Marshall McLuhan Was Right About Technology

[00:00:00]When you're on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don't have a physical body. You're just an image on the air.

[00:00:06]When you don't have a physical body, you're a disincarnate being.

[00:00:10]You have a very different relation to the world around you.

[00:00:15]And this I think has been one of the [music] big effects of the electric age.

[00:00:19]It has deprived people really of their private identity.

[00:00:28]>> [singing] [music] [singing] [music and singing] >> All right. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. This is Dr. David Patrick Carey with Church of the Eternal Logos.

[00:00:50]And today, we're going to be talking about why technology is actually making you primitive.

[00:00:58]It's kind of ironic given the advancement of technology. You would think the idea is that we're sophisticated, civilized, modern people.

[00:01:08]But the goal of today's stream is actually to introduce concepts, theories, but also an individual which many people are not familiar with.

[00:01:20]Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian scholar of media. He developed the concept of the media ecology.

[00:01:30]Some people have highlighted that he's essentially the founder of the field of communications.

[00:01:35]And he has some very interesting articles which are theories and ideas, concepts that we're going to be going through today.

[00:01:44]We're going to be watching some of his old videos because this man, if you've never heard of him, was actually like a famous intellectual during the 1960s.

[00:01:56]Like you could imagine turning on the television set um and there'd be an interview with scholar Marshall McLuhan. And he was kind of presented as a totally incomprehensible individual. You can't understand what he's saying, he speaks over your head.

[00:02:13]But we're going to break it down. You're going to be able to understand what Marshall McLuhan's main theories were and why it's actually really advantageous for you to put it in your intellectual tool belt so that you can better analyze and see the impact that technology is having on you and I. Um and I brought this up during my speech in Montana. I mentioned Marshall McLuhan very briefly and his theories about hot and cool media, which we'll get into.

[00:02:44]And arguing that every medium essentially shapes and creates the contours of human consciousness in every era. He's the first person to really look at history itself and read it from the perspective of what mediums what ways in which media is being and information is being transmitted in a particular civilization, oral, manuscript, book writing, book printing.

[00:03:13]We're going to be getting into that because all these fascinating insights that you would never think about actually come to the forefront when you read Marshall McLuhan.

[00:03:23]Um I have a couple books. Um I have a PDF version that we'll be looking at here regarding his famous phrase the medium is the message.

[00:03:33]Meaning again, it's not about whether on if you're watching television, whether you're watching a nature documentary or you're watching a slasher film, it doesn't matter the content.

[00:03:45]His argument is despite the content of any medium, radio, print culture, writing, um television, pictures, films. It doesn't matter the media or doesn't matter the content of the medium. It's that the medium itself shapes your sensory ratios.

[00:04:04]The actual senses in which you use to come to knowledge of the world. That's one of the most fascinating things. So, he argued that we're moving into what he called the global village. Now, I'll explain all this stuff later.

[00:04:19]But, essentially that the sensory ratios through the evolution of media, and this is where he gets into the Gutenberg Galaxy. This book in particular out of all his books is really focusing on the trajectory of intellectual history, and it's fascinating stuff. And when you read him, it's almost psychedelic because it's not the typical linear scholastic way that you would under think you would understand someone to present an idea. And there's so much onus on the reader when you read his stuff because Marshall McLuhan was actually a professor of English.

[00:04:55]He was a literary scholar. Now, mind you, his whole uh professional career ends up being a critique of print culture per se in the role of the book.

[00:05:05]But, he has read everything. We're talking about philosophers. We're talking about, you know, uh fiction, whether it be from Shakespeare to uh Russian and French poetry, everything. The guy has read everything, and he just makes continually references when you read his stuff. So, it's it's a bit of a whirlwind when you read his stuff, but it's fascinating. I want to even read a little bit sections to you guys today just to get a a vibe for Marshall McLuhan. I mean, some of the stuff that he talks about, for example, just so you get a feel for it, is he he delineates between oral or tribal culture, uh literate culture, printed culture, and then the electric culture and now the digital age. So, he argues that tribal man, oral man, pre-literate man, basically was dominated by his auditory senses.

[00:06:06]He listened to the world in a way, but he also he he looked at the world, which is very different from reading.

[00:06:13]And he makes this point in this delineation that reading is not seeing.

[00:06:18]And that when you for example, when you read his stuff, he was a traditional Roman Catholic Canadian scholar. And he kind of has a soft spot for the medieval era. Now, us Orthodox, the Byzantine Empire, this is all during the medieval period and he argues, at least makes reference, that he believed the medieval era in particular had an equilibrium between oral culture and literate culture. And that it was still driven because of the history of early Christianity, it was still driven by an oral culture.

[00:06:53]But once the Gutenberg printing press, you know, Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press comes out, it totally devastates the medieval worldview, which is a manuscript oriented culture. When you read a manuscript, you actually look at a manuscript. You don't read it like you read a text because it's handwritten, it's illuminated, has pictures and colors, and it's very individualistic. The hand of the maker is present in a manuscript. And when you once you get to the printing press and you get typesetting, that every E is the same E, every T is the same T, he argues, and I think this is a profundity that most people never even discuss, is that it actually shaped the predispositions of modernity. Meaning individual, we talked about what is modernity?

[00:07:43]Individualism, rationalism, scientism, technological progress, and democracy.

[00:07:47]Well, here's the thing that he argues.

[00:07:50]None of that stuff would have been possible as a paradigmatic shift without the printing press.

[00:07:55]Because it's print culture.

[00:07:58]He argues that it's linear focused. It's more logically oriented. Um and that print culture established the idea of the individual as a sort of printed letter present in the printing press. That the same thing can be used ad infinitum, which sets the precedent for an idea of democracy. The individual, the public. Right? That there's a mass group of things and that printing culture and reading in specific um [snorts] begins to delineate and decipher things and group things into categories and separates.

[00:08:35]Which is exactly what we're talking about with the idea of the the public. What Who's the public? You wouldn't hear this in a medieval society. You wouldn't even hear this in you know, ancient Rome or something because there's so many different groups, so many different ethnic identities, different languages being spoken. There wasn't this general idea of an abstract public. This all comes as a consequence due to print culture. And so these there's these fascinating insights. For example, he argues that words construct conceptual walls. And that Western civilization as he saw it at the end of the 20th century was essentially the consequence of print culture. What we would consider modernity. But he would say before you get modernity, you get printing press.

[00:09:23]And that the medium in which we engage in information actually changes our ratios, our sensory ratios of how we perceive reality.

[00:09:33]And so in light of all that, he believed through the electronic sphere, the electronic world as he called it, there was an extension of the nervous system of man.

[00:09:46]And so a basic tenant, you know, the medium is the message is a famous phrase that he coined, but another one is that all technology is an extension of man in some way.

[00:09:56]For example, every technology extends a physical attribute or capability of man and then atrophies something else.

[00:10:07]For example, the wheel is an extension of the human foot.

[00:10:12]But once we create the wheel, people then no longer have to walk as much. So there's a loss or or less walking per se. You walk less. You ride in a car or a buggy or something like that. There's new ways of transportation.

[00:10:27]Writing is an extension of human memory.

[00:10:30]Remember the famous conversation that Plato recalled with Socrates as Socrates was against Plato writing, you know, all his philosophical works, his dialectical back and forth. Why? Cuz Socrates said it was going to atrophy your brain. You weren't going to be able to memorize all the all the traditions, all the stories, all the songs that these were embedded in the human memory and that people, and this is a fact even with modern research. I'm going to show you some articles in today's stream, that people are literally losing their memory. And this is something that is happening to you and me and everyone right now. We're engaging in a digital black mirror.

[00:11:10]And just by the engagement of these technologies and realizing that they are truly extensions of ourselves, we lose a piece of ourselves in it. And so he talked about how the entire electronic world is an extension of the human nervous system and that as we continue to move forward, he says this is a re uh really a reintegration of tribal man sensory ratios. The problem is he talked about how the medieval period, so medieval Christianity in particular, of which something he was very fond of, is this equilibrium between oral culture and literate culture. But this is pre-printing press. And he argued that it was a perfect equilibrium because it still validated participation.

[00:11:53]Well, ala Orthodox theology, Eastern Orthodoxy, one of the delineations between East and West is this emphasis on participation over and over again, right? That theosis is an ongoing participation with God through the uncreated energies in our own personal lives.

[00:12:11]And he even marks in this book, I have it highlighted, not that I'll read much to you guys cuz I know you guys get bored with that, but he even argues that uh literate versus oral culture was one of the delineations between Christendom East and West, arguing that um literate culture was more dominant in the West, in the Latin West, than the more traditional oral culture of the East. And this was part of the underlying tensions between Rome and Constantinople, if you will.

[00:12:43]So, he believed that it was a participatory medieval element, but tribal man, even before that, didn't have some of the conceptual categories that literate man. This is why it was in equilibrium. Well, he argued that the electric age that we're all in right now is actually shifting us back towards the sensory ratios of a tribal man. That's why his book's called The Global Village.

[00:13:08]The Global Village because what we're moving back towards is a is a total involvement with everyone, that the distances between places have dissolved.

[00:13:20]And so therefore we engage in information acquisition like we're in a village filled with people that we actually know, which we don't.

[00:13:29]Ala the obsession with Hollywood celebrities and gossip culture or even infighting, even debate culture online.

[00:13:36]Cuz he said tribal culture is going to involve more tribal delineations between groups. It's not going to be this multicultural utopia.

[00:13:45]But because of that, our dominant sensory ratio is going to go back towards the auditory.

[00:13:51]And that the reason why modern man would be auditorily dominated is because he presents and believes himself to be the center of the world because when you have your auditory sense as your dominant sense, you're always at the center of your information acquisition.

[00:14:08]Meaning the sound waves around you are always operating in a way in which you're the center. Very different from a visual culture where there's a separation between you and object. The subject and object distinction is very obvious in a visual dominated culture.

[00:14:25]And so, he argued that the morality, which you can see with the scarification, tattooing, piercing, uh let's say you know, I like EDM music.

[00:14:35]EDM music is a very shamanic, you know, shamanistic, uh tribal form of drumming that all this stuff would become more and more popular as we move further into the information age. Now, he didn't get to see the the internet age. Although he predicted it. That's one of the interesting things about Marshall McLuhan is how much he actually predicted of the modern world, including smartphones. There's famous video from like the early 1960s in which he's talking about having a a phone in which you'll be able to request anything and it'll be brought to you.

[00:15:09]Ala DoorDash. Ala Amazon Prime. Ala the world that we live in now.

[00:15:16]But this he also saw was going to be a world of more and more conflict because there is no example in human history in which groups come together, different ethnicities, languages, and religions, and somehow live in harmony.

[00:15:30]Which is the sort of mythos of modernity regarding multiculturalism.

[00:15:36]So, he he also highlighted that the difference between like a medieval seeing culture, one that looks, not reads, but looks at nature, um is a more [clears throat] heart-oriented culture.

[00:15:51]Whereas a culture that's based on reading is a more head-oriented culture, which is why it's more logical, why it actually loses more religious traditionalism, why it tends to be more secular, more system-oriented, more mechanical. All of these things are rooted in the ways in which we acquire information.

[00:16:09]And so he makes the interesting argument that without the printing press, Protestantism is not possible.

[00:16:16]So most people, if you listen to some scholars, they'll say, "Oh, well, Protestantism because, you know, they believed in, you know, their independent reading of scripture and moving away from the Catholic Church, that they catalyzed the printing press." McLuhan makes the opposite argument. He says without the printing press, which occurs roughly what, 40 to 50 years before the Protestant Reformation, that it's the printing press and the fact that books become the new mass commodity, right?

[00:16:50]For the first time, books are produced, edited, manufactured, sold, and then people requested sequels. And that the book, by the end of the 15th century and moving into the 16th century, 1517 being the Protestant Reformation, the book, indicative of the print age, becomes the model in which every commodity is sold, which is the world we live in now with mass consumerism.

[00:17:17]And that so that history, and this is one of the reasons why he believed Christianity was really the Christians were the only ones that could fully understand his theories because he argued it's really an unfolding of the word throughout history. That's what he thought he was witnessing or or recognizing through his theories is that um from the logos, from the second person, from Jesus Christ speaking the world into existence, there has been a transformation of the word. And every time the word or information, and let's put word as a lower w, so we're not talking about the logos, he does not change. Let's talk about the the diminutive form of the word in which that we participate in.

[00:18:01]That is evolving throughout historical time and changing human consciousness and our species.

[00:18:09]So right now in 2026 in America, we have the lowest math scores.

[00:18:15]We have this with this even surprised me. Remember I did a stream with FDA what was it a few years ago on people who don't have internal monologues?

[00:18:25]I found an article today in prep for today's stream that is arguing that almost 70% of Americans don't have internal monologues.

[00:18:35]Now, this is according to some other study they cited in the in the article, but it claimed that only 30 to 50% of people have a continuous internal monologue in their head.

[00:18:47]Shocking.

[00:18:49]Shocking. For me, I constantly have an internal monologue.

[00:18:53]But we're seeing drop in IQ scores for the first time. We're seeing the iPad generation have no social skills whatsoever.

[00:19:03]We're seeing um literacy rates drop at precipitous levels generation after generation. And so in in in very interesting ways, the world in which Marshall McLuhan was sort of forecasted or prophesied, we are now living in.

[00:19:21]And I would say we're not moving into some sweet spot of a medieval culture cuz one of the things he argued is that the television as a cool media, we'll get into hot cool media, as a cool media is more like a manuscript. You look at a television. You don't read a television.

[00:19:35]You don't focus and and scan your eyes and guess the next word and put in logical sequence a series of thoughts and orders. You look at a television.

[00:19:44]And just like you would look at a manuscript, and he thought this would sort of change our sensory ratios to bring us hopefully back to some equilibrium. However, what I would argue is that we're moving past the medieval and going totally archaic.

[00:19:58]So, with the postmodern turn, and that's what postmodernity is really reacting to in many ways is print culture. I mean, what what was the dominant hermeneutic of postmodernism is that there's no authority behind the text. There's no objective meaning in the text.

[00:20:14]Uh that's really a response against what he considered print culture because in print culture, where Protestantism emerges out of, you get personal interpretations, you get an objective text that is authoritative in itself.

[00:20:28]The literal meaning is the meaning.

[00:20:30]Individualism um is forecasted by the typesetting of the printing press. Personal interpretation is elevated over church authority. There's a standardized set of Bibles now.

[00:20:43]And that literacy becomes the way in which you commune and interact with the community. Because before in a in a medieval or a premodern era, there's many people who are nonliterate, they still participated in the community in a different way than which Protestantism demands a sort of literacy.

[00:21:01]Right? You must be literate. You must read the Bible. It's a new formation of man, which develops this idea of his private conscience.

[00:21:09]And so, authority totally shifts from the church to the individual in that printing era.

[00:21:16]And maybe that's why Protestantism is actually falling apart right now. It because we are transitioning to essentially a primitive state. Man really is being reoriented towards a much more primitive and that's why we see the rise of Nordic and Germanic paganism, trad Catholicism, and also Orthodoxy. I would say trad Catholicism and Orthodoxy is an attempt to reach back for what McLuhan highlighted as the perfect equilibrium between oral, traditional, ritual, liturgical culture, symbolic culture, and literate, more philosophical, more logical, more even linearly um approached culture, put together, brought together in manuscripts in the writings of of the medieval period. But, the printing press totally destroys oral culture. That's his argument. Is that the beginning of the printing press is the end of oral culture. And what we're moving back towards really is totally archaic. As I said, scarification, tattoos, piercings, polyamorous sexual orientations, relativistic morality.

[00:22:23]I mean, people are getting into wild transgenderism.

[00:22:27]This is not medieval. This is This is archaic. This is totally primitive. And I think if Marshall McLuhan lived he would see what has become of everything and I think he would agree that this isn't about a returning to the medieval period. This is a return back to the archaic.

[00:22:46]>> That the future of education requires that we pay much attention to the media we're employing as forms of study.

[00:22:55]Not necessarily, you know, not necessarily the hardware of merely the hardware skill in the use of cameras and of microphones, but awareness of the nature of the operation.

[00:23:09]>> When you said that >> For example, there is research done recently um regarding schools that provide iPads or electronic devices for students versus some of these private schools that there is no electronics allowed during the school day.

[00:23:26]Everything's written, everything's note taking, and they use physical books. And they found that the critical reasoning skills, attention spans, and comprehension of the students that did not use any digital technologies was higher than those that used iPads or computers or whatever type of digital medium that they wanted to educate the students through. So, very interesting finding that relates to what he's saying in 1977.

[00:23:55]>> The television uses the eyes and ear.

[00:23:58]What do you mean by that?

[00:23:59]>> It is a phrase of Tony Schwartz in a a very interesting book called The Responsive Chord.

[00:24:05]Uh what he means literally is that the image is constituted by a millions of these resonating particles.

[00:24:14]Uh you have no There are no pictures on television. There are no There are no snapshots. There's no no shutter.

[00:24:20]There's no camera.

[00:24:22]There is a an an outpouring of these small bits of information in patterns that are the entirely uh active and dynamic.

[00:24:34]So, they resonate.

[00:24:35]So, he was really saying that the television image is primarily not a visual, but resonating form of experience.

[00:24:44]>> This uh [snorts] with this with the glasses. Not behind you. Sorry. I had to go.

[00:24:48]No, all right. I'm sorry. You go ahead then. Too Too late.

[00:24:51]>> Professor McLuhan, is television the ultimate medium or is there worse to come?

[00:24:56]>> The You've heard of the hologram.

[00:24:59]>> Mhm.

[00:25:01]The hologram goes completely around.

[00:25:02]Your television only goes a little bit around you.

[00:25:05]The hologram is 360°.

[00:25:08]Um but it's been anticipated by these the rock music in which you have to become just enclosed in a sound bubble.

[00:25:20]Uh the hologram does for TV what rock does for auditory entertainment.

[00:25:28]But um the hologram is is technically here.

[00:25:34]>> Yes, in the front row.

[00:25:35]>> In the particular area you spoke about, us as going out rather for our privacy and coming home for the social aspect.

[00:25:43]I'd like to hear you comment on that in relation to electronic man's new thirst for meditation, contemplation, mystical experience.

[00:25:54]>> Well, I've asked me and asked about the relation of this inside outside on the life of meditation.

[00:26:02]Well, as you know, the transcendental meditation has become exceedingly popular.

[00:26:07]Um all forms of um mystic meditation have become very popular in our television age.

[00:26:15]Uh the East we have gone very far to the East since television.

[00:26:22]Um just as an exercise in awareness and so on, meditation has come in very big since television.

[00:26:31]>> So, one of the things to give context, McLuhan talks about, I don't I can't remember which book it's in or if it was an interview I watched, how he believed that television altered the interior state of Western man to be something more indicative of the reflective disposition of the Oriental man, that Occidental man has become very much like Oriental man through the television.

[00:26:59]And that they're more reflective about feelings or emotions.

[00:27:04]And for him, he believes that without the television, there would be no counterculture. So, whether you take think about the sexual revolution, the psychedelic revolution, he believed it was the changing of the interior state of man that gave the precondition for the counterculture where Eastern mysticism and yoga and tantric practices, psychedelic drugs, shamanism, all this stuff flooded into the Western world. He said it's it's because the interior state of man had already been altered to something very much that's more reminiscent to the Oriental due to the electric environment we exist.

[00:27:41]>> Um I'm not I'm not sure that that is a good or bad at all. It just has happened.

[00:27:48]And um do you think of it as a a very significant event in >> I think of it as very significant. Yes, it seems to me almost like a nostalgia for a return to that private self without going outdoors to find it.

[00:28:03]>> Mhm.

[00:28:03]>> Return to an inner union with God, with yourself, which electronic man seems to need and is looking for in this way.

[00:28:12]>> Jane Austen of all people has quite a big comment on that inside outside.

[00:28:17]She said that people go outside to be alone just to prove their inner resources.

[00:28:24]That they don't need people.

[00:28:26]We can make it alone.

[00:28:29]And that the romantic movement was based upon this psychic development.

[00:28:34]Jane Austen has quite a bit to say about that of all people. I was amazed to come across it in her work a few months ago.

[00:28:41]But there there's another American writer, um Hawthorne, who regarded this American habit of going outside to be alone as an undermining of democracy. He said, "This is sheer aristocracy.

[00:28:56]This is putting on the aristocratic thing, and it is going to undermine our whole democracy."

[00:29:02]So, Hawthorne regarded it with great alarm.

[00:29:05]The moralist, by the way, is always a a person who never studies effects so much as studies the content of situations.

[00:29:13]The studies the figure and not the ground.

[00:29:16]Uh this, I think, is a great concern to advertisers who are here tonight in some numbers. Advertisers tend to study figure and not the ground.

[00:29:25]They stand to tend to count noses rather than to estimate the pressures under the noses.

[00:29:31]The uh form of noses.

[00:29:35]Do we have an advertiser who would like to >> And then we'll flip to part three of this same Q&A.

[00:29:43]>> bit of that advertising and it's changed changed justly the course of the conversation slightly, and it's a serious question, Professor.

[00:29:50]>> And just want to remind everyone, smash that like, guys. Really appreciate you all being here. Major thank you to everyone who supported. God bless you all. Um major thank you over on donor chat to Paris Alexandrew throws in $5.

[00:30:06]Says, "If you believe in Sola Scriptura, then you must venerate Gutenberg."

[00:30:11]>> [laughter] >> I love that. Thank you so much, Paris.

[00:30:14]And Meridoc Brandybuck throws in 10 bucks over on Streamlabs and says, "Me and the gents totally agree." Well, thank you very much, Meridoc Brandybuck.

[00:30:27]Interesting name.

[00:30:28]Uh thank you very much for the support.

[00:30:30]Do appreciate it.

[00:30:33]And I saw Austin DeTullio threw in another five. Austin, thank you so much, brother, along with Frank O. Lopez.

[00:30:41]And we got four minutes left on the the last goal. So, thank you so much, Franco Lopez. God bless you.

[00:30:49]>> If the world had not discovered your great thinking and your writing, how would you go about creating a demand for it? What would be your advertising campaign? What would be the the gist of it? And what section of the media would you use?

[00:31:02]>> I I put people on.

[00:31:05]I put them on. Uh putting people on means teasing them, challenging them, upsetting them, befuddling them. Any comic any comic puts on his audience by um hurting them.

[00:31:21]You can't name a comic who doesn't put on his public by hurting them.

[00:31:26]The technique of putting people on in my case consists simply in pointing to the things they have ignored, the things that concern them very nearly, but uh have been totally pushed aside as insignificant. Um put on A put on is a is a a sort of situation that I study a good deal.

[00:31:49]>> Can advertisers use it to effect?

[00:31:51]>> Uh advertising is to a large degree put on, yes, and has There has to be a certain comic element in the good advertising.

[00:32:00]Comic is always the registration of a grievance.

[00:32:04]You The funny man is the man with a grievance, whether it's W.C. Fields or Rabelais.

[00:32:12]>> What's What's the grievance of an advertiser? What kind of grievance would it be? Obviously, it could vary, but >> The grievance, of course, is you're not buying my product.

[00:32:22]And uh >> It's as plain as that.

[00:32:26]>> Very simple.

[00:32:27]>> See the new light. Yes, in the glass of the stand.

[00:32:30]>> Does the fact that Professor Bronowski's book, The Ascent of Man, the fact that it was on the best seller list in America us month after month, is that a victory for advertising and marketing, or is that a victory for Professor Bronowski's ideals and the message he was trying to get across?

[00:32:44]>> I didn't see the his shows.

[00:32:46]And of course The Ascent of Man is a is a popular cliche.

[00:32:52]It also very nostalgic since that is not necessarily the way things are going.

[00:32:59]But No, I I I I know that the best seller is a mysterious thing that is uh mainly created. It's not a spontaneous thing.

[00:33:11]Publishers have methods for creating best sellers at any time they have to.

[00:33:15]And it means investing a good deal of money in a book. Now, his program had many millions of dollars invested in it quite apart from the book.

[00:33:24]>> Listen to him predict the internet in 1966.

[00:33:33]>> Because if you suddenly if you've noticed the mood of North America has changed very drastically. Things like the safety car couldn't have happened 10 years ago.

[00:33:40]>> Why is that?

[00:33:41]>> Well, it's because people have suddenly become obsessed with consequences of things. They used to be obsessed with mere products and packages and launching these things out into markets and into the public. Now they've suddenly become concerned about what happens when these things go out on the highway.

[00:34:00]What happens when this kind of program gets on the air? What happen They want safety air, safety cigarette, safety cars, and safety programming.

[00:34:10]This need for safety is a sudden awareness that things have effects.

[00:34:15]Now, my writing has for years been concerned with the effects of things, not their impact, but their consequences after impact.

[00:34:26]TV, unlike the fantasy world, the escape world of the movies, TV creates enormously serious and uh realistic-minded sort of person.

[00:34:37]Well, almost oriental in his inward uh meditativeness.

[00:34:42]I think that >> This is the teenager of today.

[00:34:44]>> No, see he's becoming almost oriental in his inwardness.

[00:34:47]>> He's so thoughtful and serious.

[00:34:49]>> No, grim.

[00:34:51]Uh whereas the uh the movie generations uh of the '20s and '30s were uh a coon-coated bunch of superficial types, had a good time, and uh went to college but not for knowledge and that sort of thing.

[00:35:04]Uh all has changed.

[00:35:07]>> And changed because of television, because >> Very much uh television gave the old electric circuitry uh that is already here, gave it a huge extra push in this direction of involvement and inwardness.

[00:35:20]You see the circuit uh it doesn't just simply push things out for inspection, it pushes you in to the circuit. It involves you.

[00:35:29]When you put a new medium in >> No, Scott, you're absolutely right. So, this stream really connects with the conversation we had with the second industrial revolution with Nikola Tesla talking about the electric revolution and what he was a part of in the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries and how he set the stage for very you know, in in many ways Tesla created the technology for the electric world we live in.

[00:35:56]McLuhan living in that world post Tesla is describing the effect of digital electronic technologies on our lives.

[00:36:05]And we did the last live stream I did before I left for Montanica was the MK Ultra stream, which is about how they manipulate and control the mind itself, of which we got into electrodes with Dr. Jose Delgado and some of his research in the 1950s, uh Ewen Cameron, the Canadian doctor in Canada who figured out psychic driving and how to break the psyche of people.

[00:36:32]So, the CIA was absolutely interested in McLuhan's theories. Not that McLuhan was working with the CIA.

[00:36:40]Um, in fact, he was a traditional Catholic even though he was culturally in the 1960s kind of associated with the counterculture because the counterculture loved his work so much, but his work wasn't value-laden. It was quantitative. It was not qualitative.

[00:36:55]So, he didn't say if it was bad or good.

[00:36:57]He just gave a quantitative analysis of what he saw was happening. And the counterculture, the hippies loved it because for them the archaic revival returning back to primitive man, um, breaking down the print culture uh construct of Christendom and literate man, all of it was celebrated.

[00:37:17]Now, as I told you privately, like the quote that I used at the opening of my book Return to Babylon, he viewed the electric age and what it was bringing in as a form of Antichrist. It was a false mystical body.

[00:37:29]So, you know, keep that in mind when you are listening to him. He's not providing qualitative, although privately we have found things after he died.

[00:37:41]But, he's talking about the quantitative effects of these new mediums. And it I don't know. It's just It's just fascinating. I don't know if you guys find him as fascinating as I do, but it it's fantastic.

[00:37:55]And it truly is part of this larger general theme as Scott mentioned. The CIA read and listened everything this guy said. Absolutely because they are interested in how these technologies can be utilized to manipulate us, which he said, I mean, just like uh literate man being more susceptible to propaganda because often you have to read propaganda.

[00:38:16]Right? Oral tribal man is more manipulable through his emotions, getting him to act cuz he has less patience. He has less self-control.

[00:38:26]He's more participatory, all these different things. He's He's uh a participant, not an observer. A literate man, especially printed man, can separate himself. So, it it's very interesting when you start looking at these media theories and and wonder how it is that the intelligence agencies are utilizing to manipulate all the populations around the world in various ways.

[00:38:48]Every nation is and every intelligence agency is very much interested in these types of things.

[00:38:56]>> to play in a in a given population, all their sensory life shifts a bit.

[00:39:01]Sometimes shifts a lot. This changes their outlook, their attitudes, changes their feelings about studies, about school, about politics. Since TV uh both Canadian and British and American politics have cooled off almost to the point of rigor mortis, our politics require uh much more hotting up than the TV medium will give them.

[00:39:22]A TV is ideal, as you see, when you've got two experts like ourselves discussing TV. The This is good TV because there's a process going on of mutual uh challenge, discovery, and uh processing.

[00:39:35]Now, TV is good for that, and same with ads. Uh if the audience can become involved in the actual process of making the ad, then it's happy. It's like the old quiz shows.

[00:39:50]They were great TV because it gave the audience a role, something to do.

[00:39:54]They were horrified when they discovered they'd really been left out all the time cuz the shows are rigged.

[00:39:59]Now, they This is a horrible uh misunderstanding of TV on the part of the uh programmers.

[00:40:05]But, in the same way, most advertisers do not understand TV medium. Do you know that uh most people read ads about things they already own?

[00:40:13]They don't read things to buy them, but to feel reassured that they have already bought the right thing. In other words, they get huge information satisfaction from ads far more than they do from the product itself. This they uh the center of where where advertising is heading is quite simply into a world where the ad will become a substitute for the product. And all the satisfactions will be derived informationally from the ad, and the product will be a merely a number in some file somewhere. Instead of going out and buying a packaged book uh of which there have been 5,000 copies printed, you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs, your problems, and say, "I'm working now on the history of Egyptian arithmetic. I know a bit of Sanskrit. I I am I'm qualified in German, and I am a good mathematician." They said, "It'll be right over." And they at once Xerox with the help of computers in the libraries of the world all the latest material just for you personally, not as something to be put out on on the bookshelf.

[00:41:12]They send you the package as a direct personal service. This is where we're heading under electronic information conditions. Products, increasingly, are becoming services.

[00:41:21]>> What kind of a world would you rather live in?

[00:41:23]Is there Is there a period in the past or a possible period in the future you'd rather be in?

[00:41:27]>> I I I'd rather be in any period at all as long as people are going to leave it alone for a while. Let's let go. Just leave it now.

[00:41:35]>> But they're not going to, are they?

[00:41:36]>> No.

[00:41:37]So, the only alternative is to understand everything that's going on, and then counter and neutralize it as much as possible, turn off as many buttons as you can, and and uh frustrate them as much as you can. I I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what's happening.

[00:41:56]Because I I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Now, uh this many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favor of it. Uh the exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly to be something I'm resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button.

[00:42:19]>> So, let that be a message for all of us in regards to how the technology is not only affecting us, but changing us. And as regards to the global village theory of Marshall McLuhan, the electric age is returning us back to a primitive tribal sensory ratio. We are truly returning back to an archaic form. Now, as I said, he speculated this was may potentially leading toward a medieval resurgence, but I argue, especially since the 21st century, with when we look at culture at large with transgenderism and homosexuality and scarification, tattoos, piercings, polyamorous relationships, really what we're seeing is a drive past the medieval era straight to the archaic. And in that sense, I it's an idea I actually share with Terence McKenna. He talks about the archaic revival.

[00:43:16]And in many ways, that is exactly what I'm seeing occur right now.