Dialogue 31 — Transcript

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs are here with episode number 31,

[00:08] Bob Dobbs: and we've done the end of my long pamphlet on

[00:14] Bob Dobbs: Trump and McLuhan,

[00:16] Bob Dobbs: and now we're starting at the beginning.

[00:18] Bob Dobbs: So we're on page,

[00:20] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,

[00:21] Bob Dobbs: seven or eight or nine.

[00:24] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron has an opening statement to make.

[00:28] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[00:28] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if it's a statement,

[00:29] Cameron McEwen: but...

[00:31] Cameron McEwen: I just want to bring up what has been brought up in the past,

[00:34] Cameron McEwen: but hasn't been discussed much.

[00:36] Cameron McEwen: And that is that there's an interesting overlap between how you want to approach Trump how you want to approach McLuhan.

[00:46] Cameron McEwen: So your idea in the pamphlet is that you have things that you want to reveal in and through

[00:57] Cameron McEwen: Trump the way you want to do it is...

[01:00] Cameron McEwen: by revealing things in and through McLuhan.

[01:03] Cameron McEwen: And so then the question comes up,

[01:06] Cameron McEwen: well,

[01:08] Cameron McEwen: how much are the two people conscious of what you want to develop through them?

[01:16] Cameron McEwen: Presumably McLuhan was more conscious Trump,

[01:21] Cameron McEwen: but

[01:21] Cameron McEwen: I think your approach to McLuhan is that there's not only interesting new stuff to be found in McLuhan,

[01:29] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,

[01:30] Cameron McEwen: there's also stuff that McLuhan was doing that McLuhan himself either didn't develop or didn't even know was there.

[01:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[01:41] Cameron McEwen: And so one of the things that I find interesting in you is that you knew McLuhan,

[01:52] Cameron McEwen: spent a lot of time with McLuhan,

[01:54] Cameron McEwen: and you have this kind of interesting perspective that in the depths of McLuhan.

[02:00] Cameron McEwen: there are undiscovered depths.

[02:04] Cameron McEwen: And I see one of my roles in our conversation here as trying to bring you to places where you can comment on that.

[02:18] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[02:18] Cameron McEwen: So,

[02:19] Cameron McEwen: for example...

[02:19] Bob Dobbs: You're doing great so far in the first 30 episodes.

[02:24] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[02:25] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[02:25] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.

[02:27] Cameron McEwen: If you're happy with...

[02:29] Cameron McEwen: what we're doing,

[02:30] Cameron McEwen: then

[02:31] Cameron McEwen: I'm happy with what we're doing.

[02:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[02:35] Cameron McEwen: So in interrogating what's going on here,

[02:43] Cameron McEwen: one of the things that I noticed,

[02:45] Cameron McEwen: and

[02:46] Cameron McEwen: I don't even know what page this is on,

[02:48] Cameron McEwen: but you have a great phrase of the global village theater,

[02:54] Cameron McEwen: which is not a phrase of McLuhan.

[02:57] Cameron McEwen: but is a phrase of yours where you find stuff in McLuhan that he didn't develop.

[03:04] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[03:05] Cameron McEwen: And it's,

[03:10] Cameron McEwen: I would say it's a kind of unconscious or subconscious of McLuhan that you can channel.

[03:21] Cameron McEwen: And it's interesting to hear you do that.

[03:25] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[03:25] Bob Dobbs: well,

[03:25] Bob Dobbs: I just searched.

[03:26] Bob Dobbs: it and

[03:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying there's part of the book is me explaining stuff to a listener and I say there's this tetrad on the radio in laws of media and it says what does radio flip into and it says this is in the book laws of media the global village theater correct

[03:49] Bob Dobbs: and then I say to this listener I had never seen that phrase before not global theater

[03:54] Bob Dobbs: But the Global Village Theater,

[03:56] Bob Dobbs: interesting phrase.

[03:57] Bob Dobbs: It's like halfway to the Global Theater evoked by satellites.

[04:01] Bob Dobbs: That's the first quote to point out.

[04:03] Bob Dobbs: What is the Global Village?

[04:05] Bob Dobbs: So,

[04:06] Bob Dobbs: scrolling down.

[04:09] Bob Dobbs: It doesn't,

[04:10] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[04:10] Bob Dobbs: get down here.

[04:14] Bob Dobbs: Then I have a quote.

[04:17] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan on Orwell.

[04:18] Bob Dobbs: Utopians and Menippean are always obsessed with a period preceding their own.

[04:23] Bob Dobbs: Orwell 1984 happened in 1930.

[04:26] Bob Dobbs: That's page 75 in Take Today.

[04:30] Bob Dobbs: Then I go,

[04:33] Bob Dobbs: Orwell is what I'm saying to the person.

[04:35] Bob Dobbs: Orwell 1984 was a big deal in the 60s.

[04:36] Bob Dobbs: 1984 was coming.

[04:38] Bob Dobbs: The professors had no clue that it had happened 50 years before.

[04:43] Bob Dobbs: And then I had this really great quote from letters,

[04:49] Bob Dobbs: January

[04:50] Bob Dobbs: 51. Yeah,

[04:51] Cameron McEwen: it was a letter to Pound.

[04:53] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[04:53] Bob Dobbs: Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws.

[04:57] Bob Dobbs: Nature now pays 5 million percent.

[04:59] Bob Dobbs: Applied science,

[05:00] Bob Dobbs: now the master usurer.

[05:02] Bob Dobbs: To hell with our topsoil.

[05:04] Bob Dobbs: We can grow potatoes on the moon tomorrow.

[05:07] Bob Dobbs: How are you going to expose that while there is still human life on the planet?

[05:12] Bob Dobbs: Life in quotes.

[05:13] Bob Dobbs: So I'll say it again.

[05:14] Bob Dobbs: How are you going to expose that while there is still human life on the planet?

[05:20] Bob Dobbs: So I then say,

[05:21] Bob Dobbs: nobody playing off the 1951 quote,

[05:23] Bob Dobbs: I say nobody cares about pollution in

[05:25] Bob Dobbs: 1951 because we're going to go to the moon.

[05:29] Bob Dobbs: And I go,

[05:30] Bob Dobbs: how are you going to expose that to all of the nature lovers created by the Gutenberg Galaxy?

[05:35] Bob Dobbs: You're a general citizen.

[05:37] Bob Dobbs: Look at McLuhan.

[05:38] Bob Dobbs: He's really doing science fiction.

[05:39] Bob Dobbs: He's saying,

[05:40] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[05:41] Bob Dobbs: look at where we're at.

[05:42] Bob Dobbs: Nobody can see what I see,

[05:44] Bob Dobbs: unquote.

[05:45] Bob Dobbs: And people are worrying or saying,

[05:47] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[05:48] Bob Dobbs: the bankers are the usury.

[05:51] Bob Dobbs: Lyndon and I say,

[05:52] Bob Dobbs: Lyndon LaRouche and the John Birchers are complaining about the nasty bankers charging interest.

[05:56] Bob Dobbs: That's Juan Gris.

[05:58] Bob Dobbs: The Arabs aren't allowed to do that.

[06:00] Bob Dobbs: But according to McLuhan,

[06:01] Bob Dobbs: it's not the bankers doing it,

[06:02] Bob Dobbs: it's applied science.

[06:04] Bob Dobbs: How is applied science doing it?

[06:05] Bob Dobbs: How is technology taxing us?

[06:08] Bob Dobbs: And it's going to keep eating up everything,

[06:09] Bob Dobbs: and then we won't have any topsoil.

[06:11] Bob Dobbs: We won't be able to grow potatoes anymore,

[06:13] Bob Dobbs: and we'll just go to the moon.

[06:14] Bob Dobbs: But try to explain that to people,

[06:16] Bob Dobbs: the ones who still think there's life on the planet.

[06:19] Bob Dobbs: There's McLuhan intuiting the,

[06:21] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[06:21] Bob Dobbs: planet of the dead in 1951.

[06:24] Bob Dobbs: He's seeing a science fiction vision that has already been realized.

[06:28] Bob Dobbs: Whatever horrible science fiction vision people read back then,

[06:32] Bob Dobbs: that was still coming down the pike.

[06:34] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan was saying that it had already happened.

[06:36] Bob Dobbs: So you're with me.

[06:38] Bob Dobbs: You're looking at that part,

[06:39] Bob Dobbs: right?

[06:40] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[06:40] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[06:41] Bob Dobbs: And I say he's retrieving the original meaning of science.

[06:44] Bob Dobbs: He was just a wise philosopher back in the manuscript days.

[06:48] Bob Dobbs: It got more specialized with the printing press.

[06:50] Bob Dobbs: But he's retrieving all meanings of science.

[06:52] Bob Dobbs: He's making a new wisdom,

[06:54] Bob Dobbs: not just a new gadget or a new specialist law.

[06:56] Bob Dobbs: He's going to include that.

[06:58] Bob Dobbs: But it's very comprehensive.

[06:59] Bob Dobbs: The new science.

[07:01] Bob Dobbs: Scientists had traditionally invented things and didn't care about the effects of what they had created.

[07:05] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said,

[07:06] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[07:06] Bob Dobbs: no,

[07:07] Bob Dobbs: we're going to have to start looking at the effects.

[07:10] Bob Dobbs: And then I have a quote from the Gutenberg Gals,

[07:12] Bob Dobbs: he pays 32.

[07:14] Bob Dobbs: And as our senses have gone outside us,

[07:16] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother goes inside.

[07:19] Bob Dobbs: So then I say,

[07:20] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother was outside,

[07:22] Bob Dobbs: quotes outside.

[07:23] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother was outside in the period before World War II in fascist countries and communist countries.

[07:27] Bob Dobbs: The police walked...

[07:28] Cameron McEwen: Let's just,

[07:29] Cameron McEwen: one sec,

[07:29] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[07:30] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[07:30] Cameron McEwen: Let's just...

[07:31] Cameron McEwen: Think a minute about the transition you're making here.

[07:36] Cameron McEwen: You're going from

[07:37] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan seeing stuff in the early

[07:41] Cameron McEwen: 50s and describing to Pound sort of what his problem is in trying to explain to people what they're actually doing as compared to what they think they're doing.

[07:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[07:58] Cameron McEwen: And the word gone.

[08:00] Cameron McEwen: which he says,

[08:01] Cameron McEwen: how are you going to expose that,

[08:03] Cameron McEwen: T-O-A-N,

[08:05] Cameron McEwen: is a Giedion expression,

[08:08] Cameron McEwen: right?

[08:08] Cameron McEwen: So when McLuhan was writing to Pound,

[08:12] Cameron McEwen: occasionally he would try to use

[08:15] Cameron McEwen: Pound lingo.

[08:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[08:18] Bob Dobbs: Pound street language,

[08:19] Bob Dobbs: but it was not street,

[08:20] Bob Dobbs: it was prairie language,

[08:21] Bob Dobbs: or wherever he came from,

[08:23] Bob Dobbs: Iowa or someplace,

[08:24] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean?

[08:25] Cameron McEwen: He came from Idaho.

[08:26] Bob Dobbs: Idaho,

[08:26] Bob Dobbs: right.

[08:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[08:29] Cameron McEwen: So

[08:30] Cameron McEwen: And the thing is,

[08:32] Cameron McEwen: we're talking about science and science fiction and all this sort of stuff.

[08:36] Cameron McEwen: And then after the quote,

[08:38] Cameron McEwen: you're into Big Brother.

[08:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[08:41] Cameron McEwen: And the question is,

[08:42] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[08:42] Cameron McEwen: how is that transition made?

[08:46] Cameron McEwen: And I think myself that the way that that's happened is that the science that

[08:58] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan Thank you.

[08:59] Cameron McEwen: was talking about,

[09:00] Cameron McEwen: which you say was really science fiction,

[09:04] Cameron McEwen: has a direct application to government,

[09:08] Cameron McEwen: to spying,

[09:11] Cameron McEwen: to war making,

[09:14] Cameron McEwen: in short,

[09:15] Cameron McEwen: to modern life.

[09:17] Cameron McEwen: And so what you've done is you've gone from

[09:22] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan talking about science and what science can do,

[09:26] Cameron McEwen: especially in cybernetics,

[09:28] Cameron McEwen: to its application.

[09:31] Cameron McEwen: And its application,

[09:32] Cameron McEwen: you might say,

[09:33] Cameron McEwen: is

[09:34] Cameron McEwen: Big Brother.

[09:35] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[09:36] Bob Dobbs: No,

[09:37] Bob Dobbs: it's a good...

[09:37] Bob Dobbs: I'm pointing out that,

[09:39] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[09:39] Bob Dobbs: people...

[09:40] Bob Dobbs: The conventional bullshit wisdom is that the guy missed politics.

[09:44] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't political.

[09:45] Bob Dobbs: His whole vision was darkly political.

[09:48] Bob Dobbs: The new politics that the intelligence agencies were doing,

[09:51] Bob Dobbs: they were operating as if the medium was the message or the massage.

[09:56] Bob Dobbs: And so get people into that point.

[09:58] Bob Dobbs: Actually.

[09:59] Bob Dobbs: They have nothing but conspiracy on their TV shows and movies,

[10:02] Bob Dobbs: so the young kids should bring it.

[10:06] Bob Dobbs: They might be interested in that.

[10:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[10:08] Bob Dobbs: here's a philosopher who's talking about the conspiracies,

[10:12] Bob Dobbs: the deep state and all that.

[10:14] Bob Dobbs: That should attract a reasonable person.

[10:18] Cameron McEwen: That's how you end the whole book.

[10:20] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[10:20] Bob Dobbs: with the

[10:22] Bob Dobbs: Catch-22, the merger,

[10:25] Bob Dobbs: the black market,

[10:26] Bob Dobbs: and war.

[10:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[10:28] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[10:28] Cameron McEwen: So this.

[10:29] Cameron McEwen: gets into what you're,

[10:31] Cameron McEwen: this transition that we're talking about has a whole series of layers to it.

[10:38] Cameron McEwen: And this series of layers eventually is going to implicate what you call the tech body.

[10:48] Cameron McEwen: And

[10:49] Cameron McEwen: I myself am not sure what sort of thing the tech body is.

[10:57] Cameron McEwen: And I I...

[10:58] Cameron McEwen: Because I don't understand that,

[10:59] Cameron McEwen: I don't understand the transition to it,

[11:03] Cameron McEwen: but I can see that sort of coming up.

[11:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[11:07] Bob Dobbs: by just going through this page here,

[11:09] Bob Dobbs: what we just did.

[11:10] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[11:11] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[11:12] Cameron McEwen: And the transition you make from science to politics.

[11:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[11:16] Cameron McEwen: And we agree that that's in everything that McLuhan Wright.

[11:23] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[11:25] Bob Dobbs: And the conventional blindness was that he missed out in politics,

[11:29] Bob Dobbs: right?

[11:29] Bob Dobbs: He thought he was a romantic idealist or something.

[11:33] Cameron McEwen: A utopian.

[11:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[11:36] Bob Dobbs: And he's criticizing both the utopians and Menippean with that great quote.

[11:41] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[11:43] Bob Dobbs: So you see that going into McLuhan like this has never been done before.

[11:49] Bob Dobbs: To jump into what McLuhan was and nobody noticed it,

[11:53] Bob Dobbs: to bring that out right away is...

[11:55] Bob Dobbs: Very useful on my part.

[11:58] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[11:58] Cameron McEwen: I guess,

[11:59] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[12:01] Cameron McEwen: I think somebody might be doing a blog with ideas along those lines.

[12:06] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[12:07] Bob Dobbs: no,

[12:07] Bob Dobbs: not with McLuhan.

[12:09] Bob Dobbs: They don't know.

[12:10] Bob Dobbs: I've looked.

[12:11] Bob Dobbs: I've never seen...

[12:12] Cameron McEwen: I'm talking about my blog,

[12:13] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[12:14] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[12:15] Bob Dobbs: well,

[12:15] Bob Dobbs: do you do that?

[12:16] Bob Dobbs: You're off in philosopher land.

[12:18] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[12:20] Cameron McEwen: what I do is attempt to show the depths.

[12:23] Cameron McEwen: in McLuhan that aren't seen.

[12:25] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[12:26] Bob Dobbs: you do do that.

[12:27] Bob Dobbs: But do you go into this kind of stuff?

[12:30] Bob Dobbs: 1984,

[12:31] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother going inside?

[12:33] Bob Dobbs: Have you?

[12:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[12:34] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[12:35] Cameron McEwen: I call that

[12:36] Cameron McEwen: State of the World.

[12:37] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[12:38] Cameron McEwen: So that State of the World is one of the topics on the right-hand side of the...

[12:44] Bob Dobbs: I haven't read them.

[12:45] Bob Dobbs: Are they more recent written stuff,

[12:47] Bob Dobbs: the last,

[12:48] Bob Dobbs: say,

[12:48] Bob Dobbs: three or four years?

[12:48] Bob Dobbs: No,

[12:49] Cameron McEwen: I've been doing that forever.

[12:50] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[12:51] Bob Dobbs: so you knew.

[12:52] Bob Dobbs: What I'm saying you knew.

[12:54] Bob Dobbs: You knew that the political part of McLuhan was missed by everybody.

[13:00] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[13:00] Cameron McEwen: you see,

[13:01] Cameron McEwen: I take a different approach to all this than you.

[13:04] Cameron McEwen: I don't regard it as important or even noteworthy that people have missed it.

[13:11] Cameron McEwen: I take it for granted that people don't know how to read McLuhan.

[13:15] Cameron McEwen: And so then I attempt to show how he should be read.

[13:21] Bob Dobbs: Great.

[13:22] Cameron McEwen: But as we were saying before we got recorded,

[13:26] Cameron McEwen: I think most people appreciate that as soon as they read a little bit of my stuff,

[13:30] Cameron McEwen: they realize it's radioactive and they stop.

[13:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[13:34] Bob Dobbs: it's going to screw up their minds.

[13:37] Bob Dobbs: It's actually a real philosophy in that sense.

[13:41] Bob Dobbs: It's poisonous or radioactive,

[13:43] Bob Dobbs: which the greats always are,

[13:47] Bob Dobbs: right?

[13:48] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[13:48] Bob Dobbs: sir.

[13:49] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[13:50] Bob Dobbs: so...

[13:51] Bob Dobbs: Let me just read a little bit more here.

[13:53] Bob Dobbs: I'm enjoying reading this more than I thought I would.

[13:59] Bob Dobbs: I'm getting into the mood.

[14:01] Bob Dobbs: I'm haranguing.

[14:02] Bob Dobbs: I'm going,

[14:03] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother was outside in the period before World War II in fascist countries and communist countries.

[14:08] Bob Dobbs: The police walked around and kept everybody suppressed.

[14:11] Bob Dobbs: But after World War II,

[14:12] Bob Dobbs: with the bomb repressing everybody,

[14:14] Bob Dobbs: everybody is terrified of the bomb,

[14:16] Bob Dobbs: then Big Brother went inside and started engaging in surveillance.

[14:21] Bob Dobbs: Not walk around with a gun to intimidate the chemical body.

[14:24] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[14:25] Bob Dobbs: I would add,

[14:26] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I bring it in here,

[14:27] Bob Dobbs: but I would add that the cities got taken over by the mafias through the unions.

[14:31] Bob Dobbs: So the mafias took over the Pryde War II

[14:36] Bob Dobbs: Nazis and fascists walking around with guns.

[14:39] Bob Dobbs: It became the mafias.

[14:40] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan does talk about that in

[14:43] Bob Dobbs: Take Today.

[14:45] Bob Dobbs: He mentions the mafia element.

[14:47] Bob Dobbs: But it's not just...

[14:49] Cameron McEwen: It's not just the,

[14:54] Cameron McEwen: what can I say,

[14:54] Cameron McEwen: the surface level mafia.

[14:57] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[14:58] Cameron McEwen: what McLuhan means by mafia is developers,

[15:05] Cameron McEwen: city planners,

[15:06] Cameron McEwen: and all this sort of stuff.

[15:07] Cameron McEwen: And in general,

[15:09] Cameron McEwen: all of the hijackers.

[15:11] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[15:11] Bob Dobbs: He calls it the big con.

[15:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[15:15] Cameron McEwen: it's the private takeover of public assets,

[15:21] Cameron McEwen: which McLuhan basically regards as the story of history.

[15:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[15:27] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[15:28] Cameron McEwen: From year zero.

[15:29] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[15:30] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[15:31] Bob Dobbs: good.

[15:33] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying not walking around with a gun to intimidate the chemical body.

[15:38] Bob Dobbs: We're fully into the electronic landscape.

[15:41] Bob Dobbs: which would later become the electric body or the TV body.

[15:44] Bob Dobbs: So I'm beginning to explain my five-bodied scenario right away,

[15:49] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[15:50] Bob Dobbs: which is my agenda is to bypass McLuhan,

[15:53] Bob Dobbs: some of McLuhan,

[15:54] Bob Dobbs: and bring in my development of the five bodies.

[15:59] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[16:00] Cameron McEwen: But it doesn't get that far from McLuhan because what you're talking about here is the same sort of stuff that McLuhan was saying already in Mechanical Bride.

[16:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[16:11] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[16:11] Cameron McEwen: Advertising functions through surveillance.

[16:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[16:17] Cameron McEwen: Advertising has to know what effect it has,

[16:20] Cameron McEwen: because nobody's going to pay for advertising and for public relations campaigns unless they can be shown to work in some way.

[16:30] Cameron McEwen: So then the pollsters come in,

[16:33] Cameron McEwen: and of course the pollsters are three-quarters bullshit and only one-quarter actual numbers.

[16:40] Cameron McEwen: but

[16:42] Cameron McEwen: they don't need to be speaking the truth.

[16:44] Cameron McEwen: All they need is to be able to convince some moron in a corporation who's got a lot of money to spend that the ad is having some effect that they want.

[16:56] Cameron McEwen: And so that's already the big brother inside.

[17:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[17:03] Bob Dobbs: and I like the way McLuhan quite early points out the role of advertising is actually to educate.

[17:10] Bob Dobbs: the society about what the people what the society is about and why they have these things it's a real university that's the ad companies didn't know they were doing that really they thought it was Gutenbergian propaganda levels or brainwashing you know they didn't know they were they were helping people understand the value of their lives what

[17:33] Bob Dobbs: their products meant yeah it's a great statement so i'm a clueless the um uh

[17:40] Cameron McEwen: You mentioned the word education and the Acadia University for what was going on here.

[17:47] Cameron McEwen: And those are excellent words,

[17:49] Cameron McEwen: but people need to understand that all of the important words in McLuhan are in quotation marks.

[17:57] Cameron McEwen: So education is not just what happens at the University of Toronto,

[18:03] Cameron McEwen: but it's also not what happens with only...

[18:08] Cameron McEwen: with advertising and stuff like this.

[18:11] Cameron McEwen: Education,

[18:12] Cameron McEwen: whatever it is,

[18:13] Cameron McEwen: is something we don't know.

[18:15] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[18:16] Cameron McEwen: And similarly with university.

[18:18] Cameron McEwen: So all of these words are actually questions.

[18:22] Cameron McEwen: They don't have a bottom to them.

[18:24] Cameron McEwen: They don't have a ground.

[18:26] Cameron McEwen: And

[18:27] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan whole technique is to put these words out and to listen to them almost like a bell and to try to figure out where their ground is.

[18:38] Cameron McEwen: And if people are going to read McLuhan,

[18:40] Cameron McEwen: then they have to learn how to read or to hear like he did.

[18:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[18:47] Bob Dobbs: you're saying all his main themes,

[18:50] Bob Dobbs: main words,

[18:51] Bob Dobbs: have to be in quotation marks.

[18:53] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[18:53] Bob Dobbs: That's not what you think it means.

[18:55] Bob Dobbs: And so he talks about the blind man with his stick,

[18:58] Bob Dobbs: right?

[18:59] Bob Dobbs: Tapping the street to see where he is.

[19:02] Bob Dobbs: That's advertising.

[19:04] Bob Dobbs: What did you say?

[19:04] Bob Dobbs: The bell?

[19:06] Bob Dobbs: You said something there.

[19:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[19:08] Cameron McEwen: he listens to words.

[19:09] Cameron McEwen: Listening.

[19:09] Cameron McEwen: Like the word education.

[19:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[19:12] Cameron McEwen: We can imagine that it's a bell.

[19:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[19:15] Cameron McEwen: And so it has waves coming out from it,

[19:18] Cameron McEwen: or it has different tones.

[19:20] Cameron McEwen: And they have to be listened to.

[19:23] Cameron McEwen: So in a certain way,

[19:24] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was aware of and doing the acoustic space before he knew the phrase.

[19:34] Cameron McEwen: And before he knew anything about it.

[19:36] Bob Dobbs: That's right,

[19:37] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[19:38] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[19:38] Cameron McEwen: And that's the way things usually happen,

[19:41] Cameron McEwen: the effect before the class.

[19:43] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[19:43] Bob Dobbs: and,

[19:44] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[19:46] Bob Dobbs: I think people have some kind of conventional meaning of probing.

[19:51] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,

[19:52] Bob Dobbs: maybe they see the person visually,

[19:55] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[19:56] Bob Dobbs: querying,

[19:57] Bob Dobbs: asking you questions.

[19:58] Bob Dobbs: Like,

[19:58] Bob Dobbs: whenever McLuhan met a famous athlete or something,

[20:00] Bob Dobbs: he'd ask them about their sport.

[20:02] Bob Dobbs: What did the instant replay do to your world,

[20:04] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[20:05] Bob Dobbs: He investigated everybody.

[20:09] Bob Dobbs: But he was doing the bell thing,

[20:10] Bob Dobbs: the blind man's cane.

[20:12] Bob Dobbs: He'd meet Gordie Howe,

[20:13] Bob Dobbs: he'd tap him with his cane to see what

[20:17] Bob Dobbs: Gordie Howe was made of,

[20:18] Bob Dobbs: what made him.

[20:20] Bob Dobbs: And that's probing.

[20:22] Bob Dobbs: It's a bit more,

[20:23] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what you say,

[20:24] Bob Dobbs: dramatic or invasive or multisensory,

[20:29] Bob Dobbs: rather than just making up ideas and aphorisms.

[20:33] Bob Dobbs: He lived it.

[20:34] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[20:34] Cameron McEwen: it's multilevel,

[20:35] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[20:35] Cameron McEwen: is the most important thing for McLuhan.

[20:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[20:39] Bob Dobbs: multisensory.

[20:40] Bob Dobbs: It's part of his living,

[20:42] Bob Dobbs: not just making up pages of prose.

[20:47] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[20:47] Cameron McEwen: But when I say multilevel,

[20:49] Cameron McEwen: that's different from multisensory in that even what is multisensory can have all sorts of different levels to it.

[21:03] Cameron McEwen: And what happens with probing is that it expands.

[21:07] Cameron McEwen: exposes multiple levels,

[21:10] Cameron McEwen: and then it raises the specter of maybe the levels don't come to an end.

[21:16] Cameron McEwen: And so the whole question of groundlessness always is being kind of posed as a specter in McLuhan probing.

[21:30] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[21:30] Cameron McEwen: So the levels would be he's doing sociology,

[21:34] Cameron McEwen: he's writing a novel,

[21:35] Cameron McEwen: he's writing a script.

[21:37] Cameron McEwen: for a film.

[21:37] Bob Dobbs: He's filming,

[21:39] Bob Dobbs: doing a TV show,

[21:40] Bob Dobbs: a TV interview.

[21:41] Bob Dobbs: He's doing all the media in his multi-level communication style.

[21:46] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[21:47] Cameron McEwen: but below that is he's doing education.

[21:51] Cameron McEwen: And below that is,

[21:52] Cameron McEwen: well,

[21:53] Cameron McEwen: what is education?

[21:55] Cameron McEwen: And it just keeps going down like that.

[21:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[21:59] Bob Dobbs: depth probing,

[22:02] Bob Dobbs: which he said would require repetition.

[22:06] Bob Dobbs: But that means you would just put it in a different ground,

[22:09] Bob Dobbs: what you were saying,

[22:10] Bob Dobbs: repeat it in different ways.

[22:11] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[22:11] Cameron McEwen: but you have to look at repetition as one of his re-words.

[22:15] Cameron McEwen: So replay,

[22:18] Bob Dobbs: retrieve,

[22:21] Cameron McEwen: on and on and on,

[22:22] Cameron McEwen: recover.

[22:24] Cameron McEwen: There's all sorts of re-words that McLuhan loves,

[22:27] Cameron McEwen: and it takes you down into what's already happened,

[22:33] Cameron McEwen: but you didn't know that it already happened.

[22:35] Cameron McEwen: So it takes you from the past into the future,

[22:39] Cameron McEwen: which is the present.

[22:41] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[22:42] Bob Dobbs: Remember I was just telling you before we started recording that Carolyn was a closet McLuhan?

[22:47] Bob Dobbs: All her products begin with re,

[22:50] Bob Dobbs: Wright,

[22:51] Bob Dobbs: re-structure,

[22:52] Bob Dobbs: re-mag,

[22:53] Bob Dobbs: re-new.

[22:54] Bob Dobbs: She got into the RE.

[22:57] Bob Dobbs: I had never thought of that before.

[22:58] Bob Dobbs: It's McLuhan RE.

[23:00] Cameron McEwen: And doesn't her website?

[23:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[23:02] Bob Dobbs: Reset.

[23:04] Bob Dobbs: RNA Reset.

[23:05] Cameron McEwen: There you go.

[23:06] Bob Dobbs: And now the world oligarchs over there in Switzerland,

[23:08] Bob Dobbs: the Davos Forum,

[23:10] Bob Dobbs: are calling it the global reset.

[23:12] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[23:14] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[23:15] Cameron McEwen: And so maybe

[23:18] Cameron McEwen: RNA research,

[23:19] Cameron McEwen: maybe the

[23:20] Cameron McEwen: R in RNA is actually a re.

[23:23] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[23:24] Cameron McEwen: it is.

[23:26] Cameron McEwen: It's RNA,

[23:27] Cameron McEwen: but with a bracketed E after the R.

[23:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[23:31] Bob Dobbs: What do you get?

[23:32] Bob Dobbs: Ribonucleic and...

[23:34] Bob Dobbs: Deoxy Bobby,

[23:35] Bob Dobbs: whatever DNA is.

[23:38] Bob Dobbs: Deoxy or something.

[23:39] Bob Dobbs: But

[23:41] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn started talking about the RNA because of ion

[23:44] Bob Dobbs: 12 years,

[23:45] Bob Dobbs: 11 years ago.

[23:47] Bob Dobbs: And then suddenly,

[23:48] Bob Dobbs: through the past decade,

[23:50] Bob Dobbs: RNA became a big research thing.

[23:53] Bob Dobbs: And now you've got mRNA killing everybody,

[23:57] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[23:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[23:59] Bob Dobbs: That's M for McLuhan.

[24:01] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,

[24:01] Bob Dobbs: RNA.

[24:04] Cameron McEwen: or memory.

[24:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[24:06] Cameron McEwen: well,

[24:07] Cameron McEwen: the

[24:08] Cameron McEwen: M is actually for messenger,

[24:10] Cameron McEwen: but there's lots of essays and books about McLuhan that call him the messenger.

[24:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[24:15] Bob Dobbs: that's right.

[24:16] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[24:17] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[24:17] Bob Dobbs: that's why I made the Tiny Note be around RNA,

[24:21] Bob Dobbs: not DNA,

[24:22] Bob Dobbs: because I was dealing with the Android Meme and the messaging of society or communication,

[24:29] Bob Dobbs: and that was influenced by McLuhan.

[24:31] Bob Dobbs: That's what I was...

[24:33] Bob Dobbs: And then,

[24:34] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[24:34] Bob Dobbs: talking to Ion,

[24:35] Bob Dobbs: Ion says the RNA is way more important than the DNA.

[24:38] Bob Dobbs: But nobody realized that until the last

[24:41] Bob Dobbs: 10 or so years.

[24:46] Cameron McEwen: So if we go back to page 8,

[24:50] Cameron McEwen: the bottom of page 8 has got your list of global village,

[24:55] Cameron McEwen: global theater,

[24:56] Cameron McEwen: global membrane,

[24:58] Cameron McEwen: or Android Meme phase 1,

[25:00] Cameron McEwen: Android Meme phase 2,

[25:02] Cameron McEwen: Anthropomorphic Physical.

[25:03] Cameron McEwen: physical and then the tech body.

[25:05] Cameron McEwen: and so on.

[25:08] Cameron McEwen: We were on page 13 or something like that.

[25:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[25:12] Cameron McEwen: But in a certain way,

[25:13] Cameron McEwen: what we're doing is we're getting into the kinds of transitions that you listed before.

[25:19] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[25:21] Bob Dobbs: This inventory is organized through the following phases,

[25:24] Bob Dobbs: making up six sections,

[25:25] Bob Dobbs: shows how far McLuhan goes.

[25:28] Bob Dobbs: Global village,

[25:28] Bob Dobbs: global theater,

[25:29] Bob Dobbs: global membrane,

[25:30] Bob Dobbs: or Android Meme phase one,

[25:31] Bob Dobbs: Android Meme phase two,

[25:33] Bob Dobbs: Anthropomorphic Physical,

[25:34] Bob Dobbs: and then the tech body.

[25:35] Bob Dobbs: So you can see that it's going beyond McLuhan,

[25:40] Bob Dobbs: but I'm trying to make McLuhan quotes fit these changes.

[25:45] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[25:45] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan never mentioned Android Meme,

[25:48] Bob Dobbs: but I'm going to show how it fits and what he did say.

[25:53] Cameron McEwen: But when McLuhan talks about humans being the sex apparatus of the machines,

[26:03] Cameron McEwen: that's pretty much right.

[26:05] Cameron McEwen: what Android Meme is right yeah yeah yeah exactly good you're rephrasing um certain things from McLuhan and um when we get into the Anthropomorphic Physical um

[26:23] Cameron McEwen: that's probably has overtones in uh what McLuhan uh talks about uh positively as the mystical body yeah uh but

[26:34] Cameron McEwen: but then speaks negatively about it in terms of the pseudo-mystical body,

[26:44] Cameron McEwen: the acoustic in which the church can get just as lost as it can in the visual.

[26:52] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[26:55] Bob Dobbs: So that's good commentary.

[26:58] Bob Dobbs: So we're at...

[27:02] Cameron McEwen: You were just going to get into Watson.

[27:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[27:04] Cameron McEwen: 13,

[27:05] Cameron McEwen: I think it was.

[27:08] Bob Dobbs: Are you finished commenting?

[27:11] Cameron McEwen: No,

[27:11] Cameron McEwen: I just wanted to point out that what you're doing here on page 12 is you are getting into the transitions that you had already capsulated

[27:29] Cameron McEwen: in that list that we were talking about.

[27:32] Cameron McEwen: As we go into the electronic

[27:34] Cameron McEwen: landscape and the electronic body and into your you know multiple bodies what we're doing

[27:45] Cameron McEwen: I believe is going into the depths of McLuhan yeah if he maybe didn't see everything that you're talking about here and he certainly didn't name it in the same way but once

[28:02] Cameron McEwen: You look into the overtones of what McLuhan was talking about,

[28:07] Cameron McEwen: you find a lot of the same stuff.

[28:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[28:10] Bob Dobbs: and I pulled together the quotes to show that.

[28:14] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[28:15] Cameron McEwen: correct.

[28:16] Cameron McEwen: And then,

[28:17] Cameron McEwen: and the whole book.

[28:18] Cameron McEwen: I'm saying,

[28:19] Cameron McEwen: look,

[28:19] Cameron McEwen: here's what I was talking about.

[28:21] Cameron McEwen: Do you get it or not?

[28:23] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[28:24] Bob Dobbs: So I say we're fully into the electronic landscape,

[28:26] Bob Dobbs: which would later become the electric body or the TV body.

[28:30] Bob Dobbs: That surveillance is...

[28:31] Bob Dobbs: the chief characteristic of the TV landscape from advertising to Echelon.

[28:35] Bob Dobbs: Echelon is actually the West's solar surveillance organization.

[28:42] Bob Dobbs: Do you know about Echelon?

[28:45] Cameron McEwen: I've read the wiki link that you supplied me.

[28:50] Bob Dobbs: Good.

[28:52] Bob Dobbs: It's the beginning of surveillance in many types.

[28:54] Bob Dobbs: That's the new enemy.

[28:55] Bob Dobbs: There are lots of science fiction stories in the 50s and 60s about some fascist or communist guy coming in,

[29:00] Bob Dobbs: dominating the planet and killing all of the chemical bodies.

[29:03] Bob Dobbs: And it's a replay of the first half of the 20th century.

[29:06] Bob Dobbs: The Nazi fear,

[29:07] Bob Dobbs: the yellow fear.

[29:08] Bob Dobbs: But after,

[29:09] Bob Dobbs: what was it,

[29:10] Bob Dobbs: the yellow fear,

[29:11] Bob Dobbs: the yellow?

[29:12] Cameron McEwen: Yellow peril.

[29:13] Bob Dobbs: Peril.

[29:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[29:15] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[29:15] Bob Dobbs: But after World War

[29:18] Bob Dobbs: II, and this is in my talking,

[29:20] Bob Dobbs: casual talking to somebody,

[29:22] Bob Dobbs: so I can get away with not being perfect in the oral thing here and saying yellow fear.

[29:27] Bob Dobbs: But after World War II,

[29:28] Bob Dobbs: The dominator becomes invisible.

[29:31] Bob Dobbs: People didn't even know they were being surveilled.

[29:33] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know that Big Brother had moved into the information circuitry.

[29:36] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is most informed on that new factor in society.

[29:41] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[29:42] Bob Dobbs: So then this great line from Explorations 1957,

[29:47] Bob Dobbs: not Big Brother is watching,

[29:48] Bob Dobbs: but all the brothers.

[29:50] Bob Dobbs: That's pretty neat.

[29:52] Bob Dobbs: Nobody points out that line.

[29:54] Bob Dobbs: That's a good one to say.

[29:58] Bob Dobbs: When you're next on The View or

[30:00] Bob Dobbs: 60 Minutes interviewing you,

[30:02] Bob Dobbs: say,

[30:02] Bob Dobbs: not Big Brothers watching,

[30:04] Bob Dobbs: but all the brothers.

[30:06] Bob Dobbs: It's good.

[30:07] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[30:08] Bob Dobbs: it's multi-level,

[30:09] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan pointing out.

[30:10] Bob Dobbs: There's not just one big brother.

[30:11] Bob Dobbs: There's all kinds of brothers.

[30:12] Bob Dobbs: That's an important point.

[30:15] Cameron McEwen: I was just going to say,

[30:16] Cameron McEwen: this gets back to the multi-level insight that we were just talking about.

[30:24] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[30:26] Cameron McEwen: Once the topic of big brothers' broil up,

[30:33] Cameron McEwen: it implicates...

[30:35] Cameron McEwen: levels below it.

[30:37] Cameron McEwen: And when it does,

[30:40] Cameron McEwen: it's very difficult to know if it's got any ground to it.

[30:43] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[30:44] Cameron McEwen: It threatens to just open up into nothing,

[30:48] Cameron McEwen: into something that's so unimaginably evil,

[30:55] Cameron McEwen: or so unimaginably amorphous,

[31:00] Cameron McEwen: that it can't be conceptualized,

[31:04] Cameron McEwen: it can't

[31:04] Cameron McEwen: be,

[31:05] Cameron McEwen: there's nothing can be done about it,

[31:07] Cameron McEwen: and it sort of falls through itself into a generalized terrifying fog.

[31:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[31:16] Bob Dobbs: let me compliment what you're saying there,

[31:19] Bob Dobbs: or complete.

[31:24] Bob Dobbs: Oh yeah,

[31:25] Bob Dobbs: no ground to Big Brother.

[31:27] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother is the participatory nature of the electric anti-environment the audience becomes in charge.

[31:34] Bob Dobbs: There's no

[31:34] Bob Dobbs: spectators.

[31:35] Bob Dobbs: Actually,

[31:35] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother or the bankers are the spectators,

[31:38] Bob Dobbs: he says at one point.

[31:41] Bob Dobbs: But the people are running themselves,

[31:43] Bob Dobbs: surveilling themselves.

[31:45] Bob Dobbs: And so it's hard to figure out who is actually imposing.

[31:48] Bob Dobbs: That's why to use terms like fascist,

[31:51] Bob Dobbs: or yeah,

[31:51] Bob Dobbs: fascist is so silly today.

[31:54] Bob Dobbs: In that way,

[31:55] Bob Dobbs: since the 60s it's not appropriate.

[31:57] Bob Dobbs: Not the right description.

[31:59] Bob Dobbs: And so the tactile spying and

[32:04] Bob Dobbs: talking of all parts of society with each other and everybody participating in it.

[32:11] Bob Dobbs: You can't say who's controlling who.

[32:14] Bob Dobbs: And I think I had another idea there.

[32:17] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[32:17] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[32:17] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan says society is an art form.

[32:21] Bob Dobbs: There is no society in the sense of an organized matriarchy or patriarchy.

[32:27] Bob Dobbs: It's just constant communication or surveillance of everybody on everybody.

[32:31] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's engaged in daily espionage.

[32:33] Bob Dobbs: the

[32:33] Bob Dobbs: Society is defined every day as something the White House says we are,

[32:38] Cameron McEwen: but it doesn't hold.

[32:42] Cameron McEwen: It's like there being just enough news every day to fill a newspaper.

[32:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[32:47] Bob Dobbs: to make a sense of society.

[32:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[32:50] Cameron McEwen: but there's an important point here in regards to McLuhan,

[32:54] Cameron McEwen: and that is that what you're saying is that modern life has gotten...

[33:04] Cameron McEwen: has exposed complications so that it's really not clear who's controlling who and who's the audience.

[33:19] Cameron McEwen: But what McLuhan says is,

[33:22] Cameron McEwen: but actually this has a long history of consideration.

[33:28] Cameron McEwen: And what we need to do is we need to understand that this is actually how language works.

[33:35] Cameron McEwen: Nobody knows who makes language.

[33:40] Cameron McEwen: It's this upheaval of old things and new things,

[33:46] Cameron McEwen: and somehow people know how to do it,

[33:49] Cameron McEwen: but they don't know what's going on.

[33:52] Cameron McEwen: They don't know how it's happened.

[33:55] Cameron McEwen: It's just sort of there.

[33:57] Cameron McEwen: But then,

[33:58] Cameron McEwen: so then he says,

[33:59] Cameron McEwen: but look,

[34:00] Cameron McEwen: language has been considered.

[34:04] Cameron McEwen: Forever.

[34:06] Cameron McEwen: And what we need to do is we need to go not forward into the fog,

[34:11] Cameron McEwen: but backwards into very great considerations of what language is.

[34:19] Cameron McEwen: And all of those things lead up to Finnegans Wake.

[34:22] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[34:23] Cameron McEwen: Which is just the kind of modern consideration of both the contemporary fog.

[34:32] Cameron McEwen: and the history of its consideration.

[34:34] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[34:35] Bob Dobbs: and he says somewhere interior landscape,

[34:37] Bob Dobbs: maybe around page 118,

[34:39] Bob Dobbs: he says for the Christian,

[34:41] Bob Dobbs: the Christian believes that something comes out of nothing.

[34:45] Bob Dobbs: That's language.

[34:46] Bob Dobbs: It's something that comes out of nothing,

[34:48] Bob Dobbs: or we don't know what it's come out of,

[34:49] Bob Dobbs: what you were just saying.

[34:51] Bob Dobbs: And,

[34:51] Bob Dobbs: of course,

[34:52] Bob Dobbs: that's Finnegans Wake.

[34:53] Bob Dobbs: And when I talked to Joyce through the

[34:56] Bob Dobbs: Evergreens, Michael Blake Read was channeling the Evergreens,

[34:59] Bob Dobbs: he said that he made sure.

[35:01] Bob Dobbs: that he erased everything at the bottom of the wake so nobody could say or find a ground to it.

[35:08] Bob Dobbs: It had to be a nothing at the ground.

[35:10] Bob Dobbs: So it would be a something coming at a nothing,

[35:13] Bob Dobbs: which is what you just said the wake does.

[35:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[35:16] Bob Dobbs: it's exploring the act of speech and,

[35:21] Bob Dobbs: well,

[35:22] Bob Dobbs: just the act of people sharing knowing,

[35:25] Bob Dobbs: which is very strange because people block on,

[35:29] Bob Dobbs: well,

[35:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm not knowing that much.

[35:31] Bob Dobbs: You know a lot more than me.

[35:35] Bob Dobbs: It's at least a lot of humor.

[35:37] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[35:39] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[35:40] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[35:40] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[35:41] Cameron McEwen: language is funny,

[35:45] Cameron McEwen: right?

[35:45] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[35:45] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was a funny guy.

[35:47] Cameron McEwen: Joyce was a funny guy.

[35:50] Cameron McEwen: There's a lot of sort of funny things going on.

[35:55] Cameron McEwen: A lot of the

[35:56] Cameron McEwen: Internet, a lot of YouTube is just people trying to be funny,

[36:01] Cameron McEwen: trying to manipulate language in some way that will make people laugh.

[36:06] Cameron McEwen: Make people give them money in

[36:10] Cameron McEwen: Patreon or something.

[36:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[36:13] Cameron McEwen: so language,

[36:17] Cameron McEwen: again,

[36:18] Cameron McEwen: as soon as you think about it,

[36:21] Cameron McEwen: implicates multiple levels and groundlessness.

[36:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[36:26] Bob Dobbs: it's the juice of our being.

[36:30] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[36:32] Bob Dobbs: So I say the spectacle,

[36:34] Bob Dobbs: visual space,

[36:34] Bob Dobbs: perspectival illusion is that there's this powerful secret cabal like Orwell presents,

[36:40] Bob Dobbs: big brother,

[36:41] Bob Dobbs: but actually there are all kinds of brothers watching you.

[36:43] Bob Dobbs: In other words,

[36:44] Bob Dobbs: in the advertising industry,

[36:46] Bob Dobbs: in Hollywood,

[36:47] Bob Dobbs: trying to figure out focus groups,

[36:48] Bob Dobbs: miming the next movie,

[36:51] Bob Dobbs: what's the next trend?

[36:52] Bob Dobbs: There are all kinds of big brother surveillances going on.

[36:55] Bob Dobbs: It's original to say there's more than one.

[36:57] Bob Dobbs: It's not big brother.

[36:58] Bob Dobbs: It's a whole bunch of brothers watching you.

[37:00] Bob Dobbs: So I'm complimenting McLuhan there.

[37:03] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.

[37:05] Bob Dobbs: As far as the management of the efficient causality of these new technological anti-environment,

[37:09] Bob Dobbs: the media,

[37:11] Bob Dobbs: in brackets,

[37:12] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan problematized,

[37:14] Bob Dobbs: which is a word I heard academics using back in the 70s,

[37:19] Bob Dobbs: 80s,

[37:19] Bob Dobbs: right?

[37:21] Bob Dobbs: Throw a little academic.

[37:21] Cameron McEwen: I think that's a good word.

[37:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[37:23] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan problematized the simple visions of Orwell and other Dawkins with some practical,

[37:28] Bob Dobbs: optimistic options.

[37:31] Bob Dobbs: So

[37:32] Bob Dobbs: I elaborate that.

[37:33] Bob Dobbs: verbally by saying efficient causality is management,

[37:36] Bob Dobbs: just making sure the TV shows ran on time.

[37:39] Bob Dobbs: They weren't interested in the effects of the media dynamics.

[37:42] Bob Dobbs: They're just into the content dispersal.

[37:44] Bob Dobbs: And that's efficient causality.

[37:46] Bob Dobbs: People started worrying about freedom of speech and suppression of factors in content.

[37:51] Bob Dobbs: The Puritanism of the

[37:53] Bob Dobbs: 50s, they would never show a married couple in the same bed.

[37:55] Bob Dobbs: These were efficient causality content issues that made people unaware of the formal causality that McLuhan was investigating.

[38:02] Bob Dobbs: Like how technically on the level of a formal cause and the cause of form,

[38:07] Bob Dobbs: on the level of form there was no life anymore,

[38:10] Bob Dobbs: let alone worrying about being put in a concentration camp.

[38:13] Bob Dobbs: That assumed there still was life to put in a concentration camp.

[38:17] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan problematized the 1984 vision by saying,

[38:20] Bob Dobbs: oh no,

[38:21] Bob Dobbs: that's way back in the 30s.

[38:23] Bob Dobbs: And he also brought in optimistic angles on the services of the new situation.

[38:27] Bob Dobbs: There were services to Big Brother.

[38:29] Bob Dobbs: Everybody else was living in a state of foreboding,

[38:32] Bob Dobbs: waiting for a terrible,

[38:33] Bob Dobbs: horrible moment,

[38:34] Bob Dobbs: which is a line in

[38:37] Bob Dobbs: Ulysses, I think,

[38:41] Bob Dobbs: something about the waiting for the next moment.

[38:44] Bob Dobbs: Living as if every moment were his next,

[38:47] Bob Dobbs: something like that in Ulysses.

[38:50] Cameron McEwen: I'm quoted by McLuhan several times.

[38:54] Bob Dobbs: Everybody else was living in a state of foreboding,

[38:56] Bob Dobbs: waiting for a terrible,

[38:57] Bob Dobbs: horrible moment.

[38:58] Bob Dobbs: or a horrible big brother to show up.

[39:01] Bob Dobbs: That's what many are saying President Trump going to do today.

[39:06] Bob Dobbs: But back in McLuhan day,

[39:07] Bob Dobbs: they were unaware of all kinds of actual new freedoms for the chemical body that were happening in the 50s and 60s.

[39:12] Bob Dobbs: That's why in the

[39:13] Bob Dobbs: 50s and 60s,

[39:13] Bob Dobbs: there was a great increase in the reasons slash excuses for festivals.

[39:18] Bob Dobbs: It was considered quite an abundant,

[39:20] Bob Dobbs: fun time,

[39:20] Bob Dobbs: at least in the West.

[39:22] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan says,

[39:23] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[39:24] Bob Dobbs: your vision of this horrible 1984 is going to be too simple.

[39:28] Bob Dobbs: There are going to be lots of Orwell delights happening in our modern utopia.

[39:33] Bob Dobbs: And then that reminds me of Postman who says,

[39:36] Bob Dobbs: it's actually not Orwell,

[39:37] Bob Dobbs: it's Huxley's

[39:39] Bob Dobbs: Brave New World.

[39:40] Bob Dobbs: The hedonistic factor that was coming in,

[39:42] Bob Dobbs: he saw that more accurate than Orwell.

[39:45] Bob Dobbs: But you have to have both,

[39:46] Bob Dobbs: and more probably,

[39:48] Bob Dobbs: not just two.

[39:49] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan says,

[39:50] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[39:50] Bob Dobbs: your vision of this horrible 1984 is going to be too simple.

[39:53] Bob Dobbs: There are going to be lots of Orwell delights happening in our modern utopia.

[39:58] Bob Dobbs: End of quote.

[39:59] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan saw practical,

[40:01] Bob Dobbs: optimistic options which shocked most of the literate people.

[40:04] Bob Dobbs: They couldn't believe that McLuhan appeared to be optimistic.

[40:06] Bob Dobbs: But he wasn't completely optimistic because he would make an inventory of both the services and disservices,

[40:12] Bob Dobbs: which would be the not,

[40:13] Bob Dobbs: right?

[40:14] Bob Dobbs: He'd show the whole of that.

[40:16] Bob Dobbs: He would do both,

[40:17] Bob Dobbs: and nobody did that because they would make an opinion about how bad it's getting or how great it's going to be.

[40:22] Bob Dobbs: That was the range of the debate.

[40:24] Bob Dobbs: Nobody read McLuhan back then,

[40:26] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan used to point that out.

[40:27] Bob Dobbs: that nobody read them.

[40:29] Bob Dobbs: But when the baby boomers or younger generations had to come up with some PhD or something,

[40:33] Bob Dobbs: they had to read the guy,

[40:34] Bob Dobbs: and they noticed,

[40:35] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[40:36] Bob Dobbs: he didn't have a point of view about this.

[40:38] Bob Dobbs: Nobody knew that when he was popular.

[40:41] Bob Dobbs: It was surface,

[40:42] Bob Dobbs: S-U-R-F-A-C-E.

[40:43] Bob Dobbs: It was all surface.

[40:45] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,

[40:45] Bob Dobbs: when he first talks to Michael

[40:48] Bob Dobbs: Nevitt or something in 1976 and says he's a Menippean satirist,

[40:52] Bob Dobbs: he says,

[40:53] Bob Dobbs: I deal with the surfaces of life,

[40:55] Bob Dobbs: the manners,

[40:56] Bob Dobbs: surface manners.

[40:57] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[40:59] Bob Dobbs: And it was surface,

[41:01] Bob Dobbs: S-U-R-F-A-C-E.

[41:03] Bob Dobbs: It was all surface.

[41:04] Bob Dobbs: That's capital letters,

[41:05] Bob Dobbs: S-U-R-F-A-C-E.

[41:07] Bob Dobbs: It was all surface.

[41:07] Bob Dobbs: People were too distracted by the proliferating anti-environment,

[41:11] Bob Dobbs: which admonishment McLuhan repeated often.

[41:13] Bob Dobbs: What generally prevailed was the silly Neil Postman vision.

[41:16] Bob Dobbs: Quote,

[41:17] Bob Dobbs: everybody was amusing themselves to death.

[41:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[41:20] Bob Dobbs: they all get stuck with that guy.

[41:23] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[41:24] Cameron McEwen: let's just point out that when you say it was surface,

[41:28] Cameron McEwen: and then you have a capital letter spelling out service,

[41:31] Cameron McEwen: you have surface in quotation marks.

[41:35] Cameron McEwen: And that gets back...

[41:36] Cameron McEwen: to what we were just saying about all of the important words are in quotation marks.

[41:42] Cameron McEwen: So when McLuhan is dealing with surface,

[41:46] Cameron McEwen: he may be dealing with something that is seemingly obvious,

[41:51] Cameron McEwen: but he is always looking at it in a multi-level way.

[41:57] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[41:57] Bob Dobbs: and also you pointed out,

[41:59] Bob Dobbs: there's no background.

[42:00] Bob Dobbs: It's all foreground.

[42:01] Bob Dobbs: Everything's in your face.

[42:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[42:04] Cameron McEwen: but the...

[42:05] Cameron McEwen: The even surface has multi-levels.

[42:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[42:10] Bob Dobbs: under the face.

[42:12] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[42:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[42:14] Bob Dobbs: Under face.

[42:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[42:16] Bob Dobbs: it's,

[42:17] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,

[42:18] Bob Dobbs: remember,

[42:19] Bob Dobbs: other than how you're explaining,

[42:20] Bob Dobbs: I don't remember what I was actually thinking,

[42:23] Bob Dobbs: other than he said it was surface to

[42:25] Bob Dobbs: Michael Horniansky,

[42:27] Bob Dobbs: but I don't know why I italicized it.

[42:30] Bob Dobbs: Maybe I was thinking what I just said,

[42:32] Bob Dobbs: the everything's up in our face.

[42:35] Bob Dobbs: or inside us,

[42:36] Bob Dobbs: gone through our heads.

[42:37] Bob Dobbs: It's inside us.

[42:39] Bob Dobbs: We had no perspective.

[42:45] Cameron McEwen: If I had to say what's the transition going on here,

[42:50] Cameron McEwen: I think what you do is you show that McLuhan not interested in a dualism.

[42:57] Cameron McEwen: He's not interested in something that says everything's going to hell and he's not interested in everything's fine.

[43:05] Cameron McEwen: So in that case,

[43:07] Cameron McEwen: what is he interested in?

[43:09] Cameron McEwen: And what he's interested in is the complete obvious stuff.

[43:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[43:17] Bob Dobbs: the cliché.

[43:18] Cameron McEwen: The new words that people are saying,

[43:21] Cameron McEwen: the new trends,

[43:22] Cameron McEwen: the new fashions,

[43:24] Cameron McEwen: the new music.

[43:26] Cameron McEwen: What do these things say?

[43:28] Cameron McEwen: What are these things trying to tell us?

[43:30] Bob Dobbs: The new enthusiasms.

[43:33] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[43:37] Cameron McEwen: one way that this could be expressed is simply to say he's interested in surface.

[43:44] Cameron McEwen: But of course,

[43:45] Cameron McEwen: nobody knows what surface is.

[43:47] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[43:47] Bob Dobbs: And he says in his essay in Lewis in 1944,

[43:50] Bob Dobbs: he emphasizes the word appetite.

[43:53] Bob Dobbs: All is appetite,

[43:54] Bob Dobbs: and he italicizes it.

[43:55] Bob Dobbs: Then that gets into his great quote in Hot and Cool.

[44:03] Bob Dobbs: It is the dynamic symmetry of tensions among proportions.

[44:07] Bob Dobbs: That's the gold section.

[44:09] Bob Dobbs: But the interaction of symmetry and ratios and proportions is what he's interested in.

[44:15] Bob Dobbs: And he even says that's the Thomas vision,

[44:17] Bob Dobbs: right?

[44:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[44:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[44:20] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[44:21] Bob Dobbs: And so there's no favoritism there.

[44:23] Bob Dobbs: He's looking at the ratios.

[44:26] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[44:26] Cameron McEwen: So one way to understand the quotation marks around surface is that

[44:34] Cameron McEwen: Not only is surface eminently questionable,

[44:37] Cameron McEwen: but it's also plural.

[44:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[44:41] Cameron McEwen: People have a million different surfaces that they're interested in and that they think is obvious.

[44:48] Cameron McEwen: And in your jump to hot and cool and the idea that this resonance can be surface,

[45:01] Cameron McEwen: that's very important,

[45:03] Cameron McEwen: right?

[45:03] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.

[45:03] Cameron McEwen: means that if we want to understand surface,

[45:08] Cameron McEwen: probably we have to understand resonance,

[45:11] Cameron McEwen: and that tells us that surface is not one thing,

[45:15] Cameron McEwen: that it's already plural and multilevel.

[45:18] Cameron McEwen: Because resonance...

[45:19] Bob Dobbs: Symmetry of tensions among proportions and,

[45:24] Bob Dobbs: what was I going to add to that?

[45:26] Bob Dobbs: The juggling of your senses and what,

[45:29] Bob Dobbs: senses is not just your physical sense,

[45:31] Bob Dobbs: it's making sense or the semantic word that comes with your situation.

[45:36] Bob Dobbs: So the user is the content,

[45:37] Bob Dobbs: is the ratios you prefer or think are obvious and you don't know that you've been conditioned to have certain ratios prominent in your tensions than other ratios.

[45:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[45:50] Cameron McEwen: and then there's ratios that are going on that you have no idea about,

[45:56] Cameron McEwen: but they're there.

[45:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[45:58] Bob Dobbs: so that's...

[45:58] Cameron McEwen: So just the use of language,

[46:02] Cameron McEwen: excuse me,

[46:03] Cameron McEwen: the use of language is juggling ratios,

[46:09] Cameron McEwen: and people do it successfully,

[46:11] Cameron McEwen: but they have no idea that they're doing it.

[46:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[46:16] Bob Dobbs: what...

[46:18] Bob Dobbs: Acutely aware of what we're talking about and I'm interacting with somebody

[46:24] Bob Dobbs: Look at their

[46:25] Bob Dobbs: Sensory ratios what what senses they're interacting with now neuro linguist.

[46:30] Bob Dobbs: What is it?

[46:31] Bob Dobbs: Neurolinguistic programming they look at where your eye looks up left right it means a certain visual bias,

[46:36] Bob Dobbs: you know about that,

[46:37] Bob Dobbs: right?

[46:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[46:38] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[46:39] Bob Dobbs: so I'm looking at people and they're juggling the words and meanings as we interact and

[46:45] Bob Dobbs: I'll think of McLuhan quotes

[46:47] Bob Dobbs: And I'll laugh.

[46:49] Bob Dobbs: It's like McLuhan has given me a running commentary on my private thoughts as I'm interacting,

[46:55] Bob Dobbs: talking with somebody.

[46:56] Bob Dobbs: He's given me the soundtrack,

[46:58] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[46:59] Bob Dobbs: and I'll see it in people's living,

[47:02] Bob Dobbs: which can evoke humor.

[47:06] Cameron McEwen: And I think when we began today,

[47:10] Cameron McEwen: I was trying to say something along the lines.

[47:15] Cameron McEwen: of what you're just saying now.

[47:17] Cameron McEwen: I didn't know that that's what I wanted to say,

[47:21] Cameron McEwen: but your Explorations now about

[47:27] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan sort of being in the background and giving you a real-time commentary on what's going on in your mind and in the other person's mind and on the space between you,

[47:44] Cameron McEwen: um,

[47:45] Cameron McEwen: I think that's kind of how you wrote this pamphlet,

[47:49] Cameron McEwen: number one.

[47:51] Cameron McEwen: And number two,

[47:53] Cameron McEwen: it's what I try to evoke in our conversation.

[47:58] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[48:00] Bob Dobbs: well said.

[48:02] Bob Dobbs: That's what's going on here.

[48:05] Bob Dobbs: So,

[48:08] Bob Dobbs: then I have this quote.

[48:09] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[48:10] Bob Dobbs: I jumped ahead.

[48:14] Bob Dobbs: Closer to...

[48:15] Bob Dobbs: Culture is our business,

[48:16] Bob Dobbs: page 104.

[48:18] Bob Dobbs: Surely it is not unbelievable that decision makers are totally out of touch with the world they live in.

[48:24] Bob Dobbs: How could any contemporary person in any age be entrusted with powers carefully developed and monopolized by people from the previous time?

[48:31] Bob Dobbs: That's explaining Big Brother,

[48:33] Bob Dobbs: or the deep state,

[48:34] Bob Dobbs: or tradition,

[48:35] Bob Dobbs: or the surveillance establishment,

[48:38] Bob Dobbs: or society.

[48:39] Cameron McEwen: Or the Roman Catholic Church.

[48:40] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[48:41] Bob Dobbs: the churches and all the bureaucracies.

[48:44] Bob Dobbs: So...

[48:45] Bob Dobbs: I always thought that was a great quote.

[48:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[48:48] Cameron McEwen: basically what it's talking about is the rearview mirror.

[48:52] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[48:53] Cameron McEwen: It's talking about the retention of Gutenberg perspectives in electronic times.

[49:02] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[49:02] Bob Dobbs: so people look to the politician to be up to date and responding to the new pressures and changes when actually to go into the bureaucracy of politics,

[49:13] Bob Dobbs: you have to connect.

[49:14] Bob Dobbs: to the Byzantine history of who the previous intelligence agencies were,

[49:19] Bob Dobbs: and you've got to find out that history.

[49:21] Bob Dobbs: You've got to find out who's who in the attempt to find...

[49:26] Cameron McEwen: If you're interested in how they work and what they're thinking and stuff,

[49:32] Cameron McEwen: it's not going to do you any good if you want to know what's really going on in the world.

[49:37] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[49:38] Bob Dobbs: So people think that power,

[49:42] Bob Dobbs: you get to be a politician,

[49:43] Bob Dobbs: and you then get access to the secret trilateral commissions or whatever,

[49:47] Bob Dobbs: the secret societies,

[49:49] Bob Dobbs: and you think you're going to find out some amazing new information,

[49:54] Bob Dobbs: but all you find is what

[49:56] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan found at the Bilderbergers meeting in 1969.

[49:59] Bob Dobbs: They're so out of date,

[50:00] Bob Dobbs: they're totally out of touch with what's going on in their own families and their children.

[50:06] Bob Dobbs: And he found that at Bilderbergers,

[50:08] Bob Dobbs: and he kind of knew it,

[50:10] Bob Dobbs: but it shocked him because he thought,

[50:11] Bob Dobbs: There'd be all these cool European esthetes there,

[50:14] Bob Dobbs: and they were all sticking the muds and had no clue what he was Tombo,

[50:19] Bob Dobbs: which was the present.

[50:21] Bob Dobbs: So this statement from 1970 probably was formed the day he got back from the Bilderberger meeting in May

[50:39] Bob Dobbs: 69. It's like the other one.

[50:40] Bob Dobbs: Must we continue to mow down the Kennedys to show that the hot politics don't work in the cool TV scene?

[50:47] Bob Dobbs: So these are great quotes.

[50:50] Bob Dobbs: that I'm highlighting.

[50:52] Bob Dobbs: And let's see,

[50:55] Bob Dobbs: I just hit the thing.

[50:56] Bob Dobbs: So we're doing,

[50:59] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if we're going to read everything,

[51:00] Bob Dobbs: but going through what I said is sort of an interesting way to do it.

[51:08] Bob Dobbs: And you can comment or if you want to go to something,

[51:12] Bob Dobbs: you don't have to read.

[51:13] Cameron McEwen: The problem is if we,

[51:15] Cameron McEwen: I have throughout the book,

[51:17] Cameron McEwen: I have stuff that I've highlighted.

[51:19] Cameron McEwen: But the problem is,

[51:20] Cameron McEwen: that the highlighted portions are not linked in a way that most people would follow.

[51:31] Cameron McEwen: I think you wouldn't have any problem going from some highlighted portion.

[51:40] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[51:42] Cameron McEwen: I've got out-of-touch highlighted here,

[51:45] Cameron McEwen: which for McLuhan always has to do with tactility.

[51:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[51:50] Cameron McEwen: So when people are out of touch,

[51:54] Cameron McEwen: they are missing what's most important.

[51:59] Cameron McEwen: And that gets back to what you were just saying about resonance and the proportionality.

[52:07] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[52:10] Cameron McEwen: So then the next thing I have highlighted is the superlative nobody on the next page.

[52:19] Bob Dobbs: page.

[52:20] Cameron McEwen: So,

[52:21] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[52:21] Cameron McEwen: you wouldn't mind talking about the superlative nobody,

[52:25] Cameron McEwen: and we could talk about that forever,

[52:28] Cameron McEwen: but I think it may be too much of a jump to really get across to people that may be listening.

[52:41] Cameron McEwen: So I think the slow way of reading passages,

[52:45] Cameron McEwen: we don't have to read all of them,

[52:48] Cameron McEwen: Going the way we're going,

[52:49] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[52:50] Cameron McEwen: is more efficient than jumping to my highlighted passages.

[52:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[52:57] Bob Dobbs: after I've read it,

[52:58] Bob Dobbs: then you can point out where you highlighted it after I've explained it.

[53:03] Bob Dobbs: So then I go,

[53:04] Bob Dobbs: so referring to the out-of-touch,

[53:07] Bob Dobbs: I say what Marshall McLuhan pointing out here is people like Richard Nixon,

[53:11] Bob Dobbs: when they ran for president,

[53:12] Bob Dobbs: they seemed so obsolete and out-of-touch with the vibrant world of the global theater in the late 60s.

[53:18] Bob Dobbs: The people wanted some radical Dick Gregory or somebody in there.

[53:23] Cameron McEwen: That's happening now.

[53:26] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[53:26] Bob Dobbs: and Dick Gregory did run for president in 68.

[53:29] Bob Dobbs: He was in the Peace and Something Party.

[53:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[53:33] Cameron McEwen: he probably got four votes.

[53:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[53:37] Bob Dobbs: the people wanted some radical Dick Gregory or somebody in there.

[53:39] Bob Dobbs: Somebody who had charisma in popular modern terms,

[53:42] Bob Dobbs: but they didn't understand that there were these huge anti-environment built up over 500 years.

[53:48] Bob Dobbs: including the Big Brother environment,

[53:49] Bob Dobbs: which had gone inside.

[53:51] Bob Dobbs: And then,

[53:52] Bob Dobbs: if you're going to be allowed to manage the world through an obsolete bureaucratic management focused on the White House,

[53:58] Bob Dobbs: there's the ongoing manipulation of people by advertising on the formal causality level and all the other activities that were distracting people and mutating them into a non-life planet of the dead.

[54:09] Bob Dobbs: But someone like Nixon had to go back and find out about Project Paperclip.

[54:13] Bob Dobbs: That was bringing the Nazis over to set up the CIA.

[54:17] Bob Dobbs: But someone like Nixon had to go back and find out about Project Paperclip and all the secret maneuvers that the intelligence agencies were doing after World War II that the people didn't know about.

[54:26] Bob Dobbs: You had to find out about it and then shut up.

[54:29] Bob Dobbs: Even Frank Zappa said this when he started thinking about running for president.

[54:32] Bob Dobbs: That was about 1991.

[54:35] Bob Dobbs: Quote,

[54:35] Bob Dobbs: I became aware by talking to people in Washington.

[54:38] Bob Dobbs: It's quite a Byzantine process.

[54:40] Bob Dobbs: So that's a good,

[54:42] Bob Dobbs: honest statement.

[54:42] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[54:43] Bob Dobbs: he found it was way more complicated even to become a candidate.

[54:48] Bob Dobbs: The Byzantine process,

[54:49] Bob Dobbs: the cliché of the Byzantine bureaucracy of a thousand years before in Constantinople.

[54:55] Bob Dobbs: There are all kinds of elites that became prominent in the 17th century,

[54:58] Bob Dobbs: and then were superseded by the 18th century and 19th century elites.

[55:03] Bob Dobbs: Each technological phase created new kinds of elites,

[55:05] Bob Dobbs: and they still got their big bank accounts overlaid on each other.

[55:09] Bob Dobbs: You've got to find out who's actually in control,

[55:11] Bob Dobbs: because whoever wants to be president is going to have to be educated in how you will have no power.

[55:18] Bob Dobbs: You've got to find out who actually knows to prove to you you have no power.

[55:24] Bob Dobbs: They don't admit,

[55:26] Bob Dobbs: the secret societies don't admit they have no power either.

[55:31] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[55:31] Bob Dobbs: go ahead.

[55:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[55:33] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[55:33] Cameron McEwen: I was just going to say that this isn't talking about Trump,

[55:37] Cameron McEwen: but that's what happened Trump.

[55:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[55:39] Cameron McEwen: That he just didn't know enough about the political system to survive.

[55:52] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[55:52] Bob Dobbs: he...

[55:53] Bob Dobbs: I would say that he did know a lot about the establishment,

[55:57] Bob Dobbs: having been in New York and all that through the years.

[56:00] Bob Dobbs: He didn't know how to alter it,

[56:03] Bob Dobbs: adjust it,

[56:04] Bob Dobbs: expose it.

[56:05] Bob Dobbs: He didn't know how to communicate the cul-de-sac.

[56:08] Bob Dobbs: He thought knowing who they were was enough.

[56:11] Bob Dobbs: And he did know who they are,

[56:12] Bob Dobbs: and he's still nailing people,

[56:14] Bob Dobbs: as you will see.

[56:15] Bob Dobbs: You don't know that Trump coming back.

[56:18] Bob Dobbs: And that will make this book even more relevant.

[56:22] Bob Dobbs: He's coming back.

[56:25] Cameron McEwen: But he didn't,

[56:27] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[56:29] Cameron McEwen: his whole presidency was weakened,

[56:35] Cameron McEwen: attenuated by his inability to control believers in Washington enough,

[56:44] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[56:46] Cameron McEwen: not to be investigated,

[56:50] Cameron McEwen: not.

[56:51] Cameron McEwen: to have the significant portions of the bureaucracy and the military working against him,

[57:00] Cameron McEwen: even people that he appointed.

[57:02] Bob Dobbs: No,

[57:03] Bob Dobbs: that's true.

[57:03] Bob Dobbs: And so he's a great teacher.

[57:06] Bob Dobbs: He showed the people who put so much into him,

[57:10] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[57:10] Bob Dobbs: the common person had no clue what was going on.

[57:13] Bob Dobbs: They thought,

[57:13] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[57:13] Bob Dobbs: wow,

[57:14] Bob Dobbs: this is a guy.

[57:14] Bob Dobbs: He's a businessman.

[57:16] Bob Dobbs: He knows how to get things done.

[57:18] Bob Dobbs: And they've had to realize over the past year.

[57:21] Bob Dobbs: What the hell happened?

[57:22] Bob Dobbs: How come our powerful president couldn't stay in power?

[57:26] Bob Dobbs: And they are learning through the audits and all kinds of the cheating that went on.

[57:31] Bob Dobbs: It's a big educational project that Trump providing.

[57:35] Bob Dobbs: And okay,

[57:36] Bob Dobbs: so he gets knocked out for a few years.

[57:38] Bob Dobbs: He'll be back in.

[57:39] Bob Dobbs: And what he's going to be back in charge of,

[57:42] Bob Dobbs: I'll just give you a hint,

[57:43] Bob Dobbs: is a new feudalism.

[57:45] Bob Dobbs: They're going to get rid of the legislative and the executive and the judiciary.

[57:50] Bob Dobbs: collapsing.

[57:51] Bob Dobbs: And it's going to be a semi-civil war.

[57:54] Bob Dobbs: And it's starting this past couple of weeks.

[57:56] Bob Dobbs: It's gotten very intense.

[57:58] Bob Dobbs: Fauci is yelling at Paul.

[58:00] Bob Dobbs: Paul's yelling at Fauci.

[58:02] Bob Dobbs: The Democrats are trying to get committees to investigate the Republicans.

[58:05] Bob Dobbs: The Republicans are trying to come up with committees to investigate the Democrats.

[58:09] Bob Dobbs: This is going to be quite funny,

[58:11] Bob Dobbs: even though disasters.

[58:12] Bob Dobbs: On top of that,

[58:13] Bob Dobbs: more and more people will be dropping dead from the

[58:16] Bob Dobbs: Delta variant and The Lambda variant is coming.

[58:20] Bob Dobbs: So get ready.

[58:23] Bob Dobbs: Shit's hitting the fan again and more violently,

[58:26] Bob Dobbs: more intensely.

[58:27] Bob Dobbs: So

[58:29] Bob Dobbs: I think what I just described is what McLuhan saw coming.

[58:32] Bob Dobbs: He saw this collision of so many complications.

[58:36] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[58:36] Bob Dobbs: he said the idea of a philosopher king could not be a balancing factor in this situation.

[58:45] Bob Dobbs: And then the American version of

[58:46] Bob Dobbs: Larry Flint,

[58:47] Bob Dobbs: who I call,

[58:48] Bob Dobbs: I did a play on it.

[58:49] Bob Dobbs: furry lint.

[58:50] Bob Dobbs: Trump furry lint in the White House.

[58:52] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[58:53] Bob Dobbs: he's aware of all the different parts of the basement and the upstairs of society.

[58:57] Bob Dobbs: He's part of it.

[58:58] Bob Dobbs: He's got a bad rumor,

[59:00] Bob Dobbs: bad image in all of it.

[59:02] Bob Dobbs: But people thought,

[59:03] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[59:03] Bob Dobbs: this guy really knows what's going on,

[59:05] Bob Dobbs: and he's going in there,

[59:06] Bob Dobbs: he's going to fix it.

[59:07] Bob Dobbs: So there's a desperation going across the population now.

[59:12] Bob Dobbs: I pick it up just from watching blogs or whatever one watches by ESP.

[59:18] Bob Dobbs: my daily espionage,

[59:20] Bob Dobbs: there's a desperation.

[59:20] Bob Dobbs: He was just,

[59:21] Bob Dobbs: fuck,

[59:21] Bob Dobbs: nobody can fix this.

[59:23] Bob Dobbs: That's what's terrifying people right now.

[59:27] Cameron McEwen: So that's what I call,

[59:28] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[59:28] Cameron McEwen: we've been talking about levels and the ground giving way.

[59:36] Cameron McEwen: After you've gone through a whole series of levels,

[59:39] Cameron McEwen: you worry if there's,

[59:41] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[59:42] Cameron McEwen: any end to them.

[59:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[59:43] Cameron McEwen: And once you start doing that,

[59:45] Cameron McEwen: then you see.

[59:47] Cameron McEwen: the ground opening up beneath your feet and that's something that McLuhan was talking about forever right and what is it you um there's no finish line it's the last line in culture is our business that's right hello don't

[1:00:03] Bob Dobbs: you say somewhere that that's wrong um i can't think of that right now i might but far from my thinking well how could it be wrong um yeah i know

[1:00:16] Cameron McEwen: I think it was something that Ed put up on the website.

[1:00:23] Cameron McEwen: But anyway,

[1:00:24] Cameron McEwen: let's not worry about that.

[1:00:25] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:00:25] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[1:00:25] Bob Dobbs: He did have a statement.

[1:00:27] Bob Dobbs: And it was a headline,

[1:00:29] Bob Dobbs: and he had me saying it,

[1:00:30] Bob Dobbs: and it wasn't me.

[1:00:31] Bob Dobbs: And I got him to change it to Dave.

[1:00:32] Bob Dobbs: This guy named Dave said it.

[1:00:34] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:00:34] Bob Dobbs: I see.

[1:00:34] Bob Dobbs: I'm just wondering if it was not something I would say.

[1:00:37] Bob Dobbs: And it looks like Bob's saying it,

[1:00:39] Bob Dobbs: and I got him to correct it.

[1:00:40] Bob Dobbs: So you may not.

[1:00:41] Bob Dobbs: That might be what you're thinking of.

[1:00:43] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:00:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:00:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:00:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:00:47] Bob Dobbs: so you got the each technological phase created new kinds of elites,

[1:00:50] Bob Dobbs: and they've still got their big bank accounts overlaid on each other.

[1:00:55] Bob Dobbs: You've got to find out who's actually in control,

[1:00:57] Bob Dobbs: because whoever wants to be president is going to have to be educated in how you will have no power.

[1:01:01] Bob Dobbs: Or I should have said,

[1:01:02] Bob Dobbs: how he or she will have no power.

[1:01:06] Bob Dobbs: You'll be,

[1:01:06] Bob Dobbs: as McLuhan said,

[1:01:07] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:01:07] Bob Dobbs: the automated presidential surrogate will be the superlative nobody,

[1:01:11] Bob Dobbs: which is an awesome statement.

[1:01:14] Bob Dobbs: One of his best,

[1:01:16] Bob Dobbs: because the president is not the president.

[1:01:19] Bob Dobbs: He's imitating a president.

[1:01:21] Bob Dobbs: He's a surrogate.

[1:01:23] Bob Dobbs: And he has to be a superlative nobody.

[1:01:25] Bob Dobbs: He has to get close to the ground.

[1:01:27] Bob Dobbs: He has to shut up.

[1:01:29] Bob Dobbs: And once he finds out approximations of the ground,

[1:01:32] Bob Dobbs: he can't talk about it.

[1:01:34] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:01:34] Bob Dobbs: they actually do have that.

[1:01:37] Bob Dobbs: When you become president,

[1:01:38] Bob Dobbs: you're briefed on the stuff that nobody but the president can know.

[1:01:43] Bob Dobbs: You know about that,

[1:01:44] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:01:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:01:46] Bob Dobbs: And then that makes you a nobody because you say,

[1:01:48] Bob Dobbs: geez,

[1:01:49] Bob Dobbs: this is better than I thought it was.

[1:01:52] Bob Dobbs: But we can't say that.

[1:01:54] Bob Dobbs: We must keep the drug companies going,

[1:01:56] Bob Dobbs: keep people in tension and fear and sickness.

[1:01:59] Bob Dobbs: Can't tell them how great it is.

[1:02:04] Cameron McEwen: We should point out that the phrase,

[1:02:06] Cameron McEwen: the superlative nobody,

[1:02:08] Cameron McEwen: is a perfect example of McLuhan humor and is kind of his imitation of Joyce.

[1:02:16] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:02:21] Cameron McEwen: The superlative nobody is funny on a whole bunch of different levels.

[1:02:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:02:25] Bob Dobbs: that's Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker,

[1:02:27] Bob Dobbs: that's HCE,

[1:02:28] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake.

[1:02:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:02:31] Cameron McEwen: But the idea that you could have a superlative nobody is already funny,

[1:02:39] Cameron McEwen: just without even thinking about it.

[1:02:42] Cameron McEwen: And then nobody does not,

[1:02:44] Cameron McEwen: has no up and down,

[1:02:47] Cameron McEwen: so there can't be a superlative to it.

[1:02:49] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:02:51] Cameron McEwen: And then people are spending all of their lives and all of their fortunes in order to become a superlative nobody,

[1:03:02] Cameron McEwen: even though there is no such thing.

[1:03:05] Cameron McEwen: And it's not going to get them anything,

[1:03:07] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:03:08] Bob Dobbs: It's like the phrase global village.

[1:03:11] Bob Dobbs: The village is not global,

[1:03:12] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[1:03:13] Bob Dobbs: It's village,

[1:03:14] Bob Dobbs: local,

[1:03:15] Bob Dobbs: global.

[1:03:15] Bob Dobbs: Contradictory on one of the services.

[1:03:18] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:03:19] Bob Dobbs: a superlative nobody is a contradiction,

[1:03:21] Bob Dobbs: but that's how you make insight poetry,

[1:03:24] Bob Dobbs: through bringing together opposite terms.

[1:03:27] Bob Dobbs: And that's the nonsense of language,

[1:03:30] Bob Dobbs: of communication.

[1:03:32] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:03:32] Bob Dobbs: And we find temporary patterns or meaning in it,

[1:03:35] Bob Dobbs: but it doesn't hold up as you look closer at it,

[1:03:40] Bob Dobbs: because of black holes.

[1:03:41] Cameron McEwen: But it also gives,

[1:03:42] Cameron McEwen: that's true,

[1:03:43] Cameron McEwen: but it also is what gives.

[1:03:47] Cameron McEwen: generates humor.

[1:03:49] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:03:49] Bob Dobbs: and pattern and a sense of coherency for a moment or two.

[1:03:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:03:55] Bob Dobbs: That's what's interesting is that you get insights into the conversation and what someone says is so appropriate and apt and he nails it,

[1:04:03] Bob Dobbs: he or she nails it,

[1:04:05] Bob Dobbs: and then you get into talking and then you're lost again and you wander around and then you make another one,

[1:04:10] Bob Dobbs: another pattern that sparks the mind.

[1:04:14] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:04:15] Bob Dobbs: It puts it in order.

[1:04:16] Bob Dobbs: So you're actually talking yourself into order all the time,

[1:04:20] Bob Dobbs: temporary patterns of order.

[1:04:22] Bob Dobbs: And he has that in the brain chart.

[1:04:26] Bob Dobbs: He has two kinds of order.

[1:04:28] Bob Dobbs: There's the left hemisphere,

[1:04:30] Bob Dobbs: I think it's abstract order or something,

[1:04:32] Bob Dobbs: and then the right hemisphere has significant patterns of order or something.

[1:04:36] Bob Dobbs: Two different ways of saying a sense of something making sense.

[1:04:41] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever noticed that in the hemisphere chart?

[1:04:45] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[1:04:46] Bob Dobbs: There's two abstractions or intellectual coherence.

[1:04:52] Bob Dobbs: Two different ways of saying it.

[1:04:55] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:04:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:04:56] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:04:56] Cameron McEwen: but just wait a sec.

[1:04:59] Cameron McEwen: We need to understand that when people are going about making order,

[1:05:05] Cameron McEwen: I think that's the phrase you use.

[1:05:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:05:09] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:05:10] Cameron McEwen: I think you said that that's what they're doing 24 hours a day.

[1:05:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:05:17] Cameron McEwen: 24-7.

[1:05:20] Cameron McEwen: Of course.

[1:05:21] Cameron McEwen: At the very same time,

[1:05:22] Cameron McEwen: they're making disorder.

[1:05:23] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:05:25] Cameron McEwen: They're making disorder not only individually but collectively.

[1:05:29] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:05:30] Cameron McEwen: And we're now doing it juggling atomic bombs.

[1:05:34] Cameron McEwen: So we have no idea of just how much disorder we're making and what its effect is going to be in the future.

[1:05:44] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:05:44] Bob Dobbs: So there's two kinds of wisdom.

[1:05:47] Bob Dobbs: There's the person who says,

[1:05:49] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:05:49] Bob Dobbs: we don't know what we're talking about,

[1:05:50] Bob Dobbs: all shut up.

[1:05:51] Bob Dobbs: So they're the wise,

[1:05:52] Bob Dobbs: quiet archetype.

[1:05:54] Bob Dobbs: But the other,

[1:05:55] Bob Dobbs: the opposite,

[1:05:56] Bob Dobbs: is someone who's talking like McLuhan,

[1:05:57] Bob Dobbs: who pretends to know what's going on and that he's making sense.

[1:06:01] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[1:06:02] Bob Dobbs: That's the other kind of wisdom.

[1:06:05] Cameron McEwen: The second one is being a superlative nobody.

[1:06:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:06:11] Bob Dobbs: So automated presidential surrogate will be the superlative nobody.

[1:06:19] Bob Dobbs: You see,

[1:06:20] Bob Dobbs: since,

[1:06:21] Bob Dobbs: say,

[1:06:21] Bob Dobbs: Eisenhower,

[1:06:23] Bob Dobbs: maybe it includes Eisenhower,

[1:06:24] Bob Dobbs: the presidents were nobodies.

[1:06:27] Bob Dobbs: They were scum.

[1:06:28] Bob Dobbs: They were the bottom of the barrel,

[1:06:29] Bob Dobbs: usually,

[1:06:31] Bob Dobbs: like Nixon.

[1:06:32] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:06:32] Bob Dobbs: Carter tried to be a superlative somebody,

[1:06:34] Bob Dobbs: or he looked like one,

[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: or they thought he was.

[1:06:37] Bob Dobbs: And he's still trying to prove he's a superlative somebody because he goes around helping people make houses and shelters.

[1:06:45] Bob Dobbs: And he's considered the worst president.

[1:06:48] Bob Dobbs: by a lot of people.

[1:06:50] Bob Dobbs: And Reagan,

[1:06:51] Bob Dobbs: who obviously didn't know anything,

[1:06:52] Bob Dobbs: didn't even know where he was,

[1:06:53] Bob Dobbs: is considered a great communicator.

[1:06:56] Bob Dobbs: What absurdities,

[1:06:57] Bob Dobbs: constant absurdities going on here.

[1:07:02] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[1:07:03] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:07:04] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:07:04] Cameron McEwen: So then people have to keep in mind that ultimately you're going to be talking about

[1:07:13] Cameron McEwen: Trump.

[1:07:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:07:14] Cameron McEwen: And that kind of dialect.

[1:07:16] Cameron McEwen: is also going on with him.

[1:07:20] Bob Dobbs: Why are people so outraged?

[1:07:23] Bob Dobbs: He's just continuing what everybody already was.

[1:07:26] Cameron McEwen: There's a flip side to all of this stuff.

[1:07:29] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:07:29] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:07:30] Cameron McEwen: So the outrage just sees the guy as totally villainous,

[1:07:40] Cameron McEwen: and the flip side of that is him seeing stuff that needs to be seen.

[1:07:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:07:46] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:07:47] Bob Dobbs: and saying it.

[1:07:49] Bob Dobbs: He's the most radical president in terms of the military.

[1:07:52] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:07:53] Bob Dobbs: these are all useless wars.

[1:07:55] Bob Dobbs: We've been doing it for decades.

[1:07:56] Bob Dobbs: We've got to stop this.

[1:07:57] Bob Dobbs: I'm pulling everybody back.

[1:07:59] Bob Dobbs: Boy,

[1:08:00] Bob Dobbs: who said that?

[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: That was the radical student dream in the

[1:08:05] Bob Dobbs: 60s, was to get a president there who would pull everybody out of the American empire around the world,

[1:08:10] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:08:10] Bob Dobbs: militarily.

[1:08:12] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:08:12] Bob Dobbs: of course,

[1:08:13] Bob Dobbs: that was never going to happen.

[1:08:15] Bob Dobbs: And Trump actually got a simulation of some kind of piece in the Middle East for a couple of weeks,

[1:08:23] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:08:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:08:25] Bob Dobbs: for a couple of weeks.

[1:08:27] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:08:28] Cameron McEwen: he was,

[1:08:30] Cameron McEwen: all of these things have two sides.

[1:08:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:08:33] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:08:33] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:08:36] Cameron McEwen: Trump a lot of stuff to make the Middle East worse.

[1:08:42] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:08:42] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:08:46] Cameron McEwen: He also tried to do things that would make it better.

[1:08:49] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:08:50] Bob Dobbs: And like they say,

[1:08:52] Bob Dobbs: he ignored the allies,

[1:08:54] Bob Dobbs: went around visiting the dictators,

[1:08:57] Bob Dobbs: making friends with the evil guys like North Korea.

[1:09:01] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:09:02] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:09:03] Bob Dobbs: the average person,

[1:09:04] Bob Dobbs: a sensible,

[1:09:05] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:09:05] Bob Dobbs: sensible,

[1:09:06] Bob Dobbs: well-adjusted person must have thought,

[1:09:08] Bob Dobbs: what the hell is going on here?

[1:09:10] Bob Dobbs: We have an insane guy in the White House.

[1:09:12] Bob Dobbs: How did he get here?

[1:09:13] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:09:14] Bob Dobbs: the people who've got children and drive their kids to school and have to be sensible.

[1:09:19] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:09:20] Bob Dobbs: This guy is not sensible.

[1:09:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:09:22] Cameron McEwen: that's what they were told 24-7 on the media.

[1:09:26] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:09:27] Bob Dobbs: And now,

[1:09:29] Bob Dobbs: each thing is a progression,

[1:09:31] Bob Dobbs: paradoxically.

[1:09:32] Bob Dobbs: There is a change.

[1:09:34] Bob Dobbs: And nobody had the scandals Trump had,

[1:09:39] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:09:40] Bob Dobbs: And the words he said.

[1:09:42] Bob Dobbs: And it was worse than Clinton and

[1:09:45] Bob Dobbs: Discarnate.

[1:09:46] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:09:47] Bob Dobbs: talk about pussy.

[1:09:49] Bob Dobbs: I got a great kick out of that word being on CNN,

[1:09:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:09:56] Bob Dobbs: in people's living rooms.

[1:09:58] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:09:58] Bob Dobbs: maybe they don't have living rooms anymore,

[1:10:00] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:10:00] Bob Dobbs: in suburbia.

[1:10:01] Bob Dobbs: Do they?

[1:10:02] Bob Dobbs: I think a little bit.

[1:10:04] Bob Dobbs: Do they even have a TV in suburban homes now?

[1:10:09] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:10:10] Cameron McEwen: huge ones.

[1:10:11] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:10:11] Bob Dobbs: that's right.

[1:10:12] Cameron McEwen: Over the fireplace.

[1:10:14] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:10:14] Bob Dobbs: right.

[1:10:14] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:10:15] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:10:15] Bob Dobbs: like,

[1:10:16] Bob Dobbs: I don't see that.

[1:10:18] Bob Dobbs: We don't have that.

[1:10:19] Bob Dobbs: But they're probably in some of the houses here.

[1:10:23] Bob Dobbs: But I haven't seen that much.

[1:10:24] Bob Dobbs: But I know if I go to a regular mainland suburbia,

[1:10:28] Bob Dobbs: I would see that,

[1:10:28] Bob Dobbs: but not in this sort of utopian tropical setup.

[1:10:34] Bob Dobbs: You don't see that too much.

[1:10:35] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:10:35] Cameron McEwen: I'd be surprised,

[1:10:35] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[1:10:36] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[1:10:37] Cameron McEwen: my parents used to live in Rancho Mirage,

[1:10:41] Cameron McEwen: a super wealthy enclave.

[1:10:46] Cameron McEwen: But that's mainland.

[1:10:48] Bob Dobbs: That's mainland.

[1:10:49] Bob Dobbs: I'm here in tropical paradise.

[1:10:52] Cameron McEwen: I know exactly where you are.

[1:10:56] Cameron McEwen: I will bet that.

[1:10:57] Cameron McEwen: 95%

[1:10:59] Cameron McEwen: of the people there have typical housing.

[1:11:07] Cameron McEwen: They watch

[1:11:11] Cameron McEwen: CNN.

[1:11:13] Bob Dobbs: Okay, you know,

[1:11:14] Bob Dobbs: actually I have seen that in a couple of places along the walkway,

[1:11:18] Bob Dobbs: these big things that people rent.

[1:11:21] Bob Dobbs: Now let me do a survey.

[1:11:22] Bob Dobbs: Hey,

[1:11:23] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn,

[1:11:25] Bob Dobbs: when you walk around here,

[1:11:27] Bob Dobbs: Do you ever see houses with big TV screens?

[1:11:34] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:11:35] Bob Dobbs: you won that point,

[1:11:38] Bob Dobbs: the new child.

[1:11:39] Bob Dobbs: But I don't see any.

[1:11:40] Bob Dobbs: But

[1:11:41] Bob Dobbs: I don't walk around that much.

[1:11:44] Bob Dobbs: But a lot of the houses,

[1:11:45] Bob Dobbs: there's nobody in them.

[1:11:49] Bob Dobbs: They're Canadians,

[1:11:50] Bob Dobbs: they just come over for the winter.

[1:11:52] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,

[1:11:53] Bob Dobbs: I only know big screens.

[1:11:55] Bob Dobbs: screens when I walk to the beach in those houses at Whaley Point.

[1:11:59] Bob Dobbs: They've got big screens.

[1:12:01] Bob Dobbs: But they're tourists.

[1:12:04] Bob Dobbs: Oh yeah,

[1:12:04] Bob Dobbs: I go the back way.

[1:12:05] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:12:06] Bob Dobbs: I don't even walk through this compound.

[1:12:11] Bob Dobbs: You hear that?

[1:12:12] Bob Dobbs: I don't even walk through it.

[1:12:13] Bob Dobbs: That's why I don't see Eddie.

[1:12:15] Bob Dobbs: True.

[1:12:16] Bob Dobbs: I walk along the golf course.

[1:12:18] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,

[1:12:20] Bob Dobbs: so you've got to become a nobody to become a president.

[1:12:24] Bob Dobbs: You've got to become too busy making connections,

[1:12:27] Bob Dobbs: and you're usually in the lawyer world,

[1:12:29] Bob Dobbs: to the actual establishment.

[1:12:33] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is saying,

[1:12:35] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:12:35] Bob Dobbs: you people are running around and asking your presidential candidates to be hip modern people who hung out with the Beatles.

[1:12:41] Bob Dobbs: You don't realize you live in a world of huge anti-environment that have been building up for over 500 years,

[1:12:46] Bob Dobbs: and they have to be understood where they came from and how they're part of the modern global theater.

[1:12:51] Bob Dobbs: Did I say McLuhan saying that?

[1:12:53] Bob Dobbs: Hey you,

[1:12:54] Bob Dobbs: you of course,

[1:12:55] Bob Dobbs: know that the president has to be a guy totally out of touch.

[1:12:59] Bob Dobbs: And I go,

[1:12:59] Bob Dobbs: it's a little satirical there by McLuhan.

[1:13:02] Bob Dobbs: Then McLuhan says,

[1:13:03] Bob Dobbs: surely it is not unbelievable that decision makers are totally out of touch.

[1:13:07] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,

[1:13:08] Bob Dobbs: do you know why?

[1:13:09] Bob Dobbs: Because they've got to live in the past.

[1:13:11] Bob Dobbs: They've got to find out about all of the previous rear view mirror bureaucracies.

[1:13:15] Bob Dobbs: So this is a put on question here.

[1:13:17] Bob Dobbs: He's saying it to the young students in his class.

[1:13:20] Bob Dobbs: Quote,

[1:13:20] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[1:13:21] Bob Dobbs: How can any contemporary person be relevant?

[1:13:24] Bob Dobbs: You want someone who's not relevant,

[1:13:26] Bob Dobbs: end of quote.

[1:13:27] Bob Dobbs: And then I say,

[1:13:28] Bob Dobbs: that was the prevalent mood in the 60s.

[1:13:31] Bob Dobbs: Bring someone in who's relevant.

[1:13:33] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan would gently hint,

[1:13:34] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:13:35] Bob Dobbs: what you young people don't realize is that you actually live in a Postman world where there are huge anti-environment that you're manipulated by and engage in and enjoy.

[1:13:43] Bob Dobbs: And you don't know where the rulers came from that are now in charge,

[1:13:47] Bob Dobbs: unquote.

[1:13:48] Bob Dobbs: And I say,

[1:13:49] Bob Dobbs: all of which Lyndon LaRouche global network of journalists would document as much as possible.

[1:13:54] Bob Dobbs: Who was who going way back?

[1:13:57] Bob Dobbs: That's what LaRouche would do.

[1:13:59] Bob Dobbs: And that'd be called conspiracy theory.

[1:14:00] Bob Dobbs: If you documented who knew what and who brought over the Nazis in 1945 and who started World War I,

[1:14:06] Bob Dobbs: you track it back.

[1:14:10] Cameron McEwen: So let me just point out that you have the sentence in the middle of some quotations.

[1:14:18] Cameron McEwen: where you say it's a little satirical there.

[1:14:23] Cameron McEwen: That's what we mean by saying that all of his words are in quotation marks.

[1:14:27] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:14:29] Cameron McEwen: They can never be taken as some kind of surface with one meaning.

[1:14:36] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:14:36] Cameron McEwen: They're always semantically rich,

[1:14:39] Cameron McEwen: as the academics say.

[1:14:41] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:14:42] Bob Dobbs: Ion says in every theme,

[1:14:44] Bob Dobbs: every topic,

[1:14:45] Bob Dobbs: there's always two conversations.

[1:14:48] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:14:48] Bob Dobbs: And that's what you were saying earlier.

[1:14:50] Bob Dobbs: There's always two,

[1:14:51] Bob Dobbs: at least two sides.

[1:14:52] Bob Dobbs: And then the book enhances the dialectic of that,

[1:14:56] Bob Dobbs: and then you need the electric acoustic retrieval to get out of the tendency to make it a literate dialectic.

[1:15:03] Bob Dobbs: It's actually a hundred conversations going on.

[1:15:05] Bob Dobbs: which is what

[1:15:06] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake shows.

[1:15:10] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:15:10] Bob Dobbs: But the civilized person who's been made literate,

[1:15:13] Bob Dobbs: he thinks there's,

[1:15:14] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:15:15] Bob Dobbs: he would be quite happy to know there were two conversations going on because they're stressed to be a point of view.

[1:15:21] Bob Dobbs: So they think there's just one conversation going on and everybody's arguing over what's the right thing to say on one level,

[1:15:28] Bob Dobbs: the equitone of the Gutenberg era.

[1:15:31] Bob Dobbs: That's the big blind spot.

[1:15:37] Cameron McEwen: So the Gutenberg perspective is always dualistic,

[1:15:43] Cameron McEwen: but in a way that is in search of being monotone.

[1:15:48] Bob Dobbs: That's right,

[1:15:49] Bob Dobbs: equitone and monotone.

[1:15:50] Bob Dobbs: And if you go multi-voiced,

[1:15:55] Bob Dobbs: multi-leveled,

[1:15:56] Bob Dobbs: you make a collage and you're an artist.

[1:16:00] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan said that the formula of 20th century art is to make a collage.

[1:16:05] Bob Dobbs: Just move out of the Gutenberg bias and you look like you seem to be someone who's prophetic.

[1:16:12] Bob Dobbs: So that's why art wasn't art anymore.

[1:16:15] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't a anti-environment.

[1:16:16] Bob Dobbs: The anti-environment themselves were the new shaping mechanism that artists thought they were doing in their Gutenberg arts.

[1:16:25] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:16:25] Cameron McEwen: So when something is supposed to be meaningful,

[1:16:31] Cameron McEwen: like the church or like art or like...

[1:16:35] Cameron McEwen: philosophy has become.

[1:16:37] Cameron McEwen: As soon as these things are put in quotation marks,

[1:16:41] Cameron McEwen: as soon as these things invite satire,

[1:16:45] Cameron McEwen: then they cease to be what they were.

[1:16:49] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:16:50] Cameron McEwen: That's happened to everything in the modern world.

[1:16:52] Cameron McEwen: It's happened to government.

[1:16:54] Cameron McEwen: It's happened to families.

[1:16:56] Cameron McEwen: It's happened to mother.

[1:16:57] Cameron McEwen: It's happened to father.

[1:16:58] Cameron McEwen: It's happened to child.

[1:17:00] Cameron McEwen: It's happened to literally everything.

[1:17:03] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:17:03] Bob Dobbs: he Wright.

[1:17:04] Bob Dobbs: He Wright a lot about that in Cliché to archetype.

[1:17:07] Bob Dobbs: And Archetype is a cliché that's put in quotes.

[1:17:12] Bob Dobbs: And he plays,

[1:17:14] Bob Dobbs: and he says sometimes he gets,

[1:17:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:17:15] Bob Dobbs: he plays a cliché to archetype,

[1:17:17] Bob Dobbs: flips it around so they play opposite roles,

[1:17:20] Bob Dobbs: like Shem and Shaun in Finnegans Wake.

[1:17:22] Bob Dobbs: But basically he does talk about an archetype,

[1:17:26] Bob Dobbs: his definition is a quoted environment.

[1:17:29] Bob Dobbs: Quoted.

[1:17:30] Bob Dobbs: So what you're talking about,

[1:17:31] Bob Dobbs: he does a whole couple of pages on.

[1:17:36] Bob Dobbs: quotation marks.

[1:17:37] Cameron McEwen: The whole book is like that.

[1:17:40] Cameron McEwen: Because a quoted word is a cliche.

[1:17:44] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:17:46] Cameron McEwen: That's what a cliche is.

[1:17:48] Bob Dobbs: And then you make a point,

[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: you'll make a point,

[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: Wright book about the cliche,

[1:17:53] Bob Dobbs: and then you've made an archetype.

[1:17:55] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:17:56] Cameron McEwen: So you could say,

[1:17:57] Cameron McEwen: if an archetype is a quoted cliche,

[1:18:00] Cameron McEwen: and a cliche is already quoted.

[1:18:03] Cameron McEwen: And an archetype is a cliché square.

[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:18:09] Bob Dobbs: and that's what we Menippean our album titles.

[1:18:12] Bob Dobbs: Bosby calls you squared.

[1:18:15] Bob Dobbs: I use that in my chart.

[1:18:18] Bob Dobbs: What's interesting about the book,

[1:18:20] Bob Dobbs: 1970,

[1:18:21] Bob Dobbs: from cliché to archetype,

[1:18:23] Bob Dobbs: that is exactly when McLuhan became an archetype.

[1:18:27] Bob Dobbs: He was obsolescent at 69,

[1:18:29] Bob Dobbs: 70.

[1:18:29] Bob Dobbs: Nobody cared about him anymore.

[1:18:32] Bob Dobbs: He had arrived at archetypal status,

[1:18:35] Bob Dobbs: and he got the Order of Canada in 1970.

[1:18:38] Bob Dobbs: So I always thought there was a bit of an autobiographical statement there.

[1:18:42] Bob Dobbs: Had you ever thought of that?

[1:18:44] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:18:45] Bob Dobbs: You like it?

[1:18:49] Bob Dobbs: Does Mikey like it?

[1:18:53] Cameron McEwen: It's interesting to contemplate,

[1:18:55] Cameron McEwen: put it that way.

[1:18:56] Cameron McEwen: All right.

[1:18:58] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:18:59] Bob Dobbs: I have a quote here in the middle of this.

[1:19:01] Bob Dobbs: talking about this.

[1:19:04] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan with Wilfred Watson,

[1:19:05] Bob Dobbs: 1970,

[1:19:07] Bob Dobbs: page 46.

[1:19:09] Bob Dobbs: So he says,

[1:19:09] Bob Dobbs: Overkill,

[1:19:11] Bob Dobbs: the technologies for total destruction of mankind and the planet,

[1:19:14] Bob Dobbs: create a peace,

[1:19:15] Bob Dobbs: peace in quotes,

[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: create a peace that passes all technology.

[1:19:20] Bob Dobbs: Bernard Mandeville built his Fable of the Bees,

[1:19:23] Bob Dobbs: that's like in the

[1:19:24] Bob Dobbs: 1700s or so,

[1:19:26] Bob Dobbs: on the same observation,

[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:19:28] Bob Dobbs: private vices,

[1:19:29] Bob Dobbs: public benefits.

[1:19:31] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:19:31] Bob Dobbs: so technically you've got to be careful of finger pointing about who's wrong and who's right and who's good and who's evil.

[1:19:41] Bob Dobbs: Because they're flipping all the time.

[1:19:45] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:19:45] Cameron McEwen: So not only is there this dynamic that's always going on,

[1:19:52] Cameron McEwen: but in particular,

[1:19:55] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan humor is to put forward something like this,

[1:19:59] Cameron McEwen: private places,

[1:20:00] Cameron McEwen: public benefits.

[1:20:02] Cameron McEwen: And what that means is that somebody is doing something for themselves,

[1:20:09] Cameron McEwen: and it may not be totally moral,

[1:20:11] Cameron McEwen: but it turns out to have public benefit.

[1:20:14] Cameron McEwen: But then you turn the page and McLuhan will be saying something like the capitalist is a man who's able to make something private

[1:20:29] Cameron McEwen: that is inherently public.

[1:20:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:20:31] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:20:33] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:20:34] Cameron McEwen: maybe the capitalist is able to control the water supply or the capitalist puts up a huge billboard.

[1:20:44] Cameron McEwen: that's digital,

[1:20:45] Cameron McEwen: that is casting its message for three counties or something.

[1:20:51] Cameron McEwen: And so the capitalist takes over everybody's visual space and is able to generate money out of that.

[1:21:02] Cameron McEwen: So private vices,

[1:21:03] Cameron McEwen: public benefits also works opposite,

[1:21:07] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:21:08] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:21:09] Cameron McEwen: Public vices.

[1:21:12] Bob Dobbs: private benefits.

[1:21:19] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:21:23] Bob Dobbs: private don't know so I'm going to say this

[1:21:29] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan seemed pretty hip to point out that and not use value judgments that's what he's first known for curious guy making commentary and he's not saying things are good or evil

[1:21:41] Bob Dobbs: So that made him seem modern and hip.

[1:21:44] Bob Dobbs: So when he died,

[1:21:46] Bob Dobbs: or later,

[1:21:47] Bob Dobbs: when you found out that McLuhan was a Catholic,

[1:21:50] Bob Dobbs: you found that odd,

[1:21:51] Bob Dobbs: because his image was this cool guy who wasn't getting lost in religious value judgments,

[1:21:58] Bob Dobbs: or what people would think a religious person would do.

[1:22:01] Bob Dobbs: So his image played with the good and evil clichés.

[1:22:06] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:22:08] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember what the other point was.

[1:22:10] Bob Dobbs: About the public-private benefits.

[1:22:16] Bob Dobbs: No.

[1:22:17] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:22:17] Bob Dobbs: so did you get that point?

[1:22:21] Bob Dobbs: I remember when McLuhan died,

[1:22:24] Bob Dobbs: and some of these CBC intellectuals were on there a week or so after,

[1:22:30] Bob Dobbs: and one guy says,

[1:22:31] Bob Dobbs: and he was a prominent neoconservative,

[1:22:35] Bob Dobbs: 80s Mulroney-supporting professor who didn't have any knowledge of McLuhan.

[1:22:39] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:22:39] Bob Dobbs: I was shocked to hear that he was a Catholic because they thought in what I call the Madison Avenue image that this was a hip professor.

[1:22:50] Bob Dobbs: And he even says in a talk in the early

[1:22:52] Bob Dobbs: 60s that he was considered the beatnik professor.

[1:22:57] Bob Dobbs: He says that.

[1:22:58] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:22:59] Cameron McEwen: So people's idea of religion was that...

[1:23:07] Cameron McEwen: Whose idea?

[1:23:09] Cameron McEwen: Just the general idea of religion was that you couldn't get into things like rock and roll or fashion.

[1:23:22] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:23:24] Cameron McEwen: That this was somehow beneath religion.

[1:23:28] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:23:30] Cameron McEwen: But that takes us back to the two different ways of...

[1:23:38] Cameron McEwen: looking at contemporary society that you brought out at the start of your pamphlet,

[1:23:44] Cameron McEwen: is to say there is the emotional,

[1:23:47] Cameron McEwen: emotive,

[1:23:48] Cameron McEwen: evaluative way of looking at things,

[1:23:54] Cameron McEwen: and there's the cognitive way.

[1:23:56] Cameron McEwen: And the reactions that you're talking about are the ethical as opposed to the cognitive.

[1:24:03] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:24:04] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:24:04] Bob Dobbs: you know...

[1:24:07] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,

[1:24:10] Bob Dobbs: he was striking in the

[1:24:11] Bob Dobbs: 60s, but the anarchy that he predicted that was coming in the 70s and 90s,

[1:24:17] Bob Dobbs: way beyond what anybody thought,

[1:24:20] Bob Dobbs: anarchy being the services and disservices multiplied,

[1:24:23] Bob Dobbs: what I call Orphic Baroque spirals.

[1:24:26] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is,

[1:24:28] Bob Dobbs: he's not complicated enough to be relevant in the 70s and 80s,

[1:24:33] Bob Dobbs: at least for surface readers.

[1:24:34] Bob Dobbs: So that's why Derrida and these post-modernists...

[1:24:37] Bob Dobbs: modern post-structuralist complicators that people would read in college and couldn't understand.

[1:24:42] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[1:24:43] Bob Dobbs: Robert Fulford said he can't understand any modern criticism anymore.

[1:24:47] Bob Dobbs: So this complexity came in that McLuhan would appear too simple,

[1:24:53] Bob Dobbs: if you put it up against the Derrida.

[1:24:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:24:56] Bob Dobbs: So...

[1:24:58] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan got the last insights before you went into the world of silence,

[1:25:04] Bob Dobbs: and nobody's going to come up with anything after McLuhan.

[1:25:07] Bob Dobbs: They're just going to be either conscious or unconscious Menippean,

[1:25:11] Bob Dobbs: like he said Derrida was.

[1:25:15] Bob Dobbs: Really,

[1:25:15] Bob Dobbs: he did get the last word.

[1:25:17] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:25:17] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:25:17] Bob Dobbs: there's the finish line.

[1:25:19] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan the finish line.

[1:25:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:25:22] Cameron McEwen: except that

[1:25:25] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, you can put...

[1:25:27] Cameron McEwen: quotes around that word too.

[1:25:30] Cameron McEwen: There's many levels to that and the question of ground there as well.

[1:25:37] Bob Dobbs: The fact that there's no finish line leads to endless energy yet beyond the friction based society.

[1:25:47] Bob Dobbs: Our technology we're bringing forth creates and is frictionless.

[1:25:53] Bob Dobbs: No ending.

[1:25:54] Bob Dobbs: No beginning.

[1:25:56] Bob Dobbs: No marker.

[1:25:58] Bob Dobbs: So this is where the software eternity that we've been living in since TV and the global theater and the global membrane are the effects of endless

[1:26:13] Bob Dobbs: hardware,

[1:26:15] Bob Dobbs: what we call Coldplay,

[1:26:16] Bob Dobbs: sense-making of electricity.

[1:26:19] Bob Dobbs: That's the figure or the cause that the effects of our world have been.

[1:26:26] Bob Dobbs: laying out for 50 years.

[1:26:28] Bob Dobbs: We've been in a cold fusion environment

[1:26:31] Bob Dobbs: 24-7, constant information that you can engage,

[1:26:36] Bob Dobbs: either on your smartphone or whatever old media you have.

[1:26:40] Bob Dobbs: So we're in a frictionless,

[1:26:42] Bob Dobbs: and he called it a flow,

[1:26:45] Bob Dobbs: on an effect level.

[1:26:47] Bob Dobbs: And that meant,

[1:26:47] Bob Dobbs: like he used to say,

[1:26:49] Bob Dobbs: you're going to have anti-gravity machines,

[1:26:52] Bob Dobbs: because we're already floating.

[1:26:56] Bob Dobbs: You get that?

[1:27:00] Cameron McEwen: Sorry,

[1:27:00] Cameron McEwen: keep going.

[1:27:02] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:27:02] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying that our device that we've invented that will change the world creates endless electricity.

[1:27:09] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:27:10] Bob Dobbs: I call that a frictionless technology.

[1:27:13] Bob Dobbs: All technologies up to this point have been discarnate.

[1:27:16] Bob Dobbs: They're entropic.

[1:27:17] Bob Dobbs: They wind down.

[1:27:19] Bob Dobbs: They wear out.

[1:27:21] Bob Dobbs: But we've been living for the brain.

[1:27:24] Bob Dobbs: People can,

[1:27:25] Bob Dobbs: if you've got insomnia,

[1:27:27] Bob Dobbs: you can live and be stimulated for days until you collapse.

[1:27:32] Bob Dobbs: Who's ever had that before?

[1:27:35] Bob Dobbs: You haven't had this extension of your central nervous system outside of you,

[1:27:41] Bob Dobbs: which then goes back inside of you,

[1:27:43] Bob Dobbs: and your dangling ganglia are endlessly tickled.

[1:27:48] Bob Dobbs: That's a new kind of distraction.

[1:27:53] Bob Dobbs: Maybe.

[1:27:55] Cameron McEwen: There's an upside and a downside.

[1:27:56] Cameron McEwen: The upside,

[1:27:58] Cameron McEwen: which we can hope is going to happen,

[1:28:01] Cameron McEwen: is that the frictionless technology that you're talking about is resonance.

[1:28:12] Cameron McEwen: But resonance isn't necessarily put to good use.

[1:28:21] Cameron McEwen: Resuments.

[1:28:22] Cameron McEwen: is the,

[1:28:27] Cameron McEwen: not the technology,

[1:28:29] Cameron McEwen: but the principle behind a great deal of the very destructive technology that people are developing and that they're deploying.

[1:28:40] Cameron McEwen: And so there's kind of,

[1:28:41] Cameron McEwen: at the moment,

[1:28:42] Cameron McEwen: there's kind of a race going on between these two different developments.

[1:28:49] Cameron McEwen: The one towards limitless.

[1:28:51] Cameron McEwen: generation of energy that you're talking about,

[1:28:54] Cameron McEwen: and the other is limitless generation of violence.

[1:28:59] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:28:59] Bob Dobbs: and that,

[1:29:05] Bob Dobbs: let's see,

[1:29:05] Bob Dobbs: the,

[1:29:08] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[1:29:08] Bob Dobbs: this is where the Gutenberg rearview mirror cannot be dropped.

[1:29:13] Bob Dobbs: And so we take what this new breakthrough,

[1:29:15] Bob Dobbs: frictionless,

[1:29:16] Bob Dobbs: and we put it back into our Gutenberg framework,

[1:29:18] Bob Dobbs: our visual bias.

[1:29:20] Bob Dobbs: We try to say,

[1:29:21] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:29:21] Bob Dobbs: how is this going to make people better capitalists,

[1:29:23] Bob Dobbs: better individuals,

[1:29:24] Bob Dobbs: more talented,

[1:29:25] Bob Dobbs: more powerful?

[1:29:27] Bob Dobbs: That's

[1:29:28] Bob Dobbs: Louis Kelso's economics,

[1:29:30] Bob Dobbs: which is in War and Peace in the Golden Village,

[1:29:32] Bob Dobbs: where he says,

[1:29:32] Bob Dobbs: make everybody a shareholder,

[1:29:36] Bob Dobbs: the average worker.

[1:29:37] Bob Dobbs: The point is,

[1:29:37] Bob Dobbs: they're trying to prop up the individual with this beehive effect of frictionless energy.

[1:29:44] Bob Dobbs: And so as we get more and more beehived,

[1:29:48] Bob Dobbs: we feel more lost.

[1:29:49] Bob Dobbs: because we have no anchor for our literate self,

[1:29:53] Bob Dobbs: which is such a powerful impact over the last 500 years.

[1:29:56] Bob Dobbs: It's a powerful meme.

[1:29:59] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:30:01] Cameron McEwen: I think you're saying that the whole concept of frictionlessness is one that can be understood as potentially very positive,

[1:30:15] Cameron McEwen: but at the same time potentially very negative.

[1:30:19] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:30:19] Bob Dobbs: because we're not going to have the equipment,

[1:30:22] Bob Dobbs: the sensory training to drop our Gutenberg habit.

[1:30:25] Bob Dobbs: and see clearly what the implications are of the new situation,

[1:30:30] Bob Dobbs: which is not Gutenbergian.

[1:30:32] Bob Dobbs: So we are hampered by our values,

[1:30:36] Bob Dobbs: by our most treasured archetypes and clichés that come out of the Gutenberg tradition.

[1:30:43] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:30:44] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:30:45] Bob Dobbs: most education is still geared to make the student a smart reader,

[1:30:52] Bob Dobbs: and they're failing every year.

[1:30:53] Bob Dobbs: It's worse and worse.

[1:30:55] Bob Dobbs: They now,

[1:30:56] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:30:57] Bob Dobbs: graduate people who can't read.

[1:30:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:31:01] Bob Dobbs: What'd you say?

[1:31:01] Cameron McEwen: Definitely.

[1:31:03] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:31:03] Cameron McEwen: I agree with that.

[1:31:05] Cameron McEwen: It just,

[1:31:06] Cameron McEwen: I'm trying to,

[1:31:07] Cameron McEwen: it seems to me that there's something important that we're getting at here,

[1:31:15] Cameron McEwen: and I'm not quite sure how to say it.

[1:31:19] Cameron McEwen: I'm just...

[1:31:21] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:31:21] Bob Dobbs: here's something that comes to mind.

[1:31:23] Bob Dobbs: The Gutenberg bias...

[1:31:26] Bob Dobbs: It's too old.

[1:31:27] Bob Dobbs: There's the kinetic industrial bias.

[1:31:30] Bob Dobbs: Maybe endless vehicles,

[1:31:32] Bob Dobbs: driving,

[1:31:33] Bob Dobbs: flying,

[1:31:33] Bob Dobbs: moving.

[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: That's a big bias.

[1:31:37] Bob Dobbs: The industrial age extended our kinetic senses.

[1:31:40] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:31:41] Bob Dobbs: I think partly the Gutenberg's important,

[1:31:44] Bob Dobbs: but it's too far back.

[1:31:46] Bob Dobbs: What do we call it?

[1:31:47] Bob Dobbs: If we call electric analog media the Marconi stuff,

[1:31:51] Bob Dobbs: we have a Marconi bias.

[1:31:53] Bob Dobbs: We think we're broadcasting.

[1:31:55] Bob Dobbs: And we don't broadcast anymore,

[1:31:57] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:31:58] Bob Dobbs: What is it?

[1:31:58] Bob Dobbs: It's mobile.

[1:32:01] Bob Dobbs: You're narrowcasting and broadcasting and broadcatching and narrowcatching.

[1:32:09] Bob Dobbs: Those are terms I made up.

[1:32:10] Bob Dobbs: That might have been in Negroponte's book,

[1:32:13] Bob Dobbs: Being Digital in the mid-80s,

[1:32:16] Bob Dobbs: was it?

[1:32:16] Bob Dobbs: Or early

[1:32:17] Bob Dobbs: 90s? Anyways,

[1:32:20] Bob Dobbs: the Bloomberg bias is not...

[1:32:24] Bob Dobbs: People don't even know what it is.

[1:32:27] Bob Dobbs: They could understand the Marconi bias they have.

[1:32:31] Bob Dobbs: So for us,

[1:32:33] Bob Dobbs: we have images in our minds of radio and TV and all the analog media that young people for a generation or two don't have.

[1:32:42] Bob Dobbs: They don't have the same content in their heads as we do.

[1:32:49] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:32:49] Bob Dobbs: imagine that.

[1:32:50] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:32:51] Bob Dobbs: people lived in...

[1:32:52] Bob Dobbs: You could say people are different,

[1:32:53] Bob Dobbs: generations are different,

[1:32:54] Bob Dobbs: but in slower times,

[1:32:56] Bob Dobbs: medieval times,

[1:32:58] Bob Dobbs: people had shared the image of trees in the valley they lived in,

[1:33:03] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:33:04] Bob Dobbs: We've got people.

[1:33:06] Cameron McEwen: But are you talking at the level of message?

[1:33:09] Bob Dobbs: No.

[1:33:11] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:33:11] Bob Dobbs: the images in their brains.

[1:33:14] Bob Dobbs: Frank Zingrone told me this,

[1:33:16] Bob Dobbs: that he couldn't teach understanding media in the

[1:33:18] Bob Dobbs: 90s to the...

[1:33:21] Bob Dobbs: 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds because they didn't know what a TV was as McLuhan described it.

[1:33:26] Bob Dobbs: They had not experienced it.

[1:33:28] Bob Dobbs: They were into the digital media,

[1:33:30] Bob Dobbs: cell phones and whatever they had.

[1:33:33] Bob Dobbs: There still was television around in the homes,

[1:33:35] Bob Dobbs: but they really found it hard to visualize what the media were in understanding media.

[1:33:42] Bob Dobbs: They didn't have that experience anymore.

[1:33:46] Cameron McEwen: I think that that's...

[1:33:50] Bob Dobbs: Too extreme.

[1:33:55] Cameron McEwen: Very literal.

[1:33:55] Cameron McEwen: Sorry?

[1:33:55] Cameron McEwen: Too extreme.

[1:33:55] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:33:55] Cameron McEwen: I just,

[1:33:56] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:33:56] Cameron McEwen: not extreme enough.

[1:33:58] Cameron McEwen: I think what Zingrone was doing there was taking what McLuhan was talking about too literally,

[1:34:07] Cameron McEwen: as if what he was saying in 1967 had in mind certain literal machines.

[1:34:16] Cameron McEwen: And if you didn't know what those literal machines were,

[1:34:19] Cameron McEwen: then you wouldn't be able to understand the book.

[1:34:22] Cameron McEwen: But that's exactly what McLuhan wasn't talking about.

[1:34:26] Cameron McEwen: He was talking about getting away from Carl Williams.

[1:34:31] Bob Dobbs: That's why he had to change the word the meaning of medium five times.

[1:34:36] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,

[1:34:37] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[1:34:37] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:34:38] Cameron McEwen: that's an example of how the word message,

[1:34:44] Cameron McEwen: say,

[1:34:45] Cameron McEwen: was in quotation marks so that it...

[1:34:48] Cameron McEwen: It meant a whole series of things that were beyond message.

[1:34:54] Cameron McEwen: And the same was true of medium.

[1:34:57] Cameron McEwen: So then...

[1:34:58] Cameron McEwen: But the idea that people have different stuff in their brains remains,

[1:35:08] Cameron McEwen: as far as I can see,

[1:35:10] Cameron McEwen: at the level of content,

[1:35:12] Cameron McEwen: at the level of message.

[1:35:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:35:16] Cameron McEwen: Just because people don't know what a walkie-talkie is or something.

[1:35:28] Cameron McEwen: It doesn't mean that the fundamental ways in which people think have changed.

[1:35:37] Cameron McEwen: They haven't.

[1:35:40] Cameron McEwen: And that's true at different levels itself.

[1:35:44] Cameron McEwen: We've been talking all morning basically about the tentacles of the Gutenberg galaxy retaining their power in the contemporary world.

[1:35:58] Cameron McEwen: even when the

[1:36:01] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg Galaxy technologies have largely disappeared.

[1:36:07] Cameron McEwen: And this is one way to explain the great danger of the contemporary world.

[1:36:15] Cameron McEwen: It's Gutenbergian to want to dominate,

[1:36:19] Cameron McEwen: to want to be the number one country in the history of the world.

[1:36:26] Cameron McEwen: But that doesn't...

[1:36:28] Cameron McEwen: That is contradictory anti-environment we live in.

[1:36:32] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:36:32] Cameron McEwen: It is electric and dialogical.

[1:36:35] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:36:35] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:36:36] Bob Dobbs: now,

[1:36:37] Bob Dobbs: Zingrone was McLuhan worst student.

[1:36:41] Bob Dobbs: You're proving that Zingrone didn't understand McLuhan.

[1:36:44] Bob Dobbs: And he always...

[1:36:44] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:36:45] Bob Dobbs: He came to the Coach House at least once a year and had a big argument with McLuhan in front of everybody.

[1:36:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:36:52] Bob Dobbs: Great.

[1:36:52] Bob Dobbs: I believe that.

[1:36:53] Bob Dobbs: And he later wrote in some...

[1:36:57] Bob Dobbs: book,

[1:36:57] Bob Dobbs: maybe the one,

[1:36:58] Bob Dobbs: Who Was Marshall McLuhan?

[1:37:01] Bob Dobbs: He talks about going to a restaurant in Toronto about six weeks before his stroke in September 79.

[1:37:11] Bob Dobbs: But he is writing years later and he's saying,

[1:37:15] Bob Dobbs: I regret that I didn't listen to McLuhan more.

[1:37:18] Bob Dobbs: He admits he didn't get him.

[1:37:20] Bob Dobbs: He admits that he was lazy and he should have worked and not yelled and argued with McLuhan so much.

[1:37:27] Bob Dobbs: so Zingrone does but he worked with Eric to put out the Essential McLuhan book he got the gig he didn't understand McLuhan but he got the gig to edit the collection of

[1:37:40] Bob Dobbs: Essential McLuhan articles which is called

[1:37:43] Bob Dobbs: Essential McLuhan the book with Eric so what does McLuhan say a lot of tiger traps and elephant cages in there

[1:37:56] Bob Dobbs: That's what he used to say.

[1:37:58] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:37:58] Bob Dobbs: you have to be careful.

[1:38:00] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:38:01] Bob Dobbs: it's interesting you say that.

[1:38:03] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:38:04] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[1:38:04] Bob Dobbs: though,

[1:38:04] Bob Dobbs: that when you say people always think the same through eternity,

[1:38:11] Bob Dobbs: that might be a Gutenbergian notion.

[1:38:14] Bob Dobbs: Because if you have,

[1:38:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:38:16] Bob Dobbs: bicameral minds that are thinking differently,

[1:38:20] Bob Dobbs: pre-writing,

[1:38:21] Bob Dobbs: we don't know if they're the same.

[1:38:23] Bob Dobbs: So we don't know what is the same.

[1:38:25] Cameron McEwen: same about humans or what makes people human so we got to put that in quotes well that's it's true that we have to put it in quotes but when something put in quotes that doesn't mean we don't know anything or that we can't know about it or something all

[1:38:44] Cameron McEwen: it means is that the word or the area being investigated is complicated yeah

[1:38:54] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[1:38:54] Cameron McEwen: the idea that we don't know what people were thinking about in

[1:38:59] Cameron McEwen: 15,000 BC,

[1:39:03] Cameron McEwen: every day that's becoming less true.

[1:39:06] Cameron McEwen: We're finding out more and more and more about people 15,000 years ago,

[1:39:13] Cameron McEwen: 40,000 years ago,

[1:39:16] Cameron McEwen: through DNA,

[1:39:17] Cameron McEwen: through archaeology,

[1:39:20] Cameron McEwen: through botany.

[1:39:24] Cameron McEwen: through all kinds of areas that are exposing things that we thought we would never know.

[1:39:35] Bob Dobbs: Do we tend to begin to realize that we've always been the same,

[1:39:38] Bob Dobbs: or do we,

[1:39:40] Bob Dobbs: with this new knowledge,

[1:39:41] Bob Dobbs: realize how different we are through the millennia?

[1:39:46] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:39:47] Cameron McEwen: the whole idea that...

[1:39:49] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:39:52] Cameron McEwen: those are very big questions,

[1:39:54] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:39:55] Cameron McEwen: Are we the same?

[1:39:56] Cameron McEwen: Are we different?

[1:39:57] Cameron McEwen: And one of the questions that those sorts of big issues raise is,

[1:40:07] Cameron McEwen: how can we get a handle on something like this?

[1:40:09] Cameron McEwen: Are we being like the octopus trying to grab the pyramid?

[1:40:15] Cameron McEwen: Or do we have a way of...

[1:40:19] Cameron McEwen: getting a handle on this.

[1:40:20] Cameron McEwen: So what McLuhan said was,

[1:40:23] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:40:23] Cameron McEwen: look,

[1:40:24] Cameron McEwen: basically,

[1:40:26] Cameron McEwen: there's only two different ways in which the mind can be seen to work.

[1:40:35] Cameron McEwen: And that is through the

[1:40:38] Cameron McEwen: Paleolithic slash electrical and through the

[1:40:43] Cameron McEwen: Gutenbergian.

[1:40:44] Cameron McEwen: And according to McLuhan,

[1:40:48] Cameron McEwen: There's all-at-onceness,

[1:40:49] Cameron McEwen: which means that these two ways,

[1:40:52] Cameron McEwen: either alone or in a myriad ways of combination,

[1:40:56] Cameron McEwen: have always been the case.

[1:40:59] Cameron McEwen: That's what all-at-onceness is.

[1:41:01] Cameron McEwen: So if we use that way of looking at things,

[1:41:09] Cameron McEwen: what does it tell us about are things the same or are they different?

[1:41:13] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:41:15] Cameron McEwen: the whole idea that...

[1:41:16] Cameron McEwen: things are progressing towards difference is Gutenbergian because it's linear,

[1:41:22] Cameron McEwen: because it believes in some kind of progression,

[1:41:27] Cameron McEwen: even though the progression is going into difference.

[1:41:31] Cameron McEwen: So from McLuhan perspective,

[1:41:34] Cameron McEwen: that can be judged to be faulty.

[1:41:40] Cameron McEwen: It's not an enlightening way to look at history.

[1:41:47] Cameron McEwen: because it adopts a Gutenbergian perspective,

[1:41:50] Cameron McEwen: and a Gutenbergian perspective is inherently closed-minded,

[1:41:58] Cameron McEwen: I guess you could say.

[1:42:00] Bob Dobbs: Why is the Gutenberg aspect of ourselves still here?

[1:42:11] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:42:12] Cameron McEwen: for the very reason that...

[1:42:15] Cameron McEwen: The forms of mind are always available.

[1:42:22] Bob Dobbs: The forms of mind?

[1:42:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:42:24] Cameron McEwen: so like the Gutenbergian form.

[1:42:27] Cameron McEwen: It's never going to be obviated.

[1:42:33] Bob Dobbs: What about the pre-literate or Friedenberg?

[1:42:37] Bob Dobbs: That's here.

[1:42:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:42:39] Cameron McEwen: and that will never be obviated either.

[1:42:43] Bob Dobbs: And the kinetic is here,

[1:42:45] Bob Dobbs: the industrial.

[1:42:48] Bob Dobbs: It's interesting that the tactility of the last 100 years may be becoming an archetype.

[1:42:57] Cameron McEwen: So now we're into...

[1:43:00] Cameron McEwen: Tactility is already named when we name the

[1:43:04] Cameron McEwen: Paleolithic electric.

[1:43:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:43:07] Cameron McEwen: The outstanding feature of what McLuhan regards as Paleolithic electric...

[1:43:12] Cameron McEwen: is tactility.

[1:43:15] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:43:15] Cameron McEwen: The outstanding feature of the Gutenberg Galaxy is that it tends towards the elimination of tactility.

[1:43:28] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg Galaxy is inherently an uncomfortable dualism.

[1:43:34] Cameron McEwen: If it were comfortable,

[1:43:35] Cameron McEwen: it would have tactility.

[1:43:36] Cameron McEwen: So it's an uncomfortable dualism that tends towards

[1:43:41] Cameron McEwen: a monolithic perspective.

[1:43:44] Cameron McEwen: So a monolithic means absent tactility.

[1:43:49] Cameron McEwen: So the two perspectives that have always been around are the comfortable dualism and uncomfortable dualism.

[1:44:02] Cameron McEwen: And once that is seen,

[1:44:05] Cameron McEwen: then you can say,

[1:44:05] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:44:06] Cameron McEwen: how could there be a family

[1:44:08] Cameron McEwen: 50,000 years ago?

[1:44:10] Cameron McEwen: that didn't have both comfortable Carl Williams and uncomfortable Carl Williams,

[1:44:16] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:44:20] Cameron McEwen: Sometimes the man and the woman in the family would be comfortable,

[1:44:24] Cameron McEwen: and sometimes they wouldn't.

[1:44:26] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:44:27] Cameron McEwen: And so they would exemplify these two different archetypes of human beings.

[1:44:34] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:44:37] Cameron McEwen: And,

[1:44:37] Cameron McEwen: in fact,

[1:44:38] Cameron McEwen: the whole idea of

[1:44:40] Cameron McEwen: of a what you might call the archetype of tactility.

[1:44:49] Cameron McEwen: if it's going to be genuine,

[1:44:51] Cameron McEwen: needs to envision and relate itself to tactility.

[1:44:57] Cameron McEwen: Because if it simply rejected tactility,

[1:45:00] Cameron McEwen: that would be an uncomfortable dualism,

[1:45:03] Cameron McEwen: and it would be Gutenbergian.

[1:45:05] Cameron McEwen: So the

[1:45:07] Cameron McEwen: Paleolithic electric has to relate itself essentially to the

[1:45:13] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg vision.

[1:45:16] Cameron McEwen: because of that essential relation to otherness,

[1:45:21] Cameron McEwen: the comfortable relation to the other that is tactility,

[1:45:25] Cameron McEwen: that makes the forms of human being eternal or all at once,

[1:45:31] Cameron McEwen: always available.

[1:45:39] Bob Dobbs: So easy for you to say.

[1:45:48] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:45:48] Bob Dobbs: you've wrapped it up,

[1:45:49] Bob Dobbs: and off to Washington you go.

[1:45:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:45:56] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:45:56] Cameron McEwen: remember when

[1:45:58] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was always saying that the president has to be everybody.

[1:46:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:46:04] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:46:05] Bob Dobbs: Look like charisma.

[1:46:06] Bob Dobbs: Look like a lot of people.

[1:46:08] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:46:09] Cameron McEwen: And we were just saying the president has to be nobody.

[1:46:12] Cameron McEwen: And those go together.

[1:46:14] Cameron McEwen: perfectly.

[1:46:15] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:46:16] Cameron McEwen: The everybody is a nobody.

[1:46:18] Bob Dobbs: But the individualist American culture thinks charisma and pop culture is someone who's a very individualistic standout,

[1:46:27] Bob Dobbs: not like everybody else,

[1:46:29] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:46:30] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:46:31] Bob Dobbs: That's the paradox.

[1:46:32] Cameron McEwen: Who cares what they think?

[1:46:35] Cameron McEwen: That's one of the distinctive differences between you and me,

[1:46:38] Cameron McEwen: I think.

[1:46:38] Cameron McEwen: I couldn't care less what they think.

[1:46:41] Cameron McEwen: I don't see that it's important.

[1:46:44] Bob Dobbs: What the assumptions are in the culture?

[1:46:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:46:48] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:46:49] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:46:49] Bob Dobbs: that's what we're analyzing.

[1:46:51] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:46:52] Cameron McEwen: But for me,

[1:46:53] Cameron McEwen: it's a given from the start that the cultural presuppositions out there are useless.

[1:47:09] Cameron McEwen: I'm going too far here,

[1:47:10] Cameron McEwen: I guess.

[1:47:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:47:11] Bob Dobbs: you need to get out more.

[1:47:12] Bob Dobbs: You need to get out more.

[1:47:17] Cameron McEwen: I think that's right.

[1:47:18] Cameron McEwen: I think that's right.

[1:47:19] Cameron McEwen: Because I don't even mean what I just said.

[1:47:21] Cameron McEwen: So I have to be more careful.

[1:47:23] Bob Dobbs: What have you talked yourself into here?

[1:47:25] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:47:26] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:47:28] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:47:28] Bob Dobbs: that's nice that you admit it.

[1:47:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:47:31] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:47:32] Cameron McEwen: 94%

[1:47:35] Cameron McEwen: of the stuff I say turns out to be Gilson and ill-fought.

[1:47:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:47:41] Bob Dobbs: it's interesting.

[1:47:43] Bob Dobbs: how people talk about god all the time and what the hell would that be they can't conceive what god is but their most used word among the people except in modern times the most word is fucking yeah yeah that's right which is tactile like as tactility no

[1:48:02] Cameron McEwen: do you notice that McLuhan said that it's wearing his tactile yeah i can see that yeah if i can replace the literate god

[1:48:12] Bob Dobbs: God is dead.

[1:48:13] Bob Dobbs: The word became not as communicative as fucking did.

[1:48:21] Bob Dobbs: It's amazing,

[1:48:23] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:48:23] Bob Dobbs: we're old enough to be back when nobody would say fucking in public.

[1:48:27] Bob Dobbs: That's all I hear walk along the beaches,

[1:48:29] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:48:30] Bob Dobbs: mothers with their kids and that.

[1:48:31] Bob Dobbs: Fuck this,

[1:48:32] Bob Dobbs: fuck that,

[1:48:32] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:48:33] Bob Dobbs: that's all you hear.

[1:48:35] Bob Dobbs: But,

[1:48:35] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:48:35] Bob Dobbs: I can see that it's a grasping for the tactility that has been enhanced.

[1:48:40] Bob Dobbs: by the anti-environment.

[1:48:43] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.

[1:48:44] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.

[1:48:46] Cameron McEwen: It's been enhanced as a possibility of knowing something,

[1:48:50] Cameron McEwen: but at the same time it's been numbed.

[1:48:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:48:54] Cameron McEwen: And people don't know it.

[1:48:56] Cameron McEwen: So you have that contrast,

[1:48:57] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:48:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:48:58] Bob Dobbs: and it helps them emphasize.

[1:49:01] Bob Dobbs: They're more desperate to sound knowing,

[1:49:03] Bob Dobbs: so they've got to use that word to sound knowing,

[1:49:05] Bob Dobbs: but in the end it's not appropriate or it doesn't mean

[1:49:10] Bob Dobbs: The certitude they're looking for doesn't have it.

[1:49:14] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:49:16] Bob Dobbs: So people are more contradictory,

[1:49:23] Bob Dobbs: and they were like that before literacy or before the printing press,

[1:49:27] Bob Dobbs: and they've retrieved that.

[1:49:28] Bob Dobbs: The contradictory nature of people is accepted more now.

[1:49:34] Bob Dobbs: What's a popular phrase?

[1:49:35] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:49:36] Bob Dobbs: it's a complex world is one of them.

[1:49:39] Bob Dobbs: I don't think the average citizen,

[1:49:43] Bob Dobbs: lower classes or lower middle classes,

[1:49:46] Bob Dobbs: a hundred years ago were saying it's a complicated world.

[1:49:50] Bob Dobbs: That's where I see people have become media colleges by instinct.

[1:49:56] Bob Dobbs: They know that anti-environment coming down the pike are going to upset us.

[1:50:00] Bob Dobbs: They don't have the naivety of the

[1:50:02] Bob Dobbs: 19th century.

[1:50:03] Bob Dobbs: So that basic being cautious about bringing anti-environment into your situation is a Cosmic Awareness now.

[1:50:16] Cameron McEwen: You don't know where it came from.

[1:50:21] Cameron McEwen: It's possible that it's developing.

[1:50:23] Cameron McEwen: I don't see people,

[1:50:28] Cameron McEwen: every time I turn around,

[1:50:29] Cameron McEwen: there's some device.

[1:50:31] Cameron McEwen: that everybody else in the world seems to know about and to use,

[1:50:35] Cameron McEwen: and I've never heard of it.

[1:50:37] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:50:38] Bob Dobbs: but they can't stop using it.

[1:50:41] Bob Dobbs: But they know it's going to do them in.

[1:50:45] Bob Dobbs: And now that's where Kroker gets into the nihilistic world we're in now.

[1:50:49] Bob Dobbs: Or didn't you mention that?

[1:50:50] Bob Dobbs: We're nihilists.

[1:50:51] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:50:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:50:52] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:50:52] Cameron McEwen: the cul-de-sac.

[1:50:54] Bob Dobbs: And preliterate people were nihilists.

[1:50:56] Bob Dobbs: That's what McLuhan said.

[1:50:57] Bob Dobbs: They thought the world was a prison.

[1:51:01] Bob Dobbs: They didn't aspire to balance.

[1:51:03] Bob Dobbs: They accepted the extremes of whatever the situation was.

[1:51:07] Bob Dobbs: Slave societies,

[1:51:09] Bob Dobbs: you know that quote in Explorations where

[1:51:12] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan describes people hacking up the tribe next door very violently?

[1:51:18] Bob Dobbs: I don't know where that quote's from.

[1:51:20] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if it's in the Bible or something,

[1:51:21] Bob Dobbs: but he's showing the hyper-violence before

[1:51:27] Bob Dobbs: Bloomberg Galaxy,

[1:51:29] Bob Dobbs: and we're coming back to that.

[1:51:30] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:51:30] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:51:31] Bob Dobbs: concentration camps were the beginning of that,

[1:51:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:51:34] Bob Dobbs: huge brutality slicing up people.

[1:51:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:51:38] Cameron McEwen: he was reacting against people saying that Global Village was going to be all sweetness and light.

[1:51:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:51:45] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[1:51:46] Cameron McEwen: But it's kind of ridiculous to talk about society singular before the Gutenberg Galaxy.

[1:51:54] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[1:51:55] Cameron McEwen: there were hundreds of thousands of years that there were hominids.

[1:52:00] Cameron McEwen: And with who knows how many languages,

[1:52:04] Cameron McEwen: how many cultures and all this stuff.

[1:52:07] Cameron McEwen: And it's impossible to generalize about how they were and what they thought and all that stuff.

[1:52:15] Cameron McEwen: It's a very,

[1:52:16] Cameron McEwen: very complicated question.

[1:52:19] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[1:52:20] Bob Dobbs: And yet the Gutenberg made people project the Gutenberg effect back on these people.

[1:52:25] Bob Dobbs: Anthropologists made that mistake.

[1:52:27] Cameron McEwen: That's absolutely right.

[1:52:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:52:29] Cameron McEwen: That's why...

[1:52:31] Cameron McEwen: We can't do the same thing.

[1:52:34] Cameron McEwen: We can't just talk in terms of singularities,

[1:52:38] Cameron McEwen: even about

[1:52:39] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg.

[1:52:41] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:52:42] Bob Dobbs: So people,

[1:52:49] Bob Dobbs: they expect the new,

[1:52:50] Bob Dobbs: total new,

[1:52:51] Bob Dobbs: radical change.

[1:52:52] Bob Dobbs: And if it doesn't be,

[1:52:53] Bob Dobbs: if it isn't completely new,

[1:52:55] Bob Dobbs: they get frustrated.

[1:52:57] Bob Dobbs: They expect newness at least every six months.

[1:53:01] Bob Dobbs: And that can't be done because we're paralyzed and have been killed,

[1:53:04] Bob Dobbs: killed off.

[1:53:11] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:53:11] Cameron McEwen: that's a very big topic,

[1:53:13] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:53:14] Bob Dobbs: Every one of our topics is big.

[1:53:19] Bob Dobbs: We talk big.

[1:53:22] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,

[1:53:23] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[1:53:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:53:26] Bob Dobbs: that's what you object to the McLuhan.

[1:53:28] Bob Dobbs: They don't talk big enough.

[1:53:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:53:31] Cameron McEwen: or,

[1:53:33] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:53:34] Cameron McEwen: I could even say they don't talk small enough.

[1:53:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:53:37] Cameron McEwen: That they don't get into the cracks and the crevices where the good stuff is.

[1:53:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:53:49] Bob Dobbs: You started to say something else.

[1:53:50] Bob Dobbs: What were you saying?

[1:53:51] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:53:51] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:53:52] Cameron McEwen: I just,

[1:53:53] Cameron McEwen: I think actually we're getting close to the end here.

[1:53:56] Bob Dobbs: We are.

[1:53:57] Cameron McEwen: I'm going to need to break off.

[1:54:00] Cameron McEwen: Maybe next time,

[1:54:02] Cameron McEwen: or at least in one of our talks,

[1:54:04] Cameron McEwen: we should talk about how the new sort of falls through itself.

[1:54:12] Cameron McEwen: If there's something new every five minutes,

[1:54:15] Cameron McEwen: after a while you become inured to it,

[1:54:18] Cameron McEwen: and you need to have more and more stimulation.

[1:54:22] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:54:23] Cameron McEwen: I guess that gets into the drug culture.

[1:54:26] Cameron McEwen: I guess that gets into,

[1:54:28] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:54:29] Cameron McEwen: shock art and shock jocks and all that sort of stuff.

[1:54:34] Cameron McEwen: So you probably know an awful lot more about that.

[1:54:37] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:54:38] Cameron McEwen: I do.

[1:54:39] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:54:42] Bob Dobbs: I know a lot about that.

[1:54:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:54:47] Bob Dobbs: I get out more than you.

[1:54:49] Cameron McEwen: Definitely.

[1:54:50] Cameron McEwen: Definitely.

[1:54:51] Cameron McEwen: In all senses of the word.

[1:54:52] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:54:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:54:54] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:54:55] Bob Dobbs: excellent.

[1:54:56] Bob Dobbs: Another great dialogue.

[1:54:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:54:58] Bob Dobbs: Bob,

[1:54:59] Cameron McEwen: enjoyed talking with you,

[1:55:00] Cameron McEwen: and I look forward to next time.

[1:55:02] Bob Dobbs: Great.

[1:55:02] Bob Dobbs: And the quote is,

[1:55:04] Bob Dobbs: that's back in the 1700s.

[1:55:06] Bob Dobbs: That's the next conversational thing I'm going to say.

[1:55:09] Bob Dobbs: Just put it in your mind.

[1:55:10] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[1:55:11] Bob Dobbs: Maybe I'll make a note of it.

[1:55:12] Cameron McEwen: Page 16.

[1:55:14] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:55:14] Bob Dobbs: good.

[1:55:15] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[1:55:16] Cameron McEwen: Bobby Hulse,

[1:55:17] Cameron McEwen: old number.

[1:55:20] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:55:20] Bob Dobbs: Mr.

[1:55:21] Bob Dobbs: Königsberg,

[1:55:21] Bob Dobbs: I'll talk to you soon.

[1:55:23] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:55:24] Cameron McEwen: thanks,

[1:55:24] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[1:55:24] Cameron McEwen: Bye.

[1:55:25] Bob Dobbs: Bye.