Shmooze with Paul Levinson

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome. You're in the right place and this is absolutely the right time. You're listening to the Executive Dropout Podcast. I'm your host, Jacob Sager. Thanks for being here. This is the first episode. I'm Jacob Sager, and today I'm really happily joined with Paul Levinson, who I've had the pleasure of interviewing twice before on my other show, Space Midrash, which I think is a great way to kind of introduce this conversation here today, in that the first time I interviewed Paul, we were talking about a bit of his editorship in the publication of a book about religion and space travel. And some of it was fiction, some of it was nonfiction, and it was a really just like, wonderful anthology. And then the next time we talked about was Paul's contribution to a collection of stories about robots called Robots throughout the Ages. And that the timing of that one was interesting because that was like a couple months after ChatGPT had emerged into the public zeitgeist. So I have to ask you, as somebody who's been a professor for many different decades, and particularly across the eras of home computing and desktop computing into the age of ChatGPT, we talked like a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago about ChatGPT. Have your feelings changed since then about any of the ways these new technologies are emerging either in practice or in the way people talk about them? [00:01:41] Speaker B: Really? Not at all. And I don't mean to sound arrogant about that, but basically, on the one hand, I'm not at all worried, as you know, in general about Chat GPT and about AI. You know, I. I think this view, you know, I sort of consider it the Schwarzeneggeren view that AI is like a knock on the door. And where does Sarah Connor. Well, I don't know who Sarah Connor is. I'll be back. I think, you know, great. That was a wonderful science fiction movie. I loved it. It has zero to do with reality. AI is not sentient in any manner, shape or form. It's just a very, very sophisticated computing system. Something which goes back, you know, to the 1850s with the difference engines and etc. Etc. That Charles Babbage and other people were responsible for getting going. As a matter of fact, at the same time, I've had, you know, one experience with the limitations of AI and in particular CHAT GPT. And just to be clear about it, I don't know how many of you listeners know ChatGPT is available for free. And then there are two or three payment levels that you can subscribe to to get better, faster, I guess, more sophisticated in some ways, use of the ChatGPT system. So one of the things we're going to talk about, I know a little later in this episode, is my publication of Tom Cooper's book Wisdom the Lives and Thought of Harold innes and Marshall McLuhan. That's a huge book, 670 pages. And we, that is Tom and I wanted the book to have an index. And it still may have an index someday, but not now because we had so much other work to do and we wanted to get the book out. My initial thought was, hey, we'll ask ChatGPT to do the index. So before I did that, I figured as a test case, I have a hundred some odd page, very small book called McLuhan in an Age of Social Media. And I started writing it in 2015. It was published then. I updated whenever I feel like updating it. And I realized this would be a good test case for how well ChatGPT could do an index. And basically I worked with the thing for like a good couple of weeks. And in the end I said, okay, thank you very much. Because it got about 80% of the index correct. It kept out on leaving out some crucial names. I don't know why, when I told it, please go back again, it got some of those names left out, other names. And then even worse, I'm sure many of our listeners have heard of the AI hallucination problem, that the AI makes up things that, that aren't there. And sure enough, Chat GPT made up some names which were not in that book at all. To give it credit, I do say somewhere in McLuhan, in an age of social media, you know, the billionaire who bought Twitter and Chat GPT was intelligent enough to list Elon Musk there. So, you know, that's in effect an hallucination that was helping to get a more astute index. But at the same time it made up five or six names that just had nothing to do with anything in the book. So the reason why I'm mentioning this is the world needs to stop worrying so much about AI. You know, not only is it not the Terminator, it's not even that sophisticated as yet. It's at the very early stages. Sure, we need to consider how we want to use it, what, where we want to use it. But look, as some of your listeners may also know, and as you might know as well, I have been an advocate of advancing technology all of my professional life. I mean, you know, I remember back in the 1970s, when I was, you know, writing my doctoral dissertation, it was generally thought that, that watching television was leading to an illiterate populace because, you know, you watch television, you're not reading. I thought then that was abject nonsense. And then by the end of the 1970s, there was a survey that was done in some Midwestern state, I think it was Indiana. It compared literacy levels of kids in high school. I guess first the survey was done in 1945, then it was done again at the end of the 1970s after three or two and a half decades of relentless television watching. And you know what? The levels were exactly the same. And then I remember, you know, in the 1990s, you know, running out like 8 o' clock in the morning on a Saturday where I'd rather be home sleeping to get my daughter a copy of the latest Harry Potter novel and waiting online for three hours. These were kids who were so thrilled by the Harry Potter stories, they wanted to read it the second the novel was available. So, you know, those are just two examples of one of the battles I've been fighting as an academic, which is take it easy. Technology can do a lot of good. Sure, it might lead to some problems. I'm not saying it's a panacea, but by and large, as I think the British philosopher and technologist Peter Medawar, Sir Peter Medawar, the late Peter Medawar, famously said, technology is what makes us human. That's really the big difference. I mean, chimps can like use a stick, like poke a couple of ants. Okay, great for the chimps to have a little bit of technology there. But we have gotten off this planet with our technology. We have beaten back epidemics through our technology, like, you know, the RNA vaccines basically clamping down on the COVID pandemics. So for me, AI is just another branch of that technology. [00:08:55] Speaker A: Well, you talked about your book McLuhan in the Age of Social Media and how you fed it through ChatGPT, which is an interesting thing because compared to McLuhan himself, your book has, you're very well cited. You know each chapter well, of course you wrote it. But to anyone listening who hasn't read it, each chapter has its citations within the chapter. It's really clear. So then there's pieces there that are going to be doubly explicit where the bot should be able to get it. Any intern there would be able to, would double check their work to make sure that they gave you that right answer. And then there's some things there that are kind of contextual that just come up in language that maybe don't need a citation because your reader knows them or it shows up in what you're writing. But that book is an interesting one because you did mention that you update it regularly or periodically. I have a copy in print. I have it on my Kindle. I had it on my Kindle from a much earlier version because I searched on Kindle for McLuhan and social media. And there's maybe three or four books that'll ping if you look that way, which is, I think, interesting. I think there would be more, but maybe that's why I'm making the shows, to help encourage that. But you've updated a lot. But it is one book out of a few that you've written since the turn of the millennium about applying McLuhanistic ideas or media theory ideas or all that which you've worked on to the technologies that have really emerged post Internet, which for instance, in new new media. I think there's a whole chapter on MySpace which was like, you know, very apt and very thorough about MySpace, which at this point in time, MySpace has been sold two or three times. I don't even know if it's still a tool people are using out there. I'm curious. There's something interesting, particularly about how you're keeping McLuhan in the McLuhan in the age of social media, you're like really leaning into the self publishing and the medium itself, which is the Kindle direct publishing platform. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts as an author and a publisher and a media professor about. I don't know how that both emerged and occurred for you as something to do with that work in particular. [00:11:32] Speaker B: Well, I'll tell you very, you know, specifically, I started out just like, you know, most people my age thinking that, well, the last thing I want to do is ever self publish a book. You know, I want a publisher to publisher. Back in those days, we didn't talk about traditional publishers because all publishers were pretty much the same. You know, you had to get somebody at the publishing company interested in you a book. You know, they gave you a contract. You know, if you were more advanced, you. If you were more advanced as a writer, the publisher would pay you a certain amount of money up front. That was called an advance. Then when the book would sell, you get a certain amount of royalties first it would have to pay the publisher back for the advance. Then you start earning royalties. And so really, you know, my first book that I got published by a professional publisher was by A small press called JAI called Mind at Large Knowing in the Technological Age. And that was published in 1988, and it was, you know, a pretty serious philosophic probe of tech. And, you know, I began to learn that, you know, back then, getting published by traditional publisher was not quite the experience which I might have thought it had been. For example, I learned that most traditional publishers, when they publish a book, they'll put a certain amount of promotion into it, but then after a period of time, sometimes as little as a month, there's. They'll go on to promote other books. And it's not that they disowned your book, but they're not going to be too interested in promoting your book. And because of that, by the time the Kindle came around. So I guess we're talking, depending upon, if you want to look at when it was first proposed, when it became popular, we're talking pretty much about the. The middle to the end of the decade of the 20 aughts. So by 2011, 2012, people were buying Kindle books in great numbers. And one of the things that the Kindle did is for the first time really in history, it made it incredibly easy for an author to. To publish their own book. You didn't have to go through a publisher. And in fact, all you had to do, and that's still the case, is you write the book. And, you know, obviously you might want to. I mean, you do need to make sure everything is correct in the book and that it's formatted, you know. Well, you upload it through Kindle create. You can put together your own cover. You can use one of Amazon's covers. You can, you know, that's a whole bunch of sort of, you know, stock covers, and you can change them however you want. And literally, you know, within an hour or less, the book is off to the Kindle operation to be published. And it's usually published within hours, or if you're going for paperback or hardcover, it can take a day or two. So right there you can see the incredible impact that the Kindle had on the process of being an author. One of the things that I always liked about McLuhan, I liked a myriad of things about McLuhan, but he quoted some French philosopher who basically his comment about the book was, the book always arrives too late. And if you think about it, that's because you write the book and you're lucky if the book comes out in print a year later. Lucky if that happens. I mean, if you're Stephen King, the book will be published, you know, immediately or whatever. But unless you're a best selling author, you really have to wait a year, sometimes two years before the book comes out. That, to me is absurd. I mean, as an author, when you finish writing a book, and I know all authors feel that way, you want the book to be published the next day, if possible. And you say that to a traditional publisher, they'll laugh in your face. But Kindle, that becomes a reality. So that's just one of the many things I discovered that I really loved about publishing Kindle editions of the book and then later softcover and hardcover through Amazon. Another thing, hey, I think money is good, right? It's good to have money. You know, nothing wrong with that back in the day. And by the way, it's much worse now. You were lucky if you wrote a scholarly book, if you got a 10% royalty, that is 10% of the money that the publisher takes in. And I say lucky because many of the contracts were 7, 8, even 6% sometimes. So Amazon, in case anyone doesn't know this, Amazon, because Amazon is not the publisher really of the book. Amazon's the distributor of the book. [00:17:17] Speaker A: The distributor, which is a very different. They're the, they're the platform in the logistics. They are something a little bit too just beyond the publisher. [00:17:26] Speaker B: Right, exactly. And they pay the author, publisher, 70%, 70% of sales. So that's much better money. And then, you know, finally, you know, as you mentioned, one of the wonderful things about the Kindle, you can update it whenever you want. And that in itself has changed, I think, the very fundamental nature of the book. I was speaking actually last year to another media theorist. You might want to interview him someday. His name is Andre Meir. He's written a whole bunch of books, including a book called Post Journalism the Death of Newspapers in the Age of Trump, which he wrote a few years ago. I think it's a really brilliant book. But I was talking to him last year and he said to me, you know, for me, that is, for Andre, a book is like a finished product. If I have something new to say, I'll write something else. And I can understand that. That's the way the book has been thought of, you know, throughout history. Although, you know, if you think about it, if you think about the Iliad and the Odyssey, which started out as spoken poems, they probably changed things around a lot in the beginning back then. But I remember I told Andre in this conversation, that's not what I think of as a book. I think of a book as what the author has to say about a given issue at a given time. And if there is something that is very relevant. And sure, you can write a new book about that, but sometimes it makes more sense to just update your original book. So anytime the person buys the book, they get the latest update. Now, I wish Amazon would alert everyone like you who bought the earlier book that, hey, there's a new book out, and for a very small amount of money, you can get the, you know, the updated edition. Maybe someday it'll do that, but it doesn't yet do that. But those are the reasons I think the Kindle is such a significant development for the author. And let me just say, also on that issue, I know a lot of people are down on Jeff Bezos because, you know, let's face it, the Washington Post pretty much started out under the Bezos ownership. As, you know, they're the light in this darkness, you know, and democracy dies in darkness. And the Washington Post is providing the light. That was great. But obviously, more recently, Jeff Bezos has found some accommodation with Trump and his policies. So a lot of people are angry at Jeff Bezos. And that's not the only reason. But that has zero to do with the value of the Kindle. [00:20:25] Speaker A: Right? The Kindle, it's changed a lot. So let me ask you this. This is a kind of a playful question. We were talking about your Nonfiction work, specifically McLuhan in the Age of Social Media, which is the most recent that you are or you have updated a few times over the years. I mean, there's one of. I have a copy in print, and the copy I got was at least since 2018. So you talk about a Trump election. But let me ask you, as somebody who's also written fiction, do you feel this. Would you feel the same way about your fiction and changing a published piece of fiction that you put out there or. Because your definition of what an author wants to say at a point in time, I think lands differently for fiction. But as somebody, I'm working on something right now, and I haven't put it out there yet. And I'm constantly going back. I know there's kind of a creative writer's itch that can come up. [00:21:24] Speaker B: That is a great question. So first of all, let me say about nonfiction, the main things that I do are updates because the world is obviously changing and moving forward all the time. So last June, So talking about June 2024, literally the day of the evening of Biden's disastrous performance in the one Trump Biden debate, I Realized I had to put something in McLuhan in the nature of social media because debates, as you know, are a large part of the book. So I wrote a little, I wrote a blog post and then I put it in the book itself. Tis the debate that's dead, not he meaning you know, or not Biden meaning that maybe we shouldn't place so much emphasis on a debate. After all, what does it have to do with what a president does in office? Right. I mean, my understanding of what we need in a president is he or she has woken up in the middle of the night, it's two o' clock in the morning, some war has broken out somewhere, there has to be a meeting. You know that room, you know, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, decide what to do. That's what we want in a president. Who cares how the president performs in a debate. So that's. [00:22:51] Speaker A: Well, so one thing I want to bring up slightly, that's changed. And I think you talk about this too in the last 15 years. I mean, really not. I want to say that I saw this for McCain, Biden election, but I didn't see this for Obama. McCain. I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry, maybe I'm wrong on who's there. But I want to say this was pretty recent, which is they have 1000Americans with a plus minus button watching the debate and they're showing that as a seismic reaction of America, which is like very post people. The youth won't remember that. You know, there used to be a few network news stations, very few 24 hour news. And before 9 11, there was no such thing as that news ticker at the bottom. I mean there was like a news ticker as a completely different thing that wasn't television. But now post that is, we have this, that seismic graph of, you know, how does everyone else feel? And, and that is, I mean then it's no longer about listening to anything anyone's saying. It's about how does everyone else feel and how should I feel based off of the sounds that I'm hearing. When I think of the McLuhanistic phrase of the medium is the message. I mean that changes the medium completely by having that graph there. I don't know what your thoughts are on that. [00:24:18] Speaker B: No, my thoughts are right along the lines that you're suggesting that basically distorts whatever it is of value that the debate might bring. In other words, if you are seeing on the screen how many people like it or don't like it, that is basically moving your attention Somewhat away from what are the people saying at that time, the two candidates being the two people or the three candidates, however many people there are in the debate, you know, that's fine as far as just general entertainment and even as far as politics are concerned. But if we're going to place such importance on the debate that, you know, that basically Biden was finished as a result of that poor performance in the debate, then certainly we need to try to keep people focused on what the candidates are saying. But I'm going a step further. I'm saying, as far as I'm concerned, And I think McLuhan would agree with me, the debate's a great entertainment. You know, the medium is the message. It's fun. It's entertainment. We laugh at debates, we get angry at debates. We throw, you know, banana peels. Figuratively, at the debates. We scream and yell all that stuff. That's fun. You know, it's almost equivalent to the gladiators, you know, in ancient Rome, you know, seeing people verbally battle like that. But I don't know what relevance that has to the actual job of being president. But to get back to what we were saying. So that's an example of something I felt had to be in the updated version of McLuhan in an age of social media. But you asked a very, very astute and crucial question. Does the same apply to fiction? And the first part of my answer would be, no, it certainly doesn't and certainly can't. In other words, if you have a story and it ends a certain way, whatever that way is, whatever the denouement, and this is especially the case in mystery and science fiction stories, which are the kinds of literature that I write, then there's something almost insane about updating a published work and thereby saying, well, here's a new edition. But, you know, so, for example, my most recent work of fiction, I know we talked about my story, Robinson Calculator and Robots through the Ages, but I have something even more recent called It's Real Life, An Alternate History of the Beatles. It started as a short story. One of my students in the 1980s, Vin Tisi, now known as Vincyclone, did a radio play of it. And that sort of motivated me to write a novel of it. So the novel has an ending like any novel would have. For me to go in and change the ending would be. You know, that doesn't make any sense to me. If I have more, I want to say in the story, in the novel, I'll write a sequel. But here is something I'll confess, I am not a perfect person. No one is a perfect person. I discovered a long time ago that there is a fundamental law of the universe. It may even be related to the second law of thermodynamics. People can look that up if they're interested. But its existence is. In book publishing is. It is impossible to eliminate every single error in the book at any one time by errors. You know, I discovered this, actually my first published work. I didn't write the whole book. I edited a book called In Pursuit of Truth on the philosophy of Karl Popper on the occasion of his 80th birthday that was published in 1982. I was determined that I was young and idealistic and ignorant of this fundamental principle. I was determined to have a perfect book. And there was a word where you needed an umlaut over the O, you know, for whatever the word was. The umlaut are those two dots that you sometimes see. And basically, when I got, you know, the page proofs back from the publisher, it wasn't there. So I explained to them, okay, you know what? You either have to add an E after the O. That's one way of representing it, or you have to put those two dots in. Otherwise you've misspelled that word in German. The publisher gets back to me, okay, we've made the change. Much to my horror, I see now it's spelled oe with an umlaut over the O. In other words, they did both of the things which is incorrect. To make a long story short, I went back and forth with this publisher like five or six times, and they still didn't have it right. And finally I said, you know what? I want this book published. And I realized then that there's no such thing as a perfect book. Look, you know, people send me now for connected editions, something that they say has been copy edited. It's supposed to be a camera ready copy. Inevitably, there are spelling mistakes, words left out, just slightly different things. One of the things that my wife Tina, who worked for a publisher and I talk about from time to time is why that happens. And one of the reasons why that happens is whenever you correct a mistake, your brain is like, sort of so happy that you corrected that mistake that you are blind to a mistake that comes close after that, you might find a mistake on another page. But anyway, so that is the kind of mistake that I'll go in, in a novel or work of fiction and correct, you know, a word left out, an umlaut where it shouldn't be. Whatever it is because all that's doing is correcting mistake. But for me, that's a bridge too far to go in and basically change, you know, a story, you know. [00:30:45] Speaker A: Right. All of a sudden, you know, I decided after the fact, Harry Potter is actually Scottish now. And let's just go change every little detail that matches up. That would be kind of a hard thing to do. Let me ask you about the history of kind of being a McLuhanist. For anyone who's listening in particular, Marshall McLuhan's most famous books came out in the mid-60s. We have Understanding Media came out, I think, 1965. The medium is the message, or the medium is a massage, which was my primer and is a primer for a lot of people. Oh, I just remembered a question I want to ask you. I hope I don't forget it. Let me. No, I have it written down, but let me just. [00:31:36] Speaker B: While you're looking fat, can I just say, actually, Understanding Media came out in 1964. And in general, I mean, obviously people have their own opinions. First of all, all of McLuhan's books are brilliant in one way or another. But probably, and I would even say definitely, his two most important books, both in terms of being path breaking, saying something new, and also having the greatest wealth of information, would be his 1962 book, the Gutenberg Galaxy, and his 1964 book, Understanding Media. But the medium is the massage. You know, that's a very important book. And actually, as long as they're talking about that, I would say, because people often ask me, what would you say that is the third most important book that McLuhan wrote? And I would say, take today, the Executive is Dropout, one of his later books, which was written in the 1970s. But I just want to say one thing about McLuhan and traditional publishers. I organized this tetrad conference with Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan and a couple of other people where I was then teaching at Fairleigh Dickinson University in the spring of 1978. But Marshall came down with a whole bunch of copies of Tate Today, the Executive as Dropout. And at the end of the conference, he gave them to me. He said, well, you know, thank you very much. I appreciate that. And he said to me, well, you know, the book now has been remaindered, so you all know best what to do with the book, with the books. Please give them to deserving students over the years, which I did for about 20 years until I had no more copies of that book left, but remainder for people who don't know means the geniuses are. Whoever the publisher was basically said, hey, you know what? Not only we're not going to promote the book, we don't even want to sell the book anymore. It's not selling well enough. So they remaindered it. And that taught me a very important lesson also about traditional publishers, that someone like Marshall McLuhan, okay, doesn't mean every book he wrote was great. But nonetheless, they. They thought enough of the book to publish it. So, okay, the book didn't do that well. And what does the publisher do? They remainder it. They say, hey, goodbye. We don't want to even handle this book anymore. So that's yet another advantage. Now, jumping ahead in time that the Kindle and Amazon give to authors. [00:34:13] Speaker A: I like the three books that you picked. I think that's an interesting spread in that. And I want to talk about something. You've talked in one of your books about them a second, which is you talk about how Marshall's use of headlining in Gutenberg Galaxy and in Take Today is very much similar to writing a tweet, which I think is very apt. And in a notebook I tried keeping, I wanted to also touch on with all of these books. I read all three of them and they all took a. I don't know what it was like reading a book like that in, say, 1974. But I mean, it's a lot of work to read any one of those books. They're. They're not. It's not that necessarily they're dense, which they are. It's that Marshall is not necessarily citing himself. And Will could jump between three different topics or three different kind of what we would call subjects. But he would insist at the end of Understanding Media that the subjects are kind of going away with automation anyway. The Gutenberg Galaxy tends to be very historical. Understanding Media, each chapter is about a media form. And Take Today was written. Was co authored with Barrington Nevitt as this. This business book, which I always think is fascinating. Like, I wonder what it was like at that point in time. You know, you're an academic at that time. You're coming into this. I know that that book you talk about, it got remaindered. It was loved and hated by particular audiences. But it was this really. I don't know, I think it was pretty brilliant to try to push maybe was it ahead of its time to try to take media theory and really try to make it applicable to business people or the entrepreneurs of the world, like, as an entrepreneur in spirit. Every page of that book spoke to Me, I loved it. But it's. As somebody who's read a lot of business books and went to business school, I get why they would have never put that on the curriculum. So I'd love to hear your take on that book as kind of this resonant energy and the vibes it gives out. [00:36:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, let me first say, to get back to your point that I made in McLuhan in an age of Social Media, that the chapter titles, the blurbs, as McLuhan referred to them, that appeared at the beginning of every small chapter are, were and are tweets. And, you know, I realize that, of course, by the time I'm writing McLuhan and Asia social Media, I know what tweets are, because it's 2014, 2015, and Twitter has been around at that point for, like, at least nine or 10 years already. So maybe eight or nine years. But I think that just looking at the Gutenberg Galaxy for a moment, and then I'll get to take today. That book is amazing and basically is a precursor of two kinds of digital systems, because the headlines are tweets. You know, the world is turning into a global village. Whatever the headline is. That's, you know, think about all the knowledge that's encompassed in just that headline from the Gutenberg Galaxy. But then what comes after. I also realized in the 1980s, before there were Twitters and, you know, even more so, you know, in the 1990s, that these short essays were actually what the earliest digital expressions were, which became eventually called blogs. So a blog post, if you think about it, it's not usually the length of a chapter as in a traditional book. It's usually like, you know, seven, eight, nine, ten paragraphs. That's exactly what you find in the Gutenberg Galaxy. So that amazing book was a precursor both of blogging and tweeting in its format. So what are we to make of that? You know, I'm not saying McLuhan was clairvoyant at all, but, you know, when he said, you know, that there's a global village being created, and that didn't come true until there was an Internet again. It's not that he was some kind of clairvoyant and predicted the future in that sense. It's that he understood on a very profound level the way the human mind works. And he understood when he was writing the Gutenberg Galaxy, that these titles he was coming up with and the sections that follow the titles and every quote, chapter, unquote, that would be something that the human brain would be Very comfortable with decoding and understanding. And it shocked a lot of people at the time. And I'll tell you the truth, I read the Gutenberg Galaxy back literally in the mid, even a little early than the mid. Like maybe like 1965, I guess. 1965 is the mid-1960s, I read. [00:39:34] Speaker A: So this was before you were in college? Yeah. [00:39:38] Speaker B: You were in college, right? City College of New York when I was 16. So I read, I took a course in education. Very enlightened Catholic professor assigned the Gutenberg Galaxy as reading in that course. I was basically, you know, 18 years old at the time. I looked at it. I said, what is this? You know, I was a kid, I expected it to be like normal sized chapters. I expected titles to be 3, 4, 5 words, not a complete sentence. And, you know, I put it aside. And it wasn't until a good eight or nine, ten years later when I was in the master's program at the New School for Social Research and of course, taught by John Culkin, who was one of McLuhan's acolytes. He invited Marshall McLuhan to come down to Fordham University in the late 1960s. He has a whole fascinating story himself. John Culkin. The late John Culkin, unfortunately. And the course that I took with him, which was called Understanding Media, and I began, and in that course we read both Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. It suddenly became clear to me, wow, this is a treasure trove. Just take it easy, relax, you know, and there's something significant there, I think someone in a graduate program reads a book, the same book very differently than an undergraduate, because an undergraduate, you worry, what's your grade going to be? I need to graduate. By the time you get to the graduate level, you're a little bit more relaxed. You still want to graduate, but you have more confidence in yourself. And so I'm sure I'm not alone in being someone who didn't really get McLuhan that much as an undergraduate, but as a graduate in a graduate program, it all came together. Did I answer your question there? Did I just go, well, you kept. [00:41:36] Speaker A: Me on track, that my question became layered, and you kept me on. You kept to a couple of the layers, but then the last layer you didn't address, which was you said that your third favorite book in the list was Take Today, which I think is an awesome book, but it is a book that's loved and hated and apparently was, as you said, it was remaindered. It was not. It was not a commercial success in its day. But they wanted it to be. I mean, the publisher wanted it to be. And there's a piece of me that really believes that, you know, with more of a modern tongue. But if that book was published today, it would be, you know, the thing that people in Silicon Valley are handing out to their entire teams. [00:42:17] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I'll tell you what it was about that book. And so it has to be considered in the context of the books that came in between Understanding Media and Take Today, and you mentioned one of them, the medium is the massage. Another one is War and Peace in the Global Village. And there's a lot of value in those books. But as anyone who's read those books know, they were very pictorial. You know, there are a lot of images in the books. I have nothing against pictures or images, but ultimately I think it was McLuhan's words that best expressed his thinking. You know, the pictures were fun. I guess it's easier for some people to understand pictures than written words. I'm not one of those people, you know, I mean, I can understand pictures as well as anybody else can, but I think that words are still our primary as human beings, whether spoken or written are primary and best modes of intellectual discourse. So one of the things that immediately attracted me to take today, the executive is Dropout, was the fact that this was something that said finally, okay, we've had enough with these picture books, you know, published by Bantam, you know, these little paperbacks, okay, I have nothing against Bantam, nothing against those books. There are some great insights in those books for sure. But we again get McLuhan's and Barrington Nevitt, you're right, he co wrote the book with McLuhan. But I want to say something about that as well. We get and take Today again, you know, more of a traditional discourse. And I like that. I like the organization of the book. The other thing that really struck me about the book, and I think this makes me similar to you, McLuhan in his talk always had like a practical element, like understanding this is valuable because you can do that in the real world. He very much resisted being cast as some kind of academic in an ivory tower who's writing only for academics. And so I agree with you completely. That book could be a best seller today because it's something that deals with business and there's business acumen that Barrington never did bring to the book. But I do want to say, I mean, and you know, this is a question that's impossible to answer. The people that McLuhan Co wrote books with it has always been impossible for me to figure out, well, what exactly did these other people contribute? Because, you know, the ideas were slightly different, but again, the ideas were slightly different between the Gutenberg Galaxy and understanding media. So McLuhan himself was capable of focusing on slightly different things. And I don't know. And again, you know, I'll be happy to cede this territory to someone who knows specifically more about what Barrington Nevitt or any of his co authors, like Harley Parker, you know, contributed. But to some extent I think the co authorship was almost McLuhan needing to bounce his ideas off someone. And out of that that book came into being. Let me also throw in here. I saw just a couple, couple of months ago, I don't know if you ever heard of a media theorist by the name of Gary Gumpert. G U M P E R T. He was best known probably like in the late 60s, early 70s, he wrote an article which he called the Rise of Minicom. And the gist of the article was like by wearing a little button, some very small thing, you can have like an impact. So he's like trying to talk about small media. He wrote some other very good articles as well. He passed away in December 2024. I think he was in his 90s. And so this past spring straight, my colleague at Fordham University, who also is like now very much involved in the International Society for General Semantics, organized a really wonderful memorial event at the Players in New York City where, you know, people got up. Lance Strait of course, was talking about Gumpert, knew him very well because Lance Strait was Gumpert's student at Queen's College, part of the City University of New York. Josh Meyerowitz, a good friend of mine, he was there and he was another student of Gumpert. I wasn't a student of Gumpert, but one of the things that was shown, this is what I'm getting at in this event was a very primitive television show from 1960, so two years before the publication of the Gutenberg Galaxy that Gumpert made. And it's just like, I think they had a kinescope of it. I mean the thing looked like, I don't know, like Sergei Eisenstein filmed it like somehow back in 1920. It's like, it is so funny, you know, if you look at it that way. Basically their way of like moving a camera in and out was they had like almost like a camera on wheels which wasn't robotic. I think somebody slightly pushed the camera off camera and the camera like moves a little bit and stops. So that's their way of doing a close up in 1960. But the reason why I'm mentioning this is it was a great conversation between Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker and someone else whose name I forgot. But he's no longer with us, so we won't be angry. But you could see in that conversation the two of them playing off each other. And so that's why I'm thinking that in, I think the two books that Harley Parker and Marsha McLuhan collaborated on that captured what was going on in the conversation. Parker did come up with some original ideas, but it was basically McLuhan talking, bouncing an idea of Parker responding to it and they go back and forth like that. So again, I don't know exactly how Take Today was written, but I think there's a little too much attention given to the fact that Marshall, pretty much after Understanding Media, stopped writing books by himself and began collaborating with other people. I know that Neil Postman, who was my mentor, I think we've talked about him before in my PhD program. I loved him as a professor. He was the most exciting, the warmest, the most caring professor you could ask for. It was a pleasure to be in his classroom. And if I'm any good as a teacher, I think I owe that in large part to what I learned about teaching from Neil Postman. But I disagreed vehemently with his view about media. As you know, he basically thought computers were just another kind of television screen and were leading to a reduction in literacy, et cetera, et cetera. But Postman's view was that McLuhan, after understanding media, needed someone to bounce off his ideas to write his next books. But that was Postman's take. And I don't really know, you know, I never had. I did meet Marshall and work with him a little bit on, you know, the Tetrad and so on and did a conference with him, but I never had that conversation. Marshall, tell me the truth. How much did you contribute? How much did Barrington never contribute? But it cries out for some kind of resolution because when you have a book written by two people, it cries out. The question cries out, well, so who wrote what? [00:50:47] Speaker A: I want to ask you about the TETRAD conference. The tetrad's an important idea and I would think that the self selected audience it's going to find this show to begin with is hopefully going to know what the TETRAD is. But it is this four part framework that's created by Marshall McLuhan about explaining the laws of meteor. The understanding a particular media, if I'm not mistaken, you can kind of just take it and apply it to anything out there. We could apply it to a laptop computer or just computers in general, or a website itself, or the Internet as a whole. And it breaks it into four part that which is enhanced by the media, that which is made obsolescent by the media, that which gets reversed by the media. No, retrieved, retrieved, retrieved, retrieved. [00:51:39] Speaker B: And then what's. And then again reverses into something else which is very similar to it, but at the same time is very different. The examples I always use because, you know, they're so obvious. Take, take radio. Okay, so what does radio enhance? Instant verbal communication across great distances. What does radio obsolesce? Well, it depends if you're talking, let's say, just about news, radio, obsolescence, newspapers. And the truth of the matter is, in the 1920s there began to be a reduction in newspapers because people began getting their news in the radio through the radio, actually in the radio, but through the radio as well. And the retrieval process, that's actually a lot of fun. In the case of radio, it's pretty obvious we spoke before we wrote. You know, anthropologists would agree with that. And so what radio does is it pulls verbal acoustic communication back into first place as an obsolescence print. Then the question is, what does radio reverse into? And so there you have like one of the greatest examples that you could ask for. It reverses into television. That literally happened. The Jack Benny Show, Gunsmoke, they were radio shows which by the 1950s, they were on television. And you know, and figuratively, almost all of radio flipped into television. The only parts of radio that lasted were indeed the news. And this gets back into my work. Human replay. Media survive when they perform an essential human activity. Radio survived in part because people were driving by the 1950s, and you can't very well watch television as a driver and get very far because if you're watching television, not the road, you're going to wind up behind a tree. So the radio came along at a unique time and it survived at a unique time. As more people got in their cars by the 1950s, they wanted to listen to the news, they wanted to listen to music. The other reason that radio survived so well is it was radio's good fortune and in the 1950s to start playing rock and roll music, which revolutionized music. I mean, classical music is still important, it still exists, but it basically threw classical music out of any first place position. Jazz never was in first place. You Know, it was like a very hip thing, but radio as we know through rock and roll basically made an enormous connection to anyone from like, I don't know, eight years old initially to like, probably in their 20s. And then the Beatles came along and all that strengthened radio. So that there's the example of the tetrad. And you, and what you said is right. You can apply it to anything. And a lot of people, again, the people who were not really interested in exploring, exploring media in the way that Marshall McLuhan was inviting people to do, they got frustrated with the media, with the tetrad. Oh, it's just an arbitrary thing. Come on. Don't dignify it and call it laws. By the way, I wrote the preface to McLuhan's second published article about the tetrad in etc. The Journal of the International Society for General Semantics. And he starts that article with a joke. He says, when I found out about that, I found out that Karl Popper said a scientific law can be falsified. That's when I decided to come up with and publish these laws of the media. So in other words, he was not doing any damage because these laws could be falsified. So there's no problem. By the way, that's another thing about understanding McLuhan. There was a joke behind almost every single thing that he said. He was a great believer in humor as a way of literally teaching people, extending, expanding, disseminating information. At the same time, he famously said, Marshall McGlorin said that there's a grievance at the root of every joke. So just think about that for a while. When you tell a joke, what is the grievance behind the joke? [00:56:24] Speaker A: I mean, the opening of Take Today talks very much about how the grievance. And then he ties it, he plays, does a lot of punnery around hang ups. And that the grievance is the hang up and talking about the phone. And somebody gets way too hung up on something, they can't get the joke in it and they can't move past it because they're hung up on it. And it's, it's the way that there's this word play between the metaphorical or analogical meaning and then back to the literal meaning and then back and forth to make the point is really fun. And it chops in there. I gotta ask you, this was the question I was gonna ask, which is speaking of McLuhan and jokes as a mode of teaching, teaching something. You know, there's the great opening scene to Annie hall where he's standing online. And right behind him is a professor type who lets us know that he happens to teach a class at the New York University on film theory or television theory or something. So I. I want to know how that felt as seeing that scene as, you know, you are directly in line with McLuhan, or rather, you are a McLuhanist, whereas this person was directly challenging him and his thoughts or had the whole fallacy. I'd love to hear what it was like seeing that. And if you know how you guys talked about it in your circles. [00:57:44] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, first of all, let me say I'm A graduate of NYU twice. Both my undergraduate degree and my PhD. I did take a course at Columbia University, but I never got a degree from them. That professor standing in that line with his girlfriend in Eddie hall, he was a Columbia University professor, not an NYU professor. No NYU professor could ever have been as stupid as that professor. Although he joined a huge group of people who misunderstood McLuhan. I mean, you know, hot and cool and so on. It's still misunderstood. A guy, Jonathan something or other, wrote a book on McLuhan. It was published, I think, in the early 1970s. He got it wrong in the book. Jonathan Miller, I think his name is. He basically. I mean, just think about that for a second. This guy wrote a book, very bright guy. He published a whole bunch of other books. He had an editor, he had a publisher. And he blatantly, in the book, reverses what hot and cool are, right? I mean, hot is like overwhelming information. Cool is much less information that draws you into it. That's why cool is much more powerful. That's just, you know, an example of people misunderstanding McLuhan. But here's the full story, as far as I know it, about how that came about. Woody Allen, who is a brain comedian, a comedic genius, asked Marshall McLuhan, could I have you appear in this movie I'm making? And McLuhan said, of course. And by the way, make no mistake about it, McLuhan loved publicity just as much as I do. Just as much as you do. He was not a shy, you know, academic, hiding away at his house someplace and, like, nervous about speaking. He loved to speak. When you asked him a question, before you even heard the words in his mouth, you would see the twinkle in his eye. He just loved so much talking and basically educating the world around him. Woody Allen shared with McLuhan what the scene would be. There'd be some ignoramus professor who would be. There's a Yiddish expression, hawking his girlfriend a chinik. That means like what? Like banging on a china pot, right? For my favorite expressions, hawking his girlfriend in China. You know, about McLuhan getting it completely wrong. Woody Allen is standing there on the move line, getting more and more frustrated. And it was Woody Allen who came up with the idea. Wouldn't it be great if I could just pull McLuhan in, Marshall McLuhan, to set this idiotic professor straight? And so McLuhan came in there and did that. But here is a story that a lot of people don't know, and this is the truth. McLuhan came up with what is probably the most enigmatic and in many ways the best part of that whole dialogue. Because when he. When. When Woody Allen says, just a second, wait a minute, he pulls McLuhan in, basically, McLuhan says, you know nothing of my work. You think my fallacies are all wrong. Now, if you think about what does that mean? You think my fallacies are wrong? It's a classic McLuhan s statement when you first hear it, what is this guy talking about? But. But right. This guy, this professor from Columbia, is so far off understanding McLuhan, he. He doesn't even understand when McLuhan is wrong. So that's why, you know, you think my fallacies are all wrong. So. But McLuhan was so proud of that line when we were talking about that. And every single time the subject would come up, McLuhan would say, you know, I came up with that line Woody Allen say about it. Well, he was all right with it. You got to give Woody Allen credit. He must have liked the line because he left it in the play. In the movie, he could have cut that out. But, yeah, that, by the way, is the way most people who know about Marshall McLuhan know about him. Because that was an enormously successful movie. You know, it's easily available to see, but it really is a great introduction to McLuhan as a testament to Woody Allen, because that really was the way Marshall McLuhan was. That's the way he spoke. That's the way he thought. [01:02:19] Speaker A: When I was first introduced to McLuhanism, I was at a coffee shop in college with a friend close to midnight. And we were just working on papers and whatnot, and he handed me the mediumism massage. He had it in his backpack, amongst other books. He goes, you should read this. And I go, I have no idea who this author is. And he goes, of course you do. And we reenacted the entire scene loudly in that coffee Shop for everyone around us. I want to ask you just one more bit on the Tetrad and then move into one other thing. But another piece of scholarship that you contributed to the laws of media and to the TETRAD is the. The chiasmus, which is a concept that if you're looking at the kind of. I don't know if you use this word, but the scaffolding, the way that a subsequent technology that kind of takes the place of a previous technology, there is a relationship between how you can look at the tetrad, and that is that in itself is a lot of media or a theory here to work with. So I just would love for you to just briefly explain that to me. I've read your paper. I've emailed you about this. It's still something I think is very fascinating and I can always understand better. [01:03:37] Speaker B: Okay, so first of all, I want to mention Matt Lindia. L I N D I A. He just completed his PhD, and if I'm not wrong, I think he told me he just got a job at a university in Florida. But I'm not 100% sure that he just got a job at a university. I'm not 100% sure it's in Florida. So the way that paper came about was Matt wrote an article in which he talked about something that I began talking about at the TETRAD conference that I organized with Marshall McLuhan in 1978, and that's Wheels of Tetrad Evolution. And if you search on that, you can find a paper that I presented at the TETRAD conference. It's available on Academia. Edu. [01:04:34] Speaker A: And you can see. You can see the typewriter font from where you. Where you originally typed it up. [01:04:39] Speaker B: That's right. Barely legible, but. So what I was doing with the Tetrad wheel was exactly what you were talking about regarding chiasmus. Basically, the point I was making is, okay, you can do it. Remember I said, you know, the TETRAD for radio concludes when it reverses into television, but then television has its own tetrad. And so what is the Tetrad in television? Well, it enhances audio, visual, instant communication across great distances. What does it obsolesce, audio only. What does it retrieve? Well, it retrieves again, you know, the visual, which is, you know, part of life. Also not the Alphabet, but the primitive visual life is audio, visual. What does it reverse into? And when I was writing that in 1982, it wasn't clear it could be holography. We now know television has reversed into streaming. You know, it can reverse into all kinds of things. Matt Lindier wrote a paper in which he mentioned the tetrad wheels. And what he said was, you know, in fact, good for Paul Levinson for just not only talking about the tetrad, but talking about how you can explain media evolution through the Tetrad. And that really is the main contribution of our paper, that if you look at a given medium, you need to do more than just looking at what it does. It is in itself an evolution of the four things. But there's really, I call it Tetrad Wheels of Revolution. It's really a spiral. So after the radio tetrad, you go up to television. It ends with radio reversing into television, but the television tetrad begins with television. And that has its whole process, and it goes in circles. And because one circle is after the other circle, it's a series of spirals. And that's really what we were getting at by the relationship. You know, if you think about like a slinky and you spread it apart or you stand it up, that. Except. Except it goes on and on. [01:06:56] Speaker A: All right, thank you for that. So I want to ask you about the Tetrad of Paul Evanson, you know, professor, writer, critic. And now, I mean, you're a publisher. We talked about the self publishing before, but you're also. I mean, you're also in the. In the publishing game. You are producing. And so very recently you have helped Tom. You have published Tom Cooper's recent book, which is on the history of Harold innes and Marshall McLuhan, who are two independent thinkers who knew each other very well and had a lot of synthesis in how they thought. And Tom Cooper is a longtime friend and colleague of yours. Tell me about just kind of the natural progression into knowing that you're the publisher in this work or becoming a publisher as somebody who has experience in writing. But also, let's talk about this work itself, which is a very. A very important piece in this history. [01:08:00] Speaker B: First of all, let me give you and everyone a little history as to how Connected Editions publishing Company was created. I'm not sure if you and I talked about this before, and actually, it's good that you were introduced to Tina, because back in the 1980s, in the mid-1980s, we created a company called Connected Education, which offered courses completely online for academic credit granted by the New School for Social Research. We had a university in London that gave, you know, British credit for this and several other universities. And so the name of the company was Connected Education. And we hired teachers and we designed courses, and I taught some courses. And after a couple of years, it became clear that some of our faculty were writing books, and they were interested in getting their books published and making those books available to the students. But it had to happen very quickly because, like, somebody was teaching a course, say, which started in September, and they let us know in August, hey, I have a book. Can I make this available to the students? You know, do you have a publisher? And obviously, there's no publisher on earth. Again, unless you're Stephen King and you've written a new book, who's going to get a book published within a month? But it dawned on me that, hey, again, this is the 1980s. There's no generally available Internet as yet. And there were, of course, discs. And it dawned on me that, well, if I could get these books on a disc in a format that somebody could read, then they could actually assign that book as a class and let the students buy the discs for their course, just like they would any other required readings. So we created a company, Connected Editions, which also had the nice advantage of Connected. Education for short was known as Connected or Connected, but Connected Editions for short is known as Connected as well, Connected Edition. So that worked nicely. And back then, Bowker, which supplies ISBMs, was already in existence for something like 10 or 20 bucks. I bought, like, a thousand ISBNs back then. So that's how Connected Editions began. And for a while, we did publish a couple of books written by the faculty. We published. One of our faculty actually wrote, you know, several novels. Sharon Lurch was her name. And so we published, you know, some of our fiction. One of our students, Bill Doobie is his name. I should say. Sharon Loach is her name. I don't know what she's doing now. I hope she's still with us. But. But Bill Dooby certainly is. He was a student of ours back then, and it turned out he was a poet, and we published a book of his poetry. So those were the first things Connected Editions published. Okay, now let's move ahead to we're in the 21st century, and remember I told you that we. That I actually had had, you know, a whole bunch of books published by traditional publishers, both nonfiction, media theory, and science fiction. By 2012, I, in a variety or for a variety of ways, was getting increasingly irritated working with my traditional publishers. And at the same time, I met someone. I knew him online. His name is Larry Ketchersid. He was starting a very small, small publishing company in Texas, by the way. So he's a. He's, he's a State colleague of yours. And he basically was saying to me, hey, Paul, I'm starting a small publishing company, Josara Media, and it's based on the names of our two children, Joe and Sarah, and we're looking for books, you know, to publish. Do you have, you know, anything that you might be interested having published as a Kindle? And I said, well, you know, at that point, I hadn't, hadn't written a new novel in a couple of years. I said, I have all my science fiction novels published by Tor Books, but frankly, and I don't mind if Tor that's still in existence hears this, they were doing a total of zero promotion by 2012 on the Silk Code, which was published in 1999, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, even on the plot to save Socrates. It was published in 2006. By 2012, it was just off their agenda. So, to make a long story short, I got back the rights from Tor, the traditional publisher for these science fiction novels, and gave them, I guess, back then, a Docx file or PDF to Larry Ketchersid. He converted them to a format that could be published on Kindle. And to this day, you'll see on the Kindle editions of those early novels, Josaramidia is there in some kind of way. To make another long story short, though, over the years that followed, Harry began to get involved in other things. So I was trying to decide what to do with those books. So now we're talking about 2014, 2015, and I realized that, hey, you know, connected editions created back in the 1980s, they're still a publisher of these earlier books. So I began publishing the Psychota and the Plot to Save Socrates and pretty much all of my early science fiction novels on Kindle. And I quickly discovered, you know, literally in the first year that I was making 10 times the amount of money selling Kindle editions that I had in the years after the first publication of the Silk Code, how much I made on that book. So from a monetary point of view, that seemed like a good thing. The final piece of this is Routledge was the publisher of the Soft Edge and the publisher of Digital McGloon. They also, after the first couple of years, did a terrible job in promoting those books. They still, however, had the rights to the books because the books were nonetheless selling. They were used as textbooks and so on. But I wrote in 2015, I sat down one day at the end of one of my classes and began writing what would become McLuhan in an age of Social Media. And I contacted the person who was the current editor at Routledge Books, the editor who had acquired digital McLuhan was no longer with the company. And by the way, he was a great editor. As a great editor, Adrian Driscoll is his name. A fine person and a fine editor. But his successors didn't particularly want to publish anything by me. But nonetheless, I sent them the chapter where I said, this could be a new chapter at the end of Digital McLoom, because social media didn't exist when Digital McLoom was published in 1999. So here's something that talks about to Twitter, Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. I got no response from them. Not only did they say no, just zero response. So finally I said, you know what? And, you know, I remember the day that it happened. And I said, you know what? Connected Editions is now publishing my science fiction. I can publish my nonfiction as well. And so McLuhan in an age of Social Media was the first nonfiction book that Connected Editions published. And from there, I then wrote another book called Fake News in Real Context. And in addition to that, you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation Touching the Face of the Cosmos on the intersection of space travel and religion. That was a book of essays and short stories that I put together with Michael Woltermath. Connected Editions published the Kindle of that in 2015. And I decided to work out a deal with Fordham University Press to publish the paperback and the hardcover, because back then, Kindle was not publishing paperbacks and hardcovers. So that's the context in which, a little over a year ago, Tom Cooper approached me and said, hey, can I talk to you about something? In strictest confidence? I said, of course. And what he wanted to talk to me about, he had written this book, Wisdom Weavers, you know, the Lives and Thought of Harold and Marshall McGlorin. He had heard. And in fact, Bob Logan, who had known about Connectivisions, told, hey, you might want to contact Paul Levinson. So he knew about Connected Editions, and he'd been working on this book. This book, as you'll find out when you interview Tom, this book literally is 50 years in the writing. It's based initially on his doctoral dissertation that he completed in the 1970s, and he's been working on it ever since, has published a bunch of other books in the interim. But this was last summer, and he sent me the book, and I thought it was a great book. I thought it was a very important book that filled in a very, very important part of intellectual history, namely the relationship of Harold innes and Marshall McLuhan when both of them were alive. And in some ways, even more important, the relationship after Ennis passed away way too young in the early 1950s. Just to give you an idea of what Tom Cooper's book did, before I read Tom Cooper's book, I thought that the sole relationship of the two men when they were alive was in 1951. Marshall McLuhan is walking by the classroom at the University of Toronto where Harold Dennis is teaching a course. And McLuhan is thrilled to see that his book that's just been published in 1951, the Mechanical Bride, is in the syllabus of the course that Harold Dennis was teaching. That's the story that was told to me. I don't know by who, maybe Neil Postman. But that was the story that sort of came. Came down to us as PhD students and the world at large. But it turns out, and Tom Cooper found this through years of diligent investigation, that actually McLuhan and Innis knew each other before 1951, that basically there was correspondence between them. McLuhan even proposed that the two of them put together a school of communication, which is seen by many as the foundation of what is now called the Toronto School of Communication, even though there is no physical Toronto School of Communication, but the concept of a school. So all of that I just told you about this relationship between Innes and Macroom when they were alive. That is just a relatively small section of the book. And there's a much greater tableau of what Innes did on his own, what McLuhan went on to do on his own, and then, of course, the intersection of their work. [01:21:27] Speaker A: And so. And that's already available for. On distribution via Kindle, too, right? [01:21:33] Speaker B: Yes, it's available actually on Kindle, paperback and hardcover. And all you need to do is you just search on. You don't even have to do the whole tile. Just search on, quote, wisdom, Weavers, unquote, quote Tom Cooper, unquote. Those two names are at Amazon in the Book of Come. Right. [01:21:56] Speaker A: And you used one of the ISBNs you. You bought in your. Your back a thousand ISBNs from 30 years ago. [01:22:02] Speaker B: That's right. Right. Three of the. [01:22:06] Speaker A: Well, I learned. [01:22:07] Speaker B: Let me just say three. [01:22:08] Speaker A: Oh, right. For each. For each version. [01:22:11] Speaker B: Correct. Yeah. [01:22:13] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an interesting thing. Well, this was a great chat today, Paul. I really, I. I learned a lot. I really appreciated this. This is very energizing for me and I think so for our audience as well. I mean, we. We covered a lot. We talked about a lot of great stuff today. Oh, I. You. I got it. I'll close by telling you this anecdote that I appreciate, which was, you know, you were talking earlier about Chat. GPT has premium features. I pay the $20 a month so that it can remember things about me, so I can ask it to bring up those things. Things later. And so I said to ChatGPT the other day, I said, based on everything you know about me, who should I meet out in the world, like, who. Who would I find really stimulating and. And could, like, help me understand things in the world that I want to know. And you at top of the list, it said you should meet Paul Levinson. He has a lot of similar interests and you would be interested, which I took as being a good thing in that it knows a lot. It definitely was. Right. I want to talk to Paul Levinson, but it doesn't know that we've talked before, which I think is good that it doesn't. Doesn't have all of our full communication records in its memory just as of yet. [01:23:28] Speaker B: So how are you sure that it doesn't know that we talked before? Because you asked who should I meet that I don't know, in effect. [01:23:36] Speaker A: Yes, I see. Well, listen, I think that's my context for it. [01:23:41] Speaker B: Well, I'm very glad you told me that because as a result of that, what I said earlier about ChatGPT, that's the last bad thing I'll ever say about that program because finally, a publicist that says the right thing. [01:24:06] Speaker A: Yeah, it's great. Okay. [01:24:08] Speaker B: Well. [01:24:10] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I hope to keep this show going and we'll have another conversation again later down the line. Thank you so much. [01:24:19] Speaker B: My pleasure. It's a great title. [01:24:23] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the first episode of the Executive Dropout podcast. This was a great interview with Paul Levinson. If you'd like to listen to more, please subscribe and we get some more listeners out here. So if you found this conversation, great, share it and put it out there so we can get some more listeners. Thank you very much and enjoy the next episode.