05/24/2026: Booms, Busts and Bubbles, Sculpting Evolution, The Payam Method

0:00Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. And Bubba Wallace. You know what's the worst part of a race? A rain delay. Sitting around, waiting for the track to dry is dull. But instead of waiting, we hang out with Chumba Casino. Social casino slots, bingo, solitaire, plenty of fun to keep us entertained. So why let a rain delay slow you down? Play now at Chumbacasino.com. Let's Chumba! Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. BGW group order prohibited by law. 21 plus. Terms and conditions apply. You're a pro at running your life, at committing to your workout, at showing up every day. At Bombas, we're pros too.

0:36Pros at making socks. Our sport assortment has specialized socks for whatever sport you're committed to. Running, hiking, golf, Pilates, and so much more. Made with sweat-wicking yarns, blister-fighting details, and targeted art support. Bombas Sport is pro-level socks from the pros of socks. For another pro, you. Go to bombas.com slash audio and use code audio for 20 % off your first purchase. That's Bombas.com and use code audio.

1:06Do you think that we will have a crash? We thought it was a good time to check in with Andrew Ross Sorkin, one of the country's most influential financial reporters. He's written a book about the market crash a century ago. Are you scared? I'm anxious that we are at prices that may not feel sustainable. We are either living through some kind of remarkable boom. Or we're reliving. 1929. The natural disaster in our area is not hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes. It is Lyme disease. Genetic engineers believe they found a way to slow the spread of the debilitating disease carried by ticks. It is amazing to see this.

1:54Tonight, a look at something that's never been attempted, genetically engineering wild mice to prevent people from getting sick. Do you worry about fooling around with Mother Nature?

2:09It's a fairly safe bet that most kids taking piano lessons don't like them. Now, along comes a piano teacher named Payam Kaskuday. If you learn 1, 3, 5... He's come up with a new method of teaching that has students loving their piano lessons. Piano's not supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be strict. It's supposed to be stressful. And we're like, why? Our students don't just learn piano. They love piano.

2:39I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and in our last minute, actress Sally Field with a childhood lesson about America. Tonight on 60 Minutes.

3:19away than playing Chumba Casino. Sign up today and you could win a VIP experience with Chumba Casino and WWE for SummerSlam. So what are you waiting for? Play Chumba Casino and enter for your chance to win. Let's Chumba. New purchase necessary. PGW Group. Void for prohibited by law. CTs and Zs. 21+. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. Thank you for calling the Bombas Comfort Line. Bombas make socks, slippers, tees, and underwear made with the highest quality materials. Press 1 for comfort. 2 for style. 3 for donation. You chose style. Bombas is styles for whatever you enjoy. You can run in Bombas, lounge in Bombas, dress them up, dress them down, but always give back in Bombas because with every item purchased, another is donated.

3:58Bombas, comfort worth calling for. Go to bombas.com slash audio and use code audio for 20 % off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com and use code audio. The stock market has been steadily rising for many months now, despite occasional volatility around issues like tariffs and war. This resilience got us thinking about booms, busts, and bubbles. So we decided to talk to one of the country's top financial reporters, Andrew Ross Sorkin. As we first reported in October, Sorkin had just written a book called 1929 about the market crash a century ago. We wondered if he ran out of news to cover, or was he alerting us that what's happening in the markets right now is a replay of what led to the most devastating financial collapse in our history?

4:54Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Imagine the New York Stock Exchange back then. The crush of frightened traders dumping stocks. Investors losing their shirts, businesses, their homes. sweeping away the roaring 20s. Walking that same but transformed floor today... Everything's digital. Well, yeah, okay. Andrew Ross Sorkin says we're in our own roaring 20s, the 2020s, with stocks climbing for months just like then. The crazy part about this is from 1928 to September of 1929, the stock market was up 90%. When you say the stock market was way up, immediately I think of now. Are you scared? I'm anxious. I'm anxious that we are at prices that may not feel sustainable.

5:52And what I don't know is we are either living through some kind of remarkable boom, and part of that's artificial intelligence and technology and all of that, or everything's overpriced. Or we're reliving... 1929. There was so much anxiety. Sorkin has covered the markets for two decades. He joined the New York Times after college, soon founding the Dealbook newsletter covering finance. He also co-hosts Squawk Box on CNBC. Good to see you, too. Thanks for having me. Runs the Dealbook Summit, where he interviews the high and mighty. He co-created Billions, the TV show. wrote a bestseller about the 2008 crash, and now a book about 1929.

6:42We're always being undone by bubbles. There was the Internet bubble in 2000, the housing in 2008. Are we in another bubble, an AI bubble or something like that? I think it's hard to say we're not in a bubble of some sort. The question is always, when is the bubble going to pop? One symptom of a bubble is when the market goes up and up, but the underlying economy, the real economy, goes soft. And that appears to be happening right now. I would argue to you that the economy is being propped up almost artificially by the artificial intelligence boom. There are hundreds of billions of dollars that are being invested today in artificial intelligence.

7:29This is either a gold rush or a sugar rush. And we probably won't know for a couple of years which one it is. 1929 was a sugar rush caused by speculation and debt. People who didn't really have much money were lured by Wall Street bankers to invest, using a newfangled concept to take on debt called credit. You only had to put down 10 % of the stock price, borrowing the rest from your broker. Prior to 1919, most people did not take on credit or debt at all. It was a sin. It was a moral sin to use credit to buy anything. And it was really General Motors that basically came up with the idea that we're going to lend you money so you can afford to buy our cars.

8:27Brilliant. And then the bankers realized what's happening, and they realized that they can lend out money so that more folks can buy stocks. It was all sort of wrapped in the flag of democratizing access. And in good times, when the stock is going up, it's like free money. In bad times, you're on the hook, and you're on the hook in a very bad way. Since then, laws, regulations, and agencies have been put in place to protect investors, especially the less affluent, from being exploited. We put up barriers after 1929. Yes. Protections. Yes. So those are coming down. They're tumbling down. The SEC rules aren't as stringent anymore.

9:16Yes. The Consumer Protection Bureau practically doesn't exist anymore. Correct. That's what concerns me. It's not that we're going off a cliff tomorrow. It's that there's speculation in the market today. There's an increasing amount of debt in the market today. And all of that's happening against the backdrop of the guardrails coming off. Including guardrails that allow only the wealthy to invest directly in private companies that have fewer regulations, like AI startups, before they go public. So over the last 20 or 30 years, folks who had access to, who could invest in private equity and venture capital, clearly outperformed folks who didn't.

10:04That's how you really made money. But you have to remember that these kind of assets are gambles. Public companies, after the SEC was created, were required to have all sorts of disclosure rules so that the public could understand what's going on inside them. Private companies don't have that. But historically, the average ordinary American wasn't really allowed to invest in the private companies. But in this flag of democratizing finance, there's a lot of people who want access to that. Isn't this something? This is spectacular. Sorkin took us to the Fifth Avenue mansion of one of the big bankers back then who pushed democratization.

10:45If this idea of bringing the regular guy into buying stock, if that was a big problem back in 1929, why are we going there again? Doesn't it defy some kind of logic? There is a view that it's been only the elites that have had access to these investments. Facebook, before it ever went public. Uber, before it went public. So there is this idea that it's unfair, actually, to the ordinary investor, because we haven't allowed them to get access to some of these investment opportunities early. And there is a real push, partially by the Trump administration, partially by the industry itself, which wants to get more money in, to open up the market to more and more people.

11:36So we have these guardrails for a reason. I mean, they're there to protect, and they have protected. They have protected a lot of people, but some people would say they protected people from getting rich. Many people don't believe in capitalism anymore. And I think a lot of it is because they were not a part of the growth of the economy. We went to Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world's biggest money manager, handling about$14 trillion in assets like pension funds. His annual letter to investors is a kind of industry roadmap. In 2025, it suggested opening our retirement 401ks, bastions of caution, to riskier private investments in the name of, wait for it, democratizing investing.

12:30As I wrote, there are many great opportunities to be investing in startup companies, to invest in AI or data centers. Right now, we are precluded to put those type of assets in many retirement products. And the Trump administration has now said we are going to allow in our 401k products the opportunity to invest in these private markets. But they are risky, aren't they? Yes. But everything is risky other than keeping your money in a bank account overnight. But we're talking about 401ks. Yes. investing out of retirement accounts. Yes. You're risking the nest egg, or a little part of the nest egg.

13:18But what the markets will teach you over the last 100 years, even at the worst moments, if you have the ability to persevere and you have a long-term horizon, you're going to do fine. And a diversified portfolio is essential. We're not suggesting, you know, one shoe fits all. we are suggesting the opportunity to have that ability to invest in these private market investments. He also believes we should be investing in crypto. It wasn't that long ago that the big bankers, Jamie Dimon and Larry Fink, were saying that crypto was stupid and a fraud. I did say Bitcoin, because we were talking about Bitcoin then, was the domain of money launderers and thieves.

14:06But, you know, the markets teach you, you have to always re-look at your assumptions. There is a role for crypto in the same way there's a role for gold. That is, it's an alternative. For those looking to diversify, this is not a bad asset, but I don't believe that it should be a large component of your portfolio. Leo? But Sorkin says some crypto can be abused in ways similar to 1929. Take meme coins, cryptocurrencies that can be manipulated by speculators who pump them up, then let them crash. There are a number of examples where it felt like there was an inside group of people who were colluding to pump up some of these cryptocurrencies and other things.

14:57I give you a bizarre story of my own. I was on television with Larry Fink, and he makes a joke, I think, about how there should be a Sorkin coin. I think the Sorkin coin should... Sorkin coin. Well, two hours later, somebody makes a Sorkin coin. And all of a sudden, this Sorkin coin is now worth millions of dollars, and I'm watching it. Are you serious? Go up and up and up and up and up. The Sorkin coin peaked at$170 million worth of trading in a day. And I think today it does something like$20 or$21 a day. So I'm thrilled to have Bill Gates with us. Sorkin is trusted by the world's top business leaders who talk to him often exclusively.

15:42I have no problem being hated, by the way. What role do you think these business leaders should be playing now? My own view is that most CEOs in America today are very scared to speak out publicly about anything. They are so worried that they are going to be potentially attacked by the administration or regulated. They're going to have a merger in front of some agency that's not going to be allowed to go through. They are so nervous about criticizing anything that's going on with this administration. There are some economists who suggest that because Mr. Trump ties his success to the success of the market, that he's not going to let anything like what happened in 1929 happen, and that we should feel secure because of that.

16:37I think it's hard to know how things get out of control. When confidence disappears, it happens like this. So you spent nearly 10 years on this book. The inevitable question is, do you think that we will have a crash or not? The answer is we will have a crash. I just can't tell you when, and I can't tell you how deep. But I can assure you, unfortunately, I wish I wasn't saying this, we will have a crash.

17:19Ready to level up? Chumba Casino is your playbook to fun. It's free to play with no purchase necessary. Enjoy hundreds of online social games like Blackjack, Slots, and Solitaire. Anytime, anywhere, with fresh releases every week. Whether you're at home or on the go, let Chumba Casino bring the excitement to you. Plus, get free daily login bonuses and a free welcome bonus. Join now for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Play Chumba Casino today. No purchase necessary. VGW Group. Void word prohibited by law. 21+. TNCs apply.

18:14slash audio and use code audio for 20 % off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com and use code audio. Now, Dr. John LaPook on assignment for 60 minutes. Biologist Charles Darwin began crafting his theory of evolution on a trip to the Galapagos Islands, where he discovered animals had developed unique traits that varied from island to island. Nearly two centuries later, on a different island, scientists aren't just observing evolution, they now have the technology to shape it. We met a team of modern-day Darwins on Nantucket, where, as we first told you last fall, they're hoping to use genetic engineering to reduce the transmission of Lyme disease, a tick-borne illness found primarily in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, but also throughout the United States.

19:05The scientists' target may surprise you. It's not the deer often associated with the disease or even the ticks, but wild mice, the main carriers of Lyme. With the rate of emergency room visits for tick bites at a record high in some regions, this could be the summer Americans consider a new strategy to fight disease, sculpting evolution. 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is the island of Nantucket. A 14-mile-long, 3-mile-wide oasis known for its natural beauty, pristine shorelines, and protected landscape. But Hidden is a scourge that's afflicted 15 % of its residents. The natural disaster in our area is not hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes.

19:53It is Lyme disease. It is the one plague that might be severe enough that communities might want to engineer a wild organism in order to get rid of it. or at least reduce the level of Lyme. Deep in the island's brush, in 2024, we found MIT associate professor Kevin Esvelt, a pioneer in genetic engineering, waving a white flag in search of ticks. So we just grab it. These tiny vectors of Lyme disease were not hard to find. You just pop it in. These are the big ones because these are largely adults. If the adults are this small, imagine the tiny, tiny, what are they called, nymphs? Nibs, yeah. You often think of poppy seed sized.

20:37Esfeld's collaborator is Sam Telford, an epidemiologist at Tufts University who's been studying ticks on Nantucket for the last 41 years. There's a 50 % chance, maybe more, that this is actually carrying Lyme disease. But you're not afraid because it has to be embedded and attached. It has to be attached for more than 24 hours. Right, to infect you. That's correct. These guys will swell up. Yeah. 50 to 100 times that size with blood, you know, it becomes that big. And that's how you know when they're engorged, you know, that they've been feeding on you. If you see it that big, then you're in trouble.

21:16The scientists aren't here just to collect ticks. They're interested in this critter. This is a wild mouse? This is a wild, white-footed mouse. And you've tagged it? I've tagged it, so when I come back in April or May of next year, we get an idea of what overwintering success is. Telford is tracking the mouse population on Nantucket as part of a novel project. The scientists want to use genetic engineering to interrupt the cycle of infection necessary for Lyme disease to flourish. White-footed mice are the main host of Lyme bacteria. When an uninfected tick bites an infected mouse, the bacteria transfer to the tick.

21:56When that infected tick then bites an uninfected mouse, the cycle continues. Deer don't get infected, but they help spread the disease because ticks embed on them to feed, then reproduce, with a single female tick laying as many as 2 ,000 eggs. Here's Esfeldt and Telford's big idea. Change the genetic makeup of the mice so they're immune to Lyme. That way, the ticks that bite them won't get infected. You don't have to kill the mouse in order to interrupt the cycle. It'd be so much more economical and straightforward to just go out and poison all the mice, right? Get rid of the mice. But then there's a whole food chain that might depend on these mice that would be impacted.

22:38The dream is that we can use new technologies to ensure that wild creatures can live in peace, playing their normal ecological role, but without causing disease that make people suffer. Come on in, Manny. If Esfeld's dream becomes a reality, 80-year-old Dr. Timothy Lepre might finally be able to retire. So how did you get Lyme disease, do you think, Winnie?

23:09Over the past 40 years, he's been the island's emergency room head, sole surgeon, even its medical examiner. Today, Dr. Lepre runs the only private practice on Nantucket, where he treats dozens of patients with Lyme disease each year. Fall my finger. And yes, that's a giant tick in his waiting room. Being in private practice, it is, while not well paid... You get paid in, like, what, chickens and doughnuts and... We prefer lobsters, actually. Lobsters, clams, and scallops. But you'll take anything, right? I will take anything. Come on down, Shauna. Lyme disease can be treated with antibiotics, but if left untreated, the infection can spread to the heart, joints, and nervous system, as it did for 33-year-old Shauna Asplint.

24:04My body hurts all the time. Okay. I don't know if that's for my Lyme disease or what. My neck is stiff, my ankles are sore, and my hips. Asplint was first diagnosed with Lyme when she was 10 years old. A few years later, the left side of her face stopped moving. A residual effect from the disease is still noticeable today. Let's see your smile. It's still a little off, and then if I raise my eyebrows, it just doesn't move. We see people with facial palsies. We see little kids with swollen knees. We see people with Lyme rashes. So it alters people's behavior and activities. The problem on Nantucket can be traced back to 1926, when locals voted to import two female deer to the island to give a lone buck company.

24:55As the deer population grew, so did the ticks. On top of that, by the 1950s, half the land on the island was put into conservation. The untamed brush and wild grasslands create an ideal ecosystem for Lyme's host to thrive. We have a problem with tick-borne disease because we engineered the environment to maximize the number of ticks and to maximize the number of mice that are the best host of Lyme disease. And it came back and bit us. Literally. A trip at age 11 to the Galapagos Islands sparked Esfeldt's lifelong obsession with evolution. In 2013, he was the first to propose that CRISPR, a revolutionary technology that enables scientists to edit DNA, could be used to change a species' genetics in perpetuity, hacking the laws of inheritance.

25:46I mean, it's not like we want a fitness advantage. This idea led to the project they call Mice Against Ticks in the sculpting evolution lab Esvelt runs at MIT. For the last 10 years, he and researcher Joanna Buckthall have been studying whether they could add a gene for an antibody that prevents Lyme infection to a mouse embryo that, as we see here, has progressed into two cells. Is it going to be into one of those cells or both of them? So our technique involves injecting both cells to maximize the likelihood that we get the antibody gene in their DNA. Buckthall and embryologist Zach Hill showed us how they genetically engineer lab mice.

26:30He's going to actually inject through the plasma membrane and into the nucleus for both of these cells. How are you at darts? Not very good. But you're going to hit the center of this. Oh yeah, okay. So I already have an embryo set up on the dish here. So I'm just trying to find the nucleus here. It is amazing to see this. So that little burst that you can see in the nucleus is when he's actually injecting the genome engineering tools directly into the nucleus where the DNA is. The injection mix contains both the antibody gene and CRISPR, which acts like molecular scissors. After CRISPR finds and cuts the targeted area of DNA, the cell inserts the gene into the mouse's genetic code.

27:18When this mouse is born, it will be immune to Lyme disease, and so will its children. If I get a polio vaccine, my kids aren't going to be immune to polio unless they get the vaccine too. That's exactly right. So this is a heritable immunization. What do you mean by that? What we're actually doing is we're encoding immunity so that that immunity is passed on generationally, and every mouse that gets the antibody gene is actually immune. Typical standard evolution happened very slowly, right? Over thousands, maybe millions of years. Are you speeding up evolution here? We are absolutely speeding up evolution.

27:58And that's precisely why we have to be careful. Because we are doing things that couldn't happen naturally. The plan is to release thousands of engineered mice on Nantucket over time, starting during the winter months, when the native mouse population is low. But first, Esvelt needs community buy-in.

28:24He chose Nantucket not only for its high rate of line, but also for its tight-knit, well-educated community with the tradition of town hall democracy. I am going to call the October 23rd select board meeting to order at 5.30 p.m. We also need to start small. We saw this in action in October 2024, when for the 10th time the scientists presented their latest findings to locals. So it appears that we have indeed produced the first heritably Lyme immune laboratory mice capable of breaking the disease transmission cycle. Followed by a public Q &A. We have a huge population of field mice here. Shall we expect a larger population?

29:06Having had Lyme disease twice, I thought, what a cool idea. but mice are kind of the foundation of the food chain. So tinkering with the food chain makes me a little cautious. How long before it's actually going to take effect and keep me from getting Lyme disease again? When you're in these meetings, what's that been like? Some people are really gung-ho about this. Some people have deep reservations. But what I found heartening about this, and Nantucket in particular, is that pretty much everyone agrees that this is how we should go about developing these kinds of technologies. That it should not just be scientists in their laboratories, get a clever idea, and then boom, it's there.