William Shatner stays so busy, it's simply illogical
By Amy Carlson Gustafson agustafson@pioneerpress.com Posted: 03/11/2012 12:01:00 AM CST Updated: 03/11/2012 01:06:28 AM CST
Capt. Kirk. Denny Crane. Priceline Negotiator. William Shatner has adapted many personas in an acting career spanning more than a half-century. But in his new one-man show, "Shatner's World: We Just Live in It," the Canadian turns the attention inward, reflecting on his work, including his iconic "Star Trek" role, mortality and life in general. He describes this latest endeavor as the "most gratifying" thing he has ever done. "Shatner's World," which made its Broadway debut last month, arrives at the Orpheum Theatre on Thursday.
We caught up with the 80-year-old over the phone recently and chatted with him about his loyal fan base, the possibility of retirement and his Minnesota connection. Here's what he had to say:
Q. When you were putting "Shatner's World" together, what was the mindset behind it?
A. Well, it started in Australia. They asked me to do a one-man show. I started off telling anecdotes and stories about my life. That went well. Then, Canada asked me to do it, so I did it in Canada. Then, after I finished Canada, Broadway said they'd like to do it. Thinking I'd be held to a higher standard in New York, I decided to change the show and reshape it and revamp it and sharpen it in every way. I did that, and I made it more about my life, about the funny things that have happened to me, lessons I've learned.
Q. How did you decide what to include in the play? Were there things you left out that you wish could have been in there?
A. That's a good question. The question was what to keep in. I had a show that ran longer than two hours. They wanted it to be about an hour and 45 minutes. I started cutting things out. Not only was it a choice of what to put in, it was also a choice of what to take out. You could make a dramatic and funny story about anything in your life, but there are certain incidences in everybody's life and certainly in mine that stand out enough that you can dramatize and it's good material.
Q. What is it like going through all these moments in your life and trying to put them together for show?
A. I reflected on what it was I wanted to say. What was the meaning of what I was about to say? How can I make that story entertaining enough for you to understand what it was I was reflecting on and revealing? It became a complex interplay of things to write about. I just had to use selectivity. Things I wished I could keep in I had to cut out. Q. What were your emotions like as you were writing and going through all these memories?
A. In the play, I talk about death and life and humor and what humor and death can be like - two sides of the same coin. I talk about music and failure and success. I talk about early life and horses and the joy of being with horses and the sorrow of horses that expired. I try to follow the panoply of my life and all those things that you mentioned are there. I had to start off reflecting on it and then get some artistic removal from it in order to write about it.
Q. So, what do you think of your life so far?
A. [Laughs.] I think I made a lot of mistakes, but I did some things right.
Q. Your work - "Star Trek," "Boston Legal," Priceline commercials - has spanned generations of fans. How have you managed to stay relevant?
A. I'm very much alive. I'm surrounded by young people. I make a point of trying to stay with the latest tastes. In many cases, I don't understand them, but I get there. That's what I am - current. I try to be. I don't necessarily like it.
Q. Are your fans getting older, or are younger ones still popping up?
A. A 7-year-old last night wanted my autograph. His father was 40, and in the background was the boy's grandfather. And they were all there at the theater.
Q. How does that make you feel?
A. I don't quite understand it. I seek to try and understand it. But joyful is a good word.
Q. Who's more rabid - Capt. Kirk or Denny Crane fans?
A. Probably die-hard "Star Trek" fans. But I think if we wait around long enough, maybe they'll be the same rabid Denny Crane fans.
Q. Are you and James Spader still friends? You had such great chemistry on "Boston Legal."
A. Yes we are. He's a lovely guy.
Q. Do you have any ties to Minnesota?
A. My son-in-law's name is Joel Gretsch. He could have been a great golfer except he wanted to become an actor. But he learned to play golf in your part of the country just outside of Minneapolis. How somebody learns to play golf in that wintry country I don't know. But his family is there and I expect they'll all come to the show. Q. Any plans to slow down after this? Retiring, perhaps?
A. I do. I plan to retire after this conversation, at least for a 40-minute nap. I never understood the word retire.
Q. Any projects you're dying to do?
A. I don't like to use the word dying. It cuts close to the bone. I've got so many things that I'm doing that it's silly. But what I'm focused on now is getting to your city, making sure your audience has the same reaction as this New York audience, and that is, at the end of the evening, they explode out of their seats with excitement and applause.
Amy Carlson Gustafson can be reached at 651-228-5561. Follow her at twitter.com/amygustafson.
Humans are born with the curiosity of scientists but switch to investment banking.
By BRIAN BOLDUC Updated March 9, 2012, 7:17 p.m. ET
New York
By 2020, the word "computer" will have vanished from the English language, physicist Michio Kaku predicts. Every 18 months, computer power doubles, he notes, so in eight years, a microchip will cost only a penny. Instead of one chip inside a desktop, we'll have millions of chips in all our possessions: furniture, cars, appliances, clothes. Chips will become so ubiquitous that "we won't say the word 'computer,'" prophesies Mr. Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York. "We'll simply turn things on."
Mr. Kaku, who is 65, enjoys making predictions. In his latest book, "Physics of the Future," which Anchor released in paperback in February, he predicts driverless cars by 2020 and synthetic organs by 2030. If his forecasts sound strange, Mr. Kaku understands the skepticism. "If you could meet your grandkids as elderly citizens in the year 2100," he offers, "you would view them as being, basically, Greek gods." Nonetheless, he says, "that's where we're headed," —and he worries that the U.S. will fall behind in this technological onrush.
To comprehend the world we're entering, consider another word that will disappear soon: "tumor." "We will have DNA chips inside our toilet, which will sample some of our blood and urine and tell us if we have cancer maybe 10 years before a tumor forms," Mr. Kaku says. When you need to see a doctor, you'll talk to a wall in your home, and "an animated, artificially intelligent doctor will appear." You'll scan your body with a hand-held MRI machine, the "Robodoc" will analyze the results, and you'll receive "a diagnosis that is 99 percent accurate."
In this "augmented reality," as Mr. Kaku calls it, the Internet will be in your contact lens. "You will blink, and you will go online," he says. "That's going to change everything." Students will look up the answers to tests while taking them. Actors will cheat from their scripts while performing onstage. Foreigners will translate their conversations with natives instantly. Job-seekers will identify "who to suck up to at any cocktail party" surreptitiously. And President Obama "will never have to have teleprompters in front of him," he jokes.
Although these gadgets seem light years away, Mr. Kaku insists that they're "coming very, very fast." The military already has a prototype of the contact lens called "Land Warrior." In 2010, he tried out the device while filming a special for the Science channel, on which he appears regularly. The Land Warrior is a helmet with an eyepiece that allows the wearer to see the entire battlefield. "You see friendly forces, enemy forces, artillery, aircraft, everything," Mr. Kaku says, "just by flicking it down right over your eye."
As he describes the eyepiece, Mr. Kaku peers at me through his cupped hand. We're sitting in a side room off the lobby of his high-rise overlooking the Hudson River. With his silver-gray hair tossed behind his ears, he makes quick gestures to illustrate his points. And he laughs constantly. Despite his enthusiasm for science's successes, he also finds humor in its failures.
Take the paperless office. Futurists predicted that the computer would make paper obsolete. Now, however, we use more paper than ever. Techies overlooked what Mr. Kaku calls "the Caveman Principle": the fact that "our personalities haven't changed for 100,000 years, since modern humans emerged from Africa." The scientist likes high tech, "but the caveman likes high touch," he explains. "People don't feel comfortable with all the electrons on their PC screen." With the flip of a switch, those electrons disappear, worrying our inner caveman. "We want a hard copy."
Still, Mr. Kaku is bullish on mankind's prospects. Propelled by advances in nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and biotech, we'll become a fully globalized civilization by 2100, he predicts: "The planetary language will be English. The Internet will be the planetary telephone system. The European Union and big trading blocs will be the planetary economy. Soccer and the Olympics will be the planetary sports. Gucci and Chanel will be the planetary high fashion. And planetary youth culture will be rock 'n' roll and rap."
Mr. Kaku has been exploring the frontiers of physics since childhood. When he was eight years old, Albert Einstein died, and the public reaction to the physicist's passing "was as big as Whitney Houston dying," he remembers. Amid the hullabaloo, he heard that Einstein had failed to finish his greatest work: a single, inch-long equation that would summarize the laws of physics. Einstein hoped this all-encompassing theory would explain how the universe worked. Fascinated by the idea, Mr. Kaku decided to pick up where he left off.
To understand the universe, physicists first need to figure out what it's made of. "We had to rewrite every textbook," Mr. Kaku recounts, "because 10 years ago they all said the universe is mainly made out of atoms. We now know that's wrong." In reality, atoms make up only 4% of the universe. The other 96% consists of dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious substances about which very little is known.
What's more, physicists are still finalizing the standard model, the theory behind particles. They now know there aren't just three types of particles—protons, neutrons and electrons—but rather, thousands of them. Physicists in Geneva are close to discovering the last particle they need to complete the model, the Higgs boson. Using a humongous atom smasher called the Large Hadron Collider, they spend their days shooting beams of protons into each other and inspecting what comes out.
Mr. Kaku is confident that researchers will discover the Higgs by the end of the year. Their next goal is to create dark matter. And eventually, they hope to nail down what exactly dark energy is. When calculating the amount of dark energy in the universe, the current theory produces an estimate that is off by by 10120. "That is the biggest mismatch ever between theory and experiment in the history of physics," Mr. Kaku admits, chuckling. "This is very embarrassing."
What's also embarrassing is that the U.S. is falling behind its rivals in scientific research. The Large Hadron Collider is in Switzerland because Congress canceled the construction of our much larger atom smasher, the Superconducting Super Collider, in 1993. In addition, many of our laboratories studying nuclear fusion are closing, while France plans to open a nuclear-fusion reactor in 2019. Finally, the U.S. is ceding the manned space program to China. "In 2025, don't be surprised if a Chinese flag is placed on the moon," Mr. Kaku warns.
And woe to the nation that loses its edge. Great Britain became a world empire when it pioneered steam power in the 19th century, Mr. Kaku recounts. In the 1920s, however, Britain began to rest on its laurels. British industry lost its focus on developing the latest technology, thus solidifying the country's status as a declining world power. "And who took over? Germany." German scientists split the atom and developed aeronautics. "So the cutting edge in science shifted from England to Germany with catastrophic results" in World War II, Mr. Kaku concludes.
Now, he says, the U.S. is losing its edge because we're not producing enough scientists. "Fifty percent of Ph.D. physicists are foreign-born, and they're here compliments of the H1-B visa," Mr. Kaku relates. "There's a brain drain into the United States; that's why we're still No. 1. But it can't last forever." China and India are slowly luring back their natives, while our top students are eschewing the hard sciences for lucrative careers in areas such as investment banking.
"I have nothing against investment banking," Mr. Kaku says, "but it's like massaging money rather than creating money. If you're in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS." If you're an investment banker, on the other hand, "you don't create anything new. You simply massage other people's money and take a cut."
It's a shame, because Mr. Kaku believes humans are natural-born scientists. "When we're born, we want to know why the stars shine. We want to know why the sun rises." But then we hit "the danger years" for young people: high school. "And we lose them by the millions—literally by the millions. Why? It's a combination of bad teachers and no inspiration."
After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, Mr. Kaku's hobby became a vocation: "It was this huge national outrage that the Russians were beating us left and right. It was your patriotic duty to become a physicist." Today, unfortunately, no such catalyst exists for our students: "It's all gone." Mr. Kaku has spent his life trying to fill the void: "I want to inspire young kids to have their 'Sputnik moment.'"
Despite his concerns that his country is losing its edge, Mr. Kaku can't help but be optimistic. Just last month, scientists announced they had found a planet very likely to have liquid oceans (and thus the potential for life) 22 light years from the Earth. He predicts that within this century, we'll find evidence that "we're not the only game in town."
In short, physicists will keep pushing the frontiers of science ahead, whether or not the U.S. is in the lead. Mr. Kaku just hopes we won't let ourselves fall too far behind.
Mr. Bolduc, a former Robert L. Bartley fellow at the Journal, is an editorial associate for National Review.
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