[00:00] Bob Dobbs: Welcome,
[00:01] Bob Dobbs: this is Bob and Cameron.
[00:02] Bob Dobbs: It's been five weeks or so since we last recorded.
[00:07] Bob Dobbs: We had a lot of personal stuff to do and couldn't get back to the phones.
[00:12] Bob Dobbs: So we are starting on page 160,
[00:18] Bob Dobbs: the section 5 called the Anthropomorphic Physical,
[00:22] Bob Dobbs: AP in brackets,
[00:25] Bob Dobbs: but talking to Cameron just before we started recording.
[00:28] Bob Dobbs: We want to go back to 158 and go in depth into a quote that we glossed over.
[00:38] Bob Dobbs: So this quote is from page 297 of Take Today,
[00:46] Bob Dobbs: The Executive's Dropout by
[00:49] Bob Dobbs: Marshall and Barry Nevitt,
[00:50] Bob Dobbs: 1972.
[00:53] Bob Dobbs: And it's on the last page of the book,
[00:55] Bob Dobbs: page 297.
[00:58] Bob Dobbs: And it's the big wrap-up,
[00:59] Bob Dobbs: and it goes like this.
[01:04] Bob Dobbs: The familiar idea of,
[01:05] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[01:05] Bob Dobbs: making the news now yields to making the world itself.
[01:09] Bob Dobbs: For the best part of a century,
[01:10] Bob Dobbs: we have been programming human consciousness with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious.
[01:16] Bob Dobbs: The complementary of this process would seem to be the natural,
[01:19] Bob Dobbs: natural is in quotes,
[01:22] Bob Dobbs: the complementary of this process would seem to be the natural program for the period ahead.
[01:27] Bob Dobbs: Then it has an italics.
[01:28] Bob Dobbs: Programming is a colon and then an italics.
[01:32] Bob Dobbs: Programming the unconscious.
[01:35] Bob Dobbs: Now this is the natural program for the period ahead.
[01:37] Bob Dobbs: Programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness.
[01:42] Bob Dobbs: Then normal print.
[01:44] Bob Dobbs: This procedure would evoke a new form of consciousness radically different from former consciousness.
[01:50] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan's implying a kind of alchemy he's going to do.
[01:55] Bob Dobbs: He does use the word alchemy in an article titled 1955 about Finnegans Wake,
[02:02] Bob Dobbs: so alchemy is in his bailiwick.
[02:07] Bob Dobbs: So this quote,
[02:12] Bob Dobbs: Marshall was gone at the end of 1980,
[02:16] Bob Dobbs: so then Barry Nevitt was the guy to talk to.
[02:19] Bob Dobbs: So somewhere in there,
[02:21] Bob Dobbs: I asked him...
[02:23] Bob Dobbs: What are the recently achieved forms of consciousness?
[02:25] Bob Dobbs: And he said,
[02:26] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake.
[02:27] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[02:27] Bob Dobbs: I tell that story a lot.
[02:29] Bob Dobbs: I probably said it on this series,
[02:32] Bob Dobbs: and I don't know if I said it.
[02:33] Bob Dobbs: We're in episode 75 here.
[02:37] Bob Dobbs: I say that point.
[02:38] Bob Dobbs: And so I've thought about that for over 40 years,
[02:41] Bob Dobbs: what it means.
[02:42] Bob Dobbs: It made a lot of progress,
[02:43] Bob Dobbs: I think.
[02:44] Bob Dobbs: So we're now helping Cameron to understand it,
[02:48] Bob Dobbs: or his translation will help me understand it.
[02:52] Bob Dobbs: That's how we ended the last episode,
[02:54] Bob Dobbs: with the loop-de-loop.
[02:56] Bob Dobbs: Is Cameron imitating Bob,
[02:58] Bob Dobbs: or is Bob imitating Cameron?
[02:59] Bob Dobbs: That's the question.
[03:02] Bob Dobbs: So,
[03:03] Bob Dobbs: as usual,
[03:04] Bob Dobbs: Cameron has something to say.
[03:06] Bob Dobbs: What would you begin to say about this quote?
[03:10] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[03:11] Cameron McEwen: let's just start with what Barry had to say.
[03:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[03:17] Cameron McEwen: I think that...
[03:19] Cameron McEwen: What he had to say about Finnegans Wake as the recently achieved form of consciousness is both right and wrong.
[03:26] Cameron McEwen: It's wrong in the sense that
[03:30] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan almost certainly had a whole range of other ideas in mind.
[03:40] Cameron McEwen: So,
[03:41] Cameron McEwen: symbolist poetry,
[03:43] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[03:46] Cameron McEwen: anthropology.
[03:48] Cameron McEwen: analytic psychology,
[03:52] Cameron McEwen: all of these recently achieved forms of consciousness,
[03:57] Cameron McEwen: I think are meant at the end of
[04:00] Cameron McEwen: Take Today.
[04:01] Cameron McEwen: On the other hand,
[04:04] Cameron McEwen: Finnegans Wake can be seen as a kind of synopsis of these developments in the latter part of the
[04:15] Cameron McEwen: 19th century and then the 20th century.
[04:17] Cameron McEwen: And so in that sense,
[04:19] Cameron McEwen: what
[04:20] Cameron McEwen: Nevitt has to say is correct.
[04:22] Cameron McEwen: So
[04:23] Cameron McEwen: I would just say that the way to take
[04:30] Cameron McEwen: Barry's pronouncement is to be careful to tease it apart and to think of the complications that are involved in what seems like a simple statement.
[04:47] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[04:47] Bob Dobbs: The Finnegans Wake,
[04:50] Bob Dobbs: until recently,
[04:53] Bob Dobbs: was not a well-known book.
[04:56] Bob Dobbs: And
[04:57] Bob Dobbs: 99% of the people who ran across it ran from it.
[05:02] Bob Dobbs: When I was in New York in the
[05:04] Bob Dobbs: 90s, starting in late 93,
[05:07] Bob Dobbs: I found the Finnegans Wake Reading Group and joined it and stayed with them for many years.
[05:12] Bob Dobbs: And in the
[05:16] Bob Dobbs: 90s, the group started popping up all over the place.
[05:19] Bob Dobbs: So by
[05:20] Bob Dobbs: 95, there were about 52 of them.
[05:23] Bob Dobbs: And so something about the
[05:27] Bob Dobbs: 90s made
[05:30] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake...
[05:32] Bob Dobbs: appear to be accessible.
[05:34] Bob Dobbs: So you go back to that quote in 1970 in a letter to the editor of Playboy by McLuhan saying that
[05:43] Bob Dobbs: T.S. Eliot's auditory imagination,
[05:46] Bob Dobbs: I think that's the phrase,
[05:49] Bob Dobbs: written about in the 1920s,
[05:51] Bob Dobbs: was normal awareness today,
[05:55] Bob Dobbs: says McLuhan in 1970.
[05:58] Bob Dobbs: But he says,
[05:58] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake has not...
[06:02] Bob Dobbs: become part of the ordinary consciousness yet.
[06:07] Bob Dobbs: But he predicted it would at some point.
[06:09] Bob Dobbs: He implied it.
[06:11] Bob Dobbs: So we had over the past,
[06:13] Bob Dobbs: so that's 50 years ago,
[06:16] Bob Dobbs: 53 years ago,
[06:20] Bob Dobbs: we've had like,
[06:21] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,
[06:21] Bob Dobbs: the last seven years or something,
[06:23] Bob Dobbs: this popular phenomenon in the journalistic news headline world,
[06:28] Bob Dobbs: the woke.
[06:30] Bob Dobbs: There's a major meme running around referring to something.
[06:35] Bob Dobbs: And
[06:36] Bob Dobbs: I, at some point over the last seven years,
[06:38] Bob Dobbs: said,
[06:38] Bob Dobbs: wow,
[06:39] Bob Dobbs: there it is.
[06:40] Bob Dobbs: People don't know it.
[06:41] Bob Dobbs: Like in the
[06:42] Bob Dobbs: 1970s with the electronic music explosion of rock and everything,
[06:49] Bob Dobbs: people didn't know Eliot's quote.
[06:52] Bob Dobbs: They wouldn't know what McLuhan meant,
[06:54] Bob Dobbs: but they were living it out.
[06:56] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said we were living entirely by music back then.
[06:59] Bob Dobbs: So.
[07:00] Bob Dobbs: The acoustic imagination became a figure of idolatry,
[07:04] Bob Dobbs: almost.
[07:05] Bob Dobbs: So,
[07:07] Bob Dobbs: pagan idolatry.
[07:08] Bob Dobbs: So,
[07:08] Bob Dobbs: here it is,
[07:10] Bob Dobbs: at some kind of conclusion of technological communication among people,
[07:16] Bob Dobbs: the most fantastic layout,
[07:18] Bob Dobbs: which I,
[07:19] Bob Dobbs: many years ago,
[07:19] Bob Dobbs: called the Android meme,
[07:21] Bob Dobbs: and now I say it's become psychopathic,
[07:23] Bob Dobbs: so I call it the tech body.
[07:26] Bob Dobbs: But to have people talk about being woke...
[07:30] Bob Dobbs: as if it's obvious what we should do,
[07:35] Bob Dobbs: and yet it causes the most division.
[07:37] Bob Dobbs: And,
[07:37] Bob Dobbs: of course,
[07:38] Bob Dobbs: if you talk to the so-called leaders of the woke movement,
[07:40] Bob Dobbs: they can't define it.
[07:42] Bob Dobbs: So this is an example of something in consciousness caused by the technology of the day that evokes,
[07:50] Bob Dobbs: just like in the 60s,
[07:51] Bob Dobbs: the phrase,
[07:52] Bob Dobbs: where it's at.
[07:53] Bob Dobbs: Everybody adopts it.
[07:54] Bob Dobbs: Another word from the 60s,
[07:56] Bob Dobbs: freak out.
[07:56] Bob Dobbs: It's amazing.
[07:57] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[07:58] Bob Dobbs: Zappa coined the word freak out.
[08:00] Bob Dobbs: but it made it popular and nobody knew Zappa stuff but you know by
[08:05] Bob Dobbs: 1980s your grandmother says oh yeah I was freaked out yeah you know that camera now that word became used by everybody and it was what no you're right and uh um this
[08:23] Cameron McEwen: you could say that the the topic here is language yeah um
[08:30] Cameron McEwen: The question is,
[08:32] Cameron McEwen: how does language develop in a largely unconscious way,
[08:39] Cameron McEwen: which then evokes new forms of consciousness?
[08:43] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[08:43] Bob Dobbs: it points to reasonably cheap forms of consciousness.
[08:47] Cameron McEwen: So,
[08:48] Bob Dobbs: have you thought of woke,
[08:50] Bob Dobbs: the popularity of that word,
[08:53] Bob Dobbs: in terms of Finnegans Wake the last few years?
[08:56] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[08:57] Cameron McEwen: you mentioned,
[08:58] Cameron McEwen: I hadn't.
[08:58] Cameron McEwen: But you mentioned the association of wake and woke a few programs ago,
[09:06] Cameron McEwen: if I remember correctly.
[09:08] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[09:08] Bob Dobbs: So you hadn't thought of that.
[09:09] Bob Dobbs: So I get credit for articulating.
[09:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[09:12] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[09:12] Cameron McEwen: You're the man,
[09:13] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[09:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[09:14] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[09:14] Bob Dobbs: I've also said over the past
[09:16] Bob Dobbs: 10 years as social media became such anarchy,
[09:21] Bob Dobbs: and in the
[09:22] Bob Dobbs: 90s, email was anarchy for a lot of people.
[09:24] Bob Dobbs: They didn't like it.
[09:26] Bob Dobbs: lot of uh...
[09:27] Bob Dobbs: Crudity and rudeness happened,
[09:29] Bob Dobbs: a lot of threatening people's identities.
[09:32] Bob Dobbs: So to me,
[09:35] Bob Dobbs: more and more,
[09:36] Bob Dobbs: because I was looking at the wake for all the time I was in New York and even when I came to Maui,
[09:43] Bob Dobbs: a page of Finnegans Wake looked to me like a Facebook page,
[09:48] Bob Dobbs: the threads and the way people talked.
[09:50] Bob Dobbs: And you could go into more radical places.
[09:55] Bob Dobbs: Reddit,
[09:55] Bob Dobbs: is it called?
[09:56] Bob Dobbs: You go into Reddit.
[09:58] Bob Dobbs: These different places and it's so like Finnegans Wake.
[10:02] Bob Dobbs: And the misspelling and everything of people's communications and the range of attitudes and postures of mind that are taken.
[10:12] Bob Dobbs: I thought,
[10:12] Bob Dobbs: wow,
[10:12] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake,
[10:13] Bob Dobbs: it painted where we arrived.
[10:16] Bob Dobbs: And that's why
[10:18] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was pointing out the Valley of the Wake.
[10:20] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't a novel.
[10:22] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't a painting.
[10:24] Bob Dobbs: What was it?
[10:25] Bob Dobbs: But it showed you and indicated this could be seen in all media.
[10:30] Bob Dobbs: If you could start to understand McLuhan's interpretation of it,
[10:34] Bob Dobbs: you could see it showed our time.
[10:36] Bob Dobbs: Joyce knew that communication,
[10:39] Bob Dobbs: or felt that communication was going to take over in a way that would become a monster.
[10:44] Bob Dobbs: And that's what he did.
[10:46] Bob Dobbs: And then now,
[10:48] Bob Dobbs: what is woke?
[10:50] Bob Dobbs: Woke means some kind of respect for every possible tribe,
[10:56] Bob Dobbs: anthropomorphic tribe you could say,
[10:58] Bob Dobbs: that's out there.
[11:00] Bob Dobbs: You have to be very careful what you say.
[11:02] Bob Dobbs: So people became very aware of communicating with everybody.
[11:05] Bob Dobbs: And then I would say that confirms my term in 1999 of cloning ESP.
[11:11] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's in a very sensitive,
[11:13] Bob Dobbs: almost ESP level,
[11:15] Bob Dobbs: and you must be aware.
[11:16] Bob Dobbs: You have to understand the effects of what you're saying.
[11:19] Bob Dobbs: So another level is everybody's forced to be a media ecologist,
[11:22] Bob Dobbs: as McLuhan said,
[11:23] Bob Dobbs: to look at the environment and be careful of how you say it and where you say it and even what you say.
[11:29] Bob Dobbs: All that,
[11:30] Bob Dobbs: all those aspects I just said are part of being woke.
[11:35] Bob Dobbs: Yet it comes across as an irritant to most people,
[11:40] Bob Dobbs: to the somnambulists,
[11:42] Bob Dobbs: the motivated somnambulists,
[11:43] Bob Dobbs: who are not always wrong.
[11:45] Bob Dobbs: They're tuned into the present.
[11:47] Bob Dobbs: They're just more consciously stuck in the effects of it and have no clue how they got there.
[11:53] Bob Dobbs: But they register what's going on,
[11:56] Bob Dobbs: and they say there's something off about this.
[11:59] Bob Dobbs: I think it's the majority view.
[12:00] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[12:00] Bob Dobbs: what's interesting is the majority on the street or in the suburbs that these woke people have gone too far,
[12:07] Bob Dobbs: but corporations and the,
[12:10] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[12:11] Bob Dobbs: elites of society,
[12:12] Bob Dobbs: the managers,
[12:12] Bob Dobbs: are implementing it.
[12:14] Bob Dobbs: That's what's interesting,
[12:15] Bob Dobbs: right?
[12:16] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[12:17] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[12:18] Cameron McEwen: at least in my mind,
[12:23] Cameron McEwen: the term woke means not awake.
[12:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[12:29] Bob Dobbs: well,
[12:29] Bob Dobbs: they're saying you must become,
[12:31] Bob Dobbs: they say I'm woke,
[12:32] Bob Dobbs: so they say they've woken up,
[12:34] Bob Dobbs: but they admit they were asleep.
[12:37] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[12:37] Cameron McEwen: but,
[12:37] Cameron McEwen: you know.
[12:39] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[12:39] Bob Dobbs: from our point of view,
[12:40] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[12:41] Bob Dobbs: they ain't woke.
[12:44] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you're saying?
[12:45] Cameron McEwen: I don't believe that people use the term woke in a positive sense.
[12:51] Cameron McEwen: You seem to be saying that,
[12:55] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[12:55] Cameron McEwen: the media.
[12:57] Cameron McEwen: The Main Street media believes that wokeness is good or something,
[13:05] Cameron McEwen: but they believe what wokeness designates is good,
[13:12] Cameron McEwen: but they don't like the term woke.
[13:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[13:17] Cameron McEwen: Nobody does.
[13:20] Bob Dobbs: It just occurred to me now,
[13:21] Bob Dobbs: it's usually about issues that nobody is guilty of.
[13:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[13:27] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[13:31] Cameron McEwen: it's a kind of conscious manipulation that everybody hates and nobody admits doing.
[13:42] Cameron McEwen: But at the same time,
[13:45] Cameron McEwen: that's completely enveloped the whole culture.
[13:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[13:50] Bob Dobbs: But what I mean is most...
[13:52] Bob Dobbs: What did you say?
[13:53] Bob Dobbs: Main Street?
[13:55] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[13:55] Bob Dobbs: that's actually a word.
[13:56] Cameron McEwen: Main Street media,
[13:58] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[13:58] Bob Dobbs: Main Street media.
[14:01] Bob Dobbs: The average person,
[14:02] Bob Dobbs: the so-called average person is saying,
[14:06] Bob Dobbs: I'm not racist.
[14:08] Bob Dobbs: People at my work,
[14:08] Bob Dobbs: we're not racist.
[14:09] Bob Dobbs: They don't understand what the complaint,
[14:11] Bob Dobbs: where that came from.
[14:13] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[14:14] Bob Dobbs: if you get into a sociologist or some ideologue,
[14:17] Bob Dobbs: Marxist or humanist or something,
[14:20] Bob Dobbs: they'll say,
[14:20] Bob Dobbs: no,
[14:21] Bob Dobbs: no,
[14:21] Bob Dobbs: there's racism in America.
[14:23] Bob Dobbs: But that...
[14:25] Bob Dobbs: is not noticing the tribal warfare that McLuhan predicted would come.
[14:29] Bob Dobbs: At least on the,
[14:30] Bob Dobbs: I call it in the PV body,
[14:32] Bob Dobbs: cultural warfare is the icons.
[14:34] Bob Dobbs: You must respect the icons of all the different tribes,
[14:37] Bob Dobbs: this kind of tribes floating among the signs of our time,
[14:41] Bob Dobbs: right?
[14:42] Bob Dobbs: And so you're supposed to respect them.
[14:43] Bob Dobbs: And most people have succumbed to that,
[14:47] Bob Dobbs: but they don't see why people should make a big issue out of it.
[14:50] Bob Dobbs: We're doing it as best as we can.
[14:53] Bob Dobbs: and uh
[14:54] Bob Dobbs: The people who are woke say,
[14:55] Bob Dobbs: no,
[14:55] Bob Dobbs: you're not.
[14:57] Bob Dobbs: You're suppressing everything even worse.
[15:02] Cameron McEwen: You see,
[15:03] Cameron McEwen: before you used the term alchemy,
[15:07] Cameron McEwen: and compared that to both what McLuhan was doing and what's generally going on.
[15:15] Cameron McEwen: And I think that's a very good term because alchemy was doing some very good work with what would come to be known as chemicals,
[15:30] Cameron McEwen: but it didn't know what it was doing.
[15:32] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[15:33] Cameron McEwen: And the good work...
[15:36] Cameron McEwen: that it was doing was not only in alchemical laboratories,
[15:43] Cameron McEwen: it was working with materials that are everywhere,
[15:47] Cameron McEwen: right?
[15:47] Cameron McEwen: And so when chemistry was born,
[15:51] Cameron McEwen: partly out of alchemy,
[15:53] Cameron McEwen: around 1800,
[15:55] Cameron McEwen: what people found out was about everything that had always been going on forever.
[16:06] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[16:06] Cameron McEwen: but they didn't know.
[16:08] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[16:08] Bob Dobbs: So we're in a...
[16:10] Bob Dobbs: Let me just say this.
[16:12] Bob Dobbs: So they discovered that the search for knowledge,
[16:17] Bob Dobbs: the landing point represented by chemistry,
[16:21] Bob Dobbs: was right in front of them all the time.
[16:24] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[16:27] Cameron McEwen: And their brains,
[16:31] Cameron McEwen: the brains that were operating on those materials,
[16:35] Cameron McEwen: were themselves...
[16:36] Cameron McEwen: chemical.
[16:39] Cameron McEwen: So I mean you have loop within loop within loop and it's not enough to say that you have to become conscious of these loops because we're actually hyper-conscious in transhumanism
[16:56] Cameron McEwen: and all of these sort of woke disciplines.
[17:01] Cameron McEwen: We're hyper-consciousness of the loopiness but we don't
[17:06] Cameron McEwen: really know what's going on.
[17:08] Bob Dobbs: Or we're not comfortable with it,
[17:10] Bob Dobbs: or they don't think people are actually getting it.
[17:13] Bob Dobbs: They're not getting what should be gotten,
[17:15] Bob Dobbs: which might get to some social piece of understanding.
[17:19] Bob Dobbs: And they just see the understandings getting less and less.
[17:23] Bob Dobbs: So what are people claiming they're woke about?
[17:26] Bob Dobbs: They're obviously not woke on the right issues,
[17:28] Bob Dobbs: but there is a wokeness,
[17:30] Bob Dobbs: there is a collective consciousness that McLuhan said we arrived at by the 60s in the global theater.
[17:36] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's tuned in on a level playing field with the headlines,
[17:41] Bob Dobbs: so nobody could say that they weren't informed about what to do with it,
[17:47] Bob Dobbs: how to,
[17:48] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[17:48] Bob Dobbs: solve the issues.
[17:49] Bob Dobbs: That's where the division happens,
[17:51] Bob Dobbs: and that's where you get all the different bureaucracies and movements and cults and all kinds of things arguing over how to deal with it.
[18:01] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[18:03] Cameron McEwen: So notice that McLuhan from...
[18:05] Cameron McEwen: the mid-1940s had been saying that a central clue to all this sort of stuff is a page of a newspaper.
[18:17] Cameron McEwen: And so a page of a newspaper is sort of like Finnegans Wake in that you have a ton of stuff that's all thrown together.
[18:27] Cameron McEwen: There's no unity to it except for the dateline.
[18:31] Cameron McEwen: And in Finnegans Wake,
[18:32] Cameron McEwen: there's no unity to it except that.
[18:35] Cameron McEwen: The book starts at a certain point,
[18:37] Cameron McEwen: goes to the end,
[18:39] Cameron McEwen: and then starts up again,
[18:40] Cameron McEwen: right?
[18:40] Cameron McEwen: And so it's a bound volume that's just more or less like a dateline.
[18:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[18:49] Bob Dobbs: And it's a commentary on Ulysses,
[18:51] Bob Dobbs: which is a dateline.
[18:53] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[18:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[18:54] Cameron McEwen: that's absolutely right.
[18:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[18:56] Cameron McEwen: So then taking that metaphor,
[19:01] Cameron McEwen: we can imagine that what's going on in the world,
[19:04] Cameron McEwen: is that on a newspaper page,
[19:09] Cameron McEwen: the different stories,
[19:10] Cameron McEwen: the different captions,
[19:12] Cameron McEwen: the different pictures,
[19:13] Cameron McEwen: the different cartoons,
[19:14] Cameron McEwen: the different dates,
[19:15] Cameron McEwen: the different numbers,
[19:17] Cameron McEwen: each of these is trying to impose itself on the rest.
[19:23] Cameron McEwen: And what the jump from alchemy to chemistry shows is that you cannot take anything from the old regime
[19:33] Cameron McEwen: and think that it's going to supply an intelligibility for the new one.
[19:40] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[19:42] Cameron McEwen: Our situation is always that we're trying to find intelligibility in the rearview mirror when that's exactly what denies intelligibility.
[19:54] Bob Dobbs: And doesn't recognize how much things have changed with every new environment.
[19:59] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[20:00] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[20:02] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[20:03] Bob Dobbs: So,
[20:04] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[20:04] Bob Dobbs: back in the 60s...
[20:07] Bob Dobbs: the humanist movements,
[20:08] Bob Dobbs: the radical movements,
[20:09] Bob Dobbs: everyone was saying,
[20:10] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[20:10] Bob Dobbs: we've got to wake up the people.
[20:12] Bob Dobbs: So by the 80s,
[20:13] Bob Dobbs: on my radio show,
[20:15] Bob Dobbs: me and the poet Ian Arlott used to say,
[20:18] Bob Dobbs: we're here to drive you to sleep.
[20:22] Cameron McEwen: That's good.
[20:26] Cameron McEwen: You folks are too awake.
[20:28] Bob Dobbs: We're what?
[20:28] Bob Dobbs: Too what?
[20:30] Cameron McEwen: The folks out there are too awake.
[20:32] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[20:33] Bob Dobbs: And I was right.
[20:35] Bob Dobbs: People were trying to find out how to get back to what they called peace of mind and stuff.
[20:41] Bob Dobbs: They were trying to get back in their bodies again.
[20:44] Bob Dobbs: Get somewhere.
[20:45] Bob Dobbs: It's no fun floating around dealing with paranoia,
[20:49] Bob Dobbs: schizophrenia,
[20:50] Bob Dobbs: hysteria,
[20:50] Bob Dobbs: panic,
[20:51] Bob Dobbs: and ecstasy every day.
[20:54] Bob Dobbs: The different expressions of it.
[20:57] Bob Dobbs: So the woke.
[21:00] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[21:01] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[21:02] Bob Dobbs: he said,
[21:03] Bob Dobbs: I think in the Hot and Cool interview with Starz,
[21:05] Bob Dobbs: Stearn,
[21:06] Bob Dobbs: my sources are esoteric.
[21:08] Bob Dobbs: So he was lucky to become aware of Mallarmé and the symbolists that a lot of people in North America had no awareness of.
[21:16] Bob Dobbs: He didn't get any of it at Winnipeg,
[21:18] Bob Dobbs: I don't think,
[21:18] Bob Dobbs: at the University of Manitoba.
[21:21] Cameron McEwen: That came from
[21:22] Cameron McEwen: Giedion. Yeah.
[21:24] Cameron McEwen: When he met Giedion in 1943,
[21:26] Cameron McEwen: the same year he met Lewis,
[21:29] Cameron McEwen: Giedion wrote him a postcard,
[21:33] Cameron McEwen: I think from Europe.
[21:35] Cameron McEwen: And in that postcard,
[21:37] Cameron McEwen: he said that he didn't think
[21:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan knew enough about French poetry and that he should start with
[21:51] Cameron McEwen: Apollinaire. And probably
[21:55] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan did that.
[21:56] Cameron McEwen: And by the end of the
[21:58] Cameron McEwen: 1940s, he was doing
[22:01] Cameron McEwen: Mallarmé almost every day.
[22:05] Cameron McEwen: with a,
[22:08] Cameron McEwen: I think she was a graduate student slash teaching assistant at UT who was an expert in
[22:18] Cameron McEwen: Mallarmé. I think she was doing her PhD on Mallarmé,
[22:21] Cameron McEwen: and he was sitting with her every single day.
[22:24] Bob Dobbs: What was her name?
[22:25] Cameron McEwen: I can't remember.
[22:26] Cameron McEwen: I'll look it up,
[22:27] Cameron McEwen: and I'll send it to you.
[22:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[22:28] Bob Dobbs: not Sheila Watson.
[22:30] Bob Dobbs: No,
[22:30] Bob Dobbs: no.
[22:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[22:31] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[22:31] Cameron McEwen: this is.
[22:32] Bob Dobbs: Where do you come across that information?
[22:37] Cameron McEwen: You know,
[22:38] Cameron McEwen: I can't remember.
[22:39] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[22:40] Bob Dobbs: But you found it in your scrounging in the garbage of our civilization.
[22:43] Bob Dobbs: You found it.
[22:45] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[22:48] Bob Dobbs: So he felt,
[22:49] Bob Dobbs: well,
[22:50] Bob Dobbs: I would say one was lucky to discover that stuff early,
[22:54] Bob Dobbs: and I was lucky to discover Finnegans Wake.
[22:56] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[22:57] Bob Dobbs: people didn't know that.
[22:58] Bob Dobbs: But if you kept it in mind and...
[23:00] Bob Dobbs: puzzled over it and stayed with it,
[23:02] Bob Dobbs: you all of a sudden were on the leading edge of everything as society went extreme in the 70s,
[23:09] Bob Dobbs: 80s,
[23:09] Bob Dobbs: and 90s.
[23:10] Bob Dobbs: So
[23:11] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was lucky in finding esoteric sources.
[23:13] Bob Dobbs: I always felt I was lucky,
[23:15] Bob Dobbs: but I was going with what he told me.
[23:17] Bob Dobbs: And then I found some other stuff,
[23:18] Bob Dobbs: but that was a big deal to become aware of these new forms from the 19th century.
[23:28] Bob Dobbs: If you didn't know,
[23:29] Bob Dobbs: that's what the...
[23:30] Bob Dobbs: leading European poets were doing,
[23:32] Bob Dobbs: you were pretty naive about what was coming.
[23:35] Bob Dobbs: And you see a lot of people did that in the 40s and
[23:38] Bob Dobbs: 50s, discovered Mallarmé.
[23:39] Bob Dobbs: I'm sure Ginsburg and those people,
[23:41] Bob Dobbs: they celebrated
[23:42] Bob Dobbs: Rambo. Jim Morrison celebrated of the Doors,
[23:46] Bob Dobbs: celebrated Rambo.
[23:47] Bob Dobbs: It became popular cliché eventually by the
[23:51] Bob Dobbs: 70s as people discovered it in the
[23:53] Bob Dobbs: 60s. I don't even know if they found out from McLuhan.
[23:56] Bob Dobbs: One or two professors might have,
[23:58] Bob Dobbs: but...
[23:59] Bob Dobbs: It was in the air to become aware of these European poets.
[24:05] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[24:06] Cameron McEwen: well,
[24:06] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[24:08] Cameron McEwen: the late
[24:12] Cameron McEwen: 1940s and
[24:13] Cameron McEwen: 1950s had all kinds of professors emigrating from Europe into the United States.
[24:22] Cameron McEwen: And so there was,
[24:24] Cameron McEwen: as
[24:25] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was very conscious of,
[24:29] Cameron McEwen: There was a new kind of intellectual exodus that was like the exodus that followed the fall of
[24:38] Cameron McEwen: Constantinople in 1453.
[24:41] Cameron McEwen: So all of the
[24:45] Cameron McEwen: Greek scholars left the new Turkish Empire.
[24:54] Cameron McEwen: and came west,
[24:57] Cameron McEwen: often to
[24:58] Cameron McEwen: Italy, and introduced a new type of consciousness to Europe.
[25:04] Cameron McEwen: And according to McLuhan,
[25:07] Cameron McEwen: that same sort of thing happened after the Second World War.
[25:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[25:14] Bob Dobbs: So when you talk about the Renaissance,
[25:18] Bob Dobbs: a new form of consciousness,
[25:19] Bob Dobbs: it would be new forms of man.
[25:22] Bob Dobbs: New retrieved manuscripts?
[25:25] Cameron McEwen: Sure,
[25:25] Cameron McEwen: but also new ways of thinking,
[25:29] Cameron McEwen: new types of historical knowledge.
[25:34] Cameron McEwen: It was a brain drain out of the East to the West.
[25:40] Cameron McEwen: And this was something that
[25:43] Cameron McEwen: Etienne Gilson had done a lot of research on,
[25:47] Cameron McEwen: and it was sort of common knowledge at St.
[25:51] Cameron McEwen: Michael's.
[25:52] Cameron McEwen: that this type of intellectual migration was one of the spurs of Western civilization.
[26:05] Bob Dobbs: And the printing press created a canceling,
[26:10] Bob Dobbs: a new problem,
[26:13] Bob Dobbs: extension,
[26:14] Bob Dobbs: numbness,
[26:15] Bob Dobbs: that challenged...
[26:20] Bob Dobbs: misdirected or obsolesced the content of the Renaissance.
[26:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[26:26] Cameron McEwen: but you could say that it introduced a sort of complication that
[26:32] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, following Havelock and others,
[26:36] Cameron McEwen: said was what produces high culture.
[26:40] Cameron McEwen: So according to
[26:43] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and Havelock,
[26:44] Cameron McEwen: what happened in classical Greece was that you had the oral tradition
[26:49] Cameron McEwen: come together with the literal innovation.
[26:53] Cameron McEwen: And then you have the same thing again in Elizabethan England,
[26:57] Cameron McEwen: where you have the oral culture of medieval England coming together with a new literate consciousness.
[27:05] Cameron McEwen: So the idea here is that when you have a clash of mentalities,
[27:11] Cameron McEwen: a clash of sensibilities,
[27:13] Cameron McEwen: that that can give rise to high culture.
[27:17] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't the term from Harold Innis,
[27:19] Bob Dobbs: Minerva's owl?
[27:21] Bob Dobbs: Wasn't that his metaphor for that?
[27:24] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[27:25] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[27:26] Cameron McEwen: I think that's an interesting insight for
[27:31] Cameron McEwen: Minerva's owl as an image that comes from Hegel and what Hegel meant by it and what
[27:41] Cameron McEwen: Harold Innis in using it.
[27:44] Cameron McEwen: as the title of an important lecture,
[27:47] Cameron McEwen: what they were thinking of was that high culture signals the imminence of decline.
[27:59] Cameron McEwen: So when Hegel said that the owl of Minerva takes its flight only in the evening,
[28:09] Cameron McEwen: what he means is darkness is falling.
[28:12] Cameron McEwen: at the very time that the owl of Minerva takes its brilliant flight.
[28:17] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[28:18] Bob Dobbs: and that's the supernova of the culture.
[28:22] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[28:23] Bob Dobbs: so the supernova of the
[28:25] Bob Dobbs: 50s, what are people becoming aware of that McLuhan was ahead of everybody on or on top of it,
[28:37] Bob Dobbs: surfing it?
[28:39] Bob Dobbs: What was the Minerva's Owl?
[28:40] Bob Dobbs: What was declining in the 50s?
[28:45] Bob Dobbs: Literacy?
[28:46] Bob Dobbs: Books?
[28:47] Bob Dobbs: Or was it early electronic telegraph era?
[28:52] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[28:55] Cameron McEwen: the thing that was in great decline was the unanimity of culture.
[29:00] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[29:01] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[29:01] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[29:02] Bob Dobbs: that's the print effect.
[29:04] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[29:07] Bob Dobbs: first it was perceived as the um you know the death of god the death of the book illiterate values civilization and the beatniks were the popular expression of that repudiation right their poetry was not accepted by the major
[29:25] Bob Dobbs: literate poets of the day they were street anarchists they were hooligans rock and rollers dope addicts you know but they end up defining the
[29:36] Bob Dobbs: the culture and I always thought it's interesting that
[29:38] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's Playboy interview is in
[29:42] Bob Dobbs: March 69.
[29:43] Bob Dobbs: And what is the next issue?
[29:45] Bob Dobbs: April 69 is Allen Ginsberg,
[29:48] Bob Dobbs: who at the time Marshall had a big photo in his Coach House of.
[29:54] Bob Dobbs: And
[29:55] Bob Dobbs: I think it's a Zarbock's Altman,
[29:58] Bob Dobbs: a new video of him,
[29:59] Bob Dobbs: or I don't know when he did it.
[30:01] Bob Dobbs: It might be on Frank's and Zingrone or
[30:04] Bob Dobbs: I don't know where I saw it.
[30:05] Bob Dobbs: It just the other day we were looking at it and it flashes by of McLuhan in the Coach House.
[30:12] Bob Dobbs: And there's the poster of
[30:15] Bob Dobbs: Ginsburg. Now,
[30:16] Bob Dobbs: in 1980,
[30:21] Bob Dobbs: when I was in 2000 on.
[30:22] Bob Dobbs: just moving to City Island out of
[30:25] Bob Dobbs: Eastside, upper Manhattan,
[30:27] Bob Dobbs: there was an article on McLuhan,
[30:29] Bob Dobbs: like September 2000.
[30:31] Bob Dobbs: I don't remember why,
[30:33] Bob Dobbs: but the New York Times had this picture of McLuhan lying on a couch,
[30:36] Bob Dobbs: and he's sort of underneath this big photo in the Coach House of Ginsburg.
[30:41] Bob Dobbs: So it looks like he respects Ginsburg.
[30:44] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[30:46] Bob Dobbs: I think he's a pretty big deal,
[30:47] Bob Dobbs: but you know Marshall considered that.
[30:51] Bob Dobbs: the environment he wanted to provide an environment to.
[30:54] Bob Dobbs: And later,
[30:56] Bob Dobbs: Walter Bowart told me that when Ginsburg met McLuhan,
[31:00] Bob Dobbs: he was turned off because McLuhan wouldn't respond to Ginsburg's hug.
[31:06] Bob Dobbs: He stiffened up.
[31:07] Bob Dobbs: So he probably thought
[31:09] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was some kind of hang up over gay people.
[31:13] Bob Dobbs: There would be a lot we know,
[31:14] Bob Dobbs: there'd be a lot of other reasons he wouldn't respond to a hug,
[31:17] Bob Dobbs: not chemical body reasons.
[31:19] Bob Dobbs: So.
[31:22] Cameron McEwen: Let's just note that
[31:23] Cameron McEwen: Ginsberg and Burroughs were very close,
[31:26] Cameron McEwen: and
[31:28] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had done his Burroughs piece earlier in that same decade,
[31:34] Cameron McEwen: 1964,
[31:36] Cameron McEwen: I think it was.
[31:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[31:38] Bob Dobbs: December 64,
[31:39] Bob Dobbs: Nation magazine.
[31:40] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[31:40] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[31:41] Cameron McEwen: So it wouldn't be right to say that
[31:48] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was...
[31:50] Cameron McEwen: trying to supply only the anti-environment to Burroughs and Ginsburg,
[31:57] Cameron McEwen: because what he was trying to do was do what he describes in the last sentence of the passage you read from Take Today,
[32:11] Cameron McEwen: 297.
[32:13] Cameron McEwen: This procedure would evoke a new form of consciousness,
[32:16] Cameron McEwen: radically different from former consciousness.
[32:19] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[32:21] Cameron McEwen: that is the sort of thing that he wanted to do for
[32:25] Cameron McEwen: Burrough and
[32:26] Cameron McEwen: Ginsburg, and by extension to the whole cultural nexus,
[32:31] Cameron McEwen: but not by canceling them,
[32:35] Cameron McEwen: by showing what they were.
[32:37] Bob Dobbs: The ground to them as figures.
[32:40] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,
[32:41] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[32:42] Cameron McEwen: Just like when chemistry is born,
[32:44] Cameron McEwen: it doesn't change stuff.
[32:46] Cameron McEwen: What it does is it specifies.
[32:49] Cameron McEwen: what's going on and what always has gone on.
[32:53] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[32:53] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[32:53] Bob Dobbs: here's what's interesting.
[32:54] Bob Dobbs: In the late 70s,
[32:56] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said to me,
[32:58] Bob Dobbs: Burroughs came up.
[32:59] Bob Dobbs: He was reading,
[32:59] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[33:00] Bob Dobbs: Third City or I think that's a Burroughs book.
[33:03] Bob Dobbs: It was on his table,
[33:03] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[33:04] Bob Dobbs: just before his stroke.
[33:05] Bob Dobbs: And he said to me,
[33:08] Bob Dobbs: I don't know why he picked me to say it to,
[33:11] Bob Dobbs: but he said,
[33:14] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[33:15] Bob Dobbs: don't hang out with the Burroughs people.
[33:17] Bob Dobbs: That's a bad scene.
[33:18] Bob Dobbs: So he made a moral,
[33:20] Bob Dobbs: personal judgment about the Burroughs scene.
[33:23] Bob Dobbs: Burroughs was starting to get a lot of attention,
[33:25] Bob Dobbs: having a revival at that period.
[33:27] Bob Dobbs: And so there's Marshall giving his personal opinion,
[33:30] Bob Dobbs: which he would never do in public,
[33:31] Bob Dobbs: in public media.
[33:33] Bob Dobbs: And he was dealing with a different point,
[33:35] Bob Dobbs: which you just spelled out eloquently,
[33:38] Bob Dobbs: of what the Burroughs scene meant.
[33:40] Bob Dobbs: It had nothing to do with judging his lifestyle or how much of a junkie he was.
[33:46] Bob Dobbs: That was not significant.
[33:47] Bob Dobbs: But if you actually were,
[33:49] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[33:49] Bob Dobbs: a student around him,
[33:51] Bob Dobbs: he'd give you a warning just for not to be sick,
[33:54] Bob Dobbs: not to really,
[33:55] Bob Dobbs: on a practical level,
[33:56] Bob Dobbs: they'll get sucked into the latest fad.
[33:59] Bob Dobbs: So it was interesting getting these personal comments,
[34:02] Bob Dobbs: and I never took them as relevant to his public self,
[34:07] Bob Dobbs: his discarnate super angel self,
[34:09] Bob Dobbs: commenting on the world with this new kind of poetry.
[34:14] Cameron McEwen: So I noticed it does fit together.
[34:17] Cameron McEwen: with his public stuff because his public stuff he's always advocating inclusive consciousness versus exclusive right so you could say he's always talking about wake instead of woke so
[34:34] Cameron McEwen: i i would say what he was saying to you was uh look um these people are dangerous if they are identified with if they're what if they're identified yet
[34:46] Bob Dobbs: What?
[34:46] Bob Dobbs: Say it again.
[34:46] Cameron McEwen: With.
[34:47] Cameron McEwen: If they're identified with.
[34:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[34:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[34:50] Cameron McEwen: So that as the object of study or as even as respectful awareness of possibilities of human sensitivity,
[35:06] Cameron McEwen: these guys are a great thing to study.
[35:10] Cameron McEwen: But to identify with or to,
[35:14] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[35:14] Cameron McEwen: sort of become part of the group,
[35:18] Cameron McEwen: that's not going to work.
[35:20] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[35:20] Bob Dobbs: He used to say,
[35:21] Bob Dobbs: people think if I talk about something,
[35:22] Bob Dobbs: I'm for it.
[35:24] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[35:25] Bob Dobbs: That's a great line.
[35:26] Bob Dobbs: Do you know anybody in history of thought who said something like that also?
[35:34] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[35:34] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[35:35] Cameron McEwen: I think Eliot is largely about that.
[35:38] Cameron McEwen: I think that's what the men of 1914 were all about.
[35:43] Cameron McEwen: I think Pound is often about that,
[35:46] Cameron McEwen: Joyce certainly.
[35:47] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[35:48] Cameron McEwen: If you just think of Ulysses with every chapter being a different point of view,
[35:55] Cameron McEwen: a different aspect of Ulysses'
[35:58] Cameron McEwen: voyage,
[35:59] Cameron McEwen: a different color,
[36:00] Cameron McEwen: a different type of music,
[36:03] Cameron McEwen: etc.
[36:04] Cameron McEwen: It's always respect for a necessary multiplicity,
[36:13] Cameron McEwen: which is a phrase from
[36:15] Cameron McEwen: Wittgenstein.
[36:16] Bob Dobbs: Yes, and the...
[36:18] Bob Dobbs: The popular consciousness was,
[36:19] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[36:20] Bob Dobbs: don't talk about things that will disturb me.
[36:23] Bob Dobbs: Don't talk about politics and religion.
[36:25] Bob Dobbs: So if you talked about stuff,
[36:27] Bob Dobbs: you had to be for it.
[36:28] Bob Dobbs: So that was a new way to deal with social interaction to say,
[36:33] Bob Dobbs: if I'm talking about something,
[36:34] Bob Dobbs: you've been damn sure I'm against it.
[36:36] Bob Dobbs: That was rude or that was odd to do that.
[36:40] Bob Dobbs: But that was the new sensibility that these men in 1914 picked up on.
[36:45] Bob Dobbs: So...
[36:46] Bob Dobbs: But we're digressing.
[36:48] Bob Dobbs: We were talking about this woke thing.
[36:50] Bob Dobbs: So Marshall has a medium as a massage.
[36:53] Bob Dobbs: The situation leads to we're going to either have a wake,
[36:58] Bob Dobbs: W-A-K-E,
[36:59] Bob Dobbs: or we're going to be awake,
[37:03] Bob Dobbs: or make it a wake,
[37:05] Bob Dobbs: W-A-K-E,
[37:06] Bob Dobbs: or both.
[37:07] Bob Dobbs: That's the way to describe the woke situation.
[37:10] Bob Dobbs: We're either having a wake,
[37:12] Bob Dobbs: and we could be awake about it,
[37:15] Bob Dobbs: and you may not be able to do it.
[37:16] Bob Dobbs: do both or you could do both.
[37:19] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[37:20] Bob Dobbs: that's the phrase.
[37:21] Bob Dobbs: That's the way he writes that.
[37:22] Bob Dobbs: It was striking in 1967 in The Medium is the Massage.
[37:27] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[37:28] Bob Dobbs: it was like all he did was,
[37:31] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[37:32] Bob Dobbs: for kindergarten,
[37:33] Bob Dobbs: acted a little discontinuous.
[37:36] Bob Dobbs: Like he had more than one thought in his mind.
[37:38] Bob Dobbs: So he said,
[37:39] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[37:39] Bob Dobbs: we can make it awake.
[37:41] Bob Dobbs: Or awake or both.
[37:45] Bob Dobbs: That was new.
[37:46] Cameron McEwen: for people educated well he had that was you could say that that was the theme song of the cambridge english school yeah right the the um fundamentality of ambiguity so
[38:03] Cameron McEwen: um what McLuhan was trying to say is that we there are two um central uh aspects to ambiguity and we need both.
[38:16] Cameron McEwen: The first aspect of ambiguity is that nothing makes sense by itself.
[38:24] Cameron McEwen: But the second aspect is that when things don't make sense by themselves,
[38:34] Cameron McEwen: the feeling that is precipitated out of that is one of chaos,
[38:42] Cameron McEwen: despair,
[38:44] Cameron McEwen: lack of orientation.
[38:46] Cameron McEwen: And the second aspect for McLuhan is that exactly this type of fundamental ambiguity can be used for orientation,
[38:57] Cameron McEwen: like a gyroscope.
[39:01] Bob Dobbs: Would you say,
[39:03] Bob Dobbs: as David Lynch says,
[39:04] Bob Dobbs: he makes these movies,
[39:05] Bob Dobbs: he wants people to explore the underbelly,
[39:08] Bob Dobbs: the dark side.
[39:10] Bob Dobbs: Is that what McLuhan's doing?
[39:13] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[39:15] Cameron McEwen: in part.
[39:16] Cameron McEwen: but think of alchemy becoming chemistry.
[39:21] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's trying to indicate that exploration is not one that lacks orientation.
[39:34] Cameron McEwen: It's not one that we're at sea and we don't know where we're going and all that stuff.
[39:39] Cameron McEwen: No,
[39:40] Cameron McEwen: we're at sea.
[39:44] Cameron McEwen: The world that we're...
[39:45] Cameron McEwen: analyzing is tremendously chaotic,
[39:49] Cameron McEwen: but there's an order to it.
[39:51] Cameron McEwen: And trying to keep afoot in both those camps is a difficult matter,
[39:57] Cameron McEwen: but according to McLuhan,
[39:59] Cameron McEwen: it's a necessary matter.
[40:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[40:03] Bob Dobbs: So have we finished with the woke theme?
[40:09] Bob Dobbs: Have we run into the ground?
[40:11] Bob Dobbs: Do you have...
[40:15] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.
[40:15] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[40:17] Cameron McEwen: to me,
[40:17] Cameron McEwen: the interesting thing about wokeness...
[40:20] Cameron McEwen: is that it's the attempt to show that in the maelstrom of life,
[40:28] Cameron McEwen: there is a singular value which supplies the orientation that we need.
[40:38] Cameron McEwen: So it's exactly the different path from what
[40:45] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan,
[40:46] Cameron McEwen: Eliot, Pound,
[40:47] Cameron McEwen: Joyce,
[40:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeats,
[40:48] Cameron McEwen: etc.
[40:49] Cameron McEwen: are talking about,
[40:51] Cameron McEwen: because it's kind of a last-ditch attempt to invoke singularity.
[40:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[40:58] Bob Dobbs: univocal?
[41:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[41:01] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[41:01] Bob Dobbs: I remember...
[41:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[41:04] Bob Dobbs: go ahead.
[41:05] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[41:05] Cameron McEwen: what people react against is that they feel that the people that grasp this singularity are doing so because it gives them power.
[41:18] Cameron McEwen: And they resent that,
[41:21] Cameron McEwen: intuitively.
[41:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[41:23] Bob Dobbs: So
[41:24] Bob Dobbs: Don Theall used to say that an aspect that's not discussed too much was that
[41:29] Bob Dobbs: James Joyce was making fun of people who became apocalyptics,
[41:33] Bob Dobbs: who thought things were coming to an end or dramatic turmoil that could lead to a lot of problems.
[41:40] Bob Dobbs: He was making fun of sentience being awake,
[41:44] Bob Dobbs: awakened by something they didn't know was creating a new consciousness.
[41:48] Bob Dobbs: and they were interpreting it through old consciousness,
[41:51] Bob Dobbs: and therefore in a panic state.
[41:54] Bob Dobbs: That's an interesting way to look at the wake.
[41:57] Bob Dobbs: He's always got exclamation marks all through the book.
[42:03] Bob Dobbs: The same panic is going on every ten pages,
[42:06] Bob Dobbs: and especially around each of the ten thunders.
[42:09] Bob Dobbs: So he's showing this repeating theme of upset,
[42:14] Bob Dobbs: cultural upset,
[42:15] Bob Dobbs: and he sees it as somnambulism.
[42:18] Bob Dobbs: So he's not saying become awake.
[42:22] Bob Dobbs: You must wake up.
[42:23] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[42:24] Bob Dobbs: that wouldn't be the right way.
[42:25] Bob Dobbs: He wants you to wake up,
[42:26] Bob Dobbs: but the fact is that you're not even aware of that you need to notice.
[42:29] Bob Dobbs: So it's a different,
[42:31] Bob Dobbs: it's not a chemical body waking up.
[42:34] Bob Dobbs: It's not even a mental awareness waking up.
[42:37] Bob Dobbs: It's a perceptual thing,
[42:38] Bob Dobbs: or whatever term you use,
[42:40] Bob Dobbs: that can look across the actions of millions of people.
[42:46] Bob Dobbs: and have media report what they seem to be doing.
[42:49] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[42:50] Bob Dobbs: That's a new kind of scenario,
[42:51] Bob Dobbs: landscape.
[42:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[42:53] Cameron McEwen: and notice what Finnegans Wake is,
[42:59] Cameron McEwen: right?
[42:59] Cameron McEwen: So
[42:59] Cameron McEwen: Finnegans Wake is a wake that is not awake because the person they're waking is dead,
[43:06] Cameron McEwen: is supposedly dead,
[43:07] Cameron McEwen: but he's not dead.
[43:09] Cameron McEwen: And everybody at the wake is drunk,
[43:13] Cameron McEwen: including...
[43:14] Cameron McEwen: including the dead guy.
[43:16] Bob Dobbs: Who wakes up.
[43:18] Cameron McEwen: So what being wake is,
[43:23] Cameron McEwen: is a very strange matter.
[43:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[43:27] Bob Dobbs: I wonder what prompted him to notice that.
[43:34] Bob Dobbs: Was he dealing with that in Ulysses,
[43:38] Bob Dobbs: the day book,
[43:39] Bob Dobbs: as opposed to the night book?
[43:40] Bob Dobbs: Was he...
[43:41] Bob Dobbs: Talking about people being asleep,
[43:43] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure,
[43:43] Bob Dobbs: I guess so.
[43:45] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's criticism has the denizens of the day are the stone men,
[43:51] Bob Dobbs: the police,
[43:52] Bob Dobbs: the robotic,
[43:54] Bob Dobbs: institutional,
[43:55] Bob Dobbs: moral,
[43:55] Bob Dobbs: or orderly,
[43:57] Bob Dobbs: the ones imposing order.
[43:58] Bob Dobbs: And the nighttime,
[44:02] Bob Dobbs: the people of the moon,
[44:04] Bob Dobbs: and emotion,
[44:05] Bob Dobbs: and these two points,
[44:08] Bob Dobbs: moon and sun,
[44:09] Bob Dobbs: are...
[44:10] Bob Dobbs: metaphors that McLuhan used,
[44:12] Bob Dobbs: but are a basic pattern in Ulysses.
[44:17] Bob Dobbs: And then the two books.
[44:18] Bob Dobbs: You've got the book of the sun and the book of the night.
[44:22] Bob Dobbs: And they're pointing to factors that are not books.
[44:27] Bob Dobbs: That's another point.
[44:28] Bob Dobbs: Pointing to the post-book situation.
[44:33] Bob Dobbs: So,
[44:34] Bob Dobbs: I think we better go back to the quote.
[44:36] Bob Dobbs: We're too awake here.
[44:40] Bob Dobbs: A univocal theme.
[44:41] Bob Dobbs: So,
[44:42] Bob Dobbs: I find it interesting in the opening sentence,
[44:44] Bob Dobbs: making the news yields to making the world itself.
[44:47] Bob Dobbs: So I see Thoreau Take Today,
[44:49] Bob Dobbs: he's trying to explain what that world is and how did it get made,
[44:53] Bob Dobbs: and one of the key...
[44:55] Bob Dobbs: lines for me is that the the word that makes the market and it's directed at the white house or american politics around the image of the president the automated presidential surrogate and they you
[45:11] Bob Dobbs: make a world and it's not as he begins his phd the making of a world through speech it's his speech drenched with the history of every form of extension of humans at that point in the 60s.
[45:26] Bob Dobbs: And so it's making a world,
[45:28] Bob Dobbs: that's alchemy.
[45:30] Bob Dobbs: And that became the normal business of people.
[45:33] Bob Dobbs: And they had no clue that's what they were doing.
[45:37] Cameron McEwen: So just think of chemistry for a minute.
[45:42] Cameron McEwen: The world is being made by chemical materials.
[45:50] Cameron McEwen: But up until 200 years ago,
[45:52] Cameron McEwen: nobody knew about it.
[45:54] Cameron McEwen: So the question is,
[45:59] Cameron McEwen: is the world going to be made the way it always has been made,
[46:04] Cameron McEwen: or is it going to be made in a new way that reflects a new consciousness of how the world always has been made?
[46:14] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[46:14] Bob Dobbs: I guess the world was always made by social gossip,
[46:18] Bob Dobbs: whatever the tribe community was involved in.
[46:21] Bob Dobbs: So that's making the news.
[46:23] Bob Dobbs: But he thinks he's making a new statement here.
[46:27] Bob Dobbs: The familiar idea of making the news yields to something astounding,
[46:30] Bob Dobbs: making the world itself.
[46:32] Bob Dobbs: So people probably didn't think the news was a made-up world.
[46:37] Bob Dobbs: They thought the news reporting what the world had arrived at,
[46:42] Bob Dobbs: not that it was making the world.
[46:44] Bob Dobbs: It was reporting on the world that had been made up to that point.
[46:47] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[46:49] Cameron McEwen: but they weren't wrong in a certain sense.
[46:52] Cameron McEwen: That was how the world was being made,
[46:55] Cameron McEwen: but they didn't know how to look at it.
[46:58] Cameron McEwen: You have to put the first sentence of this passage together with the last sentence,
[47:04] Cameron McEwen: where you have the new form of consciousness radically different from former consciousness.
[47:09] Cameron McEwen: So the former consciousness can be called making the news,
[47:13] Cameron McEwen: and then making the world can be the new form of consciousness radically different.
[47:20] Bob Dobbs: Great.
[47:20] Bob Dobbs: So then he goes into...
[47:22] Bob Dobbs: The characteristics of the world.
[47:25] Bob Dobbs: So for a hundred years,
[47:26] Bob Dobbs: we have been programming human consciousness,
[47:28] Bob Dobbs: programming it with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious.
[47:33] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[47:34] Bob Dobbs: So people,
[47:36] Bob Dobbs: they didn't think of themselves as tribal in the way McLuhan was talking about it in the 60s.
[47:42] Bob Dobbs: So it was very controversial just using that word.
[47:45] Bob Dobbs: And people argued over whether,
[47:47] Bob Dobbs: are we tribal?
[47:48] Bob Dobbs: Are we going tribal?
[47:49] Bob Dobbs: Not recognizing that it's always been tribal.
[47:53] Bob Dobbs: So,
[47:53] Bob Dobbs: but he's saying that's not what's happening.
[47:57] Bob Dobbs: That's what's interesting.
[47:58] Bob Dobbs: It's not about programming the tribal unconscious.
[48:02] Bob Dobbs: The complementary to this process,
[48:04] Bob Dobbs: which seemed to be the natural program for the period ahead,
[48:06] Bob Dobbs: and he's implying we are doing it,
[48:09] Bob Dobbs: and if you become aware of it,
[48:11] Bob Dobbs: you help in programming the unconscious with recently achieved forms of consciousness,
[48:14] Bob Dobbs: which may be you if you are a media figure.
[48:19] Bob Dobbs: Remember that line in the statement in...
[48:21] Bob Dobbs: the NFB film,
[48:22] Bob Dobbs: that's a film in 64,
[48:24] Bob Dobbs: Children of the Future or something it was called.
[48:27] Bob Dobbs: And he's talking about the amazing new fact that,
[48:30] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[48:31] Bob Dobbs: young people,
[48:32] Bob Dobbs: children are programming the world.
[48:35] Bob Dobbs: And
[48:36] Bob Dobbs: I would think of the Beatles at that point.
[48:38] Bob Dobbs: That was their big year,
[48:39] Bob Dobbs: 64,
[48:41] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[48:41] Bob Dobbs: to someone like McLuhan,
[48:42] Bob Dobbs: they're just kids.
[48:45] Bob Dobbs: But that was the new fact,
[48:48] Bob Dobbs: right?
[48:48] Bob Dobbs: that the,
[48:49] Bob Dobbs: that...
[48:51] Bob Dobbs: The programmers were not the CIA,
[48:56] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[48:57] Bob Dobbs: or the White House.
[48:59] Bob Dobbs: The programmers were figures in all kinds of media.
[49:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[49:07] Cameron McEwen: I hadn't really thought of that process in the terms that you just put it in.
[49:15] Cameron McEwen: I think that was interesting,
[49:17] Cameron McEwen: and I'll have to give that some more thought.
[49:22] Cameron McEwen: I was thinking along the lines of when people investigated primitive tribes.
[49:33] Cameron McEwen: in anthropology for the first time starting around 1870 or something like that.
[49:40] Cameron McEwen: And then when that was built into poetry starting around the same time and built in the music and sculpture and ballet also starting sometime around then.
[49:54] Cameron McEwen: And then
[49:56] Cameron McEwen: Freud and Jung and the psychoanalytic people.
[50:02] Cameron McEwen: We're doing something related in psychology.
[50:09] Cameron McEwen: These are new types of human consciousness that are retrievals and replays of what was possible in the unconscious.
[50:21] Cameron McEwen: If they weren't possible in the human unconscious,
[50:24] Cameron McEwen: then they could never have come to light.
[50:27] Cameron McEwen: They could never have become expressions.
[50:31] Cameron McEwen: but the the
[50:36] Cameron McEwen: the overview of what was going on was lacking.
[50:40] Cameron McEwen: So there was all kinds of new programming going on,
[50:48] Cameron McEwen: but nobody knew how to program the programming.
[50:52] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan said that that was possible if he knew how to get to it.
[50:58] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.
[51:00] Bob Dobbs: So there's the wokeness that we had arrived at.
[51:04] Bob Dobbs: We had arrived at the post-tribal programming.
[51:07] Bob Dobbs: We were programming something else,
[51:09] Bob Dobbs: which you could call it cyborg,
[51:12] Bob Dobbs: all the different things,
[51:13] Bob Dobbs: virtual reality.
[51:14] Bob Dobbs: But there was a programming that everybody was engaging in.
[51:17] Bob Dobbs: They were making the world.
[51:19] Bob Dobbs: And that is definitely what the phrase woke should refer to.
[51:26] Bob Dobbs: It's about what we're doing.
[51:28] Bob Dobbs: So it's not about...
[51:29] Bob Dobbs: See,
[51:29] Bob Dobbs: the woke fanatics are demanding you to do something that's not being done.
[51:35] Bob Dobbs: And that's the exact opposite.
[51:37] Bob Dobbs: People are too awake.
[51:38] Bob Dobbs: People are making and programming and not really taking any notice of the consequences of all that.
[51:46] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[51:47] Bob Dobbs: I just find when you look,
[51:49] Bob Dobbs: and I don't do much of it,
[51:50] Bob Dobbs: but if I watch the talking heads on CNN or any of these major Fox News,
[51:56] Bob Dobbs: the massive irresponsibility of these people.
[51:59] Bob Dobbs: on there 24-7 telling us,
[52:01] Bob Dobbs: look at this,
[52:01] Bob Dobbs: look at that,
[52:01] Bob Dobbs: look at that problem.
[52:03] Bob Dobbs: That is really social anarchy.
[52:06] Bob Dobbs: And they're always pointing to the other people who are the anarchists,
[52:09] Bob Dobbs: not them.
[52:10] Bob Dobbs: But they are the anarchists.
[52:11] Bob Dobbs: That's why in 1990 I got interviewed by a little magazine in Toronto,
[52:15] Bob Dobbs: and I said the first terrorist we've got to deal with is Barbara Frum.
[52:22] Bob Dobbs: That was excellent.
[52:24] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[52:24] Bob Dobbs: it was a good statement,
[52:25] Bob Dobbs: and I could have gotten in trouble with it,
[52:26] Bob Dobbs: but it was an obscure little magazine.
[52:28] Bob Dobbs: But then her son became.
[52:30] Cameron McEwen: I was just going to say the son is the perfect expression of what you had described.
[52:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[52:36] Bob Dobbs: I predicted her son.
[52:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[52:38] Bob Dobbs: I would say we got to get rid of Barbara or her children are going to be a problem.
[52:45] Cameron McEwen: Her children being all of Canada.
[52:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[52:50] Bob Dobbs: Just for people who don't know,
[52:51] Bob Dobbs: David Frum,
[52:52] Bob Dobbs: what did he program?
[52:54] Bob Dobbs: George Bush,
[52:55] Bob Dobbs: the junior,
[52:56] Bob Dobbs: right?
[52:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[52:57] Bob Dobbs: It was the Iraq War,
[52:59] Bob Dobbs: probably,
[53:00] Bob Dobbs: right?
[53:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[53:01] Cameron McEwen: oh,
[53:01] Cameron McEwen: definitely.
[53:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[53:01] Cameron McEwen: He was a big proponent,
[53:03] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[53:03] Bob Dobbs: You see,
[53:04] Bob Dobbs: Canadian people,
[53:05] Bob Dobbs: they're running the White House.
[53:07] Bob Dobbs: And he's the son of the Walter Cronkite in journalism,
[53:12] Bob Dobbs: but when the right hemisphere took over,
[53:14] Bob Dobbs: so we had to have a woman be
[53:15] Bob Dobbs: Walter Cronkite,
[53:16] Bob Dobbs: and she was known as Barbara Frum,
[53:18] Bob Dobbs: but she died early of a disease.
[53:20] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[53:21] Bob Dobbs: I've told this story before,
[53:22] Bob Dobbs: but just in this context.
[53:24] Bob Dobbs: Tom Wolfe spoke at the University of Toronto in 1977.
[53:27] Bob Dobbs: And Barbara Frum was appointed to introduce him.
[53:31] Bob Dobbs: So she's sitting up there beside his pulpit place,
[53:35] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan's off on the side bleachers watching this.
[53:39] Bob Dobbs: So as
[53:41] Bob Dobbs: Wolf started talking,
[53:44] Bob Dobbs: and he was saying things that people were surprised at,
[53:48] Bob Dobbs: he was a good McLuhan,
[53:49] Bob Dobbs: he knew where to trigger people,
[53:52] Bob Dobbs: and Barbara Frum thought that she had to remain sitting there on the podium right beside the...
[53:57] Bob Dobbs: Tom Wolfe,
[53:58] Bob Dobbs: and so she was just looking at the audience.
[54:00] Bob Dobbs: It was a very embarrassing situation for her.
[54:02] Bob Dobbs: But as it unfolded,
[54:04] Bob Dobbs: you could see she didn't know what the hell he was talking about.
[54:08] Bob Dobbs: As this became more and more obvious,
[54:09] Bob Dobbs: you could see McLuhan over the bleachers laughing his head off.
[54:15] Bob Dobbs: His vengeance on against these Barbara Frum's people.
[54:18] Bob Dobbs: Because remember,
[54:19] Bob Dobbs: Mike Wallace interviewed him in 1966 for some obscure thing.
[54:23] Bob Dobbs: That's before 60 Minutes.
[54:24] Bob Dobbs: And he says,
[54:25] Bob Dobbs: so what do you want about Marshall?
[54:27] Bob Dobbs: What's your agenda?
[54:28] Bob Dobbs: What are you investigating?
[54:29] Bob Dobbs: And he says,
[54:30] Bob Dobbs: I'm investigating you.
[54:35] Bob Dobbs: And so,
[54:35] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[54:35] Bob Dobbs: the news.
[54:36] Bob Dobbs: Back in the 60s,
[54:37] Bob Dobbs: the word media people thought meant the news,
[54:39] Bob Dobbs: the news overload.
[54:43] Bob Dobbs: So he's watching the news archetype,
[54:45] Bob Dobbs: which is someone who makes worlds every day.
[54:49] Bob Dobbs: at headquarters,
[54:50] Bob Dobbs: and it's a perceived literate headquarters,
[54:54] Bob Dobbs: and he's watching her being massaged by his understudy,
[54:57] Bob Dobbs: Tom Wolfe.
[54:58] Bob Dobbs: It's quite a hilarious situation.
[55:01] Bob Dobbs: And everybody was uncomfortable,
[55:03] Bob Dobbs: except for Marshall.
[55:05] Bob Dobbs: He loved it.
[55:07] Bob Dobbs: I've never seen him like that.
[55:08] Bob Dobbs: He was off on the side,
[55:09] Bob Dobbs: he had his arms folded,
[55:11] Bob Dobbs: and he was like giggling,
[55:13] Bob Dobbs: chuckling,
[55:14] Bob Dobbs: hardly keeping it quiet.
[55:16] Bob Dobbs: And if you looked over,
[55:17] Bob Dobbs: you'd see him.
[55:18] Bob Dobbs: who's that guy shaking over there?
[55:20] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[55:20] Bob Dobbs: that's McLuhan.
[55:21] Bob Dobbs: What's he laughing at?
[55:24] Bob Dobbs: It almost could be taken that he was laughing at Tom Wolfe's attempt to be McLuhan.
[55:30] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[55:30] Cameron McEwen: the whole scene.
[55:33] Bob Dobbs: The whole what?
[55:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[55:34] Bob Dobbs: the whole scene.
[55:35] Cameron McEwen: The whole scene.
[55:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[55:37] Cameron McEwen: So
[55:38] Bob Dobbs: I'm glad I saw that.
[55:40] Bob Dobbs: I'll never forget that scene.
[55:42] Bob Dobbs: That spoke a lot to me.
[55:43] Bob Dobbs: And it was.
[55:44] Bob Dobbs: That was 77.
[55:45] Bob Dobbs: Thirteen years later,
[55:46] Bob Dobbs: I'm picking up the ball and saying,
[55:47] Bob Dobbs: well,
[55:47] Bob Dobbs: it's gotten out of hand.
[55:49] Bob Dobbs: She should be sitting on the podium too long.
[55:52] Bob Dobbs: We must remove her.
[55:53] Bob Dobbs: She's a terrorist.
[55:57] Cameron McEwen: So the
[55:59] Cameron McEwen: German term Frum is probably a variation of fromm.
[56:10] Cameron McEwen: And fromm in
[56:11] Cameron McEwen: German means piety.
[56:13] Bob Dobbs: Ah,
[56:13] Bob Dobbs: that's what she was.
[56:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[56:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[56:15] Cameron McEwen: this relates to woke very much.
[56:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[56:17] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[56:18] Bob Dobbs: And you know that or you just looked it up?
[56:21] Cameron McEwen: No,
[56:21] Cameron McEwen: I just know that.
[56:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[56:23] Bob Dobbs: well,
[56:23] Bob Dobbs: that's good.
[56:24] Bob Dobbs: So,
[56:25] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[56:25] Bob Dobbs: she is the high priest of the secular religion of being informed and being woke.
[56:33] Bob Dobbs: And you must be aware of what's happening.
[56:35] Bob Dobbs: You must know what disruptions happen to your community today.
[56:39] Bob Dobbs: And then there's arguments over what is your community.
[56:42] Bob Dobbs: What are the boundaries of it?
[56:44] Bob Dobbs: And it turned out there were four worlds,
[56:47] Bob Dobbs: according to McLuhan.
[56:51] Cameron McEwen: Wasn't her show called As It Happens?
[56:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[56:54] Bob Dobbs: that was on radio in the
[56:57] Bob Dobbs: 70s before she became the Walter Cronkite.
[57:00] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[57:00] Bob Dobbs: I used to listen to that.
[57:01] Bob Dobbs: I was in Nova Scotia.
[57:02] Bob Dobbs: I didn't think that I was being informed by the local media very well,
[57:09] Bob Dobbs: effectively.
[57:10] Bob Dobbs: So I made a point of listening to that a lot.
[57:12] Bob Dobbs: I would just find out what was going on.
[57:15] Bob Dobbs: They'd interview everybody in all stories.
[57:17] Bob Dobbs: It was a good radio show for the period.
[57:20] Bob Dobbs: I certainly was aware of the McLuhan services and disservices situation.
[57:24] Bob Dobbs: I wasn't a naive person.
[57:26] Bob Dobbs: As a matter of fact,
[57:27] Bob Dobbs: about 1975,
[57:29] Bob Dobbs: I was walking down the main street of Halifax downtown,
[57:33] Bob Dobbs: and there was a CBC reporter,
[57:34] Bob Dobbs: a local reporter there.
[57:35] Bob Dobbs: And he jumps on me and says,
[57:36] Bob Dobbs: hey,
[57:37] Bob Dobbs: what do you say about this?
[57:39] Bob Dobbs: whatever it was,
[57:39] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what.
[57:41] Bob Dobbs: So it was the first time I was going to be on the media,
[57:43] Bob Dobbs: right?
[57:44] Bob Dobbs: Back then,
[57:44] Bob Dobbs: it was a big deal,
[57:45] Bob Dobbs: man.
[57:46] Bob Dobbs: So there was only one network.
[57:49] Bob Dobbs: In America,
[57:49] Bob Dobbs: they only had three networks.
[57:51] Bob Dobbs: We only had one.
[57:53] Bob Dobbs: So I started saying,
[57:55] Bob Dobbs: well,
[57:55] Bob Dobbs: the problem is today that we have huge populations being decimated
[58:00] Bob Dobbs: 24-7 in the electric conditions.
[58:03] Bob Dobbs: So I went on and explained the disembodied,
[58:05] Bob Dobbs: discarded situation of the super angels.
[58:09] Bob Dobbs: The next day,
[58:11] Bob Dobbs: they played it.
[58:12] Bob Dobbs: It's one of the commentaries about whatever was going on.
[58:15] Bob Dobbs: And a woman,
[58:16] Bob Dobbs: older woman,
[58:18] Bob Dobbs: who ran the conservative party of Nova Scotia,
[58:22] Bob Dobbs: a real battle axe in charge of everything.
[58:26] Cameron McEwen: Blue hair.
[58:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[58:27] Bob Dobbs: blue hair.
[58:28] Bob Dobbs: She knew me.
[58:30] Bob Dobbs: And seven years before,
[58:32] Bob Dobbs: declared to her son that I was the Antichrist.
[58:36] Bob Dobbs: So life changed.
[58:38] Bob Dobbs: Led her,
[58:39] Bob Dobbs: seven,
[58:39] Bob Dobbs: eight years later,
[58:40] Bob Dobbs: to hear me on the radio and to confirm her worst suspicions.
[58:44] Bob Dobbs: I'm on there saying everybody is being murdered immediately by some nebulous force in the world.
[58:52] Bob Dobbs: That's how they would hear it.
[58:54] Bob Dobbs: So that was fantastic that she was who I was talking to at that point.
[58:59] Bob Dobbs: And in my actuality,
[59:03] Bob Dobbs: that's who I wanted to hear me.
[59:05] Bob Dobbs: So it worked.
[59:06] Bob Dobbs: It happened.
[59:07] Bob Dobbs: But that was my attempt to wake up the people.
[59:12] Cameron McEwen: Your first attempt.
[59:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[59:13] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[59:14] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[59:14] Bob Dobbs: Sorry.
[59:14] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[59:15] Bob Dobbs: I've been replaying this for a long time,
[59:17] Bob Dobbs: haven't I?
[59:20] Bob Dobbs: So that was a lucky break.
[59:23] Bob Dobbs: So,
[59:23] Bob Dobbs: okay.
[59:24] Bob Dobbs: So then back to this thing.
[59:26] Bob Dobbs: I think we're making some progress here.
[59:30] Bob Dobbs: So understand,
[59:31] Bob Dobbs: people,
[59:32] Bob Dobbs: that the tribal unconscious has been replayed,
[59:33] Bob Dobbs: retrieved,
[59:35] Bob Dobbs: and do the electric tribal effect.
[59:38] Bob Dobbs: somnambulistically for 100 years.
[59:41] Bob Dobbs: It's a telegraph.
[59:42] Bob Dobbs: And the complementary is,
[59:45] Bob Dobbs: and it's a natural program,
[59:46] Bob Dobbs: which means it's inevitable.
[59:48] Bob Dobbs: Something approaching this will happen.
[59:51] Bob Dobbs: And we did arrive at,
[59:53] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[59:54] Bob Dobbs: an update of Eliot's auditory imagination.
[59:56] Bob Dobbs: We are now with Joyce's tactile imagination.
[1:00:00] Bob Dobbs: I'll call it secondary tactility,
[1:00:02] Bob Dobbs: not Walter Ong's secondary orality.
[1:00:05] Bob Dobbs: Secondary tactility is the consciousness that we're conscious of and not sure how to speak around it.
[1:00:14] Bob Dobbs: And it was inevitable where we got to today.
[1:00:18] Bob Dobbs: And that's sort of a natural program.
[1:00:21] Cameron McEwen: It occurs to me that all of the new types of consciousness,
[1:00:29] Cameron McEwen: which were very avant-garde,
[1:00:32] Cameron McEwen: were replayed by the children that you talked about in the
[1:00:39] Bob Dobbs: 1950s. Yeah.
[1:00:40] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:00:40] Cameron McEwen: So what the children picked up in the
[1:00:45] Cameron McEwen: 1950s with turn to rock and roll.
[1:00:49] Cameron McEwen: Get your in the ride.
[1:00:51] Cameron McEwen: All this stuff.
[1:00:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:00:52] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[1:00:54] Cameron McEwen: What they were picking up was the retrievals and replays that the avant-garde
[1:01:03] Cameron McEwen: 50 and
[1:01:05] Cameron McEwen: 30 years before had been retailing as high culture,
[1:01:14] Cameron McEwen: now had entered into language.
[1:01:19] Cameron McEwen: deeply enough and exoterically enough for children to be putting it out.
[1:01:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:01:27] Bob Dobbs: and it also showed that it didn't matter how old you were.
[1:01:31] Bob Dobbs: Your chemical body boundaries or descriptors weren't relevant.
[1:01:36] Bob Dobbs: If you had access to the content of the global theater,
[1:01:41] Bob Dobbs: you were shaping people.
[1:01:42] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:01:43] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:01:43] Bob Dobbs: and then Warhol comes along and says,
[1:01:44] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:01:44] Bob Dobbs: you only got 15 minutes,
[1:01:45] Bob Dobbs: so make the most of it.
[1:01:47] Bob Dobbs: Bye.
[1:01:48] Bob Dobbs: There was a turnover,
[1:01:50] Bob Dobbs: but that is what was shocking everybody.
[1:01:52] Bob Dobbs: So they called the hippies and all that a children's crusade,
[1:01:55] Bob Dobbs: the older journalists,
[1:01:58] Bob Dobbs: which is a replay of the Troubadour
[1:02:01] Bob Dobbs: 1200s, right,
[1:02:03] Bob Dobbs: before the printing press.
[1:02:04] Bob Dobbs: So what's important is that McLuhan was describing what was happening so accurately,
[1:02:12] Bob Dobbs: and yet nobody read it.
[1:02:15] Bob Dobbs: Nobody noticed it and nobody understood it,
[1:02:18] Bob Dobbs: if they did read it.
[1:02:20] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:02:21] Cameron McEwen: And that was happening in a very explicit,
[1:02:28] Cameron McEwen: very conscious sense.
[1:02:30] Cameron McEwen: When McLuhan was going to corporations like IBM and AT&T and
[1:02:37] Cameron McEwen: General Electric,
[1:02:39] Cameron McEwen: he was saying to these people,
[1:02:41] Cameron McEwen: look,
[1:02:43] Cameron McEwen: information.
[1:02:44] Cameron McEwen: is the new economy.
[1:02:48] Cameron McEwen: You people don't really know what business you're in and all this sort of stuff.
[1:02:52] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:02:52] Cameron McEwen: none of these corporations understood what he was talking about.
[1:02:56] Cameron McEwen: As a matter of fact,
[1:02:56] Cameron McEwen: he went to
[1:02:59] Cameron McEwen: Kodak and he said,
[1:03:03] Cameron McEwen: Parker and I will come down and tell you guys what business you're in,
[1:03:09] Cameron McEwen: but you have to give us,
[1:03:10] Cameron McEwen: I forget what the figure was,
[1:03:12] Cameron McEwen: it was
[1:03:13] Cameron McEwen: $2,000 or $4,000.
[1:03:14] Cameron McEwen: $5,000 or whatever.
[1:03:17] Cameron McEwen: And I translated the amount of money he wanted,
[1:03:21] Cameron McEwen: this was sometime around 1970,
[1:03:24] Cameron McEwen: into dollars today.
[1:03:26] Cameron McEwen: And it came out to be $40,000.
[1:03:30] Cameron McEwen: So he was asking Kodak for $40,000 for him and Parker to come down for one day.
[1:03:36] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:03:37] Cameron McEwen: they didn't want him.
[1:03:39] Cameron McEwen: But the thing is,
[1:03:40] Cameron McEwen: because it was too expensive,
[1:03:42] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:03:42] Cameron McEwen: But it cost...
[1:03:44] Cameron McEwen: the whole corporation.
[1:03:46] Cameron McEwen: By not having McLuhan and therefore not understanding what he would have told them,
[1:03:52] Cameron McEwen: Kodak died.
[1:03:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:03:54] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:03:55] Bob Dobbs: And because IBM got shattered too in the early 80s.
[1:03:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:03:59] Cameron McEwen: and General Electric.
[1:04:00] Cameron McEwen: So all of the great new big corporations like Google,
[1:04:07] Cameron McEwen: like Facebook,
[1:04:09] Cameron McEwen: like
[1:04:09] Cameron McEwen: Twitter, like Amazon,
[1:04:13] Cameron McEwen: All of these corporations are built on principles that McLuhan was telling the old corporations,
[1:04:20] Cameron McEwen: but they didn't listen.
[1:04:21] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:04:22] Bob Dobbs: that's a very good point.
[1:04:24] Cameron McEwen: So billions and billions of dollars were lost.
[1:04:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:04:28] Bob Dobbs: and that's never been said as far as I know.
[1:04:31] Bob Dobbs: People might,
[1:04:32] Bob Dobbs: if they look in to read a Tom Wolfe excerpt,
[1:04:35] Bob Dobbs: what if he's right,
[1:04:36] Bob Dobbs: that article,
[1:04:36] Bob Dobbs: 1965,
[1:04:38] Bob Dobbs: they would see,
[1:04:39] Bob Dobbs: even today,
[1:04:39] Bob Dobbs: a young student could read it,
[1:04:40] Bob Dobbs: they'd see,
[1:04:41] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:04:41] Bob Dobbs: he went around to these corporations and was sort of...
[1:04:43] Bob Dobbs: Odd to them.
[1:04:44] Bob Dobbs: They told them they didn't know what business they were in.
[1:04:47] Bob Dobbs: Nobody falls up and says,
[1:04:48] Bob Dobbs: every one of those ones are gone.
[1:04:51] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:04:52] Bob Dobbs: I give you credit for that.
[1:04:53] Bob Dobbs: It's the first time that's been said in relation to McLuhan.
[1:04:57] Bob Dobbs: The follow-up on what happened,
[1:04:59] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:04:59] Bob Dobbs: It's very important,
[1:05:00] Bob Dobbs: like you just said.
[1:05:03] Bob Dobbs: So would you say that of all the icons of the 60s,
[1:05:12] Bob Dobbs: you've got Norman Mailer,
[1:05:14] Bob Dobbs: Ginsburg,
[1:05:15] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[1:05:16] Bob Dobbs: Tim Leary,
[1:05:17] Bob Dobbs: Ralph Nader,
[1:05:19] Bob Dobbs: maybe some right-wingers.
[1:05:21] Bob Dobbs: the nazi party guy rockwell okay just take the journalistic icons of the 60s would you agree with me and i say this that the one who survived and is still seen as relevant is marshall McLuhan he's the most quoted guy from that era right now and
[1:05:38] Cameron McEwen: it's becoming more and more of the case yeah because the number of people that even heard of McLuhan let alone read anything by him is still very small.
[1:05:49] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:05:49] Cameron McEwen: But,
[1:05:50] Cameron McEwen: um,
[1:05:51] Cameron McEwen: Still,
[1:05:51] Cameron McEwen: the quotations,
[1:05:53] Cameron McEwen: the citations from McLuhan,
[1:05:57] Cameron McEwen: from all of the...
[1:05:58] Bob Dobbs: Are in the articles that they read on their computer.
[1:06:01] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[1:06:02] Cameron McEwen: correct.
[1:06:03] Cameron McEwen: But as you say,
[1:06:05] Cameron McEwen: he's becoming more and more and more relevant to more and more people.
[1:06:09] Cameron McEwen: And yet,
[1:06:11] Cameron McEwen: there's,
[1:06:11] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[1:06:13] Cameron McEwen: very,
[1:06:13] Cameron McEwen: very little of him is understood and even less...
[1:06:20] Cameron McEwen: applied.
[1:06:22] Cameron McEwen: So what's going to happen in the future?
[1:06:23] Cameron McEwen: If we do have a future,
[1:06:27] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is going to turn out to be the figure from that decade that's new.
[1:06:34] Bob Dobbs: From the 22nd half of the 20th century,
[1:06:37] Bob Dobbs: we would say.
[1:06:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:06:41] Bob Dobbs: and the,
[1:06:41] Bob Dobbs: what was my thought there?
[1:06:46] Bob Dobbs: The harbinger of a lot of this was Wired Magazine.
[1:06:49] Bob Dobbs: 1993.
[1:06:51] Bob Dobbs: They made McLuhan their patron saint.
[1:06:53] Bob Dobbs: But that's not exactly what I wanted to say.
[1:06:57] Bob Dobbs: So when McLuhan said,
[1:06:58] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:06:58] Bob Dobbs: Eliot's auditory imagination,
[1:07:00] Bob Dobbs: he could have said,
[1:07:01] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's,
[1:07:03] Bob Dobbs: the medium is the message,
[1:07:04] Bob Dobbs: and The Medium is the Massage,
[1:07:05] Bob Dobbs: will be the,
[1:07:07] Bob Dobbs: the people aren't aware of that yet,
[1:07:08] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:07:09] Bob Dobbs: Because he was translating Finnegans Wake.
[1:07:11] Bob Dobbs: So he could have said Finnegans Wake,
[1:07:13] Bob Dobbs: and we'll end up into a woke situation,
[1:07:16] Bob Dobbs: or that cultural reference point.
[1:07:18] Bob Dobbs: But it's also referring to him.
[1:07:20] Bob Dobbs: So in the woke period,
[1:07:23] Bob Dobbs: which resonates with the title,
[1:07:24] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake,
[1:07:26] Bob Dobbs: it also resonates with McLuhan himself and his own image,
[1:07:28] Bob Dobbs: because that's what he was explaining and predicting.
[1:07:31] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:07:33] Cameron McEwen: If you look at the term auditory imagination,
[1:07:39] Cameron McEwen: you have the ear and the eye.
[1:07:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:07:42] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:07:42] Cameron McEwen: Auditory ear,
[1:07:44] Cameron McEwen: imagination,
[1:07:45] Cameron McEwen: the eye.
[1:07:46] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:07:47] Cameron McEwen: So.
[1:07:48] Cameron McEwen: Then McLuhan comes along and he says the medium is the message.
[1:07:51] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:07:52] Cameron McEwen: what is the medium?
[1:07:53] Cameron McEwen: It's not a newspaper.
[1:07:55] Cameron McEwen: It's the tactility in between the ear and the eye.
[1:07:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:08:00] Bob Dobbs: good point.
[1:08:01] Cameron McEwen: So then what McLuhan is saying is that the ear and the eye stand in for all possible interrelationships.
[1:08:17] Cameron McEwen: And if we want to understand the message of all those possible interrelationships,
[1:08:24] Cameron McEwen: we have to understand the media.
[1:08:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:08:27] Cameron McEwen: That is to say,
[1:08:28] Cameron McEwen: the mediating tactility,
[1:08:32] Cameron McEwen: that is what might be called the basic form of all of those relations.
[1:08:41] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:08:41] Bob Dobbs: we get to secondary tactility.
[1:08:43] Bob Dobbs: You probably didn't think Walter Ong was...
[1:08:48] Bob Dobbs: keeping up with everything.
[1:08:50] Cameron McEwen: No.
[1:08:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:08:52] Bob Dobbs: He dealt with secondary orality,
[1:08:53] Bob Dobbs: which is,
[1:08:54] Bob Dobbs: that's
[1:08:55] Bob Dobbs: T.S. Eliot's auditory imagination.
[1:08:58] Bob Dobbs: But he missed out on secondary tactility,
[1:09:01] Bob Dobbs: which is shown in my Tiny Note chart,
[1:09:03] Bob Dobbs: the squaring of the tactile environment in the Kroker quadrant.
[1:09:09] Bob Dobbs: They square the tactility.
[1:09:11] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is the only other quadrant that mentions tactility,
[1:09:15] Bob Dobbs: the tactile.
[1:09:16] Bob Dobbs: In my...
[1:09:17] Bob Dobbs: right column of the chart,
[1:09:19] Bob Dobbs: the sensory ratios of the time.
[1:09:21] Bob Dobbs: So tactile is mentioned in McLuhan,
[1:09:22] Bob Dobbs: but then it comes into Kroker in the fourth quarter,
[1:09:26] Bob Dobbs: and it's squared,
[1:09:28] Bob Dobbs: and that gets into where we are.
[1:09:32] Bob Dobbs: Somebody has a new McLuhan.
[1:09:36] Bob Dobbs: There's this woman who was an employee at Facebook,
[1:09:40] Bob Dobbs: and a couple of years ago,
[1:09:43] Bob Dobbs: she quit and went public and complained about Facebook.
[1:09:47] Bob Dobbs: And I noticed on YouTube she's interviewed,
[1:09:49] Bob Dobbs: she was on 60 Minutes and all kinds of programs.
[1:09:51] Bob Dobbs: It's been a big deal,
[1:09:52] Bob Dobbs: but I just saw her being interviewed the other day.
[1:09:55] Bob Dobbs: Her name was Frances Haugen,
[1:09:56] Bob Dobbs: I think it's H-A-U-G-A-N.
[1:09:59] Bob Dobbs: And so I got a friend to listen to it,
[1:10:01] Bob Dobbs: and he said...
[1:10:02] Bob Dobbs: Man,
[1:10:03] Bob Dobbs: there is media ecology in the normal consciousness today.
[1:10:07] Bob Dobbs: This woman is trying to be a media ecologist,
[1:10:09] Bob Dobbs: as he understands it,
[1:10:11] Bob Dobbs: what McLuhan was saying.
[1:10:12] Bob Dobbs: And it's obvious that's what's going on.
[1:10:15] Bob Dobbs: And she's volunteering,
[1:10:18] Bob Dobbs: she's the new Ralph Nader,
[1:10:19] Bob Dobbs: to go back into Facebook and get them on the right course with some media ecology.
[1:10:27] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:10:28] Bob Dobbs: she came up with the phrase or...
[1:10:30] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if you came up with it,
[1:10:31] Bob Dobbs: but she used it.
[1:10:32] Bob Dobbs: The cyborg theocracy.
[1:10:35] Bob Dobbs: And that's what I was just about to say.
[1:10:37] Bob Dobbs: I'm explaining where I heard it the other day.
[1:10:38] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:10:39] Cameron McEwen: that's a good phrase.
[1:10:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:10:40] Bob Dobbs: cyborg theocracy.
[1:10:42] Bob Dobbs: Now that's McLuhan's religious temples.
[1:10:44] Bob Dobbs: Remember,
[1:10:44] Bob Dobbs: temple bureaucracies were before the Roman military bureaucracies.
[1:10:49] Bob Dobbs: So we've retrieved temple bureaucracies in media afterimages like ABC News or
[1:10:57] Bob Dobbs: CBC. These are temples.
[1:11:01] Bob Dobbs: a bureaucracy of trying to impose some kind of a chemical body hierarchy and status,
[1:11:07] Bob Dobbs: a sense of a social order,
[1:11:09] Bob Dobbs: just completely irrelevant and failing.
[1:11:13] Bob Dobbs: And it's a theocracy.
[1:11:15] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:11:15] Bob Dobbs: it's Tony Schwartz's The Second God.
[1:11:20] Bob Dobbs: What's the name of his book?
[1:11:22] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[1:11:22] Bob Dobbs: there's another one I think he did,
[1:11:25] Bob Dobbs: The Second God,
[1:11:26] Bob Dobbs: which is media.
[1:11:28] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:11:28] Bob Dobbs: that's another point.
[1:11:29] Bob Dobbs: The terms in Understanding Media and the media environments he's describing in his books aren't there anymore.
[1:11:36] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:11:36] Bob Dobbs: he did anticipate this,
[1:11:38] Bob Dobbs: and the best way to do it was to keep Finnegans Wake as a figure.
[1:11:42] Bob Dobbs: But those environments,
[1:11:44] Bob Dobbs: they're the analog media that became the content of the Android meme.
[1:11:50] Bob Dobbs: And they're the afterimages which have run their course.
[1:11:52] Bob Dobbs: So in
[1:11:53] Bob Dobbs: 1970, auditory imagination meant that the...
[1:11:58] Bob Dobbs: Virtual temple bureaucracies would take over.
[1:12:01] Bob Dobbs: So from 1970 to 2010,
[1:12:03] Bob Dobbs: 2020,
[1:12:04] Bob Dobbs: 40 or 50 years,
[1:12:07] Bob Dobbs: the news-making process,
[1:12:08] Bob Dobbs: which was really more consciously seen as making the world,
[1:12:12] Bob Dobbs: were the content,
[1:12:14] Bob Dobbs: the figures.
[1:12:16] Bob Dobbs: And what was not noticed was the super-angelization,
[1:12:22] Bob Dobbs: the super-humanization of every citizen who got a cell phone.
[1:12:28] Bob Dobbs: That was really the new hidden ground,
[1:12:31] Bob Dobbs: the digitalization and holiopathizing and turning into gods of the
[1:12:44] Bob Dobbs: Microsoft and Gates'
[1:12:45] Bob Dobbs: technology,
[1:12:46] Bob Dobbs: I guess the Apple products.
[1:12:49] Cameron McEwen: But that's the squaring of...
[1:12:57] Cameron McEwen: digitization you could say.
[1:12:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:12:59] Bob Dobbs: squaring of tactility.
[1:13:01] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:13:03] Cameron McEwen: all of these things are always ambiguous.
[1:13:06] Cameron McEwen: So it's the squaring of tactility but not knowing that that's what it is.
[1:13:14] Cameron McEwen: And when you have a kind of woke unknowing then you have
[1:13:26] Cameron McEwen: a cyborgian theocracy,
[1:13:31] Cameron McEwen: as you were just saying,
[1:13:33] Cameron McEwen: that it's a woke attempt at a singular value that is inherently ignorant,
[1:13:47] Cameron McEwen: because there is no singularity and there is no sort of natural value.
[1:13:55] Bob Dobbs: And an important word for the singularity is the univocal.
[1:13:58] Bob Dobbs: The world is still looking for Mr.
[1:14:00] Bob Dobbs: Univocal,
[1:14:01] Bob Dobbs: which is the Antichrist.
[1:14:02] Bob Dobbs: And everybody is competing.
[1:14:04] Bob Dobbs: You're talking about running for White House,
[1:14:06] Bob Dobbs: the President of the United States.
[1:14:07] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:14:07] Bob Dobbs: everybody's running to be the guy at the center making the new world and defining it inaccurately because they're univocal.
[1:14:17] Bob Dobbs: That univocal is the old medium,
[1:14:21] Bob Dobbs: which we keep,
[1:14:22] Bob Dobbs: as McLuhan would say,
[1:14:23] Bob Dobbs: these are the old tools that don't work today.
[1:14:25] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[1:14:26] Cameron McEwen: correct.
[1:14:27] Bob Dobbs: So you have this poly-vocality shown in Finnegans Wake.
[1:14:31] Bob Dobbs: That is the fact.
[1:14:32] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's engaged.
[1:14:34] Bob Dobbs: Here comes everybody.
[1:14:35] Bob Dobbs: Everybody's talking to everybody.
[1:14:36] Bob Dobbs: Everybody is a world maker,
[1:14:39] Bob Dobbs: and they can't see what world has been made.
[1:14:42] Bob Dobbs: Like he said,
[1:14:42] Bob Dobbs: it's recently achieved forms of consciousness,
[1:14:45] Bob Dobbs: forms of wokeness.
[1:14:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:14:50] Cameron McEwen: so you have,
[1:14:51] Cameron McEwen: of course,
[1:14:52] Cameron McEwen: in
[1:14:53] Cameron McEwen: Ukraine,
[1:14:55] Cameron McEwen: and Taiwan.
[1:14:57] Cameron McEwen: You have the contest over multipolarity,
[1:15:01] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:15:01] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:15:02] Cameron McEwen: And so the world is ever more conscious,
[1:15:12] Cameron McEwen: in one sense,
[1:15:13] Cameron McEwen: of this contest between the unipolar and the multipolar,
[1:15:20] Cameron McEwen: the univocal and the...
[1:15:23] Cameron McEwen: What,
[1:15:23] Cameron McEwen: polyvocal or,
[1:15:25] Cameron McEwen: I don't know,
[1:15:26] Bob Dobbs: multivocal?
[1:15:29] Cameron McEwen: So the world is becoming more conscious of these things,
[1:15:35] Cameron McEwen: but in a strangely unconscious way.
[1:15:39] Cameron McEwen: I'd say where even the people that invoke multipolarity tend to do so as a univocal value.
[1:15:52] Bob Dobbs: They keep it stuck in the chemical body.
[1:15:56] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:15:57] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:15:57] Bob Dobbs: that's the AP that we're coming to.
[1:16:01] Bob Dobbs: That's a variation of the AP.
[1:16:03] Bob Dobbs: And it's anthropomorphic physical.
[1:16:07] Bob Dobbs: But I don't want to just get there yet,
[1:16:08] Bob Dobbs: but that's good.
[1:16:09] Bob Dobbs: That's how we get there.
[1:16:10] Bob Dobbs: What you're trying to say is what I'm going to be trying to point out with this.
[1:16:15] Cameron McEwen: Another couple of pages.
[1:16:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:16:18] Cameron McEwen: But isn't...
[1:16:20] Cameron McEwen: One thing that I haven't understood about the chemical body is that aren't all of the bodies that you talk about,
[1:16:30] Cameron McEwen: whether they're five or six or even seven,
[1:16:34] Cameron McEwen: aren't they always there,
[1:16:37] Cameron McEwen: known or unknown,
[1:16:39] Cameron McEwen: in some kind of dynamic interplay?
[1:16:42] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:16:42] Bob Dobbs: they are interplay.
[1:16:44] Bob Dobbs: We live what I call quadrophrenia.
[1:16:46] Bob Dobbs: We've got five bodies.
[1:16:48] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:16:48] Bob Dobbs: the thing is,
[1:16:49] Bob Dobbs: the bodies...
[1:16:50] Bob Dobbs: are our images.
[1:16:51] Bob Dobbs: The chemical body is ruled by the last gasp of the book.
[1:16:56] Bob Dobbs: Starting in 1850,
[1:16:57] Bob Dobbs: the book becomes archetype.
[1:17:00] Bob Dobbs: And so science defines what our body image is,
[1:17:03] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:17:04] Bob Dobbs: anatomy,
[1:17:05] Bob Dobbs: psychology,
[1:17:06] Bob Dobbs: biology,
[1:17:07] Bob Dobbs: all the terms describing our human physical form.
[1:17:11] Bob Dobbs: That was locked in by the book,
[1:17:13] Bob Dobbs: created by the book,
[1:17:14] Bob Dobbs: because remember that great quote from McLuhan?
[1:17:17] Bob Dobbs: He talks about the medieval humors.
[1:17:20] Bob Dobbs: That was the body image.
[1:17:21] Bob Dobbs: And then it becomes a pump hose in the beginning of the steam engine and the kinetic machines.
[1:17:29] Bob Dobbs: The body image responds to that environment.
[1:17:32] Bob Dobbs: And then in the 19th century,
[1:17:34] Bob Dobbs: we become a bag of chemicals.
[1:17:37] Bob Dobbs: That's the last image.
[1:17:39] Bob Dobbs: And now the genetic images,
[1:17:41] Bob Dobbs: that's something later.
[1:17:43] Bob Dobbs: But the chemical body is the image that the medical professionals...
[1:17:48] Bob Dobbs: imposing on everybody and getting into problems because we're not that chemical form.
[1:17:53] Bob Dobbs: The image doesn't work anymore.
[1:17:56] Bob Dobbs: And I saw a lot of it following on Carolyn's career.
[1:17:59] Bob Dobbs: She was an expert in looking at all the alternative modalities,
[1:18:04] Bob Dobbs: acupuncture,
[1:18:05] Bob Dobbs: something called energy medicine.
[1:18:08] Bob Dobbs: And my chart,
[1:18:09] Bob Dobbs: actually,
[1:18:09] Bob Dobbs: I have diseases on them,
[1:18:10] Bob Dobbs: and they're showing the different phases of an attempt to get the body image as the chip body,
[1:18:16] Bob Dobbs: the chip.
[1:18:17] Bob Dobbs: reality,
[1:18:18] Bob Dobbs: the chip landscape is molding people.
[1:18:20] Bob Dobbs: So there were all these fads of dealing with the obsolescence of the drug model and the surgery model in medicine.
[1:18:30] Bob Dobbs: It just was having a supernova and being overused.
[1:18:35] Bob Dobbs: And so
[1:18:36] Bob Dobbs: I document the different popular ailments that reflect the different media quadrants.
[1:18:43] Bob Dobbs: I never talked much about that.
[1:18:44] Bob Dobbs: But it's a development of the McLuhan quote,
[1:18:48] Bob Dobbs: which comes from,
[1:18:48] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[1:18:48] Bob Dobbs: explorations back in the 50s.
[1:18:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:18:52] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:18:52] Bob Dobbs: So as the body,
[1:18:53] Bob Dobbs: as the chemical body became more ethereal,
[1:18:56] Bob Dobbs: more diffuse,
[1:18:57] Bob Dobbs: more scattered,
[1:18:57] Bob Dobbs: or what Kroker called splayed,
[1:19:00] Bob Dobbs: S-P-L-A-Y-E-D,
[1:19:01] Bob Dobbs: the distributive networks of the central nervous system were splayed,
[1:19:06] Bob Dobbs: people were,
[1:19:07] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:19:07] Bob Dobbs: people who were a little more open to the failure of the hospital.
[1:19:15] Bob Dobbs: And it was becoming the new religion,
[1:19:18] Bob Dobbs: the hospital.
[1:19:19] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:19:20] Bob Dobbs: Carol and I met Ivan Illich in 1975,
[1:19:24] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:19:24] Bob Dobbs: 50 years ago.
[1:19:26] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:19:27] Bob Dobbs: Carol told him she was in med school.
[1:19:29] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[1:19:30] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:19:30] Bob Dobbs: I consider all med students new Nazis.
[1:19:35] Bob Dobbs: That's what he said to her.
[1:19:36] Cameron McEwen: Wasn't he a doctor himself?
[1:19:39] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:19:39] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what he was.
[1:19:41] Bob Dobbs: He was a priest.
[1:19:43] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:19:44] Bob Dobbs: he's the one that McLuhan argued over what should be done in the schools.
[1:19:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:19:48] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:19:48] Cameron McEwen: he had a book called...
[1:19:50] Bob Dobbs: De-schooling Society.
[1:19:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:19:52] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[1:19:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:19:53] Bob Dobbs: and he was staged down in Cuernavaca in Mexico and had social programs he was advocating,
[1:19:59] Bob Dobbs: but I never thought of him as a doctor.
[1:20:01] Bob Dobbs: I don't think he was a medical person.
[1:20:03] Bob Dobbs: He was just a thinker and a writer and alienated,
[1:20:07] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:20:07] Bob Dobbs: he became...
[1:20:09] Bob Dobbs: angry at,
[1:20:09] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[1:20:10] Bob Dobbs: the church.
[1:20:11] Bob Dobbs: He became a humanist or a radical guy.
[1:20:14] Bob Dobbs: So the attempt to form a body image,
[1:20:20] Bob Dobbs: which McLuhan said the Children's Crusade were people trying to establish a body percept.
[1:20:25] Bob Dobbs: He actually said it in an interview.
[1:20:26] Bob Dobbs: I think it was in
[1:20:29] Bob Dobbs: Dalhousie.
[1:20:31] Bob Dobbs: Body percept.
[1:20:32] Cameron McEwen: I have a post on his language of body percept.
[1:20:36] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:20:37] Cameron McEwen: Um,
[1:20:38] Cameron McEwen: wrote about that a lot for about a two or three year period.
[1:20:42] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:20:43] Cameron McEwen: That's how McLuhan mind works.
[1:20:45] Cameron McEwen: He would adopt an image.
[1:20:47] Cameron McEwen: He would go over and over and over it and finally exhaust it and then just leave it.
[1:20:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:20:53] Cameron McEwen: Never mention it again.
[1:20:55] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:20:55] Bob Dobbs: And the image in 67,
[1:20:57] Bob Dobbs: he said he was just beginning to talk about figuring ground.
[1:21:00] Bob Dobbs: And he said the hippies were trying to touch the ground with their bare feet.
[1:21:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:21:06] Bob Dobbs: They couldn't get there with their shoes,
[1:21:08] Bob Dobbs: obsolete clothing.
[1:21:10] Bob Dobbs: They'd take their clothes off to touch the ground.
[1:21:13] Bob Dobbs: What the kids were doing literally was a metaphor,
[1:21:17] Bob Dobbs: a symbol of the process that was going on.
[1:21:21] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[1:21:23] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan's mind,
[1:21:25] Cameron McEwen: I think it was
[1:21:26] Cameron McEwen: Norman Mailer,
[1:21:28] Cameron McEwen: said that nobody thought in terms of metaphors like McLuhan did.
[1:21:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:21:34] Bob Dobbs: You know what Mailer said?
[1:21:36] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[1:21:36] Bob Dobbs: I used to think I had a fast mind,
[1:21:38] Bob Dobbs: but no.
[1:21:40] Bob Dobbs: I was a loser compared to McLuhan.
[1:21:42] Bob Dobbs: Rapidity of metaphor,
[1:21:43] Bob Dobbs: which is interesting because he didn't have as many metaphors as
[1:21:47] Bob Dobbs: Mailer would need in his novels.
[1:21:49] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan quotes from
[1:21:52] Bob Dobbs: Armies of the Night or something,
[1:21:53] Bob Dobbs: I think in Cliché to archetype,
[1:21:54] Bob Dobbs: and says it was a very eerie passage he was quoting.
[1:21:57] Bob Dobbs: But he was complimenting him on Mailer's metaphors.
[1:22:01] Bob Dobbs: And Mailer had to come up with a lot of metaphors,
[1:22:03] Bob Dobbs: so it's odd that he thought that McLuhan was more metaphorical.
[1:22:07] Bob Dobbs: But that's because he was dealing with a larger metaphor,
[1:22:10] Bob Dobbs: which is a figure of ground ratio.
[1:22:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:22:14] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:22:14] Cameron McEwen: also,
[1:22:15] Cameron McEwen: Mailer was always trying to get out of his metaphors.
[1:22:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:22:19] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[1:22:20] Cameron McEwen: He wanted to find that moment.
[1:22:23] Cameron McEwen: It could be on his motorcycle,
[1:22:25] Cameron McEwen: or it could be in the boxing ring,
[1:22:27] Cameron McEwen: or it could be with a woman,
[1:22:29] Cameron McEwen: or whatever.
[1:22:30] Cameron McEwen: But it would be that.
[1:22:31] Cameron McEwen: moment where he would escape from himself.
[1:22:34] Cameron McEwen: And of course,
[1:22:35] Cameron McEwen: for McLuhan,
[1:22:36] Cameron McEwen: that was death.
[1:22:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:22:38] Bob Dobbs: and
[1:22:39] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan satirized existentialism,
[1:22:41] Bob Dobbs: but Mailer thought he was doing the existential.
[1:22:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:22:44] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[1:22:45] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:22:48] Bob Dobbs: on the early versions of my Tiny Note chart,
[1:22:51] Bob Dobbs: the bottom-up,
[1:22:52] Bob Dobbs: small bottom-up chart and top-down chart,
[1:22:53] Bob Dobbs: I had Mailer versus McLuhan on it.
[1:22:55] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if you ever noticed that.
[1:22:57] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if you've seen those.
[1:22:59] Bob Dobbs: I should send them to you,
[1:23:00] Bob Dobbs: see the dynamic,
[1:23:01] Bob Dobbs: because that was the,
[1:23:05] Bob Dobbs: in the magazine world,
[1:23:06] Bob Dobbs: that was the battle,
[1:23:07] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan versus Mailer,
[1:23:08] Bob Dobbs: and they had several opportunities to perform.
[1:23:11] Bob Dobbs: They were the Ali-Forman fights in metaphysics,
[1:23:17] Bob Dobbs: which had become content and was subject to the pagan idolatry and conflict that every other human chemical body endeavor was going through.
[1:23:28] Cameron McEwen: Their fight,
[1:23:28] Cameron McEwen: though,
[1:23:29] Cameron McEwen: is...
[1:23:29] Cameron McEwen: still in the future.
[1:23:30] Cameron McEwen: It's an interesting thing that there may have been some sort of battle that people thought was going on in the 60s,
[1:23:41] Cameron McEwen: but actually their battle is yet to be entered into.
[1:23:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:23:47] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:23:47] Bob Dobbs: the deeper aspects of their battle,
[1:23:49] Bob Dobbs: what they were really fighting over.
[1:23:53] Bob Dobbs: I would say they were fighting over what is art,
[1:23:55] Bob Dobbs: what is the artist's role.
[1:23:57] Bob Dobbs: Mailer was a traditional artist with all the romantic images.
[1:24:00] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan knew the chemical body artist was not relevant at all.
[1:24:05] Bob Dobbs: This thing that even Don Theall says in his Medium Is the Rear View Mirror in 1971,
[1:24:12] Bob Dobbs: his book on McLuhan,
[1:24:14] Bob Dobbs: he says the big value of McLuhan is he drew attention to the artist as an important person in analyzing sociological situations.
[1:24:24] Bob Dobbs: That's not
[1:24:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's message.
[1:24:27] Bob Dobbs: He was pointing out the artist was no longer available.
[1:24:30] Bob Dobbs: It was a new phenomenon.
[1:24:32] Bob Dobbs: You had to include the collectivity of the populations that are making the art products,
[1:24:39] Bob Dobbs: daily forming the new world,
[1:24:40] Bob Dobbs: the new consciousness.
[1:24:42] Bob Dobbs: And then what is a figure,
[1:24:43] Bob Dobbs: what's an environment to that?
[1:24:45] Bob Dobbs: So that's my bugaboo.
[1:24:47] Bob Dobbs: When I meet art students in New York,
[1:24:50] Bob Dobbs: I met a lot of art critics.
[1:24:52] Bob Dobbs: I tell them,
[1:24:53] Bob Dobbs: you guys don't even know what the art critics...
[1:24:56] Bob Dobbs: You have a problem in art.
[1:24:58] Bob Dobbs: You guys think it's obsolete or you discuss it,
[1:25:00] Bob Dobbs: the Wall Street commodification of it.
[1:25:02] Bob Dobbs: You don't even know what the real art battle was.
[1:25:06] Bob Dobbs: And that involved McLuhan giving us an explanation of where art had gone.
[1:25:12] Bob Dobbs: Nobody knows that.
[1:25:13] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:25:13] Bob Dobbs: there is this Dutch woman,
[1:25:15] Bob Dobbs: Sjoukje
[1:25:16] Bob Dobbs: van der Meulen,
[1:25:17] Bob Dobbs: I think her name is.
[1:25:18] Bob Dobbs: I met her in New York.
[1:25:19] Bob Dobbs: And she was doing a PhD on
[1:25:22] Bob Dobbs: Clement Greenberg versus McLuhan.
[1:25:25] Bob Dobbs: She had figured out that there was an art argument there that the art world didn't know about.
[1:25:31] Bob Dobbs: It's a very good
[1:25:32] Bob Dobbs: PhD. I recommend it.
[1:25:33] Bob Dobbs: I think you could find it online,
[1:25:36] Bob Dobbs: maybe.
[1:25:37] Bob Dobbs: And she said it was replayed by...
[1:25:40] Bob Dobbs: Rosalind Krauss is the major editor,
[1:25:44] Bob Dobbs: queen of art criticism in New York for the last 30 years or whatever,
[1:25:48] Bob Dobbs: in the magazine October.
[1:25:49] Bob Dobbs: Do you know that magazine?
[1:25:51] Cameron McEwen: No.
[1:25:51] Bob Dobbs: That journal?
[1:25:52] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:25:52] Bob Dobbs: so that's one of the top art magazines,
[1:25:54] Bob Dobbs: art reviews.
[1:25:58] Bob Dobbs: It's Rosalind Krauss versus the German guy,
[1:26:01] Bob Dobbs: Kittler.
[1:26:02] Bob Dobbs: Do you know about him?
[1:26:04] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:26:04] Cameron McEwen: I know the name,
[1:26:05] Cameron McEwen: but I've never read a line of the guy.
[1:26:07] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:26:08] Bob Dobbs: so he was considered the best.
[1:26:10] Bob Dobbs: Beg your pardon?
[1:26:11] Cameron McEwen: I should be reading them,
[1:26:12] Cameron McEwen: but I haven't.
[1:26:13] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: maybe not.
[1:26:14] Bob Dobbs: But you need to know a little bit more about him.
[1:26:17] Bob Dobbs: But he was the best retrieval of McLuhan for Europeans.
[1:26:25] Bob Dobbs: So he was the big European McLuhan.
[1:26:27] Bob Dobbs: He died a few years ago.
[1:26:29] Bob Dobbs: And so it wasn't popular to use McLuhan,
[1:26:33] Bob Dobbs: but he successfully retrieved McLuhan in a too literal way.
[1:26:39] Bob Dobbs: But he...
[1:26:40] Bob Dobbs: He got a lot of attention,
[1:26:41] Bob Dobbs: a lot of honors,
[1:26:42] Bob Dobbs: and made a big meal.
[1:26:44] Bob Dobbs: Once McLuhan was retrieved,
[1:26:46] Bob Dobbs: Kittler was right there to take the honors,
[1:26:48] Bob Dobbs: okay?
[1:26:50] Bob Dobbs: But what was interesting is that
[1:26:52] Bob Dobbs: Sjoukje said that Rosalind Krauss,
[1:26:56] Bob Dobbs: her naivety about McLuhan,
[1:26:58] Bob Dobbs: but she ends up saying that medium is not the message or something.
[1:27:01] Bob Dobbs: She does a major essay at some point around 2000,
[1:27:07] Bob Dobbs: having to acknowledge the McLuhan meme.
[1:27:09] Bob Dobbs: So it's Krauss versus Kittler replaying Greenberg versus
[1:27:12] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan. Does that sound interesting to you?
[1:27:15] Bob Dobbs: Sure.
[1:27:16] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:27:16] Bob Dobbs: definitely we try to get you the PhD.
[1:27:19] Bob Dobbs: It's very good.
[1:27:20] Bob Dobbs: But that's the thing that
[1:27:22] Bob Dobbs: I met a lot of McLuhanites who were art professors.
[1:27:25] Bob Dobbs: They didn't know.
[1:27:26] Bob Dobbs: They didn't think Through the Vanishing Point said anything,
[1:27:29] Bob Dobbs: if they even knew about the book.
[1:27:30] Bob Dobbs: But that's where he laid out a new way to do art criticism,
[1:27:35] Bob Dobbs: or at least to put on the art world.
[1:27:36] Bob Dobbs: And every one of his books is...
[1:27:37] Bob Dobbs: putting on a particular world,
[1:27:39] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:27:39] Bob Dobbs: Particular specialism,
[1:27:42] Bob Dobbs: a particular profession.
[1:27:44] Bob Dobbs: And that was the art critic one.
[1:27:45] Bob Dobbs: And he wrote to Playboy around that time saying,
[1:27:48] Bob Dobbs: responding to somebody,
[1:27:49] Bob Dobbs: Leslie Fiedler or somebody,
[1:27:52] Bob Dobbs: talking about the,
[1:27:53] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:27:53] Bob Dobbs: the forlorn state of the art world.
[1:27:56] Bob Dobbs: And he said,
[1:27:56] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:27:57] Bob Dobbs: we've solved that problem.
[1:27:58] Bob Dobbs: Get our book,
[1:27:59] Bob Dobbs: Through the Vanishing Point.
[1:28:01] Bob Dobbs: We feel that we have made some...
[1:28:05] Bob Dobbs: Explanations of the new consciousness in the art world.
[1:28:09] Cameron McEwen: Notice how that relates to the Take Today quotation mark,
[1:28:17] Cameron McEwen: quotation.
[1:28:17] Cameron McEwen: The idea of how you go to the totally new consciousness from the old consciousness and the answer is Through the Vanishing Point.
[1:28:26] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:28:27] Bob Dobbs: and it's today.
[1:28:29] Bob Dobbs: A new day every day and you're living 200 months.
[1:28:32] Bob Dobbs: 200 years every 12 months,
[1:28:34] Bob Dobbs: he said,
[1:28:34] Bob Dobbs: in 1971 or so.
[1:28:37] Bob Dobbs: So a lot of new Take Today.
[1:28:40] Bob Dobbs: So this is what's so fun to read McLuhan,
[1:28:45] Bob Dobbs: to know about it and see what happened and to see how appropriate this paragraph is,
[1:28:50] Bob Dobbs: how prophetic.
[1:28:53] Bob Dobbs: And a challenge,
[1:28:54] Bob Dobbs: you have to get a certain understanding of McLuhan,
[1:28:57] Bob Dobbs: real understanding,
[1:28:59] Bob Dobbs: perception of McLuhan,
[1:29:00] Bob Dobbs: to even figure out what he's talking about here.
[1:29:03] Bob Dobbs: And then to find out that Finnegans Wake has recently achieved what?
[1:29:06] Bob Dobbs: How could this book be?
[1:29:07] Bob Dobbs: Nobody's aware of that.
[1:29:09] Bob Dobbs: How's it an achieved form of consciousness?
[1:29:11] Bob Dobbs: Unless you're thinking it's an artist by himself being the leading edge,
[1:29:15] Bob Dobbs: which Joyce was.
[1:29:17] Bob Dobbs: But it's referring to a world that's post-Joyce in the pagan worship of art.
[1:29:26] Bob Dobbs: That is subject to commodification in Jean Baudrillard.
[1:29:31] Bob Dobbs: A pretty interesting McLuhanite who cracked the code and became,
[1:29:36] Bob Dobbs: because he was seeing through the art world in the 80s,
[1:29:39] Bob Dobbs: they had to adopt him as the critic of the day.
[1:29:42] Bob Dobbs: So there's a lot of quoting of Baudrillard,
[1:29:44] Bob Dobbs: but probably they could have done better with McLuhan.
[1:29:50] Bob Dobbs: It would have been more acceptable for people.
[1:29:54] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:29:54] Cameron McEwen: what's going on there in the background is the working of language.
[1:30:00] Cameron McEwen: The working of sort of social self-consciousness and the in-language.
[1:30:14] Cameron McEwen: There is no such thing ultimately as the innovator or the one who deserves credit and all this stuff.
[1:30:26] Cameron McEwen: Language eats all that stuff.
[1:30:31] Cameron McEwen: The great mystery is what is going on with this huge form for which all human beings and humanity itself.
[1:30:43] Cameron McEwen: as a figure.
[1:30:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:30:45] Bob Dobbs: this reminds me of an important point.
[1:30:49] Bob Dobbs: With the rise of McLuhan in the 60s,
[1:30:50] Bob Dobbs: the same period in pop culture was Bob Dylan.
[1:30:54] Bob Dobbs: I read a book called Dylanology about the culture of Dylan's fans or even cults.
[1:31:02] Bob Dobbs: It was very interesting,
[1:31:03] Bob Dobbs: but I found out that at some point,
[1:31:07] Bob Dobbs: 15 years ago or something,
[1:31:09] Bob Dobbs: they found out that Dylan you
[1:31:11] Bob Dobbs: got his imagery for all his raucous music in the mid-60s,
[1:31:16] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:31:16] Bob Dobbs: like a Rolling Stone or not,
[1:31:17] Bob Dobbs: from magazine clippings and quotes from all kinds of different sources.
[1:31:23] Bob Dobbs: And there's a picture on one of those early mid-60s albums,
[1:31:27] Bob Dobbs: Highway 61 Revisited or whatever,
[1:31:29] Bob Dobbs: and he's there sitting in a New York
[1:31:32] Bob Dobbs: Park Avenue palace,
[1:31:33] Bob Dobbs: and he's looking at all these magazines.
[1:31:36] Bob Dobbs: So people start documenting.
[1:31:37] Bob Dobbs: They could find the quotes and the images.
[1:31:40] Bob Dobbs: He didn't write one...
[1:31:41] Bob Dobbs: And remember,
[1:31:42] Bob Dobbs: he is being hoiked up for the children as a creative self-expressionist.
[1:31:48] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:31:48] Bob Dobbs: A guy with incredible imagination.
[1:31:50] Bob Dobbs: Look at those crazy words.
[1:31:51] Bob Dobbs: Maybe he's doing drugs or something.
[1:31:53] Bob Dobbs: But it turns out he was doing McLuhan.
[1:31:56] Bob Dobbs: He was just looking at media,
[1:31:58] Bob Dobbs: finding images,
[1:31:59] Bob Dobbs: and then sticking them in and making poems out of it,
[1:32:01] Bob Dobbs: and then songs.
[1:32:03] Bob Dobbs: And there was a big debate in this book.
[1:32:06] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:32:06] Bob Dobbs: it reported the debate,
[1:32:08] Bob Dobbs: the struggle between...
[1:32:09] Bob Dobbs: Certain guys had written books on Dylan and then there were other guys,
[1:32:13] Bob Dobbs: and they couldn't decide whether,
[1:32:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:32:15] Bob Dobbs: a lot of them were deflated.
[1:32:16] Bob Dobbs: This guy wasn't creative.
[1:32:18] Bob Dobbs: He stole everything.
[1:32:20] Bob Dobbs: And here he was doing,
[1:32:21] Bob Dobbs: just doing McLuhan on a pop culture,
[1:32:25] Bob Dobbs: more chaotic way,
[1:32:26] Bob Dobbs: but he was looking at the materials around him.
[1:32:29] Bob Dobbs: And that is the best way to be a poet in that period,
[1:32:32] Bob Dobbs: following the school of McLuhan.
[1:32:34] Bob Dobbs: And so the literate throwbacks of trying to find a...
[1:32:39] Bob Dobbs: a shelly or Keats in in dylan are shocked that he was using pop culture images and put making them part of his collage not his own imagination so that's the you don't use your materials to be an artist by the 60s you
[1:32:55] Cameron McEwen: don't use your thoughts well you never you never had but people didn't know that yeah people didn't know that so he's noticing the in the uh
[1:33:07] Cameron McEwen: citation that we keep coming back to at the end of uh Take Today he he says uh for the best part of the century we've been programming human consciousness with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious well that's just what you described of dylan looking at magazines right and the one
[1:33:27] Bob Dobbs: of the tribal unconscious that people don't get is uh the tribal unconscious that the Printing Press brought in...
[1:33:34] Bob Dobbs: That was the beginning of a new kind of tribal consciousness.
[1:33:38] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:33:39] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.
[1:33:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:33:40] Bob Dobbs: but it was an eyeball,
[1:33:42] Bob Dobbs: literate eyeball consciousness,
[1:33:44] Bob Dobbs: not the ear.
[1:33:45] Bob Dobbs: And the electric age continues the process but retrieves the ear.
[1:33:48] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:33:48] Bob Dobbs: you take that image in the medium as a massage of the ear overlaying the eye,
[1:33:54] Bob Dobbs: which may be,
[1:33:55] Bob Dobbs: was it,
[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: not Max Ernst,
[1:33:58] Bob Dobbs: but
[1:34:00] Bob Dobbs: Man Ray.
[1:34:01] Bob Dobbs: Did he make that image?
[1:34:02] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure.
[1:34:03] Bob Dobbs: But the...
[1:34:04] Bob Dobbs: The thing is,
[1:34:05] Bob Dobbs: I think it applied to Joyce in some way,
[1:34:07] Bob Dobbs: but I took it as that way,
[1:34:09] Bob Dobbs: because there's some drawing of Joyce that somebody did back in his day of his eye and his ear coming together.
[1:34:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:34:16] Cameron McEwen: I think that was
[1:34:17] Cameron McEwen: Moholy-Nagy.
[1:34:19] Bob Dobbs: Moholy-Nagy, yeah,
[1:34:20] Bob Dobbs: right.
[1:34:22] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:34:22] Bob Dobbs: that's how they pronounce it.
[1:34:23] Bob Dobbs: I was told this in the air.
[1:34:24] Bob Dobbs: Moholy-Nagy.
[1:34:25] Bob Dobbs: It's not Nagy.
[1:34:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:34:28] Cameron McEwen: Anyway.
[1:34:28] Cameron McEwen: It's Hungarian,
[1:34:29] Cameron McEwen: so it could be anything.
[1:34:31] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:34:32] Bob Dobbs: So the...
[1:34:35] Bob Dobbs: So you would,
[1:34:36] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[1:34:37] Bob Dobbs: T.S. Eliot is the eye-ear dialectic,
[1:34:40] Bob Dobbs: auditory imagination.
[1:34:41] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:34:42] Bob Dobbs: What is the image,
[1:34:44] Bob Dobbs: if you want to use body parts,
[1:34:46] Bob Dobbs: of the woke period,
[1:34:50] Bob Dobbs: the Finnegans Wake period?
[1:34:52] Bob Dobbs: What McLuhan was saying was not awake yet.
[1:34:55] Bob Dobbs: People weren't aware of it.
[1:34:56] Bob Dobbs: Would it have been the image of The Medium is the Massage,
[1:34:59] Bob Dobbs: of the people lined up and walking into the womb of this big sculpture of a woman?
[1:35:05] Bob Dobbs: Is that?
[1:35:05] Bob Dobbs: Maybe.
[1:35:06] Bob Dobbs: That tactility?
[1:35:09] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:35:10] Cameron McEwen: I would say that's anti-tactility.
[1:35:15] Cameron McEwen: It's tactility writ large,
[1:35:19] Cameron McEwen: which the wokesters can't see.
[1:35:24] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:35:24] Bob Dobbs: I guess what I'm saying is you've got the eye here.
[1:35:27] Bob Dobbs: What organ replaces that?
[1:35:30] Bob Dobbs: Basically,
[1:35:31] Bob Dobbs: the corpus callosum.
[1:35:32] Bob Dobbs: What would be an image for the corpus callosum?
[1:35:38] Bob Dobbs: So I'm just wondering about,
[1:35:39] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:35:39] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's choice of that,
[1:35:42] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:35:42] Bob Dobbs: womb.
[1:35:44] Bob Dobbs: But if you just literally took organs,
[1:35:48] Bob Dobbs: I guess a lot of the psychedelic and digital art that shows the central nervous system splayed all over the place,
[1:35:58] Bob Dobbs: maybe different landscapes overlaid on the brain,
[1:36:02] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:36:02] Bob Dobbs: those cliches through the years,
[1:36:05] Bob Dobbs: that might be what we're looking at.
[1:36:08] Bob Dobbs: in the global theater.
[1:36:09] Bob Dobbs: That might be appropriate images in terms of body parts.
[1:36:13] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:36:13] Bob Dobbs: again,
[1:36:14] Bob Dobbs: we're coming to what are we made up of?
[1:36:17] Bob Dobbs: How are we human or what are we human?
[1:36:19] Bob Dobbs: That's the Anthropomorphic Physical,
[1:36:21] Bob Dobbs: which is humans thinking,
[1:36:25] Bob Dobbs: and I think I've said this several times,
[1:36:28] Bob Dobbs: people don't want to be embedded in the environment.
[1:36:32] Bob Dobbs: They don't want to be a machine or some kind of...
[1:36:38] Bob Dobbs: Loss of autonomy or will or personal care.
[1:36:46] Bob Dobbs: And we're trying to find out where is that part of ourselves.
[1:36:50] Bob Dobbs: We're trying to remember the anthropomorphic,
[1:36:53] Bob Dobbs: which would be the whole history of human form and all the cultural images of it,
[1:36:58] Bob Dobbs: from cavemen to the cyborg.
[1:37:02] Bob Dobbs: And it's also trying to get...
[1:37:04] Bob Dobbs: physical to get anchored,
[1:37:06] Bob Dobbs: to find a ground to the post-ground melange we're in,
[1:37:13] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:37:13] Bob Dobbs: clusterfuck we're in today,
[1:37:15] Bob Dobbs: where people don't know what the ground is or if there can be.
[1:37:19] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:37:19] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:37:20] Bob Dobbs: the question is,
[1:37:21] Bob Dobbs: can there be an Anthropomorphic Physical?
[1:37:23] Bob Dobbs: So we're coming into the quadrant,
[1:37:24] Bob Dobbs: which is the Dobbs quadrant of the Tiny Note chart,
[1:37:29] Bob Dobbs: where we are groping for an image and
[1:37:34] Bob Dobbs: It's misguided looking for the Anthropomorphic Physical.
[1:37:38] Bob Dobbs: We need to become aware of that drive to save that,
[1:37:43] Bob Dobbs: the urge,
[1:37:45] Bob Dobbs: the unwoke condition of looking for an Anthropomorphic Physical.
[1:37:50] Bob Dobbs: Not that we have to go non-human,
[1:37:53] Bob Dobbs: non-anthropomorphic,
[1:37:54] Bob Dobbs: but that is what's driving so much,
[1:37:57] Bob Dobbs: is people are arguing over how do you relate the cyborg
[1:38:02] Bob Dobbs: to traditional theology,
[1:38:04] Bob Dobbs: say,
[1:38:06] Bob Dobbs: to the image of the human in its divinity,
[1:38:09] Bob Dobbs: or not?
[1:38:11] Cameron McEwen: People are increasingly conscious,
[1:38:15] Cameron McEwen: both because of their personal problems,
[1:38:17] Cameron McEwen: their interpersonal problems,
[1:38:19] Cameron McEwen: the international problems,
[1:38:22] Cameron McEwen: the economic problems,
[1:38:24] Cameron McEwen: etc.,
[1:38:24] Cameron McEwen: etc.
[1:38:25] Cameron McEwen: People are increasingly conscious that there are problems to which we don't know the answers.
[1:38:32] Cameron McEwen: And we desperately need to have answers.
[1:38:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:38:36] Bob Dobbs: and the answers have been tried.
[1:38:37] Bob Dobbs: The ones we knew,
[1:38:39] Bob Dobbs: the anthropomorphic answers even,
[1:38:41] Bob Dobbs: didn't work.
[1:38:42] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[1:38:43] Bob Dobbs: Because we've been stretched out in this condition since 1945,
[1:38:47] Bob Dobbs: like I said.
[1:38:47] Bob Dobbs: We never left 1945.
[1:38:49] Bob Dobbs: We're just laying information over on information.
[1:38:51] Bob Dobbs: But it's interesting how every decade there was an attempt or a mood that,
[1:38:57] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:38:57] Bob Dobbs: we can do something about this.
[1:38:58] Bob Dobbs: Let's have a movement.
[1:38:59] Bob Dobbs: And they tried.
[1:39:00] Bob Dobbs: And none of them worked.
[1:39:02] Bob Dobbs: And we were stuck here for,
[1:39:06] Bob Dobbs: what,
[1:39:06] Bob Dobbs: 80 years of floating here in this limbo of trying everything and knowing,
[1:39:13] Bob Dobbs: some of us,
[1:39:13] Bob Dobbs: that none of it was going to work because we didn't know what we were up against.
[1:39:16] Bob Dobbs: We didn't understand it.
[1:39:19] Cameron McEwen: And look at how the
[1:39:22] Cameron McEwen: Nazi episode in the Canadian Parliament perfectly expresses this.
[1:39:28] Cameron McEwen: We're right back at 1945.
[1:39:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:39:32] Bob Dobbs: We covered that in office hours today,
[1:39:34] Bob Dobbs: Clinton and I and Greg,
[1:39:37] Bob Dobbs: because we did a video version of ourselves.
[1:39:39] Bob Dobbs: We did that a year or two ago,
[1:39:41] Bob Dobbs: but it wasn't working.
[1:39:43] Bob Dobbs: But now we have better equipment,
[1:39:44] Bob Dobbs: so we did it.
[1:39:45] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:39:46] Bob Dobbs: Greg and Clinton,
[1:39:48] Bob Dobbs: I was aware of it a bit,
[1:39:49] Bob Dobbs: but they brought the footage that we showed of the ridiculous scene in Parliament.
[1:39:55] Bob Dobbs: The people applauding this old doddering guy,
[1:39:57] Bob Dobbs: 98 years old,
[1:39:58] Bob Dobbs: didn't even know where he was.
[1:39:59] Bob Dobbs: He's worse than Biden.
[1:40:02] Bob Dobbs: And they all,
[1:40:04] Bob Dobbs: over the weekend,
[1:40:04] Bob Dobbs: thought,
[1:40:05] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:40:05] Bob Dobbs: Jesus,
[1:40:05] Bob Dobbs: that was Adolf Hitler,
[1:40:07] Bob Dobbs: not a nice guy from Calgary.
[1:40:10] Bob Dobbs: And then they all start pointing fingers at each other,
[1:40:13] Bob Dobbs: and the Speaker of the House,
[1:40:14] Bob Dobbs: he's gone already.
[1:40:16] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:40:17] Bob Dobbs: Their own party kicked out their guy.
[1:40:22] Bob Dobbs: And the footage they were showing me,
[1:40:25] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know that he'd get kicked out until after they showed the footage.
[1:40:28] Bob Dobbs: And he's there.
[1:40:29] Bob Dobbs: He made a ridiculous,
[1:40:30] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:40:31] Bob Dobbs: trying to be funny and celebrating the guy up in the gallery.
[1:40:34] Bob Dobbs: And it's so
[1:40:38] Bob Dobbs: Canadian and pompous and fragile and silly.
[1:40:41] Bob Dobbs: He's Monty Python almost.
[1:40:43] Bob Dobbs: And then I found out that was...
[1:40:45] Bob Dobbs: that the guy was,
[1:40:46] Bob Dobbs: he's the first casualty.
[1:40:47] Bob Dobbs: He had to step down the other day or today or something.
[1:40:51] Bob Dobbs: What a story.
[1:40:52] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:40:52] Cameron McEwen: he had to take the blame for
[1:40:54] Bob Dobbs: Trudeau. Yeah,
[1:41:01] Bob Dobbs: but your point is,
[1:41:02] Bob Dobbs: yes,
[1:41:02] Bob Dobbs: we're back,
[1:41:02] Bob Dobbs: and we never left 1945,
[1:41:04] Bob Dobbs: and it's a big scandal we found that we never left it.
[1:41:07] Cameron McEwen: That was your point,
[1:41:08] Cameron McEwen: Bob.
[1:41:09] Bob Dobbs: Beg your pardon?
[1:41:11] Cameron McEwen: That was your point.
[1:41:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:41:12] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:41:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:41:13] Bob Dobbs: I hadn't thought of that.
[1:41:15] Bob Dobbs: Again,
[1:41:15] Bob Dobbs: I was the prophet once again.
[1:41:17] Bob Dobbs: I forgot to put that point in that story back to my 1945 famous aphorism.
[1:41:25] Bob Dobbs: So pretty good.
[1:41:28] Bob Dobbs: Anyways.
[1:41:33] Cameron McEwen: I wanted to ask you a question about the Anthropomorphic Physical.
[1:41:38] Cameron McEwen: Sometimes you seem to use it in a fairly positive sense.
[1:41:43] Cameron McEwen: and other times in a negative sense.
[1:41:45] Cameron McEwen: And
[1:41:46] Cameron McEwen: I can easily believe that it has both.
[1:41:49] Cameron McEwen: But,
[1:41:49] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[1:41:50] Cameron McEwen: if you say that people are looking for the Anthropomorphic Physical,
[1:41:55] Cameron McEwen: do you mean that in a good sense and that it's a valuable goal to have or an interesting goal to have?
[1:42:11] Cameron McEwen: Or do you mean that it's a miscommunication?
[1:42:13] Cameron McEwen: guided goal.
[1:42:14] Bob Dobbs: You can be assured,
[1:42:16] Bob Dobbs: I was going to say Clinton,
[1:42:18] Bob Dobbs: after talking to him all day on the show,
[1:42:21] Bob Dobbs: you can be assured,
[1:42:21] Bob Dobbs: Cameron,
[1:42:22] Bob Dobbs: if I talk about it,
[1:42:23] Bob Dobbs: I'm not for it.
[1:42:27] Bob Dobbs: To quote a wag,
[1:42:31] Bob Dobbs: which is a word I learned from McLuhan.
[1:42:33] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know there were wags,
[1:42:34] Bob Dobbs: W-A-G.
[1:42:36] Bob Dobbs: I started saying it.
[1:42:38] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying that's the knee-jerk natural program.
[1:42:42] Cameron McEwen: In quotes.
[1:42:43] Cameron McEwen: Good.
[1:42:44] Bob Dobbs: That is an effect.
[1:42:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:42:47] Bob Dobbs: And me personally know this because I'm dealing with the post-answer of a porphyry every day,
[1:42:53] Bob Dobbs: and that's iON,
[1:42:54] Bob Dobbs: for freak's sake.
[1:42:55] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:42:56] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:42:57] Bob Dobbs: So I have a whole agenda there.
[1:42:59] Bob Dobbs: Remember,
[1:43:00] Bob Dobbs: the Tiny Note chart,
[1:43:01] Bob Dobbs: in my terms,
[1:43:02] Bob Dobbs: predicted iON.
[1:43:03] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know that,
[1:43:04] Bob Dobbs: but that's what happened.
[1:43:05] Bob Dobbs: That's the waiting.
[1:43:07] Bob Dobbs: Remember at the bottom,
[1:43:08] Bob Dobbs: it says,
[1:43:09] Bob Dobbs: waiting for organic bodies.
[1:43:12] Bob Dobbs: The spinning clothing crystals have danced the hexadvertisement.
[1:43:17] Bob Dobbs: So my chart is an advertisement,
[1:43:19] Bob Dobbs: and it includes the Anthropomorphic Physical as part of the content,
[1:43:23] Bob Dobbs: part of the effects,
[1:43:24] Bob Dobbs: the spinning,
[1:43:25] Bob Dobbs: waiting for organic bodies.
[1:43:27] Bob Dobbs: That's waiting for the AP at a certain level.
[1:43:31] Bob Dobbs: The environments are spinning clothing crystals.
[1:43:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:43:35] Cameron McEwen: and the hexadic,
[1:43:36] Cameron McEwen: that's six,
[1:43:37] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:43:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:43:38] Bob Dobbs: that's,
[1:43:39] Bob Dobbs: the chart is pointing...
[1:43:42] Bob Dobbs: to the hidden ground that's surfacing and i did this in 1995 iron doesn't show up till
[1:43:48] Bob Dobbs: 14 years later but i was trying to point out the obsolescence of wired and the chip body and the chip landscape because i was always trying to one-up everybody if i say well you're missing the hidden ground which that's what any good student McLuhan learns to do right it's
[1:44:05] Bob Dobbs: so i was trying to point to something now where did i get even a notion of it well
[1:44:10] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn,
[1:44:11] Bob Dobbs: we were in New York,
[1:44:12] Bob Dobbs: and
[1:44:14] Bob Dobbs: Walter Fischman had invented this gadget,
[1:44:17] Bob Dobbs: which was called MIHR.
[1:44:18] Bob Dobbs: It stood for MIHR,
[1:44:20] Bob Dobbs: Magnetically Influenced
[1:44:22] Bob Dobbs: Homeopathic Remedies or Herbal Remedies.
[1:44:25] Bob Dobbs: It was made up of a little vaccination box,
[1:44:30] Bob Dobbs: and the needle had a liquid in it,
[1:44:33] Bob Dobbs: which was herbs that had been homeopathized.
[1:44:38] Bob Dobbs: It made into a liquid.
[1:44:39] Bob Dobbs: and made invisible.
[1:44:42] Bob Dobbs: Homeopathy is sub-known kind of stuff.
[1:44:46] Bob Dobbs: And so you take herbs,
[1:44:49] Bob Dobbs: your homeopath eyes make liquid,
[1:44:50] Bob Dobbs: you put that in a syringe needle and you inject it into an acupuncture point while putting an electromagnetic pulse on it as it goes into the system.
[1:45:02] Bob Dobbs: And it treated AIDS wonderfully.
[1:45:04] Bob Dobbs: We had an AIDS solution and then a lot of shit happened.
[1:45:09] Bob Dobbs: And people objected to it in the...
[1:45:12] Bob Dobbs: American Medical Association started to hassle
[1:45:15] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn because Walter died.
[1:45:17] Bob Dobbs: When we got there in August 1993,
[1:45:20] Bob Dobbs: he died within a couple of weeks.
[1:45:23] Bob Dobbs: And I hadn't even gotten there.
[1:45:24] Bob Dobbs: I was still in L.A.
[1:45:25] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:45:26] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn was on her own with the widow.
[1:45:28] Bob Dobbs: And they did really good stuff.
[1:45:29] Bob Dobbs: And then
[1:45:30] Bob Dobbs: Mario Cuomo passed a law in 1994.
[1:45:35] Bob Dobbs: He was governor of New York saying that alternative medicine cannot be hassled anymore.
[1:45:40] Bob Dobbs: Told the AMA to back off.
[1:45:42] Bob Dobbs: And so they had three years,
[1:45:44] Bob Dobbs: 94,
[1:45:45] Bob Dobbs: 95,
[1:45:45] Bob Dobbs: 567,
[1:45:46] Bob Dobbs: up to 98,
[1:45:47] Bob Dobbs: to implement the program.
[1:45:49] Bob Dobbs: And they had a clinic and were doing really good work.
[1:45:51] Bob Dobbs: And it was working.
[1:45:52] Bob Dobbs: And then all of a sudden the AMA was creeping around.
[1:45:56] Bob Dobbs: And they started attacking people,
[1:45:58] Bob Dobbs: ignoring Cuomo's rules or legislation.
[1:46:02] Bob Dobbs: Probably they had more power than Cuomo.
[1:46:04] Bob Dobbs: And so they had to stop it.
[1:46:07] Bob Dobbs: They wouldn't let
[1:46:08] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn send the...
[1:46:10] Bob Dobbs: the technology outside of New York City.
[1:46:13] Bob Dobbs: We weren't allowed to send it to other states,
[1:46:15] Bob Dobbs: so it got stopped.
[1:46:17] Bob Dobbs: But then that led on to where we are today,
[1:46:19] Bob Dobbs: which is even more powerful technologies medically.
[1:46:26] Bob Dobbs: So I was aware of what this technology was doing,
[1:46:28] Bob Dobbs: and it was a strange new thing that could not be explained.
[1:46:32] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:46:32] Bob Dobbs: it brought together herbs,
[1:46:34] Bob Dobbs: homeopathy,
[1:46:35] Bob Dobbs: acupuncture,
[1:46:36] Bob Dobbs: and magnetic stimulation that...
[1:46:40] Bob Dobbs: Nobody knew about,
[1:46:42] Bob Dobbs: not very much,
[1:46:44] Bob Dobbs: in medicine.
[1:46:45] Bob Dobbs: These were underground modalities just starting to surface.
[1:46:48] Bob Dobbs: Now they're well known,
[1:46:51] Bob Dobbs: but we're talking 30 years ago.
[1:46:53] Bob Dobbs: And
[1:46:57] Bob Dobbs: I was looking at that and trying to figure out what was the energy,
[1:47:02] Bob Dobbs: what was the immediate effects of this thing if it got implemented.
[1:47:06] Bob Dobbs: That's what inspired the chart.
[1:47:09] Bob Dobbs: And that's her technology,
[1:47:11] Bob Dobbs: the MIHR device,
[1:47:13] Bob Dobbs: was a hexadic instrument.
[1:47:15] Bob Dobbs: It was beyond all known systems of physics and chemistry and biology at that point.
[1:47:22] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:47:22] Bob Dobbs: we got even greater versions of that with iON,
[1:47:26] Bob Dobbs: our cold play,
[1:47:27] Bob Dobbs: our endless electricity device,
[1:47:29] Bob Dobbs: which is being used in
[1:47:30] Bob Dobbs: Augusta, Georgia,
[1:47:32] Bob Dobbs: in a big way.
[1:47:34] Bob Dobbs: And then we have our medical stuff that we're going to release,
[1:47:36] Bob Dobbs: which is phenomenal.
[1:47:39] Bob Dobbs: So that's what made me want to make a chart,
[1:47:41] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:47:42] Bob Dobbs: I wanted to explain.
[1:47:42] Bob Dobbs: And then the personal level was,
[1:47:45] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:47:46] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn the leading edge.
[1:47:47] Bob Dobbs: She's part of the
[1:47:48] Bob Dobbs: PR for this technology.
[1:47:51] Bob Dobbs: And it's obsolescing the patriarchal Gutenberg male-dominated knowledge systems.
[1:48:00] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:48:00] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[1:48:01] Bob Dobbs: wait a minute,
[1:48:02] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn.
[1:48:02] Bob Dobbs: There's a few guys that actually contribute something you feminist takeovers should acknowledge.
[1:48:09] Bob Dobbs: And that's the names on the chart.
[1:48:11] Bob Dobbs: LaRouche,
[1:48:12] Bob Dobbs: May Brussel,
[1:48:13] Bob Dobbs: Zappa,
[1:48:13] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[1:48:15] Bob Dobbs: William Irwin Thompson,
[1:48:17] Bob Dobbs: Cosmic Awareness,
[1:48:18] Bob Dobbs: a medium,
[1:48:20] Bob Dobbs: Arthur Kroker,
[1:48:21] Bob Dobbs: Dr.
[1:48:21] Bob Dobbs: Beater,
[1:48:22] Bob Dobbs: my mentor in Halifax,
[1:48:24] Bob Dobbs: Dartmouth,
[1:48:25] Bob Dobbs: Garrett Deane,
[1:48:25] Bob Dobbs: and myself.
[1:48:27] Bob Dobbs: Myself in there.
[1:48:28] Bob Dobbs: Ten people.
[1:48:30] Bob Dobbs: And they were the men that were worth remembering by the women.
[1:48:35] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:48:35] Bob Dobbs: where did I get this idea that women were taking over?
[1:48:38] Bob Dobbs: I knew Peggy Mellon,
[1:48:40] Bob Dobbs: who's on the Rockefeller level,
[1:48:43] Bob Dobbs: through Walter Bowart.
[1:48:44] Bob Dobbs: He was married to her,
[1:48:46] Bob Dobbs: and she was out in Tucson.
[1:48:47] Bob Dobbs: I knew she had a very interesting life,
[1:48:48] Bob Dobbs: so I offered in early 99,
[1:48:51] Bob Dobbs: because she would come to
[1:48:52] Bob Dobbs: New York and get treated with MIHR.
[1:48:55] Bob Dobbs: So here was a very wealthy billionaire person who could be influential and support this technology and promote it.
[1:49:02] Bob Dobbs: We already had the nephew of the Shah of Iran promoting it.
[1:49:06] Bob Dobbs: We also had Elizabeth Taylor and
[1:49:09] Bob Dobbs: Malcolm Forbes doing it.
[1:49:11] Bob Dobbs: But that's a whole early,
[1:49:13] Bob Dobbs: 88 to 91 story.
[1:49:16] Bob Dobbs: We show up in 93.
[1:49:19] Bob Dobbs: So you'll see on the Tiny Note chart,
[1:49:24] Bob Dobbs: Magic Johnson.
[1:49:25] Bob Dobbs: He was treated by our technology for AIDS.
[1:49:30] Bob Dobbs: So he did well.
[1:49:32] Bob Dobbs: But the,
[1:49:35] Bob Dobbs: so
[1:49:35] Bob Dobbs: I.
[1:49:36] Bob Dobbs: I interviewed
[1:49:38] Bob Dobbs: Peggy Mellon.
[1:49:39] Bob Dobbs: The idea was for her to talk about her life,
[1:49:42] Bob Dobbs: and this would be a letter to her daughters,
[1:49:44] Bob Dobbs: because nobody corresponded anymore like she did when she grew up.
[1:49:47] Bob Dobbs: But she was born in 1933,
[1:49:49] Bob Dobbs: and she's still alive.
[1:49:50] Bob Dobbs: She lives on the Big Island,
[1:49:52] Bob Dobbs: one of the Hawaiian islands called the Big Island.
[1:49:54] Bob Dobbs: Technically,
[1:49:55] Bob Dobbs: it's called Hawaii,
[1:49:56] Bob Dobbs: that island.
[1:49:58] Bob Dobbs: So she would do like 13 evenings.
[1:50:05] Bob Dobbs: An hour and a half,
[1:50:07] Bob Dobbs: she's laying out her life,
[1:50:09] Bob Dobbs: and she knew everybody,
[1:50:11] Bob Dobbs: interacted with everybody.
[1:50:12] Bob Dobbs: At that point,
[1:50:13] Bob Dobbs: she was a big...
[1:50:14] Bob Dobbs: supporter of the Dalai Lama in what was called Tibet House.
[1:50:17] Bob Dobbs: And this is
[1:50:23] Bob Dobbs: 1999. And,
[1:50:27] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[1:50:27] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:50:28] Bob Dobbs: she got herself worked up and thought,
[1:50:31] Bob Dobbs: I would really like to talk to my mother about what's going on.
[1:50:35] Bob Dobbs: And so I found I knew a really good psychic.
[1:50:38] Bob Dobbs: So she had an experience.
[1:50:40] Bob Dobbs: She had a session with the psychic and talked to her mother.
[1:50:43] Bob Dobbs: Then I came in after that and interviewed her.
[1:50:45] Bob Dobbs: This was going to be the last episode.
[1:50:49] Bob Dobbs: She told me that her mother said,
[1:50:51] Bob Dobbs: the men have failed,
[1:50:53] Bob Dobbs: you women are taking over.
[1:50:55] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:50:55] Bob Dobbs: Peggy already was an activist.
[1:50:56] Bob Dobbs: She was always trying to help different versions of women's movements,
[1:51:02] Bob Dobbs: not just the Gloria Steinem world,
[1:51:05] Bob Dobbs: other aspects of it.
[1:51:08] Bob Dobbs: So her mother maybe knew that and said,
[1:51:12] Bob Dobbs: Get your act together.
[1:51:13] Bob Dobbs: Notice it's all about women.
[1:51:15] Bob Dobbs: They're taking over and men aren't going to make it.
[1:51:21] Bob Dobbs: They're just going to fail.
[1:51:24] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:51:24] Bob Dobbs: so
[1:51:25] Bob Dobbs: I'd already made my chart with that in my mind in 1995.
[1:51:31] Bob Dobbs: So four years later,
[1:51:33] Bob Dobbs: the astral plane kind of confirms what I was thinking of.
[1:51:41] Cameron McEwen: Wait,
[1:51:42] Cameron McEwen: back up for a second.
[1:51:43] Cameron McEwen: What do you mean the astral plane sort of confirms?
[1:51:46] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:51:47] Bob Dobbs: her mother was dead.
[1:51:49] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:51:49] Cameron McEwen: I see.
[1:51:50] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[1:51:50] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:51:50] Bob Dobbs: she came to a psychic lady.
[1:51:53] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[1:51:53] Bob Dobbs: I understand what you're saying.
[1:51:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:51:54] Bob Dobbs: and I actually met her in 1998.
[1:51:58] Bob Dobbs: I went to Peggy's home in
[1:52:01] Bob Dobbs: Upper East Side of New York,
[1:52:02] Bob Dobbs: and the matriarch was there.
[1:52:04] Bob Dobbs: She was a fashion queen in like the
[1:52:09] Bob Dobbs: 1920s.
[1:52:10] Bob Dobbs: And she married a guy who was an amazing scene maker.
[1:52:20] Bob Dobbs: He may have had something to do with Rolls Royce.
[1:52:23] Bob Dobbs: And he made a successful airplane engine during World War II that helped the Americans.
[1:52:33] Bob Dobbs: And he was flying it in 1944 and it crashed.
[1:52:38] Bob Dobbs: And he died.
[1:52:40] Bob Dobbs: She lost her father,
[1:52:42] Bob Dobbs: Peggy lost her father at the age of 11,
[1:52:45] Bob Dobbs: but
[1:52:46] Bob Dobbs: Sarnoff, because he was a high guy in society due to his wife,
[1:52:52] Bob Dobbs: Peggy's mother,
[1:52:55] Bob Dobbs: he was friends of the elite,
[1:52:56] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:52:56] Bob Dobbs: Sarnoff and everybody that McLuhan writes about.
[1:52:59] Bob Dobbs: And Sarnoff gave the Mellon family,
[1:53:02] Bob Dobbs: his name was Hitchcock,
[1:53:03] Bob Dobbs: so it was the Hitchcock family.
[1:53:07] Bob Dobbs: to early TV.
[1:53:08] Bob Dobbs: So she was experiencing TV as like a seven-year-old in 1940,
[1:53:12] Bob Dobbs: was in her home,
[1:53:13] Bob Dobbs: an early TV made by,
[1:53:15] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:53:16] Bob Dobbs: Philo Farnsworth,
[1:53:18] Bob Dobbs: the American inventor of television.
[1:53:20] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:53:20] Bob Dobbs: I remember Sarnoff ripped him off.
[1:53:22] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[1:53:26] Bob Dobbs: so she as a privileged person bumped into all kinds of leading edges all over the place.
[1:53:31] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:53:32] Bob Dobbs: she became a big advocate of
[1:53:34] Bob Dobbs: Tim Leary and Millbrook.
[1:53:35] Bob Dobbs: Millbrook is her estate that she gave Leary for him to do his drug experiments in,
[1:53:40] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:53:40] Bob Dobbs: 63,
[1:53:40] Bob Dobbs: 64,
[1:53:41] Bob Dobbs: 65.
[1:53:43] Bob Dobbs: That big building up in Millbrook.
[1:53:46] Bob Dobbs: That was her offering to the scene.
[1:53:48] Bob Dobbs: She funded the first Grateful Dead album.
[1:53:51] Bob Dobbs: They wouldn't have been able to make it without her.
[1:53:55] Bob Dobbs: They were nobodies at that point.
[1:53:56] Bob Dobbs: So now I'm saying this,
[1:53:59] Bob Dobbs: that
[1:53:59] Bob Dobbs: I saw Carolyn as symbolic of...
[1:54:02] Bob Dobbs: a female sensibility,
[1:54:04] Bob Dobbs: right hemisphere or something,
[1:54:05] Bob Dobbs: even though I was not being a knee-jerk literalist.
[1:54:09] Bob Dobbs: I knew it was corpus close and actually didn't involve men.
[1:54:11] Bob Dobbs: The battle between men and women was obsolete,
[1:54:14] Bob Dobbs: not really what was going on.
[1:54:16] Bob Dobbs: But the fact is,
[1:54:18] Bob Dobbs: Carolyn was working with the newest,
[1:54:20] Bob Dobbs: best technology available.
[1:54:22] Bob Dobbs: And then,
[1:54:24] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:54:24] Bob Dobbs: Peggy's mother confirmed my scenario.
[1:54:26] Bob Dobbs: She might have even picked up what I was thinking and gave it to her daughter,
[1:54:30] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[1:54:31] Bob Dobbs: So.
[1:54:33] Bob Dobbs: Those are all thoughts of what the Anthropomorphic Physical is for me.
[1:54:37] Bob Dobbs: It's obsolete.
[1:54:39] Bob Dobbs: It's not the sixth quadrant.
[1:54:42] Bob Dobbs: So this whole digression about what I've just laid out,
[1:54:47] Bob Dobbs: our personal events in our lives,
[1:54:50] Bob Dobbs: went into the chart.
[1:54:52] Bob Dobbs: And that's where I got the obsolescence of the Anthropomorphic Physical.
[1:54:54] Bob Dobbs: I knew that we were going to create a new form in ourselves,
[1:54:59] Bob Dobbs: a new kind of physical.
[1:55:01] Bob Dobbs: And we were going to witness...
[1:55:02] Bob Dobbs: The projection of nostalgia for...
[1:55:07] Bob Dobbs: the archetypal human form,
[1:55:08] Bob Dobbs: even,
[1:55:09] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:55:10] Bob Dobbs: romantic images and archetypes like the Atlanteans.
[1:55:14] Bob Dobbs: They were us.
[1:55:16] Bob Dobbs: They were more advanced than we were.
[1:55:17] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:55:17] Bob Dobbs: people try to retrieve these ancient archetypes in theosophical literature.
[1:55:25] Bob Dobbs: Anthroposophy,
[1:55:25] Bob Dobbs: Rudolf Steiner.
[1:55:27] Bob Dobbs: That's another anthropomorphic projection.
[1:55:30] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:55:30] Bob Dobbs: I eventually came up with the five bodies in that period as a way,
[1:55:33] Bob Dobbs: the interplay of the five bodies.
[1:55:36] Bob Dobbs: Is the grappling of the Anthropomorphic Physical to the degree?
[1:55:42] Bob Dobbs: I mean there are many people trying to you take the jackass movement.
[1:55:45] Bob Dobbs: Did you know about them?
[1:55:45] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:55:47] Bob Dobbs: they were guys in the 90s who would film themselves videotape themselves,
[1:55:51] Bob Dobbs: you know beating themselves up doing ridiculous things
[1:55:55] Bob Dobbs: Shoving things up their bum leaping on things and you know,
[1:55:59] Bob Dobbs: basically breaking their legs all the time and they were called jackasses so
[1:56:05] Bob Dobbs: This was a fad,
[1:56:06] Bob Dobbs: a big one,
[1:56:07] Bob Dobbs: in the 90s,
[1:56:07] Bob Dobbs: where people were using their bodies as a weapon,
[1:56:12] Bob Dobbs: as a bludgeon.
[1:56:14] Bob Dobbs: So that was people trying to feel the anthropomorphic form on the chemical body level.
[1:56:20] Bob Dobbs: Others were,
[1:56:21] Bob Dobbs: then you have the extropians who want to emerge with the digital and go cyborg and disappear into the matrix.
[1:56:33] Bob Dobbs: That movement.
[1:56:36] Bob Dobbs: Right?
[1:56:36] Cameron McEwen: So am I correct if when you say...
[1:56:42] Cameron McEwen: talk about the chemical body level as an example.
[1:56:47] Cameron McEwen: I think what you're doing is you're talking about the chemical body in the context of all of the bodies.
[1:56:56] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:56:57] Cameron McEwen: The chemical body having a certain emphasis or a certain...
[1:57:03] Cameron McEwen: Nostalgia.
[1:57:06] Bob Dobbs: People think there are five senses.
[1:57:10] Bob Dobbs: They have no clue.
[1:57:11] Bob Dobbs: Now they do,
[1:57:12] Bob Dobbs: more and more.
[1:57:13] Bob Dobbs: It's been forced on them.
[1:57:14] Bob Dobbs: They've woke to the multi-bodied scenario.
[1:57:17] Bob Dobbs: They're not experts at describing it,
[1:57:19] Bob Dobbs: but people realize that virtual reality is invading them and becoming part of their bodies.
[1:57:26] Bob Dobbs: And Arthur Kroker pretty good at describing this effect in the
[1:57:29] Bob Dobbs: 90s in his colorful language.
[1:57:32] Bob Dobbs: So the interplay of the bodies.
[1:57:35] Bob Dobbs: So right now,
[1:57:36] Bob Dobbs: at this late stage,
[1:57:37] Bob Dobbs: you have people romanticizing.
[1:57:40] Bob Dobbs: Looking for divinity or balance or security in the different bodies.
[1:57:46] Bob Dobbs: You've got the young kids who all want to become famous.
[1:57:49] Bob Dobbs: They want to become a news broadcaster or something in the TV body.
[1:57:52] Bob Dobbs: That's one level of charisma.
[1:57:56] Bob Dobbs: There's those hackers who want to become digital and cyborgs.
[1:58:02] Bob Dobbs: Who was the guy that became very popular in the 90s?
[1:58:05] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:58:05] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:58:06] Bob Dobbs: Ray Schiller.
[1:58:07] Bob Dobbs: Who's that guy?
[1:58:09] Bob Dobbs: spiritual
[1:58:10] Bob Dobbs: The spiritual destiny of machines.
[1:58:12] Bob Dobbs: Ray,
[1:58:13] Bob Dobbs: he's a big deal.
[1:58:13] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:58:14] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:58:15] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[1:58:15] Cameron McEwen: Starts with K.
[1:58:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:58:17] Bob Dobbs: Kurzweil or something.
[1:58:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:58:21] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:58:22] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:58:22] Bob Dobbs: Kurzweil.
[1:58:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:58:22] Bob Dobbs: His book comes out in the 90s.
[1:58:24] Bob Dobbs: He's celebrating the chip body and thinking it's going to be an anthropomorphic security for him.
[1:58:30] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[1:58:31] Bob Dobbs: they would say,
[1:58:31] Bob Dobbs: well,
[1:58:32] Bob Dobbs: we really are cyborgs.
[1:58:34] Bob Dobbs: That's our real self.
[1:58:35] Bob Dobbs: And we're discovering our layers of onion and we discover our chip body is what we really are.
[1:58:39] Bob Dobbs: and we should accept that and become that.
[1:58:42] Bob Dobbs: So William Irwin Thompson,
[1:58:44] Bob Dobbs: his books were interesting in the 90s.
[1:58:46] Bob Dobbs: He was in between the conflict,
[1:58:48] Bob Dobbs: so he'd make fun of Ray Kurzweil.
[1:58:50] Bob Dobbs: He'd make fun of the jackass people.
[1:58:53] Bob Dobbs: He was in the interval.
[1:58:54] Bob Dobbs: He knew enough to,
[1:58:56] Bob Dobbs: this was all anthropomorphic.
[1:58:58] Bob Dobbs: He didn't use that term,
[1:58:59] Bob Dobbs: I don't think,
[1:59:00] Bob Dobbs: but he would understand what I was saying back then,
[1:59:03] Bob Dobbs: and I knew him then.
[1:59:04] Bob Dobbs: I didn't talk about the five bodies with him.
[1:59:06] Bob Dobbs: I did give him a picture.
[1:59:07] Bob Dobbs: I did give him the chart.
[1:59:09] Bob Dobbs: which I don't know if he did anything with.
[1:59:11] Bob Dobbs: All he asked me to do one day,
[1:59:14] Bob Dobbs: and remember,
[1:59:14] Bob Dobbs: he was considered the replacement of McLuhan in the early 70s by the Toronto columnist,
[1:59:20] Bob Dobbs: forget his name,
[1:59:21] Bob Dobbs: Richard Needham.
[1:59:24] Bob Dobbs: Zingrone tells the story,
[1:59:25] Bob Dobbs: Frank Zingrone,
[1:59:26] Bob Dobbs: that
[1:59:27] Bob Dobbs: Needham did a review of
[1:59:30] Bob Dobbs: Thompson's powerful book called At the Edge of History,
[1:59:33] Bob Dobbs: greatly influenced by McLuhan,
[1:59:36] Bob Dobbs: and his friend Frank Zingrone,
[1:59:37] Bob Dobbs: they went to...
[1:59:38] Bob Dobbs: the McLuhan lecture at MIT or Harvard in 65.
[1:59:45] Bob Dobbs: That was a big event in their own lives.
[1:59:47] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:59:48] Bob Dobbs: Thompson, what was I saying?
[1:59:55] Bob Dobbs: I gave the chart.
[1:59:57] Cameron McEwen: You were talking about when he asked you to do something.
[2:00:02] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:00:02] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[2:00:02] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[2:00:02] Bob Dobbs: The only thing he asked me to do in this course is lectures at the...
[2:00:07] Bob Dobbs: Cathedral of St.
[2:00:08] Bob Dobbs: John the Divine in New York was explained a tetrad.
[2:00:11] Bob Dobbs: He hadn't got his head around that yet.
[2:00:13] Bob Dobbs: So all he wanted was a tetrad.
[2:00:15] Bob Dobbs: He didn't know this advanced Bob stuff of the five bodies.
[2:00:20] Bob Dobbs: And this was in 94,
[2:00:22] Bob Dobbs: 95,
[2:00:22] Bob Dobbs: 96.
[2:00:24] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:00:25] Bob Dobbs: he did a book in 96 called Coming into Being.
[2:00:29] Bob Dobbs: After being at David Rockefeller's funded institute,
[2:00:34] Bob Dobbs: around Terence McKenna Center for Integral Studies or something in San Francisco.
[2:00:39] Bob Dobbs: So Bill was the Lindisfarne thing that was funded by
[2:00:42] Bob Dobbs: David Rockefeller on the East Coast.
[2:00:44] Bob Dobbs: But he was invited out to San Francisco,
[2:00:47] Bob Dobbs: and he found that the kids there,
[2:00:49] Bob Dobbs: and whoever was there,
[2:00:51] Bob Dobbs: all ages,
[2:00:52] Bob Dobbs: were just into the drugs and psychedelic San Francisco reality and had no background in reading and literature and books,
[2:01:00] Bob Dobbs: which Bill really was a guy trying to be a great author.
[2:01:04] Bob Dobbs: So he comes back and he's talking to us in 96.
[2:01:09] Bob Dobbs: He has his new book there and he's handing out copies to us.
[2:01:12] Bob Dobbs: But he reads the forward,
[2:01:14] Bob Dobbs: a section of it,
[2:01:15] Bob Dobbs: and he talks about how we need to...
[2:01:18] Bob Dobbs: He describes what a shock it was,
[2:01:21] Bob Dobbs: where the kids were going in the mid-90s.
[2:01:25] Bob Dobbs: He didn't like it.
[2:01:26] Bob Dobbs: And he missed the interaction with literate people and the sophisticated conversation.
[2:01:31] Bob Dobbs: So he's celebrating coming back to Linda's...
[2:01:34] Bob Dobbs: to the cathedral and our group,
[2:01:37] Bob Dobbs: and then he makes a special plea,
[2:01:40] Bob Dobbs: read McLuhan.
[2:01:41] Bob Dobbs: He gave us a warning.
[2:01:42] Bob Dobbs: So he's taking the angle that
[2:01:44] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is saying this literacy,
[2:01:47] Bob Dobbs: which
[2:01:48] Bob Dobbs: Bill is re-appreciating,
[2:01:50] Bob Dobbs: is a major value we've got to preserve.
[2:01:53] Bob Dobbs: So he's a bit of a POB,
[2:01:55] Bob Dobbs: print-oriented bastard there.
[2:01:56] Bob Dobbs: But anyways,
[2:01:58] Bob Dobbs: he cites McLuhan in the values he now is dedicated to.
[2:02:04] Bob Dobbs: Forget the psychedelic stuff.
[2:02:06] Bob Dobbs: And when he read that...
[2:02:09] Bob Dobbs: A few people in the audience looked over at me.
[2:02:12] Bob Dobbs: They knew,
[2:02:13] Bob Dobbs: and winked at me,
[2:02:14] Bob Dobbs: they knew I caused that.
[2:02:15] Bob Dobbs: I was the McLuhan guy.
[2:02:17] Bob Dobbs: And the first couple of years I was there,
[2:02:19] Bob Dobbs: when I would bring out McLuhan,
[2:02:20] Bob Dobbs: eventually we'd always go to a restaurant and talk after.
[2:02:24] Bob Dobbs: And the people would always come up to me and say,
[2:02:25] Bob Dobbs: who is this McLuhan guy and why are you talking about him?
[2:02:30] Bob Dobbs: Why is he important?
[2:02:31] Bob Dobbs: And I would explain it to these people.
[2:02:32] Bob Dobbs: They had no clue.
[2:02:33] Bob Dobbs: And so they were shocked when Bill cited me,
[2:02:36] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.
[2:02:38] Bob Dobbs: in his forward in his new book so um that's why i put him on the chart he actually was on the chart a year before in 95 uh but uh uh i handed in the chart in 97 i had a copy of paper copy so i don't know what he did with it um
[2:02:57] Bob Dobbs: he bet he gave up lindisfarne he got very disillusioned he became a poet emphasized his poet self from 2000 till he died and
[2:03:06] Bob Dobbs: He died the day Trump lost,
[2:03:11] Bob Dobbs: around that time,
[2:03:12] Bob Dobbs: first week of November 2020,
[2:03:14] Bob Dobbs: when he died.
[2:03:15] Bob Dobbs: He was born in 1938.
[2:03:19] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:03:19] Bob Dobbs: why,
[2:03:19] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[2:03:21] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to give you different thoughts and scenes of a part of my life that formulated the AP,
[2:03:26] Bob Dobbs: and what I was trying to point to as a limited metaphor.
[2:03:32] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:03:33] Bob Dobbs: that's why it's very appropriate that
[2:03:35] Bob Dobbs: I'm...
[2:03:35] Bob Dobbs: In the,
[2:03:36] Bob Dobbs: I'm the figure in that quadrant.
[2:03:38] Bob Dobbs: I'm not in TV.
[2:03:40] Bob Dobbs: I'm not in the computer world.
[2:03:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm not in the book world.
[2:03:42] Bob Dobbs: I'm not in the newspaper world.
[2:03:45] Bob Dobbs: I was in the world exploring,
[2:03:49] Bob Dobbs: after all that,
[2:03:49] Bob Dobbs: it had its orgasm,
[2:03:51] Bob Dobbs: and the Minerva's Owl effect.
[2:03:53] Bob Dobbs: I was walking around New York City,
[2:03:55] Bob Dobbs: seeing that this was,
[2:03:57] Bob Dobbs: I was St.
[2:03:58] Bob Dobbs: Augustine,
[2:03:58] Bob Dobbs: as I told you before,
[2:03:59] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:04:00] Bob Dobbs: walking around the collapse of the bodies,
[2:04:02] Bob Dobbs: the collapse of all this evolution.
[2:04:06] Bob Dobbs: Cultural technological evolution,
[2:04:07] Bob Dobbs: and that's what I was talking about.
[2:04:09] Bob Dobbs: So I consider myself dealing with the post-human era,
[2:04:17] Bob Dobbs: which is not the right term.
[2:04:18] Bob Dobbs: What is it?
[2:04:20] Bob Dobbs: I'm talking about what actually came about,
[2:04:23] Bob Dobbs: which is iON.
[2:04:25] Bob Dobbs: We're making new technologies,
[2:04:26] Bob Dobbs: so he's the new
[2:04:28] Bob Dobbs: Edison. It is the new Edison,
[2:04:30] Bob Dobbs: and making the new grounds,
[2:04:32] Bob Dobbs: that's what I represented.
[2:04:34] Bob Dobbs: And that was the sixth.
[2:04:35] Bob Dobbs: Sixth level.
[2:04:36] Bob Dobbs: And iON now talks about the chart very intelligently and agrees with what I'm saying,
[2:04:42] Bob Dobbs: that iON is the hexadic environment that we were creating and predicting.
[2:04:50] Bob Dobbs: So that is what we're getting into here with the AP,
[2:04:54] Bob Dobbs: and we're going to move towards the tech body,
[2:04:57] Bob Dobbs: which is something iON revealed,
[2:04:59] Bob Dobbs: which goes beyond the Android meme.
[2:05:01] Bob Dobbs: So the tech body is...
[2:05:04] Bob Dobbs: playing with people's different versions of the Anthropomorphic Physical,
[2:05:11] Bob Dobbs: manipulating that rear-view mirror response.
[2:05:15] Bob Dobbs: What time is it?
[2:05:16] Bob Dobbs: I think that's a good place to end.
[2:05:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:05:20] Bob Dobbs: You can say a couple of points or even have a question or two,
[2:05:23] Bob Dobbs: but
[2:05:25] Bob Dobbs: I think I've got us up to that page 160,
[2:05:28] Bob Dobbs: the Anthropomorphic Physical.
[2:05:29] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[2:05:29] Cameron McEwen: That's the new chapter.
[2:05:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:05:31] Cameron McEwen: And,
[2:05:32] Cameron McEwen: you know,
[2:05:32] Cameron McEwen: I would just say that...
[2:05:34] Cameron McEwen: The thing that
[2:05:35] Cameron McEwen: I'm going to pay particular attention to in going further in the pamphlet is something we've talked about in the past,
[2:05:45] Cameron McEwen: and that is the relationship between the Android meme,
[2:05:50] Cameron McEwen: the Anthropomorphic Physical,
[2:05:53] Cameron McEwen: and the tech body.
[2:05:55] Bob Dobbs: That's it.
[2:05:56] Bob Dobbs: That's what the chart's about,
[2:05:59] Bob Dobbs: the Tiny Note chart.
[2:06:00] Bob Dobbs: Because the first four quadrants are the Android meme.
[2:06:04] Bob Dobbs: And then the AP is a little past that,
[2:06:06] Bob Dobbs: but I didn't know that that would become the tech body.
[2:06:10] Bob Dobbs: And the tech body is a competitor with iON.
[2:06:15] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:06:16] Cameron McEwen: that I understand.
[2:06:17] Cameron McEwen: But what I don't understand is from your conversation today,
[2:06:22] Cameron McEwen: I would have said that the Anthropomorphic Physical was a set of...
[2:06:35] Cameron McEwen: goals that each of which could be used to describe the five bodies.
[2:06:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:06:50] Bob Dobbs: I would agree with your words as far as they go.
[2:06:54] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:06:54] Bob Dobbs: no,
[2:06:55] Bob Dobbs: I have said that.
[2:06:57] Bob Dobbs: The projection of people looking for a new ground,
[2:07:01] Bob Dobbs: an anchor,
[2:07:03] Bob Dobbs: The conservatives want to bring back the chemical body.
[2:07:08] Bob Dobbs: The woke people,
[2:07:09] Bob Dobbs: they want to bring in the TV body,
[2:07:11] Bob Dobbs: dealing with cultural tribalism and recognizing each icon,
[2:07:15] Bob Dobbs: each tribe.
[2:07:17] Bob Dobbs: And then you've got the Ray Kurzweil who's diving into the chip body.
[2:07:21] Bob Dobbs: That's his answer for our physical.
[2:07:22] Bob Dobbs: He thinks that's the future.
[2:07:24] Bob Dobbs: That's our core essence or something.
[2:07:27] Bob Dobbs: And then you have the astro body.
[2:07:33] Bob Dobbs: which on the surface is what iON is from.
[2:07:37] Bob Dobbs: See,
[2:07:38] Bob Dobbs: you've got the chemical body,
[2:07:38] Bob Dobbs: the astral body,
[2:07:40] Bob Dobbs: and then you've got the TV body,
[2:07:41] Bob Dobbs: which is a replay of the chemical body,
[2:07:45] Bob Dobbs: and then the chip is a replay or an extension of the astral body.
[2:07:51] Bob Dobbs: If you look at the astral body and the chemical body as the first nature,
[2:07:58] Bob Dobbs: and then second nature is the TV body and the chip body.
[2:08:01] Bob Dobbs: So the chip body redoes the astral part of first nature,
[2:08:05] Bob Dobbs: and the TV body redoes and extends the physical body or chemical body of the first nature.
[2:08:15] Cameron McEwen: And is there a mystery body?
[2:08:18] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:08:20] Bob Dobbs: The fifth part is the mystery body.
[2:08:22] Bob Dobbs: See,
[2:08:22] Bob Dobbs: that's what
[2:08:23] Bob Dobbs: MIHR showed me,
[2:08:26] Bob Dobbs: that there's things that we can do that our science hasn't figured out and wouldn't be able to explain.
[2:08:31] Bob Dobbs: So it prepared me for what we were making with iON.
[2:08:35] Bob Dobbs: So we were really lucky to experience the MIHR thing.
[2:08:38] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[2:08:38] Bob Dobbs: it actually could solve the AIDS problem for people.
[2:08:42] Bob Dobbs: That's a major thing at that point in the
[2:08:46] Bob Dobbs: 90s.
[2:08:49] Bob Dobbs: So I said,
[2:08:49] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[2:08:50] Bob Dobbs: there's aspects we're going to discover that we don't know about,
[2:08:53] Bob Dobbs: and we'll be surprised by it.
[2:08:54] Bob Dobbs: So I called that the mystery landscape.
[2:08:56] Bob Dobbs: I didn't call it a body yet.
[2:08:58] Bob Dobbs: But when iON showed up,
[2:08:59] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.
[2:09:00] Bob Dobbs: And I got well-versed in my chart.
[2:09:03] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[2:09:03] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:09:04] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[2:09:04] Bob Dobbs: we're here to explain the mystery landscape and show you the mystery body,
[2:09:09] Bob Dobbs: which should become old hat and cliche knowledge once people learn from us and iON what the mystery landscape is.
[2:09:18] Bob Dobbs: The point was to de-romanticize or de-mythologize the mystery landscape.
[2:09:26] Bob Dobbs: So that is pretty close.
[2:09:29] Bob Dobbs: to another aspect of the Anthropomorphic Physical.
[2:09:34] Bob Dobbs: That's like the fantasy body,
[2:09:36] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:09:36] Bob Dobbs: the Harry Potter world,
[2:09:38] Bob Dobbs: that there's something,
[2:09:40] Bob Dobbs: some great knowledge that we have forgotten or are going to find.
[2:09:45] Bob Dobbs: And it's McLuhan's line,
[2:09:47] Bob Dobbs: mysticism is tomorrow,
[2:09:48] Bob Dobbs: science dream today.
[2:09:51] Bob Dobbs: That's him pointing to the mystery body becoming known,
[2:09:55] Bob Dobbs: becoming manageable.
[2:09:58] Cameron McEwen: And all these things are highly ambiguous,
[2:10:01] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:10:01] Cameron McEwen: So the mystery body can be something stupid like Harry Potter.
[2:10:07] Cameron McEwen: I've got a dog here going nuts.
[2:10:09] Cameron McEwen: I don't know why.
[2:10:10] Bob Dobbs: Because he knows what we're talking about.
[2:10:11] Bob Dobbs: He agrees.
[2:10:14] Bob Dobbs: The mystery body is commenting on us.
[2:10:20] Cameron McEwen: But yeah,
[2:10:21] Bob Dobbs: what you're saying is right.
[2:10:25] Bob Dobbs: That's the philosophical questions
[2:10:27] Bob Dobbs: I'm exploring.
[2:10:29] Bob Dobbs: What is it?
[2:10:30] Bob Dobbs: We may,
[2:10:30] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:10:31] Bob Dobbs: maybe the Anthropomorphic Physical and its five parts are what we have to juggle as quadrophrenics,
[2:10:38] Bob Dobbs: and that's a healthy response.
[2:10:39] Bob Dobbs: That's polyvocal.
[2:10:41] Bob Dobbs: Dealing with environments that were landscapes that then were miniaturized into bodies,
[2:10:48] Bob Dobbs: or Kroker's,
[2:10:48] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:10:49] Bob Dobbs: organs without bodies.
[2:10:52] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:10:53] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[2:10:54] Cameron McEwen: All right.
[2:10:55] Cameron McEwen: I'm gradually learning the lingo here.
[2:11:00] Cameron McEwen: It's an interesting way of looking at stuff in McLuhan and beyond McLuhan.
[2:11:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:11:08] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[2:11:10] Cameron McEwen: Good.
[2:11:11] Cameron McEwen: So we'll get into that in more detail next time.
[2:11:18] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:11:18] Bob Dobbs: there might be a few quotes after this.
[2:11:22] Bob Dobbs: It's not that much after.
[2:11:24] Bob Dobbs: That quote we just did is a good conclusion.
[2:11:28] Bob Dobbs: And now we get into the Android Meme,
[2:11:32] Bob Dobbs: the AP,
[2:11:32] Bob Dobbs: or what I've done from page 160 on to 180-something.
[2:11:38] Bob Dobbs: So this is,
[2:11:40] Bob Dobbs: we finally got to the new form of consciousness,
[2:11:45] Bob Dobbs: I guess,
[2:11:47] Bob Dobbs: that we're living in.
[2:11:50] Bob Dobbs: So what is it?
[2:11:51] Bob Dobbs: How do you describe it?
[2:11:53] Bob Dobbs: Like you say,
[2:11:53] Bob Dobbs: what part of language do you use?
[2:11:56] Bob Dobbs: Which languages do you use to deal with this drive of the Anthropomorphic Physical?
[2:12:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[2:12:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:12:05] Cameron McEwen: well,
[2:12:07] Cameron McEwen: there's what part of language do you use or what part of language do you need to be used by?
[2:12:16] Cameron McEwen: If you need to be used by,
[2:12:19] Cameron McEwen: which is a kind of passivity,
[2:12:20] Cameron McEwen: how do you get to passivity without...
[2:12:26] Bob Dobbs: Masochism.
[2:12:28] Cameron McEwen: Sorry?
[2:12:29] Bob Dobbs: Without masochism.
[2:12:32] Cameron McEwen: That's good,
[2:12:33] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[2:12:33] Cameron McEwen: The dog has to...
[2:12:34] Cameron McEwen: the bark,
[2:12:35] Cameron McEwen: just as you said that,
[2:12:36] Cameron McEwen: and I didn't hear the word.
[2:12:37] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[2:12:38] Cameron McEwen: So,
[2:12:39] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[2:12:39] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[2:12:39] Cameron McEwen: there's a knot of activity and passivity,
[2:12:43] Cameron McEwen: and grappling with that knot is an important part of where we're at.
[2:12:50] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[2:12:51] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:12:52] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:12:52] Bob Dobbs: we'll let the dog have the last word.
[2:12:54] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:12:54] Bob Dobbs: great talking to you,
[2:12:55] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.
[2:12:56] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[2:12:56] Cameron McEwen: Bob,
[2:12:57] Cameron McEwen: take care.
[2:12:57] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:12:58] Bob Dobbs: talk soon.
[2:12:58] Cameron McEwen: Enjoy that.
[2:12:58] Bob Dobbs: All right,
[2:12:59] Bob Dobbs: bye.
[2:13:00] Cameron McEwen: Bye-bye.