Episode 257: Aural Fixation

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] We do what we do-esay. Entiendes, Mendez? Look, wait a minute! I have brains and you have... Anybody can have a brain? You're a very bad man! I'm a very good man, just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:17] Dave, Steven Pinker has gone into the NFT business and he will be selling tokens of his ideas. Now, look, I know that we may go on to say that this is the douchiest reductio ad absurdum

[00:01:34] of neoliberal technocrat ideas we've ever heard, but over under on when you and I set up an NFT for VBW dick jokes. Just out of sheer principle now, I can never do it. So, okay, so I'm looking at the link where this announcement was made.

[00:01:58] And my first thought was like, did Steve Pinker get hacked and somebody is just putting out this press release? And it says though, other thought leaders who have confirmed they will be releasing digital collectibles of their most popular ideas and causes include

[00:02:16] racial justice icon Dr. Cornel West, animal rights activist Peter Singer, and Shashi Tarur, India's leading voice on colonialism and human rights. Now, Peter Singer, I'm like, fine, fuck it. If he's just like, you know, he's run the numbers.

[00:02:32] Give him a full pass on this as long as he privately thinks it's stupid. Cornel West who I like, but like he will do like it doesn't fully surprise me. This is like getting an offer to roll on the Matrix in the Matrix movies.

[00:02:48] But what is this is just the problem with NFTs. It's like, what are you buying? So here's where you actually are buying something, but it's still like it doesn't make it better. So he's going to release digital collectibles of his famous idea.

[00:03:02] This was Steven Pinker's famous idea that free speech is fundamental. Like, first of all, just that like the idea that that's his idea. But these collectibles will guarantee recurrent access to intimate group video calls with Pinker.

[00:03:18] Like do they like jerk off on camera to intimate group video calls with Pinker to discuss this topic for the next several years. Can you imagine paying? So there's two tiers that'll be available.

[00:03:32] The gold collectible, which is unique, grants the buyer the right to co-host the calls with Pinker and will be priced at $50,000. The standard collectibles, which are limited to 30 items, grant the buyers the right to access those video calls and ask questions to Pinker at the end.

[00:03:48] That's what you get for a point to Ethereum or $300. You get to like scramble in a couple of questions at the end if his co-host is taking questions. This is, uh, our listeners know I'm a fan of capitalism.

[00:04:05] You know, I think it's brought us some like real cool shit. This is not one of them. This is like enough to make me a Marxist. You know, normally you would just be, the way that you could get a question answered

[00:04:19] is by like rushing up to that microphone they set up in the like aisle of the auditorium and hoping that you get there soon. Now you got to pay like thousands of dollars to hear like... Yeah, or like 2.4 Ethereum. I have some Ethereum actually. No, I don't know.

[00:04:41] You know, I don't know what's going on here. Is it just that throwing enough money? I guess. I guess what was maybe in your question at the beginning was that if enough money was thrown at you, you would totally be doing NFTs.

[00:04:54] Like, I don't think I could do this even for like an astronomically high amount of money. Like I couldn't do this. And you know, it's also funny that it's free speech. Quote unquote free speech. Yeah, right. You can trade these as with any token.

[00:05:10] You're like, I have a Pinker, do you have a West? Like I'll trade you a Pinker for a West. And then just the way it's described, as more thought leaders from different backgrounds and ideologies start producing collectibles of their ideas, a new asset class could be born. Ideas.

[00:05:27] Pinker is in fact part of a new wave of some of the world's most influential thinkers and activists, transforming their ideas into digital assets. What does that even mean? I can see like, I'm not committed to capitalism like you are,

[00:05:41] but holy shit, how are you supposed to go back to your Milton Friedman after this? Right. Like isn't releasing an e-book already transforming your idea into a digital asset? Do you really need it to be encrypted? I guess it's just another way of here.

[00:05:58] I'm going to throw like an exclusive salon for wealthy people and you can be a part of it. Look, I respect Steve Pinker as much as he's given me reasons to dislike him. But this is, I think, honestly embarrassing. And kind of shameful. Like I really think.

[00:06:22] I mean, look, we have Patreon. It's not like we're anti-money. It's not like we don't give people access to some of our content behind some sort of paywall. But this just feels like, if you just literally turned it into $50,000 and you, it's like a charity auction.

[00:06:40] Like when you get to date, go on a date with Steve Pinker, who can bid the highest. Right, it's like Arrested Development. Five thousand dollars! Oh, buster! For $25,000 you can get Pizarro and me doing Liza Minnelli impressions. You could trade a hundred Pizarro's for one Pinker.

[00:07:13] Alright, let's actually, if we're going to try to be self-reflective on this. Like is that true? Because we do our Ask Us Anythings, you know. What's the difference between that and this? The price? The price, and then also that we don't talk about it like this.

[00:07:30] Yeah, we would never say something like, the asset is backed by recurrent real-world access to the figure leading and embodying the idea of an idea or leader grow in popularity. One should expect people will want to be, so it's like an investment, you know.

[00:07:48] Yeah, okay, here's what turns me off about it. One is that there is, like the whole point of blockchain is to introduce scarcity. And no matter how many people, look I would love it if a million people paid

[00:08:04] five bucks per episode and they got all of our content. This is introducing a sort of like, only eight people get access to my coolest ideas. And so it feels a little different for that reason.

[00:08:21] Two, as much as in principle like we are both doing things for money, there is something about the amount of money that is, it just seems like really like I'm telling you that you can't have access to me unless you're pretty wealthy, like essentially.

[00:08:35] And then third, which is less rational on my part, but it's just a bunch of crypto bullshit. Yeah. Like hasn't there been enough exposure of NFTs like being not worth it? Like they're not, there's nothing there.

[00:08:51] It's also just so banal and like the first guy to do it, his idea was China is winning the war against the US. Cornel West, again, like him, his first idea to be transformed into a collectible will be racism in America must die for democracy to live.

[00:09:12] I mean, these are cliches. The fact that it's an idea is almost like a red herring. It's really just access. What does it even mean that the ideas are? An asset class. Yeah. Like wasn't that the idea? Didn't you just print it?

[00:09:27] Like what did you just give away what the idea was? Right. Well, in the same way, like, well, I can look at that photo on like Google images, why do I need to purchase the NFT? No, no, no. But this has a token. Yeah.

[00:09:44] In any case, we will sell our souls too, but we will, I think, do it in a more aesthetically tasteful way. Right. We're artists. We are. We're totally artists. All right. Speaking of, I think like this topic, the opening segment topic and the main topic are all connected.

[00:10:06] They are. I was thinking the same thing. Yeah. So in the second segment, we're going to be talking about Marshall McLuhan, specifically a Playboy interview that he did. You believe that like that's like remember when Playboy was just like, had these like incredibly in-depth interviews with. Absolutely.

[00:10:25] Are they a thing anymore? I don't know. Is Playboy a thing anymore? I don't know. I mean, I like, I remember that they took out nude pictures, like they stopped being, you know, what was essentially Playboy. So I don't know if it actually exists.

[00:10:38] Talk about a good example of the media is the message. Like the difference between Playboy and, you know, online porn is a big difference. Yeah. Although I think the content also matters. It's a good example of where the content actually is important too.

[00:10:54] But we're talking about his interview, but also his chapter, The Media is the Message. Right. Yeah. And then right now we're going to talk about, did you put this in the Slack or did I? You did.

[00:11:06] It is, the title of it is a Wired article from March, just this month. I asked an algorithm to optimize my life. Here's what happened by Lucy Liu. Just not that Lucy Liu. Or is it? So this is something when I first just heard the headline,

[00:11:30] I thought was. It was perfect clickbait for you. It's perfect. This is why our society is completely unraveling in the worst and just most depressing possible way. You know, it's actually, when you read it, it's a little different than that. And I'm not exactly sure why.

[00:11:50] What did you think about it? Yeah, I read it expecting that it would cause a healthy argument between us where somebody was defending the use of like an algorithmic approach to your decision making. And it turns out, I think her conclusion,

[00:12:05] first of all, I think it's well done. But I think her conclusion is way more in line with what you would believe going into this. Yeah. So what did she do? Can you describe it? So Lucy Liu was a,

[00:12:22] I guess she was doing her master's in computer science. So she's that kind of a nerd. She was working as a data scientist and working on algorithms. And she was just surrounded by people who, as she says in the article,

[00:12:33] were constantly talking about like the local maximum and sub-optimality and all these things that you would create an algorithm to maximize, to optimize on something or other. And so she thought, like, look, there is just a ton of,

[00:12:49] there are a ton of things in my life that do seem suboptimal. Like there are decisions that I make that might actually be the wrong decisions to make given what I could have done. And so she decided that she was going to create,

[00:13:00] like modify an algorithm that optimizes to help her make decisions. She goes through like a pretty lengthy process where she comes up with a procedure so that whenever she was faced with a decision, she would feed it into this algorithm and the algorithm would tell her

[00:13:19] whether to do one thing or another. But also it would randomly toss in just a decision that she might not take otherwise. Like it had like a random function so that she might be, she might take decisions that she would never normally take.

[00:13:35] And that way the algorithm and she can learn. Right. So it was like, it would spit out a number between one and a hundred. If it was over five, she would do the thing that historically had been good. But if it was five or under,

[00:13:48] then it would randomly select options. An option. Yeah. Yeah. Which that was kind of cool. Yeah. Because that solves a problem that you might get stuck in your, in your ways. So if you sort of like let insert some, some chaos into your life,

[00:14:03] you might discover things you never would have otherwise. And so she would do that. So she went about like using this algorithm, this basically like reinforcement learning. And she would, she had to decide what exactly it was, I guess that she was trying to optimize. And that, that,

[00:14:17] that became the big issue where you're deciding, for instance, in her example, whether to sleep in for 30 minutes and get the satisfaction of that extra sleep or to get up when her alarm rang and go to sleep.

[00:14:27] And so she would have to decide what exactly it was that she was trying to optimize. And that, that became the big issue where you're deciding, when her alarm rang and get some stuff done. And so she realized, I think what she realized,

[00:14:42] she didn't say it this way, was that there is just a plurality of values that she, that no algorithm could take care of. Like these algorithms are built to optimize on something very simple. Like, especially if it's a quantifiable, it's a single metric, you know,

[00:14:59] you're optimizing for amounts of time or amounts of money, like an algorithm that picks stocks or something like that. When you get to the realm of like, was this a satisfying or a good decision? All of a sudden you're faced with thinking about the criteria and this is

[00:15:16] what this whole exercise led her to, which was like reflecting on what are the criteria that I'm trying, that I would try to optimize on. You know, now, now you're getting into the philosophy of wellbeing really. Like what is- Right. Valerie Tiberius, like episode whatever, 77 or 78.

[00:15:33] Are you a desire satisfactionist? I'm like, what is a desire? Like this, that kind of shit. What do you value? What do you value? Yeah. And in that sense, it's a really useful exercise. I don't think you would want to do,

[00:15:45] I think you definitely wouldn't want to do it every day, but it's a useful exercise to get you to think about these things because a lot of the time habits being what they are, we don't, we just go through the motions, the grooves that we've spent the last,

[00:16:00] like however many years, defining in our brains. And so like- Totally. So like, I think that's a really good part of it. The other thing that I think is a really good part of it is that it forces you to just take a step and think about like,

[00:16:17] I think I'm very high on this idea actually. When you have a choice, you now have to think about making the choice and you have to think about what's worked in the past and what hasn't. And just that little, like now you,

[00:16:28] even if you're like maybe tempted to not do that, there's just some little bit of impetus, you know? Like this is like, it often just makes you think about it for a second and take like a breath before you just do what you normally do, you know, automatically,

[00:16:45] like a robot. Would you call that mindfulness? Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly what I was thinking is a kind of mindfulness. Maybe it's a kind of cognitive behavioral therapy. Yeah. Right. That's right. Because cognitive behavioral therapy, it's like a way for you to like pay attention to the antecedents,

[00:17:01] your behaviors and the consequences. And like you're just paying attention. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm glad. I'm glad. I'm glad to think that. Yeah. I thought this was a surprisingly humanistic article at the end. Like, so you know, the language of optimization is not one that I like.

[00:17:15] I don't like, I feel like that's destroying like the world. Everyone trying to optimize everything, but it's, and even that she kind of was like, what does it mean to optimize? Yeah. She says like, quote, in general, I believe that having more of certain things, namely health, time,

[00:17:33] money and energy is always preferable. But we can lose a lot when we optimize for these four goals beyond paying in one to obtain another. There are compelling arguments that fixating on optimization can make people less connected to reality and unduly obsessed with control. Right.

[00:17:46] And that's true that it can also induce a kind of paralysis and decision making because it's very hard to judge in close calls what will optimize. And so if you're committed to that, you will spend way too much time like deliberating about a decision.

[00:18:02] Not if you have an app. Right. And I guess it might be good for that. And you know, like I do low tech analog versions of this. Like when, when I have a little rule that if I feel 50 50 or anywhere close to 50 50 about whether

[00:18:16] to go out or whether to just stay home and I always go out, like that's just my rule. So if I'm weighing it and it seems like, oh, I'd like to, I'd like to go out, but then I would love,

[00:18:28] it would be so much fun to just stay at home and watch a movie. If it's 50 50, I'll go out, you know? Like, so I do that. I do like roll. My wife and I have done rolling dice to make decisions that we don't know just to get a

[00:18:38] sense of what, like which one we're rooting for. Right. Oh yeah. Like flipping a coin when you have like a, right. When it's made it midair, you often know exactly what you, what you actually want. Yeah. And if you do like three out of five,

[00:18:52] it gives even more time for you to figure out like who, what you're rooting for. You know? Right. Right. So like, yeah, I thought I would hate this, but I like it. It seems, I don't know why I get this like,

[00:19:07] like it's something William James would have tried. Yeah. You know? Right. And like just written a written essay about like his experience. Totally. Yeah. I mean, you know, William James might've had a little spectrum. But they didn't talk about that. That's right. That's right. He wasn't on Twitter,

[00:19:26] so we can't see how. All right. Let's come back and talk about Marshall McLuhan. This episode of very bad wizards is brought to you by better help. You know, getting to know yourself can be a lifelong process because we're always growing and changing

[00:19:46] and often changing in ways we can't understand. New habits creep up on us. New media, as we're about to talk about shape, our experience, our attitudes, our interpersonal relationships. And you know, even if we're not going to set up an optimizing algorithm,

[00:20:01] it's important to reflect on how these changes are affecting our well being. Therapy is all about deepening your self awareness and understanding because sometimes we don't know what we want or why we react the way we do until we can talk it through with someone.

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[00:22:25] This is the time of the show where we would like to take a moment to thank everybody for all their support. In particular, thank you so much for all of the communication that you have with us, all the interaction.

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[00:27:19] Now, like Tamar said, we're going to discuss probably the most famous work of Marshall McLuhan. The opening chapter of his 1964 book, Understanding Media, in which he lays out his now very oft-repeated aphorism, The Medium is the Message. It's the title of the chapter.

[00:27:36] But also we're tossing in this Playboy interview because honestly, I needed the Playboy interview. I think if you read the chapter on its own, it might be a bit confusing. Baffling. Baffling. Just a couple of things about Marshall McLuhan.

[00:27:52] He died in 1980, but he was a Canadian professor of English at the University of Toronto. He spent most of his career there. And he was pretty influential as an academic. I think the whole field of media studies owes a debt to his influence.

[00:28:05] But he was also about as famous as an academic can get in popular culture. So during the later part of his career, he was just all over everything. He was name-checked on Laugh-In, which I know is the height of popular culture.

[00:28:18] All our younger listeners will be very impressed. But not Laugh-In. He was in Annie Hall, which I think we even named an episode after that particular cameo. Did we? Like, I have Marshall McLuhan right here. It was like, If Only Life Were Like This. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:28:35] Okay. The influence of television. Now Marshall McLuhan deals with it in terms of it being a high intensity, you understand, a hot medium as opposed to a pit. What do you do when you get stuck on a movie line with a guy like this behind you?

[00:28:55] Wait a minute, why can't I give my opinion? This is a free country? He can give you, do you have to give it so loud? I mean, aren't you ashamed to pontificate like that?

[00:29:03] And the funny part of it is, Marshall McLuhan, you don't know anything about Marshall McLuhan's work. Oh really? Really? I happen to teach a class at Columbia called TV, Media and Culture. So I think that my insights into Mr. McLuhan will have a great deal of validity.

[00:29:15] Oh, do you? Well, that's funny because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here. So, so yeah, just let me, I mean, come over here a second. Oh, I heard what you're saying. You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.

[00:29:30] How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing. Boy, If Life Were Only Like This. He was also like a futurist. So he just wrote a lot about what he thought the future would hold.

[00:29:44] You can find a whole bunch of that throughout his writings and interviews. He was a consultant to major corporations and he had speaking gigs and he was like working in advertising.

[00:29:54] So, but yeah, so he was just like kind of a big deal just right before at least my time. And mine. Yeah, and maybe yours. So let's get to the chapter and the argument that he's making. I'll do my best to summarize.

[00:30:11] But again, it's his writing styles a tad bit convoluted. I think that his main point, I think, is that we, and by we here, he means our entire species, have paid very little attention to the transformative nature of media.

[00:30:26] And not when he says media, he doesn't mean the content of media, but of the specific media itself. And it's the media that I think he believes the vessel for the content that has the power to transform our modes of being,

[00:30:39] our perceptions, our social structure, the structure of society as a whole. To quote from him, the medium shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

[00:30:49] And for McLuhan, there have been like a few times in human history that society has been radically changed by the emergence of new media. Technologies. So he points to the first being the phonetic alphabet, which he thought shaped the way that we think and reason,

[00:31:03] like reasoning in a linear fashion, which I'm sure we'll talk about. And it turns us from people that use all of their senses to one that is focused primarily on the visual.

[00:31:14] On the visual. And that sort of got like multiplied like crazy with the advent of print media. So taking the phonetic alphabet and basically putting it in the hands of everyone. He thinks that the advent of print media, he really thinks led to industrialization, mechanization,

[00:31:30] which both rely ultimately on a linear form of thinking. It also led to homogenization of culture and was a force behind, he thinks, a number of other things, including nationalism,

[00:31:39] which relies on a shared identity that you can only have when you have that kind of homogeneity that's shared through print media. And now with electronic media. So for him, electronic media was the telegraph, radio and TV. And he was, I think, focused on TV especially.

[00:31:54] And I think he, I want to get to what exactly was about electronic media, but for now, I'll just say that one of the things he thought was that electronic media allowed for instantaneous communication, for non-linearity and for non-literary forms of art.

[00:32:10] And he thought that they were at the, that we as a people were at the cusp of a real, real big change on culture and society as a whole. And he just thought that we ought to very intentionally try to study the form of media

[00:32:24] because it was so easy to miss its effects. We just don't notice it because we're bathed in and we're surrounded by the form of the media. It's part of our environment. So it's like, it's like water for fish.

[00:32:35] And he thought especially that the rapid pace of change in modern media, electronic media, was an extra reason to focus on it. But he believed that most people were in complete darkness about it.

[00:32:44] They focused so much on the content that they were losing sight of what the media itself, the medium itself was doing to change things. Except for artists. I think he thought that artists could tap into the change that was occurring in a,

[00:33:00] in a better way than like the rational academics. Like, I think he thought that they had a pulse on it because like when he talks about cubism as being like a, like he thought cubism sort of signaled the entry of the electronic era.

[00:33:15] But you know, it wasn't in an electronic medium. But what he thought that they were showing was this instantaneous nature of electronic communication that they were showing now all perspectives at the same time.

[00:33:26] So I think that's right. And it's very characteristic of like kind of mid, mid 20th century art. Artists are the ones maybe that are the most conscious of the medium they're working within.

[00:33:39] Most willing to play with that, stretch it. And just that, if that's essential to an artist, that means that they're going to be conscious of the environment and the context of what they're doing more than a normal consumer or even a normal person working within media.

[00:33:58] Yeah. So actually let me ask you, what do you think of this? Because I could see you having one part of you pulled to the kind of mouth dropping open, holy shit, like that you had for some of the Lakoff metaphor stuff.

[00:34:15] And on the other hand, I could see you having a more dismissive, somewhat snobby attitude like you have towards Young. So like, which is it with Marshall McLuhan? So you know me too well. I think that there is, like I'll say at the outset,

[00:34:33] I think that there is something just deeply interesting and probably true about this analysis. And I think that like what excited me, you know, when we were talking about this, I think you had brought this up before, but in the context of this episode,

[00:34:46] I brought up like, why don't we do the medium as the message? And I was always fascinated by that, you know, the aphorism, the medium is the message. So I wanted to know what exactly, what the fuck is he saying?

[00:34:55] Because it never quite made sense to me. And after reading the chapter, I was just like, it angers me, Tamler, when people write this way. Like it's so full of like literary and historical allusions.

[00:35:08] And like, I'm not the snob here. Like he's the snob for writing in this way and making it almost intentionally inaccessible, like almost like hiding what I think is a real nugget of a good idea, like a real good idea in there.

[00:35:20] But with like a real convoluted, um, post, like worst of postmodern humanities kind of writing. It has that kind of continental style of constantly quoting people when it's not clear why or what relevance it has to what you're saying.

[00:35:37] Right. It was almost stream of consciousness. Like I was like, wait, here's another idea that starts this paragraph, but I'm not quite sure what it had to do with what he just finished saying. Like, it might be a great idea. It might be cool.

[00:35:47] But like, I'm not, I wasn't sure how it all connected. But then other times, like the allusions are good. Like, like the passage to India when he's talking about oral cultures versus the visual rational European cultures and how that has influenced like our understanding of rational,

[00:36:07] like the concept of rationality. Right. So he says, uh, rational of course has for the West long meant uniform and continuous and sequential. In other words, we have confused reason with literacy and rationalism with a single technology at this time print.

[00:36:25] Thus in the electric age, man seems to the conventional of the West to become irrational because the electric age is this next stage. Yeah. Yeah. But that was helpful actually. Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. Absolutely. It's, it's kind of funny.

[00:36:40] So reading this, reading the Playboy interview and reading like just here and there other bits and pieces, uh, or like listening to some of his interviews. I actually think the guy was really insightful and,

[00:36:54] and that's saying a lot because a lot of the things that he like would say seem batshit. So like, despite all that, despite like doing it in a way that might be the perfect way, as you predicted to turn me off, despite all that,

[00:37:08] I think that there is something that's super worth talking about. Um, and, and more now than ever, like that's totally, that is, it is true. One of the things that he was saying about the rapid pace of change in electronic media is it's,

[00:37:23] it seems almost laughable for him to think that it was going rapidly in the sixties and seventies when you compare that to how it's going now in the last 20, 25 years or yeah, the last 10 years even. Yeah.

[00:37:35] Like look at every day we're getting like a new chat GPT four and, and it's different than it was last week. Yeah, that's right. Um, so yeah, I'm trying to figure out how best to present this and maybe it is by

[00:37:52] distinguishing what he's saying here with some very related ideas like the form of a, of a work of art influences the content or it's inseparable from the content. Or like, I think this about Plato's dialogues, like the fact that there are dialogues is as important as whatever

[00:38:13] the people are saying in the dialogues. The fact that that's how he, he's writing. And I think this is true of, of even Marshall McLuhan himself is that his style of writing, uh, for better or for worse has as much to do with how we talk about him

[00:38:30] and how we think about his ideas as the actual words in them themselves. You know? Yeah. Um, so I think there's that aspect of it, which is just the form of something in the content. We think we can separate them and we have this long standing disposition

[00:38:50] to focus only on the content and not very much on the forum. Like nobody pays attention to the fact that Plato wrote dialogues. They don't think about that when they're talking about the arguments that you find in Plato. So in one sense, it's just a matter of, uh,

[00:39:06] and I think that I agree with this a hundred percent, shifting our emphasis a little bit, not just taking the form of it or the style of it for granted, but incorporating that into our analysis of the work as a whole.

[00:39:20] That's one aspect of McLuhan that you can get, but it goes deeper than that. Like he talks about the way these things are affecting our central nervous system, you know? Yeah. He thinks that there is like a deep change. Like a very deep change.

[00:39:38] So when we're watching TV, it's like, these things go into the deepest parts of our senses. So this is what he says. He says, all media from the phonetic alphabet to the computer are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment.

[00:39:53] So an extension is an intensification, amplification of an organ, sense or function. And whenever it takes place, the central nervous system appears to institute a self-protected numbing of the affected area, insulating and anesthetizing it from conscious awareness of what is happening to it.

[00:40:11] And then this is what he thinks is the real problem. He says, I call this form of self-hypnosis narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in, like you said.

[00:40:28] Yeah. It's very psychoanalytic. I mean, like explicitly, obviously here, he's a nod to Freud. But also he quotes Jung at the end of his chapter. Which discredits him. Which is good. The idea that the media is the message taken to the extreme is almost self-evident.

[00:40:49] It's self-refuting because we're, the whole reason we're talking about this is because of the content of this interview and the work. The fact that it's an interview or... I actually saw a TV, just like some black and white interview program

[00:41:06] where a woman in the audience, there was a Q&A and a woman in the audience actually asked almost exactly what you said. She said, if it's true that the media is the message, then why are we here listening to you

[00:41:16] and why am I asking you this question? Yeah. I think I might have seen this. Is that where he says, like, I'm not saying it's meaningless, but it's incidental to all the other things that are happening. Yeah. He liked to make that strong sort of claim.

[00:41:29] But at various points he's like, obviously, like, you know, what Hitler said mattered. It's like, I think Nietzsche, I was telling you maybe off air that this reminded me of Nietzsche in some ways where he would intentionally sort of exaggerate his point

[00:41:43] and he was somewhat self-conscious about it. He would talk about this in a very metaphoristic style in general. But it was a way of goading us, inspiring us, shaking us out of our slumber. And when you're McLuhan and you think, as he clearly does,

[00:41:59] that we are in this kind of dogmatic slumber, we're just like hypnotized to only talk about things in these very limited parameters of the content without examining just what the form in general is doing to us. I think that's... He had reason to shout it.

[00:42:17] Yeah, I think that's totally right. He had reason to shout it. And like, I think he was right to do so. Like, you know, I actually... It really actually doesn't bother me that much that he had these crazy ideas about like, you know, TV turning people into tribalistic.

[00:42:32] I mean, is he wrong about that? Well, he's not wrong that maybe we might become more tribalistic, but I don't know that TV is the cause. I mean... Well, think about like right wing television and Rush Limbaugh and just what the shape of...

[00:42:49] Yeah, maybe it's more evident with talk radio and now with the internet than TV. But certainly Fox News has played a big role. I'm sure like MSNBC and CNN has turned a lot of people into brain dead neoliberal zombies too. And just the fact that

[00:43:07] you have to present ideas in a way now that will appeal to a TV audience and that will also get advertising money. That also has a big effect and it has to be... So all of a sudden we're getting our news in very small chunks

[00:43:25] and then of course Twitter comes along and even smaller chunks. And you think about the way you are when you're on Twitter. If that's not affecting central nervous system, then, you know, like I don't know what is. Like you get all riled up

[00:43:40] just because it's Twitter, you know. Like podcasts have a more relaxing effect on you whereas like these other kinds of media you get more antsy and anxious and pissed off and there's definitely a big truth to this even if he wasn't always accurate on exactly what would happen.

[00:44:00] Yeah, and I'm not sure he was right about the why. You know, his view was really that TV specifically was a different medium from even movies, but definitely from print in that he thought of it as a cool medium. Yeah, let's talk about this hot and cool media.

[00:44:25] Yeah, right. So the distinction that he... A big distinction that he made is actually in chapter two of his book is between hot and cool media and there he's just referring to really the degree of participation that the medium requires of you. Like how...

[00:44:43] Like print is offering you up a completed idea in this very neat package and for McLuhan that meant that you didn't have to take much like... You didn't have to take active steps to finish the thought that was coming at you from print.

[00:44:59] It was a high fidelity way of communicating whereas television and comics, for instance, were more low fidelity in that your brain had to complete the images on its own. Your brain was doing... Being more of an active participant in taking in the media.

[00:45:20] This is a very hard thing to understand and maybe counterintuitive because I would have maybe thought exactly the opposite, you know? That TV is this kind of numbing thing that you are not participating in and that reading actually requires some imagination

[00:45:36] but I think to try to do it justice... To try to steal man? To steal me. Exactly. You know, the way reading works it's like all in order. It's just we're only using our eyes on it and it is leading us to a conclusion

[00:45:55] in a very sequential way whereas I think he thinks television is bombarding all of our senses in all these different ways which just challenges us at a deeper level because our areas of attention are more distributed. We now have to figure out a way of organizing it

[00:46:14] in a way that makes sense whereas with reading it's just given to us and we have a very narrow focus of attention and that's all we need. Something like that. I think that's doing it justice and by the way I think this is why he loved Finnegan's Wake

[00:46:32] because Finnegan's Wake is pushing the boundaries of the print media into probably a mode of thinking that we would never get from print media. Exactly, and that's the kind of art I think that he liked, right? The kind of art that is just stretching the form

[00:46:51] because people are in this narcoleptic stupor they don't even understand that there is something to be stretched and that's also a way of shocking us. This way of describing TV it is also counterintuitive that he focuses so much on reading and print media as being visual

[00:47:11] where TV seems so visual that it seems like, wait if the claim was that it's taking you out of he almost has a noble savage view of early man where they were in tune with all of your senses and for him the oral tradition and the aural tradition

[00:47:33] like a URL that was a tradition of communication that he thinks involved all of your senses in a way that reading took away and I think he thinks that TV is a way back to that tradition. Which is strange, but yes I think you're right.

[00:47:53] He has a nostalgia for pre-literate cultures and what that did and the richness of your experience that you would have but then to think that TV is our way back to that It's very weird. I think that if he were around today he would be saying

[00:48:13] well I don't know what he'd be saying about the internet to be honest I'm not quite sure the internet is such a mixed media he uses the light bulb and I say think about the light bulb it's dumb to think about the light bulb lighting a baseball game

[00:48:28] or lighting an operating table because of course it has those changes but he says those activities are like the content of media what we need to think about is just the way having light changed changed our being and it's true like having an electric light available

[00:48:46] at any time of the night changed a whole lot about the way that we live and it's all it's very you get everything on the internet you get everything that you would get on TV you get everything that you would get in film

[00:49:00] you get everything that you would get in print media and then a whole bunch more but you get it in a different way than you get it if you're in a movie theater or you're in so I think that's also part of it too

[00:49:12] it's not just that you get all these things but the environment that you are getting it has been changed which also will change you whatever it is and you and I were talking actually about the feeling a bit sorry for that cohort of kids

[00:49:30] who had to spend a couple of their high school years where their entire their entire life was online they were forced to be on Zoom for school and not going out and interacting with people and so in some ways almost like an experimental group

[00:49:46] of people who have to be getting all of their media from the internet which is a real problem for a lot of people and I mean look it's definitely changed people some people say I liked that better I felt more comfortable but there's no denying

[00:50:08] that it's had this effect and again like that was so extreme that I think people actually noticed and thought about it but with a lot of things you don't that we've never been able to do before we just start thinking oh this is a good YouTube clip

[00:50:29] this is a good one oh that one's a little dangerous and that I think is like that's a great example like it changes the way people understand sports and fandom like obviously politics in all these different ways that's the thing we should be thinking about

[00:50:47] not the content of any particular YouTube video Yeah I think that's right too I think that's one of the things one the algorithmic nature tying into our opening segment the algorithmic nature of YouTube watching and TikTok and Instagram now is it really is a different mode of interacting

[00:51:07] and I'm curious what McLuhan would think about this in some ways it is the most passive kind of experience where you are not even you're not even channel surfing which is a phrase he coined a lot of phrases global village yeah and apparently Andy Warhol

[00:51:27] said that the 15 minutes of fame quote was directly from a conversation he had with McLuhan that nature of watching where I'm letting the algorithm determine what I watch or what's at least suggested for me to watch but in many cases if you just leave

[00:51:45] the autoplay on which I know a lot of younger people do they just let it go as far as I know he doesn't talk about it in this or in the interview but what is media what is a medium so in some ways he's talking about

[00:52:03] any technology that conveys information but is would algorithmic watching be a new medium for him is that not true I don't know like I actually have no idea how he tried to define they seem like it's a category that's bigger than just the difference between TikTok and YouTube

[00:52:25] or something like that streaming maybe feels like it's a new mode of yeah I would say maybe I doubt he would have some firm opinion you know like but it's a good question because I also just in thinking about how to talk about this

[00:52:43] do you talk about the difference between like blogs and Twitter or something like that rather than the media itself totally and in some ways what he's talking about is is just technology changing I think he was focused on a specific kind of change

[00:53:01] brought about by a specific kind of technology but you know he was super interested in just how mechanization and industry affected are being those aren't the assembly line at Ford isn't media but it is a way that is being used to change

[00:53:23] but I think he thinks it all might come down to media technologies yeah or at least that that's the parts that we are maybe least likely to examine critically that's right I think like it's also such a good whether you know whatever he meant by it

[00:53:45] it's such an interesting way to think about like particular like Reddit versus a different kind of social media just what that does to you like one of the things I was thinking about a form of media that I'm a big fan of podcasts right

[00:54:01] I often think that's the most benign such a good success story for the internet and online culture the fact that all of a sudden we have these really smart people who in fun and accessible ways can make you feel like you'll learn about something that you care about

[00:54:22] and if now you see a movie and you read a book you can look forward to somebody talking about that you know like the Celtics lose to the Bucks in June I'm going to have like 10 podcasts that I can listen to like bitching about it

[00:54:40] just in the same way I'm bitching about it June you're very optimistic well I'm assuming there'll be one two seats in case but then if I think of myself in 2003 I could like get dressed without feeling like I need to listen to a podcast

[00:54:59] I could brush my teeth without thinking I could like go to the grocery store without now I feel like my body like tenses up if I don't have like a good podcast to listen to while I'm doing that must have pretty profound effects on my whole psyche

[00:55:14] and my whole like consciousness the fact that now I expect to be kept company at all times by something you know and we I think we've talked about this on our podcast just having time on a walk to think without without having anything being pumped into your ears

[00:55:34] it's man it is it's weirdly anxiety inducing to like go out and be like well I don't have any podcasts to listen to like they're all I'm all caught up on my feet or something like that you know or my airpods are dead which you know another technology

[00:55:49] that has really changed it that it's the combination of podcasts and airpods that makes it like no matter where you go in the house you don't even have to have your phone with you could be naked coming out of the shower and I put my airpods in yeah

[00:56:04] all these things airpods are a great example something you wouldn't think about oh it's just better it's so much better than and it means that you like your clothes can be different too because you don't have all of it is interconnected like here's an extreme claim

[00:56:20] but I was thinking about it you know how we always talk about Gen Z and their levels of eight tier levels of irony that for the first time we feel like we don't can't connect with or understand what was it that led them to have this kind of

[00:56:36] perspective and things like TikTok maybe there's just something about that media that lends itself to this kind of irony this detached meta meta meta perspective I would buy that yeah I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this and the particular kind of humor that emerged

[00:56:59] I think in the 2000s and one of the reasons I've been thinking about it is because I've been watching a lot of content from this comedian Tim Heidecker who was part of who was part of a comedy duo who had like a couple of shows on

[00:57:18] the Cartoon Network and the way that they did their skits or sketches or whatever relied a whole lot on the ability to edit video in a really weird way and so they had this like surreal a bunch of very surreal skits and if you can

[00:57:39] if you can represent meta visually they would do that like with just a bunch of heads popping out of one head for instance or something just very weird odd stuff that just couldn't have happened without the tools to edit video easily yeah digital video yeah digital video

[00:57:54] digital editing and I think that this is at least one big source of that brand of humor that absurdist it's very weird that a younger child might have more absurdist sensibilities than like a wizened old person like us yeah or like a 34 year old or something like that

[00:58:14] which should be your peak like recognition of absurdity but it's not now it's like a 15 year old and they're making the content you know now these guys Tim and Eric are Gen Xers yeah that's interesting like that's like this is exactly I think what Marshall McLuhan

[00:58:36] would want you to do he would want you to look at like okay so this is digital editing but then also like why does that digital that digital editing has this effect on people that makes them now have a much more absurdist worldview than they did before

[00:58:53] I can't yeah I can't put it into words well dude but I swear that this particular way of being funny on the internet that I think has a lot of Tim and Eric influence but surely others for some reason the emotion that instills in me

[00:59:09] is a bit fatalistic it's like a nothing matters kind of humor and I can't explain it well but it really is like oh man it's like the world's burning let's make like these ridiculous edits to this like I don't know in a different way than like

[00:59:26] a Coen Brothers movie would do it different Coen Brothers is like it might as yeah Coen Brothers is much more structured and fine tuned to give you specific kinds of emotions I think you know they're craftsmen this is this is like they throw it together in 30 minutes

[00:59:45] and it's despair I mean I like it but it's despair it's an expression of like someone falling into an abyss but also kind of laughing about it right yeah other wet things that I think have profoundly shaped us in ways that we don't understand even though we're

[01:00:06] like email right like email and text is something that has just changed the way we interact socially the way we approach our jobs and email is a good example now of the fact that something as an email is more salient than whatever's in the email compared to

[01:00:29] other things you know what I mean and text too have its own forms of like you get a text and it's also different but I guess the biggest obvious way in which it's changed us is how often we communicate with each other and in what way we communicate

[01:00:45] with each other and how easy it is now to schedule a time to meet but then also at the same time like it gives you kind of a reason where you don't have to meet because you can and like all these things must be shaping us socially intellectually

[01:01:02] cognitively in all sorts of different ways that it's when you're swimming in it it's very hard to like figure out exactly how and we do take it for granted we don't think about the ways that that's completely changing our way of interacting with the world yeah I mean

[01:01:19] here's one real simple change that it's created and that is the guilt I feel for not talking to my family as much as maybe I should where you know when I was growing up my father all of our family was in Chile and you know we

[01:01:37] didn't have a lot of money and collect and sorry long distance calls were expensive so we would once a month gather around the phone and talk to the family my father now is 88 years old and his brother I think just turned 90 or 91 and they talk

[01:01:52] every day on FaceTime and it's it's you know McLuhan over and over again especially in the Playboy interview says that he's not here to make value judgments about things like he just wants to point out that the change is happening he prefers not to say

[01:02:08] whether it's good or bad he does give an opinion at the end of that interview which is interesting but here's one where I can say that has connected my father in a way to his family that I think probably has made him live longer to be honest

[01:02:24] like that is a social connection that we could never have had before totally yeah I mean look how many friends are you still in touch with that in a million years you wouldn't be in touch right and that's gonna make you think about your past your childhood

[01:02:39] in a different way and it has both positive and negative effects but like I said when it comes to something like that the ability to FaceTime the fact that when I was in college I had to go to a payphone and

[01:02:52] I had to like put a collect call into my parents who had to be there and we had to somehow communicate that this would be the time that I called probably like that was whereas with like Eliza and like both text and phone we were interacting constantly

[01:03:11] is Eliza is she good at texting you back yeah oh for the most part yeah I think she feels that guilt that you feel if you like text someone I told my daughter explicitly my daughter is pretty bad at like texting back and I was I'm pretty bad

[01:03:28] with a lot of that I told her explicitly don't ever I don't ever want you feeling guilty because you haven't replied to me like it was just priority number one I was like I don't want her emotions to be like the ones that I have affected yeah

[01:03:42] I said to my daughter just like if you don't get back to me like two hours after I text you I'm going to start cutting myself you have a timer yeah timer clean razor blades close by no but it's like

[01:04:03] you know it makes it a very different thing and I'm sure it makes it different for her too like you have I probably had to make my own way in the world and figure this shit out on my own in a way that she doesn't have to

[01:04:16] that's going to shape the way she matures as a human being again I think for better and for worse but like there's no way that these things don't have a profound impact on us at every level and people talk about again the content like when they complain about

[01:04:33] helicopter parents or whatever you know without talking about the things that have actually made that way more it's not even that it's easier to do it it's that it's that once you have these technologies that allow you to be in constant communication with your child then our just

[01:04:52] like our natural emotional system is going to be like why wouldn't I reach out to them if I can and that creates a whole unexpected set of consequences probably the helicopter parent example is really interesting because yeah it was you couldn't be a helicopter yeah

[01:05:08] you're like writing letters I think my mom probably tried her best especially academically like she would try she was really committed to me doing well academically but like there was a limit to what she could do because she wasn't and if I was at my dad's house

[01:05:26] because they were divorced like yeah there was nothing she could do and like that's such a great example because it's transformed the way kids have grown up kids grow up now you know especially at certain like SES levels right like now kids are constantly just aware

[01:05:43] of their parents' expectations and their parents not just in the long term but like in their smallest daily decisions it's like it's easy to say like what's wrong with these parents or what's wrong with these kids and I've said that before and the truth is

[01:06:02] there's nothing wrong with them that's just the natural result of having this ability to communicate it turns it turns normal parenting into something just different because now you can text your kid and I think McLuhan like you said for the most part he says

[01:06:21] I want to be value free about this I think he has a clear nostalgia for really primitive enchanted times

[01:08:29] and I think it's really interesting to think that just the existence of TV as a medium is going to cause the dissolution of the union but at the same time like there are talks like of you know by members of Congress that we like certain red states

[01:08:50] should secede from the union and there's this rural urban divide and there's this and but I don't think it's because of the laws like uniting the five senses No that's I guess that's not right but I think there's other aspects of like media culture or the forms

[01:09:10] of media where people get their where people are politically informed that might account for it the fact that we went to television as a way of communicating political ideas whereas before you had to go to like you had to read about it or you had to go

[01:09:26] and actually see and I think the people talking you know now maybe that makes tribalism a lot easier to kind of cement and harden and get people to dig in their heels about and maybe less able to see nuance Yeah and I think the internet and maybe

[01:09:47] and social media and maybe algorithmic news feeds do play a big role in that Right and you know I don't know the details of how television and similar forms of media would do this are wrong but I might be right that that it has done what he said

[01:10:09] it was going to do or it's on its way to doing that So listen to this he says the computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness so he's he's talking about like the power

[01:10:24] of computers in the position where they will be able to conduct carefully orchestrated programming of the sensory life of whole populations I know it sounds rather science fictional but if you understood cybernetics you'd realize we could do it today he's very condescending the computer could program the media

[01:10:41] to determine the given messages the messages that people should hear in terms of their overall needs creating a total media experience absorbed and patterned by all the senses now he's talking about like the ability of computational stuff to provide this like wonderful sensory stuff like he wants

[01:10:56] to be able to program the world to return back to this this state of all five senses being in balance but what he's describing is actually what's happened except for not in a good way like computers have been programmed to provide different sensory experiences to different people

[01:11:13] and shape opinions and shape behavior yeah that's exactly what's happened did you I didn't get in that quote that he thought this was a really positive thing well he's talking yeah the context I think is where he's saying that uh he says automation and cybernation

[01:11:34] can play an essential role in smoothing the transition to the new society and he is talking about the power of computers to create a good sensory life of sorry he says we could program five hours less of tv in italy to promote the reading of newspapers

[01:11:50] during an election or an additional election to cool down the tribal temperature raised by the radio the preceding month so he's saying because the guy was asking won't this tribalism cause all kinds of social strife and he's saying yeah but with cybernetics or whatever we can actually

[01:12:07] regulate this we can control it yeah that always works no no no yeah but it's funny because at other times he is very sneering about this kind of view that as a person who has a lot of this kind of view that as long as we use

[01:12:23] this for good it will be fine and that all that matters is the intentions of the person that's using it like he essentially makes fun of the idea guns don't kill people people kill people he's like the media is the thing and it won't matter whether the people

[01:12:38] in charge have like want to wield it for the forces of good or for the forces of evil right so it's funny that he says that I know it is it seems like what he's saying is that if we can get the right balance

[01:12:51] of the kinds of media through some sort of centralized operation you know where we give okay this group needs some cool media right now this group needs some hot media and then you can ease the transition but yeah you're right I don't think he had much

[01:13:06] of a problem contradicting himself probably right and why would he can we talk about this idea of the you know oral culture and this idea of acoustic space so I think this stuff I was interested to see what you thought of this part but this is on like

[01:13:22] page 6 of the PDF of the interview where he's talking about oral cultures how they lived in a different acoustic space than literate man did and the interviewer says what do you mean by that and he says I mean space that has no center no margin unlike strictly

[01:13:39] visual space which is an extension and an intensification of the eye acoustic space is organic and integral and perceived and is interplay of all the senses whereas rational or pictorial space rational in quotes is uniform sequential and continuous and creates a closed world

[01:13:57] with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echo land our own western time space concepts this is a pretty deep point here at least a radical point our own western time space concepts derived from the environment created by the discovery of phonetic writing as does our entire

[01:14:16] concept of western civilization the man of the tribal world led a complex kaleidoscopic life precisely because the ear unlike the eye cannot be focused and is synesthetic rather than analytic and linear and he goes on on this but I'm wondering what you think about this idea you know

[01:14:37] it almost has a Kantian or you know that kind of structuralist way of understanding even basic concepts like time and space yeah I highlighted some of this honestly as I was reading it I was like well is that true? Is there an empirical claim in there about what

[01:14:57] you know like auditory life is like could we go to preliterate cultures now and actually see that they have some sort of different sensory experience I don't think it's crazy that the written word has completely changed the way that we that we think

[01:15:20] I think that part is not crazy but I am not quite sure what this is what gets me he always says that he's not making value judgments it really does seem like he thinks that this previous era was better in some way that there was this balance

[01:15:35] of sensory experience that was better and I don't I don't quite get it I mean I buy that we're different now you know one of the things about just take memory right in oral cultures people's memory is crazy good because they have to memorize everything and

[01:15:53] that's a big difference and I buy that when you have when you're just living as a hunter-gatherer you have to be more in tune with your environment at all times we're sitting here staring at pieces of electronic equipment for like 12 hours a day

[01:16:07] and that certainly has to do something to our psychology I'm just not quite sure about the like well this is where concepts of space-time come in yeah I was telling you before that this reminded me of the Ted Chiang truth of fact truth of feeling

[01:16:21] and one of the ways that he's comparing oral cultures and written cultures that's not focused on time and space as much as it is truth like what you mean by truth and how you understand whether something is true or not God, that's such a good fucking story yeah

[01:16:36] it's awesome and I bet influenced by some of this like McLuhan philosophy, right? so and I think that's probably right that even something as basic as what do we consider true will be changed based on whether we are brought up in this visually focused literate environment or whether

[01:16:59] we're brought up in an environment where people just constantly telling stories to each other as ways of conveying information but there's no there's nothing written down that you can always consult to see yeah, and I think I actually think let's there's an extreme claim

[01:17:18] that he might be making here which is that you know that the universe actually that what we know about whatever Einstein whatever Einstein knows about time and space is only a result of the red word there's like an extreme version of that claim

[01:17:34] that I don't think is true but but phenomenologically our experience of time and space if that's the claim he's making then that has to be true I mean even just having a calendar in front of you laying out the year you know, week by week

[01:17:50] I think has to have a a deep influence on our phenomenology you know we never would have been asked what we were doing in you know December 7th of this year are you free? like are you available? I don't fucking know what you're talking about yeah no, right

[01:18:08] right I guess to press you a little bit on even the more extreme view that kind of Einstein's theories of general relativity or something is only a product of but maybe the way Einstein tackled the problem approaches the problem conceptualizes the problem is not just trivially influenced by

[01:18:31] being in a literate culture because he had to be able to to write numbers out to write it down read other people you know read Newton read all the people before him but also just like yeah like maybe you like the things that you want

[01:18:46] to try to explain or the things that you want to try to understand are conceptualized in completely different ways if you're in an oral culture rather than a literate culture or maybe if we're in this whatever new culture we're about to get into we'll think about these things

[01:19:02] in such a radically different way that it'll seem like Einstein is answering questions that don't make sense to us or trying to understand the problem in ways that don't make sense to us yeah I guess I would you know if you're asking my deep opinion I would say

[01:19:19] that there is a math to this stuff that transcends whatever humans think about it but just what a literate culture person is saying that's right but you know there's something about the abstract the abstract level of the math leaves a lot of room for

[01:19:40] the metaphors that we use the way that we even talk about about this stuff like there's nothing I have zero understanding of the math and so all I know about space-time is what's presented to me through the use of like visual metaphors and in a different culture

[01:20:00] those metaphors might have been completely different right it could have been described in a very different way and still be describing the mathematics but maybe not but I also think like you know he has this stuff about causation which I know you're not a fan of

[01:20:18] but this idea that the way we think about cause in this human way of like sequence one thing following another is just the result of the fact that's how we read things one word follows the next word and so it just becomes ingrained in us that causation

[01:20:36] has this function and I'm sure that's you know kind of at the basis of a lot of scientific methods scientific at the deepest levels is is that notion See I feel like it's been that literacy has been an aid to discover causation so I think that

[01:20:55] he's right to connect the two but I just I guess I think like we all know there really are I mean push comes to shove who knows what a cause is but like there really is something happening or else science wouldn't work I just

[01:21:07] like I don't think that the Gutenberg invented the fact that that we see like you know that we get we know about gravity So you're using induction to justify induction Okay I guess You do you So the last part of that quote that McLuhan says is

[01:21:29] Audile tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual its values divine and unchallenged whereas literate or visual man creates an environment that is strongly fragmented individualistic explicit logical specialized specialized and detached So I mean

[01:21:53] based on what you just said he you know McLuhan might say just the fact that you're saying well science wouldn't work unless like all these laws really accurately described reality is because you're not living in this magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual like

[01:22:12] so you have to think there must be a reason if we can make a rocket ship and it works every time if we follow these laws then that must mean you know we've described the universe correctly at least in this domain and like I guess

[01:22:27] it's very hard to step outside this debate and see you know who's right this is part of the slightly unfalsifiable nature of it but like pretty much anything that you say when you're pushing back he can he can say as he does sometimes to the interviewer you know

[01:22:44] classic literate you know man perspective This is the frustration of like reading Freud you know sometimes But that doesn't mean it's wrong right? It just means that I have other reasons to think that there is a reality that is described accurately by some of these models you know

[01:23:00] that that but but I can't disagree that tribal man governed by myth and ritual could never build a spaceship I mean or they would never even think to build a spaceship He's not just saying that No, I'm giving him I'm giving him the the benefit of the doubt

[01:23:16] because as I was reading this I was thinking to myself is this where the shrooms kicked in? like for him where he's talking about magic magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual its values divine and unchallenged and partaking of the collective unconscious Look like

[01:23:31] I just don't know where he's getting any of that Like I That's It seems just so speculative that not even if it were right would I believe that he got there reliably But I mean I know you're being snide when you say did the shrooms kick in

[01:23:44] but I do get the sense that he thinks that like in these cultures your daily experience your daily phenomenon your daily phenomenology was hallucinogenic in the way that it is when you're taking mushrooms or acid or something because you're taking in so much more of a gestalt

[01:24:04] of what's going on and you have so much more openness to and alertness to your environment as a whole than you normally do when we have kind of blinders on and we're very focused on what our attention is And so like I actually think you know

[01:24:22] he thinks that's something we've lost It's something we've also gained You know as he says to the interviewer in the Playboy interview it's like there's progress and then there's also bad things about it And I'm not That's And my personal view is

[01:24:35] I don't like a lot of what technology is bringing But but I think he might be right about like we can only underestimate the impact that something like the printing not even the printing press but just first the alphabet and then the printing press had on us And

[01:24:58] and we're a little beyond it so we can maybe step into a position where we're judging like what's the difference between living in an oral culture and living in a a literate culture But then we're also enmeshed in this new thing which is much harder

[01:25:16] to try to imagine the ways in which it will change us But if it does change us in a way that I think McLuhan is suggesting it will we can't imagine what that's gonna look like probably You know Unless we're Maybe our kids are in that

[01:25:32] in that in between state where their phenomenology is actually drastically different than ours because of the way that that their environment their media environment was as they were raised Like we wouldn't really know But it could I even mean in the broader sense of like in 80 years

[01:25:49] Like maybe science looks completely different when you've had a hundred years of the internet You know And maybe It's more replicable because people can post their preprints Exactly They can pre-register Brian Nosa has changed the world He's changed the way people interact Turns out causality

[01:26:17] is just different 80 years from now because of Open Science Foundation I mean Like that kind of happened with quantum physics, right? Like with That was not something that was really imaginable 200 years before that 300 years before that No And Einstein too But that's at a slightly lower level

[01:26:39] than what I'm talking about Yeah I think you and I constitutionally are just different Where I think that there may Like I have no problem saying people had a They were more in touch with their environments They were probably psychologically closer to each other Bonds of communities

[01:26:55] were different Obviously There are parts of psychology like the oral tradition made you good at a particular kind of storytelling and remembering I think there are all kinds of really interesting ways in which our psychology is deeply different I'm not buying the mystical shit

[01:27:11] Like that's just not me Like I just think that to say that they were in touch with something divine and it was a collective unconscious It's like well Are hunter-gatherers that are not in literary societies do they have that? You know I'm also of the opinion that we

[01:27:24] that there is true progress That something like quantum theory came about because literacy allowed us to share ideas and information and you could do math and that these are true discoveries And that we were He agrees with that though That they were true discoveries?

[01:27:41] Well that we couldn't have made these kinds of discoveries and that's progress of a certain kind for sure You can't deny that they understand Just the fact that you can build the rocket ship shows that you understand something about the world that other people haven't understood Okay yeah

[01:28:00] See I just didn't know whether you're pushing the strongest of relativistic claims where when you're in a world where you believe in that space and time are this thing that they in fact are this thing I mean I'm not as committed to like the scientific realist

[01:28:14] versus anti-realist debate All I'm saying and not as a way of shitting on science or saying FIARA band or whatever was right All I'm saying is that information culture the internet you give it a hundred years and what science looks like then and the way they approach

[01:28:35] certain basic fundamental scientific questions might be totally different You could still say and they might still be able to say Oh we're closer to the truth than they were back in 2023 That's an orthogonal question to what I'm saying is that this form of new media that we're bombarded

[01:28:57] and growing up in could just drastically change the way science operates and like understands certain basic questions about the universe Yeah maybe so I'm not opposed to that What we consider drastically different maybe the devil's in the details there but you know say for instance

[01:29:21] like say the ability to run large scale simulations based on all the data we've gathered about humanity or about the physical world that's just not available to us That's what I would consider drastic change and maybe the methods of science change completely because of that stuff

[01:29:36] I think though the stuff we were talking about before about like even you and I and our relationship to media in terms of AirPods and podcasts is like a deep phenomenological difference Like I don't think it's It seems like it might be surface like oh yeah

[01:29:52] I listen to more podcasts now than I ever you know than I ever listened to audio books when I was a kid But I think there is something real deep I think and I think for instance that cohort of kids who was in high school

[01:30:03] or even just us like people like us who spent two years apart from you know in social isolation we have like a lot of people probably not you had increased anxiety just from like the first parties they went to and not because of COVID just because of people

[01:30:20] because of like being around people I think that technology and this is what I love about McLuhan he's saying pay attention to this stuff because if you're just paying attention to like what you were watching on Netflix during COVID that's a complete that's a complete distraction

[01:30:36] like were you watching Marvel movies or were you watching you know film noir no Tiger King that's the problem with these kids they're watching Tiger King Right It's that we could it's that what it meant to be indoors for two years

[01:30:50] is different than what it would have meant to be indoors for two years in the 1918 epidemic and technology has made that really different Yeah I'll give you an example like I'm going on and on but I think this is this is good stuff

[01:31:02] like I was at this conference the social psychology conference that I was talking about in the last episode and I ran into one of my students who just started working with me and she was like it's really weird to see you in person

[01:31:15] like it felt like a different social interaction that we were having we've been meeting every week for like a year and being next to each other just felt like it was a different human being Right This is why like if you send me an email

[01:31:31] that's such a different thing than if you send me a text which is such a different thing than if we talk on the phone or if we see each other in person like those are completely different kinds of experiences but we do have a tendency to conflate it

[01:31:43] like you know I'm sure this podcast would be very different if we recorded it in person and we lived in the same city and we all these things have this cumulative effect on top of that there's this general kind of alienating and atomizing effect

[01:31:57] that these kinds of technologies have they give you this kind of simulation of social interaction that can probably satisfy a surface need that you have and all that does is make it so that when you actually go out and interact with people like they did in the

[01:32:14] old tribal days of like the 1990s or whatever then like they don't know how to handle it and so that's going to shape the way they interact with each other that there's this baseline social anxiety that has been there always to some extent but it's probably been amplified

[01:32:31] and is only going to get further amplified in that direction Yeah One of the things I wanted to say what you were saying earlier that once these technologies are out there it's like even if you are concerned about its effect it's like you can't not do it

[01:32:48] because it's out there it's like texting it's like well like maybe it's not a good thing to be constantly texting your kid but here's this funny joke or this funny link that she would like and it's like so it's like just its availability

[01:33:01] makes it hard to turn down even if you're worried about some of the effects and one of the things I was thinking did you do for Bella like that Life 365 or whatever what is it it's essentially like a tracker for your kid so your kid

[01:33:16] so you'll always know where your kid is No but she has location turned on for me on her iPhone so I know and I told her I was like look I will never check unless I'm worried like about something and and I promise you that turning it on

[01:33:35] I mean she didn't need a lot of convincing because they share location with each other which I think is fucking bat shit and so I said look I'll text you less if I have this because you know if you stayed out late and I know

[01:33:49] that you're at a party and I can just see you know I just won't bother you you know like I won't be like hey are you okay yeah so I had this kind of argument with some of my friends who are doing it with their kids

[01:34:02] and I was thinking how can you do this this is Orwellian this is like some kind of dystopia that you're constantly tracking your kid like part of growing up is that you know that you can't be tracked and you can't be found

[01:34:14] and all of them gave an answer like well yeah but if you can do it like what if like what if like I don't know where she is and she's supposed to be somewhere and plus it's more convenient like I'll know if we're supposed to meet and she's

[01:34:28] 10 minutes late or half an hour late like I'll know what it's gonna be and it's and I happen to on this particular issue and probably very few others take that kind of troglodyte stand of no like that was something that I didn't have when I was a kid

[01:34:44] I was fine my parents didn't need to know where I was every two seconds and so I'm not gonna do it but there's so many other times and I'm sure I could have gotten pushed in this direction even on this issue where we just accept it cause

[01:34:59] it's like it's there and so why would you not do it you can conceive of times where it would be really helpful if not like life saving and so then just the fact that it exists makes you think you can't not do it you know

[01:35:13] you can't not treat it right and I think even like even sneakier than that it hijacks your normal like normal human emotional systems where if your daughter was in the house and you like you could just easily call out to her and say hi how was your day

[01:35:35] now you can do that over the phone and so your impulse is just a good normal human one to reach out to your daughter but what we had what you and I had was that our parents couldn't do that every day to us I'm sure they wanted to

[01:35:48] I'm sure like that feeling of like missing your kid it's just the harsh reality was that you yeah you can't you just can't and now that we can it seems even like well why but why wouldn't you reach out to your daughter you know right

[01:36:03] and I feel that and like when it comes to like texting like all the time and talking on the phone all the time like I do all that stuff even though you know I'm sure that has effects um that are some good some bad but I feel like

[01:36:18] it's just a bad thing that we're doing and I don't know like I do think between COVID and the internet and the effects on mental health in teenagers now it's very hard to judge to what extent it's influenced by what but it's it does seem like it's a

[01:36:49] bad thing and I feel like it's a bad thing that we're doing and I don't know what I'm trying to say but I feel like it's a bad thing that we're doing and I don't know what I'm trying to say but I feel like it's a bad thing

[01:37:29] that we're doing and I don't know what I'm trying to say but I don't know what I'm trying to say but I feel like it's a bad thing that we're doing and I don't know what I'm trying to say but I don't know what I'm trying to say

[01:38:13] the next book or a later book, The Medium is the Massage. Yeah, I saw that. It was because of a typo, but then he liked it. So he kept it. Then he liked it. Yeah, yeah. You know what hasn't changed society the way people thought it might,

[01:38:30] at least so far, is virtual porn. This, tune in next time where we talk about why has virtual porn not taken off? All right, join us next time for the podcast, Very Bad Wizards. The podcast is the message. The podcast is the message.

[01:39:17] Thoughts, and with no more brains than you have, anybody can have a brain? Very bad man. I'm a very good man, just a very bad wizard.