60 Minutes - 7/26/2015: "The Gaskos", Wikimania, Star-Struck

Episode Date: July 27, 2015

FBI agents tell Steve Kroft about their 16-year search and eventual capture of Boston mobster Whitey Bulger; then, Morley Safer meets the Wikipedians; and, Charlie Rose profiles astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. 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

Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $5. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, English muffin sandwiches, value iced coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. That's the apartment. That corner on the third floor. The apartment belonged to Boston mobster and longtime fugitive Whitey Bulger, then the most

wanted man in America. Bulger eluded the FBI for 14 years by hiding in plain sight in Santa Monica, California. Tonight, you'll hear from the agents who finally caught him with some help from an alley cat and his girlfriend's breast implants. We just rushed him. He means guns out, FBI, don't move. I asked him to identify himself and that didn't go over well. He asked me to FN identify myself and I asked him, I said, are you Whitey Bulger? He said yes. Over 200 times a second, half a billion times a month, somebody clicks on Wikipedia. It's the greatest argument settler wrought by man, or at least the fastest, perfectly suited to our era of instant gratification. You created one of the most successful websites in the world, and yet you chose to make it the least profitable.

It just felt right that we should be a charity, free knowledge for everyone. So that's always been our philosophy. Here is something you haven't seen before, an astrophysicist on stage in a sold-out auditorium. Neil deGrasse Tyson is reigniting a fascination for the great beyond. He's succeeded Carl Sagan as the country's most captivating scientific communicator. When I was 11, I said, this is so amazing, who wouldn't want to study the universe? What was so amazing? The endless frontier of it all.

The vastness of it. The mystery of it. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Morley Safer. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Morley Safer. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Charlie Rose. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. like Float Choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale,

expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. Charlie and Carol Gasco were an elderly couple who moved to Santa Monica, California sometime in early 1997 to begin a new phase of their life. For the next 14 years, they did almost nothing that was memorable. And as we first reported back in 2013, they would be of absolutely no interest if it weren't for the fact that Charlie Gasco turned out to be James Whitey Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster and longtime fugitive who's now in prison serving two lifetime sentences. Carol Gasco was actually Catherine Gregg, Whitey's longtime girlfriend and caregiver. The story of how they managed to elude an international manhunt for so long while hiding in plain sight is interesting.

And tonight, you'll hear it from the Gasco's neighbors and from federal agents who finally unraveled the case with the help of a boob job and an alley cat. If you're forced into retirement with a comfortable nest egg and a desire to be left completely alone, there is no better place than Santa Monica, California. This low-key seaside suburb of L.A. is shared by transients and tourists, hippies and hedonists, celebrities, and lots of senior citizens, attracted to the climate and an abundance of inexpensive rent-controlled apartments just a few blocks from the ocean. Places like the Princess Eugenia on 3rd Street,

which is where Charlie and Carol Gasco, a childless couple from Chicago, lived for 14 years without attracting much attention from longtime neighbors or landlords. Josh Bond is the building manager. What were they like? They were like the nice retired old couple that lived in the apartment next to me. Good tenants? Excellent tenants. Never complained. Always paid rent on time. In cash? In cash. Janice Goodwin lived down the hole. They had nothing and they never went out. They never had food delivered. She never dressed nicely.

You thought they were poor? Yes, without a doubt. The one thing everyone remembers about the Gascos is that they loved animals and always made a fuss over the ones in the neighborhood. Barbara Gluck remembers that Carol Gasco always fed a stray cat after its owner had died. She would, you know, pet it and be sweet to it, and then she would put a plate of food, like, out here. And what about Charlie Gasco? You know, he always had a hat on and dark glasses.

I have to say, it was mysterious to me why a lovely woman like that was hanging out with that guy, that old grumpy man. I never could figure that one out until I heard they had $800,000-something in the wall. And then I went, oh, okay, you know. Money wasn't the only thing found in the Gasco's apartment on June 22, 2011, when the FBI stopped by and ended what it called the most extensive manhunt in the Bureau's history. Weapons all over the apartment. I mean, weapons by his nightstand, weapons under the windowsill, shotguns, mini Ruggers, rifles. Loaded.

Loaded, ready to go. What had started out as a routine day for Special Agent Scott Gariola, who was in charge of hunting fugitives in L.A., would turn into one of the most interesting days of his career. After getting a call to stake out a building in Santa Monica, he notified his backup team with the LAPD. I had four guys working that day, and they said, we got a tip on Whitey Bulger, and I'll see you there in about an hour. And invariably, the text would return, who's Whitey Bulger? Really?

A few of them. I had to remind them, gently remind them, who Whitey Bulger was. That he was number one on the FBI's most wanted list. Number one. Number one, yeah. Big East Coast figure, but on the West Coast, not so much. The cops in L.A. were focused on gangbangers and cartel members, not some retired Irish mobster who hadn't been spotted in 16 years. But then few mobsters have ever been as infamous in the city as Whitey Bulger was in Boston, and his reputation was for more than just being grumpy. Besides extortion and flooding the city with cocaine,

Bulger routinely performed or ordered executions, some at close range, some with a hail of bullets, and at least one by strangulation, after which it's said he took a nap. Special Agent Rich Tehan, who ran the FBI's Whitey Bulger Fugitive Task Force, had heard it all. Bulger was charged with 19 counts of murder. He was charged with other crimes. He was a scourge to the society in South Boston, his own community. He was also a scourge to the FBI and a great source of embarrassment to Tehan, Special Agent Phil Torsney, and others on the FBI task force. Years earlier, Whitey Bulger had infiltrated the Boston office of the FBI and bought off agents who protected him and plied him with information,

including the tip that allowed Bulger to flee just days before he was to be indicted. We really had to catch this guy to establish credibility after all the other issues, and it was just a matter of bringing this guy back to Boston. Toursney, who's now retired, and agent Tommy McDonald joined the task force in 2009. The joke was Bulger was on the FBI's least wanted list. There hadn't been a credible lead in more than a decade, and their efforts in Bulger's old neighborhood of South Boston were met with mistrust and ridicule. Some people, they told us right out front, you guys aren't looking for that guy. People just made the assumption we had him stashed somewhere. I mean, people really thought that kind of thing. Despite that mindset that we're not going to help you, the FBI still got it done. Took 16 years. Took 16 years. Yeah, this was not

a typical fugitive. The FBI says Bulger had planned his getaway years in advance, with money set aside and a fake identity for a Thomas Baxter. During his first two years on the lam, Bulger was in touch with friends and family, shuttling between New York, Chicago, and the resort town of Grand Isle, Louisiana, where he rented a home until his identity was compromised. After that, it seemed as if Bulger had disappeared from the face of the earth, except for the alleged sightings all over the world. How many of these tips do you think might have been true? Boy, there was thousands and thousands of tips, and I think, I don't think any of them are true. One of the obstacles was there were really no good

photographs of Bulger or his longtime live-in girlfriend, Catherine Gregg, a former dental hygienist. The FBI often noted that the couple shared a love of animals, especially dogs and cats, and asked veterinarians to be on the lookout. There were reports that Gregg once had breast implants and other plastic surgery in Boston, so the task force reached out to physicians. Eventually, they got a call from a Dr. Matthias Donilon, who had located her files in storage. I was trying to leave the office a little early to catch one of my kids' ball games, and I said, well, listen, I'm going to swing by in the morning and pick those up.

And they said to me, do you want the photos, too? And I said, you have photos? And they said to me, do you want the photos too? And I said, you have photos? And they say, yeah, we have photos. I said, we'll be there in 15 minutes. The breast implant lead produced a treasure trove of high resolution Catherine Gregg photographs that would help crack the case. The FBI decided to switch strategies, going after the girlfriend in order to catch the gangster. This is an announcement catch the gangster. This is an announcement by the FBI. The FBI created this public service announcement. 60-year-old Grieg is the girlfriend of 81-year-old Bulger. It ran in 14 markets on daytime talk shows aimed at women.

Call the tip line at 1-800-CALL-FBI. And it didn't take long. The very next morning, the Bulger task force got three messages from someone that used to live in Santa Monica and was 100% certain that Charlie and Carol Gasco, apartment 303 at the Princess Eugenia Apartments, were the people they were looking for. The descriptions and the age difference matched, and Deputy U.S. Marshal Neil Sullivan, who handled the lead,

said there was another piece of tantalizing information. The tipster specifically described that they were caring for this cat and their love for this cat. So that was just one piece of the puzzle and the tip that just added up to saying, if this isn't them, it's something we better check out immediately, because it sure sounds like them. A search of the FBI's computer database for the Gascos raised another red flag, not for what it found, but for what it didn't. Basically, like they were ghosts. No driver's license.

Exactly. No driver's license, no California ID, like they didn't exist. That's the apartment. That corner on the third floor. On the right-hand side? Yep. By early afternoon, FBI agent Scott Gariola had set up a number of surveillance posts and had already met with apartment manager Josh Bond to talk about his tenants. He closed the door, threw down a folder and opened it up and said,

are these the people that live in apartment 303? Did you say anything when you saw the pictures? My initial reaction was, holy s**t. You're living next door to a gangster. Well, I still didn't really know who he was. But it didn't take him long to figure it out. While the FBI was mulling its options, Bond logged on to Bulger's Wikipedia page. I'm kind of scrolling down, and it's like, oh, wow, this guy's serious. It's like murders and extortion. And then I get to the bottom, and there's this thing.

It's like from one of his old people saying, well, the last time I saw him, he said, you know, when he goes out, he's going to have guns and he's going to be ready to take people with him. I was like, ooh, maybe I shouldn't be involved in this. I mean, we were sitting here laughing about it, but he's a pretty serious guy. Yeah, yeah. He killed a lot of people. True. Or had them killed. I didn't know that at the time.

Bond told the FBI he wasn't going to knock on the Gasco's door because there was a note posted expressly asking people not to bother them. Carroll had told neighbors that Charlie was showing signs of dementia. So we were back there. So Garriola devised a ruse involving the Gasco's storage locker in the garage. It had the name Gasco across it and apartment 303. He had the manager called to tell them that their locker had been broken into and that he needed someone to come down to see if anything was missing. Carol Gasco said her husband would be right down. We just rushed him.

You mean guns out, FBI, don't move? Gave the words, hey, FBI, get your hands up. Hands went up right away. And then at that moment, we told him to get down on his knees, and he gave us, yeah, he gave us a, I ain't getting down on my effing knees. Didn't want to get his pants dirty. Didn't want to get his pants dirty.

You know, wearing white and seeing the oil on the ground, I guess he didn't want to get down in oil. Even at 81, this was a man used to being in control. I asked him to identify himself, and that didn't go over well. He asked me to F and identify myself, which I did. And I asked him, I said, are you Whitey Bulger? He said yes. Just about that moment, someone catches my attention from a few feet away by the elevator shaft. It was Janice Goodwin from the third floor coming to do her laundry. And I said, excuse me, I think I can help you. This man has dementia, so if he's acting oddly,

you know, that could be why. Immediately what flashed through my mind is, oh, my God, I just arrested an 81-year-old man with Alzheimer's who thinks he's Whitey Bulger. What is he going to tell me next? He's Elvis? So I said, do me a favor. I said, this woman over here says you have a touch of Alzheimer's. He said, don't listen to tell me next? He's Elvis. So I said, do me a favor. I said, this woman over here says you have a touch of Alzheimer's. He said, don't listen to her. She's

effing nuts. He says, I'm James Bulger. A few minutes later, he confirmed it, signing a consent form allowing the FBI to search his apartment. As he's signing, he says, that's the first time I've signed that name in a long time. Was there a feeling of resignation? I don't think he had it. I did ask him, I said, hey, Whitey, aren't you relieved that you don't have to look over your shoulder anymore and it's come to an end?

And he said, are you f***ing nuts? But in some ways, Whitey Bulger and Catherine Gregg had already been prisoners in Apartment 303, which appeared to be a mixture of the murderous and the mundane. Alongside the weapons and all the money, they had stockpiled a lifetime supply of cleansers, creams, and detergents. The FBI took special interest in a collection of 64-ounce bottles with white socks stretched over the top. I said, hey, Whitey, what are these? Are these some kind of Molotov cocktail you're making? He goes, no.

I said, I buy tube socks from the 99-cent store and they're too tight on my calves, so I stretch them out. I said, why are you shopping at the 99-cent store? You have half a million dollars under your bed. He goes, I had to make the money last. It's been said that one of the reasons it took so long to catch Whitey Bulger is that people were looking for a gangster, and Bulger, whether he liked it or not, had ceased to be one.

He said it was hard to keep up that mindset of a criminal, and that's part of the reason he came down to that garage. It was hard to stay on that edge, that criminal edge, after being on the lam as a regular citizen for 15 years. The master manipulator gave credit to Catherine Gregg for keeping him crime-free, hoping it would mitigate her sentence. She's now serving eight years for harboring a fugitive. On the long plane ride back to Boston, Bulger told his captors that he became obsessed with not getting caught and would do anything to avoid it, even if it meant obeying the law. Whitey Bulger's biggest fear, they said, was being discovered dead in his apartment,

and he had a plan to avoid it. If he became ill and knew he was on his deathbed, he'd go down to Arizona, crawl down the bottom of one of these mines and die and decompose and hope that we would never find him and still be looking for him forever. As for all that money that was seized from Whitey Bulger's apartment, federal prosecutors are preparing to distribute nearly $822,000 to the families of his murder victims and three men who were extorted by the gangster. 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.

Over 200 times a second, half a billion times a month, somebody clicks on Wikipedia. It's the greatest argument settler wrought by man, or at least the fastest, perfectly suited to our era of instant gratification. As we reported last April, when it debuted 14 years ago, the online encyclopedia was a novelty, its accuracy hit or miss. Now it's one of the world's busiest websites, its reliability vastly improved, but not quite perfect. What's more, it's a charity, a nonprofit,

where a devoted army of unpaid authors collaborate, articles about everything you can imagine. Who are they, and how does it all work? Ask Mr. Wikipedia himself, Jimmy Wells. In general, I would say, we're a lot of geeks, a lot of tech geeks, a lot of people who are really passionate about information. What on earth is wiki?

Wiki. So the word is from wiki wiki, which is a Hawaiian word. If you go to Maui at the airport, you take the wiki wiki bus. And the word wiki wiki means quick. So the idea of wiki software is quick collaboration. It's a tool to allow people to come together and quickly edit things. And once a year, a band of hardcore contributors to Wikipedia come together from the four corners of the earth for what you might call the Dance of the Geeks, meeting this time in London.

The entertainment is, shall we say, eclectic. And so is the crowd. They call it Wikimania. 2,000 showed up for the event. Some are buttoned down, some are rock and roll. The articles they write and edit cover everything from aardvarks to ZZ Top. And they're all true believers in Wikipedia's power.

But it is a fantastic attempt to really be the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy of the real world. Wikipedians take to these pages in a never-ending worldwide cyber conversation to write articles, add or subtract from the work of others, post comments and argue about what's worthy of notice and what needs fixing. There are 12,000 new pages created every day, a grand total of 35 million articles

in 288 different languages. The end result of that is really rich, really complex, and mostly reliable and credible. Sue Gardner spent seven years as Jimmy Wales' lieutenant, running the website day to day and sizing up the people who do the writing. It's about 100,000 people around the world, every political persuasion, every religion, no religion, you know, from seven years old to 75 years old. The one characteristic all Wikipedians have in common

is that they're all incredibly smart. They are really, really smart. Smart and passionate. Yeah, and persnickety, right? They're fussy people. They're sort of a little OCD. They are careful and they're cautious and they're serious and it matters to them that things are right.

They're persnickety people. And how does it work? We enlisted the help of Amanda Lewandowski, a recent law school graduate who's worked on dozens of articles. I do the editing because I love it, particularly with regards to articles about the law. Well, what is the reward? You have the satisfaction of feeling like you participated in something. But for Wikipedia in particular, there's another whole benefit because you have the opportunity to help other people find information about stuff you're into.

Now, one of the other neat things you can do is... Anybody can do it. We'll go to edit. You hit the edit button and you type. But your information has to have a legitimate source and some degree of notability. No love letters to yourself. Three times a second, 12,000 times an hour, someone somewhere makes an edit, small or large.

And the articles keep piling up. There is no limit in a certain way, correct? Oh, I think that the growth could be infinite, yeah. Billions upon billions of areas. Possibly, yeah. There are Wikipedians in residence at places like the National Archives, a goldmine of historical detail. At the Frick Museum in New York,

these Wikipedians get their kicks from studying antique clocks. Do you know roughly what is it? What is it about? It's about a Hindu goddess. It's truly an international movement. There were Egyptian Wikipedians at this year's gathering, a delegation of school kids from Kazakhstan in Central Asia, where the website has over 200,000 articles in the Kazakh language. You're the real bright spot in your region.

You know, all of your neighboring countries maybe are not so good. And in South Africa, this man is Mr. Wikipedia, Dumi Ndubani. Just remember that voltage drops... Back home in Johannesburg, when he's not at his real job as an electrical engineer, Ndubani and his colleagues work overtime to

get South Africa into the Wikipedia world. It was built in 1905. They contribute entries about notable landmarks. This Catholic school originally a convent. Do we have the history on the school? Yes. Then that becomes a section. He's written about the house in Johannesburg where Mahatma Gandhi once lived.

The idea of tolerance, really, and passive resistance was born here, in this house. He's written about the Soweto uprising by high school students in 1976, the spark for the eventual downfall of apartheid. And he encourages today's students to translate Wikipedia articles into their native languages. What language are you? Tonga. Tonga.

Tonga. Zulu. Zulu. And we need all those languages on Wikipedia. We need them. The website's headquarters are in San Francisco. There's a staff of about 200 working in typically laid-back, techie style. And then you can do function.

Of prime importance, developing rules and computer code to eliminate as many errors as possible. Executive Director Laila Tretikov. We've had numerous studies that show that as a body of knowledge, it's more accurate than other encyclopedias in existence in the past. So it's never 100%, but it's very high quality. There are computer programs that scour the site for evangelism and vulgarities, striking them out almost instantly. Wikipedians worldwide also act as fact-checkers looking for personal attacks and manipulation by PR people.

But Wales admits you can't catch them all. Our biggest problems with bias and things that are wrong that stay for a long time are actually on very obscure topics. You know, a topic that not many people are interested in and not many people are looking at. And so if something's wrong, it can persist for quite some time. That's brilliant. And because it's a non-profit, unlike virtually every other major website, there's one thing you won't find at Wikipedia Central. Internet zillionaires. You created one of the most successful websites in the world, and yet you chose to make it

the least profitable. It just felt right that we should be a charity, free knowledge for everyone. So that's always been our philosophy. The money to pay the staff and keep the site up and running comes from donations, large and mostly small. Last year, people from around

the world gave $51 million in 70 different currencies. I think they give to Wikipedia out of affection. I think it's that simple. Which means the main preoccupation at other websites, advertising, isn't even on the radar.

If we were ad-supported, we would always be thinking about, well, gee, look at all these people reading about Elizabethan poetry. There's nothing to sell them. Let's try to get them to read about hotels in Las Vegas or something like this. And we don't. We just don't care. In a sense, it was probably in the stars that Jimmy Wales, the kid from Huntsville, Alabama, would become the Internet's most famous knowledge broker.

His mother taught school, and the World Book Encyclopedia in the living room was a constant presence. He was a first-generation geek, 10 years old when personal computers hit the market in the mid-70s. His first internet site was BOMAS, a place where guys could compare notes on guy things, cars, sports, and babes. BOMAS failed, but it got Wales thinking about the possibilities of mass collaboration on the internet, which led eventually to Wikipedia. How does Wikipedia sort of fundamentally work?

Break-and-file Wikipedians today are still mainly men, reflecting the tech world at large. Women are less likely to kind of geek out at their computer for 10, 20, 40 hours. I mean, there's a reason that the stereotype of the hacker is a guy in a filthy T-shirt eating Doritos, right? Like, that's hard. A woman is less likely to get social permission to be in a dirty T-shirt eating Doritos. The gender imbalance was at the heart

of a significant internal dispute at Wikipedia. When William and Kate got married, the royal wedding, someone created an entry about Kate Middleton's dress. And somebody nominated it for deletion. And some of the arguments were, you know, effectively, this is stupid, it's just a dress. How can you have an encyclopedia entry about a dress? Wales intervened, pointing out that there are thousands of articles about computers and software programs. And we don't think anything about that because we're a bunch of computer geeks.

So we decided to keep it. But there was an interesting moment in that debate where people were saying, oh, I don't know about this, therefore it's not important. And that is bias, and that is something that we have to be really careful about. Careful. When he's not on the road,

Wales lives mainly in London. His wife Kate worked for former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. And Wales himself is already an elder statesman in the Internet world. It's our time at the limits of the social media. Moving in influential circles, making a comfortable living from speaking engagements. We are really, really powerful.

But though he passed up billions by making Wikipedia a non-profit, he clearly doesn't suffer from that Silicon Valley condition known as Zuckerberg envy. Do you ever wonder or get wistful about, gosh, if I only had a billion, think of all the good things I could do. No, not really. I mean, how many bankers are there in the world

who earn fabulous salaries but whose lives are incredibly boring compared to mine? I mean, I have a fantastic, amazing life where, you know, my work feels meaningful to me in a way that almost nothing else could. So, yeah, it's great. Don't worry about me. Happy birthday to you.

A final burning question Wikipedians have debated over the years. What day is Jimmy Wales' birthday? I have this really funny situation where the reliable source of my birth certificate is wrong. It says August 8th, but his mother says that's an error. He was born August 7th. I trust my mother. She was there. So his Wikipedia entry says the 7th, but just to be safe, his persnickety followers sang happy birthday twice.

Happy birthday to you. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. 46 years ago, astronauts landed on the moon and space travel captured the country's imagination.

But NASA isn't launching astronauts anymore, and America's fascination with space has come down to Earth. Neil deGrasse Tyson is on a one-man mission to change that. He wants to get people so interested in the universe that they look up every time they go out. As we first reported last March, Tyson is reigniting a fascination for the great beyond. He succeeded Carl Sagan as the country's most captivating science communicator. Here's something hard to imagine, an astrophysicist on stage in a sold-out auditorium. His following has grown as he has mastered many mediums, including television, Twitter, and radio. The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

We caught up with him in Seattle where he said a cosmic perspective could improve life on Earth. We in astrophysics, we think of the universe all the time. So to us, Earth is just another planet. From a distance, it's a speck. And I'm convinced that if everyone had a cosmic perspective, you wouldn't have legions of armies waging war on other people because someone would say, stop, look at the universe. So you've become a superstar of the universe. The status that you refer to is I'm, I'm shocked by it every day, just every day. Every day I wake up and I look at my Twitter feed and- Two million, by the way. Two and a half million. Two and a half.

Two and a half million. I'm thinking, I need to remind these people, hey, look, I'm an astrophysicist. Did I tell you that? There's still time to back out. But for me, as an educator and as a scientist, what it tells me is that there really is an underserved curiosity in adults. To spark that curiosity, he told us this is the most mind-altering picture ever taken, shot 46 years ago from Apollo 8 while orbiting the moon. This was the first time any of us had seen Earth the way nature had intended, with oceans and land and clouds. So many of us had only ever seen Earth on a schoolroom globe.

And so this is the birth of a cosmic perspective. And that idea should change our world. Back then, that idea should change our world. Back then, that idea did change our world. Earth Day was founded. Leaded gas was banned. DDT was banned. All of a sudden, people were thinking about Earth as a world,

that we're all in it together. We're thinking we're exploring the moon, and we discovered the Earth for the first time. He's the head of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and lives in the city with his wife and two children. Tyson received his doctorate from Columbia. He says there are so few astrophysicists that there are literally one in a million.

Please tell me what is an astrophysicist? In astrophysics, we care about how matter, motion, and energy manifest in objects and phenomenon in the universe. Stars are born, they live out their lives, they die. Some of the ones that die explode. Our sun will not be one of those, but it will die, and it will take Earth with us. So we make sure we have other destinations in mind when that happens. And I've got it on my calendar. When is this going to happen? Because I want to make plans. In about 5 billion years.

And so we probably have other issues to concern ourselves with for our survival between now and then. You said, I am, we are stardust. Yes. What does that mean? For me, the most astonishing fact is that the molecules that comprise our body are traceable, are traceable to the crucibles of the centers of stars that manufactured these elements from lighter versions of themselves and then exploded, scattering this enrichment across the galaxy into gas clouds that would later collapse to form next-generation star systems.

One of those star systems was ours. These atoms and molecules are in us because, in fact, the universe is in us. And we are not only figuratively, but literally Stardust. Tyson became most widely known hosting the television series Cosmos. When we try to look even farther into the universe, we come to what appears to be the end of space. But actually, it's the beginning of time. Fans line up down the block to watch him record his radio show, StarTalk. The sun keeps all the planets on their appointed orbits, yet somehow manages to ripen a bunch of grapes

as though it had nothing else in the world to do. Galileo. Star Talk Radio, thank you. In April, Star Talk Radio also became a weekly cable television show. He is not in movies yet, but he becomes a movie critic when he spots a scene that's supposed to be scientifically accurate, but isn't.

You saw the movie Titanic. Yes. And it was a scene in which they're looking up at the stars. And you see it. It wasn't just a scene. The ship is sinking at a longitude, latitude, time, date. We know it, and there's only one sky. It should have been over that sinking ship.

And it wasn't. It was the wrong sky. But it was not only the wrong sky. They, like, made it up. And the left half of the sky was a mirror reflection of the right. So it's not only the wrong sky. It was a lazy sky. It's a movie. You really want to take me there? Say it again. Let me hear sky. It's a movie. You really want to take me there. You want to say it again. Let me hear it. It's a movie. Okay. They found the Titanic. They photographed the Titanic. They knew what the state wounds look like and the China patterns. So they set the standard. They required of me that I analyze it at that level. Instead of the fake sky, Tyson said the real sky

would have looked like this. So in a a later release director James Cameron changed the sky to Tyson specifications over there is the and as for what's falling from the sky he showed me a piece of an asteroid that he keeps in his office from space yeah yeah yeah you can feel just the weight of this thing. And this was part of a much larger asteroid that collided with Earth about 50,000 years ago. And so now imagine this about a million times larger going 40,000 miles an hour colliding with Earth. And you get a sense of the energy of what is out there. And that Earth is in a shooting gallery.

This is why we have to worry about asteroids. I should think so. Tyson first became interested in the stars staring up at them from the roof of his apartment building. Now his playground is the Hayden Planetarium. The Milky Way is actually visible behind me here. This is the planetarium that changed his life when he was just nine years old. You'd seen the sky from your rooftop.

From my roof in the Bronx. And I saw all dozen stars that are visible. On a good night, maybe 14 stars. And I come in here and then they dim the light. And I said, wow. And it was the universe. When you walked out of this planetarium, I mean, were you a different person because you were overwhelmed by the experience? You put your finger on it. I spent my entire life never knowing that such a sky existed.

And then to be struck by it, to be star struck by it. And after that day, I said, I want to learn more about it. Children keep changing their minds about what they want to be, but Tyson stuck with the stars. And if you ask me, as a kid at age 11, that annoying question that adults always ask kids, what do you want to do when you grow up? I would say astrophysicist.

And that pretty much shut everybody up in the room. The universe is so amazing and so limitless. And who wouldn't want to study the universe? What was so amazing? The endless frontier of it all. The vastness of it. The mystery of it. But Tyson had to fight societal stereotypes to reach his goal.

Because he is black, he said, teachers pushed him towards athletics, not astrophysics, which he called the path of most resistance. When I needed to overcome the low expectations of others or the bias that would be expressed in one circumstance or another, I'd keep on keeping on. And I'd climb over the obstacle, go around it, dig under it, fly over it. That's what kept me going. Otherwise, I would have never been an astrophysicist. At age 56, Tyson is still starstruck by both the sky

and the planetarium that brought it to life. So imprinted was I by that sky that to this day, I go to mountaintops where the finest observatories in the world are located. And I say to myself, that reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium. And when you walk outside, wherever you are, do you look up every time you walk outdoors? Anytime I exit a building, I look up. I can tell you that kids, kids will look up when they come out, and adults just stop. You know, we stop catching snowflakes in our mouth. We stop jumping into puddles.

And I don't want to ever lose that. In life and in the universe, it's always best to keep looking up. Uplifting and upbeat, he is as ebullient backstage as he is on it. Everyone should, their mind should be blown at least once a day. We're moments away from opening the house. There's a half hour call to the top of the show. I am ready. The ceiling has spoken.

He relates easily to everybody. Watch how he connected to this questioner. I saw you a couple of years ago in Houston. Houston, the first word ever spoken from the surface of the moon. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The eagle has landed. But Tyson upset a lot of people when he argued in part that Pluto was too small and insignificant to qualify as a planet, despite what we'd learned in school. I didn't kill Pluto, but I was an accessory. Yeah, you were complicit.

No, I drove the getaway car, perhaps. That's all I'll admit to. He got hate mail from elementary school students, including this letter he read during his performance in Seattle. Why can't Pluto be a planet? Some people like Pluto. And if it doesn't exist, then they don't have a favorite planet. Please write back, but not in cursive, because I can't read cursive. His big finish is often this picture of Earth taken from the Cassini spacecraft

showing Earth as a tiny dot under Saturn's rings. Carl Sagan would ultimately write a book called The Pale Blue Dot where he waxed poetic about its meaning and significance. I want to end the recitation from the Book of Carl. If you look at Earth from space, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. It underscores the responsibility to deal more kindly

and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. Thank you all. I'm Steve Croft. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.