60 Minutes - 06/29/2025: Humans in the Loop, Sealand, Werner Herzog

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

As chatbots continue to evolve, Lesley Stahl reports from Nairobi, Kenya, on the growing market of “humans in the loop” – workers around the world who help train AI for big American tech companies. Stahl speaks with digital workers who have spent hours in front of screens teaching and improving AI, but complain of poor working conditions, low pay and undertreated psychological trauma. Correspondent Jon Wertheim journeys by boat (and winch) into the world’s smallest – and unlikeliest – state: the Principality of Sealand. Just off the English coast, and roughly the landmass of two tennis courts, it boasts a full-time population of one. It was built during World War II as a nautical fort, and later repurposed as a “pirate radio” station under its monarchs, the Bates family. Wertheim takes a tour of this micronation and its history of piracy, coups, countercoups and rogues. The name Werner Herzog may not be as recognizable as Spielberg or Scorsese, but over the last six decades, the German filmmaker has had a profound and far-reaching influence on the world of cinema. He’s made over 70 features and documentaries, which are often dream-like explorations of nature’s power, human frailties and the edges of sanity. Correspondent Anderson Cooper sits down with the enigmatic director to discuss his films, and his other roles as writer and actor. 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

On July 18th, it's the Blue Crew to the rescue. It's smurfing time. Hefty. Can you even lift, bro? Glouchy. I hate the radio. Quiet. There's something important to tell you.

I have no idea what he just said. And smurf-ette. That's how it's done, boys. Smurfs, only in theaters July 18th. Whether you own a bustling hair salon or a hot new bakery, you need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs.

With flexible coverage options from TV Insurance, you only pay for what you need. TD. Ready for you. Tonight meet the people who sort, label, and sift through reams of data to make artificial intelligence run smoothly for American tech companies. Jobs that are often farmed out to developing countries with conditions that have been likened to sweatshops with computers instead of sewing machines. It's terrible to see just how many American companies

are just doing wrong here and it's something that they wouldn't do at home. Enter some countries you arrive in style. Here, you arrive in what's basically a backyard swing hoisted by a crank 60 feet above the North Sea. And if you're wondering about the safety regulations, yeah, us too. Then again, when you are a sovereign nation, you, by definition, set your own rules. That's a hell of a way to get into a country.

The only way to travel. Welcome to Sealand, a monarchy that declared its independence in 1967. Just wait till you hear this story. In celluloid, we trust. In all of Herzog's feature films and documentaries, you'll find remarkable moments, nightmarish ones as well. His curiosity has taken him to the remotest regions of our planet, and apocalyptic oil fires in Kuwait after the first Gulf War. You have to have a certain amount of good criminal energy. To make a film.

Sometimes, yes. You have to go outside of what the norm is. 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 Nora O'Donnell.

I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. John Wirthheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Nora O'Donnell. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Get to Toronto's main venues like Budweiser Stage and the new Rogers Stadium with Go Transit. Thanks to Go Transit's special online e-ticket fares, a $10 one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel on any weekend day or holiday, anywhere along the GO! Network. And the weekday group passes offer the same weekday travel flexibility across the network, starting at $30 for two people and up to $60 for a group of five. Buy your online GO! Pass ahead of the show

at Gotransit.com slash tickets. What's the export impact? From Meadowlake Tribal Council, it's when your homegrown lumber supports housing markets abroad, and when global opportunities strengthens your community back home. Turn uncertainty into your next business opportunity with Export Development Canada's Market Insights,

Connections and financial solutions. Discover the export impact today at edc.ca slash export. The familiar narrative is that artificial intelligence will take away human jobs. Machine learning will let cars, computers, and chatbots teach themselves, making us humans obsolete. Well, that is not very likely, as we first reported in November. There's a growing global army of millions toiling to make AI run smoothly.

They're called humans in the loop, people sorting, labeling, and sifting reams of data to train and improve AI for companies like Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. It's grunt work that needs to be done accurately, fast, and to do it cheaply, it's often farmed out to places like Africa. The robots or the machines, you're teaching them how to think like human and to do things like human.

We met Naftali Wambalo in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the main hubs for this kind of work. It's a country desperate for jobs because of an unemployment rate as high as 67 percent among young people. So Naftali, father of two, college-educated, with a degree in mathematics, was elated to finally find work in an emerging field, artificial intelligence. You were labeling? I did labeling for videos and images. Naftali and digital workers like him spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching the AI algorithms

to recognize them. You label, let's say, furniture in a house, and you say, this is a TV, this is a microwave. So you are teaching the AI to identify these items. And then there was one for faces of people, the color of the face. If it looks like this, this is white. If it looks like this is black, this is Asian. You're teaching the AI to identify them automatically.

Humans tag cars and pedestrians to teach autonomous vehicles not to hit them. Humans circle abnormalities to teach AI to recognize diseases. Even as AI is getting smarter, humans in the loop will always be needed because there will always be new devices and inventions that'll need labeling. You find these humans in the loop not only here in Kenya but in other countries thousands of miles from Silicon Valley. In India, the Philippines, Venezuela, often countries with large low-wage populations well well-educated but unemployed. Honestly, it's like modern-day slavery, because it's cheap labor.

It's cheap labor. Like modern-day slavery, says Narima Wako-Ojiwa, a Kenyan civil rights activist, because big American tech companies come here and advertise the jobs as a ticket to the future. But really, she says, it's exploitation. What we're seeing is an inequality. It sounds so good. An AI job. Is there any job security?

The contracts that we see are very short-term, And I've seen people who have contracts that are monthly, some of them weekly, some of them days, which is ridiculous. She calls the workspaces AI sweatshops with computers instead of sewing machines. I think that we're so concerned with creating opportunities, but we're not asking, are they good opportunities? Because every year a million young people enter the job market, the government has been courting tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Apple and Intel to come here, promoting Kenya's

reputation as the Silicon Savannah, tech savvy and digitally connected. The president has been really pushing forward opportunities in AI. President? Yes, our president, Ruto. The president does have to create at least one million jobs a year, the minimum. So it's a very tight position to be in. To lure the tech giants, Ruto has been offering financial incentives on top of already lax labor laws.

But the workers aren't hired directly by the big companies. They engage outsourcing firms, also mostly American, to hire for them. There's a go-between. Yes. They hire, they pay. I mean, they hire thousands of people. And they are protecting the Facebooks from having their names associated with this.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. We're talking about the richest companies on Earth. Yes, but then they are paying people peanuts. AI jobs don't pay much? They don't pay well. They do not pay Africans well enough. And the workforce is so large and desperate that they could pay whatever and have whatever working conditions

and they will have someone who will pick up that job. So what's the average pay for these jobs? It's about a dollar and a half, two dollars an hour. Two dollars per hour, and that is gross before tax. Naftali, Nathan, and Fasika were hired by an American outsourcing company called Sama that employs over 3,000 workers here and hired for Meta and OpenAI. In documents we obtained, OpenAI agreed to pay Sama $12.50 an hour per worker, much more than the $2 the workers actually got. Though Sama says that's a fair wage for the

region. If the big tech companies are going to keep doing this business, they have to do it the right way. So it's not because you realize Kenya is a third world country, you say, this job I would normally pay $30 in U.S., but because you are Kenya, $2 is enough for you. That idea has to end. Okay, $2 an hour in Kenya. Is that low, medium, is it an okay salary? So for me, I was living paycheck to paycheck.

I have saved nothing because it's not enough. Is it an insult? It is, of course. It is. Why did you take the job? I have a family to feed, and instead of staying home, let me just at least have something to do. And not only did the jobs not pay well, they were draining. They say deadlines were unrealistic, punitive,

with often just seconds to complete complicated labeling tasks. Did you see people who were fired just because they complained? Yes, we were walking on eggshells. They were all hired per project, and say Sama kept pushing them to complete the work faster than the projects

required, an allegation Sama denies. Let's say the contract for a certain job was six months. What if you finished in three months? Does the worker get paid for those extra three months? No. KFC. What? We used to get KFC and Coca-Cola. They used to say, thank you,

they gave you a bottle of soda and KFC chicken, two pieces, and that is it. Worse yet, workers told us that some of the projects for Metta and OpenAI were grim and caused them harm. Naftali was assigned to train AI to recognize and weed out pornography, hate speech, and excessive violence, which meant sifting through the worst of the worst content online for hours on end. I looked at people being slaughtered,

people engaging in sexual activity with animals, people abusing children physically, sexually, people committing suicide. All day long? Yes, all day long. Eight hours a day, forty hours a week. The workers told us they were tricked into this work by ads like this that describe these jobs as call center agents to assist our clients' community

and help resolve inquiries empathetically. I was told I was going to do a translation job. Exactly what was the job you were doing? I was basically reviewing content, which are very graphic, very disturbing contents. I was watching dismembered bodies or drone attack victims, you name it, you know, whenever I talk about this, I still have flashbacks.

Are any of you a different person than they were before you had this job? Yeah, I find it hard now to even have conversations with people. It's just that I find it easy to cry than to speak. You continue isolating yourself from people. You don't want to socialize with others. It's you, and it's you alone.

Are you a different person? Yeah, I'm a different person. I used to enjoy my marriage, especially when it comes to bedroom fireworks. But after the job, I hate sex. You hated sex? After countless seeing those sexual activities, pornography on the job that I was doing, I hate sex. Sama says mental health counseling was provided by, quote,

fully licensed professionals, but the workers say it was woefully inadequate. We want psychiatrists, we want psychologists qualified who know exactly what we are going through and how they can help us to cope. Trauma experts. Yes. Do you think the big company, Facebook, ChatGPT, do you think they know how this is affecting the workers?

It's their job to know. It's their f***ing job to know, actually, because they are the ones providing the work. These three and nearly 200 other digital workers are suing Sama and Metta over unreasonable working conditions that caused psychiatric problems. It was proven by a psychiatrist that we are thoroughly sick. We have gone through a psychiatric evaluation just a few months ago and it was proven that we are all sick, thoroughly sick. They know that we're damaged, but they don't care. We're humans, just because we're black or just because we're just vulnerable for now, that doesn't give them the right to just exploit us like this.

SAMA, which has terminated those projects, would not agree to an on-camera interview. Meta and OpenAI told us they're committed to safe working conditions, including fair wages and access to mental health counseling. Another American AI training company facing criticism in Kenya is Scale AI, which operates a website called Remotasks. Did you all work for Remotasks? Yes. Or work with them? Of Phantus, Joan, Joy, Michael and Duncan signed up online, creating an account and clicked for work remotely, getting paid per task.

Problem is, sometimes the company just didn't pay them. When it gets to the day before payday, they close their account and say that you violated a policy. They say you violated their policy and they don't pay you for the work you've done? Would you say that that's almost common, that you do work and you're not paid for it? And you have no recourse, you have no way to even complain? There is no way. The company says any work that was done in line with our community guidelines was paid out. Last year, as workers started complaining publicly,

remote tasks abruptly shut down in Kenya altogether. There are no labor laws here. Our labor law is about 20 years old. It doesn't touch on digital labor. I do think that our labor laws need to recognize it, but not just in Kenya alone. Because what happens is when we start to push back in terms of protections of workers, a lot of these companies, they shut down

and they move to a neighboring country. It's easy to see how you're trapped. Kenya is trapped. They need jobs so desperately that there's a fear that if you complain, if your government complained, then these companies don't have to come here. Yeah, and that's what they throw at us all the time, and it's terrible to see just how many American companies are just doing wrong here, just doing wrong here, just doing wrong here.

And it's something that they wouldn't do at home. So why do it here? The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. 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 the iPorter to learn more. Okay, name that country. It's planted opposite Europe, sitting proudly on the other side of the North Sea. It's a monarchy that features its own currency,

postage stamps, constitution, national anthem, love of tea, and a pair of handsome princes born two years apart. We speak of sea land, A crumb of real estate off the English coast that declared its independence in 1967, sea land has a full-time population of one. It has a landmass the size of roughly two tennis courts. Its leading export might be the national mythology, a history of piracy, coups, countercoups, rogues, and offshore internet schemes.

It may make tiny Liechtenstein look like China by comparison, but as we first told you in 2023, by rights, Sealand is a sovereign nation. Join us as we compile some notes from a truly small island. We can see Sealand over there by the way now. You see that? Oh there she is. Yeah, yeah. On the starboard bow.

Behold the world's smallest state. It's a micronation in the extreme. A principality which sits, or stands, only seven miles off the coast of England. It's self-described reigning monarch is this guy, Prince Michael Bates. Here we are. Yep. A platform and a couple of concrete husks and this is a

state. Yep. Enter some countries you arrive in style. Here you arrive in what's basically a backyard swing hoisted by a crank 60 feet above the North Sea. And if you're wondering about the safety regulations, yeah, us too. Then again, when you are a sovereign nation, you, by

definition, set your own rules. Mike Barrington, U.S. Air Force Base, North Carolina On the plus side, there's no long line at the arrivals hall. I'm following you to passport control. Mike Barrington fills various roles and positions on Sea Land. Right now it's immigration and customs.

He also happens to be the only permanent resident. There you are sir. So now I'm official. You are. Welcome to Sea Land. It wasn't always named Sea Land and it was never intended to be a country. Originally called His Majesty's Ruffs Tower, it was a hastily constructed nautical fort, one of several the British set up in the North Sea during World War II.

Equipped with anti-aircraft artillery, these forts were designed to prevent German bombing raids on London. During the war, more than 100 Royal Marines were crammed into these towers for months on end. Descending the seven-story towers, it feels and smells like a cross between a tree house and a diesel-soaked submarine. First up, the first-class bedroom suite.

Yeah, it's a nice one. Yeah, nice TV. Our claustrophobic tour continued downward. Now we're underwater at this point. So we've still got a couple floors to go. You hear ships going past. You hear the propellers going around. Ding, ding, ding, ding.

Like many countries, there's a national cathedral. Freedom of worship and sea land. I think there's even the Quran here somewhere. On the bottom floor, the jail. Two days in the brig, bread and water. I have to look at the sea land constitution and see what my rights are. Very limited.

If you're wondering by now how this concrete island constitutes a country, stick with us here. This is Radio Carolina on 199. Back in the 1960s, these same waters played host to the burgeoning unlicensed commercial radio business that operated on ships and old Fords, what the British government called pirate radio. It was the time of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks.

But the stodgy BBC, which had a monopoly on broadcasting in Britain, gave the rock bands just an hour of airtime a week. The younger set in Britain, millions of them, tuned their radio knobs to the pirate stations. In 1965, Prince Michael's father, Roy Bates, an enterprising swashbuckling World War II veteran, commandeered a fort where another pirate station operated. It was the Wild West on the North Sea.

The DJs may not be highly experienced, but they certainly pull their weight. Bates set up Britain's first 24-hour outfit. He called it Radio Essex. Radio Essex broadcasting on 22 meters. We're doing a job that's needed. The public wants us to do the job, so do businesses. And I think while this demand is here, we're remaining business. But not for long.

The British government enacted a new law rendering all pirate radio stations illegal. Bates was forced to shut down, but true to his nature, he was something other than scared off. Far from surrendering, Bates seized another fort, Ruff's Tower, which was outside UK territorial waters. Instead of restarting Radio Essex, he did something bolder still. On September 2, 1967, he declared it an independent state, Zeeland, and declared himself its prince. It was his wife Joan's birthday. And it was, of course, a hugely romantic gesture to make my mother a princess.

In addition to taking you out to dinner, I'm going to make you a princess. He didn't take her out to dinner, but he just made her a princess, yeah. Prince Roy and Princess Joan, along with their two children, Michael and Penny, set up home on Sealand. The sheer novelty of their lifestyle was a, set up home on sea land. The sheer novelty of their lifestyle was a constant source of amusement on the mainland. This newsreel is from 1969. The start of another day, even for the new royals, is no different than for millions of others, the request for a common cuppa.

Mrs. Bates, how is it possible to keep looking glamorous in conditions like these? It's no more difficult than anywhere else in the world. We're quite comfortable here. We have all the things I want. Look, make-ups, brushes and things. At age 16, Penny was less convinced. It was freezing cold and it had no electricity. To flush the toilet, you'd have to chuck a bucket over the side, drop it down about 80

feet, pull it up and flush the toilet. That was your toilet? Yes. The Bates family had big ambitions to turn sea land into a tax haven, a luxury island and casino. And they went all in on the trappings of statehood, fashioning a flag, stamps, currency, an anthem, even a national motto, Imare Lias, from the sea, freedom.

As teens, Michael and Penny would spend months on sea land, holding down the fort, as it were, firing off warning shots and tossing Molotov cocktails overboard to fend off periodic attempts of invasion from rivals and buccaneers. When the press eventually came out and took photographs, my father called me down and he said, now look, he said, how many times have I told you, you do not hold a gun like that?

You weren't holding the gun the right way. And actually, if you look at the picture, the way I'm holding the guns is dreadful. Firmly settled on sea land, the Bates's remained a nuisance to the British government. So much so as a warning to the family, a team of Royal Engineers blew up a similar North Sea fort. At sea land's National Archives, which doubles as Prince Michael's dining room table, we

were shown declassified plans drawn up by the British Ministry of Defence to take sea land by force. John H. H. H. H. The following units are to be available to the execution of the operation. Royal Navy, two Wessex 5 helicopters, crafts from H.M. naval base Chatham, Portsmouth, Medway and a clearance diving team.

It's crazy, isn't it? naval base Chatham, Portsmouth, Medway and a clearance diving team. It's crazy, isn't it?" But it wasn't just the British government that wanted to dislodge the family. In August 1978, a band of rogue German and Dutch lawyers and diamond merchants launched a coup d'etat with designs of founding their own offshore casino.

They arrived by helicopter with a film crew in tow, taking Prince Michael by surprise and then roughing him up. They tied my elbow together, my knees together, my feet together, my hands down to my knees and they picked me up and they sponsored the other in German. Let's chuck this bastard over the side, he's too

much trouble. You're a full on political prisoner right now. Sealand had fallen. After three days, Michael was released. Did Michael and his father then return via helicopter, fully armed and flanked by a group of bruisers to stage a successful counter-coup? Yes, yes they did. But I jumped and landed crash in the middle of the Germans.

The sawed-off shotgun hit the deck, boom, and all the Germans went like that. Surrender, that's it. You've reclaimed your principality. Yep. Yep. Disarmed, the plotters were released, all except for one.

His name was Putz. And he was made to clean the bathroom, make coffee, and imposed a fine for treason, $37,000. His imprisonment brought a German diplomat to Sealand. But if you have German emissaries coming here to try and negotiate the release of this prisoner, doesn't that imply that Sealand is a state that's

having relations? Absolutely. It's de facto recognition, isn't it? It happened, yeah. This diplomatic visit was critical for the Bates family. An international treaty signed in the 1930s established four requirements for statehood.

One is recognition by another state. Sea Land had already met the other tests. A government check, a defined territory check, and a permanent population check thanks to Michael Barrington. So what's your position here? Well, I do most of the engineering work, electrically and whatever. Apparently I'm head of homeland security.

What are you protecting this place from? The British government or anybody else that decides to take us over. We're our country after all, a small nation. You're ready to use weapons if you had to? If need be, yes. No hesitation. But in recent years, to keep sea land afloat, the

Bates family has updated their pirate radio sensibilities for the times. In the early 2000s, they partnered with fringe internet entrepreneurs who invested millions with designs of turning sea land into an offshore data haven. Prince Michael's son, Prince James, showed us the old server room.

We used to run things like gambling sites, porn sites. We had a few dubious people asking us to do things that we didn't really agree with. There was an organ transplant company like Human Organs that wanted to host out here, which my father was against. Gambling and porn is okay, but we draw a line at harvesting human organs. Yes, exactly. That venture failed dismally.

But today, James and his younger brother, Prince Liam, are still harnessing the power of the internet. The Bates family won't disclose the size of the national debt or the yearly budget, but it is serviced through the online sale of noble titles. Become a lord or lady for $30. $600 will make you a sea-land duke or duchess. And people are buying these titles.

What is that all about? I think it means so many things to so many different people. Some people love the act of political defiance. Some people love the love story that ran through it with my grandparents. Some people love David against Goliath." That national myth, the very idea of sea land, has now far outgrown the country itself. As for the House of Bates, well, Roy and Joan have passed on.

And the rest of the lineage lives in the small English resort town of South End-on-Sea. Princes James and Liam run a business harvesting cockles. Princess Penny runs a Botox clinic nearby. And seven years ago, Prince Michael married and welcomed a new princess, Mei Shi, a former artillery major in China's People's Liberation Army. Six decades after founding their private little country, the royal family remains committed to the bit.

Is this a golden age for sea land? Hopefully. The British Navy rolled up tomorrow and said it's time to reclaim Sealand. How do you respond? Well first of all, I'm sure they wouldn't, but if they did, I'd just get the best China out and make them a nice cup of tea. Sealand's flag now adorns football helmets?

Yes, the micronation now fields men's and women's tackle football teams. The Sealand Seahawks play opponents from the UK, Europe, and the US. Naturally, all their games are held away from home. ["The Seahawks"] Werner Herzog may not be a household name, but he is one of the most respected and unusual filmmakers of our time. Over the last six decades, the German director has made more than 70 documentaries and feature

films about everything from an unhinged cop in New Orleans to a guy who thought he could live with grizzly bears. He did until they ate him. Verner Herzog has never shied away from the extreme. If anything, he's drawn to it. His movies are often dreamlike explorations of the power of nature, the frailties of man, and the edges of sanity. Today he's 82 years old, and as we reported last March, he is still working constantly, still making movies no one else would or could

ever dream of. This was the film that introduced Werner Herzog to the world in 1972. Aguirre, the Wrath of God, about a group of conquistadors searching for a lost city of gold in the Amazon and the wrath who gradually descend into madness. The wrath of God. Shot on a shoestring budget in Peru, it only got finished because of Herzog's force of will and determination.

I read that you sold your shoes in order to get some fish to feed the crew. Well, it's not normally what a director has to do. It's good to have some good boots and you can barter it for a load of fish. On my wristwatch, I would give away, I would give away everything. And it's worth it? Of course. Of course it's worth it. I get away with the loot. I have a film. That's the loot, though. You're not talking about making millions and millions of dollars.

The loot for you is the film. Yeah. And of course I make money sometimes and I invest it in the next film. If you've seen any of Herzog's documentaries, it may be Grizzly Man, one of his most commercially successful. It tells the strange tale of Timothy Treadwell, an eccentric drifter who spent 13 summers in the wilds of Alaska, recording himself interacting with grizzly bears. By show weakness, I may be hurt, I may be killed.

Treadwell seemed convinced he had a spiritual connection with the Grizzlies and was somehow their protector. In the end, he's the one who needed protecting. Go back and play. We sat down with Herzog to watch the film and others at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, David Geffen Theater in Los Angeles. And what haunts me is that in all the faces

of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. You have a distinctly unromantic view of nature. Yes. Nature is utterly indifferent. We are not made to become brothers with the bears. That happens in Walt Disney, not in real life. Take a step to the left. Okay.

In all of Herzog's feature films and documentaries, you'll find remarkable moments, nightmarish ones as well. His curiosity has taken him to the remotest regions of our planet. In celluloid we trust. With his distinctly Teutonic tone, he narrates his documentaries himself and asks questions that rarely have easy answers.

Do fish have souls? Do fish have dreams? Herzog has revealed hidden landscapes under the Antarctic ice sheet and apocalyptic oil fires in Kuwait after the first Gulf War. Has life without fire become unbearable for them? He's risked his life to capture the power of volcanoes and filmed ancient cave paintings in France rarely seen before. Yeah, hold it, hold it, hold it. Herzog is now working on a new documentary in Los Angeles with his editor Marco Capaldo. And now music.

Wow. Schubert's not... No, I have not. It's a movie about the search for a legendary herd of elephants in southern Africa, but Herzog insists it's not a wildlife film. It's a fantasy of elephants, maybe a search like for the white whale from Moby Dick. It's a dream of an elephant. Herzog never had any formal training as a director. He was born in Munich just two weeks before the Allies bombed it in 1942.

His father was away serving in the German army when his mother fled with Werner and his older brother to the mountains of Bavaria. We grew up in complete poverty, and we had no running water, no sewage system, hardly ever electricity. We had one loaf of bread per week, and we were hanging it at her skirt, wailing that we were hungry, and she spins around, and she looks at us,

and she says, boys, if I could cut it out of my ribs, I would cut it out of my ribs, but I can't. To this day, that experience shapes you? Yes, it does. Follow me! Herzog didn't see his first film until he was 11. He got hooked on American B-movies like Zorro

and decided filmmaking was his destiny. He just needed a camera. He finally found one in a film school in Munich. One day I saw this camera room and nobody was in there and I took one and tested it, walked out and they never noticed that a camera was missing. I mean, that's a stolen camera. It was more expropriation than theft. You have to have a certain amount of,

I say, good criminal energy. To make a film. Sometimes, yes, you have to. You have to go outside of what the norm is. He's been going outside the norm his whole life. In 1979, he began working on a fever dream of a film called Fitzcarraldo. ["Faith of the Fathers"]

It took him three grueling years to make. German actor Klaus Kinski plays an obsessed Irishman who'll stop at nothing to build an opera house in the Amazon. I want my opera house! Give it a go! To raise the money for it, Fitzcarraldo hatches a plan to harvest lucrative rubber trees in a remote jungle

and hires indigenous laborers to haul a ship over a mountain to do it. Herzog refused to cut corners. He insisted on buying a 340-ton steam ship and actually moving it up a mountain to do it. Herzog refused to cut corners. He insisted on buying a 340-ton steam ship and actually moving it up a mountain. Couldn't you have used special effects with a model of a ship being moved over a mountain rather than actually moving an enormous... Yes, that was a discussion with 20th Century Fox. And they said we could shoot it in the Botanic Garden in San Diego

and we could move a tiny miniature boat and I said now we are not speaking the same language. It certainly would have been easier. No it would have been a lousy film. That was the least of it. A border war forced Herzog to move the production a thousand miles away to a new location. There were money problems, plane crashes, fighting between local indigenous groups, and constant battles against the rain and mud. Herzog's relentless pursuit of his vision took a toll on the cast and crew and on him as well. Documentary filmmakers shot the chaos behind the scenes and turned it into a movie all its own called burden of dreams

It's just been re-released in theaters. We are challenging nature itself and it hits back It just hits back. That's all and That's grandiose about it and we have to to accept that it is much stronger than we are Of course, there's a lot of misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing, they just screech in pain. Did you feel that every day? Every day, every night, and the next day,

and the next night and on. I scream or I don't scream, and you don't tell me, but I'm screaming. Herzog also had to deal with Klaus Kinski, the star of the film, who was prone to explosions of rage. I had a madman as a leading character. He had a temper. As demented as it gets, you had to contain him. And I made his madness, his explosive destructiveness, productive for the screen.

How do you do that? Every gray hair on my head I call Kinski. Kinski appeared in five of Herzog's films and died in 1991, but not before putting his own thoughts about Herzog down on paper. This is what Klaus Kinski said of you in his autobiography. I've never in my life met anybody so dull, humorless, uptight, and swaggering. Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep. Yes, it's beautiful stuff. I actually helped him.

You helped him write this? With a dictionary, yeah, with Roger E. Thesaurus. When Fitzcarraldo was finally released in 1982, Herzog won the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival. You must have been deluded to make this, or crazy in some way. No, no, no. But the fact is, when you look at the film industry, there's so much craziness around. So much illusion, so much dementia, so much ego. And when I look at this, I know I'm the only one who is clinically sane.

This shows you're the only one who's sane? It shows it, yes, yes. That's my proof. Notebooks. Herzog still has the journals he wrote while making Fitzcarraldo. Over the months, as the pressure on him grew, his writing became barely readable.

But it becomes microscopic almost. He turned those journals into a book called The Conquest of the Useless. He's published 11 others as well. Fiction, poetry and memoirs. I've always maintained since more than four decades that my writing, my prose and my poetry will outlive my films. You think your writing will outlive your films? Yes, I'm totally convinced of that.

Herzog doesn't just work behind the camera. Every now and then, he acts. That's him in the Star Wars series The Mandalorian. Please lower your blaster. You would do well to remember that life is heartless. He's also lent his distinctive voice to several characters on The Simpsons. I'd say goodbye, but what's the point? I have to know when I'm keeping away from them.

Last September, we joined Herzog as he taught aspiring filmmakers on the Spanish island of La Palma off the west coast of Africa. It's covered in volcanic rock and ash from an eruption three years ago, a Herzogian landscape if ever there was one. You want to leave him and he looks in this direction, you just pan away.

It's an 11-day workshop. Less about the fundamentals of filmmaking and more about poetic vision and grit. It's his fantasies, it's his ghosts that he's searching. He calls it a film school for rogues. And for the rogues, I also say, you are able-bodied, earned money to finance your first films, but don't earn it with clerical works in an office.

Go out and work as a bouncer in a sex club. Work as a warden in a lunatic asylum. Go out to a cattle ranch and learn how to milk a cow. Earn your money that way in real life. You do not become a poet by being in a college. And I teach them a few things like forging a shooting permit can I have you see it should look really authentic. How to fake a shooting permit. The shooting permit during a dictatorship. Have you made

those? Yes of course and I teach lock picking. You have to know, yes you have to be good at that. To make a film you have to know how to forge a permit and pick a lock. And you better carry bolt cutters everywhere. It's not for the faint-hearted. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.