No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Mastering the Medium with Andrew McLuhan
What happens when you blend the strategic brilliance of John Boyd with the transformative media insights of Marshall McLuhan? We promise you'll gain a fresh perspective on decision-making and media effects. This episode features an enlightening conversation with Andrew McLuhan, who shares the legacy of his grandfather, Marshall McLuhan, while exploring the powerful synergy between Boyd’s OODA “loop” sketch and the groundbreaking theories of media as “extensions of man.” Our discussion offers a deeper understanding of how these two thinkers complement each other, especially in the realm of cognitive science and the practical application of their ideas in our ever-changing world.
We also take a thought-provoking look at the pervasive influence of smartphones, not just as devices, but as integral elements of modern life that shape societal dynamics. We consider the hypothetical chaos that would ensue should these devices vanish, emphasizing how they’ve become as essential as electricity. Andrew McLuhan, Mark and Ponch explore how the medium, rather than its content, dominates our interactions, reflecting on the broader environmental and technological implications. This episode invites you to ponder the profound connection between technology and culture and challenges you to rethink how deeply media shapes human experience.
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Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
Acta Non Verba – with Marcus Aurelius Anderson
Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
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So, Ponch, you and I have both been guests on Ed Brennegar's podcast on leadership, and it was at the end of last year. Ed sends me this email, CC Andrew McLuhan and he's like you two guys absolutely have to meet. And there I am kind of dumbstruck that I'm getting connected to Marshall McLuhan's grandson, connected to Marshall McLuhan's grandson and Marshall McLuhan, who I became deeply familiar with I only had a surface understanding with until I started studying with John Robb years ago, who's been a guest on our show three times, of drawing the parallels between what Boyd was saying. You get. You get a better understanding of what John Boyd is saying if you understand what Marshall McLuhan was saying and vice versa. I feel like I have a better understanding of what John Boyd is saying if you understand what Marshall McLuhan was saying and vice versa. I feel like I have a better understanding of what Marshall McLuhan was saying if I have an understanding of what John Boyd is saying.
Mark McGrath:And, Andrew, we're really glad that you can join us and I think the one thing that we could all could agree with at the very beginning all three of us is that either John Boyd or Marshall McLuhan. Either way, the masses don't understand what exactly John Boyd was trying to say and what Marshall McLuhan was trying to say. So in Boyd's case, he's reduced to OODA loop, for example, or in Marshall McLuhan's case, it's the medium, is the message. That's what he said and it's almost as if there was nothing else beyond that. So here we are, exploring the ideas and broadening them and trying to demonstrate to people that knowing one helps you know the other better, and it's a massive, massive edge as volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity continue to unfold. So where should we start, Ponch? I'll start with you. What's your immediate impression of that?
Ponch Rivera:So over the course of the podcast we've had a lot of guests on and some of them from neuroscience, talking about the four E's of cognition. So the idea of embodied, embedded, inactive and extended is critical to understand John Boyd's OODA loop. And I think when I first heard the medium is the message I'm like I don't understand this, and then I started to make more sense of it. It's just that extended thing. That's part of the OODA loop, right?
Ponch Rivera:We never put the OODA loop around the brain and say it's just the brain, it's scale-free, it's a fractal. So when we talk about the OODA loop, we like to put a boundary around whatever it is the mind, the body, the mind and the extended mind, which could be a computer, it could be the internet, it could be X or Twitter or whatever it used to be called, but that's it right. So that was a big connection for me is to hear the neuroscientists talk about 4E cognition and those from the cognitive science background talk about it as well. So that's where the connection is for me, as well as information theory when you look at McLuhan's work. So that's where I am on this Mark. I'm looking forward to today's conversation.
Mark McGrath:So, andrew, we're going to introduce you. Now You're the grandson of Marshall McLuhan and there you are at the end of last year, minding your own business, and Ed Brennegar connects you with an email to me and the next thing you know, we're Zooming. I remember exactly where I was. We're Zooming for like two or three hours and I'm telling you about John Boyd. Why don't you start from there and let's steer it back? So here's me telling you in December John Boyd, john Boyd, the connections, what do you think?
Andrew McLuhan:Yeah, it's funny, I'll get a text message and my son, ezra, will say oh, is that Mark? Again, because we've been talking pretty much nonstop, very regularly, since we were introduced by Ed, and not only were we introduced to each other, but I was introduced to John Boyd and the OODA loop, which it's been really interesting, because I think every conversation that we've had has been, you know, a step toward this larger goal which we both have, I believe, which is that we see Marshall McLuhan's work in understanding the nature and effects of technologies and we see John Boyd's work in decision making and understanding all the parts of that process, decision-making and understanding all the parts of that process and we see that these are very, very much parallel kind of things even running on on the same thing, and what we're we keep trying to put them together and seeing how they, how and where they interface. And the the fun thing, the fun part, or the the fun or maddening part, is that it's like we know they fit together, um, but what we've been trying to do is, you know, it's like when you, when you know something, um, deeply in yourself, it's like, yeah, I know, one plus one is two, but how do you actually articulate that? How do you express that so that other people can understand it? And, in a sense, that's been a lot of my work with my family's work and, as he said, marshall McLuhan was my grandfather.
Andrew McLuhan:My father, eric McLuhan, was his eldest son and I'm kind of the third generation in this area, which is a whole other story. But, you know, a lot of my work is preserving the work that my father and grandfather did, but not just preserving it. Bring it forward to where it's useful, because I think this is the thing which characterizes, I think, boyd's work is its utility, right, its applicability. And for me, that's what's most interesting in my family's work is its utility and applicability. Because, you know, while I'm proud of my heritage and the history, I'm really more. I think we're at a point in time today where history and museums are great, but we need tools and we need to be able to understand what we're doing, uh, in order to make better informed decisions, which is what the ooda loop's all about as well.
Mark McGrath:Right, absolutely so. That was one of the things that I learned in our discourse starting in December was that your dad was, you know, as renowned of a scholar on these ideas as your grandfather was. He just didn't have the sort of 60s pop culture publicity I guess you'd say, or notoriety I guess, that your grandfather had.
Andrew McLuhan:I guess you'd say that or notoriety, I guess that your grandfather had. Yeah, well, and that's because you know I say I'm the third generation, but you know my great-grandmother, marshall's mother, elsie Naomi Hall McLuhan, was a performer. She was what was called an elocutionist, which is a term you don't hear anymore, but basically she was a dramatist. So she was a stage performer and she would read or recite poetry, dramatic monologues one person plays this sort of thing. She was an entertainer and Marshall was very much an entertainer as well. Critically, he saw that the work he was doing was important in the world and he was a university professor, an English professor, and as an English professor at St Michael's College, university of Toronto, he was able to interact with and impact students' lives. But it was the world that needed this work and he went out into the world and became a household name in the 1960s and basically a world figure and part of popular culture.
Andrew McLuhan:My father, on the other hand, who, incidentally, in the early 1960s joined the US Air Force he was born in St Louis, missouri was a United States citizen, like his mother, who was born in Texas and did his tour in the US Air Force, did his tour in the US Air Force. He was not very outgoing, to say the least. He wanted to be in his library reading books, researching, studying, exploring and writing. I, on the other hand, I think, am more of a throwback to the other side of the family, which is, you know. I think I'm more of a throwback to the other side of the family, which is, you know, I'm a poet. I've been interested in words and poetry since as long as I can remember and interested in performing as well.
Andrew McLuhan:I played in a punk rock band for many years and I like to think that the poetry and the punk rock kind of tells you a lot about how I do things and my methods and my interests and my approach from this, because the thing about and you're going to have to interrupt me when you want me to stop because I'll talk forever but the thing about McLuhan work, as you suggested with Boyd, is it's not just the medium, is the message, it's not just the OODA loop, like Marshall's interests cut across all human activities. In fact, the media, the medium he talked about, were not just communications technologies but all human innovation. Communications technologies but all human innovation, everything from words and speech and writing to telephone and telegraph and television and computer, to clothing and automobiles, forks and knives and eyeglasses. He called them extensions of man or extensions of human powers. When he's talking about media, he's talking about all human technologies, not just communications media and certainly not just the press like newspapers and television stations and stuff.
Mark McGrath:So because of that, his interests go across the world as well. Let's dive into this now. So that was a great segue. Let's dive into this now. So that's a great segue. So let's let's really dive into this. And maybe a place to start is what you just alluded to that most people misunderstand. When he says the medium is the message, they limit the thinking of what McLuhan is talking about only to communications or media or the press or social media or whatever.
Andrew McLuhan:They're not thinking of a broader definition of media, which was his intent. Is that a good place to start? It's a very good place to start. So I'm a poet and he was a professor of English, of poetry, and a student of it and a lover of it, and he understood that poetry is very different from prose. For example, you don't tend to read a book of poetry cover to cover in one sitting. You approach it differently than you would read a work of fiction or nonfiction, which you can start at the start and move your way through, and that's because the way that it uses language and the way that it expresses thought and emotion and feeling are very different.
Andrew McLuhan:Poetry is condensed, thought, right, it's really distilled down and like those little dinosaurs that you get for your kids and you put it in water and watch it grow. Poetry involves you in making it grow, in adding meaning, in finding meaning, in discovering things, whereas we expect we're more spoon-fed from prose. So poetry, condensed thought, is more involving. It involves you and it requires you to make more meaning from it. The medium is the message, is a poetic statement. It's five little words, but they contain so much and they not only invite you to think more deeply. They demand you think more deeply because it doesn't make any sense on the surface. It's a paradox. The medium is the message. Well, I mean the message is the message. What do you mean? The medium? What are you talking about? So if you want to get anything out of it, you have to think. And the first thing you have to consider is what does he mean by medium? And he means several things. By medium, he means mainly environment. What he said later was he said if I were to say the environment is the message, that's a better way of saying the medium is the message. It's not as pithy or as poetic perhaps, but another word for medium is environment, like a growth medium, you know, a bacterial medium, a sample in which you grow something from a medium environment, a milieu.
Andrew McLuhan:And this is how we consider technologies, because technologies don't exist alone or in isolation. They tend to create an environment around them, an environment of services and disservices. And they act the same way. For example, if you, if you think about an environment in pollution right, if you've got a factory on one end of the lake that's pumping something nasty into it, it doesn't just stay at that one end of the lake. It affects the total system, and technologies work this way as well. When we get a technology, it quickly becomes environmental and surrounding us and involved in all parts of our life. Even something like AI, which is relatively kind of new on the scene, has quickly become very involved in our day-to-day lives, and one way to test this is to kind of conceptually take it out of the situation. So, like with smartphones, for example, what would happen? I do this exercise with kids and it's so much fun.
Andrew McLuhan:We spend a little time looking at the smartphone and all the things which are involved in smartphones. You know research and development, natural resources, education, finances, global systems, electricity, internet networks all these things which are wrapped up in this small device called a cell phone, and then all the things that we do with it communication, purchasing, all these things. Now, what happens if you take that out, all these things? Now, what happens if you take that out, if you remove smartphones from our society overnight? What does tomorrow look like?
Andrew McLuhan:Tomorrow looks like chaos. Imagine you wake up tomorrow and your smartphone doesn't work and it's never going to work, and nobody's smartphones work. What happens to our society? It collapses, and the crazy thing is that everything the smartphone does. Essentially, we can do different ways. It might be a little bit slower, it might be a little less efficient, but we can do things differently. It's just we've come to depend on it so much that we're we'd have pulled it out all of a sudden, just like shutting off the power, for example Society collapses and things get medieval very quickly. So this is one way to think about the medium as a message, way to think about the medium as a message because, um, it's, it's less the content or the uses to which we put these things which determine the personal and social impact of these devices. You know, as far as that smartphone goes, it matters less that we're having this conversation.
Mark McGrath:Uh, on mcclellan and boyd this is where people get stuck right, exactly, but this is the point. Yeah, this is where people get hammered.
Andrew McLuhan:We could be having a business meeting. That Is a little to the side Of the effect of the actual device In society and that is why the medium Is the message, because it accounts for really 90 of the effect whereas people generally get so hung up when they hear that they focus solely on content, they're not thinking of environment, technology and those sorts of things yeah, they get up, they get upset about it really, um, and they they say all kinds of things.
Andrew McLuhan:Uh, I, they get up, they get upset about it really Um, and they, they say all kinds of things. Uh, I love the way that in 1964, marshall published a book called the uh understanding media uh, in which the first chapter is the medium is the message. And in that he there you go, nice one, mark. Uh, in that he's no-transcript, it uploads it all to the cloud and stitches it back together. Well, I have an upload speed at my farm of one megabit per second and it takes. Last time I did this at home on this software, it took like literally 10 hours to upload the whole thing and me sweating the whole time that the connection is going to get reset or something you know, versus coming into town with DSL and it uploads in seconds.
Andrew McLuhan:Right, but in in understanding media in 64, in the medium is a message, marshall goes to great lengths to give you different examples of the Medium is a Message and he talks about the content by paraphrasing TS Eliot. And he says in Understanding Media that content is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. And so, far from being irrelevant, content actually has very important functions, the main one being distraction. And you know it took me a long time. It's one thing to hear and say, yeah, that makes sense. It's another thing to really understand it. And it took me a long time to understand what he's talking about Because it's like, okay, if you take this analogy, what is okay? Content is the juicy piece of meat. I get it. The medium is a burglar, but what are they stealing? What is being burgled here? What's happening? And actually what's happening is we are being subtly but profoundly rewired and reshaped, because who we are is very dependent on, because who we are is very dependent on. You know, marshall says elsewhere that any culture is an order of sensory preferences.
Andrew McLuhan:In talking with Mark about this, I often revert to the analogy of the blind person, because when somebody cannot see, they don't care what color their sweater is, they don't care what art is on the wall, they don't have any visual preferences at all. But if you think about our society and our culture and what we value, we value visual things dearly Visual art, art galleries, art markets, clothing. So much of our identity is wrapped up in the things that we wear day to day. This was driven home to me when we had a house fire when I was a teenager and all my clothes burned up. I had to go buy new clothes and I felt like I didn't know who I was because all my identity was so wrapped up in the things that I wore I didn't even realize it. So this is an extreme case, the case of the blind person. But if you put all these blind people together, you have a society, and as a society they value completely different things than a sighted society, right?
Andrew McLuhan:Well, media technologies, all human technologies, affect us on a sensory level first. Our opinions, our feelings about things are things that happen after we interact with information through our senses. That act of perception happens before opinions, before feelings, before values and morals and all the rest of it. But what it does is it shapes us in certain ways and sort of sets our senses up in a ratio, in a calibration, and it's more subtle than being suddenly struck blind, but it's no less impactful. And what's happening with the burglar and the piece of meat and the content is, when we focus on the content we aren't paying attention to what's happening while we're focusing on that content which is the shaping of our senses.
Andrew McLuhan:Because the thing about our senses is that they're not neutral or unchanging. It's not simply a pipe that water goes through. They're organic living systems and they're affected by what goes through them. And that is the whole point that, while this content is going through, we're being adjusted and reshaped so that, when we have a lot of visual content through, our eye is being dominated. The other critical part of this and I know I'm going on the other critical part of this is that our eyes, our senses, don't exist independent from each other, but they exist in a balance. So if you were to go blind, when you go blind later in life, people mention how, as their visual faculty dims, their other senses react. Your sense of hearing becomes more acute, your sense of touch more sensitive. Our senses respond to any readjustment among them and that readjustment is a new identity, it's a new culture, it's a new human. This is why the medium is a message, because that readjustment doesn't happen because I'm watching an educational program or I'm watching the latest Marvel movie. It happens because I'm watching the technology.
Ponch Rivera:Hey, andrew, I'm a knuckle dragger here and I want to go back to the external environment. This is interesting. So I think there's a connection to increasing VUCA volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity with the changing environment, and there's also a connection to snowmobiles and I'll bounce that off a mark here in a second. There's also the connection to Stuart Kaufman's, the Adjacent Possible, basically saying that as we build something new today and Mark builds something new and you build something new, somebody tomorrow could look back and repurpose those three new things we built independently to create something new. So that's this hockey stick growth, if you will, in volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity is based on the environment that we're actively changing, the technologies we're creating, which goes beyond technologies as well, as you put it.
Ponch Rivera:So, mark, I'm kind of seeing another parallel here on the external environment in the OODA loop to the snowmobile capability, stuart Kaufman's work with the Jason Pospoles and, of course, what McLuhan has. So I want to make sure I'm grasping this concept before I turn it over to Mark. One thing we learned from Boyd and others when Boyd was studying the Toyota production system, he made it very clear that control is outside and bottom up. The outside controls you, and I think that's what Andrew just pointed out. So, mark, any thoughts on what I just shared with you.
Mark McGrath:Well, I think that the biggest tie-in that I've always seen with McLuhan's work, with Marshall McLuhan's work, is flowing right into destruction, creation and conceptual spiral. Because, as you say, we're constantly destroying and creating new things as time goes on and in that we're building off of things that previously existed. So, if I took Heisenberg, gödel, godel and thermodynamics, second law, entropy, you know I can create doodle loop, sketch that that was Boyd's basic basic idea. Or, as you say, the snowmobile, I could take the handlebars off of this and the motor off of that and skis off of that, et cetera, and I feel like there's a lot of synergy into thinking that. I mean, it's really.
Mark McGrath:I guess this was really my foundational point with with Boy McLuhan was drawing the connection at Destruction, creations, conceptual Spiral, which are his two most important contributions, and how they synergize. Because, as Andrew's describing, that constant change in technology, that constant change because Boyd talks about, talks about those technological changes in conceptual spiral, all of that is changing your environment. You know, if you have air conditioning in a house, that's changing your environment. That's going to have an effect on, that's going to have an effect on you. If you have, you know, pasteurized milk, you know that's going to have an effect on you, right?
Andrew McLuhan:Is that in line with a lot of the things that we've discussed? Would you say, andrew? Because people get hung up on content when you're talking about communications technology and it's a lot harder to get hung up on content when you're talking about air conditioners. But air conditioners are an incredibly powerful shaping force. They have not only an effect on your relative comfort. They have not only an effect on your relative comfort, but they make it possible to live in Florida all year round or in the Gobi Desert. Not only that, but a culture without air conditioners in a hot climate develops something like the siesta, where you take a couple hours in the hottest part of the day and you don't even try to work because your brain is boiling right. Introducing air conditioners removes the necessity of the siesta and by doing that it profoundly impacts the culture, because siesta has become entrenched in the culture and it's become valued as well. We move from necessity to value. Media is. I think it's a village in India.
Andrew McLuhan:This well-meaning Westerner comes in and sees that the women spend like half of their day going back and forth to the well to fetch pots of water and he says look, we can bring in pipes and plumbing. We can do this fairly easily and you get half of your day. Imagine the things you can accomplish. And they said, yeah, that sounds great. But you know, while I'm at the well waiting my turn to get the water, I'm talking with Margaret about you know what happened to her son yesterday and I'm talking with Julia about you know what we're going to do next week and it's an important part of their culture.
Andrew McLuhan:To add plumbing would destroy that. Add air conditioning and you can have a building that's 30 stories high, which you can't without air conditioning because you need to open the windows. You can't open the windows in a 30-story building. There's a reason the windows don't open. With or without air conditioning, you have completely different possibilities, services and even disservices. Same with the electric light. The electric light means that we can work 24 hours. It means we can have 24-hour cities. It means we can have all kinds of things, and this happens with the air conditioner, for example. It happens regardless of whether you're the New York Stock Exchange or whether you're an air conditioner factory. It's the affordances by the very presence and the environment of the technology which factor. Now VUCA, you know volatility, uncertainty. These things are kind of anti-entropic.
Andrew McLuhan:I love that you've mentioned both snowmobiles and hockey sticks. I feel very much at home up here in Canada I'll introduce the third term and that's the idea of the snowball. Up here in Canada, I'll introduce the third term and that's the idea of the snowball Snowballs. You roll a snowball down the hill and it gathers speed and it gathers mass. This is what has happened steadily with technology over the centuries and again there are pluses and minuses to that. When technology proceeds really slowly so let's go back before electricity when things happen really slowly, you don't notice them as readily and you have time to adjust as well.
Andrew McLuhan:Marshall liked to bring up an analogy of Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell said that if you only raise the temperature of the bath water by a degree every hour, you wouldn't know when to scream. Okay. So when change happens really slowly, when you sit in a lukewarm bath and you slowly add hot water and hot water and hot water, you can get that bath up to a really hot temperature and be quite comfortable. But if you were to step into that hot bath from the lukewarm air environment of the bathroom, you'd burn your foot right, you'd pull your foot right out. So this is what happens with the increased scale and pace of technology is that we don't have time to adjust. We increase volatility and uncertainty and ambiguity as well, but we notice it, and noticing it gives us the opportunity to make different choices and decisions. Maybe we don't want to live in a steam bath, maybe we like room temperature a little more. Maybe that's better for us and for our society, or worse. The point is, the more attention we have, the more agency we potentially have.
Mark McGrath:So so just pulling out of the first chapter of understanding media, and that's the you know, we would recommend to people that are listening that's the critical book to, to get and focus on the first seven chapters that really underscore and explain what exactly Marshall McLuhan is saying.
Andrew McLuhan:But there's one quote from You've been paying attention, Mark.
Mark McGrath:Well, you've been a great teacher, but the parallels that I've seen anyway with Boyd like. Here's an example. This is on page 20. It says for the message in quotes of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces Introduces into human affairs, into human affairs. So what Boyd is talking about and depicting with OODA Loop Sketch is people, ideas, things, a human, human cognition, shaping and sense making inside of an environment as circumstances unfold, inside of an environment as circumstances unfold. And it's really where I see the connection point Marshall McLuhan, your grandfather, was saying basically the same exact thing is that it goes a little further. It says the medium that shapes and controls the scale. It's the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association in action. And that's what Ponch and I are in the business of of helping humans make better decisions, make better actions, individually or together in associative groups, be they sports teams or companies, et cetera.
Andrew McLuhan:Yeah, well, the thing is the more. The fact of the matter is that the more that you know, the more information you have, the more informed decisions you can make. I think it was toward the end of that chapter. Marshall despairs saying I'm in the position of Louis Pasteur telling people that their greatest enemy is all around them, unseen people that their greatest enemy is all around them, unseen. Louis Pasteur, one of the grandfathers of modern science and medicine, basically discovered the role of bacteria in human health, which wasn't possible to know before the microscope, before we could see bacteria. After we understood that, we operated literally quite differently. We washed our hands, we sterilized our instruments because we understood that it's great if the operation is a complete success, not so great if the patient dies, you know. So this is In that chapterall explains over and over what he means by the medium is the message and why the medium is the message.
Andrew McLuhan:And it's because, as you quoted, it is the medium, it is this technological, the technology, the environment shaped by it, which controls the scale and pace and pattern. And if you think about those three things scale and pace and pattern content has little effect on those things, but it's scale, it's the fact that our technologies are worldwide. That scale versus before the telephone and telegraph, before written language, when the only way to communicate with each other was from my mouth to your ear, or maybe you tell one person, they tell another person, they tell another person. That is a completely different scale than when I can be on a three-way video call with you right now, and not only with you right now, but with whoever is watching or listening to this after the fact. That is scale, scale and pace.
Andrew McLuhan:So speed right is also a huge factor. The fact that we can have this simultaneous discussion rather than you know, the fact that you and I, mark, can be texting each other and you're on a ferry to Nantucket or you're in Washington Square what we like to call the human internet versus a written correspondence where I'm writing a letter that takes a week to get to you, you're taking a day or two to respond and I hear from you a week later. That's two weeks between parts of a conversation. Reducing the friction, reducing that speed to instantaneity. That happens. That is the factor, not the fact that we're talking about fish and chips or technology. It's not the content, scale and speed and pattern everything about our society right. It means that I can live in the country, not having to move to New York or to Washington to continue my work and my outreach. It is the medium which controls scale and pace and pattern in human affairs.
Mark McGrath:That is you know, Ponch, what do you think of those pretty buoyed words? Pace scale, speed pattern?
Ponch Rivera:we hear about them all the time, right? Uh, pattern matching beans, that's a good thing. We know about tempo and speed, um, and then scale is, uh, yeah, and I can't stop. You know I'm thinking about assembly theory, things are coming out of santa fe institute, things like that, that, very much aligned to the whole idea that evolution is dependent on what we make today, can be, you know, doubled, quadrupled, exponentially more tomorrow. So that is the pace and scale aspect of it. And the pattern repeats itself, right, so it's a fractal pattern.
Ponch Rivera:You start with. Let me just come up with some numbers here real fast. You know, 10 things today equals 45 possible things tomorrow. A fractal pattern, you start with. Let me just come up with some numbers here real fast 10 things today equals 45 possible things tomorrow. 100 things today equals 4,500 possible things tomorrow. So that's the pace and it's fractal in scale. It's a pattern. So that's that hockey stick we're talking about in uncertainty. So uncertainty, you can think, is a function of change and that's where we are today. So I think the parallels are absolutely insane. I think more people need to get into books and not just look at what your grandfather did, but look at what Boyd wrote about and make the connection. Bring an assembly of ideas together, if you will, and use them from assembly theory. Bring these things together to see that from physics, from neuroscience, from chemistry, you name it there's a lot of overlap here, and this is what informs, in my opinion, what informs John Boyd's OODA loop, and I think that's what your grandfather was working on as well.
Mark McGrath:So, ponch, one of the things that Andrew and I had run into, I had given him the custody thing from the Marine Corps archives. You know that has all the books that Boyd read and all the authors and what was interesting to note, that Marshall McLuhan was not on the list. However, as Andrew pointed out, he literally bracketed everything my grandfather was reading and citing and sourcing, like like all the way around it, without actually hitting and reading anything by McLuhan.
Ponch Rivera:That's a good thing, and let me explain why that's a good thing. So, when we talk about red teaming techniques and a shallow dive into chaos, I don't want to know what you know, right, I don't. We want to break that apart so independently. If we come to an overlapping conclusion or agreement, that's a good thing, right, but I think echo chambers like you and I studying Boyd could be a bad thing, right? Or it could be a good thing. You're looking at some things that I'm not and I'm looking at other things that you may not be looking at, but at the same time, we're coming back to hey, this is how this works. So, again, we were looking at the archives there to see if Boyd looked at McLuhan, but he looked at everything that, not everything, a lot of things that McLuhan looked at.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, the synergies are staggering and it is interesting, as we've pointed out in other episodes with Hunter Hastings and others, how, even in disciplines like economics and Marshall McLuhan's case English literature, it's amazing that sort of this interdisciplinary approach generally there are thinkers like Boyd McLuhan, hayek and others that come to this conclusions or point to these, you know, very similar conclusions. Yeah, it's always fascinating. Never a dull moment with this stuff, right, andrew?
Andrew McLuhan:No, never. I mean, in fact's. That's kind of the kind of the difficult thing about it is. It's, um, it's funny when I, when I started the mccluhan institute a handful of years ago, my uncle uh noticed the acronym tmi, uh the mccluhan, and he says, andrew, you know what that means, right? I said, yeah, exactly, too much information. That's the problem and this is the solution, right?
Andrew McLuhan:So the difficulty here, the thing I'm confronted with in the work, is that it's so vast, it's an ocean, and it's easy to get bogged down trying to count or account for water droplets. You really just have to pick a path, because there's way much work, there's way too much work for any person to do in a lifetime. So you kind of have to pick and choose a lifetime. So you kind of have to pick and choose, and what I pick and choose from is my entire focus is pulling out what is practical and useful from that work, from those decades and generations of work, for us to apply to and use today to understand what's happening. And that, indeed, I think, is what my grandfather was trying to do, because he didn't simply study specific technologies, he studied technology as a category and he wanted to explore the nature of human innovation in general, and he managed to find out quite a lot about it. And why that is useful is because, if you're only studying digital technologies, what happens when we move on from digital technologies technologies? What happens when we move on from digital technologies?
Andrew McLuhan:What Marshall discovered was that all human technologies, all human innovations, behave in certain ways. And when you know that, you have good starting points for looking at any human technologies because, as many people have observed that our technologies are the most human things about us you mentioned evolution, mark, and evolution is a technology. It's a way of you know, ensuring our survival and optimizing things. But like raising the bathwater a degree every hour, it's very, very slow. It is as sure as it is slow, but it's very, very slow. And I think when humans took that fork in the road that separated us from all the rest of nature was when we decided that evolution wasn't enough and we wanted to go faster, and we picked up a stick and used it like a hammer or a spear, and it's gone hockey stick since then. We left behind evolution in favor of innovation, and here we are.
Mark McGrath:Staying on. So again, I would recommend anyone listening to start by reading two things. One is the interview from 1969 of your grandfather and playboy, which is, I think, would you agree that's very, I mean, that's, that's extremely instructive and entertaining. But the other, one.
Andrew McLuhan:It's a lot.
Mark McGrath:It's yeah, it is a lot. And then the other one, you know, understanding media. In that first chapter, the medium is the message. Again, we want to help as many people understand that there's more to the normal tone that you hear. He talks about in great depth the electric light and a lot of the things that you see the clips on YouTube and others of Marshall McLuhan talking about electricity and the electricity and the electric light. You know it has the title Marshall McLuhan predicting the internet or predicting Twitter or predicting, you know, social media. You know how would you recontextualize that for people to actually understand what it is he was saying in the medium and the message when he's talking about the electric light?
Andrew McLuhan:well, um, as I said it, uh, it makes you think. Uh, the whole point of it is to make you think because, after all, um, we learn. You know we're not really taught anything, but we're helped to understand and learn because that happens on an individual basis. Teachers think a lot of themselves as teaching people, but we really just, you can lead a horse to water, right, but the horse has to drink. The number one tip I give people for reading Understanding Media or any of McLuhan's work, is to approach it like poetry and, as I explained, poetry requires a lot from you. You really complete the picture. The poem describes it. If you want to think about it like this and you paint it, you know you really create that act of understanding and generating meaning.
Andrew McLuhan:The best thing you can do in reading understanding media is take it a page, a paragraph, even a sentence. At the time, just like we talked about for a few minutes, you know that one quote off page 20. That is the medium that shapes and controls human action, scale and speed and pace, whatever human affairs. You really have to have to chew that over and talk it out. You know, add, add water to make it expand. Excuse me, but well, I got thrown way off track. Maybe I'm too caffeinated. Where did we start there, mark?
Mark McGrath:Well, I mean just like the electric light, because it is, he says in the chapter. It's totally radical, pervasive and decentralized.
Andrew McLuhan:Yeah, in the chapter it's totally radical, pervasive and decentralized. Yeah, uh, yeah, marshall liked to use the electric light because, um, he said it's a medium without content, as it were. Right, um, but you were talking about, uh, you know, mccluhan predicting quote-unquote the internet well, that's what they take, right they, they take his quotes, yeah yeah, the interesting thing is that uh marshall said that I'm very careful to only predict things which have already happened.
Andrew McLuhan:And now he was somebody who liked to play with words and play with people. Um, he had an extraordinarily quick mind and he enjoyed encounters like this and speaking a kind of verbal sparring and all the rest of it. But he was actually being quite genuine and he is usually being quite genuine and serious when he says stuff like that. He insisted that he generally just described what he saw around him and he said that people live. You know, basically we march backwards into the future, he said. And he talked about the rearview mirror. We tend to it's very, very hard, it's very difficult to see the present and what is happening moment to moment. It's a weird thing about people that we tend to kind of live 10 plus years in the past.
Ponch Rivera:I want to stop here. This is awesome. Okay, say that again, because this is absolutely critical in understanding the OODA loop, and I'll rephrase this For you to achieve a state of flow, to be peak performance, you have to be present. You have to be present. The OODA loop helps you do that. I mean, I hate to say do that, but what you just said there is critical. If you look at what's going on globally, there's a lot of people that are not present, understanding what's actually happening now. They're projecting out their attitudes and beliefs about what's going to happen in the future, regardless of what's happening now. Can you restate that? I want to hear that again regardless of what's happening now.
Andrew McLuhan:So can you restate that? I want to hear that again. Well, he said, you know the future of the future is the present. But the thing is is that he did insist that anything he talked about was something which had already happened. The funny thing is people say, oh my god, he was predicting the internet, or he was predicting the future, and I see it all around us. What he said then we're living it today. He insisted that he was describing his present, and if you think about it, 1964 was 60 years ago, and if what he was saying in 1964 is visible to the rest of us today as being our present, that means that we're living 60 years in the past. And the thing that keeps me up at night a little bit is that what is happening right now, that I'm not going to see for several decades, because that's the implication and that's kind of spooky.
Andrew McLuhan:Now, one thing which we hadn't talked about yet is the arts and the artist, and Marshall McLuhan relied very heavily on the arts and artists, because again, it comes back to that, uh, that kind of well, I've been working on a sort of model of communication or media, um, to help graphically, uh, understand the mechanics of this process. But, um again, our senses experience things in real time, our cognition experience things in real time. Our cognition, our feelings, our opinions are always a step behind, and this kind of relates to how we're living in the past, because we're always playing catch-up to the actual information that we're interfacing through our senses. Artists are different Because, you know, you and I, the rest of us as we age, our senses dull. You know, mark and I are wearing glasses because our eyes are deteriorating. You know my sense of hearing probably standing in front of really loud amplifiers for a few years didn't help me there. But our sense of hearing, all our senses again, are organic systems which hit a peak performance and then decline. Artists are a little different because artists are people in society who are always trying to experience things in new and fresh ways and to express them to the rest of us. Artists are people who, unlike the rest of us, whose senses are dulling over time, they're constantly sharpening their senses so that they can encounter new things in new ways and because of this they're very valuable to the rest of us.
Andrew McLuhan:But this is why new art and this is a very broad category, it covers music, visual arts, all the rest of it. This is why new art often looks strange or even offensive to our senses. If not our sense of propriety, it's because it's alien to us. The artist is experiencing the present in real time that we aren't going to catch up to. But I think about it like this you know, elvis Presley, right, it's hard to imagine a more vanilla kind of benign figure than Elvis Presley, right?
Andrew McLuhan:Pretty harmless dude, right. But in the 50s, when Elvis was new, was new, he was not a harmless dude, he was a shock. People our age back then were hiding our children from Elvis Presley, swinging his hips like that and talking like the way he did. That was a shock to that culture. But today it's quite harmless. Put them aside, like Marilyn Manson or something, and there's no comparison, right, but even Marilyn Manson might not be the shocking figure that he was 10, 20 years ago.
Andrew McLuhan:So, artists and new art is often offensive because the new art is meeting the old sensibility. You know, when we talk about our ourselves being the sum of our senses in an order of sensory preferences, when, uh, when, something new, when we encounter something new that, uh, doesn't really mesh with that culture or order of preferences. It's offensive. But what quickly is new and strange and even offensive, it can quickly become cherished and valued, right? What's more American than Elvis Presley? Right, like what's more american than elvis presley? You know well, he certainly wasn't, wasn't a paragon of america at the time. Uh, you know, he's not not quite in line with traditional american values in the 1950s, but now. But now it's an inseparable part of that time in our imagination. So the artist is very, very useful to us and the arts are very, very useful to us because they are our kind of canary in the coal mine. They are more sensitive than we are Now.
Andrew McLuhan:It's one thing to say that, it's quite another to extract any meaning from it. But one way to do it is to think about language, because language is a living thing. Our language isn't static, it changes all the time. Slang, as Marshall talks about in Understanding Media, should be very important to the student of media, because language is a living index to change.
Andrew McLuhan:Language is how we describe the world around us and how we communicate. We can only describe what we have words to describe, what we have words to describe, and when things change, we change our language to accommodate those facts. So I pay a lot of attention to slang, because slang tells you a lot. For example, the way we describe time has changed a lot. We'll say it's been a minute, meaning it's been a long time, but we used to say, wow, it's been a while. Now we say it's been a minute, or we say it's been a hot second or things like this it's been a minute. Or we say it's been a hot second or things like this. Pay attention to when language changes, because language doesn't change just for the hell of it. Language always changes in reaction to something. So you trace that backward and you can try and find the source, like what is being reacted to, to what has changed in the environment.
Mark McGrath:That forces us to change our language to account for it so when an 11 year old tells me that something is skibbity, under no circumstances look up skibbity toilets yeah someone's uh, sigma, like sigma has got a lot of riz. Yeah, these are the canaries in the, in the canaries in the mine, as you say.
Mark McGrath:Well, I think you know and understand that things have changed yeah, well, I think, I mean, I think one of the the big overarching themes with both boyd and m and McLuhan and sort of fusing them together, is improved situational awareness. You know, as you say, as Pancho was talking about, being in a state of flow, you know it's not so much just looking backwards, it's being ready, that you can be more anticipatory, you know, to make better decisions and actions as you go forward, or at least understand, uh, have a better understanding of what. You know, what's actually, what's actually going on.
Andrew McLuhan:Well, I mean, it does beg the question. It's like well, that's great, but uh, who cares? You know, why does it matter? Well, um, it matters if, uh, uh, you care about your life, uh, your way of life and your culture. Um, understand that a new technological paradigm is a cultural shift and a value shift. And if you have things which you wish to preserve, for example, you've got a saltwater aquarium and you've got all these beautiful fish in it, you understand that you've got to be measuring and maintaining the pH balance and the salinity of that aquarium if you want those fish to survive and thrive.
Andrew McLuhan:Well, our cultures are no different. Our cultures are delicate systems with pH balances and salinity and relative nutrients and whatever else. And when you change the mix, you change what's possible inside it. It's really hard to maintain certain values when you change the environment around them. Like, if I value family time and a quiet meal with my family, it's really hard to maintain that when everybody has a smartphone on the table. Our all-at-once, always-online, demanding culture makes it very difficult to maintain the older culture, those values, those things we value, which were built in a different set of circumstances. And you change the circumstances and you make it impossible to maintain those values. This is why you have some Mennonite or Hutterite sects who are very careful about introducing new technologies because they understand that their way of life is not necessarily compatible with major changes in technology.
Andrew McLuhan:You have, for example, the United States and a system of government which was formed when things moved at horse and mail speed. When things moved at horse speed and mail speed, it made sense to appoint somebody from the community to go to Washington to represent your interests. Because we can't all go to Washington, so sure, we designate this person to go do it for us, but today we can all go to Washington in the blink of an eye, as easily as we can connect to each other on this podcast. For 90% of the circumstances, we don't need somebody to go to Washington for us. We don't need to hold a ballot of mailing things in. We can do it instantaneously. Circumstances have changed and the way we do things have not, and there's an extreme dissonance which happens when you don't take into account changing circumstances and you try to hold on to those values just by sheer will. Well, you're holding onto a cliff and you're piling weights on your legs and eventually you're going to lose your grip.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, so we study the Kenevan framework and what you just described there is spot on, as context matters, right? And if you apply the wrong method in the wrong context, you end up in a confused state and sometimes it moves into chaos. Chaos is good if it's on purpose, if you can control it, but it's not good if you fall in there accidentally, right? So I think a lot of times what you just kind of pointed out there is we're not updating our methods to match the context. Is that correct? To match the context, is that?
Andrew McLuhan:correct.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah exactly.
Andrew McLuhan:So you know it comes back to you know, once you understand, the more information you have about the system, the more control you potentially have. You know if, coming back to the aquarium.
Ponch Rivera:Let's reverse that. If you don't have an understanding's, say um, I want to be in a position of power. I can use that to my advantage, correct? Yeah, if I understand the system better than you, then I can.
Andrew McLuhan:I can control you well, precisely, you know, thinking again about the aquarium, it's. It's like, if I understand, uh, the ph balance, I can control that environment and adjust the conditions for the health of the people or animals or whatever in it. And you know people, this can get dark right and people can talk about, oh well, engineering, people, and you know Big Brother and all the rest of it is like, well, you know, sure, you can take it kind of Orwellian if you want to, but you know, as my grandfather said, I refuse to simply sit back and let the juggernaut roll over me. He also said that there's a curious repugnance in the human heart against understanding the actions within which he is involved. It's very strange.
Andrew McLuhan:He believes that understanding entails responsibility, and he's not wrong. If you understand the forces at work, you kind of accept responsibility for your role in them. It's a lot easier to just ignore certain things and then you can't be blamed for them, but you also have to live with the consequences. So I think, when it comes down to it, it's better to understand more fully the situation and at least try and do something about it than to be kind of willfully ignorant and hope for the best.
Mark McGrath:One of the. So, if I have understanding media as you've shown me, the first seven chapters are really critical to understand. You know, conceptually, what it is that Marshall McLuhan is trying to convey, and then the remainder of the book is, you know, illustrative things like money and other things, that kind of show the show the concepts. One of the chapters that we spent some time on and I think there's some Boyd parallel too was the chapter on hybrid energy, and on page 76, where it says the present book, in seeking to understand many media, the conflicts from which they spring, the even greater conflicts to which they give rise, holds out the promise of reducing these conflicts by an increase of human autonomy.
Andrew McLuhan:Yeah, beautiful.
Mark McGrath:It's a beautiful statement. Unpack that, because I see a lot of Boyd parallels. But I want to hear, maybe from your standpoint, you know why is that? I mean, other than it explains what the purpose of the book is, but what's the most important thing to take away from that?
Andrew McLuhan:Well, it's a more elegant way of saying what I just spent a couple minutes saying For Marshall McLuhan it's all about agency and autonomy. You know having a measure of control, you know steering the ship rather than just hoping it doesn't run aground. The title of the book, understanding Media, suggests that such a thing is possible To understand media, to understand the nature of technology, the effects of technology, of technology, the effects of technology, and maybe take more control instead of you know kind of designing things and hoping for the best. Because we understand that we design these tools, these technologies, these innovations for one purpose and when we look back at what actually happened, they do a whole lot of things that we didn't anticipate. We call those unintended consequences, but there's, I think, a very big difference between unintended consequences and unavoidable consequences.
Andrew McLuhan:Okay, in the early 20th century down south there, you guys implemented something called the Food and Drug Safety Act and created the Food and Drug Administration, because people were getting sick from tainted meat, people were being sold snake oil and they demanded better. So the government said okay, you can no longer sell your drugs, your pharmaceuticals, without a much better understanding of what they're going to do. They have to be safe for human consumption and they have to be effective. They have to do what you say they're going to do. We don't do this with technology because we don't have a very complete understanding of their nature. We don't understand what safe and effective means, because it's not that simple. What it is is it's a new culture, a new set of values. Is that safe and effective? These are questions.
Andrew McLuhan:So Marshall McLuhan wrote this book. He engaged in this work in order to increase human autonomy, so that we might have some measure of control, so that we might mitigate or avoid unintended consequences and do better. Because if we understand certain principles about technology, we can anticipate things. Just like we can study a drug and its effects and anticipate things. And if we think, oh, that's going to make you sick as a drug. Or if we think, oh, that's going to make you sick as a drug, or if we think, oh, that's going to shift this part of culture, we can take those into effect and we can maybe design a little bit differently.
Andrew McLuhan:So what Marshall was doing in that book, understanding Media, is he's studying technologies as a category to understand and develop general principles. So part one when you look at the table of contents there of understanding media. You've got part one and part two. Part one is seven chapters and it basically entails seven different principles or ways of looking at the nature and effects of technologies as a category human innovation. Then you have part two. Part two is 26 chapters Chapters on speech, on print, on telephone, on television, on clothing, on housing. He's taking these general principles from part one and applying them to specific cases. So he goes from general principles to specific application and he creates what I consider a field guide.
Andrew McLuhan:So, chap, I think part two never ends because, uh, every time you read this book and I teach a course on understanding media, which I read it aloud, word by word, exploring all of every phrase, the way we have done here in this podcast with my students, and that turns into 36 three-hour classes weekly over about 18 months to get through the whole thing. I've done it all the way through with two cohorts and I'm one third the way through with a third cohort right now. And the thing is, the crazy thing about this book is, every time you read it it's a different book because it's a field guide and as such, it's evergreen. It's perennial Because, basically, you can read this book every time there's a new technology and you have all these new answers about it. It's quite a remarkable thing, and what I've realized is that it's not accidental but it's quite deliberate, because this is you know, you could retitle the book A Guide to Understanding Media, because that's what it is, and I was so excited to be taking this latest cohort through it when AI has just come off the ground, because it's so valuable.
Andrew McLuhan:The medium is the message. What does that mean for AI? Media? Hot and cool. Is AI hot? Is it cool? Hybrid media how does that relate to AI? All these principles from those seven chapters, those seven principles tell you a lot and the thing is it's not like this work has all the answers for technology, but it has a lot of them. And when you know nothing, but it has a lot of them. Uh, and when?
Mark McGrath:you know nothing, like, hey, I'll take seven ideas to get me kicking. Well, I think, um, I mean, we can, we, we could go on for days and and have a lot more discussions. That's true, yeah, no, because the the synergies between mcclellan and boyd are uncanny. Um, just even the concept of increasing uh, you know, reducing conflict and increasing human autonomy, I mean, he says in destruction, creation.
Mark McGrath:John boyd says, you know, the intent is to improve our capacity for free and independent action. And I, and I think that what I would tell people, and what I do tell people, is that, the better you understand Boyd, and then you can augment that thinking with McLuhan, or vice versa, if I understand McLuhan, I can augment that thinking with Boyd is that I'm taking proactive steps to improve my capacity for free and independent action, whether it's me or the, you know, the family, or the team, or the organization or whatever it is that I'm a part of or leading in. There's a lot of upside and, as Ponch says, the hockey stick, the potential is geometric for those that get it where it clicks where it clicks. So, any, any, uh, any final thoughts before we uh, we pause here and we'll, uh, we'll save the rest for another, another episode.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, hey, hey, moose, for me the the same experience with John Boyd's work. Anytime something new happens in the environment, you go back and read it. You know I'll find something. It means something different every single day.
Ponch Rivera:Right, so you're looking at. Yeah, every time you look at what's happening over in in Eastern Europe, you look at what's going on in the South China sea, you look at what's going on in the U? S right now, with the election coming up, you find it, you find something valuable to go. Okay, that's what that means, or, or this is how I can look at it.
Andrew McLuhan:So know the funny thing, marshall McLuhan was interviewed by this guy is it Michael or something, mcmanus, excuse me? And toward the end of the interview he said to him you know, dr McLuhan, is there any period in time you would rather have lived in? Is there any period in time you would rather have lived in? And Marshall replied I would rather live in any period at all, so long as they're willing to leave it alone for a while. The funny thing is, the interesting thing is is my grandfather was a very conservative guy who really just wanted things to be left alone. Right, he wanted to sit and read and he was an English professor. He loved content, he loved literature and poetry. But he also, you know, his first year of university in Manitoba he did in mechanical engineering because he was really interested in how things work. He switched after his first year to English literature and to an arts degree. But I think the fact that he started in mechanical engineering is very telling because he's really interested in how things work and the fact that they have and that interest carried through and eventually made it impossible for him to stay just inside English literature. But quite remarkably, what he did and this is hard to really credit. But he took the principles he learned for studying the effects of literature and poetry and applied them to culture and technology to look at how culture and technology work and affect us, and in so doing, he essentially invented media studies, which is remarkable and is what it is.
Andrew McLuhan:But the interviewer said is there a time you'd rather live in? And Marshall said no, I'd rather live in. And marshall said not, I'd rather live any time, as long as they're willing to leave it alone for a while. You know, um and mcmahon says but they're not going to, are they? And I said no, they're not. So the only thing left to do is to understand and be able to turn off as many buttons as you can and frustrate them as much as you can, and that's what he set out to do and to show us to leave behind. You know steps for us to do it.
Andrew McLuhan:And is it easy work to read? No, should it be? I don't think so. Should it be? I don't think so Because, look, these processes that are all around us are incredibly difficult, dynamic, hard to understand things. It's going to take work. So either you're willing to put the work in or you're not, and for me, I find it quite rewarding. I got into this later in life because it never made any sense to me as a kid. I don't know why or what happened, but in my 30s what my dad was saying clicked and it made sense for the first time in my life. And when something makes sense, when you understand something, anything, for the first time, it's a seductive thing, isn't it? You want more. It's like, oh shoot, that's really cool. I want more of that. And that's kind of led me to where I am now and it's a never-ending. It never ends because you know, the world moves on and, uh, we can either be swept along or or swim along.
Mark McGrath:I think the choice is ours well, it's a great place to pause for now. We'll make sure that people are directed to the mccluhan institute. Uh, and your and your substack the mcclu newsletter, which I highly recommend. I'm a subscriber Also to the Playboy interview. We recommend everybody get a 2003 edition of Understanding Media Extensions of man so that they can better understand what Marshall McLuhan work really is and how it ties to John Boyd Cool. Thank you, andrew.
Andrew McLuhan:Hey, thank you, great to talk to you guys.
