Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

[00:01:27] Phillip: Brian, are you tired?

[00:01:28] Brian: Yeah. That's my secret, Phillip. I'm always tired. {laughter}

[00:01:34] Phillip: You were stuck on a plane for hours. You, like, wrote an angry tweet. Did you delete it?

[00:01:41] Brian: Oh, man. Oh, I didn't delete it. I saved it. I have that one...

[00:01:44] Phillip: You never actually hit the button.

[00:01:46] Brian: I didn't hit send. I'm actually gonna just send that privately. It's... Delta's... Delta is going down.

[00:01:53] Phillip: One more time, Delta. That's all it takes. It's one more time.

[00:01:57] Brian: Just push me one more time.

[00:01:59] Phillip: Just push me a little further.

[00:02:01] Brian: Getting out of our on-site. Our on-site was incredible. What a time. What a time to be alive. In Palm Beach, Florida.

[00:02:10] Phillip: I can't wait to have you back. It was so cool to have you here. Had the whole team here, and it was really cool to have you.

[00:02:15] Brian: Almost the whole team. We missed JT.

[00:02:19] Phillip: Missed JT. It's really awesome, I think, just watching Future Commerce grow, watching our influence grow. We announced VISIONS, obviously, we have our new summit coming here in June... Watching us push the button on Thursday and watching ticket sales come in, and then our team off-site. So, just, what an amazing week. And then you got stuck. You couldn't get out of Palm Beach. You were stuck for a while.

[00:02:46] Brian: For a while. It was long because it was like LA to Palm Beach. And then my plane broke down, and then POTUS came in, and the whole airport shut down. And then I missed my flight, and it was ugh.

[00:02:56] Phillip: We shan't talk about POTUS.

[00:02:58] Brian: But enough of that. We have probably I mean, to be honest, probably the guest I've been most anticipating maybe my whole life.

[00:03:11] Phillip: Yeah. Not even an exaggeration. I think what's great about the influence of this show and we've been talking about scenes. You know, we had Daisy on and Francis here just a few weeks ago. We've been talking about how we have found other people who sort of have similar modes of thought and other folks who I think have shared similar mind space and spheres of influence. And Future Commerce has allowed us to find other folks who, I think, have intellectual prowess that I think have expanded the way that we think, but also have allowed us to bring their intellectual modes of thought to our community. And it has been such an honor and a privilege for you, I think, in particular, but for us generally to bring people like Andrew McLuhan to the Future Commerce audience. And so it is a joy and a privilege to welcome, author, teacher, speaker and consultant, and the steward of the McLuhan Institute to the show today. Welcome to Future Commerce, Mr. Andrew McLuhan.

[00:04:21] Andrew: Wow, thank you. Thank you so much. That is the privilege of having a podcast or show. It's to be able to invite people that you wanna talk to who wouldn't talk to you otherwise. That said, I'm always happy to talk to you guys. {laughter} That came out kinda bad. And it's also funny that Brian first came on my show, on my radio show. So I guess, Phillip, that means you're next.

[00:04:50] Phillip: Oh, I wouldn't even know what to talk about. Maybe we could talk about the fact that you're in our newest journal Lore. You actually closed out this book, and I will talk about this in just a little bit. But we've collaborated just a few times here. And I am so honored and thrilled that we have this now, I think, multiyear long friendship and collaboration between our two camps. And I think that that's just so cool. But welcome.

[00:05:19] Andrew: Thank you.

[00:05:20] Phillip: For those who aren't familiar, catch us up. What are you working on these days over at the McLuhan Institute?

[00:05:26] Andrew: You know, I just actually went over to one of my whiteboards to make a list of the things I'm working on because I was starting to lose track, which means I'm probably working on too many things. Actually, I'm actively working on working less. That is, I'm working on fewer things because I've been trying to write a book. Well, I've tried to write several books, and it's more difficult than you think. It's easy to come up with the ideas. It's quite another thing to make a book appear, a physical object, as you guys know. But, yeah, I'm trying to write this book on The Medium is The Message. You know, my grandfather's phrase. And for a few reasons. For one oh, well, we could go way down the wormhole here, but what the heck? For one, I think the medium is the message is the basic unit of media studies of understanding how technologies affect us aside from their content and persuasion and propaganda and that kind of thing. How you know, the root of this phrase, we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. What is the mechanism by which we're shaped? And the answer to how that happens is via the medium because the medium itself is what reshapes us individually and socially. That is the very short answer. The longer answer I think was worth exploring. So when I started the McLuhan Institute back in like 2017, and I was thinking about where to start, what to do with it, I've found that my family's work is huge. It touches so many different parts of our world and our lives, fields of study, spheres of influence. And I've also found that it's when you start to talk about it with people, you know, when somebody says, "Well, what's the McLuhan Institute about?" Or "What did Marshall McLuhan do?" Right? It's like, I learned a lesson early on. I was invited to teach a class at Queen's University, and I thought, "Wow. This is great. This is my chance to teach them all the things." So I wrote down a couple pages of notes, and I wanted to teach them about The Medium is The Message and about the tetrads and the laws of media and about hot and cool media and understanding media and about literature and how literary criticism led to media studies and all the things. Right? And I discovered very quickly that it's easy to overwhelm people with too much information. And you're doing... It's almost the worst thing you can do because you lose them, and it can be hard to get them back. What I've discovered is that if you wanna teach people something, well, you've gotta teach them something. That sounds really stupid to say. But it's much easier and more effective to teach one thing than to try and teach 10 things at one time. And the other thing paired with that is that a lot of these ideas with media study are things that people aren't really exposed to. They're not used to thinking like this. It's really hard for people to put content to the side and look at structure and form and how that affects you. And to put aside things like meaning and morals, like are these good or bad things? What do they mean? Put those things aside and look at the effect. Really, really difficult for us to do in a world where we're quick to judgment. We want to judge. We want to know, is this good for me? Is this bad for me, for my family? The problem is when you focus on those questions, you lose a lot of what's actually happening. Because a lot of what's happening, whether it's good or bad, depends where you are socially, personally, in time. These things are positional, and the values even can be relative. So I'm constantly trying to dial things back and simplify things, understanding that they're very complicated. It's new information. So I hit on The Medium is The Message as basically the basic unit of understanding. Is where we've got to start if we wanna understand how technology works. The basic thing to understand is that the major changes that happen to us individually and socially come from the structure of the forms rather than the content or the uses to which they're put. The medium is the message.

[00:11:00] Phillip: Do you think it's fair... Just to jump in. Do you think it's fair for others to interpret that in their own context? For instance, we've spent a few years interpreting The Medium is The Message in our own context is sort of commerce is a form of media, especially in the modern day where we say commerce is our culture to say that, so much of online shopping, especially we talk about retail media nowadays, like media and advertising and commerce have all sort of formed together in sort of one cohesive experience. It follows you around everywhere you go. These media networks sort of have fingerprinted people. I walk into a store. I walk out of that store, and now my Instagram has fingerprinted me. It's gonna follow me around forever. So there's sort of this, like, media journey, commerce journey that are sort of these cohesive user flows now. They're sort of one in the same to most people. They sort of feel like they have these seamless... they feel seamless to some degree. And so when we've interpreted or when I've interpreted, I want to speak for Brian, when I've interpreted The Medium is The Message, I'm saying, from my perspective, commerce is a form of media. It is manipulating people in some way, and people are being shaped by it. Do you think that that's a fair interpretation, or is it a simplistic interpretation from our own perspective?

[00:12:41] Andrew: {laughter} I'm sure I could argue both ways. My dad liked to quote TS Eliot often.

[00:12:52] Phillip: Eric. Right?

[00:12:53] Andrew: Yeah. Eric. Yeah. Who was Marshall's eldest son. TS Eliot, somebody once asked him about one of his poems and what it meant and said, "I got this. Is this what it means?" And Elliot's response was basically that a poem can't mean something that it doesn't mean to you, which is kinda deep. It's not the cop out that it sounds like. There's many layers to it. The fascinating thing, the most fascinating thing to me about The Medium is The Message, is that it's five words. It's five words, and there are galaxies of meaning in it. I've been tracking it. So I've been tracking it from the first time Marshall said it in 1958 in a speech. He was actually giving a talk at a radio broadcaster's conference in Vancouver in 1958, and they were really worried about television, which they had reason to be, just like people today are worried about AI. And Marshall told them that the medium is a message. He told them that, you know, yes, you're obsolete. No, that doesn't mean you're dead. "Obsolescence," he said, "never meant the death of anything, merely the beginning." Because a new medium comes along and it tends to absorb the older medium as its content for one thing. But the older medium also gets a rebirth, usually as an art form. Right? Where once the thing was kind of vulgar and pop and for the masses, like film used to be, now it's an art form. This is part of the cycle of innovation. So you can look at it as a threat. You can also look at it as an area of opportunity. In fact, if you're smart, you'll look at it as an area of opportunity because while some people jump ship, there's a lot of life left there if you wanna take advantage of it.

[00:16:31] Brian: This is why artists are so often drawn to nostalgia. Nostalgia is actually just an example of of one medium transforming to, it's becoming obsolete, and therefore, it's becoming an art form. And so the artists are like, "That is cool. This is something to work with." But it's interesting because they are also the canary in the coal mine. Right?

[00:16:57] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:16:58] Brian: So how does that work? When you're looking backwards to create art, but you're also the ones that are out in front telling the new stories of what will happen. How does that all kind of interplay happen?

[00:17:14] Andrew: Well, it's an interesting process. And nostalgia is a of a sign of rebirth. It means when all of a sudden something, when that nostalgic impulse is invoked, it means that something big has happened. Some change has happened. It's part of that cycle of innovation in obsolescence and nostalgia. And as an art form, it's usually very rich territory. It can be interesting for the artist, but it's also a surefire way to connect with certain groups of people, certain audiences, for which that's significant. We have nostalgia for the times which formed us. And one of the interesting things about today is that cycle is shrinking because our speed, our rate of innovation happens so fast. So, you know, before you know it 2020 is gonna be coming back. When it used to be, you know, a couple of decades. We used to think of a generation in terms of, like, twenty, thirty years. But that's...

[00:19:02] Brian: Now it's based on gaming consoles. That's the nostalgia {laughter} because...

[00:19:08] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:19:08] Brian: Gaming consoles form a generation.

[00:19:11] Andrew: Yeah. Or GPT 3 and 4. You know, software generations. And that happens in a year or less. So, you know, I've even seen some early Midjourney type images as a kind of a retro aesthetic.

[00:19:30] Brian: Yes. Same.

[00:19:32] Andrew: Right? And wow. That's interesting. But The Medium is The Message thing is wild because well, it really rests on two words, medium and message. And people don't usually stop to think about what those terms mean. But for me, the easiest way I've found to explain or help people understand what the phrase means is just to show them all the different ways that my grandfather, that Marshall used them over the years. So this is the backbone of my book is actually this timeline from 1958 and along to about 1979 when the last time he had a major stroke and wasn't able to speak for the last year and a half of his life. So about the last time he said it. And then all the years in between, all the various ways he said the medium is the message are really interesting ways of exploring its meaning. And it's funny how it still strikes a chord with people today. I was in The States two weeks ago for a conference, and I drove down. I crossed the US, or tried to cross the US border, and the border person sent me over for an extra interview. And the guy, after they eventually got to talking with me, he said, "So what are you talking about?" And I said, "Words." He said, "Words?" I was like, "Yeah. You know, words. Words as a technology. The word in your mind, the spoken word, the written word, the typed word. And now there's a very interesting evolution happening with words. With AI, interesting things are happening with the word." You could see his eyes glaze over. He's like, "Okay, whatever, buddy." Funnily enough, on the way back coming across the Canadian side, hand over my passport. "How long have you been in The States?" "Since Wednesday." "What were you doing?" "Giving a talk." "Oh yeah, on what? The Medium is The Message?"

[00:22:00] Brian: {laughter} That is amazing.

[00:22:02] Andrew: Yeah, I may have mentioned that. Kind of funny. So it's interesting how that phrase has gotten into the public imagination. And people use it as kind of a foil to, you know, explore different things.

[00:22:25] Brian: I do think the fun thing about the phrase is it's many meanings, and one of those meanings is actually medium can mean more than one thing as a word.

[00:22:37] Andrew: Yep.

[00:22:37] Brian: I think that's something that people forget about in that phrase. How is the word medium applied to people and when is it applied to people?

[00:22:48] Andrew: Yep.

[00:22:49] Brian: And that adds a whole additional layer on top of it. Is that something you've explored? I'm sure you have.

[00:22:54] Andrew: Definitely. Well, one of the beautiful things about the phrase is also one of the things that frustrates people, and that is its ambiguity and its paradox. But those things are poetic techniques in order to get you to think, god forbid, that you should have to think about something.

[00:23:19] Phillip: Right? It's the most frustrating thing about people listening to this podcast, by the way.

[00:23:23] Andrew: Yeah. Why do you make me think? Well, we want to understand. The goal is to understand things. Well, what is the goal actually? For Marshall McLuhan, what the point was, was he saw that throughout human history, we've been essentially controlled and steered more by the structure and the nature of our innovations than what we've done with them on purpose. That it's been mostly an unconscious and subliminal process. We create this great new tool, and then we wake up a decade later wondering what happened to our culture. Not realizing that a new medium is a new culture. It's a new person. It's a new culture. Is there any avoiding it? Is kind of the question. So the first part of that as well, first, pay attention to it. But his general goal was prediction and control. Marshall was asked in an interview once if there was any time period he would rather be alive in. And he said, "I'd rather be alive in any time period when people were going to leave things alone." He was actually a very conservative guy. He basically loved books and literate culture and wanted to do his... He was an English professor. And the reporter, the interviewer said, "But they're not going to leave it alone, are they?" And Marshall said, "No, they're not. So the only thing you can do is find where all the buttons are and put as many of them off as possible." Because he says, "I refuse to simply lay back and let the juggernaut roll over me." We don't like finding out that we're being used. We really do not like finding out that other things have been going on below our notice, and we feel used.

[00:25:43] Brian: And yet everyone seems to have a sense that this is happening. Everyone kind of feels it in their gut, in their spirit.

[00:25:52] Andrew: But that's a change. That's new.

[00:25:54] Brian: Yeah. That's new. That is new. It is new because they haven't been used in the way that they're being used in the past, at least not at the level that we're experiencing with the Internet.

[00:26:10] Andrew: Well, the thing is we have, I think. You know what? Language, human language was just as revolutionary for pre language humans as the Internet is or was for literate people. I would argue just as impactful. Two completely different societies. But, you know, Bertrand Russell, who Marshall like to bring up, said that "If we only raise the temperature of the bathwater by a degree every hour, we wouldn't know when to scream." And the fact is if you get into a bath and you slowly raise the temperature, you can get into a really hot bath quite comfortably. But if you tried to step into that bath from the cool room, you'd feel like you burnt your foot. And the point of that is that when technological change happens really slowly, we adapt, we adjust, we don't notice. The temperature, the result is the same, but we don't notice. So it's easier to transition. I think today, we're in effect stepping into a boiling bath every time we turn around and we can't ignore it anymore. And it's disorienting, disconcerting. But the problem is, to raise another quote, "We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't a fish." The difficulty is that these changes are very difficult to say where they come from. It's not as easy as taking your foot into the water because we don't realize we've put our foot in the water. And this is the medium is the message thing. Because as long as we focus on content and censorship and proper use or whatever else, we kind of are missing a lot of the point. But the effect is there. And so people are really freaked out about AI because they recognize that this is world changing. And this actually gives me hope in terms of technological change and human agency. Because things don't change typically in our societies until people get really pissed off. And demand change from those in a position to do it. Because, yeah, I could throw away my smartphone. Sure. I could disconnect the Internet and just be in this building with my books and whatever. But another anecdote is Marshall McLuhan and WH Auden and Buckminster Fuller were at the University of Toronto debating television. And Auden, who was a poet and playwright said, "I don't have a television. I wouldn't dream of having one." And Marshall said, "Well, you merely suffer the consequences without enjoying any of the benefits." So I could turn off the TV. I could throw away my cell phone. But I still live in a smartphone culture. I still live in a world controlled by the smartphone. And without it, you're at a serious disadvantage, and you don't enjoy any of the benefits either.

[00:31:52] Brian: Marshall also, if I recall correctly, did sort of limit  usage at some level. Am I wrong?

[00:32:02] Andrew: Sure. Well, so Marshall determined that the effects of technologies come on two major levels, the personal and the social. And this is something that I'm working on with my book is a McLuhan model of communication or media. Because like a graphic model, a visual model. Because we have the Shannon Weaver model of communication, which shows that a message has a source and then it goes through a channel, and then it gets eventually to a receiver. And the message goes through. And Marshall called this a transportation model of communication, how a message gets from one place to another with minimal disruption. And that's great as far as transmitting messages goes, but it doesn't account for what we might think of as the side effects, which end up being the main effects. So the difference between a world with telephones and a world without telephones, the difference in culture. That cars and roads created suburbs more than they just allowed people to get to work and home. And that suburbs created a certain way of life in Middle America and all the rest of it. That isn't taken into account in that model. So the personal and social, first technologies affect us individually. Because essentially humans are bundles of meat around our various sensory organs. Organs of perception. So we have our eyes and our ears, taste, all these things which take in information. And then downstream of that, we make sense of things or make determinations. This tastes good. This tastes bad. So this is good, or this is bad, or that's beautiful. Oh, that's an awful sound. Oh, that's way too loud. That's just right. But the first thing is the senses. Because as far as we're concerned, nothing exists outside of our senses. If we don't have eyes to see, we don't see anything. Now so the sense is basically it all... I like to say we're the sum of our senses because it basically comes down to the nature of our senses. And a lot... Our senses are not... Forgive me if I'm getting way too into the weeds with this.

[00:35:06] Brian: No. No.

[00:35:07] Andrew: Our senses aren't static inert things. They change. When you're first born, your senses, like your sense of sight, your sense of sound, your sense of touch, especially, and remember that touch doesn't just happen on your fingertips. Right? Your whole skin is all about touch. We know this very well. Pleasure or pain. But when we're first born, when we're very young, sensation is a hundred percent. Everything is bright. Everything is loud. Everything is exquisite, or everything is painful. And as we age, our senses form pathways. They get used to things and they dull even. Two of three of us, maybe you're wearing contacts, Brian, or had laser eye surgery. Two or three of us are wearing glasses because we don't see as well as we used to.

[00:36:11] Phillip: I think Brian's just raw doggin it. I think he also can't see. He just doesn't wear them.

[00:36:17] Brian: I have, like, vision right on the edge. Technically, I pass the driver's test every year. But... {laughter}

[00:36:25] Andrew: But he's in denial. As we grow older, our senses tend to atrophy a bit. They grow duller. We don't see as well. We don't hear as well. We don't taste as well. We add seasoning. We add flavor, not because we're more adventurous, although there's that, but because our sensation lessens. So we gotta pick it up. Right? Our senses aren't inert things.

[00:36:54] Brian: I would make the case that sometimes that dulling allows us to go after things that we wouldn't have been able to go after before.

[00:37:02] Andrew: For sure.

[00:37:03] Brian: Actually, there's some interesting effects of the dulling. I'm sure you're gonna get into this.

[00:37:10] Andrew: Yeah. I mean, it isn't necessarily a disadvantage, but it is a fact.

[00:37:16] Brian: Right.

[00:37:16] Andrew: What you wanna make of that fact is another thing. But the point of that is that our senses aren't plastic. They aren't inert. And the other main point here is that they exist together as one thing. We're one thing, individually.

[00:37:37] Brian: Although people compartmentalize all the time.

[00:37:40] Andrew: Yeah. People compartmentalize, but it's really hard to fool your senses. You can ignore them a little bit, but, again, there's a content level, and then there's a deeper level. The nature of perception is that we're always experiencing far more than we're aware of. You guys know this as advertisers. A lot of advertising kinda relies on the fact that people notice things, but they don't pay attention to them. And there are very human reasons for that. If we were to pay attention to everything which passed through our senses, well, we'd go crazy, and we'd never be able to get anything done. Because there's just so much. We live in such stimulating environments. Our senses pick up so many things. And if I were to pay too much attention to the birds chirping outside or to the cat meowing beside me, I wouldn't be able to have this conversation. My attention would be too divided. So we necessarily focus on things, but there's a lot happening.

[00:39:03] Brian: There's a lot happening. Yeah. And then actually, just a quick interjection. Like, we just talked with Daisy Alioto and Francis Zierer about this. Attention is getting split so brutally right now. You're being told to pay attention to competing things at the same time and you end up giving them less attention. And also the Internet wants to call half attention, full attention. And so if they can even get half of your attention, that's changing how we think about what attention is.

[00:39:41] Andrew: Sure. Well, attention is a scale. It's a range.

[00:39:47] Brian: Not all attention is created equal.

[00:39:48] Andrew: No. Not at all. And there's levels of focus. And attention is also something to train. Something that can be trained, like memory. It's a skill, really. One of the points my grandfather made about writing and the written and printed word, well, about senses really, was the big distinction between the eye and the ear. Actually, I got into this a little bit in my speech. The conference I was at two weeks ago was about orality and literacy. The world of speech in the ear before writing, and then the literate world after writing. And they're very different worlds, very different modes of experience because they're very different senses. The eye, for example, tends to well, it has a an area of focus, a degree of vision, versus the ear, which hears from all around at once. We we talk metaphorically about having eyes on the back of your head, but we really see forward and a little bit to the side. But we hear from all directions at once. So that's one point, and it's not a trivial difference. The eye also tends to look at one thing at a time. We do get some peripheral, but we generally have an area of focus versus the ear, which doesn't quite work that way. In fact, if we wanna focus our ear, we tend to close our eyes and listen more intently and to kind of turn. But they're very different modes of experience. So the eye tends to look at one thing at a time. And that naturally kinda leads to sequence. Like things a, b, c, d, or one, two, three, four, things following another versus the ear, which tends to lean towards simultaneity. Everything everywhere all at once. Marshall's contention in books like the Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media was that literacy, the written word was eye dominant. And this new world that they were coming into in the early twentieth century, even in the nineteenth century, the electric world, did not have that character of the eye, the one thing at a time. He felt that it had more in common actually with the central nervous system. It had more in common with the ear than with the eye. Yeah. Which is a major distinction. And his book Understanding Media is really about the transition between these two great ages. The age of print and literacy and mechanism, and the electric age, which was rapidly taking over. Mechanism, the machine, was basically kind of the end of the arc of techniques that started with the printed word, the written word, the alphabet, if you wanna go back. So the alphabet was a revolutionary technology which took language, which was for the ear and made it for the eye, which was a very radical thing because it separated. It separated sound from sense, from meaning. The phonetic alphabet takes these letters, which don't mean anything on their own and assigns them meaning as opposed to words which mean things.

[00:44:16] Brian: Right. And speed readers hear things less in their head. They just absorb the meaning. If you're really, like, fast sometimes you skip the orality inside your mind, I think. Because a lot of people, when they read, they have to hear what they're reading.

[00:44:36] Andrew: Yes.

[00:44:37] Brian: But speed readers could just kind of skip past retranslating it into the oral consciousness or the sonic consciousness or whatever you wanna call it. And that's how they can move past the words more quickly.

[00:44:56] Andrew: Well, you have to move faster than speech because speech only goes at about 120 to 140 words a minute. If you wanna read faster than that, you obviously have to bypass speech. There's another study...

[00:45:17] Brian: That is interesting. Yeah. Because electric media is faster than speech. No question. Yeah. So it's this weird new orality that we're talking about because you're gonna be absorbed... You should be able to absorb things through your ears at the speed of electricity, but we have this orality that's already inherent. This makes me think that we're gonna see even faster evolutions in language, and actually, we're already seeing that between AIs, and they're like kind of inventing their own AI speak. And I was thinking about this the other day. I don't remember if I was talking to somebody about it or I just was thinking about it. But like in the future, sounds may have way more encoded in them, like enough to create a whole web page. You know what I mean? If we're talking about the evolution of language, a lot of how our language works right now is built for an embodied world, but building stuff that's disembodied in the digital world that doesn't require a physical as much, it's based on light and electricity, then you can create whole worlds with single sounds.

[00:46:47] Phillip: You heard it here first. Brian's a Bene Gesserit. {imitation} He's got the voice.

[00:46:56] Brian: {laughter} I got the voice. Yep.

[00:46:57] Andrew: We might not even need that much. But this is why Marshall likened the new technologies having more in common to the central nervous system than otherwise because messages from our central nervous system, neurons firing through our brains move at the speed of, well, at the speed of light.

[00:47:24] Brian: Right.

[00:47:24] Andrew: Or better.

[00:47:26] Brian: So you're saying we can adapt to this new world because right now it feels like we're not built to interact with computers. That's the whole Norbert Wiener thing. Like, some things should be computer to computer interaction, something should be human to computer actions, and something should be human to human. And we have to categorize where those things belong. But you're saying maybe because our brains can technically move at that speed, there is a world in which we can start to absorb and interact with things that fast. But it's happening too quickly. We've moved too fast. We can't keep up. We can't adapt.

[00:48:01] Phillip: Is that what he's saying? That's not what I heard.

[00:48:03] Brian: I put words in your mouth, Andrew.

[00:48:06] Andrew: Oh, well oh, I knew Barry would make an appearance.

[00:48:10] Brian: What's up, Barry?

[00:48:13] Andrew: I mean, should, meant to. When I first went to Europe, in my twenties, as an adult, I was struck by the difference in the sense of history. Here in Canada, if a building is from the eighteen hundreds, that's old.

[00:48:41] Brian: Right.

[00:48:42] Andrew: In Europe, I was in eleventh century castles.

[00:48:48] Brian: Yeah.

[00:48:48] Andrew: Like, wait. What? You know, businesses that are centuries and centuries and centuries old. These things can be very, very relative depending on where you're coming from. One of the downsides or upsides, what's that Spider Man thing? With great power comes great responsibility. You can't unsee things. You can't unknow things. Ignorance is bliss in a lot of ways. And this might account for our seemingly motivated ignorance when it comes to these things. Because when you understand something, it kind of adds a responsibility. As they say, ignorance of the laws...

[00:49:50] Brian: All of business is driven on this right now. Fear of finding out.

[00:49:54] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:49:55] Brian: I can't take credit for that one.

[00:49:57] Andrew: Terrifying.

[00:49:58] Brian: People are afraid to find out because they get it it puts them in a position of having to be responsible for what they know.

[00:50:04] Andrew: Right. Well, it takes the fun out of it. Right? It's like, man, I got a great deal on that shirt. I don't wanna find out why I got a great deal on that shirt.

[00:50:15] Phillip: {laughter} Wow.

[00:50:18] Andrew: You know? I want to enjoy the thrill of that purchase, not the dismay at somebody's six year old child in a factory somewhere making it so I could buy it for $6. Right, Barry?

[00:50:34] Phillip: That's right. Well, just to go back to something I think that's, if we were to project it beyond, you know, the past and the present into the future, if we looked at there's a trend line, right? So we have this from the past, the Gutenberg printing press visual media into what we call electric media and sort of like maybe radio auditory processing. And then we have sort of the Internet age, which maybe is something else, something different. Now we're into this AI moment, and something that made the rounds yesterday is an HBR study, which we'll throw into the show notes and will probably show here on the YouTube, that shows the different modalities of this study that made the rounds here. Preferences for using AI and sort of the top box preferences of what people are using AI for. A lot of it's recommendation based. A lot of it is self-service, but a lot of it is like relationship and advice based. And so a lot of it seems to be indexing towards things you might think of as, I mean, companionship is probably not the right word, but there's a word of like a surrogacy for a companionship or advice or therapy or just belonging, someone to be with. And this is anecdotal at best, but something that felt very analogous to this is a post on X that didn't do numbers, but felt like it was germane to the conversation was Damon Chen, user on X Damon G. Chen posted, "I used to love listening to podcasts when I'm driving. Now I prefer chatting with ChatGPT in voice chat mode." And this to me feels like it's now we've sort of moved into a new... That's a new mode. Feels like we've shifted into something different and that feels like it's projecting beyond us. That's no longer an internalization of something. It's feels like it's para. It's a parasocial or it's projected beyond outside of us now. It's not just our internal senses. It's outside of us. It's an extra sensory. I'm sure there's something really visual there to me. It's feels like it's outside of our senses, but I don't wanna... I'm not leading the witness here. I'm curious how you interpret that, Andrew. You know, it seems like you're trying to, there's a lot of what you do, and this is something I'm curious, in that sense. Your work is rooted in a remarkable lineage for sure. But you've contributed to our work over the last couple of years. And how do you personally negotiate these types of ideas in your own thoughts while also you're actively interpreting your own ideas, you're evolving your own ideas, but you have this influence of your father and your grandfather as well. I'm curious how you think of this. You're living in this age. They're not.

[00:54:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:54:08] Phillip: So I'm curious, what do you think about all of this?

[00:54:13] Andrew: Well, there's about 10 questions in there.

[00:54:15] Phillip: Well, sorry. I haven't spoken a lot in the last fifty minutes. {laughter}

[00:54:19] Andrew: I apologize. My wife is in constant awe of how I can talk to people like this. I was like, well, I mean, try and shut me up. There's so many things to say about it. For one thing and I talk about understanding media. Marshall McLuhan's 1964 book, Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man, a lot because there's so much there. As I said, it's the kind of the underlying theme of it is this switchover between the mechanistic age, which kind of, as Marshall charts it, began with the phonetic alphabet and ended with this technique of the mechanical. The assembly line, for example, which the strength of the assembly line was in fragmenting things into their component parts in order to repeat the process and put them back together again in identical ways. This was the power of the phonetic alphabet, which took apart speech into component parts and allowed you to put them together. It became the printing press, which made this into movable type that allowed you to put things together and do it identically in ways over and over and over and over. But the nature of this is the nature of the eye to take things apart, to isolate things versus the nature of the ear and the nature of the electric, which is instead of sequentiality, it's simultaneity. Instead of fragmenting and bringing things apart, it's about simultaneity and bringing things together. So the nature of the structure has everything to do with the nature of the effect. And by studying the structure, you can learn a lot about the effect. So when the nature of the dominant technology is all about fragmenting and pulling things apart, you have things like abstract thought and reasoning and being able to put your emotions aside and analyze things kinda coldly. These are effects of that structure. Take that structure away, and you're left with just the ghost of something without the foundation to back it up, which accounts for I think of it as a kind of dissonance. We're left with these values, but these values are born of habits, which are born of structures. And you take those things away, and without the structure to hold it up, they collapse. And we're seeing that all around us. So the fragmentation pushing things apart is quite different from simultaneity and involvement and putting things together, pulling things together. And that nature explains things like, well, people don't just wanna listen to a radio show. They want to be part of it. So we have a podcast. And people don't just wanna listen to the podcast. They wanna interact with it. So we have these GPT things, which can apply to a book as well. People don't wanna just read a book. They wanna interact with the book. They wanna be part. They wanna be involved because everything is coming together. Everything everywhere all at once to me is the perfect phrase to sum up where we are. And it's early days. I'm not sure people understand, but when you think about the timeline of literacy, which basically ended with electricity as electrocuted. That timeline is thousands of years from the phonetic alphabet to the assembly line. Electricity was discovered and started making its rounds in the late eighteenth century. And we go from electricity to the digital to the Internet to now this phase of things. And I don't think this is the last stop by any means. It's a stop along the way.

[00:59:20] Brian: Or at the end of things, Andrew?

[00:59:22] Andrew: Well, the difficulty here is that our technologies are so powerful that we could destroy ourselves pretty easily. It was hard to do that with the hammer.

[00:59:39] Brian: That what I meant, actually. What I meant was everything is happening everywhere all the time at one, you know, at once. When that happens now and electricity is like just connecting things faster and faster, does that end progress in many ways?

[01:00:04] Phillip: Accelerationists would say no.

[01:00:06] Brian: Well, no. Hear me hear me out. Progress as moving people around and getting goods to where they need to be, that's all gonna keep changing. Those are knock on effects of where we're at. I'm talking about culturally because all information is now going to be made available to everyone whenever they want it. And there's no end to good things to consume, if this makes sense. No one person at this moment can consume all of the good things that are available to consume in their lifetime. Even as we adapt further and further to the way that technology works and electrocommunication works, you will never be able to, as a single person, absorb all of the most excellent of content or forms or media that is available. And so there's no incentive...

[01:01:10] Andrew: Well, you know, people will never be able to fly in the air like birds, Brian.

[01:01:14] Brian: Oh, okay. Okay. So you're saying that the ability to, I'm thinking about all of literature and all of film and so on. We're gonna be able to absorb and internalize the things that are about that that actually are incredible. Or maybe they won't matter. Maybe they won't matter in the future. I don't know. I'm curious what you think about that.

[01:01:42] Andrew: Well, I know better than to ever say never.

[01:01:46] Brian: Sure.

[01:01:48] Andrew: I think if we can imagine it, there's a world where it's possible.

[01:01:54] Brian: I can imagine some pretty weird things, man. {laughter}

[01:01:57] Andrew: Well, I'm sure you can, Brian. We know you. I mean, possible and likely are very different things. However, again, in Understanding Media, actually, Marshall opens the book saying, "Rapidly, we're approaching the final phase of the extensions of man."

[01:02:17] Brian: That's exactly what I'm talking about.

[01:02:20] Andrew: The extension of consciousness.

[01:02:22] Brian: Yeah.

[01:02:23] Andrew: So we're not there. That's not AI. AI is still external thing. People are trying to make moves that way.

[01:02:37] Brian: What could it be? Example what would it be? Like, you say AI is not that thing. What is the thing?

[01:02:44] Andrew: The thing it would be that we're no longer separate, but we're all connected and not connected in that we can talk like this. So it's not even connected. It's we are become. So I don't know if you ever watched Star Trek The Next Generation.

[01:03:06] Brian: Yes. Borg. The Borg.

[01:03:08] Andrew: The Borg. The Borg is that. It's one organism, all aware. Just like in yourself. If I hurt my hand, I know about it. If we were all connected, so I think a lot about words, and my speech at Geneva College was about words and about the evolution of the word. I don't need words in myself. We sometimes some of us think in words, some of us don't think in words, and the two groups are often shocked to find that the other exists. But you don't need words. Marshall said, again, in Understanding Media, that humans don't need words anymore than computers need numbers. And he said that in 1964, by the way. But we don't particularly need words. And if the three of us shared a mind, we wouldn't need words either. We wouldn't need all kinds of things like inhibition or decency. You'd know what I'm thinking, right, the minute I think it.

[01:04:31] Brian: So is that the endgame? Like, the Borg? That's our future? I don't mean to be facetious, but if electric media is connecting us faster and faster to the point where everyone will know what everyone else is thinking at all times, in some sense.

[01:04:52] Phillip: Brian, it sounds like you just need to read Homo Deus. It sounds like that's what you need to do.

[01:04:55] Brian: {laughter} So part of me is like, screw that. I don't want that. I'm out.

[01:05:02] Andrew: Yeah, but I understand that that reaction is born of a certain set of habits and biases and values.

[01:05:10] Brian: Certainly. Yeah. No. No. No question. It is.

[01:05:12] Andrew: Which Some people, for example, mister Musk, do not seem to share.

[01:05:17] Brian: Right. And this is where judgment starts to play a role because and I think you said, "What are the effects?" I'm looking ahead at the effects, and I'm like, {worried exclamation}. {laughter} I see the effects and where they're headed, and that world is the world and maybe I am not, maybe I don't understand what we need to be, but I love our individuality. I love that we have things that make us distinct. I want distinctness. In fact, the joy of life comes from distinctiveness. And so how can we retain distinctiveness in an upcoming world? I think that this requires being aware of things. Andrew, you're nodding your head or shaking your head both at the same time.

[01:06:17] Andrew: Because his is the great question that we need to be asking when we design and build and implement technologies. And it's the one we're not because we're putting technology first and ourselves last. And if we want to preserve any part of our culture and the things we value, we have to think about that.

[01:06:41] Brian: So allow me to bring you a solution.

[01:06:44] Andrew: Okay.

[01:06:44] Brian: It's called commerce. {laughter} Sorry to go there, but one of the beautiful things about commerce is that it says, "I am distinctive. I own things." Commerce is identity exchange, but it's a choice. The beauty of commerce is that it allows you to say, "I have a thing and you have a thing and we are going to trade those things." But those things then become distinctively separate. They're now, you have that thing and I have this thing. And that actually is a distinctive. It's a way of saying that there is something separate, there is something that we have that is special per person and that we have the ability to give that thing to other people. And if you're the Borg, there's no commerce. Commerce is gone in the Borg. And so, Phillip, we haven't chatted about this before. This is fun.

[01:07:47] Andrew: Commerce is gone in the Borg. {laughter} I like stuff. I like things. If you took a look around this well, even from what you can see, you can see that I love variety. It blows my mind actually thinking about this. Kind of an aside, do you know what we call... Do you know what a cobra chicken is?

[01:08:14] Brian: I should know what a cobra chicken is. I've been on a chicken kick lately. So tell me. I'm very excited to hear about a cobra chicken.

[01:08:22] Andrew: It's my favorite new term for Canada goose.

[01:08:28] Brian: That's pretty good. I like that. Very cute.

[01:08:32] Andrew: I love it. Some person who I believe English was his second language described the Canada goose as a cobra chicken. Because if you look at it, it's got this neck and, like, the coloring is kind of cobra like.

[01:08:46] Phillip: I got it. That's amazing.

[01:08:48] Andrew: Cobra chicken is my jam. But the reason I brought that up is because I look at a flock of Canada geese or penguins or cobra chickens or whatever. And to me, I just see a flock. I don't see individuals in there. How do they recognize each other as distinct? But they do. They know who their kids are. They know who their parents are. They know who is of their flock and who's not. Just as we do. I think we maybe make it a lot more obvious, but maybe I don't. Maybe that's my bias. For them, it's as obvious as as looking at each other here is. But to me, one cobra chicken looks much like another. I'm never gonna tire from using that phrase. But for myself, I don't see... I have a funny relationship to commerce. One of the big tensions in my life is that I inherited an incredibly rich intellectual legacy. Incredibly rich. Ridiculous. And it's not just things like the 5,000 books of my dad's library that I'm here in or even the library and all the things in it. But it's a way of understanding, a way of knowing, a way seeing, a way of exploring, of explaining. It's incalculably rich. So I was left with this very rich intellectual legacy, but not really any kind of financial legacy to do anything with it. So for myself, what I wanna do is sit in here and write my book and teach my classes and give my lectures and not have to worry about how I'm gonna replace the roof and building this into a actual international institute that people can come visit and stay and study. But the things are are inextricable. So commerce does come into it. And that's probably the biggest tension or challenge really that I face, is reconciling those things. Because I'm just trying to finish my book, but, you know, also my kids are in hockey, so I need another job. And all the other things. So there's that tension contains a resentment, and I suppose there's an entitlement that comes into it as well, a sense of entitlement.

[01:12:15] Brian: I feel like your family over the years, your legacy is putting out some extremely powerful ideas that influence our culture and have sort of defined and have given definition to a lot of the changes that we've seen. And the problem is that in our capitalist society that hasn't come back as a monetary, the transaction was imbalanced, if that makes sense.

[01:12:48] Andrew: Well and actually, as a matter of fact so before I did this, I ran a small business doing furniture upholstery for about ten years. I'm a craftsman. I didn't actually go to university. I barely graduated high school, and I worked all my life. Ending with with this small business repairing and reupholstering people's grandfather's chairs and stuff like that. And I love doing it, actually. But I did that in the big barn next door where I have a workshop here. And my dad was here in this office. And it was great because when I started getting interested in his work, I could come over and have a conversation here with him and kind of fill up my head and walk away and go actually do some physical work and let my mind kind of chew it over and absorb it. But as I got more and more interested in it, I've been really fortunate in that I've been able to... I'm not getting rich. And I'm not even at this... I have a grand vision for what I want the McLuhan Institute to be. And I gave you a hint of it. It's crazy to me that there's no place other than what I've built here in Canada solely dedicated to the McLuhan work. Seems crazy to me. I feel like if Marshall McLuhan were an American, there would already be a McLuhan Institute. And it would be endowed. Could you imagine if Einstein didn't have a an intellectual home. To me, it's of that level. To me, The Medium is The Message is e=mc squared of media studies. So it's crazy to me that that didn't exist before I started this, and I've had to build it myself. And I'm not bitter or angry about that at all. In fact, I wouldn't have it any other way. It means I've been able to do it according to what I felt was the best way to do it. And that's priceless. But I've been really fortunate in that I was able to kinda scale back my upholstery work and scale up this work. And giving talks and teaching classes kinda pays my bills. I mean, my wife still has a steady, good job, which means we have a mortgage and everything because the bank doesn't like what I do for a living. But I'm at a subsistence kind of level, which to me is huge. Honestly, I've made it. I basically am paid to do this work, which is an incredible gift. But I have bigger dreams. I want people to be able to come to this, I'm in Prince Edward County, Ontario. And it's a growing wine region and food scene. And there's the Sandbanks Provincial Park that brings a million visitors a year. And I want people to be able to come here where it's the greatest, a great concentration of McLuhan media studies. And I want people to be able to come and read these books and think about these ideas and stay here and I'd love Future Commerce to be able to come have their off-site here. And it drives me crazy that I'm not there yet. But I am getting there. I have no idea where we started this conversation. You asked me too many questions at once.

[01:16:42] Phillip: Yeah. No. I think it was the role of commerce and and how it plays a role in identity and individuality and whether that individuality has like an endgame and whether we lose that over time. And I'll let you go first in that conversation. I think it it hits a double edged sword. The double edged sword is that it plays a role in you sort of cementing a legacy, and and that legacy, I think, helps us to fight against this endgame that Brian's talking about. And I think what I would say is that on the other side is that not just the legacy that you're shepherding at the McLuhan Institute between, you know, the ideas and the writings of your father and your grandfather. I think there's the other side, which I think both your father and grandfather have written about extensively, especially your father. I think there's a spiritual side and a spiritual depth to be spoken about that we've talked about in the After Dark, Brian, that I would say many facets of faith would say to deny yourself individuality and to become less individual, and that your needs and rights as an individual need to wither over time to be more a part of a collective. I would say that in reality, there's a lot of people who would say that the needs of the individual are selfish on some degree. And that sounds very Marxist. Doesn't sound very western or capitalistic. And to some degree, commerce actually is an affront to that. So I feel very conflicted in many ways to that because I think that those things are in tension with each other. So I, when you ask me, if I was gonna answer that, not to have the last word, I would say I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't know. I also have a little conflict there. But I think what's awesome about this and the kind of conversation we can have here is we can have a very deep conversation about that tension. And we can have people like you, Andrew, to come and tease it out. And we can actually elevate the conversation in this space because that's really what we're trying to do is to help folks think more deeply about the work that we do in commerce because I think that we have a very powerful catalyst in society with commerce because I believe that everybody has to engage with it whether they want to or not. You have to transact to live in this world. And so the work that we do is really important and very meaningful. And I think that at the end of the day, we have the power to shape the future with the commerce work that we do. And so that in that way, whether it's individual or collective, I think that that's the responsibility that we all hold. I don't know if I answered that question, Brian.

[01:19:57] Brian: You sort of did. I think it's a really good point. Sort of yeah. The giving over to collective. It's interesting. I think that's part of transaction, though. I think I mean, I would argue. But I think you did a good job of answering it, Phillip. Nicely done. Last note on this, McLuhan's Global Village is sort of in this... The thing about Marshall McLuhan is that he didn't... I mean, a lot of people think about this Global Village concept as a really good thing. Didn't seem like Marshall was, he had a different idea of what this was doing to people and how they were gonna interact with each other as a result. And we think about commerce and borders coming down or borders going up as it were...

[01:20:59] Brian: Especially now.

[01:20:59] Brian: Yep. And what borders even mean anymore because of how governments function or don't function. So, yeah, I would love to hear your viewpoint, Andrew, about this Global Village concept is a hot button issue right now. How are people's transformations, due to new technology, playing into how we think about global commerce? And I guess that is a really specific question. I'll leave you there.

[01:21:44] Andrew: Well, there's a lot there. And some of it has to do with these kind of ghost values that we have where the structure, the reason for them being there has disappeared, like long distance charges on the phone seems like a crazy thing now.

[01:22:09] Brian: Right.

[01:22:11] Andrew: Where I live... Area codes. Where I live, it seems crazy. I can call across from the East Coast Of Canada to the West Coast, but I can't call 50 miles across the lake to Rochester without it being somehow long distance.

[01:22:32] Brian: Right.

[01:22:32] Andrew: What are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense. And in fact, my own phone plan is now Canada/US, so it makes no difference, as far as that goes. But even Canada/US, it's not any more effort or expense to call to Australia than it is to call across the road. The Global Village is a term that Marshall came up with. He actually kinda stole it from this British painter and writer, Wyndham Lewis, who wrote in a book called America and Cosmic Man. That sounds like a person. Cos. Cosmic man. America in Cosmic Man. He wrote that "the world has shrunk to a very village like affair with telegraph poles laid end to end." So the idea of the Global Village came about as an effective telegraph, which basically connected the world in shrunk distance and reorganized what time and space meant. And basically, just like it's as easy for me to call across the road as it is across the world, it makes in effect a village of the world, one village, because time and space don't have the same meaning. Now he also pointed out that some people have a kind of rose colored glasses idea of what village life is like. Mainly people who've never lived in a village think that it's some Garden of Eden ultimate state of being. When villages can be very nasty places, you know, gossip and intrigue and hyper awareness of what everybody else is up to. No sense of privacy. These are these are also, you know, battles and grudges, and these are also aspects of village life. So it isn't all necessarily a great thing. There's many things to be recommended with a city. A city like New York, for example. He also developed the metaphor of Global Village to that of Global Theater. Because with further developments in media, he felt that all the world is a stage. That just particularly now with TV cameras in our pockets and everything, we're always on. We're always performing. So that's a whole other thing. This urge to perform and to share and all this stuff. One little exercise or daydream I have sometimes is to imagine if Marshall were alive today, how would he interact with the world? Because he used the technologies, the means available to him in order to reach the world with his message as it were. A lot of that was television. Would he be on TikTok? Would he be on Twitter? He did something which wasn't really done back then in the fifties and sixties, which was he was an academic. He was a scholar. He was actually one of the leading literary critics of his day who somehow became a public intellectual. And that was very unseemly. That's not something a proper English professor would do. And it's ironic because today, every academic wants to be a pundit or a public intellectual. But back then, it was unseemly, indecorous, you might say. But he did that intentionally because he wanted to wake the world up to what was happening. One of the greatest letters he ever wrote, one of the, to me, the most spectacular statements he ever made was in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1951 when he said, "I am an intellectual thug who has slowly been gathering an arsenal with every intention of using it. In order to...distract the trigger men from the sidelines or to needle the somnambulists." He was trying to wake people up to the effects of technologies that, you know, every service contains great disservice, that every new technology is a new culture and comes at the expense at the cost of the old culture more times than not. And so he realized that he couldn't tell the world this from the English department at the University of Toronto. He had to go about it differently. And he did, which is amazing. So I wonder, I think about what that would look like today. And I'm not trying to be that at all. I don't mind coming on podcasts and stuff, but man, I do not really...

[01:28:44] Brian: Well and to your point, all of most intellectuals now wanna be public intellectuals. And so how would Marshall have reacted to that? Would he have joined in that fray, that mimetic cycle, or would he have retreated, or would he have looked past? What I think Marshall did is he he figured out the memetic cycle. And he sort of was an anti memetic. He found a way to kick back.

[01:29:25] Andrew: Well...

[01:29:26] Brian: So when everyone else now is like, "Oh, how do we be public? How do we be public? How do we get famous? How do we capture this audience and capture this attention?" Would the reverse be to say, "I'm gonna write incredible things or make incredible things, and I'm gonna release them on a slow cycle, and I'm gonna do them in a really different way than how everyone else is doing it."

[01:29:50] Andrew: Well, he had an uncanny understanding of various media and how best to interact with them in order to achieve greatest effect. One of the things my dad taught me were something he and Marshall, Eric and Marshall played back and forth together that they called theory of communication. And to find out what somebody's theory of communication was, you answered two questions. Who is their intended audience? And what is their intended effect? And this is actually a really great way, these are two very powerful questions that anybody should ask whenever they're writing something, making a piece of content whatsoever. Answer those two questions. Who are you trying to reach? And what are you trying to achieve? Because you can begin with that and you work back to to how you do it in order to be effective.

[01:31:02] Brian: I'm curious now since you're one of the only people in the world that's listened to my novella, what do you think my answer to those two questions was in writing that?

[01:31:16] Andrew: Oh, wow.

[01:31:20] Brian: Sorry. I put you on the spot.

[01:31:23] Andrew: No. I don't mind being on the spot a bit. Well, an interesting way to go about it... Because I think you answered that question in the form of novella rather than in the form of a commerce blog. Because the effect you wanted to achieve, the effect you would like to achieve, or the audience may be the same. But you're talking about spiritual matters more than commercial ones. And I think you realize that that was the vehicle for it. And I love it. I can't wait to see it actually in print.

[01:32:30] Brian: If I can find somebody to print it. Yes. As you've discovered, getting people to make things for you and it's like to get a book out into the world turns out to be an almost impossible task. That's why...

[01:32:43] Phillip: I think this might actually be the first time that you've mentioned the novella in public on this show. Right?

[01:32:49] Brian: Probably. Yeah. I think I mentioned that I did read it on Andrew's show at one point. But yes.

[01:32:55] Phillip: I think that was in the After Dark.

[01:32:56] Brian: Oh the After Dark. Yeah.

[01:32:57] Phillip: Might actually have to source that. I think there's probably another, there's a lineage of other public intellectuals. Obviously, no one with the cultural staying power of of Marshall McLuhan. I mean, obviously. But I think that there's other folks that I think have other cultural staying power, but they're not intellectuals. But then they're, like, weirdly fraudsters. {laughter} So I don't wanna riff on them, but there's people that also did the Tonight Show circuit or whatever. They all said they had all the same, like, media circuit, people in my in my mind, and they're like the Yuri Gellers of the world. People that were, like, weird public performers of some sort that were mentalists or whatever. And they're not in the same camp, but they had weird cultural zeitgeist that also use the media to great effect that I think also in a similar generational time frame. I think they also knew how to manipulate media in a same way. It's that Marshall McLuhan knew what he was doing and was doing it in a meta way. He understood the sense of his the importance of the medium was, I hate to become recursive here, but it was important in the context of getting the message out. Right? So I don't know that everybody else understood what they were doing. I think a lot of other people were just experiencing a moment of fame.

[01:34:41] Brian: Some of them had essential...

[01:34:42] Phillip: And so I think it's hard to contextualize whether he would do, like would he use all of the same mediums today? Probably. But I wonder what the... I think beyond this moment, I think the question is, you see what's happening with was it H&M is using AI models now in their photography? We're seeing a lot of... John Mearsheimer created a Mearsheimer.ai, I believe is what it was. It was like it's political science AI, and you can ask him any question now and get his perspective on public policy. And he's not a fan of tariffs if you go ask his AI. But these sorts of things, it's like people are sort of externalizing their or taking their corpus of knowledge, and they're externalizing it now and basically disembodying themselves to say... I don't know. That's a new form of communication too. Is that is that also a medium that we would have seen Marshall McLuhan employ to his effect too? That's a question.

[01:36:15] Brian: That's a good question.

[01:36:17] Andrew: It is a good question, which is kind of impossible to answer unless you asked McLuhan AI or whatever.

[01:36:25] Brian: Exactly.

[01:36:27] Andrew: Even then, you know, you gotta understand that there are advantages and disadvantages. And Marshall wasn't anti technology, really as much as people sometimes assumed he was. People used to say that he was the enemy of the book. I was like, what?

[01:37:03] Phillip: What are you talking about?

[01:37:05] Andrew: He is literally, literally, an author, an English professor. Books are what he loves, what he values most. But he wasn't one to dismiss technology for the sake of it. But he understood there were trade offs and advantages and disadvantages. He changed, for example, the way that he composed books. He moved to a more dialogic kind of method where and it's not because he couldn't write, but he understood that there's a very big difference between the written word and the spoken word. And they make for different content, essentially, different relatability. So it's one thing to write something, to write a speech, for example. It's another thing to speak more extemporaneously to have a conversation. It's much more engaging. One of the worst things, and I try to avoid it when I can, is to write a paper and then go to a conference and read it. It's one of the most boring things you can do. Second to that is putting it on slides and then reading the slides. It's terrible. And I've never really use slides. And my compromise, {laughter} and I'm not sure how it works, is I tend to write my inner dialogue, if that makes any kind of sense. So that the talk that I give, while written or typed is really more conversational because I'm not producing this very logical sequential argument and interior, you know, might not it make for pretty prose, but hopefully, it makes for a good conversation and experience with the audience. It was unconventional, I think is how somebody wrote me a note about how that speech went. Yeah. So Marshall actually moved to this method where he would get together. And as his earlier books were solo authored and then a lot of his later books were with coauthors. And that's not because he forgot how to write. He would get together with an author. They would have a discussion like this while on various subjects while the author takes notes, the co author, and then the co author went away and wrote it up. And that turns into a book. And that is more engaging to people's sensibilities. It was then anyway. So I think he would have... The other thing to say about Marshall's celebrity that's funny or interesting is that for a few years there, Marshall held quite a bright spotlight. He was all across all kinds of media, newspapers, television, magazines, even in film. And then almost as quickly as it came, it went. And for the 70s, well, he died New Year's Eve 1980. He basically sank back into obscurity at the University of Toronto, basically. And that suited him just fine. I think he had a very keen understanding that he'd accomplished what he needed to, and that it wasn't disappearing. I don't know if he necessarily saw YouTube coming, but he's all over, all over the place. And I think he he actually enjoyed being out of the spotlight so he could... Now people think that he peaked in the sixties, but he did some of his most impressive work in the seventies with my father. So yeah.

[01:42:16] Phillip: I think there's, if anything is, most impressive it's that the imprint beyond just the the name and the the legacy of what he said and the things that he's left behind is I mean. That is enough to be what an imprint on the culture and what an imprint on just not just media studies and media theory, but that continues to echo today. The people that have come after Marshall and Eric who have built on the ideas are people that are have impacted our modern moment. I think of in some of the research and some of the things I've looked into coming up to this interview, which we had to postpone so I could be here because I think things got moved around. So thank you. But for instance, Jean Baudrillard was in a interview and name checked your grandfather in an interview in 1990. Basically said Marshall saw a glimpse of the future but didn't take it far enough. He was like, know, saw the future, definitely was like the person who saw the future, but was like, didn't understand that there was going to be a full implosion of meaning. Saw the future, enamored with communication, but there would be a full implosion of meaning in the future. And, you know, the only reason that I think that that's like so profound is that while it's emblazoned in my brain because I showed my kids The Matrix last weekend and there's a simulacra and simulation is the first thing you see when the movie starts. It's the book that Neo picks up at the beginning of the movie. And it's like emblazoned in our culture. And the echoes of of Marshall McLuhan, if affected the people who have made profound impacts on the work that's come afterwards. We don't have Baudrillard without Marshall McLuhan. I think it's a pretty obvious lineage. And I just think you can tie back a lot of the profound work that we have, the work that's being done now. I think everyone in our modern circles are obviously people you're working with are profoundly impacted. You should be very proud of the work you're doing. I feel like we could talk for hours longer. Yeah, I'm not sure of a way to wrap this up. We need to do it again.

[01:45:25] Andrew: Well, that's very kind of you. Yeah. Always happy to do it again. Yeah. It's one of the reasons that Marshall and McLuhan work has such staying power. How it continues to remain relevant is and not everybody agrees, and that's fine. But Marshall said, "You don't like that idea? I got others." {laughter} But the main reason why that is the case, why a book like Understanding Media is so relevant is because Marshall studied media. He studied technology in general, in abstract. And he studied specific technologies, but he sought their general principles. As long as we continue to iterate and innovate, those principles will be valuable and the work will remain relevant.

[01:46:33] Brian: And I'll add to that. So you don't know this, Andrew. The way that we came across Marshall McLuhan is because our first employee who's related to my family through marriage, was a high school English teacher at the time. He now is in tech. And we were camping, and he was no longer working for us, but he's kept up with what we're doing. And he's like, "Man, the work that you guys are doing really reminds me of somebody." He was like, "There's this guy that my English professor in college handed me his book and said, "This is as punk rock as it gets. This is as fight system as it comes. And it's this guy named Marshall McLuhan. And, Brian, you need to go read his work understanding media, and have you ever heard the phrase The Medium is The Message?'" So this is how we came across Marshall McLuhan. He was introduced to me as the most, like, punk rock fight the system guy that there was. And I think that he would be really happy about that. That's his legacy, I think, is that he is the guy that says, if as long as we contemplate things, there's no inevitability. I think that's a legacy that's pretty cool.

[01:48:15] Andrew: Aw. Thank you. I mean, I'll take that as a punk rocker. He actually spoke truth to power in a very Canadian, conservative, mid century kind of way. And he got away with a lot of it just because it flew over people's heads, which is hilarious as well. It's, you know, you mean to say my whole fallacy is wrong. You know nothing of my work. Right? Like, Marshall actually spoke to the Bilderberg Meeting in 1969, which was crazy. And they didn't get him then, and they don't really get him now, but they understand that he was onto something. And I love that. I love how McLuhan people find McLuhan and find each other. Because this class that I teach on understanding media, I've taught since 2020. I'm now going through my third group of students, and they come from around the world and across industries. Students, teachers, advertising, musicians, artists, business people, marketers, PR, everybody, all sectors, farmer, but we all desperately want to understand what's happening to us. And my family's work doesn't have all the answers, but it has a few.

[01:50:02] Brian: That's a great place to leave it.

[01:50:04] Phillip: Let me take a moment to say Andrew McLuhan featured at the close of our brand new book, Lore. This is available from Future Commerce Press. You can get it at futurecommerce.com/lore. I'll give you a shot on the overhead. This is the full inclusion of his zine. It's called Dystopia and Oblivion: 59 Chains to the Mood, and it's presented with no modifications. We included it in its exact, in its exact unadulterated fashion, exactly as it was sent to me, so that it would be presented exactly as it was as God intended. It has its own lore. I've included a little footnote about it and how it came to me. And it's very, very special, and we loved having it. It's also our second time collaborating with Andrew. Our first time was Muses, and you can get both of them over at futurecommerce.com and click in the shop link up in the top. We really appreciate working with you. We love this collaboration, and would love to have you back again. Thank you so much for joining us.

[01:51:15] Andrew: Well, same. I love you guys. I love what you're up to.

[01:51:18] Phillip: You too.

[01:51:19] Andrew: How you do it in the world. So I can't wait to see what's next.

[01:51:23] Phillip: Same. Thank you, Andrew.

[01:51:25] Andrew: Anytime.

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