The Looting of Cambodia, Part 2

 

[This is the second part of the transcript of a 60 Minutes (CBS News) segment originally broadcast on 17 December 2023 and rerun on 28 June 2026.  As readers of Rick On Theater know, I have a strong interest in art in general, and in the preservation of art in particular.

[Other ROT posts on that subject include: “‘How High-Tech Replicas Can Help Save Our Cultural Heritage‘“ by Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour (28 May 2017); “Conserving Modern Art“ (11 December 2018); “‘Smithsonian and U.S. Army join forces to save works of art and culture threatened by war‘“ by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport of PBS News Hour (15 September 2022); “Greenwood Pond: Double Site“ (22 February 2024); ”Two Restorations“ (4 November 2024); and “Replicating Classic Art Works“ (21 February 2026).] 

“HOW CAMBODIAN ARTIFACTS STOLEN FROM TEMPLES
ENDED UP IN AMERICAN MUSEUMS, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS”
(continued)
by Anderson Cooper

[Cooper’s 60 Minutes report, with video, is posted on the CBS News website.  I have split it into two parts for republication on ROT, with Part 1 posted on Wednesday. 8 July.  As always, I recommend that ROTters go back and read the beginning of the transcript before turning to Part 2, below.  (There’s a brief précis of Cambodian history in the afterword to Part 1.)]

Cambodia tracking down thousands of priceless looted antiquities

It’s taken a team of Cambodian investigators led by Brad Gordon, an American lawyer, more than 10 years to document the theft of thousands of ancient statues and relics by a British collector named Douglas Latchford. As we reported in 2023, they’ve managed to get some of what he stole back, but many of Cambodia’s greatest treasures are still out there, hidden away in the mansions of millionaires and billionaires, and hiding in plain sight, on display in some of the most prestigious museums around the world.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has one of the most important collections of Cambodian antiquities in the world. But many of the finest pieces on display here in the Southeast Asian art wing [the South and Southeast Asian Art collection, housed in the Florence and Herbert Irving Asian Wing] . . . are stolen. Like this one. And this one . . . This as well – all passed through the hands of Douglas Latchford. 

Latchford sold this one to the Met in the early 1990s . . . This one he donated. 

Anderson Cooper: Do you think people visiting the Met, know that these were looted? 

Brad Gordon: I think most people walk through the Met, they have no idea those are blood antiquities. They have no idea what– what the history is behind those pieces. They don’t know– the temples they came from. They don’t know the people who were killed to get them here.

Anderson Cooper: The dirt has been brushed off. There’s a little note that says where it came from. Should people believe what’s on that little note?

Brad Gordon: No. Absolutely not.

In 2023, we went with Brad Gordon to see where in Cambodia the Met and other museums’ collections really did come from. 

Anderson Cooper: This is incredible.

This seven-story pyramid is more than 1,000 years old . . . and rises out of the jungle in Koh Ker in northeast Cambodia . . . It’s one of dozens of temples in what was once the capital [928-944 CE] of an ancient Khmer empire.

Anderson Cooper: –looters have been all over this site for– for decades.

Brad Gordon: Correct. 

Anderson Cooper: Douglas Latchford loved the statuary . . .

Brad Gordon: In love with the beauty, in love with the artistic–

Anderson Cooper: The statues from here are–

Anderson Cooper: –have a distinctive style that he particularly loved?

Brad Gordon: Correct. 

And perhaps the most famous statues in that distinctive style that Latchford stole from Koh Ker were nine stone warriors once arranged together in a battle scene [10th century; stolen from the Prasat Chen temple at Koh Ker]. When we were there, seven had been returned to the National Museum in Phnom Penh, including this 500-pound sandstone sculpture — it’s the one Sotheby’s tried to sell in 2011. They’re back on their original pedestals, their ankles reunited with their feet, hacked off by looters.

Anderson Cooper: This was at Sotheby’s. This is at Christie’s.

Hab Touch: Norton Simon’s.

Anderson Cooper: Norton Simon Museum [Pasadena, California]–

Hab Touch [b. 1965] is the secretary of state in Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture [2019-present]. He is working with Brad Gordon to bring back the two Koh Ker statues who’s empty pedestals sit in the museum.

Anderson Cooper: So do you know what are supposed to be on–

Anderson Cooper: You know what are supposed to be here, and you know what’s–

Hab Touch: We know–

Anderson Cooper: –supposed to be here?

Hab Touch: Among nine sculpture, we have seven already. Only two missing.

One of those missing sculptures was discovered in the glossy pages of Architectural Digest in 2008 . . . this mythical army commander and a stunning number of other stolen works . . . were all together in the Palm Beach mansion of the late billionaire George Lindemann [1936-2018; businessman; CEO of a fossil fuel infrastructure and pipeline company] and his wife Frayda [b. 1939]. 

[The referenced article and photo spread was “Striking a New Note in Palm Beach” by Judith Thurman in the January 2008 issue of AD. (nb: The link to the slide show that includes the Cambodian statues seems to be broken. Some views are shown on the 60 Minutes video. If a reader is a subscriber to AD, or wishes to become one, back articles are available on the magazine’s website.) There are two later articles that comment/report on this one: Spencer Woodman, Malia Politzer, Peter Whoriskey and Nicole Sadek, “Hidden Treasures: Magazine spread of ‘most beautiful house in America’ conceals allegedly stolen Cambodian relics,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (website) 15 Aug. 2022,  <https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/lindemann-cambodia-relics-altered-photo-magazine/>, 12 July 2026, and Sarah Cascone, “An ‘Architectural Digest’ Spread About Two Art Collectors Was Photoshopped to Obscure Potentially Looted Cambodian Statues in Their Home,” artnet 16 Aug. 2022, <https://news.artnet.com/art-world/looted-cambodian-art-architectural-digest-2160490>, 12 July 2026.]

Anderson Cooper: The ancient treasures of Cambodia were sitting in the living room of an incredibly wealthy family in America, in Florida, on display, while people were having cocktails and–

Brad Gordon: The one thing that I’m always struck by is how many people witnessed it and have been silent and continue to be silent today.

The Lindemann’s spent an estimated $20 million building the collection with the help of Douglas Latchford . . . Frayda Lindemann didn’t respond to our request for an interview.

But in Koh Ker . . . we showed her home to two former looters.

Anderson Cooper: What do you think of this house?

It’s a beautiful house, he said, it looks like it belongs to a king.

The former looters pointed out another statue in the Lindemann’s living room they said they helped steal . . . this reclining figure of the Hindu God Vishnu. They said it was dug out of the ground from this exact spot in late 1995.

Anderson Cooper: You’re 100% sure this was taken from here by you and others in 1995?

Lida (translated): Yeah, I’m sure. 

They also identified a number of other statues they say they stole that appear in books published by Douglas Latchford. They say they found this copper statue using a metal detector.

Anderson Cooper: This is Bodhisattva at Ease [late 10th century to the early 11th century; looted from the Koh Ker temple complex]? 

[In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a person who has attained, or is striving towards, bodhi (meaning ‘awakening’ or ‘enlightenment’) or Buddhahood. In this sculpture, the word refers to a class of powerful, semi-divine savior deities (here, specifically, Avalokiteshvara, a celestial being of infinite compassion and mercy) who forgo or delay personal liberation (nirvana) or bodhi in order to help other individuals reach Buddhahood.]

Brad Gordon: Yeah. 

They dug it out of the ground here in 1990. J.P. Labbat, former special agent with Homeland Security, found photos of the statue covered in dirt on Douglas Latchford’s computer. Latchford sold it to the Met in 1992. When we visited, it was still on display.

Anderson Cooper: You were able to get access to some of Latchford’s– emails?

J.P. Labatt: Yes. And in there– there are d– detailed– stories about the manner in which he obtained pieces, the fact that he was having them reassembled– and repaired, that dirt and– and crustaceans were being– cleaned off of them.

Anderson Cooper: They were freshly dug out of the ground?

J.P. Labatt: Fresh. The– these were fresh pieces that he would describe in his emails that needed a level of restoration before he could even attempt to sell them. 

Douglas Latchford was indicted in 2019 but died [of complications of Parkinson’s disease in Bangkok at 89] before he could be put on trial. Federal prosecutors in New York however continued tracing his looted artifacts . . . they believe at least 18 of them have landed up at the Met.

Andrea Bayer: I am very involved in our work on provenance.

Andrea Bayer [b. 1957] is deputy director for Collections and Administration at The Met.

Anderson Cooper: The Met has said that they will return objects based upon rigorous evidentiary review. What rigorous evidentiary review was done before acquiring these pieces?

Andrea Bayer: Not enough.

Anderson Cooper: It seems like the Met had a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. They wanted to build up their collection. And nobody was really asking questions where it came from.

Andrea Bayer: For people, many people in the art world, there was a sense of protecting great objects that stood a chance of being destroyed. We no longer feel about it that way.

Under pressure 13 years ago, the Met did return two statues called Kneeling Attendants [10th century; stolen from Koh Ker during the civil war of the 1970s], which had been donated to them by Douglas Latchford. 

Anderson Cooper: In 2013, when you returned the kneeling attendants, did you investigate the other items that Douglas Latchford had brought to this museum?

Andrea Bayer: I don’t know the answer to that question. I can only pick up the story several years later, when Doug– Douglas Latchford was indicted in 2019, when we immediately and proactively went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and offered our full cooperation.

Anderson Cooper: Well, I can pick up the story actually in 2013, because a spokesman for the Met, said that “No special effort was gonna be made to check the provenances of any other Douglas Latchford donated work.” Why wouldn’t the Met want to look into everything else that Douglas Latchford had brought to this museum?

Andrea Bayer: I can’t speculate about why that didn’t happen.

Anderson Cooper: But no one investigated all the other items that Douglas Latchford gave?

Andrea Bayer: Not to my knowledge.

The Met is not the only major museum with looted Cambodian artifacts, but its collection is one of the largest in the world. In 2023, the museum announced it would create a research team to examine the provenance or acquisition history of all its collections. 

Anderson Cooper: It’s taken 10 years since Douglas Latchford was shown to have given stolen property to the Met, for the Met to set up this provenance team. Why has it taken 10 years?

Andrea Bayer: It was a slow process, I’ll grant you that. It was a slow process, but– I think that the fact that we are– fully engaged now, fully cooperative now is– is our only answer to this really. it’s a moment of reckoning, and we’re ready to do what it takes now– to right whatever the wrong is. 

Anderson Cooper: Four years ago, when Douglas Latchford was indicted by prosecutors, did you set up a team to check the provenance of every Latchford work–

Andrea Bayer: Yes. We started, absolutely we started to dig in right then and there. It’s not easy. I mean the fact that we don’t have much information has to do with the fact that it’s very hard to find the information–

Anderson Cooper: But there’s enough information for federal prosecutors- to charge Douglas Latchford with stealing and looting and trafficking in smuggled items. How much more evidence do you need? You haven’t–

Andrea Bayer: We need–

Anderson Cooper: –returned any of the– any Douglas Latchford-related items since he’s been indicted, and that was four years ago.

Andrea Bayer: But we are on the verge of– of– of returning a number of them.

Anderson Cooper: All of them?

Andrea Bayer: That I can’t say.

Four months after that interview, just two days before we went to air in 2023, prosecutors announced the Met would return 13 antiquities that came through Douglas Latchford.

But the Met has not returned this statue, which was specifically cited in the indictment of Latchford, or this one, which Latchford sold to the Met in 1992.

Cambodia’s Culture Minister called the Met’s announcement a “first step” and says she looks “forward to the return of many more of our treasures.”

Anderson Cooper: Shouldn’t museums have thought twice about buying things that were coming out of Cambodia in– during the genocide and civil war and decades of strife?

J.P. Labatt: And this question that you raise is really– the– the crux of– of what we’re wrestling with. 

J.P. Labatt: You– acquired pieces from a known smuggler who– used a team of looters that the government has interviewed and taken statements from. They have emails which refute the information in your own provenance at the museum. You have items in the museum which were named in the indictment of Latchford that are still there. And so these pieces should go back.

Anderson Cooper: There’s no question.

J.P. Labatt: It’s the right thing to do.

In 2023, the Lindemann family, whose collection was showcased in Architectural Digest, struck a deal with federal authorities . . . voluntarily agreeing to return 33 stolen treasures. In a statement to the New York Times [Tom Mashberg, “Lindemann Family Returns 33 Looted Artifacts to Cambodia,” 12 Sept. 2023 (online only)], the Lindemann’s said: “Having purchased these items from dealers that we assumed were reputable, we were saddened to learn how they made their way to the market in the United States.”

Anderson Cooper: Why did the Lindemanns agree to return their collection to Cambodia?

J.P. Labatt: The pieces were dirty. I– I think they finally came around to the– the fact that– Latchford was dirty, their collection was– was all looted pieces. It was obvious. And– and so they– they– decided to surrender them.

We got a peek at what was the Lindemann collection shortly after the deal was done. It was sitting in a warehouse in upstate New York. A nation’s living gods and ancestors waiting for a ride home.

Brad Gordon: This is like a whole wing of a museum.

A wing of a museum that only the Lindemann’s and their friends had access to. 

Anderson Cooper: If the Lindemann’s hadn’t published these in Architectural Digest back in 2008?

Brad Gordon: I think there’s a good chance we maybe never would have found it. 

Brad Gordon: We always say, the gods want to come home. We feel like the gods have spoken today. They want to come home.

As one of the biggest crates was being opened . . . waiting eagerly was Muikong Taing and Thyda Long . . . two members of Brad Gordon’s investigative team. This would be their first look at the mythical army commander taken from Koh Ker . . . they were likely the first Cambodians to set eyes on it since Douglas Latchford stole it more than 50 years ago.

Thyda Long: He’s here.

Anderson Cooper: There’s a look in his eyes and on his face.

Thyda Long: It’s much bigger than I expected it to be.

Anderson Cooper: His presence is extraordinary.

Thyda Long: I did not expect to feel this way. 

Even the commander seemed to be smiling. 

Then it was time to see the rarest piece in the Lindemann’s collection. The Cambodian team knelt in reverence as the Hindu god Vishnu [10th century; looted from the Prasat Krachap temple in Koh Ker] was uncrated. Despite all the fuss, he appeared unperturbed . . . reclining in a cosmic slumber. When this statue arrived in Cambodia, it was welcomed as one of the most important ever returned.

Earlier this month, the Met returned two more artifacts to Cambodia following a seizure by the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. The Cambodian government is still demanding the repatriation of 30 others in the Met’s possession.

Produced by Michael H. Gavshon and Nadim Roberts. Associate producer, Eliza Costas. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by Patrick Lee. 

[With respect to restoration of the ancient artifacts in the Cambodian temples about which Anderson Cooper reports above, looting, aside from its desecration, is an act of vandalism—the willful and malicious damaging of the sculptures. 

[In my coverage of art conservation and preservation on ROT, there are other forms of damage and potential damage against which art conservators and restorers must struggle.  I want to offer a look at another kind of conservation and restoration with which I had personal experience.

[Back in 2007, there was an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., on the conservation and preservation of experimental and innovative art that doesn’t age well or lend itself easily to cleaning.  

[As artists were experimenting with new media and techniques, they never considered how those elements would change over time.  This created sometimes immense challenges for museums and conservators, as well as private owners with fewer resources, long after the artists had probably died. 

[Some years earlier, in 1985, the Hirshhorn had mounted another exhibit in which works modern artists from the museum’s own collection that had undergone conservation treatment were shown.  The conserved pieces were accompanied by photographs depicting what they’d looked like before the treatment.  

[A later Hirshhorn display, in 2003-2004, was “intended to address the interaction of principle, practice, materials, techniques and ideas, which characterizes the preservation and care of contemporary and modern art.”

[I had a serious problem of this nature with a painting from 1958 that began to deteriorate because of the innovative technique the artist used to create it.  The fate of my little Abstract Expressionist painting, Intermezzo by Norman Carton (1908-80), is a simple, but perfect example of this issue.  

[The 18-inch-by-16-inch, heavily impastoed, multi-colored work in oil on canvas, a 14th-birthday gift for me from my parents, is one of the most cherished pieces I have and, except when I went to college and the army, I took it with me every time I moved. 

[In the 1980s, the painting began to deteriorate.  The oil paint—Carton made the painting before new pigments like acrylics were invented—had just begun to dry on the inside of the thick gobs the artist had applied to the canvas with a palette knife.  Who knew it would take three decades for oil paint to dry inside large clumps?  

[As the paint dried, the globs shrank and pulled away from the canvas, not only threatening to come off, but causing cracks and flakes (called “cleavage,” “flaking,” “blistering,” or “scaling”) in the primer (known as “ground”) and flatter areas of paint on the canvas.  I knew that if I didn’t do something, I’d lose the painting.  

[I was frantic.  I even went so far as to write to the administration of New York’s New School for Social Research (now just The New School), where Carton had exhibited and taught, because on the third floor of the old main building, the school displayed a larger Carton canvas in the same style as my small one.  I asked if they had encountered the same problem and, if so, what they did about it, but I never received an answer.

[At the time, my father was a docent at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, so I asked him to use his contacts at the museum to find a conservator who might be able to save Intermezzo and he did.  In 1987, I ended up paying five times the painting’s 1960 purchase price—but a quarter of its estimated value at the time—to stabilize it to prevent further deterioration.  To this day, I don’t regret the expenditure for a New York second.]

The Looting of Cambodia, Part 1

[This post is the transcript of a 60 Minutes (CBS News) segment originally broadcast on 17 December 2023 and rerun 28 June 2026.  Apparently, I didn’t deem Anderson Cooper’s report worth republishing on Rick On Theater two-and-a-half years ago, but on watching it again last week, I decided it is.  Given my interest in art in general, and in the preservation of art in particular, I can’t explain my first decision.]

“HOW CAMBODIAN ARTIFACTS STOLEN FROM TEMPLES
ENDED UP IN AMERICAN MUSEUMS, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS”
by Anderson Cooper

[Anderson Cooper’s 60 Minutes report, with video, is posted on the CBS News website.  I have split it into two parts for republication on ROT.  The second installment will be posted on Saturday, 11 July. 

[Other posts on ROT that deal with the conservation or preservation of art and antiquities include: “‘How High-Tech Replicas Can Help Save Our Cultural Heritage‘“ by Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour (28 May 2017); “Conserving Modern Art“ (11 December 2018); “‘Smithsonian and U.S. Army join forces to save works of art and culture threatened by war‘“ by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport of PBS News Hour (15 September 2022); “Greenwood Pond: Double Site“ (22 February 2024); “Two Restorations“ (4 November 2024); and “Replicating Classic Art Works“ (21 February 2026).]

Cambodia tracking down thousands of priceless looted antiquities

The theft of Cambodia’s cultural treasures . . . thousands of sacred stone, bronze and gold artifacts from religious sites across the country . . . might just be the greatest art heist in history. It began nearly a century ago when Cambodia was colonized by France [the French protectorate lasted from 1863 until 1953, interrupted from 1941 to 1945 during the World War II occupation by Japan] . . . but in the 1970s, 80s and 90s amidst genocide, civil war, and political turmoil – the looting became a global business, much of it run by a British man named Douglas Latchford [1931-2020]. He kept some of it for himself, but much of what his gang of thieves stole, Latchford then sold to wealthy private collectors and some of the most important museums around the world. As we first reported in 2023, Cambodia’s government has spent the last 14 years trying to track it all down . . . and bring their history and heritage home.

Angkor Wat [Khmer for ‘City (or ‘Capital’) of Temples’], with its towering spires, is the glory of Cambodia. Nearly a thousand years old, it’s one of the biggest and most extraordinary religious temples in the world — sprawling across 400 acres. Originally built [1122-1150 CE] to honor the Hindu god Vishnu, it then became a Buddhist temple [ca. 1181 CE], and remains a place of worship today. You can wander here for weeks, lost in a labyrinth of ancient stone corridors and sacred chambers. But the scars of plunder run deep: looters have hacked off the heads of many statues . . . they’ve stolen bodies as well . . . empty pedestals mark where gods and deities once stood . . . on some, only the feet remain.

It’s worse in the rest of Cambodia’s 4,000 temples. Nearly all have been looted. This one is a hundred miles northeast of Angkor Wat . . . on a remote mountain . . . called Sandak [established late 9th century CE].

Brad Gordon: This was hit very heavily by the looting gangs.

Brad Gordon: They found gold, they found statues, they found many, many things.

That’s Brad Gordon, an American lawyer, who’s been working for the Cambodian government for 14 years, tracking down its stolen treasures . . . he brought us to Sandak with his team of investigators, archeologists and art scholars.

Anderson Cooper: This is so cool.

In the temple’s crumbling courtyard, little remains . . . mostly empty pedestals scattered among the Sralao trees.

Anderson Cooper: It’s remarkable to me just how much stuff is just scattered on the ground. 

Brad Gordon: Yes.

Brad Gordon: It’s like a pedestal graveyard.

Anderson Cooper: We’ve all seen in museums these statues with no feet on them, and I don’t think people realize the feet were hacked off. Because in order to steal them, that’s the easiest way to– to get them off the pedestal.

Brad Gordon: And we know when the looters came to sites like this, the first thing they took was the heads. That was the easiest to grab. And then later on maybe they come back and get the torso. But they were not very careful, so they left behind pieces.

For Cambodians, these statues are not just works of art . . . they are sacred deities that hold the souls of their ancestors to whom they ask for guidance and pray . . .

Anderson Cooper: This is incredible. Th– these were all looted.

Phoeurng Sackona: Yes, all looted.

Anderson Cooper: All of these heads, like, cut off–

Phoeurng Sackona: And the head was cut off, yes.

Phoeurng Sackona [b. 1959], Cambodia’s minister of culture [2013-present], is in charge of the government’s efforts to track down their stolen gods. We met her in a closely guarded warehouse not far from Angkor Wat . . . ––where more than 6,000 pieces from temples across the country are stored for safekeeping . . . each one sculpted by an artisan from an ancient Khmer Empire . . . that lasted for more than five centuries [802-1431 CE] and spanned Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. 

Anderson Cooper: So the statues have a soul? The statues are– are they living?

Phoeurng Sackona: For us, yes.

Phoeurng Sackona: And we believe that we can talk with them. They will hear. They will see. What do you want? What do you see? What do you do in your life, in your house, outside in the society, also? So that–

Anderson Cooper: They’re watching.

Phoeurng Sackona: They’re watching, everywhere . . .

Phoeurng Sackona’s entire family was killed in the genocide that began in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge, a radical communist group took over, forcing millions of Cambodians into labor camps. Some 2 million people, nearly a quarter of the population, were slaughtered or starved to death. The Khmer Rouge lost power in 1979 [to the invading army of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam], but fighting and instability continued for decades, leaving Cambodia’s temples unprotected and vulnerable . . . easy targets for unscrupulous antiquities dealers like Douglas Latchford.

Anderson Cooper: Who was Douglas Latchford?

Brad Gordon: I would say that he was, in many ways, the mastermind behind the greatest art heist in history.

Anderson Cooper: The greatest art heist in history?

Brad Gordon: Yes, in terms of scope and multitude of crime sites and the enormous amount of statues that were taken out.

Latchford lived in Thailand . . . an enigmatic British businessman . . . he began collecting in the 1960s. He had, it seems, two great loves: Cambodian antiquities and . . . Thai bodybuilders . . . He sponsored Bangkok’s biggest bodybuilding competition, the Latchford Classic [from ca. 2004].

Anderson Cooper: How would you describe him?

Brad Gordon: He was extremely deceptive, I think in many ways, was ruthless. But he hid that behind this incredible façade of charm.

Latchford portrayed himself as a scholar and protector of Cambodia’s culture, a reputation he burnished by donating sculptures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other prestigious institutions. He also published three books filled with the finest examples of Cambodian antiquities [Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art (Art Media Resources, 2004); Khmer Gold Gifts for the Gods (Art Media Resources, 2008); Khmer Bronzes: New Interpretations of the Past (Art Media Resources, 2011)] . . . many of them, it turns out, Latchford had stolen.

Brad Gordon: He was using the books as sales catalogs. You know, he was handing them out. He was using them to sell pieces. And– and he understood a certain psychology of collectors out there that if they see something in a beautiful book, they think it’s legitimate.

Those books have been an invaluable guide for Brad Gordon and his team, helping them compile a database of thousands of missing artifacts. Many of which they didn’t know existed until Latchford published photos of them. 

Gordon’s team got their big break when they met this man in 2012. He was a former Khmer Rouge child soldier and leader of a gang of looters. His name was Toek Tik [ca. 1959-2021; pronounced day duck].

Brad Gordon: That first meeting, I– I didn’t really know who we had met. You know, I knew– I knew that he was important. I knew that many people were telling me he was the best. And I knew that he was feared. 

Anderson Cooper: Why were people afraid of him?

Brad Gordon: You know, over the years, he had killed many people. 

It turned out Toek Tik had worked for decades supplying Douglas Latchford with thousands of treasures . . . and he was amazed to see them again in Latchford’s books.

Brad Gordon: He kept opening the book and going back to the front cover and– and going through and tapping and saying, “I know this one. I know this one. I know this one.” 

Anderson Cooper: And when he says he knew this one, means he– he helped loot the– those ones.

Brad Gordon: That’s what we learned later, yeah.

Toek Tik became a key confidential source for Gordon’s team. They gave him a code name, Lion, to protect his identity. And followed him to dozens of temples where he confessed what he’d found, and how he’d stolen it.

Brad Gordon: He would say to us, “I’m gonna transfer everything in my head to you. I’m gonna tell you everything. Every secret.”

Anderson Cooper: You felt like his memory was very good. It was accurate.

Brad Gordon: Oh it was unbelievable. He remembered the size of everything. Measured against his body. He would use his arm to show us how long a statue was.

Anderson Cooper: Why do you think he wanted to cooperate?

Brad Gordon: You know, he felt tremendously guilty about many things he had done in his life, about the killing, about the looting. And we offered him a road of redemption– a way to do something really good at the end of his life.

They recorded hundreds of hours of Lion’s testimony . . . he explained how gangs of looters would spend weeks at remote temples . . . using shovels, chisels, metal detectors . . . even dynamite . . . to find and dig out treasures. Dozens of men would hoist heavy stone statues onto oxcarts before transporting them across the border . . . into Thailand . . . and into the hands of Douglas Latchford. Lion never met Latchford, but he’d send him photographs of artifacts he could choose from.

Brad Gordon: We hear about them saying, “Oh we had to go to this temple and take a photo. And then sending it back.” You know, my sense is he was shopping. He had a list. The looters knew his priorities.

Like these . . . which came from a temple complex called Koh Ker [koh kay]. The statues from there had a distinctive style that Latchford loved.

It was, however, a dangerous business. Most looters only made enough to buy food for their families. And fighting between rival gangs was common. 

Anderson Cooper: People were killed over these– these antiquities. Do you look at these as blood statues?

Brad Gordon: For sure. They’re blood antiquities. Whenever I see a statue I think about, you know, who died to– to get this out of the ground or get it out of a temple and to– to move it here? So, so much of this looting was done in the shadow of the war, shadow of the genocide. 

It was this 500-pound sandstone warrior from Koh Ker that appeared in a Sotheby’s auction catalog in 2011 that put Douglas Latchford on the radar of U.S. law enforcement. Its feet were missing. And the price tag? An estimated $2-3 million.

J.P. Labbat: When it appeared in the market– there were a number of archaeologists, a number of people who immediately recognized the– the source of the statue as being a specific temple in Cambodia.

Anderson Cooper: It c– came from Koh Ker?

J.P. Labbat: That’s right.

Until he retired in 2023, J.P. Labbat was a special agent on the cultural property, art and antiquities unit with Homeland Security. 

J.P. Labbat: A team from the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the Southern District of New York traveled to Cambodia– to inspect the site where the statue had been removed.

J.P. Labbat: And so the base– was still there with it with the feet still in the ground. And so– they were able to match that base and feet to the statue.

Anderson Cooper: And that was enough evidence to get the statue pulled off the market?

J.P. Labbat: That’s right. 

After years of legal wrangling, Sotheby’s finally agreed to send this stolen warrior back to Cambodia . . .

A ceremony was held welcoming it home . . . and investigators were able to trace its original sale back to Douglas Latchford . . . who was asked about its repatriation in a German documentary in 2014 [Die Spur der Tempelräuber (‘The trail of the temple robbers’; known in English as The Stolen Warriors; nb: film databases like IMDb list the release date as 2015)].

Wolfgang Luck: Is it a good day for Cambodia, or is it a bad day for the art market if these things are coming back? 

Douglas Latchford: It’s a good day for Cambodia, it’s a bad day for the art market.

Law enforcement in New York was closing in on Latchford, but he claimed prosecutors had him all wrong. 

Douglas Latchford: Their imagination has gone wild. They’ve seen too many Indiana Jones films. As far as I know there is no such thing as a smuggling network and I certainly don’t belong to any smuggling network.

Anderson Cooper: The attempted sale of this statue in 2011, was that a turning point in the unraveling of Douglas Latchford?

J.P. Labbat: I would say yes. That case put more of a– focus and a spotlight on him. And then efforts were– were then doubled to, like, really peel back the onion and look into Latchford’s activities.

The testimony of former looters found by Brad Gordon and his team was critical for the U.S. attorney’s case against Latchford. 

Anderson Cooper: How rare is it to actually have access to the looters? To people who actually stole these things 10, 20, 30 years ago.

J.P. Labbat: I know of no other case where– where that’s happened. And– it– it’s quite remarkable to have looters actively assisting a team of investigators to recover artifacts that they had a firsthand in helping remove from the country.

Douglas Latchford was finally indicted by U.S. authorities in 2019 for smuggling, conspiracy, wire fraud and other charges, but he died before he could be put on trial. Brad Gordon eventually convinced Latchford’s family to return his personal collection of stolen treasures . . . Among the first pieces to come home in 2021 was this statue from Koh Ker. Lion, weakened by cancer, came to inspect it in Cambodia’s National Museum to verify it was the same one he’d dug out of the ground.

Brad Gordon: And then he turned to me and he said, “It’s the real statue.” You know, it was a remarkable thing to watch. And just his– his relationship, it– it was living to him.

Anderson Cooper: Do you think he was happy it was back? 

Brad Gordon: Thrilled. So happy, he knew that he had done something good. 

Lion died a few months later . . . but the secrets he revealed continue to bring statues back to Cambodia’s National Museum . . . masterpieces that left the country long before these school children were born.

Anderson Cooper: Does the return of these statues, of these Gods, help some to heal.

Phoeurng Sackona: Yes. To get back the soul of the nation.

Anderson Cooper: The soul of the nation.

Phoeurng Sackona: It’s not only for me– but all of my family who was died [sic] during the war, and for– for all Cambodian people.

There are still many more stolen Cambodian statues and artifacts in museums and private collections around the world. 

When we return, Cambodia’s fight to get those looted relics back.

Produced by Michael H. Gavshon and Nadim Roberts. Associate producer, Eliza Costas. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by Patrick Lee. 

[I don’t want to do a history lesson here, but I think a little background and some identifications are useful.  The Khmer Empire was established in 802 CE and by the 12th century, when most of the temples in the 60 Minutes report were built, was the largest empire in Southeast Asia.  The empire prospered and grew until 1431, when wars with neighboring kingdoms led to the sack of Angkor, the imperial capital. The empire went into decline and existed under the influence of Siam and Annam (now known as Thailand and Vietnam), reduced to little more than a vassal state.

[King Norodom (1834-1904) signed a treaty of protection with France, making the Kingdom of Cambodia a French protectorate—read “colony”—from 1863 until it gained independence in 1953 under King Norodom Sihanouk (1922-2012).  In 1970, Sihanouk was ousted in a military coup by Lon Nol (1913-85), a Cambodian politician and general who proclaimed the Khmer Republic. 

[Khmer means ‘Cambodian’ in the native language, which is also called Khmer.  Khmer Rouge, French for ‘Red Cambodian,’ is the name Sihanouk gave to the Communist Party of Kampuchea led by Pol Pot (1925-98); it became the term everyone, both inside the country and abroad, used for the CPK.  Kampuchea is the anglicization of the indigenous Khmer name for Cambodia.

[On 17 April 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces took Phnom Penh, the capital of the country, and the next year established the radical Marxist-Leninist state of Democratic Kampuchea.  Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge set about removing from Kampuchea all foreign and bourgeois influences by rounding up all intellectuals, professionals, capitalists, and artists and sending them to camps in the countryside; Phnom Penh, a city of 370,000 inhabitants in 1975, was almost emptied of people. 

[By 1978, only 32,000 people lived in the city; many of the Cambodians the Khmer Rouge transported died either from execution, harsh conditions and treatment, or disease.  Between 21 and 24 percent of Cambodia’s population was lost, from 1.7 to 1.9 million people. 

[After years of hostility between the two communist countries, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam—the now-united North and South Vietnam—invaded Kampuchea in 1979 in response to border raids by the Khmer Rouge.  The Vietnamese forces defeated the Khmer Rouge and established the People’s Republic of Kampuchea; Pol Pot fled and was eventually arrested by his own Khmer Rouge in 1997 and tried in Phnom Penh.  He received a life sentence to be served under house arrest, but died, likely by suicide, in 1998.

[In 1993, the monarchy was restored and the country again became the Kingdom of Cambodia.  King Sihanouk retook the throne until his abdication in 2004; his successor is his son, Norodom Sihamoni (b. 1953).  The head of government in Cambodia is Prime Minister Hun Manet (b, 1977), in office since 2023.  

[Anderson Cooper left 60 Minutes in May 2026, announcing his departure in People magazine in February 2026.  He explained, “I have little kids now and I want to spend as much time with them as possible, while they still want to spend time with me."  He remains anchor of the CNN broadcast show Anderson Cooper 360.°]

Robots! (Part 1)

 

[A robot—as if anyone today doesn’t already know—is a machine that resembles a human and does mechanical, routine tasks on command.  That’s the meaning in the world of sci-fi; in the real-life industrial world, it’s a machine built and programmed to carry out some complex task or group of tasks by physically moving. 

[Lately, these two definitions are coming closer and closer together (as you’ll read in the reports in this post and the second one coming up in Part 2).

[While a robot may be constructed to suggest human form without mimicking human appearance and behavior, like the arguably best-known anthropomorphic robot, C-3PO from Star Wars.  (3PO’s companion, R2-D2, is a non-humanoid robot, resembling a moving trash can.) 

[A robot that’s designed to look and act like a human being is called an android, sometimes a ’droid for short.  Probably the most famous ’droid is Lieutenant Commander Data from the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount Television, 1987-94; syndicated) and the subsequent films.

[A being that’s part machine and part organic is a cyborg, a kind of hybrid of a human and a robot.  This, of course, is a largely fictional creature—at least for the present. 

[The word ‘robot’ was first used in Karel Čapek’s (Czech; 1890-1938) 1920 play R.U.R.  The abbreviation in the title stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots (in Czech, Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti.)  In Czech, robota means forced labor.  The word, itself, was coined by the playwright’s brother. Josef (1887-1945), a Czech artist best known as a painter, but who was also a noted writer and a poet, who suggested it to Karel.

[‘Android,’ for the curious reader, is an amalgam of the ancient Greek andros (ανδρος), ‘man’ or ‘human,’ and eidos (ειδος), ‘form,’ ‘image,’ ‘shape,’ ‘appearance,’ or ‘look.’  It dates back, surprisingly, to the 1700s.  ‘Cyborg,’ coined in 1960, is a portmanteau word made up of syllables taken from ‘cybernetic’ (of or relating to the study of communication and control in living organisms or machines [i.e., cybernetics]) and ‘organism.’

[Humans have been fascinated with the idea of artificial life forms for almost as long as we’ve been writing down our thoughts, dreams, and fears.  The earliest treatment of man-made creatures was in Homeric Greece.  Around 700 to 600 BCE, the idea of robots appears in the Iliad when the god of fire, Hephaestus, forged armor for Achilles with the help of “golden maidens” who could talk, move, and reason, and were taught by the gods to make things with their hands.

[The Bible, in the Book of Revelation (Chapter 13), commonly dated to about 95 CE, describes a man-made object that is supernaturalized to act as a living creature and is granted “breath,” thus becoming capable of speaking.

[In Jewish folklore, a golem is an animated humanoid creature created entirely from inanimate matter—most commonly clay or mud—and brought to life through mystical rituals.  Though the word appears in the Bible and in early Talmudic texts, the golem as an animated clay statue created to protect Jews was a largely Ashkenazi (Jews of Eastern and Central Europe) figure.

[Abba ben Joseph bar Ḥama (ca. 280-352 CE), a Babylonian rabbi who’s referred to in the Talmud by the name Rava, was believed to have once created a golem.  The best-known stories about golems date to the 16th and 17th centuries in Poland and Bohemia.

[There’s a long history of discoveries of artificial creatures, going back as far as Egyptian dancing dwarves from about 2000 BCE animated via a system of gut strings and rollers and Archytas of Tarentum’s (Greek; 435/410-360/350 BCE) wooden bird powered by a jet of steam or compressed air (ca. 400-350 BCE), often cited as the first documented scientific “robot.”

[Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) designed the first documented physical humanoid robot (ca. 1495), a knight in metal armor.  Reconstructions from his notebooks show a system of pulleys and gears that allowed it to sit, stand, and move its visor.

[In 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson (French; 1709-82) devised one of the most famous early functional automatons: a gilded copper bird that could flap its wings and simulate eating and digesting grain.

[Eric (1928), one of the first modern humanoid robots made of metal, was an aluminum suit of armor built by British engineer William Henry (W. H.) Richards (1868-1948).  He could move his arms and head and was controlled by remote or voice.  In 1939, Elektro, a seven-foot-tall robot with a steel skeleton covered in an aluminum skin, was built by engineers at the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and displayed at the New York World’s Fair.  It could walk, talk via a record player, and even “smoke” cigarettes.  Both Eric and Elektro were officially labeled “robots,” Čapek’s play having been produced around the world, popularizing the word.

[My own first memorable encounter with the notion of robots was probably the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (Twentieth Century Fox) in which Michael Rennie’s intergalactic ambassador, Klaatu, has a powerful robot, the “Iron Man,” named Gort.  The film’s my favorite science fiction flick—for two reasons.  One, it’s a terrific movie—a good plot, well told and well acted (with one of our best actresses in Patricia Neal, plus a favorite of mine, Sam Jaffe)—and, two, it was set and filmed in Washington, D.C., the town where I was born (though I was only 4 when it was being made there).]

“BOSTON DYNAMICS: INSIDE THE WORKSHOP
WHERE ROBOTS OF THE FUTURE ARE BEING BUILT”
by Anderson Cooper 

[This report from the 60 Minutes episode of 28 March 2021 (CBS News) was on a rare look behind the curtain of the robotics labs of Boston Dynamics.  The segment bore the on-air headline, “The Next Generation of Robots.”  Over four-and-a-half years later, 60 Minutes revisited and updated this subject.  That report will follow on Monday, 12 January.

[There’s no full video of this broadcast on line except for subscribers to Paramount+; readers who are subscribers or who wish to become one can log on from the page with this report.  On YouTube, there’s a short excerpt from near the beginning that’s less than a minute long and a five-minute video of a “60 Minutes Overtime” segment.  (There’s a link to Paramount+ on this site as well.)]

Boston Dynamics is a cutting-edge robotics company that’s spent decades behind closed doors making robots that move in ways we’ve only seen in science fiction films. They occasionally release videos on YouTube of their life-like machines spinning, somersaulting or sprinting, which are greeted with fascination and fear. We’ve been trying, without any luck, to get into Boston Dynamics’ workshop for years, and a few weeks ago they finally agreed to let us in. After working out strict COVID protocols, we went to Massachusetts to see how they make robots do the unimaginable.

From the outside, Boston Dynamics headquarters looks pretty normal. Inside, however. it’s anything but. If Willy Wonka made robots, his workshop might look something like this. There are robots in corridors, offices and kennels. They trot and dance and whirl and the 200-or-so human roboticists, who build and often break them, barely bat an eye.

That is Atlas, the most human-looking robot they’ve ever made.

It’s nearly 5 feet tall, 175 pounds, and is programmed to run, leap and spin like an automated acrobat.

Marc Raibert, the founder and chairman of Boston Dynamics doesn’t like to play favorites, but definitely has a soft spot for Atlas.

Marc Raibert: So here’s a little bit of a jump.

Anderson Cooper: I mean, that’s incredible. (LAUGH)

Atlas isn’t doing all this on its own. Technician Bryan Hollingsworth is steering it with this remote control. But the robot’s software allows it to make other key decisions autonomously.

Marc Raibert: So really the robot is–

Anderson Cooper: That’s incredible–

Marc Raibert: You know, doing all its own balance, all its own control. Bryan’s just steering it, telling it what speed and direction. Its computers are– adjusting how the legs are placed and what forces it’s applying–

Marc Raibert: In order to keep it– balanced.

Atlas balances with the help of sensors, as well as a gyroscope and three on-board computers. It was definitely built to be pushed around.

Marc Raibert: Good, push it a little bit more. It’s just trying to keep its balance. Just like you will, if I push you. And you can push it in any direction, you can push it from the side. (LAUGH)

Making machines that can stay upright on their own and move through the world with the ease of an animal or human has been an obsession of Marc Raiberts’ for 40 years.

[On 10 November 2025, Russia’s first AI-powered humanoid robot, officially called AIDOL (occasionally, but unofficially, AIdol), failed a fundamental task during its official unveiling. (The robot’s name is pronounced exactly like the English word ‘idol.’) As the robot was led onto the stage in Moscow to the theme song from Rocky, it managed a small wave before losing its balance and falling face-first onto the stage floor. Vladimir Vitukhin, CEO of Artificial Intelligence Dynamic Organism Lab (note the initials), the developing tech company, attributed the failure to a calibration error in the robot’s balance algorithms or insufficient lighting affecting its sensors.

[For curious ROTters who read Russian, the standard form of the robot’s name used by Russian news agencies and tech journals is “Айдол” (also pronounced like ‘idol’), written with a capital А at the beginning and continuing in lowercase (note the ‘short I’/I kratkoye). “АЙДОЛ” (all upper case), while technically an equivalent to the all-caps romanization “AIDOL,” is rarely used in Russian text and mostly appears only in headlines, logos, or as a stylized design choice. (Because the specific capitalization of “AIdol,” used by some English-language publications, is intended to highlight the English abbreviation and colloquialism for “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), it has no Cyrillic equivalent.)

[The robot’s English name, AIDOL, is an acronym for the name of the company that created it, Artificial Intelligence Dynamic Organism Lab. The company’s name in Russian is Лаборатория Динамических Организмов с Искусственным Интеллектом (literally, ‘Laboratory of Dynamic Organisms with Artificial Intelligence’). The Russian term for ‘artificial intelligence’ is искусственный интеллект (‘iskusstvennyi intellekt’; искусство/‘iskusstvo’ is Russian for ‘art’).]

Anderson Cooper: The space of time you’ve been working in is nothing compared to the time it’s taken for animals and humans to develop.

Marc Raibert: Some people look at me and say, “Oh, Raibert, you’ve been stuck on this problem for 40 years.” Animals are amazingly good, and people, at– at what they do. You know, we’re so agile. We’re so versatile. We really haven’t achieved what humans can do yet. But I think– I think we can.

Raibert isn’t making it easy for himself, he’s given most of his robots legs.

Anderson Cooper: Why focus on, on legs? I would think wheels would be easier.

Marc Raibert: Yeah, wheels and tracks are great if you have a prepared surface like a road or even a dirt road. But people and animals can go anywhere on earth– using their legs. And, so, that, you know, that was the inspiration.

Some of the first contraptions he built in the early 1980s bounced around on what looked like pogo sticks. They appeared in this documentary when Raibert was a pioneering professor of robotics and computer science at Carnegie Mellon. He founded Boston Dynamics in 1992, and with CEO Robert Playter has been working for decades to perfect how robots move.

They developed this robot, called Big Dog, for the military as well as a larger pack mule that could carry 400 pounds on its back. Experimenting with speed, they got this cheetah-like robot to run nearly 30 miles an hour.

None of these made it out of the prototype phase. But they did lead to this. It’s called Spot. Boston Dynamics made it not knowing exactly how it would be used.

But the inspiration for it isn’t hard to figure out.

Hannah Rossi: So Spot is a[n] omni-directional robot. So I can go forwards and backwards.

Anderson Cooper: This is crazy. (LAUGH)

Robert Playter: This is the real benefit of legs. Legs give you that capability.

That’s Robert Playter, the CEO, and Hannah Rossi, a technician who works on Spot.

Hannah Rossi: I’m not doing anything special to let it walk over those rocks. There you go.

The controls are easier to use than you might expect.

Anderson Cooper: Does it have to come in, straight on?

Hannah Rossi: You don’t have to be perfect about it drive it close to wherever you want to go and the robot will do the rest.

Anderson Cooper: Wow. In some ways it’s like driving a very sophisticated remote[-]control car. What makes it different?

Robert Playter: Spot is really smart about its own locomotion. It deals with all the details about how to place my feet, what gait to use, how to manage my body so that all you have to tell it is the direction they go to.

And in some cases, you don’t even have to do that. When signaled, Spot can take itself off its charging station and go for a walk on its own – as long as it’s pre-programmed with the route.

It uses five 3D cameras to map its surroundings and avoid obstacles.

Atlas has a similar technology, while we were talking in front of Atlas, this is how it saw us. 

Marc Raibert: This is inside Atlas’s brain. And it shows its perception system. So, what looks like a flashlight is really the data that’s coming back from its cameras. And it– you see the white– rectangles, that means it’s identifying a place that it could step. And then once it identifies it, it attaches those footsteps to it, and it says, “Okay, I’m gonna try and step there.” And then it adjusts its mechanics so that it actually hits those places when it’s– running.

All of that happens in a matter of milliseconds.

Marc Raibert: And so it’s gonna use that vision to adjust itself as it goes running over these blocks.

Atlas cost tens of millions of dollars to develop, but it’s not for sale. It’s used purely for research and development.

But Spot is on the market. More than 400 are out in the world. They sell for about $75,000 a piece, accessories cost extra. Some [S]pots work at utility companies using mounted cameras to check on equipment. Others monitor construction sites and several police departments are trying them out to assist with investigations.

Anderson Cooper: Let’s talk about the– the fear factor, When you post a video of Atlas or Spot doing something, a ton of people are amazed by it and think it’s great. And there’s a lot of people who think this is terrifying.

Robert Playter: The rogue robot story is a powerful story. And it’s been told for 100 years. But it’s fiction. Robots don’t have agency. They don’t make up their own minds about what their tasks are. They operate within a narrow bound [sic] of their programming.

Anderson Cooper: It is easy to project human qualities onto these machines.

Robert Playter: I think people do attribute to our robots much more than they should. Because you know, they haven’t seen machines move like this before. And so they– they want to project intelligence and emotion onto that in ways that are fiction.

In other words, these robots still have a long way to go.

Anderson Cooper: I mean, it’s not C[-]3PO. It– it’s not– a thinking–

Marc Raibert: Yeah. So let me tell you–

Anderson Cooper: Okay.

Marc Raibert: About that. There’s a cognitive intelligence and an athletic intelligence. You know, cognitive intelligence is making plans, making decisions– reasoning, and things like that.

Anderson Cooper: It’s not doing that?

Marc Raibert: It’s mostly doing athletic intelligence–

Anderson Cooper: Okay–

Marc Raibert: Which is managing its body, its posture, its energetics. If you told it to travel in a circle in the room it can go through the sequence of steps. But if you ask it to– go find me a soda, it’s– it’s not doing anything like that.

Just picking an item off the floor can sometimes be a struggle for Spot. Enabling it to open a door has taken years of programming and practice and a human has to tell it where the hinges are. 

Kevin Blankespoor: Each time we add some new capability– and we feel like we’ve got it to a decent point, that’s when you push it to failure to figure out, you know, how good of a job you’ve really done.

Kevin Blankespoor is one of the lead engineers here, but at times, he prefers a very low-tech approach to testing robots.

Anderson Cooper: You’re pretty tough on robots.

Kevin Blankespoor: We think of that as– as just another way to push them out of the comfort zone.

Failure is a big part of the process. When trying something new, robots, like humans, don’t get it right every time. There might be dozens of crashes for every one success.

Anderson Cooper: How often do you break a robot? (LAUGH)

Marc Raibert: We break them all the time. I mean, it’s part of our culture. We have a motto, “Build it, break it, fix it.”

To do that, Boston Dynamics has recruited roboticists with diverse backgrounds – there’s plenty of Ph.D’s, but also bike builders, and race car mechanics. Bill Washburn is part of that pit crew.

Anderson Cooper: They all look pretty dinged up.

Bill Washburn: Yeah.

Anderson Cooper: How often do these need to get repaired?

Bill Washburn: The biggest– kinda failures for me are, like, the bottom part of the robot breaks off of the top part of the robot. (CHUCKLE) And it’s like–

Anderson Cooper: That seems like a big– big failure. (CHUCKLE)

Bill Washburn: And the hydraulic hoses are the only thing holding it together.

Recently, Raibert and his team decided to push their robots in a way they never had before.

Marc Raibert: We spent at least six months, maybe eight, just preparing for what we were gonna do. And then we started to get the technical teams working on the behavior.

The behavior was dancing. All their robots got in on the act. The movements were cutting edge, but the music and the Mashed Potato were definitely old[-]school.

Anderson Cooper: There are some people who see that and say, “That can’t be real.”

Marc Raibert: Nothing’s more gratifying than hearing that.

Anderson Cooper: What’s the point in proving that the robot can do the Mashed Potato [popular dance craze of 1962, made famous by James Brown]?

Marc Raibert: This process of, you know, doing new things with the robots lets you generate new tools, new approaches, new understanding of the problem– that takes you forward. But, man, isn’t it just fun?

Anderson Cooper: But, I mean, it’s– it costs a lotta money. It took 18 months of your time.

Marc Raibert: I think it was worth it. (LAUGHTER)

Whether it’ll be worth it to Boston Dynamics’ new owners is less clear.

The South Korean carmaker, Hyundai, has agreed to buy a majority stake for more than a billion dollars. It’ll be Boston Dynamics’ third owner in eight years. There’s pressure to turn their research into revenue.

And Boston Dynamics hopes this new robot will help. It’s called Stretch and it’s due to go on sale next year. This is the first time they’ve shown it publically [sic].

Kevin Blankespoor: Warehouses is really the next frontier for robotics.

Stretch may not be that exciting to look at, but it’s built with a definite purpose in mind.  It’s got a seven-foot arm and they say it can move 800 boxes an hour in a warehouse and work for up to 16 hours without a break. Unlike many industrial robots that sit in one place, stretch is designed to move around.

Kevin Blankespoor: You can drive it around with a joystick. And at times, that’s the easiest way to get it set up. But once it’s ready to go in a truck and unload it, you hit go and from there on it’s autonomous. And it’ll keep finding boxes and moving ’em until it’s all the way through.

Robert Playter: This generation of robots is gonna be different. They’re gonna work amongst us. They’re gonna work next to us– in ways where we help them but they also take some of the burden from us.

Anderson Cooper: The more robots are integrated into the workforce, the more jobs would be taken away.

Robert Playter: At the same time, you’re creating a new industry. We envision a job– we– we– we like to call the robot wrangler. He’ll launch and manage five to 10 robots at a time and sort of– keep them all working.

Anderson Cooper: Is there a robot you’ve always dreamt of making (LAUGH) that you haven’t been able to do yet?

Marc Raibert: A car with an active suspension essentially legs like w– like a roller[-]skating robot. And a robot like that, you know, could go anywhere on earth. That’s one thing that maybe we’ll do at some point. But, you know, really, the sky’s the limit. There’s– there’s all kinds of things we can and will do.

As with so many things Boston Dynamics does. It’s hard to imagine how that would work, but then again, who’d have thought a bunch of metal machines would one day show us all how to do the Mashed Potato.

[Anderson Cooper, anchor of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, has contributed to 60 Minutes since 2006.  His exceptional reporting on big news events has earned Cooper a reputation as one of television’s preeminent newsmen.

[I decided to post this report after I watched the one coming up next earlier this month.  I was attracted to the upcoming 60 Minutes segment just because it fascinated me, and I considered reposting it while I was watching.  As you’ll see, Bill Whitaker, the correspondent on Part 2, makes reference to this report—which I saw back in 2021 and was remembering it as I took in Whitaker’s report—so I decided to repost both reports.  As I said: just because the topic intrigued me.

[I hope ROTters will find this interesting, too, and will return on Monday, the 12th, foe the second part of this short series.]