60 Minutes - 3/27/2022: Talking to the Past, One Small Step

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

Is it possible to speak with a Holocaust survivor who passed away years ago? With the help of artificial intelligence, Lesley Stahl finds out. Norah O'Donnell sits down with Dave Isay, founder of the "One Small Step" program. He hopes to bridge the political divide. 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

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. On this special edition of 60 Minutes Presents, capturing history.

Can you sing me a song from your youth? Tonight, a story of history, hope, survival, and resilience, which has its roots in another time when the world was convulsed by crisis, World War II. Aaron, tell us what your parents did before the war. They owned and operated a butcher shop. This interview was unlike any we have ever done. Keep your mentality. Keep your mentality. Keep your soul. Keep your mind. Incredibly, Aaron Elster, a Holocaust survivor, died four years ago. What's the weather like today? I'm actually recording. I cannot answer that question. I'm here because

I thought I want to be a part of a better world for our children and our grandchildren. I can't save the whole world, but I can do my part. What would happen if you put Americans from opposite sides of the political spectrum across from one another and ask them to talk? Have a look at something called One Small Step. People feel misunderstood and judged. You know, nobody has ever, in the history of humanity, nobody's ever changed their mind because by being called an idiot or a moron or a snowflake.

I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Werthein. I'm Nora O'Donnell. I'm Leslie Stahl. Those stories tonight.

But first, Holly Williams with the latest from Ukraine this evening. This past week, Ukrainians marked a month since Vladimir Putin launched his brutal invasion of their country, bombarding its cities and killing more than a thousand civilians, according to the United Nations. More than half of this country's children have now fled their homes, according to the UN. But Russia's ground invasion has been stymied by Ukrainian counterattacks. The Russians are stalled outside the capital, Kyiv. Between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian troops have been killed, according to a NATO official. Moscow even suggested on Friday it may now have more limited goals,

focused on Ukraine's Far East. Ukraine's resistance is being fuelled by tens of thousands of volunteers signing up to fight. At a military base this past week, we met some of those new recruits. And they showed us their armory, boosted by weapons sent by NATO countries. But they want more. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky asked NATO member states this past week for one percent of their aircraft and tanks. Here in the city of Dmitry, we found Serhii Melnik sifting through the wreckage of what was his house until it was destroyed by Russian airstrikes earlier this month. His daughter Katya was killed, leaving behind a one-year-old baby girl.

President Biden, who's now back in Washington, condemned Russia's leader in Poland yesterday, saying, quote, this man cannot remain in power. I'm Holly Williams in Dmitryuk, Ukraine, for 60 Minutes. Good evening. Welcome to 60 Minutes Presents. I'm Lesley Stahl. Tonight, capturing history. We'll look at two projects that do just that. Later, Norah O'Donnell visits StoryCorps' Dave Isay as he works to change the harsh and hostile tone of America's political debate, one conversation at a time. But we begin with a project to bring history to life in a way we'd never seen before. Most survivors of World War II's Nazi concentration camps are now in their 80s and 90s,

and soon there will be no one left who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand, no one to answer questions or bear witness to future generations. But as we first reported two years ago, a new and dramatic effort is underway to change that by harnessing the technologies of the present and the future to keep alive the ability to talk to and get answers from the past. Hi, Aaron. Hello. Can I ask you some questions? You can ask me anything you want, within reason.

Our interview with Holocaust survivor Aaron Elster, who spent two years of his childhood hidden in a neighbor's attic, was unlike any interview we have ever done. Aaron, tell us what your parents did before the war. They owned and operated a butcher shop. It wasn't the content of the interview that was so unusual. Where did you live? I was born in a small town in Poland called Sokow Podlaskie. It's the fact that this interview was with a man who was no longer alive. Aaron Elster died four years ago. What's the weather like today? I'm actually recording.

I cannot answer that question. The survivors were getting very old. Heather Mayo came up with the idea for this project. She had worked on exhibits featuring Holocaust survivors for years and wanted future generations to have the same opportunity to interact with them as she'd had. I wanted to talk to a Holocaust survivor like I would today with that person sitting right in front of me and we were having a conversation. She knew that back in the 90s. After making the film Schindler's List,

Steven Spielberg created a foundation named for the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, Shoah, to film and collect testimonies from as many survivors as possible. They have interviewed nearly 55,000 of them so far and have stored them at the University of Southern California. But Mayo dreamed of something more dynamic, being able to actively converse with survivors after they're gone. And she figured in the age of artificial intelligence tools like Siri and Alexa, the technology had to be creatable. I've been involved in interviewing Holocaust survivors for over 20 years. She brought the idea to Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah

Foundation, and now her husband. He loved it, but some of his colleagues weren't so sure. One of them looked at me, she was like, you want to talk to dead people? And you said yes, because that's the point. That's the point. Well, maybe people thought you're turning the Holocaust into something maybe hokey. Yeah. They said that you're going to Disney-fy the Holocaust. We had a lot of pushback on this project. Is it the right thing to do?

What about the well-being of the survivors? Are we trying to keep them alive beyond their death? Everyone had questions except for one group of people, the survivors themselves, who said, Where do I sign up? I would like to participate in this project. No barriers to entry. The first survivor they signed up to do a trial run was a man named

Pincus Guter, who was born in Poland and deported to the Majdanek concentration camp with his parents and twin sister Sabina at the age of 11. He's the only one who survived. They flew Pincus from his home in Toronto to Los Angeles and asked him to sit inside this. So you're in this dome? Yeah, I call it the sphere, they call it the dome, and then eventually it was called a bubble. A bubble surrounding him with lights and more than 20 cameras. What's our f-stop? The goal was to future-proof the interviews so that as technology advances and 3D hologram-like projection becomes the norm, they'll have all the necessary angles. So the very first day we went to film Pinchas, we had these ultra high-speed cameras that were all linked together and synced together to make this video of him. So we sit down and they press record,

nothing happens. So Pincus is sitting there with 6,000 LED lights on him and cameras that don't work. Can I go back to sleep now? Sunglasses shielded his eyes. When are we going to start? I was bored sitting in that chair, so I started singing to myself. So suddenly Stephen had this idea. Oh, he's singing. We're going to record some songs of his. He was such a good sport. He was a really good sport.

Eventually, the cameras rolled, and Pincus was asked to come back to the bubble for the real thing. How long were you in that chair? A whole week from 9 to 5. A week? We were there with breaks for lunch, but I was there from 9 to 5 answering questions. Oh my gosh. It took so long because they asked him nearly 2,000 questions.

The idea was to cover every conceivable question anyone might ever want to ask him. Did you have to look exactly the same? I had to wear the same clothes, and I had three pairs of the same jackets, the same shirts, the same trousers, the same shoes. Every morning... Pincus can now be seen in those shirts, trousers, and shoes at Holocaust museums in Dallas, Indiana, and here at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie, outside Chicago, where visitors can ask him their own questions. What kept you going or what gave you hope while you were experiencing hardship in the camps? We did hope that the Nazis would lose the war. Pincus' image is projected onto an 11-foot high screen. What we see here...

Smith joined us to explain how the technology works. So what's happening is all of the answers to the questions that Pincus gave go into a database. Then when you ask a question, the algorithm is looking through all of the database. Do I have an answer to that? And then it'll bring back what it thinks is the closest answer to your question. I'm going to try talking to Pincus. Yes. All right. Did you have a happy childhood? I had a very happy childhood. My parents were winemakers. My father started teaching me to become a winemaker when I was three and a half years old. And by the age of five,

I could already read and I could already write. Wow, you're very smart. Thank you. I've noticed there's a little jiggle right before Pinker starts to talk. What is that? What you're seeing here isn't a human being. It's video clips that are being butted up to each other and played. And as it searches and brings the clip in,

you're seeing a little bit of a jump cut. The jump cuts stopped being distracting once we started talking about the fate of Pincus' family. Tell us what happened when you got to the camp. As soon as we arrived there, we were being separated into different groups. And my sister was somehow pushed towards the children. And I saw her.

She must have spotted my mother. So she ran towards my mother. I saw my mother. And she hugged her. And since that time, all I can remember whenever I think of my sister is her long, big, long, blonde braid. That was the last time he saw his twin sister, Sabina. He learned later that day that she and both his parents had been killed in the gas chambers. Pincus was alone at age 11, put to work as a slave laborer. Did you ever see anybody killed? Unfortunately, I saw many people die in front of my eyes. I wasn't sure how a recording would handle what I wanted to ask Pincus next.

How can you still have faith in God? How can you possibly not believe in God? Well, how did he let this happen? God gave human beings the knowledge of right and wrong, and he allowed them to do what they wished on this earth, to find their own way. To my mind, when God sees what human beings are up to, especially things like genocide, he weeps. Wow. Stephen, I could ask him questions for 10 hours. And on the screen.

Yeah. Since Pincus Guter was filmed, the Shoah Foundation has recorded interviews with dozens more Holocaust survivors, each for a full week. And they've shrunk the setup required, so they can take a mobile rig on the road to record survivors close to where they live. They've deliberately chosen interview subjects with all different wartime experiences. Survivors of Auschwitz, hidden children, and as we saw last fall in New Jersey, 93-year-old Alan Moskin, who isn't a Holocaust survivor. He was a liberator. Entering that camp was the most horrific sight I've ever seen or ever hoped to see the rest of my life. Moskin was an 18-year-old private when his army unit liberated a little-known

concentration camp called Goonskirchen. There was a pile of skeleton-like bodies on the left. There was another pile of skeleton-like bodies on the right. Those poor souls, that's the term my lieutenant kept screaming, oh my God, look at these poor souls. Each of Alan Moskin's answers is then isolated by a team of researchers at the Shoah Foundation office. I remember the expression and the attitude of all of us.

What in the freak, what is this God Almighty? Who add into the system a variety of questions people might ask to trigger that response. For every question that we asked, there are 15 different ways of asking the same question. And that's fed in. And that's all manual. Editors rotate the image, turn the green screen background into black, and then a long process of testing begins, some of it in schools. So, Mr. Pincus, on your screen.

Students are asked to try it out, ask whatever questions they want, and see if the system calls up the correct answer. How did you find out that your city was getting invaded by Germany? Would you ever want to seek revenge? How did you feel about your family? Can you rephrase that, please? Every question and response is then reviewed. We log every single question that's asked of the system Can you rephrase that, please? Every question and response is then reviewed.

We log every single question that's asked of the system and see if there is a better response that addresses that question more directly. As we discovered, it's still a work in progress. Tell us about your family when you were a little boy. How about you ask me about life after the war? So a couple of things about artificial intelligence. It is mainly artificial and not so intelligent. Just yet, for now. But the beauty of artificial intelligence is it develops over time. So we aren't changing the content. All the answers remain the same. But over time, the range of questions that you can ask will be enhanced considerably. And you had to stay silent?

Questions to draw out what it was like for Aaron Elster hiding in that attic 75 years ago. I used to pray to God to let me live till I was 25. I wanted to taste what adulthood would be like. The rest of that conversation with Aaron Elster, as well as one with a survivor of Joseph Mengele's infamous twin experiments at Auschwitz, when we come back. So, am I a lucky guy? Yes, I am. 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 whole point of the Shoah Foundation's project is to allow meaningful conversations with Holocaust survivors to

continue even after the survivors themselves are gone. And of the more than 50 men and women who participated so far, six have passed away already. Tonight, we wanted to share conversations with two of them, conversations that at times felt so normal, we could almost forget we were talking to the digital image of someone who was no longer living. First, a spunky, four-foot-nine-inch-tall woman named Eva Kaur, an identical twin who, together with her sister, survived Auschwitz, and the notorious experiments of Dr. Joseph Mengele. Eva Korr spent her life after the war in Terre Haute, Indiana. She died in the summer of 2019 at the age of 85.

Hi, Eva. How are you today? I'm fine. And how are you? I'm good. It felt natural to answer her question before posing my own. So how old were you when you went to Auschwitz? When I arrived in Auschwitz, I was 10 years old, and I stayed in Auschwitz until liberation, which was about nine months later when we were liberated. So we made a little announcement about the fact

we were starting this project. I get a call the next day from a lady called Eva Kor. I didn't know her at that point in time, and she says, I want to be one of those 3D interviews. I want to be a hologram. Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, and his wife and colleague, Heather Mayo Smith, were running the project. I said, well, I'm traveling. I'm very sorry. Where are you going?

Well, I've got to go to New York. I'm going to D.C. When are you going to go to D.C.? I'm going to D.C. Turns out we were going to the same event in D.C. I arrive at my hotel. She's sitting in the lobby waiting for me. When Eva, on the right, and her twin sister Miriam arrived at Auschwitz, they were pulled away from their parents and older sisters and taken to a barrack full of twins. They never saw their family again. Fifty years ago, at a railroad site...

Sixty minutes reported on Mengele's twin experiments in a story back in 1992. And we actually interviewed the living Eva Kor at her home in Terre Haute. Eva told us then about becoming extremely sick after an injection. Mengele came in every morning and every evening with four other doctors and he declared very sarcastically laughing, too bad she's so young, she has only two weeks to live. When I heard that, I knew he was right and I immediately made a silent pledge that I will prove you, Dr. Mengele, wrong. Imagine picking up a conversation almost 30 years later and after Eva's death. Eva, tell us about Dr. Mengele. what was he like? He had a gorgeous face, a movie star face, and very pleasant, actually.

Dark hair, dark eyes. When I looked into his eyes, I could see nothing but evil. People say that the eyes are the center of the soul, and in Mengele's case, that was correct. Eva and Miriam are visible in footage taken by the Soviet forces that liberated Auschwitz 77 years ago. They went back to the camp many times, Eva continuing to go even after Miriam's death in 1993. Because if the train came in that direction... after Miriam's death in 1993. It was on one of those visits that Eva made a stunning announcement that she had decided to forgive her Nazi captors. She came under blistering attack from other survivors.

How can you forgive? How is that possible? My forgiveness does not mean that I forget what happened, which is impossible. My forgiveness is an act of self-healing, self-liberation, and self-empowerment. Are you able to forgive, Aaron? I cannot forgive. Aaron Elster disagrees. For them to get forgiveness,

they have to ask my little sister, Sarah, whom they brutally murdered. I have no right to forgive, and I will not forgive. What's important for me in this project is that we have Holocaust survivors who have different points of view about God and religion and faith and forgiveness, and that's what this project will allow us to do. Aaron Elster, unlike many Holocaust survivors, never spent time in a concentration camp. As Jews were being rounded up in his town's marketplace

and sent to Treblinka, his father told him to run. He was nine years old. And I managed to crawl into the sewer that ran along the marketplace, the street, and kept crawling till I felt I was out of sight, stood up and started running. He made it to the building of an older Polish couple named the Gurskis, who'd been customers at his family's butcher shop. He shows up, and she didn't want to take him. He started crying, and then she led him upstairs. Aaron, how long did you stay in the attic?

I lived in that attic for close to two years. Two years with just one visit a day to bring food and water. What was it like in the attic? Oh, there's so many things that I remember. The hunger, the fear, the absolute total loneliness. What do you do all day? You're sitting there. I used to catch flies out of desperation and tear their wings off so they wouldn't fly away. So I hid them there. How did you survive? How did you survive in that attic? I had the ability to daydream. I used to write novels in my head. I was the hero all the time. And we have that ability to either give in to our misery and our pain and die,

or absorb the physical pain but keep your mentality, keep your soul, keep your mind. So was I bored? Was I scared? Was I in need of somebody to accept me or to tell me that I'm okay, that I'm a nice kid, sure. But that was not part of my life. We got a phone call to say that Aaron Elster had suddenly passed away. I was at a conference at that time. So the next morning I went into the little room that we had and I turned on Aaron Elster's testimony.

And I realized I was gonna be the first person ever to click that little button and ask a question of somebody who was no longer alive. And for the next six hours, people came in and out of that room. His funeral had not yet taken place, and yet the legacy was already continuing, and it was a very powerful and touching moment. You're good. You're doing great. A touching moment that may soon be available to others

beyond the community of Holocaust survivors. They're going to come in and they're going to have you look. Heather Mayo-Smith says in the process of developing and testing this technology, she was barraged with inquiries. There wasn't one person, literally not one, that didn't ask me if they could do a similar interview with either a loved one, for themselves. Unrelated to the Holocaust. Unrelated, completely unrelated. Can I do this with someone that I know? What's the answer?

Yes. She has started an independent company that's trying to expand the use of this technology. I was an astronaut for NASA. Recording interviews with other historical figures like astronauts, and eventually with anyone at all. What unit were you in during World War II? So do you think that this is just going to be a tool that people use? Everybody will be recording their histories. Interactively.

And other people can interview them. Mm-hmm. It'll just be life. Yeah. We're going to go ahead and get started. For now, though, the race is on to capture interviews with as many Holocaust survivors as possible while there's still time, so the conversations can continue, always always with people like Aaron Elster. Do you want revenge?

When I was a youngster, I wanted revenge very, very, very much. And I hate it. I hate it. But most of the perpetrators, most of the killers are dead. So who am I going to hate? The grandchildren that had nothing to do with? It's not right. Revenge is not part of my life, not part of my thinking.

You know, here you have these people who were basically destined to be annihilated, that they survived as a miracle, but they were supposed to be murdered, killed, and now they have immortality. They were not supposed to have a name. They were supposed to be destroyed for all time. And now, through this program, they will be able to continue to answer questions hundreds of years after the Nazis have gone. It's that never forget. We've had a lot of cliches around the Holocaust, you know, never again, never forget, we must remember, all this sort of thing. What this does, it makes sure that there isn't closure because it's not about a statement.

It's not about a particular thing that's being instructed of you. The onus is on you to ask the questions. The onus is on you to be curious and to want to know. And so in a sense, it turns the learning on its head and says, I'm not going to tell you what the lessons of the Holocaust are. I'm not going to tell you what the Holocaust means. But if you want to find out, then you can ask. It's so terribly important.

So there we were at a special moment in time when the living Pincus Guter could talk to the one who will live forever. Would you ask you a question for us? I will ask the one which is my favorite. OK. Can you sing me a song from your youth? You want me to sing it for you? Yes, please. What does that mean?

What is the song? Is it a happy song? Yeah, it's a happy song. It's like a brother and a sister, which of course my twin sister, are traveling in the woods or on the road and they can't get over how beautiful the world is. Oh, my God.

SINGING IN GERMAN On January 6th last year, when an angry mob tried and failed to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election, the insurrection's only success was to further polarize a country already divided. This past January, Nora O'Donnell introduced us to someone attempting to bridge that divide. Dave Isay has created a program called One Small Step to get Americans from across the political spectrum to stop demonizing one another and start communicating face-to-face, one conversation at a time. One small step grew out of StoryCorps, the oral history project Dave Isay founded 18 years ago.

It has taped more than a half a million Americans telling their stories to become the largest single collection of human voices ever recorded with one aim at its core. What if we just give the entire country the chance to be listened to and have a chance to talk about, you know, who they are? Do you think part of the problem we're having in America is that people are so angry because they don't feel like anybody's listening to them? Yeah, I think people feel misunderstood and judged and heard. You know, nobody has ever, in the history of humanity, nobody's ever changed their mind

because by being called an idiot or a moron or a snowflake. But, you know, many minds have been changed by being listened to, by conversation, being told that they're loved. Something that we would all consider maybe so simple is so powerful. Yeah, being told that all of our stories matter equally and infinitely is something everyone needs to hear. Dave Isay seems to always be listening, always taking notes, even during our interview.

He told us journalism should be a public service and now hopes that one small step can help end what he calls the culture of contempt that is tearing apart the country. The situation is so bad that, you know, if the culture of contempt wins, things are just not going to end well for the United States. What's fueling the culture of contempt? It's media. It's social media. I mean, there's a multi, multi, multi-billion dollar hate industrial complex where people, you know, can make money by making us hate and fear each other. It's a little bit of a David and Goliath fight here. Long before he started StoryCorps in one small step, DeVise fought to tell stories

of the forgotten by making radio documentaries in flophouses, coal mines, and public housing projects. I need you guys from here on in to be like really on top of stuff. He first appeared on 60 Minutes nearly 25 years ago in a story with Leslie Stahl about two teenagers from Chicago who made their own documentary with his help. The pair won a Peabody Award, one of the highest honors in broadcasting. Thank you. In 2003, he got the idea for StoryCorps. Everybody, my family, everybody thought it was absolutely insane. You know, we started with a booth in Grand Central Terminal, and it's a very simple idea. You come to the booth with your grandmother, with anyone you want to honor by listening to them. So people think of it as if I had 40 minutes left to live, what would I say to this person who means so much to me?

To attract people, he reached out to the People's Library, specifically the director of the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center. And I said, I'm going to try and record the whole country. Will you accept the materials? And she said those magical three letters, yes. And that was it. And here we are. The StoryCorps archive is in good company at what is the largest library in the world. Other treasures here include a rare Gutenberg Bible, as well as a draft of the Declaration of Independence, handwritten by Thomas Jefferson, and a preliminary draft of President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

Dr. Carla Hayden serves as the Librarian of Congress. Until recently, it was a lifetime appointment, so only 14 people have held the job since 1802. How does having StoryCorps here fit into your vision for the Library of Congress? StoryCorps is an important part of adding history and context and the individuals who make history, not just the ones that we see on the news, but the people who were part of the fabric of our American life, the everyday people. What did they feel?

What did they believe? To try to find out, StoryCorps rolled out a mobile booth in 2005 to travel the country. They also launched partnerships and story collection programs in multiple American cities. This is Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps. When the pandemic hit, they created a new way for people to submit stories online.

Share your interview far and wide and know that someday, future generations will be listening. Every Friday for the last 16 years, National Public Radio sends one story into the homes, headphones, and cars of six million people. Hey, it's Friday, which is when we hear from StoryCorps. We were recently at NPR's Washington studio to hear Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep introduce the story of Miguel Encinus, a decorated fighter pilot who passed away in 2016 at the age of 92. He served as a U.S. military

pilot in World War II and Korea and Vietnam. Two of his children, Isabel and Juan Pablo Encinus, came to StoryCorps to remember him. When I was little, I remember him flying in in his fighter jet and us waiting for him on the tarmac and thinking, oh my God, what a hero my father is. As he got older, he was diagnosed with dementia. But even at the end when he cognitively wasn't all there, he would hear a plane and just look up and stare at it in the sky. And you could tell that he just wanted to be up in that plane with every ounce of his being. Maybe he's listening to us somewhere up there. I hope so. Sometimes in an interview, you can almost see sparks flying out of someone's mouth.

There's just this kind of magnificence and grace to the story. And those are the ones where you just, it almost demands to be shared with a larger audience. In 2010, StoryCorps began to animate conversations to be viewed by new audiences online, like this one recorded in Mississippi between Albert Sykes and his nine-year-old son, Aiden. Are you proud of me? Of course. You're my man.

I just love everything about you, period. The thing I love about you, you never give up on me. That's one of the things I will always remember about my dad. Have you thought about selling Kleenexes? You could make a lot of money. We always wanted to get Kleenex as a sponsor, but they've never agreed. Only a tiny fraction of StoryCorps' hundreds of thousands of stories

ever make it onto the radio. They're selected by StoryCorps' facilitators, who make up the actual core of StoryCorps. Once I press record, we're going to have you introduce yourselves. Facilitators are trained in both the art and the technical aspects of story collection. Wonderful. Jason Reynolds serves on StoryCorps' board of directors.

He's also one of the most popular and celebrated young adult authors in the country. Sixteen years ago, fresh out of college, he was a facilitator who conducted close to 300 StoryCorps sessions over 18 months. I felt like I was privy to something special, something sacred, you know, and something that would last forever. And no one would know that I'm in the room, right? But I was in the room for some of the most beautiful tales I've ever heard. So it sounds like what you heard in the booth is very different than what people may hear on the radio. Absolutely.

Sometimes, you know, you can almost hear the anxiety of it all. And other times, you can hear the gentle tenderness of human beings. I think StoryCorps and the facilitators, they get to see, you know, who we really are as Americans. And it's not what you see on 24-hour news. Around the time of the 2016 presidential election, Dave Isay says he got the idea for a new kind of StoryCorps that could perhaps help unite a country becoming increasingly divided.

He decided to call it One Small Step. What's the difference between regular StoryCorps and One Small Step? So every regular StoryCorps interview are people who know and love each other. And every One Small Step interview are strangers. And in the case of One Small Step, it's people who are across a political divide. After you read each other's bios, I'm going to ask, why did you want to do the interview today? So we match strangers who disagree politically to put them face to face for 50 minutes. It's not to talk about politics. It's just to talk

about your lives. Facilitators begin by asking the participants to read one another's biography out loud, as in this recent session in Richmond, Virginia. The project tries to match people who may be from different political parties, but have something else in common. Hi, I grew up as an army brat and an evangelical Christian, surrounded by a very powerful ideology of conservatism, patriotism, and religion. I am a Baptist pastor and performance artist, a native Charlottesvillian, graduate of the University of Virginia and Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Participants are encouraged to focus on what they share. We're pastors and we're helping people to find their path and find their voice.

Oh, Brenda, I love what you just said about helping people find their path because I feel such a connection there. The format is derived from a psychological concept developed in the 1950s called contact theory. Which says that when you have two people who are enemies and you put them face to face under very, very specific conditions, and they have a conversation and a kind of visceral, emotional experience with each other, that hate can melt away, and people can see each other in a new way. I'm here because I thought I want to be a part of a better world for our children and our grandchildren.

Yeah. Yeah. I can't save the whole world, but I can do my part where I am. And dang nab it, I'm going to. One Small Step just crossed the not-so-small milestone of completing 1,000 sessions, and there are over 6,000 people on the waiting list. So I'm just going to give you a quick rundown on what's been going on with One Small Step since we last spoke. Once a month, Dave Isay meets with what he calls One Small Step's brain trust.

It includes social psychology professors from Yale and Columbia, former political advisors from both the right and the left. I like how you can't tell who's a Democrat and who's a Republican. And pollsters who found data to support the idea that there is an exhausted majority in America. They're tired, they're scared, they're sick of the division, and they want to figure out a way out. And we've got to figure out, we've got to give them a way out. Dave Isay makes it a point to venture outside of StoryCorps' home turf on NPR

to increase the project's reach. I have no idea what your politics are, which is one of the reasons I like you so much, because I don't think you are primarily political. You're really interested in bringing people together. You actively seek out media outlets that appeal to conservatives like Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck. Yeah. You know, I think what makes One Small Step special

is that all of us believe in every cell of our body that there is a flame of good in you, whether you're liberal or whether you're conservative. And our job is to fan that flame until it becomes a roaring fire. I take my hat off to Dave. I think once more he's proving that, like, he's willing to walk the walk.

When you heard about the One Small Step initiative, what did you think? It is very, very difficult for us to hate one another. When I'm looking you in the face and we're talking about what we like to cook our children for dinner, and we're talking about how difficult it is to get our babies into college,

it isn't an easy fix. It isn't some kind of hocus-pocus, you know, kumbaya, it's all fine. It isn't any of that. He knows that. But somebody got to do something. Our dream with One Small Step is that we convince the country that it's our patriotic duty to see the humanity in people with whom we disagree. It's going to take a lot of stories to bring this country together.

We're banking on a bit of a miracle here. You just don't give up. I'm Leslie Stahl. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back next week with a brand new edition of 60 Minutes.