""It's not the first time this happened," says Chomsky. "But you have to really ask questions in depth to know what they mean. So back in the early `70s, there was some kind of poll ... among American intellectuals, about who was the most influential American intellectual, just in politics, and I think that I appeared first or close to the top in that. But there was another poll where they asked further questions which made sense. They said, `Who would you pay attention to?' Or something like that - I was way down at the bottom.""