60 Minutes - 07/28/2024: Quantum Computing, Knife, College of Magic

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

QUANTUM COMPUTING – Correspondent Scott Pelley reports on the pioneering technology of quantum computing, a new kind of computer that could answer impossible questions in physics, chemistry, engineering and medicine. Pelley travels to California to see Google’s quantum lab, visits one of the first quantum computers outside the lab at Cleveland Clinic and gets a first look at IBM’s newest quantum computer, its most advanced to date. Denise Schrier Cetta and Katie Brennan are the producers. KNIFE – In his first television interview since he was attacked at a literary festival in Chautauqua, N.Y., almost two years ago, author Salman Rushdie details his experience to correspondent Anderson Cooper. Rushdie, who was stabbed 15 times and lost his right eye, has come to terms with the attack by writing about it in his new book, KNIFE (Penguin, 2024.) He talks to Cooper about Iran’s religious decree – or fatwa – that called for his death 35 years ago, his years in hiding and how he reclaimed his life in the U.S. before he was nearly killed by an assailant wielding a knife. Michael Gavshon and Nadim Roberts are the producers. COLLEGE OF MAGIC – You can’t wave a wand and make intolerance, poverty and violence disappear, but you can use magic to try. Jon Wertheim visits the College of Magic in Cape Town, South Africa, where students learn sleight of hand, juggling, ventriloquism and card tricks. But what the school really teaches is also the great superpower of magic itself: rethinking the limits of possibility. Michael Gavshon and Nadim Roberts are the producers. 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

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IBM, Google, Microsoft, Honeywell, because the nation or company that does this will rule the world economy. Did people try to kill you? Yes. Author Salman Rushdie has been a marked man for nearly half his life. And in 2022, a knife-wielding attacker almost killed him. This is his first television interview. One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me, he said, first you were really unlucky and then you were really lucky. I said, what's the lucky part? He said, well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.

You can't wave a wand and make intolerance, hardship, and violence disappear. But you can use magic to try. Everybody, the magic plants! We learned that after visiting a remarkable school in Cape Town, South Africa. It's called the College of Magic. While it's not an accredited institution, it is a real-life Hogwarts, a school filled with students from privilege and from poverty. One, two, three, focus, focus!

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 Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

Artificial intelligence is the magic of the moment, but this is a story about what's next, something incomprehensible. This past December, IBM announced an advance in an entirely new kind of computing, one that may solve problems in minutes that would take today's supercomputers millions of years. That's the difference in quantum computing, a technology being developed at IBM, Google, and others. It's named for quantum physics, which describes the forces of the subatomic realm. And as we told you last winter, the science is deep, and we can't scratch the surface. But we hope to explain just enough so that you won't be blindsided by a breakthrough that could transform civilization. The quantum computer pushes the limits of knowledge, new science, new engineering, all

leading to this processor that computes with the atomic forces that created the universe. I think this moment, it feels to us like the pioneers on the 1940s and 50s that were building the first digital computers. Dario Gil is something of a quantum crusader. Spanish-born with a PhD in electrical engineering, Gil is head of research at IBM. How much faster is this than, say, the world's best supercomputer today? We are now in a stage

where we can do certain calculations with these systems that would take the biggest supercomputers in the world to be able to do some similar calculation. But the beauty of it is that we see that we're going to continue to expand that capability such that not even a million or a billion of those supercomputers connected together could do the calculations of these future machines. So we've come a long way. And the most exciting part is that we have a roadmap and a journey right now where that is going to continue to increase at a rate that is going to be shocking.

I'm not sure the world is prepared for this change. Definitely not. To understand the change, go back to 1947 and the invention of a switch called a transistor. The transistor, a new name. Computers have processed information on transistors ever since, getting faster as more transistors were squeezed onto a chip, billions of them today. But it takes that many, because each transistor holds information in only two states. It's either on or it's off, like a coin, heads or tails. Quantum abandons transistors and encodes information on electrons that behave like this coin we created with animation. Electrons behave in a way so that they are heads and tails and everything in between.

You've gone from handling one bit of information at a time on a transistor to exponentially more data. You can see that there is a fantastic amount of information stored when you can look at all possible angles, not just up or down. Physicist Michio Kaku of the City University of New York already calls today's computers classical. He uses a maze to explain quantum's difference. Let's look at a classical computer calculating how a mouse navigates a maze. It is painful. One by one, it has to map every single left turn, right turn, left turn, right turn before it finds the goal. Now, a quantum computer scans all possible routes simultaneously. This is amazing. How many turns are there? Hundreds of possible turns, right? Quantum computers do it all at once. Kaku's book, titled Quantum Supremacy, explains the stakes.

We're looking at a race, a race between China, between IBM, Google, Microsoft, Honeywell, all the big boys are in this race to create a workable, operationally efficient quantum computer because the nation or company that does this will rule the world economy. But a reliable, general-purpose quantum computer is a tough climb yet. Maybe that's why this wall is in the lobby of Google's quantum lab in California. Here we got an inside look, starting with a microscope's view of what replaces the transistor. This right here is one qubit, and this is another qubit. This is a five-qubit chain.

Those crosses at the bottom are qubits, short for quantum bits. They hold the electrons and act like artificial atoms. Unlike transistors, each additional qubit doubles the computer's power. It's exponential. So while 20 transistors are 20 times more powerful than one, 20 qubits are a million times more powerful than one. So this gets positioned right here on the fridge. Karina Chow, chief operating officer of Google's lab,

showed us the processor that holds the qubits. Much of that above chills the qubits to what physicists call near absolute zero. Near absolute zero, I understand, is about 460 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. So that's about as cold as anything can get. Yes, almost as cold as possible. That temperature inside a sealed computer is one of the coldest places in the universe.

The deep freeze eliminates electrical resistance and isolates the qubits from outside vibrations so they can be controlled with an electromagnetic field. The qubits must vibrate in unison, but that's a tough trick called coherence. Once you've achieved coherence of the qubits, how easy is that to maintain? It's really hard. Coherence is very challenging. Coherence is very challenging. Coherence is fleeting. In all similar machines, coherence breaks down constantly, creating errors.

We're making about one error in every hundred or so steps. Ultimately, we think we're going to need about one error in every million or so steps. That would probably be identified as one of the biggest barriers. Mitigating those errors and extending coherence time while scaling up to larger machines are the challenges facing German-American scientist Hartmut Nevin, who founded Google's lab and its casual style in 2012. Can the problems that are in the way of quantum computing be solved? I should confess my subtitle here is Chief Optimist. So after having said this, I would say at this point, we don't need any more fundamental breakthroughs.

We need little improvements here and there. We have all the pieces together. We just need to integrate them well to build larger and larger systems. And you think that all of this will be integrated into a system in what period of time? Yeah, we often say we want to do it by the end of the decade so that we can use this Kennedy quote and get it done by the end of the decade. The end of this decade? Yes. Five or six years? Yes. That's about the timeline Dario Gil predicts, and the IBM research director told us something surprising. There are problems that classical

computers can never solve. Can never solve. And I think this is an important point because we're accustomed to say, computers get better. Actually, there are many, many problems that are so complex that we can make that statement that, actually, classical computers will never be able to solve that problem. Not now, not a hundred years from now, not a thousand years from now. You actually require a different way to represent information and process information. That's what quantum gives you. Quantum could give us answers to impossible problems in physics, chemistry, engineering, and medicine, which is why IBM and Cleveland Clinic have installed one of the first quantum computers

to leave the lab for the real world. It takes time. It takes way too much time to find the solutions we need. We sat down with Dario Gill and Dr. Serpil Ersrum, chief research officer at Cleveland Clinic. She told us health care would be transformed if quantum computers can model the behavior of proteins, the molecules that regulate

all life. Proteins change shape to change function in ways too complex to follow, and when they get it wrong, that causes disease. It takes on many shapes, many, many shapes, depending upon what it's doing and where it is and which other protein it's with. I need to understand the shape it's in when it's doing an interaction or a function that I don't want it to do for that patient. Cancer, autoimmunity, it's a problem. We are limited completely by the computational ability to look at the structure in real time for any even one molecule.

Cleveland Clinic is so proud of its quantum computer, they set it up in a lobby. Behind the glass, that shiny silver cylinder encloses the kind of cooling system and processor you saw earlier. Quantum is not solving the protein problem yet. This is more of a trial run to introduce researchers to quantum's potential. The people using this machine, are they having to learn an entirely different way

to communicate with a computer? I think that's what's really nice, that you actually just use a regular laptop and you write a program, very much like you would write a traditional program, but when you, you know, click, you know, go and run, it just happens to run on a very different kind of computer. There are a half dozen competing designs in the race. China named quantum a top national priority and the U.S. government is spending nearly a billion dollars a year on research. The first change is expected to come this year when the U.S. publishes new standards for encryption because quantum is

expected one day to break the codes that lock everything from national secrets to credit cards. This past December, IBM unveiled its Quantum System 2, with three times the qubits as the machine you saw in Cleveland. Last year, we saw System 2 under construction. It's a machine unlike anything we've ever built. And this is it. This is it. IBM's Dario Gil told us System 2 has the room to expand to thousands of qubits.

What are the chances that this is one of those things that's going to be ready in five years and always will be? We don't see an obstacle right now that will prevent us from building systems that will have tens of thousands and even 100,000 qubits working with each other. So we are highly confident that we will get there. Of all the amazing things we heard, it was physicist Michio Kaku who led us down the path to the biggest idea of all. He said we were walking through a quantum computer.

Processing information with subatomic particles is how the universe works. You know, when I look at the night sky, I see stars. I look at the flowers, the trees. I realize that it's all quantum. The splendor of the universe itself, the language of the universe is the language of the quantum. Learning that language may bring more than inconceivable speed. Reverse engineering nature's computer could be a window on creation itself. 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. Salman Rushdie has been a marked man for nearly half his life. In 1989, Iran's leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared his novel, The Satanic Verses, blasphemous, an insult to Islam, and called for the Indian-born writer's assassination. Rushdie went into hiding with around-the-clock police protection for 10 years. He eventually moved to the U.S. and thought he was safe. But in August 2022, as he was about to speak at a literary festival in Chautauqua, New York, Salman Rushdie was attacked by a Muslim man with a knife.

Rushdie, who's now 77, lost his right eye and came close to dying. He's come to terms with the attempt on his life by writing a book about it, called simply Knife, which came out in April. We spoke to Rushdie earlier this year in his first television interview since the attack. writing a book about it called simply Knife, which came out in April. We spoke to Rushdie earlier this year in his first television interview since the attack. You had had a dream two days, I think it was, before the attack. What was the dream? I kind of had a premonition.

I mean, I had a dream of being attacked in an amphitheater. But it was a kind of Roman Empire dream, you know? It's as if I was in the Colosseum, and it was just somebody with a spear stabbing downwards, and I was rolling around on the floor trying to get away from him. And I woke up and was quite shaken by it. And I had to go to Chautauqua, you know, and I said to my wife, Eliza, I said,

you know, I don't want to go. Because of the dream. Because of the dream. And then I thought, don't Eliza, I said, you know, I don't want to go. Because of the dream. Because of the dream. And then I thought, don't be silly, it's a dream. Salman Rushdie, one of his generation's most acclaimed writers, had been invited to the town of Chautauqua, close to Lake Erie, to speak about a subject he knows all too well, the importance of protecting writers whose lives are under threat.

Did you have any anxiety being in such a public space? Not really, because in the more than 20 years that I've been living in America, I've done a lot of these things. You haven't had security around you, a close protection detail for a long time? Long time. But, you know, what happens in many places that you go and lecture is that they're used to having a certain degree of security, venue security. In this case, there wasn't any. The irony, of course, is you were there to talk about writers in danger. Yeah, exactly.

And the need for writers from other countries to have safe spaces in America, amongst other places. And then, yeah, it just turned out not to be a safe space for me. For years no place was safe for Salman Rushdie, whose sprawling 600-page novel The Satanic Verses offended some Muslims for its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, a religious decree calling for Rushdie's death in 1989. There were worldwide protests from London to Lahore. The Satanic Verses was burned and 12 people died in clashes with police.

The book's Japanese translator was murdered and others associated with it were attacked. Did you have any idea that it would cause violence? No, I had no idea. I thought probably some conservative religious people wouldn't like it, but they didn't like anything I wrote anyway. So I thought, well, they don't have to read it. Were you naive? Probably. You know, I mean, it's easy looking back to think,

but nothing like this had ever happened to anybody. And of course, almost all the people who attacked the book did so without reading it. I was often told that I had intended to insult, offend people. My view was, if I need to insult you, I can do it really quickly. I don't need to spend five years of my life trying to write a 600-page book to insult you. Rushdie was living in London when he went into hiding, and for the next 10 years, the British government provided him with 24-hour police protection. Did people try to kill you? Yes. There were maybe as

many as half a dozen serious assassination attempts, which were not random people. They were state-sponsored terrorism professionals. After diplomatic negotiations, the Iranian state called off its assassins in 1998. Rushdie finally came out of the shadows. He moved to New York and for the next two decades lived openly. He was a man about town. He continued writing and became a celebrated advocate for freedom of expression. So when he received the invitation to speak in Chautauqua in August 2022, he gladly accepted.

I was seated at stage right. In his new book, Knife, he describes what happened next. Then in the corner of my right eye, the last thing my right eye would ever see, I saw the man in black running towards me down the right-hand side of the seating area. Black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low, a squat missile. I confess I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, so it's you. Here you are. So it's you. Here you are. Yeah. It's like you've been waiting

for it. Yeah. That's what it felt like. It felt like something coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back in time, if you like, back into that distant past in order to kill me. And when he got to me, he basically hit me very hard here. And initially I thought I'd been punched. You didn't actually see a knife? I didn't see the knife. And I didn't realize until I saw blood coming out that there had been a knife in his fist. So where was that stab?

Here. In your neck? In my neck, yeah. Then there were a lot more. The worst wounds was there was a big slash wound like this across my neck. And there's a puncture stab wound here. And then, of course, there was the attack on my eye. Do you remember being stabbed in the eye? No. I remember falling. Then I remember not knowing what had happened to my eye. He was also stabbed in his hand, chest, abdomen, and thigh.

Fifteen wounds in all. He was both stabbing and also slashing. I think he was just wildly... The attack lasted 27 seconds. To feel just how long that is... This is what 27 seconds is. That's it. That's quite a long time. That's the extraordinary half minute of intimacy

in which life meets death. What stopped it from being longer? The audience pulling him off me. Strangers to you? To this day, I don't know their names. Some of those strangers restrained the attacker, while others desperately tried to stem the flow of Rushdie's blood. There was really a lot of blood.

You were actually watching your blood? I was actually watching it spread. And then I remember thinking that I was probably dying. And it was interesting because it was quite matter of fact. It wasn't like I was terrified of it or whatever. And yeah, there was nothing. No heavenly choirs. No pearly gates.

I mean, I'm not a supernatural person, you know. I believe that death comes as the end. There was nothing that happened that made me change my mind about that. You have not had a revelation? I have not had any revelation, except that there's no revelation to be had. His attacker, the man in black, was hustled off the stage. In the book, you do not use the attacker's name.

Yeah. I thought, you know, I don't want his name in my book. And I don't use it in conversation either. But that is important to you, not to give him space in your brain. Yeah. He and I had 27 seconds together. You know, that's it. I don't need to give him any more of my time. Paramedics flew Rushdie to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, 40 miles away, where a team of doctors battled for eight hours to save his life.

When he finally came out of surgery, his wife, Eliza, a poet and novelist, was waiting. He wasn't moving, and he was just laid out. He looked half-dead to you? Yes, he did. He was a different color. He was cold. I mean, his face was stapled, just staples holding his face together.

Rushdie was on a ventilator, unable to speak. Eliza and the doctors had no idea whether the knife that had penetrated his eye had damaged his brain. Someone from the staff said that we would use this system of wiggling the toes. To communicate? To communicate. Do you remember the first question you asked to get a wiggle? I think I said, Salman, it's Eliza, can you hear me? And there was a wiggle.

And I asked him, I think, do you know where you are? And he wiggled. And it was very basic, simple questions. You can't express yourself with any subtlety with your toes. Which is your favorite thing. After 18 days in the hospital and three weeks in rehab, Rushdie was discharged. One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me, first you were really unlucky and then you were really lucky. I said, what's the lucky part?

And he said, well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife. You're not a believer in miracles, but the fact that you survived, you write in the book, is a miracle. This is a contradiction. How does somebody who doesn't believe in the supernatural account for the fact that something has happened which feels like a miracle? I mean, I certainly don't feel that some hand reached down from the skies and guarded me. even the supernatural, account for the fact that something has happened which feels like a miracle. I mean, I certainly don't feel that some hand reached down from the skies and guarded me,

but I do think something happened which wasn't supposed to happen, and I have no explanation for it. His attacker was a 24-year-old from New Jersey who lived in his mother's basement. He's believed to be a lone wolf. He's pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and is awaiting trial. In an interview, he told the New York Post he'd only read a couple pages of the satanic verses and seen some clips of Rushdie on YouTube. He said he didn't like him very much because Rushdie had attacked Islam. Does it matter to you what his motive was? I mean, it's interesting to me, because it's a mystery. If I had written a character who knew so little about his proposed victim and yet was willing to commit the crime of murder, my publishers might well say to me that that's under-motivated. You need to develop that character better.

Yeah, not enough of a reason. You know, not convincing. But yet that's what he did. Rushdie's Knife, his 22nd book, is one he initially did not want to write. That was the last thing I wanted to do. Because you didn't want this to yet again define you? Yeah. It was very difficult for me after The Satanic Verses was published that the only thing anybody

knew about me was this death threat. But it became clear to me that I couldn't write anything else. You had to write this first. I had to write this first. I just thought, you know, I need to focus on, you know, to use the cliche, the elephant in the room. And the moment I thought that, kind of something changed in my head. And it then became a book I really very much wanted to write. You say the language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back, to take charge of what had happened to me,

to own it, make it mine. Yeah, I mean, language is a way of breaking open the world. I don't have any other weapons, but I've been using this particular tool for quite a long time. So I thought this was my way of dealing with it. It's been almost two years since the attack, and Rushdie is back home now in New York, slowly getting used to navigating the world with one eye. How much time did it take to kind of readjust?

I'm still doing it. You still are? Yeah. Do you feel like you are a different person after the attack? I don't feel I'm very different, but I do feel that it has left a shadow. I think that shadow is just there. And some days it's dark and some days it's not. You feel less than you were before?

No, I just feel more the presence of death. In an interview almost 25 years ago, you said of the fatwa, I want to find an end to this story. It is the one story I must find an end to. Have you found that ending and an ending to this story as well? Well, I thought I had, and then it turned out I hadn't. I'm hoping this is just a last twitch of that story. I don't know. I'll let you know.

Salman Rushdie on censorship in America today. There's a movement from the left and a movement from the right. At 60minutesovertime.com There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way.

Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. 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. Groceries that over-deliver. You can't wave a wand and make intolerance, hardship, and violence disappear. But you can use magic to try. We learned that after visiting a remarkable school in Cape Town, South Africa.

It's called the College of Magic. While it's not an accredited institution, it is a real-life Hogwarts. A school filled with students ranging in age from 10 to 18 and, more importantly, reflecting South Africa. They come from privilege and poverty. Pick a canard, any canard. Slate of hand, juggling, ventriloquism, card tricks, you can learn it all at the College of Magic. But as we first reported two years ago, what the school really teaches is also the great superpower of magic itself, rethinking the limits of possibility. Rethinking the Limits of Possibility.

It looks like any other campus. Gothic architecture, a diverse student body, a core curriculum. All balanced with electives. To become masters of magic, these kids must be both tacticians and technicians. Up, down, a kiss. Like any art form, this one requires practice, application, discipline. Six spades.

Ah, diamonds. There is no magic bullet. While students attend academic school during the week, they come here after school, on weekends and on holidays. Can you do this, God? No. It takes six years to earn a diploma. One, two, three.

Sinatemba Bawuti is a teacher, a graduate, and himself now a practicing magician. He shows students the tricks of the trade. What is it about magic? What appeals to you so much about this? I didn't think that I would be doing this as a career or performing it, doing it to support myself. I want to put a smile on people's faces, make them happy, entertain them, break ice. That's what I wanted to do. But then it became my thing, like, that I'm using to feed my family and myself. So it's one, and then you transfer. And he says he and the school aim to teach the kids honesty, humility, and respect.

Sounds like the tricks and the juggling is only a small part of it. Yeah, it's not a college of magic, it's a college of life. Let's get a look upstairs. For the revered dean and founder, David Gore, it's been 40 years since he stopped practicing law and pulled the ultimate bit of misdirection. Oh, wow. In his hometown of Cape Town, he opened a college,

the only school of its kind devoted to wonder. Hello! I'm surely not the first person to make the joke. You gave up law to pursue a career of deception. I like to think of it as deception. We like to think of it as illusion and wonderment. This is giving some of the game away. Gore's encyclopedic knowledge and love of magic fills the halls, quite literally.

Contraptions and memorabilia trace the history of illusion. Even with all the sophistication around us, there's nothing more exciting than seeing a magician alive and seeing something appear or disappear right under your nose. What do you attribute that to? I think people genuinely are very interested in and curious about how the laws of nature can be suspended. And I think the magician offers that opportunity,

that gateway to a world which we all would love to be part of, where gravity is always pulling us to planet Earth where we can float upwards. It's a beautiful feeling. Nothing here is quite as it seems. On our visit here in July 2022, students were preparing for the annual Children's Magic Festival.

We have a dress rehearsal. What do you think, turban or no turban? I like the turban. It's a good look. . Whoa. Turn up your card, please. Turn it up? Yes.

. Wow.. Very good. That was a winner. Turn it up? Yes. Very good. That was a winner. Come into our close-up theater. Come inside. Michael Barta has been teaching here for decades. I teach children how to use their hands. And this, this, I do. Okay, I was juggling three balls. Somebody's taken my ball. The school was always conceived to go beyond hocus pocus.

Is magic about what you see or what you miss? Barta thinks it's both. So how many balls do I have? Magic develops skepticism and curiosity. Those two things are needed in education. But that's great. You come here, there's a healthy skepticism, how did he do that? Yeah.

And it's mixed with this curiosity, this wonder, how did he do that? I know. How did he do that? Wow. This one's spinning around. From the school's beginning, it reflected a cross-section of South Africa. Now, as then, students come from the most wealthy suburbs and from Cape Town's most impoverished townships. Duma McCorkie's day starts at dawn in the tin shack he shares with his grandmother and aunt. Duma's mother was murdered four years ago. The sprawling shantytown, like so many others in the country, is pocked by violence and drugs.

Some of them are carrying guns and some of them are carrying guns, and some of them are carrying knives, like, busy robbing old people, like, being on drugs and stuff. So, like, I have to be endorsed because, ha, gunshots. Quack, quack. You're describing gunshots and knives and drugs and gangs,

and you come here, it must be a bit of a relief. It helped me a lot. It saved me from doing those stuff. Because I became an artist and I became to take care of myself. You say artist. Yeah. You're a magician, you're an artist, because it's art. Yeah. In the townships, you don't come across many bow ties, so when Duma passes by, he draws attention. A quick bit of whiz.

And gee whiz. And he's off. The school arranges transportation when needed, shuttling the kids on the long journey into the city. There is no uniform as such, but students are encouraged to dress as smartly as they can. For many, going to the school marks a rare opportunity to get out of the township. Tuition is $350 a year, unaffordable for most of the 130 students.

The college, a non-profit, raises funds for scholarships, breakfast and lunch included. You have some kids coming here who are malnourished. You have to feed. You have other kids getting picked up by parents in fancy sports cars. Is that hard for you to watch? Yes, I think it's an important part of our nation building and for understanding that young people get to understand how each other is living and how we think and how we approach life. Because these are going to be the young people who are going to drive this nation forward. I can see some people watching this saying,

there's this college of magic is all well and good, and you're teaching kids to make coins disappear, but why aren't you teaching them coding or something more practical? I think the most important skill in the 21st century is going to be imaginative thinking, because no matter which career you select to go into, it's going to no longer be your knowledge around that, because that knowledge is so freely available now on the internet. It's going to be how you use that knowledge.

And there is no better topic or subject than magic to explode the whole idea of imagination. They trade their cape for a three-piece suit or for a sports jersey or for a nurse's attire. You're okay with that? Absolutely. Fifteen-year-old Nakane Ntame is a rising star at the college. But four years ago, she had to beg her mother to allow her to enroll. And then I was like, Mom, I would like to join this. What are you talking about?

I want to become a magician. And she thought I was crazy, but here I am today. Here you are. Your mom said you were crazy for wanting to be a magician. Because they do not believe in magic. Not only that, for many in the townships, magic is associated with the occult or witchcraft. The first time I performed, I performed for my grandmother, right? So she does not understand magic at all.

And every time she would see magic, she'd be like, ah, mulo'i, which means darkness, you know, evil powers and stuff like that. People are saying, I don't understand, explain it to me. What do you tell them? Oh, that magic is not black magic. We do not practice any kinds of spells, dog spells. There are actually secrets behind the magic, and it takes time to practice and master it. This effect, you must follow very, very carefully because a lot of things happen. Milo Dreyer-Smith says his mom had to convince him to enroll.

Before I came to the College of Magic, I was very shy. So I couldn't dance even in front of my brother and sister. I would just kind of go high behind my mom, and my mom said, I need to learn SI skills. SI is social intelligence. Yes. And then when we learned about the College of Magic, she was like, that is the perfect spot. Firstly, you'll get into a good high school because you have lots of

different talents. And secondly, it's SI skills. I'm going to go out on a limb here. I'm going to take a risk. You came here for more social intelligence to come out of your shell a little bit. It seems like it's working. Yeah, it is working. Being a magician, do you feel like you're part of a secret society,

a secret club? Yes. Like a secret agent of you feel like you're part of a secret society, a secret club? Yes. Like a secret agent of a big force. Let's do a role play. Milo, Milo, tell me how you do that trick. No. Why not? Because you're a dunderhead and you wouldn't be able to understand.

I'm a dunderhead? Yes, you are. Never give up your secrets though, right? Actually, all my family has learned all of it by now, because when I practice for a performance, they pick up my mistakes. Your family can keep a secret? I'm not sure about my sister. Ten miles and an incalculable distance from where Milo lives meet Lulo Stofile, Lulo the Great, as he calls himself.

Lulo the Great. He lives in a one-bedroom home with his father, Sean, mother, Belinda, and little sister, Lolo. Forgot something. He, too, transformed after joining the College of Magic. He's, like, hyperactive. Was he always that way? No, he was too shy, like his sister. This guy was shy? Very, very shy. Was he always that way?

This guy was shy? I don't believe it. But for Belinda and Sean, magic is more than a tool to get Lulo out of his shell. It might also be his path out of poverty. Continue with your magic. Yes. Fly wherever you want to go to. It's your life, it's not my life.

But the only thing that I want from you is to succeed in life. Succeed in life. That's it. One day, I'm going to be a famous magician. One day you're going to be a famous magician. Is that what you want? Yes, and it will happen. But first things first. One day you're going to be a famous magician. Is that what you want? But first things first. Tomorrow is the Children's Magic Festival, and Lulo can barely contain himself. What's the goal tomorrow?

Cards, juggle, dancing. What doesn't Lula the Great do? Lula the Great doesn't do only one thing. Many stuff. A man of many talents. Many talents. There was an abundance of talent on display, and there was an abundance of wide-eyed wonder.

One, two, three, focus, focus! Kids and parents and this correspondent converged on the college. Duma McCorkie was among the showstoppers. Some of them, it's the first time to see this. I bring happiness to the kids. That's why why I feel happy because I'm making them happy. You're not just making them happy you're making them wonder. You're expanding their idea of possibility and imagination. Yeah it's a great feeling. It's a great feeling. But you don't give it up when they say how'd you do it?

It's magic. It's magic. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.