Dialogue 73 — Transcript

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Hello,

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

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

[00:11] Bob Dobbs: And we are doing episode number 73 tonight,

[00:18] Bob Dobbs: and this is July 27,

[00:21] Bob Dobbs: 2023.

[00:22] Bob Dobbs: And we're in the middle of page

[00:26] Bob Dobbs: 155 of the book.

[00:28] Bob Dobbs: and you'll see

[00:29] Bob Dobbs: see,

[00:29] Bob Dobbs: if you scroll down,

[00:30] Bob Dobbs: you'll see the blue part where I'm talking about

[00:36] Bob Dobbs: McLean's magazine.

[00:38] Bob Dobbs: And look at this,

[00:39] Bob Dobbs: Cameron,

[00:39] Bob Dobbs: in light of what we were saying the last 15 minutes privately,

[00:44] Bob Dobbs: it starts off with Pollstergeist.

[00:46] Bob Dobbs: I hadn't noticed that.

[00:48] Bob Dobbs: We were talking about that based on

[00:51] Bob Dobbs: Cameron's inventory of quotes on ESP and telepathy that McLuhan sprinkled throughout his work.

[00:59] Bob Dobbs: as we were trying to figure out the makeup of pre-tribal awareness that we've been talking about occasionally.

[01:07] Bob Dobbs: So are you ready to read this quote?

[01:12] Bob Dobbs: I am.

[01:13] Cameron McEwen: By the way,

[01:14] Cameron McEwen: doesn't he use Pollstergeist in

[01:16] Cameron McEwen: Mechanical Bride?

[01:18] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[01:20] Cameron McEwen: I kind of think so.

[01:21] Cameron McEwen: And what's interesting about that is that's his first book,

[01:25] Cameron McEwen: of course.

[01:27] Cameron McEwen: And here this is...

[01:29] Cameron McEwen: in his last year.

[01:32] Bob Dobbs: It was one of his last writings,

[01:35] Bob Dobbs: January 7th,

[01:36] Bob Dobbs: 1980,

[01:37] Bob Dobbs: issue of Maclean's Magazine.

[01:38] Bob Dobbs: So it was written in the fall of 79,

[01:40] Bob Dobbs: and I think

[01:42] Bob Dobbs: Eric said he had to finish it because Marshall had his stroke in

[01:47] Bob Dobbs: September

[01:49] Cameron McEwen: 26th,

[01:50] Bob Dobbs: 79. Yeah.

[01:52] Bob Dobbs: So it was going to be an inaugural

[01:55] Bob Dobbs: Maclean's Magazine issue about the new decade.

[01:58] Bob Dobbs: So they would have started a few months earlier,

[02:02] Bob Dobbs: and in that period,

[02:04] Bob Dobbs: Marshall might not have been there to be involved with the completion of it.

[02:09] Cameron McEwen: Yep.

[02:09] Bob Dobbs: Because he comes out on January 7th,

[02:11] Bob Dobbs: 1980,

[02:13] Bob Dobbs: that particular issue.

[02:14] Bob Dobbs: So I have here just before,

[02:17] Bob Dobbs: in the black column,

[02:19] Bob Dobbs: my series commentary,

[02:21] Bob Dobbs: I say,

[02:22] Bob Dobbs: six schools of Media Ecology,

[02:24] Bob Dobbs: and I have that in quotes.

[02:25] Bob Dobbs: six schools of Media Ecology are the result of the Android Meme replay of McLuhan in the

[02:31] Bob Dobbs: 90s the replay is in the

[02:33] Bob Dobbs: 90s of McLuhan 60s and 70s and then i say and this is where the symptoms of quadrophrenia make their entrance McLuhan knew that he had to mind discontinuously the splintering after images of human slash

[02:48] Bob Dobbs: technological cognition to manifest an quote impossible and environment.

[02:54] Bob Dobbs: to the seduction effected by the Pollstergeist.

[02:58] Bob Dobbs: And then I cite McLean's magazine,

[03:01] Bob Dobbs: January 7th,

[03:01] Bob Dobbs: 1980.

[03:03] Bob Dobbs: Then my casual comment is,

[03:06] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan used that word Pollstergeist in McLean's magazine,

[03:10] Bob Dobbs: January 7th,

[03:10] Bob Dobbs: 1980.

[03:12] Bob Dobbs: Marshall and Eric McLuhan predicted what would happen in the 80s in that article.

[03:16] Bob Dobbs: Pollstergeists were ghosts,

[03:18] Bob Dobbs: vampires that possessed us.

[03:20] Bob Dobbs: The McLuhans were trying to make an anti-environment.

[03:23] Bob Dobbs: and came up with an impossible accuracy more than any other prescient wager.

[03:28] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[03:30] Bob Dobbs: the idea of predicting is you make a bet.

[03:33] Bob Dobbs: So does that prompt you to say anything?

[03:39] Cameron McEwen: No,

[03:39] Cameron McEwen: I just,

[03:41] Cameron McEwen: it ties in with everything that you've been doing.

[03:47] Cameron McEwen: It's,

[03:51] Cameron McEwen: we're...

[03:53] Cameron McEwen: We're going towards collective language,

[03:59] Cameron McEwen: collective thinking,

[04:00] Cameron McEwen: and

[04:01] Cameron McEwen: I don't really understand yet how that works into the tech body,

[04:07] Cameron McEwen: but I can see how these things are headed in that direction,

[04:12] Cameron McEwen: and that's what Pollstergeist brings us to,

[04:16] Cameron McEwen: as far as I can see.

[04:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[04:18] Bob Dobbs: the Pollstergeist are ghosts and vampires that possess us,

[04:21] Bob Dobbs: but...

[04:22] Bob Dobbs: It's actually the environment.

[04:23] Bob Dobbs: Remember his commentary on the film in 1973,

[04:28] Bob Dobbs: The Exorcist,

[04:29] Bob Dobbs: and that was about people being possessed by the electric environment.

[04:33] Bob Dobbs: That's what he said it was,

[04:34] Bob Dobbs: that movement.

[04:35] Cameron McEwen: But in German,

[04:39] Cameron McEwen: Poltergeist is a ghost.

[04:41] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[04:41] Cameron McEwen: And then he changes it to pollster.

[04:45] Bob Dobbs: Which is advertising.

[04:46] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[04:47] Cameron McEwen: So it's an environment that is...

[04:53] Cameron McEwen: produced by the consumers.

[04:56] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[04:56] Bob Dobbs: and it's based on focus groups.

[04:59] Bob Dobbs: Audience research,

[05:00] Bob Dobbs: that's actually not advertising.

[05:03] Bob Dobbs: That comes up after.

[05:04] Bob Dobbs: But yeah,

[05:04] Bob Dobbs: the Pollstergeist is the probing of the audience to find out what the trends are,

[05:08] Bob Dobbs: what's the new phases.

[05:11] Bob Dobbs: That's the ghost and vampires that he's trying to see.

[05:17] Cameron McEwen: It's research into what people are doing on the basis of not understanding what they're doing.

[05:26] Bob Dobbs: Having no clue at all.

[05:30] Bob Dobbs: I came up with this idea,

[05:31] Bob Dobbs: well,

[05:33] Bob Dobbs: I've sort of said it before,

[05:34] Bob Dobbs: but it really struck me today.

[05:35] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[05:36] Bob Dobbs: it's like,

[05:37] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[05:37] Bob Dobbs: on a clear day,

[05:38] Bob Dobbs: you can see for miles or something.

[05:40] Bob Dobbs: The massive use of social media,

[05:45] Bob Dobbs: Web 2.0 that's going on.

[05:48] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said that new media,

[05:53] Bob Dobbs: when they're not really noticed,

[05:55] Bob Dobbs: they start to give people attitudes,

[05:58] Bob Dobbs: impressions.

[05:59] Bob Dobbs: desires,

[06:00] Bob Dobbs: new notions come to them,

[06:02] Bob Dobbs: which is caused by the new technical environment.

[06:07] Bob Dobbs: So I was looking at this transgender thing and the super angelic effect that we've talked about,

[06:15] Bob Dobbs: the super discarnate,

[06:16] Bob Dobbs: super disembodied,

[06:17] Bob Dobbs: and the multiple bodies,

[06:19] Bob Dobbs: techno bodies we're inside.

[06:21] Bob Dobbs: We're not looking at how incredible that environment is.

[06:25] Bob Dobbs: And the Pollstergeist effect is

[06:28] Bob Dobbs: It's making people have strange feelings.

[06:32] Bob Dobbs: So the trans movement,

[06:34] Bob Dobbs: and I was listening to a sociologist who was analyzing the different generations,

[06:38] Bob Dobbs: boomers,

[06:39] Bob Dobbs: Generation Z,

[06:40] Bob Dobbs: Y,

[06:41] Bob Dobbs: and Zed,

[06:42] Bob Dobbs: and finding interesting differences in them.

[06:47] Bob Dobbs: And the journalist that she was talking to was saying,

[06:50] Bob Dobbs: I'm so shocked at how many women I know suddenly decided they were lesbians.

[06:57] Bob Dobbs: And converted to that.

[06:59] Bob Dobbs: And they were talking about other trends,

[07:01] Bob Dobbs: like the way the kids are.

[07:03] Bob Dobbs: This is not due to Judith Butler or whoever the right says is propagating ideas about being non-binary or whatever in the college classes.

[07:17] Bob Dobbs: It is there because this effect is literally McLuhan's prophecy,

[07:23] Bob Dobbs: his understanding of things.

[07:26] Bob Dobbs: The super angelic effect of social media is putting this crazy new mutation in people's minds so rapidly.

[07:34] Bob Dobbs: We don't know how fast it is.

[07:36] Bob Dobbs: Like they were talking in this interview,

[07:39] Bob Dobbs: the sociologist was amazed at how much things have changed since 2012 with the smartphone.

[07:46] Bob Dobbs: And so all this new chemical body fantasy life,

[07:51] Bob Dobbs: so to speak,

[07:52] Bob Dobbs: is a major effect of the swamping of us.

[07:56] Bob Dobbs: by the Pollstergeist of social media.

[08:00] Bob Dobbs: We don't recognize what it's doing to us.

[08:02] Bob Dobbs: We don't understand what kind of communications happen to us.

[08:07] Bob Dobbs: So it struck me today that the whole thing is nothing to do with what they're teaching in class.

[08:13] Bob Dobbs: It is the feeling is there already implanted by the media massage.

[08:21] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[08:22] Cameron McEwen: You could tie this up.

[08:23] Cameron McEwen: to

[08:24] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's talk about color TV as opposed to black and white TV.

[08:30] Cameron McEwen: So the music,

[08:34] Bob Dobbs: the drug taking of the 60s is so different from the

[08:37] Bob Dobbs: 50s, you know?

[08:37] Bob Dobbs: Color TV was a way to,

[08:41] Bob Dobbs: well,

[08:41] Bob Dobbs: had a psychedelic effect and then psychedelic drugs were what people took to have that respond to match with the...

[08:52] Bob Dobbs: Color TV effect is a massive environment.

[08:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[08:56] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[08:57] Cameron McEwen: So I don't know.

[08:59] Bob Dobbs: Let me just say this.

[09:00] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if people visualize properly what these things are.

[09:04] Bob Dobbs: They have a TV in the

[09:06] Bob Dobbs: 50s. We have a TV.

[09:07] Bob Dobbs: Our neighbors got a TV.

[09:08] Bob Dobbs: We watch TV.

[09:09] Bob Dobbs: They don't get the,

[09:11] Bob Dobbs: how do you visualize everybody using TV more and more in the 50s and

[09:16] Bob Dobbs: 60s?

[09:18] Bob Dobbs: The people don't think about that.

[09:20] Bob Dobbs: pinging on people's very suggestible consciousness.

[09:26] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[09:27] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely not.

[09:30] Cameron McEwen: That's one of the reasons that McLuhan was able to take off.

[09:35] Cameron McEwen: In the 50s,

[09:36] Cameron McEwen: he was saying,

[09:38] Cameron McEwen: we have to look at what media do to us.

[09:42] Cameron McEwen: For most people,

[09:43] Cameron McEwen: that was a whole new idea.

[09:45] Cameron McEwen: They'd never thought of that.

[09:47] Cameron McEwen: So his um,

[09:49] Cameron McEwen: influential publications in the

[09:51] Cameron McEwen: 50s were in educational magazines or journals.

[09:59] Cameron McEwen: And his talk about what media are doing to us rang a bell,

[10:05] Cameron McEwen: first of all,

[10:06] Cameron McEwen: with teachers.

[10:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[10:08] Cameron McEwen: Because they could see that changes were happening to kids,

[10:13] Cameron McEwen: but they didn't have a handle on it.

[10:15] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan gave them a way to...

[10:20] Cameron McEwen: begin to think about what was going on.

[10:23] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[10:24] Bob Dobbs: And I say that the visualization in the teacher's minds of the colossal TV environment,

[10:34] Bob Dobbs: no one ever caught up to a real accurate visualization.

[10:38] Cameron McEwen: How are you using the word visualization?

[10:43] Cameron McEwen: There's a strange word there.

[10:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[10:45] Bob Dobbs: I mean mental imagery.

[10:48] Bob Dobbs: If I think of TV,

[10:50] Bob Dobbs: I got different...

[10:51] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[10:51] Bob Dobbs: not anymore,

[10:52] Bob Dobbs: but years ago I have conventional images of people watching TV in suburbia and the light glowing in the living room or something,

[11:00] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[11:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[11:00] Cameron McEwen: 24 hours a day,

[11:02] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[11:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[11:03] Bob Dobbs: but to visualize,

[11:05] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,

[11:06] Bob Dobbs: to inventory,

[11:07] Bob Dobbs: to perceive multiple sensory tactile perceptive kinetic and all these other senses,

[11:15] Bob Dobbs: proprioceptive,

[11:16] Bob Dobbs: what's happening to people collectively,

[11:18] Bob Dobbs: Millions of people are engaging the Straits.

[11:21] Bob Dobbs: vampire possession that is not properly uh uh quote visualized or mentalized about the colossal impact it has people don't think of that if they did they'd immediately say turn this thing off it's a monster like that's why McLuhan was saying turn it off you know he was getting closer to visualizing it or to seeing

[11:45] Bob Dobbs: what it was doing to our sensory makeup yeah yeah

[11:49] Cameron McEwen: And that's exactly what he said about monsters,

[11:52] Cameron McEwen: right?

[11:52] Cameron McEwen: He said we're fascinated with monsters,

[11:55] Cameron McEwen: but we don't understand why.

[11:57] Cameron McEwen: We don't understand what these monsters are.

[12:00] Cameron McEwen: These monsters are what we're doing to ourselves.

[12:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[12:03] Bob Dobbs: well,

[12:03] Bob Dobbs: they are us.

[12:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[12:06] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[12:06] Bob Dobbs: Wasn't it Typhon?

[12:08] Bob Dobbs: Typhon was a monster.

[12:10] Cameron McEwen: Typhon,

[12:11] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[12:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[12:12] Bob Dobbs: that was the title before Mechanical Bride.

[12:16] Bob Dobbs: So...

[12:17] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[12:17] Bob Dobbs: what's interesting is the pop culture effects,

[12:22] Bob Dobbs: like the way music changed and dancing and everything that happened in the

[12:26] Bob Dobbs: 60s.

[12:27] Bob Dobbs: That, you can see that people are talking back to the monster,

[12:32] Bob Dobbs: right?

[12:32] Bob Dobbs: Tuning into it.

[12:34] Cameron McEwen: And therefore,

[12:35] Cameron McEwen: it's always a shock.

[12:36] Cameron McEwen: They don't really know what they're doing.

[12:38] Bob Dobbs: No,

[12:38] Bob Dobbs: they don't.

[12:39] Bob Dobbs: But they are responding.

[12:40] Bob Dobbs: They are talking to it.

[12:42] Bob Dobbs: And of course,

[12:44] Bob Dobbs: the new...

[12:45] Cameron McEwen: That ties in with...

[12:47] Cameron McEwen: Finnegans Wake because you have a dialogue that's going on where people cannot help but dialogue but they don't know that they're dialoguing.

[13:01] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[13:02] Bob Dobbs: And it's not just talking dialogue.

[13:05] Bob Dobbs: All the senses are talking to each other and to previous media environments and previous sensory biases.

[13:10] Bob Dobbs: And

[13:11] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake is the most accurate way to describe,

[13:14] Bob Dobbs: the way it's presented I did.

[13:15] Bob Dobbs: It's the proper way to express the complexity that I'm trying to communicate and you're agreeing with.

[13:21] Bob Dobbs: That's the way you would write it because he's showing the whole world is involved.

[13:27] Bob Dobbs: He's got to have all the countries in there.

[13:28] Bob Dobbs: He's got to have all the national languages.

[13:31] Bob Dobbs: Then he's got to have all the various historical means and myths of all the different cultures because that's what's reacting to the global theater in the

[13:39] Cameron McEwen: 60s. That's right.

[13:41] Cameron McEwen: But at the same time,

[13:43] Cameron McEwen: that whole...

[13:45] Cameron McEwen: morass is always individual,

[13:49] Cameron McEwen: right?

[13:50] Cameron McEwen: It's both the widest possible collectivity and the most tightly focused individuality.

[13:57] Cameron McEwen: So Finnegans Wake is full of stuff that are only about Joyce.

[14:02] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[14:02] Cameron McEwen: But at the same time,

[14:04] Cameron McEwen: it's about everything.

[14:05] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[14:05] Bob Dobbs: So that's the other half of his formula is the user is the content.

[14:11] Bob Dobbs: And he said,

[14:11] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[14:11] Bob Dobbs: I kept that out in the fifth.

[14:13] Bob Dobbs: in the

[14:14] Bob Dobbs: 60s, 50s,

[14:14] Bob Dobbs: 60s,

[14:15] Bob Dobbs: to get the formal effect.

[14:17] Bob Dobbs: But then in the

[14:18] Bob Dobbs: 70s,

[14:20] Bob Dobbs: Charles Reich,

[14:20] Bob Dobbs: I guess his name was,

[14:21] Bob Dobbs: of The Greening of America,

[14:23] Bob Dobbs: prompted him to start.

[14:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[14:25] Bob Dobbs: that's true.

[14:25] Bob Dobbs: The user is the content is the other half of the story.

[14:29] Bob Dobbs: So Joyce is,

[14:31] Bob Dobbs: and the co-anesthetic effect of more and more media puts you in the driver's seat,

[14:36] Bob Dobbs: and it's all about you,

[14:37] Bob Dobbs: and then you become,

[14:38] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[14:38] Bob Dobbs: godlike.

[14:40] Bob Dobbs: That's why Joyce would have himself in there.

[14:42] Bob Dobbs: He intuited,

[14:44] Bob Dobbs: maybe accidentally,

[14:45] Bob Dobbs: but he intuited that he had to be in there,

[14:47] Bob Dobbs: but not to celebrate his life,

[14:49] Bob Dobbs: but to show how the individual personally is inflated.

[14:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[14:57] Cameron McEwen: and that inflation happens through a kind of envelopment that cannot be helped.

[15:04] Cameron McEwen: It's an envelopment that...

[15:07] Bob Dobbs: You mean can't be resisted?

[15:08] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you mean by can't be helped?

[15:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[15:10] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[15:10] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[15:11] Cameron McEwen: Can't be resisted,

[15:13] Cameron McEwen: can't be gone around,

[15:15] Cameron McEwen: can't be avoided.

[15:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[15:17] Bob Dobbs: and so once you really see this more and more,

[15:19] Bob Dobbs: you practice noticing this,

[15:21] Bob Dobbs: not being distracted by other content.

[15:25] Bob Dobbs: It's very easy to see what's happened the last 150 years.

[15:29] Bob Dobbs: And very easy to understand why Marshall said various things.

[15:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[15:35] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[15:36] Bob Dobbs: about the identity crisis and every technology causes a war.

[15:43] Bob Dobbs: That's why

[15:44] Bob Dobbs: I don't need to do it so much because I'm so familiar with it now.

[15:47] Bob Dobbs: But I enjoyed looking at historical footage.

[15:51] Bob Dobbs: And it would just be...

[15:54] Bob Dobbs: me getting an inventory reminding myself of the effects of each environment for the last 150 years that McLuhan had written about.

[16:03] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[16:03] Bob Dobbs: So I would look at footage to remind me of the effects.

[16:07] Bob Dobbs: So all that documentary footage was assigned empirical means,

[16:11] Bob Dobbs: empirical evidence,

[16:12] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan would call it.

[16:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[16:14] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[16:15] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[16:16] Cameron McEwen: If you look at old movies and you see,

[16:19] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[16:20] Cameron McEwen: how reporters operate.

[16:25] Cameron McEwen: It's a representation of unconscious actions that to us now are completely obvious.

[16:34] Cameron McEwen: But at the time,

[16:35] Cameron McEwen: it was entertainment or exciting or smart-alecky or something like that.

[16:41] Bob Dobbs: And he raised that question in Mechanical Bride.

[16:43] Bob Dobbs: He said,

[16:43] Bob Dobbs: why are we fascinated with the reporter,

[16:45] Bob Dobbs: with the journalist?

[16:46] Bob Dobbs: That's what I remember that question he put in there somewhere.

[16:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[16:50] Cameron McEwen: and that's directly from Innis.

[16:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[16:53] Cameron McEwen: And I said,

[16:53] Cameron McEwen: I've been writing about this at that time for 15 years.

[16:57] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[16:58] Bob Dobbs: So then when you look at the herd,

[17:02] Bob Dobbs: what we call herd journalism that came in,

[17:04] Bob Dobbs: I guess,

[17:04] Bob Dobbs: in the 70s or 80s,

[17:07] Bob Dobbs: the ridiculous life that news people have swarming around the White House are stupid.

[17:14] Bob Dobbs: Some minister of government to get a remark.

[17:18] Bob Dobbs: No more investigation of anything.

[17:21] Bob Dobbs: If you do that,

[17:22] Bob Dobbs: you're fucking canceled.

[17:26] Bob Dobbs: But the herd journalism is such a ridiculous behavior when you can get a bit of detachment from it through McLuhan.

[17:36] Bob Dobbs: And you look at the acceptance of it.

[17:39] Bob Dobbs: Like,

[17:39] Bob Dobbs: imagine being a White House reporter.

[17:41] Bob Dobbs: You get in there every day and watch the person lie to you,

[17:45] Bob Dobbs: make up shit,

[17:46] Bob Dobbs: and that's your job.

[17:47] Bob Dobbs: What a stupid way to live,

[17:49] Bob Dobbs: right?

[17:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[17:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[17:51] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[17:52] Cameron McEwen: And you have to get in that swimming pool with the person that's lying with you in order to have a fitting question.

[18:00] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[18:00] Bob Dobbs: So they do not,

[18:03] Bob Dobbs: talking about a busy environment,

[18:04] Bob Dobbs: they do not see that as weird.

[18:05] Bob Dobbs: They're so used to it through the decades.

[18:08] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[18:09] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[18:10] Bob Dobbs: maybe privately they become alcoholics of that,

[18:12] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[18:13] Bob Dobbs: or drug addicts.

[18:15] Bob Dobbs: But they don't pay any attention to it when they're there in the briefing room.

[18:21] Bob Dobbs: They're pretending it's a sober fucking event.

[18:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[18:26] Bob Dobbs: And so that's where,

[18:28] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[18:28] Bob Dobbs: Trump,

[18:28] Bob Dobbs: now this comes to the book,

[18:30] Bob Dobbs: that's where Trump,

[18:31] Bob Dobbs: as a cyborg,

[18:35] Bob Dobbs: started to,

[18:36] Bob Dobbs: it was time to joke with it.

[18:39] Bob Dobbs: And then Biden's even worse.

[18:42] Bob Dobbs: As I say,

[18:42] Bob Dobbs: he doesn't even finish his syllables,

[18:44] Bob Dobbs: let alone the sentences.

[18:46] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[18:46] Bob Dobbs: the thing is,

[18:49] Bob Dobbs: I was thinking about.

[18:50] Bob Dobbs: the Tiny Note chart.

[18:53] Bob Dobbs: Each quadrant,

[18:54] Bob Dobbs: we've been cyborg,

[18:56] Bob Dobbs: merged,

[18:57] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[18:58] Bob Dobbs: ever since the,

[18:59] Bob Dobbs: you could say telegraph,

[18:59] Bob Dobbs: but especially radio,

[19:01] Bob Dobbs: we've been merged into the electrical discarnate effect.

[19:05] Bob Dobbs: And even the imaging of being a robot is not accurate.

[19:09] Bob Dobbs: But we've been so involved in the 50s,

[19:14] Bob Dobbs: we could call it a dream maybe,

[19:16] Bob Dobbs: but we're so involved in the making of patterns.

[19:19] Bob Dobbs: And it's a collective electric monster.

[19:24] Bob Dobbs: What was I going to say?

[19:25] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[19:26] Bob Dobbs: so each quadrant is a different kind of cyborg.

[19:30] Bob Dobbs: So the LaRouche quadrant,

[19:32] Bob Dobbs: 1947 to 57,

[19:35] Bob Dobbs: is a certain kind of innocent cyborg compared to today.

[19:39] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[19:39] Bob Dobbs: this might help explain tech body.

[19:41] Bob Dobbs: Then McLuhan,

[19:42] Bob Dobbs: 57 to 67,

[19:44] Bob Dobbs: some more complex populist cyborgian involvement with media.

[19:49] Bob Dobbs: People are watching it more and more.

[19:51] Bob Dobbs: It's real.

[19:52] Bob Dobbs: It's nature.

[19:53] Bob Dobbs: It's replaced nature.

[19:54] Bob Dobbs: So that's very important when he says the satellite caused nature to fall out.

[19:59] Bob Dobbs: Nature was dispensed with.

[20:02] Bob Dobbs: So that's more and more,

[20:04] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[20:04] Bob Dobbs: cyborgian.

[20:05] Bob Dobbs: And then the Thompson quadrant,

[20:07] Bob Dobbs: 67 to 72,

[20:10] Bob Dobbs: which I call politics in that quadrant,

[20:13] Bob Dobbs: is the next level of...

[20:15] Bob Dobbs: the computer coming in more and more in people's lives.

[20:20] Bob Dobbs: Back then it was reels,

[20:22] Bob Dobbs: right?

[20:22] Bob Dobbs: You'd go to the bank and you'd see the reels in the computer room.

[20:27] Bob Dobbs: That's the next level cyborg.

[20:29] Bob Dobbs: And then you get the Kroker quadrant,

[20:33] Bob Dobbs: which is 72 to 77.

[20:39] Bob Dobbs: And I always round it off to a particular year.

[20:42] Bob Dobbs: um,

[20:44] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche is rounded off to 1960,

[20:51] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is rounded off to 1965,

[20:56] Bob Dobbs: Thompson is rounded off to 1970,

[20:58] Bob Dobbs: and Kroker is rounded off to 1980.

[21:00] Bob Dobbs: So you get into the

[21:01] Bob Dobbs: Reagan era,

[21:03] Bob Dobbs: and that is the cyborg as nostalgia.

[21:08] Bob Dobbs: But it's a deeper form of cyborg in,

[21:11] Bob Dobbs: which I call the Android meme.

[21:13] Bob Dobbs: So.

[21:15] Bob Dobbs: We are,

[21:15] Bob Dobbs: it's not like,

[21:16] Bob Dobbs: oh,

[21:17] Bob Dobbs: we're becoming robots here in 2023,

[21:20] Bob Dobbs: in a way we can't leave our texting alone.

[21:24] Bob Dobbs: No,

[21:24] Bob Dobbs: no,

[21:24] Bob Dobbs: you've got to look at the cyborgian that's been going on in most of the electric era,

[21:29] Bob Dobbs: because it's an organic medium.

[21:32] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said electricity was organic.

[21:34] Bob Dobbs: It's just closer to our body processes.

[21:39] Bob Dobbs: So look at the Tiny Note chart as five phases of the cyborgian.

[21:44] Bob Dobbs: Deep involvement with the electric self,

[21:47] Bob Dobbs: and then they break it down into the five bodies,

[21:49] Bob Dobbs: and it's plunging into something where the cyborg in the Android meme phase is cyborging of the machines themselves,

[22:02] Bob Dobbs: not so much us,

[22:03] Bob Dobbs: I'd have to say,

[22:04] Bob Dobbs: not so much our chemical bodies.

[22:06] Bob Dobbs: That's dropped by 1980,

[22:09] Bob Dobbs: so therefore we have the nostalgia of Reagan,

[22:11] Bob Dobbs: the chemical body,

[22:12] Bob Dobbs: trying to retrieve...

[22:13] Bob Dobbs: human scale,

[22:14] Bob Dobbs: small town politics,

[22:16] Bob Dobbs: they said.

[22:17] Bob Dobbs: But if you watch the machine cyborg itself somehow,

[22:22] Bob Dobbs: which is a very complex thing,

[22:25] Bob Dobbs: that's where you get to the tech body.

[22:28] Bob Dobbs: You see?

[22:28] Bob Dobbs: We're looking at the tech body.

[22:32] Bob Dobbs: Sure.

[22:32] Cameron McEwen: So these collective forms are active.

[22:41] Cameron McEwen: And they're only secondarily active through us.

[22:45] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[22:45] Cameron McEwen: They're,

[22:46] Cameron McEwen: first of all,

[22:46] Cameron McEwen: active through themselves.

[22:48] Bob Dobbs: But more so now.

[22:50] Bob Dobbs: Basically,

[22:51] Bob Dobbs: they've left us.

[22:52] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[22:52] Bob Dobbs: Kroker does a good job in describing surplus flesh and the dropping off of the chemical body.

[22:58] Bob Dobbs: And there's no involvement of us in chemical body terms in what the heck we're in,

[23:04] Bob Dobbs: which is...

[23:04] Cameron McEwen: Isn't that just the human body,

[23:08] Cameron McEwen: the human person becoming...

[23:12] Cameron McEwen: ever less important to the point of disappearance?

[23:16] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[23:16] Bob Dobbs: that's what he develops,

[23:17] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[23:18] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[23:18] Bob Dobbs: I think it was Virilio,

[23:20] Bob Dobbs: he talked about the disappearance of the postmodern era.

[23:23] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[23:24] Bob Dobbs: Kroker exaggerated it way beyond Baudrillard and everybody,

[23:28] Bob Dobbs: with the help of

[23:29] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan. You know,

[23:30] Bob Dobbs: he understood McLuhan,

[23:31] Bob Dobbs: or he could,

[23:32] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[23:33] Bob Dobbs: visualize it and see more than Baudrillard and those guys did.

[23:37] Bob Dobbs: So he was able to outdo them in the exaggerated prose he made it.

[23:41] Bob Dobbs: he made.

[23:43] Bob Dobbs: What did you say?

[23:45] Cameron McEwen: No,

[23:46] Cameron McEwen: I guess I would say that

[23:49] Cameron McEwen: Kroker only saw McLuhan up to a certain point,

[23:53] Cameron McEwen: right?

[23:53] Cameron McEwen: That

[23:54] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had seen what

[24:00] Cameron McEwen: Kroker saw,

[24:02] Cameron McEwen: but he saw the way to get out of that cul-de-sac,

[24:06] Cameron McEwen: and Kroker didn't.

[24:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[24:08] Bob Dobbs: so Kroker did

[24:10] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[24:10] Bob Dobbs: his whole style,

[24:11] Bob Dobbs: he said,

[24:12] Bob Dobbs: we're in a panic situation.

[24:14] Bob Dobbs: This is by the 80s.

[24:15] Bob Dobbs: So he said,

[24:16] Bob Dobbs: I'm doing panic writing.

[24:19] Bob Dobbs: I can't get beyond the possession.

[24:21] Bob Dobbs: And he did a whole book on the possessed individual.

[24:24] Bob Dobbs: And he analyzes how each one of the major postmodern French guys was acting out a certain kind of possession or cyborgian-ness,

[24:32] Bob Dobbs: I could say.

[24:34] Bob Dobbs: And so he did the postmodern move of,

[24:37] Bob Dobbs: I'm not trying to get out of this.

[24:38] Bob Dobbs: I'm stuck in it.

[24:40] Bob Dobbs: And I'm going to try to write myself out of it by making books and stuff and videos.

[24:46] Bob Dobbs: So heavily involved in accepting the cyborging effect because you're not,

[24:54] Bob Dobbs: you as a human writer or thinker are irrelevant to what you're witnessing.

[24:59] Bob Dobbs: You've been cast aside.

[25:00] Bob Dobbs: So it's not only surplus flesh,

[25:02] Bob Dobbs: it's surplus pattern recognition,

[25:04] Bob Dobbs: surplus minds.

[25:05] Bob Dobbs: And that's...

[25:10] Bob Dobbs: So Kroker,

[25:12] Bob Dobbs: he does good exaggerated prose.

[25:15] Bob Dobbs: to impact on you what you're dealing with,

[25:18] Bob Dobbs: the level of monstrousness.

[25:22] Cameron McEwen: And he identifies a kind of struggle that's going on,

[25:27] Cameron McEwen: right?

[25:27] Cameron McEwen: So

[25:30] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan saw what

[25:34] Cameron McEwen: Kroker was talking about,

[25:37] Cameron McEwen: or foresaw that,

[25:39] Cameron McEwen: and was able to see a way around it.

[25:44] Cameron McEwen: was able to see that that was already included in,

[25:48] Cameron McEwen: say,

[25:49] Cameron McEwen: Middle Ages thinking or something.

[25:52] Cameron McEwen: And Kroker wasn't able to see that.

[25:54] Cameron McEwen: And those two ways of thinking are in combat as we speak today.

[26:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[26:04] Bob Dobbs: about the medieval thing,

[26:05] Bob Dobbs: hold it.

[26:07] Bob Dobbs: He would write about Bojerd and Virilio,

[26:10] Bob Dobbs: and then he'd say St.

[26:11] Bob Dobbs: Augustine.

[26:12] Bob Dobbs: He saw...

[26:13] Bob Dobbs: He saw what McLuhan saw,

[26:15] Bob Dobbs: and he probably got it from McLuhan,

[26:16] Bob Dobbs: that the fathers of the church were living in a modern environment in the desert,

[26:23] Bob Dobbs: I guess,

[26:24] Bob Dobbs: end of the Roman Empire kind of period.

[26:28] Bob Dobbs: The bleak,

[26:29] Bob Dobbs: stark reality of

[26:31] Bob Dobbs: Augustine's time,

[26:32] Bob Dobbs: and then you get into,

[26:33] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[26:33] Bob Dobbs: the Dark Ages.

[26:36] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan saw that symbolist poetry was retrieving.

[26:39] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't anything new as far as he thought the fathers understood.

[26:43] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,

[26:44] Bob Dobbs: Kroker did bring back Augustine.

[26:47] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[26:47] Bob Dobbs: So I wouldn't say he missed at all,

[26:50] Bob Dobbs: but he...

[26:53] Cameron McEwen: No,

[26:53] Cameron McEwen: not at all.

[26:53] Cameron McEwen: And he wrote a lot about

[26:56] Cameron McEwen: Augustine. Yeah.

[26:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[26:58] Bob Dobbs: But you're saying he didn't see it as deeply as McLuhan did.

[27:02] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[27:03] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[27:04] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan saw that he was able to remain Catholic and Kroker didn't.

[27:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[27:10] Cameron McEwen: And the question there is,

[27:11] Cameron McEwen: well,

[27:12] Cameron McEwen: what...

[27:13] Cameron McEwen: what is it that allows that?

[27:15] Cameron McEwen: Is it,

[27:15] Cameron McEwen: is it blindness?

[27:17] Cameron McEwen: That's what Kroker would think.

[27:18] Cameron McEwen: Is it blindness?

[27:19] Cameron McEwen: Is it a kind of stupidity?

[27:21] Cameron McEwen: Is it a kind of,

[27:22] Cameron McEwen: um,

[27:23] Cameron McEwen: uh,

[27:24] Cameron McEwen: conservatism that won't allow itself to be,

[27:27] Cameron McEwen: uh,

[27:28] Cameron McEwen: warped?

[27:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[27:29] Cameron McEwen: Uh,

[27:30] Cameron McEwen: right.

[27:30] Cameron McEwen: Or,

[27:31] Cameron McEwen: or is it something really profound?

[27:34] Cameron McEwen: And,

[27:34] Cameron McEwen: um,

[27:35] Cameron McEwen: I think that,

[27:36] Cameron McEwen: um,

[27:37] Cameron McEwen: uh,

[27:37] Cameron McEwen: one of the things that McLuhan saw in Joyce was that struggle between those too.

[27:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[27:44] Bob Dobbs: and Kroker always blew it by celebrating McLuhan and then saying,

[27:48] Bob Dobbs: but he screwed up with his Catholicism.

[27:50] Bob Dobbs: He always mentioned that,

[27:52] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[27:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[27:53] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[27:54] Bob Dobbs: And he'd misinterpret.

[27:55] Bob Dobbs: He taught that McLuhan was an optimist and silly things like that,

[27:58] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[27:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[27:59] Cameron McEwen: that was ridiculous.

[28:02] Cameron McEwen: And he still,

[28:02] Cameron McEwen: his latest book,

[28:05] Cameron McEwen: is still maintaining that.

[28:07] Bob Dobbs: What's the latest book?

[28:12] Cameron McEwen: By latest,

[28:12] Cameron McEwen: I'm not talking about in the last couple of years.

[28:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[28:15] Bob Dobbs: you're talking about five,

[28:16] Bob Dobbs: eight years ago he did one.

[28:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[28:17] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[28:18] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[28:19] Bob Dobbs: Forget the title.

[28:21] Cameron McEwen: Something about realism,

[28:24] Cameron McEwen: right?

[28:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[28:26] Bob Dobbs: techno-realism or something.

[28:27] Bob Dobbs: Not techno-realism,

[28:28] Bob Dobbs: but

[28:31] Bob Dobbs: I think he puts the word technology back into the title.

[28:37] Bob Dobbs: The new realism,

[28:37] Bob Dobbs: maybe?

[28:38] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,

[28:39] Bob Dobbs: the point is that...

[28:42] Bob Dobbs: So my Tiny Note chart was pointing to the tech body more than I realized.

[28:47] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[28:47] Bob Dobbs: I made it

[28:48] Bob Dobbs: 30 years ago.

[28:50] Bob Dobbs: And so I was just getting a crystallization of this stuff.

[28:54] Bob Dobbs: And that made me think about the tech body is creating this transgender stuff,

[29:04] Bob Dobbs: not humans.

[29:05] Bob Dobbs: Humans are just flipped along.

[29:11] Cameron McEwen: When...

[29:11] Cameron McEwen: you were composing your chart when you were doing essays like cloning ESP back in those days.

[29:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[29:21] Bob Dobbs: I did the chart in 95,

[29:23] Bob Dobbs: and I wrote cloning ESP in

[29:25] Bob Dobbs: 99. And also I did that long essay on McLuhan's quadrophrenia in 98 or so.

[29:32] Bob Dobbs: So yes,

[29:33] Bob Dobbs: the chart was my background for those later essays.

[29:37] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[29:38] Cameron McEwen: But what was your consciousness?

[29:40] Cameron McEwen: of what was going on.

[29:42] Cameron McEwen: Were you trying to consolidate your insights from the

[29:48] Cameron McEwen: 80s?

[29:49] Cameron McEwen: What was your intention as you were writing this stuff?

[29:53] Bob Dobbs: I was in the heart of the Android meme.

[29:54] Bob Dobbs: I was in New York City.

[29:56] Bob Dobbs: I was there from

[29:58] Bob Dobbs: 93, 15 years to 2008.

[30:03] Bob Dobbs: I knew nothing there was interesting to me.

[30:06] Bob Dobbs: I did.

[30:07] Bob Dobbs: I would force myself to take advantage of the culture.

[30:10] Bob Dobbs: So every week

[30:12] Bob Dobbs: I would go to the Museum of Modern Art,

[30:15] Bob Dobbs: the Whitney,

[30:16] Bob Dobbs: and walk around in them and look at this ridiculous nothing art.

[30:19] Bob Dobbs: But I sort of got a lot of the historical stuff.

[30:21] Bob Dobbs: So I educated myself in the old humanist way there.

[30:26] Bob Dobbs: But all the time,

[30:27] Bob Dobbs: and I used to say this because I wasn't on the radio as much.

[30:30] Bob Dobbs: I didn't have a show.

[30:32] Bob Dobbs: The album was out,

[30:33] Bob Dobbs: and occasionally I get interviewed,

[30:34] Bob Dobbs: but I was not doing my public hyper-creativity I'd been doing for seven years in Toronto.

[30:41] Bob Dobbs: So

[30:42] Bob Dobbs: I kept saying to people,

[30:44] Bob Dobbs: I feel like I'm Augustine walking around at the end of the Roman Empire,

[30:49] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[30:50] Bob Dobbs: But it's not the chemical Roman Empire,

[30:53] Bob Dobbs: chemical body,

[30:53] Bob Dobbs: it's the fucking death of all media.

[30:55] Bob Dobbs: So

[30:56] Bob Dobbs: I find Kroker's exaggerated description was...

[31:00] Bob Dobbs: close to what I was experiencing in New York.

[31:02] Bob Dobbs: I really was an alien in New York.

[31:05] Bob Dobbs: And as you know,

[31:06] Bob Dobbs: I did all kinds of prompt to important performances on the street,

[31:11] Bob Dobbs: meaning

[31:13] Bob Dobbs: Borders and

[31:14] Bob Dobbs: Barnes & Noble book readings.

[31:16] Bob Dobbs: I would go after whatever damn famous reporter showed up,

[31:19] Bob Dobbs: you know what I mean?

[31:21] Bob Dobbs: And bring up

[31:23] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan points that nobody knew.

[31:27] Bob Dobbs: So I was really...

[31:31] Bob Dobbs: So that detachment from what was going on,

[31:35] Bob Dobbs: I didn't have the distraction of being on a radio show.

[31:37] Bob Dobbs: So that's fun.

[31:38] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[31:39] Bob Dobbs: seven years in Toronto was a lot of fun doing it.

[31:41] Bob Dobbs: And you get involved with people,

[31:43] Bob Dobbs: and you're not being the exact detached observer,

[31:46] Bob Dobbs: right?

[31:48] Bob Dobbs: You get lazy or you go drinking with people.

[31:51] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[31:53] Bob Dobbs: As Nelson used to say,

[31:54] Bob Dobbs: Bob keeps his windshield clean.

[31:57] Bob Dobbs: He had some phrase.

[31:59] Bob Dobbs: Bob was always keeping his senses,

[32:02] Bob Dobbs: his windshield of his senses clean.

[32:04] Bob Dobbs: And that was true,

[32:04] Bob Dobbs: but once I was in the radio,

[32:06] Bob Dobbs: you're mixed up with your,

[32:08] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[32:08] Bob Dobbs: fans,

[32:09] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[32:10] Bob Dobbs: and just talking to people,

[32:11] Bob Dobbs: and you say sloppy stuff.

[32:12] Bob Dobbs: And you have to adjust to what they're thinking and talking to explain stuff.

[32:16] Bob Dobbs: So you say things silly just to get them to begin to get an opening.

[32:20] Bob Dobbs: But in New York,

[32:21] Bob Dobbs: I didn't have that distraction.

[32:23] Bob Dobbs: So

[32:23] Bob Dobbs: I became a,

[32:24] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[32:25] Bob Dobbs: purist again.

[32:26] Bob Dobbs: And...

[32:29] Bob Dobbs: So in the inspiration of that,

[32:30] Bob Dobbs: by 1995,

[32:31] Bob Dobbs: two years in New York,

[32:33] Bob Dobbs: I got the chart.

[32:34] Bob Dobbs: And then I applied it,

[32:35] Bob Dobbs: and I started talking with the five bodies.

[32:37] Bob Dobbs: And totally incomprehensible to anybody.

[32:40] Bob Dobbs: And I used to say crazy stuff in the finish group.

[32:44] Bob Dobbs: So

[32:45] Bob Dobbs: I was a troll,

[32:46] Bob Dobbs: a civilizational troll,

[32:48] Bob Dobbs: in person,

[32:49] Bob Dobbs: not on the Internet,

[32:50] Bob Dobbs: but in person in New York.

[32:52] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[32:54] Cameron McEwen: Were you conscious of that?

[32:55] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[32:55] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[32:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[32:57] Cameron McEwen: okay.

[32:57] Bob Dobbs: I was not having an identity crisis.

[32:59] Bob Dobbs: I was wondering,

[33:01] Bob Dobbs: where is this going to go?

[33:02] Bob Dobbs: How far are we going to go?

[33:04] Bob Dobbs: And then we had the,

[33:06] Bob Dobbs: and that was right there,

[33:07] Bob Dobbs: we had the 911.

[33:09] Bob Dobbs: That was a great punchline.

[33:11] Bob Dobbs: That sobered up the New Yorkers.

[33:14] Bob Dobbs: They never recovered after that.

[33:15] Bob Dobbs: The malaise in New York,

[33:17] Bob Dobbs: it was no fun for people being in New York.

[33:19] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[33:20] Bob Dobbs: their friends had died and all this stuff.

[33:21] Bob Dobbs: But for me,

[33:23] Bob Dobbs: who was always looking for the next scene,

[33:25] Bob Dobbs: There was nothing going to happen here in New York.

[33:28] Bob Dobbs: And that was the last place to be.

[33:30] Bob Dobbs: If you want to be in touch with culture,

[33:32] Bob Dobbs: you're at the center of the Android meme.

[33:34] Bob Dobbs: But it had been smashed.

[33:36] Bob Dobbs: So I was looking for what was coming next.

[33:39] Bob Dobbs: And

[33:40] Bob Dobbs: I came out after seven years under post-9-1 conditions.

[33:47] Bob Dobbs: I end up out here.

[33:48] Bob Dobbs: And then,

[33:48] Bob Dobbs: lo and behold,

[33:50] Bob Dobbs: accidentally,

[33:50] Bob Dobbs: iON shows up.

[33:51] Bob Dobbs: And then that brought a new kind of...

[33:55] Bob Dobbs: clarity to what I had been probing around looking for or something,

[34:00] Bob Dobbs: whatever you call this,

[34:02] Bob Dobbs: because it became a very interesting experience interacting with iON.

[34:07] Bob Dobbs: And all kinds of new benefits in my lifestyle happened.

[34:12] Bob Dobbs: So

[34:15] Bob Dobbs: I did a long period of creating my next quote art form.

[34:21] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[34:22] Bob Dobbs: That was basically New York.

[34:24] Bob Dobbs: 15 years.

[34:27] Bob Dobbs: of doing,

[34:28] Bob Dobbs: of obsolescent retrieving and extending and flipping,

[34:35] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[34:36] Bob Dobbs: tetrading all over the place.

[34:38] Cameron McEwen: Did you feel like a voice crying in the wilderness?

[34:44] Bob Dobbs: That would be a corny way to say it,

[34:45] Bob Dobbs: but definitely.

[34:47] Bob Dobbs: I knew because I would go around to advanced classes.

[34:53] Bob Dobbs: Professors,

[34:54] Bob Dobbs: some of them.

[34:55] Bob Dobbs: One guy,

[34:55] Bob Dobbs: he did

[34:58] Bob Dobbs: Mikel Mose's book about 1998,

[35:01] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[35:01] Bob Dobbs: that collection of...

[35:03] Bob Dobbs: good McLuhan articles that Michelle did.

[35:05] Bob Dobbs: His sponsor was a professor at this art school,

[35:09] Bob Dobbs: school of,

[35:09] Bob Dobbs: near school of visual art or something.

[35:12] Bob Dobbs: And I'd go to his lectures and that.

[35:14] Bob Dobbs: And this guy,

[35:15] Bob Dobbs: and I would bring out McLuhan's,

[35:16] Bob Dobbs: and he sponsored a book on McLuhan.

[35:18] Bob Dobbs: He thought it was relevant.

[35:20] Bob Dobbs: He didn't have a fucking clue what I was talking about.

[35:22] Bob Dobbs: And

[35:24] Bob Dobbs: I was realizing that,

[35:26] Bob Dobbs: man,

[35:26] Bob Dobbs: these people,

[35:28] Bob Dobbs: nobody here in New York knows what's going on.

[35:32] Bob Dobbs: And so

[35:34] Bob Dobbs: I kept trying to find somebody interesting.

[35:38] Bob Dobbs: And the best I could get was the people in the Finnegans Wake group,

[35:41] Bob Dobbs: but they didn't know anything.

[35:42] Bob Dobbs: But Murray,

[35:43] Bob Dobbs: the leader,

[35:44] Bob Dobbs: at least he and I had interesting dialogues.

[35:46] Bob Dobbs: And he did not understand McLuhan at first.

[35:49] Bob Dobbs: But after I left and then was gone for a few years until I came back,

[35:55] Bob Dobbs: and there he was using McLuhan.

[35:57] Bob Dobbs: So he had caught up.

[35:58] Bob Dobbs: To me...

[35:59] Bob Dobbs: That showed you that you've got to go through a certain old-fashioned acquaintance with the wake,

[36:07] Bob Dobbs: do it the old-fashioned styles that's recommended by the old professors.

[36:11] Bob Dobbs: But you will be forced,

[36:12] Bob Dobbs: if you stick with it,

[36:13] Bob Dobbs: to come to the McLuhan level.

[36:15] Bob Dobbs: And Murray,

[36:16] Bob Dobbs: who was such a stick-in-the-mind,

[36:17] Bob Dobbs: former FBI guy,

[36:19] Bob Dobbs: a stick-in-the-mind about this

[36:20] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan, how stupid McLuhan was,

[36:24] Bob Dobbs: he changed,

[36:25] Bob Dobbs: and he caught up with me,

[36:27] Bob Dobbs: quotes.

[36:27] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.

[36:28] Bob Dobbs: He realized he had to use McLuhan.

[36:30] Bob Dobbs: So that was a revelation just to see that happen in one person.

[36:35] Bob Dobbs: Because I never met anybody who stuck with the wake long enough to get to the McLuhan point.

[36:44] Cameron McEwen: As we're talking here,

[36:46] Cameron McEwen: it occurs to me that

[36:49] Cameron McEwen: I would say that when

[36:51] Cameron McEwen: New York flipped was not so much in 2001.

[36:56] Cameron McEwen: It was

[36:58] Cameron McEwen: sometime in the early

[37:00] Bob Dobbs: 70s. Well,

[37:01] Bob Dobbs: it's when Ford said,

[37:02] Bob Dobbs: fuck you and wouldn't support their bankruptcy in 75.

[37:06] Bob Dobbs: That was a big moment.

[37:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[37:10] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[37:10] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[37:11] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[37:11] Cameron McEwen: New York was like a huge small town up until sometime in the early

[37:17] Cameron McEwen: 70s. And,

[37:19] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[37:19] Cameron McEwen: it was safe to walk anywhere,

[37:22] Cameron McEwen: and it was swinging.

[37:26] Cameron McEwen: It was as cool as...

[37:29] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[37:29] Cameron McEwen: but at the same time,

[37:31] Cameron McEwen: it was outrageously cool.

[37:36] Cameron McEwen: It just felt good to be there.

[37:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[37:38] Bob Dobbs: now you had that experience being nearby in Princeton,

[37:41] Bob Dobbs: right?

[37:42] Cameron McEwen: That's right,

[37:43] Cameron McEwen: in the 60s.

[37:44] Cameron McEwen: But if you went back in the

[37:47] Cameron McEwen: 70s, it was graffiti everywhere.

[37:49] Cameron McEwen: You'd get onto a subway train,

[37:51] Cameron McEwen: and you couldn't even see out of the windows.

[37:54] Cameron McEwen: So it was...

[37:55] Cameron McEwen: It was like taking a tube into hell.

[37:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[37:59] Cameron McEwen: There was graffiti everywhere.

[38:02] Cameron McEwen: The garbage wasn't being picked up.

[38:05] Cameron McEwen: The

[38:06] Cameron McEwen: Bronx and Harlem were falling apart even worse.

[38:09] Bob Dobbs: And the village,

[38:11] Bob Dobbs: that's when the punk sensibility came in,

[38:12] Bob Dobbs: because,

[38:13] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[38:13] Bob Dobbs: Patti Smith and them were living in the garbage of the village.

[38:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[38:17] Cameron McEwen: especially the East Village.

[38:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[38:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[38:21] Cameron McEwen: But what occurred to me was,

[38:24] Cameron McEwen: Before we were talking about the difference between Kroker and McLuhan,

[38:29] Cameron McEwen: and you could say that that's the difference between

[38:33] Cameron McEwen: New York in the

[38:35] Cameron McEwen: 60s and 70s,

[38:36] Cameron McEwen: or you could say it's the difference between

[38:39] Cameron McEwen: New York in,

[38:40] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[38:40] Cameron McEwen: the 90s and Toronto.

[38:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[38:43] Cameron McEwen: And now Toronto has gone the New York way.

[38:46] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[38:47] Cameron McEwen: Where it used to be a great big village,

[38:50] Cameron McEwen: and it felt good to be in there and all that sort of stuff,

[38:52] Cameron McEwen: and now it's flipped.

[38:54] Cameron McEwen: into this unfriendly people with guns.

[38:59] Cameron McEwen: It's unrecognizable for anybody that knew Toronto at one time,

[39:04] Cameron McEwen: right?

[39:05] Cameron McEwen: And so now,

[39:06] Cameron McEwen: where has the old New York and the old Toronto gone?

[39:09] Cameron McEwen: And the answer is Moscow.

[39:11] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[39:12] Cameron McEwen: good point.

[39:13] Cameron McEwen: So the struggle that's going on in the world today is,

[39:16] Cameron McEwen: are we going to,

[39:18] Cameron McEwen: is the whole world going to flip into the...

[39:21] Cameron McEwen: New New York,

[39:22] Cameron McEwen: New Toronto mode?

[39:23] Cameron McEwen: Or are we going to go into sort of the Moscow mode?

[39:28] Cameron McEwen: Nobody knows the answer to that.

[39:30] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[39:30] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[39:31] Bob Dobbs: let me just supplement what you're saying there,

[39:33] Bob Dobbs: support.

[39:34] Bob Dobbs: So

[39:35] Bob Dobbs: I went to New York in the 70s a lot.

[39:39] Bob Dobbs: When Ford in 75,

[39:42] Bob Dobbs: the computer economy was starting to come in and money was evaporating,

[39:46] Bob Dobbs: so New York couldn't make it anymore by 75.

[39:50] Bob Dobbs: And Gerald Ford said,

[39:51] Bob Dobbs: we're not going to help you.

[39:52] Bob Dobbs: So then in 76,

[39:53] Bob Dobbs: 77,

[39:54] Bob Dobbs: 78,

[39:54] Bob Dobbs: 79,

[39:55] Bob Dobbs: it goes downhill,

[39:56] Bob Dobbs: and then it's really bad in the early

[39:58] Bob Dobbs: 80s, all through the

[40:00] Bob Dobbs: 80s. But then

[40:02] Bob Dobbs: I show up having a glorious

[40:05] Bob Dobbs: 80s in Toronto,

[40:06] Bob Dobbs: which was like...

[40:07] Bob Dobbs: the peak,

[40:08] Bob Dobbs: nice time of Toronto.

[40:09] Bob Dobbs: It was very good there because it wasn't provincial anymore.

[40:13] Bob Dobbs: And it was all these other cultures,

[40:14] Bob Dobbs: and there was all kinds of media,

[40:16] Bob Dobbs: and the festivals and that,

[40:17] Bob Dobbs: so it was a perfect time.

[40:19] Bob Dobbs: And so I go to New York,

[40:21] Bob Dobbs: and immediately,

[40:22] Bob Dobbs: Giuliani comes in and cleans up,

[40:24] Bob Dobbs: makes a Spickspan,

[40:26] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[40:26] Bob Dobbs: what's that phrase,

[40:27] Bob Dobbs: Spickspan,

[40:29] Bob Dobbs: version of New York for a few years,

[40:31] Bob Dobbs: until 9-1-1.

[40:32] Bob Dobbs: And so

[40:34] Bob Dobbs: I, in a sense,

[40:35] Bob Dobbs: Being in Canada and Nova Scotia,

[40:37] Bob Dobbs: then Toronto,

[40:38] Bob Dobbs: I had the clean Canadian experience,

[40:42] Bob Dobbs: which then became more meaningful in the 80s in Toronto.

[40:45] Bob Dobbs: But I was always looking for the end environment in New York and

[40:48] Bob Dobbs: L.A. and all that stuff and going to places to get out of the Canadian thing.

[40:53] Bob Dobbs: But when I got into New York in 1993,

[40:57] Bob Dobbs: the Canadian cleanliness continued for me.

[41:01] Bob Dobbs: They cleaned up New York because I was there.

[41:04] Bob Dobbs: And...

[41:05] Bob Dobbs: See,

[41:07] Bob Dobbs: am I walking around like Augustine Despair?

[41:10] Bob Dobbs: No,

[41:11] Bob Dobbs: I'm recognizing the good times are still coming to Bob.

[41:16] Bob Dobbs: As soon as I got there,

[41:17] Bob Dobbs: the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup,

[41:19] Bob Dobbs: but they hadn't done anything in like 50 years or something.

[41:22] Bob Dobbs: And a couple other victories are happening in the sports and that,

[41:27] Bob Dobbs: and New York was doing okay.

[41:28] Bob Dobbs: So they had a good period there for...

[41:33] Bob Dobbs: To be a tourist,

[41:34] Bob Dobbs: which is what I was,

[41:35] Bob Dobbs: but I was a very perceptive tourist.

[41:37] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[41:39] Bob Dobbs: Because I didn't have to work.

[41:40] Bob Dobbs: I didn't have to do anything.

[41:42] Bob Dobbs: And I could go on and introduce myself to all kinds of minds because I had the time to.

[41:50] Bob Dobbs: So it was a great university experience.

[41:53] Bob Dobbs: Classroom without walls.

[41:56] Bob Dobbs: But something had to break because I knew this is...

[42:01] Bob Dobbs: This is not,

[42:03] Bob Dobbs: there are new effects coming.

[42:05] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[42:05] Bob Dobbs: I could have gone apocalyptic and fundamentalist biblical,

[42:09] Bob Dobbs: right?

[42:09] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[42:10] Bob Dobbs: you start looking at the

[42:12] Bob Dobbs: Book of Revelations and all the tremors that it predicts.

[42:17] Bob Dobbs: But I knew not to do that.

[42:19] Cameron McEwen: Bob Dylan.

[42:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[42:21] Bob Dobbs: the Bob Dylan route.

[42:23] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[42:24] Bob Dobbs: here's the thing.

[42:25] Bob Dobbs: With McLuhan,

[42:27] Bob Dobbs: most people were beginning to live in the tech body.

[42:31] Bob Dobbs: in the 80s,

[42:32] Bob Dobbs: and then the chip landscape was sneaking up on them,

[42:35] Bob Dobbs: and then they were going to be in the chip body.

[42:37] Bob Dobbs: It was not a desolate experience for most people in North America.

[42:43] Bob Dobbs: What was happening for the chemical body in New York was not what people were living.

[42:46] Bob Dobbs: They were living in the ecstasy of,

[42:48] Bob Dobbs: as Baudrillard would say,

[42:50] Bob Dobbs: the ecstasy of communication,

[42:51] Bob Dobbs: multi-body communication.

[42:53] Bob Dobbs: That's where people really were living.

[42:55] Bob Dobbs: No clue that there was trouble coming.

[42:57] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[42:59] Bob Dobbs: Trouble coming.

[43:00] Bob Dobbs: to the chip body and the TV body.

[43:02] Bob Dobbs: That became the culture wars.

[43:04] Bob Dobbs: So that's the way I would describe it.

[43:09] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[43:12] Cameron McEwen: I would just caution that people may not have had a clue consciously,

[43:18] Cameron McEwen: but unconsciously they were living out a kind of desperate uncertainty.

[43:27] Cameron McEwen: The churches were falling apart.

[43:29] Cameron McEwen: The social organizations were falling apart.

[43:32] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[43:32] Bob Dobbs: that's the chemical body.

[43:33] Bob Dobbs: They were being very lax in paying attention to their chemical body responsibilities.

[43:38] Bob Dobbs: And that's probably what they were terrified of because they knew they couldn't do anything about it because they were possessed by these newer environments,

[43:44] Bob Dobbs: which were a lot of fun to be distracted by.

[43:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[43:51] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that I would say that fun was the...

[43:56] Bob Dobbs: No,

[43:56] Bob Dobbs: you're talking about the anxiety.

[43:57] Bob Dobbs: The anxiety is registered in the chemical body.

[44:01] Bob Dobbs: What do you call,

[44:04] Bob Dobbs: I would say social media.

[44:06] Bob Dobbs: That's when the chip body,

[44:08] Bob Dobbs: the chip landscape,

[44:09] Bob Dobbs: turned on the person drunk on the chip landscape experience.

[44:15] Bob Dobbs: It turned on them.

[44:16] Bob Dobbs: And then we found out later there was surveillance capitalism and everything was being stolen from people,

[44:23] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[44:24] Bob Dobbs: economically.

[44:25] Bob Dobbs: I'm out.

[44:26] Bob Dobbs: Now we're here.

[44:28] Bob Dobbs: Now we're here at the impossible conclusion.

[44:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[44:33] Cameron McEwen: So aren't one topic that I've raised before,

[44:39] Cameron McEwen: but I don't understand it yet,

[44:41] Cameron McEwen: is I don't understand the point of trying to specify these things in chronological phases.

[44:51] Cameron McEwen: To me,

[44:51] Cameron McEwen: all these things are perennial possibilities,

[44:55] Cameron McEwen: and the reason that you have the civil war of media is that they are all simultaneous in their possible effect.

[45:06] Cameron McEwen: Whereas you like to say,

[45:07] Cameron McEwen: well,

[45:07] Cameron McEwen: this is 1960,

[45:09] Cameron McEwen: this is 1970,

[45:10] Cameron McEwen: this is 1980,

[45:12] Cameron McEwen: and I just don't understand the point of doing that.

[45:15] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[45:15] Bob Dobbs: It's an update.

[45:16] Bob Dobbs: I've got to use words when I talk to you,

[45:18] Bob Dobbs: but I use media.

[45:20] Bob Dobbs: figures and cliches that all people know to put them in a place to attempt to visualize what happened then as opposed to today,

[45:29] Bob Dobbs: what is different.

[45:30] Bob Dobbs: So it's my language.

[45:32] Bob Dobbs: It's me putting on the language of the people,

[45:35] Bob Dobbs: the folk tales of the people,

[45:37] Bob Dobbs: which is all these archetypal events that they go through in their discovery channels and nostalgia channels.

[45:44] Bob Dobbs: That's my language to communicate to them.

[45:46] Bob Dobbs: It's not what I'm...

[45:50] Bob Dobbs: communicating.

[45:50] Bob Dobbs: It's not what I want them to get to keep,

[45:55] Bob Dobbs: to stick with.

[45:57] Cameron McEwen: So it's a kind of a spotlight?

[45:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[45:59] Bob Dobbs: it's a rhetorical technique.

[46:00] Cameron McEwen: Pay attention to this,

[46:01] Cameron McEwen: pay attention to that.

[46:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[46:04] Bob Dobbs: with what they know.

[46:05] Bob Dobbs: You look at the Tiny Note chart,

[46:06] Bob Dobbs: it's just got cliche events on there.

[46:08] Bob Dobbs: The Kennedy assassination,

[46:09] Bob Dobbs: Watergate,

[46:11] Bob Dobbs: McCarthy era,

[46:12] Bob Dobbs: there's,

[46:13] Bob Dobbs: there's,

[46:13] Bob Dobbs: they're meant to be cliches on there.

[46:15] Bob Dobbs: That's what's called,

[46:15] Bob Dobbs: holopathy cliche probes.

[46:17] Bob Dobbs: So.

[46:18] Bob Dobbs: So I would say that's a good way to say it.

[46:20] Bob Dobbs: I'm updating.

[46:22] Bob Dobbs: I've got to use words when I talk to you.

[46:24] Bob Dobbs: I've got to use the global Esperanto of imagery,

[46:27] Bob Dobbs: which everybody in their collective consciousness knows about,

[46:30] Bob Dobbs: like just 911.

[46:32] Bob Dobbs: So people think in dates and in the chronology,

[46:38] Bob Dobbs: so I'll put that on.

[46:40] Bob Dobbs: I then say,

[46:42] Bob Dobbs: now look at this book,

[46:43] Bob Dobbs: and get them to look at a page of Finnegans Wake,

[46:44] Bob Dobbs: and there's no chronology there.

[46:46] Bob Dobbs: That's what we're moving them towards,

[46:48] Bob Dobbs: to get them to see how to drop the chronological attempt to explain Finnegans Wake.

[46:56] Bob Dobbs: I agree and think about the timelessness or the all times and all events happening at the same time.

[47:04] Bob Dobbs: I'm fully aware of that.

[47:06] Bob Dobbs: I got that in the 70s from McLuhan.

[47:12] Bob Dobbs: I've been in an explanatory posture for decades.

[47:16] Bob Dobbs: in radio and whatever other media I have.

[47:19] Bob Dobbs: So I've been,

[47:20] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[47:21] Bob Dobbs: a professor,

[47:24] Bob Dobbs: adapting to the local tribes of cliches and myths.

[47:31] Bob Dobbs: So

[47:33] Bob Dobbs: I don't worry about your puzzlement at it because I know I'm not limited to that.

[47:42] Bob Dobbs: I think I've explained it to you.

[47:43] Cameron McEwen: When I bring it up,

[47:44] Cameron McEwen: I'm not asking.

[47:45] Cameron McEwen: you to worry

[47:47] Cameron McEwen: I'm looking for

[47:50] Cameron McEwen: I'm trying to interview you in a way that I think will bring out interesting stuff well I just did didn't my explanation I just say explain it yeah yeah that was good okay good so

[48:03] Cameron McEwen: I felt like the my question had had a good effect.

[48:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[48:11] Cameron McEwen: It was,

[48:11] Cameron McEwen: and your answer was that...

[48:16] Cameron McEwen: you are interested in coming to grips with a kind of language.

[48:26] Cameron McEwen: It's a language that is in the background of our languages and that is not an individual language and it's not a language that anybody consciously learns but

[48:41] Cameron McEwen: it's a language that is...

[48:44] Cameron McEwen: always being spoken and that is actually more alive than individuals are alive.

[48:51] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[48:51] Bob Dobbs: and probably the takeover of comedy and the content of comedy is the expression of that underlying language and its grievances and whatever,

[49:06] Bob Dobbs: incitements.

[49:08] Bob Dobbs: Comedy is a big drug today and a necessary,

[49:12] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[49:13] Bob Dobbs: reflex or release mechanism more and more.

[49:17] Bob Dobbs: And so remember what Clooney said,

[49:19] Bob Dobbs: 90%

[49:20] Bob Dobbs: of the world's scientists are alive today?

[49:21] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[49:22] Bob Dobbs: 90%

[49:22] Bob Dobbs: of the world's comedians ever were alive today.

[49:26] Bob Dobbs: And it's more than postman's amusing ourselves to death.

[49:32] Bob Dobbs: But the comedy points to what people are seeing on this global Esperanto level that I'm looking at.

[49:42] Bob Dobbs: And you're trying to...

[49:43] Bob Dobbs: Explain.

[49:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[49:47] Cameron McEwen: I think I see that.

[49:48] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[49:49] Cameron McEwen: if you think of a comedian getting up and taking the mic and getting into the light,

[49:58] Cameron McEwen: one of the things that they're doing is that they're saying,

[50:02] Cameron McEwen: I'm going to expose my individuality to this stuff.

[50:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[50:07] Cameron McEwen: And what I think you're doing is that squared or that cubed.

[50:16] Cameron McEwen: Yep.

[50:17] Cameron McEwen: Um,

[50:17] Cameron McEwen: you're saying...

[50:18] Bob Dobbs: I'm the Einstein of that.

[50:23] Bob Dobbs: Ha but listen this this point about comedy comedy is so ridiculous compared to the greats of the 20th century you know you got people like uh what was his name bill somebody uh

[50:35] Cameron McEwen: bill mcdonald or something he just died uh he just come out and be stupid you know do you know who that guy is oh yeah yeah yeah he was a canadian wasn't he if i remember i'm not sure

[50:46] Bob Dobbs: But the different variety of comedy,

[50:49] Bob Dobbs: you never could have done that in the

[50:51] Bob Dobbs: 30s, 40s,

[50:52] Bob Dobbs: and 50s.

[50:53] Bob Dobbs: So the comedy itself has mutated,

[50:55] Bob Dobbs: and it's not comedy.

[50:57] Bob Dobbs: It's not traditional comedy.

[50:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[50:59] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[51:00] Cameron McEwen: It goes back to Lenny Bruce,

[51:03] Cameron McEwen: right?

[51:05] Cameron McEwen: It's a kind of desperation comedy.

[51:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[51:09] Bob Dobbs: And people just talk about their life.

[51:12] Bob Dobbs: They laugh during their joke.

[51:16] Bob Dobbs: There's no proper separation where you're talking serious and then you get the eyes to laugh.

[51:21] Bob Dobbs: You don't laugh.

[51:23] Bob Dobbs: But it's normal the last 30 years where the comedians are smiling and laughing while telling their joke.

[51:29] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[51:31] Bob Dobbs: That's sloppy compared to the standards of

[51:34] Bob Dobbs: Milton Berle way back in the

[51:37] Bob Dobbs: 40s.

[51:38] Bob Dobbs: So

[51:39] Bob Dobbs: I'm almost inclined to say that comedy ain't what it used to be,

[51:43] Bob Dobbs: that there's something else going on.

[51:45] Bob Dobbs: that we call comedy,

[51:47] Bob Dobbs: but it serves an excuse for the individual to get up and mouth off and talk back to,

[51:54] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[51:55] Bob Dobbs: power,

[51:55] Bob Dobbs: right?

[51:56] Bob Dobbs: To talk back to power.

[51:58] Bob Dobbs: You have to pretend you're a comedian.

[52:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[52:02] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[52:02] Cameron McEwen: But

[52:03] Cameron McEwen: I would say it's an attempt to talk back.

[52:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[52:07] Cameron McEwen: But it really doesn't work unless you allow yourself to be overcome.

[52:15] Cameron McEwen: You have to be able to present the desperation,

[52:18] Cameron McEwen: the panic mode that people are in,

[52:23] Cameron McEwen: in order to even register.

[52:26] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[52:27] Cameron McEwen: Anybody who gets up there and tells sort of happy jokes,

[52:31] Cameron McEwen: that doesn't work.

[52:32] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[52:33] Cameron McEwen: that's not even comedy anymore.

[52:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[52:35] Bob Dobbs: you have to be in a state of pain.

[52:38] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[52:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[52:39] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[52:40] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[52:40] Bob Dobbs: the...

[52:41] Bob Dobbs: So I just wrote something lately that McLuhan was the greatest actor of his day because he was conscious of the need for actors and how the global theater turned everybody into actors.

[52:52] Bob Dobbs: So he's super meta about it.

[52:55] Bob Dobbs: And

[52:56] Bob Dobbs: I was thinking about it because Jack Nicholson,

[52:58] Bob Dobbs: I found an old interview with him.

[52:59] Bob Dobbs: I know in the early

[53:01] Bob Dobbs: 70s I read something where he said

[53:03] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's cliché book was a big insight for him.

[53:07] Bob Dobbs: And I don't know what he said.

[53:09] Bob Dobbs: But then...

[53:10] Bob Dobbs: I don't remember,

[53:10] Bob Dobbs: but then I found this interview in 1985.

[53:13] Bob Dobbs: He's talking about the movie he made with the monkeys called Head.

[53:16] Bob Dobbs: And he said the script he wrote was based on the theories of Marshall McLuhan.

[53:21] Bob Dobbs: And he's saying this in 1985.

[53:23] Bob Dobbs: And Mary McLuhan used to hang out at David Greenberg's place in Pasadena where

[53:30] Bob Dobbs: Jack and Warren Beatty would show up after going to the beach where they would read Understanding Media to each other.

[53:36] Bob Dobbs: So here is,

[53:37] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[53:37] Bob Dobbs: one of the greatest,

[53:38] Bob Dobbs: well...

[53:39] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[53:39] Bob Dobbs: greatest actors of our time,

[53:41] Bob Dobbs: influenced,

[53:42] Bob Dobbs: inspired by McLuhan.

[53:44] Bob Dobbs: See,

[53:44] Bob Dobbs: there's something that's important to look at.

[53:47] Bob Dobbs: And probably a lot of other guys like that read McLuhan and got some understanding of what they were doing.

[53:53] Bob Dobbs: So I say McLuhan was the greatest actor.

[53:57] Bob Dobbs: And then I said,

[53:58] Bob Dobbs: well,

[53:59] Bob Dobbs: he ain't around,

[54:00] Bob Dobbs: so someone's got to do it.

[54:01] Bob Dobbs: So I say I'm the greatest actor today.

[54:04] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[54:04] Bob Dobbs: I'm not doing,

[54:05] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[54:07] Bob Dobbs: movies and radio shows or Saturday Night Live or something.

[54:11] Bob Dobbs: My acting is mental gestures of ESP bouncing off this organism called iON and trying to explain what's happening or to illustrate ways of looking at it quadrophenically.

[54:26] Bob Dobbs: That's the way you'd be an actor today,

[54:27] Bob Dobbs: a conscious actor.

[54:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[54:30] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[54:31] Bob Dobbs: And

[54:32] Bob Dobbs: I think you wouldn't have believed this a year ago.

[54:34] Bob Dobbs: two years ago,

[54:34] Bob Dobbs: but I think you know me better now.

[54:36] Bob Dobbs: You can see,

[54:37] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[54:37] Bob Dobbs: I accept Bob saying that.

[54:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[54:41] Cameron McEwen: I think that may be true.

[54:43] Cameron McEwen: That may be true.

[54:45] Cameron McEwen: Let me just read you the sentence from Mechanical Bride,

[54:50] Cameron McEwen: where he uses the term Pollstergeist.

[54:52] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[54:52] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[54:53] Cameron McEwen: It actually relates closely to what we're talking about.

[54:56] Cameron McEwen: He says,

[54:56] Cameron McEwen: this spontaneous outburst of joy suggests that there was a very widespread and suppressed anxiety about the human effects of the Pollstergeist operations.

[55:10] Cameron McEwen: Wow.

[55:12] Bob Dobbs: What page is that?

[55:13] Bob Dobbs: What section?

[55:15] Cameron McEwen: It's page

[55:17] Cameron McEwen: 47.

[55:20] Cameron McEwen: Okay. And it's the

[55:24] Cameron McEwen: Galliputians. Yeah,

[55:26] Bob Dobbs: the Galliputians.

[55:27] Bob Dobbs: And so you're right,

[55:29] Bob Dobbs: that is such a perfect replay of what we've just been trying to say.

[55:33] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[55:34] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[55:37] Cameron McEwen: He would have written that sometime in the late

[55:40] Cameron McEwen: 1940s.

[55:42] Cameron McEwen: So it's

[55:44] Cameron McEwen: 30 years later that that same word is used in his 1980 essay.

[55:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[55:53] Bob Dobbs: 30 years later.

[55:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[55:54] Bob Dobbs: well,

[55:55] Bob Dobbs: 50 to 80,

[55:56] Bob Dobbs: right,

[55:56] Bob Dobbs: 30 years.

[55:57] Bob Dobbs: So the idea there,

[56:00] Bob Dobbs: the joys to...

[56:04] Bob Dobbs: to relief the anxieties,

[56:09] Bob Dobbs: I guess that caused the market a bullion from 83 to

[56:15] Bob Dobbs: 2008. It was the joys that were bursting out to cover up the anxieties.

[56:23] Bob Dobbs: And it was translated into an economic super boom.

[56:26] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[56:27] Cameron McEwen: And that relates to the word joy is explained.

[56:33] Cameron McEwen: in a couple sentences before.

[56:36] Cameron McEwen: So let me read you those because it relates directly to what you just said.

[56:39] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[56:41] Cameron McEwen: On November the 3rd,

[56:42] Cameron McEwen: 1948,

[56:44] Cameron McEwen: when the pollsters were proved wrong in forecasting a dewy victory over Truman,

[56:50] Cameron McEwen: nobody failed to notice that there was a congratulation even amongst Republicans.

[56:56] Cameron McEwen: It was vaguely felt to be a victory of men over the machines.

[57:02] Cameron McEwen: That's...

[57:02] Cameron McEwen: the joy that he's talking about with the Pollstergeist operations.

[57:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[57:07] Bob Dobbs: now,

[57:08] Bob Dobbs: that's a particular event,

[57:10] Bob Dobbs: but when the environment makes people think that they triumph over the machines,

[57:14] Bob Dobbs: which is the co-anesthetic effect of social media,

[57:17] Bob Dobbs: that's when it gets really complicated.

[57:24] Bob Dobbs: It's not an event that made you feel superior to machines.

[57:27] Bob Dobbs: You've got technologies.

[57:29] Bob Dobbs: The tech body is making you feel superior to it.

[57:32] Bob Dobbs: as a seduction.

[57:34] Bob Dobbs: And that's where we're not any traditional politics,

[57:38] Bob Dobbs: religion,

[57:39] Bob Dobbs: science,

[57:40] Bob Dobbs: nothing can handle that stress or that disservice or that effect.

[57:46] Bob Dobbs: That's how complicated it is.

[57:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[57:49] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[57:49] Cameron McEwen: So he uses the word effect,

[57:51] Cameron McEwen: right?

[57:52] Cameron McEwen: He says this spontaneous outburst of joy,

[57:56] Cameron McEwen: namely the victory of men over machines.

[58:00] Cameron McEwen: Spontaneous outbursts of joy suggest that there was a very widespread and suppressed anxiety about the human effects of the Pollstergeist operations.

[58:11] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[58:11] Cameron McEwen: So

[58:14] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had his finger on what we've been talking about.

[58:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[58:20] Cameron McEwen: But although he had a kind of intuition and a...

[58:28] Cameron McEwen: a bad feeling you could say around 1950 about this stuff he didn't know how to talk about it yet even even in his own mind yeah so it was going to take him all of the

[58:40] Cameron McEwen: 1950s um that is to say from the time he was 40 until the time he was 50 uh to um uh recover from the illness well that too yeah too yeah

[58:56] Cameron McEwen: yeah so it was a

[58:57] Cameron McEwen: A physical and a psychological illness.

[59:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[59:03] Bob Dobbs: And then where he got is very hard to explain.

[59:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[59:09] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[59:11] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that he ever himself got entirely clear about that.

[59:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[59:19] Cameron McEwen: Laws of Media,

[59:23] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[59:24] Cameron McEwen: has a lot of Eric in it.

[59:26] Cameron McEwen: But it also has a kind of vagueness in McLuhan's own mind.

[59:36] Cameron McEwen: that is unmistakable.

[59:39] Cameron McEwen: Laws of Media is much more a suggestion than it is a definition or specification.

[59:46] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[59:46] Bob Dobbs: they kind of admitted at the end,

[59:48] Bob Dobbs: the last page,

[59:49] Bob Dobbs: they call it the uncharted,

[59:51] Bob Dobbs: the unchartable milieu,

[59:53] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[59:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[59:54] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[59:54] Bob Dobbs: They're giving up.

[59:56] Bob Dobbs: They gave up.

[1:00:00] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:00:01] Bob Dobbs: I'll tell you though,

[1:00:01] Bob Dobbs: it was great fun.

[1:00:04] Bob Dobbs: to know that stuff and to walk around in New York and witness it,

[1:00:09] Bob Dobbs: witness it in so many forms,

[1:00:11] Bob Dobbs: what was going on.

[1:00:13] Bob Dobbs: Even the fake Giuliani good times,

[1:00:16] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:00:17] Bob Dobbs: how that happened or how people believed it.

[1:00:21] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:00:21] Cameron McEwen: you were like going to the heart of the atom,

[1:00:25] Cameron McEwen: the heart of the molecule,

[1:00:28] Cameron McEwen: and letting it kind of roll over you and see.

[1:00:35] Cameron McEwen: sort of what the mechanism was,

[1:00:38] Cameron McEwen: what the effects were,

[1:00:40] Cameron McEwen: what the potential for dialogue is,

[1:00:42] Cameron McEwen: etc.

[1:00:44] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:00:45] Bob Dobbs: I had the great emotional support of Carolyn actually being able to treat AIDS successfully.

[1:00:52] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:00:52] Bob Dobbs: I always had what she was doing as an optimistic something that pointed out whatever tragedy that I was seeing.

[1:01:03] Bob Dobbs: that there was something else possible,

[1:01:05] Bob Dobbs: and she was always doing it.

[1:01:07] Bob Dobbs: And so that was a unique support thing for me.

[1:01:10] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?

[1:01:12] Bob Dobbs: Sure.

[1:01:12] Bob Dobbs: By myself,

[1:01:14] Bob Dobbs: and I didn't know anything about that kind of stuff that she did with me or what was called me or an aide.

[1:01:20] Bob Dobbs: If I did not know anything about that,

[1:01:23] Bob Dobbs: I'd be just like every other jerk.

[1:01:24] Bob Dobbs: I'd be like Kroker,

[1:01:25] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:01:26] Bob Dobbs: despondent or whatever you call the desperate alienation.

[1:01:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:01:32] Cameron McEwen: I'm hinged.

[1:01:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:01:35] Bob Dobbs: I just can't imagine what I would have been doing.

[1:01:38] Bob Dobbs: Because now when people start to,

[1:01:43] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:01:43] Bob Dobbs: people used to say in the 80s to me,

[1:01:46] Bob Dobbs: how do you live with what you see,

[1:01:48] Bob Dobbs: with what you know?

[1:01:50] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:01:50] Bob Dobbs: they noticed there was something deeply dangerous about allowing yourself to see what McLuhan saw.

[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: And that would be the little person's reaction.

[1:02:02] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:02:03] Bob Dobbs: it's people,

[1:02:03] Bob Dobbs: they're on our products,

[1:02:05] Bob Dobbs: and they feel really good from it,

[1:02:06] Bob Dobbs: as they should,

[1:02:08] Bob Dobbs: and they say,

[1:02:08] Bob Dobbs: man,

[1:02:09] Bob Dobbs: I couldn't take all this stuff you're saying,

[1:02:11] Bob Dobbs: Bob,

[1:02:11] Bob Dobbs: without these products you've got.

[1:02:13] Bob Dobbs: So I actually have a food that's an anti-environment to this dangerous perception that we're engaging.

[1:02:23] Bob Dobbs: So that's unique.

[1:02:25] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:02:25] Bob Dobbs: so it was a team effort there,

[1:02:28] Bob Dobbs: Cameron,

[1:02:29] Bob Dobbs: team effort.

[1:02:31] Cameron McEwen: And I think the opposite was true with Kroker.

[1:02:33] Cameron McEwen: Wasn't his wife even more extreme?

[1:02:37] Cameron McEwen: And sort of the unhinged side,

[1:02:42] Cameron McEwen: wasn't it the case that she was very brave in her artwork and dance and stuff?

[1:02:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:02:53] Bob Dobbs: I met a few people that knew them well,

[1:02:56] Bob Dobbs: and they said that Mary Louise was this

[1:03:00] Bob Dobbs: the support.

[1:03:01] Bob Dobbs: Arthur couldn't do what he was doing without Mary Louise.

[1:03:04] Bob Dobbs: So now here's what's interesting.

[1:03:07] Bob Dobbs: iON out of the blue,

[1:03:09] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:03:09] Bob Dobbs: she died four days from Eric in 2018,

[1:03:13] Bob Dobbs: I think.

[1:03:14] Bob Dobbs: I think Eric was

[1:03:16] Bob Dobbs: May 18th and she died May

[1:03:18] Bob Dobbs: 22nd.

[1:03:20] Bob Dobbs: So it's been five years,

[1:03:21] Bob Dobbs: but about a year ago,

[1:03:22] Bob Dobbs: iON started saying that Mary Louise is around and really digs what you're doing,

[1:03:27] Bob Dobbs: Bob.

[1:03:30] Bob Dobbs: And I was always talking about Mary Louise as really important for inputting in what we're doing the way Marg Stewart was with Marshall.

[1:03:42] Bob Dobbs: Marg Stewart was very important.

[1:03:44] Bob Dobbs: So it's interesting you bring up,

[1:03:46] Bob Dobbs: I haven't told you that,

[1:03:47] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:03:47] Bob Dobbs: That Aya makes a big deal out of Mary Louise.

[1:03:49] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:03:49] Cameron McEwen: no.

[1:03:52] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:03:52] Bob Dobbs: and that's the kind of,

[1:03:54] Bob Dobbs: you bring up something.

[1:03:55] Bob Dobbs: innocent like Mary Louise,

[1:03:57] Bob Dobbs: and I tell you,

[1:03:57] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:03:58] Bob Dobbs: she's a major producer of our scene.

[1:04:02] Bob Dobbs: That's where I get to say crazy things that are just not for scene,

[1:04:05] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:04:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:04:10] Bob Dobbs: So I'll tell you,

[1:04:11] Bob Dobbs: I'm having a lot of fun being Augustine.

[1:04:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:04:17] Cameron McEwen: And by the way,

[1:04:17] Cameron McEwen: I wanted to mention that when

[1:04:24] Cameron McEwen: Kroker...

[1:04:26] Cameron McEwen: speaks about

[1:04:27] Cameron McEwen: Augustine, then that comes through

[1:04:32] Cameron McEwen: Charles, what was his name,

[1:04:34] Cameron McEwen: Charles...

[1:04:37] Bob Dobbs: What,

[1:04:38] Bob Dobbs: poet or what?

[1:04:38] Bob Dobbs: What are you trying to think of?

[1:04:40] Cameron McEwen: The classicist at the University of Toronto.

[1:04:43] Bob Dobbs: Not Charles Taylor.

[1:04:45] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:04:45] Cameron McEwen: it starts with C.

[1:04:47] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:04:47] Bob Dobbs: Cochrane.

[1:04:49] Cameron McEwen: That's right,

[1:04:49] Cameron McEwen: Cochrane,

[1:04:50] Cameron McEwen: Charles Cochrane.

[1:04:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:04:52] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:04:53] Cameron McEwen: Cochrane and Innis were very close,

[1:04:56] Cameron McEwen: and that is another one of the sources of this,

[1:05:02] Cameron McEwen: what can be called the inside of the hick.

[1:05:08] Cameron McEwen: Cochrane was able to give

[1:05:12] Cameron McEwen: Innis the deep background in the Greeks,

[1:05:16] Cameron McEwen: in Greek tragedy and thucydides,

[1:05:21] Cameron McEwen: to what was going on in the world and especially in Canada.

[1:05:26] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[1:05:27] Bob Dobbs: you knew that Kroker cited Cochrane.

[1:05:30] Bob Dobbs: You've seen that.

[1:05:30] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:05:31] Cameron McEwen: he wrote a whole essay on him.

[1:05:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:05:32] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:05:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:05:34] Cameron McEwen: a long essay.

[1:05:37] Cameron McEwen: on Cochrane as kind of summing up where Canada was.

[1:05:44] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:05:44] Cameron McEwen: And Cochrane died in 1944,

[1:05:48] Cameron McEwen: died young of cancer.

[1:05:50] Cameron McEwen: And when

[1:05:52] Cameron McEwen: Kroker wrote his essay,

[1:05:54] Cameron McEwen: I believe it was in 1984.

[1:05:57] Cameron McEwen: So that's 40 years later.

[1:05:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:06:00] Cameron McEwen: Kroker saw Cochrane as defining Canada from 40 years before.

[1:06:05] Cameron McEwen: before.

[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:06:06] Bob Dobbs: I think

[1:06:09] Bob Dobbs: Kroker wrote his thesis on Talcott Parsons,

[1:06:12] Bob Dobbs: another influence.

[1:06:13] Bob Dobbs: Do you know much about him?

[1:06:15] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:06:16] Cameron McEwen: I know a little bit,

[1:06:17] Cameron McEwen: but not much.

[1:06:19] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:06:19] Bob Dobbs: so there was a guy,

[1:06:24] Bob Dobbs: some English person,

[1:06:25] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[1:06:26] Bob Dobbs: who claimed to be a Tibetan.

[1:06:28] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever heard of T.

[1:06:29] Bob Dobbs: Lobsang Rampa?

[1:06:32] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:06:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:06:33] Bob Dobbs: so he had these popular books in the 80s.

[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: In the 60s,

[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: I read a couple.

[1:06:37] Bob Dobbs: So he predicted that Canada and Brazil would be major figures,

[1:06:45] Bob Dobbs: iconically as nations,

[1:06:47] Bob Dobbs: in the

[1:06:48] Bob Dobbs: 21st century.

[1:06:50] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:06:51] Bob Dobbs: Canada has failed and made a fool of Mr.

[1:06:54] Bob Dobbs: Rapa.

[1:06:56] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:06:58] Cameron McEwen: there's a lot to go of this century.

[1:07:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:07:01] Bob Dobbs: but the thing is...

[1:07:03] Cameron McEwen: So far,

[1:07:04] Cameron McEwen: you're right.

[1:07:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:07:07] Bob Dobbs: but I haven't finished.

[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: T.

[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: Lobsang Rampa was picking up on McLuhan right then,

[1:07:12] Bob Dobbs: not something in the future.

[1:07:14] Bob Dobbs: That there was a beacon of something coming out of Canada,

[1:07:18] Bob Dobbs: and he projected it culturally or politically as something in the future,

[1:07:22] Bob Dobbs: but he was picking up in the late 60s McLuhan,

[1:07:24] Bob Dobbs: I would say.

[1:07:26] Bob Dobbs: As Donald Theall says,

[1:07:27] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's center was the new Illuminati,

[1:07:31] Bob Dobbs: inheriting the whole tradition of the Illuminati going back to Egypt.

[1:07:34] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever seen

[1:07:36] Bob Dobbs: Theo write about that?

[1:07:37] Bob Dobbs: Have you seen those sentences?

[1:07:41] Cameron McEwen: I've read his books,

[1:07:42] Cameron McEwen: but not for decades.

[1:07:45] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:07:45] Bob Dobbs: but you may have missed that pattern.

[1:07:47] Bob Dobbs: He goes from Egypt to Rome to

[1:07:51] Bob Dobbs: Greece and Rome and then maybe Venice and then eventually gets to England in the 19th century.

[1:07:57] Bob Dobbs: They're the leading sensibility.

[1:07:59] Bob Dobbs: And then it goes to New York,

[1:08:00] Bob Dobbs: and then he says it went to Canada.

[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: It's a very interesting statement.

[1:08:06] Bob Dobbs: This could be Theo inflating his own life,

[1:08:09] Bob Dobbs: but,

[1:08:09] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:08:10] Bob Dobbs: he was there to witness it and was part of it.

[1:08:14] Bob Dobbs: So Canada is so ridiculous now that...

[1:08:20] Cameron McEwen: It ceased to be.

[1:08:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:08:22] Bob Dobbs: And so nothing is coming out of there that Mr.

[1:08:25] Bob Dobbs: Rampa predicted yet,

[1:08:27] Bob Dobbs: unless you look at me and Carolyn,

[1:08:29] Bob Dobbs: but we had to go to the States to do it,

[1:08:31] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:08:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:08:32] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:08:32] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:08:33] Bob Dobbs: And we are doing pretty phenomenal stuff,

[1:08:34] Bob Dobbs: and it's being recognized.

[1:08:36] Bob Dobbs: So as a matter of fact,

[1:08:39] Bob Dobbs: somebody told me yesterday,

[1:08:42] Bob Dobbs: or even maybe the show today,

[1:08:44] Bob Dobbs: they're going to look it up.

[1:08:45] Bob Dobbs: They saw YouTube,

[1:08:47] Bob Dobbs: and they said,

[1:08:49] Bob Dobbs: the savior of the world comes out of Canada.

[1:08:53] Bob Dobbs: I like to find out where the guy got that.

[1:08:55] Bob Dobbs: But if anybody's going to do that,

[1:08:58] Bob Dobbs: it's going to be me and Carolyn and JW.

[1:09:00] Bob Dobbs: uh

[1:09:02] Bob Dobbs: That's okay.

[1:09:03] Bob Dobbs: So I'm pointing out that something in Canada died,

[1:09:08] Bob Dobbs: and it was because they didn't pay attention to McLuhan.

[1:09:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:09:15] Cameron McEwen: but they couldn't,

[1:09:17] Cameron McEwen: I think you could say,

[1:09:18] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:09:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:09:19] Bob Dobbs: it's pretty hard to pay attention to.

[1:09:22] Bob Dobbs: But so what do you see?

[1:09:26] Bob Dobbs: The nice vision of Canada as a friendly,

[1:09:28] Bob Dobbs: liberal country,

[1:09:29] Bob Dobbs: open to everybody.

[1:09:31] Bob Dobbs: Something came along that undermined it.

[1:09:34] Bob Dobbs: that reality of Canada.

[1:09:36] Bob Dobbs: It no longer was an environment anymore.

[1:09:39] Bob Dobbs: So it's interesting to figure out what is that that died.

[1:09:45] Cameron McEwen: And the answer to that is independence.

[1:09:50] Cameron McEwen: Canadians were Canadian,

[1:09:53] Cameron McEwen: but they were Canadian unconsciously.

[1:09:56] Cameron McEwen: And when they had to become Canadians consciously,

[1:10:00] Cameron McEwen: they couldn't do it.

[1:10:02] Cameron McEwen: When did that start?

[1:10:04] Bob Dobbs: Is that Trudeau in the 60s?

[1:10:09] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:10:09] Cameron McEwen: I think there's a big difference,

[1:10:12] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:10:12] Cameron McEwen: between the two Trudeaus.

[1:10:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:10:15] Bob Dobbs: I'm not citing the little kid.

[1:10:17] Bob Dobbs: He's just so symbolic of little Canada.

[1:10:20] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:10:20] Bob Dobbs: you have this little boy.

[1:10:22] Bob Dobbs: That's their leader,

[1:10:23] Bob Dobbs: a little boy.

[1:10:25] Bob Dobbs: But,

[1:10:25] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:10:26] Bob Dobbs: they're thinking of when did

[1:10:27] Bob Dobbs: Canadians have the opportunity to become aware of themselves.

[1:10:31] Bob Dobbs: Wouldn't that be from Pierre Trudeau's era?

[1:10:34] Cameron McEwen: Certainly during that era,

[1:10:39] Cameron McEwen: the Conservatives in Canada began to change,

[1:10:44] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:10:44] Cameron McEwen: And Diefenbaker was sort of the last sort of powerful traditional red Conservative,

[1:10:52] Cameron McEwen: red Tory.

[1:10:53] Cameron McEwen: And when the Conservative Party got taken over and became sort of a neoconservative party,

[1:11:05] Cameron McEwen: that gradually spread over all of Canada.

[1:11:08] Cameron McEwen: And that represented the failure of Canadians to remain

[1:11:15] Cameron McEwen: Canadian in their maturity.

[1:11:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:11:20] Cameron McEwen: They could not continue this sort of open friendliness in a conscious way.

[1:11:31] Cameron McEwen: They could only do it unconsciously.

[1:11:34] Cameron McEwen: And so when that failure of consciousness was like having a teenage crisis,

[1:11:45] Cameron McEwen: which is still with them to this day.

[1:11:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:11:50] Cameron McEwen: I heard someone,

[1:11:51] Bob Dobbs: a Canadian journalist,

[1:11:53] Bob Dobbs: talking about the immigrants coming to Canada,

[1:11:59] Bob Dobbs: believing in this old image of Canada.

[1:12:02] Bob Dobbs: and being shocked to find out what a horrible place it is,

[1:12:05] Bob Dobbs: and they all want to go back home.

[1:12:08] Bob Dobbs: That's a sign of the failure of Canada.

[1:12:10] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.

[1:12:11] Cameron McEwen: But my impression is that many of the immigrants from

[1:12:19] Cameron McEwen: India and

[1:12:20] Cameron McEwen: Turkey and Syria and stuff,

[1:12:22] Cameron McEwen: that they have a sense of the old Canada that most Canadians have lost.

[1:12:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:12:30] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:12:30] Bob Dobbs: that's what they came,

[1:12:31] Bob Dobbs: they heard of,

[1:12:32] Bob Dobbs: they thought that was there,

[1:12:34] Bob Dobbs: and that's what they came looking for.

[1:12:36] Bob Dobbs: And it's been very hard for them to find it,

[1:12:38] Bob Dobbs: they say,

[1:12:39] Bob Dobbs: among themselves.

[1:12:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:12:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:12:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:12:42] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:12:45] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:12:46] Bob Dobbs: Trudeau,

[1:12:47] Bob Dobbs: you could see Trudeau was aware of the neoconservative mistake,

[1:12:53] Bob Dobbs: and he was trying to,

[1:12:55] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:12:56] Bob Dobbs: prevent Canaver going that way,

[1:12:57] Bob Dobbs: but he failed.

[1:12:59] Bob Dobbs: And that may be the main message of Trudeau's life.

[1:13:09] Bob Dobbs: And then Canadians,

[1:13:11] Bob Dobbs: I understand,

[1:13:12] Bob Dobbs: they started to romanticize him,

[1:13:14] Bob Dobbs: and now he's considered a great prime minister.

[1:13:18] Bob Dobbs: They might be picking up on the neoconservative trend that you're talking about and how he was an anti-environment to that,

[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: but it didn't succeed.

[1:13:29] Cameron McEwen: But that lack of success was universal.

[1:13:33] Cameron McEwen: So he failed,

[1:13:35] Cameron McEwen: but he failed in a way that the civilization has failed.

[1:13:39] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:13:39] Bob Dobbs: you're going beyond Canada now.

[1:13:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:13:42] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:13:43] Cameron McEwen: What happened to Canada is happening as we speak to Europe.

[1:13:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:13:52] Cameron McEwen: There is,

[1:13:53] Cameron McEwen: in our civilization,

[1:13:54] Cameron McEwen: there is no way.

[1:13:58] Cameron McEwen: to become conscious of traditional values.

[1:14:05] Cameron McEwen: That's all gone.

[1:14:08] Cameron McEwen: People don't know how to do it.

[1:14:11] Cameron McEwen: So it's a reaction to that lack of foundation that they're desperately searching in sexuality or in just...

[1:14:26] Cameron McEwen: sort of crazy assurance.

[1:14:30] Bob Dobbs: Attempts to be detached.

[1:14:31] Bob Dobbs: Attempts to avoid.

[1:14:32] Bob Dobbs: Attempts to be detached.

[1:14:34] Bob Dobbs: To be different.

[1:14:38] Cameron McEwen: But usually,

[1:14:40] Cameron McEwen: at least in my experience,

[1:14:41] Cameron McEwen: usually the attempt to be autonomous,

[1:14:44] Cameron McEwen: the attempt to be critical means mouthing stuff that is obviously just been fed into you.

[1:14:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:14:55] Bob Dobbs: it's a sign of your lack of autonomy.

[1:14:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:14:58] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[1:14:59] Cameron McEwen: You see,

[1:15:00] Cameron McEwen: that's the great secret of the deep state is to have...

[1:15:06] Cameron McEwen: people think that they're being free when they're being most manipulated.

[1:15:11] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:15:12] Bob Dobbs: And I think that the way we're talking is a way to acquire something close to autonomy.

[1:15:20] Bob Dobbs: I think our dialogue represents that.

[1:15:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:15:23] Cameron McEwen: we hope so,

[1:15:24] Cameron McEwen: for sure.

[1:15:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:15:25] Cameron McEwen: And that's what's,

[1:15:27] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:15:28] Cameron McEwen: that is right there is the,

[1:15:30] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[1:15:31] Cameron McEwen: is what we talked about before between...

[1:15:34] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and Kroker.

[1:15:37] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,

[1:15:37] Cameron McEwen: starting in the late 40s,

[1:15:40] Cameron McEwen: began to look at art as the retracing of perception.

[1:15:47] Cameron McEwen: And the retracing of perception for McLuhan always came down to some exercise of autonomy.

[1:15:58] Cameron McEwen: And that exercise of autonomy meant that we're never limited to a role.

[1:16:04] Cameron McEwen: It's always a question of being confronted with roles,

[1:16:08] Cameron McEwen: plural,

[1:16:09] Cameron McEwen: and making an election or making an activation of a certain role.

[1:16:18] Cameron McEwen: So it's that freedom that allowed McLuhan to be a Catholic.

[1:16:23] Cameron McEwen: And it's that freedom which Kroker doesn't see.

[1:16:28] Cameron McEwen: And he may know that he doesn't see it.

[1:16:31] Cameron McEwen: He may think that it's not possible.

[1:16:34] Cameron McEwen: to see it.

[1:16:35] Cameron McEwen: So it's not as if he can't consider the possibility.

[1:16:41] Cameron McEwen: He just,

[1:16:42] Cameron McEwen: in his face,

[1:16:44] Cameron McEwen: it's not there as a possible activation.

[1:16:50] Cameron McEwen: And so that's really the question that's hanging above us all,

[1:16:55] Cameron McEwen: is what is the spectrum over which autonomy can be exercised?

[1:17:05] Cameron McEwen: And that's where McLuhan,

[1:17:07] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:17:08] Cameron McEwen: is exemplary.

[1:17:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:17:14] Bob Dobbs: But you think that McLuhan failed in some way to pass it on?

[1:17:22] Bob Dobbs: I think that's what you say.

[1:17:23] Bob Dobbs: He failed to communicate this exemplary position.

[1:17:27] Cameron McEwen: But first of all,

[1:17:28] Cameron McEwen: to himself.

[1:17:29] Cameron McEwen: He wasn't what

[1:17:33] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had to do.

[1:17:35] Cameron McEwen: was find a way to,

[1:17:38] Cameron McEwen: I'm just going to move here to let the dog open the door.

[1:17:41] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:17:46] Cameron McEwen: What McLuhan had to do was find a way to articulate this stuff to himself that would then work for others,

[1:17:54] Cameron McEwen: and I don't think he ever did that.

[1:17:58] Cameron McEwen: But it was a huge problem,

[1:18:00] Cameron McEwen: and it's a problem that we have too.

[1:18:04] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:18:04] Bob Dobbs: that's what I think that we've come up with something,

[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: me,

[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: J.W.,

[1:18:09] Bob Dobbs: and Carol.

[1:18:09] Bob Dobbs: If you have a new energy source that gives people autonomy,

[1:18:14] Bob Dobbs: and you have a new kind of food that keeps them really healthy that the regular food doesn't,

[1:18:20] Bob Dobbs: and neither does the medicine,

[1:18:23] Bob Dobbs: you've got something new.

[1:18:25] Bob Dobbs: You've never had a movement.

[1:18:27] Bob Dobbs: If I look at myself as an artist or an avant-garde artist,

[1:18:31] Bob Dobbs: You look back at Leonardo da Vinci and all these guys,

[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: they didn't have foods.

[1:18:34] Bob Dobbs: They didn't have breakthrough devices for medicine.

[1:18:39] Bob Dobbs: We have that,

[1:18:40] Bob Dobbs: and we're doing it right now,

[1:18:42] Bob Dobbs: this past couple of weeks,

[1:18:44] Bob Dobbs: proving it.

[1:18:45] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:18:47] Bob Dobbs: I think you have to have technologies,

[1:18:51] Bob Dobbs: a bunch of technologies in a new way that we're getting thanks to iON.

[1:18:58] Bob Dobbs: That's how you create a new environment.

[1:19:02] Bob Dobbs: So if McLuhan's showing technologies cause these services and disservices,

[1:19:06] Bob Dobbs: but in the end the disservices win out,

[1:19:09] Bob Dobbs: if you come up with something really dramatic,

[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: and it's very hard to get rid of its services,

[1:19:15] Bob Dobbs: then you have an opening.

[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: I'm not saying that there aren't disservices to what we do.

[1:19:23] Bob Dobbs: There always is.

[1:19:25] Bob Dobbs: But we've got something to work with.

[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: and it's unique.

[1:19:28] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:19:29] Bob Dobbs: I see me doing...

[1:19:35] Bob Dobbs: It's in a way,

[1:19:35] Bob Dobbs: it's putting together McLuhan and Bucky Fuller,

[1:19:38] Bob Dobbs: who have this endless argument.

[1:19:41] Bob Dobbs: But,

[1:19:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:19:41] Bob Dobbs: Bucky thought technology would save people or the implementation of the potential of it.

[1:19:46] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:19:46] Bob Dobbs: if you take that aspect and then you take McLuhan's intellectual perception of things,

[1:19:54] Bob Dobbs: not making new environments,

[1:19:56] Bob Dobbs: at least not hardware,

[1:19:59] Bob Dobbs: you put the two together,

[1:20:01] Bob Dobbs: that explains me.

[1:20:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:20:04] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:20:04] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:20:05] Cameron McEwen: we have similar strategies,

[1:20:06] Cameron McEwen: I think.

[1:20:07] Cameron McEwen: The reason that I'm doing quantum physics is that I'm trying to find a way that's exterior to this kind of thinking that can provide a basis that will work.

[1:20:23] Cameron McEwen: The basis should be in itself,

[1:20:25] Cameron McEwen: but it turns out that that is very,

[1:20:27] Cameron McEwen: very hard to communicate.

[1:20:29] Cameron McEwen: It's not impossible.

[1:20:31] Cameron McEwen: And so...

[1:20:32] Cameron McEwen: Just as you were saying with your technologies and your offerings,

[1:20:36] Cameron McEwen: you're finding a way to provide a new basis,

[1:20:41] Cameron McEwen: which then leads into this other stuff.

[1:20:44] Cameron McEwen: That's my strategy as well,

[1:20:47] Cameron McEwen: but a different one.

[1:20:49] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:20:52] Bob Dobbs: I think you should listen to

[1:20:54] Bob Dobbs: iON do Finnegans Wake.

[1:20:56] Bob Dobbs: That might give you some new angles on the math here,

[1:21:00] Bob Dobbs: on the physics.

[1:21:01] Bob Dobbs: We do physics.

[1:21:03] Bob Dobbs: We have people who know physics,

[1:21:05] Bob Dobbs: and they get into really interesting...

[1:21:07] Bob Dobbs: They evoke a lot of new stuff from iON about this,

[1:21:11] Bob Dobbs: about physics.

[1:21:12] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:21:13] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:21:13] Bob Dobbs: you can even go in there and ask iON questions about that,

[1:21:16] Bob Dobbs: see what they would say.

[1:21:20] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:21:20] Bob Dobbs: let's go back to the book here,

[1:21:24] Bob Dobbs: that quote.

[1:21:26] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:21:26] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan used the word Pollstergeist in McLean's magazine,

[1:21:29] Bob Dobbs: January 7,

[1:21:30] Bob Dobbs: 1980.

[1:21:31] Bob Dobbs: Marshall and Eric McLuhan predicted what would happen in the 80s in that article.

[1:21:35] Bob Dobbs: And they are.

[1:21:36] Bob Dobbs: You know the article.

[1:21:37] Bob Dobbs: They make a lot of good general predictions.

[1:21:39] Bob Dobbs: They predict the holy wars of the 80s.

[1:21:41] Bob Dobbs: A lot of good things that they write on.

[1:21:46] Bob Dobbs: The McLuhans were trying to make an anti-environment and came up with an impossible accuracy,

[1:21:52] Bob Dobbs: more than any other prescient wager.

[1:21:55] Bob Dobbs: So then this is where

[1:21:57] Bob Dobbs: I jump back to serious mode and say,

[1:22:01] Bob Dobbs: This is why an anticipated cursory inspection of McLuhan's books produced the intended effect that they were rampant with confusion.

[1:22:12] Bob Dobbs: So cursory means not an in-depth.

[1:22:16] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan knew how people would look at his books on the surface level.

[1:22:21] Bob Dobbs: An early and persistent complaint by his critics,

[1:22:24] Bob Dobbs: which proved the success of the technique.

[1:22:27] Bob Dobbs: Then McLuhan says,

[1:22:28] Bob Dobbs: And...

[1:22:30] Bob Dobbs: In a cameo in Woody Allen's film,

[1:22:31] Bob Dobbs: Annie Hall,

[1:22:32] Bob Dobbs: 1977,

[1:22:33] Bob Dobbs: you mean my whole fallacy is wrong,

[1:22:36] Bob Dobbs: which is quite an important statement.

[1:22:37] Bob Dobbs: So I'm just going to read this again.

[1:22:40] Bob Dobbs: This is why an anticipated cursory inspection of McLuhan's books produced the intended effect that they were rampant with confusion.

[1:22:48] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan knew that people would think he was confused.

[1:22:52] Bob Dobbs: And more and more people now can read his books and see they're very clear today.

[1:22:57] Bob Dobbs: especially when I read them.

[1:22:58] Bob Dobbs: They're ridiculously simple,

[1:23:00] Bob Dobbs: and I don't know why people didn't understand them in the 60s.

[1:23:05] Bob Dobbs: What didn't they miss?

[1:23:07] Bob Dobbs: What did they miss?

[1:23:09] Bob Dobbs: This is why an anticipated cursory inspection of McLuhan's would produce the intended effect that they were rampant with confusion and early and persistent complaint by his critics,

[1:23:19] Bob Dobbs: which proved the success of McLuhan's technique.

[1:23:23] Bob Dobbs: So...

[1:23:26] Bob Dobbs: You like to point out the difficulty of communication,

[1:23:30] Bob Dobbs: the cul-de-sac that always happens.

[1:23:32] Bob Dobbs: He is showing his awareness of that,

[1:23:35] Bob Dobbs: how difficult it is.

[1:23:37] Bob Dobbs: And he has to do these bizarre run-arounds by saying,

[1:23:41] Bob Dobbs: well,

[1:23:41] Bob Dobbs: what I do is a fallacy or a cartoon.

[1:23:45] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:23:46] Bob Dobbs: this was necessary for him to say things like that.

[1:23:49] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:23:49] Cameron McEwen: And he was doing this against the background of knowing that he could die at any moment.

[1:23:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:23:58] Cameron McEwen: His mother died of a stroke,

[1:24:01] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:24:02] Cameron McEwen: in 61,

[1:24:03] Cameron McEwen: maybe

[1:24:05] Cameron McEwen: 62, 63,

[1:24:06] Cameron McEwen: the early

[1:24:07] Cameron McEwen: 60s.

[1:24:09] Cameron McEwen: But she had had a major stroke in the late 50s.

[1:24:14] Cameron McEwen: And so then at the exact same time,

[1:24:16] Cameron McEwen: his blackout started,

[1:24:19] Cameron McEwen: and the tumor was growing in the back of his brain.

[1:24:26] Cameron McEwen: So at the very time that he was becoming more and more aware of the difficulty of communicating,

[1:24:34] Cameron McEwen: he was also aware that he could die at any moment.

[1:24:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:24:39] Cameron McEwen: So it was a very complicated period for McLuhan in the last 20 years of his life.

[1:24:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:24:48] Bob Dobbs: So.

[1:24:49] Bob Dobbs: You don't think he resolved it,

[1:24:51] Bob Dobbs: though?

[1:24:52] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:24:52] Cameron McEwen: I don't.

[1:24:53] Cameron McEwen: But that's not a,

[1:24:55] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:24:55] Cameron McEwen: no one has.

[1:24:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:24:58] Bob Dobbs: he's not alone.

[1:24:58] Cameron McEwen: It's not as if it's a personal failure.

[1:25:02] Cameron McEwen: It's a question of hanging over the civilization.

[1:25:06] Cameron McEwen: And one of the things that's interesting about this is that some of the greatest consideration that's ever been made of the problem happened at the very beginning,

[1:25:17] Cameron McEwen: namely with Greek tragedy.

[1:25:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:25:20] Bob Dobbs: and he said Watergate and these events were Greek tragedies.

[1:25:25] Cameron McEwen: Uh-huh.

[1:25:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:25:26] Bob Dobbs: remember?

[1:25:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:25:28] Cameron McEwen: everything is a Greek tragedy in the sense of being the background civil war of the forces that are larger than us.

[1:25:39] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:25:39] Bob Dobbs: and he said that we have a new appreciation of the Greek fact,

[1:25:45] Bob Dobbs: of what was going on in Greece with the alphabet and that.

[1:25:49] Bob Dobbs: we have a new appreciation of that.

[1:25:52] Cameron McEwen: A we that was limited to about three people.

[1:25:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:25:58] Bob Dobbs: but you know,

[1:25:59] Bob Dobbs: he's writing for them,

[1:26:01] Bob Dobbs: on behalf of them.

[1:26:02] Bob Dobbs: Do you know that letter where he says that?

[1:26:05] Bob Dobbs: No.

[1:26:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:26:07] Bob Dobbs: if you scan,

[1:26:07] Bob Dobbs: look for Greek,

[1:26:09] Bob Dobbs: he says we have a new appreciation of the metaphysical situation of the Greeks.

[1:26:14] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:26:14] Cameron McEwen: that's interesting.

[1:26:16] Cameron McEwen: I'll try and find that.

[1:26:17] Bob Dobbs: Is that in the published letters?

[1:26:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:26:20] Bob Dobbs: in my mind,

[1:26:21] Bob Dobbs: that's where I read it.

[1:26:22] Bob Dobbs: I might be able to find it quickly later.

[1:26:25] Bob Dobbs: So,

[1:26:26] Bob Dobbs: I then say,

[1:26:27] Bob Dobbs: one minute,

[1:26:27] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan seemed to be a utopian.

[1:26:29] Bob Dobbs: The next,

[1:26:30] Bob Dobbs: a neo-Luddite.

[1:26:31] Bob Dobbs: Then a Gnostic.

[1:26:32] Bob Dobbs: Still later,

[1:26:33] Bob Dobbs: an agent of the Vatican.

[1:26:34] Bob Dobbs: Or a Zen Buddhist.

[1:26:35] Bob Dobbs: Then a technological determinist.

[1:26:37] Bob Dobbs: Pseudo-scientist.

[1:26:38] Bob Dobbs: Manhattan Project Romantic.

[1:26:40] Bob Dobbs: That's him.

[1:26:42] Bob Dobbs: being at the head of the computer managing whole populations and whether they have radio or not for two weeks.

[1:26:47] Bob Dobbs: That's what I meant by

[1:26:48] Bob Dobbs: Manhattan Project Romantic.

[1:26:50] Bob Dobbs: And on and on and back and forth.

[1:26:54] Bob Dobbs: So then I come in and I say casually,

[1:26:57] Bob Dobbs: these were different complaints lodged at him,

[1:26:59] Bob Dobbs: and I put them all together.

[1:27:01] Bob Dobbs: They especially didn't like what seemed to be technological determinism.

[1:27:05] Bob Dobbs: That's in quotes.

[1:27:06] Bob Dobbs: They didn't like his pseudoscience.

[1:27:08] Bob Dobbs: It was a huge,

[1:27:08] Bob Dobbs: ambitious project like the making of the atomic bomb,

[1:27:11] Bob Dobbs: the Manhattan Project,

[1:27:12] Bob Dobbs: and further,

[1:27:13] Bob Dobbs: he was sometimes an Orientalist,

[1:27:16] Bob Dobbs: or a Westerner,

[1:27:17] Bob Dobbs: or a Vatican Thomist,

[1:27:18] Bob Dobbs: or a Gnostic,

[1:27:19] Bob Dobbs: or a Neoludite,

[1:27:20] Bob Dobbs: or a Utopian.

[1:27:21] Bob Dobbs: All categories able to trigger grievance in every case.

[1:27:25] Bob Dobbs: I'll just read that again.

[1:27:26] Bob Dobbs: They didn't like his pseudoscience.

[1:27:28] Bob Dobbs: It was a huge,

[1:27:29] Bob Dobbs: ambitious project like the making of the atomic bomb,

[1:27:32] Bob Dobbs: the Manhattan Project.

[1:27:33] Bob Dobbs: And further,

[1:27:34] Bob Dobbs: he was sometimes an Orientalist.

[1:27:36] Bob Dobbs: or a Westerner,

[1:27:37] Bob Dobbs: or a Vatican Thomist,

[1:27:38] Bob Dobbs: or a Gnostic,

[1:27:39] Bob Dobbs: or a Neoludite,

[1:27:40] Bob Dobbs: or a Utopian.

[1:27:41] Bob Dobbs: All categories able to trigger grievance in every case.

[1:27:44] Bob Dobbs: Now remember he says in Gutenberg Galaxy that the postures of individual mind were spelled out by Alexander Pope.

[1:27:54] Bob Dobbs: And what McLuhan was saying he got from Joyce,

[1:27:57] Bob Dobbs: and I guess others,

[1:27:58] Bob Dobbs: was the postures of collective mind,

[1:28:00] Bob Dobbs: the archetypes.

[1:28:04] Bob Dobbs: If you're projecting McLuhan's doing a particular cultural mind or specialist mind,

[1:28:11] Bob Dobbs: then he could play with that and jump around.

[1:28:15] Bob Dobbs: He'd look like an Orientalist,

[1:28:16] Bob Dobbs: look like an Ossetian,

[1:28:17] Bob Dobbs: look like a Vatican.

[1:28:18] Bob Dobbs: They were expendable.

[1:28:20] Bob Dobbs: They were not the archetypes of the collective mind that he was trying to point to,

[1:28:26] Bob Dobbs: which would be levels of cyborgian-ness.

[1:28:30] Cameron McEwen: And that may revert.

[1:28:33] Cameron McEwen: back to the letter to Pound that you brought up at the very start where he talked about what he did wrong with the little magazines.

[1:28:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:28:42] Cameron McEwen: And that was that he put forward a point of view.

[1:28:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:28:49] Bob Dobbs: Big mistake.

[1:28:51] Bob Dobbs: But not really.

[1:28:53] Bob Dobbs: It moved him into another direction.

[1:28:55] Bob Dobbs: He could have ended up being editor of Sewanee Review,

[1:28:57] Bob Dobbs: but no,

[1:28:58] Bob Dobbs: he went in,

[1:28:59] Bob Dobbs: met Carpenter,

[1:29:00] Bob Dobbs: and went on a whole other level.

[1:29:02] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:29:03] Bob Dobbs: often mistakes are important,

[1:29:05] Bob Dobbs: are good,

[1:29:06] Bob Dobbs: useful.

[1:29:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:29:08] Cameron McEwen: he was put forward by somebody.

[1:29:09] Cameron McEwen: I can't remember if it was Brooks,

[1:29:12] Cameron McEwen: but somebody suggested that he should be the editor of Swanee Review.

[1:29:19] Cameron McEwen: Really?

[1:29:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:29:20] Cameron McEwen: it was.

[1:29:21] Cameron McEwen: Do you remember who the editor was of

[1:29:24] Cameron McEwen: Swanee Review?

[1:29:26] Cameron McEwen: Sorry?

[1:29:27] Bob Dobbs: Not John Pick of Renaissance,

[1:29:28] Bob Dobbs: so the editor of Siouan Review,

[1:29:31] Bob Dobbs: we're talking about...

[1:29:32] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:29:32] Cameron McEwen: the editor of Kenyon Review.

[1:29:34] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:29:34] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[1:29:36] Cameron McEwen: Starts

[1:29:38] Cameron McEwen: John

[1:29:40] Cameron McEwen: Ramson.

[1:29:42] Cameron McEwen: Isn't that his name?

[1:29:44] Cameron McEwen: He was a critic and was at Kenyon College.

[1:29:48] Bob Dobbs: You mean Ransom?

[1:29:50] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:29:51] Bob Dobbs: Ransom,

[1:29:51] Bob Dobbs: not Ramson.

[1:29:52] Bob Dobbs: Ransom.

[1:29:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:29:54] Cameron McEwen: So he suggested when

[1:29:58] Cameron McEwen: Allen Tate quit as the editor of

[1:30:01] Cameron McEwen: Swanee Review,

[1:30:02] Cameron McEwen: which I think happened at sort of maybe end of 45,

[1:30:08] Cameron McEwen: start of 46,

[1:30:09] Cameron McEwen: sometime in there,

[1:30:12] Cameron McEwen: Then the review got in touch with people and asked,

[1:30:18] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:30:18] Cameron McEwen: who should take over the editorship because we don't have an editor now.

[1:30:23] Cameron McEwen: And Ransom wrote back that he thought McLuhan should be.

[1:30:28] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[1:30:28] Bob Dobbs: And that's how would Ransom know him?

[1:30:32] Cameron McEwen: Because he had published with Ransom.

[1:30:37] Cameron McEwen: He published.

[1:30:39] Cameron McEwen: his Hopkins essay,

[1:30:41] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:30:43] Cameron McEwen: in the Kenyon Review.

[1:30:46] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:30:48] Cameron McEwen: Ransom was part of the Southern group.

[1:30:50] Bob Dobbs: The agrarians.

[1:30:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:30:53] Cameron McEwen: the agrarians,

[1:30:54] Cameron McEwen: the fugitives.

[1:30:55] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:30:57] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if

[1:30:59] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan met him in person,

[1:31:00] Cameron McEwen: but he knew a lot of Ransom's friends.

[1:31:03] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:31:04] Cameron McEwen: Brooks and

[1:31:05] Cameron McEwen: Tate and people like this were good friends with Ransom.

[1:31:09] Bob Dobbs: So that would be in the St.

[1:31:10] Bob Dobbs: Louis days.

[1:31:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:31:14] Cameron McEwen: St.

[1:31:14] Cameron McEwen: Louis slash

[1:31:17] Cameron McEwen: Windsor. Yeah.

[1:31:20] Bob Dobbs: But remember,

[1:31:21] Bob Dobbs: he was in St.

[1:31:22] Bob Dobbs: Louis from 37,

[1:31:24] Bob Dobbs: 38,

[1:31:25] Bob Dobbs: six years before he met Louis.

[1:31:28] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:31:29] Cameron McEwen: But he only met the Southern people,

[1:31:32] Cameron McEwen: I think he met in

[1:31:35] Cameron McEwen: 42 was when he first met.

[1:31:41] Cameron McEwen: Cleanth Brooks and became good friends with him,

[1:31:44] Cameron McEwen: I believe,

[1:31:44] Cameron McEwen: starting in 42.

[1:31:46] Cameron McEwen: And that was from his friend Felix,

[1:31:52] Cameron McEwen: the guy that he,

[1:31:54] Cameron McEwen: Gio Cometti,

[1:31:54] Cameron McEwen: is that his name?

[1:31:56] Bob Dobbs: Gio Vanelli.

[1:31:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:31:58] Cameron McEwen: Gio Vanelli,

[1:31:58] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[1:32:00] Cameron McEwen: He met

[1:32:01] Cameron McEwen: Lewis with

[1:32:03] Cameron McEwen: Felix. Yeah.

[1:32:05] Bob Dobbs: Have you done much on Felix?

[1:32:07] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:32:07] Bob Dobbs: he was such a big...

[1:32:08] Bob Dobbs: participant,

[1:32:09] Bob Dobbs: co-partner with McLuhan in his early

[1:32:13] Bob Dobbs: 40s. What do you know about him that we may not know?

[1:32:17] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:32:17] Cameron McEwen: first off,

[1:32:19] Cameron McEwen: people know almost nothing about him.

[1:32:22] Cameron McEwen: He got his Ph.D.

[1:32:24] Cameron McEwen: at Illinois in Romance languages,

[1:32:30] Cameron McEwen: and that was,

[1:32:31] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:32:31] Cameron McEwen: in either 40 or 41.

[1:32:35] Cameron McEwen: And then he went to

[1:32:36] Cameron McEwen: St. Louis and became a...

[1:32:39] Cameron McEwen: professor there.

[1:32:40] Cameron McEwen: And as soon as he became a professor there,

[1:32:43] Cameron McEwen: then he and McLuhan became very good friends and remained friends until his early death.

[1:32:53] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:32:54] Cameron McEwen: But he dropped out of the literary scene.

[1:33:00] Cameron McEwen: And I think what happened was that he,

[1:33:04] Cameron McEwen: around the time that

[1:33:06] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and And on our team...

[1:33:09] Cameron McEwen: left

[1:33:10] Cameron McEwen: St. Louis,

[1:33:11] Cameron McEwen: Muller-Thym in 1942 and McLuhan in 1944,

[1:33:16] Cameron McEwen: Giovinelli went to New York.

[1:33:18] Cameron McEwen: And in New York,

[1:33:20] Cameron McEwen: he was primarily responsible for the Mechanical Bride ever being published,

[1:33:28] Cameron McEwen: going around to all sorts of different people.

[1:33:31] Cameron McEwen: And then once

[1:33:33] Cameron McEwen: Vanguard agreed to do it,

[1:33:36] Cameron McEwen: they...

[1:33:37] Cameron McEwen: changed their minds repeatedly.

[1:33:39] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:33:40] Cameron McEwen: Felix had to sort of bring them back in line all the time,

[1:33:44] Cameron McEwen: which he did.

[1:33:45] Cameron McEwen: But when they...

[1:33:48] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[1:33:48] Bob Dobbs: how do you know that?

[1:33:49] Bob Dobbs: Where do you read that?

[1:33:50] Bob Dobbs: You got letters by him?

[1:33:53] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:33:54] Cameron McEwen: And there are letters just in the published letters that talk about this.

[1:34:02] Cameron McEwen: And then also in the Pound correspondence,

[1:34:04] Cameron McEwen: they talk a lot about Felix.

[1:34:07] Cameron McEwen: And in those days,

[1:34:09] Cameron McEwen: if McLuhan wrote to Pound,

[1:34:11] Cameron McEwen: then those letters would also go to Felix.

[1:34:15] Cameron McEwen: And if Felix wrote to Pound,

[1:34:18] Cameron McEwen: same thing to McLuhan.

[1:34:20] Cameron McEwen: So they were kind of a collective group.

[1:34:22] Cameron McEwen: But when the Bollingen Prize went to

[1:34:25] Cameron McEwen: Pound, I think in 1948 or 1949,

[1:34:29] Cameron McEwen: for the cantos,

[1:34:33] Cameron McEwen: that produced a tremendous schism amongst the literati in New York City.

[1:34:42] Cameron McEwen: And especially the Jewish poets thought that this was a kind of betrayal by the non-Jewish poets.

[1:34:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:34:53] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:34:55] Cameron McEwen: Giovinelli, by this time,

[1:34:57] Cameron McEwen: time had moved to New York and was teaching some courses at NYU,

[1:35:03] Cameron McEwen: but was also doing translations.

[1:35:06] Cameron McEwen: And he ended up sort of falling away from

[1:35:12] Cameron McEwen: Pound and McLuhan because of this award to

[1:35:16] Cameron McEwen: Pound and his need to sort of keep up with his

[1:35:22] Cameron McEwen: New York friends.

[1:35:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:35:24] Cameron McEwen: and what...

[1:35:26] Cameron McEwen: Pound says happened to Giovinelli is that he became more interested in the horses.

[1:35:34] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:35:34] Cameron McEwen: I guess

[1:35:35] Cameron McEwen: Giovinelli became fairly poor and fairly desperate in New York.

[1:35:43] Cameron McEwen: And through the Bollingen thing and through not having money,

[1:35:50] Cameron McEwen: he fell completely out of touch with both Pound and McLuhan.

[1:35:57] Cameron McEwen: And then died early.

[1:35:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:35:59] Bob Dobbs: now

[1:36:01] Bob Dobbs: I have some correspondence I got sent to me of Felix's wife describing him dying to Corinne,

[1:36:09] Bob Dobbs: or maybe the whole McLuhan family.

[1:36:12] Bob Dobbs: So there was that,

[1:36:13] Bob Dobbs: there was still the connection,

[1:36:14] Bob Dobbs: I guess,

[1:36:14] Bob Dobbs: through the wife.

[1:36:16] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:36:18] Cameron McEwen: They had always,

[1:36:19] Cameron McEwen: in the

[1:36:21] Cameron McEwen: 40s,

[1:36:22] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and his wife were very good friends.

[1:36:26] Cameron McEwen: friends with uh Muller-Thym and with giovinelli um because uh both of them had very interesting wives and so it wasn't a case of just a friendship of marshall it was also a friendship of corinne yeah so

[1:36:45] Bob Dobbs: uh now you you know this that's falling out where do you see that that's not in the letters

[1:36:56] Bob Dobbs: He's just not there anymore.

[1:36:57] Bob Dobbs: But did you find other places to read about him?

[1:37:00] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:37:01] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if you've seen all of the letters of

[1:37:05] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and Pound,

[1:37:07] Cameron McEwen: because it is talked about there.

[1:37:09] Cameron McEwen: But quite a few of the letters of McLuhan and Pound are in the letters book.

[1:37:14] Cameron McEwen: But there's still another 25,

[1:37:17] Cameron McEwen: 30 percent that aren't.

[1:37:20] Bob Dobbs: I have a lot of those,

[1:37:21] Bob Dobbs: but I don't know if I have all of them.

[1:37:24] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:37:25] Cameron McEwen: I think they're online now,

[1:37:26] Cameron McEwen: so I'll send you a link if I can.

[1:37:30] Bob Dobbs: Who would put that up?

[1:37:32] Bob Dobbs: Some university?

[1:37:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:37:33] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:37:34] Cameron McEwen: the Pound

[1:37:35] Cameron McEwen: Journal. Ah.

[1:37:36] Cameron McEwen: Make it new.

[1:37:38] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:37:39] Bob Dobbs: that'd be great.

[1:37:39] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:37:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:37:40] Bob Dobbs: I'd like to see that.

[1:37:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:37:43] Bob Dobbs: Felix was an interesting character at the time.

[1:37:46] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:37:47] Bob Dobbs: But that's not known,

[1:37:49] Bob Dobbs: that he made Mechanical Bride happen.

[1:37:51] Bob Dobbs: That's certainly never said.

[1:37:54] Cameron McEwen: But another thing,

[1:37:57] Cameron McEwen: he was the one that brought

[1:38:00] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan together with the Southerners.

[1:38:04] Cameron McEwen: So that was another very important thing for McLuhan because that's how he got published.

[1:38:09] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[1:38:10] Cameron McEwen: a huge amount of his early work was published either in the Kenyon Review or the Swanee Review.

[1:38:19] Cameron McEwen: He did a couple pieces in the 40s.

[1:38:23] Cameron McEwen: through the University of Toronto Quarterly.

[1:38:26] Cameron McEwen: But that happened,

[1:38:29] Cameron McEwen: I believe,

[1:38:31] Cameron McEwen: through his mentor.

[1:38:34] Cameron McEwen: What's the guy's name that helped with his conversion?

[1:38:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:38:40] Cameron McEwen: Father Phelan.

[1:38:41] Cameron McEwen: Father Phelan from

[1:38:43] Cameron McEwen: Halifax, amongst the famous people from Halifax.

[1:38:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:38:49] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:38:50] Bob Dobbs: Very interesting.

[1:38:53] Bob Dobbs: I'm talking about him using chemical body categories to fluster people.

[1:39:01] Bob Dobbs: So I say,

[1:39:03] Bob Dobbs: but the classifiers,

[1:39:05] Bob Dobbs: looking at McLuhan,

[1:39:07] Bob Dobbs: couldn't see the method in the actor's performance,

[1:39:09] Bob Dobbs: the miming of the fate that the Pollstergeist needed,

[1:39:14] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:39:14] Bob Dobbs: a rapid succession of innovations as airsats and environments.

[1:39:18] Bob Dobbs: That's a very important statement.

[1:39:21] Bob Dobbs: You have a rapid succession of innovations.

[1:39:23] Bob Dobbs: Not just one thing is an anti-environment.

[1:39:25] Bob Dobbs: The rapid succession of innovations is the anti-environment,

[1:39:29] Bob Dobbs: even though it's a failed anti-environment.

[1:39:32] Bob Dobbs: So they couldn't see the method in McLuhan's actor performance,

[1:39:35] Bob Dobbs: the miming of the fate,

[1:39:37] Bob Dobbs: that the Pollstergeist needed a rapid succession.

[1:39:39] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan had to adopt many postures to mime the desperation of the chemical body mind trying to keep up.

[1:39:49] Cameron McEwen: Notice how that relates to what you were saying earlier about the comedians nowadays.

[1:39:57] Cameron McEwen: The environment has taken over the ambient environment.

[1:40:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:40:02] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:40:04] Bob Dobbs: The environment is the funniest thing for people to encounter.

[1:40:09] Bob Dobbs: They have an increasing sensitivity to the absurd because they don't know how to talk about it or think about it.

[1:40:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:40:14] Cameron McEwen: but it's one dimensionality,

[1:40:19] Cameron McEwen: like Marcuse was talking about.

[1:40:24] Cameron McEwen: Marcuse himself was sort of a strange Marxist kind of guy.

[1:40:30] Cameron McEwen: who went up to Canada to Regina to teach for a while.

[1:40:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:40:35] Cameron McEwen: He,

[1:40:36] Cameron McEwen: but one dimensionality is a very,

[1:40:41] Cameron McEwen: very good description of the environment.

[1:40:44] Cameron McEwen: It's able to eat everything,

[1:40:46] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:40:47] Cameron McEwen: And so the whole question of the cul-de-sac is,

[1:40:50] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:40:52] Cameron McEwen: how do you not get digested?

[1:40:53] Cameron McEwen: How does your mind not get digested?

[1:40:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:40:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:40:59] Bob Dobbs: So this method of McLuhan,

[1:41:03] Bob Dobbs: rapid succession of innovations,

[1:41:05] Bob Dobbs: airsats,

[1:41:05] Bob Dobbs: and environments,

[1:41:07] Bob Dobbs: disguised the fact it,

[1:41:11] Bob Dobbs: what is it?

[1:41:14] Bob Dobbs: The Pollstergeist had long disappeared as a constitutive factor.

[1:41:19] Bob Dobbs: See his many letters to Playboy magazine,

[1:41:21] Bob Dobbs: 69 to 70.

[1:41:24] Bob Dobbs: I'll read that again.

[1:41:25] Bob Dobbs: But the classifiers couldn't see the method in the actor's performance,

[1:41:28] Bob Dobbs: the miming of the fate that the Pollstergeist needed,

[1:41:31] Bob Dobbs: a rapid succession of innovations in airsets and environments,

[1:41:34] Bob Dobbs: to disguise the fact that it had long disappeared as a constituent factor.

[1:41:40] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:41:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure what I mean by that the Pollstergeist disappeared.

[1:41:45] Bob Dobbs: I'll have to see what I say next to remind myself of what I'm trying to say here.

[1:41:52] Cameron McEwen: Let me guess.

[1:41:54] Cameron McEwen: I think you're going to say that the

[1:41:57] Cameron McEwen: Pollstergeist had to disappear in order to become more powerful.

[1:42:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:42:04] Bob Dobbs: it stopped possessing people,

[1:42:05] Bob Dobbs: and it just started possessing its other machines,

[1:42:09] Bob Dobbs: possessing the machinic,

[1:42:13] Bob Dobbs: and that's the machines extending themselves.

[1:42:17] Bob Dobbs: That's probably what I'm trying to get here,

[1:42:19] Bob Dobbs: too.

[1:42:19] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan's satiric retrieval of the mini-module...

[1:42:23] Bob Dobbs: From Cliché to Archetype,

[1:42:24] Bob Dobbs: page 160,

[1:42:26] Bob Dobbs: of acoustic and tactile mirrors via the constituency of the homeopathic print mirror in the genre of a memory theater reflected the...

[1:42:38] Bob Dobbs: Now there's apparently probably the memory theater is the chronological thing you complain about.

[1:42:45] Bob Dobbs: So I put it in quotes.

[1:42:47] Bob Dobbs: In the genre of a memory theater reflected the contemporary Medusian afterimage...

[1:42:52] Bob Dobbs: of collective technological quadrophrenia and its complementary human echo.

[1:42:57] Bob Dobbs: Boy,

[1:42:57] Bob Dobbs: that's a funny sentence.

[1:42:58] Bob Dobbs: Let's try that again.

[1:43:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:43:00] Cameron McEwen: it's pretty good.

[1:43:01] Cameron McEwen: Let me just mention that

[1:43:04] Cameron McEwen: Frances Yates did a book on memory theater,

[1:43:06] Cameron McEwen: and I think that's why you have it in quotation marks.

[1:43:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:43:12] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's satiric retrieval of the mini-module of acoustic and tactile mirrors via the constituency of the homeopathic...

[1:43:22] Bob Dobbs: print mirror.

[1:43:23] Bob Dobbs: So the print is the figure,

[1:43:26] Bob Dobbs: and the ground is the acoustic tactile,

[1:43:27] Bob Dobbs: or maybe the content is acoustic tactile,

[1:43:31] Bob Dobbs: and the ground is the mirror,

[1:43:32] Bob Dobbs: is the print.

[1:43:34] Bob Dobbs: Maybe that's what I mean.

[1:43:36] Bob Dobbs: Because when you say...

[1:43:38] Bob Dobbs: Go ahead.

[1:43:39] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:43:40] Cameron McEwen: you're pointing to the difficulty of trying to print,

[1:43:43] Cameron McEwen: of trying to communicate something beyond print and print.

[1:43:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:43:49] Bob Dobbs: and constituency always means

[1:43:52] Bob Dobbs: Constitutive,

[1:43:53] Bob Dobbs: I think.

[1:43:54] Bob Dobbs: Usually

[1:43:55] Bob Dobbs: I use the word constitutive.

[1:43:56] Bob Dobbs: That's the ground.

[1:43:58] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:43:59] Bob Dobbs: I think

[1:44:00] Bob Dobbs: I wouldn't say constitutive of,

[1:44:03] Bob Dobbs: maybe,

[1:44:03] Bob Dobbs: but I'm saying,

[1:44:04] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[1:44:05] Bob Dobbs: meaning that,

[1:44:05] Bob Dobbs: and I say the constituency of the homeopathy premier.

[1:44:09] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:44:09] Bob Dobbs: all of that,

[1:44:11] Bob Dobbs: in the genre of a memory theater,

[1:44:14] Bob Dobbs: that's print,

[1:44:16] Bob Dobbs: reflected the contemporary Medusin,

[1:44:19] Bob Dobbs: that's the monster.

[1:44:20] Bob Dobbs: afterimage of collective technology and quadrophrenia.

[1:44:23] Bob Dobbs: So the media themselves are going through quadrophrenia and that means reflecting

[1:44:30] Bob Dobbs: the Zen Buddhist,

[1:44:31] Bob Dobbs: the Catholic,

[1:44:33] Bob Dobbs: the different

[1:44:34] Bob Dobbs: Luddite things I list above.

[1:44:37] Bob Dobbs: But it's an afterimage,

[1:44:38] Bob Dobbs: because it disappeared,

[1:44:39] Bob Dobbs: of collective technological quantiphony,

[1:44:41] Bob Dobbs: and it's complementary human echo.

[1:44:43] Bob Dobbs: So that's where the humans are non-autonomously reflecting what's going on.

[1:44:49] Cameron McEwen: So note the word constituency is,

[1:44:55] Cameron McEwen: in this sentence,

[1:44:56] Cameron McEwen: is echoed by the word collective.

[1:44:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:45:00] Cameron McEwen: The difference is that constituency,

[1:45:04] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[1:45:05] Cameron McEwen: is it's like a group that votes on a representative,

[1:45:14] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:45:14] Cameron McEwen: to parliament.

[1:45:15] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:45:15] Cameron McEwen: That's what constituency is.

[1:45:19] Cameron McEwen: But in the move to collective,

[1:45:23] Cameron McEwen: the people aren't the voting.

[1:45:27] Cameron McEwen: The decision has fallen out.

[1:45:31] Cameron McEwen: So the movement from constituency to collective is...

[1:45:36] Bob Dobbs: What's going on.

[1:45:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:45:38] Cameron McEwen: it's a movement from autonomy to groupthink.

[1:45:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:45:42] Bob Dobbs: and the book is an actor itself,

[1:45:45] Bob Dobbs: the book effect.

[1:45:46] Bob Dobbs: So that's quite an amazing sentence.

[1:45:50] Bob Dobbs: And

[1:45:50] Bob Dobbs: I'm not trying to be bureaucratically obscure,

[1:45:54] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to be accurate.

[1:45:56] Bob Dobbs: It's almost like spelling out a mathematical formula,

[1:46:00] Bob Dobbs: you know?

[1:46:01] Bob Dobbs: So I'm trying to say here,

[1:46:03] Bob Dobbs: I think what you just said helps people to see that it's very precise what I'm saying.

[1:46:13] Bob Dobbs: You've got the after image of media,

[1:46:19] Bob Dobbs: and it's monstrous,

[1:46:20] Bob Dobbs: and then the human is absorbed into that.

[1:46:23] Bob Dobbs: So how do you communicate that?

[1:46:25] Bob Dobbs: You retrieve a mini-module,

[1:46:28] Bob Dobbs: or you could say the aphoristic.

[1:46:29] Bob Dobbs: of acoustic and tactile mirrors through propping up the book and that was a question McLuhan had in the 50s what's the role of the book yeah but it's homeopathic it's very um it's invisible like homeopathy but still has a memory remember homeopathy still carries the memory of the substance that's

[1:46:50] Bob Dobbs: probably another level i mean there the homeopathy is is uh translated as memory

[1:46:59] Bob Dobbs: memory theater.

[1:47:00] Bob Dobbs: So it's a very impressive sentence.

[1:47:03] Bob Dobbs: I like what I wrote,

[1:47:04] Bob Dobbs: but I can see where people would complain that I'm packing too much into it.

[1:47:10] Bob Dobbs: But you've got to do that.

[1:47:12] Bob Dobbs: It is so much packed in.

[1:47:13] Bob Dobbs: It's like a page of Finnegans Wake.

[1:47:16] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:47:16] Cameron McEwen: it's a good homework assignment,

[1:47:17] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:47:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:47:19] Cameron McEwen: It's something that can be delved into at great length and with great benefits if it's

[1:47:28] Cameron McEwen: done sedulously.

[1:47:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:47:30] Bob Dobbs: So then

[1:47:31] Bob Dobbs: I get casual and say Meduson is visual.

[1:47:36] Bob Dobbs: A lady with snakes like an octopus.

[1:47:38] Bob Dobbs: It's a monstrous image about Big Brother,

[1:47:41] Bob Dobbs: but a little out of date because it's visual and Big Brother has gone inside.

[1:47:46] Bob Dobbs: Therefore,

[1:47:46] Bob Dobbs: you bring in the sound echo of the visual Meduson.

[1:47:50] Bob Dobbs: Complementary,

[1:47:50] Bob Dobbs: it fits like a hand in a glove,

[1:47:52] Bob Dobbs: the human echo.

[1:47:54] Bob Dobbs: The human fits into the cyborgian.

[1:47:58] Bob Dobbs: acoustic and tactile mirrors via the consistency of the homeopathic print mirror in the genre of a memory theater reflected in contemporary monstrous afterimage of collective technological endorphinia.

[1:48:09] Bob Dobbs: So all of that,

[1:48:10] Bob Dobbs: people thinking and acting in all directions with all their bodies,

[1:48:15] Bob Dobbs: and that's the complementary human echo.

[1:48:18] Bob Dobbs: These quotations should help.

[1:48:20] Bob Dobbs: So we're now going to some special quotations.

[1:48:25] Bob Dobbs: Let me see how many I've got here.

[1:48:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:48:28] Bob Dobbs: I got a Kroker one in there.

[1:48:30] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:48:31] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:48:31] Bob Dobbs: they're pretty good.

[1:48:32] Bob Dobbs: So the first one is from Understanding Media,

[1:48:36] Bob Dobbs: page 130.

[1:48:38] Bob Dobbs: Languages are stuttering extensions of our five senses in varying ratios and wavelengths.

[1:48:45] Bob Dobbs: An immediate simulation of consciousness would bypass speech in a kind of massive,

[1:48:50] Bob Dobbs: uh-oh,

[1:48:51] Bob Dobbs: here we come,

[1:48:52] Bob Dobbs: kind of massive extrasensory perception.

[1:48:55] Bob Dobbs: Just as global thermostats could bypass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses,

[1:49:01] Bob Dobbs: such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the

[1:49:07] Bob Dobbs: 1960s. Well,

[1:49:08] Bob Dobbs: there's one for you to get your teeth into.

[1:49:13] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:49:13] Cameron McEwen: I think it did happen in the

[1:49:15] Cameron McEwen: 1960s, as a matter of fact.

[1:49:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:49:18] Cameron McEwen: It's just that the processes were...

[1:49:23] Cameron McEwen: so large and so invisible that they haven't been noticed,

[1:49:28] Cameron McEwen: and they haven't been noticed in the

[1:49:31] Cameron McEwen: 60 years since,

[1:49:32] Cameron McEwen: the 65 years since.

[1:49:35] Bob Dobbs: You could say the Internet was that we moved into something else,

[1:49:39] Bob Dobbs: and then the Internet was a simulation,

[1:49:41] Bob Dobbs: a replay,

[1:49:43] Bob Dobbs: an art forming of this process of consciousness.

[1:49:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:49:48] Cameron McEwen: You could say that radio had already done that,

[1:49:50] Cameron McEwen: TV had already done that.

[1:49:52] Cameron McEwen: It just became more explicit.

[1:49:55] Bob Dobbs: It became smaller.

[1:49:57] Bob Dobbs: It allowed you to be thinking you're bigger than it.

[1:50:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:50:05] Cameron McEwen: that relates to what we were reading before about the triumph of humans over machines,

[1:50:16] Cameron McEwen: what McLuhan was talking about,

[1:50:18] Cameron McEwen: the mechanical bride.

[1:50:19] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:50:20] Bob Dobbs: So the varying ratios and wavelengths,

[1:50:22] Bob Dobbs: that would be partly the meaning of the quadrants of the Taino chart of the various cyborgian phases or ratios and wavelengths.

[1:50:34] Bob Dobbs: I provide ratios on the right column of the

[1:50:38] Bob Dobbs: Tino chart.

[1:50:39] Bob Dobbs: So languages are stuttering extensions of our five senses.

[1:50:43] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan made a lot out of stuttering.

[1:50:47] Bob Dobbs: H.C.E.

[1:50:48] Bob Dobbs: and Finnegans Wake stuttered,

[1:50:50] Bob Dobbs: like Moses.

[1:50:51] Bob Dobbs: Languages are stuttering extensions of our five senses in varying ratios and wavelengths.

[1:50:56] Bob Dobbs: An immediate simulation of consciousness would bypass speech in a kind of massive exocentric perception.

[1:51:03] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:51:03] Bob Dobbs: I think the word macroscopic gesticulation might be a translation of massive exosensory perception.

[1:51:11] Bob Dobbs: Another phrase he used.

[1:51:15] Bob Dobbs: An immediate simulation of consciousness would bypass speech in a kind of massive exosensory perception,

[1:51:20] Bob Dobbs: just as global thermostats could bypass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses.

[1:51:26] Bob Dobbs: Such an extension of the process of consciousness by electric simulation may easily occur in the 60s.

[1:51:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:51:34] Cameron McEwen: and it did.

[1:51:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:51:35] Cameron McEwen: so one of the problems of this kind of writing,

[1:51:42] Cameron McEwen: which

[1:51:43] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan always refused to revise his writing,

[1:51:47] Cameron McEwen: it was once it was out,

[1:51:48] Cameron McEwen: it was out.

[1:51:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:51:49] Cameron McEwen: And he regarded revision and any kind of stylization as...

[1:52:02] Cameron McEwen: being locked into print mode.

[1:52:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:52:05] Cameron McEwen: So he says here an immediate simulation.

[1:52:09] Cameron McEwen: But he doesn't really mean immediate because,

[1:52:13] Cameron McEwen: as you said,

[1:52:14] Cameron McEwen: this could be translated by gesticulation.

[1:52:18] Cameron McEwen: So what does he mean by immediate?

[1:52:20] Cameron McEwen: He means something like what happens with chemistry.

[1:52:27] Cameron McEwen: When we are looking at the world,

[1:52:32] Cameron McEwen: We have the immediate impression of chemistry and physics.

[1:52:40] Cameron McEwen: It's nothing that we need to sort of clutch into an awareness of.

[1:52:49] Cameron McEwen: It's immediate.

[1:52:50] Cameron McEwen: So it's not that chemistry and physics aren't highly complicated.

[1:52:55] Cameron McEwen: It's not that they're immediate in the sense of being intuitive or something.

[1:53:00] Cameron McEwen: They're immediate in the sense that we know that they're there.

[1:53:05] Cameron McEwen: And that's what he means by immediate simulation here.

[1:53:08] Cameron McEwen: He does not mean some sort of mystical awareness.

[1:53:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:53:13] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:53:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:53:15] Cameron McEwen: And this is one of the difficulties of

[1:53:18] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's writing,

[1:53:19] Cameron McEwen: is that he needs to be read as somebody who has something to say,

[1:53:28] Cameron McEwen: but an unrevised.

[1:53:30] Cameron McEwen: form.

[1:53:32] Bob Dobbs: What was the last bit?

[1:53:33] Bob Dobbs: In an unrevised?

[1:53:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:53:35] Cameron McEwen: unrevised form.

[1:53:38] Bob Dobbs: What's the last word?

[1:53:40] Cameron McEwen: Form.

[1:53:41] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:53:42] Bob Dobbs: so say that last sentence again.

[1:53:43] Bob Dobbs: What needs to be done in an unrevised form?

[1:53:49] Cameron McEwen: I'm saying that he needs to be read as somebody who has something very deep to say,

[1:53:55] Cameron McEwen: but someone who is saying it in an unrevised form.

[1:54:00] Cameron McEwen: So it's part of the jumping around that you've been describing.

[1:54:08] Cameron McEwen: So

[1:54:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan regarded writing like that,

[1:54:11] Cameron McEwen: but the problem is that when you try to get a handle on what he's saying in order to communicate it,

[1:54:22] Cameron McEwen: it can't be done as McLuhan himself showed to his dismay.

[1:54:29] Cameron McEwen: It can't be done the way he tried.

[1:54:31] Cameron McEwen: It's got to be done in another way.

[1:54:34] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:54:34] Bob Dobbs: so...

[1:54:34] Cameron McEwen: But we don't know what that is.

[1:54:38] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:54:39] Bob Dobbs: He has a line in

[1:54:41] Bob Dobbs: Understanding Media that when he's describing the global theater,

[1:54:48] Bob Dobbs: he had to be open to using anything.

[1:54:51] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:54:52] Bob Dobbs: Something like that,

[1:54:53] Bob Dobbs: he says.

[1:54:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:54:53] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:54:55] Bob Dobbs: Anything at hand,

[1:54:57] Bob Dobbs: he'll use.

[1:54:58] Bob Dobbs: So that is...

[1:55:01] Bob Dobbs: What the word gesticulation sounds like,

[1:55:02] Bob Dobbs: it's kind of like a hand-waving,

[1:55:05] Bob Dobbs: panicky hand-waving,

[1:55:07] Bob Dobbs: is what he is forced to look like he's doing.

[1:55:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:55:15] Cameron McEwen: you're right.

[1:55:16] Cameron McEwen: There's different senses to gesticulation that are important to bear in mind.

[1:55:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:55:24] Bob Dobbs: so that was a good statement you made there.

[1:55:27] Bob Dobbs: An immediate simulation of consciousness would...

[1:55:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:55:30] Bob Dobbs: people would take that as mystical.

[1:55:32] Bob Dobbs: An immediate simulation of consciousness would bypass speech in a kind of massive extensory perception,

[1:55:37] Bob Dobbs: just as global thermostats could bypass those extensions of skin and body that we call houses.

[1:55:42] Bob Dobbs: All right,

[1:55:43] Bob Dobbs: so then I...

[1:55:45] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:55:46] Cameron McEwen: that sentence is very,

[1:55:48] Cameron McEwen: very deep,

[1:55:50] Cameron McEwen: and it is calling for a revolution of...

[1:55:58] Cameron McEwen: individual consciousness and of social being.

[1:56:02] Cameron McEwen: And in McLuhan's mind,

[1:56:05] Cameron McEwen: at least,

[1:56:06] Cameron McEwen: if we don't understand that and are unable to perform the kind of flip that he's talking about,

[1:56:13] Cameron McEwen: then we're endangering our own survival.

[1:56:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:56:19] Bob Dobbs: it's very serious,

[1:56:26] Bob Dobbs: what he's saying.

[1:56:28] Bob Dobbs: Very serious.

[1:56:30] Bob Dobbs: So I say McLuhan told me two separate times that he miscalculated global management.

[1:56:36] Bob Dobbs: This is his second version of the reasons.

[1:56:39] Bob Dobbs: Second.

[1:56:41] Bob Dobbs: He didn't understand how management could hold the evolution of media at the stage before the simulation of consciousness.

[1:56:48] Bob Dobbs: He didn't think that they could hold that back.

[1:56:51] Bob Dobbs: It was changing too much,

[1:56:52] Bob Dobbs: but management was becoming bigger than the media.

[1:56:56] Bob Dobbs: By the

[1:56:56] Bob Dobbs: 70s, you had these big honchos running the Hollywood studios,

[1:57:00] Bob Dobbs: and they were getting the same effect as their children.

[1:57:03] Bob Dobbs: They were bigger than the media.

[1:57:04] Bob Dobbs: They had huge egos.

[1:57:06] Bob Dobbs: That's why it didn't happen in the 60s.

[1:57:08] Bob Dobbs: And that's that quote.

[1:57:10] Bob Dobbs: Elites today have the right to interpret the speed of light society in big patterns.

[1:57:17] Bob Dobbs: So they hog the making of the big patterns of what is serious,

[1:57:23] Bob Dobbs: what needs to be dealt with.

[1:57:25] Bob Dobbs: That's what they balk at and do a bad job of the big picture.

[1:57:33] Bob Dobbs: As a matter of fact,

[1:57:33] Bob Dobbs: they're really bad in the big picture.

[1:57:37] Bob Dobbs: He didn't understand how management could hold...

[1:57:39] Bob Dobbs: So...

[1:57:40] Bob Dobbs: he told me two separate times he miscalculated global management.

[1:57:43] Bob Dobbs: That means the bureaucrats.

[1:57:45] Bob Dobbs: This is his second version of the reasons.

[1:57:48] Bob Dobbs: He didn't understand how management could hold the evolution of media at the stage before the simulation of consciousness.

[1:57:53] Bob Dobbs: He thought it was going to happen a lot faster.

[1:57:55] Bob Dobbs: He didn't think that they...

[1:57:55] Cameron McEwen: So notice,

[1:57:57] Cameron McEwen: that's what we've been talking about the whole time,

[1:58:01] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:58:01] Cameron McEwen: How the,

[1:58:03] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:58:04] Cameron McEwen: if we're talking about comedians,

[1:58:09] Cameron McEwen: The

[1:58:10] Cameron McEwen: The original intent,

[1:58:12] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[1:58:13] Cameron McEwen: of comedy,

[1:58:15] Cameron McEwen: and especially of McLuhan doing comedy,

[1:58:19] Cameron McEwen: was to try to break with the hold of the technological manipulation of the individual and social brain.

[1:58:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:58:36] Cameron McEwen: But the...

[1:58:37] Cameron McEwen: technological environment was able to take that over.

[1:58:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:58:42] Bob Dobbs: and in the early phases it did the co-anesthetic,

[1:58:45] Bob Dobbs: it put the big honchos in the driver's seat.

[1:58:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:58:49] Cameron McEwen: so the very road that McLuhan was hoping would lead to the simulation of consciousness,

[1:58:56] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:58:56] Cameron McEwen: And what he means by simulation of consciousness is like what chemistry is to the physical world.

[1:59:05] Cameron McEwen: It's the...

[1:59:06] Cameron McEwen: simulation at the level of theory that if you understand chemistry,

[1:59:12] Cameron McEwen: then you understand the world out there.

[1:59:14] Cameron McEwen: And the simulation of consciousness is that if you understand the play or the war,

[1:59:23] Bob Dobbs: the wavelengths and ratios,

[1:59:25] Cameron McEwen: that's right,

[1:59:26] Cameron McEwen: of media,

[1:59:27] Cameron McEwen: then you understand how consciousness works.

[1:59:31] Cameron McEwen: But the very way that that might have

[1:59:35] Cameron McEwen: become conscious was taken over by the forces that were manipulating consciousness.

[1:59:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:59:44] Cameron McEwen: And so that then presents the problem that McLuhan was trying to address.

[1:59:51] Cameron McEwen: How do you get out of that cul-de-sac?

[1:59:54] Cameron McEwen: How do you break that mold?

[1:59:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:59:57] Bob Dobbs: and the popular interpretation of that is what they call conspiracy theory.

[2:00:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:00:03] Bob Dobbs: he has that great sentence in the varsity version of Explorations in 71.

[2:00:09] Bob Dobbs: He titled the essay,

[2:00:10] Bob Dobbs: The Hijacking of Cities,

[2:00:13] Bob Dobbs: Nations,

[2:00:13] Bob Dobbs: and Planets.

[2:00:15] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:00:17] Bob Dobbs: That was what the Brzezinskis,

[2:00:20] Bob Dobbs: the Kissingers,

[2:00:23] Bob Dobbs: the guy who represented Hollywood,

[2:00:25] Bob Dobbs: forget his name,

[2:00:26] Bob Dobbs: Jack Valenti.

[2:00:27] Bob Dobbs: Jack Valenti.

[2:00:28] Bob Dobbs: You ever heard of him?

[2:00:30] Cameron McEwen: Definitely.

[2:00:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:00:32] Bob Dobbs: He was a character.

[2:00:33] Bob Dobbs: So he didn't think that they could hold that back.

[2:00:37] Bob Dobbs: It was changing too much,

[2:00:38] Bob Dobbs: but management was becoming bigger than the media.

[2:00:40] Bob Dobbs: So he might have missed the co-anesthetic effect.

[2:00:49] Bob Dobbs: I don't like to say McClure.

[2:00:51] Cameron McEwen: How do you mean?

[2:00:53] Bob Dobbs: He missed that the co-anesthetic would put the honchos able to hijack.

[2:00:57] Bob Dobbs: He understood the hijacking,

[2:00:58] Bob Dobbs: so actually he did say they were hijacking.

[2:01:01] Bob Dobbs: But maybe that was his realization by 1970.

[2:01:05] Bob Dobbs: When he wrote Understanding Media,

[2:01:07] Bob Dobbs: he didn't see that yet.

[2:01:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:01:11] Cameron McEwen: I think what he didn't see was how the simulation of consciousness,

[2:01:17] Cameron McEwen: either consciously or unconsciously,

[2:01:20] Cameron McEwen: could itself be put to work.

[2:01:23] Cameron McEwen: And I think that's what you mean by the tech body.

[2:01:25] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure about that,

[2:01:26] Cameron McEwen: but I think so.

[2:01:28] Bob Dobbs: Are you saying the simulation of consciousness could be put to work?

[2:01:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:01:33] Bob Dobbs: by...

[2:01:36] Bob Dobbs: individual mind?

[2:01:37] Cameron McEwen: By those that did not want the simulation of consciousness extended to the world.

[2:01:44] Cameron McEwen: That wanted to use the simulation of consciousness.

[2:01:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:01:49] Bob Dobbs: he says in Counterblast in 69 that

[2:01:56] Bob Dobbs: Hollywood is Barnum and Bailey hijackers.

[2:02:02] Bob Dobbs: I think you used the phrase Barnum and Bailey types.

[2:02:07] Bob Dobbs: They exaggerated the content.

[2:02:10] Bob Dobbs: So the tech body,

[2:02:13] Bob Dobbs: it's not just content,

[2:02:14] Bob Dobbs: though.

[2:02:15] Bob Dobbs: It's the formal dynamic,

[2:02:16] Bob Dobbs: too.

[2:02:18] Bob Dobbs: So we'll have to see.

[2:02:21] Bob Dobbs: We'll have to come back to that maybe later when we get some more sentences.

[2:02:26] Cameron McEwen: At that level,

[2:02:27] Cameron McEwen: isn't the simulation of consciousness

[2:02:32] Cameron McEwen: the array of forms.

[2:02:34] Cameron McEwen: So,

[2:02:34] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[2:02:35] Cameron McEwen: you would have to be,

[2:02:37] Cameron McEwen: you're on both sides of the content-media correlation.

[2:02:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:02:43] Cameron McEwen: Simulation of consciousness is always about both.

[2:02:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:02:50] Bob Dobbs: But there might be an aggression,

[2:02:57] Bob Dobbs: some kind of hands-on manipulation.

[2:03:00] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[2:03:01] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[2:03:03] Cameron McEwen: Isn't that what is now at stake in the world?

[2:03:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:03:07] Cameron McEwen: That we went,

[2:03:11] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[2:03:12] Cameron McEwen: from 1960 until 1920,

[2:03:16] Cameron McEwen: so 60 years.

[2:03:18] Cameron McEwen: I mean 2020.

[2:03:21] Cameron McEwen: I'm sorry,

[2:03:21] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[2:03:21] Cameron McEwen: 2020.

[2:03:23] Cameron McEwen: 60 years where the simulation of consciousness was used to hold back.

[2:03:31] Cameron McEwen: consciousness.

[2:03:32] Cameron McEwen: But suddenly that's breaking.

[2:03:35] Cameron McEwen: Nowadays,

[2:03:36] Cameron McEwen: if you're stealing all of

[2:03:40] Cameron McEwen: Syria's oil,

[2:03:42] Cameron McEwen: everybody in Africa or Latin America knows about that.

[2:03:49] Cameron McEwen: You can't just say,

[2:03:50] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:03:52] Cameron McEwen: we're doing good in Syria anymore.

[2:03:55] Cameron McEwen: That doesn't work in the world.

[2:03:57] Cameron McEwen: And so suddenly the dam that was construed

[2:04:00] Cameron McEwen: constructed on the basis of the simulation of consciousness,

[2:04:05] Cameron McEwen: but to hold back the simulation of consciousness,

[2:04:08] Cameron McEwen: that dam is breaking.

[2:04:11] Cameron McEwen: Nobody knows what's going to happen.

[2:04:14] Bob Dobbs: Other than that the forces that be are blatantly,

[2:04:19] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[2:04:20] Bob Dobbs: being fascistic,

[2:04:21] Bob Dobbs: regardless of what you think.

[2:04:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:04:25] Cameron McEwen: and as a matter of fact,

[2:04:26] Cameron McEwen: we're going to tell you right out.

[2:04:29] Cameron McEwen: that we hate you and are probably going to kill you and stuff,

[2:04:33] Cameron McEwen: and there's nothing you can do about it.

[2:04:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:04:36] Bob Dobbs: all gloves are off.

[2:04:40] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's so conscious that there's nothing,

[2:04:43] Bob Dobbs: no old analog media will distract you.

[2:04:47] Bob Dobbs: So they're desperately trying to distract everybody,

[2:04:50] Bob Dobbs: and everybody's saying,

[2:04:50] Bob Dobbs: look at the distractions.

[2:04:53] Bob Dobbs: That's right,

[2:04:54] Cameron McEwen: and being distracted by that.

[2:04:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:04:57] Bob Dobbs: By distracted,

[2:04:57] Bob Dobbs: by the fact they see the distractions.

[2:05:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:05:00] Bob Dobbs: It's very subtle.

[2:05:02] Cameron McEwen: There's that quote at T.S.

[2:05:04] Cameron McEwen: Eliot,

[2:05:05] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:05:06] Cameron McEwen: Distracted from distraction by distraction.

[2:05:09] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:05:10] Bob Dobbs: So by the 70s,

[2:05:15] Bob Dobbs: you had these big honchos running the Hollywood studios.

[2:05:19] Bob Dobbs: They were getting the same effect as their children.

[2:05:21] Bob Dobbs: They were bigger than the media.

[2:05:22] Bob Dobbs: They had huge effects.

[2:05:23] Bob Dobbs: What do I mean they were getting the same effect as their children?

[2:05:30] Cameron McEwen: I think you mean that the children were kind of intuiting what was going on.

[2:05:42] Cameron McEwen: But the problem was that their parents were also getting that,

[2:05:48] Cameron McEwen: and at least in terms of the Hollywood honchos.

[2:05:50] Cameron McEwen: We're using that to derail what would have been the natural effect on the kids if that consciousness were allowed to grow properly on its own.

[2:06:05] Bob Dobbs: Any event,

[2:06:06] Bob Dobbs: any media event,

[2:06:07] Bob Dobbs: there's a million people pile on and analyze the deception,

[2:06:14] Bob Dobbs: the conspiracy,

[2:06:15] Bob Dobbs: the manipulation,

[2:06:16] Bob Dobbs: the deception,

[2:06:17] Bob Dobbs: you know.

[2:06:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:06:18] Bob Dobbs: you

[2:06:19] Bob Dobbs: We're so beyond having something to tell people.

[2:06:25] Bob Dobbs: They all see it in some way.

[2:06:28] Bob Dobbs: They already see it all,

[2:06:29] Bob Dobbs: and they don't know what to do with that.

[2:06:30] Cameron McEwen: This is exactly what

[2:06:32] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan said about advertising in 1950.

[2:06:37] Cameron McEwen: Of course it's manipulation.

[2:06:38] Cameron McEwen: Everybody can see that.

[2:06:40] Cameron McEwen: We know that already.

[2:06:41] Cameron McEwen: It's the form that matters.

[2:06:44] Cameron McEwen: And of course nowadays we're in exactly the same place.

[2:06:48] Cameron McEwen: Everybody can see it,

[2:06:49] Cameron McEwen: but they don't see the form.

[2:06:51] Bob Dobbs: And the tech body is doing that too,

[2:06:56] Bob Dobbs: not just people.

[2:06:59] Cameron McEwen: How do you mean doing that?

[2:07:02] Bob Dobbs: It is pretending it's a honcho at the same time letting you think you're in charge.

[2:07:09] Bob Dobbs: The complicated chicanery that the Hollywood honchos do is now being done by the Matrix.

[2:07:17] Bob Dobbs: So in that movie,

[2:07:18] Bob Dobbs: The Matrix,

[2:07:19] Bob Dobbs: where Agent Smith,

[2:07:20] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:07:21] Bob Dobbs: hundreds of them will pile on Neo,

[2:07:23] Bob Dobbs: that is a beginning of the aggressive part of the tech body.

[2:07:29] Bob Dobbs: But there's also the very passive,

[2:07:31] Bob Dobbs: sweet part.

[2:07:31] Bob Dobbs: part of the tech body,

[2:07:33] Bob Dobbs: where it's,

[2:07:35] Bob Dobbs: you don't have to work anymore,

[2:07:37] Bob Dobbs: we'll take care of you,

[2:07:38] Bob Dobbs: here's your check,

[2:07:40] Bob Dobbs: do whatever you want to do.

[2:07:41] Bob Dobbs: There's that coddling that the tech body's also doing.

[2:07:44] Bob Dobbs: So it's not a blatant enemy of humans on the surface.

[2:07:47] Bob Dobbs: It doesn't look like it's an enemy.

[2:07:50] Bob Dobbs: It's a lover.

[2:07:53] Cameron McEwen: So it's the movies,

[2:07:54] Cameron McEwen: it's TV,

[2:07:54] Cameron McEwen: it's music,

[2:07:57] Bob Dobbs: it's

[2:07:58] Bob Dobbs: Justin Trudeau.

[2:08:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:08:04] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[2:08:04] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[2:08:05] Cameron McEwen: I forget,

[2:08:05] Cameron McEwen: isn't there somebody,

[2:08:06] Cameron McEwen: Taylor,

[2:08:07] Cameron McEwen: maybe Swift or something like that,

[2:08:10] Cameron McEwen: who's got more people following her than any other human being in the history of the world?

[2:08:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:08:21] Bob Dobbs: Taylor Swift,

[2:08:21] Bob Dobbs: you're right,

[2:08:22] Bob Dobbs: Taylor Swift.

[2:08:27] Bob Dobbs: Way bigger than Jesus.

[2:08:30] Cameron McEwen: That's way nicer.

[2:08:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:08:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:08:33] Bob Dobbs: so here's a really good quote following from that,

[2:08:38] Bob Dobbs: which is probably saying what we've been saying.

[2:08:40] Bob Dobbs: So Kroker says in 1993,

[2:08:42] Bob Dobbs: page 53,

[2:08:44] Bob Dobbs: a culture of quantum fluctuations,

[2:08:46] Bob Dobbs: which is wavelengths and ratios above,

[2:08:49] Bob Dobbs: where you can only know that you have never seen what you thought you were looking at because you've never really heard what you were listening to.

[2:08:57] Bob Dobbs: So there's a disappearance of sensory input.

[2:09:00] Bob Dobbs: Regular chemical body sensory input.

[2:09:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:09:03] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:09:04] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:09:04] Bob Dobbs: you say that Taylor Swift is the biggest thing that ever happened to consciousness,

[2:09:08] Bob Dobbs: but we have not experienced it.

[2:09:12] Bob Dobbs: It's hard to say who's experiencing Taylor Swift.

[2:09:15] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:09:17] Bob Dobbs: The tech body is putting it out.

[2:09:18] Bob Dobbs: There was this guy,

[2:09:20] Bob Dobbs: Fuck Buddy or something,

[2:09:22] Bob Dobbs: about four years ago.

[2:09:25] Bob Dobbs: He suddenly became,

[2:09:27] Bob Dobbs: he put out a video or a song or something.

[2:09:30] Bob Dobbs: And he had a billion people within 10 minutes.

[2:09:36] Bob Dobbs: And I was laughing and mocking this total tech body manipulation of a guy.

[2:09:41] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what happened to him.

[2:09:42] Bob Dobbs: He was famous for a few weeks,

[2:09:44] Bob Dobbs: but he had extraordinarily high statistics much too rapidly.

[2:09:51] Bob Dobbs: So

[2:09:52] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what was going on there,

[2:09:53] Bob Dobbs: but nobody knew that this guy was.

[2:09:58] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[2:09:59] Bob Dobbs: they say that a lot of bots are out there,

[2:10:01] Bob Dobbs: and people can hijack bots to get credits for the clicks on their latest blog or something.

[2:10:07] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:10:09] Bob Dobbs: again,

[2:10:10] Bob Dobbs: it's the uncharitable situation.

[2:10:13] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:10:13] Bob Dobbs: therefore,

[2:10:13] Bob Dobbs: the most exaggerated claims can be made.

[2:10:19] Bob Dobbs: A culture of quantum fluctuations where you can only know.

[2:10:22] Bob Dobbs: This is what we can know,

[2:10:23] Bob Dobbs: that you've never seen what you thought you were looking at.

[2:10:26] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:10:26] Bob Dobbs: I thought I was looking at something.

[2:10:27] Bob Dobbs: No,

[2:10:27] Bob Dobbs: I didn't see it.

[2:10:28] Bob Dobbs: I know I didn't see it because you didn't hear it either.

[2:10:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:10:33] Cameron McEwen: So that's a very good quotation.

[2:10:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:10:36] Bob Dobbs: A culture of quantum fluctuations where you can only know what you can know.

[2:10:41] Bob Dobbs: I never saw what I thought you were looking at or what I was looking at because I never really heard what I was listening to.

[2:10:49] Bob Dobbs: Another way,

[2:10:50] Bob Dobbs: you can't focus on one thing to register it.

[2:10:52] Bob Dobbs: You're too busy focusing on several things.

[2:10:55] Bob Dobbs: or what I'd call the multiple bodies.

[2:10:57] Bob Dobbs: So that leads to the familiar,

[2:11:02] Bob Dobbs: this is the cliche archetype,

[2:11:03] Bob Dobbs: page 155,

[2:11:05] Bob Dobbs: the familiar ad form of rippling repetition,

[2:11:08] Bob Dobbs: which is like quantum fluctuations,

[2:11:10] Bob Dobbs: the rippling repetition of profiles is an accessible example of the mini-module that is found in every electric structure,

[2:11:17] Bob Dobbs: from space capsule to the modes of consciousness.

[2:11:21] Bob Dobbs: So that struck me as a good quote.

[2:11:26] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to get to the holeopathic memes.

[2:11:31] Bob Dobbs: That's what these modules are going to be.

[2:11:35] Bob Dobbs: More and more miniaturization.

[2:11:37] Bob Dobbs: Doing more with less is what's modular,

[2:11:43] Bob Dobbs: what McLuhan calls modular,

[2:11:44] Bob Dobbs: and he saw that Joyce was doing that in Finnegans Wake.

[2:11:49] Cameron McEwen: To me,

[2:11:50] Cameron McEwen: the big message that's being repeated in these quotations is that something that looked like it was tending to enlightenment got detoured

[2:12:05] Cameron McEwen: into

[2:12:07] Cameron McEwen: manipulation.

[2:12:09] Cameron McEwen: So the very thing that could have set us free,

[2:12:16] Cameron McEwen: in fact,

[2:12:18] Cameron McEwen: set us in bondage.

[2:12:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:12:21] Bob Dobbs: so that's part of the obsolescence of art,

[2:12:25] Bob Dobbs: science,

[2:12:26] Bob Dobbs: and everything is anti-environments.

[2:12:27] Bob Dobbs: They're air-sets anti-environments.

[2:12:29] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:12:31] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.

[2:12:33] Bob Dobbs: Uh...

[2:12:38] Bob Dobbs: What was I just saying there?

[2:12:38] Bob Dobbs: The air-satisfied environments,

[2:12:42] Bob Dobbs: the...

[2:12:43] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:12:43] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[2:12:44] Bob Dobbs: So that's where,

[2:12:44] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:12:44] Bob Dobbs: Gnosticism or any of the traditional,

[2:12:47] Bob Dobbs: even that statement back to Pound,

[2:12:49] Bob Dobbs: that art provides the stages of apprehension,

[2:12:53] Bob Dobbs: sensory guidance.

[2:12:54] Bob Dobbs: That doesn't apply anymore.

[2:12:56] Bob Dobbs: That is not the way to create autonomy,

[2:13:00] Bob Dobbs: detachment,

[2:13:01] Bob Dobbs: wisdom,

[2:13:02] Bob Dobbs: or some kind of slack.

[2:13:07] Bob Dobbs: So therefore,

[2:13:10] Bob Dobbs: to disguise that fact is why you have a rapid series of innovations.

[2:13:15] Bob Dobbs: Hey,

[2:13:18] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[2:13:18] Bob Dobbs: buddy,

[2:13:19] Bob Dobbs: listen to this one.

[2:13:19] Bob Dobbs: Here's a good quote for you.

[2:13:21] Bob Dobbs: You like that?

[2:13:22] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:13:22] Bob Dobbs: here's another one.

[2:13:24] Bob Dobbs: And before they can realize the second one,

[2:13:25] Bob Dobbs: you say there's a third one.

[2:13:29] Cameron McEwen: When you say disguise the fact,

[2:13:31] Cameron McEwen: are you talking about the…

[2:13:35] Bob Dobbs: What you just said.

[2:13:36] Bob Dobbs: It disguises the failure of every traditional form of intelligence,

[2:13:41] Bob Dobbs: insight,

[2:13:42] Bob Dobbs: pattern recognition,

[2:13:43] Bob Dobbs: or breakthrough.

[2:13:45] Bob Dobbs: We aren't going to get...

[2:13:46] Bob Dobbs: Breakthroughs aren't what they used to be.

[2:13:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:13:52] Cameron McEwen: but you see,

[2:13:55] Cameron McEwen: what's disguised in that disguised fact is that human consciousness...

[2:14:05] Cameron McEwen: is momentary,

[2:14:07] Cameron McEwen: moment to moment,

[2:14:08] Cameron McEwen: as McLuhan sometimes says.

[2:14:10] Cameron McEwen: And what does that mean?

[2:14:12] Cameron McEwen: It means that time is not only chronological,

[2:14:16] Cameron McEwen: it's also synchronic.

[2:14:18] Cameron McEwen: And what is synchronic time?

[2:14:19] Cameron McEwen: Synchronic time is the exercise of freedom.

[2:14:23] Cameron McEwen: So there's a double cover-up going on.

[2:14:30] Cameron McEwen: There's the first level cover-up where we don't know what we're doing.

[2:14:34] Cameron McEwen: And then there's a second level cover-up of what that first cover-up might show if we know how to look at it.

[2:14:43] Bob Dobbs: If we knew what we were looking at,

[2:14:45] Bob Dobbs: but we didn't hear it.

[2:14:46] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:14:47] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[2:14:50] Bob Dobbs: I think that's what I meant by squaring.

[2:14:53] Bob Dobbs: The squaring process is what you're calling doubling.

[2:14:56] Cameron McEwen: Uh-huh.

[2:14:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:14:59] Bob Dobbs: So,

[2:14:59] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[2:15:00] Cameron McEwen: rippling repetition.

[2:15:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:15:03] Cameron McEwen: That's how advertising works.

[2:15:06] Cameron McEwen: But rippling repetition also points to the fact that consciousness is continually reset.

[2:15:14] Cameron McEwen: So if we knew the message of advertising,

[2:15:18] Cameron McEwen: then we would be able to exercise freedom.

[2:15:22] Cameron McEwen: But instead of that,

[2:15:23] Cameron McEwen: we get caught in the use of rippling repetition in advertising to...

[2:15:33] Cameron McEwen: enslave or to set us in bondage.

[2:15:38] Bob Dobbs: Or to be killed.

[2:15:39] Bob Dobbs: Remember McLuhan line?

[2:15:40] Bob Dobbs: Is there life before death?

[2:15:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:15:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:15:46] Bob Dobbs: so,

[2:15:50] Bob Dobbs: oh yeah,

[2:15:50] Bob Dobbs: what I wanted to say was,

[2:15:51] Bob Dobbs: I think he says somewhere analyzing media the way he demands is way more complicated and requires more concentration than

[2:16:03] Bob Dobbs: Modern mathematics.

[2:16:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:16:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:16:07] Cameron McEwen: he says somewhere that what he's doing is far more important than the discovery of DNA.

[2:16:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:16:15] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[2:16:16] Bob Dobbs: Even though they have the same year.

[2:16:19] Bob Dobbs: Nice try,

[2:16:20] Bob Dobbs: DNA.

[2:16:22] Bob Dobbs: Or Cricket Watson.

[2:16:24] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:16:24] Bob Dobbs: so then we come to innovation is obsolete.

[2:16:28] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:16:29] Bob Dobbs: So is obsolescence.

[2:16:31] Bob Dobbs: As information speed-up transforms man and his world into art form.

[2:16:36] Bob Dobbs: That's a good one.

[2:16:37] Cameron McEwen: Yep.

[2:16:41] Bob Dobbs: There he's using the traditional meaning of obsolete.

[2:16:44] Bob Dobbs: Remember,

[2:16:44] Bob Dobbs: he changed obsolete.

[2:16:47] Bob Dobbs: Obsolete meant prominence.

[2:16:50] Bob Dobbs: But the idea that it's old-fashioned or dead is the meaning he's using here.

[2:16:55] Bob Dobbs: And maybe Barry wrote that,

[2:16:59] Bob Dobbs: Barry Nevins.

[2:16:59] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:17:00] Cameron McEwen: one thing they're doing there is they're defining the cul-de-sac.

[2:17:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:17:04] Cameron McEwen: If you're in a situation where innovation doesn't work,

[2:17:07] Cameron McEwen: but also obsolescent doesn't work,

[2:17:09] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:17:10] Cameron McEwen: what is going to work?

[2:17:13] Bob Dobbs: Something works,

[2:17:14] Bob Dobbs: but you can't chart it.

[2:17:16] Bob Dobbs: You can't hear it.

[2:17:17] Bob Dobbs: You can't see it.

[2:17:18] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[2:17:18] Bob Dobbs: And that's what you've got to become aware of.

[2:17:21] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:17:21] Bob Dobbs: You don't need to look at the news to know what's going on.

[2:17:24] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:17:26] Bob Dobbs: So then this next sentence is good,

[2:17:28] Bob Dobbs: from Take Today.

[2:17:29] Bob Dobbs: The last one was from Take Today,

[2:17:31] Bob Dobbs: page 297,

[2:17:32] Bob Dobbs: which I think is the last page of the book.

[2:17:34] Bob Dobbs: And then you've got page 221 of Take Today.

[2:17:38] Bob Dobbs: Whereas mechanical dehumanization,

[2:17:40] Bob Dobbs: that's the 19th century,

[2:17:42] Bob Dobbs: wrecked the person,

[2:17:43] Bob Dobbs: electric superhumanization wrecks the entire system.

[2:17:48] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[2:17:48] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:17:49] Bob Dobbs: that would be the system for chemical bodies,

[2:17:52] Bob Dobbs: the management of humans.

[2:17:54] Bob Dobbs: But they're superhumanized,

[2:17:56] Bob Dobbs: superkilled,

[2:17:57] Bob Dobbs: superangelized,

[2:17:59] Bob Dobbs: angelicized.

[2:18:02] Bob Dobbs: That is a really important point,

[2:18:04] Bob Dobbs: the superhumanization.

[2:18:06] Bob Dobbs: So everybody thinks they're entitled to everything.

[2:18:09] Bob Dobbs: Here comes everybody.

[2:18:12] Bob Dobbs: It's making you think that you're at the center of everything.

[2:18:18] Bob Dobbs: Then you expect everything.

[2:18:20] Bob Dobbs: And then you get the kind of people we have to live with today.

[2:18:23] Bob Dobbs: Small brats who,

[2:18:27] Bob Dobbs: at the slightest inconvenience,

[2:18:30] Bob Dobbs: will kill somebody.

[2:18:32] Bob Dobbs: Will shoot you.

[2:18:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:18:35] Cameron McEwen: But they're also being completely factual and just reading the situation,

[2:18:44] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:18:46] Bob Dobbs: Who the person is or McLuhan is here?

[2:18:50] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:18:50] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and Nevitt.

[2:18:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:18:52] Cameron McEwen: That's why I'm using the plural.

[2:18:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:18:55] Cameron McEwen: The human beings have made.

[2:19:04] Cameron McEwen: super progress into a situation where they may destroy themselves.

[2:19:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:19:12] Bob Dobbs: and they have destroyed a lot of themselves already.

[2:19:16] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[2:19:17] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[2:19:19] Cameron McEwen: So we have a situation where the human beings have used their progress to retrogress.

[2:19:33] Cameron McEwen: And if progress doesn't work and retrogression doesn't work,

[2:19:38] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:19:38] Cameron McEwen: what works?

[2:19:39] Cameron McEwen: So that's the wrecking the entire system is having no way to go,

[2:19:45] Cameron McEwen: not forward,

[2:19:46] Cameron McEwen: not backwards.

[2:19:47] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:19:48] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:19:48] Bob Dobbs: the next quote,

[2:19:49] Bob Dobbs: really important from the last page of the book,

[2:19:52] Bob Dobbs: where the recently achieved forms of consciousness have done something.

[2:19:57] Bob Dobbs: That's what we're going to start with next time.

[2:19:58] Bob Dobbs: It's too big to go into now.

[2:20:01] Cameron McEwen: Fine.

[2:20:03] Bob Dobbs: What did you say?

[2:20:04] Bob Dobbs: You said fine?

[2:20:05] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[2:20:05] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[2:20:06] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:20:06] Bob Dobbs: So what you said was a good lead up to what is this important paragraph coming up saying.

[2:20:12] Bob Dobbs: It's really important.

[2:20:13] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:20:14] Bob Dobbs: So another great dialogue.

[2:20:17] Bob Dobbs: Thanks a lot,

[2:20:17] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.

[2:20:18] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[2:20:19] Cameron McEwen: Thank you,

[2:20:19] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[2:20:20] Bob Dobbs: You're making good progress understanding me.

[2:20:24] Bob Dobbs: Trying.

[2:20:25] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:20:26] Bob Dobbs: I'm doing the tech body.

[2:20:27] Bob Dobbs: The more I pretend I'm understanding you,

[2:20:30] Bob Dobbs: the more you think you understand me,

[2:20:32] Bob Dobbs: right?

[2:20:33] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[2:20:33] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[2:20:33] Bob Dobbs: There's the tactile interplay,

[2:20:35] Bob Dobbs: tactile manipulation.

[2:20:39] Cameron McEwen: It's attempting to teach reading between the lines.

[2:20:43] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:20:43] Bob Dobbs: attempting to teach that.

[2:20:45] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[2:20:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:20:48] Bob Dobbs: in a non-book.

[2:20:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:20:50] Cameron McEwen: well,

[2:20:50] Cameron McEwen: in a book slash non-book.

[2:20:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:20:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:20:55] Bob Dobbs: talk to you later,

[2:20:55] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.

[2:20:55] Bob Dobbs: Good,

[2:20:56] Bob Dobbs: Bob.

[2:20:56] Bob Dobbs: Yep,

[2:20:56] Cameron McEwen: thanks.

[2:20:57] Cameron McEwen: Bye-bye.

[2:20:57] Bob Dobbs: Thank you.

[2:20:58] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:20:58] Bob Dobbs: bye.