60 Minutes - 04/21/2024: Secretary of Commerce, On British Soil, Kevin Hart

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

Since taking office as the U.S. Secretary of Commerce under the Biden administration, Gina Raimondo has turned the second-tier agency into a center of national security, manufacturing, and job creation. Correspondent Lesley Stahl meets Raimondo - including in her home state of Rhode Island, where she previously served as governor - to talk about the international “chip war” after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the escalating trade tensions with China over U.S. restrictions on the sale of leading-edge semiconductors and U.S. jobs hanging in the balance. Raimondo also shares the path that brought her to lead President Joe Biden’s Department of Commerce.  Less than 100 miles from Britain’s mainland lie the Channel Islands, British Crown dependencies, with a fraught and hotly debated history. 60 Minutes contributor Holly Williams visits the islands that were occupied by Germany for five years during World War II and where the Nazis operated two concentration camps. Williams speaks with historians, British government officials and longtime residents to find out what really happened. Correspondent Anderson Cooper profiles Kevin Hart, the highest grossing comedian today and bankable movie star, who is now adding a new title to his resume – entertainment and business mogul. Cooper goes backstage with Hart in Pasadena, California to watch him test out new material for an upcoming comedy tour and sits down with him at his headquarters in Los Angeles to talk about the business of being funny and his growing empire. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. This is just good business. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is a fast-rising star in the Democratic Party, enforcing large parts of our tough China trade policy while working to create millions of new jobs here in the U.S.

We allowed manufacturing in this country to wither on the vine in search of cheaper labor in Asia, cheaper capital in Asia, and here we are. It's pretty well hidden, isn't it? Yeah. It's all overgrown. If you didn't know how to get here, you wouldn't easily stumble across it.

On the windswept island of Alderney, the Nazis operated concentration camps on British soil. Decades later, the British government is investigating how many people were killed here. Why might the British government have tried to cover up what happened on the Channel Islands? The wall is full of great comedians. Kevin Hart is a comedian.

I've been 5'5 my whole life, 5'4, 5'2 and a half. A movie star. And as you'll hear tonight, a budding tycoon. Cheers. Are you a billionaire yet? None of your business, man. You trying to get me robbed? You trying to get me knocked in my goddamn head? I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon 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 60 Minutes. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks.

More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card. And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO VI Porter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash VI Porter to learn more. Hi there, I'm Ryan Reynolds and I have a list of things I like to have on set. It's just little

things like two freshly cracked eggs scrambled with crispy hash brown sausage crumble and creamy chipotle sauce from Tim Hortons. From my rider to Tim's menu, try my new scrambled eggs loaded breakfast box. What does the Secretary of Commerce do? Until now, mainly promote U.S. businesses abroad. It had not been a high-profile job till Gina Raimondo turned the second-tier agency into a center of job creation, manufacturing, and national security. Once the governor of Rhode Island, Raimondo, at 52, seems to have come out of nowhere to

become a rising star of the Democratic Party and of the Biden administration. As Commerce Secretary, she's running new projects that could touch the lives of every American. And she's helping lead the expanding Cold War with China and confront Russia's aggression in Ukraine. The battlefield for both those conflicts is technology. If you think about national security today, in 2024, it's not just tanks and missiles, it's technology. It's semiconductors, it's AI, it's drones. And the Commerce Department is at the red-hot center of technology. And at the red-hot center, a global chip war that ramped up, says Gina Raimondo, when Russia invaded Ukraine. The Commerce Department stopped all semiconductor chips from being sold to Russia.

Every drone, every missile, every tank has semiconductors in them. And, you know, Leslie, you know we're being effective because shortly after we started that work, we heard stories of Russians taking semiconductors out of refrigerators, out of dishwashers, out of breast pumps, getting the chips to put them into their military equipment. However, the Russians are now working their way around this. They are. Successfully, and they're doing better in the war probably because of this. You are right in what you say.

But she says… It's absolutely the case that our export controls have hurt their ability to conduct the war, made it harder, and we are enforcing this every minute of every day, doing everything we can. These are some of the enforcers. We should talk about our controls on Russia. Raimondo's team at Commerce that monitors and polices the ban on any company in the world

from selling products with American chips in them to Russia. But not just Russia. I've made sure that the most advanced American technologies can't be used in China. The Chinese warn that these export controls could trigger an escalating trade war. Trade with China accounts for 750,000 U.S. jobs. And if trade ends, we lose our jobs. We want to trade with China on the vast majority of goods and services. But on those technologies that affect our national security, no. Those advanced chips are in consumer goods. Banks use them. Hospitals. This is going toward products that are made for civilian use.

Yeah, well, they also go into nuclear weapons, surveillance systems, and we know they want these chips and our sophisticated technology to advance their military. Her toughness has made her a target in China, where fake ads have her promoting the new Chinese-made smartphone. Last year, the government in Beijing hacked her email. And when she was in China, on a trip, ironically, to improve relations, the tech company Huawei introduced that new smartphone with an advanced Chinese-made chip. It was kind of in your face, as if to say, look at the chip that we have. And it was a pretty good high-level chip, right? Well, I have their attention, clearly.

And they've gotten yours. Well, what it tells me is the export controls are working because that chip is not nearly as good. It's years behind what we have in the United States. We have the most sophisticated semiconductors in the world. China doesn't. We've out-innovated China. Well, we, you mean Taiwan. Fair.

While American tech companies design the world's most advanced chips, none are actually made in the U.S. 90% of them come from Taiwan, and they are key to the future of U.S. military weaponry. And China, from time to time, threatens, you know, the wolf to invade Taiwan. And some people say the whole reason is to get their hands on those chips. That's a problem. It's a risk. It makes us vulnerable. The problem of our outsourcing production goes way beyond high tech, with millions of American workers having lost their jobs that went overseas,

something Raimondo knows firsthand, growing up as the youngest child in an Italian-American family in Rhode Island. This is the old Bulova watch factory where my dad worked for almost 30 years. Her dad lost his job when Bulova abandoned the factory in 1983 and moved its operations to China. It's hard for you to imagine it now as you look around here, but this was a bustling place. They had a thousand people working here, food trucks on the sidewalk, an electroplating shop there, a tool and die shop there, and now this is what you have. And how old were you? I was in like sixth grade, but I saw the toll it took on my dad and my family. And that influenced her career choices,

from when she studied economics and played rugby at Harvard. So this is my office. To when she left a high-paying job as a venture capitalist to run for public office in Rhode Island. This was the day that I was sworn in as state treasurer, and those were my parents. That was my dad. That's your dad? Super proud of me. The man who worked at Bulova?

The man who worked at Bulova, the man who taught me about manufacturing, taught me that a job is about your pride, ability to take care of your family, not just a paycheck. Married with two children, Raimondo, a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School graduate, was elected the state's first female governor in 2014 as a moderate pro-business Democrat. Liberals in your party, this is a quote,

look upon you as a sellout to big business. I think that's ridiculous. I hold businesses accountable as much as anyone. When I tell them they can't sell their semiconductors to China, they don't love that, but I do that. In late 2020, President-elect Joe Biden called her about leading the Commerce Department, which till then managed without much fanfare or headlines, a mishmash of agencies and assignments, ranging from monitoring the weather to measuring the level of contaminants in household dust.

So one day, President-elect Biden calls you and said, what about being Commerce Secretary? And you heard that and thought... Truthfully, initially I thought, what does the Commerce Secretary do? And then the President-elect said to me, come, I want you to work with me to help rebuild American manufacturing. And I called my brother, my big brother, and he said, Gina, Dad would be so proud. You've got to do do it. You got to do it. And that was it. Once at Commerce, she began to lean on Congress to fund her new programs with $100 billion,

including $50 billion for the bipartisan CHIPS Act that she is now dispensing to reduce America's reliance on Taiwan. It's a huge day for the entire country. Last month in Arizona, she announced her first award for making leading-edge chips in the U.S. to Intel. We are announcing our intention to invest $8.5 billion in Intel, America's champion semiconductor company. Intel intends to construct and modernize facilities in Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and Ohio.

She's made two other big awards, totaling $13 billion to Taiwan-based TSMC and the South Korean company Samsung to make the world's most advanced chips in Arizona and Texas. Raimondo is also spreading her largesse elsewhere in the country with another huge initiative, the Internet for All program. We went with her to a Corning factory in North Carolina, the world's largest manufacturer of fiber optic table. You're looking at fiber on these spools, all different colors. What's inside of there is actually one of the most precise products ever manufactured by man. Wendell Weeks, chairman and CEO of Corning,

is expanding production to make some of the 10 million miles of new cable that's needed to connect the 24 million Americans living mostly in rural America who don't have access to high-speed Internet. And under prodding by Raimondo, he's investing Corning's own capital to do it. We've invested another half billion dollars and doubled our footprint for the U.S. When you're spending all this money to connect, you know, small numbers of people who live miles away, the expense almost doesn't make sense.

It does make sense. The Internet is no longer a luxury. You need it to see the doctor, to go to school, to do your business, to pay your bills, to sign up for, you know, Social Security. Everyone has electricity in this country. Everyone ought to have the Internet. Together, she says, the Internet for All

and the CHIPS Act initiatives will create about a half million jobs by 2030. But Wall Street is skeptical. Intel, for example, just reported $7 billion in operating losses. When you go to pick these different companies to give the money to, it's social industrial policy, something, you know, we gave up because it was shown the private industry does a better job picking. You're smiling. Well, do they? Because in the case of semiconductors, the market didn't get it right. How did we lose this? We allowed

manufacturing in this country to wither on the vine in search of cheaper labor in Asia, cheaper capital in Asia, and here we are. We just pursued profit over national security. There are strings attached to these grants. They have to provide daycare. You want them to have a diverse workforce. Be union workers? That is not social policy, Leslie. Sounds like it.

It's math. This is pure math. You won't have enough workers to do the job unless you figure out how to get women working in the facilities. But on that point, if they need women and women need daycare, that's a decision for the company to make. Why mandate it if it's what they need? It's not mandated. To be clear, these are not mandates. But it's written in there.

It is written, but you know what's funny? I never hear complaints about this from the companies. The only complaints I have are from politicians. In her three years in Washington, Raimondo has elevated the Commerce Department and its secretary into a high-profile player. China wakes up every day figuring out how to get around our regulations. We got to wake up every day that much more relentless and aggressive. So I bring it every day. So here comes the

inevitable obvious question that you know is coming your way. You are on a list of future presidential candidates. Does that sound good to you? Is it appetizing? What sounds good to me is being the best Commerce Secretary there's ever been. One qualification for high office is being able to duck a question like that. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup.

Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast

chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, Holly Williams on assignment for 60 minutes. The names Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald aren't infamous as the scene of atrocities, concentration camps run by Adolf Hitler's notorious SS. But what you may be surprised to learn, as we were, is that two Nazi concentration camps were established on British soil, in the Channel Islands, around 80 miles from the British mainland.

The islands lie just off the coast of France, became possessions of the English crown around a thousand years ago and were occupied by Germany for nearly five years during World War II. Even in the United Kingdom, many people don't know about the camps, and as we discovered, exactly what happened there is hotly disputed. It's pretty well hidden, isn't it? Yeah, well, if you didn't know how to get here, you wouldn't easily stumble across it.

And this was the sort of back entrance. There's not much left of the Third Reich's Lager Silt concentration camp. On the windswept island of Alderney, about three miles long and one and a half wide, nature is gradually swallowing up its crumbling concrete walls. And the camps up here. These take you straight into the camp. Marcus Roberts is an Oxford-educated amateur historian who runs heritage tours.

He's spent years researching this forgotten chapter in British history. So undoubtedly, if you wanted to put a pin on the map, you could say this is where the Holocaust happened on British sovereign territory. When Germany invaded France in 1940, the British government calculated that the Channel Islands had no strategic value and gave them up without a fight. Nearly all of the residents of Alderney decided to evacuate before the German troops arrived. On the empty island, the Germans set up two concentration camps as well as labour camps. They brought in prisoners of war and forced labourers to build giant fortifications that still survive today. Part of Hitler's Atlantic Wall to protect against

Allied attack. A minority of them were Jewish. Others were from Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Spain. I understand this was called the Tunnel death. Yes it was notorious in the memory of prisoners. On two occasions they were forced to cram in here in an apparent rehearsal for their own death. After the war in 1945 the British military investigated the camps and put the death toll on Alderney in the low hundreds. Some of those who lost their lives were buried under this plot of land. But Marcus Roberts and others argue that more than 10,000 must have died on the island based on controversial calculations about the size of the labour force needed to build the fortifications. Roberts told us it's because he's Jewish that he's determined to count all of the labour force needed to build the fortifications. Roberts told us it's because he's Jewish

that he's determined to count all of the dead. There's the Jewish instinct to, you know, leave no-one behind. You're trying to make sure that all the Jewish dead are counted? Remembered. If you don't remember a life, it's as if they never lived at all. Most academics dispute Roberts's estimate of the death toll. But partly as a result of those disagreements, last year the British government appointed a team of researchers

to comb through archives across Europe and more accurately count the number of prisoners who died on Alderney. Dr Jilly Carr, an archaeologist at Cambridge University, is coordinating the review. Why is this just a document search, not a deke? It is likely that some of the people in mass graves were Jewish, and according to Halakha or Jewish law, you cannot disturb the dead. But the second reason is that according to prisoner statements,

some people were dumped at sea or thrown off cliffs. What are we going to do, dig up the entire island? Well, we can't do that. The researchers are drawing on rich material. The Nazis were meticulous record keepers and British archives contain first-hand testimonies from survivors. Look at this. We were beaten with everything they could lay their hands on,

with sticks, spades, pickaxes. It sounds absolutely ghastly. On certain days, five to six, up to ten men died. Dr Carr told us there's no evidence that gas chambers were used on Alderney, but there were summary executions, and the prisoners built the Nazi fortifications on starvation rations. Were they taken to Alderney to be worked to death? They were certainly seen as expendable.

The aim was to get every ounce of work out of them. And if they died, it didn't matter, and that was kind of perhaps expected. They were disposable human beings. Yes. How did your father end up in Alderney? At a pub in the Channel Islands, we met Gary Font. His father, Francisco Font,

fought on the losing side in the Spanish Civil War, was arrested in France, handed over to the Germans and sent to a concentration camp on Alderney. Francisco survived and later married a British woman, Gary's mother. He witnessed the execution of a young Soviet boy who decided to leave the work in detail and to change his footwear. So he decided to pick up these paper bags and wrap them around his feet and then tie them with string. And an SS guard had seen him do this and walked up to him and shot him point-blank range.

Gary told us his father's experiences left him scarred. I saw the emotion on his face. It's a tough one. Do you think that emotion came from that he had survived the war in Spain and survived the camp here? Yeah, absolutely. It was the first time I realised, wow, this man has a deep-rooted emotion inside him

that he could never get out. The British government's effort to get the truth out by recounting the dead was commissioned by Lord Pickles. Sir Eric Pickles! A former cabinet minister and now the UK's envoy for post-Holocaust issues. was commissioned by Lord Pickles. Sir Eric Pickles! A former cabinet minister and now the UK's envoy for post-Holocaust issues. The figures vary, not by a few hundred, not by a few thousand, but by tens of thousands.

So it was the controversy that prompted you to commission the review? Yes. It seemed to me that the sensible thing was, well, OK, let's do this in the open, let's do it fully transparent. He's also asked the researchers to put names to as many of those killed as they can. If you remember them as individuals,

then it's another blow against Hitler. Hitler wanted to eradicate the memory of people. So this is kind of an ongoing fight against Hitler and his ideas. Hitler's evil hand still continues to affect Europe and to affect the world. But it's taken nearly 80 years for the British government to re-examine what happened on Alderney and to make its report public.

The official British investigations in 1945 were classified for decades. And unlike the trials of Nazi officials in Nuremberg, the British authorities failed to prosecute a single German officer who worked on Alderney, even though many of them ended up in British prisoner of war camps. I mean, just to be clear, these are possible war criminals. The British government has gathered evidence against them and they are in British custody. Yes, they are at this point, yes. A sort of slam dunk case. You'd have thought. That's led Marcus Roberts and others to claim that the British government tried to cover up

the extent of the atrocities on Alderney. Dr Carr told us that could be true, but one key document from the British War Office investigation that may explain why there were no prosecutions is missing. It could have been shredded decades ago as part of what do we need these files for anymore. But could it also have been shredded for more nefarious purposes? I have no idea. In order for me to say there was a cover-up, I want to see the decisions taken. I want to look through those steps and to make up my own mind.

Why might the British government have tried to cover up or whitewash what happened on Alderney and maybe more broadly on the Channel Islands? There are some things that happened that might not, that the British government might not necessarily have wanted a wider audience to know about. Those things, once feared too troubling for the broader public, happened on three of the other Channel Islands, where most residents did not evacuate before the occupation. When the Germans arrived, the locals mostly cooperated, often with little choice. Hitler's portrait was hung outside this cinema on the island of Guernsey.

Nazi propaganda showed the British police working for German troops. And British newspapers on the islands printed orders from Berlin. This is a British newspaper and it's got the SWAS sticker on top. That's right. At the official archives on the island of Jersey,

Linda Romerill showed us how British officials implemented Nazi policies, asking Jewish residents to identify themselves and then confiscating their assets. There was a huge amount of requisitioning of people's houses, people's property during the occupation period. But some resisted, risking punishment to paint anti-Nazi graffiti and illegally listening to British news on the radio. That's my great-aunt Louisa. I suspect that she was probably quite steely. One member of the resistance was Louisa Gould, who hid an escaped Russian prisoner in her home for nearly two years. Jenny Lecote told us when her great-aunt Louisa was finally caught,

she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. She was killed in a Nazi gas chamber. She was gassed to death, yeah. After the occupation, did the British government get in touch with your family to talk about what Louisa had done during the occupation and about her murder by the Nazis? The British government, I think, were kind of ashamed. They were horrified that it happened and they didn't really want to get too involved in what had gone on there. Not wanting to talk about the resistance or not wanting to talk about the occupation at all? Well, it was such a mixed picture. There were people who had resisted the Germans as much as resistance was possible within a tiny nine by five mile island. And there were also people

who'd collaborated some people had betrayed their own country the only possible legislation was treason which was still a hanging offence they didn't want to get into that that was the confusing messy dirty mixed picture of the Channel Islands occupation we'll learn more about that messy dirty history when the British government's review of the death toll at the camps on Alderney is published next month. But it's unlikely to satisfy everyone. Some kind of an apology and, you know, moral recompense would be helpful.

You want the British government to apologise for not having prosecuted alleged war criminals? Yes, I think it would be appropriate for them to recognise what should have been done didn't happen. The horrors carried out on this tiny, remote island are difficult to imagine. The victims were silenced and buried. But now, nearly eight decades later, they're finally being counted. There have been plenty of successful stand-up comedians, but few who've managed to do what Kevin Hart has.

In addition to becoming a bankable movie star, he's also built an entertainment and business empire. And last month at 44, he was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, as close to a Lifetime Achievement Award as you can get. Hart's comedy isn't particularly controversial. It's conversational, with a lot of cursing thrown in. He tells revealing stories about his wife and four kids, his embarrassing insecurities, and his many shortcomings. On stage, Kevin Hart is an open book.

But when we sat down with him on one topic at least, he was a bit hard to pin down. GQ said you're 5'5", the LA Times says you're 5'4", and some other place said you were 5'2". Well, that place is bullsh-. GQ finally got it right. 5'5"? 5'5". All right.

5'5", like with a shoe on, like a sneaker. Now, if I put a boot on, I can get to 5'5 1⁄2". Kevin Hart has been telling tall tales about himself on stage for more than two decades. 43 years old. I've been 5'5 my whole life. 5'4, 5'2 1⁄2 my whole life. It's talking about the things that you aren't afraid to laugh at about yourself. I'm really confident that the laugh that I'm getting,

you're not laughing necessarily at me as if I'm a joke, you're laughing at the experience. I'm giving you an experience through a story that is relatable, and more importantly, I'm saying things that other people just don't have the heart to say. I mean, you told a story about your wife watching tall people porn.

Yeah, he was taller than me. That was your main issue? Yeah. Why is he so tall? Is that what you want? That was real, we had a real conversation off of that. Is that what you're looking for? If your search starts with tall...

You can't fix that. Yeah, no, I can't fix that. We got a problem. One of the sites wasn't even porn. One of the sites was a bunch of tall men being active. They were changing light bulbs, putting on shelves, hanging paintings. What kind of is this? What the is this? She was like, what? You can't do none of that stuff. I like that stuff. Hart is the highest grossing comedian today. He sells out arenas around the world and the occasional football stadium. We sold a football stadium out tonight, so I need to hear that.

The wall is full of great comedians. When we first met him in January at his offices in Los Angeles, he was working on new material for an upcoming comedy tour. To do an hour comedy special, how long does it take? You need to really work on a set, eight to nine months. Are you sitting in a room with your team? No, I'm going back to ground zero. Just small comedy clubs, trying it out.

Small comedy clubs, rooms. I got two guys, Harry Radford, Joey Wells, they act as my writers, and what they do is, they grab my material as I say it. But you can't write it down for me. Like, I don't like the long joke to the long sentence. So it has to be in bullet points. Travel.

Bad. Bad travel. Why bad travel makes me drive. Driving. Good versus bad. Everything has a good and a bad. My rule is when I get on stage, I would much rather have the dismantled picture in my head

of kind of what I think it is and it not be good and then figure it out in real time and walk off stage and go, it was something there. A few hours later, 3,000 people showed up in Pasadena to hear Hart figure out his new jokes on stage. Everyone had to hand over their phones. Before he began, Hart explained why. Like 90 percent of what I'm gonna do tonight, I feel like it's really good. The reason why I took your phones is because of the other 10%, right? Like, just in case.

Just in case some of it's not, you don't have no proof. We agreed not to record any of his routine either. But backstage, we found his collaborators, Harry Ratchford and Joey Wells, taking a lot of notes. I appreciate y'all. I'm Kevin Hart. I love you. Good night. How was this audience? This audience was great. Great. Like, you could feel the laughter never stop. That's the beauty of a theater. The theater lets you really feel the highs and lows of a set. There's so much that he wants to do.

Joey Wells and Harry Ratchford, along with comedians Will Spank-Horton and Naeem Lynn, are among Hart's closest friends. They're also known professionally as the Plastic Cup Boys. What are you actually looking for when he's on a stage and telling a joke? What notes do you have? Harry is always structured.

We should put the joke here and move it around. And for me, I'm always just like, how can it be just a little funnier? He might get a standing ovation, I go, that was great, that was great. What if he tried this? Spank and Naeem have known Hart since he was a teenager,

growing up in a rough neighborhood in North Philadelphia. Was Kevin always as confident as he is today? Yes. I mean, it was perplexing in the beginning. Like, why does this little ugly dude have this much confidence? I didn't get it. No feeling. No feeling.

I don't know what he thinks he's doing. He swears he can dance. Home movies his mom made show Hart was always the family entertainer. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment with his brother Robert and his mom Nancy Hart. She kept a close eye on Kevin. She planned every moment of your day. I had no free time. After finishing my homework, I had to get to swim practice.

Me and my mom would walk home from practice. The homework that I was supposed to do beforehand, she would go over and check and end up making me redo it, because nine times out of ten, I rushed through it just to get it done. She would then make me read, and I would skip pages, not expecting the quiz of the book to come. What she would give you. What she would give me when I said I was done, and then she would make me read it again. Do you credit her with the drive you have?

Absolutely. Absolutely. His mom also kept Kevin's dad, Henry Witherspoon, at a distance. He was in and out of prison and addicted to drugs, which Hart talked about in a 2011 stand-up special called Laugh at My Pain. I was in a weird, like, spelling bees debate. Now, here's the thing. My dad would show up at my events and treat them as if they were athletic events. First of all, you can't cheer for no kid at a spelling bee.

It's a spelling bee. It's quiet. I'm focused. I'm in the middle of spelling a very difficult word. My dad shows up late, busts through the back door, high as hell, making cokehead noises, all right? Once again, I cannot make this up, all right? This is all I heard. I'm in the middle of spelling some... Out of nowhere, all I heard was, all right, all right, all right!

Yeah! The actual details of stuff he did are really heartbreaking. Yeah. And yet, you tell it in a way that's funny. Is it heartbreaking to you? No, because... It must have been at the time.

I see it for what it was. As a kid, that's dead. By the way, in my environment, that's the norm. It's normal to see a parent drunk or whatever. Your dad, even in the depths of his drug use, he wanted to see you and your brother. Absolutely. There was a period where he disappeared,

but I didn't see him in a long time. And I saw him on the subway, and he was in bad shape. And I was like, Dad? He turned around and saw me. And doors opened. My dad, he turned around and saw me and doors opened. My dad walked off and ran. Later told me I ran because it just hurt me for you to see me like that. And that was one of his key factors into going and getting help. Hart was eventually able to help his dad get clean before he died in 2022. My dad is crazy. Kevin said his father loved to hear the stories

he told about him in front of thousands of people. So we talk about my dad. We celebrate my dad. But when Hart started doing stand-up at 18, he struggled to find places to perform. Hey, hey! And you would take gigs wherever you could get them? Like, you're talking bowling alleys.

You're talking cabarets, strip clubs. I did play strip clubs. Is there a lot of comedy in strip clubs? No! And it's a white thing. There's a lot. No! I don't know who thought that comedy and strippers mix. But I remember one of the most heartbreaking moments for me on stage is, like, in the middle of my set. This was at a strip club?

And I remember hearing this lady go, Oh, baby. After you told the joke. Oh, baby. Like, basically. So disgusted and heartbroken that this is what I chose to do with my life. Hart thought he was about to make it big

when he shot a sitcom for ABC called The Big House in 2003. My God, it's Lil' Kevin Hart! The network flew him out to the up-fronts to present the show to advertisers and the media. I'm next to walk on stage so they can announce The Big House. You're the guy with the microphone that's backstage managing the... This is what I see. He's right here. I'm with him. All right, I'll tell him right now. Kevin, hold up one second. They just said they're not going to go through or pick it up.

Somebody should be back here to talk to you shortly. What does that mean? The guy with the microphone is telling you that your series is not being picked up by the network. Not the network exec. Not the CEO of Disney coming out saying, hey. No, no, no.

A guy named Barry in the back holding a curtain. It was only because of that rejection. I don't want to feel that. I don't like that you got to hire me when you're ready. You're saying that my career is basically determined off of the needs of people that I don't know? That I don't talk to? I might be sitting here all day if I don't go grab it

and I don't go make what I feel should be mine. And that is what he did. He started a small production company, now called HeartBeat, and began making his own hour-long stand-up specials. He also marketed himself relentlessly through social media. Hollywood studios took notice. Get on my back. I would rather die. Jump on my back. Nope, I'm going to die. When he was picked in 2018 to host the Oscars, it seemed like a high point in his career.

I have nothing against gay people. But then comments he made about gay people years earlier on stage and on Twitter caused controversy. Me being a heterosexual male, if I can prevent my son from being gay, I will. Hart stepped down as the Oscars host. Initially, you didn't apologize. Later on, you did. Well, later on, the understanding came from the best light bulb ever.

Wanda Sykes said, there's people that are being hurt today because of comments like the ones that you made then. And there's people that were saying it's OK to make those comments today based off of what you did then. It was presented to me in a way where I couldn't, I couldn't ignore that. So in those moments of despair, great understanding and education can't come out of it if you're giving the opportunity. These days, it's hard to keep track of all the businesses Hart has a hand in. The weekend we spent with him, he was in constant motion and promotion, starting with his daily pre-dawn workout. 60 minutes. Is this what you want? This what you want? I'm going to get you what you want.

So the good thing is that we make it out of here. Then he was off to Walmart to publicize a nutrition supplement company he owns. You need to reach people. Finally, you're a real person. I am. He's also got a fast food chain, a tequila brand, and a $100 million venture capital fund. Cheers.

And Heartbeat, that little production company he started, is now worth more than $650 million. I'm no longer just a comedian. I'm an investment. I'm a studio. I'm a partner looking for partnerships. Work for hire is not in my best interest if it's a one and done situation. That means the endless stream of movies, shows, podcasts, and commercials Kevin Hart pops up in. Chances are, Heartbeat is making money off them, too. Even my stunt

double has a stunt double. Are you a billionaire yet? None of your business, man. You trying to get me robbed? What the hell are you doing? You trying to get me knocked into my goddamn house? You will be a billionaire. I mean, hopefully. And even if I don't or if I'm not, I think the better side

to what I've done is create what can become the new norm for other people in the business of funny, for other people in the business of entertainment, right? Not just being a part of the business, but learning and understanding how to in the business of funny, for other people in the business of entertainment, right? Not just being a part of the business, but learning and understanding how to be the business. Now, the last minute of 60 Minutes. Tonight, an update of our story on developments in 60 Minutes' five-year investigation

into mysterious brain injuries to U.S. national security personnel. We reported evidence possibly linking the injuries to a secret Russian intelligence unit called 29155. This past week, a bipartisan group of senators wrote the president, the 60 Minutes piece presented compelling evidence that warrants further review and requested that the administration renew efforts to identify the cause of these injuries and ensure that victims get the treatment they deserve. The intelligence community continues to maintain that it does not see the hand of a foreign adversary in this. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.