Michael Crichton interview on "Prey" (2002)

michael crichton is here he is the author of 12 bestselling novels including the Andromeda Strain Jurassic Park sphere and Rising Sun and others his books have been translated into 30 languages and have sold more than 20 million copies over the years he's also penned eight screenplays and was a creator of the NBC television show ER his new book is called prey I am pleased to have him back at this table again welcome back thanks for life wait have you this has been one hell of a year for you you have it has it let's because people want to know about it is to make sure first of all on September 11th you were bordering a plane I was at Kennedy right o'clock in the morning is and so man that you look back on that what thoughts does that well you know it didn't we were put down in Indianapolis and I then was making my way across the country was about 48 hours later before I started to shake you know and and to realize it probably there are a lot of weather 8:00 a.m. flights to Los Angeles that could have did you then also began to read a lot about some of the conflicts that exist within the realm of terrorism and our relationship and all that kind of thing because I thought I read somewhere that you had become more hawkish because of this experience no it wasn't actually that it was another one was it the time that you someone broke into your house in Santa Monica and tied you up and what put a gun to my head but a gun to you alright and what was interesting to me was that I was watching the sunday news shows the following week and realized that I mean they were going on as they always had and I realized that I had moved on the question of Iraq without even thinking about it because I was now understanding that there are some things that are the way they are whether you like them or not and actually talking isn't gonna make a difference there are things in that category and you know I think certainly in my case I think in the situation of a lot of people who are on TV giving their opinions they can really arrange they're their lives and their worlds to be the way they want them to be yeah and and to have something come in very forcefully and the absolutely not in your control phenomenally dangerous and you must deal with it right then and when someone else's terms is not a typical experience let me turn to this book question always comes up about you is - there's an idea morph into a book there's you I know have multiple interest hmm we've talked about many of them on this program yes we have some have not been made into books yet but might be like Freud being one yes still waiting for him I'm sure that's gonna be a book at some point there the whole notion of psychoanalysis how did this get started for you this idea of prey you know I gave a lecture to the American Association for the Advancement of science a few years ago and the topic was images of science and of scientists in the media so in the course of that you're reviewing different ideas and there really are two core sort of mythic images and stories one is Faust and the other is Frankenstein and Frankenstein if if we are if anyone is asked to visualize that what they think of as Boris Karloff staggering around with bolts in his neck and it occurred to me - that image is 80 years old and that's an eternity in science and that if there were an escaped monster if there were a demonstration of scientific power going wrong that it would not have that shape at all I mean it's very much really almost the 19th century scape and that it would look like something the monster of today would look very different and I started thinking well what would it look like and how did you find out what it would look like I mean how did you end up with the kind of monster that you have well there's all there's also a reading list in here in case you don't know that's also an introduction about the subject as well so you you help you help us thereby there's a there is a growing interest I don't know how long ago somebody that JPL mentioned to me that the era of making these enormous Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech right thank you these these hugely expensive space probes in which you sent one out and hope for the best and then something might go wrong those days were over there we're going to start making fleets of these things and just send them out and sort of little swarms and if something happened to one or another of them that was okay and that is really sort of the initiation of a whole notion of or at least in my knowledge of using biological metaphors for mechanical devices and they start talking about self repairing machines and then pretty soon they talk about self reproducing machines and then they start talking about emergent behavior from populations of machines and having really rather small and rather stupid entities sort of like termites are small and stupid and yet they can build huge termite mounds having small little things than having and the behavior emerge from the group populations you know it's interesting as some people at MIT doing doing work on both artificial intelligence and artificial life mmm they're doing as you know I'm sure you know more about distant I knew from the get-go but they have decided to sort of start from ants and the lowest species and work off as their model that's right rather than top-down top-down right top-down I think most people would agree doesn't work now so you got to work can you figure out what they can do and what is the minimum scale you can get this down to to try to figure out how to build something mmm right yes and also and what characteristic do they have well and and you know eventually they can soon have have more characteristics than determine I mean they talk about making computer programs with virtual agents and the virtual agents can interact some can have goals and others can be you know assisting the goals and they can change their minds and maybe they can be quite quite sophisticated in a certain way and yet the behavior the program as a whole is the sum of all these behaviors and so the programmers are programming the bottom level and the behavior of the total Pro is something that's not programming here's what's interesting about price use you'd not only if you have a great idea first of all but this is not the first scientific idea that you've had that can be made into a an ongoing page-turning novel you also have here it's a very interesting story of a husband and wife in which the husband has been fired and he's at home right he's a house husband she has she's dynamic and driven and she works for this sort of a controversial company right now when did that come in to be after you decided on the science or or before and how does it mix into this don't know probably about five years ago I had this isolated image it was the image of a very well-dressed businesswoman coming home from the office late at night and going into a nursery and slapping her kids and that's all it was and I would think oh that's kind of odd what's that about it would go and six months later would be back and then would go away again and this has been several years and finally it began to come to me repeatedly to the point of the kind of a visual obsession and I began to think well you know why am I thinking about this what's it about and and I began to see that I could do this story that interested me in in a domestic context and have the begin that way and she works at the company where bad things about to happen right and he happens to be an expert in one aspect right of the problems that are about to erupt so we have a story we have two characters already and we have a story and we have a location right he's got to go somewhere in the desert to see what's going on yes so we're off and running here we are now what's hardest about this so far putting this book to paper I mean putting his story to paper the most difficult thing was that because I mean we're talking very rational what I had in mind to do but what I had in mind was to try not to figure it a lot too carefully yeah so I would get to certain points and I would think well what's going to happen now for example the the wife is a phenomenally important character and everything is about the international husband why he goes off to the desert she's not there right and I just it stopped me cold I thought what do I do now she's not here yeah she should better get her back pretty soon but in the meantime what's my second act yeah the science you have locked before I mean you have you have come to grips with the science but then you have a difficult problem it would seem to me but you're going to figure out how can I make this so that scientists are not gonna think I'm silly and real people ordinary people who don't have the luxury of your time to study mm-hmm can't comprehend it hmm is that easy or difficult it's difficult that's a real mountain for you to climb it is it's a lot of rewriting that's what it amassed and so what is yeah you get to the end of the story and then go back and rewrite or write about you know the sections mostly talking about the sections that are didactic or that are trying to explain my science and and the issue is really to try and do it very quickly to space it out so that you're not giving a huge lump but you're the plot is sort of calling for a little explanation here in the little explanation here and to do it clearly without being completely incorrect it's delicate why is it you're so fascinated with science I mean we all know you went to medical school and we all know that while you and Medical School we started writing novels under pseudonyms and help pay your way and we all know that Jonas Salk said to you you're a better writer than dr. Yeah right true words so what is it about science for you I don't know I mean I think it's something it's very easy for me and it seems to me that an enormous amount of what constitutes social change in my lifetime has been a function of scientific development so that the technologies that we're experiencing which are you know an enormous ly different from what they were 20 40 50 years ago or are what's driving a lot of the change in the society and increasingly I think if you don't understand the signs you're not going to be able to really make informed decisions and arguably in the past we some people say we have many you've basically said also that the only time that science has been stopped was with the supersonic transport yes that's the only time people said it's too much environmental damage and too much noise and it's not worth the cost and too expensive to attention and and who wants it in no other time now there are a lot of people in Congress never well saying we know how to clone but we ought not go down that direction you know where are you worried about science I'm quite worried about the whole area of self reproducing technologies which is already biotechnology yeah right now that's part of why I did this was was to try and make an example of what might be in our future but we don't really need to worry about nanotechnology right now and self reproduce twenty thirty years old here's what you have said also atomic bombs are terrible weapons but genetic engineering can do far more damage the nuclear bombs that's a powerful statement and what do you mean by genetic engineering in that context I'm not sure is one answer well I think you're not sure about your you know it's terrible to have your past brought back here what this wasn't a lockdown begun no it's not a long time ago that makes it worse you know for example I mean just to take it at the height of all the the Cold War and all the issues about nuclear exchanges nobody seriously thought I mean in the in the days of Herman Kahn and you know the dr. Strangelove imagery no one thought that a nuclear exchange what and life on the planet but conceivably if is conceivably if there was some kind of a virus that interfered with photosynthesis in enough plants which is the essential component to life right everything's gone the Bosque is essentially wiped out yes and it's possible I don't know I hope it's not possible but there certainly are coming to be some examples in which things that were imagined to be very very difficult in genetic technology are being discovered to be not necessarily so difficult bad things so back to my question what's what's necessary for civilized world to make sure that it makes wise decisions about science okay I mean I have a weird answer which is why don't we all walk around naked and it isn't really because there's a law about it or there's a regulation we don't do it for lots of reasons that were trained not to do it and and there's all kinds of social pressures not to do it and I think one important thing is that is the education of scientists scientists themselves in terms of having the intuition and an idea about what not to do I mean a very important change in my lifetime is I have heard scientists say we were looking at this line of research and we decided not to follow it it's too dangerous what example is that give me an example I can't there's no point saying that the know what it is but you're not gonna tell me yeah I mean it's something extremely toxic so wait wait okay just in a moment I'll let you go by yeah yeah it's okay for you not to tell me because in your own judgement you want to censor yourself but you're not gonna tell us because you don't want us to get alarm by door because it's up to the scientists to disrupt to debate this and come up with some idea and there's no sense in doing it on right I mean mass media I mean yes I mean here's here's a group of people who have decided not to you know not to follow this path not to take these risks and why should I be shooting my mouth off about it will you tell me after the program yes okay I mean I want to know this is something that could be so dangerous that that they don't even want to go there right and it's also something also about the balance of you know how life it is to produce something but here's my point okay there's always somebody that will go there but you see this is interesting this that's right and the classic argument always was I might as well do it because if I don't do it the next guy will and what's happening now is that the there's a new kind of ethic inside us they're saying somebody else may do it but I won't yeah and if enough say that we're okay correct that's the idea yeah yeah it's a little bit like saying why don't you rather than going with a majority why can you stand for something you know if one person stands up unconscious other people will begin to say you know there is power and right you know in numbers right and there are certain things that we ought not to do Jeanne could get out of the bottle and in it's too late I mean most of its in in molecular biology or is it most of it's there at the moment that's where the scary stories yeah so what's the science at work in prey nanotechnology watch this tape this is Bill joy who wrote an article for Wired magazine and alarmed a lot of people and scientists came out of the woodwork arguing with him saying that he was an alarmist he talked about robotics and talked about nanotechnology and he talked about other things roll tape here it is what he said on this program well nanotechnology is the ability to manipulate things at the atomic level and so in the dreams of people like Eric Drexler the idea would be that you can build almost anything by assembling it atom by atom and so you build these little tiny machines erector sets kind of little things at the atomic scale that can manufacturing anything out of just basically dirt now this drive to build these kinds of things has been ongoing for 20 years early Kitt's and it still perhaps 20 or 30 years away but it's an incredibly powerful technology if it can if it can work and I don't think it can be discounted completely anymore not far off visit well I thought it was quite a ways off ten years ago when I first heard about it and but last year I a friend of mine was a physicist told me that he thought that molecular electronics which is an electronic form of nanotechnology I was very very practical and there's been some coverage in the press about some work that's been done for example Hewlett Packard in UCLA have done some research in this area so I think that's probably the first commercializable nanotechnology and we may see it in the next couple years since the beginning of a new field so I don't think it's any longer sane to discount perhaps massive investment in this technology cuz it's way better than say silicon technology give me some sense of what happens here in terms of the technology in the science that provides the drive for your normal what what I tried to address was the the limitations that exist which are considerable in terms of having nanotechnology become a a really viable technology I mean I think clearly it's on its way I mean clearly it's going to be a major 21st century technology in the way the computers are nuclear technology influenced the last century but one of the ways to kind of short-circuit is to do some of the work of molecular or atomic assembly to do some of that work with genetic engineering in other words people have noticed you know different times if you want a certain kind of a molecule well we have these cells that are just expert at making whatever you want you know and that's what we're doing right now so that would be a way to begin the assembly process because right at this moment now I don't think anybody's really clear exactly how it would be done so the story is a kind of a piggybacking of nanotechnology on a bio technological base and the fact that it was done this way to save time and to make a leapfrog is part of what makes the difficulties when people try and unravel when people say I'm the 999 person to say this to you and you have a perfect answer when people say you're more interested in science than character what do you say true true yeah well the the very first thing that I wrote the Andromeda Strain my model was and also I can we have a very good example right now and the answer to to how to deal with oil slicks is don't let them happen once a tanker is broken open the reality is there's nothing to be done I mean people can say there's a planet there there's nothing works and that's why we see all these pictures of people scrubbing off birds and so nothing works so the solution of that problem is don't let it occur and in the same way I think of the the experience of a lot of technological circumstances scenarios which is what I'm usually writing individual personality traits in the way that we were nearly think of them are not very important in other words that this people are called some giant thing that it doesn't matter whether you're a good guy with a bad guy a fast thinker an impulsive person you're trapped in this ok but I mean counterbalance and I mean clearly you want to write interesting people I mean whether whether it has nothing to do with their ability to solve the problem you want to have interesting people in a novel or a movie dealing with the problem do we know or is the problem so significant and so powerful and so interesting that as it moves along it doesn't matter how dull 'red these people are in your case they're not but is that the thesis partly it depends you know it depends on which which thing we're talking about but I mean it's certainly true that when I was doing Jurassic Park I had to eliminate a lot of interpersonal stuff because you can't have two characters discussing some life issue where the dinosaur outside the window who's going to shut up is a dinosaur there and that kind of drives everything but here you are Michael you're the best I mean I meet most interesting people a lot of interesting people you're one of the most interesting people I know period you're interested in are because you did a book on Jasper Johns you have a modern art collection you're interested in science obviously you're interested in in psychology obviously because of your fascination with Freud you're interested in volcanoes you're interested in relationships you've been married four times so clearly so clearly you think you're gonna get it right you know you've lived on the East Coast on the west coast you lecture I mean you are you're a guy with lots of interest you are an interesting person is it possible that you can I mean don't you care about creating characters on paper that are as interesting as you are in real life with passions and relationships and okay what answer is what I told you about the dinosaurs yeah the other answer is the other answer is that what of what I really believe is that we have an idea of a mental landscape about our motivations and why we do things and I don't actually believe any of that stuff so what part of my problem and pride and ego and oh let's not believe in a sort of Henry James in why I don't believe that we know why we do what we do really yeah I mean JBS Haldane what once once said he was a famous mid 20th century biologist and he said that he had thought of everything over he come to the conclusion that he had no idea what motivated him to do anything in his life do you have any idea what motivates you tell me not really you don't it just happens I think it really does you know if you ask somebody I mean let's say somebody asks you a mathematical what was six times nine and you go 54 and I say well what was the process you went through the answer but wait a minute ah but there is no process you have it right away and you don't know how you got it and I think an enormous amount of thought is actually the way it just arrives and then we make up a story about how it happened oh maybe maybe yeah you just I think you're wrong on this actually but I do know you're right about the brain I mean and all the people studying the brain are saying you know it's a little bit like I don't say to myself I want to drink a cup of coffee so I've got to reach out and put my hand here I just boom you know right now that's part of it there's no motivation here I you know just how I do it that's part of what they're learning about neurons and what neurons do and what different neurons do and when you show them certain hope this stuff is as exciting to me as nanotechnology if not more in fact I'm surprised you didn't write a book about the brain just wait just wait just what you're fascinated by it as well as ideas this whole idea of artificial intelligence is equally interesting to you mm-hm but you know the brain issue and if what I'm talking about has validity is it now comes down to serious questions of free will you know no the experiment that I was like is if you if you're really observing people if you touch someone on the shoulder they will begin to turn toward the touch before the nerve fibers have reached the cerebral cortex so their brain doesn't know that they've been touched but they are already moving toward it and if you then say to them well what did you do they say oh I you know somebody touch me so I turn but that's an ex post facto explanation so what's the real explanation no no you don't know mm-hmm must be something unconscious unconscious must be is reflexes I have our scientist lots of them some of the best tell me what interests you the most a number of them say the unconscious a fascinator others are fascinated by memory how memory works but the unconscious is the most frequent answer I get right I agree actually and it's is this part of the reason you were so fascinated by Freud or is that a whole nother subject no I was I was mostly interested in what psychology looks like once you take Freud away because he's he's apparently wrong and everything just about you know I mean and yet still viewed as one of the great influences of the 20th century yeah still viewed still i mean i mean i think probably an important intellectual figure as marks as an important intellectual figure or i'm not sure what else but but not because he's right he's not right the basic fundamental no I mean I think even down to the core structures and you go super-ego that's not right the the primacy of early childhood in terms of how you turn out as an adult that's clearly not right I mean we have plenty of studies in this show it's not true have you ever come to grips with your relationship your father and understanding it I think over time that that relationship at least as it exists now I mean it's been dead for me 19 but as has evolved and that was 55 yeah you had something I think that's an important kind of inner dialogue that goes on and certainly changed when I became a father myself you understand sort of the scientific explanation for the way the world evolved universe correct mmm Big Bang and all that you can take it to a point where you believe you see a role for a creator am I wrong about that or not in other words you have looked at this and you understand the science and believe in the science and yet somewhere out there there's makes you say maybe there was a role for a creator now I think that yes okay so let's say let's say God's really smart which is well that's right or she what would be the most interesting way to go about making the universe and I would think the cleverest neatest slickest most most sophisticated way would be to start with the minimum number of things and have them change and and develop and you know so that you start with this little tiny infinitesimal thing and it blows apart and pretty soon a coal as is in two stars and galaxies and then eventually we have you know the byproducts of the stars is other heavier elements and then pretty soon we've got some life forms here and there and then the life form is going then this was some kind of life form that can look back on this and go how did this happen but the Creator only had to do this initial act it's pretty fantastic anyway that's what I think so what was out there for what is religion mean to you religion to me really means ethical systems because there were in the end it comes down to a sense of values for you this has already been sold to the movies yes to Fox yes it's published by HarperCollins yes you a new publisher used to be cannot for you right you made a change because I thought it was I thought I was getting lakhs and I thought I thought both I and my publisher were taking each other for granted a little bit a new players might make news did it make a difference seems to different editors oh I mean here you have no video different aircraft haven't been edited by Sonny mentor for a long time right right right you've sold it to the movies two remaining subjects for you and many but I have time limits you're developing a game Sega mmm now why in the world are you doing that that interests me what interests you I don't know I mean I dunno part of it I mean it I think in some way that that well how we define visual entertainment is going to be in the classic way of movies and television it's going to to move aside or shift and there is going to be more interactive forms of everything storytelling included and I'm interested in seeing if I can do something in those areas of developing things I've just this is not exactly on point but it is in part I just returned from doing a profile for 60 minutes on Tony Hawk he's the best skateboarders you must know from California my best eight boarder around 34 years old makes games and everything all of a sudden I got inside that culture it is fascinating it has its style it has its fashion it has its personality it is extraordinary and you understand all the how they can translate that into and what and how kids real on how they connect to it mm-hmm more kids wanna skateboarding I wanna play baseball now and that's number one but but more often the more interesting thing is that why is it that games are so attracted to them one they can do it by themselves I think number two is fast moving they like that mm-hmm and and on and on and on it is fascinating to me to Michael right and I could talk to it forever this book is called prey here's what they say I don't care how much enthusiastic the reviewer was or how the reviewer had some criticism one of the other might have had some problem was one point another they always say one central thing which is why Michael has sold a gazillion copies of all these books and made a gazillion dollars it is that the reviewer could not turn it down could not put the book down they all described it as it may I love it and therefore recommended or be I love it but I have these restraints but I couldn't put it down the end he understands that he understands storytelling and he understands the fascination of things we don't know about more than anybody that I know I am always pleased to have him on the show and I thank you for coming thanks charlie

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

Views: 14,813

Rating: 4.9186993 out of 5

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Id: 1a2-uGfssc8

Length: 32min 26sec (1946 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 15 2016