Dialogue 32 — Transcript

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: it's Ewen Cameron and Bob.

[00:03] Bob Dobbs: We're back,

[00:04] Bob Dobbs: episode number

[00:05] Bob Dobbs: 32, and

[00:09] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron has something to say right away.

[00:11] Bob Dobbs: He's looking at a quote on page 17 from Take Today,

[00:15] Bob Dobbs: page 152.

[00:17] Bob Dobbs: I'll let

[00:17] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron say the quote or break it apart,

[00:21] Bob Dobbs: however he wants to attack it.

[00:23] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.

[00:24] Cameron McEwen: All right.

[00:24] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[00:27] Cameron McEwen: we were talking about the peace that passes.

[00:30] Cameron McEwen: All technology.

[00:34] Cameron McEwen: And the idea there was that the overkill was a form of peace,

[00:39] Cameron McEwen: that we've gotten ourselves into such a huge danger,

[00:46] Cameron McEwen: you say,

[00:47] Cameron McEwen: that it's created the public benefit of relative peace.

[00:51] Cameron McEwen: But what this quotation does,

[00:54] Cameron McEwen: in one of its senses,

[00:56] Cameron McEwen: is say that that relative peace...

[01:00] Cameron McEwen: is very,

[01:01] Cameron McEwen: very dangerous and could easily precipitate the opposite of any kind of peace.

[01:11] Cameron McEwen: So he says that in the quotation that we're looking at from Take Today,

[01:17] Cameron McEwen: page 152,

[01:20] Cameron McEwen: the second sentence starts,

[01:22] Cameron McEwen: such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries.

[01:28] Cameron McEwen: as naturally as it sustains them.

[01:32] Cameron McEwen: And what he's saying there is that we may have some kind of relative peace because war has become so dangerous,

[01:45] Cameron McEwen: so threatening to life on Earth that people can't undertake it.

[01:50] Cameron McEwen: But

[01:50] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan points out that,

[01:53] Cameron McEwen: well,

[01:55] Cameron McEwen: it can liquidate or terminate its...

[01:57] Cameron McEwen: its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them.

[02:01] Cameron McEwen: And what's noteworthy in his language here is a doubling or multi-level effect that McLuhan talked about from the very beginning of his work.

[02:19] Cameron McEwen: He was always trying to point out that words and meanings cannot be

[02:27] Cameron McEwen: pinned down.

[02:29] Cameron McEwen: And so that also goes for the relative piece of an atomic balance between the powers.

[02:39] Cameron McEwen: That can very easily turn into the annihilation of its beneficiaries or of its supposed beneficiaries.

[02:51] Cameron McEwen: And the really big question posed

[02:56] Cameron McEwen: by the modern world is who benefits from us getting ourselves into this ridiculous situation?

[03:04] Cameron McEwen: Why are we spending a trillion or two trillion dollars a year on what's called defense instead of spending that money to the benefit of people?

[03:17] Cameron McEwen: And

[03:18] Cameron McEwen: I don't think anybody knows the answer to that question.

[03:23] Cameron McEwen: The new overkill...

[03:26] Cameron McEwen: is first of all a question.

[03:32] Cameron McEwen: And when he says that that's an extension of our nervous system,

[03:38] Cameron McEwen: our nervous system too is a question.

[03:42] Cameron McEwen: That's to say,

[03:44] Cameron McEwen: what human being is,

[03:47] Cameron McEwen: is first of all a question,

[03:51] Cameron McEwen: an answer to which human beings don't know.

[04:01] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[04:01] Bob Dobbs: the new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system.

[04:05] Bob Dobbs: Does that mean that our nervous systems are in a state of overkill inside us?

[04:13] Cameron McEwen: In a certain way,

[04:13] Cameron McEwen: yes.

[04:16] Cameron McEwen: Our nervous system has always been the potential to develop something like an atomic standoff.

[04:29] Cameron McEwen: So what we see as atomic standoff or where we are or a nuclear standoff,

[04:34] Cameron McEwen: the we're in a situation of using your phrase of relative peace.

[04:42] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[04:42] Cameron McEwen: And what is relative peace means?

[04:44] Cameron McEwen: It means that our weapons have become so ridiculously dangerous that we need peace just to survive.

[04:55] Cameron McEwen: The problem is the chance.

[04:58] Cameron McEwen: of an accident.

[05:01] Cameron McEwen: or the need to respond to some perceived threat can lead to nuclear war at any second.

[05:16] Cameron McEwen: So that possibility as an extension of our nervous system has always been the case,

[05:26] Cameron McEwen: and now it's been realized.

[05:29] Cameron McEwen: total ecological anti-environment that

[05:33] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan talks about,

[05:35] Cameron McEwen: he immediately goes on to talk about in terms of liquidation and termination.

[05:44] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[05:45] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure what you want to develop about that.

[05:51] Bob Dobbs: You say,

[05:52] Bob Dobbs: we don't know the answer,

[05:56] Bob Dobbs: not going to get the answer.

[05:59] Bob Dobbs: So do you just ignore that?

[06:02] Cameron McEwen: No.

[06:04] Cameron McEwen: What's needed,

[06:05] Cameron McEwen: according to McLuhan,

[06:07] Cameron McEwen: is that we have to revisit what tactility means and what an answer is.

[06:16] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,

[06:18] Cameron McEwen: the whole problem that has been constellated in the modern world is that we take tactility and we take...

[06:28] Cameron McEwen: what it would be to have an answer in Gutenbergian terms.

[06:33] Cameron McEwen: And when we do that,

[06:35] Cameron McEwen: then raising a question is something negative.

[06:39] Cameron McEwen: And having something negative means that you have no answer.

[06:44] Cameron McEwen: And for McLuhan,

[06:46] Cameron McEwen: that is what our problem is.

[06:48] Cameron McEwen: We have to see that tactility is positive,

[06:53] Cameron McEwen: or we have to see that tactility...

[06:56] Cameron McEwen: In some senses,

[06:57] Cameron McEwen: it's negative,

[06:58] Cameron McEwen: but in the most important senses,

[07:02] Cameron McEwen: it's positive.

[07:03] Cameron McEwen: And that tactility,

[07:05] Cameron McEwen: as we can see in the physical sciences,

[07:08] Cameron McEwen: is what generates answers.

[07:11] Cameron McEwen: But by dragging

[07:14] Cameron McEwen: Gutenbergian perspective into the modern world,

[07:19] Cameron McEwen: in fact,

[07:19] Cameron McEwen: by defining the modern world in terms of Gutenbergian perspective,

[07:26] Cameron McEwen: Then we come up with tactility as negative and as generating no answer,

[07:33] Cameron McEwen: namely nihilism.

[07:34] Cameron McEwen: And that's exactly the cul-de-sac with which we began all of our conversations

[07:43] Cameron McEwen: 32 episodes ago.

[07:46] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[07:47] Bob Dobbs: 31 episodes.

[07:48] Bob Dobbs: I guess we are beginning the

[07:51] Bob Dobbs: 32nd.

[07:52] Bob Dobbs: Correct. So have we done 32?

[07:54] Bob Dobbs: Not yet,

[07:54] Bob Dobbs: right?

[07:56] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[07:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[07:57] Cameron McEwen: we're just starting the third second.

[08:04] Cameron McEwen: We're revisiting your attachment to linearity,

[08:07] Cameron McEwen: my attachment to simultaneity.

[08:11] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[08:11] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[08:13] Bob Dobbs: you raised this question.

[08:17] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[08:20] Bob Dobbs: Do you need any statement to be made about it?

[08:24] Bob Dobbs: You said,

[08:25] Bob Dobbs: That's a very important question for McLuhan.

[08:29] Cameron McEwen: I see what I'm doing is commenting on your book by pointing out its multiple levels.

[08:43] Cameron McEwen: And for

[08:44] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, at least,

[08:46] Cameron McEwen: that's what reading is.

[08:49] Cameron McEwen: And so in terms of the overall...

[08:55] Cameron McEwen: theme of the book,

[08:56] Cameron McEwen: you could say that Trump phenomenon requires close reading.

[09:07] Cameron McEwen: And when we read

[09:09] Cameron McEwen: Trump closely,

[09:11] Cameron McEwen: then you see many different levels,

[09:15] Cameron McEwen: and that complicates what the man was,

[09:20] Cameron McEwen: what the man is.

[09:22] Cameron McEwen: And according to you,

[09:24] Cameron McEwen: That then leads on,

[09:28] Cameron McEwen: this is according to page number eight,

[09:39] Cameron McEwen: that then leads on to the

[09:44] Cameron McEwen: Android Meme phase one,

[09:45] Cameron McEwen: Android Meme phase two,

[09:47] Cameron McEwen: Anthropomorphic Physical,

[09:49] Cameron McEwen: and the tech body.

[09:51] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[09:52] Cameron McEwen: So the...

[09:55] Cameron McEwen: Global Village and the Global Theater are...

[09:58] Bob Dobbs: the what might be called the dance of multi-levels right so i was that okay i'm thinking you know why i put that quote in and i'm saying in my commentary there's a balance there's a total ecological balance happening in the 50s 60s on the shores of california uh

[10:21] Bob Dobbs: and then there's oil problem i think i say later but this there is this balance happening

[10:28] Bob Dobbs: between the services and the Ivins,

[10:31] Bob Dobbs: and that's part of

[10:33] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan vision.

[10:37] Bob Dobbs: He says we're getting agitated by the wrong things.

[10:41] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[10:42] Cameron McEwen: correct.

[10:43] Cameron McEwen: And let's remember that

[10:45] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, as a Catholic,

[10:50] Cameron McEwen: believes that balance is the last word,

[10:53] Cameron McEwen: that he's speaking to people

[10:56] Cameron McEwen: that

[10:57] Cameron McEwen: 99% either are not Catholic or think they're Catholics but don't know anything about

[11:04] Cameron McEwen: Catholicism, right?

[11:06] Cameron McEwen: So he's speaking to an environment that's 99%

[11:11] Cameron McEwen: unbalanced.

[11:13] Cameron McEwen: And so his language needs to be rather complex and,

[11:22] Cameron McEwen: in some senses,

[11:24] Cameron McEwen: seemingly misdirected.

[11:26] Cameron McEwen: But that's because of this extremely complicated situation that he faces,

[11:36] Cameron McEwen: and which he sees people like Joyce also facing,

[11:41] Cameron McEwen: where you need to speak to people about the extreme danger that they have placed themselves in,

[11:49] Cameron McEwen: including the total annihilation of human life on Earth.

[11:55] Cameron McEwen: You say that.

[11:56] Cameron McEwen: from a perspective that still believes in balance.

[12:01] Cameron McEwen: And how to talk about those things together is very,

[12:08] Cameron McEwen: very difficult.

[12:19] Bob Dobbs: I'm scanning down to see.

[12:21] Bob Dobbs: What I talk about next,

[12:23] Bob Dobbs: people think we're a unified global culture today with the internet or social media 2.0,

[12:27] Bob Dobbs: just as the world was for the chemical body integrated in the 20s by the blacks.

[12:34] Cameron McEwen: What page are you on here?

[12:35] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[12:35] Cameron McEwen: you're on page 18.

[12:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[12:37] Bob Dobbs: so then I go into jazz,

[12:39] Bob Dobbs: the blacks united the world.

[12:42] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[12:42] Cameron McEwen: but notice,

[12:43] Cameron McEwen: notice Bob,

[12:44] Cameron McEwen: what's going on here is that you realize

[12:50] Cameron McEwen: either consciously or unconsciously,

[12:53] Cameron McEwen: that the whole question of balance was being posed.

[12:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[12:57] Cameron McEwen: And all of these things that you go through on page 18 concern the question of balance,

[13:10] Cameron McEwen: right?

[13:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[13:13] Bob Dobbs: But we don't seem to know how to articulate balance.

[13:19] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[13:19] Cameron McEwen: That's exactly the problem.

[13:22] Cameron McEwen: Exacto.

[13:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[13:24] Bob Dobbs: the balance is not what we thought it was.

[13:28] Bob Dobbs: The way to get balance.

[13:30] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[13:31] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[13:32] Cameron McEwen: That is the whole question posed by all of the great thinkers from all time.

[13:40] Cameron McEwen: But it has,

[13:42] Cameron McEwen: in the 21st century,

[13:44] Cameron McEwen: it has come to an extreme where...

[13:49] Cameron McEwen: The answer to that question,

[13:51] Cameron McEwen: or the,

[13:53] Cameron McEwen: how can I say,

[13:54] Cameron McEwen: the interrogation of that question,

[13:56] Cameron McEwen: may be what the future of the human race depends on.

[14:05] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[14:06] Bob Dobbs: where are we going to get the question raised?

[14:09] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[14:09] Bob Dobbs: we're doing it.

[14:11] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[14:12] Cameron McEwen: we're trying to do it.

[14:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[14:13] Cameron McEwen: But Nietzsche tried to do it,

[14:15] Cameron McEwen: and Lewis tried to do it,

[14:17] Cameron McEwen: and Joyce tried to do it.

[14:17] Cameron McEwen: tried to do it and Eliot tried to do it and McLuhan tried to do it.

[14:24] Cameron McEwen: And Plato tried to do it.

[14:25] Cameron McEwen: So we're talking at least

[14:32] Cameron McEwen: 2,500 years after these sorts of questions have been raised and all there has been is failure.

[14:42] Cameron McEwen: And where our conversation takes place

[14:46] Cameron McEwen: place in that context.

[14:48] Cameron McEwen: We're trying to raise certain questions,

[14:51] Cameron McEwen: especially about balance,

[14:54] Cameron McEwen: but how that can be done is the great question.

[14:58] Cameron McEwen: And it's especially a great question when ultimately there can be no balance of one thing.

[15:08] Cameron McEwen: There has to be a balance like a teeter-totter is always two things.

[15:15] Cameron McEwen: And so the balance itself can only be balanced by unbalance.

[15:25] Cameron McEwen: And trying to...

[15:28] Cameron McEwen: get a handle or trying to get some kind of grasp on that difficult knot between balance and unbalance.

[15:39] Cameron McEwen: That's sort of what human being turns on.

[15:44] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[15:44] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[15:44] Bob Dobbs: do you think that the aboriginal cultures are balanced,

[15:48] Bob Dobbs: that they have a wisdom for us?

[15:52] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[15:52] Cameron McEwen: let's differentiate between a series of questions that are involved there.

[15:58] Cameron McEwen: First,

[16:01] Cameron McEwen: are,

[16:02] Cameron McEwen: excuse me,

[16:02] Cameron McEwen: I've got a frog in my throat here.

[16:06] Cameron McEwen: Are or were

[16:08] Cameron McEwen: Aboriginal cultures all the same?

[16:11] Cameron McEwen: And the answer to that is clearly no.

[16:13] Cameron McEwen: Then we could ask,

[16:14] Cameron McEwen: well,

[16:15] Cameron McEwen: take any one

[16:16] Cameron McEwen: Aboriginal culture.

[16:18] Cameron McEwen: Was it the same?

[16:19] Cameron McEwen: And the answer there is also no.

[16:22] Cameron McEwen: The kids,

[16:23] Cameron McEwen: when they were teenagers,

[16:26] Cameron McEwen: did they understand?

[16:28] Cameron McEwen: what some shaman understood in that same culture?

[16:33] Cameron McEwen: And the answer is no,

[16:35] Cameron McEwen: no.

[16:35] Cameron McEwen: So things have always been complicated.

[16:39] Cameron McEwen: So that's one question and one answer to it.

[16:43] Cameron McEwen: Another question is,

[16:45] Cameron McEwen: what did these people do all the time when they weren't sleeping or they weren't hunting or they weren't cooking or they weren't doing things with...

[16:57] Cameron McEwen: stone or doing things with wood,

[16:58] Cameron McEwen: what were they doing?

[17:01] Cameron McEwen: And the answer for some of the people was that they were thinking.

[17:07] Cameron McEwen: And so the chances are pretty good that at least in some cultures,

[17:14] Cameron McEwen: in the 100,000 years or so that human beings have been around,

[17:20] Cameron McEwen: at least in some cultures,

[17:22] Cameron McEwen: there was probably more thinking and conceivably

[17:26] Cameron McEwen: better thinking going on than what we can do,

[17:31] Cameron McEwen: right?

[17:31] Cameron McEwen: They didn't have all of the distractions.

[17:34] Cameron McEwen: They,

[17:36] Cameron McEwen: some people probably spent most of their lives,

[17:43] Cameron McEwen: most of their life,

[17:45] Cameron McEwen: simply thinking,

[17:47] Cameron McEwen: probably looking at the stars and wondering what the hell the stars were telling them.

[17:56] Cameron McEwen: So

[17:57] Cameron McEwen: This is the second question.

[17:59] Cameron McEwen: Was there at least in some cultures some great thinking going on?

[18:04] Cameron McEwen: I think the answer is probably yes.

[18:08] Cameron McEwen: It's probably something that we in our time aren't equal to.

[18:17] Cameron McEwen: Third question.

[18:20] Cameron McEwen: Given that great variety over that great span of time.

[18:25] Cameron McEwen: We've been literate for 2,500 years.

[18:28] Cameron McEwen: Or if we don't believe Havelock and McLuhan and we think that the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians were literate in some sense,

[18:38] Cameron McEwen: then 3,500 years.

[18:41] Cameron McEwen: We can tack on another 1,000 years to that.

[18:48] Cameron McEwen: But humans have been around for at least 100,000 and arguably with...

[18:55] Cameron McEwen: Some of the new finds in Morocco and in

[18:58] Cameron McEwen: Western Africa over there may be 300,000 years.

[19:04] Cameron McEwen: So our period has been very,

[19:09] Cameron McEwen: very small in comparison to the total history of the species.

[19:16] Cameron McEwen: So then the third question would be,

[19:18] Cameron McEwen: well,

[19:19] Cameron McEwen: what are our resources for attempting to...

[19:24] Cameron McEwen: to emulate or to interrogate or to find out what these people,

[19:35] Cameron McEwen: the best ones,

[19:36] Cameron McEwen: what they achieved in their best thinking.

[19:40] Cameron McEwen: And I think for that,

[19:43] Cameron McEwen: all we can do is try to encourage some people who have been blessed by

[19:53] Cameron McEwen: having good minds to focus.

[19:57] Cameron McEwen: as much of their time as possible on these deep questions.

[20:03] Cameron McEwen: So I would say those are three ways of thinking about the question you asked me that generally aren't asked.

[20:11] Cameron McEwen: And probably there are other ones too.

[20:16] Cameron McEwen: But the question that you asked about the Aboriginal peoples is much more complicated than people generally believe.

[20:26] Bob Dobbs: Do you feel that people have lost control right now?

[20:34] Bob Dobbs: Do you think that we're at the worst,

[20:36] Bob Dobbs: most dangerous time we've ever done since you've been alive?

[20:42] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[20:43] Cameron McEwen: I think that's probably the case.

[20:46] Bob Dobbs: What are you seeing going on out there to make you say that?

[20:54] Bob Dobbs: And,

[20:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[20:54] Bob Dobbs: you can't say,

[20:55] Bob Dobbs: well,

[20:55] Bob Dobbs: we've always been nuts,

[20:56] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[20:57] Bob Dobbs: Let's pretend there's something different here.

[21:01] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[21:01] Cameron McEwen: What do you see?

[21:07] Bob Dobbs: Do you watch the news?

[21:08] Bob Dobbs: You don't do the news,

[21:09] Bob Dobbs: right?

[21:10] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[21:11] Cameron McEwen: it all depends on what you mean by news.

[21:12] Cameron McEwen: I certainly don't look at what's called Main Street media,

[21:16] Cameron McEwen: never.

[21:17] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[21:18] Bob Dobbs: Do you go to judge?

[21:21] Cameron McEwen: No,

[21:22] Cameron McEwen: I don't know what that means.

[21:24] Bob Dobbs: How do you know what's going on?

[21:26] Bob Dobbs: I have a sense of what's going on.

[21:32] Cameron McEwen: By doing digital research,

[21:37] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[21:42] Bob Dobbs: Statistics?

[21:44] Cameron McEwen: Doing digital research,

[21:45] Cameron McEwen: you would think,

[21:47] Cameron McEwen: in the McLuhan industry,

[21:49] Cameron McEwen: would be something obvious.

[21:52] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[21:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[21:53] Cameron McEwen: As far as I can see,

[21:54] Cameron McEwen: people don't know how to do it.

[21:56] Cameron McEwen: So

[21:58] Cameron McEwen: I research the quote-unquote news in the same way as I read your book,

[22:04] Cameron McEwen: and that is that

[22:07] Cameron McEwen: I see something online like the Azerbaijanians want to build a new pipeline.

[22:22] Cameron McEwen: into Europe to compete with Russia,

[22:25] Cameron McEwen: let's say.

[22:26] Cameron McEwen: So then I have to try and figure out how the countries around the Caspian Sea are situated and how the sea is divided up between the different powers and what the possibilities are for a

[22:43] Cameron McEwen: pipeline project,

[22:47] Cameron McEwen: through what countries it would go,

[22:49] Cameron McEwen: and all this sort of stuff.

[22:51] Cameron McEwen: And that's...

[22:52] Cameron McEwen: So that's what I do with everything.

[22:55] Cameron McEwen: I try to see through some language that I know I don't know anything about.

[23:04] Cameron McEwen: I try to look into what's below it.

[23:08] Bob Dobbs: So you don't consume news or wait for someone to send it to you.

[23:16] Bob Dobbs: You're a journalist in that sense.

[23:18] Bob Dobbs: Maybe,

[23:19] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[23:20] Cameron McEwen: correct.

[23:23] Cameron McEwen: So a sense of journalism that has pretty much disappeared from the world,

[23:28] Cameron McEwen: as far as I can see.

[23:29] Cameron McEwen: But there are people that,

[23:32] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[23:32] Cameron McEwen: like I've got to say that sometimes I listen to Amazing Folly from your website.

[23:41] Cameron McEwen: And

[23:43] Cameron McEwen: I like the way that she does research.

[23:48] Cameron McEwen: When she wants to look into a topic,

[23:51] Cameron McEwen: Basically,

[23:52] Cameron McEwen: she does searching online and she keeps on searching and searching and searching into the depths of what she's finding.

[24:01] Cameron McEwen: And

[24:02] Cameron McEwen: I think that's excellent.

[24:03] Cameron McEwen: I think that's actually the way thinking should work.

[24:07] Cameron McEwen: Thinking should always be,

[24:09] Cameron McEwen: it doesn't matter if you're talking about the news or if you're talking about something that just sort of flash through your head or something.

[24:17] Cameron McEwen: You should always...

[24:20] Cameron McEwen: try to find out what lies below it.

[24:24] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[24:24] Bob Dobbs: and so if you look at the latest one she's posted,

[24:28] Bob Dobbs: did you look at,

[24:29] Bob Dobbs: listen to the today,

[24:30] Bob Dobbs: say,

[24:31] Bob Dobbs: I think Ed put it up today,

[24:33] Bob Dobbs: this past day.

[24:35] Bob Dobbs: Did you listen to her?

[24:38] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[24:38] Cameron McEwen: I really don't know.

[24:40] Cameron McEwen: Sorry,

[24:41] Cameron McEwen: I can't remember the last time I looked at her.

[24:44] Bob Dobbs: I recommend this one.

[24:45] Bob Dobbs: She's come to a peak.

[24:48] Bob Dobbs: It's titled,

[24:49] Bob Dobbs: I'm over coronavirus.

[24:50] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[24:51] Cameron McEwen: I did.

[24:52] Cameron McEwen: I did hear that.

[24:53] Bob Dobbs: Did you go all the way through?

[24:54] Bob Dobbs: I find it very entertaining.

[24:57] Bob Dobbs: She's had it.

[24:59] Bob Dobbs: It's interesting.

[25:00] Bob Dobbs: We're looking at something.

[25:01] Bob Dobbs: She's been doing the coronavirus,

[25:03] Bob Dobbs: she said,

[25:03] Bob Dobbs: 19 months.

[25:05] Bob Dobbs: Many videos.

[25:07] Bob Dobbs: Now this is what I was thinking of when I said,

[25:10] Bob Dobbs: is it worse now?

[25:11] Bob Dobbs: She says,

[25:12] Bob Dobbs: we are in a state of anarchy at the top.

[25:15] Bob Dobbs: Did you hear her say that?

[25:16] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[25:17] Bob Dobbs: Anarchy at the top.

[25:19] Bob Dobbs: That's true.

[25:19] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[25:20] Bob Dobbs: And she recognizes,

[25:21] Bob Dobbs: she says,

[25:23] Bob Dobbs: I'm not compromising.

[25:24] Bob Dobbs: I'm not going to get my apps.

[25:25] Bob Dobbs: I don't care if you do.

[25:27] Bob Dobbs: And I don't care,

[25:28] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[25:28] Bob Dobbs: you're going to get your apps so you can go to a football game or get vaccinated.

[25:31] Bob Dobbs: I'm not doing it.

[25:33] Bob Dobbs: And I may end up being a recluse.

[25:34] Bob Dobbs: We're seeing someone come to a tetrad,

[25:39] Bob Dobbs: an epiphany.

[25:41] Bob Dobbs: They realize that's it.

[25:44] Bob Dobbs: And she says,

[25:44] Bob Dobbs: I might have other things to look into.

[25:46] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[25:47] Bob Dobbs: She seems to be implying she has other interests.

[25:50] Bob Dobbs: but

[25:51] Bob Dobbs: what's going on right now she's not gonna let us do any of it anymore because she has proven to herself a hundred times that everybody's lying and it's just impossible to come up with something to tell other people what's happening just can't be done correct but uh well but a couple comments number one uh

[26:13] Cameron McEwen: she's directing the comments that you just gave to the covet situation right so

[26:19] Cameron McEwen: She says...

[26:21] Cameron McEwen: in that video that she has plenty of other topics to go on to,

[26:26] Cameron McEwen: and she's going to do that.

[26:29] Cameron McEwen: So that's number one.

[26:30] Cameron McEwen: Number two,

[26:31] Cameron McEwen: when she says there's anarchy at the top,

[26:35] Cameron McEwen: she doesn't really interrogate that in the way that I would recommend.

[26:40] Cameron McEwen: Namely,

[26:42] Cameron McEwen: what does anarchy mean in that situation?

[26:47] Cameron McEwen: And that's where I bring in Nietzsche and Aisha.

[26:51] Cameron McEwen: I try to show in my blog and in the comments that I've made in our conversation,

[26:57] Cameron McEwen: I try to show that

[27:00] Cameron McEwen: Nietzsche sees anarchy as self-dissolving.

[27:07] Cameron McEwen: Once you interrogate anarchy,

[27:11] Cameron McEwen: it dissipates into nihilism because the rules...

[27:19] Cameron McEwen: that have disappeared are the foundation of the world.

[27:25] Cameron McEwen: So you can't take away the rules that structure the world without losing the world.

[27:32] Cameron McEwen: So then once you understand that the world has been lost as a totality,

[27:41] Cameron McEwen: that you've entered the dark night of the soul,

[27:45] Cameron McEwen: but there is no you and there is no soul and there is no night.

[27:50] Cameron McEwen: Once you realize those sorts of things,

[27:53] Cameron McEwen: then you have some idea of the cul-de-sac,

[27:56] Cameron McEwen: and that's where we began our conversation.

[27:59] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[28:00] Bob Dobbs: I find it interesting to listen to her and say,

[28:04] Bob Dobbs: now what would I say to her?

[28:07] Bob Dobbs: I think right now it would be difficult to bring in what I think I know that she doesn't know.

[28:13] Bob Dobbs: And

[28:15] Bob Dobbs: I don't know how I'd communicate it to her.

[28:18] Bob Dobbs: She'd be someone I'd like to communicate,

[28:20] Bob Dobbs: give her some insights.

[28:21] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if they would be insights because she has done her own research so intensely.

[28:27] Bob Dobbs: She's kind of evolved into quite a strong perception of things.

[28:35] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[28:36] Cameron McEwen: I don't know why you would,

[28:37] Cameron McEwen: why would you want to talk to somebody if you only wanted to give them information?

[28:43] Cameron McEwen: Why wouldn't you want to talk to somebody to dialogue?

[28:47] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[28:47] Bob Dobbs: that's what I mean.

[28:48] Cameron McEwen: To give and receive.

[28:50] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure what area to talk to her about or how to talk to her.

[28:55] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[28:55] Cameron McEwen: it wouldn't matter.

[28:57] Cameron McEwen: Any topic would do because she has a very lively mind and so do you.

[29:03] Cameron McEwen: And it would be a very interesting conversation,

[29:05] Cameron McEwen: probably much more interesting than you and me.

[29:08] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[29:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[29:09] Bob Dobbs: it would be.

[29:12] Bob Dobbs: No,

[29:12] Bob Dobbs: it's...

[29:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[29:14] Bob Dobbs: she's intense.

[29:15] Bob Dobbs: We're probably more intense than you are in our conversational situation.

[29:21] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[29:25] Bob Dobbs: do you ever listen to me and Jack?

[29:27] Bob Dobbs: Have you seen those dialogues?

[29:29] Bob Dobbs: No,

[29:31] Cameron McEwen: never heard of Jack.

[29:32] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[29:32] Bob Dobbs: so he's this black entrepreneur,

[29:35] Bob Dobbs: black businessman,

[29:36] Bob Dobbs: a young guy.

[29:38] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[29:38] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry.

[29:39] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[29:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[29:40] Cameron McEwen: So I know who it is.

[29:42] Cameron McEwen: It's a guy that you talk to every couple of weeks?

[29:44] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[29:45] Cameron McEwen: The basketball player?

[29:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[29:48] Cameron McEwen: okay,

[29:48] Cameron McEwen: sorry.

[29:49] Cameron McEwen: No,

[29:49] Cameron McEwen: I don't listen to those,

[29:50] Cameron McEwen: no.

[29:51] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[29:51] Bob Dobbs: well,

[29:52] Bob Dobbs: the last one everybody thinks is fantastic,

[29:54] Bob Dobbs: and I ran through a history of different things,

[29:57] Bob Dobbs: but what's interesting is

[30:00] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying,

[30:01] Bob Dobbs: to me,

[30:02] Bob Dobbs: absolutely boring

[30:04] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan stuff,

[30:06] Bob Dobbs: but...

[30:07] Bob Dobbs: He wants me to talk about it because he's reading the book.

[30:11] Bob Dobbs: So

[30:12] Bob Dobbs: I go into it and his listeners get really excited.

[30:17] Bob Dobbs: Like they,

[30:18] Bob Dobbs: wow,

[30:18] Bob Dobbs: this is real information.

[30:21] Bob Dobbs: And,

[30:22] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[30:23] Bob Dobbs: I'm so used to it.

[30:24] Bob Dobbs: It's not very valuable to me at this point.

[30:28] Bob Dobbs: I prefer my five bodies.

[30:29] Bob Dobbs: But I find it interesting to put myself in that situation where I don't know what to tell them.

[30:38] Bob Dobbs: what level to go into.

[30:40] Bob Dobbs: And so I just wing it or improvise.

[30:47] Bob Dobbs: And then I say stuff,

[30:49] Bob Dobbs: and they're all blown away.

[30:51] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to figure out what it is they think they're getting from me.

[30:55] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[30:55] Bob Dobbs: the McLuhan language,

[30:56] Bob Dobbs: I guess,

[30:57] Bob Dobbs: is a bizarre language,

[30:59] Bob Dobbs: but it does kind of communicate.

[31:01] Bob Dobbs: It's simple.

[31:02] Bob Dobbs: And if people hear it,

[31:05] Bob Dobbs: they like it.

[31:08] Bob Dobbs: They think they're learning something,

[31:09] Bob Dobbs: so I'm sort of wondering what they're learning.

[31:13] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[31:14] Cameron McEwen: I think you just put your finger on it.

[31:17] Cameron McEwen: You said they think they're learning.

[31:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[31:20] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[31:20] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[31:21] Cameron McEwen: in our contemporary situation,

[31:25] Cameron McEwen: for many,

[31:26] Cameron McEwen: many people,

[31:27] Cameron McEwen: there has never been education in the etymological sense.

[31:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[31:33] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[31:33] Cameron McEwen: This leading out of...

[31:36] Cameron McEwen: where you are into something different,

[31:39] Cameron McEwen: right?

[31:39] Cameron McEwen: So these are,

[31:41] Cameron McEwen: many times,

[31:42] Cameron McEwen: these are very intelligent people,

[31:45] Cameron McEwen: but they do not understand anything about intelligence,

[31:53] Cameron McEwen: right?

[31:53] Cameron McEwen: So it's when they are informed about themselves in a way that leads...

[32:03] Cameron McEwen: them out of trivialities into something a little bit deeper,

[32:07] Cameron McEwen: then that's very pleasurable for them.

[32:09] Cameron McEwen: That's what,

[32:10] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[32:11] Cameron McEwen: that's what human beings are all about.

[32:13] Cameron McEwen: That's when a baby is born,

[32:16] Cameron McEwen: it is gradually educated into complexities that it had no idea about.

[32:25] Cameron McEwen: And if human beings didn't find that inherently pleasurable,

[32:31] Cameron McEwen: then there wouldn't be a species.

[32:35] Cameron McEwen: It's built into people,

[32:37] Cameron McEwen: as McLuhan would say,

[32:38] Cameron McEwen: to outer themselves,

[32:41] Cameron McEwen: to find themselves in their extensions.

[32:47] Cameron McEwen: And probably the people that react favorably to what you're saying see in your Explorations an

[33:02] Cameron McEwen: education.

[33:04] Cameron McEwen: unlike what they've experienced before.

[33:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[33:08] Bob Dobbs: it's hearing a new language presented non-pompously,

[33:12] Bob Dobbs: just sort of straightforward,

[33:15] Bob Dobbs: and so it's the appeal of new language.

[33:18] Bob Dobbs: It's kind of like poetry.

[33:20] Bob Dobbs: I'm not doing a dynamic pentameter,

[33:24] Bob Dobbs: but poetry is jungling up the words,

[33:28] Bob Dobbs: changing them,

[33:29] Bob Dobbs: putting them in different patterns from your normal dull conversations.

[33:33] Bob Dobbs: So I'm activating their poetic sense,

[33:37] Bob Dobbs: their aesthetic sense,

[33:38] Bob Dobbs: and they like it.

[33:41] Bob Dobbs: And people,

[33:42] Bob Dobbs: if they're given a chance,

[33:44] Bob Dobbs: anybody would respond to that.

[33:46] Bob Dobbs: If they're reasonably balanced or reasonably healthy mentally,

[33:51] Bob Dobbs: they like it.

[33:52] Bob Dobbs: So

[33:55] Bob Dobbs: I then wonder where to go next.

[34:02] Bob Dobbs: Leave the McLuhan poetry,

[34:03] Bob Dobbs: go to another kind of poetry.

[34:08] Bob Dobbs: But I don't get too worked up about it.

[34:13] Bob Dobbs: What's interesting is that somebody will say something.

[34:16] Bob Dobbs: I don't have to carry the whole thing.

[34:18] Bob Dobbs: The other people,

[34:19] Bob Dobbs: they're waiting to say something.

[34:21] Bob Dobbs: And so we get these people calling in,

[34:24] Bob Dobbs: and they'll say,

[34:25] Bob Dobbs: man,

[34:25] Bob Dobbs: you're talking truth,

[34:27] Bob Dobbs: the blacks have some phrase,

[34:30] Bob Dobbs: whatever it is,

[34:30] Bob Dobbs: something about...

[34:33] Bob Dobbs: What it is,

[34:34] Bob Dobbs: you're talking about what it is.

[34:37] Bob Dobbs: And then they want to talk.

[34:40] Bob Dobbs: And if I just shut up,

[34:42] Bob Dobbs: they get to actually say back to me what I said to them.

[34:46] Bob Dobbs: Not exactly the same frameworks,

[34:49] Bob Dobbs: but they tell me what they know.

[34:52] Bob Dobbs: So

[34:53] Bob Dobbs: I've given them permission to talk about what they think they know after I presented what I thought I knew.

[35:02] Bob Dobbs: That's an interesting interplay,

[35:05] Bob Dobbs: and that probably makes them feel better.

[35:10] Bob Dobbs: And then that's a bit of peace that happens in them.

[35:20] Cameron McEwen: Are you using the word peace,

[35:22] Cameron McEwen: P-E-A-C-E?

[35:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[35:26] Bob Dobbs: There's some kind of release.

[35:28] Bob Dobbs: So as I'm talking and explaining,

[35:31] Bob Dobbs: I'm watching their reactions.

[35:34] Bob Dobbs: And in a way,

[35:34] Bob Dobbs: I'm studying the effects.

[35:36] Bob Dobbs: And I find it very interesting.

[35:40] Bob Dobbs: to do it when it seems to be going well.

[35:44] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[35:44] Bob Dobbs: there's always someone who calls in and is right out of,

[35:49] Bob Dobbs: doesn't have a clue even to get any peace,

[35:53] Bob Dobbs: and they just talk about their agitation maybe,

[35:57] Bob Dobbs: and I don't know if they get any relief.

[36:00] Bob Dobbs: But that's completely different to when I meet on

[36:05] Bob Dobbs: Wednesday and talk to intelligent people,

[36:08] Bob Dobbs: including Clinton.

[36:10] Bob Dobbs: We talk differently.

[36:13] Bob Dobbs: Listen,

[36:13] Cameron McEwen: it's not that the difference in conversation is not between intelligent people or Wittgenstein people.

[36:29] Cameron McEwen: The people that think they're intelligent in this world are usually dumber than hell.

[36:35] Cameron McEwen: And they usually have stuff that they could learn.

[36:39] Cameron McEwen: from people they always uh are in a situation where they could learn from people that they consider as unintelligent so please don't think that when you're talking to clinton and his buddies that you're talking to intelligent people and

[36:54] Cameron McEwen: when you're talking to jack you're talking to unintelligent people that is not the case well it's the intelligence is a whole different language um uh yeah but that's not has nothing to do with intelligence

[37:08] Cameron McEwen: It's just a different language.

[37:10] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[37:10] Bob Dobbs: the intelligence is how to modulate.

[37:11] Bob Dobbs: Different level of bullshit.

[37:14] Bob Dobbs: How to call the bullshit.

[37:16] Bob Dobbs: Or to say something that

[37:20] Bob Dobbs: I don't have to be cautious about saying something.

[37:25] Bob Dobbs: Or

[37:25] Bob Dobbs: I can be more complex with them.

[37:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[37:31] Bob Dobbs: more complex.

[37:31] Bob Dobbs: Because

[37:32] Bob Dobbs: Jack won't let me get too complex.

[37:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[37:36] Cameron McEwen: that's good.

[37:37] Bob Dobbs: He keeps it simple.

[37:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[37:40] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[37:40] Cameron McEwen: look at the whole McLuhan industry,

[37:42] Cameron McEwen: just to take an example,

[37:44] Cameron McEwen: thinks that it's very complicated,

[37:47] Cameron McEwen: thinks that it's juggling vast ideas that are tremendously important for the history of the world or something.

[37:58] Cameron McEwen: And that's all bullshit.

[38:00] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[38:00] Cameron McEwen: so this complication is not.

[38:07] Cameron McEwen: necessarily sophisticated or intelligent or anything else.

[38:13] Cameron McEwen: It can easily be just a game that people play,

[38:16] Cameron McEwen: right?

[38:17] Cameron McEwen: So

[38:23] Cameron McEwen: I would simply say that the people asking for clarity,

[38:32] Cameron McEwen: asking for something to be said straight out.

[38:37] Cameron McEwen: is an excellent thing in the modern world.

[38:41] Cameron McEwen: Education,

[38:43] Cameron McEwen: let's say at the university level,

[38:45] Cameron McEwen: in social sciences,

[38:46] Cameron McEwen: and in the humanities,

[38:48] Cameron McEwen: has become largely an exercise in nonsense.

[38:55] Cameron McEwen: People are taught to think that they're smarter than whoever they're reading.

[39:03] Cameron McEwen: It's ridiculous,

[39:04] Cameron McEwen: but that's what...

[39:07] Cameron McEwen: education has become.

[39:09] Cameron McEwen: So if

[39:10] Cameron McEwen: Jack and his listeners are saying to you,

[39:12] Cameron McEwen: well,

[39:13] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[39:15] Cameron McEwen: what's a medium?

[39:17] Cameron McEwen: What do you mean by electric?

[39:20] Cameron McEwen: That's excellent.

[39:23] Cameron McEwen: That sort of cuts through all the bullshit.

[39:27] Cameron McEwen: You might say that is the higher education than what the Acadia University have become.

[39:36] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[39:36] Bob Dobbs: so what...

[39:37] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.

[39:38] Cameron McEwen: I'm talking through my ass.

[39:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[39:39] Cameron McEwen: you're talking through your ass.

[39:40] Bob Dobbs: I haven't listened.

[39:41] Bob Dobbs: Let me say something.

[39:46] Bob Dobbs: How would you apply some McLuhan language to explaining why Acadia University have become stupid,

[39:53] Bob Dobbs: the way you're saying?

[39:57] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[39:57] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[39:59] Cameron McEwen: that's a very complex question.

[40:01] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[40:01] Bob Dobbs: there you go.

[40:02] Bob Dobbs: Complex.

[40:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[40:03] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[40:05] Cameron McEwen: I don't think there's something wrong with complication bots.

[40:13] Cameron McEwen: I say that complication,

[40:17] Cameron McEwen: depending upon how it's exercised,

[40:20] Cameron McEwen: depending on how it's interrogated,

[40:23] Cameron McEwen: can be just a game and can be bullshit.

[40:27] Cameron McEwen: But complication is the name of what goes on with human beings.

[40:36] Cameron McEwen: Human beings,

[40:38] Cameron McEwen: as soon as they use language,

[40:41] Cameron McEwen: are...

[40:42] Cameron McEwen: Introducing very complex things anti-environment.

[40:49] Cameron McEwen: And there's not only the anti-environment,

[40:55] Cameron McEwen: the interior landscape,

[40:57] Cameron McEwen: there's also the interior landscape.

[41:00] Cameron McEwen: And so the complications not only go outwards,

[41:04] Cameron McEwen: they also go inwards.

[41:06] Cameron McEwen: And that's sort of what the history of psychoanalysis is.

[41:13] Cameron McEwen: Freud and Jung and Adler.

[41:16] Bob Dobbs: What is making people,

[41:20] Bob Dobbs: and I'm trying to explain why people are noticing energy at the top.

[41:26] Bob Dobbs: Something's going on at the top,

[41:29] Bob Dobbs: and the top is missing something,

[41:33] Bob Dobbs: and I say it's evolution of technology into the tech body,

[41:37] Bob Dobbs: and no one would believe it's gotten that far.

[41:41] Bob Dobbs: What do you say is the reason there's anarchy at the top?

[41:49] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[41:51] Cameron McEwen: let me just say that when you talk about this evolution of anarchy into the tech body,

[41:58] Cameron McEwen: that's something that I don't understand,

[42:01] Cameron McEwen: and it's something that your book is addressing.

[42:06] Cameron McEwen: We went to the end to understand something about the tech body.

[42:11] Cameron McEwen: And now we're going through McLuhan and then ultimately Trump try to understand something of that evolution you're talking about.

[42:19] Cameron McEwen: So that said,

[42:22] Cameron McEwen: then I'll go to your question.

[42:24] Cameron McEwen: And that was,

[42:25] Cameron McEwen: what do I think is going on with anarchy at the top?

[42:29] Cameron McEwen: And personally,

[42:34] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that there is such a thing as the top.

[42:40] Cameron McEwen: needs to be straightened out in some way.

[42:42] Cameron McEwen: I think what has happened is that we've,

[42:46] Cameron McEwen: through the developments of modern technology and modern thinking,

[42:56] Cameron McEwen: we have got ourselves into a cul-de-sac where everything falls apart.

[43:03] Cameron McEwen: And the people of goodwill,

[43:06] Cameron McEwen: at least,

[43:07] Cameron McEwen: are looking for what...

[43:09] Cameron McEwen: Wittgenstein calls a way of leading the fly out of the fly bottle.

[43:17] Cameron McEwen: However,

[43:21] Cameron McEwen: if things have fallen apart,

[43:24] Cameron McEwen: we really can't say whether that has been intentional or whether it has been unintentional.

[43:33] Cameron McEwen: And so the anarchy at the top precipitates the question.

[43:38] Cameron McEwen: of whether or not this anarchy is something that has simply befallen us like a fate,

[43:47] Cameron McEwen: or whether it's a trap.

[43:50] Cameron McEwen: And presumably,

[43:53] Cameron McEwen: these are the sorts of questions that lead into the tech body,

[43:58] Cameron McEwen: but we have to see when we get through the book.

[44:05] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[44:05] Bob Dobbs: so let's look at...

[44:08] Cameron McEwen: this article and where we're at and um but you bob you don't have anything to say about the question of um whether anarchy is unintentional or intentional i'm coming at it this way okay

[44:25] Bob Dobbs: yeah i want to get back into the article and see if that answers the question or clarifies and so i'm looking at what i said and did and it's a

[44:39] Bob Dobbs: I'm explaining McLuhan to people.

[44:41] Bob Dobbs: I think it's valuable to understand the stages that McLuhan appeared to go through.

[44:48] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I'm doing here,

[44:51] Bob Dobbs: but I'm trying to find,

[44:52] Bob Dobbs: is there something here that,

[45:00] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[45:01] Bob Dobbs: I'm going through the definition of medium.

[45:04] Bob Dobbs: And

[45:05] Bob Dobbs: I was reading some...

[45:08] Bob Dobbs: Art history,

[45:09] Bob Dobbs: and they were talking about Nam June Paik,

[45:12] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[45:13] Bob Dobbs: the guy who did the video art with McLuhan,

[45:16] Bob Dobbs: and they said...

[45:19] Bob Dobbs: He was pointing out,

[45:20] Bob Dobbs: Nam June was pointing out that the TV medium required a different kind of investigation than McLuhan was doing.

[45:28] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[45:28] Bob Dobbs: Nam June Paik got his ideas about the TV medium from McLuhan,

[45:33] Bob Dobbs: but he thought that McLuhan wasn't investigating it properly.

[45:37] Bob Dobbs: He was just observing and writing a book or two about it,

[45:41] Bob Dobbs: not engaging it.

[45:43] Bob Dobbs: And what did engagement mean?

[45:44] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[45:44] Bob Dobbs: Nam June Paik came up with putting little...

[45:48] Bob Dobbs: wires into the TV set and distorting the image.

[45:52] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[45:53] Bob Dobbs: Have you seen Nam June Paik's work?

[45:56] Cameron McEwen: No.

[45:58] Cameron McEwen: I don't even know who the guy is.

[45:59] Cameron McEwen: How do you spell his last name?

[46:01] Bob Dobbs: P-A-I-K.

[46:02] Bob Dobbs: He's a Korean artist,

[46:04] Bob Dobbs: part of Fluxus and the John Cage world in the

[46:07] Bob Dobbs: 60s. And he got turned on.

[46:09] Bob Dobbs: He got one of the first video cameras off the boat.

[46:13] Bob Dobbs: And inspired by McLuhan,

[46:15] Bob Dobbs: he started making...

[46:18] Bob Dobbs: Zen video art,

[46:20] Bob Dobbs: I guess he called it.

[46:21] Bob Dobbs: But he would distort the image of McLuhan.

[46:26] Bob Dobbs: You can go on

[46:27] Bob Dobbs: YouTube, put in NAM.

[46:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[46:29] Cameron McEwen: I've already got it up.

[46:30] Cameron McEwen: I see it,

[46:32] Cameron McEwen: and I did know who he was.

[46:33] Cameron McEwen: I just wasn't understanding what you were saying.

[46:35] Cameron McEwen: But the whole problem with this is that it takes something like a TV or something like magnetism or something like electricity,

[46:46] Cameron McEwen: literally,

[46:49] Cameron McEwen: Whereas for McLuhan,

[46:50] Cameron McEwen: if you do that,

[46:53] Cameron McEwen: you've automatically fallen into the Gutenbergian world.

[46:58] Cameron McEwen: And this indeed is the great problem of the modern world,

[47:02] Cameron McEwen: how it can extricate itself from Gutenberg.

[47:06] Cameron McEwen: So we've got all these great inventions like atomic bombs.

[47:18] Cameron McEwen: like applications that can listen to everything that goes on,

[47:25] Cameron McEwen: irregardless of whether your computer or your smartphone is on or off.

[47:32] Cameron McEwen: Everything is recorded.

[47:34] Cameron McEwen: Everything goes into a huge data bank somewhere and gets massaged.

[47:38] Cameron McEwen: So we've got these huge,

[47:44] Cameron McEwen: how can we say,

[47:44] Cameron McEwen: inventions,

[47:46] Cameron McEwen: But we think about...

[47:47] Cameron McEwen: them,

[47:48] Cameron McEwen: at least us peons think about them in terms of Gutenberg.

[47:57] Bob Dobbs: This is what Nam June Paik was doing.

[48:00] Bob Dobbs: He thought McLuhan was talking about the qualities and traits of the video image and how they were so different from a book.

[48:08] Bob Dobbs: That is the first understanding of medium in the

[48:12] Bob Dobbs: 50s, early 60s when people read McLuhan.

[48:14] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to get to the point where the medium

[48:17] Bob Dobbs: is not,

[48:19] Bob Dobbs: in my stages here,

[48:21] Bob Dobbs: is not the new figure.

[48:23] Bob Dobbs: It's the society that's already been created.

[48:27] Bob Dobbs: That's the medium.

[48:28] Bob Dobbs: And you'll start to see that it gets agitated.

[48:31] Bob Dobbs: That means there's some anti-environment sneaking in there that's agitating,

[48:36] Bob Dobbs: but you can only see the rear-view mirror agitation.

[48:39] Bob Dobbs: That level of...

[48:40] Cameron McEwen: I agree with all that.

[48:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[48:41] Cameron McEwen: I agree with all that.

[48:42] Bob Dobbs: So I'm pointing this out that...

[48:45] Bob Dobbs: I'm going through the meaning of the word medium as McLuhan changed it or expanded it.

[48:53] Bob Dobbs: And Nam June Paik,

[48:55] Bob Dobbs: he is somebody who's taking his version of medium,

[48:59] Bob Dobbs: a very early definition of McLuhan,

[49:01] Bob Dobbs: and making a big deal out of it,

[49:03] Bob Dobbs: getting art grants,

[49:04] Bob Dobbs: and becoming a famous video artist.

[49:07] Bob Dobbs: And I see it as very trivial,

[49:09] Bob Dobbs: what he was doing,

[49:10] Bob Dobbs: and makes me think about the New York art world.

[49:14] Bob Dobbs: how silly it was John Cage and those guys and yet they were they knew to hang around McLuhan and claim to understand them and make their art to even correct McLuhan so

[49:29] Cameron McEwen: I had that in mind go ahead yeah yeah and I agree with all of that the only the only footnote I would put in is that although these people were ultimately misdirected they

[49:44] Cameron McEwen: what they were doing is they were looking at complications and think and wondering about what these complications meant right so by distorting the image on the tv or something like that what is what does it mean that we can do this and what does it mean that the image can do this etc and

[50:04] Cameron McEwen: those are good questions right so the way that the human species works

[50:10] Cameron McEwen: is that there are a huge number of people,

[50:14] Cameron McEwen: there's a much bigger number of people that can ask questions and that can complicate things as compared to the small number of people that can come up with answers.

[50:28] Cameron McEwen: And so most of these artists,

[50:32] Cameron McEwen: or a disappearingly small number of those artists,

[50:38] Cameron McEwen: actually got into answers.

[50:40] Cameron McEwen: The rest of them were just complicating things in a way that can be appreciated,

[50:45] Cameron McEwen: but it's not answers.

[50:47] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[50:48] Bob Dobbs: So I'm glad that I thought of the Peg thing because he's a perfect example of someone doing the first level of my definition of the medium,

[50:57] Bob Dobbs: the global village level.

[50:59] Bob Dobbs: And then I can see what he very limited.

[51:03] Bob Dobbs: And I don't think he improved his understanding of McLuhan.

[51:08] Bob Dobbs: keeps studying McLuhan,

[51:09] Bob Dobbs: just went with what he read and understanding media,

[51:13] Bob Dobbs: which was ancient when it came out in McLuhan thinking,

[51:17] Bob Dobbs: and they think that's McLuhan.

[51:20] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[51:21] Cameron McEwen: And let's just say that we have to also look at why

[51:29] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was talking like that.

[51:32] Cameron McEwen: What happened in the

[51:34] Cameron McEwen: 1950s that kicked

[51:37] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan into this talk about media?

[51:41] Cameron McEwen: And the answer is that people were becoming conscious of the difference between,

[51:47] Cameron McEwen: say,

[51:48] Cameron McEwen: books and television when it came to education,

[51:52] Cameron McEwen: especially.

[51:53] Cameron McEwen: So people were wondering,

[51:56] Cameron McEwen: can we use these devices to help education?

[52:03] Cameron McEwen: And

[52:04] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan realized that what...

[52:07] Cameron McEwen: One of the ways that he might talk about the complications that he had learned from

[52:14] Cameron McEwen: Richards and Pound and Eliot and all sort of folks and Joyce,

[52:18] Cameron McEwen: maybe there was a way to talk in terms of concrete literal media that would introduce people to this type of thinking.

[52:29] Cameron McEwen: So there was a kind of intentionality built into this what you call first level of...

[52:37] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan media thinking.

[52:41] Bob Dobbs: And so when he talks later in the

[52:46] Bob Dobbs: 60s, he starts thinking of the media as a big,

[52:49] Bob Dobbs: huge social structures and the massage.

[52:54] Bob Dobbs: Do you think that was a discovery or he knew 10 years before that was the next level to get to?

[53:01] Cameron McEwen: 20 years before.

[53:02] Cameron McEwen: 20 years before.

[53:04] Cameron McEwen: Because that's because.

[53:06] Cameron McEwen: if we want to name that complication that he's talking about in the late

[53:12] Cameron McEwen: 60s, that complication is language.

[53:15] Cameron McEwen: And language is exactly what he was trying to figure out how to talk about in the late

[53:24] Cameron McEwen: 1940s.

[53:25] Cameron McEwen: That's what his early essays on

[53:27] Cameron McEwen: Tennyson and Joyce and

[53:31] Cameron McEwen: Poe.

[53:33] Cameron McEwen: and those passos,

[53:35] Cameron McEwen: etc.,

[53:35] Cameron McEwen: in the interior landscape.

[53:37] Cameron McEwen: That's what those essays are all about.

[53:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[53:44] Bob Dobbs: Why do you spend so much time reading McLuhan and studying him?

[53:50] Bob Dobbs: Have you gotten used to his language so it was easy for you?

[53:57] Cameron McEwen: I think that I chose to do this work because I could...

[54:02] Cameron McEwen: foresee that

[54:04] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was going to come back into broad popularity.

[54:11] Cameron McEwen: I think that's still growing as we speak because McLuhan addressed questions that people increasingly see as important.

[54:20] Cameron McEwen: So that's number one.

[54:21] Cameron McEwen: Number two,

[54:24] Cameron McEwen: what I like about McLuhan mind is that he self-consciously

[54:30] Cameron McEwen: used language in both writing and speech,

[54:34] Cameron McEwen: that falls through itself.

[54:37] Cameron McEwen: There's a great pleasure in seeing the depth of McLuhan language,

[54:46] Cameron McEwen: and

[54:48] Cameron McEwen: I hope that people will be led from the first level of interesting questions about the difficulties of the world into the second level.

[54:59] Cameron McEwen: which has to do with the possibility of answers.

[55:04] Bob Dobbs: So

[55:05] Bob Dobbs: I'm working through the meaning of medium.

[55:09] Bob Dobbs: And maybe there's something in there you want to mention.

[55:13] Bob Dobbs: But once I do that,

[55:17] Bob Dobbs: what do I do next?

[55:19] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.

[55:20] Bob Dobbs: I have a long section on Baudrillard.

[55:24] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[55:25] Bob Dobbs: As the transition out of the medium time.

[55:29] Cameron McEwen: I've never read even a single line of Baudrillard.

[55:34] Cameron McEwen: So that's something that

[55:38] Cameron McEwen: I can't relate to with any sort of expertise or even familiarity.

[55:45] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[55:47] Bob Dobbs: when you read the Baudrillard I included,

[55:50] Bob Dobbs: what did you make of it?

[55:52] Bob Dobbs: Was it too hard to understand?

[55:55] Cameron McEwen: No,

[55:56] Cameron McEwen: not too hard to understand,

[55:57] Cameron McEwen: but I think my reaction was exactly what my reaction is to the Korean guy who's fooling around with the images on television.

[56:10] Cameron McEwen: that

[56:12] Cameron McEwen: Baudrillard, from what you quote from him,

[56:15] Cameron McEwen: seems to me to be talking about only an incidental piece of...

[56:23] Cameron McEwen: what McLuhan was doing.

[56:25] Cameron McEwen: And so it falls into the category for me of making something more complex,

[56:34] Cameron McEwen: which isn't invaluable,

[56:37] Cameron McEwen: but it also isn't getting at the meat.

[56:41] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[56:41] Bob Dobbs: And I don't know if you could get him to see what you mean,

[56:46] Bob Dobbs: and you may not care if he gets it.

[56:51] Cameron McEwen: So that question...

[56:53] Cameron McEwen: the question of passing on something.

[56:58] Cameron McEwen: It's not as if that happens,

[57:00] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[57:00] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[57:02] Cameron McEwen: This is exactly the problem that is already apparent with Plato and was probably already apparent to guys sitting in a cave 100,000 years ago or something,

[57:17] Cameron McEwen: trying to talk to some teenager.

[57:20] Cameron McEwen: um

[57:21] Cameron McEwen: There's nothing harder than communication.

[57:26] Cameron McEwen: As you know,

[57:27] Cameron McEwen: you often quote

[57:29] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan as saying that it's a miracle when there is any communication.

[57:36] Cameron McEwen: So it's not as if if I were to speak to

[57:40] Cameron McEwen: Baudrillard, it's not as if

[57:43] Cameron McEwen: I would be able to pass on to him what I think is missing.

[57:47] Cameron McEwen: And the same goes for him to me.

[57:50] Cameron McEwen: He might say,

[57:51] Cameron McEwen: well,

[57:51] Cameron McEwen: McEwen has got his head up his ass.

[57:53] Cameron McEwen: He has no idea about what's going on with McEwen,

[57:57] Cameron McEwen: and I'll try to teach him.

[57:58] Cameron McEwen: But the chances of my communicating with him are almost nil.

[58:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[58:08] Bob Dobbs: so what do you see next in the stages here?

[58:15] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[58:16] Cameron McEwen: what page are you on?

[58:17] Cameron McEwen: Because I know...

[58:19] Cameron McEwen: I know what you're talking about in general,

[58:21] Cameron McEwen: but in order to answer your question in particular,

[58:25] Cameron McEwen: I have to know where exactly you are.

[58:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm in the

[58:30] Bob Dobbs: 30s. That's where Bernard is,

[58:32] Bob Dobbs: it seems.

[58:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[58:35] Cameron McEwen: So let me just,

[58:37] Cameron McEwen: before we get into the

[58:39] Cameron McEwen: 30s, let me just see what I've...

[58:51] Cameron McEwen: I just want to see what I've highlighted on the way to the

[58:55] Cameron McEwen: 30s to see if there's anything important here.

[59:00] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[59:01] Cameron McEwen: on page 19,

[59:04] Cameron McEwen: in a letter of McLuhan from 1952,

[59:09] Cameron McEwen: are you there?

[59:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[59:11] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[59:11] Cameron McEwen: good.

[59:11] Cameron McEwen: My phone just kind of lit up for some reason.

[59:15] Cameron McEwen: I wasn't sure what had happened.

[59:17] Bob Dobbs: Let me see if the voice is happening.

[59:20] Bob Dobbs: Hello,

[59:22] Bob Dobbs: speak.

[59:23] Cameron McEwen: Hello,

[59:24] Cameron McEwen: hello.

[59:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[59:25] Bob Dobbs: still working.

[59:26] Bob Dobbs: Still working.

[59:27] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[59:27] Cameron McEwen: good.

[59:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[59:29] Cameron McEwen: So he says that he's,

[59:34] Cameron McEwen: my object is to show the community an action rather than prove anything.

[59:41] Cameron McEwen: That's a very important statement.

[59:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[59:43] Cameron McEwen: And proving in the sense that he's using it here.

[59:50] Cameron McEwen: belongs to the Gutenberg Galaxy.

[59:53] Cameron McEwen: So the movement away from the Gutenberg Galaxy takes place through complication.

[1:00:01] Cameron McEwen: through community in a very,

[1:00:04] Cameron McEwen: very broad sense.

[1:00:05] Cameron McEwen: So in the interior landscape,

[1:00:10] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:00:11] Cameron McEwen: there is a community of figures.

[1:00:14] Cameron McEwen: They can be called archetypes,

[1:00:16] Cameron McEwen: they can be called gods,

[1:00:17] Cameron McEwen: they can be called influencers,

[1:00:21] Cameron McEwen: power figures,

[1:00:22] Cameron McEwen: on and on.

[1:00:23] Cameron McEwen: So there's a community inside,

[1:00:26] Cameron McEwen: as well as a community outside,

[1:00:28] Cameron McEwen: and the movement beyond Gutenberg.

[1:00:32] Cameron McEwen: has to do with the conversation between the people in the outside community amongst themselves and the community of the inside people amongst themselves,

[1:00:46] Cameron McEwen: and then the conversation between the two groups,

[1:00:49] Cameron McEwen: inside and outside.

[1:00:51] Cameron McEwen: So it's a very,

[1:00:52] Cameron McEwen: very complicated thing.

[1:00:54] Cameron McEwen: And what McLuhan is saying here is that real Explorations.

[1:01:01] Cameron McEwen: And real proof has to do with this complication.

[1:01:06] Cameron McEwen: And you commented,

[1:01:07] Cameron McEwen: he realizes this is a new kind of science fiction.

[1:01:13] Cameron McEwen: He's being a scientist,

[1:01:15] Cameron McEwen: but it must include the fiction part.

[1:01:17] Cameron McEwen: I think that's excellent.

[1:01:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:01:25] Bob Dobbs: What was that?

[1:01:28] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:01:28] Cameron McEwen: I'm just saying,

[1:01:29] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:01:29] Cameron McEwen: I think that's great.

[1:01:30] Cameron McEwen: you said there but that's still on page 20 or something and so I'm going as fast as I can up to

[1:01:39] Bob Dobbs: I want to reach where you are in page yeah you're scanning through okay what what do you think why did McLuhan stumble on something that everybody thought was original was

[1:01:56] Bob Dobbs: it just the language talking about the vortices

[1:02:00] Bob Dobbs: Nobody was talking in the 50s about that?

[1:02:05] Cameron McEwen: In the

[1:02:06] Cameron McEwen: 50s, McLuhan had virtually no audience.

[1:02:10] Cameron McEwen: Nobody thought he was doing anything that was special.

[1:02:15] Cameron McEwen: The first time that anybody kind of appreciated McLuhan,

[1:02:21] Cameron McEwen: that appreciation didn't mean that they understood him.

[1:02:24] Cameron McEwen: It just meant that they saw...

[1:02:30] Cameron McEwen: that his work might be usable,

[1:02:34] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:02:35] Cameron McEwen: So the National Association of Educational Broadcasters,

[1:02:39] Cameron McEwen: they thought,

[1:02:40] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:02:41] Cameron McEwen: here's a guy that can write like the devil.

[1:02:45] Cameron McEwen: If you say to McLuhan,

[1:02:46] Cameron McEwen: I need a,

[1:02:47] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:02:49] Cameron McEwen: a 3,000-word essay,

[1:02:50] Cameron McEwen: you get it the next day.

[1:02:52] Cameron McEwen: It's not something that you have to keep,

[1:02:56] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:02:56] Cameron McEwen: bugging people over

[1:02:58] Cameron McEwen: 12 months or something.

[1:02:59] Cameron McEwen: to get it out of them.

[1:03:01] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan could just turn out whatever you wanted on the spur of the moment,

[1:03:06] Cameron McEwen: either writing or speaking.

[1:03:09] Cameron McEwen: So the appreciation of McLuhan began with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters,

[1:03:19] Cameron McEwen: and that was in 1958,

[1:03:26] Cameron McEwen: 1959,

[1:03:27] Cameron McEwen: when he began his project with them.

[1:03:29] Cameron McEwen: And so appreciation did not at all mean that they understood him.

[1:03:39] Cameron McEwen: If you look at the dialogue,

[1:03:41] Cameron McEwen: as I've done in some detail,

[1:03:42] Cameron McEwen: if you look at the dialogue between McLuhan and the association,

[1:03:48] Cameron McEwen: that especially the association's what was called its research committee,

[1:03:55] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:03:55] Cameron McEwen: it's just laughable.

[1:03:57] Cameron McEwen: They had no idea what he's talking about.

[1:04:00] Cameron McEwen: None.

[1:04:01] Bob Dobbs: Do...

[1:04:02] Cameron McEwen: And...

[1:04:03] Cameron McEwen: Pardon me?

[1:04:03] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.

[1:04:04] Bob Dobbs: And...

[1:04:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:04:05] Cameron McEwen: so...

[1:04:08] Cameron McEwen: So...

[1:04:09] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:04:10] Bob Dobbs: you're saying and...

[1:04:11] Bob Dobbs: There was another point,

[1:04:11] Bob Dobbs: because if you don't say that,

[1:04:13] Bob Dobbs: I'll say something.

[1:04:14] Bob Dobbs: He did...

[1:04:15] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:04:15] Bob Dobbs: go ahead.

[1:04:16] Bob Dobbs: Ted Carpenter says that they had...

[1:04:19] Bob Dobbs: Barth and Derrida were subscribing to Explorations.

[1:04:23] Bob Dobbs: They thought they got an audience there.

[1:04:26] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:04:26] Bob Dobbs: they may be not listening to McLuhan,

[1:04:28] Bob Dobbs: but they were reading the Explorations Journal.

[1:04:31] Bob Dobbs: Some people were.

[1:04:33] Bob Dobbs: What can you say about that and the reception of that journal?

[1:04:40] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:04:42] Cameron McEwen: even in the person of

[1:04:45] Cameron McEwen: Carpenter, we know that

[1:04:49] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was trying to communicate with him.

[1:04:55] Cameron McEwen: in such a way that Carpenter converted.

[1:04:58] Cameron McEwen: to Catholicism.

[1:05:00] Cameron McEwen: And at the end of the day,

[1:05:04] Cameron McEwen: Carpenter didn't get it.

[1:05:06] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[1:05:06] Cameron McEwen: I'm not saying that getting it is Wright wrong.

[1:05:10] Cameron McEwen: I'm just saying that what McLuhan was trying to talk to Carpenter about,

[1:05:15] Cameron McEwen: ultimately Carpenter didn't get.

[1:05:18] Cameron McEwen: And he didn't get it in the only real sense of getting something,

[1:05:23] Cameron McEwen: and that is to take action on it,

[1:05:26] Cameron McEwen: to change your life on the basis of it.

[1:05:28] Cameron McEwen: something like that.

[1:05:30] Cameron McEwen: So this idea of trying to transmit something successfully is one that's very,

[1:05:43] Cameron McEwen: very difficult.

[1:05:44] Cameron McEwen: So if we apply that to

[1:05:46] Cameron McEwen: Derrida, let's say,

[1:05:48] Cameron McEwen: I think Derrida was influenced by Explorations.

[1:05:52] Cameron McEwen: I think he was influenced by McLuhan in ways that he did not recognize.

[1:05:58] Cameron McEwen: And that he played down.

[1:06:00] Cameron McEwen: In the little bit he did recognize,

[1:06:02] Cameron McEwen: he played down or even denied.

[1:06:06] Cameron McEwen: So most people think that if you have a journal and if you write stuff in it,

[1:06:13] Cameron McEwen: and if it's read by somebody very famous or influential like Derrida,

[1:06:19] Cameron McEwen: and if they use a little bit of what you said in the journal,

[1:06:23] Cameron McEwen: then that's communication.

[1:06:25] Cameron McEwen: That's great,

[1:06:26] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:06:27] Cameron McEwen: But in my sense,

[1:06:29] Cameron McEwen: that's not really achieving what needs to be achieved.

[1:06:33] Cameron McEwen: And certainly McLuhan felt that way.

[1:06:35] Cameron McEwen: He was relieved when they sort of got rid of the journal,

[1:06:39] Cameron McEwen: even though Carpenter was doing most of the work.

[1:06:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:06:43] Cameron McEwen: So let's differentiate.

[1:06:45] Cameron McEwen: Let's always keep in mind that there's education and there's education.

[1:06:52] Cameron McEwen: There's appreciation and there's appreciation.

[1:06:56] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.

[1:06:56] Cameron McEwen: The great thing about McLuhan,

[1:06:58] Cameron McEwen: to go back to the question you asked me a few minutes ago,

[1:07:01] Cameron McEwen: for me,

[1:07:01] Cameron McEwen: the great thing about McLuhan is that he kept in mind the big goal.

[1:07:07] Cameron McEwen: And what was the big goal?

[1:07:09] Cameron McEwen: Survival.

[1:07:12] Cameron McEwen: right.

[1:07:13] Cameron McEwen: So in comparison with that need,

[1:07:20] Cameron McEwen: that demand,

[1:07:21] Cameron McEwen: that vocation,

[1:07:23] Cameron McEwen: everything else becomes quite trivial.

[1:07:28] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:07:29] Bob Dobbs: That's where.

[1:07:31] Bob Dobbs: How do you how do you how could you support your idea that Carpenter didn't get it?

[1:07:36] Cameron McEwen: Because he didn't convert.

[1:07:37] Cameron McEwen: Because he.

[1:07:38] Bob Dobbs: OK.

[1:07:39] Cameron McEwen: At the end of the day,

[1:07:41] Cameron McEwen: he didn't understand in an existential way what McLuhan was trying to say to him.

[1:07:48] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[1:07:49] Cameron McEwen: the reverse could also have been true.

[1:07:52] Cameron McEwen: I'm not saying that McLuhan was correct.

[1:07:56] Cameron McEwen: I'm only talking about whether or not communication took place.

[1:08:01] Cameron McEwen: And to my way of thinking,

[1:08:04] Cameron McEwen: it manifestly did not.

[1:08:07] Bob Dobbs: But Carpenter has to get something about Catholicism.

[1:08:15] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:08:15] Cameron McEwen: it's not something about.

[1:08:17] Cameron McEwen: If McLuhan conversation,

[1:08:19] Cameron McEwen: if McLuhan interaction with

[1:08:22] Cameron McEwen: Carpenter had been...

[1:08:25] Cameron McEwen: successful in McLuhan sense,

[1:08:27] Cameron McEwen: Carpenter would have become a Catholic,

[1:08:31] Cameron McEwen: but he did not.

[1:08:32] Cameron McEwen: And what we see in that is that they're looked at both ways.

[1:08:41] Cameron McEwen: Communication ultimately failed.

[1:08:44] Cameron McEwen: But that's the history of Western civilization.

[1:08:46] Cameron McEwen: That's the history of all civilization,

[1:08:50] Cameron McEwen: I guess,

[1:08:50] Cameron McEwen: but writ large in Western civilization.

[1:08:55] Cameron McEwen: Even though the most important things were clear very early on,

[1:09:02] Cameron McEwen: with Plato at the latest,

[1:09:04] Cameron McEwen: the most important things were clear,

[1:09:07] Cameron McEwen: but the education about them always has failed.

[1:09:12] Cameron McEwen: And here we are in the cul-de-sac as a result of that.

[1:09:19] Bob Dobbs: Hmm.

[1:09:22] Bob Dobbs: So...

[1:09:24] Bob Dobbs: What,

[1:09:25] Bob Dobbs: I guess I'll just ask you,

[1:09:26] Bob Dobbs: what do you think I'm trying to communicate here as you go scan up getting up to the

[1:09:33] Bob Dobbs: 30s?

[1:09:35] Bob Dobbs: I want to show that McLuhan was a little more complex than the cliche notions he was identified with.

[1:09:43] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:09:44] Cameron McEwen: So there's,

[1:09:46] Cameron McEwen: as we've often said,

[1:09:47] Cameron McEwen: there's a parallel between what you're doing with McLuhan and what you're doing Trump.

[1:09:54] Cameron McEwen: What you're doing with McLuhan is you're saying that

[1:09:57] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan has been mistaken.

[1:10:00] Cameron McEwen: by nearly everybody,

[1:10:02] Cameron McEwen: including the big guns in the McLuhan industry.

[1:10:05] Cameron McEwen: And the way to see that he has been mistaken is to complicate how we read him,

[1:10:18] Cameron McEwen: complicate how we take him.

[1:10:21] Cameron McEwen: And so that's what you're doing here in terms of the medium,

[1:10:28] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:10:28] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[1:10:28] Cameron McEwen: I don't,

[1:10:28] Cameron McEwen: if I were to...

[1:10:29] Cameron McEwen: comment,

[1:10:29] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:10:30] Cameron McEwen: iON page 24 here.

[1:10:34] Cameron McEwen: I'm looking at the third stage of the new industries where necessary to keep,

[1:10:39] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:10:40] Cameron McEwen: the automobile in service.

[1:10:45] Cameron McEwen: What's wrong?

[1:10:46] Cameron McEwen: There's nothing wrong with what you're saying there,

[1:10:48] Cameron McEwen: but it has nothing to do with the early 70s.

[1:10:51] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:10:53] Cameron McEwen: He was clear in the

[1:10:55] Cameron McEwen: 50s that the that media.

[1:10:59] Cameron McEwen: involve anti-environment that all media are plural,

[1:11:07] Cameron McEwen: that there's no such thing as a single medium.

[1:11:12] Cameron McEwen: Every medium implies media.

[1:11:15] Cameron McEwen: So he was very,

[1:11:18] Cameron McEwen: very clear about that in the

[1:11:22] Cameron McEwen: 1950s. So it's not the case that this definition occurred to McLuhan in the

[1:11:27] Cameron McEwen: 70s, but

[1:11:29] Cameron McEwen: It is the case that it's one of the meanings of a medium,

[1:11:34] Cameron McEwen: for sure.

[1:11:37] Bob Dobbs: So what is it that you would question about my book here?

[1:11:45] Bob Dobbs: Where do you have a problem?

[1:11:47] Bob Dobbs: Maybe you don't have a problem.

[1:11:50] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:11:51] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:11:52] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:11:53] Cameron McEwen: reading doesn't involve approval and disapproval.

[1:11:57] Cameron McEwen: When you take your energy to read something and your time,

[1:12:02] Cameron McEwen: then you continue to do it only when you get something out of it.

[1:12:10] Cameron McEwen: And what's interesting about the book,

[1:12:12] Cameron McEwen: from my perspective,

[1:12:14] Cameron McEwen: is that especially the

[1:12:16] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan snippets,

[1:12:19] Cameron McEwen: the passages that are taken from McLuhan,

[1:12:22] Cameron McEwen: but also the way you relate them is interesting.

[1:12:28] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:12:28] Bob Dobbs: so I'm trying to get you to point out something about that or comment.

[1:12:32] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:12:32] Cameron McEwen: that's what I'm always talking about,

[1:12:34] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[1:12:36] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[1:12:37] Cameron McEwen: in your Tiny Note chart,

[1:12:41] Cameron McEwen: the dynamic of the thing is what it's all about.

[1:12:46] Cameron McEwen: The pieces of the chart are not like jigsaw pieces that need to be seen in some kind of arrangement.

[1:12:56] Cameron McEwen: They're more like...

[1:12:58] Cameron McEwen: They're more like subatomic particles that are in dynamic motion relative to each other.

[1:13:06] Cameron McEwen: And the question posed by the Tiny Note chart is,

[1:13:10] Cameron McEwen: how are we to understand something like this now that we know that this is what the external and interior landscape are like?

[1:13:26] Cameron McEwen: So it's a very,

[1:13:26] Cameron McEwen: very good question,

[1:13:29] Cameron McEwen: and the question itself needs to be borne in mind.

[1:13:40] Cameron McEwen: It's sort of the most important thing at this stage,

[1:13:44] Cameron McEwen: because the question of going beyond,

[1:13:47] Cameron McEwen: or the meta question of going beyond the questions to some kind of answer,

[1:13:52] Cameron McEwen: that's the huge question that is.

[1:13:55] Cameron McEwen: posed to us by the whole tradition.

[1:13:58] Cameron McEwen: We don't know what that is.

[1:14:01] Cameron McEwen: That's why we're in a cul-de-sac.

[1:14:08] Bob Dobbs: But there's a little bit more risk today.

[1:14:13] Bob Dobbs: What makes you feel that,

[1:14:15] Bob Dobbs: that there's a little more energy at the top?

[1:14:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:14:20] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:14:20] Cameron McEwen: we've already said that

[1:14:22] Cameron McEwen: I would complicate what that phrase means.

[1:14:25] Cameron McEwen: But there's two things going on that are difficult to deal with.

[1:14:30] Cameron McEwen: One is that we have all these nuclear weapons in more and more countries.

[1:14:37] Cameron McEwen: And the more nuclear weapons we have in the more countries and the more complex arrangements there are for when they're going to be used or not used or when they're taken out of service,

[1:14:53] Cameron McEwen: when they're put into service.

[1:14:55] Cameron McEwen: And when they have to be updated in various ways,

[1:15:01] Cameron McEwen: maintained,

[1:15:03] Cameron McEwen: all of these complications are...

[1:15:05] Cameron McEwen: Very dangerous,

[1:15:06] Cameron McEwen: number one.

[1:15:09] Cameron McEwen: Number two,

[1:15:09] Cameron McEwen: there seems to be an increasing consciousness of the fact that we're in this cul-de-sac.

[1:15:16] Cameron McEwen: And as you well know,

[1:15:18] Cameron McEwen: that generates panic.

[1:15:21] Cameron McEwen: And when people are panicked,

[1:15:24] Cameron McEwen: you have no idea what the hell they're going to do.

[1:15:28] Cameron McEwen: So we have those two great dangers.

[1:15:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:15:32] Bob Dobbs: I remember Bojar saying,

[1:15:34] Bob Dobbs: years ago,

[1:15:35] Bob Dobbs: people know too much.

[1:15:38] Bob Dobbs: They have too much information.

[1:15:40] Bob Dobbs: So here we are,

[1:15:43] Bob Dobbs: vulnerable humans,

[1:15:46] Bob Dobbs: clumsing along clumsily,

[1:15:48] Bob Dobbs: and we have overlaid this instantaneous communication that can make instant panic,

[1:15:54] Bob Dobbs: paranoia,

[1:15:55] Bob Dobbs: and you don't know what quarters it will manifest in,

[1:16:00] Bob Dobbs: the simultaneity of the electric world.

[1:16:05] Bob Dobbs: That's why

[1:16:06] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan would say,

[1:16:07] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:16:07] Bob Dobbs: it's going to lead to more and more anarchy at the top.

[1:16:10] Bob Dobbs: We need to take a break from this.

[1:16:13] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:16:14] Bob Dobbs: we won't be able to take a break from it,

[1:16:17] Bob Dobbs: it seems.

[1:16:20] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:16:20] Cameron McEwen: Of course not.

[1:16:21] Bob Dobbs: Of course not.

[1:16:22] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:16:22] Cameron McEwen: So it's amazing Polly says that she's going to become a hermit,

[1:16:27] Cameron McEwen: and then the planet is blown up around her.

[1:16:33] Cameron McEwen: then she's not going to be a hermit anymore.

[1:16:36] Cameron McEwen: She's not going to be anything anymore.

[1:16:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:16:40] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:16:43] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was saying,

[1:16:44] Bob Dobbs: to the degree it was a warning,

[1:16:46] Bob Dobbs: I wonder if you could figure out the service of it.

[1:16:48] Bob Dobbs: This insensiniety,

[1:16:50] Bob Dobbs: that makes people panic more.

[1:16:55] Bob Dobbs: Is there a way to get out of that panic without turning off the Gilson?

[1:17:01] Bob Dobbs: the cloned ESP,

[1:17:02] Bob Dobbs: I call it.

[1:17:04] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:17:04] Cameron McEwen: but you can't,

[1:17:05] Cameron McEwen: the simultaneity can never be turned off.

[1:17:07] Cameron McEwen: That's what being is.

[1:17:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:17:11] Cameron McEwen: That's the human environment,

[1:17:13] Cameron McEwen: not in the physical sense,

[1:17:14] Cameron McEwen: but in the metaphysical sense.

[1:17:18] Cameron McEwen: So the answer to your question is that we're in the cul-de-sac and the only way to get out of the cul-de-sac

[1:17:31] Cameron McEwen: is for that question to be answered.

[1:17:34] Bob Dobbs: And what is that question?

[1:17:38] Cameron McEwen: The question that you just asked.

[1:17:42] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[1:17:45] Cameron McEwen: If I cast my mind back,

[1:17:47] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that I can remember the question you just asked.

[1:17:51] Bob Dobbs: About the simultaneity that intensifies the anarchy at the top.

[1:17:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:17:58] Cameron McEwen: and so that's right.

[1:17:59] Cameron McEwen: And then talking about

[1:18:02] Cameron McEwen: ESP and your question was,

[1:18:06] Cameron McEwen: is there an answer to that or can we get out of that?

[1:18:11] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:18:11] Cameron McEwen: I simply say the cul-de-sac means that we have no idea of an answer to that.

[1:18:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:18:23] Cameron McEwen: From McLuhan point of view.

[1:18:28] Cameron McEwen: Being a Catholic means believing that the huge danger of nuclear annihilation,

[1:18:40] Cameron McEwen: even if it happens,

[1:18:43] Cameron McEwen: is not a contradiction of ultimate balance.

[1:18:47] Bob Dobbs: Not a contradiction of ultimate what?

[1:18:50] Cameron McEwen: Balance.

[1:18:51] Bob Dobbs: Balance.

[1:18:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:18:53] Cameron McEwen: because,

[1:18:54] Cameron McEwen: and the reason for that is that for a Catholic...

[1:18:59] Cameron McEwen: And presumably this is also true of

[1:19:01] Cameron McEwen: Orthodox Christianity,

[1:19:03] Cameron McEwen: and maybe for the first Protestant denominations like Lutheranism and

[1:19:14] Cameron McEwen: Anglicanism, the death of God is a step beyond the annihilation of the planet or the annihilation of the universe.

[1:19:30] Cameron McEwen: And since the death of God turned out to be the very sign of God,

[1:19:39] Cameron McEwen: then the annihilation of the planet and the annihilation of the universe is a relatively small affair,

[1:19:48] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:19:50] Cameron McEwen: But for people that aren't Catholic or Orthodox or something,

[1:19:54] Cameron McEwen: or aren't,

[1:19:57] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:19:57] Cameron McEwen: Hindus...

[1:20:00] Cameron McEwen: who presumably...

[1:20:03] Cameron McEwen: think that the universe has been annihilated many,

[1:20:06] Cameron McEwen: many times.

[1:20:10] Cameron McEwen: If for modern non-religious people,

[1:20:15] Cameron McEwen: the annihilation of the planet,

[1:20:17] Cameron McEwen: let alone the annihilation of the universe,

[1:20:19] Cameron McEwen: is a pretty big deal.

[1:20:24] Cameron McEwen: It's sort of the end of all things,

[1:20:26] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[1:20:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:20:29] Cameron McEwen: So the...

[1:20:33] Cameron McEwen: The treatment of these themes is,

[1:20:42] Cameron McEwen: you could say it's what human beings are called to do,

[1:20:46] Cameron McEwen: what human beings have to do,

[1:20:49] Cameron McEwen: but it's also the thing that human beings least like to do.

[1:20:54] Cameron McEwen: Nobody does it.

[1:20:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:21:00] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:21:01] Bob Dobbs: so I'm...

[1:21:02] Bob Dobbs: Going past the Baudrillard,

[1:21:07] Bob Dobbs: and I'm saying that Baudrillard,

[1:21:09] Bob Dobbs: as we leave him,

[1:21:11] Bob Dobbs: he started to notice the later meaning of medium,

[1:21:19] Bob Dobbs: that we couldn't tell the medium from the message.

[1:21:24] Bob Dobbs: He got to that point that McLuhan seemed to have gotten to.

[1:21:28] Bob Dobbs: But you'll go back to 1959.

[1:21:31] Bob Dobbs: say he had the same question there.

[1:21:34] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[1:21:35] Cameron McEwen: right.

[1:21:36] Cameron McEwen: We discussed that before.

[1:21:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:21:40] Cameron McEwen: And notice,

[1:21:41] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:21:41] Cameron McEwen: iON page 29 looking at what may be the first quotation you have from Baudrillard,

[1:21:51] Cameron McEwen: and that is where he mentions the distinction between poles can no longer be maintained.

[1:21:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:21:59] Cameron McEwen: Um,

[1:22:00] Cameron McEwen: And in a certain sense,

[1:22:01] Cameron McEwen: that's true,

[1:22:02] Cameron McEwen: but that's the characteristic vision of the

[1:22:06] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg Galaxy,

[1:22:08] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:22:08] Cameron McEwen: The idea that given a long enough perspective,

[1:22:14] Cameron McEwen: everything comes to a point.

[1:22:18] Cameron McEwen: So the big question with somebody like Baudrillard is how conscious are they that complications that you can identify in McLuhan

[1:22:29] Cameron McEwen: How conscious are they that some or all of these go back into Gutenberg instead of trying to think with McLuhan?

[1:22:41] Bob Dobbs: Do you see anybody thinking with McLuhan?

[1:22:44] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:22:45] Cameron McEwen: I'm trying to do.

[1:22:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:22:46] Cameron McEwen: I'm trying to do that.

[1:22:49] Cameron McEwen: And I see some of the work that you do as another kind of thinking about

[1:22:56] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan that's very different from mine.

[1:22:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:22:59] Cameron McEwen: I see you as somebody who is kind of a native Channer of McLuhan.

[1:23:12] Cameron McEwen: I'm not quite sure how you did it,

[1:23:15] Cameron McEwen: but you,

[1:23:17] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:23:18] Cameron McEwen: already probably in the

[1:23:21] Cameron McEwen: 1970s, you learned how to take

[1:23:27] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan.

[1:23:28] Cameron McEwen: in a very complex way.

[1:23:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:23:33] Cameron McEwen: And that's very unusual.

[1:23:37] Cameron McEwen: And for me,

[1:23:39] Cameron McEwen: who tries to think about McLuhan in a different way,

[1:23:42] Cameron McEwen: oftentimes I find stuff in your reading of McLuhan that I didn't see before and that

[1:23:50] Cameron McEwen: I like.

[1:23:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:23:53] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:23:54] Bob Dobbs: so is there nobody else?

[1:23:59] Bob Dobbs: that you might value in the McLuhan world?

[1:24:05] Bob Dobbs: Nobody.

[1:24:06] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:24:06] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't put it quite like that.

[1:24:10] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[1:24:13] Cameron McEwen: Rich Altman in Winnipeg has a mind that's a little bit like yours.

[1:24:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:24:20] Cameron McEwen: He thinks in what might be called a kind of natural hip-hop.

[1:24:26] Cameron McEwen: And again,

[1:24:27] Cameron McEwen: with...

[1:24:28] Cameron McEwen: Rich,

[1:24:29] Cameron McEwen: I find stuff that is very different from my way of thinking about anything,

[1:24:37] Cameron McEwen: but it's often interesting and very often funny.

[1:24:41] Cameron McEwen: The same with Jim Patterson.

[1:24:46] Cameron McEwen: Some of his artwork is very thought-provoking.

[1:24:50] Cameron McEwen: And,

[1:24:53] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:24:54] Cameron McEwen: again,

[1:24:55] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that way.

[1:24:57] Cameron McEwen: but I find it interesting.

[1:25:01] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:25:02] Bob Dobbs: That brings up George Sanderson.

[1:25:05] Bob Dobbs: How do you think he understood,

[1:25:06] Bob Dobbs: or did he,

[1:25:07] Bob Dobbs: or was he close?

[1:25:08] Cameron McEwen: Did he know?

[1:25:13] Bob Dobbs: You weren't talking this way back then in the late 90s,

[1:25:18] Bob Dobbs: were you?

[1:25:23] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:25:23] Cameron McEwen: I certainly wasn't as familiar with McLuhan back then,

[1:25:29] Cameron McEwen: so

[1:25:30] Cameron McEwen: I might have talked in a...

[1:25:35] Cameron McEwen: in a somewhat similar way about other people,

[1:25:38] Cameron McEwen: Hegel,

[1:25:39] Cameron McEwen: Eliot,

[1:25:40] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger,

[1:25:41] Cameron McEwen: people like that.

[1:25:43] Cameron McEwen: I might have had similar things to say,

[1:25:46] Cameron McEwen: but it's true that

[1:25:49] Cameron McEwen: I didn't understand

[1:25:51] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan as well as I should have.

[1:25:55] Cameron McEwen: But that said,

[1:25:56] Cameron McEwen: let me go on to George for a second.

[1:25:58] Cameron McEwen: George is an interesting guy.

[1:26:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:26:02] Cameron McEwen: George,

[1:26:02] Cameron McEwen: again,

[1:26:03] Cameron McEwen: is somebody that

[1:26:04] Cameron McEwen: thinks about

[1:26:07] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan differently from me.

[1:26:10] Cameron McEwen: But George had a kind of sixth sense about McLuhan.

[1:26:16] Cameron McEwen: He was able to smell stuff in McLuhan that he could see sort of in the future.

[1:26:27] Cameron McEwen: And so for me...

[1:26:32] Cameron McEwen: It was interesting to speak with

[1:26:35] Cameron McEwen: George because things that either I couldn't see or that I thought were questionable or something,

[1:26:44] Cameron McEwen: George could just identify as sort of sitting right there.

[1:26:49] Cameron McEwen: And so that was interesting,

[1:26:52] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:26:53] Cameron McEwen: All these different ways of understanding somebody like McLuhan.

[1:27:01] Cameron McEwen: as different ways of juggling him,

[1:27:02] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[1:27:05] Cameron McEwen: are interesting.

[1:27:06] Cameron McEwen: Where McLuhan becomes uninteresting,

[1:27:09] Cameron McEwen: and this is largely true of the industry,

[1:27:11] Cameron McEwen: is where people think they can take some aspect and make it in the ground,

[1:27:18] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:27:19] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:27:19] Cameron McEwen: Richard

[1:27:20] Cameron McEwen: Cavell, however he says his name,

[1:27:24] Cameron McEwen: he uses art like that.

[1:27:27] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:27:30] Cameron McEwen: you know that can't be done that can't be done um and uh derek uh he takes uh the internet to be uh some sort of fact some sort of electronic cloud you could say and

[1:27:48] Cameron McEwen: this is um this could be used as ground but it it can't be and then we could go through you know

[1:28:00] Cameron McEwen: All of the different takes on McLuhan that are often very self-interested.

[1:28:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:28:16] Cameron McEwen: So most of the people I like,

[1:28:19] Cameron McEwen: right,

[1:28:20] Cameron McEwen: so you and Altman and Jim and

[1:28:25] Cameron McEwen: George, these are all people for whom...

[1:28:30] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was not a sort of an economic asset.

[1:28:38] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:28:41] Bob Dobbs: They weren't in the academic game.

[1:28:43] Bob Dobbs: They weren't trying to get something,

[1:28:45] Bob Dobbs: make a career out of it.

[1:28:47] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: So the MEA,

[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: they just had their convention.

[1:28:59] Bob Dobbs: And I attended it last year,

[1:29:01] Bob Dobbs: virtually,

[1:29:03] Bob Dobbs: and it was pretty crummy watching these young people try to impress people with their paper.

[1:29:19] Cameron McEwen: What convention was this?

[1:29:21] Bob Dobbs: The

[1:29:21] Bob Dobbs: Media Colony Convention was online last year because of COVID.

[1:29:26] Bob Dobbs: And it was online this year,

[1:29:27] Bob Dobbs: but...

[1:29:28] Bob Dobbs: I didn't want to put myself through it again.

[1:29:32] Bob Dobbs: But

[1:29:34] Bob Dobbs: I remember Zingrone telling me that he would not go to conferences.

[1:29:37] Bob Dobbs: He hated people giving papers and all this stuff.

[1:29:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:29:43] Cameron McEwen: I can relate.

[1:29:45] Bob Dobbs: Beg your pardon?

[1:29:46] Bob Dobbs: You can relate.

[1:29:46] Cameron McEwen: I can relate.

[1:29:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:29:51] Bob Dobbs: So the anarchists at the top,

[1:29:55] Bob Dobbs: they're going to bring in...

[1:29:57] Bob Dobbs: academics to advise them because they know instinctively the academics

[1:30:05] Bob Dobbs: aren't going to get into any reality,

[1:30:08] Bob Dobbs: and therefore they won't threaten the anarchists or the unconscious anarchists.

[1:30:12] Bob Dobbs: Do you think that's a factor?

[1:30:20] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:30:22] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:30:22] Cameron McEwen: we talked earlier about the Byzantinian bureaucracy.

[1:30:28] Cameron McEwen: These people need to earn a living,

[1:30:31] Cameron McEwen: whether it's in academia or in...

[1:30:35] Cameron McEwen: business or in government,

[1:30:41] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:30:41] Cameron McEwen: they have to get a job,

[1:30:42] Cameron McEwen: they have to do stuff.

[1:30:44] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:30:50] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:30:50] Cameron McEwen: that's not to condemn them or something.

[1:30:54] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:30:54] Cameron McEwen: that's just the way it is.

[1:30:55] Cameron McEwen: You have to eat,

[1:30:56] Cameron McEwen: you have to have a roof over your head.

[1:31:00] Cameron McEwen: So the problem we've got is that we've built ourselves

[1:31:05] Cameron McEwen: Using these avenues of commerce,

[1:31:12] Cameron McEwen: these avenues of getting through life to build a cul-de-sac,

[1:31:19] Cameron McEwen: which is very,

[1:31:19] Cameron McEwen: very dangerous,

[1:31:21] Cameron McEwen: and we don't know how to get out of it.

[1:31:25] Cameron McEwen: So these people that we're talking about,

[1:31:30] Cameron McEwen: presenting their papers and one thing and another,

[1:31:33] Cameron McEwen: They're part of...

[1:31:34] Cameron McEwen: the infrastructure of the cul-de-sac.

[1:31:40] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:31:40] Cameron McEwen: Nothing else.

[1:31:43] Bob Dobbs: So we've got a drought coming in over there in your area,

[1:31:47] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:31:48] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:31:49] Bob Dobbs: Food problems.

[1:31:52] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,

[1:31:52] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:31:54] Cameron McEwen: Could be that the world is headed to a number of great problems,

[1:32:02] Cameron McEwen: which...

[1:32:03] Cameron McEwen: It is ill-prepared to meet simply because thinking has been in increasing abeyance for a very long time.

[1:32:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:32:15] Bob Dobbs: so you're seeing those images of the thousands of protesters in Europe.

[1:32:22] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:32:22] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:32:23] Bob Dobbs: the iON my site features a lot of them.

[1:32:26] Bob Dobbs: And would you say there's not as much protesting going on in America?

[1:32:33] Cameron McEwen: Seems like.

[1:32:34] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:32:34] Cameron McEwen: Seems like.

[1:32:35] Cameron McEwen: But the potential,

[1:32:37] Cameron McEwen: I would say the potential for something to be sparked is probably greater in America than elsewhere.

[1:32:45] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:32:46] Bob Dobbs: why is that?

[1:32:47] Cameron McEwen: Why?

[1:32:51] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:32:51] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:32:51] Cameron McEwen: there's a lot of guns in America,

[1:32:53] Cameron McEwen: for one thing.

[1:32:54] Cameron McEwen: But there's also a tradition.

[1:32:57] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[1:32:57] Cameron McEwen: some of the early American flags had a snake on them.

[1:33:02] Cameron McEwen: And either explicitly or implicitly,

[1:33:07] Cameron McEwen: the message was,

[1:33:07] Cameron McEwen: don't tread on me.

[1:33:09] Cameron McEwen: And this is something that is very deep in the American culture,

[1:33:15] Cameron McEwen: but

[1:33:19] Cameron McEwen: Americans are also sort of slow to get going.

[1:33:24] Cameron McEwen: Because,

[1:33:25] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:33:26] Cameron McEwen: most life in the United States is fairly comfortable.

[1:33:30] Cameron McEwen: So what happens when life...

[1:33:31] Cameron McEwen: gets less comfortable through and it could that could happen through many many different things what happens then is anybody's uh guess it's could be uh something very difficult do you have a gun in your home no

[1:33:51] Bob Dobbs: you're not going to get one no now why is that why wouldn't you have a gun

[1:34:01] Cameron McEwen: I guess there's many answers to that,

[1:34:03] Cameron McEwen: but

[1:34:04] Cameron McEwen: I'm a non-hunting Canadian.

[1:34:09] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:34:10] Bob Dobbs: so can you apply McLuhan sensory analysis to the differences between

[1:34:17] Bob Dobbs: European protest and American protest,

[1:34:21] Bob Dobbs: assuming that the anarchy is going to become more and more apparent to people,

[1:34:26] Bob Dobbs: and people are going to get,

[1:34:28] Bob Dobbs: you could say,

[1:34:28] Bob Dobbs: desperate,

[1:34:29] Bob Dobbs: or they're going to get creative?

[1:34:31] Bob Dobbs: just operate without government among themselves,

[1:34:34] Bob Dobbs: their communities,

[1:34:35] Bob Dobbs: what would be the social,

[1:34:39] Bob Dobbs: the sensory dynamics and biases of,

[1:34:42] Bob Dobbs: say,

[1:34:42] Bob Dobbs: Europeans versus Americans that you and I,

[1:34:45] Bob Dobbs: if we,

[1:34:47] Bob Dobbs: would it be relevant?

[1:34:49] Bob Dobbs: Would it be relevant to bring up?

[1:34:51] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[1:34:51] Cameron McEwen: these kinds of questions,

[1:34:54] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:34:54] Cameron McEwen: are kind of silly.

[1:34:59] Bob Dobbs: So that part of McLuhan you wouldn't apply?

[1:35:03] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:35:04] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:35:04] Cameron McEwen: I think we've already talked about that in the past,

[1:35:07] Cameron McEwen: and I even sent you a quotation from McLuhan that downplayed that.

[1:35:13] Cameron McEwen: You're talking about the idea of being able to apply to large populations the sort of surface level of McLuhan analysis.

[1:35:25] Cameron McEwen: So if you turn off radio in Venezuela,

[1:35:30] Cameron McEwen: it's going to have some effect.

[1:35:33] Cameron McEwen: And even McLuhan said in the quotation I sent you that that makes no sense,

[1:35:40] Cameron McEwen: that basically he was trying to get people to think about something like that.

[1:35:47] Cameron McEwen: If we want to think about how sensory levels might apply to protests in

[1:35:56] Cameron McEwen: Europe and the United States,

[1:35:58] Cameron McEwen: what we have to think about is the...

[1:36:03] Cameron McEwen: fact that the interior landscape is no less complicated than the exterior one.

[1:36:09] Cameron McEwen: So if we really got research going on sensory levels,

[1:36:17] Cameron McEwen: that would be like going from chemistry in 1850 to organic chemistry in 1870 to...

[1:36:29] Cameron McEwen: sort of the beginning of genetics in 1900,

[1:36:34] Cameron McEwen: it would involve getting very much more complex about how sensory levels work and how they work together.

[1:36:46] Cameron McEwen: And then it would turn out that,

[1:36:48] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[1:36:48] Cameron McEwen: we can go and we can sort of sample sensory levels.

[1:36:56] Cameron McEwen: in

[1:36:57] Cameron McEwen: Europe, let's say,

[1:36:58] Cameron McEwen: as compared to the United States,

[1:37:00] Cameron McEwen: but that would be a little bit like comparing some protein in Europe as compared to America.

[1:37:11] Cameron McEwen: And how that would be done and what the results of it would be

[1:37:17] Cameron McEwen: I think are very,

[1:37:18] Cameron McEwen: very different from how people tend to think about comparing

[1:37:27] Cameron McEwen: European protest to American protest.

[1:37:33] Bob Dobbs: Could we have been made,

[1:37:35] Bob Dobbs: or the core nature of humans has come forth,

[1:37:40] Bob Dobbs: and the cultural differences on the surfaces have been erased the past

[1:37:47] Bob Dobbs: 10, 15 years by the commonality of the digital world,

[1:37:52] Bob Dobbs: Android Meme.

[1:37:55] Bob Dobbs: So everybody has come to a new kind of unity or ignoring of their cultural past,

[1:38:06] Bob Dobbs: even though some part of the ender meme tries to fragment and get everybody to notice their differences.

[1:38:12] Bob Dobbs: But do you think there's a commonality that people are starting to see in the human condition in this cul-de-sac?

[1:38:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:38:22] Cameron McEwen: I mean...

[1:38:22] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry.

[1:38:26] Cameron McEwen: Commonality can be interpreted in many,

[1:38:29] Cameron McEwen: many different ways.

[1:38:31] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:38:32] Cameron McEwen: I thought you were headed in the direction of saying that commonality can be like a blanket that dampens down national traditions,

[1:38:44] Cameron McEwen: and a great deal can be lost through that,

[1:38:47] Cameron McEwen: which is true.

[1:38:48] Cameron McEwen: But then you seem to get into commonality as something that is potentially valuable,

[1:38:53] Cameron McEwen: which is also true.

[1:38:56] Cameron McEwen: even if things are lost.

[1:38:58] Cameron McEwen: So do we have more commonality in both senses?

[1:39:04] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:39:04] Cameron McEwen: we do.

[1:39:06] Cameron McEwen: How does it work within the cul-de-sac?

[1:39:11] Cameron McEwen: And the answer is it doesn't so far.

[1:39:15] Cameron McEwen: It hasn't extricated us or shown a way in which we could be extricated.

[1:39:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:39:24] Bob Dobbs: so...

[1:39:25] Bob Dobbs: You have the extension of our tactility with the smartphone or these cell phones,

[1:39:31] Bob Dobbs: and large parts of the world are using them.

[1:39:35] Bob Dobbs: Are they mis-sized?

[1:39:37] Bob Dobbs: Is there human nature change?

[1:39:39] Bob Dobbs: And whatever the effect of smartphones is,

[1:39:42] Bob Dobbs: has implemented,

[1:39:43] Bob Dobbs: just like literacy did something.

[1:39:45] Bob Dobbs: Granted,

[1:39:46] Bob Dobbs: literacy takes a couple hundred years,

[1:39:48] Bob Dobbs: but maybe the speed of the cell phone means nothing is done.

[1:39:53] Bob Dobbs: But everybody's in that nothing zone,

[1:39:56] Bob Dobbs: and that's the new unity here.

[1:40:00] Bob Dobbs: There's a very interesting acultural.

[1:40:05] Bob Dobbs: phenomenon going on.

[1:40:08] Bob Dobbs: People,

[1:40:09] Bob Dobbs: they visit other cultures and tourism and that,

[1:40:12] Bob Dobbs: and they don't...

[1:40:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:40:15] Cameron McEwen: thereby destroy what they think is interesting to look at.

[1:40:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:40:20] Bob Dobbs: and,

[1:40:21] Bob Dobbs: but the medium is,

[1:40:25] Bob Dobbs: what would you call this,

[1:40:27] Bob Dobbs: extension of the corporates collosum?

[1:40:30] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:40:30] Bob Dobbs: I'm not going to go into the tech body,

[1:40:32] Bob Dobbs: that's more complicated.

[1:40:34] Bob Dobbs: It's not extending anything.

[1:40:36] Bob Dobbs: It's just taking on a life of its own.

[1:40:38] Bob Dobbs: But we go back a phase,

[1:40:41] Bob Dobbs: the Android Meme say,

[1:40:43] Bob Dobbs: where people are acultural,

[1:40:47] Bob Dobbs: seeing,

[1:40:48] Bob Dobbs: and today's culture is you've got to deal with a new story every day,

[1:40:53] Bob Dobbs: a new surprise.

[1:40:55] Bob Dobbs: It might be in your country,

[1:40:57] Bob Dobbs: but there are other surprises from other countries.

[1:41:00] Bob Dobbs: The constant turmoil of the dangling ganglia,

[1:41:02] Bob Dobbs: we could say we're all just dangling ganglia,

[1:41:05] Bob Dobbs: and more and more people are living with that.

[1:41:10] Bob Dobbs: Could that be harnessed?

[1:41:14] Bob Dobbs: Could that be communicated about that we've become,

[1:41:20] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:41:20] Bob Dobbs: they probably in academia like to say we've become Postman,

[1:41:24] Bob Dobbs: but that wouldn't be appropriate.

[1:41:27] Bob Dobbs: So maybe a Cameron McEwen.

[1:41:29] Cameron McEwen: Why not?

[1:41:30] Cameron McEwen: Why not?

[1:41:31] Cameron McEwen: Postman,

[1:41:32] Cameron McEwen: Cameron McEwen,

[1:41:33] Cameron McEwen: I don't find those...

[1:41:36] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:41:36] Bob Dobbs: because people don't believe they're Postman.

[1:41:39] Bob Dobbs: And so I think Don Theall term para is better.

[1:41:42] Bob Dobbs: Cameron McEwen.

[1:41:44] Bob Dobbs: You're keeping the human in there a little bit.

[1:41:48] Bob Dobbs: And then that's what my chart's about.

[1:41:50] Bob Dobbs: The answer is more physical.

[1:41:51] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:41:53] Bob Dobbs: what we project.

[1:41:56] Bob Dobbs: But there is...

[1:41:58] Bob Dobbs: an amazing unity and McLuhan actually talked about that but he said it was the false you know yeah simulation of the body of christ yeah it's pseudomorphic what does that mean pseudomorphic it's a bad imitation okay now

[1:42:19] Bob Dobbs: but it is there that everybody is massaged on that level they are uh in the same boat

[1:42:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:42:30] Cameron McEwen: I don't,

[1:42:32] Cameron McEwen: I think all of this is true,

[1:42:33] Cameron McEwen: but it's just a,

[1:42:34] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:42:36] Cameron McEwen: we're,

[1:42:37] Cameron McEwen: the boat is in the cul-de-sac.

[1:42:40] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:42:41] Bob Dobbs: you think the cul-de-sac just has to be recognized?

[1:42:48] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:42:48] Cameron McEwen: you say just,

[1:42:49] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:42:50] Cameron McEwen: I think it's a,

[1:42:57] Cameron McEwen: it's unknown,

[1:42:58] Cameron McEwen: it's like a black hole.

[1:43:00] Cameron McEwen: It's unknown what goes in and what comes out.

[1:43:03] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:43:06] Cameron McEwen: I think most people are panicked by the very idea of the cul-de-sac.

[1:43:14] Cameron McEwen: It's a very,

[1:43:16] Cameron McEwen: very difficult problem to attempt to internalize.

[1:43:27] Bob Dobbs: So I see a collision,

[1:43:31] Bob Dobbs: a disaster.

[1:43:33] Bob Dobbs: It's not going to be stopped.

[1:43:35] Bob Dobbs: I feel,

[1:43:36] Bob Dobbs: for some reason,

[1:43:37] Bob Dobbs: pretty confident in surviving it.

[1:43:41] Bob Dobbs: Coming out of it was the smelling of roses.

[1:43:48] Bob Dobbs: But I ain't telling my neighbor that.

[1:43:57] Bob Dobbs: How do you feel about this disaster that's coming?

[1:44:01] Bob Dobbs: And it's probably started about two weeks ago.

[1:44:05] Bob Dobbs: Biden is collapsing in the polls.

[1:44:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:44:07] Bob Dobbs: the polls are the Pollstergeists.

[1:44:09] Bob Dobbs: They're everything.

[1:44:10] Bob Dobbs: And if he goes down,

[1:44:13] Bob Dobbs: then the journalists won't be their idiot,

[1:44:17] Bob Dobbs: won't be able to be their idiocy anymore.

[1:44:20] Bob Dobbs: And when they...

[1:44:21] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:44:21] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:44:23] Cameron McEwen: the polls can be...

[1:44:24] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:44:25] Cameron McEwen: are fixed,

[1:44:26] Cameron McEwen: number one.

[1:44:27] Cameron McEwen: And the polls can be fixed.

[1:44:30] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:44:30] Cameron McEwen: And they already are fixed,

[1:44:32] Cameron McEwen: so maybe they just need to be tweaked to get going in the other direction.

[1:44:41] Cameron McEwen: Number two,

[1:44:42] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that anybody really cares about the polls.

[1:44:47] Cameron McEwen: Number three,

[1:44:48] Cameron McEwen: the journalists are going to do what new journalists do.

[1:44:54] Cameron McEwen: They just wait.

[1:44:55] Cameron McEwen: to be told what to say and then they say it.

[1:44:59] Bob Dobbs: And a lot of people know that and don't pay attention.

[1:45:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:45:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:45:03] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[1:45:03] Cameron McEwen: for sure,

[1:45:04] Cameron McEwen: for sure,

[1:45:04] Cameron McEwen: and increasing numbers of people,

[1:45:07] Cameron McEwen: for sure.

[1:45:09] Cameron McEwen: But

[1:45:09] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that,

[1:45:11] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:45:11] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that means anything.

[1:45:13] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that's really very different from the conditions that have obtained for,

[1:45:19] Cameron McEwen: at the very least,

[1:45:20] Cameron McEwen: decades.

[1:45:25] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:45:28] Bob Dobbs: The miracle is that nothing huge has happened.

[1:45:32] Cameron McEwen: So far?

[1:45:33] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:45:34] Cameron McEwen: it all depends on what we mean by nothing huge has happened.

[1:45:39] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:45:40] Cameron McEwen: if it turns out that we've destroyed great chunks of the planet in some way,

[1:45:50] Cameron McEwen: either by farming where we weren't supposed to farm or by taking water out of deep levels or by polluting vast amounts of the ocean,

[1:46:01] Cameron McEwen: On and on and on.

[1:46:04] Cameron McEwen: If we've done things that we later find out in the future can't be undone and that end up killing everybody or killing most people or a lot of people or something like that,

[1:46:23] Cameron McEwen: then that changes our idea of what has happened.

[1:46:28] Cameron McEwen: We don't know.

[1:46:30] Cameron McEwen: As Tom Easterbrook would say,

[1:46:32] Cameron McEwen: we never know about the events of the future.

[1:46:36] Cameron McEwen: That's the sort of thing he would always say to McLuhan when McLuhan was trying to talk about what could be predicted on the basis of media.

[1:46:45] Bob Dobbs: Where is that on the record?

[1:46:48] Cameron McEwen: In a talk that Easterbrook gave in 1960 with McLuhan,

[1:46:55] Cameron McEwen: the two of them gave papers at the...

[1:47:02] Cameron McEwen: At the,

[1:47:03] Cameron McEwen: what's it called,

[1:47:04] Cameron McEwen: the

[1:47:07] Cameron McEwen: History of Economics Association.

[1:47:11] Bob Dobbs: So Easterbrook invited McLuhan to it?

[1:47:14] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:47:15] Cameron McEwen: they were both invited by a guy by the name of

[1:47:18] Cameron McEwen: Kohler, who was at Harvard and had been a good friend of

[1:47:25] Cameron McEwen: Harold Innis.

[1:47:27] Cameron McEwen: And so as a session within...

[1:47:31] Cameron McEwen: the meeting,

[1:47:32] Cameron McEwen: the annual meeting of the

[1:47:35] Cameron McEwen: History of Economics Association,

[1:47:38] Cameron McEwen: he set up a session basically on Innis.

[1:47:43] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:47:44] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook gave a talk on the,

[1:47:49] Cameron McEwen: or I should say it wasn't so much on Innis,

[1:47:51] Cameron McEwen: but on the promise of communication as a potential.

[1:48:03] Cameron McEwen: ground or how do they put it as a non-variable factor in economics.

[1:48:16] Cameron McEwen: In other words,

[1:48:18] Cameron McEwen: would it be possible following Innis to take communication as something through which the history of economics could be

[1:48:31] Cameron McEwen: formulated in a new way and in a way that would not only be novel at the moment,

[1:48:39] Cameron McEwen: but would give rise to increasing research in the future.

[1:48:45] Cameron McEwen: And so

[1:48:47] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook addressed that question in terms of his relationship with Innis and his relationship with

[1:48:53] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan. And in the course of that,

[1:48:56] Cameron McEwen: he said that his research in economics

[1:48:59] Cameron McEwen: was based on uncertainty and that he differed from both

[1:49:05] Cameron McEwen: Innis and McLuhan in that.

[1:49:07] Cameron McEwen: They both thought that it was possible to actually use bias as a tool of intelligibility.

[1:49:19] Bob Dobbs: So how did you find that article?

[1:49:22] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:49:22] Cameron McEwen: you have that article,

[1:49:23] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[1:49:23] Cameron McEwen: I'm sure you do.

[1:49:24] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:49:25] Bob Dobbs: I never heard of it.

[1:49:27] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:49:28] Cameron McEwen: I'm sure that's not the case.

[1:49:29] Cameron McEwen: By Easterbrook?

[1:49:29] Bob Dobbs: I have no articles by Easterbrook.

[1:49:32] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:49:32] Cameron McEwen: by Easterbrook.

[1:49:33] Cameron McEwen: I thought you were talking about the one by McLuhan.

[1:49:36] Cameron McEwen: What I can do is

[1:49:37] Cameron McEwen: I can tell you the name of the one by

[1:49:42] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan here.

[1:49:42] Cameron McEwen: Just wait a sec.

[1:49:44] Cameron McEwen: The one of

[1:49:44] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is called

[1:49:46] Cameron McEwen: Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media.

[1:49:50] Cameron McEwen: I know that.

[1:49:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:49:52] Cameron McEwen: And then

[1:49:54] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook.

[1:49:56] Cameron McEwen: Just before McLuhan spoke,

[1:49:58] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook talked on the problems of relationship of communication and economic history.

[1:50:07] Bob Dobbs: So how did you find that?

[1:50:08] Bob Dobbs: You just had to look where the conference McLuhan was at and found out

[1:50:12] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook was there?

[1:50:16] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:50:16] Cameron McEwen: I don't know how I originally knew that,

[1:50:19] Cameron McEwen: but I've known for a very long time.

[1:50:22] Cameron McEwen: that both Easterbrook and McLuhan spoke at that conference.

[1:50:26] Bob Dobbs: Is that the only time?

[1:50:27] Bob Dobbs: But

[1:50:28] Cameron McEwen: I'm more interested in people like Easterbrook than you are,

[1:50:32] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[1:50:33] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:50:34] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know you could.

[1:50:36] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:50:36] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:50:36] Bob Dobbs: I'm not that interested in,

[1:50:38] Bob Dobbs: but if he's commenting on McLuhan,

[1:50:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm interested in that,

[1:50:42] Bob Dobbs: especially him.

[1:50:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:50:44] Cameron McEwen: All right.

[1:50:44] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:50:45] Cameron McEwen: I'll send you that article.

[1:50:46] Cameron McEwen: It's not a problem.

[1:50:47] Bob Dobbs: Great.

[1:50:47] Bob Dobbs: And he's saying that he's counting on the great unknowing.

[1:50:52] Bob Dobbs: And isn't McLuhan talking about the unknowing,

[1:50:57] Bob Dobbs: the invisible?

[1:50:57] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:50:58] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[1:50:59] Cameron McEwen: I'm writing a post about that right now.

[1:51:02] Cameron McEwen: And what I'm saying in the post is that both Innis and McLuhan did not discarnate uncertainty in

[1:51:18] Cameron McEwen: terms of the future.

[1:51:23] Cameron McEwen: It's just that they were

[1:51:26] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook takes uncertainty to be in some way disabling intelligent.

[1:51:35] Cameron McEwen: What?

[1:51:36] Cameron McEwen: What did you say?

[1:51:36] Bob Dobbs: I yawned.

[1:51:37] Bob Dobbs: I said yes.

[1:51:38] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:51:38] Bob Dobbs: I see.

[1:51:39] Bob Dobbs: But disabling is the right word.

[1:51:42] Bob Dobbs: He was disabled by it.

[1:51:45] Bob Dobbs: As McLuhan would say,

[1:51:46] Bob Dobbs: the modern experts don't even pretend to know what's going on.

[1:51:49] Bob Dobbs: He pretended to know what was going on.

[1:51:53] Bob Dobbs: He could keep talking,

[1:51:58] Cameron McEwen: but in the uncertainty.

[1:51:59] Cameron McEwen: He's a good.

[1:51:59] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:51:59] Cameron McEwen: but what I say is that

[1:52:04] Cameron McEwen: Innis never made up his mind between the uncertainty,

[1:52:15] Cameron McEwen: which gets precipitated by.

[1:52:19] Cameron McEwen: the multiplicity of bias or whether the multiplicity of bias was something that enabled intelligibility.

[1:52:29] Cameron McEwen: So I say that Innis had both those ideas,

[1:52:32] Cameron McEwen: never made up his mind about them,

[1:52:34] Cameron McEwen: and probably at the end of his life tended more to the disabling of intelligibility.

[1:52:42] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:52:43] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook was a great friend of Innis and was

[1:52:49] Cameron McEwen: more or less his secretary by the end of Innis life.

[1:52:53] Cameron McEwen: And I believe that

[1:52:55] Cameron McEwen: Easterbrook took over that uncertainty side of

[1:52:59] Cameron McEwen: Innis, whereas McLuhan took the intelligibility side,

[1:53:03] Cameron McEwen: where bias is not disabling but enables intelligibility.

[1:53:09] Cameron McEwen: So that's what I'm trying to write about now.

[1:53:13] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:53:15] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:53:15] Cameron McEwen: and I should say that in regards to the uncertainty of the future,

[1:53:20] Cameron McEwen: Innis,

[1:53:21] Cameron McEwen: when he's thinking about the possibility of intelligibility,

[1:53:25] Cameron McEwen: doesn't discarnate uncertainty.

[1:53:28] Cameron McEwen: And same with McLuhan.

[1:53:31] Cameron McEwen: It's like if you have a physicist,

[1:53:34] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:53:35] Cameron McEwen: and you say to the physicist,

[1:53:38] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:53:39] Cameron McEwen: you've got your Ph.D.

[1:53:40] Cameron McEwen: in physics.

[1:53:41] Cameron McEwen: What's going to happen in this horse race tomorrow?

[1:53:48] Cameron McEwen: And the physicists might well say,

[1:53:50] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:53:51] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:53:51] Cameron McEwen: I do not know who's going to win that race.

[1:53:54] Cameron McEwen: But I can tell you,

[1:53:57] Cameron McEwen: after the race has been run,

[1:53:59] Cameron McEwen: I can tell you exactly the physics of the different horses and why they came in the position they did.

[1:54:07] Cameron McEwen: So that the uncertainty and Explorations don't disable each other.

[1:54:15] Cameron McEwen: They work together in a certain sense.

[1:54:19] Cameron McEwen: In physics,

[1:54:20] Cameron McEwen: if you find something wrong with an equation about radiation,

[1:54:25] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:54:26] Cameron McEwen: that's a great finding.

[1:54:29] Cameron McEwen: People then go in and they say,

[1:54:31] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:54:31] Cameron McEwen: what's wrong with the equation?

[1:54:34] Cameron McEwen: How did you measure these things?

[1:54:37] Cameron McEwen: And what would that imply about other equations?

[1:54:41] Cameron McEwen: So finding something wrong or uncertain is the way science works.

[1:54:47] Cameron McEwen: the motor of science you could say so it's not that McLuhan

[1:54:55] Cameron McEwen: discounted what Easterbrook had to say about uncertainty.

[1:54:58] Cameron McEwen: It's just that he took a completely different take on what that uncertainty implied.

[1:55:12] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know how to solve the problem of pairs is what I'm thinking of.

[1:55:19] Bob Dobbs: So did...

[1:55:22] Bob Dobbs: Did Easterbrook engage McLuhan anywhere else,

[1:55:25] Bob Dobbs: or was that the only time?

[1:55:27] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:55:29] Cameron McEwen: they had been doing that for more than 30 years by 1960,

[1:55:34] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:55:35] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that they had ever given papers like that.

[1:55:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:55:42] Cameron McEwen: so I don't know about that.

[1:55:43] Cameron McEwen: But you know the little book,

[1:55:45] Cameron McEwen: Speaking of Winnipeg?

[1:55:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:55:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:55:48] Cameron McEwen: so they have a dialogue there.

[1:55:52] Cameron McEwen: Then there's descriptions of them back in Winnipeg,

[1:55:59] Cameron McEwen: when they're in their early

[1:56:02] Cameron McEwen: 20s apparently,

[1:56:05] Cameron McEwen: walking and talking all night.

[1:56:07] Cameron McEwen: So as I say in the post,

[1:56:09] Cameron McEwen: outside of McLuhan family,

[1:56:12] Cameron McEwen: there's probably nobody in the world that knew McLuhan as well as Easterbrook.

[1:56:19] Bob Dobbs: Have you looked into McLuhan girlfriends?

[1:56:24] Cameron McEwen: A little bit,

[1:56:24] Cameron McEwen: but I don't know anything about it.

[1:56:26] Cameron McEwen: I just,

[1:56:27] Cameron McEwen: I just,

[1:56:28] Cameron McEwen: there's hints here and there.

[1:56:30] Bob Dobbs: It's hard to find anything.

[1:56:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:56:34] Cameron McEwen: very hard.

[1:56:37] Bob Dobbs: He's,

[1:56:39] Bob Dobbs: wasn't it?

[1:56:40] Bob Dobbs: Email at

[1:56:41] Bob Dobbs: Cambridge was her PhD guide,

[1:56:45] Bob Dobbs: his PhD guide.

[1:56:47] Bob Dobbs: Who was that?

[1:56:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:56:48] Cameron McEwen: Muriel Bertrand Russell.

[1:56:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:56:50] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:56:50] Cameron McEwen: I sent you a post I did on that.

[1:56:53] Cameron McEwen: But to me,

[1:56:56] Cameron McEwen: there are just suggestions that there may have been something between them.

[1:57:01] Cameron McEwen: But I don't know that there was.

[1:57:06] Cameron McEwen: And,

[1:57:08] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:57:08] Cameron McEwen: she could have been.

[1:57:09] Cameron McEwen: A lesbian,

[1:57:10] Cameron McEwen: for all I know,

[1:57:11] Cameron McEwen: she never got married,

[1:57:14] Cameron McEwen: and she lived in a female anti-environment her life.

[1:57:18] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:57:19] Cameron McEwen: I really know nothing about that.

[1:57:21] Cameron McEwen: And then McLuhan had a girlfriend in Winnipeg who then came over to visit him in

[1:57:28] Cameron McEwen: Cambridge. Yeah.

[1:57:30] Cameron McEwen: I forget her name,

[1:57:31] Cameron McEwen: but

[1:57:32] Cameron McEwen: I don't really know too much about that.

[1:57:37] Cameron McEwen: And then...

[1:57:41] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:57:41] Cameron McEwen: there's a woman who was in the same class as McLuhan at the University of Manitoba and was also an English major and was also in an unofficial seminar with McLuhan in

[1:58:01] Cameron McEwen: Winnipeg on Monday nights,

[1:58:03] Cameron McEwen: by the way.

[1:58:05] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:58:07] Cameron McEwen: and she...

[1:58:08] Cameron McEwen: talks about another woman that was that McLuhan was uh sort of uh i don't know in love with or in like with or would have liked to have pursued i don't know what the story is there but um let's

[1:58:24] Cameron McEwen: just say that uh like everybody else when McLuhan uh came of age um he must have had many different kinds of relations with many different kinds of women

[1:58:42] Cameron McEwen: about which we know almost nothing.

[1:58:47] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:58:47] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[1:58:48] Bob Dobbs: So I'm trying to figure out where to enter the book.

[1:58:55] Bob Dobbs: Where are we?

[1:58:57] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:58:57] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:59:00] Cameron McEwen: we're at the end of your history of media in terms of McLuhan,

[1:59:06] Cameron McEwen: which

[1:59:07] Cameron McEwen: I don't think is correct because it's linear.

[1:59:10] Cameron McEwen: and I think most of

[1:59:12] Cameron McEwen: the things that you identify as stages were actually not linear,

[1:59:19] Cameron McEwen: that he knew about most of those things early on.

[1:59:25] Cameron McEwen: But that's not a huge matter.

[1:59:28] Cameron McEwen: And then you go on to Baudrillard.

[1:59:30] Cameron McEwen: And in Baudrillard,

[1:59:32] Cameron McEwen: what we could do is,

[1:59:33] Cameron McEwen: as far as I'm concerned,

[1:59:35] Cameron McEwen: is we could comment on the quotations that you have from him.

[1:59:42] Cameron McEwen: Because,

[1:59:44] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:59:45] Cameron McEwen: you wouldn't have them if they weren't interesting.

[1:59:47] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:59:47] Cameron McEwen: And probably they can be interrogated in two different ways,

[1:59:52] Cameron McEwen: each one of them.

[1:59:53] Cameron McEwen: And one way is to say,

[1:59:55] Cameron McEwen: what light does this throw on McLuhan?

[1:59:58] Cameron McEwen: And the other way is to say,

[1:59:59] Cameron McEwen: what light does it miss in McLuhan?

[2:00:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:00:06] Bob Dobbs: because there are a lot of feminists.

[2:00:11] Bob Dobbs: who get into media studies and they really dismiss McLuhan.

[2:00:16] Bob Dobbs: They think he's very patriarchal and they don't find anything useful in what he's doing.

[2:00:22] Bob Dobbs: What do you think they miss?

[2:00:29] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:00:29] Cameron McEwen: the big thing they miss is that there have been people in the history of the tradition

[2:00:37] Cameron McEwen: that are about a thousand times smarter than you are and the whole point of education is not to learn how to dismiss uh concern with these people but

[2:00:54] Bob Dobbs: to figure out what they're saying well not much of that going on is there no almost none so far as i know

[2:01:09] Cameron McEwen: I'm certainly no big expert on what's happening in the humanities and the Acadia University.

[2:01:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:01:15] Bob Dobbs: so

[2:01:17] Bob Dobbs: I take McLuhan abstractions in a way.

[2:01:21] Bob Dobbs: So I'll look at a very broad way to look at it.

[2:01:26] Bob Dobbs: Speech became obsolete.

[2:01:30] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:01:31] Bob Dobbs: as McLuhan says,

[2:01:32] Bob Dobbs: the men went into surveillance.

[2:01:35] Bob Dobbs: And the women took over the old institutions.

[2:01:37] Bob Dobbs: It's some quote about 1970.

[2:01:39] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever heard that one?

[2:01:41] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:01:42] Cameron McEwen: I haven't,

[2:01:42] Cameron McEwen: but

[2:01:44] Cameron McEwen: I've heard stuff like it.

[2:01:46] Cameron McEwen: And I think it's essentially true.

[2:01:49] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:01:50] Cameron McEwen: Turns out women are smarter than men,

[2:01:52] Cameron McEwen: more capable than men.

[2:01:55] Cameron McEwen: And what that means in a situation in the cul-de-sac with atomic weapons,

[2:02:01] Cameron McEwen: that's a different kind of question.

[2:02:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:02:06] Bob Dobbs: Women are smarter humans than men.

[2:02:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:02:09] Bob Dobbs: But not smarter Postman,

[2:02:11] Bob Dobbs: maybe.

[2:02:16] Cameron McEwen: I don't know about that.

[2:02:19] Bob Dobbs: I've been researching it.

[2:02:23] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:02:24] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[2:02:24] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[2:02:27] Bob Dobbs: I don't think women,

[2:02:29] Bob Dobbs: at least when there were women,

[2:02:32] Bob Dobbs: I can't say there's women now,

[2:02:36] Bob Dobbs: when there were women,

[2:02:38] Bob Dobbs: they weren't too attracted by Menippean satire.

[2:02:45] Cameron McEwen: Hard to say,

[2:02:46] Cameron McEwen: hard to say,

[2:02:47] Cameron McEwen: because

[2:02:48] Cameron McEwen: I can imagine that there were women that were tremendously attracted to it and were excellent performers of it.

[2:02:58] Cameron McEwen: But,

[2:03:00] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[2:03:00] Cameron McEwen: they weren't being published in a patriarchal world.

[2:03:04] Cameron McEwen: They were,

[2:03:06] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if they were Orwell Innis gatherings to drink tea or something.

[2:03:14] Cameron McEwen: Maybe they were tremendously clever in manipulative satire.

[2:03:18] Cameron McEwen: Or if they were maids cleaning pots in a kitchen,

[2:03:24] Cameron McEwen: there too they could have been tremendously clever.

[2:03:28] Cameron McEwen: But we don't know anything about those people.

[2:03:31] Cameron McEwen: We don't want any hints about those people.

[2:03:35] Bob Dobbs: So if the tech body has no gender,

[2:03:39] Bob Dobbs: that's what we're up against.

[2:03:43] Cameron McEwen: What do you mean by that's what we're up against?

[2:03:47] Bob Dobbs: Something that has no gender.

[2:03:50] Bob Dobbs: It's not concerned about that.

[2:03:52] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:03:52] Bob Dobbs: it's another way of saying it's Postman.

[2:03:54] Bob Dobbs: It's not human,

[2:03:55] Bob Dobbs: the tech body.

[2:03:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:03:59] Bob Dobbs: I noticed,

[2:04:00] Bob Dobbs: well,

[2:04:01] Bob Dobbs: there are Explorations,

[2:04:03] Bob Dobbs: but

[2:04:04] Bob Dobbs: I think women found McLuhan cold,

[2:04:07] Bob Dobbs: just as they found Zappa cold,

[2:04:12] Bob Dobbs: though.

[2:04:13] Bob Dobbs: There were lots of women in the audience,

[2:04:15] Bob Dobbs: supposedly.

[2:04:17] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:04:19] Cameron McEwen: The terms man and woman aren't very enlightening.

[2:04:24] Cameron McEwen: Many different kinds of men,

[2:04:26] Cameron McEwen: many different kinds of women.

[2:04:28] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[2:04:29] Bob Dobbs: there's,

[2:04:29] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[2:04:30] Bob Dobbs: so you've got these kids.

[2:04:31] Bob Dobbs: I saw this article.

[2:04:33] Bob Dobbs: A woman wrote to an Ann Landers kind of columnist that she's had a real problem with her teenage daughter.

[2:04:38] Bob Dobbs: who switches her pronoun or whatever her category every other week yeah that's a pretty interesting phenomenon which i would say is quadrophrenia uh these kids they got no ground and so but

[2:04:55] Bob Dobbs: they're constantly trying to establish an identity for it there's an extreme problem where young people are distracted that's the cul-de-sac for you yeah unconscious but um

[2:05:08] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[2:05:10] Cameron McEwen: I think we should be bringing this conversation to an end because we're almost at 8 o'clock my time,

[2:05:17] Cameron McEwen: which is a half hour later than usual.

[2:05:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:05:21] Cameron McEwen: we started late.

[2:05:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:05:24] Cameron McEwen: for sure.

[2:05:24] Cameron McEwen: But let's go to Aberhart next.

[2:05:28] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:05:28] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[2:05:28] Cameron McEwen: but even we'll do Aberhart next.

[2:05:31] Cameron McEwen: But let's start with the question of quadrophrenia.

[2:05:36] Cameron McEwen: And...

[2:05:38] Cameron McEwen: whether this is a kind of teenage problem that manifests itself in lack of focus or

[2:05:54] Cameron McEwen: claimed focus,

[2:05:57] Cameron McEwen: or whether quadrophrenia is also something potentially very valuable and indicates something about

[2:06:07] Cameron McEwen: how new thinking has to function.

[2:06:10] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:06:10] Cameron McEwen: So let's take up that range next time.

[2:06:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:06:16] Bob Dobbs: I'll make a note to myself about that.

[2:06:20] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:06:21] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to end the recording,

[2:06:23] Bob Dobbs: and then I want to mention something to you,

[2:06:25] Bob Dobbs: so don't hang up,

[2:06:26] Bob Dobbs: okay?

[2:06:27] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[2:06:27] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[2:06:28] Bob Dobbs: All right,

[2:06:28] Bob Dobbs: well,

[2:06:28] Bob Dobbs: thank you very much.

[2:06:29] Bob Dobbs: That was more of a slow,

[2:06:31] Bob Dobbs: to me,

[2:06:31] Bob Dobbs: deliberative kind of performance.

[2:06:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:06:36] Bob Dobbs: Your question?

[2:06:36] Bob Dobbs: I think...

[2:06:37] Bob Dobbs: We're very good.

[2:06:40] Bob Dobbs: You did ask me one question.

[2:06:43] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:06:44] Cameron McEwen: you were a little tired today,

[2:06:45] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[2:06:45] Cameron McEwen: I think.

[2:06:46] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:06:47] Bob Dobbs: I was introspective.

[2:06:49] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[2:06:51] Bob Dobbs: Trying to figure out how to talk about this without reading every line.

[2:06:59] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:07:01] Bob Dobbs: I never get tired.

[2:07:02] Bob Dobbs: I never get tired.

[2:07:03] Bob Dobbs: Good.

[2:07:03] Bob Dobbs: I'll put that on the record.

[2:07:05] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[2:07:06] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[2:07:06] Bob Dobbs: Here we go.

[2:07:07] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to end the session.

[2:07:08] Bob Dobbs: Thank you very much.

[2:07:09] Bob Dobbs: That was good.

[2:07:10] Cameron McEwen: Same here.