welcome very much the conversation to enter a program with one of my dearest friends here in new york city or in the world that's a producer of television from the beginning of television understands it as well and written about it as well with a lot of the pioneers who have been responsible for it and that's levinson paul levinson he's written mightily the history of the extended media and that sort of thing and we're going to be talking about it in word as it go from here because we're at a time of maybe transition that is coming about at the end of a process that got started and mcluhan used to well i'm delighted to be here i don't know if i'm a real authority i'll leave that to be determined by others or in my book every hockey written has been very well researched very well done and word well put together and you always back it up very well with conversation you know and notation and so forth like that you know what you can ventura scholars you are scholars  harmonies i wrote the songs and that album for many years was almost totally unknown by anyone outside my immediate family yeah sure mark it's on the market you can listen to it on spotify i tune fiction related you probably interviewed some of these people nat hentoff a great proponent of freedom of speech no i didn't get it yeah yeah yeah i mean yeah and you know how here is why i was so moved when the village voice register yeah of course yeah i was recording it although the way i recorded it is i made a deal with the studio i was in which i said i don't have enough money to pay you but i'll give you a percentage of the album that was so great idea  take a time machine back there but i pick up the copy it was voice and i see a scathing review of paul mccartney nd solo album the beatles had broken up not that long before mccartney had come out with i was nd album i happened to love that album and the guy who wrote the viewers name is robert chris cow he was like you know the dino he was much younger then but for many years he was known as the dean of rock critics i thought they were view was not only unfair to mccartney just playing dumb as far as music was concerned chris yeah and him that's right  article paid me sixty five dollars people began calling me so that started me on your musical career no no it's sort of was the that's right from basically writing songs singing so i  of real scholarship that's exactly right i didn't like real scholarship back then when i was doing those songs but by the and by the mid seventies i decided hey you know what i gave a guest lecture set up somewhere heard that lecture someplace or maybe even been about music and i remember thinking wow you know this is even easier than writing yeah like talking yeah i mean no i mean teaching i mean standing up in front of a class and basically talking back in the sixty's who basically analyzed from a sociological point of view the academic world and he said there are three social components to any university or college and the academic situation there are the faculty there are the students and there are the administrators right and i have to tell you honestly and i you know i tell people this all the time what has kept me in the academic world i was as a matter of fact much like you i intend never to retire i'm going to keep doing what i do because i love what i'm doing and so you know people ask because i was so when he got to retire you know yes he was there is a i think a fascinating parallel in connection marshall mcluhan was primarily situated in toronto and in fact  you add together all of my nonfiction books and all of my science fiction novels i were only talking about full length books because i've had some like short of things published as well but you can write a book  he had a brilliant mind and you would have loved interviewing him you know that i couldn't i try i really i would go with pope paul used to be the laws of media by h marshall mcluhan now his name was herbert marshall mcluhan and that's how we sometimes signed you know his manuscripts i just marshall to h period marshall  without telling me then he sends it up to marshall mcluhan in toronto and you know basically says to him hey what about graduate students wrote a preface to radhika laws of the media is it ok with you if we publish you ever come up to toronto yeah you know i'd love to see you so at this point you know tina and i have a married i get home and i say hey honey don't you have some cousins and toronto that you haven't seen in a know he was in his own way but his his mind was oh yeah yeah i do want to hear more king with him and like we pass a car in the street and whatever it is we're talking about he just looks its color looks at what was done in the past but what's coming up in terms of the next month year decade in terms of media and implication what with all the media   it's just too easy it's too attractive to look at a television screen rather than take the time and a book and read the book by the way as was the case with many of these critics television will always be with us but the evolution of media did not stop with television evolution never stops and it is always we have human beings who are striving to get better kinds of communication i predicted in the s that we're going to have screens i didn't know about smart phones or anything but just in general that yeah now television has a screen is just images sounds but that we may well have screens where there are words the same words that we see in print and that we write and so on now you know it's a midnight one hundred and eighty s i had no idea about amazon  kendall where books would be available you know electronically i didn't know the specifics but i knew something that's more important than the specifics i understood that the alphabet has a picture is what photography were all these media do is they reflect a reality that's already out there so people who are watching us talking we reality are talking here you know is it enables us to communicate about things that are not in reality about things that are not physically present it enables us to effortlessly communicate about abstract concepts like freedom democracy like the very notion of abstraction this is the genius of the alphabet most people historians think probably the nations helped invent it then some sort of well yeah but it doesn't really matter who invented it  whoever did change to human history and put them played for words the contemporary world yes exactly the media which distort human knowledge that's generation after generation exactly multitask so i enjoy reading i enjoy watching television one is not knocking the other out and you know i enjoy writing i enjoy making music two very different thing you know you're just as you're saying you're very linear thinker that way when you're left reading which is not a couple one billion trying to understand you know how is it eyes lit up he says oh i know it's because you make music so in other words because music is not alphabetic your music comes from a different part of the brain so mcluhan thought that my music is nonetheless with the off the bed does i think it's the best thing ever invented to get our thoughts what's inside our heads and out there to the world it's because if you think about it writing does the same that is not into reading or not able to reading or not reading but you've got seven thousand languages right we're losing a lot of the language is we're losing a lot of the culture because we're so tied up with the thinking of the gutenberg galaxy and about what's gone on that's been the major way in which is you know the whole panoply of culture has been passed on is through the written language and everything but what it is is i  think you're going to have i just think you're going to have this i call it the store of human knowledge is going to be presented in multimedia form and it's go to be what busy the trick is to get over the injustices that exist is there room for some sort of an inclusiveness of the peoples that have not been included in the literate culture that has been the leadership of the world that is now walking with big league boots all over the place but the mass of the people are going to be included in a gigantic kind of like jam session jam session of a human a liberated human society that is the promise of the time in which we are right is simply not going to be able to just ignore as we have all the least advantaged people who are left to die of starvation or something along the roadside of the people who have been able to be part of the literate society by which the leadership has been determined and the realities of the physics in the realities of think presented in multimedia terms the big other rather than just some that's what divides the world it's what is bringing the world together but it's also what divides it so people have to be they have to be reading arabic and english or whatever and that's that  but if you do that and you get to where they can be simultaneous so it's presented to anybody in spanish or printed in india you into the him air in indian languages and you can include all the people who've been left out yes well some people have been left out of any serious decision making it's all left up to a few people have sat in a long dusty places reading all kinds of books that give them a certain understanding of the law like this guy was posed to be our our next chief capability that's expanded system ever throughout human history we're now at a point where there are extended consciousness going into it's not a normal period  this kind of thing but it would be is not something that's going to be inclusive of people and it would be something that is and then you get a point where the technology is such and used to be we could afford to let have the population and salvation or starvation or whatever the way we used to lead it was never just never just an instance of a real pull film and of the capability of human beings and so it worked but we have weapons systems joe there along the lines of which interpretation of the constitution or this is the one that really is or the power to the party that's going to be able to lead in all that kind of argument if it was under it would be the end of our species now yeah it's very new it's only been in our lifetime it's never been like that we always had a little wiggle room toward the future also we've got an ability to take care of everybody rather than just leaving all the drone or sort of society the people story of human knowledge and then get the languages seven thousand of them translated into one another a media at least so that the the that you won't have the need to read anything that's gets in the way of international communicat so they can be brought in on understanding i'm the highest level everybody can understand one another and we've got to get over the language barrier and at the present and think it has meaning and so instead of it coming out in it stronger that's what divides that world all kinds of action and that's one of the arguments in favor of that and that's predicated upon this idea that maybe we live in a time of qualitative not quantitative continuation of history we live in a time of qualitative transformation which is what i believe ok all right so here's my response ok it will be a little briefer yeah but here it is what you are describing is going on right now through social media and here is what i mean if you think about twitter if you think about facebook anyone any place in the world whether you  languages around the world right so i don't know i haven't examined her that carefully i don't know if they have five thousand different languages valuable in their translation algorithm or program in the same applies to facebook but i do know that there are an enormous number of languages and when i write something in english people in other parts of the world can read it in whatever their language is in reading yeah that's not  greatest losses of life in human history have not been the result of human activities the greatest losses of life have occurred through epidemics so for example the black plague wiped saw technologies are what enable us to push those natural disasters back a little bit so you know we've people still die from contagious illness but read absolute danger however yeah note that at this point i mean we'll see what happens literally in the next couple of days so chances are by the time this is an ad we'll know to you and i talking maybe a week prior to and people watching this as as you know the senate judiciary committee consists of twenty one people eleven were publicans ten democrats and on the day that the judiciary committee were supposed to vote whether or not to move the nomination over to the general senate and then vote which is the ultimately deciding factor see his face he was listening to them and then a little later at the senate judiciary meeting a democrat senator chris coons was betting he was talking sense think from his right but the fact of the matter is what jeff flake did is evidence that in some powerful people and the senators of power awful position human rationality can still be decisive i don't have a very good out and just landing in human rationality i don't have a very good as janet mr mr lean it was about what mr adolf hitler was about what other fascists ruled right leave the cells system of the human society totally inept having any say over anything that's going on it's a handful of people they argue back and forth like mafia down that's what they do they continue to do it and nobody's bringing twitter came about in two thousand and six so you have to go that far back in history let's say it's two thousand and five in two thousand and five the only way that anyone could get his or her thoughts out to the world was if someone like you who was in a position of power would say hey can you come by my show you know i'm fifteen i stride left to interview you or if an adult or of a newspaper said hey this might surprise you i'd love you to write an op ed for my newspaper it saturates such or there was basically no way that people could get their ideas out to the world they may busy have had the best ideas in the world but the only people who knew it were people they could talk to face to face on twitter is change that and that's what might be hoped then because i'll tell you who's really good working twitter is mitch truong yeah exactly master at it and man sees the whole world of people and that's that's something that is part of the current situation absolutely but everyone can critique him on twitter as well and i think look and often they're loved radio because there were no people from the   institution that we've got to get over is the alphabet i think we're going to get rid of that we're going to be able to get people all included and let's hope we can pull it off thank you for viewing ok like barely got started on it and i thank you over a beer good