60 Minutes - 02/08/2026: The Indomitable Margaret Atwood, Knife, Officially Amazing

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Author Margaret Atwood talks with Jon Wertheim about her dystopian classic, "The Handmaid's Tale", and why she thinks it became a cultural touchstone. Salman Rushdie came to terms with the attempt on his life the only way he knew: by writing about it in his book, "Knife". He detailed the experience in his first television interview following the attack, when he sat down with Anderson Cooper in 2024. Correspondent Cecilia Vega takes us behind the scenes of the Guinness World Records to reveal a rigorous auditing system—one that proves that, as impossible as the feats may seem, every one is real. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tonight on this special edition of 60 Minutes Presents, the 60 Minutes Book Club. Here she is taking a flamethrower to her own book. Margaret Atwood was firing back at would-be book burners. Her books have been banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt, anti-Christian. The government put out an edict to all school boards saying that they couldn't have any books in the library that had either direct or indirect sex. Why does indirect sex? Did people try to kill you?

Yes. Author Salman Rushdie has been a marked man for nearly half his life, and in 2022, a knife-wielding attacker almost killed him. This is his first television interview. One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me, he said, first you were really unlucky and then you were really lucky. I said, what's the lucky part? He said, well, the lucky part was at the number.

man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife. Whether it's this attempt at the biggest pizza party ever, or trying to eat an airplane, there's a method to the madness of getting into Guinness World Records. It's as many as 95% of submissions get rejected. We do validate people that do things that others might seem about a bit weird, like eating aircraft and stuff. Do you not see that as weird? I see it as really interesting.

Good evening, I'm John Wertheim. Welcome to the 60 Minutes Book Club. Tonight, we'll hear author Salman Rushdie discuss Knife, his book based on the near fatal attempt on his life at a literary event in 2022. Then we'll tell you about the book that is sold more than 150 million copies worldwide. But we begin with a question of sorts.

You're an 86-year-old titan of literature, have been for half-century. now. You're Canada's best-known author, 64 books and counting. And increasingly, you find your work on lists of banned books scrubbed from 135 American school districts. Yes, that includes your breakthrough work, the dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale, but you've also been censored for work like The Testaments and the Blind Assassin, both of which won the Booker Prize, the top award for English-language fiction. What to do? Sure, you take to the keyboard and write sternly worded opinion pieces, but as we first told you last fall, if you're the indomitable Margaret Atwood,

you don't stop there. Here she is taking a flamethrower to her own book. Atwood was firing back at would-be book burners by torching an unburnable edition. It was all promotion for a charity auction to benefit Pan America, a non-profit that champions free speech. Atwood's books have been banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt, anti-Christian. She told us she was particularly peeved when a recent ban came from Edmonton, Alberta, in her own country. The government put out an edict to all school boards saying that they couldn't have any books in the library that had either direct or indirect sex. What is indirect sex? You've had any indirect sex lately?

second wave feminism here. Outwood speaks as she writes, with a mix of wisdom and deadpan wit. Last fall, she invited us into her Toronto home. Do you know offhand how many languages your books have been translated in? Well, we say over 50 for everything. How old are you? Over 50?

How many books have you written? Over 50. How many awards have you won? Over 50. I thought so. Under his eye. Published in 1985, the Handmaid's Day. depicts a near-future America overtaken by religious dictatorship, where a dwindling number of fertile women are forced to cloak themselves in red and bear children for the elite. Give me children or else I die.

The book would sell more than 10 million copies and spawn an Emmy-winning Hulu series. Beyond that, its scarlet costume would become a uniform of real-life protest and resistance. Shame! Shame! Handmaid's tale is your magnum opus. You think? Your great Gatsby, how are you with that? Well, I would question the premise.

You what? Yeah. It's not due to me or the excellence of the book. It's partly the twists and turns of history. With the ongoing rollback of reproductive rights and the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the Handmaid's Tale began for many readers to feel eerily prescient. Had it been so that none of this ever got enacted, then it would probably be sitting on a shelf somewhere

and people would be saying, I'm jolly good yarn, but it didn't happen. Or didn't it? In 2003's Orix and Craig, for instance, Atwood wrote of environmental collapse and a global pandemic. Pick a catastrophe, any catastrophe. Before the real world did its thing, she warned about it in her fiction. It wasn't, you know, this is going to happen without a day. out this could happen. This might happen. So you should be on the watch for it. What is your relationship with this idea that you're the prophet of doom, this Cassandra, the forecaster of dystopia? Well, I think I'm very positive if I didn't kill everybody off at the end, you know, some people do. These are rare books. A lot of them are pretty obscure.

If Atwood can see around corners, it's because her visions have historical precedent. They come rooted in actual events. At the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto, Atwood is archived stacks of her research. That is the hundreds of news clippings that substantiate her plots. This is folder upon folder of your research for Handmaid's Tale.

She writes by a strict rule. If it didn't happen somewhere at some time, it doesn't make it into the pages of her fiction. Women forced to have babies. Mm-hmm. Communists are making women have babies. Persistent non-pregnancy will be considered a crime against the state. It's not all doom and gloom. Atwood showed us the cover she designed for her first volume of poetry. She also writes short stories and children's books. For her new book, a new genre. Her memoir, Book of Lives, published last November, takes the full sweep of her life, starting with a free-range childhood spent in the deep-will.

wilderness of Quebec. She was homeschooled until the age of 12, while her father did field work on insects as an entomologist. You wrote some family stopped for ice cream on the side of the road. You stopped for infestation. We stopped for infestation. So what was that like? You screeched to a halt. Father would get out of the car with his tarpaulin and his axe, and he would go to the infestation. He would spread the tarp out under the tree and hit the trunk with an axe, and then the things would fall out, and he would collect them. And you're in the backseat thinking what? Oh, no, we were usually out of the car watching him do it.

What did you learn watching him go to work? I think probably growing up with the biologist makes you quite particular about details because you're not saying that's a butterfly, you're saying what kind of butterfly, you're not saying that's a tree. You usually know what kind of tree. That's what draws people to reading.

Intent on spinning details into prose and becoming a writer, Atwood enrolled at Victoria College at the University of Toronto. Well, poetry was the big form in Canada in the 60s. A young poet, she hit the reading circuit and performed in student plays and reviews here at Hart House, one of Canada's oldest theaters. No, I'm not, I'm just a show off. And when Margaret Atwood wants to show off, you surrender the stage. You have to stand over there. Hold my purse. Here's not just any curtsy, but she informed us the 17th century Jacobian court curtsy she learned for a college production.

We told you she's a stickler for detail. How do I respond to that? Oh, you bow. Thank you. You remember that. Why are you so surprised that I remember them? Before we left the theater, Atwood showed us another party trick. I'm not getting vibes.

Okay. You're not getting vines for me? We're doing the classic Renaissance hand-reading. Yes, she reads palms, another mode for investigation. People might think that you're just a very reasonable sort of rational person, but in fact you have this other, this intuition. So some people stop there, and they're very logical, and that's it. You were not one of those people.

And we can see that you will never be a murderous dictator, for which we are pleased. I got that going for me. Back to our protagonist, when she graduated in 1961, Canadian writers were encouraged to pursue careers outside the country. Give us a sense of the Canadian lit scene when you were in college. What Canadian lit scene? Still, Atwood stayed,

and helped found the country's now thriving literary institutions. Along the way, she met another writer, the late Graham Gibson, who would become her longtime partner. So quintessentially Canadian, their courtship peaked with a canoe trip. We were both the kinds of people that if the canoe trip hadn't worked out, that would have been it. Good barometer for a relationship. Yeah. If you can deal with the canoe trip, you can probably deal with lots of other things, too. And they did. Gibson came to the relationship with some baggage, a quote, undivorced wife,

and two kids. In her memoir, Atwood confronts the complications of the blended family. Could I ask you to read a bit for us? Yes. There are several letters in this book for me to my inner advice columnist. Everybody has one. Dear inner advice columnist, sorry to bother you. Atwood uses the columnist device to confess that though she and Graham have a daughter of their own, she wants more children. We are back at the farm after Scotland, and I've brought up the separate. of a second child.

I would like one, but Graham has said that a total of three is enough for him. I feel deprived, resentful, and disrespected. If that sounds harsh, listen to the columnist's response, the advice she gave herself. Oh, for heaven's sakes, count your blessings. Some people don't know when they're well off. Many would give the shirt off their back to have your luck in men. Suck it up. Cherish your child.

Get another cat. Your inner advice columnist. You can chase he's rather severe. That's a very get-over-yourself advice you gave yourself. Very get-over-your-self advice, but Canadians are pretty get-over-your-self people. The Handmaids Taylor! Humility aside, Canada's leading literary figure

has become something of a cult figure and a leading voice on all things Canadian. We asked her about the recent chill between her country and the United States says President Trump raises tariffs and threatens to turn our northern neighbors into a 51st state. Atwood says the Canadian response

is best summed up by one phrase. It's a hockey thing, and it was this character called Gordy Howe, who is a very revered hockey player. Elbows up is when somebody gets you into the corner, and you block them by putting your elbow up. And it means, don't mess with me. And for those who speak of the 51st state,

I do point out that it wouldn't be just one state. What do you mean? It's very big. You can't make the whole thing just one state. And anyway, Quebec would never stand for it. You think you're going to make them part of a unilingual, big entity? Think again. Atwood is a student of government, power, and the overreaches of both.

She wrote much of the handmaid's tale on a rented typewriter in 1984, West Berlin. She recalls hearing sonic booms from the other side of the wall. In her ventures to the Eastern Bloc, she witnessed policing, paranoia, and the absence of freedom. In her memoir, too, she addresses the erosion of democracy. You say the overriding ordinary civil liberties is one of the signposts on the road to dictatorship. Do you see the U.S. on that road right now? I don't think I would be wrong if I said it's concerning. There's certain things that totalitarian coups always do.

Like what? One of them is trying to get control of the media. But the other thing is making the judicial arm part of the executive. In other words, judges just do what the chief guide tells them to. If you're saying the sideposts, the signifiers of totalitarian society are... There's some warning lights flashing for sure. Amid the warning lights, a series based on the Testaments, or sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, will begin streaming on Hulu this year.

But just when you think you can predict... on which side of the political divide outward falls, she confounds by saying something like this. Just for the record, I've always been attacked more from the left than I have from the right. Why's that? Well, I think the right thinks I'm irrelevant. And the left thinks that I should have been preaching their sermon, whatever it may happen to be, and that I am therefore a traitor for not having done that which they themselves would do. And what's your response to that?

It's unprintable. It involves a finger. Do I see a little blush? Do I see a little bit of blush? She may turn us red. She did not turn us to stone. I'm paraphrasing here, but in your memoir you say you sometimes cut this medusa-like figure with a medusa-like stare with interviewers.

I feel like we're doing okay. The earlier me. The earlier me. Now I'm a nice old lady, so you don't have to be. worried. Why the pivot? I've gone older. I became a blonde. This was my way of saying. I enjoyed this conversation. Oh, is that your way of saying it? So why aren't you a scary old witch? Is that weird your way of saying it? What inspired the signature red cloaks from the handmaid's tail? Yes, well, if you have a cult, you have to have outfits. At 60 Minutes Overtime.com.

First thing that comes to mind when you hear Malano Cortina 2026. Stress. Flame bears making it to Milan brings you stories from women Olympians and Paralympians, moving mountains to live their dreams, and the family, teammates, and coaches who make it all possible.

It's easier to be a role model when things are going good for you, right? Winting all these medals when you're doing so well. What happens when you're struggling? Tune in to Flamebearers wherever you get your podcast. Salman Rushdie has been a marked man for nearly half his life. In 1989, Iran's leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, blasphemous, an insult to Islam and called for the Indian-born writer's assassination.

Rushdie went into hiding with around-the-clock police protection for 10 years. He eventually moved to the U.S. and thought he was safe. But in August 2022, as he was about to speak at a literary event in Chautauqua, New York, Solomon Rushdie was attacked by a Muslim man with a knife. Rushdie, who's now 78, lost his right eye and came close to dying. He's come to terms with the attempt on his life by writing a book about it, called simply Knife. Anderson Cooper spoke with Rushdie in 2024 in what was his first television interview

since the attack. You had had a dream, two days, I think it was, before the attack. What was the dream? I kind of had a premonition. I mean, I had a dream of being attacked in an amphitheater. But it was a kind of Roman Empire dream, you know, as if I was in the Coliseum. And it was just somebody with the spear stabbing downwards,

and I was rolling around on the floor trying to get away from him. And I woke up and was quite shaken by it. And I had to go to Chitokwa, you know, and I said to my wife, Eliza, I said, you know, I don't want to go. Because of the dream. Because of the dream. And then I thought, don't be silly, it's a dream. Salomon Rushdie, one of his generation's most acclaimed writers,

had been invited to the town of Chautauqua, close to Lake Erie, to speak about a subject he knows all too well, the importance of protecting writers whose lives are under threat. Did you have any anxiety being in such a public space? Not really, because in the more than 20 years that I've been living in America, I've done a lot of these things. You haven't had security around you, a close, for me. protection detail for a long time.

Long time. But, you know, what happens in many places that you go in lecture is that they're used to having a certain degree of security, venue security. In this case, there wasn't any. The irony, of course, is you were there to talk about writers in danger. Yeah, exactly. And the need for writers from other countries

to have safe spaces in America, amongst other places. And then, yeah, it just turned out not to be a safe space for me. For years, no place was safe for Salman Rushdie. whose sprawling 600-page novel, The Satanic Verses, offended some Muslims for its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, a religious decree calling for Rushdie's death in 1989. There were worldwide protests from London to Lahore.

The satanic verses was burned and 12 people died in clashes with police. The book's Japanese translator was murdered, and others associated with it were attacked. Did you have any idea that it would cause violence? No, I had no idea. I thought probably some conservative religious people wouldn't like it, but they didn't like anything I wrote anyway. So I thought, well, they don't have to read it.

Were you naive? Probably. You know, I mean, it's easy looking back to think, but nothing like this had ever happened to anybody. And of course, almost all the people who attacked the book did so without reading it. I was often told that I had intended, to insult offend people. My view is, if I need to insult you, I can do it really quickly.

I don't need to spend five years of my life trying to write a 600-page book to insult you. Rushdie was living in London when he went into hiding, and for the next 10 years, the British government provided him with 24-hour police protection. Did people try to kill you? Yes. There were maybe as many as half a dozen serious assassination attempts, which were not random people. They were state-sponsored, terror. professionals. After diplomatic negotiations, the Iranian state called off its assassins in 1998. Rushdie finally came out of the shadows. He moved to New York and for the next two decades lived

openly. He was a man about town. He continued writing and became a celebrated advocate for freedom of expression. So when he received the invitation to speak in Chautauqua in August 2022, he gladly accepted. I was seated at stage right. In his book Knife, he described what happened next. Then in the corner of my right eye, the last thing my right eye would ever see, I saw the man in black running toward me down the right-hand side of the seating area. Black clothes, black face mask, he was coming in hard and low, a squat missile. I confess I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other

and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, so it's you. Here you are. So it's you, here you are. It's like you've been waiting for it. Yeah, that's what it felt like. It felt like something coming out of the distant past

and trying to drag me back in time, if you like, back into that distant past in order to kill me. And when he got to me, he basically hit me very hard here. And initially I thought I'd been punched. You didn't actually see a knife. I didn't see the knife. And I didn't realize until I saw blood coming out that there would be a knife in his fist. So where was that stab?

Yeah. In your neck? In my neck, yeah. Then there were a lot more. The worst wounds was there was a big slash wound like this across my neck. And there was a puncture stab wound here. And then, of course, there was the attack on my eye. Do you remember being stabbed in the eye?

No. I remember falling. Then I remember not knowing what had happened to my eye. He was also stabbed in his hand, chest, abdomen, and thigh. 15 wounds in all. He was both stabbing and also slashing. I think he was just wildly. The attack lasted 27 seconds to feel just how long that is.

This is what 27 seconds is. That's it. It's quite a long time. That's the extraordinary half-minute of intimacy in which life meets death. What stopped it from being longer? The audience pulling him off me. Strangers to you?

To this day, I don't know their names. Some of those strangers restrain the attacker while others desperately tried to stem the flow of Rushdie's blood. There was really a lot of blood. You were actually watching your blood? I was actually watching it spread. And then I remember thinking that I... I was probably dying.

And it was interesting because it was quite matter of fact. It wasn't like I was terrified of it or whatever. And yeah, there was nothing. No heavenly choirs, no pearly gates. I mean, I'm not a supernatural person. I believe that death comes as the end. There was nothing that happened that made me change my mind about that. You have not had a revelation.

I have not had any revelation except that there's no revelation to be had. His attacker, the man in black, was hustled off the stage. In the book, you do not use the attacker's name. Yeah. I thought, you know, I don't want his name in my book. And I don't use it in conversation either. But that is important to you, not to give him space in your brain. Yeah. He and I had 27 seconds together. You know, that's it. I don't need to give him any more of my time.

Paramedics flew Rushdie to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania 40 miles away, where a team of doctors battled for eight hours to save his life. When he finally came out of surgery, his wife, Eliza, a poet and novelist, was waiting. And he wasn't moving and he was just laid out. He looked half dead to you. Yes, he did. He was a different color. He was cold.

I mean, his face was stapled, just staples, holding his face together. Rushdie was on a ventilator, unable to speak. Eliza and the doctors had no idea whether the knife that had penetrated his eye had damaged his brain. Someone from the staff said that we would use this system of wiggling the toes. To communicate? To communicate. Do you remember the first question you asked to get a wiggled? I think I said, Salman, it's Eliza. Can you hear me?

And there was a wiggle. And asked him, I think, can you, do you know where you are? and wiggled. And it was a very basic, simple questions. Because you can't express yourself with any subtlety with your toes. Which is your favorite thing. After 18 days in the hospital and three weeks in rehab, Rushdie was discharged. One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me,

first you were really unlucky and then you were really lucky. I said, what's the lucky part? And he said, well, the lucky path was that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife. You're not a believer in miracles, but the fact that you survived, you write in the book is a miracle. This is a contradiction. How does somebody who doesn't believe in the supernatural account for the fact that something

has happened which feels like a miracle? I mean, I certainly don't feel that some hand reached down from the skies and guarded me. But I do think something happened which wasn't supposed to happen. I have no explanation for it. His attacker was a 24-year-old from New Jersey who lived in his mother's basement. He was believed to be a lone wolf. He pleaded not guilty to attempted murder, and when we talk with Rushdie, he was still awaiting trial. In an interview, he told the New York Post he'd only read a couple pages of the satanic verses

and seen some clips of Rushdie on YouTube. He said he didn't like him very much because Rushdie had attacked Islam. Does it matter to you what his motive was? I mean, it's interesting to me because it's a mystery. If I had written a character who knew so little about his proposed victim and yet was willing to commit the crime of murder, my publishers might well say to me that that's under-motivated. You need to develop that character better.

Yeah, not enough of a reason. You know, not convincing. But yet that's what he did. Rushdie's Knife, his 22nd book, is one he initially did not want to write. There was the last thing I wanted to do. Because you didn't want this to yet again define you? Yeah. It was very difficult for me after the satanic verses was published,

that the only thing anybody knew about me was this death threat. But it became clear to me that I couldn't write anything else. You had to write this first before. I had to write this first. I just thought, you know, I need to focus on, you know, to use the cliché, the elephant in the room. And the moment I thought that, kind of something changed in my head, and it then became a book I really very much wanted to write.

You say the language was my knight. was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, make it mine. Yeah, I mean, language is a way of breaking open the world. I don't have any other weapons,

but I've been using this particular tool for quite a long time. So I thought this was my way of dealing with it. It's been three years since the attack, and Rushdie is back home now, in New York, still getting used to navigating the world with one eye. How much time to take to kind of readjust? I'm still doing it. You still are?

Yeah. Do you feel like you are a different person after the attack? I don't feel I'm very different, but I do feel that it has left a shadow. I think that shadow is just there. And some days it's dark, and some days it's not. You feel less than you were before? No, I just feel more the presence of death. In an interview almost 25 years ago, you said of the

the fatwa, I want to find an end to this story, it is the one story I must find an end to. Have you found that ending and an ending to this story as well? Well, I thought I had, and then it turned out I hadn't. I'm hoping this is just a last twitch of that story. I don't know, I'll let you know. Last year, Salman Rushdie's attacker was found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison. With more than 150 million copies sold in 40 languages, Guinness World Records is one of the best-selling

books in history. In it, you'll find the shortest, tallest, tallest, alongside jaw-dropping human feats and eighth-grade bathroom humor. As Cecilia Vega first told you in November, some achievements are so over the top it was hard to keep a straight face during the interviews. But behind the spectacle, a meticulous system of British auditing, so strict it has crushed many more record attempts than it has certified. Even if what you see defies belief,

you can trust that if it made it into the book, it is real, and as Guinness World Records declares, officially amazing. Are you ready? How are you feeling? I'm feeling pumped. Yeah?

For Colin Kaplan, the stakes couldn't be higher. Not in my wildest dreams could I have ever thought that I'd be doing anything like this. After a year of planning, he's about to find doubt if his city, New Haven, Connecticut, can eat its way into history by hosting the world's largest pizza party. Let's get some pizza. Kaplan, a local historian and food tour guide, is so obsessed with pizza. Last year, he chartered a jet to Washington and got his congresswoman to

declare New Haven the Pizza Capital of America. New Haven Pizza Capital, baby. Is this a serious endeavor? Yeah. Yeah, I think it is. I'll tell you what, it seems light and fun. But it's serious in a sense of what's on the line. What's on the line is the glory of a Guinness World Record, and people will do just about anything to get one. Humans are such an interesting band, aren't we?

And record-breaking is an innately human thing. And if that means you do strange things, like swallowing sausages hole or climbing Everest or running up, marathon with a milk bottle on your head, then that's fine, that's great. Craig Glenday has been the book's editor-in-chief for the past 21 years. I really like that, so I think we want more of that. In his signature Scottish accent, he recounts with a straight face what is often a circus of absurdity.

You know, we get things like fastest time to run around my garden, playing the banjo with a snake on my head. It's like, next. They get a nice letter of, like, thank you. Thank you. Cutest babies and cutest dogs don't make the cut either. Records must meet strict criteria. They have to be filmed from multiple angles, verified by independent eyewitnesses, and measured

with precision. Each year, Guinness World Records receives roughly 50,000 applications, but as many as 95% get rejected. The largest number of submissions come from the United States. One of my favorite days in the job was I was at the X Games at the staple center in LA, and a dog zipped past me on a skateboard. And despite the heat, I chased after this dog, and I found the owner and said, I've never seen a dog on a skateboard.

He said, oh, this is Tillman. He loves skateboarding. I had a tape measure. We measured 100 meters in the car park at the staple center, and we set the record there and then, because I was so amazed by it. Do you just walk through the world with a tape measure in your pocket? Well, I do usually. Do you?

Yeah. have a tape measure on a stock watch, because you never know. Many of the record holders you know, Usain Bolt for the fastest 200 meters, Beyonce for the most Grammys, and many you've probably never even imagined. Go. Like serial record breaker David Rush,

an Idaho tech worker who has broken more than 350 records and counting, including most bites taken from three apples while juggling for a minute. minute. It's just past the two mile mark. And most t-shirts worn during a half marathon. And Monsieur Mange 2. That's Mr. Eats Everything in French. He held the record for the world's strangest diet. The guy who'd, you know, he'd supposedly eaten a Cessna because he could eat metal and glass. A Cessna plane? Well, apparently it took him two years. We couldn't quite give him. This doesn't sound very healthy. Well, I mean, he, his wife wouldn't let him use the toilet at home,

because if he'd been eating metal, it tends to come out like bullets, and it would chip the porcelain, so he'd have to use a hotel with metal toilets near his house. This is the greatest use interview I've ever done. Sorry. I'm sorry. Come back to what you're saying that when you... I mean, for me, it's every day, so I don't quite get it, but yeah, yeah. He could do glass and metal.

He couldn't do chains, but to meet him was a real honor for me because he was like a childhood hero for me. You must get this question all the time. Why? Why? I mean, it's different for everyone. Everyone has a different reason. Some just want fame.

Some want to be in print. We do validate people that do things that others might seem a bit weird, like eating aircraft and stuff. Do you not see that as weird? I mean, I see it as really interesting. I gotta tell you, I thought it would be a little crazier, Inside the company's London headquarters, Glenday keeps a cabinet of greatest hits.

It's Craig's cabinet of Curie Audities. Like the world's smallest playing cards and a giant size 29 shoe. I'm like the Vana White of Audities here. What is this? If you have a little investigation of that. It's the world oldest vomit. Vomit? You got me on that one.

It doesn't smell, and it's obviously a petrified, you know. Not everyone. chooses to break records. I'm 5'10, so what was she? She's just on seven foot. The tallest and shortest people often have had genetic conditions. The woman with the longest fingernails, 43 feet, hasn't cut them since her daughter, who painted her nails, passed away in 1997.

So she still holds the record? Still has the record. And I think that's the longest ever measured. The idea for the book began during a hunting trip at this country estate in a country estate in Ireland, where the manager of the Guinness Brewery got into an argument over who could name the fastest game bird in Europe. To settle future pub debates, he commissioned a book of superlatives, which eventually became the Guinness World Records. The first one was published in 1955. The initial reaction from the book trade was not that positive, and the first sales meeting ever,

the salesperson wrote six on the slip, and they said, do you mean six thousand, six hundred? Six. They just wanted six? Six for the whole country. Yeah. By the end of the week, it was like 10,000. They sold that quickly? And it was just blew up.

70 years later, it's still a hit at school book fairs, but today, the name Guinness World Records, is synonymous with viral stunts that become clickbait gold. Is Google your biggest competition? I could pull my phone out right now and search the world's fastest bird. You might as well open the window and shout your question into the street, and you'll get an answer. Yeah, but is it the right one?

Well, I can say I know Sultanko Sons 8 foot 3 because I was there with a tape measure. I measured him. He's also measured the shortest person who he learned about after a woodcutter passed through a remote village in Nepal and alerted the team at Guinness World Records. So it was confidence enough for me to then go to Nepal.

You get on a flight and go to Nepal to measure this person? And we would never have known about him had that woodcutter not gone through the village that day and sent us the video foot. And then there are the rules. So rigid, they've sparked office debates over who makes the cut for the largest gathering of people dressed as Smurfs. So it's like, okay, well, what is this Smurf? What do they wear?

Do they all have blue skin? Yes. You might have to write guidelines for any possible topics. So we've got this huge big book of experts, you know, from archaeologists. To Smurfs. To Smurfologists. Yeah. But, you know, like, we've got a mermacologist, which...

What is that? Mermacologist is an ant expert. So if we've got a question about what's the most dangerous ant. Quick, get the mermacologist online. Yeah. So you get like, we've just found this big ant. Is it the biggest? For large events like the New Haven Pizza Party... I am today's official Guinness World Records adjudicator, so I'm basically the judge.

Guinness World Records sometimes sends an adjudicator responsible for enforcing the rules from headquarters. You're going to write how many people you've described. Hopefully that is a nice big round zero. Thomas Bradford is one of 81 adjudicators the company employs across six continents. His day job is as a performer at Disney, but when it's go time, he puts on his trademark blue jacket. The largest gathering of people dressed as dinosaurs was one of my favorite events. And you kind of expect people to just come in the classic, you know, inflatable T-Rex costume. What do they come in?

Diplodocus, triceratop, like, you name it. We had it. Legit gear. Everything. I had to turn away people that were dressed as Godzilla, because Godzilla is not a dinosaur. How do you break it to a dinosaur and a bad costume that they don't qualify? You kind of just have to play the role. I think my accent helps, and there is a level of, you know, authority that comes

of a British accent. Very much that. The largest pizza party is probably the most competitive record that I've ever been a part of. Is that true? I didn't think it would be as it's a lot, yes. They're stressing you out? This is one of the most stressful record attempts I've had. Colin Kaplan needs 3,358 people to show up in order to beat the current record.

And you want to beat Tulsa? We're going to beat Tulsa, Oklahoma. Participants get 15 minutes to eat two slices of pizza and drink a bottle of water. But here's the catch. They have to stay until the party is officially over. And... They must eat the entire pizza. No one can leave their crusts.

They have to eat the crust. What makes a pizza party like this so difficult? People, yeah, it's, you know, you don't know if they're going to stay for 15 minutes. They might wait for 14 and be like, I'm fine. You're disqualified if you leave after 14 minutes, you know? So that people is the toughest thing. This official Guinness World Records attempt has begun. At first, it was slow going.

What if not enough people show up, or have you guys already accounted? But then, in came the pizza obsessed, college students, children, those in their finest pepperoni attire. It's 10,000 slices, which is 625 pizzas in about three and a half hours. Kaplan's pursuit of a record didn't come cheap. Brands and businesses chasing titles for marketing must pay fees. He said he paid nearly $30,000 and fundraised six figures to cover all. the cost, including eight ovens and all that cheese. When Thomas Bradford wasn't busy being a celebrity, he and a group of 100 volunteers kept the tally.

Only two, didn't finish, one left, perfect, okay. With an hour to go. It's going to go to the wire, I think. It's going to be close. Kaplan was still trying to make the pie calculations add up. We could actually feed 1,800 people, start. at six o'clock still. And that means that we could 100% beat the record and almost get to 5,000. So did they?

Finally, the verdict. And now New Haven is home to the world's largest pizza party. 4,525 people gathered for a new Guinness World Record. And a slice of history. Human beings are nearly the same everywhere. They are really because they're trying to get through from birth to death and have as much fun and enjoy life and get all the experiences that you can. And we see this every day. The world is full of these amazing fun things if you just look in the right place.

I'm John Wertheim. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back next week with an all-new edition of 60 Minutes. I want to know what's going on in the world. You can't do that if you're just sitting in a chair, reading about what other people have found. You have to get out there and listen by telling people about each other, you actually bring this country together. There are big questions that all of us are asking. I want to get you the answers. I'm Tony DeCopold. Join me on the CBS Evening News.