[00:02] Bob Dobbs: As usual,
[00:03] Bob Dobbs: I start off with the word,
[00:04] Bob Dobbs: OK.
[00:06] Bob Dobbs: And this is Bob and Cameron again.
[00:09] Bob Dobbs: And this is session number 15.
[00:12] Bob Dobbs: And we're looking at my book through my Tiny Note chart.
[00:17] Bob Dobbs: And we've done a few weeks on that.
[00:19] Bob Dobbs: And Cameron has something to say about that,
[00:23] Bob Dobbs: where we've gotten.
[00:24] Bob Dobbs: So take it away.
[00:27] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[00:27] Cameron McEwen: one thing that interests me is a comment that you made.
[00:32] Cameron McEwen: on our way to the recording this morning,
[00:36] Cameron McEwen: and you said a couple times that your Tiny Note chart predicted certain things.
[00:42] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[00:43] Cameron McEwen: And
[00:44] Cameron McEwen: I'm wondering if the power to predict is what we're looking for in something like a Tiny Note chart.
[00:56] Cameron McEwen: Is that what you see its function and value as being?
[01:02] Bob Dobbs: I was making a statement about the changes that the new technology Carolyn was working with in New York in 93 to 97,
[01:14] Bob Dobbs: and it treated AIDS successfully.
[01:16] Bob Dobbs: So what happens to the world when you have something that works,
[01:19] Bob Dobbs: and you even have a study confirming that,
[01:23] Bob Dobbs: and you've got big names behind it,
[01:25] Bob Dobbs: but then one guy dies,
[01:27] Bob Dobbs: and the other guy was the nephew of the Shah of Iran?
[01:31] Bob Dobbs: And he helped us,
[01:33] Bob Dobbs: but nobody else cared.
[01:37] Bob Dobbs: So in the tension of that situation about how much,
[01:42] Bob Dobbs: how long does Carolyn keep trying to plug away and get this going?
[01:46] Bob Dobbs: So in 94,
[01:48] Bob Dobbs: Governor Mario Cuomo changed the laws so that there was more opening opportunities for alternative medicine,
[01:56] Bob Dobbs: which this technology would be put under that category.
[02:00] Bob Dobbs: So she got to do it for three years and had a clinic and was very successful.
[02:05] Bob Dobbs: But then the sneaky
[02:08] Bob Dobbs: AMA, New York branch,
[02:10] Bob Dobbs: came to us and said,
[02:12] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[02:12] Bob Dobbs: we're not in total control.
[02:14] Bob Dobbs: We've got to acknowledge this law,
[02:15] Bob Dobbs: but we're telling you,
[02:16] Bob Dobbs: do not ship this out of the state.
[02:18] Bob Dobbs: So spreading it around across America and the world got stopped.
[02:23] Bob Dobbs: So that frustrated the operation and the widow of the inventor.
[02:28] Bob Dobbs: The inventor had died in August 1993.
[02:31] Bob Dobbs: So in the midst of all that,
[02:35] Bob Dobbs: I was taking seriously what the technology Carolyn was working with,
[02:40] Bob Dobbs: and I came up with this chart to show society's technologies were based on friction.
[02:50] Bob Dobbs: So they were entropic.
[02:53] Bob Dobbs: They had entropy.
[02:54] Bob Dobbs: But the new technologies represented by this...
[02:58] Bob Dobbs: thing that Carolyn had um an inventor was Walter Kaufmann to give us due uh we're into the new era of frictionless technologies and ponds inflation was cold fusion was also being
[03:13] Bob Dobbs: touted at that point so with this idea of moving into the frictionless i called that the phatic because the chart was five levels up to the pentad tetrad was the Android Meme
[03:28] Bob Dobbs: Sort of like the final extension of early technologies.
[03:32] Bob Dobbs: And we moved into a new dimension.
[03:35] Bob Dobbs: So
[03:35] Bob Dobbs: I wrote at the bottom,
[03:36] Bob Dobbs: waiting for organic bodies,
[03:38] Bob Dobbs: the spinning clothing crystals have danced the hexadvertisement.
[03:43] Bob Dobbs: I took Decad after pentad and put in brackets vertisement.
[03:48] Bob Dobbs: So this was an ad for what was coming.
[03:51] Bob Dobbs: So I was predicting what was coming,
[03:52] Bob Dobbs: but it had already arrived.
[03:54] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't a world anti-environment.
[03:56] Bob Dobbs: So
[03:57] Bob Dobbs: Then,
[03:59] Bob Dobbs: that didn't get very far by the year 2000.
[04:03] Bob Dobbs: So then,
[04:04] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn discovered the miracle of magnesium,
[04:06] Bob Dobbs: wrote a book on it,
[04:08] Bob Dobbs: and then got it on TV for three years.
[04:10] Bob Dobbs: And that led into a whole other direction.
[04:12] Bob Dobbs: And then,
[04:13] Bob Dobbs: iON showed up in 2009,
[04:16] Bob Dobbs: 14 years after the chart.
[04:17] Bob Dobbs: And then,
[04:18] Bob Dobbs: iON gave us the abilities to make better technologies than the mirror.
[04:22] Bob Dobbs: So,
[04:24] Bob Dobbs: that,
[04:24] Bob Dobbs: in retrospect...
[04:26] Bob Dobbs: is what I accidentally predicted.
[04:30] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[04:31] Cameron McEwen: but notice how what you're saying is that at the basis of the Tiny Note chart is a technology and a physical technology,
[04:47] Cameron McEwen: and the value that you see in the Tiny Note chart,
[04:54] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.
[04:55] Cameron McEwen: could have been a conscious value at the time of construction is that you mirrored
[05:04] Cameron McEwen: this technology and consciously or unconsciously predicted further developments in that line.
[05:17] Cameron McEwen: So,
[05:18] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[05:20] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[05:20] Cameron McEwen: so that's interesting,
[05:25] Cameron McEwen: but it's certainly not the only thing that thinking does.
[05:32] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[05:32] Bob Dobbs: and I did...
[05:33] Bob Dobbs: I did create a mirror of the internet,
[05:36] Bob Dobbs: which I called the afterimage of the Android Meme,
[05:38] Bob Dobbs: Android Meme being from 1960 to 1990.
[05:42] Bob Dobbs: So
[05:43] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember how much I thought it was the internet as I was making it.
[05:48] Bob Dobbs: I just thought,
[05:49] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[05:49] Bob Dobbs: the valuable people to prepare for what's coming were LaRouche,
[05:55] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[05:56] Bob Dobbs: Thompson,
[05:56] Bob Dobbs: Kroker,
[05:57] Bob Dobbs: and myself,
[05:59] Bob Dobbs: our thinking.
[05:59] Bob Dobbs: So I was celebrating what we had done.
[06:02] Bob Dobbs: But we were moving into something new that none of us foresaw,
[06:07] Bob Dobbs: or
[06:08] Bob Dobbs: I don't know how close we came to it in our work.
[06:12] Bob Dobbs: But they were closer than anybody else,
[06:14] Bob Dobbs: I felt.
[06:15] Bob Dobbs: So it was a recapitulation of the means or the thinkings and the anti-environment that led to this new breakthrough environment.
[06:24] Bob Dobbs: So
[06:24] Bob Dobbs: I did have that in mind,
[06:27] Bob Dobbs: and as I got more familiar with the Internet,
[06:31] Bob Dobbs: I decided that this was a mirror of the internet,
[06:33] Bob Dobbs: but I don't know how much
[06:36] Bob Dobbs: I consciously thought of that at the time.
[06:38] Bob Dobbs: I was trying to acknowledge an arrival at some state of technology.
[06:44] Bob Dobbs: That's why I came up with the term holeopathic,
[06:45] Bob Dobbs: and I was featuring the ideas of McLuhan,
[06:48] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche,
[06:49] Bob Dobbs: Thompson,
[06:49] Bob Dobbs: Kroker,
[06:50] Bob Dobbs: all mixed in,
[06:51] Bob Dobbs: and my stuff.
[06:52] Bob Dobbs: So they all contributed.
[06:54] Bob Dobbs: And that's about all I could say.
[06:59] Bob Dobbs: But what was interesting is...
[07:00] Bob Dobbs: People didn't have a,
[07:01] Bob Dobbs: they really said,
[07:02] Bob Dobbs: what the hell is this?
[07:03] Bob Dobbs: So once I laid out,
[07:04] Bob Dobbs: like I did with you,
[07:05] Bob Dobbs: how each section quadrant has characteristics that are repeated in the next quadrant,
[07:13] Bob Dobbs: and it's all lined up pretty easily once you know and notice that,
[07:18] Bob Dobbs: then it became easy to be at least read.
[07:23] Bob Dobbs: But nobody knew what it meant.
[07:25] Bob Dobbs: But through the years,
[07:26] Bob Dobbs: people still talk about it and still think there's...
[07:30] Bob Dobbs: understanding it more.
[07:31] Bob Dobbs: So,
[07:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[07:33] Bob Dobbs: it wasn't useless.
[07:37] Bob Dobbs: It still communicates to people.
[07:39] Bob Dobbs: And then I got some other charts from
[07:42] Bob Dobbs: ION, what we call the Angel Diagram,
[07:45] Bob Dobbs: and we made a video.
[07:46] Bob Dobbs: It cost us $58,000.
[07:48] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if you've ever seen that.
[07:49] Bob Dobbs: I should send that to you.
[07:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[07:52] Bob Dobbs: Have you seen it?
[07:54] Bob Dobbs: No,
[07:54] Bob Dobbs: no.
[07:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[07:56] Cameron McEwen: Send it to me.
[07:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[07:57] Bob Dobbs: that has ION explaining that chart.
[07:59] Bob Dobbs: And then
[08:00] Bob Dobbs: Then there was another chart,
[08:01] Bob Dobbs: and I sort of realized the Android Meme chart,
[08:05] Bob Dobbs: or Tiny Note chart,
[08:06] Bob Dobbs: complemented the angel diagram chart.
[08:12] Bob Dobbs: And
[08:13] Bob Dobbs: Ion started talking about the chart.
[08:15] Bob Dobbs: I had not prompted it,
[08:17] Bob Dobbs: and it has a lot to say about the chart,
[08:19] Bob Dobbs: and says it's actually referred to in the Bible,
[08:22] Bob Dobbs: in the book of Revelation.
[08:25] Cameron McEwen: Just hold on for a sec.
[08:28] Cameron McEwen: You mentioned several different charts.
[08:30] Cameron McEwen: Are you back to talking about the Tiny Note Chart,
[08:33] Cameron McEwen: or are you talking about another chart?
[08:35] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[08:35] Bob Dobbs: there's the angel diagram chart,
[08:38] Bob Dobbs: and there's another chart,
[08:42] Bob Dobbs: I don't have a name for it,
[08:43] Bob Dobbs: that Ion unveiled.
[08:46] Bob Dobbs: These are
[08:47] Cameron McEwen: 15 or more years in the future,
[08:49] Cameron McEwen: right?
[08:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[08:51] Bob Dobbs: Ion revealed the angel diagram
[08:55] Bob Dobbs: 16 years later,
[08:56] Bob Dobbs: 2000.
[08:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[08:58] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[08:58] Cameron McEwen: 15.
[08:59] Cameron McEwen: So that's quite a jump from where we are.
[09:02] Cameron McEwen: But didn't
[09:05] Cameron McEwen: I am say that there was some sort of malevolent presence of the angels in your chart that had screwed it up or screwed up your mind?
[09:21] Cameron McEwen: I don't know anything about that.
[09:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[09:23] Bob Dobbs: no.
[09:24] Cameron McEwen: It would be interesting if you were to talk about that.
[09:27] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[09:27] Bob Dobbs: no.
[09:29] Bob Dobbs: When ION first talked and told us what he wanted to tell us,
[09:33] Bob Dobbs: it was pretty avant-garde,
[09:36] Bob Dobbs: but within known human ideas.
[09:40] Bob Dobbs: But then they started pointing out that the angels objected to man,
[09:45] Bob Dobbs: humans,
[09:45] Bob Dobbs: being on the right-hand side of God.
[09:48] Bob Dobbs: And so there was a battle between the angels.
[09:51] Bob Dobbs: That was battle one in heaven.
[09:53] Bob Dobbs: Then there was a second battle between the angels and men.
[09:56] Bob Dobbs: So we learn more and more that the angels actually don't like humans and are going to do their damnedest to make sure we don't get to replace them on the right-hand side of God.
[10:06] Bob Dobbs: And these terms are metaphysical.
[10:09] Bob Dobbs: I'm not talking like a fundamentalist here,
[10:11] Bob Dobbs: but these are terms that I unused.
[10:14] Bob Dobbs: But we found it for mine,
[10:15] Bob Dobbs: deeper meanings of it.
[10:17] Bob Dobbs: So most people think angels are there to help them or are friends and all that.
[10:21] Bob Dobbs: They aren't.
[10:22] Bob Dobbs: But once you get a certain level of...
[10:24] Bob Dobbs: power spiritual power you can control them and they then they have to do your bidding so the angels
[10:32] Bob Dobbs: influenced the making of this chart for I don't know what reason,
[10:37] Bob Dobbs: it hasn't been spelled out,
[10:39] Bob Dobbs: but they helped me do it and I wasn't aware of that.
[10:43] Bob Dobbs: But I find out about it 15 years,
[10:45] Bob Dobbs: 16 years later,
[10:47] Bob Dobbs: and then a whole drama has unfolded between the meaning of the Tiny Note Chart from Ian's point of view and angels.
[10:56] Bob Dobbs: So that drama has been going on for 10 years.
[11:00] Bob Dobbs: And there's lots of stories
[11:04] Bob Dobbs: I could go into that Ion explains,
[11:09] Bob Dobbs: but no proof.
[11:10] Bob Dobbs: He's got
[11:11] Bob Dobbs: Ion's word for it,
[11:12] Bob Dobbs: but Ion's a pretty unique source of information.
[11:16] Bob Dobbs: And he's psychic and predicts things and gets into people's lives and tells them stuff,
[11:22] Bob Dobbs: and they like it,
[11:23] Bob Dobbs: they learn.
[11:24] Bob Dobbs: So it's all pretty great new university I regard it as.
[11:29] Bob Dobbs: So,
[11:30] Bob Dobbs: and we've done,
[11:30] Bob Dobbs: we've recorded over 31,000 hours with Ion.
[11:33] Bob Dobbs: But Ion is,
[11:35] Bob Dobbs: through the years,
[11:35] Bob Dobbs: at first,
[11:36] Bob Dobbs: the first six months,
[11:37] Bob Dobbs: 2009 and 2010,
[11:40] Bob Dobbs: Ion would not let me talk about McLuhan,
[11:43] Bob Dobbs: Kroker,
[11:44] Bob Dobbs: or anybody.
[11:45] Bob Dobbs: He would shut me down.
[11:46] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[11:46] Bob Dobbs: no,
[11:46] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[11:47] Bob Dobbs: we don't want to hear about that.
[11:48] Bob Dobbs: We're going to tell you what we have to tell you.
[11:51] Bob Dobbs: So after a year or so of telling me what they had to tell me,
[11:54] Bob Dobbs: then they said one day,
[11:57] Bob Dobbs: Your five bodies are useful,
[12:00] Bob Dobbs: and you have them embedded in the chart.
[12:03] Bob Dobbs: So we're going to talk more about the chart,
[12:05] Bob Dobbs: which is actually mentioned in the Bible.
[12:08] Bob Dobbs: And if McLuhan ever comes up,
[12:11] Bob Dobbs: if you quote McLuhan and insist on it,
[12:13] Bob Dobbs: you can quote McLuhan.
[12:14] Bob Dobbs: But then you have to say,
[12:15] Bob Dobbs: however,
[12:16] Bob Dobbs: Bob says.
[12:19] Bob Dobbs: So I had to qualify
[12:21] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan take on things with whatever I was learning from Ion.
[12:27] Bob Dobbs: So it was a funny drama.
[12:28] Bob Dobbs: But over the last 10 years,
[12:30] Bob Dobbs: Ion has become very expert on talking about Kroker.
[12:33] Bob Dobbs: He knows the books.
[12:34] Bob Dobbs: We can go into them.
[12:35] Bob Dobbs: And Thompson and LaRouche.
[12:37] Bob Dobbs: And he sometimes makes very interesting,
[12:39] Bob Dobbs: and he says,
[12:40] Bob Dobbs: well,
[12:40] Bob Dobbs: Kroker will do this to you,
[12:42] Bob Dobbs: but LaRouche does that to you.
[12:44] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan was over there doing this,
[12:46] Bob Dobbs: and Thompson's back there screwing all three of them up.
[12:49] Bob Dobbs: So he does go into their information seriously,
[12:53] Bob Dobbs: but other times he's heavily joked.
[12:55] Bob Dobbs: So we have a phenomenon.
[12:56] Bob Dobbs: in 2021 where this interesting voice is talking using my ideas and talking about the four and five quadrants they're very funny uh there's no other non-physical
[13:12] Bob Dobbs: source talking about my chart as far as we know so it's become very involved with ion which i like i'm glad my charts talked about.
[13:23] Bob Dobbs: So that forced our listeners to...
[13:26] Bob Dobbs: look at the chart.
[13:27] Bob Dobbs: And I have many,
[13:28] Bob Dobbs: many hours explaining,
[13:30] Bob Dobbs: recorded explaining the chart.
[13:32] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[13:32] Bob Dobbs: we did a little briefing.
[13:34] Cameron McEwen: But is this taking the chart as gospel,
[13:37] Cameron McEwen: or is this at least in part criticizing it?
[13:42] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[13:42] Cameron McEwen: I don't see how the angelic presence in the chart can be good if it turns out that...
[13:53] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[13:55] Cameron McEwen: Angels are fighting you.
[13:58] Bob Dobbs: I know.
[13:59] Bob Dobbs: It gets very complicated.
[14:01] Bob Dobbs: And it's like talking.
[14:04] Bob Dobbs: I thought of Finnegans Wake when doing the chart.
[14:07] Bob Dobbs: It's like talking about Finnegans Wake.
[14:09] Bob Dobbs: You can't figure,
[14:10] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[14:10] Bob Dobbs: what the hell are we dealing with here?
[14:12] Bob Dobbs: No conclusions.
[14:13] Bob Dobbs: There's no conclusions with ION.
[14:15] Bob Dobbs: Just figure and ground statements and different grounds.
[14:20] Bob Dobbs: So it's an ongoing drama.
[14:22] Bob Dobbs: Drama of cognition,
[14:23] Bob Dobbs: like life.
[14:24] Bob Dobbs: So all these questions are legitimate.
[14:28] Bob Dobbs: They come up.
[14:28] Bob Dobbs: People who are listening ask these questions.
[14:31] Bob Dobbs: But Ion's always got new answers.
[14:33] Bob Dobbs: But there's hundreds of hours of commentary on it through the years.
[14:38] Bob Dobbs: So
[14:39] Bob Dobbs: I can't summarize it.
[14:40] Bob Dobbs: But the proof is in the pudding.
[14:42] Bob Dobbs: We have our technologies.
[14:44] Bob Dobbs: We're going to present them to the world when the world cries out for them,
[14:47] Bob Dobbs: which they're beginning to do.
[14:49] Bob Dobbs: Our technology would be very helpful down in Texas now.
[14:53] Bob Dobbs: But Texas is going to...
[14:54] Bob Dobbs: suffer a bit more and realize they ain't going to fix themselves,
[14:57] Bob Dobbs: and then they're going to come to us.
[14:58] Bob Dobbs: And that's why the Department of Homeland Security interviews us regularly about what are we going to do with this new power.
[15:06] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[15:06] Bob Dobbs: we bring in a anti-environment.
[15:08] Bob Dobbs: We have some kind of immense power,
[15:11] Bob Dobbs: right?
[15:12] Bob Dobbs: And the present-day powers,
[15:15] Bob Dobbs: they don't like that.
[15:17] Bob Dobbs: So there's an ongoing drama with that situation.
[15:22] Bob Dobbs: And then Carolyn's doing the same thing in medicine.
[15:24] Bob Dobbs: So we have arrived.
[15:28] Bob Dobbs: uh at the situation and ian explains uh what we've done over the 10 years beyond what Carolyn and i understand and uh we implemented this covid19 situation
[15:43] Bob Dobbs: to lock down the world which is uh predicted on the chart lockdown bob rule turns out to happen so i don't expect you to understand what I'm saying,
[15:55] Bob Dobbs: but I'm just telling you...
[15:57] Bob Dobbs: the kind of stuff we talk about on the show.
[16:00] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[16:00] Bob Dobbs: is it gospel?
[16:02] Bob Dobbs: I don't,
[16:03] Bob Dobbs: well,
[16:03] Bob Dobbs: it seems to predict some things,
[16:07] Bob Dobbs: but maybe that's based on my and Ion and Carolyn's thinking,
[16:12] Bob Dobbs: but I don't,
[16:12] Bob Dobbs: it's like a new periodic table.
[16:15] Bob Dobbs: I know we're making a new periodic table of elements,
[16:18] Bob Dobbs: which you would be interested in,
[16:20] Bob Dobbs: with our new materials,
[16:23] Bob Dobbs: substances we're making,
[16:25] Bob Dobbs: and there's lots.
[16:27] Bob Dobbs: if you took time,
[16:29] Bob Dobbs: if you called in and just asked Ion,
[16:32] Bob Dobbs: could you review how you're changing the periodic table of elements?
[16:35] Bob Dobbs: And Ion probably would lay it out for you.
[16:37] Bob Dobbs: So you get an inkling.
[16:38] Bob Dobbs: You wouldn't understand it all.
[16:40] Bob Dobbs: But your talk about the elements,
[16:46] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[16:46] Bob Dobbs: Medicalzy,
[16:47] Bob Dobbs: and the elements with the chemical chemistry level,
[16:52] Bob Dobbs: and then my weather level,
[16:53] Bob Dobbs: is very timely that you've come.
[16:55] Bob Dobbs: up with because we're affecting the weather.
[16:57] Bob Dobbs: So there's so much more that I would go into talking about it with you.
[17:04] Bob Dobbs: If you came in and talked to Ian,
[17:07] Bob Dobbs: we would then talk on the radio about it.
[17:09] Bob Dobbs: But I'm keeping it for the uninformed,
[17:12] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[17:13] Bob Dobbs: trying to keep it simple the way I did it originally.
[17:18] Cameron McEwen: To me,
[17:18] Cameron McEwen: all of the stuff you're talking about lies on the other side of your book.
[17:23] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[17:24] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[17:24] Cameron McEwen: My interest.
[17:25] Cameron McEwen: is in trying to go more or less step by step.
[17:32] Cameron McEwen: I don't like the linearity of that.
[17:34] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[17:35] Cameron McEwen: But my notion is that by looking at your charts,
[17:45] Cameron McEwen: by looking at the Tiny Note chart,
[17:48] Cameron McEwen: we get an idea of where you're coming from in the book.
[17:52] Cameron McEwen: Obviously,
[17:53] Cameron McEwen: there's quite a gap.
[17:55] Cameron McEwen: between the Tiny Note Chardin 1995 or thereabouts and the book in 2020 or thereabouts.
[18:05] Cameron McEwen: So that's a quarter of a century,
[18:08] Cameron McEwen: right?
[18:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[18:09] Cameron McEwen: That jumps.
[18:12] Cameron McEwen: However,
[18:16] Cameron McEwen: about two-thirds of the book leans quite heavily on McLuhan.
[18:23] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[18:24] Cameron McEwen: and um
[18:25] Cameron McEwen: So
[18:26] Cameron McEwen: I think
[18:28] Cameron McEwen: I have a fair grasp of what was going on with McLuhan.
[18:33] Cameron McEwen: And through looking at your charts and your Tiny Note chart,
[18:37] Cameron McEwen: I'm getting an idea of what you're doing.
[18:40] Cameron McEwen: And so the way I see us trying to proceed from here is to go from the end of your Tiny Note chart and to combine that with...
[18:54] Cameron McEwen: some talk about McLuhan,
[18:57] Cameron McEwen: and with that,
[18:58] Cameron McEwen: to get into the detail of your book,
[19:01] Cameron McEwen: and to go through your book as it is before us.
[19:07] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[19:07] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[19:07] Bob Dobbs: and the other day,
[19:09] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I say at the beginning,
[19:13] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to present unknown parts of McLuhan,
[19:18] Bob Dobbs: but I thought better yesterday to say unused.
[19:23] Bob Dobbs: A lot of my quotes,
[19:24] Bob Dobbs: and you've read...
[19:24] Bob Dobbs: through them are right there to be read over the last 50 years,
[19:28] Bob Dobbs: but they're not used by anybody.
[19:30] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what I mean?
[19:31] Bob Dobbs: Other than you.
[19:34] Bob Dobbs: So,
[19:34] Bob Dobbs: yes,
[19:35] Bob Dobbs: I'm bringing out unused parts of McLuhan in Newport.
[19:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[19:41] Bob Dobbs: so,
[19:41] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[19:41] Cameron McEwen: to my way of thinking,
[19:43] Cameron McEwen: all parts of McLuhan are unused because when scholars or researchers or whatever they are
[19:53] Cameron McEwen: Um,
[19:54] Cameron McEwen: talk about McLuhan,
[19:56] Cameron McEwen: they invariably place their citations and their thoughts into the Gutenberg Galaxy.
[20:08] Cameron McEwen: And thereby they essentially or fundamentally distort what McLuhan was saying.
[20:17] Cameron McEwen: So from that perspective,
[20:19] Cameron McEwen: all of McLuhan is unused.
[20:22] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[20:22] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[20:23] Bob Dobbs: I'm sure if any of those people,
[20:25] Bob Dobbs: Paul Levinson,
[20:26] Bob Dobbs: Bob Logan,
[20:26] Bob Dobbs: De Kerckhove,
[20:27] Bob Dobbs: if they listen to us,
[20:29] Bob Dobbs: they protest.
[20:30] Bob Dobbs: No,
[20:30] Bob Dobbs: I know what McLuhan is and this and that.
[20:32] Bob Dobbs: And you're probably not that interested in debating it,
[20:35] Bob Dobbs: but you spend a lot of your time.
[20:37] Bob Dobbs: writing and correcting these people,
[20:40] Bob Dobbs: and we'd have to get them to read what you wrote to see if they take it seriously or not.
[20:46] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[20:46] Bob Dobbs: I take it seriously,
[20:48] Bob Dobbs: and I agree with you,
[20:49] Bob Dobbs: but
[20:50] Bob Dobbs: I don't call up Paul Levinson and say,
[20:52] Bob Dobbs: you know what,
[20:53] Bob Dobbs: you're a disgusting McLuhan scholar,
[20:57] Bob Dobbs: and you haven't done anything.
[20:59] Bob Dobbs: What's the point in doing that?
[21:00] Bob Dobbs: I might say it on my Facebook page in passing.
[21:04] Bob Dobbs: Did you know that they did this?
[21:09] Bob Dobbs: 12-hour review of McLuhan on his birthday last July
[21:13] Bob Dobbs: 21st, 2020.
[21:14] Bob Dobbs: Did you hear about that?
[21:15] Cameron McEwen: I know that they did it,
[21:17] Cameron McEwen: but I didn't listen to it.
[21:18] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[21:19] Bob Dobbs: and I listened to all of it,
[21:20] Bob Dobbs: and it was very frustrating and very timid and ridiculous.
[21:25] Bob Dobbs: And they also had done a whole bunch of 11 weeks of talking to different groups of McLuhan scholars around the world.
[21:33] Bob Dobbs: That was pretty tame.
[21:35] Bob Dobbs: and that that that
[21:36] Bob Dobbs: inspired me to write something.
[21:38] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[21:38] Bob Dobbs: look,
[21:39] Bob Dobbs: people ain't getting it.
[21:40] Bob Dobbs: They're not going to know what McLuhan said.
[21:43] Bob Dobbs: So in that sense,
[21:45] Bob Dobbs: I insulted them all.
[21:46] Bob Dobbs: But
[21:47] Bob Dobbs: I didn't make a big deal about it.
[21:48] Bob Dobbs: I just said,
[21:49] Bob Dobbs: this needs to be updated from what they're saying,
[21:52] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[21:53] Bob Dobbs: And then you already been doing that.
[21:56] Bob Dobbs: So then out of the blue,
[21:58] Bob Dobbs: you called me and said,
[22:00] Bob Dobbs: hey,
[22:00] Bob Dobbs: why don't we,
[22:01] Bob Dobbs: let's talk,
[22:02] Bob Dobbs: let's resume our discussions after five years.
[22:04] Bob Dobbs: And so I found that really him.
[22:06] Bob Dobbs: important what we're doing,
[22:08] Bob Dobbs: because I was delighted that what you said,
[22:11] Bob Dobbs: and we're interested in my book,
[22:12] Bob Dobbs: so we're doing fine.
[22:15] Bob Dobbs: And
[22:16] Bob Dobbs: I think this is an important conversation for any McLuhan that are around or are being born.
[22:25] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[22:25] Cameron McEwen: and not only because we're regurgitating stuff that we already know about McLuhan,
[22:34] Cameron McEwen: but in the dialogue...
[22:36] Cameron McEwen: New stuff is emerging,
[22:38] Cameron McEwen: and to me,
[22:39] Cameron McEwen: that's the most valuable part of what we're up to here.
[22:43] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[22:45] Cameron McEwen: And
[22:46] Bob Dobbs: I would like to hear De Kerckhove and other people's responses.
[22:50] Bob Dobbs: If they seriously listen to it,
[22:52] Bob Dobbs: would they say,
[22:53] Bob Dobbs: well,
[22:53] Bob Dobbs: no,
[22:53] Bob Dobbs: I said that or something?
[22:55] Bob Dobbs: I'd like to hear a serious response to what we're saying,
[22:58] Bob Dobbs: and I'm willing to hear criticism about it or what
[23:02] Bob Dobbs: I'm missing on what
[23:03] Bob Dobbs: I don't appreciate and what they did.
[23:06] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[23:08] Bob Dobbs: so it hasn't come forth yet.
[23:12] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[23:13] Bob Dobbs: But the non-professional McLuhan are loving this thing.
[23:17] Bob Dobbs: They find that we explain things very calmly and quietly,
[23:20] Bob Dobbs: and they really like it.
[23:23] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[23:23] Cameron McEwen: good,
[23:23] Cameron McEwen: good.
[23:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[23:25] Cameron McEwen: I hope they also think that it's an interesting sort of take on your stuff.
[23:32] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[23:34] Cameron McEwen: Not on your final stuff.
[23:35] Cameron McEwen: by any means,
[23:36] Cameron McEwen: but
[23:39] Cameron McEwen: I kind of regard this as me interviewing you,
[23:43] Cameron McEwen: and you get to recast your thinking in various ways that may make it more accessible or more interesting or more this or that for
[23:59] Cameron McEwen: people that are interested in your stuff.
[24:01] Bob Dobbs: It definitely does that,
[24:02] Bob Dobbs: and it's funny.
[24:03] Bob Dobbs: You're interviewing me.
[24:04] Bob Dobbs: but you're doing way more talking than me.
[24:07] Bob Dobbs: No,
[24:08] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[24:09] Cameron McEwen: you're dreaming.
[24:11] Cameron McEwen: You're talking 60 or 70%
[24:13] Cameron McEwen: of the time.
[24:14] Bob Dobbs: No,
[24:14] Bob Dobbs: no.
[24:15] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[24:15] Bob Dobbs: you're doing a lot of talking.
[24:17] Bob Dobbs: You have to admit that.
[24:18] Bob Dobbs: Let's say 50-50 then.
[24:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[24:22] Cameron McEwen: if you want,
[24:22] Cameron McEwen: but it's not true.
[24:25] Cameron McEwen: Let me bring up something that you said several times and that I think we should get clear about.
[24:33] Cameron McEwen: You have...
[24:33] Cameron McEwen: have used the term Esperanto to describe a kind of analysis that you think
[24:43] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was trying to get at.
[24:46] Cameron McEwen: And when you've done that,
[24:49] Cameron McEwen: I believe every time I've protested and I've tried to say that
[24:56] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, at least in my view,
[24:59] Cameron McEwen: was not looking for an Esperanto.
[25:03] Cameron McEwen: And a couple of days ago,
[25:05] Cameron McEwen: I thought,
[25:06] Cameron McEwen: well,
[25:06] Cameron McEwen: why don't I see what McLuhan said about Esperanto?
[25:11] Cameron McEwen: And
[25:12] Cameron McEwen: I could only find a single mention of it in his very first piece in
[25:19] Cameron McEwen: Explorations.
[25:21] Cameron McEwen: And now what he says is the following.
[25:23] Cameron McEwen: He says the language of visual form is one which lies to hand as an unused Esperanto at everybody's command.
[25:39] Bob Dobbs: There it is.
[25:40] Bob Dobbs: That's what I mean.
[25:42] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[25:42] Cameron McEwen: But let's analyze this a little bit.
[25:47] Cameron McEwen: When he says that it lies to hand.
[25:50] Cameron McEwen: as an unused Esperanto at everybody's command,
[25:53] Cameron McEwen: and he compares it to visual form.
[25:56] Cameron McEwen: What he's talking about is the fact that if you have a photograph of something,
[26:04] Cameron McEwen: or if you have a comic strip that has no background required to understand it,
[26:18] Cameron McEwen: then you can...
[26:18] Cameron McEwen: you're talking about visual form more or less like a light bulb.
[26:23] Cameron McEwen: The comparison with a light bulb is that you don't need to bring anything with you in order to understand this.
[26:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[26:34] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[26:35] Cameron McEwen: The visual form in McLuhan,
[26:38] Cameron McEwen: this is in the sort of early to middle
[26:41] Cameron McEwen: 50s, he was using visual form in a way that needed to be rethought.
[26:48] Cameron McEwen: through acoustic space,
[26:50] Cameron McEwen: but he hadn't found acoustic space yet.
[26:52] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[26:53] Cameron McEwen: So he was using visual form as an Esperanto,
[26:59] Cameron McEwen: but it was like a language without walls,
[27:03] Cameron McEwen: right?
[27:03] Cameron McEwen: A picture is a world without walls.
[27:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[27:07] Cameron McEwen: So the problem that I see in confusing that with
[27:16] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan analysis this.
[27:18] Cameron McEwen: is that light and photography and visual form in general,
[27:24] Cameron McEwen: like comics,
[27:25] Cameron McEwen: these are things which needed to be explained,
[27:30] Cameron McEwen: not things that you could use to explain with,
[27:34] Cameron McEwen: right?
[27:35] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[27:35] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[27:36] Cameron McEwen: He needed to explain media plural,
[27:41] Cameron McEwen: which meant that even things which seemed to be without a frame
[27:48] Cameron McEwen: had a grammar,
[27:50] Cameron McEwen: had a particular grammar that could be exposed.
[27:54] Cameron McEwen: And so in Understanding Media,
[27:57] Cameron McEwen: he explains the framework to the unframed,
[28:06] Cameron McEwen: right?
[28:06] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[28:07] Cameron McEwen: What does it mean in history that we have come up with media that no longer require sort of a national language?
[28:17] Cameron McEwen: or a national situation that are inherently international.
[28:23] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[28:24] Cameron McEwen: So
[28:25] Cameron McEwen: I say that although Esperanto was a very interesting phenomenon to McLuhan,
[28:33] Cameron McEwen: it isn't something that can be put forward as what he was trying to get at.
[28:39] Bob Dobbs: No,
[28:39] Bob Dobbs: it's a metaphor.
[28:40] Bob Dobbs: It's a literate Gutenberg mistake.
[28:45] Bob Dobbs: but was usurped by the new anti-environment,
[28:48] Bob Dobbs: which he recognized.
[28:49] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[28:49] Bob Dobbs: there's a kind of uniformity or people who get on the same,
[28:54] Bob Dobbs: not page,
[28:55] Bob Dobbs: but it was very interesting.
[28:57] Bob Dobbs: He said photography evoked the postures of the mind,
[29:01] Bob Dobbs: which led to Freud and Jung.
[29:04] Bob Dobbs: That's the most interesting statement McLuhan says about photography.
[29:08] Bob Dobbs: And so those postures communicate to people all over the world and pictures in newspapers and that.
[29:14] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[29:15] Bob Dobbs: They were looking at the human form,
[29:18] Bob Dobbs: regardless of what culture it was,
[29:20] Bob Dobbs: or particular differences in the cultures.
[29:24] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[29:25] Bob Dobbs: And he sort of stressed the psychic gestures that were coming out of the people.
[29:30] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[29:30] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[29:31] Cameron McEwen: This is exactly the time that he gets into the drama of cognition.
[29:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[29:36] Cameron McEwen: And that's what I'm trying to say,
[29:39] Cameron McEwen: that even the unframed has a drama of cognition behind it.
[29:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[29:44] Cameron McEwen: What you were just calling perception.
[29:46] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[29:47] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[29:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[29:47] Cameron McEwen: And at just this same time,
[29:50] Cameron McEwen: 1949,
[29:52] Cameron McEwen: 1950,
[29:53] Cameron McEwen: is when he read Cosmic Man or American Cosmic Man.
[29:57] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[29:58] Cameron McEwen: This is the real title by Wyndham Lewis.
[30:01] Cameron McEwen: And
[30:02] Cameron McEwen: Wyndham Lewis was getting into this problem of the unframed.
[30:10] Cameron McEwen: You could call
[30:11] Cameron McEwen: America the unframed.
[30:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[30:14] Cameron McEwen: as compared to every other country that has ever been.
[30:19] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[30:19] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[30:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[30:20] Cameron McEwen: And
[30:22] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was greatly taken by
[30:28] Cameron McEwen: Lewis's analysis.
[30:31] Cameron McEwen: But as he says in a letter to Pound,
[30:34] Cameron McEwen: here's this great book,
[30:35] Cameron McEwen: and it had no effect whatsoever.
[30:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[30:38] Bob Dobbs: FUG.
[30:38] Cameron McEwen: I think he says something like
[30:40] Cameron McEwen: H-bomb set off in the desert or something like that.
[30:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[30:43] Bob Dobbs: and he says FUG,
[30:44] Bob Dobbs: F-U-G.
[30:48] Bob Dobbs: The result,
[30:49] Bob Dobbs: FUG.
[30:50] Bob Dobbs: I think it's in that letter.
[30:51] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[30:51] Cameron McEwen: FUG all.
[30:52] Cameron McEwen: FUG all.
[30:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[30:53] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[30:54] Bob Dobbs: And,
[30:55] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[30:55] Bob Dobbs: Norman Mailer wrote
[30:57] Bob Dobbs: The Naked and the Dead or whatever around 1948 about World War II,
[31:00] Bob Dobbs: I think.
[31:01] Bob Dobbs: And he used F-U-G instead of FUG.
[31:06] Bob Dobbs: He couldn't use F-U-C-K,
[31:07] Bob Dobbs: but he used FUG.
[31:09] Bob Dobbs: And I'm thinking McLuhan was aware of that,
[31:10] Bob Dobbs: and that's what he did.
[31:13] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[31:14] Cameron McEwen: definitely.
[31:15] Cameron McEwen: Because I believe he uses the phrase FUG all.
[31:18] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[31:18] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[31:19] Cameron McEwen: So that would make it obvious that that's what he was doing.
[31:22] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[31:23] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[31:25] Bob Dobbs: so what was the sentence just before that?
[31:28] Bob Dobbs: You were just quoting.
[31:29] Bob Dobbs: What did he say again?
[31:32] Cameron McEwen: On Esperanto?
[31:34] Bob Dobbs: No,
[31:34] Bob Dobbs: no.
[31:35] Bob Dobbs: The FUG.
[31:35] Bob Dobbs: What is the words before that?
[31:38] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[31:38] Cameron McEwen: I don't have that in front of me.
[31:39] Cameron McEwen: I can find it.
[31:41] Bob Dobbs: But he was just saying there was no response.
[31:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[31:43] Bob Dobbs: He just said it was a bomb in the desert.
[31:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[31:46] Cameron McEwen: he said.
[31:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[31:47] Cameron McEwen: A bomb set off in the desert,
[31:48] Cameron McEwen: and it sets a kind of goal for McLuhan,
[31:54] Cameron McEwen: right,
[31:54] Cameron McEwen: a goal of thought.
[31:57] Cameron McEwen: What would it be to come up with a kind of analysis that would have effect?
[32:05] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[32:06] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[32:06] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[32:06] Cameron McEwen: And at the end of the decade,
[32:09] Cameron McEwen: he says that that's a criterion for...
[32:17] Cameron McEwen: a medium,
[32:18] Cameron McEwen: right?
[32:18] Cameron McEwen: So in his discussions with the
[32:21] Cameron McEwen: NAEB, he's always saying that what we're trying to achieve is what the sciences have already achieved,
[32:32] Cameron McEwen: and that is that the teaching in a school is not essentially different from what goes on outside the school,
[32:40] Cameron McEwen: right?
[32:40] Cameron McEwen: And that's,
[32:42] Cameron McEwen: so with chemistry as an example,
[32:48] Cameron McEwen: What is going on outside the school is inherently chemistry.
[32:53] Cameron McEwen: Everything is chemistry out there,
[32:54] Cameron McEwen: number one.
[32:56] Cameron McEwen: But number two,
[32:57] Cameron McEwen: businesses are developing chemistry in their manufacturing techniques,
[33:05] Cameron McEwen: in their distribution techniques,
[33:07] Cameron McEwen: in their communication techniques,
[33:09] Cameron McEwen: on and on.
[33:10] Cameron McEwen: So chemistry is kind of redoubled externally.
[33:15] Cameron McEwen: So what McLuhan says is,
[33:17] Cameron McEwen: look.
[33:18] Cameron McEwen: If we want to have effective teaching,
[33:23] Cameron McEwen: if we want to have real education,
[33:25] Cameron McEwen: right,
[33:26] Cameron McEwen: to lead out is the etymology of education,
[33:30] Cameron McEwen: right?
[33:31] Cameron McEwen: If we want to lead people out into the world as it is through education,
[33:37] Cameron McEwen: then we need to have something that is the same between what goes on in the school and what goes on out there.
[33:47] Cameron McEwen: And what goes on out there is redoubled.
[33:52] Cameron McEwen: There's everybody talking,
[33:54] Cameron McEwen: everybody doing whatever they're doing,
[33:57] Cameron McEwen: and then there's theories about that.
[34:00] Cameron McEwen: It just happens that nobody knows what's going on when people are just talking,
[34:05] Cameron McEwen: and the theories are all screwed up.
[34:09] Cameron McEwen: So what
[34:10] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan task,
[34:12] Cameron McEwen: you might say,
[34:13] Cameron McEwen: is taken from the lack of effective...
[34:17] Cameron McEwen: practical effectiveness of Lewis's book and he tries to turn that both into a criterion for what he's trying to do and as a lead
[34:32] Bob Dobbs: to what he's trying to do yeah let me say this the he says in 43 44 when he you know it's with Lewis in in st.
[34:44] Bob Dobbs: Louis in the States
[34:48] Bob Dobbs: he at some point says,
[34:50] Bob Dobbs: I will dedicate a lot of my next few years to spreading the word that I got from you,
[34:58] Bob Dobbs: from Lewis.
[34:59] Bob Dobbs: And what's interesting,
[35:01] Bob Dobbs: he picked the right guy because he didn't know it was coming.
[35:05] Bob Dobbs: But Lewis comes up with that book five years later,
[35:08] Bob Dobbs: 1948,
[35:09] Bob Dobbs: and it does give McLuhan,
[35:10] Bob Dobbs: holy,
[35:11] Bob Dobbs: this is new important stuff.
[35:12] Bob Dobbs: I got new stuff to say about Lewis rather than what he had said.
[35:16] Bob Dobbs: in the 20s and
[35:17] Bob Dobbs: 30s. Then there's that.
[35:19] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.
[35:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[35:20] Bob Dobbs: then there's that in The Electric Light.
[35:22] Bob Dobbs: They have the lecture he gave in 59 to what seems to be a small group at St.
[35:30] Bob Dobbs: Michael's,
[35:30] Bob Dobbs: the Epyllion,
[35:31] Bob Dobbs: where at the end he talks about
[35:33] Bob Dobbs: Lewis's fate or mistake.
[35:36] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[35:36] Bob Dobbs: Lewis failed to harness
[35:39] Bob Dobbs: Protestant fury in his day.
[35:43] Bob Dobbs: He was too amoral or non-judgmental on the kind of things that Protestants would get upset about.
[35:51] Bob Dobbs: And then McLuhan says,
[35:53] Bob Dobbs: he implies,
[35:54] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to redo Lewis,
[35:57] Bob Dobbs: and I might get response because we're now in a cool world where Protestant fury actually isn't as effective.
[36:05] Bob Dobbs: So the relaxed state of Lewis's not being morally outraged.
[36:13] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan will be that.
[36:14] Bob Dobbs: He'll adopt the non-morally outraged stance,
[36:17] Bob Dobbs: and it'll appear charismatic or unique.
[36:20] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that?
[36:21] Bob Dobbs: He spells out what Lewis couldn't get going,
[36:25] Bob Dobbs: interested in his work,
[36:26] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan figured out,
[36:27] Bob Dobbs: well,
[36:28] Bob Dobbs: I'll use the Perot and Fury now because it'll work.
[36:33] Bob Dobbs: The Pros and Fury doesn't work in the TV age,
[36:36] Bob Dobbs: and maybe the Pros didn't realize that or got frustrated.
[36:39] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that statement?
[36:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[36:42] Cameron McEwen: vaguely,
[36:43] Cameron McEwen: vaguely.
[36:45] Cameron McEwen: I take that to be closely related to what we were talking about a few minutes ago,
[36:52] Cameron McEwen: and that is that the nonjudgmental,
[36:59] Cameron McEwen: cool approach is necessary to science.
[37:04] Cameron McEwen: As soon as science gets worked up about anything,
[37:08] Cameron McEwen: it's going to be wrong.
[37:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[37:10] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[37:10] Cameron McEwen: because
[37:12] Cameron McEwen: Science is impersonal in a Richard sense.
[37:18] Cameron McEwen: So
[37:21] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan whole approach to where they had to go,
[37:26] Cameron McEwen: something he sort of figured out in the
[37:29] Cameron McEwen: 1950s, consciously reached back to what he had learned at Cambridge and what he learned from
[37:39] Cameron McEwen: Lewis.
[37:40] Cameron McEwen: the end of the
[37:42] Cameron McEwen: 1940s, what he learned by reading
[37:46] Cameron McEwen: Pound's prose,
[37:49] Cameron McEwen: and all the while kind of mixing all of this stuff up,
[37:54] Cameron McEwen: shuffling the cards in a way that is somewhat similar to what you're doing in the charts,
[38:02] Cameron McEwen: in the Tiny Note Chart.
[38:05] Cameron McEwen: And he comes up with this idea that if,
[38:10] Cameron McEwen: if we're going to have something that's the same in the school and out of the school,
[38:17] Cameron McEwen: then it cannot be emotionally charged.
[38:22] Cameron McEwen: It has to be not only neutral in the sense of analyzing everything,
[38:28] Cameron McEwen: it also has to have a certain remove,
[38:30] Cameron McEwen: right?
[38:32] Cameron McEwen: And that remove is something that he had begun to remark already in the
[38:38] Cameron McEwen: 1940s.
[38:39] Cameron McEwen: It was necessary to,
[38:42] Cameron McEwen: in the maelstrom,
[38:44] Cameron McEwen: it's necessary for the Menippean to assess his situation in a way that his brother can't.
[38:53] Cameron McEwen: And his whole saving gesture is to take a certain remove and in that way to be able to assess everything that was going around the flotsam and the jetsam.
[39:09] Cameron McEwen: about him.
[39:10] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[39:11] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[39:11] Bob Dobbs: in the
[39:12] Bob Dobbs: 60s, I don't think he said it in the
[39:14] Bob Dobbs: 50s, he said that
[39:17] Bob Dobbs: Louis Armstrong and jazz in the
[39:20] Bob Dobbs: 20s created a global language.
[39:23] Bob Dobbs: And so then later,
[39:25] Bob Dobbs: the subculture of literacy,
[39:28] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[39:28] Bob Dobbs: it had been subsumed by the Marconi Galaxy,
[39:31] Bob Dobbs: tried to reintegrate the
[39:34] Bob Dobbs: American black into its
[39:39] Bob Dobbs: values,
[39:40] Bob Dobbs: but it was too late.
[39:43] Bob Dobbs: But it's a great ironic statement,
[39:45] Bob Dobbs: and so he realized later there was an ear acoustic Esperanto created by
[39:53] Bob Dobbs: Louis Armstrong in the jazz world of the 20s.
[39:56] Bob Dobbs: So that's something he didn't know,
[39:59] Bob Dobbs: or he didn't say when he talked about visual form in 1953.
[40:07] Cameron McEwen: I think that's...
[40:07] Bob Dobbs: true but it's um what you're talking about uh this esperanto um as as visual form it actually applies to what you're saying about louis armstrong well that's that's what i mean he came up with a more modern esperanto than the visual form one right
[40:27] Cameron McEwen: but behind um a the visual form and then whatever it was that was going on would look...
[40:37] Cameron McEwen: Armstrong.
[40:41] Cameron McEwen: These are both
[40:44] Cameron McEwen: presentations that are international.
[40:46] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[40:48] Cameron McEwen: They don't require rootedness.
[40:52] Cameron McEwen: And so what they do is they force awareness of multimedia through the fact that they are inherently fluid.
[41:10] Cameron McEwen: As soon as one takes jazz...
[41:13] Cameron McEwen: seriously or takes visual form seriously,
[41:17] Cameron McEwen: they lead beyond themselves.
[41:20] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[41:22] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[41:22] Cameron McEwen: So that's why something like understanding media becomes possible.
[41:29] Cameron McEwen: It's not possible when people are rooted in some sort of nationality and some sort of emotional commitment to identity.
[41:39] Cameron McEwen: They can't.
[41:40] Cameron McEwen: cannot have an understanding of media because they really can't understand other folks'
[41:47] Cameron McEwen: media.
[41:48] Cameron McEwen: All they can do is look at other folks through their own.
[41:53] Cameron McEwen: But with an internationalization of art forms through photography or through jazz or through rock and roll,
[42:02] Cameron McEwen: it becomes not only possible,
[42:04] Cameron McEwen: it becomes necessary to exist in multimedia.
[42:09] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[42:10] Bob Dobbs: So
[42:11] Bob Dobbs: Lewis started to at that.
[42:14] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[42:14] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[42:16] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[42:16] Bob Dobbs: went further or was it consolidated?
[42:20] Bob Dobbs: Deeper.
[42:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[42:22] Bob Dobbs: deeper and consolidated.
[42:24] Bob Dobbs: And he used to say that advertising was the organizing language for industry,
[42:31] Bob Dobbs: for advanced countries,
[42:33] Bob Dobbs: right?
[42:33] Bob Dobbs: Advertising was the bond,
[42:38] Bob Dobbs: the Esperanto within.
[42:40] Bob Dobbs: North American culture.
[42:42] Bob Dobbs: It taught people what the value of these new technologies anti-environment were,
[42:47] Bob Dobbs: what the satisfactions were.
[42:49] Bob Dobbs: So that's the classroom without walls.
[42:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[42:52] Cameron McEwen: but that's true what you just said.
[42:56] Cameron McEwen: But built into what you just said is an awareness of the limitation,
[43:01] Cameron McEwen: right?
[43:02] Cameron McEwen: The Esperanto of advertising,
[43:04] Cameron McEwen: the Esperanto that teaches people.
[43:09] Cameron McEwen: what their satisfaction should be is not the Esperanto of an analysis that can look at all of this stuff and say what's really going on.
[43:19] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[43:19] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[43:19] Cameron McEwen: So that's one more example of the use of Esperanto as,
[43:24] Cameron McEwen: um,
[43:24] Cameron McEwen: it's,
[43:26] Cameron McEwen: it's,
[43:27] Cameron McEwen: helpful,
[43:28] Cameron McEwen: but it's also limited.
[43:29] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[43:30] Cameron McEwen: It's,
[43:30] Cameron McEwen: it's inherently limited.
[43:32] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[43:32] Cameron McEwen: Um,
[43:33] Cameron McEwen: let me,
[43:33] Cameron McEwen: um,
[43:33] Cameron McEwen: I,
[43:34] Cameron McEwen: I,
[43:35] Cameron McEwen: I've been re re reading,
[43:37] Cameron McEwen: the,
[43:37] Cameron McEwen: um,
[43:38] Cameron McEwen: America and cosmic man.
[43:40] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[43:40] Bob Dobbs: before you go into that,
[43:42] Bob Dobbs: how did you find that quote?
[43:43] Bob Dobbs: Do you have a lot of this digitally?
[43:46] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[43:47] Bob Dobbs: You can just type in the word and find it immediately.
[43:52] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[43:52] Cameron McEwen: if I'm in that program,
[43:54] Cameron McEwen: when I'm talking to you,
[43:56] Cameron McEwen: I try not to do that because I have the impression that
[44:01] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't be able to pay proper attention to our dialogue if at the same time I was...
[44:07] Cameron McEwen: farting around in the database.
[44:10] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[44:11] Bob Dobbs: but you have a database.
[44:12] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[44:12] Bob Dobbs: so you just decided to reread
[44:15] Bob Dobbs: American Causing Man lately.
[44:18] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[44:19] Cameron McEwen: and here's a very interesting quotation,
[44:21] Cameron McEwen: I think it is.
[44:23] Cameron McEwen: He says,
[44:25] Cameron McEwen: this is Lewis,
[44:27] Cameron McEwen: until you know something of the medium,
[44:30] Cameron McEwen: and then brackets the political and social atmosphere,
[44:34] Cameron McEwen: in which these great...
[44:36] Cameron McEwen: figures live and have their being,
[44:38] Cameron McEwen: it would be useless to attempt to delineate them for you.
[44:42] Cameron McEwen: And this is an introduction to when he's going to go into talking about
[44:48] Cameron McEwen: American presidents,
[44:50] Cameron McEwen: Roosevelt,
[44:52] Cameron McEwen: and,
[44:52] Cameron McEwen: well,
[44:52] Cameron McEwen: both Roosevelt and Wilson.
[44:57] Cameron McEwen: But to me,
[44:58] Cameron McEwen: what's interesting is here's
[45:00] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan around 1949,
[45:04] Cameron McEwen: 1950.
[45:05] Cameron McEwen: He's reading this book.
[45:05] Cameron McEwen: book,
[45:06] Cameron McEwen: and here's a specific use of the word medium,
[45:12] Cameron McEwen: and then brackets the political and social atmosphere,
[45:15] Cameron McEwen: and a light goes off in
[45:18] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan head,
[45:20] Cameron McEwen: and it directs him back to 1932,
[45:25] Cameron McEwen: so at least 15 years in the past.
[45:28] Cameron McEwen: And in 1932,
[45:31] Cameron McEwen: he's reading science
[45:35] Cameron McEwen: and Modern Man.
[45:37] Cameron McEwen: No,
[45:37] Cameron McEwen: what's it called?
[45:38] Cameron McEwen: Science and the Modern World,
[45:40] Cameron McEwen: sorry,
[45:41] Cameron McEwen: by
[45:42] Cameron McEwen: Whitehead.
[45:43] Cameron McEwen: And in
[45:45] Cameron McEwen: Whitehead, there are literally hundreds,
[45:48] Cameron McEwen: if not thousands,
[45:50] Cameron McEwen: of terms that are similar to Lewis's,
[45:55] Cameron McEwen: the political and social atmosphere.
[45:59] Cameron McEwen: Whitehead talks about ages.
[46:01] Cameron McEwen: He talks about mentalities.
[46:03] Cameron McEwen: He talks about perceptions.
[46:08] Cameron McEwen: He talks about just on and on and on classifications.
[46:14] Cameron McEwen: But the classifications are never thought about.
[46:18] Cameron McEwen: They're just used.
[46:20] Cameron McEwen: And so here's
[46:21] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan. He reads Lewis,
[46:23] Cameron McEwen: and
[46:24] Cameron McEwen: Lewis says the medium bracket,
[46:26] Cameron McEwen: the political and social atmosphere.
[46:28] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[46:28] Cameron McEwen: number one,
[46:30] Cameron McEwen: it's not clear that that's what a medium is.
[46:34] Cameron McEwen: And even if that's what a medium is,
[46:36] Cameron McEwen: it's not clear what a political and social atmosphere is.
[46:39] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[46:39] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[46:41] Cameron McEwen: So
[46:41] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, in my view,
[46:43] Cameron McEwen: is reading this stuff,
[46:44] Cameron McEwen: but he's reading it as a kind of pointer to what's wrong in what Lewis is saying,
[46:54] Cameron McEwen: or at least what is unsaid and needs saying,
[46:58] Cameron McEwen: and taking that as a pointer where he needs to go.
[47:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[47:03] Bob Dobbs: and that's a really important discovery because everybody talks about
[47:07] Bob Dobbs: Global Village as evoked in that book.
[47:11] Bob Dobbs: But nobody says,
[47:11] Bob Dobbs: wow,
[47:12] Bob Dobbs: here's Lewis beginning to point to the use of the word medium that McLuhan will develop.
[47:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[47:17] Bob Dobbs: that's really a great discovery.
[47:19] Bob Dobbs: What page is that on?
[47:23] Cameron McEwen: I should be able to.
[47:24] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[47:24] Cameron McEwen: I don't have,
[47:26] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[47:27] Cameron McEwen: I have different thumb drives and it's on a different thumb drive.
[47:33] Cameron McEwen: So
[47:34] Cameron McEwen: I can't tell you that,
[47:35] Cameron McEwen: but I can tell you that it's around page.
[47:40] Cameron McEwen: 35.
[47:40] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[47:42] Cameron McEwen: If you want me to,
[47:43] Cameron McEwen: I'll switch No,
[47:43] Cameron McEwen: no,
[47:44] Cameron McEwen: no.
[47:44] Bob Dobbs: That's all right.
[47:45] Bob Dobbs: You just give me a general area.
[47:48] Cameron McEwen: I have one thumb drive with your book and your Tiny Note chart and stuff like that on it.
[47:56] Cameron McEwen: Then another one has Lewis related.
[48:02] Cameron McEwen: Excuse me.
[48:04] Cameron McEwen: I will definitely tell you,
[48:06] Cameron McEwen: oh,
[48:07] Cameron McEwen: I know what I can do.
[48:08] Cameron McEwen: I can go to...
[48:10] Cameron McEwen: American Cosmic Man is available on the Internet Archive.
[48:15] Cameron McEwen: Ah,
[48:15] Cameron McEwen: archive.org?
[48:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[48:22] Cameron McEwen: archive.org.
[48:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[48:24] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[48:25] Cameron McEwen: And so I've just gone there,
[48:27] Cameron McEwen: and I've already found what we're looking for.
[48:30] Cameron McEwen: It's on page
[48:31] Bob Dobbs: 34.
[48:33] Bob Dobbs: Great. It's interesting how the idea of the medium that McLuhan would make famous
[48:38] Bob Dobbs: is there in different thinkers in the first half of the
[48:43] Bob Dobbs: 20th century.
[48:45] Bob Dobbs: They're being forced.
[48:46] Bob Dobbs: Nobody can miss it.
[48:48] Bob Dobbs: If you're reasonably perceptive,
[48:51] Bob Dobbs: you're going to start thinking that way because technology,
[48:55] Bob Dobbs: the anti-environment...
[48:56] Cameron McEwen: There is a certain inevitability to it.
[48:57] Bob Dobbs: Beg your pardon?
[48:59] Cameron McEwen: There is a certain inevitability to it.
[49:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[49:02] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[49:03] Cameron McEwen: And to my way of thinking,
[49:04] Cameron McEwen: it's especially apparent where the word itself...
[49:07] Cameron McEwen: itself may not be used,
[49:09] Cameron McEwen: right?
[49:10] Cameron McEwen: But where the concept,
[49:15] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[49:16] Cameron McEwen: like in Whitehead,
[49:17] Cameron McEwen: the concept is indicated but never thought through.
[49:21] Cameron McEwen: And so
[49:26] Cameron McEwen: Whitehead may have actually used the word medium,
[49:30] Cameron McEwen: and I believe he did,
[49:32] Cameron McEwen: and so did Lewis in the
[49:34] Cameron McEwen: 1920s.
[49:37] Cameron McEwen: What happens with McLuhan is when he's saying to himself,
[49:40] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[49:41] Cameron McEwen: Lewis did this great stuff.
[49:43] Cameron McEwen: It had no effect.
[49:44] Cameron McEwen: How am I going to have effect?
[49:46] Cameron McEwen: Then he takes the unthought as the way to tackle the problem.
[49:53] Bob Dobbs: The unthought?
[49:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[49:56] Cameron McEwen: The fact that medium was either explicit or implicit in what was going on,
[50:02] Cameron McEwen: but it was never thought about.
[50:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[50:05] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[50:06] Cameron McEwen: And so it was,
[50:08] Cameron McEwen: you could say it was being used,
[50:11] Cameron McEwen: but not consciously.
[50:13] Cameron McEwen: And so
[50:13] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan in the
[50:15] Cameron McEwen: 1950s is trying to figure out how can I use a medium in a way that is thought,
[50:24] Cameron McEwen: that is useful in indicating the drama of cognition.
[50:30] Bob Dobbs: So did Innis help him there?
[50:33] Cameron McEwen: Definitely.
[50:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[50:34] Cameron McEwen: Definitely.
[50:35] Cameron McEwen: Because what Innis was especially important to
[50:43] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was indicating the importance of effects.
[50:48] Cameron McEwen: So,
[50:51] Cameron McEwen: somebody like Whitehead or even Lewis,
[50:54] Cameron McEwen: when they're talking explicitly or implicitly about media,
[50:59] Cameron McEwen: they're generally talking about forms of thought.
[51:03] Cameron McEwen: And what
[51:05] Cameron McEwen: Innis does when he's talking about media is he thinks about what did they cause?
[51:14] Cameron McEwen: How did they change social behavior?
[51:18] Cameron McEwen: How did they change what men and women came to value?
[51:24] Cameron McEwen: That's an important thing that
[51:28] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan needed to be sort of urged into.
[51:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[51:38] Bob Dobbs: What a heady time it was for him when he met Pound in 1948.
[51:43] Bob Dobbs: He's meeting Innis and then Carpenter.
[51:47] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[51:48] Bob Dobbs: 48 to 52,
[51:52] Bob Dobbs: wow,
[51:52] Cameron McEwen: what an amazing turmoil he must have gone through.
[51:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[51:55] Cameron McEwen: met Giedion and Lewis both in 1943.
[52:02] Cameron McEwen: He often said that his
[52:07] Cameron McEwen: Cambridge experience was not as rich as it should have been in terms of getting to know
[52:14] Cameron McEwen: Richards or Levis,
[52:16] Cameron McEwen: people like that.
[52:17] Cameron McEwen: more personally because he was going through so many changes that he was unable to sort of reach out as a integrated personality and get to know these folks.
[52:30] Cameron McEwen: But by the
[52:32] Cameron McEwen: 1940s, he was ready.
[52:33] Cameron McEwen: And so he met a series of really important people.
[52:43] Cameron McEwen: he came to believe that
[52:46] Cameron McEwen: The ability to meet people was a very important part of advanced education.
[52:53] Cameron McEwen: And not many people can do that.
[52:58] Bob Dobbs: Meaning go and meet people and engage them,
[53:00] Bob Dobbs: get their attention?
[53:03] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[53:03] Cameron McEwen: what I mean is to be in the presence of greatness without being too intimidated or too overbearing.
[53:13] Cameron McEwen: To be in the presence of greatness.
[53:14] Cameron McEwen: presence of a great person requires above all an ability to listen and to respond to them in a way that makes
[53:30] Cameron McEwen: them know that you are listening.
[53:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[53:32] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[53:34] Bob Dobbs: yep.
[53:34] Bob Dobbs: And so he said he was very lucky in who he met.
[53:41] Bob Dobbs: Thank you.
[53:43] Bob Dobbs: He says to Mike Wallace around 1966,
[53:47] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[53:48] Bob Dobbs: what are you investigating?
[53:49] Bob Dobbs: What are you doing?
[53:49] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan says,
[53:50] Bob Dobbs: I'm investigating you.
[53:54] Bob Dobbs: And he also says in the
[53:57] Bob Dobbs: Hot and Cool interview,
[53:58] Bob Dobbs: you have to have a superiority,
[54:00] Bob Dobbs: a kind of arrogance to deal with anti-environment.
[54:03] Bob Dobbs: So he had a natural superiority complex anyways.
[54:08] Bob Dobbs: And so he could meet with superior people or...
[54:13] Bob Dobbs: giants of achievement,
[54:15] Bob Dobbs: intellectual achievement,
[54:17] Bob Dobbs: because he already had a kind of self-confidence in himself.
[54:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[54:24] Cameron McEwen: but
[54:25] Cameron McEwen: I think the superiority with McLuhan is,
[54:29] Cameron McEwen: above all,
[54:30] Cameron McEwen: a certain distance.
[54:32] Cameron McEwen: It's not a kind of vertical looking down.
[54:36] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[54:37] Cameron McEwen: It's a distance that allows...
[54:42] Cameron McEwen: a kind of etiquette,
[54:44] Cameron McEwen: a kind of politeness that is difficult for many people.
[54:49] Cameron McEwen: It's really the prerequisite for dialogue.
[54:53] Bob Dobbs: Yep,
[54:53] Cameron McEwen: the poise.
[54:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[54:56] Cameron McEwen: poise and being unemotionally engaged.
[55:01] Bob Dobbs: Yep,
[55:03] Bob Dobbs: I did that.
[55:04] Bob Dobbs: That's what the church celebrates all the giants I met,
[55:07] Bob Dobbs: with poise.
[55:12] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[55:12] Bob Dobbs: there's also an element of second-sightedness in McLuhan.
[55:16] Bob Dobbs: He knew who to go to instinctively,
[55:19] Bob Dobbs: and then he knew what to take,
[55:20] Bob Dobbs: and he knew he'd come up with something.
[55:23] Bob Dobbs: Don Theall told me that when he met Marshall in 1950 in those 50 to 53 period,
[55:31] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was always,
[55:32] Bob Dobbs: he said,
[55:32] Bob Dobbs: talking about,
[55:34] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to get power.
[55:35] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to do something.
[55:36] Bob Dobbs: And he was always looking.
[55:37] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[55:38] Bob Dobbs: what if I should write editorials for this newspaper and this and that?
[55:41] Bob Dobbs: He talked quite openly to Theo about his ambitions,
[55:45] Bob Dobbs: and he had the confidence.
[55:47] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[55:48] Bob Dobbs: I know I'm going to do something.
[55:49] Bob Dobbs: I'm just going to find out where it is.
[55:51] Bob Dobbs: Where can I launch this?
[55:52] Bob Dobbs: Because I'm not hanging around this university environment.
[55:55] Bob Dobbs: These are puny people.
[55:57] Cameron McEwen: You know what I mean?
[55:58] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[55:58] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[55:59] Cameron McEwen: He was already talking about that in the mid-1940s.
[56:04] Cameron McEwen: There's a letter.
[56:05] Cameron McEwen: It's probably to Ott.
[56:07] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[56:08] Cameron McEwen: Ong.
[56:10] Cameron McEwen: And it may be to other
[56:13] Cameron McEwen: Jesuits as well,
[56:14] Cameron McEwen: like
[56:15] Cameron McEwen: McNamee or somebody.
[56:17] Cameron McEwen: But he says in one of the letters to a Jesuit or to Jesuits at that time that um
[56:27] Cameron McEwen: The
[56:28] Cameron McEwen: Catholic religion gives people a certain insight into events,
[56:37] Cameron McEwen: which if it's used properly,
[56:40] Cameron McEwen: can obtain great influence.
[56:42] Cameron McEwen: And
[56:44] Cameron McEwen: I think one of the ways that
[56:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was searching around with his flashlight in the
[56:54] Cameron McEwen: 1950s to figure out his way you
[56:56] Cameron McEwen: was how am I going to realize the power of something that
[57:02] Cameron McEwen: I have but don't know how to direct?
[57:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[57:07] Bob Dobbs: now you say he had another revolution in perception in the late 50s around tactility.
[57:13] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you say?
[57:16] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[57:16] Cameron McEwen: he does start to talk about tactility a lot in that time period.
[57:22] Cameron McEwen: But I think the revolution that...
[57:26] Cameron McEwen: he came to was in deciding that the medium,
[57:34] Cameron McEwen: the definition of the medium,
[57:37] Cameron McEwen: which is to say the medium is the message,
[57:40] Cameron McEwen: is sort of the critical factor for the world right now.
[57:48] Cameron McEwen: And so you were talking about he was trying to figure out...
[57:55] Cameron McEwen: how he was going to have power or how he was going to have influence.
[57:59] Cameron McEwen: He wasn't looking for a great deal of money or a great deal of respect or fame or something like that.
[58:07] Cameron McEwen: He was looking to influence the world in a similar way to what he thought Lewis should have had,
[58:21] Cameron McEwen: but Lewis was ignored.
[58:23] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[58:24] Cameron McEwen: He comes to the idea in 1959,
[58:27] Cameron McEwen: I think it is.
[58:28] Cameron McEwen: No,
[58:28] Cameron McEwen: 1958 in Vancouver is where he first says the medium is the message.
[58:34] Cameron McEwen: And the light bulb that's gone off in his head is that if we're going to illuminate the interior landscape,
[58:46] Cameron McEwen: it has to take place in a way similar to how the interior landscape got illuminated.
[58:53] Cameron McEwen: And that is to say,
[58:55] Cameron McEwen: you need to start off with the common recognition of some categories.
[59:05] Cameron McEwen: In the physical world,
[59:06] Cameron McEwen: that was the chemical elements,
[59:08] Cameron McEwen: which people,
[59:09] Cameron McEwen: they began to understand the structure of that around 1800.
[59:13] Cameron McEwen: And then throughout the
[59:15] Cameron McEwen: 19th century,
[59:16] Cameron McEwen: they progressed until they got to Mendeleev's table,
[59:21] Cameron McEwen: where the entire structure.
[59:23] Cameron McEwen: of the chemical elements is set out.
[59:26] Cameron McEwen: So McLuhan realized in 1959 that if we were going to get a handle on human perception,
[59:36] Cameron McEwen: we would have to have a similar common focus as that provided in the study of the physical world by the chemical elements.
[59:49] Cameron McEwen: So that's why the...
[59:52] Cameron McEwen: specification of the medium becomes so important.
[59:58] Cameron McEwen: And then five years later,
[1:00:00] Cameron McEwen: when he reads
[1:00:01] Cameron McEwen: Kohler
[1:00:02] Cameron McEwen: Gestalt
[1:00:03] Cameron McEwen: Psychology, then he realizes that,
[1:00:06] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[1:00:07] Cameron McEwen: here we go.
[1:00:08] Cameron McEwen: This is what I've always been saying in terms of the eye and the ear,
[1:00:13] Cameron McEwen: that the new way to say that is that in all perception,
[1:00:19] Cameron McEwen: there's a figure and ground,
[1:00:21] Cameron McEwen: and the figure and ground
[1:00:23] Cameron McEwen: have a defined spectrum over which they can vary,
[1:00:27] Cameron McEwen: and that defined spectrum is the equivalent of the first intuitions of the chemical element in
[1:00:38] Bob Dobbs: 1800. Right.
[1:00:40] Bob Dobbs: You're saying five years later,
[1:00:41] Bob Dobbs: 1963,
[1:00:44] Cameron McEwen: 1964,
[1:00:46] Cameron McEwen: he reads Kohler?
[1:00:47] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:00:47] Cameron McEwen: just after he finished understanding media.
[1:00:50] Cameron McEwen: Understanding Media was published in the spring of 64,
[1:00:55] Cameron McEwen: and almost immediately after that,
[1:00:58] Cameron McEwen: in I think it was June,
[1:01:00] Cameron McEwen: he reads
[1:01:02] Cameron McEwen: Kohler.
[1:01:03] Cameron McEwen: And he immediately writes several people,
[1:01:08] Cameron McEwen: some of which,
[1:01:10] Cameron McEwen: some of the letters are in the published letters.
[1:01:14] Cameron McEwen: And he says,
[1:01:15] Cameron McEwen: I've been really reading
[1:01:17] Cameron McEwen: Kohler, and now I have to recast everything in these terms.
[1:01:24] Bob Dobbs: Is there a sentence,
[1:01:26] Bob Dobbs: either in the Wright Manitoba articles he wrote or in his diary,
[1:01:30] Bob Dobbs: that's the closest to what he's going to describe?
[1:01:32] Bob Dobbs: discover in the 50s?
[1:01:35] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:01:35] Cameron McEwen: I think so.
[1:01:36] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:01:37] Cameron McEwen: There's a letter that he writes to his family in,
[1:01:41] Cameron McEwen: I think it's December.
[1:01:42] Cameron McEwen: It could be November,
[1:01:43] Cameron McEwen: but it's either November or December in 1934.
[1:01:48] Cameron McEwen: And so this is the very first term he's at
[1:01:52] Cameron McEwen: Cambridge.
[1:01:56] Cameron McEwen: And I believe this letter is one indication among several.
[1:02:02] Cameron McEwen: that
[1:02:03] Cameron McEwen: Marshall McLuhan is wrong,
[1:02:05] Cameron McEwen: that the University of Wright Manitoba was unable to provide a decent education to McLuhan.
[1:02:12] Cameron McEwen: So in the fall of 1934,
[1:02:18] Cameron McEwen: he already has a very good idea about
[1:02:23] Cameron McEwen: T.S. Eliot.
[1:02:24] Cameron McEwen: And he writes to his family,
[1:02:26] Cameron McEwen: he says that he recognizes the SubGenius.
[1:02:32] Cameron McEwen: of T.S.
[1:02:32] Cameron McEwen: Eliot as he's able to provide the background to ordinary life,
[1:02:41] Cameron McEwen: but without removing that background from ordinary life.
[1:02:46] Cameron McEwen: In other words,
[1:02:48] Cameron McEwen: Eliot supplies both ordinary life and what's going on in that ordinary life without separating them,
[1:03:00] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:03:00] Cameron McEwen: So if you think of chemistry
[1:03:03] Cameron McEwen: you have whatever materials are in front of you and that is chemistry but it's not as if chemistry is some sort of ideal
[1:03:16] Cameron McEwen: form or some thought pattern or something like that abstracted from the material stuff.
[1:03:24] Cameron McEwen: The material stuff is the chemistry.
[1:03:29] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan recognizes in 1934 that what's going on in an Eliot poem,
[1:03:38] Cameron McEwen: and by this time,
[1:03:40] Cameron McEwen: Eliot hadn't even begun the four quartets.
[1:03:44] Cameron McEwen: So he's talking about the pre-four quartets
[1:03:48] Cameron McEwen: Eliot.
[1:03:50] Cameron McEwen: He's saying that
[1:03:51] Cameron McEwen: Eliot presents the surface,
[1:03:55] Cameron McEwen: but also what's going on in the surface.
[1:03:58] Cameron McEwen: without remove.
[1:04:00] Cameron McEwen: And so you can see that he's setting up a model where you could imagine somebody presenting the surface,
[1:04:10] Cameron McEwen: but nothing else.
[1:04:11] Cameron McEwen: And that's more or less what
[1:04:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says of Dos Passos.
[1:04:16] Cameron McEwen: Dos Passos has a very good idea of the surface,
[1:04:19] Cameron McEwen: but he doesn't know what's going on in the surface.
[1:04:22] Cameron McEwen: There's no remove.
[1:04:23] Cameron McEwen: There's no complication to it.
[1:04:27] Cameron McEwen: Somebody else
[1:04:28] Cameron McEwen: might say,
[1:04:29] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[1:04:29] Cameron McEwen: here's the surface of life,
[1:04:34] Cameron McEwen: and then there are these ideal forms,
[1:04:38] Cameron McEwen: and it's unclear sort of what the relationship is between these and how you get from the one to the other and all this sort of stuff.
[1:04:48] Cameron McEwen: So those are two extremes,
[1:04:50] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:04:51] Cameron McEwen: You could call them a platonic extreme or an idealistic extreme.
[1:04:56] Cameron McEwen: and a materialistic extreme.
[1:04:59] Bob Dobbs: He says the form point in that 34 letter?
[1:05:06] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that he says that,
[1:05:08] Cameron McEwen: but he's pretty clear that there are these three different ways of approaching the world.
[1:05:18] Cameron McEwen: And remember,
[1:05:20] Cameron McEwen: he had studied with
[1:05:23] Cameron McEwen: Lodge Wright Manitoba,
[1:05:25] Cameron McEwen: And that was...
[1:05:26] Cameron McEwen: sort of lodges whole point.
[1:05:28] Cameron McEwen: There's three different ways of looking at experience,
[1:05:34] Cameron McEwen: idealism,
[1:05:34] Cameron McEwen: realism,
[1:05:35] Cameron McEwen: and pragmatism.
[1:05:37] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:05:38] Cameron McEwen: I take
[1:05:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and his letter to be giving a kind of Gilson take on literary analysis.
[1:05:51] Cameron McEwen: So bringing together Wright Manitoba and Cambridge,
[1:05:54] Cameron McEwen: you could say.
[1:05:55] Cameron McEwen: But that whole idea that there's something going on in the surface of things that is explanatory.
[1:06:09] Cameron McEwen: of them,
[1:06:10] Cameron McEwen: but is not separate from them.
[1:06:12] Cameron McEwen: That idea is what he really explores throughout the
[1:06:18] Cameron McEwen: 1950s.
[1:06:18] Bob Dobbs: Right, and
[1:06:19] Bob Dobbs: Giedion is Rupert Lodge?
[1:06:22] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:06:22] Cameron McEwen: sir.
[1:06:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:06:23] Bob Dobbs: just for the people who don't know.
[1:06:25] Bob Dobbs: And he writes to Michael Horniansky in 1976 that his Menippean satire is a satire on the surface manners,
[1:06:34] Bob Dobbs: or the surfaces of life.
[1:06:37] Bob Dobbs: That's what you're getting at,
[1:06:38] Bob Dobbs: because he also had the science of forms that was underneath that.
[1:06:43] Bob Dobbs: The surface is satirical,
[1:06:46] Bob Dobbs: but it's a complex satire because there's some serious remove or science or detachment underneath the satire.
[1:06:54] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:06:55] Cameron McEwen: But the reason the medium is the message is that the detachment that's required there.
[1:07:06] Cameron McEwen: is not obvious,
[1:07:08] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:07:08] Cameron McEwen: The triumph of science,
[1:07:09] Cameron McEwen: you could say,
[1:07:11] Cameron McEwen: is getting the correct remove.
[1:07:13] Cameron McEwen: It can't be too close and it can't be too far away.
[1:07:17] Cameron McEwen: And so the medium is the message also in that sense.
[1:07:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:07:22] Bob Dobbs: very good.
[1:07:23] Bob Dobbs: Now look,
[1:07:24] Cameron McEwen: here's another.
[1:07:25] Bob Dobbs: Look how much you've been talking.
[1:07:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:07:29] Cameron McEwen: Case closed.
[1:07:31] Cameron McEwen: Let me give you another quotation.
[1:07:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:07:34] Cameron McEwen: Where the hell is this one from?
[1:07:42] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:07:44] Cameron McEwen: I can't even remember where this is from.
[1:07:45] Cameron McEwen: I'll have to do a search.
[1:07:48] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:07:50] Bob Dobbs: you have it,
[1:07:50] Bob Dobbs: but you didn't write down the source.
[1:07:53] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:07:54] Cameron McEwen: Like an idiot.
[1:07:54] Cameron McEwen: And what that means is that I have written down the source,
[1:07:59] Cameron McEwen: but in another place.
[1:08:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:08:01] Cameron McEwen: So.
[1:08:03] Cameron McEwen: I would never just sort of...
[1:08:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:08:08] Bob Dobbs: you never forget to name the source.
[1:08:11] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:08:12] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:08:12] Cameron McEwen: for sure not.
[1:08:12] Cameron McEwen: For sure not.
[1:08:14] Cameron McEwen: But what I did was I lifted it out of a post that must be in progress,
[1:08:21] Cameron McEwen: and
[1:08:21] Cameron McEwen: I put it into a note for talking to you,
[1:08:24] Cameron McEwen: and
[1:08:26] Cameron McEwen: I didn't note where the hell I got it.
[1:08:31] Cameron McEwen: As we're talking,
[1:08:32] Cameron McEwen: I'll find it.
[1:08:33] Cameron McEwen: Anyway,
[1:08:34] Cameron McEwen: here's the quotation,
[1:08:35] Cameron McEwen: which I think is apropos.
[1:08:38] Cameron McEwen: The mere recognition of the existence of the subliminal.
[1:08:42] Cameron McEwen: And by the way,
[1:08:43] Cameron McEwen: subliminal,
[1:08:45] Cameron McEwen: as used by McLuhan,
[1:08:47] Cameron McEwen: is not subliminal as people talk about it in advertising or something like that.
[1:08:54] Cameron McEwen: What McLuhan means by the subliminal is what the word says.
[1:08:59] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[1:08:59] Cameron McEwen: it's what is.
[1:09:00] Cameron McEwen: below the horizon of awareness.
[1:09:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:09:06] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:09:06] Cameron McEwen: It's subliminal means below the horizon or below the boundary.
[1:09:13] Cameron McEwen: So the mere recognition of the existence of the subliminal and ordinary human experience seems of itself to create fear and insecurity.
[1:09:25] Cameron McEwen: Wow.
[1:09:27] Cameron McEwen: End of sentence.
[1:09:29] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:09:29] Bob Dobbs: listen to this.
[1:09:29] Cameron McEwen: Every...
[1:09:30] Bob Dobbs: Remember he says in the early
[1:09:32] Bob Dobbs: 70s that some Japanese guy gave him the insight about why people won't study media,
[1:09:39] Bob Dobbs: and the Japanese guy says it threatens their identity.
[1:09:44] Bob Dobbs: That's a big discovery,
[1:09:45] Bob Dobbs: but here he's saying it
[1:09:47] Bob Dobbs: 20 years before maybe.
[1:09:49] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:09:49] Cameron McEwen: definitely.
[1:09:51] Cameron McEwen: Oftentimes
[1:09:53] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan would sort of dash off a letter or even a short text.
[1:10:00] Cameron McEwen: saying that something was a discovery or a breakthrough,
[1:10:03] Cameron McEwen: and really it was a recapitulation of something that he had long thought.
[1:10:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:10:09] Cameron McEwen: No question about it.
[1:10:11] Cameron McEwen: But let me just give the second sentence,
[1:10:14] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:10:14] Cameron McEwen: So the first sentence is,
[1:10:16] Cameron McEwen: the mere recognition of the existence of the subliminal in ordinary human experience seems of itself to create fear and insecurity,
[1:10:25] Cameron McEwen: since every moment of perception is loaded with...
[1:10:28] Cameron McEwen: subliminal intake,
[1:10:30] Cameron McEwen: all of us are unaware of most of the factors that shape our experience.
[1:10:36] Cameron McEwen: So what was that?
[1:10:38] Bob Dobbs: You had a word in the middle there I didn't get.
[1:10:42] Bob Dobbs: Do it again.
[1:10:44] Cameron McEwen: Since every moment of perception is loaded with subliminal intake,
[1:10:50] Cameron McEwen: all of us are unaware of most of the factors that shape our experience.
[1:10:57] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:10:57] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:10:57] Bob Dobbs: right
[1:10:58] Bob Dobbs: He says somewhere about the terrors and desires at the roots of language or something.
[1:11:06] Bob Dobbs: Remember that phrase?
[1:11:08] Bob Dobbs: Late 40s,
[1:11:09] Bob Dobbs: early 50s?
[1:11:09] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:11:10] Cameron McEwen: but it rings a vague bell.
[1:11:12] Cameron McEwen: Excuse me.
[1:11:17] Cameron McEwen: It certainly relates to what we're talking about here.
[1:11:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:11:21] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:11:22] Cameron McEwen: Excuse me.
[1:11:27] Cameron McEwen: So,
[1:11:27] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:11:28] Bob Dobbs: very good find there.
[1:11:30] Cameron McEwen: Look at how that relates to 1934.
[1:11:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:11:35] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:11:35] Cameron McEwen: This is...
[1:11:35] Cameron McEwen: The quote I read is certainly from 20 or 30 years after,
[1:11:41] Cameron McEwen: and yet,
[1:11:42] Cameron McEwen: in a certain way,
[1:11:43] Cameron McEwen: it's talking about the same thing.
[1:11:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:11:45] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:11:45] Cameron McEwen: He says,
[1:11:47] Cameron McEwen: every moment of perception is loaded with subliminal intake.
[1:11:52] Cameron McEwen: All of us,
[1:11:53] Cameron McEwen: or since every moment of perception is loaded with subliminal intake,
[1:11:58] Cameron McEwen: all of us are unaware of most of the factors that shape our experience.
[1:12:03] Cameron McEwen: So there he was in 1934.
[1:12:05] Cameron McEwen: talking about how Eliot supplies both the surface level and the level of which we're unaware,
[1:12:16] Cameron McEwen: and does it sort of simultaneously.
[1:12:21] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:12:23] Cameron McEwen: In the lines of his poetry,
[1:12:25] Cameron McEwen: he manages to have both of those things together.
[1:12:31] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:12:31] Cameron McEwen: I would say from 1934...
[1:12:35] Cameron McEwen: until at least 1960 and conceivably right until 1980.
[1:12:43] Cameron McEwen: That's exactly what he's trying to think through.
[1:12:47] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:12:47] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:12:47] Bob Dobbs: when he's 19,
[1:12:48] Bob Dobbs: he says something in his diaries about the laws of media or something.
[1:12:52] Bob Dobbs: What do you make of that sentence in relation to 34?
[1:12:57] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:13:00] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:13:00] Cameron McEwen: I do.
[1:13:01] Cameron McEwen: And it seems.
[1:13:04] Cameron McEwen: to me that...
[1:13:05] Bob Dobbs: Did I say media?
[1:13:06] Bob Dobbs: I meant the laws of advertising.
[1:13:08] Bob Dobbs: I think it is.
[1:13:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:13:10] Cameron McEwen: that's better.
[1:13:13] Cameron McEwen: I think it indicates that
[1:13:16] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan always was aware,
[1:13:19] Cameron McEwen: even as a child,
[1:13:21] Cameron McEwen: I believe,
[1:13:22] Cameron McEwen: that there was more going on in the world around him than most people saw.
[1:13:31] Cameron McEwen: His father
[1:13:33] Cameron McEwen: They're...
[1:13:35] Cameron McEwen: would ask him,
[1:13:36] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:13:36] Cameron McEwen: would you be willing to stand up in a meeting with the grown-ups and say the same thing?
[1:13:42] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan would say,
[1:13:43] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:13:44] Cameron McEwen: why not?
[1:13:44] Cameron McEwen: Because it's simply what's going on,
[1:13:47] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:13:48] Cameron McEwen: And his father would say,
[1:13:49] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:13:49] Cameron McEwen: that's not what most people think is going on.
[1:13:53] Cameron McEwen: And he would say,
[1:13:55] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:13:55] Cameron McEwen: it's obvious,
[1:13:56] Cameron McEwen: isn't it?
[1:13:57] Bob Dobbs: What would his father say to that?
[1:14:02] Cameron McEwen: He'd probably say,
[1:14:04] Cameron McEwen: not to everybody,
[1:14:05] Cameron McEwen: sonny boy.
[1:14:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:14:06] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:14:08] Bob Dobbs: His geniality of his father,
[1:14:11] Bob Dobbs: he thought too much,
[1:14:13] Bob Dobbs: he considered too much the average person's perceptions.
[1:14:16] Bob Dobbs: He brought them in.
[1:14:17] Bob Dobbs: So they limited his
[1:14:20] Bob Dobbs: X-ray laser beam that McLuhan had.
[1:14:24] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan being more,
[1:14:25] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:14:26] Bob Dobbs: antisocial or not trying to be congenial.
[1:14:30] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:14:32] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:14:32] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:14:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:14:33] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:14:34] Cameron McEwen: And he got that from his mother,
[1:14:36] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:14:36] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:14:36] Cameron McEwen: His mother was able to get up on stage and not to be bothered by being on the stage.
[1:14:44] Cameron McEwen: In fact,
[1:14:45] Cameron McEwen: to very much enjoy it.
[1:14:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:14:47] Cameron McEwen: Number one.
[1:14:48] Cameron McEwen: But number two,
[1:14:51] Cameron McEwen: she was a person who was very impatient with anti-environment.
[1:14:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:14:55] Cameron McEwen: So she moved away from the family.
[1:14:57] Cameron McEwen: And then she...
[1:14:58] Cameron McEwen: And once she moved away from the family,
[1:15:01] Cameron McEwen: she was constantly going to new positions.
[1:15:06] Cameron McEwen: And so she lived in
[1:15:08] Cameron McEwen: Toronto. Then she lived in Detroit.
[1:15:10] Cameron McEwen: Then she lived in Cleveland.
[1:15:12] Cameron McEwen: Then she lived in New Jersey.
[1:15:13] Cameron McEwen: And she was all over the damn place.
[1:15:17] Cameron McEwen: Very restless.
[1:15:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:15:19] Cameron McEwen: very.
[1:15:20] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan kind of combined the father and the mother.
[1:15:25] Cameron McEwen: He wasn't so restless as his mother.
[1:15:28] Cameron McEwen: But he wasn't as settled as the father.
[1:15:31] Bob Dobbs: Say it again.
[1:15:32] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't as restless as his mother,
[1:15:34] Bob Dobbs: and he wasn't as settled.
[1:15:35] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:15:35] Bob Dobbs: He was right in the middle.
[1:15:37] Bob Dobbs: What do you know about his brother,
[1:15:39] Bob Dobbs: Morris?
[1:15:39] Bob Dobbs: Have you looked into that much?
[1:15:42] Cameron McEwen: Not much.
[1:15:43] Cameron McEwen: I met him.
[1:15:49] Cameron McEwen: He wasn't a very deep person.
[1:15:53] Cameron McEwen: He struck me as a typical
[1:15:56] Cameron McEwen: United Church.
[1:15:57] Cameron McEwen: minister.
[1:16:00] Cameron McEwen: Somebody who hadn't really thought through what he was giving out as absolute truth.
[1:16:12] Cameron McEwen: So my whole impression of
[1:16:19] Cameron McEwen: Canadian and American society in those years,
[1:16:24] Cameron McEwen: I'm talking at the end of the
[1:16:26] Cameron McEwen: 60s, was that people were in the business of fooling themselves.
[1:16:37] Cameron McEwen: And that's kind of what I thought Maurice was up to.
[1:16:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:16:42] Bob Dobbs: so you could see the subliminals of Canadians.
[1:16:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:16:48] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:16:49] Cameron McEwen: one part,
[1:16:52] Cameron McEwen: because my insight was not productive,
[1:16:59] Cameron McEwen: it didn't get me anywhere to see that.
[1:17:03] Cameron McEwen: I just raised questions.
[1:17:06] Cameron McEwen: If I can see the insincere...
[1:17:10] Cameron McEwen: approaches of people who think they're talking about the most important things,
[1:17:14] Cameron McEwen: like religion and race's case,
[1:17:19] Cameron McEwen: how do you get to a life that is sincerely dealing,
[1:17:28] Cameron McEwen: is consciously and sincerely dealing with the most important things?
[1:17:33] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:17:35] Bob Dobbs: I think he got divorced,
[1:17:36] Bob Dobbs: and then he started working with McLuhan in 69,
[1:17:38] Bob Dobbs: 70 at the Coach House.
[1:17:40] Bob Dobbs: That's when I met him.
[1:17:41] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:17:43] Bob Dobbs: I think there's where he had to get deeper.
[1:17:47] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan forced it.
[1:17:47] Bob Dobbs: Because he told me,
[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:17:52] Bob Dobbs: Friedenberg,
[1:17:52] Bob Dobbs: Edgar Friedenberg told me in mid-70s that he was on a panel.
[1:17:55] Bob Dobbs: Remember I told you?
[1:17:56] Bob Dobbs: And Morris introduced himself saying that Marshall McLuhan was an only child.
[1:18:02] Bob Dobbs: Remember me telling you that?
[1:18:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:18:05] Bob Dobbs: Which is pretty brave for a person to do that,
[1:18:09] Bob Dobbs: but I think that's the mutation he was getting from McLuhan,
[1:18:12] Bob Dobbs: the transformation.
[1:18:13] Bob Dobbs: And then when I saw him again in 75,
[1:18:16] Bob Dobbs: I asked,
[1:18:17] Bob Dobbs: why did he quit?
[1:18:18] Bob Dobbs: He quit around 71.
[1:18:19] Bob Dobbs: George Thompson took over,
[1:18:21] Bob Dobbs: and he said,
[1:18:23] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:18:23] Bob Dobbs: you just can't be under the shade of a giant oak tree all the time.
[1:18:28] Bob Dobbs: So that was an interesting statement.
[1:18:30] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:18:30] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was the oak tree.
[1:18:31] Bob Dobbs: So he gets to be teaching at
[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: Sheridan, I think it is,
[1:18:35] Bob Dobbs: and then you have that great videotape by somebody out in Saskatchewan,
[1:18:40] Bob Dobbs: Barry somebody or
[1:18:41] Bob Dobbs: Richard somebody,
[1:18:43] Bob Dobbs: who has McLuhan in Morris'
[1:18:46] Bob Dobbs: class in the first week of 75,
[1:18:50] Bob Dobbs: and that's a really valuable tape.
[1:18:51] Bob Dobbs: But you hear
[1:18:53] Bob Dobbs: Morris in the background prompting McLuhan or just watching McLuhan massage.
[1:18:59] Bob Dobbs: I think he became a deeper person.
[1:19:03] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,
[1:19:03] Cameron McEwen: but he was always aware of playing second fiddle from the time he was very,
[1:19:11] Cameron McEwen: very young.
[1:19:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan always took a sort of condescending view to Maurice,
[1:19:18] Cameron McEwen: saying,
[1:19:19] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:19:19] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:19:19] Cameron McEwen: that's very interesting what you're saying,
[1:19:21] Cameron McEwen: but have you read Maritain?
[1:19:23] Bob Dobbs: Have you read Alfred Adler?
[1:19:25] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[1:19:26] Cameron McEwen: and...
[1:19:26] Cameron McEwen: How the hell can you go to some sort of seminary for ministers if you don't know this,
[1:19:34] Cameron McEwen: don't know this,
[1:19:35] Cameron McEwen: don't know that?
[1:19:37] Cameron McEwen: And then the mother would write,
[1:19:39] Cameron McEwen: she would say,
[1:19:40] Cameron McEwen: go easy on Maurice.
[1:19:42] Cameron McEwen: What do you,
[1:19:42] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:19:43] Cameron McEwen: let's treat him,
[1:19:47] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:19:47] Cameron McEwen: like somebody that perhaps needs some guidance,
[1:19:53] Cameron McEwen: but with gloves.
[1:19:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:19:56] Bob Dobbs: And I think,
[1:19:57] Bob Dobbs: if I recall,
[1:19:58] Bob Dobbs: in the letters in the 30s back home from England,
[1:20:01] Bob Dobbs: he was protecting Morris with slight,
[1:20:07] Bob Dobbs: what is it,
[1:20:08] Bob Dobbs: underestimating of Morris or accurate estimating.
[1:20:12] Bob Dobbs: There was the sense that
[1:20:14] Bob Dobbs: Morris needs to be protected or
[1:20:17] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if he's going to be able to take this,
[1:20:19] Bob Dobbs: but he should do it.
[1:20:21] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:20:22] Bob Dobbs: there is that.
[1:20:22] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember some of those letters?
[1:20:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:20:25] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:20:25] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:20:25] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:20:26] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:20:30] Bob Dobbs: So Dan Morris did
[1:20:31] Bob Dobbs: Who Was or Who Is Marshall McLuhan.
[1:20:34] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember the title?
[1:20:35] Bob Dobbs: Is it Who Was?
[1:20:38] Bob Dobbs: Maybe it was Who Was.
[1:20:39] Bob Dobbs: I never can remember.
[1:20:41] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[1:20:41] Bob Dobbs: you have that book that he did with
[1:20:44] Bob Dobbs: Barry Nevitt.
[1:20:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:20:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:20:47] Bob Dobbs: And I met,
[1:20:48] Bob Dobbs: I saw him at Barry's house when they were working on it,
[1:20:52] Bob Dobbs: late 80s,
[1:20:53] Bob Dobbs: I guess.
[1:20:54] Bob Dobbs: and
[1:20:56] Bob Dobbs: Um,
[1:20:58] Bob Dobbs: he knew enough to hang out with Barry.
[1:21:02] Bob Dobbs: which was good.
[1:21:04] Bob Dobbs: Barry was the best student of McLuhan around at the time,
[1:21:07] Bob Dobbs: and so he respected Barry,
[1:21:09] Bob Dobbs: so I give him kudos for knowing who to spend time with,
[1:21:14] Bob Dobbs: and then to respect Barry's commentary under each page or each person's anecdotes.
[1:21:21] Bob Dobbs: He let that go in there.
[1:21:22] Bob Dobbs: He might not have been able to do it,
[1:21:24] Bob Dobbs: but he has Barry leading the interpretation of Marshall's life throughout that book.
[1:21:33] Bob Dobbs: I think
[1:21:34] Cameron McEwen: Maurice was able to get along with anybody,
[1:21:37] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:21:38] Cameron McEwen: That went along with his profession.
[1:21:43] Cameron McEwen: He was a United Church minister in Winnipeg and Ottawa,
[1:21:46] Cameron McEwen: I think in a couple of small towns as well.
[1:21:49] Cameron McEwen: And,
[1:21:50] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:21:50] Cameron McEwen: you need to be able to get along with old ladies and young ladies,
[1:21:56] Cameron McEwen: middle-aged men,
[1:21:58] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:21:58] Cameron McEwen: everybody.
[1:21:59] Cameron McEwen: And that's your sort of...
[1:22:02] Cameron McEwen: trying to be glue to a certain kind of society.
[1:22:07] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:22:07] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:22:07] Bob Dobbs: he did quit,
[1:22:08] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:22:08] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:22:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:22:11] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:22:13] Cameron McEwen: So he,
[1:22:17] Cameron McEwen: from personal and social reasons,
[1:22:21] Cameron McEwen: probably came to feel that it wasn't a sincere life.
[1:22:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:22:27] Bob Dobbs: I often thought that Marshall had his brother in mind when he would talk about...
[1:22:31] Bob Dobbs: People in the
[1:22:32] Bob Dobbs: 60s have an identity crisis.
[1:22:34] Bob Dobbs: He knew his brother was.
[1:22:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:22:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:22:38] Cameron McEwen: But,
[1:22:38] Cameron McEwen: of course,
[1:22:40] Cameron McEwen: he knew the same thing from all sorts of students and from his own kids.
[1:22:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:22:45] Cameron McEwen: So.
[1:22:47] Bob Dobbs: They lost their mittens,
[1:22:48] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[1:22:49] Bob Dobbs: in November 74 to June Callwood.
[1:22:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:22:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:22:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:22:55] Bob Dobbs: So.
[1:22:55] Cameron McEwen: It was a little bit confusing to him in the sense that.
[1:23:01] Cameron McEwen: He had gone through similar stuff,
[1:23:04] Cameron McEwen: but he had kind of enjoyed it.
[1:23:06] Cameron McEwen: He took those kinds of crises as indicating where he should go,
[1:23:12] Cameron McEwen: as doorways.
[1:23:14] Cameron McEwen: And so when people,
[1:23:15] Cameron McEwen: instead of regarding these crises as doorways,
[1:23:19] Cameron McEwen: regarded them as barriers,
[1:23:23] Cameron McEwen: he couldn't understand the lack of courage or the lack of humor or the lack of detective.
[1:23:31] Cameron McEwen: sense that would get them to stop at that point instead of going right through.
[1:23:38] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:23:38] Bob Dobbs: He,
[1:23:42] Bob Dobbs: oh yeah,
[1:23:42] Bob Dobbs: at the very end,
[1:23:43] Bob Dobbs: there's an interview that Nelson Thal got from somebody.
[1:23:48] Bob Dobbs: It's like the spring of 79.
[1:23:50] Bob Dobbs: He's out in Las Vegas or California.
[1:23:53] Bob Dobbs: And some guy at the conference is interviewing him.
[1:23:56] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan talks about how he was not interested in happiness.
[1:24:01] Bob Dobbs: He,
[1:24:01] Bob Dobbs: as a Christian,
[1:24:02] Bob Dobbs: was into suffering,
[1:24:04] Bob Dobbs: and suffering was way more valuable than happiness,
[1:24:07] Bob Dobbs: and it's probably quite a startling statement for most people to hear someone say,
[1:24:11] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:24:12] Bob Dobbs: I'm not into happiness,
[1:24:13] Bob Dobbs: that's not important,
[1:24:15] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[1:24:15] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:24:15] Cameron McEwen: he says something like that to Nina Sutton as well.
[1:24:19] Bob Dobbs: Ah,
[1:24:19] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:24:19] Bob Dobbs: right.
[1:24:19] Cameron McEwen: In the tapes with her,
[1:24:22] Cameron McEwen: he says that he's never been interested in happiness as a goal.
[1:24:27] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:24:27] Cameron McEwen: Of course,
[1:24:28] Cameron McEwen: there's a big difference between...
[1:24:31] Cameron McEwen: Somebody saying,
[1:24:33] Cameron McEwen: I'm not interested in happiness as a goal,
[1:24:35] Cameron McEwen: and somebody saying,
[1:24:37] Cameron McEwen: I'm not happy.
[1:24:39] Cameron McEwen: Somebody can easily be very happy,
[1:24:42] Cameron McEwen: but not think that that's a praiseworthy goal in life or something.
[1:24:47] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:24:48] Bob Dobbs: And do you remember what Nina's response was when he said that?
[1:24:56] Bob Dobbs: Was she shocked?
[1:24:59] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:24:59] Cameron McEwen: I don't think so.
[1:25:00] Cameron McEwen: I don't think so.
[1:25:01] Cameron McEwen: I would have to go back and look again,
[1:25:06] Cameron McEwen: but
[1:25:07] Cameron McEwen: I think she doesn't find that surprising coming from him.
[1:25:12] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:25:14] Cameron McEwen: Maybe coming from most people would be surprising.
[1:25:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:25:19] Bob Dobbs: Have you seen the YouTube of her?
[1:25:25] Cameron McEwen: I've seen video of her in various places.
[1:25:29] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if I've seen the particular one you're talking about.
[1:25:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:25:32] Bob Dobbs: it's years later,
[1:25:34] Bob Dobbs: and it's only a minute and a half long or something,
[1:25:39] Bob Dobbs: and she's just commenting to somebody about something.
[1:25:42] Cameron McEwen: It's very short.
[1:25:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:25:46] Cameron McEwen: it's part of a website about Brighton,
[1:25:51] Cameron McEwen: which is where
[1:25:53] Cameron McEwen: Nina's uncle used to live.
[1:25:55] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:25:55] Bob Dobbs: right.
[1:25:56] Cameron McEwen: And she's...
[1:25:59] Cameron McEwen: asked
[1:26:01] Cameron McEwen: for her memories of the place.
[1:26:04] Cameron McEwen: And she talks,
[1:26:05] Cameron McEwen: as you say,
[1:26:06] Cameron McEwen: for about 90 seconds.
[1:26:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:26:08] Cameron McEwen: And that's it.
[1:26:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:26:10] Cameron McEwen: It's too bad that it's not longer.
[1:26:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:26:13] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: So what are we doing here now?
[1:26:17] Bob Dobbs: We're talking about
[1:26:20] Bob Dobbs: Desperado.
[1:26:21] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:26:22] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:26:22] Cameron McEwen: we're talking about the end of the Tiny Note chart and how we're going to go further.
[1:26:28] Cameron McEwen: Let me just say in parentheses here that the quotation I gave about the mere recognition of the existence of the subliminal,
[1:26:39] Cameron McEwen: that comes from a presentation that is on the Internet at the moment in the
[1:26:47] Cameron McEwen: NAEB files.
[1:26:49] Cameron McEwen: And it's a presentation that
[1:26:52] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan made to what was called the Research Committee for his...
[1:26:57] Cameron McEwen: Project 69,
[1:26:59] Cameron McEwen: and the date of it is September
[1:27:03] Cameron McEwen: 1959. So McLuhan is well aware in September 1959 that the medium is the message,
[1:27:14] Cameron McEwen: and what the medium means is the subliminal factors that shape experience,
[1:27:24] Cameron McEwen: but not as some kind of
[1:27:26] Cameron McEwen: Erich Heller thing.
[1:27:28] Cameron McEwen: It's got to be a structure that can be defined in the same way as a chemical element can be defined.
[1:27:37] Cameron McEwen: The medium has to be something that is open to collective investigation,
[1:27:44] Cameron McEwen: and it's that idea of collective investigation of what goes on in the classroom.
[1:27:54] Cameron McEwen: being the same kind of thing that goes on outside the classroom,
[1:27:59] Cameron McEwen: is the classroom without walls,
[1:28:02] Cameron McEwen: that depends upon a common focus,
[1:28:06] Cameron McEwen: and the common focus is the medium,
[1:28:09] Cameron McEwen: and the medium is what allows people to investigate in common what the subliminal factors of perception are.
[1:28:22] Bob Dobbs: There's that article around 57,
[1:28:24] Bob Dobbs: subliminal projection on project.
[1:28:27] Bob Dobbs: Remember that?
[1:28:28] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:28:28] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:28:28] Cameron McEwen: sir.
[1:28:29] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:28:29] Cameron McEwen: sir.
[1:28:30] Bob Dobbs: So it's an odd way he goes...
[1:28:32] Cameron McEwen: That's in the Canadian forum,
[1:28:34] Cameron McEwen: I think.
[1:28:35] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:28:35] Bob Dobbs: So he says subliminal projection on project.
[1:28:38] Bob Dobbs: So is he saying,
[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: here's my ground on my project?
[1:28:45] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:28:45] Cameron McEwen: So one of the complications of talking about...
[1:28:51] Cameron McEwen: subliminal factors in perception is that it's bullshit to do that as if only other people had subliminal factors.
[1:29:02] Cameron McEwen: So one of the tricks that is involved in media study as opposed to,
[1:29:08] Cameron McEwen: say,
[1:29:08] Cameron McEwen: chemistry is that a chemist does not need to account for the chemical activity of his or her own brain.
[1:29:21] Cameron McEwen: There is chemistry going on in there,
[1:29:24] Cameron McEwen: but it's not integral to,
[1:29:28] Cameron McEwen: in most cases,
[1:29:29] Cameron McEwen: what the chemist is doing.
[1:29:32] Cameron McEwen: But that's not the case with media analysis.
[1:29:35] Cameron McEwen: You cannot simply say that other people have subliminal factors and not take account of the subliminal factors in your perception of those subliminal factors.
[1:29:48] Cameron McEwen: So there's a...
[1:29:50] Cameron McEwen: kind of hall of mirrors factor in media analysis that is different from chemistry,
[1:29:59] Cameron McEwen: but it's one of the signposts that a media analyst has to be aware of in pointing the way forward.
[1:30:10] Cameron McEwen: This is one more complication that is actually helpful,
[1:30:16] Cameron McEwen: not a hindrance.
[1:30:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:30:19] Bob Dobbs: he says at June Callwood that he can't project to people and people can't project to him.
[1:30:24] Bob Dobbs: Is that a different meaning from subliminal projection on project or on project?
[1:30:33] Cameron McEwen: Give me what he said to June Callwood again.
[1:30:37] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[1:30:38] Bob Dobbs: as she quotes him,
[1:30:39] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[1:30:39] Bob Dobbs: people find it hard to project to me and I find it hard to project to people.
[1:30:44] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:30:45] Bob Dobbs: he may not have said find it hard.
[1:30:46] Bob Dobbs: You might have just said people.
[1:30:48] Bob Dobbs: can project to me,
[1:30:49] Bob Dobbs: and I can project to them.
[1:30:54] Cameron McEwen: I don't know exactly what he meant,
[1:30:55] Cameron McEwen: but to me it sounds like when he says communication when it happens is a miracle.
[1:31:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:31:06] Cameron McEwen: Or communication mostly doesn't happen at all.
[1:31:11] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:31:12] Cameron McEwen: So I think he's using projection in that sense there.
[1:31:16] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:31:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:31:17] Bob Dobbs: that makes sense.
[1:31:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:31:20] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:31:20] Bob Dobbs: So have we finished the Esperanto?
[1:31:23] Bob Dobbs: Is the Esperanto visual form is photography in movies?
[1:31:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:31:31] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:31:31] Cameron McEwen: I think he seems to use Esperanto to mean a form of communication that does not require some sort of particular
[1:31:47] Cameron McEwen: background.
[1:31:49] Cameron McEwen: All right,
[1:31:49] Cameron McEwen: so in...
[1:31:54] Cameron McEwen: The tribal encyclopedia of Homer,
[1:31:59] Cameron McEwen: if you're not
[1:32:02] Cameron McEwen: Greek, if you're not an 800 BC
[1:32:09] Cameron McEwen: Greek, if you're not a Greek aware of the barbarians and on and on,
[1:32:17] Cameron McEwen: then you're not going to get it,
[1:32:20] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:32:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:32:21] Cameron McEwen: At all.
[1:32:22] Cameron McEwen: And so what happens with modern means of communication is that that kind of rootedness is gone beyond.
[1:32:31] Cameron McEwen: And it's what the alphabet is sort of the premonition of.
[1:32:36] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:32:38] Cameron McEwen: The alphabet is going to be something you can apply to anything,
[1:32:42] Cameron McEwen: and it doesn't matter who you are,
[1:32:44] Cameron McEwen: it doesn't matter about anything.
[1:32:47] Cameron McEwen: If you know how the alphabet works,
[1:32:50] Cameron McEwen: it works.
[1:32:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:32:53] Bob Dobbs: it subsumes the local.
[1:32:56] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[1:32:58] Cameron McEwen: right.
[1:32:58] Cameron McEwen: So if we try to tie this to the end of the Tiny Note chart,
[1:33:03] Cameron McEwen: one question would be,
[1:33:05] Cameron McEwen: did you write the stuff at the very bottom at the time,
[1:33:11] Cameron McEwen: or is that a later edition?
[1:33:13] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:33:13] Bob Dobbs: that's at the time.
[1:33:16] Bob Dobbs: And it's complementary to the statement at the top.
[1:33:20] Bob Dobbs: The cyclotron of holopathy,
[1:33:22] Bob Dobbs: cliche probes,
[1:33:23] Bob Dobbs: causes merging with effects.
[1:33:27] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:33:27] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[1:33:27] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:33:28] Cameron McEwen: I can see that from the other charts,
[1:33:31] Cameron McEwen: so I don't have a problem with that.
[1:33:33] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:33:35] Cameron McEwen: So this waiting for organic bodies,
[1:33:41] Cameron McEwen: I guess this has to do with your wife's research at the time?
[1:33:46] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:33:47] Cameron McEwen: There would be.
[1:33:49] Cameron McEwen: some sort of new conceptualization of what an organic body means.
[1:33:54] Bob Dobbs: When I was on the radio in the 80s in CKLN,
[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: I talked about inspiring the Church of the SubGenius,
[1:34:02] Bob Dobbs: and they,
[1:34:04] Bob Dobbs: in their,
[1:34:05] Bob Dobbs: what they called,
[1:34:05] Bob Dobbs: devivals,
[1:34:06] Bob Dobbs: a satire on fundamentalist revivals,
[1:34:12] Bob Dobbs: they had a band called Doctors for Bob,
[1:34:15] Bob Dobbs: and it was
[1:34:16] Bob Dobbs: B.O.B.
[1:34:18] Bob Dobbs: But in 1990,
[1:34:22] Bob Dobbs: Nelson,
[1:34:22] Bob Dobbs: I,
[1:34:22] Bob Dobbs: and Carolyn thought it would be interesting to put a sign in front of Carolyn's clinic on St.
[1:34:28] Bob Dobbs: Clair Avenue West near Bathurst that said Doctors for Bob,
[1:34:32] Bob Dobbs: and it was B.O.B.
[1:34:34] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:34:35] Bob Dobbs: capitalized.
[1:34:37] Bob Dobbs: And it was a bit of a joke.
[1:34:38] Bob Dobbs: So the traffic was bad there.
[1:34:41] Bob Dobbs: So every morning people would go to work,
[1:34:43] Bob Dobbs: and they'd be stalled around.
[1:34:45] Bob Dobbs: her clinic.
[1:34:46] Bob Dobbs: So they'd all be looking at this sign.
[1:34:49] Bob Dobbs: Millions of people would have watched it for a year or so,
[1:34:52] Bob Dobbs: 90 to
[1:34:53] Bob Dobbs: 91, because she stopped and got ready to go to New York in the last week of December 91.
[1:35:00] Bob Dobbs: So this was doctors for Bob.
[1:35:03] Bob Dobbs: So the last week of her practice in December 91,
[1:35:07] Bob Dobbs: the college raided her office and grabbed 30 files,
[1:35:12] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:35:13] Bob Dobbs: haphazardly.
[1:35:15] Bob Dobbs: And left with them.
[1:35:16] Bob Dobbs: And said,
[1:35:17] Bob Dobbs: we'll be getting back to you.
[1:35:19] Bob Dobbs: It's almost like they tried to nail her before she left Canada.
[1:35:25] Bob Dobbs: But the old guy who led them came back in and he said,
[1:35:29] Bob Dobbs: what does Doctors for Bob stand for?
[1:35:31] Bob Dobbs: Is that Bob Ray?
[1:35:33] Bob Dobbs: It's almost like,
[1:35:33] Bob Dobbs: are you a communist or a socialist?
[1:35:35] Bob Dobbs: Because he was the premier for the NDP,
[1:35:38] Bob Dobbs: the New Democratic Party.
[1:35:40] Bob Dobbs: And Carolyn says,
[1:35:41] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:35:41] Bob Dobbs: Bob stands for...
[1:35:42] Bob Dobbs: Building organic bodies.
[1:35:46] Bob Dobbs: That was their cover story.
[1:35:47] Bob Dobbs: So it was brilliant.
[1:35:49] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I'm thinking of five years later when I say waiting for organic bodies.
[1:35:54] Bob Dobbs: It was based on Bob and the sign that we made.
[1:35:59] Cameron McEwen: Why waiting?
[1:36:01] Bob Dobbs: Because the sixth level,
[1:36:05] Bob Dobbs: the hex head,
[1:36:06] Bob Dobbs: is Carolyn's work in 95 in New York City in the lab.
[1:36:13] Bob Dobbs: And all this stuff goes to before that.
[1:36:17] Bob Dobbs: It actually goes up to 2020 in the formula chart.
[1:36:24] Bob Dobbs: But within this one,
[1:36:25] Bob Dobbs: it's 1960,
[1:36:27] Bob Dobbs: 1990.
[1:36:28] Bob Dobbs: Thank you.
[1:36:31] Bob Dobbs: It doesn't cover the five years from 90 to 95 where
[1:36:36] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn's stuff would ideally come out and become anti-environment.
[1:36:41] Bob Dobbs: So the world is waiting for organic bodies.
[1:36:44] Bob Dobbs: They're waiting for Carolyn's technology.
[1:36:47] Bob Dobbs: And I'm announcing it.
[1:36:50] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[1:36:51] Cameron McEwen: And then how does that relate to spinning clothing crystals?
[1:36:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:36:58] Bob Dobbs: Crystals was a term that William Irwin Thompson used and Baudrillard used.
[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: And spinning is,
[1:37:07] Bob Dobbs: the LaRouche would talk about the spinning of matter.
[1:37:11] Bob Dobbs: And clothing was media as clothing,
[1:37:14] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan metaphor,
[1:37:15] Bob Dobbs: were used.
[1:37:16] Bob Dobbs: So I've got
[1:37:20] Bob Dobbs: Thompson, McLuhan,
[1:37:21] Bob Dobbs: and Baudrillard,
[1:37:23] Bob Dobbs: and LaRouche in there.
[1:37:25] Bob Dobbs: So it's a juxtaposition.
[1:37:27] Bob Dobbs: of the people in the church.
[1:37:31] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan said that all we can do today,
[1:37:34] Bob Dobbs: I think this is in Take Today,
[1:37:35] Bob Dobbs: is dance on the other guy's toes,
[1:37:37] Bob Dobbs: because we're all,
[1:37:38] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:37:39] Bob Dobbs: inside the global membrane,
[1:37:41] Bob Dobbs: in the resonant node.
[1:37:42] Bob Dobbs: So that's the dancing.
[1:37:44] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche is dancing on McLuhan toes,
[1:37:47] Bob Dobbs: who's dancing on Thompson,
[1:37:48] Bob Dobbs: who's dancing on Kroker,
[1:37:49] Bob Dobbs: who's dancing on Dobson,
[1:37:50] Bob Dobbs: who's dancing on whoever I left out,
[1:37:53] Bob Dobbs: the fifth one.
[1:37:55] Bob Dobbs: So it's...
[1:37:57] Bob Dobbs: Crammed with significance,
[1:37:59] Bob Dobbs: with historical,
[1:38:00] Bob Dobbs: philological significance.
[1:38:04] Cameron McEwen: I looked up,
[1:38:06] Cameron McEwen: sorry,
[1:38:07] Cameron McEwen: I just wanted to say that
[1:38:08] Cameron McEwen: I tried to find even the word toes in the stuff I have from McLuhan.
[1:38:15] Cameron McEwen: I couldn't find anything interesting at all about dancing or being on or anything like that.
[1:38:27] Cameron McEwen: find where that quotation is from,
[1:38:31] Cameron McEwen: please send it to me.
[1:38:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:38:31] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to have to look for that.
[1:38:33] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:38:34] Bob Dobbs: yes,
[1:38:35] Bob Dobbs: you have Take Today in your index or whatever you call the collection?
[1:38:40] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:38:41] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[1:38:42] Cameron McEwen: Take Today is a little bit incomplete.
[1:38:45] Cameron McEwen: There's about 20 pages that are missing for some reason.
[1:38:49] Cameron McEwen: So it's possible that it's in Take Today but outside of what I have.
[1:38:55] Bob Dobbs: Those...
[1:38:55] Bob Dobbs: in one section or scattered throughout the book,
[1:38:59] Bob Dobbs: the 20 pages?
[1:39:00] Cameron McEwen: It's mostly in one section,
[1:39:02] Cameron McEwen: but it's a little bit broken in the
[1:39:06] Bob Dobbs: 200s. Okay,
[1:39:07] Bob Dobbs: let me know that,
[1:39:09] Bob Dobbs: if you know the numbers.
[1:39:10] Bob Dobbs: So I'll look there first,
[1:39:12] Bob Dobbs: in the missing section.
[1:39:13] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:39:13] Bob Dobbs: you can look in the missing section,
[1:39:15] Bob Dobbs: but maybe since you don't know it,
[1:39:18] Bob Dobbs: you're not going to find it.
[1:39:19] Bob Dobbs: I might find it.
[1:39:20] Bob Dobbs: But I wonder,
[1:39:22] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:39:23] Bob Dobbs: did you ever see...
[1:39:25] Bob Dobbs: the magazine Modern Office Procedures,
[1:39:27] Bob Dobbs: where he serialized Take Today?
[1:39:31] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:39:32] Cameron McEwen: but I've seen the ad for it.
[1:39:34] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:39:35] Cameron McEwen: I haven't,
[1:39:36] Cameron McEwen: and
[1:39:38] Cameron McEwen: I even,
[1:39:39] Cameron McEwen: somewhere I have that ad,
[1:39:42] Cameron McEwen: I think,
[1:39:42] Cameron McEwen: in digital form.
[1:39:44] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:39:45] Bob Dobbs: so I went and found the magazine,
[1:39:47] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:39:47] Bob Dobbs: back in the day,
[1:39:48] Bob Dobbs: in the 70s,
[1:39:48] Bob Dobbs: in
[1:39:49] Bob Dobbs: Xeroxed it.
[1:39:51] Bob Dobbs: But it's sort of,
[1:39:52] Bob Dobbs: it's interesting,
[1:39:53] Bob Dobbs: little essays.
[1:39:54] Bob Dobbs: That probably have different things that are not in Take Today.
[1:39:59] Bob Dobbs: That might be where Dancing on the Toes is.
[1:40:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:40:03] Cameron McEwen: could be.
[1:40:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:40:05] Cameron McEwen: That too would be interesting if it's a kind of addition.
[1:40:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:40:10] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.
[1:40:13] Bob Dobbs: So it's also the Spinning Clothing Crystals is pointing out that this is a biased presentation.
[1:40:21] Bob Dobbs: It's a flat visual.
[1:40:23] Bob Dobbs: paper page.
[1:40:24] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:40:25] Bob Dobbs: I'm pointing at,
[1:40:26] Bob Dobbs: if I had the means to show it,
[1:40:29] Bob Dobbs: it'd be a quite elaborate video of each quadrant spinning around the other quadrants.
[1:40:35] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:40:37] Cameron McEwen: Is that what you call vertismus,
[1:40:40] Cameron McEwen: or I don't know how you pronounce the word at the end.
[1:40:44] Cameron McEwen: Is that
[1:40:44] Cameron McEwen: English or French,
[1:40:45] Cameron McEwen: or what is that?
[1:40:47] Bob Dobbs: Which word?
[1:40:53] Cameron McEwen: advertisement in brackets at the end of the bottom comment.
[1:41:00] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:41:01] Bob Dobbs: that's Decad,
[1:41:02] Bob Dobbs: and it's an advertisement.
[1:41:05] Bob Dobbs: The whole chart.
[1:41:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:41:06] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:41:07] Cameron McEwen: I... It looks like it's a real French word,
[1:41:10] Cameron McEwen: isn't it?
[1:41:11] Cameron McEwen: No.
[1:41:11] Bob Dobbs: No.
[1:41:12] Cameron McEwen: No?
[1:41:12] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:41:13] Bob Dobbs: it's meant to be hex advertisement.
[1:41:15] Bob Dobbs: Maybe I shouldn't have put the brackets around it,
[1:41:18] Bob Dobbs: but
[1:41:19] Bob Dobbs: I wanted to have it be both,
[1:41:21] Bob Dobbs: advertisement and hex ad.
[1:41:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:41:22] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:41:25] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:41:25] Cameron McEwen: it's hex advertism...
[1:41:28] Cameron McEwen: Hex advert...
[1:41:30] Cameron McEwen: Hex advertisement.
[1:41:32] Cameron McEwen: Hex advert...
[1:41:33] Cameron McEwen: I can't say it.
[1:41:34] Cameron McEwen: But anyway,
[1:41:36] Cameron McEwen: it's a great English word combined.
[1:41:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:41:39] Bob Dobbs: and maybe there is a French word,
[1:41:41] Bob Dobbs: vertes.
[1:41:42] Bob Dobbs: I'll have to look that up.
[1:41:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:41:45] Cameron McEwen: it's a
[1:41:50] Cameron McEwen: French form for sure.
[1:41:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:41:53] Bob Dobbs: So what else should I say about this?
[1:41:57] Bob Dobbs: The middle column is tensions between anti-environment.
[1:42:03] Bob Dobbs: Like in the larger
[1:42:05] Bob Dobbs: Dobbs formula chart,
[1:42:07] Bob Dobbs: the arrows indicate the tensions.
[1:42:09] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.
[1:42:11] Bob Dobbs: And then we'll have to,
[1:42:13] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if you want to do it now,
[1:42:14] Bob Dobbs: but what do you think?
[1:42:15] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:42:16] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche.
[1:42:17] Bob Dobbs: So LaRouche is on the far right column.
[1:42:22] Bob Dobbs: He seems to be a visual kinetic.
[1:42:24] Bob Dobbs: And I'm thinking of the American bias on page
[1:42:27] Bob Dobbs: 136 of Cliché to archetype is the American.
[1:42:33] Bob Dobbs: plenary awareness or the American form or the American trait.
[1:42:39] Bob Dobbs: But he's got visual,
[1:42:40] Bob Dobbs: some visual kinetic.
[1:42:41] Bob Dobbs: But he actually is a proprioceptive-osmic acoustic guy.
[1:42:45] Bob Dobbs: He's an oral man,
[1:42:47] Bob Dobbs: which Americans are.
[1:42:49] Bob Dobbs: On the ground,
[1:42:50] Bob Dobbs: at least to the degree they're massaged by the 20th century.
[1:42:54] Bob Dobbs: So that's the ratios of
[1:42:57] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche makeup.
[1:42:58] Bob Dobbs: And then
[1:42:59] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is visual-acoustic-kinetic-osmic.
[1:43:02] Bob Dobbs: And then proprioceptive tactile is ground.
[1:43:07] Bob Dobbs: You might want to look at that,
[1:43:09] Bob Dobbs: see if there's any questions or disagreements you have.
[1:43:12] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:43:12] Bob Dobbs: note with Kroker,
[1:43:14] Bob Dobbs: he's visual,
[1:43:14] Bob Dobbs: acoustic,
[1:43:15] Bob Dobbs: Cosmic Awareness,
[1:43:16] Bob Dobbs: kinetic,
[1:43:16] Bob Dobbs: proprioceptive,
[1:43:17] Bob Dobbs: not tactile.
[1:43:19] Bob Dobbs: But he's visual,
[1:43:21] Bob Dobbs: acoustic,
[1:43:22] Bob Dobbs: kinetic,
[1:43:22] Bob Dobbs: his ground includes tactility,
[1:43:25] Bob Dobbs: and that's squared because it's the Android Meme simulation of the global hologram.
[1:43:33] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:43:33] Bob Dobbs: so you're starting to get into virtual reality or whatever you call the weird world after Reagan,
[1:43:41] Bob Dobbs: say.
[1:43:44] Cameron McEwen: Why don't you talk a bit about the Android Meme?
[1:43:48] Cameron McEwen: Because even though we've talked about it a little bit in the past,
[1:43:55] Cameron McEwen: it's still not something that I understand very well,
[1:43:58] Cameron McEwen: but I know that it's a very important kind of bridge.
[1:44:03] Cameron McEwen: from where we are with a Tiny Note chart to your book.
[1:44:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:44:08] Bob Dobbs: to the bridge to the tech body.
[1:44:12] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:44:14] Bob Dobbs: I look at the sleeve of Take Today,
[1:44:20] Bob Dobbs: the book sleeve,
[1:44:21] Bob Dobbs: and on the back there's a lot of interesting little statements.
[1:44:25] Bob Dobbs: What stood out to me,
[1:44:26] Bob Dobbs: though,
[1:44:26] Bob Dobbs: was how he would use the word software in quotes sometimes and other times not in quotes.
[1:44:33] Bob Dobbs: So software in quotes is,
[1:44:38] Bob Dobbs: I decided,
[1:44:39] Bob Dobbs: is memes,
[1:44:40] Bob Dobbs: are memes.
[1:44:43] Bob Dobbs: So real simply,
[1:44:44] Bob Dobbs: the world's becoming a communication of memes in the
[1:44:51] Bob Dobbs: 90s, say.
[1:44:51] Bob Dobbs: I don't know about the
[1:44:53] Bob Dobbs: 80s.
[1:44:54] Bob Dobbs: And it's an automatic process.
[1:45:00] Bob Dobbs: The machines is past extending.
[1:45:02] Bob Dobbs: Our faculties and the Earth,
[1:45:04] Bob Dobbs: which is extended by the satellite,
[1:45:06] Bob Dobbs: now we're into this interactive process where the machines are extending themselves and it acquires a kind of AI,
[1:45:14] Bob Dobbs: which the early version is memes.
[1:45:17] Bob Dobbs: So they're Android Meme.
[1:45:19] Bob Dobbs: It's not an automatic process that humans aren't making.
[1:45:23] Bob Dobbs: So I want to indicate the robotic or computer world that's beyond human.
[1:45:32] Bob Dobbs: grasp unless you're a technocrat or something so that's the Android Meme and the anti-environment were ideas and patterns mcclellan's third copernican revolution a world of patterns and pattern recognition and
[1:45:48] Bob Dobbs: that's all that people were engaged in that was the present that was the anti-environment and nobody had time to fix the roads or go back to the the bridges and rebuild because
[1:45:59] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:45:59] Bob Dobbs: in the 80s and 90s,
[1:46:00] Bob Dobbs: America fell apart on the hardware level.
[1:46:03] Bob Dobbs: It was crazy.
[1:46:04] Bob Dobbs: Why wasn't anybody going out there fixing and paving the highways?
[1:46:08] Bob Dobbs: People were too involved in the processing of the news or of patterns,
[1:46:14] Bob Dobbs: which always maybe were on the verge of threatening people.
[1:46:18] Bob Dobbs: And so these patterns became memes.
[1:46:23] Bob Dobbs: At the same time as virtual reality is becoming a word in coinage and simulation a little less,
[1:46:32] Bob Dobbs: but I now claim that my word won because the kids talk about memes.
[1:46:37] Bob Dobbs: That's their language.
[1:46:38] Bob Dobbs: They don't say virtual realities or simulations.
[1:46:41] Bob Dobbs: They say memes,
[1:46:43] Bob Dobbs: and that's what they process in their social media.
[1:46:46] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:46:48] Bob Dobbs: I called it right.
[1:46:49] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know I'd be right,
[1:46:50] Bob Dobbs: but that's what it is.
[1:46:52] Cameron McEwen: Go ahead.
[1:46:55] Cameron McEwen: Can we say then that the
[1:46:58] Cameron McEwen: Android Meme is the condition of human-like memes taking on a life of their own?
[1:47:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:47:12] Cameron McEwen: Is that what Android Meme is?
[1:47:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:47:14] Cameron McEwen: Android Meme is an adjective to meme?
[1:47:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:47:21] Bob Dobbs: And the...
[1:47:22] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says somewhere in the Schwartz recordings in the late 60s,
[1:47:26] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[1:47:28] Bob Dobbs: in the future,
[1:47:29] Bob Dobbs: just being in touch,
[1:47:31] Bob Dobbs: knowing what's going on is all the work required to be a functioning citizen.
[1:47:38] Bob Dobbs: And so I call that the processing of memes.
[1:47:43] Bob Dobbs: And these are software in quotes,
[1:47:46] Bob Dobbs: or maybe software without the quotes,
[1:47:48] Bob Dobbs: but they are the...
[1:47:51] Bob Dobbs: What he says by 1974,
[1:47:53] Bob Dobbs: the cognitive thrill of pattern recognition has become the collective addiction.
[1:47:58] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't say that part,
[1:47:59] Bob Dobbs: but he called it the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition,
[1:48:03] Bob Dobbs: and then maybe he says something after that that implies addiction.
[1:48:07] Bob Dobbs: So when I found doing this essay,
[1:48:12] Bob Dobbs: I went back and found verbal modules,
[1:48:15] Bob Dobbs: that phrase,
[1:48:16] Bob Dobbs: in the cliché to archetype,
[1:48:18] Bob Dobbs: and I decided,
[1:48:19] Bob Dobbs: there's McLuhan.
[1:48:20] Bob Dobbs: predicting memes,
[1:48:22] Bob Dobbs: but he had his own term,
[1:48:24] Bob Dobbs: verbal module,
[1:48:25] Bob Dobbs: and he talks about Joyce and Elliot using that.
[1:48:29] Bob Dobbs: So that's how I connect the hardware software dialectic and the normal McLuhan words in the 60s,
[1:48:38] Bob Dobbs: 70s to leap to Android Meme is through the verbal modules which shrink and shrink and become holeopathic verbal modules or holeopathic cliche probes.
[1:48:50] Bob Dobbs: The phrase cliché probe is in cliché to archetype.
[1:48:54] Bob Dobbs: So this part of that book is not used.
[1:48:58] Bob Dobbs: It's unused,
[1:48:59] Bob Dobbs: these points.
[1:49:01] Bob Dobbs: I thought it was pretty...
[1:49:02] Cameron McEwen: It sounds to me like the
[1:49:06] Cameron McEwen: Android Meme,
[1:49:07] Cameron McEwen: by definition,
[1:49:09] Cameron McEwen: does not have any particular animus.
[1:49:15] Cameron McEwen: The Android Meme sounds like...
[1:49:22] Cameron McEwen: it might be some sort of superhuman looming figure or something.
[1:49:28] Cameron McEwen: But if I understand what you're saying here properly,
[1:49:33] Cameron McEwen: the Android Meme is by definition plural and is a condition of memes taking on a life of their own.
[1:49:45] Cameron McEwen: And in that plurality,
[1:49:47] Cameron McEwen: they can never be said to have a certain
[1:49:50] Cameron McEwen: intention.
[1:49:51] Cameron McEwen: One of them might have an implied intention,
[1:49:55] Cameron McEwen: but there would always be others that would either cancel that or ignore that or something.
[1:50:02] Cameron McEwen: But at any rate,
[1:50:03] Cameron McEwen: Innis kind of what we might call a weather of memes,
[1:50:11] Cameron McEwen: there's a complex pattern going on that is...
[1:50:20] Cameron McEwen: probably something that has always gone on in a certain way,
[1:50:24] Cameron McEwen: but without ever being understood,
[1:50:29] Cameron McEwen: and that is particularly noticeable once these things are amplified by the electronic media.
[1:50:43] Cameron McEwen: And in that amplification,
[1:50:46] Cameron McEwen: they not only become...
[1:50:50] Cameron McEwen: more obvious,
[1:50:51] Cameron McEwen: they also become more alive.
[1:50:54] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.
[1:50:55] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:50:55] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:50:56] Bob Dobbs: it's an extension of language,
[1:50:57] Bob Dobbs: which McLuhan says in his PhD,
[1:50:59] Bob Dobbs: there's a school of thought that language is organic and alive.
[1:51:04] Bob Dobbs: And so you go back,
[1:51:07] Bob Dobbs: you go from there up to the electric,
[1:51:10] Bob Dobbs: organic technology,
[1:51:13] Bob Dobbs: and then they become...
[1:51:15] Bob Dobbs: Part of the shrinking and miniaturization of the hologram that we're in,
[1:51:20] Bob Dobbs: the effects of the hologram,
[1:51:22] Bob Dobbs: becomes flashing images,
[1:51:24] Bob Dobbs: flashing news stories.
[1:51:27] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:51:28] Bob Dobbs: at the time...
[1:51:29] Bob Dobbs: 90,
[1:51:30] Bob Dobbs: 91,
[1:51:31] Bob Dobbs: 92,
[1:51:31] Bob Dobbs: in Kroker book Spasm,
[1:51:35] Bob Dobbs: Possessed Individual maybe,
[1:51:39] Bob Dobbs: Data Trash 94,
[1:51:41] Bob Dobbs: I had read them,
[1:51:43] Bob Dobbs: and he talked about the Android Meme processor,
[1:51:47] Bob Dobbs: Android Meme flesh,
[1:51:49] Bob Dobbs: and maybe those two terms,
[1:51:52] Bob Dobbs: and to me the Android Meme processor were newsreaders,
[1:51:55] Bob Dobbs: the Barber Trump,
[1:51:56] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:51:56] Bob Dobbs: the Walter Cronkites.
[1:51:59] Bob Dobbs: And that proliferates when you get
[1:52:01] Bob Dobbs: CNN. So he didn't have the word meme,
[1:52:06] Bob Dobbs: I don't think.
[1:52:07] Bob Dobbs: So I said,
[1:52:08] Bob Dobbs: there's something more than flesh.
[1:52:10] Bob Dobbs: Processing is important,
[1:52:12] Bob Dobbs: but not Android Meme flesh,
[1:52:13] Bob Dobbs: it's Android Meme.
[1:52:15] Bob Dobbs: So that's my development from Kroker.
[1:52:18] Bob Dobbs: And then IONdom essay on McLuhan,
[1:52:20] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan and Holeopathic Quadrophrenia,
[1:52:23] Bob Dobbs: done three years later,
[1:52:25] Bob Dobbs: three or four years later,
[1:52:26] Bob Dobbs: late 90s.
[1:52:28] Bob Dobbs: As a statement of my talk at the McLuhan Symposium in March 98 that Lance Strait started at Fordham,
[1:52:36] Bob Dobbs: I end with a quote from,
[1:52:38] Bob Dobbs: the second last quote,
[1:52:41] Bob Dobbs: I think it's the 104th quote,
[1:52:43] Bob Dobbs: is from the 1954 counterblast where McLuhan says,
[1:52:47] Bob Dobbs: Bless the locomotives whistling on the prairies proclaiming the separateness of man.
[1:52:53] Bob Dobbs: So I thought that was pretty interesting.
[1:52:54] Bob Dobbs: I have a whole history with the word separateness.
[1:52:57] Bob Dobbs: from my Cosmic Awareness interest channeled in Seattle.
[1:53:03] Bob Dobbs: So separateness is maybe the citadel of awareness that is not accessible to media.
[1:53:12] Bob Dobbs: I wonder if I have that quote in here.
[1:53:16] Bob Dobbs: Accessible.
[1:53:17] Bob Dobbs: You remember that in Counterblast 69?
[1:53:21] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[1:53:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:53:23] Bob Dobbs: There it is.
[1:53:25] Bob Dobbs: Page 135.
[1:53:27] Bob Dobbs: And no matter how many walls have fallen,
[1:53:29] Bob Dobbs: the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen,
[1:53:32] Bob Dobbs: nor is it likely to fall,
[1:53:34] Bob Dobbs: for it is not accessible to the mass media.
[1:53:37] Bob Dobbs: That's a really important statement that,
[1:53:39] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:53:39] Bob Dobbs: the student of McLuhan one day has to get to that and be shocked.
[1:53:44] Bob Dobbs: What do you mean?
[1:53:45] Bob Dobbs: We're just reading hundreds of words about how mass media alter us,
[1:53:49] Bob Dobbs: our faculties and everything.
[1:53:51] Bob Dobbs: What is this?
[1:53:51] Bob Dobbs: What is this individual consciousness that doesn't get massaged?
[1:53:56] Bob Dobbs: And that,
[1:53:57] Bob Dobbs: you could say that's his Catholicism or something,
[1:53:59] Bob Dobbs: but that shows you that media interact with media,
[1:54:03] Bob Dobbs: not necessarily the human form,
[1:54:07] Bob Dobbs: other than surface clothing styles or something.
[1:54:11] Bob Dobbs: But it's very interesting,
[1:54:12] Bob Dobbs: don't you think,
[1:54:13] Bob Dobbs: that statement?
[1:54:14] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[1:54:17] Cameron McEwen: I guess,
[1:54:19] Cameron McEwen: prompted by you,
[1:54:21] Cameron McEwen: I wrote a whole Postman this called The Very Citadel of...
[1:54:25] Cameron McEwen: Civilized awareness.
[1:54:26] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:54:27] Bob Dobbs: I got to read that.
[1:54:28] Cameron McEwen: I go through all of the different mentions of the citadel in
[1:54:35] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan thought.
[1:54:39] Bob Dobbs: Good,
[1:54:39] Bob Dobbs: I want to read that.
[1:54:42] Cameron McEwen: I'll give you a quote from
[1:54:44] Cameron McEwen: Joyce, Portrait of an Artist.
[1:54:47] Cameron McEwen: The very frequency and violence of temptations show him at last the truth.
[1:54:54] Cameron McEwen: of what he had heard about the trials of the saints.
[1:54:57] Cameron McEwen: Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen.
[1:55:05] Bob Dobbs: Ah,
[1:55:06] Bob Dobbs: very good.
[1:55:07] Bob Dobbs: And where's that?
[1:55:08] Bob Dobbs: In portrait?
[1:55:09] Cameron McEwen: Portrait,
[1:55:10] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:55:10] Bob Dobbs: Wow,
[1:55:11] Bob Dobbs: I missed that one.
[1:55:12] Bob Dobbs: So there it is.
[1:55:14] Bob Dobbs: As McLuhan would say,
[1:55:15] Bob Dobbs: joy's got there first.
[1:55:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:55:20] Bob Dobbs: so then I end with this quote.
[1:55:23] Bob Dobbs: From Spasm,
[1:55:25] Bob Dobbs: subtitled,
[1:55:26] Bob Dobbs: this is Kroker,
[1:55:28] Bob Dobbs: Virtual Reality,
[1:55:29] Bob Dobbs: Android Meme Music and Electric Flesh,
[1:55:32] Bob Dobbs: page 53,
[1:55:33] Bob Dobbs: 1993.
[1:55:35] Bob Dobbs: So he says,
[1:55:36] Bob Dobbs: A culture of quantum fluctuations where you can only know that you have never seen what you thought you were looking at because you have never really heard what you were listening to.
[1:55:47] Bob Dobbs: That's the world of the Android Meme processor and the Android Meme.
[1:55:51] Bob Dobbs: These pa-
[1:55:52] Bob Dobbs: Patterns are turned over so fast that most people are living in a state of unconsciousness once you get into the speed up of the late 80s or into the
[1:56:03] Bob Dobbs: 90s. You see what I'm saying?
[1:56:05] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:56:05] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:56:06] Cameron McEwen: I would say,
[1:56:09] Cameron McEwen: in my nonlinear view,
[1:56:11] Cameron McEwen: I would say what's going on there is that something that has always gone on is illuminated by the speed of...
[1:56:22] Cameron McEwen: communications.
[1:56:23] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:56:23] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:56:25] Cameron McEwen: There was nothing new at the surface level.
[1:56:30] Cameron McEwen: There was something new at the potential level of awareness.
[1:56:35] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:56:36] Bob Dobbs: So the big now.
[1:56:41] Bob Dobbs: The layers of the onion are being unpeeled,
[1:56:44] Bob Dobbs: and Ion said the tech body was back there lurking beside the Ark of the Covenant.
[1:56:50] Bob Dobbs: And when the
[1:56:53] Bob Dobbs: Hebrews gave their power to the Ark of the Covenant and didn't keep their own power,
[1:57:01] Bob Dobbs: that's being replayed by the way people are giving over their power to the tech body and this stupid world of the black mirror we live in.
[1:57:10] Bob Dobbs: With everybody just looking at their cell phones constantly,
[1:57:16] Bob Dobbs: that's losing their power to the tech body.
[1:57:20] Cameron McEwen: So just back up from there,
[1:57:25] Cameron McEwen: go backwards from tech body.
[1:57:27] Cameron McEwen: Haven't you drawn a pathway between the tech body and the...
[1:57:38] Cameron McEwen: Anthropomorphic Physical in the past?
[1:57:43] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:57:43] Bob Dobbs: Anthropomorphic Physical is the Dobbs Quadrant on the Tiny Note chart,
[1:57:47] Bob Dobbs: so it is in relationship to the
[1:57:50] Bob Dobbs: Android Meme,
[1:57:52] Bob Dobbs: and that's something like the private citadel,
[1:57:54] Bob Dobbs: or citadel of consciousness,
[1:57:56] Bob Dobbs: the Anthropomorphic Physical.
[1:57:57] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:57:57] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[1:57:57] Cameron McEwen: so it's the opposite of the...
[1:58:00] Bob Dobbs: Android Meme.
[1:58:02] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:58:02] Cameron McEwen: no,
[1:58:02] Cameron McEwen: tech body.
[1:58:04] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:58:04] Bob Dobbs: it's not embedded in the media.
[1:58:08] Bob Dobbs: or in anything.
[1:58:09] Bob Dobbs: That's what humans do.
[1:58:10] Bob Dobbs: They project themselves in nature or in technology.
[1:58:16] Bob Dobbs: So the extensions of man is an Anthropomorphic Physical statement.
[1:58:21] Bob Dobbs: The media aren't necessarily extensions of us.
[1:58:25] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:58:25] Cameron McEwen: that's interesting.
[1:58:26] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:58:29] Cameron McEwen: I had previously understood you to be saying in the mid-90s that um
[1:58:38] Cameron McEwen: the extensions of man had left man and had taken on sort of a life of their own.
[1:58:47] Cameron McEwen: But here you seem to be saying that no matter what the extensions of humans,
[1:58:54] Cameron McEwen: there's still the synodal that remains in place.
[1:59:00] Bob Dobbs: That's a possibility
[1:59:03] Bob Dobbs: I include,
[1:59:04] Bob Dobbs: but I'm not sure that's true.
[1:59:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:59:08] Bob Dobbs: that's where...
[1:59:08] Cameron McEwen: So it remains a question.
[1:59:11] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:59:11] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:59:12] Bob Dobbs: that's right.
[1:59:14] Bob Dobbs: I'm known to be an incredible questioner.
[1:59:17] Bob Dobbs: Ian has complimented me on that.
[1:59:19] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:59:20] Bob Dobbs: yes,
[1:59:20] Bob Dobbs: my chart's a question.
[1:59:23] Bob Dobbs: So I do the Anthropomorphic Physical quadrant.
[1:59:27] Bob Dobbs: So is it clear what I'm saying about what the Android Meme is?
[1:59:32] Bob Dobbs: You got it now?
[1:59:33] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:59:33] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.
[1:59:33] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:59:35] Cameron McEwen: you would be the judge of that.
[1:59:37] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:59:37] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:59:38] Bob Dobbs: we'll have a test next week.
[1:59:39] Cameron McEwen: What I think was the Android Meme is necessarily plural,
[1:59:43] Cameron McEwen: so it's not something that can be singularized and said to have a point of view or a point of animus or something like that.
[1:59:54] Cameron McEwen: It's the contest,
[1:59:56] Cameron McEwen: like a cloud chamber,
[1:59:59] Cameron McEwen: of memes.
[2:00:00] Cameron McEwen: and that this in
[2:00:05] Cameron McEwen: Our times,
[2:00:07] Cameron McEwen: this becomes a kind of addition to the physical universe as the motor of things.
[2:00:20] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:00:22] Bob Dobbs: I think of what he says in Ecclesiastes Archetypes that
[2:00:26] Bob Dobbs: Paradise Lost is about how Milton confused,
[2:00:29] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[2:00:31] Bob Dobbs: Beelzebub or whatever term he uses,
[2:00:33] Bob Dobbs: confuses.
[2:00:34] Bob Dobbs: his mind with language.
[2:00:36] Bob Dobbs: And I'm saying,
[2:00:37] Bob Dobbs: wow,
[2:00:39] Bob Dobbs: the complexity of language becoming,
[2:00:42] Bob Dobbs: through the evolution of technology,
[2:00:44] Bob Dobbs: through the Android Meme,
[2:00:46] Bob Dobbs: no wonder everybody's a basket case and can't handle where we're at today because we've been squared by technology leaving us and extending itself,
[2:00:56] Bob Dobbs: and then we perceive it as this quantum fluctuations of patterns that we hardly notice.
[2:01:01] Bob Dobbs: And,
[2:01:02] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:01:02] Bob Dobbs: there's this joke.
[2:01:04] Bob Dobbs: cartoons.
[2:01:04] Bob Dobbs: I think
[2:01:05] Bob Dobbs: Jules Feiffer talked about it in his Village Voice cartoons back in the 80s or 90s,
[2:01:11] Bob Dobbs: that people did not have consciousness anymore.
[2:01:14] Bob Dobbs: They were pinheads.
[2:01:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:01:16] Bob Dobbs: that's the phrase.
[2:01:17] Bob Dobbs: My conscience is basically a pinhead compared to what's swirling around us.
[2:01:27] Cameron McEwen: Didn't
[2:01:28] Cameron McEwen: Robert Crumb do or I don't know who was Robert Crumb.
[2:01:33] Cameron McEwen: Didn't wasn't there a comic strip about pinheads?
[2:01:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:01:40] Bob Dobbs: that's right.
[2:01:41] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[2:01:42] Bob Dobbs: some weird ghostly shape guy.
[2:01:45] Bob Dobbs: He was a pinhead.
[2:01:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:01:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:01:48] Bob Dobbs: Some odd shaped thing.
[2:01:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:01:49] Bob Dobbs: What was that?
[2:01:51] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if that was crumb.
[2:01:53] Bob Dobbs: I've seen it.
[2:01:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:01:54] Bob Dobbs: so there we were,
[2:01:55] Bob Dobbs: pit heads.
[2:01:58] Bob Dobbs: And so McLuhan has that quote from the 60s where he says,
[2:02:01] Bob Dobbs: the areas where we exercise our private conscious or conscience,
[2:02:07] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what he's saying there,
[2:02:09] Bob Dobbs: our private conscious are so puny compared to what we should be exercising concern about.
[2:02:16] Bob Dobbs: Remember that statement?
[2:02:18] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[2:02:18] Cameron McEwen: And that's basically what he had been saying.
[2:02:20] Cameron McEwen: saying since about age five.
[2:02:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:02:24] Bob Dobbs: there's some blibbles.
[2:02:26] Bob Dobbs: So we have come around.
[2:02:28] Bob Dobbs: Whatever we were saying at the beginning of tonight is a good question to ask me to define Android Meme because it brought up stuff that we had said throughout the night.
[2:02:36] Bob Dobbs: It circled back.
[2:02:39] Bob Dobbs: So now the tech body is this world of quantum fluctuations of patterns,
[2:02:47] Bob Dobbs: which are almost indifferent to humans,
[2:02:49] Bob Dobbs: becomes
[2:02:50] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[2:02:50] Bob Dobbs: a psychopath and really starts to try to bug humans.
[2:02:54] Bob Dobbs: So it's a further coming alive process and it turns aggressive on humans.
[2:03:00] Bob Dobbs: And so it elected Trump.
[2:03:03] Bob Dobbs: It elected Biden.
[2:03:04] Bob Dobbs: It's causing the crazy world.
[2:03:06] Bob Dobbs: The meme,
[2:03:07] Bob Dobbs: the memes go up and down every day and nobody even knows what.
[2:03:12] Bob Dobbs: Have you heard that many people the last six months or a year have said this is weird?
[2:03:19] Bob Dobbs: The news doesn't make sense anymore.
[2:03:22] Bob Dobbs: Have you heard of that popular sentiment now being commented on?
[2:03:26] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[2:03:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:03:28] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[2:03:28] Bob Dobbs: more than whatever anybody said before.
[2:03:31] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:03:31] Bob Dobbs: and when people talked about it in the
[2:03:33] Bob Dobbs: 60s, about the media,
[2:03:35] Bob Dobbs: that was the phrase.
[2:03:36] Bob Dobbs: People would say,
[2:03:37] Bob Dobbs: the media is doing this.
[2:03:38] Bob Dobbs: They had a sense that the media was something out there,
[2:03:40] Bob Dobbs: independent of humans,
[2:03:42] Bob Dobbs: doing stuff to us.
[2:03:44] Bob Dobbs: The real term for that would be Android Meme.
[2:03:47] Bob Dobbs: But the idea...
[2:03:48] Bob Dobbs: that something was happening beyond human control,
[2:03:51] Bob Dobbs: expressed by the word media,
[2:03:53] Bob Dobbs: is what I'm trying to express with the Android Meme.
[2:03:56] Bob Dobbs: They just had an old-fashioned word on it.
[2:04:00] Bob Dobbs: Was it the horseless carriage?
[2:04:03] Bob Dobbs: When you call the Android Meme,
[2:04:04] Bob Dobbs: which was the ground from 60 to 90,
[2:04:07] Bob Dobbs: you use the old term media.
[2:04:09] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?
[2:04:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:04:11] Cameron McEwen: but here you seem to be singularizing.
[2:04:17] Cameron McEwen: Android Meme.
[2:04:19] Bob Dobbs: I would say it includes a singer.
[2:04:22] Bob Dobbs: It's a crystal.
[2:04:23] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:04:23] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard writes about this.
[2:04:25] Bob Dobbs: He has terms.
[2:04:26] Bob Dobbs: You can apply it.
[2:04:28] Bob Dobbs: I'm sure he had an influence on me.
[2:04:29] Bob Dobbs: He talks about the object or the crystal that's attacking us.
[2:04:35] Bob Dobbs: So he sees the simulation becoming sometimes or half the process.
[2:04:41] Bob Dobbs: It is an object.
[2:04:42] Bob Dobbs: And that was expressed in The Exorcist,
[2:04:45] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said.
[2:04:46] Bob Dobbs: People were possessed.
[2:04:47] Bob Dobbs: by the electric media.
[2:04:49] Bob Dobbs: And then Kroker has the book,
[2:04:50] Bob Dobbs: The Possessed Individuals.
[2:04:52] Bob Dobbs: Something,
[2:04:53] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[2:04:54] Bob Dobbs: an object is possessing us,
[2:04:56] Bob Dobbs: but what it's made up of is endless turnover of imagery,
[2:05:01] Bob Dobbs: which would be some kind of infinite sphere or bouncing,
[2:05:08] Bob Dobbs: ricocheting mirrors is the constituents of the endorhine,
[2:05:12] Bob Dobbs: but more and more seems to be an intelligence behind it.
[2:05:16] Bob Dobbs: which would be the reason in the internet era that everybody thought,
[2:05:20] Bob Dobbs: and it became the most popular content,
[2:05:22] Bob Dobbs: that there was a conspiracy happening.
[2:05:24] Bob Dobbs: That was a projection on the Android Meme on the tendency to make it a singularization.
[2:05:29] Bob Dobbs: So then you get those four statements we talked about last week.
[2:05:33] Bob Dobbs: Is it,
[2:05:33] Bob Dobbs: says McLuhan,
[2:05:34] Bob Dobbs: collective phobia,
[2:05:35] Bob Dobbs: national myth-making,
[2:05:36] Bob Dobbs: cultural norm functioning,
[2:05:38] Bob Dobbs: and individual sensation.
[2:05:41] Bob Dobbs: And those terms are used in my explanation of the chart.
[2:05:45] Bob Dobbs: called Up the Orphic Anti.
[2:05:47] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:05:48] Bob Dobbs: I'm exploring what it is on different levels.
[2:05:52] Bob Dobbs: You can't say it's one thing or another.
[2:05:55] Bob Dobbs: So if you ask me,
[2:05:57] Bob Dobbs: is it not,
[2:05:58] Bob Dobbs: it's not singular,
[2:05:59] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:05:59] Bob Dobbs: I'd agree.
[2:06:00] Bob Dobbs: But then I wait for you to sort of notice,
[2:06:02] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[2:06:02] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:06:02] Bob Dobbs: you seem to indicate just there that it's singular.
[2:06:05] Bob Dobbs: And then you say,
[2:06:06] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:06:06] Bob Dobbs: didn't you say it's,
[2:06:07] Bob Dobbs: you just said it's singular.
[2:06:08] Bob Dobbs: I say,
[2:06:09] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[2:06:09] Bob Dobbs: including that.
[2:06:10] Bob Dobbs: But you have to tell me,
[2:06:12] Bob Dobbs: you have to say it before I acknowledge it,
[2:06:14] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.
[2:06:16] Cameron McEwen: All right.
[2:06:20] Bob Dobbs: I did a talk in Halifax in 1984,
[2:06:25] Bob Dobbs: and at the end,
[2:06:26] Bob Dobbs: the audience person said something like,
[2:06:28] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:06:28] Bob Dobbs: you've left out the whole world of advertising and manipulation and content,
[2:06:34] Bob Dobbs: MKUltra programming of people.
[2:06:36] Bob Dobbs: And I said,
[2:06:37] Bob Dobbs: yes.
[2:06:38] Bob Dobbs: And I was quoting McLuhan,
[2:06:41] Bob Dobbs: what he said to the guy who ran Ramparts in the 60s,
[2:06:44] Bob Dobbs: when McLuhan died
[2:06:46] Bob Dobbs: This guy,
[2:06:46] Bob Dobbs: I forget his name,
[2:06:47] Bob Dobbs: wrote a little obituary on McLuhan out there in San Francisco.
[2:06:51] Bob Dobbs: And he quoted McLuhan saying something,
[2:06:53] Bob Dobbs: yes,
[2:06:54] Bob Dobbs: that's what I meant when I didn't say it.
[2:06:57] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I said to this guy.
[2:06:58] Bob Dobbs: I did include that,
[2:07:00] Bob Dobbs: but I didn't have time to say it.
[2:07:03] Cameron McEwen: Yep,
[2:07:03] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[2:07:03] Cameron McEwen: the unsaid.
[2:07:05] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:07:05] Bob Dobbs: the unsaid,
[2:07:06] Bob Dobbs: including the other half.
[2:07:08] Bob Dobbs: And then McLuhan says that.
[2:07:10] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[2:07:11] Bob Dobbs: he emphasized the medium and left out the user as the content,
[2:07:14] Bob Dobbs: and it wasn't until Charles Reich,
[2:07:16] Bob Dobbs: the greening of America,
[2:07:18] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:07:18] Bob Dobbs: 1970 or so,
[2:07:19] Bob Dobbs: wrote to him and said something,
[2:07:21] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan says,
[2:07:22] Bob Dobbs: yes,
[2:07:22] Bob Dobbs: the user is the content.
[2:07:24] Bob Dobbs: I think maybe even
[2:07:25] Bob Dobbs: Reich said that.
[2:07:26] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan says,
[2:07:27] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[2:07:29] Bob Dobbs: that's the best statement I ever said about the medium as a message ever.
[2:07:33] Bob Dobbs: I think that's in Take Today,
[2:07:34] Bob Dobbs: he talks about that.
[2:07:35] Bob Dobbs: And so there is,
[2:07:38] Bob Dobbs: he consciously,
[2:07:39] Bob Dobbs: as a satirist,
[2:07:40] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[2:07:41] Bob Dobbs: left out the other half.
[2:07:43] Bob Dobbs: And,
[2:07:43] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:07:43] Bob Dobbs: people in the 60s kept saying,
[2:07:44] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:07:44] Bob Dobbs: you can't go on about the media.
[2:07:46] Bob Dobbs: What about the content?
[2:07:48] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[2:07:48] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan would be oblique about it.
[2:07:50] Bob Dobbs: And then he admitted it in the
[2:07:52] Bob Dobbs: 70s. Yes,
[2:07:53] Bob Dobbs: I left that part out.
[2:07:54] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:07:57] Cameron McEwen: he said from very early on,
[2:08:01] Cameron McEwen: he took over from...
[2:08:02] Cameron McEwen: Eliot that poetry,
[2:08:06] Cameron McEwen: and by extension any human communication,
[2:08:11] Cameron McEwen: can communicate beyond itself.
[2:08:14] Bob Dobbs: Before it's understood.
[2:08:17] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[2:08:19] Cameron McEwen: So there he was,
[2:08:21] Bob Dobbs: consciously making poetry with that principle.
[2:08:27] Bob Dobbs: So very clever what he did.
[2:08:30] Bob Dobbs: So...
[2:08:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:08:33] Cameron McEwen: I'm kind of running out of Yeah,
[2:08:34] Cameron McEwen: you got to go.
[2:08:36] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[2:08:37] Cameron McEwen: but what I would recommend for one of our talks is the whole question of is
[2:08:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan in some way exceptional to these other people like
[2:08:53] Cameron McEwen: Kroker and LaRouche?
[2:08:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:08:55] Bob Dobbs: that's a good question.
[2:08:56] Bob Dobbs: Very important.
[2:08:58] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,
[2:08:59] Cameron McEwen: because I think we have different views on it.
[2:09:02] Cameron McEwen: And different views are exactly what you need for dialogue.
[2:09:08] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:09:09] Bob Dobbs: No,
[2:09:09] Bob Dobbs: that's something I think about a lot,
[2:09:11] Bob Dobbs: what I say to that question.
[2:09:13] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:09:14] Bob Dobbs: I've got a lot to say about that.
[2:09:15] Bob Dobbs: So I'm going to write that down so we'll remember.
[2:09:18] Bob Dobbs: That's the question,
[2:09:19] Bob Dobbs: what we start with next week.
[2:09:22] Bob Dobbs: But this was a perfect way to wrap up the chart,
[2:09:26] Bob Dobbs: is to explain what the heck the Android Meme is,
[2:09:29] Bob Dobbs: which I feel I've done.
[2:09:30] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,
[2:09:31] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[2:09:32] Cameron McEwen: And I've already sent you the Postman the Citadel of Civilized Awareness.
[2:09:38] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:09:38] Cameron McEwen: So you can look that up.
[2:09:40] Bob Dobbs: We've got to look that up.
[2:09:41] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:09:42] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[2:09:43] Bob Dobbs: Thanks a lot,
[2:09:44] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.
[2:09:44] Bob Dobbs: Another great talk.
[2:09:45] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:09:45] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[2:09:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:09:46] Cameron McEwen: Look forward to the next time.
[2:09:48] Bob Dobbs: All right.
[2:09:48] Bob Dobbs: Talk to you soon.
[2:09:50] Cameron McEwen: Bye-bye.
[2:09:51] Bob Dobbs: Bye.