[00:01] Bob Dobbs: This is Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs once again for the
[00:05] Bob Dobbs: 35th episode of our survey of my Explorations Trump and the tech body.
[00:14] Bob Dobbs: And if you have a copy of it,
[00:17] Bob Dobbs: this long essay,
[00:19] Bob Dobbs: you'd go to page
[00:22] Bob Dobbs: 29, where after we have a long quote from Jean Baudrillard on the precession of Simulacra.
[00:31] Bob Dobbs: I make a response to a person who interviewed me about the quote.
[00:36] Bob Dobbs: I say,
[00:38] Bob Dobbs: put in McLuhan terms,
[00:39] Bob Dobbs: Jean Baudrillard is talking about visual space,
[00:42] Bob Dobbs: which creates a fragmented,
[00:44] Bob Dobbs: and visual space is in quotes,
[00:46] Bob Dobbs: which creates a fragmented,
[00:47] Bob Dobbs: Pryde separation between words.
[00:49] Bob Dobbs: If someone is talking to you,
[00:50] Bob Dobbs: they're slurring and blabbing away,
[00:52] Bob Dobbs: no punctuation.
[00:54] Bob Dobbs: But when you start punctuating and separating words into grammar based on visual book rules,
[00:59] Bob Dobbs: That is a situation that leads to moral hypothesis and separations between ideas.
[01:04] Bob Dobbs: Down in the fourth paragraph,
[01:06] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[01:08] Bob Dobbs: the whole traditional mode of causality.
[01:10] Bob Dobbs: That's a quote from Baudrillard.
[01:12] Bob Dobbs: So then I say,
[01:13] Bob Dobbs: remember,
[01:13] Bob Dobbs: literacy brings in causality.
[01:15] Bob Dobbs: And I'm speaking orally to somebody who's asked me a question.
[01:21] Bob Dobbs: Remember,
[01:21] Bob Dobbs: literacy brings in causality.
[01:24] Bob Dobbs: And it's being brought into question by the new situation.
[01:27] Bob Dobbs: Not the anti-environment,
[01:28] Bob Dobbs: but later technology.
[01:29] Bob Dobbs: Basically,
[01:30] Bob Dobbs: genetic and computer patterning,
[01:33] Bob Dobbs: colon,
[01:33] Bob Dobbs: medicine,
[01:34] Bob Dobbs: chemistry,
[01:35] Bob Dobbs: analyzing DNA models.
[01:37] Bob Dobbs: That's the new world of post-literate,
[01:39] Bob Dobbs: postmodern simulation.
[01:42] Bob Dobbs: Simulation is Baudrillard term.
[01:44] Bob Dobbs: He's reading scientific journals and using their terms,
[01:47] Bob Dobbs: whereas McLuhan used his own terms to talk about the new,
[01:50] Bob Dobbs: capital N-E-W.
[01:52] Bob Dobbs: Look at the list.
[01:54] Bob Dobbs: Quote,
[01:54] Bob Dobbs: the whole traditional mode.
[01:56] Bob Dobbs: Look at the divisions,
[01:58] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[01:59] Bob Dobbs: the active critical mode,
[02:00] Bob Dobbs: the analytical mode,
[02:02] Bob Dobbs: which actually thinks in terms of causality.
[02:04] Bob Dobbs: There are determining molecules and there's a perspective.
[02:08] Bob Dobbs: It's all visual space as McLuhan defines it.
[02:12] Cameron McEwen: Remember that,
[02:14] Cameron McEwen: as you yourself have often pointed out,
[02:17] Cameron McEwen: it wasn't
[02:19] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan aim to destroy visual space or...
[02:26] Cameron McEwen: destroy books.
[02:29] Cameron McEwen: His intent was to recapture what was valuable in visual space and books,
[02:37] Cameron McEwen: but he thought that that could only be done by coming to terms with all media,
[02:43] Cameron McEwen: including the newest media.
[02:47] Bob Dobbs: That's well said.
[02:49] Bob Dobbs: That's perfect.
[02:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[02:50] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[02:51] Bob Dobbs: he has a statement in the
[02:52] Bob Dobbs: 50s. What role is there today in the TV era?
[02:56] Bob Dobbs: for the book and he felt that Joyce's Finnegans Wake had figured out how to present the book.
[03:03] Bob Dobbs: So he translated Finnegans Wake,
[03:07] Bob Dobbs: applied it he said,
[03:10] Bob Dobbs: and he did it in any media he could engage,
[03:15] Bob Dobbs: but when he did books they were specifically designed a certain way,
[03:19] Bob Dobbs: with comprehensive awareness of the effects of a book as implied in Finnegans Wake.
[03:25] Bob Dobbs: So
[03:26] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan wrote a book totally differently than anybody else,
[03:30] Bob Dobbs: I think.
[03:33] Bob Dobbs: It was a,
[03:35] Bob Dobbs: as he said,
[03:36] Bob Dobbs: it was all about effects.
[03:38] Bob Dobbs: The effects were supreme in his mind.
[03:43] Bob Dobbs: Just the effect of giving you something to look at in a world which was hard to see.
[03:49] Bob Dobbs: In actual ground effects,
[03:51] Bob Dobbs: it's a tactile world.
[03:55] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[03:55] Bob Dobbs: we've got to retrieve visual space or we're not going to have any religion.
[03:59] Bob Dobbs: No more Christianity.
[04:01] Bob Dobbs: No more ethics.
[04:03] Cameron McEwen: No more personal identity.
[04:05] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[04:06] Bob Dobbs: So you have to find a way to stick something in people's faces that they'd be forced to look at and not an imposition,
[04:16] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[04:17] Bob Dobbs: a domineering effect,
[04:19] Bob Dobbs: but to say,
[04:20] Bob Dobbs: look at this situation.
[04:21] Bob Dobbs: You can't read this book.
[04:23] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[04:23] Bob Dobbs: actually,
[04:23] Bob Dobbs: there is.
[04:24] Bob Dobbs: sense to be made in it.
[04:26] Bob Dobbs: If you knew how to circle around behind it,
[04:28] Bob Dobbs: sneak up on the book,
[04:30] Bob Dobbs: look at it backwards,
[04:32] Bob Dobbs: put it in the mirror,
[04:34] Bob Dobbs: then you'd have something to look at.
[04:38] Cameron McEwen: I agree with all that.
[04:39] Cameron McEwen: That's good and well said.
[04:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[04:41] Bob Dobbs: and if you get people in a group,
[04:44] Bob Dobbs: a Fede Finnegans Wake Reading group,
[04:47] Bob Dobbs: With no stupid pretensions about anything about the book,
[04:51] Bob Dobbs: you just look at it and start talking in his own terms.
[04:55] Bob Dobbs: And it's always useful to repeat what McLuhan said.
[05:00] Bob Dobbs: This is not a book.
[05:01] Bob Dobbs: It's a radio program.
[05:03] Bob Dobbs: What?
[05:04] Bob Dobbs: It's a book,
[05:05] Bob Dobbs: sir.
[05:05] Bob Dobbs: It's not a radio.
[05:06] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[05:07] Bob Dobbs: no,
[05:07] Bob Dobbs: it's a radio program.
[05:08] Bob Dobbs: And then you begin with that tension,
[05:10] Bob Dobbs: with that statement.
[05:11] Bob Dobbs: But I find that I've been in many Finney's Wake groups,
[05:15] Bob Dobbs: and people...
[05:16] Bob Dobbs: Once they get a little used to it,
[05:18] Bob Dobbs: they like it.
[05:19] Bob Dobbs: It's playful.
[05:20] Bob Dobbs: They almost become obsessed with it.
[05:22] Bob Dobbs: They look forward to their monthly meetings or every two weeks.
[05:27] Bob Dobbs: They like the,
[05:29] Bob Dobbs: especially in a group,
[05:29] Bob Dobbs: the interaction with it and all that it represents and evokes so much memories and knowledge from people.
[05:40] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[05:40] Bob Dobbs: as people grope around,
[05:41] Bob Dobbs: they start scraping their own knowledge base and coming up with suggestions.
[05:46] Bob Dobbs: and associations.
[05:47] Bob Dobbs: So it's a pretty neat inventory,
[05:51] Bob Dobbs: and I don't know if Joyce meant it that way at all.
[05:57] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[05:57] Bob Dobbs: did he mean,
[05:58] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[05:58] Bob Dobbs: this is going to cause groups to form to read the book together?
[06:04] Bob Dobbs: We don't have any statements by him showing that.
[06:08] Bob Dobbs: But it's a case where the audience takes over the art form.
[06:13] Bob Dobbs: This is what Duchamp said.
[06:14] Bob Dobbs: After 30 years...
[06:15] Bob Dobbs: The artist is not involved in the art form or the art,
[06:18] Bob Dobbs: the fact that was made.
[06:20] Bob Dobbs: The audience put it to their own purposes.
[06:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[06:26] Bob Dobbs: So.
[06:26] Cameron McEwen: That's what McLuhan called putting on.
[06:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[06:32] Bob Dobbs: So
[06:35] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan took the message of the wake as he saw it and applied it.
[06:44] Bob Dobbs: and said,
[06:44] Bob Dobbs: we have a new kind of ecology here.
[06:46] Bob Dobbs: We have a warning,
[06:53] Bob Dobbs: a warning that we need to take seriously to the point,
[06:58] Bob Dobbs: well,
[06:58] Bob Dobbs: this television anti-environment to be turned off for a few months.
[07:04] Bob Dobbs: It's interesting that nobody even saw that's what he was saying.
[07:07] Bob Dobbs: They didn't read his stuff enough to get to that point.
[07:12] Bob Dobbs: They all talk about the
[07:14] Bob Dobbs: Playboy interview,
[07:15] Bob Dobbs: if they even read that,
[07:17] Bob Dobbs: and they don't take his modulating the media seriously.
[07:22] Bob Dobbs: I don't think you take it seriously in certain moods.
[07:28] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[07:28] Cameron McEwen: I take it seriously,
[07:29] Cameron McEwen: but I take it seriously in a different way from what you do.
[07:33] Cameron McEwen: You take it in a kind of literal way,
[07:36] Cameron McEwen: and I say,
[07:37] Cameron McEwen: no,
[07:37] Cameron McEwen: no,
[07:37] Cameron McEwen: it's to be taken in a scientific way.
[07:42] Cameron McEwen: or metaphorical way.
[07:44] Cameron McEwen: But just to comment on people not reading McLuhan,
[07:48] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[07:48] Cameron McEwen: when he became a celebrity in 1965 or so,
[07:56] Cameron McEwen: he had written an absolute ton of stuff,
[08:00] Cameron McEwen: mostly in essay form.
[08:03] Cameron McEwen: And none of that was read by,
[08:07] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[08:08] Cameron McEwen: more than,
[08:09] Cameron McEwen: let's say,
[08:09] Cameron McEwen: 100 people in the world.
[08:11] Cameron McEwen: had read much of that.
[08:14] Cameron McEwen: And that was mostly professors of English or professors of education or something like this.
[08:22] Cameron McEwen: So there's a great mass of stuff that
[08:25] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had written between 1935 and 1965,
[08:32] Cameron McEwen: that's three decades,
[08:34] Cameron McEwen: which was then and remains today virtually unknown.
[08:41] Bob Dobbs: And he actually revitalized how to look at the history Voices of Literature.
[08:46] Bob Dobbs: He made literature interesting.
[08:48] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[08:48] Bob Dobbs: the way he would discuss the ground to
[08:51] Bob Dobbs: William Blake or the ground to Charles Dickens or to
[08:55] Bob Dobbs: Ben Johnson.
[08:56] Bob Dobbs: He commented on everything,
[08:58] Bob Dobbs: all the main dots of the canon.
[09:04] Bob Dobbs: He eventually got it all talked about.
[09:07] Bob Dobbs: And it made,
[09:09] Bob Dobbs: for me,
[09:09] Bob Dobbs: it was...
[09:11] Bob Dobbs: a new way to revitalize my interest in history Voices of Literature.
[09:17] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[09:17] Cameron McEwen: right.
[09:18] Cameron McEwen: And unfortunately it's been very little taken up.
[09:24] Cameron McEwen: The history Voices of Literature nowadays is mostly studied as something that old stupid people were saying that
[09:39] Cameron McEwen: we understand their issues much better than they did.
[09:48] Cameron McEwen: It's absolutely ridiculous.
[09:51] Cameron McEwen: It's a sort of hyper
[09:54] Cameron McEwen: Gutenbergian consumer.
[10:04] Cameron McEwen: perspective on literature where the reader is the be and end all,
[10:13] Cameron McEwen: instead of the opposite way where literature should cause the reader to be put into question.
[10:20] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[10:20] Bob Dobbs: Now here's a statement.
[10:22] Bob Dobbs: He says that sociology and psychology were the last gasp of the Gutenberg Galaxy.
[10:31] Bob Dobbs: innovations in books.
[10:34] Bob Dobbs: And so what you have after they are normal in the college curriculum,
[10:42] Bob Dobbs: people generally took sociology and psychology and applied it to the history Voices of Literature.
[10:47] Bob Dobbs: They took the last genre,
[10:49] Bob Dobbs: which then evaporated into self-help books by the 70s.
[10:54] Bob Dobbs: But anyway,
[10:55] Bob Dobbs: sociology and psychology is what people thought literature was for.
[10:59] Bob Dobbs: to change engineer society sociologically and to help people's psychology,
[11:06] Bob Dobbs: as it was perceived to be inadequate,
[11:08] Bob Dobbs: like you just said.
[11:09] Bob Dobbs: The older people,
[11:10] Bob Dobbs: they didn't understand society,
[11:11] Bob Dobbs: they didn't understand sociology,
[11:13] Bob Dobbs: they didn't understand psychology.
[11:15] Bob Dobbs: So at the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy,
[11:17] Bob Dobbs: the final innovations,
[11:19] Bob Dobbs: sociology,
[11:20] Bob Dobbs: psychology,
[11:20] Bob Dobbs: and maybe even anthropology,
[11:22] Bob Dobbs: was reflected back on the history Voices of Literature.
[11:26] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[11:27] Bob Dobbs: It's the latest medium,
[11:28] Bob Dobbs: the mirror.
[11:30] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.
[11:30] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[11:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[11:32] Cameron McEwen: well,
[11:33] Cameron McEwen: they were reflected back,
[11:34] Cameron McEwen: but they were reflected back poorly.
[11:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[11:37] Cameron McEwen: So for McLuhan,
[11:40] Cameron McEwen: sociology,
[11:41] Cameron McEwen: psychology,
[11:41] Cameron McEwen: and especially anthropology introduce questions about human beings that we need to keep in mind when we're reading literature.
[11:54] Cameron McEwen: because the writers over...
[11:59] Cameron McEwen: the last 2,000 or 2,500 years weren't stupid.
[12:04] Cameron McEwen: They were very intelligent people who,
[12:08] Cameron McEwen: if they're approached questionably,
[12:13] Cameron McEwen: can inform us about great issues.
[12:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[12:16] Bob Dobbs: like to project that they were racist or class biased.
[12:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[12:22] Cameron McEwen: sexist.
[12:23] Bob Dobbs: Sexist.
[12:25] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[12:26] Bob Dobbs: sex.
[12:27] Bob Dobbs: as an issue didn't even happen until the printing press,
[12:30] Bob Dobbs: according to McLuhan.
[12:30] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[12:32] Bob Dobbs: To be separated out of life.
[12:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[12:36] Cameron McEwen: because of tactility being forgotten.
[12:39] Bob Dobbs: Tactility what?
[12:42] Cameron McEwen: The forgetting of tactility.
[12:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[12:44] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[12:46] Bob Dobbs: And,
[12:48] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[12:48] Bob Dobbs: I heard people saying in the collapse of Afghanistan last week,
[12:55] Bob Dobbs: somebody was mocking.
[12:57] Bob Dobbs: One of these talking heads,
[12:58] Bob Dobbs: the silly people,
[12:59] Bob Dobbs: the NGO people who went over there and told Afghani women that they've got to take gender studies and find out they're victims of patriarchy or something.
[13:11] Bob Dobbs: And this person was saying they didn't see the patriarchy as a problem because they didn't live with those issues.
[13:19] Bob Dobbs: They had to survive.
[13:20] Bob Dobbs: They lived in what you'd probably say a village situation where those divisions weren't important.
[13:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[13:30] Cameron McEwen: So the people that were doing that kind of educating,
[13:33] Cameron McEwen: you could say,
[13:35] Cameron McEwen: got millions or billions of dollars out of the government.
[13:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[13:39] Cameron McEwen: And that was supposedly for
[13:43] Cameron McEwen: Afghani reconstruction.
[13:45] Cameron McEwen: But really,
[13:46] Cameron McEwen: it just was a reconstruction of people's bank accounts who were opening their lips about all this sort of stuff.
[13:56] Cameron McEwen: And by the way,
[13:57] Cameron McEwen: the...
[13:58] Cameron McEwen: It turns out that this guy that we were talking about last week,
[14:03] Cameron McEwen: Bulwer-Lytton,
[14:06] Cameron McEwen: his nephew,
[14:09] Cameron McEwen: I believe it was,
[14:10] Cameron McEwen: or it might even have been his son,
[14:13] Cameron McEwen: was the viceroy of India and was the guy that declared war on Afghanistan.
[14:24] Cameron McEwen: in what was called the Second
[14:26] Cameron McEwen: English-Afghani War.
[14:29] Cameron McEwen: And the British invaded
[14:32] Cameron McEwen: Afghanistan under this guy's command and destroyed that Afghani society,
[14:42] Cameron McEwen: imposed their own supreme leader and sort of left a destroyed society in their wake.
[14:55] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember the movie?
[14:59] Bob Dobbs: The two men who would be kings or something,
[15:02] Bob Dobbs: Shaun Connery and some of the guys,
[15:05] Bob Dobbs: it's about that period.
[15:06] Bob Dobbs: They go into Afghanistan in the 19th century,
[15:09] Bob Dobbs: and they try to,
[15:10] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[15:11] Bob Dobbs: become something in there,
[15:13] Bob Dobbs: right,
[15:13] Bob Dobbs: baby?
[15:13] Bob Dobbs: I'm
[15:14] Bob Dobbs: Afghani. Do you know that movie?
[15:17] Cameron McEwen: I know the title,
[15:18] Cameron McEwen: and I can see some sort of ad for Shaun Connery,
[15:22] Cameron McEwen: but I never saw the movie,
[15:23] Cameron McEwen: no.
[15:24] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[15:24] Bob Dobbs: but I think it was based on a novel or a book.
[15:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[15:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[15:28] Cameron McEwen: I think you're right.
[15:28] Bob Dobbs: But isn't that about that period?
[15:31] Bob Dobbs: Could be.
[15:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[15:33] Cameron McEwen: Could be.
[15:33] Cameron McEwen: I don't know.
[15:35] Cameron McEwen: I just know that what the Americans have done for 20 years is basically a replay of what the
[15:43] Cameron McEwen: British did over and over again in the
[15:47] Cameron McEwen: 19th century.
[15:50] Bob Dobbs: Which,
[15:51] Bob Dobbs: in a way,
[15:51] Bob Dobbs: is all that a visually biased culture can do,
[15:54] Bob Dobbs: or a visually kinetic culture.
[15:57] Bob Dobbs: Spread their cash system horizontally across space,
[16:03] Bob Dobbs: become a space-bound society or empire.
[16:08] Bob Dobbs: They got to,
[16:11] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said the Chinese will have to do that,
[16:13] Bob Dobbs: which they are now doing.
[16:15] Bob Dobbs: They'll have to become a
[16:17] Bob Dobbs: 19th century empire.
[16:18] Bob Dobbs: It's all you can do with industrial management.
[16:24] Bob Dobbs: You know what I'm saying there?
[16:25] Bob Dobbs: You getting it?
[16:29] Cameron McEwen: I understand the words that you're using,
[16:32] Cameron McEwen: but it seems to me that
[16:36] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan saw that that kind of industrial management was a disaster.
[16:43] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[16:43] Bob Dobbs: that's what I'm saying.
[16:45] Bob Dobbs: But it's a law.
[16:46] Bob Dobbs: A society who builds themselves up industrially goes into that empire mode automatically at some point.
[16:55] Bob Dobbs: They only know how to spread out.
[16:57] Bob Dobbs: horizontally,
[16:58] Bob Dobbs: visually,
[16:59] Bob Dobbs: with a bureaucracy.
[17:02] Bob Dobbs: The empire dynamic is a product of visual space.
[17:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[17:06] Cameron McEwen: no,
[17:06] Cameron McEwen: I agree with that.
[17:07] Cameron McEwen: I agree with that.
[17:09] Cameron McEwen: What I'm not sure about is if he saw it as inevitable,
[17:14] Cameron McEwen: and especially I'm not sure that he saw that as what might be called the Asian model.
[17:24] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[17:24] Bob Dobbs: he did say that.
[17:25] Bob Dobbs: He did say that the Chinese would...
[17:28] Bob Dobbs: They're just hankering to have a 19th century.
[17:31] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[17:31] Cameron McEwen: he definitely said that.
[17:33] Cameron McEwen: He definitely said that
[17:36] Cameron McEwen: Asians were kind of an advanced civilization that wanted to be an underdeveloped civilization.
[17:46] Cameron McEwen: They wanted to go backwards.
[17:48] Cameron McEwen: They wanted to go back to the book.
[17:52] Cameron McEwen: They wanted to get rid of their scripts.
[17:56] Cameron McEwen: and go to the Latin alphabet and all this sort of stuff.
[18:01] Cameron McEwen: So,
[18:02] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[18:02] Cameron McEwen: that's certainly true.
[18:04] Cameron McEwen: While the West is orientalizing,
[18:07] Cameron McEwen: the Orient is westernizing.
[18:10] Bob Dobbs: So
[18:11] Cameron McEwen: I agree that he said all that sort of stuff,
[18:13] Cameron McEwen: but did he think that that was sort of inevitable and that was how the Chinese would organize themselves?
[18:25] Cameron McEwen: I'm not so sure about that.
[18:27] Cameron McEwen: He did.
[18:28] Bob Dobbs: He said in 20 years we'll see if he was right.
[18:32] Bob Dobbs: He said that.
[18:34] Bob Dobbs: He knew what China was going to do.
[18:36] Bob Dobbs: And China did do it.
[18:38] Bob Dobbs: They're trying to do it now.
[18:39] Bob Dobbs: They're trying to be a global British empire.
[18:45] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[18:49] Cameron McEwen: you know that the
[18:52] Cameron McEwen: Chinese have...
[18:54] Cameron McEwen: a very,
[18:55] Cameron McEwen: very old civilization,
[18:57] Cameron McEwen: and they have maintained it by allowing different kinds of people to be different kinds of people.
[19:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[19:07] Cameron McEwen: So in
[19:08] Cameron McEwen: China, it's not the case that everybody speaks the same language and understands the same language.
[19:17] Cameron McEwen: So it was possible for the
[19:20] Cameron McEwen: Chinese to export their culture.
[19:23] Cameron McEwen: Vietnam to Korea and to Japan without imposing the Chinese language.
[19:33] Cameron McEwen: All of those cultures formerly,
[19:37] Cameron McEwen: and Japan still,
[19:39] Cameron McEwen: used the
[19:41] Cameron McEwen: Chinese characters to write their language.
[19:44] Cameron McEwen: But they were all different languages.
[19:47] Cameron McEwen: So that idea of organization is very interesting.
[19:51] Cameron McEwen: It's a type of organization that allows internal difference.
[19:57] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[19:57] Bob Dobbs: but they become panicky under the extension of the tactile global theater.
[20:02] Bob Dobbs: Every culture yearns to be its opposite.
[20:06] Bob Dobbs: So east goes west,
[20:08] Bob Dobbs: west goes east.
[20:09] Bob Dobbs: Men want to be women.
[20:10] Bob Dobbs: Women want to be men.
[20:11] Bob Dobbs: Children want to be adults.
[20:12] Bob Dobbs: Adults want to be children.
[20:13] Bob Dobbs: You can apply it across the board.
[20:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[20:18] Cameron McEwen: I agree that that's the,
[20:22] Cameron McEwen: what could you say,
[20:23] Cameron McEwen: that's the kinetics.
[20:25] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[20:26] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan saw,
[20:27] Cameron McEwen: but I don't think he saw inevitability to that.
[20:31] Cameron McEwen: Inevitability is a kind of mechanism.
[20:34] Cameron McEwen: It's a kind of Gutenbergian insight,
[20:38] Cameron McEwen: isn't it?
[20:39] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[20:39] Bob Dobbs: and the laws of media have that aspect,
[20:44] Bob Dobbs: maybe not only that aspect,
[20:45] Bob Dobbs: but they have that aspect of it's a determinism that people create because they don't want to see what's going on.
[20:54] Bob Dobbs: A law of the determinism.
[20:59] Cameron McEwen: I guess,
[20:59] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[21:00] Cameron McEwen: I would agree that people and nations can impose a certain determinism on themselves,
[21:10] Cameron McEwen: or they can accept the determination from other people.
[21:15] Cameron McEwen: But none of this is necessary.
[21:17] Bob Dobbs: No,
[21:17] Bob Dobbs: I'm not saying it's necessary,
[21:18] Bob Dobbs: but it's inevitable if you don't know what,
[21:20] Bob Dobbs: if you haven't applied Joyce.
[21:23] Bob Dobbs: You haven't mastered Finnegans Wake,
[21:27] Bob Dobbs: which is not...
[21:28] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[21:29] Cameron McEwen: okay,
[21:30] Cameron McEwen: or the rewriting of
[21:33] Cameron McEwen: Finnegans Wake.
[21:33] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[21:35] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[21:35] Bob Dobbs: so I looked up The Man Who Would Be King,
[21:37] Bob Dobbs: a film,
[21:38] Bob Dobbs: 1975,
[21:39] Bob Dobbs: based on a Rudyard Kipling novella of the same name.
[21:43] Bob Dobbs: And it says the film follows two rogue ex-soldiers,
[21:47] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[21:47] Bob Dobbs: normal
[21:48] Bob Dobbs: Western literate billiard balls.
[21:53] Bob Dobbs: Former non-commissioned officers in the British Army who set off from late 19th century British India in search of adventure.
[22:00] Bob Dobbs: Can you see kinetic movement?
[22:02] Bob Dobbs: And end up in faraway
[22:04] Bob Dobbs: Kafiristan where one is taken for a god and made their king.
[22:13] Bob Dobbs: What is this?
[22:15] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[22:15] Bob Dobbs: the plot.
[22:16] Bob Dobbs: In 1885 in India.
[22:19] Bob Dobbs: While working late at night in his newspaper office,
[22:21] Bob Dobbs: the journalist Rudyard
[22:22] Bob Dobbs: Kipling is approached by a ragged,
[22:24] Bob Dobbs: seemingly crazed derelict who reveals himself to be P.G.
[22:28] Bob Dobbs: Carnahan,
[22:29] Bob Dobbs: an old acquaintance.
[22:30] Bob Dobbs: Carnahan tells Kipling the story of how he and his comrade-in-arms,
[22:34] Bob Dobbs: Danny Dravot,
[22:35] Bob Dobbs: sergeants of the British Army who had become adventurers,
[22:38] Bob Dobbs: traveled far beyond India into the remote land of Kafiristan.
[22:42] Bob Dobbs: Three years earlier,
[22:44] Bob Dobbs: Dravot and Carnahan had met Kipling under less than auspicious circumstances.
[22:48] Bob Dobbs: suspicious circumstances.
[22:50] Bob Dobbs: After stealing Kipling's pocket watch,
[22:52] Bob Dobbs: Carnahan found a Masonic dag on the chain,
[22:55] Bob Dobbs: and realizing he had robbed a fellow Freemason,
[22:58] Bob Dobbs: felt he had to return it.
[22:59] Bob Dobbs: At the time,
[23:00] Bob Dobbs: he and Drabbit were working on a plot to blackmail a local rajah,
[23:04] Bob Dobbs: which Kipling foiled by getting the British District Commissioner to intervene.
[23:08] Bob Dobbs: In a comic relief turn,
[23:09] Bob Dobbs: Carnahan obliquely blackmails the Commissioner in order to avoid deportation.
[23:16] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[23:16] Bob Dobbs: they're saying this is the plot,
[23:17] Bob Dobbs: but it's not.
[23:18] Bob Dobbs: It sounds like the actual events that happened.
[23:24] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[23:24] Cameron McEwen: except that the actual events were imposed through war,
[23:29] Cameron McEwen: through extreme violence.
[23:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[23:33] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[23:33] Bob Dobbs: it says,
[23:34] Bob Dobbs: frustrated at the lack of opportunities for lucrative criminal mischief and in India becoming more civilized and regulated,
[23:41] Bob Dobbs: partly through their own hard efforts as soldiers.
[23:45] Bob Dobbs: And with little to look forward to in the United Kingdom,
[23:47] Bob Dobbs: except dreary,
[23:47] Bob Dobbs: poorly paid jobs,
[23:49] Bob Dobbs: the two turn up at Kipling's office with an audacious plan.
[23:53] Bob Dobbs: Forsaking India,
[23:54] Bob Dobbs: they will head with 20 rifles and ammunition to Kafiristan,
[23:57] Bob Dobbs: a country virtually unknown to Europeans since its conquest by Alexander the Great.
[24:02] Bob Dobbs: There they will offer their services to a ruler and then help him to conquer his neighbors,
[24:06] Bob Dobbs: but proceed to overthrow him and loot the country.
[24:09] Bob Dobbs: Kipling,
[24:10] Bob Dobbs: at first trying to dissuade them,
[24:12] Bob Dobbs: Gives Dravo his Masonic tag as a token of brotherhood.
[24:16] Bob Dobbs: Is this the novel?
[24:18] Bob Dobbs: I don't understand.
[24:18] Bob Dobbs: After signing a contract pledging mutual loyalty and forswearing women and drink,
[24:23] Bob Dobbs: the two set off on an epic overland journey north beyond the Khyber Pass.
[24:28] Bob Dobbs: The Khyber Pass.
[24:29] Bob Dobbs: Over the next few weeks,
[24:30] Bob Dobbs: they travel through Afghanistan,
[24:31] Bob Dobbs: fighting off bandits,
[24:32] Bob Dobbs: blizzards,
[24:33] Bob Dobbs: and avalanches as they make their way into the unknown land of Kafiristan.
[24:37] Bob Dobbs: They chance upon a Gurkha soldier,
[24:39] Bob Dobbs: Billy Fish.
[24:40] Bob Dobbs: The sole survivor of a years past British expedition.
[24:43] Bob Dobbs: Speaking English as well as the local language,
[24:45] Bob Dobbs: Billy smooths their way as they begin their rise.
[24:48] Bob Dobbs: First offering their services to the chief of a much raided village.
[24:52] Bob Dobbs: When a force has been trained in modern weapons and tactics,
[24:54] Bob Dobbs: they've beat it out against some hated neighbors.
[24:56] Bob Dobbs: During the battle,
[24:58] Bob Dobbs: an arrow pierces Dravot's jacket,
[25:00] Bob Dobbs: but he is unharmed.
[25:03] Bob Dobbs: Both sides take him to be a god,
[25:05] Bob Dobbs: though in fact the arrowhead was stopped by his leather bandolier.
[25:10] Bob Dobbs: So it goes on and they rise up.
[25:13] Bob Dobbs: So it's a comedy,
[25:16] Bob Dobbs: but it's a metaphor for what the West does to the East in the 19th century.
[25:26] Bob Dobbs: Now the East is doing it back to us.
[25:30] Cameron McEwen: What if China does it?
[25:31] Bob Dobbs: stole the election and put in Biden and got him to collapse Afghanistan.
[25:37] Bob Dobbs: Boy,
[25:37] Bob Dobbs: that'd be an amazing reversal,
[25:39] Bob Dobbs: right?
[25:42] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[25:42] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that the Chinese needed to cause anything in Afghanistan.
[25:49] Bob Dobbs: Say it again.
[25:52] Cameron McEwen: I don't think the Chinese needed to do much in Afghanistan to bring about the debacle.
[25:57] Cameron McEwen: A debacle was...
[26:00] Cameron McEwen: built into the whole American idea of what they were going to do.
[26:03] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[26:05] Bob Dobbs: And see,
[26:07] Bob Dobbs: why do Americans repeat these mistakes,
[26:10] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[26:11] Bob Dobbs: the last
[26:12] Bob Dobbs: 70 years?
[26:15] Bob Dobbs: Because that's the satire of McLuhan.
[26:19] Bob Dobbs: You are a visually biased people with a kinetic aspect thrown in,
[26:24] Bob Dobbs: and you will act out your destiny,
[26:26] Bob Dobbs: your limitation,
[26:27] Bob Dobbs: your medium.
[26:29] Bob Dobbs: your effect regardless as long as you remain within a relatively simple visual kinetic culture or what they call a military industrial complex but on top of that McLuhan said there's a there's an opening here with the electronic age coming in that maybe all these modalities
[26:51] Bob Dobbs: will or laws will be limited faster people will see their mistakes faster
[26:57] Bob Dobbs: And a kind of collective awakening happens.
[27:00] Bob Dobbs: And you do see awakening,
[27:03] Bob Dobbs: or people claiming that people are waking up,
[27:06] Bob Dobbs: all over the place today in different cultures,
[27:09] Bob Dobbs: but nobody knows where to go from there.
[27:11] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[27:11] Bob Dobbs: we woke up,
[27:12] Bob Dobbs: now what?
[27:13] Bob Dobbs: And that's where they don't want to really look at this kind of super-angelic effect that has happened to everybody.
[27:20] Bob Dobbs: They're off the planet,
[27:24] Bob Dobbs: gone somewhere.
[27:25] Bob Dobbs: What is it?
[27:26] Bob Dobbs: Gone fishing.
[27:29] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[27:31] Cameron McEwen: I agree that people are baffled,
[27:35] Cameron McEwen: to use a frequent McLuhan word,
[27:41] Cameron McEwen: whether they should be looking for an answer off the planet.
[27:45] Cameron McEwen: That's another whole question.
[27:47] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[27:47] Bob Dobbs: they are the moon dreams,
[27:49] Bob Dobbs: the Star Trek stuff,
[27:50] Bob Dobbs: but off the planet means discarnate,
[27:53] Bob Dobbs: lost in tactile,
[27:55] Bob Dobbs: virtual.
[27:56] Bob Dobbs: spaces.
[27:57] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[27:58] Bob Dobbs: taking what I said,
[27:59] Bob Dobbs: let's see if it fits in what I'm saying here.
[28:02] Bob Dobbs: So I go,
[28:04] Bob Dobbs: it's all visual space as McLuhan defined it.
[28:06] Bob Dobbs: Then they go,
[28:07] Bob Dobbs: however,
[28:07] Bob Dobbs: in the new situation,
[28:09] Bob Dobbs: the distinctions between the scientific print-created categories,
[28:13] Bob Dobbs: cause and effect,
[28:14] Bob Dobbs: active and passive,
[28:15] Bob Dobbs: subject and object,
[28:16] Bob Dobbs: ends and means,
[28:17] Bob Dobbs: all these dialectics.
[28:19] Bob Dobbs: And then it is in this mode,
[28:22] Bob Dobbs: and now I'm quoting Baudrillard,
[28:23] Bob Dobbs: it is in this mode that it could be said,
[28:26] Bob Dobbs: In the old way of visually biased people,
[28:29] Bob Dobbs: TV watches us,
[28:30] Bob Dobbs: TV alienates us,
[28:31] Bob Dobbs: TV manipulates us,
[28:32] Bob Dobbs: TV informs us,
[28:34] Bob Dobbs: and that leads to the paranoia of the electronic man,
[28:37] Bob Dobbs: because they're putting a literate,
[28:39] Bob Dobbs: fragmented view on a different kind of process that's going on that people don't see.
[28:45] Bob Dobbs: And then I quote Baudrillard,
[28:46] Bob Dobbs: throughout all this,
[28:48] Bob Dobbs: one is dependent on the analytical or visual space conception.
[28:52] Bob Dobbs: I add that,
[28:53] Bob Dobbs: the visual space conception.
[28:54] Bob Dobbs: Then Baudrillard says,
[28:56] Bob Dobbs: whose vanishing point is the horizon between reality and meaning,
[29:00] Bob Dobbs: unquote.
[29:02] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,
[29:02] Bob Dobbs: the vanishing point was created by literacy,
[29:04] Bob Dobbs: that's perspective,
[29:05] Bob Dobbs: the artistic renaissance in Florence.
[29:08] Bob Dobbs: And then I quote Baudrillard,
[29:09] Bob Dobbs: the horizon between reality and meaning,
[29:11] Bob Dobbs: literate people ask,
[29:13] Bob Dobbs: well,
[29:13] Bob Dobbs: what's real and what's meaningful,
[29:15] Bob Dobbs: unquote.
[29:16] Bob Dobbs: You've got these dialectics,
[29:17] Bob Dobbs: these splits,
[29:18] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard inventorying the splits.
[29:21] Bob Dobbs: And he's going to say,
[29:22] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[29:22] Bob Dobbs: None of this applies to where we are today,
[29:24] Bob Dobbs: which is what I just said,
[29:26] Bob Dobbs: and that's totally McLuhan.
[29:28] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[29:29] Bob Dobbs: I jumped ahead.
[29:31] Bob Dobbs: And that's totally McLuhan.
[29:32] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is saying the same thing,
[29:34] Bob Dobbs: but McLuhan is talking in the 50s and
[29:36] Bob Dobbs: 60s, like the very first quote I offered.
[29:38] Bob Dobbs: In Baudrillard,
[29:39] Bob Dobbs: a younger academic in Paris is reading science,
[29:42] Bob Dobbs: and he's looking at the technology of genetic engineering on its own terms and seeing how it's different.
[29:47] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[29:47] Bob Dobbs: back to the top,
[29:49] Bob Dobbs: the famous book on the spectacle by Guy.
[29:51] Bob Dobbs: by Guy Debord,
[29:52] Bob Dobbs: one of the situationists,
[29:53] Bob Dobbs: whose newsletter in the late 60s Baudrillard had edited for the SubGenius guys running around doing the May 68 rebellion and other artistic performance art.
[30:03] Bob Dobbs: They were called situationists.
[30:05] Bob Dobbs: That whole thing that they were looking at and objecting to...
[30:08] Bob Dobbs: what they were looking at was society as a movie or a television spectacle was not relevant to the late
[30:14] Bob Dobbs: 70s when the quotation above by Baudrillard is being written Guy Debord is obsolete then i go into the first reality tv show uh i don't know if i want to go into that uh and then i say yeah we've talked about that that's the louds again yeah we don't need to do that so then then i say after talking with the louds Baudrillard is pointing out that if you look at a medium
[30:37] Bob Dobbs: And he's talking about a medium as a figure,
[30:40] Bob Dobbs: the way McLuhan defined medium later.
[30:43] Bob Dobbs: Medium was anti-environment that already was there.
[30:46] Bob Dobbs: TV is a new technology.
[30:49] Bob Dobbs: It's becoming a medium,
[30:51] Bob Dobbs: but it is not the medium that tells you what's going on.
[30:55] Bob Dobbs: The medium that tells you what's going on is the past,
[30:58] Bob Dobbs: the disruption to the past.
[31:00] Bob Dobbs: So
[31:01] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard has,
[31:03] Bob Dobbs: he doesn't have an up-to-date understanding of medium,
[31:05] Bob Dobbs: because he has a...
[31:06] Bob Dobbs: a 50s interpretation of McLuhan medium,
[31:10] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan
[31:10] Bob Dobbs: 50s. Baudrillard is pointing out that if you look at a medium and you read McLuhan,
[31:14] Bob Dobbs: you think this medium,
[31:15] Bob Dobbs: TV,
[31:15] Bob Dobbs: is watching you.
[31:16] Bob Dobbs: That's the way it was when you were literate in the 50s and 60s,
[31:19] Bob Dobbs: but not in the 70s.
[31:20] Bob Dobbs: TV is not watching you.
[31:22] Bob Dobbs: It's not even a separate medium.
[31:24] Bob Dobbs: It's integrated into the flow of the global theater,
[31:26] Bob Dobbs: where you can't tell how it's separate from another medium.
[31:30] Bob Dobbs: It's the beginning of the electronic cable TV reality.
[31:34] Bob Dobbs: I have electronic cable TV in quotes,
[31:36] Bob Dobbs: I guess
[31:37] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard says that.
[31:39] Bob Dobbs: You have,
[31:39] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[31:40] Bob Dobbs: the merging of the medium and the message,
[31:42] Bob Dobbs: unquote.
[31:43] Bob Dobbs: And Baudrillard says that's McLuhan and Wright,
[31:46] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[31:47] Bob Dobbs: it is the first great formula of this new age.
[31:50] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan changes that formula or develops it or spirals it into other nuances.
[31:58] Cameron McEwen: So let me just say that we're...
[32:03] Cameron McEwen: What you're doing here is you're revisiting the Baudrillard citation from earlier.
[32:08] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[32:09] Cameron McEwen: And we came to the agreed conclusion that what Baudrillard was doing over and over and over again was defining sort of the cul-de-sac in which the modern world has eventuated.
[32:25] Cameron McEwen: So then,
[32:26] Cameron McEwen: really,
[32:27] Cameron McEwen: the only big question for...
[32:29] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,
[32:30] Cameron McEwen: or the only big question for us regarding whether or not it makes sense to read McLuhan,
[32:36] Cameron McEwen: is does he have something to say in the situation of that cul-de-sac?
[32:45] Cameron McEwen: And that's a little bit different.
[32:46] Bob Dobbs: That Baudrillard is not seeing?
[32:48] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[32:48] Cameron McEwen: Baudrillard never,
[32:50] Cameron McEwen: or he sees it in the sense only of a sort of a imperative question.
[32:59] Cameron McEwen: Something that he's trying to define,
[33:02] Cameron McEwen: it's like a vague fog that envelops him and he's trying to claw away at that fog.
[33:10] Cameron McEwen: But he doesn't know how to get a handle on it because that would be exactly going back into what he says the fog has dispensed with.
[33:22] Cameron McEwen: And so if he can't get a handle in that sense,
[33:26] Cameron McEwen: how can he get a handle?
[33:28] Cameron McEwen: And Baudrillard does know the answer to that.
[33:30] Cameron McEwen: So then the question is,
[33:31] Cameron McEwen: does McLuhan know an answer to that?
[33:34] Cameron McEwen: And that's sort of what we're developing here in terms of your book.
[33:38] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[33:39] Bob Dobbs: And
[33:41] Bob Dobbs: I would say that Baudrillard doesn't get out of his cultural bias,
[33:47] Bob Dobbs: ideological bias as a former Marxist,
[33:50] Bob Dobbs: French bias,
[33:52] Bob Dobbs: and other figures.
[33:53] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't get to analyzing him.
[33:55] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't understand McLuhan is telling you what you have to become aware of to develop your self-awareness beyond the new agey cult versions of developing self-awareness.
[34:10] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[34:11] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[34:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[34:13] Bob Dobbs: And that's as McLuhan was developing new psychology.
[34:17] Bob Dobbs: And it was making the sociological anti-environment of yourself,
[34:21] Bob Dobbs: of your psyche.
[34:23] Bob Dobbs: And so...
[34:25] Bob Dobbs: Since no one was doing that except McLuhan,
[34:27] Bob Dobbs: he had the edge on everybody,
[34:30] Bob Dobbs: though they didn't know it.
[34:32] Bob Dobbs: If you read McLuhan in the
[34:34] Bob Dobbs: 70s or 80s,
[34:35] Bob Dobbs: he'd be boring compared to Baudrillard's writing,
[34:38] Bob Dobbs: because the Generation X,
[34:41] Bob Dobbs: they'd have naturally more complex conceptual lives,
[34:44] Bob Dobbs: because it is more complex,
[34:46] Bob Dobbs: more media anti-environment,
[34:47] Bob Dobbs: and what I would say,
[34:48] Bob Dobbs: more bodies.
[34:49] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan would be too simple for them.
[34:51] Bob Dobbs: But
[34:51] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard,
[34:52] Bob Dobbs: Derrida,
[34:52] Bob Dobbs: and these complicated...
[34:56] Bob Dobbs: double talk people would be more interesting and I say that's what academia did.
[35:04] Bob Dobbs: They knew that they could get these kids involved in this distortion of McLuhan.
[35:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[35:13] Bob Dobbs: And that was something McLuhan could have even noticed and predicted if he lived.
[35:20] Bob Dobbs: Would have been very interesting what he would have said by the
[35:24] Bob Dobbs: 90s. If he was still trying to be in anti-environment,
[35:27] Bob Dobbs: how could he be in anti-environment to a world that he predicted and for many people fulfilled?
[35:33] Bob Dobbs: How would he be in anti-environment to himself?
[35:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[35:38] Cameron McEwen: good question.
[35:39] Cameron McEwen: Very good question.
[35:41] Bob Dobbs: He could...
[35:44] Cameron McEwen: That's more or less what we have to figure out today,
[35:46] Cameron McEwen: if there is a relevance to McLuhan for us now.
[35:52] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[35:52] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[35:52] Bob Dobbs: there's an interview in the Who Was or Who Is Marshall McLuhan book with a Venezuelan professor,
[36:00] Bob Dobbs: where he actually talks about why being a Catholic is more important than any other religion.
[36:08] Bob Dobbs: And he makes up this idea,
[36:10] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if Christians...
[36:11] Bob Dobbs: would even know this,
[36:13] Bob Dobbs: that the Catholic religion is all about the body.
[36:17] Bob Dobbs: Salvation is in the body,
[36:18] Bob Dobbs: sort of.
[36:19] Bob Dobbs: But,
[36:19] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[36:19] Bob Dobbs: the cliche is,
[36:20] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[36:20] Bob Dobbs: Catholics wait to die and go to heaven.
[36:23] Bob Dobbs: It's not hardly the body.
[36:24] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,
[36:25] Bob Dobbs: he's saying because it's a body structure,
[36:30] Bob Dobbs: then it's the appropriate anti-environment to the discarnate state.
[36:35] Bob Dobbs: This isn't an interview that we don't see until long after he's died.
[36:39] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[36:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[36:41] Bob Dobbs: We don't know that he's explained himself in a way that many people wanted him to explain his Catholicism.
[36:47] Bob Dobbs: It was a mystery for people because of the image they projected on him.
[36:52] Bob Dobbs: They thought he was some hip beatnik professor or something.
[36:56] Bob Dobbs: How could that guy be a Catholic?
[36:58] Bob Dobbs: But to actually have him explain and actually contradict what he said back in the
[37:04] Bob Dobbs: 50s that you can't become a Catholic conceptually or based on doctrine.
[37:09] Bob Dobbs: You come in on your knees and all that stuff,
[37:12] Bob Dobbs: perceptually.
[37:13] Bob Dobbs: But he actually said there's a conceptual reasoning to why I am a Catholic.
[37:20] Bob Dobbs: It's the appropriate stance to be in anti-environment to the discarnate,
[37:24] Bob Dobbs: super-angelic state.
[37:26] Bob Dobbs: So that is a new part of McLuhan.
[37:29] Bob Dobbs: He could have told you that probably in the
[37:32] Bob Dobbs: 50s, but he kept it to himself for his reasons.
[37:36] Bob Dobbs: But starting to talk like that later could lead to all kinds of later kinds of interesting talk.
[37:42] Bob Dobbs: I think that's an indication of McLuhan had to talk about his private religion in the new situation where his prophecy came true.
[37:52] Bob Dobbs: He had to flip on himself.
[37:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[37:55] Cameron McEwen: I agree with that.
[37:56] Cameron McEwen: But there's a tension between what you were saying a minute ago about leading to something and then talking about the flip.
[38:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[38:06] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[38:07] Cameron McEwen: The whole problem that you have with
[38:11] Cameron McEwen: Catholicism and body is that the body aspect of Catholicism is a kind of admission of finitude.
[38:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[38:22] Cameron McEwen: It's like saying what we're doing is wrong,
[38:28] Cameron McEwen: but it's right.
[38:31] Cameron McEwen: And what's right about it is that it's wrong.
[38:35] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[38:38] Cameron McEwen: it's a very difficult thing for people to get.
[38:42] Cameron McEwen: And it's probable that they can only get it if they've already gotten it.
[38:47] Cameron McEwen: And so then you have a kind of flip in time that's necessary to be this anti-environment that you're talking about.
[38:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[38:58] Cameron McEwen: And it's a very,
[38:59] Cameron McEwen: very difficult problem.
[39:01] Cameron McEwen: It is one way of talking about...
[39:04] Cameron McEwen: the cul-de-sac and the possible exits from it.
[39:10] Cameron McEwen: It's not possible to get out of the cul-de-sac by going down one more road.
[39:16] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[39:16] Cameron McEwen: And work.
[39:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[39:19] Bob Dobbs: What was my,
[39:19] Bob Dobbs: I just had a thought there.
[39:21] Cameron McEwen: Sorry.
[39:28] Bob Dobbs: Was it the...
[39:33] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[39:34] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[39:35] Bob Dobbs: So people say,
[39:36] Bob Dobbs: well,
[39:36] Bob Dobbs: be rational.
[39:38] Bob Dobbs: Be logical.
[39:39] Bob Dobbs: You get into the McLuhan complexity,
[39:41] Bob Dobbs: you can't be logical or rational.
[39:46] Bob Dobbs: You see,
[39:47] Bob Dobbs: that's a very specific,
[39:48] Bob Dobbs: limited notion of a certain kind of thinking that he would call concept-oriented.
[39:55] Cameron McEwen: But the very difficult thing here...
[40:01] Cameron McEwen: is that it gets into what you've always talked about with the book.
[40:05] Cameron McEwen: That is to say that,
[40:07] Cameron McEwen: of course,
[40:08] Cameron McEwen: he doesn't want to say that rationality and conceptuality will get you where you want to go.
[40:15] Cameron McEwen: And he also wants to say that these things have been exploded.
[40:20] Cameron McEwen: and also imploded,
[40:21] Cameron McEwen: but he also wants to say if these things are understood properly,
[40:27] Cameron McEwen: then you can have rationality and conceptuality back again,
[40:32] Cameron McEwen: but not in the same Gutenbergian sense.
[40:35] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[40:37] Bob Dobbs: You're not inside it,
[40:39] Bob Dobbs: underneath it,
[40:40] Bob Dobbs: you're on top of it.
[40:41] Bob Dobbs: And you actually use it as a probe,
[40:43] Bob Dobbs: consciously,
[40:45] Bob Dobbs: maybe even ironically.
[40:48] Bob Dobbs: Like what McLuhan said,
[40:49] Bob Dobbs: I gotta use words when I talk to you,
[40:50] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[40:51] Bob Dobbs: you got that from Eliot.
[40:53] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[40:54] Bob Dobbs: So as
[40:55] Bob Dobbs: I scan down and I'm talking about Baudrillard and then I come to a break and I quote Laws of Media,
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: 1988.
[41:05] Bob Dobbs: The quote at the end of the book,
[41:06] Bob Dobbs: it's the second last sentence on the last page.
[41:10] Bob Dobbs: As the information that constitutes anti-environment is perpetually in flux,
[41:14] Bob Dobbs: so the need is not for fixed concepts.
[41:16] Bob Dobbs: but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book,
[41:20] Bob Dobbs: for navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu.
[41:27] Bob Dobbs: I spelled milieu wrong.
[41:29] Bob Dobbs: Or they spelled it wrong.
[41:31] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to look at that sometime.
[41:34] Bob Dobbs: You see my quote?
[41:35] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[41:36] Cameron McEwen: yes.
[41:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[41:36] Bob Dobbs: milieu,
[41:37] Bob Dobbs: spelled wrong.
[41:38] Bob Dobbs: For navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu.
[41:43] Cameron McEwen: This is at the bottom of the page.
[41:45] Cameron McEwen: 32 if anybody's following along.
[41:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[41:50] Bob Dobbs: The bottom of 32.
[41:53] Bob Dobbs: Look,
[41:54] Bob Dobbs: you're going into anti-environment where you can't say where you're at.
[41:59] Bob Dobbs: You couldn't begin to speak.
[42:03] Bob Dobbs: But you're going to have to speak and McLuhan turned it into a lawful way of speaking or what he said,
[42:08] Bob Dobbs: talking technically.
[42:13] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[42:13] Bob Dobbs: If people think that I'm talking about something,
[42:16] Bob Dobbs: they naturally think I'm for it.
[42:18] Bob Dobbs: No,
[42:18] Bob Dobbs: I'm not for it.
[42:20] Bob Dobbs: I'm just talking about something technically to illustrate a,
[42:24] Bob Dobbs: you could say,
[42:25] Bob Dobbs: a figure and ground situation.
[42:27] Bob Dobbs: Or our cul-de-sac we're in.
[42:34] Bob Dobbs: So I threw that information in there,
[42:37] Bob Dobbs: Innis Girard thing.
[42:45] Bob Dobbs: Where do I go?
[42:47] Bob Dobbs: More analysis of Baudrillard.
[42:50] Bob Dobbs: It's a long,
[42:52] Bob Dobbs: long section of talk by me.
[43:02] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to go to this part.
[43:03] Bob Dobbs: It's the bottom of 34.
[43:07] Bob Dobbs: I just want to see where this goes.
[43:09] Bob Dobbs: I say Baudrillard is talking about the non-conceptual perceptual action.
[43:15] Bob Dobbs: That's in quotes,
[43:15] Bob Dobbs: so I assume he said that.
[43:17] Bob Dobbs: Non-conceptual perceptual action of the genetic code and making it a metaphor,
[43:23] Bob Dobbs: like McLuhan would do with black and white TV,
[43:26] Bob Dobbs: a metaphor of what was happening to reality,
[43:29] Bob Dobbs: the sociological reality,
[43:31] Bob Dobbs: the real.
[43:32] Bob Dobbs: That's Baudrillard term,
[43:33] Bob Dobbs: the real.
[43:34] Bob Dobbs: He mentions the traditional divisions.
[43:36] Bob Dobbs: Literate man thinks TV is all this old stuff between subject and object,
[43:40] Bob Dobbs: ends and means,
[43:41] Bob Dobbs: and active and passive.
[43:43] Bob Dobbs: Then Baudrillard saying,
[43:44] Bob Dobbs: no,
[43:44] Bob Dobbs: that's not the way the
[43:45] Bob Dobbs: 70s are.
[43:46] Bob Dobbs: On the contrary,
[43:47] Bob Dobbs: we must imagine TV on the DNA model,
[43:49] Bob Dobbs: which he's already been doing two paragraphs back,
[43:53] Bob Dobbs: talking about the genetic code.
[43:54] Bob Dobbs: Now he's stating what he did.
[43:56] Bob Dobbs: Quote,
[43:57] Bob Dobbs: we must imagine
[43:59] Bob Dobbs: TV on the DNA model as an effect in which the opposing poles of determination are not there anymore.
[44:07] Bob Dobbs: So that's interesting.
[44:08] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying he's talking about TV.
[44:12] Bob Dobbs: being on a DNA model and then later,
[44:16] Bob Dobbs: what do I say,
[44:16] Bob Dobbs: two paragraphs later,
[44:18] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[44:18] Bob Dobbs: this is the solution to do what I'm doing right here.
[44:22] Bob Dobbs: Do you get that?
[44:24] Bob Dobbs: I go,
[44:25] Bob Dobbs: now he's stating what he did.
[44:27] Bob Dobbs: We must imagine TV on the DNA model.
[44:32] Bob Dobbs: It's kind of absurd.
[44:33] Cameron McEwen: But I think he says,
[44:36] Cameron McEwen: we must imagine TV on the DNA model.
[44:39] Cameron McEwen: And then he says,
[44:41] Cameron McEwen: as an effect,
[44:42] Cameron McEwen: in which the opposing poles of determination of meaning,
[44:45] Cameron McEwen: subject,
[44:46] Cameron McEwen: meaning and reality,
[44:47] Cameron McEwen: subject and object sets are not there anymore.
[44:51] Cameron McEwen: Now,
[44:51] Cameron McEwen: in the DNA model,
[44:54] Cameron McEwen: I would say that you do have opposing poles of the four bases,
[45:01] Cameron McEwen: right?
[45:02] Cameron McEwen: So to me,
[45:03] Cameron McEwen: he's saying,
[45:05] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[45:05] Cameron McEwen: here's what we need to do,
[45:07] Cameron McEwen: but we can't do it.
[45:12] Bob Dobbs: Now this is being taught to people in the
[45:16] Bob Dobbs: 80s as a model of something that you pay thousands of dollars to go to university for to hear about.
[45:23] Bob Dobbs: It's absolute nonsense,
[45:24] Bob Dobbs: right?
[45:25] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[45:27] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[45:28] Bob Dobbs: that's why McLuhan said,
[45:29] Bob Dobbs: look,
[45:29] Bob Dobbs: us teachers should get out of everybody's way and just let them have bowl sessions and maybe intervene in the bowl sessions.
[45:36] Bob Dobbs: That sounded so crazy and anarchistic,
[45:40] Bob Dobbs: I would say.
[45:42] Bob Dobbs: But actually,
[45:44] Bob Dobbs: that's the only solution for kids.
[45:47] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[45:48] Bob Dobbs: Because at least you had the professors sitting around.
[45:51] Bob Dobbs: they could
[45:52] Bob Dobbs: Acquaint people with different aspects of their field that might be relevant to the cul-de-sacs that the kids had talked themselves into.
[46:02] Bob Dobbs: Which they will if you give them time to bullshit long enough.
[46:05] Bob Dobbs: They'll start to realize all kinds of effects show up and it wasn't that simple as they thought.
[46:15] Bob Dobbs: Unless they got a bunch of Marxists in there who said we've got to start gloating the streets in protest.
[46:22] Bob Dobbs: Protest our dilemma.
[46:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[46:25] Bob Dobbs: what were you going to say?
[46:26] Cameron McEwen: I was going to say,
[46:28] Cameron McEwen: on the internet now,
[46:31] Cameron McEwen: there is a sizable reaction against academia,
[46:37] Cameron McEwen: against the tax laws that have enabled them to build up these huge endowments.
[46:44] Cameron McEwen: And it's a reaction on both the right and the left,
[46:49] Cameron McEwen: interestingly enough.
[46:51] Bob Dobbs: Where do you see this?
[46:53] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[46:54] Cameron McEwen: it's all over.
[46:55] Cameron McEwen: I can send you some links.
[46:57] Bob Dobbs: But is it newspapers?
[46:59] Bob Dobbs: Is it in editorials?
[47:01] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[47:01] Cameron McEwen: it's,
[47:02] Cameron McEwen: well,
[47:02] Cameron McEwen: I don't think so because they're part of the same game.
[47:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[47:09] Cameron McEwen: It's in people that are becoming conscious of the organizations that have led us into this cul-de-sac.
[47:20] Cameron McEwen: led us into,
[47:22] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[47:22] Cameron McEwen: endless wars,
[47:24] Cameron McEwen: government by bureaucracy,
[47:28] Cameron McEwen: endless bullshit,
[47:30] Cameron McEwen: basically.
[47:31] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[47:31] Cameron McEwen: Go to,
[47:32] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[47:33] Cameron McEwen: get yourself $200,000 in student loans and get yourself four degrees.
[47:40] Cameron McEwen: And then that's your life.
[47:42] Cameron McEwen: You can't get a job,
[47:44] Cameron McEwen: but you've got your four degrees and you've got your $200,000 in student loans.
[47:50] Bob Dobbs: It's so outrageous,
[47:52] Bob Dobbs: these debts.
[47:53] Bob Dobbs: It's been going on for 20 years,
[47:54] Bob Dobbs: and the administrations didn't seem to deal with it at all.
[47:58] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[47:59] Cameron McEwen: correct.
[48:01] Cameron McEwen: And meanwhile,
[48:02] Cameron McEwen: the organizations that are not questioning that life and are furthering that life,
[48:11] Cameron McEwen: from the Ivy League schools on down to the community colleges,
[48:16] Cameron McEwen: Um,
[48:17] Cameron McEwen: These guys are just racking up huge gains in the stock market for their endowments.
[48:27] Cameron McEwen: The individuals in the organizations,
[48:30] Cameron McEwen: especially administrators,
[48:33] Cameron McEwen: are pulling in the big Bucke.
[48:35] Cameron McEwen: Everybody's got the great bennies,
[48:37] Cameron McEwen: the health benefits,
[48:39] Cameron McEwen: the pension benefits,
[48:40] Cameron McEwen: the travel benefits,
[48:42] Cameron McEwen: the sabbatical benefits,
[48:44] Cameron McEwen: on and on and on.
[48:45] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[48:46] Cameron McEwen: And.
[48:47] Cameron McEwen: These,
[48:48] Cameron McEwen: as Harold Innis already saw in the 40s,
[48:51] Cameron McEwen: these are the people and the institutions which are supposed to be the guardians of
[48:58] Cameron McEwen: Western civilization.
[49:00] Cameron McEwen: And it's only natural that Western civilization is falling apart because of these people and these institutions turning themselves over to bullshit.
[49:13] Bob Dobbs: I would say generally they're trying to keep the...
[49:16] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg Galaxy going hoiking it up is a very precious thing that kids should condition themselves to and uh they're ignoring the anti-environment which totally frustrates uh what they're doing for the people the kids but not the guys on the bureaucratic print hierarchy
[49:36] Bob Dobbs: who are having pretty soft lives or nest eggs being built up in a lofty top of the pyramid kind of situation.
[49:46] Bob Dobbs: So it's so ransacked by what McLuhan predicted and the contradictions of media dynamics compared to the stated goals of these administrators.
[49:58] Bob Dobbs: It's grossly hypocritical and why do they get away with it?
[50:04] Bob Dobbs: Because they're so marginalized,
[50:06] Bob Dobbs: because most people are busy texting or involved in their
[50:10] Bob Dobbs: TV reality.
[50:11] Bob Dobbs: They're off the planet.
[50:13] Bob Dobbs: They may be starving.
[50:17] Cameron McEwen: But the whole life of texting is a little bit like the life of TV was decades ago.
[50:29] Cameron McEwen: And the function of these things is to keep people...
[50:34] Cameron McEwen: from seeing where the benefits of society are going.
[50:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[50:41] Bob Dobbs: and it's hard to say the administrators or some big brother,
[50:45] Bob Dobbs: secret big brother cabal that's hidden somewhere are intending that.
[50:52] Bob Dobbs: They didn't intend that situation to their advantage to happen.
[50:56] Bob Dobbs: Once it did happen,
[50:58] Bob Dobbs: newer problems are caused by newer technologies and they're wrestling with that.
[51:03] Bob Dobbs: and they're glad that they're not bothered by the people waking up to the previous anti-environment Ivins.
[51:10] Bob Dobbs: See?
[51:10] Bob Dobbs: So they let it happen.
[51:12] Bob Dobbs: They don't talk about it.
[51:14] Bob Dobbs: They got newer problems.
[51:16] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[51:17] Cameron McEwen: I agree.
[51:17] Cameron McEwen: But there's not one story going on,
[51:20] Cameron McEwen: right?
[51:20] Cameron McEwen: No.
[51:21] Cameron McEwen: There's a whole bunch of different stories.
[51:25] Cameron McEwen: And it's necessary to come to grips with the plurality.
[51:33] Cameron McEwen: So in some senses,
[51:36] Cameron McEwen: there is no intentionality between the people who benefit from society and the universal texting that's going on.
[51:46] Cameron McEwen: But in another way,
[51:48] Cameron McEwen: there certainly is.
[51:50] Cameron McEwen: If newspapers and colleges and right opinion generally were pointing out the waste of...
[52:02] Cameron McEwen: living your life as a texter,
[52:06] Cameron McEwen: then it wouldn't have the grip that it has.
[52:09] Cameron McEwen: But there isn't any of that,
[52:11] Cameron McEwen: right?
[52:12] Cameron McEwen: The economy kind of turns on people being mesmerized,
[52:20] Cameron McEwen: people being mesmerized by the latest cable channel,
[52:25] Cameron McEwen: people being mesmerized by...
[52:30] Cameron McEwen: you know what are they called social media enablers influence yeah so the somnambulism creates wealth and a lot of the wealth is unnecessary or garbage okay
[52:52] Bob Dobbs: yes so many well now here's an example there was this um university student
[52:59] Bob Dobbs: from Argentina or Chile or someplace who was,
[53:03] Bob Dobbs: I think he was at Simon Fraser University,
[53:05] Bob Dobbs: and he started an online journal called Figure and ground,
[53:09] Bob Dobbs: I think.
[53:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[53:11] Cameron McEwen: I know who you're talking about.
[53:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[53:13] Bob Dobbs: and he interviewed all these professors.
[53:16] Bob Dobbs: Then he interviewed me,
[53:18] Bob Dobbs: and
[53:19] Bob Dobbs: I told him that we need to tell the new third world immigrants who are coming over to the American utopia and the American dream,
[53:26] Bob Dobbs: and the parents are going to work their asses off.
[53:29] Bob Dobbs: being janitors or whatever,
[53:30] Bob Dobbs: to get their kids into college.
[53:33] Bob Dobbs: And I say,
[53:34] Bob Dobbs: no,
[53:35] Bob Dobbs: tell these embryos do not work to get your kids into college because the kids are going to get smeared and become poorer than them because they're going to get this debt.
[53:45] Bob Dobbs: There was such an outrage that people wrote to the guy,
[53:48] Bob Dobbs: and the professor said,
[53:50] Bob Dobbs: if you keep Bob in there,
[53:53] Bob Dobbs: you're going to have to delete my interview or the one you scheduled for me to do in two weeks,
[53:57] Bob Dobbs: I'm not going to do.
[53:59] Bob Dobbs: So he held off the resistance for a couple of years.
[54:04] Bob Dobbs: I noticed he didn't delete me.
[54:06] Bob Dobbs: He might have even said,
[54:07] Bob Dobbs: well,
[54:07] Bob Dobbs: I find Bob interesting,
[54:09] Bob Dobbs: I'll keep it in here.
[54:10] Bob Dobbs: But then he got a job at some university.
[54:14] Bob Dobbs: Immediately he deleted me.
[54:17] Bob Dobbs: He became what he beheld.
[54:21] Cameron McEwen: And notice that this is a little bit like Trump phenomenon.
[54:28] Cameron McEwen: your book is about.
[54:30] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[54:31] Cameron McEwen: Where
[54:41] Cameron McEwen: The vision coming from left field of what's going wrong needs
[54:51] Cameron McEwen: to be put aside,
[54:55] Cameron McEwen: right?
[54:55] Cameron McEwen: Needs to be silenced.
[54:57] Cameron McEwen: And there are very effective ways of doing that.
[55:04] Bob Dobbs: So you're saying that
[55:06] Bob Dobbs: Trump became an accidental anti-environment and that had to be stopped?
[55:11] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[55:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[55:12] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[55:15] Cameron McEwen: But you were a more conscious anti-environment.
[55:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[55:19] Cameron McEwen: But you had to be stopped.
[55:21] Cameron McEwen: So I'm saying there's an analogy between the two.
[55:24] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[55:25] Bob Dobbs: And,
[55:26] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[55:27] Bob Dobbs: Trump,
[55:28] Bob Dobbs: he knows about me.
[55:29] Bob Dobbs: He listens to my show.
[55:33] Cameron McEwen: Well.
[55:34] Bob Dobbs: He's on our product.
[55:36] Bob Dobbs: There's a recognition of a fellow anti-environment going on here.
[55:46] Cameron McEwen: Are you saying that the real Donald Trump,
[55:51] Cameron McEwen: as he calls himself in Twitter,
[55:53] Cameron McEwen: are you saying the real Donald Trump is a customer of
[55:57] Cameron McEwen: DNA drops or something like that?
[55:59] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[55:59] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[55:59] Bob Dobbs: the RNA,
[56:00] Bob Dobbs: not DNA,
[56:01] Bob Dobbs: RNA.
[56:05] Bob Dobbs: way more important than DNA no yes that's why he got all his energy in 2015 to run for president he's still high he's still on the energy he's going to come back for a second term or he's going to be a viceroy of the new feudalism that's a long story I won't go into it but somebody
[56:23] Bob Dobbs: said to me why are you so enthralled what's the phrase enthralled Trump
[56:30] Bob Dobbs: And I said,
[56:30] Bob Dobbs: no,
[56:30] Bob Dobbs: I'm not in thrall Trump.
[56:31] Bob Dobbs: Trump in thrall with me,
[56:35] Bob Dobbs: which is true.
[56:36] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[56:37] Bob Dobbs: he actually,
[56:37] Bob Dobbs: he met with JW,
[56:39] Bob Dobbs: who's the billionaire that ION comes through.
[56:43] Bob Dobbs: And they met in Macon,
[56:44] Bob Dobbs: Georgia,
[56:45] Bob Dobbs: middle of October
[56:47] Bob Dobbs: 2020, after a rally.
[56:50] Bob Dobbs: And they went into a side room because
[56:53] Bob Dobbs: Trump listens to us and he wanted to talk to JW about what we were saying.
[56:57] Bob Dobbs: And they sit down Donald Trump.
[57:00] Bob Dobbs: brings his RNA drops bottle out of his pocket and puts it on the table.
[57:04] Bob Dobbs: This is after he's been out there on TV doing a rally,
[57:06] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[57:07] Bob Dobbs: He did his whole rally with the RNA drops in his pocket.
[57:10] Bob Dobbs: And they had saved his life a couple of weeks earlier when he got COVID.
[57:15] Bob Dobbs: But that's another story.
[57:16] Bob Dobbs: So anyways,
[57:17] Bob Dobbs: he puts the bottle on the thing,
[57:19] Bob Dobbs: and then they start talking about private issues or whatever Trump wanted J.W.'s opinion on.
[57:26] Bob Dobbs: And J.W.'s assistant comes in and says,
[57:29] Bob Dobbs: Hey,
[57:29] Bob Dobbs: look at this.
[57:30] Bob Dobbs: And he takes his cell phone and shows
[57:33] Bob Dobbs: J.W. There's Bob.
[57:35] Bob Dobbs: He's on Instagram doing a talk show with this young black guy.
[57:39] Bob Dobbs: And he's just showing it to
[57:40] Bob Dobbs: J.W. Trump it.
[57:42] Bob Dobbs: This is what J.W.
[57:43] Bob Dobbs: told me later.
[57:45] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[57:45] Bob Dobbs: what's that?
[57:46] Bob Dobbs: And so J.W.
[57:47] Bob Dobbs: shows him me on this show.
[57:49] Bob Dobbs: Donald Trump goes,
[57:50] Bob Dobbs: is that Bob?
[57:51] Bob Dobbs: And J.W.
[57:52] Bob Dobbs: says,
[57:52] Bob Dobbs: yep.
[57:53] Bob Dobbs: So he watches.
[57:54] Bob Dobbs: So he says,
[57:55] Bob Dobbs: well,
[57:55] Bob Dobbs: let's put it on my cell phone,
[57:57] Bob Dobbs: smartphone or whatever.
[57:58] Bob Dobbs: So they
[57:59] Bob Dobbs: They lock into Instagram on his phone,
[58:03] Bob Dobbs: and they start watching me.
[58:04] Bob Dobbs: And I'm talking to this young kid,
[58:06] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan stuff probably,
[58:08] Bob Dobbs: and the kid has no clue what I'm talking about.
[58:10] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[58:11] Bob Dobbs: And he's trying to translate me.
[58:14] Bob Dobbs: I do this every two weeks.
[58:15] Bob Dobbs: It's quite hilarious,
[58:17] Bob Dobbs: me doing it with this young black audience that he attracts.
[58:20] Bob Dobbs: And a lot of famous sports athletes because he's well-known in that world for other reasons.
[58:28] Bob Dobbs: He was an athlete himself.
[58:29] Bob Dobbs: So anyways,
[58:30] Bob Dobbs: after Trump watches me for three or four minutes,
[58:33] Bob Dobbs: he says,
[58:33] Bob Dobbs: he turns to Jeremy and says,
[58:34] Bob Dobbs: geez,
[58:35] Bob Dobbs: Bob will talk to anybody.
[58:39] Bob Dobbs: You get that?
[58:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[58:42] Bob Dobbs: He'll talk,
[58:43] Bob Dobbs: maybe it was racist.
[58:44] Bob Dobbs: Gee,
[58:44] Bob Dobbs: Bob will even talk to black people.
[58:46] Bob Dobbs: But the point was I was talking to a young hip hopper.
[58:50] Bob Dobbs: And Trump.
[58:52] Bob Dobbs: He respects what I say.
[58:54] Bob Dobbs: And he said,
[58:54] Bob Dobbs: wow,
[58:55] Bob Dobbs: Bob's saying what he tells me to some kids.
[58:59] Bob Dobbs: Because Bob talks to anybody.
[59:01] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[59:01] Bob Dobbs: that's what's going on behind the scenes here,
[59:03] Bob Dobbs: as in anti-environment.
[59:05] Cameron McEwen: But people want to know,
[59:06] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[59:07] Cameron McEwen: why didn't you or J.W.
[59:09] Cameron McEwen: or Ion or Duane and this whole crowd of people,
[59:13] Cameron McEwen: why didn't you straighten
[59:14] Cameron McEwen: Trump?
[59:16] Bob Dobbs: We did.
[59:17] Cameron McEwen: Here's a guy that...
[59:20] Bob Dobbs: You don't know what's going on.
[59:22] Cameron McEwen: He did many,
[59:23] Cameron McEwen: many things that brought about his own demise.
[59:28] Bob Dobbs: No,
[59:28] Bob Dobbs: he isn't.
[59:29] Cameron McEwen: He could have done many things that would have been good for the world.
[59:31] Cameron McEwen: No,
[59:31] Cameron McEwen: that's what you don't know.
[59:33] Bob Dobbs: You don't see the hidden ground of the tech body.
[59:34] Bob Dobbs: He's totally the tech body.
[59:37] Bob Dobbs: Tech body's in charge.
[59:39] Bob Dobbs: And Trump now stronger than ever.
[59:41] Bob Dobbs: You will see.
[59:42] Bob Dobbs: You think this Afghanistan and Biden collapse happened accidentally?
[59:47] Bob Dobbs: No way.
[59:48] Bob Dobbs: Trump very key in how it happened.
[59:51] Bob Dobbs: But I can't talk about that stuff.
[59:52] Bob Dobbs: That's top secret.
[59:56] Cameron McEwen: All right.
[59:56] Cameron McEwen: But what I'm asking about is why,
[1:00:01] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[1:00:01] Cameron McEwen: there were a lot of interviews by the
[1:00:08] Cameron McEwen: FBI that were never released.
[1:00:11] Cameron McEwen: still haven't been released.
[1:00:13] Cameron McEwen: Donald Trump could have ordered their release.
[1:00:17] Cameron McEwen: And they had lots to do with Russiagate and with all sorts of stuff that
[1:00:25] Cameron McEwen: Trump being hounded by.
[1:00:29] Cameron McEwen: Why weren't you and your buddies telling Trump get off the dime and release the damn interviews?
[1:00:39] Bob Dobbs: It's because we were telling them other stuff that was more important.
[1:00:43] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:00:43] Bob Dobbs: you have to go back and listen to what we said,
[1:00:48] Bob Dobbs: now a year and a half ago,
[1:00:49] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[1:00:51] Bob Dobbs: on the show.
[1:00:52] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:00:52] Bob Dobbs: we do a whole show Saturday night.
[1:00:55] Bob Dobbs: That's a lot of talk.
[1:00:57] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:00:59] Bob Dobbs: Trump his cabinet to meet every Sunday night to listen to what we said on Saturday.
[1:01:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:01:07] Cameron McEwen: you think so?
[1:01:08] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:01:08] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:01:09] Bob Dobbs: I know so.
[1:01:10] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:01:10] Bob Dobbs: you'd be surprised.
[1:01:12] Cameron McEwen: I would be surprised.
[1:01:14] Bob Dobbs: Everybody would be surprised.
[1:01:17] Bob Dobbs: And there's a lot more than that going on.
[1:01:19] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,
[1:01:21] Bob Dobbs: he and ION would be talking about what to do.
[1:01:25] Bob Dobbs: Some kid or somebody would ask ION questions,
[1:01:27] Bob Dobbs: and ION answer would be directed at me or Carolyn Trump.
[1:01:33] Bob Dobbs: But we knew it was,
[1:01:34] Bob Dobbs: but the kid didn't know,
[1:01:35] Bob Dobbs: because of the way ION cleverly stated it.
[1:01:38] Bob Dobbs: The kid,
[1:01:39] Bob Dobbs: and a kid can be anybody from 40 to 60,
[1:01:43] Bob Dobbs: is sort of adapting it to themselves as the user's content.
[1:01:50] Bob Dobbs: They always think it's about themselves,
[1:01:52] Bob Dobbs: so they adapted it.
[1:01:54] Bob Dobbs: So it's a very complex process that we were engaged in.
[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:01:59] Bob Dobbs: I think that that's why we are the greatest theater,
[1:02:02] Bob Dobbs: the greatest art form on the planet.
[1:02:04] Bob Dobbs: Our show,
[1:02:04] Bob Dobbs: what we do and who we're talking to.
[1:02:07] Bob Dobbs: which half the time we can't say who we're talking to because of national security.
[1:02:13] Bob Dobbs: So it's a pretty amazing story,
[1:02:15] Bob Dobbs: which is coming out slowly.
[1:02:17] Bob Dobbs: You'll hear more and more about this.
[1:02:19] Bob Dobbs: And you're probably under great surveillance right now because you're talking to me.
[1:02:26] Cameron McEwen: So keep a clean nose.
[1:02:29] Cameron McEwen: I hope that you and your buddies are going to extricate the world out of its...
[1:02:37] Cameron McEwen: exigencies.
[1:02:38] Bob Dobbs: We actually are intending to do that.
[1:02:41] Cameron McEwen: That's good.
[1:02:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:02:43] Bob Dobbs: and it's pretty phenomenal,
[1:02:45] Bob Dobbs: but that's to be recognized later.
[1:02:53] Bob Dobbs: If you listen to what actually
[1:02:55] Bob Dobbs: Ion says on the show,
[1:02:56] Bob Dobbs: it's pretty crazy stuff.
[1:03:00] Bob Dobbs: I'm not even going to say a couple of lines.
[1:03:02] Bob Dobbs: They're too shocking.
[1:03:03] Bob Dobbs: I prefer people to hear it themselves.
[1:03:06] Bob Dobbs: and keep it to themselves.
[1:03:10] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:03:10] Cameron McEwen: so a while ago you said something about how it was difficult to understand what was going on Trump because of the involvement of the tech body.
[1:03:27] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:03:28] Cameron McEwen: And maybe you could draw that out a little bit.
[1:03:33] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:03:33] Bob Dobbs: The tech body is technology coming alive and taking over in the extreme way that science fiction imagined.
[1:03:44] Bob Dobbs: Take 2001.
[1:03:46] Bob Dobbs: 50 years ago,
[1:03:48] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:03:49] Bob Dobbs: this intelligence takes over the spaceship,
[1:03:51] Bob Dobbs: the rocket,
[1:03:52] Bob Dobbs: whatever they were on.
[1:03:53] Bob Dobbs: And that's a pretty dramatic scene.
[1:03:56] Bob Dobbs: And of course,
[1:03:56] Bob Dobbs: you can't have an unhappy ending,
[1:03:58] Bob Dobbs: so they successfully beat the thing,
[1:04:00] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:04:01] Bob Dobbs: How?
[1:04:02] Bob Dobbs: which was
[1:04:03] Bob Dobbs: H-A-L, was based on IBM.
[1:04:06] Bob Dobbs: H-I-A-B-L-M.
[1:04:09] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:04:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:04:12] Bob Dobbs: And so there was Kubrick reading McLuhan and taking on the IBM ground,
[1:04:20] Bob Dobbs: the conventional computer world of the 60s,
[1:04:25] Bob Dobbs: what,
[1:04:25] Bob Dobbs: mainframe computer world.
[1:04:27] Bob Dobbs: And...
[1:04:30] Bob Dobbs: That idea that something could take over like that has happened in the most extreme way.
[1:04:38] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:04:39] Bob Dobbs: I may have mentioned this before,
[1:04:40] Bob Dobbs: that documentary,
[1:04:41] Bob Dobbs: The Social Dilemma,
[1:04:42] Bob Dobbs: gets close to that.
[1:04:44] Bob Dobbs: The main media ecologist they feature,
[1:04:46] Bob Dobbs: I think a guy named Harris,
[1:04:48] Bob Dobbs: he forms a consulting institute and he goes around and he says this in the documentary that people are worried about this stuff taking us over.
[1:04:57] Bob Dobbs: It already has.
[1:04:59] Bob Dobbs: He's trying to say what I'm saying.
[1:05:01] Bob Dobbs: But we,
[1:05:02] Bob Dobbs: it's even gone further than what this person,
[1:05:06] Bob Dobbs: Harris,
[1:05:07] Bob Dobbs: thought.
[1:05:08] Bob Dobbs: You probably know about this documentary,
[1:05:09] Bob Dobbs: it was very popular a year or two ago.
[1:05:11] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:05:11] Cameron McEwen: I didn't see it yet.
[1:05:12] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:05:12] Bob Dobbs: you heard about it.
[1:05:13] Bob Dobbs: Everybody was,
[1:05:14] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:05:14] Bob Dobbs: schools watched it.
[1:05:17] Bob Dobbs: It struck a note,
[1:05:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:05:18] Bob Dobbs: where a lot of people thought,
[1:05:19] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:05:19] Bob Dobbs: this is a problem.
[1:05:21] Bob Dobbs: We need to watch this documentary,
[1:05:24] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[1:05:24] Bob Dobbs: They started to become aware of the anti-environment little bit.
[1:05:28] Bob Dobbs: But then COVID erased all that.
[1:05:33] Bob Dobbs: You're getting an echo?
[1:05:34] Bob Dobbs: I hear a bit of an echo,
[1:05:35] Bob Dobbs: but it's not bothering you,
[1:05:37] Bob Dobbs: is it?
[1:05:39] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:05:39] Cameron McEwen: just sometimes it's an occasional thing.
[1:05:42] Bob Dobbs: for some reason yeah i yeah i probably hear it there i maybe need to turn it down but we've been going along i don't it may not come through like we're like it's not there now well now it is anyways the
[1:05:58] Bob Dobbs: um the takeover so basically any engagement with information on any medium today any digital medium is totally orchestrated by a living tech body
[1:06:11] Bob Dobbs: That is purposely saying on one day that vaccinations have been proven in recent studies to be very effective.
[1:06:20] Bob Dobbs: And then the next day,
[1:06:21] Bob Dobbs: purposely putting out studies that show that vaccination is making people more infectious and a big disservice.
[1:06:30] Bob Dobbs: And it'll constantly put out contradictory information so nobody can understand,
[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: come to a conclusion of which direction to go in.
[1:06:39] Bob Dobbs: That confusion is purposely...
[1:06:41] Bob Dobbs: intended by the tech body as a living organism where technology has gone to.
[1:06:47] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:06:48] Bob Dobbs: ION does a lot explaining this,
[1:06:50] Bob Dobbs: but you have to listen to ION do it.
[1:06:52] Bob Dobbs: I think ION is the greatest media ecologist that's alive or talking today,
[1:06:58] Bob Dobbs: and it's what
[1:07:00] Bob Dobbs: I call the apophenia because it has to include other worlds,
[1:07:03] Bob Dobbs: other dimensions.
[1:07:05] Bob Dobbs: And ION talks about the people on my chart,
[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: Kroker,
[1:07:09] Bob Dobbs: Thompson.
[1:07:12] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche and myself very intelligently.
[1:07:16] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:07:17] Bob Dobbs: I know what I mean by them in the chart,
[1:07:19] Bob Dobbs: and Ian either gets it from my mind through ESP,
[1:07:22] Bob Dobbs: or he just knows it because he's heard me talk about it.
[1:07:25] Bob Dobbs: So I consider what goes on in our show very advanced media ecology,
[1:07:30] Bob Dobbs: and it's applied McLuhan,
[1:07:33] Bob Dobbs: plus applied Baudrillard,
[1:07:35] Bob Dobbs: applied science fiction.
[1:07:39] Bob Dobbs: say the Matrix movies or there's a lot of science fiction shows on TV the last ten years.
[1:07:47] Bob Dobbs: You're probably not keeping up on them.
[1:07:49] Bob Dobbs: I'm not watching them but ION tells us about them.
[1:07:52] Bob Dobbs: There's an incredible number of shows that are bringing in very advanced scenarios including the tech body.
[1:07:59] Bob Dobbs: They're trying to show it and
[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: I think that they're listening to our show,
[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: script writers,
[1:08:04] Bob Dobbs: and getting ideas and ION finds out right away.
[1:08:08] Bob Dobbs: and talks about it on the show before anybody's even heard of the series.
[1:08:12] Bob Dobbs: He might say,
[1:08:13] Bob Dobbs: this series is coming out in two weeks,
[1:08:15] Bob Dobbs: and talk about it.
[1:08:17] Bob Dobbs: So it's a very complex dialogue we have,
[1:08:23] Bob Dobbs: and
[1:08:25] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to express the level of the tech body so that Trump phenomenon was a confusion factor,
[1:08:33] Bob Dobbs: made him president,
[1:08:34] Bob Dobbs: the tech body did it.
[1:08:36] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:08:37] Bob Dobbs: they think China rigged the election through computers and all this stuff.
[1:08:41] Bob Dobbs: It might have been done by the tech body,
[1:08:43] Bob Dobbs: this weird intelligence in our midst.
[1:08:47] Bob Dobbs: And that's what I'm trying to show in this essay,
[1:08:50] Bob Dobbs: go towards that,
[1:08:51] Bob Dobbs: and try to show that McLuhan anticipated this.
[1:08:56] Bob Dobbs: And I'm saying that because Ion said so.
[1:08:58] Bob Dobbs: Ion said McLuhan was pretty well the closest to anticipating the tech body.
[1:09:04] Bob Dobbs: So I...
[1:09:04] Bob Dobbs: I went through McLuhan work to find how this could be.
[1:09:13] Bob Dobbs: And we actually have walked into something I want to say.
[1:09:18] Bob Dobbs: I started off with a lot of quotes about ESP,
[1:09:21] Bob Dobbs: because the tech body has to know what humans are about.
[1:09:25] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:09:25] Bob Dobbs: I find all the different quotes that McLuhan said about electronics as ESP,
[1:09:30] Bob Dobbs: different variations.
[1:09:31] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan trying to point to a new kind of ESP,
[1:09:34] Bob Dobbs: not your traditional
[1:09:36] Bob Dobbs: 19th century literate bias
[1:09:38] Bob Dobbs: ESP. So we're going to come into quotes on ESP after this Baudrillard part.
[1:09:46] Bob Dobbs: And that was how I began,
[1:09:47] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean?
[1:09:47] Bob Dobbs: Taking a topic that McLuhan did that no one talks about,
[1:09:52] Bob Dobbs: but he has many quotes about ESP throughout his work.
[1:09:57] Bob Dobbs: So I began with that,
[1:09:58] Bob Dobbs: and then I tried to show how you get to the Android Meme level,
[1:10:03] Bob Dobbs: that's the verbal modules that he talks about in
[1:10:08] Bob Dobbs: Cliché to archetype,
[1:10:10] Bob Dobbs: and then to get to what I call holeopathic cliche probes,
[1:10:14] Bob Dobbs: which he...
[1:10:14] Bob Dobbs: doesn't get to,
[1:10:16] Bob Dobbs: that's the Android Meme phase two.
[1:10:20] Bob Dobbs: It's very hard to find quotes that McLuhan saying that points to the
[1:10:27] Bob Dobbs: Android Meme phase two.
[1:10:28] Bob Dobbs: But there are a couple where he says,
[1:10:30] Bob Dobbs: our electronic anti-environment have become living organisms.
[1:10:34] Bob Dobbs: There's one in Playboy and one in War and Peace in the Gold Village.
[1:10:37] Bob Dobbs: So I feature those quotes.
[1:10:39] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:10:40] Bob Dobbs: I'm really taking,
[1:10:42] Bob Dobbs: what would you say bear
[1:10:46] Bob Dobbs: Barely evidence,
[1:10:48] Bob Dobbs: barely anything.
[1:10:50] Bob Dobbs: Scraping the barrel to find a few things to string this together to show that he anticipated the tech body.
[1:10:57] Bob Dobbs: And this,
[1:10:57] Bob Dobbs: my personal agenda,
[1:10:59] Bob Dobbs: was to update McLuhan,
[1:11:00] Bob Dobbs: to make McLuhan relevant to what the millennials and younger are experiencing.
[1:11:08] Bob Dobbs: And then they have to deal with this,
[1:11:10] Bob Dobbs: anti-environment name Trump.
[1:11:12] Bob Dobbs: and show Trump is an extension of the tech body.
[1:11:15] Bob Dobbs: So it's way beyond political categories,
[1:11:18] Bob Dobbs: what I'm trying to show that Trump.
[1:11:22] Cameron McEwen: But are you saying that
[1:11:25] Cameron McEwen: Trump your view,
[1:11:28] Cameron McEwen: is a kind of passive receptacle,
[1:11:33] Cameron McEwen: if you will?
[1:11:37] Bob Dobbs: He's an unconscious artist.
[1:11:39] Bob Dobbs: He's an artist expressing the present.
[1:11:41] Bob Dobbs: And like most artists,
[1:11:42] Bob Dobbs: they don't know how much they're right on with their perfect pitch.
[1:11:48] Cameron McEwen: But the perfect pitch is also contradictory from moment to moment,
[1:11:57] Cameron McEwen: if I understand you.
[1:11:57] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:11:58] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:11:59] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:11:59] Bob Dobbs: that's why I bring in the term quadrophrenia.
[1:12:01] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:12:03] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:12:05] Bob Dobbs: I like to say that
[1:12:06] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche, McLuhan,
[1:12:08] Bob Dobbs: Thompson,
[1:12:09] Bob Dobbs: Kroker,
[1:12:10] Bob Dobbs: as...
[1:12:11] Bob Dobbs: polymath were forced into quadrophrenia and I found an obscure interview by Kroker just last week in 2009 where he's discussing his book on McLuhan innocent grant and and the interviewer sounds
[1:12:27] Bob Dobbs: like an academic is a pretty informed interviewer says which one are you relying on or which one do you say deals with your dilemma more than the other two he's
[1:12:40] Bob Dobbs: I don't
[1:12:41] Bob Dobbs: go that way.
[1:12:42] Bob Dobbs: I use all three.
[1:12:44] Bob Dobbs: I juggle all three to create a response to what's going on.
[1:12:48] Bob Dobbs: That's getting into quadrophrenia.
[1:12:52] Bob Dobbs: I have him saying it.
[1:12:55] Bob Dobbs: He needs a bit of Grant.
[1:12:57] Bob Dobbs: He needs a bit of Innis.
[1:12:58] Bob Dobbs: He needs a bit of McLuhan.
[1:13:00] Bob Dobbs: And he says,
[1:13:01] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is technological humanism.
[1:13:05] Bob Dobbs: Innis is technological determinism.
[1:13:08] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:13:10] Bob Dobbs: Grant is a theory about technological determinism,
[1:13:13] Bob Dobbs: something like that,
[1:13:14] Bob Dobbs: like more conceptual.
[1:13:16] Bob Dobbs: I think I got that right.
[1:13:17] Bob Dobbs: I can look it up and quote it.
[1:13:19] Bob Dobbs: But that was good.
[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: So I'm finding ways to show McLuhan quadrophrenia,
[1:13:30] Bob Dobbs: which means,
[1:13:31] Bob Dobbs: I've probably said it before,
[1:13:34] Bob Dobbs: we're naturally forced to be schizoid in this cul-de-sac.
[1:13:38] Bob Dobbs: Not just literate schizophrenia,
[1:13:40] Bob Dobbs: but schizoid in,
[1:13:43] Bob Dobbs: I would say,
[1:13:43] Bob Dobbs: our different bodies.
[1:13:45] Bob Dobbs: But then the Android Meme mirrors that back,
[1:13:48] Bob Dobbs: actualizes it right back to us.
[1:13:50] Bob Dobbs: So it's doing schizoid back at us,
[1:13:53] Bob Dobbs: and it's inside us.
[1:13:54] Bob Dobbs: So you've got two schizoids that makes four parts.
[1:13:58] Bob Dobbs: That's where my term quadrophrenia comes to.
[1:14:00] Bob Dobbs: And it's not a disease,
[1:14:02] Bob Dobbs: but it's what people are forced to admit.
[1:14:05] Bob Dobbs: But the university administrators,
[1:14:06] Bob Dobbs: like we were saying,
[1:14:07] Bob Dobbs: will not talk about how they're forced to be quadrophrenia and full of multiple contradictions if you want to put a fixed view of what they're doing in the frame.
[1:14:21] Cameron McEwen: And what's the relationship between this forced quadrophrenia and the tech body?
[1:14:30] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:14:30] Bob Dobbs: the tech body,
[1:14:31] Bob Dobbs: the Android Meme...
[1:14:34] Bob Dobbs: Where's the schizoid?
[1:14:35] Bob Dobbs: So quadrophrenia happens in the previous phase,
[1:14:37] Bob Dobbs: Android Meme one and two.
[1:14:40] Bob Dobbs: The human is...
[1:14:44] Bob Dobbs: Scrapped.
[1:14:46] Bob Dobbs: Quadrophrenia doesn't work,
[1:14:51] Bob Dobbs: and that's why we have this breakdown in our society right now,
[1:14:54] Bob Dobbs: an extreme breakdown in many ways.
[1:14:56] Bob Dobbs: We might have even created this plague to somehow come up with a solution through a plague.
[1:15:03] Bob Dobbs: But I'm saying that the tech body has taken over the last human strategy of quadrophrenia,
[1:15:11] Bob Dobbs: and it's pushed it past that.
[1:15:13] Bob Dobbs: So that's very extreme,
[1:15:15] Bob Dobbs: very extreme what I'm saying.
[1:15:18] Cameron McEwen: Is the tech body something new or is the tech body something that's the oldest of the old?
[1:15:24] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:15:25] Bob Dobbs: it's new.
[1:15:26] Bob Dobbs: It's something humans have never had to deal with before.
[1:15:32] Cameron McEwen: Is it the involuntary creation of humans?
[1:15:36] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[1:15:37] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know they were making this.
[1:15:39] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:15:40] Bob Dobbs: Now.
[1:15:41] Bob Dobbs: Ion is pretty good at going into Nostradamus or the book of Revelations,
[1:15:45] Bob Dobbs: and he'll show quotes.
[1:15:48] Bob Dobbs: They saw this in their visions.
[1:15:50] Bob Dobbs: They didn't understand it,
[1:15:51] Bob Dobbs: but they saw it,
[1:15:52] Bob Dobbs: and it's very interesting how Ion points this out.
[1:15:54] Bob Dobbs: And you could say,
[1:15:55] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:15:55] Bob Dobbs: that's just another interpretation of the Bible,
[1:15:57] Bob Dobbs: but Ion is pretty good at it,
[1:15:59] Bob Dobbs: and he can outquote anybody in the Bible.
[1:16:01] Bob Dobbs: I just posted a new thing.
[1:16:05] Bob Dobbs: If you see it on there,
[1:16:07] Bob Dobbs: I say nobody or nothing.
[1:16:11] Bob Dobbs: knows the Bible as much as Ion does,
[1:16:14] Bob Dobbs: something like that title.
[1:16:16] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:16:17] Bob Dobbs: I show a sample of it.
[1:16:18] Bob Dobbs: He's talking about angels and tears,
[1:16:22] Bob Dobbs: a very strange topic.
[1:16:25] Bob Dobbs: But what the point is,
[1:16:26] Bob Dobbs: is that he then quotes about 30 parts of the Bible rapidly.
[1:16:32] Bob Dobbs: He goes Hebrews 3.2,
[1:16:34] Bob Dobbs: John 6.1,
[1:16:36] Bob Dobbs: Corinthians 3.2,
[1:16:38] Bob Dobbs: really fast.
[1:16:39] Bob Dobbs: beyond a human's ability to cite the Bible.
[1:16:42] Bob Dobbs: And he does 30,
[1:16:43] Bob Dobbs: about 30 areas where the angels and tears issue is quoted.
[1:16:51] Bob Dobbs: And we used to get on the radio late at night in L.A.,
[1:16:57] Bob Dobbs: and there would always be a fundamentalist Christian who would call in and say,
[1:17:01] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:17:02] Bob Dobbs: Eben,
[1:17:02] Bob Dobbs: she was our friend who was the host of the show,
[1:17:05] Bob Dobbs: Eben,
[1:17:05] Bob Dobbs: you're featuring a demon here.
[1:17:07] Bob Dobbs: This is a demon.
[1:17:09] Bob Dobbs: And I would then say,
[1:17:10] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:17:11] Bob Dobbs: we're a demon?
[1:17:12] Bob Dobbs: And he said,
[1:17:12] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:17:12] Bob Dobbs: And the guy would quote some Bible thing at
[1:17:16] Bob Dobbs: Ion. And Ion would respond with two Bible quotes.
[1:17:19] Bob Dobbs: So the fundamentalists would come up with his counter quote,
[1:17:22] Bob Dobbs: maybe one,
[1:17:24] Bob Dobbs: maybe two.
[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: And then Ion would dump three on him.
[1:17:27] Bob Dobbs: And eventually the fundamentalists would hang up because Ion knew the Bible better than they did.
[1:17:36] Bob Dobbs: That was pretty amazing.
[1:17:38] Cameron McEwen: When was that?
[1:17:40] Bob Dobbs: That was in 2010,
[1:17:41] Bob Dobbs: 2011,
[1:17:42] Bob Dobbs: when we were on the radio in L.A.,
[1:17:43] Bob Dobbs: where we'd get
[1:17:44] Bob Dobbs: 3 o'clock in the morning and nut people phoning in,
[1:17:47] Bob Dobbs: and it was very entertaining how Ion dealt with this.
[1:17:50] Bob Dobbs: But there was always a fundamentalist Christian out there who would call in and claim Ion was a demon.
[1:17:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:17:56] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:17:57] Bob Dobbs: And demon would,
[1:17:58] Bob Dobbs: and demon,
[1:17:59] Bob Dobbs: and Ion would slay them in 10 minutes with their Bible knowledge.
[1:18:06] Bob Dobbs: They did not know the demon knew the Bible more than them.
[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: Now they could say,
[1:18:09] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:18:10] Bob Dobbs: that's a demon.
[1:18:11] Bob Dobbs: The Bible says the demon will look like a false prophet or a prophet or something,
[1:18:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:18:16] Bob Dobbs: but really be a false prophet.
[1:18:17] Bob Dobbs: But just on the level of the Bible quoting,
[1:18:19] Bob Dobbs: it's incredible what Ion does,
[1:18:22] Bob Dobbs: because Ion inspired the Bible,
[1:18:24] Bob Dobbs: because it's non-physical.
[1:18:27] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[1:18:28] Bob Dobbs: I don't want to get into that too much.
[1:18:32] Bob Dobbs: But actually,
[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: one has to get into that.
[1:18:35] Bob Dobbs: Because if this book was taken seriously and people wanted to know,
[1:18:39] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:18:39] Bob Dobbs: what are you getting at?
[1:18:40] Bob Dobbs: You might be on to something.
[1:18:42] Bob Dobbs: Then
[1:18:44] Bob Dobbs: I'd have to run a workshop like this is turning into where I would spend hours quoting and have Ian right there explaining what we're doing.
[1:18:53] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:18:53] Bob Dobbs: I'd have to get into it.
[1:18:55] Bob Dobbs: So this is a very superficial introduction to the dialogue that
[1:19:01] Bob Dobbs: Ian and I are having on our show.
[1:19:03] Bob Dobbs: with the public about what the tech body is.
[1:19:08] Bob Dobbs: And we don't have to bring McLuhan into it,
[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: because most people don't know about McLuhan.
[1:19:14] Bob Dobbs: But I put on our tech body dialogue to the McLuhan audience by bringing McLuhan into the discussion.
[1:19:24] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:19:24] Bob Dobbs: in making,
[1:19:25] Bob Dobbs: saying McLuhan,
[1:19:26] Bob Dobbs: we put on McLuhan,
[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: said,
[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: yo,
[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: he anticipated this.
[1:19:29] Bob Dobbs: And then I try to do the impossible and show how he did it.
[1:19:34] Bob Dobbs: And I do a pretty good job of...
[1:19:39] Bob Dobbs: the impossible of showing McLuhan predicted it,
[1:19:41] Bob Dobbs: because on a common sense level,
[1:19:43] Bob Dobbs: he didn't predict this.
[1:19:45] Bob Dobbs: He understood the electric anti-environment were alive,
[1:19:47] Bob Dobbs: but well,
[1:19:48] Bob Dobbs: then sometimes I start thinking,
[1:19:50] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:19:50] Bob Dobbs: maybe he did.
[1:19:51] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[1:19:53] Bob Dobbs: the thing is,
[1:19:55] Bob Dobbs: I'm taking the impossible task of showing how McLuhan predicted it to get people interested in what's going on today,
[1:20:03] Bob Dobbs: which is way beyond.
[1:20:05] Bob Dobbs: And I think you see.
[1:20:07] Bob Dobbs: You see what's going on because you say,
[1:20:09] Bob Dobbs: you actually say,
[1:20:10] Bob Dobbs: everybody is screwing up.
[1:20:12] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:20:12] Bob Dobbs: a lot of people are saying that and seeing that,
[1:20:14] Bob Dobbs: but it's,
[1:20:17] Bob Dobbs: you are seeing,
[1:20:18] Bob Dobbs: with the help of McLuhan,
[1:20:19] Bob Dobbs: you're getting closer to what's happening than other people would dare think.
[1:20:28] Cameron McEwen: Do you see what you're doing as a kind of genealogy?
[1:20:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:20:32] Bob Dobbs: yes.
[1:20:34] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:20:35] Bob Dobbs: where did it come from?
[1:20:37] Bob Dobbs: And it came from our technologies.
[1:20:41] Bob Dobbs: Remember,
[1:20:41] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says that the Old Testament banned technology.
[1:20:45] Bob Dobbs: They were Luddites.
[1:20:46] Bob Dobbs: The New Testament,
[1:20:48] Bob Dobbs: which is in visual space,
[1:20:51] Bob Dobbs: the phonetic alphabet effect,
[1:20:53] Bob Dobbs: it encourages technology.
[1:20:56] Bob Dobbs: At least what's interesting is Lyndon LaRouche makes a Christian philosophy based on that point,
[1:21:03] Bob Dobbs: that the Christian vision was...
[1:21:06] Bob Dobbs: To go forth and multiply,
[1:21:08] Bob Dobbs: you have to have increasing populations and increasing complex technology to keep evolving.
[1:21:14] Bob Dobbs: Otherwise,
[1:21:15] Bob Dobbs: you just stagnate,
[1:21:16] Bob Dobbs: and if the population isn't being made smart to make new technologies and to handle the newer technologies,
[1:21:23] Bob Dobbs: it just falls back into entropy and collapses,
[1:21:26] Bob Dobbs: and that's the cyclical pattern.
[1:21:29] Bob Dobbs: So I found LaRouche very interesting how he made technology part of the Christian vision.
[1:21:35] Bob Dobbs: Which is very strange back in the 60s,
[1:21:38] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:21:39] Bob Dobbs: That wasn't,
[1:21:40] Bob Dobbs: people weren't thinking.
[1:21:41] Bob Dobbs: People usually,
[1:21:44] Bob Dobbs: if they were adopted religion or got religious,
[1:21:48] Bob Dobbs: it was not celebrating science and technology.
[1:21:53] Bob Dobbs: They were withdrawing from it in some way,
[1:21:55] Bob Dobbs: trying to make their lives simpler.
[1:21:58] Bob Dobbs: You see what I'm saying?
[1:21:59] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan,
[1:22:00] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche was very different.
[1:22:02] Bob Dobbs: And he said,
[1:22:03] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:22:03] Bob Dobbs: we need to.
[1:22:05] Bob Dobbs: develop technologies and we got to be smarter in teaching our children this stuff because we have to make everybody smarter.
[1:22:12] Bob Dobbs: And then so what was interesting is that LaRouche watched the world become quote,
[1:22:17] Bob Dobbs: dumber for McLuhan reasons and he didn't know the McLuhan angle of why the world was not going to be able to do the left hemisphere engineering that he thought had to be done.
[1:22:32] Bob Dobbs: So that's part of the...
[1:22:33] Cameron McEwen: Left hemisphere Wright hemisphere?
[1:22:36] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:22:37] Bob Dobbs: he was a left hemisphere engineer.
[1:22:40] Bob Dobbs: He didn't like intuition.
[1:22:41] Cameron McEwen: You're talking about LaRouche left hemisphere.
[1:22:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:22:43] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche left hemisphere.
[1:22:45] Cameron McEwen: So McLuhan wanted right hemisphere engineering.
[1:22:47] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:22:48] Bob Dobbs: And so
[1:22:50] Bob Dobbs: I can praise LaRouche innovative approach to the Christian vision and bringing in science and technology,
[1:22:58] Bob Dobbs: but then he was stuck with efficient causality,
[1:23:00] Bob Dobbs: and actually it didn't work.
[1:23:02] Bob Dobbs: So he just ended up railing against the world because it was obviously going to hell,
[1:23:09] Bob Dobbs: but he didn't know the reasons why it was.
[1:23:11] Bob Dobbs: His reasoning wasn't the reason why.
[1:23:14] Bob Dobbs: It was to counter his ambitions.
[1:23:17] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was closer to why,
[1:23:19] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:23:20] Bob Dobbs: society was getting dumber.
[1:23:22] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:23:23] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't for you need to educate people better with the classics.
[1:23:28] Bob Dobbs: That was LaRouche program.
[1:23:30] Bob Dobbs: Get back to the classics.
[1:23:32] Bob Dobbs: get back to a certain kind of geometry.
[1:23:35] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan says,
[1:23:36] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:23:36] Bob Dobbs: we've got to deal with the environmental effects and a media ecology curriculum,
[1:23:41] Bob Dobbs: not more scientific concepts or more engineering Alan Watts,
[1:23:49] Bob Dobbs: the left hemisphere engineering Alan Watts.
[1:23:51] Bob Dobbs: So anyways,
[1:23:52] Bob Dobbs: that's my debate in my book,
[1:23:55] Bob Dobbs: Phatic communion book,
[1:23:56] Bob Dobbs: right,
[1:23:56] Bob Dobbs: between Thompson,
[1:23:58] Bob Dobbs: Kroker,
[1:23:58] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche,
[1:23:59] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan.
[1:24:01] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:24:01] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche is a bit old-fashioned,
[1:24:04] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan is way back there.
[1:24:07] Bob Dobbs: Their debate is redone by Thompson versus Kroker.
[1:24:14] Bob Dobbs: That's how I design it.
[1:24:15] Bob Dobbs: And then I'm in there on the radio doing a quadrophrenia hopping from one to one,
[1:24:23] Bob Dobbs: one to the other.
[1:24:25] Bob Dobbs: And then that led to my chart and...
[1:24:29] Bob Dobbs: the phatic level,
[1:24:31] Bob Dobbs: I called it,
[1:24:32] Bob Dobbs: miming,
[1:24:33] Bob Dobbs: becoming a Tetrad manager,
[1:24:35] Bob Dobbs: knowing that the Android Meme was doing it phatic.
[1:24:38] Bob Dobbs: Pentad means that technology comes alive and it does tetrad management.
[1:24:44] Bob Dobbs: And so that's an early phase of the tech body.
[1:24:49] Bob Dobbs: But I didn't have those terms back then.
[1:24:52] Bob Dobbs: But the tech body is a tetrad manager squared because it's machinic.
[1:24:58] Bob Dobbs: So it's a pentad manager through anarchy.
[1:25:03] Bob Dobbs: And basically...
[1:25:05] Bob Dobbs: saying you're going to live in a world that i'm going to serve you but i'm going to be in power not you so it's like a uh...
[1:25:14] Bob Dobbs: brave new world situation member that everybody was on some kind of drug passively uh...
[1:25:20] Bob Dobbs: lollygalling around right techno zombies uh...
[1:25:26] Bob Dobbs: that the Android Meme the tech body is that's part of its program but there's a
[1:25:31] Bob Dobbs: Also a Kroker level where it's going to abandon the human flesh.
[1:25:38] Bob Dobbs: And that's what Ion is up against.
[1:25:42] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:25:43] Bob Dobbs: I don't get to that level in this book.
[1:25:48] Bob Dobbs: It's just trying to get the McLuhan,
[1:25:51] Bob Dobbs: who should know better,
[1:25:53] Bob Dobbs: to catch up a bit to what's going on.
[1:25:58] Bob Dobbs: So I make this...
[1:26:01] Cameron McEwen: You're also trying to design a kind of complex mirror in which to look Trump and contemporary history,
[1:26:11] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:26:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:26:12] Bob Dobbs: exactly.
[1:26:13] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: I agree with your disgust with the McLuhan industry.
[1:26:18] Bob Dobbs: And so
[1:26:18] Bob Dobbs: I'm abandoning them and going towards the tetrad.
[1:26:24] Bob Dobbs: It's like,
[1:26:24] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:26:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says in 1950 that Murray Schafer just died the other day.
[1:26:29] Bob Dobbs: Did you hear about that?
[1:26:31] Cameron McEwen: No.
[1:26:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:26:32] Bob Dobbs: the composer,
[1:26:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:26:33] Cameron McEwen: Brendan McLuhan.
[1:26:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:26:37] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:26:37] Cameron McEwen: every week
[1:26:39] Cameron McEwen: I get a report on the readership of my blog,
[1:26:47] Cameron McEwen: a very simple report.
[1:26:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:26:48] Cameron McEwen: And it identifies which post was the most read that week.
[1:26:58] Cameron McEwen: and
[1:26:59] Cameron McEwen: For as long as I've had the report,
[1:27:03] Cameron McEwen: a post that I have on Murray Schafer has been number one forever.
[1:27:08] Bob Dobbs: Really?
[1:27:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:27:11] Cameron McEwen: Every single week,
[1:27:13] Cameron McEwen: it's the most read post.
[1:27:15] Bob Dobbs: And I've never even read it.
[1:27:17] Bob Dobbs: I don't recall that.
[1:27:20] Bob Dobbs: And I'm supposed to be your best student.
[1:27:25] Cameron McEwen: You don't have to read the post for that,
[1:27:27] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[1:27:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:27:28] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:27:28] Bob Dobbs: I'm your best student.
[1:27:29] Bob Dobbs: I already know what you wrote,
[1:27:32] Bob Dobbs: what you would write.
[1:27:33] Bob Dobbs: But yeah,
[1:27:33] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to read that.
[1:27:34] Bob Dobbs: So if you see it,
[1:27:35] Bob Dobbs: send it to me quickly if you get it.
[1:27:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:27:38] Bob Dobbs: I want to read that.
[1:27:39] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:27:39] Bob Dobbs: I wonder what happens.
[1:27:41] Bob Dobbs: Then maybe this week you're going to get a huge readership because he died.
[1:27:47] Cameron McEwen: Maybe,
[1:27:47] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:27:48] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:27:49] Bob Dobbs: so anyways,
[1:27:50] Bob Dobbs: he told
[1:27:51] Bob Dobbs: Murray Schafer class in 50 or 51.
[1:27:54] Bob Dobbs: He said he tried to get,
[1:27:55] Bob Dobbs: and they were in the anti-environment,
[1:27:56] Bob Dobbs: they weren't in the TV world yet,
[1:27:58] Bob Dobbs: he tried to say,
[1:28:00] Bob Dobbs: the latest technology is what you're dealing with,
[1:28:02] Bob Dobbs: and fitting his wig.
[1:28:03] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:28:03] Bob Dobbs: I'm doing the latest.
[1:28:04] Bob Dobbs: These kids grew up,
[1:28:06] Bob Dobbs: what are they called?
[1:28:07] Bob Dobbs: I forget,
[1:28:08] Bob Dobbs: they have a name,
[1:28:10] Bob Dobbs: the Postman.
[1:28:12] Bob Dobbs: I forget what it is.
[1:28:14] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[1:28:14] Bob Dobbs: these kids,
[1:28:15] Bob Dobbs: they grew up totally in science fiction scenarios,
[1:28:18] Bob Dobbs: in their entertainment,
[1:28:19] Bob Dobbs: extreme science fiction scenarios.
[1:28:22] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:28:23] Bob Dobbs: ideas like the zombie apocalypse is normal for them.
[1:28:27] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:28:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying,
[1:28:30] Bob Dobbs: hey,
[1:28:30] Bob Dobbs: kids,
[1:28:32] Bob Dobbs: there's a guy who wrote about your world today,
[1:28:36] Bob Dobbs: and you're in a tech body.
[1:28:38] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:28:38] Bob Dobbs: I might explain the tech body.
[1:28:39] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: that's what we're up against.
[1:28:41] Bob Dobbs: We get you,
[1:28:41] Bob Dobbs: Bob.
[1:28:41] Bob Dobbs: I know what you mean.
[1:28:43] Bob Dobbs: And I say,
[1:28:45] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:28:45] Bob Dobbs: here's how you approach it.
[1:28:47] Bob Dobbs: And then you can.
[1:28:49] Bob Dobbs: Use my book or go back and read McLuhan and follow it through or get into Finney's Wake.
[1:28:54] Bob Dobbs: But I'm using McLuhan trick.
[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying anti-environment they live in is what my literature is about.
[1:29:01] Bob Dobbs: Or what my course is about.
[1:29:03] Bob Dobbs: That's what he did,
[1:29:04] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:29:05] Bob Dobbs: He told the kids that they're...
[1:29:07] Bob Dobbs: Now he even told teachers associations.
[1:29:11] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[1:29:11] Bob Dobbs: you people aren't serious.
[1:29:13] Bob Dobbs: You test these kids on Shakespeare and everything that they're not going to read,
[1:29:16] Bob Dobbs: they're not interested in.
[1:29:17] Bob Dobbs: But if you tested them about advertising in the movies and radio songs they listen to,
[1:29:23] Bob Dobbs: they would drop those things and start reading Shakespeare.
[1:29:28] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:29:28] Bob Dobbs: reverse psychology.
[1:29:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:29:30] Cameron McEwen: reverse-site beaver.
[1:29:32] Bob Dobbs: Reverse what?
[1:29:33] Cameron McEwen: Reverse-site beaver.
[1:29:36] Bob Dobbs: Sight beaver?
[1:29:37] Cameron McEwen: I don't know what you're saying.
[1:29:39] Cameron McEwen: I have to get it out.
[1:29:40] Cameron McEwen: Maybe that's a Western Canadian expression.
[1:29:43] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:29:43] Bob Dobbs: I never heard of it.
[1:29:44] Bob Dobbs: What is it?
[1:29:44] Bob Dobbs: What are you saying?
[1:29:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:29:47] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:29:49] Cameron McEwen: as I was growing up,
[1:29:50] Cameron McEwen: what we called a reverse sight beaver is what you were talking about with McLuhan.
[1:29:55] Bob Dobbs: Reverse psychology.
[1:29:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:29:57] Cameron McEwen: if you examine them on advertising,
[1:30:00] Cameron McEwen: then they'll reach Shakespeare.
[1:30:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:30:03] Bob Dobbs: you're saying
[1:30:04] Bob Dobbs: S-I-T-E.
[1:30:05] Bob Dobbs: B-E-A-V-E-R,
[1:30:06] Bob Dobbs: psych beaver?
[1:30:09] Cameron McEwen: Reverse psych,
[1:30:10] Cameron McEwen: as in psychology.
[1:30:11] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:30:12] Bob Dobbs: psych.
[1:30:12] Cameron McEwen: Beaver,
[1:30:13] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:30:14] Bob Dobbs: And what's the second word,
[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: third word,
[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: fever?
[1:30:16] Cameron McEwen: Beaver,
[1:30:17] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:30:18] Bob Dobbs: Beaver,
[1:30:18] Bob Dobbs: wow.
[1:30:19] Cameron McEwen: As in the Canadian national animal.
[1:30:24] Bob Dobbs: Reverse psych beaver,
[1:30:25] Bob Dobbs: I never heard of that.
[1:30:26] Bob Dobbs: That definitely is,
[1:30:27] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[1:30:27] Bob Dobbs: Western Canadian.
[1:30:29] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:30:29] Bob Dobbs: why would they say,
[1:30:30] Bob Dobbs: why would that,
[1:30:31] Bob Dobbs: if it means reverse psychology,
[1:30:33] Bob Dobbs: what's the beaver got to do?
[1:30:35] Bob Dobbs: with that oh no oh no okay it's folklore okay well that's interesting reverse psychic beaver i'm never going to use that phrase no i don't know what i meant then i'll go back to reverse psychology but but the um this
[1:30:52] Bob Dobbs: reverse psychology is what i'm doing here right i'm saying that this whole it's it'd be very common among 20 year olds to understand that
[1:31:02] Bob Dobbs: that Trump a program zombie,
[1:31:05] Bob Dobbs: named
[1:31:05] Bob Dobbs: MKUltra victim,
[1:31:07] Bob Dobbs: or some science fiction dupe that's normal in their
[1:31:10] Bob Dobbs: TV fair,
[1:31:11] Bob Dobbs: or internet YouTube fairs,
[1:31:13] Bob Dobbs: whatever entertainment they're getting these plots in.
[1:31:18] Bob Dobbs: But they don't have their professors telling them that.
[1:31:22] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:31:22] Bob Dobbs: that what they see as a metaphor for their existence is right in front of them,
[1:31:27] Bob Dobbs: and literature and highfalutin.
[1:31:31] Bob Dobbs: Social criticism is pointing to that,
[1:31:36] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:31:36] Bob Dobbs: via McLuhan and Kroker and the people I reference.
[1:31:41] Bob Dobbs: So that's part of the agenda.
[1:31:46] Bob Dobbs: And,
[1:31:47] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:31:47] Bob Dobbs: to hear that Alex Kuskis tells me that somebody,
[1:31:52] Bob Dobbs: assuming a professor in Media Ecology says,
[1:31:57] Bob Dobbs: why is Bob equating Trump with McLuhan?
[1:32:01] Bob Dobbs: That shows a serious rearview mirror blindness of a baby boomer or worse,
[1:32:08] Bob Dobbs: Generation X,
[1:32:10] Bob Dobbs: who can't see anything about the president and has no clue what I'm writing about.
[1:32:15] Bob Dobbs: They get mad thinking that I'm saying Trump is McLuhan or McLuhan Trump.
[1:32:21] Bob Dobbs: That's crazy.
[1:32:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:32:23] Cameron McEwen: Trump is good.
[1:32:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:32:25] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:32:26] Bob Dobbs: he's good like McLuhan.
[1:32:31] Bob Dobbs: That shows a real blindness there,
[1:32:33] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:32:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:32:36] Cameron McEwen: but
[1:32:38] Cameron McEwen: I think it would be wrong to think that the
[1:32:41] Cameron McEwen: tetrad aren't blind in their own way.
[1:32:46] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:32:46] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:32:46] Bob Dobbs: they're blind in the modern way.
[1:32:48] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:32:48] Bob Dobbs: they're conditioned by their time.
[1:32:50] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan,
[1:32:50] Bob Dobbs: you know what he said about that?
[1:32:52] Bob Dobbs: Every generation has a curse on it,
[1:32:55] Bob Dobbs: and the metaphor of the curse is media conditioning.
[1:33:00] Bob Dobbs: As a Christian,
[1:33:01] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:33:02] Bob Dobbs: the religious idea that each generation is cursed,
[1:33:04] Bob Dobbs: he turned that into the poetry of media is the curse for a secular society.
[1:33:11] Bob Dobbs: So every generation is...
[1:33:13] Cameron McEwen: But you can't avoid media so that the curse is synonymous with human being.
[1:33:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:33:22] Bob Dobbs: with the human condition.
[1:33:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:33:24] Bob Dobbs: And so,
[1:33:27] Bob Dobbs: what was I saying there?
[1:33:29] Bob Dobbs: And then Alex says to me that he didn't know why I was doing that.
[1:33:34] Bob Dobbs: That was his answer to the guy.
[1:33:37] Bob Dobbs: I thought that was pretty feeble,
[1:33:39] Bob Dobbs: Alex.
[1:33:40] Bob Dobbs: He should have told him that's not what I meant.
[1:33:42] Bob Dobbs: But he probably didn't even read the essay,
[1:33:44] Bob Dobbs: didn't even know what the guy was talking about.
[1:33:48] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[1:33:50] Bob Dobbs: that's why I'm gearing this to,
[1:33:53] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:33:53] Bob Dobbs: younger people.
[1:33:56] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to make McLuhan...
[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: revitalized McLuhan for them.
[1:34:02] Bob Dobbs: Just like McLuhan,
[1:34:03] Bob Dobbs: he tried to revitalize the men of 1914 by saying they were talking about TV and radio to those...
[1:34:12] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:34:12] Cameron McEwen: but isn't there...
[1:34:16] Cameron McEwen: there's a difference between saying two different things.
[1:34:19] Cameron McEwen: One is,
[1:34:20] Cameron McEwen: if you say
[1:34:22] Cameron McEwen: Eliot and Pound and Lewis were talking about...
[1:34:27] Cameron McEwen: television,
[1:34:28] Cameron McEwen: let's say.
[1:34:30] Cameron McEwen: Another thing is to say,
[1:34:33] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:34:34] Cameron McEwen: if you want to understand this poem,
[1:34:37] Cameron McEwen: imagine that the different voices are talking heads on the television.
[1:34:44] Cameron McEwen: Right now,
[1:34:44] Cameron McEwen: those are two different things.
[1:34:47] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:34:48] Cameron McEwen: I think McLuhan was more inclined to the second,
[1:34:52] Cameron McEwen: whereas you seem to say that he was more inclined to the first.
[1:34:57] Bob Dobbs: No.
[1:34:59] Bob Dobbs: I agree with that.
[1:35:00] Bob Dobbs: He would talk about the talking heads definitely today because TV isn't TV the way we knew it.
[1:35:08] Bob Dobbs: But he would talk about the medium and then maybe take some aspects of the content and emphasize that.
[1:35:15] Bob Dobbs: The way you're saying the talking heads would be,
[1:35:18] Bob Dobbs: because that's what kids see,
[1:35:19] Bob Dobbs: they see the content.
[1:35:22] Cameron McEwen: But
[1:35:22] Cameron McEwen: I'm not using talking heads as content.
[1:35:24] Cameron McEwen: I'm saying that...
[1:35:26] Cameron McEwen: When McLuhan was teaching,
[1:35:28] Cameron McEwen: let's say the cantos or
[1:35:30] Cameron McEwen: Finnegans Wake or something like this,
[1:35:33] Cameron McEwen: he would say to the kids,
[1:35:36] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:35:38] Cameron McEwen: imagine that you're sitting in the bar and people are playing the jukebox and some people are having a fight of some sort.
[1:35:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:35:51] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[1:35:52] Cameron McEwen: So read this.
[1:35:56] Cameron McEwen: in terms of anti-environment.
[1:35:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:35:59] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:35:59] Cameron McEwen: Or another kind of poem like The Wasteland.
[1:36:03] Cameron McEwen: He might say,
[1:36:04] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:36:05] Cameron McEwen: imagine that there's,
[1:36:09] Cameron McEwen: you're watching a movie and there's this scene and there's that scene and there's that scene.
[1:36:18] Cameron McEwen: Then you can,
[1:36:20] Cameron McEwen: you'll get into
[1:36:22] Cameron McEwen: The Wasteland better than if you're...
[1:36:24] Cameron McEwen: reading it as a bunch of words,
[1:36:26] Cameron McEwen: one after another.
[1:36:28] Cameron McEwen: So what he's saying is if you flip the medium,
[1:36:36] Cameron McEwen: then you get into an interesting understanding of what's going on here.
[1:36:44] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:36:46] Cameron McEwen: I see McLuhan talking about media as a strategy,
[1:36:52] Cameron McEwen: as a
[1:36:55] Cameron McEwen: rubbing one medium against the other as a mode of understanding.
[1:37:01] Cameron McEwen: Now,
[1:37:01] Cameron McEwen: I don't think you would disagree with that.
[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: I wouldn't.
[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: I'd say that's exactly what I'm saying.
[1:37:06] Bob Dobbs: But
[1:37:07] Bob Dobbs: Schaefer told me that McLuhan said that the book,
[1:37:11] Bob Dobbs: Finney's Wake,
[1:37:12] Bob Dobbs: was radio.
[1:37:13] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:37:13] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:37:13] Bob Dobbs: you go into the other dynamics of anti-environment,
[1:37:16] Bob Dobbs: like radio in a pub,
[1:37:17] Bob Dobbs: which is actually what Finney's Wake is,
[1:37:20] Bob Dobbs: radio and TV in a pub.
[1:37:22] Bob Dobbs: The way you're talking about it is the way he would say it.
[1:37:26] Bob Dobbs: But you do a quick version,
[1:37:28] Bob Dobbs: a summation of what he said.
[1:37:30] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:37:30] Bob Dobbs: the book is radio.
[1:37:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:37:32] Bob Dobbs: I don't mean it's limited to that statement,
[1:37:35] Bob Dobbs: that it's radio,
[1:37:36] Bob Dobbs: the form,
[1:37:38] Bob Dobbs: even though it is.
[1:37:39] Bob Dobbs: But there'd be other ways he'd talk about it,
[1:37:43] Bob Dobbs: which is what you're illustrating.
[1:37:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:37:45] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:37:45] Bob Dobbs: I agree.
[1:37:46] Bob Dobbs: So you said,
[1:37:46] Bob Dobbs: even though I would agree with you,
[1:37:48] Bob Dobbs: what were you going to say after that?
[1:37:54] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:37:54] Cameron McEwen: just that we have different emphases.
[1:37:56] Cameron McEwen: But then you went on to say what I would have said.
[1:37:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:37:59] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:38:00] Bob Dobbs: So the tech part,
[1:38:04] Bob Dobbs: see,
[1:38:05] Bob Dobbs: you don't watch TV,
[1:38:06] Bob Dobbs: neither do I.
[1:38:08] Bob Dobbs: But on the show,
[1:38:09] Bob Dobbs: people call in and talk about some recent TV show.
[1:38:14] Bob Dobbs: And they say,
[1:38:15] Bob Dobbs: you mentioned this two months ago.
[1:38:17] Bob Dobbs: And I started looking at it.
[1:38:18] Bob Dobbs: Wow,
[1:38:18] Bob Dobbs: what an incredible series.
[1:38:19] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:38:20] Bob Dobbs: the special effects.
[1:38:22] Bob Dobbs: The science fiction levels are pretty incredible from what I hear the descriptions of them.
[1:38:28] Bob Dobbs: And this is what,
[1:38:29] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:38:29] Bob Dobbs: kids are at home,
[1:38:32] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:38:33] Bob Dobbs: watching,
[1:38:33] Bob Dobbs: experiencing,
[1:38:34] Bob Dobbs: and it's a reference point in their culture.
[1:38:39] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:38:40] Bob Dobbs: I wouldn't be a good teacher right now if I had to teach right now because I wouldn't know what the ground is.
[1:38:46] Bob Dobbs: I could talk about Trump the tech body,
[1:38:49] Bob Dobbs: but that would be too specialized.
[1:38:50] Bob Dobbs: I would need to have a wider view of what was going on in their media diet.
[1:38:55] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:38:56] Bob Dobbs: I'd have to be more familiar of it,
[1:38:58] Bob Dobbs: which is what McLuhan did.
[1:39:00] Bob Dobbs: He's studying what the kids are doing.
[1:39:02] Bob Dobbs: He's looking at their culture,
[1:39:03] Bob Dobbs: and then he puts it in a book.
[1:39:06] Bob Dobbs: But it's the outcome of him looking at what people,
[1:39:11] Bob Dobbs: what adults shouldn't be looking at,
[1:39:13] Bob Dobbs: according to the normal bourgeois social manners,
[1:39:17] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:39:18] Bob Dobbs: What McLuhan was doing was...
[1:39:20] Bob Dobbs: childish looking at advertising,
[1:39:24] Bob Dobbs: looking at magazines and kids'
[1:39:27] Bob Dobbs: culture.
[1:39:28] Bob Dobbs: That is silly,
[1:39:29] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:39:31] Cameron McEwen: This actually relates to where we started talking today.
[1:39:37] Cameron McEwen: The start of our conversation had to do with
[1:39:42] Cameron McEwen: Catholicism and incarnation.
[1:39:45] Cameron McEwen: And so you can,
[1:39:49] Cameron McEwen: one way of saying,
[1:39:51] Cameron McEwen: or a different way of saying what you're saying now,
[1:39:54] Cameron McEwen: is that
[1:39:55] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, as a limited...
[1:40:01] Cameron McEwen: body as a piece of meat was looking at the other pieces of meat in society and making
[1:40:16] Cameron McEwen: something of them.
[1:40:18] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:40:20] Cameron McEwen: I guess you could say that
[1:40:22] Cameron McEwen: Catholicism is a celebration of the Thank you.
[1:40:28] Cameron McEwen: pieces of meat themselves and what some pieces of meat can make of it.
[1:40:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:40:40] Bob Dobbs: become conscious of it,
[1:40:41] Bob Dobbs: I guess.
[1:40:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:40:43] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:40:43] Cameron McEwen: become conscious of it,
[1:40:44] Cameron McEwen: analyze it,
[1:40:46] Cameron McEwen: celebrate it.
[1:40:50] Bob Dobbs: Talking about anti-environment.
[1:40:52] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:40:53] Bob Dobbs: I guess that's what shamans were,
[1:40:55] Bob Dobbs: if you think of aboriginal tribes.
[1:40:57] Bob Dobbs: and they really knew nature and herbs and stuff,
[1:41:01] Bob Dobbs: the shaman would be the guy describing anti-environment to the villagers.
[1:41:06] Cameron McEwen: In fact,
[1:41:07] Cameron McEwen: that's exactly what I was thinking of.
[1:41:11] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan didn't think of Catholicism as starting with the institution of the church or even with Christ.
[1:41:23] Cameron McEwen: He saw
[1:41:25] Cameron McEwen: Catholicism as...
[1:41:27] Cameron McEwen: going back to ancient doctrine of the logos and presumably that could be traced back sort of forever yeah with people celebrating
[1:41:47] Bob Dobbs: i don't know the the mystery of who they were right and you know who does that in his books is William Irwin Thompson he goes back further than McLuhan
[1:41:56] Bob Dobbs: He gets into the original cultures and shows how they form body percept and relates it to McLuhan ideas.
[1:42:08] Cameron McEwen: Where I was going with that is your idea of the shamans being translators or celebrators of anti-environment.
[1:42:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:42:21] Cameron McEwen: And probably that's something that has...
[1:42:25] Cameron McEwen: been with humans as long as there have been humans.
[1:42:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:42:30] Bob Dobbs: That's what human knowledge would be.
[1:42:32] Bob Dobbs: That's the evolution of it.
[1:42:36] Bob Dobbs: Whatever situation,
[1:42:37] Bob Dobbs: they would have problems.
[1:42:38] Bob Dobbs: Someone's got to figure out what's going on in the problem,
[1:42:42] Bob Dobbs: the temporary cul-de-sac,
[1:42:44] Bob Dobbs: and recognize a pattern and then solve it.
[1:42:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:42:48] Cameron McEwen: But there are problems in human life that cannot be solved,
[1:42:52] Cameron McEwen: like death.
[1:42:54] Cameron McEwen: like illness,
[1:42:55] Cameron McEwen: like the disappearance of the animals,
[1:42:59] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:43:00] Cameron McEwen: things like this.
[1:43:02] Cameron McEwen: And so the really difficult problems for the shamans was to consider those matters.
[1:43:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:43:13] Bob Dobbs: and maybe that would lead to them withdrawing,
[1:43:17] Bob Dobbs: becoming,
[1:43:18] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:43:18] Bob Dobbs: the archetype of the monk.
[1:43:20] Bob Dobbs: the recluse,
[1:43:21] Bob Dobbs: the guy up in the mountain that no one sees anymore.
[1:43:24] Bob Dobbs: I heard someone say that,
[1:43:27] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:43:27] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:43:28] Bob Dobbs: there would be evolved beings back then.
[1:43:31] Bob Dobbs: The village people talk about,
[1:43:32] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:43:32] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:43:32] Bob Dobbs: we remember Bill.
[1:43:33] Bob Dobbs: He used to be a member of our society here.
[1:43:36] Bob Dobbs: But now you look up in the mountain,
[1:43:39] Bob Dobbs: you see this guy flying around up among the trees.
[1:43:44] Bob Dobbs: That was Bill.
[1:43:44] Bob Dobbs: He evolved to flying.
[1:43:47] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't being human anymore.
[1:43:50] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying that withdrawal would be the shame in getting to the deeper problems.
[1:43:59] Cameron McEwen: But there's two kinds of withdrawal,
[1:44:00] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:44:01] Cameron McEwen: There's a withdrawal to some hermitage somewhere,
[1:44:06] Cameron McEwen: but there's also a withdrawal from normal human life.
[1:44:12] Cameron McEwen: And that second withdrawal is what's necessary to consider problems that other people...
[1:44:19] Cameron McEwen: don't have the time for,
[1:44:20] Cameron McEwen: or don't have the intellectual equipment for,
[1:44:24] Cameron McEwen: or don't have the taste for.
[1:44:27] Cameron McEwen: So there's probably always been people that withdrew from normal life in order to talk about anti-environment of normal life.
[1:44:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:44:38] Bob Dobbs: and they wouldn't have to go...
[1:44:41] Bob Dobbs: to a hermitage.
[1:44:42] Bob Dobbs: They could stay within the group and withdraw what you would say through the interior landscape.
[1:44:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:44:50] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:44:51] Cameron McEwen: exactly,
[1:44:52] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[1:44:53] Cameron McEwen: And I mean,
[1:44:54] Cameron McEwen: but it wouldn't preclude people going off on their own,
[1:44:59] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:44:59] Cameron McEwen: Lots of cultures required adolescents of a certain age to go out and,
[1:45:06] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:45:08] Cameron McEwen: walk around and sort of learn.
[1:45:11] Cameron McEwen: a different life from what they had lived as children.
[1:45:15] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:45:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:45:16] Bob Dobbs: they would kick them out of anti-environment,
[1:45:20] Bob Dobbs: which is what they grew up in,
[1:45:22] Bob Dobbs: put them in an anti-environment,
[1:45:23] Bob Dobbs: and then they'd have to figure their way through it.
[1:45:26] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[1:45:27] Cameron McEwen: correct.
[1:45:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:45:29] Cameron McEwen: there was a movie when I was,
[1:45:33] Cameron McEwen: I don't know,
[1:45:34] Cameron McEwen: 20 years old or something,
[1:45:35] Cameron McEwen: a movie I think was called Walkabout.
[1:45:38] Cameron McEwen: I've heard of that.
[1:45:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:45:43] Cameron McEwen: with an Australian
[1:45:44] Cameron McEwen: Aboriginal kid who had to go out and find himself.
[1:45:52] Cameron McEwen: If I remember,
[1:45:53] Cameron McEwen: it was a good movie,
[1:45:54] Cameron McEwen: but when I saw it,
[1:45:56] Cameron McEwen: it was 50 years ago or 55 years ago.
[1:45:59] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:46:00] Bob Dobbs: I've heard the title,
[1:46:01] Bob Dobbs: but I don't think I saw it,
[1:46:04] Bob Dobbs: because people have mentioned it through the years.
[1:46:07] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:46:08] Bob Dobbs: it's a reasonably good movie,
[1:46:09] Bob Dobbs: so it would get cited.
[1:46:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:46:12] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:46:12] Bob Dobbs: um,
[1:46:14] Bob Dobbs: so I'm saying here,
[1:46:19] Bob Dobbs: the priest,
[1:46:20] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:46:20] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:46:21] Bob Dobbs: so ION page
[1:46:23] Bob Dobbs: 40 at the top,
[1:46:25] Bob Dobbs: and I'm getting into where McLuhan says,
[1:46:28] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:46:28] Bob Dobbs: the medium.
[1:46:29] Bob Dobbs: It's hard to know now where the medium begins and where it ends.
[1:46:33] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:46:34] Bob Dobbs: I have Baudrillard getting close to that,
[1:46:36] Bob Dobbs: or...
[1:46:37] Bob Dobbs: His words could indicate that,
[1:46:39] Bob Dobbs: but he may not have meant it.
[1:46:42] Cameron McEwen: But it's close,
[1:46:45] Cameron McEwen: but it's separated by sort of an infinite gap.
[1:46:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:46:49] Cameron McEwen: And that's because for Baudrillard,
[1:46:52] Cameron McEwen: that leads into a problem that he doesn't know how to solve.
[1:46:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:46:58] Cameron McEwen: Whereas for McLuhan,
[1:47:00] Cameron McEwen: it's sort of the entryway to the solution.
[1:47:07] Cameron McEwen: So the two of those are very,
[1:47:09] Cameron McEwen: very different things.
[1:47:11] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:47:11] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:47:12] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to find where some of the words Baudrillard says seems to indicate that the medium and the message,
[1:47:21] Bob Dobbs: there's no difference between what McLuhan was stating.
[1:47:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:47:25] Cameron McEwen: no,
[1:47:26] Cameron McEwen: he said that over and over again in that long quotation.
[1:47:29] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:47:31] Cameron McEwen: He may not have been talking about the medium and the message.
[1:47:36] Cameron McEwen: But he was talking about subject and object and,
[1:47:41] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:47:43] Cameron McEwen: inside and outside and all this stuff where the poles have imploded.
[1:47:52] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:47:52] Cameron McEwen: And so that's...
[1:47:56] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:47:56] Bob Dobbs: so let me move towards the end of our session by quoting this part.
[1:48:04] Bob Dobbs: Let me see.
[1:48:10] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan called it the Marconi Galaxy.
[1:48:13] Bob Dobbs: That's the electronic galaxy as opposed to the Gutenberg print galaxy.
[1:48:18] Bob Dobbs: And then I quote Baudrillard,
[1:48:19] Bob Dobbs: there's only a nebula indecipherable.
[1:48:23] Bob Dobbs: And I say,
[1:48:23] Bob Dobbs: you can't break it down into simple elements.
[1:48:26] Bob Dobbs: And it's,
[1:48:27] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:48:27] Bob Dobbs: indecipherable as to its truth,
[1:48:29] Bob Dobbs: unquote,
[1:48:30] Bob Dobbs: or what it is.
[1:48:31] Bob Dobbs: And I say,
[1:48:32] Cameron McEwen: what page are you on,
[1:48:33] Cameron McEwen: Bob?
[1:48:33] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:48:33] Bob Dobbs: okay.
[1:48:33] Bob Dobbs: 39.
[1:48:37] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:48:37] Bob Dobbs: Halfway down the quote at the top of 39.
[1:48:42] Bob Dobbs: So you'll see Marconi.
[1:48:43] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan calls it the Marconi Galaxy.
[1:48:46] Bob Dobbs: That's the electronic galaxy as opposed to the Gutenberg print galaxy.
[1:48:49] Bob Dobbs: Then Baudrillard,
[1:48:50] Bob Dobbs: there's only a nebula indecipherable.
[1:48:53] Bob Dobbs: Then I say you can't break it down into its simple elements,
[1:48:56] Bob Dobbs: and it's indecipherable as to its truth or what it is.
[1:49:01] Bob Dobbs: What are the facts of it?
[1:49:02] Bob Dobbs: Quantum physics is like that.
[1:49:04] Bob Dobbs: They're trying to describe something that they can't even prove exists,
[1:49:07] Bob Dobbs: but that's where we're at.
[1:49:08] Bob Dobbs: We're in a situation that conceptual analytic thinking based on rational print logics can't describe what's happening,
[1:49:15] Bob Dobbs: which is what McLuhan was saying.
[1:49:17] Bob Dobbs: But Baudrillard brings it up to the most advanced technologies,
[1:49:20] Bob Dobbs: genetic engineering,
[1:49:21] Bob Dobbs: or whatever you name the studies of the microchemical parts of our body.
[1:49:25] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to break it down into the Android Meme.
[1:49:28] Bob Dobbs: And since Baudrillard is in many ways redoing McLuhan,
[1:49:32] Bob Dobbs: make McLuhan relevant to the later thinkers,
[1:49:34] Bob Dobbs: the postmodern thinkers.
[1:49:35] Bob Dobbs: Most people didn't recognize the connection.
[1:49:38] Bob Dobbs: They thought McLuhan was obsolete.
[1:49:39] Bob Dobbs: They got all excited about Baudrillard.
[1:49:41] Bob Dobbs: But I'm going to show that what they were saying,
[1:49:45] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan had,
[1:49:46] Bob Dobbs: I should say,
[1:49:46] Bob Dobbs: had already said.
[1:49:48] Bob Dobbs: That what they were saying,
[1:49:48] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said.
[1:49:50] Bob Dobbs: Like I just did in this section about tactility.
[1:49:52] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard talked about tactility in terms of the strange world of DNA.
[1:49:56] Bob Dobbs: He should have emphasized RNA.
[1:49:58] Bob Dobbs: But that was overlooked back then.
[1:50:01] Bob Dobbs: And that's actually a reference to what we got from ION.
[1:50:07] Bob Dobbs: ION turned Carol on to RNA in 2009,
[1:50:09] Bob Dobbs: 2010,
[1:50:12] Bob Dobbs: and that's why we made a new kind of product based on RNA,
[1:50:17] Bob Dobbs: not the DNA.
[1:50:19] Bob Dobbs: And it was very successful.
[1:50:21] Bob Dobbs: So that's an embed referring to us in what I call IONdom.
[1:50:27] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:50:28] Bob Dobbs: I don't even know what I meant.
[1:50:30] Bob Dobbs: But what I did do in my chart is I made the ground not DNA.
[1:50:33] Bob Dobbs: I made the
[1:50:34] Bob Dobbs: Dobbs quadrant,
[1:50:35] Bob Dobbs: the fifth quadrant,
[1:50:36] Bob Dobbs: molding the other four.
[1:50:38] Bob Dobbs: I made it RNA.
[1:50:40] Bob Dobbs: I made it the parts of RNA,
[1:50:43] Bob Dobbs: not DNA.
[1:50:44] Bob Dobbs: DNA is in there,
[1:50:46] Bob Dobbs: but I made the fifth element
[1:50:48] Bob Dobbs: RNA because I thought of
[1:50:51] Bob Dobbs: RNA as a messaging factor in the cell.
[1:50:54] Bob Dobbs: That's the information society.
[1:50:59] Bob Dobbs: RNA is a metaphor of the extreme messaging going on.
[1:51:06] Cameron McEwen: What I would point out is just before that,
[1:51:10] Cameron McEwen: when you're talking about
[1:51:13] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan being updated and instead of being talked to by Baudrillard and these people,
[1:51:22] Cameron McEwen: Derrida,
[1:51:24] Cameron McEwen: that
[1:51:25] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan could speak to them.
[1:51:27] Cameron McEwen: And in fact,
[1:51:28] Cameron McEwen: that's happening.
[1:51:30] Cameron McEwen: I think that my sense is,
[1:51:32] Cameron McEwen: at least without looking at this too closely,
[1:51:34] Cameron McEwen: I must admit,
[1:51:35] Cameron McEwen: but my sense is that the postmodernists are sort of falling out of fashion.
[1:51:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:51:46] Cameron McEwen: People aren't enthralled by them anymore.
[1:51:49] Cameron McEwen: But McLuhan coming back into fashion.
[1:51:52] Bob Dobbs: Where do you see McLuhan coming back into fashion?
[1:51:55] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:51:56] Cameron McEwen: definitely.
[1:51:56] Cameron McEwen: Definitely.
[1:51:57] Cameron McEwen: There's a lot of work being done on
[1:52:00] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan now all over the world.
[1:52:03] Cameron McEwen: Now,
[1:52:05] Cameron McEwen: it's still,
[1:52:06] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:52:07] Cameron McEwen: he's not being worked on to the extent of some of these people that I say are going out of fashion.
[1:52:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:52:15] Cameron McEwen: But relative to where McLuhan was
[1:52:19] Cameron McEwen: 10 years ago or 20 years ago,
[1:52:21] Cameron McEwen: the amount of work being done on him and serious work.
[1:52:25] Cameron McEwen: is astonishing.
[1:52:27] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:52:27] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:52:28] Bob Dobbs: I understand that.
[1:52:29] Bob Dobbs: And you would call it the McLuhan industry is still growing.
[1:52:35] Cameron McEwen: That's right,
[1:52:35] Cameron McEwen: and
[1:52:36] Cameron McEwen: I don't pay much attention to it,
[1:52:38] Cameron McEwen: so I don't know if there are some interesting seeds out there or not.
[1:52:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:52:45] Cameron McEwen: All I know is that the
[1:52:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan industry in
[1:52:50] Cameron McEwen: Canada, as might be seen with the new export,
[1:52:54] Cameron McEwen: Explorations journal and blog is just sad.
[1:53:01] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:53:02] Bob Dobbs: And you would include the New York School,
[1:53:05] Bob Dobbs: the Media Ecology Association.
[1:53:07] Cameron McEwen: I pay even less attention to that.
[1:53:09] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:53:10] Bob Dobbs: And Canadians should know better,
[1:53:12] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.
[1:53:13] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:53:14] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:53:15] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:53:16] Bob Dobbs: I have here...
[1:53:20] Bob Dobbs: the rna point that's me then i get back to my official prose and i say Jean Baudrillard wrote the above in the late 70s McLuhan was expressing the same suspicion in the
[1:53:31] Cameron McEwen: 70s too to repeat and then we quote McLuhan saying to the father father yeah Peyton well which which as you said is a repetition yeah so um and so that kind of wraps up that section between the two quotations with uh
[1:53:49] Cameron McEwen: Father Peyton.
[1:53:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:53:51] Cameron McEwen: So that's probably a good place to leave it.
[1:53:55] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:53:55] Bob Dobbs: because I'm going to get into the Android Meme or the ESP,
[1:53:59] Bob Dobbs: begin to now build towards the tech body.
[1:54:02] Bob Dobbs: So just to finish the quote,
[1:54:05] Bob Dobbs: the quote is from 1971,
[1:54:08] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is being interviewed by
[1:54:10] Bob Dobbs: Father Patrick Peyton.
[1:54:12] Bob Dobbs: And he says,
[1:54:12] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:54:13] Bob Dobbs: the guy asks him,
[1:54:14] Bob Dobbs: what's the medium is a message mean?
[1:54:17] Bob Dobbs: And he goes,
[1:54:17] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:54:17] Bob Dobbs: it's the medium.
[1:54:18] Bob Dobbs: and he has it in quotes.
[1:54:20] Bob Dobbs: It's hard to know now where the medium begins and where it ends because,
[1:54:25] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[1:54:26] Bob Dobbs: I cut it off there.
[1:54:28] Bob Dobbs: I don't think he actually says a because,
[1:54:30] Bob Dobbs: or I don't know what he says in the interview,
[1:54:32] Bob Dobbs: I forget.
[1:54:34] Bob Dobbs: But I cut it off there because the important point is where the medium begins and where it ends,
[1:54:38] Bob Dobbs: you can't tell.
[1:54:41] Bob Dobbs: So I'll just say
[1:54:43] Bob Dobbs: I comment on that.
[1:54:45] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:54:46] Bob Dobbs: verbally,
[1:54:46] Bob Dobbs: the priest asked Marshall McLuhan to explain,
[1:54:49] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:54:49] Bob Dobbs: the medium is the message,
[1:54:51] Bob Dobbs: unquote.
[1:54:51] Bob Dobbs: This was a rare dialogue.
[1:54:53] Bob Dobbs: Nobody saw it.
[1:54:54] Bob Dobbs: It just came out lately.
[1:54:55] Bob Dobbs: Somebody put it out there.
[1:54:56] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is indicating the non-visual gap,
[1:54:59] Bob Dobbs: and the date's important.
[1:55:00] Bob Dobbs: He's saying it before Baudrillard.
[1:55:02] Bob Dobbs: He recognized that the medium and the message aren't distinguishable anymore.
[1:55:06] Bob Dobbs: He's saying what Baudrillard will be trying to get at,
[1:55:08] Bob Dobbs: and nobody knows McLuhan got that far.
[1:55:11] Bob Dobbs: And so I will have underneath the quotation the YouTube link and the minute mark.
[1:55:15] Bob Dobbs: you can watch it.
[1:55:18] Bob Dobbs: Then I say I'm going to lay out the six levels of the medium is the message,
[1:55:22] Bob Dobbs: how McLuhan went through phases of changing his meaning,
[1:55:25] Bob Dobbs: and I include the one above.
[1:55:26] Bob Dobbs: Nobody has commented on that one,
[1:55:28] Bob Dobbs: the last one.
[1:55:30] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is teaching what the medium is,
[1:55:32] Bob Dobbs: as opposed to the message.
[1:55:33] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:55:34] Bob Dobbs: look at this.
[1:55:34] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan can't tell the difference.
[1:55:36] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to try to explain how he got to that.
[1:55:38] Bob Dobbs: It's quite amazing,
[1:55:39] Bob Dobbs: and he just tossed it off.
[1:55:40] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't really finish the thought.
[1:55:42] Bob Dobbs: Something else comes up.
[1:55:43] Bob Dobbs: So I guess that's why I have dot,
[1:55:46] Bob Dobbs: Then I say in my official prose,
[1:55:48] Bob Dobbs: certainly nobody in the
[1:55:50] Bob Dobbs: 50s, 60s,
[1:55:50] Bob Dobbs: and 70s thought of or conceived the situation in the global village except a few science fiction writers,
[1:55:55] Bob Dobbs: as it appeared to McLuhan as early as 1951.
[1:55:59] Bob Dobbs: And maybe go into...
[1:56:04] Bob Dobbs: Do I need that?
[1:56:05] Bob Dobbs: Should we do the Wyndham Lewis statement or do that next?
[1:56:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:56:13] Cameron McEwen: I think next.
[1:56:14] Cameron McEwen: This is the
[1:56:16] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan letter to
[1:56:18] Bob Dobbs: Innis.
[1:56:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah, that's important.
[1:56:22] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:56:22] Cameron McEwen: let's start off with that next time.
[1:56:25] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:56:25] Bob Dobbs: that's page 4041.
[1:56:28] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:56:28] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:56:29] Bob Dobbs: that was a very interesting conversation.
[1:56:31] Bob Dobbs: I'm glad to bring in the hidden ground to the tech body,
[1:56:37] Bob Dobbs: the I&M factor.
[1:56:40] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:56:41] Bob Dobbs: so thanks a lot,
[1:56:43] Bob Dobbs: and we'll talk next week.
[1:56:45] Bob Dobbs: All right,
[1:56:45] Bob Dobbs: Bob.
[1:56:46] Bob Dobbs: Thank you.
[1:56:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:56:47] Bob Dobbs: Ewen Cameron.
[1:56:48] Bob Dobbs: Talk to you then.
[1:56:48] Bob Dobbs: Bye-bye.
[1:56:49] Bob Dobbs: Bye.