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 5
The Eric Dodson trilogy concludes, and this one is the secret keystone of the whole series. Recorded in early 2011: Bob and Eric take on the Church of the SubGenius — the joke religion Bob inspired and then got effectively excommunicated from for the crime of being too serious. Out of it comes the fourteen words that predicted the irony-poisoned internet: "the circus will be your prison, the clown suit will be your uniform." When everyone is joking, no one can say anything — and the only exit is the figure who can be dead serious inside the joke. Also in this episode: why every joke conceals a grievance, why communication between two people is a miracle, the story of McLuhan analyzing gender patterns at his own daughter's wedding-dress fitting (and her immortal eye-roll), "relax and allow — allow means to think," and a closing monologue on The Social Network, recorded while Facebook's founding myth was still wet. The culture eventually called this register post-irony. Bob was broadcasting it, fully built, in the winter of 2011.
