Lindsey Vonn, John Mulaney, Buena Vista Social Club on Broadway

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streaming now on Paramount+. Good morning. Jane Pauley is off this weekend.

I'm Mo Rocca and this is Sunday Morning. It was the worst nuclear energy accident in American history. And it put a relatively obscure Pennsylvania power plant called Three Mile Island front and center in the national conversation about our ever increasing energy needs. The 1979 partial meltdown of the plant's number two reactor marked a devastating setback for the nuclear power industry. But nearly 50 years later, as David Pogue will be telling us, Three Mile Island and nuclear energy may be poised for a powerful comeback.

Radioactive xenon gas is still being discharged. Ever since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, America hasn't had much appetite for new nuclear power plants. But suddenly... We're in the beginning of a renewed interest in nuclear. And who's behind this new nuclear push? Big tech. We think this is a tremendous opportunity for Google and for the world. Ahead on Sunday morning, how the A.I.

boom is bringing us a new nuclear energy boom. Few people have conquered the world of comedy like John Mulaney, performing to sold out crowds and hosting Saturday Night Live six times. He'll be talking with our Tracy Smith.

I was the best looking person at my intervention by a mile. You might say John Mulaney likes working without a net from the adrenaline rush of stand up to Saturday Night Live to the thrill of his live talk show. Explain that feeling to me. It's like coming up against a cliff and kind of dangling over it.

No, it's dangling from the cliff the whole time. Hanging with John Mulaney later on Sunday morning. A new musical is bringing the sights and especially the sounds of Cuba's old Havana to the Broadway stage. Martha Teichner has a preview of Buena Vista Social Club.

Who doesn't love a great second act story? Remember the old, mostly forgotten Cuban musicians who recorded the album Buena Vista Social Club? After the Buena Vista Social Club, they became pop stars. Pop stars? Pop stars. Worldwide?

Worldwide. Now for their third act on Broadway, coming up this Sunday morning. Luke Burbank this morning visits an Oregon prison where inmates are making a very real fashion statement. Barry Peterson explores the complicated history of artworks sold generations ago under the shadow of Nazi persecution. Lee Cowan catches up with Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn, who is racing competitively again at age 40, six years after retiring.

Plus a story from Steve Hartman and more. On a Sunday morning when we spring forward, March 9, 2025. And we'll be back in a moment. Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never.

Vegas streaming now on Paramount Plus. David Pogue this morning tells us all about the surprising resurrection of an infamous nuclear power plant and the tech giant funding its unlikely comeback. It might have seemed like one of the weirder headlines of 2024. Microsoft is paying $1.6 billion to restart Three Mile Island. Radioactive xenon gas is still being discharged. That's the nuclear power plant whose reactor number two had a partial meltdown in 1979. A government official said that a breakdown in an atomic power plant in Pennsylvania today is probably the worst nuclear reactor accident to date. There were no injuries and nobody died, but it set the nuclear industry back years.

Only two new plants have been started since that accident. This is hallowed ground in the nuclear industry. This is a place where we learned and got better. We did make change in protocols and procedures as a result of that accident.

Thousands, oh my God, yes. The one behind it, that was the reactor where we had the problem. Joe Dominguez is the CEO of Constellation Energy, which owns about half of America's 54 nuclear plants, including Three Mile Island. But the thing that people forget is that there was another reactor at the site, the one we're sitting in. That site, that reactor continued to operate until 2019 when it was closed for economic reasons. Meaning because natural gas got so cheap?

Cheap natural gas, low demand, subsidization of different technologies in the business, no policy supporting nuclear, caused plants to start retiring. So what is Microsoft's interest? All the big tech companies have ambitious goals to fight the climate crisis. That includes Google. Today I'm proud to announce that we intend to become the first major company to operate carbon free. And Apple. Apple will be 100% carbon neutral for our entire end to end footprint. And Microsoft. By 2030, Microsoft will be carbon negative. They were making progress too. Each has invested billions in wind and solar energy. And then artificial intelligence came along. AI data centers require huge amounts of electricity.

Big tech realized that they wouldn't make their goals without taking power into their own hands. Microsoft is going to enjoy the benefit of the reliable clean energy for 20 years. Is restarting this facility quicker and less expensive than just building a brand new nuclear plant?

Oh yeah. At least 10 times cheaper than building a new plant. And we think we could get it going in about 3 years versus the last plant that was built took almost 10 years. But if you're a tech company, what do you do if you don't have a recently retired nuclear plant handy?

You develop new ones. Only weeks after Microsoft's announcement, both Amazon and Google announced major investments in nuclear power. This is a deal to bring the first advanced nuclear reactor online by 2030. And we're not going to do just one reactor, but we hope to buy from what will be a series of reactors that follow that.

Michael Terrell heads Google's decarbonization efforts. Google is supplementing its already enormous green energy investments with a new kind of nuclear called small modular reactors. These are not the nuclear power plants of yesterday with the very large cooling towers.

These are much smaller facilities. But because they're modular, you can stack them together to make bigger power plants. Nuclear power isn't perfect.

It still produces waste that has to be safely stored. But unlike solar and wind, nuclear is always on, which is essential to those AI data centers. So Google is funding a company called Kairos Power to design and build this new generation of reactors. What we're building right now, you can see the construction for, will be the facility that holds our third engineering test unit. Kairos is building three small demonstration plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on the very spot where uranium was processed for the first atomic bomb.

CEO Mike Laufer says that his reactors don't use fuel rods. They use fuel pebbles, like this mock-up. It's mostly graphite. And then these little particles right here.

These are basically the tiny kernels of uranium that have the coatings. And how much power capacity is there in one of these pebbles? This is about the same as four tons of coal. Four tons of coal? And how much carbon dioxide emissions compared to the coal? Zero. The Kairos reactors also run at lower power and lower pressure than traditional reactors, which means lower risk.

Well, this all sounds great. What's the catch? There's only one problem with small modular reactors.

They don't really exist. George Washington University professor Sharon Squassoni spent 15 years researching nuclear safety for the government. She thinks the big tech companies might be in over their heads. I think they're going to find out pretty quickly that it takes way too long and it's way too expensive. I think we're going to see just how strong their commitments are to clean energy. So you're saying they may have to turn to burning stuff?

I'm pretty sure they will. Do you think there's a little bit of tech bro overconfidence there? Oh, completely. Completely.

So yes, it's really hard. I will totally agree with anyone. Kairos' Mike Laufer. But we're doing it at smaller scale to start and then building on that in the future. How much of what's here is still usable after all these years? Oh, it's all usable. Joe Dominguez's team is getting Three Mile Island ready for Microsoft.

It's this blend of old and new. Including renaming the plant the Crane Clean Energy Center. And if AI is igniting a renaissance in American nuclear, he says full steam ahead. Why do all new plants take so much longer and cost so much more than projected? Honest answer, we don't build enough of them. You don't want to build a unique design.

You want to do kind of a cookie cutter, one after another design. Now is it well understood in government and the industry that, dudes, if you start doing the same design over and over, we can get there faster and cheaper? It's probably the best understood idea.

It's understood by both Republicans and Democrats, which is a hard thing to say about anything. But sure, everybody understands that if you build a common design, you build a bunch of them. So you think we'll get there?

I do. Google's Michael Terrell agrees. As of 2030, does it look like you'll make the zero carbon goal? It is an incredibly ambitious goal.

24-7 carbon-free energy everywhere we operate, everywhere around the world. But it's something we're working very hard to achieve, and we hope to get there. What's up, Hoop fans? I'm Ashley Nicole Moss, and I'm bringing you Triple Threat, your weekly courtside pass to the most interesting moments and conversations in the NBA. From clutch performances to the stories shaping the game on and off the court, Triple Threat has you covered with it all. Culture, drama, and social media buzz, we're locked in just like you're locked in. Watch weekly on CBS Sports Network at 1 p.m. Eastern or on the CBS Sports YouTube channel as we break it all down fast and fresh. This is Triple Threat, where basketball meets culture.

Listen to On Fire, the official Survivor podcast, with me, Jeff Kropst, every Wednesday after the show, wherever you get your podcasts. Prison Blues. Luke Burbank tells us it's a popular brand of blue jeans, not without its fans or critics. Jeremiah Mauer loves his job working as a supervisor in a garment factory. What I do is I go through and I look at the seams. I'm looking for flaws like that. Yeah, this one will have to go back to the line.

Yes, this one only goes back one step and then always remember safety first, always cut away from yourself. But there's one thing about Mauer's work-life balance that's probably different from yours. Both his work and his life take place right here at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton, Oregon. It's very normalizing. I come to work eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. I mean, in several instances, it's not even like I'm in prison. My days go by fast.

My weeks go by fast. Mauer and his coworkers make the clothes for all 12,000 or so prisoners in the Oregon system, as well as a brand of denim sold on the outside known as Prison Blues. It's sold in stores, on the web, and has become popular in, of all places, Japan.

My first impression of the product was that it's really tough. It's made as work wear, and its toughness is really appealing. You might be surprised to learn all prisoners in Oregon, like many other states, are required to work while incarcerated. Most of those jobs keep institutions running, things like janitorial work and kitchen duty. And in Oregon, those jobs are paid with points that prisoners can redeem at the commissary. But the jobs with Prison Blues, which is run by an agency called Oregon Corrections Enterprises, those jobs are voluntary, they're highly sought after, and they're paid in actual money. Have you been able to save some money through this?

I have, yes. There are some people that live paycheck to paycheck, but I'm pretty simple as far as what my tastes are. Chris Seifer is working an embroidery machine, which could pay him up to $400 a month. That is, after the state takes its money for room and board and restitution for victims. Is there a kind of a personal dignity thing about going to a job that just kind of changes your mentality? Absolutely.

If you don't have that money because you have a small job, a low-paying job, like working in the scullery or other ones that don't pay very much, having to ask for money from the outside, it can break the heart sometimes. That's right. Inside prison, you can save money or go broke, just like a lot of people do living on the outside. Then there are the seven states, according to the ACLU, that don't pay prisoners at all for most jobs.

And in those places, refusing to work can lead to loss of privileges or punishment, which critics say amounts to forced labor, labor that we on the outside benefit from. If you go to a public university, you may be sitting on furniture, dorm furniture, produced by incarcerated people. Jennifer Turner is a researcher at the American Civil Liberties Union.

If you are in law enforcement, you may be wearing a bulletproof vest or in a car that's been serviced by incarcerated people. And if you go to the supermarket, you may be buying milk that came from cows that were milked and raised by incarcerated people. An AP investigation last year found that a lot of prison work, especially in states where it isn't paid, can be dangerous and demeaning, like picking cotton in the blistering sun or working in unsafe facilities with minimal training. According to Turner's research at the ACLU, incarcerated labor produces at least $2 billion worth of goods and at least $9 billion worth of services every year. Because the supply chain is challenging to track, so much produced by incarcerated people ends up in our supermarkets, in our government buildings, and elsewhere, and we are buying these products and using those services without realizing it.

The fruits of this labor is all around us, and we constantly benefit from it, but we don't know it. Not to mention the impact on the labor market, where a prison crew, say fighting wildland fires in California, will always be earning less money than a group of non-incarcerated firefighters driving wages down, potentially. It feels a lot of the times like we're being more treated as free labor.

I try to put that in perspective for some of the staff out here. It's like, well, what if you had to come here but not get paid? Some might wonder how indentured servitude is still legal in the U.S. Well, because when slavery was outlawed by the 13th Amendment, a specific exemption was made for incarcerated people.

The fact that some states don't even pay inmates at all strikes Jeff Adair, incarcerated at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, as unfair. I don't see a negative from people working in prison. It's actually a good thing to teach people a skill. I mean, if you just sat around doing nothing, then you're not going to be very productive out there when you get out.

But at the same rate, I feel that if it's going to be a job, they should be compensated just like anybody else. It doesn't matter where we're at, whether we're here or out there, we're still people. People like Theron Giles, who when we met him, was about to use the money he'd earned working at Prison Blues to start building a life on the outside, after spending most of his adulthood behind bars. I was going down a self-destructive life. Me being here gave me a chance to reflect.

This place could eat you up as well if you don't do the right thing. If you don't take the initiative to want to change, you've got to want to change. A changed person, he says, thanks in part to his work with Prison Blues, which he says is his first steady job he's ever had. For me, just being in here, it was a different environment than me feeling that I'm incarcerated. It helped me to mold my skills and hone into a better person that I can be. Spending time at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution drove home one fact for us, and that is, prisoners are people.

Yes, people who've been convicted of committing crimes, to be certain, but also people who will very likely be released one day, and who, the research shows, will have a better chance of success if they've been able to mend their lives. Martha Teichner this morning is taking us on a colorful journey to Old Havana for a preview of the new Broadway musical, Buena Vista Social Club. Remember Buena Vista Social Club, the album?

Even if you don't. Now there's Buena Vista Social Club, the musical. An exuberant blast from the past. Old Cuban music for a new audience. There is a music studio in Old Havana.

The Broadway version is a stand-in for the city's corroded grandeur. And for the studio, where in 1996, a group of old, mostly forgotten Cuban musicians recorded the album. What follows is the story of a band, not ours, though we will do our best. Some of what follows is true. Some of it only feels true.

The true part. The real person this actor is playing. Juan de Marcos Gonzalez.

Look, there he is during rehearsals. Juan de Marcos had already located and brought together the old musicians before music producers Ry Cooder and Nick Gold showed up in Havana. When their plan to make an album pairing Cuban and West African performers fell through.

They went with plan B and recorded with the group Juan de Marcos had assembled. I was so happy because they were my idols. I grew up listening to their music and then suddenly I was the band leader. Did any of the people involved, including you, have any idea that what became Buena Vista Social Club would be something big?

No. They became pop stars. It was like an unbelievable thing.

The unexpected and irresistible phenomenon that resulted is the subject of the Oscar-nominated 1999 Wim Wenders documentary. Well, it was just ubiquitous. I mean, you would hear this music everywhere. Music journalist Judy Cantor-Navas is a Substack contributor and the author of Cuba Unrecord. To say that yes, we're listening to this old Cuban music that is suddenly selling millions of albums, seemed like something that was very unlikely. Why do you think people love the music so much? I think not only this, but Cuban music has really appealed to so many different kinds of people.

They say that it has the perfect combination of the Afro-Cuban rhythms and the Spanish melodies that came together in Cuba. It's just this very infectious music that gets in your soul. It wasn't just the music they loved. It was who the musicians were. The improbable last act of their careers.

The album won a Grammy and has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide. And they were so happy because they came back to the stage. Because if you are a musician and you are an artist, you are always an artist.

And even when you are retired, you have this small candle in your heart. O'Mara Portuondo was 67. Ibrahim Ferrer was 70. Other band members were as old as 90. They began touring the world. Even singing to me for a Sunday morning story 25 years ago.

I still have to pinch myself to make sure I'm not asleep and dreaming, Ferrer says. I never thought I'd have so much success. The play tells the imagined origin story of the musicians, of their careers, their personal struggles. But I know how this story goes. With hints of romance.

Decades before their fame, late in life. What's this place called? The Buena Vista Social Club. I'm Cuban-American. I was born and raised in Miami.

But my parents and my family is Cuban. And so for me what brought me to this was the music. It was music that I was raised around my entire life.

Marco Ramirez wrote the Broadway show. He was 14 when the album came out. This is a moment of intense pride. Of us realizing that the world cared about our music. And that these songs that I was used to hearing on my grandfather's little yellow Sony boombox above the washing machine. These were songs that suddenly the whole world cared about.

That meant everything to me. I guess I just dreamed that one day with the right record we might remind the world that Mozart has got nothing on us. And I was just obsessed with this album. I kept listening to it on repeat. Something about the lyrics spoke to me. I learned the lyrics without knowing what I was talking about. Because Swahili is my first language. This was in Kenya where Sahim Ali, the director of the show, grew up. His father, an airline pilot, brought the album home. I knew nothing about their stories.

Absolutely nothing. The first time I knew about their stories was reading Marco's script. That's what excited me about this musical.

People are going to know about them now in a way that young people like me never had a chance to. Brought to life on a Broadway stage. The old songs as they were played in the 1940s and 50s. At the actual Buena Vista Social Club, a members-only Havana nightclub for working-class black Cubans. It was shut down after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. The events of the Cuban Revolution lurk at the edges of the show.

It's not your fault the world made us take sides. Until one day, there were only two types of Cubans. Those who stayed and those who left. Playing yesterday's Cuban music on Broadway. Some of today's finest Cuban musicians. Most of whom now live outside Cuba.

Because making a living there is tough. The people are going to see the real Cuba. They are going to get a piece of our country when they attend the musical. We have nothing in our country. We don't have oil, we don't have gold. But we have the music, beautiful ladies, good coffee, the best cigars and the best rum. And the music. Which is the most important thing like food for us.

Served up on Broadway, a feast. The 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy are less than a year away. And one of the biggest stars hoping to compete for Team USA is also one of the most unlikely. Ski legend Lindsey Vonn.

Lee Cowan caught up with a former retiree on the comeback trail. One final time for Lindsey Vonn. For Lindsey Vonn it was a reluctant farewell. The last run of her stellar career. In the world of alpine skiing few have been more decorated. She's won almost every major title.

From World Cup championships. So Lindsey Vonn into the lead by more than a half second. To Olympic medals. Sometimes when you're in it you don't really think about. What it took to get each one.

I think you just have a different perspective. You're focused on the next one and racing and performance. And you never really get to look back and say like, hey, good job. She was fast. Reaching speeds of up to 85 miles an hour. She was also fearless. And resilient.

Crash after terrible crash. As she hits one, two, three. And as she shakes it off.

She always fought her way back. And now has dropped back. And Vonn over the top. But 2013, that was one of her hardest seasons. Oh, and the landing is absolutely awful to watch.

Vonn's right knee bore the brunt of that crash. And it was never really the same. Fast forward almost six years. The day of her last race, bum knee and all. For the final time in her story career. Still, she somehow took home the bronze anyway.

And we've seen this seen quite a bit. The 82 World Cup wins, the 20 World Cup titles. But at 34, she was retired. Skiing was always my son. And everything in my life revolved around it. What time I woke up, what I ate, when I went to bed.

It was all dictated around. What's best for my skiing career. And then I woke up one day and my son is gone. Say hi, Lindsey. Ski racing is all Lindsey Vonn ever really wanted. Her dad, a former alpine skier himself, moved the family from Minnesota to Vail, Colorado. Just so that Lindsey could train for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The same slopes she now sees from her home in Park City, Utah. This is kind of just where I go to regroup and charge my batteries. And the dogs love it.

Who's my big boy? In retirement, she kept many of her corporate sponsors. Which helped her buy homes in Miami and Beverly Hills, too.

Looking gorgeous as usual. She continued to wow red carpets and not racing, gave her more time to pour into her foundation, helping underserved girls achieve their own athletic dreams. But that knee, that kept getting worse. I just couldn't do the things I love to do anymore. Was that bad? Yeah, it was really bad. I couldn't straighten it all the way. I couldn't flex it all the way. And so I just stuck in this half state that ended up causing hip pain, back pain, neck pain. It wasn't just my knee, unfortunately. It was kind of everything, you know.

It's like you get to the end of your rope and you got to make a decision. So I did. I'm ready.

I'm ready. A knee replacement. The outer portion of her right knee is now titanium. It sounds like, though, you didn't do it to get back into skiing. You just did it to, like, live your life.

Yeah. I don't need to ski. I am Lindsey. I am not a skier.

I'm a person that loves to ski. And that's a really big distinction for me and in my mind, in my heart. How soon afterwards did you wonder how far you could push it? It was pretty quickly after.

Only four months, in fact. She took her coaches to New Zealand to equate her new knee with her old sport. It just was such a drastic difference that I thought, well, if I can do all of these things that used to hurt me before, where would that take me, you know? And then my mind starts to wander and, you know. And here we are.

And here we are. And where she is... Lindsey Vaughn at age 40 is ready again to prioritize. ...is back on the U.S. ski team and hoping to qualify for one more trip to the Olympics. Italy, 2026.

I will be at a disadvantage. I am 40, and at that time next year I will be 41. 40-year-old Lindsey Vaughn just off the podium. But I know my skiing is there.

I think I'm actually skiing better now than I was last few years of my career. Is there some good-natured ribbing? Oh, yeah, for sure. Like what? There's one girl that calls me grandma, which I don't exactly appreciate. But there's definitely, you know, some jokes around the team that, you know, I raced in my first Olympics before one of the girls was born. She knew there would be some raised eyebrows, but she got more than that, with some critics going so far as to question her sanity. These past few weeks have been tough.

She posted on Instagram last month. I know they are only a few voices out of many, but it still hurts. What I didn't expect was people to criticize me as a person and why I'm doing it and that I can't handle life outside of ski racing. She dismisses most of it, choosing to concentrate on training smarter, not harder. It's not like I'm preparing for another 10 years of my skiing career. I'm just preparing for one year for literally two races. She's put the rest of her life on hold for the moment. A single goal does require a singularity of focus, much like making her banana bread does. I need to put on weight, man. Do you really?

Yeah, I'm about 20 pounds less than I was when I was racing before. That brand of determination, she says, came from her mom, Lindy Lund. She would have given anything to play tennis, to play squash, to ride a bike, and she couldn't. Her mom suffered a stroke while pregnant with Lindy in 1984. It was debilitating, but she soldiered on without complaint. When she was diagnosed with ALS, once known as Lou Gehrig's disease, she, like her daughter, wasn't about to give up. She thought that she could beat the odds and she could be the one that would live 20 more years and she lasted one.

Man, it was hard. I still got her number in my phone. I still message her. Do you? You just call her and talk to her?

I send her a text message. Do you really? Yeah, yeah. She said her mom would want her to be flying high once again, even though winning another downhill will be an uphill battle. 1.18 off the pace. In a sport measured in hundredths of a second, the difference between first and last can be minuscule. But on this second go-around, Lindsey Vonn is taking time to savor the view just as much as the chase.

The fact that I'm even talking about going to the Olympics right now is something I never thought I would ever do, so I'm already winning. The Bible tells us to give and you shall receive. Steve Hartman has proof. In one of Baltimore's poorest neighborhoods, we found one of its richest doctors. Rich, not in money.

In fact, he's pretty much broke. But 66-year-old family doctor Michael Zalikofer is flush with job satisfaction. I just love people. I love to see a rash. If you say you got a rash, I'm going to find you because I love a bump on your head. You see what I'm saying to you? No, not really.

I love a bump. Has anybody taken your temperature? No. Listen to my sweetie. That infectious spirit is part of what sets him apart.

Another is his prices. Can't pay? That's okay. You make everything sound so easy.

It is easy. Forget that dollar bill. I'm going to see you no matter what. You walk in that door, you will be seeing you've been your grandma with you. I'm going to see her too. Okay.

But here's what amazed us even more. In the nearly 40 years Dr. Z has been practicing, he's never taken a real vacation. Tells every patient they can call him 24-7, 365. I have his cell phone number.

Does everybody have his cell phone? Yeah. He's always available. This guy seems almost unbelievable.

He is unbelievable because you'll never meet another person like him ever. A superhero, but hardly invincible. A few months ago, Dr. Z was diagnosed with cancer. So I got two separate cancers.

One renal, one rectal, but I don't care about it. And to add insult to injury, Dr. Z didn't have insurance. There was a whole series of snafus, but bottom line is he had no way to pay for his radiation treatments until his patients turned the tables on that ever-giving doctor. I'm like, let's fight. What can we do? Dr. Z will not give up on you.

We damn sure ain't giving up on him. Whatever needs to be done to save Dr. Z, we're going to do it collectively. So collectively, they started a crowdfunding campaign. Nearly a thousand people donated, raising more than $100,000. Today, his prognosis is good. Right.

He got his insurance back, and now plans to funnel any money left over back into the community. You know what? I'm going to say something that may seem crazy as hell.

I'm thankful that I got cancer, because I am the happiest man on the planet, no matter what the outcome. What we have shown and why we're sitting in this table right now to show America, this is what you're about. We about giving. I can't make it without them. No, can't they make it without me?

You need each other. Let this nation hear this story. Let it hear this story.

And let it follow his prescription for a better outcome. If you need something, you just buzz me, okay? You know, I am Irish, and Irish people, they don't tell you a thing. Irish people keep it so bottled up.

You know, like the plan with Irish people is like, I'll keep all my emotions right here, and then one day I'll die. It's Sunday morning, and here again is Mo Rocca. From performing to sold-out crowds, to hosting Saturday Night Live, to starring on Broadway, there isn't much comedian John Mulaney can't do. But as he tells Tracy Smith, his career and his life haven't always been laughing matters. John Mulaney is a comedy superstar finding the funny in the familiar. Thank you for coming to see me at Radio City Music Hall. I love to play venues where if the guy that built the venue could see me on the stage, he would be a little bit bummed about it. At 42, he already has five highly-rated comedy specials to his name, three Primetime Emmys, and a reputation as one of the best stand-up guys in the game. I can't listen to any new songs, because every new song is about how tonight is the night and how we only have tonight.

I want to write songs for people in their 30s called Tonight's No Good, How About Wednesday? But for his new job, he's sitting down. Mulaney's hosting a talk show on Netflix, complete with a couch and celebrity guests, and the whole thing is live, in part because he likes it better that way. It feels like there's more stakes. And you like that. I love that.

It's the best. Explain that feeling to me. It's like coming up against a cliff and kind of dangling over it? No, it's dangling from the cliff the whole time. This began as an experiment during the Netflix Comedy Festival last year called Everybody's in L.A., talking about L.A. things like earthquakes and coyotes.

What's a humane, responsible way to scare a coyote off if they're coming near you? Good question, John. Now the show's back with a broader focus and a new name, and it'll go live every Wednesday night, starting this week. It's a fun feeling to know that hopefully a lot of people are watching, and it's live globally with no delay, and you could really damage... And he knows all about live TV. Thank you, thank you very much. It is great to be here hosting Saturday Night Live for the sixth time.

It's very nice to see all of you. For John Mulaney, Saturday Night Live is home turf. He started as a writer there in 2008 and helped create some of the show's biggest characters, like Bill Hader's Stefan. Mulaney would often change the script last minute to throw Hader off, like in this Halloween sketch. Have you heard of Blackula the Black Dracula?

Yes. Well, they have a Jewish Dracula. Oh, what's his name? Sidney Applebaum. Seems like this is the thing John Mulaney was born to do. Raised in Chicago, Mulaney says he grew up feeling that comedy was his destiny. Growing up, was there a moment or a memory where you realized that you were funny? Always interesting in these things because you don't want to sound egotistical, but I don't remember a time when I did... Not long after graduating from Georgetown, he joined SNL, and a career was launched. Mulaney made his mark in New York, but he's fascinated with Southern California, where he now lives year-round.

He took us record shopping at one of his favorite places, the legendary Amoeba Music in Hollywood. When you come out to places like this, do people come up to you or do they leave you alone? A little bit. My joke is that I'm like Louis Farrakhan. I mean a lot to a small group of people.

Truth is, John Mulaney is a lot bigger than he'll admit. Hello, old friend. In his most recent special, Baby Jay, he played to a sold-out crowd and focused on his drug addiction and recovery.

I walk into my intervention two hours late. According to my friends, this is what I said. Oh, okay. He describes a 2020 intervention on his behalf, staged by friends like Seth Meyers and Fred Armisen. Let me just call this out now.

I don't mean to be weird. It was a star-studded intervention. It's funny now, of course. Mulaney says he's been clean for more than four years. Forgive me if this is a naive question, but is sobriety something that you have to think about every day?

Well, that's a good question. I don't think about cocaine opioids and benzodiazepine every day. I'll acknowledge that I understand the vigilance I need. I do not think about it every day. I just, I don't. I do think about the ways that I can lead my life to perhaps never feel the kind of strain that got me there. So yeah, sobriety maybe being like a bigger term than just abstaining from the chemicals, I definitely think about it. Mulaney credits his wife, actress Olivia Munn, with helping him navigate his recovery. Are you swagging Nebraska? Yes, I am, you corn-fed hay seed. You might remember her from Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom.

Let's clip them up. Or maybe X-Men Apocalypse. But she's a bit of a superhero in real life as well. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023 and has shared her whole journey online from the initial test to a double mastectomy. Other women have since credited her with saving their lives. There's this lifetime risk assessment test that is really the only reason her cancer was discovered, and seeing so many women publicly and privately come to her that they discovered how high their risk was from that. She's also a mom to their two young children, Malcolm and May. I have this feeling a lot of times.

I go, I can't believe I know this person, let alone a man. My wife and I just welcomed a baby girl into our family. Fatherhood has given him not only more material but a whole new outlook on life. My wife takes care of the five-week-old, and I take the two-year-old out, and that's not fair. That's not an equal distribution of labor at all. Saying, you have a five-week-old, I'll take a two-year-old, that's like saying, I'll transport this convict across state lines.

You hold a potato. John Mulaney's built a good life making people laugh. Now, as a husband and father of two, he says he has something to live for. How do you think fatherhood changed how you look at the world? I'm in the world now that I'm a father. My head was my only home before that. When my son was born, the first thought I had was, I went, oh, there you are. And when my daughter was born, I had this, not to sound woo-woo or anything.

Oh, be woo-woo. Well, when she was born, I went, oh. My thought was like, oh, we've met before. I've collided with you some other time.

So it's like these people came in that just, I don't know, make me like the world a lot more. Although Germany's Nazi regime fell some eight decades ago, reverberations from that reign of terror echo to this day. Here's Barry Peterson. Few who see Picasso's The Actor at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art know its complicated history. It used to hang in the home of my great-granduncle, Paul Lefmann. Lefmann, a German Jewish businessman, sold it in 1938. He needed money to escape the Nazis. Did they get out?

They did get out, and they did survive, but not all of the family did. Laurel Zuckerman represents Lefmann's heirs, who have fought for the painting worth as much as $100 million, claiming it was sold under duress. Sold under duress?

Yes. Which means? If there had not been Nazi persecution against them, they never would have sold it.

Yet, two American courts disagreed. But for other cases, the tide may be turning, and Amsterdam Museum returned Orelisk by Henri Matisse to the heirs of Albert and Marie Stern, saying it was sold under duress. The Sterns had tried to escape, but most of the family died in concentration camps. And in a historic policy shift, the French Parliament recently unanimously approved a law fast-tracking the return of art to families who claim it is rightfully theirs.

Why? What's the motive here? To recognize what happened and to help families to get their works. David Givi, of the Culture Ministry, heads the mission for research and return of Nazi-era looted property. We have to know the history because they should be in the rightful owner's hands, because they are the last witnesses of what happened during the war.

These works are like the witnesses of the persecutions. I think there finally is political will to recognize that this is part of belated justice. Eight decades later justice.

Yes, quite belated. University of Denver professor of history, Elizabeth Campbell, wrote about the complicity of the French and other European governments in keeping what the Nazis stole. She says there could be even more change, with new guidelines agreed to by France and other countries, including the United States. These new guidelines say that any persecuted person who sold a work of art during the Nazi era should be assumed to have done so under duress. So it's now giving a blanket acknowledgement of coercion in any sale. So it's really a dramatic change.

I don't think you've been properly introduced. When the Germans retreated... Sam, it's your neighbor, Mr. Rembrandt. As shown in the movie The Monuments Men, Allied art experts found stacks of stolen paintings everywhere from caves to castles. More than 60,000 pieces of art were returned to France, but some 2,000 pieces ended up in limbo, held by the French government, with no clear rightful owner. So this is maybe a painting which was not that unusual.

We met Inès Rottermann-Reinard in front of one such painting at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. There's really a huge wish now by the French to clarify the situation. As the museum's newly hired provenance researcher, her job is to find the truth about a piece of art's Nazi-era past. It's somehow as if you take a detective and you say, look at all the cold cases which happened 80 years ago and so on.

Each story is important, and it is worth for each family to do this effort. But the case of Armand d'Orville has pitted the French government against his heirs, among them Francine Caen. Discovering those pictures, it's a way to know him.

And Raphael Faub. I feel anger when we have so much difficulties to retrieve them. When d'Orville died of natural causes, his art collection was sold at auction.

But due to anti-Semitic laws, the French authorities confiscated the proceeds, and family members, without money to escape, were later murdered at Auschwitz. 80 years later, a North Carolina museum returned one of d'Orville's paintings to the family, and a German museum returned one by impressionist Camille Pissarro. But the French government is refusing to give back more than half a dozen paintings held in public museums, saying the auction was not done under duress. It must be hard for them to give them back, so I can understand that, but it's just right, you know. It's just right.

Right to give them back to you. That's right. This one was at the Louvre. The family hired Paris lawyer Corinne Herskovich, who has spent 30 years recovering art for Jewish families.

All these people in charge of the cultural heritage, they were more concerned by keeping alive or preserve all these paintings and works of art than to preserve the Jews. Do you think some of these museum directors are still ashamed of how they got these paintings? I think so. I think so. They are embarrassed, that's for sure.

I could imagine. The Dorville heirs believe they are fighting for their history. When you get them back into the family, do you feel somehow that bad history has been corrected, erased? Not erased, never erased. Members of our family died because of it. In my mind, it's a way to repair the damage that was done. It is the memory of the family, because it was totally forgotten. And it is on our shoulder to awake this story. To tell the story?

Yes, to tell the story. I'm Mo Rocca. Thanks for listening. Please join Jane Pauley when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. Watch all the cases, all for free from all your favorite devices. We got you. Feel the free Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never. Las Vegas, streaming now on Paramount+.