there is a revolution happening right now in the world of artificial intelligence. confounding. are we ready for it? >> i am rarely speechless. i don't know what to make of this. >> with rare access, we will show you what google is developing, and the questions they're asking themselves. >> on my way, i will bring an apple to you. >> as they begin to unveil computing power that will change every part of our world forever. >> i've been working on ai for decades now, and i've always believed that it's going to be the most important invention that humanity will ever make.

please don't judge me. >> do you like books about adventures and heroism? true stories with unbelievable outcomes? then author david grann is your man. today, he's one of the world's top-selling writers, in part, because of his hands-on years-long research that breathes life back into his fearless characters. but grann is the first to admit -- >> i am not an explorer. i mean, i would have been the first to die on the island. let's be perfectly honest. >> what's the cause of death? >> oh, my cause of death. terror? [ laughter ] i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm bill whitaker. >> i'm anderson cooper. >> i'm sharyn alfonsi. >> i'm jon wertheim. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories and more tonight on "60 minutes." captioning funded by cbs troubg asleep and staying asleep -

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we may look on our time as the moment civilization was transformed as it was by fire, agriculture and electricity. in 2023, we learned that a machine taught itself how to speak to humans like a peer. which is to say, with creativity, truth, error, and lies. the technology, known as a chatbot, is only one of the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence - machines that can teach themselves superhuman skills. we explored what's coming next at google, a leader in this new

world. ceo sundar pichai told us ai will be as good or as evil as human nature allows. the revolution, he says, is coming faster than you know. >> do you think society is prepared for what's coming? >> you know, there are two ways i think about it. on one hand i feel, no, because, you know, the pace at which we can think and adapt as societal institutions, compared to the pace at which the technology's evolving, there seems to be a mismatch. on the other hand, compared to any other technology, i've seen more people worried about it earlier in its life cycle. so i feel optimistic the number of people, you know, who have started worrying about the implications, and hence the conversations are starting in a serious way as well. >> our conversations with 50-year-old sundar pichai started at google's new campus in mountain view, california. it runs on 40% sol pow a

collects more water than it uses -- hi-tech that pichai couldn't have imagined growing up in india with no telephone at home. >> we were on a waiting list to get a rotary phone, and for about five years. and it finally came home. i can still recall it vividly. it changed our lives. to me, it was the first moment i understood the power of what getting access to technology meant and, so, probably led me to be doing what i'm doing today. >> what he's doing, since 2019, is leading both google and its parent company, alphabet, valued at $1.3 trillion. worldwide, google runs 90% of internet searches and 70% of smartphones. but its dominance was attacked this past february when microsoft linked its search engine to a chatbot. in a race for ai dominance,

google just released its chatbot named bard. >> it's really here to help you brainstorm ideas, to generate content, like a speech, or a blog post, or an email. >> we were introduced to bard by google vice president sissie hsiao and senior vice president james manyika. the first thing we learned was that bard does not look for answers on the internet like google search does. >> so i wanted to get inspiration from some of the best speeches in the world. >> bard's replies come from a self-contained program that was mostly self-taught. our experience was unsettling. >> confounding, absolutely confounding. bard appeared to possess the sum of human knowledge... ahhhh... ..with micro chips more than 100,000 times faster than the human brain.

new teent. it did, in five ndatint another fouconds. then, we played with a famous six-word short story, often attributed to hemingway. >> for sale, baby shoes, never worn. >> the only prompt we gave was "finish this story," in five seconds... >> holy cow! the shoes were a gift from my wife, but we never had a baby... >> from the six-word prompt, bard created a deeply human tale with characters it invented including a man whose wife could not conceive, and a stranger, grieving after a miscarriage, and longing for closure. >> i am rarely speechless. i don't know what to make of this.

give me that story... >> we asked for the story in verse. in five seconds, there was a poem written by a machine with breathtaking insight into the mystery of faith. bard wrote, "she knew her baby's soul would always be alive." the humanity, at superhuman speed, was a shock. >> how is this possible? >> james manyika told us that over several months, bard read most everything on the internet and created a model of what language looks like. rather than search, its answers come from this language model. >> so, for example, if i said to you, scott, "peanut butter and?" >> jelly. >> right. so, it tries and learns to predict, okay, so peanut butter usually is followed by jelly. it tries to predict the most

probable next words, based on everything it's learned. so, it's not going out to find stuff, it's just predicting the next word. >> but it doesn't feel like that. we asked bard why it helps people, and it replied, quote, "because it makes me happy." >> bard, to my eye, appears to be thinking, appears to be making judgments. that's not what's happening? these machines are not sentient. they are not aware of themselves. >> they're not sentient, they're not aware of themselves. they can exhibit behaviors that look like that. because, keep in mind, they've learned from us. we're sentient beings. we have beings that have feelings, emotions, ideas, thoughts, perspectives. we've reflected all that in books, in novels, in fiction. so, when they learn from that,

they build patterns from that. so, it's no surprise to me that the exhibited behavior sometimes looks like maybe there's somebody behind it. there's nobody there. these are not sentient beings. >> zimbabwe born, oxford educated, james manyika holds a new position at google - his job is to think about how ai and humanity will best co-exist. >> ai has the potential to change many ways in which we've thought about society, about what we're able to do, the problems we can solve. >> but ai itself will pose its own problems. could hemingway write a better short story? maybe. but bard can write a million before hemingway could finish one. imagine that level of automation across the economy. >> a lot of people can be replaced by this technology. >> yes, there are some job occupations that'll start to decline over time. there are also new job

categories that'll grow over time. but the biggest change will be the jobs that'll be changed. something like more than two-thirds will have their definitions change. not go away, but change. because they're now being assisted by ai and by automation. so this is a profound change which has implications for skills. how do we assist people to build new skills, learn to work alongside machines? and how do these complement what people do today? >> this is going to impact every product across every company, and so that's why i think it's a very, very profound technology. and, so, we are just in early days. >> every product in every company. >> that's right. ai will impact everything. so, for example, you could be a radiologist. if you think about five to ten years from now, you're going to have an ai collaborator with you. it may triage. you come in the mog.u -- let's things to go through. it may say, "these are the most serious cases you need to look

at first." or when you're looking at something, it may pop up and say, "you may have missed something important." why wouldn't we take advantage of a super-powered assistant to help you across everything you do? you may be a student trying to learn math or history. and, you know, you will have something helping you. >> we asked pichai what jobs would be disrupted. he said, "knowledge workers." people like writers, accountants, architects and, ironically, software engineers. ai writes computer code, too. today sundar pichai walks a narrow line. a few employees have quit, some believing that google's ai rollout is too slow, others -- too fast. there are some serious flaws. james manyika asked bard about inflation. it wrote an instant essay in economics and recommended five books. but days later, we checked. none of the books is real. bard fabricated the titles.

this very tr with confidence, is callin the industry, hallucination. >> are you getting a lot of hallucinations? >> yes, you know, which is expected. no one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems. all models do have this as an issue. >> is it a solvable problem? >> it's a matter of intense debate. i think we'll make progress. >> to help cure hallucinations, bard features a "google it" button that leads to old-fashioned search. google has also built safety filters into bard to screen for things like hate speech and bias. >> how great a risk is the spread of disinformation? >> ai will challenge that in a deeper way. the scale of this problem is

going to be much bigger. >> bigger problems, he says, with fake news and fake images. >> it will be possible with ai to create, you know, a video easily, where it could be scott saying something, or me saying something, and we never said that, and it could look accurate. but, you know, on a societal scale, you know, it can cause a lot of harm. >> is bard safe for society? >> the way we have launched it today, as an experiment in a limited way, i think so. but we all have to be responsible in each step along the way. >> pichai told us he's being responsible by holding back for more testing, advanced versions of bard, that, he says, can reason, plan, and connect to internet search. >> you are letting this out slowly so that society can get used to it? >> that's one part of it. one part is also so that we get the user feedback.

and we can develop more robust safety layers before we build, before we deploy more capable models. >> of the ai issues we talked about, the most mysterious is called emergent properties. some ai systems are teaching themselves skills that they weren't expected to have. how this happens is not well understood. for example, one google ai program adapted, on its own, after it was prompted in the language of bangladesh, which it was not trained to know. >> we discovered that with very few amounts of prompting in bengali, it can now translate all of bengali. so now, all of a sudden, we now have a research effort where we're now trying to get to a thousand languages. >> there is an aspect of this which we call -- all of us in the field call it as a "black

box." you know, you don't fully understand, and you can't quite tell us why it said this or why it got it wrong. we have some ideas, and our ability to understand this gets better over time. but that's where the state of the art is. >> you don't fully understand how it works. and, yet, you've turned it loose on society? >> yeah. let me put it this way. i don't think we fully understand how a human mind works either. >> was it from that black box, we wondered, that bard drew its short story that seemed so disarmingly human? it talked about the pain that humans feel. it talked about redemption. how did it do all of those things if it's just trying to figure out what the next right word is? >> i have had these experiences talking with bard as well. there are two views of this. you know, there are a set of v, they're just repeating what it's seen online."

then there is the view where these algorithms are showing emergent properties, to be creative, to reason, to plan, and so on, right? and personally, i think we need to be -- we need to approach this with humility. part of the reason i think it's good that some of these technologies are getting out is so that society, you know, people like you and others can process what's happening. and we begin this conversation and debate. and i think it's important to do that. >> when we come back, we'll take you inside google's artificial intelligence labs where robots are learning.

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the revolution in artificial intelligence is the center of a debate ranging from those who hope it will save humanity to those who predict doom. google lies somewhere in the optimistic middle, introducing ai in steps so civilization can get used to it. we saw what's coming next in machine learning at google's ai lab in london - a company called deepmind - where the future looks something like this. look at that! oh, my goodness. >> they got a pretty good kick on them. >> ah! goal! a soccer match at deepmind looks like fun and games, but here's the thing. humans did not program these robots to play - they learned the game by themselves.ininffers walk, ff

>> and they're doing it, they're scoring over and over again. >> through about here. >> raia hadsell, vice president of research and robotics, showed us how engineers used motion capture technology to teach the ai program how to move like a human. but on the soccer pitch, the robots were told only that the object was to score. the self-learning program spent about two weeks testing different moves. it discarded those that didn't work, built that those that did, and created all-stars. >> there's another goal! and with practice, they get better. hadsell told us that, independent from the robots, the ai program plays thousands of games from which it learns and invents its own tactics. >> here we think that red player's going to grab it. but instead it just stops it, hands it back, passes it back, and then goes for the goal.

>> and the ai figured out how to do that on its own. >> that's right, that's right. and it takes a while. at first all the players just run after the ball together like a gaggle of, you know, 6-year-olds the first time they're playing ball. over time what we start to see is now, "ah, what's the strategy? you go after the ball, i'm coming around this way. or should we pass, or i should block while you get the goal?" so, we see all of that coordination emerging in the play. >> this is a lot of fun. but what are the practical implications of what we're seeing here? >> this is the type of research that can eventually lead to robots that can come out of the factories and work in other types of human environments.

you know, think about mining, think about dangerous construction work or exploration or disaster recovery. >> raia hadsell is among 1,000 humans at deepmind. the company was co-founded just 12 years ago by ceo demis hassabis. >> so if i think back to 2010 when we started, nobody was doing ai. there was nothing going on in industry. people used to eye roll when we talked to them, investors, about doing ai. so we couldn't, we could barely get two cents together to start off, which is crazy if you think about now the billions being invested into ai startups. >> cambridge, harvard, m.i.t., hassabis has degrees in computer science and neuroscience. his phd is in human imagination. and, imagine this, when he was 12, in his age group, he was the number two chess champion in the world. >> it was through games that he came to ai. >> i've been working on ai for decades now, and i've always believed that it's going to be the most important invention that humanity will ever make. >> will the pace of change outstrip our ability to adapt? >> i don't think so. i think that we, you know, we'r

usinl of our smartphones and other devices, and we effortlessly sort of adapt to these new technologies. and this is going to be another one of those changes like that. >> among the biggest changes at deepmind was the discovery that self-learning machines can be creative. hassabis showed us a game playing program that learns. it's called alpha zero, and it dreamed up a winning chess strategy no human had ever seen. >> but this is just a machine. how does it achieve creativity? >> it plays against itself tens of millions of times. so, it can explore parts of chess that maybe human chess players and programmers who program s ven' thought about before. >> it never gets tired. it never gets hungry. it just plays chess all the time.

>> yes. it's kind of an amazing thing to see, because actually you set off alpha zero in the morning and it starts off playing randomly. by lunchtime, you know, it's able to beat me and beat most chess players. and then by the evening, it's stronger than the world champion. >> demis hassabis sold deepmind to google in 2014. one reason was to get his hands on this. google has the enormous computing power that ai needs. this computing center is in pryor, oklahoma. but google has 23 of these, putting it near the top in computing power in the world. this is one of two advances that make ai ascendant now. first, the sum of all human knowledge is online and, second, brute force computing that "very loosely approximates" the neural networks and talents of the brain. >> things like memory, imagination, planning, reinforcement learning, these are all things that are known about how the brain does it, and we wanted to replicate some of that in our ai systems. >> those are some of the

elements that led to deepmind's greatest achievement so far - solving an "impossible" problem in biology. proteins are building blocks of life. but only a tiny fraction were understood because 3d mapping of just one could take years. deepmind created an ai program for the protein problem and set it loose. >> well, it took us about four or five years to figure out how to build the system. it's probably the most complex project that we've ever undertaken. but once we did that, it can solve a protein structure in a matter of seconds. and, actually, over the last year, we did all the 200 million proteins that are known to science. >> how long would it have taken

using traditional methods? >> well, the rule of thumb i was always told by my biologist friends is that it takes a whole phd, five years, to do one protein structure experimentally. so, if you think 200 million times five, that's a billion years of phd time it would have taken. >> deepmind made its protein database public. "a gift to humanity," hassabis called it. >> how has it been used? >> it's been used in an enormously broad number of ways actually from malaria vaccines to developing new enzymes that can eat plastic waste to new antibiotics. >> most ai systems today do one or maybe two things well. the soccer robots, for example, can't write up a grocery list or book your travel or drive your car. the ultimate goal is what's called artificial general intelligence - a learning machine that can score on a wide range of talents. >> would such a machine be conscious of itself? >> so that's another great question. we -- you know, philosophers haven't really settled on a definition of consciousness yet, but if we mean by sort of self-awareness and these kinds

of things, you know, i think there's a possibility ai one day could be. i definitely don't think they are today. but i think, again, this is one of the fascinating scientific things we're going to find out on this journey towards ai. >> even unconscious, current ai is superhuman in narrow ways. back in california, we saw google engineers teaching skills that robots will practice continuously on their own. >> push the blue cube to the blue triangle. >> they comprehend instructions... >> push the yellow hexagon to the yellow heart. >> and learn to recognize objects. >> what would you like? >> how 'bout an apple? >> how about an apple.i my w, l apple to you. >> vincent vanhoucke, senior director of robotics, showed us how robot 106 was trained on millions of images... >> i am going to pick up the apple.

...and can recognize all the items on a crowded countertop. >> if we can give the robot a diversity of experiences, a lot more different objects in different settings, the robot gets better at every one of them. >> now that humans have pulled the forbidden fruit of artificial knowledge... >> thank you. ...we start the genesis of a new humanity... >> ai can utilize all the information in the world, what no human could ever hold in their head. and i wonder if humanity is diminished by this enormous capability that we're developing. >> i think the possibilities of ai do not diminish humanity in any way. and, in fact, in some ways, i think they actually raise us to even deeper, more profound questions. >> google's james manyika sees this moment as an inflexion

point. >> i think we're constantly adding these superpowers or capabilities to what humans can do in a way that expands possibilities, as opposed to narrow them, i think. so i don't think of it as diminishing humans, but it does raise some really profound questions for us. who are we? what do we value? what are we good at? how do we relate with each other? those become very, very important questions that are constantly going to be, in one case, sense-exciting, but perhaps unsettling too. >> it is an unsettling moment. critics argue the rush to ai comes too fast -- while competitive pressure -- among giants like google and start-ups you've never heard of, is propelling humanity into the future ready or not. >> but i think if we take a ten-year outlook, it is so clear to me, we will have some form of very capable intelligence that

can do amazing things. and we need to adapt as a society for it. >> google ceo sundar pichai told us society must quickly adapt with regulations for ai in the economy, laws to punish abuse, and treaties among nations to make ai safe for the world. >> you know, these are deep questions. and, you know, we call this "alignment." you know, one way we think about how do you develop ai systems that are aligned to human values and including morality? this is why i think the development of this needs to include not just engineers but social scientists, ethicists, philosophers, and so on. and i think we have to be very thoughtful. and i think these are all things society needs to figure out as we move along. it's not for a company to

decide. >> we'll end with a note that has never appeared on "60 minutes" but one, in the ai revolution, you may be hearing often. the preceding was created with 100% human content. sundar pichai explains the exclusion of google's founding "don't be evil" motto. >> it's a lot more of a nuanced view, but it underpins how we think about things. >> at 60minutesovertime.com. i'm kareem abdul-jabbar. i was diagnosed with afib. when i first noticed symptoms, which kept coming and going, i should have gone to the doctor. instead, i tried to let it pass. if you experience irregular heartbeat, heart racing, chest pain, shortness of breath, fatigue, or light-headedness, you should talk to your doctor. afib increases the risk of stroke about 5 times.

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some authors are perfect matches for their subject matter: john grisham was once a trial lawyer.

john le carre was once a spy by another name. then, there's david grann, who has emerged as one of the world's top-selling writers - and darling of hollywood developers - by venturing into unknown worlds, abandoning his comfort zone. the unlikely adventures of david grann. his latest book "the wager," tells of british castaways from the 1740s. it's an open-water quest that becomes a saga of shipwreck, anarchy, betrayal, and murder. imagine "mutiny on the bounty" meets "lord of the flies," except every word of it really happened. grann's success comes from, yes, meticulous reporting and vivid writing but also from how he puts the pieces together. >> you talk about structuring these stories as a puzzle. >> yes. >> is there only one way to solve this puzzle? [ laughter ] >> well, i -- i'm very weird about this. i do always think there is some kind of idyllic form of a story, like, some, like, perfect, pristine, lost city that you're trying to find and get to. >> if you were going to structure the david grann story,

what would you suggest? where would we start? >> oh, god. in some archive, looking semifind in some document. that's where it always begins. >> we can work with that... we find our subject inside the national archives in the suburbs of london...unboxing dusty files, consulting documents so fail they require a pillow for support. grann spent two years playing detective, gathering facts, source material for his latest book. >> we're going to have to touch this really carefully. >> he took us tumbling back in time to the 18th century. >> you see that? >> communing with logbooks, muster books, and diaries from the expedition of the hms wager, the warship featured in his book. >> and here you see the little initials next to their names here. you'll see lieutenant. you'll see "ab" means able seaman. >> how are you deciphering this? >> when i first looked at a lot of these books, it was like reading gibberish. [ laughter ] i was, like, what is this

telling me? it again, look at it again, start to figure out the codes, the language they used. but once you do, these documents speak volumes. >> all these names and symbols told a larger story. with their empires at war, a british squadron of roughly 2,000 men set out to capture a spanish galleon filled with treasure off the philippines. that meant rounding cape horn, negotiating some of the world's most treacherous waters and winds. but one of the ships in the squadron lost its way just off the coast of patagonia. grann showed us on his own map where the wager got into trouble, a place aptly named. >> the gulf of pain. >> they're barrelling into the gulf of pain. as they're coming around, they're desperately, frantically trying to avoid this land. >> the wager careened into rocks, ripping apart. 145 castaways, many sick from scurvy, swam to the nearest island. you'd think the name alone, the gulf of pain, would discourage visitors, especially one bespectacled 56-year-old man who admits he hates camping.

>> ipe doing research in a way very suited to my physical attributes, which is in archives. >> you're indoors. >> yes -- [ laughter ] -- indoors. but there came a point where i began to fear that i could never fully understand what these 150 or so men had gone through on that island unless i went. there's always a moment where something gnaws at you, something unknown. and so it was then that i decided to try to make this trip. >> so in 2019, grann flew to chile and chartered a 52-foot vessel. >> the boat looked, you know, it looked pretty big. i thought, this is good. this is going to be -- it's going to be, like, a jacques cousteau expedition. we're going to be fine. we kind of stay originally through these channels that are sheltered - in patagonia. i think, it's perfect, it's beautiful, it's a little cold, it's winter, but it's beautiful. and then there's sort of a point where the captain says to me, "all right, now we got to go out into the open sea if we're going to get to wager island." and that was my first glimpse of

these terrifying seas. >> rough seas. >> it was truly terrifying, or at least for me. [ laughter ] let me say, my captain seemed cool. [ laughter ] >> grann and his crew endured o >> i had to sit on the floor hunkered down. the dramamine was pumping in me. >> this is wager island, named for the ship that washed up 300 years ago. a spit of inhospitable land, hugging the pacific coast. scenic from a distance but you wouldn't want to spend the night. the castaways did months in unrelenting cold and whipping winds. you know it's bad when celery is the big selling point, the only edible thing that grows on the island. though it does cure scurvy. >> there were no animals. i kept thinking, "oh, there's got to be something. like, something. there's got to be a rat." but we couldn't find anything. >> this depth of detail, it's grann's earmark. he's created his own subgenre of narrative nonfiction - keeping rehawi histor smand true crime.

but it's ali pointi you step back and glimpse a larger tableau, one with broader themes. >> this fascinates you? >> oh, yeah, yeah. well, you see, i mean, on this island you see everything playing out. you see questions of leadership playing out. you see questions of loyalty playing out, questions of duty playing out. you see human nature being peeled back. all that is taking place in this little tempest. >> and this was no one-off. for his first book, 2009's "the lost city of z," a number-one bestseller turned into a feature film... >> everyone out of the boat. >> grann trekked through the amazon - to a place known as the green hell - following the trail of a british explorer, percy fawcett. >> did i hear you right, you took out supplemental life insurance? >> yes, i did. i made sure i got extra travel insurance. i had a little child at the time. there is something -- and i think this is important, and it's not something i really like to talk about -- but there is

jour a en something out th about the pe i because ma of them dn >> grann's swashbuckling takes on an added degree of difficulty on account of a degenerative eye condition he's had since his 20s. >> what's the impact of that on your work? >> i mean, it's terrible when you're on an expedition. like, you're, like, can't see at night, and you're stumbling, getting lost, or you're falling, or you're on a boat, or something like that. but because i know i have this weakness, i'm very acutely observing as much as i can. and, in some ways, maybe paying more observation than if i could just take it in so easily. >> grann first put those powers of observation to work as a reporter on capitol hill. but, tired of washington spin, he wanted to write real stories. in 2003, he joined "the new yorker" magazine. in one issue, he might write about an eccentric giant squid hunter in new zealand. in another, a botched death penalty conviction in texas. all of it predicated on exhaustive research... >> please don't judge me. [ laughter ] >> from his office - itself an inhospitable island of sorts -

>> wow... at his home in a suburb of new york, grann showed us a pile of research from his 2017 book "killers of the flower moon." the book centered on the mysterious deaths among members of the oil-rich osage nation in 1920s oklahoma. and - boxed up in an archive, where else? - grann found a smoking gun, evidence of a systemic murder campaign by outsiders. >> this was secret grand jury testimony. and it was unmarked. i mean, it was a public record, but i was, like, "is this supposed to be -- am i allowed to look at this?" [ laughter ] >> the book sold nearly 2 million copies, and it ignited a hollywood auction. the winning bid, $5 million. the film, directed by martin scorsese, starring leonardo dicaprio, premieres at cannes next month. paramount, parent company of orrtin decidedly utor. glend n a. "the wager," out this week, has also been optioned for film.

t big screen. >> do you worry what hollywood's going to do to your work? >> yes. yeah, you always worry. the truth is you don't have that much control when hollywood develops your work. >> what is your role once one of your books gets put into development? >> maybe a certain actor will want to know about the person they're playing. >> one of the stars will call you and say, "tell me more"? >> yeah. >> what's an example? >> oh, i'll -- i'll respect privacy, but the -- but, you know, occasionally, some people will -- will reach out to you, but -- >> you do not seem particularly comfortable talking about -- >> -- the hollywood angle to this. >> your posture has changed, you're -- >> no...no...yeah, i don't like it. [ laughter ] i don't like it. i'd -- because -- you know, it's just a different world, you know. it's just a different world. >> this is portsmouth. >> grann feels much more comfortable transporting himself three centuries back to this world...the wager set sail here in the british harbor town of portsmouth. the entire expedition may have faded from memory. but grann being grann, he saw references everywhere. , wvisithe shipnson, a med thea

brh arento e wager'smed mission. >> you could be drinking, you know, have -- having a beer, enjoying yourself. >> the next minute you know -- >> -- throw you on a ship -- >> -- you're being put on a little boat that was like a floating jail. they would take you out to the ship. and it's what made creating unity and cohesion on the -- on this expedition particularly challenging. >> a few hundred yards from the pub, we boarded the hms victory, an 18th century warship preserved in the harbor, virtually the same model of ship as the wager - a thousand tons of oak and rope, where the crew ate and sl >> and after it was fired, you'd have this huge force flying back. and you better get out of the way. >> having immersed himself in what he calls the wooden world, grann got to the point he could render a description like this... >> at one point it was so windy and the gusts were so strong, they couldn't fly their sails. so the captain orders the men to climb the mast and to use their

bodies as threadbare sails. so they are on top of the mast, some of them 100 feet in the air, in a typhoon. you have to understand that the masts are going like this. they're almost touching the water. and these men are clinging like spiders. >> wow... >> as grann breathes fresh life into events from hundreds of years ago, you almost wonder if he had climbed the mast himself. he's the first to admit, yeah, that wouldn't be the case... >> i am not an explorer. like, if you compare, i mean, when i look at these people, i mean, i would have been the first to die on the island. let's be perfectly honest. >> if we're going to play this out, what's the -- what's the cause of death? >> oh, my cause of death, terror. [ laughter ] i would've taken one look at those seas and be, like, "i'm outta here, this is nuts." so, you know, i would never have endured anything that these people endured. but my own quests do sometimes get me in places and to do thin

do in my ordinary life. you would never catch me going to wager island in a little boat. >> about wager island...marooned and starving, the castaways split into factions, including a group intent on overthrowing the captain. an act of mutiny, punishable by death, when two groups of castaways made it home -- we won't spoil how -- they had conflicting accounts of what had happened. >> you know, imagine this, they get back to england, they have survived scurvy, multiple typhoons, starvation, shipwreck. and now after all that, they're summoned to face a court martial, and they could be hanged. i mean, it's just kind of unbelievable. >> unbelievable and complicated. grann solved the puzzle of structuring "the wager" by telling this tale on the high seas from three different perspectives, allowing readers to decide for themselves where the truth resides. and if he fixated on the perfect

devoted to his own quest as his characters are to theirs -- that's what makes it classic grann. >> what is your obsession with obsession? >> you know, i always thought for a long time that my fascination with obsessed people was because they made the best stories, right? i mean, the ahabs of the world, there's a reason why we tell ahab stories, right? over time, you know, i've begun to realize that i might have a little bit more in common with some of these obsessives than i care to admit. >> you call it your fascination with obsession, so they're obsessed. you're merely fascinated. >> that's what i like to think, yes. i'm just merely -- [ laughter ] -- i am completely dispassionate. but you know the truth is that i don't think you can really be a writer and a researcher and an investigator unless you are at some level obsessed.

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now "the last minute" of "60 minutes." >> in the mail: comments on last sunday's broadcast. "the origin of everything" showed some of the stunning images captured by the webb space telescope. "the resurrection of notre dame" chronicled the reconstruction of paris' fire-damaged medieval cathedral. >> what was most striking was the enthusiasm and inspiring "take" shown by the webb scientists as well as the devoted people involved with restoring notre dame. they exemplify the best of our

human species. but one viewer's inspiration is another viewer's apostasy. how disgusting to see a "60 minutes" segment on the big bang theory on easter. >> i'm scott pelley. we'll be back next week with another edition of "60 minutes". -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com ben isn't worried about retirement. his personalized plan is backed by the team at fidelity. his ira is professionally managed, and he gets one-on-one coaching when he needs it.

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previously on the equalizer... you know what to do, man. jackson: it's not like it's a full-time hustle, all right? every now and again i get paid to deliver these packages. when you take shortcuts, eventually you get cut short. just don't tell manny, all right? i won't. but maybe you should. no business is conducted near my gym. ever. (grunting) you want some more of the old man combo? i did get into it with a guy at the gym. (groans) give me a name. manny: lo-lo. (engine idling) (indistinct chatter)