60 Minutes - 08/23/2026: Ghost Train, One Mother's Story, Wild Concerto

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

GHOST TRAIN – Countries around the world have built high-speed rail – why has it failed to catch on in the U.S.? An ambitious state-run project connecting L.A. and San Francisco is vastly behind schedule and has seen costs balloon. One private company is hoping it can succeed where the public sector hasn’t – but that too faces challenges. Correspondent Jon Wertheim reports on the state of high-speed rail in the U.S. – which has become a stand-in for a broader question: can America still build big things? David M. Levine is the producer.ONE MOTHER'S STORY – Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s son Hersh was taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. On his 328th day in captivity, Hersh was executed in a tunnel in Gaza. Now, Rachel Goldberg-Polin is trying to figure out how to live after losing her child. Anderson Cooper interviews Goldberg-Polin about Hersh and her grief, and speaks with Or Levy, a released hostage who was in captivity with Hersh, and credits him with helping to save his life. Katie Brennan is the producer.WILD CONCERTO – Acclaimed drummer of The Police Stewart Copeland and celebrated British naturalist Martyn Stewart have created Wild Concerto, a pioneering album that mixes authentic animal sounds with original music. It’s based on Stewart’s unparalleled audio archive of the world’s wild inhabitants. Correspondent Bill Whitaker joins the pair at the iconic Abbey Road Studios as Copeland and Stewart give Mother Nature’s orchestra the star treatment. Heather Abbott is the producer.

California's got on board for a $33 billion high-speed train that was supposed to connect L.A. to San Francisco by 2020. Instead, they have this, an unfinished line connecting, wait for it, Bakersfield and Merced. Why have 20 other countries managed to build high-speed rail while America hasn't? We've heard people saying what happened in the past is the past, failure is not an option. Failure is always an option. It's mama. Tonight, the story of a mother who would not give up on her son after he was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

I was always saying, I love you, stay strong, survive, I love you, stay strong, survive, I love you, stay strong, survive. Was it a command to you as well? Yes. If you're a rock fan, you already know Stuart Copeland, acclaimed drummer for the police. What you may not know is who, or what he's making music with now.

As Sukukabara, hundreds of animals turned into something wild. You put an instrument with them, and those animals become Pavarotti. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm John Worthy. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Leslie Stahl. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. It's hard to exaggerate the role of the train in the American story, or the Roman.

of train travel, those iron horses galloping down rods of steel. Why then has high-speed rail, so common in other countries, not tracked in the U.S.? As we first reported in April, an ambitious state-run project connecting L.A. and San Francisco has lurched, derailed, cost billions, and may never happen. One private company is betting that it could succeed where the public sector is not, but that too has had its bumps. As U.S. high-speed rail remains a mirage, a ghost train, it's become a stand-in for a broader question. Can America get its act together and still build big things? The very model of modern engineering,

it homes across the fruited plains at a top speed of 200 miles an hour. It's revolutionized travel. It's a source of national pride. In Morocco. Here in the U.S., high-speed rail looks like this, hardly passenger-ready. America's hopes for its first high-speed rail were kindled in 2008 when California voters approved a ballot measure for a train

connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours. The estimated price tag, $33 billion. Completion date 2020. It would cut pollution, revitalize local economies, clear gridlock. Status update. Today, the state's high-speed rail authority is preparing to lay its first tracks at roughly the same cost. Only, slight

course correction here, instead of L.A. to San Francisco, it will run one-third of that distance connecting, wait for it, the metropolis of Bakersfield and Merced, population 99,000. Oh, and when will it open?

2033. Maybe. I think that the California high-speed rail nightmare is the quintessential example of government waste and mismanagement. You say this needs to stop. He's a stop. Congressman Vince Fong, a Republican from Bakersfield, sits on the House Transportation Committee. He says that when California voters first approved high-speed rail,

the promise and price tag were more marketing campaign than realistic projection. We're now in 2026. There are no trains. There's no track laid. It's a complete bait-and-switch. If I vote for a mansion in Malibu by next year and someone says, actually, you know what, in five years we're going to have a doghouse in Modesto. How do things go so off the rails?

The business plan that was put out in 2008 was very theoretical. You know, this is what we think is going to happen. And it became very clear that they didn't have the specifics worked out. This project... On that point, management doesn't disagree. Tokes on a shock in is California's Secretary of Transportation and Anthony Williams or Rail Authority board member. Both are relatively new to the job left to answer for their predecessors.

There were mistakes made. Some of the criticism on this project, I think are very fair. What happened? I don't think the voters fully understood, and neither did we in the public sector, what it was going to take to actually get this project delivered. To get the necessary political buy-in from the whole state,

the plan called for the train to run inland, threading the farmland of the Central Valley. Yet the rail authority hadn't answered basic questions, like precisely where it could lay down its tracks, what's known as right-of-way. 3,000 parcels had to be negotiated just for the segments that we're working on today in the Central Valley. It seems to be one farmer doesn't want high-speed rail going through his field, and you've got a guy that can gum up the works for a long time.

Yeah, that's what happens sometimes in these processes. More snarl, California's exacting environmental regulations, which triggered all manner of reviews, lawsuits, and delays. As anyone who's renovated a home knows, delay adds to price. So do the high U.S. labor and construction costs, at least compared to many other countries. And while the federal government contributed modestly under the Obama and Biden administrations, the burden fell largely on the state. When construction started, was the financing there to complete this rail?

It wasn't. Let's be real. We had a lot to learn, and we had a lot of growth to do. And, you know, it's arguable whether, you know, we should have been clearer about that. By 2019, cost ballooning in the timeline years off schedule, bipartisan political pressure mounted. Newly elected, Governor Gavin Newsom said this in his first state of the state. Right now, there simply isn't a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A.

Under Newsom, who didn't respond to repeated interview requests, California decided to focus on that initial Central Valley segment, around few cliques. clamored for and fewer are likely to ride, though the ultimate goal remains connecting northern and southern California. When you have a project like this and when the budget no longer permits you to finish it the way you wanted to, you start cutting off your arms and legs. Lou Thompson helped found Amtrak in the 1970s and until 2024 sat on California's high-speed rail peer review group.

We've heard people say time to cut bait. We've heard people saying what happened in the past is the past, failure is not an option. Failure is always an option. Is that what's going to happen here? No, I don't think so. But I think what will happen in the short range is that they will cut back and do the best they can with the money they have available. Here outside Fresno in California's Central Valley, one of the few signs of concrete progress, literally, structures like this. Locals here jokingly refer to it as their own stokes.

Stonehenge. Ideally, these bridges and viaducts will one day be used to support California high-speed rail. But for now, these are curiosities in a field, monuments to promises that haven't been met and plants that haven't been executed. Ironic, because American rail was once the world's envy. In the 1800s, the U.S. government oversaw the birth of the Transcontinental Railroad, stitching the country together as it expanded westward. We turn to the future. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration decided that the transportation vanguard was off the tracks,

creating and critically continuously funding the interstate highway system. And the family car is in tip-top shape. Fueling the world's proudest car culture. Meanwhile, Japan's famous bullet train opened in 1964, and today more than 20 countries have high-speed rail, generally defined as cruising at 150 miles an hour or more. Yes, Germany and France and China, but also Turkey, Indonesia. Egypt has broken ground.

The obvious question there is, like, how can it be that we can't get it done and they can get it done, right? We know we can do this. It's an economic engine. Mike Reininger is managing director of Brightline West, a private company that believes it can achieve what California has it. Oh, wow. Next stop, Zurich. It's just like a European train? This train, which opened in 2018 and runs between Miami and Orlando, hits top speeds of around 125 miles an hour.

Not quite high speed, but close. It's akin to a beta test for Brightline's next project, a bullet train connecting L.A. and Las Vegas in just over two hours, a trip that can take five hours by car. Brightline West will be true high-speed rail first time in the country, and we'll operate at speeds of about 200 miles an hour maximum. Out west, Brightline is solving the right-of-way issue by running on the median of the I-15 highway. Construction has already begun on some of the station structures. The plan is to start service in 29.

What are you telling people to get them out of their cars or getting them avoid the airport? It's more enjoyable. It's safer. It's reliable. This really is all about changing people's behavior. You don't think we're just, this car culture is intractable. It's so hardened and it's It's so much a part of the American psyche. It just can't be cracked. I don't think so at all. Cultural questions aside, Brightline's Florida trains run at street level through crowded neighborhoods.

And according to numbers compiled by the Miami Herald and local public radio, more than 200 people have been hit and killed by the trains in the near decades since operations began. Brightline says that running rail in the desert out west, where track crossings won't be at street level, will be a safer proposition. Then there are the finances. The stratospheric costs of building and running a rail line vastly outstripped revenues. Analysts have downgraded Brightline's debt to junk, raising questions about private rail as a business. To what extent big picture do you worry about the future financial viability of Brightline?

The business has built slower than we originally expected it to build. We thought we would be carrying more passengers today than we are. The business is, in fact, growing month over month, year over year. That's a great thing. That solidifies in our mind the viability of the business. Brightline's West Coast project has already received some federal funding and is hoping for a $6 billion loan from the Trump administration. If you look around the world, for the most part, the infrastructure systems are funded by the public sector.

You do see a role for government here. Absolutely. We welcome it. Back in California, the Rail Authority insists state funds can cover the cost of the Central Valley leg. As for the rest, just to be clear, as we speak right now, are the funds there to complete L.A. to San Francisco? The entire amount of money we need, not there today, but do we believe we can get those funds to get the project done? Absolutely. How much do you estimate it's going to cost to connect high-speed rail, San Francisco, and L.A.? Today, we estimate with the right optimization, just over $125 billion. I think $126 billion is the current estimate for that.

That's more funding than Amtrak has received in its history, and still leaves a shortfall of roughly $90 billion. That's a big gap to fill. It is a big gap to fill, but, again, we have an understanding of how to get there and to fill that gap. A gap the authority hopes to fill, with a new plan to cut costs, lure private investment, and connect to bigger cities much sooner. But there's another challenge to building anything today, the swirling winds of a political climate in which one party pushes and the other reflexively polls.

Remember Gavin Newsom's pessimism? In recent months, he's championed the project. This is not just a transportation project. This is about reimagining the future of this region. Meanwhile, in 2025, President Trump canceled $4 billion in federal grants for the train, swiping at a political nemesis in the process. Did you ever hear of Gavin Newscombe? He has got that train is the worst cost overrun I've ever seen. In a statement to 60 minutes, Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy said the administration

is in favor of high-speed rail, but this project has, quote, wasted billions in taxpayer dollars yet delivered nothing. Can this be done without help from the federal government? This initial segment, we believe so. The ultimate 494 miles of building this out without the federal government's help will be challenging. There's no doubt about that. Is this a non-starter to build a project like this without federal funding? Well, not only can't it be done, it shouldn't be done. Because a lot of the benefits of the project, the reason why you build a project is public.

Pollution reduction, congestion reduction, improve safety. comfort, reliability. All of those things are public benefits. There are other ideas for U.S. high-speed rail, say Dallas to Houston, but nothing else in the building stage, leaving that uneasy overarching question. Morocco has high-speed rail. And Serbia and China, and Japan and Western Europe, why don't we? What's your simple answer? Well, the simple answer is they've decided they want to do it and pay for it, and we haven't. You think we will in our lifetimes? I don't know. I'm dubious. I'm dubious. Absent a national political will to work with the states to create some of these systems, I think it's going to be in, of course, my lifetime almost certainly not, but maybe yours, I don't know. On Reddit, true crime doesn't come from journalists. It comes from the victims, the witnesses, and sometimes the suspects themselves.

Every Tuesday on Crimes of Reddit, we read these posts out loud. I'm Sabrina DeAnna Roga. and I'm Alexis Linkletter. One of us brings the story, the other goes in blind, reacting in real time just like you. New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen to and follow Crimes of Reddit, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Since Hamas launched a terror attack on Israel nearly three years ago in the war in Gaza began, far too many mothers, Palestinian and Israeli, have lost children. This is one mother's story. Her name is Rachel Goldberg, Poland. She's an American Israeli who moved to Jerusalem 18 years ago with her husband John and their three children. Her only son, Hirsch, was badly wounded and taken hostage by Hamas on October 7th. Rachel and John worked tirelessly to bring Hirsch and the other hostages home.

But on the 328th day of his captivity, Hirsch was executed in a tunnel in Gaza. When we met her earlier this year, Rachel Goldberg-Pollin told us that now, like so many others, She's trying to figure out how to live after her child has died. To know that your child is being tortured, tormented, starved, abused is maimed. And that's an excruciating form of suffering. And then what's so fascinating to me is that when they came to tell us that Hirsch had been executed, then I realized that those. Those 330 days had been the good part because he was alive.

And now I'm in this place and this is the rest of my life. How do I walk through this place without a piece of me here? Have you figured that out yet? I'm trying to re-understand what it means to be in this world. There are millions of us right now. who have buried children. There's nothing unique about me, but it creates light for me

to try to give words to the pain. What was Hirsch like? Easy. Easy. The universe really knew what it was doing when it said, Rachel's going to have one son, so this is the one for her.

I was really blessed. Hirsch and his best friend, Aner Shapira, were at the Nova Music Festival near the Gaza border. On the morning of October 7th, when Hamas terrorists attacked. They slaughtered 378 people and wounded hundreds more. What do you remember about the morning, October 7? The siren started, and I went and turned on my phone. And at 8.11, two messages had come in from Hirsch. The first one said, I love you, and the second one said, I'm sorry.

And that was it. Everything that had ever happened in my life from the day I was born until that second was over. Hirsch sent those texts from inside this bomb shelter crammed with more than two dozen people. That's Hirsch against the wall and on air near the entrance. Hamas came to the doorway and was throwing in hand grenades. Anir was picking them up and throwing them. out, picking them up and throwing them out. According to survivors, Anair threw back at least 10 grenades.

When he was killed, others took his place. In all, 16 people were killed in the shelter. Hurst survived, but was seriously wounded by a grenade. There were four young men who were not able to hide under bodies. They were all wounded, and they were taken outside, and put on a pickup truck and driven into Gaza. And that footage we saw for the first time when we talked with you. We spoke on October 16th, Van Siena and you and John.

Our son, by all accounts, of the witnesses, had his left arm blown off. When John said that, I realized I'd seen their son being kidnapped. Four days earlier at the Nova Festival site, Israeli soldiers showed me this gruesome video recovered from a terrorist cell. phone. That's Hirsch, with the bones sticking out of his left forearm being forced into a pickup truck. As soon as we got off, I said, I need to call you. But I still, to this day, I'm sorry that that is how you found out that I was the one to tell you that there's this video.

But we were so thankful, and it made us know that he was taken alive, that he walked on his own two feet, and he was. feet and we also were really grateful that you did it in such a human way. In this sideways world, when we had the proof that he was kidnapped, that was actually good. The time is running out to save them. The time is running out to save all of us. Rachel became for many the face of the hostage crisis, meeting the Pope, world leaders, and giving hundreds of interviews. We want to save Hershey's life. We want to save all of those hostages. Every day she wore a piece of tape. On it, she'd written the number of days since Hirsch and the other 250 hostages were taken. I was always saying, I love you, stay strong, survive. I love you, stay strong, survive. I love you, stay strong, survive. I love you, stay strong, survive.

Was it a command to you as well? Yes, because there were times when I would just get seized with emotional and psychological and physical pain. And I would keel over onto John. And I would just say, how much longer? How much longer? How much longer? How much longer? On the 2001st day, Hamas posted this video of Hirsch.

And we see the stump of his arm. It was a propaganda video. Yes. And that gave us another bolt of adrenaline. Keep going. this child needs you. It's mama. On the 328th day,

Rachel and John joined other hostage families, screaming their loved ones' names into a microphone towards Gaza. Rachel didn't know it then, but that was the day her son was murdered by Hamas. We ended up finding out it killed him that day. And so I wonder,

did he hear me? Do you think he did? I think there are other ways that you can hear your parents screaming for you, even if you don't hear them. It was in this underground tunnel in Rafa on August 31, 2024, Israeli soldiers found Hirsch's body. He and five other hostages had been executed. Hirsch was shot six times at close range. When his body was brought back to Israel, thousands lined the streets and attended his funeral. Finally, my sweet boy, finally, finally, finally, finally you're free.

Rachel and John continued to advocate for the remaining hostages, but they were desperate for details about the last year of their son's life. Then in February 2025, something remarkable happened. A hostage named Orr Levy was released by Hamas along with two others. When Orr was reunited with his family and three, year old son, he learned his wife, Aenev, was killed on October 7th. He was also told Hirsch had been murdered. It broke me, and I told my parents right away, I want to meet their parents. It turned out, Orr had spent three days with Hirsch in a tunnel, and he says

something Hirsch told him saved his life. Seeing this guy without a hand, and you know what he did, He laughed about it. About his hand? Yeah. He laughed about everything, and he smiled the entire time. He wasn't broken. No, he wasn't. Hirsch kept repeating this mantra.

He who as a why can bear anyhow. He who has a why can bear any how is a mantra Hirsch got from this book, Man's Search for Meaning, a 1946 concentration camp memoir by a survivor, Victor Frankel, who adapted a similar saying by Friedrich Nietzsche. It became our mantra. Everybody there. Everybody there.

That idea that if you have a why, you can survive. You can do anything. Soon after he was freed or got Hershey's mantra tattooed on his arm. My son, he asked me, what does he say? He doesn't speak English, and I just left and I said, your name. Your name. Because that's your why. This is my one.

The only reason why I survived was him. What was Hershey's why? What was Hirsch's why? I asked Or that, and he said, he went like this. You. It was this shocking, life-affirming CPR from beyond to have Hirsch through Or telling us, what's your why going to be? Because you can bear this, even this, even losing me, you could do it.

And so part of what I'm trying so hard to do now is to figure out what is my why. is my why. Rachel was told something else by Oar that gave her tremendous comfort. He said, it's important that you know that he told me that my mother spoke to the Secretary of State in the U.S. Hershey told him that. Yeah, and I said, he heard on the news I had spoken to the Secretary of State, and he said, no, he heard you on the news.

And it was like all of the sudden, thank you. God. First of all, that he heard my voice and that he knew. We are nobody's. We are absolute nobody's. I even say the equivalent of John Doe in the Jewish world is Rachel Goldberg. But we tried so. And he knew. When we met Rachel in Jerusalem in February, days before the new war with Iran, she'd recently finished writing a book called When We See You Again, which came out in April. You wrote in the book, people want hope, resilience, recovery, strength, survival, healing. They want thriving and rising from the ashes like the phoenix from the days of yore. The pain is chronic, ever-present, constant, gnawing, circular, not linear.

That's how it feels. That's how it feels. Now I'm open to it feeling different. Have you noticed a change? I think my understanding of grief has changed. changed. I was dreading and uncomfortable with grief. And recently I had this whole different thought of maybe grief is actually just this precious badge of love that you wear because someone has died and your love is continuing to grow. When the body of the last hostage was returned this past January, it had been 840. three days since the October 7th attack. Rachel and John finally took down the pieces of tape their family had worn and stuck on a wall

in their apartment. That's the day we buried Hirsch. So many lives, so many innocent lives on both sides, lost. Rachel has kept Hirsch's room as he left it. And that's the tape that we took down. Oh, my gosh. It's extraordinary to see. all the pain and everything that is in that ball.

You know, it's like these symbols of failure. What we were fighting for did happen. We got all of these people home. Not as we wanted. We wanted them home alive, but they had come home. You said these are all symbols of failure. Do you think you fail? Yeah.

You did more than anybody could possibly do. It's true. And sometimes 100% is not enough. If you're a rock and roll fan, you already know Stuart Copeland. Drumming legend Copeland, Andy Summers, and a guy named Sting

romped to global stardom as the police in the 1970s. So we were intrigued to learn that Copeland had teamed up with celebrated naturalist, Martin Stewart, for a pioneering album, sharing the limelight, not with Sting, but with hyenas, owls, and howler monkey.

It's called Wild Concerto. As we first reported in April, the album is based on Martin Stewart's life work, an extraordinary collection of audio recordings of the world's living creatures. Some are now extinct or endangered, making Wild Concerto as much a manifesto as a music album. We had to hear more. There's really only one way to start the day at the world's most famous recording story. studio. Martin, in the flesh at last.

So great to see you. We've been so deep into our mission. Martin Stewart, Stuart Copeland. This unlikely pair, the quiet naturalist and the intrepid rock star. I hope you have fun with this music. We're here at Abbey Road to turn animal sounds into a concerto, here in the same studio the Fab Four made famous. No pressure. Unbelievable, the history in here is just...

Imagine McCartney running up and down those stairs. This almost makes us beetles. But today it's the animal kingdom that gets its shot at start-up. It's superstar time for the wrens, bears, frogs, and hundreds more. That's the cuckaburra. While the humans play back up. That's the wanga pigeon. A younger pigeon.

Even better, we're good. Brilliant. Let's move on. Wild Concerto is a groundbreaking album based on the unmatched audio archive of Martin Stewart. He's crisscrossed the planet for decades, collecting nearly 100,000 recordings of its wild inhabitants. Stuart Copeland wrote the music. When you send me your original raw samples. All he had to do was weighed through 30,000 hours of field recordings

to choose which animals would get the star treatment. The screaming pia was unnatural. There is the bird in question. Here is the orchestral version of that bird. It's just brilliant. Copeland told us it was the raw sounds of the animals themselves that dictated what instruments he chose. Take this tune by some Arctic wolves.

First of all, we have the wolves. on their own. Beautiful, right? Still makes my hair stand on end. Okay, let's hear that with the orchestra. It's a trombone with the walls. They're not actual notes, but you put an instrument with them and those animals become pavarotti. In the recording studio, the wolves howled into the musicians' headsets. Yep, we got it. I'm going to come out there, kiss and hug every single one of you. So puck her up, babies. Thank you so much, everybody. You rock!

Copeland should know. You may remember his rock star days when he wielded drumsticks as if they were lethal weapons. As one third of the police, Copeland banged his way to the upper reaches of pop stardom. The police sold more than 75 million records.

Singing along yet, By 1986, the party was over. The police were busted. But it didn't take long before Copeland's propulsive drumming landed him a new gig and put him on a glide path to becoming a composer. How did that happen? I blame Francis Coppola. It's his fault.

You blame him. Yes. His thing is to find the talent and give him rope. and he got a drummer from a rock band and hired me to score his movie because his concept was all about rhythm. This is Rumblefish? This is Rumblefish.

Copeland told us he knew nothing about film scores, but he knew rhythm. So he arranged barking dogs, clacking billiard balls, and pile drivers in rhythmic loops, making music for what he called found sound. For horror films, this here is very useful. More movies followed.

Then, he started writing classical music. This here, it's an opera that I did with a Deutsch National Theater in Germany. Copeland told us he'd found a new love. Because the main thing you want to do as a composer is create parts that are fun to play. As he showed us around his Los Angeles studio stuffed with instruments. He says he noodles around on the mall. when he's composing. The drummer, who had never followed a sheet of music, had become a maestro.

You loved the drums right from the start. The power. What is it about the orchestra you love so much? It's the beauty. You know, my daddy raised me to be a jazz musician. Meanwhile, just quietly, my mother was playing Stravinsky, Ravel, WC. And that hit me emotionally. Now I've got,

I've got like in one ear I got Jimmy Hendrix and the other here I've got Igor Stravinsky. And so they've always both kind of been there interacting in my brain. We will hear these sounds in Wild Concerto. Yeah, as well as all these. And these. A world away, different music was pouring into the ears of Martin Stewart. He's been eavesdropping on nature now for more than 60 years. It started when he was 11, armed with a tape record.

he'd escaped to the Bluebell Woods near his home in Middle England. His first recordings, this Eurasian Blackbird, what started as a boyhood lark, became a career with a mission. I always believe the reason I'm on this planet is to fight for the animals and the environment. And it's kind of my rent for being here. I feel empowered to kind of give that message. And what is that message? we're losing some of the most precious species on Earth.

I can go back to places that have been monitored over a period of 20 years and the change is significant. And audio's done that. Audio is the barometer of the planet. If you want to know the health of the stream or the river, the dipper will tell you, the frog will tell you the health of the marsh, and the birds will tell you the health of the planet. At home in Florida, Stuart told us,

He still takes his microphone out every day, like a doctor with a stethoscope. Watch this spiders, Bill. He listens to the rhythms of the natural world. I hear that white noise of the ocean. The cicada. These days, he's deeply worried about a catastrophic decline in wildlife populations around the world. Stewart has the last known recording of the golden Panamanian frog. here in its digital form.

The northern white rhino is also extinct in the wild. Other recordings give no hint of the danger he overcame to get them. Here's a howler monkey spoiling for a fight. And the crocodile that swallowed one of his microphones. We have the hyenas here. Stuart Copeland told us his favorite animal was the hyena. A rare recording from the skeleton coast in Namibia. Well, they have a very wide vocabulary.

They make loving sounds, they make aggressive sounds. How does the loving sounds sound like? Mm-hmm. That's interesting. In fact, I'll share with you that my wife and I have adopted the hyena love sounds as a part of our relationship. A little kinky but works. And then they have the laughing hyena.

They actually do. No surprise, the hyenas got their own cut on wild concerto. How did you come up with a composition that enhanced the sound of the hyenas? I have asked the Lord above that question many times. And what did he say? He said, I don't know, just see if you can make a living out of it. Just be you. This is just magic. It's magical.

Martin Stewart told us working at Abbey Road was a revelation. He's used to being alone in wild spaces at the ends of the earth. So we wondered what had made Stewart share his life work with a rock star. What made you decide to do that? I'm living with cancer. It's hard to talk about that stuff, Bill. But I got ill. and my niece Amanda, who works at the BBC,

and she said, we have to preserve your archive. You need people to see what you have. Stuart told us his illness is not the only crisis he's dealing with. He fears more animals are facing extinction as the world keeps growing. Part of his audio archive has become a mausoleum to past lives. If we keep stealing from nature, then the inevitable is going to happen. We're going to lose a lot more.

What is the inevitable? Mass extinction. When you think about what we've lost in my lifetime, there's no change. It's not slowing down. And I don't know how to slow it down. But if you show people the beauty of something and get them to fall in love with that, maybe we can tip something. He says he hopes Wild Concerto will draw in those who wouldn't otherwise listen to a screaming Pia or a go-away bird. Count Copeland among the converted.

Okay, what's the Walla Walla, Walla, Walla. Here we go. What's that? Walla, Walla, Walla. Which is the marbled frog mouth. Marvelled frog mouth. I remember that. Copeland told us he hopes Wild Concerto will immortalize those animal songs.

A human tribute, a heartfelt elegy to Mother Nature's orchestra. Take a tour through Stuart Copeland's studio. Sting gave me this little guitar here. At 60 Minutes Overtime.com. Now streaming on Paramount Plus. Everyone be ready. Boldly go, one step closer to where it all began. What we are about to do cannot be taken back.

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