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

9:55Cecilia Vega: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.

10:16Margaret Atwood:And you're in the backseat thinking what?

10:18Cecilia Vega:Oh no, we were usually out of the car watching him do it.

10:21Margaret Atwood:What did you learn watching him go to work?

10:24Cecilia Vega:I think probably growing up with the biologists 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.

10:41Margaret Atwood:Intent on spinning details into prose and becoming a writer, Atwood enrolled at Victoria College at the University of Toronto.

10:49Cecilia Vega:Well, poetry was the big form in Canada in the 60s.

10:53Margaret Atwood: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.

11:03Cecilia Vega:I'm just a show-off.

11:04Margaret Atwood:And when Margaret Atwood wants to show off, you surrender the stage.

11:09Cecilia Vega:You have to stand over there. Hold my purse.

11:12Margaret Atwood:Here's not just any curtsy, but she informed us the 17th century Jacobean court curtsy she learned for a college production. We told you she's a stickler for detail. How do I respond to that?

11:25Cecilia Vega:Oh, you bow. Thank you.

11:28Margaret Atwood:You remember that.

11:29Cecilia Vega:Why are you so surprised that I remember that? That was...

11:32Margaret Atwood:Before we left the theater, Atwood showed us another party trick.

11:36Cecilia Vega:I'm not getting vibes, okay?

11:38Margaret Atwood:You're not getting vibes for me?

11:40Cecilia Vega:No. We're doing the classic Renaissance hand reading.

11:44Margaret Atwood:Yes, she reads palms, another mode for investigation. People might think that you're just a very reasonable, sort of rational person,

11:55Cecilia Vega:but in fact you have this other, this intuition. So some people stop there and they're very logical and that's it. You are not one of those people. And we can see that you will never be a murderous dictator for which we are pleased.

12:10Margaret Atwood: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.

12:26Cecilia Vega:What Canadian lit scene?

12:30Margaret Atwood: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.

12:47Cecilia Vega:We were both the kinds of people that if the canoe trip hadn't worked out, that would have been it.

12:54Margaret Atwood:Good barometer for a relationship. Yeah.

12:56Cecilia Vega:If you can deal with the canoe trip, you can probably deal with lots of other things, too.

13:02Margaret Atwood: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. Can I ask you to read a bit for us?

13:16Cecilia Vega:Yes. There are several letters in this book from me to my inner advice columnist. Everybody has one. Dear inner advice columnist, sorry to bother you.

13:28Margaret Atwood:Atwood uses the columnist device to confess that though she and Graham have a daughter of their own, she wants more children.

13:34Cecilia Vega:We are back at the farm after Scotland, and I've brought up the subject 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,

13:52Margaret Atwood:the advice she gave herself.

13:54Cecilia Vega: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 see he's rather severe.

14:14Margaret Atwood:That's a very get-over-yourself advice you gave yourself.

14:17Cecilia Vega:Very get-over-yourself advice, but Canadians are pretty get-over-yourself people.

14:22Anderson Cooper:The Handmaid's Tale!

14:24Margaret Atwood: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 as 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.

14:47Cecilia Vega:It's a hockey thing, and it was this character called Gordie 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.

15:09Margaret Atwood:What do you mean?

15:10Cecilia Vega: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.

15:22Margaret Atwood: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?

15:52Cecilia Vega:I don't think I would be wrong if I said it's concerning. There are certain things that totalitarian coups always do.

16:00Salman Rushdie:Like what?

16:01Cecilia Vega: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.

16:16Margaret Atwood: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, her 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 Atwood falls, she confounds by saying something like this.

16:41Cecilia Vega: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.

17:01Margaret Atwood:And what's your response to that? It's unprintable.

17:06Cecilia Vega:It involves a finger. Do I see a little blush? Do I see a little bit of a blush?

17:14Margaret Atwood: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.

17:27Cecilia Vega:The earlier me. The earlier me. Now I'm a nice old lady, so you don't have to be worried.

17:33Margaret Atwood:Why the pivot?

17:34Cecilia Vega:I got older. I became a blonde.

17:39Margaret Atwood:This was my way of saying I enjoyed this conversation.

17:42Cecilia Vega:Oh, is that your way of saying it? So why aren't you a scary old witch? Is that your way of saying it?

17:54Cecilia Vega:What inspired the signature red cloaks from The Handmaid's Tale? Yes, well, if you have a cult, you have to have outfits. At 60MinutesOvertime.com

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19:41Margaret Atwood: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 in 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, Salman 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.

20:25Margaret Atwood: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.

20:37Jon Wertheim:What was the dream?

20:38Salman Rushdie: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 Colosseum. And it was just somebody with a 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.

21:05Jon Wertheim:Because of the dream?

21:06Salman Rushdie:Because of the dream. And then I thought, don't be silly, it's a dream.

21:10Jon Wertheim:Salman 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?

21:30Salman Rushdie:Not really, because in the more than 20 years that I've been living in America, I've done a lot of these things.

21:38Jon Wertheim:You haven't had security around you? of close protection detail for a long time. Long time.

21:41Salman Rushdie:But, you know, what happens in many places that you go and lecture is that they're used to having a certain degree of security, venue security. In this case, there wasn't any.

21:52Jon Wertheim:The irony, of course, is you were there to talk about riders in danger.

21:55Salman Rushdie:Yeah, exactly. And the need for riders 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.

22:06Jon Wertheim: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?

22:45Salman Rushdie: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.

22:55Jon Wertheim:Were you naive?

22:56Salman Rushdie: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 was, 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.

23:21Jon Wertheim: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?

23:30Salman Rushdie:Yes, there were maybe as many as half a dozen serious assassination attempts, which were not random people. They were state-sponsored terrorism professionals.

23:40Jon Wertheim: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,

24:17Salman Rushdie:I saw the man in black running towards 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.

24:47Jon Wertheim:So it's you. Here you are. Yeah. It's like you've been waiting for it.

24:51Salman Rushdie: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? Here.

25:20Jon Wertheim:In your neck?

25:21Salman Rushdie: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's a puncture stab wound here. And then, of course, there was an attack on my eye.

25:36Jon Wertheim:Do you remember being stabbed in the eye?

25:39Salman Rushdie:No. I remember falling. Then I remember not knowing what had happened to my eye.

25:45Jon Wertheim:He was also stabbed in his hand, chest, abdomen, and thigh. Fifteen wounds in all. He was both stabbing. Stabbing and slashing.

25:54Salman Rushdie:I think he was just wildly...

25:56Jon Wertheim:The attack lasted 27 seconds. To feel just how long that is. This is what 27 seconds is.

26:31Jon Wertheim:That's it.

26:31Salman Rushdie:That's quite a long time. That's the extraordinary half minute of intimacy in which life meets death.

26:42Jon Wertheim:What stopped it from being longer?

26:44Salman Rushdie:The audience pulling him off me.

26:46Jon Wertheim:Strangers to you?

26:47Salman Rushdie:To this day, I don't know their names.

26:50Jon Wertheim:Some of those strangers restrain the attacker, while others desperately try to stem the flow of Rushdie's blood. There was really a lot of blood. You were actually watching your blood.

27:00Salman Rushdie:I was actually watching it spread. And then I remember thinking that 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, you know. I believe that death comes as the end. There was nothing that happened that made me change my mind about that.

27:24Jon Wertheim:You have not had a revelation.

27:26Salman Rushdie:I have not had any revelation except that there's no revelation to be had.

27:30Jon Wertheim:His attacker, the man in black, was hustled off the stage. In the book, you do not use the attacker's name.

27:38Salman Rushdie:Yeah. I thought, you know, I don't want his name in my book. And I don't use it in conversation either.

27:44Jon Wertheim:But that is important to you, not to give him space in your brain.

27:47Salman Rushdie: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.

27:56Jon Wertheim: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.

28:09Anderson Cooper:And he wasn't moving and he was just laid out.

28:13Jon Wertheim:He looked half dead to you?

28:14Anderson Cooper:Yes, he did. He was a different color. He was cold. I mean, his face was stapled, just staples holding his face together.

28:26Jon Wertheim: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.

28:36Anderson Cooper:Someone from the staff said that we would use this system of wiggling the toes.

28:42Jon Wertheim:To communicate?

28:43Anderson Cooper:To communicate.

28:44Jon Wertheim:Do you remember the first question you asked to get a wiggle?

28:47Anderson Cooper:I think I said, Salman, it's Eliza. Can you hear me? And there was a wiggle. And I asked him, I think, do you know where you are? And he wiggled. And it was very basic, simple questions.

29:03Salman Rushdie:Because you can't express yourself with any subtlety with your toes.

29:07Anderson Cooper:Which is your favorite thing.

29:11Jon Wertheim: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,

29:22Salman Rushdie: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 that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.

29:32Jon Wertheim:You're not a believer in miracles, but the fact that you survived, you write in the book, is a miracle.

29:38Salman Rushdie: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. And I have no explanation for it.

29:57Jon Wertheim: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?

30:25Salman Rushdie: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.

30:41Jon Wertheim:You need to develop that character better. Yeah, not enough of a reason.

30:44Salman Rushdie:You know, not convincing. But yet that's what he did.

30:49Jon Wertheim:Rushdie's Knife, his 22nd book, is one he initially did not want to write.

30:54Salman Rushdie:That was the last thing I wanted to do.

30:56Jon Wertheim:Because you didn't want this to yet again define you?

30:59Salman Rushdie:Yeah. It was very difficult for me after The Satanic Versus 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.

31:09Jon Wertheim:You had to write this first.

31:10Salman Rushdie:I had to write this first. I just thought, you know, I need to focus on, you know, to use the cliche, 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.

31:24Jon Wertheim:You say the language 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.

31:42Salman Rushdie: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.

31:51Jon Wertheim: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 did it 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?

32:07Salman Rushdie: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.

32:17Jon Wertheim:You feel less than you were before?

32:19Salman Rushdie:No, I just feel more the presence of death.

32:22Jon Wertheim:In an interview almost 25 years ago, you said of 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?

32:33Salman Rushdie: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.

32:44I don't know.

32:45Salman Rushdie:I'll let you know.

32:47Margaret Atwood:Last year, Salman Rushdie's attacker was found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

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33:45Margaret Atwood: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, and fastest, 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.

34:28Anderson Cooper:Are you ready? Yeah! How are you feeling? I'm feeling pumped. Yeah? Yeah. For Colin Kaplan, the stakes couldn't be higher.

34:39Margaret Atwood:Not in my wildest dreams could I have ever thought that I'd be doing anything like this.

34:43Anderson Cooper:After a year of planning, he's about to find out if his city, New Haven, Connecticut, can eat its way into history by hosting the world's largest pizza party.

34:54Margaret Atwood:Let's get some pizza!

34:56Anderson Cooper: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?

35:14Margaret Atwood: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.

35:24Anderson Cooper:What's on the line is the glory of a Guinness World Record, and people will do just about anything to get one.

35:33Margaret Atwood:Humans are such an interesting bunch, aren't we? And record-breaking is an innately human thing. And if that means you do strange things like swallowing sausages whole or climbing Everest or running a marathon with a milk bottle on your head, then that's fine. That's great.

35:52Anderson Cooper:Craig Glenday has been the book's editor-in-chief for the past 21 years.

35:56Margaret Atwood:I really like that, so I think we want more of that.

35:59Anderson Cooper:In his signature Scottish accent, he recounts with a straight face what is often a circus of absurdity.

36:06Margaret Atwood: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, but no thank you.

36:17Anderson Cooper: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.

36:45Margaret Atwood:One of my favorite days in the job was I was at the X Games at the Staples Center in L.A. 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 out 100 meters of the car park at the Staples Center and we set the record there and then because I was so amazed by it.

37:09Anderson Cooper:Do you just walk through the world with a tape measure in your pocket? Well, I do usually. Do you? Yeah, I have a tape measure and a stopwatch 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. 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. It's just past the two-mile mark. And most T-shirts worn during a half marathon. And Monsieur Mange 2, that's Mr.

37:54Anderson Cooper:Eats Everything in French, he held the record for the world's strangest diet.

38:00Margaret Atwood:The guy who'd, you know, he'd supposedly eaten a Cessna because he could eat metal and glass. A Cessna plain? Well, apparently it took him two years. We couldn't quite give him... Doesn't sound very healthy. Well, I mean, 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.

38:23Anderson Cooper:This is the craziest interview I've ever done. Let's just say. Sorry. I'm sorry. Come back to what you were saying.

38:33Margaret Atwood:I mean, for me, it's every day, so I don't quite get it. 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.

38:44Anderson Cooper:You must get this question all the time.

38:46Margaret Atwood: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.

39:01Anderson Cooper:Do you not see that as weird?

39:04Margaret Atwood:I mean, I see it as really interesting.

39:09Anderson Cooper:I've got to 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 curiosities. Like the world's smallest playing cards and a giant size 29 shoe. I'm like the Vanna White of oddities here. What is this?

39:30Margaret Atwood:If you have a little investigation of that, it's the world's oldest vomit.

39:35Anderson Cooper:Vomit?

39:36Margaret Atwood:Vomit. You got me on that one. 160. It doesn't smell, and it's obviously petrified.

39:40Anderson Cooper:Not everyone chooses to break records. I'm 5 '10", so what was she?

39:45Margaret Atwood:She's just on seven foot.

39:47Anderson Cooper: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?

40:04Margaret Atwood:Still has the record, and I think that's the longest ever measured.

40:07Anderson Cooper:The idea for the book began during a hunting trip at this 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.

40:30Margaret Atwood:The initial reaction from the book trade was not that positive. In the first sales meeting ever, the salesperson wrote six on the slip, and they said, do you mean 6 ,000, 600? 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 just blew up.

40:50Anderson Cooper: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.

41:10Margaret Atwood:And you'll get an answer, yeah, but is it the right one? Well, I can say I know Sultan Kosen's 8 '3", because I was there with the tape measure. I measured him.

41:19Anderson Cooper: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.

41:29Margaret Atwood:So it was confidence enough for me to then go to Nepal.

41:33Anderson Cooper:You get on a flight and go to Nepal to measure this person?

41:35Margaret Atwood:And we would never have known about him had that woodcutter not gone through the village that day and sent us the video footage.

41:43Anderson Cooper: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.

41:53Margaret Atwood:So it's like, OK, well, what is a Smurf? What do they wear? Do they all have blue skin? Yes. You know, you might have to write guidelines for any possible topic. So we've got this huge big book of experts, you know, from archaeologists. To Smurfs. To Smurfologists. Yeah, I don't know if that's something. But, you know, we've got a mermecologist. What is that? Mermecologist, an ant expert. So if we've got a question about what's the most dangerous ant.

42:20Anderson Cooper:Quick, get the mermecologist online.

42:22Margaret Atwood:Yeah, so you get us like, we've just found this big ant. Is it the biggest?

42:25Anderson Cooper:For large events like the New Haven Pizza Party.

42:28Jon Wertheim:I am today's official Guinness World Records adjudicator. So I'm basically the judge.

42:33Anderson Cooper:Guinness World Records sometimes sends an adjudicator responsible for enforcing the rules from headquarters.

42:40Jon Wertheim:You're going to write how many people you disqualified. Hopefully that is a nice big round zero.

42:45Anderson Cooper: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.

42:58Jon Wertheim: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.

43:07Anderson Cooper:What do they come in?

43:09Jon Wertheim:Diplodocus, Triceratops, like you name it, we had it.

43:12Anderson Cooper:Legit gear.

43:13Jon Wertheim:Everything. I had to turn away people that were dressed as Godzilla, because Godzilla is not a dinosaur.

43:17Anderson Cooper:How do you break it to a dinosaur in a bad costume that they don't qualify?

43:21Jon Wertheim: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 from 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.

43:43Anderson Cooper: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...

44:05Jon Wertheim:They must eat the entire pizza. No one can leave their crusts.

44:10Anderson Cooper:They have to eat the crust. What makes a pizza party like this so difficult?

44:16Jon Wertheim: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's, people is the toughest thing. This official Guinness World Records attempt has begun!

44:35Anderson Cooper:At first, it was slow going.

44:38Margaret Atwood:What if not enough people show up? Have you guys already counted? But then, in came the pizza obsessed.

44:46Anderson Cooper:College students, children, those in their finest pepperoni attire.

44:51Margaret Atwood:It's 10 ,000 slices, which is 625 pizzas in about three and a half hours.

44:57Anderson Cooper: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 costs, 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.

45:26Jon Wertheim:Only two didn't finish. One left. Perfect.

45:30Anderson Cooper:With an hour to go...

45:31Jon Wertheim:It's going to go to the wire, I think. It's going to be close.

45:34Anderson Cooper:Kaplan was still trying to make the pie calculations add up.

45:38Margaret Atwood:We could actually feed 1 ,800 people starting at 6 o 'clock still. And that means that we could 100 % beat the record and almost get to 5 ,000.

45:47Anderson Cooper: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.

46:04Jon Wertheim:Congratulations, New Haven. You are all officially amazing.

46:10Anderson Cooper:And a slice of history.

46:13Margaret Atwood: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.

46:36Margaret Atwood:I'm John Wertheim. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back next week with an all-new edition of 60 Minutes. This episode is brought to you by Progressive. Most of you aren't just listening right now. You're driving, cleaning, and even exercising. But what if you could be saving money by switching to Progressive? Drivers who save by switching save nearly$750 on average, and auto customers qualify for an average of 7 discounts. Multitask right now. Quote today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of$744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023.

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