Customer Reviews

Charlie Rose with Michael Crichton (February 19, 2007)

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I have watched this interview several times...and hold it up as an example of something we rarely get...a real interview. The interviewer Charlie Rose is brilliant (unlike Larry King) and his subject Michael Crichton is of course the same. Rose doesn't just throw softballs to allow Crichton to push his latest project ..in fact they jump off that and Rose interrogates him about his views on Global Warming. Its hard not to be impressed by both and Crichton impresses as a person who actually reads the data instead of listening to "experts" who have a financial stake (see grant money and more) in perpetuating hysteria instead of looking at the issue with a cooler more analytical place. Regardless of your views...this is a wonderful meeting of a couple of minds worth listening to.

Crichton appears in order to publicize his latest novel 'Next'. He explains his sense that much of the talk about the new genetics is hot - air. He does not believe 'designer-babies' are about to happen, but rather says that the problems involved with gene- manipulation are extemely complex and difficult. He himself is not interested in the wild- science fiction fantasy speculative stuff on genetics but the hard practical scientific and legal questions involved.
In the second part of the interview Rose shows what is an unusual for him a resistance to his interviewee. Crichton says that though there has been global warming of six to eight tenths of one - degree Celsius over the past hundred years, and though he believes Global Warming will continue he does not see this as disastrous. He also questions whether carbon emissions are the main culprit in all of this. There is a bit of tension in the discussion on the 'global warming issue' but it never gets really hostile. Rose finds a way back to the kind of good-natured spirit usually involved in his interviews.
I do not know the work of Crichton. As a personality he comes across as dry, and a bit supercilious. Enormously intelligent there is nonetheless something not very likeable about the 'know it all spirit' He did however tell one wonderful anecdote about Einstein. During the war the Germans gathered two hundred physicists together who signed a petition saying that Relativity is wrong. Einstein said in response 'It takes only one person to prove me wrong'. Of course that person could not be found.
Crichton seems to imply he is the Einstein of the Global- Warming issue.