11:32] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[11:34] Cameron McEwen: when he talks about an ancient quarrel in modern America,

[11:40] Cameron McEwen: he's obviously talking about something with great duration,

[11:45] Cameron McEwen: starting at least in pre-classical Greece.

[11:50] Cameron McEwen: and coming up to the present time.

[11:52] Cameron McEwen: But as you know,

[11:53] Cameron McEwen: my feeling is that

[11:57] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan real contribution had to do with all at onceness,

[12:01] Cameron McEwen: the big now.

[12:04] Cameron McEwen: And so

[12:05] Cameron McEwen: I prefer to speak about

[12:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan in terms of the categories that don't change,

[12:17] Cameron McEwen: right?

[12:18] Cameron McEwen: And so I'd

[12:18] Cameron McEwen: I see one exercise that we're doing here of trying to sort of correlate my synchronic bias with your diachronic bias.

[12:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[12:30] Cameron McEwen: And

[12:31] Cameron McEwen: I think what we're going to see is that they have very similar motivation.

[12:39] Bob Dobbs: Yep,

[12:40] Bob Dobbs: I think so.

[12:42] Bob Dobbs: So they're cliches.

[12:46] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says the phrase or the operation of the medium over a span of time,

[12:53] Bob Dobbs: he says that in Counterblast.

[12:55] Bob Dobbs: I don't have the page with me right now,

[12:57] Bob Dobbs: but it's interesting.

[12:58] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[12:59] Bob Dobbs: Innis world of 20th century information overload,

[13:03] Bob Dobbs: generalities over huge spans of time are useful.

[13:07] Bob Dobbs: And that was his objective on that level.

[13:11] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[13:11] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[13:11] Bob Dobbs: it could be sequential.

[13:13] Bob Dobbs: he would explain in other areas why the sequential falls away.

[13:17] Bob Dobbs: But the sequential's there,

[13:19] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[13:19] Bob Dobbs: and you've got to use books to talk to most people.

[13:22] Bob Dobbs: So he laid it out in a linear way.

[13:26] Bob Dobbs: So I'm doing that here.

[13:28] Bob Dobbs: So what's interesting is

[13:30] Bob Dobbs: I call Christ a popular art form,

[13:32] Bob Dobbs: and I call Plato and Aristotle highbrow.

[13:35] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[13:35] Bob Dobbs: the educated elites are engaging the ideas of Plato and Aristotle and many other people,

[13:42] Bob Dobbs: but they're the cliche.

[13:43] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan said,

[13:44] Bob Dobbs: anybody in the West,

[13:45] Bob Dobbs: no,

[13:45] Bob Dobbs: Coleridge said,

[13:46] Bob Dobbs: anybody in the West is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian.

[13:49] Bob Dobbs: Remember that quote?

[13:50] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[13:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[13:52] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[13:52] Cameron McEwen: And that was cited by McLuhan many times.

[13:54] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[13:56] Bob Dobbs: So Christ is a popular art form for the educated,

[14:00] Bob Dobbs: the Pharisees,

[14:02] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[14:03] Bob Dobbs: the hypocritical academics.

[14:05] Bob Dobbs: Plato and Aristotle is what they're interested in.

[14:08] Bob Dobbs: Technological art form.

[14:10] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[14:10] Bob Dobbs: I'm showing that.

[14:12] Bob Dobbs: It's going to be a previous environment,

[14:14] Bob Dobbs: a previous technology,

[14:15] Bob Dobbs: a previous ground.

[14:17] Bob Dobbs: So phonetic alphabet for Pyrus is the hidden ground,

[14:21] Bob Dobbs: and so it makes a figure,

[14:22] Bob Dobbs: the spoken word,

[14:24] Bob Dobbs: and that's a previous anti-environment.

[14:27] Bob Dobbs: And the spoken word,

[14:28] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said as art form,

[14:30] Bob Dobbs: was Plato's dialogues.

[14:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[14:34] Bob Dobbs: So these are simple McLuhan points.

[14:36] Bob Dobbs: But it's nice to have it on a chart.

[14:38] Bob Dobbs: So then the popular archetype.

[14:41] Bob Dobbs: And the archetype is anti-environment,

[14:44] Bob Dobbs: but it's gone past art form to archetypal status.

[14:51] Bob Dobbs: And this is from a quote by Howard Gossage.

[14:55] Bob Dobbs: And it's in the first couple of few,

[14:58] Bob Dobbs: ten pages of

[15:01] Bob Dobbs: Hot and Cool,

[15:02] Bob Dobbs: Gerald Stearn's book that came out in 1967.

[15:06] Bob Dobbs: He quotes,

[15:06] Bob Dobbs: or just somehow,

[15:08] Bob Dobbs: maybe it's an essay by Gossage,

[15:10] Bob Dobbs: in the early pages,

[15:11] Bob Dobbs: and he says,

[15:11] Bob Dobbs: first something is the last word,

[15:13] Bob Dobbs: meaning it's new and a novelty and striking,

[15:17] Bob Dobbs: then it becomes a cliché,

[15:18] Bob Dobbs: then it becomes an art form,

[15:20] Bob Dobbs: then it becomes an archetype through use.

[15:23] Bob Dobbs: So.

[15:25] Bob Dobbs: I am presenting the archetype,

[15:28] Bob Dobbs: at the time of Christ,

[15:29] Bob Dobbs: is the tribe,

[15:32] Bob Dobbs: user is monarch of.

[15:34] Bob Dobbs: The tribe is the organization that is at that point confronted with the alphabetized,

[15:45] Bob Dobbs: phonetic alphabetized individual.

[15:48] Bob Dobbs: So it's the new phenomenon,

[15:50] Bob Dobbs: it's the new threat,

[15:51] Bob Dobbs: it's the new novelty.

[15:54] Bob Dobbs: It's up against the archetype of the tribe,

[15:57] Bob Dobbs: which had been around a long time.

[15:59] Bob Dobbs: Okay?

[16:00] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?

[16:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[16:02] Cameron McEwen: so the tribe has the same relationship with phonetic alphabet and papyrus as the spoken word does.

[16:10] Cameron McEwen: Just the spoken word is,

[16:12] Cameron McEwen: as you say,

[16:13] Cameron McEwen: the technological art form,

[16:15] Cameron McEwen: and the tribe is what might be called the social art form.

[16:19] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[16:20] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[16:21] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[16:22] Bob Dobbs: so then the ghetto or the dropout.

[16:25] Bob Dobbs: is the family,

[16:32] Bob Dobbs: which,

[16:34] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[16:34] Bob Dobbs: families are always around,

[16:37] Bob Dobbs: but with the individual becoming a new factor,

[16:43] Bob Dobbs: the family gets lost in the shuttle.

[16:47] Bob Dobbs: So that's why the

[16:51] Bob Dobbs: Christ and the mythology of the Holy Family,

[16:53] Bob Dobbs: either,

[16:53] Bob Dobbs: right?

[16:54] Bob Dobbs: super psychological decentralization of something that is being wrecked.

[17:00] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[17:00] Bob Dobbs: if you look at

[17:02] Bob Dobbs: Fellini's movie Satyricon,

[17:04] Bob Dobbs: any historical movies of Roman era,

[17:07] Bob Dobbs: there's always families being killed,

[17:09] Bob Dobbs: wiped out,

[17:11] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[17:11] Bob Dobbs: for larger,

[17:12] Bob Dobbs: either phonetic goals or industrial,

[17:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[17:16] Bob Dobbs: historical army conquering space goals.

[17:19] Bob Dobbs: Family gets beat up bad.

[17:21] Bob Dobbs: So it's interesting that Christ

[17:24] Bob Dobbs: represented the Holy Family or came out of an idealized situation of the family,

[17:30] Bob Dobbs: right?

[17:30] Bob Dobbs: You get that?

[17:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[17:32] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[17:33] Cameron McEwen: I can add,

[17:36] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[17:36] Cameron McEwen: as an interesting note to that,

[17:38] Cameron McEwen: and that is that when

[17:41] Cameron McEwen: Havelock, Eric Havelock,

[17:43] Cameron McEwen: was teaching in Toronto,

[17:46] Cameron McEwen: which he did from

[17:48] Cameron McEwen: 1929 to 1946,

[17:51] Cameron McEwen: and in 1946 he had one year of overlap.

[17:53] Cameron McEwen: with McLuhan,

[17:55] Cameron McEwen: although

[17:56] Cameron McEwen: Havelock was mostly at Harvard that year as sort of a trial lecturer.

[18:03] Cameron McEwen: But his family remained in Toronto,

[18:05] Cameron McEwen: and Havelock was sort of going back and forth,

[18:08] Cameron McEwen: and he held some public lectures in

[18:12] Cameron McEwen: Toronto, which were influential at least to

[18:17] Cameron McEwen: Ennis, but I think also to McLuhan.

[18:20] Cameron McEwen: Now what's...

[18:22] Cameron McEwen: Interesting to me about 1946 and the relationship of Havelock and McLuhan is that when McLuhan came to Toronto,

[18:36] Cameron McEwen: he came as an historian of Western education,

[18:41] Cameron McEwen: because that's what he had written his PhD thesis on.

[18:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[18:48] Cameron McEwen: He came to St.

[18:49] Cameron McEwen: Michael's and he was in the English department,

[18:53] Cameron McEwen: but that was his specialty.

[18:55] Cameron McEwen: And

[18:56] Cameron McEwen: Havelock specialty in those years was education in

[19:02] Cameron McEwen: Greece from,

[19:03] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[19:04] Cameron McEwen: 525 to

[19:09] Cameron McEwen: 375, something like that.

[19:12] Cameron McEwen: And

[19:14] Cameron McEwen: Havelock had been publishing.

[19:16] Cameron McEwen: this topic for more than 10 years in 1946 he had been going to meetings of the Modern Language Association and had been giving

[19:34] Cameron McEwen: lectures on how education had changed from sort of pre classical Greece

[19:45] Cameron McEwen: to what happened with

[19:47] Cameron McEwen: Plato in the Academy and Aristotle in the Lyceum.

[19:55] Cameron McEwen: So the notion that

[19:59] Cameron McEwen: Havelock put forward is that education up until,

[20:03] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[20:04] Cameron McEwen: 500,

[20:06] Cameron McEwen: or I should say up until around 400,

[20:11] Cameron McEwen: was family-based.

[20:13] Cameron McEwen: and that the way somebody learned about something was up until a certain age,

[20:21] Cameron McEwen: they would learn.

[20:24] Cameron McEwen: what their father was doing.

[20:27] Cameron McEwen: And then,

[20:28] Cameron McEwen: let's say at 15 or something like this,

[20:31] Cameron McEwen: they would go to a related family and they would learn something else.

[20:38] Cameron McEwen: And by going to this other family,

[20:41] Cameron McEwen: they would both learn other skills,

[20:44] Cameron McEwen: but also learn how to change their mind a little bit,

[20:48] Cameron McEwen: get into a different mindset.

[20:50] Cameron McEwen: But everything was family based.

[20:53] Cameron McEwen: And so for Havelock,

[20:54] Cameron McEwen: The big change that was introduced by Plato and by some of the sophists was the idea that there is a kind of general learning that you can get into that isn't family-based.

[21:11] Cameron McEwen: And so,

[21:12] Cameron McEwen: as I see it,

[21:12] Cameron McEwen: that accords very well with your chart here.

[21:16] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[21:16] Cameron McEwen: These,

[21:20] Cameron McEwen: what you're highlighting are things that...

[21:25] Cameron McEwen: had been unconscious up until this time,

[21:29] Cameron McEwen: and now they become conscious in a strange way,

[21:35] Cameron McEwen: where they both intrude on consciousness,

[21:39] Cameron McEwen: but also become relativized.

[21:43] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[21:44] Bob Dobbs: very good.

[21:46] Bob Dobbs: So I'm calling that,

[21:47] Bob Dobbs: it's sort of like part of the obsolescence phase of the tetrad,

[21:50] Bob Dobbs: it's dropout.

[21:52] Bob Dobbs: it up.

[21:55] Bob Dobbs: The obsolescence phase,

[21:56] Bob Dobbs: according to McLuhan,

[21:57] Bob Dobbs: is quite prominent.

[21:59] Bob Dobbs: More and more of something.

[22:00] Bob Dobbs: It's just not constitutive.

[22:02] Bob Dobbs: There's that word.

[22:03] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[22:03] Cameron McEwen: It's losing its hold.

[22:09] Bob Dobbs: Its hold.

[22:09] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.

[22:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[22:12] Cameron McEwen: No,

[22:12] Cameron McEwen: I was just saying that.

[22:14] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[22:14] Bob Dobbs: hold.

[22:14] Bob Dobbs: H-O-L-D.

[22:16] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[22:16] Bob Dobbs: sir.

[22:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[22:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[22:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[22:18] Bob Dobbs: it's losing its hold,

[22:19] Bob Dobbs: and it's kind of vulnerable.

[22:21] Bob Dobbs: It's a ghetto.

[22:22] Bob Dobbs: kind of forgotten socially.

[22:25] Bob Dobbs: So then the symptom,

[22:26] Bob Dobbs: the historical cliche,

[22:29] Bob Dobbs: symptoms plural I have,

[22:31] Bob Dobbs: another figure is some phenomenon,

[22:34] Bob Dobbs: and geez,

[22:34] Bob Dobbs: everybody knows about Caesar,

[22:36] Bob Dobbs: right?

[22:36] Bob Dobbs: So Caesar is a new kind of leader for the space-based societies using Innocence categories,

[22:45] Bob Dobbs: like Rome,

[22:46] Bob Dobbs: where they conquered space with Rhodes and

[22:50] Bob Dobbs: Papyrus.

[22:57] Bob Dobbs: And they were a new phenomenon with the roads and papyrus against the traditional time-based societies like Sumerian,

[23:11] Bob Dobbs: Babylon,

[23:12] Bob Dobbs: and these civilizations that didn't spread over space,

[23:17] Bob Dobbs: supposedly,

[23:18] Bob Dobbs: very much.

[23:19] Bob Dobbs: They stayed within the walls.

[23:21] Bob Dobbs: the priest-controlled time.

[23:24] Bob Dobbs: So

[23:25] Bob Dobbs: Caesar's a new symptom for the time of Christ and the phonetic alphabet and papyrus.

[23:30] Bob Dobbs: So once you see what I'm doing,

[23:32] Bob Dobbs: it's pretty straightforward.

[23:34] Bob Dobbs: What's interesting may be what I pick.

[23:36] Bob Dobbs: Popular art form,

[23:37] Bob Dobbs: Shakespeare.

[23:39] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[23:39] Bob Dobbs: Shakespeare himself,

[23:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[23:41] Bob Dobbs: it's argued over whether he wrote the plays or he just produced them on the fly as a playwright in London.

[23:50] Bob Dobbs: So the sophisticate of his time was Francis Bacon,

[23:54] Bob Dobbs: the philosopher,

[23:56] Bob Dobbs: the grammarian,

[23:57] Bob Dobbs: all kinds of things,

[23:58] Bob Dobbs: the scientist.

[24:00] Bob Dobbs: He's a big deal.

[24:01] Bob Dobbs: He's even the Channer of the Exchequer.

[24:05] Bob Dobbs: I think he is.

[24:05] Cameron McEwen: I believe so.

[24:07] Bob Dobbs: So he's the intellectual elite,

[24:11] Bob Dobbs: and he's up against

[24:12] Bob Dobbs: Shakespeare.

[24:14] Bob Dobbs: The technological art form is...

[24:17] Bob Dobbs: that medieval form,

[24:18] Bob Dobbs: the manuscript that's been going on for centuries.

[24:22] Bob Dobbs: It is the technological art form at the time of the anti-environment of print.

[24:28] Bob Dobbs: So it is translated,

[24:31] Bob Dobbs: affected,

[24:33] Bob Dobbs: altered,

[24:34] Bob Dobbs: and also more of them are available with print for people.

[24:38] Bob Dobbs: And then the village is starting to lose its

[24:46] Bob Dobbs: It's ground influence because people are traveling.

[24:53] Bob Dobbs: They have new visual markers.

[24:56] Bob Dobbs: Accompanying that to move across the oceans and end up attacking other villages by other races who are not at the beginning of industrialization with the printing press.

[25:10] Bob Dobbs: And so the dropout in that case is the tribe,

[25:13] Bob Dobbs: and a symptom is Martin Luther King.

[25:16] Bob Dobbs: Martin Luther,

[25:16] Bob Dobbs: rather,

[25:17] Bob Dobbs: founds the Protestant religion.

[25:19] Bob Dobbs: So do we need to go through them all?

[25:21] Bob Dobbs: Do you see the pattern?

[25:23] Bob Dobbs: It's pretty simple.

[25:24] Cameron McEwen: No,

[25:25] Cameron McEwen: I can see it,

[25:27] Cameron McEwen: and it does agree with my figure around the spectrum quite closely.

[25:35] Cameron McEwen: And

[25:37] Cameron McEwen: I didn't understand that before.

[25:39] Cameron McEwen: I suspected that it might be the case.

[25:41] Cameron McEwen: But now that

[25:42] Cameron McEwen: I can see that it very much is the case,

[25:48] Cameron McEwen: you're dealing with shifts over time that…

[25:55] Cameron McEwen: need to be accounted for by anything like what I call chemistry.

[26:04] Cameron McEwen: In chemistry,

[26:05] Cameron McEwen: it's not enough to say that,

[26:10] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[26:10] Cameron McEwen: water is hydrogen and oxygen.

[26:14] Cameron McEwen: You also have to be able to say what happens when you put water and iron together.

[26:21] Cameron McEwen: And that's

[26:22] Cameron McEwen: That has a side that has to do with formulas that are always the case,

[26:29] Cameron McEwen: but it also has to do with a progression in time.

[26:33] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[26:34] Cameron McEwen: And so you can't separate the formulaic,

[26:41] Cameron McEwen: which I tend to talk about,

[26:43] Cameron McEwen: from the progress through time,

[26:45] Cameron McEwen: which you can talk about.

[26:48] Cameron McEwen: So I think they go together well.

[26:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[26:50] Bob Dobbs: and I use the word formula in the next phase.

[26:55] Bob Dobbs: I point that out.

[26:56] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[26:57] Bob Dobbs: so what

[26:58] Bob Dobbs: I sort of what's clever is who I pick.

[27:02] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[27:02] Bob Dobbs: Dickens,

[27:03] Bob Dobbs: well-known phenomenon,

[27:05] Bob Dobbs: a new kind of phenomenon in the newspaper age,

[27:08] Bob Dobbs: his popular level of success.

[27:12] Bob Dobbs: But the intellectuals are Darwin and Marx.

[27:15] Bob Dobbs: They shape people.

[27:16] Bob Dobbs: They're new.

[27:18] Bob Dobbs: And the printed book becomes a novel or an art form.

[27:24] Bob Dobbs: The town drops out.

[27:25] Bob Dobbs: Rather,

[27:27] Bob Dobbs: you're from a town.

[27:28] Bob Dobbs: Towns are cliche.

[27:30] Bob Dobbs: But the village drops out.

[27:32] Bob Dobbs: And you have a symptom.

[27:35] Bob Dobbs: The inhuman effect of industry is starting to bother people.

[27:41] Bob Dobbs: So luddites are a famous response.

[27:45] Bob Dobbs: Also symptomatic of...

[27:46] Bob Dobbs: failure to stop their failed resistance.

[27:51] Bob Dobbs: So you have to know who Al Capone is in the early part of the 20th century.

[27:56] Bob Dobbs: You have to know who Einstein and Freud and James Joyce are to get that one.

[28:00] Bob Dobbs: But the mafia is a phenomenon,

[28:03] Bob Dobbs: a decentralization that the telephone anti-environment makes possible.

[28:08] Bob Dobbs: And they bypass the literate,

[28:10] Bob Dobbs: respectable legal institutions.

[28:13] Bob Dobbs: So I like having Al Capone in there.

[28:15] Bob Dobbs: Now...

[28:16] Bob Dobbs: Now that's the global village.

[28:18] Bob Dobbs: The global village is

[28:19] Bob Dobbs: 2,000 years old or more.

[28:22] Bob Dobbs: We don't realize how much people traveled

[28:25] Bob Dobbs: 2,000 years ago,

[28:26] Bob Dobbs: all over the place.

[28:28] Bob Dobbs: You know about that,

[28:29] Bob Dobbs: right?

[28:29] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[28:30] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[28:30] Bob Dobbs: It's a global village.

[28:32] Cameron McEwen: Even before.

[28:35] Cameron McEwen: Nowadays,

[28:36] Cameron McEwen: we're learning that the Neanderthal,

[28:39] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[28:42] Cameron McEwen: traveled from

[28:44] Cameron McEwen: Europe to China.

[28:46] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[28:48] Cameron McEwen: And that is maybe 50,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago.

[28:53] Cameron McEwen: Human beings having a nomadic lifestyle is sort of at the very foundation of things.

[29:03] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[29:04] Bob Dobbs: So

[29:07] Bob Dobbs: I'm probing McLuhan,

[29:09] Bob Dobbs: taking his cliche that the global village,

[29:11] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[29:11] Bob Dobbs: is in the 20th century and said,

[29:12] Bob Dobbs: no,

[29:14] Bob Dobbs: it's way back there.

[29:15] Bob Dobbs: It gets more intense through the centuries,

[29:19] Bob Dobbs: but a big shift happens with the global theater.

[29:22] Bob Dobbs: So,

[29:23] Bob Dobbs: even though television is starting to be used in the late 40s,

[29:29] Bob Dobbs: early 50s in the United States,

[29:32] Bob Dobbs: the effect of the global theater is coming because people are starting to fantasize about space.

[29:36] Bob Dobbs: There's meetings with enthusiasts.

[29:39] Bob Dobbs: My friend Dr.

[29:40] Bob Dobbs: Beter was one of the leaders in these meetings.

[29:44] Bob Dobbs: He got to meet in the

[29:45] Bob Dobbs: 50s, he was born in 1921,

[29:48] Bob Dobbs: so he's 30 and 51.

[29:51] Bob Dobbs: In his

[29:51] Bob Dobbs: 30s, he got to meet

[29:52] Bob Dobbs: Werner Von Braun and some of the guys in Huntsville,

[29:56] Bob Dobbs: Alabama that become important with the space movement in the late 50s,

[30:01] Bob Dobbs: early 60s.

[30:02] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[30:03] Bob Dobbs: So the effects of the satellite start to lurk,

[30:08] Bob Dobbs: start to be there.

[30:10] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying,

[30:11] Bob Dobbs: look,

[30:12] Bob Dobbs: we're in a new context when you look at television and computer and satellite.

[30:16] Bob Dobbs: So that's my innovation on McLuhan cliche pattern.

[30:22] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[30:23] Bob Dobbs: Cliche McLuhan.

[30:25] Bob Dobbs: People don't even know about global theater in the

[30:27] Bob Dobbs: 60s, not until the early 70s do they start to hear about it,

[30:30] Bob Dobbs: if at all.

[30:31] Bob Dobbs: So

[30:33] Bob Dobbs: I'm showing the mosaic cross-cultural action of things,

[30:39] Bob Dobbs: the interplay of figures due to the pressures of the ground.

[30:44] Bob Dobbs: So television comes in,

[30:45] Bob Dobbs: and you've got more and more phenomena.

[30:49] Bob Dobbs: What is happening?

[30:50] Bob Dobbs: You've got movies and radio,

[30:52] Bob Dobbs: so you're going to have two popular art forms,

[30:55] Bob Dobbs: Elvis and Fellini,

[30:57] Bob Dobbs: as examples.

[30:58] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?

[31:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[31:02] Cameron McEwen: Let me just ask about Global Village and Global Theater.

[31:08] Cameron McEwen: Could we say that the Global Village has nature as ground and the Global Theater has moved beyond nature to a anti-environment?

[31:19] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[31:20] Bob Dobbs: that's what I mean.

[31:21] Bob Dobbs: The Global Theater,

[31:22] Bob Dobbs: that's what I'm saying,

[31:23] Bob Dobbs: it's thought about in the

[31:24] Bob Dobbs: 50s before 1957 when Russia puts the Sputnik up.

[31:29] Bob Dobbs: People are...

[31:31] Bob Dobbs: Their imaginations are moving out into the solar system.

[31:35] Bob Dobbs: And that's maybe,

[31:37] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan would say,

[31:38] Bob Dobbs: that's the effect of radio.

[31:40] Bob Dobbs: Because you are in a strange new membrane with the anti-environment.

[31:43] Bob Dobbs: You're not even in terrestrial scenarios.

[31:47] Bob Dobbs: Where are you with radio?

[31:49] Bob Dobbs: So people you can see filling in,

[31:51] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[31:52] Bob Dobbs: I'm quite expansive.

[31:55] Bob Dobbs: I'm in Wisconsin.

[31:56] Bob Dobbs: I can hear radio all over the world in shortwave.

[31:59] Bob Dobbs: Awareness is pushed out,

[32:01] Bob Dobbs: and then I might start looking at solar system more than I did,

[32:05] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[32:05] Bob Dobbs: 100 years before.

[32:07] Bob Dobbs: And that gets into science fiction.

[32:08] Bob Dobbs: So the effects are preceding the causes.

[32:10] Bob Dobbs: And you're going to see that developed in later charts,

[32:14] Bob Dobbs: the effects preceding causes.

[32:16] Bob Dobbs: But existentialism was a highbrow philosophy.

[32:23] Bob Dobbs: Sartre,

[32:23] Bob Dobbs: Giedion Sartre,

[32:24] Bob Dobbs: the French writer.

[32:27] Bob Dobbs: On the technological level,

[32:28] Bob Dobbs: you've got two becoming art forms,

[32:29] Bob Dobbs: radio and movies.

[32:31] Bob Dobbs: Definitely radio as an art form is teen music,

[32:36] Bob Dobbs: rock and roll,

[32:37] Bob Dobbs: right?

[32:37] Bob Dobbs: A whole new audience is created out of anti-environment that's sort of sidelined by television.

[32:45] Bob Dobbs: And movies become an art form,

[32:47] Bob Dobbs: especially in France.

[32:50] Bob Dobbs: Remember all those great French directors of the

[32:55] Bob Dobbs: 1560s?

[32:56] Bob Dobbs: Truffaut,

[32:56] Bob Dobbs: Godard,

[32:58] Bob Dobbs: they thought Jerry Lewis was an amazing art form.

[33:01] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[33:04] Bob Dobbs: It was a joke to Americans,

[33:05] Bob Dobbs: but the French were bringing a different sensibility and a bit outside of the process,

[33:10] Bob Dobbs: so they looked at movies differently and they moved into art form.

[33:13] Bob Dobbs: And the nation is dropping out as the globalists,

[33:18] Bob Dobbs: the internationalists,

[33:19] Bob Dobbs: start working the whole planet.

[33:22] Bob Dobbs: The Rockefellers are...

[33:25] Bob Dobbs: flirting with the

[33:26] Bob Dobbs: Soviet Union and other things all over the place.

[33:31] Bob Dobbs: The city becomes the ghetto,

[33:33] Bob Dobbs: and you can see it.

[33:38] Bob Dobbs: The ghetto becomes even more ghetto in cities.

[33:42] Bob Dobbs: So the stress of the allure of cities is fading.

[33:50] Bob Dobbs: New York had its heyday up to about...

[33:53] Bob Dobbs: Late 60s when the youth culture started happening,

[33:56] Bob Dobbs: that polluted the world from the adult's point of view.

[33:59] Bob Dobbs: That polluted New York City,

[34:00] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean?

[34:01] Bob Dobbs: These kids walking around with hardly any clothes on and dirty and barefoot.

[34:08] Bob Dobbs: And

[34:09] Bob Dobbs: I've talked to many people,

[34:10] Bob Dobbs: I was in New York and then,

[34:12] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[34:12] Bob Dobbs: everybody looked at those images in the

[34:14] Bob Dobbs: 50s, they'd go to New York and they'd wear nice hats and dresses and suits.

[34:18] Bob Dobbs: It was a big deal to show up and go to a...

[34:21] Bob Dobbs: a film or the opera or symphony,

[34:23] Bob Dobbs: right?

[34:24] Bob Dobbs: It was middle class going to church kind of stuff,

[34:28] Bob Dobbs: but it's the cultural church.

[34:30] Bob Dobbs: And New York had a big magnet in the

[34:34] Bob Dobbs: 1560s as the middle classes were starting to get the abundance of the

[34:38] Bob Dobbs: 50s after the

[34:40] Bob Dobbs: GI Bill in the States.

[34:42] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I'm communicating here.

[34:48] Bob Dobbs: the nation

[34:50] Bob Dobbs: is becoming threatened and the city has become a dropout.

[34:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay?

[34:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[34:58] Cameron McEwen: You could actually see that when you went to New York.

[35:02] Cameron McEwen: That was the time that I was going to Princeton just outside of New York.

[35:06] Cameron McEwen: I spent a lot of time in New York.

[35:09] Cameron McEwen: It was just amazing to see the deterioration of Harlem and the Bronx,

[35:19] Cameron McEwen: only a couple miles away from the United Nations Upper East Side,

[35:25] Cameron McEwen: fabulous wealth.

[35:28] Cameron McEwen: Midtown.

[35:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[35:29] Cameron McEwen: you could see it.

[35:29] Cameron McEwen: see the city falling apart.

[35:32] Cameron McEwen: Brooklyn was falling apart.

[35:33] Cameron McEwen: There was no investment in the outer Burroughs at all.

[35:39] Cameron McEwen: And so the city at once represented this magnet you're talking about,

[35:45] Cameron McEwen: but anybody that actually looked at what was going on with the

[35:49] Cameron McEwen: Al-Ghazali could see that it was disintegrating.

[35:55] Bob Dobbs: And McCool commented on it.

[35:56] Bob Dobbs: He said the city was obsolete.

[36:00] Bob Dobbs: At best,

[36:01] Bob Dobbs: they would be museums for people to play in.

[36:07] Bob Dobbs: And he did say in some letters there would be conflict between,

[36:10] Bob Dobbs: in particular in New York City,

[36:11] Bob Dobbs: between the Jews and the

[36:14] Bob Dobbs: African Americans.

[36:15] Bob Dobbs: He saw that coming,

[36:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[36:17] Bob Dobbs: in these tribal conflicts due to money evaporating and all the effects of the...

[36:24] Bob Dobbs: the actual computer environment coming in.

[36:26] Bob Dobbs: So

[36:28] Bob Dobbs: I'm showing you have to know a little bit about history of what you should know to understand why the city is a ghetto.

[36:37] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[36:37] Bob Dobbs: this totally fits what I'm doing there.

[36:43] Bob Dobbs: And then McCarthyism is the paranoia.

[36:46] Bob Dobbs: It's almost like McCarthyism is radio content in a Anti-environment.

[36:52] Bob Dobbs: You know what I'm saying?

[36:53] Bob Dobbs: It's radio paranoia,

[36:55] Bob Dobbs: which was not so conscious in the radio era.

[36:58] Bob Dobbs: Everybody was paranoid and they didn't know it.

[37:00] Bob Dobbs: But it became a figure in the

[37:03] Bob Dobbs: 50s as TV came in.

[37:05] Bob Dobbs: Follow what I'm saying?

[37:06] Bob Dobbs: That's a symptom.

[37:07] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[37:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[37:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[37:09] Bob Dobbs: So,

[37:10] Bob Dobbs: and then you have the first half of the 60s is Beatles,

[37:13] Bob Dobbs: Norman Mailer.

[37:14] Bob Dobbs: The second half of the 60s is Psychedelia.

[37:16] Bob Dobbs: That's Marshall McLuhan.

[37:18] Bob Dobbs: You have black and white TV in the first half of the

[37:21] Bob Dobbs: 60s is...

[37:23] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[37:25] Bob Dobbs: it's an art form.

[37:27] Bob Dobbs: Color TV is making it an art form.

[37:30] Bob Dobbs: But I'm including Color TV as an art form because it's affecting people rapidly.

[37:35] Bob Dobbs: And then people,

[37:36] Bob Dobbs: psychedelics is taking the color mosaics of Color TV and putting it in your brain,

[37:44] Bob Dobbs: right?

[37:45] Bob Dobbs: So that's playing with Color TV inside the ground of the computer.

[37:51] Bob Dobbs: And then the planet.

[37:52] Bob Dobbs: becomes what people think they're really living in.

[37:56] Bob Dobbs: User is monarch of means that your sensibility is,

[38:01] Bob Dobbs: you're thinking,

[38:02] Bob Dobbs: I can go to any part of the world with a jet plane.

[38:05] Bob Dobbs: And the computer is being brought into all kinds of advanced technological corporations.

[38:13] Bob Dobbs: So Planet is the archetype.

[38:16] Bob Dobbs: The nation is a dropout.

[38:18] Bob Dobbs: And you have the figure,

[38:19] Bob Dobbs: JFK assassination.

[38:21] Bob Dobbs: I like to say that part of the reason Kennedy was assassinated,

[38:25] Bob Dobbs: there was all kinds of reasons,

[38:27] Bob Dobbs: was being on TV and having the power of that with his press conferences.

[38:32] Bob Dobbs: And being charismatic,

[38:34] Bob Dobbs: no one had seen that kind of political charisma or power.

[38:38] Bob Dobbs: And I think it threatened the Big Brother people.

[38:41] Bob Dobbs: They said,

[38:42] Bob Dobbs: this Kennedy is getting on a level of influence that goes beyond what Big Brother thought it was controlling.

[38:49] Bob Dobbs: So that's the figure.

[38:51] Bob Dobbs: It's a TV effect and a computer effect,

[38:54] Bob Dobbs: the JFK assassination.

[38:56] Bob Dobbs: Isn't that clever?

[38:58] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[38:59] Bob Dobbs: And then

[39:01] Bob Dobbs: 10 years later,

[39:02] Bob Dobbs: Watergate.

[39:03] Bob Dobbs: And you see,

[39:04] Bob Dobbs: it's obvious,

[39:05] Bob Dobbs: the popular art form is punk rock,

[39:07] Bob Dobbs: New Wave,

[39:08] Bob Dobbs: Saturday Night Live,

[39:09] Bob Dobbs: the TV show,

[39:10] Bob Dobbs: and cults.

[39:11] Bob Dobbs: Cults is like trying to retrieve for the chemical body human scale,

[39:15] Bob Dobbs: community.

[39:16] Bob Dobbs: You know what I'm saying?

[39:18] Bob Dobbs: After the...

[39:19] Bob Dobbs: you know global phenomena of television and computers the computer is uh you know the interior landscape being enhanced uh so the club of rome you know what they are they were the european intellectuals who started the fear of the ecology and pollution and all that do you know about them right oh yeah sure that was ayer that

[39:41] Cameron McEwen: was what robert ehrlich at stanford the guy that was um talking about that stuff Bye.

[39:49] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[39:49] Cameron McEwen: Limits to Growth was his book.

[39:51] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[39:52] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[39:52] Bob Dobbs: that was The Meadows.

[39:54] Bob Dobbs: The Meadows,

[39:55] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[39:55] Bob Dobbs: did

[39:56] Bob Dobbs: Limits to Growth,

[39:57] Bob Dobbs: but maybe Ehrlich was an advisor on it or something.

[40:00] Bob Dobbs: But the Club of Rome,

[40:01] Bob Dobbs: when they came to recruit McLuhan to the ideology,

[40:04] Bob Dobbs: he says,

[40:05] Bob Dobbs: no,

[40:05] Bob Dobbs: you guys are the Club of Ruin.

[40:08] Bob Dobbs: R-U-I-N.

[40:11] Bob Dobbs: Did you know about that?

[40:13] Cameron McEwen: I've seen something like that in his stuff,

[40:17] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[40:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[40:19] Bob Dobbs: So he wasn't fooled by it.

[40:20] Bob Dobbs: He knew that ecology and pollution overpopulation were figures,

[40:25] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[40:26] Bob Dobbs: There was a ground effect that's going on that the elites of Europe,

[40:31] Bob Dobbs: the Club of Rome,

[40:32] Bob Dobbs: the guy

[40:33] Bob Dobbs: Agnelli who ran

[40:34] Bob Dobbs: Fiat car company,

[40:36] Bob Dobbs: he was a major guy in it.

[40:39] Bob Dobbs: It turned out later it was the P2,

[40:41] Bob Dobbs: a lot of secret societies,

[40:45] Bob Dobbs: agents in Italy were involved with this Club of Rome.

[40:53] Bob Dobbs: The Club of Life was Lyndon LaRouche's reaction to the Club of Rome.

[40:58] Bob Dobbs: So nobody really knows about the Club of Life,

[41:01] Bob Dobbs: but that was a little point I put in there,

[41:03] Bob Dobbs: because LaRouche was spreading around the globe his journalism.

[41:08] Bob Dobbs: his network,

[41:09] Bob Dobbs: so they were the club of life.

[41:10] Bob Dobbs: And then genetic engineering is a technological art form.

[41:14] Bob Dobbs: It's the interior landscape of the body,

[41:17] Bob Dobbs: the physical body.

[41:18] Bob Dobbs: And,

[41:18] Bob Dobbs: of course,

[41:19] Bob Dobbs: see,

[41:20] Bob Dobbs: it's quite mechanical,

[41:21] Bob Dobbs: what I'm showing,

[41:22] Bob Dobbs: but McLuhan is mechanical on the introductory level.

[41:26] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[41:26] Bob Dobbs: you just take the previous anti-environment and stick them into the technological art form,

[41:30] Bob Dobbs: right?

[41:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[41:32] Bob Dobbs: And the solar system becomes...

[41:35] Bob Dobbs: That's an interesting pattern I'm pointing out.

[41:36] Bob Dobbs: Solar system becomes a ghetto.

[41:38] Bob Dobbs: You start to have science fiction movies of no more romance of outer space.

[41:47] Bob Dobbs: Going to the moon,

[41:48] Bob Dobbs: there's battles with the moon.

[41:49] Bob Dobbs: 2001 comes in in 68.

[41:54] Bob Dobbs: Some of the movies in the 70s and 80s showed quite a corrupted lifestyle in spaceships.

[42:05] Bob Dobbs: colonies.

[42:06] Bob Dobbs: You have,

[42:07] Bob Dobbs: what was it,

[42:07] Bob Dobbs: Solaris?

[42:09] Bob Dobbs: That famous Russian movie,

[42:11] Bob Dobbs: Solaris,

[42:12] Bob Dobbs: I think it's called.

[42:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[42:13] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[42:13] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[42:14] Bob Dobbs: 1972,

[42:16] Bob Dobbs: where,

[42:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[42:17] Bob Dobbs: other novelistic phenomena are being introduced into space,

[42:23] Bob Dobbs: right?

[42:24] Bob Dobbs: Just the problems of Earth start happening out in space.

[42:27] Bob Dobbs: It's no longer the romantic fantasy.

[42:31] Bob Dobbs: So that's the solar system as...

[42:34] Bob Dobbs: as a popular archetype of,

[42:37] Bob Dobbs: and the planet becomes a ghetto,

[42:39] Bob Dobbs: and that's ecology.

[42:41] Bob Dobbs: And then you have Watergate.

[42:42] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[42:43] Bob Dobbs: the final one,

[42:44] Bob Dobbs: the second coming,

[42:46] Bob Dobbs: that's an idiosyncratic point,

[42:50] Bob Dobbs: for some of what I mean,

[42:51] Bob Dobbs: but not all of it.

[42:54] Bob Dobbs: The second coming is this incredible implosion of the global theater.

[43:02] Bob Dobbs: All kinds of fantasies happen,

[43:04] Bob Dobbs: all kinds of movements happen in the 70s and 80s.

[43:10] Bob Dobbs: Remember Pope John Paul

[43:13] Bob Dobbs: II becomes a big phenomenon in the

[43:17] Bob Dobbs: 80s.

[43:18] Bob Dobbs: He's seen as a second coming for the Catholic religion.

[43:23] Bob Dobbs: He's got youth all over the world interested,

[43:25] Bob Dobbs: renewed fanaticism about involvement in the icon of the Catholic Church.

[43:32] Bob Dobbs: And Reagan is doing that in politics.

[43:35] Bob Dobbs: And,

[43:35] Bob Dobbs: of course,

[43:35] Bob Dobbs: they're also very controversial characters,

[43:38] Bob Dobbs: right?

[43:38] Bob Dobbs: They threaten people.

[43:41] Bob Dobbs: So,

[43:42] Bob Dobbs: Furry Lindt is a play I made in 1984,

[43:48] Bob Dobbs: Who's Forgotten Furry Lindt?

[43:50] Bob Dobbs: And that was based on the attack on Larry Flint,

[43:55] Bob Dobbs: who created Hustler magazine.

[43:57] Bob Dobbs: And he had been...

[43:59] Bob Dobbs: shot in 1978 because he had bought the Los Angeles Free Press,

[44:04] Bob Dobbs: put a big issue out of investigating who killed Kennedy,

[44:08] Bob Dobbs: and that led to him being shot in 1978.

[44:12] Bob Dobbs: So he was paralyzed in a wheelchair for five years and in pain.

[44:17] Bob Dobbs: But then he had surgery,

[44:18] Bob Dobbs: which made him impotent,

[44:20] Bob Dobbs: but he no longer had pain,

[44:22] Bob Dobbs: so he had new energies to do stuff.

[44:24] Bob Dobbs: So he really started,

[44:26] Bob Dobbs: he was still making lots of money anyways.

[44:28] Bob Dobbs: So he decided to create a competitor to Time magazine called The

[44:34] Bob Dobbs: Rebel or The Rebel.

[44:36] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember.

[44:37] Bob Dobbs: And I knew

[44:39] Bob Dobbs: May Brussel at the time,

[44:40] Bob Dobbs: and Larry Flint met May and said,

[44:42] Bob Dobbs: Wow,

[44:42] Bob Dobbs: you're the journalist I want,

[44:44] Bob Dobbs: and made her editor of the magazine.

[44:47] Bob Dobbs: This is 1983.

[44:48] Bob Dobbs: But there was other jealous people.

[44:51] Bob Dobbs: struggles within the magazine.

[44:54] Bob Dobbs: So

[44:55] Bob Dobbs: May never became the editor-in-chief because of other people.

[45:00] Bob Dobbs: But the point is that what happened to Larry Flint is he decided to run in late 83 for president.

[45:07] Bob Dobbs: He was arrested,

[45:09] Bob Dobbs: charged with this and that,

[45:10] Bob Dobbs: and put in a

[45:11] Bob Dobbs: Rochester, I think it was,

[45:13] Bob Dobbs: mental hospital for almost like political prisoners in America.

[45:18] Bob Dobbs: And he got

[45:20] Bob Dobbs: side swipes all through 84,

[45:22] Bob Dobbs: and other people came in and took over his organization,

[45:25] Bob Dobbs: and Hustler Magazine was never the same.

[45:27] Bob Dobbs: So

[45:28] Bob Dobbs: Larry Flint,

[45:29] Bob Dobbs: I changed to furry lint.

[45:31] Bob Dobbs: And what I have,

[45:33] Bob Dobbs: what I mean by that is charismatic people,

[45:37] Bob Dobbs: you could think of,

[45:38] Bob Dobbs: what's that guy,

[45:39] Bob Dobbs: Sharpton in New York City,

[45:43] Bob Dobbs: definitely cult leaders,

[45:44] Bob Dobbs: rock stars,

[45:46] Bob Dobbs: movie stars.

[45:48] Bob Dobbs: People who have a huge impact and get political,

[45:55] Bob Dobbs: they are like lint on the global theater's fabric or clothes and easily flicked off.

[46:04] Bob Dobbs: So you have a lot of...

[46:05] Cameron McEwen: Looks like Malcolm X.

[46:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[46:08] Bob Dobbs: He's an early furry lint.

[46:10] Bob Dobbs: And even John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.

[46:13] Bob Dobbs: Anybody who starts to become charismatic and looks like he's...

[46:18] Bob Dobbs: upsetting the establishment.

[46:19] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan in his

[46:22] Bob Dobbs: Forces Hydro magazine 1973,

[46:26] Bob Dobbs: that really great interview with him,

[46:28] Bob Dobbs: he talks about the Kennedy assassination and how foolish it is to try to change the establishment or threaten the establishment.

[46:35] Bob Dobbs: He understood that those kind of humanist movements were not really going to work anymore.

[46:41] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?

[46:43] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[46:43] Cameron McEwen: Sure,

[46:43] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[46:44] Bob Dobbs: So that's the furry lint syndrome.

[46:47] Bob Dobbs: Furry lint.

[46:48] Bob Dobbs: And the art form that people think that they're part of,

[46:53] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan talks about in Take Today,

[46:56] Bob Dobbs: the TV viewer starts to think of themselves as a king or queen in all that he surveys.

[47:02] Bob Dobbs: It's just getting so abundant and convenient for people to have access to great amounts of entertainment that they're beginning to accept and live and be molded by the masked man idea.

[47:17] Bob Dobbs: The instantaneous access to everything.

[47:20] Bob Dobbs: McClellan later called the super angel.

[47:22] Bob Dobbs: So you have the furry lint.

[47:25] Bob Dobbs: It's the intellectual art form.

[47:30] Bob Dobbs: Some kind of educated person thinks they've got the key to everything and starts getting politically motivated.

[47:40] Bob Dobbs: But it's up against the popular effects of the second coming,

[47:44] Bob Dobbs: which are Ronald Reagan and Pope John the Paul.

[47:47] Bob Dobbs: The second.

[47:48] Bob Dobbs: So the second coming,

[47:51] Bob Dobbs: according to the Evergreens,

[47:56] Bob Dobbs: the entities channeled through Michael Blake Read that I engaged through the 80s and 90s and

[48:02] Bob Dobbs: 2000s. And I always like to point out McLuhan family went to the Evergreens one time in 1976.

[48:10] Bob Dobbs: They described the second coming as a time of perpetual change.

[48:14] Bob Dobbs: And I thought that was really useful.

[48:16] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[48:17] Bob Dobbs: definitely Finnegans Wake and McLuhan are pointing at a time of perpetual change.

[48:21] Bob Dobbs: And so that was another meaning of second coming I was including.

[48:26] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?

[48:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[48:30] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[48:31] Cameron McEwen: I'm following what you're saying,

[48:34] Cameron McEwen: and

[48:35] Cameron McEwen: I like the dynamic of the thing,

[48:38] Cameron McEwen: right?

[48:41] Cameron McEwen: What you do is follow changes over time.

[48:47] Cameron McEwen: where the changes sometimes represent an attempted solution and other times represent a dissolution.

[48:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[49:00] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[49:01] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[49:01] Cameron McEwen: You follow that dialectic,

[49:03] Cameron McEwen: and I think that's right on.

[49:08] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[49:08] Bob Dobbs: And,

[49:09] Bob Dobbs: Furry Lindt,

[49:12] Bob Dobbs: once you had the global theater,

[49:15] Bob Dobbs: If someone becomes famous,

[49:17] Bob Dobbs: my God,

[49:18] Bob Dobbs: they're over the whole planet.

[49:19] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[49:20] Bob Dobbs: Caesar never had that.

[49:21] Bob Dobbs: Nobody had that before.

[49:22] Bob Dobbs: It's a new phenomenon of second coming mythical proportions,

[49:28] Bob Dobbs: right?

[49:29] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[49:29] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[49:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[49:31] Bob Dobbs: And then they're up against the discarnate super angel,

[49:34] Bob Dobbs: the masked man,

[49:35] Bob Dobbs: who's still passive.

[49:38] Bob Dobbs: Having gotten into the interactive digital,

[49:41] Bob Dobbs: really,

[49:41] Bob Dobbs: is starting to,

[49:42] Bob Dobbs: but...

[49:43] Bob Dobbs: It's the cable TV era.

[49:45] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[49:47] Bob Dobbs: So the other...

[49:48] Cameron McEwen: There's some humor to this,

[49:50] Cameron McEwen: right?

[49:50] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[49:50] Cameron McEwen: they...

[49:52] Cameron McEwen: man,

[49:54] Cameron McEwen: a.k.a.

[49:55] Cameron McEwen: angel,

[49:57] Cameron McEwen: in reality is just somebody that needs to buy a certain deodorant or a certain soap or something.

[50:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[50:07] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[50:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[50:09] Cameron McEwen: So,

[50:10] Cameron McEwen: good.

[50:12] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[50:12] Bob Dobbs: So,

[50:13] Bob Dobbs: I have the universe is art form,

[50:16] Bob Dobbs: or people think they're living in it,

[50:18] Bob Dobbs: and that's the Star Wars movies.

[50:22] Bob Dobbs: Star Trek,

[50:24] Bob Dobbs: also the New Age,

[50:26] Bob Dobbs: the Shirley MacLaine phenomenon of people stoned on ayahuasca or something,

[50:33] Bob Dobbs: getting cosmic visions of themselves,

[50:36] Bob Dobbs: right?

[50:37] Bob Dobbs: Cosmic narcissism,

[50:38] Bob Dobbs: you could say.

[50:39] Bob Dobbs: That's part of a popular second coming.

[50:42] Bob Dobbs: And outer space is a complete ghetto.

[50:45] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember some of the movies.

[50:48] Bob Dobbs: I can see them,

[50:49] Bob Dobbs: but...

[50:49] Bob Dobbs: There's all kinds of disastrous scenarios in outer space,

[50:53] Bob Dobbs: right,

[50:54] Bob Dobbs: going beyond the solar system.

[50:58] Bob Dobbs: It's a dangerous place.

[51:00] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[51:00] Bob Dobbs: you have Watergate in the satellite phase,

[51:03] Bob Dobbs: the penultimate level,

[51:04] Bob Dobbs: but then in second coming you've got the Battle of the Harvest Moon.

[51:07] Bob Dobbs: Nobody knows what that is.

[51:10] Bob Dobbs: One or two people on the planet knew Dr.

[51:11] Bob Dobbs: Beater,

[51:12] Bob Dobbs: but it was actually an event that Beater maintained happened.

[51:18] Bob Dobbs: The

[51:19] Bob Dobbs: Rockefellers, who had always had a secret alliance with the Bolsheviks throughout the 20th century,

[51:25] Bob Dobbs: and he was involved in that levels of intelligence,

[51:27] Bob Dobbs: so he claimed to know about this through his experience,

[51:32] Bob Dobbs: they started to get paranoid about each other in the mid-70s.

[51:40] Bob Dobbs: So this is the beginning of the global theater,

[51:44] Bob Dobbs: the global membrane.

[51:45] Bob Dobbs: Somebody could hijack the whole thing.

[51:48] Bob Dobbs: you know and so it's getting too tiny and so the rockefellers and the soviet unions come out of the global village the electric phase they go at each other it's a race to the moon and the russians get there first or the soviet union and they put their particle beam up there and they knock out some of the rockefeller satellites there's

[52:08] Bob Dobbs: a famous battle september 27 1977 that's the battle of the harvest moon.

[52:16] Bob Dobbs: So it's part of the universe or even outer space.

[52:21] Bob Dobbs: You're getting corporate battles that we saw in the 19th and 20th century are now starting to happen on the moon.

[52:32] Bob Dobbs: Okay?

[52:32] Bob Dobbs: So that's a symptom.

[52:34] Bob Dobbs: The action has moved off the planet for secret power struggles.

[52:40] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[52:41] Cameron McEwen: right.

[52:42] Cameron McEwen: So let me just try to describe.

[52:46] Cameron McEwen: from my point of view,

[52:48] Cameron McEwen: what you're doing with something like the Second Coming.

[52:52] Cameron McEwen: The line before that,

[52:54] Cameron McEwen: the satellite line,

[52:56] Cameron McEwen: has precipitated certain possibilities and certain problems.

[53:02] Cameron McEwen: And so what you have is with certain people,

[53:07] Cameron McEwen: you have a positive or negative.

[53:12] Cameron McEwen: realization of new possibilities like

[53:16] Cameron McEwen: Ronald Reagan and

[53:18] Cameron McEwen: Pope John Paul.

[53:20] Cameron McEwen: On the positive side and on the negative side,

[53:23] Cameron McEwen: the furry lint type people.

[53:26] Cameron McEwen: And then for the ordinary guy,

[53:30] Cameron McEwen: the precipitate is mass man,

[53:33] Cameron McEwen: angelic man,

[53:37] Cameron McEwen: Mass seems to be very large,

[53:40] Cameron McEwen: but actually it's

[53:42] Cameron McEwen: very small.

[53:44] Cameron McEwen: There's a great difference between how the masked man conceives himself and what he actually is.

[53:53] Cameron McEwen: And that'll be part of problems that get precipitated to the next line,

[53:59] Cameron McEwen: apparently.

[54:00] Cameron McEwen: So then with the universe,

[54:05] Cameron McEwen: you have a...

[54:10] Cameron McEwen: both a positive and negative result from the satellite line of what thought can do,

[54:22] Cameron McEwen: right?

[54:22] Cameron McEwen: So you have a positive realization you were talking about with

[54:26] Cameron McEwen: Shirley MacLaine and folks like that is a kind of universal vision that somehow includes them.

[54:37] Cameron McEwen: And then on the negative side,

[54:39] Cameron McEwen: you have a universal vision that doesn't include people.

[54:44] Cameron McEwen: And both of those are going to precipitate problems in the next...

[54:51] Cameron McEwen: I guess that'll be the global membrane.

[54:54] Cameron McEwen: And so as I see the way you're looking at history here,

[55:02] Cameron McEwen: technology is one way of seeing how problems become concrete in history,

[55:13] Cameron McEwen: but at the same time precipitate out problems that are going to have to be solved.

[55:20] Cameron McEwen: on both the technological and non-technological level at the next phase.

[55:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[55:27] Bob Dobbs: so exactly.

[55:30] Bob Dobbs: And so what I did was didactic,

[55:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[55:34] Bob Dobbs: doing basic McLuhan,

[55:36] Bob Dobbs: but showing what he was really doing,

[55:41] Bob Dobbs: the interacting of all these different institutions,

[55:43] Bob Dobbs: which were the past institutions.

[55:46] Bob Dobbs: That was his later definition of the medium.

[55:48] Bob Dobbs: So I'm showing...

[55:49] Cameron McEwen: the figures under the figures is the medium that's being affected by the ground uh the new figure even though it's a ground effect like television um but one way of one way of saying uh what you were doing in the in the mid

[56:05] Cameron McEwen: 80s is that you were trying to capture in a slightly different form how McLuhan mind worked yeah i was showing a portrait of McLuhan

[56:16] Bob Dobbs: And,

[56:16] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[56:16] Bob Dobbs: it's a very informed,

[56:18] Bob Dobbs: up-to-date,

[56:18] Bob Dobbs: and accurate presentation of how McLuhan looked at things.

[56:24] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[56:24] Bob Dobbs: But nobody understood it.

[56:27] Bob Dobbs: They were doing a lot of explaining of it.

[56:32] Bob Dobbs: But after I explained it,

[56:33] Bob Dobbs: people could get it.

[56:34] Bob Dobbs: But it's funny,

[56:35] Bob Dobbs: they couldn't see it.

[56:37] Bob Dobbs: They weren't used to looking at something that would be figure and ground.

[56:41] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what I mean?

[56:42] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[56:43] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[56:43] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[56:43] Cameron McEwen: it's the...

[56:46] Cameron McEwen: the great problem that we're talking about here still exists today in spades.

[56:56] Cameron McEwen: And it is that people are completely unable to see their own identity,

[57:06] Cameron McEwen: their own way of looking at the world as a figure.

[57:11] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[57:13] Cameron McEwen: As something that isn't.

[57:15] Cameron McEwen: fixed or stable.

[57:18] Cameron McEwen: And that's why getting tenure or getting recognition from your quote-unquote colleagues is so important.

[57:30] Cameron McEwen: These things act as sheet anchors against the storm of life.

[57:35] Cameron McEwen: And so what you were able to do in the mid-80s is that you were able to

[57:42] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.

[57:44] Cameron McEwen: Understand the dialectic of figure and ground in a way that didn't threaten you.

[57:53] Cameron McEwen: And that's exactly what people still haven't understood.

[57:58] Bob Dobbs: That it's not threatening,

[58:00] Bob Dobbs: you're saying?

[58:00] Bob Dobbs: I don't threaten people.

[58:02] Cameron McEwen: The dynamic of figure and ground that's always going on and that's always undermining everything is either.

[58:11] Cameron McEwen: can be taken as so threatening as to not be recognized at all,

[58:16] Cameron McEwen: which is what most McLuhan scholarship demonstrates.

[58:21] Cameron McEwen: Yep.

[58:22] Cameron McEwen: Or if you expose yourself to it and allow yourself to live through it,

[58:32] Cameron McEwen: you could come out the other side with a new sort of equanimity,

[58:39] Cameron McEwen: A new way of...

[58:41] Cameron McEwen: going with the flow,

[58:42] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[58:44] Bob Dobbs: I like to say a new poise.

[58:47] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[58:48] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan talked about poise a lot,

[58:50] Cameron McEwen: of course.

[58:52] Cameron McEwen: And that poise gives you a certain humor.

[58:59] Cameron McEwen: There's an absurd aspect to all of these changes that go on.

[59:11] Cameron McEwen: It's like the stock characters of the

[59:15] Cameron McEwen: Italian theater that keep thinking that what they're doing is original and new,

[59:23] Cameron McEwen: but they themselves aren't original and new.

[59:28] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[59:29] Bob Dobbs: correct.

[59:30] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[59:31] Bob Dobbs: I put in Second Coming.

[59:33] Bob Dobbs: That's a perverse,

[59:37] Bob Dobbs: eccentric thing to put in as a technological ground.

[59:40] Bob Dobbs: But I actually thought I knew something by that.

[59:45] Bob Dobbs: I thought I had an important new way to look at religious experience.

[59:50] Bob Dobbs: due to technological factors.

[59:52] Bob Dobbs: And the global membrane merging that was going on for all intents and purposes,

[59:57] Bob Dobbs: that's a...

[59:58] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan said in Playboy,

[1:00:00] Bob Dobbs: we have a technological version of the body of Christ,

[1:00:04] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:00:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:00:07] Cameron McEwen: I don't think he was very serious there.

[1:00:10] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:00:10] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:00:10] Bob Dobbs: he said it was ethereal and a sham,

[1:00:13] Bob Dobbs: but...

[1:00:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:00:14] Cameron McEwen: absolutely,

[1:00:15] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:00:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:00:16] Bob Dobbs: but the popular...

[1:00:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:00:17] Bob Dobbs: 300 years before,

[1:00:19] Bob Dobbs: whatever people,

[1:00:19] Bob Dobbs: they fantasized Jesus coming back and everybody transformed in some world.

[1:00:24] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know that was going to happen to them electrically,

[1:00:27] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:00:32] Bob Dobbs: So I considered what I did there a Postman music opera.

[1:00:38] Bob Dobbs: I considered that an incredible art form what I made there,

[1:00:42] Bob Dobbs: a modern painting,

[1:00:43] Bob Dobbs: a modern mathematical formula.

[1:00:46] Bob Dobbs: especially as it interrelates with the other chart,

[1:00:50] Bob Dobbs: top-down identity.

[1:00:51] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:00:52] Bob Dobbs: This was useful,

[1:00:54] Bob Dobbs: and maybe at first it has to be it requires some sophisticated training and perception,

[1:01:00] Bob Dobbs: but

[1:01:01] Bob Dobbs: I would see this as important.

[1:01:03] Bob Dobbs: It should be in every high school class,

[1:01:06] Bob Dobbs: senior year.

[1:01:08] Cameron McEwen: Tell me this,

[1:01:08] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[1:01:09] Cameron McEwen: When you were working on this stuff,

[1:01:12] Cameron McEwen: were you working on something that was past?

[1:01:16] Cameron McEwen: in your own biography or were you working on something a little bit like an artist in a studio where this was sort of an ongoing processing in your own mind?

[1:01:32] Bob Dobbs: A lot of it was what I knew,

[1:01:35] Bob Dobbs: so it was rearview mirror in my mind,

[1:01:38] Bob Dobbs: but it led to new developments that I didn't foresee.

[1:01:43] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:01:43] Cameron McEwen: So it had a...

[1:01:45] Cameron McEwen: And putting down what you knew,

[1:01:48] Cameron McEwen: you were able to precipitate out stuff that you had to know.

[1:01:52] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:01:53] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:01:54] Bob Dobbs: did you say hadn't known or had to know?

[1:01:56] Cameron McEwen: Had to know,

[1:01:57] Cameron McEwen: that you were being led to know.

[1:02:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:02:01] Bob Dobbs: And the lucky people who got these charts,

[1:02:06] Bob Dobbs: they profited from it,

[1:02:07] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:02:08] Bob Dobbs: because they could see it.

[1:02:10] Bob Dobbs: They were living it and they didn't know it.

[1:02:11] Bob Dobbs: It was pretty obvious once it was explained.

[1:02:13] Bob Dobbs: And they,

[1:02:14] Bob Dobbs: wow,

[1:02:14] Bob Dobbs: look at this.

[1:02:15] Bob Dobbs: Pretty comprehensive.

[1:02:16] Bob Dobbs: So it would enter their conversations with people.

[1:02:18] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:02:19] Bob Dobbs: they'd cite these

[1:02:20] Bob Dobbs: Mailer and McLuhan as examples.

[1:02:25] Cameron McEwen: Were people doing that in a way that you thought was correct?

[1:02:31] Cameron McEwen: Or were they taking this and largely distorting it,

[1:02:36] Cameron McEwen: using it as markers where you had intended something dynamic and they were using it as something fixed?

[1:02:45] Bob Dobbs: They were using it.

[1:02:48] Bob Dobbs: They were novices.

[1:02:49] Bob Dobbs: Nobody really was good at it.

[1:02:52] Cameron McEwen: That's what I thought.

[1:02:55] Bob Dobbs: And nobody stuck with it.

[1:02:56] Bob Dobbs: They were too distracted by second coming implosions and new versions of the second coming.

[1:03:02] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:03:02] Bob Dobbs: people couldn't stay attentive on anything.

[1:03:06] Bob Dobbs: I call it metaphysical promiscuity.

[1:03:08] Bob Dobbs: That's what people,

[1:03:09] Bob Dobbs: the baby boomers,

[1:03:10] Bob Dobbs: created.

[1:03:11] Bob Dobbs: Metaphysical promiscuity.

[1:03:13] Bob Dobbs: Hopping from one...

[1:03:14] Bob Dobbs: inspiring intellectual the mind is art form as

[1:03:18] Bob Dobbs: William Empson said and people jumping from one mind pattern to another right but without understanding the process right totally somnambulistic yeah okay so that's

[1:03:34] Bob Dobbs: the beginning so then in the

[1:03:37] Bob Dobbs: 80s there was starting to be interest in conspiracies

[1:03:44] Bob Dobbs: thinking.

[1:03:45] Bob Dobbs: Conspiracy theory.

[1:03:48] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't called conspiracy theory in the 60s and

[1:03:51] Bob Dobbs: 70s. It's called journalism.

[1:03:54] Bob Dobbs: But of course,

[1:03:56] Bob Dobbs: Barry Nevitt did a tetrad on news,

[1:03:58] Bob Dobbs: and it flips into the news behind the news.

[1:04:02] Bob Dobbs: That is the result of the global theater.

[1:04:07] Bob Dobbs: So the news behind the news is what people get interested in,

[1:04:10] Bob Dobbs: and then that becomes a conspiracy.

[1:04:14] Bob Dobbs: research or conspiracy journalism or actual historical proven theories,

[1:04:22] Bob Dobbs: phenomenon that,

[1:04:25] Bob Dobbs: of course,

[1:04:26] Bob Dobbs: get popularized because the mind was,

[1:04:29] Bob Dobbs: in a way,

[1:04:29] Bob Dobbs: obsolete.

[1:04:30] Bob Dobbs: It got popularized in the

[1:04:31] Bob Dobbs: 80s, and especially in the Internet.

[1:04:34] Bob Dobbs: It was just more rampant pattern recognition was really what the phenomenon was.

[1:04:39] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan nailed it in the 70s with that phrase.

[1:04:43] Bob Dobbs: He called it the increasing cognitive thrills of pattern recognition.

[1:04:47] Bob Dobbs: And that became,

[1:04:48] Bob Dobbs: on the Internet,

[1:04:49] Bob Dobbs: conspiracy theory.

[1:04:51] Bob Dobbs: So anyways,

[1:04:52] Bob Dobbs: because this was happening in the 80s in Toronto around me and the information I dealt with,

[1:05:01] Bob Dobbs: I made a technological chart showing the ground of figures of conspiracy.

[1:05:09] Cameron McEwen: Are we moving here to the top down?

[1:05:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:05:13] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[1:05:14] Cameron McEwen: One question.

[1:05:16] Cameron McEwen: I noticed that the bottom-up chart has secret government as its ground,

[1:05:23] Cameron McEwen: and then the top-down chart also has secret government as its ground.

[1:05:30] Cameron McEwen: Does secret government in these cases,

[1:05:36] Cameron McEwen: does that mean something like the hidden dynamic?

[1:05:46] Cameron McEwen: that is driving the changes,

[1:05:49] Cameron McEwen: something like that?

[1:05:50] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:05:50] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:05:51] Bob Dobbs: The secret government in the bottom up,

[1:05:54] Bob Dobbs: which is the figures are the cultural heroes in the West,

[1:05:59] Bob Dobbs: the constitutive factor is not a person,

[1:06:03] Bob Dobbs: it's technology that's conspiring against the medium or the traditional setup of a society or culture.

[1:06:13] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying it's a technological secret government.

[1:06:15] Bob Dobbs: You are shaped and governed by the media of your time.

[1:06:20] Bob Dobbs: So it's a pun,

[1:06:21] Bob Dobbs: I guess you'd say,

[1:06:22] Bob Dobbs: on secret government.

[1:06:23] Bob Dobbs: But the cliché meaning of secret bureaucrats running the show is what is meant in the top-down chart.

[1:06:33] Bob Dobbs: It's the power bureaucracy in the West.

[1:06:37] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:06:38] Bob Dobbs: I run through...

[1:06:39] Bob Dobbs: almost the same aspects of the bottom-up chart,

[1:06:44] Bob Dobbs: the same periods,

[1:06:45] Bob Dobbs: but with humans being the ground,

[1:06:50] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:06:50] Bob Dobbs: So at the time of Rome,

[1:06:52] Bob Dobbs: the Illuminati.

[1:06:53] Bob Dobbs: The time of the printing press,

[1:06:55] Bob Dobbs: Venice.

[1:06:56] Bob Dobbs: Time of industrialism,

[1:06:58] Bob Dobbs: the family trust,

[1:06:59] Bob Dobbs: or what's called in Italy the fondo,

[1:07:02] Bob Dobbs: the fund.

[1:07:04] Bob Dobbs: And then you get the global village moving into global theater.

[1:07:09] Bob Dobbs: the League of Nations,

[1:07:12] Bob Dobbs: and then that's redone as the United Nations,

[1:07:15] Bob Dobbs: once you get into full-blown global theater.

[1:07:18] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:07:18] Bob Dobbs: note in 1960,

[1:07:21] Bob Dobbs: when man is becoming both figure and ground,

[1:07:26] Bob Dobbs: it becomes technology.

[1:07:30] Bob Dobbs: The secret government slips back into the bottom-up chart,

[1:07:36] Bob Dobbs: but it's more...

[1:07:38] Bob Dobbs: geared towards a military operation,

[1:07:41] Bob Dobbs: military control,

[1:07:43] Bob Dobbs: laser beam.

[1:07:44] Bob Dobbs: And that's going to lead to the Battle of the Harvest Moon in 1977.

[1:07:49] Bob Dobbs: And then Masked Man is a military operation.

[1:07:52] Bob Dobbs: And the Second Coming is a military operation.

[1:07:55] Bob Dobbs: You see,

[1:07:57] Bob Dobbs: it's people hijacking what technology does,

[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: and they actually become the technology.

[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: That's what's happening.

[1:08:05] Bob Dobbs: global theater they're hijacking the technology and behind their backs the technology is hijacking them right and to keep it within bureaucratic power um because on the bottom up chart technologies are affecting all over all kinds of society

[1:08:22] Bob Dobbs: and different media and different paths and different futures the laser beam is a particular technology services in 1960 and it's a military operation.

[1:08:34] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said by the

[1:08:35] Bob Dobbs: 1970s, the elites,

[1:08:37] Bob Dobbs: and he was always talking to the triggermen,

[1:08:40] Bob Dobbs: he called them.

[1:08:41] Bob Dobbs: He knew there was a,

[1:08:42] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:08:42] Bob Dobbs: secret government.

[1:08:43] Bob Dobbs: There had to be.

[1:08:44] Bob Dobbs: It was a practical necessity,

[1:08:46] Bob Dobbs: government by committee,

[1:08:47] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:08:48] Bob Dobbs: just the way the dynamics of somnambulistic economy requires that.

[1:08:54] Bob Dobbs: So he said in the early

[1:08:59] Bob Dobbs: 70s, what was I saying?

[1:09:00] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[1:09:01] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[1:09:01] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:09:02] Bob Dobbs: TV was a threat at the time of,

[1:09:05] Bob Dobbs: say,

[1:09:05] Bob Dobbs: JFK,

[1:09:05] Bob Dobbs: 1960.

[1:09:07] Bob Dobbs: It threatened the internationalists.

[1:09:12] Bob Dobbs: That's the term for them in the 20s and

[1:09:14] Bob Dobbs: 30s.

[1:09:15] Bob Dobbs: The cliché Rockefeller,

[1:09:16] Bob Dobbs: Morgan,

[1:09:18] Bob Dobbs: Bolshevik,

[1:09:18] Bob Dobbs: say.

[1:09:18] Bob Dobbs: He says in

[1:09:20] Bob Dobbs: 1970 that the elites realized,

[1:09:23] Bob Dobbs: wow,

[1:09:23] Bob Dobbs: this television saves us a lot of effort to propagate...

[1:09:30] Bob Dobbs: propagate like Big Brother and make people believe certain ideologies,

[1:09:34] Bob Dobbs: certain ideas.

[1:09:35] Bob Dobbs: They don't need to believe in anything as long as we keep giving them anti-environment to stimulate them or massage them.

[1:09:43] Bob Dobbs: And he says that in that 1957 article,

[1:09:46] Bob Dobbs: God Making Machines.

[1:09:48] Bob Dobbs: He said we move from...

[1:09:50] Cameron McEwen: the social control through morals and mythologies to norm functioning cultural norm function remember that yeah yeah that's actually uh 54 uh that's a review um in commonweal um and what's interesting about what you're saying there is that uh McLuhan had been talking about advertising in

[1:10:14] Cameron McEwen: those terms for a long time since at least.

[1:10:21] Bob Dobbs: 1947.

[1:10:22] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[1:10:22] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:10:22] Bob Dobbs: 43,

[1:10:23] Bob Dobbs: 44,

[1:10:24] Bob Dobbs: I think meeting Lewis got him into it at St.

[1:10:27] Bob Dobbs: Louis.

[1:10:27] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.

[1:10:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:10:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:10:30] Cameron McEwen: Certainly in the

[1:10:32] Cameron McEwen: 40s,

[1:10:33] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, in large part,

[1:10:36] Cameron McEwen: I guess,

[1:10:37] Cameron McEwen: through Lewis,

[1:10:39] Cameron McEwen: was trying to think through how thought was being controlled by

[1:10:50] Cameron McEwen: the illusion of thought.

[1:10:54] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:10:56] Bob Dobbs: Not by people.

[1:10:57] Bob Dobbs: Not by people.

[1:10:59] Cameron McEwen: Pardon me?

[1:11:00] Bob Dobbs: Not being controlled,

[1:11:01] Bob Dobbs: not by people.

[1:11:04] Bob Dobbs: Being controlled by cartoons and ads and,

[1:11:07] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:11:07] Bob Dobbs: media phenomena.

[1:11:08] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[1:11:09] Cameron McEwen: right,

[1:11:09] Cameron McEwen: right.

[1:11:10] Cameron McEwen: But the ostensible message of Time magazine or a

[1:11:19] Cameron McEwen: the advertisements,

[1:11:21] Cameron McEwen: et cetera,

[1:11:22] Cameron McEwen: was how much in charge you are.

[1:11:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:11:25] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:11:26] Cameron McEwen: So as you were being led around by the nose,

[1:11:30] Cameron McEwen: the ring in your nose was what a great,

[1:11:34] Cameron McEwen: intelligent,

[1:11:35] Cameron McEwen: independent being you are.

[1:11:38] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:11:39] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:11:40] Bob Dobbs: in Culture Is Our Business,

[1:11:41] Bob Dobbs: he has some,

[1:11:43] Bob Dobbs: like a kind of a truck driver guy.

[1:11:46] Bob Dobbs: who probably didn't get beyond high school,

[1:11:48] Bob Dobbs: he's got a tuxedo on and he's going to the opera.

[1:11:51] Bob Dobbs: It's the Culture Is Our Business theme,

[1:11:53] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean?

[1:11:54] Bob Dobbs: He's putting on the aristocratic airs of the educated of the 19th century and it's what he does when he goes on a date or something.

[1:12:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:12:05] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:12:06] Bob Dobbs: There's an image of that particular guy in Culture Is Our Business in one of the ads.

[1:12:11] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[1:12:12] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:12:14] Bob Dobbs: now how do we get on to that?

[1:12:15] Bob Dobbs: what were we talking about?

[1:12:18] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:12:18] Bob Dobbs: about

[1:12:19] Bob Dobbs: 50, now,

[1:12:20] Bob Dobbs: the Sense-making Machines is 57.

[1:12:23] Bob Dobbs: What is he written in 54 that goes into cultural norm functioning?

[1:12:29] Cameron McEwen: The Sense-making Machines essay was 1954.

[1:12:33] Cameron McEwen: You have the wrong year there.

[1:12:35] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:12:37] Bob Dobbs: What about,

[1:12:39] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:12:39] Bob Dobbs: Project Subliminal?

[1:12:42] Bob Dobbs: That's maybe,

[1:12:44] Cameron McEwen: that's 57.

[1:12:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:12:46] Cameron McEwen: I think so.

[1:12:46] Cameron McEwen: That was in the Canadian Forum.

[1:12:49] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:12:50] Bob Dobbs: And he has five.

[1:12:52] Bob Dobbs: He asks,

[1:12:53] Bob Dobbs: what is running the show here?

[1:12:55] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:12:57] Bob Dobbs: national myths.

[1:12:58] Bob Dobbs: Is it national myth-making,

[1:13:00] Bob Dobbs: collective phobia,

[1:13:01] Bob Dobbs: cultural norm functioning,

[1:13:03] Bob Dobbs: or individual sensation?

[1:13:05] Bob Dobbs: Those were the four in that article.

[1:13:08] Bob Dobbs: I think it was that article.

[1:13:10] Bob Dobbs: But

[1:13:11] Bob Dobbs: Sense-making machines,

[1:13:12] Bob Dobbs: I thought that was 57.

[1:13:13] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:13:15] Bob Dobbs: Same time as Catholic Humanism.

[1:13:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:13:17] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:13:17] Cameron McEwen: In 1953 and 1954,

[1:13:22] Cameron McEwen: he published,

[1:13:24] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:13:25] Cameron McEwen: four different articles and reviews in Commonweal.

[1:13:31] Cameron McEwen: One of them was Sight,

[1:13:32] Bob Dobbs: Sound,

[1:13:32] Bob Dobbs: and Fury,

[1:13:33] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:13:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:13:34] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:13:35] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:13:37] Cameron McEwen: Commonweal is a Catholic magazine,

[1:13:40] Cameron McEwen: and his...

[1:13:42] Cameron McEwen: Catholic humanism lecture was given at St.

[1:13:45] Cameron McEwen: Joseph's in Hartford,

[1:13:47] Cameron McEwen: and so McClellan in 1954 was making an attempt to kind of establish his credentials in the Catholic community,

[1:14:01] Cameron McEwen: but at the same time kind of attacking that community.

[1:14:06] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:14:08] Cameron McEwen: And it was sort of a failed venture.

[1:14:11] Cameron McEwen: He gave it up.

[1:14:16] Bob Dobbs: I wonder if he started it again in the mid-70s,

[1:14:19] Bob Dobbs: started to complain about Gnosticism.

[1:14:22] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:14:23] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:14:23] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:14:24] Cameron McEwen: he was complaining about Gnosticism right at that time in 53,

[1:14:27] Cameron McEwen: 54.

[1:14:29] Cameron McEwen: So his letters to

[1:14:33] Cameron McEwen: Eric Goodwin,

[1:14:33] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:14:35] Cameron McEwen: are explicitly about that.

[1:14:37] Cameron McEwen: And he also has some letters to Lewis.

[1:14:40] Cameron McEwen: about Gnosticism and then in his review of Kenner book on Lewis in 1955.

[1:14:50] Cameron McEwen: his definitive statement on

[1:14:52] Cameron McEwen: Gnosticism, which ends by saying,

[1:14:56] Cameron McEwen: let us go and rejoin the one.

[1:15:01] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:15:01] Bob Dobbs: and that's Eric Ivins,

[1:15:03] Bob Dobbs: who was a bit blurred out from my hearing,

[1:15:06] Bob Dobbs: so it's V-O-E-G-E-L-I-N,

[1:15:09] Bob Dobbs: something like that.

[1:15:10] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:15:11] Bob Dobbs: right,

[1:15:11] Cameron McEwen: right.

[1:15:12] Cameron McEwen: So the German pronunciation is Ivins.

[1:15:15] Cameron McEwen: Ivins.

[1:15:16] Cameron McEwen: That's why it's even blurred,

[1:15:17] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:15:18] Cameron McEwen: In English,

[1:15:19] Cameron McEwen: we have a hard time with the old umlaut in German.

[1:15:23] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:15:24] Cameron McEwen: Like Hölderlin.

[1:15:25] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:15:26] Bob Dobbs: So what you were just...

[1:15:27] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:15:27] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:15:28] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:15:28] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:15:28] Bob Dobbs: he doesn't talk about Nazism too much in the 60s,

[1:15:30] Bob Dobbs: early 70s.

[1:15:31] Bob Dobbs: But by the mid-70s,

[1:15:34] Bob Dobbs: he's talking about it in interviews again.

[1:15:36] Bob Dobbs: I have a few interviews where he brings it up.

[1:15:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:15:38] Cameron McEwen: and talking about the value of life and anti-abortion and all this stuff.

[1:15:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:15:44] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:15:45] Cameron McEwen: So he...

[1:15:46] Cameron McEwen: It was kind of another wave of trying to reestablish a tie between his work and the church.

[1:15:55] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[1:15:57] Bob Dobbs: And he had just been named,

[1:15:58] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:15:59] Bob Dobbs: an advisor on communication media or something in 73 by

[1:16:03] Bob Dobbs: Rome. So he had to talk their language a little more.

[1:16:10] Bob Dobbs: So we're looking at the top-down chart.

[1:16:14] Bob Dobbs: You can see we've got figures,

[1:16:16] Bob Dobbs: but not as many as the bottom-up,

[1:16:19] Bob Dobbs: because it's the bureaucrat world.

[1:16:22] Bob Dobbs: So the popular government,

[1:16:24] Bob Dobbs: or front,

[1:16:25] Bob Dobbs: for the elite,

[1:16:26] Bob Dobbs: which is secret,

[1:16:28] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:16:29] Bob Dobbs: Rome at the time of Christ,

[1:16:30] Bob Dobbs: House of Habsburg at the time of the printing press,

[1:16:34] Bob Dobbs: Britain in the 19th century,

[1:16:37] Bob Dobbs: and then America,

[1:16:39] Bob Dobbs: the Rockefellers in the...

[1:16:42] Bob Dobbs: and the Morgans in the

[1:16:44] Bob Dobbs: 20s.

[1:16:45] Bob Dobbs: So you have a technological government at the same time.

[1:16:49] Bob Dobbs: The spoken word is a control factor for bureaucrats.

[1:16:56] Bob Dobbs: You've got to believe one religion or talk up one god and can't talk about others.

[1:17:01] Bob Dobbs: They started to police it,

[1:17:03] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:17:04] Bob Dobbs: That's the effect of the phonetic alphabet.

[1:17:08] Bob Dobbs: And then the printing press leads to...

[1:17:12] Bob Dobbs: The government of manuscript.

[1:17:15] Bob Dobbs: Now note this is a bit behind.

[1:17:18] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:17:18] Bob Dobbs: the technological government at the time of industrialism is the previous technology,

[1:17:28] Bob Dobbs: which was ground once,

[1:17:30] Bob Dobbs: the printed book.

[1:17:31] Bob Dobbs: Now this gets into science.

[1:17:34] Bob Dobbs: Why science takes over?

[1:17:37] Bob Dobbs: Because it's the...

[1:17:42] Bob Dobbs: the rigidification of visual space.

[1:17:47] Bob Dobbs: McClellan says that,

[1:17:50] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:17:50] Bob Dobbs: when a anti-environment comes in,

[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: the previous owners,

[1:17:53] Bob Dobbs: they freeze on the controls.

[1:17:56] Bob Dobbs: These are media that are becoming frozen for policing actions by the elites.

[1:18:05] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying there?

[1:18:07] Bob Dobbs: Technological government.

[1:18:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:18:09] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:18:11] Cameron McEwen: And these things are subject to a strange dynamic themselves.

[1:18:17] Cameron McEwen: So the spoken word is,

[1:18:23] Cameron McEwen: you might say,

[1:18:25] Cameron McEwen: throughout the

[1:18:26] Cameron McEwen: Roman Empire,

[1:18:28] Cameron McEwen: you have commands and laws issued in Latin.

[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:18:33] Cameron McEwen: And the possibility of this.

[1:18:40] Cameron McEwen: according to

[1:18:41] Cameron McEwen: Ennis is paper and the availability of papyrus.

[1:18:48] Cameron McEwen: So you have in each one of these technologies you have the utilization of a technology that's known that has the seeds within it overthrowing

[1:19:03] Cameron McEwen: itself.

[1:19:05] Bob Dobbs: Overthrowing itself did you say?

[1:19:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:19:08] Cameron McEwen: overthrowing itself.

[1:19:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:19:10] Cameron McEwen: So the spoken word is actually a government of the written word.

[1:19:20] Cameron McEwen: And the manuscript in 1500 is actually the...

[1:19:31] Bob Dobbs: Government.

[1:19:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:19:33] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:19:34] Cameron McEwen: the multiplication of written stuff.

[1:19:37] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:19:38] Cameron McEwen: That already has printing built into it.

[1:19:44] Cameron McEwen: Printing has actually already started by 1500.

[1:19:49] Cameron McEwen: And so,

[1:19:51] Cameron McEwen: although it seems like you have governments by reams of paper that are going around,

[1:20:00] Cameron McEwen: actually you have a government that is subject to overthrow by the technology that is sort of hidden inside how you're governing.

[1:20:16] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[1:20:18] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:20:19] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says mechanical bride.

[1:20:20] Bob Dobbs: Why does a journalist have charisma?

[1:20:23] Bob Dobbs: You remember that statement or question?

[1:20:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:20:26] Bob Dobbs: And why are we involved,

[1:20:27] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:20:28] Bob Dobbs: fascinated by the activities or role of the journalist?

[1:20:32] Bob Dobbs: That's probably,

[1:20:33] Bob Dobbs: when I put these things together,

[1:20:35] Bob Dobbs: I've got quotes from McLuhan in my mind.

[1:20:38] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:20:39] Bob Dobbs: And that quote is why newspaper.

[1:20:43] Bob Dobbs: And people were fascinated because the journalist was becoming a new kind of a government.

[1:20:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:20:50] Bob Dobbs: On the top-down bureaucratic control level.

[1:20:54] Bob Dobbs: So you have in the

[1:20:57] Bob Dobbs: 40s and 50s increasing censorship of radio movies.

[1:21:02] Bob Dobbs: In the

[1:21:03] Bob Dobbs: 60s, television has stopped from being live.

[1:21:08] Bob Dobbs: That was a new kind of control.

[1:21:10] Bob Dobbs: And the computer,

[1:21:13] Bob Dobbs: hmm,

[1:21:14] Bob Dobbs: what would have been?

[1:21:16] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:21:16] Bob Dobbs: certainly the idea.

[1:21:19] Bob Dobbs: Before 1984,

[1:21:20] Bob Dobbs: where the famous Apple ad announces the computer now is free for you to whoop the asses of IBM.

[1:21:29] Bob Dobbs: But in the

[1:21:30] Bob Dobbs: 70s, people thought,

[1:21:31] Bob Dobbs: in the late 60s,

[1:21:32] Bob Dobbs: they thought that they were being controlled.

[1:21:34] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[1:21:35] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan had that line,

[1:21:36] Bob Dobbs: don't findle,

[1:21:37] Bob Dobbs: fold,

[1:21:38] Bob Dobbs: or mutilate.

[1:21:40] Bob Dobbs: People thought that the computer environment somehow was not necessarily watching them,

[1:21:46] Bob Dobbs: but monitoring them.

[1:21:48] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:21:49] Bob Dobbs: This is the new image of government.

[1:21:54] Bob Dobbs: And then in the second coming,

[1:21:56] Bob Dobbs: you have a battle.

[1:21:58] Bob Dobbs: If some mythical entity actually showed up on the skyline like a hologram and was beaming there over everybody,

[1:22:08] Bob Dobbs: there might be arguments over whether it was a UFO or a hologramic projection on the sky.

[1:22:14] Bob Dobbs: There'd be all kinds of arguments over what the hell is this phenomenon.

[1:22:18] Bob Dobbs: if it showed up as a power dynamic,

[1:22:21] Bob Dobbs: someone that everybody,

[1:22:22] Bob Dobbs: uh-oh,

[1:22:22] Bob Dobbs: we've got to listen to this guy,

[1:22:24] Bob Dobbs: we're going to have to follow what he says,

[1:22:25] Bob Dobbs: he knows a lot more than us,

[1:22:27] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:22:27] Bob Dobbs: So that's the satellite government,

[1:22:31] Bob Dobbs: that popular image of government coming out of space,

[1:22:37] Bob Dobbs: out of outer space and taking over the planet.

[1:22:40] Bob Dobbs: The Church of SubGenius,

[1:22:42] Bob Dobbs: their book in 1983 had that on the cover,

[1:22:45] Bob Dobbs: a parody of that situation.

[1:22:48] Bob Dobbs: And among conspiracy people,

[1:22:51] Bob Dobbs: you're saying something?

[1:22:53] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:22:53] Cameron McEwen: I just wanted you to enlarge on that.

[1:22:55] Cameron McEwen: I'm not familiar with the image,

[1:22:58] Cameron McEwen: but it sounds like it might be interesting.

[1:23:01] Cameron McEwen: What did they show on the cover?

[1:23:03] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:23:03] Bob Dobbs: so you can,

[1:23:04] Bob Dobbs: when you get a chance,

[1:23:05] Bob Dobbs: Google Church of the SubGenius,

[1:23:07] Bob Dobbs: S-U-B,

[1:23:08] Bob Dobbs: capital G-E-N-I-U-S.

[1:23:11] Bob Dobbs: It's not

[1:23:12] Bob Dobbs: O-U-S, just I-U-S.

[1:23:14] Bob Dobbs: So you will see a picture of...

[1:23:18] Bob Dobbs: Actually,

[1:23:18] Bob Dobbs: it was based on my father,

[1:23:20] Bob Dobbs: but a handsome 50s ad man kind of face.

[1:23:24] Bob Dobbs: He's coming over suburbia,

[1:23:26] Bob Dobbs: and you have people doing their domestic activities in their homes,

[1:23:31] Bob Dobbs: reading the paper,

[1:23:32] Bob Dobbs: listening to the radio,

[1:23:32] Bob Dobbs: watching TV,

[1:23:33] Bob Dobbs: kids playing baseball,

[1:23:35] Bob Dobbs: a suburban pastoral situation.

[1:23:38] Bob Dobbs: And there's Bob's head,

[1:23:41] Bob Dobbs: J.R.

[1:23:41] Bob Dobbs: Bob Dove's head,

[1:23:42] Bob Dobbs: and behind him are,

[1:23:43] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:23:44] Bob Dobbs: the cliché image of the UFOs.

[1:23:46] Bob Dobbs: laser beaving,

[1:23:48] Bob Dobbs: blowing up houses,

[1:23:49] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:23:50] Bob Dobbs: So it's a

[1:23:52] Bob Dobbs: UFO invasion scenario.

[1:23:57] Bob Dobbs: But it's led by just this head,

[1:24:00] Bob Dobbs: which is called the Dobbs head for J.R.

[1:24:02] Bob Dobbs: Bob Dobbs.

[1:24:03] Bob Dobbs: And this handsome 50s

[1:24:06] Bob Dobbs: Mr. Beaver kind of guy is leading.

[1:24:11] Bob Dobbs: He is the interface between the aliens and the humans.

[1:24:14] Bob Dobbs: and two-thirds of humans are not qualified to be saved.

[1:24:18] Bob Dobbs: One-third are,

[1:24:20] Bob Dobbs: and they're the subgeniuses.

[1:24:21] Bob Dobbs: And they're going to get on those vehicles,

[1:24:23] Bob Dobbs: those UFOs,

[1:24:24] Bob Dobbs: and there's going to be all kinds of sex goddess virgins on them for you.

[1:24:28] Bob Dobbs: That's what was promised by the Church of the SubGenius.

[1:24:31] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:24:32] Bob Dobbs: I don't know when the idea of the 72 virgins of the Muslim religion,

[1:24:39] Bob Dobbs: how real that is.

[1:24:40] Bob Dobbs: Remember that was promised to terrorists or something back in the...

[1:24:44] Cameron McEwen: 80s,

[1:24:44] Cameron McEwen: late 80s.

[1:24:45] Cameron McEwen: Still being promised,

[1:24:46] Bob Dobbs: I believe.

[1:24:48] Bob Dobbs: Late 80s,

[1:24:49] Bob Dobbs: early 90s.

[1:24:49] Bob Dobbs: But they did this in 83.

[1:24:53] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if they knew about this

[1:24:56] Bob Dobbs: Muslim fantasy or Muslim fact,

[1:24:58] Bob Dobbs: whatever they...

[1:24:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:24:59] Cameron McEwen: maybe not.

[1:25:00] Cameron McEwen: Maybe not.

[1:25:01] Cameron McEwen: It could be a Jungian phenomenon,

[1:25:04] Cameron McEwen: some sort of archetype of the collective unconscious.

[1:25:08] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:25:08] Bob Dobbs: they tapped into it.

[1:25:10] Bob Dobbs: And so it's...

[1:25:13] Cameron McEwen: Let me ask a question about this.

[1:25:15] Cameron McEwen: I think the image that you're talking about maybe is the image you see all over the place of

[1:25:28] Cameron McEwen: Bob with the pipe.

[1:25:30] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:25:31] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[1:25:32] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:25:32] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:25:32] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:25:33] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:25:34] Cameron McEwen: excuse me.

[1:25:35] Cameron McEwen: So what this suggests to me is that the

[1:25:41] Cameron McEwen: Bob meme

[1:25:44] Cameron McEwen: might be taken to be the dynamic of the interface between sort of practical,

[1:25:59] Cameron McEwen: in quotation marks,

[1:26:00] Cameron McEwen: normal,

[1:26:01] Cameron McEwen: in quotation marks,

[1:26:03] Cameron McEwen: life,

[1:26:05] Cameron McEwen: going on that you were talking about reading papers,

[1:26:07] Cameron McEwen: doing the dishes,

[1:26:09] Cameron McEwen: playing baseball.

[1:26:10] Cameron McEwen: And then on the other hand,

[1:26:12] Cameron McEwen: this archetypal world of the outer space wars,

[1:26:19] Cameron McEwen: I guess you would probably talk about the media wars.

[1:26:26] Cameron McEwen: But if

[1:26:28] Cameron McEwen: Bob, namely a function that is not limited to you,

[1:26:38] Cameron McEwen: but you are excellent at doing it,

[1:26:43] Cameron McEwen: as illustrated by your name or as denominated by your name.

[1:26:49] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:26:51] Cameron McEwen: If

[1:26:51] Cameron McEwen: Bob can be taken as the shuttle,

[1:26:57] Cameron McEwen: not only in the space term of shuttle or even the airplane name of shuttle,

[1:27:07] Cameron McEwen: but in the use of shuttle.

[1:27:11] Cameron McEwen: in spinning thread.

[1:27:15] Cameron McEwen: So there has to be a shuttle between figure and ground that is perpetually changing them,

[1:27:25] Cameron McEwen: which is taking what was a ground,

[1:27:28] Cameron McEwen: making it into a figure,

[1:27:31] Cameron McEwen: precipitating other problems,

[1:27:34] Cameron McEwen: which include new grounds and new figures.

[1:27:37] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:27:37] Cameron McEwen: Bob can be taken.

[1:27:41] Cameron McEwen: as this intermediary dynamic,

[1:27:44] Cameron McEwen: the medium that is the message.

[1:27:47] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:27:48] Bob Dobbs: exactly.

[1:27:49] Bob Dobbs: It's the Take Today,

[1:27:50] Bob Dobbs: page 11,

[1:27:51] Bob Dobbs: where man becomes figure and ground,

[1:27:55] Bob Dobbs: and in the interval.

[1:27:57] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:27:59] Bob Dobbs: what's amazing is that,

[1:28:01] Bob Dobbs: I'll just put a personal note in here,

[1:28:03] Bob Dobbs: that that prediction by the church subgenius,

[1:28:07] Bob Dobbs: using an image that was based on my father's face,

[1:28:11] Bob Dobbs: And anybody can see this at dobstown.com.

[1:28:15] Bob Dobbs: Just go there,

[1:28:16] Bob Dobbs: scroll down slightly,

[1:28:18] Bob Dobbs: and you'll see the flipping back and forth of my father's face and what's called the Dobbs head,

[1:28:23] Bob Dobbs: designed by people in Dallas in the early

[1:28:26] Bob Dobbs: 80s.

[1:28:29] Bob Dobbs: This has come true.

[1:28:32] Bob Dobbs: Apparently,

[1:28:34] Bob Dobbs: when Ion showed up,

[1:28:35] Bob Dobbs: that was my role.

[1:28:37] Bob Dobbs: One of my roles is to interface with the aliens.

[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: I've broadcast what Ian says about this.

[1:28:42] Bob Dobbs: I don't know anything about this.

[1:28:45] Bob Dobbs: I'm not conscious of what I'm supposed to do.

[1:28:48] Bob Dobbs: But the latest information is that the aliens are going to be talking like Finnegans Wake.

[1:28:54] Bob Dobbs: And since I know a lot about Finnegans Wake,

[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: I'm qualified to get close to understanding them.

[1:29:00] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:29:02] Bob Dobbs: Joyce didn't know.

[1:29:04] Bob Dobbs: James Joyce was actually encountering aliens.

[1:29:08] Bob Dobbs: And that's where he got his fitting his wig from.

[1:29:12] Bob Dobbs: So that's the latest discovery here at the labs.

[1:29:16] Cameron McEwen: But aliens don't necessarily have to be figures that are embodying some strange matter and some strange language in a strange spaceship,

[1:29:32] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:29:33] Cameron McEwen: Aliens can simply be the...

[1:29:36] Cameron McEwen: Wow.

[1:29:38] Cameron McEwen: what we don't understand,

[1:29:42] Cameron McEwen: but we need to understand.

[1:29:45] Cameron McEwen: And so the function of a medium is to go between what we need to understand and what we do understand,

[1:29:58] Cameron McEwen: but only in a very limited sense of sort of going about our daily living and stuff.

[1:30:06] Cameron McEwen: And the...

[1:30:07] Cameron McEwen: The function of the medium is to

[1:30:10] Cameron McEwen: work between those two so that the quote-unquote alien thought or the alien being comes to be formulated,

[1:30:22] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[1:30:23] Cameron McEwen: or specified.

[1:30:25] Cameron McEwen: And at the same time,

[1:30:27] Cameron McEwen: so does what is going on in normal life because of the new information that's getting through the middle.

[1:30:37] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:30:37] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:30:38] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:30:39] Cameron McEwen: Actually,

[1:30:40] Cameron McEwen: that's the same dynamic that you've been pointing out throughout these charts,

[1:30:46] Cameron McEwen: where an unknown art form is incipient in what is going on,

[1:30:55] Cameron McEwen: but is not known.

[1:30:57] Cameron McEwen: And that Innis will eventually become revealed.

[1:31:06] Cameron McEwen: but only to throw up a new veil with its own problems,

[1:31:11] Cameron McEwen: right,

[1:31:11] Cameron McEwen: and its own fascinations.

[1:31:14] Cameron McEwen: And this kind of turn around,

[1:31:19] Cameron McEwen: turn about is the dynamic of history.

[1:31:25] Cameron McEwen: And at its

[1:31:28] Cameron McEwen: Peter Totter focus,

[1:31:32] Cameron McEwen: there has to be a medium.

[1:31:35] Cameron McEwen: And you situate yourself at that medium point,

[1:31:41] Cameron McEwen: which can be called Bob,

[1:31:44] Cameron McEwen: because you have,

[1:31:46] Cameron McEwen: with B-O-B,

[1:31:47] Cameron McEwen: you have a B and a B that are actually different,

[1:31:53] Cameron McEwen: but they're joined in the O.

[1:31:54] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:31:56] Bob Dobbs: And that's what McClellan called himself,

[1:31:58] Bob Dobbs: Center for Culture and Technology.

[1:32:00] Bob Dobbs: That's a pretty grandiose statement.

[1:32:02] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:32:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:32:05] Cameron McEwen: at a time when centers weren't really known at the University of Toronto.

[1:32:08] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:32:09] Bob Dobbs: They were popping up,

[1:32:10] Bob Dobbs: but the people didn't know.

[1:32:11] Bob Dobbs: And he writes about it in the mid-'60s,

[1:32:13] Bob Dobbs: about the new role of the center in the new city of the university.

[1:32:20] Bob Dobbs: He was actually avant-garde or one of the early recipients of that new art form.

[1:32:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:32:28] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[1:32:29] Bob Dobbs: So did you say whole and B and B and...

[1:32:38] Cameron McEwen: The hole in between?

[1:32:39] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:32:39] Bob Dobbs: the O.

[1:32:39] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:32:40] Bob Dobbs: the O in between,

[1:32:40] Bob Dobbs: right.

[1:32:41] Bob Dobbs: The zero.

[1:32:43] Bob Dobbs: And see,

[1:32:43] Bob Dobbs: that B is the second letter,

[1:32:45] Bob Dobbs: so that's 2-2.

[1:32:47] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan is number 22 on a later chart we're coming to.

[1:32:51] Bob Dobbs: So that's some of the reasoning.

[1:32:54] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:32:54] Bob Dobbs: definitely the people who wrote The Church of SubGenius,

[1:32:59] Bob Dobbs: I had told them things,

[1:33:00] Bob Dobbs: but...

[1:33:02] Bob Dobbs: They had a smattering of,

[1:33:03] Bob Dobbs: they were smart artist kind of people,

[1:33:05] Bob Dobbs: and they're even written up in High Performance Magazine.

[1:33:09] Bob Dobbs: But they have the tetrad,

[1:33:11] Bob Dobbs: a crude tetrad in there in 1983.

[1:33:14] Bob Dobbs: They have other patterns of other knowledges,

[1:33:18] Bob Dobbs: and they have references to James Joyce.

[1:33:20] Bob Dobbs: So they were picking up,

[1:33:26] Bob Dobbs: it was an avant-garde phenomenon with perfect pitch for its time.

[1:33:32] Bob Dobbs: Which basically...

[1:33:33] Cameron McEwen: And a lot of humor,

[1:33:36] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:33:36] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:33:36] Bob Dobbs: constant humor.

[1:33:38] Bob Dobbs: They used to say that we're a religion mocking religion.

[1:33:42] Bob Dobbs: We're a business mocking business.

[1:33:44] Bob Dobbs: We're science mocking science.

[1:33:45] Bob Dobbs: We're art mocking art.

[1:33:47] Bob Dobbs: They mocked everything.

[1:33:47] Bob Dobbs: They're supreme Maritain,

[1:33:49] Bob Dobbs: which that's probably one of the first people to point out that McLuhan Society of the

[1:33:55] Bob Dobbs: 80s, what he was predicting coming,

[1:33:57] Bob Dobbs: was a population of Maritain.

[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:34:01] Bob Dobbs: They were a phenomenon of that.

[1:34:03] Bob Dobbs: And you'll see they're on the later chart.

[1:34:05] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:34:06] Bob Dobbs: so under symptoms,

[1:34:09] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:34:09] Bob Dobbs: you take some cliche images.

[1:34:11] Bob Dobbs: Slaughter of Christians at the time of Rome.

[1:34:14] Bob Dobbs: Spanish Inquisition in the Armada,

[1:34:16] Bob Dobbs: time of the printing press.

[1:34:17] Bob Dobbs: Napoleon,

[1:34:18] Bob Dobbs: the Railway War.

[1:34:20] Bob Dobbs: Decentralizing monarchies.

[1:34:22] Bob Dobbs: World War I,

[1:34:23] Bob Dobbs: the industrial

[1:34:24] Bob Dobbs: 19th century.

[1:34:25] Bob Dobbs: Then you have the electronic radio era.

[1:34:28] Bob Dobbs: Hitler,

[1:34:28] Bob Dobbs: Stalin,

[1:34:29] Bob Dobbs: radio war.

[1:34:30] Bob Dobbs: decentralized Western empires.

[1:34:35] Bob Dobbs: Global theater,

[1:34:36] Bob Dobbs: now you get into the information war,

[1:34:38] Bob Dobbs: or what's called the Cold War,

[1:34:40] Bob Dobbs: which is a TV war,

[1:34:42] Bob Dobbs: which is World War III,

[1:34:43] Bob Dobbs: which decentralizes world government.

[1:34:45] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan used to talk about,

[1:34:50] Bob Dobbs: one sentence,

[1:34:51] Bob Dobbs: it's the age of paratroopers.

[1:34:53] Bob Dobbs: You ever notice that one?

[1:34:55] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:34:55] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:34:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:34:56] Cameron McEwen: In fact,

[1:34:58] Cameron McEwen: that...

[1:35:00] Cameron McEwen: He talked about that,

[1:35:02] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:35:03] Cameron McEwen: in the

[1:35:04] Cameron McEwen: 1950s and then quoted it in

[1:35:06] Cameron McEwen: Counter Blast.

[1:35:08] Cameron McEwen: 69.

[1:35:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:35:10] Bob Dobbs: And that's what he called the CIA world,

[1:35:12] Bob Dobbs: the James Bond world.

[1:35:14] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:35:15] Bob Dobbs: the power bureaucracy,

[1:35:17] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother went inside.

[1:35:19] Bob Dobbs: It was small teams.

[1:35:21] Bob Dobbs: They could manage the global village,

[1:35:23] Bob Dobbs: the global theater,

[1:35:24] Bob Dobbs: not through empirical,

[1:35:26] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:35:26] Bob Dobbs: Empson bureaucracies.

[1:35:28] Bob Dobbs: That was just natural.

[1:35:29] Bob Dobbs: The anti-environment grew to that size.

[1:35:31] Bob Dobbs: But for controlling the flow of information,

[1:35:35] Bob Dobbs: or of what's coming next kind of knowledge that was done by small teams.

[1:35:40] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:35:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:35:43] Bob Dobbs: JFK,

[1:35:45] Bob Dobbs: just before he got assassinated,

[1:35:46] Bob Dobbs: he said,

[1:35:46] Bob Dobbs: I want to scatter the CIA to the winds.

[1:35:49] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:35:49] Bob Dobbs: he didn't get the chance to do it,

[1:35:51] Bob Dobbs: but it was scattered to the winds anyways.

[1:35:54] Bob Dobbs: And this factional fight surfaces in the mid-'70s when George Bush is made director,

[1:36:01] Bob Dobbs: and they fire a whole bunch of CIA people,

[1:36:03] Bob Dobbs: seniority level.

[1:36:05] Bob Dobbs: and replace them with others.

[1:36:06] Bob Dobbs: And it became known as a battle between Team B,

[1:36:09] Bob Dobbs: Team A,

[1:36:09] Bob Dobbs: and Team B.

[1:36:10] Bob Dobbs: That is a decentralization later on my chart here.

[1:36:15] Bob Dobbs: So you've got decentralized world government.

[1:36:18] Bob Dobbs: Decentralized Western empires at the end of World War II is the decolonization that supposedly happened in Africa,

[1:36:25] Bob Dobbs: in Asia,

[1:36:27] Bob Dobbs: the withdrawing of European empires.

[1:36:30] Bob Dobbs: The decentralizing world government is the fragmentation.

[1:36:35] Bob Dobbs: and moving into outer space,

[1:36:36] Bob Dobbs: a new ground.

[1:36:38] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I'm trying to get at there.

[1:36:42] Bob Dobbs: And then you've got the decentralized solar government.

[1:36:47] Bob Dobbs: That leads to the Battle of the Harvest Moon,

[1:36:49] Bob Dobbs: because the secret solar government was the Rockefeller-Bolshevik alliance,

[1:36:53] Bob Dobbs: but that falls apart in the 70s.

[1:36:55] Bob Dobbs: Then we have a decentralized universal government,

[1:37:00] Bob Dobbs: left hemisphere and right hemisphere.

[1:37:02] Bob Dobbs: That's when the society...

[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: Starts to have a war between the new age and old science.

[1:37:07] Bob Dobbs: And the figure for that is Carl Sagan.

[1:37:11] Bob Dobbs: Remember his documentaries on science,

[1:37:14] Bob Dobbs: on cosmology?

[1:37:14] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:37:14] Cameron McEwen: very much.

[1:37:15] Cameron McEwen: Very much.

[1:37:15] Cameron McEwen: He was a very Gnostic guy,

[1:37:17] Cameron McEwen: but I remember him well.

[1:37:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:37:22] Bob Dobbs: so he was a figure.

[1:37:24] Bob Dobbs: So by the

[1:37:25] Bob Dobbs: 80s, he's saying,

[1:37:26] Bob Dobbs: I'm very disappointed in the population.

[1:37:29] Bob Dobbs: They're going for crackpot.

[1:37:30] Bob Dobbs: conspiracy theories,

[1:37:31] Bob Dobbs: new age fantasies,

[1:37:33] Bob Dobbs: astrology.

[1:37:33] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:37:34] Bob Dobbs: he just represented the University of City,

[1:37:37] Bob Dobbs: the policeman saying,

[1:37:38] Bob Dobbs: where's our belief in science and,

[1:37:40] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:37:41] Bob Dobbs: real stuff and rational thinking.

[1:37:43] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[1:37:44] Cameron McEwen: right.

[1:37:44] Cameron McEwen: But he was talking about himself there,

[1:37:46] Cameron McEwen: I think.

[1:37:47] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:37:47] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:37:48] Cameron McEwen: Earlier,

[1:37:50] Cameron McEwen: he had been talking about intelligence coming from outer space and all that sort of stuff.

[1:37:56] Cameron McEwen: And then when he got sick and...

[1:38:01] Cameron McEwen: sort of was forcibly reminded of his humanity and his finitude then he started to regret some of the stuff that he earlier said.

[1:38:15] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:38:16] Bob Dobbs: and it's also an example of the literate person in the ivory tower and the mob effect of electric pop culture swallowing him.

[1:38:29] Cameron McEwen: What

[1:38:29] Cameron McEwen: I...

[1:38:30] Cameron McEwen: If somebody were looking at a chart like this,

[1:38:32] Cameron McEwen: I would say,

[1:38:33] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:38:34] Cameron McEwen: maybe one way to think of it is that the middle column,

[1:38:38] Cameron McEwen: which you call technological government,

[1:38:42] Cameron McEwen: might be thought of as an art form.

[1:38:45] Cameron McEwen: The art form is not at all restricted to art.

[1:38:50] Cameron McEwen: It is a form of organization which has...

[1:38:59] Cameron McEwen: grown out of previous forms of organization.

[1:39:03] Cameron McEwen: And then this art form can manifest itself in various ways.

[1:39:12] Cameron McEwen: And one way is through the popular government on one side,

[1:39:18] Cameron McEwen: and another way it manifests itself are the symptoms on the other side.

[1:39:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:39:23] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:39:25] Cameron McEwen: you have particular history on both the two wings,

[1:39:29] Cameron McEwen: the left and right sides.

[1:39:31] Cameron McEwen: And in the middle,

[1:39:32] Cameron McEwen: you have the form of history,

[1:39:36] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[1:39:37] Cameron McEwen: that's generating all these changes on the sides.

[1:39:41] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:39:42] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:39:43] Bob Dobbs: there,

[1:39:43] Bob Dobbs: the previous environment,

[1:39:44] Bob Dobbs: people think it is the ground,

[1:39:46] Bob Dobbs: but it's one phase back.

[1:39:49] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[1:39:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:39:49] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[1:39:50] Cameron McEwen: So part of the overthrow.

[1:39:55] Cameron McEwen: of any technology is people beginning to see it.

[1:39:59] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:40:00] Cameron McEwen: It's already on the way out the door if people think that it's the latest thing.

[1:40:07] Bob Dobbs: And the bureaucrats of that increasingly obsolete technology freeze on the controls.

[1:40:13] Bob Dobbs: They get rigid,

[1:40:15] Bob Dobbs: inflexible as they go down.

[1:40:18] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:40:18] Cameron McEwen: So there's an inflexible bureaucracy that has a necessary opposition to it that has a

[1:40:34] Cameron McEwen: new form of flexibility.

[1:40:39] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:40:39] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:40:40] Cameron McEwen: Every time the art form is going to,

[1:40:44] Cameron McEwen: there's going to be no such thing as the pure art form.

[1:40:47] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:40:49] Cameron McEwen: It's always going to have manifestations that are themselves dynamic and diverse.

[1:40:57] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:40:58] Cameron McEwen: And it's this strange sort of multiple...

[1:41:05] Cameron McEwen: dynamic that's going to give rise to changes in all of the things,

[1:41:12] Cameron McEwen: all of the manifestations that we're talking about at any given stage.

[1:41:16] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:41:17] Bob Dobbs: And what's interesting,

[1:41:19] Bob Dobbs: it's epitomized in the Android Meme tech body phase we're in now by the phrase deep state.

[1:41:27] Bob Dobbs: The whole world has become conspiracy theorists,

[1:41:31] Bob Dobbs: which is an interesting effect there of the obsolescence of this.

[1:41:35] Bob Dobbs: of the chemical body,

[1:41:36] Bob Dobbs: maybe even the TV body,

[1:41:37] Bob Dobbs: the freezing under controls,

[1:41:39] Bob Dobbs: and where everybody's up against a deep state.

[1:41:42] Bob Dobbs: It's quite phenomenal what has happened in pop culture,

[1:41:47] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[1:41:48] Bob Dobbs: But you can understand it through McLuhan.

[1:41:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:41:52] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:41:54] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:41:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:41:55] Bob Dobbs: the left hemisphere versus the right hemisphere,

[1:41:57] Bob Dobbs: that's in medicine.

[1:41:59] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn went through this.

[1:42:02] Bob Dobbs: The new technologies...

[1:42:04] Bob Dobbs: say the subtleties of the global theater and then the global membrane got people into what they called energy medicine and into acupuncture and Bach flower remedies,

[1:42:14] Bob Dobbs: all these sensitivities,

[1:42:16] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean?

[1:42:16] Bob Dobbs: This extra refinement of matter was an effect of the stages I'm showing on the chart here.

[1:42:23] Bob Dobbs: So the left hemisphere of Western science froze in response to people.

[1:42:29] Bob Dobbs: They started recovering voodoo.

[1:42:31] Bob Dobbs: or hoodoo and all these different things got retrieved.

[1:42:35] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:42:35] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said in the Malinowski or even in the 50s that the occult got dropped into the lap of the first half of the 20th century due to electric conditions.

[1:42:45] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:42:46] Bob Dobbs: we have the battle between left and right hemisphere dropped into the lap of everybody in the 70s and 80s.

[1:42:53] Bob Dobbs: So you can see that

[1:42:54] Bob Dobbs: I'm updating McLuhan here.

[1:43:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:43:02] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:43:02] Cameron McEwen: I don't,

[1:43:03] Cameron McEwen: that's a little,

[1:43:04] Cameron McEwen: the whole idea of updating is one that

[1:43:07] Cameron McEwen: I'm not fond of,

[1:43:08] Cameron McEwen: but

[1:43:10] Cameron McEwen: I can see you applying

[1:43:13] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan to new phenomena.

[1:43:16] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:43:16] Bob Dobbs: that's what I'm doing.

[1:43:17] Bob Dobbs: I'm just using the McLuhan formula to what he wasn't around to do.

[1:43:22] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[1:43:23] Cameron McEwen: okay,

[1:43:23] Cameron McEwen: so updating in that sense I can understand,

[1:43:26] Cameron McEwen: yeah?

[1:43:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:43:28] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:43:28] Bob Dobbs: he gets into the left-right hemisphere as maybe a ground to be taken seriously.

[1:43:37] Bob Dobbs: But over the next 15 years,

[1:43:38] Bob Dobbs: there's arguments in academia and science about the validity of that,

[1:43:42] Bob Dobbs: those divisions.

[1:43:44] Bob Dobbs: And then they become a pop culture art form,

[1:43:48] Bob Dobbs: a comic strip in the 90s.

[1:43:51] Bob Dobbs: And people go around,

[1:43:52] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:43:52] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:43:52] Bob Dobbs: I was left hemisphere yesterday,

[1:43:54] Bob Dobbs: but today I'm working on my right hemisphere.

[1:43:59] Bob Dobbs: The turning of the serious new conceptual breakthrough into trivialities because of later changes.

[1:44:07] Cameron McEwen: Sure,

[1:44:08] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:44:08] Cameron McEwen: So the same dynamic that we've seen at all times.

[1:44:14] Cameron McEwen: And this one's particularly funny,

[1:44:16] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:44:17] Cameron McEwen: because when McLuhan got into left and right hemisphere,

[1:44:22] Cameron McEwen: he was quite sick.

[1:44:25] Cameron McEwen: He didn't have many years to live.

[1:44:27] Cameron McEwen: And he was looking around for ways to try to put his work into formulas.

[1:44:35] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:44:35] Cameron McEwen: So the tetrad was one of these.

[1:44:37] Cameron McEwen: The left and right hemisphere was one of these.

[1:44:40] Cameron McEwen: And he was increasingly less able to see the humor in these things,

[1:44:48] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:44:48] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:44:49] Cameron McEwen: So when the left and right hemisphere became humorous and became

[1:44:56] Cameron McEwen: sort of pop culture,

[1:44:57] Cameron McEwen: as you were saying,

[1:44:59] Cameron McEwen: it's what

[1:45:00] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan would have seen earlier in his career as something inevitably funny.

[1:45:07] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:45:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:45:09] Bob Dobbs: the absurd,

[1:45:11] Bob Dobbs: what do you call it?

[1:45:11] Bob Dobbs: The global theater of the absurd.

[1:45:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:45:14] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:45:16] Bob Dobbs: Now let me think,

[1:45:16] Bob Dobbs: what was I going to add to that?

[1:45:25] Bob Dobbs: So you're saying,

[1:45:26] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[1:45:27] Bob Dobbs: the humor.

[1:45:30] Bob Dobbs: Also,

[1:45:31] Bob Dobbs: it's incredible how...

[1:45:35] Bob Dobbs: Simple his time was compared to today.

[1:45:39] Bob Dobbs: I don't think people saw the overwhelming information overload to the degree and then the multi-bodied situation that I called.

[1:45:48] Bob Dobbs: They didn't see that coming.

[1:45:49] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:45:50] Bob Dobbs: Nobody saw this.

[1:45:52] Bob Dobbs: Maybe Finnegans Wake did,

[1:45:54] Bob Dobbs: if you knew how to look at it.

[1:45:57] Bob Dobbs: He did,

[1:45:58] Bob Dobbs: but it's like,

[1:46:00] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:46:02] Bob Dobbs: I wish Zappa was still alive to comment on everything.

[1:46:05] Bob Dobbs: make music in response.

[1:46:07] Bob Dobbs: We all wish that McCone lived through the last 30 years,

[1:46:11] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:46:11] Bob Dobbs: What would he have been saying and doing?

[1:46:13] Bob Dobbs: It would have been really interesting.

[1:46:17] Cameron McEwen: One of your activities is to try to imagine that,

[1:46:20] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:46:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:46:21] Bob Dobbs: I'm carrying it on in public media like he did.

[1:46:27] Bob Dobbs: So the final stage,

[1:46:31] Bob Dobbs: now we're getting into the popular government is universal.

[1:46:34] Bob Dobbs: This is the...

[1:46:35] Bob Dobbs: This is the cults of Star Wars fans and Star Trek and all this other stuff that goes on.

[1:46:42] Bob Dobbs: The blockbuster movies,

[1:46:44] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:46:46] Bob Dobbs: That's playing with the popular government.

[1:46:50] Bob Dobbs: We're all up against demons and reptilians,

[1:46:56] Bob Dobbs: right,

[1:46:57] Bob Dobbs: in the popular culture.

[1:46:58] Bob Dobbs: That's the popular government.

[1:47:01] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:47:01] Bob Dobbs: it's not uncommon to think that,

[1:47:03] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:47:03] Bob Dobbs: there's a whole...

[1:47:04] Bob Dobbs: School of thought that says Obama as a young boy was part of the colonization of Mars.

[1:47:11] Bob Dobbs: This is what people think and talk about.

[1:47:16] Cameron McEwen: That's new to me.

[1:47:18] Bob Dobbs: Oh yeah,

[1:47:19] Bob Dobbs: no.

[1:47:20] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:47:20] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,

[1:47:22] Bob Dobbs: he looked at fringe extreme behavior beyond what academics really would look at.

[1:47:30] Bob Dobbs: I've kept that part of McLuhan going.

[1:47:32] Bob Dobbs: I'm an expert on...

[1:47:33] Bob Dobbs: extreme fringe behavior.

[1:47:35] Bob Dobbs: I've checked them all out.

[1:47:38] Bob Dobbs: They're cliche for me,

[1:47:40] Bob Dobbs: but you never heard of this.

[1:47:42] Bob Dobbs: The Lemurian dynamic,

[1:47:43] Bob Dobbs: eh?

[1:47:43] Bob Dobbs: You haven't heard of that.

[1:47:44] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:47:45] Cameron McEwen: but it doesn't at all surprise me.

[1:47:48] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:47:49] Bob Dobbs: oh yeah,

[1:47:49] Bob Dobbs: I wanted to say that a while ago,

[1:47:52] Bob Dobbs: the visual space on the go back to the previous chart

[1:48:10] Bob Dobbs: Bottom up,

[1:48:14] Bob Dobbs: moving from nation,

[1:48:17] Bob Dobbs: planet,

[1:48:18] Bob Dobbs: solar system,

[1:48:19] Bob Dobbs: universe in the global theater,

[1:48:22] Bob Dobbs: it is visual space,

[1:48:25] Bob Dobbs: telescope space,

[1:48:26] Bob Dobbs: so that in the final second coming phase,

[1:48:29] Bob Dobbs: people project what their eyes can see to the furthest reaches of light years.

[1:48:36] Bob Dobbs: That's the popular imagination.

[1:48:40] Bob Dobbs: That's in the bottom up.

[1:48:43] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:48:43] Bob Dobbs: what's interesting,

[1:48:44] Bob Dobbs: we flip into string theory,

[1:48:46] Bob Dobbs: which is acoustic,

[1:48:48] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:48:49] Bob Dobbs: Finally,

[1:48:50] Bob Dobbs: they left visual space.

[1:48:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:48:53] Cameron McEwen: but you can think of radio telescopes there as well.

[1:48:56] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:48:57] Bob Dobbs: and so let's see.

[1:49:00] Bob Dobbs: We're back to the universal stage or the mythic stage.

[1:49:07] Bob Dobbs: That's...

[1:49:08] Bob Dobbs: That's...

[1:49:08] Bob Dobbs: TV iconicity to the max.

[1:49:12] Bob Dobbs: Global theater iconicity is government.

[1:49:16] Bob Dobbs: Technology is a satellite,

[1:49:17] Bob Dobbs: an old technology.

[1:49:19] Bob Dobbs: And then you get these fundamentalist battles.

[1:49:23] Bob Dobbs: All religions and institutions,

[1:49:25] Bob Dobbs: including science and art,

[1:49:27] Bob Dobbs: become fundamentalists.

[1:49:28] Bob Dobbs: Devil versus God.

[1:49:30] Bob Dobbs: State versus church.

[1:49:32] Bob Dobbs: Armageddon.

[1:49:32] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan predicted that.

[1:49:34] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[1:49:35] Bob Dobbs: we will become more religious.

[1:49:38] Bob Dobbs: And he meant this kind of stuff.

[1:49:39] Cameron McEwen: Religious age in the history of the world.

[1:49:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:49:43] Bob Dobbs: And he meant this kind of pagan religion sort of thing.

[1:49:47] Bob Dobbs: And it's always interesting to figure out what he meant by the phrase,

[1:49:51] Bob Dobbs: the true church that he thought he represented in the state versus church battles,

[1:49:56] Bob Dobbs: devil versus God.

[1:49:57] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:49:58] Bob Dobbs: and Boger writes a book,

[1:50:01] Bob Dobbs: The Demon of Images or The Demonology of Images.

[1:50:04] Bob Dobbs: So devil versus God is the increasing.

[1:50:08] Bob Dobbs: Culture wars going on.

[1:50:11] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:50:14] Bob Dobbs: I could see that happening in the

[1:50:16] Bob Dobbs: 80s, but I don't know if I saw it becoming as extreme as it became.

[1:50:28] Bob Dobbs: I do have Armageddon there.

[1:50:32] Bob Dobbs: That's pretty serious or pretty destructive.

[1:50:36] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:50:36] Bob Dobbs: so you see how it's easy to follow the chart now,

[1:50:39] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:50:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:50:41] Cameron McEwen: I see what's going on,

[1:50:42] Cameron McEwen: and

[1:50:43] Cameron McEwen: I can translate it to my terms fairly easily.

[1:50:48] Cameron McEwen: But let's just understand where you're going.

[1:50:49] Bob Dobbs: Now I want to go to the tiny note chart.

[1:50:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:50:52] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:50:53] Cameron McEwen: But first I want to know,

[1:50:56] Cameron McEwen: when you were writing the top-down identity chart,

[1:51:04] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.

[1:51:06] Cameron McEwen: Was this part of writing down the bottom-up identity chart?

[1:51:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:51:11] Bob Dobbs: they're done at the same time,

[1:51:13] Bob Dobbs: in 1985.

[1:51:15] Cameron McEwen: So they're just sort of mirror images.

[1:51:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:51:17] Bob Dobbs: they're the complementary.

[1:51:19] Bob Dobbs: It's man as figure and ground.

[1:51:21] Bob Dobbs: This is what Take Today dealt with,

[1:51:23] Bob Dobbs: both these levels.

[1:51:25] Bob Dobbs: McCullen didn't do it so much in Take Today.

[1:51:29] Bob Dobbs: The mid-'60s books,

[1:51:30] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg Galaxy and...

[1:51:32] Bob Dobbs: I understand media about it.

[1:51:33] Bob Dobbs: Then he went through the transformation of cliché to archetype in 1970,

[1:51:37] Bob Dobbs: and that got into the analysis of power.

[1:51:42] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:51:44] Bob Dobbs: I'm, you know,

[1:51:45] Bob Dobbs: and when I'm doing this in the 80s,

[1:51:46] Bob Dobbs: people don't know take today.

[1:51:48] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:51:48] Bob Dobbs: I'm avant-garde McLuhan here.

[1:51:50] Bob Dobbs: I'm way ahead of everybody pretty well,

[1:51:53] Bob Dobbs: unless there's people we never heard of that were doing it,

[1:51:57] Bob Dobbs: never showed up.

[1:51:58] Bob Dobbs: But

[1:51:59] Bob Dobbs: I know to have this interplay.

[1:52:02] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:52:02] Bob Dobbs: so

[1:52:03] Bob Dobbs: Eric McLuhan says that he would discourage his father thinking in the Freemasonic conspiracies of the

[1:52:09] Bob Dobbs: 50s in the

[1:52:11] Bob Dobbs: 70s. He would discourage his father,

[1:52:14] Bob Dobbs: but Marshall wasn't going to be discouraged because he knew that was part of the dialectic,

[1:52:19] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:52:20] Bob Dobbs: to include the power of bureaucracy.

[1:52:25] Bob Dobbs: And you know what?

[1:52:27] Bob Dobbs: What?

[1:52:29] Cameron McEwen: Go ahead,

[1:52:29] Cameron McEwen: sorry.

[1:52:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:52:30] Bob Dobbs: So he told me through the evergreens by around 1990,

[1:52:35] Bob Dobbs: maybe,

[1:52:36] Bob Dobbs: that the kind of statements he made in Understanding Media where we soon are going to have the extension of the satellite,

[1:52:43] Bob Dobbs: which will become the extension of consciousness.

[1:52:47] Bob Dobbs: Remember that statement,

[1:52:48] Bob Dobbs: 1964?

[1:52:54] Bob Dobbs: And he said,

[1:52:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:52:54] Bob Dobbs: in five years,

[1:52:56] Bob Dobbs: this will be the case.

[1:52:58] Bob Dobbs: So he.

[1:52:59] Bob Dobbs: I didn't ask him.

[1:52:59] Bob Dobbs: He brought it up.

[1:53:00] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[1:53:02] Bob Dobbs: I was off on one point or one level.

[1:53:06] Bob Dobbs: I didn't understand that management could delay the technological effects of the changes as much as they did.

[1:53:15] Bob Dobbs: It got bottled up.

[1:53:18] Bob Dobbs: He didn't see.

[1:53:19] Bob Dobbs: He just thought these developments would happen rapidly.

[1:53:22] Bob Dobbs: And by 1969,

[1:53:24] Bob Dobbs: he said,

[1:53:24] Bob Dobbs: we're going to be able to take over the world.

[1:53:26] Bob Dobbs: He said this in 64,

[1:53:27] Bob Dobbs: in five years.

[1:53:28] Bob Dobbs: We're going to use Madison Avenue to take over the world.

[1:53:31] Bob Dobbs: If things kept happening at the speed he imagined was happening,

[1:53:35] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[1:53:35] Bob Dobbs: But there was the lockdown and the stopping of this stuff by management,

[1:53:41] Bob Dobbs: he says.

[1:53:42] Bob Dobbs: He didn't realize the Nixons and the mafia and the actual conspiracy of the

[1:53:48] Bob Dobbs: 70s, of these bad elites taking over the globe and doing police states.

[1:53:57] Bob Dobbs: And he has this great article in the Varsity Graduate of 1971,

[1:54:03] Bob Dobbs: The Hijacking of Cities,

[1:54:06] Bob Dobbs: Nations,

[1:54:07] Bob Dobbs: and Planets.

[1:54:08] Bob Dobbs: So management,

[1:54:10] Bob Dobbs: he started to see management was hijacking things and actually discouraging new breakthroughs,

[1:54:16] Bob Dobbs: which were lurking,

[1:54:17] Bob Dobbs: at least in rumor.

[1:54:20] Bob Dobbs: And he didn't think that they,

[1:54:22] Bob Dobbs: he didn't understand or didn't,

[1:54:24] Bob Dobbs: This didn't...

[1:54:25] Bob Dobbs: He forgot to look at it,

[1:54:27] Bob Dobbs: but he's saying that management was able to frustrate what he thought was unfolding.

[1:54:33] Bob Dobbs: So that's the go ahead.

[1:54:37] Cameron McEwen: From my point of view,

[1:54:39] Cameron McEwen: what's going on there is that

[1:54:43] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and the medium as the message phase was thinking that if you got handled

[1:54:55] Cameron McEwen: on the medium,

[1:54:57] Cameron McEwen: then you will see a revolution in

[1:55:07] Cameron McEwen: human affairs analogous to the revolution that happened with the chemical revolution after 1800.

[1:55:17] Cameron McEwen: But what he didn't understand is that just as with the chemical revolution,

[1:55:29] Cameron McEwen: it's not enough to understand something at a theoretical level.

[1:55:35] Cameron McEwen: You have to understand its...

[1:55:37] Cameron McEwen: practical applications and ramifications.

[1:55:41] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:55:42] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, around 1960,

[1:55:45] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:55:47] Cameron McEwen: didn't know enough about the ramifications and the problems that he would have to begin to understand in the

[1:56:02] Cameron McEwen: 60s and 70s.

[1:56:06] Cameron McEwen: He had to understand them both internally,

[1:56:10] Cameron McEwen: this was a time of interior disintegration,

[1:56:15] Cameron McEwen: and externally with the increasing problems that were occurring in the world that paid no attention to his discoveries.

[1:56:29] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:56:29] Bob Dobbs: and he caught up,

[1:56:32] Bob Dobbs: half caught up,

[1:56:34] Bob Dobbs: thanks to Barry Nevitt.

[1:56:35] Bob Dobbs: Barry Neves'

[1:56:36] Bob Dobbs: experience of building the global village and the global theater,

[1:56:40] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[1:56:40] Bob Dobbs: in industry in South America.

[1:56:41] Bob Dobbs: He said he dealt with Nazis in South America,

[1:56:45] Bob Dobbs: former World War II Nazis.

[1:56:48] Bob Dobbs: That was common knowledge in his experience.

[1:56:50] Bob Dobbs: He worked for a Norwegian firm,

[1:56:51] Bob Dobbs: I think.

[1:56:52] Bob Dobbs: But he brought the efficient causality factors in the global theater to McLuhan,

[1:56:59] Bob Dobbs: and that made the great book take today.

[1:57:04] Cameron McEwen: And I think at the same time,

[1:57:07] Cameron McEwen: what Nevitt brought...

[1:57:10] Cameron McEwen: was this increasing evaluation and later McLuhan of Asian thought.

[1:57:19] Cameron McEwen: So that instead of thinking that if we can get everything figured out,

[1:57:28] Cameron McEwen: we can more or less in Western fashion get the world straightened out,

[1:57:34] Cameron McEwen: he came to see that the world isn't subject to it.

[1:57:39] Cameron McEwen: to being straightened out.

[1:57:41] Cameron McEwen: The world is always going to be subject to this figure and ground dynamic,

[1:57:49] Cameron McEwen: and we have to learn to be content with it.

[1:57:55] Bob Dobbs: Are you saying Barry helped them see that?

[1:57:58] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:57:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:57:59] Cameron McEwen: Weren't

[1:58:01] Cameron McEwen: Barry's parents were missionaries,

[1:58:03] Cameron McEwen: weren't they,

[1:58:04] Cameron McEwen: in China?

[1:58:04] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:58:06] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:58:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:58:07] Cameron McEwen: so yeah.

[1:58:08] Cameron McEwen: I think that there's starting sometime in the Malinowski,

[1:58:16] Cameron McEwen: there is an increasing attention paid by McLuhan to Asian thought.

[1:58:23] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:58:25] Bob Dobbs: Marxist thought.

[1:58:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:58:27] Cameron McEwen: and to Heidegger,

[1:58:29] Cameron McEwen: to his friend Tom Langer.

[1:58:32] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:58:33] Bob Dobbs: and systems theory,

[1:58:34] Bob Dobbs: which barely came out of systems theory.

[1:58:37] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:58:40] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:58:41] Bob Dobbs: general systems theory,

[1:58:42] Bob Dobbs: Barry Talansi.

[1:58:45] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:58:45] Bob Dobbs: people don't know this about Barry.

[1:58:47] Bob Dobbs: So we could say,

[1:58:47] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:58:48] Bob Dobbs: there was Carpenter in the early

[1:58:50] Bob Dobbs: 50s. Then there's Skornia.

[1:58:52] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:58:52] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:58:52] Bob Dobbs: let's go.

[1:58:53] Bob Dobbs: Muller team,

[1:58:54] Bob Dobbs: Muller time,

[1:58:55] Bob Dobbs: however you say his name.

[1:58:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:58:57] Bob Dobbs: Then

[1:58:58] Bob Dobbs: Lewis and Gideon.

[1:59:00] Bob Dobbs: And then,

[1:59:01] Bob Dobbs: but on a personal interactive,

[1:59:03] Bob Dobbs: you've got

[1:59:04] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter, late 40s,

[1:59:06] Bob Dobbs: early 50s.

[1:59:07] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter gets alienated in the late 50s and leaves,

[1:59:11] Bob Dobbs: and that's when Skornia comes in.

[1:59:14] Bob Dobbs: And then that gets

[1:59:15] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan on another level.

[1:59:18] Bob Dobbs: And then maybe Daniel Capon,

[1:59:20] Bob Dobbs: 64,

[1:59:21] Bob Dobbs: 65,

[1:59:23] Bob Dobbs: with the

[1:59:24] Bob Dobbs: Global Thermostat Project,

[1:59:25] Bob Dobbs: that big image in the May 64 newspaper.

[1:59:28] Bob Dobbs: When understanding media comes out,

[1:59:30] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:59:30] Bob Dobbs: they have this big expo design proposal.

[1:59:34] Bob Dobbs: Remember that?

[1:59:35] Bob Dobbs: You've seen that picture.

[1:59:36] Bob Dobbs: And after that,

[1:59:40] Bob Dobbs: after Empson and maybe Tony Schwartz and

[1:59:45] Bob Dobbs: New York people,

[1:59:47] Bob Dobbs: in comes Barry.

[1:59:48] Bob Dobbs: And so Barry is natural to be an important colleague after Carpenter.

[1:59:56] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:59:56] Cameron McEwen: I think that's right.

[1:59:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:59:59] Cameron McEwen: Harley Parker was very important to him as well.

[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: Harley Parker.

[2:00:04] Bob Dobbs: It's parallel to

[2:00:07] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter, but yeah,

[2:00:11] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter's gone.

[2:00:13] Bob Dobbs: So that leaves room for Parker to do through the vanishing point.

[2:00:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:00:17] Bob Dobbs: Parker is important.

[2:00:19] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:00:19] Bob Dobbs: in

[2:00:20] Bob Dobbs: 1971,

[2:00:22] Bob Dobbs: I once talked to,

[2:00:23] Bob Dobbs: I interacted with Parker several times,

[2:00:25] Bob Dobbs: but one time

[2:00:27] Bob Dobbs: I called up the senator and he was there and he answered.

[2:00:32] Bob Dobbs: In the course of his discussion with me,

[2:00:34] Bob Dobbs: he said he taught McLuhan everything about art.

[2:00:37] Bob Dobbs: He said McLuhan didn't know anything about art.

[2:00:40] Bob Dobbs: He taught him.

[2:00:41] Bob Dobbs: These people,

[2:00:43] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter said the same kind of thing.

[2:00:45] Bob Dobbs: People got inflated around McLuhan.

[2:00:47] Bob Dobbs: It was almost like he was such a detached observer,

[2:00:50] Bob Dobbs: they'd rush in to fill the void and thought they were creating it,

[2:00:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:00:56] Bob Dobbs: with their knowledge.

[2:00:58] Bob Dobbs: Their specialism that they brought to it.

[2:00:59] Bob Dobbs: There's an interesting phenomenon that happened around McLuhan.

[2:01:02] Bob Dobbs: I don't think

[2:01:03] Bob Dobbs: Parker taught McLuhan about art.

[2:01:08] Bob Dobbs: That's ridiculous.

[2:01:10] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:01:12] Cameron McEwen: What he may have done is he may have helped prompt

[2:01:17] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan to look into art as a way of developing his thought.

[2:01:26] Cameron McEwen: away from literature.

[2:01:28] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:01:29] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[2:01:29] Cameron McEwen: so it's certainly true that

[2:01:33] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan met

[2:01:35] Cameron McEwen: Parker in the early

[2:01:37] Cameron McEwen: 50s and then

[2:01:41] Cameron McEwen: Not too long after that,

[2:01:43] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan started to get into the theory of art.

[2:01:51] Cameron McEwen: So it was very influential to McLuhan in the

[2:01:56] Cameron McEwen: 1950s to go through a whole series of art theoreticians like

[2:02:04] Cameron McEwen: Gombrich and

[2:02:06] Cameron McEwen: Ivans.

[2:02:10] Cameron McEwen: Who was Gideon's teacher?

[2:02:12] Bob Dobbs: Burkhart?

[2:02:14] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:02:15] Bob Dobbs: Walter Kaufmann.

[2:02:16] Bob Dobbs: Walter Kaufmann.

[2:02:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:02:16] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[2:02:17] Cameron McEwen: exactly,

[2:02:17] Cameron McEwen: Walter Kaufmann.

[2:02:19] Cameron McEwen: So all of these art theoreticians were

[2:02:24] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan way of finding another mode of explanation beyond his literary mode.

[2:02:36] Cameron McEwen: And it was that.

[2:02:40] Cameron McEwen: Looking at art theory and earlier he had looked at film theory,

[2:02:46] Cameron McEwen: sort of through the influence of Pound,

[2:02:48] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[2:02:50] Cameron McEwen: that precipitated in the late 50s the idea that the media missed the message.

[2:02:57] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:03:00] Cameron McEwen: Parker probably was important to McLuhan in suggesting something,

[2:03:06] Cameron McEwen: and then

[2:03:07] Cameron McEwen: Parker confused.

[2:03:10] Cameron McEwen: the suggestion with the realization.

[2:03:13] Cameron McEwen: It certainly didn't help with the realization.

[2:03:19] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:03:19] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:03:21] Bob Dobbs: the pattern I'm seeing here is incredible.

[2:03:24] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan used to have himself photographed in every department,

[2:03:27] Bob Dobbs: but he actually did that.

[2:03:29] Bob Dobbs: He'd meet some interesting genius,

[2:03:31] Bob Dobbs: Innis guy,

[2:03:32] Bob Dobbs: and he'd really learn from them or have them to bounce off to push his thoughts.

[2:03:37] Bob Dobbs: And the people we listed

[2:03:40] Bob Dobbs: are very important.

[2:03:42] Bob Dobbs: And he's a modern thinker.

[2:03:44] Bob Dobbs: Was Heidegger dialoguing with people from different fields?

[2:03:48] Bob Dobbs: Was anybody back from the Merleau-Ponty,

[2:03:51] Bob Dobbs: were they doing that?

[2:03:54] Bob Dobbs: If they were professors,

[2:03:55] Bob Dobbs: they might have.

[2:03:56] Bob Dobbs: But

[2:03:57] Bob Dobbs: McClellan was roaming.

[2:03:58] Bob Dobbs: He'd go to John Lennon,

[2:04:00] Bob Dobbs: John Cage,

[2:04:00] Bob Dobbs: and then the guy who came up with the left-right hemisphere,

[2:04:04] Bob Dobbs: he'd correspond with him.

[2:04:06] Bob Dobbs: You know?

[2:04:08] Cameron McEwen: I think

[2:04:10] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was more eclectic than most people.

[2:04:15] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger interfaced with Heisenberg and with physicists and musicians and artists.

[2:04:29] Cameron McEwen: So

[2:04:30] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger was certainly able to speak with people and to be suggestive with people.

[2:04:37] Cameron McEwen: in a way like McLuhan,

[2:04:38] Cameron McEwen: but

[2:04:40] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger's thought works on a completely different level from

[2:04:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan. Yeah.

[2:04:48] Cameron McEwen: So that's a topic we can get into at another time,

[2:04:51] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[2:04:52] Cameron McEwen: But you're certainly right that what McLuhan was able to do,

[2:04:59] Cameron McEwen: if we take his interface with Gideon,

[2:05:01] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[2:05:03] Cameron McEwen: he read Gideon.

[2:05:05] Cameron McEwen: He thought,

[2:05:05] Cameron McEwen: nah,

[2:05:06] Cameron McEwen: this guy is right.

[2:05:09] Cameron McEwen: But unlike Gideon,

[2:05:11] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan then said,

[2:05:12] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:05:13] Cameron McEwen: how can we realize this?

[2:05:17] Cameron McEwen: How can I use my energy to try to bring this about?

[2:05:22] Bob Dobbs: You mean like get practical?

[2:05:23] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you mean by getting practical?

[2:05:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:05:27] Cameron McEwen: How can we put this together?

[2:05:28] Cameron McEwen: How can we finance this?

[2:05:30] Cameron McEwen: How can we find the people to interface with?

[2:05:34] Cameron McEwen: But also,

[2:05:36] Cameron McEwen: how can we think about this in other terms that may bring in other people to help,

[2:05:44] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:05:45] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[2:05:46] Bob Dobbs: He was always looking,

[2:05:47] Bob Dobbs: he would say in his letters,

[2:05:48] Bob Dobbs: I'm always still always looking for five people for a little community that he thought he could take over with.

[2:05:55] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:05:55] Cameron McEwen: And that is one of the amazing things about modern life is that that idea is so...

[2:06:04] Cameron McEwen: strong and so obvious and so needed and yet nothing is done about it.

[2:06:12] Cameron McEwen: The idea is simply that if you take a physicist and you say to the physicist,

[2:06:20] Cameron McEwen: do you believe that the human mind can obtain truth about physical phenomena?

[2:06:32] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[2:06:33] Cameron McEwen: And if the physicist says yes,

[2:06:35] Cameron McEwen: you say fine.

[2:06:36] Cameron McEwen: Now I'm going to go to a musician and I'm going to ask him.

[2:06:39] Cameron McEwen: if he thinks that human beings have a truthful relation to music.

[2:06:45] Cameron McEwen: And if he says yes,

[2:06:46] Cameron McEwen: then I want to bring that musician and that physicist together,

[2:06:51] Cameron McEwen: and I'm going to do the same thing for three or four other fields,

[2:06:54] Cameron McEwen: and I'm going to ask those people to interface with one another and to try to define for everybody the human relationship to truth,

[2:07:05] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:07:06] Cameron McEwen: And if you look at your charts,

[2:07:09] Cameron McEwen: Oftentimes,

[2:07:11] Cameron McEwen: what is going on is people unable to find truth in the crazy,

[2:07:23] Cameron McEwen: catastrophic world that they found themselves in,

[2:07:27] Cameron McEwen: and therefore they fall back into some attempt at fixation.

[2:07:33] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:07:33] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[2:07:34] Cameron McEwen: Which again,

[2:07:36] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[2:07:36] Cameron McEwen: gets overturned naturally,

[2:07:38] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:07:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:07:38] Cameron McEwen: So.

[2:07:40] Cameron McEwen: You could say that the history,

[2:07:43] Cameron McEwen: the nightmare of history that Joyce was trying to awake from is the nightmare of people not being able to find common truth,

[2:07:54] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:07:55] Cameron McEwen: And common truth both in the sense of a truth for everybody and common truth in the sense of what is the truth for everybody.

[2:08:04] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:08:04] Cameron McEwen: So the

[2:08:08] Cameron McEwen: The thing that McLuhan got from Gideon was that this is something that's possible and necessary.

[2:08:17] Cameron McEwen: And he kept on working at that ideal with tremendous energy until his body broke down,

[2:08:30] Cameron McEwen: basically.

[2:08:32] Cameron McEwen: And that story of what McLuhan was doing...

[2:08:37] Cameron McEwen: I believe is largely unknown,

[2:08:40] Cameron McEwen: and yet it's the most important thing about him.

[2:08:43] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:08:43] Bob Dobbs: and we gave him the means to rebuild his body.

[2:08:47] Bob Dobbs: He got it on

[2:08:48] Bob Dobbs: September 19th,

[2:08:50] Bob Dobbs: the Selye,

[2:08:51] Bob Dobbs: which has led to our fantastic products.

[2:08:56] Bob Dobbs: ION showed us how to develop the Selye into a new level.

[2:09:00] Bob Dobbs: So we gave,

[2:09:02] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn met with Marshall on September

[2:09:05] Bob Dobbs: 19th.

[2:09:07] Bob Dobbs: gave him the D cell,

[2:09:09] Bob Dobbs: told him how to use it,

[2:09:11] Bob Dobbs: and it would have saved him on the health level,

[2:09:14] Bob Dobbs: saved us back then.

[2:09:16] Bob Dobbs: And the next Saturday,

[2:09:20] Bob Dobbs: Jim Stewart,

[2:09:22] Bob Dobbs: who knew of the D cell,

[2:09:25] Bob Dobbs: comes into the home.

[2:09:26] Bob Dobbs: It's the morning after

[2:09:28] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan has fainted or had his stroke,

[2:09:32] Bob Dobbs: and I guess is in the hospital,

[2:09:34] Bob Dobbs: and Jim is the...

[2:09:35] Bob Dobbs: janitor around the house,

[2:09:36] Bob Dobbs: Marge Stewart,

[2:09:37] Bob Dobbs: the secretary's husband.

[2:09:39] Bob Dobbs: And there on the little table in the vestibule is the decal,

[2:09:42] Bob Dobbs: unopened.

[2:09:43] Bob Dobbs: It had not been cracked open.

[2:09:45] Bob Dobbs: So he got to the promised land,

[2:09:47] Bob Dobbs: but then,

[2:09:47] Bob Dobbs: like Moses,

[2:09:48] Bob Dobbs: wasn't allowed in.

[2:09:50] Bob Dobbs: So

[2:09:52] Bob Dobbs: I've studied and thought a lot about his health situation,

[2:09:56] Bob Dobbs: especially since

[2:09:58] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn became an advisor on it and then helped Marge Stewart.

[2:10:01] Bob Dobbs: And then Mark would tell us all these stories.

[2:10:02] Bob Dobbs: So that's a story we can tell.

[2:10:06] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan collapsing body,

[2:10:07] Bob Dobbs: if that's what you were referring to.

[2:10:12] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:10:12] Cameron McEwen: I think

[2:10:14] Cameron McEwen: I would tell the story a little bit differently than you would.

[2:10:17] Cameron McEwen: But,

[2:10:18] Cameron McEwen: yes,

[2:10:19] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[2:10:19] Cameron McEwen: it's the same story.

[2:10:21] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan nearly always had health problems from the late

[2:10:28] Cameron McEwen: 1940s on.

[2:10:30] Bob Dobbs: Did I tell you my theory earlier?

[2:10:32] Bob Dobbs: Didn't I run through that?

[2:10:33] Bob Dobbs: each.

[2:10:34] Bob Dobbs: As each new technology came in,

[2:10:37] Bob Dobbs: he got ill.

[2:10:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:10:40] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[2:10:41] Bob Dobbs: I ran through that with you.

[2:10:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:10:44] Cameron McEwen: So that,

[2:10:45] Cameron McEwen: you see,

[2:10:46] Cameron McEwen: in all of this stuff,

[2:10:48] Cameron McEwen: what I see is a particular quality of mind that you have.

[2:10:52] Cameron McEwen: And it's a storytelling mind,

[2:10:56] Cameron McEwen: a mind that is able to make things concrete,

[2:11:00] Cameron McEwen: that is able to see surprising connections.

[2:11:05] Cameron McEwen: and so you're a master of narrative we might say and so

[2:11:16] Cameron McEwen: I think that we have to listen to that narrative and understand what's going on in it and

[2:11:27] Cameron McEwen: I think there's two levels that are interesting there it's interesting to me to

[2:11:32] Cameron McEwen: I try to understand

[2:11:33] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan in that narrative,

[2:11:35] Cameron McEwen: but I'm also interested in understanding you through that narrative.

[2:11:41] Bob Dobbs: Great.

[2:11:42] Bob Dobbs: And I'm interested in understanding your understanding of my narrative and your narrative.

[2:11:47] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:11:48] Bob Dobbs: I was going to say something.

[2:11:52] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:11:52] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[2:11:55] Bob Dobbs: Beg your pardon?

[2:11:55] Cameron McEwen: Go ahead.

[2:11:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:12:00] Bob Dobbs: The final collaborator of McLuhan in the late

[2:12:03] Bob Dobbs: 70s, nobody knows his story.

[2:12:05] Bob Dobbs: I may have told you about it.

[2:12:08] Bob Dobbs: His name is David Greenberg.

[2:12:10] Bob Dobbs: He lived here in Maui,

[2:12:12] Bob Dobbs: and maybe I told you this,

[2:12:14] Bob Dobbs: so I won't go into too many details.

[2:12:15] Bob Dobbs: It might be on a recording earlier.

[2:12:19] Bob Dobbs: He became a lover of Mary McLuhan in 77 or so.

[2:12:24] Bob Dobbs: And he was from a wealthy family in L.A.,

[2:12:27] Bob Dobbs: very involved in the art world.

[2:12:31] Bob Dobbs: As a rich guy,

[2:12:32] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:12:32] Bob Dobbs: he's like a Gertrude Stein.

[2:12:33] Bob Dobbs: He could host all kinds of scenes.

[2:12:36] Bob Dobbs: Jack Nicholson and...

[2:12:38] Bob Dobbs: and Warren Beatty hung out with them,

[2:12:40] Bob Dobbs: and that's how Mary met them.

[2:12:42] Bob Dobbs: They would go to the beach in the 80s and read Understanding Media.

[2:12:46] Bob Dobbs: But he ended up being over here,

[2:12:50] Bob Dobbs: and then he went to Toronto to be with Mary,

[2:12:53] Bob Dobbs: and he met McLuhan,

[2:12:55] Bob Dobbs: and then he said he could do a TV series in L.A.

[2:12:59] Bob Dobbs: He had the connections,

[2:13:01] Bob Dobbs: like

[2:13:03] Bob Dobbs: Kenneth Clark's Civilization.

[2:13:05] Bob Dobbs: The Ascent of Man by that guy,

[2:13:07] Bob Dobbs: whoever that guy was in the early 70s.

[2:13:09] Bob Dobbs: Remember those?

[2:13:10] Bob Dobbs: Those TV specials?

[2:13:11] Cameron McEwen: That was Noam Chomsky.

[2:13:14] Bob Dobbs: Noam Chomsky,

[2:13:14] Bob Dobbs: right.

[2:13:15] Bob Dobbs: So here he was,

[2:13:17] Bob Dobbs: Marshall was right in 76 to 79 when he started to,

[2:13:21] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:13:22] Bob Dobbs: it's hard to stay at the University of Toronto.

[2:13:26] Bob Dobbs: Trudeau gets knocked out.

[2:13:28] Bob Dobbs: His support base is eroding.

[2:13:32] Bob Dobbs: He's isolated.

[2:13:35] Bob Dobbs: All of a sudden,

[2:13:36] Bob Dobbs: this guy comes up with what McLuhan would love to do,

[2:13:38] Bob Dobbs: a TV series.

[2:13:40] Bob Dobbs: So they map it out,

[2:13:41] Bob Dobbs: and everything gets set,

[2:13:43] Bob Dobbs: and it's going to be maybe on the LA

[2:13:45] Bob Dobbs: PBS station,

[2:13:47] Bob Dobbs: because this guy had the connections to do this,

[2:13:49] Bob Dobbs: and then he had the stroke.

[2:13:52] Bob Dobbs: And so it didn't happen.

[2:13:54] Bob Dobbs: But Mary,

[2:13:55] Bob Dobbs: when I came here in 2008,

[2:13:57] Bob Dobbs: Mary introduced me to him,

[2:13:58] Bob Dobbs: and we got together and talked a lot about McLuhan.

[2:14:01] Bob Dobbs: And he got inspired.

[2:14:03] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[2:14:03] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:14:04] Bob Dobbs: Bob,

[2:14:05] Bob Dobbs: You're the first person I've met who's like McLuhan.

[2:14:08] Bob Dobbs: Why don't we put on a show at the

[2:14:11] Bob Dobbs: Maui Arts Centre where you come out and be McLuhan?

[2:14:16] Bob Dobbs: But that was a...

[2:14:17] Cameron McEwen: I can see that.

[2:14:19] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:14:19] Cameron McEwen: One thing I didn't understand,

[2:14:20] Cameron McEwen: though,

[2:14:21] Cameron McEwen: wasn't Mary in California then?

[2:14:23] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:14:23] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[2:14:25] Cameron McEwen: You said something about

[2:14:26] Cameron McEwen: Greenberg went to Toronto to be with Mary,

[2:14:29] Cameron McEwen: but she wasn't in Toronto.

[2:14:32] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:14:32] Bob Dobbs: but she was going back and forth all the time.

[2:14:35] Bob Dobbs: And

[2:14:36] Bob Dobbs: Marshall, she said,

[2:14:38] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if this is true or not,

[2:14:39] Bob Dobbs: she said that Marshall always liked working with Mary because they got involved with Jerry Brown and Stuart Brand,

[2:14:45] Bob Dobbs: and she got a job in the Department of Education for California.

[2:14:50] Bob Dobbs: She said Marshall would get a talk.

[2:14:53] Bob Dobbs: He'd say,

[2:14:54] Bob Dobbs: somebody down there in

[2:14:56] Bob Dobbs: Long Beach,

[2:14:57] Bob Dobbs: get a talk for me.

[2:14:58] Bob Dobbs: So he could go visit.

[2:14:59] Bob Dobbs: Mary,

[2:15:00] Bob Dobbs: and I have their letters and I have their projects that they worked on that's in the archives with Jerry Brown.

[2:15:07] Bob Dobbs: So she was the most active

[2:15:10] Bob Dobbs: American part of the McLuhan family.

[2:15:12] Bob Dobbs: Eric is in Toronto,

[2:15:13] Bob Dobbs: but Mary is in California,

[2:15:16] Bob Dobbs: which was a happening place.

[2:15:17] Bob Dobbs: And she's very important for Marshall there.

[2:15:20] Bob Dobbs: And they did a lot of stuff.

[2:15:22] Bob Dobbs: And somehow she met Greenberg in there.

[2:15:25] Bob Dobbs: And so he got so involved.

[2:15:27] Bob Dobbs: that he would come to Toronto to be with Mary,

[2:15:30] Bob Dobbs: but also to work with Marshall.

[2:15:31] Bob Dobbs: And a couple of times,

[2:15:33] Bob Dobbs: Trudeau used to crash at their home.

[2:15:35] Bob Dobbs: When he came,

[2:15:36] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:15:36] Bob Dobbs: at the private,

[2:15:37] Bob Dobbs: Trudeau,

[2:15:37] Bob Dobbs: he was still prime minister,

[2:15:38] Bob Dobbs: but he'd come to Toronto and hide out and do stuff in his personal life while being prime minister.

[2:15:45] Bob Dobbs: And he would crash at the McLuhan home,

[2:15:47] Bob Dobbs: and one time he called up,

[2:15:49] Bob Dobbs: and Marshall,

[2:15:50] Bob Dobbs: David didn't know who he was talking to,

[2:15:53] Bob Dobbs: overheard this,

[2:15:54] Bob Dobbs: where Marshall said,

[2:15:55] Bob Dobbs: no,

[2:15:55] Bob Dobbs: I'm very busy.

[2:15:57] Bob Dobbs: I got to do this and that.

[2:15:59] Bob Dobbs: Later,

[2:16:00] Bob Dobbs: when David found out it was Trudeau,

[2:16:01] Bob Dobbs: he knew that Marshall was really into his project because he always welcomed Trudeau and enjoyed being with him.

[2:16:09] Bob Dobbs: But

[2:16:10] Bob Dobbs: David had usurped that,

[2:16:11] Bob Dobbs: and Marshall was getting ready to move to California to work and start a new operation there.

[2:16:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:16:20] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was a guest lecturer.

[2:16:26] Cameron McEwen: in

[2:16:27] Cameron McEwen: Santa Barbara,

[2:16:29] Cameron McEwen: what,

[2:16:30] Cameron McEwen: in the middle

[2:16:31] Cameron McEwen: 60s sometime,

[2:16:33] Cameron McEwen: and really liked it.

[2:16:35] Cameron McEwen: Where was that?

[2:16:36] Bob Dobbs: At the Democratic Institution's place?

[2:16:39] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:16:39] Cameron McEwen: it was...

[2:16:42] Cameron McEwen: You're right that that's where the institute was located,

[2:16:46] Cameron McEwen: but

[2:16:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was lecturing at the University of Santa Barbara,

[2:16:51] Cameron McEwen: University of California,

[2:16:52] Cameron McEwen: Santa Barbara.

[2:16:53] Bob Dobbs: Did Hugh Kenner get him there?

[2:16:56] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,

[2:16:56] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[2:16:57] Cameron McEwen: Kenner was away in Europe,

[2:16:59] Cameron McEwen: so the two of them weren't together there.

[2:17:04] Bob Dobbs: But Kenner had been working there,

[2:17:07] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:17:08] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[2:17:08] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:17:09] Cameron McEwen: That was near the end of his tenure there.

[2:17:12] Cameron McEwen: about to leave for Johns Hopkins.

[2:17:14] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:17:14] Cameron McEwen: But

[2:17:15] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan took his whole family there,

[2:17:20] Cameron McEwen: the same as he took his whole family to UBC a few years earlier.

[2:17:25] Cameron McEwen: And there are letters in the published letters volume where he talks about how great it was in California and how he might like to relocate there.

[2:17:41] Cameron McEwen: So what you're talking about from the

[2:17:43] Cameron McEwen: 70s was kind of an echo of what he'd already thought about in the

[2:17:49] Bob Dobbs: 60s. Well,

[2:17:50] Bob Dobbs: about 1960,

[2:17:52] Bob Dobbs: Marchand describes McLuhan driving across the country with,

[2:17:57] Bob Dobbs: I guess,

[2:17:58] Bob Dobbs: most of his family to visit Santa Barbara.

[2:18:01] Bob Dobbs: You don't mean that trip.

[2:18:03] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[2:18:03] Cameron McEwen: I do.

[2:18:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:18:04] Bob Dobbs: well,

[2:18:04] Bob Dobbs: that's 1960,

[2:18:06] Bob Dobbs: and that's when Kenner is there.

[2:18:09] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:18:09] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:18:10] Cameron McEwen: the...

[2:18:11] Cameron McEwen: I'm pretty sure that when he drove his whole family over there,

[2:18:19] Cameron McEwen: he was going to stay for a couple months.

[2:18:22] Cameron McEwen: And because he wouldn't take his whole family over there driving,

[2:18:28] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[2:18:28] Cameron McEwen: for a couple days or something.

[2:18:30] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:18:30] Bob Dobbs: but it was his summer vacation.

[2:18:33] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:18:33] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:18:35] Cameron McEwen: And Kenner was not there.

[2:18:38] Cameron McEwen: If you think he was,

[2:18:39] Cameron McEwen: that's a mistake.

[2:18:41] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:18:41] Bob Dobbs: let me just see.

[2:18:42] Bob Dobbs: I'm looking at Kenner

[2:18:44] Bob Dobbs: Wikipedia thing.

[2:18:48] Bob Dobbs: Does it academic career?

[2:18:50] Bob Dobbs: He's teaching at Santa Barbara from 51 to 73.

[2:18:57] Bob Dobbs: And then John Hopkins,

[2:18:58] Bob Dobbs: 73 to 90.

[2:18:59] Bob Dobbs: And then the University of Georgia,

[2:19:00] Bob Dobbs: 90 to 99.

[2:19:06] Bob Dobbs: So he,

[2:19:06] Bob Dobbs: in

[2:19:07] Bob Dobbs: 1960, McLuhan goes out there.

[2:19:09] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:19:09] Cameron McEwen: But Kenner had some sort of sabbatical in Europe.

[2:19:13] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:19:13] Bob Dobbs: so in a way he offered McLuhan as a substitute for the faculty.

[2:19:17] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,

[2:19:18] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[2:19:20] Cameron McEwen: Or there may have been an ongoing lecture series at the university,

[2:19:25] Cameron McEwen: and

[2:19:26] Cameron McEwen: Kenner suggested that McLuhan could be that year's lecturer.

[2:19:33] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure exactly what the mechanism was.

[2:19:37] Cameron McEwen: It's hard to believe that Kenner wasn't involved in it in some way,

[2:19:42] Cameron McEwen: but I do know that

[2:19:43] Cameron McEwen: Kenner wasn't there.

[2:19:45] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[2:19:45] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[2:19:46] Bob Dobbs: The point is that

[2:19:49] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan goes out to the University of British Columbia after that,

[2:19:53] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:19:54] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:19:56] Cameron McEwen: he lectured twice in summer sessions at UBC.

[2:20:00] Cameron McEwen: One was 1957 and the second...

[2:20:05] Cameron McEwen: was 1958 and it was in the 1958 summer session that he first talked about the medium as the message.

[2:20:16] Bob Dobbs: Right and so you're saying he took his family out to that?

[2:20:20] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:20:21] Bob Dobbs: So in through ION talking to McLuhan through ION you know we talk about his second sight

[2:20:31] Bob Dobbs: That was triggered by an experience of British Columbia when he was young and he went out there with his mother.

[2:20:37] Bob Dobbs: It was like the beauty of British Columbia,

[2:20:39] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:20:40] Bob Dobbs: sparked something in him.

[2:20:42] Bob Dobbs: And so he had what?

[2:20:45] Cameron McEwen: He always remembered that McLuhan always talks about something like

[2:20:52] Cameron McEwen: Second Sight being operative in him from the very beginning in

[2:20:56] Cameron McEwen: Winnipeg. Yes.

[2:20:59] Cameron McEwen: He talks,

[2:21:00] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[2:21:00] Cameron McEwen: in the Nina Sutton interview,

[2:21:03] Cameron McEwen: he talks about how his father would ask him what he was talking about,

[2:21:11] Cameron McEwen: if McLuhan would get up at some sort of social club or something.

[2:21:15] Cameron McEwen: With men.

[2:21:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:21:18] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[2:21:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:21:25] Bob Dobbs: So Ion tells me this,

[2:21:26] Bob Dobbs: or McLuhan through Ion.

[2:21:28] Bob Dobbs: That he went out to British Columbia,

[2:21:29] Bob Dobbs: in my sense of his biography,

[2:21:31] Bob Dobbs: I didn't see how he got out to

[2:21:33] Bob Dobbs: British Columbia in early years.

[2:21:36] Bob Dobbs: But when I was at the...

[2:21:38] Bob Dobbs: archives in Ottawa.

[2:21:39] Bob Dobbs: I was going through those early years and I found a description or something of him being out there with his mother,

[2:21:46] Bob Dobbs: probably when she was speaking and doing her performances in his teens,

[2:21:52] Bob Dobbs: maybe.

[2:21:54] Cameron McEwen: She had a brother there.

[2:21:56] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[2:21:58] Cameron McEwen: She had two brothers and one of them was the head of an experimental farm for the

[2:22:04] Cameron McEwen: BC government just outside of

[2:22:07] Cameron McEwen: Sydney.

[2:22:08] Cameron McEwen: which is just north of Victoria.

[2:22:11] Cameron McEwen: And so they went out to stay with the brother.

[2:22:15] Bob Dobbs: Wait,

[2:22:15] Bob Dobbs: was that guy named Ray?

[2:22:17] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[2:22:18] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:22:19] Bob Dobbs: I read stuff,

[2:22:19] Bob Dobbs: letters and stuff about him.

[2:22:22] Bob Dobbs: And I think Tom Cooper interviewed him or corresponded with him.

[2:22:26] Cameron McEwen: Maybe there are.

[2:22:28] Cameron McEwen: I know that there are,

[2:22:30] Cameron McEwen: even online,

[2:22:32] Cameron McEwen: there is some memories of

[2:22:37] Cameron McEwen: Ray.

[2:22:38] Cameron McEwen: that get into

[2:22:40] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan being out there.

[2:22:42] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[2:22:42] Bob Dobbs: so that adds to it.

[2:22:44] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[2:22:45] Bob Dobbs: I imagine it was with her traveling and performing they got out there.

[2:22:50] Bob Dobbs: But definitely with the family out there,

[2:22:52] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[2:22:52] Bob Dobbs: that's another reason he was out there.

[2:22:54] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:22:55] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:22:55] Bob Dobbs: he liked the Pacific Anti-environment,

[2:22:58] Bob Dobbs: British Columbia,

[2:22:59] Bob Dobbs: and then he certainly liked California.

[2:23:01] Bob Dobbs: And so he does Kenner scene in 60.

[2:23:07] Bob Dobbs: Then he does British Columbia,

[2:23:08] Bob Dobbs: and then he gets involved with Gossage and is out in California 65,

[2:23:12] Bob Dobbs: 66,

[2:23:12] Bob Dobbs: 67 a lot.

[2:23:14] Bob Dobbs: And did you know that Mary,

[2:23:16] Bob Dobbs: she had hitchhiked to Banff around 65,

[2:23:19] Bob Dobbs: 66,

[2:23:20] Bob Dobbs: and instead of going back to university,

[2:23:22] Bob Dobbs: she went down to San Francisco,

[2:23:24] Bob Dobbs: and then when she was there,

[2:23:26] Bob Dobbs: she had no money.

[2:23:26] Bob Dobbs: She called up her dad and said,

[2:23:28] Bob Dobbs: hey,

[2:23:28] Bob Dobbs: I'm in San Francisco.

[2:23:30] Bob Dobbs: Do you know anybody?

[2:23:31] Bob Dobbs: What should I do?

[2:23:32] Bob Dobbs: And he said,

[2:23:33] Bob Dobbs: go visit Howard Gossage.

[2:23:35] Bob Dobbs: So she went there and she lived with the Gossages for a couple of years,

[2:23:39] Bob Dobbs: 66,

[2:23:40] Bob Dobbs: 67,

[2:23:41] Bob Dobbs: in there.

[2:23:41] Bob Dobbs: And then she got married in late 66.

[2:23:44] Bob Dobbs: So maybe it was 65 and 66.

[2:23:46] Bob Dobbs: So she knew a lot about the Gossages in that period.

[2:23:50] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan would come out and visit.

[2:23:52] Bob Dobbs: So yes,

[2:23:54] Bob Dobbs: Marshall got out to California as much as he could.

[2:23:56] Bob Dobbs: And he almost got to his next phase,

[2:24:00] Bob Dobbs: if he had survived,

[2:24:02] Bob Dobbs: would have been in California.

[2:24:05] Cameron McEwen: And,

[2:24:06] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[2:24:06] Cameron McEwen: when you talk about him liking to go out to

[2:24:10] Cameron McEwen: British Columbia or going out to California,

[2:24:13] Cameron McEwen: part of this is just being a Western Canadian.

[2:24:16] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:24:17] Cameron McEwen: Western Canadians feel a little bit uncomfortable in Toronto and in the East generally.

[2:24:24] Cameron McEwen: There's just a kind of edge to life that is strange.

[2:24:30] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[2:24:30] Cameron McEwen: And when you get back to any...

[2:24:34] Cameron McEwen: part of western canada um and all western canadian cities are mashes of um other western canadian cities so for example when you get to calgary half the people you meet are from saskatoon or regina and

[2:24:51] Cameron McEwen: uh when when you get to winnipeg i mean edmonton there's lots of people from uh winnipeg and then you get out to vancouver and uh you know half the town is either retirees

[2:25:04] Cameron McEwen: or people that have been recruited out of the prairies.

[2:25:07] Bob Dobbs: I see.

[2:25:08] Cameron McEwen: So a Western Canadian feels a comfort in the

[2:25:15] Cameron McEwen: West, and it doesn't matter if you're talking about Western Canada or Western United States,

[2:25:22] Cameron McEwen: that is kind of a relief from the East.

[2:25:27] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:25:28] Bob Dobbs: And as a result of the jet age,

[2:25:32] Bob Dobbs: Most Canadians we encounter here,

[2:25:34] Bob Dobbs: and many have houses in our compound here,

[2:25:36] Bob Dobbs: are from Calgary.

[2:25:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:25:39] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[2:25:40] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:25:40] Bob Dobbs: A major Calgary,

[2:25:41] Bob Dobbs: Hawaii,

[2:25:42] Bob Dobbs: or Calgary and Maui interface going on.

[2:25:46] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[2:25:47] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[2:25:48] Cameron McEwen: I know people from

[2:25:51] Cameron McEwen: Regina that also have places in Calgary that have places there in Maui as well.

[2:26:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:26:01] Bob Dobbs: And you're down there,

[2:26:02] Bob Dobbs: you're part of the West Coast,

[2:26:06] Bob Dobbs: you're in California.

[2:26:08] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:26:09] Cameron McEwen: When we met,

[2:26:10] Cameron McEwen: I was living close to Princeton,

[2:26:13] Cameron McEwen: and you were living in New York,

[2:26:17] Cameron McEwen: but I was never comfortable in the East.

[2:26:21] Cameron McEwen: I was in the East both for university,

[2:26:25] Cameron McEwen: and then

[2:26:26] Cameron McEwen: I lived there for

[2:26:27] Cameron McEwen: 15 years around the time that we met.

[2:26:30] Cameron McEwen: And it was a great relief for me to be able to get out to the West again.

[2:26:36] Bob Dobbs: Great.

[2:26:38] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know that you were living nearby in Princeton.

[2:26:42] Bob Dobbs: didn't come across at the time.

[2:26:44] Bob Dobbs: So when we saw you in 98,

[2:26:48] Bob Dobbs: how many years had you already been in Princeton and how many after

[2:26:51] Bob Dobbs: 98?

[2:26:53] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:26:56] Cameron McEwen: I moved to a town,

[2:26:59] Cameron McEwen: Cleanth Brooks,

[2:27:00] Cameron McEwen: near to Princeton.

[2:27:01] Cameron McEwen: I wasn't doing anything with Princeton at the time,

[2:27:04] Cameron McEwen: but I moved there in the late 80s.

[2:27:06] Cameron McEwen: In 1988,

[2:27:08] Cameron McEwen: I bought a place there,

[2:27:09] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[2:27:10] Cameron McEwen: and then

[2:27:12] Cameron McEwen: stayed there until a little after 2000.

[2:27:16] Cameron McEwen: So basically 15 years.

[2:27:19] Cameron McEwen: And when we met,

[2:27:20] Cameron McEwen: I was near the end of my tenure there.

[2:27:23] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:27:24] Bob Dobbs: And what were you doing there?

[2:27:25] Bob Dobbs: Is that when you were working for the digital company?

[2:27:27] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:27:29] Bob Dobbs: With George Sanderson project,

[2:27:32] Bob Dobbs: Looming.

[2:27:34] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:27:35] Cameron McEwen: George was,

[2:27:36] Cameron McEwen: because of our expertise in

[2:27:40] Cameron McEwen: digital media,

[2:27:41] Cameron McEwen: George was hoping that we could meld what he thought was his permission to do the electric

[2:27:50] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan with what we were doing.

[2:27:52] Cameron McEwen: And

[2:27:54] Cameron McEwen: I got together with Corinne to discuss that and she was gung-ho,

[2:28:00] Cameron McEwen: I must say,

[2:28:01] Cameron McEwen: for that and got...

[2:28:05] Bob Dobbs: Mady.

[2:28:05] Bob Dobbs: What was the name?

[2:28:06] Bob Dobbs: Mady.

[2:28:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:28:06] Cameron McEwen: Mady.

[2:28:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:28:07] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[2:28:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:28:08] Cameron McEwen: I got Mady involved.

[2:28:10] Cameron McEwen: But then

[2:28:13] Cameron McEwen: I couldn't get my partners to agree to the financial outlay that would be necessary.

[2:28:24] Cameron McEwen: And so we never could sort of get the ends to meet.

[2:28:30] Cameron McEwen: And

[2:28:30] Cameron McEwen: I always regretted that

[2:28:32] Cameron McEwen: George Sanderson never saw the realization of a project that he had really worked.

[2:28:40] Bob Dobbs: hard on and set his his heart on yeah and so um i thought it was matey's resistance could they have lowered their financial demand no

[2:28:58] Cameron McEwen: i mean the basic problem was that um uh the internet had only become a possibility um maybe um

[2:29:10] Cameron McEwen: A year or two before this,

[2:29:13] Cameron McEwen: we had made the transition from

[2:29:15] Cameron McEwen: CD to Internet,

[2:29:17] Cameron McEwen: and the possibilities before the company were basically unlimited,

[2:29:24] Cameron McEwen: right,

[2:29:24] Cameron McEwen: if you think of digitizing the tradition.

[2:29:27] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:29:27] Cameron McEwen: And so we were working on Thomas and Wittgenstein and Leibniz and Hegel and Kant and on and on.

[2:29:35] Cameron McEwen: And so...

[2:29:36] Cameron McEwen: I go up to

[2:29:37] Cameron McEwen: Nova Scotia and visit with George,

[2:29:39] Cameron McEwen: and then I go to Toronto and visit with Corinne,

[2:29:42] Cameron McEwen: and then

[2:29:43] Cameron McEwen: I come back and I talk to my partners and I say,

[2:29:45] Cameron McEwen: look,

[2:29:47] Cameron McEwen: we can do McLuhan,

[2:29:49] Cameron McEwen: let's do it.

[2:29:50] Cameron McEwen: And they said,

[2:29:52] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:29:52] Cameron McEwen: wait a sec,

[2:29:54] Cameron McEwen: where are we going to prioritize McLuhan when we're doing

[2:29:58] Cameron McEwen: Hegel and Wittgenstein and Plato,

[2:30:01] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:30:02] Cameron McEwen: And it was more the idea that

[2:30:07] Cameron McEwen: the priority was just too low for my partners.

[2:30:12] Cameron McEwen: And I've always regretted that I didn't say,

[2:30:14] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:30:14] Cameron McEwen: do you mind if I do it on the side?

[2:30:17] Cameron McEwen: Because

[2:30:17] Cameron McEwen: I think I could have put that together.

[2:30:19] Cameron McEwen: But

[2:30:21] Cameron McEwen: I just,

[2:30:22] Cameron McEwen: I didn't think to do that.

[2:30:24] Cameron McEwen: And then the thing sort of fell apart.

[2:30:30] Cameron McEwen: But one of the big problems was that

[2:30:35] Cameron McEwen: George...

[2:30:35] Cameron McEwen: thought he had a contract with Corinne and maybe disputed that.

[2:30:41] Cameron McEwen: So that's one of the hurdles that would have had to be overcome.

[2:30:45] Cameron McEwen: But basically,

[2:30:46] Cameron McEwen: my job with the publishing company was solving problems like that.

[2:30:52] Cameron McEwen: And

[2:30:53] Cameron McEwen: I think that would have been a fairly minor thing to straighten out if my partners had agreed that we should do McLuhan.

[2:31:03] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:31:04] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:31:04] Bob Dobbs: you said your job was solving those kind of problems.

[2:31:08] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[2:31:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:31:09] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[2:31:10] Bob Dobbs: Were they a bit naive about the importance of McLuhan?

[2:31:15] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:31:15] Cameron McEwen: they certainly didn't agree with me that he was very important in comparison to the other people that they were dedicating their budget to.

[2:31:26] Bob Dobbs: So that was in the Princeton area,

[2:31:29] Bob Dobbs: 88 to 2002 or something,

[2:31:31] Bob Dobbs: and then you moved to California?

[2:31:33] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:31:34] Cameron McEwen: first back to Chicago.

[2:31:36] Cameron McEwen: I had been in,

[2:31:38] Cameron McEwen: I had gone from LA to Chicago.

[2:31:41] Cameron McEwen: I was in Chicago when

[2:31:44] Cameron McEwen: Obama was an aspiring local politician who was getting beaten in local elections.

[2:31:53] Cameron McEwen: I was in Chicago from around 1985 to 1988 or 1989 and really liked Chicago.

[2:32:07] Cameron McEwen: Chicago is a kind of western town.

[2:32:10] Cameron McEwen: It's not an eastern town.

[2:32:12] Cameron McEwen: And it's just got a lot of attractions to it.

[2:32:17] Cameron McEwen: So then

[2:32:18] Cameron McEwen: I, from,

[2:32:19] Cameron McEwen: and oftentimes when I'm moving around like this,

[2:32:22] Cameron McEwen: it was because

[2:32:24] Cameron McEwen: I could do the

[2:32:25] Cameron McEwen: Internet job from anywhere,

[2:32:28] Cameron McEwen: but my wife would get jobs that were tied to particular places,

[2:32:33] Cameron McEwen: like New Jersey or like Chicago.

[2:32:36] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:32:37] Cameron McEwen: So we moved back to Chicago sometime around 2000,

[2:32:43] Cameron McEwen: and then in

[2:32:45] Cameron McEwen: 2005, she got the opportunity to work in Orange County.

[2:32:52] Cameron McEwen: And for me,

[2:32:53] Cameron McEwen: going back to the West Coast was perfect.

[2:32:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:32:58] Cameron McEwen: And so we came back here.

[2:33:01] Bob Dobbs: And were you still working with the digital company?

[2:33:05] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[2:33:05] Cameron McEwen: until...

[2:33:08] Cameron McEwen: I retired maybe,

[2:33:13] Cameron McEwen: I don't know,

[2:33:13] Cameron McEwen: five or six years after we moved here.

[2:33:16] Cameron McEwen: And

[2:33:17] Cameron McEwen: I still own part of it,

[2:33:19] Cameron McEwen: so

[2:33:20] Cameron McEwen: I'm not entirely removed from it.

[2:33:23] Cameron McEwen: I'm just removed from the day-to-day activities that I used to do.

[2:33:28] Bob Dobbs: So that's 2005.

[2:33:32] Bob Dobbs: The last 15 years,

[2:33:33] Bob Dobbs: you haven't been employed in anything?

[2:33:39] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:33:39] Cameron McEwen: it was 2010 or so that I retired,

[2:33:43] Cameron McEwen: but

[2:33:46] Cameron McEwen: I had always,

[2:33:47] Cameron McEwen: no matter what I was doing,

[2:33:49] Cameron McEwen: I always regarded my work as my way of financing my writing.

[2:33:58] Bob Dobbs: So

[2:33:59] Cameron McEwen: I always had,

[2:34:04] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[2:34:04] Cameron McEwen: I was investing in the stock market and things like this.

[2:34:08] Cameron McEwen: as part of my need to keep my family fed at the same time that I had my first priority,

[2:34:18] Cameron McEwen: which was my writing.

[2:34:19] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:34:20] Bob Dobbs: So you did the virtual company until 2010,

[2:34:25] Bob Dobbs: and then you've been on your own since then.

[2:34:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:34:29] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:34:30] Bob Dobbs: Back to George Sanderson.

[2:34:31] Bob Dobbs: I knew George.

[2:34:34] Bob Dobbs: I wondered,

[2:34:36] Bob Dobbs: what was his experience?

[2:34:37] Bob Dobbs: expertise on McLuhan.

[2:34:39] Bob Dobbs: He did do that book with Frank somebody.

[2:34:44] Bob Dobbs: How was he for dialoguing about McLuhan or with McLuhan?

[2:34:50] Bob Dobbs: Your interaction with him.

[2:34:51] Bob Dobbs: What did you learn from him?

[2:34:54] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that I learned anything from

[2:34:56] Cameron McEwen: George. Number one,

[2:34:58] Cameron McEwen: George was a great guy that I liked being with.

[2:35:01] Cameron McEwen: George had a lot of energy so that he

[2:35:06] Cameron McEwen: was a one-man band with the anti-Ganesh review.

[2:35:13] Cameron McEwen: George realized that

[2:35:17] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was an important Canadian thinker and was more in tune with

[2:35:27] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan than most people.

[2:35:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:35:30] Cameron McEwen: And

[2:35:32] Cameron McEwen: George was interested in...

[2:35:34] Cameron McEwen: what you might call the application of McLuhan,

[2:35:38] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:35:39] Cameron McEwen: How would understanding McLuhan change education?

[2:35:44] Cameron McEwen: How would it change how we think about ourselves?

[2:35:46] Cameron McEwen: How would it change what we write?

[2:35:50] Cameron McEwen: And the review was a kind of reflection of that,

[2:35:59] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:35:59] Cameron McEwen: It was the review was it subsequently became

[2:36:04] Cameron McEwen: almost exclusively short stories and poetry.

[2:36:09] Cameron McEwen: But for George,

[2:36:10] Cameron McEwen: it involved art.

[2:36:12] Cameron McEwen: His son was an artist and often did covers for the review.

[2:36:18] Cameron McEwen: There was poetry in there,

[2:36:19] Cameron McEwen: but there was also theory.

[2:36:21] Cameron McEwen: There was also reviews of deep stuff.

[2:36:28] Cameron McEwen: So the review was a reflection of

[2:36:31] Cameron McEwen: George's mind and of

[2:36:34] Cameron McEwen: how he understood McLuhan.

[2:36:37] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:36:37] Bob Dobbs: all right.

[2:36:38] Bob Dobbs: That makes sense.

[2:36:40] Bob Dobbs: The point I wanted to make is that

[2:36:44] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan way of interacting with all the different specialties in the university and out in regular life or commercial life,

[2:36:52] Bob Dobbs: he,

[2:36:53] Bob Dobbs: I would call this,

[2:36:55] Bob Dobbs: I called it later metaphysical promiscuity,

[2:36:57] Bob Dobbs: but the way people live today with the Internet over the last 10 or 15 years,

[2:37:01] Bob Dobbs: they can read a little anthropology,

[2:37:03] Bob Dobbs: a little physics,

[2:37:04] Bob Dobbs: a little this,

[2:37:05] Bob Dobbs: a little that.

[2:37:05] Bob Dobbs: the way McLuhan mind was.

[2:37:09] Bob Dobbs: in the sense that it was more doing this interdisciplinary,

[2:37:12] Bob Dobbs: inter-experienced documentation and observation.

[2:37:17] Bob Dobbs: It's why they anticipated how we live today,

[2:37:21] Bob Dobbs: at least how our minds are.

[2:37:24] Cameron McEwen: That's correct.

[2:37:25] Cameron McEwen: But we're still in the main that's still being done as sleepwalking.

[2:37:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:37:33] Cameron McEwen: Whereas what McLuhan was doing was...

[2:37:39] Cameron McEwen: since the

[2:37:40] Cameron McEwen: 1940s was sort of a conscious promiscuity.

[2:37:47] Cameron McEwen: He was following Giedion's lead to see the commonalities and things or the disjunctions,

[2:37:56] Cameron McEwen: for that matter.

[2:37:58] Cameron McEwen: He was a person that understood the kind of figure and ground dynamic that you illustrate in your charts.

[2:38:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:38:09] Bob Dobbs: my chart is about that.

[2:38:10] Bob Dobbs: So let's go to what happens 10 years later.

[2:38:14] Bob Dobbs: So we have the bond up and top down,

[2:38:17] Bob Dobbs: and we go up to,

[2:38:20] Bob Dobbs: how is this person?

[2:38:22] Bob Dobbs: We're getting a reorganized table,

[2:38:24] Bob Dobbs: and that's not that.

[2:38:27] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[2:38:28] Cameron McEwen: I wonder if what we should do is take that up another time.

[2:38:35] Cameron McEwen: I'm not pressed.

[2:38:37] Cameron McEwen: I could.

[2:38:38] Cameron McEwen: keep on going,

[2:38:39] Cameron McEwen: but I feel bad for anybody that would be listening to this.

[2:38:45] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[2:38:45] Cameron McEwen: They might be getting fatigued.

[2:38:48] Cameron McEwen: We're into our third hour here.

[2:38:52] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[2:38:53] Bob Dobbs: we'll stop.

[2:38:53] Cameron McEwen: What I would say is,

[2:38:55] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[2:38:56] Cameron McEwen: but why don't you give a kind of homework assignment,

[2:38:59] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:39:00] Cameron McEwen: Why don't you look ahead to the next session and say,

[2:39:03] Cameron McEwen: I'm going to talk about this chart and that chart.

[2:39:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:39:09] Bob Dobbs: All right,

[2:39:09] Bob Dobbs: so you would look at the

[2:39:13] Bob Dobbs: Bob Dobbs formula chart.

[2:39:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:39:17] Bob Dobbs: It's the last of the visual,

[2:39:20] Bob Dobbs: and then underneath it says Bob Dobbs tiny note chart,

[2:39:23] Bob Dobbs: and you click on that,

[2:39:24] Bob Dobbs: and that's bigger.

[2:39:26] Bob Dobbs: So looking at the Dobbs formula chart,

[2:39:31] Bob Dobbs: it's organized around the characters of Finnegans Wake,

[2:39:34] Bob Dobbs: the family,

[2:39:35] Bob Dobbs: and you scroll down to...

[2:39:40] Bob Dobbs: The third bottom line,

[2:39:42] Bob Dobbs: the section from the bottom,

[2:39:44] Bob Dobbs: third up,

[2:39:45] Bob Dobbs: has Reagan as the political actor,

[2:39:47] Bob Dobbs: but on the left it says,

[2:39:48] Bob Dobbs: holyopathic cliche probes.

[2:39:50] Bob Dobbs: And then the next slot down,

[2:39:53] Bob Dobbs: Anthropomorphic Physical,

[2:39:55] Bob Dobbs: those two rows become the tiny note chart.

[2:39:59] Bob Dobbs: They're pulled out of the formula chart and become the tiny note chart.

[2:40:04] Bob Dobbs: So that's what you can do.

[2:40:06] Bob Dobbs: You can look at the...

[2:40:07] Bob Dobbs: Structure,

[2:40:08] Bob Dobbs: and if you're really listening to what I've been saying,

[2:40:11] Bob Dobbs: you can figure it out.

[2:40:12] Bob Dobbs: It's not that hard.

[2:40:13] Bob Dobbs: Figure and ground.

[2:40:16] Bob Dobbs: The ground is ALP,

[2:40:18] Bob Dobbs: the female,

[2:40:20] Bob Dobbs: on the left.

[2:40:21] Bob Dobbs: And the top-down stuff is HCE on the far right.

[2:40:25] Bob Dobbs: That's the bureaucratic power response.

[2:40:28] Bob Dobbs: So I put the two charts together,

[2:40:30] Bob Dobbs: top-down and bottom-up,

[2:40:35] Bob Dobbs: in the formula chart.

[2:40:36] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?

[2:40:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:40:38] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[2:40:39] Cameron McEwen: And then the formula chart itself is two together.

[2:40:43] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:40:43] Cameron McEwen: that's what I'm saying.

[2:40:47] Bob Dobbs: The formula chart and the tiny note.

[2:40:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:40:50] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying the formula chart is the two charts from 10 years before 1985 together.

[2:40:54] Bob Dobbs: The tiny note chart is an anticipation of the Android Meme from 1960 to 1990.

[2:41:05] Bob Dobbs: So the characteristics,

[2:41:08] Bob Dobbs: the tiny node chart shows the mind of McLuhan,

[2:41:11] Bob Dobbs: which becomes the mind of Dobbs,

[2:41:15] Bob Dobbs: exaggerated in the internet.

[2:41:18] Bob Dobbs: So the Android Meme is the ground to what's going to happen in the mid-90s,

[2:41:23] Bob Dobbs: and the ground is 60 to 90.

[2:41:25] Bob Dobbs: The tiny node chart is that outlay of 60 to 90,

[2:41:32] Bob Dobbs: and it comes out of the formula chart.

[2:41:35] Bob Dobbs: Which is from 1750 to 2020.

[2:41:40] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:41:40] Bob Dobbs: so that's the assignment is to look at that and should be able to figure it out.

[2:41:44] Bob Dobbs: It's pretty straightforward.

[2:41:45] Bob Dobbs: It's mechanically staged.

[2:41:48] Bob Dobbs: One step to the next.

[2:41:49] Cameron McEwen: All right.

[2:41:55] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:41:55] Cameron McEwen: I learned a lot about your own thinking and your thinking about McLuhan today,

[2:42:03] Cameron McEwen: and I'll look forward to...

[2:42:05] Cameron McEwen: learning more about them the next time through these two other terms.

[2:42:11] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:42:11] Bob Dobbs: great.

[2:42:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:42:13] Bob Dobbs: it's fun explaining them.

[2:42:15] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:42:15] Bob Dobbs: so we'll talk next week,

[2:42:17] Bob Dobbs: same time.

[2:42:19] Bob Dobbs: Thanks a lot.

[2:42:20] Cameron McEwen: Same time,

[2:42:22] Bob Dobbs: same station.

[2:42:23] Bob Dobbs: Thanks a lot.

[2:42:24] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:42:24] Cameron McEwen: see you.

[2:42:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.