60 Minutes - 11/05/2023: John Eastman, Our Problem is Your Responsibility, Monkey Island

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

Scott Pelley interviews John Eastman, the conservative former law professor who championed a radical legal theory to keep President Trump in power. Eastman is now facing charges in Georgia’s election conspiracy case. He has pleaded not guilty. Few people realize it, but Social Security’s mistakes are your responsibility. It often doesn’t matter if it’s not your fault – you still must pay. Anderson Cooper reports. Lesley Stahl travels to an island completely inhabited by monkeys. It’s not open to the public. Researchers have been studying the monkeys for decades. Learn about the behavioral scientific discoveries that may apply to humans. 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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John Eastman says he's innocent, and he told us if he was ever guilty of anything, it was giving bold legal advice to Donald Trump. He was among the architects of President Trump's bid to stay in power. One judge called Eastman's strategy a coup in search of a legal theory. You said 2,500 convicts, the investigation found four. You said 10,000 dead voters, the investigation found four. It doesn't seem like you knew what you were talking about. Last year, nearly one million Americans, like Stephen and Becky Sword,

received a letter from the Social Security Administration saying that due to a government miscalculation, they owed Social Security money. A lot of money. In their case, $51,887. The Sorge were asked to repay it within 30 days. Are you scared? He's thinking we're going to lose our house. You know, what are we going to do? I mean, we're very scared. There are roughly 1,800 monkeys on Cayo Santiago. They live in isolation in what is a natural laboratory.

Today, scientists are studying how the stress of a devastating hurricane affected their overall health and relationships, and what that might teach us about ourselves, since we share 94% of our DNA with them. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim.

I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and in our last minute, an update on the war in the Middle East. Tonight on 60 Minutes. 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. John Eastman says he's innocent, and he told us if he was ever guilty of anything, it was giving bold legal advice to Donald Trump. Eastman was a little-known law professor who found himself at the center of history, among the architects of President Trump's bid to stay in power. One judge called Eastman's strategy a coup in search of a legal theory. Today, Eastman faces nine criminal counts in Georgia's election conspiracy case, and we found he's still handing out bold legal advice, this time to himself. Facing possible years in prison, he agreed to talk with us. That was the first advice I got from my legal team when I put them together, is that we don't

talk about anything. And in normal times, that's the right advice for lawyers to give their criminal defendant clients. But I quickly determined that this fight was much more about the criminal law, the specific law, and a public fight. We did nothing wrong, and it's important to counteract the false narratives on that, because all of my actions were designed to investigate illegality in the election, to see if they had an impact. 63-year-old John Eastman graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and was dean of Chapman University's law school in California. He views the world from the far right and has said the political left is an existential threat. We're no longer disagreeing about means to get to shared ends. We've got wings of the two

parties that disagree fundamentally on the ends and the purpose of our government. Existential, you said. Well, I do think existential. I think what we're seeing now in the criminalization of political opposition and the threat to shutting down speech of opposing political views means that the people are no longer in charge of the direction of their government. In November 2020, Eastman joined Rudy Giuliani's effort to persuade seven states to withhold certification of Joe Biden's victory. There's a plethora of evidence that you can go through that will convince you that this election was stolen. My name is John Eastman. Eastman testified on Zoom to lawmakers

in Georgia. He said state election officials hadn't followed the law and he leveled dubious claims of fraud, including votes by 2,500 felons and 10,000 dead people. Something is amiss here, and that the legislature simply must investigate as you're doing with this hearing today. But not one state agreed to withhold certification of its vote. 50 Trump lawsuits were failing. By January, the deadline was at hand. On January 6th, electoral votes from the states are counted before a joint session of Congress. The Constitution appoints the Vice President to open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted. But two days before the count, Eastman came to this Oval Office meeting with a radical

interpretation of those words. Vice President Pence, he said, had the power to stop the count and return the votes to the states for reconsideration. To delay, to let them finish their investigative work and make a determination on whether the illegality had affected the outcome of the election. And if it didn't, to report back so that we could have some more certainty about the validity of the Biden electors. But if it did, then we wanted to make sure that the person who actually won the election was the one that was certified. No vice president had ever exercised this authority. No vice president had ever claimed to have the power to exercise this authority. Greg Jacob was Vice President Pence's legal counsel. He was in the Oval Office hearing Eastman read between the lines of the Constitution. So it really was him inventing something

without any historical roots or any historical foundations, and then desperately trying to find some hook in the constitutional text that neither history, nor structure, nor practice, nor common sense supported. Eastman disagreed with that, and even predicted that the courts might not intervene. If the courts stayed out of it, there is no other actor to decide that issue. And I expressed to Professor Eastman at our meeting the next morning on January 5th that if it's not the courts,

it's effectively going to be decided in the streets. Greg Jacob told us Vice President Pence never believed he had the power to do anything but open and read the certified votes. The certificate of the electors for president. Back in 2001, Pence was a freshman congressman when Vice President Al Gore read the votes that denied Gore the presidency in one of the closest elections of all time. May God bless our new president and our new vice president, and may God bless the United States of America.

Did you see at any point in this period the vice president reconsider that view or waver in that determination? No, the vice president never wavered. It never made sense to him that the vice president would be empowered to decide issues like that by the framers. And he said, look, I know the rules that judges have to follow. You would never allow a judge to preside over and decide an issue when they have the kind of interest that I have in this case. I'm on the ticket. Obviously, I want us to win this election. How could it possibly be proper for the Vice President of the United States to

decide such an important question in which he has a personal interest like that? Were there other lawyers in the White House who agreed with Eastman, or was he out there alone? I was not aware of any lawyers who agreed with Eastman, or was he out there alone? I was not aware of any lawyers who agreed with him. But one person did agree. And I hope Mike Pence comes through for us, I have to tell you. The day of the Eastman meeting, Mr. Trump raised expectations that Pence could flip the election. Of course, if he doesn't come through, I won't like him quite as much.

In a press release the day before the count, Mr. Trump said, The vice president and I are in total agreement that the vice president has the power to act. When you saw that statement, what did you think? I was outraged because I knew it was categorically false. I knew that the vice president had conveyed multiple times to the president what his position was, and I knew that the statement was not accurate.

John Eastman. On January 6th, John Eastman told the president's rally that Georgia voting machines were rigged. You know the old way was to have a bunch of ballots sitting in a box under the floor, and when you needed more, you pulled them out in the dark of night. They put those ballots in a secret folder in the machines. That was false. And so were claims Eastman made to the Georgia legislature, according to an investigation by Georgia's Republican Secretary of State, who himself had voted for Trump. You said 2,500 convicts, the investigation found four. You said 10,000 dead voters,

the investigation found four. It doesn't seem like you knew what you were talking about. You've now mischaracterized my testimony, and I'm not going to let you get away with that. They were based on the expert analysis, and it didn't say 2,500 felons voted. It said as many as. It acknowledged the limitation of the data they had, and the analysis that was conducted, contrary analysis that was provided by the Secretary of State, was simply a press conference. I'd love to see the data, and we will adjust the numbers as the complaint that was filed the next day said we would once we got the additional data. Too late to adjust the numbers now. You've already testified to the legislature, and there's a big difference between as many as 2,500 and the actual number of four.

Well, we don't know the actual number is four because the Secretary of State has declined to give us the information on which that analysis was based. We wondered if Eastman believes there's so much evidence, why has no state reported fraud that would overturn its election result? I think we are quickly turning into a country where there's the pro-government party or the uniparty, one might euphemistically call it, and folks that are concerned about the direction our country is going. The MAGA movement, the Tea Party movement before that, if you will. And the folks in those government offices tend to be on the one side of that dispute rather than the other. And you say they're covering it up?

Well, certainly they're not investigating it to the level I think the evidence warrants. Further investigation was pursued by Georgia prosecutors. A grand jury indicted 19 defendants, including the former president, alleging a conspiracy to overturn the election, including false statements to persuade Georgia legislators to reject lawful electoral votes. We know that dead people voted. With only hours to go before the count at the Capitol, Eastman's dubious reading of the Constitution became an ultimatum.

And all we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at 1 o'clock, he let the legislatures of the state look into this so we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not. And anybody that is not willing to stand up to do it does not deserve to be in the office.

It is that simple. Hours later, after the president's speech, rioters were stalking Mike Pence. Greg Jacob, the vice president's counsel, was in the Capitol as Pence was reading, not judging, the vote. We started hearing, boom, boom, boom, and all of a sudden glass shattered. The riots stopped the count. In the moment, Jacobs sent emails to John Eastman. Thanks to your bull, we are now under siege. He called Eastman a serpent in the ear of the president. The violence caused the vote count to take longer than the rules allow, so Eastman wrote back to Jacob with a plea. Since the rules

were broken already, why not break one more and send the votes back to the states? The people who stormed the building believed that the vice president had authorities that he in fact did not have. And that that was a motivating factor for them in storming the building. And after you see all of that actually play out, the kind of practical implications that I had expressed to him on the 5th, if the courts don't decide this is going to be decided in the streets, well, the streets had come to us. And he still wanted us to go ahead and push ahead with his theory. Which told you what about John Eastman? He was mostly concerned with the results and didn't really care how many laws had to be broken to get there. Eastman was forced to retire as a professor at Chapman University.

He asked to get on the president's pardon list, but that didn't happen. Today, he's fighting disbarment in California, and this past August, he turned himself in in Georgia and has pleaded not guilty. Who is the John Eastman that we see in the mugshot? The John Eastman you see in that mugshot is one who remains astounded that we have so corrupted our criminal law that this is even broad. I hope in the fullness of time we get our acts together and understand this is a bridge too far in our criminalization of the law and our criminalization of our political opposition.

Last year, Democrats and Republicans passed an electoral count law. It now clarifies the vice president's role is to read, not judge, the votes. 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. Each month, about 71 million Americans, retirees, disabled workers, and others or wherever you get your podcasts. because the Social Security Administration miscalculated their benefits and paid them too much. It can happen to anyone, and it can take years, even decades, for these unexpected debts to suddenly come to light. It often doesn't matter if it's not the recipient's fault. They still have to pay. Few people realize it, but Social Security's mistakes are your responsibility. Last year, at Stephen and Becky Sword's home in Chicago,

a letter arrived from the Social Security Administration. When Becky Sword read it, she was stunned to discover that she and her husband owed Social Security $51,887 and were expected to repay it within 30 days. That letter changed your life? Oh, yeah. Are you scared? He's thinking we're going to lose our house. You know, what are we going to do?

I mean, we're very scared. When we spoke with Stephen and Becky Sword in August, Stephen was making $16 an hour as a security guard on the overnight shift at a condominium complex. Becky was working days as an occupational therapy assistant in a nursing home. They're 62 years old and have worked full-time most of their lives. But for several years now, Stephen's been dealing with the effects of a pancreatic disease that nearly killed him in 2016. How long were you in the hospital for? About 105 days. It was hard because when I left the

hospital, it took me about two months to learn to eat and walk again. Stevens started receiving social security disability checks in 2017 as he recovered and returned to work. The agency's rules are complicated, but Becky faxed Stevens pay stubs to social security so the agency could monitor his earnings and eligibility. She kept the fax receipts. So I knew they were getting it, you know. In return, Social Security sent the Swords letters like this one, saying it had increased Stevens' benefits to give him credit for his 2019 earnings.

Is the impression you got from that that they're examining the pay stubs and they're paying attention? Yeah, because they're increasing it. But the letter the Swords got last year from Social Security said Stephen shouldn't have gotten any money at the time the agency gave him that increase. Stephen and Becky owed more than $50,000, the agency said, because we did not stop his checks about three years sooner. Has anyone in Social Security ever sort of apologized? No. They take no blame at all. They say it's our fault. They're saying you should have known that... They're making too much money.

That Social Security was giving you too much money. Yeah. Even though Social Security didn't know that they were giving you too much money. Which is strange because you're sending in all your pay stuff. Someone has to file that. And when we asked them, they said, well, they're not looking at that every month. And then she even said, well, they're not even looking at it every year. I would think yearly, at least they would review it. I could see making a mistake after a few months, but not three years of a mistake. And then they blamed it on COVID. They blamed it on being understaffed. And so to me right there, it's saying it's their fault.

The Social Security Administration told us its privacy rules prevent it from commenting on individual cases like the Swords. And no one from the agency would give us an on-camera interview. But Kilolo Kijikazi, the acting commissioner of Social Security, gave this testimony before a congressional committee late last month. How many people are receiving overpayment notices in a year? For FY 2022, 1,028,389. For FY 2023, 986,912. Seems like an awful lot. Nobody knows this is happening to so many people. This is not a story Social Security wants to publicize. No. Terry Savage writes a nationally syndicated column on personal finance. Lawrence Kotlikoff, an economics professor at Boston University,

created software to help people maximize their Social Security benefits. Together, they've been trying to draw attention to what they call Social Security horror stories, caused largely, they say, by the Social Security administration's own mistakes. Their mantra, their rule is, our mistake is your mistake. And you can appeal it or ask for a waiver. The only reason that you will waive this clawback is if you are indigent, really, really poor. The worst part of it is they have all the power because they say, if you don't pay us back, we're just going to cut your benefit check. Imagine, people live on those checks and all of a sudden you get no check or a small amount? If someone's been paid too much in Social Security benefits,

why shouldn't they have to pay it back? Because you relied on it, so you may have decided to retire early or to spend the money on your child's tuition. Overpayments have existed for decades and caused people a lot of financial pain, but fixing the problem has never been a high priority on Capitol Hill. In 2015, Congress did approve a measure to reduce overpayments by giving Social Security more timely access to payroll data. But eight years later, the agency still hasn't put the new system in place. Aging technology and staff shortages have taken a toll on Social Security. Last year, the agency's workforce hit a 25-year low as the number of

people claiming benefits kept going up. When we took a close look at Social Security's annual reports to Congress, we discovered something else has been going up as well. The amount of money the agency has been clawing back from the checks of people with overpayments. Jean Rodriguez, who's 73 years old, told us her retirement checks had been withheld for the past two years. A former school cafeteria worker, she started receiving benefits in 2014. But four years later, she and her husband Glenn were asked to come to the local social security office in Virginia Beach, Virginia to speak with the representative. And he says, we have a small problem. How much did he say they had overpaid you?

$72,000. That doesn't sound like a small problem. No. It wasn't. We were both devastated. What did they tell you happened? Somewhere along the line, they made a combination of four other people in addition to my numbers. So they were giving you benefits based not just on your salary, but on four other people's salary all combined. How does that happen? Good question. Don't know how they did it. Did Social Security admit to you that this was their fault?

Yes, they did. But the agency said the Rodriguez's had to pay the money back anyway because they could afford to do so. Jean and Glenn own their home, and Glenn gets a pension from the Navy. If it was something I knew I did totally wrong, they have the right to come after me. But I didn't know how they calculated it. And then they waited four years to figure it out. In a statement, the Social Security Administration told us our payment accuracy rates are high, yet even small error rates add up to substantial improper payment amounts.

The agency said it's required by law to recover this money and added that overpayments are not necessarily the agency's fault. They can happen when a beneficiary does not timely report work or other financial information. There's no statute of limitations on how long Social Security can wait to collect an overpayment. Two years ago, Roy Farmer of Grand Rapids, Michigan, got a letter from Social Security asking him whether he'd forgotten to pay a debt he didn't know he had. This is an alleged overpayment from 20 years ago? Yes, sir.

When you were 11 or 12 years old? Correct. Roy Farmer grew up in rural Cadillac, Michigan, in a family of six that struggled to make ends meet. We ended up near homelessness a couple of times. At one point, even living, you know, six of us in a camper trailer. He was born with cerebral palsy. I had leg braces. I had to walk with a child-sized version of like an old person walker. And you had surgeries, you had doctor's visits, you had it treated. Yeah, and so thankfully they were able to get me to a point where I can live a more or less normal life with some limitations.

He's 33 years old now and works full time. But when he was a child, his mother received benefits on his behalf. Social Security told him that when he was 11 years old, the agency determined he was no longer medically eligible for benefits, and his mother received $4,902 too much. His mother died a few years ago, and the agency is insisting he pay back the money because it believes he can afford to do so. Could you afford $4,902? No, sir. That much is about a sixth of my annual take-home pay. Like most of the people we spoke to, Roy Farmer couldn't find a lawyer to help him. There's little financial incentive for attorneys to take on these cases. It took Farmer

nine months to get the document in his Social Security file. He was looking for the agency's evidence that he was no longer medically eligible for benefits when he was 11 years old. But he says there was none. And they told me, we probably had it at some point, but we don't have it now. And they admit there's no evidence you're at fault, but they're still coming after you for it. Yes, sir. People at Social Security have told us, look, this is a law. This has to be changed through Congress. Our hands are tied. It's not, Anderson, because the law says that if equity and good conscience demands that the clawback be waived, it should be waived. Lawrence Kotlikoff, the economist who's written about overpayments,

is talking about a specific part of the Social Security Act that says the agency should not recover an overpayment if doing so would be against equity and good conscience. The problem, he says, is that Social Security interprets that phrase in a very narrow way. So the agency itself, Social Security Administration, has a lot of discretion. Absolutely, yes. Oh, sure they do. But financially, the long-term picture is not good. And they've trained the staff,

look, your job is to collect every penny you can, no matter what. The Social Security Trust Fund for Retirement and Disability Benefits is expected to be depleted around 2035 because the benefits being paid out are greater than the payroll taxes coming in. But Kotlikoff and Savage argue that clawing back money from the elderly and disabled isn't going to make much of a dent in that problem. They say there are some

simple things Congress and the Social Security Administration could do to alleviate the stress and financial difficulty caused by overpayments. For example, shouldn't there be a statute of limitations so that after 18 months it's their mistake and they have to deal with it, not the person who mistakenly received and lived on that benefit check? If it's more than a year or two... Diswave it. Just say, our mistake, you're fine. Roy Farmer in Michigan has been waiting four months to appeal his case before an administrative law judge who works for Social Security. Gene and Glenn Rodriguez told us they'd been waiting four years.

As for the swords in Chicago, Stephen and Becky told us they were tired of fighting the government and had decided not to appeal the matter any further. I just figured we're going to have to give up our retirement funds. That's the only way you could do it? That's the only way, yeah. Because they said we'd have to pay it back in three years' time, and we'd have to come up with $1,400 a month to pay back. And we don't have that. We don't have that kind of money. When Stephen Sword was not working the night shift and Becky Sword was not working the day shift,

they were preparing to hand over most of the $60,000 they'd saved for their retirement to the government agency charged with supporting Americans in their old age. All the people we interviewed for this story asked the Social Security Administration to waive their debts. Their requests were denied. But after we asked the agency about these cases,

Social Security told the Swords, the Rodriguez's, and Roy Farmer that they would not have to pay the money back. The agency says it's now reviewing its policies and procedures regarding overpayments. With extreme weather events on the rise across the globe, like the rare Category 5 hurricane that hit Mexico 11 days ago, we were interested in a study on a remote island very few people are allowed to visit, where scientists are studying how the stress of these environmental crises affects longevity and overall health. The subjects are monkeys, rhesus macaque monkeys, whose behavior has been studied there for over 80 years

because 94% of their DNA is the same as humans. They survived with relative environmental stability until six years ago when the island was hit with a devastating storm. After taking tests for tuberculosis, measles, and COVID, we were allowed to visit Cayo Santiago, or Monkey Island, off the coast of Puerto Rico. There are roughly 1,800 monkeys on Cayo. They live in isolation in what is a natural laboratory, halfway between captivity and the way they would live in the wild. Are they fighting? Yeah.

She's looking around and screaming for help, trying to get others to come to her aid. Wow. Biologists James Haim of NYU and Noah Snyder-Mackler of Arizona State University are part of a team of investigators in this long-term research project. What's the lifespan usually? The lifespan here on the island for the females, the median lifespan,

is about 18 years, and then in males about 15 years, right? Do they have, is there a predator? No predators here. Another way life here is unlike the wild is that these guys serve their meals every morning. Researchers tell us there's a hierarchy. The highest-ranking monkeys get to eat first. I've even seen high-ranking individuals go up to a lower-ranking individual

who is eating food in their mouth and hold their mouth open and take the food out of their mouth and then... What did they get? Purina monkey chow. There's monkey chow? Made by Purina. Oh, my goodness. Rhesus monkeys are commonly used for medical research because there are close

relatives genetically and physiologically similar to humans. They have systems that are quite like us, eyes that are like us, lungs and hearts that are like us. These rhesus macaque monkeys, their ancestors, came here from India in 1938. The macaque is used in larger numbers for medical and zoological research than any other kind of primate. American primatologist Clarence Carpenter took 500 of them on a grueling 14,000-mile sea voyage that lasted 51 days. He wanted to create a naturalistic research facility to study the monkeys' social and sexual behaviors. Their early years here were tough. Many died from disease,

but enough of them lived on so that by the 1950s, scientists began tattooing them and taking a daily census. That meticulous record-keeping has continued with today's monkeys, all of whom descended from the original group, giving scientists rare access to more than six decades of their biological and behavioral data. One of the things they learned is that they're highly adaptable, acclimating quickly to the island. They also learn that they can be quite aggressive, especially around food and during the mating season.

Are these monkeys intelligent? Sure. They're pretty intelligent. You know, they're socially intelligent. How similar to us are they in how they live? They form really strong social relationships with their best friends and their family members. They have best friends? Some close friends, some best friends, right.

Rhesus monkeys live in female-led societies. Mothers, daughters, aunts, and grandmothers stick together in groups, while the males leave when they reach maturity and join other troops for breeding. Few people know the troop tensions and allegiances better than research assistants Daniel Phillips and Josue Negron, who've worked on Cayo for years. They arrive every morning by boat at 7 a.m. and for the next seven hours,

they document things like aggression, grooming, vigilance and feeding. Do you ever get to know individuals? In other words, you know that monkey versus that one? Yeah. Yeah, we need to recognize them right away, because I need to know, like, who is interacting with who, how they, like, groom each other or attack each other. And how can you tell the difference? What are the characteristics that you see?

You can see the differences on even how they walk, how they move. Their even faces have differences. In other words, their faces become as ordinary in a way to your eyes as human faces. Yes. You'll recognize them in families. Exactly. Like, your face is familiar, you should be the son of this female. Everything changed for the research and the monkeys when Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico in September 2017.

A 155-mile-an-hour wind smashed into homes and office buildings, destroying everything in sight, including the power grid and communication systems. Nearly 3,000 people died. There was no way for the team to get to Monkey Island. Angelina Ruiz-Lambides, the then-scientific director of CAIO, seven months pregnant at the time, sheltered in her home outside of San Juan with her husband and two young children. You thought the monkeys were all going to die.

Yeah, we thought that the monkeys were going to die. James Haim and Noah Snyder-Mackler couldn't get any news about their colleagues or the monkeys. So two days after the storm, the team came up with an idea. And you hired a helicopter? We hired a helicopter. They enlisted the pilot to fly over Cayo and do a survey, and they had a list of questions. Can he see any monkeys? Are they alive?

What is the status of the vegetation? Are there standing pools of water that they might be able to drink? Angelina, who had decided to go up with the pilot, was horrified. This is footage she shot from the helicopter. I see this destruction, like 80 plus years of work completely flattened. This is Cayo before the hurricane, with a dense canopy of trees and lush foliage. This is after.

A green oasis turned brown, buried in dead branches. The island lost two-thirds of its vegetation. Heartbroken by what she was seeing from the air, Angelina wanted a closer look. But even on the ground, she didn't see any monkeys. So then I get on the helicopter again. Back up again. And that's when I see a social group running from the helicopter and I was like, oh, there's monkeys. They're still coyote. I think I estimated, okay, that must be around like 300, 400 monkeys or so. Out of 1,700. Yes. But once the staff was able to return and do a complete census on the ground, they found, to their utter astonishment, that most had lived. They estimated just about 50 had died.

And you're thinking, how could they survive this? How could they? How could they survive this? It's still a mystery. What did the monkeys do to ride out the storm? Where did they shelter from the wind? And ride out the storm? Where did they shelter from the wind? And what did they eat? So one of the big questions is, without being fed, how were they nourished? Yeah, so although the hurricane did dramatically de-vegetate the island, one thing it also did was deposited a great amount of seaweed and algae onto the island.

And so one possibility is that the monkeys were eating more of this kind of vegetation. Which they still seem to enjoy. After the hurricane, the monkeys had to adjust to a new, far more hostile environment. Their innate adaptability certainly helped. So they bob up and down to try and stop themselves from falling forward. Six years after the storm, the adjusting continues. Attempts to replant the trees have been stymied because the monkeys, ever curious about anything new in their environment, uproot them before

they have a chance to grow. So now there's very little shade. This used to be almost forested, right? Lots of space and shade. And now they're forced to sit in a few shaded areas, and so they've been clumped by the changing distribution of shade. So an interesting thing that we saw is that individuals became more social. Not just more social. The researchers have noticed that the monkeys are more tolerant of each other,

which at first seemed counterintuitive. I'm thinking of humans in a situation where there's fewer resources. And I see in my mind's eye competition. I see them saying, get off my property or whatever. But you're saying that it was the opposite here. Perhaps, but there's also famous examples of people pulling together. So I think it can go both ways. We're capable of great greed and competition and cruelty, but humans are also capable of great kindness and compassion and friendship and generosity. And that kind of duality exists in racist macabre societies too. And I think anyone you talk to here in Puerto Rico

would bring up the fact that they, you know, the people of Puerto Rico sort of gelled and increased their support of one another in the face of this event. Beyond observing their social interactions, they were also able to track biological changes since they had access to blood tests done on the monkeys for 13 years. So what we found is that individuals who had lived through the hurricane had immune systems that looked like they had aged an extra two years. What is that in human years? Is it six to eight human years?

They aged six to eight years? They aged six to eight human years. Oh my gosh. Through the trauma. That was on average. That's the work that we're trying to do right now, is what makes some of these individuals more resilient to the hurricane, right?

Is the hypothesis that it has something to do with friendships? We think that those individuals who are able to have stronger bonds, stronger friendships, might have been protected from this really stressful event. The hurricane opened all new avenues of their research, with questions such as what predicts who survives a catastrophe like an earthquake or a hurricane, and how quickly they recover. So when you step back and look at your study in terms of climate-related trauma

or any kind of trauma, are you expecting to find answers for survivability in these situations for human beings? Given the strong similarity between these primates, these monkeys, and us, we know that a lot of the work that we're doing and the things that they might do to be more resilient to this might be translatable to humans, to us, and might provide ways for us to intervene and help buffer against the negative effects of these traumatic events. now cbs news correspondent charlie daggett from israel this morning secretary of state

antony blinken made a surprise visit to the west bank where palestinian president makhmud joined arab leaders in calling for a ceasefire. Secretary Blinken's push for a humanitarian pause was refused by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying not until all the hostages are returned. The fighting in Gaza has only intensified. Hamas claims an overnight airstrike killed at least 40 people at another refugee camp and that the overall death toll has now surpassed 9,700. The Israeli military claims it has surrounded Gaza City and troops are closing in. Hanging in the balance, the fate of more than 240 hostages

taken by the terror group and those attacks that killed more than 1,400 people.