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New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mintmobile.com. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley, and this is Sunday morning. It's estimated nearly seven million older Americans have Alzheimer's disease, a number that's expected to double in coming decades.
There's no cure for this devastating illness that leads to memory loss, cognitive decline, and behavioral changes. But as our Dr. John Lepug will tell us, There's more optimism now than ever before. thanks to some breakthrough treatments. Here on the left and on the top, these are all amyloid plaques.
At WashU Medicine, Dr. Randy Bateman is leading research into fighting early onset Alzheimer's.
Now we have a chance to change the course of the disease in a way we've never been able to do before. And philanthropist Bill Gates is lending a hand. How much have you already invested personally? I put in a bit over 300 million. Trying to prevent Alzheimer's.
Ahead on Sunday morning. There's no one quite like Billy Bob Thornton. The Oscar winner brings his own unique style to life and to every one of his acting roles. He'll share the secret of being Billy Bob with our Lee Cowan. I run the company.
She owns it and she owned it before. Landman's Billy Bob Thornton loves acting. But it's music that was his first muff. How does that feel? If music was such a passion for you, where did acting come into picture?
You know what? If CBS Sunday Mornings was a three and a half hour show, I could so tell you the story. Billy Bobthorpe tells us a whole bunch of other stories later on Sunday morning. Right on the mark every time. Tuesday is Veterans Day.
A time to remember and appreciate the sacrifices millions of our military veterans have made. With that in mind, this morning Leslie Stahl examines some of the unseen challenges faced by an entire generation of veterans. the generation that's come to be known as our greatest. He's commissioned as a second lieutenant. Historian David Nassau has discovered a new perspective on World War II veterans.
They are the greatest generation, but They return from war and bringing wounds home with them that are invisible. Coming up on Sunday morning a fresh look at the greatest generation. Also ahead this morning. I have a lot of life. Mm-hmm.
Seth Doan visits with Ireland's Jesse Buckley. who stars in a new movie based on the best-selling novel, Hamlet. Plus a story from Steve Hartman.
Okay, fam, lock in. Faith Saley tries to make sense of a viral sensation sweeping young America. And more. this Sunday morning for the ninth of november, twenty twenty five. We'll be back in a moment.
Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. John Lapouk starts us off this morning. with a look at new medical inroads in the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's disease. I just know that my brain's not right and And so I hate it. I just want it to be normal.
Carrie Richardson is forty-four years old. At 41, she developed early-onset Alzheimer's disease. The condition is caused by rare genetic mutations that essentially guarantee a person will develop the disease. But you always know you can count on me. Her mother, Mary Salter of Montgomery, Alabama, knows the toll of the disease all too well.
Seven so far, I've lost seven family members from the ages of 37 to 44. including her son Brian, who died last year. Remember the first time we came to Washu? Brian was with us. Mary, Carrie and Carrie's daughter Hannah have been coming to the Washington University School of Medicine in St.
Louis.
Okay? to participate in some of the world's first clinical trials in Alzheimer's prevention. It's the least I can do to help. I feel like I couldn't live with myself if I didn't do it.
Now we have a chance to change the course of the disease in a way we've never been able to do before. Dr. Randy Bateman leads international clinical trials at WashU Medicine. Wow, this is a big operation here. One reason for Dr.
Bateman's optimism? For the first time, there's finally success treating mild Alzheimer's with medication that removes amyloid plaques. The protein deposits that build up on the outside of nerve cells in the brain, interfering with memory and thinking. These are all amyloid plaques. These drugs have been shown to slow cognitive decline.
The people who had the plaques removed. are thirty percent better than the people who didn't have the plaques removed. But it does not reverse the dementia. No. Even at that stage.
It doesn't stop the dementia. The dementia still continues, but at a slower rate.
So, of course, the next question is. What would happen if you started the treatment even earlier? Even earlier. Even before symptoms. That's the whole point.
If you look at the people who are treated in these trials, the people who are at the earlier stages. the earlier stage you go. the better off they do.
Some of them actually have been stable. And so what this suggests is that timing is critically important. Within a particular family with early onset Alzheimer's, symptoms usually start at about the same age, so researchers can figure out when to start treatment to try to prevent the disease.
So this is a way to test the hypothesis that if you start treating people before they have symptoms, it'll make a difference. Absolutely it is.
So think of it this way. In these people, we have near 100% certainty they will get Alzheimer's disease dementia. And we know about when they're going to get it. We'll take the proteins from a patient. Though these rare mutations account for less than 1% of Alzheimer's patients.
The lessons learned about when to start treatment may apply to everyone. Jake Hendricks is a Broadway theater electrician from Brooklyn who carries one of the early onset genes. The disease claimed his grandmother, uncle, father, and brother. all in that same age range. Which was around symptoms in the 40s and dying in the 50s.
The word Alzheimer's for you must have growing up, I imagine, had It was a death sentence. No drug allergies. Heinrich started getting treatment in Dr. Bateman's study in 2013. Though he's definitely getting an antibody called lacanumab now, for the first seven years he did not know if he was receiving an antibody or placebo.
I was at an age where I should have been showing signs. And I am now at an age that I should probably not even be alive. Did you see what mama and I put in? Yeah, we hooped. We hooped it.
His wife is Broadway director Rachel Chavkin. She says over the past three years he will occasionally repeat a question. but otherwise has shown no cognitive decline since she fell in love with him twenty years ago. Jake is now 51, which is the age that his father was when he died. Touch my finger.
Touch your nose. Back and forth. The Trump administration's budget cuts have stopped or delayed millions of dollars in Alzheimer's research. the situation has already had an impact on Dr. Bateman's trials.
And so it's a precarious time. And Research is not like building a building or painting a wall. where you can start and then stop for a few years and then go back and resume what you were doing. It's much more like feeding a baby. And that if you stop doing that for a few weeks, It's irrecoverable.
With federal research money being threatened, What do you see as the potential side effect of decreasing that investment? It delays The breakthrough, the data these young researchers have to consider different ideas is so much better. than even five years ago.
So this is the time where you think, Wow. uh let's double down on this disease. That's exactly what Bill Gates is doing. Drop this shield. The billionaire Microsoft co-founder is using his wealth and influence to bring together industry and government to tackle Alzheimer's.
How much have you already invested personally? I put in a bit over $300 million and I'm going to stay. Very involved in this.
So these are what the samples are stored in. At a time of such possibility, uncertainty about funding is threatening momentum. It's quite up in the air if you talk to researchers. They're dealing with the uncertainty of should they hire young people or buy new equipment uh And so hopefully in the next several months uh this gets resolved and um you know, that we can go full speed ahead. Gates has spent a considerable amount of his fortune to improve public health.
and for him it so happens Alzheimer's is personal. Bill Gates, senior was an attorney and philanthropist who died five years ago at the age of ninety four. Your father had Alzheimer's, and it strikes me that Even being Bill Gates didn't protect your family from that. He was lucky enough to have 24-hour care, but there was no medicine, nothing that could bring his cognition back. Gates is supporting research to improve early diagnosis, treatment, and patient enrollment in trials, and, no surprise, he sees a huge role for advanced computing.
Where does AI come in? Uh All of that. That got a smile from you. Yeah. That's it.
Well, AI is going to impact everything we do. The biology of the brain is so complex that AI's ability to take large amounts of data And find Meaning in that data means that this research is going to go a lot faster. Show me how you screw in a light bulb. The early onset clinical trials are expected to continue for at least another five years, involving hundreds of people at 40 sites around the world. If successful, it could usher in routine screening for Alzheimer's with a simple blood test, just as we do now for high cholesterol and diabetes.
And I can imagine our viewers looking at this right now, saying to each other, Do I want to be tested or How can I get tested? And right now, in medicine, we don't test people without symptoms because the treatments aren't yet proven to work in people without symptoms. Finding effective treatments is a hot area of research and may include giving cocktails of medications that target not only amyloid, but other possible culprits, such as brain inflammation and a damaging nerve cell protein called tau. And so, if this trial holds up. and we can dem continue to demonstrate benefit year after year that these people are protected.
then I actually think that will predict. what's going to happen in the near future in ongoing prevention trials. that they will be positive. They will work. They will give people years of dementia-free life.
We had MRIs before. Many, many. Many, many. So Jake Heinrichs undergoes regular MRIs. Physicals, memory testing.
Spinal taps, and PET scans to monitor his brain function and see if he can prevent an almost certain genetic destiny. You know, your dad's a little bit of a hero, did you know that? Four-year-old Sam Heinrichs is living proof of what can come from a belief in science. and a leap of faith. What made you finally say, you know what?
Even though there's a 50% chance he might get the gene? we're going to go ahead and try to have a baby. Because I've been part of this study. and it seems to be effective. Uh it gave me Hope.
That. the scourge of Alzheimer's is something that we're not going to fear. in the future. Anything could happen, but right now, I have hope. This is the story of the one.
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Oscar-nominated actor Jesse Buckley is, as they say, having a moment. and she's talking about it with Seth Doan. I was born Without a whisper. Who are any of you? To pretend I have had a choice.
Ah! She's been called the acting world's best kept secret. What do you wish to do, Hamlet? But her latest role in the film Hamnet may change that. Mama.
They may be gone. Mama. I just knew I had to go somewhere. mentally, emotionally. As Rolling Stone put it, people will be talking about Jesse Buckley's performance for years.
you have this fire inside you. That's what we see on film. I don't know, do you? I'd say so. In what I've seen.
I have fire, but I tell you what Hamlet gave me, which I also was looking for, was tenderness. And uh sometimes It's just as strong as fire. Buckley plays the wife of William Shakespeare. Portrayed by fellow Irish actor Paul Meskill. He lives not.
The fictionalized tale about the death of Shakespeare's son Hamlet imagines the tragedy inspired him to write to die. Hamlet. To sleep. Perchance to dream. When we started to shoot the more difficult stuff like Hamlet's death, I said to my husband, I need to go away for two weeks So Buckley came here, Hampstead Heath, a vast green space in London, where she'd go swimming each morning.
I just need to be in nature and start my day and wake up that way and go to this set and see what came out. She says Hamlet director Chloe Zhao reminded her cinema is not just escapism. You know, our jobs as actors and as storytellers are to touch the most heightened expressions that are too hard to hold in our own. Yeah. I get to incubate the bits of Us, myself, that, the shadow bits.
What are the shadow bits of you? They came out for this role. I'm not telling you. You have to watch it and make up your own mind. Lana Laka.
Her breakout role was playing a single mom just out of prison in Wild Rose. I'm not three and there's so much I can't undo. Then in 2022, Buckley got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress in The Lost Daughter. I never in a million years thought I'd make a film. Because I didn't have a T V till I was fifteen.
And it was exotic. Like it was in Hollywood, you know, it was like. It wasn't in Kerry. In rugged County Carey in Ireland's southeast, Buckley grew up in an artistic family, playing harp, clarinet, and piano. She sang and did school productions.
There is nothing. But it was the British talent show I'd Do Anything that put her on a bigger stage and in front of Andrew Lloyd Weber. Jessie has the sacred flame of star quality. Shall we go inside? Yeah.
She lost the competition, but quickly landed theater roles. Her first Shakespeare was here. This was actually a theater that preceded the Globe Theatre and where Shakespeare's early plays were first performed here. And this is the kind of... Skeleton of what is left of this very, very special place.
This red circular outline on the floor is what we're seeing here. Yeah. It's hard to imagine that this was this. I haven't just brought you to like a dirty car park. Let's put it that way.
It's hard to kind of understand. Shakespeare, she says, changed everything. I think before I felt like music was the only way to contain. What was kind of wanting to come out, and then Shakespeare's words and his worlds were so. Titanic that, um, It just made me realise how powerful words could be.
You know everything about a person by touching them here? Not everything. Tell me about the chemistry between you and Paul Mescal. I Absolutely adore. That man.
From our very first chemistry read. A chemistry read is to make sure you have chemistry? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it would be really like depressing if I didn't.
It would be the only woman in the world who failed to find chemistry with Paul Mescal. The 35-year-old actor says she also found chemistry with Christian Bale for her next film. Come on, Big Man, in which she plays Frankenstein's bride. I went to a screening at 7:30 this morning of The Bride. Heh heh.
Did you have coffee beforehand? Directed by Maggie Gyllenhall, it's genre and expectation bending. It's punk. It's proper punk. I remember when I read it first.
It was like being plugged into an electrical socket. What's my name? I can't remember. Maggie Gyllenholt. referred to as kind of a wild animal.
Ha ha ha. Yeah. Do you think there's a truth to that? I have a lot of life. Mm-hmm.
That life and vitality we now see on film is the result of the journey that brought her to London as a teenager. At the time, she says she was in a dark place. I was not wa I had depression and I wasn't very well and I wanted a lot from life. I was really hungry. For us.
And I felt like there was no Place For that. And I think that's when it imploded in on me and when I got sick and Lost myself, you know. How did you deal with it? I got help, I got therapy. Singing?
I honestly think it's kinda saved me.
Something wasn't alive then, let's just say. Is it like it is now? With Veterans Day on Tuesday, our 60 Minutes colleague Leslie Stahl offers a new perspective on the lives of those who returned home from World War II. In 1984, President Reagan commemorated the 40th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy. And paid tribute to the World War II soldiers known as the Greatest Generation.
These are the champions who helped free a continent. And these are the heroes who helped end a war. But historian David Nassau calls them the wounded generation. Why did you call them wounded? They are the greatest generation, but They return from war.
and bringing wounds home with them that are invisible. They're psychic wounds.
Now we know that a lot of those wounds were PTSD. But PTSD was not diagnosed for 40 years after the return. of the World War II veterans. One clue he came upon was the famous photo of Times Square on VJ Day 1945. Nassau saw something beyond end-of-the-war jubilation.
Now, let's look very carefully. And she's pulling away. She's pulling away. She's pulling away. He's grabbed her.
He's locked her in. This is a second photograph by another photographer. She's freed one arm, but he won't let go of her. She's got a clenched fist. Yeah, a clenched fist.
Now this is not joy. This is a solve. You said sh that she talked about this. Years after the event. And she said.
She said, I thought I was going to be suffocated. I didn't know who this was, where he had come from. He wouldn't let me go. Nassau saw something in the photo that touched a nerve. it reminded him of his own father when he came home from the war after serving in Eritrea.
He came home an alcoholic. Oh wow. He came home smoking three or four packs of Luckies a day. No. He came home.
with a heart condition from the war. He dies at age 61. And I had never had the chance. to find out what happened in Eritrea. what he went through.
So What do I do as a historian? I can't find out his story.
So I jump in to find out. the story of his generation. He combed through newspapers, magazines, government records, and went back through movies. A Pulitzer finalist for his biographies of Andrew Carnegie and Joseph B. Kennedy.
Nassau is a dogged researcher. This hospital is one of the many for the care and treatment of the psychoneurotic soldier. One thing he found was that government officials knew enough to warn wives what to expect when the soldiers returned home. You write about almost primers. They're telling these wives, you're not going to have the same man who left.
This was one of the things I learned that just shocked me. The wives, and the mothers, and the girlfriends were told, we'll do as much as we can in the VA hospitals. But you've got to cure this guy. You've got to live with his temper. and is drinking.
and his foul mouth, and his inability to take care of his kids. And if he can't readjust, It's your fault. In your book, you talk about lobotomies. They actually gave these soldiers to fight What we now know is PTSD. Lobotomies?
Yeah. Really? The worst cases, the men who came back totally out of it, unable to connect to their wives, to their parents, ended up in VA hospitals. The VA hospitals Yeah. Forms of talk therapy.
If you don't get better, they give you shock treatment, electroshock treatment. The VA hospitals do their best. But they don't know how often they should be treated, how long. Shock treatments do no good. And the next is lobotomies.
Let's talk about the government stepping in to help. To ease this re-entry problem. Congress. understood in every war We have rewarded our veterans from the Revolutionary War onward. with land bounties, with old age pensions.
But more than that, we were going to return to the depression. when the government stopped Funding defense plans. And when these 16 million guys came back looking for jobs.
So a GI Bill is written. to provide Unemployment compensation for the vets when they get back. Why? To keep them off the job market for a year. Free tuition.
Whether you want to go to a vocational school or whether you want to go to college or graduate school. is provided. For the veterans.
So they won't go looking for a job. No, they won't. Because the sense is that it may take four or five years to reconvert. from a war economy to a peace economy. The government provided mortgage guarantees for veterans looking to buy homes.
This encouraged real estate developers to build entire suburbs like Levittown on New York's Long Island. and apartments like Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan.
So they worked out a deal with Metropolitan Life Insurance to give them all sorts of tax breaks. and build this extraordinary complex. By the end of 1955, The GI Bill and other Veterans War benefits totaled $24.5 billion, around $435 billion in today's dollars. and almost double the cost of the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Western Europe. Yet not all veterans benefited.
If you were a Black veteran. north, south, east, and west. The banks were hesitant. to give you a mortgage. Without a mortgage from a bank, you couldn't get a mortgage guarantee.
So what happens? This nation is transformed. There's a new middle class. It includes. Jewish immigrants, Italian immigrants, Polish immigrants, working class people.
Black veterans are shut out. when the black veterans came home. There was a lot of violence against them and the South. The South has learned that the only way to put down what they fear is going to be an attack on Jim Crow is to use violence. The black veterans come home and one of the Ironies here is that they can't afford to buy new clothes.
So they wear their uniforms. And for white politicians and a lot of white Southerners, seeing a black man in a uniform is a direct provocation. Think of the suffering of those hit by artillery. We found Nassau on a guided tour of the World War II Museum in New Orleans. There's a purple heart.
My father got a purple heart. I never saw it. I asked him over and over again, where is your purple heart? And he just sort of shrugged. While David Nassau might never know why his father earned a Purple Heart or where it went.
his research has uncovered new insights into the experiences of all war veterans. The Vietnam veterans, when they came home and had all their problems, They thought that they were weak because they didn't know. That was also true of World War II. In Vietnam, it was not considered by. the majority of the population a good war.
or a war that Americans won. Therefore, the Vietnam veterans suffered. What I've discovered is it doesn't matter. There's no magic. Wand.
that makes the war go away from People who've been In combat, who've risked their lives, whether you're in World War II, in Vietnam, in Korea. in Afghanistan, in Iraq. It's the same. It's very much the same. It's a viral phenomenon sweeping the nation.
Faith Saley is here to make some sense of it. or try to, anyway.
Okay, fam, lock in because I low-key have something really important to tell you. Six seven Oh gosh, I hope you don't need me, a middle-aged person, to explain 6'7 to you because that would be cringe. But here goes. 6'7 can be traced back to a song called Doot Doot by rapper Skrilla, which was then used in videos featuring basketball players like Lamello Ball, who is in fact 6'7. And then kids started intoning it with these hand gestures and then it took over America.
And now here we are. Get it? It's okay. Me neither. And we're not supposed to.
Even dictionary.com says it can't be defined. Basically, it's one big inside joke that's now outside and everywhere. And it's giving aura. And that's the best part. The bar to entry for 6'7 is so low.
People call it brain rot, but not gonna lie, I find it liberating. Here's something that doesn't ask us to choose sides or fact check. The choreo is easy. Everyone can say it and sound equally inane. 6'7.
Yeah. 6'7. And the more we oldies say it, the more we paradoxically thrill children and douse the meme with our millennial Gen X boomer energy. Yeah, yeah. What'd they say, 6'7 or 6'6'7?
I give it Six, seven weeks until it's flushed down the cultural toilet like last year's skippity. Look, I'm no linguist or sociologist. I'm just a mom of middle schoolers. And I say we embrace some of life's beautiful mysteries. Mona Lisa's smile, dark matter, and the inscrutably addictive quality of 6'7.
Carl, see if you can figure out what's wrong with this thing. It won't crank up, and everything seems to be put together right. Tell us.
Okay. Stop back by. Don't worry about your boy now. doing good. It ain't got no gas in it.
Actor, director, and writer Billy Bob Thornton has spent a career creating singularly memorable characters. including his title role in the hit streaming series Landman. And that's appropriate because, as Lee Cowan will show us, Billy Bob Thornton is a pretty singular character himself. Uh What are you listening to? This cream?
Oh cool. I haven't been inside many A-listers' trailers, mind you. Check the bedroom out, Tom. Show me the bedroom. But I imagine the inside of Billy Bob Thornton's, maybe it's a Queen of Sheba or something, is about as unique as he is.
So I only eat with my left foot with a fork.
So if you guys want to see that, I can show you. We weren't sure if he was joking or not. After all, he can deliver a line. I'm goddamn pleased to meet you. With a sincerity that's almost mocking.
No, highly irregular is the time I found a human foot in a toaster oven. This is just odd. Hey Billy, love landman. His irreverence mixes with his southern charm like a good old whiskey sour. Where are we going?
I already told you to the batting cages. You guys swing like hell and killer at a pinata party. Gotta do something about it. He even, with a wink and a nod, um, Santa? Yeah, I'm Santa.
Come on, what do you want? Played a not-so-saintly St. Nick. Is that your underwear? Part of it.
Where the hell's the rest of it? No, actually, don't tell me. I don't want to know.
Some saw that as a brave choice. He doesn't. A brave choice is to see someone being attacked in a park and go intervene. That's a brave choice. It's not a brave choice to do some weird thing in the middle of a scene.
You know what I mean? His current role, he's making choices too. Mostly Just to be himself. I don't know what to do. What do I do?
Can I can I walk away? That bit's the top of my list, yeah. Oh my god, it's moving! I don't understand why you're not moving. Damn it.
Well, I mean, I pretty much... I'm playing myself if I were a landman. If you don't know what a landman is, the Paramount Plus show of the same name does a pretty good job of explaining it all. I can't wait for the day with you. And everyone like you leaves this place.
You might want to think that through. Because if I'm gone, that means the oil's gone. If the oil's gone, that means the money's gone. And that means you're gone. You're taking a peek behind the curtain of a world we really don't see.
I mean, the movie Giant, one of my favorites, I mean, that took place in the oil business in West Texas. Looks like 70 years old. Yeah, exactly. It's here. And there ain't a dang thing you're gonna do about it.
I always tell people that this is kind of like giant with cursing. You are president of an oil company. It's time you start living like it. We're on a fing Gulf Stream. I am living.
Yeah, I mean, we're flying back to our fing fat house in Midland. Fans have been waiting a long time for Landman's second season. It debuts next Sunday. I gave it to the movers. It don't belong to us.
We rent it. Billy does not like to rehearse. That's his co-star, Allie Larkin.
So you have to be ready to go. Because he just wants it to be in the moment? Fresh. Like, whatever happens is going to happen. At $2,800, the truffle is not optional.
You're kidding me. For a mushroom? His hillbilly vibe isn't a put-on. Give me about $600 worth. He proudly calls himself a Texarkansan.
the product of a lot of rural places that even the railroads passed by. Did you like growing up in a small town? I did, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I keep my upbringing in my back pocket all the time. You never forget it.
While he never actually worked on an oil rig, he did have his fair share of jobs where dangerous machinery decided if you came home that night or not. Machine shops And sawmills are both not exactly the safest places to work, especially when you're a. Dumb little skinny hippie kid with hair to your waist. We always had a joke about sawmill workers, which was: Do you know what this is? It's a sawmill worker ordering five beers.
He went from sawdust to Hollywood fairy dust in a pretty unconventional way. I only took drama because I thought I got to get a C in something. You know, because I was not good in school. His idols were Robert Duvall. Bruce Dern and Sam Elliott.
But in Los Angeles, at a cocktail party where Thornton was working as a busboy, famed screenwriter and director Billy Wilder told him acting. wasn't for him. He said, forget about it. You're too ugly to be a leading man. And he said, you're too pretty to be a character actor.
And I said, what do I do? He said, can you write? I said, yeah, I do write. He goes, Write your own stories. create your own characters, don't stand in line with everybody else.
I kinda want something other to eat. Mm-hmm. He did write his own story and create his own character. You got any biscuits for sale in there? Slingblade earned him an Academy Award for the Best Adapted Screenplay.
and an Oscar nomination for Best Actor to boot. I love you, boy. I love you too. Do you think you'll ever Go back to writing and directing. You know, I don't know that anybody wants to see What I have to say as a director or a writer, because all my stuff is based on southern literature.
And I don't think that. Those stories would really be relevant to anyone right now, so I doubt I ever do it again. Letting go of things he loves isn't easy. We were stunned to find out that he hasn't felt truly carefree since the short-lived TV show The Outsiders more than 30 years ago. I had no responsibility.
I was making $2,500 an episode. Never thought I'd see that kind of money. And then my brother Jimmy died. Yeah. Changed my life.
He was my best friend.
So that's when you talk about carrying it around in your back pocket. Yeah. No. They both grew up playing in bands. To this day, Billy Bob still idolizes his brother's musical talent.
He played every instrument. Did he, really? Except drums. He looked like he had a disorder when he tried to play drums. How does that feel?
How does that feel? Billy Bubb never gave up his love of music. His band, the Boxmasters, have recorded 19 albums, and this past summer, they actually opened... For the who? We're just there to waste 45 minutes while they're getting ready.
You know, so hopefully the fans will be with us. Please help me. Down here. He doesn't act his age, which in hindsight we probably shouldn't have asked about. Any thoughts on turning 70?
What did you say? No, you know what? It's so funny. You're scared of every milestone. But this one actually did affect me in a way that I had to have a few.
meetings with myself late at night. In the end, what Billy Bob Thornton found is that he and so many of his older contemporaries, including his friend Sam Elliott, who's still acting with him at 81, what's the plan here? We're bringing you home are still defined. by their good work. We've all seen each other get older.
And when I see that wisdom and see the respect that people have for them, it just kind of makes everything melt away somehow. I mean, I'm in a successful band. I'm in a successful show. Every day when I wake up, I just say, I'm blessed. That's really it.
Results from Tuesday's elections are likely to reverberate in the weeks and months ahead. as next year's midterms come into focus. We've asked our Robert Costa for an assessment. A new generation of Democrats stepped onto the national stage this past week. Tonight, you have delivered.
A mandate for change. Zoran Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democratic socialist, surged to victory in New York City. Winning more votes than any mayoral candidate since 1969. Virginia chose pragmatism. Over partisanship.
I hear you, New Jersey. Good government doesn't just manage problems. It solves them. But in New Jersey and Virginia, centrist Democrats were at the fore as Mikey Sherrill and Abigail Spamberger won their bids for governor. A through line for all the Democrats' campaigns, a focus on economic anxiety.
Is the economy top of mind for voters right now? All of these candidates seem to be talking about affordability. That's certainly the message the White House has taken from it. And so unless Republicans are able to deliver on those promises on the pocketbook issues, they could see the exact strategy they use to retake all of government used against them. Luke Broadwater and Annie Carney are reporters for the New York Times and co-wrote Madhouse about dysfunction inside the Capitol.
You had blue states and blue cities that voted blue, to the alarm of no one. They say lawmakers are digesting this past week's results. Last night was a shellacking. With an eye on next year's midterms. Off-year elections can be a sign of what's to come, but also they can sometimes be false flags.
I think what happened this week exceeded Democrats' expectations. They feel like this was a referendum on the shutdown. On Trump's policies, and that, yes, it presages big gains in 2026. Credit for those hopes can also be given to California, where voters pass Proposition 50, Governor Gavin Newsom's ballot measure that will enable Democrats to redraw the state's congressional map and pick up U.S. House seats.
What you're seeing in California is the Democrats trying to do exactly what the Republicans are trying to do in Texas, which is you're trying to rearrange the game so that your party can get more seats. And I think we're going to see more and more of this in every state across the country. In another sign of change, I will not be seeking reelection. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a force for decades and the first woman to ever hold the gavel, announced she would not seek re-election. For now, the ascent of Mamdani, an ally of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has thrilled many on the left.
But the success of Spamberger Cheryl and Newsom shows the battle for the Democrats' future is just beginning. There's a divide in the party, the establishment and the progressives. We saw both versions win, and that tension will continue to be what they're fighting about until 2028 when they decide their presidential nominee will. Though President Trump has shrugged off talk of this past Tuesday being a referendum, they say that I wasn't on the ballot was the biggest factor. other Republicans see the results as a wake-up call.
And all this comes as the government shutdown continues and as anger grows over flights being delayed across the country. The House stands adjourned until noon on Monday, November 10th. The GOP House remains out of session, and senators are trying to jump-start the negotiations.
So many Americans are struggling with air travel. Is this enough, Annie and Luke, to bring These parties together, people can sort of look the other way at the national parks closing or look the other way at government workers being furloughed. But when it comes to travel for Thanksgiving and you couldn't get back home, that's really going to bring the anger. And enough anger traditionally is what ends a shutdown. At the beginning of this, someone who has worked through many shutdowns explained to me: Democrats and Republicans don't get in a room together and negotiate out of the goodness of their hearts.
They get in there when they are feeling extreme pain, and they feel extreme pain by voters yelling at them and worrying that they are going to lose their seats. As for Annie Carney and Luke Broadwater, they say leaders in both parties believe the real recording. for the Trump presidency and for Congress will come next November. If Democrats win, that means they have subpoena power in the U.S. House.
and can try to hold President Trump. To account. No longer will it be Trump who's running roughshod over all these states and running roughshod over the Congress and doing whatever he wants. He's going to be after dealing with their investigations, with their inquiries, and maybe even another impeachment. It'll be a whole different world for Donald Trump if he wakes up.
to a Democratic House after the midterm election. Thank you for listening. Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. Tulsa is my home now. Academy Award nominee Sylvester Stallone stars in the Paramount Plus original series, Tulsa King.
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