[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[00:03] Bob Dobbs: Cameron and Bob are back,
[00:05] Bob Dobbs: and we're going into episode number 79,
[00:08] Bob Dobbs: and we're going to the top of page 164 of my probe about what is the tech body.
[00:18] Bob Dobbs: And we've come to the point in this article pamphlet of finding out what the hell is a tech body,
[00:25] Bob Dobbs: and what is that as opposed to the Android meme,
[00:29] Bob Dobbs: and what does McLuhan mean by...
[00:31] Bob Dobbs: technology coming alive,
[00:33] Bob Dobbs: which is the beginning point I like to take,
[00:35] Bob Dobbs: or show that McLuhan was talking about something that became popular years later,
[00:42] Bob Dobbs: I guess as discussed as virtual reality.
[00:45] Bob Dobbs: So
[00:47] Bob Dobbs: Cameron and I were just talking...
[00:48] Cameron McEwen: We should note that it's the 7th of December.
[00:52] Bob Dobbs: Is that what it is?
[00:54] Bob Dobbs: World War II?
[00:57] Bob Dobbs: Pearl Harbor?
[01:00] Cameron McEwen: 7th of December 2023.
[01:03] Bob Dobbs: Is there a reason you're citing the number?
[01:07] Cameron McEwen: Just that usually when we talk about the conversation we're having,
[01:12] Cameron McEwen: we identify the date.
[01:14] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[01:17] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[01:18] Bob Dobbs: just give me a,
[01:19] Bob Dobbs: what did you just say that I said,
[01:21] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[01:21] Bob Dobbs: that's what I want to talk about?
[01:23] Bob Dobbs: Just say a few words,
[01:24] Bob Dobbs: not the whole idea.
[01:25] Bob Dobbs: What were the last words we said before we started recording?
[01:30] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[01:30] Cameron McEwen: we mentioned that on this page,
[01:32] Cameron McEwen: 164,
[01:34] Cameron McEwen: it gets down to...
[01:35] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[01:35] Bob Dobbs: the House of Dead.
[01:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[01:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[01:38] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[01:39] Bob Dobbs: So we're at top 164.
[01:43] Bob Dobbs: We went over the Arthur Kroker 1993 quote from Spasm last episode in 78.
[01:51] Bob Dobbs: And then we're into section five,
[01:58] Bob Dobbs: is it?
[02:02] Bob Dobbs: Where are we?
[02:03] Bob Dobbs: I'm up there.
[02:04] Bob Dobbs: 162?
[02:08] Cameron McEwen: 160 starts Section 5,
[02:12] Cameron McEwen: the Anthropomorphic Physical,
[02:13] Cameron McEwen: the AP.
[02:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[02:15] Bob Dobbs: So the AP anticipates or is a figure for the tech body,
[02:24] Bob Dobbs: even though it's the later stage of the Android meme.
[02:27] Bob Dobbs: There's an overlap there.
[02:30] Bob Dobbs: So
[02:32] Bob Dobbs: I'm now going down.
[02:32] Cameron McEwen: Overlap between what?
[02:36] Bob Dobbs: Between the Android meme and the tech body,
[02:37] Bob Dobbs: the AP comes in.
[02:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[02:44] Cameron McEwen: My understanding of the AP is that the AP is a natural plurality and that the
[02:54] Cameron McEwen: Android meme and the tech body are both examples of um,
[02:59] Cameron McEwen: the AP.
[03:01] Cameron McEwen: Is that wrong?
[03:03] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[03:03] Bob Dobbs: I say the AP is the liberation of human scale up against these massive environments for a couple hundred years,
[03:16] Bob Dobbs: and as they shrunk,
[03:17] Bob Dobbs: what we call from Don Theall,
[03:19] Bob Dobbs: the co-anesthetic,
[03:21] Bob Dobbs: so that everybody is in the driver's seat in their blogging.
[03:27] Bob Dobbs: We're at Web 2.0,
[03:28] Bob Dobbs: it might even be Web 3.0,
[03:30] Bob Dobbs: as people have command of everything digitally,
[03:36] Bob Dobbs: which was the Android meme bigger than people in its early years,
[03:40] Bob Dobbs: and 1.0 is now smaller.
[03:43] Bob Dobbs: But it has,
[03:44] Bob Dobbs: and so the idea that we've got human scale,
[03:48] Bob Dobbs: a lot of people project that's reestablishing the autonomy of the chemical body,
[03:54] Bob Dobbs: the physical body.
[03:56] Bob Dobbs: And that might be the neoconservativism or the alt-right celebrating original
[04:05] Bob Dobbs: American Constitution and anti-big government and all this stuff.
[04:11] Bob Dobbs: That is a misnomer for what's going on because you only have this feeling of superiority to your media environment through the holeopathic effect of the chip body.
[04:24] Bob Dobbs: This is a delusion caused by the chip body.
[04:29] Bob Dobbs: But it is a new effect.
[04:31] Bob Dobbs: And so
[04:32] Bob Dobbs: I'm trying to figure out how to describe the AP by showing how people misidentify with it.
[04:41] Cameron McEwen: But if I were to describe what you just described,
[04:45] Cameron McEwen: I would say that,
[04:47] Cameron McEwen: to put it in McLuhan's terms,
[04:49] Cameron McEwen: that what happens in the 20th century is that...
[04:55] Cameron McEwen: People come to understand that all human experience presupposes an immersion in the unconscious.
[05:05] Cameron McEwen: And the unconscious for McLuhan is a myriad of possibilities.
[05:11] Bob Dobbs: Oh wait,
[05:12] Bob Dobbs: you flipped out.
[05:13] Bob Dobbs: A myriad of what?
[05:14] Cameron McEwen: Possibility.
[05:15] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[05:17] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[05:17] Cameron McEwen: So at every instant,
[05:20] Cameron McEwen: the human being is going into the unconscious and selecting out of the unconscious a way of looking at the world.
[05:32] Cameron McEwen: So what you were just calling being in the driver's seat is what the human subject is.
[05:40] Cameron McEwen: is in the unconscious except that being a driver's seat isn't conscious.
[05:50] Cameron McEwen: Don't know that that's what they're doing.
[05:53] Cameron McEwen: So we shouldn't understand the history that you're talking about as something that is only sort of out there in the world.
[06:06] Cameron McEwen: It's at the same time it is interior.
[06:09] Cameron McEwen: And what needs to be understood is the relationship between that outer history and the inner drama.
[06:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[06:17] Bob Dobbs: so I give McLuhan credit for coming up with a
[06:23] Bob Dobbs: 50% better definition of the unconscious as our extended environment,
[06:27] Bob Dobbs: technology.
[06:28] Bob Dobbs: So it goes beyond Freud,
[06:29] Bob Dobbs: Jung,
[06:31] Bob Dobbs: or Bateson,
[06:31] Bob Dobbs: or anybody else that thinks the environment is some kind of unconscious.
[06:35] Bob Dobbs: It's more particular,
[06:36] Bob Dobbs: the environment as technologies.
[06:39] Bob Dobbs: But I agree that these technologies,
[06:41] Bob Dobbs: as they get pretty ethereal,
[06:43] Bob Dobbs: you might be in a level of mind or what you call inner that is not technologies like television and radio and these last phases of analog media that
[06:58] Bob Dobbs: were objective,
[06:59] Bob Dobbs: they seem,
[07:00] Bob Dobbs: to people.
[07:01] Bob Dobbs: So the objectivity has flipped,
[07:03] Bob Dobbs: and that just occurs to me right now to say that may be why we start...
[07:08] Bob Dobbs: thinking something alive is growing out there because we have displaced where the aliveness is because we can't use our biology to use it as alive.
[07:19] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[07:19] Bob Dobbs: we might say our minds,
[07:21] Bob Dobbs: but even that's questionable.
[07:23] Bob Dobbs: So your definition of the unconscious is what we're exploring,
[07:27] Bob Dobbs: what we are not sure what it is.
[07:30] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[07:31] Cameron McEwen: And that applies also to the whole concept of what being alive means.
[07:38] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[07:39] Cameron McEwen: So both in regards to the unconscious,
[07:44] Cameron McEwen: in terms of being alive,
[07:45] Cameron McEwen: in terms of being in the driver's seat,
[07:48] Cameron McEwen: all these things emerge as questions.
[07:53] Cameron McEwen: And the whole topic that we're getting into here is how does an individual and a society
[08:07] Cameron McEwen: come to live with the possibilities before it.
[08:13] Bob Dobbs: And with awareness.
[08:15] Bob Dobbs: And so McLuhan said maybe original sin is not wanting to be aware.
[08:19] Bob Dobbs: But I was telling some friends yesterday,
[08:22] Bob Dobbs: well,
[08:23] Bob Dobbs: earlier today on office hours,
[08:24] Bob Dobbs: on Wednesday on the radio,
[08:26] Bob Dobbs: that you can't use traditional meanings of awareness.
[08:30] Bob Dobbs: None of the techniques in shaman land or yoga land or philosophy land about...
[08:37] Bob Dobbs: getting the population aware of something,
[08:40] Bob Dobbs: that doesn't work.
[08:41] Bob Dobbs: That's not what awareness is anymore.
[08:43] Bob Dobbs: So awareness is part of the exploration here.
[08:46] Bob Dobbs: What is awareness?
[08:46] Bob Dobbs: What's the unconscious?
[08:47] Bob Dobbs: What is conscious?
[08:49] Bob Dobbs: What is the mind?
[08:50] Bob Dobbs: And what is self-awareness of the mind?
[08:52] Bob Dobbs: All those terms are what we're talking about.
[08:55] Bob Dobbs: But you have to know that it's not too useful to quote anybody in the past as if they've solved it and we need to recover whatever they were talking about.
[09:07] Bob Dobbs: So there's a whole democracy of contribution by anybody about discussing what we're supposed to be aware of,
[09:15] Bob Dobbs: and that is what the blogosphere,
[09:18] Bob Dobbs: the Web 2.0,
[09:19] Bob Dobbs: the Everybody in a Driver's Seat,
[09:21] Bob Dobbs: they all got their anthropomorphic notions of what awareness is or what human is or where we should be getting to.
[09:30] Cameron McEwen: And,
[09:31] Bob Dobbs: of course,
[09:31] Bob Dobbs: that would be past,
[09:32] Bob Dobbs: present,
[09:32] Bob Dobbs: future because you can evoke images from the past or…
[09:36] Bob Dobbs: possibilities in the future or the present that is the extent of what we're questioning and if you really see that you might shut up and just see what mistakes people are making who don't shut up and what they think they're trying to say you're
[09:51] Bob Dobbs: ready to not respond positively to what they're saying uh because they haven't recognized the need for silence or correct to recognize it's really hard to talk about this oh yeah what are you saying
[10:06] Cameron McEwen: I'm saying that what you've been talking about for the last two minutes,
[10:10] Cameron McEwen: I think,
[10:11] Cameron McEwen: is 100%
[10:12] Cameron McEwen: correct,
[10:13] Cameron McEwen: except where you started.
[10:15] Cameron McEwen: And where you started,
[10:16] Cameron McEwen: you said that
[10:17] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan regarded original sin as the failure to be aware.
[10:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[10:23] Cameron McEwen: But
[10:24] Cameron McEwen: I think McLuhan regarded original sin as the deception of being aware.
[10:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[10:32] Cameron McEwen: that
[10:33] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,
[10:34] Cameron McEwen: we have to realize that awareness is,
[10:39] Cameron McEwen: at the end of the day,
[10:40] Cameron McEwen: is extremely questionable.
[10:43] Cameron McEwen: That the human ability to be aware,
[10:50] Cameron McEwen: at bottom,
[10:52] Cameron McEwen: never comes to an end.
[10:54] Cameron McEwen: It's always subject to exploration,
[10:56] Cameron McEwen: it's always subject to ambiguity,
[10:59] Cameron McEwen: it's always subject to new definition.
[11:06] Bob Dobbs: So the dialectic is most people,
[11:09] Bob Dobbs: especially in the West,
[11:11] Bob Dobbs: think going back to something in books is awareness.
[11:15] Bob Dobbs: And they're up against people who recognize the fallacy of that,
[11:19] Bob Dobbs: but they don't get the possibilities,
[11:23] Bob Dobbs: the advantages,
[11:24] Bob Dobbs: or how to talk about the post book.
[11:26] Bob Dobbs: And so you got the maybe liberals are pro post book.
[11:32] Bob Dobbs: And conservatives or ecologists are pro-book.
[11:37] Bob Dobbs: And that's the conflict here in media terms.
[11:40] Bob Dobbs: And the liberals are,
[11:42] Bob Dobbs: because they don't know to study McLuhan and maybe the men of 1914,
[11:46] Bob Dobbs: to recognize that what they think is coming,
[11:50] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[11:51] Bob Dobbs: what are those guys called?
[11:52] Bob Dobbs: The trans,
[11:53] Bob Dobbs: the optimists,
[11:54] Bob Dobbs: the trans technology.
[11:59] Bob Dobbs: They want to chop their heads off,
[12:00] Bob Dobbs: have their head preserved,
[12:01] Bob Dobbs: and then someday technology can reawaken their head.
[12:05] Bob Dobbs: What are those guys called?
[12:09] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[12:10] Cameron McEwen: you're talking about the people that get frozen?
[12:13] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[12:15] Bob Dobbs: there's a term for them years ago.
[12:19] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[12:22] Bob Dobbs: the transformation cult.
[12:27] Bob Dobbs: The hoping that technology will save you,
[12:32] Bob Dobbs: that's what the,
[12:33] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[12:33] Bob Dobbs: liberals are for.
[12:34] Bob Dobbs: They think Trump,
[12:36] Bob Dobbs: the right wing are,
[12:38] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[12:40] Bob Dobbs: neocon
[12:41] Bob Dobbs: troglodytes trying to grab something in the past that they know doesn't apply.
[12:46] Bob Dobbs: But they don't seem to be sophisticated enough to know why that doesn't apply.
[12:50] Bob Dobbs: They don't see the technological changes and the grounds and the laws of that that you can figure out.
[12:56] Bob Dobbs: put in order what happened in the past and avoid the ideological political arguments.
[13:05] Bob Dobbs: And the
[13:08] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg guys think that's a lot of pipe dreams.
[13:12] Bob Dobbs: So they're both inadequate,
[13:15] Bob Dobbs: and we're not talking within either one of them.
[13:18] Bob Dobbs: We're trying to say there is a tradition or there is something that's been developed that
[13:24] Bob Dobbs: But...
[13:25] Bob Dobbs: gets to the issue of what we're supposed to be aware of,
[13:29] Bob Dobbs: or what we're supposed to recognize as our unconscious,
[13:33] Bob Dobbs: any of those terms.
[13:35] Bob Dobbs: That's what we're talking to.
[13:37] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[13:37] Bob Dobbs: I think some of the,
[13:38] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[13:39] Bob Dobbs: liberals might think they're talking about it when they get into virtual reality,
[13:44] Bob Dobbs: or
[13:45] Bob Dobbs: Ray Kurzweil says machines are spiritual.
[13:47] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[13:48] Bob Dobbs: there is an attempt to grasp it.
[13:54] Bob Dobbs: Let's go for this quote to see if I come up with anything.
[13:58] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[13:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[13:59] Cameron McEwen: Fire away.
[14:01] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[14:02] Bob Dobbs: Top of 164.
[14:04] Bob Dobbs: As we move into the more extreme case of the present cloned ESP environment.
[14:09] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[14:10] Bob Dobbs: That's an interesting phrase.
[14:11] Bob Dobbs: Cloned ESP.
[14:13] Bob Dobbs: So
[14:14] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said in the
[14:15] Bob Dobbs: 50s, electronics is ESP,
[14:18] Bob Dobbs: but then you have the digital.
[14:21] Bob Dobbs: Extension of the analog electric ESP,
[14:25] Bob Dobbs: which actually takes the analog ESP and manufactures it quickly all over the world with the simulated societies,
[14:35] Bob Dobbs: quick propped up environments in the third world.
[14:38] Bob Dobbs: And so they're cloning the analog ESP environment.
[14:42] Bob Dobbs: I think that's what I mean.
[14:43] Bob Dobbs: The cloned ESP,
[14:45] Bob Dobbs: the cloning of the analog ESP by something that can manipulate it.
[14:50] Bob Dobbs: In other words,
[14:51] Bob Dobbs: it's the ground,
[14:52] Bob Dobbs: which we call virtual reality or the digital or AI.
[14:56] Bob Dobbs: So the present cloned ESP environment is not enough.
[15:01] Bob Dobbs: That's why I add in the tech body.
[15:04] Bob Dobbs: The more extreme case is the present cloned ESP environment.
[15:08] Bob Dobbs: Kroker sort of writes about that,
[15:10] Bob Dobbs: so that's where we've been for the last 30,
[15:12] Bob Dobbs: 40 years.
[15:13] Bob Dobbs: But there's something new that is making people think that our control of the cloned ESP environment is not working.
[15:22] Bob Dobbs: So that's the tech body.
[15:24] Bob Dobbs: So as we move into this dialectic between the cloned ESP and the tech body,
[15:28] Bob Dobbs: perhaps Finnegans Wake will stay the course,
[15:31] Bob Dobbs: in other words,
[15:32] Bob Dobbs: slow us down.
[15:33] Bob Dobbs: as the non-now echoes Frank Zappa's concept of synchronicity.
[15:40] Bob Dobbs: Let's see,
[15:41] Bob Dobbs: do I give a definition?
[15:43] Bob Dobbs: Go down to footnote 64.
[15:46] Bob Dobbs: Where are my footnotes?
[15:48] Cameron McEwen: At the bottom of the page.
[15:51] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[15:51] Bob Dobbs: okay.
[15:56] Cameron McEwen: So that refers to an article in Wikipedia.
[15:59] Bob Dobbs: Hmm.
[16:04] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[16:04] Bob Dobbs: so I'm going to have to explain it a bit.
[16:06] Bob Dobbs: So Zappa would,
[16:07] Bob Dobbs: with his computerized studio,
[16:12] Bob Dobbs: he had lots of recordings of concerts.
[16:14] Bob Dobbs: And so he would take a drum solo from one concert,
[16:18] Bob Dobbs: one song,
[16:19] Bob Dobbs: and then a guitar solo from another song,
[16:22] Bob Dobbs: nothing to do with the first song,
[16:24] Bob Dobbs: and want them to clash,
[16:26] Bob Dobbs: put them together,
[16:28] Bob Dobbs: trying to create dissonance.
[16:29] Bob Dobbs: And he often found...
[16:31] Bob Dobbs: According to his ears,
[16:33] Bob Dobbs: they meshed and resonated together and were consonant,
[16:36] Bob Dobbs: you would say,
[16:37] Bob Dobbs: rather than dissonant.
[16:38] Bob Dobbs: And so that was a strange synchronization.
[16:41] Bob Dobbs: Xeno means strange.
[16:43] Bob Dobbs: Strange synchronization that he was trying to avoid.
[16:47] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[16:47] Bob Dobbs: I took that...
[16:49] Cameron McEwen: Trying to avoid or trying to enact?
[16:52] Bob Dobbs: He's trying to avoid synchronicity.
[16:55] Bob Dobbs: Zappa,
[16:57] Bob Dobbs: half of them wanted to upset people with his sound.
[17:00] Cameron McEwen: Okay.
[17:02] Bob Dobbs: Which might be his way of being an anti-environment.
[17:05] Bob Dobbs: So he would be satirical with his sound.
[17:09] Bob Dobbs: But he also said he would relieve that dissonance with consonants and know that you bring in nice,
[17:16] Bob Dobbs: whatever,
[17:17] Bob Dobbs: harmony melodies or what he called a harmonic climate.
[17:19] Cameron McEwen: So this is what's interesting about what you're saying there for me is that
[17:29] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan...
[17:30] Cameron McEwen: always insists on discontinuity.
[17:33] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[17:34] Cameron McEwen: But discontinuity would not be discontinuity if it excluded continuity.
[17:41] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[17:42] Cameron McEwen: Because if discontinuity ate
[17:45] Cameron McEwen: ATE, if it ate continuity,
[17:48] Cameron McEwen: then there would only be discontinuity,
[17:50] Cameron McEwen: and it wouldn't be discontinuity anymore.
[17:54] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[17:55] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[17:56] Bob Dobbs: So.
[17:58] Bob Dobbs: I was aware of Frank having this strange synchronization.
[18:02] Bob Dobbs: And in a cloned ESP environment,
[18:06] Bob Dobbs: I said the digital Web 2.0 allowed one to disconnect from the analog ESP of television and radio,
[18:17] Bob Dobbs: first half of the 20th century,
[18:19] Bob Dobbs: where there's a kind of a hive mind already,
[18:23] Bob Dobbs: rather than a digital hive mind.
[18:27] Bob Dobbs: Web 1.0 allowed everybody to participate in the analog,
[18:33] Bob Dobbs: have a sense of being detached from it,
[18:35] Bob Dobbs: atomization was their term,
[18:38] Bob Dobbs: and therefore engage in the analog cloned ESP voluntarily.
[18:45] Bob Dobbs: So I had voluntary ESP was subsuming the cloned ESP,
[18:52] Bob Dobbs: the hive mind effect of analog TV.
[18:56] Bob Dobbs: or the global theater under early satellite conditions.
[18:59] Bob Dobbs: So the digital or the virtual enhanced autonomy or created the effect of autonomy,
[19:05] Bob Dobbs: and therefore you didn't have to engage.
[19:08] Bob Dobbs: You didn't have to watch something like everybody else.
[19:10] Bob Dobbs: It was very simple.
[19:12] Bob Dobbs: You could record something,
[19:13] Bob Dobbs: watch it later in your own time.
[19:15] Bob Dobbs: So the synchronization of people discussing what was on TV,
[19:20] Bob Dobbs: that old cliche at the office,
[19:22] Bob Dobbs: became harder to maintain.
[19:24] Bob Dobbs: because people were recording and seeing it at a different time than the other people in the office.
[19:29] Bob Dobbs: So apparently that made people who are naturally social at work as a stress relief,
[19:35] Bob Dobbs: right?
[19:35] Bob Dobbs: You're working,
[19:37] Bob Dobbs: and then the sociality,
[19:38] Bob Dobbs: the coffee break,
[19:39] Bob Dobbs: or whatever they do.
[19:41] Bob Dobbs: I remember reading that in factories in the
[19:43] Bob Dobbs: 90s, people would go outside and fuck on their break,
[19:49] Bob Dobbs: which would be a natural.
[19:51] Bob Dobbs: development of the break,
[19:52] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[19:53] Bob Dobbs: nobody had quote morals anymore.
[19:56] Bob Dobbs: So he just got fucked whenever he could.
[20:00] Bob Dobbs: And maybe a lot of people weren't even married.
[20:01] Bob Dobbs: So that
[20:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[20:07] Bob Dobbs: what was that?
[20:08] Bob Dobbs: That's the desire for sociality,
[20:12] Bob Dobbs: the pros and cons of it.
[20:16] Bob Dobbs: You could disconnect from it more with voluntary ESP and digital technology.
[20:22] Bob Dobbs: So there was a...
[20:25] Cameron McEwen: We should point out how the images that you're talking about here are things that...
[20:35] Cameron McEwen: are going on in the world.
[20:37] Cameron McEwen: So factory workers,
[20:39] Cameron McEwen: for example,
[20:41] Cameron McEwen: they're working in the factory,
[20:43] Cameron McEwen: they're taking breaks and all this sort of stuff.
[20:46] Cameron McEwen: But there's also a mind looking at these factory workers and what they're doing.
[20:55] Cameron McEwen: And as the mind looks on at this,
[21:00] Cameron McEwen: it's almost like a movie or something of people working in the factory.
[21:05] Cameron McEwen: that mind that's looking at this is also developing itself.
[21:12] Cameron McEwen: And so you're always talking about two things happening at the same time.
[21:19] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[21:19] Cameron McEwen: There's a historical objective dimension,
[21:25] Cameron McEwen: and there's an ahistorical subjective dimension.
[21:30] Cameron McEwen: And these things are meshed in that
[21:36] Cameron McEwen: they're never independent of each other.
[21:38] Cameron McEwen: But how they are meshed is not conscious.
[21:44] Cameron McEwen: And that's sociality.
[21:47] Bob Dobbs: The effects of social being are the unconscious.
[21:52] Bob Dobbs: And the mind is reacting.
[21:54] Bob Dobbs: It doesn't want to merge with everything.
[21:56] Bob Dobbs: It wants to maintain some kind of separateness,
[21:58] Bob Dobbs: which would be the Anthropomorphic Physical or the autonomy.
[22:02] Bob Dobbs: the ongoing,
[22:04] Bob Dobbs: what did
[22:05] Bob Dobbs: Buber call it,
[22:06] Bob Dobbs: the I and the thou,
[22:08] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[22:09] Bob Dobbs: that interplay of people,
[22:12] Bob Dobbs: which is all the tension in media.
[22:15] Bob Dobbs: So you're right to say there's a part of your being,
[22:20] Bob Dobbs: call it mind,
[22:21] Bob Dobbs: and maybe that's what I mean by software,
[22:26] Bob Dobbs: is not embedded in hardware.
[22:27] Bob Dobbs: But because the hardware and software is McLuhan's...
[22:31] Bob Dobbs: spells out and Take Today in 1972,
[22:33] Bob Dobbs: it's merging.
[22:34] Bob Dobbs: It's getting harder to say what you're detached from.
[22:38] Bob Dobbs: And that's probably where you start projecting that some technology is getting out of control and it's becoming alive because you can't really even notice where your unconscious is.
[22:50] Bob Dobbs: So that confusion is increasing since Web 1.0.
[22:58] Bob Dobbs: So then I was saying...
[23:04] Bob Dobbs: What was I just saying before that?
[23:06] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[23:07] Bob Dobbs: I was reading here.
[23:08] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[23:08] Bob Dobbs: it's anachrony.
[23:11] Bob Dobbs: So Zappa's there.
[23:13] Bob Dobbs: Something is interfering with his orderly attempt to create dissonance.
[23:17] Bob Dobbs: He can't even make dissonance.
[23:20] Bob Dobbs: Something keeps synchronizing.
[23:22] Bob Dobbs: So then when Zappa died,
[23:28] Bob Dobbs: I heard,
[23:29] Bob Dobbs: well,
[23:29] Bob Dobbs: this is the anniversary.
[23:30] Bob Dobbs: It was December 4th,
[23:31] Bob Dobbs: 30 years ago in 93.
[23:34] Bob Dobbs: So a week or so after,
[23:35] Bob Dobbs: she was on local radio,
[23:37] Bob Dobbs: some rock critic interviewed her about it,
[23:39] Bob Dobbs: and she said that Frank would often think up a song or something,
[23:44] Bob Dobbs: and then he would see news events out there,
[23:48] Bob Dobbs: odd news events,
[23:49] Bob Dobbs: that mirrored his song.
[23:53] Bob Dobbs: So
[23:54] Bob Dobbs: I got from that that they noticed there was a synchronizing with his creativity in the something out there.
[24:01] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[24:02] Bob Dobbs: I found that very interesting because that was my experience.
[24:06] Bob Dobbs: First trigger,
[24:06] Bob Dobbs: I've mentioned it,
[24:07] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[24:07] Bob Dobbs: before,
[24:09] Bob Dobbs: when Nelson told me,
[24:10] Bob Dobbs: Nelson Thall,
[24:12] Bob Dobbs: in the mid-'80s or so,
[24:16] Bob Dobbs: he was in Toronto when the Blues Brothers were being made,
[24:20] Bob Dobbs: and he met
[24:21] Bob Dobbs: Belushi and the other guy,
[24:23] Bob Dobbs: Aykroyd.
[24:24] Bob Dobbs: And so he was looking at it in the late-'80s,
[24:28] Bob Dobbs: and he said,
[24:28] Bob Dobbs: well,
[24:28] Bob Dobbs: geez,
[24:29] Bob Dobbs: they're dancing like Bob.
[24:30] Bob Dobbs: He had seen me dance.
[24:31] Bob Dobbs: And so,
[24:32] Bob Dobbs: you dance like Bob,
[24:34] Bob Dobbs: or Bob,
[24:35] Bob Dobbs: you dance like them.
[24:36] Bob Dobbs: So I looked at it and said,
[24:37] Bob Dobbs: that's interesting.
[24:38] Bob Dobbs: And I had noticed other synchronicities in my behavior and in the media.
[24:42] Bob Dobbs: But I didn't look for it.
[24:44] Bob Dobbs: Other people pointed out.
[24:46] Bob Dobbs: So I call that a strange synchronicity.
[24:48] Bob Dobbs: So I adopted Frank's term,
[24:51] Bob Dobbs: xenocrity,
[24:52] Bob Dobbs: for my own personal meaning.
[24:54] Bob Dobbs: In other words,
[24:55] Bob Dobbs: I was not attempting to be tuned into things.
[25:00] Bob Dobbs: I thought that was a bit obsolete.
[25:01] Bob Dobbs: I was trying to not engage in ESP.
[25:04] Bob Dobbs: I understood,
[25:05] Bob Dobbs: well,
[25:05] Bob Dobbs: you've got to do voluntary ESP.
[25:07] Bob Dobbs: So I was not trying to sync up with anything.
[25:11] Bob Dobbs: And
[25:12] Bob Dobbs: I thought Zappa was trying to do that in his music,
[25:15] Bob Dobbs: but he kept getting sucked in.
[25:16] Bob Dobbs: So
[25:17] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[25:17] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[25:18] Bob Dobbs: I keep getting drawn in,
[25:20] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[25:20] Bob Dobbs: like the guy in Godfather,
[25:21] Bob Dobbs: Al Pacino.
[25:23] Bob Dobbs: Getting drawn in is how his complaint in Godfather III at the beginning.
[25:29] Bob Dobbs: because he's trying to be respectable.
[25:31] Bob Dobbs: So I get being drawn in,
[25:33] Bob Dobbs: and people are telling me,
[25:36] Bob Dobbs: you're right in the middle of this cloned ESP,
[25:38] Bob Dobbs: Bob.
[25:38] Bob Dobbs: Your image keeps showing up.
[25:39] Bob Dobbs: So this happened more and more as I developed different media phenomena through the hundreds of hours of engaging in media that at least a few people would notice.
[25:50] Bob Dobbs: So
[25:51] Bob Dobbs: I'm taking xenochrony as something unique to me.
[25:55] Bob Dobbs: People,
[25:56] Bob Dobbs: the average Joe is out there seeing what he can identify with.
[25:59] Bob Dobbs: And so on my
[26:01] Bob Dobbs: Facebook page,
[26:02] Bob Dobbs: no,
[26:02] Bob Dobbs: my original site before Facebook,
[26:05] Bob Dobbs: well,
[26:05] Bob Dobbs: 2005,
[26:07] Bob Dobbs: fivebody.com,
[26:08] Bob Dobbs: I had people in there,
[26:09] Bob Dobbs: and they would engage with me,
[26:11] Bob Dobbs: but they would start seeing themselves in different places,
[26:15] Bob Dobbs: or they would try to see themselves.
[26:16] Bob Dobbs: They thought that's what I meant,
[26:18] Bob Dobbs: that I was trying to see myself.
[26:19] Bob Dobbs: And I said,
[26:20] Bob Dobbs: no,
[26:20] Bob Dobbs: I'm not.
[26:20] Bob Dobbs: But they didn't get that.
[26:22] Bob Dobbs: They would see themselves and say,
[26:23] Bob Dobbs: wow,
[26:24] Bob Dobbs: that synchronizes with me.
[26:25] Bob Dobbs: So they were into synchronicity.
[26:28] Bob Dobbs: Electric synchronicity.
[26:30] Bob Dobbs: They were catching up to the cloned ESP thing.
[26:32] Bob Dobbs: They weren't into voluntary disconnection,
[26:37] Bob Dobbs: voluntary ESP.
[26:39] Bob Dobbs: So
[26:39] Bob Dobbs: I was surprised to hear that
[26:42] Bob Dobbs: Frank and Gail noticed that happening in Zappa.
[26:46] Bob Dobbs: So I said,
[26:47] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[26:47] Bob Dobbs: if you're a powerful creator,
[26:50] Bob Dobbs: maybe the environment,
[26:51] Bob Dobbs: this living
[26:53] Bob Dobbs: Android meme,
[26:54] Bob Dobbs: responds to somebody who's powerful,
[26:56] Bob Dobbs: who understands what the...
[26:58] Bob Dobbs: Hive Mind is going through in the Cloned ESP and is trying not to engage it.
[27:02] Bob Dobbs: Therefore,
[27:02] Bob Dobbs: the Android
[27:02] Bob Dobbs: meme takes that as a challenge and then starts showing you yourself in the media.
[27:08] Bob Dobbs: So he would see his songs there.
[27:10] Bob Dobbs: So I started seeing this more and more.
[27:12] Bob Dobbs: And
[27:13] Bob Dobbs: I've got a there was a guy named Brian Taylor.
[27:17] Bob Dobbs: He if you look at my Dobstown.com and listen to my interview with him in
[27:23] Bob Dobbs: 2008 or 2009 or so,
[27:25] Bob Dobbs: He was a guy who used to listen to me on CKLN and all that,
[27:28] Bob Dobbs: and he started having synchronicity himself,
[27:33] Bob Dobbs: but it often happened when he was engaging me.
[27:36] Bob Dobbs: So he was an interesting guy who was understanding the synchronicity I was going through,
[27:41] Bob Dobbs: understood how it was not the synchronicity he was experiencing,
[27:45] Bob Dobbs: but he couldn't deny that I was affecting him somehow.
[27:49] Bob Dobbs: So that's an interesting dialogue,
[27:51] Bob Dobbs: and Brian is now,
[27:54] Bob Dobbs: what is this?
[27:55] Bob Dobbs: 15 years later is a member of the Office Hour show.
[27:59] Bob Dobbs: And he will bring in this weird synchronicity he has with me,
[28:04] Bob Dobbs: but knowing I'm not trying to have that.
[28:07] Bob Dobbs: So he's a good updater of this drama that is,
[28:12] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[28:12] Bob Dobbs: dialoguing with me,
[28:14] Bob Dobbs: trying to figure out what I mean by his xenochrony.
[28:17] Bob Dobbs: So let's say that's enough to say that and go back to this point where
[28:23] Bob Dobbs: I'm bringing this.
[28:23] Bob Dobbs: point in to say that Zappa's strange xenochrony.
[28:27] Bob Dobbs: So I say,
[28:28] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake will stay the course as the non-now echoes Frank Zappa's concept of xenochrony,
[28:36] Bob Dobbs: which then leads to my concept of xenochrony.
[28:40] Bob Dobbs: And that's what the Tiny Note chart is.
[28:42] Bob Dobbs: It's as Bob's xenochronist decade dance or something echoes the Grand Wazoo's big note.
[28:51] Bob Dobbs: So I call Bob's xenochrony the Tiny Note.
[28:54] Bob Dobbs: So I'm making Zappa's
[28:56] Bob Dobbs: xenochrony a ground of the Android meme,
[29:03] Bob Dobbs: which my Tiny Note chart is a picture of,
[29:04] Bob Dobbs: made in 1995.
[29:07] Bob Dobbs: Instead of saying it's about me,
[29:08] Bob Dobbs: but the title does have me in there.
[29:11] Bob Dobbs: So I'm trying to show you my xenochrony.
[29:13] Bob Dobbs: So granted,
[29:14] Bob Dobbs: we don't know what I mean.
[29:16] Bob Dobbs: If you're just first reading this,
[29:17] Bob Dobbs: what the hell?
[29:18] Bob Dobbs: How does the non-now echo Frank Zappa's concept of synchronicity?
[29:22] Bob Dobbs: Probably the non-now is how you talk about the synchronous that must include the diachronic,
[29:31] Bob Dobbs: but it's not the diachronic.
[29:32] Bob Dobbs: What you had just said five minutes ago is a way of saying it's not just a big now.
[29:39] Bob Dobbs: You have to include the non-now or the non-time in here.
[29:43] Bob Dobbs: So,
[29:44] Bob Dobbs: these are words that are admitted.
[29:52] Bob Dobbs: aren't understandable.
[29:54] Bob Dobbs: I'm not pretending this is understandable.
[29:56] Bob Dobbs: It is an attempt to say something.
[29:59] Bob Dobbs: You might call it poetry,
[30:01] Bob Dobbs: right?
[30:01] Bob Dobbs: Poetry exceeds our grasp.
[30:04] Bob Dobbs: So then I say...
[30:06] Cameron McEwen: They don't explicate themselves.
[30:08] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[30:09] Bob Dobbs: I've got to go by a kind of intuition.
[30:12] Bob Dobbs: Who can intuit something?
[30:14] Bob Dobbs: Which means some strange,
[30:16] Bob Dobbs: new,
[30:16] Bob Dobbs: weird thing that's going on.
[30:23] Bob Dobbs: There seems to be a common agreement in the popular expression of wherever you see popular expression in the news or in the blogs.
[30:31] Bob Dobbs: There seems to be a growing concern or perception that something weird is going on.
[30:38] Bob Dobbs: And some people call it AI,
[30:40] Bob Dobbs: but a lot of people aren't sophisticated and don't think of it that way.
[30:42] Bob Dobbs: They just say,
[30:43] Bob Dobbs: my life doesn't make sense anymore,
[30:46] Bob Dobbs: though they're not despondent all the time.
[30:50] Bob Dobbs: They're intrigued by this seductive weirdness that's happening.
[30:55] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[30:55] Bob Dobbs: so that makes everybody addictive to what's going on and texting and monitoring the media,
[31:00] Bob Dobbs: right?
[31:01] Bob Dobbs: To see where we're at.
[31:03] Bob Dobbs: This is their identity,
[31:05] Bob Dobbs: is to see what they can see of themselves,
[31:09] Bob Dobbs: their own AP in an environment that they think must have Anthropomorphic Physical in there.
[31:14] Bob Dobbs: They can't believe it's totally disconnected from humans,
[31:17] Bob Dobbs: and therefore there's no anthropomorphic.
[31:20] Bob Dobbs: physical in there anymore.
[31:22] Bob Dobbs: So in my chart,
[31:24] Bob Dobbs: the Anthropomorphic Physical is a bit of a resistance,
[31:26] Bob Dobbs: you could say a bit of sentimentality of hoping for some kind of point of awareness that makes you feel not totally swallowed up.
[31:37] Bob Dobbs: So I think that's,
[31:38] Bob Dobbs: do you agree with me that there's a lot of expression of that in the average opinion about I'm being swallowed up and I don't know if I'm going to ever get out of it.
[31:49] Bob Dobbs: Have you ever heard that feeling?
[31:50] Bob Dobbs: Do you agree that that's a mood out there?
[31:53] Cameron McEwen: Sure,
[31:54] Cameron McEwen: sure.
[31:54] Cameron McEwen: I think that has been going from very,
[32:01] Cameron McEwen: very intelligent people early in the 20th century.
[32:06] Cameron McEwen: Let's say the men of 1914,
[32:10] Cameron McEwen: their notion of Western civilization coming into a cul-de-sac has...
[32:17] Cameron McEwen: over the following century become a general conception.
[32:25] Cameron McEwen: Right,
[32:25] Bob Dobbs: we come back to that quote from McLuhan in Playboy in 1970,
[32:29] Bob Dobbs: that the auditory imagination has become common awareness by 1970,
[32:34] Bob Dobbs: but Finnegans Wake hasn't.
[32:35] Bob Dobbs: We have now got to Finnegans Wake as the common awareness.
[32:41] Bob Dobbs: Not that they know that,
[32:43] Bob Dobbs: but it is...
[32:46] Bob Dobbs: The...
[32:46] Bob Dobbs: post-auditory imagination,
[32:48] Bob Dobbs: you might call it the tactile imagination,
[32:50] Bob Dobbs: is best expressed by Finnegans Wake.
[32:54] Bob Dobbs: So in other words,
[32:54] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said 50 years ago,
[32:57] Bob Dobbs: we had not got to where you're saying and I'm saying we got to right now,
[33:02] Bob Dobbs: what the tactile men of 1914 started to pick up.
[33:06] Bob Dobbs: 100 years later,
[33:07] Bob Dobbs: it's a common awareness.
[33:09] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[33:10] Bob Dobbs: how do you make people aware that that's what they're aware of and they don't know?
[33:14] Bob Dobbs: the literary antecedents.
[33:15] Bob Dobbs: Do you need to know about Finnegans Wake?
[33:17] Bob Dobbs: That's so,
[33:19] Bob Dobbs: I say perhaps Finnegans Wake will stay the course or help us stay the course to the common mood,
[33:27] Bob Dobbs: the collective consciousness you just expressed has happened now on a big scale,
[33:32] Bob Dobbs: wide scale,
[33:34] Bob Dobbs: okay?
[33:35] Bob Dobbs: So that's partly what I'm talking about.
[33:37] Bob Dobbs: And that includes people feeling something is synchronistic with their life a lot.
[33:44] Bob Dobbs: It's not hard to get people,
[33:46] Bob Dobbs: if you bring up synchronicity,
[33:47] Bob Dobbs: say,
[33:47] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[33:48] Bob Dobbs: that happened to me when I watched this movie,
[33:50] Bob Dobbs: or I'm watching TV,
[33:51] Bob Dobbs: some kind of information environment,
[33:53] Bob Dobbs: they seem to have the synchronicity.
[33:56] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[33:57] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying that
[33:59] Bob Dobbs: I'm not subject to that,
[34:02] Bob Dobbs: but you'll think that you'll see me in the media more and more.
[34:11] Bob Dobbs: And that's because I'm a xenochronist,
[34:13] Bob Dobbs: not a synchronicity.
[34:14] Bob Dobbs: I'm really good at not being swallowed up in the cloned ESP,
[34:19] Bob Dobbs: but I still can't escape it.
[34:21] Bob Dobbs: So
[34:21] Bob Dobbs: I cite Zappa because I found out from his wife that it was something they talked about,
[34:30] Bob Dobbs: that his creativity was echoed out there.
[34:35] Bob Dobbs: What is the title of my Tiny Note?
[34:37] Bob Dobbs: Bob's Xenochrony Tiny Note.
[34:41] Bob Dobbs: I have the Grand Wazoo...
[34:43] Bob Dobbs: I guess I have to bring it up.
[34:45] Bob Dobbs: the actual title of my Tiny Note.
[34:49] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.
[34:50] Bob Dobbs: Do I make it really easy here to see?
[34:55] Bob Dobbs: Just a second.
[34:56] Bob Dobbs: I want to show you how
[34:58] Bob Dobbs: I have Zappa and myself in the chart.
[35:01] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[35:01] Bob Dobbs: here it is.
[35:04] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[35:04] Bob Dobbs: the title is,
[35:06] Bob Dobbs: I have at the very top,
[35:07] Bob Dobbs: a chain letter of phase shifts.
[35:09] Bob Dobbs: Then in bigger letters,
[35:11] Bob Dobbs: Xenochrony: Bob's Tiny Note equals the Grand Wazoo's decade.
[35:15] Bob Dobbs: hyphen dance the Grand Wazoo is a zappa concept what he named his band at one point when it was the beginning of uh rock jazz fusion um he called his band the Grand Wazoo and he writes a story about you
[35:33] Bob Dobbs: know the head of a secret society like the shriners the freemasons the Grand wazoo's decade decadence but i'm saying it's a decade dance every 10 years it shifts it's a phase shift
[35:44] Bob Dobbs: And then the subtitle of that is a cyclotron of holeopathic cliché probes wherein causes merge with effects.
[35:51] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I'm trying to show.
[35:54] Bob Dobbs: And a simple phrase is tactility.
[35:57] Bob Dobbs: Because when Zappa was asked,
[36:00] Bob Dobbs: is the culture mirroring TV or is TV mirroring the culture?
[36:03] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[36:04] Bob Dobbs: well,
[36:04] Bob Dobbs: they overlay.
[36:06] Bob Dobbs: It's hard to tell which is which.
[36:07] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan expressed that when he said he didn't know whether the message was the medium or the medium was the message.
[36:12] Bob Dobbs: He found it hard to figure out what the medium was.
[36:15] Bob Dobbs: That's your unconscious.
[36:16] Bob Dobbs: More and more of the unconscious is right around you,
[36:21] Bob Dobbs: and you can either accept it and be a robot and go along with it or try to separate yourself from it.
[36:27] Bob Dobbs: But to separate yourself from it in Gutenberg terms doesn't work,
[36:31] Bob Dobbs: and it doesn't necessarily work in virtual terms or whatever they mean by AI.
[36:39] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[36:39] Bob Dobbs: so that's...
[36:41] Bob Dobbs: That's what I say about what I'm saying in that first sentence.
[36:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[36:47] Bob Dobbs: the next sentence.
[36:48] Bob Dobbs: The early
[36:49] Bob Dobbs: 21st century can be perceived as a digital-slash-mobile phase of voluntary ESP,
[36:54] Bob Dobbs: a celebration of pinhead consciousness-slash-intelligence,
[36:58] Bob Dobbs: rather than simply discarnate connected tactile intelligence.
[37:02] Bob Dobbs: So I'm always taking on de Kerckhove's concepts in his books in the
[37:07] Bob Dobbs: 90s. I always felt he had no clue what was going on.
[37:10] Bob Dobbs: And that he was a simple retrieval of McLuhan and not using the deeper McLuhan.
[37:15] Bob Dobbs: I claimed that I had a sense of the deeper McLuhan,
[37:19] Bob Dobbs: and I later realized you,
[37:21] Bob Dobbs: through talking to you,
[37:22] Bob Dobbs: you have a deeper sense of McLuhan than anybody else.
[37:25] Bob Dobbs: So this is what I'm saying,
[37:27] Bob Dobbs: a celebration of pinhead consciousness.
[37:29] Bob Dobbs: In other words,
[37:30] Bob Dobbs: not able to become aware,
[37:32] Bob Dobbs: but it's a kind of intelligence,
[37:33] Bob Dobbs: rather than simply discarding a connected tactile intelligence.
[37:37] Bob Dobbs: This kind of connected tactile intelligence is the cloned ESP analog environment,
[37:42] Bob Dobbs: okay?
[37:43] Bob Dobbs: It's the content of the digital.
[37:44] Bob Dobbs: The digital is a pinhead consciousness.
[37:49] Bob Dobbs: So then I say,
[37:49] Bob Dobbs: in this complex culture of tactility in extremis,
[37:53] Bob Dobbs: which means it's tactility squared by the Android meme.
[37:56] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme is tactile.
[37:58] Bob Dobbs: It's overlaying the cloned ESP,
[38:01] Bob Dobbs: the ESP of electronics in the first half of the 20th century that...
[38:06] Bob Dobbs: the men of 1914 were dealing with.
[38:08] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan started to perceive the squaring of this tactility in the digital or computer world,
[38:17] Bob Dobbs: what he called technology coming alive.
[38:19] Bob Dobbs: So that's a complex culture of tactility in extremis.
[38:22] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,
[38:23] Bob Dobbs: see,
[38:24] Bob Dobbs: but you can't just see it,
[38:26] Bob Dobbs: so it has to be in quotes,
[38:27] Bob Dobbs: see Frank Zappa's musical concepts.
[38:28] Bob Dobbs: In other words,
[38:29] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying go back to Zinarchini and read what he says about time and spherical reality and...
[38:35] Bob Dobbs: xenochrony.
[38:38] Bob Dobbs: In this complex culture,
[38:39] Bob Dobbs: we've witnessed the phrase artificial slash virtual intelligence lose its charisma.
[38:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[38:45] Bob Dobbs: whatever we thought we were moving towards,
[38:47] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[38:48] Bob Dobbs: in the
[38:49] Bob Dobbs: 90s, information longs to be free.
[38:51] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[38:52] Bob Dobbs: that Grateful Dead songwriter guy,
[38:55] Bob Dobbs: he led the Electronic Frontier organization.
[39:01] Bob Dobbs: He had Wired Magazine.
[39:02] Bob Dobbs: There was a...
[39:03] Bob Dobbs: As usual,
[39:03] Bob Dobbs: when new technology happens,
[39:05] Bob Dobbs: there's a utopian celebration of it.
[39:08] Bob Dobbs: And then the disservices show up.
[39:11] Bob Dobbs: So that's partly what I mean is the wonders of AI that they were trying to figure out,
[39:19] Bob Dobbs: part of it being the human genome project,
[39:22] Bob Dobbs: and that failed.
[39:23] Bob Dobbs: They didn't get what they thought they would get.
[39:27] Bob Dobbs: That was an 80s thing.
[39:31] Bob Dobbs: It lost its charisma.
[39:33] Bob Dobbs: AI has lost its charisma.
[39:35] Bob Dobbs: We're now just worried about it.
[39:37] Bob Dobbs: So
[39:39] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying the ground of that losing is...
[39:42] Bob Dobbs: Charisma is the tactically squared thing.
[39:46] Bob Dobbs: So
[39:47] Bob Dobbs: I could just quote you and say,
[39:49] Bob Dobbs: the unconscious is proving more unconscious than we thought it would be.
[39:54] Bob Dobbs: We thought we would become conscious of the unconscious and have an awareness.
[39:58] Bob Dobbs: Now what's interesting is McLuhan says we do have collective intelligence,
[40:02] Bob Dobbs: collective consciousness in the analog phase of the global theater in the 60s,
[40:07] Bob Dobbs: but we did not understand what the implications of that were,
[40:10] Bob Dobbs: and at best we thought it was a Gutenberg.
[40:13] Bob Dobbs: retrieval.
[40:14] Bob Dobbs: This is what you see in Bob Logan's books.
[40:16] Bob Dobbs: I remember him in his,
[40:18] Bob Dobbs: he had a book,
[40:19] Bob Dobbs: what,
[40:20] Bob Dobbs: the fifth language,
[40:21] Bob Dobbs: the sixth language,
[40:22] Bob Dobbs: he had a couple of books like that as the digital unfolded in the
[40:25] Bob Dobbs: 90s. And he was saying,
[40:27] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[40:27] Bob Dobbs: reading's coming back.
[40:28] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that?
[40:30] Bob Dobbs: Or did you even not know about his books?
[40:33] Cameron McEwen: I didn't read them.
[40:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[40:34] Bob Dobbs: well that's what he would say.
[40:36] Bob Dobbs: He'd celebrate,
[40:36] Bob Dobbs: he'd celebrate people were reading again.
[40:40] Bob Dobbs: And that is the fourth school you
[40:42] Bob Dobbs: of Media Ecology in my long essay on the six schools of Media Ecology.
[40:46] Bob Dobbs: That's the Diasporic School.
[40:47] Bob Dobbs: That's the Neil Postman,
[40:50] Bob Dobbs: the Lance Strate,
[40:51] Bob Dobbs: the Bruce Powe,
[40:55] Bob Dobbs: Frank Zingrone.
[40:57] Bob Dobbs: Not so much Frank.
[40:58] Bob Dobbs: Let's put him aside.
[41:00] Bob Dobbs: Who else was it?
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[41:02] Bob Dobbs: William Irwin Thompson,
[41:03] Bob Dobbs: Bruce Powe,
[41:04] Bob Dobbs: Neil Postman,
[41:06] Bob Dobbs: and Derrick de Kerckhove.
[41:07] Bob Dobbs: They were hip on the electric effects.
[41:11] Bob Dobbs: as McLuhan laid them out,
[41:13] Bob Dobbs: but they really deeply valued Gutenberg values.
[41:16] Bob Dobbs: They wondered if they'd ever get the humanities back or the Gutenberg back,
[41:21] Bob Dobbs: and they couldn't accept,
[41:23] Bob Dobbs: like McLuhan did,
[41:24] Bob Dobbs: we're not getting it back.
[41:26] Bob Dobbs: So they futilely become popular because the population is yearning to get the Gutenberg back,
[41:33] Bob Dobbs: whether they know it or not.
[41:35] Bob Dobbs: I call that the diasporic school.
[41:37] Bob Dobbs: They're all literate guys,
[41:38] Bob Dobbs: and they didn't get together and form a movement.
[41:41] Bob Dobbs: like me and Nelson did on the radio,
[41:43] Bob Dobbs: using an electric medium,
[41:46] Bob Dobbs: they just bemoaned their situation individually.
[41:50] Bob Dobbs: Essentially,
[41:50] Bob Dobbs: Don Theall would agree with me.
[41:53] Bob Dobbs: He was more on my side.
[41:55] Bob Dobbs: He considered Neil Postman a thug,
[41:58] Bob Dobbs: a guy that the CBC would keep interviewing with his Gutenberg values and ignore someone like Don Theall,
[42:06] Bob Dobbs: who could describe the digital reality...
[42:08] Bob Dobbs: better using Finnegans Wake than Postman or anybody,
[42:11] Bob Dobbs: but they didn't have him.
[42:12] Bob Dobbs: They wouldn't have him on.
[42:14] Bob Dobbs: So I think that pissed Don off a bit,
[42:16] Bob Dobbs: but he knew if he got on,
[42:18] Bob Dobbs: it would be pretty futile.
[42:19] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[42:20] Bob Dobbs: he joined me,
[42:21] Bob Dobbs: me and Nelson.
[42:22] Bob Dobbs: We formed the McLuhan Institute.
[42:24] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if you ever hear that,
[42:25] Bob Dobbs: the Eric McLuhan Institute in
[42:29] Bob Dobbs: 2000 or so.
[42:30] Bob Dobbs: Do you ever see that?
[42:32] Cameron McEwen: No,
[42:33] Cameron McEwen: I don't think so.
[42:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[42:34] Bob Dobbs: we formed it in 2001.
[42:36] Bob Dobbs: After 9-1-1,
[42:39] Bob Dobbs: with some movers and shakers in Toronto,
[42:42] Bob Dobbs: but Theall was our eminence grise in it.
[42:46] Bob Dobbs: And it was just me and Nelson trying to get something going beyond ourselves on the radio.
[42:51] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[42:55] Bob Dobbs: so we're groping for what McLuhan really meant.
[42:59] Bob Dobbs: And your little talk at the beginning about the unconscious and what is the unconscious.
[43:05] Bob Dobbs: I think you need to understand that technologies are the unconscious,
[43:08] Bob Dobbs: but then the technologies have evaporated.
[43:11] Bob Dobbs: We're not sure what is technology and what is human anymore.
[43:14] Bob Dobbs: So that's a bit past
[43:16] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's definition or important insight that our real unconscious is the environment created by new technologies.
[43:30] Bob Dobbs: Theo told me that a word that became popular in the 90s in academia,
[43:34] Bob Dobbs: advanced academia,
[43:36] Bob Dobbs: was techne.
[43:37] Bob Dobbs: It seemed that technology was not a good word to use,
[43:40] Bob Dobbs: so they went back and found techne,
[43:43] Bob Dobbs: and that would be another way of discussing virtual reality.
[43:47] Bob Dobbs: Did you know that,
[43:48] Bob Dobbs: the use of the word techne?
[43:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[43:50] Cameron McEwen: that comes from Heidegger.
[43:52] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[43:52] Bob Dobbs: so Heidegger was a popular guy among the Gutenberg academics,
[43:57] Bob Dobbs: yet...
[43:58] Bob Dobbs: seem to be pointing to something that
[44:01] Bob Dobbs: 19th century literate people didn't recognize.
[44:03] Bob Dobbs: So techne was the new term rather than technology.
[44:06] Bob Dobbs: So for those that went with techne,
[44:09] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's language was obsolete.
[44:14] Bob Dobbs: But then they're looking for language.
[44:16] Bob Dobbs: They're looking for communication and to get some kind of authoritative position.
[44:24] Bob Dobbs: to justify them being at the head of the class teaching to a bunch of other people who are involved with the same dilemma as the teacher is.
[44:32] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[44:32] Bob Dobbs: so that's what I'm trying to say here,
[44:36] Bob Dobbs: in a way.
[44:37] Bob Dobbs: It is complex culture of tactility in extremists.
[44:40] Bob Dobbs: See Frank Zappa's musical concepts.
[44:43] Bob Dobbs: which are really tactile concepts.
[44:44] Bob Dobbs: We've witnessed the phrase artificial intelligence or virtual intelligence lose its charisma.
[44:50] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[44:50] Bob Dobbs: would you agree that
[44:53] Bob Dobbs: I'm on to something saying,
[44:55] Bob Dobbs: say,
[44:55] Bob Dobbs: the Android meme level or virtual reality has lost its charisma of the
[45:00] Bob Dobbs: 90s? What do you think?
[45:02] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[45:02] Cameron McEwen: No,
[45:02] Cameron McEwen: I think
[45:05] Cameron McEwen: I relate to what you've been talking about for the last five minutes or so.
[45:14] Cameron McEwen: Not only in terms of developing technology out there in the world,
[45:20] Cameron McEwen: but also what mind,
[45:23] Cameron McEwen: what the subjective person in the driver's seat learns from looking at these objective possibilities.
[45:33] Cameron McEwen: Because these objective possibilities are environments that are...
[45:42] Cameron McEwen: birthed or genetically encoded in the unconscious.
[45:49] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[45:50] Cameron McEwen: And so human beings are being,
[45:55] Cameron McEwen: over this history,
[45:56] Cameron McEwen: human beings are being driven to understand a very difficult problem.
[46:13] Cameron McEwen: of being in the driver's seat,
[46:17] Cameron McEwen: which is not only an active role,
[46:23] Cameron McEwen: it's also a passive role.
[46:24] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[46:25] Cameron McEwen: And so it's a very difficult figure where the...
[46:31] Bob Dobbs: That's what I mean by pinhead consciousness,
[46:33] Bob Dobbs: the passive part.
[46:35] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[46:36] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[46:37] Cameron McEwen: and also you mean that pinhead consciousness...
[46:40] Cameron McEwen: as in the diasporic school that you were just talking about,
[46:47] Cameron McEwen: it thinks that it can relate to sort of independent concepts in order to reach the conclusions that put it at the head of the class,
[47:01] Cameron McEwen: as you just said.
[47:02] Cameron McEwen: But the problem is there aren't such things as
[47:10] Cameron McEwen: independent,
[47:11] Cameron McEwen: pinhead concepts.
[47:15] Cameron McEwen: Everything flows into everything else.
[47:18] Bob Dobbs: That's where that's Finnegans Wake is a painting of that.
[47:21] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.
[47:22] Cameron McEwen: So then the question is,
[47:25] Cameron McEwen: how does the mind,
[47:29] Cameron McEwen: either individually or collectively,
[47:31] Cameron McEwen: how does human being come to terms with this new...
[47:39] Cameron McEwen: With this emerging demand on consciousness,
[47:44] Cameron McEwen: it's a demand on consciousness that cannot be controlled by consciousness.
[47:51] Cameron McEwen: It's a demand made on consciousness that is received,
[47:57] Cameron McEwen: that is passive.
[47:58] Cameron McEwen: And how consciousness can go through a kind of somersault.
[48:07] Cameron McEwen: To come to terms with this driven passivity is sort of the great question hanging over everything today.
[48:17] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[48:17] Bob Dobbs: And the Gutenberg Galaxy try to reestablish will or independence or some kind of separateness.
[48:26] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[48:27] Cameron McEwen: That's why the term diaspora is so good.
[48:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[48:31] Cameron McEwen: Right?
[48:31] Cameron McEwen: A diaspora is a disconnect.
[48:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[48:35] Bob Dobbs: And you would never...
[48:37] Bob Dobbs: even desire to have that separateness because it cannot be achieved.
[48:41] Bob Dobbs: But it is a problem to be totally merged,
[48:44] Bob Dobbs: at least historically for the West.
[48:47] Bob Dobbs: People like to say,
[48:48] Bob Dobbs: well,
[48:48] Bob Dobbs: the Chinese are pretty good at being zombies,
[48:50] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[48:51] Bob Dobbs: because they were kind of like that.
[48:52] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[48:52] Bob Dobbs: that would be,
[48:54] Bob Dobbs: they did not have the Gutenberg effect in them.
[48:56] Bob Dobbs: But they don't seem to be balanced,
[49:00] Bob Dobbs: even though they have the advantage of their tactility.
[49:03] Bob Dobbs: The Asians have the...
[49:04] Bob Dobbs: It's one thing about the counterculture,
[49:06] Bob Dobbs: it's attracted to tactility,
[49:08] Bob Dobbs: and a lot of the,
[49:09] Bob Dobbs: it goes east.
[49:11] Bob Dobbs: It's interesting that different variations of non-Western culture,
[49:14] Bob Dobbs: maybe even
[49:15] Bob Dobbs: Southern and Third World cultures,
[49:17] Bob Dobbs: Aboriginal cultures,
[49:19] Bob Dobbs: often includes drug taking,
[49:22] Bob Dobbs: that's a celebration of merging into the tactility.
[49:26] Bob Dobbs: But you're just being,
[49:29] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if that's a problem.
[49:31] Bob Dobbs: Could be a problem.
[49:33] Bob Dobbs: Some people make it a problem.
[49:35] Bob Dobbs: And that's another thing is you don't make things a problem,
[49:40] Bob Dobbs: but then...
[49:41] Bob Dobbs: There's a lot of resistance to that.
[49:43] Bob Dobbs: Gotta have a problem.
[49:45] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[49:46] Bob Dobbs: so anyways,
[49:48] Bob Dobbs: we're doing a good job of making incomplete syllables.
[49:51] Bob Dobbs: We're not completing our syllables.
[49:53] Bob Dobbs: We're keeping up with Biden.
[49:55] Bob Dobbs: Trump is old-fashioned.
[49:57] Bob Dobbs: He didn't complete his sentences.
[50:01] Bob Dobbs: We're pretending we're speaking in sentences,
[50:03] Bob Dobbs: but actually we're syllabizing.
[50:06] Bob Dobbs: So then I go...
[50:07] Bob Dobbs: Quite a mysterious and devastating implication that nobody was expecting from the global theater.
[50:12] Bob Dobbs: What I just said,
[50:13] Bob Dobbs: the complex culture,
[50:14] Bob Dobbs: you lose,
[50:15] Bob Dobbs: AI lost its charisma.
[50:17] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying that's quite a mysterious and devastating implication nobody was expecting from the global theater.
[50:22] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[50:22] Cameron McEwen: Let me just say there that the reason that it's a mysterious and devastating implication is that the global theater implicates roles,
[50:32] Cameron McEwen: but it turns out that the roles are self-dissolving.
[50:36] Cameron McEwen: So that's...
[50:37] Cameron McEwen: why it's a mysterious and devastating implication.
[50:40] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[50:41] Bob Dobbs: and your audience is self-developing.
[50:44] Bob Dobbs: You're not sure who your role is for.
[50:47] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[50:49] Bob Dobbs: So let's see if I say that in the next sentence.
[50:51] Bob Dobbs: The greatest disservice that was foreseen was the evocation of desperation and urgency in national,
[50:59] Bob Dobbs: tribal,
[50:59] Bob Dobbs: and personal identity.
[51:00] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[51:01] Bob Dobbs: the identity question is what the fuck role am I doing,
[51:04] Bob Dobbs: that I think I'm doing?
[51:05] Bob Dobbs: So the greatest disservice that was foreseen was the evocation of desperation and urgency in national,
[51:11] Bob Dobbs: tribal,
[51:12] Bob Dobbs: and personal identity quests that created a more violent mood in the 70s,
[51:15] Bob Dobbs: 80s.
[51:16] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[51:17] Bob Dobbs: that's because your image of the role you think you've got to make doesn't,
[51:23] Bob Dobbs: you don't recognize that there's no stage for your role.
[51:26] Bob Dobbs: You can have a role,
[51:27] Bob Dobbs: but perhaps only for six months.
[51:30] Bob Dobbs: The demand on changing your roles,
[51:33] Bob Dobbs: which I call later quadrophrenia,
[51:35] Bob Dobbs: is something that humans can't deal with.
[51:40] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said,
[51:41] Bob Dobbs: we can't live with this stuff.
[51:42] Bob Dobbs: That's a big deal.
[51:43] Bob Dobbs: Give up your job.
[51:45] Bob Dobbs: Get a role.
[51:46] Bob Dobbs: But the roles don't satisfy you either because there's too many mood shifts and too many different audiences surfacing.
[51:54] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[51:54] Bob Dobbs: Ted Carpenter and McLuhan talk about this in their book,
[51:57] Bob Dobbs: They Became What They Beheld,
[51:58] Bob Dobbs: about 1970 or 71,
[52:00] Bob Dobbs: that book came out.
[52:01] Bob Dobbs: And they're talking about new media creates new roles and new audiences.
[52:05] Bob Dobbs: and the young people were responding to new audiences.
[52:09] Bob Dobbs: That leads to video art and performance art.
[52:12] Bob Dobbs: But that's long lost its charisma because if everything becomes a role,
[52:18] Bob Dobbs: then there's no roles.
[52:19] Bob Dobbs: And then if there's something that keeps shifting what the theater seems to demand,
[52:25] Bob Dobbs: the stage keeps shifting,
[52:30] Bob Dobbs: that begins to look like something beyond human is running the show.
[52:34] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[52:35] Bob Dobbs: What were you calling it?
[52:38] Bob Dobbs: What was running this show?
[52:39] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[52:40] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[52:40] Bob Dobbs: they had to be passive,
[52:41] Bob Dobbs: too.
[52:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[52:44] Bob Dobbs: So there's a great passivity going on.
[52:48] Bob Dobbs: And some would call it apathy.
[52:49] Cameron McEwen: It's what McLuhan attributed to the satellite.
[52:52] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[52:53] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[52:54] Bob Dobbs: the end of nature.
[52:56] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[52:57] Cameron McEwen: end of ground.
[52:58] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[52:59] Bob Dobbs: so,
[52:59] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[52:59] Bob Dobbs: they say 70%
[53:00] Bob Dobbs: of people don't vote.
[53:02] Bob Dobbs: That's good.
[53:03] Bob Dobbs: That's passive.
[53:05] Bob Dobbs: So to demand,
[53:06] Bob Dobbs: to say that our civilization is falling away and we have nothing new to grasp on is to miss the changes and adaptations that McLuhan said the audience always does.
[53:20] Bob Dobbs: They can't describe it anymore,
[53:21] Bob Dobbs: but they're adapting.
[53:23] Bob Dobbs: In other words,
[53:23] Bob Dobbs: we haven't blown ourselves up yet.
[53:27] Bob Dobbs: Something is stopping that.
[53:32] Cameron McEwen: So one of the reasons that McLuhan was a Catholic convert was that he had this idea that every extreme reverses itself.
[53:44] Cameron McEwen: So he believed that in going to hell,
[53:50] Cameron McEwen: the world was also saving itself.
[53:53] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[53:53] Bob Dobbs: There's always these flips.
[53:54] Bob Dobbs: So he counted on the flips and he knew they were happening faster and faster.
[54:00] Bob Dobbs: In some ways,
[54:00] Bob Dobbs: he had nothing more to say.
[54:02] Bob Dobbs: He had figured out how to handle what was going on,
[54:06] Bob Dobbs: at least personally,
[54:08] Bob Dobbs: and he didn't develop his probes as much in the
[54:14] Bob Dobbs: 70s. He had a few he developed,
[54:16] Bob Dobbs: but that's just looking like he's participating and coming up with useful stuff.
[54:21] Bob Dobbs: But there was an increasing passivity that he said was the answer back in Understanding Media.
[54:29] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[54:29] Bob Dobbs: the audience has become passive in many ways.
[54:33] Bob Dobbs: They could say non-judgmental,
[54:35] Bob Dobbs: while the minority Android meme screams and demands people to become judgmental,
[54:42] Bob Dobbs: become aware,
[54:43] Bob Dobbs: to wake up.
[54:45] Bob Dobbs: To not appreciate,
[54:46] Bob Dobbs: to not go with this trend.
[54:49] Bob Dobbs: We're drifting.
[54:51] Bob Dobbs: So that screaming,
[54:53] Bob Dobbs: Don Theall said,
[54:54] Bob Dobbs: is what Joyce satirized in Finnegans Wake.
[54:57] Bob Dobbs: All through the book,
[54:58] Bob Dobbs: there's demands to wake up.
[55:00] Bob Dobbs: And he's making fun of these hysterical efforts to wake up because they're always inadequate in what they think has to be awakened.
[55:12] Cameron McEwen: Correct.
[55:13] Cameron McEwen: That's a big...
[55:14] Bob Dobbs: theme in lewis okay in Paleface yes which is what 1929 book 1930 yeah but written in uh it most of it appeared earlier in uh 27 right
[55:31] Bob Dobbs: and he probably wrote it in that 1500 page thing he did in 1924 25 right a man of the world a lot of it a lot of it yeah so
[55:40] Bob Dobbs: He watched,
[55:41] Bob Dobbs: in 1922,
[55:42] Bob Dobbs: he sees Eliot becoming famous,
[55:43] Bob Dobbs: he sees
[55:44] Bob Dobbs: Joyce becoming famous,
[55:46] Bob Dobbs: and he's not becoming famous.
[55:48] Bob Dobbs: And he knows he's inspired those two guys.
[55:51] Bob Dobbs: So he was forced into a passivity,
[55:54] Bob Dobbs: or he's going to be ruled.
[55:56] Bob Dobbs: So he writes The Art of Being Ruled in there at the beginning.
[56:01] Bob Dobbs: He was starting to maybe save his Anthropomorphic Physical,
[56:04] Bob Dobbs: save his identity,
[56:06] Bob Dobbs: by making something out of not being creative.
[56:09] Bob Dobbs: Men without art was not a problem,
[56:12] Bob Dobbs: but he still had a problem.
[56:14] Bob Dobbs: He still couldn't give it up completely.
[56:18] Bob Dobbs: But I'm just realizing now that he was beginning to celebrate and maybe the first to recognize the passivity because your creativity would always be outdone by the new developments in technology.
[56:33] Bob Dobbs: Couldn't keep up with it.
[56:35] Bob Dobbs: What do you think of that?
[56:37] Bob Dobbs: He perceived the passivity,
[56:38] Bob Dobbs: and so he's very passive in 22-23,
[56:41] Bob Dobbs: and then all these ideas or criticisms that he could express,
[56:45] Bob Dobbs: showing his not being fooled by the demands of the present,
[56:50] Bob Dobbs: which he called time.
[56:52] Bob Dobbs: So he criticized every creative effort in science,
[56:55] Bob Dobbs: sociology,
[56:56] Bob Dobbs: philosophy,
[56:57] Bob Dobbs: and art,
[56:58] Bob Dobbs: and literature.
[56:58] Bob Dobbs: He went after all of them,
[57:01] Bob Dobbs: because they weren't part of this new passivity.
[57:04] Bob Dobbs: And he would often say,
[57:06] Bob Dobbs: The passivity recognizes that the environment is doing something that is more important than any private creativity going on in art or science.
[57:17] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[57:18] Cameron McEwen: We have to recognize that a word like passivity has many different meanings.
[57:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[57:23] Cameron McEwen: So
[57:23] Cameron McEwen: Lewis criticized passivity in the sense of people not being aware of what the hell they were doing,
[57:31] Cameron McEwen: especially when they were moralizing,
[57:33] Cameron McEwen: especially when they were...
[57:36] Bob Dobbs: I try to show this to the Wyndham Lewis Society members.
[57:39] Bob Dobbs: I don't think they get it.
[57:40] Bob Dobbs: They still think he's a writer.
[57:43] Bob Dobbs: They don't get that Lewis is pointing out a post-writer situation.
[57:47] Bob Dobbs: That's why his books were,
[57:48] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[57:48] Bob Dobbs: superficial.
[57:49] Bob Dobbs: This conversational winging it and sniping at people.
[57:54] Bob Dobbs: And it irritates those that want a deeper literary concept.
[57:59] Bob Dobbs: And you see that in the Lewis group,
[58:02] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[58:03] Bob Dobbs: the POB people.
[58:04] Bob Dobbs: Print-oriented bastards are frustrated with the superficiality of Lewis,
[58:10] Bob Dobbs: but they can't say it's wrong.
[58:12] Bob Dobbs: They can't say they like the titillation and all kinds of interesting patterns he gives.
[58:20] Bob Dobbs: See,
[58:20] Bob Dobbs: because that's the present is pattern addiction.
[58:23] Bob Dobbs: A pattern addiction,
[58:24] Bob Dobbs: pattern recognition is the endless percept that we're in.
[58:29] Bob Dobbs: And that threatens people's passivity.
[58:33] Bob Dobbs: They get excited about a pattern they got,
[58:38] Bob Dobbs: and they form a movement out of it.
[58:39] Bob Dobbs: That's probably Pound's problem.
[58:41] Bob Dobbs: He got a big pattern out of social credit,
[58:44] Bob Dobbs: Douglas'
[58:45] Bob Dobbs: economics,
[58:46] Bob Dobbs: and then he fucking harped on that for 20 years until he heard Bucky Fuller.
[58:52] Bob Dobbs: Then he recognized,
[58:53] Bob Dobbs: according to Kenner,
[58:55] Bob Dobbs: oh,
[58:55] Bob Dobbs: maybe I missed something.
[58:58] Bob Dobbs: He got so active,
[58:59] Bob Dobbs: he got on the radio and became a treasonous.
[59:02] Bob Dobbs: Person,
[59:02] Bob Dobbs: right?
[59:03] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[59:05] Bob Dobbs: And Joyce was understanding eventually the passivity because he said,
[59:09] Bob Dobbs: let Hitler take over.
[59:11] Bob Dobbs: He wasn't going to resist it.
[59:14] Bob Dobbs: He had to resist it.
[59:15] Bob Dobbs: He had to run and escape.
[59:17] Bob Dobbs: But conceptually,
[59:18] Bob Dobbs: perceptually,
[59:20] Bob Dobbs: he knew there was something to Lewis's passivity.
[59:25] Bob Dobbs: Though Lewis looked very active and in the
[59:28] Bob Dobbs: 30s was trying to help the Jews and everything.
[59:32] Bob Dobbs: He was very active and hoping to have peace,
[59:35] Bob Dobbs: but he also knew war was coming.
[59:39] Bob Dobbs: So again,
[59:41] Bob Dobbs: it really was hard to...
[59:43] Bob Dobbs: write prose without turning into Finnegans Wake,
[59:50] Bob Dobbs: you know?
[59:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[59:53] Cameron McEwen: I don't know that I would say that
[59:56] Cameron McEwen: Lewis writes in a superficial way.
[1:00:00] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:00:00] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:00:00] Bob Dobbs: people find,
[1:00:02] Bob Dobbs: and this is what's good about a Wyndham Lewis Society,
[1:00:04] Bob Dobbs: you get a bunch of people reading his books,
[1:00:07] Bob Dobbs: everybody seems to see that he's playing with the world.
[1:00:09] Bob Dobbs: playing with us.
[1:00:10] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't come up with a solution.
[1:00:11] Bob Dobbs: He contradicts himself all the way through the book.
[1:00:14] Bob Dobbs: And that bothers them.
[1:00:16] Bob Dobbs: That effect of Lewis's writing is undeniable.
[1:00:19] Bob Dobbs: That's what's going on there.
[1:00:21] Bob Dobbs: And so I'm putting in quotes that appear superficial to people.
[1:00:27] Bob Dobbs: He should stop contradicting and come to his point.
[1:00:30] Bob Dobbs: What is your goddamn point,
[1:00:31] Bob Dobbs: Lewis?
[1:00:32] Bob Dobbs: Nobody can figure out what his points are in all these books.
[1:00:38] Cameron McEwen: Personally,
[1:00:38] Cameron McEwen: I think that's something that also happens in McLuhan.
[1:00:44] Cameron McEwen: And it's where
[1:00:46] Cameron McEwen: Lewis and McLuhan say things that they see as obvious,
[1:00:51] Cameron McEwen: and in fact are obvious,
[1:00:53] Cameron McEwen: but the whole world can't see it.
[1:00:55] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:00:56] Cameron McEwen: So if we read Lewis today,
[1:00:59] Cameron McEwen: especially the nonfiction books of the late 20s,
[1:01:04] Cameron McEwen: Art of Being Ruled,
[1:01:05] Cameron McEwen: Time and Western Man,
[1:01:06] Cameron McEwen: Paleface,
[1:01:08] Cameron McEwen: Those books set out where we are right now today.
[1:01:12] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:01:13] Bob Dobbs: In 2023.
[1:01:16] Bob Dobbs: And his 30s books do that too,
[1:01:18] Bob Dobbs: if you stay with them and read them.
[1:01:20] Cameron McEwen: Personally,
[1:01:20] Cameron McEwen: I haven't read those yet,
[1:01:21] Cameron McEwen: so I have to look forward to that.
[1:01:23] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:01:24] Cameron McEwen: But for 100 years,
[1:01:26] Cameron McEwen: people could not see what was obvious in the late
[1:01:33] Cameron McEwen: 1920s.
[1:01:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah, the themes,
[1:01:35] Bob Dobbs: we'd gone into the Electric Eternity.
[1:01:37] Bob Dobbs: The themes that he saw that he was wrestling with,
[1:01:41] Bob Dobbs: they would not go away under electric conditions.
[1:01:44] Bob Dobbs: So they'd still be here because we're under electric conditions.
[1:01:48] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:01:48] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:01:49] Cameron McEwen: I would say it's because they're always the case that it's a,
[1:01:55] Cameron McEwen: excuse me,
[1:01:55] Cameron McEwen: it's a synchronic happening that he's talking about.
[1:02:01] Cameron McEwen: And so it's as true in
[1:02:05] Cameron McEwen: 1926 as in.
[1:02:08] Cameron McEwen: 2023.
[1:02:09] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:02:10] Bob Dobbs: So that's where you go.
[1:02:11] Bob Dobbs: You could retrieve Aristotle,
[1:02:14] Bob Dobbs: pre-Socratics,
[1:02:15] Bob Dobbs: Aboriginals.
[1:02:17] Bob Dobbs: That's when you get into the now,
[1:02:19] Bob Dobbs: which you're calling synchronic.
[1:02:21] Bob Dobbs: And the electric gets us out of the diachronic progressive Gutenberg illusion.
[1:02:27] Bob Dobbs: Correct.
[1:02:28] Bob Dobbs: So apparently human history has been largely synchronic.
[1:02:33] Bob Dobbs: The Gutenberg is a short phase.
[1:02:35] Bob Dobbs: And the electric age,
[1:02:36] Bob Dobbs: electric eternity is putting us back into that again.
[1:02:39] Bob Dobbs: So that's the eternal problems that everybody's wrestling with.
[1:02:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:02:44] Cameron McEwen: but you can't say that history is largely synchronic as opposed to diachronic.
[1:02:54] Cameron McEwen: It's always both.
[1:02:56] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[1:02:56] Cameron McEwen: So the great test is whether...
[1:03:06] Cameron McEwen: A person can sort of roll with the synchronic genesis of the diachronic.
[1:03:20] Bob Dobbs: The genesis of the diachronic is what you said.
[1:03:24] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:03:25] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:03:26] Cameron McEwen: So if you look at the world situation today,
[1:03:29] Cameron McEwen: the great contest is unipolarity and multipolarity.
[1:03:35] Cameron McEwen: before you were talking about
[1:03:37] Cameron McEwen: East and West.
[1:03:39] Cameron McEwen: So the East,
[1:03:43] Cameron McEwen: represented by
[1:03:45] Cameron McEwen: Russia, China,
[1:03:46] Cameron McEwen: BRICS,
[1:03:46] Cameron McEwen: etc.,
[1:03:47] Cameron McEwen: etc.,
[1:03:49] Cameron McEwen: they rest upon the idea of multivariate,
[1:03:53] Cameron McEwen: which is non-judgmental...
[1:03:59] Bob Dobbs: Passivity.
[1:03:59] Cameron McEwen: Passivity.
[1:04:03] Bob Dobbs: Non-judgmental passivity.
[1:04:06] Cameron McEwen: All right,
[1:04:07] Cameron McEwen: we can say that.
[1:04:09] Cameron McEwen: They accept the governance of countries as the business of those countries and not anyone else.
[1:04:22] Cameron McEwen: And the unipolarity is the idea that there's a rule-based order,
[1:04:28] Cameron McEwen: as they say,
[1:04:30] Cameron McEwen: that is the rule for everybody.
[1:04:33] Cameron McEwen: Very Gutenbergian concept.
[1:04:35] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:04:36] Bob Dobbs: and so it's important to understand that the diachronic doesn't go away,
[1:04:40] Bob Dobbs: and that it was good to go through the diachronic to create a different...
[1:04:45] Bob Dobbs: environment,
[1:04:46] Bob Dobbs: therefore a different awareness,
[1:04:48] Bob Dobbs: to get out of the eternity of acoustic and tactile spaces before.
[1:04:54] Bob Dobbs: So when we come back,
[1:04:56] Bob Dobbs: we have not the retrieval of the diachronic,
[1:04:58] Bob Dobbs: but the diachronic doesn't go away,
[1:05:01] Bob Dobbs: which is what McLuhan used to say.
[1:05:03] Bob Dobbs: So the diachronic is there in the synchronic,
[1:05:06] Bob Dobbs: which you keep saying.
[1:05:09] Bob Dobbs: So I attempted to explain what that was,
[1:05:11] Bob Dobbs: is that we went through the diachronic, a big error.
[1:05:14] Bob Dobbs: a fallacy,
[1:05:15] Bob Dobbs: but it was necessary to,
[1:05:19] Bob Dobbs: in fact,
[1:05:19] Bob Dobbs: the retrieved big now,
[1:05:21] Bob Dobbs: the synchronic.
[1:05:23] Bob Dobbs: So seeing that clearly,
[1:05:26] Bob Dobbs: that makes you passive.
[1:05:29] Bob Dobbs: I can watch a movie or read a book or neither,
[1:05:34] Bob Dobbs: go surfing or something.
[1:05:36] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:05:38] Cameron McEwen: So no matter what a person does,
[1:05:40] Cameron McEwen: reading a book,
[1:05:41] Cameron McEwen: going surfing,
[1:05:42] Cameron McEwen: whatever,
[1:05:43] Cameron McEwen: is always a possibility that is before the individual,
[1:05:48] Cameron McEwen: before both in a spatial and a temporal sense.
[1:05:53] Cameron McEwen: So it's not possible for anybody to do something that's not a pre-existing possibility.
[1:06:01] Cameron McEwen: So in regards to the pre...
[1:06:02] Bob Dobbs: You can't be original in that sense.
[1:06:03] Bob Dobbs: The Gutenberg idea,
[1:06:05] Bob Dobbs: desire to be original.
[1:06:07] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:06:08] Cameron McEwen: So in that sense,
[1:06:10] Cameron McEwen: everybody is passive.
[1:06:11] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:06:12] Cameron McEwen: But there is a strange kind of creativity that goes with that passivity,
[1:06:21] Cameron McEwen: and that we're not necessarily doomed to living out passivities that are handed to us.
[1:06:31] Cameron McEwen: The world of advertising,
[1:06:33] Cameron McEwen: the world of the deep state,
[1:06:34] Cameron McEwen: etc.,
[1:06:35] Cameron McEwen: wants to assume the role of assigning passivities.
[1:06:41] Bob Dobbs: That is a rule.
[1:06:44] Bob Dobbs: Preserving the rules,
[1:06:45] Bob Dobbs: that's maybe political correctness.
[1:06:47] Bob Dobbs: The different correctnesses are silly.
[1:06:53] Cameron McEwen: So the big question is whether or not humans are going to be able to acclimatize themselves to this strange not,
[1:07:04] Cameron McEwen: K-N-O-T,
[1:07:05] Cameron McEwen: of activity and passivity.
[1:07:08] Cameron McEwen: And the jury is out.
[1:07:10] Cameron McEwen: nobody knows if human beings can stand that sort of responsibility.
[1:07:20] Bob Dobbs: Can they stand that there's no finish line?
[1:07:23] Bob Dobbs: It's not resolved which posture is correct.
[1:07:27] Bob Dobbs: This is where journalism is a huge disservice.
[1:07:30] Bob Dobbs: They're always pointing out problems and endlessly discussing them now with the
[1:07:35] Bob Dobbs: Web 2.0.
[1:07:36] Bob Dobbs: There's nothing but people yakking away.
[1:07:39] Bob Dobbs: about this shit and
[1:07:41] Bob Dobbs: They should shut up,
[1:07:43] Bob Dobbs: but it's the way for the West to make money people get paid for typing and talking
[1:07:49] Bob Dobbs: That's the big deal get your role going and you get an audience and you get paid for it.
[1:07:55] Bob Dobbs: That's really irresponsible
[1:07:57] Bob Dobbs: That's that that's but I'm not gonna panic about it,
[1:08:00] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: I'm gonna get upset about it But
[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: I'll say buddy.
[1:08:04] Bob Dobbs: I'm not inviting you over here.
[1:08:05] Bob Dobbs: I'm not interested what you have to fucking say
[1:08:09] Bob Dobbs: You can go on jacking away.
[1:08:10] Bob Dobbs: You can be Tucker Carlson and get everybody activated.
[1:08:14] Bob Dobbs: It's all worked up.
[1:08:15] Bob Dobbs: It's a lot of noise,
[1:08:16] Bob Dobbs: and I can handle it,
[1:08:18] Bob Dobbs: and you can't.
[1:08:21] Bob Dobbs: The guys that can't handle,
[1:08:23] Bob Dobbs: the guys making the noise,
[1:08:24] Bob Dobbs: they can't handle the silence.
[1:08:28] Bob Dobbs: They can't handle the noise.
[1:08:32] Bob Dobbs: I am declaring something I've arrived at there,
[1:08:35] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.
[1:08:37] Bob Dobbs: I'm successfully handling the noise.
[1:08:40] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:08:40] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:08:41] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:08:43] Cameron McEwen: to be alive means to be situated in the space between noise and silence.
[1:08:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:08:54] Cameron McEwen: So it's like...
[1:08:58] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:08:59] Bob Dobbs: there's a magazine in 2000,
[1:09:02] Bob Dobbs: issue number 22 of Paranoia magazine,
[1:09:04] Bob Dobbs: has me on the cover.
[1:09:06] Bob Dobbs: And it says...
[1:09:07] Bob Dobbs: the only man alive today.
[1:09:11] Bob Dobbs: I meant what you just said.
[1:09:14] Bob Dobbs: I was between the noise and the silence.
[1:09:16] Bob Dobbs: That's probably what I meant.
[1:09:18] Cameron McEwen: Sure.
[1:09:19] Cameron McEwen: And so that's to situate yourself in tactility.
[1:09:23] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:09:24] Bob Dobbs: And co-anesthetic in the driver's chair,
[1:09:27] Bob Dobbs: driver's seat.
[1:09:30] Bob Dobbs: And then I actually activated that accidentally,
[1:09:34] Bob Dobbs: where I'm now actually...
[1:09:36] Bob Dobbs: What they're all fighting over,
[1:09:38] Bob Dobbs: what I've created,
[1:09:39] Bob Dobbs: the practical,
[1:09:41] Bob Dobbs: the breakthrough.
[1:09:43] Bob Dobbs: So again,
[1:09:43] Bob Dobbs: we come back to explaining me.
[1:09:45] Bob Dobbs: So this is what this book is.
[1:09:47] Bob Dobbs: It's an attempt to explain me.
[1:09:50] Bob Dobbs: As I am saying.
[1:09:51] Cameron McEwen: Even to yourself.
[1:09:52] Bob Dobbs: What?
[1:09:53] Cameron McEwen: Even to yourself.
[1:09:54] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:09:54] Bob Dobbs: right.
[1:09:55] Bob Dobbs: Ongoing aspiration.
[1:09:56] Bob Dobbs: But this is what I am saying.
[1:09:57] Bob Dobbs: Trump is Bob in the White House.
[1:10:01] Bob Dobbs: When he got in,
[1:10:02] Bob Dobbs: that's what he used to say.
[1:10:03] Bob Dobbs: It took a while to glimpse what the hell I am was saying,
[1:10:06] Bob Dobbs: but I am pretty perceptive.
[1:10:08] Bob Dobbs: He says things that nobody else would ever say or even know to say.
[1:10:12] Bob Dobbs: Way ahead of me.
[1:10:14] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:10:16] Bob Dobbs: yes,
[1:10:17] Bob Dobbs: what do we call this book?
[1:10:18] Bob Dobbs: Understanding
[1:10:19] Bob Dobbs: What You Don't Know About Trump and the Tech Body.
[1:10:23] Bob Dobbs: What you don't know about me.
[1:10:26] Bob Dobbs: I am the new unconscious.
[1:10:28] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:10:29] Bob Dobbs: I actually say this in public.
[1:10:31] Bob Dobbs: And so,
[1:10:32] Bob Dobbs: of course,
[1:10:33] Bob Dobbs: that allows me to have no fucking audience,
[1:10:36] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:10:38] Bob Dobbs: Which keeps me out of the noise.
[1:10:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm so successful now,
[1:10:43] Bob Dobbs: I don't even think
[1:10:44] Bob Dobbs: I would accept being interviewed by the Android meme people or the tech body people.
[1:10:51] Bob Dobbs: I'll talk to you.
[1:10:53] Bob Dobbs: I ain't talking to Tucker Carlson.
[1:10:54] Bob Dobbs: They're not worth it.
[1:10:55] Bob Dobbs: Or Joe Rogan.
[1:10:58] Bob Dobbs: So am I trying to establish a,
[1:11:00] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:11:02] Bob Dobbs: what do you call that,
[1:11:03] Bob Dobbs: a secret space,
[1:11:05] Bob Dobbs: an autonomous zone?
[1:11:06] Bob Dobbs: Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here.
[1:11:10] Bob Dobbs: I'm not participating.
[1:11:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:11:11] Cameron McEwen: that makes sense to me.
[1:11:13] Cameron McEwen: You're trying to enlarge the autonomous zone.
[1:11:16] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:11:18] Bob Dobbs: I like the way I keep making sense to you.
[1:11:21] Bob Dobbs: That's good.
[1:11:23] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:11:23] Bob Dobbs: let's try this.
[1:11:26] Bob Dobbs: And I carry on here.
[1:11:27] Bob Dobbs: The greatest disservice that was foreseen was the evocation of desperation and urgency in national,
[1:11:34] Bob Dobbs: tribal,
[1:11:34] Bob Dobbs: and personal identity quests that created a more violent mood in the 70s and 80s.
[1:11:40] Bob Dobbs: See McLuhan's title in 1968,
[1:11:43] Bob Dobbs: Mind Your Media Men or You'll Catch a Cold Environment.
[1:11:46] Bob Dobbs: So I'm defining cold environment as,
[1:11:48] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:11:48] Bob Dobbs: increasing a violent mood.
[1:11:51] Bob Dobbs: The subtitle of the reversal over the overheated image,
[1:11:53] Bob Dobbs: therefore he knew reversal was coming.
[1:11:56] Bob Dobbs: So the ecstasy of the 60s is going to flip into what Lester Bangs called the bland out of the 70s,
[1:12:05] Bob Dobbs: the dead zone,
[1:12:07] Bob Dobbs: or planet of the dead,
[1:12:09] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan said.
[1:12:10] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:12:11] Bob Dobbs: so
[1:12:11] Bob Dobbs: I say that,
[1:12:13] Bob Dobbs: then my little oral repeat of this says,
[1:12:17] Bob Dobbs: to have a social identity,
[1:12:18] Bob Dobbs: you have to have violence.
[1:12:19] Bob Dobbs: And I'm quoting McLuhan with that one.
[1:12:21] Bob Dobbs: You are a fascist.
[1:12:23] Bob Dobbs: You impose it on society.
[1:12:25] Bob Dobbs: I'm taking the cliche idea that power is aggressive.
[1:12:28] Bob Dobbs: You maintain your socially aggressive power if you want to have an identity.
[1:12:33] Bob Dobbs: Establishing an identity is an act of violence.
[1:12:36] Bob Dobbs: Becoming literate is a violent act.
[1:12:38] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[1:12:38] Bob Dobbs: in one of his books From Cliché to Archetype,
[1:12:40] Bob Dobbs: quotes people fearing the literate back in the
[1:12:44] Bob Dobbs: 1400s.
[1:12:45] Bob Dobbs: And his quote is,
[1:12:49] Bob Dobbs: where is it from?
[1:12:51] Bob Dobbs: I guess Joseph Frank.
[1:12:53] Bob Dobbs: Joseph Frank discusses Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead in terms which gives stark,
[1:12:58] Bob Dobbs: iconic...
[1:13:00] Bob Dobbs: This is McLuhan saying this.
[1:13:03] Bob Dobbs: In terms which gives stark,
[1:13:05] Bob Dobbs: iconic...
[1:13:06] Bob Dobbs: forced to the division between the literate and the illiterate classes in a feudal society.
[1:13:11] Bob Dobbs: To the peasant,
[1:13:12] Bob Dobbs: the literate man is armored.
[1:13:15] Bob Dobbs: Quote,
[1:13:15] Bob Dobbs: you gentry,
[1:13:16] Bob Dobbs: iron beaks,
[1:13:17] Bob Dobbs: you devoured us.
[1:13:18] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[1:13:18] Bob Dobbs: there's the swallowing up.
[1:13:20] Bob Dobbs: So we're back to that.
[1:13:23] Bob Dobbs: If to the degree we're retrieved feudal society,
[1:13:25] Bob Dobbs: which McLuhan said we did by the TV age.
[1:13:28] Bob Dobbs: So we have a literate and the illiterate.
[1:13:33] Bob Dobbs: The...
[1:13:35] Bob Dobbs: Liberal post-literates versus the
[1:13:37] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg post-literates in a society where everybody shares hardship of the stresses of the unknown.
[1:13:48] Bob Dobbs: And the literate man is armored.
[1:13:51] Bob Dobbs: It's kind of reversed now.
[1:13:54] Bob Dobbs: The illiterate,
[1:13:56] Bob Dobbs: the peasant,
[1:13:56] Bob Dobbs: is yearning for Gutenberg values.
[1:13:59] Bob Dobbs: That's the mega gang.
[1:14:01] Bob Dobbs: And they're against the literate guys who are embracing...
[1:14:04] Bob Dobbs: the new armor,
[1:14:06] Bob Dobbs: which is post-literate.
[1:14:08] Bob Dobbs: So it's kind of reversed from what McLuhan's saying here.
[1:14:12] Bob Dobbs: It's still House of the Dead,
[1:14:14] Bob Dobbs: but the literate and illiterate classes have flipped.
[1:14:20] Bob Dobbs: And it's not just a feudal society.
[1:14:22] Bob Dobbs: It's
[1:14:23] Bob Dobbs: Paleolithic, pre-Paleolithic.
[1:14:25] Bob Dobbs: It's post-utopian,
[1:14:27] Bob Dobbs: or it's post-human,
[1:14:30] Bob Dobbs: para-human.
[1:14:31] Bob Dobbs: So we're...
[1:14:33] Cameron McEwen: post-literate.
[1:14:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:14:35] Bob Dobbs: So you could take this quote.
[1:14:41] Bob Dobbs: to get our bearings in what has flipped.
[1:14:45] Bob Dobbs: So you say this quote not to celebrate the quote,
[1:14:48] Bob Dobbs: but to show how it's inadequate.
[1:14:51] Bob Dobbs: But you're showing people what is inadequate.
[1:14:53] Bob Dobbs: Now restate it or talk beyond it,
[1:14:58] Bob Dobbs: and then you might get closer to what the problem is.
[1:15:03] Bob Dobbs: That's basically how I'm using McLuhan.
[1:15:06] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:15:12] Cameron McEwen: For McLuhan,
[1:15:12] Cameron McEwen: it's basic that tactility involves a flip.
[1:15:19] Cameron McEwen: Tactility is a relation between two poles or two opposites,
[1:15:28] Cameron McEwen: you could say,
[1:15:29] Cameron McEwen: and emphasis can be on either one of them.
[1:15:35] Cameron McEwen: And the drama of the unconscious is the...
[1:15:41] Bob Dobbs: including the other.
[1:15:44] Cameron McEwen: That's right.
[1:15:44] Cameron McEwen: But all of the possibilities in the unconscious are tactile relations.
[1:15:54] Cameron McEwen: And these tactile relations always include the possibility of being flipped.
[1:16:02] Cameron McEwen: So the flip is just another possibility in the unconscious.
[1:16:06] Cameron McEwen: So,
[1:16:07] Cameron McEwen: yeah,
[1:16:07] Bob Dobbs: we flipped into the post-human or the Android Meme or the tech body.
[1:16:11] Bob Dobbs: That's part of the flip.
[1:16:14] Cameron McEwen: But the flip itself comes in a variety of flavors.
[1:16:19] Cameron McEwen: So the flip of the Gutenberg Galaxy is always to the one or to the other.
[1:16:28] Cameron McEwen: But in an electric environment,
[1:16:31] Cameron McEwen: the tactility is both of those.
[1:16:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:16:35] Bob Dobbs: In other words,
[1:16:35] Bob Dobbs: you can't flip,
[1:16:37] Bob Dobbs: maybe.
[1:16:39] Bob Dobbs: That'd be one way to look at it or define it.
[1:16:42] Bob Dobbs: You can't flip.
[1:16:44] Cameron McEwen: You can't flip in the Gutenbergian sense.
[1:16:46] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:16:47] Cameron McEwen: But the whole secret of the electric or of the magnetic that develops in the early
[1:16:55] Cameron McEwen: 19th century is that there is a natural flip to the world,
[1:17:01] Cameron McEwen: and that can be harnessed.
[1:17:04] Cameron McEwen: So the...
[1:17:05] Cameron McEwen: The modern technologies coming out of the early electric and magnetic experiments of people like Faraday,
[1:17:15] Cameron McEwen: that's what develops into everything that we have today.
[1:17:20] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:17:20] Bob Dobbs: so that's where the tetrad is obsolete.
[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: In the traditional meaning of obsolete,
[1:17:26] Bob Dobbs: it doesn't define things.
[1:17:29] Bob Dobbs: And that's why I call the Android meme replay of the tetrad the pentad.
[1:17:35] Bob Dobbs: There's something different in the Pentatic.
[1:17:38] Bob Dobbs: There's nothing...
[1:17:39] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:17:40] Bob Dobbs: we read up above here,
[1:17:41] Bob Dobbs: the drifting of rising and falling.
[1:17:45] Bob Dobbs: Didn't that get said?
[1:17:48] Bob Dobbs: The cliché of rising and falling?
[1:17:52] Cameron McEwen: You mean on another program?
[1:17:56] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:17:57] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:17:57] Bob Dobbs: just up above here.
[1:18:01] Bob Dobbs: I just read that somewhere.
[1:18:06] Bob Dobbs: The Rising and Falling.
[1:18:12] Bob Dobbs: Maybe it's not in here.
[1:18:13] Bob Dobbs: Maybe I just read it.
[1:18:14] Bob Dobbs: It might even,
[1:18:15] Bob Dobbs: it was maybe a review of Lewis.
[1:18:19] Bob Dobbs: The Endless
[1:18:20] Bob Dobbs: Rising and Falling.
[1:18:22] Bob Dobbs: Didn't I say that up here?
[1:18:28] Bob Dobbs: Looking back at 161.
[1:18:36] Bob Dobbs: Didn't you say the cycles?
[1:18:40] Cameron McEwen: Could well be.
[1:18:41] Cameron McEwen: I don't think we've talked about it today,
[1:18:43] Cameron McEwen: though.
[1:18:43] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:18:43] Cameron McEwen: we've talked about that.
[1:18:48] Cameron McEwen: Basically,
[1:18:49] Cameron McEwen: that's the whole dynamic of the flip,
[1:18:52] Cameron McEwen: the rising and the fall.
[1:18:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay.
[1:18:55] Cameron McEwen: So there's a thousand ways in which the rise and fall can express themselves.
[1:19:03] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: Just go back,
[1:19:12] Bob Dobbs: look at this end.
[1:19:13] Bob Dobbs: The Android meme is aping us with more Jerry Springer type shows.
[1:19:17] Bob Dobbs: This is the
[1:19:18] Bob Dobbs: 90s. And the audience thinks that the world's getting dumber and dumber.
[1:19:21] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:19:21] Bob Dobbs: the Android meme is getting smarter and showing how humans can believe they're still humans.
[1:19:26] Bob Dobbs: This is all a fighting against the fact that everything has disappeared.
[1:19:29] Bob Dobbs: Every now and then,
[1:19:30] Bob Dobbs: somebody from way back then will shout to me,
[1:19:32] Bob Dobbs: Hey,
[1:19:32] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[1:19:32] Bob Dobbs: everything's disappeared.
[1:19:34] Bob Dobbs: They remember.
[1:19:35] Bob Dobbs: It's rushing back to them 30 years later.
[1:19:39] Bob Dobbs: So I think it was I read somewhere.
[1:19:42] Bob Dobbs: the rising and falling and and that is not what's going on and so i call that the pentatic i'm saying the flip is uh merged with something so that becomes what for many people is very boredom very
[1:20:00] Bob Dobbs: boring they're looking for that dramatic shift and missing the shifts of unconscious uh do i have it we didn't do this uh quote
[1:20:10] Bob Dobbs: That's what we got to do next.
[1:20:12] Bob Dobbs: So when I was saying that being literate,
[1:20:17] Bob Dobbs: getting an identity is the maintenance of social power,
[1:20:22] Bob Dobbs: that is what runs the economy now.
[1:20:25] Bob Dobbs: That's software abrasiveness everywhere where everybody is maintaining their identity.
[1:20:31] Bob Dobbs: And advertising is geared to everybody's different kind of identities.
[1:20:34] Bob Dobbs: That's what they're smart on,
[1:20:36] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:20:36] Bob Dobbs: Millions of ads for millions of identities.
[1:20:40] Bob Dobbs: That's the identity crisis.
[1:20:42] Bob Dobbs: The violence is going on.
[1:20:44] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:20:45] Bob Dobbs: I'd have to say I'm indifferent to that violence.
[1:20:51] Cameron McEwen: The reason violence and identity go together is that identity is naturally a plural.
[1:21:02] Cameron McEwen: The unconscious has this myriad of possibilities for who you are.
[1:21:11] Cameron McEwen: Being in the driver's seat seems like it can,
[1:21:17] Cameron McEwen: it seems like the driver can establish that.
[1:21:20] Cameron McEwen: But once the driver realizes that all of these possibilities are possible environments that include a driver,
[1:21:34] Cameron McEwen: then the whole idea of being in the driver's seat and controlling these
[1:21:39] Cameron McEwen: possibilities of identity dissolves.
[1:21:43] Cameron McEwen: And the only way of trying to have an identity is the violent act of saying,
[1:21:53] Cameron McEwen: I'm not going to pay attention to all those other possibilities.
[1:21:57] Cameron McEwen: I'm just going to be me.
[1:22:00] Cameron McEwen: Or I'm going to give up me and just be what somebody else said or what somebody else wants me to do,
[1:22:06] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:22:07] Cameron McEwen: So...
[1:22:08] Cameron McEwen: There is a kind of violence to human being that seems to contradict intelligibility,
[1:22:16] Cameron McEwen: seems to contradict freedom.
[1:22:18] Cameron McEwen: And the great question that we have today is,
[1:22:22] Cameron McEwen: is there a way of being free and being independent and being intelligent that does not turn away from the myriad of possibilities that are always below us?
[1:22:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:22:36] Bob Dobbs: I think Joyce had a line in Ulysses,
[1:22:39] Bob Dobbs: living as if every moment were your next.
[1:22:41] Bob Dobbs: That means every possible role is your next.
[1:22:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:22:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan has that in
[1:22:50] Cameron McEwen: Take Today,
[1:22:51] Cameron McEwen: I believe.
[1:22:52] Cameron McEwen: But
[1:22:54] Cameron McEwen: I found it in an unpublished work,
[1:22:57] Cameron McEwen: I think it was from the
[1:22:59] Cameron McEwen: 1940s, living as if every moment were your next.
[1:23:05] Cameron McEwen: It's a typical
[1:23:06] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan turn of phrase.
[1:23:08] Cameron McEwen: Maybe he got it from Joyce because it's also a typical Joyce.
[1:23:13] Bob Dobbs: I don't think it's in Finnegans Wake.
[1:23:14] Bob Dobbs: It's too simple.
[1:23:15] Bob Dobbs: It's in Ulysses.
[1:23:18] Cameron McEwen: But it's a great line.
[1:23:20] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:23:21] Bob Dobbs: And that leads to passivity,
[1:23:25] Bob Dobbs: which Joyce is an exemplar of because Pound wouldn't like Joyce's passivity.
[1:23:32] Bob Dobbs: He thought you had to do something.
[1:23:34] Bob Dobbs: Eliot was in between,
[1:23:36] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg guy,
[1:23:37] Bob Dobbs: and
[1:23:38] Bob Dobbs: Lewis was pretending he had an identity crisis.
[1:23:44] Bob Dobbs: Or that he understood your identity crisis.
[1:23:50] Bob Dobbs: So the,
[1:23:54] Bob Dobbs: I can see why that's where the population is so quadrophrenic.
[1:23:57] Bob Dobbs: They adopt different roles,
[1:23:59] Bob Dobbs: different responses to the situation,
[1:24:01] Bob Dobbs: and it's okay whatever they adopt.
[1:24:04] Bob Dobbs: Apathy,
[1:24:05] Bob Dobbs: indifference,
[1:24:07] Bob Dobbs: activism,
[1:24:09] Bob Dobbs: greed,
[1:24:11] Bob Dobbs: license.
[1:24:12] Cameron McEwen: That's what they hope to achieve,
[1:24:15] Cameron McEwen: being okay.
[1:24:17] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:24:17] Bob Dobbs: that's where they have to realize that they didn't succeed in being passive or active or greedy or whatever.
[1:24:24] Bob Dobbs: You can't achieve what you choose.
[1:24:28] Bob Dobbs: So there is a world.
[1:24:30] Bob Dobbs: Clint was quoting.
[1:24:32] Bob Dobbs: Mechanical Bride today,
[1:24:34] Bob Dobbs: the freedom to listen.
[1:24:37] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't the freedom of choice of radio content.
[1:24:40] Bob Dobbs: This is the Mechanical Bride.
[1:24:42] Bob Dobbs: It was the freedom to have radio be imposed on you,
[1:24:47] Bob Dobbs: the freedom to listen,
[1:24:49] Bob Dobbs: not to make a choice.
[1:24:52] Bob Dobbs: So that's getting at what we're saying here,
[1:24:54] Bob Dobbs: or I'm saying here,
[1:24:55] Bob Dobbs: is the freedom to put up with wonderful inventions that are being sold.
[1:25:03] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:25:03] Bob Dobbs: so here's McLuhan.
[1:25:06] Cameron McEwen: Let's read this quotation from McLuhan and see how much of it we've anticipated.
[1:25:13] Bob Dobbs: And so this is an op-ed,
[1:25:16] Bob Dobbs: a smaller one,
[1:25:18] Bob Dobbs: same year.
[1:25:19] Bob Dobbs: This is before the immediate approach to inflation,
[1:25:22] Bob Dobbs: which was in September.
[1:25:24] Bob Dobbs: This is May 10,
[1:25:25] Bob Dobbs: 1974.
[1:25:29] Bob Dobbs: And I don't know if McLuhan titled it
[1:25:32] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:25:33] Bob Dobbs: maybe the New York Times did.
[1:25:34] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure.
[1:25:35] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[1:25:35] Cameron McEwen: I'm sure.
[1:25:36] Cameron McEwen: I'm sure.
[1:25:37] Bob Dobbs: You're sure that the New York Times did?
[1:25:40] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:25:42] Bob Dobbs: I can see if McLuhan did it.
[1:25:44] Bob Dobbs: He was in a playful mood.
[1:25:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:25:47] Bob Dobbs: so he says,
[1:25:48] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says,
[1:25:49] Bob Dobbs: One of the peculiarities of the new electronic world is to be seen here.
[1:25:53] Bob Dobbs: For the very immediacy with which people interrelate electric speed,
[1:25:57] Bob Dobbs: so that's what we were talking about,
[1:25:59] Bob Dobbs: the endless percept,
[1:26:01] Bob Dobbs: also has the effect of reducing their private and individual identities to a very low profile.
[1:26:05] Bob Dobbs: We did say that.
[1:26:08] Bob Dobbs: Their identities aren't making it.
[1:26:10] Bob Dobbs: There's too many of them,
[1:26:12] Bob Dobbs: and they thought they had to choose one.
[1:26:15] Bob Dobbs: If everybody is a nobody at a ballgame,
[1:26:17] Bob Dobbs: the simultaneous presence of everybody to everybody at electric speeds makes everybody a masked man.
[1:26:23] Bob Dobbs: So we were talking about being passive to that effect,
[1:26:29] Bob Dobbs: not making a big deal about it,
[1:26:31] Bob Dobbs: because the unconscious is there's all kinds of...
[1:26:35] Bob Dobbs: identities happening underneath you.
[1:26:38] Bob Dobbs: One of the effects of this simultaneity in dimming down private identity is the weakening of personal ethics and moral constraint in the private sectors of daily life.
[1:26:48] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:26:48] Bob Dobbs: that's where,
[1:26:48] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:26:50] Bob Dobbs: be irresponsible,
[1:26:51] Bob Dobbs: be greedy,
[1:26:53] Bob Dobbs: be licentious,
[1:26:55] Bob Dobbs: be antisocial,
[1:26:58] Bob Dobbs: be a Nazi.
[1:26:59] Bob Dobbs: All these things are the chemical body retrieving
[1:27:05] Bob Dobbs: the AP,
[1:27:06] Bob Dobbs: the Anthropomorphic Physical.
[1:27:09] Bob Dobbs: You can see there's a whole movement,
[1:27:11] Bob Dobbs: there's been movements like being an asshole,
[1:27:15] Bob Dobbs: okay?
[1:27:16] Bob Dobbs: Celebrating being an asshole.
[1:27:19] Bob Dobbs: That is in your private life.
[1:27:23] Bob Dobbs: So your private life cannot be,
[1:27:28] Bob Dobbs: your private roles cannot have any staying power because you're always reduced
[1:27:34] Bob Dobbs: the masked man.
[1:27:36] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:27:37] Bob Dobbs: I see this first paragraph is supplementing what we said.
[1:27:42] Bob Dobbs: So then he says,
[1:27:43] Bob Dobbs: concurrently,
[1:27:44] Bob Dobbs: however,
[1:27:44] Bob Dobbs: it's always a however,
[1:27:46] Bob Dobbs: with the loss of more standards in these private sectors,
[1:27:49] Bob Dobbs: there's a corresponding new demand for high standards of conduct and integrity in the public sector.
[1:27:56] Bob Dobbs: That's what becomes the TV body,
[1:27:59] Bob Dobbs: not the TV landscape.
[1:28:00] Bob Dobbs: And political correctness.
[1:28:02] Bob Dobbs: Political correctness is the iconography of the TV landscape,
[1:28:05] Bob Dobbs: which became a TV body.
[1:28:08] Bob Dobbs: You don't have that chemical body content that the television has in the chip body.
[1:28:16] Bob Dobbs: There's no identity to argue over like there is in the TV body.
[1:28:26] Cameron McEwen: So the TV body is sort of like the superego?
[1:28:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:28:30] Bob Dobbs: where you can see something.
[1:28:32] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:28:32] Bob Dobbs: that guy's Italian.
[1:28:33] Bob Dobbs: I accept his mafia roots.
[1:28:36] Bob Dobbs: This guy's black.
[1:28:37] Bob Dobbs: I accept his ridiculous African dancing addiction.
[1:28:41] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:28:42] Bob Dobbs: you see the cultures.
[1:28:45] Bob Dobbs: You don't see cultures in the chip body.
[1:28:48] Bob Dobbs: You just see opinions and mental postures.
[1:28:51] Bob Dobbs: And usually you don't like them.
[1:28:56] Bob Dobbs: Because the chip body forgot that they're a nobody.
[1:29:00] Bob Dobbs: The chip body allows you to communicate,
[1:29:03] Bob Dobbs: be creative,
[1:29:05] Bob Dobbs: be engaged in software content that was not allowed to you in the mass iconography of the TV body.
[1:29:16] Bob Dobbs: Remember McLuhan said in the newspaper they would identify people,
[1:29:19] Bob Dobbs: so-and-so,
[1:29:19] Bob Dobbs: 36,
[1:29:21] Bob Dobbs: Republican.
[1:29:22] Bob Dobbs: That's how you'd be identified in newspaper articles,
[1:29:25] Bob Dobbs: these old icons.
[1:29:26] Bob Dobbs: That was in the radio era.
[1:29:29] Bob Dobbs: Now you've got even more sophisticated,
[1:29:32] Bob Dobbs: insulting,
[1:29:33] Bob Dobbs: what McLuhan called Time magazine pros.
[1:29:36] Bob Dobbs: Time was very good at that.
[1:29:38] Bob Dobbs: coming up with insulting labels for different identities and role players.
[1:29:43] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:29:44] Bob Dobbs: most people can do that on their own.
[1:29:48] Bob Dobbs: They have slang terms for certain attitudes.
[1:29:52] Bob Dobbs: Like one of the ones,
[1:29:54] Bob Dobbs: a new one that women have is mansplaining.
[1:30:00] Bob Dobbs: If you reveal that you're a man and you're talking among a lot of women around,
[1:30:06] Bob Dobbs: they'll accuse you of mansplaining.
[1:30:07] Bob Dobbs: explaining.
[1:30:11] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:30:11] Bob Dobbs: can you say woman explaining?
[1:30:14] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:30:14] Bob Dobbs: because they say,
[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:30:15] Bob Dobbs: we never had a chance to take over and establish a woman.
[1:30:20] Bob Dobbs: And they're using that to take over a non-existent stage to pretend you are triumphant in.
[1:30:29] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:30:29] Bob Dobbs: a lot of,
[1:30:30] Bob Dobbs: they said a lot of feminism is just women trying to be men.
[1:30:33] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[1:30:34] Bob Dobbs: that includes.
[1:30:36] Bob Dobbs: dealing with the collapse of identity that men went through in the first half of the 20th century.
[1:30:42] Bob Dobbs: Women are catching up with that.
[1:30:43] Bob Dobbs: They're having their own crisis of identity thanks to these wonderful transgender people who make women think they can't be a woman anymore.
[1:30:52] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[1:30:53] Bob Dobbs: it's a big movement now,
[1:30:55] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:30:56] Bob Dobbs: save the woman,
[1:30:58] Bob Dobbs: which is a phrase on my chart.
[1:31:04] Bob Dobbs: Save the kidney,
[1:31:08] Bob Dobbs: the Dobbs quadrant.
[1:31:09] Bob Dobbs: The slogan is save the kidney.
[1:31:11] Bob Dobbs: It's from Saturday Night Live.
[1:31:14] Bob Dobbs: So you've got women trying to save.
[1:31:18] Bob Dobbs: There were some lesbian couple here that rented our other house,
[1:31:23] Bob Dobbs: and one of them spent,
[1:31:26] Bob Dobbs: she didn't work,
[1:31:26] Bob Dobbs: the other worked,
[1:31:27] Bob Dobbs: but she didn't.
[1:31:28] Bob Dobbs: She spent all day long reading about the,
[1:31:32] Bob Dobbs: this is over the last couple of years.
[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: reading about the transgender movement insulting feminism and women.
[1:31:40] Bob Dobbs: She was really upset about it.
[1:31:42] Bob Dobbs: Her whole identity was monitoring that and fighting it and worrying about it.
[1:31:47] Bob Dobbs: Who are these assholes who won't be women?
[1:31:52] Cameron McEwen: And meanwhile,
[1:31:52] Cameron McEwen: she was a lesbian.
[1:31:54] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:31:54] Bob Dobbs: that's right.
[1:31:57] Bob Dobbs: I probably thought the woman was the ground of being,
[1:32:00] Bob Dobbs: not men.
[1:32:03] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:32:05] Bob Dobbs: the transgenders,
[1:32:08] Bob Dobbs: I guess it's like the hippies or the punkers,
[1:32:13] Bob Dobbs: these various beatniks that irritated the general masses.
[1:32:19] Bob Dobbs: They stood out,
[1:32:19] Bob Dobbs: they irritated people,
[1:32:21] Bob Dobbs: and were eventually adapted to.
[1:32:25] Bob Dobbs: The transgenders are trying to be adapted to,
[1:32:28] Bob Dobbs: but they're the new phenomenon.
[1:32:30] Bob Dobbs: I have it on my chart.
[1:32:31] Bob Dobbs: I've got beatniks.
[1:32:32] Bob Dobbs: hippies,
[1:32:33] Bob Dobbs: yippies,
[1:32:34] Bob Dobbs: yuppies,
[1:32:34] Bob Dobbs: and then guppies,
[1:32:35] Bob Dobbs: which is green yuppies in the 90s.
[1:32:38] Bob Dobbs: Al Gore was a guppy.
[1:32:40] Bob Dobbs: The trans thing is in the,
[1:32:43] Bob Dobbs: we're in the hexadic now,
[1:32:45] Bob Dobbs: that the trans thing are the hated in crowd.
[1:32:50] Bob Dobbs: The in crowd,
[1:32:51] Bob Dobbs: that's the newspaper world celebrates,
[1:32:55] Bob Dobbs: supposedly,
[1:32:56] Bob Dobbs: the liberals celebrate the acceptance of,
[1:32:58] Bob Dobbs: they're there trying to accept,
[1:33:00] Bob Dobbs: be passive,
[1:33:01] Bob Dobbs: accept this.
[1:33:02] Bob Dobbs: Ridiculous phenomenon or ridiculous identity.
[1:33:07] Bob Dobbs: And they win at it,
[1:33:09] Bob Dobbs: it seems,
[1:33:10] Bob Dobbs: though some people say there's a flip now coming and
[1:33:16] Bob Dobbs: Trumpism is back,
[1:33:17] Bob Dobbs: so some people say
[1:33:20] Bob Dobbs: Biden has run his course.
[1:33:21] Bob Dobbs: So that's a replay,
[1:33:24] Bob Dobbs: which is what we call in page
[1:33:28] Bob Dobbs: 297 of Take Today,
[1:33:30] Bob Dobbs: endless.
[1:33:31] Bob Dobbs: replays of the tribal unconscious.
[1:33:34] Bob Dobbs: Remember that phrase?
[1:33:35] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[1:33:36] Bob Dobbs: That's what we're talking about.
[1:33:37] Bob Dobbs: The tribal,
[1:33:38] Bob Dobbs: specializing in one kind of unconscious,
[1:33:41] Bob Dobbs: not recognizing the quadrophrenia of the unconsciousness.
[1:33:46] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:33:47] Bob Dobbs: back to,
[1:33:47] Bob Dobbs: okay,
[1:33:48] Bob Dobbs: so you got a weakening of personal ethics in the private life,
[1:33:52] Bob Dobbs: and you got a lot of correctness happening in the iconic
[1:33:56] Bob Dobbs: TV landscape.
[1:33:57] Bob Dobbs: This reversal of values has suddenly elevated politics to the utopian level by virtue of the rigorous and unremitting public inspection resulting from electric media.
[1:34:08] Bob Dobbs: Now what's that mean?
[1:34:10] Bob Dobbs: Elevated politics to the utopian?
[1:34:12] Bob Dobbs: In other words,
[1:34:13] Bob Dobbs: people are being very aware and they're not letting anybody get away with anything.
[1:34:18] Bob Dobbs: Obsolete awareness.
[1:34:22] Bob Dobbs: Obsolete policing.
[1:34:24] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:34:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is satirizing.
[1:34:27] Bob Dobbs: Calling this politics to the utopian level of everybody has to claim they're a do-gooder.
[1:34:38] Cameron McEwen: So this is in 1974,
[1:34:44] Cameron McEwen: and
[1:34:44] Cameron McEwen: 50 years before,
[1:34:47] Cameron McEwen: Lewis had seen this perfectly and set it out.
[1:34:50] Cameron McEwen: So
[1:34:51] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is just quoting
[1:34:53] Cameron McEwen: Lewis here,
[1:34:54] Cameron McEwen: as
[1:34:56] Cameron McEwen: Lewis from 50 years before saying,
[1:34:59] Cameron McEwen: here's what our present is.
[1:35:01] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:35:01] Bob Dobbs: here's an idea.
[1:35:03] Bob Dobbs: He does his article in Atlantic Monthly in December 69 on Lewis.
[1:35:07] Bob Dobbs: In the last line,
[1:35:09] Bob Dobbs: in the last paragraph,
[1:35:10] Bob Dobbs: he's talking about how
[1:35:11] Bob Dobbs: Lewis is artist tactile.
[1:35:13] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:35:13] Bob Dobbs: he celebrates the eye,
[1:35:15] Bob Dobbs: but McLuhan says,
[1:35:16] Bob Dobbs: no,
[1:35:17] Bob Dobbs: it was the tactile eye.
[1:35:19] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:35:19] Bob Dobbs: Lewisians wouldn't understand what McLuhan meant,
[1:35:22] Bob Dobbs: that Lewis was totally in tune with sculptural tactile values evoked by television in the 50s and 60s.
[1:35:30] Bob Dobbs: And then he says,
[1:35:35] Bob Dobbs: so.
[1:35:36] Bob Dobbs: He's saying that Lewis,
[1:35:38] Bob Dobbs: at his best,
[1:35:40] Bob Dobbs: he stayed up with the tactility until he's relevant in the TV age.
[1:35:45] Bob Dobbs: Probably why McLuhan said in 1949,
[1:35:47] Bob Dobbs: as TV started to happen,
[1:35:49] Bob Dobbs: I've got to get back to Lewis.
[1:35:50] Bob Dobbs: He was intuiting there was something tactile or
[1:35:53] Bob Dobbs: TV iconic.
[1:35:55] Bob Dobbs: So these issues of ethics or non-ethics,
[1:35:59] Bob Dobbs: private entity and corporate entity,
[1:36:00] Bob Dobbs: that's part of the TV body,
[1:36:03] Bob Dobbs: which is then subject to political correctness.
[1:36:06] Bob Dobbs: mandates.
[1:36:07] Bob Dobbs: So
[1:36:08] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan will quote Lewis,
[1:36:11] Bob Dobbs: replay Lewis when he's talking about the TV landscape.
[1:36:15] Bob Dobbs: When he's getting into the computer and the virtual and the digital,
[1:36:19] Bob Dobbs: he'll do Finnegans Wake because you don't have the defined iconic pictures that the TV medium has.
[1:36:29] Bob Dobbs: And that's why he had under the impact of the new digital in the
[1:36:34] Bob Dobbs: 60s.
[1:36:35] Bob Dobbs: and the psychedelic,
[1:36:37] Bob Dobbs: he dropped Lewis and went for Joyce for a while.
[1:36:40] Bob Dobbs: Even though Don Theall would come along and say,
[1:36:42] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan is really faking his Joyce fandom.
[1:36:45] Bob Dobbs: He's a Lewisian cynic.
[1:36:48] Bob Dobbs: So Theall got stuck with categorizing
[1:36:51] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan as a Lewisian in the end.
[1:36:54] Bob Dobbs: That's not accurate.
[1:36:56] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan was adapting.
[1:36:57] Bob Dobbs: He was quadrophrenic.
[1:36:59] Bob Dobbs: Because at the end of the
[1:37:01] Bob Dobbs: 60s, when the
[1:37:02] Bob Dobbs: Joycean is now fading off,
[1:37:05] Bob Dobbs: He gets back to Lewis.
[1:37:09] Bob Dobbs: He does a lot of essays in the early
[1:37:13] Bob Dobbs: 70s around Lewis.
[1:37:15] Bob Dobbs: So that's because the iconic correctness of the ideogramic is being locked in,
[1:37:27] Bob Dobbs: under the guise of the retrieval of visual values,
[1:37:30] Bob Dobbs: which was neoconservativism,
[1:37:32] Bob Dobbs: which actually was...
[1:37:34] Bob Dobbs: a knee-jerk response,
[1:37:36] Bob Dobbs: a Gutenberg response to the digital body that was coming in.
[1:37:39] Bob Dobbs: So I just did a Lewisian superficial pattern recognition there,
[1:37:45] Bob Dobbs: right?
[1:37:46] Bob Dobbs: But you can get enough people to be interested in what I just said and think they learned something.
[1:37:55] Bob Dobbs: You get what I'm saying?
[1:37:56] Bob Dobbs: I'm not putting great value on what I'm saying here,
[1:37:59] Bob Dobbs: even though it's pretty fucking good on a temporary level.
[1:38:05] Bob Dobbs: I'm applying
[1:38:07] Bob Dobbs: Dobbs's five-body model going past Finnegans Wake,
[1:38:15] Bob Dobbs: and you're digging it.
[1:38:18] Bob Dobbs: You're accepting it.
[1:38:20] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:38:21] Cameron McEwen: well,
[1:38:25] Cameron McEwen: as we've discussed on other occasions,
[1:38:30] Cameron McEwen: what I see is a mind actively at work.
[1:38:38] Cameron McEwen: constantly asking about itself in terms of what's going on out there in the world.
[1:38:49] Bob Dobbs: Pretending there's an out there,
[1:38:52] Bob Dobbs: putting on an out there.
[1:38:55] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:38:56] Cameron McEwen: So,
[1:38:56] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:38:56] Cameron McEwen: it's not as if there's no out there and it has to be pretended.
[1:39:00] Cameron McEwen: It's that the out there is...
[1:39:03] Cameron McEwen: Not one thing.
[1:39:04] Cameron McEwen: It's multiple things.
[1:39:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:39:07] Bob Dobbs: How do you define Finnegans Wake?
[1:39:08] Bob Dobbs: Where's the noun?
[1:39:09] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:39:10] Bob Dobbs: there's no noun.
[1:39:12] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[1:39:13] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[1:39:14] Bob Dobbs: so look at the next paragraph.
[1:39:16] Bob Dobbs: This reversal,
[1:39:19] Bob Dobbs: now the reversal I was saying was TV body,
[1:39:24] Bob Dobbs: but that's long after McLuhan.
[1:39:27] Bob Dobbs: So he's just talking about chemical body terms of morality or immorality.
[1:39:34] Bob Dobbs: This is his Christian self.
[1:39:36] Bob Dobbs: Looking at the paganism that's increasing.
[1:39:40] Bob Dobbs: Those are chemical body categories.
[1:39:42] Bob Dobbs: So he's saying that nobody's really being moral.
[1:39:47] Bob Dobbs: They are,
[1:39:48] Bob Dobbs: but the Android meme is growing and is projecting utopian levels of surveillance,
[1:39:56] Bob Dobbs: making everybody keep a clean nose.
[1:39:59] Bob Dobbs: And where are their,
[1:40:01] Bob Dobbs: what is it,
[1:40:02] Bob Dobbs: virtue signaling?
[1:40:03] Bob Dobbs: putting their virtues on their sleeves,
[1:40:05] Bob Dobbs: as he talked about that in Understanding Media.
[1:40:08] Bob Dobbs: This reversal has provided public and political life with a cast of representatives left over from the old order.
[1:40:14] Bob Dobbs: That is,
[1:40:15] Bob Dobbs: the figures in the political drama are still men of private goals and ambitions,
[1:40:18] Bob Dobbs: so he's talking about the Gutenbergian content,
[1:40:22] Bob Dobbs: recruited from the individualist age when politics seemed to most people to be a dirty game to be played by individuals with private ambitions.
[1:40:29] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:40:30] Bob Dobbs: in a way,
[1:40:30] Bob Dobbs: he's spelling out...
[1:40:32] Bob Dobbs: What he predicts in Culture Is Our Business in 1970,
[1:40:35] Bob Dobbs: the flip into neo-visual values.
[1:40:40] Bob Dobbs: So he's calling this political correctness,
[1:40:44] Bob Dobbs: it's actually a bit erroneous.
[1:40:46] Bob Dobbs: He's limiting it to a retrieval of Gutenberg values,
[1:40:49] Bob Dobbs: but
[1:40:50] Bob Dobbs: I would say it's a retrieval of the Anthropomorphic Physical as just a chemical body,
[1:40:57] Bob Dobbs: not anybody,
[1:40:59] Bob Dobbs: any culture that has a body.
[1:41:02] Bob Dobbs: Not just so he's too Gutenbergian in his criticism here.
[1:41:11] Bob Dobbs: Then he says,
[1:41:15] Bob Dobbs: to many people,
[1:41:16] Bob Dobbs: President Nixon may well appear as a leftover from that older political era when private ethics were expected to be high,
[1:41:23] Bob Dobbs: but public behavior was permissively much lower than it can ever be again.
[1:41:28] Bob Dobbs: It was much lower than it can be.
[1:41:32] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:41:32] Bob Dobbs: here's another thing,
[1:41:34] Bob Dobbs: is that there is an anarchy going on that he sometimes refers to,
[1:41:40] Bob Dobbs: and this pattern is superficial.
[1:41:43] Bob Dobbs: There's a bigger pattern of anarchy that's going to enhance through the 70s and into the 80s.
[1:41:47] Cameron McEwen: I think what McLuhan is talking about here is a dialectic between...
[1:42:01] Cameron McEwen: different conceptions of individuality and morality.
[1:42:08] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[1:42:08] Bob Dobbs: Eye and ear.
[1:42:09] Bob Dobbs: He's bringing together eye and ear in a larger tactile environment,
[1:42:13] Bob Dobbs: which he spells out a few months later in the media approach to environment.
[1:42:18] Bob Dobbs: That article is about the ground of tactility becoming figure.
[1:42:22] Bob Dobbs: So these two articles are written in reverse.
[1:42:26] Bob Dobbs: You've got to read the other one first and then see here.
[1:42:28] Bob Dobbs: He's showing the superficiality of the eye-ear merger.
[1:42:32] Bob Dobbs: And so there's two kinds of eye and two kinds of ear that are getting mixed up.
[1:42:37] Bob Dobbs: And he's not going into that.
[1:42:39] Bob Dobbs: He's keeping it simple.
[1:42:42] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:42:43] Cameron McEwen: exactly.
[1:42:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:42:44] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.
[1:42:45] Cameron McEwen: So this is for people who are trying to get some sort of basic orientation of what's going on.
[1:42:53] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:42:54] Cameron McEwen: Here's one way of looking at it.
[1:42:56] Cameron McEwen: That's what he's saying.
[1:42:57] Cameron McEwen: But of course...
[1:42:59] Bob Dobbs: And if you get it,
[1:43:01] Bob Dobbs: I think you have a little ecstasy of an epiphany.
[1:43:04] Bob Dobbs: You'd be able to mock what's going on because you see the hypocrisy,
[1:43:08] Bob Dobbs: which he talks about in the next paragraph.
[1:43:09] Bob Dobbs: Because people are trying to find a way to maintain a witty position at the cocktail party.
[1:43:20] Bob Dobbs: People live for what they're going to say at parties.
[1:43:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:43:28] Cameron McEwen: That's called identity.
[1:43:30] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:43:33] Bob Dobbs: They've got to come up with new ways to keep their identity charismatic.
[1:43:38] Bob Dobbs: And this will disappear when the chip body takes over in 95.
[1:43:45] Bob Dobbs: It becomes translated to inner space as the content of the chip body,
[1:43:49] Bob Dobbs: where people are yelling at each other's attitudes,
[1:43:53] Bob Dobbs: which they pick up by ESP.
[1:43:56] Bob Dobbs: which is indicated by whatever words you use.
[1:44:00] Bob Dobbs: So it's a crude form of ESP based on ideas and what identities your ideas seem to represent.
[1:44:08] Bob Dobbs: And you,
[1:44:09] Bob Dobbs: as an opponent of that,
[1:44:10] Bob Dobbs: is not going to be that identity,
[1:44:12] Bob Dobbs: so you're going to mock it.
[1:44:13] Bob Dobbs: So immediately the chip body became a very violent environment from 95 to 2000,
[1:44:19] Bob Dobbs: and many friendships were gone because they got sucked into a new kind of cocktail wittiness.
[1:44:26] Bob Dobbs: in its super angelic state.
[1:44:31] Cameron McEwen: Now,
[1:44:31] Bob Dobbs: you could transcribe that out,
[1:44:32] Bob Dobbs: what I just said.
[1:44:34] Bob Dobbs: That would appeal to people.
[1:44:35] Bob Dobbs: This guy's got a lot of insights.
[1:44:37] Bob Dobbs: You know what I mean?
[1:44:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:44:40] Cameron McEwen: I think you could sum it up by saying that the world became a New Yorker cartoon.
[1:44:44] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:44:45] Bob Dobbs: yeah.
[1:44:46] Bob Dobbs: And everybody could be a New Yorker.
[1:44:49] Bob Dobbs: It was easy because there was enough familiarity of the different archetypes and movements of old unconscious in the 50s,
[1:44:57] Bob Dobbs: 60s,
[1:44:57] Bob Dobbs: 70s.
[1:44:58] Bob Dobbs: All the different,
[1:44:58] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[1:44:59] Bob Dobbs: revolutions attempted.
[1:45:03] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:45:03] Bob Dobbs: The valuation of values.
[1:45:06] Cameron McEwen: What I see you doing when you're talking.
[1:45:10] Cameron McEwen: You use these terms like 60s,
[1:45:12] Cameron McEwen: 70s,
[1:45:13] Cameron McEwen: and 80s,
[1:45:13] Cameron McEwen: or in 1996 this happened,
[1:45:17] Cameron McEwen: or whatever.
[1:45:18] Bob Dobbs: You know what that is?
[1:45:19] Bob Dobbs: You know there's neurolinguistics where a person indicates their bias by where they look with their eyes?
[1:45:28] Bob Dobbs: You know about that science?
[1:45:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:45:31] Bob Dobbs: I use words and people's journalistic...
[1:45:35] Bob Dobbs: pattern recognition that they have in the decade dance they have in themselves.
[1:45:38] Bob Dobbs: People have images,
[1:45:39] Bob Dobbs: you can say 60s,
[1:45:40] Bob Dobbs: they got images,
[1:45:41] Bob Dobbs: 70s images.
[1:45:42] Bob Dobbs: These are modern poetic terms.
[1:45:46] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[1:45:47] Cameron McEwen: that's right.
[1:45:48] Cameron McEwen: So you tend to use years in the sense of you're talking about something
[1:45:59] Cameron McEwen: X and you want to indicate that there's also
[1:46:04] Cameron McEwen: Y.
[1:46:04] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[1:46:05] Cameron McEwen: So your particular way of doing that is to say that in the
[1:46:10] Cameron McEwen: 80s there was X,
[1:46:11] Cameron McEwen: but then in the
[1:46:12] Cameron McEwen: 90s there was Y.
[1:46:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:46:14] Bob Dobbs: these are the chain letter phase shifts or the decade dance.
[1:46:18] Cameron McEwen: Correct,
[1:46:19] Cameron McEwen: correct.
[1:46:21] Bob Dobbs: Again,
[1:46:21] Bob Dobbs: I'm just talking about myself,
[1:46:23] Bob Dobbs: aren't I?
[1:46:25] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[1:46:26] Cameron McEwen: in a sense,
[1:46:27] Cameron McEwen: everybody does that all the time.
[1:46:29] Bob Dobbs: Right,
[1:46:30] Bob Dobbs: but it is a kind of poetry.
[1:46:33] Bob Dobbs: It's not...
[1:46:34] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg poetry,
[1:46:36] Bob Dobbs: it's conversational poetry,
[1:46:37] Bob Dobbs: it's instant pattern recognition,
[1:46:38] Bob Dobbs: which is what people want.
[1:46:41] Cameron McEwen: That's your way of dancing.
[1:46:42] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[1:46:43] Bob Dobbs: that's the way I dance,
[1:46:44] Bob Dobbs: verbally dance.
[1:46:45] Bob Dobbs: And mental gesture and ESP.
[1:46:47] Bob Dobbs: I'm assuming you get what I'm saying,
[1:46:49] Bob Dobbs: which is actually what
[1:46:52] Bob Dobbs: Cosmic Awareness said to me in October 8th,
[1:46:54] Bob Dobbs: 1969.
[1:46:56] Bob Dobbs: It was so accurate.
[1:46:58] Bob Dobbs: They said,
[1:46:58] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[1:47:00] Bob Dobbs: they had something called the Symbolic Project.
[1:47:03] Bob Dobbs: 44 symbols they came up with,
[1:47:04] Bob Dobbs: metaphysical symbols that meant all kinds of occult stuff.
[1:47:07] Bob Dobbs: And that was like an encyclopedia of all the previous Kabbalah systems.
[1:47:13] Bob Dobbs: And so they said,
[1:47:14] Bob Dobbs: you have an extraordinary action in the symbolic project.
[1:47:18] Bob Dobbs: You have a way of communicating high abstractions with a transpersonal effect.
[1:47:27] Bob Dobbs: And transpersonal was intuitive ESP.
[1:47:29] Bob Dobbs: So I was good at vast generalizations.
[1:47:32] Bob Dobbs: That's why I like McLuhan.
[1:47:36] Bob Dobbs: And made it personal and bring in the intuitive or whatever,
[1:47:40] Bob Dobbs: words that evoked a sense of what people,
[1:47:44] Bob Dobbs: was the actual Esperanto language they lived,
[1:47:46] Bob Dobbs: which was the Decad Dance terms and images they had.
[1:47:51] Bob Dobbs: So they said I was good at expressing high something,
[1:47:58] Bob Dobbs: high level or high something symbolism.
[1:48:04] Bob Dobbs: with a transpersonal charisma.
[1:48:05] Bob Dobbs: That's exactly what I just did and what you're talking about.
[1:48:08] Bob Dobbs: That's what I do.
[1:48:10] Bob Dobbs: So I could go on the radio 40 years ago and just talk my way through for 33,000 hours or more.
[1:48:18] Bob Dobbs: I was doing Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh.
[1:48:23] Bob Dobbs: Howard Stern and Limbaugh,
[1:48:25] Bob Dobbs: they're not as good as me.
[1:48:27] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:48:27] Cameron McEwen: they only can do an hour or two.
[1:48:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[1:48:30] Cameron McEwen: For you.
[1:48:31] Cameron McEwen: Talking 24 hours is no problem at all.
[1:48:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:48:34] Bob Dobbs: because my audience will react to what I'm saying,
[1:48:37] Bob Dobbs: and I get new patterns right from their words.
[1:48:42] Bob Dobbs: That's what office hours is.
[1:48:45] Bob Dobbs: So let's see if he's going to say this about me.
[1:48:49] Bob Dobbs: Let's see what happens in the next paragraph.
[1:48:53] Bob Dobbs: The new political pattern demands idealism,
[1:48:56] Bob Dobbs: not only of profession,
[1:48:57] Bob Dobbs: but behavior in public figures.
[1:48:59] Bob Dobbs: But this demand is made by people who are quite permissive in their private ethics.
[1:49:05] Bob Dobbs: A new kind of hypocrisy has been born among those who have grown up with the new media.
[1:49:11] Bob Dobbs: Now this is not me because he's dialectic and Gutenbergian almost.
[1:49:18] Bob Dobbs: He's putting on the Gutenbergian.
[1:49:19] Bob Dobbs: I got multiple levels,
[1:49:21] Bob Dobbs: quadrophrenia and five bodies,
[1:49:22] Bob Dobbs: so
[1:49:23] Bob Dobbs: I'm not subject to this criticism.
[1:49:25] Bob Dobbs: A new kind of hypocrisy has been born among those who have grown up with the new media.
[1:49:30] Bob Dobbs: They now demand of public figures a level of moral dedication,
[1:49:34] Bob Dobbs: which they feel no need to exemplify in the private sector of their own lives.
[1:49:39] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:49:40] Bob Dobbs: this is what the alt-right redid in the Android meme or in the tech body level of the chip body.
[1:49:49] Bob Dobbs: This is what they talk about,
[1:49:51] Bob Dobbs: not your moral life with your physical body,
[1:49:56] Bob Dobbs: but the moral life of your hypocritical political correctness.
[1:50:01] Bob Dobbs: They criticize the New York Times journalists for standing up for certain mental political correctness.
[1:50:09] Bob Dobbs: attitudes,
[1:50:10] Bob Dobbs: but do not live by it themselves.
[1:50:14] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:50:15] Bob Dobbs: it's mental behavior here,
[1:50:17] Bob Dobbs: not physical behavior.
[1:50:18] Bob Dobbs: It's mental immorality or hypocrisy that McLuhan's predicting.
[1:50:24] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:50:24] Bob Dobbs: he's not predicting it.
[1:50:26] Bob Dobbs: This is where he's giving the last criticism,
[1:50:29] Bob Dobbs: the last hypocrisy of the era when there was chemical bodies.
[1:50:32] Bob Dobbs: By the 90s,
[1:50:33] Bob Dobbs: when the digital takes over,
[1:50:36] Bob Dobbs: there's a new hypocrisy that he didn't live to see.
[1:50:39] Bob Dobbs: But I'm extending from McLuhan but beyond.
[1:50:45] Bob Dobbs: And basically it has to be the discarnate mental world,
[1:50:49] Bob Dobbs: the Egyptian world he has in the
[1:50:53] Bob Dobbs: Review of Burroughs.
[1:50:54] Bob Dobbs: It's a mental Egyptian intuitive world.
[1:50:56] Bob Dobbs: That's what we're arguing over.
[1:50:58] Bob Dobbs: And there's a hypocrisy there in the older legacy media,
[1:51:04] Bob Dobbs: which the chip body people recognize.
[1:51:08] Bob Dobbs: And that's another aspect of MAGA.
[1:51:10] Bob Dobbs: See,
[1:51:11] Bob Dobbs: MAGA is not a simple nostalgia.
[1:51:14] Bob Dobbs: It is a resentment to ungrammatical major media.
[1:51:21] Bob Dobbs: They do a lousy job of doing what they claim to be doing.
[1:51:25] Bob Dobbs: They don't finish stories.
[1:51:26] Bob Dobbs: They don't investigate it.
[1:51:27] Bob Dobbs: They fuck up themselves.
[1:51:29] Bob Dobbs: They actually are demanding you to not have maids and immigrants working for you.
[1:51:37] Bob Dobbs: But they have them themselves.
[1:51:39] Bob Dobbs: So that's a bit of physical,
[1:51:41] Bob Dobbs: that's an example of physical behavior.
[1:51:43] Bob Dobbs: But it's always about culture,
[1:51:45] Bob Dobbs: use of culture.
[1:51:46] Bob Dobbs: So part of this time is the interplay of cultures,
[1:51:50] Bob Dobbs: which meant that people had to stand back and create rules,
[1:51:53] Bob Dobbs: which is called political correctness,
[1:51:55] Bob Dobbs: because everybody was merging into the mass man of no identity.
[1:52:01] Bob Dobbs: So making identities is a moral activity.
[1:52:07] Bob Dobbs: on the mental level but it's hypocritical because nobody can live by that those divisions one of the ways in which it's violent yes he was talking about a page before right yeah or maybe it was you was talking about it i i was saying it but i was getting it from this i was saying it before we came to the quote or
[1:52:26] Bob Dobbs: after it but we did the quote first so uh a new kind of hypocrisy has been born among those who have grown up with new bodies not new media it.
[1:52:36] Bob Dobbs: They now demand of the TV body a level of moral,
[1:52:41] Bob Dobbs: mental gesturing and categorization,
[1:52:44] Bob Dobbs: which they feel no need to exemplify in their endless tweeting in their chip body.
[1:52:54] Bob Dobbs: So there's always an Android.
[1:52:56] Bob Dobbs: The TV level is more the Android meme.
[1:52:59] Bob Dobbs: The tech body is definitely a chip body extension.
[1:53:03] Bob Dobbs: They're always criticizing Trump for his errors in the Android meme TV iconography level.
[1:53:11] Bob Dobbs: So he said he's going to,
[1:53:14] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:53:15] Bob Dobbs: wipe out a whole bunch of people,
[1:53:17] Bob Dobbs: a lot of chemical bodies in his first,
[1:53:20] Bob Dobbs: as soon as he gets in office.
[1:53:21] Bob Dobbs: So everybody says,
[1:53:22] Bob Dobbs: this is Hitler.
[1:53:23] Bob Dobbs: He's going to be a dictator.
[1:53:24] Bob Dobbs: You know what his response was?
[1:53:26] Bob Dobbs: No,
[1:53:26] Bob Dobbs: I'm only going to do this the first day.
[1:53:28] Bob Dobbs: I will not be a dictator the second day.
[1:53:33] Bob Dobbs: Which is a great response,
[1:53:35] Bob Dobbs: and it's humorous,
[1:53:37] Bob Dobbs: and people respond to that.
[1:53:38] Bob Dobbs: And the old New York Times journalists are left fucking speechless.
[1:53:42] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:53:43] Bob Dobbs: And they're going to criticize him for lying or being hypocritical,
[1:53:46] Bob Dobbs: and that's not what's going on here.
[1:53:48] Bob Dobbs: He has to come up with a pattern from a different body to cancel their body attack or neurosis.
[1:53:58] Bob Dobbs: You see?
[1:53:59] Bob Dobbs: So it really is a...
[1:54:02] Bob Dobbs: New bodies,
[1:54:02] Bob Dobbs: not new media.
[1:54:07] Bob Dobbs: And so we can apply what McLuhan's saying and just put in bodies for,
[1:54:13] Bob Dobbs: and then you would have more than two,
[1:54:14] Bob Dobbs: you'd have five bodies or even six.
[1:54:17] Bob Dobbs: And that's the way I talk.
[1:54:19] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:54:20] Cameron McEwen: So,
[1:54:22] Cameron McEwen: I mean,
[1:54:22] Cameron McEwen: one way of talking about the dynamics of the unconscious is to do it in terms of years.
[1:54:29] Cameron McEwen: Or decades.
[1:54:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[1:54:30] Cameron McEwen: You can say in this decade,
[1:54:32] Cameron McEwen: this year.
[1:54:32] Cameron McEwen: Now,
[1:54:32] Bob Dobbs: that would be TV,
[1:54:33] Bob Dobbs: because I'm using known cliche images from each decade.
[1:54:38] Cameron McEwen: Right.
[1:54:38] Cameron McEwen: But you can also talk about it in terms of bodies.
[1:54:42] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:54:43] Cameron McEwen: You can say this belongs to this body,
[1:54:45] Cameron McEwen: that belongs to that body.
[1:54:48] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[1:54:49] Cameron McEwen: You can also talk about it in terms of media.
[1:54:51] Cameron McEwen: You can say this belongs to TV,
[1:54:54] Cameron McEwen: this belongs to x-rays,
[1:54:56] Cameron McEwen: whatever,
[1:54:57] Cameron McEwen: right?
[1:54:57] Cameron McEwen: So these are different overlays,
[1:55:02] Cameron McEwen: you can say,
[1:55:03] Cameron McEwen: different forms of mapping that can...
[1:55:07] Cameron McEwen: can be used to try to understand what's going on in the possibility land.
[1:55:18] Bob Dobbs: You're unconscious,
[1:55:19] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[1:55:20] Bob Dobbs: what you're engaging.
[1:55:23] Cameron McEwen: And this is what you're engaging in the unconscious are possibilities,
[1:55:29] Cameron McEwen: not of ideas or particular things to do with your body.
[1:55:36] Cameron McEwen: They're whole environments.
[1:55:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[1:55:38] Bob Dobbs: you are cultures.
[1:55:39] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[1:55:39] Bob Dobbs: You're wearing whole environments from culture to media.
[1:55:43] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[1:55:44] Cameron McEwen: as you talk,
[1:55:46] Bob Dobbs: we're coming right into what I...
[1:55:48] Bob Dobbs: Perfect introduction to what I say next.
[1:55:50] Bob Dobbs: I say what you're saying.
[1:55:51] Bob Dobbs: You're predicting this.
[1:55:52] Bob Dobbs: This is good.
[1:55:55] Bob Dobbs: But do you want to say one more sentence?
[1:55:56] Cameron McEwen: Lead on.
[1:55:57] Cameron McEwen: No,
[1:55:57] Cameron McEwen: no,
[1:55:57] Cameron McEwen: lead on.
[1:55:58] Cameron McEwen: If I'm leading into something...
[1:56:00] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[1:56:01] Bob Dobbs: listen to what I say.
[1:56:02] Bob Dobbs: On 166,
[1:56:03] Bob Dobbs: after the McLuhan,
[1:56:04] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[1:56:04] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan quote,
[1:56:06] Bob Dobbs: as the Android meme provided cover for itself by allowing humans to perceive more and more that the Android meme looked and acted like them,
[1:56:14] Bob Dobbs: now that would be a general looking for the chemical body in the media,
[1:56:20] Bob Dobbs: because it's still,
[1:56:21] Bob Dobbs: it's not totally chip body yet,
[1:56:24] Bob Dobbs: so it is people looking for cultures and chemical body environments that people are wearing,
[1:56:30] Bob Dobbs: collectivities.
[1:56:31] Bob Dobbs: In the Android meme,
[1:56:33] Bob Dobbs: in the virtual replay to you,
[1:56:36] Bob Dobbs: to make you think there is an America,
[1:56:38] Bob Dobbs: there is a West or East.
[1:56:40] Bob Dobbs: ...European.
[1:56:41] Bob Dobbs: These are all hippies or straight people.
[1:56:45] Bob Dobbs: As the Android meme provided cover for itself,
[1:56:48] Bob Dobbs: because it was moving into the chip body,
[1:56:50] Bob Dobbs: out of the TV body,
[1:56:52] Bob Dobbs: by allowing humans to perceive more and more that the Android meme looked and acted like them,
[1:56:58] Bob Dobbs: and more and more it'll present whatever body you think you need,
[1:57:02] Bob Dobbs: while at the same time it appeared to slowly disappear.
[1:57:05] Bob Dobbs: Now that's the anxiety part.
[1:57:08] Bob Dobbs: that.
[1:57:09] Bob Dobbs: After 30 years of this correctness of the ideogramic and the iconic,
[1:57:15] Bob Dobbs: the chip body is making it become invisible,
[1:57:19] Bob Dobbs: that those categories don't work.
[1:57:21] Bob Dobbs: We're not people.
[1:57:23] Bob Dobbs: We're post-human.
[1:57:24] Bob Dobbs: We're not bodies.
[1:57:25] Bob Dobbs: We're something else that you can't visualize.
[1:57:28] Bob Dobbs: So you can't visualize,
[1:57:30] Bob Dobbs: so it disappears.
[1:57:31] Bob Dobbs: It appeared to slowly disappear.
[1:57:33] Bob Dobbs: The shrinking Android meme evoked a renewed sense of anthropomorphic power.
[1:57:38] Bob Dobbs: in humans'
[1:57:39] Bob Dobbs: chemical bodies,
[1:57:41] Bob Dobbs: but we're going to have to include now the later bodies,
[1:57:44] Bob Dobbs: and that's in the next paragraph.
[1:57:46] Bob Dobbs: Beginning with the mood of having survived Y2K and 911,
[1:57:50] Bob Dobbs: overcoming the fear of the landscape of chip technology,
[1:57:53] Bob Dobbs: the chemical body sought out nanocommunities,
[1:57:56] Bob Dobbs: that's chip body,
[1:57:57] Bob Dobbs: online and in person,
[1:57:59] Bob Dobbs: and righteously announced a new confidence in their particular favored physical bias of form.
[1:58:05] Bob Dobbs: This was misidentified as the culture wars.
[1:58:07] Bob Dobbs: So.
[1:58:08] Bob Dobbs: I'm still emphasizing the chemical body,
[1:58:12] Bob Dobbs: not so much the astrobody and the TV body.
[1:58:14] Bob Dobbs: I'm not using those terms,
[1:58:15] Bob Dobbs: but I probably do later.
[1:58:17] Bob Dobbs: But it's chemical body at the beginning.
[1:58:21] Bob Dobbs: And that was called jackass art,
[1:58:24] Bob Dobbs: the jackass phenomenon when the Internet came in,
[1:58:27] Bob Dobbs: in the
[1:58:27] Bob Dobbs: 90s. People would,
[1:58:30] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[1:58:30] Bob Dobbs: target their bodies,
[1:58:31] Bob Dobbs: hack their bodies in different ways.
[1:58:34] Bob Dobbs: But it is not working.
[1:58:38] Bob Dobbs: The chemical body,
[1:58:39] Bob Dobbs: the celebration of the return of the chemical body as your new retrieval of the anthropomorphic is not going to work.
[1:58:47] Bob Dobbs: And that's going to lead to the tech body.
[1:58:48] Bob Dobbs: So let's see.
[1:58:49] Bob Dobbs: So I say,
[1:58:51] Bob Dobbs: while the chemical body sought out nanocommunities,
[1:58:53] Bob Dobbs: so it thought it was looking for small,
[1:58:56] Bob Dobbs: it went into the chip
[1:58:59] Bob Dobbs: 1.0 to find likes and dislikes of the chemical body online.
[1:59:06] Bob Dobbs: And then that became your community.
[1:59:08] Bob Dobbs: But it was a nano-community,
[1:59:09] Bob Dobbs: and it was digital.
[1:59:11] Bob Dobbs: And you didn't have to meet anybody physically.
[1:59:15] Bob Dobbs: Though maybe you might attempt that.
[1:59:16] Bob Dobbs: That would be the Tea Party attempting to apply,
[1:59:19] Bob Dobbs: maybe even Trump,
[1:59:21] Bob Dobbs: apply the chip body back into the chemical body.
[1:59:24] Bob Dobbs: In that sense,
[1:59:24] Bob Dobbs: it looks retro to the liberals.
[1:59:27] Bob Dobbs: While the chemical body sought out nano-communities,
[1:59:29] Bob Dobbs: that's the texting,
[1:59:31] Bob Dobbs: and righteously announced a new confidence in their particular favorite community.
[1:59:36] Bob Dobbs: It started announcing that they were transgender,
[1:59:38] Bob Dobbs: and that was better than a heterosexual.
[1:59:41] Bob Dobbs: New confidence in their particular favorite physical bias of form,
[1:59:45] Bob Dobbs: so they're arguing over the physical.
[1:59:47] Bob Dobbs: It was body wars,
[1:59:50] Bob Dobbs: not culture wars.
[1:59:51] Bob Dobbs: It was over what to do,
[1:59:53] Bob Dobbs: what kind of shape to put the chemical body in.
[1:59:55] Bob Dobbs: So,
[1:59:56] Bob Dobbs: see,
[1:59:56] Bob Dobbs: I'm describing the AP taking over.
[2:00:00] Bob Dobbs: So then you get,
[2:00:02] Bob Dobbs: Frank Zingrone comes in with a useful book,
[2:00:04] Bob Dobbs: The Media Simplex.
[2:00:06] Bob Dobbs: which is the overlaying that you're talking about in dialectical terms.
[2:00:11] Bob Dobbs: The complex and the simple is happening in the chip space.
[2:00:16] Bob Dobbs: So he says,
[2:00:17] Bob Dobbs: politics and economics have always operated in secrecy.
[2:00:21] Bob Dobbs: That's a top-down conspiracy,
[2:00:23] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[2:00:23] Bob Dobbs: theory attitude,
[2:00:25] Bob Dobbs: which everybody thinks there's a lot of group manipulation going on counter to your nano-community.
[2:00:34] Bob Dobbs: And it's misnamed conspiracy theory.
[2:00:36] Bob Dobbs: It's just everybody's operating in secrecy because they're invisible.
[2:00:41] Bob Dobbs: So politics and economics have always operated in secrecy.
[2:00:45] Bob Dobbs: In information circles,
[2:00:46] Bob Dobbs: media gatekeepers are the functionaries of the new Gnostics.
[2:00:52] Bob Dobbs: Cyberspace bandits,
[2:00:53] Bob Dobbs: information high priests,
[2:00:55] Bob Dobbs: chaos investors,
[2:00:56] Bob Dobbs: hacker terrorists,
[2:00:57] Bob Dobbs: bank presidents and IMF globalists,
[2:01:00] Bob Dobbs: drug and biotech researchers,
[2:01:01] Bob Dobbs: communication moguls and sundry other...
[2:01:04] Bob Dobbs: Infocrats,
[2:01:05] Bob Dobbs: which we could say digital bodies,
[2:01:07] Bob Dobbs: cross the data desert of the internet in one-person caravans.
[2:01:13] Bob Dobbs: That's really good.
[2:01:15] Bob Dobbs: It's,
[2:01:16] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:01:16] Bob Dobbs: super angelic,
[2:01:18] Bob Dobbs: driver's seat,
[2:01:19] Bob Dobbs: one-person caravans.
[2:01:21] Bob Dobbs: They're putting on their community.
[2:01:24] Bob Dobbs: They're pretending a bunch of people that seem to agree with them on some forum is your community.
[2:01:31] Bob Dobbs: Very ephemeral.
[2:01:34] Bob Dobbs: There's a...
[2:01:35] Bob Dobbs: So then he says there's something fundamentally mysterious about the operations of electric process.
[2:01:40] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:01:40] Bob Dobbs: he's trying to describe the digital thing,
[2:01:43] Bob Dobbs: but he's still using McLuhan
[2:01:45] Bob Dobbs: TV landscape terms,
[2:01:46] Bob Dobbs: so he calls it electric process,
[2:01:48] Bob Dobbs: but it's the tactility squared of the chip body landscape that you were describing.
[2:01:54] Bob Dobbs: Every square centimeter of Earth has become a holographic point,
[2:01:58] Bob Dobbs: that's a good statement,
[2:01:59] Bob Dobbs: containing all of the transmissions over the face of the globe.
[2:02:04] Bob Dobbs: That's him approaching the holeopathic in my chart,
[2:02:08] Bob Dobbs: which was written a few years before he wrote this,
[2:02:12] Bob Dobbs: and he's still stuck in a more solid TV body icon.
[2:02:15] Bob Dobbs: He's only seen one hologram.
[2:02:17] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't see the holeopathic.
[2:02:20] Bob Dobbs: Every square centimeter of Earth has become a holographic point containing all of the transmissions over the face of the globe.
[2:02:26] Bob Dobbs: There ain't no globe.
[2:02:28] Bob Dobbs: The elimination of time and space and human interchange
[2:02:32] Bob Dobbs: Is it big enough revolution to completely change all social values?
[2:02:36] Bob Dobbs: Virtualized,
[2:02:37] Bob Dobbs: bodiless people can make no real society.
[2:02:40] Bob Dobbs: That was the problem in the TV age.
[2:02:44] Bob Dobbs: You probably would see this as a bit of a rearview mirror,
[2:02:48] Bob Dobbs: a Marconi bias here.
[2:02:51] Bob Dobbs: Because people,
[2:02:53] Bob Dobbs: by 2001,
[2:02:54] Bob Dobbs: are not having a problem with this virtualized,
[2:02:57] Bob Dobbs: bodiless reality.
[2:02:59] Bob Dobbs: And they're not having a problem of making a...
[2:03:02] Bob Dobbs: An unreal society.
[2:03:03] Bob Dobbs: The discarnate realities of electric process and their great economic power may be the problem,
[2:03:09] Bob Dobbs: not the solution to our futures.
[2:03:11] Bob Dobbs: So that's him criticizing McLuhan.
[2:03:13] Bob Dobbs: That the electric producer-slash-consumer reality is not the solution anymore.
[2:03:23] Bob Dobbs: That's because,
[2:03:24] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[2:03:24] Bob Dobbs: we have a total chip body.
[2:03:26] Bob Dobbs: So he's describing the chip body before he knows my stuff.
[2:03:31] Cameron McEwen: So you said there that in
[2:03:36] Cameron McEwen: 2001, people didn't have a problem with this anymore.
[2:03:42] Cameron McEwen: And what I see you saying there is,
[2:03:45] Cameron McEwen: looked at another way,
[2:03:49] Cameron McEwen: there is no problem there.
[2:03:50] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:03:51] Cameron McEwen: So it's the
[2:03:57] Cameron McEwen: Bob's mind tends to function.
[2:04:01] Cameron McEwen: uh through um uh objective scenes as if you're a filmmaker yep and um you're um so uh that's what McLuhan said Innis did in the
[2:04:16] Cameron McEwen: 50s and it was cinematic and he didn't know it correct correct that's what he um in the um uh later in us yes uh essay of uh 1953.
[2:04:31] Cameron McEwen: 53,
[2:04:32] Cameron McEwen: that's right.
[2:04:33] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:04:33] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:04:33] Bob Dobbs: I'm doing Innis with television,
[2:04:37] Bob Dobbs: not cinema.
[2:04:40] Bob Dobbs: Maybe cable TV,
[2:04:41] Bob Dobbs: multiple channels.
[2:04:43] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:04:44] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[2:04:46] Cameron McEwen: Instead of a camera with frames,
[2:04:49] Cameron McEwen: a pickup camera,
[2:04:51] Cameron McEwen: like a microphone.
[2:04:52] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:04:52] Bob Dobbs: you're remote,
[2:04:54] Bob Dobbs: hopping.
[2:04:54] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:04:58] Bob Dobbs: Good.
[2:05:00] Bob Dobbs: So you see where...
[2:05:03] Bob Dobbs: um what McLuhan tried to say in Cliche to Archetype what he called the intermediate process Zingrone is talking that the
[2:05:13] Bob Dobbs: 70s McLuhan but using a different term electric process which which is only said a few times and Take Today by Barrington Nevitt so he's doing McLuhan with a little bit more advantage of uh you know many years later of the computer
[2:05:30] Bob Dobbs: world but he's Still.
[2:05:32] Bob Dobbs: Bogged down with TV concerns,
[2:05:34] Bob Dobbs: TV body,
[2:05:36] Bob Dobbs: because he keeps it in TV landscape.
[2:05:38] Bob Dobbs: And he's saying he sees it eroding.
[2:05:41] Bob Dobbs: He knows it has something to do with the computer,
[2:05:44] Bob Dobbs: but it doesn't get to the five body,
[2:05:49] Bob Dobbs: which Kroker does.
[2:05:51] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:05:51] Bob Dobbs: Zingrone used to criticize Kroker.
[2:05:54] Bob Dobbs: He read him and was bothered by him.
[2:05:55] Bob Dobbs: That's probably because Kroker was doing something that Frank didn't fully get.
[2:06:00] Bob Dobbs: So...
[2:06:06] Bob Dobbs: Frank is the best McLuhan commentator in the early 2000 period,
[2:06:11] Bob Dobbs: because the diasporic school,
[2:06:15] Bob Dobbs: they're still talking in media terms.
[2:06:17] Bob Dobbs: The Neil Postmans and
[2:06:19] Bob Dobbs: Bruce Powe and Lance Strate,
[2:06:22] Bob Dobbs: they don't get to the digital till recently.
[2:06:25] Bob Dobbs: But if you read this book,
[2:06:26] Bob Dobbs: it's a good book about,
[2:06:28] Bob Dobbs: and he's able to find all kinds of hypocritical situations.
[2:06:32] Bob Dobbs: A lot of patterns that nobody else comes up with or...
[2:06:38] Bob Dobbs: don't notice,
[2:06:39] Bob Dobbs: and he's got a lot of them in his book,
[2:06:43] Bob Dobbs: a lot of interesting patterns.
[2:06:45] Bob Dobbs: He's like McLuhan,
[2:06:45] Bob Dobbs: commenting on the mundane,
[2:06:47] Bob Dobbs: banal stuff of that day.
[2:06:51] Bob Dobbs: Like he was talking,
[2:06:52] Bob Dobbs: I know he did a paper,
[2:06:54] Bob Dobbs: an editorial op-ed in the Globe and Mail or something around 2000,
[2:06:58] Bob Dobbs: 1999,
[2:07:00] Bob Dobbs: and he talked about,
[2:07:00] Bob Dobbs: he's a university professor,
[2:07:02] Bob Dobbs: and he's talking about...
[2:07:06] Bob Dobbs: how universities,
[2:07:07] Bob Dobbs: what a fraud universities are.
[2:07:09] Bob Dobbs: There weren't many professors going that far.
[2:07:14] Bob Dobbs: So he was talking about the classroom without walls and seeing the computer was squaring the classroom without walls and it made professorships obsolete.
[2:07:23] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:07:23] Bob Dobbs: he had tenure and all that,
[2:07:25] Bob Dobbs: so he could say it,
[2:07:25] Bob Dobbs: but there was no other professor,
[2:07:28] Bob Dobbs: it seemed to me,
[2:07:29] Bob Dobbs: going that far.
[2:07:32] Cameron McEwen: And you knew him personally,
[2:07:33] Cameron McEwen: right?
[2:07:34] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:07:34] Bob Dobbs: we were good friends,
[2:07:35] Bob Dobbs: yep.
[2:07:35] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:07:35] Cameron McEwen: so did he have a lively mind?
[2:07:39] Cameron McEwen: Could he keep up with you?
[2:07:41] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:07:42] Bob Dobbs: he was a poet,
[2:07:43] Bob Dobbs: and he always could respond to what I'm saying with his own examples.
[2:07:47] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:07:48] Bob Dobbs: this was in the
[2:07:49] Bob Dobbs: 90s. He was fed up with Eric,
[2:07:52] Bob Dobbs: Derek,
[2:07:52] Bob Dobbs: and Logan,
[2:07:54] Bob Dobbs: and any other of those corny guys.
[2:07:56] Bob Dobbs: He knew that they were behind.
[2:07:59] Bob Dobbs: So he worked on this book for a few years.
[2:08:03] Bob Dobbs: And the only guy who responded to it intelligently was Don Theall.
[2:08:06] Bob Dobbs: But Don was keeping up with the scene.
[2:08:11] Bob Dobbs: It's like Don,
[2:08:12] Bob Dobbs: he got a big image in the early
[2:08:14] Bob Dobbs: 90s with saying,
[2:08:15] Bob Dobbs: cyber culture is retrieving Finnegans Wake.
[2:08:18] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:08:18] Bob Dobbs: that was pretty unique for his day.
[2:08:20] Bob Dobbs: But by 2001,
[2:08:23] Bob Dobbs: maybe he didn't have a metaphor for the post-Y2K.
[2:08:27] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:08:27] Bob Dobbs: Frank did seem to have that.
[2:08:29] Bob Dobbs: So he didn't hear...
[2:08:32] Bob Dobbs: much of my five body talk but he knew uh that i was on to something that he recognized it so he he enjoyed talking to me then to any other McLuhanite and i even got him to become a friend of don theil because he he found out i was talking to don so he got interested and then he found out don was don was basically the last guy he corresponded with uh before he died he
[2:08:56] Bob Dobbs: had a major heart attack in 1989.
[2:09:00] Bob Dobbs: And he lasted another,
[2:09:01] Bob Dobbs: once he got over that,
[2:09:03] Bob Dobbs: probably,
[2:09:03] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:09:04] Bob Dobbs: that's when he became radicalized.
[2:09:06] Bob Dobbs: He got over it.
[2:09:07] Bob Dobbs: And then he lasted until about 2009,
[2:09:10] Bob Dobbs: another 20 years.
[2:09:12] Bob Dobbs: And Don Theall,
[2:09:14] Bob Dobbs: he had his crisis when he was kicked out of the presidency of Trent University by the neocon revival.
[2:09:24] Bob Dobbs: So his
[2:09:25] Bob Dobbs: 60s patina wasn't working.
[2:09:28] Bob Dobbs: So he read Stewart
[2:09:29] Bob Dobbs: Brand's,
[2:09:30] Bob Dobbs: the Media Lab,
[2:09:32] Bob Dobbs: saw that they were using McLuhan and Finnegans Wake,
[2:09:34] Bob Dobbs: and then he realized,
[2:09:35] Bob Dobbs: ah,
[2:09:35] Bob Dobbs: I can bring back my
[2:09:37] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake expertise and have a new role.
[2:09:40] Bob Dobbs: But that's sort of wrapping up the end of analog media.
[2:09:48] Bob Dobbs: And by 2005,
[2:09:50] Bob Dobbs: 2006,
[2:09:52] Bob Dobbs: when Facebook and Twitter and YouTube come in,
[2:09:55] Bob Dobbs: he dies.
[2:09:56] Bob Dobbs: He dies in 2008.
[2:09:58] Bob Dobbs: He can't make the transition.
[2:10:01] Bob Dobbs: And then Frank dies a year later.
[2:10:06] Bob Dobbs: So I didn't read...
[2:10:07] Cameron McEwen: Did Don stay at Trent until he died?
[2:10:12] Bob Dobbs: No,
[2:10:12] Bob Dobbs: no.
[2:10:12] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:10:13] Bob Dobbs: he was an honored professor.
[2:10:16] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[2:10:17] Bob Dobbs: he taught a few courses,
[2:10:18] Bob Dobbs: but he didn't like...
[2:10:19] Cameron McEwen: But he still lived out there in Peterborough.
[2:10:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:10:22] Bob Dobbs: it was in Peterborough,
[2:10:23] Bob Dobbs: and he didn't like the universities anymore.
[2:10:24] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[2:10:25] Bob Dobbs: if I was young,
[2:10:25] Bob Dobbs: I would not become a professor.
[2:10:27] Bob Dobbs: He said it was very corrupt and stupid.
[2:10:29] Bob Dobbs: He had the same idea as Frank.
[2:10:31] Bob Dobbs: But people would ask him to advise them,
[2:10:34] Bob Dobbs: so he would teach a little bit.
[2:10:37] Bob Dobbs: But he was up against a feminist takeover that was kicking Joyce out and no longer doing English,
[2:10:44] Bob Dobbs: but culture studies.
[2:10:45] Bob Dobbs: So he had to talk in a department that he didn't like the name of because he thought modernism,
[2:10:52] Bob Dobbs: which was the men of 1914 were actually post-modernism.
[2:10:56] Bob Dobbs: that that's what the postmodern feminist academics were missing.
[2:11:00] Bob Dobbs: He still thought they need to understand Finnegans Wake,
[2:11:02] Bob Dobbs: and I agree with him.
[2:11:05] Bob Dobbs: The feminists and all these female journalists and reporters,
[2:11:08] Bob Dobbs: they don't know Finnegans Wake.
[2:11:10] Bob Dobbs: They don't have a good handle on the chip body because they're trying to save the chemical body woman version.
[2:11:19] Bob Dobbs: And now they have lost to the transgender.
[2:11:24] Bob Dobbs: Which is very interesting how it snuck up.
[2:11:26] Bob Dobbs: Nobody saw that people would start being any gender and that that would threaten the feminists.
[2:11:32] Bob Dobbs: They thought they had wrapped it up.
[2:11:34] Bob Dobbs: These men,
[2:11:34] Bob Dobbs: they can't beat us.
[2:11:35] Bob Dobbs: We're more important than men.
[2:11:37] Bob Dobbs: We're the ground of the earth and all that.
[2:11:40] Bob Dobbs: Boy,
[2:11:40] Bob Dobbs: did they not see what was coming.
[2:11:44] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:11:44] Cameron McEwen: that's the history of human beings.
[2:11:47] Bob Dobbs: Most humans.
[2:11:50] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:11:50] Cameron McEwen: All humans.
[2:11:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:11:53] Bob Dobbs: So,
[2:11:53] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[2:11:53] Bob Dobbs: no,
[2:11:54] Bob Dobbs: Frank,
[2:11:54] Bob Dobbs: he did a couple of good books on poetry.
[2:11:57] Bob Dobbs: When he went on
[2:11:59] Bob Dobbs: TV Ontario on panels,
[2:12:00] Bob Dobbs: he always was further out than anybody in what he said.
[2:12:03] Bob Dobbs: Nobody even knew what he meant.
[2:12:07] Cameron McEwen: So was he an American?
[2:12:09] Bob Dobbs: No,
[2:12:09] Bob Dobbs: no.
[2:12:10] Bob Dobbs: He grew up across the street from McLuhan on Wells Hill Avenue.
[2:12:16] Bob Dobbs: And he went to church as a kid and had mass beside McLuhan,
[2:12:21] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:12:21] Bob Dobbs: on Sundays.
[2:12:24] Bob Dobbs: So he grew up with McLuhan,
[2:12:26] Bob Dobbs: and he wasn't ready for university.
[2:12:28] Bob Dobbs: So he dropped out,
[2:12:29] Bob Dobbs: got some work,
[2:12:30] Bob Dobbs: job work,
[2:12:31] Bob Dobbs: chemical body labor,
[2:12:32] Bob Dobbs: did that for a couple years,
[2:12:34] Bob Dobbs: probably realized this ain't going anywhere,
[2:12:35] Bob Dobbs: so he went back to university.
[2:12:38] Bob Dobbs: Like,
[2:12:38] Bob Dobbs: he was born in the
[2:12:40] Bob Dobbs: 30s, say,
[2:12:40] Bob Dobbs: mid-30s or something,
[2:12:42] Bob Dobbs: maybe 32,
[2:12:43] Bob Dobbs: 33.
[2:12:44] Bob Dobbs: And so.
[2:12:45] Bob Dobbs: In 58,
[2:12:47] Bob Dobbs: so he's 25 years old,
[2:12:49] Bob Dobbs: he's back in freshman university,
[2:12:52] Bob Dobbs: I think it's at St.
[2:12:53] Bob Dobbs: Mike's,
[2:12:54] Bob Dobbs: and one of the first lectures he experienced was McLuhan.
[2:12:59] Bob Dobbs: So he knew McLuhan as a neighbor,
[2:13:01] Bob Dobbs: but he didn't have any clue what McLuhan was about.
[2:13:03] Bob Dobbs: And this guy comes in and talks,
[2:13:07] Bob Dobbs: and that was probably the biggest experience that Zingrone ever had in his life.
[2:13:10] Bob Dobbs: He talks about it.
[2:13:12] Bob Dobbs: That lecture,
[2:13:13] Bob Dobbs: he walked out stunned.
[2:13:15] Bob Dobbs: and excited.
[2:13:16] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[2:13:16] Bob Dobbs: holy shit,
[2:13:17] Bob Dobbs: there's something to think about,
[2:13:18] Bob Dobbs: because he had a latent poetic instinct.
[2:13:21] Bob Dobbs: So he was hearing the actual top poet of the day.
[2:13:24] Bob Dobbs: And so he became a student of McLuhan at St.
[2:13:26] Bob Dobbs: Mike's.
[2:13:29] Bob Dobbs: He took courses under him.
[2:13:31] Bob Dobbs: And
[2:13:33] Bob Dobbs: I think he even took me maybe,
[2:13:35] Bob Dobbs: no,
[2:13:35] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[2:13:35] Bob Dobbs: Don Theall was there.
[2:13:36] Bob Dobbs: I think he even took courses with Don Theall.
[2:13:38] Bob Dobbs: So he always appreciated McLuhan.
[2:13:41] Bob Dobbs: But what I remember of him in the
[2:13:43] Bob Dobbs: 70s.
[2:13:44] Bob Dobbs: before I knew him well,
[2:13:45] Bob Dobbs: he would come in every six months and argue the hell up with McLuhan,
[2:13:50] Bob Dobbs: be a stick in the mud.
[2:13:51] Bob Dobbs: And I thought he was too uptight about something.
[2:13:55] Bob Dobbs: He really was bothered by McLuhan.
[2:13:57] Bob Dobbs: So he writes this essay.
[2:13:59] Bob Dobbs: Do you have the book,
[2:13:59] Bob Dobbs: Who Was Marshall McLuhan?
[2:14:01] Cameron McEwen: Yes.
[2:14:02] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:14:03] Bob Dobbs: there's a great essay in there by Frank where he's with McLuhan in August
[2:14:07] Bob Dobbs: 79, you know,
[2:14:10] Bob Dobbs: like six weeks before his stroke.
[2:14:14] Bob Dobbs: He goes to dinner with McLuhan,
[2:14:16] Bob Dobbs: and he talks about
[2:14:18] Bob Dobbs: Donald Sutherland comes,
[2:14:20] Bob Dobbs: they went to Club 22 at Windsor Arms.
[2:14:22] Bob Dobbs: He talks about this,
[2:14:23] Bob Dobbs: and
[2:14:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan's making remarks about the people,
[2:14:27] Bob Dobbs: Donald Sutherland comes out,
[2:14:28] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan says actors are overpaid,
[2:14:30] Bob Dobbs: nobodies.
[2:14:31] Bob Dobbs: And Frank is liking what McLuhan was saying.
[2:14:33] Bob Dobbs: And now he's writing a few years later,
[2:14:37] Bob Dobbs: because McLuhan's gone in a year or so,
[2:14:39] Bob Dobbs: and he's regretting,
[2:14:40] Bob Dobbs: he says...
[2:14:41] Bob Dobbs: I should have spent more time listening to McLuhan.
[2:14:44] Bob Dobbs: I argue with him too much,
[2:14:46] Bob Dobbs: and I miss the boat.
[2:14:48] Bob Dobbs: This is how he ends his essay.
[2:14:50] Bob Dobbs: And so he's saying,
[2:14:51] Bob Dobbs: in a way,
[2:14:52] Bob Dobbs: he knew he had to correct that,
[2:14:56] Bob Dobbs: but he found that when he taught kids in the
[2:14:59] Bob Dobbs: 90s, in this period,
[2:15:00] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[2:15:01] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[2:15:02] Bob Dobbs: when's McLuhan go?
[2:15:03] Bob Dobbs: 1980.
[2:15:05] Bob Dobbs: So by the 90s,
[2:15:06] Bob Dobbs: Frank is trying to teach Understanding Media and this stuff.
[2:15:09] Bob Dobbs: prop up McLuhan,
[2:15:10] Bob Dobbs: and it doesn't work because the kids don't have TV and radio.
[2:15:12] Bob Dobbs: They don't even know what he's talking about,
[2:15:14] Bob Dobbs: so to speak,
[2:15:15] Bob Dobbs: in an exaggerated way.
[2:15:17] Bob Dobbs: So he recognized there was new technologies,
[2:15:19] Bob Dobbs: the digital,
[2:15:20] Bob Dobbs: and that's when it was happening,
[2:15:21] Bob Dobbs: 95 to 2000.
[2:15:23] Bob Dobbs: So he jumped in and analyzed and created a vocabulary from 95 to 2000,
[2:15:28] Bob Dobbs: which comes out in this book,
[2:15:30] Bob Dobbs: The Media Simplex.
[2:15:32] Bob Dobbs: It's called,
[2:15:32] Bob Dobbs: subtitled,
[2:15:33] Bob Dobbs: At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos.
[2:15:38] Bob Dobbs: So he's dealing with the chaos that
[2:15:42] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan maybe didn't experience as deeply.
[2:15:46] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't so obvious.
[2:15:49] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[2:15:50] Bob Dobbs: he knew it was chaotic in the fourth level of
[2:15:53] Bob Dobbs: Vico and all that,
[2:15:54] Bob Dobbs: but people weren't living in chaos.
[2:15:58] Bob Dobbs: The students weren't.
[2:15:59] Bob Dobbs: The digital generation is,
[2:16:03] Bob Dobbs: and so that's what he means.
[2:16:05] Bob Dobbs: In the age of chaos,
[2:16:07] Bob Dobbs: it's become an extreme figure.
[2:16:10] Bob Dobbs: So he's the only guy who takes that on,
[2:16:12] Bob Dobbs: it seems,
[2:16:12] Bob Dobbs: of that they call themselves the three wise men,
[2:16:17] Bob Dobbs: Logan,
[2:16:18] Bob Dobbs: de Kerckhove and Eric.
[2:16:19] Bob Dobbs: They were the three prophets.
[2:16:21] Bob Dobbs: They saw the value of McLuhan when nobody did.
[2:16:24] Bob Dobbs: And they tried to trump Frank,
[2:16:26] Bob Dobbs: but he wouldn't have it.
[2:16:27] Bob Dobbs: He knew they were a bit rearview mirror.
[2:16:30] Bob Dobbs: So I would say that just as with Don Theall,
[2:16:34] Bob Dobbs: I was the,
[2:16:34] Bob Dobbs: quote,
[2:16:35] Bob Dobbs: modern guy or postmodern guy that would stimulate them.
[2:16:39] Bob Dobbs: And he acknowledged me in the preface.
[2:16:42] Bob Dobbs: He says,
[2:16:42] Bob Dobbs: like Don Theall says,
[2:16:44] Bob Dobbs: I caused his book,
[2:16:45] Bob Dobbs: The Virtual McLuhan and the other ones.
[2:16:48] Bob Dobbs: And Zingrone says the same thing.
[2:16:51] Bob Dobbs: I'm a big deal in his preface,
[2:16:55] Bob Dobbs: in his acknowledgment.
[2:16:57] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:16:58] Bob Dobbs: I'm not making it up.
[2:16:59] Bob Dobbs: There's a record of my activity in the
[2:17:03] Bob Dobbs: 90s when I wasn't on the radio anymore,
[2:17:05] Bob Dobbs: but I was talking,
[2:17:07] Bob Dobbs: whenever I came to Toronto,
[2:17:08] Bob Dobbs: I talked to him and Theall,
[2:17:09] Bob Dobbs: talked to him on the phone a lot.
[2:17:13] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:17:14] Bob Dobbs: when his book came out,
[2:17:16] Bob Dobbs: he joined our McLuhan Institute forum,
[2:17:19] Bob Dobbs: 2001-2002.
[2:17:22] Bob Dobbs: And a couple of years later,
[2:17:24] Bob Dobbs: I bumped into him.
[2:17:25] Bob Dobbs: I came back to Toronto.
[2:17:26] Bob Dobbs: I hadn't talked to him for a year or so because I was involved in New York.
[2:17:32] Bob Dobbs: And he expressed his frustration with me and Nelson that we didn't acknowledge his posts.
[2:17:37] Bob Dobbs: He made a few posts.
[2:17:39] Bob Dobbs: I went ahead and read his book.
[2:17:40] Bob Dobbs: book.
[2:17:40] Bob Dobbs: I didn't know he was quoting his book.
[2:17:42] Bob Dobbs: It didn't strike me as too significant,
[2:17:44] Bob Dobbs: just like what you were saying 20 years ago didn't strike me as too significant or appropriate.
[2:17:50] Bob Dobbs: And he was mad at us for not acknowledging what he had done.
[2:17:55] Bob Dobbs: But he had that frustration everywhere.
[2:17:58] Bob Dobbs: He couldn't get reviews of his book.
[2:18:00] Bob Dobbs: Finally had to get
[2:18:02] Bob Dobbs: Don to do it.
[2:18:03] Bob Dobbs: But he was very pissed off.
[2:18:05] Bob Dobbs: That probably caused his second heart attack in 2009.
[2:18:11] Bob Dobbs: Why do you laugh there?
[2:18:12] Bob Dobbs: What are you laughing at?
[2:18:15] Cameron McEwen: Oh,
[2:18:15] Cameron McEwen: just,
[2:18:16] Cameron McEwen: I was thinking as you were talking about Frank that he was probably reacting his whole life long to upsets to his identity.
[2:18:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:18:30] Cameron McEwen: That his arguing with
[2:18:33] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan all the time was really an argument with himself.
[2:18:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.
[2:18:38] Bob Dobbs: You know,
[2:18:39] Bob Dobbs: he was a hip guy,
[2:18:40] Bob Dobbs: but there was that alienated part of himself,
[2:18:43] Bob Dobbs: which is,
[2:18:43] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:18:45] Bob Dobbs: he's not academically inclined when he leaves high school.
[2:18:51] Bob Dobbs: But he couldn't do anything else,
[2:18:53] Bob Dobbs: and so he had to eventually go into academia.
[2:18:56] Bob Dobbs: But he had that,
[2:18:57] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:18:58] Bob Dobbs: underclass,
[2:18:59] Bob Dobbs: I think,
[2:19:00] Bob Dobbs: resentment against eggheads.
[2:19:05] Cameron McEwen: Notice there's a marked parallel.
[2:19:08] Cameron McEwen: between Frank and Easterbrook.
[2:19:12] Cameron McEwen: Both of them were out of the academic environment for a number of years and then went back in.
[2:19:21] Cameron McEwen: And both of them,
[2:19:24] Cameron McEwen: who was Marshall McLuhan,
[2:19:26] Cameron McEwen: regret the fact that they had argued with McLuhan more than listened to him.
[2:19:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:19:32] Bob Dobbs: that's where they,
[2:19:33] Bob Dobbs: you know...
[2:19:36] Bob Dobbs: To me,
[2:19:37] Bob Dobbs: it's an old-fashioned image because a lot of kids do this now.
[2:19:39] Bob Dobbs: They don't go to university right away.
[2:19:40] Bob Dobbs: But back in the day,
[2:19:45] Bob Dobbs: you were a bit stupid if you didn't go on to university because you would be forced to work your butt off and you'd get pissed off if it didn't lead anywhere.
[2:19:53] Bob Dobbs: And then you thought you didn't have the ability to go to university.
[2:19:55] Bob Dobbs: You were trapped in the economic grind.
[2:19:58] Bob Dobbs: And that would be very pissed off.
[2:20:00] Bob Dobbs: But what's interesting is that...
[2:20:03] Bob Dobbs: Easterbrook goes back,
[2:20:04] Bob Dobbs: gets inspired by Innis,
[2:20:05] Bob Dobbs: just like Zingrone goes back and gets inspired by McLuhan,
[2:20:08] Bob Dobbs: and it triggers the poet in Zingrone.
[2:20:12] Bob Dobbs: And probably triggers the poetical level in Easterbrook.
[2:20:20] Bob Dobbs: I understand he wasn't your normal economist,
[2:20:22] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:20:26] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:20:26] Cameron McEwen: Just like Innis wasn't.
[2:20:28] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:20:29] Bob Dobbs: And he could respond to that.
[2:20:31] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:20:31] Bob Dobbs: another interesting thing is...
[2:20:33] Bob Dobbs: FZ,
[2:20:34] Bob Dobbs: which is commonly used in the Zappa world for Frank Zappa,
[2:20:37] Bob Dobbs: that's Frank's initials,
[2:20:39] Bob Dobbs: FZ.
[2:20:42] Bob Dobbs: So if you know Zingrone,
[2:20:43] Bob Dobbs: I have to spell out who I mean,
[2:20:47] Bob Dobbs: because they don't know Zappa or they know both,
[2:20:50] Bob Dobbs: and they know there's two ways it can be FZ.
[2:20:54] Bob Dobbs: So here's an example of me being relevant to Zingrone.
[2:21:02] Bob Dobbs: He,
[2:21:04] Bob Dobbs: by 95,
[2:21:06] Bob Dobbs: he said to me,
[2:21:09] Bob Dobbs: my son is involved in something that I'm very worried about.
[2:21:14] Bob Dobbs: He's met these people,
[2:21:16] Bob Dobbs: and they've got a magazine out called Prevailing Winds,
[2:21:20] Bob Dobbs: and it's all this conspiracy stuff.
[2:21:22] Bob Dobbs: And he's hanging out with this guy,
[2:21:25] Bob Dobbs: Patrick Fourmy,
[2:21:27] Bob Dobbs: and he goes on about this.
[2:21:30] Bob Dobbs: And then he says,
[2:21:32] Bob Dobbs: You ever heard of someone named Mae Brussell?
[2:21:37] Bob Dobbs: I started laughing.
[2:21:39] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[2:21:40] Bob Dobbs: I'm Mae Brussell's best friend.
[2:21:44] Bob Dobbs: He was shocked.
[2:21:45] Bob Dobbs: What?
[2:21:45] Bob Dobbs: You know about these people?
[2:21:47] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:21:47] Bob Dobbs: I know Prevailing Winds.
[2:21:48] Bob Dobbs: I know Patrick Fourmy.
[2:21:49] Bob Dobbs: I know what the fucking problem is for your son.
[2:21:53] Bob Dobbs: So that really surprised Frank,
[2:21:57] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:21:57] Bob Dobbs: that I was right there.
[2:21:58] Bob Dobbs: I was part of the scene that was bothering his son.
[2:22:01] Bob Dobbs: Because I was tuned into what that
[2:22:04] Bob Dobbs: Generation X was into.
[2:22:05] Bob Dobbs: They were into conspiracy stuff,
[2:22:07] Bob Dobbs: a lot of them,
[2:22:07] Bob Dobbs: in the 90s.
[2:22:09] Bob Dobbs: And they were retrieving Mae Brussell.
[2:22:12] Bob Dobbs: I mean,
[2:22:13] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:22:13] Bob Dobbs: I was there the day Mae Brussell died,
[2:22:16] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:22:16] Bob Dobbs: at her home.
[2:22:17] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:22:17] Bob Dobbs: at the non-home,
[2:22:19] Bob Dobbs: whatever it was,
[2:22:21] Bob Dobbs: at the clinic.
[2:22:21] Bob Dobbs: But the,
[2:22:23] Bob Dobbs: so I was talking to your friend Richard Altman a couple weeks,
[2:22:27] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:22:27] Bob Dobbs: a week or two ago.
[2:22:29] Bob Dobbs: And he says,
[2:22:29] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:22:30] Bob Dobbs: Bob,
[2:22:30] Bob Dobbs: you know who I met?
[2:22:32] Bob Dobbs: No.
[2:22:34] Bob Dobbs: I met Zingrone son.
[2:22:37] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[2:22:38] Bob Dobbs: what's his name?
[2:22:39] Bob Dobbs: He said,
[2:22:39] Bob Dobbs: Michael.
[2:22:40] Bob Dobbs: And he said he had a very interesting conversation with him.
[2:22:44] Bob Dobbs: And
[2:22:44] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[2:22:45] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:22:45] Bob Dobbs: that's pretty timely because just about three months ago,
[2:22:49] Bob Dobbs: I decided to find out what happened to Patrick Fourmy.
[2:22:53] Bob Dobbs: I couldn't even remember his last name.
[2:22:55] Bob Dobbs: some of these prevailing winds from the 90s.
[2:22:57] Bob Dobbs: So I looked up in my library and found an early one where he was editor because he dropped off the scene pretty quickly and let these other guys take over.
[2:23:07] Bob Dobbs: And so I Googled him.
[2:23:09] Bob Dobbs: It turned out he was a very controversial guy.
[2:23:13] Bob Dobbs: He did one scene after another.
[2:23:14] Bob Dobbs: He worked for an Oliver Stone movie,
[2:23:17] Bob Dobbs: did some acting here and there,
[2:23:19] Bob Dobbs: probably as an extra.
[2:23:20] Bob Dobbs: And then he got some money and he went into some,
[2:23:24] Bob Dobbs: started growing grass.
[2:23:25] Bob Dobbs: and got busted a couple of years ago.
[2:23:28] Bob Dobbs: So there was lots in the media about him right then.
[2:23:31] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:23:32] Bob Dobbs: I started Googling.
[2:23:34] Bob Dobbs: I've got to find out what Frank's son's name is.
[2:23:38] Bob Dobbs: So I look him up,
[2:23:39] Bob Dobbs: get his obituary,
[2:23:40] Bob Dobbs: get some of the kids'
[2:23:42] Bob Dobbs: names.
[2:23:42] Bob Dobbs: Then I find out his daughter had died a few years ago,
[2:23:46] Bob Dobbs: but she's married to a guy,
[2:23:48] Bob Dobbs: Stephen Katz.
[2:23:49] Bob Dobbs: So I look up Stephen Katz,
[2:23:51] Bob Dobbs: some name like that,
[2:23:52] Bob Dobbs: and he's a professor at York.
[2:23:55] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[2:23:55] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:23:55] Bob Dobbs: that makes sense.
[2:23:56] Bob Dobbs: And Frank got his son into academia.
[2:23:59] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:24:00] Bob Dobbs: I messaged him through Facebook,
[2:24:02] Bob Dobbs: and he responds.
[2:24:03] Bob Dobbs: And he talks about,
[2:24:05] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[2:24:05] Bob Dobbs: I knew Frank Zingrone.
[2:24:06] Bob Dobbs: He was my professor,
[2:24:07] Bob Dobbs: blah,
[2:24:08] Bob Dobbs: But the Stephen Katz you're talking about is not me.
[2:24:12] Bob Dobbs: That's another guy.
[2:24:15] Bob Dobbs: Who I knew.
[2:24:16] Bob Dobbs: I knew a little bit,
[2:24:16] Bob Dobbs: and I knew Frank's daughter.
[2:24:18] Bob Dobbs: So I was really close to getting the right guy,
[2:24:22] Bob Dobbs: but I missed the mark by an inch.
[2:24:25] Bob Dobbs: And that was two or three months ago.
[2:24:27] Bob Dobbs: And then all of a sudden,
[2:24:29] Bob Dobbs: Richard finds the guy out of the blue.
[2:24:32] Bob Dobbs: After having talked to Richard in five years,
[2:24:34] Bob Dobbs: he's got the answer for me.
[2:24:36] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:24:37] Bob Dobbs: so I messaged Mike Zingrone.
[2:24:39] Bob Dobbs: It may not be the right guy,
[2:24:41] Bob Dobbs: but he's in Toronto.
[2:24:42] Bob Dobbs: There's not that many.
[2:24:43] Bob Dobbs: I haven't heard back,
[2:24:44] Bob Dobbs: though.
[2:24:45] Bob Dobbs: Maybe he isn't the guy.
[2:24:47] Bob Dobbs: But I'm trying to get to the son and to see what happened to him dealing with this.
[2:24:54] Bob Dobbs: Patrick Fourmy,
[2:24:55] Bob Dobbs: who somehow was Zingrone neighbor,
[2:24:57] Bob Dobbs: I think.
[2:24:59] Bob Dobbs: So the neighbor hijacked his son for a while.
[2:25:03] Bob Dobbs: Anyways.
[2:25:04] Cameron McEwen: You talked about this Fourmy guy as sort of a Hollywood figure.
[2:25:09] Bob Dobbs: No,
[2:25:10] Bob Dobbs: he moved to the States in the early
[2:25:13] Bob Dobbs: 90s. Maybe he went to university or something.
[2:25:15] Bob Dobbs: And he's living out in California.
[2:25:17] Bob Dobbs: And he gets into the conspiracy Mae Brussell stuff and starts a magazine.
[2:25:24] Bob Dobbs: I was looking at a couple of later issues,
[2:25:27] Bob Dobbs: and Oliver Stone is writing for him.
[2:25:29] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:25:30] Bob Dobbs: Oliver Stone liked this magazine,
[2:25:32] Bob Dobbs: because this is in 92,
[2:25:34] Bob Dobbs: right when he's doing JFK.
[2:25:35] Bob Dobbs: So he's monitoring the conspiracy genre,
[2:25:38] Bob Dobbs: fine to the Mae Brussell,
[2:25:40] Bob Dobbs: but she's gone.
[2:25:41] Bob Dobbs: She died in 88,
[2:25:42] Bob Dobbs: so he gets the afterimage.
[2:25:44] Bob Dobbs: And that's Patrick Forman,
[2:25:46] Bob Dobbs: John Judge,
[2:25:46] Bob Dobbs: and Dave Emery and these guys.
[2:25:48] Bob Dobbs: And they're in the magazine,
[2:25:49] Bob Dobbs: and Peter Dale Scott,
[2:25:51] Bob Dobbs: a Canadian.
[2:25:53] Bob Dobbs: Son of the famous Canadian
[2:25:56] Bob Dobbs: Frank Scott,
[2:25:56] Bob Dobbs: F.C.
[2:25:57] Bob Dobbs: Scott or whatever,
[2:25:58] Bob Dobbs: the poet.
[2:26:00] Bob Dobbs: He was a big professor out in Berkeley,
[2:26:01] Bob Dobbs: Peter Dale Scott,
[2:26:02] Bob Dobbs: and very big,
[2:26:03] Bob Dobbs: respected,
[2:26:04] Bob Dobbs: top-down researcher.
[2:26:06] Bob Dobbs: He's still alive.
[2:26:09] Cameron McEwen: What?
[2:26:09] Cameron McEwen: He's alive now.
[2:26:10] Cameron McEwen: He's writing for anti-war magazine.
[2:26:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:26:16] Bob Dobbs: he does conspiracy stuff,
[2:26:18] Bob Dobbs: still does it.
[2:26:19] Bob Dobbs: He does really good research.
[2:26:21] Bob Dobbs: Good friend of Mae Brussell.
[2:26:22] Bob Dobbs: And,
[2:26:23] Bob Dobbs: but,
[2:26:25] Bob Dobbs: so these are the guys that Patrick is hanging out with in 92,
[2:26:30] Bob Dobbs: and that's how he met Oliver Stone,
[2:26:32] Bob Dobbs: through the charisma of the magazine.
[2:26:34] Bob Dobbs: So he drops out of the magazine.
[2:26:36] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:26:37] Bob Dobbs: by 93 or something.
[2:26:38] Bob Dobbs: And then he goes through Oliver.
[2:26:40] Bob Dobbs: He tries to get a gig as actors,
[2:26:43] Bob Dobbs: and he doesn't make it,
[2:26:44] Bob Dobbs: but he's in a few movies.
[2:26:46] Bob Dobbs: He's got an IMDb,
[2:26:49] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:26:49] Bob Dobbs: as an extra or something.
[2:26:51] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:26:51] Cameron McEwen: yeah.
[2:26:52] Bob Dobbs: So what did you,
[2:26:55] Bob Dobbs: why did you,
[2:26:56] Bob Dobbs: I just answered something you said.
[2:26:59] Bob Dobbs: What did you bring up at the end there?
[2:27:01] Bob Dobbs: Patrick Fourmy,
[2:27:02] Bob Dobbs: Oliver Stone?
[2:27:03] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:27:03] Bob Dobbs: Hollywood.
[2:27:04] Bob Dobbs: Oh,
[2:27:04] Bob Dobbs: how did it?
[2:27:05] Bob Dobbs: Why would he be in Toronto?
[2:27:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:27:07] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.
[2:27:08] Bob Dobbs: And I don't know how he got to the States.
[2:27:11] Bob Dobbs: But he's living there.
[2:27:12] Bob Dobbs: Maybe he married someone.
[2:27:14] Bob Dobbs: And he's,
[2:27:15] Bob Dobbs: you can Google him,
[2:27:16] Bob Dobbs: F-O-U-R-M-Y,
[2:27:18] Bob Dobbs: Patrick Fourmy,
[2:27:19] Bob Dobbs: F-O-U-R-M-Y.
[2:27:21] Bob Dobbs: And look at the,
[2:27:22] Bob Dobbs: he became a problem for his neighbors up there in Humboldt County.
[2:27:26] Bob Dobbs: He was growing marijuana and dealers were coming in.
[2:27:29] Bob Dobbs: And he was remaining above it all,
[2:27:32] Bob Dobbs: but disturbing the.
[2:27:34] Bob Dobbs: the quiet community there because all these people were driving up and down the highway nearby that was that was written up in the newspaper that was a few years ago so i'm trying to find out where he is today because if i if i get in touch with him i can trigger his past in
[2:27:50] Bob Dobbs: detail i i know what he was inspired by so i'd like to see what the Zingrone son would have to say yeah
[2:28:03] Cameron McEwen: The whole network there.
[2:28:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:28:07] Bob Dobbs: and Zingrone got what he deserved.
[2:28:09] Bob Dobbs: He used to talk about conspiracy in a respectable way,
[2:28:13] Bob Dobbs: like this quote here,
[2:28:14] Bob Dobbs: that economics and politics is all flooded with secrecy.
[2:28:18] Bob Dobbs: That's what the kind of stuff he would say on TV Ontario.
[2:28:22] Bob Dobbs: So his own son got trapped by the more extreme version of what he was not afraid to talk about.
[2:28:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:28:32] Bob Dobbs: But there again,
[2:28:34] Bob Dobbs: if he ever brought up anything,
[2:28:35] Bob Dobbs: I was right there.
[2:28:38] Bob Dobbs: I had the goods,
[2:28:40] Bob Dobbs: whatever he brought up.
[2:28:43] Bob Dobbs: In his essay,
[2:28:44] Bob Dobbs: in the collection of speeches at the
[2:28:48] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan conference in March 1998,
[2:28:51] Bob Dobbs: do you have that book,
[2:28:51] Bob Dobbs: The Legacy of McLuhan?
[2:28:54] Bob Dobbs: No.
[2:28:56] Bob Dobbs: The conference that Fordham was celebrating the
[2:28:59] Bob Dobbs: 30th anniversary of McLuhan there.
[2:29:00] Bob Dobbs: Right.
[2:29:01] Bob Dobbs: 97-98.
[2:29:02] Bob Dobbs: So I have that book and my essay's in there and
[2:29:06] Bob Dobbs: Frank's in there.
[2:29:07] Bob Dobbs: And Frank says in his introduction,
[2:29:10] Bob Dobbs: the difference in the McLuhan world is those that are into Finnegans Wake and recognize its importance and those that don't.
[2:29:18] Bob Dobbs: So when he wrote that addressing the Lance Strate and these guys that weren't aware of Finnegans Wake at all,
[2:29:26] Bob Dobbs: I know he was thinking of me and him.
[2:29:29] Bob Dobbs: We were the Finnegans Wake guys,
[2:29:31] Bob Dobbs: you know.
[2:29:32] Bob Dobbs: And all the dummies were not Finnegans Wake people.
[2:29:38] Cameron McEwen: Yep.
[2:29:38] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:29:40] Cameron McEwen: as long as I can remember any sort of contact with you,
[2:29:46] Cameron McEwen: you've always said that
[2:29:49] Cameron McEwen: Finnegans Wake is the key to
[2:29:51] Cameron McEwen: Marshall McLuhan.
[2:29:52] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[2:29:54] Bob Dobbs: And,
[2:29:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:29:55] Bob Dobbs: I have
[2:29:56] Bob Dobbs: Chad started a there's this young girl who heard me talk
[2:30:01] Bob Dobbs: Zappa,
[2:30:01] Bob Dobbs: she's a
[2:30:03] Bob Dobbs: 22-year-old in Rome,
[2:30:05] Bob Dobbs: and she discovered Zappa in January.
[2:30:08] Bob Dobbs: And so within five months,
[2:30:10] Bob Dobbs: she had this incredible website going,
[2:30:13] Bob Dobbs: a lot of people joining in,
[2:30:15] Bob Dobbs: and she rapidly became an incredible archivist of Zappa.
[2:30:19] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:30:19] Bob Dobbs: she discovered me and said,
[2:30:21] Bob Dobbs: holy shit,
[2:30:22] Bob Dobbs: here's a guy who talks about Zappa in a way I've never heard before.
[2:30:25] Bob Dobbs: So she started celebrating me and talking to me,
[2:30:28] Bob Dobbs: and then Chad saw this,
[2:30:29] Bob Dobbs: So he made a...
[2:30:30] Bob Dobbs: a Facebook page with my
[2:30:33] Bob Dobbs: 36 episodes on
[2:30:36] Bob Dobbs: London radio with Ben Watson,
[2:30:38] Bob Dobbs: who did a book on Zappa.
[2:30:40] Bob Dobbs: And it's very good dialogue.
[2:30:42] Bob Dobbs: It's basically his Marxism,
[2:30:44] Bob Dobbs: his British culture versus my North American McLuhanite that we debate McLuhan versus Marx via Zappa.
[2:30:53] Bob Dobbs: And it's very good what we did.
[2:30:55] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:30:55] Bob Dobbs: Chad took all that old radio archive and made great...
[2:31:00] Bob Dobbs: inventory the
[2:31:02] Bob Dobbs: YouTube's now the thing about YouTube is lately people all over the world can listen to anything because it's all translated into their languages
[2:31:13] Bob Dobbs: YouTube translation is really improved and so you got all these people around the world listening to me and Ben talk very sophisticatedly about Zappa in their language you know it's in English but they can read it and follow it so
[2:31:29] Bob Dobbs: In one month,
[2:31:31] Bob Dobbs: we had like 5,000 view...
[2:31:36] Bob Dobbs: viewers on YouTube.
[2:31:38] Bob Dobbs: After two months,
[2:31:38] Bob Dobbs: we now have
[2:31:39] Bob Dobbs: 14,000 viewers.
[2:31:42] Bob Dobbs: Chaz says he's well-versed in all this stuff.
[2:31:45] Bob Dobbs: He says it's the fastest-growing website he's ever seen on YouTube.
[2:31:50] Bob Dobbs: So they're really digging my talk about Zappa,
[2:31:54] Bob Dobbs: but let me give you a few samples of what I do.
[2:32:00] Bob Dobbs: So someone would say...
[2:32:05] Bob Dobbs: Let's see.
[2:32:12] Bob Dobbs: I start talking about,
[2:32:14] Bob Dobbs: me and Ben talked about this 20 years ago,
[2:32:16] Bob Dobbs: how Zappa completed Finnegans Wake,
[2:32:18] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:32:18] Bob Dobbs: musically.
[2:32:20] Bob Dobbs: So somebody says,
[2:32:22] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:32:23] Bob Dobbs: I've read Finnegans Wake for many years.
[2:32:26] Bob Dobbs: I was obsessed with it,
[2:32:27] Bob Dobbs: but can one finish it?
[2:32:30] Bob Dobbs: Can you finish Finnegans Wake?
[2:32:32] Bob Dobbs: So look at what I said.
[2:32:34] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:32:35] Bob Dobbs: Once one has read and understood Eric McLuhan The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake,
[2:32:39] Bob Dobbs: 1997.
[2:32:41] Bob Dobbs: Now,
[2:32:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying this to a Zappa guy,
[2:32:43] Bob Dobbs: to an audience that doesn't know any of this stuff.
[2:32:45] Bob Dobbs: This guy did Finnegans Wake,
[2:32:46] Bob Dobbs: but he's unique.
[2:32:48] Bob Dobbs: But I'm now writing for everybody,
[2:32:50] Bob Dobbs: the 10,000 people watching this.
[2:32:53] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[2:32:53] Bob Dobbs: yeah,
[2:32:54] Bob Dobbs: you can finish it once you've read Eric's book,
[2:32:57] Bob Dobbs: and you would have gotten the big picture and many epiphanies.
[2:33:01] Bob Dobbs: Then you read Marshall McLuhan's books.
[2:33:03] Bob Dobbs: and see what he did with Finnegans Wake once he had finished it.
[2:33:07] Bob Dobbs: Finished in quotes.
[2:33:09] Bob Dobbs: All of McLuhan's work is a translation of Finnegans Wake and is applied Joyce.
[2:33:14] Bob Dobbs: I have that in quotes and McLuhan in brackets.
[2:33:16] Bob Dobbs: That's what McLuhan said.
[2:33:17] Bob Dobbs: He was doing applied Joyce.
[2:33:19] Bob Dobbs: Now this is what I'm doing.
[2:33:21] Bob Dobbs: I'm talking my other holy offices to the Zappa world.
[2:33:25] Bob Dobbs: And,
[2:33:26] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:33:27] Bob Dobbs: I'm getting all kinds of funny responses to this.
[2:33:31] Bob Dobbs: Because they don't...
[2:33:33] Bob Dobbs: They don't even know what I'm talking about.
[2:33:36] Bob Dobbs: So they talk about the American.
[2:33:43] Bob Dobbs: Somebody said,
[2:33:46] Bob Dobbs: some
[2:33:46] Bob Dobbs: Zappa musician said,
[2:33:48] Bob Dobbs: Zappa was ultimately an American,
[2:33:52] Bob Dobbs: so American.
[2:33:53] Bob Dobbs: And so somebody says,
[2:33:53] Bob Dobbs: I don't think he was completely American.
[2:33:55] Bob Dobbs: I don't think that.
[2:33:56] Bob Dobbs: I don't think he was completely American.
[2:33:57] Bob Dobbs: So I come in and say,
[2:33:59] Bob Dobbs: to be an American,
[2:34:00] Bob Dobbs: American in quote,
[2:34:01] Bob Dobbs: is to be schizoid.
[2:34:03] Bob Dobbs: To be free and to have rules.
[2:34:05] Bob Dobbs: Because Zappa,
[2:34:07] Bob Dobbs: this guy was saying Zappa was so free,
[2:34:09] Bob Dobbs: he was so American,
[2:34:10] Bob Dobbs: he was acting out the American dream of total freedom way beyond norm.
[2:34:16] Bob Dobbs: And I'm saying,
[2:34:16] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:34:16] Bob Dobbs: no,
[2:34:18] Bob Dobbs: you're noticing there's something about Americans,
[2:34:20] Bob Dobbs: it's not just being free.
[2:34:21] Bob Dobbs: So I said,
[2:34:21] Bob Dobbs: it's schizoid.
[2:34:23] Bob Dobbs: It's to be free and to have rules.
[2:34:25] Bob Dobbs: And I said,
[2:34:25] Bob Dobbs: Zappa acted that out.
[2:34:27] Bob Dobbs: Then I said,
[2:34:28] Bob Dobbs: America is schizoid.
[2:34:30] Bob Dobbs: because it's the only country in history that was founded on the printing press alone.
[2:34:34] Bob Dobbs: Marshall McLuhan explained this situation many times in his books.
[2:34:39] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:34:41] Bob Dobbs: I'm dropping in
[2:34:42] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan, and then they're talking about what me and I say he's America's greatest composer,
[2:34:51] Bob Dobbs: and the greatest composer of the 20th century.
[2:34:53] Bob Dobbs: So someone says,
[2:34:53] Bob Dobbs: no,
[2:34:54] Bob Dobbs: what are you talking about?
[2:34:56] Bob Dobbs: There's Prokofiev,
[2:34:57] Bob Dobbs: or I mean
[2:34:58] Bob Dobbs: Stravinsky.
[2:35:00] Bob Dobbs: Webern,
[2:35:00] Bob Dobbs: he names all his early 20th century guys.
[2:35:02] Bob Dobbs: Zappa's nowhere near those guys.
[2:35:05] Bob Dobbs: And I say,
[2:35:06] Bob Dobbs: not true.
[2:35:07] Bob Dobbs: Zappa's main influences as a post-John Cage composer,
[2:35:13] Bob Dobbs: and he did cite Cage as an influence,
[2:35:15] Bob Dobbs: but he's post-John Cage.
[2:35:17] Bob Dobbs: Zappa's main influences were people.
[2:35:19] Bob Dobbs: I put people in quotes,
[2:35:21] Bob Dobbs: in brackets.
[2:35:22] Bob Dobbs: He said he didn't like people,
[2:35:24] Bob Dobbs: but he's influenced by sports.
[2:35:28] Bob Dobbs: country music,
[2:35:29] Bob Dobbs: the news,
[2:35:30] Bob Dobbs: his girlfriends,
[2:35:31] Bob Dobbs: and fellow band members.
[2:35:33] Bob Dobbs: This is why he was an original.
[2:35:35] Bob Dobbs: And then this is after I say earlier that,
[2:35:41] Bob Dobbs: where is this?
[2:35:46] Cameron McEwen: So you're looking at the website now?
[2:35:48] Bob Dobbs: No,
[2:35:49] Bob Dobbs: I saved my remarks.
[2:35:50] Bob Dobbs: I'm just running down my inventory of my,
[2:35:52] Bob Dobbs: I've answered a lot of different questions.
[2:35:58] Bob Dobbs: They don't have all of them,
[2:35:59] Bob Dobbs: but the one I'm looking for,
[2:36:15] Bob Dobbs: basically,
[2:36:16] Bob Dobbs: it doesn't seem to be here.
[2:36:17] Bob Dobbs: I remember I missed this one,
[2:36:18] Bob Dobbs: didn't gather it.
[2:36:20] Bob Dobbs: I'd have to go back to the site and find it.
[2:36:21] Bob Dobbs: But what I say is Zappa was,
[2:36:24] Bob Dobbs: music was not.
[2:36:27] Bob Dobbs: audio anymore.
[2:36:29] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,
[2:36:30] Bob Dobbs: as Zappa regarded society...
[2:36:34] Bob Dobbs: Like McLuhan,
[2:36:35] Bob Dobbs: everything we do is musical.
[2:36:36] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:36:37] Bob Dobbs: Zappa was an anthropologist,
[2:36:41] Bob Dobbs: a historian,
[2:36:42] Bob Dobbs: a news junkie,
[2:36:44] Bob Dobbs: a science fiction fan,
[2:36:46] Bob Dobbs: and named all these non-musical arts.
[2:36:49] Bob Dobbs: I said,
[2:36:49] Bob Dobbs: that's what Zappa was.
[2:36:51] Bob Dobbs: And that's why he's the greatest composer.
[2:36:53] Bob Dobbs: He didn't stay specialized in music.
[2:36:56] Bob Dobbs: He was running for president.
[2:36:58] Bob Dobbs: He was doing everything.
[2:37:00] Bob Dobbs: He was acting out,
[2:37:01] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake.
[2:37:02] Bob Dobbs: And what McLuhan did.
[2:37:04] Bob Dobbs: And so I'm stating that as what a composer is.
[2:37:08] Bob Dobbs: And of course,
[2:37:08] Bob Dobbs: these kids,
[2:37:09] Bob Dobbs: what?
[2:37:09] Bob Dobbs: That's not fucking music.
[2:37:11] Bob Dobbs: That's anthropology.
[2:37:11] Bob Dobbs: They don't get it.
[2:37:13] Bob Dobbs: And so then I pushed the envelope by saying,
[2:37:15] Bob Dobbs: not only did he do that,
[2:37:18] Bob Dobbs: he was not influenced by musical people other than
[2:37:22] Bob Dobbs: John Cage,
[2:37:24] Bob Dobbs: because he,
[2:37:25] Bob Dobbs: and I named everything that Zappa said he didn't like.
[2:37:28] Bob Dobbs: He hated sports.
[2:37:29] Bob Dobbs: He hated country music.
[2:37:31] Bob Dobbs: He hated the news.
[2:37:33] Bob Dobbs: He didn't like his girlfriends,
[2:37:35] Bob Dobbs: and he was bothered by his fellow band members.
[2:37:37] Bob Dobbs: I'm listing all the things he doesn't like as his influences.
[2:37:41] Bob Dobbs: Now there's your diatonic,
[2:37:44] Bob Dobbs: diachronic.
[2:37:46] Bob Dobbs: I'm including the other.
[2:37:48] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:37:50] Bob Dobbs: I'm saying things that is way beyond what normal Zappa discussion is.
[2:37:55] Bob Dobbs: So I'm very proud of it.
[2:37:57] Bob Dobbs: And everybody's reading it,
[2:37:59] Bob Dobbs: supposedly,
[2:38:00] Bob Dobbs: getting all these views.
[2:38:02] Bob Dobbs: They say,
[2:38:02] Bob Dobbs: what the fuck is this?
[2:38:04] Bob Dobbs: And so the naysayers are starting to come in and say,
[2:38:11] Bob Dobbs: no,
[2:38:13] Bob Dobbs: you're fucking nuts.
[2:38:17] Bob Dobbs: Well,
[2:38:18] Cameron McEwen: you can swing with naysayers.
[2:38:20] Bob Dobbs: That's right.
[2:38:21] Bob Dobbs: That's what I'm waiting for.
[2:38:22] Bob Dobbs: I'm good at it.
[2:38:22] Bob Dobbs: So just like on the radio show.
[2:38:25] Bob Dobbs: So that's what I'm doing,
[2:38:27] Bob Dobbs: though.
[2:38:29] Bob Dobbs: I brought this up to illustrate.
[2:38:32] Bob Dobbs: how you can use Finnegans Wake,
[2:38:34] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:38:34] Bob Dobbs: in all kinds of fields that people don't know.
[2:38:39] Bob Dobbs: So I'm actually saying,
[2:38:40] Bob Dobbs: we know it's a cliche,
[2:38:41] Bob Dobbs: you can't finish
[2:38:42] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake,
[2:38:43] Bob Dobbs: but I'm saying you can.
[2:38:44] Bob Dobbs: If you get the media dynamics that we use,
[2:38:48] Bob Dobbs: we go Finnegans Wake,
[2:38:50] Bob Dobbs: you don't have to fucking be there appreciating the music of Finnegans Wake or studying the semantic meanings in each line,
[2:38:58] Bob Dobbs: right?
[2:38:59] Bob Dobbs: There's a larger picture.
[2:39:00] Bob Dobbs: Basically,
[2:39:01] Bob Dobbs: Finnegans Wake is a product of radio.
[2:39:03] Bob Dobbs: The whole men of 1914 are products of radio.
[2:39:09] Bob Dobbs: So
[2:39:10] Bob Dobbs: I don't have to read their works.
[2:39:12] Bob Dobbs: I do and will,
[2:39:13] Bob Dobbs: but we're dealing with 100 years later.
[2:39:17] Bob Dobbs: We're dealing with the tech body.
[2:39:22] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:39:23] Cameron McEwen: if we wanted to characterize what we've talked about this morning,
[2:39:29] Cameron McEwen: You could say that everything has been around the image of the collection of personalities that make up the individual.
[2:39:45] Bob Dobbs: That's what I show on my chart.
[2:39:48] Bob Dobbs: I have the top ten individuals and I say,
[2:39:50] Bob Dobbs: this is you.
[2:39:51] Bob Dobbs: This is what you're made up of.
[2:39:54] Bob Dobbs: These are the top personalities,
[2:39:55] Bob Dobbs: not the bullshit ones that's everywhere.
[2:39:58] Bob Dobbs: You're made up of that,
[2:39:59] Bob Dobbs: too.
[2:39:59] Bob Dobbs: But to create a simulation of an academic detachment,
[2:40:04] Bob Dobbs: study these people,
[2:40:06] Bob Dobbs: they're worth it of the personalities that you're made up of.
[2:40:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:40:11] Bob Dobbs: that's part of the meaning of the Tiny Note chart.
[2:40:15] Bob Dobbs: And,
[2:40:15] Bob Dobbs: of course,
[2:40:15] Bob Dobbs: these are people that mate and merge with the media.
[2:40:19] Bob Dobbs: And the ground is always holeopathic.
[2:40:22] Bob Dobbs: So LaRouche and Mae Brussell are a holeopathic radio slash satellite.
[2:40:27] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan and Zappa are holeopathic
[2:40:31] Bob Dobbs: TV-slash-satellite.
[2:40:33] Bob Dobbs: Thompson and Krishnamurti are holeopathic computer-slash-satellite.
[2:40:39] Bob Dobbs: Then Kroker is satellite squared.
[2:40:44] Bob Dobbs: And then I'm
[2:40:46] Bob Dobbs: Rumpelstiltskin, and Anthropomorphic Physical.
[2:40:51] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,
[2:40:51] Bob Dobbs: that's how I have the people.
[2:40:52] Bob Dobbs: It's me and Garrett in the fifth quarter,
[2:40:54] Bob Dobbs: but you're exactly right.
[2:40:57] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:40:57] Bob Dobbs: carry on.
[2:40:58] Bob Dobbs: What would you say?
[2:40:59] Bob Dobbs: What are you trying to say here?
[2:41:01] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:41:02] Cameron McEwen: one thing I'm trying to say is that we're nearing the end here.
[2:41:05] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:41:05] Bob Dobbs: this is the last sentence.
[2:41:06] Bob Dobbs: We're going to give you the last thought.
[2:41:09] Cameron McEwen: Well,
[2:41:09] Cameron McEwen: no,
[2:41:10] Cameron McEwen: I already said my last thought.
[2:41:12] Cameron McEwen: What we talked about were all of these personalities,
[2:41:16] Cameron McEwen: and the goal is their dialogue.
[2:41:23] Bob Dobbs: And that is what
[2:41:24] Bob Dobbs: Joyce is showing with Finnegans Wake.
[2:41:28] Bob Dobbs: You've got every kind of personality and every medium,
[2:41:30] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:41:30] Bob Dobbs: in the book.
[2:41:31] Bob Dobbs: This is what you're made up of.
[2:41:35] Bob Dobbs: So that's,
[2:41:36] Bob Dobbs: you know,
[2:41:36] Bob Dobbs: what is it?
[2:41:37] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter says,
[2:41:38] Bob Dobbs: they became what they beheld.
[2:41:41] Bob Dobbs: I contain multitudes.
[2:41:44] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.
[2:41:45] Bob Dobbs: And Joy really expresses,
[2:41:48] Bob Dobbs: since that was coming,
[2:41:48] Bob Dobbs: and no one knew that,
[2:41:49] Bob Dobbs: but it was coming.
[2:41:52] Bob Dobbs: He really painted it well with Finnegans Wake.
[2:41:54] Bob Dobbs: It's such an accurate portrayal of at least the last half of the
[2:41:59] Bob Dobbs: 20th century.
[2:42:00] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan was so right to bounce off it.
[2:42:08] Bob Dobbs: Hey,
[2:42:09] Bob Dobbs: you agree?
[2:42:10] Bob Dobbs: Yes,
[2:42:10] Cameron McEwen: sir.
[2:42:12] Bob Dobbs: You salute?
[2:42:15] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:42:15] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:42:15] Bob Dobbs: excellent.
[2:42:17] Bob Dobbs: I think that was good.
[2:42:19] Bob Dobbs: How far did we get?
[2:42:20] Bob Dobbs: 167,
[2:42:21] Bob Dobbs: man.
[2:42:22] Bob Dobbs: That's good.
[2:42:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,
[2:42:23] Cameron McEwen: we made two or three pages.
[2:42:25] Bob Dobbs: Yes.
[2:42:26] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,
[2:42:26] Cameron McEwen: that's more than we have been making,
[2:42:28] Cameron McEwen: so that's good.
[2:42:29] Bob Dobbs: Yep.
[2:42:30] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:42:30] Bob Dobbs: well,
[2:42:31] Bob Dobbs: thank you very much,
[2:42:31] Bob Dobbs: and we'll see what kind of views we get.
[2:42:35] Cameron McEwen: Yes,
[2:42:36] Cameron McEwen: sir.
[2:42:38] Bob Dobbs: Okay,
[2:42:38] Bob Dobbs: I'll talk to you later.
[2:42:40] Cameron McEwen: Goodbye.
[2:42:41] Cameron McEwen: Okay,
[2:42:41] Bob Dobbs: bye.