what is the BOB show

A quick word on what you’re hearing, and why I’m digging it back up.

From 2010 to 2024 I co-hosted a podcast called the BOB Show with Bob Dobbs, a media scholar and the closest thing this world has to a living heir of Marshall McLuhan. The theorist Donald Theall literally called him “the new McLuhan.” We made hundreds of hours of it, out on the fringes, for a tiny audience and, as Bob liked to say, for the dead. It has been sitting in the digital equivalent of a shoebox in an attic ever since. So I’m bringing it here, to Salus of the Wake, one episode at a time, cleaned up and put in order, so that living people can finally hear it.

Here is why I think that is worth doing. Listen to these shows from 2026 and the effect is uncanny. Recorded years before the fact, they map the world we now actually live in: the collapse of news into entertainment, the politician who out-clowns his own satirists, the feed-shaped mind, the arrival of an all-knowing voice you converse with through a machine. Bob was reading the future off the surface of the present, exactly the way McLuhan taught, and almost nobody was tuned in. That is the curse and the gift of being ahead of your time. You have to wait for the time to catch up. It finally has.

So think of this as an excavation. I am organizing it, preserving it, and releasing it because content this sharp and this early deserves an audience among the living, not just in the Akashic Records. Bob made this for right now. He just happened to make it fifteen years early. Pour yourself something, suspend your disbelief, and let the transmission in.

episode 3

From 2010 to 2024 I co-hosted the BOB Show with Bob Dobbs, the media scholar Donald Theall called "the new McLuhan." I'm re-airing the archive here on Salus of the Wake because it was recorded years ahead of its time, and 2026 has finally caught up to it. In this episode, Bob sits down with Dr. Eric Dodson, existential phenomenologist and my old professor from West Georgia's famed humanistic psychology program. Recorded January 2011, it maps the world you're living in right now: the post-literate, "iconographic" mind (the meme-and-feed consciousness, named before TikTok existed), the post-information society where facts stopped moving people and violence became an identity quest, Baudrillard as "nothing but McLuhan," Finnegans Wake as the only map that never expires, and the prophecy that the user would become the content — and the king. Fifteen years early. Listen and check the date.

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