12/8/2024: Boeing’s Whistleblowers, Big Crypto, A Tutor for Every Student, Thai Elephants
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This was the view from the cabin thousands of feet above Oregon when a panel blew off the side of a Boeing 737-9 MAX airplane. For 14 terrifying minutes, nothing stood between the 177 people on board and the cold evening sky.

Tonight, you'll hear from whistleblowers who say Boeing should have seen this coming. What was your reaction? I was not surprised. I was almost expecting something to happen.

Rad Garlinghouse's cryptocurrency company and two others contributed $144 million to support pro-crypto Republicans and Democrats running for Congress. 85 percent won. It's incredible. So in your mind, is the message for any lawmaker looking to run for office that they have to take your industry seriously, fear your industry?

We're preparing a demo for 60 minutes to show people what ChatGPD can do with voice mode with vision. We're about to show you a technological innovation that could one day change the way every child in every school in America is taught. The location is spot on. The brain is right there in the head.

As for the shape, it's a good start. Don't patronize me. It's an online tutor powered by artificial intelligence. You can ask a follow-up question. Designed to help teachers be more efficient and students learn more effectively. Good work, Gaila.

I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on this special 90-minute edition of 60 Minutes.

Most of you watching tonight have probably flown on an airplane made by the Boeing company. That's why you may have been more than a little rattled when a panel blew off the side of one of its airplanes in January, leaving a gaping hole and a lot of questions for the renowned American company. Since then, four federal investigations have been launched, and Boeing hired a new CEO to, quote, "restore trust."

But that hasn't stopped a steady stream of Boeing whistleblowers from coming forward. The FAA says over the last year, it's received more than 200 reports from whistleblowers. Their safety concerns include mismanagement of parts, poor manufacturing, and sloppy inspections at Boeing. You're about to hear from some of those whistleblowers. They told us why they weren't surprised when a Boeing airplane blew open in the Oregon sky.

This was the view from the cabin thousands of feet above Portland. For 14 terrifying minutes, nothing stood between the 177 people on the Alaska Airlines flight and the cold evening sky.

The distress call came shortly after takeoff when a panel over an exit that's only open for maintenance, called a door plug, blew off three miles above the ground. Emergency aircraft is now leveling 12,000. The plane, a Boeing 737-9 Max, just a few months old, landed safely and remarkably no one was seriously injured.

A month later, the National Transportation Safety Board's investigation revealed four bolts required to secure the Max's door plug were removed during production at Boeing's factory in Renton, Washington, and never reinstalled. Boeing says it can't find any paperwork to explain how a plane left the factory broken. Sam Mohawk works at that Renton factory. This is his first television interview.

So in January, when you heard about the lost door plug incident, what was your reaction? I was not surprised. I was almost expecting something to happen. I was actually happy that it wasn't a catastrophic event that took down an airplane. That kind of put visibility, what was going on internally, out to the public.

Mohawk has worked for Boeing for 13 years on three different airplane programs. Months before the door plug incident, Mohawk says he warned Boeing and federal regulators about lapses in safety practices inside the Renton factory, which makes about 30 percent of the world's commercial jet fleet. The idea is to keep those airplanes moving, keep that line moving at all costs. At all costs, even safety? Unfortunately, yes. Yeah.

Mohawk says he started noticing problems during COVID when Boeing was ramping up production and dealing with supply chain issues. Part of his job as a quality investigator is keeping track of defective airplane parts in what employees call, quote,

The parts jail. Why parts jail? Because they're supposed to be under a locking key and supposed to be like a chain of evidence. We're following that whole part to make sure that that is not a bad part going back to the airplane. But Mohawk says in an effort to keep production moving, some Boeing employees sidestepped protocol and took bad parts out of the parts jail when his team wasn't looking. Where do you think the parts are going? There's so much chaos in that factory that...

There's a desperation for parts because we have problems with our parts suppliers. So there is, in order to get the plane built and out the door in time, I think unfortunately some of those parts were recycled back onto the airplanes in order to keep building the airplane and not stop it in production. You think that the faulty parts could be on Boeing airplanes? Yes, I do. Are you talking about a couple bad parts being put on a plane or is this happening repeatedly? I think it's happening repeatedly. We have thousands of missing parts.

And it's not just bolts, but rudders, one of the primary tools for steering an airplane. Mohawk says 42 flawed or non-conforming rudders that he says would likely not last the 30-year lifespan of a jet went missing. Those parts came into our system. They're huge parts, and they just completely went missing. Somebody, not through our group, moved all those parts away. If they're using non-conforming parts, and they're putting them on...

What's the concern? I think without a proper investigation, it could lead to a catastrophic event. It might not happen within the first year, but down the road, they're not going to last the lifetime that they're expected to last. It's like Russian roulette. You don't know if it's going to go down or not. Sam Mohawk's story echoes another Boeing whistleblower at another Boeing plant, John Barnett.

He appeared on NBC's Today Show in 2019. From day one, it's just all been about schedule and hurry up and just get it done, push your planes out, we're behind schedule. John Barnett spent three decades at Boeing. In 2010, he began working as a quality manager on the long-haul 787 Dreamliner at the company's South Carolina factory.

Barnett said managers there pressured workers to ignore FAA regulations, such as not tracking defective parts properly, then retaliated against him for speaking up. Claims Boeing denies. In 2017, he retired and reached out to Rob Turkowitz, a Charleston attorney who's worked with dozens of Boeing employees over the last decade. John Barnett walked into my office and said,

told me about what was going on, and I asked him, I said, do you have documents? And he said, actually, I do. He said, I've got thousands of documents. Turkowitz says Barnett had more than 3,000 internal documents, emails, and photos from Boeing to support his whistleblower claim.

Seven years later, John Barnett was in the final stretch of his case. I think that John Barnett was probably the best witness I've ever seen testify. He knew the facts up and down, and the defense lawyer objected and said, "He's not even looking at the documents." And if I remember right, John said, "I don't need to. I live this."

He knew every detail of his case. Absolutely. John Barnett was scheduled to complete his final day of depositions on March 9th of this year. And I tried calling John to see if he needed a ride and, you know, let him know I could pick him up at the hotel. And I got no answer.

And when I got to the deposition at about 10 o'clock, he didn't show up. He drove to John Barnett's hotel and learned the 62-year-old was dead inside his truck with what police said was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Turkowitz called John Barnett's family, brothers Rodney, Robbie, Michael, and Mom Vicki. He was used to people caring and listening. If something was wrong, they fixed it. And when he...

started in Charleston, that wasn't the case. And he would try to go to his boss, who would not listen. And I guess that's when he felt under siege, you know. He would be embarrassed at meetings. What did the fight do to him? He put up a good front with us, but, you know, at times when we really had heart-to-heart conversations, you could tell they just wore on him, you know.

I'd ask him, "Why do you just keep pursuing it?" And he'd just like, "Because it's the right thing to do. Who else is going to do it?" The Barnett family is continuing John's legal fight. His death inspired other Bowen workers to speak up. One of them is Merle Myers. He worked with John Barnett years ago. When the stories came out about how he was treated by managers, some of whom I knew, I was really angry. And he was just a really solid airplane man.

Myers began his 30-year career at Boeing as a parts inspector. He was working as a quality manager at the company's largest plant in Everett, Washington, before he left last year. He says his concerns first began in 2015, after he discovered defective 787 landing gear axles that had been scrapped were taken by workers and brought back to the factory. Why were they just taking things? Schedule-driven.

So that's really...

That's the order of the day. They needed a part. They didn't want to wait for it. Right. Right. What condition were these landing gear axles in? They were corroded beyond repair. In these photos provided to 60 Minutes, the axles are spray-painted red. Meyer says he learned scrap parts marked like this had been taken without authorization for over a decade. If the faulty parts are spray-painted red...

Would you be able to look at a part on a plane and go, that's faulty? Are they still red when they get on the plane? Yeah, or it would get cleaned up. How do they clean it up? Well, just cleaner, you know, chemicals, chemical cleaners. Like wash it off? Mm-hmm.

Boeing says it thoroughly investigated Meyer's claims and that the defective axles did not make it onto airplanes. But Meyer says the competition for airplane parts continued. And they would talk openly about it at the stand-up meetings. Senior managers would

That flap on that plane ahead of mine is supposed to be on mine, and that was taken by a competing manager. So managers compete. So they're fighting for faulty parts? Yeah, and good parts. They're not too picky. Wow. Yeah. And they talked about that openly. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And vice presidents would attend that meeting often, and they would hear this and do nothing about it.

Sam Salipour might have more reason than anyone to do something about it. He's worked in aerospace as an engineer for 40 years. I come from a space shuttle background. I don't know if you remember the Challenger explosion where we lost seven people. Ever since that explosion, I have promised myself if I see problems that they are concerning or safety related, I am going to speak up until my face is blue.

Salipour works on the 777 line in Everett. He says when the jet is assembled, pre-drilled holes are supposed to line up to join pieces together. When they didn't, Salipour told federal investigators he observed Boeing employees trying to make them line up. What were people doing to get the holes to align? Force.

Crane forces, people jumping up and down to align the holes. Jumping up and down? Yeah, they were jumping up and down like this. When I see people are jumping up and down like that to align the hole, I'm saying we have a problem. What happens then if you've got that pressure on these parts? That's like going one time more on your paperclip.

Okay? And we know that paperclip doesn't break the first time, the second time, the third time, but it may be breaking on you the 30th or the 40th time. You're saying this was happening over and over again. It's still happening right now.

Even right now, it's still happening. In a statement to 60 Minutes, Boeing said it carefully investigates all quality and safety concerns, including those of the whistleblowers we spoke to, telling us some of their feedback contributed to improvements and other issues they raised were not accurate.

Based on investigations over several years, none of their claims were found to affect airplane safety. NTSB safety reports show Boeing plane accident numbers have declined over two decades, that they're safer than they've ever been. Yeah.

How do you view that? Right now, the MAX is a new program. So these airplanes that are having the quality issues are brand new to the fleet. We don't know what's going to be coming in the future. Workers at the REN factory where they make the MAX returned to work last month after a seven-week strike. But the FAA says they have not resumed production and are focused on training and, quote, making sure they have the supply chain sorted out. Sam Mohawk still works there.

In June, he filed a federal whistleblower claim to protect him from possible retaliation. I put a big target on my back in there. So why'd you do it? Because I'm concerned with safety. Like, at the end of the day, my friends and family fly on these airplanes. The FAA is still investigating Sam Mohawk's claims, along with hundreds of others related to the Boeing company.

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Don't stop there. Go to audible.com slash cbspod and discover all the year's best waiting for you. That's audible.com slash cbspod. Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen.

Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch whenever you're ready. For

Now, Margaret Brennan, on assignment for 60 Minutes.

Rarely in American politics has a new industry spent so much money with such apparent impact as the cryptocurrency business did in the last election. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are digital assets created and maintained by networks of computers. Mystifying to some and mesmerizing to others, they're used for transactions and as high-risk investments with potentially high rewards.

At least 17 million Americans own crypto, and how the industry should be regulated in the U.S. has been the subject of much dispute. With an important piece of legislation now before Congress, perhaps it's no surprise that big crypto companies were among the top donors in this past election. And since the election, the price of Bitcoin has hit record highs.

It isn't clear whether the crypto industry will get Congress or the incoming Trump administration to craft the regulation or the legitimacy that they seek. But they've been investing a whole lot of their own cash to get something.

In the final months of a hotly contested race for a Senate seat in Ohio, Republican Bernie Marino received $40 million of positive ads from a political action committee known as the Super PAC. Defend American Jobs is responsible for the content of this ad.

The ads didn't mention cryptocurrency at all, but they were paid for by crypto companies, and they helped Marino defeat Democrat Sherrod Brown. This is a disappointment. The chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and an outspoken critic of crypto.

In a close election, that kind of money makes a huge difference, particularly in the end of a cycle. Do you think you tipped the scales? Do I think that putting that amount of money in the Ohio election had an impact? Absolutely. Brad Garlinghouse is the CEO of a company called Ripple, whose cryptocurrency XRP became the third largest in the world this past week.

Ripple and two other companies contributed $144 million to super PACs that supported pro-crypto Republicans and Democrats. Do I think we had an impact to elect a Democratic senator in Michigan, Alyssa Slotkin? Yes, absolutely. Do I think we had an impact in Arizona? A Democratic senator in Arizona, Gallego? Absolutely.

Overall, crypto companies contributed one-third of all direct corporate contributions to super PACs. Of the 29 Republicans and 33 Democrats the industry backed in congressional races, 85 percent won. It's incredible. So you see this election as a major victory? For sure. But some people will look at that and say,

You teamed up and bought an election. It's the other thing. Voters voted. We educated voters, as many industries do, about candidates. But you helped supercharge the candidates with the money in the coffers, right? We absolutely did. On whatever it is they wanted to talk about. That's absolutely right. So in your mind, is the message for any lawmaker looking to run for office that they have to take your industry seriously?

fear your industry? I think all citizens should want people in Congress, in the Senate and the House, who are going to look to how do we use technology as a way to benefit citizens. But the best news for the crypto industry came at the top of the ticket. The United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world, and we'll get it done.

Before this cycle, in June of 2021, Donald Trump was saying Bitcoin seems like a scam. Do you understand what happened with that transformation? I didn't have a front row seat to that. I think it's clear that Donald Trump embraced crypto and crypto embraced Donald Trump. Big news, the World Liberty Financial token sale is now live. Three weeks before the election, Trump announced the launch of a new digital coin that he had a financial stake in. Is that a conflict of interest in your point of view?

Whether or not it's a conflict of interest, the voters have knowingly said, we want this person to be our president. The voters have spoken more so than I have. Trump's cabinet picks have had very positive things to say about crypto. Here's what his choice for Treasury Secretary Scott Besson told Fox Business News. Crypto is about freedom, and the crypto economy is here to stay.

Perhaps most significantly, this past week, Trump selected a new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Paul Atkins, a former SEC commissioner who's done some consulting for crypto companies, is expected to take a very different approach than Biden-era chair Gary Gensler, who filed more than 120 lawsuits against crypto companies.

Last year, Gensler told the House Financial Services Committee: "I've never seen a field that's so noncompliant with laws written by Congress

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says the SEC's approach was the main reason his company and two others created the biggest industry super PAC called Fairshake. People are like, why did these companies come together and organize and say, this matters? And it's a reaction to a war on crypto. So if there had been a different SEC chair than Gary Gensler? I'm not sure Fairshake would exist. Really? Absolutely. Absolutely.

In response, an SEC spokesperson said, "Any amount spent by the crypto industry on legal defense or influence peddling pales in comparison to the savings lost by crypto investors to frauds and failures." It was definitely a war on crypto.

John Reed Stark, former chief of internet enforcement at the SEC, says he owns no cryptocurrency and has never worked for the industry. Like Garlinghouse, he believes voters have given President-elect Trump a mandate to govern. As far as these election results are concerned, the clear mandate is the SEC needs to lay off crypto, and that's exactly what's going to happen.

But that doesn't mean this former SEC official thinks the agency's actions were wrong. Crypto is a scourge. It's not something that you want in your society. It has no utility. It's just pure speculation. Remember, there's no balance sheet to crypto. There's no financial statements. You're talking about SEC filings. There's no public disclosure mandate. Exactly. Nothing. But also, there's no audit, inspection, examination, net capital requirements.

no licensure of the individuals involved, and there's no transparency into it. That creates real systemic risks, not just risk for investors. But the other part that people don't really talk about enough are the dire externalities that are enabled by crypto. What do you mean?

Every single crime you can conceive of is easier to do now because of crypto. Especially ransomware, human sex trafficking, sanctions evasion, money laundering. North Korea is financing their nuclear weapons program using crypto. Sam Bankman-Fried's conviction for fraud at one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world is a case study of what can happen without proper oversight.

Based in the Bahamas, the FTX exchange collapsed in 2022, imperiling $8 billion of customer assets, much of it beyond the reach of U.S. regulators. There were crimes there. There was fraud there. I view that as not dissimilar than if we say Bernie Madoff went to jail, that doesn't make every hedge fund manager a criminal. Of course. There's a lot of good actors in crypto.

Ripple's CEO says his company employs 900 people and has been working with regulated financial institutions to create a faster and cheaper way for people to send money overseas. XRP is the digital currency it uses to do that. But Ripple also sold the digital currency XRP to investors, and XRP now trades on exchanges where people can buy or sell it in the hope of making a profit.

So the SEC sued your company in December of 2020. That was the tail end of the Trump administration. Why? Well, their allegation was that Ripple in our sales of XRP represented the sale of an unregistered security. A security like a stock or another asset class? Correct.

Garlinghouse says Ripple has spent over $150 million fighting the SEC in court, arguing that the digital currency XRP shouldn't be subject to the agency's registration and disclosure requirements, as if it were a stock offering. I went to Harvard Business School. I think I'm reasonably intelligent about something like what is a security.

So, never once had I considered the possibility that, okay, maybe XRP is a security. I've read every case, I've read every motion and judges have said over and over again that these are securities. And they haven't said it like this is a close call. They said this is an obvious call.

Brad Garlinghouse disputes that. He also argues that existing securities laws don't fit well with the new technology, and Congress needs to draft new rules for these new digital assets. We haven't been asking to be deregulated. We've been asking to be regulated.

So we have been saying, "Hey, look, just give us clear rules of the road." So what was your strategy with putting money to work in the election? Was it to then go write those rules of the road that you want written? No, our goal has been to simply get rules written. I mean, the good news is there was a— Not just any rules. Well, there was a bill passed this summer in the House, bipartisan support, called Fit 21. It was a Republican bill. Seventy-one Democrats supported it.

The bill is passed. FIT 21 tries to create a new regulatory framework for digital assets.

While the SEC will still play a role, the legislation gives more responsibility for regulating cryptocurrencies to the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees futures markets for everything from gold to pork bellies and already has some jurisdiction over Bitcoin. The SEC is about maybe 10 times the size of the CFTC.

The SEC's mandate is one of investor protection. They have legions of attorneys who go out and do these inspections, examinations, and audits. The CFTC is more about the integrity of the marketplace. I don't blame the crypto industry for wanting to be under the CFTC. It's a much easier regulatory regime. It has bipartisan support, and it passed the House.

It doesn't surprise me at all that it has the support it has because, again, it doesn't pay for a member of Congress or the Senate, whoever you're talking about, it doesn't pay for them to be anti-crypto. There's no one that's going to give them contributions because of that.

Lawmakers from both parties told us crypto firms will not escape scrutiny since there are consumer protections in the bill. And while it's not clear whether Republican leaders will reintroduce FIT21 in the new Congress, there is bipartisan agreement that something must be done to plug regulatory gaps and prevent confusion in a market that already exists. Where is the United States better served?

Are we served by creating clear rules of the road and having this industry thrive here at home? Or should we push it offshore where people are less protected? But even some of the big financial names on Wall Street have been skeptical of crypto. Jamie Dimon called it pet rock. There are big skeptics, I think, any time a new technology, a new industry emerges. The counter to what you're describing is the most successful ETF ever in the United States. Exchange-traded fund. Was the Bitcoin ETF.

The Bitcoin ETF went live, I think, in January of this year and attracted more assets in a faster amount of time than any ETF ever before. Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, are like mutual funds. Offered by well-known investment firms and big banks, they make it easy for people to invest in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies without directly buying it themselves.

Even Jamie Dimon's bank offers clients investments in these assets he once described as pet rocks. Am I surprised that these big banks have gotten into the crypto space? No, because there's huge amounts of money to be made in fees.

Do you think that everyday people who want to make money in the crypto space understand the risk that they assume? I think many people understand it's a volatile market. And I think many people choose to participate. Many people choose to participate in the gambling market, also very risky. Should we as a government tell people how they should and shouldn't use their hard-earned money?

With the value of Ripple's XRP currency up more than 300% since the election, Brad Garlinghouse recently announced the company was putting another $25 million into the industry super PAC Fairshake. With that donation, Fairshake already has $103 million to spend on pro-crypto candidates in the midterm elections two years from now.

We're about to show you a technological innovation that could one day change the way every child in every school in America is taught.

It's an online tutor powered by artificial intelligence designed to help teachers be more efficient and students learn more effectively. It's called Conmigo. Conmigo means "with me" in Spanish, and Con is its creator. Sal Con, the well-known founder of Con Academy, whose lectures and educational software have been used for years by tens of millions of students and teachers in the U.S. and around the world.

Conmigo was built with the help of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Its potential is staggering, but it's still very much a work in progress. It's being piloted in 266 school districts in the U.S. in grades 3 through 12. We went to Hobart High School in Indiana to see how it works.

Good morning. Just a normal day in chem, right? At 8:00 in the morning, Melissa Higginson knows it's not always easy to get 30 high schoolers excited about chemistry. Are you ready? Are you ready? All right. That's what I want to hear. But these days, she has help. This is acetic acid. The pipette's not going to fill all the way. That lesson Higginson has displayed behind her and is explaining to her 9th and 10th graders was created with the assistance of Conmigo.

She told the AI tutor she wanted a four-day course in which her students would investigate the physical and chemical properties of matter. This next section is your research section. It took Conmigo minutes to come up with a detailed lesson plan that would have taken Higgison a week to create. You pull that computer back out, you're going to go back to Conmigo Research. And the students have Conmigo on their laptops too, ready to help them with their questions.

We have a couple of questions that we need to ask Conmigo. So, for example, I asked it, "What are three examples of acids?" And if I wanted to know more... So it gave you three examples of acids, like hydrochloric acid, citric, and sulfuric acid. Can you give me more examples? And if I wanted to know even more, I could ask it, like, what specifically some of the acids do.

So it's giving you acids and then it's asking you a question. Can you think of any other household items that might contain acid? Yeah, so it wants to help you understand what it's telling you and not just give you the information. Finding creative ways to help kids learn is something Sal Khan has been doing since 2005.

He'd gotten degrees in math, computer science and engineering from MIT and an MBA from Harvard and was working as a hedge fund analyst when he started recording math tutorial videos in his closet for his young cousins. Not long after, with the help of donors including Bill Gates, he quit his career in finance and started the non-profit Khan Academy.

From the beginning of Khan Academy, the true north was how do you give more students at least approximations of the type of personalization they would get if they had a personal tutor? A wealthy family can afford a tutor for their child. If every kid could have a private tutor, that would level the playing field. Yeah, that's the dream. Co-founders of OpenAI, Greg Brockman and Sam Altman, were fans of Khan Academy and hoped to evaluate their AI using Khan's database of test questions and content.

So they gave Sal Khan early access to an advanced AI technology that today underpins ChatGPT. What did you immediately think? It was pretty obvious this technology was going to transform society. So it was pretty heady stuff. But on the education side, it was like, wow, people are going to be able to use this for doing deep fakes and fraud and cheat. But

if used well with the right guardrails, etc., could also be used to support students, to give them more feedback, to support teachers for all this lesson planning and progress report writing that they spend hours a week doing. "Item level analysis." Educators and engineers at Khan Academy used OpenAI's technology to build Khanmigo. "We're going to be using Khanmigo for this." And for the last year and a half, the teachers and kids at Hobart High School and others have been testing it out.

I'll ask it a question. We sat down with two students from that morning chemistry class, Austin and Abigail, as well as Layden and Maddie, who use Conmigo in business class, and Lou and Lily, who use it in English and for SAT preparation.

I heard people at Khan Academy came and asked students to break it. Yes. That was the fun part. That was. Some students would try and trick it into just giving you the answer. The superintendent I talked to said that some students were bullying Khan Miko for the answer. I think that was the elementary school kids. Oh, yeah, okay. Blame it on the elementary school kids. Okay.

It's very helpful for those students who maybe don't feel comfortable asking questions within class. Does it have a personality? It's very much there for you.

It's very positive, it's very reassuring. - It's getting me thinking and it's not just giving me an answer. - Do you ever just want to be like, can you just give me the answer? - Yeah. - That was the hardest part for I know me and a lot of other students. Like, why isn't it giving me answers? At the end of the day, that's where your better answer is gonna be. It's not gonna be whatever the AI gives you, it's gonna be whatever you create.

So your hypothesis going into the last test is... Teachers at Hobart High don't just use Conmigo to help plan lessons and save dozens of hours a week. They also monitor their students' understanding of subjects in ways they never could before. You can track...

how a student is actually using Conmigo. - Yeah, I'm gonna click usage. And then if I wanted to pick a specific student, I could come down here and really dive into what that student's been,

looking at Conmigo. And this is real time because you saw Abigail this morning looking at acids and bases. So wait a minute. These are the footprints of Abigail's work. These are the footprints of Abigail's work. At 8 a.m. she was asking about acids and chemical reactions. So even though you may not be hovering over the student at any given moment, you're somewhere else in the classroom, you can later check

Oh, this is what Abigail was looking at. I understand her thought process on why she got these answers. So it gives me a lot of insight as a teacher in terms of who I need to spend that one-on-one time with. Maybe Conmigo throws in a mastery challenge or something. SoundCon says they won't sell the data they collect through Conmigo or give it to other tech companies. They do use it, however, to improve Conmigo's memory and personalization.

It'll guide them to sort of what to do first. Sarah Robertson, a former English teacher who's now a Conmigo product manager, showed us a new feature they've developed to help kids write better and think more critically. I found this essay that I wrote. To test it, I gave Conmigo a paper I wrote in sixth grade about my mom, Gloria Vanderbilt. So go ahead and click next, start revising. After just 90 seconds, Conmigo delivered a very detailed evaluation of my essay. Okay.

It liked some of what I wrote. The use of a quote to start the essay is effective and sets the tone for the rest of the biography. But suggested I should revise several paragraphs and my topic sentence. So I'm going to rewrite my sixth grade paper. After a few minutes of tweaking... Ask it what it thinks. Um, what do you think?

It says, connecting childhood events to our later life will make your essay more cohesive and insightful. I mean, yeah, that's good advice. I can tell you, as a former seventh grade English teacher, when I assigned an essay, I would limit myself to ten minutes per essay. I had a hundred students, so it would take me 17 hours to give feedback on every single student's first draft. The burden that we place on teachers to give that specific feedback

timely, actionable feedback is just so great that it's not possible. So I've now plugged in. To see if Conmigo could catch me cheating, I asked ChatGPT to write a paragraph about my mom and pasted it into my essay. I now see that there's a critical flag. Conmigo immediately sent an alert to Sarah Robertson. It says that you pasted 66 words while revising from an unknown source. So

So if I click on that now, it's going to load your essay and it's going to show me exactly what you just did. I'm so busted. You're busted.

Do you want to work with a three-digit or four-digit number? Conmigo is free for all teachers in the U.S., but school districts have to pay up. Fifteen dollars per student per year to cover computation costs. And it's still being improved. We got a hint of how Conmigo might evolve when Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, stopped by Salcon's office to show us their new vision technology that'll be available to ChatGPT paid subscribers soon.

We're preparing a demo for 60 minutes to show people what ChatGPD can do with voice mode with vision. It can actually see what someone is doing through live video and interact with them in real time. Brockman was talking with it on his phone.

How about an anatomy lesson? You're going to quiz him and ask him to draw whatever body part you want to quiz him on and have him label it. How does that sound? That sounds like a fantastic plan. When Brockman pointed his phone's camera at the blackboard, the AI started to quiz me. Let's start with the heart. Anderson, can you draw and label where the heart is in the body? It understood what I was doing, even though my drawing was pretty crude. The location is spot on.

Don't patronize me. It also seemed to pick up on my anxiety. Okay, this is a little tough.

This is how we learn. Absolutely. No pressure, Anderson. I put the liver on the wrong side of the body. Chat GPT corrected me. Politely. Anderson's placement is close. It's primarily on the right side, just below the diaphragm. So can you critique this diagram overall?

Anderson's diagram is a solid effort, especially for an impromptu drawing. The AI caught my mistake, but it's not foolproof. The formula is simple. One half times the base times the height. Watch what happened when Kahn asked it to calculate the area of a triangle and intentionally misidentified the height. Is this the height over here, this four? Is that right? The AI said he was right. Yes, that's correct.

It didn't catch the error. However, this technology improves quickly and it is fun to interact with. Greg Brockman asked it to write a song about the formula for the area of a triangle to make it rhyme and sing it using a British accent. Absolutely. Let's give it a try.

To find a triangle space, here's what you do. Multiply the base by the height, it's true. Then take that product and divide by two. Now you've got the area of formula to pursue. How was that? That was really fantastic. That's incredible. It is. It feels like we're in a science fiction book, really. I mean, it just feels like to actually see it, I mean, I'm sort of speechless.

The first time you see this stuff, it really does just feel like this magic and almost incomprehensible. And then after a week, then you start to realize how you can use it. That's been one of the really important things about working with Zalind and his team has been to really figure out

What's the right way to sort of bring this to parents and to teachers and to classrooms and to do that in a way so that the students really learn and aren't just, you know, asking for the answers and that the parents can have oversight and the teachers can be involved in that process. You can ask a follow-up question. Salcon hopes this new vision technology can be incorporated into Conmigo and available to students and teachers in two to three years.

but he wants it to undergo more robust testing and meet strict guidelines for privacy and data security. I can imagine a lot of teachers watching this and thinking, OK, well, this is just going to replace me. Why would I want this in my classroom? It's like a Trojan horse. I'm pretty confident that teaching any job that has a very human-centric element of it is, as long as it adapts,

reasonably well in this AI world, they're going to be some of the safest jobs out there. You think there will always be a need for teachers in a classroom talking with the student, looking the student in the eye? Oh yeah. I mean, that's what I'll always want for my own children and frankly for anyone's children. And the hope here is that we can use artificial intelligence and other technologies to amplify what a teacher can do so they can spend more time... Good job. ...standing next to a student, figuring them out, having a person-to-person connection. Two tens? Two tens, you got it. Good work, Gaila.

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Tonight, the last minute of 60 Minutes is about our final 90-minute edition of this season and an exotic trip to the forests of Thailand, where scientists are doing novel research on elephants. When scientists put this test up in the wild, some elephants seemed to be afraid and ran away from the puzzle boxes. Some tried using brute force. But this one, a five-ton adult male, put them all to shame.

figuring out all three doors in less than two minutes. When we come back, the story of how wild elephants doing puzzle boxes has led scientists to a possible breakthrough in stopping human-elephant conflict in Thailand. If you ever get an opportunity to go to Thailand, chances are you'll come home with a souvenir with the country's national animal on it: the Asian elephant. Elephants are more than a point of pride in Thailand. They're part of the country's identity.

A century ago, 90 percent of Thailand was covered in lush forests where over 100,000 wild elephants roamed. Today, that natural habitat has been reduced by more than half, with only an estimated 4,400 wild elephants remaining.

That dwindling landscape has created a growing conflict between humans and elephants. To understand it, we traveled to western Thailand to talk to villagers who are dealing with weekly elephant invasions and meet with scientists who believe they've come up with novel solutions to combat the problem. Deep inside Thailand's mountainous Western Forest Complex, 100 miles northwest of Bangkok,

We made the bumpy trip into one of the country's best-kept secrets, the Sulakpro Wildlife Sanctuary, an unconfined, lush green haven that allows 300 wild Asian elephants free range. Our guide was wildlife ranger Suti Chai. How long have you been doing this work? He told us he's been a ranger for nine years and has noticed an increase in the number of elephants in the sanctuary.

Eager to see one up close, we stopped where a herd had just come through and hiked through the thick humidity deeper into the sanctuary and saw this handsome fella. About nine feet tall and four tons, he was enjoying his daily dust bath. Created 60 years ago as Thailand's first wildlife sanctuary, Salakpra is an elephant's paradise.

containing more than 300 square miles of dense bamboo forests, streams and watering holes. A conservation area set up by the government to give wild elephants a protected home. Elephants have always held a special place in Thailand's rich history. In Buddhism, they're considered sacred, once a symbol of power for Thai royalty and a weapon of war.

Their size and might made them ideal for Thailand's lucrative logging industry, which ended up destroying more than half their natural habitat. In 1989, logging was banned in Thailand after devastating floods, putting thousands of elephants out of work. The government moved quickly to find those elephants new homes. One of them is this National Conservation Center in northern Thailand.

where mahouts, or elephant handlers, tend to all the elephants. Can I have to shake your eye for today? And vets see to their medical needs. Many were brought into tourism, an industry that brings millions into the Thai economy and leaves lucky visitors like me.

with a little elephant snot and a big smile. But the country's remaining 4,000 wild elephants faced a different future. Their population is growing, about 8% a year, forcing some of them into communities to look for food. That doesn't always end well. Over the last six years, at least 135 people have been killed by elephants in Thailand.

The problem isn't unlike human wildlife encounters in the United States. Coyotes in cities or bears rummaging through town trash or raiding homes. But stopping one of these massive beasts isn't so easy. It's illegal to shoot even a charging elephant in Thailand.

American researcher Dr. Josh Plotnick and his team are trying to find a way for people and elephants to live here peacefully. We met Plotnick at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in northern Thailand. There's always been elephants here, there's always been farms. Why the problem now? Yeah, but there haven't always been as many farmers, as many people, as much technology, as much infrastructure.

And so inevitably when you reduce the space that wildlife has, they need to figure out how to find the resources that they need. And sometimes those resources are in crop fields and people can react very negatively to that. Is there a breaking point?

There definitely is, and I think we're getting close to it simply because we don't have solutions to these problems. And all we can do as scientists, conservationists, is to try to find ways to ensure that elephants have what they need while at the same time humans have what they need. Nice office. Yeah, this is our favorite office. Josh Plotnick spends summers studying elephants inside Sulak Pro Sanctuary and is a professor of animal behavior and cognition at Hunter College in New York.

For the past 13 years, he's led the only research team inside Thailand dedicated to understanding elephant psychology, or why elephants do the things they do. And it turns out, like New Yorkers, Asian elephants are a unique breed. Smaller than their African cousins, when Asian elephants age, they lose pigment, creating that pinkish glow.

They also have a divot on their head, creating two distinct domes. But it's what's inside their massive head that fascinates researcher Josh Plotnick. Are all elephants alike? Absolutely not. I mean, we see on innovation and problem solving how they react to novel objects, how well they cooperate with each other. Some are more afraid of things they've never seen before. Some are less afraid. Some are brave when it comes to interacting with predators or humans.

Asian elephants' brains are four times larger than humans. They're one of the most intelligent animals in the world, which means much of their behavior is learned rather than instinctive. Those unique experiences create unique personalities. And so that variation, which not only tells us something about

personality in elephants, it also helps us understand why human-elephant conflict is happening and why not every elephant in the wild is interacting with people in such a way that results in these negative interactions. And that's the key of all this, right? We think so. What most people don't understand is that now it's not me looking across a field and seeing an elephant and being able to peacefully observe them. Now for villagers in some of the provinces in Thailand,

Every night they're worried not about this beautiful majestic animal being on the periphery of their crop field but this bulldozer coming in and eating their entire crop field.

Stealthy bulldozers quietly rolling towards sweet high-octane crops like cassava and sugarcane, sometimes wiping out fields and a farm's monthly income in one night. We're the elephant. We're walking from a safe place, the protected sanctuary, into a crop field, and they do this on an almost nightly basis. They'll come out of the sanctuary, they come up to this electric fence area that's protecting this cassava field, and they make a decision. Do I go in and munch on the cassava, or do I go back into the protected area?

Surveillance cameras captured these elephants making that same journey from the sanctuary to those tasty cassava fields, carefully navigating the electric fence and raiding farmer Wira Maniwong's crops. Wira has been farming for 20 years. He told us his income has been cut by nearly a quarter due to weekly elephant incursions, something he's desperate to stop.

Every night, he climbs a watchtower to look over his crops and patrols the edge of his fields for elephants, flashing a light from his truck or throwing firecrackers to try and scare them away.

That seems like it could be dangerous chasing an elephant. It's very dangerous, but I have to do it. Otherwise, they will damage all my crops. What other kind of damage have you seen the elephants do in the village? They damage homes and cars. Three people have been killed recently by elephants in my village, including my uncle.

Pawina Echechan is from another village 50 miles away. Her 54-year-old husband was killed trying to protect their crops. An alarm he had set up near the crops had gone off. But that night, the elephant didn't go away. My husband ran out to try and scare him, and he tripped in the field. And that's when the elephant trampled him. And it's not just on farms. People in

People in villages have been trampled as the elephants occasionally invade homes at night and run along roads, sometimes raiding sugar cane trucks along the way. So what do you do?

I wish we had a simple answer to that question. There are a lot of different ways to do this. One is to focus on the people. Can we find different crops for them to plant that maybe the elephants aren't attracted to? Can we find ways to set up more permanent barriers? But what we're trying to do that I think is unique is focusing on the elephant.

If elephant behavior varies from one elephant to the next, is that something that might inform the development of new strategies that are targeted at specific personality traits, certain behavioral traits that these elephants are exhibiting, that might be better or stronger long-term solutions that would prevent elephants from coming into crop fields?

When we come back, we'll learn how Josh Plotnick and his research team are hoping something called a targeted personality device will stop human-elephant conflict in Thailand.

Bye.

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When people and wildlife meet unexpectedly, the result isn't always good. Decades of deforestation and overdevelopment of natural habitat have left wild animals in search of new sources for food. In the United States, that might look like a bear busting into a home looking for lunch. But in Thailand, it's an even bigger problem — thousands of pounds bigger.

Increasingly, wild Asian elephants have wandered into towns and villages looking for food, sometimes with deadly consequences. Now, American researcher and elephant behavior specialist Dr. Josh Plotnick hopes he may have found a solution to this growing problem.

Out here we've been running a lot of studies. Josh Plotnick's big aha moment on how complex Asian elephant behavior can be came 13 years ago in northern Thailand. He placed a mirror in the middle of a field and watched to see what five-year-old two-ton Lin Chi would do.

Instead of seeing herself as another threatening animal and attacking the mirror, Lin Chi, like any self-respecting girl, began checking herself out, inspecting her face and mouth, showing a higher level of intelligence and self-directed behavior.

launching Josh Plotnick into a new realm of study. How much have they been studying the elephant's brain? Yeah, not much at all. Most of what we know about elephant behavior comes from these long-term field sites in Africa and a few long-term field sites in Asia that are mainly focused on understanding population dynamics. But actually studying what's going on inside an elephant's mind requires you to do controlled experiments where you actually are interacting with the elephants up close. That's really difficult to do in the wild.

but we're learning. - Josh Plotnick has spent the last five years leading a team of American and Thai researchers in long-term studies of wild Asian elephant behavior in Thailand's Salokpra Sanctuary. Their tests have evolved from elephants reacting to novel objects like brushes and fire hoses in trees to one of the team's most groundbreaking behavioral experiments to date, the puzzle box.

The test is made up of three metal boxes, three doors, and a sweet reward inside. You've got the answers. How does this work? Sarah Jacobson, a post-doctoral researcher at Hunter College in New York, designed the box and is part of Plotnick's research team. This top one is a slide door. You just have to slide to the right and then reach in and grab the bananas from in there. And then we have a push door, which is just held by a magnet right there.

So you push open and reach in, and then this pull door where they have to wrap their trunk around and pull down. Jacobson says in the wild, some elephants are amazing problem solvers, particularly when they're hungry. Those trunks can smell water and food as far as 12 miles away. So how innovative would these elephants be with the puzzle boxes? We sat back and watched.

Sniffing the banana inside, 17-year-old Na Mae starts knocking repeatedly on the boxes, probing each door... There you go. Good girl. ...until she finds success by pushing in door number two, grabbing that reward inside. Aww. She innovated to open the first door. That was something she'd never seen before. But now we want her to use a different technique and try to open a different door.

She has to change her behavior to do something different to try to open it. Oh gosh. Oh, she's thinking. She's got to pull that chain? Yeah. She did it. That was impressive. Oh yeah, there you go. Well done. When Jacobson put the test up in the wild, some elephants seemed to be afraid and ran away from the puzzle boxes.

Some tried using brute force. Others were fascinated but left, well, puzzled. Over two years, 176 elephants approached the puzzle box, and 58 of them solved at least one door. But this one, a five-ton adult male, put them all to shame, figuring out all three doors in less than two minutes.

So what has all this puzzle-solving shown? Smart girl. Plotnick believes, like people, elephants show a huge range of innovation and persistence, a factor he thinks could be key in deterring the more tenacious elephants from raiding farms and villages.

So you're looking for the troublemaker elephants? Correct. The elephant has evolved this capacity for hearing really well and smelling really well and using their trunk to manipulate aspects of their environment. And so when they come into contact with something new or novel, but they know that there's something they really want on the other side of that novel thing, elephants with certain personality traits find ways around the

those deterrents. So if they're cognitively flexible, we need to take a more flexible approach to keeping them away from humans. I think that's exactly what we need to be doing and how we need to think about it. Something veterinarian and leading Thai wildlife researcher Borepat Sirisirunrat spends a lot of time thinking about.

We met up with Borey Pat working with a local patrol to track down a wild elephant named Mango. Yeah, clapping ears and tail. 20 years old and weighing in at a hefty 10,000 pounds, Mango had made his way down from the mountains and into this rural village in eastern Thailand. It was about 5:15 p.m., so he started to become active and start to go out looking for food.

We spent the next two hours following a feasting mango from this back garden down the main road and straight into and through the village's central square. Strolling past the local restaurant and on to his next meal as locals stood back in amazement and took photos.

We knew Mango would be here because six months ago, Borey Pat, along with a team of rangers and vets, went deep into the forest and put a massive tracking collar like this around Mango's neck while he was sedated.

Every day we get coordinates of their whereabouts, sending to my mailbox. And then we can actually log in on a website to see exactly where the elephants are. And then what do you do with that information? We can warn the people, you know, how far is this group of five elephants from their household, so they can be mentally, physically prepared to deal with their daily routines. Elephants are tracked at this command center, where a team monitors five that have been tagged so far.

Here, you can see a map of the village where we met Mango. The red dot and line show where he's headed and where he's been over the last 24 hours.

Warnings are sent back from the command center to the phones of the village patrol. There's photos of the elephant that is spotted at night in which property and which owner, so they warn each family to look out for the elephants and the danger that might come with the elephants. Josh Plodnik is now working with Borey Pat to enhance his own theories on behavior to stop elephants like Mango from wandering into farms and villages.

Short of putting a growling predator in its path, it's hard to get an elephant to retreat when it's looking for food. So Plotnick's team has created a more manageable deterrent. Coming down. It's called the Targeted Personality Device. What's a Targeted Personality Device? The idea is that you're basically targeting mitigation for human-elephant conflict at a particular individual based on their personality. It has three components.

programmable components. So if an elephant is coming into a crop field regularly and the farmer and we as researchers can identify that elephant, we can say, "Okay, that elephant has these particular personality traits. Let's program this targeted personality device based on those traits and hope that that creates a situation where the elephant doesn't want to go into the crop field any longer."

In other words, by knowing what kind of elephant they're dealing with, scientists can find the right thing to warn them away. We went with Josh Plotnick and researcher Matthew Rudolph to a farmer's crop field to see the targeted personality device in action.

So this computer system allows us to play back multimodal sensory information for the elephant. In other words, we can display lights that strobe or have different colors. We can play back acoustic information that's programmed for a potential predator. And then we can spray olfactory information that sends a signal to the elephant that there might be the smell of a tiger or the smell of a human close by. So for instance, if Matthew were to press number two, which would indicate an elephant that might be afraid of potential predators,

it would play back the sound of a predator. So you're throwing everything at them? Yeah, the whole idea here is to create a sensory world for the elephant. They're going to be able to see, hear, and smell a potential predator, enough to say, this is not a good place for me to be. Here you can see when an elephant approaches, flashing lights, spraying odor, and the sound of a yelling woman send the elephant running away and back into the jungle.

The trick for scientists is knowing how each elephant will respond. Plotnick hopes that by understanding each elephant's unique personality traits, scientists can help create harmony between the most sacred animal in Thailand and its people. What is it that conservationists and scientists and government officials have gotten wrong about trying to stop this human-elephant conflict up till now? I think people really need to understand how

serious this problem could grow simply because you have an intelligent animal on both sides. If you have an intelligent elephant and an intelligent human trying to share limited resources, conflict is inevitable until we come up with better solutions to promote coexistence. You kind of need to know the bird. He wants us to be done. That's a wrap. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.

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Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history: presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts, but less than two minutes after liftoff.

The Challenger explodes. And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery+. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today.