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Excludes restaurants. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley, and this is Sunday Morning. Few, if any, unelected officials in recent times have had a more high-profile role in an administration than billionaire Elon Musk. As a White House advisor and disruptor of the federal government, Musk has wasted little time slashing budgets and firing tens of thousands of government workers, putting himself in the headlines almost as much as the president. Later this morning, Connor Knighton will look at how those cuts are impacting an agency familiar to all of us, the National Park Service. But to begin, Robert Costa examines the impact of Musk's unprecedented power. This is what victory feels like.
Yeah. If it feels like the news out of Washington never stops, it's not just President Trump keeping reporters busy. Billionaire Elon Musk now has enormous power and is a lightning rod for controversy. This is classic Elon Musk playbook. It's act now, apologize later, or don't apologize at all.
Ahead on Sunday morning, disruption comes to the Capitol. Actor Sarah Snook distinguished herself with her award-winning performance as Shiv Roy on the hit series Succession. Now she's taking on 26, yes, 26 roles in one Broadway play. Clearly, she has much to talk about with our Faith Sealy. There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.
Chances are, Sarah Snook in the picture of Dorian Gray is unlike anything you've ever seen before. Your performance, it's like a train leaving the station. Yeah, you got to keep up. Yeah, it doesn't stop. Yeah.
If you think too much about it, then you lose the cue, you lose the moment. Keeping up with Sarah Snook later on Sunday morning. Lee Cowan takes us to a college in Kansas where students can get a degree and a future job restoring cars of the past. Technically, the mascot of McPherson College in Kansas is a bulldog. But more recently, God, it rides beautifully.
That's everyone's first comment when they ride in it. The school has become known for its 1953 Mercedes Benz that has stunned the classic car world. I think it symbolizes not just for the program, but for this little college in Kansas, what's possible. This is how a lot of our projects will start. The young hands finding the jobs of the future in the rolling vestiges of our past. That story ahead on Sunday morning. Seth Doan this morning will shine a light on the humble and endangered and charming gas lamps of London, plus Ben Tracy on the potential of nuclear fusion to power our energy needs, along with a story from Steve Hartman and more.
It's the last Sunday morning of winter, March 16th, 2025. We'll be right back. directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Plus with indeed sponsored jobs.
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With Robert Costa, we take a closer look. So I just wanted to make a statement. I'm going to buy one. Now here's the bad news.
I'm not allowed to drive. It was a remarkable moment last Tuesday, President Donald Trump standing beside a shiny electric car at the White House, making a pitch for the car's maker, Elon Musk. Because this man has devoted his energy and his life to doing this. I think he's been treated very unfairly by a very small group of people. This is what victory feels like.
Yeah. For Musk, who spent about 300 million to help Trump win the White House, and who has reportedly pledged millions more to Trump's political efforts, it was a boost for Tesla's image, everything's computer and a show of solidarity from the president. Tesla protests across the country have been a response to the Department of Government Efficiency Initiative, known as Doge.
One of the biggest functions of the Doge team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out. And as the man at its helm, Musk has been presidential confidant, cost cutter, and government contractor all at once. Is Wired's assessment that there are conflicts of interest at play with Elon Musk? It is very clear that there are conflicts of interest across the board. I mean, Elon Musk himself is one giant conflict of interest, right?
How many people are actually in Doge now? Katie Drummond is the global editorial director of Wired, the technology publication that has scored recent scoops about Musk and his associates. When you think about SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, you think about all of these companies that are in some way, shape, or form regulated and overseen by different agencies of the federal government. And then you remember that the person who owns and runs all of these companies is flying on Air First One with President Trump.
Of course, it's a conflict of interest. After years of covering Silicon Valley, Wired was ready to cover the ascent of tech billionaires into politics. He gets it done. He's a leader.
Yeah. The magazine endures Trump's opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, last year. When you saw that picture at President Trump's inauguration of Elon Musk and all of these Silicon Valley billionaires standing up there on the dais, did that represent a new power structure in this country?
It's a power structure that has been growing for a while now, but I thought that the inauguration was such a stark moment of realization, I think should be a moment of realization for everyone in the United States about who really runs this country. Who's running it? Elon Musk or President Trump? The technology industry. You think about the trillions of dollars involved in all of those companies and those businesses. There is so much power in the technology industry. And when you combine that with, you know, essentially collusion with the federal administration, or at least a willingness to work hand in hand with the Trump administration, that's what we're about to see.
Elon Musk is the world's richest man. He has a lot of business dealing with the federal government. Are you concerned, are Republicans concerned in any way about possible conflicts of interest? Well, I think you always have to look at the danger of conflicts of interest with anybody.
But at the same time, I would say that one of the virtues of being as wealthy as he is, is he hardly needs to rig the game. But who has oversight then over Musk at this point? Donald J. Trump.
That's it? He is the chief executive officer of the United States. He was elected by the American people. And he's acting as the president of the United States, trying to change the bureaucracy. Newt Gingrich is a Republican former speaker of the House and a longtime Trump ally. Trying to broker a budget deal. Gingrich became a household name three decades ago for his own push to shrink the federal government. Many members feel very deeply that they were sent here to balance the budget, to bring wasteful federal spending under control. What makes now different, if anything?
Well, a lot of things. I think, first of all, the government's much sicker than it was in 1995. It's had a huge growth of bureaucracy, a huge growth of left-wing ideology, much bigger deficits. Come on up here, Elon. Trump has been campaigning for 10 years.
He's found in Elon Musk the kind of person who has the drive, the toughness, the intelligence, to really fundamentally take on the deep state and change it in ways that would normally be unthinkable. These are tough decisions. In the 1990s, Gingrich pressured the Democratic Clinton administration to embrace conservative budget cuts.
But in the Clinton era, most reforms came only after months of deliberation and congressional action, in stark contrast to what's happening today. So, nobody's going to bat a thousand. I mean, we will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes.
What happened if people get hurt, if the government's not functioning? Let's be clear. Some people are going to get hurt. Let's be honest.
What do you mean? I mean that there'll be some people laid off that probably shouldn't have been. There'll be some contracts that are dropped that probably shouldn't have been. But the question- Or some things that happen where the government just isn't functioning. Then the question you have to ask yourself is, on balance, does this system need to be fixed, even if the risk of fixing it is going to be some things that aren't totally 100 percent? Because you slow down enough to try to avoid any possible mistake, you'll get nothing done. You can't just start lopping off whole, you know, categories. Why not?
If some American's watching this and says, just tip over the table of government. Right. Because people will die. That's why. It's that serious.
It's that serious. Elaine K. Mark is a scholar at Washington's Brookings Institution. In the 1990s, she was effectively the Clinton administration's counterpart to Newt Gingrich, administering what was called RIGO, Reinventing Government. What Musk is doing and Trump is they're testing the limits of executive power in a way that we did not.
We went through it the old fashioned way. If we thought a law needed to be changed, we went to Congress and asked them to change it. What do you think Democrats should do now? Should they try to work with Elon Musk and President Trump? Because in the 90s, Democrats and Republicans did try. I think Democrats should try where they can. Absolutely. Work with Musk.
I think they should try to work with Musk. The problem is there's a total lack of transparency. There's a total lack of transparency. We don't know who they're cutting. There's no rationale for why they're cutting. They're saying these people are wasteful. What do you mean? What are they doing that is a waste of taxpayers' money? We've gotten none of this. This is just a sort of slash and burn exercise.
This is not a thought out exercise. In a statement to Sunday Morning, White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt said Doge has been incredibly transparent and that President Trump has stated he will not allow conflicts and Elon himself has committed to recusing himself from potential conflicts. But Katie Drummond of Wired says concerns about Musk are not going away. And Elon Musk, for now, remains empowered.
But there's no turning back, you're saying? I'm just here trying to make government more efficient. It is very clear and I think should be very clear to anyone who has watched Elon Musk and how he operates for any period of time, his work ethic and his ambitions are limitless.
I think we are really sort of only at the beginning of what has the potential to be a much more seismic transformation of these federal agencies, of the federal infrastructure, for as long as Elon Musk is involved in this transformation. This morning, a story from Seth Doan we promise you'll find illuminating. These London landmarks can predate Big Ben by half a century, casting their warm glow from the city's most recognizable sites to its quaint alleyways. But the humble gas lamp has been underappreciated of late. There used to be 55,000 guest lights in London. Today how many?
About 1,100 left. Aaron Osmond is among London's last lamp lighters. While fashions came and went and the pace of life grew quicker and brighter, they still shed their soft and sympathetic light.
What's a leery? Why, it's what we lamp lighters call ourselves. Leeries or lamp lighters have endured in film lore, including Mary Poppins Returns. And the historic lamps set the scene in Harry Potter.
But it's a livelihood nearly extinguished in the harsh glare of so-called progress. The old gas mantle can't compete with the new sodium lamp whose illumination can be up to 20 times as great. Cleaner, more energy-efficient and brighter energy light sources have come into vogue, the unromantic LED being the latest.
And then I'll light the pilot. Osmond explains the lamps mostly run on timers now, but require regular maintenance. He works for British Gas, which has a history with these relics, stretching to 1813, when each had to be lit individually. Oh, once they're gone, they're gone. They've been here for over 200 years. So that's why we do our best to keep them looking and working and how they are.
The future of your job was pretty much on the line. Yeah, a year ago, you know, this was finished until the London Gasketeers sort of stepped in. We've got to thank them, really. Those Gasketeers think musketeers with a gas lamp saving mission are headquartered, quite fittingly, in an antique bookshop. A gas light really suits the character of the street. Meet Tim Bryers of Bryers & Bryers Books, who was astonished when he found workers about to dig up the gas lamp outside. And they told me not to worry. They were just going to see how easy it was to convert our wonderful working gas lamp to an LED. And at that point, I was like, are you?
Are you really? He put a stop to that, and it sparked the idea for a campaign to try to save other lamps. How architecture is lit, how buildings are lit, is really important. And the gas lamps give this incredibly distinctive warm glow, which can't be replicated with a modern LED light. Were the gas lamps something you'd noticed before? Yeah, I just assumed that they were safe, though. I didn't believe that anyone would come along after 100 years and just take them away.
It seemed crazy. There are environmental reasons to replace these gas lamps. The combined emissions of the gas lamps in Westminster account for 0.0088% of the borough's carbon emissions. In fact, you could argue that often the simplest and cheapest and greenest option is to keep what's already there. That, and the fact they're better for moths and bats and biodiversity, all reasons to get the remaining ones listed on a historic registry to protect them. They've done excellent research. They've shown it's a negligible environmental impact.
Lord Stephen Parkinson was Culture Minister when this campaign started. They've saved dozens of lamps. I think that's really convinced lots of people that it's great, we should hold on to this little slice of the past.
They also illuminate a particularly, well, pungent part of that past. So this is known as the sewer lamp. So it's the last one remaining that works the way it works. So we're here next to the Savoy Hotel on Carting Lane. This is known as Farting Lane. Farting Lane? Yep, because this is where all the sewage from London used to run into the Thames. Methane from that sewage, unwittingly provided by hotel guests, helps power the lamp.
And once upon a time, it had the added benefit of burning off some of the Victorian era stench, shining even brighter when London is busy. I never thought I was going to know this much about gas lamps. You know, I look at a gas lamp now and I go, right, I can see that's a 1908 model Rochester with a Horstman clockwork timer and a... Anyway, I've got to be careful. I'm not allowed to talk about gas lamps at home after eight o'clock at night. Your wife says please, you know?
Sometimes. These lights from Charles Dickens era just have so much more personality than an LED. It's a beautiful light. It's a beautiful light.
We call it the Dickensian glow. And for the gas companies Aaron Osman, they make for a pretty good perch. It's the places that we get to work. You know, the royal parks, the palaces, and then all them quirky little streets.
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That's warbyparker.com. Jeff Probst, every Wednesday after the show, wherever you get your podcasts. 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. For decades now, Americans have been captivated by the idea of the car of the future, be it electric, self-driving, even flying. But as Lee Cowan tells us, some students in Kansas are finding their future in the automotive past. There are country roads outside McPherson, Kansas, about an hour north of Wichita, that haven't changed much in a hundred years. And if you follow them to the campus of McPherson College, it seems time has slowed even more.
Model T's putter around, and so do vintage track cars. And a student night out can look a lot like a Laurel and Hardy movie. But here, these old cars and these young students need each other like a windshield needs a wiper. McPherson College is home to the nation's first and only four-year automotive restoration program, Riley Soyka. He didn't want to learn just to be in the camp. Nope, he came here to learn the art of fixing what's there, not replacing it. Seeing the facility for the first time, it was kind of like that aha moment, like this is it, I know it. Now this is not a trade school.
McPherson is a private liberal arts college. Where undergraduates like Anthony Campanelli, will each earn a bachelor of science degree for rescuing rolling relics. You learn everything.
You learn how to do paint work, metal work, body work, engine work, transmission work, basically anything and everything to fully restore a car. Brian Martin is the senior director here. This is how a lot of our projects will start.
He's also a McPherson alum. This is restorable? This is restorable. But this would still take years. This would take years.
As bad as it looks, this 1925 Rolls-Royce could one day end up looking like this, the 1917 Willys Knight. So this was all restored by the students? This was all restored by students. Why do you think a program like this is so necessary? Why is it so important?
The skills that go into restoring these cars to what they were when they were first created, are getting lost. Amanda Gutierrez is McPherson's vice president of the program, which means she has access to the school's project cars, including this 1965 Porsche. How popular is it? I mean, you're pretty much full up every year, right? We had this year about 160 student applications that we looked at for 60 spots.
Does that look like that's in the window? Students like Isabella Bradley and Joe Behar. Call my friends at the end of the day and they'll be telling me about how they had to take a math midterm. And I'll just say, oh yeah, I had to take a welding test.
You know, get a piece of metal looking good. Sometimes you're walking into your other courses all covered in stuff and dirty. That's because it's not just hands-on learning, but there's plenty of classroom work too.
My lights aren't on. Like courses in automotive history and business. We don't have any Greek life. We don't, you know, there's, it's really not a party school. Most days of the week, we go over to the sheds and work on our cars and hang out and tell stories.
The sheds are an off-campus facility where students work on their own vehicles on their own time. These aren't fancy one-of-a-kind, but their meaning is just as valuable. Steegan Longtime brought his great-grandparents 55 Oldsmobile with him to college. Its nickname? Bluebird. It's been in the family since it came off the lot. He's got a picture of his great-grandmother on the dash and all the blue upholstery he did himself. Tegan was so good at upholstery, in fact, that it landed him a job at Martin Brothers Customs near Austin, Texas, home to Motor Trend's popular reality show. This is Iron Resurrection.
I was like, oh, I've been watching these guys for years. I want to go get a t-shirt. So I walked in, asked for a t-shirt, and I walked out with them telling me, if you want a job here, it's yours.
Because of the reputation of the school? Is that good? Yeah, it's that good. By some estimates, there are at least 40 million collector cars in the U.S. I guess it's fair to call this the Cadillac of Cadillacs.
Big auction companies like Meekum, as well as car museums and restoration shops and private collectors, they're all in growing need of qualified people to keep those old cars on the road. Look at that! Look at that! I'm charging!
My battery's charging! After all, even Jay Leno doesn't fix, restore, and show his cars by himself. Which may explain why, back in 1997, Leno actually called McPherson College himself. Did you guys think you were being pranked? Absolutely.
Absolutely. Turns out he was being honored with a car award, and he wanted to use the occasion to highlight what students in the middle of Kansas were doing to preserve the craft. And I remember my boss coming back into my office, he walked in with a stack of business cards, and he said, everybody wants to know about our students.
But that's not McPherson's claim to fame. This is a 1953 Mercedes Benz. After seven years of meticulous work by more than 60 students, it was restored, nut by nut, bolt by bolt, and the college was invited to enter that Mercedes into the Pebble Beach Concorde Elegance, one of the world's most prestigious car competitions. It's like a high school team competing in the Super Bowl.
And guess what? It placed second in its class in 2023, the first entirely student-restored car in Pebble's 73-year history to do that. It looks and runs like the day it came off the line in Germany more than 60 years ago. Do you know what it's worth now? Yeah.
He'd prefer not to say the school isn't selling it anyway. Its real value is as a rolling mascot. Well, congratulations.
This one is absolutely gorgeous. It's a special car. It's become McPherson's ambassador. Like here at the Amelia last year, a car extravaganza on Amelia Island, just north of Jacksonville, Florida. Within the program, we have a couple different areas of emphasis. Since the car's win at Pebble Beach, applications to McPherson's auto restoration program have increased by 85 percent. More and more we get employers who are like, oh yeah, we've just never seen anything like this and we never realized that there was a place that is producing future restorers.
It's a craft to be sure. Those who restore cars learn to be detectives, mechanics, historians, and artists. And most will admit they're all pretty car crazy, too. The ghosts of our roadways have a lot to offer the future.
If that is, you listen to what they have to say. And at McPherson, the students are all ears. Seeing our students be able to accomplish what they want and to connect with people who care about them and want to give them those opportunities, I'll take that all day long. Among the agencies impacted by the administration's planned cuts to the federal workforce, the National Park Service, which operates many of our parks, seashores, historic sites, battlefields, they do a lot more than you might think. Connor Knighton takes us to the Grand Canyon. When British novelist J.B. Priestley visited the Grand Canyon in the 1930s, he described it as all Beethoven's nine symphonies in stone and magic light.
If I were an American, he wrote, I should make my remembrance of it the final test of men, art and policies. Every member or officer of the federal government ought to remind himself with triumphant pride that he's on the staff of the Grand Canyon. When the federal government fired some of the National Park Service staff who work at the canyon, this was the scene near the South Rim. In February, as part of the Trump administration's efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce, approximately 1,000 employees were laid off across the Park Service.
In the weeks since, there have been protests at hundreds of Park Service sites, from Acadia to Zion. Jim Landahl worked as a seasonal ranger for years until he got a promotion to a permanent posting at Grand Canyon six months ago. Then came the termination email, stating that we lacked the necessary skills, qualifications, fitness to perform this job. And I didn't take that personally at all because I knew that was a lie.
I knew that was false. Whoever wrote that letter wasn't hiking with me down into the canyon in 100 degree heat to do our job. Landahl's work involved restoring habitat disturbed by the reconstruction of the park's failing Transcanyon water line, which provides water to lodges and other infrastructure. Since he'd been in this position for less than a year, he was classified as a probationary employee.
I spent pretty much every dime to move here. Archaeologist Leah Gallo had only been working on the project for two weeks when she was let go. The project is a critical infrastructure project for Grand Canyon and without it there would be pretty much no Grand Canyon. Gallo had just hiked all the way to the bottom of the canyon when she got the news. You start at the rim of the canyon, you have a job.
By the time you arrive back at the rim, you don't. Yes. But this past Thursday, two federal judges ruled that the government must reinstate thousands of fired probationary workers across several agencies, finding that the layoffs were carried out under false pretenses.
That performance wasn't a factor. It's currently unclear if and when park service staff might be back on the job. We're headed into the busy season.
Are you nervous about what's to come? Yeah, we're definitely worried about, you know, people having to wait in several hour-long lines just to get into the park. Mindy Riesenberg is the chief of communications for the Grand Canyon Conservancy, a non-profit group that supports the park. We had almost five million visitors last year at Grand Canyon and now I think we're down to about 11 fee collectors for the South Rim for five million people a year. When we visited the canyon last weekend, visitors were waiting up to an hour and a half to enter the park. In New Mexico, Carlsbad Caverns National Park had canceled all ranger-led tours.
Colorado's Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument announced it would be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays due to the staffing cuts. Cuts also impact ongoing projects visitors might not see, like the Trans-Canyon water line. That project is going to be held up because scientists and botanists and arborists who were replanting trees down there for shade for safety after that project and that's all going to stop. It's going to hold the project up.
To me it looks like there's no rhyme or reason about why these things are taking place. Chuck Sams served as the 19th director of the National Park Service. He stepped down this January. During your time with the Park Service, did you feel like the parks were appropriately staffed? Oh, I absolutely felt that we needed more employees. National Park Service needs at least 15 to as much as 25 percent more staff on the ground in order to fully meet its mandate. It's important that these folks are out there and now we've seen a 10 percent reduction in staff so it's going to be detrimental to people's experiences in the parks.
So I'm here at the Grand Canyon. While the National Park Service says it won't comment on personnel matters under litigation, a group of current employees known as the Resistance Rangers have been tracking the cuts speaking out on behalf of their fired co-workers. None of us want to be doing this. We're public land servants. We're civil servants who just want to be doing our job.
I cannot separate myself from the mission. I am doing this for the love of public lands. I'm doing this for my nieces and nephews. I'm doing this for the people to come in 150 years. This ranger, who asked that we conceal their identity out of fear of retaliation, is especially worried about the crush of visitors who will be headed to understaffed parks this spring and summer.
We were hobbled to begin with and now our kneecaps are cut off. In addition to that, we have 12 billion dollars in maintenance deficit. Like every single national park you ask me about that I've been to, I can point out six or seven high priority products that need to happen in order to protect the integrity of that place. We just had our highest visitation year ever in history. 331 million people went to parks went to parks last year.
That is an absurd number of people. Americans love their national parks. Last year, a Pew Research Center opinion poll found that when it comes to federal agencies, the public has the most favorable view of the National Park Service and ranked highest with Democrats and Republicans. During my service as the National Park Service Director, I had never met a member of Congress that didn't love the park that was in their home state and I generally saw bipartisan support for the National Park Service. Moving forward, there has to be a strong understanding that parks aren't partisan.
The flora and fauna, the natural and cultural resources inside of the park don't belong to any political party. Fired training specialist Linda Jones joined the Park Service to serve her country. Both my parents are veterans. They served in the military and they instilled in me the importance of public service. While Thursday's rulings have reinstated her position at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, at least temporarily, the Trump administration has appealed. A larger reduction in force is still possible, which leaves park staff like Jones dealing with an uncertain future, worried about what's to come. This is the story of America.
The story of the people who live here and it doesn't matter your background or where you're from, these places belong to all of us and they really are America's best idea. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going cha-ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are.
Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. Earlier, we showed you how cars can help pave the way to a future. Steve Hartman shows us how cars can help heal wounds of the past. Sometimes wearing rainbow colors isn't about orientation or politicization. Sometimes a rainbow is just a rainbow, like when 10-year-old Hunter Blankenship picked out his glasses. This car-loving autistic boy wasn't making a statement, he just loved the look. Until the day he didn't. He hated him, he wanted to break him.
And that's all because of that one bully. Megan Fancher, unfortunately, is Hunter's mom and she says a few months ago, Hunter was outside playing when an older kid teased him about his glasses, called him a homophobic slur, and then told Hunter he should just kill himself. Hunter took that literally.
Literally. All of a sudden, he stormed off and he's holding a knife. And I was like, no, what are you doing? He said, I'm going to kill myself.
Hunter spent the next two weeks on the psychiatric floor here at the Children's Hospital in Birmingham. And just before his release, his mother, desperate for some way to show Hunter that people care and life can be joyful, posted this small request. Could we arrange a few people to bring cars and trucks to let him see? So if I get four or five cars to just come down my driveway when he comes home, that would have been more than enough for him. But that's not but that's not what you got.
That is not what we got. What they got was Sergio Sanchez, a local restaurant owner here in Clanton, Alabama, who saw the post and put word out to car clubs. Cars all the way from North Alabama to South Alabama, they literally had to shut down downtown.
They shut down downtown. Roughly 1,500 show cars showed up, along with more than 1,500 friends that Hunter never knew he had. He was, oh, there's my favorite person. There's my other favorite person. We're running to everybody.
And all of them, big fans of rainbow colored glasses, which Hunter now wears proudly. There you go. Thanks to that gathering of car collectors driven to make a difference. It did.
It saved his life. All right, fine. From my perspective, truth be told, yeah, selling would be great. No more blowback with my career. I'll take my money.
Five years time, I'd like to be free of this company and the Roy name. You might recognize Sarah Snook as Shiv Roy in the hugely popular series Succession. A tough act to follow, which as Faith Staley will show us, might explain the theatrical challenge Snook's just taken on. Curtain going up on Sarah Snook. Thank you. Sarah Snook is setting the record straight.
Would you please explain how to pronounce your name correctly? Oh, yeah, Snook. Everyone thinks it's Snook.
I know. Well, I mean, yeah, because it looks like look or book or chuck, but it's Snook. If only I could remain always young and the picture could grow old.
On Broadway this spring, she's neither Snook nor Snook, but 26 completely different people. I will give my soul for that. The 37-year-old Australian is chameleonic in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young artists of England.
I know you will laugh at me, replied Basil Hallward, but I really can't exhibit it. Changing accents, wigs, and gender to tell the story of a man who makes a spiritual bargain to appear eternally young while his portrait reflects the hideousness of his actions. This show has suspense, it has horror, it has humor, and it also has a lot of heart. People don't often credit Oscar Wilde with something heartfelt. Yeah, it's a lot of pathos. Sarah Snook.
It's a performance for which she won an Olivier, the British Theatre Award, during the show's run in London's West End. I think there's a lot of empathy for the human condition. I think, you know, seeing the soul as a real thing and as a part of your body, personality, spiritual makeup that one might need to protect and look after.
Oscar Wilde published the story, his only novel, in 1890. Victorian critics called it poisonous and morally depraved. Now, almost a century and a half later, the tale feels resonant.
In this play, moral decrepitude is conflated with aging as well, as if they're equal sins in a way. Yeah, it's an interesting time to come to that story, I think, now, where we have such an image-based culture and ability to construct a visual image to sell to anyone online on Instagram. And in this, part of the reason of playing multiple different characters is about choosing which mask is the right mask, which is the public-private mask that we show of ourselves.
You make a very handsome man. And I just saw the image of me as Lord Henry up there. Yeah. And was like, that'll be a really interesting experience for people to walk past and go, oh, she came from succession. What the heck? She got a mustache on.
That recognition is something Snook is finally used to. After making her name known abroad, she's now beloved by American audiences as Siobhan Roy, the cutthroat billionaire she played as the scion of a family empire on the TV series Succession. You're a squalid little backroom deal. He blackmailed you, didn't he? No, no.
If he takes over, I'll sell my shares. Yeah. The saltiness of her Shiv garnered Snook legions of fans and several awards. You originally didn't want to audition for Shiv because you said you couldn't relate to her being beautiful and wealthy.
Yeah. There was nothing in myself that I could see as like, reflective or accessible in that character. Like Dorian Gray, Shiv is an antihero and Snook's been drawn to those complicated characters for a long time. I watched a ton of Disney films when I was a kid and all I wanted to be was Ursula and Scar, all the villains, all the people who had more seeming, more complexity to why they were that in the first place.
Snook discovered that complexity for herself during one of her first acting gigs back home in Adelaide. I used to do fairy parties. Yeah. It was such a good training ground because kids, man, they tell you if they're not interested.
Were you heckled? Yeah. Like fly. Let me see you fly. Come on.
Why can't you fly? Show us. Yeah. The reason I will not exhibit Dorian Gray's picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul. I arrived at drama school at the National Institute of Dramatic Art the year that Sarah had just left.
Can I do one thing with you first? Kip Williams is the director and adapter of Dorian Gray. And there was this word around school that there was this incredible redheaded actress. So my radar as a director was up for Sarah from the beginning.
Much more than a model or a setter, he likes me. Williams knew that he wanted to collaborate with Snook and felt that a single actor could embody all the facets of Wilde's legendary work. Oscar Wilde talks about this notion that life is one grand act of theater and that people are always in a form of performance where they are either revealing or concealing parts of themselves. So the form of this piece, one performer playing all of these 26 characters, is an expression of that idea. It is with technology that Williams illuminates humanity. He calls it cine theater, combining live performance with cameras, large screens, and pre-recorded videos.
I had intended never to enter your house again, Gray, but you said it was a matter of life and death. Yes, it is a matter of life and death, Alan. Is it fair to call this a one-woman show? I think it is definitely a one-person show, but it is also paradoxically an ensemble piece. The camera team and the crew are kind of like her co-performers. They dance with her on stage literally in one moment. A dance that feels intimately familiar to Snook.
The feeling of a camera really close to you and not having that disrupt your train of thought or your flow, I think that's something that was really useful in Succession because we kind of absorbed them as extra characters. Snook has a few extra characters in her own life too. She got married during the pandemic and has a young daughter. But as it turns out, Sarah Snook has not bitten off more than she can chew. So this is your Broadway debut. Yeah.
Is there pressure off since you've already had such a successful run? Actually, one thing that Kip said on the first day of rehearsals was you can only eat an elephant one spoonful at a time. I was like, okay. Yeah, sure. Okay. I'll do it that way. Do you think you've eaten the whole thing by now?
No. Now I've got to eat the Broadway part of the elephant. You don't have to be a nuclear physicist to know that fusion is a complicated topic. But as Ben Tracy explains, it could also be the next big thing in clean energy. This looks very impressive. What exactly is this? This is the engine of the Starship Enterprise.
You could fool me. I'd believe that. If this looks like the set of some Hollywood sci-fi show, perhaps that's fitting because what they're doing here is making stars on Earth.
That is absolutely right. We are able to make miniature stars because fusion is the same reaction that powers the sun and the stars. Tammy Ma leads the Fusion Energy Initiative at the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, in Livermore, California.
It's part of the same government laboratory that ensures the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear stockpile. Every time we do a fusion experiment on the NIF, we are actually the hottest place in the entire solar system, hotter than the center of the sun. Hotter than the center of the sun.
Hotter than the center of the sun. I noticed a word over on the equipment over there. It says Dante. Yes. Is that a kind of a play on this is hotter than hell? It is. It's kind of mind-blowing when you say that to think that that's what's going on here. Humans are amazing, aren't we?
Yes. And the humans here are using the largest laser ever built. It's 1,000 times more powerful than the entire US electrical grid, and is housed in this massive room. How big is this room full of lasers? It is the size of three US football fields, side by side, or about the size of a large football stadium. 192 laser beams travel nearly a mile and then focus in on a tiny target or a fuel pellet, smaller than a peppercorn.
When the lasers hit the pellet, the atoms fuse together, releasing energy in the process. Would you like to hold one? Sure. It's that tiny. Yeah, that little fuel pellet is about two millimeters in diameter.
But the consequences could be huge. Fusion would theoretically provide a nearly limitless source of clean and safe energy, powering our world without the fossil fuels that are warming the planet and contributing to climate change. It would make energy-intensive technologies like vertical farming and water desalination much cheaper, potentially solving the world's food and water problems.
It is completely clean. There's no carbon anywhere in the equation. There's no high-level nuclear waste. You can place fusion power plants nearly anywhere.
It could help meet all of the energy needs for the US, now and into the future, even as our needs, our energy needs rise. Fusion is a process that merges atoms together and releases more energy than fission, which splits atoms apart. Fission is used by today's nuclear power plants and creates hazardous nuclear waste. Fusion does not. But fusion is hard. After 60 years of research by scientists at NIF, they finally generated a reaction that produced more energy than it consumed. The breakthrough in 2022, crucial to ever creating a fusion power plant, made headlines around the world. Humans had unlocked the power of the stars.
This is the first time this has ever been demonstrated by humans here on Earth. And that is what ignition is? That is ignition, more energy out than we put in with the lasers. So you put the eye in NIF?
We finally put the eye in NIF, that's right. They have achieved ignition several times since then, and now the race is on to generate enough energy to consistently power a commercial fusion plant. So this is where the fusion will take place? Yep. So this is the room where we'll build the machine that actually makes the fusion.
The room where it happens. Bob Mumgard is CEO and co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems outside of Boston, one of more than two dozen fusion startups getting billions of dollars in funding from the government and investors. And that's from investors who look and say, yeah, it's going to take time, it's going to take work, but this is the birth of an industry. Instead of lasers, Commonwealth uses a cloud of superheated plasma that burns at around 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, held in place by massive magnets that the company actually manufactures on site.
And so how strong are these magnets that can hold something like that in place? The magnets in this machine will be the strongest magnets in the world, the magnets that can lift up an aircraft carrier. Commonwealth expects to complete its demonstration reactor next year. It just announced plans to build its first full-scale power plant in Virginia, but that won't deliver energy to the grid until sometime next decade. So this isn't an experiment just to say, gee whiz, we can actually do this. This is a process designed to lead to an actual power plant. Yeah, that's right. If we added a few more parts and made it a little bit bigger, that would be the basis of a commercial power plant.
This is the penultimate step to that. Critics like to point out that fusion power has been an ever-elusive holy grail, always 20 to 30 years away. But startups like Commonwealth say this time is different. The technology is advancing as fast as the need for clean energy is rising. Stars aligning in the quest to create stars here on Earth. Is it possible that we're the closest we've ever been, but we're still quite far away?
This is not a paper exercise for us. We're putting this machine together, we're buying the parts, we're machining the parts, and it's all coming together at the exact time that the world really needs something like this. I think that's a really cool story. Thank you for listening.
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It's only the biggest event in history. Better Man, now streaming on Paramount Plus, rated R.
