I just always wanted to write.

And I couldn't find anyone that would pay me to write when I got out of college.

So I got into newspapers, then I got into magazines, then I found my way to television television and then I was hired by Cable News

Network when it started and became a bureau chief there. And then I wanted to, I was just tired

of disposable news, so I wanted to get into something a little deeper, a little meteor, and I got

into documentaries, PBS documentaries. And that led to the first book that I wrote because it was, I developed for PBS

called Space Age. So I wrote that for Random House, did a couple of other things, and then

fell into working with William Shatner, who wanted to do a book about Star Trek.

And so he and I got together, and we wrote that book, and that was a blast.

And then I finally was in a situation where I could write my own books, the kind of books I wanted to write.

I was fascinated with high technology,

but I realized that we were never really going to figure out how to solve technological problems

until we understood what made us tick. So I thought, well, you've got to go back to the beginning

and you have to talk about or understand evolution, human evolution, and what makes us the way we are? I mean, we're this very strange creature when you think about it, so different from anything else on the planet. And so I just went back and I wrote two books about that, thumbs, toes, and tears and another one called Last Ape Standing.

And they really kind of try, it's my way of trying to understand why do we behave the way we do, why do we do the horrible things we do, and also the remarkable things we do.

Think about it.

I mean, we're leaving other planets.

You know, what kind of creature does

that? Nothing like this. Look at the cities we build. Look at the technologies we've built. Both,

you know, destructive ones and remarkably beautiful ones. So that was, those two were my effort.

And then it's almost with immortality ink i was you know

obviously i was writing a lot of science uh and i just was looking around and i was saying

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