07/05/2026: Elemental Crisis, The Knowledge, Banana Ball

0:07In our southwest of Las Vegas, in the guts of the Mojave, sits the only active rare earth mine in the US. an unlikely battlefield in our trade war with China, which has a near monopoly over these strategic metals. When Beijing choked off supplies last year, James Latinsky and his company got the call. We got called into the Pentagon, and it was clear that there was a directive from the president to solve this problem as quickly as possible. On ancient roads in London, a very modern battle is brewing. If we do a left hand, the goldsmith's hole. Black cabs will soon be competing with artificial intelligence-powered autonomous taxis.

0:49But as we found out, London's cabbies aren't about to hand over their keys. Your knowledge is better than what a Google map will tell you to go. Oh, don't make me laugh. Seriously, you know. It's like comparing a hot dog vendor to a Gordon Ramsay. It looks like baseball and feels like baseball. But then, there's this. An umpire feeling the music? A batter on no stilts? Gymnastics in the outfield? And on the way home? Longtime baseball writer Tim Kirchhen came to a game, and he said, this is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. I loved it.

1:40I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

1:58In May, President Trump traveled to Beijing for a summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. One agenda item that figured prominently, rare earth elements. Right now, China holds a near monopoly over these strategic metals that are key components in so much that makes the modern world go. Smartphones, robotics, EVs, also fighter jets, drones, and radar technology. That is, China controls materials essential to America's ability to wage war. But tonight, the story of an American company confronting this elemental crisis. It mines rare earth elements, processes them, and makes them into super-powered magnets.

2:37And as we first reported in March, it's part-owned by us, American taxpayers, in an unusual deal crafted by the federal government. In our southwest of Las Vegas, in the guts of the Mojave, Mountain Pass, California might be the ultimate front of our trade war with China. This massive cavity in the ground? Behold, the only active rare earth mine in the U.S. This is an unlikely battleground. Are we stepping on rare earths as we speak? Yes, everywhere you look is rare earths. And Michael Rosenthal and James Latinsky are the unlikely men in charge. Two Floridians in the snow, two finance types suddenly trafficking in mining and metallurgy.

3:22You have no background in geology, and now you're running the biggest rare earth mine in the U.S. This is just such an important site. And the idea that this entire supply chain was on the other side of the world in China, it just occurred to us that someone had to help fix this problem. The Trump administration is keenly aware of the problem of China's rare earth dominance. Doug Burgum is Secretary of the Interior. If you have a cell phone, have a laptop, if you drive a car, then you're touching rare earth minerals and rare earth magnets. It's essential to everyday life, but it's also essential to aerospace, telecom, defense systems.

4:04Yes, defense systems. According to the military, one F-35 fighter jet contains about 100 pounds of rare earths incorporated into its various parts. Just to be clear, the U.S. defense industry is subject to the whims of China and Xi Jinping for military technology? Well, this is one of the reasons why President Trump created the National Energy Dominance Council with a broad set of objectives. One of those was to make sure that we had secure supply chains for critical and rare earth minerals. Right now, we don't have secure supply chains of rare earths because China has cornered the market. They also weaponize it because if anybody in the rest of the free world said, hey, we're going to start mining or we're going to start refining, then they would target that particular mineral, dump a quantity onto the market, drive the price down.

4:53and companies, including U.S. companies, that were profitable suddenly became unprofitable. Before we proceed, let's dispense with the misnomer. Rare earths aren't rare. Here's what is rare. Sites with high enough concentrations of rare earths and accessible enough locations to make extraction worthwhile. In their purest form, rare earths aren't rocks but elemental metals. Deep cuts on the periodic table, numbers 57 through 71 in two others for those scoring at home. Lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, samarium. Julie Klinger is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a rare earth expert who's visited mines worldwide and written extensively on the subject.

5:38What are their qualities? The thing that distinguishes rare earth elements are their fantastic magnetic, conductive, and optical properties. So they're used often the way you might use spices in cooking because if you add just a little bit of a certain rare earth element, say, to a magnet, that enables that magnet to be both very small and very powerful. Geologists found rare earths at Mountain Pass in 1949. By the 60s, individual rare earths were being mined, separated, and utilized, not least europium, which enhanced the color red in early television sets. CBS presents this program in color.

6:18Then, in 1982, researchers found that another, neodymium, strengthens magnets. And these super high-powered magnets are used in everything from, you know, making your cell phone buzz, to the navigation components for drones and smart bombs, to high-speed rail and electric vehicles. For decades, Mountain Pass was the world's rare earth mine. But gradually, then suddenly, mining and magnet making began moving offshore. Familiar story. China could do it cheaper. The U.S. disinvested in rare earths. Absolutely. Why? It's a dirty business. It's a risky business. It's a difficult business to really break even.

6:59In the 1990s, Mountain Pass fell victim to economics and to environmental regulators after radioactive water leaked into the desert. The mine languished for a decade until a new company, Mollicor, tried unsuccessfully to compete with China and revive the business. James Latinski was running a Chicago hedge fund looking for value in distressed companies. When Mollicor filed for bankruptcy in 2015, Latinski glimpsed opportunity. When you're running a hedge fund, there's not much tangible to it. You're moving numbers on a screen. And then I made the mistake of going out and looking at the site. Actually seeing what your investment looked like.

7:39Yes. And I was just blown away by the scale of the assets. The assets? This massive open pit, these concentric circles, a mine 3 ,000 feet across, 600 feet deep, with one of the world's richest deposits. Lytinski turned to Michael Rosenthal, then working for a New York hedge fund. The two were close friends growing up, and they decided to partner. You appreciate the absurdity of the story, for sure. Two hedge fund guys buy a mine. What could go wrong? For a while, plenty. When they bought the mine in 2017, it was underwater, financially and literally. 30 million gallons had puddled at the bottom.

8:21There were only eight employees. They called their new company, MP Materials, and got the mine back up and running. Blasting earth, then crushing rocks into gravel, then milling it into fine powder. Lutensky took over the business as CEO, while Rosenthal spent long days on site becoming an expert on rare earth mining and refining. How do you characterize a division of labor here? I get dirty and Jim explains what we're doing. Today, Mountain Pass employs more than 700. Rosenthal manages the operation. I cannot get over how extensive and intensive all of this process is once you're done with the actual mining.

9:07Yeah, the mining is really the easiest part. The hard part? Separating the rare earths from the rock, and then each other. Three years ago, MP reached a milestone. After investing hundreds of millions of dollars, it was able to refine neodymium and praziodemium to 99.9 % purity. This is the refined product. This is the money room. This is it. This is it. Each bag was worth around$120 ,000. There were 300 bags, roughly$36 million in inventory when we visited. So this fine powder could end up in your pocket. Could end up in my iPhone. MP needed one last link to bypass China and reclaim the supply chain, making the final product, those high-powered rare earth magnets.

9:54So in Fort Worth, Texas, MP built this facility, where pure rare earth powder from mountain paths gets melted, cooled, compressed, diced, and eventually turned into, well, these. In a matter of months, millions will be going into GM cars and into Apple products starting next year. MP was fulfilling its business plan, taking rare earths from mine to magnets. In the spring of 2025, it alchemized from a vertically integrated business into a pivotal player in our national security. We will supercharge our domestic industrial base. Last year, President Trump unveiled his global tariffs plan, so-called Liberation Day.

10:36China retaliated to devastating effect, choking off rare earths to the U.S. Ford Motors, for one, suddenly without magnets, had to temporarily stop making Explorer SUVs. After a series of trade truces between the U.S. and China, the rare earth spigot came back on. Litinski says few realize how close we were to economic catastrophe. There were major manufacturers that didn't even realize the extent of the rare earth magnets that they had in their supply chain. We were seeing the economy on the verge of shutdown. With markets reeling, senior Trump administration officials summoned Litinsky and Rosenthal to Washington.

11:16We got called into the Pentagon, and it was clear that there was a directive from the president to solve this problem as quickly as possible. What did the government want from you? The Pentagon wanted a Manhattan-style project to accelerate the entire supply chain of rare earth magnetics in the country. That's the analogy. Those exact words were used. Manhattan Project or Operation Warp Speed. We've got to work to scale up everything that you're doing as quickly as we possibly can. A Manhattan Project for rare earths resulted in an unusual deal. The Pentagon agreed to inject$400 million into MP materials and took a 15 percent ownership stake.

11:58So we Americans are all in the rare earth business now. Plus, critically, the deal came with a guaranteed 10-year price floor for rare earths. So even if China tries to flood the market again, driving down prices, MP is covered. Has there ever been anything like this? Well, exactly like this, maybe not. But if you look back, whether it was the railroads or aluminum for aviation prior to World War II or the semiconductor industry, there's actually a long tradition of really critical industries where our country needs to bring online infrastructure. And I think this is one of those industries. And the government had one more stipulation for MP, ramp up rare earth magnet production tenfold.

12:42To do so, MP is building an even bigger rare earth magnet factory also in Texas that, it says, could produce enough to meet the country's needs. It's expected to be complete in in 2028. Still… As we sit here today, what percentage of the world's rare earth magnets are made in China? Well north of 90 percent. So China, in effect, can still hold the world hostage here? They currently do. Back in Washington, Secretary Burgum has been a vocal supporter of stockpiling America's critical minerals. He defends the NP deal even if it strays from the principles of market capitalism. You're talking about equity positions in private companies and price floors, and in this case, a demand that production increases 10x, tenfold.

13:26Wait a second, that is the whiff of socialism. I wouldn't call it socialism. I'd call it, I'd certainly call it pragmatism because free markets work, but they don't work if you have an adversary that controls a monopoly that control the price. You're talking China. I'm talking about China. There's no market setting the price. It's China setting the price. To get this industry started again, we have to do some things to kickstart the private capital. This kind of industrial policy you're talking about, does this happen but for China's retaliation to last April? I think it was a catalyst. Frankly, we probably needed a crisis to wake up.

14:05And so I think if there's a silver lining in the sense what happened last year was a big-time crisis that we needed. I'm struck by how quickly the economics bleed into geopolitics. If China says, listen, we're going to go invade Taiwan, and if you stand in our way, we're shutting off our rare earth magnets. Well, that's the risk. As it stands today, we need permission from the Chinese government to make things. We need permission from the Chinese government to make military things. And the practical reality is that it's not an acceptable condition. And so we have to change this dynamic. The current U.S.-China trade truce is set to expire in November.

14:50Absent a new deal, our rare earth supply, short-term anyway, remains vulnerable.

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15:35On ancient roads and in medieval alleyways in London, a very modern battle is brewing. Black cabs, which are as synonymous with that city as Buckingham Palace, will soon be competing with artificial intelligence-powered autonomous taxis. Tech companies promise these AI inventions, some of which are already operating in several American cities, are safer and smarter than human drivers. But as we first told you earlier this year, London's cabbies aren't about to hand over their keys. After all, just to get a license, they've already proven their own kind of intelligence, studying often for years to pass a 161-year-old test called the knowledge.

16:15There's nothing artificial about it. They just have to memorize 25 ,000 streets and thousands of landmarks and businesses and know the shortest routes between them all.

16:29Look, we're the oldest form of transport in the world. In fact, we come before buses and trains and stuff. We are the icons of London. If we do a left here, you'll have the Goldsmiths' Hall. Tom Scullion has been driving one of London's famous black cabs for the past 34 years. What's the weirdest request you've gotten from a passenger? What, this week? You wouldn't believe. There's a guy, it's a regular ride, and he's got an Irish wolfhound. Dog. Because you're a bit of paper where the dog lives. Dog jumps in the back. One of the best customers I've got. Never says a word, never complains about a ride.

17:07But we get people, hailing us down in the morning, take my kid to school. Never seen me before in their life, probably never seen me again. That's the trust we get. The trust and confidence in cabbies here dates back to 1865, when the knowledge exam was first introduced to London's horse-drawn cabmen. Do you have riders testing your knowledge? Every ride. Which way you're going, mate? And Google says this and Google says that. You're never going to bait the knowledge. Your knowledge is better than what a Google map will tell you to go. Oh, don't make me laugh. Seriously, you know. It's like comparing a hot dog vendor to a Gordon Ramsay.

17:49At the Transport for London office, nervous, aspiring cabbies dress up in their Sunday best to take a series of oral exams known as appearances. Whenever you're ready, sir, we'll go from Soho House, 40 Greek Street to the Chancery Rosewood, please. Candidates are quizzed on how to get between two random points. I live on left Greek Street, right Shaftesbury Avenue, left Great Windmill Street, forward Haymarket. As examiners measure the distance, ensuring they're calling the shortest route. Unfortunately, sir, I can't score you today. He failed this round, but for those who do pass the knowledge, this memorization has proven to be so challenging it can change the structure of their brains.

18:31A study from University College London found cab drivers' posterior hippocampi, the part of the brain linked to memory, got bigger throughout their careers. Everyone in their profession has had to train themselves with knowledge to be the best what they are, and that's what we're doing. Stephen Fairbrass has been trying to pass the knowledge for eight years. Anshu Morjani for five. They showed us the official study guide known as the Blue Book. These are like the points, points of interest that any paying customer would want you to take them to. I mean there's thousands of them. Yeah, six thousand of them.

19:09I just have to look at this. The Last Judgment PH, the Law Society Hall, the Londoner Hotel, the Marquis, the Mon Library, the National Gallery. I mean, this is crazy that you have to know all this. You have to learn individual restaurants? Individual restaurants. Public houses. What if a restaurant goes out of business? And it changes names and then you learn a new name. Then it comes on the list. It comes on the list. Yeah, it goes on the list. Now their knowledge is being tested like never before. Autonomous vehicles haven't been approved to pick up passengers in London yet, but several companies are already trying out their cars here.

19:43Wave, a British startup backed by NVIDIA and Microsoft, hopes to be operational later this year, as does Waymo, which is owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet. Takedra Mawakana is Waymo's co-CEO. She says putting more of its robo-taxis on the roads can save lives by reducing the million traffic deaths worldwide each year. You believe driverless cars are safer than a human-driven vehicle? In the case of Waymo, we actually have the data. that shows us that we're five times safer than a human driver. Waymo has already made significant inroads in the U.S. It first began offering rides to customers in a Phoenix suburb in 2020.

20:25Now, millions of riders across 11 major U.S. cities are being driven by Waymos each month. Humans want to get in the car, send that last email they didn't get to send, and check on the kid that's screaming. But we're trying to drive and do that. So this really gives you the chance to take care of all of those things and then let the Waymo driver safely get you from point A to point B. You call it a Waymo driver, but there's no driver. We really think it's important to think of it as there is a driver, right? This driver is the most experienced driver in the world. We travel over 2 million miles a week, so humans drive about 700 ,000 miles in a lifetime.

21:06So this is almost three lifetimes per week that our fleet is driving. Because it's been trained on every other ride that Waymo's given? The whole fleet, yes. Waymo's AI has also driven billions of miles in simulation to train for the countless rare scenarios it might face on roads, like snow on the Golden Gate Bridge or even an elephant stopping traffic. Start ride whenever you're ready. In San Francisco, we took a trip in one of its robo-taxis with product manager Chris Ludwig. Happy Friday. It's a little freaky not to have a driver. You hear this all the time, but I'm watching the wheel very, very carefully.

21:48Yep. But after a few minutes, the ride felt strangely normal. Feels like a very careful driver. Our goal is kind of blissfully boring. The car is outfitted with 29 cameras, 6 radars, 5 microphones, and 5 LiDAR sensors, which continuously pulse to measure distances, objects, and people as far as three football fields away. Inside, a screen shows riders what the car is seeing. It sees an intersection, I don't know, 300 feet away, but because there's other cars, I can't see it, but it sees around these other cars. That's right, and that's partly the design of the placement of the sensors. It makes it superhuman compared to what a human would be able to do.

22:30Waymo says the data gathered from these sensors enables the AI to respond faster than a human. We saw that when a woman talking on her phone crossed right in front of us. It's kind of crazy to see a person change their mind and how quickly the Waymo responded to like a slight motion of them moving forward. Exactly. The system has learned to react to those subtle cues because that's what's necessary. Waymo's AI may have a lot of training, but it still makes some rookie mistakes. Oh my God, what the f*** is that Waymo doing? In Los Angeles, a Waymo drove through an active police scene. Waymo, come on!

23:08There's also been incidents of the robo-taxis getting in the way of emergency responders and illegally passing stopped school buses, leading to a software recall and a federal investigation. Back in London, Waymo's robo-taxis have been driving the streets to build a detailed 3D map to train its AI, a company standard before operating in a new area. But it does have competition. We want to make sure our AI can understand every concept it might encounter. Alex Kendall is WAVE's CEO. Unlike Waymo's, his artificial intelligence doesn't map out a city before driving in it. How is it possible you don't need to map a city entirely before getting your vehicles to drive autonomously in it?

23:53Well, think about how you and I learned how to drive. I've learned how to go through a few traffic lights, and that taught me how the concept of traffic lights works. In a similar way, that's how our AI learns. We train it on millions of hours of experience driving all around the world. So this means when it goes somewhere it's never seen before or it's never been mapped, it can understand what's in front of it and make decisions in real time. Wave's robo-taxis are still in testing and not yet available to the public. The products that we're building will use in-built sensors. But Kendall believes his AI will be able to more easily adapt to new environments.

24:28Let's go for a drive. He took us to Westminster, a district in London that's home to some of the city's most historic landmarks, to show us where he's been training his fleet since WAVE's early days in 2019. And your foot is not... So I'm not touching the controls. The AI is controlling the steering, the speed, the indicators, the brake. Until robo-taxis are approved by the government here, a human has to sit in the driver's seat for safety. Here's one of the busier roundabouts in front of Westminster, right in front of Parliament. Lots of tourists around, different vehicles. This guy just crossed into our lane.

25:10Now back to another lane. There's a bike that we're going to have to wait for before making the lane change. There's just such a long list of things that can happen on the road. I think that's the main advantage of an AI driver here, is that it can have the intelligence to deal with things that you may never expect on the roads. Aspiring cabbie Stephen Fairbrass didn't seem too concerned about that. Do you worry about the future of this? You know, autonomous vehicles driving around? No. Why don't you worry? To me, the human brain will always be the strongest tool. Can you imagine you're trying to howl down a vehicle with no driver in it?

25:55You're standing there in the rain trying to get home, and that vehicle just drives straight past you because it hasn't got a sensor or a human brain or an eye to turn. So to me, human beings, drivers, always going to be needed. Always. Anshu Morgiani, however, didn't seem so sure. Every profession is being affected by AI. I don't know what it's going to do in the near future, but it's always there on your mind that yes, you're getting into a career not knowing what the future is. Over the last decade, London's black cab industry has seen a steep decline. The number of drivers has fallen from 25 ,000 to 16 ,000 today.