Rewind: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

0:00Thank you.

0:34so

0:45brian are you tired yeah that's my secret philip i'm always tired that's my secret

0:52Phillip: the secret cap you were uh stuck on a plane for hours you like wrote an angry tweet did you delete it oh man oh i i didn't delete it i saved it i have that you never actually you never actually hit the button i didn't hit send i'm actually gonna just send that privately it's it's delta's delta is going down one more time delta that's all it takes is one more time just push me one more time yeah that's uh just push me a little further getting out of our our on-site our on-site was incredible what a what a time what a time to be alive i can't beach florida i can't wait to have you back it was so cool to have you here and then you got stuck you couldn't get out of palm beach you were stuck yeah it was it was long because it was like la to palm beach and then my plane broke down and then potus came in and the whole airport shut down and then i missed my flight and we shan't talk about yes um but enough of that we have probably i mean to to be honest, like probably, uh, the guests I've been most anticipating, maybe my whole life.

1:59Uh, yeah, not even an exaggeration.

2:01Phillip: Um, I think, uh, what's, what's great about the influence of, of this show. Um, and we've been talking about scenes, you know, we had Daisy on, uh, and Francis, uh, here just a few weeks ago, we've been talking about how, um, we have found other people who sort of have similar modes of thought and other folks who I think have shared similar mind space and spheres of influence. And Future Commerce has allowed us to find other folks who I think have intellectual prowess that I think have expanded the way that we think, but also have allowed us to bring their intellectual modes of thought to our community.

2:44Phillip: And it has been such an honor and a privilege for you, I think, in particular, but for us generally to bring people like Andrew McLuhan to the Future Commerce audience. And so it is a joy and a privilege to welcome author, teacher, speaker and consultant and the steward of the McLuhan Institute to the show today. Welcome to Future Commerce, Mr. Andrew McLuhan. Wow. Thank you. Thank you so much. That is the privilege of having a podcast or show. It's to be able to invite people that you want to talk to who wouldn't talk to you otherwise. That said, I'm always happy to talk to you guys. That came out kind of bad.

3:28And it's also funny that Brian first came on my show, on my radio show. So I guess, Philip, that means you're next.

3:38Phillip: Oh, I wouldn't even know what to talk about. Maybe we could talk about the fact that you're in our newest journal, Lore. You actually closed out this book. And we'll talk about this in just a little bit. But we've collaborated just a few times here. And I'm just I am so honored and thrilled that we have this now, I think, multi-year-long friendship and collaboration between our two camps. And I think that that's just so cool. But welcome. Awesome. For those who aren't familiar, catch us up. What are you working on these days over at the McLuhan Institute? doing? You know, I just actually went over to one of my whiteboards to make a list of the things I'm working on because I was starting to lose track, which means I'm probably working on too many things.

4:28Actually, I'm actively working on working less. That is, I'm working on fewer things because I've been trying to write a book. Well, I've tried to write several books, and it's more difficult than you think. It's easy to come up with the ideas. It's quite another thing to make a book appear, a physical object, as you guys know. but yeah I'm trying to write this book on the medium is the message you know my grandfather's phrase and for a few reasons for one oh well we could we could go way down the wormhole here but what the heck for one I think the medium is the message is the basic unit of media studies of understanding how technologies affect us, aside from their content and, you know, persuasion and propaganda and that kind of thing.

5:35How, you know, the root of this phrase, we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. What is the mechanism by which we're shaped? And the answer to how that happens is via the medium, you know, because the medium itself is what reshapes us individually and socially. That is the very short answer. The longer answer, I think, was worth exploring. So when I started the McLuhan Institute back in like 2017, and I was thinking about, you know, where to start, what to do with it.

6:19I've found that my family's work is huge. It touches so many different parts of our world and our lives, fields of study, spheres of influence. And I've also found that it's when you start to talk about it with people, you know, when somebody says, well, what's the McLuhan Institute about? Or what did Marshall McLuhan do? Right? It's like, I learned a lesson early on. I was invited to teach a class at Queen's University. And I thought, wow, this is great. This is my chance to teach them all the things. So I wrote down a couple pages of notes and I wanted to teach them about the medium is the message and about the tetrads and the laws of media and about hot and cool media and understanding media and about literature and how literature, uh, literary criticism led to media studies and all the things.

7:20Right. Um, and I, I discovered very quickly that, uh, it's easy to overwhelm people with too much information and, and you're doing, it's almost the worst thing you can do because you lose them and it can be hard to get them back. What I've discovered is that if you want to teach people something, well, you've got to teach them something. That sounds really stupid to say, but it's much easier and more effective to teach one thing than to try and teach 10 things at one time. And the other thing paired with that is that a lot of these ideas with media study are things that people aren't really exposed to.

8:14They're not used to thinking like this. It's really hard for people to put content to the side and look at structure and form and how that affects you. and to put aside things like meaning and morals, like are these good or bad things? What do they mean? Put those things aside and look at the effect. Really, really difficult for us to do in a world where we're quick to judgment. We want to judge. We want to know, is this good for me? Is this bad for me, for my family? the problem is when you when you focus on those questions you lose a lot of what's actually happening because a lot of what's happening whether it's good or bad depends where you are socially personally in time these things are positional and the values even can be relative so so i'm constantly trying to dial things back and simplify things understanding that they're very complicated it's new information so i hit on the medium is the message as basically the basic unit of understanding like this is where we've got to start if we want to understand how technology works the basic thing to understand is that the major changes that happen to us individually and socially come from the structure of the forms rather than the content or the uses to which they're put.

9:47The medium is the message.

9:49Phillip: All right, here's something that every brand leader listening already knows in their guts. A surprising amount of consumer decision-making that you do on the brand side still comes down to some form of educated guess. Now, it's not because you don't have data, right? I mean, to be honest with you, I think we have too much data, but that's another story for another time. It's the fragmentation, right? Your reviews live in one platform. You have social listening with another tool that you're paying for. You're probably not even using. You get the email in your inbox. You don't even look at it. Call center transcripts.

10:21Phillip: Yeah, there's going to someone else and they live in another system research that's buried in like a million decks and shared drives. You don't even know where they are. I'm just be honest with me. Every time someone has to pull all of those signals together, you're spending time and money just to understand what your customer is already telling you. The intelligence, you've got it. It's just fragmented and it lives in a million places. And that's what our newest partner, Merziv, changes. They're a consumer intelligence platform and they're built for the enterprise and they're built for brands that connect all of these sources together and helps you to interrogate them as if they're one unified data set.

11:01Phillip: You ask a question and Mercev synthesizes all of that into evidence that is clear answers to your question. This is the kind of work that took an analyst days or weeks in the old world and it can happen in minutes now. So you spend less time putting together a picture of what your consumer might be doing. You spend a lot more time deciding on all the ways that you can act on what you're going to do about it. It's the difference between guessing and knowing. It's called Merziv. Go find your answer at Merziv.com. That's M-E-R-C-I-V.com. Consumer intelligence for brands that need answers, not another dashboard.

11:45Phillip: That's Merziv, M-E-R-C-I-V.com. Do you think it's fair, just to jump in, Do you think it's fair for others to interpret that in their own context? For instance, you know, we've spent a few years interpreting the medium as the message in our own context, as sort of commerce as a form of media, especially in the modern day where we say commerce is our culture, to say that, you know, so much of online shopping, especially we talk about retail media nowadays, like media and advertising and commerce have all sort of formed together and sort of one sort of like, you know, one cohesive experience. It is a it follows you around everywhere you go.

12:36Phillip: These media networks sort of have fingerprinted people. I walk into a store, I walk out of that store. And now my Instagram has fingerprinted me, it's going to follow me around forever. So there's sort of this like media journey, commerce journey that are sort of these cohesive user flows now. They're sort of one in the same to most people. They sort of feel like they have these seamless, they feel seamless to some degree. And so when we've interpreted or when I've interpreted, I want to speak for Brian, when I've interpreted the medium as the message, I'm saying from my perspective, commerce is a form of media.

13:16Phillip: It is manipulating people in some way and people are being shaped by it. Do you think that that's a fair interpretation or is it a simplistic interpretation from our own perspective? I'm sure I could argue both ways.

13:37My dad liked to quote T.S. Eliot often. Eric, right? Yeah, Eric, who was Marshall's eldest son. T.S. Eliot, somebody once asked him about one of his poems and what it meant. And I said, I got this, is this what it means? And Eliot's response was basically that a poem can't mean something that it doesn't mean to you.

14:05which is kind of deep it's not the cop-out that it sounds like

14:13um there's many layers to it the fascinating thing the most fascinating thing to me about the medium is the message is that it's five words it's five words and there are galaxies of meaning in it.

14:31People, I've been tracking it. So I've been tracking it from the first time Marshall said it in 1958 in a speech. He was actually giving a talk at a radio broadcaster's conference in Vancouver in 1958, and they were really worried about television, which they had reason to be, just like people today are worried about AI. And Marshall told them that the medium is a message. He told them that, you know, yes, you're obsolete. No, that doesn't mean you're dead. But obsolescence, he said, never meant the death of anything, merely the beginning. Because a new medium comes along and it tends to absorb the older medium as its content, for one thing.

15:31But the older medium also gets a rebirth, usually as an art form. where once the thing was kind of vulgar and pop and for the masses, now, like film used to be, now it's an art form. This is part of the cycle of innovation. So you can look at it as a threat. You can also look at it as an area of opportunity. In fact, if you're smart, you'll look at it as an area of opportunity because while some people jump ship, there's a lot of life left there if you want to take advantage of it. Is this why artists are so often drawn to nostalgia? Nostalgia is actually just an example of one medium transforming to, it's becoming obsolete and therefore it's becoming an art form.

16:31And so the artists are like, that is cool. this is something to work with um but it's interesting because that they they are also the canary in the coal mine right um so how does that work when you're looking backwards to create art uh you want to but but you're also the ones that that are like out in front telling telling the new stories of what will happen um how does that all kind of interplay happen well um it's an interesting process and nostalgia nostalgia is a is a kind of a sign of rebirth um it means when when all of a sudden something uh when that nostalgic impulse is invoked it means that something big has happened some change has happened right it's a um it's part of part of that cycle of innovation and obsolescence and nostalgia.

17:35And as an art form, it's usually very rich territory. It can be interesting for the artist, but it's also a surefire way to connect with certain groups of people, certain audiences, right? For which that's significant. You know, we have nostalgia for the times which formed us. Right? And one of the interesting things about today is that cycle is shrinking because our speed, our rate of innovation happens so fast. So, you know, before you know it, you know, 2020 is going to be coming back, right? When it used to be, you know, a couple of decades. We used to think of a generation in terms of like 20, 30 years.

18:46But that's... Now it's based on gaming consoles. Like, that's the nostalgia. Because the gaming consoles form a generation. Yeah. Or GPT-3 and 4, you know, software generations. And that happens in a year or less. So, you know, I've even seen some like early mid-journey type images as, you know, a kind of a retro aesthetic. Yes, same. Right? And wow, that's interesting. but you know the medium is a message thing is wild because well it really rests on on two words medium and message and people don't usually stop to think about what those terms mean but for me the easiest way I've found to to explain or help people understand what the phrase means, is just to show them all the different ways that my grandfather, that Marshall, used them over the years.

19:55So this is the backbone of my book is actually this timeline from 1958 and along to about 1979 when the last time he had a major stroke and wasn't able to speak for the last year and a half of his life. So about the last time he said it. And then all the years in between all the various ways he said the medium is the message, are really interesting ways of exploring its meaning. And it's funny how it still strikes a chord with people today. I was in the States two weeks ago for a conference.

20:37And I drove down. I tried to cross the U.S. border, and the border person sent me over for an extra interview. and the guy was like after they eventually got to talking with me he said so what are you talking about and i said uh words i said words i was like yeah you know words uh words as a technology um the word in your mind the spoken word the written word the typed word um and now there's a very interesting evolution happening with words uh with ai um interesting things are happening with the word it's like you could see his eyes glaze over he's like okay whatever buddy um funnily enough on on the way back coming across the canadian side hand over my passport how long have you been in the states since wednesday what were you doing giving a talk oh yeah on what the medium is the message that is amazing i may have mentioned that i'm funny so that it's interesting how that phrase has gotten into the the public imagination and people use it as kind of a foil uh to you know explore different things I do think the fun thing about the phrase is it's many meanings.

22:15And one of those meanings is actually medium can mean more than one thing as a word. And I think that's something that people forget about in that phrase. How is the word medium applied to people and when is it applied to people? And that adds a whole additional layer on top of it. Is that something you've explored? I'm sure you have. Definitely. Well, one of the beautiful things about the phrase is also one of the things that frustrates people, and that is its ambiguity and its paradox. But those things are poetic techniques in order to get you to think, God forbid, that you should have to think about something.

23:03Phillip: It's the most frustrating thing about people listening to this podcast, by the way. Why do you make me think? Well, we want to understand. The goal is to understand things. Well, what is the goal, actually? For Marshall McLuhan, what the point was, was he saw that through human history, we've been essentially controlled and steered more by the structure and the nature of our innovations. than what we've done with them on purpose, right? That it's been mostly an unconscious and subliminal process. We create this great new tool, and then we wake up a decade later wondering what happened to our culture, right?

23:52Not realizing that a new medium is a new culture. It's a new person, it's a new culture. Is there any avoiding it is kind of the question. So, the first part of that as well. First, pay attention to it. But his general goal was prediction and control.

24:22Marshall was asked in an interview once if there was any time period he would rather be alive in. And he said, I'd rather be alive in any time period when people were going to leave things alone. He was actually a very conservative guy. He basically loved books and literate culture and wanted to do... He was an English professor. And the reporter, the interviewer said, but they're not going to leave it alone, are they? And Marshall said, no, they're not. So the only thing you can do is find where all the buttons are and put as many of them off as possible because he says i refuse to simply lay back and let the juggernaut roll over me you know we don't we don't like finding out that we're being used you know we hate we really do not like finding out that um you know other things have been going on below our notice and we feel used and yet everyone seems to have a sense that this is happening Like everyone kind of feels it in their gut, in their spirit.

25:36But that's a change. Yeah. That's new. That's new. That is new. It is new because they haven't been used in the way that they're being used in the past, at least not at the level that we're experiencing with the internet. Well, the thing is, we have, I think. You know what? Language, human language, was just as revolutionary for pre-language humans as the internet is or was for literate people. I would argue just as impactful. Two completely different societies.

26:21but you know Bertrand Russell Marshall like to bring up said that if we only raise the temperature of the bath water by a degree every hour we wouldn't know when to scream and the fact is if you if you get into a bath and you slowly raise the temperature you can get into a really hot bath quite comfortably. But if you tried to step into that bath from the cool room, you'd feel like you burnt your foot, right? And the point of that is that when technological change happens really slowly, we adapt, we adjust, we don't notice. The temperature, the result is the same, but we don't notice. So it's easier to transition.

27:12i think today we're in effect stepping into a boiling bath every time we turn around and we can't ignore it anymore and it's you know it's disorienting disconcerting and it's but the problem is it's like the to raise another quote we don't know who discovered water but we know it wasn't a fish, right? The difficulty is that these changes are very difficult to say where they come from, right? It's not as easy as taking your foot into the water because we don't realize we've put our foot in the water. And this is the mediumist message thing. Because as long as we focus on content and censorship and proper use or whatever else, um you know we we kind of are missing a lot of the point but uh but the effect is there and so people are really freaked out about ai because they recognize that this is world changing and this actually gives me uh hope uh in terms of you know technological change in human agency because things don't change typically in our societies until people get really pissed off, right?

28:40And demand change from those in a position to do it. Because, you know, yeah, I could throw away my smartphone. Sure, I could disconnect the internet and just be in this building with my books and whatever. but um you know another anecdote is marshall mcclellan and wh odd and buckminster fuller were at the university of toronto debating television and oddin who was a poet and playwright said you know i don't have a television i wouldn't dream of having one and marshall said well you merely you merely suffer the consequences without enjoying any of the benefits

29:28which you know so i could throw i could turn off the tv i could throw away my cell phone but i still live in a smartphone culture i still live in a world controlled by the smartphone and without it uh you're at a serious disadvantage um and you don't enjoy any of the benefits either but Marshall also if I recall correctly did sort of limit usage at some level am I wrong? sure so Marshall determined that the effects of technologies come on two major levels the personal and the social so and this is something that I'm working on with my book is a McLuhan model of communication or media because like a graphic model a visual model because we have like the shannon weaver model of communication which uh shows you know that a message right has a source and then it goes through a channel and then it gets eventually to a receiver right and the message goes through and marshall called this a transportation model of communication how a message gets from one place to another with minimal disruption.

30:50And that's great as far as transmitting messages goes, but it doesn't account for what we might think of as the side effects, which end up being the main effects. So the difference between a world with telephones in a world without telephones, the difference in culture, right? That cars and roads created suburbs more than they just allowed people to get to work and home, right? And that suburbs created a certain way of life in middle America and all the rest of it. That isn't taken into account in that model. So the personal and the social, first technologies affect us individually because essentially humans are bundles of meat around our various sensory organs, right?

31:54Organs of perception. So we have our eyes and our ears, taste, all these things which take in information, right?

32:07And then downstream of that, we make sense of things or make determinations, right? This tastes good. This tastes bad. So this is good for this is bad, or that's beautiful. Oh, that's an awful sound. Oh, that's way too loud. That's just right. You know? But the first thing is the senses. Because as far as we're concerned, nothing exists outside of our senses. If we don't have eyes to see, we don't see anything.

32:41Now, so the senses, basically it all, I like to say we're the sum of our senses. Because it basically comes down to the nature of our senses. And And a lot, our senses are not, forgive me if I'm getting way too into the weeds with this, but our senses aren't static, inert things. They change. When you're first born, your senses, like your sense of sight, your sense of sound, your sense of touch, especially. And remember that touch doesn't just happen on your fingertips, right? Your whole skin is all about touch. We know this very well. Pleasure or pain. But when we're first born, when we're very young, sensation is 100%.

33:42Everything is bright. Everything is loud. Everything is exquisite. Or everything is painful. and as we age, our senses form pathways, they get used to things and they dull even. Two of three of us, maybe you're wearing contacts, Brian or had laser eye surgery, two or three of us are wearing glasses because we don't see as well as we used to.

34:09Phillip: I think Brian's just a raw dog in it. I think he also can't see, he just doesn't wear them. i have like vision right on the edge it's like i technically i pass the driver's you know test every year but he's in denial but you know as we grow older our senses tend to atrophy a bit they grow duller we don't see as well we don't hear as well we don't taste as well we add seasoning we add flavor not because we're more adventurous although there's that but because our sensation lessens so we got to pick it pick it up right our senses aren't inert things um i would make the case that sometimes that doling allows us to to go after things that we wouldn't be able to go after before so for sure actually there's like a there's some interesting effects of the doling i'm sure you're going to get into this um yeah i mean it isn't necessarily a disadvantage um but it is a fact right um what you want to make of that fact is another thing but the point of that is that um our senses aren't plastic they aren't inert and uh the other main point here is that they exist together as one thing we're one thing you know individually although people compartmentalize all the time uh people compartmentalize but um but it's really hard to to fool your senses you can ignore them a little bit but uh you know again there's there's a content level and then there's a deeper level um the nature of perception is that we're always um experiencing far more than we're aware of you guys know this as advertisers, a lot of advertising kind of relies on the fact that people notice things, but they don't pay attention to them.

36:16And there are very human reasons for that. If we were to pay attention to everything which passed through our senses, well, we'd go crazy, and we'd never be able to get anything done. because there's just so much. We live in such stimulating environments. Our senses pick up so many things. And if I were to pay too much attention to the birds chirping outside or to the cat meowing beside me, I wouldn't be able to have this conversation. My attention would be too divided. So we necessarily focus on things, but uh but there's a lot happening there's a lot happening yeah and then actually just a quick interjection injection like we just talked with uh dacy eliot and francis there uh about this like attention is getting split so so brutally right now like you're being told to pay attention to competing things at the same time and you end up giving them less attention and and also the internet wants to call like half attention full attention and so if they can even get half of your attention that's like changing how we think about what attention is um sure well attention is a is a scale it's it's a range not all attention is created equal no not at all and And, you know, there's levels of focus.

37:54And attention is also something to train, something that can be trained, like memory. It's a skill, really. One of the points my grandfather made about writing and the written and printed word, well, about senses, really. was the big distinction between the eye and the ear. Actually, I got into this a little bit in my speech. The conference I was at two weeks ago was about orality and literacy. You know, the world of speech and the ear before writing, and then the literate world after writing. And they're very different worlds. very different modes of experience because they're very different senses the eye for example tends to well it has a an area of focus right a degree of vision versus the ear which hears from all around at once we we talk you know metaphorically about having eyes in the back of your head, but we really see forward and a little bit to the side.

39:12But we hear from all directions at once. So, that's one point. And it's not a trivial difference. The eye also tends to look at one thing at a time, right? Like we do get some peripheral, but we generally have an area of focus versus the ear, which doesn't quite work that way. In fact, if we want to focus our ear, we tend to close our eyes and listen more intently and to kind of turn. But they're very different modes of experience. So the eye tends to look at one thing at a time, and that naturally kind of leads to sequence. like things A, B, C, D, or 1, 2, 3, 4, things following another, versus the ear, which tends to lean towards simultaneity.

40:12You know, everything, everywhere, all at once. Marshall's contention in books like The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media was that literacy, the written word, was I-dominant. And this new world that they were coming into in the early 20th century, even in the 19th century, the electric world, did not have that character of the eye, the one thing at a time. He felt that it had more in common, actually, with the central nervous system. had more in common with the ear than with the eye. Yeah, which is a major distinction. And his book, Understanding Media, is really about the transition between these two great ages, the age of print and literacy and mechanism, and the electric age, which was rapidly taking over.

41:24The mechanism, the machine, was basically kind of the end of the arc of techniques that started with the printed word, the written word, the alphabet, if you want to go back. so the alphabet was a revolutionary technology which took language which was for the ear and made it for the eye which was a very radical thing because it it separated it separated sound from sense for meaning the phonetic alphabet takes these letters which don't mean anything on their own and assigns them meaning as opposed to words which mean things. Right. And like speed readers hear things less in their head. They just absorb the meaning.

42:21Like if you're really fast, sometimes you skip the orality inside your mind, I think, because a lot of people, when they read, they have to hear what they're reading. but speed readers could just like kind of skip past retranslating it into the oral like consciousness um right yeah and uh for the sonic consciousness or whatever you want to call it um and that's that's how they can like move past the the words more quickly well you have to move um you have to move faster than speech because each um only goes at about 120 to 140 words a minute if you want to read faster than that you obviously have to bypass um speech uh there's another study that is interesting yeah because like electric media is faster than speech no question so it's this weird new orality that we're talking about because you're you're you're going to be absorbed you should be able to absorb things through your ears at the speed of electricity but we have this sorality that's already inherent um this this makes me think that we're going to see even faster evolutions in language and actually we're already seeing that between ais and they're like kind of inventing their own AI speak.

43:51And I was thinking about this the other day. I don't remember if I was talking to somebody about it or I just was thinking about it. But like in the future, sounds may have way more encoded in them, like enough to create a whole web page. You know what I mean? like like that if we're talking about the evolution of language um a lot of a lot of how our language works right now isn't is is like built for an embodied world but that like building stuff that's disembodied in the digital world that doesn't require you know a physical as much, it's based on light and electricity, then you can create whole worlds with single sounds.

44:45You heard it here first, Brian's the

44:47Phillip: Bene Gesserit. He's like, he's got the voice. I got the voice. We might not even need that much. But this is why Marshall likened the new technologies having more in common to central nervous system um than otherwise because messages from our central nervous system neurons firing through our brains uh move at the speed of well at the speed of light right or better so you're saying we can't adapt to this new world because right now it feels like we're not built to interact with with computers like that's the whole norbert weiner thing like some things should be computer to computer interactions something should be human to computer actions and something should be human human and like we have to categorize where those things belong but you're saying maybe because our brains can technically move at that speed there is a world in which we can start to absorb and interact with with things that but it's happening too quickly we've moved too fast we can't keep up can't adapt is that what he's saying that's not what i heard i put i put words in your mouth right andrew well oh i i knew barry would make an appearance what's up barry um i mean should meant to um when i first went to europe uh in my 20s uh as an adult um I was struck by the difference in the sense of history.

46:32Here in Canada, if a building is from the 1800s, that's old. In Europe, I was in 11th century castles. Yeah. Like, wait, what? Businesses that are centuries and centuries and centuries old. Um, these things can be very, very relative depending on where you're coming from. Um, the things, you know, one of the, one of the downsides or upsides, uh, you know, was that Spider-Man thing with great power comes great responsibility. You know, you can't unsee things. You can't unknow things. Um, ignorance is bliss in a lot of ways. and you know this might account for our uh seemingly motivated ignorance when it comes to these things because um when you understand something it kind of adds a responsibility right as they say ignorance of the laws all this business is driven on this right now fear of finding out is like the i can't take credit for that one but uh you're like people are afraid to find out because it puts them in a position of having to be responsible for what they know well it takes the fun out of it right it's like man i got a great deal on that shirt i don't want to find out why i got a great deal on that shirt wow you know i want to enjoy the thrill of that purchase, not the dismay at somebody's six-year-old child, you know, in a factory somewhere making it so I could buy it for six bucks.

48:31Right, Barry? That's right.

48:34Phillip: Well, just to go back to, you know, something I think that's, like, if we were to project it beyond, you know, the past into and the present into the future. If we looked at the, there's a trend line, right? So we had this, from the past, this, the Gutenberg, the printing press, visual media into what we call it electric media, and sort of like maybe radio auditory processing. And then we have sort of the internet age, which maybe is something else, something different. Now we're into this AI moment. And something that made the rounds yesterday is an HBR study, which we'll throw into the show notes and we'll probably show here on the YouTube that shows the different modalities of this study that made the rounds here, preferences for using AI and sort of the top box preferences of what people are using AI for.

49:40Phillip: A lot of it's recommendation based. A lot of it is self-service, but a lot of it is like relationship and advice based. And so a lot of it seems to be indexing towards things you might think of as, I mean, companionship is probably not the right word, but there's a word of like a surrogacy for a, uh, like a companionship or advice or therapy or just belonging someone to be with. Um, and this is anecdotal at best, uh, but something that felt very analogous to this is a, is, is a post on X that did, didn't do numbers, but felt like it was germane to the conversation was uh damon chen uh user on x uh damon g chen posted i used to love listening to podcasts when i'm driving now i prefer chatting with chat gpt and voice chat mode and this to me feels like it's now we've sort of moved into a new that's a new mode feels like we've shifted into something different and that that feels like it's projecting beyond us right That's no longer an internalization of some thing.

50:55Phillip: It feels like it's parasocial or it's projected beyond outside of us now. It's not just our internal senses. It's outside of us. It's extra sensory. I'm sure there's something really visual there to me. It feels like it's outside of our senses. But I don't want to – I'm not leading the witness here. I'm curious how you interpret that, Andrew. You know, it seems like you're trying to, there's a lot of what you do, and this is something I'm curious, in that sense, you know, your work is rooted in a remarkable lineage, for sure. But, you know, you have your, you've contributed to our work over the last couple of years.

51:43Phillip: and how do you personally negotiate these types of ideas and your own thoughts while also you're actively interpreting your own ideas, you're evolving your own ideas, but you have this influence of your father and your grandfather as well. I'm curious how you think of this. You're living in this age. They're not, right? So I'm curious, what do you think about all of this? and, you know. There's about 10 questions in there. Well, sorry. I haven't spoken a lot in the last 50 minutes. So I apologize. You know, I used to, my wife is, my wife is in constant awe of how I can talk to people like this.

52:30I was like, well, I mean, try and shut me up.

52:35There's so many things to say about it. For one thing, and I talk about Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan's 1964 book, Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man, a lot, because there's so much there. um as i said it's the kind of the underlying theme of it is this switch over between um the mechanistic age which kind of as marshall charts it began with the phonetic alphabet and ended with this technique of of the mechanical um the assembly line for example which the strength of the assembly line was in fragmenting things into their component parts in order to repeat the process and put them back together again in identical ways.

53:24This was the power of the phonetic alphabet, which took apart speech into component parts and allowed you to put them together. It became the printing press, which made this into movable type that allowed you to put things together and redo it identically in ways over and over and over and over. But the nature of this is the nature of the eye to take things apart, to isolate things, versus the nature of the ear and the nature of the electric, which is instead of sequentiality, it's simultaneity. Instead of fragmenting and bringing things apart, it's about simultaneity and bringing things together.

54:13so you know the nature of the structure has everything to do with the nature of the effect and by studying the structure you can learn a lot about the effect so when the nature of the of the dominant technology is all about fragmenting and pulling things apart you know you have things like abstract thought and reasoning and you know being able to put your emotions aside and analyze things kind of coldly these are effects of of that structure take that structure away and you're left with just the ghost of something without the foundation to back it up, which accounts for, I think of it as a kind of dissonance, right?

55:08We're left with these values, but these values are born of habits, which are born of structures. And you take those things away, and without the structure to hold it up, they collapse. And we're seeing that all around us. But so, when things are, when the fragmentation, pushing things apart is quite different from simultaneity and involvement and putting things together, pulling things together. And that nature explains things like, Like, well, people don't just want to listen to a radio show. They want to be part of it. So we have a podcast, right? And people don't just want to listen to the podcast.

55:59They want to interact with it. So we have these GPT things, which can apply to a book as well. People don't want to just read a book. They want to interact with the book. They want to be part. They want to be involved because everything is coming together. Everything, everywhere, all at once, to me, is the perfect phrase to sum up where we are. And it's early days. I'm not sure people understand, but when you think about the timeline of literacy, which basically ended with electricity, it was electrocuted, that timeline is thousands of years from from the phonetic alphabet to the assembly line electricity was discovered and started making its rounds in the late 18th century you know and we go from electricity to the digital to the internet uh to now this phase of things and I don't think this is the last stop by any means it's a stop along the way

57:17or are we at the end of things Andrew the difficulty here is that our technologies are so powerful that we could destroy ourselves pretty easily uh it was hard to do that with a hammer yes but that's not what i meant actually uh what i meant was uh everything is happening everywhere all the time at one you know once like that when you when that happens now and electric electricity is like just connecting things faster and faster, does that end progress in many ways? Because... Accelerationists would say no. Well, no. Hear me out. Progress as moving people around and getting goods to where they need to be, that's all going to keep changing.

58:16Those are knock-on effects of where we're at. I'm talking about culturally because all information is now going to be made available to everyone whenever they want it. And there's no end to good things to consume, if this makes sense. Like, no one person at this moment can consume all of the good things that are available to consume in their lifetime. even even as we like adapt further and further to the way that technology works and electric electric communication works you you will never be able to as a single person absorb all of the the most excellent of content or forms or media that is available um and so there's no incentive Well, you know, people will never be able to fly in the air like birds, Brian.

59:12Oh, okay. Okay. So you're saying that the ability to like, like I'm thinking about all of literature and like all of, all of like film and so on. And we're going to be able to absorb and internalize like the things that are about that, that actually like are incredible. Or maybe they won't matter. Maybe they won't matter in the future. You're like, I don't know. I'm curious what you think about. Well, I know better than to ever say never. Sure. I think if we can imagine it, there's a world where it's possible. I can imagine some pretty weird things, man. Yeah. I don't know. I'm sure you can, Brian.

59:56We know you. I mean, possible and likely are very different things. However, again in Understanding Media, actually Marshall opens the book saying, rapidly we're approaching the final phase of the extensions of man. That's exactly what I'm talking about. The extension of consciousness. Yeah. So... But we're not there. That's not AI. AI is still an external thing.

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1:01:09Phillip: And they looked at everything from checkout and shipping to delivery and unboxing. And then they turned all of that research into the DTC fulfillment experience quiz. It's 16 questions. It takes five minutes and it gives you a benchmark for where your operation is strong and where there's a gap for the customer experience that's breaking down for you right now. And let's say that fulfillment is becoming a constraint on your growth. Ship Fusion is giving future commerce listeners three months of free fulfillment when you partner with them. I can't think of a better way of getting started on BFCM than doing that right now.

1:01:44Phillip: So start your journey by banking your operation at shipfusion.com slash future commerce. that's shipfusion.com slash future commerce take the dtc fulfillment experience quiz 16 questions five minutes get a benchmark for where you are and get three months of free fulfillment when you partner with them but you got to use our link shipfusion.com slash future commerce um people are trying to make moves that way what would it be tell us what would it be like you say ai is not that thing what is the thing well the thing it would be that we're no longer separate but we're all connected and not and not connected in that i can we can talk like this um so it's not even connected it's we are become right so i don't know if you ever watched Star Trek The Next Generation.

1:02:42Yes, Borg. The Borg. The Borg. The Borg is that. It's one organism. All aware. Just like in yourself. If I hurt my hand, I know about it. If we were all connected, this is, you know, so I think a lot about words. And my speech at Geneva College was about words. and about the evolution of the word. You know, I don't need words in myself. We sometimes, some of us think in words, some of us don't think in words, and the two groups are often shocked to find that the other exists. But you don't need words. Marshall said, again, in Understanding Media, that humans don't need words any more than computers need numbers.

1:03:39and he said that in 1964 by the way but um we don't particularly need words and if the three of us shared a mind um we wouldn't need words either we wouldn't need all kinds of things like uh inhibition or decency you know what i'm thinking right the minute i think it um So is that the end game? Like the Borg? Like, that's our, that's our future. Like, and I'm, I don't mean to be facetious, like, but if electric media is like, connecting us faster and faster to the point where everyone will know what everyone else is thinking at all times, in some sense, like, in focus. Brian, it sounds like you just need to read Homo Deus.

1:04:30It sounds like that's what you need to do. so part of me is like screw that i don't want that i'm out like i i think i understand that that that reaction is born of a certain set of habits and biases and values certainly yeah no no no question it is some people for example mr musk do not seem to share right and this is where judgment starts to play a role because and i think you said what are the effects i'm looking ahead of the facts and i'm like she i don't i see the effects and where they're headed and i'm like i i that world is the the world and and and maybe maybe i am not like uh i maybe i don't understand what we need to be but i'm like i love our individuality i love that we have things that make us distinct i want distinctness in fact the joy of life comes from distinctiveness uh and so how can we retain distinctiveness in uh in in an upcoming world i think that this requires well being aware of things like you know andrew you're nodding your head or shaking your head Because this is the great question that we need to be asking when we design and build and implement technologies.

1:06:02And it's the one we're not. Because we're putting technology first and ourselves last. And if we want to preserve any part of our culture and the things we value, we have to think about that. So allow me to bring you a solution. It's called commerce.

1:06:28sorry to go there, but like one of the beautiful things about commerce is that it says, I am distinctive. I own things. Commerce is identity exchange, but it's a choice. Like it's the beauty of commerce is that it allows you to say, I have a thing and you have a thing, and we are going to trade those things. But those things then become distinctively separate. Like now you have that thing and I have this thing. And that actually is a distinctive. It's a way of saying that there is something separate. There is something that we have that is special per person and that we have the ability to give that thing to other people.

1:07:13And if you're the Borg, there's no commerce. Commerce is gone in the Borg. and so Philip, we haven't tried about this before this is fun

1:07:27I like stuff I like things if you took a look around this well, even from what you can see you can see that I love variety you know, it blows my mind actually thinking about this kind of an aside do you know what we call do you know what a cobra chicken is i should know what a cobra chicken is i've been on a chicken kick lately so tell me what i'm i'm very excited to hear about a cobra chicken it's it's my favorite new term for canada goose

1:08:06that's pretty good i like that i love it some some person who i believe english was his second language described the canada goose as a cobra chicken because if you if you if you look at it it's got this neck and like the coloring is kind of cobra like i got it um and it's amazing chicken is my jam but um the reason i brought that up is because uh i look at a flock of canada geese or penguins or cobra chickens or whatever. And to me, I just see a flock. I don't see individuals in there. How do they recognize each other as distinct? But they do. They know who their kids are. They know who their parents are.

1:08:55They know who is of their flock and who's not. just as we do. I think we maybe make it a lot more obvious, but maybe I don't. Maybe that's my bias. For them, it's as obvious as looking at each other here is. But to me, one cobra chicken looks much like another.

1:09:25I'm never going to tire from using that phrase. But, you know, for myself, I don't see – I have a funny relationship to commerce. You know, it's one of the big tensions in my life is that I inherited an incredibly rich intellectual legacy. Incredibly rich. Like, ridiculous. And it's not just things. like the 5 ,000 books of my dad's library that I'm here in, or even the library and all the things in it. But it's a way of understanding, a way of knowing, a way of seeing, a way of exploring, of explaining.

1:10:18It's incalculably rich. So I was left with this very rich intellectual legacy, but not really any kind of financial legacy to do anything with it right so for myself what I want to do is sit in here and write my book and teach my classes and give my lectures and not have to not have to worry about how I'm going to replace the roof and building this into an actual international institute that people can come visit and stay and study. But the things are inextricable. So, commerce does come into it. And that's probably the biggest tension or challenge, really, that I face, is reconciling those things.

1:11:18Because I'm just trying to finish my book, But, you know, I also, my kids are in hockey, so I need another job, you know, and like all the other things. So there's, that tension contains a resentment because, you know, and I suppose there's an entitlement that comes into it as well, a sense of entitlement. but maybe it's i feel like you put out your family over the years your legacy is putting out some extremely powerful ideas that influence our culture and have sort of defined like have given definition to a lot of the changes that we've seen um and the problem is that like the in our capitalist society like that hasn't come back as like a like a monetary there's like the the transaction was, uh, imbalanced, if that makes sense.

1:12:25Well, and, um, and actually as a matter of fact, um, so before I did this, I ran a small business doing furniture upholstery for about 10 years. Uh, I'm a craftsman. Um, I didn't, I didn't actually go to university. Uh, I barely graduated high school and I worked all my life. Um, And ending with this small business, you know, repairing and reupholstering people's grandfather's chairs and stuff like that. And I love doing it, actually. but I did that in the big barn next door where I have a workshop here and my dad was here in this office and it was great because when I started getting interested in his work I could come over and have a conversation here with him and kind of fill up my head and walk away and like go actually do some physical work and let my mind kind of chew it over and absorb it but as I got more and more interested in it.

1:13:28I've been really fortunate in that I've been able to, I'm not getting rich, and I'm not even at this, I have a grand vision for what I want the McLuhan Institute to be, and I gave you a hint of it. It's crazy to me that there's no place other than what I've built here in Canada solely dedicated to the McLuhan work. Like, it seems crazy to me. I feel like if Marshall McLuhan were an American, there would already be a McLuhan Institute, and it would be endowed. It's like, could you imagine if Einstein didn't have an intellectual home, right? Right? Me, it's of that level. To me, the medium is the message is E equals MC squared of media studies.

1:14:24So it's crazy to me that that didn't exist before I started this. And I've had to build it myself. And I'm not bitter or angry about that at all. In fact, I wouldn't have it any other way. It means I've been able to do it according to what I felt was the best way to do it. And that's priceless. But I've been really fortunate in that I was able to kind of scale back my upholstery work and scale up this work. And, you know, giving talks and teaching classes kind of pays my bills. I mean, my wife still has a steady, a good job, which means we have a mortgage and everything because the bank doesn't like what I do for a living.

1:15:07But I'm at a I'm at a subsistence kind of level, which to me is huge. Like, honestly, I've made it. I basically am paid to do this work, which is an incredible gift. But it's not, I have bigger dreams. I want people to be able to come to this, you know, I'm in Prince Edward County, Ontario. And it's a growing wine region and food scene. and there's the Sandbanks Provincial Park that brings a million visitors a year. And I want people to be able to come here where it's the greatest, a great concentration of McLuhan media studies. And I want people to be able to come and read these books and think about these ideas and stay here.

1:15:57And I'd love future commerce to be able to come have their off-site here. you know um and it drives me crazy that i'm not there yet um but i am getting there i have no idea where we started this conversation you asked me too many questions at once yeah no i think it

1:16:19Phillip: was the uh the the the role of commerce and um and how you know it plays a role in identity and individuality and whether that individuality has like an end game and whether we lose that over time and um i let you go first in that conversation i think it hits a double-edged sword like the double-edged sword is that it plays a role in in you sort of cementing a legacy and and that legacy i think helps us to fight against this end game um that brian's talking about um and i think uh what i would say is that uh on the other side is that not just the the uh the uh the legacy that you're shepherding at the McLuhan Institute between, you know, the ideas and the writings of, of your father and your grandfather.

1:17:08Phillip: I think there's the other side, which I think both your father and grandfather have written about extensively, especially your father. I think there's a spiritual side and a spiritual depth to be, to be spoken about that we've talked about in the after dark, Brian, that I would say many facets of faith would say to deny yourself individuality and to become less individual and that your needs and rights as an individual need to wither over time to be more a part of a collective. So I would say that in reality, there's a lot of people who would say that the needs of the individual are selfish on some degree.

1:18:01Phillip: And that sounds very Marxist. Doesn't sound very Western or capitalistic. And to some degree, commerce actually is an affront to that. So I feel very conflicted in many ways to that because I think that those things are in tension with each other. So I, when you ask me if I was going to answer that, not to have the last word, I would say I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't know. I have a very, I also have a very little conflict there. But I think what's awesome about this and the kind of conversation we can have here is we can have like a very deep conversation about that tension. And we can have people like you, Andrew, to come and tease it out.

1:18:46Phillip: And we can actually elevate the conversation in this space because that's really what we're trying to do is to help folks think more deeply about the work that we do in commerce. Because I think that we have a very powerful catalyst in society with commerce because I believe that everybody has to engage with it, whether they want to or not. You have to transact to live in this world. And so the work that we do is really important and very meaningful. And I think that at the end of the day, we have the power to shape the future with the commerce work that we do. And so that in that way, whether it's individual or collective, I think that that's the that's the responsibility that we all hold.

1:19:30Phillip: I don't know if I answered that question, Brian, but that's you sort of did. I think it's a really good point. sort of yeah the giving you know giving over to the collective it's interesting I think there's that's part of transaction though I think I mean I would argue but the the yeah I think you did a good job of answering it Philip nicely done last note on this McLuhan's global village you know is sort of in this the thing about mcluhan marshall mcluhan uh is that he didn't i mean a lot of people think about this global village concept as like a really good thing um didn't seem like marshall was like like he he had a different idea of what this was doing to people and how like how they were going to react with each other as a result and you know um we think about commerce and borders coming down or borders going up, as it were.

1:20:34Especially now. Yep. And it's like, what borders even mean anymore because of how governments function or don't function? So yeah, I would love to hear your viewpoint, Andrew, about this global village concept is a hot button issue right now. How are people's transformations due to new technology playing into how we think about global commerce? And I guess that is a really specific question. I'll leave you there. Well, there's a lot there And some of it has to do with these kind of ghost values that we have where the structure, the reason for them being there has disappeared. Like long distance charges on the phone.

1:21:42It seems like a crazy thing now. Right. Where I live, you know, area codes. Where I live, it seems crazy. I can call across from the east coast of Canada to the west coast, but I can't call 50 miles across the lake to Rochester without it being somehow long distance. Right. What are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense. And in fact, my own phone plan is now Canada, US. So it makes no difference as far as that goes. But even Canada, US, it's not any more effort or expense to call to Australia than it is to call across the road. um the global village is uh is a term that marshall came up with he actually kind of stole it from this uh british painter and writer wyndham lewis uh who wrote in a book called america and cosmic man um it sounds like a person cause cosmic man uh america and cosmic man um he wrote that uh the world has shrunk to a very village-like affair with telegraph poles laid end to end so the the idea of the global village came about um as an effective telegraph which um basically connected the world uh in shrunk distance and reorganized what time and space meant.

1:23:24And basically, just like it's as easy for me to call across the road as it is across the world, it makes in effect a village of the world, one village, because time and space don't have the same meaning. Now, he also pointed out that some people have a kind of rose-colored glasses idea of what village life is like. Mainly people who've never lived in a village think that it's some, like, Garden of Eden ultimate state of being. When villages can be very nasty places. You know, gossip and intrigue and

1:24:11hyper-awareness of what everybody else is up to, no sense of privacy. These are also battles and grudges, and these are also aspects of village life. So it isn't all necessarily a great thing. There's many things to be recommended with a city, a city like New York, for example. He also developed the metaphor of global village to that of global theater, because with further developments in media, he felt that all the world as a stage, right? That particularly now with TV cameras in our pockets and everything, we're always on, right? We're always performing. So that's a whole other thing, this urge to perform and to share and all this stuff.

1:25:25one little exercise or daydream I have sometimes is to imagine if Marshall were alive today how would he interact with the world because he used the technologies the means available to him in order to reach the world with his message, as it were. Right? A lot of that was television. Would he be on TikTok? Would he be on Twitter?

1:26:06He did something which wasn't really done then, back then in the 50s and 60s, which was, he wasn't academic. He was a scholar. He was actually one of the leading literary critics of his day. who somehow became a public intellectual. And that was very unseemly. That's not something a proper English professor would do. And it's ironic, because today every academic wants to be a pundit or a public intellectual. But back then, it was unseemly, undecorous, you might say. but he did that intentionally because he wanted to wake the world up to what was happening one of the greatest letters he ever wrote one of the to me the most spectacular statements he ever made was in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1951 when he said, I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly been gathering an arsenal with every intention of using it in order to, you know, dot, dot, dot, in order to distract the trigger men from the sidelines or to needle the somnambulists.

1:27:30He was trying to wake people up to the effects of technologies, that every service contains great disservice, that every new technology is a new culture and comes at the expense, at the cost of the old culture, more times than not. and so he realized that he couldn't tell the world this from the English department at the University of Toronto he had to go about it differently and he did which is amazing so I wonder I think about what that would look like today and I'm not trying to be that at all i don't mind coming on podcasts and stuff but man i i do not really well and and to your point like all of all of most intellectuals now want to be public intellectuals and so how would marshall have reacted to that it's uh you know would he have joined in that fray of that you into that memetic cycle um or would he have like retreated or would he have looked past like there there's what i think marshall did is he he figured out the memetic cycle right uh and he he sort of was this he was an anti-memetic he found a way to like kick back um so when everyone else now is like, oh, how do we be public?

1:29:05How do we be public? How do we get famous? How do we capture this audience and capture this attention? Would the reverse be to say, I'm going to write incredible things or make incredible things, and I'm going to release them on a slow cycle, and I'm going to do them in a really different way than how everyone else is doing it well he had an uncanny understanding of various media and how best to um interact with them in order to achieve greatest effect um you know one of the things my dad taught me were uh something he and in marshall eric and marshall played back and forth together that they called theory of communication.

1:29:54And to find out what somebody's theory of communication was, you answered two questions. Who is their intended audience and what is their intended effect? And this is actually a really great way, these are very two powerful questions that anybody should ask whenever they're writing something, making a piece of content whatsoever. Answer those two questions. Who are you trying to reach and what are you trying to achieve? Because you begin with that and you work back to how you do it in order to be effective. I'm curious now, since you're like one of the only people in the world that's listen to my novella what do you think my answer to those two questions was in writing that oh wow um that's sorry i put you on the spot i don't mind i don't mean being on the spot a bit uh

1:31:07Well, it's an interesting way to go about it because I think you answered that question in the form of a novella rather than in the form of a commerce blog. because the effect you wanted to achieve, the effect you would like to achieve, or, you know, the audience may be the same, but you're talking about spiritual matters more than commercial ones. and uh i think you realize that that was the vehicle for it and i love it i can't wait to see it actually uh in print if i can find somebody to print it as as you've discovered getting people to to make things for you and like to get a book out into the world turns out to be like an almost impossible task that's why i think this might

1:32:20Phillip: actually be the first time that you've mentioned the novella in public on this show right probably yeah i think i mentioned that i did read it on andrew's show at one point but yeah i think that was in the after dark i might have to dark yeah might actually have to to source that um i think there's there's probably another there's a lineage of other like public intellectuals obviously no with the cultural staying power of of marshall mccluhan i mean obviously right i think that there's other there's other folks that i think have other cultural staying power but they're not intellectuals but then they're like weirdly fraudsters um but they right so like i i i don't want to like riff on them but there's people that like also did the tonight show circuit or whatever They also they had all the same like media circuit, like people in my in my mind.

1:33:14Phillip: And they're like the Uri Gellers of the world, like people that were like weird public performers of some sort that were like mentalists or whatever. And they're not in the same camp, but they had weird cultural zeitgeist that also used the media to great effect that I think also of a similar in a similar generational time frame. I think they also knew how to manipulate media in a same way. It's that Marshall McLuhan knew what he was doing and was doing it in a meta way. Like he understood that the sense of his, the importance of the medium was like, I hate to become recursive here. but like it was important in, in the context of getting the message out.

1:34:09Phillip: Right. And like he was, so I don't know that everybody else understood what they were doing. I think a lot of other people were just. Some of them had experiencing a moment of fame. Right. I think that's, and, and so I think it's hard to contextualize like whether he would do what he, like would he use all of the same mediums today? Probably. But I, I wonder what the, I think beyond this moment, I think the question is, is you see what's happening with, was it H &M is using AI models now in, you know, in their photography. um you know we're seeing a lot of uh uh you know uh was it uh john meersheimer um you know created a meersheimer.ai i believe is what it was it was like you know it's political science uh ai and like you can ask him any question now and like get his perspective on uh public policy and you know He's not a fan of tariffs if you go ask his AI.

1:35:21But these sorts of things, it's like people are sort of externalizing their,

1:35:26Phillip: or taking their corpus of knowledge and they're externalizing it now and basically disembodying themselves to say like, oh, it's like I don't know. That's a new form of communication too. Is that something that we would, is that is that also a medium that we would have seen marshall mcclellan employ to his effect to you know that that's a question that's a good question it is a good question which is kind of impossible to answer sure unless you asked mcclellan ai or whatever exactly uh even then um you know

1:36:11you got to understand that there are advantages and disadvantages, right? And Marshall wasn't anti-technology, really, as much as people sometimes assumed he was. People used to say that he was the enemy of the book. I was like, what? What are you talking about? He is literally an author, an English professor. Books are what he loves, what he values most.

1:36:53But he wasn't one to dismiss technology for the sake of it. But he understood there were trade-offs. and advantages and disadvantages. You know, he changed, for example, the way that he composed books. He moved to a more dialogic kind of method

1:37:23where, and it's not because he couldn't write, but he understood that there's a very big difference between the written word and the spoken word. And they make for different content, essentially, different relatability. So, you know, it's one thing to write something, to write a speech, for example. It's another thing to speak more extemporaneously, to have a conversation. It's much more engaging. um you know the worst one of the worst things and i try to avoid it when i can is to write a paper and then go to a conference and read it um it's one of the most boring things you can do uh second to that is is putting it on slides and then reading the slides right like it's it's terrible uh and i i never really use slides um and my my compromise and i'm not sure how it works um is i tend to write uh my inner dialogue if that makes any kind of sense, so that the talk that I give while written or typed is really more conversational, because I'm not producing this very logical sequential argument and interior.

1:39:05It might not make for pretty prose, but hopefully it makes for a good conversation and experience with the audience. It was unconventional, I think, is how somebody wrote me a note about how that speech went. Yeah, so Marshall actually moved to this method where he would get together. He knows his earlier books were solo-authored, and then a lot of his later books were with co-authors. And that's not because he forgot how to write, but he would get together with an author. they would have a discussion like this on various subjects while the author takes notes, the co-author and then the co-author went away and wrote it up and that turns into a book and that is more engaging to people's sensibilities I think or it was then anyway so I think he would have the other thing to say about Marshall's celebrity that's funny or interesting is that for a few years there Marshall held quite a bright spotlight he was across all kinds of media, newspapers, television, magazines even in film and then almost as quickly as it came it went and for the 70s well he died New Year's Eve 1980 he basically sank back into obscurity at the University of Toronto basically and that suited him just fine I think he He had a very keen understanding that he'd accomplished what he needed to and that it wasn't disappearing.

1:41:22I don't know if he necessarily saw YouTube coming, but he's all over, all over the place. and I think he actually enjoyed being out of the spotlight so he could you know people think that he peaked in the 60s but he did some of his most impressive work in the 70s with my father so yeah I think I think there's some if, if anything is, uh, most impressive is that the, the imprint beyond just the, the name and

1:42:05Phillip: the, the legacy of what he's, he said and the things that he's left behind is, I mean, that, that is, that is enough to be what an imprint on the culture and what an imprint on, um, on, uh, uh, just not just media studies and media theory, but, uh, uh, that continues to echo today. The people that have come after, you know, Marshall and Eric, um, who have built on the ideas, um, are people that are, are, have impacted our modern moment. Um, I think of, uh, in some, you know, some of the research and some of the things I've looked into coming up to this interview, which we had to postpone so I could be here because I think things got moved around.

1:42:55Phillip: So thank you. But for instance, Jean Baudrillard was in a in a interview and name checked your grandfather in an interview, um, and, uh, in 1990, um, and, uh, it basically said, you know, that, uh, you know, Marshall saw a glimpse of the future, but didn't take it far enough. It was like, you know, saw the future definitely was like the person who saw the future, but was like, didn't understand that there was going to be a full implosion of meaning. like there was a like saw the future saw was like enamored with communication but there would be a full implosion of meaning in the future and you know the only reason that i think that that's like so profound is that you know uh well it's it's in it's emblazoned in my brain because i showed my kids the matrix you know last weekend and you know there's a similacra and simulation is the first thing you see when, you know, the movie starts is it's, it's the book that Neo picks up, you know, um, at the beginning of the movie.

1:44:07Phillip: And I'm like, it's like emblazoned in our culture. And, um, you know, the, the, the echoes of, of Marshall McLuhan, if affect the people that, uh, who have made profound impacts on the work that's come afterwards, we don't have Baudrillard without Marshall McLuhan. I think it's a, it's a pretty obvious, lineage. And I just think you can tie back a lot of the profound work that we have. The work that's being done now, I think everyone in our modern circles are obviously people you're working with are profoundly impacted. You should be very proud of the work you're doing. I feel like we could talk for hours longer but yeah I'm not sure of a way to wrap this up we need to do it again well that's very kind of you yeah always happy to do it again it's one of the reasons that Marshall and McLuhan work has such staying power how it continues to remain relevant is and not everybody agrees and that's fine.

1:45:22But Marshall said, you don't like that idea? I got others. The main reason why that is the case, why a book like Understanding Media is so relevant is because Marshall studied media. He studied technology in general, in abstract. and he studied specific technologies, but he sought their general principles.

1:45:57As long as we continue to iterate and innovate, those principles will be valuable and the work will remain relevant. I'll add to that. You don't know this, Andrew. The way that we came across Marshall McLuhan is because our first employee, who's related to my family through marriage, was an English, high school English teacher at the time. He now is in tech. And we were camping. and uh he had he's he no he was no longer working for us but he's kept up with what we're doing and he's like man the work that you guys are doing really reminds me of somebody um he was like there's this guy that you know my english professor in college handed me his book and said, this is as punk rock as it gets.

1:47:03This is as fight system as it comes. And it was this guy named Marshall McLuhan. And Brian, you need to go read his work, Understanding Media, and have you ever heard the phrase, the medium is the message? So this is how we came across Marshall McLuhan. He was introduced to me as the most punk rock fight the system guy that there was. And I think that he would be really happy about that. And that's his legacy, I think, is that he is the guy that says, as long as we contemplate things, there's no inevitability. Like, I think that's a legacy that's pretty cool. Thank you. I mean, I'll take that as a punk rocker.

1:47:56um you know he uh he actually spoke truth to power um in a very canadian conservative mid-century kind of way um and a lot of the he got away with a lot of it just because it flew over people's heads right uh which is hilarious as well as you know you mean to Say my whole fallacy is wrong. You know nothing of my work, right? Like Marshall actually spoke to the Bilderberg meeting in 1969, which was crazy.

1:48:38And they didn't get him then, and they don't really get him now, but they understand that he was on to something. And I love that. I love how McLuhan people find McLuhan. and find each other. Because this class that I teach on understanding media, I've taught since 2020, am now going through my third group of students, and they come from around the world and across industries. Students, teachers, advertising, musicians, artists, business people, marketers, PR, everybody, all sectors, farmer, but we all desperately want to understand what's happening to us. And my family's work doesn't have all the answers, but it has a few.

1:49:37That's a great place to leave it.

1:49:39Phillip: Let me take a moment to say Andrew McLuhan featured at the close of our brand new book, Lore. This is available from Future Commerce Press. You can get it at futurecommerce.com slash lore. I'll give you a shot on the overhead. This is the full inclusion of his zine. It's called Dystopia and Oblivion, 59 Chains to the Mood. And it's presented with no modifications. We included it in its exact unadulterated fashion, exactly as it was sent to me, so that it would be presented exactly as God intended. And that has its own lore. I've included a little footnote about it and how it came to me. And it's very, very special.

1:50:28Phillip: And we loved having it. It's also our second time collaborating with Andrew. Our first time was Muses, and you can get both of them over at futurecommerce.com. And click in the shop link up in the top. We really appreciate working with you. We love this collaboration, and we'd love to have you back again. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, same. I love you guys. I love what you're up to. You too. How you do it in the world. So I can't wait to see what's next. Same. Thank you, Andrew. Anytime.

1:51:06Thank you.

1:51:41Euclidean