Yes, the Society of Mind was rather successful. I’ve had messages from people all over the world over the years saying this changed my life and… and I think the reason for its success is first, the chapters are short and each chapter has one main idea, or most of them do, and also the vocabulary I trimmed so that it doesn’t have many words that a ninth grader doesn’t know. So it's… it’s a pre-college book in the sense that its vocabulary, except for a dozen words – new words – is pretty limited. But the other thing is that the book itself illustrates the theory of the mind, that… that the way the mind works, it might have a couple of hundred different pieces of machinery, each of which occasionally interact with some of the others. And so the book itself is a... tries to be a… an analogy with how I think the brain works; mainly, here’s this thing that it does, it’s good at this kind of thing, and every now and then it calls on this one to take over or criticize itself and so forth.

And, so the new book, The Emotion Machine, has been out for three years and I’ve gotten a rather small number of messages saying: 'This was very exciting to read' and said… they’re very respectful, and they say: 'This looks like it has very important ideas and I’m already half way through it.' The letters about the… that’s The Emotion Machine, but the letters about the Society of Mind book says: 'I couldn’t put the thing down and I read it every year and it’s changed my life.' And I'm sure that the ideas in the new book are actually better, but they’re harder. And… I hope somebody comes along and rewrites it someday.

Incidentally, Michael Crichton helped me on the first book and he read the first 100 pages and had quite a lot of suggestions. He took out all the 'verys', I didn’t realize that if you say something is very important, that’s much weaker than saying something is important, but Michael took out a lot of qualifying words that... and he had several technical ideas. I’ve forgotten exactly which ones they were, but he actually had some important contributions that I rewrote into the book and forgot to credit him with.