Dialogue 25 — Transcript

[00:01] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: this is session episode number 25 with Ewen Cameron and Bob,

[00:09] Bob Dobbs: and we're looking at my essay on what you,

[00:13] Bob Dobbs: we,

[00:13] Bob Dobbs: didn't know about

[00:14] Bob Dobbs: Donald Trump.

[00:16] Bob Dobbs: And if you bring it up,

[00:19] Bob Dobbs: we're on page 183 at the top,

[00:22] Bob Dobbs: where we're talking to the tech body.

[00:25] Bob Dobbs: And the tech body says,

[00:29] Bob Dobbs: The yo-yo has power only from the passing of the wrist.

[00:33] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[00:33] Bob Dobbs: we did that sentence,

[00:34] Bob Dobbs: and the next sentence,

[00:35] Bob Dobbs: the wrist action comes from the tech body,

[00:37] Bob Dobbs: which is the uber-conclusion of the mechanical bride.

[00:41] Bob Dobbs: So we discussed that back in session 24 or 23.

[00:46] Bob Dobbs: Then,

[00:47] Bob Dobbs: the tech body says,

[00:48] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan went all through history because without Ezra Pound,

[00:52] Bob Dobbs: there is no Marshall McLuhan.

[00:55] Bob Dobbs: Then it says,

[00:56] Bob Dobbs: it made just enough conversation.

[00:59] Bob Dobbs: We didn't include Wyndham Lewis.

[01:01] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis killed it all.

[01:03] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis would put baking soda on everything.

[01:06] Bob Dobbs: It would neutralize everything.

[01:09] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis made the tech body successful because the bland condition may push people further away.

[01:15] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[01:16] Bob Dobbs: that's enough for beginning.

[01:21] Bob Dobbs: I know Ezra Pound was really important for McLuhan in the late 40s.

[01:26] Bob Dobbs: And when he...

[01:28] Bob Dobbs: Started corresponding with him from June 1948 for about four years and then sporadic.

[01:37] Bob Dobbs: What do you make of what the tech body is saying?

[01:40] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan went all through history because without Ezra Pound,

[01:43] Bob Dobbs: there's no Marshall McLuhan.

[01:44] Bob Dobbs: That means Ezra Pound went all through history.

[01:48] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[01:50] Cameron McEwen: In order to meet with

[01:52] Cameron McEwen: Pound and then as a result of the meeting,

[01:57] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan...

[01:58] Cameron McEwen: read everything that he could find by Pound.

[02:04] Cameron McEwen: And so

[02:06] Cameron McEwen: Pound's literary essays,

[02:10] Cameron McEwen: and especially his translations in all sorts of different languages,

[02:15] Cameron McEwen: from Old English to Chinese,

[02:19] Cameron McEwen: increased

[02:21] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan scope on history.

[02:25] Cameron McEwen: And that...

[02:29] Cameron McEwen: kind of tore him away from the provincialism that he previously had had.

[02:37] Bob Dobbs: That includes

[02:39] Bob Dobbs: Cambridge studies?

[02:41] Bob Dobbs: Are they provincial?

[02:41] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[02:43] Cameron McEwen: yes.

[02:43] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[02:44] Cameron McEwen: by provincial there,

[02:46] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[02:46] Cameron McEwen: I don't mean limited in some stupid way.

[02:52] Cameron McEwen: What I mean is that his studies had been...

[02:57] Cameron McEwen: primarily literary and his thinking about history was definitely primarily primarily literary but when he read Pound he was forced to

[03:13] Cameron McEwen: the idea that literature is bound up with politics and economics and society and so he

[03:26] Cameron McEwen: Kuhn had to rethink his conclusions from earlier in his life to see which ones still held.

[03:37] Bob Dobbs: So

[03:39] Bob Dobbs: Ezra Pound taught him more than James Joyce and Eliot at that point?

[03:45] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[03:46] Cameron McEwen: maybe at that point.

[03:47] Cameron McEwen: He really,

[03:48] Cameron McEwen: I think it was Pound that kind of pushed him into rereading Joyce.

[03:56] Cameron McEwen: understanding

[03:57] Cameron McEwen: Joyce through what might be called the universalism of Pound.

[04:03] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[04:04] Bob Dobbs: so Pound's erudition and eclecticism,

[04:09] Bob Dobbs: that was a stimulus for McLuhan.

[04:12] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[04:13] Bob Dobbs: More than Eliot.

[04:14] Bob Dobbs: Remember he was going to Wright book with Kenner in 1946 or so about Eliot?

[04:20] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[04:21] Bob Dobbs: right.

[04:21] Cameron McEwen: And when you say more than Eliot,

[04:24] Cameron McEwen: Um,

[04:25] Cameron McEwen: I think that's a little bit off because

[04:29] Cameron McEwen: Eliot and Pound weren't directly comparable in what McLuhan was doing.

[04:36] Cameron McEwen: Eliot provided a kind of background schema for trying to understand literally anything,

[04:45] Cameron McEwen: especially the four quartets.

[04:48] Cameron McEwen: Whereas Pound was,

[04:51] Cameron McEwen: as you say,

[04:52] Cameron McEwen: extremely eclectic.

[04:54] Cameron McEwen: And...

[04:55] Cameron McEwen: forced any kind of thinking that McLuhan might have had through Eliot to become more precise and more capacious.

[05:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[05:10] Bob Dobbs: so what do you think...

[05:13] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan thought about Pound's broadcast on the radio for Mussolini and whatever other writings he was doing during the war.

[05:27] Bob Dobbs: Was that a factor in McLuhan thinking,

[05:29] Bob Dobbs: or he ignored that?

[05:31] Cameron McEwen: No,

[05:33] Cameron McEwen: I think it was a factor in McLuhan thinking,

[05:35] Cameron McEwen: but not so much in terms of his evaluation of Pound.

[05:41] Cameron McEwen: It became a factor in his evaluation of his own career.

[05:45] Cameron McEwen: So I think it was one of the reasons that he dropped association with Pound.

[05:52] Bob Dobbs: Ah,

[05:53] Bob Dobbs: and he does that with that letter,

[05:57] Bob Dobbs: 51,

[05:58] Bob Dobbs: 52,

[06:00] Bob Dobbs: where he outlines the Gutenberg Galaxy and goes beyond what Pound expects from him in ideas.

[06:08] Bob Dobbs: Wouldn't you say that was his goodbye letter?

[06:12] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[06:12] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if it was a goodbye letter.

[06:15] Cameron McEwen: It may have turned into that because of

[06:18] Cameron McEwen: Pound's reaction or lack of reaction.

[06:23] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was hoping that he could engage what was left of Pound's mind in those questions.

[06:32] Cameron McEwen: And he was more or less setting out not only his book,

[06:38] Cameron McEwen: The Gutenberg Era,

[06:40] Cameron McEwen: which wouldn't be published for another 10 years,

[06:44] Cameron McEwen: he was setting out what might be called conditions for dialogue.

[06:49] Cameron McEwen: But there was no dialogue because

[06:52] Cameron McEwen: Pound either wasn't interested or didn't understand or didn't want to respond or something.

[06:59] Cameron McEwen: And so their conversation more or less petered out.

[07:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[07:05] Bob Dobbs: in about 1949,

[07:08] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said that

[07:09] Bob Dobbs: He was going to emphasize Lewis more,

[07:13] Bob Dobbs: and he knew that was risky,

[07:17] Bob Dobbs: but he kept engaging Pound.

[07:19] Bob Dobbs: And you're saying about 53,

[07:21] Bob Dobbs: he decides to put on Joyce?

[07:24] Bob Dobbs: That would be the safest one as compared to Lewis and

[07:29] Bob Dobbs: Pound as a critic?

[07:34] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't say that safest was the prime consideration.

[07:40] Cameron McEwen: I think by 1950,

[07:43] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[07:50] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan exposure to Stephen Hero,

[07:53] Cameron McEwen: for one thing,

[07:55] Cameron McEwen: his rereading the rest of Joyce in terms of Stephen Hero,

[08:00] Cameron McEwen: his rereading Joyce with a much broader idea of history.

[08:09] Cameron McEwen: both through Lewis and Pound.

[08:12] Cameron McEwen: All of that caused him to reread and reevaluate Joyce and eventuated in his essays on Joyce early in the

[08:24] Cameron McEwen: 50s. So a very important essay in 1951,

[08:29] Cameron McEwen: and then other important essays in 53 and 54.

[08:35] Cameron McEwen: So

[08:37] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is already...

[08:39] Cameron McEwen: much engaged with Joyce just after 1950.

[08:43] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[08:44] Bob Dobbs: so 51 would be

[08:45] Bob Dobbs: Joyce Aquinas and the Poetic Process,

[08:48] Bob Dobbs: that essay.

[08:51] Cameron McEwen: Was it the Poetic Process or was it the print?

[08:57] Bob Dobbs: Print.

[08:58] Cameron McEwen: I would have to look that up because those essays are kind of jumbled in my poor mind.

[09:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[09:05] Bob Dobbs: so...

[09:08] Bob Dobbs: In 1953,

[09:12] Bob Dobbs: he does an essay on Pound,

[09:15] Bob Dobbs: Joyce,

[09:16] Bob Dobbs: maybe two on Joyce,

[09:17] Bob Dobbs: and one on Lewis.

[09:18] Bob Dobbs: He does them all around

[09:21] Cameron McEwen: 1953. The one on Lewis is a kind of rehash of stuff that he had thrown together in the 40s.

[09:31] Cameron McEwen: There's very little original in the Lewis essay.

[09:35] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[09:35] Bob Dobbs: what struck me was when he talked about...

[09:38] Bob Dobbs: The modern scientist invents a formula.

[09:42] Bob Dobbs: And so McLuhan knew he needed a formula to put on the scientific aspect of his project.

[09:47] Bob Dobbs: And that comes into the medium is the message,

[09:51] Bob Dobbs: is his formula.

[09:52] Cameron McEwen: And that's a real important insight that you just formulated.

[09:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[09:57] Bob Dobbs: And so the tech body is correct here.

[10:02] Bob Dobbs: Whatever this tech body is,

[10:04] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[10:04] Bob Dobbs: I didn't make this up.

[10:05] Bob Dobbs: This is what...

[10:06] Bob Dobbs: came through

[10:08] Bob Dobbs: JW's mouth.

[10:09] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan went all through history because without Ezra Pound,

[10:12] Bob Dobbs: there is no Marshall McLuhan.

[10:14] Bob Dobbs: That's a bit extreme,

[10:15] Bob Dobbs: but it's important.

[10:17] Bob Dobbs: Or it's sort of.

[10:18] Bob Dobbs: You have to be wrong in pointing out something.

[10:22] Bob Dobbs: So to really emphasize Pound that way is semi-true.

[10:26] Bob Dobbs: It's a fallacy,

[10:27] Bob Dobbs: but it's a correct fallacy.

[10:30] Cameron McEwen: You know?

[10:31] Bob Dobbs: And it made just enough conversation.

[10:34] Bob Dobbs: What do you think that means?

[10:36] Bob Dobbs: It just allowed McLuhan to get more ideas out of Pound?

[10:43] Cameron McEwen: I think what he means is it wasn't too much and it wasn't too little.

[10:47] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[10:50] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[10:51] Bob Dobbs: Then the tech body says we didn't include Wyndham Lewis.

[10:53] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis killed it all.

[10:56] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis would put baking soda on everything.

[10:59] Bob Dobbs: That sounds like...

[11:00] Cameron McEwen: You should notice there's a misprint there,

[11:02] Cameron McEwen: right?

[11:04] Cameron McEwen: Instead of Wyndham Lewis...

[11:05] Cameron McEwen: killed it all in the book is at all.

[11:10] Bob Dobbs: Not in my essay,

[11:11] Bob Dobbs: in your essay?

[11:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[11:14] Cameron McEwen: or maybe I have an earlier version.

[11:16] Cameron McEwen: Could be that that's been corrected in the meantime.

[11:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[11:20] Bob Dobbs: did you go to the new Explorations site?

[11:25] Bob Dobbs: I should send you that if you don't have that.

[11:28] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to send you the link.

[11:32] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[11:33] Cameron McEwen: I know of this.

[11:34] Cameron McEwen: site and I know that your book has been put up there by Clinton.

[11:39] Cameron McEwen: So it may be that this typo in an older version was corrected in the new Explorations.

[11:50] Bob Dobbs: But I want you to have the correct one.

[11:52] Bob Dobbs: So can you go to the new Explorations and click on it again?

[12:21] Bob Dobbs: Waiting,

[12:21] Bob Dobbs: waiting,

[12:22] Bob Dobbs: waiting.

[12:24] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[12:24] Cameron McEwen: sorry.

[12:26] Cameron McEwen: I don't have it as a link,

[12:29] Cameron McEwen: so I have to search for it.

[12:31] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[12:32] Bob Dobbs: Shall I email it to you?

[12:34] Cameron McEwen: No,

[12:34] Cameron McEwen: I'm going there now.

[12:36] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[12:42] Bob Dobbs: Searching,

[12:48] Cameron McEwen: I've got to.

[12:49] Cameron McEwen: to the journal.

[12:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[12:53] Cameron McEwen: scroll down,

[12:54] Bob Dobbs: you'll see the

[12:56] Bob Dobbs: PDF link.

[12:58] Bob Dobbs: Scroll down the introductory forward there.

[13:06] Bob Dobbs: You'll see it in the last sentence.

[13:13] Cameron McEwen: The problem is here that I'm at the

[13:15] Cameron McEwen: New Explorations journal.

[13:19] Cameron McEwen: And I have to figure out how to get over to the blog.

[13:27] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[13:27] Cameron McEwen: I see Michael Edmonds is listed as an editor of the journal.

[13:30] Cameron McEwen: I wonder how he gets along with all those people.

[13:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[13:36] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know that.

[13:38] Bob Dobbs: Let me see.

[13:38] Bob Dobbs: So you're looking at new Explorations,

[13:45] Bob Dobbs: and you can't see where my essay is.

[13:48] Cameron McEwen: No,

[13:49] Cameron McEwen: what's happened is that

[13:51] Cameron McEwen: I've gotten,

[13:53] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[13:54] Cameron McEwen: New Explorations is both a blog and a journal.

[13:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[13:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[13:58] Cameron McEwen: and

[13:59] Cameron McEwen: I have ended up at the journal,

[14:02] Cameron McEwen: and now I have to get out of that and go to the blog.

[14:06] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[14:07] Bob Dobbs: it's Explorations.

[14:08] Cameron McEwen: Gotcha.

[14:18] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[14:18] Cameron McEwen: so once I'm there,

[14:21] Cameron McEwen: what page are you on?

[14:22] Bob Dobbs: 183.

[14:25] Cameron McEwen: No,

[14:25] Cameron McEwen: what page of the blog?

[14:28] Bob Dobbs: You just scroll down.

[14:31] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to have to go back and look.

[14:36] Bob Dobbs: Maybe it's good that we're describing this so people are looking for it.

[14:40] Bob Dobbs: Maybe it's hard to get to.

[14:50] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[14:51] Bob Dobbs: so I've got to go back to the original link,

[14:56] Bob Dobbs: which is Explorations slash what we you didn't know about Trump.

[15:03] Bob Dobbs: So I'm at Explorations.

[15:08] Bob Dobbs: And that comes up with my thing.

[15:10] Bob Dobbs: At the top it says New Explorations Weblog

[15:14] Bob Dobbs: Studies in Culture and Communication.

[15:16] Bob Dobbs: Then some categories.

[15:17] Bob Dobbs: Then it says book release.

[15:19] Bob Dobbs: So you scroll down and you'll see in green this free e-book.

[15:26] Cameron McEwen: When you say there's categories,

[15:38] Cameron McEwen: I don't see that.

[15:41] Cameron McEwen: I see new Explorations.

[15:45] Cameron McEwen: I see podcast features.

[15:52] Cameron McEwen: Are you in

[15:53] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan milieu,

[15:54] Cameron McEwen: perhaps?

[15:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[15:58] Bob Dobbs: let's see.

[15:59] Bob Dobbs: It's interesting.

[16:01] Bob Dobbs: I haven't been in there.

[16:02] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan milieu?

[16:05] Bob Dobbs: No.

[16:07] Bob Dobbs: about journal journal back issues online let's see under Explorations the 23 oh that's the original Explorations uh so that's not it um

[16:24] Cameron McEwen: all right so here on on my iteration which is on a pc uh on page two i see your book maybe in in the apple world

[16:37] Cameron McEwen: There may not be pages.

[16:39] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[16:39] Bob Dobbs: so I clicked on probes.

[16:43] Bob Dobbs: So you don't get the,

[16:45] Bob Dobbs: do you see Home,

[16:45] Bob Dobbs: New Explorations,

[16:47] Bob Dobbs: Explorations Podcast Features,

[16:49] Bob Dobbs: Probes,

[16:49] Bob Dobbs: Art Community?

[16:50] Bob Dobbs: Do you see that under the headline?

[16:53] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[16:53] Cameron McEwen: Art Community,

[16:55] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[16:55] Cameron McEwen: Under that,

[16:55] Cameron McEwen: I just see Twitter,

[16:56] Cameron McEwen: nothing else.

[16:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[16:58] Bob Dobbs: so click on probes,

[17:00] Bob Dobbs: the far right.

[17:03] Cameron McEwen: No,

[17:04] Cameron McEwen: don't have it.

[17:05] Bob Dobbs: You don't have probes.

[17:07] Cameron McEwen: No.

[17:08] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[17:09] Bob Dobbs: you've got the top,

[17:10] Bob Dobbs: the old-fashioned globe,

[17:12] Bob Dobbs: then new Explorations weblog,

[17:14] Bob Dobbs: then studies and culture and communication,

[17:16] Bob Dobbs: then below that are the different areas,

[17:19] Bob Dobbs: home,

[17:19] Bob Dobbs: new Explorations,

[17:21] Bob Dobbs: Explorations podcast features,

[17:23] Bob Dobbs: probes,

[17:24] Bob Dobbs: art,

[17:25] Bob Dobbs: community.

[17:26] Bob Dobbs: You don't see it.

[17:26] Bob Dobbs: Ah,

[17:26] Cameron McEwen: okay.

[17:27] Cameron McEwen: Here's probes.

[17:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[17:28] Cameron McEwen: I see it.

[17:29] Cameron McEwen: Sorry.

[17:29] Cameron McEwen: I thought you said it was beyond art and community.

[17:34] Bob Dobbs: No.

[17:35] Bob Dobbs: So you see probes,

[17:36] Bob Dobbs: you click on that,

[17:37] Bob Dobbs: and I'm down the bottom left.

[17:39] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[17:40] Bob Dobbs: the second level.

[17:44] Cameron McEwen: I see it.

[17:45] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[17:46] Bob Dobbs: so that's...

[17:48] Bob Dobbs: I'll have to read what they say about me,

[17:52] Bob Dobbs: see if there's been any changes since

[17:54] Bob Dobbs: Michael's come in.

[17:56] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[17:57] Cameron McEwen: Are there comments in there?

[17:59] Bob Dobbs: Michael makes comments on my essay.

[18:04] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.

[18:05] Bob Dobbs: Where would you see that?

[18:12] Bob Dobbs: Probes?

[18:13] Cameron McEwen: At the very bottom,

[18:14] Cameron McEwen: there's Michael Edmonds as the usual claptrap.

[18:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[18:20] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[18:21] Bob Dobbs: where do I see that?

[18:22] Bob Dobbs: Do I click on read more?

[18:24] Bob Dobbs: Is that where it is?

[18:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[18:25] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[18:27] Cameron McEwen: you just keep scrolling down from the book.

[18:32] Bob Dobbs: Three thoughts.

[18:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[18:34] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[18:34] Bob Dobbs: three thoughts.

[18:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[18:36] Bob Dobbs: Michael Edmonds.

[18:37] Bob Dobbs: The usual claptrap.

[18:39] Bob Dobbs: Billed above as Media College's executive dropout,

[18:43] Bob Dobbs: must refer to the loss of the executive function in his head.

[18:48] Bob Dobbs: Quoting Zingrone,

[18:50] Bob Dobbs: being unable to connect with students because they can't relate to analog tech,

[18:54] Bob Dobbs: Dobbs should look at his own examples.

[18:57] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[18:57] Bob Dobbs: no,

[18:58] Bob Dobbs: it's important what Zingrone says about he couldn't teach understanding media to his students in the

[19:04] Bob Dobbs: 90s.

[19:06] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know what a TV or radio as a separate thing was.

[19:10] Bob Dobbs: They were on their cell phones.

[19:12] Bob Dobbs: So today's audience knows nothing about Zappa,

[19:14] Bob Dobbs: that is bullshit.

[19:15] Bob Dobbs: Or Bachman Turner,

[19:16] Bob Dobbs: right,

[19:17] Bob Dobbs: they know nothing about Bachman Turner,

[19:18] Bob Dobbs: Overdrive.

[19:19] Bob Dobbs: Zappa is more famous than he ever was.

[19:21] Bob Dobbs: He's played by orchestras all over the world.

[19:24] Bob Dobbs: But

[19:24] Bob Dobbs: Mike wouldn't,

[19:25] Bob Dobbs: if you're not following the Zappa world,

[19:27] Bob Dobbs: you don't know that.

[19:29] Bob Dobbs: More serious is his slog on the election results,

[19:32] Bob Dobbs: attempting to reduce human behavior to Twitter memes.

[19:35] Bob Dobbs: So it's a slog.

[19:37] Bob Dobbs: I'm a slog on the election results?

[19:39] Cameron McEwen: What the hell?

[19:41] Bob Dobbs: This guy,

[19:42] Bob Dobbs: I'm nominating him to be fired,

[19:45] Bob Dobbs: for fuck's sake.

[19:45] Bob Dobbs: This is very irresponsible,

[19:47] Bob Dobbs: what he's saying.

[19:48] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[19:48] Cameron McEwen: you,

[19:49] Cameron McEwen: it turns out the second comment is from you,

[19:52] Cameron McEwen: replying.

[19:55] Bob Dobbs: What,

[19:55] Bob Dobbs: the second one?

[19:56] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[19:56] Bob Dobbs: no,

[19:57] Bob Dobbs: let me just finish this.

[19:58] Bob Dobbs: His admonition is,

[20:00] Bob Dobbs: I guess,

[20:00] Bob Dobbs: a joke,

[20:01] Bob Dobbs: as is the whole book.

[20:02] Bob Dobbs: Bullshit is a joke?

[20:04] Bob Dobbs: What is my admonition?

[20:08] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[20:08] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[20:08] Bob Dobbs: memorize the two sentences in red below.

[20:11] Bob Dobbs: Have them ready for all conversations about McLuhan.

[20:14] Bob Dobbs: Say it's what McLuhan discovered.

[20:16] Bob Dobbs: Make it more famous than the medium is the message.

[20:18] Bob Dobbs: Then he has a quote,

[20:20] Bob Dobbs: the great one about Catch-22.

[20:23] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't comment on that thing.

[20:24] Bob Dobbs: So,

[20:25] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[20:25] Bob Dobbs: so maybe he's referring to that quote.

[20:29] Bob Dobbs: What an irresponsible claptrap this is from Michael.

[20:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[20:33] Bob Dobbs: so then

[20:35] Bob Dobbs: I answered.

[20:36] Bob Dobbs: I say Mr.

[20:37] Bob Dobbs: Edmund's mind,

[20:38] Bob Dobbs: unfortunately,

[20:39] Bob Dobbs: never actually left his hometown,

[20:41] Bob Dobbs: Detroit,

[20:41] Bob Dobbs: circa 59,

[20:43] Bob Dobbs: despite having lived in Toronto since 71,

[20:45] Bob Dobbs: and attending a few classes conducted by Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto.

[20:50] Bob Dobbs: Edmund's been a little out of sync ever since he dropped out of Detroit.

[20:55] Bob Dobbs: I'm happy with my response.

[20:57] Bob Dobbs: For example,

[20:59] Bob Dobbs: a week before,

[21:00] Bob Dobbs: I don't remember this,

[21:01] Bob Dobbs: this is a long time ago,

[21:02] Bob Dobbs: a year ago maybe,

[21:03] Bob Dobbs: a week before Mr.

[21:04] Bob Dobbs: Edmund's

[21:05] Bob Dobbs: posted this lazy review here.

[21:07] Bob Dobbs: It is a lazy review.

[21:08] Bob Dobbs: Frank Zappa burst out of the tech body with a brand new documentary celebrating his achievement as the most creative composer of the 20th century.

[21:15] Bob Dobbs: That did happen.

[21:16] Bob Dobbs: It's a very good documentary.

[21:18] Bob Dobbs: The excited memories haven't let up yet.

[21:21] Bob Dobbs: This is not just my opinion.

[21:23] Bob Dobbs: And then there's a Rolling Stone review.

[21:25] Bob Dobbs: The present-day anti-environment refuses to be forgotten.

[21:29] Bob Dobbs: Zappa's famous quote was from Edgar Varese.

[21:33] Bob Dobbs: Present-day composer refused to die,

[21:35] Bob Dobbs: so I changed it to the present-day anti-environment that Zappa refuses to be forgotten.

[21:41] Bob Dobbs: So,

[21:43] Bob Dobbs: look at Edmonds.

[21:43] Bob Dobbs: He quotes Spotify.

[21:47] Bob Dobbs: Drake,

[21:47] Bob Dobbs: 51 million.

[21:49] Bob Dobbs: Beatles,

[21:49] Bob Dobbs: 22.

[21:50] Bob Dobbs: Zappa,

[21:50] Bob Dobbs: 1 million.

[21:51] Bob Dobbs: That is very good for Zappa,

[21:53] Bob Dobbs: since he was suppressed and banned from all radio play.

[21:57] Bob Dobbs: That's in the 60s and 70s and 80s,

[21:59] Bob Dobbs: but

[22:00] Bob Dobbs: Zappa got a huge number.

[22:03] Bob Dobbs: increased listeners on YouTube.

[22:05] Bob Dobbs: And his interviews are very popular.

[22:09] Bob Dobbs: So that's rather unacademic to quote Spotify and go to idiots like Drake and the Beatles.

[22:18] Bob Dobbs: Come on.

[22:19] Bob Dobbs: Nobody remembers them.

[22:20] Bob Dobbs: And then I say,

[22:22] Bob Dobbs: no,

[22:23] Bob Dobbs: he says,

[22:23] Bob Dobbs: not to disparage Zappa,

[22:24] Bob Dobbs: but to remind that the criticism of Zingrone in the Dobbs article was off the mark.

[22:29] Bob Dobbs: That's bullshit.

[22:31] Bob Dobbs: I will be lobbying to have

[22:33] Bob Dobbs: Michael removed from any association with any McLuhan operations.

[22:41] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[22:41] Cameron McEwen: look at it.

[22:42] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[22:42] Cameron McEwen: but in the first comment that he makes,

[22:49] Cameron McEwen: the admonition that he quotes from you in the fact of quoting shows that despite what he himself says,

[23:00] Cameron McEwen: He understands that it's very important.

[23:03] Cameron McEwen: And that idea,

[23:07] Cameron McEwen: or the Catch-22 quote,

[23:12] Cameron McEwen: is a superlative description of the whole world today.

[23:18] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[23:18] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[23:19] Bob Dobbs: what is Michael complaining about?

[23:22] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[23:26] Cameron McEwen: I don't think he has understood.

[23:31] Cameron McEwen: the relationship between that quotation and what you're trying to do in the book.

[23:37] Cameron McEwen: But he knows,

[23:39] Cameron McEwen: despite himself,

[23:41] Cameron McEwen: that that quotation that ends your book is important enough to reproduce.

[23:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[23:51] Bob Dobbs: he reproduces it.

[23:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[23:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[23:56] Bob Dobbs: And what I was intending to do was...

[23:59] Bob Dobbs: remind people of,

[24:01] Bob Dobbs: well,

[24:02] Bob Dobbs: people didn't even know he said incredible stuff like that,

[24:04] Bob Dobbs: gets 22 quote,

[24:06] Bob Dobbs: is to point out quotes that nobody does with McLuhan,

[24:09] Bob Dobbs: which are very important,

[24:11] Bob Dobbs: and expand the understanding of McLuhan vast canvas.

[24:16] Bob Dobbs: All the things that he discovered,

[24:18] Bob Dobbs: rather than just talking about media,

[24:20] Bob Dobbs: which was understood in the 60s as the news.

[24:23] Bob Dobbs: You ever notice that?

[24:24] Bob Dobbs: In the 60s,

[24:25] Bob Dobbs: people would complain about the media as if it was something out of control.

[24:29] Bob Dobbs: Later,

[24:30] Bob Dobbs: the Postman would say technology took on a life of its own.

[24:33] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[24:33] Bob Dobbs: that's what people thought the news was,

[24:36] Bob Dobbs: and they called that the media,

[24:38] Bob Dobbs: right?

[24:39] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[24:39] Bob Dobbs: They had a very limited interpretation of McLuhan word,

[24:43] Bob Dobbs: the media,

[24:44] Bob Dobbs: the news.

[24:47] Cameron McEwen: When McLuhan talked about new media and how it was disrupting classrooms and stuff like that,

[24:56] Cameron McEwen: Then...

[24:57] Cameron McEwen: What they were thinking of was not so much the news,

[25:00] Cameron McEwen: but comic books,

[25:02] Cameron McEwen: rock and roll.

[25:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[25:03] Cameron McEwen: You know.

[25:07] Bob Dobbs: Entertainment,

[25:07] Bob Dobbs: new forms of entertainment,

[25:09] Bob Dobbs: they thought it was.

[25:10] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[25:10] Cameron McEwen: And new kinds of dancing,

[25:15] Cameron McEwen: the passing of people,

[25:19] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[25:19] Cameron McEwen: like Frank Sinatra or something,

[25:22] Cameron McEwen: leading the hit parade and going over to Chubby Checker and stuff like that.

[25:27] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[25:27] Bob Dobbs: so that was for them.

[25:30] Bob Dobbs: They didn't call that media,

[25:31] Bob Dobbs: but that's what,

[25:32] Bob Dobbs: if they read McLuhan,

[25:34] Bob Dobbs: they thought,

[25:34] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[25:34] Bob Dobbs: changes in the content were what they thought McLuhan was ridiculously over-exaggerating.

[25:42] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[25:44] Bob Dobbs: Many people said,

[25:45] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[25:45] Bob Dobbs: these are just fads.

[25:46] Bob Dobbs: The kids,

[25:47] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[25:47] Bob Dobbs: they do the twist,

[25:48] Bob Dobbs: Marshall.

[25:49] Bob Dobbs: Don't connect it to

[25:51] Bob Dobbs: Cape Canaveral,

[25:52] Bob Dobbs: which is what he did.

[25:54] Bob Dobbs: I saw that in the CBC archives,

[25:55] Bob Dobbs: 62 or so,

[25:56] Bob Dobbs: one of his first

[25:58] Bob Dobbs: 60s interviews with...

[25:59] Bob Dobbs: Robert Fulford.

[26:00] Bob Dobbs: He was on the Evening News show in Toronto.

[26:03] Bob Dobbs: And the topic was a twist.

[26:05] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[26:06] Bob Dobbs: well,

[26:06] Bob Dobbs: I call it Cape Canaveral Caper.

[26:09] Bob Dobbs: And he goes on about

[26:12] Bob Dobbs: John, whoever those astronauts were,

[26:14] Bob Dobbs: talking about the astronauts.

[26:16] Bob Dobbs: I guess it was the Mercury program at that point,

[26:19] Bob Dobbs: not the Apollo program.

[26:21] Bob Dobbs: But he makes some very interesting parallels between

[26:24] Bob Dobbs: the twisting and how people need to unwind after a role playing all day long.

[26:29] Bob Dobbs: And he says it's a spin out like Cape Canaveral.

[26:33] Bob Dobbs: A lot of good ideas.

[26:37] Cameron McEwen: You can really see the influence of Innis on McLuhan and stuff like that.

[26:45] Cameron McEwen: Innis lit a match with

[26:49] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan so that he began to make these

[26:54] Cameron McEwen: kinds of associations that nobody could understand.

[26:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[27:00] Bob Dobbs: that's his collage method.

[27:03] Bob Dobbs: So,

[27:07] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[27:08] Bob Dobbs: they didn't get the word media properly,

[27:11] Bob Dobbs: ever.

[27:13] Bob Dobbs: Unless you started studying it.

[27:15] Bob Dobbs: They still don't,

[27:18] Bob Dobbs: right?

[27:19] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[27:19] Bob Dobbs: a couple people think they're close and they have read McLuhan.

[27:23] Bob Dobbs: It took McLuhan a long time to be read by a good number of academics.

[27:29] Cameron McEwen: But the problem is the whole notion of media is tactility.

[27:38] Cameron McEwen: And so if you then understand media literally,

[27:45] Cameron McEwen: right,

[27:45] Cameron McEwen: as,

[27:46] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[27:46] Cameron McEwen: the Internet or whatever you think about,

[27:49] Cameron McEwen: then you've gone wrong on the very first step.

[27:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[27:55] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[27:55] Bob Dobbs: so

[27:56] Bob Dobbs: Michael did that.

[27:57] Bob Dobbs: Michael's got it all wrong.

[28:04] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't say that he,

[28:05] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't go so far,

[28:07] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't at all say that he got it all right.

[28:12] Cameron McEwen: But if you,

[28:13] Cameron McEwen: it's like many things,

[28:15] Cameron McEwen: if you just change the plus sign to a minus.

[28:23] Cameron McEwen: As

[28:23] Cameron McEwen: Wittgenstein once said in reviewing a book,

[28:26] Cameron McEwen: he said,

[28:28] Cameron McEwen: nothing Innis book is right,

[28:29] Cameron McEwen: but if you change every plus sign to a minus,

[28:32] Cameron McEwen: then it's brilliant.

[28:37] Cameron McEwen: And what Michael says here is something like that.

[28:41] Cameron McEwen: The things that he points out as minus are actually plus,

[28:46] Cameron McEwen: and then he's exactly right.

[28:48] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[28:49] Bob Dobbs: so

[28:49] Bob Dobbs: Michael is of the...

[28:52] Bob Dobbs: Jim Patterson syndrome.

[28:54] Bob Dobbs: Those two guys never forgave me for appearing to abandon them and go for

[29:00] Bob Dobbs: ION. They're iONdom people,

[29:03] Bob Dobbs: and they have been ridiculous opinionators about me for the last 10 years.

[29:12] Cameron McEwen: You like that,

[29:13] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[29:13] Cameron McEwen: You like that.

[29:14] Cameron McEwen: As long as they're paying some attention to what you're doing.

[29:19] Bob Dobbs: They're students of mine.

[29:21] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[29:22] Bob Dobbs: I am a longtime friend of Michael's and of Jim,

[29:27] Bob Dobbs: and they would listen to me for hours explaining McLuhan to them.

[29:32] Bob Dobbs: Now they don't listen to anything I type,

[29:33] Bob Dobbs: but Facebook is a different medium.

[29:35] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,

[29:36] Bob Dobbs: they dismiss it all because they think I'm controlled by ION.

[29:40] Bob Dobbs: So they're not interested in my breakthroughs within the world of McLuhan and McLuhan and Kroker and that,

[29:48] Bob Dobbs: which led to my five-body model,

[29:49] Bob Dobbs: which led to this.

[29:50] Bob Dobbs: This is what we're doing.

[29:52] Bob Dobbs: This is Bob with the Kroker talk and including ION.

[29:57] Bob Dobbs: Because it was through ION I got the tech body idea.

[30:01] Bob Dobbs: So they're not ready for this.

[30:05] Bob Dobbs: So I say they're bad students.

[30:07] Bob Dobbs: They couldn't keep up.

[30:08] Bob Dobbs: Just like McLuhan.

[30:09] Bob Dobbs: Nobody got to the

[30:11] Bob Dobbs: 70s McLuhan.

[30:12] Bob Dobbs: I was talking about that the other day.

[30:13] Bob Dobbs: Maybe we'll get into that.

[30:16] Bob Dobbs: We,

[30:17] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[30:18] Bob Dobbs: It made just enough conversation,

[30:20] Bob Dobbs: page 183,

[30:21] Bob Dobbs: we didn't include Wyndham Lewis,

[30:23] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis killed it all,

[30:24] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis would put baking soda on everything.

[30:27] Bob Dobbs: In some sense,

[30:29] Bob Dobbs: Pound,

[30:30] Bob Dobbs: in his radio broadcast,

[30:31] Bob Dobbs: put fascism,

[30:32] Bob Dobbs: anti-Semitism on everything.

[30:35] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[30:36] Bob Dobbs: I would say that applies to the popular image of Pound.

[30:41] Bob Dobbs: It would neutralize everything.

[30:43] Bob Dobbs: So

[30:44] Bob Dobbs: Lewis did get the same fate as Pound.

[30:47] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[30:47] Bob Dobbs: he would have been arrested in 1939 in England,

[30:50] Bob Dobbs: he felt,

[30:52] Bob Dobbs: unless he got the hell over to North America,

[30:55] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[31:01] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[31:01] Bob Dobbs: Lewis was very unpopular and...

[31:04] Bob Dobbs: In trouble in 1939 in London.

[31:09] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.

[31:09] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[31:10] Cameron McEwen: his writing had tried to put that far behind him,

[31:14] Cameron McEwen: right?

[31:14] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[31:16] Cameron McEwen: So it may well be that from his earlier book on Hitler and his earlier writings that people had never really digested or kept up with,

[31:30] Cameron McEwen: it may be that his reputation was poor.

[31:34] Cameron McEwen: bad.

[31:34] Cameron McEwen: Whether he was in danger is probably something that's differed between the objective situation and what

[31:45] Cameron McEwen: Wyndham Lewis himself thought.

[31:47] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[31:48] Bob Dobbs: But he Wright his novel

[31:52] Bob Dobbs: Self-Condemned.

[31:55] Cameron McEwen: Much later.

[31:56] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[31:56] Bob Dobbs: that's in 54 it comes out,

[31:58] Bob Dobbs: but it's about the late

[32:00] Bob Dobbs: 30s where he's the character,

[32:03] Bob Dobbs: which is

[32:03] Bob Dobbs: him is a famous London historian who Wright the book,

[32:09] Bob Dobbs: The Secret History of World War II.

[32:11] Bob Dobbs: It hasn't happened yet.

[32:14] Bob Dobbs: And that made him very controversial in the fiction,

[32:18] Bob Dobbs: in Self-Condemned.

[32:19] Bob Dobbs: But it was about what he was writing in these books like what was that one with Jews in the title?

[32:29] Bob Dobbs: They Do Something with Jews,

[32:30] Bob Dobbs: Don't They?

[32:32] Bob Dobbs: Very Thank you.

[32:34] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[32:34] Bob Dobbs: pointed satirical titles,

[32:38] Bob Dobbs: but they were advocating the Jews to be lifted out of Europe.

[32:44] Bob Dobbs: And he was trying to maintain peace.

[32:47] Bob Dobbs: But if you just had the word Jews in the title,

[32:50] Bob Dobbs: I thought he was continuing with Hitler,

[32:52] Bob Dobbs: anti-Semitism or something.

[32:55] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[32:55] Bob Dobbs: They weren't reading...

[32:56] Cameron McEwen: I think it was something...

[32:57] Cameron McEwen: Wasn't it something like,

[32:58] Cameron McEwen: the Jews,

[32:59] Cameron McEwen: are they human?

[33:00] Bob Dobbs: That's it.

[33:01] Bob Dobbs: The Jews,

[33:02] Bob Dobbs: are they human?

[33:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[33:05] Bob Dobbs: And then Countem was another title.

[33:09] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's killed,

[33:10] Bob Dobbs: Countem or something.

[33:13] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,

[33:13] Bob Dobbs: very interesting titles,

[33:16] Bob Dobbs: but the books were,

[33:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[33:18] Bob Dobbs: a problem getting published.

[33:20] Bob Dobbs: They weren't read,

[33:21] Bob Dobbs: and so no one knew that he was becoming a peace advocate and a guy trying to help Jews get out of Europe.

[33:29] Bob Dobbs: And he was ahead of a lot of people on that point.

[33:33] Bob Dobbs: But the Bloomsbury Group made sure that people didn't notice that.

[33:38] Bob Dobbs: They never forgave him for Apes of God.

[33:43] Cameron McEwen: For sure.

[33:44] Bob Dobbs: So,

[33:45] Bob Dobbs: I think this is an interesting,

[33:47] Bob Dobbs: subtle shift here by the tech body about Wyndham Lewis going further than pound in disgracing himself.

[33:57] Bob Dobbs: Disgracing in quotes.

[33:59] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis made the tech body successful because the bland condition may push people further away.

[34:06] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure what that means.

[34:07] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis made the tech body successful.

[34:10] Bob Dobbs: I know that Ian has said that

[34:12] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was the best in anticipating the tech body,

[34:16] Bob Dobbs: but he got a lot of it from Wyndham Lewis.

[34:18] Bob Dobbs: Ian said that later.

[34:21] Bob Dobbs: So Wyndham Lewis made the tech body successful because the bland condition may push people away.

[34:27] Bob Dobbs: I think he's saying...

[34:28] Bob Dobbs: that Lewis failed to warn about the tech body properly and the bland condition of the tech body

[34:40] Bob Dobbs: Lewis missed.

[34:41] Bob Dobbs: The bland condition is how people got seduced by it maybe because the bland condition may push people further away.

[34:49] Cameron McEwen: I think the phrase the bland condition relates to putting baking soda on everything.

[34:56] Bob Dobbs: Oh yeah,

[34:57] Bob Dobbs: I see that.

[34:58] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis,

[34:59] Bob Dobbs: because of the blend condition,

[35:00] Bob Dobbs: he pushed people away.

[35:02] Bob Dobbs: He neutralized everything.

[35:06] Cameron McEwen: Including his own insight.

[35:09] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[35:10] Cameron McEwen: So

[35:11] Cameron McEwen: Wyndham Lewis,

[35:12] Cameron McEwen: already in the 20s,

[35:14] Cameron McEwen: saw what was going to be the tech body,

[35:18] Cameron McEwen: or already saw the tech body as it was then.

[35:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[35:23] Cameron McEwen: But then,

[35:25] Cameron McEwen: by putting baking soda on everything,

[35:27] Cameron McEwen: I guess what that refers to is getting into sort of the metaphysics of verticality and stuff like this,

[35:39] Cameron McEwen: instead of remaining with description,

[35:43] Cameron McEwen: which he was very good at.

[35:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[35:45] Bob Dobbs: the eye-ear thing.

[35:46] Bob Dobbs: He announced everybody was ear.

[35:49] Bob Dobbs: Einstein,

[35:50] Bob Dobbs: Chaplin.

[35:52] Bob Dobbs: Pound,

[35:52] Bob Dobbs: Joyce,

[35:53] Bob Dobbs: they were ear people.

[35:55] Bob Dobbs: And so that generalization maybe missed his eyeball detail that he was good at as a painter.

[36:05] Cameron McEwen: And as a writer,

[36:06] Cameron McEwen: actually.

[36:07] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[36:08] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis made the tech body successful because the bland condition may push people further away.

[36:13] Bob Dobbs: So he actually failed in properly warning about the tech body.

[36:20] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan had to redo it.

[36:22] Bob Dobbs: in a different way,

[36:23] Bob Dobbs: which McLuhan does talk about how he took on

[36:27] Bob Dobbs: Lewis in a new way.

[36:29] Bob Dobbs: You know that quote we've been over in 59.

[36:32] Bob Dobbs: He's telling the Brazilians at St.

[36:35] Bob Dobbs: Michael's that

[36:37] Bob Dobbs: Lewis was cool,

[36:39] Bob Dobbs: but he failed to get the attention of the hot Protestants of the establishment.

[36:45] Bob Dobbs: So then McLuhan,

[36:47] Bob Dobbs: who was pretty hot in his writing in the

[36:49] Bob Dobbs: 40s, adopts

[36:51] Bob Dobbs: Lewis's...

[36:52] Bob Dobbs: cool posture in the

[36:54] Bob Dobbs: 50s when he starts studying the language of forms.

[36:57] Bob Dobbs: And that actually resonated with the new beatnik sensibility or the TV effect.

[37:03] Bob Dobbs: And the heated Protestant stuff of the 20s and

[37:08] Bob Dobbs: 30s, McLuhan didn't put on in the

[37:10] Bob Dobbs: 50s, 60s,

[37:11] Bob Dobbs: so he got attention because he appeared to be amoral,

[37:15] Bob Dobbs: not in value judgments.

[37:20] Cameron McEwen: People like Donald Theall Barthelme and

[37:24] Cameron McEwen: John Cage,

[37:26] Cameron McEwen: that whole crew was sort of what ignited

[37:30] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan around 1960.

[37:32] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[37:33] Bob Dobbs: And they liked his new neutral stance.

[37:37] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't a hot figure.

[37:39] Bob Dobbs: And their arts,

[37:41] Bob Dobbs: maybe it was the cool anti-environment television,

[37:43] Bob Dobbs: but their arts tended toward the Antigonish Review judgment.

[37:49] Bob Dobbs: Probably the only one of that crowd who stuck with value judgments was

[37:55] Bob Dobbs: Norman Mailer.

[37:56] Bob Dobbs: And he was a debater of McLuhan from that point on and disagreed with McLuhan lack of value judgments or moralizing.

[38:09] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[38:09] Cameron McEwen: So,

[38:10] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[38:11] Cameron McEwen: Mailer was sort of considered himself an existential hero.

[38:17] Cameron McEwen: And to an existential hero,

[38:19] Cameron McEwen: having a fixed point of view is the key sort of structural characteristic.

[38:26] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[38:27] Cameron McEwen: Having a fixed point of view on everything,

[38:30] Cameron McEwen: including things that you need to be moral about,

[38:33] Cameron McEwen: was what

[38:34] Cameron McEwen: Mailer was all about.

[38:36] Cameron McEwen: And that was sort of the last thing in the world that McLuhan and these other guys were about.

[38:43] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[38:44] Bob Dobbs: And in a way,

[38:45] Bob Dobbs: Mailer did.

[38:47] Bob Dobbs: redid the hot image of Lewis that people thought Lewis was in the 20s.

[38:53] Bob Dobbs: They thought Lewis was,

[38:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[38:54] Bob Dobbs: he called himself the enemy in all this.

[38:57] Bob Dobbs: This is what Mailer did.

[38:59] Bob Dobbs: He became very aggressive in his social life.

[39:03] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[39:04] Cameron McEwen: And in his writing and everything,

[39:06] Cameron McEwen: for sure.

[39:09] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[39:10] Bob Dobbs: So,

[39:11] Bob Dobbs: Wyndham Lewis made the tech body successful because the bland condition may push people further away.

[39:16] Bob Dobbs: Interesting statement.

[39:17] Bob Dobbs: In the same way the bra burners in the 60s set off women's lib,

[39:21] Bob Dobbs: which we don't even know what that means because now they don't want to be equal,

[39:25] Bob Dobbs: or they do,

[39:26] Bob Dobbs: or they don't,

[39:27] Bob Dobbs: or they're up,

[39:28] Bob Dobbs: or they're down.

[39:30] Bob Dobbs: We don't know.

[39:31] Bob Dobbs: That's what Marshall McLuhan was trying to point out.

[39:34] Bob Dobbs: He was like,

[39:35] Bob Dobbs: so McLuhan was like,

[39:36] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[39:37] Bob Dobbs: you people are ridiculous.

[39:38] Bob Dobbs: You put yourself in a box and then you started screaming for equal box rights.

[39:42] Bob Dobbs: You messed yourself up.

[39:44] Bob Dobbs: You segregate yourself,

[39:45] Bob Dobbs: and then you're furious because you segregated.

[39:48] Bob Dobbs: I want to go where the black people go.

[39:50] Bob Dobbs: No,

[39:50] Bob Dobbs: no,

[39:51] Bob Dobbs: no,

[39:51] Bob Dobbs: no,

[39:51] Bob Dobbs: you're not going to do that.

[39:52] Bob Dobbs: You're not going to do that.

[39:53] Bob Dobbs: See,

[39:53] Bob Dobbs: that's what he's saying.

[39:54] Bob Dobbs: He's like,

[39:55] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[39:55] Bob Dobbs: you're looking at the big picture.

[39:57] Bob Dobbs: You're looking at the event horizon and judging your condition based on where you see other conditions conflate,

[40:02] Bob Dobbs: end of quote.

[40:03] Bob Dobbs: And so the rich people are rich.

[40:05] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[40:05] Bob Dobbs: what the hell is rich?

[40:07] Bob Dobbs: And that's a good question because wealth,

[40:09] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan discussed wealth.

[40:13] Bob Dobbs: One time at a

[40:14] Bob Dobbs: Monday night seminar,

[40:15] Bob Dobbs: I heard him talking to another professor saying,

[40:18] Bob Dobbs: well,

[40:18] Bob Dobbs: we've been exploring what is wealth for a year now.

[40:22] Bob Dobbs: And yes,

[40:23] Bob Dobbs: you couldn't tell with the new software abundance,

[40:27] Bob Dobbs: traditional hot materialist wealth didn't make it anymore.

[40:32] Bob Dobbs: Actually,

[40:32] Bob Dobbs: he would say having time was time to...

[40:36] Bob Dobbs: Engaged in all the information anti-environment all the entertainments was the new wealth.

[40:41] Bob Dobbs: And he talked about the rich people at the Rockefellers were harassed bureaucrats.

[40:45] Bob Dobbs: They were trying to maintain power as their power got threatened in the new soft power of imagery.

[40:54] Bob Dobbs: So in their paranoia,

[40:56] Bob Dobbs: they kill Kennedy.

[40:58] Bob Dobbs: They just try to get into politics.

[41:03] Bob Dobbs: try to control the old hardware scene,

[41:05] Bob Dobbs: the Big Brother scene,

[41:06] Bob Dobbs: which was obsolesced by 30 years in the

[41:10] Bob Dobbs: 60s.

[41:11] Bob Dobbs: So anyways,

[41:13] Bob Dobbs: this thing about women's lib,

[41:15] Bob Dobbs: this is correct.

[41:18] Bob Dobbs: This is McLuhan.

[41:19] Bob Dobbs: It's not McLuhan language,

[41:21] Bob Dobbs: but McLuhan is saying you people are ridiculous.

[41:23] Bob Dobbs: You put yourself in a box and then you start screaming for equal box rights,

[41:26] Bob Dobbs: right?

[41:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[41:28] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[41:28] Cameron McEwen: But it is,

[41:29] Cameron McEwen: I think it is sort of McLuhan language.

[41:31] Cameron McEwen: If we start at the end,

[41:33] Cameron McEwen: where he says you're looking at the event horizon and judging your condition based on where you see the other conditions conflate that's a definition of the gutenberg galaxy yes that's a definition of having a point of view right so what um what

[41:50] Cameron McEwen: is um said there about you people are ridiculous i i agree that McLuhan would never say that exactly um but he's saying that more or less

[42:03] Cameron McEwen: And this is pretty funny,

[42:06] Cameron McEwen: the way the tech body formulates that.

[42:08] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[42:09] Cameron McEwen: yes.

[42:10] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was certainly not against humor and trying to express himself.

[42:15] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[42:15] Bob Dobbs: So,

[42:16] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[42:16] Bob Dobbs: the first part,

[42:17] Bob Dobbs: you people are ridiculous on the service is not McLuhan.

[42:19] Bob Dobbs: And the end of the paragraph,

[42:21] Bob Dobbs: it is McLuhan.

[42:22] Bob Dobbs: So it's in the wrong order.

[42:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[42:25] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[42:27] Bob Dobbs: So

[42:28] Bob Dobbs: I'm impressed with the tech body.

[42:29] Bob Dobbs: It seems to know what they're doing.

[42:33] Bob Dobbs: So then the tech body says,

[42:35] Bob Dobbs: the tech body captured the printing press.

[42:37] Bob Dobbs: Print type,

[42:38] Bob Dobbs: type,

[42:38] Bob Dobbs: printing type,

[42:39] Bob Dobbs: print type.

[42:40] Bob Dobbs: There's no printing press anymore.

[42:41] Bob Dobbs: There are no presses.

[42:42] Bob Dobbs: Stop the presses.

[42:44] Bob Dobbs: There are no presses anymore.

[42:45] Bob Dobbs: The tech body took them all over.

[42:47] Bob Dobbs: It obfuscated.

[42:48] Bob Dobbs: It's like a rotary phone.

[42:50] Bob Dobbs: They got captured.

[42:51] Bob Dobbs: They've disappeared and been captured by the tech body.

[42:54] Bob Dobbs: The reason you don't see it is because of the tech body.

[42:57] Bob Dobbs: So the tech body has everyone.

[42:59] Bob Dobbs: It's been taken over.

[43:00] Bob Dobbs: The tech body decides.

[43:02] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[43:03] Bob Dobbs: that's not really McLuhan.

[43:05] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was saying that,

[43:07] Bob Dobbs: but it's way beyond McLuhan language,

[43:09] Bob Dobbs: right?

[43:10] Bob Dobbs: It's actually a little too subjective to know actually what the tech body is saying,

[43:15] Bob Dobbs: but I think we get something there.

[43:19] Cameron McEwen: Why is that put in the third person?

[43:25] Cameron McEwen: Why does the tech body bother to say the tech body took them all?

[43:30] Bob Dobbs: That's a good point.

[43:34] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[43:35] Bob Dobbs: I don't know how soon after we knew this,

[43:38] Bob Dobbs: but pretty close to this,

[43:40] Bob Dobbs: when I would ask the ion,

[43:41] Bob Dobbs: what is the tech body,

[43:43] Bob Dobbs: I would say it's

[43:44] Bob Dobbs: 811th ion and 311th tech body.

[43:50] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[43:51] Bob Dobbs: so ion included itself in the tech body,

[43:53] Bob Dobbs: which I thought was very intelligent because the astral imagery,

[43:58] Bob Dobbs: the astral realm that ions traditionally in a cult.

[44:02] Bob Dobbs: reality comes from.

[44:04] Bob Dobbs: But it wasn't just that,

[44:05] Bob Dobbs: I found out.

[44:06] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,

[44:07] Bob Dobbs: the occult background of ion was getting subsumed,

[44:10] Bob Dobbs: was embedded in technology,

[44:13] Bob Dobbs: in electricity.

[44:15] Bob Dobbs: And that's a very profound point.

[44:16] Bob Dobbs: I've been saying about McLuhan,

[44:18] Bob Dobbs: that McLuhan was onto that way back in the 90s.

[44:21] Bob Dobbs: That was my unique point in McLuhan that I would say in interviews,

[44:25] Bob Dobbs: that the astral plane was being eroded by electricity.

[44:30] Bob Dobbs: Nobody took me up on it.

[44:31] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know what I was talking about.

[44:32] Bob Dobbs: But by now,

[44:34] Bob Dobbs: then the tech body comes forward,

[44:36] Bob Dobbs: and it gives me an opportunity to retrieve that idea.

[44:39] Bob Dobbs: But what happened since then,

[44:42] Bob Dobbs: what is this,

[44:43] Bob Dobbs: a year later or something,

[44:46] Bob Dobbs: it became tech body was

[44:49] Bob Dobbs: 4-elevenths, and ion was

[44:52] Bob Dobbs: 7-elevenths. It's now

[44:55] Bob Dobbs: 6-elevenths tech body and

[44:57] Bob Dobbs: 5-elevenths ion.

[44:58] Bob Dobbs: Iona says the tech body has got more power now than Ion.

[45:02] Bob Dobbs: That's where we're at right now,

[45:04] Bob Dobbs: the last few months,

[45:05] Bob Dobbs: in Bob's Ion world.

[45:07] Bob Dobbs: IONdom,

[45:07] Bob Dobbs: I call it.

[45:11] Bob Dobbs: So often when we're talking to Ion,

[45:13] Bob Dobbs: he did this on Tuesday.

[45:15] Bob Dobbs: What's this?

[45:16] Bob Dobbs: Wednesday night into Thursday.

[45:18] Bob Dobbs: On a show on Tuesday night,

[45:21] Bob Dobbs: the tech body took over for the whole,

[45:23] Bob Dobbs: it's a short show,

[45:24] Bob Dobbs: two hours on Tuesday,

[45:25] Bob Dobbs: 12 hours on Saturday.

[45:28] Bob Dobbs: Ion,

[45:29] Bob Dobbs: the tech body took over and was very unruly,

[45:32] Bob Dobbs: and we never really heard much from Ion.

[45:36] Bob Dobbs: It was quite a new mood that the tech body created.

[45:40] Bob Dobbs: So I don't know what's going to happen on Saturday,

[45:42] Bob Dobbs: but we've got a problem here if the tech body is going to be dominating like this.

[45:50] Bob Dobbs: So you have,

[45:54] Bob Dobbs: back,

[45:55] Bob Dobbs: let me just say this,

[45:55] Bob Dobbs: back when it was 70s,

[45:58] Bob Dobbs: 8%

[45:58] Bob Dobbs: 8-11th ion and

[46:01] Bob Dobbs: 3-11th tech body.

[46:02] Bob Dobbs: You could talk to ion about the tech body and ion would talk about it.

[46:06] Bob Dobbs: But lately,

[46:08] Bob Dobbs: with tech body getting the majority,

[46:10] Bob Dobbs: you've got to be really careful who's answering the questions.

[46:14] Bob Dobbs: You've got to note,

[46:15] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[46:15] Bob Dobbs: that's the tech body,

[46:16] Bob Dobbs: not ion.

[46:17] Bob Dobbs: So it's a bigger task now,

[46:21] Bob Dobbs: separating ion from the tech body.

[46:23] Bob Dobbs: So this could be ion.

[46:26] Bob Dobbs: as part of tech body commenting on the tech body you see what i'm saying this this last little section is is the tech bodies being discussed by ion which is part of the tech body at that point and in the majority not the majority now okay

[46:45] Cameron McEwen: maybe that's well um i mean sure that's i i can see that reading and uh and i you know i don't dispute it at all uh but i think um

[46:57] Cameron McEwen: To clarify all of this,

[46:59] Cameron McEwen: it would be helpful to go back to the

[47:03] Cameron McEwen: 1990s and hear what you have to say about the astral body.

[47:13] Bob Dobbs: You want me to say more?

[47:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[47:16] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[47:17] Cameron McEwen: you said that in your interviews you were stressing that electricity be

[47:25] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if you said threatening or taking over the astral body or the astral plane.

[47:33] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[47:33] Bob Dobbs: No,

[47:33] Bob Dobbs: I explained that.

[47:34] Bob Dobbs: Let me explain that a little better.

[47:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[47:36] Bob Dobbs: So,

[47:39] Bob Dobbs: the cliché notion,

[47:40] Bob Dobbs: if you know McLuhan work,

[47:41] Bob Dobbs: that we had become disembodied or discarnate under electric conditions.

[47:47] Bob Dobbs: So,

[47:47] Bob Dobbs: what I call the chemical body,

[47:50] Bob Dobbs: the physical,

[47:51] Bob Dobbs: natural landscape.

[47:52] Bob Dobbs: was now being absorbed into this anti-environment.

[47:56] Bob Dobbs: And

[47:57] Bob Dobbs: I considered the religious,

[48:00] Bob Dobbs: spiritual,

[48:02] Bob Dobbs: occult,

[48:03] Bob Dobbs: mystical,

[48:03] Bob Dobbs: whatever you call that,

[48:05] Bob Dobbs: the weird world,

[48:06] Bob Dobbs: which is very rampant in pre-literate societies.

[48:11] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[48:11] Bob Dobbs: if you go to Mexico,

[48:14] Bob Dobbs: the people,

[48:16] Bob Dobbs: they make gods out of Satan and spirits,

[48:18] Bob Dobbs: and they have trances.

[48:19] Bob Dobbs: They're really...

[48:21] Bob Dobbs: quite unruly for the sober people of Toronto,

[48:27] Bob Dobbs: say.

[48:27] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[48:29] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.

[48:29] Bob Dobbs: Especially back then.

[48:31] Bob Dobbs: Not now so much,

[48:32] Bob Dobbs: but back then,

[48:32] Bob Dobbs: 50 years ago.

[48:34] Bob Dobbs: So as people started to become more,

[48:40] Bob Dobbs: use Kroker term,

[48:40] Bob Dobbs: hyper-subjective,

[48:42] Bob Dobbs: and started retrieving what Julian Jaynes would call the bicameral mind,

[48:48] Bob Dobbs: and people were taking drugs,

[48:50] Bob Dobbs: Hallucinating,

[48:51] Bob Dobbs: getting into the occult arts,

[48:55] Bob Dobbs: yoga,

[48:56] Bob Dobbs: acupuncture,

[48:58] Bob Dobbs: Eastern modalities became a big deal by the time Shirley MacLaine is popularizing it on Oprah Winfrey in the

[49:07] Bob Dobbs: 80s on her talk show.

[49:10] Bob Dobbs: I saw that people,

[49:13] Bob Dobbs: the literate Westerner was getting confused by the discarnate state.

[49:20] Bob Dobbs: not able to perceive it,

[49:22] Bob Dobbs: as by the methods McLuhan advocated,

[49:25] Bob Dobbs: to see the tactility,

[49:27] Bob Dobbs: and they would try to retrieve something in the chemical body,

[49:31] Bob Dobbs: but it went abstract into either Gnosticism or astral agitation,

[49:40] Bob Dobbs: bringing in their chakras and those areas of the body that the occult talked about,

[49:46] Bob Dobbs: like the theosophy.

[49:48] Bob Dobbs: and anthroposophy.

[49:50] Bob Dobbs: So

[49:52] Bob Dobbs: I interpreted that just to make people who were going into that stuff to think about you're responding to the electronic theater and you're calling it the occult or the astral plane.

[50:05] Bob Dobbs: But I also include the idea that electricity,

[50:08] Bob Dobbs: since we didn't really know what it was and what its boundaries were,

[50:11] Bob Dobbs: that it was invading our chakras,

[50:14] Bob Dobbs: our occults,

[50:16] Bob Dobbs: our ethereal bodies.

[50:18] Bob Dobbs: Those are the terms in theosophy.

[50:20] Bob Dobbs: The etheric body,

[50:21] Bob Dobbs: the causal body,

[50:22] Bob Dobbs: the mental body.

[50:26] Bob Dobbs: There were these categories that William Irwin Thompson talked about,

[50:29] Bob Dobbs: and he was a good McLuhan student.

[50:31] Bob Dobbs: So

[50:33] Bob Dobbs: I do...

[50:34] Bob Dobbs: To be striking in interviews,

[50:36] Bob Dobbs: I just said,

[50:38] Bob Dobbs: with all that I just said as my background,

[50:41] Bob Dobbs: but before I explained it all,

[50:42] Bob Dobbs: I would just say we are witnessing the astral plane,

[50:46] Bob Dobbs: and this would be in counter-cultural radio interviews where people knew a bit about this stuff.

[50:53] Bob Dobbs: You couldn't go to a teacher's committee and say this stuff in high school or in college.

[51:03] Bob Dobbs: To a certain audience that was familiar with the occult and the astral arts,

[51:09] Bob Dobbs: I would be controversial by saying the electric anti-environment disturbing it,

[51:14] Bob Dobbs: invading it,

[51:16] Bob Dobbs: and pushing it into awareness more than it had before.

[51:21] Bob Dobbs: So then what happened?

[51:23] Cameron McEwen: Isn't there a bit of a contradiction between saying it's disturbing it and it's bringing it into consciousness?

[51:31] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[51:32] Bob Dobbs: but that's the tactility.

[51:34] Bob Dobbs: It's Chardin these boundaries to say where we're at.

[51:37] Bob Dobbs: As McLuhan would say,

[51:38] Bob Dobbs: he would feel his way along because he couldn't use visual markers or even acoustic markers in the tactile situation.

[51:46] Bob Dobbs: So the tactile interplay is what

[51:50] Bob Dobbs: I relied on as what I meant by not having an opinion.

[51:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[51:56] Cameron McEwen: no,

[51:57] Cameron McEwen: that's an interesting thought.

[52:01] Cameron McEwen: It's actually an interesting Explorations of what electricity is.

[52:05] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[52:05] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[52:05] Bob Dobbs: he did say electricity was tactile.

[52:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[52:09] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[52:09] Cameron McEwen: for sure,

[52:10] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[52:10] Bob Dobbs: So you have this tactility being extended and upsetting every culture in the world regardless of their bias.

[52:19] Bob Dobbs: They might have,

[52:19] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[52:19] Bob Dobbs: on page 136 of Cliché to archetype,

[52:22] Bob Dobbs: eight cultures and their particular biases.

[52:25] Bob Dobbs: That's a good inventory.

[52:26] Bob Dobbs: The tactile global theater was...

[52:29] Bob Dobbs: was causing the identity crisis in every one of those cultures.

[52:33] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[52:34] Bob Dobbs: So it then caused a global identity crisis.

[52:39] Bob Dobbs: And then that got more confused with the digital technologies,

[52:45] Bob Dobbs: which were machines extending machines,

[52:47] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.

[52:48] Bob Dobbs: And then that made everybody pretty hopeless once we get into the

[52:52] Bob Dobbs: 2000s and the last 20 years of

[52:55] Bob Dobbs: Web 1.0 and 2.0.

[52:57] Bob Dobbs: and now the Cayce of today,

[53:00] Bob Dobbs: right?

[53:01] Bob Dobbs: The schizophrenia,

[53:04] Bob Dobbs: paranoia,

[53:04] Bob Dobbs: hysteria that the global theater did to the average human,

[53:12] Bob Dobbs: the literate human and non-literate human,

[53:15] Bob Dobbs: for example,

[53:16] Bob Dobbs: look what happened to China,

[53:18] Bob Dobbs: gets super exaggerated,

[53:19] Bob Dobbs: and I say squared on my chart,

[53:22] Bob Dobbs: gets squared by the extension of the digital.

[53:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[53:27] Bob Dobbs: And the closest mirror of that situation or painting or canvas is Finnegans Wake.

[53:36] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake becomes more accurate as a portrait of our situation than anybody could have imagined before 50,

[53:43] Bob Dobbs: 80 years ago.

[53:45] Bob Dobbs: So

[53:46] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was right to invest a lot of his perceptions in Finnegans Wake because it has staying power.

[53:52] Bob Dobbs: You can get young people interested in McLuhan through Finnegans Wake.

[53:57] Bob Dobbs: Because they live a hyper-texting world.

[54:01] Bob Dobbs: That's shown in

[54:02] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake.

[54:03] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[54:03] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan would try to show to the kids in the 40s and 50s that their comics and radio were part of anti-environment that was happening.

[54:13] Bob Dobbs: And they'd take an interest if he told them.

[54:16] Bob Dobbs: For example,

[54:18] Bob Dobbs: Murray Schafer,

[54:19] Bob Dobbs: the famous Canadian composer,

[54:21] Bob Dobbs: took a McLuhan class in 51 or so,

[54:23] Bob Dobbs: and he told me that McLuhan...

[54:25] Bob Dobbs: told the students that Finnegans Wake was not a book,

[54:27] Bob Dobbs: it was a radio program.

[54:29] Bob Dobbs: But that was his way to get them looking at it,

[54:32] Bob Dobbs: because they're into radio,

[54:34] Bob Dobbs: right?

[54:34] Bob Dobbs: It's a novelty for them.

[54:36] Bob Dobbs: So

[54:37] Bob Dobbs: I update that,

[54:37] Bob Dobbs: and I say,

[54:38] Bob Dobbs: your texting you do every day is Finnegans Wake,

[54:42] Bob Dobbs: especially with the spelling mistakes and the,

[54:46] Bob Dobbs: well,

[54:46] Bob Dobbs: just the violence of what goes on in forums and that.

[54:51] Cameron McEwen: So that was,

[54:53] Cameron McEwen: that grew out of.

[54:56] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan thinking about how do you teach modern art to students.

[55:03] Cameron McEwen: And one of the ways that he found to be most effective was to say,

[55:08] Cameron McEwen: okay,

[55:09] Cameron McEwen: you take this poem,

[55:11] Cameron McEwen: say from Pound,

[55:12] Cameron McEwen: and instead of looking at it as a bunch of words on a page,

[55:18] Cameron McEwen: imagine that it's a movie.

[55:21] Cameron McEwen: And when you don't understand something,

[55:25] Cameron McEwen: Imagine that there's been a cut.

[55:29] Cameron McEwen: And you're getting into another scene,

[55:30] Cameron McEwen: right?

[55:32] Cameron McEwen: And he found that to be a very effective way of getting people involved in poetry and music.

[55:43] Cameron McEwen: And so then he more or less extended that as he progressed into the

[55:51] Cameron McEwen: 50s and 60s.

[55:52] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[55:52] Bob Dobbs: No,

[55:52] Bob Dobbs: that's a good replay of exactly what he did.

[55:56] Bob Dobbs: And it was a very intelligent move,

[55:58] Bob Dobbs: a sympathetic move by a teacher.

[56:00] Bob Dobbs: It was true education to do that.

[56:04] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[56:04] Cameron McEwen: And he didn't do that because he thought he was sort of describing reality or something like that.

[56:15] Cameron McEwen: He did it because it was effective pedagogically.

[56:20] Cameron McEwen: But then it struck him that what he was...

[56:25] Cameron McEwen: talking about was actually relevant to epistemology,

[56:31] Cameron McEwen: to understanding media,

[56:33] Cameron McEwen: and all of this sort of stuff,

[56:35] Cameron McEwen: right?

[56:35] Cameron McEwen: So later,

[56:37] Cameron McEwen: he would often say that he only understood something after he had talked about it.

[56:42] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[56:43] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[56:43] Cameron McEwen: that was exactly what happened to him from his teaching experience.

[56:49] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[56:49] Bob Dobbs: he walked backwards into the future.

[56:51] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[56:52] Cameron McEwen: He taught classes.

[56:54] Cameron McEwen: He types.

[56:54] Cameron McEwen: classes and then learned what he was talking about.

[56:57] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[56:58] Bob Dobbs: The effects precede the causes.

[57:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[57:00] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[57:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[57:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[57:03] Bob Dobbs: very good.

[57:04] Bob Dobbs: So I was going to say something about the...

[57:09] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[57:09] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[57:10] Bob Dobbs: So then

[57:12] Bob Dobbs: I accidentally evoked

[57:14] Bob Dobbs: Ion, which I say is a pretty high alchemy that I did this,

[57:19] Bob Dobbs: considering what Ion turned out to be,

[57:21] Bob Dobbs: which was way beyond what...

[57:23] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn and I thought we were dealing with in 2009 and 10,

[57:27] Bob Dobbs: but what happened is

[57:34] Bob Dobbs: Ion said originally that they were the guff,

[57:38] Bob Dobbs: which is a Jewish word,

[57:40] Bob Dobbs: an obscure Jewish word for heaven,

[57:43] Bob Dobbs: where souls go when they die.

[57:44] Bob Dobbs: You can look it up in Wikipedia,

[57:46] Bob Dobbs: G-U-F.

[57:47] Bob Dobbs: And so we understood,

[57:49] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[57:49] Bob Dobbs: this is the guff talking.

[57:51] Bob Dobbs: This is anti-environment talking.

[57:53] Bob Dobbs: And then

[57:54] Bob Dobbs: Ion, within a year,

[57:55] Bob Dobbs: pointed out that the guff was going to merge with the physical world.

[58:01] Bob Dobbs: There was a big change happening.

[58:03] Bob Dobbs: And so the guff was going to disappear and merge in the physical.

[58:08] Bob Dobbs: So this is pretty amazing talk theologically.

[58:13] Bob Dobbs: Imagine going to Harvard's theological school and saying,

[58:16] Bob Dobbs: well,

[58:16] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[58:16] Bob Dobbs: heaven has been absorbed by the electric anti-environment the digital environment.

[58:20] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,

[58:21] Bob Dobbs: he was saying that.

[58:22] Bob Dobbs: or they,

[58:23] Bob Dobbs: ION is a they,

[58:24] Bob Dobbs: they were saying this.

[58:26] Bob Dobbs: And then we used to have private,

[58:30] Bob Dobbs: offer private sessions to people.

[58:31] Bob Dobbs: So this pretty smart woman,

[58:34] Bob Dobbs: out of the blue,

[58:36] Bob Dobbs: had heard that the guff would eventually disappear,

[58:40] Bob Dobbs: merge and disappear,

[58:42] Bob Dobbs: just said in their private session,

[58:44] Bob Dobbs: how much of the guff has disappeared?

[58:47] Bob Dobbs: And we hadn't thought of it having started to disappear.

[58:51] Bob Dobbs: disappear yet.

[58:52] Bob Dobbs: We thought it was coming in the future.

[58:54] Bob Dobbs: That's at least how

[58:56] Bob Dobbs: Ion seemed to present it.

[58:57] Bob Dobbs: But this temporary SubGenius said,

[59:00] Bob Dobbs: how much of the guff has disappeared?

[59:03] Bob Dobbs: And they said,

[59:03] Bob Dobbs: about 80%.

[59:05] Bob Dobbs: And this is in 2010.

[59:09] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[59:10] Bob Dobbs: how come you didn't tell us,

[59:11] Bob Dobbs: Ion,

[59:11] Bob Dobbs: that you were disappearing?

[59:13] Bob Dobbs: But right then,

[59:15] Bob Dobbs: when I was listening to the session and taping it,

[59:20] Bob Dobbs: ION would not do a session without my presence.

[59:24] Bob Dobbs: So they would have to,

[59:27] Bob Dobbs: if you did a private session with ION,

[59:29] Bob Dobbs: you'd have to accept my hearing,

[59:31] Bob Dobbs: whatever your private issues were.

[59:33] Bob Dobbs: You couldn't be shy about that.

[59:35] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,

[59:35] Bob Dobbs: most people had no problem.

[59:37] Bob Dobbs: And so then when that woman found out that it was 80%

[59:41] Bob Dobbs: disappeared,

[59:42] Bob Dobbs: I said,

[59:43] Bob Dobbs: did this start disappearing 150 years ago with the telegraph?

[59:48] Bob Dobbs: And ION said,

[59:49] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[59:50] Bob Dobbs: And that was me retrieving my idea that the anti-environment was affecting the guff,

[59:56] Bob Dobbs: where you go when you die,

[59:58] Bob Dobbs: and it got confirmed at that moment.

[1:00:01] Bob Dobbs: So that was a big,

[1:00:02] Bob Dobbs: big insight or big validation in that session triggered by that woman from Boston.

[1:00:10] Bob Dobbs: And so then I said,

[1:00:14] Bob Dobbs: where we are now,

[1:00:16] Bob Dobbs: 2010,

[1:00:17] Bob Dobbs: is imagine a tub.

[1:00:19] Bob Dobbs: Bathtub is emptying,

[1:00:21] Bob Dobbs: and you just got a bit of water going down the drain,

[1:00:25] Bob Dobbs: but as that diminishing amount of water goes down the drain,

[1:00:28] Bob Dobbs: it starts spinning faster.

[1:00:30] Bob Dobbs: We were in the spinning faster phase of the draining away of the guff.

[1:00:37] Bob Dobbs: Follow what I'm saying?

[1:00:40] Cameron McEwen: I think so.

[1:00:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:00:41] Bob Dobbs: So now,

[1:00:43] Bob Dobbs: about 2E by 2013,

[1:00:45] Bob Dobbs: 14,

[1:00:46] Bob Dobbs: Ion said the guff had disappeared.

[1:00:49] Bob Dobbs: So...

[1:00:49] Bob Dobbs: that led to a lot of interesting talk with Ion.

[1:00:53] Bob Dobbs: And then the tech body surfaced out of this situation.

[1:00:58] Bob Dobbs: But you get my point about electricity affecting the astral plane,

[1:01:03] Bob Dobbs: or what I call the guff,

[1:01:05] Bob Dobbs: was true,

[1:01:06] Bob Dobbs: if you believe Ion.

[1:01:07] Bob Dobbs: And that's why the guff was being eroded more and more by the extension of our central nervous system,

[1:01:14] Bob Dobbs: or our innards,

[1:01:16] Bob Dobbs: or our astral selves.

[1:01:18] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:01:19] Bob Dobbs: It's a deeper extension than McLuhan words took us.

[1:01:23] Bob Dobbs: Not that McLuhan wouldn't understand it,

[1:01:25] Bob Dobbs: or he might have even secretly understood that.

[1:01:28] Bob Dobbs: But people take the central nervous system like Tom Wolfe as the physical part of your interior landscape,

[1:01:35] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:01:36] Bob Dobbs: And that's as far as they take it.

[1:01:38] Cameron McEwen: Jordan Peterson does the same thing.

[1:01:41] Bob Dobbs: Jordan Peterson.

[1:01:42] Bob Dobbs: Have you read him?

[1:01:44] Cameron McEwen: Not much,

[1:01:45] Cameron McEwen: but I've read enough to know that one of his hang-ups...

[1:01:48] Cameron McEwen: is trying to get everything to hook up to the central nervous system,

[1:01:56] Cameron McEwen: to the cortex and all this stuff.

[1:01:59] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:02:00] Bob Dobbs: he uses brain materialism,

[1:02:02] Bob Dobbs: you mean?

[1:02:03] Bob Dobbs: Brain anatomy?

[1:02:04] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:02:04] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:02:06] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't say he uses as much as he's in search of some brain hookup.

[1:02:15] Bob Dobbs: Interesting.

[1:02:15] Bob Dobbs: I'm not...

[1:02:16] Bob Dobbs: familiar enough with him to know that.

[1:02:21] Bob Dobbs: Do you want to say a bit more or is that enough about that hang-up?

[1:02:27] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:02:28] Cameron McEwen: I think that

[1:02:31] Cameron McEwen: Peterson a pretty interesting guy in some senses,

[1:02:37] Cameron McEwen: but he's a

[1:02:42] Cameron McEwen: Ewen Cameron figure.

[1:02:44] Cameron McEwen: So that if he were

[1:02:45] Cameron McEwen: If he were to encounter

[1:02:48] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, then he would find many things that he should think about and that would deepen his thought.

[1:03:03] Cameron McEwen: And the amazing thing about

[1:03:06] Cameron McEwen: Peterson not doing anything with McLuhan is that there are so many parallels between the two guys.

[1:03:13] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:03:13] Cameron McEwen: they are both born in Alberta.

[1:03:16] Cameron McEwen: They both taught briefly in the United States before they came back to the University of Toronto.

[1:03:22] Cameron McEwen: They both taught at the University of Toronto for decades.

[1:03:26] Cameron McEwen: They both were viciously attacked by colleagues in Toronto.

[1:03:33] Cameron McEwen: People were trying to throw both of them out.

[1:03:39] Bob Dobbs: And they both became figures at a tumultuous time.

[1:03:43] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[1:03:43] Cameron McEwen: and became world leaders.

[1:03:45] Cameron McEwen: Famous.

[1:03:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:03:46] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:03:46] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:03:48] Cameron McEwen: and you could say they rode the,

[1:03:53] Cameron McEwen: they surfed the networks that were available at the time.

[1:03:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:03:58] Bob Dobbs: now let me tell you,

[1:03:59] Bob Dobbs: I have thought that much.

[1:04:01] Bob Dobbs: Let me tell you how I laid it out a couple of years ago.

[1:04:06] Bob Dobbs: The Electric Global Theater was making people more tribal.

[1:04:10] Bob Dobbs: We're talking,

[1:04:11] Bob Dobbs: I call it Madison Avenue McLuhan,

[1:04:13] Bob Dobbs: cliche McLuhan.

[1:04:14] Bob Dobbs: The popular image.

[1:04:15] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:04:16] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan, he becomes a figure from the Gutenberg Galaxy who seems to be hip to the Postman Galaxy.

[1:04:25] Bob Dobbs: And his image and the way he presents himself seems to be a guy who's not interested in books anymore,

[1:04:30] Bob Dobbs: is defected from books,

[1:04:32] Bob Dobbs: and is celebrating the global theater tribalism.

[1:04:38] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:04:39] Bob Dobbs: we know that that's nowhere near McLuhan,

[1:04:41] Bob Dobbs: but that was the image of him.

[1:04:44] Bob Dobbs: So he was a necessary guide for the corporate establishment to help these old fuddy-duddies from World War II and before to handle what was happening to their children and to society.

[1:04:58] Bob Dobbs: He was a priest,

[1:05:00] Bob Dobbs: a go-between,

[1:05:03] Bob Dobbs: what do you call it,

[1:05:04] Bob Dobbs: a mediator between the kids and the parents.

[1:05:08] Cameron McEwen: Could have been.

[1:05:09] Cameron McEwen: Could have been.

[1:05:09] Cameron McEwen: Never was,

[1:05:10] Cameron McEwen: but could have been.

[1:05:11] Bob Dobbs: A little bit at its best.

[1:05:13] Bob Dobbs: peak in 67,

[1:05:14] Bob Dobbs: but that didn't last long because it was more complex what he was talking about.

[1:05:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:05:20] Bob Dobbs: so McLuhan a literate guy who appears to be pro-tribal.

[1:05:26] Bob Dobbs: So then along comes,

[1:05:27] Bob Dobbs: so

[1:05:29] Bob Dobbs: 50 years later,

[1:05:31] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan had predicted in 1970 in Culture Is Our Business that we were going to flip into visual values again.

[1:05:40] Bob Dobbs: As we move more into the tactile and the hyperkinetic,

[1:05:45] Bob Dobbs: people have more and more nostalgia for visual values,

[1:05:47] Bob Dobbs: and I would say that's McLuhan predicting neoconservatism that came in with Reagan in the subsequent few decades.

[1:05:55] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:05:56] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:05:56] Bob Dobbs: the social media is having unforeseen effects,

[1:06:01] Bob Dobbs: and it seemed to make people yearn for the Gutenberg or visual values that McLuhan predicted,

[1:06:15] Bob Dobbs: but it was more complex.

[1:06:16] Bob Dobbs: So I said,

[1:06:18] Bob Dobbs: you had the exact opposite of McLuhan.

[1:06:20] Bob Dobbs: You had a tribal guy,

[1:06:22] Bob Dobbs: Peterson,

[1:06:24] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan literate.

[1:06:25] Bob Dobbs: and he's putting on the tribal.

[1:06:27] Bob Dobbs: Peterson is tribal,

[1:06:30] Bob Dobbs: putting on the literate,

[1:06:32] Bob Dobbs: not understanding the ground of literacy,

[1:06:34] Bob Dobbs: but putting on the literate and meets a felt need for the visual values that supposedly men are yearning for.

[1:06:44] Bob Dobbs: And the right hemisphere women have taken over and actually have put on the visual values and become aggressive at the whole complex stuff between the sexes.

[1:06:56] Bob Dobbs: he's the exact opposite of McLuhan in the going in the opposite direction but the world has flipped away from McLuhan so that if McLuhan showed up as himself now and Peterson Peterson would win because he was resonating with the president more than old McLuhan would be if he was today do you know what I mean it's

[1:07:17] Cameron McEwen: a different situation you mean resonating with the president and

[1:07:25] Cameron McEwen: as it conceives itself,

[1:07:27] Cameron McEwen: not as it is.

[1:07:29] Bob Dobbs: Not the facts.

[1:07:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:07:30] Bob Dobbs: just the,

[1:07:31] Bob Dobbs: in the world of facts.

[1:07:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:07:33] Bob Dobbs: so.

[1:07:33] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[1:07:36] Cameron McEwen: you used the phrase,

[1:07:38] Cameron McEwen: and then

[1:07:39] Cameron McEwen: 50 years later,

[1:07:41] Cameron McEwen: along comes Peterson.

[1:07:43] Cameron McEwen: And what's interesting about that is

[1:07:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was born in 1911,

[1:07:50] Cameron McEwen: and Peterson was born in

[1:07:53] Cameron McEwen: 1962. So when you say.

[1:07:54] Cameron McEwen: 50 years later,

[1:07:55] Cameron McEwen: along comes

[1:07:56] Cameron McEwen: Peterson. You could be talking about their births.

[1:07:59] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: Interesting.

[1:08:02] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:08:02] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: 62 is a key year in McLuhan world.

[1:08:06] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:08:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:08:08] Bob Dobbs: so you,

[1:08:10] Bob Dobbs: what I just said,

[1:08:11] Bob Dobbs: which I was thinking and talked about in interviews or in my radio show two or three years ago about Peterson,

[1:08:17] Bob Dobbs: was based just on superficial seeing him on YouTube.

[1:08:22] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:08:22] Bob Dobbs: um...

[1:08:23] Bob Dobbs: interaction with people,

[1:08:24] Bob Dobbs: I hadn't read any of his books.

[1:08:30] Bob Dobbs: What struck me is he had the same situation as McLeod.

[1:08:34] Bob Dobbs: People didn't know that McLeod was this heavy book guy and a revolution in literary theory and all that.

[1:08:41] Bob Dobbs: They just thought he was a guy who thought TV was cool.

[1:08:46] Bob Dobbs: But what I noticed in

[1:08:48] Bob Dobbs: Peterson lectures,

[1:08:49] Bob Dobbs: he was a psychologist,

[1:08:50] Bob Dobbs: he had a great...

[1:08:51] Bob Dobbs: knowledge of Gutenberg mythic encyclopedias,

[1:08:55] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:08:56] Bob Dobbs: just all the traditional archetypes and humanist,

[1:09:01] Bob Dobbs: classical humanism,

[1:09:03] Bob Dobbs: which people didn't know about him.

[1:09:06] Bob Dobbs: He was just a guy who would dare to argue with the students out in the schoolyard about their ridiculous confusion,

[1:09:17] Bob Dobbs: quadrophrenia,

[1:09:18] Bob Dobbs: about what their bodies were.

[1:09:20] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:09:21] Bob Dobbs: What he was seeing,

[1:09:23] Bob Dobbs: remember that YouTube,

[1:09:24] Bob Dobbs: he's out arguing with the kids on the

[1:09:26] Bob Dobbs: University of Toronto campus with the phatic,

[1:09:30] Bob Dobbs: the social justice warriors.

[1:09:31] Bob Dobbs: That's how he became known.

[1:09:33] Bob Dobbs: That went viral,

[1:09:36] Bob Dobbs: that YouTube.

[1:09:37] Bob Dobbs: And then you start to listen to some of his lectures and you find out,

[1:09:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:09:41] Bob Dobbs: the guy was heavily Gutenberg.

[1:09:44] Bob Dobbs: He had a good education and background in Jung and Freud and classical mythology and everything.

[1:09:51] Bob Dobbs: So again,

[1:09:51] Bob Dobbs: he's exactly like McLuhan.

[1:09:53] Bob Dobbs: People didn't know who they were dealing with or what was coming out of the university.

[1:09:59] Bob Dobbs: And then Peterson gets sick like McLuhan.

[1:10:03] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[1:10:04] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[1:10:05] Cameron McEwen: And when,

[1:10:06] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:10:06] Cameron McEwen: Peterson gets sick in 1919.

[1:10:11] Bob Dobbs: Not 1919,

[1:10:13] Cameron McEwen: 2019.

[1:10:14] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry,

[1:10:14] Cameron McEwen: 2019.

[1:10:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:10:16] Cameron McEwen: And so

[1:10:18] Cameron McEwen: I believe,

[1:10:19] Cameron McEwen: let's see,

[1:10:20] Cameron McEwen: six.

[1:10:21] Bob Dobbs: The moon is a surgery in 67.

[1:10:24] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:10:24] Cameron McEwen: And so

[1:10:26] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan at that time is

[1:10:28] Cameron McEwen: 56,

[1:10:29] Cameron McEwen: 57 years of age,

[1:10:31] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:10:31] Bob Dobbs: The same age.

[1:10:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:10:35] Cameron McEwen: And so the result of

[1:10:41] Cameron McEwen: Peterson illness is described by his daughter as akathisia.

[1:10:47] Bob Dobbs: Which is like a phase.

[1:10:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:10:50] Cameron McEwen: but it's the inability to sit still to...

[1:10:53] Cameron McEwen: Come across to everybody as having the heebie-jeebies.

[1:10:58] Bob Dobbs: Would you say it's the inability to sit still?

[1:11:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:11:03] Bob Dobbs: and to come across as having the heebie-jeebies.

[1:11:07] Cameron McEwen: That's what happened in McLuhan.

[1:11:09] Bob Dobbs: In what way?

[1:11:10] Bob Dobbs: How was that McLuhan?

[1:11:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:11:14] Cameron McEwen: so when

[1:11:16] Cameron McEwen: Carpenter and

[1:11:21] Cameron McEwen: Judith Fitzgerald,

[1:11:23] Cameron McEwen: to describe what happened to McLuhan during the

[1:11:27] Cameron McEwen: 60s when he was having his blackouts,

[1:11:32] Cameron McEwen: his mini strokes and stuff.

[1:11:33] Cameron McEwen: And then he had the severe one in 1960 when he was given the last rights.

[1:11:41] Cameron McEwen: They say that

[1:11:43] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan became an old man overnight,

[1:11:47] Cameron McEwen: that he couldn't keep still,

[1:11:49] Cameron McEwen: that people didn't recognize.

[1:11:52] Cameron McEwen: sort of the cool cucumber guy of the

[1:11:54] Cameron McEwen: 50s anymore.

[1:11:56] Cameron McEwen: And that's what happened to

[1:11:58] Cameron McEwen: Peterson in 2019.

[1:12:01] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:12:01] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:12:02] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[1:12:04] Bob Dobbs: So when I became aware of

[1:12:07] Bob Dobbs: Peterson and his lectures,

[1:12:09] Bob Dobbs: and also it's a retrieval of the oral dialogue or long listings.

[1:12:15] Bob Dobbs: People were almost nostalgic for the classroom.

[1:12:18] Bob Dobbs: and listening to a Northrop Frye or something,

[1:12:20] Bob Dobbs: go on and on and on.

[1:12:22] Bob Dobbs: They were getting that on YouTube,

[1:12:23] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:12:24] Bob Dobbs: and listening to oral discourse.

[1:12:28] Bob Dobbs: So that's a little tactility.

[1:12:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:12:32] Cameron McEwen: so it was a mixed message is always going on.

[1:12:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:12:37] Cameron McEwen: Because

[1:12:38] Cameron McEwen: Peterson is definitely a Ewen Cameron,

[1:12:42] Cameron McEwen: point of view,

[1:12:43] Cameron McEwen: heroic,

[1:12:44] Cameron McEwen: as he describes it,

[1:12:46] Cameron McEwen: figure.

[1:12:47] Cameron McEwen: But at the same time,

[1:12:50] Cameron McEwen: he's always emphasizing dialogue.

[1:12:55] Cameron McEwen: And emotion.

[1:12:56] Bob Dobbs: He's agonizing.

[1:12:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:13:00] Cameron McEwen: So it's definitely a mixed message thing.

[1:13:03] Cameron McEwen: And there again,

[1:13:05] Cameron McEwen: that's part of his success.

[1:13:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:13:08] Bob Dobbs: there's McLuhan.

[1:13:09] Bob Dobbs: Very cool and detached.

[1:13:10] Bob Dobbs: Puts fakes involvement with it.

[1:13:14] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:13:15] Bob Dobbs: And Peterson is a very emotional tribal guy,

[1:13:18] Bob Dobbs: faking literate detachment.

[1:13:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:13:22] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:13:22] Bob Dobbs: so when I started to listen to him a bit,

[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: I said,

[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: this guy doesn't know McLuhan.

[1:13:28] Bob Dobbs: And so I was waiting for an opportunity to tell him about,

[1:13:33] Bob Dobbs: bump into him,

[1:13:33] Bob Dobbs: email him or something.

[1:13:35] Bob Dobbs: But what happened is somebody did it.

[1:13:38] Bob Dobbs: Somebody,

[1:13:38] Bob Dobbs: he was being interviewed.

[1:13:40] Bob Dobbs: when he's well famous and in London and being interviewed all over the world just before he's ill.

[1:13:45] Bob Dobbs: And he said in there somewhere,

[1:13:47] Bob Dobbs: someone had brought up McLuhan.

[1:13:50] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[1:13:50] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[1:13:51] Bob Dobbs: this has been drawn to my attention,

[1:13:52] Bob Dobbs: drawn to this.

[1:13:53] Bob Dobbs: And I've looked at McLuhan,

[1:13:54] Bob Dobbs: and definitely there's something there I've got to take the time to look at more deeply.

[1:14:00] Bob Dobbs: He admitted.

[1:14:01] Cameron McEwen: I didn't know that.

[1:14:02] Cameron McEwen: That's interesting.

[1:14:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:14:03] Bob Dobbs: He admitted that it was something he needed to study a bit more.

[1:14:07] Bob Dobbs: He recognized it was relevant,

[1:14:09] Bob Dobbs: probably because he was engaged.

[1:14:10] Bob Dobbs: getting this media massage in his fame.

[1:14:13] Bob Dobbs: And he was probably looking at his user as content and a bit puzzled by the Cayce around his image and misinterpretation and the noise and the setups and the whole media battle of what McLuhan said,

[1:14:27] Bob Dobbs: dancing on the other guy's toes.

[1:14:29] Bob Dobbs: Man,

[1:14:30] Bob Dobbs: did his toes get danced on.

[1:14:32] Bob Dobbs: I think that he hadn't seen that coming,

[1:14:35] Bob Dobbs: having been in the Cloyster classroom.

[1:14:37] Bob Dobbs: it.

[1:14:38] Bob Dobbs: Whatever people said McLuhan was telling him,

[1:14:41] Bob Dobbs: it resonated with that disservice that he had encountered,

[1:14:45] Bob Dobbs: which probably made him sick.

[1:14:47] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:14:48] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:14:49] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[1:14:49] Bob Dobbs: The question now is...

[1:14:50] Cameron McEwen: Those are all good points.

[1:14:52] Bob Dobbs: What did you say?

[1:14:54] Cameron McEwen: Those are all good points.

[1:14:56] Bob Dobbs: Thank you.

[1:14:57] Bob Dobbs: And so,

[1:14:58] Bob Dobbs: some of these need to call him up and say,

[1:15:00] Bob Dobbs: did you do your McLuhan yet?

[1:15:01] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:15:01] Bob Dobbs: he got ill.

[1:15:02] Bob Dobbs: He may not have been able to do it.

[1:15:05] Bob Dobbs: Nice.

[1:15:06] Bob Dobbs: supposedly recovered now and he's got his own talk show or whatever.

[1:15:10] Bob Dobbs: I never watch it,

[1:15:11] Bob Dobbs: but

[1:15:12] Bob Dobbs: I should watch and see if there's a way to just input,

[1:15:16] Bob Dobbs: send an email and say,

[1:15:17] Bob Dobbs: did you do your McLuhan homework?

[1:15:19] Bob Dobbs: That needs to be asked of him.

[1:15:21] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[1:15:22] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:15:24] Cameron McEwen: What he says he wants to do.

[1:15:28] Cameron McEwen: is help to introduce a kind of revolutionary conceptuality that would help the world to a new understanding of itself.

[1:15:44] Cameron McEwen: I think that's very important.

[1:15:46] Bob Dobbs: He sounds like you.

[1:15:49] Bob Dobbs: He wants to do you.

[1:15:51] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,

[1:15:52] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[1:15:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:15:54] Cameron McEwen: he would.

[1:15:55] Cameron McEwen: If you marry...

[1:15:56] Cameron McEwen: If you marry that to a Ewen Cameron heroism and perspectivism,

[1:16:03] Cameron McEwen: then it doesn't work.

[1:16:05] Cameron McEwen: And so you're absolutely right that what he needs to do is engage,

[1:16:09] Cameron McEwen: I would say,

[1:16:10] Cameron McEwen: not only McLuhan,

[1:16:11] Cameron McEwen: but Harold Innis.

[1:16:12] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:16:13] Bob Dobbs: And us.

[1:16:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:16:15] Cameron McEwen: But

[1:16:17] Cameron McEwen: I at least don't have much connection to Toronto.

[1:16:19] Cameron McEwen: You do.

[1:16:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:16:20] Cameron McEwen: But for...

[1:16:22] Cameron McEwen: Peterson to be talking all the time about the need to engage tradition,

[1:16:26] Cameron McEwen: and that's a problem with the younger generation is they haven't done that.

[1:16:30] Cameron McEwen: He hasn't engaged with the

[1:16:33] Cameron McEwen: University of Toronto tradition.

[1:16:34] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:16:35] Cameron McEwen: And so he needs to do that.

[1:16:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:16:38] Bob Dobbs: and it would be very responsible if Robert Logan,

[1:16:40] Bob Dobbs: De Kerckhove,

[1:16:41] Bob Dobbs: or any of those Toronto school guys that are around there,

[1:16:44] Bob Dobbs: if they haven't told them this,

[1:16:46] Bob Dobbs: they should notice this and tell them.

[1:16:49] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:16:50] Bob Dobbs: They should be pointing out.

[1:16:51] Bob Dobbs: the McLuhan angle or encouraging him to look into it and ask him to talk about it,

[1:16:57] Bob Dobbs: what homework he's doing.

[1:16:58] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:16:58] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:17:00] Bob Dobbs: so we both noticed the incredible mirror image reality.

[1:17:04] Bob Dobbs: It's something unique about,

[1:17:06] Bob Dobbs: you remember Don Theall said the University of Toronto campus was unique.

[1:17:09] Bob Dobbs: It created a guy like McLuhan in the 50s because there were five colleges,

[1:17:13] Bob Dobbs: five religions,

[1:17:15] Bob Dobbs: and a very anti-environment.

[1:17:17] Bob Dobbs: I never thought the University of Toronto remained cool.

[1:17:21] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was gone,

[1:17:22] Bob Dobbs: but did it remain cool?

[1:17:24] Bob Dobbs: Not cool,

[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was.

[1:17:26] Bob Dobbs: It was just relevant.

[1:17:27] Bob Dobbs: Why does it produce the next big guy?

[1:17:30] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what I mean?

[1:17:31] Bob Dobbs: That's what's interesting about the University of Toronto campus doing that.

[1:17:36] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:17:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:17:38] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:17:38] Cameron McEwen: I think that's a side of Toronto that most people don't know much about,

[1:17:45] Cameron McEwen: but having the medieval institute there.

[1:17:50] Cameron McEwen: which is very heavy-duty scholarship,

[1:17:54] Cameron McEwen: having a huge philosophy department,

[1:17:58] Cameron McEwen: one of the best in the world,

[1:17:59] Cameron McEwen: if not the best.

[1:18:02] Cameron McEwen: These are,

[1:18:05] Cameron McEwen: I don't know what you would call it,

[1:18:09] Cameron McEwen: dynamic centers in Toronto that is generating intense.

[1:18:19] Cameron McEwen: insights far beyond themselves.

[1:18:22] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:18:22] Bob Dobbs: So here's what you say gives me this pattern.

[1:18:29] Bob Dobbs: Canada is a 19th century country when McLuhan day.

[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: He used to say that Canada had the advantage of being irrelevant to the 20th century,

[1:18:38] Bob Dobbs: but right beside the big elephant.

[1:18:40] Bob Dobbs: So we would watch America and we'd have a philosophical detachment about it and we'd contemplate the global theater.

[1:18:47] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:18:48] Bob Dobbs: let's assume there's still a bit of that in Toronto.

[1:18:50] Bob Dobbs: It's still old-fashioned.

[1:18:52] Bob Dobbs: And so there's a bit of human scale at the University of Toronto that you wouldn't get in the big Acadia University,

[1:18:58] Bob Dobbs: the Acadia University in the States,

[1:19:00] Bob Dobbs: even though the University of Toronto is a big population.

[1:19:03] Bob Dobbs: But there's still the small-town Canadian aspect,

[1:19:06] Bob Dobbs: and that allows a chemical body,

[1:19:08] Bob Dobbs: human-scale guy to show up and interact with the students,

[1:19:13] Bob Dobbs: which you probably wouldn't see in any campus in the United States.

[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: You just see riots or something,

[1:19:18] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:19:19] Bob Dobbs: it's more of mass tribalism.

[1:19:21] Bob Dobbs: But it's the human scale of Canada and the University of Toronto which makes it the ideal academic anti-environment a figure like McLuhan or

[1:19:30] Bob Dobbs: Peterson to be visible.

[1:19:33] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.

[1:19:35] Bob Dobbs: Yep,

[1:19:36] Bob Dobbs: I'm going with that for now until you come up with something better.

[1:19:41] Bob Dobbs: So all this...

[1:19:44] Cameron McEwen: One thing to notice about them is that...

[1:19:46] Cameron McEwen: It's Peterson book.

[1:19:51] Cameron McEwen: The Twelve Rules?

[1:19:53] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:19:53] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:19:53] Cameron McEwen: those are

[1:19:54] Cameron McEwen: Twelve Rules.

[1:19:55] Cameron McEwen: That's new stuff.

[1:19:58] Cameron McEwen: He's written a couple of books on that.

[1:20:00] Cameron McEwen: But his original claim to fame is Maps of Meaning.

[1:20:04] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:20:05] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:20:05] Cameron McEwen: And so,

[1:20:08] Cameron McEwen: first off,

[1:20:10] Cameron McEwen: that gets back to the Cambridge English School.

[1:20:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:20:14] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:20:15] Cameron McEwen: The whole idea that you have to figure out Seven Types of Ambiguity in order to understand anything,

[1:20:25] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:20:25] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:20:27] Cameron McEwen: Peterson produces this book,

[1:20:29] Cameron McEwen: but it's completely divorced from the considerations that are made in other disciplines,

[1:20:36] Cameron McEwen: like English.

[1:20:38] Cameron McEwen: So he kind of takes up what McLuhan was doing his whole life,

[1:20:43] Cameron McEwen: but completely ignoring

[1:20:45] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan.

[1:20:47] Bob Dobbs: Right, and the Cambridge background.

[1:20:50] Cameron McEwen: And the Cambridge background.

[1:20:52] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:20:52] Cameron McEwen: there's just,

[1:20:53] Cameron McEwen: I could go on and on and on about what he ignores.

[1:20:56] Cameron McEwen: But the amazing thing is that you have this idea of maps of meaning.

[1:21:03] Cameron McEwen: And so McLuhan would say,

[1:21:05] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:21:05] Cameron McEwen: the medium is the message.

[1:21:07] Cameron McEwen: Therefore,

[1:21:08] Cameron McEwen: you have to first define maps in order to have maps of meaning.

[1:21:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:21:14] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:21:14] Cameron McEwen: If you haven't defined the map,

[1:21:16] Cameron McEwen: then it's useless.

[1:21:19] Cameron McEwen: And so

[1:21:22] Cameron McEwen: Peterson, by not getting into this relevant background,

[1:21:30] Cameron McEwen: did not understand sort of the crucial point that he himself was making.

[1:21:36] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:21:37] Cameron McEwen: And so he made his whole career by kind of interjecting into very,

[1:21:44] Cameron McEwen: very academic discussions in psychology about experiments with rats and experiments by taking mammals and cutting their spinal column in various places and really gruesome

[1:22:01] Cameron McEwen: sort of stuff.

[1:22:02] Cameron McEwen: Interjecting in that the whole world of myth.

[1:22:07] Cameron McEwen: The whole world of

[1:22:09] Cameron McEwen: Dostoevsky and Jung and Tolstoy and all that stuff.

[1:22:13] Cameron McEwen: Not that Peterson understands these people with great acuity,

[1:22:18] Cameron McEwen: but just that these topics,

[1:22:21] Cameron McEwen: these themes,

[1:22:22] Cameron McEwen: these subjects were completely unknown in his field.

[1:22:27] Cameron McEwen: And so that he became,

[1:22:30] Cameron McEwen: let's say by 20 years ago or something,

[1:22:33] Cameron McEwen: He was the guru of...

[1:22:35] Cameron McEwen: mythology,

[1:22:37] Cameron McEwen: and of existentialism in the field of psychology.

[1:22:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:22:44] Bob Dobbs: and that's the problem.

[1:22:45] Bob Dobbs: He stayed too much in modern psychology.

[1:22:48] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't know the classical ground of,

[1:22:51] Bob Dobbs: say,

[1:22:53] Bob Dobbs: Greek literacy of our psyche,

[1:22:55] Bob Dobbs: where the psyche came from.

[1:22:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:22:58] Cameron McEwen: this is absolutely true,

[1:22:59] Cameron McEwen: and that's because,

[1:23:01] Cameron McEwen: although he talks about Plato and he talks about

[1:23:07] Cameron McEwen: Leibniz and Hegel and all this sort of stuff.

[1:23:10] Cameron McEwen: What he hasn't done is pursued any of these people deeply enough to get into the real problems that they instigate.

[1:23:23] Cameron McEwen: Because he hasn't done that,

[1:23:25] Cameron McEwen: he's able to remain at the level of the

[1:23:30] Cameron McEwen: Ewen Cameron hero,

[1:23:33] Cameron McEwen: which is just unfortunate.

[1:23:35] Bob Dobbs: And it's not going to work.

[1:23:36] Bob Dobbs: And he'll get sick again.

[1:23:39] Cameron McEwen: Maybe it'll work to make him fabulously wealthy.

[1:23:43] Cameron McEwen: He'll become like Midas.

[1:23:45] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:23:45] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:23:46] Bob Dobbs: remember,

[1:23:46] Bob Dobbs: his goal a couple years ago was to create Acadia University.

[1:23:51] Bob Dobbs: Remember that?

[1:23:52] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:23:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:23:53] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:23:53] Bob Dobbs: And in a way,

[1:23:54] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan wanted to do that.

[1:23:56] Bob Dobbs: And he'll want to do it.

[1:23:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:23:58] Bob Dobbs: So he's even putting on the McLuhan agenda or goal or somehow revitalize education.

[1:24:05] Bob Dobbs: But it's pretty hard to do that today in the media mix we're in.

[1:24:10] Bob Dobbs: That's why,

[1:24:11] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:24:11] Bob Dobbs: when you were proposing to do that,

[1:24:14] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:24:15] Bob Dobbs: several months ago,

[1:24:16] Bob Dobbs: I had to put you through a rigorous inquiry and investigation.

[1:24:21] Bob Dobbs: And what is the other one?

[1:24:24] Bob Dobbs: Inquisition about what the hell you thought you were going to do.

[1:24:30] Bob Dobbs: Because it's pretty hard to do.

[1:24:32] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:24:33] Bob Dobbs: he has,

[1:24:34] Bob Dobbs: what is he now?

[1:24:38] Cameron McEwen: He's a guy who has a YouTube talk show,

[1:24:39] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:24:39] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:24:39] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:24:40] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:24:40] Cameron McEwen: it's far more than that.

[1:24:41] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:24:42] Cameron McEwen: he's on YouTube.

[1:24:43] Cameron McEwen: He's writing books.

[1:24:45] Cameron McEwen: He's going around the world dialoguing with people.

[1:24:51] Cameron McEwen: He's got,

[1:24:52] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:24:54] Cameron McEwen: tens of millions of followers

[1:24:57] Cameron McEwen: 24 hours a day.

[1:25:00] Cameron McEwen: So he has the attention,

[1:25:01] Cameron McEwen: the wealth.

[1:25:04] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.

[1:25:04] Cameron McEwen: some of the motivations to actually accomplish some of the things that need to be accomplished.

[1:25:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:25:13] Bob Dobbs: he is doing what you would have avoided doing with the same goal,

[1:25:20] Bob Dobbs: but not to end up like him,

[1:25:22] Bob Dobbs: what he's doing.

[1:25:23] Bob Dobbs: He's kind of making a mistake.

[1:25:25] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:25:26] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[1:25:26] Cameron McEwen: We'll see.

[1:25:27] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:25:28] Bob Dobbs: but he can't be successful without the McLuhan.

[1:25:35] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:25:35] Cameron McEwen: But

[1:25:36] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan...

[1:25:37] Cameron McEwen: Himself,

[1:25:39] Cameron McEwen: after 1960,

[1:25:41] Cameron McEwen: he not only became recurrently ill,

[1:25:45] Cameron McEwen: he also became fabulously famous.

[1:25:49] Cameron McEwen: And it's not clear that his fame did him any good.

[1:25:55] Bob Dobbs: He even said,

[1:25:58] Bob Dobbs: see,

[1:25:59] Bob Dobbs: I found that in my archives.

[1:26:03] Bob Dobbs: He admitted he had failed.

[1:26:08] Bob Dobbs: I have a transcript of,

[1:26:12] Bob Dobbs: in the letters this guy sent me,

[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: of him at the University of Toronto in February 69.

[1:26:19] Bob Dobbs: So he's been a big deal,

[1:26:20] Bob Dobbs: 66,

[1:26:21] Bob Dobbs: 67,

[1:26:22] Bob Dobbs: 68.

[1:26:23] Bob Dobbs: And he's meeting with the president and

[1:26:26] Bob Dobbs: Bissell and those guys.

[1:26:27] Bob Dobbs: And they're trying to figure out what can we do with the student,

[1:26:31] Bob Dobbs: the Bob Rays and the student radicals.

[1:26:33] Bob Dobbs: And they want to do something about it and recognize it.

[1:26:36] Bob Dobbs: seriously,

[1:26:37] Bob Dobbs: but they're at their wits end about what to do.

[1:26:40] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:26:42] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says in there,

[1:26:47] Bob Dobbs: they bring up about what we could do,

[1:26:49] Bob Dobbs: which was sort of,

[1:26:51] Bob Dobbs: we need a Jordan Peterson kind of thing,

[1:26:56] Bob Dobbs: in their terms back then.

[1:26:57] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan says,

[1:26:58] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:26:58] Bob Dobbs: I already did it.

[1:27:00] Bob Dobbs: And they all start laughing,

[1:27:01] Bob Dobbs: that's right.

[1:27:02] Bob Dobbs: And he said,

[1:27:03] Bob Dobbs: it didn't work.

[1:27:07] Bob Dobbs: he's saying it it's like his inside private point of view to his buddies at the university of toronto board level uh so that's a really interesting confession that he's saying in 69 and then throughout 69 into 70 the

[1:27:21] Bob Dobbs: media jumped on him and he had to retreat i mean i talked to his brother morris in about

[1:27:26] Bob Dobbs: 70 71 and uh he says we're not going out there speaking anymore we're stick it here in Toronto.

[1:27:34] Bob Dobbs: We're just going to do it work locally.

[1:27:36] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:27:36] Bob Dobbs: he doesn't really start to go out there and be in the media again until 74 when Newsweek interviewed him.

[1:27:42] Bob Dobbs: And I remember saying,

[1:27:43] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[1:27:43] Bob Dobbs: McClellan's back.

[1:27:45] Bob Dobbs: And he says that public transportation won't work because Americans go out to be alone.

[1:27:52] Bob Dobbs: So that was his new insight,

[1:27:53] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:27:54] Bob Dobbs: that he was flogging in 73,

[1:27:57] Bob Dobbs: 74.

[1:27:57] Bob Dobbs: So he used it in his first return interview in Newsweek because he wasn't in the.

[1:28:03] Bob Dobbs: the popular media in 71,

[1:28:05] Bob Dobbs: 72,

[1:28:07] Bob Dobbs: 73.

[1:28:07] Cameron McEwen: Maybe a couple of...

[1:28:08] Bob Dobbs: What?

[1:28:10] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:28:10] Cameron McEwen: there's two things I would say to that.

[1:28:12] Cameron McEwen: I don't want to interrupt you,

[1:28:13] Cameron McEwen: though,

[1:28:13] Cameron McEwen: if you were...

[1:28:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:28:14] Bob Dobbs: let me just finish that.

[1:28:18] Bob Dobbs: But he did a conscious media ecological posture of retreating from the media fame,

[1:28:25] Bob Dobbs: and that's what he and Moore said they were doing in 71,

[1:28:28] Bob Dobbs: 72,

[1:28:29] Bob Dobbs: and he did that as much as he could.

[1:28:30] Bob Dobbs: I think he got...

[1:28:31] Bob Dobbs: But that's also the time he got into fighting this Chardin Expressway.

[1:28:36] Bob Dobbs: That was his local media colony,

[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.

[1:28:41] Bob Dobbs: So then...

[1:28:45] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:28:45] Cameron McEwen: let me just say that in 1970,

[1:28:49] Cameron McEwen: he had already been very sick,

[1:28:50] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[1:28:51] Cameron McEwen: from his brain tumor.

[1:28:53] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:28:53] Cameron McEwen: 1970,

[1:28:55] Cameron McEwen: he had a bad heart attack,

[1:28:57] Cameron McEwen: and they discovered that his arteries were all...

[1:29:00] Cameron McEwen: screwed up in his neck.

[1:29:03] Cameron McEwen: And so he was a very sick man for a couple of years there at the start of the

[1:29:11] Cameron McEwen: 70s. Yeah,

[1:29:12] Bob Dobbs: 70 and 72.

[1:29:14] Bob Dobbs: He had a crisis in 76.

[1:29:16] Bob Dobbs: He had three problems.

[1:29:18] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:29:18] Bob Dobbs: he had to be hospitalized.

[1:29:19] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:29:19] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:29:20] Cameron McEwen: just on and on and on.

[1:29:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:29:23] Cameron McEwen: But at least in the early 70s,

[1:29:25] Cameron McEwen: he was in no physical shape to really engage with the media.

[1:29:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:29:29] Bob Dobbs: and that may be a reason why he did retreat.

[1:29:31] Bob Dobbs: That's another private reason.

[1:29:33] Bob Dobbs: He didn't have the energy to do it.

[1:29:35] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:29:36] Cameron McEwen: But when you say that he then reappeared in Route 74 and his new message was Americans go out to be alone,

[1:29:46] Cameron McEwen: this is actually a new formulation of a thought that he had always had.

[1:29:54] Cameron McEwen: Because what McLuhan means by going out to be alone isn't

[1:30:00] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:30:00] Cameron McEwen: physically walking into a restaurant with your dates and you're alone or something.

[1:30:07] Cameron McEwen: What he means is the persona that's put on by people to go out into the world is not subject to correction by others.

[1:30:20] Cameron McEwen: By what?

[1:30:20] Bob Dobbs: By others,

[1:30:21] Bob Dobbs: did you say?

[1:30:22] Cameron McEwen: By others.

[1:30:22] Cameron McEwen: Other people.

[1:30:23] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:30:25] Cameron McEwen: In other words,

[1:30:26] Cameron McEwen: it's forcible.

[1:30:28] Cameron McEwen: It's something that is not related to tradition.

[1:30:32] Cameron McEwen: It's not related anti-environment.

[1:30:35] Cameron McEwen: It's

[1:30:36] Cameron McEwen: Americans go out to be alone.

[1:30:39] Cameron McEwen: That is,

[1:30:40] Cameron McEwen: they're forcing their persona on everything else,

[1:30:46] Cameron McEwen: including on their own selves.

[1:30:50] Cameron McEwen: And you could say that this is what has become of the world.

[1:30:55] Cameron McEwen: America has introduced...

[1:30:57] Cameron McEwen: that way of being a self everywhere.

[1:31:02] Cameron McEwen: And as you were saying earlier in our conversation today,

[1:31:05] Cameron McEwen: that necessarily dissolves all other cultures.

[1:31:10] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:31:11] Cameron McEwen: It's a kind of acid.

[1:31:13] Cameron McEwen: And to get back to Peterson,

[1:31:15] Cameron McEwen: the great contradiction in what he's trying to do is he's trying to produce very communitarian goals.

[1:31:24] Cameron McEwen: uh you

[1:31:26] Cameron McEwen: using precisely this acid.

[1:31:28] Cameron McEwen: And it'll never work if he doesn't see how he has to let the acid,

[1:31:39] Cameron McEwen: instead of using the acid,

[1:31:41] Cameron McEwen: he has to let the acid dissolve himself,

[1:31:45] Cameron McEwen: and then he would be able to reemerge in a way that would enable the success of his communitarian goals.

[1:31:54] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:31:54] Bob Dobbs: out.

[1:31:56] Bob Dobbs: Let me say that when you read McLuhan writings in the Borderline case about going out to be alone,

[1:32:03] Bob Dobbs: it's environmental.

[1:32:05] Bob Dobbs: America's come to this wilderness and they've got to tame it.

[1:32:10] Bob Dobbs: They're coming from Europe where the land has been tamed for thousands of years.

[1:32:15] Bob Dobbs: It's pastoral and agricultural and all that.

[1:32:17] Bob Dobbs: You don't get that in America.

[1:32:18] Bob Dobbs: So you go out to be alone is a response anti-environment.

[1:32:23] Bob Dobbs: It's hostile.

[1:32:24] Bob Dobbs: And you go home to be social,

[1:32:26] Bob Dobbs: whereas in Europe you go home to be alone.

[1:32:29] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:32:30] Bob Dobbs: I don't know why you said it didn't,

[1:32:33] Bob Dobbs: your words didn't seem to go with what I'm saying.

[1:32:36] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:32:37] Cameron McEwen: remember that when you say that nature is hostile,

[1:32:42] Cameron McEwen: that itself is a perception.

[1:32:44] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:32:44] Bob Dobbs: that's a literate perception that they bring.

[1:32:47] Bob Dobbs: But they didn't have the oral,

[1:32:49] Bob Dobbs: pastoral,

[1:32:51] Bob Dobbs: wonderful Europe that tourism serves Innis.

[1:32:54] Bob Dobbs: new wilderness.

[1:32:55] Bob Dobbs: It was exciting in a new way,

[1:32:57] Bob Dobbs: but you had to be aggressive with it.

[1:32:59] Bob Dobbs: You had to slice through the foliage.

[1:33:03] Bob Dobbs: You had to encounter the first natives and all that.

[1:33:10] Bob Dobbs: So you became an aggressive person socially outside of your home,

[1:33:15] Bob Dobbs: but you went home to be social and the warmth of the kitchen and social hearth.

[1:33:22] Bob Dobbs: He points out that the first Canadian school of painters,

[1:33:28] Bob Dobbs: the group of seven,

[1:33:30] Bob Dobbs: they make paintings with no humans in them.

[1:33:33] Bob Dobbs: They're showing the hostile anti-environment romanticizing it,

[1:33:36] Bob Dobbs: whatever.

[1:33:37] Bob Dobbs: But it's important that,

[1:33:40] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan said this,

[1:33:41] Bob Dobbs: that their art that becomes archetypal Canadian art shows the landscape that Margaret Atwood laid out.

[1:33:52] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[1:33:52] Bob Dobbs: he got his insight from Margaret Atwood in her survival book.

[1:33:59] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:33:59] Cameron McEwen: he definitely read on many occasions.

[1:34:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:34:06] Bob Dobbs: but he realized she didn't know that the pattern was people going out alone.

[1:34:10] Bob Dobbs: But the way she described

[1:34:12] Bob Dobbs: Canadian literature,

[1:34:14] Bob Dobbs: the going out to be alone was what he got out of it.

[1:34:18] Bob Dobbs: She stimulated him.

[1:34:22] Cameron McEwen: At least to my way of thinking,

[1:34:26] Cameron McEwen: this idea,

[1:34:27] Cameron McEwen: which I admit

[1:34:28] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan talked about many times,

[1:34:31] Cameron McEwen: sort of the harsh,

[1:34:33] Cameron McEwen: inhuman

[1:34:35] Cameron McEwen: Canadian environment.

[1:34:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:34:38] Cameron McEwen: To me,

[1:34:40] Cameron McEwen: there's something wrong there.

[1:34:43] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:34:43] Bob Dobbs: so let's clarify that.

[1:34:45] Bob Dobbs: That's why,

[1:34:45] Bob Dobbs: because what you were saying was something different from what I understood he would say in his Explorations.

[1:34:52] Bob Dobbs: explaining about going out to be alone,

[1:34:54] Bob Dobbs: why Americans did that.

[1:34:56] Bob Dobbs: You're saying something else about the individual imposing something?

[1:35:00] Bob Dobbs: What are you saying there?

[1:35:01] Cameron McEwen: Their persona.

[1:35:03] Cameron McEwen: I'm saying going out is what human beings do.

[1:35:08] Cameron McEwen: When they speak or when they look,

[1:35:12] Cameron McEwen: even when they hear,

[1:35:13] Cameron McEwen: when they feel,

[1:35:14] Cameron McEwen: this is a going out,

[1:35:16] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:35:17] Cameron McEwen: And the whole existence of a person is going out.

[1:35:21] Cameron McEwen: going out.

[1:35:22] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:35:22] Bob Dobbs: that's uttering.

[1:35:23] Bob Dobbs: That's uttering is outering.

[1:35:24] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:35:25] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:35:26] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:35:26] Cameron McEwen: So then the great question is,

[1:35:30] Cameron McEwen: Does that uttering take place in a communal environment,

[1:35:35] Cameron McEwen: or does it impose itself on anti-environment that is beheld as difficult and wild and barbaric because of the imposition?

[1:35:51] Cameron McEwen: If you didn't have to impose,

[1:35:54] Cameron McEwen: then anti-environment wouldn't be barbaric.

[1:35:58] Cameron McEwen: So the great question is,

[1:36:04] Cameron McEwen: where did these perceptions of anti-environment,

[1:36:10] Cameron McEwen: where did these notions of uttering come from?

[1:36:14] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan answer to that was media.

[1:36:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:36:17] Cameron McEwen: So if we are to believe what you were saying about McLuhan view,

[1:36:24] Cameron McEwen: namely,

[1:36:25] Cameron McEwen: you have a wild environment.

[1:36:29] Cameron McEwen: that's sort of a given,

[1:36:30] Cameron McEwen: and then people react to that.

[1:36:33] Bob Dobbs: Literate people.

[1:36:36] Cameron McEwen: Sorry?

[1:36:36] Bob Dobbs: Literate people react in a certain way.

[1:36:39] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[1:36:40] Cameron McEwen: correct.

[1:36:41] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:36:42] Cameron McEwen: in other words,

[1:36:43] Cameron McEwen: anti-environment,

[1:36:45] Cameron McEwen: even Innis most extreme way above the Arctic Circle,

[1:36:51] Cameron McEwen: as long as you have a society that knows what it's doing,

[1:36:58] Cameron McEwen: then anti-environment can be lived in.

[1:37:00] Cameron McEwen: And so you have the Eskimos,

[1:37:02] Cameron McEwen: and then you have the different

[1:37:07] Cameron McEwen: Athabascan peoples,

[1:37:08] Cameron McEwen: and then you have the Métis,

[1:37:10] Cameron McEwen: anti-environment can be perfectly social,

[1:37:15] Cameron McEwen: but it all depends on the media through which anti-environment is processed.

[1:37:24] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:37:25] Bob Dobbs: So the American...

[1:37:26] Bob Dobbs: The European comes to America,

[1:37:27] Bob Dobbs: he's got the literate bias,

[1:37:29] Bob Dobbs: he's not aware that his literate bias will make him perceive the outside as hostile.

[1:37:35] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:37:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:37:37] Bob Dobbs: Whereas the acoustic tactile natives,

[1:37:39] Bob Dobbs: they don't have that problem.

[1:37:41] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:37:42] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:37:43] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:37:43] Bob Dobbs: so you get this literate effect,

[1:37:47] Bob Dobbs: and it's like the literate European background is put on the moon,

[1:37:53] Bob Dobbs: which is North America.

[1:37:55] Bob Dobbs: It has a...

[1:37:56] Bob Dobbs: a whole different response.

[1:37:59] Bob Dobbs: But it does explain a lot of American bias,

[1:38:03] Bob Dobbs: as shown in

[1:38:04] Bob Dobbs: Henry James novels.

[1:38:06] Bob Dobbs: When Daisy Miller goes to Europe,

[1:38:08] Bob Dobbs: she's the American that goes out to be alone.

[1:38:10] Bob Dobbs: So she's very aggressive and upsets the aristocratic going out to be social.

[1:38:16] Bob Dobbs: And did you ever see McLuhan talking about the role of the mistress in America versus Europe?

[1:38:22] Bob Dobbs: So you know that point.

[1:38:24] Bob Dobbs: That's very interesting.

[1:38:25] Bob Dobbs: The mistress is isolated in America.

[1:38:28] Bob Dobbs: They can't be taken into the home.

[1:38:31] Bob Dobbs: They can't enjoy social life in the kitchen.

[1:38:34] Bob Dobbs: So they're always isolated in their apartment waiting for the guy to marry them so that they can be social.

[1:38:41] Bob Dobbs: But if they don't,

[1:38:42] Bob Dobbs: they have a pretty sad situation.

[1:38:44] Bob Dobbs: They're isolated.

[1:38:45] Bob Dobbs: They can only go out and be alone when they go out and no social life really.

[1:38:52] Bob Dobbs: The European mistress

[1:38:55] Bob Dobbs: has a grand time out in society,

[1:38:58] Bob Dobbs: but does not have the advantage of going home to be alone,

[1:39:01] Bob Dobbs: which the wife has in European society.

[1:39:04] Bob Dobbs: So it's a very interesting pattern that he made,

[1:39:08] Bob Dobbs: and it's enlightening.

[1:39:08] Bob Dobbs: You tell people about the difference between the American mistress and the European mistress.

[1:39:16] Bob Dobbs: The European mistress doesn't have the isolation that Americans do.

[1:39:22] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:39:23] Bob Dobbs: then

[1:39:26] Cameron McEwen: The question is,

[1:39:27] Cameron McEwen: what's being talked about in all of this?

[1:39:31] Cameron McEwen: There's the literal level.

[1:39:33] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:39:33] Cameron McEwen: there's,

[1:39:34] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:39:34] Cameron McEwen: he's talking about the mistress and he's talking about the frontier and all this sort of stuff.

[1:39:40] Cameron McEwen: But I think he's mostly talking about sense-making and its relationship with meditation.

[1:39:51] Cameron McEwen: So when the European goes home to be alone,

[1:39:55] Cameron McEwen: what does that mean?

[1:39:56] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:39:56] Cameron McEwen: aren't there people in the house?

[1:39:59] Cameron McEwen: Don't they invite people over?

[1:40:01] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:40:01] Cameron McEwen: they don't.

[1:40:02] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:40:03] Cameron McEwen: but come on,

[1:40:04] Cameron McEwen: they do.

[1:40:05] Cameron McEwen: I know,

[1:40:05] Bob Dobbs: but McLuhan took that trend.

[1:40:07] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[1:40:08] Bob Dobbs: you'll never get invited home by a European.

[1:40:10] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:40:10] Bob Dobbs: that's not true.

[1:40:11] Cameron McEwen: And no,

[1:40:13] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:40:13] Cameron McEwen: it is true in England.

[1:40:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:40:16] Bob Dobbs: in certain parts of Europe.

[1:40:19] Bob Dobbs: It's a bit of a difference from North America.

[1:40:21] Bob Dobbs: It's like he says,

[1:40:22] Bob Dobbs: he does a satire on the surface manners of life.

[1:40:25] Bob Dobbs: These are surface things.

[1:40:26] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:40:28] Cameron McEwen: But,

[1:40:30] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:40:30] Cameron McEwen: the subtopic of almost everything we've said.

[1:40:34] Cameron McEwen: in our conversation today is tactility.

[1:40:36] Cameron McEwen: So when McLuhan is talking about mistresses and going home or not going home and all that sort of stuff,

[1:40:45] Cameron McEwen: he's always talking about something else at the same time because that's what the tactile or the electric is,

[1:40:54] Cameron McEwen: is this multiplicity of levels of poles that can't be avoided.

[1:41:03] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:41:03] Cameron McEwen: And when McLuhan talked about learning stuff from his talk,

[1:41:07] Cameron McEwen: partly that was because when he was talking about something,

[1:41:11] Cameron McEwen: he was also talking about something else.

[1:41:13] Cameron McEwen: He didn't know it at the time,

[1:41:16] Cameron McEwen: but after he had talked about it,

[1:41:17] Cameron McEwen: he could see it.

[1:41:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:41:19] Bob Dobbs: he could see the effect.

[1:41:20] Bob Dobbs: I have an example of that.

[1:41:23] Bob Dobbs: When he died,

[1:41:26] Bob Dobbs: the famous guy who ran Ramparts magazine knew McLuhan in the 60s.

[1:41:31] Bob Dobbs: And he talks about some of the dinners and stuff,

[1:41:35] Bob Dobbs: conversations.

[1:41:36] Bob Dobbs: And he said one time he and maybe Howard Gossage and a bunch of them were having dinner.

[1:41:43] Bob Dobbs: And one of them started to complain about McLuhan always harping on figure and ground or the media.

[1:41:53] Bob Dobbs: And the guy in his obituary memories is saying McLuhan shocked everybody.

[1:41:58] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[1:41:59] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan responded,

[1:41:59] Bob Dobbs: he says,

[1:42:00] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:42:00] Bob Dobbs: that's what I meant when I didn't say it.

[1:42:05] Bob Dobbs: And I've used that.

[1:42:07] Bob Dobbs: When people say,

[1:42:07] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:42:08] Bob Dobbs: you're leaving out the whole advertising,

[1:42:10] Bob Dobbs: commercial,

[1:42:10] Bob Dobbs: blah,

[1:42:10] Bob Dobbs: blah.

[1:42:10] Bob Dobbs: I say,

[1:42:10] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:42:11] Bob Dobbs: that's what I meant when I didn't say it.

[1:42:13] Bob Dobbs: It's a great line,

[1:42:14] Bob Dobbs: but that's confirming what you're saying.

[1:42:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:42:21] Bob Dobbs: There were other things he's noticing that he can't talk about at the same time.

[1:42:26] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:42:27] Cameron McEwen: Or he didn't even know.

[1:42:30] Cameron McEwen: that he was talking about them.

[1:42:32] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:42:32] Bob Dobbs: so he'd get the,

[1:42:34] Bob Dobbs: like he said,

[1:42:34] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know what I thought until after I'd said it.

[1:42:37] Bob Dobbs: So he,

[1:42:38] Bob Dobbs: Cosmic Awareness of himself,

[1:42:40] Bob Dobbs: maybe they call that self-reflexivity in post-modernism.

[1:42:44] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,

[1:42:45] Cameron McEwen: but it works for me.

[1:42:47] Cameron McEwen: That's a good word.

[1:42:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:42:49] Cameron McEwen: Or a good phrase,

[1:42:50] Cameron McEwen: perhaps.

[1:42:50] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:42:51] Bob Dobbs: so,

[1:42:53] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:42:54] Bob Dobbs: there's,

[1:42:54] Bob Dobbs: so we've illustrated the multi-level point of McLuhan,

[1:42:57] Bob Dobbs: which not many,

[1:42:58] Bob Dobbs: nobody,

[1:42:59] Bob Dobbs: points out in his communication methodology.

[1:43:03] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:43:04] Bob Dobbs: to say that he's,

[1:43:06] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:43:06] Bob Dobbs: he's studying the medium as he's doing it,

[1:43:09] Bob Dobbs: that's too literal,

[1:43:11] Bob Dobbs: too mundane of what he's actually doing when he's engaging in conversation or interacting with audiences.

[1:43:19] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:43:20] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely correct.

[1:43:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:43:21] Cameron McEwen: And it's the great problem that we have here can be put in terms of uh,

[1:43:29] Cameron McEwen: of what we were saying earlier about Peterson.

[1:43:33] Cameron McEwen: Peterson hero thinks that what he does is engage uncertainty,

[1:43:42] Cameron McEwen: and in uncertainty he sees a range of possibilities,

[1:43:46] Cameron McEwen: and the hero,

[1:43:48] Cameron McEwen: unlike your citizen who's a banker or a newspaper man or something like that,

[1:43:55] Cameron McEwen: your hero engages with the different possibilities.

[1:43:59] Cameron McEwen: and then re-energizes society by coming back with a new possibility.

[1:44:04] Cameron McEwen: So what's wrong with this prescription is that the ability to see the level of possibilities and the ability to see different possibilities in that level are not given like a tree is given,

[1:44:25] Cameron McEwen: that it requires a certain...

[1:44:29] Cameron McEwen: type of perception.

[1:44:31] Cameron McEwen: But the problem is that that certain type of perception is itself a possibility.

[1:44:38] Cameron McEwen: So in order to see the level of possibilities,

[1:44:42] Cameron McEwen: you have to have already seen it.

[1:44:44] Cameron McEwen: And so there's this not-K-N-O-T in time which reconfigures the hero.

[1:44:54] Cameron McEwen: The hero cannot go into the realm of

[1:44:58] Cameron McEwen: possibilities as the hero and then sort things out there and then come back.

[1:45:03] Cameron McEwen: The hero has to lose herself completely in order to have these perceptions of possibility.

[1:45:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:45:15] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:45:15] Bob Dobbs: Carry on.

[1:45:16] Bob Dobbs: I'm looking up a quote,

[1:45:16] Bob Dobbs: but carry on.

[1:45:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:45:18] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:45:18] Cameron McEwen: So in what we're talking about,

[1:45:23] Cameron McEwen: what's interesting about McLuhan trying to...

[1:45:28] Cameron McEwen: engage people about multi-levels,

[1:45:32] Cameron McEwen: as you were just saying,

[1:45:33] Cameron McEwen: is that these multi-levels cannot be pointed out,

[1:45:38] Cameron McEwen: like there's a refrigerator over there,

[1:45:41] Cameron McEwen: and over there,

[1:45:42] Cameron McEwen: there's a dog.

[1:45:43] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:45:45] Cameron McEwen: The there's a kind of somersault that is required to engage with these things.

[1:45:53] Cameron McEwen: And absent the somersault,

[1:45:55] Cameron McEwen: then everything is going to be literal.

[1:45:59] Cameron McEwen: And so the great riddle that now faces the world is how do we get out of the literal into the world of potentiality without.

[1:46:13] Cameron McEwen: destroying ourselves.

[1:46:15] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:46:15] Bob Dobbs: So I go to this quote when you're talking about,

[1:46:21] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:46:22] Bob Dobbs: I'll read the quote and it'll remind me of what you were saying.

[1:46:26] Bob Dobbs: This is Cliché to archetype,

[1:46:28] Bob Dobbs: page 163.

[1:46:30] Bob Dobbs: Like Alice,

[1:46:30] Bob Dobbs: Joyce pushed all the way through the narcissist's looking glass.

[1:46:35] Bob Dobbs: That's the hero.

[1:46:37] Bob Dobbs: He moved from the private Stephen Dedalus to the Finnegans Wake corporate image.

[1:46:41] Bob Dobbs: The mirror,

[1:46:42] Bob Dobbs: like the mind,

[1:46:43] Bob Dobbs: by taking in and feeding back the same image,

[1:46:45] Bob Dobbs: becomes a wheel,

[1:46:46] Bob Dobbs: a cycle,

[1:46:47] Bob Dobbs: able to retrieve all experience.

[1:46:49] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:46:50] Bob Dobbs: Ulysses is about the hero,

[1:46:52] Bob Dobbs: Joyce's Ulysses,

[1:46:53] Bob Dobbs: and then Finnegans Wake is the dissolved

[1:46:56] Bob Dobbs: Humphrey Hillman Earwaker,

[1:46:58] Bob Dobbs: the dissolved hero.

[1:47:01] Cameron McEwen: Although Ulysses,

[1:47:02] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[1:47:02] Cameron McEwen: has bloom,

[1:47:03] Cameron McEwen: and so it's kind of the dialogue between the hero and the anti-hero.

[1:47:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:47:10] Bob Dobbs: but the point is...

[1:47:11] Bob Dobbs: still dealing with the individual,

[1:47:12] Bob Dobbs: the Gutenberg individual,

[1:47:15] Bob Dobbs: the tribal,

[1:47:16] Bob Dobbs: the dissolved situation you were describing there that Peterson hasn't gone through yet is the meaning of Finnegans Wake or the demonstration of it.

[1:47:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:47:27] Bob Dobbs: So I just wanted to mention that great quote,

[1:47:30] Bob Dobbs: how that fits here.

[1:47:34] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.

[1:47:36] Bob Dobbs: Where are we?

[1:47:38] Bob Dobbs: How are we doing?

[1:47:41] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:47:41] Cameron McEwen: we were just about to get into the TechBody's interview with anybody that gives short questions and answers.

[1:47:52] Cameron McEwen: It's basically the end of the book.

[1:47:55] Cameron McEwen: But before we get into that,

[1:47:57] Cameron McEwen: read that quotation from Cliché to archetype one more time.

[1:48:01] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:48:01] Cameron McEwen: Because that is,

[1:48:03] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:48:03] Cameron McEwen: you're absolutely right.

[1:48:05] Cameron McEwen: That is such an important quote.

[1:48:09] Cameron McEwen: It can hardly be overemphasized.

[1:48:12] Bob Dobbs: All right,

[1:48:13] Bob Dobbs: and I'll read the second one from the same page.

[1:48:15] Bob Dobbs: This is 163 from Cliché to archetype.

[1:48:20] Bob Dobbs: Like Alice,

[1:48:22] Bob Dobbs: or like Lewis Carroll,

[1:48:23] Bob Dobbs: like Alice,

[1:48:24] Bob Dobbs: Joyce pushed all the way through the narcissist's looking glass.

[1:48:29] Bob Dobbs: He moved from the private Stephen Dedalus to the Finnegans Wake corporate image.

[1:48:34] Bob Dobbs: The mirror liked the mind by taking in and feeding back the same image.

[1:48:38] Bob Dobbs: becomes a wheel,

[1:48:39] Bob Dobbs: a cycle,

[1:48:41] Bob Dobbs: able to retrieve all experience.

[1:48:44] Bob Dobbs: Then later on that page,

[1:48:47] Bob Dobbs: he says,

[1:48:47] Bob Dobbs: the whole of Finnegans Wake,

[1:48:49] Bob Dobbs: including the title,

[1:48:50] Bob Dobbs: is paradox.

[1:48:53] Bob Dobbs: Based on what Joyce considered man's greatest invention,

[1:48:56] Bob Dobbs: the mirror of language,

[1:48:58] Bob Dobbs: the magazine wall of memory and all human residue.

[1:49:02] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:49:04] Bob Dobbs: 163 for those...

[1:49:11] Bob Dobbs: Those important quotes.

[1:49:14] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:49:14] Bob Dobbs: so we go back to,

[1:49:16] Bob Dobbs: but I'm wondering how on the time,

[1:49:18] Bob Dobbs: we've done two hours.

[1:49:21] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:49:22] Bob Dobbs: Is it,

[1:49:22] Bob Dobbs: so it is

[1:49:23] Bob Dobbs: 7.10, you can go till 7.30,

[1:49:26] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:49:27] Cameron McEwen: Let's say,

[1:49:27] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[1:49:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:49:29] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:49:29] Bob Dobbs: so

[1:49:31] Bob Dobbs: I think this was a round,

[1:49:34] Bob Dobbs: long Explorations of the tech body talking about itself.

[1:49:39] Bob Dobbs: Or I am talking about the tech body where,

[1:49:41] Bob Dobbs: look at this,

[1:49:42] Bob Dobbs: the tech body captured the printing press.

[1:49:44] Bob Dobbs: Print type,

[1:49:45] Bob Dobbs: type,

[1:49:46] Bob Dobbs: printing type,

[1:49:47] Bob Dobbs: print type.

[1:49:48] Bob Dobbs: There's no printing press anymore.

[1:49:50] Bob Dobbs: There are no presses.

[1:49:51] Bob Dobbs: Then he quotes,

[1:49:52] Bob Dobbs: stop the presses.

[1:49:53] Bob Dobbs: There are no presses anymore.

[1:49:55] Bob Dobbs: The tech body took them all over.

[1:49:57] Bob Dobbs: It obfuscated it.

[1:49:58] Bob Dobbs: It's like a rotary phone.

[1:50:00] Bob Dobbs: They got captured.

[1:50:01] Bob Dobbs: They've disappeared and been captured by the tech body.

[1:50:04] Bob Dobbs: The reason you don't see it is because of the tech body.

[1:50:08] Bob Dobbs: So the tech body has everyone.

[1:50:10] Bob Dobbs: It's been taken over.

[1:50:12] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:50:12] Bob Dobbs: that implies the tech body's been taken over in the grammar,

[1:50:16] Bob Dobbs: but the world has been taken over.

[1:50:17] Bob Dobbs: The tech body decides.

[1:50:21] Cameron McEwen: I think that sentence means it's all been taken over.

[1:50:25] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:50:26] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:50:27] Bob Dobbs: And Ian is always explaining how much the tech body's taken over.

[1:50:30] Bob Dobbs: This documentary,

[1:50:31] Bob Dobbs: The Social Dilemma,

[1:50:33] Bob Dobbs: did you see that?

[1:50:34] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:50:35] Cameron McEwen: You've referred to it.

[1:50:36] Cameron McEwen: several times,

[1:50:37] Cameron McEwen: so maybe I should see it one day.

[1:50:39] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:50:39] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:50:39] Bob Dobbs: because the hero is a media ecologist.

[1:50:42] Bob Dobbs: Postman media ecologist and what he's trying to do.

[1:50:45] Bob Dobbs: And he even got funding to set up an institute to do what you wanted to do.

[1:50:50] Bob Dobbs: He got there first because he was part of this Silicon Valley world.

[1:50:58] Bob Dobbs: So this movie is very good to show the figure of what they're missing.

[1:51:02] Bob Dobbs: It's like another version of

[1:51:03] Bob Dobbs: Peterson.

[1:51:05] Bob Dobbs: They get very close and they try to say what people fantasize.

[1:51:13] Bob Dobbs: of technology taking us over.

[1:51:15] Bob Dobbs: What we're worried is going to happen and they'll replace and dump humans.

[1:51:20] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:51:21] Bob Dobbs: this guy,

[1:51:22] Bob Dobbs: that that's already happened.

[1:51:24] Bob Dobbs: And I agree.

[1:51:24] Bob Dobbs: It's further along than people realize.

[1:51:29] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[1:51:30] Bob Dobbs: And you're saying that too.

[1:51:32] Bob Dobbs: So it's been taken over.

[1:51:33] Bob Dobbs: The tech body decides.

[1:51:34] Bob Dobbs: So anybody,

[1:51:36] Bob Dobbs: the little man says,

[1:51:37] Bob Dobbs: hey,

[1:51:37] Bob Dobbs: tech body,

[1:51:38] Bob Dobbs: is the tech body a physical machine?

[1:51:41] Bob Dobbs: Tech body says no.

[1:51:43] Bob Dobbs: Anybody,

[1:51:44] Bob Dobbs: is the tech body a construct of somebody's mind?

[1:51:47] Bob Dobbs: Tech body says,

[1:51:48] Bob Dobbs: we don't know quite what you mean,

[1:51:50] Bob Dobbs: but the answer would be yes.

[1:51:52] Bob Dobbs: If you can picture your words as something over the game,

[1:51:56] Bob Dobbs: watching the game,

[1:51:57] Bob Dobbs: controlling the game,

[1:51:59] Bob Dobbs: deciding what moves are next for individual players that should have their own free will,

[1:52:03] Bob Dobbs: but they don't.

[1:52:04] Bob Dobbs: That's quite a sentence.

[1:52:07] Bob Dobbs: That's kind of knowing through words,

[1:52:10] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan humanist aspect.

[1:52:12] Bob Dobbs: If you have the right words,

[1:52:14] Bob Dobbs: you can control it.

[1:52:15] Bob Dobbs: And so

[1:52:16] Bob Dobbs: Peterson doesn't have the right words.

[1:52:19] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan felt he had the right words,

[1:52:20] Bob Dobbs: and it was almost a science,

[1:52:22] Bob Dobbs: his words.

[1:52:24] Bob Dobbs: So the tech bodies agree with McLuhan.

[1:52:26] Bob Dobbs: We don't quite know what you mean,

[1:52:29] Bob Dobbs: us as a construct of somebody's mind.

[1:52:31] Bob Dobbs: But the answer would be yes,

[1:52:32] Bob Dobbs: if you can picture your words as something over the game,

[1:52:35] Bob Dobbs: watching the game.

[1:52:37] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[1:52:38] Bob Dobbs: In understanding media,

[1:52:39] Bob Dobbs: the games are the only media that has the same definition as the title,

[1:52:43] Bob Dobbs: Extensions of Man.

[1:52:44] Bob Dobbs: So media are games.

[1:52:46] Bob Dobbs: So your words are something over the game,

[1:52:49] Bob Dobbs: watching the game,

[1:52:49] Bob Dobbs: controlling the game,

[1:52:51] Bob Dobbs: deciding what moves are next for individual players that should have their own free will,

[1:52:55] Bob Dobbs: but they don't,

[1:52:56] Bob Dobbs: which reminds me that this individual going out to be alone thing,

[1:53:03] Bob Dobbs: one time,

[1:53:04] Bob Dobbs: and I quote it in the essay here,

[1:53:06] Bob Dobbs: Um,

[1:53:07] Bob Dobbs: He's in California about 1970,

[1:53:10] Bob Dobbs: and he says that the private individual is something from way back,

[1:53:19] Bob Dobbs: before tribalism,

[1:53:20] Bob Dobbs: before caveman,

[1:53:21] Bob Dobbs: so to speak,

[1:53:22] Bob Dobbs: or

[1:53:22] Bob Dobbs: Neanderthal caveman was his private individual,

[1:53:25] Bob Dobbs: and he says he got retrieved by the Gutenberg world.

[1:53:28] Bob Dobbs: He never says that anywhere else.

[1:53:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:53:31] Cameron McEwen: that's a very weird thing.

[1:53:34] Cameron McEwen: I don't know what to make of that myself.

[1:53:37] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:53:37] Bob Dobbs: I got a lot to say about that,

[1:53:39] Bob Dobbs: but you remember me bringing up that quote before?

[1:53:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:53:43] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:53:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:53:45] Cameron McEwen: Well.

[1:53:45] Cameron McEwen: I didn't understand it then,

[1:53:46] Cameron McEwen: and I don't understand it now.

[1:53:48] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:53:49] Bob Dobbs: Imagine before there was socialization,

[1:53:52] Bob Dobbs: whether humans were cavemen or half animal or something,

[1:53:56] Bob Dobbs: but let's say they're not socialized in any way.

[1:53:59] Bob Dobbs: They can't speak.

[1:54:00] Bob Dobbs: They live in the world of verbum.

[1:54:02] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan tetrad on verbum is pretty good.

[1:54:05] Bob Dobbs: It reminds me of Zappa's movie script he had in the 60s,

[1:54:09] Bob Dobbs: Captain Deepfart meets the grunt people.

[1:54:11] Bob Dobbs: So you got this grunting going on.

[1:54:13] Bob Dobbs: They don't have language yet.

[1:54:15] Bob Dobbs: Remember that movie of early men that Trudeau liked and promoted back about 1980?

[1:54:23] Bob Dobbs: Quest for Fire.

[1:54:25] Bob Dobbs: Ever see that?

[1:54:26] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:54:27] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:54:28] Bob Dobbs: They have some interesting scenes of early humans.

[1:54:31] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:54:32] Bob Dobbs: So early humans.

[1:54:36] Bob Dobbs: are not socialized.

[1:54:37] Bob Dobbs: They're by themselves wandering around maybe with one other person.

[1:54:42] Bob Dobbs: It's that.

[1:54:43] Bob Dobbs: That is the ancient isolation that we've arrived at today.

[1:54:49] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:54:49] Cameron McEwen: but there was,

[1:54:50] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:54:51] Cameron McEwen: if we're talking in terms of fact,

[1:54:54] Cameron McEwen: there never was such a quote-unquote human,

[1:54:58] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:54:59] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:55:00] Bob Dobbs: maybe there was,

[1:55:01] Bob Dobbs: but in normal knowledge,

[1:55:02] Bob Dobbs: no.

[1:55:03] Bob Dobbs: But see,

[1:55:03] Bob Dobbs: that's why you don't understand it.

[1:55:04] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:55:05] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan dared think,

[1:55:06] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:55:06] Bob Dobbs: maybe before we were socialized,

[1:55:07] Bob Dobbs: before there was speech,

[1:55:10] Bob Dobbs: there was these hypersensitive individuals,

[1:55:12] Bob Dobbs: sort of like Sasquatches or those kind of characters.

[1:55:18] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan often said that it's language that defines humans.

[1:55:24] Cameron McEwen: There's no humans before language,

[1:55:26] Cameron McEwen: etc.

[1:55:26] Cameron McEwen: But also you have to think about how humans get born.

[1:55:30] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:55:31] Cameron McEwen: you do need a man and a woman to do that.

[1:55:36] Cameron McEwen: And then the child can't be just left in a pile of shit somewhere.

[1:55:40] Cameron McEwen: The child needs to be cared for.

[1:55:43] Cameron McEwen: So...

[1:55:45] Cameron McEwen: Humans,

[1:55:45] Cameron McEwen: aside from language and aside from socialization,

[1:55:50] Cameron McEwen: are not thinkable.

[1:55:52] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:55:53] Bob Dobbs: so now that's where ION comes in.

[1:55:54] Bob Dobbs: ION says humans aren't born.

[1:55:57] Bob Dobbs: They're eternal.

[1:55:58] Bob Dobbs: They never showed,

[1:56:00] Bob Dobbs: they never had a beginning point.

[1:56:03] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:56:04] Bob Dobbs: now granted,

[1:56:05] Bob Dobbs: who's going to believe that?

[1:56:05] Bob Dobbs: Nobody.

[1:56:06] Bob Dobbs: But ION says,

[1:56:07] Bob Dobbs: and so

[1:56:09] Bob Dobbs: I thought about that idea.

[1:56:11] Bob Dobbs: We exist before.

[1:56:13] Bob Dobbs: The whole thing of being birthed is an illusion.

[1:56:17] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:56:18] Bob Dobbs: ION says there's no such thing as reincarnation.

[1:56:21] Bob Dobbs: You're already coronated and you don't get re-coronated.

[1:56:26] Bob Dobbs: So that weird scenario that ION talks about helped me project into McLuhan idea that there was a private individual or an eternal individual at the very beginning.

[1:56:39] Bob Dobbs: So that's...

[1:56:40] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:56:41] Cameron McEwen: there's a big difference between humans having at least an aspect of themselves that's eternal and imagining that there's

[1:56:58] Cameron McEwen: quote-unquote humans wandering around in some part of Africa that didn't get born and didn't have language.

[1:57:08] Bob Dobbs: I know it sounds a little preposterous,

[1:57:10] Bob Dobbs: but

[1:57:13] Bob Dobbs: I'm not afraid to include it as a scenario,

[1:57:18] Bob Dobbs: especially when I get an iON it.

[1:57:20] Bob Dobbs: Wax is eloquent.

[1:57:21] Bob Dobbs: A lot of details about it.

[1:57:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:57:24] Cameron McEwen: This is,

[1:57:25] Cameron McEwen: in my opinion,

[1:57:27] Cameron McEwen: this is the great thing about your mind,

[1:57:31] Cameron McEwen: is that you're not,

[1:57:33] Cameron McEwen: number one,

[1:57:34] Cameron McEwen: you're not afraid to say things.

[1:57:36] Cameron McEwen: And number two,

[1:57:37] Cameron McEwen: the things that you say very often come across as ridiculous.

[1:57:46] Cameron McEwen: It's vague.

[1:57:48] Cameron McEwen: But if you think about what you're saying,

[1:57:54] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:57:54] Cameron McEwen: if other people on hearing you think about it and really think about it,

[1:58:00] Cameron McEwen: then very often it's profound.

[1:58:03] Cameron McEwen: As we were saying earlier with McLuhan,

[1:58:05] Cameron McEwen: It doesn't have anything to do with you or them.

[1:58:12] Bob Dobbs: Say it again.

[1:58:12] Bob Dobbs: It doesn't have anything to do with what?

[1:58:15] Cameron McEwen: With what you're intending to say.

[1:58:17] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:58:18] Cameron McEwen: And that's because intention is localized to one or maybe two levels or something.

[1:58:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:58:27] Cameron McEwen: People speak profoundly.

[1:58:29] Cameron McEwen: They're speaking in multi-levels.

[1:58:32] Cameron McEwen: And in order to...

[1:58:34] Cameron McEwen: think about what they're saying is you have to understand those levels.

[1:58:38] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:58:39] Cameron McEwen: I'm good at that.

[1:58:42] Bob Dobbs: You're very good at that.

[1:58:46] Cameron McEwen: And amongst the things that are in the levels below the literal level of what you're saying is that there's a very close attention to

[1:58:58] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and to other people so that...

[1:59:03] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[1:59:04] Cameron McEwen: when you quote a cliché to archetype,

[1:59:07] Cameron McEwen: as you did a few minutes ago from

[1:59:09] Cameron McEwen: 163, people should appreciate that this is not something that,

[1:59:21] Cameron McEwen: quote-unquote,

[1:59:22] Cameron McEwen: normal people can do.

[1:59:25] Cameron McEwen: It takes an ordinary mind to be able to do that.

[1:59:31] Bob Dobbs: Good memory.

[1:59:33] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:59:34] Cameron McEwen: more than that.

[1:59:35] Cameron McEwen: It's more than that.

[1:59:36] Cameron McEwen: Because you need to be able,

[1:59:38] Cameron McEwen: it's not just a memory,

[1:59:40] Cameron McEwen: it's a question of knowing which passages are particularly pregnant,

[1:59:46] Cameron McEwen: understanding the relationship to other passages,

[1:59:50] Cameron McEwen: and being able to reproduce these things in a fashion that demands thought.

[1:59:59] Cameron McEwen: Those are all qualities beyond memory.

[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: Very good.

[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: it's like knowing when to retrieve the thing at the right time and figure and ground resonance.

[2:00:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:00:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:00:11] Bob Dobbs: I find that's generally how my mind works.

[2:00:17] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn Dean does it in medicine.

[2:00:19] Bob Dobbs: Someone will ask a question she hasn't thought about in medical terms for decades,

[2:00:23] Bob Dobbs: but the answer pops up right away in her mind,

[2:00:27] Bob Dobbs: and she hadn't thought of that answer in a long time.

[2:00:29] Bob Dobbs: I seem to be able to do that with McLuhan.

[2:00:32] Bob Dobbs: I'm not thinking about quotes,

[2:00:35] Bob Dobbs: not engaging it,

[2:00:36] Bob Dobbs: and then talking to you,

[2:00:38] Bob Dobbs: the quotes pop into my mind.

[2:00:41] Bob Dobbs: Because they become part of me,

[2:00:42] Bob Dobbs: but I'm not thinking about them all the time.

[2:00:44] Bob Dobbs: But they're ready to be used,

[2:00:47] Bob Dobbs: which would be the rhetorical ideal.

[2:00:51] Bob Dobbs: The rhetorician has that ability.

[2:00:56] Bob Dobbs: So I'm glad you appreciate that.

[2:00:59] Bob Dobbs: It's rare for someone not to...

[2:01:02] Bob Dobbs: Flip out about it.

[2:01:04] Bob Dobbs: Tell me to go home.

[2:01:06] Bob Dobbs: Go home and be alone again.

[2:01:13] Bob Dobbs: So that's quite a paragraph there.

[2:01:16] Bob Dobbs: And then so he's saying the players,

[2:01:19] Bob Dobbs: individual players,

[2:01:20] Bob Dobbs: that should have their own free will,

[2:01:21] Bob Dobbs: but they don't.

[2:01:22] Bob Dobbs: Then anybody says,

[2:01:23] Bob Dobbs: that implies there's some godlike.

[2:01:26] Bob Dobbs: That's why he goes,

[2:01:26] Bob Dobbs: power.

[2:01:28] Bob Dobbs: And

[2:01:29] Bob Dobbs: I go,

[2:01:29] Bob Dobbs: something that is.

[2:01:31] Bob Dobbs: or anybody does,

[2:01:32] Bob Dobbs: something that is,

[2:01:33] Bob Dobbs: and then the tech body says power again,

[2:01:36] Bob Dobbs: then I go the tech body.

[2:01:38] Bob Dobbs: So I start to say the tech body is power.

[2:01:42] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.

[2:01:44] Bob Dobbs: I say...

[2:01:44] Cameron McEwen: That's what the tech body goes on to say immediately.

[2:01:48] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:01:48] Bob Dobbs: That implies there's some godlike...

[2:01:50] Bob Dobbs: It says,

[2:01:52] Bob Dobbs: it,

[2:01:52] Bob Dobbs: power,

[2:01:53] Bob Dobbs: us.

[2:01:54] Bob Dobbs: And I go,

[2:01:54] Bob Dobbs: that's something like the tech body.

[2:01:57] Bob Dobbs: So we're converged,

[2:01:58] Bob Dobbs: conflating there.

[2:02:00] Bob Dobbs: Then,

[2:02:00] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[2:02:00] Bob Dobbs: then you mean the next paragraph where he goes,

[2:02:02] Bob Dobbs: power.

[2:02:03] Bob Dobbs: It's your power.

[2:02:04] Bob Dobbs: It's your human power.

[2:02:06] Bob Dobbs: That's a good phrase.

[2:02:07] Bob Dobbs: That's extensions of humans.

[2:02:08] Bob Dobbs: All technology are extensions of the human powers.

[2:02:11] Bob Dobbs: It's your power that you separated yourself from because you didn't use what Marshall McLuhan said,

[2:02:16] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[2:02:17] Bob Dobbs: you're ridiculous,

[2:02:17] Bob Dobbs: and you don't know what you're doing,

[2:02:19] Bob Dobbs: and you're doing it anyway,

[2:02:20] Bob Dobbs: and you think you're watching TV,

[2:02:22] Bob Dobbs: but the TV's watching you,

[2:02:23] Bob Dobbs: unquote.

[2:02:27] Cameron McEwen: One thing that

[2:02:28] Cameron McEwen: I find particularly interesting in this passage here is that in

[2:02:35] Cameron McEwen: Nietzsche later career,

[2:02:41] Cameron McEwen: he came to see everything in terms of the will to power.

[2:02:44] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:02:45] Cameron McEwen: And our conversation has often gone to

[2:02:52] Cameron McEwen: Nietzsche nihilism and to how that nihilism was a kind of cul-de-sac that the modern world has become ensnared in.

[2:03:05] Cameron McEwen: And part of that whole context,

[2:03:08] Cameron McEwen: that whole picture,

[2:03:11] Cameron McEwen: is power.

[2:03:13] Cameron McEwen: It's the idea that it's very hard to get around the notion that everything is Explorations power.

[2:03:25] Cameron McEwen: Expression that is intended to shape,

[2:03:32] Cameron McEwen: not expression that is part of some sort of dialogue.

[2:03:36] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[2:03:38] Bob Dobbs: right.

[2:03:38] Bob Dobbs: So that's being numb.

[2:03:41] Bob Dobbs: You have your powers and you're unaware of your powers and how it's shaping you.

[2:03:46] Bob Dobbs: You need to have the tactile conversation to become aware of the misuse of your powers.

[2:03:51] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:03:52] Bob Dobbs: Something like that.

[2:03:53] Cameron McEwen: The stunting of your powers.

[2:03:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:03:56] Bob Dobbs: So I'm there trying to keep up with the tech body,

[2:03:59] Bob Dobbs: so I go,

[2:03:59] Bob Dobbs: so that's...

[2:04:01] Bob Dobbs: And the tech body won't let me finish my sentence.

[2:04:02] Bob Dobbs: It goes,

[2:04:03] Bob Dobbs: now,

[2:04:04] Bob Dobbs: we're going to decide what you watch.

[2:04:06] Bob Dobbs: They go,

[2:04:06] Bob Dobbs: exactly what you have said,

[2:04:07] Bob Dobbs: that we've given up our power to do those things.

[2:04:09] Bob Dobbs: Tech body goes,

[2:04:10] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[2:04:11] Bob Dobbs: And I finish the sentence.

[2:04:13] Bob Dobbs: Do those things to something else.

[2:04:15] Bob Dobbs: Tech body says,

[2:04:16] Bob Dobbs: correct.

[2:04:17] Bob Dobbs: Then I go,

[2:04:18] Bob Dobbs: so that's something else.

[2:04:19] Bob Dobbs: Tech body interrupts now.

[2:04:20] Bob Dobbs: The powerful humans are left to drive this new tech body that's very powerful.

[2:04:23] Bob Dobbs: Very powerful.

[2:04:26] Bob Dobbs: And then I go,

[2:04:27] Bob Dobbs: if it's not a physical machine,

[2:04:29] Bob Dobbs: what is it?

[2:04:30] Bob Dobbs: Power.

[2:04:31] Bob Dobbs: And who is wielding the power if we aren't?

[2:04:34] Bob Dobbs: Tech body,

[2:04:34] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[2:04:35] Bob Dobbs: The humans sacrifice or separate themselves from their power because they wanted something special.

[2:04:39] Bob Dobbs: smarter than they to then they they want something smarter than they to run the ship and so they got it they asked for it and they got it so the humans created the tech body and they continue now artificial intelligence which isn't very artificial anymore makes its own artificial intelligence it can run every potential outcome it takes all probability out of the conversation right

[2:05:03] Cameron McEwen: so that's I noticed somebody something smarter than they to run the ship

[2:05:08] Cameron McEwen: What runs the ship is the captain,

[2:05:11] Cameron McEwen: the co-anesthetic,

[2:05:13] Cameron McEwen: and so that's cybernetics.

[2:05:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:05:16] Cameron McEwen: And then taking probability out of the conversation is sort of the motor of cybernetics.

[2:05:24] Cameron McEwen: So cybernetics isn't mentioned in the paragraph literally,

[2:05:29] Cameron McEwen: but it's all about cybernetics.

[2:05:31] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:05:32] Bob Dobbs: And the tech body enhances,

[2:05:33] Bob Dobbs: extends,

[2:05:34] Bob Dobbs: squares that.

[2:05:36] Bob Dobbs: And it's now taking over.

[2:05:38] Bob Dobbs: We're losing whatever power we could have taken advantage of.

[2:05:44] Bob Dobbs: Basically,

[2:05:44] Bob Dobbs: the tech body,

[2:05:46] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:05:46] Bob Dobbs: humans are extending themselves and getting incredible power just with their smartphones,

[2:05:57] Bob Dobbs: but they're totally ridiculous in relation to it.

[2:06:00] Bob Dobbs: They don't understand the implications of it,

[2:06:02] Bob Dobbs: what happens to tradition and everything.

[2:06:07] Bob Dobbs: So because humans are misusing,

[2:06:09] Bob Dobbs: unaware of the power that's been dumped on them,

[2:06:11] Bob Dobbs: by default,

[2:06:12] Bob Dobbs: with the new extensions,

[2:06:15] Bob Dobbs: they become giants and don't realize it,

[2:06:17] Bob Dobbs: the tech body hijacks it and takes it over.

[2:06:20] Bob Dobbs: And that's what the tech body ion says.

[2:06:24] Bob Dobbs: It wants us to get more and more powerful and be unaware that we have become more powerful,

[2:06:29] Bob Dobbs: and then it sucks it away from us.

[2:06:31] Bob Dobbs: That's what he's trying to say here.

[2:06:33] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[2:06:33] Bob Dobbs: I know that from later conversations.

[2:06:35] Bob Dobbs: But I didn't know what was being said here too much as it first happened,

[2:06:40] Bob Dobbs: because this is the first talk with the tech body.

[2:06:43] Bob Dobbs: So let's leave it at that.

[2:06:44] Bob Dobbs: It's complex.

[2:06:45] Bob Dobbs: We need to take a break,

[2:06:46] Bob Dobbs: think about what the hell we've learned here,

[2:06:49] Bob Dobbs: what we've done to ourselves,

[2:06:51] Bob Dobbs: and come back next week.

[2:06:53] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:06:54] Cameron McEwen: And one question that we've mentioned in the past,

[2:06:58] Cameron McEwen: and which I think this whole section raises again,

[2:07:04] Cameron McEwen: is that we need to understand how the Anthropomorphic Physical relates to this.

[2:07:17] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:07:18] Cameron McEwen: And how it's the same or different.

[2:07:22] Cameron McEwen: And maybe that's...

[2:07:23] Cameron McEwen: something that we can discuss next week when we come to the end of this interview.

[2:07:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:07:30] Bob Dobbs: we do the interview,

[2:07:31] Bob Dobbs: finish the interview,

[2:07:32] Bob Dobbs: then do that,

[2:07:33] Bob Dobbs: the AP.

[2:07:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:07:34] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[2:07:35] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:07:35] Bob Dobbs: good.

[2:07:36] Bob Dobbs: I'll make a note on that.

[2:07:37] Bob Dobbs: And we'll also do the technique of suspended judgment that you wanted to do today.

[2:07:44] Bob Dobbs: So we can bring that up because I just wanted to get more of this interview done.

[2:07:48] Bob Dobbs: I'm happy with what we've got done.

[2:07:50] Bob Dobbs: We've got a good chunk of it.

[2:07:52] Bob Dobbs: And then so we can do the technique of suspended judgment.

[2:07:56] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:07:57] Bob Dobbs: Good.

[2:07:58] Bob Dobbs: That's very good.

[2:07:59] Bob Dobbs: Thanks a lot,

[2:08:00] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron.

[2:08:01] Bob Dobbs: Thank you,

[2:08:01] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[2:08:02] Bob Dobbs: Glad you're feeling better.

[2:08:03] Cameron McEwen: Good to talk to you.

[2:08:05] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:08:05] Bob Dobbs: Very good.

[2:08:06] Cameron McEwen: Appreciate it.

[2:08:07] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[2:08:07] Bob Dobbs: Talk to you later.

[2:08:08] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[2:08:09] Cameron McEwen: Bye-bye.

[2:08:09] Bob Dobbs: Bye.

[2:08:10] Bob Dobbs: Bye.