Description

We are always grateful to have time with Newsweek's Steven Levy. Kate and I were delighted that he came down to the Beet.TV studios on Friday to talk with us about about Apple, Steve Jobs (who he first met in 1983 when writing a piece for Rolling Stone) and, of course, the iPod. The iPod was launched five years ago today. Steven has a wonderful new book about the iPod called The Perfect Thing. The book's been getting some great reviews.

Transcript

Newsweek's Steven Levy on His iPod Book Male: Oh my God, that is the most gigantic iPod, Steve. How many megabytes is that? Let’s check out it’s got the big mark on it? Steven Levy: Yeah, this is Apple’s biggest iPod. It holds every song ever recorded, every movie ever made and every evil thought that any person has ever had. And the cup wheel really doesn’t move too much but I can’t figure how to turn it off. The book actually tries to emulate the spirit of the iPod and tries to be iPod-like in a number of different ways. Once as I tried to have fun like you have fun on your iPod and one thing, I’ve done because I think shuffle is the coolest part of the iPod. I just love it when you take all your music collection and you reorder it and things come up you didn’t know it was on there and great segue ways come, segue ways come from one song storages like there’s amazing things that disc jockeys used to do, an era progressive radio and back in the 60’s. And shuffle also since they made to be sort of the symbol of our age and digital age, you shuffle one way on music, when we shuffle our radio with iPod and the podcast and you shuffle the television schedule and we shuffle our news by going to different sites in the internet. So I’m starting to actually shuffle the book. Each chapter I wrote can stand alone as an essay, as little word in itself so I made it. So you could shuffle the chapters in a reading experience would not lose anything. So the first chapter is always the same the sort of introduction but from then on I had my son and my niece take ping pong balls and pick them out and they randomly shuffle the book and I picked out on a bunch of shuffles, the ones that seems to me are best to read. So this book, the second chapter is called identity and your book it might be called origin where it might be called personal. I think download is the fear itself for so it’s three different versions of the book and the one you read might be different from someone else’s. Male: Wow! That’s very unusual. It’s not -- I never knew that. I don’t think anyone has ever done that before. There have been versions of Julio Cortazar, a fantastic Latin American novelist wrote the book called Hopscotch where he did a complicated scheme by which in a kind of read it this way, you read it that way and you have to read well front forward in 1922 and you have to jump around yourself. I guess you could still do that in this backward because of many books. But this book actually gives you four different shuffles.