60 Minutes - 10/30/2022: Belief in the Ballot, Pathogen X, David Sedaris

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

On this edition of “60 Minutes,” no state has been more deeply divided by former President Trump’s election-denying claims than Arizona. Scott Pelley travels to the state and speaks with top Republican state officials about what the party’s divide could mean for 2022 and beyond. Since 2009, American scientists have discovered more than 900 new viruses. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. is sending scientists to disease hotspots. Bill Whitaker joins them in Uganda. It’s difficult to achieve literary stardom in the modern era, but David Sedaris has managed to do it. Sedaris speaks with Jon Wertheim about his process and, tomorrow. 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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I don't know off the top of my head. It's four. Okay. Whether it's four or 4,000, it doesn't matter. It wasn't the presidential election. It was a primary. It doesn't matter. It's a defect okay? Whether it's four or 4,000, it doesn't matter. It wasn't the presidential election, it was a primary. It doesn't matter. It's a defect in the system. Donald Trump won. And I will fight for Trump's America First agenda. Let's go get him!

Tonight, the story of MAGA election deniers running for office and their relationship with the facts. What's inside Africa's impenetrable forest? We found rugged terrain, mountain gorillas, and caves full of bats, all of which contain clues for this team of virus hunters searching for the next deadly pathogen capable of starting the next pandemic. It seems like a really daunting task for you to find pathogen X before it finds us. It's definitely achievable. I'm an idiot, basically. The best stories happen to those who can tell them.

All writers are thieves. Meet David Sedaris, a masterful writer who makes sharing personal, reliably funny, often uncomfortable stories look easy. I'm in show business, and I love the show business life. I really do. It's the laziest form of show business there is, But, yeah, I think of it as show business. I do. 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. It's the vote that holds America together. Belief that with a ballot, voices are heard, disputes are addressed, and there's always another chance. Countries without this belief tend to be in bondage or at war. Election Day is coming, but across America, belief is under attack.

Politicians who say the 2020 election was stolen are running for governor in 19 states, attorney general in 10, and in 12 states, election deniers are running for secretary of state, which would give them power over elections. After two years of investigations and audits, no fraud or error has been found in any state that would change the 2020 outcome. But in 2022, spreading doubt has been key to an endorsement from Donald Trump. No state has been more deeply riven by this than Arizona, where a split in the GOP has Republicans on opposite sides of a Grand Canyon. On one side of the Arizona chasm stands Rusty Bowers,

a lifelong Republican and artist who became Arizona's Speaker of the House. Bowers told us he was disappointed when Joe Biden won. So when President Trump and Rudy Giuliani called after the election, he was listening. First, Rudy started, he said, well, there's been a lot of fraud all across the country and in Arizona, and then he listed off large numbers in categories that would be illegal, dead people, stolen ballots. Bowers says Giuliani wanted him to hold a vote to revoke Biden's electors. And I said, but Rudy, I want the proof. You're going to give me the proof? And he said, yes. So Giuliani and co-counsel Jenna Ellis flew out to meet Bowers.

You left the meeting with Rudy Giuliani thinking what? I wasn't happy. I said, okay, time out. Mr. Giuliani, you said you were going to bring me some proof, names, et cetera, of all of these people. Did you bring me some proof, names, et cetera, of all of these people. Did you bring me the proof? He looked at Jenna Ellis and he said, do we have the proof? And she said, yes, we do. Do you have it with you? No, no. Where is it? Well, it might be back at the hotel room. And I said, I asked you for the proof. You said you'd bring it. You're not bringing it. You're asking me to break my oath and make up something to pull electors and replace electors, which has never been done in the history of the United States. And I'm going to try that on my state.

Without Bowers, Giuliani found an ally willing to call the vote criminal, Arizona State Representative Mark Fincham. It's exceedingly hard for me to place a label on what we've heard other than racketeering. Good old-fashioned mobster racketeering. Four weeks after Mr. Trump's defeat, Finensham held an unofficial hearing featuring Giuliani. A conspiracy that was hatched by the crooked leaders of the Democratic Party. A day of allegations without credible evidence ended with this. When Satan wants to extinguish a light, he will stop at nothing.

So be on your guard, put on the full armor of God, and be prepared to fight. Mark Fincham fought, and now the 65-year-old former police officer is the Republican nominee for Arizona Secretary of State, which would give him authority over elections. Ladies and gentlemen, we know it, and they know it. Donald Trump won. But Mark Brnovich does not know it. He's Arizona's Republican attorney general who's investigated for two years and has a word for claims of fraud. Horse s***. And that's what it is. Most of it's horse s***. And I've been trying to scrape it off my shoes for the last year.

Brnovich supported Trump, who called him with advice. He goes, all you got to do is say the election's fraudulent and you will be a superstar. You'll be the most popular guy in America. And I told him, I said, Mr. President, I didn't become attorney general to be a star. I brought my star with me. And I don't need anybody, whether it's a former president or any other person, validating what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. What he's doing is bringing indictments in every 2020 vote fraud case that he can back with evidence. Altogether, to date, from the general election, Arizona has indicted 12 defendants in cases

involving a total of 12 ballots. 12 statewide. Biden won Arizona by 10,000. There is no one in this country that wanted to find evidence of fraud more than I did. But I thought it was important to systematically go through and say, no, this is the facts. This is the evidence. Everyone's entitled to their own opinions. But when you're an actual prosecutor, when you're the actual government, there's a higher obligation. You can't afford to be sloppy. In addition to Brnovich's investigations, in 2021, the Republican-led state Senate audited Phoenix's Maricopa County, home to 60 percent of the state vote. The audit was done by a company that had never audited an election. The audit's hand recount confirmed Joe Biden won, but its report

also raised questions about discrepancies it found. Those questions were answered online in detail by Maricopa County. Still, widespread fraud is Mark Fincham's charge. When you steal something, that's not really a win. That's a fraud. That was in Washington the day before the attack on the Capitol, which Fincham describes this way. This entire J6 crap was manufactured to create a narrative that there was an assault on the Capitol. This fits into the Marxist ideology of how do you go to one party rule. Today, Fincham is running neck and neck with his Democratic opponent,

Adrian Fontes, who helped lead the 2020 election in Maricopa County. We are far too divided away from each other based on lies and conspiracies, and we as election administrators across Arizona have to do a better job showing folks that the system is quite good. I'd like to see a world where it's easy to vote but hard to cheat. We asked Fincham for credible proof of fraud. He raised not evidence, but those questions from the state Senate audit. Next, Fincham told us about a mysterious post-election email, which he featured in a rally. We had a whistleblower who sent an email not just to the DOJ, but to every single legislator saying, In the email, Fincham speaks of a Brian Watson said Democrats added bogus votes electronically in Pima County. The writer had no evidence, asked not to be contacted, and closed his email account.

Why would you give this any credence? Again, it's an open question. I want to know, was there a possibility that this happened? Now, we've now proven that it happened, Scott. How so? We've got two precincts that show over 100% of the people registered to vote in that precinct voted. That is an undeniable fact. But it is deniable by Pima County, which says no precinct had more votes than voters. Another of Fincham's frequent points concerns a pair of indictments.

We have, for example, in Yuma County, ballot harvesting and votes. I mean, we've got people who were indicted for the very thing that we're talking about right now, who pled guilty. And frankly, those votes altered the outcome of Yuma County. Yuma County, we've actually had indictments and people that have pled guilty to ballot trafficking. How many ballots were involved? I don't know off the top of my head. It's four. Okay. Whether it's four or 4,000, it doesn't matter.

It wasn't the presidential election. It was a primary. It doesn't matter. It's a defect in the system. A minuscule defect. Two women in Yuma County pleaded guilty to collecting four ballots and dropping them in a ballot box. It's against state law to deposit a ballot that isn't yours or your family's. It's four ballots in a primary. In that instance. In that instance. You have a

bigger one? Well, we've got information that's been turned over to the Attorney General's office, and you say that there was nothing there. Okay. Then I'm going to have to live with that. But do I know for a fact that there were other ballot trafficking operations around the country, and some in Arizona? Yeah, I do. Name one.

Yuma County, 25,000 ballots. What happened? Same fingerprints on those ballots for five individuals. So where'd that go? Where's that evidence? I know it's been turned over to the Attorney General's office. I know that the FBI field office actually did the prints. That's false, according to the FBI.

Yuma County told us that no one in law enforcement fingerprinted 25,000 ballots. Fincham often says that evidence is with Attorney General Brnovich, implying that something big is coming. In fact, he has a mountain of evidence that's sitting in his office. But Brnovich told us his investigation is essentially over. We as prosecutors deal in facts and evidence. And I'm not like the clowns that throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks. Clowns?

Clowns. Did I say that? Yes. I think that there were a lot of clowns out there that they saw what they wanted to see. What is that Simon Garfunkel line that a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest? There was a lot of that going on. It's going on in the top Arizona races, where the Republican for governor is a denier. We had a fraudulent election, a corrupt election, and we have an illegitimate president sitting in the White House. It's like a giant grift in some ways. A grift, a swindle is what you're saying. Yes. All of these accusations, the case in Yuma, scaremongering, the Brian Watson email, scaremongering. You called Arizona the epicenter of fraud. It's scaremongering. Mm-hmm. It's not the fraud that is breaking people's faith in our elections,

it's people like you. So you say. But when we look at the violations of state statute, this is the epicenter of the problem. Nationwide, 190 election deniers are running for the U.S. House and 14 for the U.S. Senate, according to the Brookings Institution. Mark Brnovich lost his primary to a denier, and so did Rusty Bowers, which may come as a relief. Don't come over. Don't come over. Post-election, Trump supporters and conspiracy spinners laid siege to Bowers' home up to three times a week. Rusty Bowers is a pedophile. You go home. He had to fend them off. A man with a pistol,

demonstrators in their own armored car. And at the state capitol on January 6, 2021, they came with rifles and a guillotine. In Arizona, when belief in the vote eroded, this is what filled the void. Has the Republican Party that you've known all your life been hijacked? It's a large group of them that is doing the hijacking. I just don't think it's a majority. Its effectiveness as a party and its legitimacy in public discourse is grossly undermined by how they've acted in this state. 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. An outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Uganda has alarmed scientists. While no cases have yet been discovered outside Africa, the U.S. has started screening all arrivals from Uganda. Ebola is among the deadliest of pathogens capable of jumping from wild animals to humans, just as COVID-19 likely did. It's called spillover. Disease detectives warn the threat of spillover has never been higher as urban populations grow and come into contact with

wild animals and their viruses. Since 2009, American scientists have discovered more than 900 new viruses. Now the U.S. government is doubling down, sending virus hunters to global hotspots to find the next deadly virus before it finds us. We joined a team from the University of California Davis and their Ugandan partners in the rugged, impenetrable forest on the search for pathogen X. We landed in Kahihi, a speck of a town in southwest Uganda. As we headed off to the impenetrable forest, we soon saw how it got its name. It's so thick with trees, vines, and roots that Ugandans call it the place of darkness. As our 4x4s bumped and swerved along deeply rutted tracks, we passed tea farmers, loggers, villagers, all living on the edge of the forest

where the risk of infectious disease spilling over from animals is highest. Wildlife epidemiologist Christine Johnson handicapped the stakes. How would you rate the odds of another pandemic? I would say another pandemic is guaranteed. Guaranteed. It's not a matter of if but when. That's why we're so committed to preparation. Johnson leads the UC Davis team and has been hunting viruses around the globe for decades. We were headed to an abandoned mine shaft to look for bats. Johnson told us bats are prime suspects for spillover. They harbor more viruses lethal to humans than any other mammal.

New bat species and new viruses are still being discovered. It seems like a really daunting task for you to find pathogen X before it finds us. It's definitely achievable, but it does- It is achievable. Absolutely. It's all here right now, right? It's not like we're exploring outer space.

All of these viruses and all of the wildlife are right here on our planet. The bats would start flying at dusk. We waited as the UC Davis team and their Ugandan partners hung a fine mesh net across the entrance of the cave. We wore masks and goggles to protect ourselves against any early risers. Bernard Sebade, one of Uganda's top wildlife vets, told us this area used to be all forest. Now, villagers had planted a cornfield right up to the mouth of the bat cave, increasing the risk of spillover. As if on cue, we watched women carrying water cut through the cornfield while schoolchildren ran home. The transfer between bats and humans,

it's much more likely when you've got people living so close. Exactly. The population has grown. People have moved into areas they never tried before. That shrinkage of the buffer, the habitat between people and wildlife has become so narrow. So that increases the contact. We're talking about people who are now living right on the edge of the impenetrable forest. Exactly. Governments cannot stop people from moving in some of these areas because they have nowhere else to go. Bats are known to carry coronaviruses, the same virus

family that spawned COVID-19, as well as lethal Ebola viruses. So we had to dress head to toe in protective gear. Once the hazmat suit was on, we added two sets of gloves, a mask, and a face shield to guard against flying guano and other toxins. Once we begin, I must assume everything is contaminated. Exactly. The impenetrable forest was soon pitch black, and we had only the light from our headlamps to guide us. Soon, they'd trapped a large Egyptian fruit bat. Wildlife vet Bernard Zebede gently disentangled it and put it in a fabric sack. We followed him back to the makeshift lab, glowing in the dark. The bat sacks quivered in the ghostly light.

It felt like we were on the set of a sci-fi movie. Oh, he's a big guy. Up close, the bats did little to dispel their fearsome reputations. We watched as the fruit bat grew agitated, trying to escape. The scientist held its nose to a test tube filled with a mild anesthetic. Finally, the bat succumbed. Epidemiologist Christine Johnson told us the bat would be swabbed for a suite of viruses. Does this hurt the bat at all?

No, it doesn't hurt the bat. We get the right size swab so that we're just doing an oral sample. It might be a little uncomfortable. The bat's wings were examined for parasites and ticks that might also have pathogens. All the samples would be sent to a lab for DNA sequencing. Johnson told us a virus's genetic code can help identify which might cross to humans. After the tests were done, the bats were released, groggy but unharmed. The next day, we joined Tiara Smiley-Evans, a UC Davis epidemiologist and wildlife vet.

We were looking for monkeys and baboons. Like bats, primates carry many viruses that have leapt to people. Smiley-Evans told us catching an outbreak early at the point of spillover is vital to containing it. It sounds like there's no shortage of viruses that can infect humans that come out of the forest. There are probably more pathogens that we don't know about than ones that we do know about. We need to gather more information and more intelligence about what may be out there and able to spill over before it does. So they come right down to the hospital?

Yeah, in the back. It butts up right against the forest. We met her at the Bwindi Community Hospital on the edge of the forest. It's really something. It's so close, we saw baboons casually strolling on the hospital grounds, sometimes getting into patients' rooms. Whenever you're creating a new opportunity for humans to come in contact with wildlife populations that they were never in contact with before, you're creating a brand new situation. So as human populations grow, that's pushing us into areas we've never been before. Exactly. Putting us into contact with animals we've never we've never been before. Exactly. Putting us into contact

with animals we've never been in contact with before. Exactly. To find out what viruses the baboons were carrying, Smiley Evans pioneered a simple but groundbreaking method to collect saliva samples, the stealth banana. Tied to a string, the banana is tossed to the curious baboons. But hidden inside is an oral swab coated in something sweet that the baboons love to chew. Smiley Evans and Ugandan wildlife vet Ukamba Nelson had prepared the bananas earlier in the day. So we have tried strawberry jam. We have tried mango juice. Have you found they like one more than the other? The difference is that sometimes they'll chew on that swab

for longer periods of time with a different attractant versus another, and that's what we really want. It's like bubble gum for primates. When the sweet is gone, the baboons throw the swab away, leaving behind plenty of saliva that can be decoded for viruses.

But family politics can sometimes get in the way. Meet the big daddy of this troop. He wasn't about to let anyone else get even a mouthful. Mom hauled the babies out of the way until, finally, the coast was clear. By then, all that was left were soggy leftovers. Wildlife vet Bukamba Nelson told us it was worth the wait. It was rare to see babies venture this close. So you got saliva samples from the babies yesterday? Yeah. That's unusual?

It's very unusual. So what do you get from the babies that you don't get from the adults? You never know. I might find a particular disease in this age bracket which might not be found in the juvenile or the females, sex, age, all that plays a lot in disease intelligence. Disease intelligence that also includes training villagers to be on the lookout for any unusual fevers or flu-like symptoms.

Scientists can then match human illnesses to the animal viruses they've found in the same area. Smiley Evans told us it was putting pieces of a puzzle together. All the samples are tested in the same way for the same pathogens. So the goal is that if we're sampling at the same time, in the same area, we can start to connect the dots and understand when there's been transmission of a particular virus. One of the most closely monitored species in the impenetrable forest are its star residents, the endangered mountain gorilla. Nearly half the world's remaining gorillas are here, 459 at last count. They're always on the move. So we set off to find them. One ridge led to another, each steeper than the

last. The forest was so dense there was no sunlight and no gorillas. Wildlife vet Bernard Zebede assured us we were on the right path. Are you seeing signs of the gorillas around here? Yeah, I've seen some already. Our porters breezed along unfazed. We, not so much. Then, hours after trekking, suddenly, there they were. We spotted a mother first high in the trees, gorging on twigs.

Soon, we were surrounded by all 19 members of an extended family, including a massive silverback and another mother cradling her infant. We had put on our masks not to protect ourselves, but to protect the gorillas from any infection we might be carrying. Amy Bond is with Gorilla Doctors, an international conservation group. She told us how they identify each gorilla. Just like humans where we each have our own unique fingerprint that helps us be identifiable as an individual. Gorillas have unique nose prints. A nose print. A nose print. And that's what allows us to identify those individuals. And so we go through and we make sure we get each individual in the group that we can do a visual assessment looking for signs of illness or injury. Bond and wildlife

vet Bernard Sebede told us that gorillas are susceptible to many of the same pathogens that we are, and they can be an early harbinger of disease. The gorillas are monitored daily for any warning signs. When they're sick, it's very similar, right? Runny nose, coughing, sneezing, they're not moving, they don't want to eat if a gorilla is lying down sabade told us they'll assess if he's resting or if something else is preventing him from moving we spotted one young male on his own but amy bond told us he was likely suffering from a problem of a different sort you can also sometimes tell which silverback is dominated by the number of females around him.

So this poor guy sitting over here, he's just out. He's always second choice. Aside from a case of wounded male pride, gorilla doctors Amy Bond told us this family appeared to be thriving. But their future isn't guaranteed. And if theirs isn't, neither is ours. Bond told us as spillover threats grow, it's impossible to separate human health from the health of the natural world.

As UC Davis scientists continue their work, the search for Pathogen X is a search for what threatens the animals of the impenetrable forest as much as it threatens us. The best stories happen to those who can tell them. It's a fundamental rule of writing, maybe of life, and for decades now, David Sedaris has taken his offbeat experiences and unfiltered observations and turned them into rollicking essays, which he not only writes masterfully but then performs as he threads the globe on tour. It's made him among the world's best-selling authors.

It's made him rich enough to buy a Picasso. It's made him a humorist on the order of Mark Twain, if Mark Twain had been discovered after writing about his job as a department store Christmas elf. I'm in show business, and I love the show business life. I really do. It's the laziest form of show business there is, but yeah, I think of it as show business. I do. Writers tend to be a solitary, introverted tribe. Show business, the readings, appearances, book signings, often mark the worst part of the job. Not so for David Sedaris.

Oh, thank you so much. He turns his tours into performances, drawing big crowds to hear him hold forth on topics petty and profound and reliably funny. That's what makes me unworthy of a biography. Not just that I'm dull and have never been unfaithful, but that I'll zone out and think about Dumbledore or a TV show I like called Thousand Pound Sisters. And it's not just in front of the urban hipster crowd. When we first met up with Sedaris, he happened to be headed to Skagway, Alaska,

population 1,100, for a show at the local Eagle Lodge. Thank you so much for coming tonight. Followed by a line to experience that Sedarian satire one-on-one. That's crazy. I did save your life. He loves the interactions, stays for hours. But Sedaris also gets something practical out of this, potential material. One time I said to this woman, when was the last time you touched a monkey? And she said, can you smell it on me? And she worked for a center in Boston that trains monkeys to act as helpers for paralyzed people.

You had no inkling. I had no idea, none whatsoever. And then she invited me to the center. And so I went to the center and I had monkeys all over me. Sedaris' ability to find a story anywhere and everywhere has helped make him a runaway success, with more than a dozen books and counting, nearly every one a bestseller. Fifteen million copies sold. Why do you think so many people relate to your work? Every night I am on stage and I look out and I see people and I want to say, why are you here?

Why are you here? Yeah. I guess I'm thinking like, surely you had stuff to do at home. The thing is, I'm nobody. Do you know what I mean? Maybe what happens in the theater is just a celebration of our shared ordinariness. All writers are thieves, poaching a bit of one person's life and stitching it to part of another's. His subject matter traces the human experience, visits to the doctor, struggles in the TSA line,

and, of course, the comedy and complexities of family. Well, I'm 100 years old, my father tells us. Can you beat that? 98, Amy corrects him. Including his sister, Amy Sedaris. She's a comedian and actor, a showbiz type herself, and remains her brother's closest confidant. There were six Sedaris siblings growing up in suburban Raleigh, North Carolina, a typical middle-class household. That is, until you flipped the page, as it were, and ventured inside.

It just felt like we weren't sentimental. I don't know, it was almost like we were hard-bitten, alcoholic children. No, but it doesn't sound like, it wasn't corny, but it doesn't sound like you were arch or judgmental either. Judgmental, yeah. Judgmental for sure. If you're wearing a toe ring and you're going to come into our house, we will rip you to shreds.

Spend time with the Sedaris, you'll notice they share a certain sensibility, a legacy of their mother Sharon, Spend time with the Sedaris, you'll notice they share a certain sensibility, a legacy of their mother Sharon, who also gave them their first lessons in storytelling. Something would happen and she'd get on the phone and then tell a friend about it. And then she'd get on the phone a while later and tell another friend. And you'd think, oh, it changed. She'd work the story, which is where he gets it from. And then she would do it again and again and again. And by the end of the day, she had this little polished gem.

But I do that same thing. Like, Amy never does that. Amy never repeats herself. Oh, yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. Their father, Lucidaris, they say, was never quite in on all the stories and jokes and could be cruel to his children, particularly to David. I just feel like my dad bet all his chips on me being a failure.

You know, my father said a million times, you know what you are? A big, fat zero. I mean, how many times did dad say that to me? And everything you touch turns to crap. I mean, over and over and over and over again. And so as a kid, I thought, you know what, I'll show you, but you never show them. David's early years were a struggle. He wrestled with obsessions and compulsions and with his father's refusal to accept that he was gay. He drank too much and dropped out of college twice before finally getting a degree in visual arts.

In the early 90s, Sedaris moved to New York, where he took a series of odd jobs, chronicling his life in a diary but publishing no essays, until he wrote about his time working as a department store Christmas elf. He read us an excerpt. Well, there was a line for Santa and a line for the women's bathroom. And one woman, after asking me a thousand questions already,

asked which is the line for the women's bathroom. And I shouted that I thought it was the line with all the women in it. And she said, I'm going to have you fired. I had two people say that to me today. I'm going to have you fired. Go ahead and people say that to me today. I'm going to have you fired. Go ahead and be my guest. I'm wearing a green velvet costume.

It doesn't get any worse than this. Let's be clear. You didn't take this job as an elf for irony or because you thought you were going to write about it? No. I don't have any skills. I applied for all sorts of jobs. And I got this job because I'm short. You know, I'm short and I didn't have a criminal record. In the history of unlikely literary breaks, this might take the prize. What started as a journal entry became a national public radio essay,

Santa Land Diaries, which, when it aired in 1992, did the equivalent of going viral. This would be your breakout hit. So this is what put you on the map. Yeah. Did you know that at the time? which, when it aired in 1992, did the equivalent of going viral. This would be your breakout hit. So this is what put you on the map. Yeah. Did you know that at the time? No. Nope.

It just seemed like everyone was listening to the radio that day, and it really, I went from somebody with no opportunities to someone having to weed them out. Since then, his subject matter expanded, but his form has remained consistent. No novels or sweeping narratives, he starts with a notebook he brings everywhere and turns the jottings into personal essays that mix memory, observation, and he admits some exaggeration in service of humor. The final product usually begins with the mundane and ends with the meaningful. And while the literary celebrity may be an endangered species... Please welcome back to The Late Show, David Sedaris.

Sedaris not only plays the part, but dresses the part. He contributes essays to The New Yorker, the BBC, and on occasion CBS News. And at age 65, he's on the road more than 200 days each year. Good for his brand, but also his process. He writes for the ear as much as for the reader's eye, which makes audiences not simply his fans, but his most important editor. The audience isn't wrong, right?

You can't convince somebody that something is funny. Either they laughed at it or they didn't. Either they paid attention to it or they didn't. And the audience is telling you all of that. So it's my job to listen to them. For all his success, his approach to the job can still leave him feeling like an imposter. That's when I worry, though, because I think, well, what if I'm not really a writer? Because what if I'm, you know, there's certain ways you can cheat with your voice, right?

You can make your voice. You really have that concern? A dozen plus books into this, millions and millions sold. You really have that, I'm not a writer? Yeah, well, because then you think, well, I'm cheating here. Look, I'm saying, he's afraid of a woman, Andrew R. Ripple. A woman. I'm not describing her voice.

I'm doing her voice, right? So can a reader hear her, right? Or am I cheating? Am I cheating by using my voice? Still, his readings drive book sales, which drive ticket sales, a virtuous cycle that's afforded Sedaris multiple homes, including this cottage in southeast England, where he spends part of the year with his partner of more than 30 years, Hugh Hamrick, an artist who appears in many essays as the sensible, centering ballast

to David's flights of fancy. In my mind, this is sort of a classic domestic story. One character is, you know, kind of hapless, and the other person is reliable and capable, and that's Hugh all over, right? I don't know how to do anything. I don't know how to look at our bank statements online. I don't open any envelope unless it looks like fan mail. Hamrick hates the limelight as much as Sedaris craves it, and it took some convincing to get him to sit down with us.

We wondered what it was like living with someone for whom everything is a potential story. Do you have any veto power? Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't want this thing going on. I think he would know what I'd accept and what I wouldn't accept. You never had to say, no, no, no, no, this can't go out to the readers of The New Yorker or the millions of people reading your books.

I think I might have tried a few times just saying, do you have to say that? He says, yeah, everyone thinks it's funny. I was like, okay. These days, going for the biggest laugh can be risky, especially for someone like Sedaris, who proudly doesn't much traffic in boundaries. Are you sensitive to,

man, this is going to make me look bad when people read this? Everything is such a landmine now. I don't want to sit at my desk with my hands and feet tied together. You offended me. You offended me. You offended me. Great, there's other stuff for you to read.

Go somewhere else. Out here in England, far from the Twitter mob, mornings are for writing, while afternoons are for going on walks. Or, well, remember we mentioned Sedaris' childhood compulsions? The adult version, he says, is this. Picking up trash on the side of the rural roadways. We naturally wanted to tag along. How many hours a day? I'm between four and six usually. I go out after midnight. I'll go out. I know it sounds so crazy. I'll go out with a headlamp on and do busier

roads. This is also where he says he does a lot of thinking, which recently has centered on his father, Lou, who died last year. Their unhappy relationship left unresolved. David wrote about one of their last conversations. Then he turned to me. David, he said, as if he just realized who I was. You've accomplished so many fantastic things in your life. You're, well, I want to tell you, you, you won. When he said you won, you think it was this cosmic, you won the game of life, or do you think it's you won, you defeated me? I'd go back and forth.

I mean, that's part of what made it compelling to write about, is that I don't know. That's a question I'll be asking myself, I don't know, for the rest of my life. Tonight, an update on a story from last May, ballet in exile. That's when we met ballet artists, both Russian and Ukrainian, who fled the war to pursue their art overseas. Some Ukrainians out of necessity, some Russians out of protest, like the Bolshoi's Olga Shmirnova. I had to leave everything, like my home, my theater, my repertoire, my partners, my parents, sister, brother, everything.

But I don't have regrets. No regrets? No. Because at least I can be honest with myself. American philanthropist Howard Buffett, son of Warren Buffett and once the focus of a 60 Minutes profile, was watching. His foundation has granted more than a million dollars to help support the exiled Ukrainian dancers. I'm John Wertheim. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.