60 Minutes - 10/23/2022: Dominion, American Prairie, Ina Garten

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

On this edition of “60 Minutes,” just days after the 2020 presidential election, lawyers supporting then-President Trump began spreading unsubstantiated claims that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the election. Dominion CEO John Poulos speaks with Anderson Cooper. Bill Whitaker looks at a non-profit called American Prairie that wants a reserve on the American grasslands where bison could roam once again, and that the public can enjoy. However, some local ranchers aren’t convinced the organization is helping. The “Barefoot Contessa,” Ina Garten, sits down with Sharyn Alfonsi about how the pandemic inspired her latest cookbook, and offers advice to home cooks.  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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As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. We have a company that's very suspect. Its name is Dominion. How did false allegations about an American company's voting machines in the last presidential election cause so much havoc? Can you flip votes in the computer system? Can you add votes that did not exist? Absolutely not.

With our system. Tonight, the CEO of Dominion shows 60 Minutes how his voting machines actually work and reveals the threat that his own family and employees live under to this day. People have been put into danger all because of lies. Through a vast stretch of open and for the moment empty grassland, Allison Fox is taking us up a muddy two-track path in search of Buffalo. Fox is the CEO of American Prairie, which has, as just one of many audacious goals, the restoration of bison to a landscape they once ruled.

Oh, there they are. Look at that. Oh, look at the babies. Over the years, I've kind of perfected it, made it easier to cook. Ina Garten, also known as the Barefoot Contessa, is a best-selling author with impressive culinary chops. You can use canned beef stock. She told us she wants to help people relax in their kitchens while following her recipe for a good life. Julia sold French food, right? Martha sold perfection. You're slinging fun. Well, I just think if you're not having fun, what's the point, really?

I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. Getting your kids to school safely is important to you.

It's important to us, too. Toyota, for what matters most. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. It was just days after the 2020 presidential election that lawyers supporting then-President Donald Trump began spreading unsubstantiated claims that an American company,

Dominion Voting Systems, had rigged the election. They said Dominion was backed by Venezuela and that its machines and software switch millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. They never showed any evidence, but that didn't stop pro-Trump attorneys from making baseless claims or conservative news networks from giving them plenty of airtime. Dominion has filed eight lawsuits seeking more than $10 billion in damages against Fox News and other networks, corporations, and individuals. But Dominion CEO John Poulos has remained largely silent until now. We spoke with him about the lawsuits, the lies, and the irreparable damage he says they've caused to his company and his

employees. People have been put into danger. Their families have been put into danger. Their lives have been upended and all because of lies. It was a very clear calculation that they knew there were lies and they were repeating them and endorsing them. It's important to you people admit what they said was wrong. It's important to me. It's important to all the people whose families have been impacted by this. Anderson, my kids still are not allowed to get any package from the front door until we verify that it's actually from a trusted sender.

You're that concerned about somebody sending something to your house? It's not unfounded concern. People have done that? People have done this. People are warning that they will continue to do this. For John Poulos and his company, the trouble began five days after the election when Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo brought up Dominion with attorney Sidney Powell. Sidney, we talked about the Dominion software. I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that. That's to put it mildly. The computer glitches could not

and should not have happened at all. That is where the fraud took place, where they were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist. Sidney Powell was never able to show fraud, but she was repeatedly invited back on Fox networks, as was the president's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who also wove a false narrative about Smartmatic, an election technology company which is now suing Giuliani, Fox News, and others. Smartmatic is a company that was formed by three Venezuelans who were very close to the dictator Chavez of Venezuela. And it was formed in order to fix elections. That's the company that owns

Dominion. Does Smartmatic own Dominion? No. We do have a relationship. We are competitors. Were you associated with the late Hugo Chavez? Absolutely not. Do you use a Venezuelan company's software that's been used to steal election out of the countries? Absolutely not. Anderson, I can cut all of this short. We were founded in Toronto, which is where my family was from, and there was nothing to do with Venezuela. Can you flip votes in the computer system? Can you add votes that did not exist? Absolutely not. President Trump first mentioned Dominion in a tweet November 12th, and recorded this video a few weeks later, which was posted on Facebook.

We have a company that's very suspect. Its name is Dominion. With the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you can press a button for Trump, and the vote goes to Biden. What kind of a system is this? We have to go to paper. Maybe it takes longer. But the only secure system is paper. Why not just have paper ballots?

We do have paper ballots. What the machines do is they count those paper ballots in a way that makes it very easy for people to verify after the fact through the means of audits and recounts. Dominion makes two types of machines. One is called a ballot marker. It's a touchscreen device that a voter can use to mark their choices and then print the ballot. The second machine is a scanner that reads that paper ballot, counts the vote, and immediately stores the ballot securely. A voter takes a paper ballot.

They've made their marks however they make their marks, depending on the jurisdiction. As they deposit it into the ballot box, it goes through a digital scanner and then drops into the ballot box. So how do you hack a paper ballot? With our system... He showed us how it works. This is the scanner that sits atop a locked and sealed ballot box. This is how they cast their ballot.

It goes through a scanner, and now we have an image of the ballot that we just cast, and we have the paper ballot that is used for recounts. John Poulos says it was watching the presidential recounts in Florida in 2000, with those arguments over hanging chads that got him interested in improving how paper ballots were marked and counted. He was an engineer working at a startup in Silicon Valley and began looking at ways to make it easier to recount paper ballots and to help people with disabilities vote without assistance. Our goal was to allow any voter to make their marks on a paper

ballot in a very clear, unambiguous way, regardless of physical ability. John Poulos is Canadian and founded Dominion in 2002. He remains its chief executive, though it was acquired by an American investment group in 2018. Dominion is based in Denver. Do you ever think to yourself, I got into this to help paraplegics and blind people vote more easily and look what's happened? I think about it all the time.

Dominion is one of three companies that make most of the voting systems in America. In the 2020 presidential election, their machines were in 28 states, red states and blue. On election day in a precinct, are your machines hooked up to the internet? No, not by any stretch. We go through a number of certifications, government certifications, and the first one is at a federal level. So those standards mandate that election systems, such as ours, are designed to work in a closed system, air-gapped, no internet. In all the major swing states of 2020, there are paper ballots backing up.

Not only are there paper ballots that make up the official record, those paper ballots have been hand-counted and audited over a thousand times on just the 2020 election. Recounts and audits in the swing states of Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada all confirmed Dominion's results. More than 60 lawsuits around the country challenging the election by Trump or his supporters were ultimately withdrawn or failed. In Georgia, there have been three recounts, two electronic ones and one hand recount. In front of cameras, bipartisan poll watchers, and thousands of local residents across the state of Georgia,

and it once again reaffirmed the results. That should have put an end to all of it, but the lies persisted. And so have incidents of harassment and threats against John Poulos and his employees. Every single person at Dominion is going to end up in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs. You f***ing whores. You cheating f***ing pigs. Yeah, good afternoon, scumbags. We're going to blow your f***ing building up. Piece of f***ing s***. I don't wish to sit here and say that this is something that happened 18 months ago. This is something that continues to happen every single day for us. Last Friday, we had an office on lockdown. Two days prior to that, I was on a phone call with one of our employees,

who's a mother of two, very upset and crying. It's hard to talk about. Had something been said to her personally? A very disgusting death threat in detail. Received? On her personal cell phone. It's completely and utterly surreal. None of these lies have been substantiated to any extent. Every single one of them has been debunked. Chris Krebs was director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, charged with protecting the 2020 election. He called it the most secure election in

American history, and days later it was fired by President Trump. He now has a cyber consulting firm and is a contributor for CBS News. We showed him a press conference held two days after his firing at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee when Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and others continued their attacks on Dominion machines and software. It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden. Do you remember watching that? Yeah, I tweeted about it immediately afterwards. I think I said something along the lines of that

was the most insane, dangerous 45 minutes of TV in American history, effectively. How secure was the 2020 election? Let me put it this way. It was the most litigated. It was the most scrutinized. It was the most audited. This election was put through the ringer from so many different directions. And what I tend to like to say is, you know, don't listen to me. Listen to Bill Barr. Bill Barr said it. He was then the Attorney General of the United States. This is what Bill Barr later said to the January 6th committee. These claims on the Dominion voting machines, and they were idiotic claims. I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations, but they were made in such a sensational way

that they obviously were influencing a lot of people. Dominion began alerting Fox News and other networks of the false allegations they were broadcasting November 12th, four days after Sidney Powell first discussed Dominion with Maria Bartiromo. But Dominion says Fox News never retracted their reporting. You gave them a lot of chances to correct their statements. They still haven't corrected them. To me, that's the most powerful part of the complaint. Lee Levine is a First Amendment attorney who's litigated cases for

40 years on behalf of most media companies, including CBS and Fox. He's retired now, but his old firm is currently representing CNN and Me in a separate matter, filed by attorneys who also represent Dominion in its cases against Fox News and others. Take the Fox case, for example. November 12th seems to me to be the key date in that case because that's the day that Dominion started on a regular basis sending information sheets to every producer on every show at Fox that was having Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani on, saying, here are the true facts, here are links supporting our assertions that these are the true facts.

And then these people continued to invite Giuliani and Powell on their shows. Defamation cases are hard to prove, aren't they? Yes, they are. The plaintiff has to prove what the law calls actual malice. You need to show, basically, that the defendant published or broadcast a deliberate lie, a calculated falsehood. They knew it was a lie when they broadcast it? They knew it was a lie, or they knew it was probably a lie.

How strong is Dominion's case against Fox and the others? I think it is much stronger than most defamation cases that I have seen. I might say it is the strongest. How many defamation cases have you seen? I have litigated myself hundreds. And I'm certainly aware of every significant defamation case in the last 40 years. And this is the strongest one? In my judgment. In a statement to 60 Minutes, Fox said it's confident it will prevail, citing freedom of

the press protections, and stating it was reporting on a newsworthy allegation made by the then president, and aired segments fact-checking the allegations against Dominion. Dominion is suing Fox News and its parent corporation for $1.6 billion each, and in its statement, Fox said that Dominion's financial demand is unsupported. Efforts by Fox News and other defendants to have the lawsuits dismissed have been rejected by the courts. Do you think that you can show not only that they lied, but they knew that they were lying? I don't even think, I think that's the easiest part. You as a company told them specifically, repeatedly. We told them. We told

them in real time. Others told them. Government officials told them. Partisan government officials told them. People inside the Trump administration told them. Local election officials on both sides of the aisle told them. This is not a matter of not knowing the truth. They knew the truth. It's a real privilege to be able to travel and to see different places. Taking yourself out in comfortable positions and challenging yourself. No one builds a legacy by standing still.

Start your journey at remova.com. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

The United States has national parks devoted to canyons and deserts, glaciers and geysers, even underwater coral reefs, 63 national parks in all. But somehow, we skipped the American prairie. The grasslands that once stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rockies played a vital role in the lives of Native Americans, white settlers, and an endless variety of wildlife. They inspired explorers and artists, but apparently not park planners. Nearly 20 years ago, a non-profit organization began trying to fix that, not with a new national park, but rather a huge privately operated nature reserve on the Great Plains, one that would be open to the public,

but also a place where buffalo can roam once again. Through a vast stretch of open, and for the moment empty, grassland, Allison Fox is taking us up a muddy two-track path in search of buffalo. This road is incredible. Fox is the CEO of American Prairie, which has, as just one of many audacious goals, the restoration of bison to a landscape they once ruled.

Oh, there. There. There. Look at that. Wow, there they are. Oh, look at the face. Look at that. Oh. We found part of what American Prairie calls its conservation herd of about 800 buffalo. This group is mainly mothers with new calves, which are a distinctive shade of red. I was trying to do a count of the babies,

but now they've kind of moved the babies into the middle of the group. This land is like this as far as the eye can see. As far as the eye can see. That's not a bad description of the scale of American Prairie's ambition to create the largest nature reserve in the contiguous United States. The non-profit has more than 50 employees, from fundraisers to

buffalo rankers. Allison Fox has worked there for 15 years and has been in charge for the last four. Overall, the goal is to have how many acres in this reserve? Yeah, the overall goal is about 5,000 square miles, 3.2 million acres of intact grasslands. Comparable to the size of the state of Connecticut, and also comparable to Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks combined. That's big. It is big. The big chunk of land is mostly north of the Missouri River in north-central Montana,

one of the most remote parts of the country. It's a patchwork of privately owned cattle ranches and land owned by the government, including a huge existing National Wildlife Refuge named after the famous cowboy painter Charles M. Russell. And that 1.1 million acres serves as the anchor of American Prairie's 3.2 million acre vision. And so you've got these big chunks of federal land and you're buying land in between to try to piece it all together. Exactly. So just about every time a private ranch comes up for sale inside its desired footprint,

American Prairie tries to buy it to add another piece to its puzzle and preserve more grassland. How many ranches have you purchased? We have purchased 34 ranches. To buy all those ranches, American Prairie has raised nearly $200 million for more than 4,000 donors, including Wall Street financiers and technology moguls.

It says it will take hundreds of millions more and decades more to complete the patchwork. So this is a long game. This is a long game, and it's a long game for land acquisition. It's a probably even longer game for the restoration of habitats and species. This area was America's Serengeti, truly America's Serengeti, with tens of thousands of bison, pronghorn, elk, deer, grizzly bears, wolves. Is that the goal or is that a goal to restore that? Yes, to have the ecosystem function fully as it once did. Charles Russell's paintings portray a romanticized version of what the prairie ecosystem used to look like. Teeming herds of buffalo. Native Americans hunting and living

alongside the buffalo. At least until they both were displaced by white settlers and hundreds of thousands of cattle. It's amazing to think of the people that lived here before us. People and other things. So over this direction there's quite a cluster of teepee rings, so the Native Americans used to use this. Come on, Ross. Connie French operates this cattle ranch with her husband, Craig. And they are proud of their collaboration with conservation groups. In fact, they graze some of their cattle on a ranch that's been owned by the Nature Conservancy for more than 20 years. Okay, girl. But when American Prairie's early leaders came in

talking about saving the land, it really rubbed her wrong. So saving it, yes, but not just tromping over people. Is that what it feels like? It does feel like that sometimes, yes. They came in like, we know better. You have said that for their vision to become a reality, you and what you do, that you're gone. I guess I can say, yes, that's how it feels to us, to me.

Along the few roads slicing through the grasslands here, the signs are everywhere. Save the cowboy. Stop American Prairie Reserve. They make it clear that a lot of Connie French's ranching neighbors share her concern. What some ranchers have told us is that when you say you want to save the land,

what they hear is that you want to save the land from them. Yeah, no, we are well aware that that word save hit a nerve, and that was not at all our intention. Many of our ranching neighbors are committed to conservation, so if I could pull back that word save, I absolutely would. American Prairie is now working hard to mend fences with skeptical neighbors. It has a program called Wild Sky, run by a wildlife biologist on its staff, Daniel Kinka. Wild Sky ranchers are the best at what they do in terms of sustainable ranching. Wild Sky will pay a rancher up to $15,000 a year for things like modifying fences to make them easier for wildlife to get over or through

while still keeping cattle contained. It also pays ranchers to install cameras on their property. The rancher gets paid for every animal that crosses the path of this camera? That's correct. You get a coyote, that's $25. A black bear comes behind it, that's $300. Four or five elk come behind it, that's 50 bucks. The biggest payouts are for wolves and grizzly bears, $500 per picture, per camera, per day. Wolves and grizzly bears aren't on this part

of the prairie at the moment. The idea of Wild Sky is that as they and other wildlife do return, payments will help cattle ranchers tolerate them. Make sure you follow up the calves. Lance Johnson, a fourth-generation Montanan who runs a cattle ranch with his wife and two daughters, is one of 15 Wild Sky ranchers. The cameras on his property have captured enough pictures this year to earn him $6,000, the annual maximum

American Prairie will pay for photos of wildlife. These ranches are so hard to make profitable that if you can figure out any way to supplement your income, then that's probably necessary right now. Johnson also leases grass and grazes cattle on a ranch owned by American Prairie. So while some of his neighbors see it as a threat, he says that working with it helps ensure his family's future. You see a place for you and your daughters and your cattle on this land for the foreseeable future. We hope so. We hope for the rest of our lives that we're there. I want to do everything I can to give our girls that opportunity to have ranching in the future. American Prairie says it intends to work alongside cattle ranchers for decades to come, and it does have some natural allies in the neighborhood.

The rancher and the wild space, can those two coexist? Yeah, they can and they are. Happening right now. Mark Asher was born and raised on the Fort Belknap Reservation, which is adjacent to where American Prairie is assembling its reserve. He's a former president of the reservation's tribal council, made up of members of two tribes, the Nakota and the Ani. Is there any recollection of what this land was like before the white settlers came? Like the wildlife. Yes, it was plentiful.

Millions and millions of buffalo and antelope and deer and prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets, elk. The tribes at Fort Belknap began building their bison herd nearly a half century ago, and it's now more than a thousand animals. Mark Asher took us out to see part of the herd, which roams across a huge pasture on the reservation. So they're just scattered out doing what buffalo do, and that's eat the grass and right now enjoy the weather.

The tribes benefit economically from selling some buffalo meat. But you can see in the symbols used during native ceremonies that their value is much greater than money. We know the history of the tribes and the buffalo, and they were one in the same. To come out here and get on the prairie and see a herd of buffalo, you can kind of leave that world for a little bit and reconnect with that lifestyle that my ancestors lived years ago. It might be just a little bit, but it's there. Some ranchers fear that the tribes and American prairie

will let their buffalo roam free as they once did. You use the term free, and I always argued that point because there's a fence somewhere. There has to be a fence somewhere. But as much room as we can give them to roam, then within that context, they'll be free. But not like it was 200 years ago. And we understand that.

Still be a place where you can come and see the buffalo roam. Absolutely. American Prairie encourages people to visit the land it owns. It operates campgrounds and has built huts and yurts that anyone can reserve. It allows hunting on many properties, which helps to build support among Montanans. Across the West, you see more and more no trespassing signs. We've talked a lot about wildlife and wildlife habitat, but certainly providing access for people to appreciate, learn from, recreate on this land is a really important part of what we're doing as well. The debate over American prairie is often framed as an either-or.

Either there are cattle or buffalo. If preservationists win, ranchers lose. What we found across these wide expanses of grass were much more subtle shades of green. You know, when a new group comes in, new folks, new neighbors, it takes some time to learn if it's legit. What I think I hear you saying is they have to earn your trust and so far they have not. No, that trust isn't given lightly. With the size of the state of Montana and the the herds of cattle, hundreds of thousands of animals in this state,

I don't think buffalo will ever compete. And that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying, with American Prairie, take a section of land in the state and return it back as best we can to what it was 200 years ago. It's a huge section of land. Still not bigger than Montana. I think there's room here for both. She's one of the most beloved cooks in the country,

Ina Garten, known as the Barefoot Contessa. Her cookbooks have sold more than 7 million copies, her weekly television show has run for two decades, earned seven Emmys, three James Beard Awards, and millions of devoted fans who tune in as much for the cooking lesson as the cocktail party that typically follows. So we were surprised to see that Ina Garten isn't quite as freewheeling as you might think. As remarkable as her culinary chops may be, Ina Garten isn't quite as freewheeling as you might think. As remarkable as her culinary chops may be, Ina Garten's success hinges on hard work, shrewd business sense, and leaving nothing to chance. This is just a great weeknight meal. It's so easy to do. You do the first stage,

have yourself a glass of wine, do the second stage, and dinner's ready. Whether she's whipping up one of her signature chicken dishes, slinging Cosmos for her real-life friends, or scooping ice cream, Ina Garten is a calming presence in the kitchen, taking the mystery out of cooking. Now, how easy is that? She's built a culinary empire by making it all look effortless. I know people don't believe this, but I'm really a nervous cook, and I'm sure every recipe is going to turn out wrong. So I'm incredibly precise. Even now?

Even now. I'm there with a cookbook going, is it a half a teaspoon or a whole teaspoon? Are you really? I follow my own recipes exactly, because I've spent so much time getting the balance of flavors and textures and everything right. I'm really not a confident cook. I would think that you were like, you know, swigging wine and tossing an herb. Let's keep that image going. So this is my commute to work. Oh, awful for you. At 74,

the image of Ina Garten with her denim shirt, chic scarves, and signature bob is as reliable as the tried-and-true recipes she's built her reputation on. Those recipes are a roadmap for home cooks from a home cook. People like Bobby Flay have worked in restaurant kitchens all his life, and he can just throw things together. I've watched him. He's such a brilliant cook. I'm not that person. I didn't have that experience. When you say you're testing and testing yourself at first, how many times do you have to make something before you get away? Sometimes 10 times, sometimes 25 times. And then I'll print out a page and give it to one of my assistants and watch them make it.

And it so surprises me what people do. I was making lentil salad, warm French lentils, and she was putting in garlic in it. I said, what are you doing? And she said, well, it said cloves, cloves of garlic in it. And I was like, no, it's cloves, not cloves of garlic. And I thought I never would have made that mistake, but somebody else at home is going to make that mistake. So I just want you to feel like I'm right there beside you, just kind of guiding you through the recipe. So this is the secret garden. Don't tell anybody about it. Garden has been guiding viewers from her home in East Hampton, New York, for 20 years.

I love these tomatoes. Do you really do the gardening? Well, I point. So yes. Yes. It may seem like she grew out of the rich Long Island soil. She did not. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ina Rosenberg grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. Her dad was a doctor, her mom a dietician. As a teenager, she was instructed to stay out of the kitchen and excel in school. She did both. She met her future husband, Jeffrey Garden, while she was 16 years old,

and four years later, they were married. Jeffrey, a lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne, later took her backpacking through France. She came home with an ambitious mission. So I got Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and I just worked my way through those books, which were very complicated recipes. I mean, there were ingredients in each recipe that was another recipe in itself. And I loved that challenge. You never went to cooking school. Never went to cooking school. Was Julia Child's book your cooking school? Julia Child was my cooking school. Yeah, exactly. Her actual degree was in economics.

At 26, she had a job at the White House, analyzing nuclear energy policy for the Ford administration. Jeffrey worked around the corner at the State Department. Each weekend, Ina says, they devote their time to less bureaucratic pursuits, like making a great dinner party look simple. To this day, I follow this. I never made something for a dinner party I hadn't made several times. So I would, on Monday, I would make the roast leg of lamb with tomatoes with duxelles, which are minced, finely minced mushrooms, for Jeffrey for dinner. Lucky man. And then I'd make it again on Wednesday. And then by Saturday, I knew how to make it.

And the poor guy would go, oh, this is delicious. What is this? After a thousand dinner parties and two administrations at 30 years old, Ina had burned out of life inside the Beltway. In 1978, she saw this ad in the back of the New York Times for a 400-square-foot specialty food store in West Hampton, New York, called the Barefoot Contessa. But you had never been to the Hamptons. You didn't know anything about running a store. I knew how to make 12 brownies from my friends, but I certainly didn't

know how to make 100 brownies. I didn't even know how to cash out the register or slice smoked salmon. I mean, to me, brie was like a foreign language. So was it confidence that allowed you to do that or was it that you were being naive? I have a very low threshold of boredom. And I was really bored with my job. And I just thought, this is really exciting. This is what I do for fun. And now I can do it professionally. And so I just thought, I'm just going to jump in thinking, well, how hard could

this be? Oh my God. It was really hard. The gardens say they double mortgaged their house. Ina told us she was working 20 hours a day to keep up with the crowds who came to gawk at the goods and load up on lobster salad. Soon, she opened a bigger shop in East Hampton. It's very deliberate. I was always doing research. You know, it looked like I was just having a good time, you know, wandering around having a party. But it was all careful and deliberate. A calculating businesswoman, Ina Garten elevated the food scene and soon had finicky Hampton's clientele falling over themselves

to have the Barefoot Contessa cater their weddings or Thanksgiving. And every year we would pack up the orders Wednesday night so people could come in Thursday morning. And I would use the van out next to the store as a refrigerator. And one year, it was like 33 degrees when I was going home and I thought, nobody wants a frozen Thanksgiving dinner. So I drove the van home and I set my alarm for every single hour all night to turn the heat on for a few minutes and then go back to sleep. To keep the turkeys warm. To keep the turkeys, well the turkeys we roasted in the morning, but like the vegetables and the sides and all that stuff. After 18 years, Garden decided to sell the Barefoot Contessa in 1996.

So, I mean, one minute I'm making a thousand baguettes, and the next minute I have nothing to do. How was that? It was horrible. And I thought, you know, I'm 50. Maybe that's the end of my career. Hardly. The lull lasted nine months before Garten started writing The Barefoot Contessa cookbook, the first of 13 cookbooks, nine of which became New York Times bestsellers, crushing big-name chefs by remembering the lessons learned at her specialty food shop. I realized later what I knew was what people wanted to eat at home, which was roast chicken and roast carrots and chocolate cake and coconut cupcakes and things that I knew from the store people bought and took home.

You weren't trying to say, here's everything I know. You were saying, here's what you need to know. Yeah. and coconut cupcakes and things that I knew from the store people bought and took home. You weren't trying to say, here's everything I know. You were saying, here's what you need to know. Yeah, here's what will make you happy at home. Her latest cookbook, Go-To Dinners, was inspired by the pandemic. And again, Ina is in every detail. One of the things about the book that is not by accident is that you can put it on the counter and it doesn't flop shut. I'm so glad you noticed that.

Early on, Garten sought out a printer in Japan so her cookbooks would lie flat. It wouldn't close while cooking. She designed them to have white space for notes and pictures as guides. Simplicity is a non-negotiable. Do you ever throw something out because it's too difficult to make? Absolutely. If I get to a point in a recipe and I go, I'm never going to make this recipe again, everything goes in the trash.

And if you're exhausted by the time you finish that, it's not good for the party. So you're thinking about the party above all things? I'm always thinking about the party. The party got real big, real fast after Ina was invited to be on Martha Stewart's show. An outtake caught the eye of a Food Network executive. She said that I was making something and I took a spoonful of it and tasted it and go, this is really good. And Martha Stewart Cruz said, cut, you can't talk with your mouth full. And I was like, why? It's a cooking show. Garden told network executives she didn't want a show, but eventually gave in with a caveat.

Instead of an adoring studio audience, she insisted on a more intimate affair in her kitchen. She directed the cameras to come closer, so it felt like a dinner party. One of the things I'm fascinated by is that there are a lot of people who watch your show who don't cook. Don't cook. What do you think the appeal is? Why are they watching you cook? I think there was a time when mom was in the kitchen cooking for us, and I think people feel like they're just hanging out with me and I'm cooking for them.

When you're cooking, it's not about look at me. Oh, it's never about look at me. I'm like, don't look at me. I'm just the opposite. It's not about look at me. Oh, it's never about look at me. I'm like, don't look at me. I'm just the opposite. It's funny. I have a friend who said everybody else is like, look at me, look at me. I'm, you know, pay attention to me. And I'm like, well, this is what I do.

You can do whatever the f*** you want to do. And I'm just having fun here. The fun came to a screeching halt for Ina and everyone else during the pandemic. Unable to film her show or cook for her friends, Garden turned to Instagram, offering practical advice to home cooks. It's really important to keep traditions alive. And stirring up some fun. You never know who's going to stop by. Wait a minute, nobody's stopping by.

Two cups of vodka and more than 3 million views later. Delicious. With the lockdown over, we wanted to make sure Ina didn't have to drink alone. If you do this, Jeffrey arrives. Hi, sweetie. You know Sharon, right? I know Sharon. Hi, Sharon. So we made a red grapefruit Paloma for you.

Wow. How's that? Mr. Garden had a successful career on Wall Street and served as the dean of Yale's business school. But millions of viewers know him simply as Jeffrey. Ina has called you her muse before. What is she to you? Well, she's the center of my life. Oh.

She's actually the font of enormous amount of fun. And she is the center of a home. That's what she is to me. Thank you. That's not bad. The couple's been married for more than 50 years. Is this a typical day at the house? Oh, yeah, we have cocktails all the time.

A couple of times a day. And that's the secret to a happy marriage. Exactly right. Just delicious. Thank you. The next morning, we went looking for carbs. But in the Hamptons, the corner shop doesn't sell donuts. This is Carissa's.

So cute. Isn't it wonderful? Garten took us to her favorite local bakery for a taste of the good life. What is it that you love about this spot? Well, first, I love Carissa's because it's two local women, and the two of them have built this extraordinary place with great quality food. They use local ingredients in almost everything, and they're here every day, and it just feels like what I used to do. It Feels like coming home. Oh, look how fabulous that is. Oh, that is fancy patina. This is just what I would typically have for breakfast.

Exactly. This is all lovely, but the bacon, egg and cheese sandwich is like $20. A lobster rolls $38. But you know, first of all, it's organic, it's local, and things are expensive here. But it's not just a piece of white bread, it's a roll that Carissa made. One of the luxuries of being here is that you can make a really good quality product. Garden's life isn't all French pastries and rose-colored cocktails, but we thought it's pretty dang close. She may still be a nervous cook, but Ina Garden has nailed the recipe for a good life. I don't want to do what I love doing, and Ina Garten has nailed the recipe for a good life.

I don't want to do what I love doing, and I want to do it really well, and then I want to have a life. Julia sold French food, right? Martha sold perfection. You're slinging fun. Well, I just think if you're not having fun, what's the point, really? In the mail this week, as Russia stepped up its drone attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine, viewers commented on Scott Pelley's story last Sunday on the lost souls of Bucha and the attempt to restore names and faces to civilians hastily buried in a mass grave in the Kiev suburb.

Thank you for honoring the dead of Bucha and reaching our hearts and consciences. You'll get some complaints about the graphic nature of your report on Bucha, but it was brilliantly done and important for everyone to see and understand. And there was this from a Canadian viewer. So utterly heartbreaking, shocking, terrifying, and horrifying, producing tears and anger that I've no doubt are the collective reactions of those who watch this. I'm Anderson Cooper. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.