60 Minutes - 11/24/2024: Disruptor U., Humans in the Loop, Lowriders of New Mexico

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

As contempt for cancel culture and self-censorship on college campuses continues to drive a political divide across the country, correspondent Jon Wertheim reports on a new start-up university, the University of Austin, in Austin, Texas. Labeled by some as an “anti-woke university,” Wertheim speaks to the founders, students, and advisors, about how they believe they’re disrupting modern academia by fostering debate and ideological openness in their classrooms. As chatbots continue to evolve, Lesley Stahl reports from Nairobi, Kenya, on the growing market of “humans in the loop” – workers around the world who help train AI for big American tech companies. Stahl speaks with digital workers who have spent hours in front of screens teaching and improving AI, but complain of poor working conditions, low pay, and undertreated psychological trauma. Correspondent Bill Whitaker cruises through Espanola, New Mexico, a town that’s a hub of lowrider culture: vintage American automobiles with vibrant paint jobs and street-scraping suspensions. He meets a community of “cruisers” who are turning their hobby’s bad-boy reputation on its head, paving a new route as activists and community servants, and claiming a place as custodians of Hispanic culture and champions of fine art. 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

When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from Winners? Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag, is that from Winners? Ooh, or that beautiful silk skirt, did she pay full price? Or those suede sneakers? Or that luggage? Or that trench? Those jeans, that jacket, those heels, is anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering, start winning. Win anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering. Start winning.

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Across America, everyone has an opinion on quote, wokeness. Nowhere more than on our college campuses. Politics should be studied at a university. It shouldn't be the operating system of university. In Texas, one new university is prioritizing open debate to reset the marketplace of ideas. If our universities are screwed up, and I believe they are, then that will screw up

America as a whole quite quickly. Tonight meet the people who sort, label, and sift through reams of data to make artificial intelligence run smoothly for American tech companies. Jobs that are often farmed out to developing countries with conditions that have been likened to sweatshops with computers instead of sewing machines. It's terrible to see just how many American companies are just doing wrong here. And it's something that they wouldn't do at home. You got to have your siren.. You gotta have your siren. Española, New Mexico calls itself the lowrider capital of the world.

And when we were there, we watched a candy-colored caravan of cars strutting their stuff. Whether they hopped to the sky or sat ever so low to the ground, each lowrider we saw seemed to say, here I am. It's sleek, it's classic, it's beautiful. It's kind of me. 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 Nora O'Donnell. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Nora O'Donnell. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. These are not soaring times for higher education. Tuition costs rise unchecked. Contempt for today's campus culture, the trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions help swing the election. And this past week, President-elect Donald Trump nominated former WWE executive Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education,

an agency that each year distributes billions to U.S. colleges, some that Trump has vowed to tax and sue for their, quote, wokeness. But if America does one thing well, it's innovation. Conceived largely by frustrated professors at schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Brown, the University of Austin started classes this fall. A college startup touting open debate, a shout-nothing-but-say-anything philosophy, and for now, free tuition. Will this be just another politicized campus swinging right, or a true disruptor resetting the marketplace of ideas? 140 years old, the University of Texas at Austin ranks among the country's largest schools.

Football games draw more than 100,000 fans. But blocks away, in between a Ruth's Chris and a Velvet Taco, on a floor of what was once a downtown department store, one of America's smallest universities, UATX, the University of Austin. How would you describe members of the founding class? Very outspoken. You'll never enter a conversation and leave without something that you didn't know before, talking to someone. Olivia Antunes, Dylan Wu, Constantine Whitmire, Grace Price, and Jacob Hornstein are among the 92 students in the inaugural class.

If UT is built around Longhorn football, the focal point of UATX... Pursuing the truth. Are you stopped by telling the truth? Pursuit of truth. Furthest pursuit of truth to me is I have this kind of mentality that the best way that you should go about your life

is to always assume that you're wrong in some capacity. You're prepared for that. Right. To be challenged and stress-tested and confronted? It's not just even prepared. That's why I'm at this school. I want them to be challenged, because I know that I'm wrong in some way.

What are some things that differentiate you guys? We're very intellectually diverse. I've met people of every political persuasion here, from, like, far-left Democrats who are for Bernie Sanders, or to the left of that even, to people who would make Donald Trump look like a liberal. Roughly half the students come from Texas, a third are female. They share academic strength, averaging in the 92nd percentile on the SAT.

Some were accepted at schools like the University of Chicago in Georgetown, but chose UATX for what it is and is not. I remember visiting a college in the northeast of the U.S. and the student guiding me there was like, we have different dorms for different student groups. I didn't want to go to a space that was like that. Why do you think it's important to be at a college where differing views aren't just accepted and tolerated, but welcome? We're actually listening to the other side and understanding each other. And still, we're friends with each other.

I vehemently disagree with many of the things Jacob says, and I think you do, too. I don't want to... It's like what? We still belong pretty well, and it's a beautiful thing. Not exactly the vibe on so many other campuses. Long before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, colleges have been sites of protest and have leaned left. But the atmosphere has intensified over the past decade.

Speakers shouted down. You're not listening. Professors canceled when students feel unheard. End Hamas now! Then the reckoning this past year. J! Campus chaos led first to congressional hearings. Ms. McGill, the fact is that Penn regulates speech that it doesn't like.

Then to the resignation of the presidents at Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. From a historian's point of view, it's terribly important that the United States improves, reforms, revitalizes its universities. Scottish-born, Oxford-educated, and recently knighted, Neil Ferguson is one of the founders of UATX. An historian, also known for his conservative views, Ferguson spent more than a decade as a professor at Harvard and is now a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. You say something is rotten in the state of academia. What do you mean by that? Right up until, I guess, the early 2000s, it still seemed like universities were the places where you could think most freely and speak most freely and take the most intellectual risk. And at some point in the last 10 years, that changed. And it changed in a way that began to stifle free expression.

We came across some data that less than 3% of the Harvard faculty identifies as conservative, more than 75% identifies as liberal. Wildly out of proportion with the American public. There's a huge disconnect now between the academic elite and the average American voter. Ferguson says this political imbalance, plus social media, plus an army of campus administrators monitoring speech, equals a culture where, per one study, nearly 80% of today's students self-censor on campus

for fear of being ostracized. Faculty feels the chill, too. The president of a university I won't name once told me that he received, on average, one e-mail a day from a member of the university community calling for somebody else to be fired for something they'd said. That reminds me vividly of the bad old days of Stalin's Soviet Union, and yet it's happening on American campuses. The stakes are that high. I think if a university

system starts to go wrong, then something is bound to go wrong for the society as a whole. The ideas that start on campus pretty quickly spread to corporations, to media organizations. University forms the way you think about the world for the rest of your life. If our universities are screwed up, and I believe they are, then that will screw up America as a whole quite quickly. In 2021, Ferguson launched UATX with former New York Times journalist Barry Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of data analytics company Palantir, and Pano Canelos, the former president of St. John's College in Maryland. Larry Summers, the former Harvard president and U.S. Treasury secretary under Clinton, became an advisor.

In this ad, they announced they were done waiting for America's universities to fix themselves. UATX received initial approval from the state of Texas and raised nearly $200 million from private donors, in part to cover tuition. Good morning, everyone. Canellos was named president. Our work is to stir up settled ideas. He says that to the detriment of learning, colleges have become echo chambers. What is going on on campuses that are leading you to draw this conclusion?

It's as if people have come to expect that they're just sort of two versions of everything. And therefore, there's a right version and a wrong version, depending on which side you stand. But the truth is that one opinion meeting another opinion shouldn't leave us with two opinions, it should leave us with better opinions. What do you mean by that exactly? The Christian values that we have. To combat fears of saying the wrong thing in class, UATX comes armed with a weapon.

Tell an American audience, what do you mean by Chatham House rule? The Chatham House rule is a great British invention, and it says that if you are a participant in a discussion and you hear an interesting thing said, maybe a controversial thing, you can refer to the information that you've gleaned, but you can't attribute it to a person. People fear that the thing they said that was not not right was politically incorrect ends up on X or for that matter on Instagram. And that which happens in the classroom should stay in the classroom. At UATX, classes are small, seminar style, and based in Western civilization. The Bible, Greek classics. Faculty includes a former Navy captain, a Greek Orthodox

priest, Father Maximus teaches a class on chaos and civilization, and a tech entrepreneur. You're trying to play the Steve Jobs role here, right? There are no on-campus science labs, but founders chose Austin for its booming startup culture, linking students with companies like Elon Musk's Neuralink, How do you take this cutting-edge research... Startup culture, linking students with companies like Elon Musk's Neuralink, and helping the kids sharpen their tech skills and even fund their own ideas. We have both a non-profit and a startup side. To stem the scandalously high costs of higher education, the UATX campus is bare bones. No dorms.

The students live in apartments next to UT undergrads. And no meal plan. Cook for yourselves, kids. The closest thing we found to a college rager? Students learning the Texas two-step. When the guys next door are playing beer pong, and you're reading Aristotle and working with lasers. Playing chess.

Any envy? That's not to say that we're all prudes and we just spend our whole day reading Aristotle. We have fun. As for admissions, UATX swaps DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, for what some call MEI, merit, excellence, and intelligence. Gender, race, ethnicity, what is the factor of that in your admissions decisions? We don't take any of that into consideration in admissions. The primary thing that we're interested in is the mind. Meaning what?

The kind of capacity to think deeply, to answer questions, to challenge norms. I've got to tell you, we did not see a particularly diverse student body. We are putting resources into finding talent of an intellectual variety. And if you're interested in diversity, I recommend you look at the social backgrounds of our students, at the family circumstances of our students, at the family circumstances of our students. High-profile UATX donors include Trump-backing billionaire Bill Ackman, a Harvard grad who vocally criticized his school after October 7th, and Harlan Crowe, close friend of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Critics attack UATX as a right-wing university simply wearing the cloak of free speech. UATX has been called the anti-woke university. Harvard is a liberal university. UATX is going to be a conservative university. Politics should be studied at a university. It shouldn't be the operating system of university. Any university that is identifiably political is not fulfilling its highest mission. Pushback might be, are you going to be too dependent to donors? We've seen on other campuses what happens when the donor class gets dissatisfied. Do you worry about that? If donors are ever pushing us in a way that is not aligned with our mission and that,

somebody's going to call us out on it. And the backers aren't solely from the right. A liberal legal scholar Nadine Strawson was president of the ACLU for nearly 20 years. She is now a UATX advisor. The most important topics of public policy debate are not being candidly and frankly discussed on campus, including abortion, immigration, police practices, anything to do with race and gender. Provided it comes with no serious harm, Strassen argues all speech should be allowed. You think censorship leads to worse outcomes than allowing even the most objectively hateful speech? My concern is to try to eliminate the underlying discriminatory attitudes.

You don't do that by punishing expression. You do that through education, through more speech, not less. Free-range, free speech resonated. When UATX announced its founding, thousands sent in job inquiries. Some of UATX's academics were disciplined, canceled, they may say, at their previous schools. Some of the advisors and faculty came here under some clouds of controversy. I mean, that's not what we're seeking.

I mean, we're not, you know, shelter for... Even for the canceled. Even for people who have canceled. But many of the people who are pushing boundaries in academic culture, let's say in the public sphere, have paid a price for that and still should be heard. UATX's national accreditation won't be decided until the first class has graduated, a standard for new universities.

Meanwhile, applications are open for the second class. Tuition's still free. So is the speech. 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 familiar narrative is that artificial intelligence will take away human jobs. Machine learning will let cars, computers, and chatbots teach themselves, making us humans obsolete.

Well, that's not very likely, and we're going to tell you why. There's a growing global army of millions toiling to make AI run smoothly. They're called humans in the loop—people sorting, labeling, and sifting reams of data to train and improve AI for companies like Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. It's grunt work that needs to be done accurately, fast, and to do it cheaply, it's often farmed out to places like Africa. The robots or the machines, you're teaching them how to think like human and to do things like human. We met Naftali Wambalo in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the main hubs for this kind of work.

It's a country desperate for jobs because of an unemployment rate as high as 67% among young people. So Naftali, father of two, college-educated, with a degree in mathematics, was elated to finally find work in an emerging field, artificial intelligence. You were labeling. I did labeling for videos and images. Naftali and digital workers like him spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching the AI algorithms to recognize them.

You label, let's say, furniture in a house, and you say this is a TV, and labeling them, teaching the AI algorithms to recognize them. You label, let's say, furniture in a house, and you say this is a TV, this is a microwave. So you are teaching the AI to identify these items. Right. And then there was one for faces of people, the color of the face. If it looks like this, this is white. If it looks like this, this is black. This is Asian.

You're teaching the AI to identify them automatically. Humans tag cars and pedestrians to teach autonomous vehicles not to hit them. Humans circle abnormalities to teach AI to recognize diseases. Even as AI is getting smarter, humans in the loop will always be needed because there will always be new devices and inventions that will need labeling. You find these humans in the loop not only here in Kenya, but in other countries thousands of miles from Silicon Valley. In India, the Philippines, Venezuela. Often countries with large, low-wage populations,

well-educated but unemployed. Honestly, it's like modern-day slavery, because it's cheap labor. Whoa, what are you... It's cheap labor. Like modern-day slavery, says Narima Wakil-Ojiwa, a Kenyan civil rights activist, because big American tech companies come here

and advertise the jobs as a ticket to the future. But really, she says, it's exploitation. What we're seeing is an inequality. It sounds so good, an AI job. Is there any job security? The contracts that we see are very short term, and I've seen people who have contracts that are monthly, some of them weekly, some of them days, which is ridiculous.

She calls the workspaces AI sweatshops with computers instead of sewing machines. I think that we're so concerned with creating opportunities, but we're not asking, are they good opportunities? Because every year a million young people enter the job market, the government has been courting tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Intel to come here, promoting Kenya's reputation as the Silicon Savannah, tech-savvy and digitally connected. The president has been really pushing forward opportunities in AI. President? Yes, our president, Ruto.

Yes. The president does have to create at least one million jobs a year, the minimum. So it's a very tight position to be in. To lure the tech giants, Ruto has been offering financial incentives on top of already lax labor laws. But the workers aren't hired directly by the big companies. They engage outsourcing firms, also mostly American, to hire for them. There's a go-between.

Yes. They hire, they pay. I mean, they hire thousands of people. And they are protecting the Facebooks from having their names associated with them. Yes, yes, yes, yes. We're talking about the richest companies on earth. Yes, but then they are paying people peanuts. AI jobs don't pay much?

They don't pay well. They do not pay Africans well enough. And the workforce is so large and desperate that they could pay whatever and have whatever working conditions, and they will have someone who will pick up that job. So what's the average pay for these jobs? It's about $1.50, $2 an hour. $2 per hour, and that is gross before tax. Naftali, Nathan, and Fasika were hired by an American outsourcing company called Sama that employs over 3,000 workers here and hired for Meta and OpenAI.

In documents we obtained, OpenAI agreed to pay Sama $12.50 an hour per worker, much more than the $2 the workers actually got. Though Sama says that's a fair wage for the region. If the big tech companies are going to keep doing this business, they have to do it the right way. So it's not because you realize Kenya is a third world country, you say, this job I would normally pay $30 in US, but because you are Kenya, $2 is enough for you. That idea has to end. Okay, $2 an hour in Kenya, is that low, medium, Is it an okay salary? So for me, I was living paycheck to paycheck. I have saved nothing because it's not enough. Is it an insult?

It is, of course. It is. Why did you take the job? I have a family to feed, and instead of staying home, let me just at least have something to do. And not only did the jobs not pay well, they were draining. They say deadlines were unrealistic, punitive, with often just seconds to complete complicated labeling tasks. Did you see people who were fired just because they complained?

Yes, we were walking on eggshells. They were all hired per project, and say Sama kept pushing them to complete the work faster we were walking on eggshells. They were all hired per project, and say Sama kept pushing them to complete the work faster than the projects required, an allegation Sama denies. Let's say the contract for a certain job was six months, okay? What if you finished in three months? Does the worker get paid for those extra three months? No.

KFC. What? We used to get KFC and Coca-Cola. They used to say, thank you, they gave you a bottle of soda and KFC chicken, two pieces, and that is it. Worse yet, workers told us that some of the projects for Meta and OpenAI were grim and caused them harm. Naftali was assigned to train AI to recognize and weed out pornography,

hate speech, and excessive violence, which meant sifting through the worst of the worst content online for hours on end. I looked at people being slaughtered, people engaging in sexual activity with animals, people abusing children physically, sexually, people committing suicide. All day long? Yes, all day long. Eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. The workers told us they were tricked into this work by ads like this that described these jobs as call center agents to assist our clients' community and help resolve

inquiries empathetically. I was told I was going to do a translation job. Exactly what was the job you were doing? I was basically reviewing content which are very graphic, very disturbing contents. I was watching dismembered bodies or drone attack victims, you name it. You know, whenever I talk about this, I still have, you know, flashbacks. Are any of you a different person than they were before you had this job. Yeah, I find it hard now to even have conversations with people. It's just that I find it easier to cry than to speak. You continue isolating yourself from people.

You don't want to socialize with others. It's you and it's you alone. Are you a different person? Yeah, I'm a different person. I used to enjoy my marriage, especially when it comes to bedroom fireworks. But after the job, I hate sex. You hated sex? After countlessly seeing those sexual activities, pornography on the job that I was doing, I hate sex. Sama says mental health counseling was provided by, quote, fully licensed professionals,

but the workers say it was woefully inadequate. We want psychiatrists. We want psychologists, qualified, who know exactly what we are going through and how they can help us to cope. Trauma experts. Yes. Do you think the big company, Facebook, ChatGPT,

do you think they know how this is affecting the workers? It's their job to know. It's their f***ing job to know. Actually, because they are the ones providing the work. These three and nearly 200 other digital workers are suing Sama and Meta over unreasonable working conditions that caused psychiatric problems. It was proven by a psychiatrist that we are thoroughly sick.

We have gone through a psychiatric evaluation just a few months ago, and it was proven that we are all sick, thoroughly sick. They know that we're damaged, but they don't care. We're humans. Just because we're black or just because we're just vulnerable for now, that doesn't give them the right to just exploit us like this. Sama, which has terminated those projects, would not agree to an on-camera interview. Meta and OpenAI told us they're committed to safe working conditions, including fair wages and access to mental health counseling. Another American AI training company facing criticism in Kenya is Scale AI,

which operates a website called RemoTasks. Did you all work for RemoTasks or work with them? Afantis, Joan, Joy, Michael and Duncan signed up online, creating an account and clicked for work remotely, getting paid per task. Problem is, sometimes the company just didn't pay them. When it gets to the day before payday, they close the account and say that you violated a policy. They say you violated their policy?

Yes. And they don't pay you for the work you've done? Would you say that that's almost common, that you do work and you're not paid for it? And you have no recourse, you have no way to even complain? There's no way. The company says any work that was done in line with our community guidelines was paid out.

In March, as workers started complaining publicly, Remo tasks abruptly shut down in Kenya altogether. There are no labor laws here. Our labor law is about 20 years old. It doesn't touch on digital labor. I do think that our labor laws need to recognize it, but not just in Kenya alone. Because what happens is when we start to push back

in terms of protections of workers, a lot of these companies, they shut down and they move to a neighboring country. It's easy to see how you're trapped. Kenya is trapped. They need jobs so desperately that there's a fear that if you complain, if your government complained, then these companies don't have to come here. Yeah, and that's what they throw at us all the time.

And it's terrible to see just how many American companies are just doing wrong here. Just doing wrong here. And it's something that they wouldn't do at home. So why do it here? The Hot Honey McCrispy is so back at McDonald's. With juicy 100% Canadian-raised seasoned chicken, shredded lettuce, crispy jalapenos, and that completely craveable hot honey sauce, it's a sweet heat repeat you don't want to miss. Get your hot honey McCrispy today. Available for a limited time only at McDonald's. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage

wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines lowrider as a customized car with a chassis that has been lowered so that it narrowly clears the ground. Lowrider also is used to describe the person driving such a vehicle. And both car and driver have long been potent cultural symbols, especially among Mexican Americans. In the 1980s and 90s, many cities passed anti-cruising ordinances because police departments and the public often saw lowriders as menacing, connected to drugs and gangs. It's taken decades, but that perception is finally changing,

and nowhere is the transformation more pronounced than in the lowrider hotbed of northern New Mexico. The ride will be a little bit rough. That's okay. That's what hydraulics is. But we look cool. On Good Friday, 2024, we're cruising down Riverside Drive in Española, New Mexico, with Eppie Martinez and his family in his 1953 Chevy Bel Air, his pride and joy. You gotta have your siren, you gotta have your siren. He's been cruising this road in this vintage car since he was a kid with his dad at the wheel, and Good Friday has long been the day for local lowriders. This is the grand opening of spring,

you know, so everybody look forward. As you can see today, oh my God, you're going to blow my mind. Definitely. Martinez is leading a candy-colored caravan of cars from his Viejitos car club. That's Old Men in Spanish. Española calls itself the low-rider capital of the world. And on Good Friday the Viejitos were joined by lowriders from many other local car clubs for a chrome and tail fin celebration of their culture. Some were shining up and staying put to be admired, while others showed off the crazy hydraulic gymnastics low riders are known for. Among New Mexico's low riders, Eppie Martinez is known as

the man who makes cars do that. So people come to you to have the hydraulics put in their car? Yes, yes, yes, exactly. How many have you done? Oh, I've done over 500, probably. The hydraulics in his own precious 53 Bel Air are fairly modest. We got ourselves here something not too much. I got two pumps set up. It's mostly aircraft. This is aircraft technology. Exactly, but...

In this old car. Exactly. Those hydraulic pumps, designed to operate aircraft flaps and landing gear, are controlled by switches at the driver's seat. See? So that's really, that's all it really does. It doesn't go too much because, you know, I don't want to hurt it. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Over the years, Martinez has installed hydraulics that seem guaranteed to hurt cars, turning them into what lowriders call hoppers that drew competitors and crowds to this Española parking lot on Good Friday to see who could jump highest. Whether they hopped to the sky or sat ever so low to the ground, each lowrider we saw that day seemed to say, here I am. It's an expression of who you are, so it's kind of an extension of your personality. De Lubina and Eric Montoya were there with their 1947 Chevrolet Fleetmaster convertible. It's sleek, it's classic, it's beautiful. It's kind of me.

It's round, it's shapey, it's shiny. It's me. Lowriders are all about that, right? They're the car amongst cars. They're going to be the one that pops. Patricia Trujillo is an Espanola native, a college professor, and deputy cabinet secretary of New Mexico's Department of Higher Education. She told us the roots of the lowrider culture here stretch back to just after World War II. You had many Mexican-Americans going into the army and then coming back and still being treated as second-class citizens. And so a lot of those people basically created this counterculture to be able to speak back and say, we belong here too. It's almost like a saunter or a swagger in vehicle form, right? It's sort of like embracing the Americanness, the car culture.

Yes. But making it your own and saying, I'm part of America, but I'm not part of this mainstream. I'm doing my own thing here. Yeah, and we are our own thing. So low and slow instead of fast and furious. Yes, absolutely. These are Buicks and Pontiacs and Chevys from the glory days of Detroit. Customized with elaborate interiors, intricate engraving,

and kaleidoscopic colors in the paint jobs. The over-the-top style isn't for everyone, but these cars are all labors of love, whether do-it-yourself jobs or those restored by professionals for tens of thousands of dollars. This ends up about 100 coats of material when it's all said and done. 100 coats of paint. 100 coats of paint. 100 coats of paint. Rob Vanderslice is a legendary painter from Albuquerque and a rare gringo in New Mexico's lowrider world.

Why not utilize the tape before you end up with a nice little point through the middle? Famous for using tape and spray paint to lay down layers of different colors, as he demonstrates in weekly YouTube tutorials. We're talking hours and hours, and it just is a beautiful breakup of like a darker orange, a medium orange, and then a light orange. It's kind of a fan of colors. Vanderslice started painting lowriders in the late 1980s.

That's just about when gangster rap artists popularized the cars in music videos. That contributed to a public impression of lowriders as connected to gangs and drugs. Back in the day, were most of your clients involved with gangs and drugs? Back then, I did a car for just about every gang you could think, you know what I mean? Vanderslice himself had a years-long addiction to crystal meth while he was making a name for himself painting all those cars. Congratulations on being clean. Thank you. How long?

13 years clean now. How'd you do it? Got in trouble. I'm a three-time convicted felon. And the last time I just said, you know what, I'm done. His personal rehabilitation parallels the path traveled by New Mexico's lowriders. Counterculture rebels turned gangsters now steadily rolling into the mainstream. So you have gone from painting cars for gangs to painting cars for the Albuquerque Police Department.

Right, right. That's a big leap. Yeah, that's a huge leap. In the lowrider's leap, Patricia Trujillo remembers a particular pivot. In the plaza in Santa Fe, lowriding had been banned for many years. Santa Fe is the capital of New Mexico and its artistic center. So when the city's mayor not only dropped the ban on cruising,

but declared a low-rider day in 2016, Trujillo says cars slow rolled in by the hundreds. There was this real shift in culture in that moment of recognizing lowriders as an important part of our heritage, an important part of the artistry of our communities, and I really feel like that marked a new moment in New Mexico. So we're all a family. Joanne and Arthur Medina, everyone calls him Lolo,

personify the morphing of Lowrider's image in the Espanola Valley. She was in junior high school when they met more than 40 years ago. As we were driving into Espanola, I'm like, oh my gosh, look at that car. And then I was like, look at the guy in it. I told my aunt. Was his car better than everybody else's car? We don't like to compete with people, but yeah. It stood out more.

It stood out more, a lot more. You can see it from miles. That car is still in a makeshift museum full of lowriders outside their home, with a few in the yard awaiting makeovers. Lolo's masterpiece, covered front, back, and sides with murals depicting the life of Jesus, was being repainted the day we were there. Is your car making a statement? Yes. Yes. And what's that statement? It's our fishing net. Wherever we take our cars, people are drawn to his artwork.

People are drawn to what we've done to the cars and who we are, and people know us from all over. So it draws people in. It draws people. But if drawing attention was once the only goal, they're now using that attention to help kids and serve their community. Words now, we're saying family, community, faith. In the past, words associated with lowriders were gangs,

drugs, and crime. Yes, that's very true. What changed? I think what changed in a big way is that we started being out more in the community to kind of volunteer. We're always here to encourage. We're always here to help. We saw a need for the homeless,

and I said, okay, let's do a coat drive and a clothing drive. Man, we got five huge truckloads of jackets and clothes and shoes. Is it almost as simple as the original lowriders have just grown out of their rebellious ways? I wouldn't say they've grown out of rebellion. I think that they've redefined it.

So what's the definition of rebellion now? Rebellion now is healing to be that beacon of hope, right? Española needs hope. With rates of poverty, crime, and drug addiction well above state and national averages, despair is part of the landscape. A lot of our kids are from broken homes. Ben Sandoval is director of the YMCA Teen Center in Española. There's drugs. There's bad influences.

What we try to do through the Teen Center is to provide them a safe place. In 2023, Sandoval got a grant from the DEA, yes, the Drug Enforcement Administration, for a project to build low-rider bicycles. How does that help with the at-risk kids? First of all, it gives them an opportunity to say, hey, I've got to get to the teen center after school every Wednesday. They have to feel that they're valued and their role as the engineer, as the designer, as the designer, as the planner.

They do it all. The finished bikes were so creative, so impressive, the prestigious Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe mounted a special exhibition to put them on display. It really is quite beautiful art these kids have created. Thank you. It's remarkable. It was just this vibrant buzz of happiness in the room during the opening.

Yeah, the kids hadn't seen them like this before. No, never. And I'd sit back with three or four youth and I'd say, look at that. They're taking pictures of your bike. That's what you did. Car shows now feature low-rider bicycles with trophies for the best. Same for kids with radio-controlled cars that tilt and bounce. And the fanciest car shows rival any museum display. Now when you see cruises, it literally can feel like

a moving art exhibit, right? As you're watching it go by. A moving art exhibit. That's pretty good. Joanne Medina's artwork is a glittering Grand Prix. She and Lolo loved showing it off for us on an afternoon cruise in the hills above Española. All cars have a different style when you're cruising them.

This one, I have to tell you, is eye-catching. Thank you. That's what I wanted. Next Sunday on 60 Minutes, a unique first look at the rebirth of one of the world's great treasures, the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. After a devastating fire nearly destroyed Notre Dame in 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron immediately promised to have it open again within five years. A lot of people called him crazy, but he's about to keep that

promise. How are you? We met Macron at Notre Dame as workers scurried to complete the job. It's impressive and very moving to see that we still have dozens of people working hard

to finish the job. When 60 Minutes returns next week, we'll bring you inside. I'm Bill Whitaker. Happy Thanksgiving.