Dialogue 57 — Transcript

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Hello,

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: this is Bob and Cameron McEwen,

[00:05] Bob Dobbs: and we're continuing our series on my book on Trump and the tech body.

[00:12] Bob Dobbs: And this is going to be the

[00:14] Bob Dobbs: 57th episode.

[00:16] Bob Dobbs: It's September 29th,

[00:17] Bob Dobbs: 2022.

[00:21] Bob Dobbs: And we are on page 115 at the top.

[00:25] Bob Dobbs: And we're going to start off with one of my favorite quotes,

[00:28] Bob Dobbs: which was on the back

[00:30] Bob Dobbs: of Take Today on the cover,

[00:32] Bob Dobbs: on the sleeve.

[00:34] Bob Dobbs: I don't think it was in the book.

[00:35] Bob Dobbs: What do you think?

[00:38] Bob Dobbs: Is this page in the book and it was just put on the cover?

[00:44] Bob Dobbs: I don't have a page for it inside the book.

[00:47] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[00:47] Bob Dobbs: Have you got a search thing for Take Today?

[00:52] Bob Dobbs: A PDF?

[00:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[00:54] Cameron McEwen: I can look that up.

[00:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[00:55] Bob Dobbs: look up undulated.

[00:57] Bob Dobbs: Undulated sirens.

[00:58] Bob Dobbs: That's a sentence.

[00:59] Bob Dobbs: That's two words.

[01:01] Cameron McEwen: You like phrases like that,

[01:02] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[01:03] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[01:04] Bob Dobbs: yes.

[01:05] Bob Dobbs: I'm a poet,

[01:05] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.

[01:08] Bob Dobbs: Old school.

[01:10] Bob Dobbs: Back before Homer.

[01:13] Bob Dobbs: So,

[01:14] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[01:15] Bob Dobbs: so this quote,

[01:16] Bob Dobbs: as you're looking,

[01:18] Bob Dobbs: I will say it's on the cover sleeve on the back of the book,

[01:21] Bob Dobbs: and the book is Take Today,

[01:22] Bob Dobbs: The Executive's Dropout,

[01:23] Bob Dobbs: 1972.

[01:25] Bob Dobbs: Very important book.

[01:26] Bob Dobbs: And here's the quote.

[01:28] Bob Dobbs: Barry Nevitt,

[01:29] Bob Dobbs: or McLuhan,

[01:30] Bob Dobbs: wrote,

[01:30] Bob Dobbs: most likely Barry Nevitt,

[01:32] Bob Dobbs: and then McLuhan approved it.

[01:35] Bob Dobbs: Half the world today is engaged in keeping the other half under surveillance.

[01:39] Bob Dobbs: And under surveillance is in quotes.

[01:42] Bob Dobbs: This,

[01:42] Bob Dobbs: in fact,

[01:42] Bob Dobbs: is the hang-up of the age of software,

[01:45] Bob Dobbs: and software is in quotes,

[01:47] Bob Dobbs: and information.

[01:49] Bob Dobbs: Software,

[01:50] Bob Dobbs: in quotes,

[01:50] Bob Dobbs: and information.

[01:52] Bob Dobbs: In the preceding hardware age,

[01:54] Bob Dobbs: hardware is in quotes,

[01:56] Bob Dobbs: the haves,

[01:57] Bob Dobbs: haves is in quotes,

[01:58] Bob Dobbs: of the world had kept the have-nots,

[02:01] Bob Dobbs: which is in quotes,

[02:02] Bob Dobbs: under surveillance,

[02:03] Bob Dobbs: and surveillance is in quotes.

[02:06] Bob Dobbs: So,

[02:07] Bob Dobbs: look at this,

[02:07] Bob Dobbs: it's all this quoting.

[02:09] Bob Dobbs: This,

[02:09] Bob Dobbs: in fact,

[02:09] Bob Dobbs: is a hang-up of the age of software information.

[02:13] Bob Dobbs: In the preceding hardware age,

[02:15] Bob Dobbs: the haves of the world had kept the have-nots under surveillance.

[02:21] Bob Dobbs: This old beat for flatfoots,

[02:23] Bob Dobbs: for younger people,

[02:24] Bob Dobbs: that means detectives or spies,

[02:27] Bob Dobbs: flatfoots.

[02:28] Bob Dobbs: This old beat for flatfoots has now been relegated to the world of popular entertainment.

[02:33] Bob Dobbs: And then in italics,

[02:34] Bob Dobbs: this sentence,

[02:35] Bob Dobbs: The police state is now a work of art,

[02:38] Bob Dobbs: a bureaucratic ballet of undulated sirens.

[02:42] Bob Dobbs: End of italicized part.

[02:45] Bob Dobbs: That is a way of saying,

[02:47] Bob Dobbs: they go on,

[02:49] Bob Dobbs: That is a way of saying that the espionage activities of our multitudinous manhunters and crediting agencies,

[02:56] Bob Dobbs: crediting in quotes,

[02:58] Bob Dobbs: are not only archaic,

[03:01] Bob Dobbs: but redundant and irrelevant.

[03:03] Bob Dobbs: So,

[03:04] Bob Dobbs: repeat that.

[03:05] Bob Dobbs: That is a way of saying that the espionage activities of our multitudinous manhunters and crediting agencies are not only archaic,

[03:14] Bob Dobbs: but redundant and irrelevant,

[03:16] Bob Dobbs: and,

[03:16] Bob Dobbs: as he says earlier,

[03:17] Bob Dobbs: relegated to the world of popular entertainment.

[03:20] Bob Dobbs: So all this spy stuff,

[03:21] Bob Dobbs: watergate,

[03:22] Bob Dobbs: assassinations,

[03:23] Bob Dobbs: conspiracies,

[03:24] Bob Dobbs: is entertainment,

[03:26] Bob Dobbs: and it is redundant and irrelevant.

[03:28] Bob Dobbs: Because everything they're doing is in quotes.

[03:32] Bob Dobbs: There is no hardware age.

[03:33] Bob Dobbs: There are no haves or have-nots.

[03:35] Bob Dobbs: And they're not under surveillance.

[03:37] Bob Dobbs: There's something more involved.

[03:39] Bob Dobbs: So let's see if we can unpack this.

[03:42] Cameron McEwen: What do you think the word hang-up means in that quotation?

[03:48] Bob Dobbs: That's our cul-de-sac,

[03:53] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[03:54] Bob Dobbs: our major theme,

[03:54] Bob Dobbs: the cul-de-sac.

[03:57] Bob Dobbs: This is the cul-de-sac of the age of software and information.

[04:01] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[04:03] Cameron McEwen: I think that's certainly part of it,

[04:06] Cameron McEwen: but doesn't hang-up also have to do with dropout,

[04:12] Cameron McEwen: with disconnection?

[04:16] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[04:17] Cameron McEwen: it's a polyvalent term,

[04:20] Cameron McEwen: right?

[04:21] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[04:21] Bob Dobbs: back in the

[04:22] Bob Dobbs: 60s, people talked psychologically.

[04:24] Bob Dobbs: I have hang-ups about this or that.

[04:27] Bob Dobbs: Meaning they would balk at it.

[04:31] Bob Dobbs: They weren't cool about it.

[04:33] Bob Dobbs: Or they thought they were too hot about something.

[04:37] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[04:38] Bob Dobbs: And they're supposed to be cool.

[04:40] Bob Dobbs: So it was an irritation.

[04:43] Bob Dobbs: That was the personal use of it.

[04:45] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,

[04:46] Bob Dobbs: of course,

[04:47] Bob Dobbs: made it part of the media world.

[04:49] Bob Dobbs: Or the Android meme.

[04:50] Bob Dobbs: Or the technology's cognitive dram of cognition.

[04:55] Bob Dobbs: The hang-up of the age of software and information.

[04:58] Bob Dobbs: It's a good...

[05:00] Bob Dobbs: pun on the telephone and the fact that nobody was matching in that sense of communication.

[05:08] Bob Dobbs: This is the hang,

[05:09] Bob Dobbs: in a way,

[05:10] Bob Dobbs: that's what you were saying,

[05:10] Bob Dobbs: is the disconnection,

[05:13] Bob Dobbs: not connecting in the old community sense,

[05:17] Bob Dobbs: right?

[05:18] Bob Dobbs: This is the hang up.

[05:19] Bob Dobbs: This is the dropout of the age of software.

[05:21] Bob Dobbs: But that's a bit eccentric to use that term.

[05:27] Bob Dobbs: It's not an immediate reaction of people.

[05:29] Bob Dobbs: They'll just take it on the slang level.

[05:32] Bob Dobbs: It's a problem that people have,

[05:36] Bob Dobbs: something they're embarrassed by,

[05:38] Bob Dobbs: maybe.

[05:41] Bob Dobbs: And back then,

[05:42] Bob Dobbs: nobody admitted they were spying on everybody.

[05:45] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[05:45] Bob Dobbs: that's your daily bread,

[05:49] Bob Dobbs: is espionage.

[05:50] Bob Dobbs: As McLuhan says in Cliché to archetype,

[05:52] Bob Dobbs: espionage is our daily activity.

[05:57] Bob Dobbs: And,

[05:57] Bob Dobbs: of course,

[05:57] Bob Dobbs: that meant...

[05:59] Bob Dobbs: focus groups,

[06:00] Bob Dobbs: polling,

[06:01] Bob Dobbs: any kind of trying to get a profile of the crowd.

[06:06] Bob Dobbs: Doing anything.

[06:08] Cameron McEwen: Doing anything.

[06:09] Cameron McEwen: Doing a search,

[06:11] Cameron McEwen: walking into a certain store,

[06:13] Cameron McEwen: buying gasoline,

[06:15] Cameron McEwen: all of that.

[06:19] Bob Dobbs: That's an effect of the global theater.

[06:21] Bob Dobbs: Everybody is a put-on.

[06:23] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's an actor.

[06:24] Bob Dobbs: Nobody is,

[06:25] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[06:25] Bob Dobbs: genuine.

[06:27] Bob Dobbs: They're all acting.

[06:28] Bob Dobbs: following a script that they're inventing or that they think they've been assigned,

[06:34] Bob Dobbs: which means you don't know anybody's motives.

[06:41] Bob Dobbs: Or it was a world where people's motives were irrelevant.

[06:46] Bob Dobbs: They were dangerous anyways,

[06:48] Bob Dobbs: no matter what.

[06:52] Cameron McEwen: So

[06:53] Cameron McEwen: I looked up the undulated sirens.

[06:56] Cameron McEwen: It's only on the book cover.

[06:58] Bob Dobbs: Isn't that interesting?

[06:59] Bob Dobbs: That means Barry wrote it and it was on a page that was rejected,

[07:03] Bob Dobbs: but the quote was left over and they stuck it on the book.

[07:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[07:10] Cameron McEwen: I think the same thing that's true.

[07:12] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[07:13] Cameron McEwen: wasn't there a long advertisement for Take Today that had several paragraphs of stuff that was not only taken from the book?

[07:25] Cameron McEwen: Some of it was taken from the book,

[07:26] Cameron McEwen: but it was...

[07:27] Cameron McEwen: an enlargement of the book.

[07:30] Bob Dobbs: Wow,

[07:30] Bob Dobbs: I've never seen that.

[07:32] Bob Dobbs: That would be interesting to see.

[07:33] Cameron McEwen: I'll see if I can find it for you.

[07:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[07:35] Bob Dobbs: so there's stuff on there that isn't in the book,

[07:37] Bob Dobbs: you're thinking.

[07:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[07:39] Cameron McEwen: uh-huh.

[07:39] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[07:40] Bob Dobbs: that's McLuhan,

[07:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[07:41] Bob Dobbs: dropping it here and there.

[07:42] Bob Dobbs: You've got to check out every corner of McLuhan's room.

[07:47] Bob Dobbs: Don't assume that he isn't hiding some things or fooling you or putting you on by putting the good stuff over there where you wouldn't look.

[07:57] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[07:58] Bob Dobbs: Wouldn't expect it.

[08:01] Bob Dobbs: Very conscious of every item of input he was creating.

[08:09] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[08:10] Bob Dobbs: Carefully painting.

[08:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[08:14] Cameron McEwen: do you think that he had an idea of sort of control like that?

[08:23] Cameron McEwen: Or do you think he just let himself...

[08:26] Cameron McEwen: into the universal undulation.

[08:31] Bob Dobbs: No,

[08:32] Bob Dobbs: he was very conscious.

[08:33] Bob Dobbs: Matter of fact,

[08:34] Bob Dobbs: if he had Barry write the stuff,

[08:35] Bob Dobbs: that makes it easier for him to surveil it all,

[08:39] Bob Dobbs: right?

[08:39] Bob Dobbs: He can see everything.

[08:42] Bob Dobbs: It gives him a level of detachment,

[08:43] Bob Dobbs: and then he can think of other things to do with it,

[08:46] Bob Dobbs: to play with it.

[08:47] Bob Dobbs: I think that's part of having a co-writer.

[08:50] Bob Dobbs: It gave him a better position to sculpt the thing.

[08:57] Bob Dobbs: program it so yep no i think that McLuhan people like to say that he was sloppy coach fitting his way can give no attribution he'd get the wrong page number and all this um i was reviewing uh uh the

[09:15] Bob Dobbs: line in the fox by Wyndham Lewis the first book after he surfaces after the the miracle year 1922 where elliott gets

[09:26] Bob Dobbs: famous with the Wasteland and Joyce gets famous with Ulysses,

[09:29] Bob Dobbs: so Lewis is left out.

[09:31] Bob Dobbs: So he retreats in 2324 and he writes this huge 1500 page thing called A Man of the World,

[09:37] Bob Dobbs: I think it was.

[09:39] Bob Dobbs: And then he proceeds over the next six years to chop it up and make six different books out of it.

[09:46] Bob Dobbs: The first book he put out from it was on the role of the hero in Shakespeare plays.

[09:51] Bob Dobbs: It was called The Lion and the Fox.

[09:52] Bob Dobbs: So we were reviewing it,

[09:54] Bob Dobbs: this Lewis study group.

[09:56] Bob Dobbs: And people were pointing out...

[09:58] Bob Dobbs: The numerous mistakes the guy had is if he wasn't,

[10:01] Bob Dobbs: he didn't check what he wrote.

[10:04] Bob Dobbs: He didn't edit it or really care.

[10:07] Bob Dobbs: And so people thought,

[10:10] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[10:11] Bob Dobbs: he was lazy or hectic or something.

[10:14] Bob Dobbs: I'm thinking he did it on purpose,

[10:16] Bob Dobbs: like McLuhan did.

[10:18] Bob Dobbs: He put the mistakes in on purpose for some reason,

[10:23] Bob Dobbs: maybe just to see if you're reading carefully.

[10:27] Bob Dobbs: Sat there on the fact that he could do it and nobody reads anymore,

[10:30] Bob Dobbs: really.

[10:31] Bob Dobbs: So they miss it.

[10:35] Bob Dobbs: So I think...

[10:36] Cameron McEwen: In McLuhan's case,

[10:38] Cameron McEwen: he thought that correcting and rereading was sort of a Gutenbergian activity.

[10:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[10:45] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[10:46] Cameron McEwen: He did.

[10:46] Bob Dobbs: He never reread.

[10:47] Bob Dobbs: He never read his work.

[10:48] Bob Dobbs: He never liked listening to it or anything.

[10:51] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[10:54] Bob Dobbs: So...

[10:56] Bob Dobbs: That was a conscious move?

[10:58] Cameron McEwen: That's why I say I don't think he thought in terms of control.

[11:02] Cameron McEwen: I think he thought that in a world of no identity,

[11:09] Cameron McEwen: in a world of no fixed place or fixed time,

[11:15] Cameron McEwen: all I can do is attempt to ride the wave.

[11:21] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[11:21] Bob Dobbs: he,

[11:22] Bob Dobbs: in...

[11:24] Bob Dobbs: Radio and TV versus the absent mind at one of those mid-50s essays and explorations.

[11:29] Bob Dobbs: I think I brought it up

[11:30] Bob Dobbs: It ends it might be the media as art forms political art forms or something

[11:36] Bob Dobbs: He he's writing at the end and then it just merges with this direct section out of Finnegans Wake with no attribution

[11:44] Bob Dobbs: So he's becoming Finnegans Wake if it's conscious and I always thought that was conscious

[11:48] Bob Dobbs: But I pointed out to Eric and he said no that's a mistake.

[11:51] Bob Dobbs: So they didn't even scotchess though

[11:53] Bob Dobbs: So maybe my view is a minority.

[11:57] Bob Dobbs: No,

[11:57] Bob Dobbs: no,

[11:58] Cameron McEwen: I think you're right.

[11:59] Cameron McEwen: I think you're right.

[12:01] Cameron McEwen: Eric had a different view of exactitude than his father did.

[12:11] Cameron McEwen: Eric's mind was not as focused as Marshall's,

[12:16] Cameron McEwen: in my view.

[12:18] Cameron McEwen: But as a result of that,

[12:20] Cameron McEwen: Eric was more concerned with...

[12:23] Cameron McEwen: particular points than

[12:25] Cameron McEwen: Marshall was.

[12:27] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[12:27] Bob Dobbs: Did you get to know Eric when you were negotiating with Corinne and with George Sanderson?

[12:33] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[12:34] Cameron McEwen: I got to know Eric actually before

[12:37] Cameron McEwen: Corinne. And we were fairly good friends.

[12:41] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[12:42] Cameron McEwen: certainly not close,

[12:43] Cameron McEwen: but

[12:44] Cameron McEwen: I knew Eric fairly well.

[12:46] Bob Dobbs: Did you ever visit him?

[12:49] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[12:50] Cameron McEwen: but not at the farm.

[12:52] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[12:52] Bob Dobbs: before that,

[12:53] Bob Dobbs: at the East End.

[12:55] Bob Dobbs: I was at that house in the

[12:56] Bob Dobbs: 70s, would you say?

[12:58] Cameron McEwen: No,

[12:58] Cameron McEwen: no,

[12:58] Cameron McEwen: no.

[12:59] Cameron McEwen: I didn't meet Eric until the

[13:01] Cameron McEwen: 90s.

[13:02] Bob Dobbs: So he hadn't gone to...

[13:05] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[13:05] Bob Dobbs: no,

[13:05] Cameron McEwen: I shouldn't say that.

[13:05] Cameron McEwen: I think when I met Marshall,

[13:09] Cameron McEwen: I think

[13:10] Cameron McEwen: Eric was around.

[13:12] Bob Dobbs: 1969,

[13:15] Cameron McEwen: 70.

[13:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[13:15] Cameron McEwen: this is right around 1970,

[13:17] Cameron McEwen: maybe 1969,

[13:19] Cameron McEwen: even 68 maybe.

[13:21] Bob Dobbs: And you went and visited Eric at his home then?

[13:24] Bob Dobbs: No,

[13:25] Cameron McEwen: I didn't visit him at his home.

[13:26] Cameron McEwen: I only met him along with Marshall at the center.

[13:31] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[13:32] Bob Dobbs: So,

[13:32] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[13:33] Bob Dobbs: you got involved with him on the level we're talking about with George Sanderson in the

[13:37] Bob Dobbs: 90s, doing that proposal.

[13:41] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[13:41] Cameron McEwen: sort of.

[13:42] Cameron McEwen: But what I was doing with George was...

[13:50] Cameron McEwen: certainly connected with

[13:52] Cameron McEwen: Eric and Corinne,

[13:53] Cameron McEwen: but it was also two different paths,

[14:00] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[14:01] Cameron McEwen: because Lo,

[14:05] Cameron McEwen: George,

[14:05] Cameron McEwen: and I were definitely on the same page as regards electronic publishing and as regards how

[14:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan needed to be made available.

[14:19] Cameron McEwen: We didn't have the same sense of why McLuhan was important.

[14:25] Bob Dobbs: Really?

[14:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[14:29] Bob Dobbs: What did George,

[14:30] Bob Dobbs: what was his reason?

[14:35] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[14:35] Cameron McEwen: George thought,

[14:38] Cameron McEwen: I'm not saying George was wrong and I was right.

[14:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[14:42] Cameron McEwen: We just had slightly different views.

[14:45] Cameron McEwen: George thought that

[14:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's thought.

[14:49] Cameron McEwen: was generally unappreciated,

[14:54] Cameron McEwen: and he believed that it was unappreciated in the family.

[14:59] Cameron McEwen: And so what he was trying to do was sort out how

[15:07] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan could be published more or less against what the family was trying to do to sort of protect McLuhan.

[15:18] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[15:18] Cameron McEwen: George thought

[15:19] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan didn't need protection.

[15:22] Cameron McEwen: He just needed to be got out there.

[15:25] Cameron McEwen: So I didn't disagree with that,

[15:27] Cameron McEwen: but I just...

[15:28] Cameron McEwen: that wasn't my focus.

[15:30] Cameron McEwen: My focus was on trying to understand what McLuhan was up to and how that project could be continued.

[15:43] Cameron McEwen: And

[15:44] Cameron McEwen: I've sort of never left that way of thinking about it.

[15:50] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[15:50] Bob Dobbs: So for George,

[15:52] Bob Dobbs: it was finished.

[15:55] Bob Dobbs: You know.

[15:55] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan project was finished.

[15:56] Bob Dobbs: He didn't have a way of continuing it like you're saying.

[15:59] Bob Dobbs: You felt good.

[16:01] Cameron McEwen: In my view,

[16:03] Cameron McEwen: George didn't understand

[16:07] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan as sort of passing on a task to us.

[16:16] Cameron McEwen: He understood McLuhan as something that was very significant for Canada and um,

[16:25] Cameron McEwen: something that was potentially significant for the Maritimes.

[16:29] Cameron McEwen: And so he was working to sort of bring that to fruition.

[16:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[16:38] Bob Dobbs: As the head of the Antigonish Review,

[16:40] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[16:41] Bob Dobbs: that was his role.

[16:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[16:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[16:44] Cameron McEwen: George was very frustrated with all this.

[16:48] Cameron McEwen: He continually thought he had an agreement,

[16:51] Cameron McEwen: and then it would turn out he didn't have an agreement.

[16:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[16:56] Bob Dobbs: the Matie Molinaro problem.

[16:59] Bob Dobbs: It was,

[17:00] Bob Dobbs: everybody had complaints about her,

[17:03] Bob Dobbs: if they had to do something with Marshall McLuhan materials.

[17:09] Bob Dobbs: Don't know if she was...

[17:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[17:11] Cameron McEwen: she was certainly very influential with Corinne.

[17:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[17:16] Bob Dobbs: so George was frustrated,

[17:18] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[17:18] Bob Dobbs: So,

[17:19] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[17:22] Bob Dobbs: we got on that about...

[17:24] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[17:24] Bob Dobbs: so Eric.

[17:25] Bob Dobbs: So you got to know Eric a bit and your commentary on his style was based on talking to him,

[17:32] Bob Dobbs: knowing him a bit?

[17:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[17:34] Cameron McEwen: And then trying to,

[17:36] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[17:36] Cameron McEwen: if you read the laws of media,

[17:41] Cameron McEwen: you have to kind of figure out how the bits and pieces of Marshall were put together by Eric.

[17:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[17:51] Cameron McEwen: And then you have to.

[17:54] Cameron McEwen: Then you have to figure out,

[17:55] Cameron McEwen: well,

[17:57] Cameron McEwen: have these things been put together correctly or is it somehow misleading?

[18:05] Cameron McEwen: Misleading in sort of the concrete sense,

[18:08] Cameron McEwen: taking you away from what Marshall is up to.

[18:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[18:14] Cameron McEwen: And so that's,

[18:16] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[18:16] Cameron McEwen: in many ways,

[18:19] Cameron McEwen: Eric understood his father like nobody else.

[18:23] Cameron McEwen: but because they were very close personally but I think

[18:29] Cameron McEwen: Eric didn't understand his sort of a central matter in McLuhan which which has to do with what you call tactility yes and what I would call discontinuous yeah yeah

[18:47] Bob Dobbs: okay so we got onto that because

[18:54] Bob Dobbs: the word hang up was it?

[18:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[18:58] Cameron McEwen: so and the question of were there things that were outside of the

[19:06] Bob Dobbs: Oh, his organizing materials,

[19:08] Bob Dobbs: how precise was he in this stuff and the ad for Take Today was that done by Barry?

[19:17] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[19:18] Bob Dobbs: Barry would have stuck Thanks.

[19:19] Bob Dobbs: stuff in that he thought was valuable,

[19:21] Bob Dobbs: Marshall didn't notice,

[19:23] Cameron McEwen: on your understanding.

[19:25] Cameron McEwen: Maybe he didn't care.

[19:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[19:27] Bob Dobbs: he didn't care.

[19:30] Bob Dobbs: But remember,

[19:31] Bob Dobbs: this is coming out right before the same month as Watergate.

[19:37] Bob Dobbs: I was in New York in July 72 for the first Newport,

[19:41] Bob Dobbs: New York

[19:42] Bob Dobbs: Jazz Festival.

[19:44] Bob Dobbs: First time they did it in New York.

[19:45] Bob Dobbs: It was July.

[19:47] Bob Dobbs: And walking down Madison Avenue or something there in the bookstore was the Take Today in the window.

[19:54] Bob Dobbs: I didn't look at it at that point.

[19:55] Bob Dobbs: I was too distracted with the music and all that,

[19:58] Bob Dobbs: but I definitely remember that.

[20:00] Bob Dobbs: And Watergate happens on June something.

[20:05] Bob Dobbs: That's a month before.

[20:07] Bob Dobbs: But people don't know

[20:09] Bob Dobbs: Watergate's not a big deal yet.

[20:11] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[20:13] Bob Dobbs: And here's a book dealing with that world.

[20:18] Bob Dobbs: And so when he was asked to comment on Watergate in 73,

[20:22] Bob Dobbs: he was talking about this.

[20:23] Bob Dobbs: theater as a two levels manhunting and something else i don't know what the other level was but it was the first time i heard him talk about manhunting and that's in this quote here multitudinous manhunters and

[20:41] Cameron McEwen: see in this um uh this quote has the subtitle of Take Today the executive is dropout so um when i see the word hang up

[20:54] Cameron McEwen: Which is also,

[20:55] Cameron McEwen: that's on the cover of

[20:56] Cameron McEwen: Take Today,

[20:57] Cameron McEwen: right?

[20:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[20:58] Cameron McEwen: A phone that's disconnected.

[21:00] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[21:01] Bob Dobbs: Head dangling.

[21:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[21:04] Cameron McEwen: So,

[21:06] Cameron McEwen: to me,

[21:06] Cameron McEwen: the word hang up has to do with something that is sort of unresolved and points the way to something else.

[21:19] Cameron McEwen: And so,

[21:20] Cameron McEwen: when he's talking about...

[21:22] Cameron McEwen: the universal surveillance being the hang-up,

[21:28] Cameron McEwen: to me he seems to be saying that we think that this is surveillance,

[21:34] Cameron McEwen: but surveillance belongs to the hardware world.

[21:37] Cameron McEwen: In fact,

[21:38] Cameron McEwen: it's something else.

[21:40] Bob Dobbs: That's why everything's in quotes,

[21:42] Bob Dobbs: because all the stuff that people think goes along with the spy world is not real.

[21:50] Bob Dobbs: It's a fake.

[21:51] Bob Dobbs: And so their surveillance is not...

[21:55] Bob Dobbs: The way people think of surveillance,

[21:57] Bob Dobbs: there's a whole other level of surveillance that the garbage man is involved in and everybody else in the global theater.

[22:04] Bob Dobbs: So that's why everything's in quotes because the hang-up is thinking there's software and information and hardware and has and has not.

[22:12] Bob Dobbs: All those categories are delusions.

[22:16] Bob Dobbs: They do not...

[22:17] Bob Dobbs: You cannot define them.

[22:19] Bob Dobbs: if you include the participatory

[22:23] Bob Dobbs: Android meme factors that are going on and the co-creation of everything in the global tactility.

[22:29] Bob Dobbs: You can't make categories.

[22:31] Cameron McEwen: So in your view,

[22:33] Cameron McEwen: is he the thing that he's pointing to as opposed to the he's looking in the rearview mirror and he's saying,

[22:43] Cameron McEwen: okay,

[22:43] Cameron McEwen: here are these images.

[22:45] Cameron McEwen: and the images are...

[22:51] Cameron McEwen: are only a hang-up in the sense of something that doesn't make sense,

[22:56] Cameron McEwen: something that doesn't cohere.

[22:59] Cameron McEwen: So he's pointing to something else,

[23:00] Cameron McEwen: and the something else seems to be the sentence that's in italics.

[23:06] Cameron McEwen: The police state is now a work of art,

[23:08] Cameron McEwen: a bureaucratic delay of undeleted sirens.

[23:12] Cameron McEwen: So in your view,

[23:14] Cameron McEwen: is the thing that he's pointing to that the...

[23:20] Cameron McEwen: the world as a work of art is not the work of art of individuals.

[23:27] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[23:29] Cameron McEwen: It's a work of art that is some sort of an undulation in which we are located,

[23:44] Cameron McEwen: but which we cannot steer.

[23:47] Cameron McEwen: as if we were in the hardware world.

[23:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[23:51] Bob Dobbs: it's the environments,

[23:53] Bob Dobbs: the corporate environments that are in interplay.

[23:56] Bob Dobbs: So normal human big brother worries or Orwellian worries is not the issue.

[24:04] Bob Dobbs: It's not a world of paranoia.

[24:06] Bob Dobbs: It becomes a world of paranoia because everybody doesn't get what's going on.

[24:11] Bob Dobbs: So that's a rear-view mirror reaction.

[24:13] Bob Dobbs: And that's why he's saying it's a work of art,

[24:15] Bob Dobbs: it's a ballet.

[24:17] Bob Dobbs: He's saying the police state is not what it used to be.

[24:21] Bob Dobbs: It's a new thing.

[24:22] Bob Dobbs: And he says that in Gutenberg Galaxy.

[24:25] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother went inside.

[24:26] Bob Dobbs: It's not marching around the streets like in the 30s.

[24:32] Bob Dobbs: And then you're involved with espionage.

[24:35] Bob Dobbs: Everything you do is espionage.

[24:37] Bob Dobbs: So to keep the image of government and...

[24:45] Bob Dobbs: Washington bureaucracy going,

[24:47] Bob Dobbs: they pretend that there's something that must be surveilled and protected from.

[24:56] Bob Dobbs: So they take a bunch of students,

[24:57] Bob Dobbs: make a big deal out of them,

[24:59] Bob Dobbs: right?

[24:59] Bob Dobbs: They're just blowing up little scuffles in the street,

[25:04] Bob Dobbs: making them threaten the calm in suburbia.

[25:10] Bob Dobbs: And that's the work of art.

[25:13] Bob Dobbs: It's a programmed image,

[25:14] Bob Dobbs: an intended image,

[25:17] Bob Dobbs: to distract you from the fact that nothing is going on that you expect.

[25:23] Bob Dobbs: And that was Foucault's point.

[25:25] Bob Dobbs: is that the protesters and that we're putting energy into the authorities.

[25:33] Bob Dobbs: Foucault said ignore them.

[25:36] Bob Dobbs: Then they have no role.

[25:37] Bob Dobbs: You're creating a role for them by protesting against them.

[25:42] Bob Dobbs: So that's a second level,

[25:49] Bob Dobbs: more amateurish understanding of what McLuhan's talking about.

[25:53] Bob Dobbs: Foucault could see something.

[25:55] Bob Dobbs: about the work of art but he wasn't as poetic as McLuhan or his accuracy so this tends in towards uh McLuhan talk about orientalizing right yeah orientalizing

[26:11] Bob Dobbs: that's the chinese bureaucracy that's happening to the west and and the china they just this this is the time when nixon goes over allows

[26:24] Bob Dobbs: China into the capitalist world,

[26:27] Bob Dobbs: right?

[26:28] Bob Dobbs: That's the beginning.

[26:29] Bob Dobbs: All these students coming over,

[26:31] Bob Dobbs: putting on the left hemisphere,

[26:34] Bob Dobbs: if you believe in those categories,

[26:35] Bob Dobbs: but putting on the West.

[26:39] Bob Dobbs: They take over the universities over the next 30 years.

[26:43] Bob Dobbs: That's the westernizing of the East.

[26:51] Bob Dobbs: That's part of the undeleted.

[26:56] Cameron McEwen: undulated you know and you ladies undulating is undulating that word yeah undulated as a word yes and the but the UN the UN oh yeah is it that's not that that

[27:10] Cameron McEwen: is does not have the meaning of not that undula is C is Latin for wave so undulated means

[27:23] Cameron McEwen: waved or waving.

[27:28] Cameron McEwen: It's an image of the sea cresting and the sirens are riding those waves.

[27:38] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[27:38] Bob Dobbs: the surface of the liquid undulated gently or the landscape rolled and undulated for miles in every direction.

[27:45] Bob Dobbs: So it's a smooth thing.

[27:49] Bob Dobbs: I was thinking of it more as dancing,

[27:51] Bob Dobbs: but it's not dancing,

[27:51] Bob Dobbs: it's just the rolling of the seas.

[27:54] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[27:57] Bob Dobbs: So acoustic attention-getting things are the sirens,

[28:03] Bob Dobbs: but they're going up and down in economic cycles,

[28:08] Bob Dobbs: maybe pendulum swinging in public mood.

[28:12] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[28:12] Cameron McEwen: but sirens itself is just like the wave is going up and down.

[28:18] Cameron McEwen: The sirens,

[28:20] Cameron McEwen: as in the Odyssey,

[28:21] Cameron McEwen: can be misleading,

[28:25] Cameron McEwen: enticing to danger,

[28:27] Cameron McEwen: but sirens can also,

[28:30] Cameron McEwen: if they're properly understood,

[28:32] Cameron McEwen: can indicate the right way.

[28:34] Cameron McEwen: So this is an image of sort of the way up is the way down.

[28:41] Cameron McEwen: It's the membrane that you...

[28:45] Cameron McEwen: like to refer to all the time.

[28:48] Cameron McEwen: So it's a corporate status where the individual needs to find him or herself,

[29:03] Cameron McEwen: not in terms of private identity.

[29:06] Cameron McEwen: That's a very difficult matter to try to think about.

[29:10] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[29:10] Bob Dobbs: And undulating signs would be the up and down of recession,

[29:14] Bob Dobbs: boom,

[29:15] Bob Dobbs: bust,

[29:16] Bob Dobbs: the statistics of the economy,

[29:18] Bob Dobbs: the sculpting of the crowd,

[29:19] Bob Dobbs: profile of the crowd.

[29:21] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[29:22] Cameron McEwen: partly that,

[29:23] Cameron McEwen: but also ontologically,

[29:25] Cameron McEwen: it's reality.

[29:26] Cameron McEwen: It's the way things are.

[29:29] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[29:29] Bob Dobbs: And people think the economics is reality.

[29:32] Bob Dobbs: So if you focus on that.

[29:34] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[29:35] Cameron McEwen: In order for the economics to be what it is.

[29:39] Cameron McEwen: going up and down it needs to have an ontological foundation yeah he's saying the espionage activities and the crediting agencies are archaic redundant and irrelevant so the

[29:56] Bob Dobbs: The norms of economic worries that came in in the

[30:00] Bob Dobbs: 70s and continued,

[30:03] Bob Dobbs: the austerity conditions and all these different proposals,

[30:06] Bob Dobbs: wage and price controls and that,

[30:08] Bob Dobbs: they were all red herrings for a new,

[30:16] Bob Dobbs: incredible,

[30:17] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[30:18] Bob Dobbs: freedom.

[30:18] Bob Dobbs: That's what that quote,

[30:20] Bob Dobbs: freedom of expression,

[30:21] Bob Dobbs: freedom of wealth,

[30:22] Bob Dobbs: freedom of information,

[30:24] Bob Dobbs: freedom of distraction,

[30:25] Bob Dobbs: freedom.

[30:25] Bob Dobbs: delusion,

[30:28] Bob Dobbs: a wonderful psychedelic trip that the whole society,

[30:32] Bob Dobbs: the whole global theater was on.

[30:35] Bob Dobbs: That's what was going on.

[30:37] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[30:38] Cameron McEwen: But those two sides,

[30:41] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[30:42] Cameron McEwen: are both false.

[30:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[30:44] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[30:44] Cameron McEwen: So it's thinking them together that makes sense.

[30:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[30:52] Bob Dobbs: And so

[30:54] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says,

[30:54] Bob Dobbs: suspended judgment,

[30:57] Bob Dobbs: there's a lot of left hemisphere Gutenbergian judgment going on,

[31:00] Bob Dobbs: appraisal and valuing this over that.

[31:04] Bob Dobbs: A lot of useless creating statuses or hierarchies or irrelevant.

[31:16] Cameron McEwen: But on the other hand,

[31:18] Cameron McEwen: if you didn't have that,

[31:20] Cameron McEwen: then you wouldn't have anything.

[31:23] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[31:24] Cameron McEwen: There's always going to be limited situations.

[31:30] Cameron McEwen: It can be economic,

[31:32] Cameron McEwen: political,

[31:33] Cameron McEwen: personal,

[31:34] Cameron McEwen: whatever.

[31:36] Cameron McEwen: The limited situations are the way that the undulation expresses itself.

[31:44] Cameron McEwen: So the limited situations need to be seen in their correlation.

[31:53] Cameron McEwen: And that's why they are redundant and irrelevant if taken in themselves.

[32:01] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[32:01] Cameron McEwen: right.

[32:02] Cameron McEwen: If they're seen against the background of their possibility,

[32:07] Cameron McEwen: then they're not redundant and they're not irrelevant.

[32:11] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[32:11] Bob Dobbs: so the old-fashioned wealth,

[32:15] Bob Dobbs: or when he did the tetrad on the credit card,

[32:19] Bob Dobbs: it enhanced prestige.

[32:21] Bob Dobbs: person's identity and prestige is enhanced within the gutenberg categories of economics and so that was the content the distract the watchdog of the mind you know the the beef put out for the dog so

[32:38] Bob Dobbs: much of uh of uh what was called economic activity was just um old obsolete forms

[32:51] Bob Dobbs: He also said today,

[32:53] Bob Dobbs: it's a global theater of endless repertoire.

[32:57] Bob Dobbs: We could retrieve any event we want.

[32:58] Bob Dobbs: So a lot of retrieval of all kinds of scenarios to hide the fact that we'd gone into the total void or Big Bang.

[33:09] Bob Dobbs: We were not anywhere's measurable.

[33:12] Bob Dobbs: And of course,

[33:13] Bob Dobbs: that's what Finnegans Wake was trying to show.

[33:15] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[33:15] Bob Dobbs: the six degrees of separation,

[33:18] Bob Dobbs: 14 degrees of freedom of motion and all that.

[33:21] Bob Dobbs: They were not the way one lived.

[33:25] Bob Dobbs: No,

[33:26] Bob Dobbs: that wasn't your actual being.

[33:28] Bob Dobbs: So there was no way to communicate that.

[33:32] Bob Dobbs: So people would recognize the fallacies of their games that they play in their professions,

[33:42] Bob Dobbs: and it would bother them,

[33:44] Bob Dobbs: the futility of it,

[33:45] Bob Dobbs: so they'd drop out and go into the silence for a while.

[33:50] Bob Dobbs: and actually half confront the void that was happening.

[33:58] Cameron McEwen: So the present situation that we have in Ukraine and the destruction of the pipelines and sort of universal war and stuff is all an attempt to avoid that

[34:15] Cameron McEwen: dropout.

[34:16] Bob Dobbs: The larger war.

[34:17] Bob Dobbs: the larger disaster,

[34:19] Bob Dobbs: the larger

[34:20] Bob Dobbs: Armageddon, the fact that everything's disappeared,

[34:25] Bob Dobbs: or it was,

[34:28] Bob Dobbs: as McLuhan said,

[34:28] Bob Dobbs: by 1950.

[34:30] Bob Dobbs: There's no human life anymore.

[34:33] Bob Dobbs: And if you think somebody's caring for the planet and they wouldn't let it go,

[34:37] Bob Dobbs: no,

[34:37] Bob Dobbs: that's not the case.

[34:38] Bob Dobbs: They're going to go to the moon.

[34:39] Bob Dobbs: They can grow vegetables on the moon.

[34:41] Cameron McEwen: So they think.

[34:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[34:42] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[34:43] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[34:45] Cameron McEwen: So growing vegetables on the moon.

[34:48] Cameron McEwen: means something like,

[34:51] Cameron McEwen: let's go to war and we'll be able to cultivate peace through that.

[34:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[34:57] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[34:58] Cameron McEwen: which is ridiculous.

[35:00] Cameron McEwen: The entire world is caught up in that right now.

[35:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[35:04] Bob Dobbs: but you said we need that.

[35:07] Bob Dobbs: In a time of peace,

[35:09] Bob Dobbs: we can play active that we're preventing war and things like that and appear to be in control of it.

[35:16] Bob Dobbs: That is the content to make wealth.

[35:18] Bob Dobbs: Then that has to flip like a tip thread into the facts of um

[35:27] Bob Dobbs: None of it has any meaning.

[35:29] Bob Dobbs: None of it is really the ground of what's going on.

[35:31] Bob Dobbs: So people always crack up in that situation and burn out or get drug addicted or alcoholic or destroy their families.

[35:42] Bob Dobbs: All kinds of ridiculous stuff goes on when they can't take the grind of the old ways that makes wealth.

[35:52] Bob Dobbs: Because that wealth doesn't have any staying power.

[35:55] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[35:56] Bob Dobbs: The real wealth is the ability to sit back and watch the information vortex,

[36:02] Bob Dobbs: to be able to watch and enjoy the spectacle.

[36:07] Bob Dobbs: That is the wealth that everybody would like to have more time to do.

[36:11] Bob Dobbs: They used to,

[36:12] Bob Dobbs: anyways,

[36:12] Bob Dobbs: have more time to do,

[36:13] Bob Dobbs: but they had harassed lives.

[36:15] Bob Dobbs: They had to go pay their mortgage.

[36:17] Bob Dobbs: They had to work in different jobs that really didn't go anywhere.

[36:20] Bob Dobbs: It just made everything worse.

[36:24] Bob Dobbs: And that would bother people because they couldn't,

[36:27] Bob Dobbs: they were missing out on their favorite TV shows and were the real wealth that was being made.

[36:33] Bob Dobbs: The new experiences that was happening in TV shows.

[36:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[36:40] Bob Dobbs: So what people,

[36:41] Bob Dobbs: I would hear people say,

[36:42] Bob Dobbs: well,

[36:42] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[36:42] Bob Dobbs: my father,

[36:43] Bob Dobbs: you can't talk to him Sunday night.

[36:45] Bob Dobbs: He watches Columbo and you can't interrupt him.

[36:49] Bob Dobbs: It's the only TV he gets each week,

[36:51] Bob Dobbs: right?

[36:52] Bob Dobbs: But it's almost a church service.

[36:53] Bob Dobbs: He has to do it.

[36:55] Bob Dobbs: And the family has to disappear.

[36:57] Bob Dobbs: Don't bug him.

[36:58] Bob Dobbs: He's got to watch Columbo.

[37:00] Cameron McEwen: That's like the NFL.

[37:02] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[37:03] Cameron McEwen: Monday Night Football.

[37:04] Cameron McEwen: The NFL is the new church.

[37:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[37:06] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[37:07] Bob Dobbs: And that was so immature from my perspective.

[37:10] Bob Dobbs: I always say,

[37:11] Bob Dobbs: I don't watch football.

[37:11] Bob Dobbs: I play it,

[37:12] Bob Dobbs: for fuck's sake.

[37:14] Bob Dobbs: Where's the game?

[37:14] Bob Dobbs: Let's play.

[37:15] Bob Dobbs: Why should I watch a bunch of other people playing?

[37:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[37:19] Bob Dobbs: there was nothing more.

[37:22] Bob Dobbs: indicative of paralysis,

[37:24] Bob Dobbs: social paralysis,

[37:24] Bob Dobbs: and the fact that people had this Monday night football obsession.

[37:28] Bob Dobbs: Boy,

[37:28] Bob Dobbs: that was really a hang-up.

[37:31] Bob Dobbs: That was a hang-up,

[37:33] Bob Dobbs: a disconnect back to it.

[37:36] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[37:37] Bob Dobbs: and I'm not an anti-jock.

[37:38] Bob Dobbs: I'm a jock.

[37:39] Bob Dobbs: I like sports.

[37:41] Bob Dobbs: But to make a ritual out of that and then get out of shape while doing it,

[37:47] Bob Dobbs: that's a big sin.

[37:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[37:50] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[37:50] Cameron McEwen: And notice how...

[37:51] Cameron McEwen: Monday night football has become Thursday night football.

[37:55] Cameron McEwen: It has become Sunday night football.

[37:58] Cameron McEwen: It's gradually taking over the week.

[38:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[38:03] Bob Dobbs: That's blatant addiction,

[38:04] Bob Dobbs: isn't it?

[38:05] Bob Dobbs: You need more and more of it to get the hit,

[38:07] Bob Dobbs: to get the satisfaction from it.

[38:12] Cameron McEwen: And,

[38:12] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[38:13] Cameron McEwen: the satisfaction behind it all is the amount of control,

[38:19] Cameron McEwen: the amount of money.

[38:21] Cameron McEwen: The amount of prestige that the people have that own the teams or that present what's going on on TV or that are the networks that control all this.

[38:34] Cameron McEwen: All of this is the work of art.

[38:41] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[38:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[38:42] Cameron McEwen: but at the first level,

[38:43] Cameron McEwen: it's what he calls the haves.

[38:46] Bob Dobbs: The haves.

[38:47] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[38:47] Cameron McEwen: it's the haves.

[38:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[38:49] Cameron McEwen: And then you have to see,

[38:50] Cameron McEwen: well,

[38:50] Cameron McEwen: the haves,

[38:52] Cameron McEwen: really,

[38:52] Cameron McEwen: that's itself a work of art.

[38:54] Cameron McEwen: And then the work of art of having,

[38:59] Cameron McEwen: that itself is an aspect of the undulation.

[39:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[39:05] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[39:07] Bob Dobbs: Because you could become a have-not.

[39:10] Cameron McEwen: You are a have-not.

[39:12] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[39:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[39:13] Bob Dobbs: that could become a figure.

[39:14] Cameron McEwen: That's the hang-up.

[39:17] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[39:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[39:19] Bob Dobbs: the haves of the world have kept the have-nots under surveillance.

[39:22] Bob Dobbs: And yet,

[39:24] Bob Dobbs: if you're surveilling somebody,

[39:26] Bob Dobbs: you're under surveillance too.

[39:27] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[39:28] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[39:30] Cameron McEwen: You cannot surveil except by sort of marking your activity.

[39:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[39:37] Cameron McEwen: You need machines.

[39:38] Cameron McEwen: You need recording devices.

[39:40] Cameron McEwen: You need all the stuff that goes into surveilling.

[39:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[39:46] Bob Dobbs: And then they pick.

[39:48] Bob Dobbs: One iconic event like Watergate and then so much is done for the next couple of years around Watergate

[39:56] Bob Dobbs: books and movies and distraction and trying to find out who did what to who and it's always a mystery nothing is explained because the terms that explain it aren't dealing with the issue it's alchemy and not doing chemistry in your terms correct

[40:17] Cameron McEwen: so yeah it would be interesting to look at a watergate and try to understand

[40:27] Cameron McEwen: what was going on there sort of in Trumpian terms.

[40:32] Cameron McEwen: What is it about Nixon and Trump,

[40:36] Cameron McEwen: about the two of them together,

[40:38] Cameron McEwen: that needed to be canceled?

[40:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[40:45] Bob Dobbs: now McLuhan said

[40:47] Bob Dobbs: Watergate was a battle between television and the newspaper over the advertising dollar.

[40:58] Bob Dobbs: You ever hear that statement?

[41:00] Cameron McEwen: No,

[41:00] Cameron McEwen: but it makes sense.

[41:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[41:02] Bob Dobbs: So it was a war for the entertainment,

[41:07] Bob Dobbs: the coverage in the world of things.

[41:11] Cameron McEwen: It's a good example of what you sometimes talk about,

[41:17] Cameron McEwen: of the war of the media.

[41:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[41:19] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[41:23] Bob Dobbs: So I have McLuhan's statement back in the 50s.

[41:25] Bob Dobbs: the media.

[41:27] Bob Dobbs: as political art forms.

[41:32] Bob Dobbs: I saw an art critic,

[41:35] Bob Dobbs: he wrote an essay on McLuhan years ago,

[41:38] Bob Dobbs: five years ago or something,

[41:40] Bob Dobbs: and he noticed a quote that McLuhan said,

[41:43] Bob Dobbs: Canada is the great artist of our time.

[41:46] Bob Dobbs: Not a person,

[41:48] Bob Dobbs: it was a corporation,

[41:50] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[41:50] Bob Dobbs: a corporate image,

[41:52] Bob Dobbs: Canada.

[41:53] Bob Dobbs: And that's what the art world won't deal with.

[41:56] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan,

[41:57] Bob Dobbs: as the great art critic,

[41:58] Bob Dobbs: was showing and measuring the ballet of bureaucratic,

[42:04] Bob Dobbs: undulating,

[42:06] Bob Dobbs: iconic institutions.

[42:11] Bob Dobbs: Canada was the greatest artist because it was not involved in any of the particular worlds,

[42:16] Bob Dobbs: the four worlds.

[42:17] Bob Dobbs: It was on the sidelines and in the gap.

[42:20] Bob Dobbs: And so a guy like Pearson could be hoiked up as a peacemaker.

[42:26] Cameron McEwen: And this has reminded me of a funny quotation that I just saw the other day,

[42:31] Cameron McEwen: and I made a note of it.

[42:34] Cameron McEwen: It's in his lecture in 1966,

[42:40] Cameron McEwen: The Medium is the Massage,

[42:42] Cameron McEwen: the lecture he made at the

[42:45] Bob Dobbs: Y in New York.

[42:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[42:47] Bob Dobbs: 92nd Street,

[42:47] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[42:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[42:48] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[42:49] Cameron McEwen: So here's the quote.

[42:51] Cameron McEwen: He says,

[42:52] Cameron McEwen: those who lived through the

[42:54] Cameron McEwen: 19th century.

[42:55] Cameron McEwen: lived through the most stupefying and fragmenting and systematizing and categorizing century in human history.

[43:05] Cameron McEwen: So the first thing to note about that is that that's what McLuhan was involved in when he was at the University of Manitoba.

[43:12] Cameron McEwen: He wrote his thesis on

[43:15] Cameron McEwen: George Meredith,

[43:17] Cameron McEwen: who lived from the start of the 19th century until the end.

[43:22] Cameron McEwen: And then listen to this.

[43:24] Cameron McEwen: And then he says,

[43:25] Cameron McEwen: Canada is in a peculiar position.

[43:28] Cameron McEwen: Canada never had anything but a 19th century.

[43:34] Bob Dobbs: That's all we had.

[43:35] Bob Dobbs: We have never had anything else.

[43:37] Cameron McEwen: The most stupefying,

[43:39] Cameron McEwen: fragmenting,

[43:40] Cameron McEwen: and systematizing and categorizing century in human history.

[43:44] Cameron McEwen: And that is what Canada is.

[43:46] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[43:47] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[43:49] Bob Dobbs: Canada became,

[43:52] Bob Dobbs: in the global theater though,

[43:55] Bob Dobbs: It had this image of a nice place.

[43:59] Bob Dobbs: Absolutely.

[43:59] Bob Dobbs: The kids didn't go to Vietnam,

[44:01] Bob Dobbs: and he said they had an image of utopia.

[44:05] Bob Dobbs: That's the artist.

[44:06] Bob Dobbs: It was the hip place,

[44:08] Bob Dobbs: modern comfort.

[44:10] Cameron McEwen: It threw it all away,

[44:11] Cameron McEwen: but that's...

[44:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[44:12] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[44:13] Bob Dobbs: It was a great artist for a while.

[44:16] Bob Dobbs: Like all great artists,

[44:17] Bob Dobbs: they all fail.

[44:18] Bob Dobbs: All great artists,

[44:19] Bob Dobbs: they fail.

[44:20] Bob Dobbs: They get eaten up.

[44:22] Bob Dobbs: from Dali to Warhol.

[44:25] Bob Dobbs: They're like celebrities.

[44:28] Bob Dobbs: It's not a good fate.

[44:31] Bob Dobbs: But this guy,

[44:33] Bob Dobbs: he noted that quote,

[44:35] Bob Dobbs: and he didn't know what to make of it because he was an art critic,

[44:39] Bob Dobbs: Gutenbergian art critic.

[44:41] Bob Dobbs: They just ignored it.

[44:42] Bob Dobbs: But he said,

[44:43] Bob Dobbs: that's puzzling.

[44:45] Bob Dobbs: That's an odd statement by Marshall,

[44:46] Bob Dobbs: but that's a key thing.

[44:49] Bob Dobbs: Ted Carpenter was down there in New York.

[44:51] Bob Dobbs: in the art world because his wife was part of the

[44:58] Bob Dobbs: What were they called?

[44:59] Bob Dobbs: The

[45:00] Bob Dobbs: Schlumberger family?

[45:01] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[45:01] Bob Dobbs: the de Menil family.

[45:02] Bob Dobbs: And they ran the art world,

[45:03] Bob Dobbs: from Warhol to the guys who sculpted planetary art out in the desert.

[45:10] Bob Dobbs: And that was not,

[45:12] Bob Dobbs: now,

[45:13] Bob Dobbs: Ted Carpenter told me he didn't like the later McLuhan,

[45:15] Bob Dobbs: the guy who got into more radio in Venezuela,

[45:19] Bob Dobbs: programming the global environments.

[45:22] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[45:22] Bob Dobbs: I appreciate the early McLuhan,

[45:24] Bob Dobbs: the aesthetic McLuhan.

[45:25] Cameron McEwen: That's the

[45:27] Bob Dobbs: 50s.

[45:28] Bob Dobbs: And

[45:29] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan, but there's Ted.

[45:32] Bob Dobbs: He's in the

[45:33] Bob Dobbs: Gutenbergian art world.

[45:34] Bob Dobbs: He's being an estate.

[45:36] Bob Dobbs: So it led.

[45:37] Bob Dobbs: What he preferred,

[45:38] Bob Dobbs: that's where he ended up.

[45:40] Bob Dobbs: And,

[45:40] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[45:44] Bob Dobbs: the children of,

[45:47] Bob Dobbs: and one of them was his wife,

[45:49] Bob Dobbs: of the

[45:50] Bob Dobbs: de Menil matriarchy all fought over different parts of the art world.

[45:57] Bob Dobbs: They had different agendas in their privileged position.

[46:02] Bob Dobbs: And that was the very distraction that McLuhan has in his preface,

[46:07] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[46:07] Bob Dobbs: to understanding media about how irrelevant the art world is and what they emphasize.

[46:13] Bob Dobbs: And they had no clue that we're in a bureaucratic ballet of underlating sirens where even Orwell is just a work of art.

[46:22] Bob Dobbs: It's not the future.

[46:24] Bob Dobbs: It's 1934.

[46:26] Bob Dobbs: That's the kind of stuff that I wanted people to talk about.

[46:29] Bob Dobbs: That's big thinking.

[46:31] Bob Dobbs: That gets you out of all the stupid little Gutenbergian issues like race.

[46:37] Cameron McEwen: But at the same time,

[46:41] Cameron McEwen: we have to appreciate

[46:44] Cameron McEwen: Carpenter's objection.

[46:46] Cameron McEwen: And Carpenter's objection is,

[46:48] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[46:48] Cameron McEwen: but we have to do something.

[46:53] Cameron McEwen: We need to...

[46:55] Cameron McEwen: appreciate what good art is.

[46:58] Cameron McEwen: And if there's good art,

[47:00] Cameron McEwen: then it needs to be put into some sort of context like the museum in Houston that they built.

[47:07] Cameron McEwen: And we have to try to preserve

[47:12] Cameron McEwen: Eskimo language or we have to try to preserve the totem poles that the Haida are just leaving to rot someplace.

[47:20] Cameron McEwen: So what Carpenter is thinking isn't

[47:24] Cameron McEwen: stupid and in a sense it's necessary.

[47:30] Cameron McEwen: And what McLuhan is advising against that is also necessary,

[47:36] Cameron McEwen: but it's very difficult,

[47:38] Cameron McEwen: right?

[47:40] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,

[47:41] Cameron McEwen: you can see him sort of lying on his couch and drinking a beer and sort of letting all that stuff go.

[47:50] Cameron McEwen: Yep.

[47:51] Cameron McEwen: It's...

[47:53] Cameron McEwen: The tension between the two guys is quite enormous and I think is important to think about.

[48:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[48:05] Bob Dobbs: and Carpenter couldn't take it.

[48:07] Bob Dobbs: He took the scandal of his own divorce in the

[48:11] Bob Dobbs: 50s in Toronto as an excuse to get away from McLuhan.

[48:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[48:16] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[48:18] Cameron McEwen: there's a letter from,

[48:19] Cameron McEwen: I think it's

[48:20] Cameron McEwen: 1956.

[48:22] Cameron McEwen: in which

[48:23] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan writes to another Catholic literature professor down in Florida,

[48:33] Cameron McEwen: and he says,

[48:36] Cameron McEwen: good news,

[48:37] Cameron McEwen: I think Carpenter is going to convert.

[48:41] Cameron McEwen: And so when ultimately...

[48:51] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and Carpenter came to a certain crossroads,

[48:57] Cameron McEwen: and

[48:58] Cameron McEwen: Carpenter couldn't keep going with McLuhan along the road he was going.

[49:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[49:05] Bob Dobbs: and that was the figure of it.

[49:07] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was trying to convert them,

[49:10] Bob Dobbs: trying to have them be converted.

[49:12] Bob Dobbs: And

[49:13] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter is too much of a marine,

[49:16] Bob Dobbs: freewheeling pagan to do that.

[49:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[49:21] Cameron McEwen: he couldn't,

[49:23] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[49:24] Cameron McEwen: whenever anybody wants to think,

[49:30] Cameron McEwen: they have to decide if they are going to allow themselves to be subservient to thought or if they are going to steer it.

[49:42] Cameron McEwen: And if you decide,

[49:46] Cameron McEwen: usually unconsciously,

[49:47] Cameron McEwen: but if you decide that you're going to steer your thought,

[49:51] Cameron McEwen: then you can never start to think.

[49:55] Cameron McEwen: That's sort of the ultimate switch.

[49:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[49:59] Cameron McEwen: You either become subservient to the thinking that goes on through you,

[50:05] Cameron McEwen: like channeling,

[50:07] Cameron McEwen: or you try to steer your thought like a car.

[50:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[50:11] Cameron McEwen: And the latter is not thinking.

[50:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[50:18] Bob Dobbs: So we're talking about Carpenter.

[50:20] Bob Dobbs: So Carpenter runs,

[50:21] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[50:21] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[50:21] Bob Dobbs: Barry Nevitt.

[50:23] Bob Dobbs: Did I ever tell you how Marshall did it to Barry in the 70s?

[50:28] Bob Dobbs: He kept trying to get Barry to convert.

[50:31] Bob Dobbs: No,

[50:31] Cameron McEwen: that's interesting.

[50:32] Cameron McEwen: Talk about that.

[50:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[50:34] Bob Dobbs: So Barry said he'd have a winsome smile,

[50:38] Bob Dobbs: empty smile as he talked to me about it.

[50:42] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[50:43] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[50:44] Bob Dobbs: Marshall will try to get you to convert eventually if you get close to him and you're working with him.

[50:50] Bob Dobbs: That's what he will do.

[50:51] Bob Dobbs: And...

[50:53] Bob Dobbs: What,

[50:54] Bob Dobbs: Barry,

[50:55] Bob Dobbs: in that book,

[50:56] Bob Dobbs: who is Marshall McLuhan?

[50:57] Bob Dobbs: Do you have that book?

[50:59] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[51:01] Cameron McEwen: Not right here,

[51:02] Cameron McEwen: but I have it.

[51:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[51:03] Bob Dobbs: Barry,

[51:04] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[51:04] Bob Dobbs: in there quotes himself asking Marshall,

[51:06] Bob Dobbs: what would you do if you found that you were dead?

[51:11] Bob Dobbs: And

[51:12] Bob Dobbs: Marshall said,

[51:13] Bob Dobbs: plunge your head.

[51:15] Bob Dobbs: So Barry would use that.

[51:17] Bob Dobbs: He used it back on Marshall,

[51:21] Bob Dobbs: I think.

[51:22] Bob Dobbs: Marshall said,

[51:22] Bob Dobbs: Barry,

[51:23] Bob Dobbs: why don't you convert?

[51:25] Bob Dobbs: And Barry had some flippant answer like that.

[51:28] Bob Dobbs: No,

[51:29] Bob Dobbs: Marshall,

[51:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm just going to plunge ahead.

[51:32] Bob Dobbs: I don't think that's necessary right now.

[51:36] Bob Dobbs: So everybody,

[51:38] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[51:38] Bob Dobbs: hanging around McLuhan,

[51:40] Bob Dobbs: you suddenly realize,

[51:42] Bob Dobbs: uh-oh,

[51:43] Bob Dobbs: this guy has the was that steering his thought?

[51:48] Bob Dobbs: Is McLuhan steering his thought?

[51:50] Cameron McEwen: I didn't

[51:51] Cameron McEwen: understand you there.

[51:52] Bob Dobbs: Is McLuhan steering his thought when he has an agenda to convert you?

[51:59] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[51:59] Cameron McEwen: no.

[52:00] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[52:00] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[52:00] Cameron McEwen: that's the big question,

[52:01] Cameron McEwen: right?

[52:04] Cameron McEwen: How do you do something that is not steering?

[52:09] Cameron McEwen: That's a very,

[52:10] Cameron McEwen: very difficult question.

[52:11] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[52:13] Cameron McEwen: So the whole idea of sort of becoming

[52:20] Cameron McEwen: free by submitting to something,

[52:30] Cameron McEwen: that's involved in conversion.

[52:34] Cameron McEwen: So the question then becomes,

[52:39] Cameron McEwen: is conversion to something particular,

[52:42] Cameron McEwen: like the

[52:43] Cameron McEwen: Catholic Church today or something,

[52:46] Cameron McEwen: is that,

[52:49] Cameron McEwen: do you...

[52:51] Cameron McEwen: need in submitting to something larger than yourself do you have to submit to something particular or can or can submission be made to something like uh the undulation uh in that quote yeah

[53:07] Bob Dobbs: which is here's the undulation uh this person was telling me they were gambling in las vegas something and it was a process that you i guess work in the

[53:21] Bob Dobbs: Working those things you pull on,

[53:23] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[53:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[53:24] Cameron McEwen: slot machines.

[53:24] Bob Dobbs: Slot machines or something.

[53:26] Bob Dobbs: She was doing something like that.

[53:28] Bob Dobbs: And it was working,

[53:31] Bob Dobbs: and she was winning.

[53:32] Bob Dobbs: Then she noticed she was winning,

[53:34] Bob Dobbs: and it would stop.

[53:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[53:36] Bob Dobbs: So then she'd say,

[53:37] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[53:38] Bob Dobbs: keep doing it.

[53:39] Bob Dobbs: Don't notice you're winning.

[53:41] Bob Dobbs: Just keep doing it.

[53:42] Bob Dobbs: It's good.

[53:43] Bob Dobbs: You're riding it.

[53:45] Bob Dobbs: Almost like don't have an orgasm.

[53:47] Bob Dobbs: Keep doing it.

[53:48] Bob Dobbs: And avoid.

[53:50] Bob Dobbs: thinking about it.

[53:51] Bob Dobbs: So she was in the interval between steering her thought and submerging herself,

[53:59] Bob Dobbs: submitting herself.

[54:01] Bob Dobbs: That was the ultimate,

[54:02] Bob Dobbs: I thought,

[54:02] Bob Dobbs: expression of tactility.

[54:04] Bob Dobbs: The interplay between you and the environment.

[54:06] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[54:07] Bob Dobbs: And you can screw it up by noticing it.

[54:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[54:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[54:12] Cameron McEwen: It's like trying to fall asleep.

[54:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[54:17] Cameron McEwen: And in sports,

[54:18] Cameron McEwen: for example.

[54:20] Cameron McEwen: When you play a sport very well,

[54:24] Cameron McEwen: you cannot be thinking about what you're doing.

[54:28] Cameron McEwen: You have to go with the game.

[54:33] Cameron McEwen: You have to let the puck come to you or let the ball come to you.

[54:37] Cameron McEwen: And it's a wonderful feeling when you do that.

[54:42] Cameron McEwen: But it's not something that you can do.

[54:48] Cameron McEwen: sort of with intent or consciously because that screws it up.

[54:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[54:55] Bob Dobbs: So the other thing Barry said was in this sort of religious context,

[55:00] Bob Dobbs: he said,

[55:02] Bob Dobbs: When you die,

[55:03] Bob Dobbs: he says,

[55:04] Bob Dobbs: you go to this place where there are no secrets.

[55:07] Bob Dobbs: Everybody knows everything about you and everything else.

[55:11] Bob Dobbs: That was his image of the afterlife.

[55:17] Bob Dobbs: And I knew he knew that's where the world was becoming secularly.

[55:23] Bob Dobbs: There was no privacy,

[55:25] Bob Dobbs: no secrets.

[55:26] Bob Dobbs: So that's how Marshall said that the...

[55:31] Bob Dobbs: We are simulating the body of Christ with the Global Membrane.

[55:37] Bob Dobbs: An aspect of that would be the surveillance,

[55:40] Bob Dobbs: the no secrets.

[55:41] Bob Dobbs: That's an aspect of the state of heaven or something that

[55:48] Bob Dobbs: Jesus was supposed to represent or bring in or something like that.

[55:54] Bob Dobbs: That was the...

[56:00] Bob Dobbs: What do they think?

[56:01] Bob Dobbs: They say,

[56:02] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[56:02] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[56:02] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says the prince of the air is a great engineer,

[56:08] Bob Dobbs: and it's Lucifer,

[56:09] Bob Dobbs: he's programming the environment,

[56:11] Bob Dobbs: and that's,

[56:12] Bob Dobbs: yet many people mistake that for some mystical body of Christ.

[56:17] Bob Dobbs: He said a Dante vision.

[56:20] Bob Dobbs: But they don't think of

[56:23] Bob Dobbs: Barry's point that everybody knows everything in heaven,

[56:27] Bob Dobbs: and that we were simulating that.

[56:30] Bob Dobbs: have no secrets in more and more.

[56:33] Bob Dobbs: And now many people resign themselves that they can't have privacy.

[56:39] Bob Dobbs: And they're probably bothered by it and get nervous tics about it.

[56:42] Bob Dobbs: But the last 10 years has shown people that it's impossible to stay in the old world of privacy.

[56:55] Bob Dobbs: Sure.

[56:56] Cameron McEwen: Privacy also has to do with...

[56:59] Cameron McEwen: trying to have things,

[57:01] Cameron McEwen: trying to have wealth,

[57:02] Cameron McEwen: trying to have fame.

[57:06] Cameron McEwen: All of these things are impossible in a certain sense.

[57:11] Cameron McEwen: But notice in a world where everybody knows everything,

[57:14] Cameron McEwen: notice how that has to do with McLuhan's mode of composition,

[57:21] Cameron McEwen: especially in the last 20 years of his life.

[57:24] Cameron McEwen: If everybody knows everything,

[57:27] Cameron McEwen: then why go back?

[57:29] Cameron McEwen: and correct things and make them,

[57:30] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[57:33] Cameron McEwen: quote-unquote right.

[57:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[57:37] Bob Dobbs: so,

[57:39] Bob Dobbs: what did you say just before that?

[57:41] Bob Dobbs: So,

[57:43] Bob Dobbs: before the mode of composition,

[57:48] Bob Dobbs: so Barry said...

[57:49] Cameron McEwen: I was talking about...

[57:50] Bob Dobbs: No secret.

[57:51] Bob Dobbs: Privacy.

[57:53] Bob Dobbs: Privacy.

[57:55] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[57:55] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[57:57] Bob Dobbs: So,

[57:57] Bob Dobbs: people would...

[58:02] Bob Dobbs: acquire objects and wealth,

[58:05] Bob Dobbs: they become some particular media that they wanted to lose their identity in.

[58:10] Bob Dobbs: And that would be their identity.

[58:13] Bob Dobbs: The merging with old environments,

[58:17] Bob Dobbs: the old scraps he called it,

[58:22] Bob Dobbs: was the solution for people who couldn't stand the fact that there was no privacy.

[58:29] Bob Dobbs: So they,

[58:30] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[58:30] Bob Dobbs: so in privacy,

[58:32] Bob Dobbs: what did he say?

[58:35] Bob Dobbs: You could,

[58:40] Bob Dobbs: so privacy is putting media over yourself.

[58:47] Bob Dobbs: He used to say in Mechanical Bride that the tribal person would wear the skin of a cougar or something,

[58:54] Bob Dobbs: an animal,

[58:56] Bob Dobbs: and put on.

[58:58] Bob Dobbs: what he was afraid of yeah so people put on cars and wealth and buying art and all whatever prestige activities there are country clubs and that they were put on because

[59:13] Bob Dobbs: they were afraid so they put on the uh the old i don't know how okay so the tribal guy puts on he's pushing himself probing himself by putting the uh skin of the animal which he's afraid of

[59:28] Bob Dobbs: That's not what people who are looking for comfort and wealth and retrieving privacy are doing.

[59:35] Bob Dobbs: They're trying to stop the probing.

[59:41] Bob Dobbs: Sure.

[59:42] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[59:42] Cameron McEwen: both are going on at the same time,

[59:44] Cameron McEwen: right?

[59:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[59:45] Bob Dobbs: Trying to numb themselves.

[59:47] Bob Dobbs: And so...

[59:51] Cameron McEwen: Notice how this is the process of print,

[59:55] Cameron McEwen: right?

[59:56] Cameron McEwen: In order for...

[59:58] Cameron McEwen: print to be legible.

[1:00:01] Cameron McEwen: You have to have edges.

[1:00:04] Cameron McEwen: You have to know where the black is and where the white is.

[1:00:08] Cameron McEwen: So this idea of putting on an identity as something that defines you positively,

[1:00:18] Cameron McEwen: but also reflects you negatively in terms of the fear that it's avoiding.

[1:00:26] Cameron McEwen: This is all Gutenbergian.

[1:00:28] Cameron McEwen: This whole complex.

[1:00:29] Cameron McEwen: is a way of drawing borders so that the black letter can be seen against the white page.

[1:00:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:00:39] Bob Dobbs: so that's why,

[1:00:41] Bob Dobbs: for anybody who's interested,

[1:00:42] Bob Dobbs: under surveillance,

[1:00:43] Bob Dobbs: software,

[1:00:44] Bob Dobbs: haves and have-nots,

[1:00:47] Bob Dobbs: crediting agencies,

[1:00:49] Bob Dobbs: surveillance have to be in quotes.

[1:00:51] Bob Dobbs: They're all Gutenbergian.

[1:00:53] Bob Dobbs: They're all avoiding the...

[1:00:58] Bob Dobbs: the merger,

[1:00:59] Bob Dobbs: the collective consciousness of the Global Membrane that puts everybody beyond any normal,

[1:01:05] Bob Dobbs: tribal,

[1:01:06] Bob Dobbs: personal,

[1:01:08] Bob Dobbs: psychological categories of identity.

[1:01:11] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:01:11] Bob Dobbs: there's no race,

[1:01:12] Bob Dobbs: there's no sex,

[1:01:13] Bob Dobbs: there's no class.

[1:01:14] Bob Dobbs: There's not any of those things that the recently woke people are making a big issue about.

[1:01:21] Bob Dobbs: Gender,

[1:01:21] Bob Dobbs: class,

[1:01:22] Bob Dobbs: and race.

[1:01:25] Bob Dobbs: Was that the three things?

[1:01:26] Bob Dobbs: Race?

[1:01:27] Bob Dobbs: class and gender,

[1:01:28] Bob Dobbs: I think so,

[1:01:30] Bob Dobbs: those came in with the printing press and have gone.

[1:01:33] Bob Dobbs: And it's the only thing that people can get violent about because it's rearview mirror,

[1:01:39] Bob Dobbs: so they can pretend they're noticing something.

[1:01:43] Bob Dobbs: The void.

[1:01:44] Bob Dobbs: And then now,

[1:01:45] Bob Dobbs: as a result of COVID,

[1:01:47] Bob Dobbs: it's almost like the bureaucratic siren said,

[1:01:52] Bob Dobbs: We accept the guaranteed income.

[1:01:53] Bob Dobbs: We're not going to give you a guaranteed income.

[1:01:55] Bob Dobbs: We're not going to admit that.

[1:01:56] Bob Dobbs: We're not going to say that's it.

[1:01:57] Bob Dobbs: But everybody gets a basic stipend now,

[1:02:00] Bob Dobbs: and they don't have to work.

[1:02:02] Bob Dobbs: It flipped into a...

[1:02:10] Bob Dobbs: So I was just saying that people struggled for Gutenbergian categories,

[1:02:14] Bob Dobbs: but that's been erased by the COVID thing.

[1:02:17] Bob Dobbs: You can't get status.

[1:02:19] Bob Dobbs: You just get your...

[1:02:20] Bob Dobbs: your basic stipend that keeps you going.

[1:02:24] Bob Dobbs: That's a radical change in society.

[1:02:28] Bob Dobbs: That has gone past the categories that we're discussing in this quote.

[1:02:34] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's now allowed to be in the same...

[1:02:40] Cameron McEwen: Boat.

[1:02:41] Bob Dobbs: Boat?

[1:02:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:02:44] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:02:44] Bob Dobbs: In the same boat,

[1:02:46] Bob Dobbs: or...

[1:02:48] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:02:49] Bob Dobbs: in

[1:02:50] Bob Dobbs: Cronenberg's movie version of Naked Lunch,

[1:02:54] Bob Dobbs: he has people,

[1:02:57] Bob Dobbs: it's a scene from

[1:02:58] Bob Dobbs: Burroughs' writing,

[1:02:59] Bob Dobbs: they're all sucking in some tube,

[1:03:01] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:03:02] Bob Dobbs: some nectar.

[1:03:05] Bob Dobbs: That's what everybody can have now.

[1:03:06] Bob Dobbs: They can have the nectar for very little cost.

[1:03:11] Bob Dobbs: But it does,

[1:03:13] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,

[1:03:14] Bob Dobbs: is there an identity crisis about that now?

[1:03:19] Bob Dobbs: People are very concerned about what's happening to their children in schools.

[1:03:24] Cameron McEwen: Very concerned,

[1:03:25] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:03:29] Cameron McEwen: For decades,

[1:03:30] Cameron McEwen: we've thrown our children into huge factories.

[1:03:36] Cameron McEwen: We haven't cared about teacher education or teacher salaries.

[1:03:41] Cameron McEwen: We haven't tried to figure out what exactly should children know.

[1:03:46] Cameron McEwen: What should they learn?

[1:03:47] Cameron McEwen: And then we call that being concerned about our children.

[1:03:50] Cameron McEwen: It's ridiculous.

[1:03:51] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:03:52] Bob Dobbs: And so that's the distraction.

[1:03:54] Bob Dobbs: They're worried about that while their older kids who are in college or of that age,

[1:04:01] Bob Dobbs: they're getting a stipend that won't work.

[1:04:04] Bob Dobbs: So the parents are struggling over the younger brothers and sisters who are in the grade schools and getting abused.

[1:04:11] Bob Dobbs: They could focus on that,

[1:04:13] Bob Dobbs: but they don't deal with the fact that the older brothers and sisters are...

[1:04:18] Bob Dobbs: out of the house and just vegetating and don't want to do anything.

[1:04:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:04:24] Cameron McEwen: and are becoming the teachers that are doing the uneducation of the younger ones.

[1:04:31] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:04:32] Bob Dobbs: they're refusing to be teachers.

[1:04:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:04:34] Bob Dobbs: Have you heard that?

[1:04:35] Bob Dobbs: They can't get nurses.

[1:04:36] Bob Dobbs: They can't get this.

[1:04:37] Bob Dobbs: They can't get that.

[1:04:38] Bob Dobbs: They can't get anybody to be working,

[1:04:41] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:04:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:04:44] Bob Dobbs: The ideal of the guaranteed income certainly...

[1:04:48] Bob Dobbs: No one thought it would be accidentally stumbled into and done backwards for the wrong motives or something.

[1:04:56] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:04:56] Bob Dobbs: we've got the guaranteed income,

[1:04:58] Bob Dobbs: but it looks like somebody.

[1:05:01] Bob Dobbs: doesn't like this and wants to start a big war,

[1:05:07] Bob Dobbs: massive identity crisis in there.

[1:05:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:05:10] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:05:10] Cameron McEwen: it's hard to know if the war is for the ongoing process or against it.

[1:05:17] Cameron McEwen: I kind of think that it's for the ongoing process.

[1:05:23] Cameron McEwen: It's the communist revolution in a way that nobody expected.

[1:05:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:05:32] Bob Dobbs: the capitalists are bringing in the communists.

[1:05:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:05:36] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[1:05:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:05:38] Bob Dobbs: so you say it's emerging with the collectivity,

[1:05:49] Bob Dobbs: and we can't afford everybody,

[1:05:52] Bob Dobbs: so we start shooting and see who survives it,

[1:05:56] Bob Dobbs: and they'll have the communistic nectar.

[1:06:00] Bob Dobbs: When the dust settles,

[1:06:02] Bob Dobbs: which is what you hear people,

[1:06:04] Bob Dobbs: that's an old cliche.

[1:06:05] Bob Dobbs: They always say,

[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: we can get into a really great world,

[1:06:09] Bob Dobbs: but it's going to get worse before we do that.

[1:06:14] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[1:06:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:06:17] Cameron McEwen: I'd like to go to the idea of we can't afford that.

[1:06:21] Cameron McEwen: But,

[1:06:22] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[1:06:22] Cameron McEwen: we can.

[1:06:23] Cameron McEwen: Because to afford something just means that you get the...

[1:06:29] Cameron McEwen: printing press to turn out dollars a little bit faster.

[1:06:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:06:34] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:06:34] Cameron McEwen: Affording nowadays has nothing to do with actually paying for something.

[1:06:42] Cameron McEwen: It just means deciding to throw some paper at it.

[1:06:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:06:50] Bob Dobbs: So a big grievance is the wiping out the student loan of kids and those that paid off.

[1:06:59] Bob Dobbs: their loans are outraged and probably not going to allow it to happen.

[1:07:05] Bob Dobbs: So we have a lot of emotions.

[1:07:10] Bob Dobbs: This is what I have on my chart.

[1:07:11] Bob Dobbs: Paranoia,

[1:07:11] Bob Dobbs: schizophrenia,

[1:07:13] Bob Dobbs: hysteria,

[1:07:14] Bob Dobbs: panic,

[1:07:14] Bob Dobbs: and ecstasy.

[1:07:15] Bob Dobbs: A lot of these intensities are what our society is making wealth from,

[1:07:23] Bob Dobbs: or statistic wealth,

[1:07:25] Bob Dobbs: pretending their GNP is doing great.

[1:07:28] Bob Dobbs: or just saying in bigger bank accounts it's all based on overreaction emoting about things finding it so that's what people say too many people are claiming to be victims that's

[1:07:43] Bob Dobbs: that's the mentality of having an emotion and outrage about something so all of these are ways of establishing identity which is to say establishing a certain

[1:07:59] Cameron McEwen: limit,

[1:08:00] Cameron McEwen: a certain border between what you take you to be and what you take you not to be.

[1:08:10] Cameron McEwen: So it's all just

[1:08:13] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg is over,

[1:08:15] Cameron McEwen: so we need more of it.

[1:08:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:08:17] Bob Dobbs: and

[1:08:18] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said,

[1:08:20] Bob Dobbs: if reality appears to be unstoppable,

[1:08:23] Bob Dobbs: that frightens people.

[1:08:25] Bob Dobbs: The unstoppability of this situation.

[1:08:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:08:32] Cameron McEwen: which has two faces,

[1:08:36] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:08:36] Cameron McEwen: It's got the face of over-management and the face of the impossibility of management.

[1:08:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:08:47] Bob Dobbs: and giving up of responsibilities.

[1:08:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:08:50] Cameron McEwen: so it's like the question of the hang-up.

[1:08:55] Cameron McEwen: Is the hang-up something that...

[1:08:59] Cameron McEwen: is kind of a negative fate or is it a door to something?

[1:09:06] Cameron McEwen: And Take Today as sort of a meditation on that question.

[1:09:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:09:12] Bob Dobbs: So this quote,

[1:09:14] Bob Dobbs: which is not in the book but it's on the cover,

[1:09:16] Bob Dobbs: so you've got to have the cover to get it,

[1:09:19] Bob Dobbs: is you have to understand why these words are in quotes.

[1:09:28] Bob Dobbs: You don't get McLuhan unless you understand why they are that way.

[1:09:34] Bob Dobbs: That is,

[1:09:35] Bob Dobbs: why are crediting agencies,

[1:09:37] Bob Dobbs: why is crediting in quotes?

[1:09:41] Bob Dobbs: You have to write that way when you know that the electric environment can't be bought,

[1:09:45] Bob Dobbs: sold,

[1:09:45] Bob Dobbs: or stolen.

[1:09:46] Bob Dobbs: Right?

[1:09:47] Bob Dobbs: That statement.

[1:09:48] Bob Dobbs: Can't be bought,

[1:09:49] Bob Dobbs: sold,

[1:09:49] Bob Dobbs: or stolen.

[1:09:52] Bob Dobbs: That erases all Gutenberg categories.

[1:09:54] Bob Dobbs: And so then you have...

[1:09:57] Bob Dobbs: People pretending to keep other people under surveillance.

[1:10:01] Bob Dobbs: And that's in quotes because it's not the action.

[1:10:04] Bob Dobbs: So this is a quote trying to point out what is life like under the Android meme or the Global Membrane.

[1:10:12] Bob Dobbs: So what I say underneath,

[1:10:14] Bob Dobbs: let's see how I try to translate this.

[1:10:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:10:20] Bob Dobbs: I just jumped ahead a second.

[1:10:23] Bob Dobbs: So I say they're putting it back into the old drama of pre-World War II good and bad.

[1:10:31] Bob Dobbs: Trying to maintain a stable society.

[1:10:34] Bob Dobbs: The old cop and spy world.

[1:10:37] Bob Dobbs: That's in quotes.

[1:10:38] Bob Dobbs: Whereas the real espionage is right in front of everybody on the TV shows and in the advertising agencies.

[1:10:44] Bob Dobbs: They're programming the world,

[1:10:46] Bob Dobbs: not secret places.

[1:10:48] Bob Dobbs: They're only useful during a war.

[1:10:50] Bob Dobbs: Occasionally you have a little outbreak.

[1:10:53] Bob Dobbs: I guess that means the spies.

[1:10:55] Bob Dobbs: You go fight in some garbage dump of the world.

[1:10:58] Bob Dobbs: It brings back the old CIA guys.

[1:11:01] Bob Dobbs: But the actual programming and spying is the news agencies,

[1:11:05] Bob Dobbs: which have now come to be seen as enemies of the people.

[1:11:10] Bob Dobbs: People have become,

[1:11:11] Bob Dobbs: on a popular cliché slang level through Donald Trump,

[1:11:15] Bob Dobbs: media ecologists in a very crude way.

[1:11:18] Bob Dobbs: They've got autonomy.

[1:11:19] Bob Dobbs: They're not listening to the news.

[1:11:21] Bob Dobbs: They don't take it seriously.

[1:11:23] Bob Dobbs: And then I have a quote.

[1:11:24] Bob Dobbs: You trying to tell me something?

[1:11:27] Bob Dobbs: Bob said that the Android meme is not talking to me.

[1:11:31] Bob Dobbs: That's what they quote.

[1:11:32] Bob Dobbs: They quote me.

[1:11:34] Bob Dobbs: You're trying to tell me something.

[1:11:35] Bob Dobbs: That's what Marshall one night said to this professor.

[1:11:37] Bob Dobbs: You're trying to tell me something.

[1:11:39] Bob Dobbs: Bob said the end of a meme is not talking to me.

[1:11:41] Bob Dobbs: The news is not talking to me.

[1:11:44] Bob Dobbs: They're living that.

[1:11:45] Bob Dobbs: Now I'm saying they're living that attitude.

[1:11:49] Bob Dobbs: They are media ecologists in the sense they're not looking at the content.

[1:11:54] Bob Dobbs: They're not distracted by it.

[1:11:57] Bob Dobbs: So we really had to up the content.

[1:12:02] Bob Dobbs: with plagues and drastic invasions and bring back the threat of nuclear war that people thought had long disappeared.

[1:12:14] Bob Dobbs: They had upped the ante.

[1:12:15] Bob Dobbs: And you could say they began that by knocking down the Twin Towers.

[1:12:20] Bob Dobbs: That was a shocking image.

[1:12:24] Cameron McEwen: Is the stuff that you're reading,

[1:12:26] Cameron McEwen: the stuff in blue,

[1:12:27] Cameron McEwen: is that taken from some recording?

[1:12:32] Cameron McEwen: Where you were talking?

[1:12:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:12:34] Bob Dobbs: I was talking to a friend,

[1:12:37] Bob Dobbs: Bert in Switzerland,

[1:12:38] Bob Dobbs: and then he would transcribe it.

[1:12:41] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:12:42] Cameron McEwen: I'm wondering,

[1:12:43] Cameron McEwen: you have here that they are programming the world,

[1:12:48] Cameron McEwen: that is to say the advertising agencies.

[1:12:51] Cameron McEwen: So it says they're programming the world.

[1:12:53] Bob Dobbs: I think I mean they're the spy agencies,

[1:12:57] Bob Dobbs: the fake Gutenbergian spy agencies are trying to program the world in the old way.

[1:13:01] Bob Dobbs: Old cop in my world.

[1:13:03] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:13:06] Cameron McEwen: the sentence is,

[1:13:08] Cameron McEwen: they're programming the world,

[1:13:09] Cameron McEwen: not secret places.

[1:13:12] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:13:12] Bob Dobbs: that's the advertising agency.

[1:13:16] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:13:16] Cameron McEwen: But I think the word places is a mistake in the transcription.

[1:13:21] Cameron McEwen: I think it should be police.

[1:13:24] Bob Dobbs: Not secret police.

[1:13:25] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[1:13:28] Bob Dobbs: But let me say,

[1:13:28] Bob Dobbs: look,

[1:13:29] Bob Dobbs: they're putting it back.

[1:13:30] Bob Dobbs: spies,

[1:13:30] Bob Dobbs: the big brother with the fake news,

[1:13:34] Bob Dobbs: they're trying to put everything back into the old drama of pre-World War II when you had identities.

[1:13:40] Bob Dobbs: They think that'll maintain a stable society,

[1:13:42] Bob Dobbs: the old cop and spy world.

[1:13:44] Bob Dobbs: Whereas the real espionage is the advertising agencies,

[1:13:47] Bob Dobbs: which is constant demand for adjustment.

[1:13:50] Bob Dobbs: They're programming the world,

[1:13:52] Bob Dobbs: that's advertising,

[1:13:53] Bob Dobbs: not secret places.

[1:13:54] Bob Dobbs: The cops are doing the secret places illusion.

[1:14:00] Bob Dobbs: It's not secret programming of the world by a secret elite.

[1:14:03] Bob Dobbs: The program is right in front of us.

[1:14:06] Bob Dobbs: You bring out the old cops and spies when you have an old hardware world,

[1:14:09] Bob Dobbs: and you go fight in some garbage dump of the world.

[1:14:12] Bob Dobbs: It brings back the old CIA guys.

[1:14:14] Bob Dobbs: But the actual programming and spying is the news agencies.

[1:14:18] Bob Dobbs: So they say Marshall McLuhan wasn't political.

[1:14:20] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:14:20] Bob Dobbs: he was.

[1:14:21] Bob Dobbs: He took on the real politicians,

[1:14:23] Bob Dobbs: which were the ad agencies.

[1:14:25] Bob Dobbs: That was where the real issues of power were happening.

[1:14:28] Bob Dobbs: Not in the political world of spies and political parties and managers of elections.

[1:14:37] Bob Dobbs: And that all becomes entertainment.

[1:14:41] Bob Dobbs: It was a rigged election.

[1:14:42] Bob Dobbs: Do you know that the Democrats said it was a rigged election after 2016?

[1:14:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:14:50] Bob Dobbs: And then the Republicans did it.

[1:14:52] Bob Dobbs: But the actual programming and spying is the news agencies,

[1:14:54] Bob Dobbs: which have now come to be seen as enemies of the people.

[1:14:57] Bob Dobbs: Now I'm bringing it up to

[1:14:59] Bob Dobbs: Trump time.

[1:15:00] Bob Dobbs: People have become,

[1:15:01] Bob Dobbs: on a popular cliche level,

[1:15:02] Bob Dobbs: through Donald Trump,

[1:15:03] Bob Dobbs: media ecologists.

[1:15:05] Bob Dobbs: They're demanding,

[1:15:06] Bob Dobbs: you're trying to keep me informed of your constant disturbance,

[1:15:10] Bob Dobbs: and I'm not having it anymore.

[1:15:12] Bob Dobbs: I'm not listening to you guys.

[1:15:13] Bob Dobbs: I'm looking at the form,

[1:15:14] Bob Dobbs: not the content.

[1:15:16] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:15:16] Bob Dobbs: so I see media ecology as becoming a popular reaction of a collectively conscious bunch of actors who have been doing it for

[1:15:28] Bob Dobbs: 30, 40 years,

[1:15:29] Bob Dobbs: and now they recognize what's duping them.

[1:15:32] Bob Dobbs: They've become McLuhan.

[1:15:33] Bob Dobbs: They're not looking at the content.

[1:15:34] Bob Dobbs: You're not going to fool me with your content stuff.

[1:15:37] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:15:38] Bob Dobbs: this war or that war.

[1:15:39] Bob Dobbs: And so now,

[1:15:41] Bob Dobbs: even,

[1:15:41] Bob Dobbs: so the president had to say,

[1:15:43] Bob Dobbs: there's too many people out there who are conspiracy theorists.

[1:15:46] Bob Dobbs: And what that means,

[1:15:47] Bob Dobbs: he's complaining that nobody is taking the mainstream legacy media seriously.

[1:15:52] Bob Dobbs: They've become

[1:15:53] Bob Dobbs: McLuhanites. They are unconsciously looking at the form,

[1:15:56] Bob Dobbs: not the content.

[1:15:58] Bob Dobbs: And they say,

[1:15:59] Bob Dobbs: what you're presenting is fake.

[1:16:01] Bob Dobbs: That is a new grievance by the powerful when Biden complains that everybody thinks there's a conspiracy going on.

[1:16:11] Bob Dobbs: And the conspiracy theory or that mood is just every inflated first world person who's a king or queen of the mediascape not putting up with

[1:16:26] Bob Dobbs: Big Brother playing games and trying to distract me.

[1:16:30] Bob Dobbs: there.

[1:16:31] Bob Dobbs: to make a fake,

[1:16:32] Bob Dobbs: what they call that,

[1:16:33] Bob Dobbs: a fake something.

[1:16:39] Bob Dobbs: They say that on 9-1-1,

[1:16:43] Bob Dobbs: there were a lot of exercises going on that day.

[1:16:47] Bob Dobbs: And what do you call it?

[1:16:47] Bob Dobbs: You have a fake hoax?

[1:16:48] Bob Dobbs: There's a phrase,

[1:16:51] Bob Dobbs: and people use it a lot now.

[1:16:55] Bob Dobbs: And so this is why Alex Jones becomes a figure.

[1:16:59] Bob Dobbs: He's acting out the objection to the managers of society emphasizing content,

[1:17:08] Bob Dobbs: emphasizing the anthropomorphic,

[1:17:10] Bob Dobbs: when there is none.

[1:17:12] Bob Dobbs: And the people feel that.

[1:17:14] Bob Dobbs: They see that what society is trying to make you concerned about is not the issue.

[1:17:21] Bob Dobbs: And that's what McLuhan said.

[1:17:23] Bob Dobbs: What you want me to be concerned about is not the issue.

[1:17:28] Bob Dobbs: There are other issues.

[1:17:31] Bob Dobbs: So this is an important point to make.

[1:17:33] Cameron McEwen: Very important.

[1:17:35] Bob Dobbs: That the people have it.

[1:17:36] Bob Dobbs: Very important.

[1:17:36] Cameron McEwen: But doesn't it leave people,

[1:17:40] Cameron McEwen: even consciously,

[1:17:43] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:17:44] Cameron McEwen: it leaves people hung up.

[1:17:46] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,

[1:17:47] Cameron McEwen: they appreciate that everything has got an angle to it.

[1:17:53] Cameron McEwen: Nothing is not.

[1:17:57] Cameron McEwen: surveillance.

[1:18:00] Cameron McEwen: So where does that leave me?

[1:18:03] Cameron McEwen: People are left in a state of sort of fog at the moment.

[1:18:07] Bob Dobbs: And that's why,

[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: you have rampant fentanyl people,

[1:18:11] Bob Dobbs: 300 people dying every day.

[1:18:14] Bob Dobbs: People are committing suicide all over the place in different ways because it's too frightening.

[1:18:20] Bob Dobbs: The void they've been put into a world of a void too quickly.

[1:18:26] Bob Dobbs: Not used to it.

[1:18:26] Bob Dobbs: Did

[1:18:27] Bob Dobbs: I mention at the beginning that the missing word last time at the end was gyroscope?

[1:18:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:18:34] Cameron McEwen: that's the word that you were looking for.

[1:18:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:18:36] Bob Dobbs: Did I say that at the beginning of this session?

[1:18:40] Cameron McEwen: You mentioned the word.

[1:18:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:18:41] Cameron McEwen: You mentioned the word,

[1:18:42] Cameron McEwen: but you didn't go into anything about it.

[1:18:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:18:45] Bob Dobbs: so I'm just putting on the record,

[1:18:46] Bob Dobbs: just to get it on the tape,

[1:18:47] Bob Dobbs: that the word I was looking for is gyroscope.

[1:18:49] Bob Dobbs: So go back and listen to what I was saying in the previous show at the end and know the word I was looking for.

[1:18:56] Bob Dobbs: The gyroscope is an interesting phenomenon.

[1:19:00] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:19:00] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:19:01] Cameron McEwen: The way it moves.

[1:19:01] Cameron McEwen: In fact,

[1:19:02] Cameron McEwen: when you brought it up last time,

[1:19:04] Cameron McEwen: I mentioned that gyro means circle,

[1:19:08] Cameron McEwen: and the implication is the maelstrom.

[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: here's something.

[1:19:13] Bob Dobbs: I asked Ion,

[1:19:14] Bob Dobbs: do you agree that gyroscope means circle?

[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:19:18] Bob Dobbs: it's orbital.

[1:19:22] Cameron McEwen: Orbital?

[1:19:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:19:24] Cameron McEwen: An orbit is a circle,

[1:19:26] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: but when

[1:19:29] Bob Dobbs: I saw someone demonstrating,

[1:19:30] Bob Dobbs: they sent me a YouTube,

[1:19:32] Bob Dobbs: because I said this on the show,

[1:19:35] Bob Dobbs: and so someone sent this YouTube,

[1:19:37] Bob Dobbs: and the guy is showing how the gyroscope spins and slants and does these odd movements.

[1:19:44] Bob Dobbs: It's not just a circular movement.

[1:19:46] Bob Dobbs: There's angular momentum within it.

[1:19:52] Bob Dobbs: I think that's what I'm saying.

[1:19:53] Cameron McEwen: But it's always circling.

[1:19:57] Bob Dobbs: But there's several parts circling on different angles.

[1:20:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:20:00] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[1:20:01] Cameron McEwen: It's like a top.

[1:20:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:20:02] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:20:04] Cameron McEwen: The way that the gyroscope or the top is able to maintain its balance at the different angles is because it's spinning.

[1:20:15] Cameron McEwen: If it weren't spinning,

[1:20:16] Cameron McEwen: it would just fall over.

[1:20:17] Bob Dobbs: So it's poly-spinning,

[1:20:19] Bob Dobbs: poly-circles,

[1:20:21] Bob Dobbs: the gyroscope.

[1:20:22] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:20:22] Cameron McEwen: It's like the world in that sense.

[1:20:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:20:24] Bob Dobbs: that's a better image of the four worlds.

[1:20:27] Bob Dobbs: They're spinning like a gyroscope,

[1:20:29] Bob Dobbs: the four bodies.

[1:20:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:20:33] Bob Dobbs: my four bodies are spinning within a core spin.

[1:20:41] Cameron McEwen: I thought you were up to six or seven bodies now.

[1:20:44] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:20:45] Bob Dobbs: it's four,

[1:20:46] Bob Dobbs: and then you add the mystery body.

[1:20:48] Bob Dobbs: But since I couldn't get

[1:20:52] Bob Dobbs: Clinton's friend to even talk about the five-body model,

[1:20:55] Cameron McEwen: I'm on a program to simplify it to say four to get it out there.

[1:21:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:21:05] Bob Dobbs: but in actual fact,

[1:21:06] Bob Dobbs: behind the scenes,

[1:21:07] Bob Dobbs: we're operating on six bodies.

[1:21:08] Bob Dobbs: We're in a hectic situation.

[1:21:11] Bob Dobbs: So what's interesting about this,

[1:21:14] Bob Dobbs: I'm doing supposedly a serious paper,

[1:21:18] Bob Dobbs: but I have my random or sloppy conversational commentary going on with it.

[1:21:25] Bob Dobbs: I have two styles here happening.

[1:21:27] Bob Dobbs: I think that's kind of unique,

[1:21:29] Bob Dobbs: isn't it?

[1:21:30] Bob Dobbs: I don't think anybody's done that.

[1:21:32] Bob Dobbs: I'm making a serious essay.

[1:21:33] Bob Dobbs: There's the essay part,

[1:21:35] Bob Dobbs: and then there's just me winging it,

[1:21:38] Bob Dobbs: making up,

[1:21:38] Bob Dobbs: trying to find patterns that the prose can't get to.

[1:21:44] Cameron McEwen: But it sort of goes back to ancient forms of composition,

[1:21:50] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:21:51] Cameron McEwen: When people were copying texts,

[1:21:54] Cameron McEwen: when the scribes were copying texts,

[1:21:57] Cameron McEwen: they often made comments on the side,

[1:22:01] Cameron McEwen: or they often...

[1:22:02] Cameron McEwen: often changed the word they didn't like.

[1:22:04] Bob Dobbs: The polymphic.

[1:22:05] Cameron McEwen: They were copying,

[1:22:06] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:22:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:22:07] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:22:08] Cameron McEwen: So this is going to the new by returning to the old.

[1:22:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:22:12] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:22:14] Bob Dobbs: And so,

[1:22:16] Bob Dobbs: but the actual thing itself,

[1:22:18] Bob Dobbs: not many people.

[1:22:21] Cameron McEwen: You're getting away from Gutenberg,

[1:22:22] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:22:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:22:24] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:22:24] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg is all on one level.

[1:22:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:22:27] Cameron McEwen: Starting at a certain place and going to a certain end.

[1:22:31] Cameron McEwen: And what you're doing is you're introducing gyroscopic movement on every page.

[1:22:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:22:39] Bob Dobbs: while trying to be precise.

[1:22:41] Bob Dobbs: That's one of the spins.

[1:22:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:22:43] Bob Dobbs: so that's pretty neat.

[1:22:47] Bob Dobbs: So did you kind of pick up on that and like that,

[1:22:51] Bob Dobbs: the parallel activities there?

[1:22:52] Bob Dobbs: Did you appreciate it?

[1:22:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:22:56] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:23:00] Cameron McEwen: you're not only commenting on McLuhan,

[1:23:04] Cameron McEwen: you're commenting on yourself.

[1:23:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:23:06] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:23:07] Cameron McEwen: So we've actually talked about this,

[1:23:10] Cameron McEwen: I believe,

[1:23:10] Cameron McEwen: in a previous show.

[1:23:16] Cameron McEwen: The book is very complicated.

[1:23:24] Cameron McEwen: In order to understand the book,

[1:23:26] Cameron McEwen: you have to engage.

[1:23:28] Cameron McEwen: with it on many different levels.

[1:23:31] Cameron McEwen: And in fact,

[1:23:31] Cameron McEwen: we're creating a new level in our conversation.

[1:23:34] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:23:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:23:35] Bob Dobbs: that's what's so great to have someone talk about it and bounce back on me.

[1:23:40] Bob Dobbs: So you go to page 116,

[1:23:43] Bob Dobbs: and we have another quote from Take Today,

[1:23:46] Bob Dobbs: another cover sleeve,

[1:23:48] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:23:48] Bob Dobbs: on the back of the book,

[1:23:49] Bob Dobbs: on the cover sleeve,

[1:23:51] Bob Dobbs: and it says,

[1:23:52] Bob Dobbs: this is in more quotes within the sentence,

[1:23:56] Bob Dobbs: The public becomes the participant consumer producer of hardware products and software information alike.

[1:24:03] Bob Dobbs: So that's beginning to have multiple bodies,

[1:24:07] Bob Dobbs: keeping the old environment going and yet engaging the new environment.

[1:24:11] Bob Dobbs: And they are somehow,

[1:24:13] Bob Dobbs: as categories,

[1:24:14] Bob Dobbs: not factual.

[1:24:18] Bob Dobbs: There is no hardware products.

[1:24:20] Bob Dobbs: There is no software information in some way.

[1:24:26] Bob Dobbs: consumer producer of hardware products and software information see why would they be in quotes there are hardware products in in understanding media but now it's like 10 years later and he's got to put that in quotes he's

[1:24:41] Bob Dobbs: got to put software in quotes and he talks about um i think he talked about understanding media being both consumer and producer is that right i think yeah yeah

[1:24:54] Bob Dobbs: The participant consumer producer,

[1:24:57] Bob Dobbs: you can't tell who's making what.

[1:24:59] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:25:00] Bob Dobbs: who's the entrepreneur?

[1:25:01] Bob Dobbs: Who's the passive victim?

[1:25:06] Bob Dobbs: Everybody is playing all roles,

[1:25:09] Bob Dobbs: both sides,

[1:25:10] Bob Dobbs: in the tactility.

[1:25:12] Bob Dobbs: So the participant consumer producer of hardware products and software information alike.

[1:25:21] Bob Dobbs: So then

[1:25:22] Bob Dobbs: I then try to talk about it.

[1:25:25] Bob Dobbs: The mixture of them would be memes.

[1:25:28] Bob Dobbs: Software information is a meme,

[1:25:29] Bob Dobbs: obviously,

[1:25:30] Bob Dobbs: but there are images of hardware,

[1:25:32] Bob Dobbs: and people consume hardware imagery.

[1:25:34] Bob Dobbs: Now that becomes an autonomic Android meme.

[1:25:37] Bob Dobbs: The meme world is an Android,

[1:25:39] Bob Dobbs: the information world that's not listening to you and not talking to you.

[1:25:44] Bob Dobbs: It's not engaged in surveilling you.

[1:25:46] Bob Dobbs: It's talking among its machinic parts.

[1:25:48] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:25:48] Bob Dobbs: there I am saying what's being surveilling.

[1:25:52] Bob Dobbs: It's surveilling itself,

[1:25:53] Bob Dobbs: not you.

[1:25:54] Bob Dobbs: As McLuhan used to say,

[1:25:56] Bob Dobbs: Quote,

[1:25:57] Bob Dobbs: a bee goes from flower to flower and carries the pollen accidentally.

[1:26:02] Bob Dobbs: It's pollinating the flowers,

[1:26:03] Bob Dobbs: but it's irrelevant.

[1:26:05] Bob Dobbs: It's not aware of what it's doing with the flowers.

[1:26:07] Bob Dobbs: The flowers are taking advantage of the bee,

[1:26:09] Bob Dobbs: and that's what kids are doing.

[1:26:11] Bob Dobbs: They're typing memes to each other so that the android meme seems to be doing something for humans among its machinic selves.

[1:26:19] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure what I mean by that,

[1:26:20] Bob Dobbs: but...

[1:26:21] Bob Dobbs: That's what kids are doing.

[1:26:22] Bob Dobbs: They're typing memes to each other so that the Android meme seems to be doing something for humans among its machinic selves.

[1:26:29] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:26:29] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:26:30] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:26:31] Cameron McEwen: that makes good sense.

[1:26:32] Bob Dobbs: Good.

[1:26:33] Bob Dobbs: I'm glad someone did that.

[1:26:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:26:38] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:26:39] Bob Dobbs: I think I know what you mean.

[1:26:41] Bob Dobbs: It made sense there.

[1:26:42] Bob Dobbs: The idea is that the Android meme is not engaging humans,

[1:26:45] Bob Dobbs: so the kids are pretending they're engaged.

[1:26:52] Bob Dobbs: That could be part of the reason they're so neurotically can't stop looking at their texting.

[1:26:58] Bob Dobbs: Because it's so fascinating because they kind of feel it's a fake what they're talking about.

[1:27:04] Bob Dobbs: There's no real purpose to it.

[1:27:06] Bob Dobbs: And they want to see if anybody's cracking up while doing it.

[1:27:09] Bob Dobbs: There's a real drama there watching your buddies keep up this ridiculous phatic communion.

[1:27:16] Bob Dobbs: And everybody knowing it's a complete put on.

[1:27:21] Bob Dobbs: not leading to anything,

[1:27:23] Bob Dobbs: but they can't let it go because it's the most nerve-wracking activity that's happening in your community,

[1:27:32] Bob Dobbs: which is your peer group in school.

[1:27:36] Bob Dobbs: That's your community.

[1:27:38] Bob Dobbs: So I'm saying they're doing something for humans,

[1:27:42] Bob Dobbs: typing memes to each other so that the Android,

[1:27:44] Bob Dobbs: they're helping,

[1:27:45] Bob Dobbs: see,

[1:27:45] Bob Dobbs: they're producing.

[1:27:46] Bob Dobbs: They're helping the Android meme,

[1:27:48] Bob Dobbs: continuing its attempt to distract us from the fact that...

[1:27:51] Bob Dobbs: It's not talking to us.

[1:27:54] Bob Dobbs: They're typing it together,

[1:27:55] Bob Dobbs: so the Android meme seems to be doing something for humans,

[1:27:59] Bob Dobbs: but it's actually among its machinic selves.

[1:28:02] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:28:03] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:28:07] Cameron McEwen: I guess what I would ask about there is if the

[1:28:12] Cameron McEwen: Android meme is not in dialogue except with itself,

[1:28:17] Cameron McEwen: doesn't that locate the Android meme back in the...

[1:28:21] Cameron McEwen: Excuse me,

[1:28:21] Cameron McEwen: back in the Gutenberg Galaxy?

[1:28:27] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying not to say that.

[1:28:32] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme is on a new front.

[1:28:35] Bob Dobbs: And maybe this search for AI,

[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: humans are refusing to look at the Gutenbergian aspect of the Android meme.

[1:28:45] Bob Dobbs: They're trying to put it back into the

[1:28:49] Bob Dobbs: Gutenbergian.

[1:28:50] Bob Dobbs: characteristics.

[1:28:51] Bob Dobbs: So the kids type to each other.

[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: They tend to be communicating.

[1:28:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:28:58] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:28:59] Cameron McEwen: So then what you're saying there is that the Android meme,

[1:29:02] Cameron McEwen: like anything else,

[1:29:03] Cameron McEwen: has a range of meanings.

[1:29:07] Cameron McEwen: And the Android meme is not something that can be avoided.

[1:29:12] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[1:29:14] Cameron McEwen: it would be like an octopus attacking the Great Pyramid,

[1:29:17] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:29:18] Cameron McEwen: So the um,

[1:29:20] Cameron McEwen: Android meme is a fact,

[1:29:27] Cameron McEwen: if there were such a thing as a fact anymore.

[1:29:30] Cameron McEwen: And it needs to be appreciated,

[1:29:38] Cameron McEwen: extra

[1:29:39] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg Galaxy.

[1:29:41] Cameron McEwen: And so how to do that?

[1:29:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:29:44] Cameron McEwen: Because it involves our identity,

[1:29:47] Cameron McEwen: it involves everything.

[1:29:49] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:29:50] Bob Dobbs: somebody asked me,

[1:29:51] Bob Dobbs: Bob,

[1:29:51] Bob Dobbs: could you explain what the Android meme is?

[1:29:53] Bob Dobbs: And I produced this

[1:29:54] Bob Dobbs: 200-page book.

[1:29:58] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know I'd have to go that far in answering them.

[1:30:02] Bob Dobbs: It's a very hard question,

[1:30:05] Bob Dobbs: what the Android meme is.

[1:30:07] Bob Dobbs: But that's the tactility.

[1:30:08] Bob Dobbs: You can't have meaning alone.

[1:30:11] Bob Dobbs: You have to have non-meaning going on.

[1:30:14] Cameron McEwen: Correct,

[1:30:17] Cameron McEwen: We were talking about that a little while ago,

[1:30:19] Cameron McEwen: about how the undulation is not something abstract.

[1:30:25] Cameron McEwen: It needs to be particular.

[1:30:28] Bob Dobbs: And that's what you're saying here.

[1:30:36] Cameron McEwen: You could not have tactility by itself.

[1:30:38] Cameron McEwen: Tactility needs to be between things.

[1:30:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:30:42] Bob Dobbs: and what I call tactility,

[1:30:44] Bob Dobbs: you call discontinuity.

[1:30:46] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:30:47] Bob Dobbs: That's where we're saying what we're saying again.

[1:30:50] Cameron McEwen: And I think here I would say that the pollen is tactility and discontinuity,

[1:30:58] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:30:58] Cameron McEwen: You say a bee goes from flower to flower and carries pollen accidentally.

[1:31:03] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:31:04] Bob Dobbs: It's pollinating the flowers.

[1:31:06] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:31:07] Cameron McEwen: But the flowers think that they're taking advantage of the bee.

[1:31:12] Cameron McEwen: The bee thinks it's taking advantage of the flowers.

[1:31:15] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:31:15] Cameron McEwen: What's wrong?

[1:31:16] Cameron McEwen: What's really going on is that the pollen is being taken from here to there.

[1:31:20] Cameron McEwen: So the pollen,

[1:31:21] Cameron McEwen: you can say,

[1:31:22] Cameron McEwen: is communication.

[1:31:24] Bob Dobbs: And that keeps life going.

[1:31:26] Bob Dobbs: We are actually keeping life going.

[1:31:28] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:31:30] Cameron McEwen: That's the undulation right there.

[1:31:32] Cameron McEwen: The undulation is the movement of the pollen between flowers,

[1:31:36] Cameron McEwen: which pollinates the flowers,

[1:31:38] Cameron McEwen: which is to say,

[1:31:40] Cameron McEwen: allows them to keep going.

[1:31:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:31:43] Bob Dobbs: Zappa in an interview,

[1:31:43] Bob Dobbs: right out of the blue,

[1:31:44] Bob Dobbs: he said,

[1:31:45] Bob Dobbs: radio is new life.

[1:31:48] Bob Dobbs: That's an analog phase back in the 60s.

[1:31:52] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying now you have the digital version of that.

[1:31:55] Bob Dobbs: The people are making new life.

[1:32:00] Bob Dobbs: The new fantasy is,

[1:32:01] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:32:01] Bob Dobbs: we will genetically engineer new lives.

[1:32:03] Bob Dobbs: The womb can close.

[1:32:04] Bob Dobbs: We don't need to have reproduction in the chemical body.

[1:32:07] Bob Dobbs: We'll make the life.

[1:32:09] Bob Dobbs: We're already doing that somehow,

[1:32:11] Bob Dobbs: and that would be effects preceding the causes.

[1:32:14] Bob Dobbs: We are,

[1:32:15] Bob Dobbs: you know...

[1:32:17] Bob Dobbs: There was a bunch of rock critics at the Dia Center.

[1:32:20] Bob Dobbs: We were talking about the carpenter's wife and the art world,

[1:32:25] Bob Dobbs: the

[1:32:26] Bob Dobbs: de Menil people,

[1:32:27] Bob Dobbs: and they had a big panel on rock culture.

[1:32:30] Bob Dobbs: So all these rock critics were up on the panel.

[1:32:32] Bob Dobbs: So when it was time for the audience to comment,

[1:32:35] Bob Dobbs: I got up and I said,

[1:32:36] Bob Dobbs: First of all,

[1:32:37] Bob Dobbs: let's all recognize that every one of you guys up there on the panel are genetic engineers.

[1:32:45] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:32:46] Bob Dobbs: and,

[1:32:46] Bob Dobbs: uh...

[1:32:47] Bob Dobbs: Arthur Kroker co-author Michael Weinstein in the great book Data Trash,

[1:32:52] Bob Dobbs: his wife is a professor out there in Chicago or someplace.

[1:32:57] Cameron McEwen: They're all professors.

[1:32:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:33:00] Bob Dobbs: and they're rock critics.

[1:33:01] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:33:02] Bob Dobbs: Writing,

[1:33:03] Bob Dobbs: reviewing the Osmond sisters or whatever they are,

[1:33:08] Bob Dobbs: or something stupid,

[1:33:09] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:33:11] Bob Dobbs: Something trivial.

[1:33:12] Bob Dobbs: And so I noticed her because she was on the panel.

[1:33:16] Bob Dobbs: She might have laughed a little bit because she would be around her wild husband,

[1:33:20] Bob Dobbs: and that wouldn't be so far off in her world.

[1:33:24] Bob Dobbs: I later was talking to somebody,

[1:33:25] Bob Dobbs: and I saw her walking by,

[1:33:27] Bob Dobbs: skulking by me,

[1:33:29] Bob Dobbs: looking at me,

[1:33:30] Bob Dobbs: spying on me so blatantly,

[1:33:32] Bob Dobbs: her face and her posture.

[1:33:35] Bob Dobbs: She was watching to see if I'd noticed it,

[1:33:37] Bob Dobbs: and I noticed it.

[1:33:38] Bob Dobbs: Then years later,

[1:33:40] Bob Dobbs: when her husband died,

[1:33:41] Bob Dobbs: which was about two years ago or something,

[1:33:43] Bob Dobbs: I called her up.

[1:33:44] Bob Dobbs: Introduced myself and reminded her of that whole scene,

[1:33:47] Bob Dobbs: but she didn't remember any of it,

[1:33:49] Bob Dobbs: but

[1:33:50] Bob Dobbs: We had a nice conversation became friends

[1:33:53] Bob Dobbs: Conversationally discarnate for a minute

[1:33:57] Bob Dobbs: But I always wanted to talk to her.

[1:33:59] Bob Dobbs: I wish I would have liked to have responded to her at that point Because she was sort of intrigued with you know,

[1:34:05] Bob Dobbs: hey buddy.

[1:34:06] Bob Dobbs: You're you using real accurate words You reading Arthur Kroker you read my husband.

[1:34:10] Bob Dobbs: Don't you is what she was thinking it

[1:34:16] Bob Dobbs: But I couldn't leave who I was talking to.

[1:34:19] Bob Dobbs: But I eventually got to talk to her.

[1:34:24] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:34:25] Bob Dobbs: that's how crazy what I'm trying to say with the Android media.

[1:34:30] Bob Dobbs: If we're not stuck in the chemical body,

[1:34:32] Bob Dobbs: we can't do normal analysis of bodies to see how they're pregnant or not.

[1:34:39] Bob Dobbs: We are producing other levels,

[1:34:42] Bob Dobbs: and that creates...

[1:34:43] Bob Dobbs: other realities,

[1:34:44] Bob Dobbs: other forms of life,

[1:34:45] Bob Dobbs: and that's what makes...

[1:34:47] Bob Dobbs: The chemical body is so futile and forlorn and abandoned and all the crazy stuff it's trying to do,

[1:34:53] Bob Dobbs: as well as the TV body and the chip body.

[1:34:55] Bob Dobbs: They're all on the dole now.

[1:34:59] Bob Dobbs: They're all homeless.

[1:35:02] Bob Dobbs: And so that's the new area we're in now,

[1:35:06] Bob Dobbs: which I call the tech body.

[1:35:12] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:35:12] Cameron McEwen: good.

[1:35:14] Cameron McEwen: I hadn't understood before.

[1:35:16] Cameron McEwen: for the homeless aspect of the tech body.

[1:35:21] Cameron McEwen: That's interesting.

[1:35:24] Cameron McEwen: That's the fate of the world.

[1:35:28] Cameron McEwen: Humans are trying to find out who they are and what they should do,

[1:35:32] Cameron McEwen: and the great question there is,

[1:35:34] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:35:34] Cameron McEwen: where is your home?

[1:35:36] Cameron McEwen: What would it be to be at home?

[1:35:38] Cameron McEwen: And that's what they don't know.

[1:35:40] Cameron McEwen: That's what we don't know.

[1:35:42] Bob Dobbs: And so we're global,

[1:35:44] Bob Dobbs: and the ones that...

[1:35:46] Bob Dobbs: But it becomes a grievance.

[1:35:48] Bob Dobbs: And so everybody thinks they're against being global.

[1:35:50] Bob Dobbs: And they're saying some guys,

[1:35:52] Bob Dobbs: the 1%ers are the globalists.

[1:35:53] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:35:53] Bob Dobbs: you're a globalist.

[1:35:55] Bob Dobbs: You're a solar occupant,

[1:35:57] Bob Dobbs: even.

[1:35:58] Bob Dobbs: And so you're not recognizing how your terms don't express the problem,

[1:36:03] Bob Dobbs: don't get to the issue.

[1:36:05] Bob Dobbs: That's what makes Alex Jones and everybody that's known,

[1:36:09] Bob Dobbs: anybody who's well-known is a fool.

[1:36:13] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:36:14] Cameron McEwen: like Joe Rogan.

[1:36:16] Cameron McEwen: It's a qualification that's necessary.

[1:36:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:36:19] Bob Dobbs: And so numbness,

[1:36:21] Bob Dobbs: not intelligence,

[1:36:22] Bob Dobbs: numbness makes wealth to the degree we need to hide in old costumes.

[1:36:29] Bob Dobbs: Hardware products.

[1:36:31] Bob Dobbs: So that's why hardware.

[1:36:32] Bob Dobbs: So I'm gradually talking myself into understanding what the hell I just,

[1:36:36] Bob Dobbs: what my quote meant.

[1:36:38] Bob Dobbs: That's why hardware products are in quotes.

[1:36:41] Bob Dobbs: There's no such thing as hardware.

[1:36:44] Bob Dobbs: You can't determine where hardware and software begin and leave each other.

[1:36:48] Bob Dobbs: So that's pretty neat.

[1:36:50] Bob Dobbs: And again,

[1:36:51] Bob Dobbs: it's always no wonder McLuhan always said,

[1:36:53] Bob Dobbs: we go back and damn,

[1:36:54] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake got there first.

[1:36:55] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:36:55] Bob Dobbs: the way he presented Finnegans Wake,

[1:36:58] Bob Dobbs: it keeps up with what we're talking about.

[1:37:00] Bob Dobbs: It's absurdity.

[1:37:02] Bob Dobbs: No categories,

[1:37:03] Bob Dobbs: no boundaries.

[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: That's what it had to do constantly.

[1:37:06] Bob Dobbs: And that's what we're re-recognizing,

[1:37:11] Bob Dobbs: re-cognizing.

[1:37:13] Bob Dobbs: what the wake was pointing out,

[1:37:14] Bob Dobbs: just like Marshall kept recognizing the wake.

[1:37:20] Bob Dobbs: So I have here,

[1:37:21] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[1:37:22] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was intuiting,

[1:37:23] Bob Dobbs: now this is the serious part,

[1:37:25] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[1:37:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was intuiting the environment of dismembered collective consciousness that was taking on a life of its own,

[1:37:32] Bob Dobbs: what people first glimpsed in the film The Matrix 30 years later.

[1:37:36] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,

[1:37:40] Bob Dobbs: I quote myself,

[1:37:41] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[1:37:41] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was intuiting the environment of dismembered collective consciousness.

[1:37:44] Bob Dobbs: Bert,

[1:37:45] Bob Dobbs: that's the guy in Switzerland,

[1:37:46] Bob Dobbs: it's been fragmented.

[1:37:48] Bob Dobbs: It's not collective anymore.

[1:37:49] Bob Dobbs: It was taking on a life of its own,

[1:37:51] Bob Dobbs: what people first glimpsed in the film The Matrix.

[1:37:54] Bob Dobbs: He was intuiting it in the

[1:37:56] Bob Dobbs: 60s, the living electronic environment,

[1:37:58] Bob Dobbs: and it became a popular figure,

[1:38:00] Bob Dobbs: in quotes,

[1:38:00] Bob Dobbs: 30 years later in 99.

[1:38:03] Bob Dobbs: They were Wachowski brothers.

[1:38:04] Bob Dobbs: They got McLuhan through Baudrillard.

[1:38:06] Bob Dobbs: Remember that?

[1:38:08] Bob Dobbs: They thought.

[1:38:09] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard was their mentor.

[1:38:11] Bob Dobbs: They wanted Baudrillard to help write the second and third movies in the Matrix series.

[1:38:15] Bob Dobbs: And he responded,

[1:38:16] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:38:16] Bob Dobbs: what you're making,

[1:38:17] Bob Dobbs: your movie,

[1:38:18] Bob Dobbs: The Matrix,

[1:38:18] Bob Dobbs: is something The Matrix would have made.

[1:38:22] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard objected to that.

[1:38:23] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:38:24] Bob Dobbs: I say he dismissed them.

[1:38:26] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know what they were talking about.

[1:38:28] Bob Dobbs: Then I was told later,

[1:38:29] Bob Dobbs: Keanu Reeves was seen going into a Santa Monica bookstore asking for books by McLuhan.

[1:38:36] Bob Dobbs: Then I make up.

[1:38:37] Bob Dobbs: this is the thought this is the thought of Keanu Reeves it's not Baudrillard i've got to go back and read McLuhan that's what Keanu realized and i said that's Keanu Reeves the actor who played neo in the matrix trying to figure out what the matrix was all about you know that's the the actors they make some movie and they don't know what it's about so they got to figure out i mean most

[1:39:00] Bob Dobbs: movies were understandable until recently if you were starring the movie you didn't have to figure out what it was about.

[1:39:09] Cameron McEwen: Isn't it?

[1:39:09] Cameron McEwen: Wasn't he from Toronto?

[1:39:12] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:39:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:39:13] Cameron McEwen: Keanu Reeves?

[1:39:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:39:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:39:14] Bob Dobbs: I think his mother was a patient of Carolyn's.

[1:39:16] Cameron McEwen: Huh.

[1:39:19] Bob Dobbs: They lived in Yorkville.

[1:39:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:39:21] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:39:21] Bob Dobbs: that was discussed.

[1:39:24] Bob Dobbs: So then I say McLuhan anticipated the post-tactile.

[1:39:29] Bob Dobbs: That's something that no one ever said.

[1:39:30] Bob Dobbs: They don't even get to the tactile,

[1:39:32] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:39:32] Bob Dobbs: They're back there with the eye,

[1:39:33] Bob Dobbs: ear,

[1:39:34] Bob Dobbs: oral,

[1:39:34] Bob Dobbs: visual nonsense.

[1:39:37] Bob Dobbs: But I'm saying,

[1:39:37] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:39:38] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan even got post-tactile.

[1:39:39] Bob Dobbs: He anticipated the post-tactile in his New York Times op-ed September 21,

[1:39:44] Bob Dobbs: 1974.

[1:39:46] Bob Dobbs: So now I'm going to read.

[1:39:47] Bob Dobbs: This is an incredible quote.

[1:39:50] Cameron McEwen: It's all from McLuhan here coming up?

[1:39:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:39:52] Bob Dobbs: this is his op-ed.

[1:39:54] Bob Dobbs: It was called A Media Approach to Inflation.

[1:39:58] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:39:58] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:39:59] Bob Dobbs: Awesome,

[1:40:00] Bob Dobbs: awesome statement.

[1:40:01] Bob Dobbs: September 21st,

[1:40:02] Bob Dobbs: 74.

[1:40:04] Bob Dobbs: It's probably,

[1:40:06] Bob Dobbs: that's the 70s McLuhan,

[1:40:08] Bob Dobbs: what he was really working on that nobody had a clue.

[1:40:12] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't depressed.

[1:40:13] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't upset.

[1:40:14] Bob Dobbs: He was working on a new...

[1:40:17] Bob Dobbs: more advanced version of Finnegans Wake that was being made in front of us.

[1:40:22] Bob Dobbs: And very different from the 60s McLuhan or the 50s McLuhan or the 40s McLuhan.

[1:40:31] Bob Dobbs: So this is a good one.

[1:40:34] Bob Dobbs: We're going to read it.

[1:40:36] Bob Dobbs: It is the peculiar character of the gambler that he seeks to exploit this very nothing or interval as a situation with its own laws.

[1:40:44] Bob Dobbs: So it's nothing.

[1:40:46] Bob Dobbs: But it's got its own laws,

[1:40:47] Bob Dobbs: see?

[1:40:48] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[1:40:48] Bob Dobbs: Anybody who was honest would read this.

[1:40:50] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:40:50] Bob Dobbs: what the hell is McLuhan saying here?

[1:40:52] Bob Dobbs: What the heck is this?

[1:40:54] Bob Dobbs: The gambler seeks to exploit the very nothing interval as a situation with its own laws.

[1:40:59] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:40:59] Bob Dobbs: I guess I was trying to say that when I talked about my friend gambling and feeling in the zone.

[1:41:06] Bob Dobbs: And then,

[1:41:06] Bob Dobbs: uh-oh,

[1:41:07] Bob Dobbs: hey,

[1:41:07] Bob Dobbs: I'm in the zone.

[1:41:08] Bob Dobbs: I'm doing great.

[1:41:08] Bob Dobbs: Ah,

[1:41:09] Bob Dobbs: fuck,

[1:41:09] Bob Dobbs: I shouldn't have noticed it.

[1:41:10] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:41:13] Bob Dobbs: That's what this is about.

[1:41:15] Bob Dobbs: The gambler,

[1:41:16] Bob Dobbs: he's in the nothing.

[1:41:18] Bob Dobbs: On this situation,

[1:41:19] Bob Dobbs: or reified interval,

[1:41:20] Bob Dobbs: he's prepared to make his bet.

[1:41:22] Bob Dobbs: And it is the intervals and the processes of the commodity market,

[1:41:25] Bob Dobbs: which at electric speed are projected as figure or thing.

[1:41:29] Bob Dobbs: The interval is the thing,

[1:41:30] Bob Dobbs: the nothing.

[1:41:31] Bob Dobbs: The Russian roulette player stakes his life on the intervals in the chamber.

[1:41:35] Bob Dobbs: The enthralling and all-involving fascination of Russian roulette is the obsession with the gap or interval.

[1:41:42] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan is saying the interval.

[1:41:44] Bob Dobbs: is what's marketed in the 70s on Wall Street.

[1:41:49] Bob Dobbs: The nothing.

[1:41:49] Cameron McEwen: Isn't this,

[1:41:50] Cameron McEwen: can't we say that this goes back to what you were just saying about the kids?

[1:41:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:41:56] Bob Dobbs: making nothing to imitate the best back of the Android meme.

[1:42:01] Bob Dobbs: That's why the market is not making products or software.

[1:42:04] Bob Dobbs: It's engaging in this very intimate tactility with the Android meme and pretending they're not being fooled by it or pretending they get it or something,

[1:42:12] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:42:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:42:14] Bob Dobbs: It's your,

[1:42:16] Bob Dobbs: what were the two things?

[1:42:18] Bob Dobbs: You submit to it or you try to steer it.

[1:42:22] Bob Dobbs: So when you become aware of what's happening,

[1:42:27] Bob Dobbs: you get frustrated because the steering thing surfaces.

[1:42:32] Bob Dobbs: I don't even know if you can have those different functions.

[1:42:35] Bob Dobbs: You wouldn't be able to tell which is which when you're doing it.

[1:42:38] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:42:39] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:42:39] Cameron McEwen: They flip.

[1:42:40] Cameron McEwen: No question about it.

[1:42:42] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:42:43] Bob Dobbs: So this is what Marshall McLuhan is trying to say here about the market.

[1:42:46] Bob Dobbs: Like the current dealing in futures at electric speeds,

[1:42:50] Bob Dobbs: Russian roulette accelerates the older forms of gambling.

[1:42:53] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:42:54] Bob Dobbs: we might be able to project on it,

[1:42:55] Bob Dobbs: Putin accelerates the older forms of gambling.

[1:42:59] Bob Dobbs: The answer comes quickly,

[1:43:00] Bob Dobbs: the whole Ukraine thing.

[1:43:02] Bob Dobbs: The answer comes quickly,

[1:43:03] Bob Dobbs: and the fascination is in the ratio to the speed of the answer.

[1:43:07] Bob Dobbs: The fascination of the one-armed bandit or slot machine.

[1:43:10] Bob Dobbs: One-armed bandit.

[1:43:12] Bob Dobbs: At this point,

[1:43:13] Bob Dobbs: Maslow's rule comes into play.

[1:43:15] Bob Dobbs: Quote,

[1:43:16] Bob Dobbs: the closer a need comes to being satisfied,

[1:43:18] Bob Dobbs: the larger an increment of additional gratification will be required to produce the same satisfaction.

[1:43:23] Bob Dobbs: You said that an hour ago.

[1:43:25] Bob Dobbs: You said something,

[1:43:27] Bob Dobbs: we're making more to make more of the opposite.

[1:43:30] Bob Dobbs: Remember that statement you made?

[1:43:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:43:34] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:43:35] Bob Dobbs: the new inflation goes beyond all markets.

[1:43:38] Bob Dobbs: So it's not even involved in business.

[1:43:42] Bob Dobbs: The new inflation goes beyond all markets,

[1:43:44] Bob Dobbs: turning them into art form or playgrounds for economic playboys.

[1:43:47] Bob Dobbs: The breakdown of markets into playgrounds may also point to a cure for inflation,

[1:43:52] Bob Dobbs: a cure beyond economics and politics,

[1:43:55] Bob Dobbs: when the planet becomes a theater for the new role players like Henry A.

[1:43:59] Bob Dobbs: Kissinger.

[1:44:01] Bob Dobbs: He is neither a bureaucrat nor a professor nor a politician,

[1:44:04] Bob Dobbs: but all of these things at once.

[1:44:06] Bob Dobbs: That's where I get into quadrophenia,

[1:44:09] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:44:09] Bob Dobbs: We're all playing these multiple roles.

[1:44:11] Bob Dobbs: The fact that our economies now constitute in large degree by information structures of pulsating data,

[1:44:17] Bob Dobbs: like that of the TV image,

[1:44:19] Bob Dobbs: means that they're...

[1:44:20] Bob Dobbs: So the TV image was ground,

[1:44:22] Bob Dobbs: it became figure,

[1:44:23] Bob Dobbs: and became business.

[1:44:25] Bob Dobbs: What they called economics.

[1:44:27] Bob Dobbs: The pulsating data.

[1:44:31] Bob Dobbs: The undulating sirens.

[1:44:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:44:34] Cameron McEwen: so everything that he's talking about in these paragraphs is an attempt to reaffirm...

[1:44:43] Cameron McEwen: something that can't be reified.

[1:44:45] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:44:46] Bob Dobbs: And therefore,

[1:44:46] Bob Dobbs: you can't have wealth,

[1:44:47] Bob Dobbs: you can't have identity,

[1:44:48] Bob Dobbs: you can't have any of the Gutenberg distinctions.

[1:44:52] Bob Dobbs: And,

[1:44:52] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:44:53] Bob Dobbs: that's maybe the way aboriginal people lived.

[1:44:56] Bob Dobbs: They all hunted and survived and found things and shared because there was no distinctions between things.

[1:45:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:45:05] Cameron McEwen: that's the direction

[1:45:08] Cameron McEwen: Marshall McLuhan is going in,

[1:45:09] Cameron McEwen: no question about it.

[1:45:10] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:45:11] Cameron McEwen: I believe that's what he meant by Orientalizing.

[1:45:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:45:15] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:45:17] Bob Dobbs: The fact that our economy is now constantly in large degree by information structures of pulsating data,

[1:45:22] Bob Dobbs: like that of the TV image,

[1:45:24] Bob Dobbs: means that there are innumerable new intervals in every social situation which provide opportunities for new involvements and obsessions,

[1:45:32] Bob Dobbs: endless games with futures in antiques,

[1:45:35] Bob Dobbs: in horoscopes,

[1:45:36] Bob Dobbs: fashions,

[1:45:36] Bob Dobbs: and commodities.

[1:45:38] Bob Dobbs: Everything becomes,

[1:45:42] Bob Dobbs: you make wagers on.

[1:45:45] Bob Dobbs: That would be making wages on the undulations,

[1:45:47] Bob Dobbs: what's going to go up and what's going to go down.

[1:45:50] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:45:51] Bob Dobbs: Such opportunity.

[1:45:53] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:45:53] Bob Dobbs: this is a,

[1:45:53] Bob Dobbs: look how amazing this article is.

[1:45:56] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:45:57] Bob Dobbs: nobody deals with this,

[1:45:58] Bob Dobbs: but he said here,

[1:45:59] Bob Dobbs: it's like his last great swan song,

[1:46:03] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:46:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:46:08] Cameron McEwen: he's attempting to say how to read the world.

[1:46:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:46:12] Bob Dobbs: a more complex world than the 60s.

[1:46:18] Bob Dobbs: Such opportunities are nowhere thicker than in the old commodity markets of supply and demand,

[1:46:23] Bob Dobbs: especially when they move at the speed of light.

[1:46:25] Bob Dobbs: It is here that it is possible to buy up futures in oil or meat or grain or real estate or antiques,

[1:46:32] Bob Dobbs: using the time intervals between supply and demand as the point of intervention and gambling.

[1:46:37] Bob Dobbs: At electric speed,

[1:46:38] Bob Dobbs: it is possible to play Russian roulette with whole economies.

[1:46:41] Bob Dobbs: That's George Soros with London in 1992.

[1:46:45] Bob Dobbs: Remember?

[1:46:46] Bob Dobbs: He crashed the pound.

[1:46:49] Bob Dobbs: At electric speed,

[1:46:50] Bob Dobbs: it is possible to play Russian roulette with whole economies,

[1:46:53] Bob Dobbs: with entire educational systems,

[1:46:55] Bob Dobbs: and with political regimes.

[1:46:57] Bob Dobbs: So maybe

[1:46:58] Bob Dobbs: Trump scares people because he was kind of a Russian roulette with the sacred White House,

[1:47:05] Bob Dobbs: or even the way he campaigned,

[1:47:06] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:47:09] Bob Dobbs: He was a George Soros of political campaigning.

[1:47:13] Bob Dobbs: He hijacked the whole process.

[1:47:16] Cameron McEwen: I was just going to say this is the hijacking theme.

[1:47:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:47:20] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:47:21] Bob Dobbs: which is earlier.

[1:47:23] Bob Dobbs: We did that.

[1:47:23] Bob Dobbs: That's a few pages back.

[1:47:27] Bob Dobbs: Henry Kissinger seems to be the current triggerman.

[1:47:30] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:47:30] Bob Dobbs: for McLuhan,

[1:47:31] Bob Dobbs: that's the big brothers,

[1:47:34] Bob Dobbs: the deep state guys,

[1:47:37] Bob Dobbs: the one who looks like he's in charge,

[1:47:40] Bob Dobbs: the closest looking,

[1:47:41] Bob Dobbs: because he's so inside with the...

[1:47:44] Bob Dobbs: with the Gutenberg categories of the Rockefellers and the wealthy and the powerful and the this and the that,

[1:47:51] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:47:51] Bob Dobbs: and he's hanging around with all of them.

[1:47:53] Bob Dobbs: So he looks like to be their representative.

[1:47:56] Bob Dobbs: Henry Kissinger,

[1:47:57] Bob Dobbs: remember,

[1:47:57] Bob Dobbs: he says way back in 1951 in the letter to Pound,

[1:48:01] Bob Dobbs: June 22nd,

[1:48:03] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to create a distraction on the sidelines for the triggermen and needle the somnambulist citizen.

[1:48:11] Bob Dobbs: He didn't say citizens.

[1:48:11] Bob Dobbs: That's what he means.

[1:48:12] Bob Dobbs: So he's going to needle the big brother guys.

[1:48:15] Bob Dobbs: and distract,

[1:48:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:48:17] Bob Dobbs: upset their language that they're trying to impose on people,

[1:48:21] Bob Dobbs: at the same time wake up the average numbskull to where they are,

[1:48:26] Bob Dobbs: how homeless they are.

[1:48:29] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:48:30] Bob Dobbs: I think he says the word triggerman way back there.

[1:48:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:48:34] Cameron McEwen: around 1951,

[1:48:37] Bob Dobbs: I think that was.

[1:48:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:48:38] Bob Dobbs: June 22nd,

[1:48:38] Bob Dobbs: and you never see it again in any published stuff until this,

[1:48:42] Bob Dobbs: until 74.

[1:48:44] Bob Dobbs: There's an interview,

[1:48:45] Bob Dobbs: maybe his last interview,

[1:48:47] Bob Dobbs: somebody did out in California in 79 that Nelson and I came across.

[1:48:51] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:48:52] Bob Dobbs: Kissinger comes up and he says,

[1:48:53] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:48:54] Bob Dobbs: that's the kiss of death.

[1:48:56] Bob Dobbs: He said that nickname for Kissinger is the kiss of death.

[1:49:00] Bob Dobbs: Henry Kissinger seems to be the current trigger man in this planetary game among the intervals of first,

[1:49:05] Bob Dobbs: second,

[1:49:05] Bob Dobbs: third and fourth worlds.

[1:49:07] Bob Dobbs: The first world being the industrialized West,

[1:49:09] Bob Dobbs: the second being Russian socialism,

[1:49:11] Bob Dobbs: the third the non-industrialized lands.

[1:49:13] Bob Dobbs: And the fourth,

[1:49:14] Bob Dobbs: the electric world,

[1:49:15] Bob Dobbs: that has gone around the rest,

[1:49:16] Bob Dobbs: becoming the primum mobile of inflation in all the rest.

[1:49:21] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[1:49:23] Bob Dobbs: What a mouthful.

[1:49:24] Bob Dobbs: It was a lot of fun reading this for the first time.

[1:49:27] Bob Dobbs: When you read,

[1:49:28] Bob Dobbs: if you half understood McLuhan and you read something great that was new,

[1:49:31] Bob Dobbs: it would be so mind-expanding or something.

[1:49:34] Cameron McEwen: You know what I mean?

[1:49:38] Bob Dobbs: It would be very exciting.

[1:49:39] Bob Dobbs: It would be like a great music performance or a great opera or a great...

[1:49:42] Bob Dobbs: classical or great rock song or something.

[1:49:46] Bob Dobbs: It had these aesthetic triggers,

[1:49:49] Bob Dobbs: aesthetic massages going on.

[1:49:53] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:49:54] Bob Dobbs: there's a lot of fun to read that over and over and try to figure out what it is.

[1:50:03] Cameron McEwen: To me,

[1:50:03] Cameron McEwen: all of this stuff says that everything that you think is going on is palimpsest.

[1:50:14] Cameron McEwen: And you need to read the text that's on the other side of what you're looking at.

[1:50:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:50:21] Bob Dobbs: you have to look at what's beneath the palimpsest,

[1:50:23] Bob Dobbs: the markings and scribblings that erase the original text.

[1:50:29] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:50:30] Bob Dobbs: I then say in the series part,

[1:50:33] Bob Dobbs: I named this radical non-extension.

[1:50:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:50:37] Bob Dobbs: it's not an extension of us.

[1:50:38] Bob Dobbs: It's an extension of its parts,

[1:50:40] Bob Dobbs: of the machinic parts.

[1:50:42] Bob Dobbs: I named this radical non-extension the Android meme in a column I wrote for Flipside magazine in the 96-2002 era.

[1:50:49] Bob Dobbs: The uniqueness of this new situation was perceived by McLuhan as beginning with the technology known as the instant replay.

[1:50:58] Bob Dobbs: And then we go into the instant replay.

[1:50:59] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:50:59] Bob Dobbs: how are we doing for time?

[1:51:02] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:51:02] Cameron McEwen: we're coming up to

[1:51:04] Cameron McEwen: 6 o'clock our time.

[1:51:07] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:51:10] Cameron McEwen: as far as I'm concerned,

[1:51:11] Cameron McEwen: we can go on a while,

[1:51:13] Cameron McEwen: but we need to be aware that we're coming up to the end.

[1:51:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:51:18] Bob Dobbs: and you...

[1:51:19] Bob Dobbs: Don't have to do something around this time?

[1:51:22] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:51:23] Cameron McEwen: I don't know when this happened,

[1:51:27] Cameron McEwen: but our poor dog died.

[1:51:30] Cameron McEwen: What?

[1:51:30] Cameron McEwen: I can't remember if this happened in the intervening period.

[1:51:38] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:51:38] Cameron McEwen: I used to need to feed our dog around now,

[1:51:41] Cameron McEwen: but the poor guy died.

[1:51:43] Bob Dobbs: Just a week or so ago.

[1:51:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:51:45] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:51:47] Bob Dobbs: He just dropped dead?

[1:51:49] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:51:51] Cameron McEwen: he went to sleep and never woke up.

[1:51:54] Cameron McEwen: He didn't have a prolonged period of being sick,

[1:52:03] Cameron McEwen: which was good.

[1:52:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:52:05] Cameron McEwen: But,

[1:52:06] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:52:07] Bob Dobbs: But it was a big surprise.

[1:52:09] Bob Dobbs: Didn't expect it.

[1:52:10] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:52:10] Cameron McEwen: terrible.

[1:52:11] Cameron McEwen: Terrible.

[1:52:11] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:52:12] Cameron McEwen: we knew that he wasn't feeling well.

[1:52:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:52:16] Cameron McEwen: And we had been taking him to the vet to try to.

[1:52:18] Cameron McEwen: figure out what was going on but we never did figure it out and this night he went to sleep and then the morning when I went to see how he was he was dead.

[1:52:32] Bob Dobbs: So what do you do with a dead dog where do you take it?

[1:52:37] Cameron McEwen: Well there's different possibilities but we took him to a place to be cremated.

[1:52:44] Bob Dobbs: And you get it done the same day?

[1:52:47] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:52:48] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:52:48] Bob Dobbs: So you just go in there.

[1:52:49] Bob Dobbs: You don't do a ceremony.

[1:52:51] Bob Dobbs: You could do a ceremony if you want to,

[1:52:52] Bob Dobbs: but just get rid of it.

[1:52:55] Bob Dobbs: So what was the dog's name?

[1:52:59] Cameron McEwen: Pogo.

[1:53:00] Bob Dobbs: Pogo.

[1:53:00] Bob Dobbs: P-O-G-O?

[1:53:02] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:53:02] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[1:53:04] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:53:06] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:53:06] Bob Dobbs: so you're free.

[1:53:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:53:10] Cameron McEwen: not in a good way.

[1:53:12] Cameron McEwen: I miss that dog a lot.

[1:53:13] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:53:14] Bob Dobbs: How long did you have him?

[1:53:17] Cameron McEwen: He died young.

[1:53:17] Cameron McEwen: He was only 10,

[1:53:18] Cameron McEwen: but we had him since he was a puppy,

[1:53:20] Cameron McEwen: so we had him 10 years.

[1:53:23] Bob Dobbs: 10 years.

[1:53:24] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:53:25] Bob Dobbs: but that was part of your life.

[1:53:26] Bob Dobbs: You anchored the ritual at 5.30 in the morning,

[1:53:30] Bob Dobbs: feeding the dog.

[1:53:31] Bob Dobbs: That's correct.

[1:53:33] Bob Dobbs: Your identity was shattered.

[1:53:35] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:53:36] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[1:53:37] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:53:38] Bob Dobbs: the uniqueness of this new situation was perceived by McLuhan as beginning with the technology known as the instant replay.

[1:53:44] Bob Dobbs: So then I have the tetrad,

[1:53:45] Bob Dobbs: instant replay.

[1:53:47] Bob Dobbs: So it enhances,

[1:53:48] Bob Dobbs: or it says,

[1:53:49] Bob Dobbs: instant replay of experience equals the cliche.

[1:53:54] Bob Dobbs: Amplifies cognitive awareness.

[1:53:58] Bob Dobbs: Wipes out the merely representational and chronological.

[1:54:03] Bob Dobbs: You've got to scan past the blue part.

[1:54:05] Bob Dobbs: Retrieves meaning.

[1:54:08] Bob Dobbs: I.A.

[1:54:08] Bob Dobbs: Richards did the book,

[1:54:09] Bob Dobbs: The Meaning of Meaning.

[1:54:11] Bob Dobbs: So retrieves meaning.

[1:54:13] Bob Dobbs: in quotes,

[1:54:15] Bob Dobbs: flips from individual experience to pattern recognition,

[1:54:18] Bob Dobbs: the nature of the archetype.

[1:54:20] Bob Dobbs: So that's in Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers'

[1:54:23] Bob Dobbs: book,

[1:54:23] Bob Dobbs: The Global Village,

[1:54:24] Bob Dobbs: 1989,

[1:54:29] Bob Dobbs: page 176.

[1:54:29] Bob Dobbs: So then I have a quote from McLuhan addressing students in his brother's class at Sheridan School of Art and Design,

[1:54:36] Bob Dobbs: Mississauga,

[1:54:36] Bob Dobbs: Ontario,

[1:54:37] Bob Dobbs: in January 75.

[1:54:39] Bob Dobbs: This was caught on video by Richard Kerr.

[1:54:42] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[1:54:43] Bob Dobbs: I think the instant replay is probably the most powerful experience that you will ever have in your lifetime.

[1:54:49] Bob Dobbs: He's saying that to the university students.

[1:54:52] Bob Dobbs: So what do I say?

[1:54:56] Bob Dobbs: Do you have anything to say about this at this point,

[1:54:58] Bob Dobbs: or do I keep talking?

[1:55:02] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:55:02] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:55:04] Cameron McEwen: the instant replay is obviously a big theme in McLuhan and is very important to consider.

[1:55:11] Cameron McEwen: But

[1:55:11] Cameron McEwen: I'm interested in the word that you use,

[1:55:15] Cameron McEwen: non-extension.

[1:55:17] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:55:17] Cameron McEwen: And you quickly sort of glossed it by saying it's...

[1:55:21] Cameron McEwen: the non-extension of the human.

[1:55:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:55:25] Cameron McEwen: But isn't there an aspect of the Android meme itself that is a non-extension?

[1:55:32] Cameron McEwen: Isn't there,

[1:55:34] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:55:34] Cameron McEwen: you talk about the Android meme just talking to its parts.

[1:55:40] Cameron McEwen: And so it's a non-extension in itself,

[1:55:45] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[1:55:46] Cameron McEwen: or at least one aspect of the Android meme.

[1:55:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:55:49] Bob Dobbs: it is doing a lot of extending.

[1:55:51] Bob Dobbs: within its world.

[1:55:53] Bob Dobbs: So it's a non-extension.

[1:55:58] Bob Dobbs: I'm throwing that in,

[1:56:00] Bob Dobbs: even though it's not correct,

[1:56:03] Bob Dobbs: if you analyze it the way you just did.

[1:56:06] Bob Dobbs: But

[1:56:07] Bob Dobbs: I'm reinforcing the point that you were supposed to get earlier,

[1:56:11] Bob Dobbs: that we have stopped extending ourself.

[1:56:13] Bob Dobbs: And we are extending it.

[1:56:15] Bob Dobbs: The machine is extending itself.

[1:56:17] Bob Dobbs: So that's the only time I've ever said that.

[1:56:20] Bob Dobbs: I just...

[1:56:21] Bob Dobbs: say non-extension,

[1:56:22] Bob Dobbs: you're supposed to understand what that means.

[1:56:25] Bob Dobbs: If you don't get it,

[1:56:26] Bob Dobbs: you didn't get what I'm saying,

[1:56:28] Bob Dobbs: that the Android meme is beyond the extensions that McLuhan outlines in Understanding Media.

[1:56:37] Cameron McEwen: I don't,

[1:56:37] Cameron McEwen: um,

[1:56:38] Cameron McEwen: um,

[1:56:39] Cameron McEwen: isn't,

[1:56:40] Cameron McEwen: uh...

[1:56:40] Cameron McEwen: A surprising word like that,

[1:56:43] Cameron McEwen: an attempt to get people to think,

[1:56:48] Cameron McEwen: isn't it saying,

[1:56:49] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:56:50] Cameron McEwen: here's where you should do some thinking.

[1:56:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:56:53] Cameron McEwen: And there isn't,

[1:56:55] Cameron McEwen: there's no stability here,

[1:56:58] Cameron McEwen: there's no handle here.

[1:57:01] Cameron McEwen: It's a kind of confusion that you need to go into.

[1:57:09] Cameron McEwen: in order even to begin thinking.

[1:57:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:57:12] Bob Dobbs: So it's like

[1:57:13] Bob Dobbs: I'm teaching a bunch of kids,

[1:57:18] Bob Dobbs: and then I pull out a gun and I tell the student to shoot another student.

[1:57:22] Bob Dobbs: A totally bizarre,

[1:57:26] Bob Dobbs: unpredicted,

[1:57:27] Bob Dobbs: absurd action.

[1:57:29] Bob Dobbs: That's why

[1:57:30] Bob Dobbs: I put in this word that had never been said before in that sentence to wake people up to a new level.

[1:57:38] Bob Dobbs: that they were sort of maybe half getting when they were enjoying the illiterate prose of my explanation.

[1:57:46] Bob Dobbs: Suddenly I stuck it,

[1:57:47] Bob Dobbs: put them inside the Android meme saying non-extension because

[1:57:51] Bob Dobbs: I don't even remember doing this,

[1:57:53] Bob Dobbs: but I did it.

[1:57:55] Bob Dobbs: I named this radical non-extension.

[1:57:57] Bob Dobbs: Like,

[1:57:58] Bob Dobbs: geez,

[1:57:58] Bob Dobbs: when you're doing McLuhan,

[1:58:00] Bob Dobbs: everybody uses the word extension.

[1:58:02] Bob Dobbs: So it's a good disruptor to make people think or to notice what's being.

[1:58:09] Bob Dobbs: thought about in front of you.

[1:58:12] Cameron McEwen: And you use the word radical in front of it.

[1:58:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:58:18] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:58:19] Cameron McEwen: Which means that the various extensions that McLuhan is always talking about do not exclude,

[1:58:29] Cameron McEwen: at the most fundamental level,

[1:58:32] Cameron McEwen: non-extension.

[1:58:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:58:38] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:58:39] Bob Dobbs: I was trying to communicate the new.

[1:58:42] Bob Dobbs: This is the way you've got to do it.

[1:58:43] Bob Dobbs: The whole thing,

[1:58:45] Bob Dobbs: the whole thing,

[1:58:46] Bob Dobbs: the 50 and 100 pages was to lead to this sentence.

[1:58:49] Bob Dobbs: Radical non-extension,

[1:58:51] Bob Dobbs: what's that?

[1:58:53] Bob Dobbs: Has Bob left the reservoir?

[1:58:56] Bob Dobbs: Left the plantation?

[1:58:58] Bob Dobbs: Now over in the anomalous school?

[1:59:02] Bob Dobbs: Suddenly he's Andy McLuhan.

[1:59:06] Cameron McEwen: So when you write this stuff,

[1:59:08] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[1:59:09] Cameron McEwen: are you...

[1:59:12] Bob Dobbs: Very conscious.

[1:59:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah?

[1:59:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:59:15] Bob Dobbs: It's no dreamy writing.

[1:59:17] Bob Dobbs: And that's why I think McLuhan is conscious because I do it,

[1:59:21] Bob Dobbs: so I'm projecting that into him.

[1:59:24] Cameron McEwen: So when you're writing stuff like this,

[1:59:28] Cameron McEwen: you come up with something that is unusual and surprising.

[1:59:33] Cameron McEwen: Does it make you laugh?

[1:59:35] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:59:36] Bob Dobbs: You know the story?

[1:59:38] Bob Dobbs: The McLuhan family says every now and then Marshall comes bursting out of his bedroom or wherever he was writing in his home and says,

[1:59:44] Bob Dobbs: this is going to mess them up.

[1:59:47] Bob Dobbs: Something like that.

[1:59:48] Bob Dobbs: This will get them.

[1:59:50] Bob Dobbs: As if everybody was in,

[1:59:51] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:59:51] Bob Dobbs: Marshall's in there.

[1:59:52] Bob Dobbs: He's going to get those guys down at the university campus.

[1:59:55] Bob Dobbs: He's going to do some sniping.

[1:59:58] Bob Dobbs: But he goes running,

[1:59:59] Bob Dobbs: I'll say,

[1:59:59] Bob Dobbs: this will get them.

[2:00:00] Bob Dobbs: Something like that.

[2:00:02] Bob Dobbs: This is going to really upset them.

[2:00:06] Bob Dobbs: I do that all the time.

[2:00:08] Bob Dobbs: Even when I'm on the radio show,

[2:00:10] Bob Dobbs: even when I'm talking to you,

[2:00:11] Bob Dobbs: I'm talking along and I see I'm going to say,

[2:00:13] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[2:00:13] Bob Dobbs: this will get Cameron.

[2:00:18] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:00:19] Bob Dobbs: looking at the effects before they happen.

[2:00:23] Bob Dobbs: Do you do that when you write your probe,

[2:00:27] Bob Dobbs: your blog?

[2:00:30] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[2:00:30] Cameron McEwen: I often have the experience of...

[2:00:34] Bob Dobbs: understanding a connection or understanding a disconnection or something like that that I hadn't seen before that I that it's only become available to me by writing yeah and so you're laughing I don't laugh a lot I'm laughing in my inside myself is that what you're doing yes

[2:00:55] Cameron McEwen: hello I mean if something is really new if something like every five years or something

[2:01:04] Cameron McEwen: I'll have a thought that makes me laugh out loud.

[2:01:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:01:08] Bob Dobbs: maybe I laugh,

[2:01:10] Bob Dobbs: but I do a lot of laughing inside.

[2:01:14] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:01:14] Cameron McEwen: you do a lot of laughing when you're on the radio or just when you're talking.

[2:01:19] Cameron McEwen: You're enjoying the dialogue,

[2:01:23] Cameron McEwen: which is mostly dialogue with yourself.

[2:01:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:01:26] Bob Dobbs: and Michael of South Africa says,

[2:01:29] Bob Dobbs: Bob,

[2:01:30] Bob Dobbs: interacting with ION.

[2:01:32] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:01:32] Bob Dobbs: all these years on the radio,

[2:01:34] Bob Dobbs: no one has laughed as much as Bob has on this radio show.

[2:01:40] Bob Dobbs: Because it is funny.

[2:01:41] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:01:42] Bob Dobbs: when I present myself as a hologram of JW,

[2:01:46] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I ever told you about this,

[2:01:47] Bob Dobbs: but this happened in November 2014.

[2:01:52] Bob Dobbs: What I noticed,

[2:01:53] Bob Dobbs: the hologram,

[2:01:54] Bob Dobbs: so here was the ion manifesting as a form,

[2:01:59] Bob Dobbs: not human,

[2:02:00] Bob Dobbs: but looking exactly like JW and floating around the room.

[2:02:03] Bob Dobbs: We were watching it on Skype.

[2:02:07] Bob Dobbs: As I was talking to it,

[2:02:13] Bob Dobbs: I would be finishing up my statement,

[2:02:14] Bob Dobbs: and then they were going to say something.

[2:02:15] Bob Dobbs: I could see a slight grin being on its face,

[2:02:20] Bob Dobbs: because it knew it was going to be funny in its response,

[2:02:22] Bob Dobbs: or be something I didn't see.

[2:02:26] Bob Dobbs: I could see that on its face,

[2:02:27] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean?

[2:02:29] Bob Dobbs: On the hologram's face.

[2:02:31] Bob Dobbs: I could see them smiling at what they were going to do,

[2:02:35] Bob Dobbs: what they were going to say.

[2:02:37] Bob Dobbs: So even the hologram is enjoying itself.

[2:02:42] Bob Dobbs: You get that?

[2:02:43] Cameron McEwen: Are you?

[2:02:44] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:02:45] Bob Dobbs: when I'm doing the show with Ion,

[2:02:48] Bob Dobbs: Ion has a great sense of humor,

[2:02:50] Bob Dobbs: and

[2:02:52] Bob Dobbs: I can hear something coming,

[2:02:54] Bob Dobbs: a joke,

[2:02:55] Bob Dobbs: funny,

[2:02:57] Bob Dobbs: and that's so I can hear it as well as seeing it in the hologram.

[2:03:01] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:03:02] Bob Dobbs: no,

[2:03:02] Bob Dobbs: really,

[2:03:02] Bob Dobbs: I have a great time interacting with Ion.

[2:03:08] Bob Dobbs: and people,

[2:03:10] Bob Dobbs: but it's always,

[2:03:12] Bob Dobbs: I am there for 12 hours,

[2:03:14] Bob Dobbs: constantly,

[2:03:15] Bob Dobbs: ready to laugh or to notice,

[2:03:16] Bob Dobbs: to make new perceptions.

[2:03:18] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:03:19] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[2:03:19] Bob Dobbs: it is very enjoyable.

[2:03:20] Bob Dobbs: You've noticed that when you've heard of the show?

[2:03:24] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you mean?

[2:03:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:03:25] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:03:25] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[2:03:26] Cameron McEwen: I don't listen to your show very much.

[2:03:30] Cameron McEwen: What I do is,

[2:03:32] Cameron McEwen: occasionally,

[2:03:32] Cameron McEwen: you'll send me a link and say,

[2:03:35] Cameron McEwen: you should listen to this or something.

[2:03:37] Cameron McEwen: And so

[2:03:38] Cameron McEwen: I do.

[2:03:39] Cameron McEwen: And so I've heard how you interact.

[2:03:42] Bob Dobbs: A lot of laughter.

[2:03:44] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:03:44] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:03:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:03:48] Bob Dobbs: so the instant replay.

[2:03:50] Bob Dobbs: Instant replay of experience equals the cliche,

[2:03:53] Bob Dobbs: amplifies cognitive awareness,

[2:03:55] Bob Dobbs: wipes out the merely representational and chronological,

[2:04:01] Bob Dobbs: retrieves meaning,

[2:04:02] Bob Dobbs: and then flips from individual experience to pattern recognition,

[2:04:05] Bob Dobbs: the nature of the archetype.

[2:04:07] Bob Dobbs: That's very packed.

[2:04:09] Bob Dobbs: So

[2:04:10] Bob Dobbs: I go back up.

[2:04:12] Bob Dobbs: We were going to do this and then we got distracted.

[2:04:14] Bob Dobbs: So my first blue commentary back before the media approach inflation.

[2:04:25] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:04:26] Bob Dobbs: I did that.

[2:04:26] Bob Dobbs: Good.

[2:04:26] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:04:27] Bob Dobbs: So we move forward to this talk of the instant replay.

[2:04:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:04:37] Cameron McEwen: you're in the middle.

[2:04:38] Cameron McEwen: What you do is,

[2:04:40] Cameron McEwen: instead of going with the four,

[2:04:42] Cameron McEwen: you break it after the two.

[2:04:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:04:46] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[2:04:46] Cameron McEwen: And then you're going to just clarify where the instant replay consideration is going.

[2:05:00] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:05:01] Bob Dobbs: So I say Gutenberg painting back in the day,

[2:05:03] Bob Dobbs: in the Gutenberg matching era,

[2:05:06] Bob Dobbs: You tried to make your painting look just like the object you were painting.

[2:05:10] Bob Dobbs: You'd match the two.

[2:05:11] Bob Dobbs: That's representing the object.

[2:05:13] Bob Dobbs: A painting is a representation,

[2:05:15] Bob Dobbs: and that's spatial.

[2:05:17] Bob Dobbs: Then there's time.

[2:05:18] Bob Dobbs: That's chronological.

[2:05:19] Bob Dobbs: Chronological is the 1 to 10 order.

[2:05:22] Bob Dobbs: So the whole literate structure is representational and chronological.

[2:05:27] Bob Dobbs: That gets wiped out.

[2:05:28] Bob Dobbs: That's obsolesced by the instant replay.

[2:05:31] Bob Dobbs: In a way,

[2:05:32] Bob Dobbs: the archetype is wiped out because the instant replay explains.

[2:05:35] Bob Dobbs: Expands the cliche probe.

[2:05:37] Bob Dobbs: Reading that again.

[2:05:38] Bob Dobbs: In a way,

[2:05:38] Bob Dobbs: the archetype is wiped out because the instant replay expands the cliche probe.

[2:05:42] Bob Dobbs: It equals the cliche.

[2:05:45] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:05:45] Cameron McEwen: So there's no time element whereby the archetype becomes cliche.

[2:05:53] Cameron McEwen: The archetype is already cliche.

[2:05:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:05:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:05:58] Bob Dobbs: No time and no space.

[2:06:00] Bob Dobbs: you

[2:06:04] Bob Dobbs: I didn't say,

[2:06:04] Bob Dobbs: you've got both the cliche and the archetype in here.

[2:06:07] Bob Dobbs: It bypasses obsolescence and extension in a way.

[2:06:11] Bob Dobbs: Look at that.

[2:06:13] Bob Dobbs: We're archetypalizing and clicheing.

[2:06:16] Bob Dobbs: And the merely representational and chronological is like normal prose,

[2:06:19] Bob Dobbs: scientific prose,

[2:06:21] Bob Dobbs: explaining something which retrieves meaning.

[2:06:24] Bob Dobbs: I.A.

[2:06:25] Bob Dobbs: Richards was one of McLuhan's professors at Cambridge.

[2:06:27] Bob Dobbs: He wrote a book,

[2:06:28] Bob Dobbs: The Meaning of Meaning,

[2:06:29] Bob Dobbs: which was an important influence on James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp.

[2:06:32] Bob Dobbs: The flipping goes from individual to collective,

[2:06:35] Bob Dobbs: but the collective is pattern recognition.

[2:06:37] Bob Dobbs: The observation of individual experience and then projecting sociological patterns,

[2:06:42] Bob Dobbs: so to speak,

[2:06:43] Bob Dobbs: that's what we do.

[2:06:45] Bob Dobbs: And that's what the instant replay does on its own,

[2:06:47] Bob Dobbs: regardless of what humans think.

[2:06:50] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:06:50] Bob Dobbs: a big part of the Android meme is endless pattern recognition that's offered to people.

[2:06:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:06:58] Cameron McEwen: but you just finished saying that it's really not offered to people.

[2:07:01] Cameron McEwen: It's only offered to itself.

[2:07:02] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[2:07:04] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:07:05] Cameron McEwen: So humans,

[2:07:08] Cameron McEwen: I guess.

[2:07:09] Bob Dobbs: It's not individual experience.

[2:07:12] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:07:16] Cameron McEwen: It's like what we were saying about.

[2:07:21] Cameron McEwen: When somebody is on a roll,

[2:07:23] Cameron McEwen: let's say gambling or playing...

[2:07:25] Bob Dobbs: In the zone.

[2:07:26] Cameron McEwen: In the zone.

[2:07:27] Cameron McEwen: When somebody is in a zone,

[2:07:30] Cameron McEwen: you can't wake up without destroying the bubble,

[2:07:35] Cameron McEwen: if you will.

[2:07:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:07:36] Cameron McEwen: So the problem for humans is to try to understand how they are going to accord with the new reality.

[2:07:49] Cameron McEwen: without a courting.

[2:07:51] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[2:07:53] Cameron McEwen: You need to be in the zone without going into the zone.

[2:07:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:07:57] Bob Dobbs: you wake up,

[2:07:58] Bob Dobbs: you get out of the bubble without waking up.

[2:08:01] Cameron McEwen: It's a very,

[2:08:02] Cameron McEwen: very difficult problem.

[2:08:04] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:08:04] Bob Dobbs: it's ridiculous.

[2:08:05] Bob Dobbs: It's ridiculous to do this,

[2:08:07] Bob Dobbs: but we're going to have to do it,

[2:08:08] Bob Dobbs: apparently.

[2:08:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:08:10] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:08:11] Cameron McEwen: Remember McLuhan?

[2:08:11] Bob Dobbs: He said you can't live.

[2:08:14] Bob Dobbs: You can't live with this technology.

[2:08:16] Bob Dobbs: You know?

[2:08:17] Bob Dobbs: What you have to be able to do is pretty hard to do.

[2:08:21] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:08:21] Cameron McEwen: But if you say it's this ridiculously hard problem,

[2:08:27] Cameron McEwen: that has made it into what it's not.

[2:08:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:08:31] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[2:08:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:08:32] Bob Dobbs: It's easy.

[2:08:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:08:37] Cameron McEwen: That would be a mode of steering.

[2:08:39] Cameron McEwen: If you thought you could solve the problem.

[2:08:43] Cameron McEwen: If you thought you could take your identity from here to there or something,

[2:08:47] Cameron McEwen: then you've made it impossible.

[2:08:49] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[2:08:51] Bob Dobbs: That's the steering that doesn't work.

[2:08:55] Cameron McEwen: One thing,

[2:08:56] Cameron McEwen: just as a footnote here,

[2:08:58] Cameron McEwen: I.A.

[2:08:59] Cameron McEwen: Richards,

[2:08:59] Cameron McEwen: who wrote

[2:09:01] Cameron McEwen: The Meaning of Meaning in 1922 and was giving a course on rhetoric in 1935,

[2:09:10] Cameron McEwen: which McLuhan took.

[2:09:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:09:12] Cameron McEwen: So

[2:09:13] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan knew I.A.

[2:09:14] Cameron McEwen: Richards personally,

[2:09:16] Cameron McEwen: but only as a student to the professor.

[2:09:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:09:20] Cameron McEwen: I.A.

[2:09:21] Cameron McEwen: Richards,

[2:09:21] Cameron McEwen: in 1939,

[2:09:24] Cameron McEwen: went to Harvard and stayed at Harvard for the rest of his life.

[2:09:30] Cameron McEwen: So another student of

[2:09:34] Cameron McEwen: I.A. Richards at

[2:09:38] Cameron McEwen: Cambridge, this was in the

[2:09:41] Cameron McEwen: 1920s,

[2:09:42] Cameron McEwen: was Eric Havelock.

[2:09:43] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[2:09:44] Cameron McEwen: And in 1946,

[2:09:48] Cameron McEwen: when I.A.

[2:09:49] Cameron McEwen: Richards was a university professor at Harvard,

[2:09:53] Cameron McEwen: Harvard recruited Havelock.

[2:09:55] Cameron McEwen: And I'm not sure if Richards played a role in that.

[2:09:58] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure if

[2:09:59] Cameron McEwen: Richards knew

[2:10:00] Cameron McEwen: Havelock from the

[2:10:03] Cameron McEwen: 1920s at Cambridge.

[2:10:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:10:04] Cameron McEwen: At any rate,

[2:10:05] Cameron McEwen: at

[2:10:06] Cameron McEwen: Harvard, I.A.

[2:10:07] Cameron McEwen: Richards and Havelock became friends.

[2:10:11] Cameron McEwen: And Havelock's theories about oral education and the switch from morality to literacy in Greece became very influential with Richards.

[2:10:25] Cameron McEwen: And Richards kind of built that into his basic

[2:10:30] Cameron McEwen: English emphasis.

[2:10:33] Cameron McEwen: And

[2:10:33] Cameron McEwen: Richards at Harvard started translating Plato and Homer.

[2:10:39] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[2:10:40] Cameron McEwen: So the...

[2:10:42] Bob Dobbs: How long did he live?

[2:10:44] Cameron McEwen: Richards,

[2:10:46] Cameron McEwen: up until the

[2:10:47] Cameron McEwen: 1970s. I believe he died around

[2:10:50] Cameron McEwen: 75 or so.

[2:10:52] Cameron McEwen: I'm not exactly sure.

[2:10:55] Cameron McEwen: But his Festschrift was given to him in

[2:10:59] Bob Dobbs: 1973. What's that?

[2:11:02] Bob Dobbs: A Festschrift?

[2:11:03] Bob Dobbs: I know the word,

[2:11:03] Bob Dobbs: but I don't know what it means.

[2:11:04] Cameron McEwen: A celebration.

[2:11:05] Cameron McEwen: Celebration of his life.

[2:11:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:11:07] Bob Dobbs: At Harvard.

[2:11:08] Cameron McEwen: A Festschrift.

[2:11:10] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:11:12] Cameron McEwen: as a professor who had great influence on the contributors to the volume,

[2:11:23] Cameron McEwen: one of which was Havelock.

[2:11:24] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:11:26] Bob Dobbs: Is it a roast?

[2:11:27] Bob Dobbs: A festrift?

[2:11:29] Bob Dobbs: No.

[2:11:30] Cameron McEwen: Fest is the same word as English feast.

[2:11:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:11:33] Cameron McEwen: And Schrift is the same word as the script.

[2:11:38] Cameron McEwen: world.

[2:11:39] Cameron McEwen: The

[2:11:40] Cameron McEwen: Festschrift is a celebratory writing.

[2:11:44] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:11:45] Bob Dobbs: it's a book of essays on him.

[2:11:48] Cameron McEwen: Dedicated to him,

[2:11:49] Cameron McEwen: yes.

[2:11:49] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:11:51] Cameron McEwen: In fact,

[2:11:51] Cameron McEwen: the book is titled

[2:11:54] Cameron McEwen: In His Honor.

[2:11:56] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:11:57] Cameron McEwen: So E.A.

[2:11:57] Cameron McEwen: Richards,

[2:11:58] Cameron McEwen: or I.A.

[2:11:59] Cameron McEwen: Richards,

[2:12:00] Cameron McEwen: In His Honor.

[2:12:01] Cameron McEwen: And so it's a celebration and a thanking.

[2:12:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:12:07] Bob Dobbs: so that he,

[2:12:15] Bob Dobbs: do they write about his work?

[2:12:17] Bob Dobbs: or they write about anything.

[2:12:19] Cameron McEwen: They can write about anything,

[2:12:20] Cameron McEwen: but usually people write about his work or write about something else,

[2:12:28] Cameron McEwen: which they then correlate with his work.

[2:12:35] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:12:35] Bob Dobbs: So that's very interesting that two people,

[2:12:40] Bob Dobbs: very influential on McLuhan in the early years.

[2:12:45] Bob Dobbs: team up on their own away from McLuhan.

[2:12:50] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:12:50] Cameron McEwen: And but one thing to notice in this complex is that in McLuhan's thesis from 1943,

[2:13:05] Cameron McEwen: he begins with classical Greece and then comes forward to the Elizabethan era.

[2:13:13] Cameron McEwen: Then

[2:13:14] Cameron McEwen: He does something of the same sort in the Gutenberg Galaxy,

[2:13:18] Cameron McEwen: but he starts before the classical era.

[2:13:22] Cameron McEwen: And what he says at the start of that book is that he is going to consider the Parry-Lord thesis of orality.

[2:13:32] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:13:32] Cameron McEwen: the Parry-Lord thesis on orality was started at Harvard and was going on with

[2:13:41] Cameron McEwen: I.A. Richards and Havelock.

[2:13:44] Bob Dobbs: So after Parry?

[2:13:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:13:48] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:13:48] Cameron McEwen: Perry died in an accident in 34 or 35.

[2:13:55] Cameron McEwen: So Albert Lord then carried on his work at Harvard.

[2:14:01] Bob Dobbs: And so did Havelock and

[2:14:04] Bob Dobbs: Richards. So,

[2:14:06] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[2:14:06] Cameron McEwen: so the start of the Gutenberg Galaxy is a kind of a nod to this history that we're talking about.

[2:14:13] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:14:14] Bob Dobbs: So he's,

[2:14:15] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[2:14:15] Bob Dobbs: so McLuhan is thinking through

[2:14:18] Bob Dobbs: Richards and

[2:14:21] Bob Dobbs: Havelock.

[2:14:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah. Wow,

[2:14:26] Bob Dobbs: and he thinks he's moving along farther than them,

[2:14:30] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:14:31] Bob Dobbs: that they may not even understand how he's jumped off from their work.

[2:14:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:14:38] Cameron McEwen: but that's a chronological understanding,

[2:14:41] Cameron McEwen: and what...

[2:14:44] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is tending towards,

[2:14:46] Cameron McEwen: as you know,

[2:14:48] Cameron McEwen: is a sort of an interplay of the media themselves that is timeless.

[2:14:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:14:56] Bob Dobbs: so this point,

[2:15:01] Bob Dobbs: the observation of individual experience and then projecting sociological patterns,

[2:15:06] Bob Dobbs: that's what we do.

[2:15:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:15:09] Cameron McEwen: that's what we're just talking about right now.

[2:15:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:15:11] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[2:15:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:15:13] Bob Dobbs: like there's a constant demand on people to state an opinion about what's going on.

[2:15:19] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:15:19] Bob Dobbs: the old literate projecting yourself over the civilization.

[2:15:23] Bob Dobbs: E.T.

[2:15:23] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan said sociology was the last gasp of

[2:15:26] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg writing.

[2:15:29] Bob Dobbs: And so we are projecting over the population and supposed to know what's going on in the collective ESP or as if we had ESP.

[2:15:37] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[2:15:39] Bob Dobbs: That's what a lot of news,

[2:15:41] Bob Dobbs: Fox and...

[2:15:42] Bob Dobbs: And then are people commenting on what's going on in general,

[2:15:45] Bob Dobbs: projecting sociologically?

[2:15:47] Bob Dobbs: And so that would be the human being trying to,

[2:15:49] Bob Dobbs: like kids,

[2:15:50] Bob Dobbs: imitate the collectivity that the Android meme is making.

[2:15:55] Bob Dobbs: And so this is why the news changed to people just giving opinions about what's going on,

[2:16:00] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:16:01] Bob Dobbs: And how far has the temperature of the body politic gone too far or not?

[2:16:06] Bob Dobbs: That's what I guess I'm getting at there when

[2:16:08] Bob Dobbs: I talk about it's a world of collective experience.

[2:16:11] Bob Dobbs: No more individual experience.

[2:16:13] Bob Dobbs: Collective pattern recognition.

[2:16:17] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[2:16:18] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:16:19] Cameron McEwen: isn't that what we've been talking about the whole time?

[2:16:22] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[2:16:22] Cameron McEwen: That there's this undulation,

[2:16:27] Cameron McEwen: and human beings as a species need to figure out their relation to it.

[2:16:35] Bob Dobbs: And they seem to be aware of that.

[2:16:37] Bob Dobbs: They're always talking about it,

[2:16:39] Bob Dobbs: but that's the problem.

[2:16:41] Bob Dobbs: They're talking the elephant in the room,

[2:16:44] Bob Dobbs: but not having a vocabulary to gather around.

[2:16:49] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:16:49] Bob Dobbs: And I claim I have the vocabulary they can say,

[2:16:53] Bob Dobbs: they can use.

[2:16:56] Bob Dobbs: Just like McLuhan,

[2:16:57] Bob Dobbs: he thought he had the vocabulary for everybody.

[2:17:00] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[2:17:01] Bob Dobbs: Rabelais,

[2:17:03] Bob Dobbs: he quotes somebody saying,

[2:17:04] Bob Dobbs: Rabelais told everybody to put down their plow and read his books.

[2:17:09] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan then did it orally by going out in the public sphere of television and asking people to think with his terms.

[2:17:19] Bob Dobbs: with his categories.

[2:17:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:17:23] Cameron McEwen: but I would say that the emphasis there is think.

[2:17:29] Cameron McEwen: The categories themselves are irrelevant.

[2:17:34] Cameron McEwen: The categories you need to think through in the sense of,

[2:17:39] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:17:39] Cameron McEwen: in two different senses.

[2:17:41] Cameron McEwen: First,

[2:17:42] Cameron McEwen: to allow the light of those categories to come towards you.

[2:17:48] Cameron McEwen: That's what

[2:17:50] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan called light through.

[2:17:51] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:17:52] Cameron McEwen: And then the other sense of thinking through the categories is to see the categories as the foreground text under which there's another text.

[2:18:07] Cameron McEwen: So the palimpsestic theme that we were talking about earlier.

[2:18:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:18:12] Bob Dobbs: So the language.

[2:18:15] Bob Dobbs: that he insisted on people use was to get them out of the content and into the form and then he doesn't dictate you won't come back and have his idea his maybe solution or pattern he they

[2:18:30] Bob Dobbs: might come back and then that's interesting if people keep coming back to the same pattern but he lets you go forward with the formula you have the right tools his words are the are the closest to

[2:18:45] Bob Dobbs: Starting off properly and not getting distracted by the content.

[2:18:49] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:18:50] Cameron McEwen: what you say in your next commentary in the blue goes to this.

[2:18:56] Cameron McEwen: So maybe we should end up with what you say there about cliche and archetype.

[2:19:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:19:05] Bob Dobbs: so that's not the sign in the junkyard.

[2:19:10] Cameron McEwen: No,

[2:19:11] Cameron McEwen: this is at the bottom of 119.

[2:19:15] Cameron McEwen: just after the instant replay stuff.

[2:19:19] Bob Dobbs: I read that.

[2:19:21] Bob Dobbs: I go,

[2:19:21] Bob Dobbs: you've got both the cliche and the archetype in here.

[2:19:24] Bob Dobbs: It bypasses obsolescence and extension in a way.

[2:19:28] Bob Dobbs: Remember?

[2:19:28] Bob Dobbs: I read that.

[2:19:36] Bob Dobbs: Are you there?

[2:19:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:19:37] Cameron McEwen: I'm here.

[2:19:38] Cameron McEwen: I'm just rereading it.

[2:19:40] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[2:19:40] Cameron McEwen: good.

[2:19:40] Cameron McEwen: I wasn't...

[2:19:42] Cameron McEwen: I guess I wasn't in the moment there because now when I'm rereading this,

[2:19:49] Cameron McEwen: I'm seeing that there's a lot in it that

[2:19:54] Cameron McEwen: I wasn't following before.

[2:19:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:19:58] Cameron McEwen: so the flipping goes from individual to collective,

[2:20:03] Cameron McEwen: but the collective is pattern recognition.

[2:20:06] Cameron McEwen: And what he means there is that the...

[2:20:11] Cameron McEwen: Once you recognize pattern recognition,

[2:20:14] Cameron McEwen: you recognize that the individual identity comes from the pattern recognition,

[2:20:23] Cameron McEwen: not that the individual identity can read the pattern recognition.

[2:20:28] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[2:20:30] Cameron McEwen: There's a flip in direction there.

[2:20:33] Bob Dobbs: And so if the kids are having a hard time getting body percept.

[2:20:41] Bob Dobbs: What you just said is why the kids,

[2:20:42] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:20:43] Bob Dobbs: one week they want to be a girl and two weeks later they want to be a guy.

[2:20:48] Bob Dobbs: That's shifting.

[2:20:49] Bob Dobbs: It's what you just indicated,

[2:20:50] Bob Dobbs: the way you said that.

[2:20:52] Bob Dobbs: The individual merging with the pattern recognition,

[2:20:55] Bob Dobbs: that's where their identity comes from,

[2:20:57] Bob Dobbs: the pattern recognition.

[2:20:59] Bob Dobbs: And the problem is,

[2:21:00] Bob Dobbs: as Trump symbolized,

[2:21:02] Bob Dobbs: there's too many patterns being made in

[2:21:05] Bob Dobbs: 10 hours for people.

[2:21:08] Bob Dobbs: So much rapid turnover.

[2:21:10] Bob Dobbs: which is apparently why the global economy's collapsed,

[2:21:13] Bob Dobbs: because they were printing trillions of dollars,

[2:21:16] Bob Dobbs: and then there was a point that they forgot to notice that they could never pay it back.

[2:21:21] Bob Dobbs: It was just too much.

[2:21:24] Bob Dobbs: So they went into the void.

[2:21:26] Bob Dobbs: That's where we're at today,

[2:21:27] Bob Dobbs: according to ION.

[2:21:28] Bob Dobbs: That's why the Bank of England will not be able to recover.

[2:21:33] Bob Dobbs: They made everybody bankrupt.

[2:21:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:21:38] Cameron McEwen: Personally,

[2:21:38] Cameron McEwen: I don't think that they were printing all this money and not noticing that it couldn't be paid back.

[2:21:45] Cameron McEwen: I think they were printing the money knowing that it couldn't be paid back.

[2:21:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:21:50] Bob Dobbs: and then what's the reaction to that?

[2:21:52] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:21:53] Cameron McEwen: the collapse of everything.

[2:21:55] Bob Dobbs: And moving into digital,

[2:21:57] Bob Dobbs: moving to the...

[2:21:58] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:21:58] Cameron McEwen: we'll see about that.

[2:22:00] Cameron McEwen: We'll see about that.

[2:22:02] Cameron McEwen: That's easy to say,

[2:22:03] Cameron McEwen: but hard to do.

[2:22:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:22:05] Bob Dobbs: that's why they brought in the troops in London,

[2:22:09] Bob Dobbs: to monitor the reaction of the media ecologists in the population.

[2:22:15] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[2:22:16] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:22:17] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[2:22:18] Cameron McEwen: if people can't...

[2:22:19] Cameron McEwen: feed themselves and can't heat themselves,

[2:22:22] Cameron McEwen: then of course you're going to have enormous problems.

[2:22:27] Bob Dobbs: Look at China.

[2:22:28] Bob Dobbs: They've got people locked in their buildings.

[2:22:32] Cameron McEwen: Because of COVID,

[2:22:33] Cameron McEwen: you mean?

[2:22:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:22:35] Bob Dobbs: well,

[2:22:35] Bob Dobbs: right now,

[2:22:36] Bob Dobbs: for different reasons,

[2:22:37] Bob Dobbs: whatever they're going through,

[2:22:38] Bob Dobbs: it's too many things going on,

[2:22:40] Bob Dobbs: there are floods and stuff,

[2:22:41] Bob Dobbs: but yeah,

[2:22:42] Bob Dobbs: they won't let them out of their buildings.

[2:22:45] Bob Dobbs: They're not allowed to get other buildings to go to the bank and get some money in the tanks that surround the banks.

[2:22:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:22:53] Cameron McEwen: the world.

[2:22:54] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[2:22:55] Cameron McEwen: imagine the world coming to this.

[2:22:58] Bob Dobbs: Imagine the world what?

[2:22:59] Cameron McEwen: Coming to this.

[2:23:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:23:02] Bob Dobbs: but it does make sense if you understand McLuhan.

[2:23:06] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:23:06] Cameron McEwen: you can you can see through it.

[2:23:08] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't call it making sense.

[2:23:10] Cameron McEwen: I would say it's senseless.

[2:23:13] Cameron McEwen: But coming to terms with senselessness is what McLuhan's all about.

[2:23:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:23:18] Bob Dobbs: and we are explaining what people are seeing today and what they're finding meaningless or crazy.

[2:23:24] Cameron McEwen: We're trying to,

[2:23:25] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:23:25] Cameron McEwen: We're trying to.

[2:23:27] Bob Dobbs: And maybe what we say can't even be understood.

[2:23:30] Bob Dobbs: You have to know the jargon,

[2:23:33] Bob Dobbs: know the formula,

[2:23:34] Bob Dobbs: and then know how to talk within it,

[2:23:37] Bob Dobbs: which is what we do every episode.

[2:23:40] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:23:40] Bob Dobbs: sir.

[2:23:41] Bob Dobbs: I was going to say,

[2:23:42] Bob Dobbs: what is this?

[2:23:45] Bob Dobbs: So there's a long quote there.

[2:23:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:23:49] Bob Dobbs: basically I was describing how it became sociological patterns or collective experience,

[2:23:56] Bob Dobbs: and you were thinking about something else.

[2:23:59] Bob Dobbs: But I was busy explaining this quote.

[2:24:01] Bob Dobbs: Then he said,

[2:24:01] Bob Dobbs: well,

[2:24:01] Bob Dobbs: let's read this quote.

[2:24:02] Bob Dobbs: But I had been explaining it.

[2:24:04] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[2:24:05] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[2:24:05] Cameron McEwen: right.

[2:24:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:24:07] Cameron McEwen: Because

[2:24:09] Cameron McEwen: I was hung up.

[2:24:11] Cameron McEwen: on the idea of introducing Footnote about Richards and Havelock.

[2:24:16] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[2:24:17] Bob Dobbs: which was interesting.

[2:24:18] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:24:18] Bob Dobbs: so,

[2:24:19] Bob Dobbs: and with this,

[2:24:20] Bob Dobbs: did you,

[2:24:22] Bob Dobbs: on office hours,

[2:24:23] Bob Dobbs: on our show today,

[2:24:24] Bob Dobbs: Clinton,

[2:24:24] Bob Dobbs: we were going through a couple of tetrads.

[2:24:26] Bob Dobbs: So we,

[2:24:27] Bob Dobbs: the one for media ecology,

[2:24:29] Bob Dobbs: it enhances pattern recognition.

[2:24:33] Bob Dobbs: Obsolescence is when we retrieve something,

[2:24:35] Bob Dobbs: but it flips into programming the environment.

[2:24:40] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:24:42] Bob Dobbs: Media Ecology doesn't mean making sure

[2:24:47] Bob Dobbs: Venezuela gets radio when they need it.

[2:24:50] Bob Dobbs: That's not Media Ecology.

[2:24:52] Bob Dobbs: That flips into something else,

[2:24:54] Bob Dobbs: which he called programming the world,

[2:24:57] Bob Dobbs: programming something.

[2:24:58] Bob Dobbs: This is in The Lost Tetrads,

[2:25:00] Bob Dobbs: if you want to look it up.

[2:25:00] Bob Dobbs: Do you have that book?

[2:25:05] Cameron McEwen: Somebody gave me that book electronically.

[2:25:08] Cameron McEwen: Maybe it was Clinton.

[2:25:10] Cameron McEwen: But I haven't read it.

[2:25:11] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:25:12] Bob Dobbs: So look up that one,

[2:25:13] Bob Dobbs: The Media Ecology,

[2:25:14] Bob Dobbs: because I realized that

[2:25:17] Bob Dobbs: I went on the radio in the mid-'80s doing the flip of media ecology by doing a programmed environment and saying,

[2:25:29] Bob Dobbs: look,

[2:25:29] Bob Dobbs: we're going to have to turn off this thing or that for a few weeks.

[2:25:32] Bob Dobbs: I was doing the Playboy interview.

[2:25:35] Bob Dobbs: Nobody was doing that.

[2:25:37] Bob Dobbs: No one even knew about it to do it.

[2:25:39] Bob Dobbs: In the McLuhan field,

[2:25:40] Bob Dobbs: de Kerckhove wasn't doing that.

[2:25:42] Bob Dobbs: He was doing pattern recognition or media ecology,

[2:25:46] Bob Dobbs: the first part.

[2:25:48] Bob Dobbs: But I was doing this weird,

[2:25:53] Bob Dobbs: maybe go back to the beginning.

[2:25:54] Bob Dobbs: I was trying to steer the world.

[2:25:59] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:26:00] Cameron McEwen: So,

[2:26:00] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[2:26:01] Cameron McEwen: we disagree on the application of pattern recognition.

[2:26:08] Cameron McEwen: But we agree that pattern recognition does have an application.

[2:26:15] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[2:26:16] Bob Dobbs: So

[2:26:20] Bob Dobbs: I just wanted to point out that in that tetrad,

[2:26:24] Bob Dobbs: that McLuhan was not doing Media Ecology,

[2:26:26] Bob Dobbs: if you understand that tetrad.

[2:26:28] Bob Dobbs: He was in the fourth level.

[2:26:30] Bob Dobbs: He flipped out of it into trying to program the world.

[2:26:35] Bob Dobbs: He'd become uptight.

[2:26:38] Cameron McEwen: You think trying to program the world is right?

[2:26:42] Cameron McEwen: Recognizing that the world is programmed is different from trying to program the world.

[2:26:48] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:26:48] Bob Dobbs: on the surface,

[2:26:49] Bob Dobbs: he was saying we need to program it.

[2:26:51] Bob Dobbs: Whether he meant it,

[2:26:53] Bob Dobbs: whether it was satire,

[2:26:54] Bob Dobbs: who knows.

[2:26:56] Bob Dobbs: He tried to build the big institute to do that,

[2:26:59] Bob Dobbs: but they didn't know how to analyze sensory thresholds,

[2:27:03] Bob Dobbs: which is what they said they had to measure.

[2:27:05] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:27:06] Bob Dobbs: Daniel Capon blew it,

[2:27:08] Bob Dobbs: that computer guy.

[2:27:11] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:27:11] Cameron McEwen: but he took McLuhan with him for a while.

[2:27:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:27:14] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[2:27:16] Bob Dobbs: So it's all the fourth level exegesis.

[2:27:21] Bob Dobbs: It's anagogical,

[2:27:23] Bob Dobbs: ultimate mysteries.

[2:27:25] Bob Dobbs: eschatological is what a lot of McLuhan in the 60s was eschatological grasping for straws you know sure because of because of the closeness uh to death that he was leading say it again the closeness to what death

[2:27:43] Cameron McEwen: yeah death that he was leading yeah yeah i mean he uh he was having blackouts yeah um

[2:27:54] Cameron McEwen: brain was in danger of being ruptured.

[2:27:58] Cameron McEwen: So he was...

[2:28:03] Bob Dobbs: That's called being honest.

[2:28:07] Bob Dobbs: He was the only public intellectual who would dare demonstrate it.

[2:28:15] Cameron McEwen: It raises all sorts of questions about what should you do?

[2:28:21] Cameron McEwen: What should you leave?

[2:28:26] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[2:28:27] Cameron McEwen: what has been your life?

[2:28:30] Bob Dobbs: Your light or life?

[2:28:33] Bob Dobbs: Life.

[2:28:34] Bob Dobbs: L-I-F-E.

[2:28:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:28:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:28:38] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:28:38] Bob Dobbs: those are very...

[2:29:31] Bob Dobbs: Oh

[2:32:47] Bob Dobbs: Hello